“Sick to the soul.”
On his return to Denver, Morning found no difficulty in speedily closing
up his business and converting his mortgages into money. In about ten
days he was ready to depart for San Francisco, where he intended
purchasing the necessary machinery for five mills of forty stamps each.
His sole remaining business in Denver was the execution and delivery to
the purchaser of a conveyance of some city property which he had sold.
While breakfasting at the Windsor that morning, his appetite was not
increased by reading from the Associated Press telegrams the following:—
“MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE.
“BOSTON, February 13, 1893.
“There was celebrated this morning at the residence of the bride’s
father, Professor John Thornton, in Roxbury, the nuptials of one of
Boston’s greatest heiresses and acknowledged belles, the beautiful and
accomplished Miss Ellen Thornton, to the Baron Von Eulaw. The happy
couple will sail on the _Servia_ to-morrow, and will proceed directly
to Berlin. It is intimated that our fair countrywoman may be restored
to us after a season by the appointment of the Baron Von Eulaw as
envoy at Washington from the German Empire.”
Forgotten? Ah, no! there are experiences in life that may never be
forgotten. Time rolls by, and against the door of the mausoleum where we
buried our dead out of sight the years have piled events and emotions
and distractions, and the passion which we once thought immortal becomes
now an episode, and by and by a dream, and at last a vague and shadowy
remembrance, and one day some new and mighty fact stalks forward, and
sweeps away all obstructions, and the doors of the tomb are reopened,
and the dead of our heart come forth, bringing to us sometimes the joys
of life’s morning, and sometimes the bitterness of a new death.
David Morning walked from the hotel to his office without noticing many
of the friendly greetings bestowed upon him, for his thoughts were busy
with the past, and there was a dull, dead pain tugging at his heart
strings.
The notary who had taken Morning’s acknowledgment to the deed whose
delivery would complete his business in Denver, brought the instrument
to Morning’s office, and, not finding him in, slipped the paper in the
top of a desk with a circular cover. This desk was one of Morning’s
first possessions in the way of office furniture, and, finding it
convenient and commodious, he had caused it to accompany every change of
quarters which his increasing business had from time to time rendered
necessary.
Entering his office, Morning hurriedly threw back the cover of the desk,
not noticing the deed in the top of it until it was too late to prevent
the paper from being carried by the revolving cover into the interior of
the desk, where it could only be reached by removing a portion of the
back. The services of a mechanic from a neighboring furniture store were
procured, the back of the desk was removed, and Morning recovered the
deed.
He also recovered another paper. It was an unopened letter addressed to
himself, which had doubtless reached its resting-place in the old desk
through the same process as that which carried the deed there. The
envelope was covered with dust; it was postmarked “Boston, Mass.,
February, 1883”—ten years before—and the superscription was in the
handwriting of Ellen Thornton, now the Baroness Von Eulaw.
Dispatching the recovered deed to its destination, Morning closed the
door of his private office, and, with breath coming thick and fast,
proceeded to open and peruse the missive. It read as follows:—
ROXBURY, Mass., Feb. 13, 1883.
MY DEAR MR. MORNING: This letter may bring you a moment of surprise;
if it be not a surprise mixed with chagrin, I am less justly repaid
than perhaps I deserve for that which may seem my instability of
purpose. But I have heard you say that you scarcely knew which was the
weaker, the man who changed his mind too often or who never changed it
at all, and in this recollection I find refuge.
With men as intuitive as yourself, explanations are almost
superfluous. Nevertheless, you will bear with me while I pass under
review a few of the causes which have led to this action.
After the change in my father’s fortunes and our subsequent removal to
Boston, life began to open up new possibilities, and what with the
increased demands upon my time, and the many beguilements of
flattering tongues, together with—let me confess it—an unresting
desire to forget the act of folly which had shut out every ray of
sunshine from my heart, as I found too late, I at length fixed my
footing to the artificial conditions of the situation, and for a brief
time flattered myself that you were forgotten.
My letter, if written at all, ought to stop here. But thus much I have
learned—that passion tinctured with sorrow is the greatest of
egotists, and that the feeling that brooks no measure of repression or
discouragement inspires a degree of courage little short of defiance.
Thus stimulated, I feel a growing joy in being able to surmount
artificial restraint and to address you as I know you would wish an
honest girl who loves you with her whole heart, should speak.
What will you think of me? Will you call me fickle and unworthy?
unwomanly? In a word, will you misunderstand me? How could I know till
my eyes were opened that there was but one sun? that the whole world
to me was adjusted to your simple, noble qualities? How could I know
that the music of the spheres meant the remembered tones of your
voice, that your face should haunt alike every scene of splendor and
every secret shadow, or that I would give my patrimony to be able to
pass my fingers through your brown locks for ever so brief a moment?
What am I writing? I dare not read it. How confident I feel, how
transported with the thought that you may in remembering me forget my
much-repented dictum, or at least relegate it to the Quixotic realm to
which it belongs.
As I near the close of my letter, I am possessed with a new fear.
Shall I dare send it? What if you shall have discovered new powers in
yourself, new persons out in the broad world, which shall make you
glad of your escape? It is so long since I have heard of you, and life
is so full of new things, I forget that you too have quite the right
to change your mind. If this be your condition, do not, I beg of you,
write me. I could not bear the humiliation as your great heart bore
yours. Consign my letter, then, to the great silence, and only
remember me as ever and always your sincere friend,
ELLEN.
What was his colossal fortune to David Morning now? Out of the past came
this message of life and love; of a love gone forever, and a life which
now seemed barren of purpose and hope.
What is time but a name? The intervening years shriveled into
nothingness, and he was again bathing in the light which shone from the
eyes of the woman he loved, the one woman on earth or in heaven for him,
yesterday and to-day and forever. Again he walked with her under the
whispering foliage along the brow of the hill which crowns the Queen
City of the plains, and watched the burning sunsets illumine the
lavender mountains and change the clouds into embers of glory. Again he
sat beside her, reading some tender or beautiful or stirring passage
from poet or essayist. Again, at the good-night going, he felt her
dainty kiss, thrilling his soul to ecstasy.
And she was lost to him now, lost through his pride, lost through his
vanity, lost through such dense and inexcusable stupidity as never
before possessed or afflicted a man. He had taken her girlish doubts as
final. He had thought to exhibit his manly pride—which was, after all,
only conceit of self—as an offset to her presuming to question the
possibility of her being possessed by a great love for him. Coward that
he was to surrender this glorious creature without an effort. Dolt that
he was to so mistake her maidenly hesitancy.
And she—dear heart—had loved him after all. She had condescended to
summon him, and he had never received the message. What had she thought
of his failure to respond? What must she have thought of him, save that
he was a cruel, conceited creature unworthy of her love? What
humiliation his unexplained silence must for a time have brought to her
gentle spirit! What wreck and misery had not this miscarriage of her
missive brought to his life!
If he could have identified the clerk or postman whose carelessness had
misplaced her letter, he would have beaten him in his fury, and he
wished for an ax that he might hew and batter to splinters the inanimate
desk whose machinery had been instrumental in wrecking two lives.
Were they hopelessly wrecked? He caught his breath at the thought. He at
least was free, and whatever else might come never would he be
otherwise. Never should wile of woman enchant him, never should desire
for home and love and perpetuation of race and name beguile him. He
would walk lonely to the gates of the eternal morning, and wait for her
beyond the portal, and carry her soul upon the pinions of his immortal
love to the uttermost confines of ether, where no entrapments or
environments of earth could follow or molest them, and in the glow of
the astral light he would claim her as his own, and give himself to her
forever and ever.
Ellen’s letter released the passion which had been locked for ten years
in the silent chambers of David Morning’s soul, and it possessed the
man, and mastered him with throes of bitter agony and throbs of ecstatic
delight. His cheeks were wet with the tears of disappointment, and again
to the very center of him he laughed with joy as he covered the letter
with kisses.
“She loved me, my darling, my own, she loved me!” he cried. “Maybe she
loves me yet!” and again his heart beat wildly. “For ten years she
remained unmated. But yesterday she married this German nobleman, this
Baron Von Eulaw. Surely love could not have moved her to the union.
Surely with her nature she could not have forgotten her first love. She
was outraged and humiliated and incensed at the silence and seeming
indifference of the man she really loved, and so she married, for
reasons common enough in society.”
Was this tie irrevocable? Could it not be severed? Might it not be
possible that happiness should yet be in store on this earth for his
darling and himself? He was now in possession of the lever that moves
the world. Should he not use this power for her and for himself, as well
as for the benefit of mankind?
Who was this German baron that he should stand against him? There were
hundreds of barons, but only one owner of the Morning mine. He would use
millions piled upon millions to bring his Ellen to his arms.
Napoleon divorced Josephine and married Maria Louisa. Cæsar put away one
wife and married another. David placed Uriah in the front of the battle.
Many kings had used their power to readjust to their liking their own
domestic relations and those of their subjects.
He was a mightier king than Darius. He ruled greater armies than any
ever commanded by Bonaparte. Not the Kaiser or the Romanoff upon their
imperial thrones could exercise so great a power as David Morning.
He would bid his golden armies serve their master. Walpole had
truthfully said that “every man has his price,” and the Baron Von Eulaw
probably had his. How many millions would this titled Dutchman take for
his wife? ten? fifty? a hundred? a thousand?—he should have them
multiplied again and again.
Morning smiled grimly at the grotesque fancy. Von Eulaw aspired to the
American embassy. Mayhap he was not covetous but ambitious. Very well,
he would ask the Hohenzollern to name his figures for offices and
ribbons and rank to be accorded to the baron in exchange for a surrender
of his American wife. He would pay off the national debt of Germany if
necessary. Or he would buy the baron a kingdom. There were always
thrones for sale for cash or approved credit in the Danubian country.
That of Servia was just now in the market, and even that of Spain or
Portugal might be purchased.
Maybe the baron loved his wife. How could he help loving her? Curse him,
what right had he to love her? What if Morning emulated the example of
the Psalmist and caused the Baroness Von Eulaw to be made a widow? Money
would accomplish this, and none be the wiser.
None? Ah, what of the God that rules worlds and directs the eternities,
the God that was in and a part of David Morning, the God that punishes
and pities, the God that smote David, that struck down Cæsar, that gave
Napoleon to an exile’s death, and Henry Tudor to centuries of infamy?
If Morning gained his Ellen’s arms through wrong to another, through
wrong to his own imperial and impartial conscience, there would be
bitterness in her kisses, and misery in his soul; they would go maimed
and chained to the gates of death, and in the other land they should
meet not again.
And, inch by inch and minute by minute, Ohromades and Ahriman fought for
the soul of David Morning. The ebon-plumed spirit of darkness and the
silver-armored essence of light battled along the lines of heaven and
hell, and the light triumphed, and darkness was hurled from the
battlements, and peace and strength came to the aching soul.
He would wait. He would not even jeopardize her peace by righting
himself in her esteem. He would offer no explanation. He would wait,
wait for the decree of the Father, wait for the hour of meeting in
honor. If it came on earth, well; if it came only through the help of
death, still well, for “life is short but love immortal.” In the other
land there would be readjustments, and each soul not mated truly here
would find its true mate there, in a mating that should be prevented by
no power, and limited by no death, but should endure so long as the
planets circle in their orbits.
How did he know this? Not through any evidence presented to the material
senses, nor through any logic of the schools. It is the spiritual sense
of man that perceives his spiritual life. No priest can give him his
intuitions, no scoffer can take them from him, and the querulous
questionings of science are but as the babblings of infancy in the
august presence of the soul.
And for full five minutes David Morning sat with his face between his
hands, then rose and went forth a conqueror.