I suppose, nay, I am certain, that the memory of our happiest moments
ought ever to be of the very faintest and weakest, since, could we
recall them in all their fulness and freshness, the recollection would
only serve to deepen the gloom of age, and imbitter all its daily
trials. Nor is it, altogether, a question of memory! It is in the very
essence of happiness to be indescribable. Who could impart in words the
simple pleasure he has felt as he lay day-dreaming in the deep grass,
lulled by the humming insect, or the splash of falling water, with
teeming fancy peopling the space around, and blending the possible with
the actual? The more exquisite the sense of enjoyment, the more will
it defy delineation. And so, when we come to describe the happiness of
others, do we find our words weak, and our attempt mere failure.
It is in this difficulty that I now find myself. I would tell, if I
could, how enjoyably the Barringtons sauntered about through the old
villages on the Rhine and up the Moselle, less travelling than strolling
along in purposeless indolence, resting here, and halting there, always
interested, always pleased. It was strange into what perfect harmony
these three natures--unlike as they were--blended!
Old Peter's sympathies went with all things human, and he loved to watch
the village life and catch what he could of its ways and instincts. His
sister, to whom the love of scenery was a passion, never wearied of the
picturesque land they travelled; and as for Josephine, she was no longer
the demure pensionnaire of the convent,--thoughtful and reserved,
even to secrecy,--but a happy child, revelling in a thousand senses of
enjoyment, and actually exulting in the beauty of all she saw around
her. What depression must come of captivity, when even its faintest
image, the cloister, could have weighed down a heart like hers! Such was
Barrington's thought as he beheld her at play with the peasant children,
weaving garlands for a village _fête_, or joyously joining the chorus of
a peasant song. There was, besides, something singularly touching in the
half-consciousness of her freedom, when recalled for an instant to the
past by the tinkling bell of a church. She would seem to stop in her
play, and bethink her how and why she was there, and then, with a cry of
joy, bound away after her companions in wild delight.
“Dearest aunt,” said she, one day, as they sat on a rocky ledge over the
little river that traverses the Lahnech, “shall I always find the same
enjoyment in life that I feel now, for it seems to me this is a measure
of happiness that could not endure?”
“Some share of this is owing to contrast, Fifine. Your convent life had
not too many pleasures.”
“It was, or rather it seems to me now, as I look back, a long and weary
dream; but, at the same time, it appears more real than this; for do
what I may I cannot imagine this to be the world of misery and sorrow
I have heard so much of. Can any one fancy a scene more beautiful than
this before us? Where is the perfume more exquisite than these violets
I now crush in my hand? The peasants, as they salute us, look happy and
contented. Is it, then, only in great cities that men make each other
miserable?”
Dinah shook her head, but did not speak.
“I am so glad grandpapa does not live in a city. Aunt, I am never
wearied of hearing you talk of that dear cottage beside the river; and
through all my present delight I feel a sense of impatience to be there,
to be at 'home.'”
“So that you will not hold us to our pledge to bring you back to
Bramaigne, Fifine,” said Miss Dinah, smiling.
“Oh no, no! Not if you will let me live with you. Never!”
“But you have been happy up to this, Fifine? You have said over and
over again that your convent life was dear to you, and all its ways
pleasant.”
“It is just the same change to me to live as I now do, as in my heart
I feel changed after reading out one of those delightful stories to
grandpapa,--Rob Roy, for instance. It all tells of a world so much more
bright and beautiful than I know of, that it seems as though new senses
were given to me. It is so strange and so captivating, too, to hear of
generous impulses, noble devotion,--of faith that never swerved, and
love that never faltered.
“In novels, child; these were in novels.”
“True, aunt; but they had found no place there had they been incredible;
at least, it is clear that he who tells the tale would have us believe
it to be true.”
Miss Dinah had not been a convert to her brother's notions as to
Fifine's readings; and she was now more disposed to doubt than ever. To
overthrow of a sudden, as though by a great shock, all the stem realism
of a cloister existence, and supply its place with fictitious incidents
and people, seemed rash and perilous; but old Peter only thought of
giving a full liberty to the imprisoned spirit,--striking off chain and
fetter, and setting the captive free,--free in all the glorious liberty
of a young imagination.
“Well, here comes grandpapa,” said Miss Dinah, “and, if I don't mistake,
with a book in his hand for one of your morning readings.”
Josephine ran eagerly to meet him, and, fondly drawing her arm within
his own, came back at his side.
“The third volume, Fifine, the third volume,” said he, holding the
book aloft. “Only think, child, what fates are enclosed within a
third volume! What a deal of happiness or long-living misery are here
included!”
[Illustration: 312]
She straggled to take the book from his hand, but he evaded her grasp,
and placed it in his pocket, saying,--
“Not till evening, Fifine. I am bent on a long ramble up the Glen this
morning, and you shall tell me all about the sisterhood, and sing me one
of those little Latin canticles I'm so fond of.”
“Meanwhile, I 'll go and finish my letter to Polly Dill. I told her,
Peter, that by Thursday next, or Friday, she might expect us.”
“I hope so, with all my heart; for, beautiful as all this is, it wants
the greatest charm,--it's not home! Then I want, besides, to see Fifine
full of household cares.”
“Feeding the chickens instead of chasing the butterflies, Fifine.
Totting up the house-bills, in lieu of sighing over 'Waverley.'”
“And, if I know Fifine, she will be able to do one without relinquishing
the other,” said Peter, gravely. “Our daily life is all the more
beautiful when it has its landscape reliefs of light and shadow.”
“I think I could, too,” cried Fifine, eagerly. “I feel as though I could
work in the fields and be happy, just in the conscious sense of doing
what it was good to do, and what others would praise me for.”
“There's a paymaster will never fail you in such hire,” said Miss Dinah,
pointing to her brother; and then, turning away, she walked back to the
little inn. As she drew nigh, the landlord came to tell her that a young
gentleman, on seeing her name in the list of strangers, had made many
inquiries after her, and begged he might be informed of her return. On
learning that he was in the garden, she went thither at once.
“I felt it was you. I knew who had been asking for me, Mr. Conyers,”
said she, advancing towards Fred with her hand out. “But what strange
chance could have led you here?”
“You have just said it, Miss Barrington; a chance,--a mere chance. I
had got a short leave fron| my regiment, and came abroad to wander about
with no very definite object; but, growing impatient of the wearisome
hordes of our countrymen on the Rhine, I turned aside yesterday from
that great high-road and reached this spot, whose greatest charm--shall
I own it?--was a fancied resemblance to a scene I loved far better.”
“You are right. It was only this morning my brother said it was so like
our own cottage.”
“And he is here also?” said the young man, with a half-constraint.
“Yes, and very eager to see you, and ask your forgive ness for his
ungracious manner to you; not that I saw it, or understand what it could
mean, but he says that he has a pardon to crave at your hands.”
So confused was Conyers for an instant that he made no answer, and when
he did speak it was falteringly and with embarrassment, “I never could
have anticipated meeting you here. It is more good fortune than I ever
looked for.”
[Illustration: 312]
“We came over to the Continent to fetch away my grand-niece, the
daughter of that Colonel Barrington you have heard so much of.”
“And is she--” He stopped, and grew scarlet with confusion; but she
broke in, laughingly,--
“No, not black, only dark-complexioned; in fact, a brunette, and no
more.”
“Oh, I don't mean,--I surely could not have said--”
“No matter what you meant or said. Your unuttered question was one that
kept occurring to my brother and myself every morning as we journeyed
here, though neither of us had the courage to speak it. But our wonders
are over; she is a dear good, girl, and we love her better every day we
see her. But now a little about yourself. Why do I find you so low and
depressed?”
“I have had much to fret me, Miss Barrington. Some were things that
could give but passing unhappiness; others were of graver import.”
“Tell me so much as you may of them, and I will try to help you to bear
up against them.”
“I will tell you all,--everything!” cried he. “It is the very moment I
have been longing for, when I could pour out all my cares before you and
ask, What shall I do?”
Miss Barrington silently drew her arm within his, and they strolled
along the shady alley without a word.
“I must begin with my great grief,--it absorbs all the rest,” said he,
suddenly. “My father is coming home; he has lost, or thrown up, I can't
tell which, his high employment. I have heard both versions of the
story; and his own few words, in the only letter he has written me, do
not confirm either. His tone is indignant; but far more it is sad and
depressed,--he who never wrote a line but in the joyousness of his
high-hearted nature; who met each accident of life with an undaunted
spirit, and spurned the very thought of being cast down by fortune. See
what he says here.” And he took a much crumpled letter from his pocket,
and folded down a part of it “Read that. 'The time for men of my stamp
is gone by in India. We are as much bygones as the old flint musket or
the matchlock. Soldiers of a different temperament are the fashion now;
and the sooner we are pensioned or die off the better. For my own part,
I am sick of it. I have lost my liver and have not made my fortune,
and like men who have missed their opportunities, I come away too
discontented with myself to think well of any one. They fancied that by
coldness and neglect they might get rid of me, as they did once before
of a far worthier and better fellow; but though I never had the courage
that he had, they shall not break _my_ heart.' Does it strike you to
whom he alludes there?” asked Conyers, suddenly; “for each time that I
read the words I am more disposed to believe that they refer to Colonel
Barrington.”
“I am sure of it!” cried she. “It is the testimony of a sorrow-stricken
heart to an old friend's memory; but I hear my brother's voice; let me
go and tell him you are here.” But Barrington was already coming towards
them.
“Ah, Mr. Conyers!” cried he. “If you knew how I have longed for this
moment! I believe you are the only man in the world I ever ill treated
on my own threshold; but the very thought of it gave me a fit of
illness, and now the best thing I know on my recovery is, that I am here
to ask your pardon.”
“I have really nothing to forgive. I met under your roof with a kindness
that never befell me before; nor do I know the spot on earth where I
could look for the like to-morrow.”
“Come back to it, then, and see if the charm should not be there still.”
“Where 's Josephine, brother?” asked Miss Barrington, who, seeing the
young man's agitation, wished to change the theme.
“She's gone to put some ferns in water; but here she comes now.”
Bounding wildly along, like a child in joyous freedom, Josephine came
towards them, and, suddenly halting at sight of a stranger, she stopped
and courtesied deeply, while Conyers, half ashamed at his own unhappy
blunder about her, blushed deeply as he saluted her. Indeed, their
meeting was more like that of two awkward timid children than of two
young persons of their age; and they eyed each other with the distrust
school boys and girls exchange on a first acquaintance.
“Brother, I have something to tell you,” said Miss Barrington, who was
eager to communicate the news she had just heard of General Conyers; and
while she drew him to one side, the young people still stood there,
each seeming to expect the other would make some advance towards
acquaintanceship. Conyers tried to say some commonplace,--some one of
the fifty things that would have occurred so naturally in presence of
a young lady to whom he had been just presented; but he could think of
none, or else those that _he_ thought of seemed inappropriate. How
talk, for instance, of the world and its pleasures to one who had been
estranged from it! While he thus struggled and contended with himself,
she suddenly started as if with a flash of memory, and said, “How
forgetful!”
“Forgetful!--and of what?” asked he.
“I have left the book I was reading to grandpapa on the rock where we
were sitting. I must go and fetch it.”
“May I go with you?” asked he, half timidly.
“Yes, if you like.”
“And your book,--what was it?”
“Oh, a charming book,--such a delightful story! So many people one
would have loved to know!--such scenes one would have loved to
visit!--incidents, too, that keep the heart in intense anxiety, that
you wonder how he who imagined them could have sustained the thrilling
interest, and held his own heart so long in terrible suspense!”
“And the name of this wonderful book is--”
“'Waverley.'”
“I have read it,” said he, coldly.
“And have you not longed to be a soldier? Has not your heart bounded
with eagerness for a life of adventure and peril?”
“I am a soldier,” said he, quietly.
“Indeed!” replied she, slowly, while her steadfast glance scanned him
calmly and deliberately.
“You find it hard to recognize as a soldier one dressed as I am, and
probably wonder how such a life as this consorts with enterprise and
danger. Is not that what is passing in your mind?”
“Mayhap,” said she, in a low voice.
“It is all because the world has changed a good deal since Waverley's
time.”
“How sorry I am to hear it!”
“Nay, for your sake it is all the better. Young ladies have a pleasanter
existence now than they had sixty years since. They lived then lives of
household drudgery or utter weariness.”
“And what have they now?” asked she, eagerly.
“What have they not! All that can embellish life is around them; they
are taught in a hundred ways to employ the faculties which give to
existence its highest charm. They draw, sing, dance, ride, dress
becomingly, read what may give to their conversation an added elegance
and make their presence felt as an added lustre.”
“How unlike all this was our convent life!” said she, slowly. “The beads
in my rosary were not more alike than the days that followed each other,
and but for the change of season I should have thought life a dreary
sleep. Oh, if you but knew what a charm there is in the changeful year
to one who lives in any bondage!”
“And yet I remember to have heard how you hoped you might not be taken
away from that convent life, and be compelled to enter the world,” said
he, with a malicious twinkle of the eye.
“True; and had I lived there still I had not asked for other. But how
came it that you should have heard of me? I never heard of _you!_”
“That is easily told. I was your aunt's guest at the time she resolved
to come abroad to see you and fetch you home. I used to hear all her
plans about you, so that at last--I blush to own--I talked of Josephine
as though she were my sister.”
“How strangely cold you were, then, when we met!” said she, quietly.
“Was it that you found me so unlike what you expected?”
“Unlike, indeed!”
“Tell me how--tell me, I pray you, what you had pictured me.”
“It was not mere fancy I drew from. There was a miniature of you as a
child at the cottage, and I have looked at it till I could recall every
line of it.”
“Go on!” cried she, as he hesitated.
“The child's face was very serious,--actually grave for childhood,--and
had something almost stern in its expression; and yet I see nothing of
this in yours.”
“So that, like grandpapa,” said she, laughing, “you were disappointed in
not finding me a young tiger from Bengal; but be patient, and remember
how long it is since I left the jungle.”
Sportively as the words were uttered, her eyes flashed and her cheek
colored, and Conyers saw for the first time how she resembled her
portrait in infancy.
“Yes,” added she, as though answering what was passing in his mind, “you
are thinking just like the sisters, 'What years and years it would take
to discipline one of such a race!' I have heard that given as a reason
for numberless inflictions. And now, all of a sudden, comes grandpapa
to say, 'We love you so because you are one of us.' Can you understand
this?”
“I think I can,--that is, I think I can understand why--” he was going
to add, “why they should love you;” but he stopped, ashamed of his own
eagerness.
She waited a moment for him to continue, and then, herself blushing, as
though she had guessed his embarrassment, she turned away.
“And this book that we have been forgetting,--let us go and search for
it,” said she, walking on rapidly in front of him; but he was speedily
at her side again.
“Look there, brother Peter,--look there!” said Miss Dinah, as she
pointed after them, “and see how well fitted we are to be guardians to a
young lady!”
“I see no harm in it, Dinah,--I protest, I see no harm in it.”
“Possibly not, brother Peter, and it may only be a part of your system
for making her--as you phrase it--feel a holy horror of the convent.”
“Well,” said he, meditatively, “he seems a fine, frank-hearted young
fellow, and in this world she is about to enter, her first experiences
might easily be worse.”
“I vow and declare,” cried she, warmly, “I believe it is your slipshod
philosophy that makes me as severe as a holy inquisitor!”
“Every evil calls forth its own correction, Dinah,” said he, laughing.
“If there were no fools to skate on the Serpentine, there had been no
Humane Society.”
“One might grow tired of the task of resuscitating, Peter Barrington,”
said she, hardly.
“Not you, not you, Dinah,--at least, if I was the drowned man,” said
he, drawing her affectionately to his side; “and as for those young
creatures yonder, it's like gathering dog-roses, and they 'll stop when
they have pricked their fingers.”
“I'll go and look after the nosegay myself,” said she, turning hastily
away, and following them.
A real liking for Conyers, and a sincere interest in him were the great
correctives to the part of Dragon which Miss Dinah declared she foresaw
to be her future lot in life. For years and years had she believed that
the cares of a household and the rule of servants were the last trials
of human patience. The larder, the dairy, and the garden were each
of them departments with special opportunities for deception and
embezzlement, and it seemed to her that new discoveries in roguery kept
pace with the inventions of science; but she was energetic and active,
and kept herself at what the French would call “the level of the
situation;” and neither the cook nor the dairymaid nor Darby could be
vainglorious over their battles with her. And now, all of a sudden, a
new part was assigned her, with new duties, functions, and requirements;
and she was called on to exercise qualities which had lain long dormant
and in disuse, and renew a knowledge she had not employed for many a
year. And what a strange blending of pleasure and pain must have come
of that memory of long ago! Old conquests revived, old rivalries and
jealousies and triumphs; glorious little glimpses of brilliant delight,
and some dark hours, too, of disappointment,--almost despair!
“Once a bishop, always a bishop,” says the canon; but might we not with
almost as much truth say, “Once a beauty, always a beauty”?--not in
lineament and feature, in downy cheek or silky tresses, but in the
heartfelt consciousness of a once sovereign power, in that sense of
having been able to exact a homage and enforce a tribute. And as we see
in the deposed monarch how the dignity of kingcraft clings to him, how
through all he does and says there runs a vein of royal graciousness as
from one the fount of honor, so it is with beauty. There lives through
all its wreck the splendid memory of a despotism the most absolute, the
most fascinating of all!
“I am so glad that young Conyers has no plans, Dinah,” said Barrington;
“he says he will join us if we permit him.”
“Humph!” said Miss Barrington, as she went on with her knitting.
“I see nothing against it, sister.”
“Of course not, Peter,” said she, snappishly; “it would surprise me much
if you did.”
“Do _you_, Dinah?” asked he, with a true simplicity of voice and look.
“I see great danger in it, if that be what you mean. And what answer did
you make him, Peter?”
“The same answer that I make to every one,--I would consult my sister
Dinah. 'Le Roi s'avisera' meant, I take it, that he 'd be led by a wiser
head than his own.”
“He was wise when he knew it,” said she, sententiously, and continued
her work.
And from that day forth they all journeyed together, and one of them
was very happy, and some were far more than happy; and Aunt Dinah was
anxious even beyond her wont.