Lost liberty and love at once he bore;
His prison pained him much, his passion more.--_Palemon and Arcite_.
Since his illness, Morton had had some of an invalid's privilege. He
had been allowed to walk on the rampart for half an hour daily. In the
distance, a great mountain range bounded the view, and, nearer, the
Croatian forest stretched its dark and wild frontier. The scene
recalled kindred scenes at home; and when he was led back to his cell,
when the heavy door clashed and the bolts grated upon him, he leaned
his forehead on his hand, and stood in fancy again among the mountains
of New England, with all their associations of health, freedom, and
golden hopes. The White Mountains seemed to rise around him like a
living presence, rugged with their rocks and pines, scarred with
avalanches, cinctured with morning mists; and, standing again on the
bank of the Saco, he seemed to feel their breezes and hear the
brawling of their waters. Then his roused fancy took a wider range;
carried him across the Alleghanies and along the Ohio, up the
Mississippi to its source, and downward to the sea, picturing the
whole like the shifting scene of a panorama.
"Ah," he thought, "if my story could be blown abroad over those
western waters! How long then should I lie here dying by inches? The
farmers of Ohio, the planters of Tennessee, the backwoodsmen of
Missouri, how would they endure such outrage to the meanest member of
their haughty sovereignty! A hopeless dream! I have looked my last on
America. My wrongs will find no voice. They and I are smothering
together, safely walled up in sound and solid mason-work. Strange, the
power of fancy! Heaven knows how or why, but at this moment I could
believe myself seated on the edge of the lake at Matherton, under the
beech trees, on a hot July noon. The leaves will not rustle; the birds
will not sing; nothing seems awake but the small yellow butterflies,
flickering over the clover tops, and the heat-loving cicala, raising
his shrill voice from the dead pear tree. The breathless pines on the
farther bank grow downward in the glassy mirror. The water lies at my
feet, pellucid as the air; the dace, the bream, and the perch glide
through it like spirits, their shadows following them over the quartz
pebbles; and, in the cove hard by, the pirate pickerel lies asleep
under the water lilies.
"On such a day, I came down the garden walk, and found Edith reading
under the shade of the maple grove. On the evening of such a day, I
heard from her lips the words which seemed to launch me upon a life of
more than human happiness. Could I have looked into the future! Could
I have lifted the glowing curtain which my fancy drew before it, the
gay and gilded illusion which covered the hideous truth! Where is she
now? Does she still walk in the garden, and read under the grove of
maples? She thinks me dead: almost four years! She has good cause to
think so; and perhaps at this moment some glib-tongued suitor, as
earnest and eager as I was, is whispering persuasion into her ear,
winning her to his hearth stone and his arms. Powers of hell, if you
would rack man's soul with torments like your own, show him first a
gleam of heaven; bathe him in celestial light; then thrust him down to
a damnation like this."
And he groaned between his set teeth, in the extremity of mental
torture.