Adventure and endurance and emprise
Exalted his mind's faculties, and strung
His body's sinews.--_Bryant_.
On a rock, at the end of the promontory which forms the harbor of
Beyrout, stood Vassall Morton; and at his side his friend Buckland,
whom he had met in New York just after his return from Austria. They
had encountered again in the East Indies, and had made together a long
and varied journey, not without hardship and danger, among the tribes
of Upper India and Central Asia. Buckland was greatly changed. His
look and bearing betokened recovered health and spirit; while his
companion, in the fulness of masculine vigor, was swarthy as an Arab
with the long burning of the Eastern sun.
"Our travels are over, Buckland. We have nothing to do, now, but to
get on board ship, and lie still for a few weeks, and we shall be at
home again. I hardly know why it is that I wish so much to shorten the
space, unless from a cat-like propensity to haunt old places."
"And to see your friends again."
"Yes, that is something--a good deal. I have friends enough, unless
they have died since I last heard from them. But for household gods, I
have none; or, rather, my ancestral Lares have no better abode than an
old clapboarded parsonage in an up-country Yankee village. You are
much more fortunate in that respect. You go home again, besides, a new
man, rejuvenated in mind and body."
"Thanks to you for that. I was a wreck till you set me afloat and
refitted me."
"I gave you a shove off shore; but the refitting came afterwards, and
was no doing of mine. I should hardly know you for the same man."
"That infatuation seems to me like a dream, as I remember you
prophesied on the evening when we sat together on the Battery."
"Half of a woman's weakness springs from the sensitiveness of her
bodily organization; and three fourths of your infatuation may be laid
to the same account. One may say that, without any tendency to
flounder into materialism. You are a man again now; and even if you
had not heard of your sorceress's death, you might go back, I think,
without the least fear of her spells."
"I hope so; but I wish that, like you, I had some engrossing object to
return to."
"I wish that, like you, I had a family, and a fixed home to return to.
My travels are finished, though. I have roamed the world enough. My
objects are accomplished, as well as I could ever accomplish them. I
have not wandered for nothing; and now I shall bend myself to make my
journeyings bear what fruit I can. By the sun, and by my watch, it is
time for the consul to have returned. Did not his servant say that he
would come ashore from the frigate at about six?"
"Yes."
"If he does not, I will get a boat and go to find him. He must have
letters for one or the other of us."
"I will ride to the town, and see if he has come."
"Very well; I will wait for you here."
Their horses were near at hand, in the keeping of an Arab servant.
Buckland mounted his own, and rode off.
Morton seated himself on a jutting edge of the rock overhanging the
bay, and gave himself up to his thoughts.
"Two years of wandering! Two years more, and I should grow like the
man in Anastasius, never happy at rest, never content in motion. I
have had my fill of adventure. I must learn repose before it is too
late. Why is it that I look so longingly towards America? Except half
a dozen near friends, I have no ties there that are worth the name.
America is the paradise of the laboring class, the purgatory of those
of educated tastes. What career is open to me there, that I could not
better follow elsewhere? I have chosen my path. I have an object which
fills and engrosses me, and would fill the lifetime of twenty men
abler than I. America is not my best field of labor; but where else
should I plant myself? I could not live in England. I am of English
race, but of an altered type; too like, and too unlike, to find
harmony there. The continent is more cosmopolitan; but it would be a
dreary life. I should grow homesick, thinking of the old woods and
rocks. I will go home, buckle to my work, and end my days where I
began them.
"My life has been, in its small way, a varied one; very hard, at
times, but perhaps none too much so. Blows are good for most men, and
suffering, to the farthest limit of their endurance, what they most
need. It is a child's part to complain under any fate; and what color
of complaint have I, or any man sound in mind and body, and with the
world free before him? And yet I turn girl-hearted when I think of
that summer evening by the lake at Matherton. What is my fate to Edith
Leslie's? How will a few years of suffering, with one deadening memory
in their wake, compare with her life-long endurance? A woman's nature,
it is said, will mould itself into conformity with her husband's. I
will rather believe that Vinal's presence, instead of drawing her to
itself, has repelled her upward into a higher atmosphere, and made her
life as lofty as it must be sad. I wish to go back, and yet I shrink
from this voyage. I have some cause, remembering my last welcome home.
Heaven knows what I may learn of her this time. It was her marriage
then; perhaps it will be her death now. And which of the two will have
been the worse either for me to hear or for her to undergo? Perhaps
these letters may bring some word of her; though that is not likely,
for none of my friends, but one, know that I should have any special
interest in hearing it. If they write of her, it will be some news of
disaster."
These dismal forebodings weighed upon him, and his desire to have them
resolved soon grew so importunate, that mounting his horse, he
followed Buckland's track towards the town. Threading the busy
streets, he stopped before a door adorned with the effigy of a spread
eagle wearing a striped shield about his neck, and clutching
thunderbolts and olive boughs in his claws. He threw the rein to his
servant, mounted the consular stair, and at the head met Buckland
emerging.
"Is the consul come?"
"Yes; and letters for you. I am sorry for you, if you mean to answer
them all."
And he gave Morton a formidable packet. Morton cut the string.
"These are all six or eight months old. They are postmarked from
Calcutta."
"Yes, they came after we had gone up the country, and were sent back
to this place to meet you. Wait a moment; here are more. These two
have just come from England."
Morton took them; recognized on one the handwriting of Meredith; on
the other, that of his friend Mrs. Ashland. His heart leaped to his
throat; he tore open the seal, and glanced down the page.
Buckland saw his agitation.
"No bad news, I trust."
"I had an enemy, and he is dead. You shall know more of it to-morrow."
And hastening from the house, he mounted again, and through the midst
of mules, donkeys, dromedaries, men, children, and old women, rode at
an unlawful speed towards his lodging.
Here, with a beating heart, he explored his profuse correspondence
from beginning to end. By the Calcutta packet, he learned how his
native town had been thrown into commotion by the exposure and flight
of Vinal, and how his friends were eager and impatient to hear his
explanation of the affair. The more recent letters bore tidings still
more startling. The bark Swallow had touched at Gibraltar, and a
letter from her captain to her owners, forwarded by the Oriental
steamer on her return voyage, told how his passenger, John White, had
been lost overboard during a gale, two of the crew having seen the
accident; how, arriving at Gibraltar, his trunks had been opened in
the consul's presence, to learn his address; and how, along with a
large amount of money in gold, letters and papers had been found,
showing that he was not John White, but Horace Vinal, of Boston.
* * * * *
On the next morning, Morton despatched a letter to Meredith. In it, he
told his friend the whole course of his story; and these were the
closing words:--
"One thing you may well believe--that, before you will have had this
letter many days, I shall follow it. There will be no rest for me till
I touch American soil. An old passion, only half stifled under a load
of hopelessness, springs into fresh life again, and burns, less
brightly, perhaps, but I can almost believe, more deeply and fervently
than ever. I was consoling myself yesterday with trying to think that
blows were my mind's best medicine; but I feel now, that after being
broken with the plough and harrow, it will yield the better for the
summer sunshine. Yet I am afraid to flatter myself with too bright a
prospect. Miss Leslie loved me, and the planets in their course are
not more constant and unswerving; but I cannot tell what may have been
the effect of so much suffering, or what determination, fatal to my
hope, it may not have impelled her to embrace. She will soon know my
mind. I have written to her, and begged her to send her reply to New
York, where, if my reckoning does not fail, I shall arrive about the
middle of June. By it I shall be able to judge to what fortune I am to
look forward.
"You have so lately passed your own anxieties, that you will easily
appreciate mine. I can wish for them nothing more than that they may
find as happy an issue; and I will take it as an earnest of the
intentions of destiny towards me that it has just brought together my
two best friends."