Bressant Part 16

"We're waiting for you to say we may be, papa."

"It is right--it is just!" said the professor, solemnly, though still with a sluggish utterance. "I sought to glorify G.o.d to the end of mine own glorification, and lo! He hath taken from me my own heart's blood!"

Swept off his feet by the profundity of his emotion, the ministerial form of speech, so long disused, rose naturally to the old man's lips.

But presently, the paralyzing effect of the shock beginning to wear off, he drew a few long breaths, and found himself growing very hot. He took out his handkerchief and wiped away the perspiration that had gathered on his forehead. Then he took his little daughter strongly yet tremblingly to his heart, and kissed her more than once.

"G.o.d bless you! my darling--my Sophie--you're my Sophie still, if you are in love with that--great overgrown rascal. I'm a fool--an old fool!

Well--and how long has this been going on between you, my darling?"

Sophie's heart, which, in the pa.s.sionate tumult of her recent interview with her lover, had remained so steady and unfaltering, began now to beat with such violence as to impede her utterance and visibly to shake her. She was resolved to show herself to her father even as she was.

"I hardly can say how long, papa--I think--I think it must have been a--a long time--at least, on my side. Oh! I have been so false--so false to myself, and so unwomanly! I have courted him, papa--_I_, papa--think of it! I've thrown myself in his way, and--and made him interested in me; and talked to him about things that--no one but his mother, or you, should have done. Poor fellow!--I've forced myself upon him, papa. I took advantage of his illness and helplessness, and pretended all the time I was thinking only of his spiritual welfare, and--and not of--of any thing else. That was the wickedest part. And yet, somehow, I deceived myself too--or, rather, I wouldn't see the truth: and I didn't know--papa, I really believe I didn't know that I--loved him, till he--till he began to speak of it; then it seemed suddenly to fill all my heart, as if it had always lived there. For I succeeded, papa: I've won his love, and, oh! he loves me so! he loves me so! and so I've found my punishment in my happiness. G.o.d is so just and good. The happier his love makes me, you see, the more I shall be humbled to think how it became mine. It is well for me, for I was proud and reserved and full of self-conceit. And you really think it will not hurt him to love me, and to have me love him, papa?"

"Stuff and nonsense!" growled the old gentleman, testily; "hurt him!"

But the professor was really a very wise man, in spite of his occasional blindness; and he refrained from showing Sophie the exaggeration and distortion which marked the view she took of her conduct. He saw it would involve lowering the high integrity of her ideal conceptions respecting delicacy and honor--hardly worth while, merely for the sake of explaining the distinction between a trifling piece of self-deception and mistaken vanity, and the severe and unrelenting sentence which Sophie had pa.s.sed upon herself. Meanwhile, every word she had uttered had been an indirect, but none the less telling blow upon a sore place in his own conscience. It was long since Professor Valeyon had stood so low in his own self-esteem.

They sat awhile in silence, Sophie nestling up to her father as if seeking protection from the very love that had come to her; and he sighed, and sighed again, and coughed, and pulled his nose and his beard, and finally blew his nose. Then, depositing Sophie upon her feet, he got slowly up, stretched himself, and went for his pipe.

"Run off, my dear. Go up in your room, or out in the garden, or somewhere. I must be alone a little while, you know; must think it all over, and see how things stand. Besides, I must step in and see this fellow who's going to rob me of my daughter, and tell him what I think of him. Come, off with you!"

"You'll be happy about it--you'll forgive us, won't you, papa?" she said, turning at the door.

The old gentleman shuffled heavily up to her, and kissed her on the forehead.

"G.o.d bless you, and G.o.d's will be done, my darling!" said he; but at that moment he could say no more.

An hour afterward, however, when the professor knocked the ashes out of his second pipe, and laid his hand upon the latch of Bressant's door, the expression upon his strongly-cut features was neither gloomy nor severe. There was a look in his eyes of benignant sweetness, all the more impressive because it made one wonder how it could find a place beneath such stern eyebrows and so deeply lined a forehead. But, cutting off an offending right hand, although a bitter piece of work enough for the time being, may, in its after-effect, work as gracious a miracle in an older and more forbidding gentleman even than Professor Valeyon.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A FLANK MOVEMENT.

Bressant was lying comfortably upon his bed with his eyes closed; no one would have imagined there had been any outburst or convulsion of pa.s.sion in his mental or emotional organism. He breathed easily; there was a pale tint of red in his cheeks, above his close, brown beard; his forehead was slightly moist, and his pulse, on which the surgeon laid his finger with professional instinct, beat quietly and regularly. In entering upon the world of love, all marks of wounds received upon the journey seemed to have pa.s.sed away.

He opened his eyes at the professor's touch, and fixed them upon the old gentleman in such a serene stare of untroubled complacency as one sometimes receives from a baby nine months old.

"Well, sir"--the professor, from some subtle delicacy of feeling respecting the prospective change in their relationship, adopted this form of address in preference to that more paternal one he had been in the habit of using since Bressant's accident--"well, sir, how do you find yourself now?"

"Much better; I shall soon be well now. I feel differently from ever before--very light and full here," said the young man, indicating the region of his heart.

"I've seen Sophie," observed Professor Valeyon, after a somewhat long silence, which Bressant, who had calmly closed his eyes again, showed no intention of breaking.

"Sophie and I love each other," responded he, meditatively, and rather to himself than to the father. The latter could not but feel some surprise at the untroubled confidence the young man's manner displayed.

Before he could put his thought into fitting words, the other spoke again.

"I've been thinking, I should like to marry her."

"You'd like to marry her?" repeated the old gentleman, with a mixture of sternness and astonishment, his forehead reddening. "What else do you suppose I expected, sir?"

Bressant turned over on his side, and regarded him with some curiosity.

"Do all people who love each other, or because they love each other, marry?" demanded he.

For a moment, the professor seemed to suspect some latent satire in this question; but the young man's face convinced him to the contrary.

"In many marriages, there's little love--true love--on either side; that's certain," said he, pa.s.sing his hand down his face, and looking grave. "But marriage was ordained for none but lovers."

"The reason I want to be married to Sophie is because I love her so much I couldn't live without her," resumed Bressant, as if stating some unusual circ.u.mstance.

"Humph!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the professor, partly amused and partly puzzled.

Bressant rubbed his forehead, and fingered his beard awhile, and then continued:

"We've been reading poetry lately, and romances, and such things. I used to think they were nonsense--good for nothing; because they came out so beautifully, and represented love to be so great an element in the world. But now I see they were not good enough; they are much below the truth; I mean to write poetry and romances myself!"

This tickled Professor Valeyon so much, that he burst out in a most genuine laugh. The intellectual animal of two or three months before seemed to have laid aside all claims to what his brain had won for him, and to be beginning existence over again with a new object and new materials. And had Bressant indeed been a child, the succession of his ideas and impulses could hardly have been more primitive and natural.

"What's to become of our Hebrew and history, if you turn poet?" inquired the old gentleman, still chuckling.

Bressant turned his head away and closed his eyes wearily. "I don't want any thing more to do with that," said he. "Love is study enough, and work enough, for a lifetime. Mathematics, and logic, and philosophy--all those things have nothing to do with love, and couldn't help me in it.

It's outside of every thing else: it has laws of its own: I'm just beginning to learn them."

"A professional lover! well, as long as you recognize the sufficiency of one object in your studies, you might do worse, that's certain. But you can't make a living out of it, my boy."

"I don't need money, I have enough; if I hadn't, money-making is for men without hearts; but mine is bigger than my head; I must give myself up to it."

"That won't do," returned the professor, shaking his head. "Lovers must earn their bread-and-b.u.t.ter as well as people with brains. Besides,"

here his face and tone became serious, "there's one thing we've both forgotten. This matter of your false name--you can't be married as Bressant, you know: and if the tenure of your property depends, as you said, on preserving the _incognito_, I have reason to believe that you stand an excellent chance of losing every cent of it, the moment the minister has p.r.o.nounced your real name."

"No matter!" said the young man, with an impatient movement, as if to dismiss an unprofitable subject. "I shall have Sophie; my father's will can't deprive me of her. I don't want to be famous, nor to have a great reputation--except with her."

The old man was touched at this devotion, unreasonable and impracticable though it was. He laid his hand kindly on the invalid's big shoulder.

"I don't say but that a wife's a good exchange for the world, my boy; I'm glad you should feel it, too. But when you marry her, you promise to support her, as long as you have strength and health to do it. It's a natural and necessary consequence of your love for her"--and here the professor paused a moment to marvel at the position in which he found himself--stating the first axioms of life to such a man as this pupil of his; "and you should be unwilling to take her, as I certainly should be to give her, on any other terms. If your hands are empty, you must at any rate be able to show that they won't always continue so."

"Well, but I don't want to think about that just now; I can be a farmer, or a clerk; I can make a living with my body, if I can't with my mind; and I can write to Mrs. Vanderplanck, some time, and find out just how things are."

"Very well--very well! or perhaps I'd better write to her myself--well--and as long as you are on your back, there'll be no use in troubling you with business--that's certain! And perhaps things may turn out better than they look, in the end."

As Professor Valeyon p.r.o.nounced this latter sentence, he smiled to himself pleasantly and mysteriously. He seemed to fancy he had stronger grounds for believing in a happy issue, than, for some reason, he was at liberty to disclose. And the smile lingered about the corners of his mouth and eyes, as if the issue in question were to be of that peculiarly harmonious kind usually supposed to be reserved for the themes of poems, or the conclusions of novels.

"I never was interested to hear of the every-day lives of men who have loved, and wanted to make their way in the world; for I never expected I should be such a man. Now, I'm sorry; it would have been useful to me, wouldn't it?"

"Perhaps it might," responded the old gentleman, musing at the change in the att.i.tude of the young man's mind--once so self-sufficient and a.s.sertive, now so dependent and inexperienced. "Very few lives are bare and empty enough not to teach one something worth knowing. I know the events of one man's life," he added, after a few moments of thoughtful consideration; "perhaps it might lead to some good, if I were to tell them to yon."