Charlemont; Or, The Pride of the Village Part 10

It appears that William Hinkley submitted to all this scrutiny with exemplary fort.i.tude, but gave no satisfactory answers to any of the questions asked him. He had no complaints, he denied any suffering; and expressed himself annoyed at the inquisition into his thoughts and feelings. This annoyance had been expressed, however, with the subdued tones and language of one habitually gentle and modest. Whenever he was approached on the subject, as the good old lady a.s.sured her guest, he shook off his questioners with no little haste, and took to the woods for the rest of the day. "That day," said she, "you needn't look for William Hinkley to his dinner."

Stevens had been struck with the deportment of this youth, which had seemed to him haughty and repulsive; and, as he fancied, characterized by some sentiment of hostility for himself. He was surprised therefore to learn from the old lady that the lad was remarkable for his gentleness.

"How long has he been in this way, Mrs. Hinkley?" he asked with some curiosity.

"Well now, Brother Stevens, I can't tell you. It's been growing on him for some time. I reckon it's a matter of more than four months since I first seen it; but it's only been a few weeks that I have spoken to him.

Brother Cross spoke to him only Monday of last week. My old man don't seem to see so much of it; but I know there's a great change in him now from what there used to be. A mother's eye sees a great way farther into the hearts of her children, Brother Stevens, than any other persons; and I can see plainly that William is no more the same boy--no! nor nothing like it--that he once was. Why, once, he was all life, and good humor; could dance and sing with the merriest among them; and was always so good and kind, and loved to do whatever would please a body; and was always with somebody, or other, making merry, and planning the prettiest sports. Now, he don't sing, nor dance, nor play; when you see him, you 'most always see him alone. He goes by himself into the woods, and he'll be going over the hills all day, n.o.body with him, and never seeming to care about his food, and what's more strange, never looking at the books that he used to be so fond of."

"He has been fond of books, then--had he many?"

"Oh, yes, a whole drawer of them, and he used to get them besides from the schoolmaster, Mr. Calvert, a very good man that lives about half a mile from the village, and has a world of books. But now he neither gets books from other people nor reads what he's got. I'm dubious, Brother Stevens, that he's read too much for his own good. Something's not right here, I'm a thinking."

The good old lady touched her head with her finger and in this manner indicated her conjecture as to the seat of her son's disease. Stevens answered her encouragingly.

"I scarcely think, Mrs. Hinkley, that it can be anything so bad. The young man is at that age when a change naturally takes place in the mind and habits. He wants to go into the world, I suspect. He's probably tired of doing nothing. What is to be his business? It's high time that such a youth should have made a choice."

"That's true, Brother Stevens, but he's been the apple to our eyes, and we haven't been willing that he should take up any business that would--carry him away from us. He's done a little farming about the country, but that took him away, and latterly he's kept pretty much at home, going over his books and studying, now one and now another, just as Mr. Calvert gave them to him."

"What studies did he pursue?"

"Well, I can't tell you. He was a good time at Latin, and then he wants to be a lawyer;--"

"A lawyer!"

"Yes, he had a great notion to be a lawyer and was at his books pretty hard for a good year, constant, day by day, until, as I said before, about four months ago, when I saw that he was growing thin, and that he had put down the books altogether, and had the change come over him just as I told you. You see how thin he is now. You'd scarce believe him to be the same person if you'd seen him then. Why his cheeks were as full and as red as roses, and his eye was always shining and laughing, and he had the liveliest step, and between him and Ned Hinkley, his cousin, what with flute and fiddle, they kept the house in a constant uproar, and we were all so happy. Now, it isn't once a month that we hear the sound of the fiddle in the house. He never sings, and he never dances, and he never plays, and what little he lets us see of him, is always so sad and so spiritless that I feel heartsick whenever I look upon him.

Oh! Brother Stevens, if you could only find out what's the matter, and tell us what to do, it would be the most blessed kindness, and I'd never forget it, or forget you, to my dying day."

"Whatever I can do, Mrs. Hinkley, shall surely be done. I will see and speak with your son."

"Oh! do--that's a dear good sir. I'm sure if you only talk to him and advise him it will do him good."

"Without being so sure, ma'am, I will certainly try to please you.

Though I think you see the matter with too serious eyes. Such changes are natural enough to young people, and to old ones too. But what may be your son's age."

"Nineteen last April."

"Quite a man for his years, Mrs. Hinkley."

"Isn't he?"

"He will do you credit yet."

"Ah! if I could believe so. But you'll speak to him, Brother Stevens?

You'll try and bring all to rights?"

"Rely upon me to do what I can;--to do my best."

"Well, that's as much as any man can do, and I'm sure I'll be so happy--we shall all be so much indebted to you."

"Do not speak of it, my dear madam," said Stevens, bowing with profound deference as the old lady took her departure. She went off with light heart, having great faith in the powers of the holy man, and an equal faith in his sincerity.

"What a bore!" he muttered as he closed the door behind her. "This is one of the penalties, I suppose, which I must pay for my privileges. I shall be called upon to reform the morals and manners, and look into the petty cares of every chuckle-headed boor and boor's brat for ten miles round. See why boys reject their mush, and why the girls dislike to listen to the exhortations of a mamma, who requires them to leave undone what she has done herself--and with sufficient reason too, if her own experience be not wholly profitless. Well, I must submit. There are advantages, however; I shall have other pupils to tutor, and it shall go hard with me if all the grapes prove sour where the vines are so various."

The student of divinity, after these conclusions, prepared to make his toilet. Very few of these students, in their extreme solicitude for the well being of the inner man, show themselves wholly regardless of their externals. Even mourning, it appears, requires to be disposed by a fashionable costumer. Though the garments to which the necessities of travel limited Brother Stevens were not various, they were yet select.

The good young man had an affection for his person, which was such certainly as to deserve his care. On this occasion he was more than usually particular. He did not scruple to discard the white cravat.

For this he subst.i.tuted a handkerchief which had the prettiest sprig of lilac, on a ground of the most delicate lemon color. He consulted complexions, and his mirror determined him in favor of this pattern.

Brother Stevens would not have worn it had he been summoned, in his new vocation, to preach or pray at the conventicle; nor would he have dreamed of anything but a black stock had his business been to address the democracy from the top of a cider-barrel. His habits, under such necessities, would have been made to correspond with the principles with which such a situation more distinctly called for.

But the thoughts of our worthy brother ran upon other objects. He was thinking of Margaret Cooper. He was about to pay that damsel a visit.

His progress, we may suppose, had not been inconsiderable when we are told that his present visit was one of previous arrangement. They were about to go forth on a ramble together--the woods were so wild and lovely--the rocks surrounding Charlemont were so very picturesque;--there was the quietest tarn, a sort of basin in the bosom of the hills at a little distance, which she was to show him; and there was the sweetest stream in the world, that meandered in the neighborhood; and Brother Stevens so loved the picturesque--lakes embosomed in hills, and streams stealing through unbroken forests, and all so much the more devotedly, when he had such a companion as Margaret Cooper.

And Margaret Cooper!--she the wild, the impa.s.sioned. A dreamer--a muse--filled with ambitious thoughts--proud, vain, aspiring after the vague, the unfathomable! What was her joy, now that she could speak her whole soul, with all its pa.s.sionate fullness, to understanding ears!

Stevens and herself had already spoken together. Her books had been his books. The glowing pa.s.sages which she loved to repeat, were also the favorite pa.s.sages in his memory. Over the burning and thrilling strains of Byron, the tender and spiritual of Sh.e.l.ley, the graceful and soft of Campbell, she loved to linger. They filled her thoughts. They made her thoughts. She felt that her true utterance lay in their language; and this language, until now, had fallen dead and without fruit upon the dull ears of her companions in Charlemont. What was their fiddling and festivity to her! What their tedious recreations by hillside or stream, when she had to depress her speech to the base levels of their unimaginative souls! The loveliness of nature itself, unrepresented by the glowing hues of poetry, grew tame, if not offensive; and when challenged to its contemplation by those to whom the muse was nothing, the fancy of the true observer grew chilled and heavy, and the scenes of beauty seemed prost.i.tuted in their glance.

We have all felt this. Nothing can more annoy the soul of taste or sensibility than to behold its favorite scene and subject fail in awakening others to that emotion which it has inspired in ourselves.

We turn away in haste, lest the object of our worship should become degraded by a longer survey. Enthusiasm recoils at a denial of sympathy; and all the worth of our companion, in a thousand other respects, fails to reconcile us to his coldness and indifference.

That Alfred Stevens had taste and talent--that he was well read in the volumes which had been her favorite study, Margaret Cooper needed no long time to discover. She soon ascribed to him qualities and tastes which were beyond his nature. Deceived by his tact, she believed in his enthusiasm. He soon discovered HER tastes; and she found equally soon that HIS were like her own. After this discovery, she gave him credit for other and more important possessions; and little dreamed that, while he responded to her glowing sentiments with others equally glowing--avowed the same love for the same authors, and concurred with her in the preference of the same pa.s.sages--his feelings were as little susceptible of sympathy with hers as would have been those of the cold demon Mephistopheles! While her eye was flashing, her cheek flushed, her breast heaving with the burning thoughts and strains of the master to whom her beautiful lips were giving utterance, he was simply sensible to HER beauty--to its strange, wild charms--and meditating thoughts from which the soul of true poetry recoils with the last feelings of aversion. Even the pa.s.sion which he felt while he surveyed her, foreign as it was to those legitimate emotions which her ambition and her genius would equally have tended to inspire in any justly-minded nature, might well be considered frigid--regarded as the result of deliberate artifice--the true offspring of an habitual and base indulgence.

It was to meet this unsophisticated, impa.s.sioned, and confiding girl, that Alfred Stevens bestowed such particular pains on his costume. He felt its deficiencies, and, accordingly, the necessity of making the most of it; for, though he perfectly well knew that such a woman as Margaret Cooper would have been the very last to regard the mere garment in which a congenial nature is arrayed, yet he also well knew that the costume is not less indicative of the tastes than the wealth of the wearer. You will see thousands of persons, men and women, richly dressed, and but one will be WELL dressed: that one, most generally, will be the individual who is perhaps of all others possessed of the least resources for dress, other than those which dwell in the well-arranged mind, the well-disposing taste, and the happy, crowning fancy.

His tasks of the toilet were at length ended, and he was preparing to go forth. He was about to leave the chamber, had already placed his hand upon the latch of the door, when he heard the voice of his hostess, on the stairway, in seeming expostulation with her son. He was about to forbear his purpose of departure as the parties had retired, when, remembering the solicitude of the lady, and thinking it would show that zest in her service which he really could not entertain, he determined at once to to join the young man, and begin with him that certain degree of intimacy without which it could scarcely be supposed that he could broach the subject of his personal affairs. He felt somewhat the awkwardness of this a.s.sumed duty, but then he recollected his vocation; he knew the paramount influence of the clergy upon all cla.s.ses of persons in the West, and, with the conscious superiority derived from greater years and better education, he felt himself fortified in undertaking the paternal office which the fond, foolish mother had confided to his hands. Accordingly, descending the stairs briskly, he joined the two at the entrance of the dwelling. The son was already on the outside; the mother stood in the doorway: and, as Stevens appeared and drew nigh, William Hinkley bowed, and turned away as if to withdraw.

"If you have no objections, Mr. Hinkley," said Stevens, "I will join you. You seem to be about to go my way."

The young man paused with an air of reluctance, muttered something which was not altogether intelligible, but which Stevens construed into a.s.sent, and the two set forth together--the good old matron giving a glance of grat.i.tude to the benevolent young student which her son did not fail to note, while, at the same time, a sentence which evidently conveyed some motherly rebuke, was addressed to his already-irritated ears.

CHAPTER XI.

WRESTLING.

Alfred Stevens, as he walked behind his young companion, observed him with a more deliberate survey than he had yet taken. Hitherto, the young man had challenged but little of his scrutiny. He had simply noted him for a tall youth, yet in the green, who appeared of a sulky, retiring nature, and whose looks had seemed to him on one or more occasions to manifest something like distaste for himself. The complacency of Stevens, however, was too well grounded to be much disturbed by such an exhibition. Perhaps, indeed, he would have derived a malicious sort of satisfaction in making a presumptuous lad feel his inferiority. He had just that smallness of spirit which would find its triumph in the success of such a performance.

He now observed that the youth was well formed, tall, not ungraceful--with features of singular intelligence, though subdued to the verge of sadness. His face was pale and thin, his eyes were a little sunken, and his air, expression, and general outside, denoted a youth of keen sensibilities, who had suffered some disappointment.

In making this examination, Alfred Stevens was not awakened to any generous purposes. He designed, in reality, nothing more than to acquit himself of the duty he had undertaken with the smallest possible exertion. His own mind was one of that mediocre character which the heart never informs. His scrutiny, therefore, though it enabled him to perceive that the young man had qualities of worth, was not such as to prompt any real curiosity to examine further. A really superior mind would have been moved to look into these resources; and, without other motive than that of bringing a young, laboring, and ardent soul out of the meshes of a new and bewildering thought or situation, would have addressed himself to the task with that degree of solicitous earnestness which disarms prejudice and invites and wins confidence. But, with his first impression, that the whole business was a "bore," our benevolent young teacher determined on getting through with it with the least possible effort. He saw that the youth carried a book under his arm, the externals of which, so uniform and discouraging as they appear in every legal library, could not well be questioned as belonging to some such venerable receptacle of barbarous phrase and rigid authority. The circ.u.mstance afforded him an occasion to begin a conversation, the opening of which, with all his coolness, was a subject of some awkwardness.

"You seem a student like myself, Mr. Hinkley, and, if I mistake not from the appearance of your book, you are taking up the profession which I am about to lay down."

"This is a law-book, sir," said Hinkley, in accents which were rather meek than cold; "it is Blackstone."