Confession; Or, The Blind Heart Part 30

"No! no!" said the old man, mournfully. "I have no hope of him. There seems to me a curse upon wealth always--that follows and clings to it, and never leaves it, till it works out the ruin of all the proprietors.

See the number of our young men, springing from nothing, that make everything out of it--rise to eminence and power--get fortune as if it were a mere sport to command and to secure it; while, on the other Sand, look at the heirs of our proud families. Profligate, reckless, abandoned: as if, reasoning from the supposed wealth of their parents, they fancied that there were no responsibilities of their own. I saw this danger from the beginning. I have striven to train up my son in the paths of duty and constant employment; and yet--but complaint is idle.

The consciousness of having tried my best to have and make it otherwise is, nevertheless, a consolation. When do you think to go?"

"In a week or two at farthest. I have but to rid myself of my impediments."

"Always prompt; but it is best. Once resolved, action is the moral law.

Still, I wish I could delay you. I still think you are committing a great error. I can not understand it. You have established yourself.

This is not easy anywhere. You will find it difficult in a new country, and among strangers."

"Nay, sir, more easy there than anywhere else. If a man has anything in him, strangers and a new country are the proper influences to bring it out. Friends and an old community keep it down, suppress, strangle it.

This is the misfortune of your son. He has family, friends--resources which defeat all the operations of moral courage, and prevent independence. Necessity is the moral lever. Do you forget the saying of one of the wise men? 'If you wish your son to become a man, strip him naked and send him among strangers'--in other words, throw him upon his own resources, and let him take care of himself. The not doing this is the source of that misfortune which only now you deplored as so commonly following the condition of the select and wealthy. I do not fear the struggle in a new country. It will end in my gaining my level, be that high or low. Nothing, in such a region, can keep a man from that."

"Ay, but the roughness of those new countries--the absence of refinement--the absolute want of polish and delicacy."

"The roughness will not offend me, if it is manly. The world is full of it. To be anything, a man must not have too nice a stomach. Such a stomach will make him recoil from sights of misery and misfortune; and he who recoils from such sights, will be the last to relieve, to repair them. But while I admit the roughness and the want of polish among these frontier men, I deny the want of delicacy. Their habits are rude and simple, perhaps, but their tastes are pure and unaffected, and their hearts in the right place. They have strong affections; and strong affections, properly balanced, are the true sources of the better sort of delicacy. All other is merely conventional, and consists of forms and phrases, which are very apt to keep us from the thing itself which they are intended to represent. Give me these frank men and women of the frontier, while my own feelings are yet strong and earnest. Here, I am perpetually annoyed by the struggle to subdue within the social limits the expression of that nature which is for ever boiling up within me, and the utterance of which is neither more nor less than the heart's utterance of the faith and hope which are in it. We are told of those nice preachers who 'never mention h.e.l.l to ears polite.' They are the preachers of your highly-refined, sentimental society. Whatever h.e.l.l may be, they are the very teachers that, by their mincing forbearance, conduct the poor soul that relies on them into its jaws. It is a sort of lie not to use the properest language to express our thoughts, but rather so to falsify our thoughts by a sort of lack-a-daisaical phraseology which deprives them of all their virility. A nation or community is in a bad way for truth, when there is a tacit understanding among their members to deal in the diminutives of a language, and forbear the calling of things by their right names. An Englishman, wishing to designate something which is graceful, pleasing, delicate, or fine, uses the word 'nice'--more fitly applied to bon-bons or beefsteaks, according to the stomach of the speaker. An energetic form of speech is rated, in fashionable society, as particularly vulgar. In our larger American cities, where they have much pretension but little character, a leg must not be spoken of as such. You may say 'limb,' but not 'leg.' The word 'woman'--one of the sweetest in the language--is supposed to disparage the female to whom it is applied. She must be called a 'lady,' forsooth; and this word, originally intended to pacify an aristocratic vanity, has become the ordinary appellative of every member of that gross family which, in the language of Shakspere, is only fit to 'suckle fools and chronicle small beer.' I shall be more free, and feel more honest in that rough world of the west; a region in which the dilettantism, such as it is, of our Atlantic cities, is always very prompt to sneer at and disparage; but I look to see the day, even in our time, when that west shall be, not merely an empire herself, but the nursing mother of great empires. There shall be a genius born in that vast, wide world--a rough, unlicked genius it may be, but one whose words shall fall upon the hills like thunder, and descend into the valleys like a settled, heavy rain, which shall irrigate them all with a new life. Perhaps--"

I need not pursue this. I throw it upon paper with no deliberation. It streams from me like the rest. Its tone was somewhat derived from those peculiar, sad feelings, and that pang-provoking course of thought, which it has been the purpose of this narrative to embody. In the expression of digressive but earnest notions like these, I could momentarily divert myself from deeper and more painful emotions. I had really gone through a great trial: I say a great trial--always a.s.suming human indulgence for that disease of the blind heart which led me where I found myself, which makes me what I am. I did not feel lightly the pang of parting with my birthplace. I did not esteem lightly the sacrifice of business, comfort, and distinction which I was making; and of that greater cause of suffering, supposed or real, of the falling off in my wife's affection, the agony is already in part recorded. It may be permitted to me, perhaps, under these circ.u.mstances--with the additional knowledge, which I yet suppressed, that these sacrifices were to be made, and these sufferings endured, partly that the son might be saved--to speak with some unreserved warmth of tone to the venerable and worthy sire. He little knew how much of my determination to remove from my country was due to my regard for him. I felt a.s.sured that, if I remained, two things must happen. William Edgerton would persevere in his madness, and I should murder him in his perseverance! I banished myself in regard for that old man, and in some measure to requite his benefactions, that I might be spared this necessity.

When, the next day, I sought William Edgerton himself, and declared my novel determination, he turned pale as death. I could see that his lips quivered. I watched him closely. He was evidently racked by an emotion which was more obvious from the necessity he was under of suppressing it. With considerable difficulty he ventured to ask my reasons for this strange step, and with averted countenance repeated those which his father had proffered against my doing so. I could see that he fain would have urged his suggestions more vehemently if he dared. But the conviction that his wishes were the fathers to his arguments was conclusive to render him careful that his expostulations should not put on a show of earnestness. I must do William Edgerton the justice to say that guilt was not his familiar. He could not play the part of the practised hypocrite. He had no powers of artifice. He could not wear the flowers upon his breast, having the volcano within it. Professionally, he could be no roue. He could seem no other than he was. Conscious of guilt, which he had not the moral strength to counteract and overthrow, he had not, at the same time, the art necessary for its concealment. He could use no smooth, subtle blandishments. His cheek and eye would tell the story of his mind, though it strove to make a false presentment. I do him the further justice to believe that a great part of his misery arose from this consciousness of his doing wrong, rather than from the difficulties in the way of his success. I believe that, even were he successful in the prosecution of his illicit purposes, he would not have looked or felt a jot less miserable. I felt, while we conferred together, that my departure was perhaps the best measure for his relief.

While I mused upon his character and condition, my anger yielded in part to commiseration. I remembered the morning-time of our boyhood--when we stood up for conflict with our young enemies, side by side--obeyed the same rallying-cry, recognised the same objects, and were a sort of David and Jonathan to one another. Those days!--they soothed and softened me while I recalled them. My tone became less keen, my language less tinctured with sarcasm, when I thought of these things; and I thought of our separation without thinking of its cause.

"I leave you, Edgerton, with one regret--not that we part, for life is full of partings, and the strong mind must be reconciled with them, or it is nothing--but that I leave you so unlike your former self. I wish I could do something for you."

I gave him my hand as as I spoke. He did not grasp--he rather shrunk from it. An uncontrollable burst of feeling seemed suddenly to gush from him as he spoke:--

"Take no heed of me, Clifford--I am not worthy of YOUR thought."

"Ha! What do you mean?"

He spoke hastily, in manifest discomfiture:--

"I am worthy of no man's thought."

"Pshaw! you are a hypochondriac."

"Would it were that!--But you go!--when?"

"In a week, perhaps."

"So soon? So very soon? Do you--do you carry your family with you at once?"

There was great effort to speak this significant inquiry. I perceived that. I perceived that his eyes were on the ground while it was made. The question was offensive to me. It had a strange and painful significance. It recalled the whole cause, the bitter cause of my resolve for exile; and I could not control the altered tones of my voice in answering, which I did with some causticity of feeling, which necessarily entered into my utterance.

"Family, surely! My wife only! No great charge, I'm thinking, and her health needs an early change. Would you have me leave HER? I have no other family, you know!"

The dialogue, carried on with restraint before, was shortened by this; and, after a few business remarks, which were necessary to our office concerns, he pleaded an engagement to get away. He left me with some soreness upon my mind, which formed its expression in a brief soliloquy.

"You would have the path made even freer than before, would you? It does not content you, these long morning meditations--these pretended labors of the painting-room, the suspicious husband withdrawn, and the wife, neither scorning nor consenting, willing to believe in that devotion to the art which is properly a devotion to herself? These are not sufficient opportunities, eh? There were--more room for landscape, appoint you, Mr. Edgerton!--Ah! could I but know all. Could I be sure that she did love him! Could I be sure that she did not! That is the curse--that doubt!--Will it remain so? No! no! Once removed--once in those forest regions, it can not be that she will repine for anything.

She MUST love me then--she will feel anew the first fond pa.s.sion. She will forget these pa.s.sing fancies. They WILL pa.s.s! She is young. The image will haunt her no longer--at least, it will no longer haunt me!"

So I spoke, but I was not so sure of that last. The doubt did not trouble me, however. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. But I had another test yet to try. I wished to see how Julia would receive the communication of my purpose. As yet she knew nothing of my contemplated departure. "It will surprise her," I thought to myself. "In that surprise she will show how much our removal will distress her!"

But when I made known to her my intention, the surprise was all my own.

The communication did not seemed to distress her at all. Surprise her it did, but the surprise seemed a pleasant one. It spoke out in a sudden flashing of the eye, a gentle smiling of the mouth, which was equally unexpected and grate ful to my heart.

"I am delighted with the idea!" she exclaimed, putting her arms about my neck. "I think we shall be so happy there. I long to get away from this place."

"Indeed! But are you serious?"

"To be sure."

"I was apprehensive it might distress you."

"Oh! no! no! I have been dull and tired here, for a long while; and I thought, when you told me that Mr. Kingsley had gone to Alabama, how delightful it would be if we could go too."

"But you never told me that."

"No."

"Nor even looked it, Julia."

"Surely not--I should have been loath to have you think, while your business was so prosperous, and you seemed so well satisfied here, that I had any discontent."

"I satisfied!" I said this rather to myself than her.

"Yes, were you not? I had no reason to think otherwise. Nay, I feared you were too well satisfied, for I have seen so little of you of late.

I'm sure I wished we were anywhere, so that you could find your home more to your liking."

"And have such notions really filled your brain Julia?"

"Really."

"And you have found me a stranger--you have missed me?"

"Ah! do you not know it, Edward?"

"You shall have no need to reproach me hereafter. We will go to Alabama, and live wholly for one another. I shall leave you in business time only, and hurry back as soon as I can."

"Ah, promise me that?"

"I do!"

"We shall be so happy then. Then we shall take our old rambles, Edward, though in new regions, and will resume the pencil, if you wish it."

This was said timidly.

"To be sure I wish it. But why do you say, 'resume'? Have you not been painting all along?"

"No! I have scarcely smeared canva.s.s the last two months"