Idolatry Part 3

The old President's voice had a strain of melancholy in it, partly the result of chronic asthma, and partly, no doubt, of a melancholic temperament. This strain, being constant, sometimes had a curiously incongruous effect as contrasted with the subject or circ.u.mstances in hand. Whether hailing the dawn of the millennium; holding playful converse with a child, making a speech before the Board,--under whatever rhetorical conditions, Mr. MacGentle's intonation was always pitched in the same murmurous and somewhat plaintive key. Moreover, a corresponding immobility of facial expression had grown upon him; so that altogether, though he was the most sympathetic and sensitive of men, a superficial observer might take him to be lacking in the common feelings and impulses of humanity.

Perhaps the incongruity alluded to had not altogether escaped his own notice, and since discord of any kind pained him, he had mended the matter--as best he could--by surrendering himself entirely to his mournful voice; allowing it to master his gestures, choice of language, almost his thoughts. The result was a colorlessness of manner which did great injustice to the gentle and delicate soul behind.

This conjecture might explain why Mr. MacGentle, instead of falling upon his friend's neck and shedding tears of welcome there, only uttered a few commonplace sentences, and then drooped back into his chair. But it throws no light upon his remark that he had been expecting the arrival of a friend who, it would appear, had been dead two years. Helwyse himself may have been puzzled by this; or, being a quick-witted young man, he may have divined its explanation. He looked at his entertainer with critical sympathy not untinged with humor.

"I hope you are as well as I am," said he.

"A little tired this morning, I believe; I never was so strong a man as you, Helwyse. I think I must have pa.s.sed a bad night. I remember dreaming I was an old man,--an old man with white hair, Helwyse."

"Were you glad to wake up again?" asked the young man, meeting the elder's faded eyes.

"I hardly know whether I'm quite awake yet. And, after all, Thor, I'm not sure that I don't wish the dream might have been true. If I were really an old man, what a long, lonely future I should escape! but as it is--as it is--"

He relapsed into reverie. Ah! Mr. MacGentle, are you again the tall and graceful youth, full of romance and fire, who roamed abroad in quest of adventures with your trusty friend Thor Helwyse, the yellow-bearded Scandinavian? Do you fancy this fresh, unwrinkled face a mate to your own? and is it but the vision of a restless night,--this long-drawn life of dull routine and gradual disappointment and decay? Open those dim eyes of yours, good sir! stir those thin old legs! inflate that sunken chest!--Ha! is that cough imaginary? those trembling muscles,--are they a delusion is that misty glance only a momentary weakness There is no youth left in you, Mr.

MacGentle; not so much as would keep a rose in bloom for an hour.

"Have you seen Doctor Glyphic lately?" inquired Helwyse, after a pause.

"Glyphic?--do you know, I was thinking of him just now,--of our first meeting with him in the African desert. You remember!--a couple of Bedouins were carrying him off,--they had captured him on his way to some apocryphal ruin among the sand-heaps. What a grand moment was that when you caught the Sheik round the throat with your umbrella-handle, and pulled him off his horse! and then we mounted poor Glyphic upon it,--mummied cat and all,--and away over the hot sand! What a day was that! what a day was that!"

The speaker's eyes had kindled; for a moment one saw the far flat desert, the struggling knot of men and horses, the stampede of the three across the plain, and the high sun flaming inextinguishable laughter-over all!--and it had happened nigh forty years ago.

"He never forgot that service," resumed Mr. MacGentle, his customary plaintive manner returning. "To that, and to your saving the Egyptian lad,--. Manetho,--you owe your wife Helen: ah! forgive me,--I had forgotten; she is dead,--she is dead."

"I never could understand," remarked Helwyse, aiming to lead the conversation away from gloomy topics, "why the Doctor made so much of Manetho." "That was only a part of the Egyptian mania that possessed him, and began, you know, with his changing his name from Henry to Hiero; and has gone on, until now, I suppose, he actually believes himself to be some old inscription, containing precious secrets, not to be found elsewhere. Before the adventure with the boy, I remember, he had formed the idea of building a miniature Egypt in New Jersey; and Manetho served well as the living human element in it. 'Though I take him to America,' you know he said, 'he shall live in Egypt still.

He shall have a temple, and an altar, and Isis and Osiris, and papyri and palm-trees and a crocodile; and when he dies I will embalm him like a Pharaoh.' 'But suppose you die first?' said one of us. 'Then he shall embalm me!' cried Hiero, and I will be the first American mummy.'"

Mr. MacGentle seemed to find a dreamy enjoyment in working this vein of reminiscence. He sat back in his low arm-chair, his unsubstantial face turned meditatively towards the Magdalen, his hands brought together to support his delicate chin. Helwyse, apprehending that the vein might at last bring the dreamer down to the present day, encouraged him to follow it.

"It must have been a disappointment to the Doctor that his protege took up the Christian religion, instead of following the faith and observances of his Egyptian ancestors, for the last five thousand years!"

"Why, perhaps it was, Thor, perhaps it was," murmured Mr. MacGentle.

"But Manetho never entered the pulpit, you know; it would not have been to his interest to do so; besides that, I believe he is really devoted to Glyphic, believing that it was he who saved him from the crocodile. People are all the time making such absurd mistakes.

Manetho is a man who would be unalterable either in grat.i.tude or enmity, although his external manner is so mild. And as to his taking orders, why, as long as he wore an Egyptian robe, and said his prayers in an Egyptian temple, it would be all the same to Glyphic what religion the man professed!"

"Doctor Glyphic is still alive, then?"

The old man looked at the young one with an air half apprehensive, half perplexed, as if scenting the far approach of some undefined difficulty. He pa.s.sed his white hand over his forehead. "Everything seems out of joint-to-day, Helwyse. Nothing looks or seems natural, except you! What is the matter with me?--what is the matter with me?"

Helwyse sat with both hands twisted in his mighty beard, and one booted leg thrown over the other. He was full of sympathy at the spectacle of poor Amos MacGentle, blindly groping after the phantom of a flower whose bloom and fragrance had vanished so terribly long ago; and yet, for some reason or other he could hardly forbear a smile.

When anything is utterly out of place, it is no more pathetic than absurd; moreover, young men are always secretly inclined to laugh at old ones!

"Why should not Glyphic be alive?" resumed Mr. MacGentle. "Why not he, as well as you or I? Aren't we all about of an age?"

Helwyse drew his chair close to his companion's, and took his hand, as if it had been a young girl's. "My dear friend," said he, "you said you felt tired this morning, but you forget how far you've travelled since we last met. Doctor Glyphic, if he be living now, must be more than sixty years old. Your dream of old age was such as many have dreamed before, and not awakened from in this world!"

"Let me think!--let me think!" said the old man; and, Helwyse drawing back, there ensued a silence, varied only by a long and tremulous sigh from his companion; whether of relief or dejection, the visitor could not decide. But when Mr. MacGentle spoke, it was with more a.s.surance.

Either from mortification at his illusion, or more probably from imperfect perception of it, he made no reference to what had pa.s.sed.

Old age possesses a kind of composure, arising from dulled sensibilities, which the most self-possessed youth can never rival.

"We heard, through the London branch of our house, that Thor Helwyse died some two years ago."

"He was drowned in the Baltic Sea. I am his son Balder."

"He was my friend," observed the old man, simply; but the tone he used was a magnet to attract the son's heart. "You look very much like him, only his eyes were blue, and yours, as I now see, are dark; but you might be mistaken for him."

"I sometimes have been," rejoined Balder, with a half-smile.

"And you are his son! You are most welcome!" said Mr. MacGentle, with old-fashioned courtesy.

"Forgive me if I have--if anything has occurred to annoy you. I am a very old man, Mr. Balder; so old that sometimes I believe I forget how old I am! And Thor is dead,--drowned,--you say?"

"The Baltic, you know, has been the grave of many of our forefathers; I think my father was glad to follow them. I never saw him in better spirits than during that gale. We were bound to England from Denmark."

"Helen's death saddened him,--I know,--I know; he was never gay after that. But how--how did--?"

"He would keep the deck, though the helmsman had to be lashed to the wheel. I think he never cared to see land again, but he was full of spirits and life. He said this was weather fit for a Viking.

"We were standing by the foremast, holding on by a belaying-pin. The sea came over the side, and struck him overboard. I went after him.

Another wave brought me back; but not my father! I was knocked senseless, and when I came to, it was too late."

Helwyse's voice, towards the end of this story, became husky, and Mr.

MacGentle's eyes, as he listened, grew dimmer than ever.

"Ah!" said he, "I shall not die so. I shall die away gradually, like a breeze that has been blowing this way and that all day, and falls at sunset, no one knows how. Thor died as became him; and I shall die as becomes me,--as becomes me!" And so, indeed, he did, a few years later; but not unknown nor uncared for.

Balder Helwyse was a philosopher, no doubt; but it was no part of his wisdom to be indifferent to unstrained sympathy. He went on to speak further of his own concerns,--a thing he was little used to do.

It appeared that, from the time he first crossed the Atlantic, being then about four years old, up to the time he had recrossed it, a few weeks ago, he had been journeying to and fro over the Eastern Hemisphere. His father, who, as well as himself, was American by birth, was the descendant of a Danish family of high station and antiquity, and inherited the restless spirit of his ancestors. In the course of his early wanderings he had fallen in with MacGentle, who, though somewhat older than Helwyse, was still a young man; and later these two had encountered Hiero Glyphic. About fifteen years after this it was that Thor appeared at Glyphic's house in New Jersey, and was welcomed by that singular man as a brother; and here he fell in love with Glyphic's sister Helen, and married her. With her he received a large fortune, which the addition of his own made great; and at Glyphic's death Thor or his heirs would inherit the bulk of the estate left by him.

So Thor, being then in the first prime of life, was prepared to settle down and become domestic. But the sudden death of his wife, and the subsequent loss of one of the children she had borne him, drove him once more abroad, with his baby son, never again to take root, or to return. And here Balder's story, as told by him, began. He seemed to have matured very early, and to have taken hold of knowledge in all its branches like a t.i.tan. The precise age at which he had learned all that European schools could teach him, it is not necessary to specify; since it is rather with the nature of his mind than with the list of his accomplishments that we shall have to do. It might be possible, by tracing his-connection with French, or German, or English philosophers, to make shrewd guesses at the qualities of his own!

creed; but these will perhaps reveal themselves less diffidently under other tests.

The last four or five years of his life Balder had spent in acquiring such culture as schools could not give him. Where he went, what he did and saw, we shall not exercise our power categorically to reveal; remarking only that his means and his social rank left him free to go as high as well as low as he pleased,--to dine with English dukes or with Russian serfs. But a fine chast.i.ty inherent in his Northern blood had, whatever were his moral convictions, kept him from the mire; and the sudden death of his father had given him a graver turn than was normal to his years. Meanwhile, the financial crash, which at this time so largely affected Europe, swallowed up the greater part of Balder's fortune; and with the remnant (about a thousand pounds sterling), and a potential independence (in the shape of a learned profession) in his head, he sailed for Boston.

"I knew you were my uncle Hiero's bankers," he added, "and I supposed you would be able to tell me about him. He is my only living relative."

"Why, as to that, I believe it is a long time since the house has had anything to do with his concerns," returned the venerable President, abstractedly gazing at Balder's high boots; "but I'll ask Mr. d.y.k.e. He remembers everything."

That gentleman (who had not pa.s.sed an easy moment since Mr. Helwyse's arrival) was now called in, and his suspense regarding the mysterious visitor soon relieved. In respect to Doctor Glyphic's affair he was ready and explicit.

"No dollar of his money has been through our hands since winter of Eighteen thirty-five--six, Mr. Helwyse, sir,--winter following your and your respected father's departure for foreign parts," stated Mr.

d.y.k.e, straightening his mouth, and planting his fist on his hip.

"Hm--hm!" murmured the President, standing thin and bent before the empty fireplace, a coat-tail over each arm.

"You have heard nothing of him since then?"