Vassall Morton Part 15

"What do you mean to do with yourself to-night?" Leslie asked, as the carriage drove towards his house.

"Drive to my house in the country."

"Your people will not expect you, and will be in bed before you can get there. You had much better come home with me."

Morton was but too glad to accept the invitation.

Having bade good night to his host and his host's daughter, he pa.s.sed some hours in dreamy cogitation; then tried to sleep; but sleep long kept aloof, the consciousness of being under the same roof with Edith Leslie brought with it so strange a sensation. But as delicate health, that grand auxiliary of sentiment, was quite unknown to him, nature prevailed in the end, and at seven the next morning, a servant's knock wakened him from a deep sleep, a vision of Mount Katahdin, and an imaginary moose hunt.

CHAPTER XV.

Yet even these joys dire jealousy molests, And blackens each fair image in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s.--_Lyttleton_.

Descending to the breakfast room, he found Leslie, as usual, quiet, cordial, and gentlemanly, beguiling the moments of expectancy with a newspaper, while his daughter presided at the coffee urn. Leslie happened to be in a garrulous mood, and talked incessantly about his former military frontier life, of which, though he had detested it in the experience, he was very fond in the retrospect. Morton, who had some acquaintance with such matters, was a tempting auditor, though he would gladly have exchanged the profuse anecdotes of white-wolf running and deer shooting for a few moments' conversation with Miss Edith Leslie. This her father's busy tongue put out of the question; but Morton consoled himself with the thought that to bask in her presence was, in itself, no mean privilege.

His cup of nectar, such as it was, was in a few minutes dashed with gall; for the street door opened without a summons from the bell, a man's step sounded in the hall, and Horace Vinal came in, with a bundle of papers in his hand.

Vinal had become of late all-important to his former guardian. He was his chief business agent, and Leslie was never tired of expatiating on his talents, energy, application, and elevated character. In short, he was fast becoming dependent on him, and felt towards him the affection which a weak and kindly man may feel towards one of far greater force and capacity, whom he believes sincerely attached to him and devoted to his interests.

Vinal, as he entered, had the air of a man versed in affairs, and acquainted both with that vast and various theatre which men call the world, and with those conventional circles which ladies call the world. He had been absent for a few days on a mission of business, from which he had returned the evening before. Leslie received him with a most warm greeting, and his daughter with a smile of easy friendship, which was wormwood to the troubled spirit of Morton. The two rivals--for such, by a common instinct, each felt the other to be--regarded each other with faces of courtesy and hearts of wrath.

"How came this fellow here?" thought Vinal, as he smilingly grasped his cla.s.smate's hand.

"The devil take him!" thought Morton, as he returned the greeting, but with a much worse grace.

They seated themselves on opposite sides of the table, while the Helen who had kindled this covert warfare in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s dispensed a cup of coffee to each in turn.

There was a singular contrast between the adversaries. On the one side, the self-dependent Vinal, with little health and no other wealth than his busy and able brain; with thin features, wan cheek, and pale, firm lip; with piercing observation and rapid judgment; self-contained, self-controlled, self-confiding. But for his measuring five feet ten, he might have stood for Dryden's Achitophel:--

"A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pygmy body to decay, And o'er informed the tenement of clay."

On the other side sat the pet of fortune, fondled, if he could have endured such blandishment, in the very lap of affluence; with a cheek brown with wind and weather, and an eye which, as he often boasted, could look the sun in the face. His nature was so happily tempered, that to the degree of nervous stimulus which engenders, or is engendered by, an energetic character, he joined an indefinite capacity both of endurance and enjoyment; and yet the possessor of all these gifts was just now in a mood of extreme dissatisfaction and discomfort.

Leslie began to speak with Vinal upon business. Morton s.n.a.t.c.hed the opportunity to converse with the person most interesting to him. Vinal glanced at him askance. Each began to hate the other, after his own fashion. Morton would gladly have come to open rupture, and flung defiance at his rival; but Vinal was far remote from any wish of the kind.

Morton remained at the house as long as he in decency could, and then bade them good morning, execrating Vinal as he went down the steps.

That very afternoon, as he was walking near his cottage in the country, ruminating on Edith Leslie and Horace Vinal, he raised his head and saw a lady and gentleman, on horseback, emerging into view from a wooded bend of the road. A thrill ran through him from head to foot. They were the two persons of whom he was thinking. He bowed to Miss Leslie. She replied with a frank bow and smile; and Vinal, as he pa.s.sed, made an easy nonchalant gesture of recognition. The jealous pedestrian turned and looked after them. They had ridden a few rods when Vinal also turned his head, but, catching Morton's eye, instantly averted it again. Morton fairly ground his teeth with anger and vexation. To be jealous was bad enough; but that Vinal should be conscious of his jealousy, and perhaps triumph in it, goaded him beyond endurance. He went home, saddled and bridled a horse with his own hands, mounted, and ranged the country for an hour or two, to get rid of the vulture that was preying on him. At length he grew more rational, and was able to reflect that Vinal's riding with Miss Leslie did not necessarily imply that he stood, in any special sense, within her favor, since he was the near relative of her mother-in-law, and had formerly been for years an inmate of her father's house.

On the next day, at a time when he thought that Vinal must be safe in his office, Morton took heart of grace, and called on Miss Leslie. An old woman, an ancient dependant of the family, raised, as she would have phrased it, in the backwoods of Matherton, opened the door.

"Is Miss Leslie at home?"

"No; she was took sick yesterday, very sudden."

"Miss Leslie!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the visitor.

"Yes; the doctor says she's goin' to die, sartin; right away, may be."

"What?" gasped Morton.

"It wasn't only this morning we heered on it," said the old Yankee housekeeper, "and Miss Edith's gone up to Matherton, to tend on her."

"O, you mean Mrs. Leslie."

"Yes; Miss Leslie, Miss Edith's mother-in-law; she never was a well woman, ever since I've knowed her."

And the old woman closed the door; while Morton walked away, without knowing in what direction he was moving.

CHAPTER XVI.

_Sganarelle_. O, la grande fatigue quo d'avoir une femme, et qu'Aristote a bien raison quand il dit qu'une femme est pire qu'un demon!--_Le Medecin Malgre Lui_.

Thus day by day and month by month we past; It pleased the Lord to take my spouse at last--_Pope_.

It was nine years since, in an evil hour, Leslie had first seen Miss Cynthia Everille, playing on a harp, and accompanying herself in a thin, sweet voice, with words of her own composing. His weak heart succ.u.mbed: he fell in love off hand; and within a year after the death of his first wife, Edith's mother, her picture was taken from the wall, and a second Mrs. Leslie reigned in her stead.

"Sweet,"--"charming,"--"fascinating,"--were the least of the adjectives lavished on the interesting bride. Some of his lady acquaintance felicitated him that he had espoused an angel, an embodied beat.i.tude not more than half pertaining to this world. In fact, there was a certain aerial grace in her movements, a certain translucency in her small alabaster features, which might countenance such a notion. The winning smile, too, with which she met her visitors on her reception Thursdays, savored wholly of the angelic. She breathed courtesies around her as the beneficent royalty of Naples scatters sugar plums among his loving subjects at the carnival, and, on the next day, sends them to prison by the cart load.

The tyranny of the strong is bad enough; but the tyranny of the weak is intolerable; and this latter visitation came upon Leslie in its most rueful form--that, namely, whose weapons are sobs, sighs, vapors, and the dire coercion of hysteric fits. He was a soft-hearted fool, and a fair subject for such oppression. Not that his newly-installed mistress--his mistress, since she made him her slave--was naturally of an ill temper. On the contrary, she was somewhat amiable, or, at least, much given to tears and tenderness; but in process of time, this profuse sensibility had all centred on herself. In short, she was profoundly selfish, though nothing could have astonished her more than to tell her so; for, in her own eyes, she seemed a miracle of sensibility, as indeed she was, though her sensibility had learned to give little response to any woes but her own. What these woes might be would be hard to say: she had a wonderful talent for finding and inventing grievances. She was submerged and drowned in a sentimental melancholy, which wore in turn ten thousand different aspects, each worse than the other. She was a sea-anemone, covered with a myriad of filaments, all more shrinking and sensitive than a snail's horns.

One reads of famished wretches who have tried to nourish life from the current of their own veins. So, in a figurative sense, did she. She was always anatomizing her own ridiculous heart; groping among the depths of her own sickly fancies, and making them her daily food. She was a busy gatherer of tokens, souvenirs, and mementoes, and was beset with blighted hopes, vain longings, sad remembrances, and all the spectral ills engendered between a frail mind and a depraved stomach.

She was a great reader, and floated rudderless through a sea of books, fishing out of it all that was tender, morbid, and despairing, and stowing it up in alb.u.ms.

It may be thought that some disconsolate memory, some affection nipped in the bud, or the like catastrophe, had brought her to this pa.s.s. Far from it. She mourned that her fate had been too flat and sterile; that the rapturous emotions of her heart had never been awakened; that no sentimental pa.s.sion, in short, had ever stirred her soul from its depths. This was the grievance which rankled most in her reveries. To give her her due, she never told it to her husband; but she brooded upon it in secret; and the result was, a mult.i.tude of affecting verses, which she treasured in her alb.u.m as anonymous.

Leslie, though none of the wisest of men, was one of the most amiable; and, under his wife's discipline, he learned to be one of the most discreet. It behooved him to be watchful and circ.u.mspect. His married life was a voyage through shoals and shallows, and needed sagacious pilotage; for no common eye could see where the danger lay. There was an endless variety of subjects tabooed to him; matters to all appearance quite indifferent, but to which he must never allude, because, Heaven knows how, they touched some trembling susceptibility, or wakened some grievous memory from its blessed sleep. The penalty, if the case were mild, would be a deep-drawn sigh; if more aggravated, a flood of tears; if extreme, an hysteric fit. And if, in his efforts to console her, he ventured to add any thing in the form of remonstrance, or let fall any word which might intimate that her conduct was not quite reasonable, the outraged sufferer would cease weeping, cast up her eyes reproachfully, and murmuring, "O William, is it come to this?" relapse again instantly into the depths of sobbing affliction. It was only by the most abject submission, coupled with all the resources of conjugal eloquence, that Leslie could succeed at length in purchasing a look of resignation and a faint smile of forgiveness.

Use, it is said, will blunt the sharpest of troubles. In time, he became acclimated to his fate; yet, on one or two occasions, his equanimity was quite overset. He thought that his wife was losing her wits; for, as he came into her room, she fixed on him a melting gaze, sank on his shoulder, and flooded him with such a freshet of tears, that he might have complained with De Bracy, that a water fiend possessed her. The truth was, she had just been musing on her own dissolution, and imagining, in a luxury of woe, her own funeral, with all the circ.u.mstance of that sad event. As she looked around and bethought her how desolate that chamber would be when she was gone, and how each trifle that had once been hers would be treasured by those she left behind, her sensitive heart had dissolved in tenderness, and produced the hydraulic demonstration just mentioned.

This libel on womankind became the mother of a pair of twins--the same infant prodigies whom Morton had seen at the White Mountains. Both perished at the age of seven, their precocious brains having by that time usurped all the vitality of their miserable little bodies. She was inconsolable at their death, though, while they lived, her delicate nerves could seldom abide their presence for five minutes at a time.

There was once an idiot, who, being of a conciliating temper, thought to appease a fire and persuade it to go out by feeding it with fuel till it should be satisfied, and crave no more. On the same principle Leslie tried to satisfy the exacting spirit of his wife by a most watchful and anxious devotion to all her whims; but the greater his devotion, the more exacting she grew. She felt her power, and used it without mercy. She was, withal, intolerably jealous, not so much of any living rival, as of the memory of a dead one, Leslie's former wife. Here, indeed, she had some show of reason; for the poles are not wider asunder than were the characters of herself and her predecessor.

Those who had known the latter in her maidenhood--she married young, or perhaps she would never have married Leslie--knew her as the dominant belle of the season, conspicuous for her beauty, her position, and for a degree of culture rare in America at that time; devoted and ardent towards a few close friends, haughty and distant towards the many; greatly loved by her few intimates, and either greatly admired or greatly disliked by most others around her. Those who knew her in the last years of her life knew her as one who had pa.s.sed through a fiery ordeal. Of her many children, only one was left. They had fallen around her in a sudden and sharp succession, till it seemed to her that a destroying doom had gone forth against her race, and that the world of her affections was turned to a field of carnage. Leslie felt the shock acutely, not to say intensely, for a while; but the storm pa.s.sed, and left on him very little trace. It sank into the deeper nature of his wife with such a penetrating sense of the vanity of life and the rottenness of mortal hope, as, in the olden time, drew saints and anchorites to renounce the world and give themselves to penance and seclusion. It made no anchorite of her. She rose from her baptism of fire saddened, but not broken nor unstrung; with a rooted faith and an absolute resignation; a nice perception of all human suffering; sympathies broad and embracing as the air; a benevolence pervading as the sunshine; and a spirit so calm in its elevation that no wind of calamity had power to ruffle it.

Edith Leslie was a child when her mother died, yet old enough to feel the loss profoundly, and to be greatly shocked and cast down at the alacrity with which her father contrived to forget it. Having reduced Leslie to obedience, his bride essayed the same experiment on his daughter, but failed notably. There was something in the nature of the latter which revolted so impatiently against the selfish caprices and morbid fooleries which were played off hourly before her,--she was so indignant, moreover, at seeing her father sunk inch by inch in the slough of matrimonial thraldom,--that the issue might easily have been a protracted household feud. None but herself could know with how costly an effort she schooled herself to patience. With a caustic wit, and a fervent fancy which haunted her with images of an ideal life brighter than the work-day world around her, a nature with impulses which, less curbed and tempered, might have carried her through all the mazes of morbid rebellion, she still bent herself to accept her lot as she found it, in the full faith that flowers may be taught to grow on the flintiest soil. And now that the imagined maladies of a lifetime were turned at last into a mortal reality, and her step-mother lay on her death bed, Edith Leslie watched by her side with as much care as if this wretched piece of perverted sensibility had deserved her affection and esteem.