Vassall Morton Part 56

"You have found yourself again," said Meredith; "you have grown back again to your old look."

Morton's eye glistened.

"I think I know the handwriting of that letter. Miss Leslie's,--I will call her so still--it is hers, is it not?"

"Yes."

"She writes, I trust, what you hoped to hear."

"All that I hoped, and much more."

"I am glad of it from my heart. Fortune has been hard enough upon you.

She was bound to pay you her score."

"She has done so with usury."

"Are you going to Boston this afternoon?"

"Yes."

"Then you have just two hours to spare. If you have any leisure for such sublunary matters, we had better get dinner at once. Romeo himself, at his worst case, asks his friend when they shall dine."

Three hours later, the eastward-bound steamer was ploughing the Sound, and Morton and Meredith paced her deck.

"I have told you now the whole history, from first to last. I need not ask you to forgive my having kept it secret from you so long."

"Why should you ask me? Every man has a right to his own secrets, and I like him the better for keeping them. Vinal, at all events, had good cause to thank you."

"He is dead; and his memory, if it will, had better die with him."

"You said in your letter that his agent was called Henry Speyer. I thought, at the time, that I had seen the name before; and a day or two since, I found it accidentally again. The newspapers, two months or more ago, mention a foreigner called Henry Speyer as an officer in this last piratical forray into Cuba. His party lost their way, fell into an ambuscade of government soldiers, and Speyer was shot through the head."

"He found a better end than his princ.i.p.al."

"And deserved a better one. A professed rascal is better than a pharisee."

CHAPTER LXXIV.

The rainbow to the storms of life; The evening beam that smiles the clouds away.--_Bride of Abydos_.

Morton rode along the edge of the lake at Matherton. He pa.s.sed under the shadowy verdure of the pines, and approached the old family mansion of the Leslies. It was years since he had seen it. His imprisonment, his escape, his dreary greeting home, all lay between.

He was the same man, yet different;--with a mind calmed by experience, and strong by action and endurance; an ardor which had lost all of its intoxication, but none of its force; and which, as the past and the present rose upon his thoughts, was tempered with a melancholy which had in it nothing of pain.

The hall door stood open, as if to welcome him. The roses and the laurels were in bloom; the gra.s.s, ripe for the scythe, was waving in the meadow; and, by glimpses between the elm and maple boughs, the lake, crisped in the June wind, was sparkling with the sunlight.

Morton dismounted; his foot was on the porch; but he had no time for thought; for a step sounded in the hall, and Edith met him on the threshold.

That evening, at sunset, Miss Leslie and Morton stood on the brink of the lake, at the foot of the garden. It was the spot which had been most sweet and most bitter in the latter's recollections.

"Do you remember, Edith, when we last stood here?"

"How could I ever forget?"

"The years that have pa.s.sed since are like a nightmare. I could believe them so, but that I feel their marks."

"And I, as well; we were boy and girl then."

"At least, I was a boy; and, do you know, I find you different from what I had pictured you."

"Should I be sorry for it, or glad?"

"I had pictured you as I saw you last, very calm, very resolute, very sad; but you are like the breaking of a long, dull storm. The sun shines again, and the world glows the brighter for past rain and darkness."

"Could I have welcomed you home with a sad face? Could I be calm and cold, now that I have found what I thought was lost forever?--when the ashes of my life have kindled into flame again? Because I, and others, have known sorrow, should I turn my face into a homily, and be your lifelong _memento mori_?"

"It is a brave heart that can hide a deep thought under a smile."

"And a weak one that is always crouching among the shadows."

"There is an abounding spirit of faith in you; the essence which makes heroes, from Joan of Arc to Jeanie Deans."

"I know no one with faith like yours, which could hold to you through all your years of living burial."

"Mine! it was wrenched to its uttermost roots. I thought the world was given over to the devil."

"But that was only for the moment."

"I consoled myself with imagining that I had come to the worst, and that any change must needs be for the better; but now I am lifted of a sudden to such a pitch of fortune, that I tremble at it. Many a man, my equal or superior, no weaker in heart or meaner in aim than I, has been fettered through his days by cramping poverty, while I stand mailed and weaponed at all points. Many a man of n.o.ble instincts and high requirements has found in life nothing but a mockery of his imaginings,--a bright dream, matched with a base reality. Who can blame him if he turn cynic? I have dreamed a dream, too; wakened, and found it a living truth."