Maria Brooks.

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXXIII.     
    PHILADELPHIA,  AUGUST,  1848. 
       No. 2.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE LATE MARIA BROOKS.

BY RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLD.

[WITH A PORTRAIT.]

This remarkable woman was not only one of the
first writers of her country, but she deserves to be
ranked with the most celebrated persons of her sex
who have lived in any nation or age. Within the
last century woman has done more than ever before
in investigation, reflection and literary art. On the
continent of Europe an Agnesi, a Dacier and a Chastelet
have commanded respect by their learning, and
a De Stael, a Dudevant and a Bremer have been
admired for their genius; in Great Britain the names
of More, Burney, Barbauld, Baillie, Somerville,
Farrar, Hemans, Edgeworth, Austen, Landon, Norman
and Barrett, are familiar in the histories of literature
and science; and in our own country we turn
with pride to Sedgwick, Child, Beecher, Kirkland,
Parkes Smith, Fuller, and others, who in various departments
have written so as to deserve as well as
receive the general applause; but it may be doubted
whether in the long catalogue of those whose works
demonstrate and vindicate the intellectual character and
position of the sex, there are many names that will
shine with a clearer, steadier, and more enduring
lustre than that of Maria del Occidente.

Maria Gowen, afterward Mrs. Brooks, upon whom
this title was conferred originally I believe by the
poet Southey, was descended from a Welsh family
that settled in Charlestown, near Boston, sometime
before the Revolution. A considerable portion of
the liberal fortune of her grandfather was lost by the
burning of that city in 1775, and he soon afterward
removed to Medford, across the Mystic river, where
Maria Gowen was born about the year 1795. Her
father was a man of education, and among his intimate
friends were several of the professors of Harvard
College, whose occasional visits varied the
pleasures of a rural life. From this society she
derived at an early period a taste for letters and
learning. Before the completion of her ninth year she
had committed to memory many passages from the
best poets; and her conversation excited special
wonder by its elegance, variety and wisdom. She
grew in beauty, too, as she grew in years, and when
her father died, a bankrupt, before she had attained
the age of fourteen, she was betrothed to a merchant
of Boston, who undertook the completion of her education,
and as soon as she quitted the school was
married to her. Her early womanhood was passed
in commercial affluence; but the loss of several
vessels at sea in which her husband was interested
was followed by other losses on land, and years
were spent in comparitive indigence. In that remarkable
book, “Idomen, or the Vale of Yumuri,”
she says, referring to this period: “Our table
had been hospitable, our doors open to many; but
to part with our well-garnished dwelling had now
become inevitable. We retired, with one servant,
to a remote house of meaner dimensions, and were
sought no longer by those who had come in our
wealth. I looked earnestly around me; the present
was cheerless, the future dark and fearful. My
parents were dead, my few relatives in distant
countries, where they thought perhaps but little of
my happiness. Burleigh I had never loved other
than as a father and protector; but he had been the
benefactor of my fallen family, and to him I owed
comfort, education, and every ray of pleasure that
had glanced before me in this world. But the sun of
his energies was setting, and the faults which had
balanced his virtues increased as his fortune declined.
He might live through many years of misery, and to
be devoted to him was my duty while a spark of his
life endured. I strove to nerve my heart for the
worst. Still there were moments when fortitude
became faint with endurance, and visions of happiness
that might have been mine came smiling to my
imagination. I wept and prayed in agony.”

In this period poetry was resorted to for amusement
and consolation. At nineteen she wrote a[Pg 62]
metrical romance, in seven cantos, but it was never
published. It was followed by many shorter lyrical
pieces which were printed anonymously; and in
1820, after favorable judgments of it had been expressed
by some literary friends, she gave to the
public a small volume entitled “Judith, Esther, and
other Poems, by a Lover of the Fine Arts.” It
contained many fine passages, and gave promise of
the powers of which the maturity is illustrated by
“Zophiël,” very much in the style of which is this
stanza:

And this picture of a boy:

And this description of the preparations of Esther
to appear before Ahasuerus:

Among the shorter poems are several that are
marked by fancy and feeling, and a graceful versification,
of one of which, an elegy, these are the
opening verses:

In 1823 Mr. Brooks died, and a paternal uncle
soon after invited the poetess to the Island of
Cuba, where, two years afterward, she completed
the first canto of “Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven,”
which was published in Boston in 1825. The second
canto was finished in Cuba in the opening of 1827;
the third, fourth and fifth in 1828; and the sixth in
the beginning of 1829. The relative of Mrs. Brooks
was now dead, and he had left to her his coffee
plantation and other property, which afforded her a
liberal income. She returned again to the United
States, and resided more than a year in the vicinity
of Dartmouth College, where her son was pursuing
his studies; and in the autumn of 1830, she went to
Paris, where she passed the following winter. The
curious and learned notes to “Zophiël,” were written
in various places, some in Cuba, some in Hanover,
some in Canada, (which she visited during her residence
at Hanover,) some at Paris, and the rest at
Keswick, in England, the home of Robert Southey,
where she passed the spring of 1831. When she
quitted the hospitable home of this much honored
and much attached friend, she left with him the completed
work, which he subsequently saw through
the press, correcting the proof sheets himself, previous
to its appearance in London in 1833.

The materials of this poem are universal; that is,
such as may be appropriated by every polished nation.
In all the most beautiful oriental systems of
religion, including our own, may be found such
beings as its characters. The early fathers of Christianity
not only believed in them, but wrote cumbrous
folios upon their nature and attributes. It is a
curious fact that they never doubted the existence
and the power of the Grecian and Roman gods, but
supposed them to be fallen angels, who had caused
themselves to be worshiped under particular forms,
and for particular characteristics. To what an extent,
and to how very late a period this belief has
prevailed, may be learned from a remarkable little
work of Fontenelle,
[1] in which that pleasing writer
endeavors seriously to disprove that any preternatural
power was evinced in the responses of the ancient
oracles. The Christian belief in good and evil angels
is too beautiful to be laid aside. Their actual and
present existence can be disproved neither by analogy,
philosophy, or theology, nor can it be questioned
without casting a doubt also upon the whole system
of our religion. This religion, by many a fanciful
skeptic, has been called barren and gloomy; but
setting aside all the legends of the Jews, and confining
ourselves entirely to the generally received
Scriptures, there will be found sufficient food for
an imagination warm as that of Homer, Apelles,
Phidias, or Praxiteles. It is astonishing that such
rich materials for poetry should for so many centuries
have been so little regarded, appropriated, or
even perceived.

The story of Zophiël, though accompanied by
many notes, is simple and easily followed. Reduced
to prose, and a child, or a common novel reader,
would peruse it with satisfaction. It is in six cantos,
and is supposed to occupy the time of nine months:
from the blooming of roses at Ecbatana to the coming
in of spices at Babylon. Of this time the greater
part is supposed to elapse between the second and
third canto, where Zophiël thus speaks to Egla of
Phraërion:

The king of Medea, introduced in the second canto,
is an ideal personage; but the history of that country,
[Pg 63]near the time of the second captivity, is very confused,
and more than one young prince resembling
Sardius, might have reigned and died without a record.
So much of the main story however as relates to
human life is based upon sacred or profane history;
and we have sufficient authority for the legend of
an angel’s passion for one of the fair daughters of
our own world. It was a custom in the early ages
to style heroes, to raise to the rank of demigods,
men who were distinguished for great abilities,
qualities or actions. Above such men the angels who
are supposed to have visited the earth were but one
grade exalted, and they were capable of participating
in human pains and pleasures. Zophiël is described
as one of those who fell with Lucifer, not from ambition
or turbulence, but from friendship and excessive
admiration of the chief disturber of the tranquillity
of heaven: as he declares, when thwarted by
his betrayer, in the fourth canto:

During the whole interview in which this stanza
occurs, the deceiver of men and angels exhibits his
alledged power of inflicting pain. He says to Zophiël,
after arresting his course:

To which Zophiël replies:

Phraërion, another fallen angel, but of a nature
gentler than that of Zophiël, is thus introduced:

Such are the principal preter-human characters
in the poem. Egla, the heroine, is a Hebress of
perfect beauty, who lives with her parents not far
from the city of Ecbatana, and has been saved, by
stratagem, from a general massacre of captives,
under a former king of Medea. Being brought
before the reigning monarch to answer for the supposed
murder of Meles, she exclaims,

Zophiël is described throughout the poem as burning
with the admiration of virtue, yet frequently betrayed
into crime by the pursuit of pleasure. Straying
accidentally to the grove of Egla, he is struck with
her beauty, and finds consolation in her presence.
He appears, however, at an unfortunate moment, for
the fair Judean has just yielded to the entreaties of
her mother and assented to proposals offered by
Meles, a noble of the country; but Zophiël causes his
rival to expire suddenly on entering the bridal apartment,
and his previous life at Babylon, as revealed
in the fifth canto, shows that he was not undeserving
of his doom. Despite her extreme sensibility,
Egla is highly endowed with “conscience
and caution;” and she regards the advances of
Zophiël with distrust and apprehension. Meles being
missed, she is brought to court to answer for his
murder. Her sole fear is for her parents, who are
the only Hebrews in the kingdom, and are suffered
to live but through the clemency of Sardius, a young
prince who has lately come to the throne, and who,
like many oriental monarchs, reserves to himself the
privilege of decreeing death. The king is convinced
of her innocence, and, struck with her extraordinary
beauty and character, resolves suddenly to make her
his queen. We know of nothing in its way finer
than the description which follows, of her introduction,
in the simple costume of her country, to a
gorgeous banqueting hall in which he sits with his
assembled chiefs:

Idaspes, the Medean vizier, or prime minister, has
reflected on the maiden’s story, and is alarmed for
the safety of his youthful sovereign, who consents
to some delay and experiment, but will not be dissuaded
from his design until five inmates of his palace
have fallen dead in the captive’s apartment. The
last of these is Altheëtor, a favorite of the king,
(whose Greek name is intended to express his
qualities,) and the circumstances of his death, and
the consequent grief of Egla and despair of Zophiël,
are painted with a beauty, power and passion
scarcely surpassed.

And Zophiël exclaims,

Beloved and admired at first, Egla becomes an object
of hatred and fear; for Zophiël being invisible
to others her story is discredited, and she is suspected
of murdering by some baleful art all who
have died in her presence. She is, however, sent
safely to her home, and lives, as usual, in retirement
with her parents. The visits of Zophiël are now unimpeded.
He instructs the young Jewess in music
and poetry; his admiration and affection grow with
the hours; and he exerts his immortal energies to
preserve her from the least pain or sorrow, but
selfishly confines her as much as possible to solitude,
and permits for her only such amusements as he
himself can minister. Her confidence in him increases,
and in her gentle society he almost forgets
his fall and banishment.

But the difference in their natures causes him continual
anxiety; knowing her mortality, he is always
in fear that death or sudden blight will deprive him
of her; and he consults with Phraërion on the best
means of saving her from the perils of human existence.
One evening,

Tahathyam is the son of a fallen angel, and lives
concealed in the bosom of the earth, guarding in his
possession a vase of the elixir of life, bequeathed to
him by a father whom he is not permitted to see.
The visit of Zophiël and Phraërion to this beautiful
but unhappy creature will remind the reader of the
splendid creations of Dante.

Sending through the rock an answering strain, to
give the spirits welcome, the gnome prepares to
meet them at his palace-door:

The errand of the angels is made known to the
sovereign of this interior and resplendent world, and
upon conditions the precious elixir is promised; but
first Zophiël and Phraërion are ushered through sparry
portals to a banquet.

Gifted with every pleasing endowment, in possession
of an elixir of which a drop perpetuates life
and youth, surrounded by friends of his own choice,
who are all anxious to please and amuse him, the
gnome feels himself inferior in happiness to the
lowest of mortals. His sphere is confined, his high
powers useless, for he is without the “last, best gift
of God to man,” and there is no object on which he
can exercise his benevolence. The feast is described
with the terse beauty which marks all the canto, and
at its close—

But Zophiël lingers with ill-dissembled impatience
and Tahathyam leads the way to where the elixir of
life is to be surrendered.

Great pains have evidently been taken to have
every thing throughout the work in keeping. Most
of the names have been selected for their particular
meaning. Tahathyam and his retinue appear to have
been settled in their submarine dominion before the
great deluge that changed the face of the earth, as is
intimated in the lines last quoted; and as the accounts
of that judgment, and of the visits and communications
of angels connected with it, are chiefly in Hebrew,
they have names from that language. It would
have been better perhaps not to have called the persons
of the third canto “gnomes,” as at this word
one is reminded of all the varieties of the Rosicrucian
system, of which Pope has so well availed himself
in the Rape of the Lock, which sprightly production
has been said to be derived, though remotely,
from Jewish legends of fallen angels. Tahathyam
can be called gnome only on account of the retreat
to which his erring father has consigned him.

The spirits leave the cavern, and Zophiël exults a
moment, as if restored to perfect happiness. But
there is no way of bearing his prize to the earth except
through the most dangerous depths of the sea.

The furious storm has been raised by the power
of his betrayer and persecutor, and in gloomy desperation
Zophiël rises with the frail Phraërion to the
upper air:

But his flight toward Medea is stayed by a renewal
of the tempest—

At length comes a shock, as if the earth crashed
against some other planet, and they are thrown
amazed and prostrate upon the heath. Zophiël,

The interview between the bland spirit and the prime
cause of his guilt is full of the energy of passion,
and the rhetoric of the conversation has a masculine
beauty of which Mrs. Brooks alone of all the poets
of her sex is capable.

Zophiël returns to Medea and the drama draws to
a close, which is painted with consummate art.
Egla wanders alone at twilight in the shadowy vistas
of a grove, wondering and sighing at the continued
absence of the enamored angel, who approaches unseen
while she sings a strain that he had taught her.

He saw her—but

This scene is in the sixth canto. In the fifth, which
is occupied almost entirely by mortals, and bears a
closer relation than the others to the chief works in
narrative and dramatic poetry, are related the adventures
of Zameia, which, with the story of her death,
following the last extract, would make a fine tragedy.
Her misfortunes are simply told by an aged attendant
who had fled with her in pursuit of Meles, whom
she had seen and loved in Babylon. At the feast of
Venus Mylitta,

Again she is discovered, sleeping, by the rocky margin
of a river:

It was Zameia that rushed between Zophiël and
Egla, and that now with quivering lip, disordered
hair, and eye gleaming with frenzy, seized her arm,
reproached her with the murder of Meles, and attempted
to kill her. But as her dagger touches the
white robe of the maiden her arm is arrested by some
unseen power, and she falls dead at Egla’s feet. Reproached
by her own handmaid and by the aged attendant
of the princess, Egla feels all the horrors of
despair, and, beset with evil influences, she seeks to
end her own life, but is prevented by the timely appearance
of Raphael, in the character of a traveler’s
guide, leading Helon, a young man of her own nation
and kindred who has been living unknown at
Babylon, protected by the same angel, and destined
to be her husband; and to the mere idea of whose
existence, imparted to her in a mysterious and vague
manner by Raphael, she has remained faithful from
her childhood.

Zophiël, who by the power of Lucifer has been
detained struggling in the grove, is suffered once
more to enter the presence of the object of his affection.
He sees her supported in the arms of Helon,
whom he makes one futile effort to destroy, and then
is banished forever. The emissaries of his immortal
enemy pursue the baffled seraph to his place of exile,
and by their derision endeavor to augment his misery,

But, at last, is visited by Raphael, who gives him
hopes of restoration to his original rank in heaven.

The concluding canto is entitled “The Bridal of
Helon,” and in the following lines it contains much
of the author’s philosophy of life:

On consulting “Zophiël,” it will readily be seen
that the passages here extracted have not been chosen
for their superior poetical merit. It has simply been
attempted by quotations and a running commentary
to convey a just impression of the scope and character
of the work. There is not perhaps in the English
language a poem containing a greater variety of
thought, description and incident, and though the
author did not possess in an eminent degree the constructive
faculty, there are few narratives that are
conducted with more regard to unities, or with more
simplicity and perspicuity.

Though characterized by force and even freedom
of expression, it does not contain an impure or irreligious
sentiment. Every page is full of passion,
but passion subdued and chastened by refinement
and delicacy. Several of the characters are original
and splendid creations. Zophiël seems to us the
finest fallen angel that has come from the hand of a
poet. Milton’s outcasts from heaven are utterly depraved
and abraded of their glory; but Zophiël has
traces of his original virtue and beauty, and a lingering
hope of restoration to the presence of the Divinity.
Deceived by the specious fallacies of an
immortal like himself, and his superior in rank, he
encounters the blackest perfidy in him for whom so
much had been forfeited, and the blight of every
prospect that had lured his fancy or ambition. Egla,
though one of the most important characters in the
poem, is much less interesting. She is represented
as heroically consistent, except when given over for
a moment to the malice of infernal emissaries. In
her immediate reception of Helon as a husband, she
is constant to a long cherished idea, and fulfills the
design of her guardian spirit, or it would excite some
wonder that Zophiël was worsted in such competition.
It will be perceived upon a careful examination
that the work is in admirable keeping, and that
the entire conduct of its several persons bears a just
relation to their characters and position.

Mrs. Brooks returned to the United States, and her
son being now a student in the military academy,
she took up her residence in the vicinity of West
Point, where, with occasional intermissions in which
she visited her plantation in Cuba or traveled in
the United States, she remained until 1839. Her
marked individuality, the variety, beauty and occasional
splendor of her conversation, made her house
a favorite resort of the officers of the academy, and
of the most accomplished persons who frequented
that romantic neighborhood, by many of whom she
will long be remembered with mingled affection and
admiration.

In 1834 she caused to be published in Boston an
edition of “Zophiël,” for the benefit of the Polish
exiles who were thronging to this country after their
then recent struggle for freedom. There were at
that time too few readers among us of sufficiently
cultivated and independent taste to appreciate a work
of art which time or accident had not commended to
the popular applause, and “Zophiël” scarcely anywhere
excited any interest or attracted any attention.
At the end of a month but about twenty copies[Pg 68]
had been sold, and, in a moment of disappointment,
Mrs. Brooks caused the remainder of the impression
to be withdrawn from the market. The poem has
therefore been little read in this country, and even
the title of it would have remained unknown to the
common reader of elegant literature but for occasional
allusions to it by Southey and other foreign
critics.
[2]

In the summer of 1843, while Mrs. Brooks was
residing at Fort Columbus, in the bay of New York,—a
military post at which her son, Captain Horace
Brooks, was stationed several years—she had printed
for private circulation the remarkable little
work to which allusion has already been made, entitled
“Idomen, or the Vale of the Yumuri.” It is
in the style of a romance, but contains little that is
fictitious except the names of the characters. The
account which Idomen gives of her own history is
literally true, except in relation to an excursion to
Niagara, which occurred in a different period of the
author’s life. It is impossible to read these interesting
“confessions” without feeling a profound interest
in the character which they illustrate; a character of
singular strength, dignity and delicacy, subjected to
the severest tests, and exposed to the most curious
and easy analysis. “To see the inmost soul of one
who bore all the impulse and torture of self-murder
without perishing, is what can seldom be done: very
few have memories strong enough to retain a distinct
impression of past suffering, and few, though possessed
of such memories, have the power of so describing
their sensations as to make them apparent to
another.” “Idomen” will possess an interest and
value as a psychological study, independent of that
which belongs to it as a record of the experience of
so eminent a poet.

Mrs. Brooks was anxious to have published an
edition of all her writings, including “Idomen,” before
leaving New York, and she authorized me to
offer gratuitously her copyrights to an eminent publishing
house for that purpose. In the existing condition
of the copyright laws, which should have
been entitled acts for the discouragement of a native
literature, she was not surprised that the offer was
declined, though indignant that the reason assigned
should have been that they were “of too elevated a
character to sell.” Writing to me soon afterward
she observed, “I do not think any thing from my
humble imagination can be ‘too elevated,’ or elevated
enough, for the public as it really is in these
North American States…. In the words of poor
Spurzheim, (uttered to me a short time before his
death, in Boston,) I solace myself by saying, ‘Stupidity!
stupidity! the knowledge of that alone has
saved me from misanthropy.'”

In December, 1843, Mrs. Brooks sailed the last
time from her native country for the Island of Cuba.
There, on her coffee estate, Hermita, she renewed
for a while her literary labors. The small stone
building, smoothly plastered, with a flight of steps
leading to its entrance, in which she wrote some of
the cantos of “Zophiël,” is described by a recent
traveler
[3]
as surrounded by alleys of “palms, cocoas,
and oranges, interspersed with the tamarind, the
pomegranate, the mangoe, and the rose-apple, with
a back ground of coffee and plantains covering every
portion of the soil with their luxuriant verdure. I
have often passed it,” he observes, “in the still
night, when the moon was shining brightly, and the
leaves of the cocoa and palm threw fringe-like shadows
on the walls and the floor, and the elfin lamps
of the cocullos swept through the windows and door,
casting their lurid, mysterious light on every object,
while the air was laden with mingled perfume from
the coffee and orange, and the tube-rose and night-blooming
ceres, and have thought that no fitter birth-place
could be found for the images she has created.”

Her habits of composition were peculiar. With
an almost unconquerable aversion to the use of the
pen, especially in her later years, it was her custom
to finish her shorter pieces, and entire cantos of
longer poems, before committing a word of them to
paper. She had long meditated, and had partly composed,
an epic under the title of “Beatriz, the Beloved
of Columbus,” and when transmitting to me
the MS. of “The Departed,” in August, 1844, she
remarked: “When I have written out my ‘Vistas
del Infierno’ and one other short poem, I hope to begin
the penning of the epic I have so often spoken to
you of; but when or whether it will ever be finished,
Heaven alone can tell.” I have not learned whether
this poem was written, but when I heard her repeat
passages of it, I thought it would be a nobler work
than “Zophiël.”

Mrs. Brooks died at Patricio, in Cuba, near the
close of December, 1844.

I have no room for particular criticism of her
minor poems. They will soon I trust be given to
the public in a suitable edition, when it will be discovered
that they are heart-voices, distinguished for
the same fearlessness of thought and expression
which is illustrated by the work which has been considered
in this brief reviewal.

The accompanying portrait is from a picture by
Mr. Alexander, of Boston, and though the engraver
has very well preserved the details and general
effect of the painting, it does little justice to the fine
intellectual expression of the subject. It was a fancy
of Mr. Southey’s that induced her to wear in her
hair the passion-flower, which that poet deemed the
fittest emblem of her nature.

THE CRUISE OF THE RAKER.

A TALE OF THE WAR OF 1812-15.

BY HENRY A. CLARK.

CHAPTER I.

The Departure of the Privateer.

It was a dark and cloudy afternoon near the close
of the war of 1812-15. A little vessel was scudding
seaward before a strong sou’wester, which lashed
the bright waters of the Delaware till its breast seemed
a mimic ocean, heaving and swelling with tiny
waves. As the sky and sea grew darker and darker
in the gathering shades of twilight, the little bark
rose upon the heavy swell of the ocean, and meeting
Cape May on its lee-beam, shot out upon the broad
waste of waters, alone in its daring course, seeming
like the fearless bird which spreads its long wings
amid the fury of the storm and the darkness of the
cloud.

Upon the deck, near the helm, stood the captain,
whom we introduce to our readers as George Greene,
captain of the American privater, Raker. He was
a weather-bronzed, red-cheeked, sturdy-built personage,
with a dark-blue eye, the same in color as
the great sea over which it was roving with an
earnest and careful glance, rather as if in search of
a strange sail, than in apprehension of the approaching
storm. His countenance denoted firmness and
resolution, which he truly possessed in an extraordinary
degree, and his whole appearance was that
of a hardy sailor accustomed to buffet with the storm
and laugh at the fiercest wave.

It was evident that a bad night was before them,
and there were some on board the little privateer
who thought they had better have remained inside
the light-house of Cape May, than ventured out upon
the sea. The heavy masses of black clouds which
were piled on the edge of the distant horizon seemed
gradually gathering nearer and nearer, as if to surround
and ingulf the gallant vessel, which sped onward
fearlessly and proudly, as if conscious of its
power to survive the tempest, and bide the storm.

Captain Greene’s eye was at length attracted by
the threatening aspect of the sky, and seizing his
speaking-trumpet he gave the orders of preparation,
which were the more promptly executed inasmuch
as they had been anxiously awaited.

“Lay aloft there, lads, and in with the fore
to’gallant-sail and royal—down with the main gaff
top-sail!—bear a hand, lads, a norther on the Banks
is no plaything! Clear away both cables, and see
them bent to the anchors—let’s have all snug—lower
the flag from the gaff-peak, and send up the storm-pennant,
there—now we are ready.”

A thunder-storm at sea is perhaps the sublimest
sight in nature, especially when attended with the
darkness and mystery of night. The struggling vessel
plunges onward into the deep blackness, like a
blind and unbridled war-horse. All is dark—fearfully
dark. Stand with me, dear reader, here in the
bow of the ship! make fast to that halliard, and share
with me in the glorious feelings engendered by the
storm which is now rioting over the waters and
rending the sky. We hear the fierce roar of the contending
surges, yet we see them not. We hear the
quivering sails and strained sheets, creaking and fluttering
like imprisoned spirits, above and around us,
but all is solemnly invisible; now, see in the distant
horizon the faint premonitory flush of light, preceding
the vivid lightning flash—now, for a moment,
every thing—sky—water—sheet—shroud and spar
are glowing with a brilliancy that exceedeth the
brightness of day—the sky is a broad canopy of
golden radiance, and the waves are crested with a
red and fiery surge, that reminds you of your conception
of the “lake of burning fire and brimstone.”
We feel the dread—the vast sublimity of the breathless
moment, and while the mighty thoughts and
tumultuous conceptions are striving for form and
order of utterance within our throbbing breasts—again
all is dark—sadly, solemnly dark. Is not the
scene—is not the hour, truly sublime?

There was one at least on board the little Raker,
who felt as we should have felt, dear reader—a sense
of exultation, mingled with awe. It is upon the
ocean that man learns his own weakness, and his
own strength—he feels the light vessel trembling beneath
him, as if it feared dissolution—he hears the
strained sheets moaning in almost conscious agony—he
sees the great waves dashing from stem to stern
in relentless glee, and he feels that he is a sport and
a plaything in the grasp of a mightier power; he
learns his own insignificance. Yet the firm deck
remains—the taut sheets and twisted halliards give
not away; and he learns a proud reliance on his own
skill and might, when he finds that with but a narrow
hold between him and death, he can outride the
storm, and o’ermaster the wave.

Such were the thoughts which filled the mind of
Henry Morris, as he stood by the side of Captain
Greene on the quarter-deck of the Raker; as he stood
with his left arm resting on the main-boom, and his
gracefully turned little tarpaulin thrown back from
a broad, high forehead, surrounded by dark and clustering
curls, and with his black, brilliant eyes lighted
up with the enthusiasm of thought, he presented a
splendid specimen of an American sailor. The epau[Pg 70]lette
upon his shoulder denoted that he was an officer;
he was indeed second in command in the privateer.
He was a native of New Jersey, and his
father had been in Revolutionary days one of the
“Jarsey Blues,” as brave and gallant men as fought
in that glorious struggle.

“Well, Harry,” said Captain Greene, “it’s a dirty
night, but I’ll turn in a spell, and leave you in command.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

Captain Greene threw out a huge quid of tobacco
which had rested for some time in his mouth, walked
the deck a few times fore and aft, gaped as if his
jaws were about to separate forever, and then disappeared
through the cabin-door.

Henry Morris, though an universal favorite with
the crew and officers under his command, was yet a
strict disciplinarian, and being left in command of
the deck at once went the rounds of the watch, to
see that all were on the look out. The night had far
advanced before he saw any remissness; at length,
however, he discovered a brawny tar stowed away
in a coil of rope, snoring in melodious unison with
the noise of the wind and wave; his mouth was open,
developing an amazing circumference. Morris looked
at him for some time, when, with a smile, he addressed
a sailor near him.

“I say, Jack Marlinspike!”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“Jack, get some oakum.”

Jack speedily brought a fist-full.

“Now, Jack, some slush.”

Jack dipped the oakum in the slush-bucket which
hung against the main-mast.

“Now, Jack, a little tar.”

The mixture was immediately dropped into the
tar-bucket.

“Now, Jack, stow it away in Pratt’s mouth—don’t
wake him up—’tis a delicate undertaking, but
he sleeps soundly.”

“Lord! a stroke of lightning wouldn’t wake him—ha!
ha! ha! he’ll dream he is eating his breakfast!”

With a broad grin upon his weather-beaten face,
Marlinspike proceeded to obey orders. He placed
the execrable compound carefully in Pratt’s mouth,
and plugged it down, as he called it, with the end of
his jack-knife, then surveying his work with a complacent
laugh, he touched his hat, and withdrew a
few paces to bide the event.

Pratt breathed hard, but slept on, though the melody
of his snoring was sadly impaired in the clearness of
its utterance.

Morris gazed at him quietly, and then sung out,

“Pratt—Pratt—what are you lying there wheezing
like a porpoise for? Get up, man, your watch is
not out.”

The sailor opened his eyes with a ludicrous expression
of fright, as he became immediately conscious
of a peculiar feeling of difficulty in breathing—thrusting
his huge hand into his mouth, he hauled
away upon its contents, and at length found room for
utterance.

“By heaven, just tell me who did that ‘ar nasty
trick—that’s all.”

At this moment he caught sight of Marlinspike,
who was looking at him with a grin extending from
ear to ear. Without further remark, Pratt let the
substance which he had held in his hand fly at
Marlinspike’s head; that individual, however, dodged
very successfully, and it disappeared to leeward.

Pratt was about to follow up his first discharge
with an assault from a pair of giant fists, but the voice
of his commander restrained him.

“Ah, Pratt! somebody has been fooling you—you
must look out for the future.”

Pratt immediately knew from the peculiar tone
of the voice which accompanied this remark who
was the real author of the joke, and turned to his
duty with the usual philosophy of a sailor, at the same
time filling his mouth with nearly a whole hand of
tobacco, to take the taste out, as he said. He did
not soon sleep upon his watch again.

As the reader will perceive, Lieut. Morris was
decidedly fond of a joke, as, indeed, is every sailor.

The storm still raged onward as day broke over
the waters; the little Raker was surrounded by immense
waves which heaved their foaming spray over
the vessel from stem to stern.

Yet all on board were in good spirits; all had confidence
in the well-tried strength of their bark, and
the joke and jest went round as gayly and carelessly
as if the wind were only blowing a good stiff way.

“Here, you snow-ball,” cried Jack Marlinspike,
to the black cook, who had just emptied his washings
overboard, and was tumbling back to his galley
as well as the uneasy motion of the vessel would
allow; “here, snow-ball.”

“Well, massa—what want?”

“Haint we all told you that you mustn’t empty
nothing over to windward but hot water and ashes—all
else must go to leeward?”

“Yes, Massa.”

“Well, recollect it now; go and empty your ash-pot,
so you’ll learn how.”

“Yes, massa.”

Cuffy soon appeared with his pot, which he
capsized as directed, and got his eyes full of the dust.

“O, Lord! O, Lord! I see um now; I guess you
wont catch dis child that way agin.”

“Well, well, Cuffy! we must all learn by experience.”

“Gorry, massa, guess I wont try de hot water!”

“Well, I wouldn’t, Cuff. Now hurry up the
pork—you’ve learnt something this morning.”

Such was the spirit of the Raker’s crew, as they
once more stretched out upon the broad ocean. It
was their third privateering trip, and they felt confident
of success, as they had been unusually fortunate
in their previous trips. The crew consisted
of but twenty men, but all were brave and powerful
fellows, and all actuated by a true love of country,
as well as prompted by a desire for gain. A long
thirty-two lay amidships, carefully covered with
canvas, which also concealed a formidable pile of
balls. Altogether, the Raker, though evidently built[Pg 71]
entirely for speed, seemed also a vessel well able to
enter into an engagement with any vessel of its size
and complement.

As the middle day approached the clouds arose
and scudded away to leeward like great flocks of
wild geese, and the bright sun once more shone
upon the waters, seeming to hang a string of pearls
about the dark crest of each subsiding wave. All
sail was set aboard the Raker, which stretched out
toward mid ocean, with the stars and stripes flying
at her peak, the free ocean beneath, and her band of
gallant hearts upon her decks, ready for the battle or
the breeze.

CHAPTER II.

The Merchant Brig.

Two weeks later than the period at which we left
the Raker, a handsome merchant vessel, with all
sail set, was gliding down the English channel, bound
for the East Indies. The gentle breeze of a lovely
autumnal morning scarcely sufficed to fill the sails,
and the vessel made but little progress till outside the
Lizard, when a freer wind struck it, and it swept
oceanward with a gallant pace, dashing aside the
waters, and careering gracefully as a swan upon the
wave. Its armament was of little weight, and it
seemed evident that its voyage, as far as any design
of the owners was concerned, was to be a peaceful
one. England at that time had become the undisputed
mistress of the ocean; and even the few
splendid victories obtained by the gallant little American
navy, had failed as yet to inspire in the bosoms of
her sailors, any feeling like that of fear or of caution;
and Captain Horton, of the merchantman Betsy
Allen, smoked his pipe, and drank his glass as unconcernedly
as if there were no such thing as an
American privateer upon the ocean.

The passengers in the vessel, which was a small
brig of not more than a hundred and forty tons, were
an honest merchant of London, Thomas Williams
by name, and his daughter, a lovely girl of seventeen.
Mr. Williams had failed in business, but through the
influence of friends had obtained an appointment
from the East India Company, and was now on his
way to take his station. He was a blunt and somewhat
unpolished man, but kind in heart as he was
frank in speech.

Julia Williams was a fair specimen of English
beauty; she was tall, yet so well developed, that she
did not appear slight or angular, and withal so gracefully
rounded was every limb, that any less degree
of fullness would have detracted from her beauty.
She was full of ardor and enterprise, not easily
appalled by danger, and properly confident in her own
resources, yet there was no unfeminine expression
of boldness in her countenance, for nothing could be
softer, purer, or more delicate, than the outlines of
her charming features. There were times when,
roused by intense emotion, she seemed queen-like
in her haughty step and majestic beauty, yet in her
calmer mind, her retiring and modest demeanor partook
more of a womanly dependence than of the
severity of command.

Julia was seated on the deck beside her father, in
the grateful shade of the main-mast, gazing upon the
green shores which they had just passed, now fast
fading in the distance, while the chalky cliffs which
circle the whole coast of England, began to stand
out in bold relief upon the shore.

“Good-bye to dear England, father!” said the
beautiful girl; “shall we ever see it again?”

“You may, dear Julia, probably I never shall.”

“Well, let us hope that we may.”

“Yes, we will hope, it will be a proud day for
me, if it ever come, when I go back to London and
pay my creditors every cent I owe them, when no
man shall have reason to curse me for the injury I
have done him, however unintentional.”

“No man will do so now, dear father, no one but
knows you did all you could to avert the calamity,
and when it came, surrendered all your property to
meet the demands of your creditors. You did all
that an honest man should do, father; and you can
have no reason to reproach yourself.”

“True, girl, true! I do not; yet I hate to think that
I, whose name was once as good as the bank,
should now owe, when I cannot pay—that’s all; a
bad feeling, but a few years in India may make all
right again.”

“O, yes! but, father, it is time for you to take your
morning glass. You know you wont feel well if you
forget it.”

“Never fear my forgetting that; my stomach
always tell me, and I know by that when it is
11 o’clock, A.M., as well as by my time-piece.”

“Well, John, bring Mr. Williams his morning
glass.”

Julia spoke to their servant, a worthy, clever
fellow, who had long lived in their family, and
would not leave it now. He had never been upon
the ocean before, and already began to be sea-sick.
He however managed to reach the cabin-door, and
after a long time returned with the glass, which he
got to his master’s hand, spilling half its contents on
the way.

“There, master, I haint been drinking none on’t,
but this plaguey ship is so dommed uneasy, I can’t
walk steady, and I feels very sick, I does; I think
I be’s going to die.”

“You are only a little sea-sick, John.”

“Not so dommed little, either.”

“You are not yet used to your new situation,
John; in a few days you’ll be quite a sailor.”

“Will I though? Well, the way I feels now, I’d
just as lief die as not—oh!—ugh”—and John rushed
to the gunwale.

“Heave yo!” sung out a jolly tar; “pitch your
cargo overboard. You’ll sail better if you lighten
ship.”

“Dom this ere sailing—ugh—I will die.”

Thus resolving, John laid himself down by the
galley, and closed his eyes with a heroic determination.

Such an event, as might be expected, was a great[Pg 72]
joke to the crew—a land-lubber at sea being with
sailors always a fair butt, and poor John’s misery
was aggravated by their, as it seemed to him, unfeeling
remarks, yet he was so far gone that he
could only faintly “dom them.” His master, who
knew that he would soon be well, made no attempt
to relieve him; and John was for some time unmolested
in his vigorous attempt to die.

He was aroused at length by the same tar who had
first noticed his sickness,

“I say, lubber, are you sick?”

“Yes, dom sick.”

“Well, I expect you’ve got to die, there’s only
one thing that’ll save you—get up and follow me to
the cock-pit.”

John attempted to rise, but now really unwell, he
was not able to stir. His kind physician calling a
brother tar to his aid, they assisted John below.

“There, now, you lubber, I’m going to cure you,
if you’ll only foller directions.”

John merely grunted.

“Here’s some raw pork, and some grog, though
it’s a pity to waste grog on such a lubber—now, you
must eat as if you’d never ate before, if you don’t,
you are a goner.”

John very faintly uttered, that he couldn’t “eat a
dom bit.”

“Then you’ll die, and the fishes will eat YOU.”

John shuddered, “Well, I’ll try.”

So saying, he downed one of the pieces of pork,
which as speedily came up again.

“Now drink, and be quick about it, or I shall
drink it for you.”

With much exertion they made John eat and drink
heartily, after which they left him to sleep awhile.

The following morning John appeared on deck
again, exceedingly pale to be sure, but entirely
recovered from his sea-sickness, and with a feeling
of fervent gratitude toward the sailor, who, as he
fancied, had saved his valuable life.

Nothing occurred to interrupt the peaceful monotony
of life aboard the little craft for the following
ten days: before a good breeze they had made much
way in their voyage, and all on board were pleased
with prosperous wind and calm sea and sky.

On the morning of the following day, however, the
cry from the mast-head of “sail ho!” aroused all on
board to a feeling of interest.

“Where away?”

“Right over the lee-bow.”

“What do you make of her?”

“Square to’sails, queer rig—flag, can’t see it.”

“O! captain,” said Julia, “can’t you go near
enough to speak it?”

“Of course I could, ’cause it’s right on the lee,
but whether I’d better or not is quite another thing.”

“The captain knows best, my dear,” said the
merchant.

“Certainly, but I should so like to see some other
faces besides those which are about us every day.”

“If you are tired already, my pretty lady,” said
Captain Horton, “I wonder what you’ll be before
we get to the Indies.”

“Heigh-ho,” sighed the fair lady.

“Mast-head there,” shouted Captain Horton.

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“What do you make of her now?”

“Nothing yet, sir; we are overhauling her fast
though.”

In a short time the top-sails of the strange vessel
became visible from the deck.

“Ah! she’s hove in sight, has she?” said Captain
Horton. “I’ll see what I can make of her,” and
seizing his glass he ascended the fore-ratlins, nearly
to the cross-trees, and after a long and steady survey
of the approaching vessel, in which survey he also
included the whole horizon, he descended with a
thoughtful countenance, muttering to himself, “I
was a little afraid of it.”

“Well captain,” inquired Julia, “is it an English
vessel?”

“May be ‘t is—can’t tell where ‘t was built.”

“Can’t you see the flag?”

“Can’t make it out yet.”

“Captain Horton,” exclaimed the merchant, who
had been watching his countenance from the moment
he had descended the ratlins, “you do know something
about that vessel, I am sure.”

Captain Horton interrupted him by an earnest
glance toward Julia, which the fair girl herself noticed.

“O! be not afraid to say any thing before me,
captain. I am not easily frightened, and if you have
to fight I will help you.”

The bright eyes of the girl as she spoke grew
brighter, and her little hand was clenched as if it held
a sword.

Casting a glance of admiration toward the beautiful
girl, Captain Horton leisurely filled his pipe from
his waistcoat pocket, and replied as he lit it—

“Well, I’m inclined to think it’s what we call a
pirate, my fair lady.”

“A pirate,” sung out John, “a pirate, boo-hoo!
oh dear! we shall all be ravaged and cooked, and
eaten. O dear! why didn’t I marry Susan Thompson,
and go to keeping an inn—boo-hoo!”

“John,” said his master, “be still, or if you must
cry, go below.”

The servant made a manly effort, and managed to
repress his ejaculations, but could not keep back the
large tears which followed each other down his
cheeks in rapid succession.

“Can’t you run from her, captain?” asked the
merchant.

“Have you no guns aboard?” inquired Julia.

“I see you are for fighting the rascals, Miss Julia,
and I own that would be the pleasantest course for
me; but you see, we can’t do it. The company
don’t allow their vessels enough fire-arms to beat off
a brig half their own size—there’s no way but to
run for it, and these rascals always have a swift
craft—generally a Baltimore clipper, which is just
the fastest and prettiest vessel in the world, if those
pesky Yankees do build them—but the Betsy Allen
aint a slow craft, and we’ll do the best we can to
show ’em a clean pair of heels.”[Pg 73]

“You are to windward of them, captain,” said
Julia.

“Yes, that’s true; but these clippers sail right in
the teeth of the wind; see, now, how they’ve neared
us—ahoy!—all hands ahoy!”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“‘Bout ship, my boys—let go the jibs—lively,
boys; now the fore peak-halyards. There she is—that
throws the strange sail right astern; and a stern
chase is a long chase.”

Three or four hours of painful anxiety succeeded,
when it became evident even to the unpracticed
eyes of Julia and her father, that the strange vessel
was slowly but surely overhauling them. Yet the
brave girl showed none of the usual weakness of
her sex, and even encouraged her father, who, though
himself a brave man, yet trembled as he thought of
the probable fate of his daughter. As for poor John,
that unfortunate individual was so completely beside
himself, that he wandered from one part of the vessel
to the other, asking each sailor successively what
his opinion of the chances of escape might be, and
what treatment they might expect from the pirates
after they were taken. As may be imagined,
he received little consolation from the hardy tars,
who, although themselves well aware of their probable
fate, yet had been too long schooled in
danger to show fear before the peril was immediately
around them, and were each pursuing the
duties of their several stations, very much as if
only threatened with the usual dangers of the
voyage. The unmanly fears of John even induced
them to play upon his anxiety, and magnify his
terror.

“Why, John,” said his old friend, who had so
scientifically cured him of his sea-sickness, and toward
whom John evinced a kind of filial reverence,
placing peculiar reliance upon every thing said by
the worthy tar, “why, John, they will make us all
walk the plank.”

“Will they—O, dear me! and what is that, does
it hurt a fellow?”

“O, no! he dies easy.”

“Dies! oh, lud!”

“Why, yes! you know what walking the plank
is, don’t yer?”

“No I don’t. O, dear!”

“Well, they run a plank over the side of the ship,
and ask you very politely to walk out to the end
of it.”

“O, lud! and don’t they let a body hold on?”

“And then when you get to the end of it, why,
John, it naturally follers that it tips up, and lets you
into the sea.”

“And don’t they help you out?”

“No, no, John! I aint joking now, by my honor;
that’s the end of a man, and that’s where we shall
go to if they get hold of us.”

“O, dear me! what did I come to sea for?
Well, but s’posin you wont go out on the plank,
wouldn’t it do just to tell ’em you’d rather not,
perlitely, you know—perliteness goes a great
way.”

“They just blow your brains out with a pistol,
that’s all.”

“O, lud!”

“Yes, John, that’s the way they use folks.”

“The bloody villains! and have we all got to walk
the plank? Oh! dear Miss Julia, and all?”

“No, no, John, not her; poor girl, it would be
better if she had”—and the kind-hearted tar brushed
away a tear with his tawny hand.

“What! don’t they kill the women, then?”

“No, no, John, they lets them live.”

A sudden light shone in the eyes of John; it was
the first happy expression that had flitted across his
countenance since the strange sail had been discovered,
and the fearful word, pirate, had fallen upon
his ears.

“I have it—I have it!”

“What, John?”

But John danced off, leaving the sailor to wonder
at the sudden metamorphosis in the feelings of the
cockney.

“Well, that’s a queer son of a lubber; I wonder
what he’s after now.”

John, in the meantime, approached Julia, and in a
very mysterious manner desired a few moments
private conversation with her.

“Why, John, what can you want?” She had
been no woman, if, however, her curiosity to learn
the motive of so strange a request from her servant
had not induced her to listen to him.

“Miss Julia,” commenced John, “I’ve discovered
a way in which we can all be saved alive by these
bloody pirates, after they catch us; by all, I mean
you and your father, and I, and the captain, if he’s
a mind to.”

“Well, what is it, John?”

“I’ll tell you, Miss Julia. Dick Halyard says
they only kill the men—they makes all them walk
the plank, which is—”

“I know what it is,” said Julia, with a slight
shudder.

“Well, they saves all the women, out o’ respect
for the weaker sex. Now, Miss Julia.”

“Why, John!”

“But I know it’s so, ’cause Dick Halyard told me
all about it; now you see if you’ll only let me
take one of your dresses—I wont hurt it none; and
then your father can take another, and we’ll get clear
of the bloody villains—wont it be great?”

Julia could not repress a laugh even in the midst
of the melancholy thoughts which involuntarily arose
in her mind during the elucidation of John’s plan of
escape; she could not, however, explain the difficulties
in the way of its successful issue to the self-satisfied
expounder, and finding no other more convenient
way of closing the conversation, she told
him he should have a woman’s dress, with all the
necessary accompaniments.

John was delighted.

“You’ll tell your father, Miss Julia, wont you?
O, Lud! we’ll cheat the bloody fellows yet; I’ll go
and curl my hair.”

Julia returned to her father’s side, and silently[Pg 74]
watched the strange sail, which was evidently
drawing nearer, as her dark hull had shown itself
above the waters.

“We have but one chance of escape left,” exclaimed
Captain Horton; “if we can elude them
during the night, all will be well; if to-morrow’s
sun find us in sight, we shall inevitably fall into their
hands.”

Night gradually settled over the deep, and when
the twilight had passed, and all was dark, the lights
of the pirate brig were some five miles to leeward.
Her blood-red flag had been run up to the fore-peak,
as if in mockery of the prey the pirates felt sure could
not escape them—and the booming noise of a heavy
gun had reached the ears of the fugitives, as if to
signal their predestined doom. Yet the calm, round
moon looked down upon the gloomy waters with the
same serene countenance that had gazed into their
bosom for thousands of years, and trod upward on
her starry pathway with the same queenly pace; yet,
perchance, in her own domains contention and strife,
animosity and bloodshed were rife; perchance the
sound of tumultuous war, even then, was echoing
among her mountains, and staining her streams
with gore.

[To be continued.

THE SOUL’S DREAM.

BY GEORGE H. BOKER.

THE MAID OF BOGOTA.

A TALE FROM COLOMBIAN HISTORY.

BY W. GILMORE SIMMS.

Whenever the several nations of the earth which
have achieved their deliverance from misrule and
tyranny shall point, as they each may, to the fair
women who have taken active part in the cause of
liberty, and by their smiles and services have contributed
in no measured degree to the great objects of
national defence and deliverance, it will be with a
becoming and just pride only that the Colombians
shall point to their virgin martyr, commonly known
among them as La Pola, the Maid of Bogota. With
the history of their struggle for freedom her story
will always be intimately associated; her tragical
fate, due solely to the cause of her country, being
linked with all the touching interest of the most romantic
adventure. Her spirit seemed to be woven
of the finest materials. She was gentle, exquisitively
sensitive, and capable of the most true and tender
attachments. Her mind was one of rarest endowments,
touched to the finest issues of eloquence, and
gifted with all the powers of the improvisatrice,
while her courage and patriotism seem to have been
cast in those heroic moulds of antiquity from which
came the Cornelias and Deborahs of famous memory.
Well had it been for her country had the glorious
model which she bestowed upon her people been
held in becoming homage by the race with which her
destiny was cast—a race masculine only in exterior,
and wanting wholly in that necessary strength of soul
which, rising to the due appreciation of the blessings
of national freedom, is equally prepared to make,
for its attainment, every necessary sacrifice of self;
and yet our heroine was but a child in years—a
lovely, tender, feeble creature, scarcely fifteen years
of age. But the soul grows rapidly to maturity in
some countries, and in the case of women, it is always
great in its youth, if greatness is ever destined to be
its possession.

Doña Apolenaria Zalabariata—better known by the
name of La Pola—was a young girl, the daughter of
a good family of Bogota, who was distinguished at
an early period, as well for her great gifts of beauty
as of intellect. She was but a child when Bolivar
first commenced his struggles with the Spanish authorities,
with the ostensible object of freeing his
country from their oppressive tyrannies. It is not
within our province to discuss the merits of his pretensions
as a deliverer, or of his courage and military
skill as a hero. The judgment of the world and of
time has fairly set at rest those specious and hypocritical
claims, which, for a season, presumed to
place him on the pedestal with our Washington.
We now know that he was not only a very selfish,
but a very ordinary man—not ordinary, perhaps, in
the sense of intellect, for that would be impossible in
the case of one who was so long able to maintain his
eminent position, and to succeed in his capricious
progresses, in spite of inferior means, and a singular
deficiency of the heroic faculty. But his ambition
was the vulgar ambition, and, if possible, something
still inferior. It contemplated his personal wants
alone; it lacked all the elevation of purpose which is
the great essential of patriotism, and was wholly
wanting in that magnanimity of soul which delights
in the sacrifice of self, whenever such sacrifice promises
the safety of the single great purpose which it
professes to desire. But we are not now to consider
Bolivar, the deliverer, as one whose place in the
pantheon has already been determined by the unerring
judgment of posterity. We are to behold him only
with those eyes in which he was seen by the devoted
followers to whom he brought, or appeared to bring,
the deliverance for which they yearned. It is with
the eyes of the passionate young girl, La Pola, the
beautiful and gifted child, whose dream of country
perpetually craved the republican condition of ancient
Rome, in the days of its simplicity and virtue; it is
with her fancy and admiration that we are to crown
the ideal Bolivar, till we acknowledge him, as he
appears to her, the Washington of the Colombians,
eager only to emulate the patriotism, and to achieve
like success with his great model of the northern
confederacy. Her feelings and opinions, with regard
to the Liberator, were those of her family. Her
father was a resident of Bogota, a man of large
possessions and considerable intellectual acquirements.
He gradually passed from a secret admiration
of Bolivar to a warm sympathy with his progress,
and an active support—so far as he dared, living in a
city under immediate and despotic Spanish rule—of
all his objects. He followed with eager eyes the fortunes
of the chief, as they fluctuated between defeat
and victory in other provinces, waiting anxiously
the moment when the success and policy of the
struggle should bring deliverance, in turn, to the
gates of Bogota. Without taking up arms himself,
he contributed secretly from his own resources to
supplying the coffers of Bolivar with treasure, even
when his operations were remote—and his daughter
was the agent through whose unsuspected ministry
the money was conveyed to the several emissaries
who were commissioned to receive it. The duty
was equally delicate and dangerous, requiring great
prudence and circumspection; and the skill, address
and courage with which the child succeeded in the execution
of her trusts, would furnish a frequent lesson
for older heads and the sterner and the bolder sex.

La Pola was but fourteen years old when she obtained
her first glimpse of the great man in whose
cause she had already been employed, and of whose
deeds and distinctions she had heard so much. By[Pg 76]
the language of the Spanish tyranny, which swayed
with iron authority over her native city, she heard
him denounced and execrated as a rebel and marauder,
for whom an ignominious death was already
decreed by the despotic viceroy. This language,
from such lips, was of itself calculated to raise its
object favorably in her enthusiastic sight. By the
patriots, whom she had been accustomed to love
and venerate, she heard the same name breathed
always in whispers of hope and affection, and fondly
commended, with tearful blessings, to the watchful
care of Heaven. She was now to behold with her
own eyes this individual thus equally distinguished
by hate and homage in her hearing. Bolivar apprised
his friends in Bogota that he should visit them in
secret. That province, ruled with a fearfully strong
hand by Zamano, the viceroy, had not yet ventured
to declare itself for the republic. It was necessary
to operate with caution; and it was no small peril
which Bolivar necessarily incurred in penetrating to
its capital, and laying his snares, and fomenting
insurrection beneath the very hearth-stones of the
tyrant. It was to La Pola’s hands that the messenger
of the Liberator confided the missives that communicated
this important intelligence to her father. She
little knew the contents of the billet which she carried
him in safety, nor did he confide them to the child.
He himself did not dream the precocious extent of
that enthusiasm which she felt almost equally in the
common cause, and in the person of its great advocate
and champion. Her father simply praised her
care and diligence, rewarded her with his fondest
caresses, and then proceeded with all quiet despatch
to make his preparations for the secret reception of
the deliverer. It was at midnight, and while a
thunder-storm was raging, that he entered the city,
making his way, agreeably to previous arrangement,
and under select guidance, into the inner apartments
of the house of Zalabariata. A meeting of the conspirators—for
such they were—of head men among
the patriots of Bogota, had been contemplated for his
reception. Several of them were accordingly in
attendance when he came. These were persons
whose sentiments were well known to be friendly to
the cause of liberty, who had suffered by the hands,
or were pursued by the suspicions of Zamano, and
who, it was naturally supposed, would be eagerly
alive to every opportunity of shaking off the rule of
the oppressor. But patriotism, as a philosophic
sentiment, to be indulged after a good dinner, and
discussed phlegmatically, if not classically, over
sherry and cigars, is a very different sort of thing
from patriotism as a principle of action, to be prosecuted
as a duty, at every peril, instantly and always,
to the death, if need be. Our patriots at Bogota were
but too frequently of the contemplative, the philosophical
order. Patriotism with them was rather a
subject for eloquence than use. They could recall
those Utopian histories of Greece and Rome which
furnish us with ideals rather than facts, and sigh for
names like those of Cato, and Brutus, and Aristides.
But more than this did not seem to enter their imaginations
as at all necessary to assert the character
which it pleased them to profess, or maintain the reputation
which they had prospectively acquired for
the very commendable virtue which constituted their
ordinary theme. Bolivar found them cold. Accustomed
to overthrow and usurpation, they were now
slow to venture property and life upon the predictions
and promises of one who, however perfect
in their estimation as a patriot, had yet suffered from
most capricious fortunes. His past history, indeed,
except for its patriotism, offered but very doubtful
guarantees in favor of the enterprise to which they
were invoked. Bolivar was artful and ingenious.
He had considerable powers of eloquence—was
specious and persuasive; had an oily and bewitching
tongue, like Balial; and if not altogether capable of
making the worse appear the better cause, could at
least so shape the aspects of evil fortune, that, to the
unsuspicious nature, they would seem to be the very
results aimed at by the most deliberate arrangement
and resolve. But Bolivar, on this occasion, was
something more than ingenious and persuasive, he
was warmly earnest, and passionately eloquent. In
truth, he was excited much beyond his wont. He
was stung to indignation by a sense of disappointment.
He had calculated largely on this meeting,
and it promised now to be a failure. He had anticipated
the eager enthusiasm of a host of brave and
noble spirits ready to fling out the banner of freedom
to the winds, and cast the scabbard from the sword
forever. Instead of this, he found but a little knot
of cold, irresolute men, thinking only of the perils of
life which they should incur, and the forfeiture and
loss of property which might accrue from any
hazardous experiments. Bolivar spoke to them in
language less artificial and much more impassioned
than was his wont. He was a man of impulse rather
than of thought or principle, and, once aroused, the
intense fire of a southern sun seemed to burn fiercely
in all his words and actions. His speech was heard
by other ears than those to which it was addressed.
The shrewd mind of La Pola readily conjectured
that the meeting at her father’s house, at midnight,
and under peculiar circumstances, contemplated
some extraordinary object. She was aware that
a tall, mysterious stranger had passed through the
court, under the immediate conduct of her father
himself. Her instinct divined in this stranger the
person of the deliverer, and her heart would not
suffer her to lose the words, or if possible to obtain,
to forego the sight of the great object of its patriotic
worship. Beside, she had a right to know and to
see. She was of the party, and had done them service.
She was yet to do them more. Concealed in an adjoining
apartment—a sort of oratory, connected by a
gallery with the chamber in which the conspirators
were assembled—she was able to hear the earnest
arguments and passionate remonstrances of the Liberator.
They confirmed all her previous admiration
of his genius and character. She felt with indignation
the humiliating position which the men of Bogota
held in his eyes. She heard their pleas and scruples,
and listened with a bitter scorn to the thousand
suggestions of prudence, the thousand calculations[Pg 77]
of doubt and caution with which timidity seeks to
avoid precipitating a crisis. She could listen and
endure no longer. The spirit of the improvisatrice
was upon her. Was it also that of fate and a higher
Providence? She seized the guitar, of which she
was the perfect mistress, and sung even as her soul
counseled and the exigency of the event demanded.
Our translation of her lyrical overflow is necessarily
a cold and feeble one.

At the first sudden gush of the music from within,
the father of the damsel started to his feet, and with
confusion in his countenance, was about to leave the
apartment. But Bolivar arrested his footsteps, and
in a whisper, commanded him to be silent and remain.
The conspirators, startled, if not alarmed, were compelled
to listen. Bolivar did so with a pleased attention.
He was passionately fond of music, and this
was of a sort at once to appeal to his objects and his
tastes. His eye kindled as the song proceeded. His
heart rose with an exulting sentiment. The moment,
indeed, embodied one of his greatest triumphs—the
tribute of a pure, unsophisticated soul, inspired by
Heaven with the happiest and highest endowments,
and by earth with the noblest sentiments of pride and
country. When the music ceased, Zalabariata was
about to apologize, and to explain, but Bolivar again
gently and affectionately arrested his utterance.

“Fear nothing,” said he. “Indeed, why should
you fear? I am in the greater danger here, if there
be danger for any; and I would as soon place my
life in the keeping of that noble damsel, as in the
arms of my mother. Let her remain, my friend;
let her hear and see all; and above all, do not attempt
to apologize for her. She is my ally. Would
that she could make these men of Bogota feel with
herself—feel as she makes even me to feel.”

The eloquence of the Liberator received a new
impulse from that of the improvisatrice. He renewed
his arguments and entreaties in a different spirit. He
denounced, in yet bolder language than before, that
wretched pusillanimity which quite as much, he
asserted, as the tyranny of the Spaniard, was the
cause under which the liberties of the country
groaned and suffered.

“And now, I ask,” he continued, passionately,
“men of Bogota, if ye really purpose to deny yourselves
all share in the glory and peril of the effort
which is for your own emancipation? Are your
brethren of the other provinces to maintain the conflict
in your behalf, while, with folded hands, you
submit, doing nothing for yourselves? Will you not
lift the banner also? Will you not draw sword in
your own honor, and the defence of your fire-sides
and families. Talk not to me of secret contributions.
It is your manhood, not your money, that is needful
for success. And can you withhold yourselves while
you profess to hunger after that liberty for which
other men are free to peril all—manhood, money,
life, hope, every thing but honor and the sense of
freedom. But why speak of peril in this. Peril is
every where. It is the inevitable child of life, natural
to all conditions—to repose as well as action, to the
obscurity which never goes abroad, as well as to
that adventure which forever seeks the field. You
incur no more peril in openly braving your tyrant,
all together as one man, than you do thus tamely
sitting beneath his footstool, and trembling forever
lest his capricious will may slay as it enslaves. Be
you but true to yourselves—openly true—and the
danger disappears as the night-mists that speed from
before the rising sun. There is little that deserves
the name of peril in the issue which lies before us.[Pg 78]
We are more than a match, united, and filled with
the proper spirit, for all the forces that Spain can
send against us. It is in our coldness that she warms—in
our want of unity that she finds strength. But
even were we not superior to her in numbers—even
were the chances all wholly and decidedly against
us—I still cannot see how it is that you hesitate to
draw the sword in so sacred a strife—a strife which
consecrates the effort, and claims Heaven’s sanction
for success. Are your souls so subdued by servitude;
are you so accustomed to bonds and tortures, that
these no longer irk and vex your daily consciousness?
Are you so wedded to inaction that you cease to
feel? Is it the frequency of the punishment that has
made you callous to the ignominy and the pain?
Certainly your viceroy gives you frequent occasion
to grow reconciled to any degree of hurt and degradation.
Daily you behold, and I hear, of the exactions
of this tyrant—of the cruelties and the murders
to which he accustoms you in Bogota. Hundreds of
your friends and kinsmen, even now, lie rotting in
the common prisons, denied equally your sympathies
and every show of justice, perishing, daily, under
the most cruel privations. Hundreds have perished
by this and other modes of torture, and the gallows
and garote seem never to be unoccupied. Was it
not the bleaching skeleton of the venerable Hermano,
whom I well knew for his wisdom and patriotism,
which I beheld, even as I entered, hanging in chains
over the gateway of your city? Was he not the
victim of his wealth and love of country? Who
among you is secure? He dared but to deliver himself
as a man, and as he was suffered to stand alone,
he was destroyed. Had you, when he spoke, but
prepared yourselves to act, flung out the banner of
resistance to the winds, and bared the sword for the
last noble struggle, Hermano had not perished, nor
were the glorious work only now to be begun. But
which of you, involved in the same peril with Hermano,
will find the friend, in the moment of his need,
to take the first step for his rescue? Each of you, in
turn, having wealth to tempt the spoiler, will be sure
to need such friendship. It seems you do not look
for it among one another—where, then, do you propose
to find it? Will you seek for it among the
Cartagenians—among the other provinces—to Bolivar
without? Vain expectation, if you are unwilling
to peril any thing for yourselves within!
In a tyranny so suspicious and so reckless as is yours,
you must momentarily tremble lest ye suffer at the
hands of your despot. True manhood rather prefers
any peril which puts an end to this state of anxiety
and fear. Thus to tremble with apprehension ever,
is ever to be dying. It is a life of death only which
ye live—and any death or peril that comes quickly
at the summons, is to be preferred before it. If, then,
ye have hearts to feel, or hopes to warm ye—a pride
to suffer consciousness of shame, or an ambition that
longs for better things—affections for which to covet
life, or the courage with which to assert and to defend
your affections, ye cannot, ye will not hesitate to
determine, with souls of freemen, upon what is
needful to be done. Ye have but one choice as men;
and the question which is left for ye to resolve, is
that which determines, not your possessions, not
even your lives, but simply your rank and stature
in the world of humanity and man.”

The Liberator paused, not so much through his
own or the exhaustion of the subject, as that his
hearers should in turn be heard. But with this latter
object his forbearance was profitless. There were
those among them, indeed, who had their answers to
his exhortations, but these were not of a character to
promise boldly for their patriotism or courage. Their
professions, indeed, were ample, but were confined
to unmeaning generalities. “Now is the time, now!”
was the response of Bolivar to all that was said.
But they faltered and hung back at every utterance
of his spasmodically uttered “now! now!” He
scanned their faces eagerly, with a hope that gradually
yielded to despondency. Their features were
blank and inexpressive, as their answers had been
meaningless or evasive. Several of them were of
that class of quiet citizens, unaccustomed to any enterprises
but those of trade, who are always slow to
peril wealth by a direct issue with their despotism.
They felt the truth of Bolivar’s assertions. They
knew that their treasures were only so many baits
and lures to the cupidity and exactions of the royal
emissaries, but they still relied on their habitual caution
and docility to keep terms with the tyranny at
which they yet trembled. When, in the warmth of
his enthusiasm, Bolivar depicted the bloody struggles
which must precede their deliverance, they began
indeed to wonder among themselves how they ever
came to fall into that mischievous philosophy of patriotism
which had involved them with such a restless
rebel as Bolivar! Others of the company were
ancient hidalgos, who had been men of spirit in their
day, but who had survived the season of enterprise,
which is that period only when the heart swells and
overflows with full tides of warm and impetuous
blood.

“Your error,” said he, in a whisper to Señor Don
Joachim de Zalabariata, “was in not bringing young
men into your counsels.”

“We shall have them hereafter,” was the reply,
also in a whisper.

“We shall see,” muttered the Liberator, who continued,
though in silence, to scan the assembly with
inquisitive eyes, and an excitement of soul, which
increased duly with his efforts to subdue it. He had
found some allies in the circle. Some few generous
spirits, who, responding to his desires, were anxious
to be up and doing. But it was only too apparent
that the main body of the company had been rather
disquieted than warmed. In this condition of hopeless
and speechless indecision, the emotions of the
Liberator became scarcely controllable. His whole
frame trembled with the anxiety and indignation of
his spirit. He paced the room hurriedly, passing
from group to group, appealing to individuals now,
where hitherto he had spoken collectively, and suggesting
detailed arguments in behalf of hopes and
objects, which it does not need that we should incorporate
with our narrative. But when he found how[Pg 79]
feeble was the influence which he exercised, and how
cold was the echo to his appeal, he became impatient,
and no longer strove to modify the expression of that
scorn and indignation which he had for some time
felt. The explosion followed in no measured language.

“Men of Bogota, you are not worthy to be free.
Your chains are merited. You deserve your insecurities,
and may embrace, even as ye please, the
fates which lie before you. Acquiesce in the tyranny
which offends no longer, but be sure that acquiescence
never yet has disarmed the despot when his
rapacity needs a victim. Your lives and possessions—which
ye dare not peril in the cause of freedom—lie
equally at his mercy. He will not pause, as you
do, to use them at his pleasure. To save them from
him there was but one way—to employ them against
him. There is no security against power but in
power; and to check the insolence of foreign strength
you must oppose to it your own. This ye have not
soul to do, and I leave you to the destiny you have
chosen. This day, this night, it was yours to resolve.
I have periled all to move you to the proper resolution.
You have denied me, and I leave you. To-morrow—unless
indeed I am betrayed to-night”—looking
with a sarcastic smile around him as he
spoke—”I shall unfurl the banner of the republic
even within your own province, in behalf of Bogota,
and seek, even against your own desires, to bestow
upon you those blessings of liberty which ye have
not the soul to conquer for yourselves.”

Hardly had these words been spoken, when the
guitar again sounded from within. Every ear was
instantly hushed as the strain ascended—a strain,
more ambitious than the preceding, of melancholy
and indignant apostrophe. The improvisatrice was
no longer able to control the passionate inspiration
which took its tone from the stern eloquence of the
Liberator. She caught from him the burning sentiment
of scorn which it was no longer his policy to
repress, and gave it additional effect in the polished
sarcasm of her song. Our translation will poorly
suffice to convey a proper notion of the strain.

As the song proceeded, Bolivar stood forward as
one wrapt in ecstasy. The exultation brightened in
his eye, and his manner was that of a soul in the
realization of its highest triumph. Not so the Bogotans
by whom he was surrounded. They felt the
terrible sarcasm which the damsel’s song conveyed—a
sarcasm immortalized to all the future, in the undying
depths of a song to be remembered. They
felt the humiliation of such a record, and hung their
heads in shame. At the close of the ballad, Bolivar
exclaimed to Joachim de Zalabariata, the father:

“Bring the child before us. She is worthy to be
a prime minister. A prime minister? No! the
hero of the forlorn hope! a spirit to raise a fallen
standard from the dust, and to tear down and trample
that of the enemy. Bring her forth, Joachim. Had
you men of Bogota but a tithe of a heart so precious!
Nay, could her heart be divided amongst them—it
might serve a thousand—there were no viceroy of
Spain within your city now!”

And when the father brought her forth from the
little cabinet, that girl, flashing with inspiration—pale
and red by turns—slightly made, but graceful—very
lovely to look upon—wrapt in loose white garments,
with her long hair, dark and flowing, unconfined,
and so long that it was easy for her to walk
upon it
[4]
—the admiration of the Liberator was insuppressible.

“Bless you forever,” he cried, “my fair Priestess
of Freedom! You, at least, have a free soul, and
one that is certainly inspired by the great divinity of
earth. You shall be mine ally, though I find none
other in all Bogota sufficiently courageous. In you,
my child, in you and yours, there is still a redeeming
spirit which shall save your city utterly from shame!”

While he spoke, the emotions of the maiden were
of a sort readily to show how easily she should be
quickened with the inspiration of lyric song. The
color came and went upon her soft white cheeks.
The tears rose, big and bright, upon her eyelashes—heavy
drops, incapable of suppression, that swelled
one after the other, trembled and fell, while the light
blazed, even more brightly from the shower, in the
dark and dilating orbs which harbored such capacious
fountains. She had no words at first, but, trembling
like a leaf, sunk upon a cushion at the feet of her
father, as Bolivar, with a kiss upon her forehead, released
her from his clasp. Her courage came back
to her a moment after. She was a thing of impulse,
whose movements were as prompt and unexpected
[Pg 80]
as the inspiration by which she sung. Bolivar had
scarcely turned from her, as if to relieve her tremor,
when she recovered all her strength and courage.
Suddenly rising from the cushion, she seized the
hand of her father, and with an action equally passionate
and dignified, she led him to the Liberator, to
whom, speaking for the first time in that presence,
she thus addressed herself:

“He is yours—he has always been ready with his
life and money. Believe me, for I know it. Nay,
more! doubt not that there are hundreds in Bogota—though
they be not here—who, like him, will be
ready whenever they hear the summons of your
trumpet. Nor will the women of Bogota be wanting.
There will be many of them who will take the
weapons of those who use them not, and do as brave
deeds for their country as did the dames of Magdalena
when they slew four hundred Spaniards”.
[5]

“Ah! I remember! A most glorious achievement,
and worthy to be writ in characters of gold. It was
at Mompox where they rose upon the garrison of
Morillo. Girl, you are worthy to have been the
chief of those women of Magdalena. You will be
chief yet of the women of Bogota. I take your assurance
with regard to them; but for the men, it
were better that thou peril nothing even in thy
speech.”

The last sarcasm of the Liberator might have been
spared. That which his eloquence had failed to
effect was suddenly accomplished by this child of
beauty. Her inspiration and presence were electrical.
The old forgot their caution and their years.
The young, who needed but a leader, had suddenly
found a genius. There was now no lack of the necessary
enthusiasm. There were no more scruples.
Hesitation yielded to resolve. The required pledges
were given—given more abundantly than required;
and raising the slight form of the damsel to his own
height, Bolivar again pressed his lips upon her forehead,
gazing at her with a respectful delight, while
he bestowed upon her the name of the Guardian
Angel of Bogota. With a heart bounding and beating
with the most enthusiastic emotions—too full for
further utterance, La Pola disappeared from that imposing
presence, which her coming had filled with a
new life and impulse.

It was nearly dawn when the Liberator left the
city. That night the bleaching skeleton of the venerable
patriot Hermano was taken down from the
gibbet where it had hung so long, by hands that left
the revolutionary banner waving proudly in its
place. This was an event to startle the viceroy. It
was followed by other events. In a few days more
and the sounds of insurrection were heard throughout
the province—the city still moving secretly—sending
forth supplies and intelligence by stealth, but
unable to raise the standard of rebellion, while Zamano,
the viceroy, doubtful of its loyalty, remained
in possession of its strong places with an overawing
force. Bolivar himself, under these circumstances,
was unwilling that the patriots should throw aside
the mask. Throughout the province, however, the
rising was general. They responded eagerly to the
call of the Liberator, and it was easy to foresee that
their cause must ultimately prevail. The people in
conflict proved themselves equal to their rulers.
The Spaniards had been neither moderate when
strong, nor were they prudent now when the conflict
found them weak. Still, the successes were
various. The Spaniards had a foothold from which
it was not easy to expel them, and were in possession
of resources, in arms and material, derived from
the mother country, with which the republicans
found it no easy matter to contend. But they did
contend, and this, with the right upon their side, was
the great guaranty for success. What the Colombians
wanted in the materials of warfare, was more
than supplied by their energy and patriotism; and
however slow in attaining their desired object, it
was yet evident to all, except their enemies, that the
issue was certainly in their own hands.

For two years that the war had been carried on,
the casual observer could, perhaps, see but little
change in the respective relations of the combatants.
The Spaniards still continued to maintain their foothold
wherever the risings of the patriots had been
premature or partial. But the resources of the former
were hourly undergoing diminution, and the
great lessening of the productions of the country, incident
to its insurrectionary condition, had subtracted
largely from the temptations to the further prosecution
of the war. The hopes of the patriots naturally
rose with the depression of their enemies, and their
increasing numbers and improving skill in the use
of their weapons, not a little contributed to their endurance
and activity. But for this history we must
look to other volumes. The question for us is confined
to an individual. How, in all this time, had La
Pola redeemed her pledge to the Liberator—how had
she whom he had described as the “guardian genius
of Bogota,” adhered to the enthusiastic faith which
she had voluntarily pledged to him in behalf of herself
and people?

Now, it may be supposed that a woman’s promise,
to participate in the business of an insurrection, is
not a thing upon which much stress is to be laid.
We are apt to assume for the sex a too humble capacity
for high performances, and a too small sympathy
with the interests and affairs of public life. In
both respects we are mistaken. A proper education
for the sex would result in showing their ability to
share with man in all his toils, and to sympathize
with him in all the legitimate concerns of manhood.
But what, demands the caviler, can be expected of a
child of fifteen; and should her promises be held
[Pg 81]
against her for rigid fulfillment and performance?
It might be enough to answer that we are writing a
sober history. There is the record. The fact is as
we give it. But a girl of fifteen, in the warm latitudes
of South America, is quite as mature as the northern
maiden of twenty-five; with an ardor in her nature
that seems to wing the operations of the mind, making
that intuitive with her, which, in the person of a
colder climate is the result only of long calculation
and deliberate thought. She is sometimes a mother
at twelve, and, as in the case of La Pola, a heroine
at fifteen. We freely admit that Bolivar, though
greatly interested in the improvisatrice, was chiefly
grateful to her for the timely rebuke which she administered,
through her peculiar faculty of lyric
song, to the unpatriotic inactivity of her countrymen.
As a matter of course, he might still expect that the
same muse would take fire under similar provocation
hereafter. But he certainly never calculated on
other and more decided services at her hands. He
misunderstood the being whom he had somewhat
contributed to inspire. He did not appreciate her
ambition, or comprehend her resources. From the
moment of his meeting with her she became a
woman. She was already a politician as she was a
poet. Intrigue is natural to the genius of the sex,
and the faculty is enlivened by the possession of a
warm imagination. La Pola put all her faculties in
requisition. Her soul was now addressed to the
achievement of some plan of co-operation with the
republican chief, and she succeeded where wiser
persons must have failed in compassing the desirable
facilities. Living in Bogota—the stronghold of the
enemy—she exercised a policy and address which
disarmed suspicion. Her father and his family were
to be saved and shielded, while they remained under
the power of the viceroy, Zamano, a military despot
who had already acquired a reputation for cruelty
scarcely inferior to that of the worst of the Roman
emperors in the latter days of the empire. The wealth
of her father, partly known, made him a desirable
victim. Her beauty, her spirit, the charm of her song
and conversation, were exercised, as well to secure
favor for him, as to procure the needed intelligence
and assistance for the Liberator. She managed the
twofold object with admirable success—disarming
suspicion, and under cover of the confidence which
she inspired, succeeding in effecting constant communication
with the patriots, by which she put into
their possession all the plans of the Spaniards. Her
rare talents and beauty were the chief sources of
her success. She subdued her passionate and intense
nature—her wild impulse and eager heart—employing
them only to impart to her fancy a more impressive
and spiritual existence. She clothed her genius
in the brightest and gayest colors, sporting above the
precipice of feeling, and making of it a background
and a relief to heighten the charm of her seemingly
willful fancy. Song came at her summons, and disarmed
the serious questioner. In the eyes of her
country’s enemies she was only the improvisatrice—a
rarely gifted creature, living in the clouds, and
totally regardless of the things of earth. She could
thus beguile from the young officers of the Spanish
army, without provoking the slightest apprehension
of any sinister object, the secret plan and purpose—the
new supply—the contemplated enterprise—in
short, a thousand things which, as an inspired idiot,
might be yielded to her with indifference, which, in
the case of one solicitous to know, would be guarded
with the most jealous vigilance. She was the princess
of the tertulia—that mode of evening entertainment
so common, yet so precious, among the Spaniards.
At these parties she ministered with a grace
and influence which made the house of her father a
place of general resort. The Spanish gallants thronged
about her person, watchful of her every motion,
and yielding always to the exquisite compass, and
delightful spirituality of her song. At worst, they
suspected her of no greater offence than of being
totally heartless with all her charms, and of aiming
at no treachery more dangerous than that of making
conquests, only to deride them. It was the popular
qualification of all her beauties and accomplishments
that she was a coquette, at once so cold, and so insatiate.
Perhaps, the woman politician never so
thoroughly conceals her game as when she masks it
with the art which men are most apt to describe as
the prevailing passion of her sex.

By these arts, La Pola fulfilled most amply her
pledges to the Liberator. She was, indeed, his most
admirable ally in Bogota. She soon became thoroughly
conversant with all the facts in the condition
of the Spanish army—the strength of the several
armaments, their disposition and destination—the
operations in prospect, and the opinions and merits
of the officers—all of whom she knew, and from
whom she obtained no small knowledge of the worth
and value of their absent comrades. These particulars,
all regularly transmitted to Bolivar, were quite
as much the secret of his success, as his own genius
and the valor of his troops. The constant disappointment
and defeat of the royalist arms, in the operations
which were conducted in the Province of
Bogota, attested the closeness and correctness of her
knowledge, and its vast importance to the cause of
the patriots.

Unfortunately, however, one of her communications
was intercepted, and the cowardly bearer, intimidated
by the terrors of impending death, was
persuaded to betray his employer. He revealed all
that he knew of her practices, and one of his statements,
namely, that she usually drew from her shoe
the paper which she gave him, served to fix conclusively
upon her the proofs of her offence. She was
arrested in the midst of an admiring throng, presiding
with her usual grace at the tertulia, to which her wit
and music furnished the eminent attractions. Forced
to submit, her shoes were taken from her feet in the
presence of the crowd, and in one of them, between
the sole and the lining, was a memorandum designed
for Bolivar, containing the details, in anticipation, of
one of the intended movements of the viceroy. She
was not confounded, nor did she sink beneath this
discovery. Her soul seemed to rise rather into an
unusual degree of serenity and strength. She en
[Pg 82]couraged
her friends with smiles and the sweetest
seeming indifference, though she well knew that her
doom was certainly at hand. She had her consolations
even under this conviction. Her father was
in safety in the camp of Bolivar. With her counsel
and assistance he would save much of his property
from the wreck of confiscation. The plot had ripened
in her hands almost to maturity, and before very long
Bogota itself would speak for liberty in a formidable
pronunciamento. And this was mostly her work!
What more was done, by her agency and influence,
may be readily conjectured from what has been
already written. Enough, that she herself felt that
in leaving life she left it when there was little more
left for her to do.

La Pola was hurried from the tertulia before a
military court—martial law then prevailing in the
capital—with a rapidity corresponding with the supposed
enormity of her offences. It was her chief
pang that she was not hurried there alone. We have
not hitherto mentioned that she had a lover, one Juan
de Sylva Gomero, to whom she was affianced—a
worthy and noble youth, who entertained for her the
most passionate attachment. It is a somewhat
curious fact, that she kept him wholly from any
knowledge of her political alliances; and never was
man more indignant than he when she was arrested,
or more confounded when the proofs of her guilt
were drawn from her person. His offence consisted
in his resistance to the authorities who seized her.
There was not the slightest reason to suppose that he
knew or participated at all in her intimacy with the
patriots and Bolivar. He was tried along with her, and
both condemned—for at this time condemnation and
trial were words of synonimous import—to be shot.
A respite of twelve hours from execution was granted
them for the purposes of confession. Zamano, the
viceroy, anxious for other victims, spared no means
to procure a full revelation of all the secrets of our
heroine. The priest who waited upon her was
the one who attended on the viceroy himself. He
held out lures of pardon in both lives, here and hereafter,
upon the one condition only of a full declaration
of her secrets and accomplices. Well might
the leading people of Bogota tremble all the while.
But she was firm in her refusal. Neither promises of
present mercy, nor threats of the future, could extort
from her a single fact in relation to her proceedings.
Her lover, naturally desirous of life, particularly in
the possession of so much to make it precious, joined
in the entreaties of the priest; but she answered him
with a mournful severity that smote him like a sharp
weapon,

“Gomero! did I love you for this? Beware, lest
I hate you ere I die! Is life so dear to you that you
would dishonor both of us to live? Is there no consolation
in the thought that we shall die together?”

“But we shall be spared—we shall be saved,” was
the reply of the lover.

“Believe it not—it is false! Zamano spares none.
Our lives are forfeit, and all that we could say would
be unavailing to avert your fate or mine. Let us not
lesson the value of this sacrifice on the altars of our
country, by any unworthy fears. If you have ever
loved me, be firm. I am a woman, but I am strong.
Be not less ready for the death-shot than is she whom
you have chosen for your wife.”

Other arts were employed by the despot for the
attainment of his desires. Some of the native citizens
of Bogota, who had been content to become
the creatures of the viceroy, were employed to work
upon her fears and affections, by alarming her with
regard to persons of the city whom she greatly
esteemed and valued, and whom Zamano suspected.
But their endeavors were met wholly with scorn.
When they entreated her, among other things, “to
give peace to our country,” the phrase seemed to
awaken all her indignation.

“Peace! peace to our country!” she exclaimed.
“What peace! the peace of death, and shame, and
the grave, forever!” And her soul again found relief
only in its wild lyrical overflows.

Such a response as this effectually silenced all
those cunning agents of the viceroy who urged their
arguments in behalf of their country. Nothing, it
was seen, could be done with a spirit so inflexible;
and in his fury Zamano ordered the couple forth to
instant execution. Bogota was in mourning. Its
people covered their heads, a few only excepted, and
refused to be seen or comforted. The priests who
attended the victims received no satisfaction as concerned
the secrets of the patriots; and they retired in
chagrin, and without granting absolution to either
victim. The firing party made ready. Then it was,
[Pg 83]
for the first time, that the spirit of this noble maiden
seemed to shrink from the approach of death.

“Butcher!” she exclaimed, to the viceroy, who
stood in his balcony, overlooking the scene of execution.
“Butcher! you have then the heart to kill
a woman!”

These were the only words of weakness. She recovered
herself instantly, and, preparing for her fate,
without looking for any effect from her words, she
proceeded to cover her face with the saya, or veil,
which she wore. Drawing it aside for the purpose,
the words “Vive la Patria!” embroidered in letters
of gold, were discovered on the basquina. As the
signal for execution was given, a distant hum, as of
the clamors of an approaching army, was heard fitfully
to rise upon the air.

“It is he! He comes! It is Bolivar! It is the
Liberator!” was her cry, in a tone of hope and
triumph, which found its echo in the bosom of hundreds
who dared not give their hearts a voice. It
was, indeed, the Liberator. Bolivar was at hand,
pressing onward with all speed to the work of deliverance;
but he came too late for the rescue of the
beautiful and gifted damsel to whom he owed so
much. The fatal bullets of the executioners penetrated
her heart ere the cry of her exultation had
subsided from the ear. Thus perished a woman
worthy to be remembered with the purest and
proudest who have done honor to nature and the
sex; one who, with all the feelings and sensibilities
of the woman, possessed all the pride and patriotism,
the courage, the sagacity and the daring of the man.

TO THE EAGLE.

BY MRS. E. C. KINNEY.

FIEL A LA MUERTE, OR TRUE LOVE’S DEVOTION.

A TALE OF THE TIMES OF LOUIS QUINZE.

BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, AUTHOR OF “THE ROMAN TRAITOR,” “MARMADUKE
WYVIL,” “CROMWELL,” ETC.

(Continued from page 12.)

PART II.

The castle of St. Renan, like the dwellings of
many of the nobles of Bretagne and Gascony, was a
superb old pile of solid masonry towering above the
huge cliffs which guard the whole of that iron coast
with its gigantic masses of rude masonry. So close
did it stand to the verge of these precipitous crags on
its seaward face, that whenever the wind from the
westward blew angrily and in earnest, the spray of
the tremendous billows which rolled in from the wide
Atlantic, and burst in thunder at the foot of those
stern ramparts, was dashed so high by the collision
that it would often fall in salt, bitter rain, upon the
esplanade above, and dim the diamond-paned casements
with its cold mists.

For leagues on either side, as the spectator stood
upon the terrace above and gazed out on the expanse
of the everlasting ocean, nothing was to be seen but
the saliant angles or deep recesses formed by the
dark, gray cliffs, unrelieved by any spot of verdure,
or even by that line of silver sand at their base,
which often intervenes between the rocks of an iron
coast and the sea. Here, however, there was no
such intermediate step visible; the black face of the
rocks sunk sheer and abrupt into the water, which,
by its dark green hue indicated to the practiced eye,
that it was deep and scarcely fathomable to the very
shore.

In places, indeed, where huge caverns opening in
front to the vast ocean, which had probably hollowed
them out of the earth-fast rock in the course of succeeding
ages, yawned in the mimicry of Gothic
arches, the entering tide would rush, as it were, into
the bowels of the land, roaring and groaning in those
strange subterranean dungeons like some strong
prisoner, Typhon, Enceladus, or Ephialtes, in his
immortal agony. One of these singular vaults opened
right in the base of the rock on the summit of which
stood the castle of St. Renan, and into this the billows
rushed with rapidity so tumultuous and terrible that
the fishers of that stormy coast avowed that a vortex
was created in the bay by their influx or return seaward,
which could be perceived sensibly at a league’s
distance; and that to be caught in it, unless the wind
blew strong and steadily off land, was sure destruction.
However that might be, it is certain that this
great subterranean tunnel extended far beneath the
rocks into the interior of the land, for at the distance
of nearly two miles from the castle, directly eastward,
in the bottom of a dark, wooded glen, which runs
for many miles nearly parallel to the coast, there is
a deep, rocky well, or natural cavity, of a form nearly
circular, which, when the tide is up, is filled to over-flowing
with bitter sea-water, on which the bubbles
and foam-flakes show the obstacles against which it
must have striven in its landward journey. At low
water, on the contrary, “the Devil’s Drinking Cup,”
for so it is named by the superstitious peasantry of
the neighborhood, presents nothing to the eye but a
deep, black abyss, which the country folks, of course,
assert to be bottomless. But, in truth, its depth is
immense, as can easily be perceived, if you cast a
stone into it, by the length of time during which it
may be heard thundering from side to side, until the
reverberated roar of its descent appears to die away,
not because it has ceased, but because the sound is
too distant to be conveyed to human ears.

On this side of the castle every thing differs as
much as it is possible to conceive from the view to
the seaward, which is grim and desolate as any ocean
scenery the world over. Few sails are ever seen on
those dangerous coasts; all vessels bound to the
mouth of the Garonne, or southward to the shores of
Spain, giving as wide a berth as possible to its
frightful reefs and inaccessible crags, which to all
their other terrors add that, from the extraordinary
prevalence of the west wind on that part of the ocean,
of being, during at least three parts of the year, a
lee shore.

Inland, however, instead of the bleak and barren
surface of the ever stormy sea, indented into long
rolling ridges and dark tempestuous hollows, all was
varied and smiling, and gratifying to every sense
given by nature for his good to man. Immediately
from the brink of the cliffs the land sloped downward
southwardly and to the eastward, so that it was
bathed during all the day, except a few late evening
hours, in the fullest radiance of the sunbeams. Over
this immense sloping descent the eye could range
from the castle battlements, for miles and miles, until
the rich green champaign was lost in the blue haze
of distance. And it was green and gay over the
whole of that vast expanse, here with the dense and
unpruned foliage of immemorial forests, well stocked
with every species of game, from the gaunt wolf and
the tusky boar, to the fleet roebuck and the timid
hare; here with the trim and smiling verdure of rich
orchards, in which nestled around their old, gray
shrines the humble hamlets of the happy peasantry;
and every where with the long intersecting curves,
[Pg 85]
and sinuous irregular lines of the old hawthorn hedges,
thick set with pollard trees and hedgerow timber,
which make the whole country, when viewed from
a height, resemble a continuous tract of intermingled
glades and copices, and which have procured for an
adjoining district, the well known, and in after days,
far celebrated name of the Bocage.

Immediately around the castle, on the edge as it
were of this beautiful and almost boundless slope,
there lay a large and well-kept garden in the old
French style, laid out in a succession of terraces,
bordered by balustrades of marble, adorned at frequent
intervals by urns and statues, and rendered
accessible each from the next below by flights of
ornamented steps of regular and easy elevation;
pleached bowery walks, and high clipped hedges of
holly, yew and hornbeam, were the usual decorations
of such a garden, and here they abounded to an extent
that would have gladdened the heart of an admirer
of the tastes and habits of the olden time. In addition
to these, however, there were a profusion of flowers
of the choicest kinds known or cultivated in those
days—roses and lilies without number, and honeysuckles
and the sweet-scented clematis, climbing in
bountiful luxuriance over the numberless seats and
bowers which every where tempted to repose.

Below this beautiful garden a wide expanse of
smooth, green turf, dotted here and there with majestic
trees, and at rarer intervals diversified with
tall groves and verdant coppices, covered the whole
descent of the first hill to the dim wooded dell which
has been mentioned as containing the singular cavity
known throughout the country as the “Devil’s
Drinking Cup.” This dell, which was the limit of
Count de St. Renan’s demesnes in that direction, was
divided from the park by a ragged paling many feet
in height, and of considerable strength, framed of
rough timber from the woods, the space within being
appropriated to a singular and choice breed of deer,
imported from the East by one of the former counts,
who, being of an adventurous and roving disposition,
had sojourned for some time in the French settlements
of Hindostan. Beyond this dell again, which
was defended on the outer side by a strong and lofty
wall of brick, all over-run with luxuriant ivy, the
ground rose in a small rounded knoll, or hillock of
small extent, richly wooded, and crowned by the
gray turrets and steep flagged roofs of the old château
d’Argenson.

This building, however, was as much inferior in
size and stateliness to the grand feudal fortalice of
St. Renan, as the little round-topped hill on which it
stood, so slightly elevated above the face of the surrounding
country as to detract nothing, at least in
appearance, from its general slope to the south-eastward,
was lower than the great rock-bound ridge
from which it overlooked the territories, all of which
had in distant times obeyed the rule of its almost
princely dwellers.

The sun of a lovely evening in the latter part of
July had already sunk so far down in the west that
only half of its great golden disc was visible above the
well-defined, dark outline of the seaward crags, which
relieved by the glowing radiance of the whole
western sky, stood out massive and solid like a huge
purple wall, and seemed so close at hand that the
spectator could almost persuade himself that he had
but to stretch out his arm, in order to touch the great
barrier, which was in truth several miles distant.

Over the crest, and through the gaps of this continuous
line of highland, the long level rays streamed
down in the slope in one vast flood of golden glory,
which was checkered only by the interminable
length of shadows which were projected from every
single tree, or scattered clump, from every petty
elevation of the soil, down the soft glimmering declivity.

Three years had elapsed since the frightful fate of
the unhappy Lord of Kerguelen, and the various incidents,
which in some sort took their origin from
the nature of his crime and its consequence, affecting
in the highest degree the happiness of the families of
St. Renan and D’Argenson.

Three years had elapsed—three years! That is a
little space in the annals of the world, in the life of
nations, nay, in the narrow records of humanity.
Three years of careless happiness, three years of
indolent and tranquil ease, unmarked by any great
event, pass over our heads unnoted, and, save in the
gray hairs which they scatter, leave no memorial of
their transit, more than the sunshine of a happy summer
day. They are, they are gone, they are forgotten.

Even three years of gloom and sorrow, of that deep
anguish which at the time the sufferer believes to be
indelible and everlasting, lag on their weary, desolate
course, and when they too are over-passed, and he
looks back upon their transit, which seemed so painfully
protracted, and, lo! all is changed, and their
flight also is now but as an ended minute.

And yet what strange and sudden changes altering
the affairs of men, changing the hearts of mortals,
yea, revolutionizing their whole intellects, and over-turning
their very natures—more than the devastating
earthquake or the destroying lava transforms the
face of the everlasting earth—have not been wrought,
and again well nigh forgotten within that little period.

Three years had passed, I say, over the head of
Raoul de Douarnez—the three most marked and
memorable years in the life of every young man—and
from the ingenuous and promising stripling, he
had now become in all respects a man, and a bold
and enterprising man, moreover, who had seen much
and struggled much, and suffered somewhat—without
which there is no gain of his wisdom here below—in
his transit, even thus far, over the billows and among
the reefs and quicksands of the world.

His father had kept his promise to that loved son
in all things, nor had the Sieur d’Argenson failed
of his plighted faith. The autumn of that year, the
spring of which saw Kerguelen die in unutterable
agony, saw Raoul de Douarnez the contracted and
affianced husband of the lovely and beloved Melanie.

All that was wanted now to render them actually
man and wife, to create between them that bond
which, alone of mortal ties, man cannot sunder, was
the ministration of the church’s holiest rite, and that,
[Pg 86]
in wise consideration of their tender years, was postponed
until the termination of the third summer.

During the interval it was decided that Raoul, as
was the custom of the world in those days, especially
among the nobility, and most especially among the
nobility of France, should bear arms in active service,
and see something of the world abroad, before settling
down into the easier duties of domestic life. The
family of St. Renan, since the days of that ancestor
who has been already mentioned as having sojourned
in Pondicherry, had never ceased to maintain some
relations with the East Indian possessions of France,
and a relation of the house in no very remote degree
was at this time military governor of the French
East Indias, which were then, previous to the unexampled
growth of the British empire in the East, important,
flourishing, and full of future promise.

Thither, then, it was determined that Raoul should
go in search of adventures, if not of fortune, in the
spring following the signature of his marriage contract
with the young demoiselle d’Argenson. And,
consequently, after a winter passed in quiet domestic
happiness on the noble estates, whereon the gentry
of Britanny were wont to reside in almost patriarchal
state—a winter, every day of which the young lovers
spent in company, and at every eve of which they
separated more in love than they were at meeting in
the morning—Raoul set sail in a fine frigate,
carrying several companies of the line, invested with
the rank of ensign, and proud to bear the colors of
his king, for the shores of the still half fabulous
oriental world.

Three years had passed, and the boy had returned
a man, the ensign had returned a colonel, so rapid
was the promotion of the nobility of the sword in the
French army, under the ancient regime; and—greatest
change of all, ay, and saddest—the Viscount
of Douarnez had returned Count de St. Renan. An
infectious fever, ere he had been one year absent
from the land of his birth, had cut off his noble father
in the very pride and maturity of his intellectual
manhood; nor had his mother lingered long behind
him whom she had ever loved so fondly. A low, slow
fever, caught from that beloved patient whom she
had so affectionately nurtured, was as fatal to her,
though not so suddenly, as it had proved to her good
lord; and when their son returned to France full of
honors achieved, and gay anticipations for the future,
he found himself an orphan, the lord in lonely and
unwilling state of the superb demesnes which had so
long called his family their owners.

There never in the world was a kinder heart than
that which beat in the breast of the young soldier,
and never was a family more strictly bound together
by all the kindly influences which breed love and
confidence, and domestic happiness among all the
members of it, than that of St. Renan. There had
been nothing austere or rigid in the bringing up of
the gallant boy; the father who had at one hour
been the tutor and the monitor, was at the next the
comrade and the playmate, and at all times the true
and trusted friend, while the mother had been ever the
idolized and adored protectress, and the confidante
of all the innocent schemes and artless joys of boyhood.

Bitter, then, was the blow stricken to the very
heart of the young soldier, when the first tidings
which he received, on landing in his loved France,
was the intelligence that those—all those, with but
one exception—whom he most tenderly and truly
loved, all those to whom he looked up with affectionate
trust for advice and guidance, all those on whom
he relied for support in his first trials of young manhood,
were cold and silent in the all absorbing tomb.

To him there was no hot, feverish ambition prompting
him to grasp joyously the absolute command of
his great heritage. In his heart there was none of
that fierce yet sordid avarice which finds compensation
for the loss of the scarce-lamented dead in the
severance of the dearest natural bonds, in the possession
of wealth, or the promise of power. Nor was
this all, for, in truth, so well had Raoul de Douarnez
been brought up, and so completely had wisdom
grown up with his growth, that when, at the age of
nineteen years, he found himself endowed with the
rank and revenues of one of the highest and wealthiest
peers of France, and in all but mere name his
own master—for the Abbé de Chastellar, his mother’s
brother, who had been appointed his guardian by his
father’s will, scarcely attempted to exercise even a
nominal jurisdiction over him—he felt himself more
than ever at a loss, deprived as he was, when he
most needed it, of his best natural counsellor; and
instead of rejoicing, was more than half inclined to
lament over the almost absolute self-control with
which he found himself invested.

Young hearts are naturally true themselves, and
prone to put trust in others; and it is rarely, except
in a few dark and morose and gloomy natures,
which are exceptions to the rule and standard of
human nature, that man learns to be distrustful and
suspicious of his kind, even after experience of fickleness
and falsehood may have in some sort justified
suspicions, until his head has grown gray.

And this in an eminent degree was the case with
Raoul de St. Renan, for henceforth he must be called
by the title which his altered state had conferred
upon him.

His natural disposition was as trustful and unsuspicious
as it was artless and ingenuous; and from his
early youth all the lessons which had been taught
him by his parents tended to preserve in him unblemished
and unbroken that bright gem, which once
shattered never can be restored, confidence in the
truth, the probity, the goodness of mankind.

Some ruder schooling he had met in the course of
his service in the eastern world—he had already
learned that men, and—harder knowledge yet to
gain—women also, can feign friendship, ay, and
love, where neither have the least root in the heart,
for purposes the vilest, ends the most sordid. He
had learned that bosom friends can be secret foes;
that false loves can betray; and yet he was not disenchanted
with humanity, he had not even dreamed
of doubting, because he had fallen among worldly-minded
flatterers and fickle-hearted coquettes, that
[Pg 87]
absolute friendship and unchangeable love may exist,
even in this evil world, stainless and incorruptible
among all the changes and chances of this mortal life.

If he had been deceived, he had attributed the
failure of his hopes hitherto to the right cause—the
fallacy of his own judgment, and the error of his
own choice; and the more he had been disappointed,
the more firmly had he relied on what he felt certain
could not change, the affection of his parents, the
love of his betrothed bride.

On the very instant of his landing he found himself
shipwrecked in his first hope; and on his earliest
interview with his uncle, in Paris, he had the agony—the
utter and appalling agony to undergo—of hearing
that in the only promise which he had flattered
himself was yet left to him, he was destined in all probability
to undergo a deeper, deadlier disappointment.

If Melanie d’Argenson had been a lovely girl, the
good abbé said, when she was budding out of childhood
into youth, so utterly had she outstripped all
the promise of her girlhood, that no words could
describe, no imagination suggest to itself the charms
of the mature yet youthful woman. There was no
other beauty named, when loveliness was the theme,
throughout all France, than that of the young betrothed
of Raoul de Douarnez. And that which was
so loudly and so widely bruited abroad, could not
fail to reach the ever open, ever greedy ears of the
vile and sensual tyrant who sat on the throne of
France at that time, heaping upon his people that
load of suffering and anguish which was in after
times to be avenged so bitterly and bloodily upon the
innocent heads of his unhappy descendants.

Louis had, moreover, heard years before, nay,
looked upon the nascent loveliness of Melanie d’Argenson,
and, with that cold-blooded voluptuary, to
look on beauty was to lust after it, to lust after it was
to devote all the powers his despotism could command
to win it.

Hence, as the Abbé de Chastellar soon made his
unfortunate nephew and pupil comprehend, a settled
determination had arisen on the part of the odious
despot to break off the marriage of the lovely girl
with the young soldier whom it was well known
that she fondly loved, and to have her the wife of one
who would be less tender of his honor, and less reluctant
to surrender, or less difficult to be deprived of
a bride, too transcendently beautiful to bless the arms
of a subject, even if he were the noblest of the noble.

All this was easily arranged, the base father of
Melanie was willing enough to sell his exquisite and
virtuous child to the splendid infamy of becoming a
king’s paramour, and the yet baser Chevalier de la
Rochederrien was eager to make the shameful negotiation
easy, and to sanction it to the eyes of the
willingly hoodwinked world, by giving his name and
rank to a woman, who was to be his wife but in
name, and whose charms and virtue he had precontracted
to make over to another.

The infamous contract had been agreed upon by
the principal actors; nay, the wages of the iniquity
had been paid in advance. The Sieur d’Argenson
had grown into the comte of the same, with the
governorship of the town of Morlaix added, by the
revenues of which to support his new dignities;
while the Chevalier de la Rochederrien had become
no less a personage than the Marquis de Ploermel,
with a captaincy of the mousquetaires, and heaven
knows what beside of honorary title and highly
gilded sinecure, whereby to reconcile him to such
depth of sordid infamy as the meanest galley-slave
could have scarce undertaken as the price of exchange
between his fetters and his oar, and the great
noble’s splendor.

Such were the tidings which greeted Raoul on his
return from honorable service to his king—service
for which he was thus repaid; and, before he had
even time to reflect on the consequences, or to comprehend
the anguish thus entailed upon him, his eyes
were opened instantly to comprehension of two or
three occurrences which previously he had been unable
to explain to himself, or even to guess at their
meaning by any exercise of ingenuity. The first of
these was the singular ignorance in which he had
been kept of the death of his parents by the government
officials in the East, and the very evident suppression
of the letters which, as his uncle informed
him, had been dispatched to summon him with all
speed homeward.

The second was the pertinacity with which he had
been thrust forward, time after time, on the most desperate
and deadly duty—a pertinacity so striking, that,
eager as the young soldier was, and greedy of any
chance of winning honor, it had not failed to strike
him that he was frequently ordered on duty of a
nature which, under ordinary circumstances, is performed
by volunteers.

Occurrences of this kind are soon remarked in
armies, and it had early become a current remark in
the camp that to serve in Raoul’s company was a
sure passport either to promotion or to the other
world. But to such an extent was this carried, that
when time after time that company had been decimated,
even the bravest of the brave experienced an
involuntary sinking of the heart when informed that
they were transferred or even promoted into those
fatal ranks.

Nor was this all, for twice it had occurred, once
when he was a captain in command of a company,
and again when he had a whole regiment under his
orders as its colonel, that his superiors, after detaching
him on duty so desperate that it might almost be
regarded as a forlorn hope, had entirely neglected
either to support or recall him, but had left him exposed
to almost inevitable destruction.

In the first instance, not a man whether officer or
private of his company had escaped, with the exception
of himself. And he was found, when all
was supposed to be over, in the last ditch of the redoubt
which he had been ordered to defend to the
uttermost, after it had been retaken, with his colors
wrapped around his breast, still breathing a little,
although so cruelly wounded that his life was long
despaired of, and was only saved at last by the vigor
and purity of an unblemished and unbroken constitution.
On the second occasion, he had been suffer
[Pg 88]ed
to contend alone for three entire days with but a
single battalion against a whole oriental army; but
then, that which had been intended to destroy him
had won him deathless fame, for by a degree of skill
in handling his little force, which had by no means
been looked for in so young an officer, although his
courage and his conduct were both well known, he
had succeeded in giving a bloody repulse to the over-whelming
masses of the enemy, and when at length
he was supported—doubtless when support was
deemed too late to avail him aught—by a few hundred
native horse and a few guns, he had converted
that check into a total and disastrous route.

So palpable was the case, that although Raoul suspected
nothing of the reasons which had led to that
disgraceful affair, he had demanded an inquiry into
the conduct of his superior; and that unfortunate personage
being clearly convicted of unmilitary conduct,
and having failed in the end which would have justified
the means in the eyes of the voluptuous tyrant,
was ruthlessly abandoned to his fate, and actually
died on the scaffold with a gag in his mouth, as did
the gallant Lally a few years afterward, to prevent
his revelation of the orders which he had received,
and for obeying which he perished.

All this, though strange and even extraordinary,
had failed up to this moment to awaken any suspicion
of undue or treasonable agency in the mind of Raoul.

But now as his uncle spoke the scales fell from his
eyes, and he saw all the baseness, all the villany of
the monarch and his satellites in its true light.

“Is it so? Is it, indeed, so?” he said mournfully.
And it really appeared that grief at detecting such a
dereliction on the part of his king, had a greater
share in the feelings of the noble youth than indignation
or resentment. “Is it, indeed, so?” he said,
“and could neither my father’s long and glorious
services, nor my poor conduct avail aught to turn
him from such infamy! But tell me,” he continued,
the blood now mounting fiery red to his pale face,
“tell me this, uncle, is she true to me? Is she pure
and good? Forgive me, Heaven, that I doubt her, but
in such a mass of infamy where may a man look for
faith or virtue? Is Melanie true to me, or is she,
too, consenting to this scheme of infamous and loathsome
guilt?”

“She was true, my son, when I last saw her,”
replied the good clergyman, “and you may well believe
that I spared no argument to urge her to hold
fast to her loyalty and faith, and she vowed then by
all that was most dear and holy that nothing should
induce her ever to become the wife of Rochederrien.
But they carried her off into the province, and have
immured her, I have heard men say, almost in a
dungeon, in her father’s castle, for now above a
twelvemonth. What has fallen out no one as yet
knows certainly; but it is whispered now that she
has yielded, and the court scandal goes that she has
either wedded him already, or is to do so now within
a few days. It is said that they are looked for ere
the month is out in Paris.”

“Then I will to horse, uncle,” replied Raoul, “before
this night is two hours older for St. Renan.”

“Great Heaven! To what end, Raoul. For the
sake of all that is good! By your father’s memory!
I implore you, do nothing rashly.”

“To know of my own knowledge if she be true
or false, uncle.”

“And what matters it, Raoul? My boy, my unhappy
boy! False or true she is lost to you alike,
and forever. You have that against which to contend,
which no human energy can conquer.”

“I know not the thing which human energy cannot
conquer, uncle. It is years now ago that my
good father taught me this—that there is no such
word as cannot! I have proved it before now, uncle
abbé; I may, should I find it worth the while, prove
it again, and that shortly. If so, let the guilty and
the traitors look to themselves—they were best, for
they shall need it!”

Such was the state of St. Renan’s affections and
his hopes when he left the gay capital of France,
within a few hours after his arrival, and hurried
down at the utmost speed of man and horse into
Bretagne, whither he made his way so rapidly that
the first intimation his people received of his return
from the east was his presence at the gates of the
castle.

Great, as may be imagined, was the real joy of
the old true-hearted servitors of the house, at finding
their lord thus unexpectedly restored to them, at a
time when they had in fact almost abandoned every
hope of seeing him again. The same infernal policy
which had thrust him so often, as it were, into the
very jaws of death, which had intercepted all the
letters sent to him from home, and taken, in one
word, every step that ingenuity could suggest to isolate
him altogether in that distant world, had taken
measures as deep and iniquitous at home to cause
him to be regarded as one dead, and to obliterate all
memory of his existence.

Three different times reports so circumstantial,
and accompanied by such minute details of time and
place as to render it almost impossible for men to
doubt their authenticity, had been circulated with regard
to the death of the young soldier, and as no
tidings had been received of him from any more direct
source, the last news of his fall had been generally
received as true, no motive appearing why it
should be discredited.

His appearance, therefore, at the castle of St. Renan,
was hailed as that of one who had been lost and
was now found, of one who had been dead, and lo!
he was alive. The bancloche of the old feudal pile
rang forth its blithest and most jovial notes of greeting,
the banner with the old armorial bearings of St.
Renan was displayed upon the keep, and a few
light pieces of antique artillery, falcons and culverins
and demi-cannon, which had kept their places on the
battlements since the days of the leagues, sent forth
their thunders far and wide over the astonished
country.

So generally, however, had the belief of Raoul’s
death been circulated, and so absolute had been the
credence given to the rumor, that when those unwonted
sounds of rejoicing were heard to proceed
[Pg 89]
from the long silent walls of St. Renan, men never
suspected that the lost heir had returned to enjoy his
own again, but fancied that some new master had
established his claim to the succession, and was thus
celebrating his investiture with the rights of the
Counts of St. Renan.

Nor was this wonderful, for ocular proof was
scarce enough to satisfy the oldest retainers of the
family of the young lord’s identity; and indeed ocular
proof was rendered in some sort dubious by the
great alteration which had taken place in the appearance
of the personage in question.

Between the handsome stripling of sixteen and the
grown man of twenty summers there is a greater
difference than the same lapse of time will produce
at any other period of human life. And this change
had been rendered even greater than usual by the
burning climate to which Raoul had been exposed,
by the stout endurance of fatigues which had prematurely
enlarged and hardened his youthful frame,
and above all by the dark experience which had
spread something of the thoughtful cast of age over
the smooth and gracious lineaments of boyhood.

When he left home the Viscount de Douarnez was
a slight, slender, graceful stripling, with a fair, delicate
complexion, a profusion of light hair waving in
soft curls over his shoulders, a light elastic step, and
a frame, which, though it showed the promise
already of strength to be attained with maturity, was
conspicuous as yet for ease and agility and pliability
rather than for power or robustness.

On his return, he had lost, it is true, no jot of his
gracefulness or ease of demeanor, but he had shot up
and expanded into a tall, broad-shouldered, round-chested,
thin-flanked man, with a complexion burned
to the darkest hue of which a European skin is susceptible,
and which perhaps required the aid of the
full soft blue eye to prove it to be European—with a
glance as quick, as penetrating, and at the same time
as calm and steady as that of the eagle when he
gazes undazzled at the noontide splendor.

His hair had been cut short to wear beneath the
casque which was still carried by cavaliers, and had
grown so much darker that this alteration alone
would have gone far to defy the recognition of his
friends. He wore a thick dark moustache on his
upper lip, and a large royal, which we should nowadays
call an imperial, on his chin.

The whole aspect and expression of face, moreover,
was altered, even in a greater degree than his
complexion, or his person. All the quick, sparkling
play and mobility of feature, the sharp flash of
rapidly succeeding sentiments, and strong emotions,
expressed on the ingenuous face, as soon as they
were conceived within the brain—all these had disappeared
completely—disappeared, never to return.

The grave composure of the thoughtful, self-possessed,
experienced soldier, sufficient in himself
to meet every emergency, every alternation of fortune,
had succeeded the imaginative, impulsive ardor
of the impetuous, gallant boy.

There was a shadow, too, a heavy shadow of
something more than thought—for it was, in truth,
deep, real, heartfelt melancholy, which lent an added
gloom to the cold fixity of eye and lip, which had
obliterated all the gay and gleeful flashes which used,
from moment to moment, to light up the countenance
so speaking and so frank in its disclosures.

Yet it would have been difficult to say whether
Raoul de St. Renan, grave, dark and sorrowful as he
now showed, was not both a handsomer and more attractive
person than he had been in his earlier days,
as the gay and thoughtless Viscount de Douarnez.

There was a depth of feeling, as well as of thought,
now perceptible in the pensive brow and calm eye;
and if the ordinary expression of those fine and placid
lineaments was fixed and cold, that coldness and
rigidity vanished when his face was lighted up by a
smile, as quickly as the thin ice of an April morning
melts away before the first glitter of the joyous
sunbeams.

Nor were the smiles rare or forced, though not now
as habitual as in those days of youth unalloyed by
calamity, and unsunned by passion, which, once departed,
never can return in this world.

The morning of the young lord’s arrival passed
gloomily enough; it was the very height of summer,
it is true, and the sun was shining his brightest over
field and tree and tower, and every thing appeared
to partake of the delicious influence of the charming
weather, and to put on its blithest and most radiant
apparel.

Never perhaps had the fine grounds, with their
soft mossy sloping lawns, and tranquil brimful waters
and shadowy groves of oak and elm, great
immemorial trees, looked lovelier than they did that
day to greet their long absent master.

But, inasmuch as nothing in this world is more
delightful, nothing more unmixed in its means of
conveying pleasure, than the return, after long wanderings
in foreign climes, among vicissitudes and
cares, and sorrows, to an unchanged and happy home,
where the same faces are assembled to smile on your
late return which wept at your departure, so nothing
can be imagined sadder or more depressing to the
spirit than so returning to find all things inanimate
unchanged, or if changed, more beautiful and brighter
for the alteration, but all the living, breathing, sentient
creatures—the creatures whose memory has
cheered our darkest days of sorrow, whose love we
desire most to find unaltered—gone, never to return,
swallowed by the cold grave, deaf, silent, unresponsive
to our fond affection.

Such was St. Renan’s return to the house of his
fathers. Until a few short days before he had pictured
to himself his father’s moderate and manly
pleasure, his mother’s holy kiss and chastened rapture
at beholding once again, at clasping to her happy
bosom, the son, whom she sent forth a boy, returned a
man worthy the pride of the most ambitious parent.

All this Raoul de St. Renan had anticipated, and
bitter, bitter was the pang when he perceived all
this gay and glad anticipation thrown to the winds
irreparably.

There was not a room in the old house, not a view
from a single window, not a tree in the noble park,
[Pg 90]
not a winding curve of a trout-stream glimmering
through the coppices, but was in some way connected
with his tenderest and most sacred recollections, but
had a memory of pleasant hours attached to it, but recalled
the sound of the kindliest and dearest words
couched in the sweetest tones, the sight of persons
but to think of whom made his heart thrill and quiver
to its inmost core.

And for hours he had wandered through the long
echoing corridors, the stately and superb saloons,
feeling their solitude as if it had been actual presence
weighing upon his soul, and peopling every apartment
with the phantoms of the loved and lost.

Thus had the day lagged onward, and as the sun
stooped toward the west darker and sadder had become
the young man’s fancies; and he felt as if his
last hope were about to fade out with the fading light
of the declining day-god. So gloomy, indeed, were
his thoughts, so sadly had he become inured to wo
during the last few days, so certainly had the reply
to every question he had asked been the very bitterest
and most painful he could have met, that he had, in
truth, lacked the courage to assure himself of that
on which he could not deny to himself that his last
hope of happiness depended. He had not ventured
yet even to ask of his own most faithful servants,
whether Melanie d’Argenson, who was, he well
knew, living scarcely three bow-shots distant from
the spot where he stood, was true to him, was a
maiden or a wedded wife.

And the old servitors, well aware of the earnest
love which had existed between the young people,
and of the contract which had been entered into with
the consent of all parties, knew not how their young
master now stood affected toward the lady, and consequently
feared to speak on the subject.

At length when he had dined some hours, while he
was sitting with the old bailiff, who had been endeavoring
to seduce him into an examination of I know
not what of rents and leases, dues and droits, seignorial
and manorial, while the bottles of ruby-colored
Bordeaux wine stood almost untouched before them,
the young man made an effort, and raising his head
suddenly after a long and thoughtful silence, asked
his companion whether the Comte d’Argenson was
at that time resident at the château.

“Oh, yes, monseigneur,” the old man returned
immediately, “he has been here all the summer, and
the château has been full of gay company from Paris.
Never such times have been known in my days.
Hawking parties one day, and hunting matches the
next, and music and balls every night, and cavalcades
of bright ladies, and cavaliers all ostrich-plumes
and cloth of gold and tissue, that you would
think our old woods here were converted into fairy
land. The young lady Melanie was wedded only
three days since to the Marquis de Ploermel; but
you will not know him by that name, I trow. He
was the chevalier only—the Chevalier de la Rochederrien,
when you were here before.”

“Ah, they are wedded, then,” replied the youth,
mastering his passions by a terrible exertion, and
speaking of what rent his very heart-strings asunder
as if it had been a matter which concerned him not so
much even as a thought. “I heard it was about to be
so shortly, but knew not that it had yet taken place.”

“Yes, monsiegneur, three days since, and it is
very strangely thought of in the country, and very
strange things are said on all sides concerning it.”

“As what, Matthieu?”

“Why the marquis is old enough to be her father,
or some say her grandfather for that matter, and
little Rosalie, her fille-de-chambre, has been telling
all the neighborhood that Mademoiselle Melanie
hated him with all her heart and soul, and would far
rather die than go to the altar as his bride.”

“Pshaw! is that all, good Matthieu?” answered
the youth, very bitterly—”is that all? Why there is
nothing strange in that. That is an every day event.
A pretty lady changes her mind, breaks her faith,
and weds a man she hates and despises. Well! that
is perfectly in rule; that is precisely what is done
every day at court. If you could tell just the converse
of the tale, that a beautiful woman had kept
her inclinations unchanged, her faith unbroken, her
honor pure and bright; that she had rejected a rich
man, or a powerful man, because he was base or
bad, and wedded a poor and honorable one because
she loved him, then, indeed, my good Matthieu, you
would be telling something that would make men
open their eyes wide enough, and marvel what
should follow. Is this all that you call strange?”

“You are jesting at me, monseigneur, for that I
am country bred,” replied the steward, staring at his
youthful master with big eyes of astonishment; “you
cannot mean that which you say.”

“I do mean precisely what I say, my good friend;
and I never felt less like jesting in the whole course
of my life. I know that you good folk down here in
the quiet country judge of these things as you have
spoken; but that is entirely on account of your ignorance
of court life, and what is now termed nobility.
What I tell you is strictly true, that falsehood and
intrigue, and lying, that daily sales of honor, that
adultery and infamy of all kinds are every day occurrences
in Paris, and that the wonders of the time are
truth and sincerity, and keeping faith and honor!
This, I doubt not, seems strange to you, but it is true
for all that.”

“At least it is not our custom down here in Bretagne,”
returned the old man, “and that, I suppose,
is the reason why it appears to be so extraordinary
to us here. But you will not say, I think, monsieur
le comte, that what else I shall tell you is nothing
strange or new.”

“What else will you tell me, Matthieu? Let us
hear it, and then I shall be better able to decide.”

“Why they say, monsiegneur, that she is no more
the Marquis de Ploermel’s wife than she is yours or
mine, except in name alone; and that he does not
dare to kiss her hand, much less her lips; and that
they have separate apartments, and are, as it were,
strangers altogether. And that the reason of all this
is that Ma’mselle Melanie is never to be his wife at
all, but that she is to go to Paris in a few days, and
to become the king’s mistress. Will you tell me
[Pg 91]
that this is not strange, and more than strange, infamous,
and dishonoring to the very name of man
and woman?”

“Even in this, were it true, there would be nothing,
I am grieved to say, very wondrous nowadays—for
there have been several base and terrible examples
of such things, I am told, of late; for the rest,
I must sympathize with you in your disgust and
horror of such doings, even if I prove myself thereby
a mere country hobereau, and no man of the world,
or of fashion. But you must not believe all these
things to be true which you hear from the country
gossips,” he added, desirous still of shielding Melanie,
so long as her guilt should be in the slightest possible
degree doubtful, from the reproach which seemed
already to attach to her. “I hardly can believe such
things possible of so fair and modest a demoiselle as
the young lady of d’Argenson; nor is it easy to me
to believe that the count would consent to any
arrangement so disgraceful, or that the Chevalier de
la Rocheder—I beg his pardon, the Marquis de
Ploermel, would marry a lady for such an infamous
object. I think, therefore, good Matthieu, that,
although there would not even in this be any thing
very wonderful, it is yet neither probable nor true.”

“Oh, yes, it is true! I am well assured that it is
true, monseigneur,” replied the old man, shaking
his head obstinately; “I do not believe that there is
much truth or honor in this lady either, or she would
not so easily have broken one contract, or forgotten
one lover!”

“Hush, hush, Matthieu!” cried Raoul, “you
forget that we were mere children at that time; such
early troth plightings are foolish ceremonials at the
best; beside, do you not see that you are condemning
me also as well as the lady?”

“Oh, that is different—that is quite different!” replied
the old steward, “gentlemen may be permitted
to take some little liberties which with ladies are not
allowable. But that a young demoiselle should break
her contract in such wise is disgraceful.”

“Well, well, we will not argue it to-night, Matthieu,”
said the young soldier, rising and looking out
of the great oriel window over the sunshiny park;
“I believe I will go and walk out for an hour or two
and refresh my recollections of old times. It is a
lovely afternoon as I ever beheld in France or
elsewhere.”

And with the word he took up his rapier which lay
on a slab near the table at which he had been sitting,
and hung it to his belt, and then throwing on his
plumed hat carelessly, without putting on his cloak,
strolled leisurely out into the glorious summer
evening.

For a little while he loitered on the esplanade,
gazing out toward the sea, the ridgy waves of which
were sparkling like emeralds tipped with diamonds
in the grand glow of the setting sun. But ere long
he turned thence with a sigh, called up perhaps by
some fancied similitude between that bright and
boundless ocean, desolate and unadorned even by a
single passing sail, and his own course of life so
desert, friendless and uncompanioned.

Thence he strolled listlessly through the fine garden,
inhaling the rare odors of the roses, hundreds of which
bloomed on every side of him, there in low bushes,
there in trim standards, and not a few climbing over
tall trellices and bowery alcoves in one mass of
living bloom. He saw the happy swallow darting
and wheeling to and fro through the pellucid azure,
in pursuit of their insect prey. He heard the rich
mellow notes of the blackbirds and thrushes, thousands
and thousands of which were warbling incessantly
in the cool shadow of the yew and holly
hedges. But his diseased and unhappy spirit took no
delight in the animated sounds, or summer-teeming
sights of rejoicing nature. No, the very joy and
merriment, which seemed to pervade all nature, animate
or inanimate around him, while he himself had
no present joys to elevate, no future promises to
cheer him, rendered him, if that were possible,
darker and gloomier, and more mournful.

The spirits of the departed seemed to hover about
him, forbidding him ever again to admit hope or joy
as an inmate to his desolate heart; and, wrapt in
these dark phantasies, with his brow bent, and his
eyes downcast, he wandered from terrace to terrace
through the garden, until he reached its farthest
boundary, and then passed out into the park, through
which he strolled, almost unconscious whither, until
he came to the great deer-fence of the utmost glen,
through a wicket of which, just as the sun was
setting, he entered into the shadowy woodland.

Then a whole flood of wild and whirling thoughts
rushed over his brain at once. He had strolled without
a thought into the very scene of his happy rambles
with the beloved, the faithless, the lost Melanie.
Carried away by a rush of inexplicable feelings, he
walked swiftly onward through the dim wild-wood
path toward the Devil’s Drinking Cup. He came in
sight of it—a woman sat by its brink, who started to
her feet at the sound of his approaching footsteps.

It was Melanie—alone—and if his eyes deceived
him not, weeping bitterly.

She gazed at him, at the first, with an earnest, half-alarmed,
half-inquiring glance, as if she did not recognize
his face, and, perhaps, apprehended rudeness,
if not danger, from the approach of a stranger.

Gradually, however, she seemed in part to recognize
him. The look of inquiry and alarm gave place
to a fixed, glaring, icy stare of unmixed dread and
horror; and when he had now come to within six or
eight paces of her, still without speaking, she cried,
in a wild, low voice,

“Great God! great God! has he come up from the
grave to reproach me! I am true, Raoul; true to
the last, my beloved!”

And with a long, shivering, low shriek, she staggered,
and would have fallen to the earth had he not
caught her in his arms.

But she had fainted in the excess of superstitious
awe, and perceived not that it was no phantom’s
hand, but a most stalwort arm of human mould that
clasped her to the heart of the living Raoul de St.
Renan.

[Conclusion in our next.

THE BLOCKHOUSE.

BY ALFRED B. STREET.

The Departure

From H. C. Corbould. Drawn with alterations & engraved by Geo. B. Ellis
Engraved expressly for Graham’s Magazine

THE DEPARTURE.

BY MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS.

[Entered According to Act of Congress in the year 1848, by
Edward Stephens, in the Clerk’s office of the
District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.]

[SEE ENGRAVING.]

CHAPTER I.

Far down upon the Long Island shore, where the
ocean heaves in wave after wave from the “outer
deep,” forming coves of inimitable beauty, promontories
wooded to the brink, and broken precipices
against which the surf lashes continually, there
stood, some thirty years ago, an old mansion-house,
with irregular and pointed roofs, low stoops, gable-windows,
in short, exhibiting all those architectural
eccentricities which our modern artists strive for so
earnestly in their studies of the picturesque. The
dwelling stood upon the bend of a cove; a forest of
oaks spread away some distance behind the dwelling,
and feathered a point of land that formed the eastern
circle down to the water’s edge.

In an opposite direction, and curving in a green
sweep with the shore, was a fine apple-orchard, and
that end of the old house was completely embowered
by plum, pear and peach trees, that sheltered minor
thickets of lilac, cerenga, snow-ball and other blossoming
shrubs. In their season, the ground under
this double screen of foliage was crimson with
patches of the dwarf rose, and the old-fashioned windows
were half covered with the tall graceful trees
of that snow-white species of the same queenly
flower, which is only to be found in very ancient
gardens, and seldom even there at the present time.
In front of the old house was a flower-garden of considerable
extent, lifted terrace after terrace from the
water, which it circled like a crescent. The profusion
of blossoms and verdure flung a sort of spring-like
glory around the old building until the autumn
storms came up from the ocean and swept the rich
vesture from the trees, leaving the mansion-house
bold, unsheltered and desolate-looking enough.

The cove upon which this old house stood looked
far out upon the ocean; no other house was in sight,
and it was completely sheltered not only by a forest
of trees but by the banks that, high and broken,
curved in at the mouth of the cove, narrowing the
inlet, and forming altogether a sea and land view
scarcely to be surpassed.

The mansion-house was an irregular and ancient
affair enough, everyway unlike the half Grecian,
half Gothic, or wholly Swiss specimens of architecture
with which Long Island is now scattered. Still,
there was a substantial appearance of comfort and
wealth about it. Though wild and of ancient growth
all its trees were in good order, and judiciously
planted; well kept outhouses were sheltered by their
luxurious foliage, and to these were joined all those
appliances to a rich man’s dwelling necessary to distinguish
the old mansion as the country residence of
some wealthy merchant, who could afford to inhabit
it only in the pleasantest portion of the year.

It was the pleasantest portion of the year—May,
bright, beautiful May, with her world of blossoms
and her dew-showers in the night. The apple-orchard,
the tall old pear-trees and the plum thickets
were one sheet of rosy or snow-white blossoms.
The old oaks rose against the sky, piled upon each
other branch over branch, their rich foliage yet
blushing with a dusky red as it unfolded leaf by leaf
to the air. The flower-garden was azure and golden
with violets, tulips, crocuses and amaranths. In
short, the old building, moss-covered though its roof
had become, and old-fashioned as it certainly was in
all its angles, might have been mistaken for one of
the most lovely nooks in Paradise, and the delusion
never regretted.

I have said that it was spring-time—the air fragrance
itself—the birds brimful of music, soft and
sweet as if they had fed only upon the apple-blossoms
that hung over them for months. Yet there
was no indication that the old house was inhabited.
The windows were all closed, the doors locked, and
the greensward with the high box borders, covered
with a shower of snowy leaves that had been shaken
from the fruit-trees. Still, upon a strip of earth kept
moist by the shadows from a gable, was one or two
slender footprints slightly impressed, that seemed to
have been very recently left. Again they appeared
upon a narrow-pointed stoop that ran beneath the
windows of a small room in an angle of the building,
and from which there was a door slightly ajar, with
the same dewy footprint broken on the threshold.
Within this room there was a sound as of some one
moving softly, yet with impatience, to and fro—once
a white hand clasped itself on the door, and a
beautiful face, flushed and agitated, glanced through
the opening and disappeared. Then followed an interval
of silence, save that the birds were making
the woods ring with music, and an old honeysuckle
that climbed over the stoop shook again with the
humming-birds that dashed hither and thither among
its crimson bells.

Again the door was pushed open, and now not
[Pg 94]
only the face but the tall and beautifully proportioned
figure of a young girl appeared on the threshold.
She paused a moment, hesitated, as if afraid to brave
the open air, and then stepped out upon the stoop,
and bending over the railing looked eagerly toward
the grove of oaks, through which a carriage-road
wound up to the broad gravel-walk that led from the
back of the dwelling.

Nothing met her eye but the soft green of the
woods, and after gazing earnestly forth during a
minute or two she turned, with an air of disappointment,
and slowly passed through the door again.

The room which she entered was richly furnished,
but the upright damask chairs, the small tables of
dark mahogany, and two or three cushions that filled
the window recesses, were lightly clouded with dust,
such as accumulates even in a closed room when
long unoccupied. There was also a grand piano in
the apartment, with other musical instruments, all
richly inlaid, but with their polish dimmed from a
like cause.

The lady seemed perfectly careless of all this disarray;
she flung herself on a high-backed damask
sofa, and one instant buried her flushed features in
the pillows—the next, she would lift her head, hold
her breath and listen if among the gush of bird-songs
and the hum of insects she could hear the one sound
that her heart was panting for. Then she would
start up, and taking a tiny watch from her bosom
snatch an impatient glance at the hands and thrust it
back to its tremulous resting-place again. Alas for
thee, Florence Hurst! All this emotion, this tremor
of soul and body, this quick leaping of the blood in
thy young heart and thrilling of thy delicate nerves,
in answer to a thought, what does it all betoken?
Love, love such as few women ever experienced,
such as no woman ever felt without keen misery,
and happiness oh how supreme! Happiness that
crowds a heaven of love into one exquisite moment,
whose memory never departs, but like the perfume
that hangs around a broken rose, lingers with existence
forever and ever.

Florence loved passionately, wildly. Else why
was she there in the solitude of that lone dwelling?
Her father’s household was in the city—no human
being was in the old mansion to greet her coming,
and yet Florence was there—alone and waiting!

It was beyond the time! You could see that by
the hot flush upon her cheek, by the sparkle of her
eyes—those eyes so full of pride, passion and tenderness,
over which the quick tears came flashing as
she wove her fingers together, while broken murmurs
dropped from her lips.

“Does he trifle with me—has he dared—”

How suddenly her attitude of haughty grief was
changed! what a burst of tender joy broke over
those lovely features! How eagerly she dashed
aside the proud tears and sat down quivering like a
leaf, and yet striving—oh how beautiful was the
strife!—to appear less impatient than she was.

Yes, it was a footstep light and rapid, coming
along the gravel-walk. It was on the stoop—in the
room—and before her stood a young man, elegant,
nay almost superb in his type of manliness, and endowed
with that indescribable air of fashion which
is more pleasing than beauty, and yet as difficult to
describe as the perfume of a flower or the misty descent
of dews in the night.

The young girl up to this moment had been in a
tumult of expectation, but now the color faded from
her cheek, and the breath as it rose trembling from
her bosom seemed to oppress her. It was but for a
moment. Scarcely had his hand closed upon hers
when her heart was free from the shadow that had
fallen upon it, and a sweet joy possessed her wholly.
She allowed his arm to circle her waist unresisted,
and when he laid a hand caressingly on one cheek
and drew the other to his bosom, that cheek was
glowing like a rose in the sunshine.

For some moments they sat together in profound
silence, she trembling with excess of happiness, he
gazing upon her with a sort of sidelong and singular
expression of the eye, that had something calculating
and subtle in it, but which changed entirely when
she drew back her head and lifted the snowy lids
that had closed softly over her eyes the moment she
felt the beating of his heart.

“And so you have come at last?” she said very
softly, and drawing back with a blush, as if the fond
attitude she had fallen into were something to which
she had hitherto been unused. “Are you alone? I
thought—”

“I know, sweet one, I know that you will hardly
forgive me,” said the young man, and his voice was
of that low, rich tone that possesses more than the
power of eloquence. “But I could not persuade the
clergyman to come down hither in my company.
Your father’s power terrifies him!”

“And he would not come? He refuses to unite us
then—and we are here—alone and thus!” cried Florence
Hurst, withdrawing herself from his arm.

“Not so, sweet one, your delicacy need not be
startled thus. He is coming with a friend, and will
stop at the village till I send over to say that all is
quiet here. He is terribly afraid that the old gentleman
may suspect something and follow us.”

“Alas, my proud old father!” cried Florence, for
a moment giving way to the thoughts of regretful
tenderness that would find entrance to her heart amid
all its tumultuous feelings.

“And do you regret that you have risked his displeasure,
which, loving you as he does, must be only
momentary, for one who adores you, Florence?” replied
the young man, in a tone of tender reproach
that thrilled over her heart-strings like music.

“No, no, I do not regret, I never can! but oh,
how much of heaven would be in this hour if he but
approved of what we are about to do!”

“But he will approve in time, beloved, believe
me he will,” said the young man, clasping both her
hands in his and kissing them.

“Yes, yes, when he knows you better,” cried Florence,
making an effort to cast off the shadow that
lay upon her heart, “when he knows all your goodness,
all the noble qualities that have won the heart
of your Florence.”

As Jameson bent his lips to the young girl’s forehead
they were curled by a faint sneering smile.
That smile was blended with the kiss he imprinted
there. It left no sting—the poison touched no one
of the delicate nerves that awoke and thrilled to the
fanning of his breath, and yet it would have been
perceptible to an observer as the glitter of a rattle-snake.

“I am sure you love me, Florence.”

“Love you!” her breath swelled and fluttered as
the words left her lips. “Love! I fear—I know that
all this is idolatry!”

“Else why are you here.”

“Truly, most truly!”

“Risking all things, even reputation, for me, and
I so unworthy.”

“Reputation!” cried Florence, her pride suddenly
stung with the venom that lay within those honied
words. “Not reputation, Jameson; I do not risk
that; I could not—it would be death!”

“And yet you are here, alone with me, beloved,
in this old house.”

“But I am here to become your wife—only to become
your wife. I risk my father’s displeasure—I
know that—I am disobedient, wicked, cruel to him,
but his good name—my own good name—no, no,
nothing that I have done should endanger that.”

The proud girl was much agitated, and the dove-like
fondness that had brooded in her eyes a moment
before began to kindle up to an expression that the
lover became earnest to change.

“You take me up too seriously,” he said, attempting
to draw her toward him, but she resisted proudly.
“I only spoke of possible not probable risk, and that
because the clergyman would be persuaded to come
down here only on a promise that the marriage
should be kept a secret till some means could be
found of reconciling the old gentleman, or at any
rate for a week or two.”

“And you gave the promise,” said Florence,
while her beautiful features settled into a grieved
and dissatisfied expression. “You gave this promise?”

“Why, Florence, what ails you? I had no choice.
You had already left home, and he would listen to
no other terms.”

“A week or two—our marriage kept secret so
long,” said Florence in a tone of dissatisfaction.
“You did well to say I was risking much for you.
My life had been little—but this—”

“And is this too much? Do you begin to regret,
Florence?”

Nothing could have been more gentle, more replete
with tenderness, ardent but full of reproach,
than the tone in which these words were uttered.
Florence lifted her eyes to his, tears came into them,
and then she smiled brightly once more.

“Oh! let us have done with this; I am nervous,
agitated, unreasonable I suppose; of course you
have done right,” she said, “but at first the thoughts
of this concealment terrified me.”

“Hark! I hear wheels. It must be the clergyman
and Byrne,” said Jameson, listening.

“And is a stranger coming,” inquired Florence,
“any one but the clergyman? I was not prepared
for that!”

“But we must have a witness. He is my friend,
and one that can be trusted. You need have no fear
of Byrne.”

“They are here!” said Florence, who had been
listening with checked breath, while her face waxed
very pale. “It is the step of two persons on the
gravel. Let me go—let me go for an instant, this is
no dress for a bride,” and she glanced hurriedly at
her black silk dress, relieved only by a frill of lace
and a knot or two of rose-colored ribbon.

“What matters it, beautiful as you always are.”

“No, no, I cannot be married in black—I will not
be married in black,” she cried hurriedly, and with
a forced effort to be gay; “wait ten minutes, I will
but step to the chamber above and be with you again
directly.”

Florence disappeared through a door leading into
the main portion of the building, while Jameson
arose and went out to meet the two men, who were
now close by the stoop, and looking about as if undecided
what door to try at for admission.

“Let us take a stroll in the garden,” he said, descending
the steps, “the lady is not quite ready yet;
how beautiful the morning is,” and passing his arm
through that of a man who seemed some years older
than himself, and who had accompanied the clergyman,
he turned an angle of the building. The clergyman
followed them a pace or two, then returning
sat down upon the steps that led to the stoop and took
off his hat.

“This is a singular affair,” he muttered, putting
back the locks from his forehead and bending his
elbows upon his knees, with the deep sigh of a man
who finds the air deliciously refreshing, “I have
half a mind to pluck a handful of flowers, step into
my chaise and go back to the city again; but for the
sweet young lady I would. There is something
about the young man that troubles me—what if my
good-nature has been imposed upon—what if old Mr.
Hurst has deeper reasons than his pride—that I
would not bend to a minute—and he gives no other
reason if they tell me truly. This young man is his
book-keeper, and so his love is presumptuous.
Probably old Hurst has imported a cargo of aristocratic
arrogance from Europe, and the young people
tell the truth. If so, why I will even marry them,
and let the stately gentleman make the best of it.
Still, I half wish the thing had not fallen upon me.”

Meantime the bridegroom and his friend walked
slowly toward the water.

“And so you have snared the bird at last,” said
Byrne.

“I did not think you could manage to get her down
here. When did she come?”

“Yesterday,” said Jameson.

“Alone?”

“Quite alone; her father thinks her visiting a
friend.”

“But you left the city yesterday.”

“Yes.”[Pg 96]

“And not with her?”

“She came down alone—so did I.”

“But directly after—ha!”

Jameson smiled, that same crafty smile that had
curled his lips even when they rested upon the forehead
of Florence Hurst.

“And did she sanction this. By heavens! I would
not have believed it—so proud, so sensitive!”

“No, no, Byrne, to do Florence justice, she supposes
that I came down this morning; but the old
house is large, and it was easy enough for me to find
a nook to sleep in, without her knowledge.”

“But what object have you in this?”

“Why, as to my object, it is scarcely settled yet;
but it struck me that by this movement I might obtain
a hold upon her father’s family pride, should his
affection for Florence fail. The haughty old don
would hardly like it to be known in the city that his
lovely daughter—his only child—had spent the night
alone, in an old country-house, with her father’s
book-keeper.”

“But how would he know this; surely you would
not become the informant?”

“Why, no!” replied Jameson, with a smile; “but
I took a little pains to inquire about the localities of
this old nest up at the village. The good people had
seen Miss Hurst leave the stage an hour before and
walk over this way. It seems very natural that he
may hear it from that quarter.”

Byrne looked at his companion a moment almost
sternly, then dropping his eyes to the ground, he
began to dash aside the rich blossoms from a tuft of
pansies with his cane.

“You do not approve of this?” said Jameson,
studying his companion’s countenance.

“No.”

“Why, it can do no harm. What would the girl
be to me without her expectations. I tell you her
father will pay any sum rather than allow a shadow
of disgrace to fall upon her. I will marry her at all
hazards; but it must be kept secret, and in a little
time some hint of this romantic excursion will be
certain to reach head-quarters; and I shall have the
old man as eager for the marriage as any of us, and
ready to come down handsomely, too. I tell you it
makes every thing doubly sure.”

“It may be so,” said the other, in a dissatisfied
manner.

“Well, like it or not, I can see no other way by
which you will be certain of the three thousand
dollars that you won of me,” replied Jameson, coolly.

Byrne dashed his cane across the pansies, sending
the broken blossoms in a shower over the gravel-walks.

“Well, manage as you like, the affair is nothing
to me, but it smacks strongly of the scoundrel, Herbert,
I can tell you that.”

“Pah! this little plot of mine will probably amount
to nothing. The old gentleman may give in at once
to the tears and caresses of my sweet bride up
yonder. Faith, I doubt if any man could resist
her.”

“More than probable—more than probable!” rejoined
the other; “but I should not like to be within
the sight of that girl’s eye if she ever finds out the
game you have been playing.”

“Yes, it would be very likely to strike fire,” replied
Jameson, carelessly; “but she loves me, and
there is no slave like a woman that loves. You will
see that before the year is over, every spark that
flashes from her eyes I shall force back upon her
heart till it burns in, I can tell you. But there she is,
all in bridal white, and fluttering like a bird around
the old stoop. Come, we must not keep her waiting!”

Meantime, Florence Hurst had entered a little
chamber, where, nineteen years before, she first
opened her eyes to the light of heaven. It was at
one end of the house, and across the window fell the
massive boughs of an old apple-tree, heaped with
masses of the richest foliage, and rosy with half-open
blossoms. A curtain of delicate lace fluttered before
the open sash, bathed in fragrance, and through
which the rough brown of the limbs, the delicate
green in which the rosy buds seemed matted, gleamed
as through a wreath of mist.

The night before Florence had left a robe of pure
white muslin near the window, exquisitely fine, but
very simple, which was to be her wedding-dress. It
was strange, but a sort of faintness crept over her
heart as she saw the dress; and she sat down powerless,
with both hands falling in her lap, gazing upon
it. For the moment her intellect was clear, her heart
yielded up to its new intuition. Her guardian spirit
was busy with her passionate but noble nature. She
felt, for the first time, in all its force, how wrong she
was acting, how indelicate was her situation. It
seemed as if she were that moment cast adrift from
her father’s love—from her own lofty self-appreciation.
The heart that had swelled and throbbed so
warmly a moment before, now lay heavy in her
bosom, shrinking from the destiny prepared for it.
Just then the sound of a voice penetrated the thick
foliage of the fruit tree, and she started up once
more full of conflicting emotions. It was Jameson’s
voice that reached her as he passed with his friend
beneath the fruit trees. She heard no syllable of
what he was saying, but the very tone, as it came
softened and low through the perfume and sweetness
that floated around her, was enough to fling her soul
into fresh tumult. How she trembled; how warm
and red came the passion-fire of that delicate cheek,
as she flung the black garment from off her superb
form, and hurried on the bridal array. It was very
chaste, and utterly without pretension, that wedding-dress,
knots of snowy ribbon fastened it at the
shoulders and bosom, and the exquisite whiteness
was unbroken save by the glow that warmed her
neck and bosom almost to a blush, and the purplish
gloss upon her tresses, that fell in raven masses
down to her shoulders.

She took a glance in the old mirror, encompassed
by its frame-work of ebony, carved and elaborated
at the top and bottom into a dark net-work of fine
filagree; she saw herself—a bride. Again the wing
of her guardian angel beat against her heart. The
unbroken whiteness of her array seemed to fold her
[Pg 97]
like a shroud, and like that thing which a shroud
clings to, became the pallor which settled on her
features; for behind her own figure, and moving, as
it were, in the background of the mirror, she saw
the image of her lover and his friend, talking earnestly
together. The friend stood with his back toward her,
but his face she saw distinctly, and that smile was
on his lips, cold, crafty, almost contemptuous. Was
it Jameson, or only something mocking her from the
mirror? She went to the window, drew aside the
filmy lace, and looked forth. Truly it was her lover;
through an interstice of the apple boughs she saw
him distinctly, and he saw her—that smile, surely
the gloomy old mirror had reflected awry. How
brilliant, how full of love was the whole expression
of his face. Again her heart lighted up. She took a
cluster of blossoms from the apple-tree bough, and
waving them lightly toward him, drew back. She
left the room, fastening the damp and fragrant buds
in her hair as she went along, for somehow she
shrunk from looking into the old mirror again.

Now the guardian angel gave way to the passion
spirit. Florence entered the little boudoir, trembling
with excitement, and warm with blushes. The
room was solitary, and she stepped out upon the
stoop—for her life she could not have composed herself
to sit down and wait a single instant. The
clergyman was there sitting upon the steps, thoughtful,
and evidently yielding to the doubts that had arisen
in his kind but just nature too late. He arose as
Florence came upon the stoop, and slowly mounting
the steps, took her hand and led her back into the room.

“My dear young lady,” he said very gravely, “I
would hear from your own lips what the impediments
to this marriage really are. I scarce know how to
account for it. Nothing has happened to change the
aspect of affairs here; but within the last hour I have
been troubled with doubts and misgivings. Has all
been done that can be to obtain your father’s
consent?”

“I believe—I know that there has,” replied Florence,
instantly saddened by the gravity of the
clergyman.

“And his objections arose purely from pride—aristocratic
pride?”

“I never heard any other reason given for withholding
his consent,” replied Florence. “To me he
never gave a reason. His commands were peremptory.”

“And you have known this young man long?”

“I was but fifteen when he first came into my
father’s employ.”

“And you love him with your whole heart?”

Florence lifted her eyes, and through the long
black lashes flashed a reply so eloquent, so beautiful,
that it made even the quiet clergyman draw a deep
breath.

“Enough—I will marry them!” he said firmly. “I
only wish the young man may prove worthy of all
this—”

His soliloquy was cut short by the appearance of
Jameson and his friend.

They were married—Florence Hurst, the only
daughter and heiress of the richest merchant in New
York, to Jameson, the protegée and book-keeper of
her proud father.

They were married, and they were left alone in
that picturesque old country-house. And now,
strange to say, Florence grew very sad; and as
Jameson sat by her, with one hand in his, and circling
her waist with his arm, she began to weep bitterly.

“Florence, Florence—how is this! why do you weep,
beloved?”

“I do not know,” said the bride, gently; “but
since the good clergyman has left us, my heart is
heavy, and I feel alone.”

“Do you not love me, Florence? Have you lost
confidence in me?”

Florence lifted her eyes, shining with affection,
and placed her hand in his.

“But this secrecy troubles me. Let us tell my
father at once,” she said, earnestly.

“But I have promised, shall I break a pledge, and
that to the man of God who has just given you to me
forever and ever. Florence?”

“Surely his consent may be obtained. He said
nothing of concealment to me.”

“And did you talk with him?” questioned Jameson,
maintaining the same tone in which his other questions
had been put, but with a certain sharpness in it.

“A little. He questioned me of the motives which
induced my father to oppose our marriage.”

“And that was all?”

“Yes; you came in just then, and the rest seems
like a dream.”

“A blessed, sweet dream, Florence, for it made
you my wife,” said Jameson.

Still Florence wept. “And now,” she said, lifting
her eyes timidly to his, “let us return to the city;
while this secrecy lasts I must see you only in the
presence of my father.”

“Florence, is this distrust—is it dislike?” cried
Jameson, startled out of his usual self-command.

“Neither,” said Florence, “you know that. You
are certain of it as I am myself. But I am your wife
now, Herbert, and have both your honor and my own
to care for. My father has no power to separate us
now, so that fear which seemed to haunt you ever
is at rest. But it is due to myself, to him, and to
you, that when you claim me as your wife, he should
know that I am such, though he may not approve.”

Florence said all this very sweetly, but with a
degree of gentle firmness that seemed the more unassailable
that it was sweet and gentle. Before he
could speak she withdrew herself from his arm, and
glided from the room. When quite alone, Jameson
fell into an unpleasant reverie, from which her return
in the black silk dress, with a bonnet and shawl on,
aroused him.

“Come,” she said, with a smile and a blush, “let
us walk through the oak woods, and across the
meadows, we shall reach the village almost as soon
as the good clergyman and your friend. The reverend
gentleman will take care of me, I feel quite sure,
and you can manage for yourself. Here we must
not remain another moment.”

“Florence!”

“Nay, nay—whoever heard of a lady being thwarted
on her wedding-morning!” cried Florence—and she
went out upon the stoop. Jameson followed, and
seemed to be expostulating; but she took his arm and
walked on, evidently unconvinced by all that he was
saying, till they disappeared in the oak woods.

CHAPTER II.

Florence was in her father’s house near the Battery,
and looking forth into a large, old-fashioned
garden, which was just growing dusky with approaching
twilight; near her, in a large crimson
chair, sat a man of fifty perhaps, tall and slender,
with handsome but stern features, rendered more
imposing by thick hair, almost entirely gray, and a
style of dress unusually rich, and partaking of
fashions that had prevailed twenty years earlier.

Florence was pensive, and an air of painful depression
hung about her. The presence of her father,
who sat gazing upon her in silence, affected her
much; the secret that lay upon her heart seemed to
grow palpable to his sight, and though she appeared
only still and pensive, the poor girl trembled from
head to foot.

“Florence!” said Mr. Hurst after the lapse of
half an hour, for it seemed as if he had been waiting
for the twilight to deepen around them—”Florence,
you are sad, child. You look unhappy. Do your
father’s wishes press so heavily upon your spirits—do
you look upon him as harsh, unreasonable, because
he will not allow his only child to throw away
her friendship, her society upon the unworthy?”

Florence did not answer, her heart was too full.
There was something tender and affectionate in her
father’s voice that made the tears start, and drowned
the words that she would have spoken. Seldom had
he addressed her in that tone before. How unlike
was he to the reserved, stern father whose arbitrary
command to part with her lover she had secretly disobeyed.

“Speak, Florence, your depression grieves me,”
continued Mr. Hurst, as he heard the sobs she was
trying in vain to suppress.

“Oh, father—father! why will you call him unworthy
because he lacks family standing and wealth?
I cannot—oh I never can think with you in this!”

“And who said that I did deem him unworthy for
these reasons? Who said that I objected to Herbert
Jameson as a companion for my daughter because
of his humble origin or his penniless condition?
Who told you this, Florence Hurst?”

“He, he told me—did you not say all this to him,
all this and more? Did you not drive him from your
presence and employ with bitter scorn, when two
weeks ago he asked for your daughter’s hand?”

“He ask for my daughter’s hand! he, the ingrate!
the—Florence, did you believe that he really possessed
the base assurance to request your hand of
me?”

“Father! father! what does this mean? Did you
not tell me on that very evening never to see him
again—never to recognize him in the street, or even
think of him! Did you not cast him forth from your
home and employ because he told you of his love
for me and of mine for him?”

“Of your love for him, Florence Hurst!”

There was something terrible in the voice of mingled
astonishment and dismay with which this exclamation
was made.

“Father!” cried the poor girl, half rising from her
seat, and falling back again pale and trembling,
“father, why this astonishment? You knew that I
loved him!”

“Who told you that I did?”

“He told me, he, Herbert Jameson. It was for this
you made him an outcast.”

“It is false, Florence, I never dreamed of this
degradation!” said Mr. Hurst, in a voice that seemed
like sound breaking up through cold marble.

“Then why that command to myself—why was I
never to see or hear from him again?” cried Florence,
almost gasping for breath.

“Because he is a dishonest man, a swindler—because
I solemnly believe that he has been robbing
me during the last three years, and squandering his
stolen spoil at the gambling-table!”

“Father—father—father!”

The sharp anguish in which these words broke
forth brought the distressed merchant to his feet.
Florence, too, stood upright, and even through the
dusk you might have seen the wild glitter of her
eyes, the fierce heave of her bosom.

“You believe, father, you only believe! should
such things be said without proof—proof broad and
clear as the open sunshine when it pours down
brightest from heaven. I say to you, my father,
Herbert Jameson is an honest, honorable man!”

“It is well, Florence—it is well!” said Mr. Hurst,
with stern and bitter emphasis. “You have doubted
my justice, you distrust that which I have said.
You are foolishly blind enough to think that this man
can love, does love you.”

“I know that he does!” said Florence with a sort
of wild exultation. “I know that he loves me.”

“And would you, if I were to give my consent—could
you become the wife of Herbert Jameson?”

“Father, I could! I would!”

“Then on this point be the issue between us,”
said Mr. Hurst, with calm and stern dignity. “Florence,
I am about to send a note desiring this man
to come once more under my roof,” and he rang a
bell for lights; “if within three hours I do not give
you proof that he loves you only for the wealth that
I can give—that he is every way despicable—I say
that if within three hours I do not furnish this proof,
clear, glaring, indisputable, then will I frankly and
at once give my consent to your marriage.”

“Father!” cried Florence, while a burst of wild
[Pg 99]
and startling joy broke over her face, “I will stand
the issue! My life—my very soul would I pledge
on his integrity.”

Mr. Hurst looked at her with mournful sternness
while she was speaking, and then proceeded to write
a note which he instantly dispatched.

While the servant was absent Mr. Hurst and his
daughter remained together, much agitated but silent
and lost in thought. In the course of half an hour
the man returned with a reply to the note. Mr.
Hurst read it, and waiting till they were alone turned
to his daughter and pointed to a glass door which
led from the room into a little conservatory of plants.

“Go in yonder, from thence you can hear all that
passes.”

“Father, is it right—will it be honorable?” said
Florence, hesitating and weak with agitation.

“It is right—it is honorable! Go in!” His voice
was stern, the gesture with which he enforced it
peremptory, and poor Florence obeyed.

A curtain of pale green silk fell over the sash-door,
and close behind it stood a garden-chair, overhung
by the blossoming tendrils of a passion-flower. Florence
sat down in the chair and her head drooped
fainting to one hand. There was something in the
scent of the various plants blossoming around that
reminded her of that wedding-morning when the air
was literally burthened with like fragrance. She
was about to see her husband for the first time since
that agitating day, to see him thus, crouching as a
spy among those delicate plants, her heart beat
heavily, she loathed herself for the seeming meanness
that had been forced upon her. Yet there was
misgiving at her heart—a vague, sickening apprehension
that chained her to the seat.

She heard the door open and some one enter the
room where her father sat, with a lamp pouring its
light over his stern and pale features till every iron
lineament was fully revealed. Scarcely conscious
of the act, Florence drew aside a fold of the curtain,
and with her forehead pressed to the cold glass
looked in. Mr. Hurst had not risen, but with an
elbow resting on the table sat pale and stern, with
his eyes bent full upon her husband, who stood a few
paces nearer to the door. In one hand was his hat,
in the other he held a slender walking-stick. He did
not seem fully at his ease, and yet there was more
of triumph than of embarrassment in his manner.
Florence observed, and with a sinking heart, that he
did not, except with a furtive glance, return the
calm and searching look with which Mr. Hurst regarded
him.

“Mr. Jameson, sit down,” began the haughty
merchant, pointing to a chair. “I did hope after our
last interview never again to be disturbed by your
presence, but it seems that, serpent-like, you will
never tire of stinging the bosom that has warmed
you.”

“I am at a loss to understand you, Mr. Hurst,”
replied Jameson, taking the chair, and Florence
sickened as she saw creeping over his lips the very
same smile that had gleamed before her in the mirror.
“When I last saw you your charges were harsh,
your treatment cruel. You imputed things to me of
which you have no proof, and upon the strength of
an absurd suspicion of—of—I may as well speak it
out—of dishonesty, you discharged me from your
employ; I am at a loss to know why you have sent
for me, certainly you cannot expect to wring proof
of these charges from my own words.”

“I have proof of them, undoubted, conclusive,
and had at the time they were first made! but you
had been cherished beneath my roof, had broken of
my bread, and I was forbearing! Was not this reason
enough why I should have sent you forth as I
did?”

Jameson gave a perceptible start and turned very
pale as Mr. Hurst spoke of the proofs that he possessed;
but the emotion was only momentary, and
it scarcely disturbed the smile that still curled about
his mouth.

“At any rate the bare suspicion of these things
was all the reason you deigned to give,” he said.

Florence heard and saw—conviction, the loathed
thing, came creeping colder and colder to her bosom.

“But since then I have other causes for pursuing
your crimes with the justice they merit, other and
deeper wrongs you have done me, serpent, fiend,
household ingrate as you are!”

“And what may those other wrongs be?” was the
cold and half sneering rejoinder to this passionate
outbreak.

“My daughter!” said the merchant, sweeping a
hand across his forehead. “It sickens me to mention
her name here and thus, but my daughter—even
there has your venom reached.”

“Perhaps I understand you,” said the young man
with insufferable coolness; “but if your daughter
chose to love where her father hates how am I to
blame? I am sure it has cost me a great deal of
trouble to keep the young lady’s partiality a secret.
If you have found it out at last so much the better.”

Mr. Hurst, with all his firmness, was struck dumb
by this cool and taunting reply, but after a moment’s
fierce struggle he mastered the passion within him
and spoke.

“You love”—the words absolutely choked the
proud man—”you love my daughter then—why was
this never mentioned to me?”

“It was the young lady’s fancy, I suppose; perhaps
she shrunk from so grim a confident; at any
rate it is very certain that I did!”

Mr. Hurst shaded his face with one hand and
seemed to struggle fiercely with himself. Jameson
sat playing with the tassel of his cane, now and then
casting furtive glances at his benefactor.

“Young man,” said the merchant, slowly withdrawing
his hand, “I have but to denounce you to
the laws, and you leave this room for a convict’s cell.”

“It may be that you have this power!” replied
Jameson, with undisturbed self-possession, “I am
sure I cannot say whether you have or not!”

“I have the power, what should withhold me!”

“Oh, many things. Your daughter, for instance!”

“My daughter!”

“You interrupt me, sir. I was about to say your
[Pg 100]
daughter has given me some rather unequivocal
proofs of her love, and they would become unpleasantly
public, you know, if her father insisted upon
dragging me before the world. Your daughter, sir,
must be my shield and buckler, I never desire a
better or fairer.”

Here a noise broke from the conservatory, and the
silk curtain shook violently, but as it was spring time,
and with open doors for the wind to circulate through,
this did not seem extraordinary. Still, Mr. Hurst
looked anxiously around, and Jameson cast a careless
glance that way.

It was very painful, nay withering to his proud
heart, but Mr. Hurst was determined to lay open the
black nature of that man before his child; he knew
that she suffered, that it was torture that he inflicted,
but nevertheless she could be redeemed in no other
way, and he remained firm as a rock.

“So, in order to deter me from a just act, you
would use my daughter’s attachment as a threat;
you would drag her name before the world, that it
might be blasted with your own! Is this what I am
to understand?”

“Well, something very like it, I must confess.”

Mr. Hurst arose. “I have done with you, Herbert
Jameson,” he said, with austere dignity. “Go,
your presence is oppressive! So young and so deep a
villain, even I did not believe you so terribly base.
Go, I have done with you!”

Jameson did not move, but sat twisting the tassel
of his cane between his thumb and finger. He did
not look full at Mr. Hurst, for there was something
in his eye that quelled even his audacity; but when
he spoke, it was without any outward agitation,
though his miscreant limbs shook, and the heart
trembled in his bosom.

“Mr. Hurst,” he said, “I do not know how far
you have used past transactions to terrify me, but I
assure you that any blow aimed at me will recoil on
yourself. But this is not enough, you have told me
to leave your roof forever—and so I will; but first
let my wife be informed that I await her pleasure
here. I take her with me, and that before you can
have an opportunity to poison her mind against her
husband.”

“Your wife! Your wife!” Mr. Hurst could only
master these words, and they fell from his white lips
in fragments. He looked wildly around toward the
door, and at the young man, who stood there smiling
at his agony.

“Yes, sir, my wife. There is the certificate of
our marriage three days ago, at your pleasant old
country-house on the Long Island shore. You see
that it is regularly witnessed—the people about there
will tell you the how and when.”

Mr. Hurst took up the certificate and held it before
his eyes, but for the universe he could not have read
a word, for it shook in his hand like a withered leaf
in the wind.

Then softly and slowly the conservatory-door
opened, and the tall figure of Florence Hurst glided
through. There was a bright red spot upon her
forehead, where it had pressed against the glass, but
save that her face, neck, and hands were colorless
as Parian marble, and almost as cold. She approached
her father, took the certificate from his hand and
tearing it slowly and deliberately into shreds, set her
foot upon them.

“Father,” she said, “take me away. I have
sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no
longer worthy to be called thy daughter, but, oh,
punish me not with the presence of this bad man!”

Without a word, Mr. Hurst took the cold hand of
his daughter and led her into another room. Jameson
was left alone—alone with his own black heart and
base thoughts. We would as soon dwell with a
rattle-snake in its hole, and attempt to analyze its
venom, as register the dark writhing of a nature like
his. The sound of a voice, low, earnest and pleading,
now and then reached his ear. Then there was a
noise as of some one falling, followed by the tramp
of several persons moving about in haste; and, after
a little, Mr. Hurst entered the room again.

Young Jameson stood up, for reflection had warned
him that he could no longer trust to the power of
Florence with her father; there had been something
in the terrible stillness of her indignation, in the pale
features, the dilated eyes, and the brows arched with
ineffable scorn, that convinced him how mistaken
was the anchor which he had expected to hold so
firmly in her love. He knew Mr. Hurst, and felt
that in his lofty pride alone could rest any hope of a
rescue from the penalty of his crimes.

He stood up, then, as I have said, with more of
respect in his manner than had hitherto marked it.

Mr. Hurst resumed his chair and motioned that the
young man should follow his example. He was
very pale, and a look of keen suffering lay around
his eyes, but still in his features was an expression of
relief, as if the degredation that had fallen upon him
was less than he had dreaded.

“How, may I ask, how is my—, how is Florence—she
looked ill; I trust nothing serious?” said
Jameson, sinking into his chair, and goaded to say
something by the keen gaze which Mr. Hurst had
turned upon him.

“Never again take that name into your lips,” said
the outraged father—and his stern voice shook with
concentrated passion. “If you but breath it in a
whisper to your own base heart alone, I will cast
aside all, and punish you even to the extremity of
the law.”

“But, Mr. Hurst—”

“Peace, sir!”

The young ingrate drew back with a start, and
looked toward the door, for the terrible passion which
he had lighted in that lofty man now broke forth in
voice, look and gesture; the wretch was appalled
by it.

“Sit still, sir, and hear what I have to say.”

“I will—I listen, Mr. Hurst, but do be more
composed. I did not mean to offend you in asking
after—”

“Young man, beware!” Mr. Hurst had in some
degree mastered himself, but the huskiness of his
voice, the vivid gleam of his eyes, gave warning
[Pg 101]
that the fire within him though smothered was not
quenched.

“I am silent, sir,” cried the wretch, completely
cowed by the strong will of his antagonist.

“I know all—all, and have but few words to cast
upon a thing so vile as you have become. If I submit
to your presence for a moment it is because that
agony must be endured in order that I may cast you
from me at once, like the viper that had stung me.”

“Sir, these are hard words,” faltered Jameson;
but Mr. Hurst lifted his hand sharply, and went on.

“You want money. How much did you expect
to obtain from me?”

“I—I—this is too abrupt, Mr. Hurst, you impute
motives—”

“I say, sir,” cried the merchant, sternly interrupting
the stammered attempt at defense, “I say
you have done this for money—impunity for your
crime first, and then money. You see I know you
thoroughly.”

The wretch shrunk from the withering smile that
swept over that white face; he looked the thing he
was—a worthless, miserable coward, with all the
natural audacity of his character dashed aside by
the strong will of the man he had wronged.

“You are too much excited, Mr. Hurst, I will call
some other time,” he faltered out.

“Now—now, sir, I give you impunity! I will
give you money. Say, how much will release me
from the infamy of your presence; I will pay well,
sir, as I would the physician who drives a pestilence
from my hearth?”

“Mr. Hurst, what do you wish—what am I to do?”

“You are to leave this country now and forever—leave
it without speaking the name of my daughter.
You are never to step your foot again upon the land
which she inhabits. Do this, and I will invest fifty
thousand dollars for your benefit, the income to be paid
you in any country that you may choose to infest,
any except this.”

“And what if I refuse to sell my liberty, my—”
he paused, for Mr. Hurst was keenly watching him,
and he dared not mention Florence as his wife, though
the word trembled on his lip.

“What then,” said the merchant, firmly, “why
you pass from this door to the presence of a magistrate—from
thence to prison—after that to trial—not
on a single indictment, but on charges urged one
after another that shall keep you during half your
life within the walls of a convict’s cell.”

“But remember—”

“I do remember everything; and I, who never
yet violated my word to mortal man, most solemnly
assure you that such is your destination, let the consequences
fall where they will.”

Jameson sat down, and with his eyes fixed on the
floor, fell into a train of subtle calculation. Mr.
Hurst sat watching him with stern patience. At last
Jameson spoke, but without lifting his eyes, “You
are a very wealthy man, Mr. Hurst, and fifty thousand
dollars is not exactly the portion that—”

“The bribe—the bribe, you mean, which is to
rid me of an ingrate,” cried the merchant, and a look
of ineffable disgust swept over his face. “The
benefit is great, too great for mere gold to purchase,
but I have named fifty thousand—choose between that
and a prison.”

“But shall I have the money down?” said Jameson,
still gazing upon the floor. “Remember, sir, my
affections, my—”

“Peace, once more—another word on that subject
and I consign you to justice at once. This
interview has lasted too long already. You have my
terms, accept or reject them at once.”

“I—I—of course I can but accept them, hard as
it is to separate from my country and friends. But
did I understand you aright, sir. Is it fifty thousand
in possession, or the income that you offer?”

“The income—and that only to be paid in a foreign
land, and while you remain there.”

“These are hard terms, Mr. Hurst, very hard
terms, indeed,” said Jameson. “Before I reply to
to them—excuse me, I intend no offence—but I
must hear from your daughter’s own lips that she
desires it.”

Mr. Hurst started to his feet and sat instantly down
again; for a moment he shrouded his eyes, and then
he arose sternly and very pale, but with iron composure.

“From her own lips—hear it, then. Go in,” he
said, casting open the door through which he had
entered the room, “go in!”

The room was large and dimly lighted; at the opposite
end there was a high, deep sofa, cushioned
with purple, and so lost in the darkness that it
seemed black; what appeared in the distance to be
a heap of white drapery, lay upon the sofa, immovable
and still, as if it had been cast over a corpse.

Jameson paused and looked back, almost hoping
that Mr. Hurst would follow him into the room, for
there was something in the stillness that appalled
him. But the merchant had left the door, and casting
himself into a chair, sat with his arms flung out upon
the table, and his face buried in them. For his life
he could not have forced himself to witness the
meeting of that vile man with his child.

Still Florence remained immovable; Jameson
closed the door, and walking quickly across the
room, like one afraid to trust his own strength, bent
over the sofa.

Florence was lying with her face to the wall, her
eyes were closed, and the whiteness of her features
was rendered more deathly by the dim light. She
had evidently heard the footstep, and mistaking it
for her father’s, for her eyelids began to quiver, and
turning her face to the pillow, she gasped out with a
shudder,

“Oh, father, father, do not look on me!”

Jameson knelt and touched the cold hand in which
she had grasped a portion of the pillow.

“Florence!”

Florence started up, a faint exclamation broke
from her lips, and she pressed herself against the
back of the sofa, in the shuddering recoil with which
she attempted to evade him.

Jameson drew back, and for the instant his counte
[Pg 102]nance
evinced genuine emotion. His self-love was
cruelly shocked by the evident loathing with which
she shrunk away from the arm that, only a few days
before, had brought the bright blood into her cheeks
did she but rest her hand upon it by accident.

“And do you hate me so, Florence?” he said, in
a voice that was full of keen feeling.

“Leave me—leave me, I am ill!” cried the poor
girl, sitting up on the sofa, and holding a hand to her
forehead, as if she were suffering great pain.

“I come by your father’s permission, Florence;
will you be more cruel than he is?”

“My father has a right to punish me, I have deserved
it,” she said, in a voice of painful humility.
“If he sent you I will try to bear it.”

“Oh, Florence, has it come to this; I am about to
leave you forever, and yet you shrink from me as if
I were a reptile,” cried Jameson.

“A reptile! oh, no, they seldom sting unless trodden
upon,” said Florence, lifting her large eyes to
his face for the first time, but withdrawing them
instantly, and with a faint moan.

Jameson turned from her and paced the room once
or twice with uneven strides. This seemed to give
Florence more strength, for the closeness of his presence
had absolutely oppressed her with a sense of
suffocation. She sat upright, and putting the hair
back from her temples, tried to collect her thoughts.
Jameson broke off his walk and turned toward her;
but she prevented his nearer approach with a motion
of her hand, and spoke with some degree of
calmness.

“You have sought me, but why? What more do
you wish? Do I not seem wretched enough?”

“It is your father who has made you thus miserable!”
said Jameson, in a low but bitter voice, for
he feared the proud man in the next room, and
dared not speak of him aloud. Florence scarcely
heeded him, she sat gazing on the floor lost in thought,
painful and harrowing. Still there was an apparent
apathy about her that reassured the bad man who
stood by suffering all the agony of a wild animal
baffled in fight. He would not believe that so short
a time had deprived him of a love so passionate, so
self-sacrificing as had absorbed that young being not
three days before.

Throwing a tone of passionate tenderness into his
voice, he approached her, this time unchecked.

“Florence, dear Florence, must we part thus;
will you send me from you for ever?”

Florence, was very weak and faint, she felt by the
thrill that went through her heart like some sharp
instrument, as the sound of his passionate entreaty
fell upon it, that, spite of herself, she might be made
powerless in his hands were the interview to proceed.
The thought filled her with dread. She
started up, and tottering a step or two from the sofa,
cried out, “Father! father!”

Mr. Hurst lifted his head from where he had buried
it in his folded arms, as if to shield his senses from
what might be passing within the other room, and
starting to his feet, was instantly by his daughter’s
side.

“What is this!” he said, throwing his arm around
the half fainting girl, and turning sternly toward her
tormentor, “have you dared—”

“No, no!” gasped Florence. “I was ill—I—oh,
father, without you I have no strength. Save me
from myself!”

“I will,” said Mr. Hurst, gently and with great
tenderness drawing the trembling young creature
close to his bosom.

“I see how it is, she is influenced only by you,
sir. I am promised an interview, and left to believe
that the lady shall decide for herself, yet even the
very first words I utter are broken in upon. I know
that this woman loves me.”

“No, no, I love him not! I did a little hour ago,
but now I am changed—do you not see how I am
changed?” cried Florence, lifting her head wildly,
and turning her pale face full upon her miscreant
husband. “Do you not know that your presence is
killing me?”

“I will go,” said Jameson, touched by the wild
agony of her look and voice; “I will go now, but
only with your promise, Mr. Hurst, that when she
is more composed, I may see and converse with her.
I will offer no opposition to your wishes; but you
will give me a week or two.”

“Do you wish to see this man again, my child?”
said Mr. Hurst, “I can trust you, Florence, decide
for yourself.”

Florence parted her lips to answer, but her strength
utterly failed, and with a feeble gasp she sunk powerless
and fainting on her father’s bosom.

Mr. Hurst gathered her in his arms and bore her
from the room, simply pausing with his precious
burden at the door while he told Jameson, in a calm
under tone, to leave the house, and wait till a message
should reach him.

But the unhappy man was in no haste to obey.
For half an hour he paced to and fro in the solitude
of that large apartment, now seating himself on the
sofa which poor Florence had just left, and again
starting up with a sort of insane desire for motion.
Sometimes he would listen, with checked breath, to
the footsteps moving to and fro in the chamber over-head,
and then hurry forward again, racked by every
fierce passion that can fill the heart of a human
being.

“I will triumph yet! I will see her, and that
when he is not near to crush every loving impulse
as it rises. Once mine, and he will never put his
threat into execution, earnest as he seemed. All
my strength lies in her love—and it is enough. She
suffers—that is a proof of it. She is angry—that is
another proof. Yes, yes, I can trust in her, she is
all romance, all feeling!”

Jameson muttered these words again and again;
it seemed as if he thought by the sound of his voice
to dispel the misgiving that lay at his heart. He
would have given much for the security that his
muttered words seemed to indicate, and as if determined
not to leave the house without some further
confirmation of his wishes, he lingered in the room
till its only light flashed and went out in the socket
[Pg 103]
of its tall silver candlestick, leaving him in total
darkness. Then he stole forth and left the house,
softly closing the street door after him.

CHAPTER III.

Mrs. Hemans.

Florence had been very ill, and a week after the
scene in our last chapter Mr. Hurst removed her
down to his old mansion-house on the Long Island
shore. There the associations were less painful than
at his town residence, where the sweetest years of
her life had been spent in unrestrained association
with the man who had so cruelly deceived her.
The old mansion-house had witnessed only one fatal
scene in the drama of her love; and here she consented
to remain. Her father divided his time between
her and the unpleasant duties that called him
to town; and more than once he was forced to endure
the presence of the man whose very look was poison
to him, but after the distressing night when the error
of his daughter was first made known, the noble old
merchant had regained all his usual dignified calmness.
No bursts of passion marked his interviews
with the wretch who had wounded him, but firm and
resolute he proceeded, step by step, in the course that
his reason and will had at first deliberately marked
out. In three days time Jameson was to depart for
Europe, and forever. It was singular what power
the merchant had obtained over his own strong passions;
always grave and courteous, his demeanor had
changed in nothing, save that toward his child there
was more delicacy, more tender solicitude than she
had ever received from him before, even in the days
of her infancy. It seemed that in forgiving her fault,
he had unlocked some hidden fount of tenderness
which bedewed and softened his whole nature.
Florence, who had always felt a little awe of her
father when no act of hers existed to excite it, now
that she had given him deep cause of offence, had
learned to watch for his coming as the young bird
waits for the parent which is to bring him food.
One night, it was just before sunset, Mr. Hurst
entered his daughter’s chamber with a handful of
heliotrope, tea-roses, and cape-jesamines, which he
had just gathered. In his tender anxiety to relieve
the sadness that preyed upon her, he remembered her
passion for these particular flowers, and had spent
half an hour in searching them out from the wilderness
of plants that filled a conservatory in one wing
of the building. The chamber where Florence sat
was the one in which she had put on her wedding
garments scarcely three weeks before. The old
ebony mirror, with the fantastic and dark tracery of
its frame, hung directly before her, and from its
depth gleamed out a face so changed that it might
well have startled one who had been proud of its
bloom and radiance one little month before.

The window was open, as it had been that day, and
across it fell the old apple-tree, with the fruit just
setting along its thickly-leaved boughs, and a few
over-ripe blossoms yielding their petals to every
gush of air that came over them. These leaves, now
almost snow-white, had swept, one by one, into the
chamber, settling upon the chair which Florence
occupied, upon her muslin wrapper, and flaking, as
with snow, the glossy disorder of her hair. With a
sort of mournful apathy she felt these broken blossoms
falling around her, remembering, oh, how
keenly, their rosy freshness, when she had selected
them as a bridal ornament. She remembered, too,
the single glimpse which that old mirror had given of
her lover—that one prophetic glimpse which had
been enough to startle, but not enough to save her.

Florence was filled with these miserable reminiscences
when her father entered the chamber. She
greeted him with a wan smile, that told her anxiety to
appear less wretched than she really was in his presence.
He came close up to her where she sat, and
stooping to kiss her forehead, laid the blossoms he
had brought in her lap.

Mr. Hurst little knew how powerful were the
associations those delicate flowers would excite.
The moment their fragrance arose around her
Florence began to shudder, and turning her face
away with an expression of sudden pain, swept
them to the floor.

“Take them away, oh take them away!” she said.
“That evening their breath was around me while I
sat listening to—take them out of the room, I cannot
endure their sweetness.”

Mr. Hurst strove to soothe the wild excitement
which his unfortunate flowers had occasioned. It
was a touching sight—that proud man, so cruelly
wronged by his daughter, and yet bending the natural
reserve of his nature into every endearing form,
in order to convince her how deep was his love,
how true his forgiveness.

“My Florence, try to conquer this keen sensitiveness.
Strive, dear child, to think of these things as
if they had not been!”

“Oh, if I had the power!” cried Florence.

“And do you love this man yet?” said Mr. Hurst,
almost sternly.

“Father,” was the reply, and Florence met her
father’s gaze with sorrowful eyes, “I am mourning
for the love that has been cast away—I pine for some
action which may restore my own self-respect. The
very thought of this man as I know him makes me
shudder—but the remembrance of what I believed
him to be makes me weep. Then the trial of this
meeting!”

“But you shall not see him again unless you desire
it.”

“True, true—but I will see him if he wishes it.
He shall not think that I am coerced or influenced.
[Pg 104]
It is due to myself, to you, my father, that he leaves
this country knowing how thorough is my self-reproach
for the past, and my wish that his absence
may be eternal. I believe that I do really wish it,
but see how my poor frame is shaken! I must have
more strength or my heart will be unstable like-wise.”
Florence held up her clasped hands that
were trembling like leaves in the autumn wind as
she spoke.

“Florence,” said Mr. Hurst gently, “it is not by
shrinking from painful associations that we conquer
them.”

“But see how weak I am! and all from the breath
of those poor flowers!”

“There is a source from which strength may be
obtained.”

“My pride, oh, father, that may do to shield me
from the world’s scorn, but it avails nothing with
my own heart.”

“But prayer, Florence, prayer to Almighty God
the Infinite. I remember how sweet it was when
you were a little child kneeling by your mother’s
lap with your tiny hands uplifted to Heaven. Surely
you have not forgotten to pray, my child?”

“Alas! in this wild passion I have forgotten every
thing—my duty to you—the very heaven where my
mother is an angel!” cried Florence, and for the first
time in many days she began to weep.

Mr. Hurst took her hands in his, tears stood in his
proud eyes, and his firm lips trembled with tender
emotions. “My child,” he said, pointing to a velvet
easy-chair that stood in the chamber, “kneel down
by your mother’s empty chair and pray even as
when you were a little child!”

Florence watched her father as he went out through
her blinding tears. The door closed after him, a
mist swam through the room, she moved toward the
empty chair, and through the dim cloud which her
tears created its crimson cushions glowed brightly,
as if tinged with gold. A gleam of sunshine had
struck them through a half open shutter, but it seemed
to her that the sudden light came directly from the
throne of Heaven.

The next moment Florence fell upon her knees
before the chair, her face was buried in the cushions,
broken words and swelling sobs filled the room; over
her fell that golden sunbeam, like a flaming arrow
sent from the Throne of Mercy to pierce her heart
and warm it at the same moment.

The sun went down. Slowly and quietly that
wandering beam mingled with the thousand rays that
streamed from the west, spreading around the young
suppliant like a luminous veil; there was blended
with the gold hues of rich crimson and purple, that
flashed over the ebony mirror, wove themselves in
a gorgeous haze among the snow-white curtains of
the bed, and fell in drops of dusky yellow over the
floor and among the waving apple-boughs.

But Florence felt nothing of this, her heart was
dark, her frame shook with sobs, and the agony of
her voice was smothered in the cushions where her
face lay buried.

It came at last, that still small voice that follows
the whirlwind and the storm. In the hush of night
it came as snow-flakes fall from the heavens. And
now Florence lay upon the cushions of her mother’s
chair motionless, and calm peace was in her heart,
and a smile of ineffable sweetness lay upon her lips.
It might have been minutes, it might have been hours
for any thing that the young suppliant knew of the
lapse of time since she had crept to her mother’s
chair. When she arose the moonlight was streaming
over her through an open window. Never did
those pale beams fall upon features so changed. A
spirituelle loveliness beamed over them, soft and
holy as the moonlight that revealed it.

Some time after midnight Mr. Hurst went into his
daughter’s chamber, for anxiety had kept him up,
and the entire stillness terrified him. She was lying
upon the bed, half veiled by the muslin curtains,
breathing tranquilly as an infant in its mother’s
bosom. During many nights she had not slept, but
sweet was her slumber now; the flowers inhaling
the dew beneath the window did not seem more
delicate and placid.

It was daylight when Florence awoke. A few
rosy streaks were in the sky, and lay reflected upon
the water like threads of crimson broken by the tide.
Out to sea, a little beyond the opening of the cove,
was a large vessel with her sails furled, and evidently
lying-to. Near a curve of the shore she saw a boat
with half a dozen men lolling sleepily in the bow.
Her heart beat quick with a presentiment of some
approaching event. She felt certain that the boat and
the distant ship were in some way connected with
herself. But the thought hardly had time to flash
through her brain when a commotion in the old apple-tree—a
shaking of the limbs and tumultuous rustling
of the leaves—made her start and turn that way.
The largest bough was that instant spurned aside,
and Jameson sprung through the open window. He
was out of breath and seemed greatly excited.

“Florence, my wife, come with me!” he said,
casting his arms around her shrinking form. “I will
not go without you. See the vessel is yonder—a
boat is on the shore. In half an hour we can be
away from your father, alone, without hindrance to
our love. Come, Florence, come with your husband!”

Ah, but for the strength which Florence had
sought from above, where would she have been then.
For a moment her heart did turn traitor; for one
single instant there came upon her cheek a crimson
flush, and in her eyes something that made Jameson’s
heart leap with exultation; but it passed away,
Florence broke from the arms that were cast around
her, and drew back toward the door.

“Leave me!” she said, mildly, but with firmness,
“I am not your wife—will never be!”

“You hate me, then!” exclaimed Jameson, goaded
by her manner. “You still believe what my enemies
say against me.”

“No, I hate no one—I could not hate you!”

“But you love me no longer.”

Florence turned very pale, but still she was firm.
“It matters nothing if I love or hate now,” she said,
[Pg 105]
“henceforth, forever and forever, you and I are
strangers. If you have come here in hopes of
taking me from my father, go before he learns any
thing of your visit; a longer stay can only bring evil.”

Again Jameson cast himself at her feet; again his
masterly eloquence was put forth to melt, to subdue,
even to over-awe that fair girl; but all that he could
wring from her was bitter tears—all that he accomplished
was a renewal of anguish that prayer had
hardly conquered.

“And you will not go! You cast me off forever!”
he exclaimed, starting up with a fierce gesture and
an expression of the eye that made her shrink back.

“I cannot go—I will not go!” she said, in a low
voice. “You have already taught me how terrible
a thing is remorse. Leave me in peace, if you would
not see me die!”

“And this is your final answer!” cried Jameson,
and his eyes flashed with fury.

“I can give no other!”

“Then farewell, and the curse of my ruin rest
with you,” he cried in desperation, and wringing her
hands fiercely in his, he cleared the window with a
bound, and letting himself down by the apple-tree,
disappeared.

The tempter was gone; Florence was left alone,
her head reeling with pain, her heart aching within
her bosom. Jameson’s last words had fallen upon
her heart like fire; what if this refusal to share
his fate had confirmed him in evil? What if she, by
partaking of his fortunes, might have won him to an
honorable and just life. These thoughts were agony
to her, and left no room for calm reflection, or she
would have known that no human influence can reclaim
a base nature; one fault may be redeemed,
nay, many faults that spring from the heat of passion
or the recklessness of youth, but habitual hypocrisy,
craft, falsehood—what female heart ever opposed its
love and truth to vices like these, without being
crushed in the endeavor to save.

But Florence could not reason then. Her soul was
affrighted by the curse that had been hurled upon it.
Half frantic with these new themes of torture, she
left her room, and hurried down to the cove just in
time to see the boat which contained Jameson half
way to the vessel. Actuated only by a wild desire
to see him depart, she threaded her way through the
oak grove, unmindful of the dew, of her thin raiment,
or of the morning wind that tossed her curls about as
she hurried on. And now she stood upon the outer
point of the shore, where it jutted inward at the mouth
of the cove and commanded a broad view of the
ocean. High trees were around her as she stood
upon the shelving bank, her white garments streaming
in the breeze, her wild eyes gazing upon the vessel
as it wheeled slowly round and made for the open
ocean. Florence remained motionless where she
stood so long as a shadow of the vessel fluttered in
sight. When it was lost in the horizon she turned
slowly and walked toward the house, weary as one
who returns from a toilsome pilgrimage. It was
days and weeks before she came forth again.

Years went by—many, many years, and yet that
outward bound vessel was never heard of again.
How she perished, or when, no man can tell. The
last ever seen of her to mortal knowledge was when
Florence Hurst stood alone upon the sea-shore, conscious
that she was right, yet filled with bitter anguish
as she watched its departure to that far-off shore
from which no traveler returns.

And Florence came forth in the world again more
attractive than ever; a spiritual loveliness, softened
without diminishing the brilliancy of her beauty, and
with every feminine grace she had added that of a
meek and contrite spirit. Did she wed again? We
answer, No. Many a lofty intellect and noble heart
bent in homage to hers; but Florence lived only for
her father—the great and good man, who was just
as well as proud, and nobly won his child from her
error by delicate tenderness, such as he had never
lavished upon her faultless youth, when many a man,
to shield his weaker pride, would have driven her
by anger and upbraiding from his heart, and thus
have kindled her warm impulses into defiance and
ruin.

SUMMER.

BY E. CURTISS HINE, U. S. N.

DESCRIPTION OF A VISIT TO NIAGARA.

BY PROFESSOR JAMES MOFFAT.