University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

Not to go back too greatly in our narrative, let
us change our ground; and leaving our youthful
traveller upon the greensward, as the night gathers
over him, let us endeavour to make the reader
somewhat better acquainted with the history upon
which we have commenced, and of the motive of
that adventurous journey which we have beheld
thus rudely interrupted.

Ralph Colleton, the youth already described, was
the only son of a Carolinian of the same name,
originally of fine fortune, but who, from circumstances,
had been compelled to fly from the place
of his nativity; an adventurer, struggling with a
proud mind and a thousand difficulties, in the less
known but more productive regions of Tennessee.
Born to wealth, seemingly adequate to all reasonable
desires, a fine plantation, numerous slaves, and
the host of friends who necessarily come with
such a condition, his individual improvidence,
thoughtless extravagance, and lavish mode of life—
a habit not uncommon in the South,—had rendered
it necessary, at the age of fifty, when the mind, not
less than the body, requires repose rather than adventure,

that he should emigrate from the place of
his birth; and with resources diminished to an existence
almost nominal, break ground once more in
unknown forests, and commence the toils and
troubles of life anew. With an only son (the
youth before us) then a mere boy, and no other
family, Colonel Ralph Colleton did not hesitate at
such an exile. He had found out the worthlessness
of men's professions at a period not very remote from
the general knowledge of his loss of fortune: and
having no other connexion claiming from him either
countenance or support, and but a single relative
from whom separation might be painful, he felt,
comparatively speaking, but few of the privations
usually following such a removal. An elder brother,
like himself a widower, with a single child, a
daughter, formed the whole of his kindred left behind
him in Carolina; and, as between the two
brothers there existed, at all times, some leading
dissimilar points of disposition and character, an
occasional correspondence, due rather to form than
to affection, served all necessary purposes in keeping
up the sentiment of kindred in their bosoms.
There were but few real affinities which could
bring them together. They never could altogether
understand, and certainly had but a limited desire
to appreciate or to approve many of the several
and distinct habits of one another, and thus they
separated with but few sentiments of genuine concern.
William Colleton, the elder brother, was
the proprietor of several thousand highly valuable
and pleasantly situated acres, upon the waters of
the Santee—a river which irrigates a region in the
state of South Carolina, notorious for its wealth,
lofty pride, polished manners, and noble and considerate
hospitality. Affluent equally with his
younger brother by descent, marriage had still
further contributed towards the growth of possessions,
which a prudent management had always kept
entire and always improving. Such was the condition
of William Colleton, the uncle of the young
Ralph, then a mere child, when he was taken by
his father into Tennessee.

There the fortune of the adventurer still maintained
its ancient aspect. He had bought lands,
and engaged in trade, and made sundry efforts in
various and honourable ways, but without success.
Vocation after vocation had a common and certain
termination, and after many years of profitless experiment,
the ways of prosperity were as far remote
from his knowledge and as perplexing to his pursuit,
as at the first hour of his adventure. In worldly concerns
he stood just where he started fifteen years
before, with this difference for the worse, however,
that he had grown older in this scope of time, less
equal to the tasks of adventure, and with the moral
energies checked as they had been by continual
disappointments, recoiling in despondency and
gloom with trying emphasis upon a spirit otherwise
noble and sufficiently daring for every legitimate
and not unwonted species of trial and occasion.
Still he had learned little, beyond hauteur and
querulousness, from the lessons of experience.
Economy was not more the inmate of his dwelling
than when he was blessed with the large income
of his birthright; but, extravagantly generous as
ever, his house was the abiding-place of a most
lavish and unwise hospitality.

His brother, William Colleton, on the other hand,
with means hourly increasing, exhibited a disposition
narrowing at times into a selfishness the
most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget
any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in
his household and with those about him, which

forms so large a peculiarity among the people of
the south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an
ostentatious entertainment—lodge his guest in the
style of a prince for weeks together, nor exhibit a
feature likely to induce a thought of intrusion in
the mind of his inmate. In public, the populace
had no complaints to urge of his penuriousness;
and in all outward shows he manifested the same
general features which marked the habit of the
class to which he belonged. But his selfishness
lay in things not so much on the surface. It was
more deep and abiding in its character; and consisted
in the false estimate which he made of the
things around him. He had learned to value wealth
as a substitute for mind, for morals—for all that is
lofty, and all that should be leading, in the consideration
of society. He valued few things beside. He
had different emotions for the rich from those which
he entertained for the poor; and from perceiving
that among men, money could usurp all places—
could defeat virtue, command respect denied to
morality and truth, and secure a real worship,
when the deity must be content with shows and
symbols—he gradually gave it the place in his regard,
which petrified the genuine feeling. He
valued it not for itself, and not with any disposition
simply to procure and to increase the quantities in
his possession. He was by no means a miser or a
mercenary, and his regards were given to it as the
visible embodiment of power little less than divine.
He was, in short, that worst of all possible pretenders,
the exclusive, the aristocrat, on the score of
his property.

In one respect, however,—and this had somewhat
created or revived the sympathies of boyhood between
them—the fortunes of the two brothers had
been by no means dissimilar. After a pleasant

union of a few years, they had lost their respective
wives; a single child preserving for each
a miniature and beloved likeness of the parents
whom, though representing, they had never known.
A son, to the younger brother, had concentrated the
affections of that exile, whose chief sorrows on
the subject of his declining fortunes and fruitless
endeavours, grew entirely out of those thoughts
about the future which every look upon his boy was
calculated to provoke; while, to William Colleton,
the elder, the young and beautiful Edith, a few
months older than her cousin Ralph, repaired
greatly the absence of her mother, and neutralized
in part, if in some respects she did not subdue,
some few of the less favourable features in the character
of the father.

Separated by several hundred miles of uncultivated
and seldom travelled forest, the brothers did
not frequently see one another; but they corresponded,
and when Ralph was fifteen, a sudden
humour of amiability on the part of his uncle,
with a reluctant consent wrung with great difficulty
from his father, transferred the youth, with
the view to his education, to the control and
direction of his uncle. The two cousins met in
Georgia for the first time, and after a brief journey
together in the more populous parts of that large,
though at that period, sparsely settled state, Ralph
was despatched to College.

The separation of the son from the father, however
beneficial to the former in some respects, was
fatal to the latter. The privation added to his sufferings,
and his defeats of fortune received additional
influence and exaggerated sting from the
solitude following his departure. He had anticipated
this result; and it was only when his brother,
with a more earnest appeal to his fraternal regard

than he had been capable for many long years of
making, urged him not to defeat by a weak selfishness
the parental plan which he had formed for the
benefit of the youth, that he consented to the sacrifice.
The charge of selfishness brought about his resolve,
and his noble heart determined to suffer in silence
for the good of his son. He no longer withheld his
consent, and attending the youth to Georgia where
his brother had engaged to meet him, he delivered
him to his uncle, and after some days' pause, he
parted with, never again to behold, him. A few
months only had elapsed, when the intelligence of
his death was received by the orphan and highly-sensitive
boy. He died, like many similar spirits,
of no known disorder.

From fifteen to nineteen is no very long leap in
the history of youth. We will make it now, and
place the young Ralph—now something older, returned
from college, finely formed, intellectual,
handsome, vivacious, manly, spirited, and susceptible,
as such a person should be—once again in
close intimacy with his beautiful cousin. The season
which had done so much for him, had been no
less liberal with her; and we now survey her, the
expanding flower, all bloom and fragrance, a tribute
of the waning spring, in the bosom of the more
forward summer.

Ralph came from college to his uncle's domicile,
now his only home. The circumstances of his
father's fate and fortune, continually acting upon
his mind and sensibilities from boyhood, had made
his character a marked and singular one,—proud,
jealous, and sensitive to an extreme which was painful
not merely to himself, but at times to others.
But he was noble, lofty, sincere, without a touch of
meanness in his composition, above circumlocution,
with a simplicity of character strikingly

great, but without any thing like puerility or weakness.

The children,—for such, in reference to their experience,
we may almost call them—had learned to recognise
in the progress of a few seasons but a single
existence. Ralph looked only for Edith, and cared
nothing for other sunlight; while Edith, with scarcely
less reserve than her bolder companion, had speech
and thought for few besides Ralph. Circumstances
contributed not a little to what would appear the
natural growth of this mutual dependance. They
were perpetually left together, and without many of
those tacit and readily understood restraints, unavoidably
accompanying the presence of others
older than themselves. Residing, save at few brief
intervals, at the plantation of Col. Colleton, they
saw little and knew less of society; and the worthy
colonel, not less ambitious than proud, having
become a politician, had still further added to those
opportunities of intimacy which had now become
so important to them both. Half of his time
was taken up in public matters. A leader of his
party in the section of country in which he
lived, he was always busy in the responsibilities
imposed upon him by such a station; and what
with canvassing at election-polls, and muster-grounds,
and dancing attendance as a silent voter at
the halls of the state regislature, to the membership of
which his constituents had returned him, he saw
but little of his family, and they almost as little of
him. His influence grew unimportant with his
wards, in proportion as it obtained vigour with
his faction—was seldom referred to by them,
and, perhaps, such was the rapid growth of their
affections, would have been but little regarded. He
appeared to take it for granted, that having provided
them with all the necessaries called for by

life, he had done quite enough for the benefit of its
members; and actually gave far less of his consideration
to his own and only child than he did to
his plantation, and the success of a party measure,
involving possibly the office of door-keeper to the
house, or of tax-collector to the district. The taste
for domestic life, which at one period might have
been held with him exclusive, had been entirely
swallowed up and forgotten in his public relations;
and entirely overlooking the fact, that in the silent
goings-on of time, the infantile will cease to be so,
he saw not that the children he had brought together
but a few years before might not with reason
be considered children any longer. Children indeed!
What years had they not lived—what volumes
of experience in human affections and feelings
had the influence and genial warmth of a Carolina
sun not unfolded to their spirits in the few sweet
and uninterrupted seasons of their intercourse.
How imperious were the dictates of that nature, to
whose immethodical but honest teachings they had
been almost entirely given up. They lived together,
walked together, rode together—read in the same
books, conned the same lessons, studied the same
prospects, saw life through the common medium
of mutual associations; and lived happy, only in
the sweet unison of emotions, gathered at a common
fountain, and equally dear, and equally necessary
to them both. And this is love—they loved!

They loved, but the discovery was yet to be
made by them. Living in its purest luxuries, in
the perpetual communion of the only one necessary
object—having no desire and as little prospect
of change—ignorant of and altogether unlessoned
by the vicissitudes of life—enjoying the sweet association
which had been the parent of that passion,
dependant now entirely upon its continuance—

they had been content, and had never given themselves
any concern to analyze its origin, or to find
for it a name. A momentary doubt—the presages
of a dim perspective—would have taught them better.
Had there been a single moment of discontent in their
lives at this period, they had not remained so long
in such ignorance. The fear of its loss can alone
teach us the true value of our treasure. But the
discovery was at hand.

A pleasant summer afternoon in June found the
two young people, Ralph and Edith—the former
something over nineteen years of age, and the latter
in the same neighbourhood, half busied, half
idle, in the long and spacious piazza of the family
mansion. They could not be said to have been
employed, for Edith rarely made much progress
with the embroidering needle and delicate fabric
in her hands, while Ralph, something more absorbed
in a romance of the day, evidently exercised little
concentration of mind in scanning its contents.
He skimmed at first, rather than studied the pages
before him; conversing occasionally with the young
maiden, who, sitting beside him, occasionally glanced
at the volume in his hand, with something of an air of
discontent that it should take even so much of his regard
from herself. As he proceeded, however, in its
perusal, the story grew upon him, and he became
unconscious of her occasional efforts to control his
attention. The needle of Edith seemed also disposed
to avail itself of the aberrations of its mistress
and rise in rebellion; and, having pricked
her finger more than once, in the effort to proceed
with her work, while her eyes wandered to her
companion, she at length threw down the gauzy
fabric upon which she had been so partially employed,
and hastily rising from her seat, passed into
the adjoining apartment. Her departure was not

attended to by her companion, who for a time
continued his perusal of the book. No great while,
however, elapsed, before rising also from his seat,
with a hasty exclamation of surprise, he threw down
the volume, and followed her into the room, where
she sat pensively meditating over thoughts and
feelings as vague and inscrutable to her mind as
they were clear and familiar to her heart. With a
degree of warm impetuosity, even exaggerated beyond
his usual manner, which bore, at all times,
this characteristic, he approached her, and seizing
her hand passionately in his, exclaimed hastily—

“Edith, my sweet Edith, how unhappy that
book has made me!”

“How so, Ralph—why should it make you unhappy?”

“It has taught me much, Edith—very much, in
the last half hour. It has spoken of privation and
disappointment as the true elements of life, and
has shown me so many pictures of society in such
various situations, and with so much that I feel
assured must be correct, that I am unable to resist
its impressions. We have been happy—so happy,
Edith, and for so many years, that I could not
bear to think that either of us should be less so;
and yet that volume has taught me, in the story of
parallel fortunes with ours, that it may be so. It
has given me a long lesson in the sometime and
hollow economy of that world which men seek,
and name society. It has told me that we, or I,
at least, may be made and kept miserable for ever.”

“How, Ralph, tell me, I pray you—how should
that book have taught you this strange notion?
speak! What book is it?” was the gasping exclamation
of the astonished girl—astonished no
less by the impetuous manner, than the strong language
of the youth, as with the tenderest concern,

she laid her hand upon his arm, while her eyes,
full of the liveliest interest, yet moistened with a
tearful apprehension, were fixed earnestly upon his
own.

“It is a foolish book, a very foolish book—a story
of false sentiment, and of mock and artificial feelings,
of which I know, and care to know, nothing.
But it has told me much that I feel is true, and that
chimes with my own experience. It has told me
much that, as it is true, I am glad to have been
taught. Hear me then, dear Edith, and smile not
carelessly at my words, for I have now learned to
tremble when I speak to you, in fear lest I should
offend you.”

She would have spoken words of assurance—
she would have taught him to think better of her
affections and their strength; but his impetuosity
checked her in her speech.

“I know what you would say, and my heart
thanks you for it, as if its very life had depended upon
the utterance. You would tell me to have no such
fear; but the fear is a portion of myself now—it is
my heart itself. Hear me then, Edith,—my Edith,
if you will so let me name you.”

Her hand rested on his assuringly, with a gentle
pressure. He continued—

“Hitherto we have lived with each other, only
with each other—we have loved each other, and I
have almost only loved you. Neither of us, Edith
(may I believe it of you?) have known much of
any other affection. But how long is this to last?
that book—where is it? but no matter—it has
taught me, that now, when a few months will carry
us both into the world, it is improper that our relationship
should continue. It says we cannot be the
children any longer that we have been—that such intercourse,

I can now perceive why, would be injurious
to you. Do you understand me?”

The blush of a first consciousness came over
the cheek of the maiden as she withdrew her hand
from his passionate clasp.

“Ah! I see already,” he exclaimed: “you too
have learned the lesson. And is it thus—and we
are happy no longer!”

“Ralph!”—she endeavoured to speak, but could
proceed no further, and her hand was again, silently
and without objection, taken into the grasp of his.
The youth, after a brief pause, in a tone which
though it had lost much of its impetuousness, was
yet full of stern resolve, proceeded,

“Hear me, Edith—but a word—a single word.
I love you—believe me, my sweet Edith, I love
you.”

The effect of this declaration was scarcely such
as the youth had desired. She had been so much
accustomed to his warm admiration, indicated frequently
in phrases such as these, that it had the
effect of restoring to her much of that self-possession,
of which the nature of the previous dialogue
had not a little deprived her; and in the most
natural manner in the world, she replied—perhaps
too, we may add, with much of the artlessness of
art—“Why, to be sure you do, cousin Ralph,—it
would be something strange indeed if you did not.
I believe you love me, as I am sure you can never
doubt how much you are beloved by me!”

“Cousin Ralph—Cousin Ralph!” exclaimed the
youth with something of his former impetuousness,
emphasizing ironically as he spoke the unfortunate
family epithet—“Ah, Edith, you will not understand
me—nor indeed, an hour ago, should I altogether
have understood myself. Suddenly, dear
Edith, however, as I read the passages of that

book, the thought darted through my brain like
lightning, and I saw into my own heart, as I had
never been permitted to see into it before. I there
saw how much I loved you—not as my cousin—
not as my sister, as you sometimes would have
me call you, but as I will not call you again—but
as—as—”

“As what?”

“As my wife—Edith—as my own, own wife!”
He clasped her hand in his, while his head sank,
and his lips were pressed upon the taper and trembling
fingers which grew cold and powerless in his
grasp.

What a volume was at that moment opened,
for the first time, before the gaze and understanding
of the half-affrighted and deep-throbbing heart of
that gentle girl. The veil which had concealed its
burning mysteries was torn away in that instant.
The key to its secret places was in her hands, and
she was bewildered with her own discoveries.
Her cheeks alternated between the pale and crimson
of doubt and hope. Her lips quivered convulsively,
and an unbidden but not painful suffusion
overspread the warm brilliance of her deep
blue eye. She strove, ineffectually, to speak; her
words came forth in broken murmurs; her voice
had sunk into a sigh; she was dumb. The youth
once more took her hand into his, as, speaking with
a suppressed tone, and with a measured slowness
which had something in it of extreme melancholy,
he broke silence:—

“And have I no answer, Edith—and must I believe
that for either of us there should be other
loves than those of childhood—that new affections
may usurp the place of old ones—that there may
come a time, dear Edith, when I shall see an arm,
not my own, about your waist, and the eyes that
would look on no prospect if you were not a part

of it, may be doomed to that fearfullest blight of
beholding your lips smiling and pressed beneath
the lips of another?”

“Never, oh never, Ralph; speak no more, I beseech
you, in such language. You do me wrong
in this—I have not thought of this—I shall not
think of it—I will be yours, and yours only, Ralph
—yours only as you have ever known me.”

She spoke with a sweet and life-giving energy;
her head, from which the light brown hair streamed
down in profuse volumes, was settled upon his
shoulder—his arms encircled her waist; and his
lips rested passionately upon her burning cheek,
when a third party entered the room in the person
of Colonel Colleton.