11. CHAPTER XI.
ONLY A PAGE OR SO.
The transaction concluded, the two still remained
seated, falling into familiar conversation, by degrees
verging into that confidential sort of sympathetic
silence, the last refinement and luxury of unaffected
good feeling. A kind of social superstition, to suppose
that to be truly friendly one must be saying friendly
words all the time, any more than be doing friendly
deeds continually. True friendliness, like true religion,
being in a sort independent of works.
At length, the good merchant, whose eyes were pensively
resting upon the gay tables in the distance, broke
the spell by saying that, from the spectacle before them,
one would little divine what other quarters of the boat
might reveal. He cited the case, accidentally encountered
but an hour or two previous, of a shrunken old
miser, clad in shrunken old moleskin, stretched out, an
invalid, on a bare plank in the emigrants' quarters,
eagerly clinging to life and lucre, though the one was
gasping for outlet, and about the other he was in torment
lest death, or some other unprincipled cut-purse,
should be the means of his losing it; by like feeble
tenure holding lungs and pouch, and yet knowing and
desiring nothing beyond them; for his mind, never
raised above mould, was now all but mouldered away.
To such a degree, indeed, that he had no trust in anything,
not even in his parchment bonds, which, the better
to preserve from the tooth of time, he had packed
down and sealed up, like brandy peaches, in a tin case
of spirits.
The worthy man proceeded at some length with
these dispiriting particulars. Nor would his cheery
companion wholly deny that there might be a point of
view from which such a case of extreme want of confidence
might, to the humane mind, present features not
altogether welcome as wine and olives after dinner.
Still, he was not without compensatory considerations,
and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for
evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he
hinted to be a somewhat jaundiced sentimentality.
Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's words, had meal and
bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way was
not to be condemned.
The other was not disposed to question the justice of
Shakespeare's thought, but would hardly admit the
propriety of the application in this instance, much less
of the comment. So, after some further temperate discussion
of the pitiable miser, finding that they could
not entirely harmonize, the merchant cited another case,
that of the negro cripple. But his companion suggested
whether the alleged hardships of that alleged
unfortunate might not exist more in the pity of the observer
than the experience of the observed. He knew
nothing about the cripple, nor had seen him, but ventured
to surmise that, could one but get at the real state
of his heart, he would be found about as happy as most
men, if not, in fact, full as happy as the speaker himself.
He added that negroes were by nature a singularly
cheerful race; no one ever heard of a native-born African
Zimmermann or Torquemada; that even from religion
they dismissed all gloom; in their hilarious rituals they
danced, so to speak, and, as it were, cut pigeon-wings.
It was improbable, therefore, that a negro, however reduced
to his stumps by fortune, could be ever thrown
off the legs of a laughing philosophy.
Foiled again, the good merchant would not desist, but
ventured still a third case, that of the man with the
weed, whose story, as narrated by himself, and confirmed
and filled out by the testimony of a certain man in a
gray coat, whom the merchant had afterwards met, he
now proceeded to give; and that, without holding
back those particulars disclosed by the second informant,
but which delicacy had prevented the unfortunate
man himself from touching upon.
But as the good merchant could, perhaps, do better
justice to the man than the story, we shall venture to
tell it in other words than his, though not to any other
effect.
