IV
His stroll was longer than he meant; and when he returned
up the Linden walk leading to the breakfast-room, and
ascended the piazza steps, and glanced into the wide window
there, he saw his mother seated not far from the table; her
face turned toward his own; and heard her gay voice, and peculiarly
light and buoyant laugh, accusing him, and not her, of
being the morning's laggard now. Dates was busy among some
spoons and napkins at a side-stand.
Summoning all possible cheerfulness to his face, Pierre entered
the room. Remembering his carefulness in bathing and
dressing; and knowing that there is no air so calculated to give
bloom to the cheek as that of a damply fresh, cool, and misty
morning, Pierre persuaded himself that small trace would now
be found on him of his long night of watching.
“Good morning sister;—Such a famous stroll! I have
been all the way to”—
“Where? good heavens! where? for such a look as that!
—why, Pierre, Pierre? what ails thee? Dates, I will touch
the bell presently.”
As the good servitor fumbled for a moment among the napkins,
as if unwilling to stir so summarily from his accustomed
duty, and not without some of a well and long-tried old domestic's
vague, intermitted murmuring, at being wholly excluded
from a matter of family interest; Mrs. Glendinning kept her
fixed eye on Pierre, who, unmindful that the breakfast was not
yet entirely ready, seating himself at the table, began helping
himself—though but nervously enough—to the cream and
sugar. The moment the door closed on Dates, the mother
sprang to her feet, and threw her arms around her son; but in
that embrace, Pierre miserably felt that their two hearts beat
not together in such unison as before.
“What haggard thing possesses thee, my son? Speak, this
is incomprehensible! Lucy;—fie!—not she?—no love-quarrel
there;—speak, speak, my darling boy!”
“My dear sister,” began Pierre.
“Sister me not, now, Pierre;—I am thy mother.”
“Well, then, dear mother, thou art quite as incomprehensible
to me as I to”—
“Talk faster, Pierre—this calmness freezes me. Tell me;
for, by my soul, something most wonderful must have happened
to thee. Thou art my son, and I command thee. It is
not Lucy; it is something else. Tell me.”
“My dear mother,” said Pierre, impulsively moving his chair
backward from the table, “if thou wouldst only believe me
when I say it, I have really nothing to tell thee. Thou knowest
that sometimes, when I happen to feel very foolishly studious and
philosophical, I sit up late in my chamber; and then, regardless
of the hour, foolishly run out into the air, for a long stroll
across the meadows. I took such a stroll last night; and had
but little time left for napping afterward; and what nap I had
I was none the better for. But I won't be so silly again, soon;
so do, dearest mother, stop looking at me, and let us to breakfast.—Dates!
Touch the bell there, sister.”
“Stay, Pierre!—There is a heaviness in this hour. I feel, I
know, that thou art deceiving me;—perhaps I erred in seeking
to wrest thy secret from thee; but believe me, my son, I never
thought thou hadst any secret thing from me, except thy first
love for Lucy—and that, my own womanhood tells me, was
most pardonable and right. But now, what can it be? Pierre,
Pierre! consider well before thou determinest upon withholding
confidence from me. I am thy mother. It may prove a fatal
thing. Can that be good and virtuous, Pierre, which shrinks
from a mother's knowledge? Let us not loose hands so, Pierre;
thy confidence from me, mine goes from thee. Now, shall I
touch the bell?”
Pierre, who had thus far been vainly seeking to occupy his
hands with his cup and spoon; he now paused, and unconsciously
fastened a speechless glance of mournfulness upon his mother.
Again he felt presentiments of his mother's newly-revealed
character. He foresaw the supposed indignation of her wounded
pride; her gradually estranged affections thereupon; he
knew her firmness, and her exaggerated ideas of the inalienable
allegiance of a son. He trembled to think, that now indeed
was come the first initial moment of his heavy trial. But
though he knew all the significance of his mother's attitude, as
she stood before him, intently eying him, with one hand upon
the bell-cord; and though he felt that the same opening of the
door that should now admit Dates, could not but give eternal
exit to all confidence between him and his mother; and though
he felt, too, that this was his mother's latent thought; nevertheless,
he was girded up in his well-considered resolution.
“Pierre, Pierre! shall I touch the bell?”
“Mother, stay!—yes do, sister.”
The bell was rung; and at the summons Dates entered;
and looking with some significance at Mrs. Glendinning, said,
—“His Reverence has come, my mistress, and is now in the
west parlor.”
“Show Mr. Falsgrave in here immediately; and bring up
the coffee; did I not tell you I expected him to breakfast this
morning?”
“Yes, my mistress; but I thought that—that—just then”
—glancing alarmedly from mother to son.
“Oh, my good Dates, nothing has happened,” cried Mrs.
Glendinning, lightly, and with a bitter smile, looking toward
her son,—“show Mr. Falsgrave in. Pierre, I did not see thee,
to tell thee, last night; but Mr. Falsgrave breakfasts with us
by invitation. I was at the parsonage yesterday, to see him
about that wretched affair of Delly, and we are finally to settle
upon what is to be done this morning. But my mind is made
up concerning Ned; no such profligate shall pollute this place;
nor shall the disgraceful Delly.”
Fortunately, the abrupt entrance of the clergyman, here
turned away attention from the sudden pallor of Pierre's countenance,
and afforded him time to rally.
“Good morning, madam; good morning, sir;” said Mr.
Falsgrave, in a singularly mild, flute-like voice, turning to
Mrs. Glendinning and her son; the lady receiving him with
answering cordiality, but Pierre too embarrassed just then to be
equally polite. As for one brief moment Mr. Falsgrave stood
before the pair, ere taking the offered chair from Dates, his aspect
was eminently attractive.
There are certain ever-to-be-cherished moments in the life
of almost any man, when a variety of little foregoing circumstances
all unite to make him temporarily oblivious of whatever
may be hard and bitter in his life, and also to make him most
amiably and ruddily disposed; when the scene and company
immediately before him are highly agreeable; and if at such
a time he chance involuntarily to put himself into a scenically
favorable bodily posture; then, in that posture, however transient,
thou shalt catch the noble stature of his Better Angel;
catch a heavenly glimpse of the latent heavenliness of man.
It was so with Mr. Falsgrave now. Not a house within a
circuit of fifty miles that he preferred entering before the
mansion-house of Saddle Meadows; and though the business
upon which he had that morning come, was any thing but
relishable to him, yet that subject was not in his memory
then. Before him stood united in one person, the most exalted
lady and the most storied beauty of all the country
round; and the finest, most intellectual, and most congenial
youth he knew. Before him also, stood the generous foundress
and the untiring patroness of the beautiful little marble
church, consecrated by the good Bishop, not four years gone
by. Before him also, stood—though in polite disguise—the
same untiring benefactress, from whose purse, he could not
help suspecting, came a great part of his salary, nominally supplied
by the rental of the pews. He had been invited to
breakfast; a meal, which, in a well-appointed country family,
is the most cheerful circumstance of daily life; he smelt all
Java's spices in the aroma from the silver coffee-urn; and well
he knew, what liquid deliciousness would soon come from it.
Besides all this, and many more minutenesses of the kind, he
was conscious that Mrs. Gendinning entertained a particular
partiality for him (though not enough to marry him, as he ten
times knew by very bitter experience), and that Pierre was not
behindhand in his esteem.
And the clergyman was well worthy of it. Nature had
been royally bountiful to him in his person. In his happier
moments, as the present, his face was radiant with a courtly,
but mild benevolence; his person was nobly robust and dignified;
while the remarkable smallness of his feet, and the almost
infantile delicacy, and vivid whiteness and purity of his hands,
strikingly contrasted with his fine girth and stature. For in
countries like America, where there is no distinct hereditary
caste of gentlemen, whose order is factitiously perpetuated as
race-horses and lords are in kingly lands; and especially, in
those agricultural districts, where, of a hundred hands, that drop
a ballot for the Presidency, ninety-nine shall be of the brownest
and the brawniest; in such districts, this daintiness of the
fingers, when united with a generally manly aspect, assumes a
remarkableness unknown in European nations.
This most prepossessing form of the clergyman lost nothing
by the character of his manners, which were polished and unobtrusive,
but peculiarly insinuating, without the least appearance
of craftiness or affectation. Heaven had given him his
fine, silver-keyed person for a flute to play on in this world;
and he was nearly the perfect master of it. His graceful
motions had the undulatoriness of melodious sounds. You
almost thought you heard, not saw him. So much the wonderful,
yet natural gentleman he seemed, that more than once
Mrs. Glendinning had held him up to Pierre as a splendid
example of the polishing and gentlemanizing influences of
Christianity upon the mind and manners; declaring, that extravagant
as it might seem, she had always been of his father's
fancy,—that no man could be a complete gentleman, and preside
with dignity at his own table, unless he partook of the
church's sacraments. Nor in Mr. Falsgrave's case was this
maxim entirely absurd. The child of a poor northern farmer
who had wedded a pretty sempstress, the clergyman had no
heraldic line of ancestry to show, as warrant and explanation
of his handsome person and gentle manners; the first, being
the willful partiality of nature; and the second, the consequence
of a scholastic life, attempered by a taste for the choicest female
society, however small, which he had always regarded as
the best relish of existence. If now his manners thus responded
to his person, his mind answered to them both, and was their
finest illustration. Besides his eloquent persuasiveness in the
pulpit, various fugitive papers upon subjects of nature, art, and
literature, attested not only his refined affinity to all beautiful
things, visible or invisible; but likewise that he possessed a
genius for celebrating such things, which in a less indolent and
more ambitious nature, would have been sure to have gained a
fair poet's name ere now. For this Mr. Falsgrave was just
hovering upon his prime of years; a period which, in such a
man, is the sweetest, and, to a mature woman, by far the most
attractive of manly life. Youth has not yet completely gone
with its beauty, grace, and strength; nor has age at all come
with its decrepitudes; though the finest undrossed parts of it—
its mildness and its wisdom—have gone on before, as decorous
chamberlains precede the sedan of some crutched king.
Such was this Mr. Falsgrave, who now sat at Mrs. Glendinning's
breakfast table, a corner of one of that lady's generous
napkins so inserted into his snowy bosom, that its folds almost
invested him as far down as the table's edge; and he seemed a
sacred priest, indeed, breakfasting in his surplice.
“Pray, Mr. Falsgrave,” said Mrs. Glendinning, “break me
off a bit of that roll.”
Whether or not his sacerdotal experiences had strangely refined
and spiritualized so simple a process as breaking bread;
or whether it was from the spotless aspect of his hands: certain
it is that Mr. Falsgrave acquitted himself on this little occasion,
in a manner that beheld of old by Leonardo, might have given
that artist no despicable hint touching his celestial painting.
As Pierre regarded him, sitting there so mild and meek; such
an image of white-browed and white-handed, and napkined
immaculateness; and as he felt the gentle humane radiations
which came from the clergyman's manly and rounded beautifulness;
and as he remembered all the good that he knew of
this man, and all the good that he had heard of him, and could
recall no blemish in his character; and as in his own concealed
misery and forlornness, he contemplated the open benevolence,
and beaming excellent-heartedness of Mr. Falsgrave,
the thought darted through his mind, that if any living being
was capable of giving him worthy counsel in his strait; and if
to any one he could go with Christian propriety and some
small hopefulness, that person was the one before him.
“Pray, Mr. Glendinning,” said the clergyman, pleasantly, as
Pierre was silently offering to help him to some tongue—“don't
let me rob you of it—pardon me, but you seem to have very
little yourself this morning, I think. An execrable pun, I know:
but”—turning toward Mrs. Glendinning—“when one is made
to feel very happy, one is somehow apt to say very silly things.
Happiness and silliness—ah, it's a suspicious coincidence.”
“Mr. Falsgrave,” said the hostess—“Your cup is empty.
Dates!—We were talking yesterday, Mr. Falsgrave, concerning
that vile fellow, Ned.”
“Well, Madam,” responded the gentleman, a very little uneasily.
“He shall not stay on any ground of mine; my mind is
made up, sir. Infamous man!—did he not have a wife as
virtuous and beautiful now, as when I first gave her away at
your altar?—It was the sheerest and most gratuitous profligacy.”
The clergyman mournfully and assentingly moved his head.
“Such men,” continued the lady, flushing with the sincerest
indignation—“are to my way of thinking more detestable than
murderers.”
“That is being a little hard upon them, my dear Madam,”
said Mr. Falsgrave, mildly.
“Do you not think so, Pierre”—now, said the lady, turning
earnestly upon her son—“is not the man, who has sinned like
that Ned, worse than a murderer? Has he not sacrificed one
woman completely, and given infamy to another—to both of
them—for their portion. If his own legitimate boy should now
hate him, I could hardly blame him.”
“My dear Madam,” said the clergyman, whose eyes having
followed Mrs. Glendinning's to her son's countenance, and
marking a strange trepidation there, had thus far been earnestly
scrutinizing Pierre's not wholly repressible emotion;—“My dear
Madam,” he said, slightly bending over his stately episcopallooking
person—“Virtue has, perhaps, an over-ardent champion
in you; you grow too warm; but Mr. Glendinning, here,
he seems to grow too cold. Pray, favor us with your views,
Mr. Glendinning?”
“I will not think now of the man,” said Pierre, slowly, and
looking away from both his auditors—“let us speak of Delly
and her infant—she has, or had one, I have loosely heard;—
their case is miserable indeed.”
“The mother deserves it,” said the lady, inflexibly—“and
the child—Reverend sir, what are the words of the Bible?”
“`The sins of the father shall be visited upon the children to
the third generation,'” said Mr. Falsgrave, with some slight reluctance
in his tones. “But Madam, that does not mean, that
the community is in any way to take the infamy of the children
into their own voluntary hands, as the conscious delegated
stewards of God's inscrutable dispensations. Because it is declared
that the infamous consequences of sin shall be hereditary,
it does not follow that our personal and active loathing of sin,
should descend from the sinful sinner to his sinless child.”
“I understand you, sir,” said Mrs. Glendinning, coloring
slightly, “you think me too censorious. But if we entirely forget
the parentage of the child, and every way receive the child
as we would any other, feel for it in all respects the same, and
attach no sign of ignominy to it—how then is the Bible dispensation
to be fulfilled? Do we not then put ourselves in the
way of its fulfilment, and is that wholly free from impiety?”
Here it was the clergyman's turn to color a little, and there
was a just perceptible tremor of the under lip.
“Pardon me,” continued the lady, courteously, “but if there
is any one blemish in the character of the Reverend Mr. Falsgrave,
it is that the benevolence of his heart, too much warps
in him the holy rigor of our Church's doctrines. For my part,
as I loathe the man, I loathe the woman, and never desire to
behold the child.”
A pause ensued, during which it was fortunate for Pierre,
that by the social sorcery of such occasions as the present, the
eyes of all three were intent upon the cloth; all three for the
moment, giving loose to their own distressful meditations upon
the subject in debate, and Mr. Falsgrave vexedly thinking that
the scene was becoming a little embarrassing.
Pierre was the first who spoke; as before, he steadfastly
kept his eyes away from both his auditors; but though he did
not designate his mother, something in the tone of his voice
showed that what he said was addressed more particularly to her.
“Since we seem to have been strangely drawn into the ethical
aspect of this melancholy matter,” said he, “suppose we go
further in it; and let me ask, how it should be between the
legitimate and the illegitimate child—children of one father—
when they shall have passed their childhood?”
Here the clergyman quickly raising his eyes, looked as surprised
and searchingly at Pierre, as his politeness would permit.
“Upon my word”—said Mrs. Glendinning, hardly less surprised,
and making no attempt at disguising it—“this is an
odd question you put; you have been more attentive to the
subject than I had fancied. But what do you mean, Pierre?
I did not entirely understand you.”
“Should the legitimate child shun the illegitimate, when one
father is father to both?” rejoined Pierre, bending his head still
further over his plate.
The clergyman looked a little down again, and was silent;
but still turned his head slightly sideways toward his hostess,
as if awaiting some reply to Pierre from her.
“Ask the world, Pierre”—said Mrs. Glendinning warmly—
“and ask your own heart.”
“My own heart? I will, Madam”—said Pierre, now looking
up steadfastly; “but what do you think, Mr. Falsgrave?” letting
his glance drop again—“should the one shun the other?
should the one refuse his highest sympathy and perfect love for
the other, especially if that other be deserted by all the rest of
the world? What think you would have been our blessed
Savior's thoughts on such a matter? And what was that he
so mildly said to the adulteress?”
A swift color passed over the clergyman's countenance, suffusing
even his expanded brow; he slightly moved in his chair,
and looked uncertainly from Pierre to his mother. He seemed
as a shrewd, benevolent-minded man, placed between opposite
opinions—merely opinions—who, with a full, and doubly-differing
persuasion in himself, still refrains from uttering it, because
of an irresistible dislike to manifesting an absolute dissent
from the honest convictions of any person, whom he both socially
and morally esteems.
“Well, what do you reply to my son?”—said Mrs. Glendinning
at last.
“Madam and sir”—said the clergyman, now regaining his
entire self-possession. “It is one of the social disadvantages
which we of the pulpit labor under, that we are supposed to
know more of the moral obligations of humanity than other
people. And it is a still more serious disadvantage to the
world, that our unconsidered, conversational opinions on the
most complex problems of ethics, are too apt to be considered
authoritative, as indirectly proceeding from the church itself.
Now, nothing can be more erroneous than such notions; and
nothing so embarrasses me, and deprives me of that entire
serenity, which is indispensable to the delivery of a careful
opinion on moral subjects, than when sudden questions of this
sort are put to me in company. Pardon this long preamble,
for I have little more to say. It is not every question, however
direct, Mr. Glendinning, which can be conscientiously answered
with a yes or no. Millions of circumstances modify all moral
questions; so that though conscience may possibly dictate freely
in any known special case; yet, by one universal maxim, to
embrace all moral contingencies,—this is not only impossible,
but the attempt, to me, seems foolish.”
At this instant, the surplice-like napkin dropped from the
clergyman's bosom, showing a minute but exquisitely cut cameo
brooch, representing the allegorical union of the serpent and
dove. It had been the gift of an appreciative friend, and was
sometimes worn on secular occasions like the present.
“I agree with you, sir”—said Pierre, bowing. “I fully agree
with you. And now, madam, let us talk of something else.”
“You madam me very punctiliously this morning, Mr.
Glendinning”—said his mother, half-bitterly smiling, and half-openly
offended, but still more surprised at Pierre's frigid demeanor.
“`Honor thy father and mother;'” said Pierre—“both
father and mother,” he unconsciously added. “And now that
it strikes me, Mr. Falsgrave, and now that we have become so
strangely polemical this morning, let me say, that as that command
is justly said to be the only one with a promise, so it
seems to be without any contingency in the application. It
would seem—would it not, sir?—that the most deceitful and
hypocritical of fathers should be equally honored by the son, as
the purest.”
“So it would certainly seem, according to the strict letter of
the Decalogue—certainly.”
“And do you think, sir, that it should be so held, and so
applied in actual life? For instance, should I honor my father,
if I knew him to be a seducer?”
“Pierre! Pierre!” said his mother, profoundly coloring, and
half rising; “there is no need of these argumentative assumptions.
You very immensely forget yourself this morning.”
“It is merely the interest of the general question, Madam,”
returned Pierre, coldly. “I am sorry. If your former objection
does not apply here, Mr. Falsgrave, will you favor me with
an answer to my question?”
“There you are again, Mr. Glendinning,” said the clergyman,
thankful for Pierre's hint; “that is another question in morals
absolutely incapable of a definite answer, which shall be universally
applicable.” Again the surplice-like napkin chanced
to drop.
“I am tacitly rebuked again then, sir,” said Pierre, slowly;
“but I admit that perhaps you are again in the right. And
now, Madam, since Mr. Falsgrave and yourself have a little
business together, to which my presence is not necessary, and
may possibly prove quite dispensable, permit me to leave you.
I am going off on a long ramble, so you need not wait dinner
for me. Good morning, Mr. Falsgrave; good morning, Madam,”
looking toward his mother.
As the door closed upon him, Mr. Falsgrave spoke—“Mr.
Glendinning looks a little pale to-day: has he been ill?”
“Not that I know of,” answered the lady, indifferently, “but
did you ever see young gentleman so stately as he was? Extraordinary!”
she murmured; “what can this mean—Madam
—Madam? But your cup is empty again, sir”—reaching forth
her hand.
“No more, no more, Madam,” said the clergyman.
“Madam? pray don't Madam me any more, Mr. Falsgrave;
I have taken a sudden hatred to that title.”
“Shall it be Your Majesty, then?” said the clergyman, gallantly;
“the May Queens are so styled, and so should be the
Queens of October.”
Here the lady laughed. “Come,” said she, “let us go into
another room, and settle the affair of that infamous Ned and
that miserable Delly.”
