 | III. Inklings of adventure |  |
3. III.
I was strolling on through one of the most fashionable
and romantic streets (when did these two words
ever before find themselves in a sentence together?)
when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar,
lit, unlike most others on that bright night, by a suspended
lamp, and crowded with company, attracted
my attention for a moment. Between the house and
the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a
white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion
to the low windows without concealing them from the
passer-by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, I
unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into
the rooms. It was the residence of a magnificent
girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut
beauty—a singular instance in America of what is
called in England a fine woman. (With us that word
applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large
as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters
have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She
was a “book of beauty” printed with virgin type;
and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all
my life been trying to express—that some women
seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to
others who seem mortal réchauffes—as if every limb
and feature had been used, and got out of shape in
some other person's service. The lady I speak of
looked new—and her name was Isidora.
She was standing just under the lamp, with a single
rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb
of a classmate of mine with evident pleasure.
She was a great fool, (did I mention that before?)
but weak, and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she
was, Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor
Psyche (soit elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly
her as dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she
obeyed her instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly,
and without design, the loveliest thing in nature. I
do not see, for my part, why all women should not
be so. They are as useful as flowers; they perpetuate
our species.
I was looking at her with irresistible admiration,
when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree,
and my chum, monster, and ally, Job Smith, (of
whom I have before spoken in these historical papers,)
laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Do you know, my dear Job,” I said, in a solemn
tone of admonition, “that blind John was imprisoned
for looking into people's windows?”
But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The
light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more
haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I
never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had
loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our
sight, since his first year in college; but that it would
ever so master him, or that he could link his monstrous
deformity, even in thought, with that radiant
vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as probable
as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere
the moon that kissed Endymion.
“I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever
since you left me,” said he. (We had parted three
hours before, at twilight.)
“And why not go in, in the name of common
sense?”
“Oh! God, Phil!—with this demon in my heart?
Can you see my face in this light?”
It was too true! he would have frightened the
household gods from their pedestals.
“But what would you do, my dear Job? Why
have known you would see?”
“Phil?”
“What, my dear boy?”
“Will you do me a kindness?”
“Certainly.”
“Isidora would do any thing you wished her to do.”
“Um! with a reservation, my dear chum!”
“But she would give you the rose that is in her
hair.”
“Without a doubt.”
“And for me—if you told her it was for me.
Would she not?”
“Perhaps. But will that content you?”
“It will soften my despair. I will never look on
her face more; but I should like my last sight of her
to be associated with kindness?”
Poor Job! how true it is that “affection is a fire
which kindleth as well in the bramble as in the oak,
and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it
may best burn.” I do believe in my heart that the soul
in thee was designed for a presentable body—thy instincts
were so invariably mistaken. When didst
thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it
did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by
conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying similitude
it was that was written on every blank page in
thy Lexicon: “Larks that mount in the air, build
their nests below in the earth; and women that cast
their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon
vassals.” Appelles must have been better looking
than Alexander, when Campaspe said that!
As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to
break any three of the commandments in your service,
but you should hesitate to require of friendship a violation
of etiquette. I was in a round jacket and boots, and
looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me to
enter a soirée upon his errand, and passed my thumb
and finger around the edge of my white jacket; but I
loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for the
same reason, with a difference—the imperishable wellspring
he carried in his heart through the desert of the
world, and which I well knew he would give up his
life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal whose
construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably resembled.
When I hesitated, and looked down at my
boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse to
evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to
beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my
request. If she had been a woman of sense, I should
have had no difficulty; but it requires caution and
skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool.
“Would not the rose do as well,” said I, in desperate
embarrassment, “if she does not know that it is for
you, my dear Job?” It would have been very easy to
have asked for it for myself.
Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not
comprehend the pang my proposition gave him.
“Away prop, and down, scaffold,” thought I, as I
gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door.
“Mr. Slingsby,” announced the servant.
“Mr. Slingsby?” inquired the mistress of the house,
seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the
hall.
“Mr. Slingsby!!!” cried out twenty voices in
amazement, as I stepped over the threshhold into the
light.
It has happened since the days of Thebet Ben Khorat,
that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was
evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all
present. (I should observe, that in those days, I
in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went
straight up to Miss Higgins, and, sotto voce, asked her
to take a turn with me in the garden.
“Isidora,” I said, “I have long known your superiority
of mind,” (when you want any thing of a woman,
praise her for that in which she is most deficient,
says La Bruyère,) “and I have great occasion to rely
on it in the request I am about to make of you.”
She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravel-walk
with heightened majesty. I had not had occasion
to pay her a compliment before since my freshman
year.
“What is it, Mr. Slingsby?”
“You know Smith—my chum.”
“Certainly.”
“I have just come from him.”
“Well!”
“He is gone mad!”
“Mad! Mr. Slingsby?”
“Stark and furious!”
“Gracious goodness!”
“And all for you!”
“For me!!”
“For you!” I thought her great blue eyes would
have become what they call in America “sot,” at this
astounding communication.
“Now, Miss Higgins,” I continued, “pray listen;
my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular
strength, that seven men cannot hold him.”
“Gracious!”
“And he has broken away, and is here at your door.”
“Good gracious!”
“Don't be afraid! He is as gentle as a kitten when
I am present. And now hear my request.—He leaves
town to-morrow, as you well know, not to return. I
bent upon one thing, and in that you must humour
him.”
Miss Higgins began to be alarmed.
“He has looked through the window and seen you
with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his
madness, of your love, he says, that if you would give
him that rose with a kind word, and a farewell, he
should be happy. You will do it, will you not?”
“Dear me! I should be so afraid to speak to him!”
“But will you? and I'll tell you what to say.”
Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and I passed
ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which,
with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded
like the most interesting thing in the world. I left her
in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and returned
to Job.
“You have come without it!” said the despairing
lover, falling back against the tree.
“Miss Higgins's compliments, and begs you will go
round by the gate, and meet her in the summer-house.
She prefers to manage her own affairs.”
“Good God! are you mocking me?”
“I will accompany you, my dear boy.”
There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness
in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together,
whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in
the world, the most generous, the most diffident of itself,
yet the most self-sacrificing and delicate, was at
the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate
abandonment for a flower and a kind word; and she,
a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of
kindness of which she could not comprehend the meaning
or the worth, but which was to be garnered up by
that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid him
for years of unrequited affection! She recited it really
them the instant there was a pause in the dialogue;
and getting Job away as fast as possible, I left Miss
Higgins with a promise of secrecy, and resumed my
midnight stroll.
Apropos—among Job's letters is a copy of verses
which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think
were written on this very occasion.
Nay—smile not on me—I have borne
Indifference and repulse from thee;
With my heart sickening I have worn
A brow, as thine own cold one, free;
My lip has been as gay as thine,
Ever thine own light mirth repeating,
Though, in this burning brain of mine,
A throb the while, like death, was beating;
My spirit did not shrink or swerve—
Thy look—I thank thee!—froze the nerve!
II.
But now again, as when I met
And loved thee in my happier days,
A smile upon thy bright lip plays,
And kindness in thine eye is set—
And this I cannot bear!
It melts the manhood from my pride,
It brings me closer to thy side—
Bewilders—chains me there—
There—where my dearest hope was crush'd and died!
III.
Oh, if thou could'st but know the deep
Of love that hope has nursed for years,
How in the heart's still chambers sleep
Its hoarded thoughts, its trembling fears—
Treasure that love has brooded o'er
Till life, than this, has nothing more—
And could'st thou—but 'tis vain!—
I will not, cannot tell thee, how
That hoard consumes its coffer now—
I may not write of pain
That sickens in the heart, and maddens in the brain!
Then smile not on me! pass me by
Coldly, and with a careless mien—
'Twill pierce my heart, and fill mine eye,
But I shall be as I have been—
Quiet in my despair!
'Tis better than the throbbing fever,
That else were in my brain for ever,
And easier to bear!
I'll not upbraid the coldest look—
The bitterest word thou hast, in my sad pride I'll brook!
If Job had rejoiced in a more euphonous name, I
should have bought a criticism in some review, and
started him fairly as a poet. But “Job Smith!”—
“Poems by Job Smith!”—It would never do! If he
wrote like a seraph, and printed the book at his own
expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown
to each person that would take one away, the critics
would damn him all the same! Really one's father
and mother have a great deal to answer for!
But Job is a poet who should have lived in the
middle ages, no less for the convenience of the nom
ne guerre, fashionable in those days, than because
his poetry, being chiefly the mixed product of feeling
and courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule.
The philosophical and iron-wire poetry of our day
stands an attack like a fortification, and comes down
upon the besieger with reason and logic as good as his
own. But the more delicate offspring of tenderness
and chivalry, intending no violence, and venturing
out to sea upon a rose-leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond
diving-bells by half a breath of scorn. I would
subscribe liberally myself to a private press and a
court of honour in poetry—critics, if admitted, to be
dumb upon a penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce
act upon this hint? Poets now-a-days are more
slaves and felons than your African, or your culprit
at the old Bailey!
I would go a great way, privately, to find a genuine
spark of chivalry, and Job lit his every-day lamp with
it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these
verses, which I copied long ago from a lady's album.
Yet, you may ridicule them if you like!
Of a high angel, pure and true,
With eyes that tears had never wet,
And lips that pity never knew;
But ever on his throne he sate,
With his white pinions proudly furl'd,
And, looking from his high estate,
Beheld the errors of a world;
Yet, never, as they rose to heaven,
Plead even for one to be forgiven.
God look'd at last upon his pride,
And bade him fold his shining wing,
And o'er a land where tempters bide,
He made the heartless angel king.
'Tis lovely reading in the tale,
The glorious spells they tried on him,
Ere grew his heavenly birth-star pale,
Ere grew his frontlet jewel dim—
Cups of such rare and ravishing wines
As even a god might drink and bless,
Gems from unsearch'd and central mines,
Whose light than heaven's was scarcely less—
Gold of a sheen like crystal spars,
And silver whiter than the moon's,
And music like the songs of stars,
And perfume like a thousand Junes,
And breezes, soft as heaven's own air,
Like fingers playing in his hair!
He shut his eyes—he closed his ears—
He bade them in God's name, begone!
And, through the yet eternal years,
Had stood, the tried and sinless one;
But there was yet one untried spell,—
A woman tempted—and he fell!
And I—if semblance I may find
Between such glorious sphere and mine—
Am not to the high honour blind,
Of filling this fair page of thine—
Sages and sires and men of song;—
But honour, though the best e'er given,
And glory, though it were a king's,
And power, though loving it like heaven,
Were, to my seeming, lesser things,
And less temptation, far, to me,
Than half a hope of serving thee!
I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader;
for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was
worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is
a little touch of his quality:—
Thou gav'st me, lady, in thy mirth,
And mourn, that, with the perishing hours
Such fair things perish from the earth—
For thus, I know, the moment's feeling
Its own light web of life unweaves,
The deepest trace from memory stealing,
Like perfume from these dying leaves,—
The thought that gave it, and the flower,
Alike the creatures of an hour.
And thus it better were, perhaps,
For feeling is the nurse of pain,
And joys that linger in their lapse,
Must die at last, and so are vain!
Could I revive these faded flowers,
Could I call back departed bliss,
I would not, though this world of ours
Were ten times brighter than it is!
They must—and let them—pass away!
We are forgotten—even as they!
I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I
have no idea why I have digressed this time from the
story which (you may see by the motto at the beginning
of the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive
easily how people, who have nothing to do, betake
themselves to autobiography—it is so pleasant
rambling about over the past and regathering only
the flowers. Why should pain and mortification be
experiences. “The best book,” said Southey,
“does but little good to the world, and much harm to
the author.” I shall deliberate whether to enlighten
the world as to Edith's metempsychosis, or no.
| III. Inklings of adventure | |