University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

The Cleverlys' was the house, on his visiting list,
where Paul was most at home. Phil. Cleverly, the
eldest son, was a college friend and intimate ally. An
introduction to the strangers for whom the party had
been made, that evening, and of the cordial kind which
would ensure full attention, would be a matter of course;
and it was with curiosity on the alert and his best manners
in readiness, that Paul walked through the rooms
with his friend's mother leaning on his arm, and awaited
the opportunity to be presented.

A visit to their friends who were in office in Canada
had brought the family of Ashlys across the water. They
were prolonging their trip by a look at “the States,”
and were to be out of England only for the summer. It
was understood that, though the gentleman was simple
Mr. Ashly, he was of that class of ancient families who
would be demeaned by accepting a title—the wealth and
gentle blood having been longer in the line of their

descent than in that of most of the present nobility.
His letters had introduced him, of course, to the principal
official persons in the different cities, and a knot
of Boston gentlemen of whom something specific could
thus be said, were now gathered around Mr. and Mrs.
Ashly, exchanging with them the civilities of new acquaintance.

But there was a Miss Ashly—a young lady apparently
of nineteen or twenty — who, leaving the party of
dignitaries around her father and mother, had strolled
off to the conservatory at the end of the long suite of
apartments, and stood in the dimmer light of its fragrant
atmosphere, examining one among the multitude of exotics
there in bloom. She was of slight and graceful figure,
rather tall, and, except that she was particularly quiet
and deliberate in her movements—walking and looking,
indeed, as if she felt entirely alone in the room—Paul
saw nothing to distinguish her, at the first glance.

The opportunity to present her young friend was seen at
once by Mrs. Cleverly.

“Miss Ashly!” she said, approaching her, and phrasing
her introduction with a demolition of ceremony at which
she was usually very successful, “this young gentleman
(allow me to present him to you — Mr. Fane), is our
walking dictionary of beautiful things, and will tell you
the names of any flowers you may not recognise.”

Miss Ashly bowed very quietly.

“Will you excuse me,” continued Mrs. Cleverly, “if I
commission him to do the honors of my conservatory,
while I look up some music for my other guests? Paul!
you will not forget to show Miss Ashly my new South
American plant, farther on.”

And, with this groundwork of conversation provided,
left quite alone with the fair stranger, his presentment
flattering, and the surroundings particularly inspiring and
beautiful, Paul's task of making himself agreeable seemed
not very difficult.

The history of the plant in question was very smoothly
entered upon. Miss Ashly followed to the vase over whose
lip it threw its flowers, heavy and gorgeous, and they
examined together the encouragement to luxury which
Nature seemed to give in so mere a prodigality of beauty.
The transition from this to other topics was easy; for Paul
was, of course, at home, as to the associations around
them, and the young lady was too thoroughly at home in
her own self-possession to have an awkwardness, either
from silence or abruptness, any way probable. They
talked away, for a half hour, in the conservatory, apparently
as any other two people might—and, to her, if she had
thought about it at all, exactly as any two indifferent
strangers, who were pretty sure never to meet again, were
likely to do.

“Mildred, my dear!” said a voice from the other room
—Mr. Ashly the next moment appearing and beckoning
to his daughter.

She half turned to Paul, after a step toward her father,
as if she had nearly forgotten even to take leave of her
new acquaintance, thus ending an interview that was to
change the whole current of life, for him, while, for her, it
was but the touch of the swallow's wing to the calm surface
of the lake.

The summons, by Mr. Ashly, was to some music in the
reception-room, which was promised to be worth the hearing—but
Paul turned back into the conservatory, and, following
the marble floor to the balcony at the end, stepped
out into the moonlight. There was a new, strange feeling
in his bosom, with which he wished to be alone.

He began by shutting out, with a half-conscious resentment
of thought, the accustomed softness of the summer
night—out of harmony, somehow, for once—and then proceeded
to call the last half hour rigidly to account.

It was not her beauty; he knew a hundred women more
beautiful. Her features were even plain, as he came to
recall them. Was there any especial grace or queenliness
in her manner? No; she was quite inelegant, he thought,
in the management of her hands; and, with that forward
bend of her neck and half neglectful indolence of gait, her
impression upon most persons would be anything but

imposing. The large grey eye—it was fine, certainly, with
its motionless cloud of dark uplifted lashes that seemed
never to close, but—

Paul tightened his lips, and concentrated mind and
memory on that feature of Miss Ashly's.

—Yes! something had flashed upon his consciousness
as that cold grey eye rested on his face—a something that
had never fallen on him from a human look before—yet so
evasive and unreal, though his whole soul was up in arms
with it, that, with all his effort, he could neither define nor
confront it. She had become a creature of intense interest
to him, but it was no beginning, ever so remote, of a passion.
There was more distaste than love in his sentiment
towards her. Yet to know her better—to understand that
look, and find the plummet that would sound the depths to
which it had reached—this seemed now the troubled fever,
before the sudden thirst of which all other feelings were
inexplicably swept away.

Unfitted for the gayety within, and unwilling to see any
one with whom he must exchange indifferent words that
night, Paul stepped from the balcony into the garden
below, and without taking leave of his friends, made his
way homeward.

The usual happiness of a talk with his mother had a
constraint in it for once, as has been already described;
but, that over, he turned his key, and, with the new

thought that he must master before sleeping, he was glad
to be alone.

To those who have not looked back and wondered at
the intangible slightness of first motive, and who have not
found, by trial, how impossible it is, with the coarse woof
of words, to portray the cobweb thread of which the most
enduring motives are sometimes woven, it will be difficult
to make the solution of the mystery thus far entangled,
seem at all satisfactory. The daylight that looked in upon
Paul's sleepless eyes the next morning, however, brought
with it, for him, a shape and semblance for his new
thought, which, though he still wondered at its power.
was sufficient for recognition, and future analysis and
study; and of this we may give a hint in our present
chapter, trusting to the progress of our story to make it
clearer as we go.

The life of our hero, hitherto, had been passed in a
circle of very vague social distinctions. With a personal
presence and manners better than his family circumstances,
a nature of large hope and confidence, and unusually quick
tact and adaptability, he had been everywhere an unquestioned
favorite, and the possibility of a society to which he
should not be promptly welcomed, or in which he might
not find it easy to please, had never occurred to him. With
the “best people,” by the world's estimate, and the best by
the preferences of his own taste, equally ready to sympathize

with and esteem him, the thought of levels of life
unattainable—human passions out of reach of his awakening
and sharing—was as distant as the thought of an
angel society for which he needed the aristocracy of wings.
To his main ambition, the Art in which he determined to
be a master (and of his career in which, this story, be it
understood, traces only a side-current, else unexplained), the
broad channel of his mind, till now, had been left clear
and open.

But now had been first felt the new impulse to the tide
through heart and brain. Without insult—without contempt—without
intended slight—that cold gray eye had
passed over his face with no recognition of him as an equal.
It was the first human look (and from a woman too!) in
which that indefinable acknowledgment—that vague something
as habitually expected as heat with sunshine, and as
unthought of separately till held back—had been ever
wanting. It was not resentment he felt, for she was a
passing stranger, whom he had only thought to amuse for
the half hour, and whom there was no probability of his
ever meeting again. It was not his pride that was wounded
(now that he thought of it—though it was that doubtless
which had at first so wildly taken the alarm), for his
consciousness of superiority in undeveloped genius—a superiority
she had no time or means to recognise—put that
sensitiveness promptly to rest. It was quite another feeling

which stood fixed, like a mountain-peak, as the clouds and
darkness of the storm of the past night fled before the
calm light of the morning.

Was he of coarser clay than some other human beings?
Were there classes on this planet between whom and himself,
by better blood or by long-accumulating culture and
refinements, there had gradually widened a chasm, now,
even by instinct impassable? Were there women who, under
no circumstances, could possibly have loved him—men who
by born superiority of quality, were insurmountably out
of reach of his fellowship and friendship? Had he lived
a blind mole in his home, wholly mistaken in his estimates
of those around him—of his mother, whom he had believed
next downward from an angel, and of one other (of whom
he scarce dared trust himself to think, in connection with
this new thought), Marry, his genius love, his mind-idol, to
whom, besides his mother, he had alone breathed of his inspirations
and aspirations hitherto?

It was by these questions that he felt he was now possessed.
The thirst to know his relative rank of nature—
to gauge his comparative human claim to respect and affection—to
measure himself by his own jealous standard, with
those whom he should find first in the world's most established
appreciation—was now like a fever in his blood.
The temptation to travel, hitherto, had been only for the
artistic errand in foreign countries. It had been a passive

day-dream only. He had looked upon it as a pleasant
probability, but a pleasure which he could easily defer very
long, or forego altogether. He had even argued, indeed,
that success in Art would be prouder and worthier if won
wholly at home—the birth, growth, and culture of what
genius he might have, thus made American only. But
travel had another charm, now. A closer view of what
was rarest and proudest in older countries promised something
beside scholarship in Art. All was confused as yet
—his whole soul troubled and perplexed with wants and
difficulties—but high above all his weary thoughts, as he
flung himself on his bed, after looking out upon the sunrise
that morning, was the new spell of that golden East—
the beckoning finger of a new want calling him irresistibly
to the far lands that lay beyond.