University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.

The business upon which Mrs. Hinkley sought the
chamber of her guest was a very simple one, and easily
expressed. Not that she expressed it in few words. That
is scarcely possible at any time with an ancient lady. But
the long story which she told, when compressed into intelligible
form, related to her son William. She had some
maternal fears on his account. The lad was a decided
melancholic. His appetite was bad; his looks were thin
and unhappy; he lacked the usual spirit of youth; he
lacked his own usual spirit. What was the cause of the
change which had come over him so suddenly, she could
not divine. Her anxiety was for the remedy. She had
consulted Brother Cross on the subject before he departed;
but that good man, after a brief examination of the patient,
had freely admitted his inability to say what was the matter
with him, and what was proper for his cure. To the
object of this solicitude himself, he had given much good
counsel, concluding finally with a recommendation to read
devoutly certain chapters in Job and Isaiah. It appears
that William Hinkley submitted to all this scrutiny with
exemplary fortitude, but gave no satisfactory answers to
any of the questions asked him. He had no complaints,
he denied any suffering; and expressed himself annoyed
at the inquisition into his thoughts and feelings. This
annoyance had been expressed, however, with the subdued
tones and language of one habitually gentle and
modest. Whenever he was approached on the subject, as
the good old lady assured her guest, he shook off his questioners
with no little haste, and took to the woods for the
rest of the day. “That day,” said she, “you needn't
look for William Hinkley to his dinner.”

Stevens had been struck with the deportment of this
youth, which had seemed to him haughty and repulsive;
and, as he fancied, characterized by some sentiment of
hostility for himself. He was surprised therefore to learn
from the old lady that the lad was remarkable for his gentleness.

“How long has he been in this way, Mrs. Hinkley?”
he asked with some curiosity.

“Well now, Brother Stevens, I can't tell you. It's been
growing on him for some time. I reckon it's a matter of
more than four months since I first seen it; but it's only
been a few weeks that I have spoken to him. Brother
Cross spoke to him only Monday of last week. My old
man don't seem to see so much of it; but I know there's
a great change in him now from what there used to be. A
mother's eye sees a great way farther into the hearts of her
children, Brother Stevens, than any other persons; and I
can see plainly that William is no more the same boy—
no! nor nothing like it—that he once was. Why, once,
he was all life, and good humour; could dance and sing
with the merriest among them; and was always so good
and kind, and loved to do whatever would please a body;
and was always with somebody, or other, making merry,
and planning the prettiest sports. Now, he don't sing,
nor dance, nor play; when you see him, you 'most always
see him alone. He goes by himself into the woods,
and he'll be going over the hills all day, nobody with
him, and never seeming to care about his food, and what's
more strange, never looking at the books that he used to
be so fond of.”

“He has been fond of books then;—had he many?”

“Oh, yes, a whole drawer of them, and he used to get
them besides from the schoolmaster, Mr. Calvert, a very
good man that lives about half a mile from the village, and
has a world of books. But now he neither gets books
from other people nor reads what he's got. I'm dubious,
Brother Stevens, that he's read too much for his own good.
Something's not right here, I'm a thinking.”

The good old lady touched her head with her finger and
in this manner indicated her conjecture as to the seat of her
son's disease. Stevens answered her encouragingly.

“I scarcely think, Mrs. Hinkley, that it can be any thing
so bad. The young man is at that age when a change
naturally takes place in the mind and habits. He wants to
go into the world, I suspect. He's probably tired of doing
nothing. What is to be his business? It's high time
that such a youth should have made a choice.”

“That's true, Brother Stevens, but he's been the apple

to our eyes, and we haven't been willing that he should
take up any business that would carry him away from us.
He's done a little farming about the country, but that took
him away, and latterly he's kept pretty much at home,
going over his books and studying, now one and now
another, just as Mr. Calvert gave them to him.”

“What studies did he pursue?”

“Well, I can't tell you. He was a good time at Latin,
and then he wants to be a lawyer;—”

“A lawyer!”

“Yes, he had a great notion to be a lawyer and was at
his books pretty hard for a good year, constant, day by day,
until, as I said before, about four months ago, when I saw
that he was growing thin, and that he had put down the
books altogether, and had the change come over him just
as I told you. You see how thin he is now. You'd
scarce believe him to be the same person if you'd seen him
then. Why his cheeks were as full and as red as roses,
and his eye was always shining and laughing, and he had
the liveliest step, and between him and Ned Hinkley, his
cousin, what with flute and fiddle, they kept the house in
a constant uproar, and we were all so happy. Now, it
isn't once a month that we hear the sound of the fiddle in
the house. He never sings, and he never dances, and he
never plays, and what little he lets us see of him, is always
so sad and so spiritless that I feel heartsick whenever I look
upon him. Oh! Brother Stevens, if you could only find
out what's the matter, and tell us what to do, it would be
the most blessed kindness, and I'd never forget it, or forget
you, to my dying day.”

“Whatever I can do, Mrs. Hinkley shall surely be
done. I will see and speak with your son.”

“Oh! do,—that's a dear good sir. I'm sure if you
only talk to him and advise him it will do him good.”

“Without being so sure, ma'am, I will certainly try to
please you. Though I think you see the matter with too
serious eyes. Such changes are natural enough to young
people, and to old ones too. But what may be your son's
age.”

“Nineteen last April.”

“Quite a man for his years, Mrs. Hinkley.”

“Isn't he?”

“He will do you credit yet.”

“Ah! if I could believe so. But you'll speak to him,
Brother Stevens? You'll try and bring all to rights.”

“Rely upon me to do what I can;—to do my best.”

“Well, that's as much as any man can do, and I'm sure
I'll be so happy—we shall all be so much indebted to
you.”

“Do not speak of it, my dear madam,” said Stevens,
bowing with profound deference as the old lady took her
departure. She went off with light heart, having great faith
in the powers of the holy man, and an equal faith in his
sincerity.

“What a bore!” he muttered as he closed the door
behind her. “This is one of the penalties, I suppose,
which I must pay for my privileges. I shall be called upon
to reform the morals and manners, and look into the petty
cares of every chuckle-headed boor, and boor's brat for ten
miles round. See why boys reject their mush, and why
the girls dislike to listen to the exhortations of a mamma,
who requires them to leave undone what she has done
herself—and with sufficient reason too, if her own experience
be not wholly profitless. Well, I must submit. There
are advantages, however; I shall have other pupils to tutor,
and it shall go hard with me if all the grapes prove sour
where the vines are so various.”

The student of divinity, after these conclusions, prepared
to make his toilet. Very few of these students, in their
extreme solicitude for the well being of the inner man,
show themselves wholly regardless of his externals. Even
mourning, it appears, requires to be disposed by a fashionble
costumier. Though the garments to which the necessities
of travel limited Brother Stevens were not various,
they were yet select. The good young man had an
affection for his person, which was such certainly as to
deserve his care. On this occasion he was more than
usually particular. He did not scruple to discard the white
cravat. For this he substituted a handkerchief which had
the prettiest sprig of lilac, on a ground of the most delicate
lemon colour. He consulted complexions, and his mirror
determined him in favour of this pattern. Brother Stevens
would not have worn it had he been summoned, in his
new vocation, to preach or pray at the conventicle; nor
would he have dreamed of any thing but a black stock had

his business been to address the democracy from the top
of a cider barrel. His habits, under such necessities, would
have been made to correspond with the principles (Qu?)
which such a situation more distinctly called for. But
the thoughts of our worthy brother ran upon other
objects. He was thinking of Margaret Cooper. He
was about to pay that damsel a visit. His progress, we
may suppose, had not been inconsiderable when we are
told that his present visit was one of previous arrangement.
They were about to go forth on a ramble together—the
woods were so wild and lovely—the rocks surrounding
Charlemont were so very picturesque;—there was the
quietest tarn, a sort of basin in the bosom of the hills at
a little distance, which she was to show him; and there
was the sweeteet stream in the world, that meandered in
the neighbourhood; and Brother Stevens so loved the
picturesque,—lakes embosomed in hills, and streams stealing
through unbroken forests, and all so much the more
devotedly, when he had such a companion as Margaret
Cooper. And Margaret Cooper!—she the wild, the impassioned.
A dreamer—a muse—filled with ambitious
thoughts—proud, vain, aspiring after the vague, the unfathomable!
What was her joy, now that she could
speak her whole soul, with all its passionate fulness, to
understanding ears! Stevens and herself had already
spoken together. Her books had been his books. The
glowing passages which she loved to repeat, were also the
favourite passages in his memory. Over the burning and
thrilling strains of Byron, the tender and spiritual of Shelley,
the graceful and soft of Campbell, she loved to linger.
They filled her thoughts. They made thoughts. She
felt that her true utterance lay in their language; and this
language, until now, had fallen dead and without fruit upon
the dull ears of her companions in Charlemont. What was
their fiddling and festivity to her! What their tedious
recreations by hillside or stream, when she had to depress
her speech to the base levels of their unimaginative souls!
The loveliness of nature itself, unrepresented by the glowing
hues of poetry, grew tame, if not offensive; and when
challenged to its contemplation by those to whom the
muse was nothing, the fancy of the true observer grew
chilled and heavy, and the scenes of beauty seemed prostituted
in their glance. We have all felt this. Nothing can
more annoy the soul of taste or sensibility than to behold
its favourite scene and subject fail of awakening in others
that emotion which it has inspired in ourselves. We turn
away in haste lest the object of our worship should become
degraded by a longer survey. Enthusiasm recoils at a
denial of sympathy, and all the worth of our companion,
in a thousand other respects, fails to reconcile us to his
coldness and indifference.

That Alfred Stevens had taste and talent—that he was
well read in the volumes which had been her favourite
study, Margaret Cooper needed no long time to discover.
She soon ascribed to him qualities and tastes which were
beyond his nature. Deceived by his tact, she believed in
his enthusiasm. He soon discovered her tastes; and she
found equally soon, that his were like her own. After this
discovery she gave him credit for other and more important
possessions; and little dreamed, that while he responded
to her glowing sentiments with others equally glowing,—avowed
the same love for the same authors, and
concurred with her in the preference of the same passages,
—his feelings were as little susceptible of sympathy with
hers as would have been those of the cold demon Mephistophles.
While her eye was flashing, her cheek flushed,
her breast heaving with the burning thoughts and strains of
the master to which her beautiful lips were giving utterance,
he was simply sensible to her beauty,—to its strange
wild charms; and meditating thoughts from which the soul
of true poetry recoils with the last feelings of aversion.
Even the passion which he felt while he surveyed her,—
foreign as it was to those legitimate emotions which her
ambition and her genius would equally have tended to
inspire in any justly-minded nature,—might well be considered
frigid,—regarded as the result of deliberate artifice,
—the true offspring of a habitual and base indulgence.

It was to meet this unsophisticated, impassioned and
confiding girl, that Alfred Stevens bestowed such particular
pains on his costume. He felt its deficiencies, and, accordingly,
the necessity of making the most of it; for, though
he perfectly well knew that such a woman as Margaret
Cooper would have been the very last to regard the mere
garment in which a congenial nature is arrayed, yet, he
also well knew that the costume is not less indicative of
the tastes, than the wealth of the wearer. You will see
thousands of persons, men and women, richly dressed, and

but one will be well dressed,—that one, most generally,
will be the individual who is perhaps of all others possessed
of the least resources for dress, other than those which
dwell in the well arranged mind, the well disposing taste,
and the happy, crowning fancy. His tasks were at length
ended, and he was preparing to go forth. He was about
to leave the chamber, had already placed his hand upon the
latch of the door, when he heard the voice of his hostess,
on the stairway, in seeming expostulation with her son.
He was about to forbear his purpose of departure until the
parties had retired, when remembering the solicitude of
the lady, and thinking it would show that zeal in her
service which he really could not entertain, he determined
at once to join the young man, and begin with him that
certain degree of intimacy without which it could scarcely
be supposed that he could broach the subject of his personal
affairs. He felt some what the awkwardness of this assumed
duty, but then he recollected his vocation;—he knew
the paramount influence of the clergy upon all classes of
persons in the west, and with the conscious superiority
derived from greater years and better education, he felt
himself fortified in undertaking the paternal office which
the fond, foolish mother had confided to his hands. Accordingly,
descending the stairs briskly, he joined the two at
the entrance of the dwelling The son was already on
the outside; the mother stood in the doorway, and as
Stevens appeared and drew nigh, William Hinkley bowed,
and turned away as if to withdraw.

“If you have no objections, Mr. Hinkley,” said Stevens,
“I will join you. You seem to be about to go my
way.”

The young man paused with an air of reluctance, muttered
something which was not altogether intelligible, but
which Stevens construed into assent; and the two set forth
together;—the good old matron giving a glance of gratitude
to the benevolent young student which her son did not ail
to note, while, at the same time, a sentence which evidently
conveyed some motherly rebuke, was addressed to his
already irritated ears.