University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

However ruffled I might have been by this event, there was
yet something in it which soothed and satisfied me. The heart
of man is a very selfish substance, even in its impulses of greatest
generosity. Perhaps, in a world, in which so superior and vast
a proportion of the performance depends upon man, it is not unfitting
that it should be so. He must be impelled by influences
of self even to the execution of those social achievements which
would seem to be most universal in their tendencies and aims.
But this is no place to philosophize. It is enough for me to confess
that I found pleasure in the conviction that the unknown
songstress was unhappy, without finding it a cause of unhappiness
to meet my glance—that she dwelt with one who was evidently
not satisfied with her; and with whom—she being the
creature of taste and sensibility which I readily assumed her to
be—she could still less be satisfied. But in what relation did
they stand to one another? This was a mystery to me which
brought with it feelings of disquietude and pain. He was old
enough to be her father. Was he so? I would have given
something—though I knew not wherefore—could I have believed
it. I prayed, unconsciously, that she was not his wife,—

and shuddered, the next moment, with the apprehension that she
might be something less, and something worse.

For two days after this I heard no music, and in all this time
the windows remained closely fastened. I saw nothing of the
songstress;—but the man, to whom I now addressed no moderate
degree of my attention, but whom before, though I had seen, I
had scarcely noted—he went forth as usual, just after my breakfast
hour had been passed. I took the precaution now, to do
my espionage through the blinds of my window, which I kept
as carefully closed as my opposite neighbour. I could see that
his eyes were cast upwards as he passed out and came in, and I
readily conjectured, that, having noted my constant watchfulness
from the window, the quick instinct of jealousy converted
my appearance at night beneath his, into proofs, and

of evil purposes contemplated, and, possibly, evil deeds performed.
Yet, truly, did I mean no evil. At the worst, that susceptible
vanity of the youthful heart which makes it equally
ready to exercise its own, and to believe that the affections of
another are sympathetically awakened, was all my error. The
strange surprise of hearing such music, and seeing such a face, in
such a dwelling, was, perhaps, more than any thing beside, the
source of that interest which the songstress awakened in my
bosom. Had she come and gone, without bringing about the
annoying little incident just mentioned, she would most probably
have been nothing more in my eyes and thought, than any other
among the “sweet singers of Israel.”