University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.

In one of the merchant palaces of the gay city
near which we have laid the principal scenes of our
narrative, dwelt Richard Langdale, between whom
and Pinckney, it was not necessary to mention it before,
there had grown up a close intimacy. Whenever
Pinckney went to the city he spent his time
chiefly with Langdale, and though their characters
in many points were entirely different, yet there was
something in each that deeply interested the other.
Perhaps the difference in their ages, pursuits, and opinions,
gave more zest to their friendship than if the
affinities between them had been apparently closer.
It is often as difficult to account for the impulses of
friendship as for those of love, and those of the last
we know are of such unaccountable characteristics
that the deity who controls them is painted blind.

When he heard of Pinckney's misfortune he visited
him daily, taking the surgeon in his carriage with him;
and as soon as Pinckney could suffer a removal, Mr.
Langdale had him borne to apartments in his own

house in the city, where he could have every advantage
of medical attendance.

Pinckney suffered more from weakness, and consequent
nervous irritability, than from his wound,
which was healing very fast. He was oppressed
with low spirits, which Langdale exerted all his conversational
talents to remove. Pinckney was one
day so struck with his powers in this respect that he
said:

“Langdale, pardon me if I compliment you at the
expense of your vocation; but really you are an exception
to the generality of merchants. I know that
you have held high political stations, and I wonder
merchants do not oftener aspire to them.”

“Well, that is a wonder, for it can be shown that
some of the leading men in the tide of time were merchants.
Think how much commerce has done for the
world! How much the world is indebted for its enlightenment
to commerce. And surely there is as much
liberality among merchants as among any other class.
I venture to say this, that merchants, take them as a
body, are as conversant upon the general matters and
concerns of men, apart from professional subjects, as
either the professors of medicine or law.”

“I am inclined to think you are correct,” said
Pinckney. “Yet you are generally self-made men.”

“Not more so than the generality of lawyers or
doctors.”

“You have more of a professional air,” said Pinckney,
“have you not?”

This remark Pinckney felt did not apply to his
friend, for Langdale possessed remarkably the air of
a man of the world. His address was polished and
easy, and his person very handsome. His eye was
brightly blue; his nose well formed; his lips full but
expressive; and his forehead high, a slight baldness

made it appear higher than it really was. This, with
the wrinkles which began to gather about the eye,
and as yet only gave to it a shrewd expression, denoted
to the observer that Mr. Langdale had reached
the meridian of life,

“Why, there is an air of great precision about your
thoroughbred merchant,” replied Langdale to Pinckney's
remark, “but not more so than that of the physician,
to say nothing of the lawyer.”

“Precision certainly is not the characteristic of
the lawyer?”

“No, it is not,” replied Langdale, “a free air, and
an affectation of bustle and business mark them.
Doctors are the most precise race in the world, with
the gravest faces. We naturally take our hue from
the associations to which we are most accustomed,
and as doctors see more death-scenes than anything
else, their phizes are gravitated, accordingly look
like death-heads. A bank clerk has generally a precise
air, they are generally very cleanly in their persons.
Bank hours are closer kept by them than the trysting
time with their lady-love. Instead of the poet
saying, `punctual as lovers to the moment sworn,' he
should have said, punctual as bank clerk to the hour
of opening. All those connected with banks are
generally courteous but prim. It has been to me a
source of no small amusement to look around and
mark the difference that professions make in the character.
At the same time, how amusing to observe
individual traits in spite of habits long engendered,
and the enforced routine showing themselves and
marking the man from the mass.”

“Do you think a city life makes a man better?”

“Yes; in the qualities of the rat and the wolf, who
congregate to prowl and to plunder. You and I,
Pinckney, have looked on life from different positions
and associations—now, I'll lay my life, you believe in

such poetic things as disinterested friendship and devoted
love?”

“Why, yes; I hold,” said Pinckney, “that such things
have been—are, in fact; but I don't believe they are
plants that grow spontaneous in every soil.”

“You have been in love, then?”

Pinckney really blushed. After a slight hesitancy,
he said, “Yes; I have been in love;” and then in a
lighter tone he added, “that is, I fancied myself in
love; do you believe a man may love twice?”

“Why not! Yes, I think every man of ardent
imagination and southern temperament, like you, who
has led a life of easy indolence, which give the
passions the full play of rumination and imagination,
has indulged, ere he arrives at your age, in scores of
`fancies,' as a boarding-school Miss would say; has
perhaps, done all he could in the power of indolence
to nurse a little cross of the kind into a sullen misanthropical
despair.”

Pinckney laughed. It was not a happy laugh,
but the laugh of rumination whose retrospection was
not all sunshine.

Langdale observed it; but without noticing it,
said:

“My life has been somewhat an odd one. The
links of events in it have not been all bright ones;
there are a great many hard knots in the chain.
Love! ha! I fancied myself in love once; maybe I
was. I'll tell it to you—there is a moral in it; but
situated as you are, I do not think its point will be of
any service to you; but it may amuse you. I am,”
said Langdale, with a smile of self-complacency upon
the lip, but with something disagreeable upon the
brow, which plainly told that the present could not entirely
gild the past. “I am entirely a self-made man.
I take a pride in it, Howard, notwithstanding the
pain this self-making gives in the operation. How

we shrink from pain when enduring it; yet the fact that
we have endured has pleasure in it. I am the youngest
of five children; my father died when I was fourteen,
leaving us nothing but an honest name, and poverty
to the lips. I had three brothers and one sister,
she next to me, and I loved her with the devotion of my
whole heart, more than all the rest of my family
together. My brothers were men grown, but they
hung loose upon society; and it was plain even to me,
then a boy, that their lives, if not criminal, would be
obscure, and their ends wretched. My father was a
merchant in a very large business, and by indorsements
became a bankrupt to an immense amount a
short time before he died. In fact, it killed him.
While he was reputed wealthy my brothers lived in
fashionable prodigality, and after his death—but no
matter, I need not dwell upon them; two of them are
dead, and the other, after scenes which I will not rehearse,
went to sea, a sailor, before the mast—I have not
heard of him since. My mother was compelled to
keep boarders; and my sister, then in the bloom of
beauty, and she was beautiful, was reduced from being
a leading belle, with high expectations, to the drudgery
of assisting my mother in the menial offices about the
house. I was almost the servant of the boarders.
Faith, Pinckney, the very heart of boyhood is corrupt.
The youths of expectations about town, my former
associates, knew me no more. Then it was that the
iron entered into my soul. To make the bitterness
still more bitter, an adventurer, a boarder in our house,
won the affection of my sister, married, and left her
in a month. A year afterwards my mother and myself
were almost the only attendants on her funeral.
My mother did not long survive my beloved sister.
While she was lying on her death-bed the officers of
the law entered her room, with an execution at the
suit of the livery stable keeper from whom the hearse
for my sister's funeral had been hired. My poor
mother looked at me when she heard the purpose of the
intruder, and said, in the very bitterness of her soul,
`My child, it will not cost much for my funeral, there is
no one to attend it but yourself. Oh, God!' she added,
in an altered tone, `that I should leave you so destitute:'
saying which she covered her eyes, as if to shut
from them some terrible sight, murmured a prayer,
cast on me a glance of unutterable wo, and never
spoke after.”

Langdale rose, and paced the apartment, hurriedly,
several times, and then stopping by the couch of
Pinckney, he said:

“'Tis strange that I should call up these things
after so many years have transpired, and after striving
so long to forget them. What an intense egotism
there is in our very sorrows, Pinckney. I pass over
my mother's funeral. How often in a melancholy,
if not misanthropical moment like the present, I have
wished that I had passed away with it, and had been
placed by the side of my mother and sister. You
know for what a worldly man I am taken by the mass,
for a cold, callous, wordly man. I hope I am mistaken
in my species as much as they are mistaken in
me. `Ha!' as Voltaire said after expressing a good
opinion of Haller, and on being told that Haller had
not expressed a good one of him: `Perhaps we are
both mistaken.' That's a good sarcasm upon my
egotism—hey, is it not?”

“A Scotch merchant, a friend of my father's, not
one of those for whom he had indorsed, but one who
had advised him against his frequent indorsements,
and with whom my father quarrelled on that account,
with the request that he would mind his own business—
this friend, a merchant, took me home with him. He
domesticated me in his own family, and after giving
me schooling sufficient to render me a good accountant

he placed me as a clerk into his counting-room.
He had a daughter, Pinckney, two years my
elder; a fat, tumid creature, who considered herself a
beauty upon the principle of the Chinese, with whom
bulk is beauty. She was as vain and envious as she
was protuberant, and malignant as Zantippe. I was
attentive to her, of course; my duty to my benefactor
required that I should be, and I never, I hope, have
wanted gallantry. A fellow clerk of mine had a
beautiful sister about my age. He and I were
intimate, and I frequently visited him at the house of
his parents, who were poor, and in the lower walks
of life. With his sister, Henrietta, I fell in love, but
while the insidious passion crept over me, my worldly
interest, like a fiend at my elbow, or like a better
prompter, as many would say, was perpetually reminding
me of the opportunity of wealth there was
in the winning of Mr. Churchill's daughter, Miss
Clarissa Churchill. The lady, the while, accepted
my attentions when there were no other beaux present:
she made me her convenience. The old gentleman
thought he perceived a growing affection
between us, and one day with the most benevolent
and fatherly feelings he broadly hinted to me that he
was pleased to see how matters were going; and that
if I continued to please him as I had done, when I
became of age he would take me into business with
him.

That very night I visited Henrietta—she never
looked lovelier. A rival of mine was by her side, and
she seemed not indifferent to his attentions; you know
the ways of women. I out sat him; and when he had
gone I told my tale of love, and was accepted. I had
hardly left the house, with her kisses glowing on my
lips, when this worldly fiend I wot of, whispered me
what a fool I was. On entering Mr. Churchill's house
there was Miss Clarissa, looking the full consciousness

of her powers, and surrounded by a whole bevy of
beaux. Success with Henrietta had elated my feelings,
given me a strange excitement, and I joined in the
conversation with a gaiety and wit, if you will pardon
the vanity of the phrase, which was not usual to me.
At the same time I did not display that devotion to
the lady, which at all other times I had been most
studious of practising. Here, now; behold the foul inconsistencies
of human nature, or rather, not to libel
human nature, of my nature. My master this very
day had as much as told me that he wished my alliance
with his daughter. That alliance, whenever I
thought it a matter of impossibility, I looked to as the
greatest advancement that could happen to me—yet
here was I indifferent to the lady, and, to tell the truth,
not so much from thinking of the one I had won, as
that there was not such a great difficulty after all in
winning the other. I am laying bare not the most
honourable impulses in the world to you, Pinckney;
but I believe I share them with the rest of my species,
and thus divide the burden, and lessen the infamy.

“My new manner to the lady piqued her to the core; I
saw it instantly, and felt my advantage. She thought me
one she could play on and off ad libitum; and that she
held me as a cat does a harmless mouse, which she
could torment to death if it pleased her. She deemed
herself a very hero, and me, a Leander, I suppose, who
would have braved the Hellespont, or deeper difficulties,
to win her. Oh! the wrath of a woman, and
such a woman, when she finds herself at fault in such
a calculation.

“For several days she treated me with high-wrought
indifference, which I bore with the philosophy of a
stoic. Then she relapsed into tenderness, almost tearful
tenderness, and by some promptings of the archenemy
I met her half-way. It was her pride that was
wounded, not her love, and I had my reward—I never

should have acted as I did, had not several debts in
which I had involved myself pressed rather heavily
on me at this juncture, and reminded me forcibly of
the advantages of wealth. When we feel one want
heavily, we forget that we may make sacrifices to
gratify it, which will eventually give more pain than
the relief can possibly afford pleasure.

“Well; I shared my leisure time between Henrietta
and Miss Clarissa Churchill; or rather, I devoted most
of my time to the first, and made the apology of
urgent business as preventing me from devoting more
to the latter.

This state of affairs could not last forever—Henrietta
made her brother, my fellow clerk, her confidant;
and one day Mr. Churchill paid him the same compliment,
and told him that I was addressing his daughter
with his approbation and consent. This was a great
error of my life, as old Franklin would say. Here
was an explosion for you. My fellow clerk, Mr.
Knight, on the instant, informed Mr. Churchill of my
engagement with his sister. He asked me—I did not
deny the fact; he informed his daughter; she said
she scorned me for my base conduct—asserted I had
made love to her over and over again, and but in pity,
and because it was her father's wish, she had thought
of accepting me. I did'nt know that I had addressed
her. However, it was all right. The old gentleman
dismissed me at short warning—I flew to my Henrietta
determined to marry her, and live on love. She
let me down the wind, by informing me that on hearing
of my `perfidy,' she had plighted her faith to my
rival. I quarrelled with her brother on the strength
of it, and nearly added murder to my other virtues;
we fought, and I gave him a desperate wound, and
flew for it. He recovered; and while I was a wanderer
without a sixpence, my kind Clarissa solaced
him for all his suffering by giving my rival her hand—
she now is Mrs. Knight.”

“Mrs. Knight—the lady I know!” exclaimed Pinckney.

“The very she. Knight took my place in the
counting-room, and in the daughter's heart instanter.
A short time afterwards, her hand followed her heart.
Last of all, to end this strange eventful history, the
father's fortune blest their love. There's a tale of
love all round for you, Pinckney, hey—all for love and
a little for the lucre.”

Pinckney smiled. “Upon my word, Langdale, you
are a strange man.”

“No, sir; quite a common-place one.”

“Knight, I know Knight; why he's a very indifferent
fellow.”

“Yes, yes; but it is circumstances, Pinckney, that
have made him so. He has been vegetating upon his
father-in-law's fortune—he suffers as much from the
twitches of gout, as ever I suffered from those of conscience;
and either of the ladies is as happy as I believe
she would have been had she married your
humble servant—and yet we all had our first loves—

“And what became of Henrietta?” asked Pinckney

“She is the happy mother of a host of heroes—
that are to be,” replied Langdale, laughing.

“Go on with your history, Langdale.”

“Some other time. I thought I'd give you this by

way of my experience. Allow me to say this for
myself, though; that afterwards, when Mr. Churchill
became embarrassed, and I had gained a fortune, I
assisted him and saved him from bankruptcy.”

“Do you believe not in love?”

“Not in its martyrdom. Henrietta's conduct shows
you that she had what the world would call towering
pride, and what I would call towering temper. She
leads, I am told, her lord a life of it; had I married
her, we should have realized the happy habitude of
cat and dog, with occasional make-up by way of
variety. They would have come through like sunshine
in a Lapland winter. As for Clarissa, if I had married
her my life would have been a continual mortification
over the flesh and folly of my bride. I like a large
woman, observe you, for my taste is Turkish; but
give me one who has sweetness of disposition, intellectual
cultivation, and ease of manner. I have known
such a one; and were I to tell you about her, I could
prove to you that a second love may be stronger than
the first.”

“Let's hear it.”

“No, no; some other time.”

Pinckney mused in silence, and the conversation
took another turn.