 | Inklings of adventure |  |
TOM FANE AND I.
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.”
Shelley.
Tom Fane's four Canadian ponies were whizzing
his light phaeton through the sand at a rate that would
have put spirits into any thing but a lover absent from
his mistress. The “heaven-kissing” pines towered on
every side like the thousand and one columns of the
Palæologi at Constantinople; their flat and spreading
tops shutting out the light of heaven almost as effectually
as the world of Mussulmen, mosques, kiosks,
bazaars, and Giaours sustained on those innumerable
capitals, darkens the subterranean wonder of Stamboul.
An American pine forest is as like a temple,
and a sublime one, as any dream that ever entered into
the architectural brain of the slumbering Martin.
The Yankee methodists, in their camp-meetings, have
but followed an irresistible instinct to worship God in
the religious dimness of these interminable aisles of
the wilderness.
Tom Fane and I had stoned the storks together in
the palace of Crœsus at Sardis. We had read Anastasius
We had burned with fig fevers in the same caravanserai
at Smyrna. We had cooled our hot foreheads
and cursed the Greeks in emulous Romaic in the dim
tomb of Agamemnon at Argos. We had been grave
at Paris, and merry at Rome; and we had pic-nic'd
with the beauties of the Fanar in the valley of Sweet
Waters in pleasant Roumelia; and when, after parting
in France, he had returned to England and his regiment,
and I to New England and law, whom should I
meet in a summer's trip to the St. Lawrence but Captain
Tom Fane of the — —th, quartered at the cliff-perched
and doughty garrison of Quebec, and ready
for any “lark” that would vary the monotony of duty!
Having eaten seven mess dinners, driven to the
Falls of Montmorenci, and paid my respects to Lord
Dalhousie, the hospitable and able Governor of the
Canadas, Quebec had no longer a temptation, and
obeying a magnet, of which more anon, I announced
to Fane that my traps were packed, and my heart sent
on a l'avant courier, to Saratoga.
“Is she pretty?” said Tom.
“As the starry-eyed Circassian we gazed at through
the grill in the slave-market at Constantinople!”
(Heaven and my mistress forgive me for the comparison!—but
it conveyed more to Tom Fane than a folio
of more respectful similitudes.)
“Have you any objection to be drawn to your lady-love
by four cattle that would buy the soul of Osbaldiston?”
“`Objection!' quotha?”
The next morning four double-jointed and well-groomed
ponies were munching their corn in the bow
of a steamer, upon the St. Lawrence, wondering possibly
what, in the name of Bucephalus, had set the
hills and churches flying at such a rate down the river.
The hills and churches came to a stand-still with the
and put to their mettle for some twenty miles, where
they were destined to be astonished by a similar flying
phenomenon in the mountains girding the lengthening
waters of Lake Champlain. Landed at Ticonderoga,
a few miles trot brought them to Lake George and a
third steamer, and, with a winding passage among
green islands and overhanging precipices loaded like a
harvest wagon with vegetation, we made our last landing
on the edge of the pine-forest, where our story
opens.
“Well, I must object,” says Tom, setting his whip
in the socket and edging round upon his driving box,
“I must object to this republican gravity of yours. I
should take it for melancholy, did I not know it was
the `complexion' of your never-smiling countrymen.”
“Spare me, Tom! `I see a hand you cannot see.'
Talk to your ponies, and let me be miserable if you
love me.”
“For what, in the name of common sense? Are
you not within five hours of your mistress? Is not
this cursed sand your natal soil? Do not
Old songs with new gladness?'
together, were you ever before grave,
sad, or sulky? and will you without a precedent, and
you a lawyer, inflict your stupidity upon me for the
first time in this waste and being-less solitude? Half
an hour more of the dread silence of this forest, and
it will not need the horn of Astolpho to set me irremediably
mad!”
“If employment will save your wits, you may invent
a scheme for marrying the son of a poor gentleman
to the ward of a rich trader in rice and molasses.”
“The programme of our approaching campaign, I
presume?”
“Simply.”
“Is the lady willing?”
“I would fain believe so?”
“Is Mr. Popkins unwilling?”
“As the most romantic lover could desire.”
“And the state of the campaign?”
“Why thus. Mr. George Washington Jefferson
Frump, whom you have irreverently called Mr. Popkins,
is sole guardian to the daughter of a dead West
Indian planter, of whom he was once the agent. I fell
in love with Kate Lorimer from description, when she
was at school with my sister, saw her by favor of a
garden-wall, and after the usual vows—”
“Too romantic for a Yankee, by half!”
“—Proposed by letter to Mr. Frump.”
“Oh, bathos!”
“He refused me.”
“Because—”
“Imprimis, I was not myself in the `Sugar line,' and
in secundis, my father wore gloves and `did nothing
for a living,'—two blots in the eyes of Mr. Frump,
which all the waters of Niagara would never wash from
my escutcheon.”
“And what the devil hindered you from running off
with her?”
“Fifty shares in the Manhattan Insurance Company,
a gold mine in Florida, heaven knows how many hogsheads
of treacle, and a million of acres on the banks
of the Missouri.”
“`Pluto's flame-colored daughter' defend us! what
a living El Dorado!”
“All of which she forfeits if she marries without old
Frump's consent.”
“I see—I see! And this Io and her Argus are now
drinking the waters at Saratoga?”
“Even so.”
“I'll bet you my four-in-hand to a sonnet, that I get
her for you before the season is over.”
“Money and all?”
“Mines, molasses, and Missouri acres!”
“And if you do, Tom, I'll give you a team of Virginian
bloods that would astonish Ascot, and throw you
into the bargain a forgiveness for riding over me with
your camel on the banks of the Hermus.”
“Santa Maria! do you remember that spongy foot
stepping over your frontispiece? I had already cast
my eyes up to Mont Sypilus to choose a clean niche
for you out of the rock-hewn tombs of the kings of
Lydia. I thought you would sleep with Alyattis,
Phil!”
We dashed on through dark forest and open clearing,
through glens of tangled cedar and wild vine, over
log bridges, corduroy marshes and sand-hills, till, towards
evening, a scattering shanty or two, and an occasional
sound of a woodman's axe, betokened our
vicinity to Saratoga. A turn around a clump of tall
pines brought us immediately into the broad street of
the village, and the flaunting shops, the overgrown, unsightly
hotels, riddled with windows like honeycombs,
the fashionable idlers out for their evening lounge to
the waters, the indolent smokers on the colonnades,
and the dusty and loaded coaches driving from door to
door in search of lodgings, formed the usual evening
picture of the Bath of America.
As it was necessary to Tom's plan that my arrival
at Saratoga should not be known, he pulled up at a
small tavern at the entrance of the street, and dropping
me and my baggage, drove on to Congress Hall,
with my best prayers, and a letter of introductionh to
my sister, whom I had left on her way to the Springs
with a party at my departure for Montreal. Unwilling
to remain in such a tantalizing vicinity, I hired a
Tom, drove to seek a retreat at Barhydt's---a spot that
cannot well be described in the tail of a paragraph.
Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the
mineral springs of Saratoga were discovered some five
miles from his door, was buried in the depth of a forest
solitude, unknown to all but the prowling Indian. The
sky is supported above him (or looks to be) by a wilderness
of straight, columnar pine-shafts, gigantic in
girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where they
branch out like round tables spread for a banquet in
the clouds. A small ear-shaped lake, sunk as deep
into the earth as the firs shoot above it, black as Erebus
in the dim shadow of its hilly shore and the obstructed
light of the trees that nearly meet over it, and
clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl-spots
of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the
blue eye of heaven that peers through the leafy vault,
sleeps beneath his window; and, around him in the
forest lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet
of the faded pine tassels, deposited in yearly layers
since the continent rose from the flood, and rooted a
foot beneath the surface to a rich mould that would
fatten the Symplegades to a flower-garden. With his
black tarn well stocked with trout, his bit of a farm
in the clearing near by, and an old Dutch Bible, Herr
Barhydt lived a life of Dutch musing, talked Dutch to
his geese and chickens, sung Dutch psalms to the
echoes of the mighty forest, and, except on his far-between
visits to Albany, which grew rarer and rarer
as the old Dutch inhabitants dropped faster away, saw
never a white human face from one maple-blossoming
to another.
A roving mineralogist tasted the waters of Saratoga,
and, like the work of a lath-and-plaster Aladdin, up
sprung a thriving village around the fountain's lip, and
hotels, tin tumblers and apothecaries, multiplied in the
with every thing else for rapidity. Libraries,
newspapers, churches, livery stables, and lawyers, followed
in their train, and it was soon established, from
the plains of Abraham to the Savannahs of Alabama,
that no person of fashionable taste or broken constitution
could exist through the months of July and August
without a visit to the chalybeate springs and populous
village of Saratoga. It contained seven thousand
inhabitants before Herr Barhydt, living in his
wooded seclusion only five miles off, became aware of
its existence. A pair of lovers, philandering about the
forest on horseback, popped in upon him one June
morning, and thenceforth there was no rest for the
soul of the Dutchman. Every body rode down to eat
his trout and make love in the dark shades of his mirrored
lagoon, and at last, in self-defence, he added a
room or two to his shanty, enclosed his cabbage-garden,
and put a price upon his trout-dinners. The
traveler now-a-days who has not dined at Barhydt's
with his own champagne cold from the tarn, and the
white-headed old settler “gargling” Dutch about the
house, in his manifold vocation of cook, ostler, and
waiter, may as well not have seen Niagara.
Installed in the back-chamber of the old man's last
addition to his house, with Barry Cornwall and Elia,
(old fellow-travelers of mine,) a rude chair, a ruder,
but clean bed, and a troop of thoughts so perpetually
from home, that it mattered very little what was the
complexion of anything about me, I waited Tom's operations
with a lover's usual patience. Barhydt's visitors
seldom arrived before two or three o'clock, and the
long, soft mornings, quiet as a shadowy Elysium on the
rim of that ebon lake, were as solitary as a melancholy
man could desire. Didst thou but know, oh! gentle
Barry Cornwall, how gratefully thou hast been read
and mused upon in those dim and whispering aisles of
smoky whereabout, methinks it would warm up the
flush of pleasure around thine eyelids, though the
“golden-tressed Adelaide” were waiting her good-night
kisses at thy knee!
I could stand it no longer. On the second evening
of my seclusion, I made bold to borrow old Barhydt's
superannuated roadster, and getting up the steam with
infinite difficulty in his rickety engine, higgled away
with a pace to which I could not venture to affix a
name, to the gay scenes of Saratoga.
It was ten o'clock when I dismounted at the stable
in Congress Hall, and, giving der Teufel, as the old
man ambitiously styled his stee, to the hands of the
ostler, stole round through the garden to the eastern
colonnade.
I feel called upon to describe “Congress Hall.”
Some fourteen or fifteen millions of white gentlemen
and ladies consider that wooden and windowed Babylon
as the proper Palace of Delight—a sojourn to be
sighed for, and sacrificed for, and economised for—
the birth-place of Love, the haunt of Hymen, the
arena of fashion—a place without which a new lease
of life were valueless—for which, if the conjuring cap
of King Erricus itself could not furnish a season ticket,
it might lie on a lady's toilet as unnoticed as a bride's
night-cap a twelvemonth after marriage. I say to myself,
sometimes, as I pass the window at White's, and
see a worldsick worldling with the curl of satiety
and disgust on his lip, wondering how the next hour
will come to its death, “If you but knew, my friend,
what a campaign of pleasure you are losing in America—what
belles than the bluebell slighter and fairer—
what hearts than the dew-drops fresher and clearer—
are living their pretty hour, like gems undived for in
the ocean—what loads of foliage, what Titans of trees,
what glorious wildernesses of rocks and waters, are
them, and all within the magic circle of which Congress
Hall is the centre, and which a circling dove
would measure to get an appetite for his breakfast—if
you but knew this, my Lord, as I know it, you would
not be gazing so vacantly on the steps of Crockford's,
nor consider `the greybeard' such a laggard in his
hours!”
Congress Hall is a wooden building, of which the
size and capacity could never be definitely ascertained.
It is built on a slight elevation, just above the strongly
impregnated spring whose name it bears, with little attempt
at architecture, save a spacious and vine-covered
colonnade, serving as a promenade on either side, and
two wings, the extremities of which are lost in the distance.
A relic or two of the still-astonished forest
towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy
group of firs; and, five minutes' walk from the
door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on
the village in its primeval grandeur, like the spirits of
the wronged Indians, whose tracks are scarce vanished
from the sand. In the strength of the summer solstice,
from five hundred to a thousand people dine together
at Congress Hall, and after absorbing as many
bottles of the best wines of the world, a sunset promenade
plays the valve to the sentiment thus generated,
and, with a cup of tea, the crowd separates to dress
for the nightly ball. There are several other hotels
in the village, equally crowded and equally spacious,
and the ball is given alternately at each. Congress
Hall is the “crack” place, however, and I expect that
Mr. Westcott, the obliging proprietor, will give me
the preference of rooms, on my next annual visit, for
this just and honorable mention.
The dinner-tables were piled into an orchestra, and
draped with green baize and green wreaths, the floor
of the immense hall was chalked with American flags
the band were playing a waltz in a style that made
the candles quiver, and the pines tremble audibly in
their tassels. The ball-room was on the ground floor,
and the colonnade upon the garden side was crowded
with spectators, a row of grinning black fellows edging
the cluster of heads at every window, and keeping
time with their hands and feet in the irresistible sympathy
of their music-loving natures. Drawing my hat
over my eyes, I stood at the least-thronged window,
and concealing my face in the curtain, waited impatiently
for the appearance of the dancers.
The bevy in the drawing-room was sufficiently
strong at last, and the lady patronesses, handed in by
a state Governor or two, and here and there a Member
of Congress, achieved the entree with their usual
intrepidity. Followed beaux, and followed belles.
Such belles! Slight, delicate, fragile-looking creatures,
elegant as Retzsch's angels, warm-eyed as Mahommedan
houris, yet timid as the antelope whose
hazel orbs they eclipse, limbed like nothing earthly
except an American woman—I would rather not go
on! When I speak of the beauty of my country-women
my heart swells. I do believe the new world
has a newer mould for its mothers and daughters. I
think I am not prejudiced. I have been years away.
I have sighed in France; I have loved in Italy; I
have bargained for Circassians in an Eastern bezestein,
and I have lounged at Howell and James's on a
sunny day in the season; and my eye is trained and
my perceptions quickened—but I do think (honor
bright! and Heath's Book of Beauty forgiving me)
that there is no such beautiful work of God under the
arch of the sky as an American girl in her bellehood.
Enter Tom Fane in a Stultz coat and Sparding
tights, looking as a man who had been the mirror of
leagues from his club-house. She leaned on his arm.
I had never seen her half so lovely. Fresh and calm
from the seclusion of her chamber, her transparent
cheek was just tinged with the first mounting blood,
from the excitement of lights and music. Her lips
were slightly parted, her fine-lined eyebrows were
arched with a girlish surprise, and her ungloved arm
lay carelessly and confidingly within his, as white,
round, and slender as if Canova had wrought it in Parian
for his Pysche. If you have never seen a beauty
of northern blood nurtured in a southern clime, the
cold fairness of her race warmed up as if it had been
steeped in some golden sunset, and her deep blue eye
darkened and filled with a fire as unnaturally resplendant
as the fusion of crysoprase into a diamond, and
if you have never known the corresponding contrast
in the character, the intelligence and constancy of the
north kindling with the enthusiasm and impulse, the
passionateness and the abandon of a more burning latitude,
you have seen nothing, let me insinuate, though
you “have been i' the Indies twice,” that could give
you an idea of Kate Lorimer.
She waltzed, and then Tom danced with my sister,
and then, resigning her to another partner, he offered
his arm again to Miss Lorimer, and left the ball-room
with several other couples for a turn in the fresh air of
the colonnade. I was not jealous, but I felt unpleasantly
at his returning to her so immediately. He was
the handsomest man, out of all comparison, in the
room, and he had dimmed my star too often in our
rambles in Europe and Asia, not to suggest a thought,
at least, that the same pleasant eclipse might occur in
our American astronomy. I stepped off the colonnade,
and took a turn in the garden.
Those “children of eternity,” as Walter Savage
Landor poetically calls “the breezes,” performed their
Tom in my confidence with an heroic effort, and turned
back. A swing hung between two gigantic pines, just
under the balustrade, and flinging myself into the cushioned
seat, I abandoned myself to the musings natural
to a person “in my situation.” The sentimentalizing
promenaders lounged backwards and forwards above
me, and not hearing Tom's drawl among them, I presumed
he had returned to the ball-room. A lady and
gentleman, walking in silence, stopped presently, and
leaned upon the railing opposite the swing. They
stood a moment, looking into the dim shadow of the
pine-grove, and then a voice, that I knew better than
my own, remarked in a low and silvery tone upon the
beauty of the night.
She was not answered, and after a moment's pause,
as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted,
she turned very earnestly to her companion, and asked,
“Are you sure, quite sure, that you could venture to
marry without a fortune?”
“Quite, dear Miss Lorimer!”
I started from the swing, but before the words of execration
that rushed choking from my heart could
struggle to my lips, they had mingled with the crowd
and vanished.
I strode down the garden-walk in a frenzy of passion.
Should I call him immediately to account?
Should I rush into the ball-room and accuse him of his
treachery to her face? Should I drown myself in old
Barhydt's tarn, or join an Indian tribe and make war
upon the whites?—or should I—could I—be magnanimous—and
write him a note immediately, offering to
be his groomsman at the wedding?
I stepped into the punch-room, asked for pen, ink,
and paper, and indited the following note:—
“If your approaching nuptials are to be sufficiently
public to admit of a groomsman, you will make me the
happiest of friends by selecting me for that office.
Having despatched it to his room, I flew to the stable,
roused der Teufel, who had gathered up his legs in the
straw for the night, flogged him furiously out of the
village, and giving him the rein as he entered the forest,
enjoyed the scenery in the humor of mad old Hieronymo
in the Spanish tragedy:—“the moon dark, the
stars extinct, the winds blowing, the owls shrieking,
the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock
striking twelve!”'
Early the next day Tom's “tiger” dismounted at
Barhydt's door with an answer to my note as follows:
“The devil must have informed you of a secret I
supposed safe from all the world. Be assured I should
have chosen no one but yourself to support me on the
occasion, and however you have discovered my design
upon your treasure, a thousand thanks for your generous
consent. I expected no less from your noble
nature.
materials for the fifth act of our comedy, to-morrow
morning.”
“Comedy!” call you this, Mr. Fane! I felt my
heart turn black as I threw down the letter. After a
thousand plans of revenge formed and abandoned, borrowing
and discharging them again into the air, I flung myself
exhausted on the bed, and reasoned myself back to my
magnanimity. I would be his groomsman!
It was a morning like the burst of a millenium on
the world. I felt as if I should never forgive the birds
for their mocking enjoyment of it. The wild heron
swung up from the reeds, the lotuses shook out their
dew into the lake as the breeze stirred them, and the
senseless old Dutchman sat fishing in his canoe, singing
one of his unintelligible psalms to a quick measure that
half maddened me. I threw myself upon the yielding
floor of pine-tassels on the edge of the lake, and with
the wretched school philosophy, “Si gravis est, brevis
est,” endeavored to put down the tempest of my
feelings.
A carriage rattled over the little bridge, mounted the
ascent rapidly, and brought up at Barhydt's door.
“Phil!” shouted Tom, “Phil!”
I gulped down a choking sensation in my throat, and
rushed up the bank to him. A stranger was dismounting
from his horse.
“Quick!” said Tom, shaking my hand hurriedly,
“there is no time to lose. Out with your inkhorn,
Mr. Poppletree, and have your papers signed while I
tie up my ponies.”
“What is this, Sir?” said I, starting back as the
stranger deliberately presented me with a paper, in
which my own name was written in conspicuous letters.
The magistrate gazed at me with a look of astonishment.
“A contract of marriage, I think, between
Mr. Philip Slingsby and Miss Katherine Lorimer, spinster.
Are you the gentleman named in that instrument,
Sir?”
At this moment my sister, leading the blushing girl
by the hand, came and threw her arms about my neck,
together.
There are some pure moments in this life that description
would only profane.
We were married by the village magistrate in that
magnificent sanctuary of the forest, old Barhydt and
his lotuses the only indifferent witnesses of vows as
passionate as ever trembled upon human lips.
I had scarce pressed her to my heart and dashed the
tears from my eyes, when Fane, who had looked more
at my sister than at the bride during the ceremony, left
her suddenly, and thrusting a roll of parchment into
my pocket, ran off to bring up his ponies. I was on
the way to Saratoga, a married man, and my bride on
the seat beside me, before I had recovered from my astonishment.
“Pray,” said Tom, “if it be not an impertinent
question, and you can find breath in your ecstasies,
how did you find out that your sister had done me the
honor to accept the offer of my hand?”
The resounding woods rung with his unmerciful
laughter at the explanation.
“And pray,” said I, in my turn, “if it is not an impertinent
question, and you can find a spare breath in
your ecstasies, by what magic did you persuade old
Frump to trust his ward and her title-deeds in your
treacherous keeping?”
“It is a long story, my dear Phil, and I will give you
the particulars when you pay me the `Virginia bloods'
you wot of. Suffice it for the present, that Mr. Frump
believes Mr. Tom Fane (alias Jacob Phipps, Esq.,
sleeping partner of a banking-house at Liverpool) to
be the accepted suitor of his fair ward. In his extreme
delight at seeing her in so fair a way to marry into a
bank, he generously made her a present of her own
fortune, signed over his right to control it by a document
in your possession, and will undergo as agreeable
excitement could desire.”
The ponies dashed on. The sandy ascent by the
Pavilion Spring was surmounted, and in another minute
we were at the door of Congress Hall. The last
stragglers from the breakfast-table were lounging down
the colonnade, and old Frump sat reading the newspaper
under the portico.
“Aha! Mr. Phipps,” said he, as Tom drove up,
“back so soon, eh? Why, I thought you and Kitty
would be billing it till dinner-time!”
“Sir!” said Tom, very gravely, “you have the honor
of addressing Captain Thomas Fane, of his Majesty's
—th Fusileers, and whenever you have a moment's
leisure I shall be happy to submit to your perusal a
certificate of the marriage of Miss Katherine Lorimer
to the gentleman I have the pleasure to present to you.
Mr. Frump, Mr. Slingsby!”
At the mention of my name, the blood in Mr.
Frump's ruddy complexion turned suddenly to the color
of the Tiber. Poetry alone can express the feeling
pictured in his countenance:—
Should creep, each one with a particular life,
Yet all as cold as ever—'twas just so:
Or had it drizzled needle-points of frost,
Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald.”
George Washington Jefferson Frump, Esq., left
Congress Hall the same evening, and has since ungraciously
refused an invitation to Captain Fane's wedding—possibly
from his having neglected to invite him
on a similar occasion at Saratoga. This last, however,
I am free to say, is a gratuitous supposition of my own.
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