2. II.
You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell,
dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of —
(perhaps you don't care about knowing exactly when
it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of
dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on
faster than I). The Springs were thronged. The
president's lady was there (this was under our administration,
the Adams'), and all the four eliques spoken
of above were amicably united—each other's beaux
dancing with each other's belles, and so on. If I were
writing merely for American eyes, I should digress
once more to describe the distinctive characters of the
south, north, and central representations of beauty:
but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I
may say, in passing, that the Boston belles were à
l'Anglaise, rosy and riantes; the New-Yorkers, like
Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy; and the Baltimoreans
(and so south), like Ionians or Romans, indolent,
passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men,
women, and pine-apples, I am inclined to think, flourish
with a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes.
The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it
was—for the parties concerned had the management
of their own affairs; that is, they who had hearts to
sell made the bargain for themselves (this was the
greater number), and they who disposed of this commodity
gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant
of the world, made the transfer in the same manner, in
person. This is your true republic. The trading in
affections by reference—the applying to an old and
selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenuous
one—the swearing to your rents, and not to your
faithful passion—to your settlements, and not your
constancy—the cold distance between yourself and
the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till
the purchase-money is secured—and the hasty marriage
and sudden abandonment of a nature thus
chilled and put on its guard, to a freedom with one
almost a stranger, that can not but seem licentious,
and can not but break down that sense of propriety in
which modesty is most strongly intrenched—this
seems to me the one evil of your old worm-eaten monarchies
this side the water, which touches the essential
happiness of the well-bred individual. Taxation
and oppression are but things he reads of in the morning
paper.
This freedom of intercourse between unmarried
people has a single disadvantage—one gets so desperately
soon to the end of the chapter! There shall be
two hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given
season, and, by the difference in taste so wisely arranged
by Providence, there will scarcely be, of course,
more than four in that number whom any one gentleman
at all difficult will find within the range of his
beau ideal. With these four he may converse freely
twelve hours in the day—more, if he particularly desires
it. They may ride together, drive together, ramble
together, sing together, be together from morning
till night, and at the end of a month passed in this way,
if he escape a committal, as is possible, he will know
all that are agreeable, in one large circle, at least, as well
as he knows his sisters—a state of things that is very
likely to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere
dearth of amusement. I have imagined, however,
the case of an unmarrying idle man, a character too
rare as yet in America to affect the general question.
People marry as they die in that country—when their
time come.
We must all marry is as much an axiom
as we must all die, and eke as melancholy.
Shall we go on with the story? I had escaped for
two blessed weeks, and was congratulating the susceptible
gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we
should never be in love with less than the whole sex
again, when a German Baron Von — arrived at
the Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen,
transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly
dependant, so delicate, so childlike, that attention to
her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as
naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The
only womanly trait about her was her voice, which
was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gentle,
so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melancholy
calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I
turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she
was not the same—as if some impassioned and eloquent
woman had taken unaware the place of the
simple and petted child.
I am inclined to think there is a particular tenderness
in the human breast for lame women. Any
other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous; but
lameness (the devil's defect) is “the devil.” I picture
to myself, to my own eye, now—pacing those rickety
colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging
heavily, and with the dependance inseparable from
her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was
the moon of the Rhine to her, full of thrilling and unearthly
influences) rode solemnly up above the mountain-tops.
And that strange voice filling like a flute
with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregular
pressure of the small wrist in her forgotten lameness,
and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling
as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her
delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that
dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and
womanly passion, of dependance and superiority, of
reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confidence
on every other—if I had not a story to tell, I
could prate of those June nights and their witcheries
till you would think
“Tutti gli alberi del mondo
Fossero penne,”
and myself “bitten by the dipsas.”
We were walking one night late in the gallery running
around the second story of the hotel. There was
a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened
somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and
mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added
to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my
bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta
that I loved her.
The building stands against the side of a steep mountain
high up above the valley, and the pines and hemlocks
at that time hung in their primeval blackness
almost over the roof. As the most difficult and embarrassed
sentence of which I had ever been delivered
died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on
my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my
side, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the
woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song.
It produced an instant and startling effect on my companion.
With the first word she quickly withdrew
her arm; and, after a moment's pause, listening with
her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense eagerness,
she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade,
and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of the forest.
The voice ceased, and she started back, and laid
her hand hastily upon my arm.
“I must go,” she said, in a voice of hurried feeling;
“if you are generous, stay here and await me!” and in
another moment she sprang along the bridge connecting
the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and
was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks.
“I have made a declaration,” thought I, “just five
minutes too soon.”
I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade,
and picked up the fragments of my dream with what
philosophy I might. By the time Meeta returned—
perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure
by her feelings or mine—I had hatched up a very pretty
and heroical magnanimity. She would have spoken,
but was breathless.
“Explain nothing,” I said, taking her arm within
mine, “and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you
better than by silence, command me entirely. I live
but for your happiness—even,” I added after a pause,
“though it spring from another.”
We were at her chamber-door. She pressed my
hand with a strength of which I did not think those
small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me,
I am free to confess, less resigned than you would suppose
from my last speech. I had done the dramatic
thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry
Cornwall! but it was not in a play. I remained killed
after the audience was gone.
