University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

IT will be easily imagined, I think, that I could not long
find existence tolerable here. There is a melancholy
pleasure in haunting the place where one's hopes were
ruined; but this pleasure comes not until after the tragedy is
consummated and long since bygone. First, we are led away
from the spot by Our Lady of Tears, and then we are kept afar
from it for a weary time by Our Lady of Sighs, and at last
we come back to it holding the cold hand of Our Lady of
Darkness. The light of life was fresh in the heart when we
fled; but when we return that heart is like an extinguished
lantern: it sheds no gleam through the darkness, and it cannot
be seen for the darkness. People behold us daily, and say
that they know us, but they have not even guessed that we
suffer, because our faces have long since ceased to be indicators
of the soul. Let a clock be stopped by any accident,
and for centuries after, if you do not disturb it, the hands will
point steadily to the moment of that catastrophe. It is never
quite thus with human beings, except in cases of lunacy.
The man's heart beats no more; it has ceased loving, and so
has ceased living; but exteriorly he is the same that he was
before; the indexes of thought and action still move with deceptive
calmness. He walks among the graves of his own
hopes, but he cries not, neither cuts himself with stones. He
sits alone and keeps silence by the side of Our Lady of

Darkness, but no one divines the cause of his solitude, and
no one can see his mighty companion.

But I had not yet reached this woe. It was Our Lady of
Tears who now called me, bidding me with a voice which I
alone heard, to forsake all and follow her. Every day she
said, you must leave this place; and at last she ordained it so
that I could not disobey. So with a calm countenance, but
earnest, questioning eyes, I faced the being from whom I had
hoped never to part, and stammered some phrases of farewell
that passed in that instant from my memory. What one of
all the miserable can remember the exact words with which
he bade adieu to hope and welcomed despair? It was as if
he had not uttered them, but as if they had been breathed
far above his will and beyond his hearing by the awful Mater
Lachrymarum.

It must not be supposed that ever tears dropped from my
eyelashes, nor that this repression of the signs of grief
proved that my yoke was light and my burden easy to be
borne. Many who weep not, many who smile, are in secret
led by Our Ladies of Sorrow. The tears fell not outwardly,
consolingly upon my cheek, but inwardly, poisonously, upon
my heart, as I turned away from this spot where I had been
so happy, and entered into a future which was already sere
and leafless and fruitless. For some time I was alone, even
amid multitudes. A great disappointment which no sympathy
can alleviate and which may not be spoken in words,
separates a man from his fellows and makes earth seem to
him uninhabited.—

Thus commenced the fourth chapter of my romance, and
thus it finished. As it will sometimes happen to an inexperienced
chorister. I had pitched my tune so high that I could
not sing it through, and came to a dead stop over the first
affetuoso. The plot of the story, so far as it had one, was the
mystery of Seacliff, such as I then supposed it to be, with the
consequences which I imagined would naturally flow from it.

I was to quit the spot and tramp restlessly about the world,
a groaning hysterical hero of the Childe Harold stamp, an
object of tearful pity to all the handsome girls on my route,
but savagely refusing to be comforted. After a lonesome
perambulation of eight or ten years, during which wealth
and power were to force themselves upon me, I was to
come back, like the Count of Monte Cristo, in search of
my friends and my enemies. Seacliff was to be a desolation,
and the family of Seacliff extinct. Johnny Treat, grown to
manhood, (rather precociously,) would meet me among the
charred ruins of the bluff, and, seated on a blackened cornerstone,
narrate the fates of the Westervelts. Mary was lying
in the graveyard, the broken-hearted though innocent victim
of Somerville's cruelty. Mr. Westervelt had committed suicide,
after having been swindled of everything by his dissolute
son-in-law, (Somerville,) and cast off by his adamantine
father. Mrs. Westervelt and Genevieve had perished
slowly of shirt-making and consumption.

After hearing the story I would rise, turn away from John
Treat, raise my moist optics to Heaven and take a silent oath
of vengeance. Then the first thing would be to catch Westervelt
senior in a perilous speculation, (Monte Cristo again,)
trip him up, empty his pockets to the uttermost farthing, and
send him to die in the almshouse, or perhaps force him to
steal and so finish him off at Sing-sing. And now for Somerville,
the deep, the dark, the double dyed villain! I would
track him like a bloodhound;—I would follow him over land
and over sea;—I would bring him to bay in some remote lair.
There I would do his business in a duel fought with Colt's
revolvers, altogether regardless of the fact that I am no duellist,
and would not allow myself to be shot at with even a
single-barrelled pistol if I could help it. In the smoke of that
deadly discharge, in the blood of that sufficing vengeance, the
story would terminate.

I think that this is very much the sort of thing that a
young man would hit on in his first attempt at a novel. Perhaps

the embryo Scott is not yet aware that true portraiture
of character,—just analysis of human nature,—is the gem
which lends practical value to a romance, gives it the power
of fact under the grace of fiction, and places it among those
kingly gifts that the world rejoices to receive. Even if he
knows this, he is no better off, for he has not had time to study
humanity, and, unless he is a genius, he cannot divine it.
Now, it is a humiliating truth that certainly not more than one
tenth of us even in America are geniuses. The young author,
no wonder of mind, but still possessed of talents, writes away
with a good heart at first; but after finishing two or three
chapters he becomes vaguely conscious that there is some
important element of immortality wanting to his work; and
so, merely to save it from lethargy and early death, he dashes
into rapid movement, passionate situations, and a rhetoric
flavored with gunpowder. His own stores of these valuables
soon giving out, he plagiarizes in his desperation, stealing one
man's hero, another man's murder, and a third man's simile.
His conscience is too uninstructed in the rights of literary
property to reprove him; it is honorable, no doubt, but it has
not yet learned the beauty, nor in fact, the exact nature of
originality; and thus he picks pockets right and left with as
honest a zeal as if he were clothing the naked and feeding
the hungry. The reader has observed what use I made of
De Quincey's terrible Ladies of Sorrow. Now I scarcely
thought of De Quincey at all when I wrote that passage. I
scribbled away with a single-heartedness which was its own
reward, and with a heated fluency of imitation which I took
for the inspiration of genius. They were not De Quincey's
Ladies of Sorrow; they were my ladies, and I meant to become
famous by them. It only required a couple of foolscap
sheets, however, to prove that my supposed ownership was a
sham, and that I had no more prospect of making those remarkable
females mine than I had of marrying the Empress
of France or the Queen of Sheba. I had not evoked Levana
and her companions, and they would not obey me. They
dragged me high into the clouds, as Mr. Thurston was carried
up by his runaway balloon; and when I could hold on
no longer, I dropped, and that was the end of me. Yes, the
novel was bound to ruin from the moment that I seized the
skirts of the Ladies of Sorrow.