University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.

It was a critical moment. I made no
reply, but, stepping backward, light in
hand, opened the door which led into
the next room. At the same moment I
extinguished the light. Eveline, from
where she stood, could see clearly into
the next chamber, which was brilliantly
lighted. She looked. The dagger dropped
upon the floor, and she came forward
and took me gently by the hand.
And I led her into the next room, where
two persons were waiting by a table,
upon which was placed an open Bible.
One of these persons was dressed in a
gown and surplice—a fat, robust, easy-looking
gentleman; and the other was a
young man, with a face like Raphael, and
the eye of a poet. “Doctor,” I said to
the clergyman, “I thank you for your
punctuality,” and, bowing to the young
man, “Louis, behold your bride!”

And the artist and maiden joined
hands. While the ceremony was said,

his eyes turned deep with passion; her
face looked wild and startled, as though
she thought herself in a dream. The rubicund
clergyman pronounced them man
and wife.

“Louis, after you left for the steamer
to-day, I discovered that it would not
sail until to-morrow. I therefore sent a
servant to you, directing you to follow
him to this room, where I could meet
you. Well! we have met. Are you
satisfied. And you, Madam Carlton, are
you satisfied?”

Louis was too full to speak; but, as
for his young and beautiful wife, she
dropped his hand, and came to me, and
put her arms about my neck, and
kissed me on the cheeks and forehead,—
“God bless you, generous man!” and
turned again to her husband weeping.

There was a long pause, in which not
a word was said.

At length, I led the way into another
room, where an elegant supper was
spread. We all sat down; Louis and
Eveline too happy to do justice to the
repast, while I slowly drank my wine,
and the portly clergyman ate and drank
as though there was a wager in the case.
And the good gentleman and I sat over
our wine, long after the bride and bridegroom
had retired to their chamber, and
talked of everything—politics, Puseyism,
“popery,” the authorship of Junius,
whether Napoleon was a greater man
than Cromwell, et cetera, et cetera.

At last, being joyous with wine, the
good man went home in my carriage,
and I retired to the library, and—took a
segar.

“Frank, my boy!” I said, as I watched
the smoke curling to the ceiling, “you
have done one good deed in your life. A
dev'lish odd way you took of doing it,
but still it was a good deed.”

And the next morning I saw the happy
couple on board the steamer, Louis
looking like a poet, and Eveline like an
empress; and, having received the last
adieu, returned to my home, wandered
sadly up to the library, and felt myself
the loneliest man in the world.

Soon after this my father died; cause,
too much terrapin, at an aldermanic repast,
and I was alone in the world.
Anxious to escape from my thoughts, I
plunged into society. I bought me fast-trotting
horses. I had my box at the
opera. I put my name among those who
got up big dinners to distinguished strangers,
managed mock funerals at the death
of great men, and patronized rich churches,
art-unions, and the various societies
for the promotion of humbug all over
the world. I gave big dinners at my
city palace. I lent money to needy
fashionables. I gambled. In a word, I
did everything that a man with half a
million dollars can do, who is anxious to
escape thinking. But it would not do.
The ugly thought of my hag-wife, hanging
by the silken cord, followed me
everywhere; and poor Eva, with her
dead baby on her breast, was always before
my eyes.

“What you might have been, Frank,
if you had not sold yourself for money,
or if your father had not sold Eva to
the rich broker!”

'Twas an ugly thought; but I could
not shake it off. And thus, one, two,
three years wagged away.

And while the years wagged on, spite
of all my attempts to banish thought, a
complete and all-overshadowing gloom
took possession of me.

The following words will but faintly
give an idea of the state of my mind at
this period:

There is something terrible in that
hour which brings to the heart a fullness
of despair—an utter listlessness in
all the affairs of life—a conviction that
there is no use to struggle and suffer
longer—a sense of the utter futility of
any and all kinds of effort—a settled
disposition to brood upon the past, to
hope not in the future, and thus to wear
the last elements of life away.

Loud-voiced suffering there is in the
world that relieves itself in wild utterance,
in alternate spasms of hope and despair,
and in tears. But there is a suffering
which is hard to bear. Quiet in its
action, always with you, crowding upon
you unbidden when you try to rouse
yourself to effort—coming to you in
dreams, and in dreams that call back
everything of the past, and print their
images even upon your waking hours—
this kind of suffering is hard to bear,
and it wears, and wears the very life
away.

Oh! the bitter, bitter hour when, satisfied
of the ingratitude and misapprehension
of your fellow-beings—when,

hopeless of he future, and certain only
that you are utterly isolated and alone—
alone—all, all alone—you throw down
your arms and give up the game of life,
as a game that has gone against you, and
—irrevocably.

Then your existence itself becomes a
sort of perpetual dream; you wander
about the places and the memories of
the past, and all the while feel that the
chords of life are snapping one by one
within you. And the hours you spend
alone with yourself no human hand can
paint, no human heart can sympathize
with.

You feel that you are an incarnate isolation,
an incarnate despair—something
that the lightnings have not killed but
blasted; you feel all the time the force of
the ever-recurring question, “What business
have I here in this weary, weary
life?”

And thus wear on the hours and days
slowly, awfully, with leaden steps and
memories that end all their lessons with an
early death and a quiet grave. So broken
down and wrecked by calamity upon calamity,
you sometimes feel a kind of horrible
joy in the thought that you have endured
all that can be endured, and that
another blow will break the last chord of
endurance and of life.

Oh! in this perpetual though quiet
agony, now anything that reminds you
of a happy home—the face, the voice of
a pure woman, or a sinless child—how it
merely increases your despair, and how
you know that, though these have once
been yours—these, all the sacred images
of home—yet never can they be again!

And you can creep away to your lonely
room, and measure the depths of your
loneliness by contrasting the present
with the past.

From thoughts like these; from the
dead apathy of despair which came with
them, I was aroused by a personage
whose history became suddenly and
strangely connected with my own. Eugenia!
And who was Eugenia, and how
came her life to mingle with my own?
Let me tell the story.