University of Virginia Library

46. XLVI.

IT would have been strange, if Adèle had not some
day formed her ideal of a lover. What young girl,
indeed, does not? Who cannot recall the sweet illusions
of those tripping youthful years, when, for the
first time, Sir William Wallace strode so gallantly with
waving plume and glittering falchion down the pages
of Miss Porter, — when sweet Helen Mar wasted
herself in love for the hero, — when the sun-browned
Ivanhoe dashed so grandly into that famous tilting-ground
near to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and brought the
wicked Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert to a reckoning, —
when we wished the disinherited knight better things
than the cold love of the passionless Rowena, and
sighed over the fate of poor Fergus MacIvor? With
all these characters, and many other such, Adèle had
made acquaintance, in company with her dear Rose,
and by the light of them, they had fashioned such
ideals in their little heads as do not often appear in
the flesh. Not that the two friends always agreed in
their dreamy fancies; but for either, a hero must have

been handsome and brave and true and kind and
sagacious and learned. If only a few hundred of men
should be patterned after the design of a young girl
of sixteen or eighteen, what an absurd figure we old
sinners should cut in the comparison! Yet it is pleasant
to reflect that thousands of fresh young hearts do
go on, year after year, conceiving of wonderful excellences
as pertaining to the baser sex; and the knowledge
of the fact should, it would seem, give a little
more of animation to our struggles against the deviltries
and brutalities of the world.

But the ideal of our friend Adèle had not been
constant. Three years back, the open, frank, brave
front which Phil Elderkin wore had almost reached
it; and when Rose had said, — as she was wont to
say, in her sisterly pride, — “He 's a noble fellow,”
there had been a little tingling of the heart in Adèle,
which seemed to echo the words. Afterward had
come that little glimpse of the world which her journey
and intercourse with Maverick had afforded; and the
country awkwardness of the Elderkins had somehow
worked an eclipse of his virtues. Reuben, indeed,
had comeliness, and had caught at that time some
of the graces of the city; but Reuben was a tease,
and failed in a certain quality of respect for her, (at
least, she fancied it,) in default of which she met all
his favors with a sisterly tenderness, in which there

was none of the reserve that tempts passion to declare
itself.

Later, when Reuben so opened the way to her belief,
and associated himself so intimately with the culmination
of her religious faith, he seemed to her for a time
the very impersonation of her girlish fancy, — so tender,
so true, so trustful. Her religious enthusiasm
blended with and warmed her sentiment; and never
had she known such hours of calm enjoyment, or such
hopeful forecast of her worldly future, as in those
golden days when the hearts of both were glowing (or
seemed to be) with a common love. It was not that
this sentiment in her took any open form of expression;
her instinctive delicacy so kept it under control
that she was but half conscious of its existence. But
it was none the less true that the sad young pilgrim,
who had been a brother, and who had unlocked for
her the Beautiful Gate, wore a new aspect. Her heart
was full of those glittering estimates of life, which
come at rare intervals, in which duties and affections
all seem in delightful accord, working each their task,
and glowing through all the reach of years, until the
glow is absorbed in the greater light which shines
upon Christian graves. But Reuben's desertion from
the faith broke this phantasm. Her faith, standing
higher, never shook; but the sentiment which grew
under its cover found nothing positive whereby to cling,

and perished with the shock. Besides which, her
father's injunction came to the support of her religious
convictions, and made her disposition to shake off that
empty fancy tenfold strong. Had Reuben, in those
days of his exaltation, made declaration of his attachment,
it would have met with a response that could
have admitted of no withdrawal, and her heart would
have been leashed to his, whatever outlawry might
threaten him. She thanked Heaven that it had not
been thus. Her ideal was still unstained and unbroken;
but it no longer found its type in the backsliding
Reuben. It is doubtful, indeed, if her sentiment
at this period, by mere force of rebound, and
encouraged by her native charities and old proclivities,
did not rally about young Elderkin, who had equipped
himself with many accomplishments of the world, and
who, if he made no pretensions to the faith she had
embraced, manifested an habitual respect that challenged
her gratitude.

As for Reuben, after his enthusiasm of the summer
had vanished, he felt a prodigious mortification in reflecting
that Adèle had been so closely the witness of
his short-lived hallucination. It humiliated him bitterly
to think that all his religious zeal had proved in
her regard but the empty crackling of a fire of thorns.
No matter what may be a youth's sentiment for girlhood,
he never likes it to be witness of any thing disparaging

to his sturdy resolution and manly purpose.
But Adèle had seen him shake like a reed under the
deepest emotions that could give tone to character;
and in his mortification at the thought, he transferred
to her a share of the resentment he felt against himself.
It was a relief to treat her with a dignified coolness,
and to meet all her tender inquiries, which she
did not forbear, with an icy assurance of manner that
was more than half affected, — yet not unkind, but
assiduously and intensely and provokingly civil.

Seeing this, the Doctor and Miss Eliza had given
over any fear of a possibly dangerous interest on the
part of Reuben; and yet keen observers might well
have scented a danger in this very studied indifference,
if they reflected that its motive lay exclusively in a
mortified pride. We are not careful to conceal our
mortifications from those whose regard we rate humbly.

At any rate, it happened, that, with the coming of
the autumn months, Reuben, still floating drearily on
a sea of religious speculation, and veering more and
more into open mockery of the beliefs of all about him,
grew weary of his affectations with respect to Adèle.
He fretted under the kindly manner with which she
met his august civilities. They did not wound her
sensibilities, as he hoped they might have done.
Either this disappointment or the need of relief provoked
a change of tactics. With a sudden zeal that

was half earnest and half a freak of vanity, he devoted
himself to Adèle. The father's sympathy with
him was just now dead; that of the aunt had never
been kindled to such a degree as to meet his craving;
with the Elderkins he was reluctant to unfold his
opinions so far as to demand sympathy. As for Adèle,
if he could light up again the sentiment which he once
saw beaming in her face, he could at least find in it
a charming beguilement of his unrest. She had a
passion for flowers: every day he gathered for her
some floral gift; every day she thanked him with a
kindness that meant only kindness. She had a passion
for poetry: every day he read to her such as he
knew she must admire; every day she thanked him
with a warmth upon which he could build no hopes.

Both the Doctor and Miss Eliza were disturbed by
this new zeal of his. At the instance of the spinster,
the Doctor undertook to lay before Reuben the information
conveyed in the letter of Maverick, and that
gentleman's disapproval of any association between
the young people looking to marriage. It was not an
easy or an agreeable task for the Doctor; and he went
about it in a very halting manner.

“Your Aunt Eliza has observed, Reuben, that you
have lately become more pointed in your attentions to
Adaly.”

“I dare say, father; worries her, does n't it?”

“We do not know how far these attentions may be
serious, Reuben.”

“Nor I, father.”

The Doctor was shocked at this new evidence of his
son's indifference to any fixed rule of conduct.

“How long is it, father,” continued Reuben, “since
Aunt Eliza has commenced her plottings against
Adèle?”

“Not plottings against her, I trust, Reuben.”

“Yes, she has, father. She 's badgering her in her
quiet way incessantly, — as far back as when she
caught sight of her in that dance at the Elderkins'.
For my part, I think it was a charming thing to see.”

“We have graver reasons for our anxiety in regard
to your relations with her, my son; and not the least
of them is Mr. Maverick's entire disapproval of any
such attachment.”

And thereupon the Doctor had proceeded to lay
before Reuben (who now showed a most lively interest)
a full revelation of the facts announced in Maverick's
letter.

The son had a strong smack of the father's family
pride, and the strange news was bewildering to him;
but in his present stage of distrust, he felt a strong
disposition to protest against all the respectable conventionalities
that hedged him in. A generous instinct
in him, too, as he thought of the poor girl under the

ban of the towns folk, craved some chivalric expression;
and whatever sentiment he may really have entertained
for her in past days took new force in view
of the sudden barriers that rose between him and the
tender, graceful, confiding, charming Adèle, whose
image had so long and (as he now thought) so constantly
dwelt in the dreamy mirage of his future.
Under the spur of these feelings, he presently gave
over his excited walk up and down the study, and,
coming close to the Doctor, whispered, with a grave
earnestness that made the old gentleman recognize a
man in his boy, —

“Father, I have doubted my own feelings about
Adèle: now I do not. I love her; I love her madly.
I shall protect her; if she will marry me,” (and he
touched the Doctor on the shoulder with a quick,
nervous tap of his hand,) “I shall marry her, — God
bless her!”

And Reuben, by the very speech, as well as by the
thoughts that had gone before, had worked himself
into a passion of devotion.

“Be careful, my son,” said the old gentleman; “remember
how your enthusiasm has betrayed you in a
still more serious matter.”

Reuben smiled bitterly.

“Don't reproach me with that, father. It seems to
me that I am acting now more on the side of the
Christian charities than either you or Aunt Eliza.”

And with this he strode out, leaving the Doctor in
an agony of apprehension.

A moment after, Miss Eliza, who was ever on the
alert, and without whose knowledge a swallow could
not dart into the chimneys of the parsonage, came
rustling into the study.

“Well, Benjamin, what does Reuben say?”

“Given over to his idols, Eliza, — given over to his
idols. We can only pray God to have him in His holy
keeping.”

It would be impossible to fathom all the emotions of
Reuben during that interview with his father. It would
be wrong to say that the view of future marriage had
not often held up its brilliant illusions before him; it
would be wrong to say that they had never been associated
with the charming vivacity of Adèle, as well as,
at other times, with the sweet graces of Rose Elderkin.
But these illusions had been of a character so transitory,
so fleeting, that he had come to love their brilliant
changes, and to look forward with some dread to the
possible permanence of them, or such fixedness as
should take away the charming drift of his vagaries.
If, in some wanton and quite impossible moment, the
modest Rose had conquered her delicacy so far as to
put her hand in his, and say, “Will you be my husband?”
he would not have been so much outraged by
her boldness as disturbed by the reflection that a

pleasant little dream of love was broken up, and that
his thought must come to that practical solution of a
yes or no which would make an end of his delightful
doubts and yearnings. The positive and the known
are, after all, so much less, under imaginative measure,
than the uncertain and the dreamy!

And if he could have taken the spinster's old tales
of Adèle's regard for him and devotion to him at their
highest truth, (which he never did, because of the girl's
provoking familiarity and indifference,) he would have
felt a great charm in his life cut off. Yet now he wanders
in search of her with his heart upon his lip and a
great fire in his brain. Not a little pride in affronting
opinion may have kindled the glow of his sudden resolve.
There was an audacity in it that tempted and
regaled him. Why should he, whose beliefs were so
uncertain, who had grown into doubts of that faith on
which all the conventional proprieties about him reposed,
— why should he not discard them, and obey a
single, strong, generous instinct? When a man's religious
sensibilities suffer recoil as Reuben's had done,
there grows up a new pride in the natural emotions of
generosity; the humane instincts show exceptional
force; the skeptics become the teachers of an exaggerated
philanthropy.

Did he love her beyond all others? Yesterday he
could not have told; to-day, under the fervor of his audacity

and of his pride, his love blazes up in a fiery
flame. It seethes around the memory of her lithe, graceful
figure in a whirl of passion. Those ripe red lips
shall taste the burning heat of his love and tenderness.
He will guard, cherish, protect, and the iron aunt may
protest, or the world talk as it will. “Adèle!” Adèle!”
His heart is full of the utterance, and his step wild
with tumultuous feeling, as he rushes away to find her,
— to win her, — to bind together their destinies forever!