University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.

Morton visited his cousin, Miss Fanny Euston, a guest,
for a few days, at a friend's house in town. By good fortune,
as he thought it, he found her alone; and, as he conversed
with her, he employed himself — after a practice usual with
him — in studying her character, and making internal comments
upon it. These insidious reflections, condensed into a
paragraph, would have been somewhat as follows: —

“A fine figure, and a very handsome face; but there is a
lurking devil in her eye, and about the corners of her mouth.”
Here some ten minutes of animated dialogue ensued before
his observations had shaped themselves into further results.
“She is exceedingly clever; she knows how to think and act
for herself. I should not like to cross her will. There is fire
enough in her to make a hundred women interesting. She is
none of our frosty New England beauties. She could love a
man to the death, and hate him as well. She could be a
heroine or a tigress. Every thing about her is wild and chaotic,
the unformed elements of a superb woman.”

Here, the conversation having lasted a half hour or more,
his imagination began to disturb the deductions of his philosophy,
and he was no longer in a mood of just psychological
analysis, when, to his vexation, his cousin's hostess, Miss
Jones, entering, brought his tête-à-tête to a close. She displayed
a marvellous fluency of discourse, and was eloquent
upon books, parties, paintings, and the opera.

“I need not ask you, Mr. Morton, if you have seen Tennyson's
new poem.”

“Yes — at the bookseller's.”

“But surely you have read it.”

“No, I am behind the age.”

“Then thank Heaven for it,” exclaimed his unceremonious
cousin; “for of all insipidity, and affectation, and fine-spun,
wire-drawn trash, Tennyson carries away the palm. Every
body reads him because he is the fashion, and every body
admires him because he is the fashion. But he is a bubble,
a film, a gossamer; there's nothing in him.”

This explosion called forth a protest from the poet's admirer.

“May I ask,” said Morton to his cousin, “who are your
literary favorites?”

“Not the latter-day poets — the Tennysonian school;
their puling mannerism is an insult to the Saxon tongue.”

“But,” urged Miss Jones, “you are not quite reasonable.”

“Of course I am not. It's not a woman's province to be
reasonable.”

“Do you subscribe to these poetical heresies, Mr. Morton?”

“On the contrary, I think that Tennyson has often great
beauties.”

“If he sometimes wrote like an angel,” pursued Fanny
Euston, “I should find no patience to see it in a man who
could put upon paper such parrot rhymes as these: —

Bah! it puts one in a passion to hear such twaddle.”

“I see,” said her friend, “that nothing less than your own
music will calm your indignation. Pray let us hear the ballad
which you set to music this morning.”

“I will sing, if you wish it; but not that ballad.”

And she seated herself before the open piano.

“What do you choose, Mr. Morton?”

“The Marseillaise. That, I think, is in your vein.”

“Ah! you can choose well!”

And, running her fingers over the keys, she launched at
once into the warlike strains of the hymn of revolution. Her
voice and execution were admirable; and though by no means
unconscious that she was producing an effect, she sang with
a fire, energy, and seeming recklessness that thrilled like
lightning through her auditor's veins. He rose involuntarily
from his seat. For that evening his study of character
was ended, and philosophy dislodged from her last
stronghold.

Half an hour later he was riding homeward in a mood
quite novel to his experience. He pushed his horse to a keen

trot, as if by fierceness of motion to keep pace with the fiery
influence that was kindling all his nerves.

“I have had my fancies before this,” he thought, — “in
fact I have almost been in love; but that feeling was no more
like this than a draught from a clear spring is like a draught
of spiced wine.”

That night he fully expected to be haunted by a vision of
Fanny Euston; but his slumbers were unromantically dreamless.

Three days later, he ventured another visit; but his cousin
had returned to her home in the country. By this time
he was conscious of a great abatement of ardor; and his
equanimity was little moved by the disappointment. In a
week he had learned to look back on his transient emotion
as an effervescence of the moment, and to regard his relative
with no slight interest, indeed, yet by no means in a light
which could blind him to her glaring faults. He summoned
up all that he could recall of herself and her family, and
chiefly of her father, whom he remembered in his boyhood as
a rough, athletic man, whose black and bushy eyebrows were
usually contracted into something which seemed like a frown.
These boyish recollections were far from doing Euston justice.
He was a man of masculine and determined character. His
will was strong, his passions violent; he was full of prejudices,
and when thwarted or contradicted, his rage was formidable.
His honor was unquestioned; he was most bluntly
and unmanageably honest. Yet through the rock and iron
of his character, there ran, known to but few, a delicate vein
of poetic feeling. The music of his daughter, or the verses

of his favorite Burns, could often bring tears to his stern gray
eyes. For his wife, whom he had married in a fit of pique
and disappointment, when little more than a boy, he cared
nothing; but his fondness for his daughter was unbounded.
He alone could control her; for she loved him ardently, and
he was the only living thing of which she stood in awe.