21. CHAPTER XXI.
Quelle diable de fantaisie t'es tu allé mettre dans la cervelle? Tu le veux, amour; il
faut être fou comme beaucoup d'autres.
— Le Malade Imaginaire.
Matherton, renowned through both hemispheres for the
manufacture of glass ware, stands, unless this history errs,
on the line of the Northern Central Railroad, the distance
from its post office to the post office at Boston being just
thirty-three miles. Four miles from the village is the tract
of land which Leslie's forefather, far back in New England
antiquity, bought of the Indians. The original purchase
covered several square miles, since dwindled to some two
hundred acres. Here, in a sequestered and very beautiful
spot, stands the mansion which Leslie's grandfather built
some eighty-five years ago. In its day it was reputed of
matchless elegance, and, with Leslie's repairs and improvements,
it might still pass as a very handsome old country
residence. Sagamore Pond, or Lake Sagamore, as the last
Mrs. Leslie, who had lived in England, insisted on calling
it, washes the foot of the garden; and along the northern
verge of the estate, Battle Brook steals down to the pond,
under the thick shade of the hemlock trees. Here King
Philip's warriors once lay in ambush, through a hot summer's
day; here many pious Puritans were butchered, and
many carried off into doleful captivity.
At the house at Battle Brook, Leslie, during spring, summer,
and autumn, had always spent every leisure moment
that he could snatch from his affairs. Since his connection
with Vinal, these intervals had become both long and frequent.
And, since grief has a privilege, and since, moreover,
a somewhat alarming cough had lately begun to trouble him,
he now committed all to Vinal's hands, and, on the day after
his daughter's return, repaired with her to his favorite homestead,
there to remain till the autumn frosts should warn
them back to town. Forthwith Matherton became the focus
to which all the thoughts of Morton concentred.
Thither, pretext or no pretext, he resolved to go. He
went, accordingly, and made his quarters at the grand hotel
of Matherton. Fortunately, Battle Brook was then the best
trout stream in Massachusetts; and this would give, he flattered
himself, some faint color to his proceeding. He arrived
in the afternoon, and, mounting a horse, rode to the inn at
the edge of Sagamore Pond, a mile or more from Leslie's
house.
He had scarcely reached it, when a brief sharp thunder
shower came up, and passed away as quickly. As the sun
was setting, he rowed out in a small boat upon the pond.
Here, skirting the brink of a sequestered cove, which the
beech and tupelo trees overhung, and where every thing was
still but the evening singing of a robin, and the mysterious
whisper of the rain-drops, falling from innumerable leaves,
with countless tiny circles on the breathless water, — here,
where his boat glided as if buoyed on a liquid air, while, over
the pebbly bottom, the perch and dace fled away from under
the shadowing prow, — he lingered dreamily for a while, and
then, bending to his oars, bore out into the middle of the
pond. The west was gorgeous with the sunset, while, far in
front, glimmering among the trees, he could see the shrine
of his idolatry, the roof that sheltered Edith Leslie.
A light breeze crisped the water, the ripples murmured
with a lulling sound under his boat, and, lying at ease, he
gave himself up to his reveries.
His passion-kindled fancies ranged earth, sea, and sky;
wandered into the past, lost themselves in the future; evoked
the shadows of dead history; mixed in one phantom conclave
the hairy war gods of the north, the bright shapes of Grecian
fable, the enormities of Egyptian mythology; and, looking
into the burning depths above him, he mused of human hopes,
human aspirations, human destiny. That oddly compounded
malady which had fastened on him had brought with it the
intense yet tranquil awakening of every faculty with which it
will sometimes visit those of the ruder sex whom it attacks
with virulence.
The magic of earth and sky; the black pines rearing their
shaggy tops against the blazing west; the shores mingling in
many-tinted shadow; the fiery sky, where three little clouds
hovered like flaming spirits; the fiery water, where he and
his boat floated as in a crimson sea; the whole glowing
scene, glowing deeper yet in the fervid light of passion, — penetrated
him like an enchantment. He scarcely knew himself;
and in his supreme of intoxication, the familiar world around
him was sublimed into a vision of Eden.
