24. CHAPTER XXIV.
Clo.
That she should love this fellow and refuse me!
If it be sin to make a true election, she is damned.
— Cymbeline.
Morton sat in the reading room of the National, the grand
hotel of Matherton. It was by no means an elegant apartment.
In the middle was a table covered with newspapers;
at the sides were desks, likewise covered with newspapers,
padlocked together in files. The walls and the ceiling glared
a drear monotony of white, broken, however, by sundry ornaments,
worthy the attention of the curious. Here, framed in
birdseye maple, was the engraved likeness of “Old Hickory,”
with hat and cane in hand, a cloak to hide the gauntness of
his figure, and hair bristling in electrified disorder. Here,
too, was a colored print of the favorite steamboat “Queen of
the Lake;” Niagara Falls, by a license of art, forming a
blue curtain in the background. At its side was a lithograph
of the Empire Hotel, New York, the sidewalk in front
being embellished with groups of pedestrians, dressed with
matchless elegance, after the fashion plates; and, over against
this, an advertisement of Jessup's steel, encircled with a
lithographed halo, composed of ehisels, axes, hammers, saws,
and ploughshares.
The apartment, thus furnished and thus adorned, had,
besides Morton, but two occupants; the one a factory agent,
who stood at a desk, absorbed in the New Orleans Picayune;
the other a country tailor, who displayed the sign of the
“Full-dressed Man” at the neighboring village of Mudfield,
and was now seated at a window, busied in polishing a huge
garnet ring, which he wore, with a red silk handkerchief.
In a window recess, aloof from the tailor's, sat Morton,
scarcely conscious of any presence but that of his own
thoughts. He had found a philosopher's stone; and through
the rest of his life, this comfortless reading room of the
Matherton Hotel, this sanctuary of dry and weary Yankeedom,
was linked in his memory with dreams of golden
brightness.
A firm, quick step crossed the threshold, and paced the
sanded floor. Till this moment, Morton had remained absorbed,
shut in from the outer world; but now an influence,
which believers may call magnetism, made him look up and
bend forward from the recess to see who the sudden stranger
might be. The stranger turned also, and showed the pale,
fixed face of Horace Vinal.
Morton was disposed to be on good terms with all the
world, and more especially with his defeated rival.
“Good morning, Vinal,” he said, holding out his hand,
which Vinal took, his cold, thin fingers trembling in the
warm grasp of Morton. He had had no thought of finding
him there; the encounter was unlooked for as it was unwelcome;
and, as he muttered a few passing words of commonplace,
his features grew haggard with the violence of struggling
emotion. He turned away, went to a desk, pretended
to read a newspaper for a few moments, and then left the
room.
Morton looked after him. He had no doubt that Vinal
had heard of his misfortune; and the first sense of pain
which, since the evening before last, the successful lover
had felt, now crossed his mind.
“It's devilish hard for him, poor fellow,” he thought, as,
measuring Vinal's passion by his own, a vivid image of the
latter's suffering rose upon him.
Vinal strode along a corridor of the hotel. There was no
one to see him. His forehead was knit, his nostrils distended,
his jaws clinched. A man, whom he knew, came from a
side passage. Instantly Vinal's face was calm again, and as
the other passed he greeted him with a smile. He went out
into the main street of the town, along which he walked for a
few rods with his usual air of alert composure; then turned
down a narrow and unfrequented by-way. Here his whole
bearing changed. He trod the gravelled sidewalk with a
fierce, nervous motion; and with hands clinched and eyes
fixed on the ground, muttered through his set teeth, —
“Fair or foul, by G—, I'll be even with him.”
