40. CHAPTER XL.
Lost liberty and love at once he bore;
His prison pained him much, his passion more.
— Palemon and Arcite.
Since his illness, Morton had had some of an invalid's
privilege. He had been allowed to walk on the rampart for
half an hour daily. In the distance, a great mountain range
bounded the view, and, nearer, the Croatian forest stretched
its dark and wild frontier. The scene recalled kindred scenes
at home; and when he was led back to his cell, when the
heavy door clashed and the bolts grated upon him, he leaned
his forehead on his hand, and stood in fancy again among the
mountains of New England, with all their associations of
health, freedom, and golden hopes. The White Mountains
seemed to rise around him like a living presence, rugged with
their rocks and pines, scarred with avalanches, cinctured with
morning mists; and, standing again on the bank of the Saco,
he seemed to feel their breezes and hear the brawling of their
waters. Then his roused fancy took a wider range; carried
him across the Alleghanies and along the Ohio, up the Mississippi
to its source, and downward to the sea, picturing the
whole like the shifting scene of a panorama.
“Ah,” he thought, “if my story could be blown abroad
over those western waters! How long then should I lie here
dying by inches? The farmers of Ohio, the planters of Tennessee,
the backwoodsmen of Missouri, how would they endure
such outrage to the meanest member of their haughty sovereignty!
A hopeless dream! I have looked my last on
America. My wrongs will find no voice. They and I are
smothering together, safely walled up in sound and solid
mason-work. Strange, the power of fancy! Heaven knows
how or why, but at this moment I could believe myself seated
on the edge of the lake at Matherton, under the beech trees,
on a hot July noon. The leaves will not rustle; the birds
will not sing; nothing seems awake but the small yellow
butterflies, flickering over the clover tops, and the heat-loving
cicala, raising his shrill voice from the dead pear tree. The
breathless pines on the farther bank grow downward in the
glassy mirror. The water lies at my feet, pellucid as the air;
the dace, the bream, and the perch glide through it like spirits,
their shadows following them over the quartz pebbles; and,
in the cove hard by, the pirate pickerel lies asleep under the
water lilies.
“On such a day, I came down the garden walk, and found
Edith reading under the shade of the maple grove. On the
evening of such a day, I heard from her lips the words which
seemed to launch me upon a life of more than human happiness.
Could I have looked into the future! Could I have
lifted the glowing curtain which my fancy drew before it, the
gay and gilded illusion which covered the hideous truth!
Where is she now? Does she still walk in the garden, and
read under the grove of maples? She thinks me dead:
almost four years! She has good cause to think so; and
perhaps at this moment some glib-tongued suitor, as earnest
and eager as I was, is whispering persuasion into her ear,
winning her to his hearth stone and his arms. Powers of
hell, if you would rack man's soul with torments like your
own, show him first a gleam of heaven; bathe him in celestial
light; then thrust him down to a damnation like this.”
And he groaned between his set teeth, in the extremity of
mental torture.
