University of Virginia Library

72. CHAPTER LXXII.

On a rock, at the end of the promontory which forms the
harbor of Beyrout, stood Vassall Morton; and at his side
his friend Buckland, whom he had met in New York just
after his return from Austria. They had encountered again
in the East Indies, and had made together a long and varied
journey, not without hardship and danger, among the tribes
of Upper India and Central Asia. Buckland was greatly
changed. His look and bearing betokened recovered health
and spirit; while his companion, in the fulness of masculine
vigor, was swarthy as an Arab with the long burning of the
Eastern sun.

“Our travels are over, Buckland. We have nothing to do,
now, but to get on board ship, and lie still for a few weeks,
and we shall be at home again. I hardly know why it is
that I wish so much to shorten the space, unless from a cat-like
propensity to haunt old places.”

“And to see your friends again.”

“Yes, that is something — a good deal. I have friends
enough, unless they have died since I last heard from them.
But for household gods, I have none; or, rather, my ancestral

Lares have no better abode than an old clapboarded parsonage
in an up-country Yankee village. You are much more
fortunate in that respect. You go home again, besides, a new
man, rejuvenated in mind and body.”

“Thanks to you for that. I was a wreck till you set me
afloat and refitted me.”

“I gave you a shove off shore; but the refitting came
afterwards, and was no doing of mine. I should hardly
know you for the same man.”

“That infatuation seems to me like a dream, as I remember
you prophesied on the evening when we sat together on
the Battery.”

“Half of a woman's weakness springs from the sensitiveness
of her bodily organization; and three fourths of your
infatuation may be laid to the same account. One may say
that, without any tendency to flounder into materialism. You
are a man again now; and even if you had not heard of
your sorceress's death, you might go back, I think, without
the least fear of her spells.”

“I hope so; but I wish that, like you, I had some engrossing
object to return to.”

“I wish that, like you, I had a family, and a fixed home to
return to. My travels are finished, though. I have roamed
the world enough. My objects are accomplished, as well as
I could ever accomplish them. I have not wandered for
nothing; and now I shall bend myself to make my journeyings
bear what fruit I can. By the sun, and by my watch,
it is time for the consul to have returned. Did not his servant
say that he would come ashore from the frigate at
about six?”

“Yes.”

“If he does not, I will get a boat and go to find him. He
must have letters for one or the other of us.”

“I will ride to the town, and see if he has come.”

“Very well; I will wait for you here.”

Their horses were near at hand, in the keeping of an Arab
servant. Buckland mounted his own, and rode off.

Morton seated himself on a jutting edge of the rock over-hanging
the bay, and gave himself up to his thoughts.

“Two years of wandering! Two years more, and I should
grow like the man in Anastasius, never happy at rest, never
content in motion. I have had my fill of adventure. I must
learn repose before it is too late. Why is it that I look so
longingly towards America? Except half a dozen near
friends, I have no ties there that are worth the name. America
is the paradise of the laboring class, the purgatory of
those of educated tastes. What career is open to me there,
that I could not better follow elsewhere? I have chosen my
path. I have an object which fills and engrosses me, and
would fill the lifetime of twenty men abler than I. America
is not my best field of labor; but where else should I plant
myself? I could not live in England. I am of English race,
but of an altered type; too like, and too unlike, to find harmony
there. The continent is more cosmopolitan; but it
would be a dreary life. I should grow homesick, thinking
of the old woods and rocks. I will go home, buckle to my
work, and end my days where I began them.

“My life has been, in its small way, a varied one; very
hard, at times, but perhaps none too much so. Blows are

good for most men, and suffering, to the farthest limit of their
endurance, what they most need. It is a child's part to
complain under any fate; and what color of complaint have
I, or any man sound in mind and body, and with the world
free before him? And yet I turn girl-hearted when I think
of that summer evening by the lake at Matherton. What is
my fate to Edith Leslie's? How will a few years of suffering,
with one deadening memory in their wake, compare with her
life-long endurance? A woman's nature, it is said, will
mould itself into conformity with her husband's. I will
rather believe that Vinal's presence, instead of drawing her
to itself, has repelled her upward into a higher atmosphere,
and made her life as lofty as it must be sad. I wish to go
back, and yet I shrink from this voyage. I have some cause,
remembering my last welcome home. Heaven knows what I
may learn of her this time. It was her marriage then; perhaps
it will be her death now. And which of the two will
have been the worse either for me to hear or for her to undergo?
Perhaps these letters may bring some word of her;
though that is not likely, for none of my friends, but one,
know that I should have any special interest in hearing it.
If they write of her, it will be some news of disaster.”

These dismal forebodings weighed upon him, and his desire
to have them resolved soon grew so importunate, that mounting
his horse, he followed Buckland's track towards the town.
Threading the busy streets, he stopped before a door adorned
with the effigy of a spread eagle wearing a striped shield
about his neck, and clutching thunderbolts and olive boughs
in his claws. He threw the rein to his servant, mounted the
consular stair, and at the head met Buckland emerging.

“Is the consul come?”

“Yes; and letters for you. I am sorry for you, if you
mean to answer them all.”

And he gave Morton a formidable packet. Morton cut
the string.

“These are all six or eight months old. They are post-marked
from Calcutta.”

“Yes, they came after we had gone up the country, and
were sent back to this place to meet you. Wait a moment;
here are more. These two have just come from England.”

Morton took them; recognized on one the handwriting of
Meredith; on the other, that of his friend Mrs. Ashland.
His heart leaped to his throat; he tore open the seal, and
glanced down the page.

Buckland saw his agitation.

“No bad news, I trust.”

“I had an enemy, and he is dead. You shall know more
of it to-morrow.”

And hastening from the house, he mounted again, and
through the midst of mules, donkeys, dromedaries, men, children,
and old women, rode at an unlawful speed towards his
lodging.

Here, with a beating heart, he explored his profuse correspondence
from beginning to end. By the Calcutta packet,
he learned how his native town had been thrown into commotion
by the exposure and flight of Vinal, and how his friends
were eager and impatient to hear his explanation of the affair.
The more recent letters bore tidings still more startling. The
bark Swallow had touched at Gibraltar, and a letter from

her captain to her owners, forwarded by the Oriental steamer
on her return voyage, told how his passenger, John White,
had been lost overboard during a gale, two of the crew having
seen the accident; how, arriving at Gibraltar, his trunks
had been opened in the consul's presence, to learn his address;
and how, along with a large amount of money in gold, letters
and papers had been found, showing that he was not John
White, but Horace Vinal, of Boston. * * *

On the next morning, Morton despatched a letter to Meredith.
In it, he told his friend the whole course of his story;
and these were the closing words: —

“One thing you may well believe — that, before you will
have had this letter many days, I shall follow it. There will
be no rest for me till I touch American soil. An old passion,
only half stifled under a load of hopelessness, springs into
fresh life again, and burns, less brightly, perhaps, but I can
almost believe, more deeply and fervently than ever. I was
consoling myself yesterday with trying to think that blows
were my mind's best medicine; but I feel now, that after
being broken with the plough and harrow, it will yield the
better for the summer sunshine. Yet I am afraid to flatter
myself with too bright a prospect. Miss Leslie loved me,
and the planets in their course are not more constant and
unswerving; but I cannot tell what may have been the effect
of so much suffering, or what determination, fatal to my hope,
it may not have impelled her to embrace. She will soon
know my mind. I have written to her, and begged her to
send her reply to New York, where, if my reckoning does
not fail, I shall arrive about the middle of June. By it

I shall be able to judge to what fortune I am to look
forward.

“You have so lately passed your own anxieties, that you
will easily appreciate mine. I can wish for them nothing
more than that they may find as happy an issue; and I will
take it as an earnest of the intentions of destiny towards me
that it has just brought together my two best friends.”