University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
THE MOTHER'S GRIEFS.

The business upon which Mrs. Hinkley sought the
chamber of her guest was a very simple one, and easily
expressed. Not that she expressed it in few words. That
is scarcely possible at any time with an ancient lady. But
the long story which she told, when compressed into intelligible
form, related to her son William. She had some
maternal fears on his account. The lad was a decided
melancholic. His appetite was bad; his looks were thin
and unhappy; he lacked the usual spirit of youth; he
lacked his own usual spirit. What was the cause of the
change which had come over him so suddenly, she could
not divine. Her anxiety was for the remedy. She had
consulted Brother Cross on the subject before he departed;
but that good man, after a brief examination of the patient,
had freely admitted his inability to say what was the matter
with him, and what was proper for his cure. To the
object of this solicitude himself, he had given much good
counsel, concluding finally with a recommendation to read
devoutly certain chapters in Job and Isaiah. It appears
that William Hinkley submitted to all this scrutiny with
exemplary fortitude, but gave no satisfactory answers to
any of the questions asked him. He had no complaints,
he denied any suffering; and expressed himself annoyed
at the inquisition into his thoughts and feelings. This annoyance
had been expressed, however, with the subdued

tones and language of one habitually gentle and modest.
Whenever he was approached on the subject, as the good
old lady assured her guest, he shook off his questioners
with no little haste, and took to the woods for the rest of
the day. “That day,” said she, “you needn't look for
William Hinkley to his dinner.”

Stevens had been struck with the deportment of this
youth, which had seemed to him haughty and repulsive;
and, as he fancied, characterized by some sentiment of
hostility for himself. He was surprised therefore to learn
from the old lady that the lad was remarkable for his gentleness.

“How long has he been in this way, Mrs. Hinkley?” he
asked with some curiosity.

“Well now, Brother Stevens, I can't tell you. It's been
growing on him for some time. I reckon it's a matter of
more than four months since I first seen it; but it's only
been a few weeks that I have spoken to him. Brother
Cross spoke to him only Monday of last week. My old
man don't seem to see so much of it; but I know there's
a great change in him now from what there used to be. A
mother's eye sees a great way farther into the hearts of
her children, Brother Stevens, than any other persons; and
I can see plainly that William is no more the same boy —
no! nor nothing like it — that he once was. Why, once,
he was all life, and good humor; could dance and sing
with the merriest among them; and was always so good
and kind, and loved to do whatever would please a body;
and was always with somebody, or other, making merry,
and planning the prettiest sports. Now, he don't sing, nor
dance, nor play; when you see him, you 'most always see
him alone. He goes by himself into the woods, and he'll
be going over the hills all day, nobody with him, and never
seeming to care about his food, and what's more strange,
never looking at the books that he used to be so fond of.”

“He has been fond of books, then — had he many?”

“Oh, yes, a whole drawer of them, and he used to get
them besides from the schoolmaster, Mr. Calvert, a very
good man that lives about half a mile from the village, and
has a world of books. But now he neither gets books from
other people nor reads what he's got. I'm dubious, Brother
Stevens, that he's read too much for his own good. Something's
not right here, I'm a thinking.”

The good old lady touched her head with her finger and
in this manner indicated her conjecture as to the seat of
her son's disease. Stevens answered her encouragingly.

“I scarcely think, Mrs. Hinkley, that it can be anything
so bad. The young man is at that age when a change naturally
takes place in the mind and habits. He wants to
go into the world, I suspect. He's probably tired of doing
nothing. What is to be his business? It's high time that
such a youth should have made a choice.”

“That's true, Brother Stevens, but he's been the apple
to our eyes, and we haven't been willing that he should take
up any business that would carry him away from us. He's
done a little farming about the country, but that took him
away, and latterly he's kept pretty much at home, going
over his books and studying, now one and now another,
just as Mr. Calvert gave them to him.”

“What studies did he pursue?”

“Well, I can't tell you. He was a good time at Latin,
and then he wants to be a lawyer; —”

“A lawyer!”

“Yes, he had a great notion to be a lawyer and was at
his books pretty hard for a good year, constant, day by day,
until, as I said before, about four months ago, when I saw
that he was growing thin, and that he had put down the
books altogether, and had the change come over him just
as I told you. You see how thin he is now. You'd scarce
believe him to be the same person if you'd seen him then.
Why his cheeks were as full and as red as roses, and his
eye was always shining and laughing, and he had the liveliest

step, and between him and Ned Hinkley, his cousin,
what with flute and fiddle, they kept the house in a constant
uproar, and we were all so happy. Now, it isn't once a
month that we hear the sound of the fiddle in the house.
He never sings, and he never dances, and he never plays,
and what little he lets us see of him, is always so sad and
so spiritless that I feel heartsick whenever I look upon
him. Oh! Brother Stevens, if you could only find out
what's the matter, and tell us what to do, it would be the
most blessed kindness, and I'd never forget it, or forget
you, to my dying day.”

“Whatever I can do, Mrs. Hinkley, shall surely be done.
I will see and speak with your son.”

“Oh! do — that's a dear good sir. I'm sure if you only
talk to him and advise him it will do him good.”

“Without being so sure, ma'am, I will certainly try to
please you. Though I think you see the matter with too
serious eyes. Such changes are natural enough to young
people, and to old ones too. But what may be your son's
age.”

“Nineteen last April.”

“Quite a man for his years, Mrs. Hinkley.”

“Isn't he?”

“He will do you credit yet.”

“Ah! if I could believe so. But you'll speak to him,
Brother Stevens? You'll try and bring all to rights?”

“Rely upon me to do what I can; — to do my best.”

“Well, that's as much as any man can do, and I'm sure
I'll be so happy — we shall all be so much indebted to
you.”

“Do not speak of it, my dear madam,” said Stevens,
bowing with profound deference as the old lady took her
departure. She went off with light heart, having great
faith in the powers of the holy man, and an equal faith in
his sincerity.

“What a bore!” he muttered as he closed the door behind

her. “This is one of the penalties, I suppose, which I
must pay for my privileges. I shall be called upon to reform
the morals and manners, and look into the petty cares
of every chuckle-headed boor and boor's brat for ten miles
round. See why boys reject their mush, and why the girls
dislike to listen to the exhortations of a mamma, who requires
them to leave undone what she has done herself —
and with sufficient reason too, if her own experience be not
wholly profitless. Well, I must submit. There are advantages,
however; I shall have other pupils to tutor, and
it shall go hard with me if all the grapes prove sour where
the vines are so various.”

The student of divinity, after these conclusions, prepared
to make his toilet. Very few of these students, in their
extreme solicitude for the well being of the inner man,
show themselves wholly regardless of their externals. Even
mourning, it appears, requires to be disposed by a fashionable
costumer. Though the garments to which the necessities
of travel limited Brother Stevens were not various, they
were yet select. The good young man had an affection for
his person, which was such certainly as to deserve his care.
On this occasion he was more than usually particular. He
did not scruple to discard the white cravat. For this he
substituted a handkerchief which had the prettiest sprig of
lilac, on a ground of the most delicate lemon color. He
consulted complexions, and his mirror determined him in
favor of this pattern. Brother Stevens would not have
worn it had he been summoned, in his new vocation, to
preach or pray at the conventicle; nor would he have
dreamed of anything but a black stock had his business
been to address the democracy from the top of a cider-barrel.
His habits, under such necessities, would have been
made to correspond with the principles (Qu?) which such
a situation more distinctly called for.

But the thoughts of our worthy brother ran upon other
objects. He was thinking of Margaret Cooper. He was

about to pay that damsel a visit. His progress, we may
suppose, had not been inconsiderable when we are told that
his present visit was one of previous arrangement. They
were about to go forth on a ramble together — the woods
were so wild and lovely — the rocks surrounding Charlemont
were so very picturesque; — there was the quietest
tarn, a sort of basin in the bosom of the hills at a little distance,
which she was to show him; and there was the
sweetest stream in the world, that meandered in the neighborhood;
and Brother Stevens so loved the picturesque —
lakes embosomed in hills, and streams stealing through unbroken
forests, and all so much the more devotedly, when
he had such a companion as Margaret Cooper.

And Margaret Cooper! — she the wild, the impassioned.
A dreamer — a muse — filled with ambitious thoughts —
proud, vain, aspiring after the vague, the unfathomable!
What was her joy, now that she could speak her whole soul,
with all its passionate fullness, to understanding ears! Stevens
and herself had already spoken together. Her books
had been his books. The glowing passages which she
loved to repeat, were also the favorite passages in his memory.
Over the burning and thrilling strains of Byron, the
tender and spiritual of Shelley, the graceful and soft of
Campbell, she loved to linger. They filled her thoughts.
They made her thoughts. She felt that her true utterance
lay in their language; and this language, until now, had
fallen dead and without fruit upon the dull ears of her companions
in Charlemont. What was their fiddling and festivity
to her! What their tedious recreations by hillside or
stream, when she had to depress her speech to the base
levels of their unimaginative souls! The loveliness of nature
itself, unrepresented by the glowing hues of poetry,
grew tame, if not offensive; and when challenged to its
contemplation by those to whom the muse was nothing, the
fancy of the true observer grew chilled and heavy, and the
scenes of beauty seemed prostituted in their glance.

We have all felt this. Nothing can more annoy the soul
of taste or sensibility than to behold its favorite scene and
subject fail in awakening others to that emotion which it
has inspired in ourselves. We turn away in haste, lest
the object of our worship should become degraded by a
longer survey. Enthusiasm recoils at a denial of sympathy;
and all the worth of our companion, in a thousand other respects,
fails to reconcile us to his coldness and indifference.

That Alfred Stevens had taste and talent — that he was
well read in the volumes which had been her favorite study,
Margaret Cooper needed no long time to discover. She
soon ascribed to him qualities and tastes which were beyond
his nature. Deceived by his tact, she believed in his enthusiasm.
He soon discovered her tastes; and she found
equally soon that his were like her own. After this discovery,
she gave him credit for other and more important
possessions; and little dreamed that, while he responded
to her glowing sentiments with others equally glowing —
avowed the same love for the same authors, and concurred
with her in the preference of the same passages — his feelings
were as little susceptible of sympathy with hers as
would have been those of the cold demon Mephistopheles!
While her eye was flashing, her cheek flushed, her breast
heaving with the burning thoughts and strains of the master
to whom her beautiful lips were giving utterance, he
was simply sensible to her beauty — to its strange, wild
charms — and meditating thoughts from which the soul of
true poetry recoils with the last feelings of aversion. Even
the passion which he felt while he surveyed her, foreign as
it was to those legitimate emotions which her ambition and
her genius would equally have tended to inspire in any
justly-minded nature, might well be considered frigid —
regarded as the result of deliberate artifice — the true offspring
of an habitual and base indulgence.

It was to meet this unsophisticated, impassioned, and
confiding girl, that Alfred Stevens bestowed such particular

pains on his costume. He felt its deficiencies, and, accordingly,
the necessity of making the most of it; for,
though he perfectly well knew that such a woman as Margaret
Cooper would have been the very last to regard the
mere garment in which a congenial nature is arrayed, yet
he also well knew that the costume is not less indicative
of the tastes than the wealth of the wearer. You will see
thousands of persons, men and women, richly dressed, and
but one will be well dressed: that one, most generally, will
be the individual who is perhaps of all others possessed of
the least resources for dress, other than those which dwell
in the well-arranged mind, the well-disposing taste, and the
happy, crowning fancy.

His tasks of the toilet were at length ended, and he was
preparing to go forth. He was about to leave the chamber,
had already placed his hand upon the latch of the door,
when he heard the voice of his hostess, on the stairway, in
seeming expostulation with her son. He was about to forbear
his purpose of departure until the parties had retired,
when, remembering the solicitude of the lady, and thinking
it would show that zeal in her service which he really could
not entertain, he determined at once to join the young man,
and begin with him that certain degree of intimacy without
which it could scarcely be supposed that he could broach
the subject of his personal affairs. He felt somewhat the
awkwardness of this assumed duty, but then he recollected
his vocation; he knew the paramount influence of the clergy
upon all classes of persons in the West, and, with the conscious
superiority derived from greater years and better
education, he felt himself fortified in undertaking the paternal
office which the fond, foolish mother had confided to his
hands. Accordingly, descending the stairs briskly, he joined
the two at the entrance of the dwelling. The son was already
on the outside; the mother stood in the doorway;
and, as Stevens appeared and drew nigh, William Hinkley
bowed, and turned away as if to withdraw.

“If you have no objections, Mr. Hinkley,” said Stevens,
“I will join you. You seem to be about to go my way.”

The young man paused with an air of reluctance, muttered
something which was not altogether intelligible, but
which Stevens construed into assent, and the two set forth
together — the good old matron giving a glance of gratitude
to the benevolent young student which her son did not fail
to note, while, at the same time, a sentence which evidently
conveyed some motherly rebuke, was addressed to his
already-irritated ears.