University of Virginia Library

7. VII.

“Catherine,” cried Beaudesfords, one wet afternoon
a day or two subsequently, coming in with
his thumb and finger between the leaves of a
worn clasp-book, “you must hear Gaston's journal:
I must read it to you” —

“Willingly,” said Caroline, with her usual
backwardness.

“No, though: on the whole,” added Beaudesfords,
“I will have Gaston read it himself, while
your needles fly — did I ever see you sew before,
Catherine?” And he looked at her a moment,
smiling with a pleased sense of the domesticity
of the scene; for Catherine and her mother, in
pursuance of a salutary plan of the former's, a
plan for clothing certain destitute people in the
neighborhood, were engaged, each after her own
fashion, — Mrs. Stanhope, that is, earnestly, as if
it were a debt she owed her own good fortune,
a pledge for her future; Catherine dreamily, like
one who understands the idleness of trying to

cozen fate, — on the wicker of sewing-work which
had been brought down to the southerly parlor,
a room much used at Beaudesfords in the autumn
days, since all one side of it was a latticed window
opening on the bright beeches and maples
of the lawn, though to-day the glory of the trees
was only to be seen there flying in gusts upon
the gale that tossed them. “I have been poring
over it,” continued Beaudesfords, — “over what I
can make out of it; for he writes a cursed shorthand
of his own invention. Here, Cyril,” as the
lad answered the bell, “ask Major Gaston if he is
too busy to join us in the morning-room.” And
Beaudesfords planted the book on the mantel-shelf,
and stood leaning over the fire while he
turned the leaves. “About as strange a record,”
said he, “as if it had been kept in another planet.
To-day the guest of an emperor” —

“Major Gaston!” cried Mrs. Stanhope, the idea
of the thing causing the degree of the man's
consideration in the good lady's mind to rise perceptibly.

“Bless your dear soul, of a greater yet! of
Christopher Columbus himself!”

“What in the world are you talking about,
Beaudesfords?” said Caroline.

“Wait a bit, — you shall see,” answered
Beaudesfords, fluttering the pages. “Here it is.
`My interview with the emperor to-day was all I
could desire. He received me with only a single
gentleman in waiting, and entered at once upon
the business in hand, examining my maps and
proposals with a swift scrutiny that showed an
amazing acquaintance with the subject; and,
observing my surprise, he remarked that he had
had time to consider many things. I told him I
was not Vespucius or Columbus to eat my bitter
bread at the gates of princes, but that, engaged
to survey in the region for private interests of
another nature, I saw opportunity for vaster
things, and came to him as the only monarch
whose sight reached beyond the boundary of his
own kingdom. “What is good for the world,”
said he, “is good for the empire,” while he admitted
with me that the cutting of Darien and Suez
would diminish the circumference of the globe
by at least one half, or, in other words, so far
as human progress is concerned with commerce,
would double the life of man. “A proud ambition,”
said he, “to fulfil the hope of Columbus,
and make the east and west one,” and he promised
the funds from his private purse to carry out my

plans in my own time, engaging only that when
completed they should be put in the hands of his
capitalists. “Certainly,” said he, “whoever has
the canal that unites the Atlantic and Pacific
has the keys that were promised to Columbus in
his dream, the keys of the gateways of the sea.”
A great man, — holding Europe in the hollow of
one hand, and reaching out the other to grasp the
vital spot of the American continent, — if in this
mighty age, when all the floods are out and
crowns and sceptres are floating down with the
raff, personal government can succeed at all, it
must succeed with him.' So much for so much,”
said Beaudesfords. “Here's the other, — listen.
`Gracias á Dios is far behind us. There Columbus
gave thanks to God. For my part, I give
thanks to my own energy. And yet as I hear
the anchor-chains rattle down where his own did
once, and I look out on the low, palm-fringed
shore with its purple mountain-line beyond, doubtless
much the same now as then, I confess that
the other had the better of me: he worshipped
an unknown power whose mere contemplation
engendered vast ideas and led him on towards
the “secret things of the sea that are bound with
such strong chains;” and as for me, — well, I am
forced to remember what the man wrote to the
Queen, el mundo es poco. But here I am in his
domain, he makes me welcome, to-morrow we go
ashore, and I begin my work, a bequest he left
me perhaps, — to make the Atlantic and Pacific
strike a balance, to bring the antipodes underneath
Greenwich meridian, to find by land the
“secret of the strait” for which he sought by
sea; a part of that most immense of all the testaments
when under stress of shipwreck he willed
away a hemisphere. Shall I link my name with
great thoughts, great deeds, great men, or is it
all another Spanish castle in the air?'”

“Gaston with castles in the air!” exclaimed
Caroline. “Well, tell us, Beaudesfords, did he
do it?”

“Oh! he made his beginning. He made famous
headway till those little tempests in a teapot,
that they call civil wars down there, rendered it
impossible to proceed. But he will be busy with
his estimates and drawings here till the coast is
clear to resume” —

“He 's a modest man, isn't he?” said Caroline.
“Offsetting Columbus with himself!”

“Well — Gaston hasn't much reverence. He
doesn't believe in the supernatural, you know.

But he believes tremendously in humanity, —
that 's what this work means. And I suppose
it is exactly because he so fully appreciates that
single-minded old sailor that he aspires to put the
best there is in himself beside him, you see.”

“Doesn't believe in the supernatural?” exclaimed
Caroline, whose mind having received
one idea could not immediately accommodate
itself to another. “But you do, Beaudesfords?”

“Oh, yes! I believe in every thing,” said
Beaudesfords, lightly, still turning the leaves.
“Wraiths and swarths, and the whole train of
hobgoblins. It requires more moral strength
and vitality than I possess to be sufficient to
yourself in the way Gaston is. I fancy I should
fall flat in the dust sometimes if I did not now
and then take the tonic of a religious idea. Here,
listen to this, Catherine. `Night before last on
a shelf of rock, Heaven only knows how high in
heaven, a precipice climbing behind me into a
ghostly sky, a precipice dropping before me into
the bottomless pit for aught I know, a blast roaring
over me On Mighty Pens, a suffocating whirl
of snow whose terrors embruted my guides
beneath the level of the mules, and in which,
without fire, without food, cold as a frozen corpse,

I fought for breath till day dawned and fervent
heat made the way clear for us again. This noon
resting in the bowels of the earth, in the huge
fissure of an earthquake whose walls a century of
summers have been hanging with mossy curtains
of green lycopods, draperies of blossoms more
brilliant than the birds that haunt them, waving
heavily at the breath of a mysterious breeze blowing
from nowhere to nowhere. One sunbeam
enters the place; far up on the brink a bamboo
feathers into a fountain of light in it; then it falls
on a pool of still water that glitters as if it were
a sheet of quicksilver; falls on the scarlet wings
of a flamingo flying down, a living flame; falls on
a white ibis standing sleepily in the ray on the
pool's edge and shining like an apparition. In
the rent above my head, the sky, a vast height
up, burns with a violet tinge so deep and sparkling
that I could swear the stars themselves were
burning there in the midday. A fine cut, — Nature
may have made it for my purpose. If we could
but foresee the oscillations of the crust and turn
them to our own uses, and with another throe open
it from sea to sea! Science is a barbarian yet, in
the age of flints; by and by will get beyond pottery
and the boiling-point perhaps, and then possibly we
may look to have the vibrations of the sphere's
surface reduced to a system, to find out a motive
for the capriccio. The eternal years of God are
hers, indeed, as well as Truth's, — she needs them
all, she will do nothing in less. Government,
too, is in the same condition, — no forecast, no
preordination: when my ditch is dug, there is its
barbacan, — the long outlying fortress, the island
that is to take tribute of the nations, commanding
presently the argosies of the Orient as they flock
by, gathering into free ports the wealth of the
world, the richest thing itself on earth, — and not
a hand reaches out to grasp it! But the Queen
of the Antilles must belong to the power that
holds the inter-oceanic strait; or else, as the centre
of the great Republic of the Archipelago, another
Venice, rising in the west as that did in the east,
renewing, by one of history's reprisals, — the
swinging of the pendulum, — those maritime
glories which the older Venice lost when Vasco
de Gama closed the Alexandrian highway by one
which must be in time abandoned for this ecliptic
of commerce, she herself will possess it!' Hm,
hm, hm,” said Beaudesfords; “now he is off on
his theories again: they won't interest you.”

“But, my dear child,” said Mrs. Stanhope,

much as if she had found a scorpion in the
house, “this man is a filibustero!”

“Gaston? Oh, no! He doesn't care the toss
of a copper for our politics, doesn't believe in
Manifest Destiny, thinks we are as given over to
stupidity as Spain is to sottishness. Gaston has
the Napoleonic bee in his bonnet. But you can't
think, Catherine, how this diary renews my
youth!”

“I should think it might,” she said.

“Yes, indeed! I see the same sights over
again that I saw when your father took me there.
Your father had some of these same fancies, you
know” —

“The same with a difference,” said Mrs. Stanhope,
sententiously.

“I remember one place in particular,” continued
Beaudesfords. “The scent of that rose
in your breast reminds me of it. I wonder if
Gaston ever came across any thing of the sort,
— the merest trifle, — entering one of those dark
old cities after midnight, where the gates were just
matted in a white convolvulus that flowers all
night long, and where the streets were carpeted
with scattered blossoms, pomegranate-buds,
orange-flowers, oleanders, jasmines, tuberoses,

frangipanis, that had been strewn there by a
religious procession to some shrine, and whose
fragrance rose alone in the moonlight still like
incense. Let us see — Leon — Granada — a
hurricane that lost its way and whipped the fish
dead in the lakes, and flocks of wild cockatoos
into the houses, and strange white unnamed
beasts fawning out of the forest — ah, here it is,
by all that 's good! The same! Now, do you
know, Catherine, just having Gaston see that
same sight a dozen years after me, gives me
more idea of the antiquity of those Spanish
places, their unchanging age, — doing the same
thing generation after generation, — than remembrance
of all their three hundred years can
do!”

“It must be very interesting to you,” said
Catherine.

“I was sure you would think so! There, you
shall take the book,” tossing it into her lap, “and
read it to yourself: you will enjoy it so much
more that way. You can make out enough of
it; and I want you to see him as I do, for one can
never have such a chance again with a man who
is as silent as a sphinx! I wonder where he is,
by the way. Not in the house, did Cyril say?”

“There he is now, coming round the lawn with
Rose,” said Caroline, rising on one arm to look
out. “How I should like a run in such a rain as
this! But I never shall have it — For mercy's
sake, what is Major Gaston carrying in his arms?”

“Ah? Oh! a child, — McRoy's May, isn't it?
Now that's as it should be! If Gaston had wife
and child” —

“He wouldn't be Gaston,” said Mrs. Stanhope,
breaking her thread with a snap.

“No: I suppose not,” said Beaudesfords, half
sadly. “They would make too much light for
him.”

“He ought to marry though, for all that,”
added Mamma Stanhope, not without an anxious
glance at Rose in a juxtaposition that was not
agreeable to her.

“Of course,” answered Beaudesfords, strolling
to the window. “A man is only half a man till
he completes himself by marriage. I told Gaston
yesterday that McRoy was happier than he, —
McRoy, with his clod of a wife and sprite of a
child. She is a rare child, — don't you think so?”

“I have thought that perhaps we might educate
her, Beaudesfords,” said Catherine.

“Why, so have I,” said Beaudesfords, still

looking out the window, though the subjects of
their remark had disappeared round the corner
of the house.

“Here they come!” cried Caroline. “Wet
through, of course. Do tell us where you picked
up Miss McRoy?”

“Major Gaston found her running after a rainbow,”
said Rose, glittering herself like her namesake
in a shower, “and he had snatched her up
under his cloak when I met them. I am not
wet” —

“Don't stand a moment, Rose,” said Mrs.
Stanhope, with displeasure. “I am surprised” —

“Don't you fret, Mamma Stanhope. Cyril
took my overshoes at the door, and there's my
cloak, and I 'm quite as dry as Dryasdust. It
is the most absurd child,” as Catherine laid aside
her work and took the little May on her knee,
while Gaston sat down by the fire and opened
the map for which he had gone out, — “the most
absurd child,” said Rose. “She was tired of
her hiding-place before we were half-way home,
and when Major Gaston said he certainly could
not leave her on the road, `Well,' says she, `I
suppose we must struggle on.' O you little old
woman!” cried Rose: “will you come and be our
little girl?”

“May can't spare herself yet,” said the child,
archly, brushing her pretty hair out of her eyes, —
hair like the “thistle-down tinted with gold.”

“Not even to stay with us and hear the bird in
the piano sing all day long?”

But May's lip trembled lest the sport were
serious. “I am my father's child,” said she
gravely then.

“That she is,” said Beaudesfords, “the apple
of McRoy's eye!”

“His May apple,” said Catherine, smoothing
the little locks.

“But I love you,” added the child, as if to
soften her dissent; and putting one arm round
Catherine's neck, she kissed her cheek, — a cool,
sweet, dewy kiss, but Catherine felt it like a drop
of blistering wax.

Beaudesfords stooped and kissed the child's
mouth after it, and then caught her on his arm
and began flourishing round the room with her
aloft, till, with shrieks of laughter and fear, her
little dimpled cheeks were red as peaches, and
her Scotch blue eyes were bright as stars.

“Beaudesfords,” said Mamma Stanhope under
her breath, as Catherine gathered up her work,
and rose and went upstairs, “you will make

the child forget that she is only the gardener's
daughter.”

“And so she is!” exclaimed Beaudesfords, as
he held the door open for Catherine to pass
through. “The same in person, or will be if she
lives: violet eyes, and Hebe bloom, and all the
rest that Eustace and the poet went to see, — `a
sight to make an old man young!' Why shouldn't
I play with the gardener's daughter? Mamma
Stanhope, you forget about the grand old gardener
and his wife! Oh, God bless the children!”
cried Beaudesfords. “How they brighten the
world for us!”

“That is true,” said Mrs. Stanhope. “Mine
have done so for me. My husband used to say
they held us in communication with the people
that are dead and those that are not born.”

“Make us ourselves a part of the great perfect
race to come,” said Beaudesfords, setting
down the child for Rose to give her to Cyril to
take home.

“Well, Beaudesfords,” remarked Caroline, with
her faculty of always saying the wrong thing at
the wrong time, — perhaps, on the assumption of
two negatives making an affirmative, thinking
two wrongs might make a right, — “if you have

no children to make you laugh, you 've none to
make you cry.”

“I wish to heaven I had!” cried Beaudesfords,
hotly and forgetfully.

“To make you cry!”

“Ah, sister mine,” for Beaudesfords' sunshine
gilded even Caroline, “love is our salvation, you
know; and the love of children is a perpetual
breaking of sacramental bread!”

“There is the dressing-bell,” said Mrs. Stanhope,
who considered such conversation very
unprofitable. “You will be late for dinner,
Caroline.”

“By the way,” said Gaston, looking up from
where he sat toasting his feet at the blaze, “I
passed Ruthven on the road. He is coming up
here presently.”

“He will stay to dinner, then,” said Beaudesfords.
“So have your symptoms ready, Miss
Stanhope. I can't say I 'm glad you 're not well,
my dear; but we shouldn't have half so much of
Ruthven if you were!”

“Thank you for nothing,” said Caroline, as
her maid came for her cushions, and the ladies
left the room.

“Ruthven loves his rubber,” said Gaston; “and

a partner like your good mother-in-law is after
his own heart. What is this, Beaudesfords?”
folding his map, and then bending to pick up the
old morocco case of his journal from the hearth.

“So you have found me out?” answered Beaudesfords,
mischievously. “I gave the book to
Catherine. She and I are one, you remember.
You haven't a word to say!”

Was it the blaze that burned so on Gaston's
dark cheek as the room darkened? or was it the
reflection that from that day Catherine must be
coupling the thought of him with lofty ideas,
heroic enterprises; with tropical magnificence,
with the music of the great South Sea singing
over the siren-caves that he had told of there,
with the antique Aztec cities he had explored,
with the traces of those mighty men who swam
on bladders down the falls and foam of mountain
rivers to the sack of Spanish cities; the colors
of Caribbean waters, the landscapes lighted by
volcanic fires, — must couple him with all the
dark, rich mystery of such adventurous travel, till
something of the atmosphere of its scenes and
sights were made over to him, and he towered
transfigured in half their grandiose splendor?

No: Gaston thought of nothing of the kind.

He only thought that at that moment Catherine
was spelling out the record he had written, —
Catherine, to whose eyes words to which Beaudesfords
was blind would stand in letters of
light.

And as for Catherine, when locked in her
room she hung above the book, it seemed to her
that the dark side of the moon had turned its
hidden things toward her.