University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

It was a fair scene, the one where we would transport our
reader, in the old days when New York was the queen city of
our young republic, with scarcely a rival to dispute her sovereignty.
We have a fairy spell, be it understood, by which we
pass “bar, and bolt, and porter's lodge,” and now we stand in
the boudoir of the Lady Aline Wentworth.

Judge Wentworth was a thoroughly-bred gentleman of the
old school, very rich, and it had been his pride and pleasure
to surround his motherless girl with every charm of the most
unbounded luxury.

The room where she was sitting was exclusively her own; and
it was a perfect bower of beauty. On a snowy velvet carpet
shone bunches of dark, purple grapes, with their green leaves, as

if fresh gathered. Beside them were thrown wreaths of bright
crimson roses, and blue-bells, looking as if piled up on snow.
Bunches of rare exotics were exquisitely arranged in antique
vases of agate and porphyry, and, here and there, of heavily
chased silver; and the room was filled with a fragrance as subtle
as that of the gardens of Gul.

There were massive mirrors, in heavy golden frames; and on
the wall hung the glorious paintings of many an old master.
There were pure-browed Madonnas, with their prayerful eyes, and
sweet pictures of the Saints, with glory-halos resting on their
tresses. Then there were bunches of flowers and pleasant landscape-scenes,
that made your very soul grow homesick for green
fields and blue sky.

But not a fairer object was there, in that luxurious collection
of the rich and beautiful, than the Lady Aline Wentworth herself.

You would hardly have dared to call her beautiful; for there
was such an air of exclusiveness about her, you would have hesitated
to speak of her as of any other woman.

She had just returned from the opera, where she had been
introduced to a half-dozen handsome students, and reigned the
lady paramount of the occasion.

She had exchanged her opera-dress of claret-colored velvet for
a white silk dressing-gown; but still her arms and hands, and
her raven tresses, literally flashed with jewels, and a cross of
diamonds, on her fair bosom, rose and fell with every breath.

Her forehead was high and calm; her nose Grecian in its outline,
with thin nostrils.

Her mouth was small, and, between her full lips, you caught
glimpses of teeth like pearls. But, though you might notice all

this when you first saw her, it needed to be but a moment in her
presence, ere you forgot all else, in the matchless glory of her
eyes.

Such eyes! — no description could realize their beauty! Large
and full as those of a gazelle, with wells of light in them like
the sea; and yet dark and fearful as the tempest-clouds in a
wild night.

They were not eyes that an artist could paint, or a poet sing;
and yet they were human eyes, destined to influence, for good
or evil, every soul on whom they rested.

There was unmistakable haughtiness in every turn of Aline
Wentworth's small, graceful head; haughtiness in her arching
neck, and even in the tiny, slippered foot which rested with such
provoking firmness upon the velvet carpet. Her position in
society, her whole course of education, had been exactly calculated
to foster this proud self-reliance, and at fifteen (the time
our story opens) Aline Wentworth was a girl no longer, but a
high-spirited woman.

Among the students she had met at the opera, was one whose
image she had borne with her into her palace-home — a man
calm, handsome, and with a full sovereignty of pride, meeting
and matching her own, — Ernest Glenville.

Was the name noble? It might be, and it might not; at all
events, she should see him again to-morrow.

Her dark eyes grew fairly liquid with light as she murmured
his name, and the flush burned on her damask cheek like the
heart of the carnation.

Scarcely a stone's throw from the stately mansion of Judge
Wentworth, in a more obscure part of the city, rose a tall, frowning,
and, even then, somewhat dilapidated wooden mansion. In
one of the most gloomy of its gloomy apartments a student sat,
gazing forth into the night.

The moon-rays fell full upon his face, and you could observe
him closely. His dark-brown hair curled in short ringlets about
his calm, firm brow; his features were regular, and rather small,
and in his clear blue eye lay slumbering a will which might
have moved a world.

He had been called Ernest at his baptism, and his sponsors
had chosen well; for, if ever there was a man on whose face
power, and will, and firmness, were stamped legibly, that man
was Ernest Glenville.

He was poor, but his great soul smiled and mocked at poverty.
His only amusement was the opera, where the music swelled his
heart with a new, exultant sense of strength.

To-night, for the first time, he had come home, bearing with
him a new inspiration, a goddess even more beautiful than fame;
to-night he had, for the first time, seen Aline Wentworth, and it
was she of whom he sat dreaming.

At last, striking his head with his hand,

“Fool, that I am!” he exclaimed, “mad, insensate fool! What
can Judge Wentworth's daughter be to me but a curse?” “And
why a curse?” whispered his cooler judgment; “why think of
her at all?”

“Sure enough, why?” he exclaimed once more. “I shall see
her to-morrow, since she invited me with Irving and the rest,
and then I will forget her. Ha, ha! fancy her dainty feet on

this bare floor! No, no! Ernest Glenville, there is work for
you on earth; you may not pause to bask in fortune's smiles, or
woman's eye.”

So saying, he turned over a file of papers on the rickety table,
drew towards him a large-sized book, bound in black leather,
and commenced studying, as if for life.

In truth, it was a strange fancy to paint the Lady Aline Wentworth
in the student's room. The uncarpeted floor was of rough
pine boards, and the single stiff, high-backed chair, had neither
arms nor rockers. The fire was kindled in a gloomy-looking little
box-stove, and across the top of the one window cobwebs were
woven, thick and strong, as if the growth of years. Here dwelt
Ernest Glenville. Here dreams were nourished which the future
was to gild with glory; and here, for the first time, the eyes of
woman flooded his path with sunlight.