“Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen who squint with their brains. It is an infirmity in one of the eyes, making the two unequal in power, that makes men squint. Just so it is an inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men idiots and others rascals. I knows a fellow whose right half is a genius, but his other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a friend perfectly honest on one side, but who was sent to jail because the other had an inveterate tendency in the direction of picking pockets and appropriating aes alienum.”
All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.
The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins had never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice might, to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative nature. Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover of lonely walks,—one who listened for the whispers of Nature and watched her shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over everything. But Cyprian had never shown the talent or the inclination for writing in verse.
He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being somewhat older, and having had the advantage of academic and college culture, often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his powers, such as genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler intelligences. Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the name of Gifted Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate neighborhood, and his autograph had been requested by more than one young lady living in another county, he never thought of envying the young poet's spreading popularity.
That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor may be inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed himself in his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one which was held at the “store” where he officiated as “clerk.”
“I become more and more assured, Cyprian,” he said, leaning over the counter, “that I was born to be a poet. I feel it in my marrow. I must succeed. I must win the laurel of fame. I must taste the sweets of”—
“Molasses,” said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that moment, bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, “ma wants three gills of molasses.”
Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure. He served the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness, made an entry on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.
“Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian. The very last piece I wrote was copied in two papers. It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and—don't think I am too vain—one young lady has told me that it reminded her of Pollok. You never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?”
“I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises, and a letter now and then. Do you find it an easy and pleasant exercise to make rhymes?”
Pleasant! Poetry is to me a delight and a passion. I never know what I am going to write when I sit down. And presently the rhymes begin pounding in my brain,—it seems as if there were a hundred couples of them, paired like so many dancers,—and then these rhymes seem to take possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in all sorts of beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the verses run measuring themselves out like”—
“Ribbins,—any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins? Five eighths of a yard, if you please, Mr. Hopkins. How's your folks?” Then, in a lower tone, “Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were sweet pooty.”
Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid of certain brass nails on the counter. He gave good measure, not prodigal, for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very moderate strain on the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with a contempt of infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its genial mood.
The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those bewitching glances which the young poet—let us rather say the poet, without making odious distinctions—is in the confirmed habit of receiving from dear woman.
Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: “I do not know where this talent, as my friends call it, of mine, comes from. My father used to carry a chain for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the house he used to measure land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet. My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I got it, it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose, almost. Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in verse, Cyprian?”
“I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often,” Cyprian answered; “but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have words that seem fitting to clothe them. I have imagined a great many poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any kind. Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'? If you have ever heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and unversed poetry.”
“I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of course you can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it.”
Cyprian left the conversation at this point. It was getting more suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.
“A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry,” Cyprian said, as he left the “store.” “All in one note, pretty much. Not a great many tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two more like them. But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt it is as exciting to Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius to express itself in a poem.”
Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting. He loved too well the sweet intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of Milton. These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted Hopkins.
Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences of rhyme. He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of childhood, its simplicity, its reverence. It seemed as if nothing of all that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else he could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to speak. He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet lavished the wealth of his verse. Thus Nature took him into her confidence. She loves the men of science well, and tells them all her family secrets,—who is the father of this or that member of the group, who is brother, sister, cousin, and so on, through all the circle of relationship. But there are others to whom she tells her dreams; not what species or genus her lily belongs to, but what vague thought it has when it dresses in white, or what memory of its birthplace that is which we call its fragrance. Cyprian was one of these. Yet he was not a complete nature. He required another and a wholly different one to be the complement of his own. Olive came as near it as a sister could, but—we must borrow an old image—moonlight is no more than a cold and vacant glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming orb of day. If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered, well-balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn her existence,—how she could direct and chasten and elevate the character of all his thoughts and actions!
“Bathsheba,” said Olive, “it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more and more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard. He has never got over the fancy he took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and called her the fire-hang-bird. Wouldn't they suit each other by and by, after Myrtle has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and noble woman, as I feel sure she will in due time?”
“Myrtle is very lovely,” Bathsheba answered, “but is n't she a little too—flighty—for one like your brother? Cyprian isn't more like other young men than Myrtle is like other young girls. I have thought sometimes—I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and common ones do not get along best together. Does n't Cyprian want some more every-day kind of girl to keep him straight? Myrtle is beautiful, beautiful,—fascinates everybody. Has Mr. Bradshaw been following after her lately? He is taken with her too. Didn't you ever think she would have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last? He looks to me like a man that would hold on desperately as a lover.”
If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl, hardly sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or nineteen, it would have been plain sailing enough for Murray Bradshaw. But he knew what a distance their ages seemed just now to put between them,—a distance which would grow practically less and less with every year, and he did not wish to risk anything so long as there was no danger of interference. He rather encouraged Gifted Hopkins to write poetry to Myrtle. “Go in, Gifted,” he said, “there's no telling what may come of it,” and Gifted did go in at a great rate.
Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth. A good young man,—limited, but exemplary. Would succeed well as rector of a small parish. That required little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of virtue. As for himself, he confessed to ambition,—yes, a great deal of ambition. A failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings. He felt the instinct to handle the larger interests of society. The village would perhaps lose sight of him for a time; but he meant to emerge sooner or later in the higher spheres of government or diplomacy. Myrtle must keep his secret. Nobody else knew it. He could not help making a confidant of her,—a thing he had never done before with any other person as to his plans in life. Perhaps she might watch his career with more interest from her acquaintance with him. He loved to think that there was one woman at least who would be pleased to hear of his success if he succeeded, as with life and health he would,—who would share his disappointment if fate should not favor him.—So he wound and wreathed himself into her thoughts.
It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she was the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to sympathize with the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she had the honor of witnessing. And it is not very far from being the solitary confidant, and the single source of inspiration, to the growth of a livelier interest, where a young man and a young woman are in question.
Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before. The three young men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in her frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of meeting her in his sister's company, and the convenient visits which, in connection with the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make, without question, at The Poplars.
It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle. Very pleasant and sisterly always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean more than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which might be fanned into the flame of love. Cyprian felt this so certainly that he was on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba, who looked to him as if she would sympathize as heartily with him as his own sister, and whose sympathy would have a certain flavor in it,—something which one cannot find in the heart of the dearest sister that ever lived. But Bathsheba was herself sensitive, and changed color when Cyprian ventured a hint or two in the direction of his thought, so that he never got so fax as to unburden his heart to her about Myrtle, whom she admired so sincerely that she could not have helped feeling a great interest in his passion towards her.
As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher and fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and more freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song. Every week she would receive a delicately tinted note with lines to “Myrtle awaking,” or to “Myrtle retiring,” (one string of verses a little too Musidora-ish, and which soon found itself in the condition of a cinder, perhaps reduced to that state by spontaneous combustion,) or to “The Flower of the Tropics,” or to the “Nymph of the River-side,” or other poetical alias, such as bards affect in their sieges of the female heart.
Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament. As he read and re-read his verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart of the angelic being to whom they were addressed. That she was slow in confessing the impression they made upon her, was a favorable sign; so many girls called his poems “sweet pooty,” that those charming words, though soothing, no longer stirred him deeply. Myrtle's silence showed that the impression his verses had made was deep. Time would develop her sentiments; they were both young; his position was humble as yet; but when he had become famous through the land-oh blissful thought!—the bard of Oxbow Village would bear a name that any woman would be proud to assume, and the M. H. which her delicate hands had wrought on the kerchiefs she wore would yet perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but Myrtle Hopkins.
There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard might have made a safe thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that she had only been secured against interference. But the constant habit of reading his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk to so excitable a nature as that of the young poet. Poets were always capable of divided affections, and Cowley's “Chronicle” is a confession that would fit the whole tribe of them. It is true that Gifted had no right to regard Susan's heart as open to the wiles of any new-comer. He knew that she considered herself, and was considered by another, as pledged and plighted. Yet she was such a devoted listener, her sympathies were so easily roused, her blue eyes glistened so tenderly at the least poetical hint, such as “Never, oh never,” “My aching heart,” “Go, let me weep,”—any of those touching phrases out of the long catalogue which readily suggests itself, that her influence was getting to be such that Myrtle (if really anxious to secure him) might look upon it with apprehension, and the owner of Susan's heart (if of a jealous disposition) might have thought it worth while to make a visit to Oxbow Village to see after his property.
It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as this to the young lady's lover.
The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature. Susan was loyal as ever to her absent friend. Gifted Hopkins had never yet presumed upon the familiar relations existing between them to attempt to shake her allegiance. It is quite as likely, after all, that the young gentleman about to make his appearance in Oxbow Village visited the place of his own accord, without a hint from anybody. But the fact concerns us more than the reason of it, just now.
“Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley? Who do you think is coming?” said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as the first season may see in a city belle, but not the second.
“Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow at that business. Perhaps the Governor. No, I don't think it can be the Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his Excellency. It must be the President, Susan Posey,—President James Buchanan. Have n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?”
“O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,—what do I care for governors and presidents? I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand presidents,—and he 's coming,—my Clement is coming,” said Susan, who had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as her next friend and faithful counsellor.
Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note informing her that her friend was soon to be with her. Everybody told everything to Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the parsonage to tell her that there was a young gentleman coming to Oxbow Village; upon which Olive asked who it was, exactly as if she did not know; whereupon Susan dropped her eyes and said, “Clement,—I mean Mr. Lindsay.”
That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,—it was too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world shouldn't know anything of what was going on in it. Bathsheba had been in all the morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the air every day; so Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive had gone, and walked straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard that a certain young gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow Village.
It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to Myrtle in the name of Clement Lindsay. Since the adventure which had brought these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a disaster, had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and but for Master Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish scandal, Myrtle had never referred to it in any way. Nobody really knew what her plans had been except Olive and Cyprian, who had observed a very kind silence about the whole matter. The common version of the story was harmless, and near enough to the truth,—down the river,—boat upset,—pulled out,—taken care of by some women in a house farther down,—sick, brain fever,—pretty near it, anyhow,—old Dr. Hurlbut called in,—had her hair cut,—hystericky, etc., etc.
Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and it was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the subject in her presence. It followed from all this that the name of Clement Lindsay had no peculiar meaning for her. Nor was she like to recognize him as the youth in whose company she had gone through her mortal peril, for all her recollections were confused and dreamlike from the moment when she awoke and found herself in the foaming rapids just above the fall, until that when her senses returned, and she saw Master Byles Gridley standing over her with that look of tenderness in his square features which had lingered in her recollection, and made her feel towards him as if she were his daughter.
Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and had been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity to have any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle Hazard as a consciousness on both sides of what had happened would naturally suggest.
“Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?” Myrtle asked.
“Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,—the young man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to her ever since they were children almost?”
“Yes, yes, I remember now. Oh dear! I have forgotten so many things, I should think I had been dead and was coming back to life again. Do you know anything about him, Bathsheba? Did n't somebody say he was very handsome? I wonder if he is really in love with Susan Posey. Such a simple thing? I want to see him. I have seen so few young men.”
As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her left arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement. The glimmering gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow gleam which has been the reddening of so many hands and the blackening of so, many souls since that innocent sin-breeder was first picked up in the land of Havilah. There came a sudden light into her eye, such as Bathsheba had never seen there before. It looked to her as if Myrtle were saying unconsciously to herself that she had the power of beauty, and would like to try its influence on the handsome young man whom she was soon to meet, even at the risk of unseating poor little Susan in his affections. This pained the gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having tasted the world's pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the lowly duties which lay nearest to her. For Bathsheba's phrasing of life was in the monosyllables of a rigid faith. Her conceptions of the human soul were all simplicity and purity, but elementary. She could not conceive the vast license the creative energy allows itself in mingling the instincts which, after long conflict, may come into harmonious adjustment. The flash which Myrtle's eye had caught from the gleam of the golden bracelet filled Bathsheba with a sudden fear that she was like to be led away by the vanities of that world lying in wickedness of which the minister's daughter had heard so much and seen so little.
Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself. She only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives us,—such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent feel,—that impalpable something which in the slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives. Bathsheba's virgin perceptions had caught a faint early ray of its glimmering twilight.
She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has made seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and that she did not know about Susan's sentiments. Only, as they had kept so long to each other, she supposed there must be love between them.
Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds of Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty fancies. She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the splendors of her full-blown womanhood.
The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed. But his features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had given him a maturity beyond his years. The story was not an uncommon one. At sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream. At eighteen he had awoke, and found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that its life was dependent on his own. Whether it would have perished if its filaments had been gently disentangled from the object to which they had attached themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps question. To justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an experiment, we must remember that to young people in their teens a first passion is a portentous and unprecedented phenomenon. The young man may have been mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and may have done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it was the mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's feelings by his own. He measured the depth of his own rather by what he felt they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.
Clement was called a “genius” by those who knew him, and was consequently in danger of being spoiled early. The risk is great enough anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an almost universal want of fixed standards of excellence.
He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work of eye and hand. It would not have been strange if he thought he could do everything, having gifts which were capable of various application,—and being an American citizen. But though he was a good draughtsman, and had made some reliefs and modelled some figures, he called himself only an architect. He had given himself up to his art, not merely from a love of it and talent for it, but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he thought his country wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of religious, social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry, and the mine. Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a brilliant failure.
“Grand notions,—grand notions,” the master with whom he studied said. “Large ground plan of life,—splendid elevation. A little wild in some of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's the kind of boy that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man. Wait and see,—wait and see. He works days, and we can let him dream nights. There's a good deal of him, anyhow.” His fellow-students were puzzled. Those who thought of their calling as a trade, and looked forward to the time when they should be embodying the ideals of municipal authorities in brick and stone, or making contracts with wealthy citizens, doubted whether Clement would have a sharp eye enough for business. “Too many whims, you know. All sorts of queer ideas in his head,—as if a boy like him were going to make things all over again!”.
No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans and expectations. But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the source of all great thoughts and deeds,—a beautiful delirium which age commonly tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world furnishes gratis proves a pretty certain cure.
Creation is always preceded by chaos. The youthful architect's mind was confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in upon it, and which he had not yet had time or developed mature strength sufficient to reduce to order. The young American of any freshness of intellect is stimulated to dangerous excess by the conditions of life into which he is born. There is a double proportion of oxygen in the New World air. The chemists have not found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs have long since made the discovery.
Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his possibilities of happiness in one direction, and he felt that there was a certain grandeur in the recompense of working out his defeated instincts through the ambitious medium of his noble art. Had not Pharaohs chosen it to proclaim their longings for immortality, Caesars their passion for pomp and luxury, and priests to symbolize their conceptions of the heavenly mansions? His dreams were on a grand scale; such, after all, are the best possessions of youth. Had he but been free, or mated with a nature akin to his own, he would have felt himself as truly the heir of creation as any young man that lived. But his lot was cast, and his youth had all the serious aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood. In the region of his art alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which his home life could never give him.
Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank, but was called unexpectedly back to the city. Happily Susan was not exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance between them to dare to question his actions. Perhaps she found a partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing them to her. “Would that you were with us at this delightful season,” she wrote in the autumn; “but no, your Susan must not repine. Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,
The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself. The letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,—for a woman can tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing the musical changes of “In Memoriam.”
The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long. They convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any rate. But at last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was coming; yes, it was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real happy to see him?
To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for human nature's daily food. Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could have told herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have confessed to certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of late, cast a shadow on her seemingly bright future. With all the pleasure that the thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a little tremor, a certain degree of awe, in contemplating his visit. If she could have clothed her self-humiliation in the gold and purple of the “Portuguese Sonnets,” it would have been another matter; but the trouble with the most common sources of disquiet is that they have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology to air themselves in; the inward burning goes on without the relief and gratifying display of the crater.
“A friend of mine is coming to the village,” she said to Mr. Gifted Hopkins. “I want you to see him. He is a genius,—as some other young men are.” (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet blushed with ingenuous delight.) “I have known him for ever so many years. He and I are very good friends.” The poet knew that this meant an exclusive relation between them; and though the fact was no surprise to him, his countenance fell a little. The truth was, that his admiration was divided between Myrtle, who seemed to him divine and adorable, but distant, and Susan, who listened to his frequent poems, whom he was in the habit of seeing in artless domestic costumes, and whose attractions had been gaining upon him of late in the enforced absence of his divinity.
He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he began thus—
“judge—judge,—no, not judge. Budge, drudge, fudge—What a disgusting language English is! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as grudge! And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in full flow, stopped short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
“Judge,—budge,—drudge,—nudge, oh!—smudge,—misery!—fudge. In vain,—futile,—no use,—all up for to-night!”
While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,—went to bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the village, where he was to make his brief residence at the house of Deacon Rumrill, who, having been a loser by the devouring element, was glad to receive a stray boarder when any such were looking about for quarters.
For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out a volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the night. It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs. Hopkins's household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience, he held it in check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages of the book with which he had prudently provided himself.
“Hope you slept well last night,” said the old Deacon, when Mr. Clement came down to breakfast the next morning.
“Very well, thank you,—that is, after I got to bed. But I sat up pretty late reading my favorite Scott. I am apt to forget how the hours pass when I have one of his books in my hand.”
The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of interest.
“You couldn't find better reading, young man. Scott is my favorite author. A great man. I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame hanging up in the other room. I have read him all through three times.”
The young man's countenance brightened. He had not expected to find so much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.
“What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon? I suppose you have your particular likings, as the rest of us have.”
The Deacon was flattered by the question. “Well,” he answered, “I can hardly tell you. I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote. Sometimes I think it is one thing, and sometimes another. Great on Paul's Epistles,—don't you think so?”
The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about “Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk,”—a book of Sir Walter's less famous than many of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the Deacon's statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and smiling at his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.
“I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and as he ought to be,” said Mr. Clement: “Such character, such nature and so much grace.”
“That's it,—that's it, young man,” the Deacon broke in,—“Natur' and Grace,—Natur' and Grace. Nobody ever knew better what those two words meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see—you've chosen such good wholesome reading. You can't set up too late, young man, to read Scott. If I had twenty children, they should all begin reading Scott as soon as they were old enough to spell sin,—and that's the first word my little ones learned, next to 'pa' and I 'ma.' Nothing like beginning the lessons of life in good season.”
“What a grim old satirist!” Clement said to himself. “I wonder if the old man reads other novelists.—Do tell me, Deacon, if you have read Thackeray's last story?”
“Thackeray's story? Published by the American Tract Society?”
“Not exactly,” Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find such an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and smile. First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the immovable solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable companion than the common ecclesiastics of his grade in country villages.
After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs. Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his visit would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for though she knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that moment in Oxbow Village.
As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey, almost running against her just as he turned a corner. She looked wonderfully lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the frosts had begun to bite. A young gentleman was walking at her side, and reading to her from a paper he held in his hand. Both looked deeply interested,—so much so that Clement felt half ashamed of himself for intruding upon them so abruptly.
But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them. The first thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous exclamations, “Why, Clement!” “Why, Susan!” What might have come next in the programme, but for the presence of a third party, is matter of conjecture; but what did come next was a mighty awkward look on the part of Susan Posey, and the following short speech: “Mr. Lindsay, let me introduce Mr. Hopkins, my friend, the poet I 've written to you about. He was just reading two of his poems to me. Some other time, Gifted—Mr. Hopkins.”
“Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,—pray go on,” said Clement. “I 'm very fond of poetry.”
The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the “Banner and Oracle,”—the first verse being, as the readers of that paper will remember,
Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone with his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably. He signified his approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the rhymes absolutely without blemish. The stanzas reminded him forcibly of one of the greatest poets of the century.
Gifted flushed hot with pleasure. He had tasted the blood of his own rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the bag of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to drag his piece away from him.
“Perhaps you will like these lines still better,” he said; “the style is more modern:—
And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of two rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
Clement was cornered. It was necessary to say something for the poet's sake,—perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense responsible for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had spoken so often and so enthusiastically.
“Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should think, until of late years. You modelled this piece on the style of a famous living English poet, did you not?”
“Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,—I never imitate. Originality is, if I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte. Why, the critics allow as much as that. See here, Mr. Lindsay.”
Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom a cutting from a newspaper,—which dropped helplessly open of itself, as if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or creases, by reason of having been often folded and unfolded read aloud as follows:
“The bard of Oxbow Pillage—our valued correspondent who writes over the signature of G. H.—is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his originality than for any other of his numerous gifts.”
Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated with a sense of triumph. Susan could not help sharing his feeling of satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without knowing it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a little bit—the merest infinitesimal atom—nearer to Gifted Hopkins, who was on one side of her, while Clement walked on the other. Women love the conquering party,—it is the way of their sex. And poets, as we have seen, are well-nigh irresistible when they exert their dangerous power of fascination upon the female heart. But Clement was above jealousy; and, if he perceived anything of this movement, took no notice of it.
He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day. She was tender in her expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little something in her looks and language from time to time that Clement did not know exactly what to make of. She colored once or twice when the young poet's name was mentioned. She was not so full of her little plans for the future as she had sometimes been, “everything was so uncertain,” she said. Clement asked himself whether she felt quite as sure that her attachment would last as she once did. But there were no reproaches, not even any explanations, which are about as bad between lovers. There was nothing but an undefined feeling on his side that she did not cling quite so closely to him, perhaps, as he had once thought, and that, if he had happened to have been drowned that day when he went down with the beautiful young woman, it was just conceivable that Susan, who would have cried dreadfully, no doubt, would in time have listened to consolation from some other young man,—possibly from the young poet whose verses he had been admiring. Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to say. Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned by Cowper.
As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this visit of Clement's than he had ever before known. He wandered about with a dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant suggestions of good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was to be her guest at tea. And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut called in the native dialect cymbal (Qu. Symbol? B. G.) which graced the board with its plastic forms, suggestive of the most pleasing objects,—the spiral ringlets pendent from the brow of beauty; the magic circlet, which is the pledge of plighted affection,—the indissoluble knot, which typifies the union of hearts, which organs were also largely represented; this exceptional delicacy would at any other time have claimed his special notice. But his mother remarked that he paid little attention to these, and his, “No, I thank you,” when it came to the preserved “damsels,” as some call them, carried a pang with it to the maternal bosom. The most touching evidence of his unhappiness—whether intentional or the result of accident was not evident was a broken heart, which he left upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the language of flowers. His thoughts were gloomy during that day, running a good deal on the more picturesque and impressive methods of bidding a voluntary farewell to a world which had allured him with visions of beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned gaze. His mother saw something of this, and got from him a few disjointed words, which led her to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late husband's razors,—an affectionate, yet perhaps unnecessary precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from this point of view by those who have the natural outlet of verse to relieve them is rarely followed by a casualty. It may rather be considered as implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those who meditate an—imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to write or a proof to be corrected.