Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860

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In the tenth year of his abode at Hadley Whalley had become extremely
infirm in mind and body, and he probably did not outlive that year.
Mr. Russell's house was standing till within a little more than half
a century ago. At its demolition, the removal of a slab in the cellar
discovered human remains of a large size. They are believed to have
belonged to the stout frame which swept through Prince Rupert's lines
at Naseby. Goffe survived his father-in-law nearly five years, at
least; how much longer, is not known. Once he was seen abroad, after
his retirement to Mr. Russell's house. The dreadful war, to which the
Indian King Philip bequeathed his long execrated name, was raging
with its worst terrors in the autumn of 1675. On the first day of
September, the people of Hadley kept a fast, to implore the Divine
protection in their distress. While they were engaged in their
worship, a sentry's shot gave notice that the stealthy savages were
upon them. Hutchinson, in his History, relates what follows, as he
had received it from the family of Governor Leverett, who was one of
the few visitors of Goffe in his retreat. "The people were in the
utmost confusion. Suddenly a grave, elderly person appeared in the
midst of them. In his mien and dress he differed from the rest of the
people. He not only encouraged them to defend themselves, but put
himself at their head, rallied, instructed, and led them on to
encounter the enemy, who by this means were repulsed. As suddenly the
deliverer of Hadley disappeared. The people were left in
consternation, utterly unable to account for this strange phenomenon.
It is not probable that they were ever able to explain it."

In the first years of the retirement of the Colonels at Hadley, they
enjoyed the society of a former friend, who did not feel obliged to
use the same strict precautions against discovery. John Dixwell, like
themselves, was a colonel in the Parliamentary service, a member of
the High Court of Justice, and a signer of the death-warrant of the
King. Nothing is known of his proceedings after the restoration of
the monarchy, till he came to Hadley, three or four months later than
Whalley and Goffe. After a residence of some years in their
neighborhood, he removed to New Haven, where, bearing the name of
James Davids, and affecting no particular privacy, he lived to old
age. The home-government never traced him to America; and though,
among his acquaintance, it was understood that he had a secret to
keep, there was no disposition to penetrate it. He married twice at
New Haven, and by his second nuptials established a family, one
branch of which survives. In testamentary documents, as well as in
communications, while he lived, to his minister and others, he
frankly made known his character and history. He died just too early
to hear the tidings, which would have renewed his strength like the
eagle's, of the expulsion of the House of Stuart. A fit monument
directs the traveller to the place of his burial, in the square
bounded on one side by the halls of Yale College.

TO THE CAT-BIRD.

You, who would with wanton art
Counterfeit another's part,
And with noisy utterance claim
Right to an ignoble name,--
Inharmonious!--why must you,
To a better self untrue,
Gifted with the charm of song,
Do the generous gift such wrong?

Delicate and downy throat,
Shaped for pure, melodious note,--
Silvery wing of softest gray,--
Bright eyes glancing every way,--
Graceful outline,--motion free:
Types of perfect harmony!

Ah! you much mistake your duty,
Mating discord thus with beauty,--
'Mid these heavenly sunset gleams,
Vexing the smooth air with screams,--
Burdening the dainty breeze
With insane discordancies.

I have heard you tell a tale
Tender as the nightingale,
Sweeter than the early thrush
Pipes at day-dawn from the bush.
Wake once more the liquid strain
That you poured, like music-rain,
When, last night, in the sweet weather,
You and I were out together.
Unto whom two notes are given,
One of earth, and one of heaven,
Were it not a shameful tale
That the earth-note should prevail?

For the sake of those who love us,
For the sake of God above us,
Each and all should do their best
To make music for the rest.
So will I no more reprove,
Though the chiding be in love:
Uttering harsh rebuke to you,
That were inharmonious, too.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER XIII.

CURIOSITY.

People will talk. _Ciascun lo dice_ is a tune that is played oftener
than the national air of this country or any other.

"That's what they say. Means to marry her, if she _is_ his cousin.
Got money himself,--that's the story,--but wants to come and live in
the old place, and get the Dudley property by-and-by."--"Mother's
folks was wealthy."--"Twenty-three to twenty-five year old."--"He
a'n't more'n twenty, or twenty-one at the outside."--"Looks as if he
knew too much to be only twenty year old."--"Guess he's been through
the mill,--don't look so green, anyhow,--hey? Did y' ever mind that
cut over his left eyebrow?"

So they gossipped in Rockland. The young fellows could make nothing
of Dick Venner. He was shy and proud with the few who made advances
to him. The young ladies called him handsome and romantic, but he
looked at them like a many-tailed pacha who was in the habit of
ordering his wives by the dozen.

"What do you think of the young man over there at the Venners'?" said
Miss Arabella Thornton to her father.

"Handsome," said the Judge, "but dangerous-looking. His face is
indictable at common law. Do you know, my dear, I think there is a
blank at the Sheriff's office, with a place for his name in it?"

The Judge paused and looked grave, as if he had just listened to the
verdict of the jury and was going to pronounce sentence.

"Have you heard anything against him?" said the Judge's daughter.

"Nothing. But I don't like these mixed bloods and half-told stories.
Besides, I have seen a good many desperate fellows at the bar, and I
have a fancy they all have a look belonging to them. The worst one I
ever sentenced looked a good deal like this fellow. A wicked mouth.
All our other features are made for us; but a man makes his own
mouth."

"Who was the person you sentenced?"

"He was a young fellow that undertook to garrote a man who had won
his money at cards. The same slender shape, the same cunning, fierce
look, smoothed over with a plausible air. Depend upon it, there is an
expression in all the sort of people that live by their wits when
they can, and by worse weapons when their wits fail them, that we old
law-doctors know just as well as the medical counselors know the
marks of disease in a man's face. Dr. Kittredge looks at a man and
says he is going to die; I look at another man and say he is going to
be hanged, if nothing happens. I don't say so of this one, but I
don't like his looks. I wonder Dudley Venner takes to him so kindly."

"It's all for Elsie's sake," said Miss Thornton; "I feel quite sure
of that. He never does anything that is not meant for her in some
way. I suppose it amuses her to have her cousin about the house. She
rides a good deal since he has been here. Have you seen them
galloping about together? He looks like my idea of a Spanish bandit
on that wild horse of his."

"Possibly he has been one,--or is one," said the Judge,--smiling as
men smile whose lips have often been freighted with the life and
death of their fellow-creatures. "I met them riding the other day.
Perhaps Dudley is right, if it pleases her to have a companion. What
will happen, though, if he makes love to her? Will Elsie be easily
taken with such a fellow? You young folks are supposed to know more
about these matters than we middle-aged people."

"Nobody can tell. Elsie is not like anybody else. The girls that have
seen most of her think she hates men, all but 'Dudley,' as she calls
her father. Some of them doubt whether she loves him. They doubt
whether she can love anything human, except perhaps the old black
woman that has taken care of her since she was a baby. The village
people have the strangest stories about her: you know what they call
her?"

She whispered three words in her father's ear. The Judge changed
color as she spoke, sighed deeply, and was silent as if lost in
thought for a moment.

"I remember her mother," he said, "so well! A sweeter creature never
lived. Elsie has something of her in her look, but those are not the
Dudley eyes. They were dark, but soft, in all I ever saw of the race.
Her father's are dark too, but mild, and even tender, I should say. I
don't know what there is about Elsie's,--but do you know, my dear, I
find myself curiously influenced by them? I have had to face a good
many sharp eyes and hard ones,--murderers' eyes and pirates',--men
that had to be watched in the bar, where they stood on trial, for
fear they should spring on the prosecuting officers like tigers,--but
I never saw such eyes as Elsie's; and yet they have a kind of drawing
virtue or power about them,--I don't know what else to call it: have
you never observed this?"

His daughter smiled in her turn.

"Never observed it? Why, of course, nobody could be with Elsie Venner
and not observe it. There are a good many other strange things about
her: did you ever notice how she dresses?"

"Why, handsomely enough, I should think," the Judge answered. "I
suppose she dresses as she likes, and sends to the city for what she
wants. What do you mean in particular? We men notice effects in
dress, but not much in detail."

"You never noticed the colors and patterns of her dresses? You never
remarked anything curious about her ornaments? Well! I don't believe
you men know, half the time, whether a lady wears a ninepenny collar
or a thread-lace cape worth a thousand dollars. I don't believe you
know a silk dress from a bombazine one. I don't believe you can tell
whether a woman is in black or in colors, unless you happen to know
she is a widow. Elsie Venner has a strange taste in dress, let me
tell you. She sends for the oddest patterns of stuffs, and picks out
the most curious things at the jeweller's, whenever she goes to town
with her father. They say the old Doctor tells him to let her have
her way about all such matters. Afraid of her mind, if she is
contradicted, I suppose.--You've heard about her going to school at
that place,--the 'Institoot,' as those people call it? They say she's
bright enough in her way,--has studied at home, you know, with her
father a good deal,--knows some modern languages and Latin, I
believe: at any rate, she would have it so,--she must go to the
'Institoot.' They have a very good female teacher there, I hear; and
the new master, that young Mr. Langdon, looks and talks like a
well-educated young man. I wonder what they'll make of Elsie, between
them!"

So they talked at the Judge's, in the calm, judicial-looking
mansion-house, in the grave, still library, with the troops of wan-hued
law-books staring blindly out of their titles at them as they talked,
like the ghosts of dead attorneys fixed motionless and speechless,
each with a thin, golden film over his unwinking eyes.

In the mean time, everything went on quietly enough after Cousin
Richard's return. A man of sense,--that is, a man who knows perfectly
well that a cool head is worth a dozen warm hearts in carrying the
fortress of a woman's affections, (not yours, "Astarte," nor yours,
"Viola,")--who knows that men are rejected by women every day because
they, the men, love them, and are accepted every day because they do
not, and therefore can study the arts of pleasing,--a man of sense,
when he finds he has established his second parallel too soon,
retires quietly to his first, and begins working on his covered ways
again. [The whole art of love may be read in any Encyclopaedia under
the title _Fortification_, where the terms just used are explained.]
After the little adventure of the necklace, Dick retreated at once to
his first parallel. Elsie loved riding,--and would go off with him on
a gallop now and then. He was a master of all those strange Indian
horseback-feats which shame the tricks of the circus-riders, and used
to astonish and almost amuse her sometimes by disappearing from his
saddle, like a phantom horseman, lying flat against the side of the
bounding creature that bore him, as if he were a hunting leopard with
his claws in the horse's flank and flattening himself out against his
heaving ribs. Elsie knew a little Spanish too, which she had learned
from the young person who had taught her dancing, and Dick enlarged
her vocabulary with a few soft phrases, and would sing her a song
sometimes, touching the air upon an ancient-looking guitar they had
found with the ghostly things in the garret,--a quaint old
instrument, marked E.M. on the back, and supposed to have belonged to
a certain Elizabeth Mascarene, before mentioned in connection with a
work of art,--a fair, dowerless lady, who smiled and sung and faded
away, unwedded, a hundred years ago, as dowerless ladies, not a few,
are smiling and singing and fading now,--God grant each of them His
love,--and one human heart as its interpreter!

As for school, Elsie went or stayed away as she liked. Sometimes,
when they thought she was at her desk in the great school-room, she
would be on The Mountain,--alone always. Dick wanted to go with her,
but she would never let him. Once, when she had followed the zigzag
path a little way up, she looked back and caught a glimpse of him
following her. She turned and passed him without a word, but giving
him a look which seemed to make the scars on his wrist tingle, went
to her room, where she locked herself up, and did not come out again
till evening,--old Sophy having brought her food, and set it down,
not speaking, but looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb
beast trying to feel out his master's will in his face. The evening
was clear and the moon shining. As Dick sat at his chamber-window,
looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit
between the trees and steal along the narrow path that led upward.
Elsie's pillow was impressed that night, but she had not been missed
by the household,--for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel. The
next morning she avoided him and went off early to school. It was the
same morning that the young master found the flower between the
leaves of his Virgil.

The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her
cousin for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought
him. She had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in
certain poetical readings which the master conducted with the elder
scholars. This gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways
when her eye was on her book, to notice the inflections of her voice,
to watch for any expression of her sentiments; for, to tell the
truth, he had a kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy to him,
and, though she interested him, he did not wish to study her heart
from the inside.

The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon
him. She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly
smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural
power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so
many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A
person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body
or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying
source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a
face produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like
the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that
human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath
the mask of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter
isolation. There was in its stony apathy, it seemed to him, the
pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the
organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out
nothing but love. And yet the master could not help feeling that some
instinct was working in this girl which was in some way leading her
to seek his presence. She did not lift her glittering eyes upon him
as at first. It seemed strange that she did not, for they were surely
her natural weapons of conquest. Her color did not come and go like
that of young girls under excitement. She had a clear brunette
complexion, a little sun-touched, it may be,--for the master noticed
once, when her necklace was slightly displaced, that a faint ring or
band of a little lighter shade than the rest of the surface encircled
her neck. What was the slight peculiarity of her enunciation, when
she read? Not a lisp, certainly, but the least possible imperfection
in articulating some of the lingual sounds,--just enough to be
noticed at first, and quite forgotten after being a few times heard.

Not a word about the flower on either side. It was not uncommon for
the schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild flower on the
teacher's desk. Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it
was a little delicate flower, that looked as if it were made to
press, and it was probably shut in by accident at the particular
place where he found it. He took it into his head to examine it in a
botanical point of view. He found it was not common,--that it grew
only in certain localities,--and that one of these was among the
rocks of the eastern spur of The Mountain.

It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb the sides
of the Alps to find the flower called the _Edelweiss_ for the maidens
whom they wish to please. It is a pretty fancy, that of scaling some
dangerous height before the dawn, so as to gather the flower in its
freshness, that the favored maiden may wear it to church on Sunday
morning, a proof at once of her lover's devotion and his courage. Mr.
Bernard determined to explore the region where this flower was said
to grow, that he might see where the wild girl sought the blossoms of
which Nature was so jealous.

It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his
land-voyage of discovery. He had more curiosity, it may be, than he
would have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering habits, and
the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances
were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon
traces of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have
known.

The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind
in an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open. The trees are
always talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every
tree talks to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the
middle of a pasture,) but grating their boughs against each
other, as old horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling palms
together,--dropping a nut or a leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a
woodpecker, or rustling as a squirrel flashes along a branch. It was
now the season of singing-birds, and the woods were haunted with
mysterious, tender music. The voices of the birds which love the
deeper shades of the forest are sadder than those of the open fields:
these are the nuns that have taken themselves away from the world and
tell their griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the
wilderness,--for the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks with
her fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied as the image of a
star in ruffled waters. Strange! The woods at first convey the
impression of profound repose, and yet, if you watch their ways with
open ear, you find the life which is in them is restless and nervous
as that of a woman: the little twigs are crossing and twining and
separating like slender fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf
is to be flattened into its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway
and twist, impatient of their constrained attitude; and the rounded
masses of foliage swell upward and subside from time to time with
long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-drops
which had lain hidden among the deeper shadows. I pray you, notice,
in the sweet summer days which will soon see you among the mountains,
this inward tranquillity that belongs to the heart of the woodland,
with this nervousness, for I do not know what else to call it, of
outer movement. One would say, that Nature, like untrained persons,
could not sit still without nestling about or doing something with
her limbs or features, and that high breeding was only to be looked
for in trim gardens, where the soul of the trees is ill at ease
perhaps, but their manners are unexceptionable, and a rustling branch
or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum. The real forest is
hardly still except in the Indian summer; then there is death in the
house, and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken months to come
with white raiment for the summer's burial.

There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most
solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions. Up to a
certain period of growth they are eminently beautiful, their boughs
disposed in the most graceful pagoda-like series of close terraces,
thick and dark with green crystalline leaflets. In spring the tender
shoots come out of a paler green, finger-like, as if they were
pointing to the violets at their feet. But when the trees have grown
old, and their rough boles measure a yard through their diameter,
they are no longer beautiful, but they have a sad solemnity all their
own, too full of meaning to require the heart's comment to be framed
in words. Below, all their earthward-looking branches are sapless and
shattered, splintered by the weight of many winters' snows; above,
they are still green and full of life, but their summits overtop all
the deciduous trees around them, and in their companionship with
heaven they are alone. On these the lightning loves to fall. One such
Mr. Bernard saw,--or rather, what had been one such; for the bolt had
torn the tree like an explosion from within, and the ground was
strewed all around the broken stump with flakes of rough bark and
strips and chips of shivered wood, into which the old tree had been
rent by the bursting rocket from the thunder-cloud.

----The master had struck up The Mountain obliquely from the western
side of the Dudley mansion-house. In this way he ascended until he
reached a point many hundred feet above the level of the plain, and
commanding all the country beneath and around. Almost at his feet he
saw the mansion-house, the chimney standing out of the middle of the
roof, or rather, like a black square hole in it,--the trees almost
directly over their stems, the fences as lines, the whole nearly as
an architect would draw a ground-plan of the house and the inclosures
round it. It frightened him to see how the huge masses of rock and
old forest-growths hung over the home below. As he descended a little
and drew near the ledge of evil name, he was struck with the
appearance of a long narrow fissure that ran parallel with it and
above it for many rods, not seemingly of very old standing,--for
there were many fibres of roots which had evidently been snapped
asunder when the rent took place, and some of which were still
succulent in both separated portions.

Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he set forth, not to come back
before he had examined the dreaded ledge. He had half persuaded
himself that it was scientific curiosity. He wished to examine the
rocks, _to see what flowers grew there_, and perhaps to pick up an
adventure in the zooelogical line; for he had on a pair of high, stout
boots, and he carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one
extremity, so as to be very convenient to hold down a _crotalus_
with, if he should happen to encounter one. He knew the aspect of the
ledge, from a distance; for its bald and leprous-looking declivities
stood out in their nakedness from the wooded sides of The Mountain,
when this was viewed from certain points of the village. But the
nearer aspect of the blasted region had something frightful in it.
The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had been gnawed for thousands
of years by hungry waves. In some places they overhung their base so
as to look like leaning towers that might topple over at any minute.
In other parts they were scooped into niches or caverns. Here and
there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them of such width
that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of meeting the
regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.

Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but
cracks or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could
find hold. High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw
some tufts of flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had
found between the leaves of his Virgil. Not there, surely! No woman
would have clung against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle
blossom. And yet the master looked round everywhere, and even up the
side of that rock, to see if there were no signs of a woman's
footstep. He peered about curiously, as if his eye might fall on some
of those fragments of dress which women leave after them, whenever
they run against each other or against anything else,--in crowded
ballrooms, in the brushwood after picnics, on the fences after
rambles, scattered round over every place that has witnessed an act
of violence, where rude hands have been laid upon them. Nothing.
Stop, though, one moment. That stone is smooth and polished, as if it
had been somewhat worn by the pressure of human feet. There is one
twig broken among the stems of that clump of shrubs. He put his foot
upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub. In this way
he turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on a natural
platform, which lay in front of one of the wider fissures,--whether
the mouth of a cavern or not he could not yet tell. A flat stone made
an easy seat, upon which he sat down, as he was very glad to do, and
looked mechanically about him. A small fragment splintered from the
rock was at his feet. He took it and threw it down the declivity a
little below where he sat. He looked about for a stem or a straw of
some kind to bite upon,--a country-instinct,--relic, no doubt, of the
old vegetable-feeding habits of Eden. Is that a stem or a straw? He
picked it up. It was a hairpin.

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