Vassall Morton Part 13

"Very fine! And how if it has no stick?"

"Then it sparkles, and blazes, and hisses on the ground; flies up and down, this way and that, plays the deuse with every thing and every body, and at last blows itself up to no purpose."

"Ah, I see that the stick is very necessary. I will try to get one."

"You speak in a bantering tone," said Morton, "but you are in earnest."

"I am in earnest!" exclaimed f.a.n.n.y Euston, with a sudden change of voice and manner. "Every word that you have spoken is true. I am driven hither and thither by feelings and impulses,--some bad, some good,--chasing every new fancy like so many b.u.t.terflies or will-o'-the-wisps,--without thinking of results--restless--dissatisfied--finding no life but in the excitement of the moment. Sometimes I have hints of better things. Glimpses of light break in upon me; but they come, and they go again. I have no rule of life, no guiding star."

Morton looked at his companion not without a certain sense of victory.

He saw that he had gained, for the moment at least, an influence over her, and roused her to the expression of feelings to which, perhaps, she had never given utterance before. Yet his own mind was any thing but tranquil. Something more than admiration was stirring within him.

He felt impelled to explore farther the proud spirit which had already yielded up to him some of its secrets. But he felt that, with her eyes upon him, he could not speak without committing himself farther than he was prepared to do. In this dilemma he determined to retreat--a resolution for which he was ent.i.tled to no little credit, if its merit is to be measured by the effort it cost him. He rose from his seat.

"Find your star, f.a.n.n.y, and you may challenge the world. But I see people coming down the garden towards us. We shall be invaded if we stay here. Let us walk back towards the house."

When he found himself alone again, he paced his room in no very enviable frame of mind.

"What devil impelled me to speak as I did? It was no part of mine to be telling her of her faults. Am I turning philanthropist and busybody? If I wished to gain her heart, I suspect I have been taking the right course. What with any other lady would have been intolerable presumption and arrogance, is the most effectual way to win her esteem. And why should I not wish to gain her heart? There is good there in abundance, if one could but depend on it. No; I am not blinded yet. This last outburst was a momentary impulse, like all the rest; and to-morrow she will be reckless as ever. She delights in lawlessness, and rejoices in the zest of breaking established bounds.

Her wayward will is like a cataract, and may carry her, G.o.d knows whither. No; I will not walk in this path; I will not try to marry her. Her heart is untouched--that is clear as the day. I wish she could say as much of mine. I will leave this place to-morrow, cost what it will."

A letter from Boston gave him a pretext; and bidding farewell to his cousin and her mother, he took the early train homewards. The newsboy brought him a paper, and his eyes rested on the columns; but his thoughts centred on f.a.n.n.y Euston and his last evening's conversation with her at the foot of the garden.

CHAPTER XIV.

* * * One fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessened by another's anguish; Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another's languish.

Take thou some new infection to thine eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.--_Romeo and Juliet_.

All day the train whirled along, and Morton's troubled thoughts found no rest.

"Matherton!" cried the conductor, opening the door of the car, as the engine stopped in a large station house, at five o'clock in the afternoon. Several pa.s.sengers got out; two or three came in; the bell rang, and with puffing and clanking, the train was on its way again. A newsboy pa.s.sed down the car with a bundle of newspapers and twopenny novels. Morton bought one of the latter as an anodyne; but even "Orlando Melville, or the Victim of the Press Gang," failed to produce the desired soporific effect, and his thoughts soon recurred to their former channel. Suddenly a violent concussion, a cras.h.i.+ng, thumping, and grating sound, the outcries of a hundred pa.s.sengers,--the women screaming, and some of the men not silent,--with a furious rocking and tossing of the car, ejected every thought but one of his personal safety. All sprang to their feet, he among the rest. The first distinct impression which his mind received was that of the man in front of him making a flying leap out of the open window of the car, carrying the sash with him--a dexterous piece of gymnastics, only to be accounted for by the fact that the performer was a distinguished artist of the Grand National Olympic Circus. His boots twinkled at the window, and he was gone, alighting on his feet like a cat, but Morton was too much frightened to laugh. In a few moments the car came to a rest, without being overturned, though the front was partly broken in, and the whole swung off the rails to an angle of forty-five degrees.

On looking out at the window, the first object that met Morton's eye was the baggage car, thrown on its side, with the door uppermost. As he looked, the door opened, and a head emerged--like a triton from the deep, or Banquo's ghost from a trap door--white with wrath and fright, and swearing with wonderful volubility. Then appeared another, rising by the side of the first, equally pallid, but much less profane. The heads belonged to two men, who had been seated in the compartment of the baggage car allotted to the mails, and when it was flung off the track, had been rattled together like dice in a box, suffering various bruises, but no serious harm. The breaking of the defective cast iron axle of the tender had caused the whole disaster, which would doubtless have produced fatal consequences had not the train been moving at a very slow rate. As it happened, a few contusions were its worst results, and one of the morning papers,

"for profound And solid lying much renowned,"

solemnly averred that none but Providence was responsible for it.

There was abundant noise and vociferation. The pa.s.sengers left the train, some lending their bungling aid to repair the mischief, while others withdrew to an inn which chanced to be in the neighborhood.

After looking for a time at the downfallen tender and the uprooted rails, Morton, from some idle impulse, entered the car which he had lately left. It was empty; and, pa.s.sing through it, he looked into that immediately behind, which had remained safely upon the rails.

This also was empty, with the exception of a single person, a young female figure, seated at one of the windows. She was closely veiled, yet there was in her air that indefinable something which told Morton at a glance that she was a lady. He stepped to the ground, conjecturing whether or no she had a companion.

Five minutes after, glancing at the window, he saw the solitary traveller seated in the same position as before, and became convinced that she was unattended. The women in the train had left it at the outset. The busy and clamorous throng of men alone remained; and Morton easily conceived that her situation must be an embarra.s.sing one. He therefore reentered the car and approached her.

"I am afraid we shall be detained here for two or three hours, and perhaps till late at night. There is a public house a little way off, to which the ladies in the train have gone. If you will allow me, I will show you the way."

So he spoke; or, rather, so he would have spoken; but he had scarcely begun when the veiled head was joyfully raised, and the veil was thrown aside, disclosing to his astonished eyes the features of Edith Leslie. She explained that she was on her way from her father's country seat at Matherton; and that he was to meet her at the station on the arrival of the train. When the accident took place, she had been led to suppose, from the conversation of two men near her, that the train would not be very long detained, and had preferred remaining in the car to mingling with the tumultuous throng outside.

"It is too fine an afternoon," said Morton, as they left the spot, "to be mured in that tavern. This lane has an inviting look. Have you a mind to explore it?"

They walked accordingly in the direction he proposed; and, as they did so, Morton cast many a stolen glance at the face of his companion. The mind of the young philosopher was that day in a peculiarly susceptible state. It seemed as if f.a.n.n.y Euston had kindled within him a flame which could not fix itself upon her, yet must needs find fuel somewhere; and as his eye met that of Edith Leslie, he began to feel that she held a deeper place in his thoughts than he had ever before suspected.

By the side of the lane stood an ancient abode, whose rotten s.h.i.+ngles supported a rich crop of green mosses; and in the yard an old man, who looked like a relic of Bunker Hill fight, was diligently chopping firewood.

"What does this lane lead to?" asked Morton, looking over the fence.

The woodchopper leaned on his axe, wiped his brows with the tatters of a red handkerchief, and seemed revolving the expediency of communicating the desired information.

"Well," he returned, after mature reflection, "if you go fur enough, it'll take you down to the Diamond Pool."

"The Diamond Pool," said Miss Leslie; "that has a promising sound."

The lane soon began to lead them down the side of a rugged hill, between barberry bushes and stunted savins, with neglected stone walls, where the striped ground squirrels chirruped as they dodged into the crevices. In a few moments they had a glimpse of the water, s.h.i.+ning between the branches of the trees below.

"Upon my word," said Morton, as they stood on the margin, "the Diamond Pool is not to be despised. We have chosen our walk well, and found a tempting place of rest at the end of it."

"A gra.s.sy bank,--a clear spring, with cardinal flowers along the edge--a cl.u.s.ter of maple trees----"

"And a flat rock at the foot of one of them, for you to rest upon. We are well provided for."

"Except that a seat for you seems to have been forgotten."

"No, if I wish to rest, this mound of gra.s.s will serve my turn. I am used to bivouacs."

The sun had just vanished behind the rocky hill on the farther side of the water; a sea of liquid fire, clouds blazoned in gold and crimson, betokened his recent presence. The lake lay like a great mirror framed in green. Another sunset glowed in its depths; rocks, hills, and trees grew downward; and the kingfisher, as he flitted over it, made a dash at the surface, as if to peck at the adversary bird, which seemed shooting upward to meet him.

"One might imagine," said Miss Leslie, "that we were a hundred miles away from railroads, factories, and all abominations of the kind."

"They will follow soon," said Morton; "they are not far off. There is no sanctuary from American enterprise."

"I know it is omnipotent at spoiling a landscape; but I hope that this one may escape,--at least if there is no mill privilege in the neighborhood."

"There is--an excellent one--at the outlet of the pond, beyond the three elms yonder. I prophesy that in five years there will be a brick factory on that meadow, with a row of one story houses for the operatives."

"It will be a scandal and a profanation. It is too beautiful for such base uses. But at least that old cedar tree, rooted in a cleft of the precipice, has found a safe sanctuary. There it was growing in King Philip's time; in its younger days it saw Indian wigwams standing on this bank; and there its offspring will grow after it, safe from Yankee axes."

"One cannot be sure of that. A time will come yet, when those rocks will be blasted to build a town hall, or open another railroad track."

"But they cannot build railroads and factories in the clouds. Our New England sunsets will still remain to remind one that there is an ideal side of life--something in it besides locomotives and cotton gins."

"There it is that you are wiser than we are. You are mistresses of a domain of which men, for the most part, know little or nothing."

"Pray what domain may that be?"

"One that is all mystery to me--a world of thoughts and sentiments which to most men is a cloudland, an undiscovered country, of which they may possibly recognize the existence, but of whose geography they know nothing."