Ernest Linwood Part 58

"Oh! I should as soon doubt that G.o.d was my Father in heaven, as you my father on earth. I _know_ it, I do not _believe_ it."

I think my feelings must have been something like a blind person's on first emerging from the darkness that has wrapped him from his birth. He does not ask, when the sunbeams fall on his unclouded vision, _if it be light_. He knows it is, because it fills his new-born capacities for sight,--he knows it is, by the shadows that roll from before it. I knew it was my father, because he met all the wants of my yearning filial nature, because I felt him worthy of honor, admiration, reverence, and love.

I know not how long I had been with him, when Mr. Brahan entered; and though it had been seventeen years since he had seen him, he immediately recognized the artist he had so much admired.

"I have found a daughter, sir," said St. James, grasping his hand with fervor. He could not add another word, and no other was necessary.

"I told her so," cried Mr. Brahan, after expressing the warmest congratulations; "I told her husband so. I knew the wretch who a.s.sumes your name was an impostor, though he wonderfully resembles yourself."

"He has a right to the name he bears," answered my father, and his countenance clouded as it always did when he alluded to his brother. "We are twin brothers, and our extraordinary resemblance in youth and early manhood caused mistakes as numerous as those recorded in the Comedy of Errors, and laid the foundation of a tragedy seldom found in the experience of life."

While they were conversing, I stole from the room and ran up stairs to tell Mrs. Brahan the wondrous tidings. Her sympathy was as heart-felt as I expected,--her surprise less. She never could believe that man my father. Mr. Brahan always said he was an impostor, only he had no means to prove it.

"How beautiful!" she said, her eyes glistening with sympathetic emotion, "that he should find you here, in his own wedded home,--the place of your birth,--the spot sanctified by the holiest memories of love. Has not your filial mission been blest? Has not Providence led you by a way you little dreamed of? My dear Gabriella, you must not indulge another sad misgiving or gloomy fear. Indeed you must not."

"I know I ought not; but come and see my father."

"What is he like?" she asked, with a smile.

"Like the dream of my childhood, when I imagined him one of the sons of G.o.d, such as once came down to earth."

"Romantic child!" she exclaimed; but when she saw my father, I read admiration as well as respect in her speaking eye, and I was satisfied with the impression he had made.

Richard came soon after informed by his father of all I could tell him and a great deal more, which he subsequently related to me. I think he was happier to know that he was cousin, than when he believed himself my brother. The transition from a lover to a brother was too painful. He could not divest himself of the idea of guilt, which, however involuntary, made him shudder in remembrance. But a cousin! The tenderness of natural affection and the memories of love, might unite in a bond so near and dear, and hallow each other.

In the joy of my emanc.i.p.ation from imagined disgrace, I did not forget that the cloud still rested darkly on him,--that he still groaned under the burden which had been lifted from my soul. He told me that he had hope of his father's ultimate regeneration,--that he had found him much softened,--that he wept at the sight of Theresa's Bible, and still more when he read aloud to him the chapters which gave most consolation to her dying hours.

The unexpected visit of his brother, from whom he had been so long separated, and whom he supposed was dead, had stirred still deeper the abysses of memoir and feeling.

I will now turn a little while from myself, and give a brief history of the twin brothers, as I learned it from my father's lips, and Richard's, who narrated to me the story of _his_ father's life as he heard it in the dungeon of the Tombs.

CHAPTER LVI.

Henry Gabriel and Gabriel Henry St. James, were born in the Highlands of New York. Their father was of English extraction, though of American birth; their mother the daughter of a French refugee, who had sought shelter in the land of freedom from the storms of the Revolution. So the elements of three nations mingled in their veins.

There was nothing remarkable in their childhood, but their resemblance to each other, which was so perfect that their own mother was not able to distinguish the one from the other. Perhaps either of them, seen separately, would not have excited extraordinary interest, but together they formed an image of dual beauty as rare as it was attractive. They were remarkable for their fine physical development, their blooming health, and its usual accompaniments, sunniness of temper, and gaiety of spirits; but even in early childhood these twin-born bodies showed that they were vitalized by far different souls. Their father was a sea-captain; and while Gabriel would climb his knees and listen with eager delight to tales of ocean life and stirring adventures, Henry, seated at his mother's feet, with his hands clasped on her lap and his eyes riveted on her face, would gather up her gently sparkling words in his young heart, and they became a pavement of diamonds, indestructible as it was bright and pure.

As they grew older, the master-pa.s.sion of each became more apparent.

Gabriel made mimic boats and s.h.i.+ps, and launched them on the bosom of a stream which flowed back of their dwelling, an infant argosy freighted with golden hopes. Henry drew figures on the sandy sh.o.r.e, of birds and beasts and creeping things, and converted every possible material into tablets for the impressions of his dawning genius. Gabriel was his father's darling, Henry was mother's beloved. I said she could not distinguish her twin-born boys; but when she looked into their eyes, there was something in the earnest depths of Henry's, an answering expression of love and sensibility, which she sought in vain in his brother's. The soul of the sea-dreaming boy was not with her; it was following the father on the foaming paths of ocean.

"My boys shall go with me on my next voyage," said the captain. "It is time to think of making men of them. They have been poring over books long enough to have a holiday; and, by the living Jove, they shall have it. It is the ruin of boys to be tied to their mother's ap.r.o.n strings after they are twelve years old. They are fit for nothing but peddlers or colporteurs."

Gabriel clapped his hands exultingly; but Henry drew closer to his mother's side.

"My hero, my young brave," cried the captain, slapping his favorite boy on the shoulder, "you are worth a dozen such girl-boys as your brother.

Let him be a kitten and cry mew, if he will, while you climb the topgallant-mast and make ladders of the clouds."

"I am as brave as he is," said Henry, straightening his youthful figure, and looking at his father with a kindling eye. "I am not afraid of the water; but who will protect my mother, if I go away with you?"

"Bravo! There is some spirit in the boy after all," exclaimed the captain, who loved his wife with the devotion and constancy of a sailor.

"He has chosen an honorable post, and by heaven I will not force him to leave it. I see that nature, when she gave us twins, intended we should go shares in our boys. It is just. Gabriel shall go with me, but the silver cup of fortune may after all find its way in Henry's sack."

Thus at twelve years of age the twin brothers separated, and from that era their life-paths diverged into a constantly widening angle.

The captain discovered too late the error he had committed in cultivating the roving propensities of his son, to the exclusion of steady, n.o.bler pursuits. He had intended merely to give him a holiday, and a taste of a seafaring life; but after revelling in the joys of freedom, he found it impossible to bind him down to the restraints of scholastic life. He wanted him to go to college, but the young rover bravely refused obedience to parental authority, saying, that one genius in a family was enough; and the father, gazing with pride on the wild, handsome, and dauntless boy, said there was no use in twisting the vine the wrong way, and yielded to his will. Henry, imbosomed in cla.s.sic shades, gathered the fruits of science and the flowers of literature, while his genius as an artist, though apparently dormant, waited the Ithuriel touch of opportunity to wake into life and action.

Captain St. James had prospered in his enterprises and acquired a handsome fortune, so that his sons would not be dependent on their own exertions for support. Gabriel unfortunately knew this circ.u.mstance too well, and on the faith of his father's fortune indulged in habits of extravagance and dissipation as ruinous as they were disgraceful. The captain did not live to witness the complete degradation of his favorite son. His vessel was wrecked on a homeward voyage, and the waves became the sailor's winding-sheet. His wife did not long survive him. She died, pining for the genial air of her own sunny clime, leaving the impress of her virtues and her graces on the character of one of her sons. Alas for the other!

Free now from parental restraint, as he had long been from moral obligations, Gabriel plunged into the wildest excesses of dissipation.

In vain Henry lifted his warning voice, in vain he extended his guardian hand, to save him who had now become the slave as well as the votary of vice. His soul clave to his brother with a tenderness of affection, which neither his selfishness nor vices, not even his crimes, could destroy. A gambler, a rouee, every thing but a drunkard, he at length became involved in so disgraceful a transaction, he was compelled for safety to flee the country; and Henry, ignorant what course he had taken, gave him up in despair, and tried to forget the existence of one whose remembrance could only awaken sorrow and shame. He went to Europe, as has been previously related, and with the eye of a painter and the heart of a poet, travelled from clime to clime, and garnered up in his imagination the sublimities of nature and the wonders of art. His genius grew and blossomed amid the warm and fostering influences of an elder world, till it formed, as it were, a bower around him, in whose perennial shades he could retire from haunting memories and uncongenial a.s.sociations.

In the mean time, Gabriel had found refuge in his mother's native land.

During his wild, roving life, he had mingled much with foreigners, and acquired a perfect knowledge of the French language,--I should rather say his knowledge was perfected by practice, for the twin brothers had been taught from infancy the melodious and expressive language of their mother's native clime. The facility with which he conversed, and his extremely handsome person, were advantages whose value he well knew how to appreciate, and to make subservient to his use.

It was at this time that he became acquainted with Theresa Josephine La Fontaine, and his worn and sated pa.s.sions were quickened into new life.

She was not beautiful, "but fair and excellent," and of a character that exercises a commanding influence over the heart of man. Had he known her before habits of selfish indulgence had become, like the Ethiopian's skin and the leopard's spots, too deep and indelible for chemic art to change, she might perhaps have saved him from the transgressor's doom.

She loved him with all the ardor of her pure, yet impa.s.sioned nature, and fully believed that her heart was given to one of the sons of light, instead of the children of darkness. For awhile his sin-dyed spirit seemed to bleach in the whitening atmosphere that surrounded him, for a father's as well as a husband's joy was his. But at length the demon of ennui possessed him. Satan was discontented in the bowers of Paradise.

Gabriel sighed for his profligate companions, in the bosom of wedded love and joy. He left home on a false pretence, and never returned. It was long before Theresa admitted a doubt of his faith, and it was not till a rumor of his marriage in America reached her ear, that she believed it possible that he could deceive and betray her. An American traveller from New York, who knew Henry St. James and was unconscious of the existence of his brother, spoke of his marriage and his beautiful bride in terms that roused every dormant pa.s.sion in the breast of the deserted Theresa. Yet she waited long in the hope and the faith of woman's trusting heart, clinging to the belief of her husband's integrity and truth, with woman's fond adhesiveness. At length, when she had but convincing reason to believe herself a betrayed and abandoned wife, she took her boy in her arms, crossed the ocean waste, landed in New York, and by the aid of a directory sought the home of Henry St.

James, deeming herself the legitimate mistress of the mansion she made desolate by her presence. The result of her visit has been already told.

She unconsciously destroyed the happiness of others, without securing her own. It is not strange, that in the moment of agony and distraction caused by the revelation made by Theresa, Rosalie should not have noticed in the marriage certificate the difference between the names of Henry Gabriel and Gabriel Henry St. James.

Henry St. James had been summoned to Texas, then the Botany Bay of America, by his unhappy brother, who had there commenced a new career of sin and misery. He had gambled away his fortune, killed a man in a scene of strife and blasphemy, been convicted of homicide, escaped from the sentence, and, lurking in by-lanes and accursed places, fell sick, and wrote to his brother to come and save him from infamy and death.

How could he wound the spotless ears of Rosalie by the tale of his brother's guilt and shame? He had never spoken to her of his existence, the subject was so exquisitely painful, for he believed himself for ever separated from him, and why should his blasted name cast a shadow over the heaven of his domestic happiness?

Alter having raised his miserable brother from the gulf of degradation in which he had plunged, and given him the means of establis.h.i.+ng himself in some honorable situation, which he promised to seek, he returned to find his home occupied by strangers, his wife and child fled, his happiness wrecked, and his peace destroyed. The deluded and half frantic Theresa, believing him to be her husband, appealed to him, by the memory of their former love and wedded felicity, to forgive the steps she had taken that she might a.s.sert the claims of her deserted boy. Maddened by the loss of the wife whom he adored, he became for the time a maniac; and so terrible was his indignation and despair, the unhappy victim of his brother's perfidy fled trembling and dismayed from his presence.

In the calmer moments that succeeded the first paroxysms of his agony, Henry thought of his brother and of the extraordinary resemblance they bore to each other, and the mystery which frenzied pa.s.sion had at first veiled from his eyes was partially revealed to his understanding. Could he then have seen her, and could she prove that she was the wife of Gabriel, he would have protected her with a brother's care and tenderness. But his first thought was for Rosalie,--the young, the beloved, the deceived, the fugitive Rosalie, of whose flight no clue could be discovered, no trace be found. The servants could throw no light on the mystery, for she had left in the darkness and silence of night. They only knew that Peggy disappeared at the same time, and was probably her companion. This circ.u.mstance afforded a faint relief to Henry's distracted mind, for he knew Peggy's physical strength and moral courage, as well as her remarkable attachment to his lovely and gentle wife. But whither had they gone? The natural supposition was, that she would throw herself on the protection of her step-mother, as the only person on whom she had any legitimate claims,--unkind as she had formerly been. He immediately started for the embattled walls of Fortress Monroe,--but before his departure, he put advertis.e.m.e.nts in every paper, which, if they met her eye, she could not fail to understand. Alas! they never reached the gray cottage imbosomed in New England woods!

In vain he sought her in the wave-washed home of her childhood. He met with no sympathy from the slighted and jealous step-mother, who had destroyed the only link that bound them together, the name of her father. She had married again, and disowned all interest in the daughter of her former husband. She went still further, and wreaked her vengeance on St. James for the wounds he had inflicted on her vanity, by aspersing and slandering the innocent Rosalie. He left her in indignation and disgust, and wandered without guide or compa.s.s, like another Orpheus in search of the lost Eurydice. Had he known Peggy's native place, he might have turned in the right direction, but he was ignorant of every thing but her name and virtues. At length, weary and desponding, he resolved to seek in foreign lands, and in devotion to his art, oblivion of his sorrows. Just before his departure he met his brother, and told him of the circ.u.mstances which banished him from home and country. Gabriel, whose love for Theresa had been the one golden vein in the dark ore of his nature, was awakened to bitter, though short-lived remorse, not only for the ruin he brought on her, but the brother, whose fraternal kindness had met with so sad a requital. Touched by the exhibition of his grief and self-reproach, Henry committed to his keeping a miniature of Rosalie, of which he had a duplicate, that he might be able to identify her, and Gabriel promised, if he discovered one trace of his wife and child, that he would write to his brother and recall him.

They parted. Henry went to Italy, where images of ideal loveliness mingled with, though they could not supplant, the taunting memories of his native clime. As an artist, and as a man, he was admired, respected, and beloved; and he found consolation, though not happiness. The one great sorrow of his life fell like a mountain shadow over his heart; but it darkened its brightness without chilling its warmth. He was still the sympathizing friend of humanity, the comforter of the afflicted, the benefactor of the poor.

In the mean time Gabriel continued his reckless and dissolute course, sometimes on land, sometimes on sea, an adventurer, a speculator, a gambler, and a wretch. Destiny chanced to throw him into the vortex of corruption boiling in the heart of New York, when I went there, the bride of Ernest. He had seen me in the street, before he met me at the theatre; and, struck by my resemblance to the miniature which his brother had given him, he inquired and learned my name and history, as well as the wealth and rank of my husband. Confirmed in his suspicion that I was the child of Rosalie, he resolved to fill his empty pockets with my husband's gold, by making me believe that _he_ was my father, and appealing to my filial compa.s.sion. Not satisfied with his success, he forged the note, whose discovery was followed by detection, conviction, imprisonment, and despair.

The only avenue to his seared and hardened heart had been found by the son of Theresa, coming to him like a messenger from heaven, in all his purity, excellence, and filial piety, not to avenge a mother's wrongs, but to cheer and illumine a guilty father's doom. His brother, too, seemed sent by Providence at this moment, that he might receive the daughter whom, from motives of the basest selfishness, he had claimed as his own.

When I first saw my father at the Falls, he had just returned to his native land, in company with Julian, the young artist. Urged by one of those irresistible impulses which may be the pressure of an angel's hand, his spirit turned to the soil where he now firmly believed the ashes of his Rosalie reposed. He and Julian parted on their first arrival, met again on the morning of our departure, and travelled together through some of the glowing and luxuriant regions of the West.

After Julian left him to visit Grandison Place, he lingered amid scenes where nature revelled in all its primeval grandeur and original simplicity, sketching its boldest and most attractive features, till, G.o.d-directed, he came to the city over which the memory of his brief wedded life trembled like a misty star throbbing on the lonely heart of night. Hearing that a St. James was in the dungeons of the Tombs, a convicted forger, he at once knew that it must be his brother. There he sought him, and learned from him that the child of Rosalie lived, though Rosalie was a more.

As simple as sad, was the solution of my life's mystery.

Concealment was the fatal source of our sorrows. Even the n.o.ble Henry St. James erred in concealing his twin brotherhood, though woe and disgrace tarnished the once golden link. Rosalie and Theresa both erred, in not giving their children their father's name, though they believed it accursed by perjury and guilt.