India: the Pearl of Pearl River

46

On the opposite side of the Pearl from Cashmere, and a little further down the river, and back from its banks, in a small vale embosomed in hills, was Silentshades, the home of Mark Sutherland. The homestead was the same that had been built by his father, upon first laying out the plantation. The house was very 68modest and unpretending—a moderate-sized, oblong building of two stories, painted light brown, with green shutters, and with piazzas surrounding both floors. The house was shaded and darkened by catalpa trees clustering thick about it and overhanging the roof. The pillars of the piazzas were thickly twined with running vines, that, branching and interlacing, formed a beautiful treillage of foliage and flowers. Doors from this piazza admitted directly into the rooms upon the first floor. In the right-hand front room, opening upon two sides into the piazza, upon the next evening after the events related in the last chapter, sat Mrs. Sutherland. She was a medium-sized, full-formed brunette, of perhaps forty years of age; yet so perfect was her physical organization, and so well regulated her moral nature, so even, calm, and blameless had been the tenor of her life, that now, she was a specimen—not, certainly, of youthful beauty—but of a rarer kind of matured and perfected matronly beauty. Her style was noble and simple. Her rich, abundant hair of glossy black, with purplish light, was plainly divided above a broad forehead, and laying down upon the temples in heavy looped bands, was carried behind and twisted into a thick, rich coil, and wound round and round into a large knot fastened with pins; there were no combs, curls, ribbons, or fripperies of any sort, to mar the simple, grand beauty of the head. The eyebrows were black and lightly arched; the eyes large, dark, and very quiet, under their curtain of long black lashes; the nose perfectly straight; and the cheeks, lips, and chin, perfectly beautiful in contour. Her complexion was of that mellow, Italian brown, flushing and deepening in the cheeks to a carnation richness. 69(Uncle Billy, who sincerely admired his sister, always said that her complexion ever reminded him of the bloom on a ripe, luscious peach.) Her dress was very simple—a black silk with a delicate lace collar pinned with a small diamond brooch. She sat in an easy chair, reading a letter; and as she read and turned the leaves a quiet smile would just dawn and play on her lips. By her side was a stand with an open book, a workbox, and a little silver hand-bell. At last, without removing her eyes from the letter, she smilingly extended her hand, and rang the little bell. A servant entered, and still without withdrawing her eyes from the fascinating letter, she said:

“Send Mrs. Jolly to me, William.”

The man withdrew with a bow, and the housekeeper entered, and awaited the commands of the lady.

Slowly and smilingly folding up the letter, she said, “Mr. Sutherland is coming home this evening. He brings a friend, a young gentleman, with him. I wish you to have their chambers prepared; and do remember to close the wire-gauze blinds, and burn catalpa leaves in the rooms, to destroy any mosquitoes that may remain.”

“And at what time shall I order supper, madam?”

“Ah, yes—it will be necessary to put it back two or three hours. You must judge of that. Mr. Sutherland may arrive at any time between this and ten o’clock.”

The housekeeper left the room, and the lady sank into her chair again, to re-peruse her letter, smiling and murmuring to herself, half aloud—“Dear boy! dearest Mark! Sure no mother ever had a son like 70mine. Comes to me first—comes to me before hastening to see his lady-love—his adored India. Dearest Mark—but his devotion shall be rewarded. He shall find his India here.” And she went to a writing-desk, took paper, and pen, and ink, and wrote the following note:

Dear India: My dear niece, but dearer daughter, just get into your carriage, and come to me, and do not pause to wonder why I ask you. It is late, I know, but the moon shines brightly, and the roads are good—your driver is careful, and the distance is short. More than all, dear daughter, I consider your coming very important. So hasten, darling, to

Having sealed this letter, the lady rang the bell and gave it in charge of a footman, urging dispatch.

Soon a waiter entered, and lighted up the rooms; and he had scarcely closed the blinds and withdrawn, before the sound of carriage-wheels was heard approaching, and the lady hastened out into the hall. The carriage paused before the door, and in an instant after, Mark Sutherland had alighted, and was clasped to the bosom of his mother.

“Oh, my dear Mark! I am so overjoyed to have you again!”

“Dear mother, I am so proud and happy to find you looking so well! Permit me to present my friend—Mr. Lincoln Lauderdale—Mrs. Sutherland.”

A low bow from the gentleman, and a deep courtesy 71from the lady, and then smilingly throwing off her habitual reserve, Mrs. Sutherland offered her hand, saying—

“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Lauderdale. You are not a stranger, I assure you. My son has taught me to esteem you, and desire your friendship. Will you enter now?”

And with another smile she gave her hand to her guest, and permitted him to lead her into the drawing-room.

Mr. Sutherland remained in the hall to give some directions to the grooms, and to order the baggage of his guest to be taken up to his chamber. After which he entered the parlour, and laying his hand affectionately upon his friend’s shoulder, said—

“My dear Lauderdale, when you feel disposed—or, rather, if you feel disposed—to change your dress—Flamingo will show you your apartment. Supper will be ready—Madame, when will supper be ready?”

“My dear Mark, any time—in an hour—an hour and a half”——

“In an hour, Lincoln; that will give you ample time. Flame! lights here. Show Mr. Lauderdale to his room, and consider yourself in his exclusive service while he honours us with his company. I presume you will prefer Flame, my dear Lincoln, because you already know the fellow.”

“Thank you, but really I do not need”——

“Oh, say not a word, my dear boy! When you have been subjected to the enervating influence of this climate for a week, you will better know what you need.”

72By this time Flamingo made his appearance with chamber lamps. Lauderdale arose to follow him. Sutherland accompanied him into the hall.

“My dear Mark,” said the former, “did I understand you to say that Mrs. Sutherland was your own mother?”

“Undoubtedly my own mother! What a question! Besides, my friend, pardon me! but really, where are your eyes? We are said to be the image of each other!”

“Well, now, although both of you are dark, with high complexions, I cannot see the likeness, to save my soul,” said Lauderdale, mischievously; then adding, “she is very handsome.”

“Is she not!” echoed Sutherland, with enthusiasm, and accompanying Lauderdale up stairs—“the handsomest woman in the world? oh, except one. You should see India. And, more than that, she—my mother, I mean—is the most excellent, except—none.”

“I cannot think that she was so handsome in early youth as she is now.”

“Oh, I suppose her youth to her maturity was as the budding to the blooming rose—that is all. Here is your room. Make Flame supply you with anything you may need, that is not at hand; and for your life—nay, more, for your good looks, worth more than life—do not open the wire shutters; if you do, you may look in the glass in ten minutes after, and fancy yourself ill with the erysipelas. Au revoir! When you are ready, come down.”

Mark Sutherland left the room, and instead of seeking his own chamber, to refresh himself with a change 73of raiment, he hastened down the stairs, entered the parlour, and once more clasped his mother fervently in his arms, and—

“My dearest mother,” and “My dearest Mark,” were the words exchanged between them. “But, oh, Mark! how haggard you look, my love! You have been ill, and never let me know it.”

“No, upon my honour, mother!”

“Ah, but you are so pale and thin, and your expression is so anxious—what is it? What can it be, Mark?”

“My own dear mother, it is nothing that should give you any uneasiness. I have had a long, fatiguing ride, and—I have not heard from India for more than a week. How is my Pearl?”

“Ah, rogue! a lover’s anxiety. Is that the cause of those haggard looks? And yet, to come to me first! Dear Mark! But I have anticipated all your wishes. Your India will be here to meet you—I am expecting her every moment. Hark! there are her carriage-wheels!” said the lady, going to the window; then hurrying back, she exclaimed, “Peste! she has some one with her—that lively little Mrs. Vivian, I suppose. Listen, Mark! I will carry her off to a dressing-room, and leave you to meet India. She does not know that you are here.”

And Mrs. Sutherland went to the hall door, which she reached just as Mrs. Vivian, who was the first to alight, entered.

“Ah, how do you do, Mrs. Vivian? I am very glad to see you! Come, come into my room.”

“Oh, but stop—let us wait for India!”

“By no means, my dear. Mark will wait for her.”

74“A-h-h-h! He has come!”

“Certainly,” said the lady, carrying off her captive.

India sauntered languidly up the door-stairs. Mark sprang forward to meet her. She started—paled—reeled—might have fallen, but he caught her to his bosom, murmuring deeply, earnestly, “India! my India!”

For a moment she had nearly swooned with surprise and joy, but in the next instant she recovered, and deeply blushing, withdrew herself from him, saying, “I did not know that you were here.”

“I have only this instant arrived,” he replied. “My dear, beautiful India! to see you, it is unspeakable happiness.”

And he would have clasped her form again, but with flushed cheek she glided out of his arms and entered the parlour. He followed her, placed an easy chair, seated her on it, rolled a cushion to her feet, untied and removed her bonnet, lifted the mass of shining amber ringlets and pressed them to his face, and then would have sunk down upon the cushion at her feet—there to sit and worship with his eyes her peerless beauty, only the sound of light footsteps and silvery laughter arrested the folly.

It was Valeria, who, chatting and laughing with her usual gaiety, entered, accompanied by Mrs. Sutherland. Their entrance was soon followed by that of Mr. Lauderdale, who was immediately presented to Mrs. Vivian and Miss Sutherland.

Supper was next announced, and the party left the drawing-room. After supper, the evening was spent in music, conversation, and cards. A storm arising, detained the ladies all night. After the party had 75separated, each to seek his or her own apartment, Sutherland stopped for an instant in Lauderdale’s room to ask, “Well, what do you think of her, Lincoln?”

“She is perfectly beautiful.”

“Is she not?”

“There is positively nothing possible to be added to her beauty!”

“Ah, did I not tell you so?”

“She has taken me completely captive.”

“The deuce! I did not require you to be taken captive.”

“If I were only in a condition to seek the lady’s love—”

“Humph! What would you do, then?”

“Lose no time in suing for it.”

“The demon you wouldn’t! That is extremely cool, upon my sacred word and honour!”

“Such glorious black eyes!”

“They are not black, mine honest friend, but blue—celestial blue.”

“Blue, are they? I thought they were black; but, in truth, one cannot follow their quickly-changing light and shade to find the hue, they scintillate and flash so.”

“Scintillate and flash! Why, they are calm and steady as stars. What the deuce are her eyes to you?”

“And then her magnificent black hair!”

“Black! you are mad! Hers is bronze in the shade, and golden in the sunlight. D——l fly away with you!” the latter clause under his breath.

“I swear her hair is superb black!”

76“Who are you talking about?”

“Who—who but charming Mrs. Vivian!”

“Cousin Valeria! Oh-h-h-h! ha! ha! ha! And I was speaking of India! So you think Mrs. Vivian good-looking?”

“Good-looking—divine.”

“I thought no one in his senses could apply that term to any woman but Miss Sutherland.”

“Who—the red-haired young lady?”

“Red-haired!” burst out the voice of Sutherland, in indignant astonishment; then reining in his anger with a strong hand, he added, “Lincoln, you are my friend, but there are some provocations”—

“Miss Sutherland is graceful,” said Lauderdale, with a quiet smile.

“Tah-tah-tah, with your faint praises; good night.”

“Now, here is a reasonable man! When he thought me praising his love with great fervour, he was so jealous as to feel like running me through the heart; and now that he finds me very moderate in my admiration of his idol, he is angry enough to sweep my head off at a blow,” said Lauderdale, laughing.

“Good night!” said Sutherland, to cover his confusion.

“Stay, I can’t let you go so; your lady-love is really lovely enough to turn all the heads and break all the hearts that approach her. But she has not disturbed the healthful action of mine—will that content you?”

“Yes, because I know it is true—especially the first part of it. Good night.”

“Good night.”

And the friends separated.

77“And is this all you have to say in support of your project, Mark?”

“Not all, my dear mother.”

The lady applied her handkerchief to her eyes quietly, almost stealthily; her face was pale and sorrowful; she seemed to restrain herself steadily, as though she thought the betrayal of strong emotion unbecoming to a woman of her age and station. Her son had just revealed to her his purpose of emancipating all the negroes upon his plantation and sending them to Liberia, with his reasons for so doing. The scene took place very early in the morning after his arrival. It was in her dressing-room. Before any of their guests had arisen, they were up, and she had called him, as he passed her door. They sat now at the open window that looked out upon the beautiful valley of the Pearl, with its groves and fields and streams all fresh and resplendent in the light of the newly-risen sun. The mother sighed deeply as she withdrew her glance from the gladdening scene, and fixed it upon the face of her son.

“And so, Mark, this is the cause of your ill and anxious looks?”

“Yes, mother; I will not deny to you that it has cost me a very severe struggle; and perhaps you see some of its effects.”

“Yes, some of them, Mark—alas! not all,” said the lady, in a low, faint voice.

If a little while before she had restrained unmeet energy of expression in the strong emotion she had felt, now all power as well as all will seemed to forsake her. She sat silent, with her hands folded and her 78eyes fixed upon them. Mr. Sutherland watched her anxiously.

“My dear madam, I have pained you.”

“I am a widow, Mark, and have no child but you”—

“Mother”——

“It is a sorrowful time for the mother, Mark, when the boy she has nursed and brought up to man’s estate turns upon her in her weakness, arrayed in all the strength and power of manhood.”

“My dearest mother”——

“Your father, Mark, never caused me a tear or a sigh in his life.”

“God bless his memory for that.”

“He trusted so in your affection for me, Mark—and so did I—that he left me totally dependent upon you”——

“My dearest mother, your comfort and convenience shall be my first object in life. Not even India, my loved India, shall cause me to forget all I owe to you.”

“Words, Mark! words! This project of yours will reduce me to beggary!”

“No, dear madam, it shall not. Me it will reduce to—my own exertions for a livelihood, but not you. When all my slaves are freed, and on their way to Africa at my cost, there will still remain, from the sale of the land, some thirty thousand dollars. That money, mother, with the homestead here, I intend to settle upon yourself”——

“Oh, my son! you break my heart. Do you think, then, that I will suffer you to beggar yourself to enrich me? No, dear Mark; no! Since you do not forget me—since you remember me with affectionate interest, it is sufficient. If I reproached you just now, 79it was only because I felt as if you did not care for me; and that is a sorrowful feeling in a parent, Mark.”

“I never for one instant forgot your interests, dear mother. How could I? I had settled the plan I have named to you, in my mind, before I left the North.”

“I cannot bear the name of that quarter of our country! the word strikes like a bullet, Mark!” exclaimed the lady, with an impulsive start, and shrunk as if indeed she were shot.

Mr. Sutherland looked down, mortified and troubled.

“And as for this plan, Mark,” proceeded the lady, “it must not be carried out. Under no circumstances can I consent that you beggar yourself for me.”

“Dearest mother, I do not think it possible for mere loss of fortune to beggar a man of good health and good morals. I shall go to the West. It is a broad field for enterprise. I studied law for my amusement, having had a strong natural attraction for it. I shall commence the practice of that profession in some western village, and grow up with the town. I shall succeed. Indeed, methinks new life and energy runs through my veins and fires my heart at the very thought of difficulties to meet and overcome!” said Mr. Sutherland, smiling gaily, stretching his arms and rubbing his hands together.

“Alas! you do not know what you are talking about, Mark! What a project! And your approaching marriage with India—is it possible in this connexion that you do not think of that?”

“Not think of that!” echoed Mr. Sutherland, as a strange, beautiful smile flitted over his face. “Mother, I dreaded this interview with you; but I looked 80forward to an explanation with my loved India as the first reward of right-doing—if what I have done is right—a foretaste of what the rewards of Heaven will be! My India! I know her generosity, her magnanimity, her high-souled enthusiasm! How many times I have experienced it! How many times, when reading with her of some high heroism of the olden time, when there were heroes, have I seen her pause, her bosom heave, her cheek flush, her eye kindle and gaze upon me, expressing unspeakable admiration of those lofty deeds! And now, when in her own life an opportunity occurs of practising those very same great virtues—when she has the power, by sacrificing wealth and luxury, to bless hundreds of her fellow-beings, and not them only, but their children and children’s children—do I not know that high-souled girl will aspire to do it! Madam, it is a majestic, a godlike power, to be able to confer the blessing of liberty and education upon hundreds of beings and their descendants to numberless generations—a power I would not now exchange for a small limited monarchy. And, oh! do I not know that my India—soul of my soul!—will think as I do—will feel as I do? Nay, do I not know that she will go beyond me? Mother, when I have doubted, or struggled against my better feelings, I have seen as in a vision, her eyes suffused with generous tears, her cheek kindle, and felt the warm pressure of her hand encouraging, inspiring me!”

“Oh, Mark! Mark! romance! nothing more. And even should India approve your project, which I think quite impossible, what is your further purpose? To leave her here, bound by an engagement, to wear out 81her youth in expectation of your making a fortune and coming back to claim her hand?”

“No, dearest mother, that were too hard a trial to both of us. No, I mean to take her with me to the West, to encourage and assist me while I make her as happy as I possibly can!”

Here, again, the lady’s feelings arose to so high a pitch of excitement that she had to put a violent constraint upon herself, while she answered quietly, “And how do you think Miss Sutherland will like to lay aside all the prestige of her rank, and wealth, and bridehood, and, instead of a splendid wedding, and a bridal tour, and a voyage to Europe, take an ignominious departure from her father’s house, for a life of poverty and privation in the West?”

“I told you, dearest mother, that my India was of a highly heroic nature. That does not mean wedded to ease and worldly honour; indeed, it more frequently means the loss of both.”

“And so you deliberately mean to take that girl—if she will go with you—to some miserable western village, to endure all the miseries of poverty?”

“What miseries of poverty, dearest mother? If you were a European talking of Europeans, I could understand your prudence; but you are an American matron talking to an American youth, and advising him not to marry the girl he loves if he has not a fortune to support her. It seems to me, mother, that in our country the man or woman who refuses to marry for such a reason, wants faith, love, hope, enterprise, energy, and every thing they ought to have; and under such circumstances, it seems but right, indeed, that they should stay single.”

82“You do not know what you are talking about. But should India be so imprudent, do you think her father will consent to such a mad project?”

“His consent to our union was long ago obtained; and if, under present circumstances, he should withdraw it—India is of age, you know!”

“Mark, tell me if you have ever had any experimental knowledge of want?” The young man looked up with a questioning glance. “Because if you do not know, I can tell you, Mark. I know how young people think of poverty, and talk of poverty, when any strong motive like love, or any other passion, urges them to embrace it; and people who are older, and should know better, talk pretty much in the same way. They will tell you that poverty deprives you of none of the real essential blessings of life; that the riches of nature and of nature’s God are free alike to the rich and the poor; that the blessings of health, of well-doing, of sunshine, and the face of nature, are open alike to both. It is so with the rich, doubtless, and it may be so with the poor who were born in this poverty; but to the well-born and well-educated, to the refined and intellectual, poverty is a dreadful, dreadful thing. It is not only to suffer the privation of proper and sufficient food, and comfortable clothing, and dwelling—it is to be shut out of all enjoyment of the blessings of nature and of society, and at the same time be exposed to all the evils that nature and society can inflict upon you. You have no leisure, or if you have, you have no respectable clothing, in which to go out and take the air, and enjoy the genial sunshine of pleasant days, on the one hand; and on the other, no adequate protection against the freezing 83cold of winter, and no escape from the burning heat of summer. And for society, pride will not permit you to seek the company of your sometime peers, and delicacy restrains you from the coarse association around you. To us, Mark, poverty would be the privation of every enjoyment. To be poor, were to be maimed, blind, ill, and imprisoned, at once!”

“Dear mother, you are a lady—I, a man! And loss of fortune has now no terrors for me; and birth and education, so far from rendering me more helpless, shall make me stronger to conquer my difficulties. I have no fear of wanting any of the comforts of life from the very onset. And as for being shut out, or rather shut in, from nature—mother, do you think I shall be? Do you think I shall keep away from nature because I cannot call on her in a coach, with a groom on horseback to take in my card? No, indeed. On the contrary, I purpose to live with nature. She’s an old intimate friend of mine, and no summer friend either—nor shall I be a summer friend of hers, and shrink from her boisterous winds and rattling sleet. And as for society, mother—oh, let me quote to you the words of Dr. Channing, whose lips, indeed, seemed touched with fire: ‘No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship.’ So, dearest mother, with industry that will procure me all the 84necessaries of life, health that will enable me to enjoy or endure nature in all her moods, and a mind dependent on itself for its enjoyment, what have I to dread from loss of fortune?”

“It may be very well for you, at least tolerable; but for India! You would not bring Miss Sutherland down to such a state?”

Mark paused, and then answered—

“Yes, mother, yes; if the only other alternative is to be a separation of many years, I would bring India down to this state.”

“Oh, Mark! that is very, very selfish!”

“I do not think so, madam.”

“Mark! Just now, when I told you of the nameless miseries of the well-born poor, you did not deny them, but said, ‘Mother, you are a lady—I, a man.’ Mark! out of your own mouth I will condemn you. India—Miss Sutherland—‘is a lady,’ Mark! Are you not selfish?”

“No, mother! not if India feels as I do—as I know she does; not if our separation would be to her, as it would be to me, a greater evil than all the early struggles our union may bring upon us.”

“My dear son, your sanguine confidence gives me deep pain. Dear Mark, be not too sure! Not for worlds would I speak a word against your India. Nor do I know that, under her circumstances, I speak much evil of her when I say that she is haughty, self-willed, indolent, and fastidious! But are those the elements of self-sacrifice?”

“Mother, I would not hear another soul breathe aught against India but you; but to answer your question—and granting, what I am unwilling to 85grant, that these faults of her station may be also hers—affection will conquer them! My life upon India’s magnanimity!”

Yet, even while he spoke, he became suddenly pale and aghast, as if, for the first time, the possibility that it might be otherwise had struck him.

The lady had been pale and disturbed throughout the interview; and now she rose, and taking his hand, said—

“Mark, they have gone down to breakfast; we must go too. We will speak of this again. Mark, I should be in despair, if I did not hope that circumstances will compel you to abandon this insane purpose. When do you break it to India?”

“This day, mother! You have conjured up a phantom whose presence I would not endure for many hours. It must be exorcised by dear India forthwith.”

Mrs. Sutherland had two grounds of hope. The first was, that her son, restored to home associations and influences, might change his views and purposes before they should become known to his uncle. Upon this first hope she founded her purpose of preventing, as long as possible, Mark’s intended communication to India. The second ground of hope was, that in the event of Mr. Sutherland’s intentions becoming known, the powerful motives that would be brought to bear upon him—the threatened loss of his uncle’s favour, and of his promised bride’s hand—might irresistibly impel him to renounce his project.

But her present wish was to arrest the disclosure of her son’s resolution until she could gain time to use her influence upon him to induce him to abandon 86them. These thoughts did not arise in her mind during her interview with Mark, nor until she sat reflecting upon it, after breakfast, in the back parlour. Her visitors, on leaving the table, had retired into the front room.

Her fit of deep thought was interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Vivian from that front parlour. The “lady gay” came in, trilling a lively opera air. Mrs. Sutherland arose, and took her hand with a very serious manner, saying—

“My dear Valeria, who have you left in the other room?”

“Mark and India,” answered the little widow, raising her eyebrows with slight surprise.

“No one else?”

“No—yes—I do not know; I believe there is a waiter, or”—

“My dearest Valeria,” said Mrs. Sutherland, drawing her to the opposite extremity of the room, “do me a favour; return to the room, and, not only while you remain here, but after you go back to Cashmere, prevent as long as possible any private conversation between those two young people; interrupt them; follow them; stay with them: circumvent them in every way.”

“Helen, you astonish me! Me play Madame Detrop, not ‘for one night only,’ but for a whole season! You positively shock me!” exclaimed Mrs. Vivian, and her eyes asked, what can you mean?

Mrs. Sutherland answered both words and looks at the same time, by saying, very gravely,—

“Valeria, I ask a very strange favour, and impose upon your friendship the unpleasant alternative of refusing 87me point blank, or taking upon yourself a most ungracious duty; but, dear Valeria, in this at least the end will justify the means. I do not wish to separate my son and niece, as your eyes seem to say, but au contraire, to prevent their separation.”

“I do not comprehend.”

“I wish to prevent a quarrel. Young people will not quarrel before others, any more than they will make love before them. There is a point of controversy between Mark and India, and I do not wish them to have an opportunity of discussing it until both their heads are cool.”

“Ah, I think I know the point of contention,” said Valeria, with a bright look of sudden intelligence.

“You?”

“Yes.”

And the thoughtless little lady, totally forgetful that the communication had been confidential, imparted to her the contents of Mark’s letter to India, and the indignation she had expressed at its contents, and the fear she had betrayed lest her father and uncle should discover her lover’s change of sentiments.

Mrs. Sutherland heard the story with a thoughtful brow, and at its close, said—

“And do you not think, Valeria, that the discussion of this subject between them at present would end fatally for our hopes?”

“I do not know, indeed. I cannot estimate the strength of Mr. Sutherland’s convictions and purposes.”

88“But you think that India will never yield to them?”

“Never!”

“And so think I. Yet Mark, dear, deluded child, would stake his soul on what he calls her heroism. Well, Valeria, now will you promise me to prevent an interview as long as you can, to give me an opportunity of trying to bring that poor boy to reason?”

“Ha! ha! ha! It is a thankless task, but I will undertake it. But you must give me an assistant, to relieve me sometimes, and to better insure the success of your enterprise. Confide in Uncle Billy, and let him be on duty while I am off.”

“I intend to have a talk with my brother upon the subject, but in the mean time I rely mainly upon you. Promise me again that you will be vigilant.”

“As vigilant as I can, Helen; but you know my first duty is to Rosalie, dear child! I reproach myself for having left her last night, but the housekeeper promised that she would sleep in the adjoining room, and watch over her.”

“Do you not think that you watch over her too much? Do you not see that she is made too much of a hothouse plant?”

“Rosalie? What! when even a slight change in the weather, or a draught of air, or a piece of fruit not ripe, or a little too ripe, or some such trifle, is sufficient to make her ill for a week, and to bring her to the brink of the grave? I would give half my fortune to any physician who would”—

The little lady’s voice broke down, and her sparkling eyes melted into tears; then she said, in a faltering tone—

89“Do you think she will die? or do you think there is a blessed possibility of her health being restored?”

“That which she never possessed, and therefore never lost, cannot, of course, be restored. But I think a different manner of treatment would strengthen the child; for how can you expect her to be strong, confined to hot rooms, and idleness, and super-dainty diet?”

“I am sure I do the very best I can for the dear girl; I take her out twice a day in the carriage; I never suffer her to go alone; she never has a bath until I dip the thermometer into it with my own hands, to regulate the temperature; she never puts on an article of clothing until I have ascertained it to be well aired; and she never even eats an orange until it has first passed through my fingers; and yet, with all my care, she droops and droops”—

“Like an over-nursed exotic. But, dear Valeria, there! There goes Thomas, with a vase of yesterday’s flowers, to change them. Hasten in there, dear Valeria, and prevent an eclaircissement, while I speak to my brother.”

“Why, is he here?”

“Certainly; he came while we were at breakfast, and went up stairs to change his dress. That is the reason I remained in this room, to give him his breakfast.”

The flighty little lady, already oblivious of her causes for distress, went singing into the room, just in time to overhear, with her quick ears, Mr. Sutherland say to his betrothed—

“Dear India—(Oh, heavens! here comes that widow 90again!)—but I must have an uninterrupted talk with you; when and where shall it be?”

“In the library, at twelve. Hush! She’s here”——

“So,” thought Mrs. Vivian, “I have just got in time enough to hear for myself that my efforts to be useful and impertinent will be totally fruitless.”

---

In the meanwhile Uncle Billy had changed his dress, and had come down in a jacket and trousers of linen, white as “driven snow,” and took his seat at the breakfast table. While she waited upon him, Mrs. Sutherland cautiously communicated the news that so burdened her mind. Gradually, as she proceeded, the truth burst with the suddenness of a thunderbolt upon Uncle Billy, who dropped his roll and cup of coffee, turned pale, fell back in his chair, and gasped—“Good gracious!”

“Don’t make a noise, brother, if you please. See, James is coming with your eggs; wait until he has withdrawn,” said the self-possessed Mrs. Sutherland; and then she directed the servant who came in to set down his salver, and leave the room. When he had gone, she turned again to her brother, and said—

“Yes, this is true, and nothing remains now but to try to overrule his purpose, or at least to gain time.”

“I—I am overwhelmed, prostrated, stunned with astonishment; though, to be sure, at my time of life, I am never the least surprised by any thing that happens. They are fools who at fifty wonder at any thing.”

Mrs. Sutherland then expressed a wish that her 91brother would aid her designs, both by delaying the opportunity of an explanation between the young people, and also by using all his logical powers upon her son, to convert him from his purpose; for, strange as it may seem, Mrs. Sutherland had unbounded faith in Mr. Bolling’s polemic abilities. His soi-disant impartiality, coolness, and precision of judgment, had really imposed upon her.

Uncle Billy dug both his hands in his pockets, and dropped his rosy chin upon his chest with an attitude and expression of deep cogitation, and his face quite flushed with the heat and burden of his thoughts. At last he said, with an air of great deliberation—

“Hem! In the first place, we must essay every possible means of persuasion and coercion, to move him from his purpose. Yes, persuasion and coercion of every possible kind and degree; for in this case the end justifies the means.”

“Yes, my dear brother, I agree with you perfectly; it is just what I said.”

“Yes, but at the same time,” said Billy Bothsides, shaking his head, and glancing keenly at his sister, with the astute air of one making a very fine distinction—“at the same time, we are not to use any undue or unfair influence over the young man.”

“Oh, certainly not,” said Mrs. Sutherland.

“No, no, I never could consent to that, although I would go to any justifiable or even unjustifiable lengths, to cure the boy of his folly. You understand me? You follow out my line of reasoning?”

“Well, no, brother William, I do not, clearly.”

“Women seldom do! women seldom do! But never mind! Trust to me! I’ll bring him round 92I—though I confess I do not believe it will be in the power of mortal man to do it,” said Mr. Bolling, rising from the table, and sauntering into the front parlour.

He found Mrs. Vivian monopolising the attention of Mr. Sutherland, by making him translate for her a sonnet of Petrarch. As soon as Uncle Billy appeared, to relieve guard, Mrs. Vivian suddenly lost all interest in Italian, dropped her book, and left the room, passing Mrs. Sutherland on her way, to whom she said, laughingly—

“A pretty commencement I have made of it! First, heard myself anathematised for a ‘pestilent widow’—next made myself and three other people wretched for an hour—those were, Sutherland, who was dying to speak to India—Lauderdale, who was longing to talk to me—India, who wishes to listen to Sutherland—and last, not least, myself, who was quite willing to hear what Lauderdale had to say.”

“Mr. Lauderdale seemed quite—pleased with you last night.”

“Pleased? Well, I should not be surprised. Perhaps he means to make love to me this morning. If he does not, perhaps—he’s only a college boy—I mean to make love to him, pour se disennuyée;” and waving her fan playfully, and half curtseying, the trifler glided off.

And soon after she was seen promenading on the piazza with young Lauderdale.

Ennuyée with the dolce far niente of the morning, Miss Sutherland ordered her carriage to return home. Uncle Billy begged a seat inside, and Mr. Sutherland 93and (at the invitation of the latter) Mr. Lauderdale mounted horses to attend the party.

Their way lay through a beautiful piece of woods, that covered the hill, just rising, and then gradually declining to the river. They crossed by a ferry.

This part of the river, being the head of the bend, resembled a beautiful woodland lake, lying embosomed among its green hills and groves, which were all distinctly reflected in the water, that was flushed with a pale purple light, changing ever into azure or crimson, or fading off into faint beautiful hues of pink or saffron.

“Oh! it is well named the Pearl—this lovely river—though it might as well be called the Opal,” said Billy Bolling, who had a taste for natural beauty.

They were but few minutes in reaching the other bank of the river, and landing at Cashmere.

Arrived at Cashmere, the party passed up the winding road leading through the groves and shrubberies of the lawn, to the foot of the marble steps leading to the rose terrace, and there alighting, passed through the verandah into the house.

Laughingly Mrs. Vivian took immediate possession of Miss Sutherland, and carried her off to seek Rosalie.

Mr. Sutherland, senior, happened to be in the house, and Mark immediately introduced his friend Lauderdale. The old gentleman welcomed the stranger with the stately suavity habitual to men of his day and station; but he received his nephew with an earnestness of affection scarcely restrained by the presence of a third party—pressing his hand with much warmth, and detaining it lingeringly in his clasp.

94Mark Sutherland could hardly repress a groan, to think how soon all this must be changed. Nay, more: he even felt a species of compunction for receiving his uncle’s kindness under what he felt to be false colours; and he determined, if possible, not to let an hour pass before having a full explanation with him. And so, after the first compliments were over, and when the planter arose and politely excused himself, saying that important business called him over to his new plantation, and expressing a hope that Mr. Lauderdale would consider his house, servants, and stables, entirely at his commands, Mark Sutherland laid his hand solemnly upon his arm, and said—

“My dear uncle, I must have a conversation with you this morning.”

“My dear Mark,” said the old man, smiling—if it could be called a smile—“I know what you are about to ask, and I answer beforehand, just as soon as India pleases. The sooner the better. I speak freely before your friend”—bowing to the latter—“whom, I presume, you have persuaded to do you the honour of attending you upon the occasion. Consult my daughter! You know her will is law in this affair.”

“My dear sir, it is upon another subject that I really must consult you, at your very earliest convenience,” said Mr. Sutherland, with such earnestness of manner as to enforce serious attention.

“Well, sir,” said the planter, “to-day you must really excuse me. I have to go over to the new plantation. Stoke, my manager there, thinks that the cotton crop is not in a vigorous state; he fears that it is taking the rot. But, excuse me—young men know little and care less for the anxieties that make their 95elders slaves.” And, smiling and bowing, the old gentleman withdrew.

And Mark Sutherland, seeing no opportunity of breaking his mind to either father or daughter for the present, invited Lauderdale for a ride over the plantation.

Mr. Sutherland rang, and ordered horses, which were at the door in fifteen minutes, and he and his friend mounted and commenced their ride.

First winding round the shaded path at the foot of the rose terrace, they turned to the left, and entered the grove which surrounded three sides of the back of the house. Half a mile’s ride through a narrow, tangled pathway, up which they were obliged to proceed in Indian file, led them to an elevated clearing of about a hundred acres, on which was situated the negro village, called, in plantation parlance, “The Quarters.”

“There! what do you think of that?” asked Mark Sutherland, with a slight dash of triumph in his tone, as they drew rein and paused under the shade of the trees at the edge of the grove.

Lauderdale’s eyes were roving leisurely and attentively over the woodland village. It was certainly a most lovely scene. The sky above was of the brilliant, intense blue of southern climes; the foliage of the woods around was of the vivid green of early summer. A few large trees were left standing at intervals in the clearing; and under these, and scattered at irregular distances through the area, were the neat white cottages with their red-painted doors. Each cottage had its small vegetable garden, and some few of the better-kept houses had their fruit trees, and even flower 96yards. The village was deserted now, except by the children playing at the doors, and the old people left to take care of them. Of these latter, some were seated upon the door-steps, and some were standing leaning over the fence-rails; some were occupied with knitting coarse stockings; and some, mostly men, were smoking their pipes. All the able-bodied men and women were out in the fields.

Lauderdale looked on, first with an expression of surprise and pleasure, but afterwards with a countenance full of thought.

“Well, my friend, how do you like that?” repeated Mr. Sutherland.

“I will give you my opinion more at large, later in the day, my dear Mark,” replied Lauderdale; and then he added, “I have been told that you have the best stud and best stables in Mississippi; will you favour me with the sight of those also?”

Mr. Sutherland immediately assented. They turned their horses’ heads, and taking another path, rode in a circuit around to the site of the stables, which lay at some distance to the right of the mansion house, and were concealed from the latter by an intervening arm of the grove. The stables were built in the most approved modern style, with much architectural beauty, and possessed every requisite for the health and comfort of the noble animals for whose accommodation they were designed. Here again Lauderdale expressed no opinion, but asked to see—don’t start, super-refined reader—the pig pens. Mark, with a queer smile, conducted his guest to the desired premises; and also, without waiting to be solicited, introduced him to the cow pens, the hen house, etc. All these 97buildings had been constructed under the direction of a celebrated English rural architect, and of course were fitted with every modern improvement for the well-being of the stock. Still Lauderdale as yet reserved his judgment, while he expressed his thanks to his host for the privilege he had enjoyed. Sutherland mischievously asked him whether he would not also like to see the pigeon boxes before dinner. Lauderdale smilingly declined, and they returned to the house. They alighted from their saddles and threw the reins to the groom, entered the hall, and separated to dress for dinner.

Half an hour after, when they met in the drawing-room, Lauderdale advanced to his host, and said,—

“Sutherland, I must thank you again for the sight of your plantation arrangements! and I must say that all your stock—horses, cows, and pigs, and slaves—are probably the best accommodated of any in the state!”

Mark Sutherland, with a flushed brow, turned away. But in an instant, Lauderdale laid his hand upon his arm, and said, with a voice and manner full of affectionate earnestness—

“I mean to say just this, dear Mark—that your negro village is comfortable, and even exceedingly beautiful, but that no amount of physical comfort can or ought to compensate an immortal being for the loss of liberty!”

The entrance of other members of the family and the speedy announcement of dinner ended this conversation for the present.

Haggard, careworn, anxious, as he was, the deep, ever-springing fountain of gladness in Mark Sutherland’s 98heart dispersed all his gloom; and, during dinner, when the jest and laugh went round, he was as usual the spring of wit and humour to the party.

After dinner, when he was about to seek an interview with his betrothed, Mrs. Vivian forestalled him, by carrying off Miss Sutherland to examine a box of goods, lately arrived from New Orleans for the bride elect. And Mr. Bolling, leaving Sutherland, senior, to entertain the guest, ran his arm through that of Mark, and marched him off in triumph.

“Well, Mark,” he said, as soon as he had got him on to the lawn, “I cannot understand it! how a young man of your strength of character, of your firmness—nay, obstinacy; stubbornness—should permit yourself to fall a prey to these adventurers.”

“I really do not see how I am their prey, Uncle Billy, or why they should be adventurers.”

“Oh, Mark, you are—I mean, dear Mark, you want experience of the world; and no amount of moral or intellectual excellence will stand you in stead for that. Nay, indeed, goodness will only make you the easier victim, and talent the more useful tool to these speculators.”

“Uncle, you wrong them! By the honour of my soul, you do! You have never seen or heard but one side of the question, and therefore you are bitterly prejudiced.”

“Prejudiced! Me prejudiced! when everybody knows that I am the most impartial person in the world! But ‘moderation has its martyrs also.’”

“You certainly are prejudiced in this matter; yet how shall I set you right? And why should I be 99surprised? Once, there was never such a scoffer as I was.”

“Yes, and that’s just what raises the hair of my head with wonder! Your good-humoured satire and gay indulgence used to please me so much more than your uncle’s haughty, scornful, persecuting resentment of these people’s affronts. You used to laugh, and say to your uncles, ‘Your anger is inadequate to the offence; it is ungenerous. These objects of your displeasure are very harmless enthusiasts.’ And now! Ah, Mark, I call to mind the poet’s line—

You began by enduring, and you end by embracing their doctrines. Ah, Mark! Mark! Mark! how came it so?”

“Uncle, did you never hear of a gay man or woman of the world—well enough in their way—not sinners above all sinners, but with a certain light, satirical way of treating serious subjects, and a certain good-humoured contempt for those that entertained them—did you never hear an instance of such a man or woman going into a religious meeting to scoff, but returning home to pray? Well, very much akin to that was my experience. I went to the convention in New York, just to fulfil a promise made to my friend Lauderdale, and next to have a laugh at them! At the first meeting—well; I am not going to give you a report of it—sufficient is it to tell you that the subject was presented to my mind in a new and startling aspect. I laughed, or rather tried to laugh, it off.”

“I wish to goodness you had taken it more earnestly 100than to begin with laughing, to end with imitating.”

“At the second meeting, there were some still higher, purer souls, and more eloquent and commanding tongues; lips touched with fire, whose words were flame consuming the wrong principle, that shrivelled up before it. But I do not mean to become eloquent myself. This is not the time or place, nor are you the audience. It is enough to say that the speakers in that meeting gave me the heartache and the headache, and I wished in my soul I had never entered their hall. Yet nevertheless a fascination drew me there the third evening. And then, whether ‘the master minds’ of the cause had said all they had to say for the time, or whether they had not yet arrived upon the scene of action, I really cannot say—(for the room was crowded, and not by friends of the cause, as you will hear, but by conspirators, who had come there to break the meeting up)—but certainly, after one short address of thrilling eloquence and power—during the progress of which I felt myself to be a participant in an injustice, and at the close of which I was ready to make an irrevocable oath to clear my life from the sin—up jumps a fellow, with more zeal than knowledge, and more deviltry, I perfectly believe, than either, and so defames me and my fellow-citizens of the South, and so caricatures us as monsters of atrocity, and so whirrs and rattles whips and chains and gyves about my ears and eyes, that it was the cast of a die whether I should laugh or swear. But before it was decided, a resolution was put and an amendment offered, and two or three people rose, and half a dozen began to speak, and everybody 101wanted to talk, and nobody—but me—wanted to hear, and there was a confusion inside and a gathering mob outside, and in an incredibly short time there was a hailstorm of stones, and battered walls, and smashed windows, and the meeting was broken up in a row; and my Celtic blood boiled up and boiled over; and while laying about me valiantly in defence of freedom of speech, I lost myself. And when I found myself, I was lying with a broken arm and broken head in the watchhouse!”

“Good gracious, Mark! what a dishonour! What would my sister, what would my niece, say to that?”

“They do not know it, and they need not.”

“Well, really, one would have thought that would have cured you!”

“My good uncle, it did—of indecision. One is very apt to be confirmed to a cause in which they have suffered somewhat. I lay very ill for two weeks. During that time I was ministered to by some excellent men, and women also—persons whose disinterestedness, benevolence, gentleness, and perfect sincerity, gave me such a deep and beautiful impression of the Christian character as I had never received from book or pulpit—persons who had sacrificed fortune, position, friendships—all, to a pure but despised cause. It was the silent influence, even more than the spoken words of these, which fixed me forever in my good purpose.”

“It may be true, Mark, that there are such, or it may only have seemed so to you. What I know is, that if there are such disinterested souls in the cause, they are, at best, only the instruments with which the 102party leaders work for their own individual ends and selfish purposes.”

“No, it is not so, nor could it be so; wisdom and goodness could not become the tools of selfishness and worldliness.”

“Now, Mark, don’t stand there and try to dazzle your old uncle’s intellect, by a fine-sounding Joseph Surface sentiment! You must either be a blockhead, or take me for one, when you pretend to tell me that the teachers of that party are not a set of self-seeking agitators, whose motives range from the mere getting of daily bread, up to the getting of political power; and who, if it fell easily in their way, would as willingly reach their ends by entering into the slave trade, as by agitating the question of emancipation.”

The hot blood crimsoned Mark Sutherland’s brow, and he answered indignantly—

“You speak of that of which you know nothing. You speak of those whose”——

“Ah! don’t I know nothing?” interrupted Mr. Bolling. “Where is that Mr. Grab, who came down here as a travelling preacher, and took that opportunity (or perhaps he was sent on purpose, and paid to do it) to preach abolition to the poor whites and the blacks, and to do Satan knows what other mischief; and the Lord knows what judgment would have fallen on him from our incensed planters, if he had not been offered an asylum in the house of your cousin, Mrs. Tilden, who, being a sentimental, compassionate young woman, and finding herself the protectress of a pale, persecuted young preacher, began to court him, as widows will court; and so, when all her brothers and brothers-in-law came in force to turn him out and 103lynch him, they met the pair coming home from the minister’s—married! The pretty widow, the plantation, and the negroes, had proved most convincing arguments, and had converted him. And now, when he feels it necessary to defend himself from the charge of treachery to his party, he says, ‘Oh, the erroneous sentiments of his youth were the effects of ignorance and enthusiasm!’ Umph, humph! we all understand that—in his case second thoughts paid better.”

During this speech, Mark had put down his anger, and now replied, gravely and earnestly—

“Uncle, it is a point that I must meet—this of yours. It has given me much, deep pain. But why should it make you scornful and incredulous of the disinterestedness of these reformers, or why should it give me sorrow? We must separate a high and pure cause, and its devoted self-sacrificing supporters, from its few unworthy advocates. Why, uncle, do we reject Christianity because among the Saviour’s chosen twelve there was one Judas, who was covetous, and whose covetousness made him sell his master? Or because among His many disciples there were some who followed Him, hoping for high places in the kingdom they supposed Him about to establish on earth? Or, even now, do we all refuse to hear the Gospel preached, because there have been some Averys and Onderdonks in the pulpits? And shall we stop our ears, and close our eyes, and fold our hands before the cause of reform, for the reason that there are some Grabs in the party? Nay, God forbid!”

Mark Sutherland paused as in painful thought some 104time, and then, with more than usual emotion, he exclaimed—

“I would to God there were no Achans in the camp! For this work, that at the best is apt to arouse so much evil passion—for this work, requiring so much wisdom and goodness to carry it on aright—for this work, more than for all others, should the labourers have clear heads, and clean hands, and pure motives.”

Then, after a short pause, addressing his uncle again, and taking his hand, he said—

“Uncle, I am about to sacrifice all I have in the world, to principles I have but so lately embraced. Well, sir, believe me, for it is God’s holy truth—notwithstanding these Grabs who bring dishonour on their cause, there are hundreds of philanthropists who have sacrificed as much as I.”

“Indeed, indeed, Mark, you are very wrong and foolish to do this thing! Very, very foolish and wrong, indeed. Nevertheless, I am constrained to say that you are perfectly wise and right in persevering in your duty! Yes, sir!” said Mr. Bothsides, wiping his face furiously, and stuffing his white handkerchief back in his pocket. “And now, what do you mean to do further?” he asked.

“I shall go to the West.”

“Yes—yes—yes—yes,” said Uncle Billy, meditatively; “do so. Go to the West—go to some new place, and grow up with it. It will be the easiest thing on earth for you to rise in the world there, and success in the end is almost certain—though—confound it! you will find you’ll have to struggle very hard, and be very apt to be disappointed at last. You 105have no reason in the world to be the least bit discouraged—but—you must not be sanguine—that I can tell you! I make it a rule, without an exception never to give advice, Mark—notwithstanding—if you are ever at a loss how to act in an emergency, consult me, Mark—my best counsel is at your service. And I really think that with it you could not possibly go wrong,” said Mr. Bolling, drawing his handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his forehead, and replacing it with a look of great self-complacency.

“My dear Uncle Billy,” said Mark, with a quiet smile, “believe me, I know how to appreciate your fine, impartial judgment, and feel convinced that I never should come to harm in following your advice.”

With this proof of his high-minded nephew’s affection and confidence, Mr. Bolling’s blue eyes filled with tears, and he seized Mark’s hand, and squeezed it, and shook it, crying—

“Deuce fly away with you, Mark! I feel a perfect contempt for your folly and wrong-headedness in this matter—nevertheless—I am compelled to admit that I am filled with unmingled admiration for the wisdom and rectitude of your character and conduct! Yes, sir!”

This was said with great emphasis, and once more the cambric handkerchief was brought into violent requisition.

An hour after the end of this conversation, Mark Sutherland was seated in the library, impatiently waiting the entrance of his uncle, with whom he had at last succeeded in appointing an interview. He was anxious, restless, and unable to occupy himself with 106anything, during the few moments which seemed ages before the planter should enter. He tumbled over the books, rumpled the papers, shifted his position many times, started up and paced the floor, looked out of all the windows in turn, and finally went to the door to listen, and reached it just as it was swung open in his face, and old Clement Sutherland entered. The planter walked to the centre of the room, and threw himself into his leather-covered chair at his writing-table, saying, in a curt voice—

“Well, sir, what is your business with me?”

Startled by the unusual sternness of his manner, Mark Sutherland turned and looked at him inquiringly. The planter’s countenance wore an aspect of severity that at once told his nephew that from some cause or by some means he had been led to suspect the nature of the communication the latter was about to make him.

“Will you oblige me, sir, by opening your business at once, as my time is somewhat valuable?” said Clement Sutherland, looking at his watch.

The young man bowed, drew a chair to the opposite side of the table, took a seat, excused himself, and deprecated his uncle’s displeasure for the painful subject he was about to introduce.

Here Clement Sutherland waved his hand impatiently, begging that he would cut his introduction as short as possible.

Then the young man commenced to relate the history of his life and experiences for the last preceding three months; he told how he had been induced to attend the colonization meetings, first merely in the spirit of bravado; how, in hearing the subject 107freely and ably discussed, the conviction had forced an entrance into his soul.

Here Clement Sutherland wheeled his chair around, so that his back was presented to the light, and his face cast into deep shadow, and from this instant to the end of the conversation, Mark Sutherland could not watch the expression of his countenance to judge his mental comments.

But he went on to relate how long and stoutly he had struggled against this conviction; how at last it had overcome him; how his pride, his selfishness, his interests, his passions, and affections—all had yielded, or must yield in any conflict between them and his sense of duty.

“Facts, sir! facts! Let us have no sentiments, no moral or metaphysical disquisitions, but actual facts! What do you intend to do?”

Mark Sutherland answered, calmly—

“To free every negro on my plantation, and at my own expense to send every one, who is willing to go, to Liberia.”

A scornful, most insulting laugh, was the only comment of the planter.

“And after freeing them, I must do all in my power to place them in a situation of happier circumstances for their present, and more hopeful probabilities for their future, lives.”

The young man here paused, and as the planter did not answer, silence ensued between them for several minutes, during which the latter passed his hand slowly back and forth over his bearded chin. At length Mark Sutherland said, in a troubled voice—

“I do not wish to conceal from you, sir, the fact 108that my greatest trial in this affair has been connected with the thought of India.”

Again he paused for a reply or comment. But the planter only caressed his bristling chin, while his countenance was inscrutable in the deep shadow.

The youth spoke again:

“It has been a subject of deep regret and anxiety to me, to feel that I can no longer hope to offer India a fortune or a position equal to her just expectations. For myself, I have no doubts or fears for the future. I feel within me a power to struggle and to conquer. I feel assured that within a very few years my position will be a higher one than it is now, or than it would be were I to retain my present wealth. I believe that my India will have no cause to blush for her husband, or you for your son-in-law.”

Still the old man did not make a single remark, and so deep remained his face in the shadow, that the youth could not read his thoughts. It was rather trying to continue speaking under these circumstances; but there was no alternative. He concluded by saying—

“Although I have long enjoyed the pleasure of your approbation in my addresses to your daughter, I thought it proper to take the very earliest opportunity of informing you of my purposes, and the consequent change they must make in my fortune and circumstances. And now, sir, I have told you all, and I wait in much anxiety to hear what you have to say.”—

“What do you wish me to say?” dryly inquired the planter.

“Just what is on your mind, my uncle.”

109“Humph! this is rather sudden, sir. It is true that a few words dropped by Mr. Bolling, and unexpectedly overheard by myself, in some degree prepared me for the strange communication you have just made. Still, it is sudden, sir! It is sudden! What, may I inquire, did you expect me to say? How did you anticipate that I should meet this?”

Mark Sutherland hesitated to reply, but got up and walked the floor in an exceedingly troubled manner.

A strange smile sat upon the face of the planter. At last he said—

“You doubtless, and with much justice, expected me to withdraw my consent to the marriage of yourself and my daughter. Did you not? Reply, if you please.”

“Sir—my dear uncle!” said Mark, coming forward again, “I had my doubts and misgivings about that. It would have been unjust to you to have seriously entertained them; and it would be unjust to myself to say that I did so.”

“You were right, sir!” said the planter, with the same inscrutable smile; “you were right—I shall not interfere. Having once sanctioned your addresses to my daughter, I shall not now oppose them. Miss Sutherland is of age. I refer you solely to her. If, under the new aspect of affairs, she is willing that this engagement between you and herself shall stand, and that the preparations for marriage proceed, I shall throw no obstacles in your way. Nay, further, sir, that in that case, the marriage shall be conducted precisely as, under other circumstances, it was planned—that is, in all things befitting the social position of 110myself and my sole daughter. Our interview is at an end, I believe?”

The words of Clement Sutherland would have called forth from his nephew the warmest emotions and expressions of gratitude, but that the tone and the smile that accompanied them, more than neutralised their good effect, and sent a pang of terrible foreboding through the heart of the young man.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said, laying his hand gently and respectfully upon the arm of his uncle, as the latter was rising to leave the library. “Do I understand you to say that you approve”——

“You will please to understand me to say, sir, that I refer you to my daughter, Miss Sutherland, and that I shall endorse her decision, whatever that may be. Excuse me, sir—good afternoon.”

And Clement Sutherland, coldly bowing, left the library.

Mark Sutherland walked up and down the floor in great disturbance of mind, and then at last he seized his hat and hurried from the room, to seek the presence of India.

111

While Mrs. Vivian sat talking with her daughter in the bed-chamber of Miss Sutherland, the latter remained in the adjoining dressing-room, where we left her seated in the easy chair, with her hands folded upon her lap, and her eyes closed as in gentle repose, only sometimes a half-smothered, shuddering sigh disturbed the statue-like stillness of her form. It was no deep sorrow, no great anxiety, that troubled this favourite of fortune—only, being quite unused to pain of any sort, physical or mental, she was impatient of its lightest touch. But she had that day been summoned to the presence of her father, and by him had been informed of Mr. Mark Sutherland’s whole plan, 119as he had just learned it from the latter. The planter had told his daughter, with distinct and dreadful detail, of all the numerous privations, toils, hardships, and humiliations, and vaguely hinted at a countless variety of suffering she must endure, if she should become a party to her lover’s purpose. He had further assured her, that if she should remain firm in opposing the plan of her lover, his resolution must finally yield to his affection for herself. And at last he had wrung from his daughter a promise, that she would make the total resignation of Mr. Mark Sutherland’s plans the only condition upon which their marriage should proceed. And so the interview between father and daughter had closed; and Miss Sutherland had returned to her room with little disposition to be amused by the variety and splendour of her newly-arrived trousseau. And, by seeming lassitude and nonchalance, she had drawn upon herself the unjust censure of Mrs. Vivian, and the wondering compassion of the more sympathetic Rosalie.

India never for an instant doubted her power over Mark Sutherland; nay, she never mentally even limited the extent of that power. The worst she anticipated was a controversy with her betrothed. That this controversy could end in any other manner than in her own favour, she never once inquired. That his fanaticism must yield to her influence, she felt certain. But she did not like to have to exert this influence. She admired and honoured Mark Sutherland above all men—nay, there were times when she feared him above all things. And she loved him as those of her clime only love. And with all her faults, this spoiled child of fortune was too true a woman to wish to take 120the position and tone of a dictator to the man she so loved. Nay, she felt indignant with all concerned in thrusting upon her such inevitable, yet such repulsive, “greatness.” And now she sat trying to compose her nerves and collect her thoughts for the unavoidable interview to which she momentarily expected to be summoned.

She had not much longer to wait. A servant soon entered, and, bowing, informed her that Mr. Sutherland requested the favour of an interview at her earliest convenience, and desired to know when and where she would receive him.

“Where is Mr. Sutherland?” inquired the young lady.

“In the library, Miss.”

“Proceed thither and announce me, then.”

Arrived at the library, the man opened the door, and merely saying, “Miss Sutherland, sir,” held it open until she had passed in, and then closing it, retired.

And India found herself alone with Mark. He was sitting at a central library-table, leaning with his head resting upon his hand; his face was very pale, his countenance haggard, his dark hair slightly dishevelled, his manner disturbed and anxious, yet withal controlled. He arose and advanced to meet her, led her to a sofa, and placed himself beside her. Taking her hand in his own, and pressing it gently, he looked down into her face, regarding her with a grave, sweet, sad, almost solemn expression of countenance; and, after a brief pause, he said, “My dearest India, you cannot be at a loss to understand my motive for requesting this interview?”

121He paused, as expecting her assent, but she did not reply in any way. She did not even lift her glance from the carpet. He pressed her hand fondly, and resumed: “My love, the time has come, the opportunity is presented for us—even for us, my India—to put in practice some of those high examples of heroism, which in others have so often won our fervent admiration. Even we, my India, may”—

She arrested his serious words by suddenly drawing her hand away, and hurriedly exclaiming, “I have heard something of your purpose of manumitting the people on your various plantations. But I would prefer to hear your plan of benevolence, or philanthropy, whichever it may be, from your own lips, unwarped by prejudice, and uncoloured by passion, and with as little preface as possible!”

The coldness and reserve of her words and tones smote him to the heart. Nevertheless, he replied, “My purpose is no plan of benevolence or philanthropy, my dear India, but a simple act of justice, originating in a simple impulse of conscientiousness.” Then gently repossessing himself of her hand, he held it tenderly in his own, while he began, and, for the fourth time since his return home, related all the mental and moral experiences that had led him to determine upon the contemplated act of emancipation. She heard him out without again interrupting him. She sat very still, with her face pale and impassable, and her eyes cast down. She was no match for him in argument, yet, nevertheless, seeing that he silently awaited her answer, and preferring to convert rather than to cast him off, she recalled and repeated all the arguments she had ever heard in defence of slavery; 122she began by saying that she thought the existence of the system of slavery to be the manifest will and ordination of Divine Providence; and she wondered how any rational being could doubt it. Was not their present subordinate position here infinitely preferable to their former savage and cannibal condition on the coast of Congo? Here at least they were Christianized.

A smile dawned upon the young man’s countenance. She saw and felt it. Her cheek flushed, and she hastened to say—

“They must be blind indeed, Mr. Sutherland, who cannot see in the enslavement of the African race by the Anglo-Saxons the purpose of Divine Providence to civilize Africa.”

Mark Sutherland took her hand, and replied gently—

“My dear India, we do not deny that God continually brings good out of evil; but is that a justification of the evil? And even admitting, for argument’s sake, that the reduction of a portion of the Ethiopian race to slavery by the Anglo-Americans is to be the means of Christianizing them, is it not full time, after two hundred years of bondage, that some of this harvest sowed with tears and blood should be reaped?—that some of these good fruits should begin to be enjoyed?”

“Besides,” said Miss Sutherland, eluding his question and evading his eye, “there is a fitness in these relations between the European and the African races—Europeans could not engage in agricultural labour under the burning heat of our Southern sun”——

“But why enslave the negroes—why not emancipate and hire them?” interrupted Mark.

123“O! you know,” she replied, hastily, “that the negroes will not work effectually, unless driven to it.”

“Plantation slaves will not, I grant you; but what has reduced them to this hopeless and inert condition?”

“I do not know why you should call their condition hopeless—I think, upon the whole, they are at least as hopeful and as happy as poor white people, or free blacks. And I never heard of a bad master, who was not also a bad son, brother, husband, father, neighbour—in short, who was not a bad Christian. And if you feel a call to reform the world, Mark Sutherland, why not begin at the right end, and Christianize it—and all other reform will follow early, and as a matter of course. Why not do that?”

“Because, my dear India, unluckily the world thinks itself already Christian. ‘And if the light that is in it be darkness, how great is that darkness?’ Neither, my dear girl, am I the missionary to dispel it. I am quite unworthy of, and unpretending to, the name of Christian, and have no presumption to begin reforming the world, either at the right end or the wrong end. I only wish to do what I consider a simple act of justice, in a matter between me and my own conscience.”

“I do not understand why your ‘conscience’ should meddle in the matter. The system appears to me to be perfectly right—every thing that we can wish. There is a beautiful adaptation in the mutual relations existing between the Anglo-Saxon master and the Ethiopian slave; for, observe, the Anglo-Saxon is highly intellectual, strong, proud, firm, self-willed, impelled to govern, gifted with great mental independence; 124the Ethiopian, on the contrary, is very unintellectual, weak, lowly in mind, imitative, affectionate, docile, easily controlled—and these traits of character so harmonize in this connection, that it seems to need only the spirit of Christianity to make it a beautiful and happy correspondence.”

“I think, my dearest girl, that even in that case the ‘beautiful and happy correspondence’ would be like Irish reciprocity—all on one side. Selfishness so blinds us, India”——

I have no space to dilate on what was said on either side. Both grew very serious, earnest, and emphatic. India became heated, fevered; she brought forward every plea she had ever heard pressed in favour of her own side of the controversy; but she was not his equal in logic. Baffled and disappointed in her failure, and unnerved by the strangeness of anxiety and contention, she suddenly burst into tears, and passionately exclaimed—

“You do not love me! You never loved me! You prefer the fancied welfare of these miserable negroes to my comfort and happiness!”

Mark Sutherland saw and felt only her tears and sorrow, and addressed himself to soothe her with all a lover’s solicitude. She took advantage of his tenderness—perhaps she even misunderstood it. She had failed to convince his judgment by her arguments, failed to change his purpose by opposition and reproaches, and now she resolved to try the power of love—of persuasion. She let him draw her to his bosom; she dropped her head upon his shoulder, with her blushing, tearful face and soft hair against his cheek, her arm upon his neck, and half-caressing, suffered 125herself to be caressed, and let him feel how sweet her love was, by the unutterable sweetness of her shy caress; and when his heart was weak unto death, she pleaded with him, yieldingly, submissively, tearfully, as with one who had the right and the power of ordering her destiny—that he would not doom her to a lot so cruel, so terrible; that she was so unprepared for it; that he must know she was; that it would kill her in a year.

All this was pleaded with her head upon his shoulder, with her face against his cheek, with her hand pressed around his neck. This seductive gentleness was very hard to resist, indeed. He answered—

“My dearest India, you are sole mistress of your own destiny, and, to a great extent, of mine. I did hope that you would have borne me company in my pilgrimage, and, even from the first, have shared my lot, hard as it is sure to be. We have both read and heard how women, even the most tenderly reared and delicate, have, for affection, for constancy, for truth, and the great idea of duty, borne poverty, toil, hardships and privations, even with a better grace and with more fortitude and patience than the strongest men. But I begin to think that history and tradition must exaggerate. How, indeed, could my own fragile lady-love endure what my strong frame must encounter and overcome? No, dear India, ardently as I once desired that you should be, from this time forward, the partner of my lot, I see and feel that the wish was thoughtless, unreasonable, selfish. It was exacting far too much. No, dearest, painful as it must be to tear myself from you, I must go forth alone to do battle with an adverse fate. Yet why should I call 126it adverse? I go forth with youth, and health, and strength; with a liberal education, and some talent; and when I have attained fame and fortune, then, like a true knight, I will come and lay them at my lady’s feet, and claim—no, not claim—but sue for my blessed reward.”

She said that she could not let him go; it would break her heart to part with him. Could he leave her to break her heart? Would he not give up his purpose for her sake, and stay with her? Her head was still upon his shoulder, and her face against his cheek. With a slight movement, at once shy and fond, she pressed her lips to his neck, and repeated her question: Would he not give up his purpose for her sake, and stay with her?

He felt his fortitude and strength fast leaving him. Amidst the fondest caresses, he said—

“My own dear India! how have I merited such love? My India, I will not stay so long as I said. I will not stay till I have won fame or fortune. I cannot remain away so long. But as soon as I have won a modest competence—in a year or two—I will be back to claim my blessing.”

Her tears fell like rain. Still she clasped, and pressed, and kissed his neck, and said that would not do at all; he must not leave her—no, not for a week; she could not, would not, bear it; she should die.

He kissed away her tears, fast as they fell, and then proposed again that she should go with him, promising to do more than man ever did, or even could do, to shield her from hardship till all hardship should be over, as it surely would be in time.

With a few deep-drawn sighs, she lifted up her 127head, and answered, No, she could not go; she was far too delicate to bear such a change; he ought to know it, and ought not to ask it. No, if he loved her, he must give up his project, and stay with her; and if he did love her, he surely would do it. Any man that really loved would do that much for his lady.

She was evidently merging from her tender, alluring mood, into an irritable and capricious one.

Full of doubt and trouble at her words, he answered—

“My dearest India, I told you that this purposed action of mine is a measure of conscience. You know it involves an immense sacrifice. Do you suppose that I would make that sacrifice, except from the most righteous principles, and do you suppose I can possibly abandon such principles? My India, if from my great love for you I could now sacrifice my conscience to your convenience, you would soon lose all esteem for me, and, in losing all esteem, lose all comfort in loving me. My India, no honourable woman can continue to love a man who has forfeited his own and her respect. Do you not know that?”

Coldly she put away his encircling arms—coldly she withdrew herself from him, saying—

“I see how it is, sir! You do not love me; you are faithless; you seek an excuse to break with me, by putting our union upon conditions impossible for me to comply with. You need not have taken such a crooked path to a plain end, sir; you needed only to have frankly named your wish, to have had your plighted troth restored. You are free, sir——to unite yourself with one of the favoured race, the objects of your manifest preference, if you please”——

128This last, most insulting clause was cast at him with a glance of insufferable scorn, as she turned to leave the room.

His brow crimsoned with the sudden smite of shame, and—

“This from you, India!” he exclaimed.

She was looking at him still; but the scorn and anger slowly passed from her face, as he rose and advanced towards her, saying—

“But you are excited; I will not lay your bitter words to heart, nor suffer you to leave me in anger. Dearest India!”

She had already regretted her sharp words; love and anger were balanced in her bosom so evenly, that it took but a trifle to disturb the equilibrium; and now his forbearance and his kind words completely upset the scale, and love ascended. Turning to him once more, and throwing herself in his open arms, she burst into tears, and said—

“Dearest Mark, only give up this mad, mad project, and I am all yours. Oh, you know I am, any way; for even now the separation that would pain you, would kill or madden me! But, oh! you know I cannot endure the hardships you would prepare for me; they would be equally fatal. Give it up, Mark! Dear Mark, give it up, for my sake, for your dear mother’s sake, for all our sakes! Stay with us! do not divide us, and break our hearts, by leaving us! We all love you so! you know we do! We would do anything in the world for you, if you would stay with us! And I only grow angry and lose my senses, and utter mad words, when you talk of leaving us! Don’t go, Mark! Dearest Mark, don’t leave us.”

129And so she pleaded, hiding her tears and blushes on his shoulder, and clasping, and pressing, and kissing his neck and cheek. The pleadings of young beauty to young love, most powerful, most painful to resist, yet they were resisted, mournfully, but calmly and firmly, resisted.

She raised her head from his shoulder.

“And you persist in your purpose?” she said.

“My India, I cannot do otherwise.”

“Notwithstanding all the suffering you may cause your mother, your relatives, and me?”

“My own India, I would I could bear all your grief in my own person.”

“But you adhere to your resolution?”

“I have no alternative.”

“And this is your final decision?”

He bowed.

“Even if you should lose me for ever?”

He started, as if suddenly struck by a bullet. He changed colour, but did not speak. She regarded him fixedly. At last she said, slowly and calmly—

“Will you please to answer my question?”

“India,” he said, “I will not for a moment, admit such a possibility. God will never repay fidelity to conscience with calamity.”

“Perhaps it might not be a calamity. I think it were well we should understand each other. The question is now before you—do not evade it.”

“My India, it is not practically before me. No, thank Heaven, the intolerable alternative of resigning you or my principles is not yet before me.”

“By all our past dreams, and present hopes, of happiness, I assure you that the alternative is now submitted 130to you, sir. And I adjure you, by your conscience, and by the strength of your vaunted principles, to decide the question, which I now repeat to you—if the adherence of your present purpose involve the final loss of my hand and heart, do you still persist in that purpose?”

Something in her tone caught up his glance, to rivet it upon her. Never in all their lives had she seemed to him so beautiful, so regnant, so irresistibly attractive. He gazed upon, he studied her face; nor did she turn it from him, nor avert her glance. She met his searching gaze proudly, fearlessly, imperially; she seemed to wish that he should read her soul, and know its immutable determination. There was no pique, no anger, no weakness, or wavering, on that high, haughty brow now; there was nothing but calm, indomitable resolution. He gazed upon her in wonder, and in sorrow, some time fascinated by the imperious beauty of her young brow, and marvelling that this could be the tender, seductive woman that lay cooing on his bosom scarce an hour ago. It would not do to waver now. He took her hand again. He answered, solemnly—

“India, you have adjured me, by my conscience, by the sacredness of my honour, to answer your question, and say whether, were the alternative finally before me, I should resign my resolution, or be resigned by you. India, I may not, must not, evade this. And I answer now, by my sacred honour and my hopes of heaven, come what may, of trial, of suffering, or of agony, I will never forego this purpose, to which reason and conscience alike urge me.”

“And that is your final determination?”

131He bowed.

“Now, then, hear mine; but first I give you back your plighted troth and its less perishable symbol”—here she drew a diamond ring from her finger, and handed it to him—“and I remove your image from my heart with less difficulty than I disentangle this miniature one from my chain”—here she took a locket, set with diamonds, from her chatelaine, and handed him. He received both pledges back, and stood with a certain mournful dignity, awaiting her further words and actions. “And now,” she said, “let me make you thoroughly acquainted with my thought upon this subject which so interests you, so that you may see how far, as the East is from the West, is my thought from yours. Know, that I like the position that I occupy, the power that I wield; our plantation is as large as a German or Italian principality; our people are better governed, more prosperous, and more profitable, than the subjects of such a principality. We have more power than its prince. And I was born to this power; I am accustomed to it; I like it. Heaven crowned me with it; and do you think that I will discrown my brow to become—what? A drudging peasant? Never! And now, hear my oath. As you are the ‘dupe’ of a party, we separate, never to meet again until you have recovered manhood and independence enough to abjure this pernicious influence, and abandon the mad project to which it has forced you—so help me God!”

And, turning haughtily away, she left the room.

132

The sun was rising in cloudless splendour, on the morning on which Mark Sutherland paused upon an 155eminence, to throw a farewell glance over the beautiful scenes of his childhood and youth—the fair valley of the Pearl. East lay the dark boundary of the pine forest, pierced by the golden, arrow-like rays of the level sun, or casting long, spear-like shadows athwart the green alluvion—south and west, belts of forest alternated with gaudy cotton-fields, and rolling green hills, interspersed with graceful groves, until in softly-blended hues they met the distant horizon. From this beautifully-variegated circumference, his eye returned to gaze upon the centre of the scene—the Pearl—the lovely river which took its name from the semi-transparent hues of clouded saffron, rose, and azure, that seemed not only caught from the glorious sky above, and the gorgeous hills, and fields, and grove, around, but flashed up from the deep channel of the stream, as if its clear waters flowed through a bed of opal.

At some distance below him, encircled by a bend of the river, lay—like some rich mosaic on the bosom of the vale—“Cashmere,” the almost Oriental scene of his youthful love-dream. There was the pebbly beach, with its miniature piers and fairy boats—the lawn, with its flowering and fragrant groves, its crystal founts, its shaded walks and vine-clad arbours; and, nearer the house, the rose terrace, with its millions of odoriferous budding and blooming roses, surrounding as within a crimson glow, that white villa and its colonnade of light Ionic shafts. At this distance, he could see distinctly the bay window, with its purple curtains, of India’s boudoir; and, at its sight, the image of the beautiful India arose before him. Again he saw her in that poetic harmony of form and colouring 156that had so ravished his artist soul—the slender, yet well-rounded figure—the warm, bright countenance, with its amber-hued ringlets, and clear olive complexion deepening into crimson upon cheeks and lips—a beauty in which there was no strong contrast, but all rich harmony—a form that he once had fondly thought clothed a soul as harmonious as beautiful. They were lost! all lost—home, and bride, and lovely dreams of youth! Do not despise him, or blame him, when I tell you, in the touching words of Scripture, “that he lifted up his voice and wept.” He was but twenty-one, and this was the first despairing passionate sorrow of his youth.

It is very easy to talk and write of the “rewards of virtue,” the comfort of a good conscience, the delights of duty. Alas! I am afraid the delights of duty are seldom believed in, and seldomer experienced. Be sure, when a great sacrifice of interest, of affection, of hope, is made, and a great sorrow is felt—nothing—nothing but a loving, Christian faith can console.

And Mark Sutherland was not a Christian man.

Here, then, even a philanthropist might reasonably inquire why all this was done? Why a youth, born and brought up a slaveholder, should, against preconceived ideas, against prudence, against self-interest, against hope, with doubtful good even to the beneficiaries of his self-devotion, beggar himself for the sake of their emancipation? Why he, being no Christian, should make such an immense sacrifice of wealth, position, affection, hope—in short, of all temporal and earthly interests?

We are all able to answer, that, had a scientific phrenologist examined the moral organs of Mark 157Sutherland’s head, he would have found his answer in the predominant CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. It was, therefore, only a severe sense of justice that laid its iron hand upon him, obliging him to do as he had done—a single sense of justice, such as might have influenced the actions of a Pagan or an Atheist—a hard, stern sense of justice, without faith, hope, or love—an uncompromising sense of justice, without self-flattery, promise, or comfort.

He is not as yet a Christian, but he may become one, he must become one, for no great sacrifice was ever made to duty, without Christ claiming that redeemed soul as his own.

After all, perhaps, there is but one sin and sorrow in the world—Idolatry—and all forms of evil are compromised within it. It includes all shades of sin, from the lightest error that clouds the conscience, to the darkest crime that brings endless night upon the soul; and all degrees of suffering, from the discontent that disturbs the passing hour, to the anguish and despair that overwhelms and swallows up all the hopes of life. We are all idolaters. Some god-passion of the heart is ever the deity we worship. Ambition, avarice, love—“the world, the flesh, or the devil,” in some form, is always the idol. Perhaps, love; the first, the most disinterested, self-devoted, of all the forms of idolatry, comes nearest to the true worship. But it is not the true worship—by all the anguish that it brings, it is not the true worship.

Oh! if but for a moment we could raise our souls to God, in the self-surrender wherewith, in passionate devotion, we throw our hearts beneath the feet of some weak and perishable form of clay—that were 158conversion—that were regeneration—that were a great deliverance—that were eternal life, and full of joy!

And are there not moments when we catch a glimpse of such a possibility? when brain and heart stand still, thoughtless, breathless? when life itself pauses in the transient revelation of such unsufferable light? And we know that some have entered in and lived this light all the days of their lives. To many of us, alas! and in most of our moods, they seem to live in an unknown world—to speak in an unknown tongue.

Who of us has not occasionally experienced these thoughts and emotions, in reading and meditating on the lives and characters of Christians of any name?—it matters little what; for there is a unity of spirit in all regenerated children of God, of every nation, rank, or sect. Fenelon and George Whitefield—the Frenchman and the Briton—the mitred archbishop and the poor field preacher—the Roman Catholic and the Methodist, dwelt in the same light, spoke the same language, because both were one in spirit. What if through the medium of each separate brain, the theology look different? The heart is greater than the brain; or, in other words, the affections are higher than the intellect. “Out of the heart are the issues of life;” and “this is life eternal, that we should know the true God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.” With their hearts, their affections, they discerned Him. And in love they were one with each other, and one with Christ and God. And who, in communing with their fervent souls—in meditating on their perfect faith and love—perfect devotion to God, 159has not been startled by some such light as this let in upon the mind?—“Why, if this unfailing love—this unwavering faith—this unreserved devotion—this total self-surrender—be the worship we owe to our Creator, then have we been idolaters; for all this instinct and power, and necessity of loving, sacrificing, and worshipping has been ours, and has been lavished, wasted, only on the creature.”

Akin to this was the feeling that impelled the dying Wolsey to exclaim, “Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”

And as Mark Sutherland stood gazing in bitterness of spirit upon the beautiful scene of his love and joy, the maddening scene of his trial and suffering, these words escaped from his bursting heart: “Oh, God! if I had worshipped thee as I worshipped her, Thy beautiful work, I had not been now alone—alone in my sorrow.”

It was the sincere, earnest cry of a stricken, penitent, suffering heart.

It was answered then and there. Around him fell an influence sober and more genial than sunshine—more refreshing than dew—a spiritual influence, warming, renewing, supporting—a Divine influence, kindling and strengthening the soul within him.

The Comforter had come, and was acknowledged. With uncovered head, and uplifted heart, then and there Mark Sutherland consecrated his life to the service of God, and His work on earth.

From the beautiful vale he turned, and, inspired by new strength and courage, put spurs to his horse, and galloped rapidly on towards the road leading to 160the town of C——, where, six weeks since, he had parted with Lauderdale. He reached C—— in time for an early breakfast. Here—not wishing to leave his family in ignorance of his fate, and by his departure thus to cut down the bridge of communication between them and himself—he addressed a letter to his bachelor uncle, Paul Sutherland, informing him that his destination was some north-western town, whence, as soon as he should become settled, he should write. He gave this letter in charge of the landlord, to be forwarded as soon as his uncle should return from the North. He then mounted his horse, and took the road to Natchez, whence he intended to embark in a steamboat up the Mississippi. He reached the city by nightfall, and found his baggage, sent by the stage-coach, had arrived in safety. He took the boat that passed that night; and the next morning he found himself many miles on his way up the river.

And to a young, adventurous, hopeful spirit, this uncertainty, joined to liberty, was not without its peculiar charm. During the greater part of the day he remained on deck, with a spy-glass in his hand, examining the face of the country on either side of the river. The lawns and villages on the Lower Mississippi did not attract him in the least degree. Their situations were low—their beach sluggishly washed by the thick and murky water—their thoroughfare wet and muddy—their general aspect unwholesome to the last degree.

But, farther up the river, and above the mouth of the 161Ohio, the country and the colour of the water began to change. High bluffs, gray old rocks, and gigantic woods, diversified the shores—crystal creeks and verdant islets varied the river. He approached the fine “Rock River country.”

Beautiful as a poetic vision of Elysium, had seemed the luxurious valley of the Pearl.

But this gigantic scene—Rock River, Rock Island, with the opposite shores of the Mississippi, widening here into a lake-like expanse—had a breadth of grandeur, a Titanic vigour and vitality of beauty, the most consonant, the most imposing and encouraging, to his own young energetic spirit.

The boat stopped opposite the village of S——, just as the morning mist was rolling away before the sun, and revealing the scene in all its picturesque beauty, and fresh life. The young city was but two years old—yet, infant of the Titaness West, it was growing and thriving most vigorously. Here, then, Mark Sutherland determined to take up his abode—here to live and labour. He ordered his baggage into the boat, and stepped in after it, and was swiftly rowed to the shore. Here, too, in order to begin aright and betimes, he shouldered his own trunk, while a porter followed with his box of books, and wended his way to the hotel on the hill.

162

In the meantime, the two young riders took their way up a narrow bridle-path, leading up a long crooked pass of the mountain.

The morning was glistening with brightness and 178freshness, and the mingled joyous sounds of rural life made music in the air. They rode along awhile in silence, strange enough in a pair so youthful. At length the young man broke the spell.

“Rose!”

“Well, Robert!”

“I cannot bear this suspense! I cannot, indeed. Heart and frame are wearing out with it!”

Rosalie stole a glance at his clear, bright blue eye, and round, fresh, ruddy cheek, looking still brighter and fresher under the glossy, crisp, curling, auburn hair—and a smile lighted up her countenance.

“Ah! you may laugh! You have the hardest, the most unimpressible heart I ever saw in my life! But good and strong as my constitution is, it will break down—it will indeed, Rosalie—if you keep this up much longer. And I wish it would break down! I do so! Then perhaps you would pity me.”

“But, Robert, my pity would be very poor compensation for lost health.”

“I don’t know! If I could make you feel for me any way, or at any cost, I should be glad.”

“I do, Robert. I feel a very sincere esteem and friendship for you. Surely you cannot doubt that.”

“Oh! yes, you are good to me to a certain degree. Your heart is like a peach!”

“Like a peach!”

“Yes; it is superficially soft and impressible, but the core of it is hard and rough—hard and rough! Oh, Rosalie, can’t you try to like me a little?”

“I like you very much without trying!”

“Oh, you know what I mean, you tormenting girl! 179Can’t you—you—can’t you love me well enough to be my own? Speak! Answer! Tell me, Rose!”

“Oh, Robert, how many times have I told you—no?”

“I—but I won’t take no for an answer! All my affections and hopes are freighted in you, and I will not resign you; I will not, Rose. I will go on hoping in spite of you—hoping against hope! It is impossible—mind I say impossible—any one loving as I do, should not win love in return. It does seem to me as if it would be unjust in heaven to permit it!”

He spoke with impatient, passionate vehemence and earnestness.

Rosalie watched and heard him with wondering and sorrowing interest. She gravely said—

“‘It is impossible that one loving so much should not win love in return,’ you say? Yes, it does seem impossible, if we did not know it to be often really possible. It does seem unjust!”

“You acknowledge it! You own it to be unjust that I should give you so much—give you all—my entire heart, with all its affections and hopes—and get back nothing, nothing in return—or next to it—only ‘esteem,’ forsooth! and ‘friendship!’ That provokes and exasperates me beyond endurance! Rosalie, I don’t want your esteem or friendship. I refuse and repudiate it! I reject and repulse it! I will have none of it! Give me nothing, or give me your whole heart and hand!”

“I would to Heaven I could do it, Robert! I would to Heaven I could give you my heart. I am ready to say that if I could, I should then be a happy and enviable girl, because I believe you a most excellent young man, whose only weakness is your regard for 180me. But I cannot, Robert. With all my friendship for you”—

“Don’t name it!”

“I must, Robert! With all my friendship for you, when you talk of love, my heart grows hard and cold, and silent as a stone—it has no response for you at all.”

“And you say that to drive me out of my senses—to make me wild!”

“I say it because it is the simple truth. I am sorry that such is the truth. I think, with you, it is strange—strange—almost unjust, that so much priceless love should be thrown away.”

“How cool she is! Good Heaven, how cool she is!”

“I have a problem for you, Robert; and I want to see if, with all your mathematics, you can solve it, and satisfy me as to why there is so much love lost in this world.”

“She can philosophise, too, after her fashion. She can do anything but love!”

“Will you solve my problem?”

“It belongs rather to metaphysics than mathematics, one would think—nevertheless, state it.”

“Thus, then: A loves B—or rather, to be clearer, Aaron loves Belinda with a perfect passion; and he thinks, by reason of its great power, it must win a response from her. But Belinda involuntarily turns from Aaron, and fixes her affection upon Charles, who does not in the least return it. Now, why should these cross purposes exist? They say that marriages are made in heaven. I wish the angel that has charge of them would look into this matter a little.”

181She spoke in a light, bantering manner, yet her voice quivered slightly. She stole an arch glance at her companion, and said—

“There is my problem—solve it.”

He eyed her closely, jealously.

“Are you putting an imaginary case?” he asked.

“Nay, answer my question before asking another.”

“Well, then, yes! I will tell you how this ought to end, and how it shall end, too. Belinda will soon feel it to be unwomanly, indelicate, undignified, to leave her heart in the possession of one who undervalues the priceless treasure; she will withdraw it, and yield it up at the demand of the rightful owner—of him who justly claims it because he prizes it above all treasures, and desires it above all possessions!”

“You think so?” said Rosalie, averting her face, and bending down, and stroking her horse’s mane.

“I know so.”

“How do you know it?”

“Because it ought to be so.”

“Again—why?”

“Because man’s love is the conquering love! But now, tell me—were you putting an imaginary case?”

“Yes, I was putting an imaginary case,” she said, in a low, quiet tone.

She drew rein.

“What is the matter, Rosalie? Are you tired? Has the ride been too much for you?” inquired the young man, checking his horse, and looking anxiously at her.

182“Yes, I think so,” she answered, wearily.

“Rest awhile, and then we will go on.”

“No—I must go home—the air is very chill,” she said, shivering.

“And you are pale,” he observed, gazing at her with earnest, affectionate interest.

She returned that gaze with a pensive, grateful glance, saying—“Indeed, I feel I ought to be very grateful to you for caring so much for a poor, sickly creature, like me. You in such fine health, too. I do not understand it. I thought every one preferred blooming girls; but you attach yourself to poor, pale me. Dear Robert, believe me, I am very, very grateful for your love, however this may end. I do wish I could be more than grateful. Dear Robert, if I could give you my whole heart as easily as I give you this rose, I would do it.” And detaching a white rose from her bosom, she handed it to him.

And they turned their horses’ heads, and went down the mountain path, towards home.

183

For the next several days, various notes of preparation as for some joyful coming event, were sounded through the old hall. Servants, within and without the house, pursued their avocations with unusual alacrity. Waggons, with new furniture, arrived from a neighbouring town. In the drawing-room and parlours, Mrs. Vivian directed the operations of the upholsterers, in putting down new carpets, and hanging new curtains, mirrors, &c. On the lawn, and in the garden, Rosalie’s taste presided at the trimming and 197dressing of vines, shrubs, and flowers; while from one to the other Colonel Ashley flew with a gay, busy interest. They were all evidently playing the prelude to some great family festival. Mark Sutherland remained unenlightened upon the subject, until, one morning, as he walked out upon the piazza, to enjoy the early freshness of the air, he was joined by the two lads, Henry and Richard, who, seizing each a hand, eagerly inquired—

“Are you going to walk out this morning, before breakfast, Mr. Sutherland?”

A nod and smile was his answer. He was depressed, despondent; he felt that he had no part in all that was going on in that house—he felt himself a stranger and an alien. Yet, too generous and benevolent to damp the spirits of the lads by his own gloom, he smiled upon them kindly, and when they asked permission to accompany him, he inquired, gaily, how it happened that, while all were so very busy, in the house and on the grounds, they alone should be idle.

“Oh, Mrs. Vivian drives us out of the way—even Rose won’t let us help her, and father threatens to lock us up if we don’t keep quiet. We’re driven about from post to pillar; and so we came out to walk with you. Father and the rest of them making such a fuss! just as if nobody ever got married before St. Gerald!” said Richard, contemptuously.

Another might have rebuked the boy for speaking so disrespectfully; but Mark had little of the tutor spirit in him, after all. Rosalie was right in that.

They left the piazza, crossed the lawn, and took the narrow path leading along the course of the stream-the 198boys sometimes affectionately holding his hands, and sometimes one or the other suddenly breaking away to pluck and bring him an early violet, or eglantine rose, or to throw a pebble in the stream, where some small fish had started up. At last—

“Making such a fuss!” again complained Richard; “making such a fuss, and driving us about so that we boys can’t have a bit of peace of our lives! Just as if she were so much better than everybody else in the world, that so much trouble must be taken for her.”

“Whom are you talking of?” inquired Mr. Sutherland, carelessly.

“Why the young lady St. Gerald is going to marry, to be sure!”

“Ah, then, Mr. Ashley is going to bring home a wife, is he?”

“Why, of course he is!” said Henry, warming up. “He is going to be married to a beautiful young lady, very rich, who was the belle of the city last winter, they say!”

“Oh, she is as rich and as beautiful as a princess in a fairy book; and that’s what all the fuss is about,” sneered Richard.

“Don’t you mind Rich, Mr. Sutherland; he can’t bear to have a word said about anybody but himself!”

“As if I wanted anybody to bother themselves about me—I’m not so much like you as that,” retorted Richard. And thereupon arose the usual squabble between the lads, until their tutor interfered and restored order, if not good feeling.

They continued their walk for about a mile along 199the mountain stream, and then returning by the back hills, got home at the breakfast hour.

Colonel Ashley, Mrs. Vivian, and Rose, were already seated at the breakfast table, and engaged in eager conversation concerning the approaching marriage of the heir of the house, when Mr. Sutherland and the lads entered.

“Good morning, Mr. Sutherland. I hope you have had a pleasant walk—though I would not be bothered with those troublesome boys, if I were you; their company is quite enough in school hours, I should think!” said the old gentleman, banteringly, as they took their places at the board.

Mrs. Vivian and Rosalie smiled a salutation. And then the thread of the conversation was taken up again, as if it had never been broken, and as if Mark Sutherland was already familiar with the premises.

“Yes; St. Gerald writes me that the marriage will come off at an early hour of the day, and that immediately after the ceremony they will set out from Washington for this place. It will take them two days to reach here, so that we may expect the party on Thursday evening. Rosalie, my dear, bear that in mind, if you please, and be ready. Mrs. Vivian, my dear lady, I do not want two cups of chocolate at once—this, I think, is intended for Mr. Sutherland!” said the old gentleman, passing the cup to Mark.

Mrs. Vivian’s mind was certainly absent and distracted, as her manner was disconcerted, and her beautiful countenance troubled.

After breakfast, the family party separated as 200usual. Colonel Ashley went to his study, to write letters; Mrs. Vivian and Rosalie to their work-table, in the parlour; and Mark to his school-room, with the boys.

The ladies had scarcely seated themselves, before a servant entered to say that Mr. Robert Bloomfield had come with the ponies, and wished to know if Miss Rosalie would ride.

“Don’t go, Rose; send an excuse. Cut this companionship firmly and kindly off, at once and forever,” said Mrs. Vivian, in a low voice.

“Tell him, William, that I am very much obliged for his kindness, but I cannot ride to-day,” said Rosalie, and, as the servant left the room, she added, “That was a very unkind, ungrateful message, mamma.”

“Nonsense! What kindness or gratitude do you owe to Robert?” answered the lady, with an apparent harshness of sentiment that her heart did not by any means justify.

But, before Rosalie could reply again, Robert Bloomfield entered the room, flushed and in haste; and, without even seeing Mrs. Vivian, hurried up to the young girl, exclaiming—“Rose! Rose! how is this? Three times I have called here, as usual—as a matter of course—to ride with you, and each time I have been met by your servant, and told—I don’t know what, except that I could not see you, Rose. Dear Rosalie, have I offended you in any way? Dear Rosalie, speak to me! Say! Say, are you angry with me?” he persisted, seeing that she did not answer.

201“Now, what on earth should I be angry with you about, Robert? Of course, I am not angry.”

“You are offended with me. You are, I feel you are—I know you are; I see it in your face, Rosalie,” he persisted, gazing on her troubled countenance, and reading, but not aright, its sorrowful expression.

“Indeed, I am not displeased with you, dear Bob. How could I possibly be, when you never in your life gave me cause for any other feeling towards you than esteem and thankfulness?”

“‘Esteem and thankfulness!’ I told you before, Rosalie, if you persisted in talking that way you’d drive me out of my senses!”

Here Mrs. Vivian hemmed, to give notice of her presence; and Robert Bloomfield turned, and perceived her for the first time. If he had not observed the lady before, he did not care about her now. He bowed; and then, forgetting her, turned, and resumed his conversation with Rosalie, in the same impatient, impassioned tone.

Mrs. Vivian, with a cold, offended air, arose and left the room. But as soon as the door closed behind the lady, and Robert found himself alone with Rosalie, he certainly betrayed a great sense of relief, for his manner became more earnest and vehement, and he pleaded anew the hopeless suit so often and so decidedly rejected. His tongue was loosened, and words flowed, without let or hindrance, in that impetuous torrent of eloquence inspired only by passion; and Rosalie listened with emotion scarcely less than his own, for every word he uttered gave expression to the vague, deep, unspoken yearning of her own heart.

202She heard him out patiently; yes, she let him begin again, and go over the whole matter a second and a third time, before she could find courage to destroy his hopes. At last she said—

“I have deeply wronged you, Robert. I did not mean it, Heaven knows; but I have wronged you. Robert, I am very sorry. I shall never forgive myself.”

“I don’t understand you, Rosalie—I—do tell me what you mean!”

“I mean that I have not been frank enough with you, Robert. I have not had the courage,” said Rosalie, in a faltering voice, for she still deeply pitied him.

He did not look like an object of pity, just then; all his countenance suddenly brightened with joy. He seized her hand, exclaiming—“Do I comprehend? Do I hear you right? Do you mean, after all, that you like me a little better than you said you did?”

“No. Oh! Robert, what a sanguine nature yours must be, to interpret every word which is not positive, in your own way. No, Robert! I mean, that I have thoughtlessly accepted all your kind services, knowing full well that I never, never can repay the smallest of them. I mean, too, that I have let you tell me, again and again, of your regard, knowing all the while that I can never, never return it in the way you wish. I have wronged you, by not telling you this with sufficient firmness before!”

“Cruel! cold! hard! heartless!”

“It is my misfortune that I cannot accept you, Robert. My reason is telling me all the time, just as any prudent old lady could tell me—that if I could like you, I should have an enviable lot in life; not 203because you are wealthy, and all that, of course, Robert, but because I really do know you are—so good, so disinterested, so true, and because your dear mother and sisters are just like you, and I could love them as if they were my own relatives.”

“In mercy, Rosalie, why do you talk to me so, if you never mean to accept me?”

“Why, indeed? Because I cannot reject this kindness, for which I am indeed most sincerely grateful, in any other but the humblest manner, and with every circumstance to assure you, that I feel how much good I reject in rejecting you, Robert. Dear Robert, there is certainly destiny, as well as duty, in these matters; and, well as I like you, I could not love you enough to marry you, if my salvation depended on it; indeed I could not. I am not destined to so easy a life, Robert. I begin to have a foreshadowing that my lot will be a very rough one, Robert; that I shall not be left to bask in the sunshine, but shall have to face and weather the storm.”

“You—you fragile snow-drop! What do you mean now? You meet the storms of life! Has the Planters’ Own Bank broken, or have all the slaves on the plantation run off in a body?”

“Neither one nor the other, Robert. And if I ‘rough it’ in the world, it will be my own free choice.”

“I confess I do not understand you—except that you make me wretched; that is plain enough, but as to the rest, I am all in the dark.”

“It is my own secret, Robert.”

“One thing I do know; that is, you are too delicate for a rough life.”

“Robert, there are many delicate natures that have 204been cherished, and nursed, and petted to miserable weakness and death. My flower garden has taught me that lesson.”

“I should like to know how a flower garden could teach you a lesson like that!”

“Oh! should you? I can tell you, then. Last year, when I came here, I found a new flower growing in the garden. I don’t know botany, and I don’t know what the flower was, or how it came there; but I suppose the wind brought the seed. My flower was so feeble and withered, that it had lost all beauty and comeliness, and every charm, except a delightful odour. I weeded and worked around it, and watered it regularly, and nursed and cherished it, but it faded faster and faster, yielding a dying fragrance. I said it was too exposed and cold, and I took it up and transplanted it to the conservatory. There it wilted and fell, and I gave it up for lost. But now mark the sequel. A few days after, I took a ride up to the mountain top, and left my horse, for a ramble on foot. A fresh, delicate, delicious odour greeted me. I looked about, and lo! there, in a cleft of the rock on the mountain top, where it would be exposed to all the snow, and wind, and hail of winter, and burning rays of summer, was my strange hothouse plant! There it grew and flourished, swaying to and fro in the wind, and filling all the air with the freshness of its fragrance! Now what do you think I did, Robert? You will laugh at me, of course, for everybody laughed. The very next day I took my poor flower, that was dying in the conservatory—and that I pitied as if it had been a sick, caged bird—and I carried it up the mountain, and planted it in the evening. 205Thunder gusts and showers the next day prevented my ride; but the third day I visited my protege. It was living! It had plucked up a spirit and intended to live. I am like that plant, Robert! And now, to come back to yourself. We must part, Robert, as friends—kindly—but not to meet again, except as mere acquaintances, until you have outgrown the present weakness of your heart.”

She extended her hand—he pressed it to his lips, seized his cap, and hastily left the house.

The day at length came upon which St. Gerald Ashley and his young bride, with their attendants, were expected to arrive at Ashley Hall. Early in the afternoon, the carriage had been sent to the village to meet them; and in the evening all the members of the family were assembled in the drawing-room, to await them. Many of the country gentry, who had been invited to meet the bridal party, had joined the circle in the course of the evening, and the rooms were now quite full. Among the guests present were 206the Right Honourable W—— R——, then Governor of the State; Judge M——, of the Supreme Court; and a few others, high in state or national authority, whose distinguished names are now historical. But there was no one present so proud or happy as old Colonel Ashley, who walked about gently rubbing his hands, in the simple gleefulness of his country heart and habits.

The carriage was behind time; for the reason, it was rumoured, that the bride and her attendants chose to rest an hour or two at the village. At length, however, the welcome wheels were heard to roll up to the door, and the travellers to alight and enter the hall. They retired to change their dresses before entering the drawing-room. In the meantime, among the country neighbours in the saloon, all was half-subdued excitement and expectancy. Among the company was Mark Sutherland, of course. He was not one to shade with his dark brow the brightness of other people’s gaiety. In the social temper of youth, he had sought to enter into the spirit of the time, and had laughed and jested with the young people, or “talked politics” with the elders, as the case demanded. He had heard the slight, subdued bustle in the hall, incident upon the arrival of the bridal party; and the instant absorption of the whole heart of the assembled company, in the interest of the moment, had left him free. He had stood a few moments quite alone and unobserved, when a slight tremulousness of the air near him, a slight disturbance of his own serenity, caused him to look up.

Rosalie Vivian was standing near him, with a deprecating, imploring look and gesture. Her face was 207white as the white crape dress she wore, and her wreath of snow drops quivered with the trembling of her frame.

Startled by her appearance, he asked hurriedly—“Dear Rosalie, has anything happened? What is the matter?”

“I ought to have told you before! Some of us ought to have told you! I ought to have done so!” she answered, somewhat vaguely and wildly.

“Told me what, dear Rosalie? What is it?”

“Give me the support of your arm into the next room—there is no one there.”

“My child, you are not well!” said Mark, looking at her now with painful anxiety, as he drew her hand through his arm.

“I am not good, you ought to say. I have not been good! I have been a coward! I have not been your friend, Mark! I have been a traitor.”

“A traitor! Rosalie, you rave!”

“I ought to have told you any time this month past; but I could not bear to do it. And now it is scarcely any use at all; it is a mockery to tell you. But yet, indeed, I could not bear to see you standing there, so gay and unsuspicious. I could not bear to think how you would lose your self-command in her presence. No, I could not endure the thought, Mark!” she said, more and more incoherently.

“Rosalie, you are very nervous; you have over-excited yourself about this wedding. Come, let me get you something,” said Mark, drawing her gently through the crowd.

As they passed, the buzz of conversation increased very much, and “They are coming;” “The bride is 208coming;” “There she is;” “Hush,” &c., were the sounds that heralded the entrance of the bridal party, just as Mark Sutherland led Rosalie Vivian into the next room. He took her to a sofa, seated her, handed her a glass of water; but she waved it aside, saying, “I do not need it—I do not need it! It is you who need strength and calmness now. O, Mark! I wish you had left the house when I advised you to leave it!” she exclaimed, her agitation becoming momentarily greater. At last, forcing herself to speak again, she asked: “Mr. Sutherland! Mark! Do you know the name of the lady whom St. Gerald Ashley has married?”

“Certainly,” said Mark Sutherland, raising his eyebrows in an interrogative manner.

“You do!” exclaimed Rosalie, greatly surprised—excited.

“Certainly I do! How could I possibly remain in ignorance of it?”

“You do! You know it! And yet you are so calm! Nay, indeed, I am afraid you are mistaken; whom do you suppose it to be?”

“One once betrothed to myself—my cousin India!”

“You know it! And you are not unhappy about it! Oh, blessed Lord! I am so thankful—so glad!” And Rosalie dropped her face upon her hands, and wept softly and quietly.

“Dear Rosalie, has all this disturbance of yours been caused by your sympathy with unworthy me?”

“I remembered how you suffered at Cashmere—I feared—I dreaded if you met her suddenly here—the bride of another—that”——

“Well, dear Rose! That”——

209“Oh, I fear you think me very impertinent. If you do, you may tell me so; indeed, I shall not take it amiss.”

“Tell me your thought, Rosalie. Was it that all those old wounds would be re-opened? That all those sufferings would be renewed?”

“Yes!”

“Yet you see that they are not.”

“No, thank Heaven, Mark! But I cannot understand it.”

“Well, then, understand it now. The advent of my promised bride, as the wedded wife of another, does not disturb a pulse of mine, because, in my heart—in any honourable heart—love could not long survive esteem, more than it could survive hope or duty, and because”—— Here his whole manner grew most earnest, most intense, and passing his arm over her shoulder, he drew her face towards his own, and kissing away the tear drops from her eyes, said, “Because I love this single tear of true feeling better than the whole heart of yonder selfish beauty!”

And now, if Mark fancied tears, he might have a plenty of them; for now they fell warm and fast.

“What is the matter, Rosalie? Why do you weep now?” asked Mark.

But she did not answer. He repeated the question perseveringly.

At last, sobbing softly, and smiling, and sighing, and blushing, and averting her face, she said, archly, “Juliet wept at what she was ‘glad of.’”

“Are you glad, Rosalie? Tell me, dear Rose. Are you glad that I love you more than all the world that 210I have chosen you the guiding star of my life?”

She did not, could not answer.

He repeated this question, also searchingly, perseveringly, only to hear her answer; and he bent his ear, and averted his eyes, and quelled the beating of his heart, to win her reply.

At last it came, with her face hidden on his shoulder, and in a tone scarcely above her breath—“I always hoped you would like me at last; I did not think you would so soon, though.”

“But are you glad—are you glad?” persisted the unreasonable man.

“Yes, glad,” whispered Rosalie; and in proof of her truth the tears rolled quietly down her face.

“And so am I! Glad, happy, hopeful, confident, Rosalie! There will be no more faltering, and fainting, and failing now! You have infused new life into me. That any gossamer girl should have the power to do this! Yet such is the case, Rosalie.”

“Am I such a gossamer?”

“You are very fragile, Rosalie.”

“‘Out of the heart are the issues of life.’”

They were interrupted, of course; people always are when they are very blessed. It does not suit “the rest of mankind” to leave them so. This time it was old Colonel Ashley, who really was happy enough in himself to have left Mark and Rosalie alone in their content, if he had known it. He came in with a brisk step, with his slight figure seeming slighter, his grey hair lighter, and his thin, rosy face fiercer than ever, with the effervescence of his joy. He advanced, speaking—

211“Ah, Mr. Sutherland, you are here! I have been looking for you. What! will you be the last to pay your respects to the bride, and she a relative—though a very distant one, I suppose, of your own? Come, let me present you.”

“Does India—does Mrs. Ashley expect me?” inquired Mr. Sutherland.

“I imagine not!” replied the old gentleman, raising his eyebrows; “but that does not matter, you know. Come!”

Pressing the hand of Rosalie, before relinquishing it, Mark Sutherland arose to accompany Colonel Ashley to the front drawing-room, and to the presence of the bride.

They could not at once approach her, on account of the number of persons around her; yet the room was not so thronged with company as to prevent their having a full view of the bride and her attendants.

There stood India receiving the homage of her circle—her superb form arrayed in the rich and gorgeous costume that was so well adapted to her majestic and luxurious style of beauty. Her cheeks were mantled with a rich, high colour, yet this seemed not the carnation bloom of youth and health, but the fire of a feverish excitement. Her eyes were dark and brilliant, yet not with the light of innocent love and joy, but with the blaze of a burning and consuming heart.

“Come,” whispered the old gentleman; “it is no use to stand here waiting our opportunity; for we might stand all night, and those fools wouldn’t give way. Poor wretches!—just like boys peeping at a gentleman’s conservatory, where they know they dare not 212touch even a rose-bud. Come, we must elbow through that circle of dandies; gently, you know—gently.”

And suiting the action to the words, Colonel Ashley adroitly insinuated himself through the outer crowd and through the nearer circle, and into the very presence of the bride.

She was not looking towards the new-comers. She was listening to a gentleman, who, having apparently exhausted all other subjects of adulation, was now expatiating upon the rare and exquisite beauty of the bouquet she held in her hand.

Colonel Ashley and Mr. Sutherland were before her.

“Mrs. Ashley”——

She looked round.

“Will you permit me to present to you my young friend, Mr. Sutherland—a distant relative of your own, may I hope?”

Mark Sutherland looked up, caught her eye, and bowed deeply. But before he had had time to do so, before even the deliberate ceremonious presentation speech of the old gentleman was half over—at the very instant she had turned around, and her eye had fallen upon Mark Sutherland—a change, an appalling change, had come over her lovely face and form, like that which might be supposed to sweep over the face of some beautiful and fertile oasis at the sudden blast of the simoom, that buries all its luxurious beauty in the burning and arid sands of the desert.

As by the sudden smite of death, all colour was dashed out from her cheek, and all light from her eye. For a moment she stood and gazed, transfixed, unable to withdraw her stony eyes from his; then, 213with a sudden cry, as if some tightly-strained heartstring had snapped—the tension of her form relaxed, and she fell to the floor!

In an instant all was confusion. Raised in the arms of her father, Clement Sutherland—who, until that moment, had remained obscure in the background—the swooning bride was borne into the adjoining room, and laid upon the sofa, while restoratives were anxiously sought for, to be administered.

In the meantime, in the saloon she had left, only two persons—Mark Sutherland and Mrs. Vivian—understood the cause of her fainting. Various innocent conjectures prevailed, far from the truth. “It was the heat of the room,” thought one; “Over-excitement,” opined another; “Standing so long,” fancied a third; “The fatigue of her journey,” imagined a fourth. “Really, it was too inconsiderate in Colonel Ashley to oblige his daughter to receive company upon the very evening of her arrival,” complained Mrs. Chief Justice M——, a large, heavy person, fanning herself slowly. “I noticed her face was very pale,” said a sympathetic lady, drawing upon her imagination for her facts. “Indeed! but I thought it was very flushed,” interrupted a matter-of-fact individual.

All these various conjectures were expressed in low, almost inaudible tones; while, undisturbed and smiling, Mrs. Vivian passed among the company, and, as it were, moved upon the troubled waters of their half-suppressed excitement, and, with her mere smile of self-possession, restoring calmness and order.

Presently the door of the inner room opened, and the bride reappeared, leaning lightly upon the arm of 214her father, and attended by her husband and bridesmaids. She entered, and passed up the saloon to her former position. Several country gentlemen zealously drew forward a cushioned chair, and several sympathetic old-fashioned ladies approached, with inquiries and expressions of condolence.

Pale and weary, but smiling and self-possessed, Mrs. Ashley gracefully accepted the services of the former, and replied to the interested questions and comments of the latter.

“It was very ill-judged on the part of the Colonel, my dear, to subject you to the fatigue of a reception, just off your journey—very indeed,” said Mrs. Chief Justice M——.

“I do really think we ought to exercise the good taste of retiring,” whispered another.

Whether India heard this remark or not, she answered—

“I am not fatigued. We made but a very short stage to-day, and rested several hours at the next village. No; it was the warmth and closeness of the room. The windows are open now, and the effect has gone with the cause,” she added, smiling brightly, while at the same moment the consciousness of the first falsehood she had ever uttered in her life brought a warm though transient blush to her cheek, that resembled the returning glow of strength, and reassured all doubt.

After a little, the musicians began to touch their instruments, and soon struck up a lively quadrille air. The younger portion of the company gave signs of restlessness. Gentlemen hesitated, and then chose their partners for the set, and remained awaiting the motions 215of Mrs. Ashley. As hostess, it was her right to select any gentleman present to honour with her hand for the quadrille; and as bride, it was her privilege to lead off the dance.

When India became aware that all were waiting for her, she threw her eyes over the assembly; and the aspiring heart of many a youth beat faster when their beams lingered for an instant on him. But he for whom she looked was nowhere to be seen. At last, a smile of scorn and self-scorn writhed swiftly athwart her lips, and her eyes suddenly blazed as their light kindled upon the form of one who came in at the farthest door. Quick as lightning flashed and fled the spasm of that face, leaving it serene and smiling, as she arose and met the new-comer, and said sweetly—

“My cousin Mark, will you honour me?”

And before the astonished man could bow, she had placed her hand in his, and he found himself by her side, at the head of a set that instantly formed around them.

India spoke and smiled with her usual charming ease, and danced with her usual grace and dignity.

And after the dance was finished, and her partner had led her to her seat, she detained him near her, toying with her fan or bouquet, talking of a thousand nothings. She presented him to her husband; and Mark Sutherland, of course, politely expressed himself pleased to form the personal acquaintance of one with whose public life and services he had been so long familiar, &c.

Throughout the long evening, India maintained a regnant self-control. And Mark Sutherland wondered at the seeming inconsistency of her conduct. He did 216not know, or he did not reflect, that in the first instance of surprise, her nerves had—so to speak—got the start of her will, and so betrayed her; but that after once the will had regained the ascendancy over the nerves, it was able to control them.

Not again that evening did Mark Sutherland find an opportunity to speak with Rosalie. India detained him at her side, smiling, chatting, and in her daring audacity carrying back their recollections into scenes and times and places that suggested the parallel of taking lighted candles among open casks of camphine or gunpowder. Her indifference was too well attested to be genuine. But Mark Sutherland’s perfect calmness—real and thorough, as hers was assumed and superficial—assisted her.

The drama of the evening was at last over. The company had departed, the lights were out, and India found herself, for a few moments, alone in her chamber. She had smiled, and glanced, and chatted, and charmed all eyes and ears to the last. She had gained the privacy of her chamber—she had angrily, then fiercely, rejected the services of her attendant, and turned her from the room. And now, for the moment, she was alone and free—the acting all was over—the mask might be laid aside—the miserable victim of pride might seem the wretch she really was.

And oh! the fearful change that came over that beautiful but agonized face when the mask of smiles fell! She threw herself, all robed, and gemmed, and wreathed, as she was, prostrate upon the bed—her form convulsed, her bosom heaving with the suffocating anguish, which, from its very excess could not be vented.

217“False! false! false!” she wailed. “False to Mark! false to my husband! falser than all, to myself! Lost! lost! lost! Lost, body, soul, and spirit! Would that I could die!”

A light, gay footstep on the stairs, a low, love-tuned voice near the door, and it opened, and St. Gerald Ashley entered, with a smile of confiding affection on his noble face.

How will that erring woman meet his manly, trusting love?

Rosalie’s content was undisturbed and perfect. She had not witnessed India’s fainting. She knew of it, but ascribed it, as others did, to fatigue, heat, and over-excitement. She never once associated the swoon of the bride with the meeting with her former lover. It is true she had dreaded this meeting, for the sake of Mark, who, she feared, still cherished an affection for India; but she had no such fears for her. She could not have imagined—the simple integrity of her heart shielded her from imagining—that India could have given her hand to one man, while cherishing a thenceforth guilty preference for another. Of course, she had heard and read of ladies who desecrated marriage by making a legal sale of themselves 218for money, rank, or convenience; but then such were ladies of society, ladies of the great world—not highhearted women, not women of noble sentiments, like her friend India, who, if she were fickle, was at least truthful, even in her fickleness. No; the thought of India, while the wife of another, still loving Mark, and fainting at his sudden appearance, never entered the girl’s mind. She heard and entirely believed India’s own explanation of her swoon—“the closeness of the room”—and so, undisturbed by the suspicion of that suffering near her, which, had she known it, would have greatly troubled her peace, Rosalie yielded up her soul to serene joy. That night in her prayers she returned earnest thanks for the happiness accorded her. She sought her pillow in the fulness of content. Mark loved her! beyond this, she did not care to ask or hope any earthly good. Mark loved her! this was happiness enough for one long season. Mark loved her! the thought enveloped her soul in a benign sense of perfect protection, safety, and comfort. Mark loved her! the thought was perfect peace. Wrapped in it, she sweetly fell asleep.

She awoke in the morning, with a vague impression of a great happiness sleeping in her heart. Suddenly, with a shock of electric joy, she remembered what it was—Mark loved her! Again, in her morning worship, she offered up fervent thanksgiving for this priceless boon of love; and after she had made her simple morning toilet, she left her room, and went down stairs. Her self-assumed domestic duties claimed attention; but still the light of her inward joy brightened all her countenance.

Colonel Ashley, always an early riser, was in the 219hall when she descended. He met her, smiling. She was smiling, too.

“Well, my bonny girl!” he said, “spite of late hours, our mountain breezes are beginning to make the roses bloom on your cheeks. You look very pretty this morning!”

“Well,” said Rosalie, “how long am I to keep the keys, or when am I to deliver them up to Madame l’épouse?”

“Ah! I don’t know. How should I? You must settle that between you. In a few days, I suppose. Ask your pretty little mamma; she is likely to know such points of domestic etiquette. Madam does not look very much like the material of which Virginia housewives are composed, I must say. I fear, little girl, that you will still have to carry the keys.”

“Now, you know, uncle, if I am to have all the duties of housekeeper, without the dignities of mistress, I intend to demand a salary for my services. Do you hear?”

“And you shall have it, my dear—ten kisses a day. Will that suit you?”

Rosalie laughed and left him.

It was yet early in the morning, and she went to “see after” breakfast. Her first visit was to her diary, to have the new milk strained, and the old milk skimmed, and the cream and butter iced and brought out for breakfast. Then she sent two little negro girls into the garden, to gather raspberries—a necessary luxury in its season on a country breakfast table. Then she went into the cellar, to select the fresh fish and game and oysters that had been kept in ice. Then went to the pantry, to give out coffee, tea, chocolate, 220sugar, &c. Then to the plate and china closet, to “parade” the best Sevres breakfast service and the family plate, in honour of the occasion. Her next visit was to the breakfast room, to see that the table was well arranged. “I wonder, after all, if India will like to spend two hours of the early morning in this manner, instead of lounging them away over her own elegant toilet,” said Rosalie to herself, as she passed into the room. Finding all in order here, the busy little housewife passed next into that pleasant room near the kitchen and the pantry, and fronting upon the garden, and devoted to the picking of vegetables and fruit, and such little half-horticultural, half-culinary pursuits. Here she found her two little black handmaids, with their baskets of raspberries, waiting for her. She praised their diligence and took the raspberries, and was engaged in putting them in cut-glass dishes, and powdering them with sugar, when she felt a light hand laid upon her shoulder, and, glancing around, she saw Mark Sutherland standing behind her, smiling upon her. A sudden bright blush suffused her beautiful countenance; but she exclaimed, saucily—

“Not even the grace of Paul Pry, to say, ‘I hope I don’t intrude.’”

“You know you gave me the freedom of this room long ago, little housekeeper.”

“A privilege which men like you seem inclined to abuse,” answered Rosalie, glancing at her gingham gown, holland apron, and turned-up sleeves.

“Beautiful in that also, Rosalie. What a charming little peasant you make!”

“I think so too,” said Rose, ingenuously; and then, 221blushing and laughing, she suddenly corrected herself, saying, “Oh! I did not mean that; I meant I like this dress and this occupation, and think they suit me perhaps as well as any other.”

“Shall I help you with this also, Rosalie?” said Mark, taking up a sugar-duster.

“Oh, no, thank you! I have nearly done. If you want employment, you may go into the garden and select a bouquet of the sweetest half-blown white rose buds and heliotrope that you can find, as a morning offering to our bride.”

“And for you, a posy of heartsease,” he answered meaningly, pressing her fingers as he went.

Rosalie finished her fruit, ornamenting the edges of the dishes with fresh green leaves, and sent them to the table. Then she went and changed her dress for breakfast; and when Mark returned from the garden, he found her standing in the hall waiting for him.

She was looking very lovely, in her fresh white muslin morning dress, without any ornament, but her own soft brown ringlets, and the bright blush and smile lighted by happiness.

“Here they are, sweetheart!” he said, gaily and fondly showing the flowers.

“An elegant bouquet for the bride!” she exclaimed admiringly.

“And a sweet little posy for you,” he said, placing the heartsease on her bosom.

“Il est a propos, n’est ce pas?”

“It is fit.”

“Oui! Comme il faut, Monsieur?”

“It is faultless.”

222“Do you mean to say you won’t talk French with me, Mark?”

“I mean only to show you, as long as you speak it to me, that there is not a word or phrase in that fashionable and hackneyed language, that has not a shorter, stronger, and more expressive synonym in our own mother tongue. There is no language for true thought and strong feeling like our earnest English. But, my Rose! even English has no word to tell how much I love you—how dear you are to me! All last evening, occupied, monopolized as I was, sometimes for a moment I would forget you, and then your image would return to me with—how shall I say it?—how express it?—with such a thrill of life and joy as I never felt before; an emotion purer, higher, more blissful than I ever knew before. But, Rose! my rose! will this dream fade also? Must I wake, to find that you cannot go with me through the rough paths of life, up which my footsteps have to toil?”

“No, Mark! No—unless you will it so. Believe in me, for I am true. ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; and the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part me and thee,’” she said earnestly.

There was earnest honour as well as deep affection in the broken words wherewith he blessed her, as he led her back into the parlour where all the family were now assembled.

223

“Come here, Rosalie; I want to have a very serious talk with you, my child,” said Colonel Ashley, rising to meet his niece, as she entered, and leading her to a seat. “Now, my dear, I am very sorry for something that I have just heard. Nay, now, be calm, my dear—I am not going to scold. If I indulge in any sort of reproach, it must be in self-reproach for my own reprehensible carelessness. And so, my child, you are engaged to be married!”

Rosalie’s face crimsoned, and her eyes fell to the ground.

“And what good, Rosalie, do you think will ever come of this imprudent step?”

The blush deepened on her cheek, but she did not reply.

“And what am I to think of this penniless young man, who uses his position in my family to wile the 236affections of my niece—an heiress? Would it not be a fair and rational conclusion to set him down as an unprincipled fortune-hunter?”

Rosalie started. Her eyes flashed, her lips quivered. She exclaimed—

“Uncle, you do not believe that—you do not!”

“Would it not be fair to believe it?”

“Uncle, you are a noble-hearted being—you always recognise true nobility in others. Uncle, be just to Mr. Sutherland—nay, be just to yourself—unsay your words.”

“Why, Rosalie, ninety-nine out of a hundred would call your lover a fortune-hunter.”

“Oh, sir, they could not—they could not! knowing that Mr. Sutherland voluntarily renounced a large fortune for an idea of duty.”

“At any rate, Rosalie, here are the naked facts: Mark Sutherland, being quite penniless, and well knowing that he has no way on earth of supporting a wife, makes the best use of his opportunities to woo and win an heiress!”

Rosalie dropped her face into her hands; her bosom heaved convulsively, as with some inward struggle, for an instant, and then lifting a countenance blushing and tearful, yet gently resolute, she said, in a faltering voice:

“I must make a confession, even if it cover me with humiliation. I must clear Mr. Sutherland, and take the blame where it truly belongs—upon my own head. Uncle, it was my fault—my own—mine solely.”

She paused, for her girl’s nature would not bear the look the old man fixed upon her. She averted her 237face, and with deeply flushed cheek and low, tremulous voice, resumed:

“I loved him, uncle. It was impossible, adoring moral heroism as I did, not to love him. God and angels know it, and you must know it, too”——

Again she paused for an answer, but Colonel Ashley did not reply, and she asked—

“Uncle! you exonerate Mr. Sutherland now, do you not?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Colonel Ashley, speaking as if waking up out of a reverie. “I exonerated him at first; I only wanted to see, Rosalie, whether you would have the honour and generosity to admit what you have. Good heaven! It seems to me fully one half the love originates with the girls, although they have too much tact to let us know it! Now, there was your aunt: I was two years courting her. In truth, I thought I had a terrible time to win her heart; but listen, now. Some time after we had been married, she told me how many months she had been ‘setting her cap’ at me before I ever thought of her; and yet you see after she had once gained her point, and brought me to her feet, she kept me on the tenterhooks of suspense for two years!”

“May I go now? Are you done with me, uncle?”

“No, my dear, I have not begun with you yet! I must give you a lecture! Don’t you know it was a very unmaidenly thing of you to ‘set your cap’ at Mr. Sutherland?”

“Uncle, Mr. Sutherland evidently does not pronounce such a judgment, and therefore it is not so.”

“No, poor fellow! because he doesn’t know you did it. He’s under the illusion that he did all the lovemaking 238himself. That’s natural. But now, then, Rosalie, how do you expect to get along in this world if you and Mark are married? You may know that he has no way of supporting you, and your guardian would see you both in the bottomless pit before he’d advance a cent of your fortune. Come, stop blushing and trembling, and answer me, my dear. I like people to be practical. What do you expect to do?”

“I do not know, uncle; I wish to leave it all to Mr. Sutherland. I have so much confidence in his judgment and in his regard for me, that I feel perfectly sure he will never draw me into any evil or suffering.”

“Always faith in Mark! Suppose he should be going away in a few days, and suppose he should wish to marry and take you with him?”

“In that case, I should wish to go, dear uncle. Have you done with me now, sir?” asked Rosalie, really distressed by the length and closeness of the examination to which she had been subjected.

“Yes, you may go!” answered the old gentleman, rising, and holding the door open for her to pass. And Rosalie left the study.

In the lower hall she saw Mark Sutherland. He came to meet her, drew her arm within his own, and then they both walked into the garden.

“Well, dear Rosalie, do you know that I shall probably leave here in the course of a week?”

“My uncle has just hinted it to me. Where do you go?”

“Back to the village of S——, to take possession of an established office about to be vacated by my friend Lauderdale, who is coming on here, upon an errand of which you are already apprised, my dear Rosalie.”

239“Yes, I know mamma and Mr. Lauderdale will be united next month.”

“Well, dear Rosalie?”

“Well?”

“I am going away in a week—must we then part?”

“Not unless you wish to go and leave me behind, Mark.”

“Wish to leave you behind! In leaving you I should turn my back upon my guiding star, my inspiration, my life!”

“Then I accompany you, Mark.”

“Your friends, Rose, will they not raise serious opposition?”

“No! I have neither father nor mother, and there are no other friends who have any wish to rule me, or any interest in doing so. My young step-mother is going to break the conventional tie between herself and me by marrying a second time; and with her own heart under the gentle influence of happiness, she will not be disposed to wring mine. As for my uncle, his son has brought a wife home now, who will be the mistress of his house, and he no longer requires my presence in that capacity. Indeed, I might even be considered in the way. And neither am I disposed to take a second place in a household of which I have hitherto been at the head. And that reminds me that I am at the head of it still, and that the duties of the position press upon me every hour—even now,” said Rosalie, moving to go.

He caught her hand to detain her.

“Stay—do not leave me just yet. And so, my dearest Rosalie, when I go forth you will accompany me?”

240“I have said that if you wish it—yes, I will accompany you.”

“God bless you, dearest Rose!” burst from his lips with impassioned fervour. “But, my dear girl—my fairy, fragile girl—do you know what women in the far West have to encounter? hardships from which the most robust shrink; hardships from which the strong and beautiful India shrank; and will my pale, frail Rosalie dare them? and can she bear them?”

“India, with her glorious physique, is still a delicate daughter of the sun; she is like a gorgeous, brilliant exotic, that can bloom only in a luxurious conservatory; while I, with my wan face and fragile form, am yet a child of the wind—a wood-anemone, that only withered in a Southern hothouse—that will flourish and thrive in the wilderness.”

“Heaven grant it may be as you say, dear Rosalie! It is impossible for me to give you up, to leave you; yet when I think of all you may have to suffer in being my companion, my heart is filled with anxiety and trouble. What did you say, dearest? Your sweetest words hide under low tones, just as the sweetest violets lurk under thick shade. What were you murmuring?”

“Only that I should not suffer half as much in meeting anything with you, as I should—as I should”—

“Well, dearest?”

“In being left behind,” said Rosalie, dropping her head upon his shoulder, as he caught her to his heart, and exclaimed, in a sudden burst of emotion—

“You shall not be left behind, my darling! my darling! By all my hopes of earth and heaven, I will never, never part from you!”

241For a moment her head had rested on his breast in peace, and then she began to grow restless and twisted herself out of his embrace.

“Where now?” he asked, rather impatiently.

She looked at him with a comic expression of countenance, and said:

“It is a mortifying necessity to confess, but the truth is, the ham has to be taken out of soak and put on to boil for dinner, and I have got to see it done; also there are gooseberry tarts and lemon custard to be prepared for the dessert, and I have got to go and do it. I wonder if uncle and cousin St. Gerald, who both love their palates, (low be it spoken,) will ever get anything fit to eat when the gorgeous Mrs. India takes my place!” and so, laughing and escaping, she ran off.

The world-honoured and time-honoured bard whose lines are quoted above habitually looked beneath the mere plausible surface of possibility, and from the deep insight thereby gained, often put forth oracles at opposition to the usual routine of thought and expectation, yet which the eternal experiences of life continue to endorse as truths.

242Were I writing a merely fictitious narrative, it would be in order now (after the custom-sanctioned manner of story-tellers) to describe the cruel opposition the lovers met from tyrannical parents, guardians, &c. But I am writing a true story—in this particular at least, “stranger than fiction”—and so have no such events to relate.

It happened as Rosalie had predicted—she met no serious opposition to the current of her affections. And if we look into the causes of that leniency on the part of her guardians, we shall not find their non-resistance so unaccountable, after all.

Left without father or mother—without near relatives or natural protectors, except a youthful step-dame, now too entirely absorbed in the contemplation of her own marriage, and an old uncle, to whom until two years past she had been a perfect stranger, Miss Vivian was thus not the first object of interest to any one around her.

It is true, that when Rosalie made known her purpose to Mrs. Vivian, the lady opposed the contemplated marriage with entreaties and tears; but finding that entreaties and tears only distressed the maiden without shaking her resolution, the young step-mother felt neither the right nor the inclination to attempt the arbitrary control of Miss Vivian’s destiny. In yielding her final consent, the sweet-lipped lady said, amid falling tears—“Oh! were he well established, Rosalie, there is no one in the world to whom I would resign you with so much pleasure and comfort, as to him whom you have chosen. And well I know, and deeply I feel, that even now, from this low point of life—with you by his side—with you for an incentive—with 243his high moral principles and intellectual faculties, and in this favoured country, he must rise, he must accomplish a brilliant destiny. But O, Rosalie, my child, in the meanwhile, I dread for you those toilsome, terrible first steps on the road to success! O Rosalie, pause! How much wiser to wait until he has conquered success!”

“And share his triumphs when I would not share his toils? No! no! no!”

“It would be so much safer, Rosalie!”

“And so much more prudent to allow him, in those moments of depression and despondency that must come, to think that it is only the successful statesman or jurist whose fortunes I would share, not those of the toiling aspirant! To turn a second India on his hands, and so forever and forever break down his faith in womanhood, in disinterestedness, and in truth! No! no! no! and a thousand times no! I have the blessed privilege of healing the heart that India wounded, of lifting up the brow that she bowed down, of strengthening and sustaining the faith that she weakened.”

“If you should be a burden to him?”

“I will never be a burden to him! Providence will never so fail me. Mine is no sudden girlish fancy. It is a deep, earnest affection, arising from the profoundest sentiments of esteem and honour that ever woman felt for man—and the Father who inspired it will bless it. He who in his benignant love said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ will strengthen me to be a true help-meet for my husband.”

“O Rosalie! be practical, child!”

“Be faithful first, and practical afterwards.”

244“Rosalie, you don’t know what you brave! Fancy yourself and Mark now married, and housekeeping (forsooth!) in some wretched log cabin or some lath-and-plaster shell of a shanty, in some new Western village. Fancy yourselves both down with that curse of new settlements, the ague, and each unable to help the other, and no one to give you a cup of tea, and perhaps with no tea in the house.”

“That is a plain statement of a very dismal contingency, dear mamma. Yet I have no doubt that we should shiver and shake safely through it, as others have done. Yet it is not fair or wise to contemplate the worst possibility only. The Western pioneers are not always laid up with the ague and without tea!” said Rosalie, with a sparkle of fun in her eyes.

But in a moment after, the young girl’s face grew serious, and she said, in a tremulous voice, “And besides, dear mamma, the very bugbears that you have evoked to frighten me from my journey only draw me on to go. Oh, do you think, mamma, that I could bear to stay here in safety, ease, and luxury, and know that he was far away, exposed to all the dangers, hardships, and privations of a pioneer life?”

“Nonsense! Danger is the natural element of man! to seek it is the nature of the creature!”

“Yes, mamma; but illness, fever, burning thirst, solitude, and helplessness, is not. And, if I thought that Mark were suffering all these things in some wretched Western cabin, and I not near to bathe his head and give him a cup of cold water, and to nurse and comfort and soothe him, but separated from him by thousands of miles of mountains and plains, I tell you, mamma, it would nearly break my heart! It is no 245use! I must go with him, to meet whatever of good or ill Fate has in store. It can have nothing else so evil as a separation! Oh! I feel as if the worst calamity that could possibly befall me, would be a separation from him.”

“Foolish girl! You love that broad-shouldered, robust man, as tenderly as a mother loves her babe!”

“I love him with a tenderness and sympathy that makes me tremblingly alive to his least sorrow or lightest pain; and yet mark you, mamma, with an esteem, with a depth of respect, with an honour that makes me aspire to his approbation as my highest good under Heaven!”

“O Rosalie, I will not farther oppose you! Yet, if you only had strength to endure the hardships of a Western life, I should feel less anxiety.”

“Do not fear. I shall be able to endure, because ‘my good will is to it;’ and energetic, because I shall have a good motive; and healthy, because I shall be happy—because my heart will be right and at rest; for I say it again, because it is a great deep truth—‘Out of the heart are the issues of life!’ Yes, out of the heart are the issues of will, purpose, hope, health, strength, enterprise, achievement, SUCCESS! Out of the heart are the issues of all the good that can come back to us in time or eternity! on earth or in Heaven!”

246

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266

All the forenoon of the next day, Mr. Garner, the landlord, was absent with his team; so that our young people were obliged to defer their removal until the afternoon; and they spent the intervening hours in reviewing their possessions and supplying those few last articles that always are forgotten in a first preparation.

At two o’clock, the capacious wagon of the hotel stood before the door, laden with furniture, trunks, provisions, and so forth. A tolerable seat was arranged for Rosalie among the baggage; but Mark, on foot, accompanied the landlord, who walked at the head of his horses. It was a slow progress; the horses, already fatigued with their morning’s work, never got out of a walk; so that it was nearly four o’clock when they entered Wolf’s Grove and drew up before the log cabin. While his horses were resting, Mr. Garner 275assisted Mark to unlade the wagon, and take in the furniture and arrange the heaviest part of it. Then, having watered his horses, he shook hands with his late guests, wished them good luck, jumped upon his seat in front of the wagon, and drove off.

And Mark and Rosalie found themselves standing, looking at each other, alone, in the forest cabin. It was a moment in which flashed back upon each the memory of their whole past lives, and the intense realization of their present position. A doubt, whether to weep or smile, quivered over Rosalie’s features for an instant. Mark saw the tremor of her lips and eyelids, and drew her to his heart; and she dropped her head upon his shoulder and smiled through her tears. He whispered, cheerily—

“Never mind, dear; you will be one of the honoured pioneer women of the West. And when this wilderness is a great Commonwealth, and Shelton is a great city, and I am an old patriarch, we will have much joy in telling of the log cabin in the wilderness, where we first went to housekeeping. And now, let us see if we cannot get this place into a little order.”

The room, as I said, was large and square, with a window east and west, facing each other, and a stone fire-place north, facing a broad door south. The walls were unplastered, but well planed and cemented, and grey with time and use. The floor was of rough but sound pine plank. A broad shelf over the fire-place served for a mantel-piece. In the corner between the east window and the fire-place stood the step-ladder leading to the loft. In the opposite corner, between the west window and the fire-place, were three triangular shelves, that did duty as cupboard or beaufet. 276Finally, the sashes of the windows were good, but the glass was all broken out of them. This was the state of the room when Mark and Rosalie looked around it. Mark went up the step-ladder to examine the loft, but found it so low that even a woman could not stand upright in it. It was therefore given up, except as a place to stow trunks, boxes, &c.

Then they began to arrange their furniture. It was very easily done, they had so little—a bedstead with its appointments, a table, a half-dozen chairs, and almost everything else in half-dozens. The form of the room favoured the convenient arrangement of these things. The bedstead had already been put up in the corner between the west window and the door, and the table placed in the corresponding corner between the door and the east window. They set the chairs in their places, and then Mark began to unpack the china, while Rosalie arranged it on the shelves of the corner cupboard. There were several things—remnants of past refinement—out of keeping with their present condition; among them, the French china—that looked upon their rough pine shelves as the elegant Mark Sutherland and the fair and delicate Rosalie looked in their rude log cabin—and the superb white Marseilles counterpanes, whose deep fringes touched the rough plank floor; and the tester and valance of fine and beautiful net-work; and lastly, the tamboured curtains that lay upon the chairs, ready to be put up when Mark should have mended the windows. These were certainly out of place here, but it could not be helped; they were Rosalie’s little personal effects, endeared to her by long possession, and by their having been the property, and some of them—the 277tamboured curtains and the net valance, for instance—the handiwork of her mother. By sunset, all was arranged, except two matters—the broken windows, with which now the young master of the house began to employ himself, taking out the sashes and laying them upon the table, and laying pane after pane in their places; and the barrel of flour which stood in the middle of the floor, with a quarter of beef laid across the top of it—both waiting to be put away out of sight, in a proper place; that is, supposing a proper place could be found on premises where there was neither storehouse, pantry, nor shed, nor even a second room.

Mark busied himself with the window sashes, trying pane after pane in the empty forms. But at length, turning around, he smiled and said—

“It’s no use, Rose; I’m not a glazier, and so carefully as I thought I measured the sashes and the glass, they will not exactly fit; and I have no diamond here to trim them, and so I suppose they must be left until to-morrow.”

And he replaced the empty sashes in the window frames. Then, seeing the neglected barrel of flour, he wheeled it up against the wall, near the door, and said it must remain there for the present; and Rosalie took a coarse, clean table-cloth and spread it over the beef, that still lay upon the top.

“And now, dear,” he said, looking around, “I believe we are as well fixed as we can be for the present. Nothing remains but to get supper; and, as I was out here in the West two years before you ever saw it, I shouldn’t wonder if I hadn’t to give you some instruction.”

278“You teach me to cook! I, my uncle’s housekeeper for two years, while you were wandering about from town to town!” exclaimed Rosalie.

Mark laughed, and bade her remember that when she was “uncle’s” housekeeper she had experienced cooks at her command, and that her housekeeping duties and responsibilities consisted in carrying the keys and ordering what she pleased to have for dinner. And he further advised her to recollect that she was not to snap up her liege lord in that way, either! Whereupon Rose bade him mind his business and his briefs; for that she should snap him, and box his ears, too, whenever the spirit moved her. She! Mark snatched her, laughing, to his bosom, and half suffocated her with kisses, and then holding her tight, bade her do her wickedest.

“And, Rose,” he exclaimed merrily, “I do not know why it is; but out here, in this cabin of the wilderness, with nobody but you for company, I feel as if the restraints of society and of maturity had fallen away, and restored me to the freedom and the wilfulness and the irresponsible wickedness of my boyhood. And oh! little one, if you were only a great deal taller and stronger, what a wrestle we would have!”

And he gazed down on her there, standing within his arms—so small, so fair, so perfectly helpless, so utterly in his power—and all the wantonness of youth fled from before her helplessness and her beauty, and a flood of unutterable tenderness rushed over his heart; and, still gazing upon her with infinite love, he said—

“God forever bless you—you little, little, wee thing; 279you delicate, beautiful creature; and God forever forsake me, if ever, willingly, I give you a moment’s pain or sorrow!”

Blushing deeply, Rose withdrew herself from his now yielding clasp, and, to cover her girlish embarrassment, took the new bucket and put it in his hands, requesting him to go to the spring, and bring her fresh water to fill the tea-kettle, and adding—

“You shall see what nice biscuits and what nice tea I can make.”

Mark took the pail and went out, and disappeared down the path.

Rosalie, observing the floor littered, looked around for the broom to sweep it up; and then laughed to find that, with all their getting, they had got no broom.

Mark came in with the pail of water, set it down, and said he would go and get some brush to kindle a fire. And while he was gone, Rosalie put water in a basin to wash her hands preparatory to making the biscuits; and then she discovered that they had forgotten soap also. And while she stood in dismay, wondering what else might have been omitted, Mark re-entered with a pile of brush on his shoulders, “like Christian with his bundle of sin,” he said. He threw it down upon the hearth, and began to look around, and then he broke into a gay, prolonged laugh.

“What’s the matter, Mark? Are you daring to laugh at me, with my sleeves and skirt tucked up?”

“O, Rosalie, we have heads, child! we have heads—and so have cabbages, when they have come to maturity.”

280“Well, don’t laugh yours off your shoulders, but tell me what you’re laughing at!”

“We have not brought a match nor a candle.”

“Oh! no! You don’t say so?”

“It is a positive fact.”

“We have forgotten soap and brooms too; we have forgotten everything.”

“No, not everything; only a few things that make everything useless.”

“What’s to be done? We can’t cook supper to-night, or even breakfast to-morrow morning, without a fire.”

“No. Let’s see—I know if one rubs two pieces of wood together long enough, they will ignite; and I know of other processes by which fire may be kindled; but, after all, I think the quickest and the surest way will be for me to go back to Shelton this evening, and get the matches; and then I can also get soap, a broom, and my pistols, which were likewise forgotten.”

“Go back to Shelton this evening! Walk three miles to Shelton, and back this evening, and the sun already down! You will be tired to death.”

“No, dear; I can walk that three miles in about an hour, get the things in ten minutes; borrow Mr. Garner’s saddle-horse to ride back, and take him home again in the morning, when I go to the office. And my brave little girl will not be afraid to stay here a a few hours by herself?”

“Afraid? No; surely not.”

“You can fasten the door with this wooden pin, if you wish to do so.”

“Oh! I shall not wish to fasten the door. I shall 281sit on the sill and watch the stars, and see if I can read our future destiny on their orbs, and wait for the moon to rise, and for you to come.”

“No, you must not do that, Rose. The woods are damp, and the evening air chill. And, now I think of it, this cabin will be too cool for you, with this draught through the open windows. Let’s see if we cannot do something with them. If you had anything to tack up against them, Rosalie?”

She went to a box and took out two sheets, each of which, doubled, was tacked against a window, and because the breeze still lifted them, a few tacks were driven in the sides and bottoms of these temporary blinds, to keep them down. Having finished that job, Mark pulled down and buttoned his wristbands, put on his coat, kissed Rosalie, bade her keep up her heart, for that he should be back at ten, or a little after, and departed. She stood at the door, watching him, until he disappeared within the intervening trees, and then she turned and entered the darkening house.

Did Mark Sutherland—did Rosalie—dream of all that should happen before they should meet again? Did either imagine the grim horror of the next few hours? It was a night that one of them never, in after life, forgot—whose fearful memory haunted thoughts by day, and visions by night, when the dreamer would start from sleep, and, with convulsive shivers and cold perspiration, gaze around in terror that could not be reassured.

282

A night’s undisturbed repose restored Rosalie’s exhausted nervous energy. The young couple arose early in the morning to begin their first day of house, or rather cabin-keeping, for the difference of style requires a difference of term. They had anticipated 292toil and privation, and had thought they were prepared to meet them. But it is one thing to think in a general way about work and want, and quite another to feel them in all their irritating and exhausting details; and the first day of housekeeping in the forest log cabin taught them this difference. They had no garden, no cow, no poultry, and there was no market where to procure the necessaries that these should have supplied. Everything that could be bought at the village shops had been provided; yet their first breakfast consisted of coffee without cream or milk, and biscuits without butter. But mutual love, and hope, and trust, sweetened the meal, and even their little privations furnished matters of jest. And when breakfast was over, and Mark was preparing to bid his “little sweetheart,” as he called her, farewell for the day, and promising to return by four o’clock, she gaily asked him what he would like for dinner, and he replied by ordering a bill of fare, that might have been furnished by some famous Eastern or European hotel. Suddenly, in the midst of their merriment, she thought of the wolves and trembled—yet restrained the expression of her fears. But the eye of affection read her thoughts, and Mark hastened to assure her that there was no more to dread—that the cabin was the last place on earth that the same animals would seek again—that they would not come within sight of its smoking chimney. Her trust in his judgment and his truthfulness completely reassured her doubting heart, and set it at perfect rest. And she let him go to his business with a gay, glad smile.

She watched him winding up the little narrow path, and disappearing among the trees, and then she turned 293into the house, to wash up the breakfast service and set the room in order. It was a queer day—that first one that she spent alone in her cabin. After arranging her corner cupboard and sweeping her room, and making a few little alterations and improvements in the disposition of her lighter furniture, she unpacked her sewing materials and sat down in the door to needlework. The primeval forest all around her, even up to the house, the blue sky above, and the log cabin, in the door of which she sat, was all that met the eye; the trilling songs of the wood birds, and the ripple-ripple of the trickling spring in the deep dell near, was all that met the ear. And yet she was not lonesome—she loved this solitude—the manifest presence of God filled it, and heart and mind received the holy, the elevating, the joyous influence. The day advanced—the sparkling freshness of the morning mellowed into noon. And then she got up and took a pitcher and went down to the spring, that seemed to have been calling her in its merry voice all the morning. A narrow, steep path down into the dingle led to the spring, and beyond it arose a high hill, heavily wooded, like all the land about there. She filled her pitcher, and returned to the house to take her lonely noontide luncheon. And then, as the meridian sun was pouring its rays in at the door, which you know faced the south, she removed her needlework to the west window, and resumed her sewing. Day waned; nor was she conscious of its waning until the burning sun began to glance in at her through the window where she sat, and oblige her to take her work to the opposite one—smiling at the conceit of being chased from place to place by 294Apollo. She sat at the cool east window, until the striking of the clock warned her that it was time to prepare the afternoon meal, which was to comprise “dinner and supper together.” She arose, and put away her work. But what was there to be got for dinner, after all? Tea without milk, bread without butter, and salted beef without vegetables. A poor meal certainly to set before an epicurean, such as Mr. Sutherland had been, for of herself she never thought.

Suddenly she recollected having seen some wild plum trees growing on the hill beyond the spring, and she knew the fruit should now be ripe, and she thought she would go and get some, to make a pie. No sooner thought than attempted. She seized her bonnet, caught up a little basket, and set out. She hastened down the dingle path, crossed the run, and climbed the hill. She reached its summit, and stopped to breathe, and rest for a moment. The sudden glory of the extended landscape held her spell-bound. On one side of the forest—a boundless ocean of waving greenery—spreading on and on, thousands of miles, for aught she knew, after it was lost under the horizon. On the other side, the vast prairie, with its dotted groves, like oases in desert, and in the distance the river, and the village, and the opposite shore of Missouri Territory. For a few minutes she stood in enchanted admiration; and then, remembering that she had no time to lose, addressed herself to the errand upon which she came, promising herself, after tea, when they should be at leisure, to return with Mark, and view the landscape over by moonlight. The wild plum trees furnished a rich harvest. She had only 295to shake the slight and graceful shaft, and a shower of ripe fruit fell around her. She quickly filled her basket; and then, with her girlish love of change, she returned to the house by another way. By this little route through the thicket, she observed, late as it was in the season, a profusion of wild raspberries, of unusual size and richness. She stopped, in pleased surprise, to gather them, and heaped them up on top of the plums, as many as the basket would hold.

Delighted with these woodland treasures—such a delicious addition to her frugal board—she returned to the cabin, and began to prepare their evening meal. Rosalie had not superintended her uncle’s Virginia farm-house for two years, to no purpose. She was a skilful little cook. It was not much to prepare a meal twice a day, for two persons; besides, her “good will was to it.” And I doubt if, in all the elegance and luxury of her Southern home, she was ever gayer, gladder, happier, than when preparing, with her own hands, this first little supper in her log cabin. The meal was soon ready. The damask table linen and the delicate china that adorned the table, and the fair girl that hovered around it, I was about to say, were somewhat out of keeping with the house. But that would not have been true; for there was nothing mean, poor, or squalid, in the surroundings of the log cabin. It had a wild, woodland air—there was as yet nothing to offend the most æsthetic taste. The arrangement of the table was complete—the last things set upon it being the delicate pastry and the cut-glass bowl of raspberries, powdered with sugar. But, there was no cream or butter; and this was Rosalie’s sole regret, as she gave a pleased glance at the whole effect, 296and then went to each window, and put aside the muslin curtains to let in the evening breeze, and the green woodland prospect. As she turned from the window, she was startled by a thump upon the floor, and the exclamation of—

“There! she sent you these! And I wonder why you couldn’t o’ comed arter them yourself!”

And with astonishment Rosalie saw standing in the room a large, fair-complexioned, middle-aged man, clothed in coarse blue linen jacket and trousers, with a waiter’s white apron tied before him. He had just thumped on the floor a large basket filled with vegetables. He still held in his hand a tin pail, with a tin pan covered upon the top of it.

“Who are you?” inquired she.

“Billy. Here’s the butter. Where am I to pour the milk?” said the man, lifting the little pan that contained a pound print, and displaying half a gallon of milk in the pail.

“Who sent these?” asked Rose, in surprise.

“She! Can’t you empty the milk? I’ve got to carry the bucket back.”

“I am afraid there is some mistake,” said Rose, hesitating. “Who did you say sent you?”

“Her, I tell you. I can’t stand here gablin’ all day.”

“But, my good friend, there is some error—these things were not sent to me,” persisted Rosalie, looking longingly at the hard, sweet-smelling butter, with the dew rising on it.

With no more ado, “Billy” marched up to the corner cupboard, seized a knife, passed it under the print of butter, and deftly turned the print out of the 297pan into a plate; next, he took up the pail and poured the milk into a pitcher; finally, he went back and seized his basket, and seeing nothing, to receive the vegetables, just turned it upside down and shook them out upon the floor—and potatoes, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, &c., rolled in every direction. And “Billy” caught up his empty pan and pail and pitched them into the basket, and hitched the latter, with a jerk, upon his arm, and marched out of the door, exclaiming—

“Now, for the futur’, mind, you must come arter ’em every day, yourself—if they’re worth havin’ they’re worth comin’ for, an’ I’ve got ’nough to do for her, ’out trudgin’ over here every day for you. An’ I told her I wan’t agoin’ to do it, nuther,” &c., &c., &c.

For long after Billy was out of sight in the woods, Rosalie heard the retreating sound of his grumbling. Full of wonder, she set about to collect the fugitive potatoes, tomatoes, &c. She put them under the lower shelf of her cupboard, and drew the short white curtain before them; then she set the pitcher of rich milk and the plate of fresh butter upon the table, much pleased with the unexpected luxury, but more pleased to anticipate the surprise and pleasure of Mark. And all being ready, she took her sewing, and sat in the door to watch for his coming. She heard his footstep before she saw his form; and she closed the door and ran up the woodland path to meet him. And soon their merry voices and silvery laughter echoed through the forest, as they approached the cabin. Rosalie had said nothing of her new luxuries; and when they entered the cabin, and he threw a glance around, and 298dropped his eyes upon the table, first of all he caught and kissed Rose again for her affectionate care, and then, by his exclamations and questions, exhibited all the surprise and satisfaction that the most exacting little Rose could have desired. While they supped, Rosalie explained the mystery of the plums and raspberries, and, after relating the visit of Billy, requested an explanation of the other mystery, of the butter, milk, and vegetables, and expressed her fears that, after all, she had no right to them—that they were intended for some one else. Mark reassured her by giving his opinion that they were intended for herself, and no other; and that she would find out, the next day, probably, the kind neighbour who had sent them.

After supper was over and cleared away, and the young pair had rested awhile, and the moon had risen, they crossed the rill and went up the hill to enjoy the fine air and the extended view.

And thus closed their first day at the log cabin.

And the next morning Rosalie found out her kind neighbours.

299

Four years had passed away since Mark Sutherland and Rosalie had taken up their residence in the village of Shelton. In this space of time many changes had passed over the village community and the individuals that composed it. The Territory had been erected into a state—new towns were incorporated—new cities founded—old ones throve. Shelton itself had more than doubled in population and importance. Where there had been but three or four stores, there were now a dozen; where there had been but two 308churches, there were now five. A handsome courthouse stood on the site of the old log tenement, whence the law, if not justice, had once issued its decisions; an excellent market-place, well attended, added much to the comfort of the citizens; a lyceum—an incipient library and museum, perhaps—lent its attractions to the town; an elegant and capacious hotel replaced the rude, clap-boarded tavern of Colonel Garner. The country around the village had become thickly settled, and many, many improvements, which it were tedious to enumerate, had added to the importance of the place.

Our friends, Mark and Rosalie, had grown up with the village. Their paper, “The True Freeman,” and their school, had both greatly prospered. But no one in the world, except Mark himself, knew how much of this prosperity was owing to the cheerful hope, the firm faith, the warm zeal, the untiring perseverance of Rosalie. And at times he wondered at the power of that pale, fragile creature—for she was still very delicate and frail.

His professional business had increased very rapidly. He could not have specified any day, or any suit, from which his success had taken its impetus—all had been so gradual, so purely the result of application and perseverance, rather than of accident or fortune. He felt that here too there was an outward influence, an external power, to which he owed much, very much, of his persistent energy—a power living by his side, that continually threw itself with all its ardour and force into his purposes—into his soul—warming and strengthening him for effort, for endurance.

309His success was wonderful. He was already the most popular, the busiest, as he was also considered the most able lawyer in the West. Though but twenty-five years of age, he was no longer only by courtesy “Judge”—he was the presiding Judge of the court, by the appointment of the Executive. He had been elected to the State Senate; he had been named as a candidate for Governor. And he felt and knew that from the quiet, fair, and fragile being at his side, he drew continual strength, and light, and warmth; that, in addition to his own, he absorbed her life—her life, that she gave freely to her love. Her form was frailer, her face wanner, but more beautiful, more impressive than ever—for her eyes were brilliant and eloquent with enthusiasm, and her lips, “touched with fire.”

“Not only for you—not only for you—but for humanity, dearest Mark, I wish you to attain power and place. You will attain them, and——I shall not die till then!” she would mentally add.

At the end of the fourth year of their residence in Shelton, Rosalie having attained her majority, it became necessary for Mark Sutherland to go to Mississippi—to Cashmere—on the part of his wife, for the purpose of making a final settlement with her guardian, Clement Sutherland, and taking possession of her splendid fortune. He wished very much that Rosalie should accompany him to the South; but as the necessity of her personal attendance might be dispensed with, and as at home the interests of their household, their school, and the paper, seemed to require the presence of one of them, it was decided 310that Mark Sutherland should depart on his journey alone.

It was on a cool, pleasant day of September that Judge Sutherland set out on his journey for the South. Rosalie had accompanied him on board the boat, to remain as long as she might before the steamer should leave the wharf. It was their first separation since their marriage, and upon that account alone, perhaps, they felt it the more sensibly; and as the boat was getting up her steam, Mark Sutherland blessed and dismissed his wife. He felt—how wan, how fragile, how spiritual was her appearance; he almost felt that at any moment she might be wafted from his possession, from his sight, for ever. The idea transfixed him with a sharp agony, but only for a little while.

The boat was on her way, and his thoughts turned from her he was leaving behind to those he was hastening to meet. This way, too, was full of anxiety. Nearly a year had passed since he had heard from any of his friends in Mississippi. Although he had written to his mother regularly, he had received no letter from her for several months, and the vague reports from Silentshades were not satisfactory. Six weeks had intervened since his wife had attained her majority, and they had advised Mr. Clement Sutherland to be prepared to give an account of and yield up the property left in his care for so many years; yet no answer had been vouchsafed. Rumour also spoke of Clement Sutherland as a suspected, if not a ruined man. Full of anxiety as to the truth of these injurious rumours and the causes of this ominous silence, Mark Sutherland paced the deck of the steamer as it pursued its course down the river.

311It was on the afternoon of the sixth day of his voyage, that the boat stopped at the wharf of the small hamlet of C——, and Mark Sutherland debarked, and hired a horse to take him to Cashmere. He left his portmanteau in the care of the landlord of the little tavern, and set out on his ride. Leaving the low banks of the river to the westward behind him, he rode on towards the interior of the State, ascended a line of hills, and descending the other side, entered once more the “Beautiful Valley of the Pearl.” Here then he stood once more upon the scene of his youth’s tragedy! With the profoundest interest he looked around. But all was, or seemed to be, changed! Had it really ever been so beautiful as it had once seemed to him, and had age and decay passed over it? Or had its beauty been only the glamour thrown over the scene by youth, and love, and hope? It might have been his changed and purified vision; for much of imagination, enthusiasm, ideality, had passed away with the morning of Mark’s life, even as the silvery mist of sunrise passes away before the full, broad day.

It might have been the waning season, for it was now late in a dry and burning September; but the beauty and glory had departed from the vale. The luxuriant green freshness of summer had departed, and the brilliant and gorgeous magnificence of autumn had not come. All the vegetation—forests, and shrubberies, and grasses—was dry and parched in the sun, and the very earth beneath seemed calcined by the dry and burning heat. The springs, ponds, and watercourses were low, muddy, and nearly exhausted; and over all the sun-burned, feverish earth, hung a still, 312coppery, parching sky. You scarcely could tell which was driest and hottest—the burning sky above, or the burning earth below.

It was, as an old field negro said, “like an oven-lid on an oven.” The Pearl itself was now a narrow, shrunken, sluggish stream, creeping between high banks of red and pulverized earth, that was always sliding in and discolouring and thickening the stream of water.

Mark Sutherland rode down to the edge of the river, to the ferry house—once a neat and well-kept little building, now fallen into neglect and dilapidation.

The white-haired negro ferryman was a servant of Clement Sutherland’s, and an old acquaintance of Mark’s. He met his “young master” with a sort of subdued surprise and pleasure, and to his question as to whether they were all well at Cashmere, answered with a sigh that they were just as well as usual.

Mark asked no other questions, and in perfect silence the old man put his passenger over to the Cashmere side.

Here had once been a well-kept wharf, but now it was much worn and out of repair. Under the shade of a group of elms on the right had once stood a pretty boat-house, in the form of a Chinese Pagoda; it was now a heap of ruins. There had once been a little fleet of boats moored under its shadow; there remained now one large, dirty skiff, half-full of mud and water, and floating idly on the turbid stream; and another smaller skiff, high and dry upon the beach, with its timbers shrunken apart, bleaching in the sun.

As Mark rode on through the grounds towards the 313house, he noticed further signs of approaching desolation. Fences were broken or down, and out-buildings were dilapidated or unroofed. Passing through the orchard, he saw the trees untrimmed; some broken down with their loads of over-ripe fruit, some blighted—a prey to vermin—and some dying or dead, and wrapped in shrouds of cobwebs. Entering the vineyard, he observed the trellis-work broken and falling, the vines trailing on the ground, and the ripe and luscious fruit rotting on its stems. He paused near the garden on his right, and a glance showed him that favourite resort of his youth, once the perfection of order and beauty, now a wilderness where thousands of the most lovely flowers and most noxious weeds dried and decayed together under the burning sun of September. There the deadly nightshade grew ranker than the rose which it crowded out of life; and the poison oak, whose contact is death, twined in and out among the tendrils of the honeysuckle and the clematis.

Everywhere! everywhere! all things betokened indifference and neglect, and prophesied of ruin and despair. While occupied with wondering what could have been the cause of this great and grievous change, Mark Sutherland perceived the approach of an old negro, who touched his hat in respectful salutation, and followed him to the foot of the Rose Terrace, where he stood in readiness to take the horse. Mark dismounted, and threw the reins to the groom, whom he now recognized for an old acquaintance. He held out his hand and spoke kindly to the old man, inquiring after his wife and children.

“All well as can be ’spected—Marse Mark! Ah, 314chile! things is changed since you was here—‘deed dey is, honey. Tree year han’ runnin’ ole marse crap fail—‘fore my blessed Hebbenly Master, dey did, honey—tree year han’ runnin’. ‘Deed, den, when we-dem had fuss-rate crap, come de tornado, an’ ruin eberyting; and nothin’ eber been fix up right since. An’ ‘pears like nothin’ eber gone right since. Den ole marse he went to speculatin’, and loss heap o’ money—leastways so dey do say. Den arter a bit come de sheriff, executionizin’ down on top o’ we-dem poor coloured people, as hadden nothin’ ‘tal to do wid it—an’ carries away all de best of us—all my poor dear gals an’ boys, as I hoped to spen’ my ole days wid, an’ good many oders. And since dat, seem like we-dem aint had no heart to tend to nothin’—a-pinin’ arter our poor children—it kinder takes all the strength out’n us.”

With a deep sigh, Mark Sutherland turned from the poor old man, and went up the stone steps that led to the Rose Terrace, that was also a neglected wilderness—but a wilderness of roses, and therefore still beautiful. Unannounced, he went up into the piazza; and before he could retreat, in an instant he saw and heard the following:—A man—or perhaps I should be expected to say, a gentleman—of very bloated and slothful appearance, was lazily reclining upon a bench, with his feet on the top of the balustrades, and with his right arm around the waist of a pretty, frightened quadroon girl, who seemed from the fan she still held, to have been engaged in keeping the flies off from him while he slept. She was now gently and fearfully struggling to free herself from his clasp, and saying, in hushed, frightened tones—

315“O! if you please, sir, don’t! Consider. Indeed it isn’t right. What would my dear mistress say?”

“Mistress! my pretty Oriole! I wish she may say anything! Let her! You shall kiss me!”

“O master! O sir!”

At this moment Mark Sutherland had entered, advanced, and bowed very coldly, saying—“Mr. St. Gerald Ashley, if I remember right?”

The ruin of St. Gerald Ashley arose to his feet, and answered, with something of his former ease and self-possession,

“Yes, sir. Mr. Sutherland, you are welcome to Cashmere again. Walk in; or would you prefer to sit down in the cool air here for a few moments? The house is very warm. Girl, go and let you mistress know that Mr. Sutherland has arrived.”

He added this command in a tone of authority, in strong contrast of his tone of wooing of a moment since.

Oriole, with her eyes filled with tears, and her face dyed with blushes, went gladly to obey.

Mr. Ashley then conducted his guest into the house.

In a few minutes Oriole returned. Her mistress was too indisposed to appear; Mr. Sutherland would please to excuse her.

Within half an hour a servant, summoned for the purpose, showed Mr. Sutherland to his room, and supplied him with articles necessary to the bath and toilet.

After refreshing himself, Mark rang the bell, and requested to know if Mr. Clement Sutherland was in the house, and when he could see him.

He was answered, that Mr. Sutherland had ridden 316to the county town, and would not return before the next morning.

And soon after he was summoned to the supper-table. No one was present at the board beside Mr. Ashley and Mark Sutherland, except Oriole, who stood at the head of the table, and poured out the coffee. With profound and melancholy interest Mark Sutherland watched this girl. She had been a pretty child, and now had ripened into a most beautiful woman. A slight and elegant form, well rounded and tapering, pliant and graceful as a willow, oval face of the purest olive, warming into pomegranate bloom upon the cheeks and lips; large, dark-grey, passionate eyes, fringed with long black lashes, “sweet low brow,” shaded with soft, black, silky ringlets, a countenance full of slumbrous passion and emotion, with little strength of spirit or of intellect. These formed the complete and matchless beauty of the maiden, and Mark Sutherland noticed—he could not help but notice, his interest was so painfully excited—the glances with which Mr. Ashley followed the gracefully-moving form of Oriole.

Mark Sutherland wished to inquire after the health and welfare of his mother, with whom he had made several attempts to open a correspondence, but from whom he had not heard for nearly four years; but an undefinable reluctance withheld him from naming the subject to the degenerate man before him. Mr. Ashley ordered more wine, and pressed it upon his companion; but Mark Sutherland, habitually abstemious, suffered his glass to be filled once, and then excused himself; and Mr. Ashley filled and quaffed glass after glass, momentarily more and more garrulous, noisy, 317and familiar with Oriole—calling her to his side, drawing her towards him, pinching her cheek and pulling her ears with maudlin freedom; while the poor girl, blushing with shame and confusion, and weeping with grief and terror, sought in vain to escape.

Mark Sutherland, deeply offended with the scene, would gladly have withdrawn, but that he felt his presence to be some protection to the poor girl; he would gladly have interfered for her succour, but that he knew such interference, far from saving her, would hurry on her destruction. It is hard to be wise and prudent when the blood is boiling; and it is uncertain how long he would have remained so, had not a bell sounded in a distant part of the house, and Oriole, taking advantage of the circumstance, exclaimed, “It is my mistress,” and made her escape.

Mr. Ashley poured out and quaffed glass after glass of wine, until his ranting mood was merging into a stupid one; and Mark Sutherland seized the first opportunity to rise and leave the table, and pass into the drawing-room.

That elegant drawing-room which you may recollect communicated with Miss Sutherland’s beautiful boudoir—how changed since he saw it last! Desolation was creeping even into the sanctuary of the house. He had scarcely time to note this by the sickly light of the moon through the open shutters, when a loud, familiar voice in the hall arrested his attention—

“Where is he? In the drawing-room? And no light there? Get a candle, directly, you scoundrel! and light me in there! I shall break my shins 318over these empty baskets and upset stools—do you hear?”

And soon after entered a slovenly man-servant bringing a guttering tallow candle, stuck in a mildewed silver candlestick, which he sat upon a dusty and spotted marble pier-table. He was followed closely by Mr. Billy Bolling, who, with outstretched arms, and almost shouting his welcome, ran to Mark, and clasped him around the body, exclaiming, sobbingly—

“My dear—dear—bo-oy! I’m so glad to see you! And how are you? And how did you leave little Rose? And when did you get here? And nobody to welcome you, but that brandy-swilling beast in there!——Begone, you black villain, you! Who gave you leave to stand there eavesdropping, eh?——That’s a field nigger, Mark! Every decent house servant, man and maid, that we had in the world, has fallen under the hammer long ago—all, except Oriole, whom that fellow yonder bought in for his own purposes. Ah! Mark, times are changed, my boy, since you were here! Heigh-ho! ‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’” said Mr. Bolling, sinking into a threadbare velvet chair, and wiping his rosy face—as fat, fair, and rosy as ever.

“You are not changed, uncle, except that you appear to be in even finer health than ever.”

“Me! Why, I’m dying of mortification and grief! I am. I have got an organic disease of the heart. Yes, of the heart. The string the most strained the soonest snaps! Heigh-ho!”

“Why, I declare, Uncle Billy, I never in all my 319life saw a man in such perfect health. You are fatter and rosier than ever!”

“Fatter and rosier! Lord help your perspicasity! It’s—it’s dropsy, and—and—fever! That’s what it is—this fat and rosy.”

“Reassure yourself, Uncle Billy, and tell me how it fares with all our friends.”

“All going to the dogs—all going to the dogs—except them that are going to the demon!”

“Nay, Uncle Billy, I hope not—any more than you are going into a consumption. How are they all at Silentshades? How is my dear mother?”

“Silentshades! Mother! Heigh! didn’t you know they had sold Silentshades long ago, and moved to Texas?” exclaimed Uncle Billy, with a look of unbounded astonishment.

“I knew nothing about it. This is the first word I have heard of it! What on earth could have tempted my mother to sell her home and move away from all her friends?”

“What could have tempted her?—what could have tempted her?” repeated Uncle Billy, mockingly, shutting his eyes, pinching his lips, and bobbing up his nose and chin, with petulance and contempt. “What could have tempted her to marry Doctor Wells, at her age?—a woman of forty, whose matrimonial feelings should all be quiet? What could have tempted her to do that?”

“I suppose my mother was lonesome.”

“Oh! lonesome be hanged! Wasn’t I there—her natural born brother—to keep her company? I don’t brag—but you know what company I am, nephew.”

“Yes,” said Mark, suppressing a smile.

320“Well, I was there to take care of her, and protect her, and keep her company, and cowhide her niggers—although that last is very laborious exertion, and always put me in a profuse perspiration, and gives me a palpitation of the heart—the thoughtless creatures, to put me to the trouble of fatiguing myself so. And now, if you want to know what tempted your mother to sell her home and leave all her friends, I’ll just tell you—vanity.”

“Vanity!”

“Yes, vanity—the wish to be thought generous, and disinterested, and confiding,” sneered Uncle Billy.

Mark Sutherland reddened.

“My dearest mother was all that in reality, without wishing to be thought so!”

“I tell you ’twas vanity—vanity that tempted her to sell her home—vanity that tempted her to marry—vanity that tempted her first to listen to a suitor—a woman of her age! But I do think women are the most incorrigible—the most provoking—the most hopeless—and of all women, middle-aged widows are the most desperate fools!”

“Uncle Billy, I suppose, as an old bachelor, you have a license to rail at women in general, and, as an elder brother, you have liberty to be unjust to your sister. My mother was a handsome woman, in her prime, and it appears to me not unnatural that she should have married. But if you thought otherwise, you should have told her so.”

“For what good? A cat may release a mouse from its claws; a rattle-snake a charmed bird from its jaws; the grave give up its victim; but never cat held mouse, or snake bird, or grave victim with such 321a death-grip as a middle-aged widow holds her last lover!”

“Just now you told me that Dr. Wells tempted my mother into this marriage—now, you lay the responsibility upon her. That is like you, old, impartial justice, Mr. ‘Bothsides.’”

“All true. They tempted each other—she, him, with her handsome property! he, her, with his handsome person! He was bent on having her plantation!—she, on having him. And so they soldered an engagement that Satan himself, with his sledge hammer, could not have shivered. I’ll tell you all about it, Mark! I kept a sharp look-out on that chap when he first came prowling about Silentshades. I was tempted to shoot him by mistake, for a catamount. But I twigged him! Very little of that palavering courtship, that I didn’t hear! Sure as ever they’d be on the piazza, I’d be in the parlour under the window, listening.”

“But what did you think of yourself, Mr. Bolling, for your eavesdropping?”

“Thought I was doing my duty by my sister, to circumvent a gay deceiver!”

Mark frowned.

“Oh, now you don’t know how old pill-box and blister-plaster could court! You should have heard him talk about that ‘regal brow’—‘that, that face!’ (as if there was no word good enough to describe it)—and ‘those holy eyes’—and ‘my darling, oh, my darling’—and ‘my lovely Helen’—and ‘it is too much, too much to crave of Heaven’ (her love you know he meant)—and ‘oh, my dearest’—and ‘this little hand’—and all the rest of the lying balderdash, which I 322suppose was mighty sweet to a woman who had not heard such words for twenty years.”

“And how do you know it was not perfectly sincere?” exclaimed Mark, indignantly rising and walking away.

“What, at forty?” coolly inquired Uncle Billy, getting up and walking about, and fanning himself, and sitting down again.

But Mr. Sutherland was much too deeply interested in his mother’s fate to keep silence. He returned, and resumed his seat, and inquired—

“Has my mother’s marriage turned out happy?”

“Don’t know—can’t say, I’m sure!”

“You have not told me yet why she sold her home.”

“Dr. Wells tempted her to do it for his sake. This was the way of it: Lord bless your soul, he was too old and cunning to stop courting her after the honeymoon, or at least until he had got his hands on the property; on the contrary, they sat on the bench of the piazza against the parlour window blinds, and courted more than ever! And I laid on the lounge under the same window in the parlour, and listened more than ever. And then he cooed to her, and called her ‘My boon,’ ‘My blessing,’ and ‘My bride;’ and told her what a noble woman she was—how full of sensibility, benevolence, and disinterestedness—how full of honour, truth, and courage.”

“Well, sir, it was truth! I can easily understand how much truth should have burst impulsively from the lips of any one intimately associated with my dear mother!” exclaimed Mark, impatiently.

323Uncle Billy shut his eyes, and bobbed up his chin contemptuously, and then resumed:

“Truth, was it? Well, you shall hear the rest of the truth. By-and-by he began to take the tone of a wise, affectionate guide and husband—which I have always noticed is very charming to good women, especially when it is mixed up with a little appreciative admiration—and he told her again what a high-principled, noble woman she was, and how she had only to get rid of one foible—one little weakness—and she would be a glorious woman—a perfect woman! And she pressed to know what it was, and she was willing to get rid of any fault he disapproved. ‘Oh,’ he told her, ‘it was a want of trustfulness—a want of that confiding spirit so beautiful in woman—it was no fault; only but for that one small foible she would be such a glorious woman!’ Well, Mark, to convince him that she could exercise a confiding spirit, and so become ‘a glorious woman’ all out, she gives him the full possession and perfect control of all her property, real and personal; and the upshot of it all is, that Dr. Wells has sold Silentshades, and they have emigrated to Texas!”

“Was my mother willing to go?”

“I don’t know, Mark. After parting with Silentshades, they remained here at Cashmere about three months before getting off to Texas; and I thought in that three months your mother altered more than any one I had ever seen.”

“Poor, dear mother!”

“There was another thing that gave her trouble. The Doctor certainly did neglect her; and then he took a great fancy to purchase a beautiful maid-servant 324from Clement Sutherland—I dare say you remember the girl—she was Mrs. Ashley’s own maid, Oriole.”

“Yes, I know”—

“Mrs. Ashley—India—wished to part with her, too; and I dare say the sale would have been effected, only there was an execution, and Oriole, with half-a-dozen of the likeliest of the house servants, both men and maids, were seized, and put up at auction. Well, when Oriole was placed upon the block, there was pretty high bidding, I assure you. The three principal bidders were a New Orleans trader—who seemed determined to have the girl at any price—and Dr. Wells, and Mr. Ashley. But Dr. Wells and Mr. Ashley outbid the trader, and had the field all to themselves; and the contest ran very high between them. I wish you could have seen those two men bidding against each other for that girl! They became excited—angry—their eyes grew blood-shot—they glanced at each other like tigers—their glances flashed fire! They ran the price up to a ridiculous pitch. Finally, Dr. Wells, frowning, sat down. Mr. Ashley was the purchaser. ‘Thank Heaven,’ said your mother, when she heard the issue. Mrs. Ashley curled her lip in proud silence!”

Mark Sutherland dropped his head upon his hands, and groaned. A pause ensued, which after some time was broken by Mr. Sutherland.

“You mentioned an execution on the premises—is it possible my uncle was in debt beyond his means of cash payment?”

“Umph! I don’t think any one in the State would consider it worth while to ask the question now.”

325“I do not understand how his colossal fortune could have so sunken.”

“Ah, well! now I’ll tell you his fortune was not so colossal after all. To be sure, he owned several thousand acres of land; but reflect that nine-tenths of that was pine barrens and cypress swamps, producing nothing and costing considerable in taxes; and he owned several hundred negroes; but remember that one-third of them were old people, and one-third of them children, who had to be supported out of the labour of the others; and he owned this very magnificent seat of Cashmere; but consider how much of his capital was invested in the building, laying out and adorning of this house and grounds, and how much in debt it left him, and you will come to a fairer conclusion in your estimate of your uncle’s fortune. And then this great commercial crash, that has ruined so many people, has affected him deeply. He lost one hundred thousand dollars by the villany of Claxton & Co., manufacturers, and nearly as much more by the failure of Fleece and Brother, importers, Liverpool. And what was worse than all, he made a desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes by speculation, and failed, with a stupendous loss. It was like a gambler’s last stake, and he lost it—and now he is ready to blow his own brains out! Lord grant that your wife’s fortune may be safe, Mark, which I doubt.”

“Oh! certainly; I have not the slightest misgiving of it. It was real estate, and could not have been staked in any way, you know.”

Mr. Bolling shook his head.

Unheedful of that wise gesture, Mr. Sutherland asked, “And how does my cousin India bear this?”

326“I don’t know—I don’t think she cares about it. Mark, perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but I don’t think she cares for anything, or has ever cared for anything, since you and she broke off, nearly seven years ago. She never cared a cent for the man she married”—

“Hush! you must not say that!”

“But I will say it, because it’s the solemn truth. She never cared a sous, cent, marquee, for him, though he loved the very ground she walked on. If ever you saw a man infatuated with a woman, St. Gerald was with India; his eyes followed her fondly wherever she moved. Yes, a year after they were married, I saw him slily take up a glove of hers, and pet it, and talk to it, and kiss it, and put it in his bosom, as if it had been a live thing—the consummate idiot! And the same day I saw him strike her down before him with a blow!”

Mark Sutherland started to his feet, and gazed wildly at the speaker, who reiterated—

“Yes, I did; I saw that with my eyes!”

“And stood by, and permitted a man to strike a woman!”

“I never interfere between man and wife. Besides, what business had she to deceive and marry him, while she loved another—and to meet his attentions with aversion—and finally to be found sobbing hysterically over a lock of black hair, when his was brown? No, if he had killed her on the spot, I should have been sorry for—him. He loved her truly and well. She loathed him. I have seen her shudder all over, if he did but press her hand, or stroke her dainty curls. He felt her repulsion; it drove him 327mad! To sum up all, Mark, as I said before, a curse is on the place and on the people; they are all going to the dogs, who are not going to the d——l! But now, tell me something about yourself. You are a Judge of the Court, I hear?”

“I have that honour.”

“Well, I always said you’d turn out well! d——d if I didn’t! I shall live to see you Chief Justice of the Supreme Court yet! And hark you, nephew; I intend to go home and live with you. I feel it my duty to encourage you. I’ll stick to you, Mark. I don’t care what Clement Sutherland and the rest say. I’ll stick to you, my boy. You shall never have it to say that your old uncle fell away from you. But now, tell me, how is your little wife? Well, I know, else you would not be here, eh?”

“Rosalie is well, but not strong.”

“Never was, poor little thing. And how are the little children, and how many of them are there, and are they girls or boys, or both, and what are their names?”

“We have no children.”

“What! lost them all? Well, poor little things, they are better off.”

“We never had any children.”

“Oh-h-h! Whew-w-w!” whistled Mr. Bolling, rather disconcerted; then resuming, he said—“well, neither have the Ashleys. That’s strange! What the d——l’s that hubbub in the dining-room? Ugh! It’s the niggers toting that animal up to bed! He, who seven years ago was called the brightest rising star on the political horizon! Now look at him! That 328is India’s fault! What tremendous power women have for evil!”

“And for good!” said Mark Sutherland, as his thoughts flew to his guardian angel, Rosalie.

Wearied with his journey, and longing for the solitude that would leave him free to reflect upon all that he had just heard, Mark Sutherland expressed a wish to retire. Mr. Bolling rang for the night lamps, and they parted for the night.

Early the next morning Mark Sutherland descended to the drawing-room. No one was there except Oriole, who had just stepped from her mistress’s boudoir, and was crossing the room, on her way to some other part of the house. Once more Mark Sutherland was mournfully affected by the marvellous, the fatal beauty of the poor girl. As she met and was passing him, with eyes cast down, cheeks painfully flushed, and heart beating, as it had too well learned to beat with fear at the look of man, his heart 329was moved with deep pity. He had known her from her infancy; he held out his hand, and spoke to her, saying—“How do you do, Oriole? You have not spoken to me since my arrival.” But without touching his hand, or even venturing a glance at his face, the maiden dropped a quick courtesy as she passed, and hurried on her errand.

“Poor, hunted, trembling deer!” said Mark: “she cannot even trust a friend. Is it possible to save her?”

His thoughts dwelt with painful but vain intensity upon the hapless girl, and it was many minutes before the old familiar scene around him—suggestive as it was of the most joyous as well as the most painful passages in his past life—could recall him to himself.

He gazed around. The sliding doors and the flowing curtains that divided the boudoir from the saloon, were drawn entirely back, revealing the whole apartment. Yes; here was the same saloon, the temple of joyous reunions, and the same boudoir, the shrine of beauty, love, and happiness. The same, yet how changed from all the pristine splendour of the past! Then all was order, beauty, freshness, and enjoyment. Now all was indifference, neglect, decay, and desolation. Even there, in the sacred boudoir of India—the latest sanctuary of elegance and luxury—rust and must, mildew and canker, had crept over all. There the sumptuous hangings of purple and gold, that made the bower seem like some gorgeous oriental sunset scene, were now faded and tarnished—the royal purple turned to a dull, streaked brown and drab—the gold cankered with green verdigris. The cheval mirrors 330were specked thickly with mildew, and obscured with fly-stains; the marble tables stained and smirched; and, for the fragrance of fresh flowers, a close, damp, stifling smell of must pervaded the apartment. All was cheerless, hopeless, desolate.

His melancholy thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of another figure. It was India. And prepared as he had been to meet a great change in the “Pearl of Pearl River,” he scarcely recognised her. The superficial is ever the first to strike us. He noticed that the gorgeous and flowing drapery which had once graced her form, was now replaced by a plain black dress. The rich, warm, olive bloom of her complexion had given place to the paleness of ivory. Naught remained of her glorious beauty but the luxuriant amber-hued ringlets and the large, dark, mournful, soul-thrilling eyes. More of real self-possession she exhibited now than she had ever shown in former times. She advanced towards Mark, holding out her hand, and welcomed him with these words:

“I am happy to see you again at Cashmere—after so many years—my dear cousin—why could we not be friends?”

Her voice faltered slightly; and when she paused, Mr. Sutherland cordially grasped her outstretched hands, and said, while he pressed them—

“We are friends, my dearest India; at least, I can speak for myself and for one who loves you not less than I do—my wife Rosalie.”

With a spasmodic catch India snatched away her hands; and, quivering through every nerve, sat down, and veiled her face with her hands, and,

331“It is a trying world!”—burst from her quivering lips.

Raising his eyebrows in painful surprise, Mark Sutherland gazed earnestly at her for an instant, and then turned away his eyes, waiting reverently for her self-recovery. Soon she looked up, and, faintly smiling, said—

“I have had much, oh! very much, indeed, to try me of late, my cousin. Everything is going to ruin with us—everything, everything.”

“I trust not. Your father is embarrassed, but with the advice and assistance of his friends, all, I hope, will be brought to a happy issue.”

“Ah, no! but it is not of our desperate affairs I wished to speak. Tell me of your own. You have been successful in life?”

“Yes, I have been successful, thanks, under Divine Providence, to the constant sympathy and co-operation of my faithful Rosalie.”

Again India hastily raised her hands, to screen the spasm of pain that traversed her countenance; and—“Why will he stab me with that name?” she thought; but she answered calmly—“Rosalie is an amiable woman; how is she?”

“Well, and very busy.”

“And your family?”

“We have no family; we are all the world to each other.”

“Tell me how you have got on since I saw you last.”

Mr. Sutherland began, and told her the principal circumstances of his life since their last parting-dwelling 332frequently upon his Rosalie’s hope and faith, and persevering energy.

“And so Rosalie has been the angel of his life,” she muttered inaudibly between her white lips.

A pause ensued, which was broken at last by India.

“All is sadly changed here; my father has been very unfortunate, and Mr. Ashley——I cannot comprehend it! I see ruin gathering darkly around us all, without the power—yes, and without the will—to avert it, any more than I could avert an earthquake, whose premonitory jars were shaking us!” she said, in a despairing tone.

Mark Sutherland made no comment. What could he have said to console her that would not have been false? He thought that not so would Rosalie have met misfortune—with inert despair. And then he remembered that much of this impending ruin the beautiful India had drawn upon her own head, and the heads of those who loved her, but whom, alas! she loved not. He felt relieved when, at this point, a summons to the breakfast-room terminated the interview.

At the breakfast table appeared India, Mark Sutherland, St. Gerald Ashley, and Mr. Bolling. Oriole served tea and coffee from a side-table. Clement Sutherland had not come home. Mr. Ashley’s face was bloated, and his eyes blood-shot—the effects of the preceding evening’s excess were but too plain. He sat silent and morose, and ate but little. India maintained a cold, severe aspect, never speaking to or looking at him. Mark Sutherland felt himself de trop and uncomfortable, but for Uncle Billy, who kept up an incessant monologue, asking a score of questions about the 333north-west, and volunteering many comments. Mr. Sutherland was rejoiced when the gloomy meal was over, and earnestly wished that the master of the house might soon return, and his business and his visit be concluded at once. He expressed this wish to Mr. Bolling, who hastened to reply—

“And so do I, nephew! and so do I! For this is the case every day. Each night that fellow goes to bed tipsy, and each morning appears at the breakfast table in a state of bloated torpor! Yes, Lord knows do I wish that Clem. Sutherland would come, and we could finish our business and leave; for you know I’m going home with you, Mark. I intend to stick to you. I admire your principles—always did—I’m your man.”

The day advanced, and still Clement Sutherland did not make his appearance. The late dinner was served, and passed as gloomily as the breakfast, and still he came not. The house was growing intolerable to Mark, who summoned one of the servants, and inquired where he should be likely to find his master; and was informed that he might be found at the Planters’ Best, where he usually stopped when business took him to the village. Mr. Sutherland then ordered his horse, and, while waiting for him to be saddled and brought to the door, went and took leave of Mr. Bolling, leaving his compliments and adieus to Mrs. Ashley, who had retired to her room to take her afternoon rest. Then he mounted his horse, and took the road to the village, intending, if possible, to have an interview and a settlement with his uncle, and to make his head-quarters at the village inn, as long as he should be obliged to remain.

334

Mark Sutherland went on board the Victress, and almost immediately betook himself to the solitude of the forsaken hurricane deck, there to walk, and while the water breeze fanned his fevered brow, to reflect upon the sinfulness, the danger, of an ungoverned lust of gold—upon the crimes to which it often leads, and upon the felony made known to him 341that evening. The orgies of a noisy party of card-players in the saloon below occasionally broke upon his silence; and the sweet laughter of young girls, walking on the guards of the ladies’ cabin, was borne upwards on the wind. But the hurricane deck was lonely, and there he paced up and down, wrapped in mournful thought, until the arrival of a noisy set, who, weary of the heated saloon, sought the free, fresh air above, and disturbed his solitude. Then he went below, and sought his berth.

Early in the morning he arose from a sleepless couch, to find all the officers and hands on the boat engaged in receiving last freight and passengers, while the engine was getting up her steam to be off. Mark Sutherland finished his morning toilet, and went out upon the guards, just as the boat was beginning to move from the wharf. The usual crowd of idlers, porters, and loafers, stood upon the shore, watching her departure. And Mark Sutherland fixed himself in a favourable position for watching the receding wharf of what might be called his native village, when the figure of a fat man, in white linen jacket and trousers, with his light hair blowing free behind his rosy face, waving a straw hat, came running desperately towards the wharf. The boat arrested her motions, the plank was thrown out, and Uncle Billy followed by a man with his trunk and portmanteau, stepped on board. Panting and blowing, and wiping his face, he hastened up to Mr. Sutherland, exclaiming, “My dear boy! I liked to have missed you! Near as possible! Wouldn’t have lost you for the world, my dearest lad! Stick to you as long as I live, Mark, for your dear mother, my sister’s sake! Whew! 342Whew-ew! what a chase I’ve had! Only heard this morning, from Clement, that you were going by the Victress! Running ain’t good for me. Dangerous!” And so, talking and shaking his nephew’s hand, and wiping his own rosy face, and blowing and panting, Mr. Bolling at last sat down, and began to fan himself with his broad-brimmed straw hat.

Mark Sutherland received his relative’s demonstrations of attachment as best he might; he welcomed him, and went to the captain’s office to see if he could secure a state-room for his enforced travelling companion; and by the time he had successfully accomplished his errand, the passengers were summoned to the breakfast table, and the boat had cleared the wharf and was well under way up the Mississippi.

It was a slow voyage up the river, and on the afternoon of the twelfth day the steamer arrived at the wharf of Shelton. Mark Sutherland wished, if possible, to get rid of his troublesome travelling companion for a few hours, while he could go home quietly, and have an uninterrupted meeting and talk with his dear Rosalie.

So, leaving all their baggage in the care of the clerk of the boat, Mark drew Uncle Billy’s fat arm within his own, and conducted him to Col. Garner’s hotel, to a private parlour, containing a comfortable lounge and easy chair. Here he ordered a luncheon of cold ham, fowl, sardines, pickled oysters, and next all the late newspapers the house could muster; and having seen them all arranged upon the table, to which the easy chair was drawn up, and while Uncle Billy stretched his lazy length 343upon the lounge, Mr. Sutherland turned to Mr. Bolling, and said—

“And now, Uncle Billy, can you excuse me, and make yourself comfortable, while I run down to Rosalie and prepare her for your arrival?”

“Eh? Yes; all right! Certainly! The child always was fond of me, and it might give her too much of a shock to meet me suddenly, after so long a separation! Very considerate of you, Mark, certainly—very!”

“Is there anything else I can order for you before I go?”

“Eh? No, nothing; I am much obliged to you, nephew.”

“Well, if you should think of anything after I am gone, you can ring for it, you know.”

“Yes—yes.”

“Good afternoon for the present, I will come and fetch you at tea-time.”

“Yes; very well, I shall be ready. Hark ye, Mark! break my arrival to your wife cautiously, do you hear? Joy kills sometimes.”

“I shall be careful not to endanger Rosalie’s life,” said Mark, smiling as he left the room.

No sooner had the door closed behind his nephew, than, with a sigh of profound satisfaction, Uncle Billy arose and sat down in the easy chair, and drew the table towards him. In addition to everything else on the table, there was a tall, black bottle, which Mr. Bolling took up, uncorked, and put to his nose with a look of delightful anticipation. He sat it down suddenly, with an expression of intense disgust—

344“Tomato catsup, by all that is detestable, and I thought it was port wine! Here, waiter!—(where the devil is the bell-rope?) Waiter, I say!”

A man in a linen apron put his head in at the door—

“Did you call, sir?”

“Yes; bring me a bottle of your best port wine.”

The man withdrew, and after a while returned with a black bottle of the villanous drugged compound which is sold and bought as the best port wine, and which bon vivants like Mr. Bolling imbibe with perfect faith.

We will leave Uncle Billy to the enjoyment of his beloved creature comforts, and follow Mark Sutherland to his “sweet home.”

On the outskirts of the town, embosomed in a grove of trees, stood Rose Cottage, the pleasant home of the Sutherlands. It was named partly from Rosalie, and partly from her favourite flower—the rose—of which every variety had been collected and cultivated to adorn her house and garden. The house itself was 345simple and plain in its structure—just an oblong two-story frame building, painted white, with green Venetian blinds, and having four rooms on each floor, with a wide passage running through the centre from front to back, and with an upper and lower piazza running all around the house.

The grounds were unpretending, too—behind the house a kitchen garden and young orchard; in front and at the sides a spacious yard, where single great forest trees were left standing, with rural seats fixed under their shade. In that rich and fertile soil the favourite rose flourished luxuriantly. Rose-trees adorned the yard, rose-bushes hedged the parterres, rose vines shaded the arbours and climbed the pillars of the piazza and gracefully festooned the eaves, and the fragrance of roses filled the air. What gave a tenderer interest to these beautiful roses was, that they were all love-offerings from the young girls and children to their beautiful and beloved teacher.

Mark Sutherland approached this sweet home. Every care and sorrow dropped from his spirit as he opened the little wicket-gate that separated his garden of Eden from the wilderness. He walked on through the shaded yard to the house, and went up to the piazza, and through the front door into the hall, or passage. Here two doors, opposite each other to the right and left, opened—one into their parlour and dining-room, and the other into the school and classroom. He paused a moment, and listened, with a smile, as the low murmur of girls’ voices revealed to him that the school was not yet dismissed.

He opened the door and entered.

Surely, there never was a school-room so pleasant 346as this, from which the aspect of dullness, weariness, restraint, and irksomeness, was so completely banished, as there certainly never was a teacher so lovely and so beloved. It was a spacious, airy apartment, lighted with many windows, shaded at a little distance by the rose-wreathed pillars and eaves of the piazza. The furniture was of bright cherry, in cheerful contrast to the white walls and floor. Maps and pictures, of rare beauty and appropriateness, decorated the walls, and shells and minerals and mosses adorned the tables.

The young girls and children—some engaged in study, some in pencil-drawing or penmanship, and some in needlework—looked cheery and very much at their ease. They left their seats, and spoke to each other without infringing any rule, but all was done quietly and gracefully, as under the influence of a beloved mistress, whom they obeyed with no forced eye-service, and whom they would not for the world distress or annoy.

And there, at the upper end of the room, on a platform raised but one step above the floor, on a chair, at a table, sat the young schoolmistress—the wife of four years’ standing—scarcely turned twenty-one, and with the loveliest and most delicate face and form in the world, yet by the power of her soul’s strength and beauty keeping in willing subjection a miscellaneous crowd of girls, of all ages, sizes, and tempers. There she sat, with her sweet, fair face, and pale, golden, curly hair, and white muslin wrapper—looking the fairest girl among them all. When Mark entered, the quiet light of joy dawned in her eyes, and she arose and came softly down to meet him. There was a 347subdued gladness in the manner of both, as they clasped hands.

“My dearest Rose, you are so much better than when I went away,” said Mark, looking fondly at her, as the bloom deepened on her cheeks.

“I am better—I am well” replied Rosalie, smiling round upon her girls, several of whom left their seats, and came fluttering forward to welcome Mr. Sutherland with saucy pleasure. He had a merry jest or a loving word for each affectionate child, but soon sent them gaily back to their places, as the hour of dismissal had come. And Rosalie, accompanied by Mark, went back to her seat, and called the school to order, and gave out and led the evening hymn that closed their exercises.

When the song was finished, and the girls all gone, Mark Sutherland turned to his young wife, and with a smile of joy drew her to his bosom. But in a moment a shade of anxiety clouded his face; and, still clasping her close to his bosom, he asked—

“Rose, what makes your heart throb so violently?”

Rosalie raised her eyes to his face, and he noticed that a sorrowful shade dimmed their lustre for an instant, but vanished before the smile with which she replied—

“I am so glad to see you.”

“But your heart knocks so forcibly?”

“Come in the parlour, and let’s sit down there and talk—I have so many things to tell you, and to ask you about,” said Rosalie, evading his remarks; and gently withdrawing herself, she led the way into the 348parlour, and wheeled up an easy chair, and begged him to “sit down and make himself at home.”

But, first, he made her recline upon the lounge and rest, while he drew the chair up and sat by her side.

And there she lay, with her sweet, spiritual face, white as her drapery, except where all the colour had concentrated in a circumscribed fiery spot in either cheek. She was breathing short, yet smiling gaily at her own difficulty.

He sat watching her, and trying to feel and to look happy, yet thinking that after all she was not so well as when he had left her—perceiving that he had mistaken fever heat for healthful bloom. He sat, trying to smile and talk cheerfully, yet with a dull, aching prophecy in his heart. It was in vain to stifle the rising anxiety. It found some vent in these words:

“My love, you work too hard; that school is hurting your health?”

“No, dear Mark, believe me, it is not—it keeps me up.”

“It exhausts, it prostrates you, my love—indeed, it must be closed—that school must be closed!”

By way of nimbly proving how strong she was, she arose to a sitting posture, arranged her hair by running her slender fingers through the ringlets, adjusted her dress, and sat straight up, while she answered—

“Not for the world would I close that school, dear Mark. I have no children, and that school is my field of almost unbounded usefulness. Those girls are my children; and not only must I cultivate their intellects, but in every young, receptive heart I must 349sow good seed, that will bring forth fruit long after I am in”——

She paused suddenly, in embarrassment.

“What do you mean, Rosalie?” he asked, in distress.

“Dearest Mark,” she said, slightly evading a direct reply, “dearest Mark, a faithful teacher, called to the work, may not abandon her post, indeed; for oh! see how mighty the influence of a teacher may be, and how long it may last—the good principles instilled into a little girl’s tender heart do not conclude their work with her alone, but influence her children, and her children’s children, and all who come within her sphere and in theirs. Consider how mighty an instrument of good is set in motion by teaching aright one little child, and I faithfully try to teach forty. So, dearest Mark, hinder me not; but while I live, let me sow the good seed, that it may bring forth good fruit when I am—I mean when all this generation shall have passed away.”

There was a pause, during which he held her hand fondly, and seemed buried in thought.

“Dearest Mark, you look so careworn—have you had much trouble in settling our business?”

He raised his head, and looked at her sweet, wan face. He could not, for his life, tell anything to distress her then; so he answered that Mr. Clement Sutherland was not yet prepared to give an account of his trust, but that all would be arranged before the close of the month.

Rosalie arose, and putting her hands upon his shoulders, pressed a kiss upon his forehead, and was sliding away.

350“Where are you going?” asked Mark, detaining her.

“To order tea, of course,” she answered.

Suddenly Mr. Sutherland remembered Uncle Billy.

“Stop, Rosalie,” he said, “I have got something to tell you.”

And Rosalie sat down again; and Mark, in some painful and ludicrous embarrassment, related his meeting with Mr. Bolling, and the manner in which that impartial, disinterested gentleman had thrust himself upon him for life.

“And where have you left him now?” asked Rosalie.

“At Col. Garner’s, enjoying himself. Really, my dearest Rose, I feel very much annoyed that you should be troubled with this old man,” said Mark Sutherland, in a tone of vexation.

“Bless your kind heart, dear Mark, he will be no trouble to me. I have not the shadow of an objection to his coming; I think I shall rather like to have him. Uncle Billy always was rather a cheerful object to me—such a neat, clean, fresh, dainty, self-satisfied, delightful old gentleman! We can put him in the other front room up stairs, you know!”

“But to be burdened with him for ever, Rose! Just think of it! And the most provoking part of it is, he thinks he is doing us a mighty benefit!”

“Well! poor, homeless old gentleman! let him think so, if it makes him happy. Never let him feel a sense of obligation, or fancy that we are not delighted to have him! I can speak truly for 351myself—I shall be very glad to make the old man contented!”

“Oh, yes; he says you’re very fond of him, and begged me not to break his arrival to you too abruptly, lest the sudden joy should be too much for you!”

Rosalie laughed outright. Her silvery laughter was very sweet, from its rarity, and Mark found it charming. He caught her gaily, and kissed her cheek. Oh, that burning cheek! it sobered him directly. He took his hat, and went to fetch Uncle Billy.

And Rosalie passed into a large, square, well-ordered kitchen, over which presided another Billy—Mrs. Attridge’s ex-servant, and now Rosalie’s maid-of-all-work. And the short history of the transfer of his services was this: Mr. and Mrs. Attridge, having no family, grew lonely, and tired of housekeeping in the country. So they broke up, sold their furniture, rented out their place, and came to Shelton, and took rooms at Garner’s Hotel.

So Billy was out of a place. A great many housekeepers 352would have been glad to hire him. But Billy, like all invaluable geniuses, had a great many eccentricities and difficulties to be got over. He wouldn’t live in a row of houses, or in any sort of a house that wasn’t a handsome house, in a large space, with trees round it. He wouldn’t live in a family that had babies, or hadn’t cows and a garden. Poultry was also indispensable, and pigs totally inadmissible. And lastly, he wouldn’t live—no, not in town or country, neither for love nor money, with anybody who was not good-looking. There—to use Billy’s own words—he set his foot down, and no one could move him from that position. And so it fell out that Billy would accept no place in Shelton, but continued hanging on to the skirts of his old master and mistress, at Garner’s Hotel.

But one day, it happened that Rosalie, after she had dismissed her afternoon school, stood at her nice white kitchen table kneading bread for supper, when a shadow darkened the door, and the sound of something dumped suddenly down upon the floor, caused her to turn round. There stood Billy, in his pale blue cotton jacket and trousers, and clean linen apron and straw hat, with a great bundle at his back, and a heavy trunk at his feet. Down he dropped the bundle upon the trunk, and heaving a deep sigh of relief, said—

“I’m been looking for you to send arter me to come and live ’long o’ you. Why ain’t you sent afore this? Don’t like to be a-losing so much time.”

“Why, Billy, I had no idea you wished to come and live with us,” returned Rose, in surprise.

353“Well, you might a-known it, then! You always knowed I liked you and him.”

“I thought you refused to go out to service?”

“I ’fused all them there” said Billy, chucking his thumb contemptuously over his shoulder, pointing in the direction of the village—“think I’m agoin’ to live in a bake-oven, like them there red brick houses?”

“But you might have gone to the country.”

“Yes, but you know most all on ’em were so ill-looking—I mean the people, and for that matter the houses too—and then they kept pigs, as made an onpleasant fragrance, and childun, as made werry onpleasant noises. And some places, the missus was either ugly in her temper, or her face, or in both, which is dreadful. And in other places the master was always a-interfering with the dinner or the dishcloths, in a very misbecoming manner. Some on ’em were not nice in their ways; and what ’couragement would it be to me to put on a clean apron every day, with a nice stiff crease ironed down in the middle of it, to sarve people as wa’n’t clean themselves? So the long and the short of it is, ma’am, that I’m come to live ’long o’ you.”

Now, Rosalie was so gentle-hearted that she did not speak her thought, and say—“But we did not send for you, Billy.” Yet, nevertheless, Billy guessed it, for he answered as if she had spoken—

“Well, what o’ that? Here I am. And here’s my trunk and bundle. I paid a man twenty-five cents to help me to bring them over. I reckon I can stay, if I ’gree to stay on your own terms,” said Billy, betraying piteous anxiety nevertheless.

Gentle and truthful Rosalie hastened to set his fears 354at rest. “Indeed, Billy, we shall be delighted to have you. You will be an invaluable acquisition to us. I am only very much surprised that you should have given us the preference.”

A bright, glad smile broke over honest Billy’s face. “Why, you see, ma’am, I don’t care how much work I have to do—I does it cheerful. I don’t care how little wages I gets—I takes it—contented. But I ain’t got but one life to live on this yeth, and while I do live, I must live in a pretty place, long o’ pretty people. Anything else smothers of me—it stifles of me—it gives me the—I mean it makes my wittles disagree with me.” And, so saying, Billy shouldered his bundle and trunk, and took them up into the loft over the kitchen, as if he had slept there all his life, and knew the way. And then he came down, and took two big buckets to go to the well. And so, without more ado, Billy was inaugurated in his new place and duties. And a most “invaluable acquisition” he really proved. Billy had now been living several months with the Sutherlands.

To return: Rosalie went into the kitchen, to give directions to Billy about the supper. She found him sitting down, stirring the batter for the pancakes. She told him she expected a stranger to tea, and that he must make coffee also, and dress two prairie fowls, and broil some ham. And next she went into her dining-room and set her table, adorning it with her finest damask table-cloth, and best china, and placing upon it her nicest cakes and preserves. She was so engaged when Mr. Sutherland returned, bringing in Uncle Billy.

I cannot do anything like justice to the vociferous 355joy with which Mr. Bolling rushed upon his dear niece, as he called Rosalie. She received him with an affectionate welcome.

“I am come to stay with you as long as I possibly can, my dear. Although a man like me has a great many conflicting claims upon his time and presence, of course, nevertheless I intend to stay with you as long as possible.”

Rosalie assured him that the longer he stayed the better she should be pleased. And then, as Billy had put supper on the table, she invited him in to that meal. And Mr. Bolling sat down and enjoyed it with as much gusto as if he had not partaken of a heavy luncheon at Garner’s. When supper was over, and Mr. Bolling had been invited by Mark to take a stroll around the premises, Billy entered, to clear off the table, and, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, he asked—

“Who is yon fat, puffed-up fellow in the rosy face and white jacket and trousers?”

“He is my husband’s uncle, and you must speak of him more respectfully.”

“That’s ’cordin’ as it may be,” said Billy, as he moved off under the weight of the laden tea-tray.

Rosalie’s benevolent heart was so gratified at having some one else to be good to, and Mark was so pleased to see her satisfaction, that he became quite reconciled to the intruder.

But Billy was not to be mollified. When Mr. Bolling had been domesticated a week in the house, one morning Billy bounced suddenly in upon Rosalie, as she stood arranging the breakfast table, and asked—

“How long is your uncle-in-law going to stay here?”

356“I do not know, Billy; probably all his life.”

“Oh! he is! Well, I tell you, one of us two’s got to leave!”

“Just as you please, Billy. You know, of course, we can’t turn out a guest to gratify you.”

“Well, I give you warning—that’s all!” and Billy bounced out in high dudgeon. But presently he came back again.

“Look here, ma’am; I don’t want to be onreasonable, but just consider what a difference it makes in my washing and ironing. Look here! every day your uncle-in-law puts on a spic span clean suit, all out! every day, clean jacket, clean trousers, clean shirt, clean what-you-call-’ems, and clean cravat, and pocket-handkerchiefs, and clean socks. Now count. There’s seven pieces every day, and seven days in the week; now, how much is seven sevens? You’re a schollard.”

“Forty-nine!”

“Well, there’s forty-nine pieces of clothing, to say nothing of four sheets and two bolster slips, and two pillow slips, and fourteen towels, and table napkins, I have extra washing and ironing for him every week. Now I’m going to count, and see how much it all ’mounts to—ninety-two pieces! Ninety-two pieces extra washing and ironing I have to do, all along of your pet uncle-in-law! Now, you know I can’t stand that! No reasonable ’oman would want me to stand it!” said Billy, appealingly.

“No, of course not,” said Rose, thoughtfully.

“So onreasonable in any uncle-in-law to act so.”

“You must excuse our visitor, Billy. He has been used to the convenience of a large plantation laundry.”

“Well, I think he ought to staid there.”

357“We will put out Mr. Bolling’s washing.”

“And put yourself to an extra ’spense, and not have clothes half done? No, I can’t ’pose on you that way, neither. Well, I’ll not give warning yet awhile! I’ll see how long I can stand it!” And Billy left the room, and took more pains to please his gentle mistress that day than he ever did before.

There was no love lost on Mr. Bolling’s side either, and—“Insolent fellow!” and “Is he an idiot?” and “You all spoil that fellow of yours, Mark!” fell often from his lips, and sometimes in honest Billy’s hearing. And one day, while the family were all gathered round the dinner-table, Mr. Bolling said to his niece and nephew—“My dear children, I must request you to drop the name of Uncle Billy, and substitute Uncle William, when you address me. There are two of that name in this house, and if you call me Uncle Billy, strangers might confound me in some way with Billy Bumpkin in the kitchen there, which would not be complimentary.”

Rosalie afterwards thought that her factotum must have heard these offensive remarks; for the next evening, as she entered the kitchen, to order supper, he approached her respectfully, and said—

“Mrs. Sutherland, ma’am, if you please, ma’am, I would be thankful if you’d be so good as to call me William, which is the name given me by my sponsors in baptism, and not ‘Billy,’ for fear people might get me jumbled up in their minds along o’ that fat, lazy man, in white teeth and linen, which would lose me my good character, and be very onpleasant to my friends.”

358

361

371

Oh life! Oh world and worldly honour! how poor and vain, how worthless and worse than worthless, how bitterly mocking do ye seem in the presence of death, the death of the best-beloved! What now to him was his political victory? what the success of his party? the cause of the country? aye, of the world, or of humanity? Nothing, and less than nothing! if that could be. He had called her “immortal”—making what stand he could against 383the overwhelming sense of annihilation that had fallen upon him. Alas! alas! he felt now as if nothing were immortal but his own bitter, insupportable grief; as if with her all things had passed from him—leaving only insufferable sorrow. And he lifted up his voice, and wept—“Oh, Rosalie! Rosalie! life of my life!” But let us not intrude upon a grief so sacred.

Pass we by the next few mournful days. Pass we by the funeral, where all who had known the angel in her mortal life, gathered around to gaze once more upon her sweet face, drop a tear to her lovely memory, and go away, haply, wiser, and more loving than they came.

Pass by the time when the news of her departure from this earth reached her distant Western home, and many other homes that felt the blessing of her influence and mourned her loss; and where to this day the memory of Rosalie is still fresh and beautiful, sweet and fragrant—even as that of some fair saint, who lived, and loved, and toiled, and suffered to benefit humanity, to whom she was given; and where the present thought of Rosalie is as that of some bright guardian angel, still blessing from heaven those she loved upon the earth.

Pass to the time when Mr. Sutherland’s official duties called him to Washington City. The first vehemence and severity of his sorrow was over—but not the sorrow: it had settled rather into a fixed and silent melancholy, from which no earthly interest was strong enough to arouse him. Even the fine powers of his mind seemed palsied for a time.

He reached Washington, the goal of his young ambition; 384was duly sworn in, and took his appointed seat in the Senate Chamber. But all this passed to him like a dream, or at least like a form in which he had no vital interest. It was well for Mark Sutherland that he was a man of very imposing presence—that his bearing was dignified and commanding, and his fine Roman features, even in the deepened repose, as in a painting, or a marble bust, still expressed a high degree of intellect; as, through that fortuitous accident of physique, taken together with his antecedents, which were not those of a negligent politician—his mental abstraction passed for the pride and reserve of a lofty mind—which it was not—rather than for the profound indifference, amounting almost to apathy, of a deeply stricken heart—as it was.

Time passed, and the “affairs of the nation” got slowly under way. And the “assembled wisdom” of the commonwealth took up its profoundest problems. Debate after debate arose, and questions in which he had once taken the profoundest interest—but they had now no power to affect or inspire him.

Into society he did not go at all; but left the Capitol only for his boarding-house, and his boarding-house only for a ride or a walk out into the country.

So the session passed, and Mr. Sutherland had failed to distinguish himself, or to do credit to his constituents. He had apparently done no service to himself, his party, humanity or heaven. His best friends were surprised, grieved and disappointed in him.

He returned home; met his constituents with the same apathetic, frozen indifference.

What was the matter?

It was scarcely credible even to himself that the 385sorrow that had fallen upon him—a sorrow no heavier apparently than that which falls upon many a man and woman, who nevertheless “take up their burden of life again,” and go on—should have so paralyzed his intellect and his will.

Had all his motive power departed with Rosalie? Had she been the secret and the fountain of his mental and moral force? He had often said so and thought so, during her mortal life; and now it seemed to be demonstrated. He once thought of resigning his seat in the Senate, and spoke of his failing health as a reason for doing so; but his personal friends dissuaded him from his half-formed purpose. And about this time Lincoln Lauderdale wrote and invited Mark Sutherland to join him in a trip to England. Mr. Sutherland accepted the invitation.

The friends met by appointment at St. Louis, and travelled in company to New York, and embarked together for Liverpool.

The voyage was made. The summer was spent in travelling through England, Scotland and Ireland.

And in the autumn they returned to the United States, and reached Washington City just before the meeting of Congress.

The trip had been made without much benefit to the health and spirits of Mr. Sutherland. And Mr. Lauderdale, with much uneasiness in regard to the state of his friend, took leave of him in Washington, and departed for the South.

The two Houses of Congress organized, in the course of time, and the nation’s business commenced. And again Mr. Sutherland sat a mere silent, handsome figure-head in his seat.

386In fact, it required—not travel and change of scene, not the offices of friendship, nor the distinctions of society, but some powerful emotion, something that should sound a trumpet-call to his heart and brain—some mental or moral shock—to rouse that dormant mind to life and action.

And it came! In the midst of a calm as profound as a sleep of peace, the thunderbolt fell that struck consternation, not only among all right-thinking men upon the floor of Congress, but all honest souls to the remotest bounds of the Union. It was in the midst of the temporary calm I have just mentioned, that a Senator arose and presented a bill for the repeal of a treaty hitherto held so sacred that the most reckless of political adventurers had not dared to dream of meddling with it until now.

It was no very extravagant figure of speech to call that event a thunderbolt. It took the Senate, the House, and the nation by surprise. It had the momentary stunning effect of a thunderbolt when it fell. Men were struck with consternation, heard as doubting the evidence of their own senses, and for a time remained dumb with astonishment.

Then followed indignation which we all know to be anything but a “dumb devil,” whether it possess a man or a body of men. And a tempest of opposition arose that in its turn provoked a storm of assault from the friends of the bill, and then the war raged fast and furious. Not very “parliamentary” was the character of the debates upon that question, for it was indeed a time that “tried men’s souls,” “what manner of spirit they were of.”

Mr. Sutherland was among the foremost, most earnest 387and strenuous among the opponents of the bill. I have said elsewhere that if Mark Sutherland were remarkable for one trait above all others it was for his severe sense of justice. It was this that had led, or rather driven him to his early sacrifices; it was this that had governed all his conduct and changed the whole current of his life. And it was this sense of justice stung to the quick that had roused the dormant faculties of his mind, and woke his spirit “all the stronger that it slept so long.” With all his strength of intellect and will, he wrought in the cause of national good faith and political righteousness, both at stake in the issue of the pending act. Other men, abler men, older men, veterans in the political arena, toiled with equal zeal and greater power, and long and faithfully was the contest kept up. All that man could do to prevent that breach of political faith was done; but, alas! the powers of evil carried the day: the bill was passed, the sacred treaty repealed, and the cause of justice lost at least for the time.

At the close of this the second session of his services, Mr. Sutherland returned once more to his home and to his constituents, who received him with cordiality; he had done what was possible for the cause of right. Thus six years passed in the distracting life of a politician, six years since his Rosalie went to heaven, and still Mark Sutherland was a lonely man. He now entered society freely, both in Washington City, during the session of Congress, and at the various watering-places, or at home in his own adopted State. But neither the rustic beauty of the country maidens in his own neighbourhood, nor the refined grace of the city belles that yearly congregate at the capital, 388had been able to attract his heart from its fidelity to the memory of his sainted Rosalie. And at the end of six years’ widowhood, though still in the early prime of life, eminently handsome and graceful, and as distinguished for elegance and accomplishments in the drawing-room as for talent and eloquence in the Senate chamber; though honoured by the country and courted by society; though constantly thrown among the young, the beautiful, the gay and the fascinating; though admired by women as well as distinguished by men—Mark Sutherland was still alone—still faithful to an earthly memory that had also become a heavenly hope, and his angel wife, Rosalie, had no mortal rival.

And where, during all these years, was India, the once fair, though faulty “Pearl of Pearl River?” Alas! how many a ship-wrecked voyager there is upon the strands of life—still making what stand he 389can against the overwhelming waves of despair that, in every advancing tide, threaten to sweep him to utter destruction! Oh life! oh mystery of life! when and where shall be found thy true solution?

When India had administered upon the estate of her deceased father, who had survived the discovery of his guilt but a few months,—when she had settled every just claim upon it,—she found herself, as she had predicted, very poor. When the last debt was paid, the surplus fund was so small that it would not have met even her moderate expenses for one year.

And the once haughty India, haughty now no longer, found it necessary to do something for her own support. In a legal point of view, it was not by any means obligatory upon India to impoverish herself to pay her father’s or her husband’s debts. A portion of the property, sufficient for her own comfortable and even elegant maintenance, she might still have withheld from the creditors; but with a late though noble sense of justice—emulative of Mark’s own strict rectitude—she resolved to pay the uttermost farthing, and clear, as much as possible, from blame the memory of the dead, by cancelling, at least, their pecuniary obligations; even though by doing so she should leave herself quite penniless. In vain her friends and neighbours remonstrated. India, once so obstinate in wrong, could be equally firm in right.

The estate settled, the creditors all paid off, all other claims of justice satisfied, and India, with a small surplus, turned to consider what next she should do.

In the South, luxurious houses enough were open to her. All—even those who would fain, out of kindness, have persuaded her to reserve a portion of 390her fortune from the claims of justice—were eloquent in the praise of that high sense of honour that led her to disregard alike her own self-interest and their benevolent counsel. And many among the wealthy families of her acquaintance, with true Southern hospitality, invited and pressed her to come and make their house her home for as long as she liked. And there is no doubt but that the high-born, beautiful, and accomplished young widow, would have been considered a great acquisition in the drawing-room of any country house. But at no time of her life would India have endured such a life of luxurious dependence—and even now, when her heart had been disciplined and chastened by sorrow, she much preferred the honest independence of labour. Therefore she gratefully and somewhat proudly, withal, declined the invitations of her friends, bade them kindly adieu, and left the neighbourhood.

Something of the old haughty reserve remaining, perhaps, induced her to cover her retreat. And so—many of her friends—Mark among others—had quite lost trace of her.

And she, also, had lost sight of all, except of Mark Sutherland, whose rising star she watched from afar, with mingled emotions of pride, joy, and passionate regret.

She had effectually hidden herself in the great city of New York, where, as a teacher of music and drawing, she lived in strict retirement, and whence she watched the upward progress of the successful statesman.

At the close of his first senatorial term, Mark Sutherland had been set up as the candidate of the 391liberal party for one of the highest offices in the gift of the people. Political business, about this time, called Mr. Sutherland to New York. He was received with enthusiasm by the friends of his party, and when his business was dispatched, he entered freely into the fashionable society of the city.

India had seen his arrival announced with the usual flourish of the press trumpets. And every day she saw his honours and his triumphs chronicled in the morning and evening papers. She could not bear the thought of meeting him in her poverty now. But in that extensive wilderness of crowded buildings, called New York, she believed herself as completely screened from observation and discovery as though she had been away in London or in Paris, or in a desert or a forest. And she also felt assured that he had not the slightest clue to her dwelling place.

But it happened that, during his sojourn in New York, Mr. Sutherland had consented, with feelings partly of amusement and partly of annoyance, to sit for his portrait, to adorn some lyceum or lecture room. And the painting had been finished and hung up, and had attracted crowds of his friends and admirers—for a few days—and then had been left “alone in its glory.”

One morning, at an hour so early that it was highly improbable he should find any other visitors there, Mr. Sutherland went to the lyceum to procure a rare volume on jurisprudence. The librarian was in his stall, but otherwise the room seemed deserted.

Perhaps Mr. Sutherland’s foot was light in stepping—perhaps the carpet was thick and soft, or it might be that the lady he presently saw standing before his 392portrait was so abstracted that she could not hear the entrance of another visitor. At all events, she did not perceive his approach, and Mr. Sutherland went past, selected his volume, and had turned to go back, when a casual glance at the lady, and a flutter of her brown veil, disclosed to his astonished eyes the face of India.

He could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy. His first impulse was to spring forward and greet her. Had he been some years younger, he would have done so on the spur of the moment; but age brings caution and teaches self-restraint; and it was well he refrained, for a second glance at that pale, impassioned face, with those dark, burning eyes, fixed with such a fascinated gaze upon the picture before her, warned him that by no rude shock must that colourless, motionless woman be approached.

Softly and silently he drew away towards the other extremity of the long room, where the librarian sat in his stall.

“Mr. Ferguson, do you know the lady at the other end of the room?” he inquired of that gentleman.

“No, I do not,” answered the librarian, after taking a look at India.

“Nor where she lives, of course?”

“Nor where she lives,” said the librarian, looking up in some surprise.

“I supposed her to be a lady that I once knew, but I did not like to speak to her in uncertainty—that is all,” said Mr. Sutherland, evasively.

The librarian was a grave man, as it befitted a custodian of grave books to be, and Mr. Sutherland’s reputation for unvarying propriety of deportment was 393beyond cavil, so there was no quizzing, and their talk ended there.

Mark Sutherland went down into the lobby, considering how best to introduce himself, without startling Mrs. Ashley. He might wait until she should come down, and then follow her home, ascertain her address, and call upon her the next day; but there appeared to him to be something about such a course as that he did not approve, something romantic, absurd, yet verging upon treachery. Besides, it was most probable that she would take an omnibus, when he should lose sight of her, unless, indeed, he should get into the same omnibus; to which there was the same great objection of presenting himself suddenly before her, which, after seeing the expression of her face, he dared not do; while, at the same time, it was the recollection of that very look that made him doubly anxious to meet her. After considering a while, he determined to address a letter to her through the city post-office. That would certainly reach her sooner or later.

He went home and put his purpose into execution.

He was unfit for study or for society that day. That sudden meeting with India, the revelation made by that look upon her worn but still lovely face, had stricken the rock in his bosom, and the long-sealed fountain of memory and affection was set free.

That motionless, colourless, most beautiful face—it haunted him all the day.

That afternoon he dressed to go to a dinner party, at a house on Fifth Avenue. On arriving at the place, just as he entered the hall, a lady closely veiled went out. That form and air! he could not be mistaken! 394Again, with a start of irrepressible pleasure, he had recognised India.

“Who is that lady?” he inquired of the “Jeemes” of that hall.

“The music mistress, yer honour,” answered “Jeemes,” who happened in this case to be “Patrick.”

“Do you know where she lives?”

“I’ll inquire, yer honour,” replied Patrick, opening the drawing-room door to admit the guest, and then departing on his errand. In a few moments he returned, with Mrs. Ashley’s address.

It was in a distant part of the city. Yet gladly would Mark have sought out her retreat that night, had he been free to do so; but nothing but the most urgent necessity could now have excused him from the dinner got up in his own honour. So he was forced to restrain his impatience for that evening. Nay, more; having found out her residence and mentally fixed the hour that he should see her the next morning, he gave himself up to the festivities of the evening, and was once more the brilliant conversationist he was reputed to be. At dinner, he led in and sat next one of the most charming women in New York, and no doubt did his devoirs with equal grace and pleasure.

Yet neither is there any doubt that he was well satisfied when the evening’s hospitality was over.

And he was still better pleased when the night was passed, and the morning came, and the sun arose, and he at last had leave to dress himself, dispatch an early breakfast, take a cab, and drive to the remote suburb where India lived.

Was it a private dwelling or a boarding-house? 395The address gave no clue to that question—it designated only the street and the number. He hoped it was a private dwelling! He must see her alone! How would she receive him? There was no mistaking that look upon her face that had thrilled him, striking the whole “electric chord” of memory and passion! that look of mingled affection, aspiration, and passionate regret! How would she receive him? Such were the glad, anxious, questioning thoughts that chased each other through his mind, while the cab rolled on. In these tumultuous, half-delightful, half-painful recollections and anticipations the distance was passed.

“This is the place, sir,” said the driver, as the cab drew up before a little cottage, surrounded by a small luxuriant flower garden, and literally covered and concealed by a complete thicket of tall rose-trees and climbing vines.

“So this is a private dwelling, and her love of beautiful surrounding survives all the crash of fortune and the wreck of life,” thought Mark Sutherland, as he alighted and opened the gate leading into the yard.

Let us precede him, by a few moments.

India, who had risen from an almost untasted breakfast, had passed into the small parlour only to escape the eyes of her attendant, the pretty, loving Oriole, who had followed the fortunes of her mistress with the most devoted affection and fidelity, and who, if a cloud did but fall upon the brow of Mrs. Ashley, reflected it in the sadness of her own face.

But this morning, in the bitterness of her emotions, India could not endure the sad, wistful glances of poor 396Oriole; so she had left the small sitting-room impatiently, and passed into the parlour, where she paced up and down with the fearful, half-suppressed excitement of some caged lioness.

Disciplined and chastened as her heart certainly had been in the trials of her life, India was still very far from Christian perfection. And, perhaps, now she needed a little of the sunshine of happiness, as well as the long, long cloud of sorrow, to nurture the growth of goodness in her heart. At all events, she found it very difficult to bear with fortitude the mortification and grief of the night before. She had met him on the steps of one of those Fifth Avenue palaces, where her pupils resided. She had met him! he had passed her, brushing her dress as he went! Though her veil was down, she had recognized him. And she knew by the start that he made, he recognized her as well! Yet he had passed without speaking! Ah! all her thoughts of the future possibilities of a rencounter that she dreaded and shrunk from, had not shaped a meeting so humiliating as this! She had feared that he would seek her out, and, from his pride of place, presume to patronize her, by endeavouring to improve her circumstances, giving her advice, offering her assistance—humiliations which to escape she would have fled to an alms-house—or, perhaps, plunged into a river, “but for the grace of God,” for India was but half regenerated. But a rencounter so mortifying as this, she had never dreamed of. All the circumstances attending that chance meeting also combined to make it inexpressibly galling—he going into that house an honoured guest, for whom its saloons were illuminated and a feast prepared, and a choice company gathered: 397she creeping out of it, a sort of hired servant with her wages in her hand. So, in the present bitterness of her mood, she looked at herself. And they had so met upon the steps, and he had seen her, recognized her, and passed her without speaking! “Ah! fool!” so she thought; “there was little need to dread that he would seek me out to benefit me. The ‘great statesman’ evidently has no wish to be bored by his poor relations. But oh, Mark! Mark! that you should have done such an unworthy thing! you, my one saving idea of manly excellence—that prosperity should have corrupted, and the world hardened, even you! When you upbraided me so bitterly, in the midst of my sorrows at Cashmere, I bore it all with a meekness—not very like me! because—oh! because I saw and felt what you would never acknowledge to your own heart—the secret, unacknowledged feeling that gave point, sting, and acrimony to all the bitter reproaches you uttered. Oh! Mark, in that day I read your heart as a woman only can! But all this is over—over—and you pass me without recognition,” she said, sinking into a chair, dropping her head upon her hands, and giving way for the first time in years to a passionate flood of tears.

Hark! the bell rings—Oriole goes to the door. It is probably the postman, and India is too much depressed, and has too little to hope, to care much about the coming of that messenger of joy or of woe to so many households. But hark!

“Why, how do you do, Oriole? Do you recollect me, child? Yes? I am very glad to see you here! How is your mistress? Is she in?”

It is a rich, full-toned voice that speaks—a cordial, 398familiar, life-giving voice—a voice that has power to thrill every nerve in her frame—in a word, it is Mark Sutherland’s voice! and he is in the little hall, and in another moment he will be in the room.

Oh! Heaven! her face is pale, and bathed with tears—he must not see her thus! In a moment the blinds are drawn down, the curtains dropped, and the room obscured, and her chair is wheeled around with its back to the windows, so as to throw her face into deep shadow. So she will await him. But Oriole enters alone, with a card.

“It is Mr. Sutherland, madame, and if you are disengaged he will be glad to see you.”

She bows in assent—she can do no more; and Oriole goes out, returns, and ushers in Mr. Sutherland.

“Mrs. Ashley”——

She rises, and extends her hand.

“Mrs. Ashley, I am very happy to see you again.”

She essays to speak, but fails, and her self-possession utterly deserts her. The hand he has taken is cold as ice—he carries it to his lips.

“My dearest India, I am so happy to find you again, after all these years.”

“All these years!”—she repeats his words, mechanically, as she sinks back in her chair.

He takes the nearest seat, and resumes—“I have sought you far and wide, I have sought you for so long, I have done all but advertise you!” He added, smiling—“Why have you hidden yourself so long from all your friends?”

“The old ‘sinful pride’ perhaps, Mark,” she answered, half smiling in her turn.

399“‘Pride,’ dear India? Ah! I understand you. Yet that same pride, in all its phases, has caused much vexation to those who love you, dear India.”

“Do I not know it? And do I not regret it?”

“And to none has it caused more trouble than to myself.”—But the conversation is growing personal, and closing in.

You and I, reader, are de trop—and will withdraw from the scene and wait.

The result was this—that Mr. Sutherland did not leave New York as soon as he had expected, by many weeks.

And one Sunday, before morning service, there was a quiet marriage ceremony performed before the altar of Grace Church.

And the next morning, in the list of passengers that sailed in the Baltic, for Liverpool, were the names of “Mr. and Mrs. Mark Sutherland, and two servants”—the latter being Oriole, who could not live without her mistress, and Mr. Sutherland’s valet, who was no other than our old friend Billy Button, who had been well drilled for some years past, and now, in a speckless suit of black, and a spotless white neckcloth, presented one of the most respectable specimens of a gentleman’s gentleman.

And in the meantime, Mr. Sutherland’s elegant country seat on Lake Crystal, in one of the most thriving of the Western States, was left under the charge of that grand, impartial, large-hearted, broad-visioned specimen of manhood, Mr. Billy Bolling, who had received a carte-blanche for fitting up and refurnishing the house; for, however uncertain any one might be as to Mr. Bolling’s opinions, no one could doubt 400his taste, which was really exquisite. And that gentleman took the greatest possible delight in preparing the mansion for the reception of the bride.

And, by the way, Mr. Bolling, by his universal agreeableness, conquered such a popularity in his own district, that he has been talked of for the Legislature, and would certainly have been made a candidate, only it seemed impossible by any means to arrive at his politics, he being claimed with equal reason by all parties.

Early in the winter, Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland returned to the United States. They went first, by invitation and pre-engagement, to spend a month among their relatives in the South.

They went to Texas, where they found Mrs. Wells, still a hale and handsome woman, though on the shady side of fifty, and the Doctor more appreciative of her real worth, and more attached to her now than he was at the period of his mercenary marriage. They spent one happy month with the Wellses, and then, accompanied by Mrs. Wells, went into Louisiana, to pay a long-promised visit to Lincoln Lauderdale and his vivacious little lady.

They found them well and prosperous, and surrounded by a thriving young family. Little change had time made in Lincoln or the piquant “Nan.” A month was whiled away in their pleasant society, and so it was near spring before the Sutherlands, still accompanied by Mrs. Wells, set out up the river for their North-Western home.

And it was quite spring when they reached the beautiful shores of Lake Crystal, and entered their 401own elegant home. Mrs. Wells remained with them and spent the summer.

And she still continues to come every year to spend her summers with her “beloved Mark,” her “only child.” Mark and India occasionally return those visits in the winter—that is, when Mr. Sutherland’s official duties permit him to do so. For Mark Sutherland is still a rising politician, adored by one party and abhorred by another. And, in the present hopeful state of the public mind, it is impossible to predict of any given contest whether the people mean to elect or mob their own candidate.

But, aside from Mr. Sutherland’s public life, his home is a very happy one. In his profession he has realized a handsome fortune. By the death of her Uncle Paul, at an advanced age, India has inherited a large property, so that they are entirely independent in their pecuniary circumstances. India is as beautiful but no longer as proud as Juno, Queen of Goddesses, and is the centre of a very refined and intellectual circle. They have two fine children—a beautiful boy, whom they named Mark—and a lovely little girl, whom they called India.

Mrs. Sutherland, in a mood of magnanimity, proposed that this child should be christened Rosalie; but Mr. Sutherland could by no means be brought to consent to that. No! the child must have its mother’s name—only hers. And so she had. India was flattered and pleased. And Mark Sutherland was exactly right.

Was Rosalie then forgotten?

No! no! and a thousand times no! She was well remembered. Her name was a sacred, sacred name, 402that he could not bear to give to another creature. It was hers and hers only; it represented her individuality; it stood to him for all that was most beautiful, pure, lovely and sweet—aye, heavenly! He could not bear to bestow it upon India’s child, passionately as he loved that child and its mother. Reader, do you understand that? India had once been his boyhood’s passion, as she was now his manhood’s love. He preferred her immeasurably before all living women. She was a handsome, intellectual, and warm-hearted woman, eminently fitted to make a man like Mark Sutherland happy. And his marriage with her was eminently happy.

The beautiful India was his Hertha, but there was one who had gone before who was and is his Psyche. And deep in his heart is a chamber into which no mortal creature entereth—a sanctuary closely veiled from all human knowledge—a holy of holies, sacred to one earthly memory and one heavenly hope—consecrated to the veiled worship of his angel wife—