“An’ forward, though I canna see,
I guess an’ fear.”—BURNS.
Three years passed over without any marked change in the external condition of our young friends. Herbert Linwood endured the hardships of an American officer during that most suffering period of the war, and remained true to the cause he had adopted, without any of those opportunities of distinction which are necessary to keep alive the fire of ordinary patriotism.
It has been seen that Eliot Lee, with most of the young men of the country (as might be expected from the insurgent and generous spirit of youth), espoused the popular side. It ought not to have been expected, that when the young country came to the muscle and vigour of manhood, it should continue to wear the leading-strings of its childhood, or remain in the bondage and apprenticeship of its youth. It has been justly said, that the seeds of our revolution and future independence were sown by the Pilgrims. The political institutions of a people may be inferred from their religion. Absolutism, as a mirror, reflects the Roman Catholic faith. Whatever varieties of names were attached to the religious sects of America, they were, with the exception of a few Papists, all Protestants—all, as Burke said of them, “agreed (if agreeing in nothing else) in the communion of the spirit of liberty—theirs was the Protestantism of the Protestant 48religion—the dissidence of dissent.” It was morally certain, that as soon as they came to man’s estate, their government would accord with this spirit of liberty; would harmonize with the independent and republican spirit of the religion of Christ, the only authority they admitted. The fires of our republic were not then kindled by a coal from the old altars of Greece and Rome, whose freest government exalted the few, and retained the many in grovelling ignorance and servitude: ours came forth invincible in the declaration of liberty to all, and equality of rights.
Such minds as Eliot Lee’s, reasoning and religious, were not so much moved by the sudden impulses of enthusiasm as incited by the convictions of duty. His heart was devoted to his country, his thoughts absorbed in her struggle; but he quenched, or rather smothered his intense desire to go forth with her champions, and remained pursuing his legal studies, near enough to his home to perform his paramount but obscure duty to his widowed mother and her young family.
Jasper Meredith’s political preferences, if not proclaimed, were easily guessed. It was obvious that his tastes were aristocratic and feudal—his sympathies with the monarch, not with the people. New-York was the headquarters of the British army, and Judge Ellis, his uncle, on the pretext of keeping his nephew out of the way of the seductions of a very gay society, advised him to pursue the study of the law in New-England, and thus for a while he avoided pledging himself. He resided in Boston or its vicinity, never far from Westbrook. He had a certain eclat in the drawing-rooms of Boston, but he was no favourite there. A professed neutrality was, if not suspicious, most offensive in the eyes of neck-or-nothing patriots. But Meredith did not escape the whisper that his neutrality was a mere mask. His accent, which was ambitiously English, was criticised, and his elaborate dress, manufactured by London artists, was particularly displeasing to the sons of the Puritans, 49who, absorbed in great objects, were then more impatient even than usual of extra sacrifices to the graces.
The transition from Boston to Westbrook was delightful to Meredith. There was no censure of any sort, but balm for the rankling wounds of vanity; and it must be confessed that he not only appeared better, but was better at Westbrook than elsewhere: the best parts of his nature were called forth; he was (if we may desecrate a technical expression) in the exercise of grace. There is a certain moral atmosphere, as propitious to moral wellbeing as a genial temperature is to health. Vanity has a sort of thermometer, which enables the possessor to graduate and adapt himself to the dispositions, the vanities (is there any gold in nature without this alloy?) of others. Meredith, when he wished to be so, was eminently agreeable. Those always stand in a most fortunate light who vary the monotony of a village existence, and he broke like a sunbeam through the dull atmosphere that hung over Westbrook. He brought the freshest news, he studied good Mrs. Lee’s partialities and prejudices, and (without her being aware of their existence) accommodated himself to them. He supplied to Eliot what all social beings hanker after, companionship with one of his own age, pursuits, and associations. The magnet that drew him to Westbrook was never the acknowledged attraction. Meredith was not in love with Bessie Lee. She was too spiritual a creature for one of earth’s mould; but his self-love, his ruling passion, was flattered by her. He saw and enjoyed (what, alas! no one else then saw) his power over her. He saw it in the mutations of her cheek, in the kindling of her eye, in the changes of her voice. It was as if an angel had left his sphere to incense him. Meredith must be acquitted of a deliberate attempt to insnare her affections. He thought not and cared not for the future. He cared only for a present selfish gratification. A ride at twilight or a walk by moonlight with this creature, all beauty, refinement, and tenderness, 50was a poetic passage to him—to her it was fraught with life or death.
Poor Bessie! she should have been hardened for the changing climate of this rough world; but by a fatal, but very common error, she had been cherished like a tropical bird, or an exotic plant. “She has such delicate health! she is so different from my other children!” said the mother.—“She is so gentle and sensitive,” said the brother. And thus, with all their sound judgment, instead of submitting her to a hardening process, it seemed an instinct with them, by every elaborate contrivance, to fence her from the ordinary trials and evils of life. Only when she was happy did they let her alone; with Meredith she seemed happy, and they were satisfied. Bessie shared this unfounded tranquillity, arising with them partly from confidence in Meredith, and partly from the belief that she was in no danger of suffering from an unrequited love; but Bessie’s arose from the most childlike ignorance of that study puzzling to the wisest and craftiest—the human heart. She was the most modest and unexacting of human creatures—her gentle spirit urged no rights—asked nothing, expected nothing beyond the present moment. The worshipper was satisfied with the presence of the idol. Her residence in New-York had impressed a conviction that a disparity of birth and condition was an impassable gulf. It was natural enough that she should have imbibed this opinion; for, being a child, the aristocratic opinions of the society she was in were expressed, unmitigated by courtesy; they sunk deep in her susceptible mind, a mind too humble to aspire above any barrier that nature or society had set up.
There was another foundation of her fancied security. This was shaken by the following conversation:—Meredith was looking over an old pocketbook, when a card dropped from it on the floor at Bessie’s feet: she handed it to him—51he smiled as he looked at it, and held it up before her. She glanced her eye over it, and saw it was a note of the date of their visit to the soothsayer Effie, and of Effie’s prediction in relation to the “dark curling hair.”
“I had totally forgotten this,” said he, carelessly.
“Forgotten it!” echoed Bessie, in a tone that indicated but too truly her feelings.
“Certainly I had—and why not, pray?”
“Oh, because—” she hesitated.
“Because what, Bessie?”
Bessie was ashamed of her embarrassment, and faltering the more the more she tried to shake it off, she said, “I did not suppose you could forget any thing that concerned Isabella.”
“Upon my honour, you are very much mistaken; I have scarcely thought of Effie and her trumpery prediction since we were there.”
“Why have you preserved the card, then, Jasper?” asked Bessie, in all simplicity.
Jasper’s complexion was not of the blushing order, or he would have blushed as he replied, at the same time replacing the card—“Oh, Lord, I don’t know! accident—the card got in here among these old memoranda and receipts, ‘trivial fond records’ all!”
“There preserve it,” said Bessie, “and we will look at it one of these days.”
“When?”
“When—as it surely will be, the prediction is verified.”
“If not till then,” he said, “it will never again see the light—this is the oddest fancy of yours,” he added.
“Not fancy, but faith.”
“Faith most unfounded—why, Bessie, Isabella and I were always quarrelling.”
“And always making up. Do you ever quarrel now, Jasper?”
52“Oh, she is still of an April temper; but I”—he looked most tenderly at Bessie—“have lived too much of late in a serene atmosphere to bear well her fitful changes.”
A long time had passed since Bessie had mentioned Isabella to Meredith. She knew not why, but she had felt a growing reluctance to advert to her friend even in thought; and she was now conscious of a thrilling sensation at the careless, cold manner in which Jasper spoke of her. It seemed as if a load had fallen off her heart. She felt like a mariner who has at length caught a glimpse of what seems distant land, and is bewildered with new sensations, and uncertain whether it be land or not. She was conscious Jasper’s eye was on hers, though her own was downcast. She longed to escape from that burning glance, and was relieved by a bustle in the next room, and her two little sisters running in, one holding up a long curling tress of her own beautiful hair, and crying out—“Did not you give this to me, Bessie?”
“Is not it mine?” said the competitor.
“No, it is mine!” exclaimed Jasper, snatching it, and holding it beyond their reach.
The girls laughed, and were endeavouring to regain it, when he slipped a ring from his finger, and set it rolling on the floor, saying, “The hair is mine—the ring belongs to whoever gets it.” The ring, obedient to the impulse he gave it, rolled out of the room; the children eagerly followed, he shut the door after them, and repeated, kissing the lock of hair—“It is mine—is it not?”
“Oh, no—no, Jasper—give it to me,” cried Bessie, excessively confused.
“You will not give it to me!—well—‘a fair exchange is no robbery,’” and taking the scissors from Bessie’s workbox, he cut off one of his own luxuriant dark locks, and offered it to her. She shook her head.
53“That is unkind—most unfriendly, Bessie”—he paused a moment, and then, still holding both locks, he extended the ends to Bessie, and asked her if she could tie a true love-knot. Bessie’s heart was throbbing; she was frightened at her own emotion; she was afraid of betraying it; and she tied the knot as the natural thing for her to do.
“There is but one altar for such a sacrifice as this,” said Meredith, and he was putting it into his bosom, when Bessie snatched it from him, burst into tears, and left the room.
After this, there was a change in Bessie’s manners—her spirits became unequal, she was nervous and restless—Meredith, in the presence of observers, was measured and cautious to the last degree in his attentions to her—when however they were alone together, though not a sentence might be uttered that a lawyer could have tortured into a special plea, yet his words were fraught with looks and tones that carried them to poor Bessie’s heart with a power that cannot be imagined by those
“Who have ceased to hear such, or ne’er heard.”
It was about this period that Meredith wrote the following reply to a letter from his mother.
“You say, my dear madam, that you have heard ‘certain reports about me, which you are not willing to believe, and yet cannot utterly discredit.’ You say, also, ‘that though you should revolt with horror from sanctioning your son in those liaisons that are advised by Lord Chesterfield, and others of your friends, yet you see no harm in’ lover-like attentions ‘to young persons in inferior stations; they serve’ you add, ‘to keep alive and cultivate that delicate finesse so essential to the success of a man of the world, and, provided they have no immoral purpose, are quite innocent,’ as the object of them must know there is an 54‘impassable gulf between her and her superiors in rank, and is therefore responsible for her mistakes.’ I have been thus particular in echoing your words, that I may assure you my conduct is in conformity to their letter and spirit. Tranquillize yourself, my dear madam. There is nothing, in any little fooleries I may be indulging in, to disquiet you for a moment. The person in question is a divine little creature—quite a prodigy for this part of the world, where she lives in a seclusion almost equal to that of Prospero’s isle; so that your humble servant, being scarce more than the ‘third man that e’er she saw,’ it would not be to marvel at ‘if he should be the first that e’er she loved’—and if I am, it is my destiny—my conscience is quite easy—I never have committed myself, nor ever shall: time and absence will soon dissipate her illusions. She is an unaspiring little person, quite aware of the gulf, as you call it, between us. She believes that even if I were lover and hero enough to play the Leander and swim it, my destiny is fixed on the other side. I have no distrust of myself, and I beg you will have none; I am saved from all responsibility as to involving the happiness of this lily of the valley, by her very clear-sighted mother, and her sage of a brother, her natural guardians.
“It is yet problematical whether, as you suppose, a certain lady’s fortune will be made by the apostacy of her disinherited brother. If the rebels win the day, the property of the tories will be confiscated, or transferred to the rebel heir. But all that is in futuro—fortune is a fickle goddess; we can only be sure of her present favours and deserve the future by our devotion.
“With profound gratitude and affection,
“Yours, my dear mother,
“J. Meredith.
“P. S.—My warmest thanks for the inestimable box, which escaped the sea and land harpies, and came safe to hand. The Artois buckle is a chef d’œuvre, worthy the inventive genius of the royal count whose taste rules the civilized world. The scarlet 55frock-coat, with its unimitated, if not inimitable, capes, ‘does credit (as friend Rivington would say in one of his flashy advertisements) to the most elegant operator of Leicester-fields.’ I must reserve it till I go to New-York, where they always take the lead in this sort of civilization—the boys would mob me if I wore it in Boston. The umbrella, a rare invention! is a curiosity here. I understand they have been introduced into New-York by the British officers. Novelty as it is, I venture to spread it here, as its utility commends it to these rationalists, who reason about an article of dress as they would concerning an article of faith.
“Once more, your devoted son, M.”
Meredith’s conscience was easy! “He had not committed himself!”—Ah, let man beware how he wilfully or carelessly perverts and blinds God’s vicegerent, conscience.
Meredith was suddenly recalled to New-York, and Bessie Lee was left to ponder on the past, and weave the future of shattered faith and blighted hopes. The scales fell too late from the eyes of her mother and brother. They reproached themselves, but never poor Bessie. They hoped that time, operating on her gentle, unresisting temper, would restore her serenity. She, like a stricken deer, took refuge under the shadow of their love; she was too affectionate, too generous, to resign herself to wretchedness without an effort. She wasted her strength in concealing the wound that rankled at her heart.