“Come not near our fairy queen.”
Before mid-winter, Linwood joined Eliot Lee at West Point, and the young men renewed their acquaintance on the footing of friends. There was just that degree of similarity and difference between them that inspires mutual confidence and begets interest. Herbert, with characteristic frankness, told the story of his love, disappointment and all. Eliot felt a true sympathy for his friend, whose deserts he thought would so well have harmonized with Bessie’s advantage and happiness; but this feeling was subordinate to his keen anxiety for his sister. This anxiety was not appeased by intelligence from home. Letters were rare blessings in those days—scarcely to him blessings. His mother wrote about every thing but Bessie, and his sister’s letters were brief and vague, and most unsatisfactory. The winter, however, passed rapidly away. Though in winter quarters, he had incessant occupation; and the exciting novelty of military life, with the deep interest of the times, to an ardent and patriotic spirit, kept every feeling on the strain.
Eliot had that intimate acquaintance with nature that makes one look upon and love all its aspects, as upon the changing expressions of a friend’s face; and as that most interests us in its soul-fraught seriousness, so he delighted even more in the wild gleams of beauty that are shot over the winter landscape, than in all its summer wealth. To eyes like 92his, faithful ministers to the soul, the scenery of West Point was a perpetual banquet.
Nature, in our spring-time, as we all know (especially in this blessed year of our Lord 1835), rises as slowly and reluctantly from her long winter’s sleep as any other sluggard. On looking back to our hero’s spring at West Point, we find she must have been at her work earlier than is her wont; for April was not far gone when Eliot, after looking in vain for Linwood to accompany him, sauntered into the woods, where the buds were swelling and the rills gushing. At first his pleasure was marred by his friend not being with him, and he now for the first time called to mind Linwood’s frequent and unexplained absences for the last few days. Linwood was so essentially a social being, that Eliot’s curiosity was naturally excited by this sudden manifestation of a love of solitude and secrecy.
He however pursued his way; and having reached the cascade which is now the resort of holyday visiters, he forgot his friend. The soil under his feet, released from the iron grasp of winter, was soft and spongy, and the tokens of spring were around him like the first mellow smile of dawn. The rills that spring together like laughing children just out of school (we borrow the obvious simile from a poetic child), and at their junction form “the cascade,” were then filled to the brim from their just unsealed fountains. Eliot followed the streamlet where it pursues its headlong course, dancing, singing, and shouting, as it flings itself over the rocks, as if it spurned their cold and stern companionship, and was impatiently running away from the leafless woods to a holyday in a summer region. He forced his way through the obstructions that impeded his descent, and was standing on a jutting point which the stream again divided, looking up at the snow-white and feathery water, as he caught a glimpse of it here and there through the intersecting branches of hemlocks, and wondering 93why it was that he instinctively infused his own nature into the outward world: why the rocks seemed to him to look sternly on the frolicking stream that capered over them, and the fresh white blossoms of the early flowering shrubs seemed to yearn with a kindred spirit towards it, when his speculations were broken by human voices mingling with the sound of the waterfall. He looked in the direction whence they came, and fancied he saw a white dress. It might be the cascade, for that at a little distance did not look unlike a white robe floating over the gray rocks, but it might be a fair lady’s gown, and that was a sight rare enough to provoke the curiosity of a young knight-errant. So Eliot, quickening his footsteps, reached the point where the streamlet ceases its din, and steals loiteringly through the deep narrow glen, now called Washington’s Valley. He had pressed on unwittingly, for he was now within a few yards of two persons on whom he would not voluntarily have intruded. One was a lady (a lady certainly, for a well-practised ear can graduate the degree of refinement by a single tone of the voice), the other party to the tête-à-tête was his truant friend Linwood. The lady was seated with her back towards Eliot, in a grape-vine that hung, a sylvan swing, from the trees; and Linwood, his face also turned from Eliot, was decking his companion’s pretty hair with wood anemones, and (ominous it was when Herbert Linwood made sentimental sallies) saying very soft and pretty things of their starry eyes. Eliot was making a quiet retreat, when, to his utter consternation, a lady on his right, till then unseen by him, addressed him, saying, “she believed she had the pleasure of speaking to Lieutenant Lee.” Eliot bowed; whereupon she added, “that she was sure, from Captain Linwood’s description, that it must be his friend. Captain Linwood is there with my sister, you perceive,” she continued; “and as he is our friend, and you are his, you will do us the favour to go home and take tea with us.”
94By this time the tête-à-tête party, though sufficiently absorbed in each other, was aroused, and both turning their heads, perceived Eliot. The lady said nothing; Linwood looked disconcerted, and merely nodded without speaking to his friend. The lady rose, and with a spirited step walked towards a farmhouse on the margin of the Hudson, the only tenement of this secluded and most lovely little glen. Linwood followed her, and seemed earnestly addressing her in a low voice. By this time Eliot had sufficiently recovered his senses to remember that the farmhouse, which was visible from West Point, had been pointed out to him as the temporary residence of a Mr. Grenville Ruthven. Mr. Ruthven was a native of Virginia, who some years before had, in consequence of pecuniary misfortunes, removed to New-York, where he had held an office under the king till the commencement of the war. His only son was in the English navy, and the father was suspected of being at heart a royalist. His political partialities, however, were not so strong but that they might be deferred to prudence: so he took her counsel, and retired with his wife and two daughters to this safe nook on the Hudson, till the troubles should be overpast.
Eliot could not be insensible to the friendly and volunteered greeting of his pretty lady patroness, and a social pleasure was never more inviting than now when he was famishing for it; but it was so manifest that his presence was any thing but desirable to Linwood and his companion, that he was making his acknowledgments and turning away, when the young lady, declaring she would not take “no” for an answer, called out, “Stop, Helen—pray, stop—come back, Captain Linwood, and introduce us regularly to your friend; he is so ceremonious that he will not go on with an acquaintance that is not begun in due form.”
95Thus compelled, Miss Ruthven stopped and submitted gracefully to an introduction, which Linwood was in fact at the moment urging, and she peremptorily refusing.
“Now, here we are, just at our own door,” said Miss Charlotte Ruthven to Eliot, “and you must positively come in and take tea with us.” Eliot still hesitated.
“Why, in the name of wonder, should you not?” said Linwood, who appeared just coming to himself.
“You must come with us,” said Miss Ruthven, for the first time speaking, “and let me show your friend how very magnanimous I can be.”
“Indeed, you must not refuse us,” urged Miss Charlotte.
“I cannot,” replied Eliot, gallantly, “though it is not very flattering to begin an acquaintance with testing the magnanimity of your sister.”
Helen Ruthven bowed, smiled, and coloured; and at the first opportunity said to Linwood, “your friend is certainly the most civilized of all the eastern savages I have yet seen, and, as your friend, I will try to tolerate him.” She soon, however, seemed to forget his presence, and to forget every thing else, in an absorbing and half-whispered conversation with Linwood, interrupted only by singing snatches of sentimental songs, accompanying herself on the piano, and giving them the expressive application that eloquent eyes can give. In the meanwhile Eliot was left to Miss Charlotte, a commonplace, frank, and good-humoured person, particularly well pleased at being relieved from the rôle she had lately played, a cipher in a trio.
Mr. and Mrs. Ruthven made their appearance with the tea-service. Mr. Ruthven, though verging towards sixty, was still in the unimpaired vigour of manhood, and was marked by the general characteristics, physical and moral, of a Virginian: the lofty stature, strong and well-built frame, the open 96brow, and expression of nobleness and kindness of disposition, and a certain something, not vanity, nor pride, nor in the least approaching to superciliousness, but a certain happy sense of the superiority, not of the individual, but of the great mass of which he is a component part.
His wife, unhappily, was not of this noble stock. She was of French descent, and a native of one of our cities. At sixteen, with but a modicum of beauty, and coquetry enough for half her sex, she succeeded, Mr. Ruthven being then a widower, in making him commit the folly of marrying her, after a six weeks’ acquaintance. She was still in the prime of life, and as impatient as a caged bird of her country seclusion, or, as she called it, imprisonment, where her daughters were losing every opportunity of achieving what she considered the chief end of a woman’s life.
Aware of her eldest daughter’s propensity to convert acquaintances into lovers, and looking down upon all rebels as most unprofitable suiters, she had sedulously guarded against any intercourse with the officers at the Point.
Of late, she had begun to despair of a favourable change in their position; and Miss Ruthven having accidentally renewed an old acquaintance with Herbert Linwood, her mother encouraged his visits from that admirable policy of maternal manœuvrers, which wisely keeps a pis-aller in reserve. Helen Ruthven was one of those persons, most uncomfortable in domestic life, who profess always to require an object (which means something out of a woman’s natural, safe, and quiet orbit) on which to exhaust their engrossing and exacting desires. Mr. Ruthven felt there was a very sudden change in his domestic atmosphere, and though it was as incomprehensible to him as a change in the weather, he enjoyed it without asking or caring for an explanation. Always hospitably inclined, he was charmed with Linwood’s good-fellowship; and while he discussed a favourite dish, obtained 97with infinite trouble, or drained a bottle of Madeira with him, he was as unobservant of his wife’s tactics and his daughters’ coquetries as the eagle is of the modus operandi of the mole. And all the while, and in his presence, Helen was lavishing her flatteries with infinite finesse and grace. Her words, glances, tones of voice even, might have turned a steadier head than Linwood’s. Her father, good, confiding man, was not suspicious, but vexed when she called his companion away, just, as he said, “as they were beginning to enjoy themselves,” to scramble over frozen ground or look at a wintry prospect! or to play over, for the fortieth time, a trumpery song. Helen, however, would throw her arms around her father’s neck, kiss him into good-humour, and carry her point; that is, secure the undivided attentions of Herbert Linwood. Matters were at this point, after a fortnight’s intercourse, when Eliot entered upon the scene; and, though his friend Miss Charlotte kept up an even flow of talk, before the evening was over he had taken some very accurate observations.
When they took their leave, and twice after they had shut the outer door, Helen called Linwood back for some last word that seemed to mean nothing, and yet clearly meant that her heart went with him: and then
“So fondly she bade him adieu,
It seemed that she bade him return.”
The young men had a long, dark, and at first rather an unsocial walk. Both were thinking of the same subject, and both were embarrassed by it. Linwood, after whipping his boots for ten minutes, said, “Hang it, Eliot, we may as well speak out; I suppose you think it deused queer that I said nothing to you of my visits to the Ruthvens?”
“Why, yes, Linwood—to speak out frankly, I do.”
98“Well, it is, I confess it. At first my silence was accidental—no, that is not plummet and line truth; for from the first I had a sort of a fear—no, not fear, but a sheepish feeling, that you might think the pleasure I took in visiting the Ruthvens quite inconsistent with the misery I had seemed to feel, and, by Heavens, did feel, to my heart’s core, about that affair at Westbrook.”
“No, Linwood—whatever else I may doubt, I never shall doubt your sincerity.”
“But my constancy you do?” Eliot made no reply, and Linwood proceeded: “Upon my soul, I have not the slightest idea of falling in love with either of these girls, but I find it exceedingly pleasant to go there. To tell the truth, Eliot, I am wretched without the society of womankind; Adam was a good sensible fellow not to find even Paradise tolerable without them. I knew the Ruthvens in New-York: I believe they like me the better, apostate as they consider me, for belonging to a tory family; and looking upon me, as they must, as a diseased branch from a sound root, they certainly are very kind to me, especially the old gentleman—a fine old fellow, is he not?”
“Yes—I liked him particularly.”
“And madame is piquant and agreeable, and very polite to me; and the girls, of course, are pleased to have their hermitage enlivened by an old acquaintance.”
Linwood’s slender artifice in saying “the girls,” when it was apparent that Miss Ruthven was the magnet, operated like the subtlety of a child, betraying what he would fain conceal. Without appearing to perceive the truth, Eliot said, “Miss Ruthven seems to restrict her hospitality to old acquaintance. It was manifest that she did not voluntarily extend it to me.”
“No, she did not. Helen Ruthven’s heart is in her hand, and she makes no secret of her antipathy to a rebel—per se a 99rebel; however, her likes and dislikes are both harmless—she is only the more attractive for them.”
Herbert had not been the first to mention Helen Ruthven; he seemed now well enough pleased to dwell upon the subject. “How did you like her singing, Eliot?” he asked.
“Why, pretty well; she sings with expression.”
“Does she not? infinite!—and then what an accompaniment are those brilliant eyes of hers.”
“With their speechless messages, Linwood?” Linwood merely hemmed in reply, and Eliot added, “Do you like the expression of her mouth?”
“No, not entirely—there is a little spice of the devil about her mouth; but when you are well acquainted with her you don’t perceive it.”
“If you are undergoing a blinding process,” thought Eliot. When the friends arrived at their quarters, and separated for the night, Linwood asked and Eliot gave a promise to repeat his visit the next evening to the glen.