Francis Parkman

“ It grew dark, and as they sat together by the fire, the red light flared against the jagged rock, the shaggy fir boughs, and knotty limbs of the oaks. It seemed to Morton as if time and space were done away; as if the prison were a dream; and as if, once more on some college ramble, he were seated by a camp fire in the familiar forests of America. But instead of a vagabond Indian, or the hardy face of a Penobscot lumberman, the flame fell on the frogged uniform and long, waxed moustache of Corporal Max, as he sat cross-legged, like a Turk, on the pile of evergreens. ”

“ And as they entered the shaded walks of that promenade, the moon was shining on the trees, and on the quiet waters of the adjacent bay.
"You must think very strangely of me," said Buckland, at length breaking his long silence; "in fact, I scarcely know myself. I am a changed man,—a lost and broken man, body and soul,—a sea-weed drifting helplessly on the water."
"You take too dark a view," said Morton, greatly moved; "there is good hope for you yet, if you will not fling it away."
Buckland shook his head. "I wish I had been born such a man as Rosny. ”

“ On the American side of the Niagara, a few miles below the Falls, is a deep chasm, bearing the inauspicious christening of the Devil's Hole. Near it there is—or perhaps was, for things have changed thereabouts—a path winding far down among rocks and forests, till it leads to the brink of the river. Here, darkened by the beetling cliffs and sombre forests, the Niagara surges on its way, like a compressed ocean, raging to break free. At the verge of this watery convulsion stood Holyoke and his wife, Miss Leslie, and Morton, whom they had chanced to meet that morning. ”

“ It is easy for me, before one whom I have loved as I have loved you, to hold this tone, and be borne up for a time above the thought of grief and renouncement. But it is a different task to still, through all a lifetime, the longings of a woman's heart, and the impatient surgings of a woman's temperament. This is the task assigned me, and I accept it. Life—action—are before you. Patience is my medicine; the slow talisman which must open in the end my door of promise."
Morton pressed her hand to his lips. ”

“ I will try to get one."
"You speak in a bantering tone," said Morton, "but you are in earnest."
"I am in earnest!" exclaimed Fanny Euston, with a sudden change of voice and manner. "Every word that you have spoken is true. I am driven hither and thither by feelings and impulses,—some bad, some good,—chasing every new fancy like so many butterflies or will-o'-the-wisps,—without thinking of results—restless—dissatisfied—finding no life but in the excitement of the moment. Sometimes I have hints of better things. ”

“ And yet I turn girl-hearted when I think of that summer evening by the lake at Matherton. What is my fate to Edith Leslie's? How will a few years of suffering, with one deadening memory in their wake, compare with her life-long endurance? A woman's nature, it is said, will mould itself into conformity with her husband's. I will rather believe that Vinal's presence, instead of drawing her to itself, has repelled her upward into a higher atmosphere, and made her life as lofty as it must be sad. ”

“ Leslie felt the shock acutely, not to say intensely, for a while; but the storm passed, and left on him very little trace. It sank into the deeper nature of his wife with such a penetrating sense of the vanity of life and the rottenness of mortal hope, as, in the olden time, drew saints and anchorites to renounce the world and give themselves to penance and seclusion. It made no anchorite of her. She rose from her baptism of fire saddened, but not broken nor unstrung; with a rooted faith and an absolute resignation; a nice perception of all human suffering ”

“ This libel on womankind became the mother of a pair of twins—the same infant prodigies whom Morton had seen at the White Mountains. Both perished at the age of seven, their precocious brains having by that time usurped all the vitality of their miserable little bodies. She was inconsolable at their death, though, while they lived, her delicate nerves could seldom abide their presence for five minutes at a time.
There was once an idiot, who, being of a conciliating temper, thought to appease a fire and persuade it to go out by feeding it with fuel till it should be satisfied, and crave no more. ”

“ The pen dropped from his pale fingers, which quivered like an aspen bough; and as Morton stood gazing on him, Vinal's upturned eyes met his, as if riveted there by a helpless fascination.
"You unhappy wretch! You are burning already with the pains of the damned. Flint and iron could not see you without softening. I have saved you,—not out of mercy, nor forgiveness,—not for your sake;—but I have saved you. I have pushed away the sword that hung over you by a hair. You are free now to be happy." ”

“ Peter's may match the wildest dream of the Arabian Nights; and this scene on the Lake of Como, with the sunset upon it, may outvie the highest wrought counterfeit of Claude or Salvator, or both combined. The world, much abused as she is, does her part. She is profuse of beauties; but, in the midst of them, one still drags with him his own work-day identity. Go where he will, his old Adam still hangs about him; and the spell-breaking sense that he is himself and no other scatters every charm that Art and Nature would cast over him.
Morton, poor devil, had other matters to think of than scenery. ”

“ The space between, though uneven, had no visible impediments but a few low fences and scattered clumps of bushes. Morton pushed through the barberry growth that fringed the road, galloped over the hard pasture, leaped one fence, passed a gap in another, and half way to his goal, found himself and his horse in a quagmire. At this moment, straining his eyes towards the cluster of houses, he saw, with agony at his heart, a white puff of vapor rising above the trees beyond. Then the dark outline of the train came into view, checking its way, and stopping, half hidden behind the buildings. ”

“ He had found a philosopher's stone; and through the rest of his life, this comfortless reading room of the Matherton Hotel, this sanctuary of dry and weary Yankeedom, was linked in his memory with dreams of golden brightness.
A firm, quick step crossed the threshold, and paced the sanded floor. Till this moment, Morton had remained absorbed, shut in from the outer world; but now an influence, which believers may call magnetism, made him look up and bend forward from the recess to see who the sudden stranger might be. The stranger turned also, and showed the pale, fixed face of Horace Vinal. ”

“ Vinal had an ideal; he had cherished it from boyhood, and battled ever since to realize it. He would fain make himself the finished man of the world, the unflinching, all-knowing, all-potential man of affairs, like a blade of steel, smooth and polished, but keen, searching, resistless. This was his aim; but nature was always balking him. He was the victim of a constitutional timidity, his scourge from childhood. He had been known to swoon outright, on being run away with in a chaise, and he never could muster nerve enough to fire a gun. ”

“ You were high in confidence, and believed that whatever you had once resolved on must, sooner or later, come to pass."
"Why are you saying this?" demanded Morton, in great surprise.
"Out of this life you were suddenly snatched and buried in a dungeon; shut off from all intercourse with men; your energies stifled; your restless mind left to prey upon itself, or sustain a weary siege against despair. Pain or danger you could have faced like a man; but this passive misery must to you have been a daily death." ”

“ Paint as thick as you will, the bare skull grins under it,—to all who have the eyes to see, and the hardihood to use them. How many among mankind have courage to face the naked truth? Not one in a thousand. Cannot the fools draw reason out of the analogy of things? Can they not see that, as their bodies will be melted and merged into the bodily substance of the world, so their minds will be merged in the great universal mind,—the animus mundi,—out of which they sprang, like bubbles on the water, and into which they will sink again, like bubbles when they burst? ”

“ Vinal and I are going on an excursion about town to-night," said Richards; "won't you go with us?"
"Thank you," replied Morton, "I have letters to write, and do not mean to go out this evening."
Vinal and Richards accordingly set forth without him, the latter acquitting himself wholly to his companion's satisfaction and his own. Vinal, who inclined very little to youthful amusements, contemplated all he saw with the eye of a philosopher rather than of a sybarite, looking upon it as a curious study of human nature, in the knowledge of which he was always eager to perfect himself. ”

“ His mind was a good lever with a feeble fulcrum; a gun mounted on a tottering rampart. When every breath of emotion that touches the fine-strung organism quivers along the electric chord to the brain, kindling there strange perturbations, then philosophy must lower her tone, and stoicism itself must soon confess that its only resource is to avoid the enemy with whom it cannot cope. Vinal was but ill fitted to act the part he had undertaken. The excitements of villany were too much for him. Peace of mind was as needful to him as food and drink. ”

“ Three miles off, the rock of Ehrenberg rose in view, bearing aloft its heavy load of battlements and towers. Morton gave it one look, prayed it might be the last, and motioned his companion forward again.
They came to a lazy brook, stealing out of a marsh. In the mud by its side was the slough where a wild boar had wallowed. The solitude and savageness of the place shot a fresh life through Morton's failing veins. The sense came upon him that his fate was now in his own hands; the resolve that he would never be taken alive. He called Max to stop. ”

“ A feeling once rooted in her mind does not loosen its hold. There are very few who comprehend her. Her character is so balanced and so harmonious, so quiet and noiseless in its movement, that no one suspects the force, and faith, and energy that are in it. It is not in words or in looks that she shows herself. It is in action, in emergencies, that she declares her power over herself and over others."
Morton's passion glowed upon him with all its early fervor. ”

“ The sky for some days had been overclouded. He had lost the points of the compass; and when he saw the great highway stretching before him, dim and lonely in the gray of the morning, he thought, or hoped, that it would lead him into the heart of Switzerland. It was the pass of the Splugen, where it leaves the Rheinwald. Turning his back on safety, he began to plod on towards the lion's jaws.
Seeing a small cottage, in a recess of the forest, he reconnoitred it, with the laudable view of robbing a henroost. ”

“ Had Meredith met his old comrade as he was making his slow way among the rocks and ravines, in dress no better than the meanest peasant, his face moustached and bearded, and thin and dark with hardship, he would have needed the eyes of a lynx to detect Morton the millionaire. The mind of the latter shared, in some sort, the changes of his outer man. Proscribed and hunted, starved into fierceness, his best friend murdered at his side, his mood was, to say the least, none of the most benign. ”

“ Suddenly Morton's heart began to beat; a light step on the staircase reached his ear, and the rustling of a dress. Miss Leslie came in with her usual natural and quiet ease of manner, while he rose to receive her with his heart in his throat. And now, when he needed them most, his wits seemed to fail him. He tried to converse, and produced nothing but barren commonplace. Again and again the conversation flagged; and the hum and chirrup of the insect world without filled the pauses between.
He glanced at his companion.
"Be a man, you idiot," he apostrophized himself. ”

“ I am racked and torn like a toad under a harrow; no rest, no peace! What if Speyer should do as he threatens, print my letters, and placard them about the streets! I will buy them out of his hands if it cost all I have. And even then I shall not be safe, as long as this ruffian is above ground. With him and Morton to haunt me, my life is a slow death, a purgatory, a hell. ”

“ Morton had a strong native thirst for adventure, and a penchant for military exploit. In his present frame of mind, he felt violently impelled to cut loose from all his old ideas and scruples, and launch at once upon a new life, fresh, unshackled, and reckless,—to plunge headlong into the tumult of the active world; fight its battles, run its races, give and take its blows, strain after its prizes,—forget the past and all its associations in the fever of the present. Mexico rose before his thoughts—snowy volcanoes, and tropical forests ”

“ Breasting the rough heights, clinging to stumps, roots, and bushes, they made their way up with all the speed which desperate need could give them. They were soon among thick trees, hidden from the pursuers, and almost from each other. But the shouts of the soldiers came up from below: they all gave tongue like so many hounds.
"Curse your yelping throats!" gasped Morton. Breathless and half spent, he was clinging to a sapling on the edge of a steep pitch of the hill. One of the soldiers saw him. A musket shot rang from below, the hollow hum of the ball passing high above his head. ”