Frederic Jesup Stimson

“ You say, tones are a few thousand beats per second, and colors a few billion beats per second—what becomes of all the numbers left between? If colored lights count all these billions, up from red to violet, and white light is the sum of all the colors, what can be its number but infinity? But is a white light GOD? Or would you cipherers make of God a cipher? Smoke looks yellow against the sky, and blue against the forest—but how can its number change? You, who make all to a number, as governments do to convicts in a prison! ”

“ One’s heart beats quick to think what might have happened had she ventured to confession—the priest who married them still was with her, in the household, an honest priest, who loved del Torre, too. But Rome, which knows how to be gentle as a mother, can also be as cruel as the grave. So Dolores went on in building churches, and Don Sebastian offered his brave heart wherever he saw a bullet fly for liberty. The best work of the world is done by broken hearts. ”

“ One moment, it seems that she will be disturbed. The younger man has left the older on his walk—for they are not always together, and gossip has made him suitor for his cousin’s hand, and he stands a moment watching her, behind a group of tree-ferns. No lovelier a girl had surely even his eyes ever rested on, as she sat there stilly, though her wonderful eyes were lost to him, following the sunset. And she was the greatest heiress in all the Spanish Main.
He might have stepped forward, into the open, to her, and no one but Jacinta would have known. ”

“ And he did not dream her eyes had been at the tower-window ever since. For their eyes never met.
But the people knew, and so they called her “Our Lady of the Tower.” And Nuestra Doña del Torre is she called there still. And thus they lived there alone within that great house, each for pity of the other in courage, each for awe of love in silence; each so loving, so brave, so silent, that the other never knew. ”

“ Thirty thousand people are said to have perished. Many were swallowed in the chasm that opened on the mountain-side, like rents in a bulging sail bursted in a gale. No stone houses in Carácas more than one-story high were standing on that night—except the old Spanish castle where, in the tower-room, Dolores sat watching for her husband. ”

“ And looking at the map, it occurred to me that the Tennessee River was the natural avenue to my domains in that direction. Luckily, I made the acquaintance of a young land-prospector, with romantic instincts like my own; and the second evening after this idea came to me he and I were seated in a wooden dug-out canoe, my parcels of samples and his instruments in the waist of the boat, drifting swiftly down the brown stream at sunset, under the lofty shadow of the Lookout Mountain. ”

“ First, a nightmare came of evil passions; after murder and suicide and despair came revenge, envy, hatred, greed of money, greed of power, lust. I say “came,” for each one came on me with all the force the worst of men can feel. Had I been free, in some other place, I should inexorably have committed the crimes these evil passions breed, and there was always some pretext of a cause. Now it was revenge on Materialismus himself for his winning of Althea Hardy ”

“ The boys made fun of Tetherby; he bore it with a splendid smile and a twinkle in his ice-blue eye, until one day it went too far, and then he tackled the last offender and chucked him off the boat-house float into the river. He would have rowed upon the university crew, but that his digestion gave out; strong as he was in mind and body, nothing, that went for the nutrition and fostering of life, was well with him. Such men as he are repellent to the sane, and are willed by the world to die alone. ”

“ Then we all went to breakfast, the Misses Bruce both fresh as dewy wood-flowers, and Mrs. Judge Pennoyer radiating amiability. Only the head commissary and the section contractor were thought of sufficient social importance to breakfast with us, and the former from his stores brought many delicacies in cans and bottles. Then after breakfast we went to walk—the ladies with sunshades and gloves—upon the location; a broad swath cut through the rolling forest and undulating far as the eye could reach in either direction, dotted with men and mules. ”

“ Thou lovest me. On the morning thou shalt wed Don Sebastian I kill him.
“Ramon del Torre.”
He read it over; then he stopped and thought. His first impulse was to boast; his second, to intrigue. He was not all tiger; something of the serpent lay within the handsome youth.
“I will send it this evening,” he said to Jacinta. And in the evening this is what he wrote:
“Señorita Condesa: The Archbishop is my enemy and makes my uncle marry you. Have you confessed to him? Surely, you have loved me? On the day he marries you he shall kill your
“Ramon.” ”

“ A dry subject, an abstruse [Pg 6] subject, a useless subject—as one might think—but it roused Tetherby to sudden fury. He made a vehement defence of the great poet-philosopher against the dry, barren mathematics of the Newtonian science.
“Do you cipherers think all that is reducible to numbers? to so many beats per second, like your own dry hearts? Sound may be nothing but a quicker rattle—is it but a rattle, the music in your souls? If light is but the impact of more rapid molecules, does MAN bring nothing else, when he worships the glory of the dawn? ”

“ Adverting one moment to the molecular, or rather mathematical, theory—first propounded by Democritus, re-established by Leibnitz, and never since denied—that the universe, both of mind and matter, body and soul, was made merely by innumerable, infinitesimal points of motion, endlessly gyrating among themselves—mere points, devoid of materiality, devoid also of soul, but each a centre of a certain force, which scientists entitle gravitation, philosophers deem will, and poets name love—he went on to Light. ”

“ A woman’s conscience rules her heart, even in Spain; but a man, even Roman Catholic, will risk his own perdition to save her sorrow, or that no sin be hers. She must save him, she must be the judge. And sunrise found her pale but decided. Then she called Jacinta to her side, and asked her if she had carried to her husband (so she called him) her note.
Jacinta looked at her fiercely; but at the word “Husband,” started. Then she said she had torn it up.
At the Countess’s look she quailed, and lied again. She had it still, she said. Dolores bade her give it to him as he came from early mass. ”

“ The higher vibrations are supposed unintelligible to man, just as he fancies there is no more subtle medium than his (already hypothetical) ether. It is possible,” said Materialismus, speaking in italics and looking at Althea, “that these higher, almost infinitely rapid vibrations may be what are called the higher emotions or passions—like religion, love and hate—dwelling in a still more subtle, but yet material, medium, that poets and churches have picturesquely termed heart, conscience, soul.” As he said this I too looked at Althea. ”

“ This is the life story of Don Sebastian Ruy José Maria, Marques del Torre y Luna; and of Maria Josepha Dolores del Torre, Condesa de Luna, his wife; and of the old stone castle that alone the earthquake left standing in the pleasant city of Carácas.
The Holy Catholic Church had alone their secret; and she kept it; and now she has, laid up on earth, their treasure too. No longer such grim motives vex their country; if she battles with herself, it is for money or for acres of wide coffee land. ”

“ He broke some raw eggs in a glass, in some sherry, and placed it by my side, and I saw him bend the lever much farther.
“Perhaps,” I spoke out, then, “you can create the emotion, or the mental existence—whatever you call it—of God himself.” I spoke with scorn, for my mind was clearer than ever.
“I can—almost,” he muttered. “Just now I have turned the rhythm to the thought millions, which lie above what you call evil passions, between them and what you call the good ones. It is all a mere question of degree. In the eye of science all are the same; morally, one is alike so good as the other. ”

“ The love of a man for a girl is perhaps different from any other passion our souls on earth are tempered with. Daphnis and Chloe are pretty, natural, charming to paint and write vers de société about; but so simple as to be shallow, so natural as to be replaceable. To Daphnis, we know that any other Chloe will be Chloe too. And they are in reality selfish; they seek the consummation of their wishes: he his, she hers. It may be the same human energy ”

“ And all the youth of Carácas would gaze after her carriage; the young men driving out too, by themselves, in carriages, who had passed their days more in gambling or cock-fighting than with books and music; [Pg 152] never, indeed, at mass. For here the lords of creation vent their authority in ordaining their wives and sisters to the Church and goodness, themselves to evil. But the most hardened duellist among them could no more than look at Dolores; only her reckless cousin Ramon would venture to ride athwart her carriage, and presume upon his cousinship to bow. ”

“ Tetherby came from that strange, cold, Maine coast, washed in its fjords and beaches by a clear, cold sea, which brings it fogs of winter but never haze of summer; where men eat little, think much, drink only water, and yet live intense lives ”

“ And he opened the door that led from his study into the old warehouse-room, and I saw him touch one of the steel levers opposite the rows of glass rods. “You see,” he said, “my mechanism is a simple one. With all these rods of different lengths, and the almost infinite speed of revolution that I am able to gif them with the power that comes from the river applied through a chain of belted wheels, is a rosined leather tongue, like that of a music-box or the bow of a violin, touching each one; and so I get any number of beats per second that I will.” ”

“ He had never been back within the walls of Carácas; and, at nearly forty, he learned of his only aunt’s death following his uncle’s, and of the little girl they left, and of his guardianship.
A little girl she appeared to his imagination on the pampas; when he got to Carácas, she was a young woman. The General’s locks were already grizzled and his face weather-beaten with ten years’ open life on the plains; his face was marked, close beside the eye, with the scar of a sabre. He had one interview with Dolores, saw her nurse, her instructors, her father confessor ”

“ With Althea Hardy, I think, I was in love.
In the winter of my second year at college there came to town a certain Dr. Materialismus—a German professor, scientist, socialist—ostensibly seeking employment as a German [Pg 10] instructor at the college; practising hypnotism, magnetism, mesmerism, and mysticism; giving lectures on Hegel, believing in Hartmann, and in the indestructibility of matter and the destructibility of the soul; and his soul was a damned one, and he cared not for the loss of it. ”

“ Dolores was brought up as follows: At five she rose, and went, with Jacinta, to early mass—nearly always to a different church, as is the seemly custom in Carácas, lest young men should take advantage of it and take [Pg 151] position behind the chairs of their adored ones in church, where they could not be repelled; for, of course, no young gentleman, however madly in love, would insult his lady by accosting her in the open street. After mass, at six, being the time of sunrise and by comparison safe, Jacinta would take her charge for a walk, usually on the Calvareo, then deserted. ”

“ The man can renounce his love; but he desires her well-being with a will to which murder is an incident and the will divine but an obstacle to be overcome.
[Pg 170]
The Archbishop had told del Torre that his nephew had been married already—secretly, but married—married to the woman who came to seek him out at the camp. Against this wall del Torre’s will had been beating in vain before his own betrothal to Dolores was announced. If she could not marry Ramon, it might, indeed, be best she married him. ”

“ God gives in all things compensation; and even sins, that are not mean or selfish, have their half atoning virtues. [Pg 146] Their silence was soothing to her sorrow; they never knew. But the priest?—The Church of Rome is cruel, but it keeps its secrets. And only it and Heaven know if their lives were one long agony of misguidance, as many lives must be on earth—perhaps sometimes the priest-confessor may help in such affairs; if so, God speed the Jesuits. But one thing is sure: in all their lives, after their marriage, they never met. ”

“ Higginbotham, Miss May Bruce.”
I bow to the more languid beauty, who does not rise, but smiles a twin sister of Miss Jeanie’s smile, showing her little white teeth and tapping her little foot in a way to make a man distracted which to look at.
“I thought you didn’t seem to be getting on very well,” says the recumbent May, “but now, I suppose, I can go to sleep,” and she pulls the lace handkerchief back over her eyes, and Jeanie leads me (it is the word) back to our seat on the other side of the car. “We are twin sisters; and some people can’t tell one from the other. ”

“ Yet I wish she would pronounce the t in “gentleman.” She does not bear malice long, but asks “where I come from?”
“Boston,” I say; “and I am twenty-three.”
She laughs merrily, in forgiveness, with a dear, lovable, quick sense of humor. Then she scans me curiously. “I never saw a gen’leman from Boston before.”
“There are some there,” I answer, humbly.
“Of course we see plenty of commercial travellers,” she says, and the conversation languishes. I look out the window, for suggestions, at the tall mountain timber and the bearded gray moss. It suggests nothing but partridges. ”

“ Yet intercourse is possible always betwixt young people who seek each other out; and all Carácas gave Ramon to her for her suitor. And to-night even, as he stood and glowered at the Archbishop from behind the tree-ferns, he had another chance. ”