PART II.
Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St. George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who, perceiving that Éloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was satisfactory; and Éloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others with the result of bad government; their association with the Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was, moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred matters about which he knew nothing at all,—and always given, in spite of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.
In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.
A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and Éloise, weary of confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place, as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's people but adored her.
"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not deigning a second address for a second rebuff,—"It will be quite impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into rivers."
Éloise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way, strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr. St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page, and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by, there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which she had stood.
"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices our still life so well!"
"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried Éloise, freeing herself.
"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little witch!"
"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"
"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."
"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."
"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all safe,—it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."
Éloise was a little sobered.
"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.
"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely impassable."
And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St. George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St. George expected, Éloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then, looking up, said,—
"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."
Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.
"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing out Éloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him swear! He galloped off at last like mad."
And as Éloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for her in the glass, the familiar girl added,—
"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,—oh, no, indeed!—but at all of us, to think we'd let you go alone."
"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken to your master about buying Vane?"
"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,—we minded ole Massa for lub,—but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St. George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean to,—as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested Hazel.
"Mr. St. George," said Éloise, "is very good to his people; they ought to wish to obey him."
"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business here."
"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said Éloise, facing the suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."
But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny cheek, she added, in a low voice,—
"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"
"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."
Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before Éloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.
It was one afternoon that Éloise sat at the drawing-room window, having recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect, just then,—her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.
"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.
Éloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek. Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other, "I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a hesitating voice came sliding towards him,—
"Mr. St. George"——
"I beg your pardon,—did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.
"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Éloise.
She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort, then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.
"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid, who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger, and I became attached to her"——
And before Éloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's riding-whip,—that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the appropriation of everything about her.
"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."
"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,—just, you know, as I might have been"——
Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that Éloise added, throwing back her head again,—
"Just as I am, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for several——Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her. I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with, when I was a little girl,—and she wouldn't let me have it, of course. Pretty initials!"
"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.
Éloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and, unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George laughed.
"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked Éloise then, mischievously.
But before he could have replied, she resumed,—
"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"——
"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours, Miss Éloise?"
"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."
"Indeed!"
"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen him; he is here a good deal,—by stealth: and they want to be married. But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and they are afraid, and—and—could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"
"I could, Miss Changarnier."
"And you will, then?" cried Éloise, springing up.
"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."
"Won't he?"
"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off the place."
"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."
"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the vicious ones are transported."
"But perhaps he would give him to you."
"Miss Éloise, he would give him to you."
"Me? I have never seen him."
"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."
"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give Vane to me?"
"Miss Éloise, I will see what I can do about it first."
"How kind you are! Thank you!"
And Éloise was about to go.
"One moment, if you please," said the other.
And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in too assured a tone.
"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should you in turn grant that enemy a favor."
"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."
"Well, then,—I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,—promise me now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"
And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.
"A whole promise is rash," said Éloise, laughing. "Half a one I give you."
"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would know it too.
It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a fire upon the hearth, and Éloise sitting on the floor before it with her box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went soaring up the chimney.
"In pursuit of an ignis-fatuus?" asked he, stooping over her an instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress, that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.
"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,—but there 'a no lustre, no flicker,—I can't find out the secret of painting flame."
"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George, unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.
And Éloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and went to bed.
So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on with her tatting and contrivances.
Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each other with less frozen chill than St. George and Éloise did on the succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Éloise silently cast up her accounts.
One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter, Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,—
"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.
"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to Éloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."
"I shall still have my work to do," said Éloise; and she went into the cabinet and sharpened her pens with a vim.
It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and perplexity, if Éloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the guests; but that was not set down in her part, and Éloise rightly felt that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget all about it,—succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.
It was past noon when Éloise, having finished her task, and having remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet, where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.
He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward, and said,—
"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."
"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in time.
Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black, of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow, set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium. Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his property,—through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.
Éloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person, constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and ran away.
Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.
"Who would not be the Abélard to such an Éloise?" he said.
There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the while a melancholy old tune.
"I'll tell you what, St. George"——
Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.
"You were about to impart some information?"
"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"
"It is no nun of my shriving."
"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"
"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am tyrant,—it is she who stands for that;—I am only Mordecai the Jew sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St. George,—"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand Unapproachable."
"Tant mieux. My way is all the clearer."
"Your way to what?"
"To the altar!"
"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George, the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the heels taking an altitude.
"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry Éloise Changarnier."
"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."
"You!"
Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.
Meantime Éloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to the group, in grand tenue, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind up Éloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim with sundry fervent ejaculations.
"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell me. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I declare——Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"
"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue poison-bells!"
"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."
"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said Éloise, turning with her smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.
"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his shoulder, as he took Éloise out to dinner, "my intention was the earlier; it will succeed!"
"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good general expose his campaign?"
"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed it."
"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George, severely.
"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they moved on.
Whether she would or not, Éloise found herself in exactly the same position in the house as before her adopted father's death,—partly because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of Éloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half undone, or a mantle dropping off,—trifles that only gave one the desire to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so controlled. But of that Éloise never dreamed.
As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of Mr. Marlboro's devotion Éloise was quite aware,—and whereas, playing with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully Éloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro' begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him. But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Éloise did not try to dispel the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro' bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,—
"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"
and constant as the magnet to its poles.
It was still the steps of Éloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow, he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes; to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose essence told all his philosophy:—"The great error in government," he said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government, individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."
Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening, as Marlboro' thus harangued Éloise.
"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all oppose."
"Nullification is a good solvent."
"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the horizon, man!"
"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"
"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr. St. George, bowing to Éloise; "and as to the last,—I'll none of it!"
And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Éloise was about to ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.
"What has that contrabandista been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St. George.
Éloise looked ignorantly up.
"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says, when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let us make the best of it!"
"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"
"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.
Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Éloise to take a vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears, or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat, and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she found another awaiting her,—her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled towards her feet,—her side cramped, behold, a cushion,—she looked for fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.
Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if Éloise had thought of once looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,—that, if they rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was secured,—and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and smiled and lightly talked the while,—not that her music was not sweet, but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask. Yet Éloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there, she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that, if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower beneath the sun;—to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool and curt to Earl St. George for days.
It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea, Éloise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St. George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which they were all acting, Éloise spilled her tea and made some work for Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on Éloise that she had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.
"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a favor."
"Then I shall."
"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.
But Éloise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.
Éloise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that, stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung above her head; and when Éloise laid her hand gently on her shoulder, she sprang as if one had struck her.
"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.
It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and Hazel, secure of Éloise's efforts, had married. It was one of the immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves were wont to journey.
Éloise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza, and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion, and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro' leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. Éloise went and took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea, a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs, like an azure mist.
"There is something there that I want," said Éloise, archly, looking at the Bluffs.
"There? you shall not wish twice."
Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.
"That is my little maid," said Éloise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles awhile, though. Is she not pretty,—Hazel?"
"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"
"Yes."
"And you want Vane?"
"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."
"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I would have difficulty, Miss Éloise, in pardoning such an offence to you, yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"
Éloise laughed in her charming way, and said,—
"But, Mr. Marlboro', would it not be an admirable lesson to your people, if Vane were sold?"
"A lesson to teach them all to go and do likewise, eh, Marlboro'?" said St. George, passing, with Miss Humphreys on his arm.
"I have never sold, I never sell, a slave," replied Marlboro', in his placid tone; but St. George was out of hearing. "Yet, Miss Éloise,—if—if you will accept him"——
"Mr. Marlboro'! Indeed? Truly indeed? How happy you make me!"
"And you can make me as happy,—happier, by the infinity of heaven over earth!"
"But ought I to accept such a gift?" asked Éloise, oblivious of his last speech. "But can I?—may I?"—as St. George's warning stole into her memory.
"Most certainly you can! most certainly you shall! he is yours!" And before Éloise could pour forth one of her multitudinous thanks, he had moved away.
Marlboro's, however, was not that noble nature that spurns to beg at the moment when it grants. Directly, he had wheeled about, and with an eager air was again beside her.
"And, Éloise," he said, "if in response I might have one smile, one hope"——
Thoughtlessly enough, Éloise turned her smiling face upon him, and gave him her hand.
"And you give it to me at last, this hand, to crown my life!" he said,—for to his excited brain the trifling deed seemed the weighty event, and when he looked up Éloise still was smiling. Only for a second, though, for her processes of thought were not instantaneous, while to him it was one of Mahomet's moments holding an eternity, and she smiled while she was thinking, thinking simply of her little handmaiden's pleasure. She tried to release her hand. But Mr. Marlboro' did not know that his grasp upon it was that of a vice, for under an artificial stimulus every action is as intense as the fired fancy itself. And as she found it impossible to free it without visible violence, other thoughts visited Éloise. Why should she not give it to him? Who else cared for it? What object had her lonely life? Speak sweetly as they might, what one of her old gallants forgot her loss of wealth? Here was a man to make happy, here was a heart to rest upon, here was a slave of his own passions to set free. Why should she continue to live with Mr. St. George for her haughty master, when here was this man at her feet? Why, but that suddenly the conviction smote her that she loved the one and despised the other, that she adored the master and despised the slave? And she snatched away her hand.
Just then Mr. St. George was coming down the piazza again, on his promenade, his head bent low as he spoke to the clinging little lady on his arm. Passing Éloise, as he raised his face, their eyes met. She was doing, he thought, the very thing that he had disadvised, and, as if to warn her afresh, he looked long, a derisive smile curling his proud lip. That was enough. "He knows it!" exclaimed Éloise to herself. "He believes it! He thinks I love him! He never shall be sure of it!" And turning once more, her face hung down and away, she laid her hand in Marlboro's, without a word or a glance. He bent low over it in the shadow, pressing it with his fervent lips, murmuring, "Mine! mine at last! my own!" And St. George saw the whole.
Just then a little sail crept in sight from where they stood, winding down the creek at the foot of the lawn.
"Oh, how delightful to be on the water to-night!" cried Laura Murray.
"You have but to command," said Mr. St. George, with a certain gayety that seemed struck out like sparks against the flinty fact of the late occurrence,—and half the party trooped down the turf to the shore. The boats were afloat and laden before one knew it. Mr. Marlboro' and Éloise were just one instant too late. Laura Murray shook a triumphant handkerchief at them, and St. George feathered his oar, pausing a moment as if he would return, and then gave a great sweep and his boat fairly leaped over the water.
Mr. Marlboro' did not hesitate. There was the sail they had first seen, now on the point of being lowered beneath the alder-bushes by the young hunters who had sought shore for the night. Gold slipped from one hand to another, a word, a name, and a promise. Éloise was on board, expecting Mrs. Arles and Mrs. Houghton to follow. Marlboro' sprang upon the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on their wild career.
"Marlboro' is mad!" said St. George, with a whitening cheek.
Marlboro', standing up, one arm about the mast, and catching the slant beam of the late-rising moon on his face, that shone awfully rapt and intent, saluted them with an ironical cheer, and dashed on. Éloise held the tiller for the moment, still pulsating with her late emotions, not above a trifling play of vanity, welcoming the exhilaration of a race, where she might half forget her trouble, and pleased with a vague anticipation of some intervention that might recall the word which even in these five dragging moments had already begun to corrode and eat into her heart like a rusting fetter. The oarsmen in the wherries bent their muscles to the strife, the boats danced over the tiny crests, the ladies sang their breeziest sea-songs to cheer them at the work. The sail-boat rounded a curve and was almost out of sight.
"Oars never caught sails yet," muttered St. George, and he put his boat to the shore. "There, Murray, try your lazy mettle, and take my oar. As for me, I'm off,"—and he sprang upon the bank, sending the boat spinning off into the current again from his foot. In ten minutes a horseman went galloping by on the high-road skirting the shore, with a pace like that of the Spectre of the Storm.
"Now, Mr. Marlboro'," said Éloise, "shall we not turn back, victorious?"
"Turn?" said Marlboro', shaking loose another fold of the linen. "I never turn! Look your last on the tiny tribe,—we shall see them no more!"
Éloise sprang to her feet. He caught her hand and replaced her; his face was so white that it shone, there was a wild glitter in his eye, and the smile that brooded over her had something in it absolutely terrific.
"We have gone far enough," said Éloise, resolutely. "I wish to rejoin my friends."
"You are with me!" said Marlboro', proudly.
She was afraid to say another word, for to oppose him now in his exultant rage might only work the mood to frenzy. The creek had widened almost to a river,—the sea was close at hand, with its great tumbling surf. She looked at the horizon and the hill for help, but none came; destruction was before them, and on they flew.
Marlboro' stood now, and steadied the tiller with his foot.
"This is motion!" said he. "We fly upon the wings of the wind! The viewless wind comes roaring out of the black region of the East, it fills the high heaven, it roars on to the uttermost undulation of the atmosphere, and we are a part of it! We are only a mote upon its breath, a dust-atom driven before it, Éloise,—and yet one great happiness is greater than it, drowns it in a vaster flood of viewless power, can whisper to it calm!"
How should Éloise contradict him? With such rude awakening, he might only snatch her in his arms and plunge down to death. Perhaps he half divined the fear.
"Yes, Éloise," he said. "They are both here, life and death, at our beck! I can take you to my heart, one instant the tides divide, then they close above us, and you are mine for ever and ever and only,—sealed mine beneath all this crystal sphere of the waters! We hear the gentle lapping of the ripples on the shore, we hear the tones of evening-bells swim out and melt above us, we hear the oar shake off its shower of tinkling drops,—up the jewel-strewn deeps of heaven the planets hang out their golden lamps to light our slumbers! Heart to heart and lip to lip, we are at rest, we are at peace, nothing comes between us, our souls have the eternities in which to mingle!"
He saw Éloise shudder, and turned from his dream, blazing full upon her. "Life, then, is best!" he cried. "But life together and alone, life where we count out its throbs in some far purple island of the main, prolonged who knows how far?—love shall make for us perpetual youth, there shall no gloom enter our Eden, perfect solitude and perfect bliss! Alone, we two in our pride and our joy can defy the powers of any other heaven, we shall become gods ourselves! Up helm and away! Life is best!"
THE NEVA.
I walk, as in a dream,
Beside the sweeping stream,
Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:
Serene the temples stand,
And sleep, on either hand,
The palace-fronts along the granite quays.
Where golden domes, remote,
Above the sea-mist float,
The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;
And Peter's fortress-spire,
A slender lance of fire,
Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.
The pillared angel soars
Above the silent shores;
Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;
And down the watery line
The exiled Sphinxes pine
For Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.
I hear, amid the hush,
The restless current's rush,
The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:
A voice portentous, deep,
To charm a monarch's sleep
With dreams of power resistless as his own.
Strong from the stormy Lake,
Pure from the springs that break
In Valdaï vales the forest's mossy floor,
Greener than beryl-stone
From fir woods vast and lone,
In one full stream the braided currents pour.
"Build up your granite piles
Around my trembling isles,"
I hear the River's scornful Genius say:
"Raise for eternal time
Your palaces sublime,
And flash your golden turrets in the day!
"But in my waters cold
A mystery I hold,—
Of empires and of dynasties the fate:
I bend my haughty will,
Unchanged, unconquered still,
And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.
"Your fetters I allow,
As a strong man may bow
His sportive neck to meet a child's command,
And curb the conscious power
That in one awful hour
Could whelm your halls and temples where they stand.
"When infant Rurik first
His Norseland mother nursed,
My willing flood the future chieftain bore:
To Alexander's fame
I lent my ancient name,
What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.
"Then Peter came. I laughed
To feel his little craft
Borne on my bosom round the marshy isles:
His daring dream to aid,
My chafing floods I laid,
And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.
"I wait the far-off day
When other dreams shall sway
The House of Empire builded by my side,—
Dreams that already soar
From yonder palace-door,
And cast their wavering colors on my tide,—
"Dreams where white temples rise
Below the purple skies,
By waters blue, which winter never frets,—
Where trees of dusky green
From terraced gardens lean,
And shoot on high the reedy minarets.
"Shadows of mountain-peaks
Vex my unshadowed creeks;
Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;
And islands, bald and high,
Break my clear round of sky,
And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.
"Then, ere the cold winds chase
These visions from my face,
I see the starry phantom of a crown,
Beside whose blazing gold
This cheating pomp is cold,
A moment hover, as the veil drops down.
"Build on! That day shall see
My streams forever free.
Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,
The frost shall split each wall:
Your domes shall crack and fall:
My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"
On palace, temple, spire,
The morn's descending fire
In thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:
Life's rising murmur drowned
The Neva where he wound
Between his isles: he keeps his secret well.
ROBSON.
In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St. Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a horrible little court branching northward from it good old George Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses, with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city. Next to Napoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest street I know.
In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert, a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance, so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic. Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French noblesse, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.
My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago, there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a rough wooden portico before it,—not unlike such a portico as I have recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,—and with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of interludes and burlettas,—that is, of pieces in which the dialogue was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse. The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there was but one step.
It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren, having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre. He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,—father and son are, alas! both dead,—and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the original Sam Weller in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,—save in one particular,—they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to hear at clubs and in critical coteries—at the Albion and the Garrick and the Café de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Réunion in Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to reign supreme—rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing Macbeth and Shylock in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody—among the bodies who were anybody—had ever heard of him before. Whence he came, or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his name was Frederick Robson.
Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had already attained middle age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.
A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic and his realization of financial success. The critics and the connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor, named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender, half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this, will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?
The Olympic arose "like a phœnix from its ashes." To use language less poetical, a wealthy tradesman—a cheesemonger, I think—found the capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was in the old or the new Olympic—but I think it was in the new one—that the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager. He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious manner. He was a man about town, a viveur, a dandy; and it turned out one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens; and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged himself in the jail.
It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play the part of Jem Baggs, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player, who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson, who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills, considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year. "Vilikins and his Dinah" created a furore. My countrymen are always going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip. Robson's portrait as Jem Baggs was in every shop-window. A newspaper began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"—
"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."
A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible "Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in Jem Baggs. His "make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into preternatural shape.
New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years before, in Macbeth, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating, whiskey-drinking Scotchman,—and in Shylock, a servile, fawning, obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew. In the Yellow Dwarf he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,—full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,—an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the outré, an unmistakably tragic element,—an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the cothurnus over his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation of Medea, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife of Jason, the diabolic loathing in which she holds Creüsa, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,—all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with astonishing force and vigor. The original Medea, the great Ristori herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him. She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue. "Uomo straordinario!" she went away saying.
I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after Jem Baggs his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity—which some thought would prove a magnificent one to him—of showing the grotesque side of insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities. A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine! Perhaps the piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run. A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of Sir Giles Overreach in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that Sir Giles, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing on a purely "legitimate" rôle. I was half persuaded to write a burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do his very best with Sir Giles; but a feeling, half of laziness, and half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got farther than the first scene.
By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in reality, a translation from the French.
The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. In Daddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Molière's Avare I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's Volpone, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper—the character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens—in Wilkie Collins's play, domestic drama was not his forte; or, rather, that it was not his fortissimo. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible, he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could play Daddy Hardacre, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none but himself could at once awe and convulse in Medea and the Yellow Dwarf. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,—their eternal grimacing and word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness. Planché retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas. Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his old loves, and Jem Baggs and Boots at the Swan, Medea and the Yellow Dwarf, continued to be his favorite parts.
The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities, decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury. Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past. The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly destitute of foundation. Don Basilio, in Beaumarchais's play, might have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel, "Calomniez, calomniez, il en résultera toujours quelque chose." He should have taught the world—if the world wants teaching—how to calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he is separated from his wife; and in any case, declare that he drinks. He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the parlor.
Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial papers—the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found—have attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water. The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has for years been overworking himself,—and that latterly prosperity has laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you shall make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out, "I am rich, I have enough, Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios, I will work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me down under my own fig-tree,"—Fortune dismisses him with a sneer: "Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and ennui, take gout and the palsy, with you."
I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never can spare a good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good, bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and our women-singers,—the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't sing, but will sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his instance.
Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the bashfulness, the mauvaise honte, which made him so shy and retiring in private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.
THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY, IN SCOTLAND.
There are phenomena in Nature which give the clue to so many of its mysteries that their correct interpretation leads at once to the broadest generalizations and to the rapid advance of science in new directions. The explanation of one very local and limited problem may clear up many collateral ones, since its solution includes the answer to a whole set of kindred inquiries. The "parallel roads" of Glen Roy offer such a problem. For half a century they have been the subject of patient investigation and the boldest speculation. To them natural philosophers have returned again and again to test their theories, and until they are fully understood no steady or permanent advance can be made in the various views which they have suggested to different observers. The theory of the formation of lakes by barriers, presented by McCulloch and Sir T. Lauder-Dick, that of continental upheavals and subsidences, advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that of inundations by great floods, maintained by Professor H. D. Rogers and Sir George Mackenzie, that of glacial action, brought forward by myself, have been duly discussed with reference to this difficult case; all have found their advocates, all have met with warm opposition, and the matter still remains a mooted point; but the one of all these theories which shall stand the test of time and repeated examination and be eventually accepted will explain many a problem besides the one it was meant to solve, and lead to farther progress in other directions.
I propose here to reconsider the facts of the case, and to present anew my own explanation of them, now more than twenty years old, but which I have never had an opportunity of publishing in detail under a popular form, though it appeared in the scientific journals of the day.
Before considering, however, the phenomena of Glen Roy, or the special glacial areas scattered over Scotland and the other British Isles, let us see what general evidence we have that glaciers ever existed at all in that realm. The reader will pardon me, if, at the risk of repetition, I sum up here the indications which, from our knowledge of glaciers as they at present exist, must be admitted, wherever they are found, as proof of their former existence. Such a summary may serve also as a guide to those who would look for glacial traces where they have not hitherto been sought.
In the first place, we have to consider the singular abrasion of the surfaces over which the glacier has moved, quite unlike that produced by the action of water. We have seen that such surfaces, wherever the glacier-marks have not been erased by some subsequent action, have several unfailing characteristics: they are highly polished, and they are also marked with scratches or fine striæ, with grooves and deeper furrows. Where best preserved, the smooth surfaces are shining; they have a lustre like stone or marble artificially polished by the combined friction and pressure of some harder material than itself until all its inequalities have been completely levelled and its surface has become glossy. Any marble mantel-piece may serve as an example of this kind of glacier-worn surface.
The levelling and abrading action of water on rock has an entirely different character. Tides or currents driven powerfully and constantly against a rocky shore, and bringing with them hard materials, may produce blunt, smooth surfaces, such as the repeated blows of a hammer on stone would cause; but they never bring it to a high polish, because, the grinding materials not being held steadily down, in firm, permanent contact with the rocky surfaces against which they move, as is the case with the glacier, but, on the contrary, dashed to and fro, they strike and rebound, making a succession of blows, but never a continuous, uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen[A] that we have beneath every glacier a complete apparatus adapted to all the results described above. In the softer fragments ground to the finest powder under the incumbent mass we have a polishing paste; in the hard materials set in that paste, whether pebbles, or angular rocky fragments of different sizes, or grains of sand, we have the various graving instruments by which the finer or coarser lines are drawn. Not only are these lines frequently uninterrupted for a distance of many yards, but they are also parallel, except when some change takes place in the thickness of the ice, which may slightly modify the trend of the mass, or where lines in a variety of directions are produced by the intermittent action of separate glaciers running successively at different angles over the same surfaces. The deeper grooves sometimes present a succession of short staccato touches, just as when one presses the finger vertically along some surface where the resistance is sufficient to interrupt the action without actually stopping it,—a kind of grating motion, showing how firmly the instrument which produced it must have been held in the moving mass. No currents or sudden freshets carrying hard materials with them, even moving along straight paths down hill-sides or mountain-slopes, have ever been known to draw any such lines. They could be made only by some instrument held fast as in a vice by the moving power. Something of the kind is occasionally produced by the drag of a wheel grating over rocks covered with loose materials.
It has been said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period, icebergs and floating ice from more northern latitudes might account for the extensive transportation of the loose materials scattered in a continuous sheet over a large portion of the globe. There can be no doubt that an immense amount of débris of all sorts is carried to great distances by floating ice; where their presence is due to this cause, however, they are everywhere stranded along the shore or dropped to the sea-bottom. Large boulders are frequently left by the ice along the New-England coast, and we shall trace them hereafter among the sand-dunes of Cape Cod. But before it can be admitted that the drift-phenomena, and the polished and engraved surfaces with which they are everywhere intimately associated, are owing to floating ice or icebergs, it must be shown that all these appearances have been produced by some agency moving from the sea-board towards the land, and extending up to the very summits of the mountains, or else that all the countries exhibiting glacial phenomena have been sunk below the ocean to the greatest height at which glacier-marks are found, and have since gradually emerged to their present level. Now, though geologists are lavish of immersions when something is to be accounted for which they cannot otherwise explain, and a fresh baptism of old Mother Earth is made to wash away many obstacles to scientific theories, yet the common sense of the world will hardly admit the latter assumption without positive proof, and all the evidence of the kind we have, at the period under consideration, indicates only a comparatively slight change of relative level between sea and land within a narrow belt along the shores; and even this is shown to be posterior, not anterior, to the glacial phenomena. As to the supposition that the motion proceeded from the sea towards the land, all the facts are against it, since the whole trend of these phenomena is from inland centres toward the shore, instead of being from the coast upward.
Certainly, no one familiar with the facts could suppose that floating ice or icebergs had abraded, polished, and furrowed the bottom of narrow valleys as we find them worn, polished, and grooved by glaciers. And it must be remembered that this is a theory founded not upon hypothesis, but upon the closest comparison. I have not become acquainted with these marks in regions where glaciers no longer exist, and made a theory to explain their presence. I have, on the contrary, studied them where they are in process of formation. I have seen the glacier engrave its lines, plough its grooves and furrows in the solid rock, and polish the surfaces over which it moved, and was familiar with all this when I found afterwards appearances corresponding exactly to those which I had investigated in the home of the present glaciers. I could therefore say, and I think with some reason, that "this also is the work of the glacier acting in ancient times as it now acts in Switzerland."
There is another character of glacial action distinguishing it from any abrasions caused by water, even if freighted with a large amount of loose materials. On any surface over which water flows we shall find that the softer materials have yielded first and most completely. Hard dikes will be left standing out, while softer rocks around them are worn away,—furrows will be eaten into more deeply,—fissures will be widened,—clay-slates will be wasted,—while hard sandstone or limestone and granite will show greater resistance. Not so with surfaces over which the levelling plough of the glacier has passed. Wherever softer and harder rocks alternate, they are brought to one outline; where dikes intersect softer rock, they are cut to one level with it; where rents or fissures traverse the rock, they do not seem to have been widened or scooped out more deeply, but their edges are simply abraded on one line with the adjoining surfaces. Whatever be the inequality in the hardness of the materials of which the rock consists, even in the case of pudding-stone, the surface is abraded so evenly as to leave the impression that a rigid rasp has moved over all the undulations of the land, advancing in one and the same direction and levelling all before it.
Among the inequalities of the glacier-worn surfaces which deserve especial notice, are the so-called "roches moutonnées." They are knolls of a peculiar appearance, frequent in the Alps, and first noticed by the illustrious De Saussure, who designated them by that name, because, where they are numerous and seen from a distance, they resemble the rounded backs of a flock of sheep resting on the ground. These knolls are the result of the prolonged abrasion of masses of rocks separated by deep indentations wide enough to be filled up by large glaciers, overtopping the summits of the intervening prominences, and passing over them like a river, or like tide-currents flowing over a submerged ledge of rock. It is evident that water rushing over such sunken hills or ledges, adapting itself readily to all the inequalities over which it flows, and forming eddies against the obstacles in its course, will scoop out tortuous furrows upon the bottom, and hollow out rounded cavities against the walls, acting especially along preëxisting fissures and upon the softer parts of the rock,—while the glacier, moving as a solid mass, and carrying on its under side its gigantic file set in a fine paste, will in course of time abrade uniformly the angles against which it strikes, equalize the depressions between the prominent masses, and round them off until they present those smooth bulging knolls known as the "roches moutonnées" in the Alps, and so characteristic everywhere of glacier-action. A comparison of any tide-worn hummock with such a glacier-worn mound will convince the observer that its smooth and evenly rounded surface was never produced by water.
Besides their peculiar form, the roches moutonnées present all the characteristic features of glacier-action in their polished surfaces accompanied with the straight lines, grooves, and furrows above described. But there are two circumstances connected with these knolls deserving special notice. They frequently present the glacial marks only on one side, while the opposite side has all the irregularities and roughness of a hill-slope not acted upon by ice. It is evident that the polished side was the one turned towards the advancing glacier, the side against which the ice pressed in its onward movement,—while it passed over the other side, the lee side as we may call it, without coming in immediate contact with it, bridging the depression, and touching bottom again a little farther on. As an additional evidence of this fact, we frequently find on the lee side of such knolls accumulations of the loose materials which the glacier carries with it. It is only, however, when the knolls are quite high, and abrupt enough to allow any rigid substance to bridge over the space in its descent from the summit to the surface below, that we find these conditions; when the knolls are low and slope gently downward in every direction, they present the characteristic glacier-surfaces equally on all sides. This circumstance should be borne in mind by all who investigate the traces of glacier-action; for this inequality in the surfaces presented by the opposite sides of any obstacle in the path of the ice is often an important means of determining the direction of its motion.
The other characteristic peculiarity of these roches moutonnées consists in the direction of the glacier-scratches, which ascend the slope to its summit in a direct line on one side, while they deviate to the right and left on the other sides of the knoll, more or less obliquely according to its steepness. Occasionally, large boulders may be found perched on the very summit of such prominences. Their position is inexplicable by the supposition of currents as the cause of their transportation. Any current strong enough to carry a boulder to such a height would of course sweep it on with it. This phenomenon finds, however, an easy explanation in the glacial theory. The thickness of such a sheet of ice is of course less above such a hill or mound than over the lower levels adjoining it. Not only will the ice melt, therefore, more readily at this spot, but, as ice is transparent to heat, the summit of the prominence will become warmed by the rays of the sun, and will itself facilitate the melting of the ice above it. On the breaking up of the ice, therefore, such a spot will be the first to yield, and allow the boulders carried on the back of the glacier to fall into the hollow thus formed, where they will rest upon the projecting rock left uncovered. This is no theoretical explanation; there are such cases in Switzerland, where holes in the ice are formed immediately above the summit of hills or prominences over which the glacier passes, and into which it drops its burdens. Of course, where the ice is constantly renewed over such a spot by the onward progress of the glacier, these materials may be carried off again; but if we suppose such a case to occur at the breaking up of the glacier-period, when the ice was disappearing forever from such a spot, it is easy to account for the poising of these large boulders on prominent peaks or ledges.
The appearances about the roches moutonnées, especially the straight scratches and grooves on the side up which the ice ascended, have led to a mistaken view of the mode in which large boulders are transported by ice. It has been supposed, by those who, while they accepted the glacial theory, were not wholly conversant with the mode of action of glaciers, that, in passing through the bottom of a valley, for instance, the glacier would take up large boulders, and, carrying them along with it, would push them up such a slope and deposit them on its summit. It is true that large boulders may sometimes be found in front of glaciers among the materials of their terminal moraines, and may, upon any advance of the glacier, be pushed forward by it. But I know of no example of erratic boulders being carried to considerable distances and raised from lower to higher levels by this means. All the angular boulders perched upon prominent rocks must have fallen upon the surface of the glacier in the upper part of its course, where rocky ledges rise above its surface and send down their broken fragments. The surface of any boulder carried under the ice, or pushed along for any distance at its terminus, would show the friction and pressure to which it had been subjected. In this connection it should be remembered that in the case of large glaciers low hills form no obstacle to their onward progress, especially when the glacier is thick enough to cover them completely, and even to rise far above them. The roches moutonnées about the Grimsel show that hills many hundred feet high have been passed over by the great glacier of the Aar, when it descended as far as Meyringen, without having seemingly influenced its onward progress.
But in enumerating the evidences of glacier-action, we have to remember not only the effects produced upon the surface of the ground by the ice itself, but also the deposits it has left behind it. The loose materials scattered over the face of the earth may point as distinctly to the source of their distribution as does the character of the rocky surfaces on which they rest indicate the different causes of abrasion. In characteristic localities the loose materials deposited by glaciers may readily be recognized at first sight, and distinguished from water-worn pebbles; nor is it difficult to distinguish both from loose materials resulting from the decomposition of rocks on the spot,—the latter always agreeing with the rocks on which they rest, while the decomposition to which they owe their separation from the solid rock is often still going on. Such débris are found everywhere about disintegrating rocks, and they constantly mingle with the loose fragments brought from a distance by various agencies. They are found upon and among the glacier-worn pebbles, especially where the latter have themselves been disturbed since their accumulation. They are also found among water-worn pebbles, wherever the rocky beds of our rivers or the rocky bluffs of our sea-shores crumble down. In investigating the character of loose materials transported from greater or less distances, either by the agency of glaciers or by water-currents, it is important at the very outset to discriminate between these deposits of older date and the local accessions mingling with them.
Occasionally we may have also to distinguish between all these deposits and the débris brought down by land-slides, or by sudden freshets transporting to a distance a vast amount of loose materials which are neither ice-worn nor water-worn. At Rossberg, for instance, in the Canton of Schwitz, the land-slide which buried the village of Goldau under a terrific avalanche, and filled a part of the Lake of Lauertz, spread an immense number of huge boulders across the valley, some of which even rolled up the opposite side to a considerable height. Many of these boulders might easily be mistaken for erratic boulders, were not the aggregate of these loose materials traceable to the hills from which they descended. In this case water had no part in loosening or bringing down this mass of fragments. They simply rolled from the declivity, and stopped when they had exhausted the momentum imparted to them by their weight. In the case of the débâcle of Bagnes, above Martigny, in a valley leading to the St. Bernard, the circumstances were very different. A glacier, advancing beyond its usual limits and rising against the opposite mountain-slope, dammed up the waters of the torrent and caused a lake to be formed. The obstruction gave way in the course of time, and the waters of the lake rushed out, carrying along with them huge boulders and a mass of loose materials of all sorts, and scattering them over the plain below. Such an accumulation of débris differs from the pebbles and loose fragments found in river-beds. The comparatively short distance over which they are carried, and the suddenness of the transportation, allow no time for the abrasion which produces the smooth surfaces of water-worn pebbles or the polished and scratched surfaces of glacier-worn ones. In the latter case, we have seen that the pebbles, being so set in the ice as to expose only one side, may be only partially polished, while others, more loosely held and turning in their sockets, may receive the same high polish on every side. In such a case the lines will intersect one another, in consequence of the different position in which the stone has been held at different times. No such appearances exist in the water-worn pebbles: their blunt surfaces, smoothed and rounded uniformly by the action of the water in which they have been rolled or tossed about, present everywhere the same aspect.
The correlation between these different loose materials and the position in which they are found helps us also to detect their origin. The loose materials bearing glacier-marks are always found resting upon surfaces which have been worn, abraded, and engraved in the same manner, while the water-worn pebbles are everywhere found resting upon rocks the abrasion of which may be traced to water. It is true that in some localities, as, for instance, in the gravel-pit of Mount Auburn, near Cambridge, large masses of glacier-worn pebbles alternate with beach-shingle; but it is easy to show that there was here a glacier advancing into the sea, crowding its front moraine and the materials carried under it over and into the shingle washed up by the waves upon the beach. Not infrequently, also, river-pebbles may be found among glacial materials. This is especially the case where, after the disappearance of large glaciers, rivers have occupied their beds. Examples of this kind may be seen in all the valleys of the Alps.
But, besides the special character of the individual fragments, the true origin of any accumulation of glacier-débris, commonly called drift, may be detected by the total absence of stratification, so essential a feature in all water-deposits. This absence of stratification throughout its mass is, after all, the great and important characteristic of the drift; and though I have alluded to it before, I reiterate it here, as that which distinguishes it from all like accumulations under water. I may be pardoned for dwelling upon this point, because the great controversy among geologists respecting the nature and origin of the sheet of loose materials scattered over a great part of the globe turns upon it. The débris of which the drift consists are thrown together pell-mell, without any arrangement according to size or weight, larger and smaller fragments being mixed so indiscriminately that the heaviest materials may be on the very summit of the mass, and the lightest at the bottom in immediate contact with the underlying rock, or the larger pieces may stand at any level in the mass of finer ones. Impalpable powder, coarse sand, rounded, polished, and scratched fragments of every size are mixed together in a homogeneous paste, in which the larger materials are imbedded, to use a homely, but expressive comparison, like raisins and currants in a pudding. The adhesive paste holding all these fragments together is, no doubt, the result of the friction to which the whole was subjected under the glacier, and which has worked some of the softer materials into a kind of cement.
The mode of aggregation of water-worn materials is very different. Examine the shingle along our beaches: we find it so distributed as to show that the fading tide-wave has carried the lighter materials farther than the heavier ones, and the successive deposits exhibit an imperfect cross-stratification resulting from changes in the height of the tide and the direction of the wind. Moreover, in any materials collected under water we find the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter on the top. It is true that large angular boulders may occasionally be found resting upon beach-shingle, but their presence in such a connection is easily explained. They may have been dropped there by floating icebergs, or have fallen from crumbling drift-cliffs.
I should add, in speaking of drift-materials, that, while we find the large angular boulders resting above them, we occasionally find boulders of unusual size mingled with them; but, when this is the case, such massive fragments are more or less rounded, polished, and marked in the same way as the smaller pebbles, or as the surfaces over which the glacier has passed. This is important to remember, because, when we examine the drift in countries where the ice, during the glacier-period, overtopped nearly all the mountains, so that few fragments could fall from them upon its surface, we find scarcely any angular boulders, while the drift is interspersed with larger fragments of this character, carried under the ice, instead of on its back. Another distinction between water-worn deposits and drift consists in the fact that the former are washed clean, while the latter always retains the mud gathered during its journey and spread throughout its mass.
In summing up the glacial evidences, I must not omit the moraines, though I have described them so fully in a previous article that I need not do more than allude to them here; but any argument for the glacial theory which did not include these characteristic walls erected by glaciers would be most imperfect. We need hardly discuss the theory of currents with reference to the formation of terminal moraines, extending across the valleys from side to side. Any current powerful enough to bring the boulders and débris of all sorts of which these walls are composed to the places where they are found would certainly not build them up with such regularity, but would sweep them away or scatter them along the bottom of the valley. That this is actually the case is seen in the lower course of the valley of the Rhone, where there are no transverse moraines, while they are frequent and undisturbed in the upper part of the valley. This is no doubt owing to the fact, that, when the main glacier had already retreated considerably up the valley, the lateral glaciers from the chains of the Combin and the Diablerets still reached the valley of the Rhone at a lower point, and barred the outlet of the waters from the glaciers above. A lake was thus formed, which, when the lower glaciers retreated up the lateral valleys, swept away all the lower transverse moraines, and formed the flat bottom of Martigny. In this case, the moraines were totally obliterated; but there are many other instances in which the materials have been only broken up and scattered over a wider surface by currents. In such remodelled moraines, the glacier-mud has, of course, been more or less washed away. We have here a blending of the action of water with that of the glacier; and, indeed, how could it be otherwise, when the colossal glaciers of past ages gradually disappeared or retreated to the mountain-heights? The wasting ice must have occasioned immense freshets, the action of which we shall trace hereafter, when examining the formation of our drift-ponds, of our river-beds and estuaries, as well as the river-terraces standing far above the present water-level.
And now, if it be asked how much of this evidence for the former existence of glaciers is to be found in Great Britain, I answer, that there is not a valley in Switzerland where all these traces are found in greater perfection than in the valleys of the Scotch Highlands, or of the mountains of Ireland and Wales, or of the lake-region in England. Not a link is wanting to the chain. Polished surfaces, traversed by striæ, grooves, and furrows, with a sheet of drift resting immediately upon them, extend throughout the realm,—the roches moutonnées raise their rounded backs from the ground there as in Switzerland,—transverse moraines bar their valleys and lateral ones border them, and the boulders from the hill-sides are scattered over the plains as thickly as between the Alps and the Jura, and are here and there perched upon the summits of isolated hills. This being the case, let us examine a little more closely the local phenomena connected with the ancient extension of glaciers in this region, and especially the parallel roads of Glen Roy.
Among the Grampian Hills, a little to the northeast of Ben Nevis, lies the valley of Glen Roy, a winding valley trending in a northeasterly direction, and some ten miles in length. Across the mouth of this valley, at right angles with it, runs the valley of Glen Spean, trending from east to west, Glen Roy thus opening directly at its southern extremity into Glen Spean. Around the walls of the Glen Roy valley run three terraces, one above the other, at different heights, like so many roads artificially cut in the sides of the valley, and indeed they go by the name of the "parallel roads." These three terraces, though in a less perfect state of preservation, are repeated for a short distance at exactly the same levels on the southern wall of the valley of Glen Spean, just opposite the opening of the Glen Roy valley; that is, they make the whole circuit of Glen Roy, stop abruptly, on both sides, at its southern extremity, and reappear again on the opposite wall of Glen Spean. I should add, however, that all three do not come to this sudden termination; for the lowest of these terraces turns eastward into the valley of Glen Spean, following the whole curve of the eastern half of the valley, while, of the two upper terraces, there is no trace whatever, nor is there any indication that either of the three ever existed in the western half of the valley. When I first visited the region, these phenomena had already been the subject of earnest discussion among English geologists. The commonly accepted explanation of the facts was that these terraces marked ancient sea-levels at a time when the ocean penetrated much farther into the interior, and Glen Roy and the adjoining valleys were as many fiords or estuaries. And though the present elevation of the locality made such an interpretation improbable at first sight, the first or highest of the terraces being eleven hundred and forty-four feet above the present sea-level, the second eighty-two feet below the first, and the third and lowest two hundred and twelve feet below the second, or eight hundred odd feet above the level of the sea, it was thought that the oscillations of the land, its alternate subsidences and upheavals, proved by the modern results of geology to have been so great and so frequent, might account even for so remarkable a change. There are, however, other objections to this theory not so easily explained away. There are no traces of organic life upon these terraces. If they were ancient sea-beaches, we should expect to find upon them the remains of marine animals, shells, crustacea, and the like. All the explanations given to lessen the significance of this absence of organic remains are futile. Again, why should the lower terrace alone be continued into the eastern end of the valley of Glen Spean, while there are no terraces at all in its western part, since both must have been as fully open to the sea as Glen Roy valley itself? This seemed the more inexplicable since all the terraces exist on the valley-wall opposite the outlet of Glen Roy, showing that this sheet of water, wherever it came from, filled the valley itself and the space between it and the southern wall of Glen Spean, but failed to spread, on either side of that space, into the eastern and western extension of Glen Spean. It is evident, that, at the time the water filled Glen Roy, some obstruction blocked the valley of Glen Spean, both to the east and west, leaving, however, that space in the centre free into which Glen Roy opens, while, by the time the water had sunk to the level of the lowest terrace, one of these barriers, that to the east, must have been removed, for the lowest terrace, as I have said, is continuous throughout the eastern part of Glen Spean.[B]
Prepossessed as I was with the idea of glacial agency in times anterior to ours, these phenomena appeared to me under a new aspect. I found the bottom of Glen Spean so worn by glacial action as to leave no doubt in my mind that it must have been the bed of a great glacier, and Dr. Buckland fully concurred with me in this impression. Indeed, the face of the country throughout that region presents not only the glacier-marks in great perfection, but other evidences of the ancient presence of glaciers. There are moraines at the lower end of Glen Spean, remodelled, it is true, by the action of currents, but still retaining enough of their ancient character to be easily recognized; and some of the finest examples of the roches moutonnées I have seen in Scotland are to be found at the entrance of the valley of Loch Treig, a lateral valley opening into Glen Spean on its southern side, and, as we shall see hereafter, intimately connected with the history of the parallel roads of Glen Roy. These roches moutonnées may very fairly be compared with those of the Grimsel, and exhibit all the characteristic features of the Alpine ones. One of them, lying on the western side of the valley where it opens into Glen Spean, is crossed by a trap-dike. The general surface of the hill, consisting of rather soft mica, has been slightly worn down by atmospheric agencies, so that the dike stands out some three-quarters of an inch above it. On the dike, however, the glacier-marks extend for its whole length in great perfection, while they have entirely disappeared from the surrounding surfaces, so as to leave the dike thus standing out in full relief. This is an instructive case, showing how little disintegration has gone on since the drift-period. All the currents that have swept over it, all the rains that have beaten upon it, have not worn away one inch from the original surface of the hill. I have observed many other roches moutonnées in Scotland, especially about the neighborhood of Loch Awe, Loch Fyne, and Loch Etive. In fact, they may be found in almost all the glens of Scotland, in the lake-region of England, and in the valleys of Wales and Ireland.
Following the glacial indications wherever we could find them in the country about Glen Roy, it became evident to me that the whole western range of the Grampian Hills had once been a great centre of glaciers, that they had come down toward Glen Spean through all the valleys on the mountain-slopes to the north and south of it, so that this valley had become, as it were, the great drainage-bed for the masses of ice thus poured into it laterally, and moving down the valley from east to west as one immense glacier. It is natural to suppose, that, at the breaking-up of the great sheet of ice which, if my view of the case is correct, must have covered the whole country at this time, the ice would yield more readily in a valley like that of Glen Roy, lying open to the south and receiving the full force of the sun, than in those on the opposite side of Glen Spean, opening to the north. At all events, it is evident that at some time posterior to this universal glacial period, when the ice began to retreat, Glen Roy became the basin of a glacial lake such as we now find in the Alps of Switzerland, where occasionally a closed valley becomes a trough, as it were, into which the water from the surrounding hills is drained. In such a lake no animals are found, such as exist in any other sheet of fresh water, and this would account for the absence of any organic remains on the terraces of Glen Roy. But at first sight it seemed that this theory was open in one respect to the same objection as the other. What prevented this sheet of water from spreading east and west in Glen Spean? If it not only filled Glen Roy, but extended to the southern side of Glen Spean immediately opposite the opening of Glen Roy, what prevented it from filling the whole of that valley also? In endeavoring to answer this question, I found the solution of the mystery.
The bed of Glen Spean, through its whole extent from east to west, is marked, as I have said, by glacial action, in rectilinear scratches and furrows. This westward track of the main glacier is crossed transversely near the centre of the valley by two other glacier-tracks cutting it at right angles. Upon tracing these cross-tracks carefully, I became satisfied, that, after the surrounding ice had begun to yield, after the masses of ice which descended from the northern and southern slopes of the mountains into Glen Spean had begun to retreat, and to form local limited glaciers, two of those lateral glaciers, one coming down from Ben Nevis on the southwest, the other from Loch Treig on the southeast, extended farther than the others and stretched across Glen Spean.[C] These two glaciers for a long time formed barriers across the western and eastern extension of this valley, damming back the waters which filled Glen Roy and the central part of Glen Spean.
Evidently the glacier descending from Loch Treig was the first to yield, for, by the time the Glen Roy lake had sunk to the level of the lowest terrace, the entrance to the eastern extension of the valley must have been free, otherwise the water could not have spread throughout that basin as we find it did; but it would seem that by the time the western barrier, or the glacier from Ben Nevis, was removed, the sheet of water was too far reduced to have left permanent marks of its outflow into the Great Glen, except by disturbing and remodelling the large moraines of the older Glen Spean glacier. There are faint indications of other terraces in Glen Roy, even at a higher level than the uppermost parallel road, owing their origin probably to the short duration of a higher level of the glacier-lake, when the great general glacier had not yet been lowered to a more permanent level determined by a limited circumscription within the walls of the valleys. There are other terraces in neighboring valleys at still different levels,—in Glen Gloy, for instance, where the one horizontal road was no doubt formed in consequence of the damming of the valley by a glacier from Loch Arkeig. Mr. Darwin has seen another in Glen Kinfillen, which I would explain by the presence of a glacier in the Great Glen, the marks of which are particularly distinct about the eastern end of Glen Garry.
The evidence of the ancient presence of glaciers is no less striking in other parts of the Scotch Highlands. Between the southeastern range of the Grampian Hills, in Forfarshire and Perthshire, and the opposite ridge of Sidlaw Hills, stretches the broad valley of Strathmore. At the time when Glen Spean received the masses of ice from the slopes of the western Grampian range, the glaciers descended from the valleys on the southern slope of the southeastern range and from those on the northern slope of Sidlaw Hills into the capacious bed of the valley which divides them. The glacial phenomena of this region present a striking resemblance in their general relations to those of the Alps and the Jura. The Grampian range on the northern side of Strathmore valley occupies the same position in reference to that of the Sidlaw Hills opposite, as does the range of the Alps to that of the Jura, while the intervening valley may be compared to the plain of Switzerland. As from the Bernese Oberland and from the valleys of the Reuss and Limmath gigantic glaciers came down and stretched across the plain of Switzerland to the Jura, scattering their erratic boulders over its summit and upon its slopes at the time of their greater extension, and, as they withdrew into the higher Alpine valleys, leaving them along their retreating track at the foot of the Jura and over the whole plain, so did the glaciers from Glen Prossen and parallel valleys on the Grampian Mountains extend across the valley of Strathmore, dropping their boulders not only on the slopes and along the base of the Sidlaw Hills, but scattering them in their retreat throughout the valley, until they were themselves reduced to isolated glaciers in the higher valleys. At the same time other glaciers came down from the heights of Schihallion on the west, and, descending through the valley of the Tay, joined the great masses of ice in the valley of Strathmore, thus combining with the eastern ice-field, just as the glacier from Mont Blanc and the valley of the Rhone formerly combined in the western part of Switzerland with those of the Bernese Oberland. The relations are identical, though the geographical position is reversed,—the higher range, or the Grampian Hills, lying to the north in Scotland, and the lower one, or the Sidlaw Hills, to the south, while in Switzerland, on the contrary, the higher range lies to the south and the lower to the north. I have alluded especially to Glen Prossen because the glacial marks in that valley are remarkably distinct, the whole bed of the valley being scratched, polished, and furrowed by the great rasp which has moved over it, while the concentric moraines at its lower extremity are very striking. But these signs, so perfectly preserved in Glen Prossen, recur with greater or less intensity in all the corresponding valleys, leaving no doubt that the same phenomena existed over the whole region.
Among the localities of Scotland where the indications of glacial action are most marked is the region about Stirling. Near Stirling Castle the polished surfaces of the rocks with their distinct grooves and scratches show us the path followed by the ice as it moved down in a northeasterly direction toward the Frith of Forth from the mountains on the northwest. To the west of Edinburgh, also, there is a broad glacier-track, showing that here also the ice was ploughing its way eastward to find an outlet on the shore.
The western slope of the great Scotch range is no less remarkable for its glacier-traces. The heads of Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Awe, and Loch Leven everywhere show upon their margins the most distinct glacial polish and furrows, while from the trend of these marks and the distribution of the moraines, especially about Ben Cruachan, it is obvious that in this part of the country the glaciers moved westward and southward. About Aberdeen, on the contrary, they moved eastward, while in the vicinity of Elgin they advanced toward the north.
It thus appears that the whole range of the Grampians formed a great centre for the distribution of glaciers, and that a colossal ice-field spread itself over the whole country, extending in every direction toward the lower lands and the sea-shore. As the glaciers which now descend through all the valleys of the Alps, along their northern as well as their southern slopes, and in their eastern as well as their western prolongation, though limited, in our days, within the valley-walls, nevertheless once covered the plain of Switzerland and that of Northern Italy, so did the ice-fields of the Grampians during the greatest extension of the Scotch glaciers spread over the whole country. They also were, in course of time, reduced to local glaciers, circumscribed within the higher valleys of the more mountainous parts of the country, until they totally disappeared, as those of Switzerland would also have done, had it not been for the greater elevation of that country above the level of the sea. Scotland nowhere rises above the present level of perpetual snow, while in Switzerland the whole Alpine range has an altitude favorable to the preservation of glaciers. In the range of the Jura, however, which had at one time its local glaciers also, but which nowhere now rises above the line of perpetual snow, they have disappeared as completely as in the Grampian Hills.
It would lead me too far, were I to give here a special account of all the investigations I made in 1840 upon the distribution of glaciers in Great Britain. I will therefore only point out a few of the more distinct areas of distribution. The region surrounding Ben Wyvis formed such a centre of dispersion from which glaciers radiated, and we have another in the Pentland Hills about Edinburgh. In Northumberland, the Cheviot Hills present a glacial centre of the same kind, and in the Westmoreland Hills we have still another. In the last-named locality, the glacial tracks can be followed in various directions, some of them descending toward the northwest from the heights of Helvellyn, others moving southward toward Ambleside. In Wales the same kind of glacial distribution has been observed; but, as Professor Ramsay has treated this subject in full, I would refer my readers to his masterly work for a further account of the ancient Welch glaciers. In Ireland I had also opportunities of making extensive local investigations of glacial action. I observed the centres of distribution in the neighborhood of Belfast, in the County of Wicklow, and in Cavan.
But nowhere are these phenomena more striking than in Fermanagh County about the neighborhood of Enniskillen, and more especially in the immediate vicinity of Florence Court, the seat of the Earl of Enniskillen. On the northern slope of Ben Calcagh are five valleys lying parallel with each other and opening into the valley of Loch Nilly, which runs from east to west at the base of the mountain. A road now passes through this valley, and, where it crosses the mouth of either of the five valleys rising towards the mountain-slope, it cuts alternately through the two horns of a crescent-shaped wall which bars the lower end of every one of them. These crescent-shaped mounds are so many terminal moraines, built up by the five glaciers formerly descending through these lateral valleys into the valley of Loch Nilly. They bore the same relation to each other as the glaciers de Tour and d'Argentière, the Glacier des Bois with the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons and the Glacier de Taconet, now bear to each other in the valley of Chamouni; and were it not for the smaller dimensions of the whole, any one familiar with the tracks of ancient glaciers might easily fancy himself crossing the ancient moraines at the foot of the northern slope of the range of Mont Blanc, through which the Arve has cut its channel, the valley of Chamouni standing in the same relation to Mont Blanc as the valley of Loch Nilly does to Ben Calcagh.
I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe, from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action, showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines across the valleys, showing, that, as the general ice-sheet broke up and contracted into local glaciers, every cluster or chain of hills became a centre of glacial dispersion, such as the Alps are now, such as the Jura, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales and Ireland, the Alps of Scandinavia, the Hartz, the Black Forest, the Vosges, and many others have been in ancient times.
In the next article we shall consider the glacial phenomena as they exist in America.