Mabel's Mistake

by Ann S. Stephens

General Harrington had spent a good many years of his life abroad, and no American ever went through that slow and too fashionable method of expatriation with more signal effect. While walking through the rooms peculiarly devoted to his use, you might have fancied yourself intruding on the privacy of some old nobleman of Louis the Fourteenth's court.

His bed chamber was arranged after the most approved French style, his dressing-room replete with every conceivable invention of the toilet, from the patent boot-jack with its silver mountings, to the superb dressing-case, glittering with gold and crystal, everything was perfect in its sumptuousness. In his own house, this old man was given up to self-worship, without a shadow of concealment. In society the graceful hypocrisy of his deportment was beautiful to contemplate, like any other exhibition of the highest art. If benevolence was the fashion, then General Harrington was the perfection of philanthropy. Nay, as it was his ambition to lead, the exemplary gentleman sometimes made a little exertion to render benevolence the rage! His name often lead in committees for charity festivals, and he was particularly interested in seeing that the funds were distributed with the most distinguished elegance, and by ladies sure to dignify humanity by distributing the munificence of the fashionable world in flowing silks and immaculate white gloves.

After this fashion, the General was a distinguished philanthropist. Indeed, humanity presents few conditions of elegant selfishness in which he was not prominent. A tyrant in his own household, he had, from his youth up, been the veriest slave to the world in which he moved. Its homage was essential to his happiness. He could not entirely cheat his astute mind into a belief of his own perfections, without the constant acclamations of society. As he grew old, this assurance became more and more essential to his self-complacency.

The General studied a good deal. His mind was naturally of more than ordinary power, and it was necessary that he should keep up with the discoveries and literature of the day, in order to shine as a savant, and belles-lettres scholar. Thus some three or four hours of every day were spent in his library, and few professional men studied harder to secure position in life, than he did to accumulate knowledge which had no object higher than self-gratulation.

Still, with all his selfishness and want of true principle, the General was, at least, by education, a gentleman, and he would at any time have found it much easier to force himself into an act of absolute wickedness, than to be thought guilty of ill-breeding in any of its forms. In short, with General Harrington, habit stood in the place of principle. He possessed few of those high passions that lead men into rash or wicked deeds, and never was guilty of wrong without knowing it.

Unconsciously to herself, Agnes Barker had wounded the old man in his weakest point, when she resented his question if she had read Mabel's journal, with so much pride. This haughty denial was a reproach to the impulse that had seized him to read the book from beginning to end. His conscience had nothing to urge in the matter, but the meanness of the thing he intended, struck him forcibly, and after a moment's hesitation, he closed the journal and laid it in a drawer of his desk. Thus, by affectation and over-acting, the girl defeated her object, much to her own mortification. The passage on which General Harrington had opened at random, was in itself harmless, a warm and somewhat glowing description of a passage up the Guadalquivir in the spring months, had nothing in it to provoke farther research, and the General seldom read much from mere curiosity. Certainly, the book might contain many secret thoughts and hidden feelings of which Mabel's husband had never dreamed, but it was many years since the old gentleman had taken sufficient interest in the feelings of his wife to care about their origin or changes, and so, Mabel's precious book, in which so many secret thoughts were registered, and memories stored, lay neglected in her husband's desk.

Fortunately, she was unconscious of her loss. Sometimes for months together, she shrank from opening the escritoir in which the volume was kept. At this period, she was under the reaction of a great excitement, and turned with a nervous shudder from anything calculated to remind her of all the pain which lay in the past.

Another reason, perhaps, why General Harrington was less curious about his wife's journal than seemed natural to his tempters, lay in his own preoccupation at the time. One of his youthful vices had grown strong, and rooted itself amid the selfishness of his heart; all other sins had so cooled down and hardened in his nature, that with most men they might have passed for virtues, the evil was so buried in elegant conventionalisms; but one active vice he still possessed, always gleaming up from the white ashes of his burnt out sins, with a spark of vivid fire.

General Harrington was a gambler. Understand me——it is not probable that he had ever entered a gambling hall openly or frankly since his youth, or ever sat down with swindlers or professed blacklegs around the faro table. The General was altogether too fastidious in his vices for that. No, he rather plumed himself secretly upon the aristocratic fashion in which he indulged this most lasting remembrance of a reckless youth.

The club life of England had always possessed great fascinations for this fine old republican gentleman, and he was among the first to introduce the system in New York. Here, his naturally fine energies had been vigorously put forth, and he became not only a prominent member of an aristocratic club, but a principal director and supporter also.