"My hero, my young brave," cried the captain, slapping his favorite boy on the shoulder, "you are worth a dozen such girl-boys as your brother. Let him be a kitten and cry mew, if he will, while you climb the topgallant-mast and make ladders of the clouds."
"I am as brave as he is," said Henry, straightening his youthful figure, and looking at his father with a kindling eye. "I am not afraid of the water; but who will protect my mother, if I go away with you?"
"Bravo! There is some spirit in the boy after all," exclaimed the captain, who loved his wife with the devotion and constancy of a sailor. "He has chosen an honorable post, and by heaven I will not force him to leave it. I see that nature, when she gave us twins, intended we should go shares in our boys. It is just. Gabriel shall go with me, but the silver cup of fortune may after all find its way in Henry's sack."
Thus at twelve years of age the twin brothers separated, and from that era their life-paths diverged into a constantly widening angle.
The captain discovered too late the error he had committed in cultivating the roving propensities of his son, to the exclusion of steady, nobler pursuits. He had intended merely to give him a holiday, and a taste of a seafaring life; but after revelling in the joys of freedom, he found it impossible to bind him down to the restraints of scholastic life. He wanted him to go to college, but the young rover bravely refused obedience to parental authority, saying, that one genius in a family was enough; and the father, gazing with pride on the wild, handsome, and dauntless boy, said there was no use in twisting the vine the wrong way, and yielded to his will. Henry, imbosomed in classic shades, gathered the fruits of science and the flowers of literature, while his genius as an artist, though apparently dormant, waited the Ithuriel touch of opportunity to wake into life and action.
Captain St. James had prospered in his enterprises and acquired a handsome fortune, so that his sons would not be dependent on their own exertions for support. Gabriel unfortunately knew this circumstance too well, and on the faith of his father's fortune indulged in habits of extravagance and dissipation as ruinous as they were disgraceful. The captain did not live to witness the complete degradation of his favorite son. His vessel was wrecked on a homeward voyage, and the waves became the sailor's winding-sheet. His wife did not long survive him. She died, pining for the genial air of her own sunny clime, leaving the impress of her virtues and her graces on the character of one of her sons. Alas for the other!
Free now from parental restraint, as he had long been from moral obligations, Gabriel plunged into the wildest excesses of dissipation. In vain Henry lifted his warning voice, in vain he extended his guardian hand, to save him who had now become the slave as well as the votary of vice. His soul clave to his brother with a tenderness of affection, which neither his selfishness nor vices, not even his crimes, could destroy. A gambler, a roueé, every thing but a drunkard, he at length became involved in so disgraceful a transaction, he was compelled for safety to flee the country; and Henry, ignorant what course he had taken, gave him up in despair, and tried to forget the existence of one whose remembrance could only awaken sorrow and shame. He went to Europe, as has been previously related, and with the eye of a painter and the heart of a poet, travelled from clime to clime, and garnered up in his imagination the sublimities of nature and the wonders of art. His genius grew and blossomed amid the warm and fostering influences of an elder world, till it formed, as it were, a bower around him, in whose perennial shades he could retire from haunting memories and uncongenial associations.
In the mean time, Gabriel had found refuge in his mother's native land. During his wild, roving life, he had mingled much with foreigners, and acquired a perfect knowledge of the French language,—I should rather say his knowledge was perfected by practice, for the twin brothers had been taught from infancy the melodious and expressive language of their mother's native clime. The facility with which he conversed, and his extremely handsome person, were advantages whose value he well knew how to appreciate, and to make subservient to his use.
It was at this time that he became acquainted with Therésa Josephine La Fontaine, and his worn and sated passions were quickened into new life. She was not beautiful, "but fair and excellent," and of a character that exercises a commanding influence over the heart of man. Had he known her before habits of selfish indulgence had become, like the Ethiopian's skin and the leopard's spots, too deep and indelible for chemic art to change, she might perhaps have saved him from the transgressor's doom. She loved him with all the ardor of her pure, yet impassioned nature, and fully believed that her heart was given to one of the sons of light, instead of the children of darkness. For awhile his sin-dyed spirit seemed to bleach in the whitening atmosphere that surrounded him, for a father's as well as a husband's joy was his. But at length the demon of ennui possessed him. Satan was discontented in the bowers of Paradise. Gabriel sighed for his profligate companions, in the bosom of wedded love and joy. He left home on a false pretence, and never returned. It was long before Therésa admitted a doubt of his faith, and it was not till a rumor of his marriage in America reached her ear, that she believed it possible that he could deceive and betray her. An American traveller from New York, who knew Henry St. James and was unconscious of the existence of his brother, spoke of his marriage and his beautiful bride in terms that roused every dormant passion in the breast of the deserted Therésa. Yet she waited long in the hope and the faith of woman's trusting heart, clinging to the belief of her husband's integrity and truth, with woman's fond adhesiveness. At length, when she had but convincing reason to believe herself a betrayed and abandoned wife, she took her boy in her arms, crossed the ocean waste, landed in New York, and by the aid of a directory sought the home of Henry St. James, deeming herself the legitimate mistress of the mansion she made desolate by her presence. The result of her visit has been already told. She unconsciously destroyed the happiness of others, without securing her own. It is not strange, that in the moment of agony and distraction caused by the revelation made by Therésa, Rosalie should not have noticed in the marriage certificate the difference between the names of Henry Gabriel and Gabriel Henry St. James.
Henry St. James had been summoned to Texas, then the Botany Bay of America, by his unhappy brother, who had there commenced a new career of sin and misery. He had gambled away his fortune, killed a man in a scene of strife and blasphemy, been convicted of homicide, escaped from the sentence, and, lurking in by-lanes and accursed places, fell sick, and wrote to his brother to come and save him from infamy and death.