A CLOUDED HONEYMOON.
It had been arranged, as the best plan for all parties, under present circumstances, that Fannie should retain her situation as shop-woman at Leroux's hair-dressing and fancy store, where they were anxious to keep her as long as possible.
With Valentine's hundred dollars, and fifty dollars that had been made in overwork by Phædra, a room was taken in M——, and neatly furnished.
And there Valentine and Fannie went to housekeeping, after this fashion: Fannie, still tending Leroux's shop all day, ate and slept at home, where Valentine visited her once a week, or oftener, whenever he could do so.
In the meantime, as winter advanced, Mr. Waring's health was fully re-established; and, as many of his favorite boon companions, who had been absent on their summer tours, returned to the neighborhood, Oswald began to resume his former habits of extravagant and reckless dissipation. Deer-hunting, coursing, partridge-shooting, and other field sports, occupied the mornings; and dinner parties, oyster suppers, and other entertainments, accompanied and followed by wine-drinking, song-singing, card-playing, and similar orgies, at home or abroad, filled up the afternoons and evenings.
Again were Valentine's services brought into requisition three or four nights of every week, to drive his master to the city at dusk, and home again at dawn. Upon these occasions, Valentine would drive Mr. Waring first to the clubhouse, restaurant, or billiard-saloon, that happened to be his destination for the evening, set him down, take the carriage and horses to the livery stable, leave them, and then go to Leroux's and stay with Fannie until the hour of closing the store arrived, when he would take her home.
Valentine, from his "gentlemanly" appearance, dress, and address, as well as from his perfectly trustworthy character, was not an unwelcome visitor at the store, where, behind the counter and by the side of Fannie, he made himself so useful that Monsieur Leroux would often speculate as to the possibility of getting him for an assistant. This also was Valentine's and Fannie's great ambition; but it was a vain one, for his personal attendance was considered indispensable to his master's comfort.
Valentine's standing order, upon these occasions of their night visits to the town, was to be in waiting with the carriage for Mr. Waring at twelve o'clock. And the man was obliged to be punctual, though he had often to wait two or three hours for the coming of the master. And, as a general fact, the longer Mr. Waring remained among his boon companions, the more intoxicated he became; and when at last he appeared, all the old humiliations and provocations of Valentine's former days were renewed. You know what these were. It would be vain repetition to describe them again.
All this was, in every respect, very trying to the poor boy. He religiously adhered to his resolution of abstinence from all spirituous liquors, and constantly and prayerfully struggled against the ebullitions of his own impetuous temper. But the life he led acted nearly fatally upon a very fragile organization; and all individuals of antagonistically-mixed races are known to be frail. The continued loss of rest, habitual irregularity in food and sleep, affectionate anxiety upon account of his master, tender solicitude for his own gentle, little wife, frequent and excessive provocation from Oswald, all combined to wear and fret his originally excitable temperament to a state of unnatural nervous irritability, that could scarcely sustain with calmness the rudeness of the shocks to which, in his false position, he was constantly exposed; and therefore he was very frequently—to use his own expression at the "love feasts"—in great danger of falling from grace.
Reflecting upon this portion of the poor, doomed boy's life; recollecting the great, the almost superhuman struggle his spirit was making against the terrible, combined powers of evil; of his discordant organization; his fiery, impulsive temperament; his unfortunate education; his unhappy position, and his exasperating surroundings, all antagonistic, false and fateful, we find his parallel nowhere in modern times, and are forced to think of the age of antiquity, and of those mighty but ineffectual struggles of some foredoomed mortal, like Œdipus, in the power of the angry Fates.