And, running her fingers over the keys, she launched at once into the warlike strains of the hymn of revolution. Her voice and execution were admirable; and though by no means unconscious that she was producing an effect, she sang with a fire, energy, and seeming recklessness that thrilled like lightning through her auditor's veins. He rose involuntarily from his seat. For that evening his study of character was ended, and philosophy dislodged from her last stronghold.
Half an hour later he was riding homeward in a mood quite novel to his experience. He pushed his horse to a keen trot, as if by fierceness of motion to keep pace with the fiery influence that was kindling all his nerves.
"I have had my fancies before this," he thought,—"in fact I have almost been in love; but that feeling was no more like this than a draught from a clear spring is like a draught of spiced wine."
That night he fully expected to be haunted by a vision of Fanny Euston; but his slumbers were unromantically dreamless.
Three days later, he ventured another visit; but his cousin had returned to her home in the country. By this time he was conscious of a great abatement of ardor; and his equanimity was little moved by the disappointment. In a week he had learned to look back on his transient emotion as an effervescence of the moment, and to regard his relative with no slight interest, indeed, yet by no means in a light which could blind him to her glaring faults. He summoned up all that he could recall of herself and her family, and chiefly of her father, whom he remembered in his boyhood as a rough, athletic man, whose black and bushy eyebrows were usually contracted into something which seemed like a frown. These boyish recollections were far from doing Euston justice. He was a man of masculine and determined character. His will was strong, his passions violent; he was full of prejudices, and when thwarted or contradicted, his rage was formidable. His honor was unquestioned; he was most bluntly and unmanageably honest. Yet through the rock and iron of his character, there ran, known to but few, a delicate vein of poetic feeling. The music of his daughter, or the verses of his favorite Burns, could often bring tears to his stern gray eyes. For his wife, whom he had married in a fit of pique and disappointment, when little more than a boy, he cared nothing; but his fondness for his daughter was unbounded. He alone could control her; for she loved him ardently, and he was the only living thing of which she stood in awe.
CHAPTER IX.
| Elle ne manque jamais de saisir promptement L'apparente lueur du moindre attachement, D'en semer la nouvelle avec beaucoup de joie,—Le Tartufe. |
Among Morton's acquaintance was a certain Miss Blanche Blondel. They had been schoolmates when children; and as, at a later date, Miss Blanche had been fond of making long visits to a friend in Cambridge, during term time, Morton, in common with many others, had a college acquaintance with her, so that they were now on a footing of easy intercourse. Not that he liked her. On the contrary, she had inspired him with a very emphatic aversion; but being rather a skirmisher on the outposts of society, than enrolled in the main battalion, she was anxious to make the most of the acquaintance she had. She had the eyes of an Argus, and was as sly, smooth, watchful, and rusée as a tortoise shell cat; wonderfully dexterous at finding or making gossip, and unwearied in sowing it, broadcast, to the right and left.
One evening Morton was at a ball, crowded to the verge of suffocation. At length he found himself in a corner from which there was no retreat, while the stately proportions of Mrs. Frederic Goldenberg barred his onward progress. But when that distinguished lady chanced to move aside, she revealed the countenance of Miss Blondel, beaming on him like the moon after an eclipse. She nodded and smiled. There was no escape. Morton smiled hypocritically, and said, "Good evening." Blanche, as usual, was eager for conversation, and, after a few commonplaces, she said, turning up her eyes at him with an arch expression,—