At the house at Battle Brook, Leslie, during spring, summer, and autumn, had always spent every leisure moment that he could snatch from his affairs. Since his connection with Vinal, these intervals had become both long and frequent. And, since grief has a privilege, and since, moreover, a somewhat alarming cough had lately begun to trouble him, he now committed all to Vinal's hands, and, on the day after his daughter's return, repaired with her to his favorite homestead, there to remain till the autumn frosts should warn them back to town. Forthwith Matherton became the focus to which all the thoughts of Morton concentred.
Thither, pretext or no pretext, he resolved to go. He went, accordingly, and made his quarters at the grand hotel of Matherton. Fortunately, Battle Brook was then the best trout stream in Massachusetts; and this would give, he flattered himself, some faint color to his proceeding. He arrived in the afternoon, and, mounting a horse, rode to the inn at the edge of Sagamore Pond, a mile or more from Leslie's house.
He had scarcely reached it, when a brief sharp thunder shower came up, and passed away as quickly. As the sun was setting, he rowed out in a small boat upon the pond. Here, skirting the brink of a sequestered cove, which the beech and tupelo trees overhung, and where every thing was still but the evening singing of a robin, and the mysterious whisper of the rain-drops, falling from innumerable leaves, with countless tiny circles on the breathless water,—here, where his boat glided as if buoyed on a liquid air, while, over the pebbly bottom, the perch and dace fled away from under the shadowing prow,—he lingered dreamily for a while, and then, bending to his oars, bore out into the middle of the pond. The west was gorgeous with the sunset, while, far in front, glimmering among the trees, he could see the shrine of his idolatry, the roof that sheltered Edith Leslie.
A light breeze crisped the water, the ripples murmured with a lulling sound under his boat, and, lying at ease, he gave himself up to his reveries.
His passion-kindled fancies ranged earth, sea, and sky; wandered into the past, lost themselves in the future; evoked the shadows of dead history; mixed in one phantom conclave the hairy war gods of the north, the bright shapes of Grecian fable, the enormities of Egyptian mythology; and, looking into the burning depths above him, he mused of human hopes, human aspirations, human destiny. That oddly compounded malady which had fastened on him had brought with it the intense yet tranquil awakening of every faculty with which it will sometimes visit those of the ruder sex whom it attacks with virulence.
The magic of earth and sky; the black pines rearing their shaggy tops against the blazing west; the shores mingling in many-tinted shadow; the fiery sky, where three little clouds hovered like flaming spirits; the fiery water, where he and his boat floated as in a crimson sea; the whole glowing scene, glowing deeper yet in the fervid light of passion,—penetrated him like an enchantment. He scarcely knew himself; and in his supreme of intoxication, the familiar world around him was sublimed into a vision of Eden.
CHAPTER XXII.
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If it were now to die, 'Twere now to be most happy; for I fear, My soul hath her content so absolute, That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.—Othello. |
It was a day of cloudless sunshine when Morton set forth for the house at Battle Brook; but his mind was far from sharing the brightness of the world without. The hope that flowed so full and calmly the night before had ebbed and left him dry. He was shaken with doubts, misgivings, perturbations. He walked his horse up the avenue, till he came within view of the house, a large, square mansion, with a veranda on three sides, a quiet-looking place enough, but in Morton's eyes priceless as Aladdin's palace, and sacred as Our Lady's house at Loretto. A monthly honeysuckle twined about one of the columns of the porch; the hall door stood open, and the air played freely through from front to rear.