True, and Other Stories

by George Parsons Lathrop

Being forlorn, was it strange that Natalia should look to Barrington for sympathy? Not at all. By degrees he thus came—without any movement on his own part—to take an important place in her daily experience. A variety of little hopes and illusions, of which her life had been pretty well divested before, and which she alone could not have revived, sprung up spontaneously under the most casual glance of Zadoc S. For example, though she had no appetite for Mrs. Douce's feeble dinners, she could get up a fictitious enjoyment of them by looking at the robust Barrington, whose bold coloring and hearty appearance deceived her as to the real measure of his relish for that dreary cookery.

Barrington was not dangerously youthful, but neither was Natalia. Financially he was not prosperous, but she was decidedly not so. Heaven only knows how, during the years of his residence in New York, he had contrived to subsist. It was not on any scientific principle of survival that he persisted; but rather on the principle of the fallen sparrow. Still, he was a portly sparrow, and must have needed a good deal to keep him on his feet. But he remained on his feet—he never soared. And yet, such as he was, Natalia—let us confess it with a becoming amount of maiden timidity—yes, Natalia had begun to love him.

II.

But she did not tell her love. She let concealment feed upon her cheek—which, to be accurate, was not damask, but rather of the quality of sarsnet. However, before her appearance had had time to suffer by this process, an unexpected proceeding on the part of Barrington led her to reveal her sentiment—to surprise and, one might say, surround him. Did capture follow? Let us see.

At this period his affairs were very low. He was a prospective patentee, a filer of caveats for little inventions, which no one could have been hired to infringe, the most ingenious point of which was their perfect adaptability for not making money. He was also by turns an agent for books, subscription engravings, sewing-machines, and what not. He did everything but succeed. Finally he conceived the idea of a new vegetable lamp-oil that could be made from floating oily matter to be found in any swamp. He had made close computation of the swampy land in the whole State of New York, which could be bought for a trifle, and turned into sources of boundless wealth. For a time he fed the flame of hope with this visionary fluid; but a serious lamp explosion, resulting from one of his experiments, deprived him at once of half his whiskers and all his expectations. There was indeed one resource left him, the nature of which we may discover presently; but he hesitated to avail himself of it, because it might compromise his independence. In fact, a certain steady effort to be a man and to keep his self-respect, in spite of his many failures, was Barrington's finest trait, and always gave me a liking for him, notwithstanding his weakness.

By the time his singed whiskers had regained their pristine vigor, and when the war had passed through its first year, there drove up to Mrs. Douce's door, one day, an express wagon with a trunk in it. The startling thing about this was that the trunk (which was made of sole-leather) was quite new, and had painted on it, with terrific distinctness, this legend:

Capt. Z. S. Barrington, U. S. A.

The painted end of the trunk happened to be nearest the house. Now, Mrs. Douce was at that very moment in her reception-room on the ground floor—a sort of little bin or wine-cooler of a room, where (having nothing better to cool) she kept callers, and sometimes herself—and from there she spied the appalling arrival. She did not know, which was the fact, that Barrington, tired of his sparrow's life on the pavements of the metropolis, had been in correspondence with friends at Washington, who had secured him the promise of a commission on his applying for it. He had not at once made such application, but had gone off with much high beating of the heart, and ordered the trunk, as a preliminary, feeling perhaps that the final step would be easier to take after committing himself thus far.

Mrs. Douce, I say, not knowing this, opened the door for the expressman in a great flurry of excitement. "Now, indeed," thought she, melodramatically, "I begin to feel what war is!"

Then she ran up-stairs herself, to inform Barrington that the trunk had come. But he was equal to the emergency. With an unshaken demeanor the hero rose from the table at which he had been conducting a busy and wholly useless correspondence, and looked at Mrs. Douce with a magnificent calm, which gave her a strange sensation of having penetrated some great general's headquarters. Then he proceeded down-stairs to parley with the expressman, who for a moment seemed to take the place of a flag-of-truce bearer, or some kind of military ambassador.