With a promise to call upon the ladies at his earliest convenience, the young merchant hurried away, with every evidence that his thoughts were intent upon the balance at his banker's and the question whether certain regular customers who were to have called during the morning had been duly impressed by his clerks with the merits of certain choice styles of goods, rapidly on the rise, that he would himself have commended to their particular attention. And yet there are odd mixtures, sometimes, even in the minds of merchants—mixtures in which customers become blended with curls and profits with profiles; for Walter Lane Harding, as he wasted yet one more moment to step into Gilsey's and light a choice Havana, indulged in a train of thought which might have been shaped into words something in the manner following:
"A pretty woman—that Miss Crawford, decidedly ladylike—which the other is not, however pleasant a companion. I should as soon think of falling in love with a handsome bombshell, as with her. No knowing when she might explode. Now if I had met Miss Crawford at Newport two years ago, who knows but affairs might have been different? Heigho!" And so Walter Harding went on to his business; while Tom Leslie, the member of the party who was "peckish," accompanied the two girls, who were decidedly hungry, to that over-gilt and tawdry caricature upon some of the palace-halls of the Old World, known as "Taylor's Saloon."
CHAPTER XI.
Some Reflections on Comparative Character—Of Houses as Well as Men—Temptation, and the Legends of the "Lurley" and the "Frozen Hand"—A Lunch at Taylor's, and an Arrangement.
In the "great day of final assize," when beneath the one unerring Eye and Hand all the drosses of life and circumstance shall be melted away and all the films and disfigurements removed from action and intention,—there will be many things, we have reason to believe, shown in a widely different light from that in which human eyes have looked upon them. Human character will surprise the beholders, if it does not produce the same effect even upon the subject under examination. Many a poor wretch who has been stumbling along through life, unfortunate and apparently guilty, of no seeming use either to himself or the world, will be found to have filled a place of necessity not suspected—to have done much good and very little harm—and to have been acting from motives quite as pure as those that in other hearts have produced such different effects. Many a "good" man will be stripped so bare of the garments woven around him by circumstances or his own self-righteousness, and so many of his best deeds will be proved to have proceeded from selfish, interested and unholy motives, that every success and every word of past approbation will be a reproach, and his naked soul will stand shivering in the chilling breath of God's displeasure.
It is not exactly certain that houses will come to judgment; but if they do, there will be the same marked difference in the estimation in which many of them have been held by the community surrounding them, and the truth of their influence shown in the "sunlight of the eternal morning." Some miserable tenant-house in Bermondsey or the Swamp, overcrowded with human rats, its atmosphere so noisome that fever floated on every breath and the passer-by from Belgravia or Murray Hill put his perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils to escape the deadly infection,—may be found to have been far less injurious to the neighborhood than the corner-house on Park Lane or the double-front of brown stone within the shadow of Dr. Spring's church on Fifth Avenue. Within the one the miserable occupants may have festered in body and rotted in soul—harming only themselves and the physical atmosphere meanwhile, and victims of the horrible aggregation of poverty in great cities; while within the other a maelstrom of pleasant dissipation has been whirling, to which the victims came in their own carriages with full liveries, the waves as they circled sending up jets of cooling spray and redolent of perfumes from the flowers of sunny lands—but continually widening its circle of evil attraction and drawing in those who thenceforth had no power of resistance against the banded demons of wine, of play and of lascivious enjoyment, who lurked beneath the waters, eager for their prey.
The fable of the "Lurline" is the story of human life and temptation; and yet few of the thousands who have read it in the old German legend of the "Lurleiberg" or the charming "Bridal of Belmont" of the author of "Lillian," or who have gazed at it for hours when presented upon the stage in the shape of "Ondine" or the "Naiad Queen,"—have fully realized its significance. To most it has been merely a pretty conceit or an effective spectacle; to the close student it is an absorbing picture of the enthralment of human energies. Sir Huldebrand of Kingstettin is a true as well as a valiant knight, and he has a golden-haired and white-handed ladie-love in the neighboring castle of the Baron of Steinbrunnen. He has a hope, a love, a faith, a duty; and on the day when he fares forth from Kingstettin and takes his way to the river bank, he has mirth as well as all these, for Karl, his merry servant, is beside him. But the day is hot and sultry, and he dismounts from his horse and lies down to sleep beside the Lurleiberg. He has granted himself rest and indulgence. Half in his sleep and half in his waking thought he sees the stream rippling below the banks and circling in pleasant eddies by rock and mossy edge, while the water-lilies nestle down their soft cheeks to the lapping water in the sheltered nooks, and the willows bend down and kiss the stream with the swaying tips of their hundred fingers, and little gleams of golden sunshine steal through the branches and touch the soft ripples here and there with such tints of transparent light as the pencil of painter never mastered. Oh, how deliciously sweet and dreamy is that half wakeful feeling of repose and indulgence! And then the music rises—gentle and almost undistinguishable at first from the singing ripple of the water—then clearer and more distinct, but with still a tinkling ripple in every cadence, and the name of the listener insensibly blended. Flattery has come with indulgence, and the subtle wine of its intoxication is mounting to his brain. Then he turns dreamily on his couch of moss, and looks over the bank into the river. Above the water white hands are circling and snowy bosoms are gleaming, and in the midst is one form of matchless rounded beauty, with a face of angelic splendor, her eye-lids gemmed with the tear-drops of an awakened affection, and her waved brown hair caressed by the tide as it sweeps backward. All the white hands are beckoning to him, and all the coral lips are uttering those low musical words in which his name is blended. The brain of the knight grows dizzy—chains of which he only feels a pleasure in the slight pressure, twine around his limbs. Voluptuous enjoyment takes the place of energy—he is himself no longer. He cannot even laugh—he can only sigh—Karl has gone chasing some Lurline of his own, far down the meadow. Ermengarde, who has been for hours leaning out of the high window at Steinbrunnen, and looking anxiously for her expected lover—is nothing to him now. His promised aid to Sir Rudolph to-morrow, with helm on brow and lance in rest, against the invader who threatens the lands of both with ravage, is nothing to him now. Love and duty are alike forgotten. The temptation has done its full work through indolence and indulgence, and the knight is lost. The brown-haired Lurline is worth all earth and heaven. Let all the rest go, without a sigh or a regret—be his the murmur of the river, the delicious music embodying his name, and the beckoning of the white hands towards him! He does not leap into the water, as some have held: he merely bends nearer to the verge, then slips down with eager eyes and outstretched hands; the white arms twine around him; the music sounds for one moment more sweetly but more sadly than ever, as the waves close above the pair so unholily wedded; then the ripples sing on and all is quiet beauty as before—calm and quiet beauty, as if no tomb had closed above the energies of a human soul.
Sir Huldebrand may come back again, after a time, as the legend is fond of making him do. He may even marry the golden-haired Ermengarde and sire children to heir his lands and perpetuate his name. But the knight is himself a wreck, with all his best energies burnt out in those weird orgies beneath the water; and his bridal vow is a hollow one, for when he utters it he hears the shriek of the Lurline blending with the wedding music, and his nightly couch is to be henceforth a torture of unrest—his ride by day a mere hopeless fleeing from the ghosts of dead pleasures.
Something of the same character is that other wild legend which has grown into song and drama—sprung from the Norse branch of the great German mind,—that of the "Ice Witch" or the "Frozen Hand." Here the Viking Harold is less wrecked by temptation than by circumstance; but the result of the enthralment is the same. The ice of the Pole closes around him with the same fatality as the waters of the Rhine around his brother and prototype. Surrounded by the white arms of Hecla in her palace of ice, he ceases to lament the bride who is awaiting him in the far South; and he has not even a thought of regret to cast towards his perished companions and the stout ship that once bore him so proudly, her brown ribs now bleaching whitely on the Arctic shore. He too returns, after a long period, but he brings with him the fatal gift of his Northern bride—a hand of ice. He may be strong and brave still, as he was when he went away; but he is no longer the peerless and envied warrior. Men look upon him with a ghostly shudder, and women shrink back from his chilling presence. Not even Freja can thaw away all the ice that has gathered in his veins. He may chastise the robber Ruric from the hills, and sleep once more in the warm embrace of Isoldane; but who knows that at some midnight hour the old curse may not return upon him and the hand he stretches in love and fondness strike death to the hearts that are dearest? Not the same—changed, changed—as is every man who has once yielded to the great temptation of his existence.