As he spoke, the worthy old gentleman took down a Bible from the shelf; and having desired Lucy to summon all the servants into the room, he read an appropriate chapter, and added to the selected prayer for the evening a few impressive and affecting words of thanksgiving, for the safe return of the long–lost member of the family.
This duty was scarcely concluded, when the outer door was violently opened; a heavy step was heard approaching, and, without waiting to be admitted or announced, the sturdy figure of Gregson entered the room.
“The captain himself, as I live!” said the honest mate. “Beg pardon, Colonel Brandon, but I heard a report of his having been seen going ten knots an hour through Marietta. So up I sticks, made sail, and was in his wake in less time than our nigger cook takes to toss off a glass of grog.”
“Give me your hand, Gregson,” said Ethelston, kindly; “there is not a truer nor an honester one between Marietta and China.”
“Thank ye, thank ye, captain,” said the mate, giving him a squeeze that would have broken the knuckles of any hand but a sailor’s; “the flipper’s well enough in its way, and I trust the heart’s somewhere about the right place; but what the devil have they been at with you in Guadaloupe?” added he, observing his chief’s wearied and wasted appearance; “considering how long those rascally Frenchmen have had you in dock, they’ve sent you to sea in precious state, both as to hull and rigging.”
“I confess, I am not over ship–shape,” said Ethelston, laughing; “but my present condition is more owing to the fatigues of my tedious journey from New Orleans than to any neglect on the part of the Frenchmen.”
The Colonel now invited the worthy mate to be seated; and Lucy brewed for him, with her own fair fingers a large tumbler of toddy, into which, by her father’s desire, she poured an extra glass of rum. Ethelston, pretending to be jealous of this favour, insisted on his right to a draught, containing less potent ingredients, but administered by the same hand; and an animated conversation ensued, in the course of which Gregson inquired after the welfare of his old friend Cupid, the black cook.
“Poor fellow, he is no more,” replied Ethelston, in a tone of deep feeling; “he died as he had lived, proud, brave, faithful to the last. I cannot tell you the story now, it is too sad a one for this our first evening at home:” as he spoke, his eyes met those of Lucy, and there he read all that his overcharged heart desired to know.
Soon after the allusion to this melancholy incident, the little party broke up; the evening being already far advanced, Gregson returned to Marietta, and the members of the Colonel’s family retired to their respective apartments, leaving Ethelston alone in the drawing–room. For a few minutes he walked up and down, and pressed his hand upon his forehead, which throbbed with various and deep emotions. He took up the music whereon Lucy had written her name, and the needlework on which her fingers had been employed: he sat down on the chair she had just left, as if to satisfy himself with the assurance that all around him was not a dream; and again he vented the full gratitude of his heart in a brief but earnest ejaculation of thanksgiving. After a short indulgence in such meditations, he retired to that rest of which he stood so much in need. The room that had been prepared for him was up stairs, and, on crossing a broad passage that led to it, he suddenly met Lucy, who was returning to her own from her mother’s apartment. Whether this meeting was purely accidental, or whether Lucy, remembering that she had not said good–night quite distinctly to her lover, lingered in her mother’s room until she heard his step on the stair, we have no means of ascertaining, and therefore leave it undecided: certain it is, however, that they did meet in the passage above mentioned, and that Ethelston, putting down his candle on a table that stood by, took Lucy’s unresisting hand and pressed it in his own: he gazed on her blushing countenance with an intensity that can only be understood by those who, like him, have been suddenly restored to a beloved one, whose image had been ever present during a long absence, assuaging the pain of sickness, comforting him in trials, dwelling with him in the solitude of a prison, and sustaining him in the extremest perils of the storm, the fight, and the shipwreck! Though he had never been formally betrothed to her in words, and though his heart was now too full to give utterance to them, he had heard enough below to satisfy him that she had never doubted his faith—he felt that their troth was tacitly plighted to each other, and now it was almost unconsciously that their lips met and sealed the unspoken contract.
That first, long, passionate kiss of requited love! Its raptures have been the theme of glowing prose, of impassioned verse, in all ages and climes; the powers of language have been exhausted upon it, the tongue and the pen of genius have, for centuries, borrowed for its description the warmest hues of fancy and imagination—and yet how far short do they fall of the reality! how impossible to express in words an electric torrent of feeling, more tumultuous than joy, more burning than the desert’s thirst,—yet sweeter and more delicious than childhood’s dream of Paradise, pouring over the heart a stream of bliss, steeping the senses in oblivion of all earthly cares, and so mysteriously blending the physical with the immaterial elements of our nature, that we feel as if, in that embrace, we could transfuse a portion of our soul and spirit into the beloved object on whose lip that first kiss of long–treasured love is imprinted.