I was silent in speechless pity.
His daughter turned, and smiled with almost tearful tenderness upon her father.
“I have not heard you so animated for a long time, dear father,” she said. “Mr. Wade seems quite to inspire you.”
“Yes, my dear, he has been talking on many very interesting topics.”
I had really done nothing except to bow, and utter those civil monosyllables which are the “Hear! hear!” of conversation.
If I had been silent, Brent had not. While the garrulous old gentleman was prattling on at full speed, I had heard all the time my friend’s low, melodious voice, as he talked to the lady. He was a trained artist in the fine art of sympathy. His own early sorrows had made him infinitely tender with all that suffer. To their hearts he came as one that had a right to enter, as one that knew their malady, and was commanded to lay a gentle touch of soothing there. It is a great power to have known the worst and bitterest that can befall the human life, and yet not be hardened. No sufferer can resist the fine magnetism of a wise and unintrusive pity. It is as mild and healing as music by night to fevered sleeplessness.
The lady’s protective armor of sternness was presently thrown aside. She perceived that she need not wear it against a man who was brother to every desolate soul,—sisterly indeed, so delicate was his comprehension of the wants of a woman’s nature. In fact, both father and daughter, as soon as they discovered that we were ready to be their friends, met us frankly. It was easy to see, poor souls! that it was long since they had found any one fit company for them, any one whose presence could excite the care-beguiling exhilaration of worthy society. They savored the aroma of good-breeding with appetite.
CHAPTER XII.
A GHOUL AT THE FEAST.
Mr. Clitheroe’s thoughts loved to recur to his native Lancashire, smoky though its air might be, and clean-shaved the grass of its lawns. I could not help believing that all the enthusiasm of this weak, gentle nature for the bleak plains and his pioneer life was a delusion. It would have been pretty talk for an after-dinner rhapsody at the old mansion he had spoken of in England. There, as he paced with me, a guest, after pointing out the gables, wings, oriels, porches, that had clustered about the old building age after age, he might have waved it away into a vision, and spoken with disdain of civilization, and with delight of the tent and the caravan. It had the flavor of Arcady, and the Golden Age, and the simple childhood of the world, when an enthusiastic Rousseauist Marquis talked in ’89 of the rights of man and universal fraternity; it would seem a crazy mockery if the same enthusiast had held the same strain a few years later, in the tumbril, as he rolled slowly along through cruel crowds to the guillotine.