Whence was the force to come that should solve the difficulty?
CHAPTER XV.
A LOVER.
Two long hours I had kept Mr. Clitheroe in talk. For my friend’s sake I would have prolonged the interview indefinitely. For my own, too. He was a new character to me, this gentle soul, so sadly astray. My filial feeling for him deepened momently. And as my pity grew more exquisitely painful, I shrank still from quitting him, and so acknowledging that the pity was hopeless.
We approached the fort. The fiddlers three were dragging their last grumbling notes out of drowsy strings. The saints began to stream by toward their wagons. We turned away to avoid recognition.
Miss Clitheroe and Brent joined us,—a sadder pair than we. The stars showed me the glimmer of tears in her eyes. But her look was brave and steady. She left my friend, and laid her hand on her father’s arm. A marked likeness, and yet a contrast more marked, between these two. He had given her his refinement, a quality so in him and of him that he colored whatever came near him with an emanation from himself, and so was blinded to its real crude tints. By this medium he made in his description that black hole of a coal mine, where so many of his years had been buried, a grotto of enchantment. He filled the world with illusions. Whatever was future and whatever was past, seen through his poetic imagination, seemed to him so beautiful, or so strange and interesting, that he lost all care for the discomforts of the present. And this same refinement of nature deluded him in judging character. Bad and base motives seemed to him so ugly, that he refused to see them, shrank from belief in them, and insisted upon trusting that men were as honorable as himself. He was a man for prosperity. What did fate mean by maltreating him with the manifold adversities of his life? To what end was this sad error?
A strange contrast, with all the likeness, between his daughter and him. A more vigorous being had mingled its life with hers. Or perhaps the stern history of her early days had taught her to forge the armor of self-protection. She seemed to have all her father’s refinement, but she used it to surround and seclude herself, not to change and glorify others. Godiva was not more delicately hidden from the vulgar world by the mantle of her own golden hair, than this sweet lady by her veil of gentle breeding.
As she took her father’s arm to lead him away to the camp, I could read in her look that there were no illusions for her. But she clave to her father,—the blinder and more hopelessly errant he might be, the closer she clave. He might reject her guidance; she still stood by to protect him, to sweeten his life, and when the darkness came, which she could not but foresee, to be a light to him. However adversity had thus far failed to teach him self-possession, it had made her a heroine and a martyr,—a noble and unselfish soul, such as, one among the myriads, God educates to shame the base and the trifling, and to hearten and inspire the true.
“Now, dear father,” she said, “we must bid these kind friends good night. We start early. We need rest.”
She held out her hand to me.