To one familiar with large hospitals, the scene was clearly intelligible. Insanity from disappointed hope was mingled with the fatuity of premature old age.
Propriety would have dictated my immediate retreat, after the necessary care of the ladies in alighting; but perceiving that the united persuasions of mother and daughter were likely to fail in inducing the grandfather to quit the coach without too strongly inviting public attention towards a private misfortune, I felt bound to inquire, “May I not save you, madam! from some embarrassment by begging you to enter the house? I will engage myself to place your father under the protection of your roof, in a very few minutes, and without annoyance.” Nothing insures such instantaneous confidence with the gentler sex as self-dependence in a man, and grave, though courteous authority of manner. The offer was accepted with a glance of mute thankfulness, and handing the ladies to the door, I returned to the carriage.
“Come, my dear sir,” I said to the elderly gentleman, “allow me the pleasure of assisting you to alight! your horses are a little restive.”
“No, sir!” he replied; “you are in league with them!—You lead me from place to place, and every where you tell me I am at home!—Oh! I shall never find it!—I wish to repose in my own house, and my own garden!—my mother’s house!—and you bring me here and tell me this is my house!—Do you think I have grown so weak and imbecile as not to know the chamber where I was born?—the garden where I played when a child?—No!—I will not go in!—They are kind to me here, but I am not at home!—Do, take me home!—You seem to think that I cannot tell the difference between this great palace, with its rich carpets and its marble columns, and our own little cottage, with its arbor of grape-vines and wild-creepers, where my mother used to nurse me to sleep in the old carved rocking-chair!—Oh! take me home!”
Long habituated to the management of lunatics, I had learned to guide the tangled reins of a disordered mind, and found but little difficulty in persuading the old man to rest awhile in the parlor on the plea of examining whether his granddaughter, to whom he was much attached, had not received some injury by stumbling in her descent from the coach. Seating him upon an ottoman, it was easy, by the same innocent deception to withdraw to another apartment in company with the ladies: and there, after tendering any further services which their affliction might render desirable, I heard, with deep attention, the history of their woes.
Mr. A——, the old gentleman, was, as I had inferred, the father of the elder and the grandsire of the younger lady. At an early age he came into hereditary possession of a handsome capital, and a range of ample stores near the centre of the commercial mart of ——.
His mother, who was esteemed rich in those early times (soon after the revolutionary war) retained the family homestead in addition to her dower; and, in this venerable mansion, distant about a mile from the borders of the then small, but flourishing city, her son continued to reside; for he preferred the society of his remaining parent, and the quietude of rural life in the intervals of business, to the gayer scenes and more luxurious habits of the town. Thither, he soon conveyed a young and beautiful wife; and there his happiest years were spent in the midst of a family circle bound together by ties of the warmest affection.—Even their dead were gathered around them:—for the white monuments of their departed friends peered over the stone wall of the family grave-yard, from the grove of funereal pines behind the garden.
But this peaceful life of domestic enjoyment was not destined to continue. Within a few years subsequent to his marriage, there occurred one of those sudden revolutions in trade which periodically sweep, with the force of a deluge, over the commercial interests of our country.—Mr. A—— was ruined!—He became dependent upon the resources of his parent for the support of his wife; but pride would not permit him to grant the urgent request of his mother that he would share that support himself; and he fled his native country for a time, to woo the breeze of Fortune beneath other stars.
After two long years of toil and danger among the furs of the North-West, the hides of California, the biche-le-mer and birds-nests of the Eastern Archipelagoes, he arrived at the great entrepot of the Celestial Empire with a cargo insuring him an ample competence, just in time to receive intelligence of the death of his wife, leaving to his charge an only child! She had been the star of his destiny!—That star was set, and darkness enshrouded his soul!
Recovering from this terrible shock, he shunned the very idea of returning to the scene of his former happiness. She for whom he had braved the deep!—had toiled—had grappled with the sun of the tropics,—the ice of the pole—had left him desolate!—the infant, whom no parent welcomed to this world of trial, was a stranger to him!—one whom he had never beheld! and the only remaining link which bound him to his country was his affection for an aged mother.