“Yes, at ten paces;” said Stanley.
“A fearful proximity for men of approved courage and skill who are bent on taking each other’s life!” rejoined Harry; then after a pause, he added, “Wilson persists in his challenge, Fred?”
“Good G—!” exclaimed Stanley in dismay at what appeared to him a prospect of losing his expected sport, “you are not afraid to meet him Harry?”
“No, Stanley,” said Harry, “not in your sense of the word. So long as consequences are limited to myself, I have little thought of fear. But,” he continued—and he spoke in a low tone and with unwonted rapidity, lest some tremulousness of the voice might betray his emotion—“there are other interests, other fears, other considerations—”
“Forget them for heaven’s sake, until after to-morrow,” said Stanley, interrupting him, “or you will never acquit yourself with honor. If you have any little affairs to despatch, set about them at once, and don’t fail to be abed and asleep before ten, or you won’t be up in season. I would not have Wilson on the ground before us for the world. Good-bye; I must prepare my pistols, for I see you will never give them a thought;” and away went Fred Stanley as full of bravery, as solicitous for his friend’s honor, and as indifferent about his friend’s distress of mind—as seconds are wont to be.
Harry did not move for some minutes after Stanley left him; and when at length he raised his eyes from the floor, his countenance bore an expression of unutterable wo.
It was no wonder. He was the only child of a widowed mother, and the affianced lover of the sweetest maid in the land. If he should fall, as he well might, what would become of that mother and of Kate Birney?
He at length aroused himself saying—“I dare not see my mother: but Kate—dearest, loveliest Kate! I promised to call on her at five; and it’s five now; and, by heaven, there she stands at her parlor window beckoning me to hasten; yes! and she holds up that bouquet of flowers. It was but yesterday I gathered them for her—and what has not happened since yesterday!” Here he paused, as if too much overcome by fond recollections to proceed: he then added in a different tone—“these follies come upon us, with both cause and consequences, as suddenly, as fatally as the inevitable casualties of life! A day of promise is changed to a life of mourning by the event of a moment; the act of an instant destroys the happiness and poisons the memory of years! Those flowers were gathered in hope; and before they—frail, perishing mementos—can wither, he who bound them and she who wears them may be lost in despair!”
With a heavy heart Harry repaired to his love’s rendezvous, where, full of beauty and tenderness, Kate awaited him. They were to be married in a week; and these interviews of the lovers now possessed an additional witchery from the fact that their communings, as lovers, were so soon to terminate forever.
The romance of passion is a bright episode in our youth. The hymenæal sun, while he yet clambers toward the “misty mountain-tops” on the morning of a wedding-day, spreads his promise over the broad firmament in a thousand fantastical images of crimson and gold. We watch the accumulating splendors of the sky and say, exultingly, if the dawn be so gorgeous what will not the day bring forth? But as we gaze, the sun heaves his broad disk above the horizon—the ephemeral imagery of vapor disappears—and the calm, steady sunlight of every day-life succeeds to the beautiful vision.