"Hong man, he outside," said the servant.
"Show him in, you stupid fool!" said the master, "and get out of the room with yourself!"
CHAPTER V.
The Hong merchant's intelligence proved at once to Swan Day the absolute necessity of his return to America to protect the interests of the Company in Boston. With the promptitude which had thus far been one of the chief elements of his success, he lost not a moment in (so to speak) changing his skin, for the new purpose of his existence.
It seemed as if with the resumption of the dress of his native country, (albeit of torrid texture still, since a chocolate silk coat, embroidered waistcoat, and trousers of dark satin speak to a modern ear of fashions as remote as China,) Swan resumed many of the habits and feelings therewith connected. With the flowing flowered robe he cast off forever the world to which it belonged, and his pulse beat rapidly and joyfully as the sails filled with the breeze that bore him away. He gazed with a disdainful pleasure at the receding shore, and closed his eyes,—to turn his back fairly and forever on the Chew-Sins and the Wu-Wangs,—to let the Hang dynasty go hang,—to shut out from all but future fireside-tales the thought of varnish-trees, soap-trees, tallow-trees, wax-trees, and litchi,—never more to look on the land of the rhinoceros, the camel, the elephant, and the ape,—on the girls with thick, protuberant lips, copper skins, and lanky, black hair,—on the corpulent gentry with their long talons, and madams tottering on their hoofs, reminding him constantly of the animal kingdom, as figured to imagination in childhood, of the rat that wanted his long tail again, or of the horse that will never win a race,—on the land of lanterns and lying, of silver pheasants and—of scamps.
The faster the good ship sailed, the stronger the east-wind blew, the swifter ran the life-current in the veins of the returning exile,—friend, countryman, lover.
As the vessel neared the coast of Massachusetts, and the land-breeze brought to his eager nostrils the odors of his native orchards, or the aromatic fragrance of the pine, and the indescribable impression, on all his senses, of home, the fresh love of country rushed purely through his veins, bubbled warmly about the place where his heart used to beat, and rose to his brain in soft, sweet imaginations. Vivid pictures of past and future; identical in all their essential features, swam before his closed eyes, languid now from excess of pleasure. Again and again he drew in the breath of home, and felt it sweeter than the gales from the Spice Islands or odors from Araby the Blest. Hovering before his fancy, came sweet eyes, full of bewildering light, half-reproachful, half-sad, and all-bewitching; a form of such exquisite grace that he wondered not it swam and undulated before him; over all, the rose-hue of youth, and the smooth, sweet charm of lip and hand that memory brought him, in that last timid caress under the pear-tree after sunset.
As soon as he could possibly so arrange his affairs in Boston as to admit of his taking a journey to Walton, Swan determined to do so. But affairs will not always consent to an arrangement; and although he exerted himself to gain a week's leisure, it was not till the Indian summer was past that he took his place in the stage-coach which plied between Boston and Walton.
How very short seemed the time since he was last on this road! Yet how much had things changed! Fifteen years! Was it possible he had been gone so long? How rapidly they had gone over himself! He felt scarcely a day older. The stage-coach was aptly termed "Accommodation," and Swan had great amusement, as he sat with the driver on the box, in noting the differences in the aspect of houses and people, since his own last ride over the same road. New villages had sprung up here and there, while already more than one manufacturing establishment showed the Northern tendencies; and the elements of progress peeped from every settlement, in the shape of meeting- and school-houses.
When the driver whipped up his modest team to an animated trot before the Eagle Hotel in Walton, Swan felt as if he must have been in a dream only, and had just now awakened. Walton was one of those New-Hampshire towns, of which there came afterwards to be many, which were said "to be good to go from"; accordingly, everybody had gone everywhere, except the old inhabitants and the children. All the youths had gone towards "the pleasant Ohio, to settle on its banks"; and such maidens as had courage to face a pioneer settlement followed their chosen lords, while the less enterprising were fain to stay at home and bewail their singlehood. All business was necessarily stagnant, and all the improvements, architectural or otherwise, which had marked the route on which Swan had come, now seemed suddenly to have ceased. He might have thought Walton the Enchanted Palace, and himself the Fairy-Prince that was to waken to life and love the Sleeping Beauty.