My step-mother did not attempt to coerce me; on the contrary, she commiserated my position, and more than once expressed her disapproval of the way in which, as she said, I was hunted down by all the marriageable womanhood of the county. She insisted on giving one ball when I came home, to introduce me to her own and my father's friends and such members of the family as I only knew by name or very slightly; but after that she subsided, and my life was as free from fuss as any life in this fussy world could be.
“Clide,” observed Mrs. de Winton one morning, as we sipped our tea over the breakfast-table, “do you think it quite impossible you should ever marry?”
“Well,” I said reflectively, “as far as a man can answer for himself, I should say quite impossible.”
“But how far is that?” observed my step-mother with a sceptical smile. “You have not yet been put to the test. You have not yet come across the woman who could persuade you that marriage is the Elysium of man here below. Supposing—I merely put it in the light of a remote supposition—that you should come across her some day...?”
“I should probably accept my fate as many a wiser man has done before me, and capitulate on reasonable terms—namely, that we should be executed at six o'clock in the morning, no wedding-dress, no bridemaids, no speechifying—no fuss, in fact, and nobody present but a beggar-woman and a policeman. Then, when we come home, no entertaining, giving and taking dinners, and that sort of fuss that comes like the farce after the tragedy. If I ever meet with a pretty girl willing to take me and the Moat on these conditions, then I will not answer for the consequences.”
One year after this conversation with my step-mother I met that pretty girl; the result was what I tacitly foretold it would be. I married her. It happened in this way: I was seized with a desire to travel, and, instead of beginning with the stereotyped grand tour, I determined to go first to America. I had a hunger for grand, wild scenery. The vast primeval forests of the far West, the awful grandeur of Niagara, drew me powerfully; so off I set, accompanied by a confidential servant named Stanton. Shyness went for something in the choice. I felt attracted towards the new young continent as by a sense of homelikeness and kindred. I was not disappointed. Everything I saw there was at once novel and familiar. I could converse with the people in my own language, and was thus spared the mortification of stuttering out my inquiries in dubious French or German, or trumpeting them through an interpreter, as must have been the case on the grand tour.
Niagara appalled and fascinated me. Day after day I stood contemplating the torrents of foam that surged up to meet the great sheet of water that flung itself in a majestic arch of hard green crystal down into the boiling, creamy gulf. I gazed and gazed till sight was dim and sense was lost in a torpor of exquisite delight—neither trance nor vision, but a state that hovered between both. The thunder of the rushing waters, the sparkling of the prism that danced and flashed and faded with the changing lights, reflecting every tint in the sunset, until the cataract blazed before my dazzled eyes like a thousand rainbows melted into one, then fainted and died, leaving a uniform sheen of emerald in its place—all this was like some magnificent apotheosis that kept me spell-bound, fascinated, entranced. I had come intending to remain three days; but a week slipped away and found me still at Niagara. At last I determined to break the spell. I must tear myself from the spectacle before it overmastered my reason; for there were moments when, after standing for hours looking down into the seething abyss of foam, I felt as if an invisible chord were drawing me on and on, nearer and nearer, luring me in a dreamy way towards the water. Then I would rouse myself and rush away; but it would not do to go on playing with a danger that was sweet and potent as a magician's spell. I came out one morning to take my last look. It was just after sunrise. The falls had never looked so beautiful, the booming of the water had never sounded so solemn, the light had never evolved such a fairy tracery of jewelled glory on the silvery vapor and the green crystal. The effect was overpowering. For one moment it seemed to me that I heard the voice of Jehovah speaking in the roar of many waters; that I stood within the sanctuary, separated by an impenetrable and mysterious wall of thunder from the outer, visible world. A spontaneous and almost unconscious impulse made me uncover myself and stand bareheaded, as in the presence of the Unseen and Omnipresent. How long I stood thus I cannot say; I know that I was roused from my revery by a sound that struck in upon my dreamy deafness with strange and thrilling effect. It was the singing of a human voice; the words were inarticulate, but I knew the music well. It was a wild, weird Highland melody; the rhythm was barely distinguishable, as the notes rose and fell through the roar and boom of the waterfall, sounding nevertheless preternaturally clear and sweet, like the wail of a spirit or some sweet sea-bird's cry. What was it? Some Undine risen from the spray, and pouring out her lament to the wave? I dared not look round, so fearful was I to banish the songster. When the voice ceased, I turned my head and looked. Was I dreaming, or was it indeed a spirit that I beheld? I doubted at first. But as I kept my eyes steadily fixed on the figure, it moved towards me, and I knew that it was neither sprite nor shadow, but a woman, a young girl rather—for she seemed barely emerged from childhood to maidenhood—more beautiful than any picture I had ever seen or that my imagination had ever painted. She was small, below the middle height. Her hair fell in profuse ringlets or coils—it seemed an accidental arrangement—down her back; it was black and glossy as [pg 603] jet. Her eyes were lustrous and dark as a gazelle's; her complexion almost colorless. She was dressed in dark green, a loose, unconventional sort of garment that draped her something after the fashion of a Roman stola; her straw hat had either fallen off or she had taken it off, and held it dangling from her arm; her hands were clasped, and her eyes fixed on the fall, as it plunged from the rocky ledge down, down into the eternity of waters.
She had come within a few yards of me before she seemed conscious of my presence—of anything but the majestic spectacle that was riveting her whole soul through her eyes. She walked on like a somnambulist. A sudden dread seized me. Was she asleep, or was she experiencing in its uttermost degree the terrible attraction that I had felt more than once, and walking on unconsciously to death? I advanced a few steps, so as to stand in her path as she drew near. The effect was instantaneous. She started as if some one had struck her. I thought she would have fallen, and rushed to prevent it by stretching out my arm. The movement apparently recalled her to the sense of where she was. With a slight acknowledgment of my courtesy, she turned quickly away, and hurried on out of sight. I followed her, and it was with an unreasonable thrill of delight that I saw her enter the hotel where I was staying. Who was this siren, or how did one so young and so beautiful come to be alone in this lonely place? Before the day was over I met her again. Chance brought us together once more in the same spot. This time she was not alone. An elderly man, whom she addressed as uncle, accompanied her. He was not prepossessing in his appearance, and I doubt whether I should have overcome my natural shyness so far as to address him, if he had not himself broken the ice by asking me if I had ventured to walk under the fall, and whether the experience was worth the risk. I assured him that it amply compensated for any imaginary danger that might exist, and volunteered to accompany him if he decided on trying it. This brought us into communication, if not into sympathy. I did not like him, consequently he did not like me. We both felt this instinctively, no doubt; there was an opposing element of some sort between us that made friendship impossible, though it did not prevent that kind of superficial intimacy which is almost inevitable amongst people of the same country who find themselves thrown close together under the same roof in a foreign land. He was Scotch, as I knew at once by his name, Prendergast, and by his accent. He was a thin, medium-sized man, and could not have been more than forty, though his silver hair gave him a prematurely old look, which was perhaps increased by a settled expression of ill-temper about the mouth, arising, so his niece affectionately alleged, from chronic tooth-ache. He seemed indeed a martyr to that trying complaint, and wore his head tied up in a woollen comforter, which must have been miserably uncomfortable; for the days were hot and the nights as balmy as June. I fancied that his beautiful niece disliked him, or at least feared him considerably more than she loved him. I noticed how the merry, bright little creature started at the sound of his voice when he called to her sharply, and how she quailed when his cold, [pg 604] hard eye lighted on her in the midst of one of her childish peals of laughter, checking it as by a cold bath. It struck me even more than once that she cast a glance towards me, as if claiming my protection—against whom or what I could not imagine; but I was resolved to ascertain, and, if my assistance or sympathy could avail her, to let her have them at any cost. We happened to be alone on the third day after our first meeting. Isabel—so I heard Mr. Prendergast call her—was apparently as pleased at the opportunity as I was. She talked to me with the frank, artless abandon of a child; and, without in the least intending it, she told me enough of her antecedents and position to satisfy me that I was right in supposing her not very happy with her uncle. She told me he was her guardian, and had brought her up since she was quite a child, her parents having died when she was five years old. Her mother was his sister; her father's name was Cameron. He held a large tract of land in Canada, and had a great deal of money—“heaps of money,” was her childish estimate of it—in banks and things in England; and she, being the only child, was heiress to all this wealth. Mr. Prendergast had had the management of it up to the present, and continued to treat her as an infant, though she was now of age, she said. He had by nature a tyrannical temper, and it was increased and rendered irritable and fierce by years of tooth-ache. He had been away in hot climates to seek relief for his exasperated nerves, and it was only on her account that he had returned to England of late. He had come out to America to look after her property, and also for the benefit of her health, which had required change and a long sea-voyage. I felt grateful to him for this at least, as the sacrifice had evidently been crowned with success. Miss Cameron looked the very picture of health, and she said the voyage had made her stronger than she had ever been in her life. It had, however, proved very disastrous to Mr. Prendergast, whose teeth had not given him a day's rest since they left England; “and of course this makes him very cross,” his niece observed deprecatingly, with a little sigh.
After this conversation we became perfectly at ease with each other, and tacitly watched for opportunities of renewing it. I need not say that I relinquished my plan of leaving the falls, which day after day grew more beautiful, more irresistibly attractive, to me. A week passed in a dreamy state of blissfulness, and then a crisis came. Mr. Prendergast, who had been howling all night in the room next to me with the tooth-ache, set off after breakfast, in spite of his swelled face, with a party that were being taken to walk under the arch of the fall. He wound a quarter of a mile of Shetland shawls round his head, and, thus fortified, donned the leathern costume of the occasion, and down he went. Everything went well enough until he was emerging from the tremendous roar that had covered him in like a curtain, and was setting his foot on dry land above, when he was seized with a rush of blood to the head, and fell insensible to the ground. He was carried to his room, and lay there dangerously ill for several days. Isabel was not allowed to see him. The doctor enjoined absolute quiet as of the first necessity; no one entered the sick-room but the medical man and a nurse whom he sent for to the nearest town. This catastrophe naturally threw Miss Cameron [pg 605] and me a good deal together. We wandered out to admire the falls by sunrise; we were to be seen there again at sunset, when the clouds rolled in golden cascades over the western sky, and made a spectacle of rival glory above and beyond the everlasting glory of Niagara. What could come of all this but what came of it? We loved each other, and we confessed it. It was a wild act on my part. I knew nothing of Isabel's family and antecedents but what she had accidentally told me; but to a man in love, first love, what more was wanted? She bore a name that was ancient as my own. As to her fortune, I cared nothing for that. She told me it was already legally in her own power; that she was twenty-one. I believed this, since she said it, but it required a strong effort of faith to credit that beaming young face with more than seventeen years in this cold world. Those were blissful days while we walked arm-in-arm through the yellowing forest, and alongside the river beyond the falls, cooing our young loves to one another, as foolish and as tender as any two Babes in the Wood. But Mr. Prendergast was getting well now, and called Isabel constantly to his side, and sternly catechised her as to what she did when she left him. He was to be down-stairs to-morrow, and they were to leave Niagara in a few days, and sail for England by the next boat that left Quebec. She whispered this to me with white lips one morning, and then rushed up-stairs to answer the call of the dragon, who was shouting to her from his open window. I waited till she came down again, and then drew her out into a favorite spot of ours at a little distance from the house.