VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
“I think I shall start for New Hampshire to-morrow,” I said. “Do you know anything about L——, in Cheshire County?”
Jones, who had been meditatively examining the coloring of a richly-tinted meerschaum, sat up erect at this question, with a sudden access of vigor.
“L——?” he said. “By George! there’s where Agnes Cortland lives now in the summer.”
It was the middle week of July. Aspirations for one whiff of the breeze among the hills had become irresistible. We were sitting together, Jones and I, in my room up-town after luncheon. Jones was a young New York artist in his first season after his return from Italy the previous autumn. He, too, was about to start on a sketching tour through Vermont, in which State his people lived. He was late leaving town, but money was not easy with him—a handsome young fellow of that golden age between twenty-three and twenty-four, when one is apt to think he needs only a very short-handled lever to move the world. He was of medium height, but squarely and powerfully built; with a face good-natured, but very resolute, in expression. A stranger would not be likely to take a liberty with him. I had a strong notion that Jones would make a better soldier than artist, if there were any question of blows being struck for the country, which happily there is not. But hitherto I had shrewdly kept that opinion to myself. Considerably older than he was, and engaged in another occupation, circumstances had thrown us a good deal together. Intimacy had brought confidence, and confidence, at his age, meant—nothing more nor less than it always does under such circumstances—the unbosoming of his love affairs. How few there are who have not found themselves in the same position, either as actors or sympathetic chorus, or in time as both! What countless dramas of passion are continually being put upon the private stage before this limited audience!
Now, it is not the purpose of this paper to pursue the history of Jones’ captivity at the hands of the tender goddess through all the infinitesimal and transcendental chapters a first romance runs into. More placid emotions and observations, befitting the serenity of approaching middle age, are in store for the reader. And in fact the history of Jones’ passion is still incomplete. But so much of it may be given as fell within the purview of our New Hampshire observations.
Jones was poor—prosaic fact, which robs life of so many compensations as we grow old. But at twenty-three we spurn the mastery of the glittering dross—that is, if Congress gives us any to spurn! Let us say rather of the flimsy paper. At that age of our flowing life we coin money at our own mint; or, more truly, draw limitless drafts on the Bank of the Future. Happy the man who meets them when they fall due! Jones, at least, had no doubts as to his future solvency. But his plans were vague—very!
Agnes Cortland was the daughter of a railroad director—or two or three directors rolled into one—and had the world, or at least the New York world, to choose from. Poor Jones! his story might almost be predicted from the start. Yet this inheritor of the (latent) genius of any half-dozen masters, ancient or modern, you choose to name, believed, perhaps with some reason, that this daughter of Dives liked him; and as for himself, he vowed with hyperbole that he adored her. They had frequently met—their families then being neighbors in the country—before he went to Italy, where he had spent two years studying and wandering about. No avowal of affection had been made between them, but he had gone away with the consciousness many little signs and tokens give that he was not disliked. Since his return a year ago some meetings had taken place—at rarer intervals—in society. At an evening party some months before she had given him, he said, a slight but unmistakable opportunity of declaring himself, if he had wished to do so.
“But I did not take it,” said Jones, who, spite of his being in love, was as manly a young fellow as one could meet. “She knows I am poor; and I don’t want to be thought a fortune-hunter.”