Scarcely was the work finished ere he died, bequeathing to his descendants, not only a vast estate, a splendid home, and an illustrious name, but, by a still stronger law of heirship, certain marked traits of character hereditary in himself,—indomitable energy, dogged independence, strong family pride, and an occasional lunacy of rage, familiarly known as the "Black Bergan temper," to which the race had been subject from time immemorial. These characteristics were to be traced, more or less distinctly through all the portraits of his successors; but in none did they seem to be so perfectly reproduced as in his present representative. In truth, Major Bergan might be regarded as the original Sir Harry over again; his harsh features and stern expression being shown in the old, time-darkened picture with a degree of prophetical accuracy little short of actual portraiture.
Other pictured faces there were, however, which time, still faithful to its work of bringing out the essential truth, had only touched into softer beauty. Such was the face of Eleanor, wife of Sir Harry; a woman of fair and noble presence, in the rich prime of her life, with a wise, strong, beautiful soul, shining out through her deep, soft eyes. Before this picture Bergan lingered long. Even in babyhood, his mother had resembled it strongly enough to make it seem most fitting that she should receive its name; and the likeness had so strengthened with years, that now, it might easily have passed for her portrait, painted from life.
Seeing how perfectly these twain of their ancestors were reflected in his mother and uncle, not only in features, but also in character, Bergan was suddenly seized with a nightmare of doubt and questioning. Was a man's good or evil, then, a mere matter of inheritance, an inevitable heirloom, handed down to him from a remote ancestry, by a more effectual law of transmission than has ever been established, in respect to more tangible property? If so,—if the defects and weaknesses, the depraved tastes and ungovernable passions, which characterized the father were inevitably passed on to the son, and the son's son,—if the moral disease under which this man groaned, as well as the sweet temper which made that woman a household sunbeam, were to be surely traced back to their ancestor of a hundred years ago; what became of individual worth, individual shame, and individual accountability?
Bergan shrank from the apparently inevitable conclusion. He felt, with an unutterable horror, its snaky coils tightening around him, squeezing the breath out of every noble aim and aspiration. He could only escape from it by an appeal from his reason to his consciousness.
"If," he asked himself, "I should now take that grim picture from the wall, and thrust it into the fire, in revenge for the pain which it has given me, should I not know, despite all reasoning to the contrary, that I—I alone, and not that bearded Sir Harry, was responsible for the foolish act? Certainly, I should; for whatever else he may have sent down to me, he did not give me either my will or my conscience. These are my own, and never Bergan of them all had them before me!" And he drew a long breath of relief.
His attention was now directed to the portrait of a young girl, at the end of the second row, nearest the window. It had an odd, illusive resemblance to some one that he had known,—a singular likeness in unlikeness, which puzzled while it attracted him. All at once, capturing the fleeting, familiar expression, as it were, by a swift side-glance, he recognized it as that portrait of his mother in her youth, of which Major Bergan had spoken. He stood gazing upon it long and earnestly, yet with a strange, undefinable feeling of sadness, too. For this bright, young being, with the smooth brow, the arch, dimpled face, and the unwakened soul dreaming at the depths of the soft eyes, was, after all, a stranger to him,—a being that he had never known, and never could know, any more than if she had been laid years ago under the sod, and her sweet substance gradually transformed into violets and daisies. He went back to the picture of Lady Eleanor, and felt, with a thrill of gladness, that he had found again the mother that he seemed, for a brief space, to have lost.
He now turned from the pictures to the book-cases, and found them to contain a heterogeneous collection of ancient and modern volumes, carelessly ranged upon the shelves, without reference either to age or theme. Latin and English classics stood shoulder to shoulder; law and poetry were harmoniously cheek by jowl; divinity and science amiably helped each other to stand upright; history, philosophy, morality, and controversy, met on the same plane, and sunk their differences under one uniform coat of dust. Geography that read like fiction, geology that had no interest except to the antiquarian, and infidelity that had not a peg left to stand upon, were huddled together in one corner, and (no doubt to their utter amazement) helped, in these latter days, to point the same moral.
Growing oppressed, at last, with the sight of so much hopelessly shelved thought, so many pages bearing the prints of a long succession of fingers now crumbled into dust, Bergan turned back to the hall, mounted the staircase, and glanced into two or three of the chambers. He found in all faded carpets, ancient bureaus, high-post bedsteads, shadow-haunted hangings, a thick coating of dust, and a heavy, breathless scent which, it seemed to him, death must needs have left there, in his oldtime visits. Indeed, he could almost have believed that the last occupant of each dusky cavern of a bed had stiffened into clay therein, and been left to choke the air, and coat the furniture, with his own mouldering substance. No lighter dust, he thought, could have made the atmosphere so thick, or caused him to draw his breath so heavily.
Opening the last door in the gallery, Bergan was startled to find a room with every appearance of recent occupancy. Not a speck of dust dimmed the carpet or the furniture; the curtains and the bed-drapery stirred lightly with the breeze from a half-open window; the soft pillows seemed waiting for the head that had dreamed upon them last night; a chair, with a shawl thrown carelessly over the back, stood where it must needs have been left a moment ago; an open workbox showed a suggestive confusion of spools of silk and bits of ribbon and worsted; a vase of flowers adorned the mantel; and a little white glove lay on the toilet-table, among brushes and scent-bottles, and was reflected in a small, bright mirror. Bergan hastily drew back, feeling intuitively that he had intruded upon a maiden's bed-chamber, keeping still the perfume of her sweet breath and happy thoughts.
Yet—the bed-linen, how strangely yellow!—the shawl, how dim and faded!—the flowers, how withered! He advanced again; he began to understand that the maiden who had dreamed on that pillow, whose hand had left its dainty mould in that glove, the sweetness of whose virgin breath still lingered in the room with the scent of the withered rosebuds, went out from it years ago,—a bride,—to be known thenceforth as wife and mother,—his mother! His eyes grew moist; one by one he touched the little possessions left behind with her girlhood, striving thus to come a little closer to the fair, shy image, that moved him with such unutterable tenderness, yet seemed so far beyond his ken. Reverently, at last, he closed the door, as upon a still, white, smiling corpse, at once ineffably beautiful and ineffably sad.