They saluted the old Frenchman, who stood with the Hungarian at the pistol bench, and left the room.
CHAPTER IV.
MURIEL AND EMILY.
Temple street slopes steeply down Beacon Hill, an aristocratic street of the aristocratic quarter.
In Temple street lived Muriel with her mother. Mrs. Eastman was a widow. Her husband, a young scholar, primarily a lawyer, had died three years after their marriage, when Muriel was but two years old. The effect of his death on his wife was peculiar. Fitly named Serena, so gentle and lovely was her nature, his death had not made her unhappy, but it had breathed a deeper quiet into her gentleness, and her life had been, since then, as calm as evening. She had been a poet—some of those exquisite little anonymous lyrics, of which America produces so many, and which float about through the press, scattering delight but winning no fame, were hers. But his death had stilled her muse forever. It seemed to have cloistered her spirit from the world. Never very fond of company, his decease had made her in love with solitude, and she spent much of her time in her own chamber, alone.
She was wealthy, having inherited from her husband a considerable property. Muriel, too, was rich in her own right; Mr. Eastman’s brother, who had a great affection for her, having died a bachelor four or five years before, and left her a handsome fortune.
It was a large, sumptuously furnished house they lived in. Into its library, the fresh spring light, which lay so palely in the long, musty, powder-scented fencing-school, streamed that morning through crystal and purple panes, and filled the perfumed air with a gold and violet glory. The library was rich and dark in color, with walnut bookcases, deep-toned walls, and violet-velvet furniture. Its prevailing sombrous hue seemed to confine and intensify the cheerful radiance which filled it, like some ethereal lustrous liquid in a cup of ebony, touching the dim gilding of the picture-frames, the delicate ornaments here and there, and resting on a distinctive feature of the apartment, a large parlor organ, of dark oak and gold.
But the library’s chief ornament that morning was Muriel—as lovely a blonde as ever grew to the gathered grace and vigor of twenty summers, and with that pervading glimmer of natural elegance and fine courtly breeding in her loveliness, which we express in the word debonair. She was standing very still, rapt in deep musing, with an open volume of Dante held in her left palm, and her white, nervous right hand resting on the page. A lilac dress of some soft tissue, stirred only above the light pulsations of her bosom, flowed in graceful folds, as she stood with one arched foot advanced and partly visible at its margin, and revealed the enchanting harmony of her tall and stately figure. The dress came quite up to the neck, flowering over there in a charming ruffle of lace, above which bloomed her exquisite countenance, virginal and gracious as the morning, as dewy-sweet, as fresh, as spiritually pure. The complexion, fair and clear as a pond-lily, was radiant with perfect health. Color, faint as the dawn, tinted the oval cheeks, and the sweet, curved mouth wore the hue of the wild-brier rose. The large grey eyes were softened with a golden sheen. Amber hair, with a tint of gold in it, parted over the serene and open brow, and rising from the head, as we see it in the Greek statues, rippled down in wavy tresses around the delicate ears, to gather behind in soft, thick loops of antique beauty. Noble and debonair from head to foot, and all imparadised in charm, so on that morning stood Muriel.
Who would have dreamed that the reverie in which she was absorbed was too solemn to have grown upon her spirit from the mighty Tuscan page before her? Who could have imagined, gazing upon her calm loveliness, that a great and awful, though silent, struggle had shaken her heart? Yet it was so. The event which can most convulse a woman’s life had come to her. She loved Harrington, and it had dawned upon her that he loved her friend Emily.
She had met it bravely. With that revelation her heart had risen to the level of heroic story, and in the spiritual strife which makes life tremble to its centre, she was the victor. She knew that the world lay lonely and disenchanted before her, but she was calm. She knew that life’s fairest hope was unaccomplished, life’s loveliest dream dissolved, but she was strong. She saw afar the dark battalia of the coming years of sadness, and her heart rose to meet them with the pulses of Marathon. It was love’s crowning hour with her—the hour of sacrifice, renunciation, the high soul’s rapture of martyrdom—the hour of bravery and sad, generous joy.