Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

CHAPTER IX.
SCHOLAR AND SOLDIER.

Harrington lived in Chambers street, not far from where he had left the carriage, and strode on over the pavement of Cambridge street to his house, drawing in deep breaths of the delicious, cool, spring air, and thinking with a rapt heart of Muriel.

It was a perfect day. The long thoroughfare sloping gently, and narrowing away into distance, with its descending row of irregular, motley buildings of brick and wood, and its lines of passengers, was fresh and salient in the morning sunlight. Blown from the country, wafts of woodland odors, balmy as the breath of Muriel, floated softly to his sense. Flowing out of the west, the morning wind, light as the lips of Muriel, touched his cheeks, and the young man’s heart and blood were full of love and spring.

O, blessed magic of one little moment, which had repaired what hours and days undid! Her breath had breathed upon his sense, her lips had met his cheek, and therefore, all thought that she loved another, all evidence that her soul was not in secret, firm alliance with his own, had vanished in the flash of rapture which filled his being. And more—the phantoms which surrounded him had vanished too. Born servant and soldier of mankind, he was often made to feel how powerless he was in the great social war of the many against the one; and at such times, to his spirit, as to that of many a lover of men, came gloomy spectres from the world of complicated wo and wrong. From the grim-grotesque, sad, turbulent scene of the morning street; from the low room of the fugitive’s humbleness and anguish, and the futile generosity of the patrician girl; from the cloud on the horizon of his soul, where glimmered the image of the coming hunter; from the whole dark consciousness of a social order leagued against the poor and weak, the invading phantoms had poured like midnight ghosts around him. But they were all gone, and again there was strength and morning in his soul. The spring day was sweet and beautiful; perfume and victory coursed through his veins; the noble face of his beloved bloomed in his heart; her wild-rose mouth had touched him like the envoy of a costly kiss; her fragrant breath had shot his blood with ecstasy; and past and future melted into the rich passion of the present hour, which had renewed his manhood and left him with the pulse and thews of a Crusader.

Flushed and throbbing with the bliss of his thought of Muriel, he reached his dwelling. It was an old, three-storied, quaintly-fashioned brick house, with green blinds, windows and window-panes smaller than those of modern date, and in the centre, up three stone steps, a door with a brass knocker, and a brass plate below it, on which was engraved the name, E. Z. Fisher. The house breathed in an air fragrant with lilacs, whose clumped green and purple bloomed pleasantly over the top of a close board fence, with a gate in it, which extended from the left hand side of the tenement to the blind side-wall of the adjoining dwelling, and inclosed a yard within which abutted from the main building a wing of two stories. In this wing dwelt Harrington; the rest of the house was occupied by the Captain and his family.

He opened the gate and entered the yard, which was in fact a small garden. A planked footway led from the gate to the two wooden steps of the door in the wing, and a similar footway crossed this, and crooked around the side of the abutment. Lilac bushes were planted against the fence and the blind wall of the dwelling on the left, and there were shrubs and flowers on either side of the door, and around the wall of the wing. It was a pleasant spot, full of fragrance and retiracy.

Without pausing, Harrington unlocked his door and entered his study. It was a square room, cool and quiet, lit by two green-curtained front windows which looked on the garden, and containing several hundred volumes on shelves, row above row, on three sides of the apartment. In the centre was a table loaded with books and papers, and an arm-chair. Four or five choice engravings hung in spaces between the book-shelves, and on one side, on a pedestal, was a noble bust of Lord Bacon. A set of foils and masks hung across the mantel, and a huge pair of dumb-bells lay on the floor in a corner. A carpet of green baize, an old sofa between the windows, and a few chairs, completed the furniture of the room, whose only other noticeable feature was a slanting step-ladder on one side, leading up by a trap in the ceiling into Harrington’s bed-chamber.

Throwing himself into his arm-chair, the young scholar took from a drawer, and pressed to his lips, a little bunch of withered herbs, which Muriel had held in her hand one evening two or three weeks before, and given him at parting. Their dry balsamic odor stole softly to his brain, freighted with the thought of the white hand that gave them, and closing his eyes, he abandoned himself to ecstatic dreams.

In a few minutes, a barrel-organ began to play outside his gate. It was a peculiarly sweet instrument—some people in the region of Beacon Hill may remember it as the one they used to follow from street to street on balmy summer evenings, so loth were they to part with its melody. Harrington was fond of all barrel-organs that were at all melodious—the poor man’s opera, he used to call them, associating them with the delight they gave to little children and the dwellers in poor houses, and always pleased to have them bring Italy into the street, as some one has felicitously phrased it. The organist, sure of his reward whenever his patron was at home, came often to the house. On this occasion, Harrington had no sooner heard the first notes, than he twisted up some change in paper, and opening the door, tossed it over the gate. The instrument stopped in the midst of the tune, and while the man was picking up the largesse, Harrington opened his windows, and resumed his chair to enjoy the music.

A rich light gush of lilac fragrance which seemed to blend with the brilliant melody of the polacca the organ played, poured in at the open windows, and melted into his mood. He sat softly beating with his hand the dance of the tune, with the debonair image of Muriel floating in melody through his fancy. She came again, expressed in a tenderer mood, as the music changed to a strain of yearning and dreamful sweetness, like a poem of deep love. Then followed one of the negro melodies of the day, a simple and mournful air, with notes of anguish, and still she was present in his mind linked with a shadowy remembrance of the wrongs and sorrows of the race to whose low estate her heart stooped so often to help and console. Soul in soul, he moved with her through the rich and melancholy maze of the succeeding music—a sombre and sumptuous Italian romanza, crowded with slow passion and tumult, with notes that swelled and poured athwart the central theme, like some dim innumerable host of love and sorrow gathering and forming, and dividing again in baffled and harmonious disorder. Air upon air came after, and sinking away, the listener lost for awhile their melody and meaning, and only knew that they were sweet and sad; till rising from reverie he heard the last of a solemn and tender strain like some delicious psalm of death and life immortal.