CHAPTER XVIII. — TRAILING THE FOX. —
This dialogue was broken by a summons to the breakfast-table. We have already intimated that while the hateful person of Stevens was an inmate of his own house, William Hinkley remained, the better portion of his time, at that of his cousin. It was not merely that Stevens was hateful to his sight, but such was the devotion of his father and mother to that adventurer, that the young man passed with little notice from either, or if he incurred their attention at all, it was only to receive their rebuke. He had not been able to disguise from them his dislike to Stevens. This dislike showed itself in many ways—in coldness, distance, silence—a reluctance to accord the necessary civilities, and in very unequivocal glances of hostility from the eyes of the jealous young villager.
Such offences against good-breeding were considered by them as so many offences against God himself, shown to one who was about to profess his ministry; and being prepared to see in Brother Stevens an object of worth and veneration only, they lacked necessarily all that keenness of discrimination which might have helped somewhat to qualify the improprieties of which they believed their son to be guilty. Of his causes of jealousy they had no suspicion, and they shared none of his antipathies. He was subject to the daily lecture from the old man, and the nightly exhortation and expostulation of the old woman. The latter did her spiriting gently. The former roared and thundered. The mother implored and kissed—the father denounced and threatened. The one, amidst the faults of her you which she reproved, could see his virtues; she could also see that he was suffering—she knew not why—as well as sinning; the other could only see an insolent, disobedient boy who was taking airs upon himself, flying in the face of his parents, and doomed to perish like the sons of Eli, unless by proving himself a better manager than Eli, he addressed himself in time to the breaking in of the unruly spirit whose offences promised to be so heinous. It was not merely from the hateful sight of his rival, or the monotonous expostulation of his mother, that the poor youth fled; it was sometimes to escape the heavily chastening hand of his bigoted father.
These things worked keenly and constantly in the mind of William Hinkley. They acquired additional powers of ferment from the coldness of Margaret Cooper, and from the goadings of his cousin. Naturally one of the gentlest of creatures, the young man was not deficient in spirit. What seemed to his more rude and elastic relative a token of imbecility, was nothing more than the softening influence of his reflective and mental over his physical powers. These, under the excitement of his blood were necessarily made subject to his animal impulses, and when he left the house that morning, with his Blackstone under his arm, on his way to the peaceful cottage of old Calvert, where he pursued his studies, his mind was in a perfect state of chaos. Of the chapter which he had striven to compass the previous night, in which the rights of persons are discussed with the usual clearness of style, but the usual one-sidedness of judgment of that smooth old monarchist, William Hinkley scarcely remembered a solitary syllable. He had read only with his eyes. His mind had kept no pace with his proceedings, and though he strove as he went along to recall the heads of topics, the points and principles of what he had been reading, his efforts at reflection, by insensible but sudden transitions, invariably concluded with some image of strife and commotion, in which he was one of the parties and Alfred Stevens another; the beautiful, proud face of Margaret Cooper being always unaccountably present, and seeming to countenance, with its scornful smiles, the spirit of strife which operated upon the combatants.
This mood had the most decided effect upon his appearance; and the good old man, Calvert, whose attention had been already drawn to the condition of distress and suffering which he manifested, was now more than ever struck with the seemingly sudden increase of this expression upon his face. It was Saturday—the saturnalia of schoolboys—and a day of rest to the venerable teacher. He was seated before his door, under the shadows of his paternal oak, once more forgetting the baffled aims and profitless toils of his own youthful ambition, in the fascinating pages of that historical romancer the stout Abbe Vertot. But a glance at the youth soon withdrew his mind from this contemplation, and the sombre pages of the present opened upon his eye, and the doubtful ones of the future became, on the instant, those which he most desired to peruse.
The study of the young is always a study of the past with the old. They seem, in such a contemplation, to live over the records of memory. They feel as one just returning from a long and weary journey, who encounters another, freshly starting to traverse the same weary but inviting track. Something in the character of William Hinkley, which seemed to resemble his own, made this feeling yet more active in the mind of Mr. Calvert; and his earnest desire was to help the youth forward on the path which, he soon perceived, it was destined that the other should finally take. He was not satisfied with the indecision of character which the youth displayed. But how could he blame it harshly? It was in this very respect that his own character had failed, and though he felt that all his counsels were to be addressed to this point, yet he knew not where; or in what manner, to begin. The volume of Blackstone which the youth carried suggested to him a course, however. He bade the young man bring out a chair, and taking the book in his hand, he proceeded to examine him upon parts of the volume which he professed to have been reading.
This examination, as it had the effect of compelling the mind of the student to contract itself to a single subject of thought, necessarily had the further effect of clearing it somewhat from the chaos of clouds which had been brooding over it, obscuring the light, and defeating the warmth of the intellectual sun behind them; and if the examination proved the youth to have been very little of a student, or one who had been reading with a vacant mind, it also proved that the original powers of his intellect were vigorous and various—that he had an analytical capacity of considerable compass; was bold in opinion, ingenious in solution, and with a tendency to metaphysical speculation, which, modified by the active wants and duties of a large city-practice, would have made him a subtle lawyer, and a very logical debater. But the blush kept heightening on the youth's cheeks as the examination proceeded. He had answered, but he felt all the while how much his answer had sprung from his own conjectures and how little from his authorities. The examination convinced him that the book had been so much waste-paper under his thumb. When it was ended the old man closed the volume, laid it on the sward beside him, and looked, with a mingled expression of interest and commiseration, on his face. William Hinkley noted this expression, and spoke, with a degree of mortification in look and accent, which he did not attempt to hide:—
“I am afraid, sir, you will make nothing of me. I can make nothing of myself. I am almost inclined to give up in despair. I will be nothing—I can be nothing. I feared as much from the beginning, sir. You only waste your time on me.”