The intervention of some legal difficulties and delays made it several weeks before the whole was arranged and it did him no harm to have a duty of this nature within that period to divert a part of his thoughts from his other troubles. He saw the H's no more than was absolutely necessary, notwithstanding their own desire to cultivate a more frequent and friendly intercourse. There was something morbid, perhaps certainly excessive, in the pride that constituted one of the principal elements of his conduct. At any rate, it was a pride of no ignoble nature. He at last found himself the denizen of a cheap garret lodging, a student in the office of one of the ablest and best of the very respectable medical faculty of New York, and the owner of nothing on earth more than about a hundred volumes of books-a tolerable gentleman's wardrobe-a ream of paper for review, magazine, and newspaper writing-a brave and sanguine spirit—a firm trust in God and in good-a heart a little bruised, but far from broken-and his Honor Bright. lied five hundred times to himself, in the assurances he as many times most positively made to that individual, that he cared nothing about it, and that he was on the whole rather glad than not. Not that he continued to love Helen. Any such sentiment rapidly disappears when that reverence which is the true foundation of love was once fairly undermined. But there are no griefs like those with which a young heart unshrines and casts forth its idols, false as it may discover them to have been. His purpose in regard to the restitution he felt himself to owe to the H's, he was resolved to carry fully out; nor could the strenuous opposition of the latter, who urged him to retain half, affect his purpose. His reasoning was very simple-very simple, of course, in a double sense. The money was not his-it was theirs; he had no more right to keep it, than he would have to take it by an act of dishonesty. Nor was there any reason why his pride should stoop to accept the gift of a portion of it at their hands, any more than from other strangers; length of possession but magnified the injury which justice bade him repair; and when he recalled that con- The above blank line represents a dition of destitution of which he had period of five years. The H-'s had a single but sufficient glimpse, he continued to reside in New York, felt that the only atonement he could though the spacious and elegant abode make to his own feelings, was by in which they were now established in stripping himself to the last cent of all St. John's square, contrasted somewhat the unrighteous wealth which had been with that in which the opening of this for so many wretched years withheld narrative found them. Charles Fitzfrom its true owners. And he was gerald was one of the rarest, though the more fixed in his determination to perhaps the most welcome of its visitaccept nothing, because he fancied that ors. Indeed, his habits of studious lait would be taking advantage of a gen- bor and seclusion made him but seldom erosity of feeling awakened on their visible in general society. He had depart by what on his was an act of mere voted himself with zealous industry to necessary right and duty,-that it would the wide range of study connected with seem as though he were only frac- the vocation he had undertaken, at the tionally honest and honorable. He same time that no slight application of claimed only secrecy respecting the labor in other modes was necessary for whole transaction, for the sake of his his support. He had notwithstanding father's memory; and in the few in- accomplished himself to an unusual terviews with the widow requisite for degree in the fascinating lore of his the arrangement of the business, he profession, which he had been now for had almost to force her full compli- two years admitted to practise—that is ance with his determined will in the to say, if he could get anybody to matter. Such was his reasoning; in practise upon; by no means an invariathe logic of which, I confess, it is hard ble concomitant of a young physician's to find the flaw, though it must be to- diploma. It must be confessed that his tally false and foolish, judged by its still continued studies were not very results, on the reductio ad absurdum often interrupted by the summons of method, at least so all the world would patients, excepting of the unpaying say, and all the world must be right. poor, upon whom every young man rassment in the good old lady's countenance and manner. It was some time before she approached the subject that had led to the note whose summons placed him there. who chooses may acquire any amount of the "experience" necessary to gain him admission to the sick room of the rich; and many a time, in the course of the explorations into which he was thus led, was the occasion of his first. It was a matter in which, after apoloclose acquaintance with poverty in its gizing for his delay, though without own home, recalled to his mind by the explaining the cause of his lateness, he parallel spectacles of destitution brought was of course passive. under his eye. It was on his return pretty late one evening from one of these too frequent scenes, while the voice of blessing was yet in his ears, poured forth from the very soul of a mother whose child he had saved from a condition of severe pain and peril—(remaining for the greater part of the day by its side, watching the fluttering breath of its doubtful life, and almost worshipped as an angel of light descended like a revelation into the midst of that human wretchedness and wo)-that Charles Fitzgerald found on the table of the small apartment that constituted as well his office as his lodging, a note in a handwriting familiar enough to him, but which caused him an emotion as he opened it, which it might take longer space to analyze than I have now to spare. And yet it was a note from an elderly lady, and was very brief and simple in its tenor: "Mrs. H― presents her kindest regards to Dr. Fitzgerald, and will be much obliged if he can spare her an hour this evening, when she will be alone in the hope and pleasure of seeing him. 'Thursday morning, Oct. 23." "What can it mean?" was our young friend's meditation. "I have not done more than leave a card there for nearly six months. She must have thought it strange and yet there is nothing but kindness in the note. She cannot have suspected-no, I have taken good care that nobody should ever suspectbut I must go, if it is not too late." And glancing at his watch he made a hurried change in his dress, and before the expiration of twenty minutes he was seated in a deep and luxurious easy chair by a famous blazing coal fire, with Mrs. Has his vis-à-vis in a situation of similar personal comfort-though evidently enough in no corresponding state of mental composure. His reception had been marked with a kindness that even affectionate, though there was at once melancholy and embar was "I have troubled you with this request," she at length said, “because I could not bring myself to leave this place-this country-without again seeing you." "Leave this country!" exclaimed her listener, whose heart was already throbbing so tumultuously that it was not easy for him to command a tone of calmness in his voice." Leave this country?-Is it possible !—and when? and why ?" "As for the when," was the reply, we sail for Havre on the 1st-that is, if Mary is able then to undergo the exertion. The why, too, is probably sufficiently answered in that;"-and the mother's eyes filled with tears, and the quivering of her lip spoke the emotion to which it gave no other expression. "Dr. F," she resumed, "gives me but faint encouragement, though the voyage, the change, and the climate of the south of Italy, afford us now our only chance. Indeed, I have been long anxious for her to go, but have never been able to overcome her own repugnance, till now she has at last yielded the only point on which she had ever opposed herself to my wishes. If we can reach Europe, I shall then have some hope.' There was a whole life's history of complete identification of heart, soul, everything, between two human beings, all in all to each other, and to each other alone, shadowed forth in that unconscious form of expression, "afford us now our only chance." Charles Fitzgerald had, no doubt, been much exhausted by his long watching by the bed of the sick child that day. The reader will not, therefore, be surprised that his face was now considerably whiter than had been the sheet on that same bed; and that if he did not fall either to the right or the left, he owed his upright posture in his easy chair, much more to the ample sides of that inestimable article of furniture, than to any inherent ability of his own to maintain it. "Is she so ill as that ?" he at length spoke in a husky voice, after a few moments of mutual silence. "I had heard that she was not well for some time, and had been anxious for some mode of hearing about her-butbut-" "But you did not adopt the very simplest and obvious mode of gratifying any such desire that you might have entertained. My manners have strangely belied the warmest and deepest feeling of my heart, next to those which are bound up in her-nay, I should have been sadly wanting in justice as well as in gratitude-if you would not always have been the most welcome visiter that crossed my threshold. You crossed it once before under circumstances which could not but make it for ever as free to you as your own. "You have indeed always been most kind, and I have been gratefully sensible of it," was his reply; "but side by side with your own manifestations of a desire to afford me the pleasure of visiting you as an intimate friend, how could I shut my eyes to the equally marked absence of any participation in such a desire on the part of Miss H? And if I have felt that I at once complied with her manifest preference on that point, and perhaps perhaps-perhaps consulted a prudential regard to my own tranquillity of mind, the rareness of the visits in which I have indulged myself can scarcely be a subject of surprise to you. Such a person as Miss H- -was scarcely to be seen too much with impunity; and if I meant ever to succeed in my profession, I believe it was better to-to-in fact, you know well enough, madam, that the wisest prayer ever placed on human lips is, Lead us not into temptation."" He smiled a very faint and sickly smile, as he thus alluded to hypothetical dangers which the young hypocrite meant to convey the idea that he had successfully avoided and resisted. If, however, he believed that he deceived his present listener, as he so often had tried to deceive himself, he was vastly mistaken. I shall not dwell longer on a conversation in which both the parties seemed to consume a very unnecessary length of time in avoiding coming to a direct and full understanding. If on other occasions his visits had been short as well as reserved, neither of these characteristics applied to the present one; for not only before he took his departure had he unbosomed to his vis-à-vis aforesaid, depths of his heart to which he had often vowed that no human eye should ever penetrate; but as he descended the steps of the house-another man than he had ascended them-old Time, in impatience at an evening call so improperly protracted, gave a single indignant stroke with his foot on the bell of the neighboring steeple of St. John's, making a most emphatic proclamation of the fact that it was one o'clock of to-morrow morning. The sum and substance of the whole matter was, that the two very foolish young people with whom our story concerns itself as so many others do in this mad world-had been for a long time at a great deal of trouble at once to misunderstand and to deceive each other. She would rather have had her heart torn out with red-hot pincers than betray how deeply, how devotedly she had allowed it to become filled with the image of one whom she believed worse than indifferent to her. The effect of such a state of things on the deportment of a proud and sensitive woman I need not describe-especially as she was so often placed on the rack lest her mother's pressing anxiety to attract his visits might be the subject of a suspicion of which the possibility was torture. He, too, had long loved her, with an attachment in comparison with which his former imaginative passion for the superficial brilliancy of a beautiful coquette seemed the merest of child's play. But he was firmly convinced that she made a studied effort to discourage any possible indulgence of such a sentiment, and, it must be confessed, he sometimes had very good apparent reason for such a belief. Shy and sensitive, as well as full of all noble and tender feeling, he was also characterized, as has perhaps been before seen, by a pride running almost into the morbid in its excess. utterly poor; and though too full of a manly and lofty self-respect ever to feel that that circumstance could degrade him in the slightest degree below the level of any woman that treads the earth, though the jewels of a crown might flash from her haughty brow, yet in spite of himself he obeyed an insen He was sible influence keeping him away from one in relation to whom the blaspheming world might impute a mercenary motive, so long as he felt what he regarded merely as a disposition and tendency to love, and not as the divine passion itself. The very fact, too, of the circumstances which had created the disparity in this respect, enriching her on the basis of his poverty, rather increased this influence;-might it not look as if he would thus reclaim what he regretted to have surrendered?-or like an abuse of the vantage ground given him by that former justice of his own, in which even he could not but feel that there was no small proportion of generosity mingled, by extorting as it were from gratitude that which should only be voluntarily bestowed by love-or-in short he reasoned and acted very much like a simpleton, and was justly punished accordingly. The consequence was eventually what we have seen. Mary's health had never been quite satisfactory since the date of the opening of this history; and she insensibly consumed herself away, till she at last reached the state in which we have again found her, and which, alas! too sadly justified her mother's apprehensions that she might not be able to endure the exertion of that voyage which afforded the sole means of attaining her only apparent chance of restoration. There was but this one subject on which there was any want of confidence on her part with her mother. It was a fault for which she suffered severely-perhaps not unjustly. The latter, however, entertained a suspicion but little short of moral certainty. Yet how could she interfere ?-What could she do?-passive as the female side of the question is always bound to be in these matters. Her invitation to Charles Fitzgerald, which we have seen to lead to all this disentanglement, was made without Mary's knowledge, and had for its object that which she professed, the desire to see him before a parting which would probably be for ever; together with that of again pressing upon him the acceptance of a portion of the wealth whose amount, already even largely increased by an enhancement of values, was fourfold more than sufficient for their most freely indulged wishes. The latter duty indeed had been strongly urged on her by Mary herself, though he was never to know of any participation of hers in the affair. Whether at the bottom of the good old lady's heartwith all her stateliness and all the positiveness with which she would have disclaimed it—whether there was not, I say, some slight, half-formed idea, or hope, or notion, that by some possibility of possibility, the result of this interview might be somewhat in the direction we have actually seen it to take-will only be known in that day when even the subtlest secret, lurking beneath the deepest fold of unconsciousness in the very heart harboring it, will be brought forth to the radiance of a stronger light than our sun. On the next morning, and every succeeding day, the neighbors might have remarked, and no doubt did, that another physician besides good, dear, and invaluable old Dr. Fhad been called in to a consulting attendance on the invalid at No. -. And certainly no physician in the city was ever half so devoted in the frequency and length of his visits, as young Dr. Fitzgerald. That is one advantage of the young medicos, who have plenty of time on hand to do full justice to every one of the few patients whose summons make their "angel visits" to the cobwebbed solitude of their offices. As third parties, especially of the masculine gender, are usually excluded from the professional interviews between "the doctor" and a fair and young patient, I am unable to give the reader any account of what took place on any of these occasions,-nor should I if I could. On the morning of the 1st, the day fixed for the departure for Europe, a singular scene was visible to the eyes of a very small number of persons present, in the front parlor in St. John's square. Those witnesses consisted of a half-dozen intimate friends, including the Rev. Dr. E, who was in his robes. The last stroke of the hour of ten had scarcely died away on the ear, when the door opened, and Mary Hentered, supported-nay, almost carried-between Charles Fitzgerald and her mother. Alas, how changed! yet still how lovely, though in that marble beauty which seems to belong to the Angel of Death alone! They led her to a seat prepared for her reception, and she smiled with a faint, sweet brightness on those around, which, with the thought of her condition and inevitable prospect, brought tears into every eye. Could it be possible? Had she indeed come thus, as though in a shroud for her white wedding garment, to be married? It was even SO. She had not even the strength to stand upright for the performance of the solemn and melancholy joy of the ceremony, and she remained sitting, while Charles stood by her side. When it was concluded, and those whom God had joined together were now beyond the power of man to sunder, though death seemed almost waiting at the door to part them-so far as death can part that holy and mystic Dual Unity-as the Husband bent over to impress his first kiss on the pallid lips of his Wife, even while his tears streamed warm and fast over the transparent whiteness of her forehead, she whispered in his ear, in a tone tremulous as well from delight as from weakness: "I am content to die now!" Before the sun of that day had set, they were far away on the heaving bosom of the Atlantic. One exact year from the date of the above occurrence, on a soft and warm autumn afternoon beneath the deep blue of an Italian sky, two persons might have been seen lingering some time after a number of other visitors, travellers apparently like themselves, within the solemn grandeur of the Coliseum's stupendous enclosure. The one of them, a lady, bore the marks of a certain delicacy of health, though there was still no want of color in her cheeks and tender lips, of a roundness in the light grace of her form, or of buoyancy in its wavy movement. She leaned on the arm of her companion as they sauntered around silently, as though both were under the spell of the awful genius of the place, with that quiet and confiding repose which always so beautifully bespeaks the happy wife. He at last led her to a fragment of a broken column which afforded a very convenient seat for two. "You are fatiguing yourself too much, Mary," he said; "and you must remember that this day twelve months I was admitted to the double authority of your travelling physician as well as that dearer title which I would not exchange for the throne of all this magnificent Europe. I therefore prescribe that you sit down and rest on this pillar, and listen to a story I have brought you here to tell you. "Provided it is a short one, for mother will be lonely and anxious, if we remain much longer," was the answer, in a voice whose clear and firm though soft melody of tone was very different from the feeble whisper which was the last sound we heard from it. 66 Very well-it's short enough. This is the very spot, this very fallen fragment of a column, where I once imagined that ideal of which I have now the dear real actually in my arms. Helen S- sat precisely where you do now;"-(he smiled as his wife involuntarily moved her seat as far as its limited space permitted)—“ Ah, what a fascinating creature she was! But she could never have got beyond the threshold of the temple in whose inmost depth you are now enshrined. That was but the first nascent blossom in the yearning soil of the young heart-I have now reaped the rich and blessed maturity of the fruit!" Charles Fitzgerald (of course I have disguised the real name) is living now, with the beautiful and lovely wife whom he sometimes points to with pride as a living trophy of his skill and care in his old profession, which he no longer practises otherwise than occasionally. From the portico of a beautiful residence on the banks of the North River, she can now enjoy, no longer alone and no longer through tears, the contemplation of those fading glories of the day which on our first acquaintance with her she was gazing upon through the dingy panes of a little miserable attic window. If she has lost the other of the two companions who were then the inmates with her of that unforgotten abode of virtuous suffering and striving, other objects of the happiest and tenderest affections have come to compensate and console the heart of the mother for the affliction of the daughter. And surrounded by her and them, I have never heard Charles Fitzgerald complain of the brave sacrifice he once made to preserve his Honor Bright. |