Читать книгу Vassall Morton - Francis Parkman - Страница 11

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Beauty is a witch Against whose charms faith melteth into blood. D. Pedro.—If thou wilt hold longer argument, Do it in notes. Benedick.—Now, divine air, now is his soul ravished. Much Ado about Nothing.

Morton visited his cousin, Miss Fanny Euston, a guest, for a few days, at a friend's house in town. By good fortune, as he thought it, he found her alone; and, as he conversed with her, he employed himself—after a practice usual with him—in studying her character, and making internal comments upon it. These insidious reflections, condensed into a paragraph, would have been somewhat as follows:—

"A fine figure, and a very handsome face; but there is a lurking devil in her eye, and about the corners of her mouth." Here some ten minutes of animated dialogue ensued before his observations had shaped themselves into further results. "She is exceedingly clever; she knows how to think and act for herself. I should not like to cross her will. There is fire enough in her to make a hundred women interesting. She is none of our frosty New England beauties. She could love a man to the death, and hate him as well. She could be a heroine or a tigress. Every thing about her is wild and chaotic, the unformed elements of a superb woman."

Here, the conversation having lasted a half hour or more, his imagination began to disturb the deductions of his philosophy, and he was no longer in a mood of just psychological analysis, when, to his vexation, his cousin's hostess, Miss Jones, entering, brought his tête-à-tête to a close. She displayed a marvellous fluency of discourse, and was eloquent upon books, parties, paintings, and the opera.

"I need not ask you, Mr. Morton, if you have seen Tennyson's new poem."

"Yes—at the bookseller's."

"But surely you have read it."

"No, I am behind the age."

"Then thank Heaven for it," exclaimed his unceremonious cousin; "for of all insipidity, and affectation, and fine-spun, wire-drawn trash, Tennyson carries away the palm. Every body reads him because he is the fashion, and every body admires him because he is the fashion. But he is a bubble, a film, a gossamer; there's nothing in him."

This explosion called forth a protest from the poet's admirer.

"May I ask," said Morton to his cousin, "who are your literary favorites?"

"Not the latter-day poets—the Tennysonian school; their puling mannerism is an insult to the Saxon tongue."

"But," urged Miss Jones, "you are not quite reasonable."

"Of course I am not. It's not a woman's province to be reasonable."

"Do you subscribe to these poetical heresies, Mr. Morton?"

"On the contrary, I think that Tennyson has often great beauties."

"If he sometimes wrote like an angel," pursued Fanny Euston, "I should find no patience to see it in a man who could put upon paper such parrot rhymes as these:—

'Not a whit of thy tuwhoo, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, With a lengthened loud halloo, Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o!'

Bah! it puts one in a passion to hear such twaddle."

"I see," said her friend, "that nothing less than your own music will calm your indignation. Pray let us hear the ballad which you set to music this morning."

"I will sing, if you wish it; but not that ballad."

And she seated herself before the open piano.

"What do you choose, Mr. Morton?"

"The Marseillaise. That, I think, is in your vein."

"Ah! you can choose well!"

And, running her fingers over the keys, she launched at once into the warlike strains of the hymn of revolution. Her voice and execution were admirable; and though by no means unconscious that she was producing an effect, she sang with a fire, energy, and seeming recklessness that thrilled like lightning through her auditor's veins. He rose involuntarily from his seat. For that evening his study of character was ended, and philosophy dislodged from her last stronghold.

Half an hour later he was riding homeward in a mood quite novel to his experience. He pushed his horse to a keen trot, as if by fierceness of motion to keep pace with the fiery influence that was kindling all his nerves.

"I have had my fancies before this," he thought—"in fact I have almost been in love; but that feeling was no more like this than a draught from a clear spring is like a draught of spiced wine."

That night he fully expected to be haunted by a vision of Fanny Euston; but his slumbers were unromantically dreamless.

Three days later, he ventured another visit; but his cousin had returned to her home in the country. By this time he was conscious of a great abatement of ardor; and his equanimity was little moved by the disappointment. In a week he had learned to look back on his transient emotion as an effervescence of the moment, and to regard his relative with no slight interest, indeed, yet by no means in a light which could blind him to her glaring faults. He summoned up all that he could recall of herself and her family, and chiefly of her father, whom he remembered in his boyhood as a rough, athletic man, whose black and bushy eyebrows were usually contracted into something which seemed like a frown. These boyish recollections were far from doing Euston justice. He was a man of masculine and determined character. His will was strong, his passions violent; he was full of prejudices, and when thwarted or contradicted, his rage was formidable. His honor was unquestioned; he was most bluntly and unmanageably honest. Yet through the rock and iron of his character, there ran, known to but few, a delicate vein of poetic feeling. The music of his daughter, or the verses of his favorite Burns, could often bring tears to his stern gray eyes. For his wife, whom he had married in a fit of pique and disappointment, when little more than a boy, he cared nothing; but his fondness for his daughter was unbounded. He alone could control her; for she loved him ardently, and he was the only living thing of which she stood in awe.