Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878

"If you mind your lameness," she said brokenly, with intervals of sobs—"if you feel that Fate is cruel to you—that there is any reason why you cannot be perfectly happy—then I wish," she exclaimed with energy, "that I had never been born to do you this great injury. I love my life, I love papa, I love your mother and you, and it seems to me as if I were going to be a very happy woman; but still, if you carry any regret for that day in your heart, I wish I had died when I was so sick before you came: I wish I lay up there on the hill with the grass growing over me."

What was anybody to do with this overwrought, fanciful child? She was so wonderfully pretty too, with her great dark, melancholy eyes, her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, her rich rare lips! "Oh, Helen," I murmured, holding her close to me, "I don't want you to go under the green grass: I'm very glad you are alive. I would have broken all my bones in your service that day and welcome, so that you might be well and unhurt. Come, now, cheer up: I am going to be a pleasanter fellow than I have been of late. Dry your eyes, dear. Your father will be laughing at you. Come, let us go and take a stroll in the moonlight: it is quite wicked not to indulge in a little romance on a sweet midsummer night like this."

When I had gone to my room that night, and sat, still bitter, still discontented, looking off through my open window toward the Point, and wondering who was looking in Georgy Lenox's starry eyes just then—thinking, with a feeling about my forehead like a band of burning iron, that some man's arm was sure to be about her waist, her face upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they danced,—while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother came in and sat down beside me.

"My dear boy," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I am going to give you a caution. You must remember that Helen, with all her frankness and impetuosity, is still no child. Don't win her heart unthinkingly."

I felt the blood rush to my face, and I think I had never in all my life experienced such embarrassment.

"I'm not such a coxcomb, mother, as to believe any girl could fall in love with me—Helen above all others."

She smiled, with a little inward amusement in her smile. "You must remember," she said again softly, "that Helen is not a child, and you surely would not make her suffer."

"Why, mother," I gasped, "we are just like brother and sister: our intimacy is the habit of years."

"Good-night, my son," my mother said, and went away still smiling: "I have perfect faith in your magnanimity."

I remembered with a flash of guilty self-consciousness one or two little circumstances about our talk by the window two hours before which I have not set down here. It had seemed an easy task to soothe the child. If there had been any absurdity like that my mother hinted at, would she—could I— No, never! She was a careless child, with fits of coldness, imperious tenderness and generosity. Not a woman at all. The idea was quite distasteful to me that Helen was a grown-up woman with whom I must be on my guard.

However, Helen's manner to me next day and at all times was calculated to assure any man that she was a wilful, self-sustained young creature of extraordinary beauty and grace, who was devoted to her father, and to him alone. I saw Thorpe one evening pick up, by stealth, the petals of a crimson rose which had dropped from the stalk that still nestled in the black ribbon at her throat, and I laughed at him for his pains as he laid them carefully away in his pocket-book.

"Miss Floyd," said I, "here is another rose. Don't honor that poor skeleton of a vanished flower."

She saw the accident which had befallen her rose, and took mine from me and replaced her ornament with a fresh blossom. "Give me the poor stem," said I as she was about to throw it away.

"What is that for?" she asked, staring at me as I placed it in my buttonhole. "What do you want of the poor old thing?"

And, mistrusting some mischief beneath my sentimental behavior, she was quite tart with me the entire evening, and would not speak to Thorpe at all, but sat demurely between my mother and Mr. Floyd, her eyes nailed on some embroidery, and behaving altogether like a spoiled child of twelve years old.

Georgy Lenox had returned from her visit at Mrs. Woodruff's, and seemed a little quiet and weary of late. I was not so much at her service as before, but had begun to console myself by teaching in song what, like other young poets, I had experienced in suffering. I thank Heaven that no eyes but my own ever beheld the tragedy I wrote that summer: still, I am a little tender-hearted over it yet, and believe that it was, after all, not so bad as it might have been. At any rate, it enabled me to find some relief from my passionate unrest in occupation, and even my own high-sounding phrases may have taught me some scanty heroism. After all, if one fights one's own battle bravely, does it make so much matter about other things? Our battles to-day, like the rest of those fought since creation, show poor cause if regarded from any other standpoint save the necessity of fighting them. Most of our fiercest struggles for life have no adequate reason: it is not so necessary for us to live as we think it is. That we do not get what we want, or that we sink beneath our load of trouble, signifies little in the aggregate of the world's history. But, all the same, our cries of despair go up to Heaven, and there seems no need in the universe so absolute, so final, as that we ourselves should live and be happy.

It is hard for a man of middle age, with a cool brain and tranquillized passions, to retrace the history of his youth. There is much that he must smile over—much, too, which is irksome for him to dwell upon. Many experiences which in their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome—just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism—silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold lace and mock splendors, disenchant us sadly, and what we took for

Horns of Elfland faintly blowing!Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying,

is now discovered to be a cheap-trumpet imitation of the enchanted notes we dreamed of hearing.

After Miss Lenox returned from the Point she was, as I have said, a little pensive: this little shadow upon the splendor of her beauty lent a subtlety and charm to her manner. If there had been a fault in her loveliness before, it was that it remained always equal: the same light seemed always to play over face and hair, the liquid clearness of her eyes was always undimmed, and there was a trifle of over-robustness about the rounded contours of her figure. In spite of all her beauty, it had at times been hard for me to realize that she was a woman to give herself thoroughly to love. I had already had many dreams of her, yet never one where I thought she could have given me the infinite softness of a caressing touch or feel the motherly quality which lies at the bottom of every true woman's love for man. Now the splendor of her eyes was veiled, her smile was half melancholy, her voice less clear and ringing.

When a man loves a woman, and her mood changes and softens, he reads but one meaning in her tenderness; and it was not long before I had begun fully to believe that there was hope for me. There seemed to be no one to meddle in my wooing. True, Judge Talbot came constantly to the house to see Miss Lenox, and lacked none of the signs by which we read a man's errand in his demeanor; but I did not fear any rivalry from him. Youth, at any rate, is something in itself, independent of other advantages: no wonder it vaunts itself and believes in its own power. That Georgy would think for an instant of giving herself to this man did not seriously occur to me. His face was like the face of thousands of successful men whom we see daily in the great marts of the world. His forehead was broad but low, his eyes inclined to smallness and set closely together, his brows shaggy and overhanging: his cheeks were heavy, and the fleshy formation of his mouth and chin denoted both cruelty and sensuality. He was a wealthy man: such men are always rich. He had the reputation of holding an iron grip over everything he claimed, and never letting it go. He had been married in early life, and now had sons and daughters past the age of the girl upon whom he was eagerly pressing his suit.

He came to dinner now and then, and over his wine he was noisy, boisterous and bragging. He had been in Congress with Mr. Floyd years before, and, though of different parties, they had innumerable recollections in common, and, much as I disliked Mr. Talbot, I recognized his cleverness in anecdote and the clearness and conciseness of his narratives. I could endure him among men, but with women he was odious, and, for some reasons occult and inexplicable to any man, plumed himself upon his success with them. He understood himself too well, and relied too entirely upon his natural abilities, to make any effort to hide his gross ignorance upon all subjects requiring either literary or mental culture. He had been eminently successful without any such acquirements in every field he entered, and consequently considered them non-essentials in a man's career—very good to have, like the cream and confectionery at dessert, tickling the palates of women and children, but eschewed by sensible men. He had travelled twice over Europe, seeing everything with the voracious curiosity of a strong man eager to get his money's worth: after his experience of cities rich in high historic charm, works of art where the rapture and exaltation of long-vanished lives have been exultingly fixed in wonderful colors or imperishable marbles, he had carried away merely a hubbub of recollections of places where the best wines were found and his miseries at being reduced in certain cases to the position of a deaf-mute through his inability to grapple with the difficulties of foreign tongues.

No, it did not in those days occur to me that I had a rival in Mr. Talbot. Helen and I used to laugh at his crass ignorance, and mystify him now and then by our allusions. Miss Lenox was never vivacious at table, and used to listen languidly to all of us, turning to me now and then and regarding me with a sort of pleased curiosity when she thought I overmatched her heavy admirer.

As I have said, I had turned to composition as an amusement, an occupation, and perhaps a refuge from feelings which were rapidly becoming an ever-present pain. I recall one day when I had sat for hours at my desk writing busily, utterly wrapped up in my fancies—so engrossed, indeed, that when I had finished my work I looked with astonishment at my watch and discovered that it was long past two o'clock. I rose and went to the window, pushed aside the curtains and threw open the blinds, and gazed out. I overlooked the garden, which was deserted except by the bees and humming-birds busy among the flowers. The mid-day heat had passed, and a breeze rustled the leaves and moaned in the pine trees. It was a fair world, and I felt what one often experiences in coming back to reality after high emotion—a sort of strangeness in the beauty of tree and grass and sea and wood.

While I stood there some one advanced along the garden-path, looked up, saw me and beckoned. It was but a moment's effort to join her, and almost before I had realized what I was doing I was beside Miss Lenox in the garden.

"Come and sit down in the arbor," she said softly.

"No," I returned, remembering that I had sworn to myself not to yield to her caprices, "I am going for a walk."

She regarded me pensively. "May I go?" she asked.

"Oh yes, you may go, Georgy," I said with a little laugh. "I am only too happy, I am afraid, if you ask to go anywhere with me."

"Don't take me where it is wet," she observed simply, "for I have on thin slippers;" and she stretched out a little foot.

"I will take care of you," I answered her.

She took up the folds of her full white dress in her hands, and we set out. The mood was upon me to take the old paths across the sloping uplands into the woods on the hill that Helen and I had tramped over so often in our childhood. Beneath us lay the sea, a wide plain of placid waters, blue in the foreground, with opal tints playing over it as it spread out toward the horizon; above us were the woods luxuriant in their midsummer verdure, silent except for the occasional note of a wild bird; and about us were the green fields, fresh mown of late, with thickets of grape and wild convolvulus and star-wreathed blackberry-vines making a luxuriant tangle over the fences.

Georgy walked before me in the narrow path, and I followed closely, watching her fine free movements, the charm of her figure in its plain white morning-dress bound at the waist with a purple ribbon. Her golden-yellow hair lay in curls upon her shoulders: now and then I caught a glimpse of the contour of her face as she half turned to see if I were close behind her. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

My own thoughts flew about like leaves in a wind, but I wondered of what she was thinking. Although I had known her all my life, she was not easy for me to understand; or rather my impressions of her at this time were so colored by the passion of my own hopes that it was impossible for me to find a clew to her real feelings. Perhaps she was thinking of Jack: she was thinking—I was sure she was thinking—of something sweet, sad and strange, or she could not have looked so beautiful.

Suddenly she stopped in her walk and uttered a little cry. "It is wet here," she cried with vexation: "we must turn back, Floyd."

"I said I would take care of you," I exclaimed quickly, and putting my arms about her I raised her and carried her safely over the spot where a hundred springs trickled up to the surface and made a morass of the luxuriant grass. I did not set her down at once. For weeks now, sleeping and waking, I had been haunted by a fierce longing to hold her to my heart as I held her now, and it was not so easy to put by so great a joy. When at last I reached the stile I released her, and she sat down on the stone and looked at me with a half smile.

"If you call that taking care of me, Floyd—" said she, shaking her head.

"You are not angry with me, Georgina?"

"How could I be angry with you?" she said, putting out her hand to me and speaking so kindly that I dared to press her little rosy palm to my lips. "But how strong you are, Floyd! You carried me like a feather's weight, and yet I am tall and very heavy. You know how to take care of me, indeed."

"If I might always take care of you!" I said, my heart beating and the blood rushing to my face. "I can carry you home if you will. Don't you remember about the Laird of Bothwick declaring that no man should marry his daughter save the one who should carry her three miles up the mountain-side? If I could have such a chance with you!"

"But about the daughter of the old laird: did she find a lover so strong as to carry her to the mountain-top?"

"Yes: one of her suitors took her in his arms and strode along, crying, 'Love gives me strength—love gives me speed.' However, he was not happy after all, poor fellow! When he reached the goal he died. How could he have died then?"

"What did the young lady do?" inquired Georgy, laughing. "I suppose another lover rode by her side as she walked home, and that she married him for his pains. That is the way the brave men of the world are rewarded, Floyd. Don't be too generous, nor too strong, nor too self-forgetful. You will gain nothing by it."

"Do you mean that I shall not gain you, Georgy?"

"Oh, I said nothing about myself. Why do you ask me all these questions as soon as we are alone? I am afraid sometimes to let you talk to me, although there are few people in the world whom I like so well to have near me. Women will always love you dearly, Floyd. You are so gentle, so harmonious with pleasant thoughts and pleasant doings: you seem less selfish and vain than other men. You deserve that some woman should make you very happy, Floyd."

"There is but one woman who can do it, Georgy."

"I am not so sure of that. I do not know why you think of me at all: what is it about me that attracts you? Helen is younger than I am—a hundred times more beautiful. No, sir, you need make no such demonstrations. If you like my poor face best, it is because we are old friends, and you are so true, so kind, to the old memories. Do not interrupt me yet. I think you are blind to your own interests when you pass Helen by: she is so rich that if you marry her you can live a life like a prince."

"But if I do not wish to lead a prince's life, Georgy?" said I, a little nettled at the indifference which must prompt such comparisons of Helen to herself. "Nothing could induce me to marry a rich woman, even if Helen were to be thought of by a poor fellow like me. I have no vague dreams about the future: my hopes are clear and definite. I want a career carved by my own industry, my own taste: I want—above all things, I want—the wife of whom I am always thinking."

"And who is she, my poor boy?"

"You know very well, Georgy," I returned, throwing myself beside her and gazing up into her face. "Since I was a little fellow in Belfield, and used to look out of the school-room window with Jack Holt, and see you going past the church with your red jacket and your curls on your shoulders, I have had just one dream of the girl I could love so well that I could die for her. I used to lie on the hilltop then and fancy myself a bold knight on a white steed who should gallop down those sunshiny streets and seize you in his arms, raise you to the saddle and carry you away into Fairyland to live with him for ever. My longing has not changed: I want the same thing still."

"But when I was to marry Jack you did not seem to mind," said Georgina, looking at me with that new pensiveness she had learned of late.

"You knew my heart very little. When Jack told me that you were still free, I hated myself, my joy, my renewal of hope, seemed so contemptibly little in contrast with his great despair. I would not have wronged him. God knows, I pity him when I remember what he has lost! Still, I too loved you as a child: I never had it in my power to serve you, but I had no other thought but you. Why may it not be, dear? Who can love you better than I do? Even although I am not rich, who will take better care of you than I shall? I am sure you love me a little. Do not put the feeling by, but think of it: do not deny it—let it have its chance."

She rose with an absent air. "We must go on," she said dreamily; and I helped her over the stile, and we walked slowly through the wood. She leaned upon my arm, but her face was downcast, and her broad hat concealed it from me.

"I wish," I said after a time, "you would let me know some of those thoughts."

She looked up at me pale but smiling. "Do you know, Floyd," she murmured, "I do think you could make me happy if anybody could."

"Promise me that I may have the chance. End now, Georgy, all your doubts, all my fears. You will be happier so."

"But we should be poor!" she cried sharply. "I could not be contented to marry a poor man. You may be clever, Floyd—I do not know much about cleverness in men—but, all the same, it is hard for a man to make money until he has worked for many, many years. I could not wait for you. I am older than you, and everybody is wondering why, with all my opportunities, I have not married. You'd much better give me up," she added, looking into my face steadily and smiling, although her lip trembled, "and let Mr. Talbot have me. He is rich, and can marry me at once. He is waiting for my answer now, and it is best that I should, as you say, end it all."

I shuddered as this pang disturbed my warm bliss. "For Heaven's sake, don't joke, Georgy!" I exclaimed. "I can't even hear you allude to the possibility of marrying such a man as that with equanimity. I am not so poor. Mr. Floyd—" But, after all, I could not tell her of Mr. Floyd's generosity to me: it seemed like basing calculations upon his death to assure her that the course of events was to bring me a fortune.

She looked at me with eagerness. "Tell me now," she said, putting her hand upon my arm. "If you love me, Floyd, you cannot keep a secret from me."

To describe the beauty of her face, the fascination of her manner, the thrill of her touch, words are quite powerless, mere pen-scratches. If any man could have withstood her, I was not that man. Shame to relate, I soon had told her everything—that Mr. Floyd had for years placed an ample income at my disposal—that I had seen his will, which gave me, without restriction, a clear third of his fortune.

She was meditative for a while. "But," she said then with a trifle of brusqueness, "if you marry me he will be angry and change all that: he does not like me. He has different plans for you: he wants you to marry Helen."

"Don't say that," I cried, "for I love Mr. Floyd so well, I owe him so much, I could refuse him nothing."

"You mean that if he asked you to marry Helen you would give me up, would take her?" she retorted with a flaming color on her cheeks and a gleam in her eyes. "You do not care for me, then. You are merely playing with me: you love her, after all."

"Now, that is nonsense, Georgy," I said gently, for through her jealousy I had the first glimpse, I fancied, of something like real love for me; "and I do not like to hear Helen's name bandied about in this way. You may be sure that she will stand in no need of suitors: I shall never be one of them. Now, then, who is it that is coquetting? You know whom I love—what I want. I am very much in earnest—unsettled in heart and mind, body, soul and spirit, until I have your answer. Tell me, Georgy darling, is it or is it not to be?"

But I was to have no answer that day. Miss Lenox said it was very tiresome hearing me reiterate that dreary question, and that she saw raspberries in the thicket which I must gather for her. Although, when she had eaten them, she let me kiss the lovely stained lips, I was still far enough from knowing whether they were mine or not—whether she liked to raise my ardent dreams merely to disappoint them, or whether at heart it was, as she sometimes hinted, that she did care for me with something of the intimate, clinging habit which bound me so closely to her.

Ellen W. Olney.[TO BE CONTINUED.]

DAWN IN THE CITY

The city slowly wakes:Her every chimney makesOffering of smoke against the cool white skies:Slowly the morning shakesThe lingering shadowy flakesOf night from doors and windows, from the city's eyes.A breath through heaven goes:Leaves of the pale sweet roseAre strewn along the clouds of upper air.Healer of ancient woes,The palm of dawn bestowsOn feverish temples peace, comfort on grim despair.Now the celestial fireFingers the sunken spire;Crocket by crocket slowly creepeth down;Brushes the maze of wire,Dewy, electric lyre,And with a silent hymn one moment fills the town.Over emergent roofsA sound of pattering hoofsAnd anxious bleatings tells the passing herd:Scared by the piteous droves,A shoal of skurrying doves,Veering, around the island of the church has whirred.Soon through the smoky haze,The park begins to raiseIts outlines clearer into daylit prose:Ever with fresh amazeThe sleepless fountains praiseMorn, that has gilt the city as it gilds the rose.High in the clearer airThe smoke now builds a stairLeading to realms no wing of bird has found:Things are more foul, more fair;A distant clock, somewhere,Strikes, and the dreamer starts at clear reverberant sound.Farther the tide of darkDrains from each square and park:Here is a city fresh and new create,Wondrous as though the arkShould once again disbarkOn a remoulded world its safe and joyous freight.Ebbs all the dark, and nowLife eddies to and froBy pier and alley, street and avenue:The myriads stir below,As hives of coral grow—Vaulted above, like them, with a fresh sea of blue.Charles de Kay.