Bressant: Chapter 18

Chapter 18

A FLANK MOVEMENT.

Bressant was lying comfortably upon his bed with his eyes closed; no one
would have imagined there had been any outburst or convulsion of passion
in his mental or emotional organism. He breathed easily; there was a
pale tint of red in his cheeks, above his close, brown beard; his
forehead was slightly moist, and his pulse, on which the surgeon laid
his finger with professional instinct, beat quietly and regularly. In
entering upon the world of love, all marks of wounds received upon the
journey seemed to have passed away.

He opened his eyes at the professor's touch, and fixed them upon the old
gentleman in such a serene stare of untroubled complacency as one
sometimes receives from a baby nine months old.

"Well, sir"--the professor, from some subtle delicacy of feeling
respecting the prospective change in their relationship, adopted this
form of address in preference to that more paternal one he had been in
the habit of using since Bressant's accident--"well, sir, how do you
find yourself now?"

"Much better; I shall soon be well now. I feel differently from ever
before--very light and full here," said the young man, indicating the
region of his heart.

"I've seen Sophie," observed Professor Valeyon, after a somewhat long
silence, which Bressant, who had calmly closed his eyes again, showed no
intention of breaking.

"Sophie and I love each other," responded he, meditatively, and rather
to himself than to the father. The latter could not but feel some
surprise at the untroubled confidence the young man's manner displayed.
Before he could put his thought into fitting words, the other spoke
again.

"I've been thinking, I should like to marry her."

"You'd like to marry her?" repeated the old gentleman, with a mixture of
sternness and astonishment, his forehead reddening. "What else do you
suppose I expected, sir?"

Bressant turned over on his side, and regarded him with some curiosity.

"Do all people who love each other, or because they love each other,
marry?" demanded he.

For a moment, the professor seemed to suspect some latent satire in this
question; but the young man's face convinced him to the contrary.

"In many marriages, there's little love--true love--on either side;
that's certain," said he, passing his hand down his face, and looking
grave. "But marriage was ordained for none but lovers."

"The reason I want to be married to Sophie is because I love her so much
I couldn't live without her," resumed Bressant, as if stating some
unusual circumstance.

"Humph!" ejaculated the professor, partly amused and partly puzzled.

Bressant rubbed his forehead, and fingered his beard awhile, and then
continued:

"We've been reading poetry lately, and romances, and such things. I used
to think they were nonsense--good for nothing; because they came out so
beautifully, and represented love to be so great an element in the
world. But now I see they were not good enough; they are much below the
truth; I mean to write poetry and romances myself!"

This tickled Professor Valeyon so much, that he burst out in a most
genuine laugh. The intellectual animal of two or three months before
seemed to have laid aside all claims to what his brain had won for him,
and to be beginning existence over again with a new object and new
materials. And had Bressant indeed been a child, the succession of his
ideas and impulses could hardly have been more primitive and natural.

"What's to become of our Hebrew and history, if you turn poet?" inquired
the old gentleman, still chuckling.

Bressant turned his head away and closed his eyes wearily. "I don't want
any thing more to do with that," said he. "Love is study enough, and
work enough, for a lifetime. Mathematics, and logic, and philosophy--all
those things have nothing to do with love, and couldn't help me in it.
It's outside of every thing else: it has laws of its own: I'm just
beginning to learn them."

"A professional lover! well, as long as you recognize the sufficiency of
one object in your studies, you might do worse, that's certain. But you
can't make a living out of it, my boy."

"I don't need money, I have enough; if I hadn't, money-making is for
men without hearts; but mine is bigger than my head; I must give myself
up to it."

"That won't do," returned the professor, shaking his head. "Lovers must
earn their bread-and-butter as well as people with brains. Besides,"
here his face and tone became serious, "there's one thing we've both
forgotten. This matter of your false name--you can't be married as
Bressant, you know: and if the tenure of your property depends, as you
said, on preserving the _incognito_, I have reason to believe that you
stand an excellent chance of losing every cent of it, the moment the
minister has pronounced your real name."

"No matter!" said the young man, with an impatient movement, as if to
dismiss an unprofitable subject. "I shall have Sophie; my father's will
can't deprive me of her. I don't want to be famous, nor to have a great
reputation--except with her."

The old man was touched at this devotion, unreasonable and impracticable
though it was. He laid his hand kindly on the invalid's big shoulder.

"I don't say but that a wife's a good exchange for the world, my boy;
I'm glad you should feel it, too. But when you marry her, you promise to
support her, as long as you have strength and health to do it. It's a
natural and necessary consequence of your love for her"--and here the
professor paused a moment to marvel at the position in which he found
himself--stating the first axioms of life to such a man as this pupil of
his; "and you should be unwilling to take her, as I certainly should be
to give her, on any other terms. If your hands are empty, you must at
any rate be able to show that they won't always continue so."

"Well, but I don't want to think about that just now; I can be a farmer,
or a clerk; I can make a living with my body, if I can't with my mind;
and I can write to Mrs. Vanderplanck, some time, and find out just how
things are."

"Very well--very well! or perhaps I'd better write to her
myself--well--and as long as you are on your back, there'll be no use in
troubling you with business--that's certain! And perhaps things may turn
out better than they look, in the end."

As Professor Valeyon pronounced this latter sentence, he smiled to
himself pleasantly and mysteriously. He seemed to fancy he had stronger
grounds for believing in a happy issue, than, for some reason, he was at
liberty to disclose. And the smile lingered about the corners of his
mouth and eyes, as if the issue in question were to be of that
peculiarly harmonious kind usually supposed to be reserved for the
themes of poems, or the conclusions of novels.

"I never was interested to hear of the every-day lives of men who have
loved, and wanted to make their way in the world; for I never expected I
should be such a man. Now, I'm sorry; it would have been useful to me,
wouldn't it?"

"Perhaps it might," responded the old gentleman, musing at the change in
the attitude of the young man's mind--once so self-sufficient and
assertive, now so dependent and inexperienced. "Very few lives are bare
and empty enough not to teach one something worth knowing. I know the
events of one man's life," he added, after a few moments of thoughtful
consideration; "perhaps it might lead to some good, if I were to tell
them to yon."

"Did he marry a woman he loved?" demanded Bressant.

"You can judge better of that when you hear what happened before his
marriage," returned the professor, apparently a little put out by the
abruptness of the question. "He made several mistakes in life; most of
them because he didn't pay respect enough to circumstances; thought that
to adhere to fixed principles was the whole duty of a man: nothing to be
allowed to the accidents of life, or to the various and unaccountable
natures of men, their uncertainty, fallibility, and so on. One of the
first resolutions he made--and he's never broken it, for when he grew
wise enough to do so, the opportunity had gone by forever--was never to
leave his native country. He wanted to prove to himself, and to
everybody else whom it might concern, that a man of fair abilities might
become learned and wise, without ever helping himself to the good things
that lay beyond the shadow of his native flag. 'The majority of people
have to live where they are born,' was his argument; 'I'll be their
representative.' Well, that would seem all well enough; but it stood in
his way twice--each time lost him an opportunity that has never come
again--the opportunity to be distinguished, and perhaps great; and the
opportunity to have a happy home, and a luxurious one. It was better for
him, no doubt, that his life was a hard and disappointed one, instead
of--as it might have been; he's had blessings enough, that's certain;
but he has much to regret, too; the more, because the ill effects of a
man's folly and willfulness fall upon his friends quite as often, and
sometimes more heavily, than upon himself.

"He was a poor man in college, and an orphan. The property of his family
had been lost in the War of 1812; from then till he was twenty-one, he
had followed a dozen trades, and saved a couple of hundred dollars; and
he'd picked up book-learning enough to enter the sophomore class. The
first thing he did was to make a friend; he loved him with his whole
heart; thought nothing was too good for him, and so on. He and his
friend led the class for three years; and up to the time of the last
examination, he was first and his friend second. In the examination they
sat side by side; one question the friend couldn't answer; the other
wrote it out for him; after the examination the two papers were found to
be alike in the answer to that question, and the friend was summoned
before the faculty, and asked if he had copied it. He denied it--said it
had been copied from him; so he took the first rank in graduating, and
the other was dropped several places."

"What became of their friendship after that?" inquired Bressant.

"He I'm telling you of never knew any thing of what his friend had done
till long afterward. Well, the faculty and some of the wealthy patrons
of the university determined to send the first scholar abroad, to finish
his education: he accepted the offer eagerly, and sailed for Europe,
without bidding his friend good-by. Afterward, the faculty made the same
offer to him, on the consideration that he had stood so well, during his
course, until the examination. But he declined it: it was contrary to
his principle of never leaving his country."

"What sort of a man was the friend?" asked Bressant, who was paying
close attention, with his hand at his ear.

"Clever, with a winning manner, and fine-looking; had a pleasant, easy
voice; never lost his temper that I know of." The professor paused,
perhaps to arrange his ideas, ere he went on. "The man I'm telling you
of left the college-yard with as much of the world before him as lies
between the fifteenth and twenty-fifth parallels of latitude, and the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He'd made up his mind to be a physician;
and in a year he was qualified to enter the hospital; worked there four
years, and, by the time he was twenty-nine, he had an office of his own
and a good practice.

"At last, he fell in love with a beautiful woman; she was the daughter
of one of his patients--a Southerner with a little Spanish blood in him.
The young doctor had--under Providence--saved the man's life; and, since
he himself came of a good family--none better--and had a respectable
income, there wasn't much difficulty in arranging the match. The only
condition was, that the father should never be out of reach of his
daughter, as long as he lived."

"Was this Southerner rich?"

"Very rich; and a dowry would go with the daughter enough to make them
more than independent for the rest of their lives. Well, just about that
time, the friend who had gone to Europe came back. He'd done well
abroad, and-was qualified for a high position at home. He was engaged to
marry a stylish, aristocratic girl, who was not, however, wealthy. But
he seemed very glad to see the doctor, and the doctor certainly was to
see him, and invited him to stay at his house a while, and he introduced
him into the house of his intended wife."

Here the professor broke off from his story, and, getting up from his
chair, he passed two or three times up and down the room; stopping at
the window to pull a leaf from the extended branch of a cherry-tree
growing outside, and again, by the empty fireplace, to roll the leaf up
between his finger and thumb, and throw it upon the hearth. When he
returned to the bedside, he dropped himself into his chair with the
slow, inelastic heaviness of age.

"The fellow played him a scurvy trick," resumed he, presently. "Exactly
what he said or did will never be known, but it was all he safely could
to put his friend in a bad light. It was because he wanted the young
lady for himself; he was ambitious, and needed her money to help him on.
What he said made a good deal of impression on the father; but the
daughter wouldn't believe it then--at any rate, she loved the doctor
still, and would, as long as she knew he loved her."

"Why didn't the other manage to make her think he didn't?"

"Well, sir, he did manage it," returned the professor, compressing his
white-bearded lips, and lowering his eyebrows. "He told the father some
story of having met relations of his in Spain; told him the climate
would cure him of all his ailments, without need of a physician, and
persuaded him to make the journey at last. The doctor heard of it first
by a note written by his intended father-in-law. It contained no
request nor encouragement to accompany them--of course, the daughter was
to go too; her father wouldn't separate from her. But the doctor's
friend had not trusted only to that: he knew that the other's resolution
never to leave his country was not likely to be broken, so he was quite
secure."

"And the doctor knew nothing of how his friend was cheating him?"

"No, not then. Far from it; he showed him the letter, and asked him for
advice. He never dreamed of doubting his constancy, either to himself or
to the girl he was engaged to marry. His friend counseled him to write a
letter to her he meant to make his wife, explaining his position, and
asking her not to leave him. He would carry it to her, and advocate it
himself, he said, and do all in his power to influence the father. The
young doctor didn't altogether relish this course, nevertheless he
trusted in his friend, wrote the letter, and gave it into his hands.

"He never saw his friend after that day. The next morning came an answer
from the young lady--a cruel and cold rejection of him--repudiation of
his love, and a doubt of his honor. It bewildered him, and, for a time,
crushed him. Long afterward, he found out that she had never seen the
letter he wrote, but a very different one, of his friend's concoction.

"Very soon afterward, they were gone--all three! and, before a year was
passed, he heard that his friend and the daughter were married, and the
father died of a fever contracted in Spain.

"He tried to go on as usual for several months, but it was no use. At
last, he left his practice, and all his connections, and wandered over
the United States--through towns and wildernesses. He rode across the
plains on a mustang; clambered through the gorges of the Rocky
Mountains; saw the tide come in through the Golden Gate at San
Francisco. He pushed north as far as Canada, and thence came down the
Mississippi to New Orleans. From there he crossed to the Pacific coast
again, and lived to find himself a second time in San Francisco. He
didn't stay there long, but struck overland, slanting southward, and, in
four or five months, appeared at Charleston, South Carolina. So he
worked up the Atlantic coast to New York. By the time he got there, he
was older and wiser, and strengthened, body and mind, by a rough
experience. He resolved to travel no more; but, as yet, it was not in
his power to feel happy.

"Much had happened in his absence. His friend, after living three or
four years with his wife in Europe, was separated from her--not,
however, by a regular divorce--and she had disappeared, and had not
since been heard of. It was reported that she was dead. She had left
with her husband a son, two or three years old, at that time a sickly
little fellow, scarcely expected to live. It was supposed that the
mother had discovered that it was her money, and not herself, that her
husband cared for, and, perhaps, too, may have imagined him to be still
thinking of his first love, who, indeed, was said to have in some way
fomented the quarrel between them, though how, or to what end, was never
known. She, by-the-way, after an absence of some years from New York,
suddenly reappeared there, and married a wealthy old Knickerbocker, who
died not long afterward, and left her his property. She became eminent
in society, and was intimate with all the most distinguished people. Her
former lover returned from Europe, with his little son, and, I believe,
settled somewhere in the neighborhood of New York. They met, and, I
understand, came to be on very friendly terms with one another, but the
conditions of their lives would have prevented the possibility of
marriage, even had they desired it.

"Well, it was before the old Knickerbocker's death that he I am telling
you of first arrived in the city. He gave up medicine, and devoted
himself to other studies; and, in the course of a few years, he found
himself occupying the chairs of History and of Science at the University
of New York. He also paid some attention to politics, and became, for a
while, a person of really considerable renown and distinction. He was
respected by the most influential persons in the city. Among the rest,
he became acquainted with the widow--as she was by this time--of the
Knickerbocker--and she showed him every kindness and attention. But he
did her the injustice of not believing her kindness genuine; he imagined
that she cared for nothing but fashion and display, and was polite to
him only because she thought he would add a little to her drawing-rooms.
At length, a sudden weariness of his mode of life coming over him, he
resigned his public positions, and his professorships, and took lodgings
in the family of a poor clergyman in Boston. While there, he took up the
study of divinity, and, before long, was fully qualified for ordination.
But, at this time, he fell, all at once, dangerously ill, and lay at
death's door.

"He owed his life to the care that the daughter of the clergyman took of
him. She was a sweet, gentle girl, a good deal younger than he; but she
grew to love him--perhaps because she had saved him from death. When he
recovered, they were married, and found a great deal of happiness; there
was no more passionate love, for him, of course; but he could feel
gratitude, and tenderness, and a steady and deep affection. They had two
children, and when they were five or six years old, the parents moved to
the country, and took a house in an out-of-the-way village."

"Is that all?" demanded Bressant, eying the professor's face with great
intentness.

"There's not much more. One of the first persons the minister--such he
was now--met, on his entrance into the village, was the woman he had
loved first--the wife of his false friend--she whom he had long believed
dead. She had settled, several years before, in this place, whither he
had unawares followed her. In an interview--the first for nearly half a
lifetime--all the old errors and falsehoods were cleared up. She told
him how her husband's heartlessness and insolent indifference had made
her leave him; and how, for the sake of her son, and partly also out of
pride, she had made no attempt to repossess herself of the fortune with
which she had endowed her husband at their marriage. The hardest of all
had been to leave her son, whom she loved with her whole heart; but he
was sickly, and she dared not expose him to the chances of privation and
hardship, such as she expected to endure. With some three thousand
dollars in her pocket, she had come to America, and since then had
never heard a word of those she had left, nor had they of her.

"About three years after his arrival, the minister's wife died. He took
his two children, and went with them to New York, where they staid
nearly a year; and the widow of the old Knickerbocker found them out,
and was as cordial as ever. But finally the minister decided to return
to his country dwelling, and there he still remains."

As Professor Valeyon concluded, he looked toward his auditor, having
been conscious, especially during the latter part of the narrative, of
the peculiar magnetic sensation which the steady glance of the young
man's eyes produced.

But at the same moment, Bressant turned his head away, and closed his
eyes, as if wearied by the strain which had been imposed upon his
attention. The old gentleman presently arose, and, after a moment's
hesitation, he apparently decided not to disturb or rouse his patient
any further. He could wait until another time for whatever discussion
yet remained. So he betook himself quietly to the door.

He had nearly closed it when, thinking he heard a sudden call or
exclamation from within, he hastily reopened it, and looked into the
room. But the invalid showed no signs of having spoken. His position was
slightly changed, indeed, but his eyes were still closed, and his face
turned somewhat away from the door.

"I must have been mistaken," said Professor Valeyon, as he shut himself
into the study. He walked to the table, and, resting one hand upon it,
stood for several moments with his head bent forward, thinking. As he
raised it, a sigh escaped him; nor was his countenance so serene as it
had been half an hour before.

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