CHAPTER XVI.

THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON.

The gibbous moon hung midway down the zenith over the vast and sleeping city, a lob of spectral light in the cold, blue heavens, over a fantastic brood of dreams. Daniel Webster’s liegemen and victims slept, and Black Dan himself, liegeman and victim to a darker power than he, slept also; but the liegemen and victims of Dan Cupid had a more uncertain chance of slumber, and four among them at least had wakeful eyes that night as the moon was going down.

As the moon was going down, its pale gleam fell upon the pallid face and disordered form of Wentworth. He had risen from his bed, and was sitting, half dressed, at his open chamber window, in an upper story of his father’s house on Tremont street, and brooding mournfully on the misshapen planet, which hung like a huge, bulging drop of watery lustre above the roofs beyond the Common trees. His bed, all tossed and tumbled, glimmered in white confusion behind him, and faint rays of moonlight touched the lines of the gilt frames upon the walls, the books upon their shelves, the ghostly busts and statuettes around the chamber, and the dark, goblin shapes of the disarranged furniture. Within the chamber all was dusk disorder, and a dusk disorder was within the clouded mind and aching heart of its tenant.

Passion had spent its fury; the frenzy and the fever of his heart were allayed; and something like the wan tranquillity of the night had succeeded. It was all over; the play was played; she had lured him on to love her; she had trampled on his love; he had repaid her with one bitter burst of scorn; he had struck her heartless pride with insult into tears; it was done; he would never see her more.

It was done, but was it well done? The calm, rebuking image of Harrington rose in his mind. Him, too, she was deceiving, or seeking to deceive—but he—would he have answered her so? Oh, idiot that I am, he thought; he would have shamed her even in her triumph by his silence, his compassion, his forgiveness, and made her feel how poor a thing she was; while I have shown her that my wound burns and rankles that she may exult over it, and given her the advantage by an insult which will only bring her sympathy and me shame!

Convulsed for a moment by the turbulent rush of fury that whirled through him, he suddenly controlled himself with a strong effort, and leaning his burning head upon his hands, thought on. How would her wiles prosper on Harrington? Ha! it was joy to think that she would be baffled there! She does not know that he loves Muriel; she will not know it; she will spin her seductive web; she will try every charm, and fail, and fail—and know not why she fails! For he loves Muriel—yes, he loves Muriel. But that thought brought another to the mind of Wentworth. In vivid contrast with his own mean and little jealousy of his friend when he thought him his rival for the love of Emily, came Harrington’s selfless generosity to him whom he thought his rival for the love of Muriel. This, too, had led Harrington to attach himself in all their walks and meetings to Emily—he had stood aside, he had waived his claim to the contest for Muriel’s love, he had left the field clear and open, with every advantage to him. Brought to the full consciousness of this lofty magnanimity, alive now to his own selfish selfness, hot tears, wrung from him in the agony of his self-abasement, welled from his eyes. But this could be atoned for. To-morrow, yes, to-morrow, he would see Harrington—he would tell him all—he would confess his fault, and ask for pardon. This wrong could be undone—so easily; a little sacrifice of pride—that was all; but Emily—her wrong to him could never be undone—never, oh, never! A ruined heart, a ruined life, love scorned, self-respect crushed; oh, Emily, Emily, his wild thought wailed, loved, idolized, adored still, despite your cruel baseness, your heartless wrong, your life-long injury to me, how can I forget you, how can I forgive you, how can I blot out your image from my life, how be again as in the days of youth and love and hope now gone forever and forever!

Weak, shaken, convulsed with passionate despair, he bowed his head upon his nerveless arms, weeping bitterly in silence, as the moon was going down.

As the moon was going down, its pale light shone into the haunted shadow of a chamber, and on the lovely pallid face and sumptuous form of Emily, dimly projected in the perfumed dusk against the velvet of a cushioned chair, in which she lay reclining like a young empress doomed to die upon the morrow morn. Her eyes were closed; her head rested back almost in profile upon the velvet; and the pale and sculptural features, relieved by the unbound blackness of her hair, were like a dream of death. The white night-robe had fallen away, and clearly outlined against the glorious length of ebon tresses which sloped in thick profusion down behind her, bloomed the polished ivory of one peerless shoulder, melting within the crumpled tissue of the loose sleeve which covered her drooping arm. Still, but for the slow heaving of her bosom, she lay in pallid loveliness—a maiden queen of passional love, love-lorn, discrowned, abandoned and brought low.

She had been warned of this—too late, too late for her own peace—and the warning had come true. How delicately, how gently, yet how clearly, had Witherlee warned her to beware of Wentworth’s insidious honey tongue. Kind friend, wise friend, whom they think treacherous and subtle, you were loyal and true to me. But your warning came too late, for I had already given my heart, my life, my peace to him. Had you but spoken earlier, had you but warned me in time—but now, too late, too late, cast off, betrayed, undone! a handsome gallant’s sport, his theme for mockery and insult—come Death, best other friend, best friend of all to me, best friend and only friend to me! take me from life to God, for all that made existence sweet is ended!

So ran the silent passion of her thought, with silent-flowing tears. The solemn night was still around her vigil, and the hush of the chamber was like the hush of the tomb. They sleep, she thought, they sleep in peace, while I watch here uncomforted. She sleeps, my noble-hearted Muriel—she who, misled by my proud, spleenful folly, thinks I have given my heart to Harrington. And he! oh, how can he forgive me when I tell him—but he will—that noble nature cannot scorn me; he will understand and pity and pardon. Let me only tell him frankly—let me atone for all my wrong by humbling myself before him; let me crave his compassion and forgiveness, and so be fitter to go from earth to my Savior’s rest. To-morrow I will depart from hence, and before I go I will see Harrington and Muriel, and make my peace with them. I who was jealous of her, even her, my sweet, deep-hearted Muriel; I will own it, I will ask her forgiveness. Punished, justly punished, for my wrong to them both, let me be forgiven by them, and then let me go away to die.

So ran the deep contrition of her thought, with mournful-running tears. Sorrowfully weeping, she turned her beautiful and haggard face to the table near her, and took from thence a single faded rose. It had been large and fresh in full-blown crimson beauty, when he had given it to her, a little week ago. Pledge of a love then in its seeming hour of radiant victory, it was the withered token of a love all dead and disenchanted now. Weeping, she pressed it to her lips; she kissed it with gentle and passionate kisses. The sweet, dry odor of the soft petals stole to her brain, with the mournful memory of the vanished and delicious hour when the rose bloomed fresh in the lover’s giving hand, and his tender and gallant face was the rose of all the world to her. Dear rose, she murmured, memorial of hours when life was ecstasy, and heaven itself seemed cold and far—you are all that is left me now! I will keep you, I will love you, while life lasts, and when I die, they shall put you in my bosom, under the shroud, and lay us together in the grave. Gift of him I loved—of him I love forever—oh, Richard, Richard, you have wronged me, but I do not scorn you—you have killed me, but I do not hate you; I love you now; I love you, I forgive you, I bless you—with my last breath I shall forgive, and love and bless you!

Murmuring the words, in an ecstasy of passionate fervor, her voice trembling, and the tears streaming from her eyes, she pressed the flower with both hands to her lips, and swooning slowly back upon the cushions, she lay motionless, a shape of glorious pallid beauty, sculptured upon the odorous dusk, as the moon was going down.

As the moon was going down, its pale ray streaming aslant the drooping misty veils that fell in parted festoons from a golden ring above the pure and cloud-like couch of Muriel, threw a tender glory on her Madonna face, sweet in its waven fall of shadowy tresses. She rested, half-reclined upon her side against the broad bank of her pillows, in the soft suffusion of gloomy bloom which insphered her couch from the darkness of the chamber. Her beautiful white arms flowing from an open sleeve, which left them bare nearly to the shoulders, lay along her form upon the silvery grey of the coverlet, and her eyes shone like dim, rich gems. Alone and sleepless, in the still seclusion of her chamber, the phantoms of her many-peopled life thronged her spirit, and the drama of the day lived anew. All the persons she had known from her childhood upward—faces, too, that she had seen and forgotten—came floating in a strange air of dreams upon her vague and pensive musing. All that had passed since morning—the places where she had been, the people she had met, their shapes, their colors, their manners and gestures; what had been said, what had been done—came in spectral retrospection, singularly minute and circumstantial; and now and then, some face, some glimpse of a passing form, some room or fragment of sunlit street, half surprised her by softly appearing to the inner visual sense, with the jut and hues and vivid reality of actual life. Amidst the profuse and teeming phantasmagoria of her thought, came often the strong face of her uncle—with the surly scowl she had last seen upon it, melting into an ominous smile she had never seen, which strangely altered it to the sinister face of the negro-holder. And with this—sometimes preceding it, sometimes following it, and mysteriously connected with it, almost as fantastically as in a dream—came the agonized and imploring dark face of Roux, which somehow seemed changed, and not his so entirely, but that it suggested a likeness to some other face which she could not recall. Following these—recurring again and again, a hundred times, and linked with the inexplicable incident of the evening—came Wentworth, pale, and bitterly laughing, passing, with half-turned, scornful head, through one door; and Emily, melting from haughty scarlet into pallor and tears, and sweeping away, with her face bowed in her hands, through the other. Because it has been played upon—because it has been played upon. The words came with every return of these two figures—came wearily and strangely; darkly significant, yet wholly meaningless, and leaving her in quiet wonder as to what lurked beneath them. In all this spectral picturing, the form of Harrington was absent; and, though several times, conscious of the vivid life of her mind that night, she strove to bring him before her, she could not succeed. But again and again the thought of his love for Emily and of hers for him, came to her, never impressing her so singularly as now. The strange reticence of his demeanor to Emily, courteous, frank, kind and loving, it is true, but yet so unlike the abandonment she might have looked for in a lover; the curious attentions of Emily to him, her lustrous looks into his face, her fond, close leaning on his arm, her form bending so near him, her restless desire to isolate herself with him even when she and Wentworth were present, her low tones and whisperings, and smiles, tokens of love, and yet somehow vaguely unloverlike; all came to her vividly, and like an ordinary page in a book which yet contained a lurking riddle that distracted the mind from the ostensible reading. Then their strange reserve. Emily had never intimated aught of her love to her, save in the conversation which she herself had instituted to charm down her lover-like jealousy, and the admission then was rather tacit than direct. And Harrington, too—he had never breathed a word, or given the remotest hint of his love to her—not even to her, his adored and trusted friend. Why this secrecy? What imaginable reason had they for this close conspiracy of reserve? She could not guess. She could not even invent a plausible supposition to account for it. In the candid and vivid temper of her mind that night, she felt that the mystery of their relation and conduct would be fathomed by her, could she but keep it before her thoughts; but in vain, for as she held it, it would drop away, and be lost in the phantasmagoric population which crowded and faded upon her, and then appear again, and again be lost; and so crowding and fading, and coming again, in quiet and spectral complication, with a vague sense of mystery, and monition and shadowy warning, all mingling indefinitely together, and leaving no result in her mind, her phantom host of useless reminiscence poured ceaselessly around her, as the moon was going down.

As the moon was going down its sad ray, filtering between a tunnelled lane of roofs and walls across the garden gate of Harrington, touched his drooping forehead, as he sat near his open window, breathing the refreshing coolness of the night air. His night-lamp left the lower part of the room in dusky shadow, but threw a steady radiance on the open volume from which he had risen when he could no longer abstract his mind to the rich pages. He was thinking of his own future—how he should arrange his life for the human service. The dream of love was dissolved; henceforth it could never agitate his heart; now he was wholly and only mankind’s. She had receded from him into the farthest distance of memory. He thought of her as of one whom he had known and loved many, many years ago. Now she was gone, and he was alone, and for him there was only the clouded present and the unknown future.

Rising from his seat, he paced the room. A strange and solemn heaviness weighed upon him, and he yearned for the morrow. With the sense of the night, the deep hush of the air, the shadowy quiet of the room, the brooding sentience of the ghostly hour, was mingled a vague, dark, unimaginable portent which hung like lead upon his soul. Pausing in his silent walk, he leaned his head upon his hand, alone in the vast, haunted solitude of his being, and longing to be at rest. Musing on and on, a fleeting gleam of peace, like a ray shining through clouds over a waste of midnight desolation, stole upon his hour of lonely weakness, as across his mind floated the image of Muriel sleeping—her lily face composed to rest in its nimbus of bright hair, and sweet with happy dreams. So had he seen her in her light slumber that day. It came into his mind as he mused—how she had leaped up from her graceful rest, with what ethereal summer lightning of a smile on her awakened face, with what delicious laughter and what gay replies. Her words—‘you are the fairy prince that awakened me, and now I am to follow you through all the world.’

He looked up with a throbbing brain. The dream of love was dissolved; henceforth it could never agitate his heart: now he was wholly and only mankind’s—Oh, mockery of mockeries!

In the dead stillness there was the sense of mighty pulses madly beating, and the air was flame. All his being rose like the torrent surge and thunder of a heaven-drowning sea, and for one fierce instant the world of life quivered through and through with agony. He gazed before him with tense and burning eyes. A faint radiance cast from the funnel of his lamp, lit the kingly-fronted statue of Verulam on its pedestal. The light lay lucid on the vast and sovereign brow, melting into fainter light below, and the face was as the face of a god rapt in the white peace of Eternity. It grew upon the convulsing storm of his passion with a diffusive calm. Slowly, as he brooded upon the august countenance, tranquil in massive majesty, its sweet serenity, its passionless and regal peace sank upon him: a sad and gentle inflowing tide of feeling lifted him above his agitations, till at length, with clasped hands and bowed head, and all the tempest of his spirit dying down in streaming tears, he rose into communion with the man whose life on earth began new ages.

No words breathed from his lips, no thoughts came to his mind, but in the ideal presence of the soul he loved, raptures of solemn comfort arose within him, and he became composed. A load seemed to lift from his spirit, and turning away, relieved and exalted, he sank into his former seat, and sat in tranquil musing as the moon was going down.