CHAPTER XVIII.
From the day on which Margaret had paid that clandestine visit to the hospital, Robert had steadily improved. Whether there was some hidden efficacy in the broth she had made for him, and which was, if the truth must be told, quite inferior to that prepared under the supervision of Sister Gabrielle, or whether the light touch on his forehead of a pair of trembling lips had wrought the favorable change in his condition, must be left to the imagination of the reader, if he have one; if he have not, he will not trouble himself with either hypothesis, but will take it for granted that it was thanks to his superb constitution that Robert Feuardent's wound healed in such a short space of time.
The sisters had lavished every care on the handsome young man who had proved so agreeable and interesting a patient. They were almost more sorry for themselves than glad for him when the day on which he was to be discharged drew near. Nuns are very human when one gets to know them well, and is no longer awed by the severity of their black robes; and it is only human for women, young or old, to prefer tending a young man full of grace and beauty, to waiting on some snuffy, cross old fellow, or a fretful, nervous woman. Robert afterwards avowed that had it not been for a certain image which always hovered about him, he should have fallen helplessly in love with the sweet, stately Sister Gabrielle. They were very pleasant, those days of convalescence; his friends all came to see him, even General Ruysdale, who before his illness had treated him with a certain reserve and caution. Bouton de Rose came at least once a day, with all the social news of the hour, which he gathered as quickly and naturally as a bee gathers honey. The Count, indeed, felt as if he had found a second home in the Crescent City. It is a wonderfully hospitable place, New Orleans, and the stranger who after a three months' residence there does not feel himself part and parcel of its society, linked to it by sympathy and good-will, must be a curmudgeon indeed.
Robert heard of Philip's departure for Thebes with a divided feeling. He shuddered to think of the work that his friend had undertaken, and yet felt that it was not so hard to be chained to the hospital when there was no rival near to Margaret. He sent half of his quarter's income to his friend for the sick at Thebes and for the comfortable housing of the woman who had gone to nurse them. The money was acknowledged by a brief note from Philip, which reached him pierced in half a dozen places and smelling vilely of sulphur and carbolic acid.
Bad news travels proverbially far and fast, and the priest of the forest learned of what had befallen Robert before his wound was whole. Early one morning he appeared at the doorway of the sick-room, and after solemnly blessing and embracing his young friend, he seated himself at the bedside and proceeded to give him all the news from his woodland home. Robert listened attentively, sometimes asking a question, again nodding an assent.
"My father," he said, suddenly breaking a pause, "tell me, if you can, who and what a certain woman by the name of Atalanta may be, or may have been, if she is dead."
"She is dead, certes, if she ever lived, which is questionable."
"Tell me all you know about her."
"It is in the nature of a fairy story," began the father, "and in such a guise you shall have it.
"Once upon a time there lived in Arcadia a beautiful maiden of the name of Atalanta. She was fleet of foot and strong of arm. The bow and arrow were her only distaff and spindle, her hunting-dogs her dearest companions. She lived in the woods; and you know half as well as I myself the delights of such an existence. She was vowed to the worship of Diana, and all men were abhorrent to her. Nevertheless, she had many suitors; and to rid herself of these, she promised to wed the one of all her lovers who could overtake and surpass the speed of her swift white feet. She was a cruel girl and very fair; and the luckless youths who lost in the trial of speed were condemned to die. Many a one lost his life; and at last, though she was still young and lovely with the reflected beauty of the 'orbed maiden' her mistress, there came no more competitors for the fair prize. Then it was that she joined the band of warriors destined to destroy the Calydonian boar. Her arrow first pierced the thick hide of the monster, and at her feet Meleager, the young ruler of Calydon, laid the spoils of the slaughtered boar. More than this, the brave young prince offered, kneeling before her, his heart and hand and kingdom. But she was fiercely wedded to her maidenhood, and would not hearken to his suit; and when the youth lay dead, like many another for her sake, the cold maiden kissed him, and wept for his youth and beauty, cut short in their green prime. But she who had overcome so many was in her turn overcome. There came to her at last a man with a cunning trick which Love had taught him, who declared himself ready to run the race for which her beauty or his life would pay the forfeit. Atalanta was weary of strife and bloodshed, and would have dissuaded the new-comer from the trial; but he taunted her with cowardice, and the tall flower of Arcadia rose in her might and loveliness, and drawing close the girdle about her tunic, laid aside her outer garments, and tightening her sandals about her ankles, stood ready for the race. She looked her antagonist once more in the face; and as her eyes met his, she grew afraid for the first time in all her life,—afraid not for him, as she had been but now, but for herself. The bold youth laughed in her face; and red with anger she gave the signal, and the race began. At first the man, spurred on by love and hope, kept the lead; but when his breath began to fail, he heard the swift, even footsteps of the inexorable huntress gaining on him. She was close behind him; the wind blew a strand of her hair across his cheek; and at that moment he drew from his bosom a golden apple and threw it at her feet. He looked behind, and saw that she had paused to pick up the wondrous fruit, strange to her country; and in the time thus consumed he gained more ground than he had lost. Again she overtook him, rushing upon his track, the apple in her vest, her whole body strained to its utmost speed. Again the ruse stopped her windy way. This time the apple looked fairer still; it grew upon a tiny branch, with bright green leaves of fairest enamelling. Yet a third time the youth was near to losing, and the goal close at hand; one apple more remained to him,—the last gift of Venus. On this glittered dew-drops of pure clear diamonds, and on its stem bloomed forth a bunch of white blossoms,—from that day typical of bridal bliss. The girl hesitated a moment, and in the next the heralds proclaimed that she had lost the race and that the prize was won by the young stranger.
"This, as I remember it, is the old myth of Arcadian Atalanta."
"What was the name of the stranger?" demanded Robert, seizing the priest by the arm.
"Ah, my son! my memory sometimes plays me false; his name has slipped from me. After all, what matters it?"
"It matters a great deal, father," cried Robert, sitting up among his pillows. "Think, think! Is it not Milanion?"
"Thou hast said it, my son. Where got'st thou so much knowledge?"
For answer, Robert only hummed the refrain of an old love-song,—
"Ai mé! sans elle il me faut mourir."
The hot weather had come, and the city had suddenly bloomed out with white-draped women. On the wide galleries, of an evening, one saw groups of dark-eyed Creole girls looking like great creamy flowers in their transparent garments of feathery white. In the streets the heavy featured negresses on their way from market strode along with their baskets of fruit and vegetables, clad in scant white raiment, which made their faces blacker than ever by contrast. In the churches the worshippers at the early Mass looked like so many white-winged angels kneeling at their devotions, their pinions folded about them.
In the gardens of the Spanish fort, the West End, the Jockey Club, white vestments glanced through the trees and shrubbery. At nightfall on the waters of Pontchartrain the same snowy figures were reflected, leaning from sloop and shallop, letting white hands trail in the cool water. The houses too had taken on their summer dress. A deeper twilight reigned in the high-ceiled drawing-rooms furnished in cool linens and carpeted with straw mattings. The latticed verandas were the favorite places of rendezvous; and Mrs. Harden, whose house stood on a breezy corner, was never obliged to complain at this season that her visitors went home too early. Darius Harden had been known unkindly to suggest that the wind-swept piazza and the matchless lemon sherbet were in some measure responsible for the difficulty with which his wife's adorers tore themselves away from her house on the hot summer evenings.
The ecstasy of iced drinks is only known by those Northerners who, like the Ruysdales, linger in New Orleans after the summer has fairly begun. The joy of the orange-flower and the pomegranate soda-water, as served by the black-eyed little Mercury at the drug-store on the corner of Rampart and Canal streets,—oh for the pen of Epicurus to write their praise in fitting phrase!
And yet that unreasonable man, General Stuart Ruysdale, was impatient to be away from New Orleans. Margaret thought it unnatural and unkind of him, and by a hundred feminine subterfuges and deceits, which six months ago she would have scorned to employ, had detained her father for several weeks after the day he had fixed for their departure. But there is an end to the patience of all men,—and the end, be it said, is usually very near to the beginning. The time came when General Ruysdale put his military foot down and ordered that all should be made ready for the retreat northward.
The Atalanta was finished; the store of slippers and shoes from the matchless shoemaker of Royal Street had come home; the races at the Fair Grounds had been won and lost; and the great sham battle between the veterans and the younger militiamen, and the famous competitive drill, were things of the past. The day of departure had been set, and the General, not without some feeling of regret, was taking leave of his new-made friends, first among whom was his old-time adversary, Colonel Lagrange. The Colonel had agreed to visit the Ruysdales at their New England home during the summer, and the General had hesitated about renewing his lease of the little house where they had passed so happy a winter. The hesitation was, however, only momentary. When he remembered the fears that had at times beset him of ever getting his daughter safely away from that city of fascinating men, he said to himself with a half sigh: "No, never again; the risk is too great." For the General was nothing but a poor, foolish old man after all, as we shall see; and the quiet Margaret, the girl whose whole life had been devoted to him and to the art that was their mutual delight, had undergone a change as wonderful and yet as natural as had been the sudden breaking of the winter into the splendor of the Southern spring.
She was sitting in her studio late one afternoon, talking with Sara Harden, who had come to see the bas-relief for the last time, when a card was brought to Miss Ruysdale. Her visitor saw the flush that spread over her face as Margaret read the name and asked that the caller should be shown into the studio.
"As I was saying when I was interrupted," Mrs. Harden went on, "I think your bas-relief a great success, barring the figure of the Milanion, which I never did like. The huntsmen, the group of girls, the dogs in the leash, are most natural. The Atalanta I like best, of course, because it is your little graceful self,—though why you ever put yourself in such a character I can't imagine. You now could never be won by such a ruse,—rousing your curiosity or cupidity by throwing a golden apple in your path. Fancy it!"
"Oh, but it means so much more than that," said Margaret. "Atalanta really wanted to be won, you know, only she was ashamed to say so, after all,—all her protestations to the contrary; and Milanion had seen that in her face."
"What liberties you take with the myths, my dear! Don't judge the Arcadian Atalanta by yourself, I beg of you. And yet, I don't know,—she married the winner in the race, though a better and a braver man was dead for her sake. She was like many another woman before and since her time. One wonders a little if she ever realized in after days that Meleager was a prince among men, and that the gold of his true heart was less mixed with dross than the gold of the apple of Hesperides. She had both in her hands. Did she ever dream in the still night-watches that she had thrown away the gold and kept the dross? Qui sait? Here comes your visitor,—Milanion himself, upon my word! I must take my own leave, as no one seems to care to take leave of me."
Robert Feuardent had entered the studio, and stood looking at Margaret with eyes that could see nothing but her. Without noticing her friend, who had slipped from the room, Margaret came to meet her guest with a few stereotyped words of welcome on her lips.
"Mr. Feuardent, I am so glad to see you so well—so much better. It 's a long time since we have met, is it not?"
"A lifetime, Atalanta."
She was trembling all over, and her hands had grown suddenly perfectly cold. Robert, in whose mind there could not fail to be a memory of that morning when he had last entered the studio, full of health and hope and love, only to leave it wounded and senseless, was very grave. He was still weak, and the emotion which the sight of Margaret had roused, together with these painful recollections, gave him a sudden moment of faintness. She placed a chair for him, and by the time she had in a measure controlled the nervous trembling which had come over her, he was himself again.
"The Count tells me you are thinking of leaving soon," he began.
"Yes," said Margaret, looking bravely in his face, with a laugh which had little of merriment, "yes, we must go next week, papa says. You know it is late in the season for us Northerners to linger here, and the fever is at Thebes,—that makes him anxious, naturally."
"Of course," said Robert severely, "quite right, I am sure; it makes me anxious myself." Then, noticing Margaret's look of astonishment, he added: "Not for myself, of course; I have had the fever already, as you know,—but for you."
"It 's very good of you."
"What is good of me?"
"To be anxious about me."
"How can I help it?" this with a look which was a love-poem in itself.
"You must take your last look at Atalanta to-day," said Margaret, ignoring the poem, "she is to be boxed to-morrow. She is going to be exhibited, poor thing, in New York. Are n't you sorry for her and for me? We shall both be so dreadfully criticised. You cannot conceive the sort of terror that grows upon me when I have nearly finished a piece of work,—the fear of ridicule. I don't mind being told that I don't know anything about art, that my modelling is bad, my conception weak, my execution anything but what it should be; but I do mind being laughed at, for my work, faulty as it is, has been done in very serious earnest, and it seems but fair that if it is to be condemned, it should be in a spirit of serious criticism, not of flippant satire."
"I should like to know who would dare to treat you or your work with disrespect. I—I would kill any man who dared to speak of it as you say." He looked fierce enough to carry out his threat.
Margaret laughed, saying: "And the women, what would you do to them? They are unapproachable, and under the invulnerable armor of their sex they discharge the poisoned arrows of envy, slander, and all uncharitableness; and we, the workers, must endure it without a murmur, for they, being but talkers, can always have the last word."
"Are they all like this?"
"No, good friend; thank Heaven, there are very few such traitors in the army of working women."
Robert moved uneasily in his chair, and said after a pause: "Do not talk to me about your work; it makes you so unlike the you I know best."
"And that is—?"
"That is the girl who danced with me at the fête, who gathered roses with me an hour after sunrise, the sister of charity who brought me soup while I was ill, and whose image has haunted my sick-room ever since she—"
Margaret interrupted him.
"It is the same—I always—" She stooped and straightened the rug upon the floor, and then took a seat a little farther away from the man whose eyes glowed with so strange a light. It made her tremble again, and the trouble in her seemed all centred in her heart, for she laid her hand upon her breast as if to stay its beating; and Robert saw the action, and knew what it meant far better than she could have told him, for love was to him not so new a thing as to this Northern maiden, in whose veins flowed the pure cool blood of the Puritans. Because it is not an easy thing for these women to let Love into their hearts, so is it impossible for them ever to drive him out; for the overthrow must be absolute and irrevocable before the sweet surrender is made. Something of this the man felt; and with the feeling came an awe of the girl whose white impassioned face was turned to him, and a resolve that the love he read so plainly in her eyes should be held as the most sacred thing in his life, which should henceforth be kept clean and pure, a fitting temple to enshrine so white a flame.
"And you are going to leave me, Atalanta?"
"Yes."
"May I come after you?"—she smiled,—"and bring you back with me,"—she blushed deliciously and cast down her eyes,—"to stay forever?"
He was close beside her now, and stood with outstretched arms looking at her with an expression which sent the terrified blood back in a flood upon her heart.
"Come!" he murmured.
She sprang to her feet with an instinct of flight, and glided from him toward the door. The sudden motion jarred the room, and from the wall an orange dropped from the branch she had hung there weeks ago. It rolled towards Margaret and under her fleet feet, which tripped on the treacherous fruit. She stumbled, and would have fallen, but that a pair of arms was ready to uphold her. A little cry, half of fright, half of love, escaped her pale lips as she felt herself folded to a heart beating quite as fast as her own. She struggled to be free for one moment longer; and then, remembering that he was still weak from his wound, she gave a low sigh and lay still for one glad moment in his arms.
And so the golden apple was responsible for all the trouble and all the joy that followed, as it was in the days of Eve and in the time of Arcadian Atalanta.
It did not prove a difficult matter for Robert to tell Margaret that he loved her, and to convince her that he must have her for his own. The arguments he used need not be set down here; they were somewhat indistinctly uttered, and yet were thoroughly understood. They were not new arguments, but have been frequently employed before,—usually with success, as every reader ought to know. For life is but a poor treadmill existence after all, a sort of dry-crust we all have to eat, and love may be prosaically compared to a kind of golden butter which transforms the hard morsel to the ambrosia of the Gods. It is a cheap luxury, the poorest may have it; and yet how many soi-disant world philosophers to-day go fasting, on the plea that it is too costly a thing to feed upon!
Robert found it a very easy thing to convince Margaret, as we have said, but it was a very different matter when it came to convincing Margaret's father, of the soundness of his arguments. They were not indeed even listened to; for when poor Robert had got as far in his story as to tell the General that he loved his only daughter and wanted her for his wife, he was spared the trouble of going any farther. Stuart Ruysdale thanked him for the honor he had done him in asking his daughter's hand, but absolutely declined to bestow it upon him. Robert, who an hour before had assured Margaret that it would be a positive injury to his health to postpone their marriage for more than a month, said falteringly that he could wait any length of time,—a year, two, three, ay, ten years,—a lifetime, even, if he were only allowed to hope. But even hope was denied him; he was told that her father had other views for Margaret. "Was there a preferred lover?" he demanded fiercely, with an inward resolution to have his life if such a one existed. No, there was no other suitor; Miss Ruysdale had never been a figure in the matrimonial market. She was devoted to things less trivial and unsatisfactory; she was, in point of fact, too much absorbed in her art to think of marriage at present.
"At present!" cried Robert aghast; "when then shall she think of it? When she is wold?" There were some sounds in the English language which he never had been able to master, for he had not learned to speak it until he was sixteen years of age.
The General looked annoyed at this remark.
"Miss Ruysdale is still quite young enough to wish to devote the next few years of her life to the art in which she has already given such undoubted marks of ability. This interview is very painful to me, Mr. Feuardent; I must beg you to let it draw to a close. I will repeat, in parting with you, that there is nothing at all derogatory to you in my refusal of your suit."
In a desperate note, full of love and grief and despair, Robert communicated the result of the interview to Margaret.
The General ate his dinner alone that night, Margaret pleading a severe headache as her excuse for not appearing. This put the old soldier in a still less amiable frame of mind; and when he had finished his solitary meal, he lit his cigar and took his way toward the club,—that retreat of all erring men when in disgrace at home.
Here he found Colonel Lagrange, and the two worthies settled down to a game of chess; but before they had been seated a half hour in the Egyptian passivity of that unnatural and awful game, the General declared himself entirely incapable of fixing his mind upon his men. He needed a confidant; and retiring to one of the quiet recesses of the card-room, he told his friend what had passed between himself and Feuardent that afternoon.
"Do you think your daughter is interested in the young man?" the Colonel inquired.
"Interested is too strong a term. I think she fancies the fellow a little, especially since his accident," the father reluctantly admitted.
"If you think that she fancies him, that is enough to convince me that she is in love with him."
"How can she tell? She does n't know any thing about love; she is not like other girls, Colonel. And you know as well as I do the worth of these first attachments,—mere flashes in the pan."
"I know what they are worth a great deal better than you do, or than you pretend to. If Miss Margaret was my daughter, I should be very thankful to bestow her hand on the first man who had touched her heart. It 's a dangerous thing, sir, when a woman learns that though love is eternal, its object may be very variable. You and I know that; but God forbid that our daughters should learn the fact. Depend upon it, the girl who marries the first man she falls in love with makes the most faithful and satisfied wife. She looks upon it as a definite thing; she is born once, loves and marries once, and dies once; and that 's an end of it. Now, your girl who is in love half-a-dozen times before her marriage has learned so much of the mutability of things, of men in especial, that she is pretty safe to repeat the sensation after matrimony."
"Other things being equal, I admit there is some truth in what you say; but in this case look at the immense disadvantages," the General demurred. "Is Feuardent in a position to marry my daughter? Is he disinterestedly attached to her? Though in our part of the world I am not a rich man, nor my daughter an heiress, here, where the scale is so different, her fortune may be an important item in the young man's calculations."
"There you wrong Robert, there you wrong our society, General Ruysdale. Thank God, sir! we have not yet arrived, in this community, at that stage of social development—decomposition, I call—it where marriages of reason are made. No, sir, my young friend is able to marry for love; and if you disinherited your daughter to-morrow, he would ask you again for her hand."
The Colonel buttoned up his coat to the very chin, as was his habit in moments of excitement, and rubbed imaginary dust from the sleeve of his well-brushed, threadbare coat.
"I may have done the young man an injustice," said the General, endeavoring to mollify his friend. "Admitting that his regard is as pure as you claim it to be, the great differences of education, of character, of tastes, of race, and of religion, are they not incompatible with a happy marriage?"
"No, sir; I don't care a button for those bugbears. Love is too strong for any and all of them combined; he can knock 'em out in the first round. It would be a good thing if there were more marriages of this sort, General. You New England folks go on marrying and intermarrying with each till your asylums are full of insane people from the eternal consanguinity of your alliances. Your natures grow colder and more intellectual in each generation; while here in the South we are still too much under the sway of our emotions, and a little of the chilly intellectuality of the Northern race would be a good leaven. If I were President of these United States I should legislate to the end of amalgamating the too-cold Northern and the over-hot Southern blood. In two generations we should have the finest race of people, sir, that has existed in this world since the day when Adam broke his alliance with the brutes and called himself man, and their master."
The Colonel had warmed up to his theme, and was pacing up and down the small alcove, gesticulating to his audience,—the one-armed General.
"Very good generalities," grumbled the latter; "but for all your theories, I don't propose to give my daughter to the first black-eyed penniless Creole who fancies her, to illustrate them."
"And why not, sir? Ah! I smell your money bags behind all that. It hurts you to think that your money may be spent, wasted even, or lost in the South. Now, look at the stupidity of the situation. Here is the North, so rich that money is a drug in the market. You can't invest it to bring you more than four per cent; and rather than risk it at that, your rich men literally sit down on their money-bags, instead of letting the money go out to earn more. Here is the South, the undeveloped country, the richest land in the world, where the earth's crust yields its harvest with less pain to man than in any other quarter of the globe, where the earth's bowels are lined with ores and gems and precious minerals,—all this treasure is waiting to enrich the whole land; and yet it remains locked in the earth, waiting till the key, capital, shall be fitted to the lock. It 's positively insane! And what 's the consequence? New York, that den of robber-barons, keeps the bulk of the wealth of the country as a species of giant playthings for the half-dozen cleverest rogues to play a game of skittles with, bowling down every man who tries to stand up against their infernal tricks. Why, the vast fortunes thus accumulated, which have wrought such malign effects on the country, never could have been possible if the people of the North had used their brains and put their money into developing the country, in some degree, to an equal prosperity. It 's a devil's game they play, those dozen or two so-called 'money-kings,' and it is your own fault that you are tumbled down, like so many tenpins, by their heavy balls. The result is ruinous all the way down to your lowest classes. The greatest gambling-hell the world has ever seen has for its croupiers these great men, whose names you mention with bated breath. 'Financiers,' you call them; swindlers and gamblers they should be termed. All over the land bank-presidents, trustees, men in the highest offices of State and private trust, are tempted to their ruin and the ruin of their dependents through the accursed influence of these men, who have set up the golden calf in our midst and cast down the gods of our forefathers."
Though Margaret did not appear at dinner that evening, her headache did not prevent her from slipping out to see Sara Harden the moment the General departed for his club. She found her faithful friend cold and indifferent; and when she finally knelt beside her, and putting her arms about her waist told her the whole story and begged for help and sympathy, the unaccountable little woman said nothing, but began to cry bitterly. Margaret rose to her feet silent and hurt. Why did every one turn against her when she so needed sympathy in her new-found happiness? She was learning that it is more rare to find natures that can rejoice with us in our joys than those that are willing to mourn with us in our griefs. No one envies our misfortunes or disgrace; but there are few who can look with perfect equanimity on our success or happiness. Blessed are they that mourn; but more blessed are they that can unfeignedly rejoice in the joy of their brother.
At last Mrs. Harden dried her blue eyes; and taking Margaret in her arms, kissed her and wished her all happiness.
"I had to cry a little, dear, for my heart was set on a very different lover for you; and you know that he is now in that pest-stricken city, working like an angel among the sick and dying. You must not grudge him my few tears."
It was Margaret's turn to cry now, and they took what comfort they could out of their tears, as women will; and then, when their eyes were quite dry, they looked the situation in the face and talked over their plan of action. For not withstanding her loyalty to Philip, Mrs. Harden was too thoroughly feminine a woman not to take delight in helping a love affair along over the proverbially rough course.
"I will see the General myself," Mrs. Harden finally said, after they had discussed the very simple matter at the greatest length, looking at it from all possible, probable, and impossible points of view. "Of course he will give in; there 's nothing else for him to do. You won't give Robert up? No? Quite sure?"
"Never!" said Margaret solemnly.
"And the young man himself, will he be equally steadfast?"
"Can you doubt him?"
"Of course I can, my dear, because I always doubt everybody,—lovers in especial; but the question is, can you doubt him?"
"I could more easily doubt myself."
"You are deliciously in love, Margaret, and I will try to forgive you for loving the wrong man; though how you could—well, no matter! Don't be angry; leave your papa to Darius and me, we will fix him between us."
"Mr. Harden—why, why Mr. Harden, what good can he do?"
"A man 's a great support in times like these, Margaret, they really are. They put the other man at such a disadvantage,—if you understand what I mean by that sort of thing. Your father, now, could appeal to my sympathies as well as I to his; but Darius,—I put it to you, who would think of appealing to Darius's sympathy? He won't have any; he's Robert's friend; he can bear testimony to his character, his family, his property, and his political sentiments. Oh, Darius will have to come too; I could n't think of facing the implacable father without my old Gaffer Harden to back me."
"Well, dear, you know best; but—"
"Of course I do; but me no buts. A husband is so convenient in a row; I call Dari my fighting editor. But to return to the General. Under the combined attack of fatherly affection and remorse, of Sara and Darius Harden, of Robert and Margaret, with the support of Colonel Lagrange thrown in if necessary, the rout will be complete."
And it was.
The enemy held out valiantly for a week, and then, after an heroic resistance, was routed,—horse, foot, and dragoon breaking under the final charge of the foe, which was the more deadly be cause of the heavy shower of tears under which it was made. Peace was restored, and the articles signed on terms which were creditable to both parties. The General was to retire to his Northern home, taking his prisoner, Margaret, with him, while her heart was left as hostage in the hands of that disturber of the peace, Robert Feuardent, who gave bonds to appear when the summer was over and restore the hostage, only again to take possession of it and the prisoner in the early autumn days, when the land should be glad with the fulness of the harvest.
And so with heavy hearts Margaret and Robert parted, each full of gloomy forebodings that they should not live to see that golden day when the virgin Atalanta should turn from the worship of Diana to burn incense before the altar of Hymen.
Ah, me! for those fond, foolish, loving days whose pain seems unendurable, those partings and meetings which tear the heart-strings, how quickly do they pass! How tenderly are they remembered in the after-time, when love has cooled, even if it has strengthened into steadfast affection. We agonize over the love-tortures, and cry out that they make life too hard for us to bear; and yet when they are past and gone, we count each moment of that time as a grain of gold in the sombre sands of life, and would gladly give a year of the prosaic contentment of our prosperous lives for one moment of that pain which is the most pleasureful thing that life has held for us!