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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XX. Time—the Reaper

Chapter XX. Time—the Reaper.

"Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river
Whose waves they have tainted with death;
It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity."1

Foremost among the dental luminaries in the State of Louisiana, within three years from the day the loosely-girthed saddle had swerved from the bolting old mare's back in the race for the Maiden Plate on the downs of the Colorado River,—but Brosie had turned into the right path himself,—appeared the name of Dr. Ambrose Vernon Whitworth, president of the leading odontological and oral institute in the city. His long stay at the college in Apricot Street, Chicago, had not after all been made in vain. The valuable certificate illustrative of the qualification of Doctor of Dental Surgery, which he had brought home to Lily Cottage among the sheaves by the "Mararona," was a diploma second to none in the world. Very few of the contemporaneous dentists of any of the neighbouring States possessed such a distinguished credential as that possessed by Brosie. He was, moreover, an exemplar among his fellows, and he lived in charity with all men.

page 505

In the transplantation and regulation of teeth he carved out fame by the discovery of methods entirely by original research, and a method which has not been improved upon ever since. There was no department in scientific dentistry which he had not thoroughly exploited. In crown and bridge work, goldfilling, trephining, pivotting, and all the niceties of the profession allied to surgery, he had few rivals worthy to compete against him. Brosie could do what no other dentist in the whole of Louisiana could do, and that is make mineral teeth, for which purpose he had a patent furnace for smelting siliceous materials. It supplied large demands for artificial teeth so subtilized that they looked under a ten thousand power Hartnack microscope2, both on the superficies and on transverse section, exactly like natural anatomical teeth, and showing the stratiform layers of enamel, dentine, and all the tiny Haversian canals3, similar to the ones supplied by Nature. Some were such, clinkers that when struck they would sparkle with fire. His remarkable skill in fitting out the mouths of the people of New Orleans, within a few months brought to his emporium a large and lucrative trade from the country towns, and even from the adjoining States, where he had agents appointed to receive patronage and take moulds of the mouths of patrons at a distance, with Coventry wax, S. S. White's godiva modelling composition, finely pulverised plaster of Paris, and dainty dental trays. He supplied the other dentists with obturators and sets for show-cases. Some of the Boèrs of South Africa carried his gold plates on the battle-field, and even Foster Wax himself displayed a show-case of Brosie's dental handiwork.

In an American almanack for 1883 is delineated the following information:—

October.

Th. 25—Charge of the six hundred at Balaclava. 1854.4

Fri. 25—Opening of Dr. Ambrose Vernon Whitworth's dental emporium and mineral teeth manufactory, New Orleans. 1853.

Sat. 27—Surrender of the fortress of Mete and the army of Marshal Bazaine with 173,000 prisoners, 3 marshals, 66 generals and 3,000 cannon, to the Prussian army, in command of Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia. 1870.

Margaret Hornblower burnt for witchcraft. 1441.

In Broad Street, one of the principal streets of the city, a new three-storey building of sand-stone, ornamented with scarped granite window-sills, tuck-pointed lintels, and a silver-buttoned page outside the big front door, afforded accommodation to the large number of operatives in his employ. From all parts of the civilised world newspapers—daily papers, weekly papers, monthly papers, illustrated papers and comic papers— whiled away the time of the crowds of clients who besieged his rooms every morning. In the waiting-room were suspended caricatures of patients in the New York Odontological Institute getting their teeth knocked out page 506with a tack-hammer, and the pharmaceutic Batty Take stirring up toothache odontalgicon in a gallipot with a pair of bull-dog forceps for a pestle. In the operating-room, where Brosie drew teeth with great address, over the mantelpiece hung a picture of the Japanese god of toothache with sufferers from that malady chewing bits of paper to a pulp and spitting them out upon the god in the hopes of a cure. On the walls were tablets pourtraying the ancient cure for toothache in the kiss of a pretty girl, and medallions showing the ceremony of burying teeth by the ancients as something sacred; chromo-lithographs, too, of scenes with pigeons during his novitiate at the emporium of Foster Wax and Co., chief among which was one of Foster Wax himself driving his patients out of the rooms, taking two pigeons out of his pocket, cleaning it out, and letting the carriers have a fly around before bidding him good-bye for ever, and a photograph of Foster Wax being taken home full of battle-axe brandy by two of his pupils, while an old man and two boys were busily furbishing Brosie's brass-plate.

Elected president of the New Orleans oral and dental academy by an enormous majority, he attended its meetings every week, and he was much sought after by parents of boys, who paid handsome premiums for their apprenticeships. Among other pupils was the eldest son of the architect, who was now located in New Orleans, and the bereaved peach-grower's boy was his page. Brosie was one of the leading lights of the American Dental Kosmos after all, and he crowed over the croakers who declared he would do no good anywhere. In the whole of the Southern States there was not a more flourishing dental emporium than that of Brosie Whitworth. The branch of the work devoted to the manufacture of mineral teeth from feldspar absorbed the energies of six experts, specially imported by the proprietor from Chicago. All the appliances of the renowned dental factory were manufactured in America, which for ages has been the home and the hot-bed of odontological science.

At this celebrated establishment employment was found by Brosie for his brother's old housekeeper, in the packing of orders to be sent into the country, and in the preparation of capsicum gum-pads, dentifrices, puriline mouth-washes, toothache odontalgicon, and lotions of various sorts under his directions for more than two years. It was a custom in Chicago to employ girls in this department of the business. Some of them proceeded from this appendical occupation to the pure studies of dentistry, and subsequently qualified themselves to practise as dentists at one of the famous colleges there. The tenure of the office of packer, dentifrice-mixer, and lotion-compounder was used by Lillie Delaine merely as a stop-gap, owing to her inability to obtain employment in the duties of housekeeping, to which she had been more accustomed. Her mother, too, had removed to the city when the generous offer was made by the prominent dentist, and there together they rented a small cottage, some years after Eugene had gone to the Cape of Good Hope.

"Lillie, my gal," said the thriving Brosie, with an air of good-humoured page 507raillery, upon the occasion of her first interview in connection with the noble offer: "the emporium I may state right here is chock-a-block fall of 'prentice hands, but I will, I calc'late, pay you four dollars per week for packing and three dollars for the dentifrice and month-wash job, during the time you show you air only a novice in your a-dopted profession. It's as easy as falling off a log, I wish to give you some good substantial proofs that I meant what I said jest before our little symposium when I informed you that I was by natur' a gen'leman, and that I would repay your generosity in advancing me the sixes and fours. You recklect I told you I'd come out on top some day, so you see I gave you right there the straight griffin. I guess I do not require any loans from you nowadays. I ain't a-wallowin' in wealth yet, but if it had not been for you I would often, I reckon, have been what you call 'hung up' for a drink. I am sorry I cannot avail myself of the services of your mother further than offering her the appointment of looking after the reg'lar sousing of the staircase, and the operating-rooms in partick'lar, for, which graft I will submit an offer of three dollars per week. For yourself I calc'late another two dollars per week after the first three months, when you air a-droit in the manipulation of the puriline mouth-wash as propounded by myself: then I guess yon an' me'll be quits." To clinch the offer and in accordance with the American customs he twice shook hands with Lillie, and the new hand replied with the customary solecisms—"Thankyer, Brosie, or rather, as I muss say, doctor Brosie. I was gettin' sick of scrubbin' floors and my mother I expex she'll come too; so it will be all right, won't it Brosie—beggin' yer pardon, doctor Brosie."

For two years the great dental emporium provided a comfortable living for Lillie and her mother. Other girls were employed there and soon were polished off in the art of comic-singing; the emporium was often heard to resound with the Chick-a-leary Bloke, a song and a dance, and the rousing chorus of "John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave," and "On the Strand—on the Strand," and "I wish I was in Dixey's land; to live and die in Dixey." At the termination of this epoch she grew tired of the monotony of the dentifrice and mouth-wash making, and, hearing that Guinevere had been seeking for a housekeeper through Miriam, she was made welcome to the situation. She served the college teacher as faithfully as she had served Eugene. In her new home, too, sometimes in the holidays she would see again Pearly and Vallie, buoyant on the spring-tide of youth and as fond of their old friends as ever. Soon afterwards she was married to Frederick, whereat Brosie, always ready to work off the old obligations, fitted out her cottage with satinwood garniture.

While lillie Delaine had been packing and mouth-wash making in New Orleans and Guinevere was engaged as assistant in the Ladies' College; while the fame of Brosie as a withdrawer of teeth and a supplanter of siliceous facsimiles of Nature, with the only difference that they would never ache, was spreading tike wildfire over the length and breadth of the United States through all the points of the compass, the black mustang page 508sent from Mexico ambled with Eugene about the yawning gulfs and rugged eminences of South Africa or forded the tortuous swift-flowing streams. Moss Rose was a horse of mustang breeding—the mare had been born and bred in Mexico.

Under the irradiating glow of the golden galleon, as he sailed through the dome of the ethereal seas in summer, or under the autumn skies as the sweat-stained lumbering beeves5 ploughed the rich loamy glebes6 on the banks of the Great Fish River, and while the upborne, russet skylark singing ever soared and soaring ever sang over their heads, the sable glossy mustang carried Eugene, with his life sometimes in his hand, in search of the afflicted with pain and disease. Over mountain crags where not a sound could be heard but the roaring din of splashing waterfalls and boiling whirlpools; through weird caverns and earthquake-tunnelled rocks, where ferns and mosses in all their rich variety unseen by the city mice luxuriated, he listened to the screeching cries of the painted macaws or the droning hum of the swarming wild bees, with the forms of Pearly and Vallie ever-present in his reveries and in his dreams and the reminiscences of the children embalmed in his mind, and like sunshine burnt into his soul. Nearer and nearer closed in upon him the time when his heart would warm at the sight of the land of his home— the land where he pourtrayed in his absent mind the sight, of his lost little cherubs at school and at play, and the home to which he longed to return.

Five years had passed away since he had sailed away in the twilight from the multi-mouthed Mississippi, and these five years had not been expended in a strange foreign country in vain. The beneficent change had rehabilitated his nature from the first week he had lived in the exhilarating climate. Few would have given credence to the difference that came in the first few months he was there. Away from the razzle-dazzle whirl of the brain-racking city of New Orleans he had found a refuge and a home in the seclusion of the transatlantic forests, Sequestered, as it was, it was a welcomehome to the indigent, hard-pressed and down-borne Eugene. In the new colony people stood aghast when they heard of the manufactured and wanton charges which had been made by his wife. His private life was exemplary and his professional abilities esteemed. He had the good word of everyone. Anear and afar he was lauded and patronised by the strangers among whom he had come, and in six months' time his medical practice was more extensive and lucrative than any in the whole of South Africa. He was a man of great dash and daring in surgery, and he would have risen to early and eminent heights had the bird of Paradise not crossed his hands. The sibylline old Jean had predicted that he would "sprachle up the brae," and climb up the hill he did, but to Jean the sense of home and duty was ever paramount and pregnant with meaning. The old order changeth in the days of andromania, and these heresies and old-fashioned follies vanish before the "emancipation of women;" but as there are more women than men in the world, on the principle of the page 509greatest happiness to the greatest number the verdict must go to the majority.

He knew only too well how futile would be his visits to the children while they were under the roof, the threats, and the bane of their mother. He patiently waited as the years rolled away for the time when they would both be emancipated from her venomous and tyrannical influences. Letter after letter from the villa named "The Horseshoe," where he lived with his old military captain, who was engaged on the diamond-fields, he wrote to them, but a few weeks brought them all back again whence they were forwarded, until finally he gave up the attempt at communicating with them and adopted the tactics of urging his lawyers to apply to the court for their disenchantment and a new mandamus7 commanding their removal to the boarding-schools in the city. When they were removed from their mother's house by the unerring nemesis of the ill-starred Marvel, the hand of Providence herself placed the benign Guinevere in charge of his little pearl of a girl, and her son as comrade to the valorous Valentine. The news was like honey to the lips of Eugene.

During his sojourn in the wilds of the Cape Colony his expenses had been comparatively small and his professional income very large. Most of this his husbandry had saved. He could have written a cheque for twenty thousand pounds. Without any blunting of his faculties as an operative surgeon by his sojourn in the heart of the bush, he had profited largely from new experiences of injury and disease. His health and vigour were unassailed. Hearing that Jonas Peck, the medical generalissimo, who was not a legally qualified medical man and was called "doctor" only by courtesy, had given over horse-racing and had come to the Cape Colony on furlough with the object of practising his empiricism on the unsuspecting Boers with a patent "monarch of pain," he galloped over a hundred miles to find him, and when he found him he picked Jonas up by the back of the neck and threw him into a green swamp among the frogs and the frantic cheers of the Kaffirs.

Nothing remained to detain him in the sepulchre of the bush now that the coast was clear for his communion with the children, untrammelled by the artifices of his divorced wife, and no sooner had he received the good tidings of great joy from his lawyer than he wrote letters to Pearly and Vallie at the schools to tell them he was coming home at last. With the thoroughbred mustang, to which his old passion for horses and the incom patability of his warm nature to tear himself away from an old friend had greatly attached him, he shipped at Port Alfred on board a brigantine which, calling at ports in Madagascar, enabled him to visit the Salaklava princes, Tamatave, Mojanga and the homes of the Hovas at Antananarivo and touching at the islands of Mauritius and Rodriguez sailed by a circuitous route for the Gulf of Mexico, where he landed on the shores of Galveston in a little under five years from the date of his embarkation on board the "Rosalind" to join in the abortive expedition against the Kaffirs page 510amongst whom and the Boers he eventually left many friends. Buoyant as a nautilus on the phosphorescent wavelets of a breeze-rippled sea, or like an ocean bird shooting the seething foam of the billows, the dainty clipper brigantine the "Sophy Bell" spread her gaff-headed mainsail and her fluttering shrouds before the fair breezes of the trades, scudding along the drowsy waters of the South Atlantic; anon to be tossed like an egg-shell on the boiling breast of a whirlpool in the tossing seas. Now she was hoisted on the cyclopean shoulders of the mountainous masses of storm-driven waters, pitching and rolling heavily, dipping prow under with every sea, shuddering, cracking her cordage and straining her spars as the angry Neptune took her by the waist and shook her on his tumultuous peaks and plunged her into the leaden trough of the tossing seas, with the waves pouring in sheets over her bulwarks, the seething wash of breakers sweeping her scuppers and league-long rollers ramming her side; now she rose again on his bosom, and again and a thousand times again through the howling storm of the deepening dark and the mournful droning gale of the seeming interminable night; then like a white cloud she came curtseying along dead before the wind on the quiet Gulf Stream in the morning, when the awful tempest with its battering-rams, the foaming monsters of the grim waves, had passed away.

Riding the Mexican black mustang to Lily cottage, where she browsed at her own sweet will on the same sweet grass as old Rosie, he found the realistic and bounteous Flying Dutchman had risen to the position of chief engineer on board one of the coastal steamers; old Christopher still loved to sit smoking the same old meerschaum on the same old box in the stable, and the larcenous gluepot Ike was charging an exorbitant rental ever since he put the jerry-built stable on the ground of the ivy-mantled cottage by the sea. In every little pigeon-hole in the attic of gluepot Ike's brain lay a dodge for swindling somebody and for adding something to the omnium gatherum in the lumber-room, and he always felt afraid if he was not getting the best of somebody else that somebody else was getting the best of him. The visits to the tomb of his departed brother and little Percy were still as religiously observed by Miriam as in the days of yore. The old tortoise-shell cat sat blinking asleep on the table in the kitchen, and from the staff on the gable of the stable fluttered the "meteor flag of old England."8 Astonished at the grand display of operatives and patients in the great dental emporium as described by his father, he heard again the clanking bells of St. John's, and on the tenter-hooks of impatience to see the children, the same evening he set sail by the "Sophy Bell" for New Orleans.

There next day he stepped ashore on the Mississippi Quay right into the heart of the city; through the Fifth Avenue, past the national court whose dark shadow had followed him for so many years and bid fair to fallow him to his grave; past the old house with the three and a-half numerals, now occupied by charlatans, and out beyond the city to Rosemary Point; while the Town Hall bells played the solemn tune which had percol-page 511ated through the divorce court—"I loved the garish day; in spite of fears Pride ruled my will; remember not past years."9 Nearing the college, he walked through the contiguous groves, wonder possessing him if his little darling "whom he had loved long since and lost awhile" would know him again; but he reflected that he had written and that she would probably ba expecting him to come. Passing through an avenue of rosemary, oleander and myrtle, he saw a number of children at play on the green sward with croquet balls, swings and skipping ropes, and as he drew near, they all stood staring like a herd of startled gazelles at the intruder; while beyond them in a bosky10 glade under a sand-box tree reclined the form whose comely embonpoint11 he knew so well, "in maiden meditation fancy free."12 Suddenly she rose, and past her school-mates ran the blossoming Pearly, her long waving hyacinthine clusters blown back by the breeze and her sailor-hat hanging by the pink ribbon around her neck. Round and rosy, with rubicund tints, and tears like trembling dewdrops on her nut-brown cheeks, she stood in exultation before him: throwing her bonnie arms around his neck as he knelt upon the sward, while her violet eyes filled with rapture inexpressible. In great agitation she entreated him to take her away with him to see Vallie, avowing that Mrs. Payne said she could go if he wanted her to go, and running back hurriedly into the school to her teacher to announce the arrival of her father. No pause for any remonstrances, she was off like the lithest fawn, and soon brought face to face with Eugene the changed and the elated Guinevere. It was high noon on life's sundial for Eugene, and as he said good-bye to his cordial friend, promising to call at her cottage again, soon the joyous little maid from school tripped away with her father in quest of the gated Vallie. While they sat speeding along in a tilbury13 to the college, she ran through the little world of her experiences of the past five years: how the naughty man had beaten Vallie, and her mother had smashed all the new dollies and toys. When the gates of the college were reached the boys of the school were playing base-ball, and Vallie lying under an umbrageous palm near the fish-pond alone with Smith's Latin grammar. "I'll make him come, puppa: Vallie knows when I whistle, and I know when Vallie whistles, listen!" to a long melodious double-barred whistling like the running notes of the cuckoo from the pink corrugated lips of Pearly; and up sprang the responsive ruddy-faced boy running to the gate out of breath with excitement and his heart bounding like a cricket-ball. "Where have you been such a long while, puppa?" he said; "muraraa said you were dead, but you're not dead, are you puppa? and I'm up to Cæsar!"

The memories of their childhood days at Bendemeer. Summer Hill and the sand-hemmed shores by Myamyn ran riot in their little hearts at the sight of the wanderer returned, and a respite for two whole days was accorded from the colleges in order that they might revisit those flower-crowned and silvery scenes again. Fearing that it would be a contravention of the propaganda of the court to detain them from school beyond the stipulated holiday, he accompanied them with vacillating footsteps back to page 512the schools. Promising to call twice a week and get them relieved of the prison ennui of boarders if he could, he left them disconsolate again and proceeded on business to the city of New Orleans.

There, in Fifth Avenue again, within a week he established himself as a consulting and operative surgeon. Beginning again with brilliant prospects, he was cordially welcomed back to the city by the many who had supported his cause with a round-robin after the trial was over. Within a few months his success in New Orleans was assured. The same groom whom for five years he had employed at Sabinnia, the city, and Summer Hill—Frederick, who had practised the counter-cuts taking the change out of the bag of bran and "laid his hands on Hoolihan," resigned the appointment of "sweepin' in a shearin' shed" and rejoined his old master. With the handsome black mustang in the lead of a tandem and a spider-wheel14 dog-cart with a black-wood splashboard15, he soon enlisted in his books a goodly number of profitable patients and became again honorary surgeon of the Louisiana infirmary. Again, as in the days of his partnership, his old patients visited him from the country towns where he had formerly practised, thus enhancing his medical retinue in the city, and he obtained a cavalry lieutenancy in one of the northern States.

In the following year Guinevere rose to the highest position in the Girton College and retained the same sense of camaraderie, in respect to the children, with Eugene. As a variant to her theory that marriages were made in Heaven, she lived a life "a little lower than the angels," and steadfastly conformed to the doctrine enunciated by St. Luke—"And Jesus answering said unto them, 'The children of this world marry and are given in marriage, but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage; neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.'"

Passion-week came, and away Eugene sailed to Galveston to spend a week's holiday with old Christopher and Miriam at the cottage by the sea, and to revisit with her the frequented tomb at St. Martin's, where lay his only child whom "the slaves of law had not rended away."16 On the first day of his holiday sojourn, when the "jocund day stood tip-toe on the misty mountain tops,"17 and the shimmering mirage on the sleeping waters of the bay dazzled the eyes for miles, tiny yachts glided nimbly upon its breeze-rippled surface, spreading their white wavering wings to the gentle puffs of the south wind playing over the acclivities rising from the blue mirror of the bay; while the magpie rang out his clarion tones and the yellowhammer whistled from the tops of the tossing wellingtonias hundreds of feet in height. Upon reaching the summit of the hill, from which the pure white stone of the marble monuments reflected flares of glinting white, they stood reviewing the beauties of the sunlit prairie and the littoral seaside scenery beyond the harbour. Blue hazes hung in filmy curtains through the valleys and across the hills; yellow leaves rustled here and there, but page 513the air was still and pregnant with the fruticose, pungent fragrance of burning sassafras. Spikelets of golden-rod, kingcups, cinque-foil, crow-foot, clove-pinks, yellow crocuses, white picotees, boys'-love, and meadow-saffron flamed among the wild forget-me-nots along the borders of the meadows, and rich crimson flowers flashed out sporadically beneath the geranium-covered wall. Along the track leading to the graveyard again they walked together and through the iron gate, where Miriam left him to deliver a book which she was lending to the sexton, while Eugene walked on under the trailing ailanthus towards the tomb alone. The voice of Nature was solemnly hushed, save twittering wood-sounds, the lonesome cry of some solitary corncrake, the darting hare, and the moving of the grass to the stir of the plaintive little titlark running with drooping wing along the ground, the low, menacing growl of a fox crouching with bristling hair and gleaming red eyes, the flutter of a grallatorial18 stork, and the pausing of a moose-deer at the purple girdle below the cataract of the creek to drink. The twinkling eyes of a squirrel peeped from his hiding-place among the rocks of the stone wall, and the subdued murmuring thrill of the cicada and the cricket was heard from amongst the shrubs and the dust of forgotten graves. Approaching the monument, he gazed with saddest memories upon the picturesque marble angel, and wondered with a strange foreboding who it was bending down tending the flowers of the grave. Dressed in shining black moiré lightly traced around with fimbriated19 jet, giving a fine glittering effect in the sun, and wearing a small black Parisian bonnet with a floriform cassowary feather, and a bunch of white fuchsias in her breast, and a black bird of Paradise spray, fragile she seemed to be, as he watched her from behind the yew-trees and quietly drew nearer and nearer to the grave, while tears coursed adown her pallid cheeks as he approached. Hearing his footsteps she stood erect and looked around. He started!—it was Marvel! "Marvel!" he muttered in amazement: "Marvel again!" impulsively proffering his hand; but she heeded it not and nervously exclaimed "Eugene!—— Eugene." Bathed in tears, palpably very ill and exhausted from laborious respiration, she leaned against the fence of the grave wiping away the tears from her anæmic cheeks with a blood-stained handkerchief, smelling a silver vinaigrette and saying after a long pause almost in a whisper, "If I have done you an injustice you will, I know, forgive me; for God alone knows I have suffered and have paid the penalty myself in full. They deluded me into seeking for that divorce so that I might get the children, and if it has brought trouble to you it has brought misery and anguish to me. But I know it will soon be ended, because I heard the doctors telling mother I had consumption; she brought me for a change into the milder air of the seaside yesterday, and this is the first time I have seen my little angel's grave since we were here with the children all together. My little darling is with God, and when I die I want to lie in peace beside him brushing the tears gracefully away with the pocket-handkerchief: "I am so glad to see you once more, Eugene, and I am so sorry it ever happened page 514that——" came flood upon flood of scalding tears again. She wept bitterly.

Hoping to brighten and comfort her, he vouchsafed his complete forgiveness, and addressing her, "Notwithstanding the flight of years," he said," and the fallacious judgments of the courts of man, my love for you, Marvel Gould, since we wandered together around the lake in the gardens is still one of my sweetest reminiscences, and beyond you and the children I have thought of no other. God alone is my judge, and if there was anything I had left undone to please you ever since you lay in that arm beneath the moonlit pine, or if I had not loved you as I told you I loved you, and loved you to adoration——." Her thoughts again were in the clouds, and, with one long far-away look, back she fell in a dead faint down among the wild-flowers around the grave level with the plinth of the masonry. Strong-minded girl as she had been, she now, like myriads who go down the river of life's hill, found that pomp and vanity and earthly glory are nothing but smouldering ashes in the end, and now that a few years had tarnished her fugitive charms and had withered the smile from her lips, that notwithstanding the flight of time the footsteps of Nemesis were swifter still. Driven by the scourgings of fate to kiss the rod20 beneath the shadow of the tomb; brought to bay by destiny, or haply foredoomed in the inscrutable records of the incomprehensible eternity, or created to be precipitated in paroxysms of agonising despair at the foot of her little darling baby's grave, and encountering in the midst of her woes the once-loved Eugene, whom she had cruelly wronged, lay white as the marble angel of the tomb that dark-eyed daughter of the Western World, Marvel Imogen Narramore Gould, the adored, the extolled, the renowned Bird of Paradise—the sometime termagant wife of the warm-hearted Eugene—geliebt und gelebt21. Sadly picturesque still, with the respiration hurrying through her white parted lips and through the fine skin of her shapely forehead the numbered minute vascular capillaries, the filmy blood-filaments of her life, trickling along their web-like ways, but degenerated by the inflammation of the lungs. He bore her through an avenue of the plumose22 yucca gloriosa trees to the side gate and opened the door of a private carriage, wherein her glum and churlish mother was dandling and coddling an infant in swaddling - clothes against her old paunch, and soon the last glimpse of his adored Marvel came to an end as the carriage moved slowly away. Returning to the tomb, where his mother had arrived, she was astonished at the revelation concerning Marvel. In the overflow of the sinless Miriam's heart she knelt upon the cowrie shells over the grave, closed her eyes and breathed as of old the prayer—"Teach us to love one another in Thee and for Thee, and in the world to come unite us at Thy feet, where peace and love are perfect and everlasting!"

Marvel's cowardly blackguard of a husband had never returned since the crashing collapse of her fortunes, and her only helper now was the faithful old Jean. In the hopes of improving her condition by the change page 515into a marine atmosphere during Easter-tide, she had induced Marvel to spend a few weeks in Galveston. There the memory of little Percy crowned all the detergent, sanctifying influences of the chapel; the memory there, too, of her holiday with Eugene and the toddling children revived all her earlier associations, and culminated in the scene over the grave. For some weeks she lingered in "The Thirteen Bells." one of the seaside hotels, reclining sometimes all day on the balcony enjoying the magnificent scenery, and bolstered up by the cheerfulness imparted by her mother and the inspired hopes of a prolongation of her existence; but the mother of little Percy never walked to his grave again!

Suddenly over the blue mountains, breaking away from the Great Rocky chain, in the dim, lurid paschal dawn of the first Sunday after Easter came the howling, droning blasts of a tornado, and tropical, torrential rain, pouring in rushing cascades down the alleys and gorges of the hill-sides beyond the Colorado River; while the whole expanse of the ebony sky was illuminated with great vitreous flashes of lightning, and the welkin rang with rumbling, repercussive, rattling reverberations, and cannonading peals of mighty thunder like a deep staccato chorus over the city and the sea. Shivering cedars and curving poplars bent their topmost branches, sweeping aside the innumerable rills that hurried down the ranges to join in the flooding of the town, and Marvel appeared at the balcony window, watching the pictorial phosphorescent pyrotechnic emblazonry in the sky! A great waterspout burst in the clouds; the freshets at the river-sources gathered forces and hurried down to swell the yellow torrent of the Colorado "tossing his tawny mane"23 and driftwood on his broad bosom, while all the morasses coalesced into a huge inland sea. Ships under close-reefed mainsails scudded on their sides into shelter; the poising ossifrage24 shrieked and cut through the storm, and cattle galloped madly through the forest, rushing here, there and everywhere in the wildest confusion, bellowing and almost batting the ground while their heels and tails were tossed high in the air. Chain-long rents were ploughed into the soil and the bark stripped from the red columns of the pines; while Marvel stood in awe at the scenographic handiwork of Him who said "Vengeance is Mine." It was doomsday for Marvel! The lightning danced and gleamed in the heavens like the quadrillion brandishing halberdiers of a mailed ethereal army in the immemorial war between inanimate Nature and man, with death amidst all its beauty; now with the scintillating glare of colossal diamonds, now changing into Titanic spears and broad arrows of blue and obvoluting oriflames25 and long tridents of serpentine green, and now flaring with the shimmering sheen of scutiform26 rotary polished silver and the incandescent glow of laminiferous sheets and braziers of diaphanous burnished majolica27 in the treasure-house of Olympus28. The heavens opened and the four winds were let loose all together. Then came terrene, seismic disturbances and a sulphurous smell as a zig-zagging blue light blazed in the zenith, quickly flickering down the match-lock iron stanchion of the infundibuliform29 gargoyle above the balcony; the-window rattled and Marvel stand-page 516ing in such imminent proximity to an infuriated universe was terrified!—first staggering, then knocked down by the lightning she lay with a charred arm prone, torpescent and unconscious upon the floor. By the side of her bed sat her mother, who had buoyed her up against the storm of disease with that love that looks cheerful on the very brink of the grave; trying to rouse the stunned Marvel, from whose gipsy cheeks the hectic bloom had faded, leaving them with the pallor of ivory. Ere yet the gloomy daylight had faded and while the evening star "sweet Hesper-Phosphor" sparkled like an immense umbelliferous30 burning amethyst above the horizon, she partially recovered and momentarily sank into a somnipathic quiescence. Then came low muttering resurgent thunder from the far distance and fitful coruscations and bivouac fires of lightning rebellious against the sovereign moon, as the large white clouds parted and followed by a single star she burst through the purple rift in the heavens. In the quiet bedroom above the buzz and glitter of "The Thirteen Bells," soon Marvel awoke assailed with the sibilant gnomes of delirium, declaring that Eugene was in the room, that she wanted to be reconveyed to him, and not stopping her protestations until her mother had made a pretence of reconnoitring the great caravanserai in quest of Eugene; that she saw little Percy in a misty robs soaring through Heaven amidst choral hosts of angels, while she herself was left behind on a slow journey to the grave and waiting for the summons of that soft tread which comes at last to all; repenting the ransomless day when she had been sundered from Eugene and suffusing the purple lunules around her eyes with streaming tears as she drew recitative pictures of her amours with him by the lilac-bordered lake in the gardens of Augusta, and all the bright chapters of her life before her secession from Eugene. At evening through the open window the quiet moonbeams illumined her face and the soft siroccos breathed through her dark waving tresses, as she lay in her dark Titian beauty whispering to her mother that she saw dioramic visions and heard tranquilising music wafted through the air from over a visionary sea, and voices calling to her from spirit-land tidings of the reunion of the dead—the dearest tenet of the Christian faith. Oh! Time the reaper, animate with messengers of pardon; love, compassion and forgiveness are so interwoven with thy spectral image that not even wrong-doing, enmity nor life-long injury hold any sway against thy mellowing influences!

Every day since he met Marvel at the grave Eugene had gone alone to St. Martin's and waited about the grounds, heedlessly strolling among the long grasses, the untended shrubs, the wild flowers and the trailing heliotrope and the foliage of the fences; abstractedly reading the in memoriam inscriptions on the tombs or throwing a tributary flower upon the grave of a departed friend. Still no sign of the suppliant Marvel! He had hoped to meet her at little Percy's grave again, but since she had been stunned by the lightning, of which she had sung the theodical monodies and hozannas in her lonely evensong before the organ in the village chapel, she never left her roam in the "Thirteen Bells" alive again. Full of page 517pardon and compassion for his dissevered spouse, he longed to lighten her anguish, bat Eugene never saw Marvel again.

The wind dropped and the stars peeped from their myriad settings in the infinite jewellry dome as the night advanced, when painlessly and peacefully flickered away the fiery flame of the spirit, of Marvel; her head sinking back upon the pillow and one calm sigh with the lingering shadow of a smile, a faint sweet smile, breathing through her quivering lips; then all around was still with the quietude of a tired child fallen asleep as she passed away into the golden morning - break of those realms where alone her harmony could be exceeded: for the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. Solemnly and with aching hearts and retrospective reveries the corse of Marvel was followed from the feretory31 of St. John's chapel in drizzling mists to its last resting-place and the home of the dust of little Percy by the prebendary32 of St. John's, the aggrieved Eugene and the tear-bedimmed Miriam, to the extraneous tolling of a distant convent bell. There tenderly and lovingly she was laid by her little darling's side, and as he stood, wrapt in thought, over the coffin of his lost and lamented Marvel he pressed a bunch of myosotis to his lips, and with some finely striated shells from the absent Pearly and Valentine he let it fall into the grave. Soon after they walked away, leaving Marvel on her journey to bliss beyond the grave, symbolized by a present rainbow that spanned the grave-yard like an allegory, its extremities resting on the earth while its arch was lost in the skies. Thus cut down in the meredian of her life, she lay in the sepulchre of the man whom she had persecuted and discarded—the girl whose powers of fascination were illustrated in the synonym of the "Bird of Paradise;" the fiery girl whose glossy and superficial sheen, as she played her gorgeous shimmering hues of ostentatious attraction before other eyes than those of Eugene, pourtrayed the brilliant nature with which she was endowed; the girl whose jealousies, inconstancy and vagaries and desertion mortised into infidelity had harassed for years the man who would have kissed the hem of her garment, and who loved her as she was lowered into the grave. In the cold, dank grave she lay; cut down like a flower of the field, and the choicest flower in the basket of her potential and powerful father; forgiven before "the corruptible had put on the incorruptible or this mortal had put on immortality;"33 forgiven in the magnanimous affection of the warm-hearted man whom she had betrayed—forgiven, but never to be forgotten! Upon the monumental facade was deftly chiselled and enamelled her name beside the name of the child gone before, and below it in letters of gold the favourite collect of Miriam—"Teach us to love one another in Thee and for Thee, and in the world to come unite us at Thy feet where peace and love are perfect and everlasting!"

Again and again as the years rolled over the cold white angel of the tomb through their sempiternal34 æons into the scrolls of her Father in Heaven, there came to strew her grave with white jessamine, lilies and forget-me-page 518nots, side by side with their father, the romantic children released from the schools. With him they would wander through the wild blue-bells among the long waving grass, nodding its heavy-laden panicles35 as they passed over the sunlit plains and the hill to St. Martin's, There for hours they loved to linger in the presence of their dead mother, plucking the rich white wildflowers, blue whortleberries, meadow-saffron, buttercups and bright yellow gentians which grew in profusion on the purple fields and the prairies, to weave them in fascicles36 and wreathe them into floscular37 crosses with the waxen chalice fleurs-de-lis and the jessamine for decoration of the urns within the fence; while Eugene scattered over the cowrie and mother-o'-pearl shells the pale blue-eyed palustral38 myosotis39, the emblem of everlasting remembrance.

"To die that we,
The common lot of all things fair,
May read in thee,
How small a part of life they share,
That are so wondrous rich and rare."40

Two years passed. The slave wars called him away upon the path of duty which leads to glory, and fighting for the manumission of slavery under the banner of Abraham Lincoln, in the last charge at the battle of Gettysburg, amidst the mangling crash of artillery and the whistling and singing of swords through the air and the fierce rattle of the musketry, with a Southern bullet through his heart, and the parting cry of "Alas! my little children!" fell forward upon the neck of the headlong charging mustang the loving, the brave, the noble Eugene, and the shattered black mare reared and rolled dead beside him. The children live under these shadows for the rest of their lives weeping for years for the voice and the step of him they should know no more. What shadows for children with such fair early prospects they were! yet what shadows we all pursue through the "roaring loom"41 on the quickening wings of Time!

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1 To William Shelley [The billows on the beach are leaping around it]. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

2 A contemporary top-of-the-line microscope, made by E Hartnack & co of Paris and Potsdam. Ars Machina 2005.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

3 Haversian canal, one of the minute cylindrical passages in bone which form the channels for blood-vessels and medullary matter. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

4 The Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

5 Oxen, cattle. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

6 The soil of the earth. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

7 A court order or writ directing an inferior court, a corporation, official, etc., to perform a public or statutory duty, esp. so as to remedy a legal defect. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

8 The Red Ensign. (Source informal.)

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

9 The Pillar of the Cloud. John Henry Newman.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

10 Consisting of or covered with bushes or underwood. OED Online,a. 1

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

11 Well-nourished appearance of body. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

12 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

13 A light open two-wheeled carriage, fashionable in the first half of the 19th century. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

14 A metal wheel with wire spokes. OED Online. See 'spider', n., sense 11a.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

15 A guard or screen in front of the driver's seat on a vehicle, serving to protect him, or others sitting beside him, from being splashed with mud from the horse's hoofs. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

16 To William Shelley [The billows on the beach are leaping around it]. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

17 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III.v.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

18 Pertaining to the order Grallatores, which consists of long-legged wading birds. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

19 Bordered with a narrow band or edge; or, having a fringe. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

20 Submit to chastisement.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

21 Lived and loved.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

22 Feathery. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

23 Possibly quoting Talbot Reed, The Master of the Shell, 1889, ch. 20.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

24 A bird of prey reputed to break bones by dropping them from a great height. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

25 The sacred banner of St Denis, of red or orange-red silk; in extended use as a bright object or a rallying point in a battle. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

26 Shield-shaped. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

27 A type of 19th-cent. earthenware with coloured decoration on an opaque white tin (or sometimes lead) glaze. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

28 The home of the gods. Dictionary of Classical Mythology 1995.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

29 Funnel-shaped. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

30 Bearing flowers arranged in umbels; of or belonging to the order of Umbelliferæ. OED Online. Uncertain in context.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

31 A small room or chapel attached to an abbey or a church, in which shrines were deposited. OED Online, sense 3.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

32 The holder of a prebend; a canon of a cathedral or collegiate church who obtained income from a prebend. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

33 The Bible. 1 Corinthians 15:53.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

34 Enduring constantly and continually. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

35 The spiked or feathery head of certain reeds and grasses. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

36 Bundles or bunches. Cf. 'fasces'.OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

37 Composed of little flowers. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

38 Marshy, or requiring a marshy habitat. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

39 Forget-me-not.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

40 Shakespeare. Tell Her That's Young.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

41 From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]