"Do not believe that I forgot you for a single hour; or that I can ever forget you. You and I have been joined at least in an equal sorrow and suspense. We have walked through depths together, and drank the same gall and bitterness."

"That one month--four miserable weeks--should have worked all this!

One month sooner, and this black picture of our lives would have been bright again as the sunshine. I could believe that some infernal power had taken the reins of our fate."

"Do not say so, nor think so. You have fronted death; you have braved despair; and now bear this blow victoriously as you have borne the rest."

"The crowning blow is the heaviest of all."

"Look into my heart,--if you could look into it,--and see on which of us it has fallen with the more sickening and withering force."

Morton looked into her face. It was like a deep lake becalmed, into which strong springs are boiling up from rocks at the bottom. The surface is still; but looking more closely, one may discern faint gliding undulations and trembling lines, which betray the turmoil below. Morton saw them, and felt their purport.

"I would to G.o.d," he said, "I could bear your burden for you."

Edith buried her face, and burst into a flood of weeping.

Grief, mixed with more ardent emotion, wrought with such violence in Morton's breast, that he scarcely restrained his impulse to throw himself at her feet. In a few moments, she raised her head.

"Do not think from this, that I am not resigned to what has fallen on us. It is best. Incomprehensible as it is, it is best for us both."

A pa.s.sionate denial rose to Morton's lips; but he did not utter it.

"I overrated my strength. I am weaker than I hoped to have found myself. You wish to bear my burden! You have had enough to bear of your own, Va.s.sall; but with you, endurance is not the whole. You still have youth, health, vigor. To one of your instincts, the world has n.o.ble tasks enough. With a heart steeled by dangers, refined by sufferings, tempered in fires of anguish, what path need you fear to tread? Forget the past;--no, do not forget it; only forget all in it that may damp your courage or weaken your hand. When I knew you first, you were full of zeal in a worthy and generous enterprise. Cling to it still. Let me see the tree which I knew in its blossoming bear a full fruit at maturity. Let me see the ardent and earnest spirit which I knew in the beginning, not quelled or flagging by the way, but holding on its course to the end. The pure chivalry of your heart which constrained me to love you, the instinct which turned towards honor and n.o.bleness as a tree turns its branches to the sun,--do not part from it; keep it unstained for my sake, and let it brighten and strengthen all your life."

"If preachers could speak with your tongue," exclaimed Morton, "the world would forget itself and grow virtuous. The love that I have lost on earth I will set among the stars. It shall be my beacon till the day I die."

"We are too delicate and timorous to bear a part in the active struggles of life; but it is a woman's office to raise and purify the thoughts of those who do. You, whose strong natures are formed for warfare, cannot be so sensitive as we are to every spot that dims the brightness of your armor. It is easy for me, before one whom I have loved as I have loved you, to hold this tone, and be borne up for a time above the thought of grief and renouncement. But it is a different task to still, through all a lifetime, the longings of a woman's heart, and the impatient surgings of a woman's temperament.

This is the task a.s.signed me, and I accept it. Life--action--are before you. Patience is my medicine; the slow talisman which must open in the end my door of promise."

Morton pressed her hand to his lips.

"'There is some soul of goodness in things evil.' A sorrow under which, feebly borne, the mind would wither to the earth, borne well will lift it above the clouds. Do not believe that I have deceived any one. He knows on what terms he takes me. I feel respect, esteem, confidence, warm friendship for him."

"May you never be undeceived," thought Morton to himself.

"But for any more ardent love,--that, I told him, was buried in the grave with you."

She was silent for a moment, and then went on.

"It will not be wise, or right, for us to see each other often. In time, you will meet some one with whom you can forget the pain of this separation."

Morton shook his head.

"Yes--at least I trust you will. But we can never forget what we have been to each other. Our reality is melted into a dream, but we must not allow it to remain a dream. Let it be to us a fountain of high thoughts, whose streams may water all our lives."

"You are an alchemist, Edith," said Morton; "you have found the secret to change lead and iron into pure gold. And yet you make me feel, more than ever, if that can be, what a crown I have lost."

When Morton left the house, after a half hour's interview, the agitation with which he had entered it had sunk into quiet; for an influence had fallen upon him as soothing and elevating as if he had been listening to the paschal music in the chapel of the choir at St.

Peter's. And as an aeronaut, tossed among tempestuous clouds, is borne of a sudden above the turmoil, and floats serene in a calmer sky, so the troubled mind of Morton felt itself buoyed up for a s.p.a.ce above the tumult of pa.s.sionate and bitter thought.

CHAPTER LVI.

For close designs and crooked counsels fit, Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit.--_Dryden_.

On the next morning he was walking near the Court House, when a man accosted him, touching his hat with one hand, and holding out the other in the way of friendly salutation. Morton, however, was at a loss to recognize him. He had an air which may most conveniently be described as _raffish_, a hat set on one side of his head, and a good-natured, easy, devil-may-care face.

"Richards is my name," said the stranger. "I met you at Paris, just before you went into Austria."

This was quite enough. Morton, who had repeatedly revolved all the circ.u.mstances connected with his arrest, at once recalled the accident by which he had discovered Richards and Vinal, on their way together to visit Speyer. Morton determined to cultivate this new acquaintance; which, however, seemed likely to grow without much tillage.

"I went on two or three excursions about the city with you, Mr. Vinal, and the rest. Perhaps you have not forgotten it."

"Not in the least; but you are changed since then."

"Yes," said Richards, touching the place where his moustaches had once grown, "I cut them off when I went into practice here in Boston. I found they were ruining my character as a professional man."

"How long were you in Paris after I saw you?"

"Two years, off and on. I wish I were there now." And taking Morton's arm, he proceeded to catechize him touching his imprisonment and escape, of which he said he had first read in the New York Herald.

Morton satisfied his curiosity, taking care to give him no suspicion of Speyer's connection with the affair, and allowing him to infer that the arrest was caused by an accidental concurrence of suspicious circ.u.mstances. Richards, at the end, broke out into a savage, red republican tirade against Metternich and the Austrian government.

"By the way," said Morton, when his companion's heat had subsided, "do you happen to remember a man called Speyer, or something like it,--a republican propagandist, at Paris? I believe you knew him."

"I never knew any body else," replied Richards, adopting a cis-Atlantic figure of speech for which rhetoricians have as yet found no name.

"Do you know where he is now?"

"What, have you lent money to Speyer, too?"

"He is heavily in my debt," said Morton, evasively.

"That's odd. He seems to have been borrowing money all round. I remember, about a year or more ago, I met Mr. Vinal, and he began to talk about Paris. 'By the way,' said he to me, 'do you happen to remember a man named Spires, or Speyers, or some such thing? I lent him five hundred francs.' 'I wish you may get it,' said I. 'Well,'

said Vinal, 'I have a friend going to Paris, who will try what can be done for me.' So I set him on the track. I don't know whether he got his money or not, but I saw him talking with Speyer in the street, one evening last spring, and Vinal looked as sour as if he had swallowed a bottle of vitriol."

"Talking with Speyer last spring!" repeated Morton; "has he been to Paris?"

"Speyer has come out to America. There is not a country in Europe but has grown too hot for him. He was under surveillance in Paris, all the time I knew him."

"When did he come?"

"Six or eight months ago."

"Where is he to be found?"

"In New York, chiefly. If you could have caught him when he was here in Boston, in the spring, you might have got something out of him; for he seemed flush of money."