Brooding, I lay upon the sward, meditating unutterable things,
and as far as ever from any conclusion. Of one thing alone I
was satisfied--that I was unutterably miserable; that my destiny
was written in sable; that I was a man foredoomed to wo! Were
my speculations strange or unnatural! Unnatural indeed! There
is a class of surface-skimming persons, who pronounce all things
unnatural which, to a cool, unprovoked, and perhaps unprovokable
mind, appear unreasonable: as if a vexed nature and exacting
passions were not the most unreasonable yet most natural of all
moral agents. My woes may have been groundless, but it was surely
not unnatural that I felt and entertained them.
Thus, with bitter mood, growing more bitter with every moment of
its unrestrained indulgence, I gloomed in loneliness beside the
banks of that silvery and smooth-flowing river. Certainly the
natural world around me lent no color to my fancies. While all
was dark within, all was bright without. A fiend was tugging at
my heart; while from a little white cottage, a few hundred yards
below, which grew flush with the margin of the stream, there stole
forth the tender, tinkling strains of a guitar, probably touched
by fair fingers of a fair maiden, with some enamored boy, blind and
doting, hovering beside her. I, too, had stood thus and hearkened
thus, and where am I--what am I!
I started to my feet. I found something offensive in the music.
It came linked with a song which I had heard Julia sing a hundred
times; and when I thought of those hours of confidence, and felt
myself where I was, alone--and how lone!--bitterer than ever were
the wayward pangs which were preying upon the tenderest fibres of
my heart.
In the next moment I ceased to be alone. I was met and jostled by
another person as I bounded forward, much too rapidly, in an effort
to bury myself in the deeper shadow of some neighboring trees. The
stranger was nearly overthrown in the collision, which extorted a
hasty exclamation from his lips, not unmingled with a famous oath
or two. In the voice. I recognised that of my friend Kingsley--the
well-known pseudo-Kentucky gentleman, who had acted a part so
important in extricating my wife from her mother's custody. I made
myself known to him in apologizing for my rudeness.
"You here!" said he; "I did not expect to meet you. I have just
been to your house, where I found your wife, and where I intended
to stop a while and wait for you. But Bill Edgerton, in the meanwhile,
popped in, and after that I could hear nothing but pictures and
paintings, Madonnas, Ecce Homos, and the like; till I began to fancy
that I smelt nothing but paint and varnish. So I popped out, with
a pretty blunt excuse, leaving the two amateurs to talk in oil
and water-colors, and settle the principles of art as they please.
Like you, I fancy a real landscape, here, by the water, and under
the green trees, in preference to a thousand of their painted
pictures."