Afloat and Ashore, James Fenimore Cooper [romantic story to read TXT] 📗

marry anybody who would make them rich; but I do not think theirs was a calling to which either sex served regular apprenticeships, as is practised to-day. Still, the business was carried on, to speak in the vernacular, and sometimes with marked success.

"You have not told me, Grace," I resumed, "whether you think Lucy is pleased, or not, with the attentions of this gentleman."

My sister looked at me intently, for a moment, as if to ascertain how far I could, or could not, ask such a question with indifference. It will be remembered that no verbal explanations had ever taken place between us, on the subject of our feelings towards the companions of our childhood, and that all that was known to either was obtained purely by inference. Between myself and Lucy nothing had ever passed, indeed, which might not have been honestly referred to our long and early association, so far as the rules of intercourse were concerned, though I sometimes fancied I could recall a hundred occasions, on which Lucy had formerly manifested deep attachment for myself; nor did I doubt her being able to show similar proofs, by reversing the picture. This, however, was, or I had thought it to be, merely the language of the heart; the tongue having never spoken. Of course, Grace had nothing but conjecture on this subject, and alas! she had begun to see how possible it was for those who lived near each other to change their views on such subjects; no wonder, then, if she fancied it still easier, for those who had been separated for years.


"I have not told you, Miles," Grace answered, after a brief delay, "because it would not be proper to communicate the secrets of my friend to a young man, even to you, were it in my power, as it is not, since Lucy never has made to me the slightest confidential communication, of any sort or nature, touching love."

"Never!" I exclaimed--reading my fancied doom in the startling fact; for I conceived it impossible, had she ever really loved me, that the matter should not have come up in conversation between two so closely united--"Never! What, no girlish--no childish preference--have you never had no mutual preferences to reveal?"

"Never"--answered Grace, firmly, though her very temples seemed illuminated--"Never. We have been satisfied with each other's affection, and have had no occasion to enter into any unfeminine and improper secrets, if any such existed."

A long, and I doubt not a mutually painful pause succeeded.

"Grace," said I, at length--"I am not envious of this probable accession of fortune to the Hardinges, but I think we should all have been much more united--much happier--without it."

My sister's colour left her face, she trembled all over, and she became pale as death.

"You may be right, in some respects, Miles," she answered, after a time. "And, yet, it is hardly generous to think so. Why should we wish to see our oldest friends; those who are so very dear to us, our excellent guardian's children, less well off than we are ourselves? No doubt, no doubt, it may seem better to us , that Clawbonny should be the castle and we its possessors; but others have their rights and interests as well as ourselves. Give the Hardinges money, and they will enjoy every advantage known in this country--more than money can possibly give us--why, then, ought we to be so selfish as to wish them deprived of this advantage? Place Lucy where you will, she will always be Lucy; and, as for Rupert, so brilliant a young man needs only an opportunity, to rise to anything the country possesses!"

Grace was so earnest, spoke with so much feeling, appeared so disinterested, so holy I had almost said, that I could not find, in my heart, the courage to try her any farther. That she began to distrust Rupert, I plainly saw, though it was merely with the glimmerings of doubt. A nature as pure as her's, and a heart so true, admitted with great reluctance, the proofs of the unworthiness of one so long loved. It was evident, moreover, that she shrunk from revealing her own great secret, while she had only conjectures to offer in regard to Lucy; and even these she withheld, as due to her sex, and the obligations of friendship. I forgot that I had not been ingenuous myself, and that I made no communication to justify any confidence on the part of my sister. That which would have been treachery in her to say, under this state of the case, might have been uttered with greater frankness on my own part. After a pause, to allow my sister to recover from her agitation, I turned the discourse to our own more immediate family interests, and soon got off the painful subject altogether.

"I shall be of age, Grace." I said, in the course of my explanations, "before you see me again. We sailors are always exposed to more chances and hazards than people ashore; and, I now tell you, should anything happen to me, my will may be found in my secretary; signed and sealed, the day I attain my majority. I have given orders to have it drawn up by a lawyer of eminence, and shall take it to sea with me, for that very purpose."

"From which I am to infer that I must not covet Clawbonny," answered Grace, with a smile that denoted how little she cared for the fact--"You give it to our cousin, Jack Wallingford, as a male heir, worthy of enjoying the honour."

"No, dearest, I give it to you . It is true, the law would do this for me; but I choose to let it be known that I wish it to be so. I am aware my father made that disposition of the place, should I die childless, before I became of age; but, once of age, the place is all mine; and that which is all mine, shall be all thine, after I am no more."

"This is melancholy conversation, and, I trust, useless. Under the circumstances you mention, Miles, I never should have expected Clawbonny, nor do I know I ought to possess it. It comes as much from Jack Wallingford's ancestors, as from our own; and it is better it should remain with the name. I will not promise you, therefore, I will not give it to him, the instant I can."

This Jack Wallingford, of whom I have not yet spoken, was a man of five-and-forty, and a bachelor. He was a cousin-german of my father's, being the son of a younger brother of my grandfather's, and somewhat of a favourite. He had gone into what was called the new countries, in that day, or a few miles west of Cayuga Bridge, which put him into Western New York. I had never seen him but once and that was on a visit he paid us on his return from selling quantities of pot and pearl ashes in town; articles made oh his new lands. He was said to be a prosperous man, and to stand little in need of the old paternal property.

After a little more conversation on the subject of my will, Grace and I separated, each more closely bound to the other, I firmly believed, for this dialogue in the "family room." Never had my sister seemed more worthy of all my love; and, certain I am, never did she possess more of it. Of Clawbonny she was as sure, as my power over it could make her.

The remainder of the week passed as weeks are apt to pass in the country, and in summer. Feeling myself so often uncomfortable in the society of the girls, I was much in the fields; always possessing the good excuse of beginning to look after my own affairs. Mr. Hardinge took charge of the Major, an intimacy beginning to spring up between these two respectable old men. There were, indeed, so many points of common feeling, that such a result was not at all surprising. They both loved the church--I beg pardon, the Holy Catholic Protestant Episcopal Church. They both disliked Bonaparte--the Major hated him, but my guardian hated nobody--both venerated Billy Pitt, and both fancied the French Revolution was merely the fulfilment of prophecy, through the agency of the devils. As we are now touching upon times likely to produce important results, let me not be misunderstood. As an old man, aiming, in a new sphere, to keep enlightened the generation that is coming into active life, it may be necessary to explain. An attempt has been made to induce the country to think that Episcopalian and tory were something like synonymous terms, in the "times that tried men's souls." This is sufficiently impudent, per se , in a country that possessed Washington, Jay, Hamilton, the Lees, the Morrises, the late Bishop White, and so many other distinguished patriots of the Southern and Middle States; but men are not particularly scrupulous when there is an object to be obtained, even though it be pretended that Heaven is an incident of that object. I shall, therefore, confine my explanations to what I have said about Billy Pitt and the French.

The youth of this day may deem it suspicious that an Episcopal divine-- Protestant Episcopal, I mean; but it is so hard to get the use of new terms as applied to old thoughts, in the decline of life!--may deem it suspicious that a Protestant Episcopal divine should care anything about Billy Pitt, or execrate Infidel France; I will, therefore, just intimate that, in 1802, no portion of the country dipped more deeply into similar sentiments than the descendants of those who first put foot on the rock of Plymouth, and whose progenitors had just before paid a visit to Geneva, where, it is "said or sung," they had found a "church without a bishop, and a state without a king." In a word, admiration of Mr. Pitt, and execration of Bonaparte, were by no means such novelties in America, in that day, as to excite wonder. For myself, however, I can truly say, that, like most Americans who went abroad in those stirring times, I was ready to say with Mercutio, "a plague on both your houses;" for neither was even moderately honest, or even decently respectful to ourselves. Party feeling, however, the most inexorable, and the most unprincipled, of all tyrants, and the bane of American liberty, notwithstanding all our boasting, decreed otherwise; and, while one half the American republic was shouting hosannas to the Great Corsican, the other half was ready to hail Pitt as the "Heaven-born Minister." The remainder of the nation felt and acted as Americans should. It was my own private opinion, that France and England would have been far better off, had neither of these worthies ever had a being.

Nevertheless, the union of opinion between the divine and the Major, was a great bond of union, in friendship. I saw they were getting on well together, and let things take their course. As for Emily, I cared very little about her, except as she might prove to be connected with Rupert, and through Rupert, with the happiness of my sister. As for Rupert, himself, I could not get entirely weaned from one whom I had so much loved in boyhood; and who, moreover, possessed the rare advantage of being Lucy's brother, and Mr. Hardinge's son. "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," gave him a value in my eyes, that he had long ceased to possess on his own account.

"You see, Neb," I said, towards the end of the week, as the black and I were walking