St. Elmo Part 8

"Is it possible? my Dante! my lost Dante! The copy that has travelled round the world in my pocket, and that I lost a year ago, somewhere in the mountains of Tennessee! Girl, where did you get it?"

"I found it where you left it--on the gra.s.s near a blacksmith's shop."

"A blacksmith's shop! where?"

"Near Chattanooga. Don't you remember the sign, under the horse- shoe, over the door, 'Aaron Hunt'?"

"No; but who was Aaron Hunt?"

For nearly a minute Edna struggled for composure, and looking suddenly up, said falteringly:

"He was my grandfather--the only person in the world I had to care for, or to love me--and--sir--"

"Well, go on."

"You cursed him because your horse fretted, and he could not shoe him in five minutes."

"Humph!"

There was an awkward silence; St. Elmo Murray bit his lip and scowled, and, recovering her self-control, the orphan added:

"You put your shawl and book on the ground, and when you started you forgot them. I called you back and gave you your shawl; but I did not see the book for some time after you rode out of sight."

"Yes, yes, I remember now about the shawl and the shop. Strange I did not recognize you before. But how did you learn that the book was mine?"

"I did not know it was yours until I came here by accident, and heard Mrs. Murray call your name; then I knew that the initials written in the book spelt your name. And besides, I remembered your figure and your voice."

Again there was a pause, and her mission ended, Edna turned to go.

"Stop! Why did you not give it to me when you first came?"

She made no reply, and putting his hand on her shoulder to detain her, he said, more gently than she had ever heard him speak to any one:

"Was it because you loved my book and disliked to part with it, or was it because you feared to come and speak to a man whom you hate?

Be truthful."

Still she was silent, and raising her face with his palm, as he had done in the park, he continued in the same low, sweet voice, which she could scarcely believe belonged to him:

"I am waiting for your answer, and I intend to have it."

Her large, sad eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with precious memories, as she lifted them steadily to meet his, and answered:

"My grandfather was n.o.ble and good, and he was all I had in this world."

"And you can not forgive a man who happened to be rude to him?"

"If you please, Mr. Murray, I would rather go now. I have given you your book, and that is all I came for."

"Which means that you are afraid of me, and want to get out of my sight?"

She did not deny it, but her face flushed painfully.

"Edna Earl, you are at least honest and truthful, and those are rare traits at the present day. I thank you for preserving and returning my Dante. Did you read any of it?"

"Yes, sir, all of it. Good-night, sir."

"Wait a moment. When did Aaron Hunt die?"

"Two months after you saw him."

"You have no relatives? No cousins, uncles, aunts?"

"None that I ever heard of. I must go, sir."

"Good-night, child. For the present, when you go out in the grounds, be sure that wolf, Ali, is chained up, or you may be sorry that I did not cut his throat, as I am still inclined to do."

She closed the door, ran lightly across the rotunda, and regaining her own room, felt inexpressibly relieved that the ordeal was over-- that in future there remained no necessity for her to address one whose very tones made her shudder, and the touch of whose hand filled her with vague dread and loathing.

When the echo of her retreating footsteps died away, St. Elmo threw his cigar out of the window, and walked up and down the quaint and elegant rooms, whose costly bizarrerie would more appropriately have adorned a villa of Parthenope or Lucanian Sybaris, than a country- house in soi-disant "republican" America. The floor, covered in winter with velvet carpet, was of white and black marble, now bare and polished as a mirror, reflecting the figure of the owner as he crossed it. Oval ormolu tables, buhl chairs, and oaken and marquetrie cabinets, loaded with cameos, intaglios, Abraxoids, whose "erudition" would have filled Mnesarchus with envy, and challenged the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of Polycrates; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the universality of what St. Elmo called his "world-sc.r.a.pings," and to the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector. On a verd-antique table lay a satin cus.h.i.+on holding a vellum MS., bound in blue velvet, whose uncial letters were written in purple ink, powdered with gold-dust, while the margins were stiff with gilded illuminations; and near the cus.h.i.+on, as if prepared to shed light on the curious cryptography, stood an exquisite white gla.s.s lamp, shaped like a vase, and richly ornamented with Arabic inscriptions in ultra-marine blue--a precious relic of some ruined Laura in the Nitrian desert, by the aid of whose rays the h.o.a.ry hermits, whom St.

Macarius ruled, broke the midnight gloom chanting, "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison," fourteen hundred years before St. Elmo's birth.

Immediately opposite, on an embossed ivory stand, and protected from air and dust by a gla.s.s case, were two antique goblets, one of green-veined agate, one of blood-red onyx; and into the coating of wax, spread along the ivory slab, were inserted amphorae, one dry and empty, the other a third full of Falerian, whose topaz drops had grown strangely mellow and golden in the ashy cellars of Herculaneum, and had doubtless been destined for some luxurious triclinium in the days of t.i.tus. A small Byzantine picture, painted on wood, with a silver frame ornamented with cornelian stars, and the background heavily gilded, hung over an etagere, where lay a leaf from Nebuchadnezzar's diary, one of those Babylonish bricks on which his royal name was stamped. Near it stood a pair of Bohemian vases representing the two varieties of lotus--one velvety white with rose-colored veins, the other with delicate blue petals. This latter whim had cost a vast amount of time, trouble, and money, it having been found difficult to carefully preserve, sketch, and paint them for the manufacturer in Bohemia, who had never seen the holy lotus, and required specimens. But the indomitable will of the man, to whose wishes neither oceans nor deserts opposed successful barriers, finally triumphed, and the coveted treasures fully repaid their price as they glistened in the gaslight, perfect as their prototypes slumbering on the bosom of the Nile, under the blazing midnight stars of rainless Egypt. Several handsome rosewood cases were filled with rare books--two in Pali--centuries old; and moth- eaten volumes and valuable MSS.--some in parchment, some bound in boards--recalled the days of astrology and alchemy, and the sombre mysteries of Rosicrucianism. Side by side, on an ebony stand, lay an Elzevir Terence, printed in red letters, and a curious Birman book, whose pages consisted of thin leaves of ivory, gilded at the edges; and here too were black rhyta from Chiusi, and a cylix from Vulci, and one of those quaint Peruvian jars, which was so constructed that, when filled with water, the air escaped in sounds that resembled that of the song or cry of the animal represented on the vase or jar. In the s.p.a.ce between the tall windows that fronted the lawn hung a weird, life-size picture that took strange hold on the imagination of all who looked at it. A gray-haired Cimbrian Prophetess, in white vestments and brazen girdle, with canvas mantle fastened on the shoulder by a broad brazen clasp, stood, with bare feet, on a low, rude scaffolding, leaning upon her sword, and eagerly watching, with divining eyes, the stream of blood which trickled from the throat of the slaughtered human victim down into the large brazen kettle beneath the scaffold. The snowy locks and white mantle seemed to flutter in the wind; and those who gazed on the stony, inexorable face of the Prophetess, and into the glittering blue eyes, shuddered and almost fancied they heard the pattering of the gory stream against the sides of the bra.s.s caldron.

But expensive and rare as were these relics of bygone dynasties and mouldering epochs, there was one other object for which the master would have given everything else in this museum of curiosities, and the secret of which no eyes but his own had yet explored. On a sculptured slab, that once formed a portion of the architrave of the Cave Temple at Elephanta, was a splendid marble miniature, four feet high, of that miracle of Saracenic architecture, the Taj Mahal at Agra. The elaborate carving resembled lacework, and the beauty of the airy dome and slender, glittering minarets of this mimic tomb of Noor-Mahal could find no parallel, save in the superb and matchless original. The richly-carved door that closed the arch of the tomb swung back on golden hinges, and opened only by a curiously-shaped golden key, which never left Mr. Murray's watch-chain; consequently what filled the penetralia was left for the conjecture of the imaginative; and when his mother expressed a desire to examine it, he merely frowned and said hastily:

"That is Pandora's box, MINUS imprisoned hope. I prefer it should not be opened."

Immediately in front of the tomb he had posted a grim sentinel--a black marble statuette of Mors, modeled from that hideous little bra.s.s figure which Spence saw at Florence, representing a skeleton sitting on the ground, resting one arm on an urn.

Filled though it was with sparkling bijouterie that would have graced the Barberini or Strozzi cabinets, the glitter of the room was cold and cheerless. No light, childish feet had ever pattered down the long rows of s.h.i.+ning tiles; no gus.h.i.+ng, mirthful laughter had ever echoed through those lofty windows; everything pointed to the past--a cla.s.sic, storied past, but dead as the mummies of Karnac, and treacherously, repulsively l.u.s.trous as the waves that break in silver circles over the buried battlements, and rustling palms and defiled altars of the proud cities of the plain. No rosy memories of early, happy manhood lingered here; no dewy gleam of the merry morning of life, when hope painted and peopled a smiling world; no magic trifles that prattled of the springtime of a heart, that in wandering to and fro through the earth, had fed itself with dust and ashes, acrid and bitter; had studiously collected only the melancholy symbols of mouldering ruin, desolation, and death, and which found its best type in the Taj Mahal, that glistened so mockingly as the gas-light flickered over it.

A stranger looking upon St. Elmo Murray for the first time, as he paced the floor, would have found it difficult to realize that only thirty-four years had plowed those deep, rugged lines in his swarthy and colorless but still handsome face; where midnight orgies and habitual excesses had left their unmistakable plague-spot, and Mephistopheles had stamped his signet. Blase, cynical, scoffing, and hopeless, he had stranded his life, and was recklessly striding to his grave, trampling upon the feelings of all with whom he a.s.sociated, and at war with a world, in which his lordly brilliant intellect would have lifted him to any eminence he desired, and which, properly directed, would have made him the benefactor and ornament of the society he snubbed and derided. Like all strong though misguided natures, the power and activity of his mind enhanced his wretchedness, and drove him farther and farther from the path of rect.i.tude; while the consciousness that he was originally capable of loftier, purer aims, and n.o.bler pursuits than those that now engrossed his perverted thoughts, rendered him savagely morose. For nearly fifteen dreary years, nothing but jeers and oaths and sarcasms had crossed his finely sculptured lips, which had forgotten how to smile; and it was only when the mocking demon of the wine-cup looked out from his gloomy gray eyes that his ringing, sneering laugh struck like a dagger to the heart that loved him, that of his proud but anxious and miserable mother. To-night, for the first time since his desperate plunge into the abyss of vice, conscience, which he had believed effectually strangled, stirred feebly, startling him with a faint moan, as unexpected as the echo from Morella's tomb, or the resurrection of Ligeia; and down the murdered years came wailing ghostly memories, which even his iron will could no longer scourge to silence. Clamorous as the avenging Erinnys, they refused to be exorcised, and goaded him almost to frenzy.

Those sweet, low, timid tones, "I am sorry for you," had astonished and mortified him. To be hated and dreaded was not at all unusual or surprising, but to be pitied and despised was a sensation as novel as humiliating; and the fact that all his ferocity failed to intimidate the "little vagrant" was unpleasantly puzzling.

For some time after Edna's departure he pondered all that had pa.s.sed between them, and at length he muttered: "How thoroughly she abhors me! If I touch her, the flesh absolutely writhes away from my hand, as if I were plague-stricken or a leper. Her very eyelids shudder when she looks at me--and I believe she would more willingly confront Apollyon himself. Strange! how she detests me. I have half a mind to make her love me, even despite herself. What a steady, brave look of scorn there was in her splendid eyes when she told me to my face I was sinful and cruel!"

He set his teeth hard, and his fingers clinched as if longing to crush something; and then came a great revulsion, a fierce spasm of remorse, and his features writhed.

"Sinful? Ay! Cruel? O my lost youth! my cursed and wrecked manhood!

If there be a h.e.l.l blacker than my miserable soul, man has not dreamed of nor language painted it. What would I not give for a fresh, pure, and untrampled heart, such as slumbers peacefully in yonder room, with no d.a.m.ning recollections to scare sleep from her pillow? Innocent childhood!"

He threw himself into a chair, and hid his face in his hands; and thus an hour went by, during which he neither moved nor sighed.

Tearing the veil from the past, he reviewed it calmly, relentlessly, vindictively, and at last, rising, he threw his head back, with his wonted defiant air, and his face hardened and darkened as he approached the marble mausoleum, and laid his hand upon the golden key.

"Too late! too late! I can not afford to reflect. The devil himself would s.h.i.+rk the reading of such a record."

He fitted the key in the lock, but paused and laughed scornfully as he slung it back on his chain.