STORIES BY AMERICAN AUTHORS. VOLUME I
THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE.
ONE OF THE THIRTY PIECES.
BALACCHI BROTHERS.
AN OPERATION IN MONEY.
STORIES BY AMERICAN AUTHORS. VOLUME I
WHO WAS SHE?
BY BAYARD TAYLOR.
Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet youreyes squarely I detect the question just slipping out of them. If youhad spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in yourmotions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; ifthis were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend whoremembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harderthan sin to some people, of whom I am one,—well, if all reasons werenot at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me ratherviolently in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, Ishould keep my trouble to myself.
Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story.But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or, what isworse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterwards—when theexternal forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial,fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which Iimagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The onlycomfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable offeeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; butI only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbidsensitiveness of my moral nerves.
The documents are all in this portfolio, under my elbow. I had just readthem again completely through, when you were announced. You may examinethem as you like, afterwards: for the present, fill your glass, takeanother Cabaña, and keep silent until my "ghastly tale" has reached itsmost lamentable conclusion.
The beginning of it was at Wampsocket Springs three years ago lastsummer. I suppose most unmarried men who have reached, or passed, theage of thirty—and I was then thirty-three—experience a milder returnof their adolescent warmth, a kind of fainter second spring, since thefirst has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn't clearlyconscious of this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful passionand my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough intowhat Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries, to save me from theScylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural nature tokeep me out of the Pharisaic Charybdis. My devotion to my legal studieshad already brought me a mild distinction; the paternal legacy was agood nest-egg for the incubation of wealth,—in short, I was a fair,respectable "party," desirable to the humbler mammas, and not to bedespised by the haughty exclusives.
The fashionable hotel at the Springs holds three hundred, and it waspacked. I had meant to lounge there for a fortnight and then finish myholidays at Long Branch; but eighty, at least, out of the three hundred,were young and moved lightly in muslin. W