Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/120



MORNING in May of the year 1812. The sun shone in a pale-blue sky. White clouds moved gently forwards.

The slow canal crept on in endless line between the heavy meadows. Here and there a pollard-willow lifted its brown tuft of spreading branches against the calm horizon. Cattle, black and white, browsed and drowsed throughout the fields.

By the waterside, planted against the foliage of a long-drawn garden, stood a summer-house—a white octagonal pagoda with dark-green Venetian shutters, such as were beloved of Dutch patricians a hundred years ago. Here the stately eighteenth-century merchant sat on summer evenings, solemnly smoking his long clay pipe and drinking his dish of still fragrant tea, whilst his eyes rested on some round-bellied rowing-boat that lazily rippled the slow water, and his thoughts were of mighty East-Indiamen, of pepper, palm-trees, and gold.

But in this year of our Lord 1812, May morning or winter night, rain or sunshine, a darkness, low, unbroken, lay heavy upon the land. "This year of our Lord!" How ironical it sounds, while the devil, century after century, fills the throne with viceroys of his choosing, which the Holy One rejected. As if the Lord of Love, beholding Napoleon, were responsible for the crimes of a brute genius of evil climbing, climbing, to earthly godhead on a scaffolding of corpses that rot away beneath his feet. Under the blood-stained hand of the conqueror the Low Countries—annexed to his empire, as "alluvial deposit of three French rivers" (including the Rhine)—lay panting, their liberties annihilated, their colonial commerce paralyzed, their children drawn away, unremittingly, to death.

It was the 9th of May. Napoleon's power remained unbroken; his enormous army was rolling eastward, to melt amid far masses of unmelting snow. The whole of Europe trembled with the tramp of driven feet.

In the quiet summer-house beside the sluggish water a girl sat doing fancy-work, with a listless youth beside her. She was a young girl, barely twenty, fair and fresh-colored, in the high-waisted, low-necked dress of the period. The young man, some half a dozen years older, was delicate-looking, a bit of a dandy, with his ruffles and gilt buttons and tight-fitting clothes.

There were long pauses of silence in the whitewashed, octagonal chamber. The dark lions on the old oak cupboards, the blue dragons on the Chinese vases, stared motionless, with uplifted claw. Through one open window came occasionally the lowing of kine.

The girl laid down her work. "How peaceful it is!" she said, looking out across the meadows.

The man yawned.

"I love peace," his companion continued. "I wish it could be always so. Peace."

The man shifted his position to one more indolent still. "Where, then," he answered, "would be all the fame and the glory?"

"I hate the horrible words."

He laughed. "How silly you are, Agnes!" he said. "What does it matter to us, besides? Our interest is confined to the news sheets."

She gazed at him. They were cousins; they had known each other all their lives. All their lives it had been almost tacitly understood that they would marry. He was an orphan, possessed of considerable property in the funds; her father had been his guardian, and much of the lad's leisure had been spent in the company of his uncle's children, male and female. She was the prettiest of the daughters; what wonder that she should become her wealthy cousin's wife? In fact, she wore