Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/599

 592 Her glittering eye, her flushed cheek, her parted lips, from which her thrilling voice came bearing on its melodious stream words that seemed suddenly inspired, held her father fascinated as he gazed.

For that brief moment the germs of genius which slumbered in the undeveloped soul of the little Indian girl seemed about to spring up, full grown. But the glow quickly subsided; it was but a flash, and, sitting down, she leaned her forehead on a table that stood near, and was silent.

The Count had ceased to be much astonished at anything Coral did or said, but he asked—

“Where did you learn that poetry, Coral?”

“I found it in a volume lying among some books in a closet,” she answered: “I read it at first because it was in English, and then because I found such beautiful things in it—things which I have often felt, but no one ever said to me before.”

Of that book or its writer the Count knew nothing; it had come into his house by chance, and he had never seen it, and the only thing in her answer that struck him was her assertion that she had first read it because it was English. Rising, he began to walk up and down the room, while Coral still rested her head on the table with an air of weariness and languor very different from the excitement she had so lately shown. Suddenly her father’s attention seemed arrested by an open book with a little sprig of hemlock lying between the leaves: a certain trace of Coral, for she gathered fresh sprigs of this beautiful tree every day, and arranged them fancifully in some vase or basket. It was the beautiful story of Paul and Virginia, open at the parting scene between the lovers, when for the first time they meet at Virginia’s Retreat, and the leaves were blistered with tears not yet dry.

The Count took up the book, and going up to Coral, drew her beside him on the sofa.

“Have you read this book, Coralie?”

“Yes, father.”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, it is beautiful—as beautiful as love itself; as full of sweetness and as full of sorrow.”

Her father gazed at her earnestly.

“Had you been Virginia, would you have suffered any one to tear you from Paul?”

“No,” said Coral; “no power on earth should have separated us. No power but his own bidding,” she added, in a more subdued tone. Still the Count watched her anxiously.

“Coralie,” he said, after a pause, I had a letter from your friend Keefe Dillon today.”

A bright smile shot over her face; her whole soul seemed to flash from her eyes, eager and questioning.

“Oh, father, tell me all, quick. Is he well?—what does he say?”

“He is well,” said the Count, gravely. “I wrote to ask him if there was any way in which I could show my gratitude for all we owe him, offering to serve him in any way he could point out to the utmost of my power. You need not be afraid, Coralie; I think even you would have approved of my letter. I felt warmly; how could I feel otherwise towards one who had preserved my child from dangers I shudder to think of, and restored her to my arms, and I wrote as I felt; but it seems he does not need, or will not accept, anything from me. He desires nothing from me, but an assurance that I have made you happy.”

Coral had hung upon every word her father uttered, as if she expected a sentence of life or death to proceed from his lips; and when he ceased speaking, she slid softly from the sofa, wrapped her arms round his knees, and looking up into his face with an expression of intense earnestness such as he had never seen eyes express before, she said in a low, fervent voice, “I can never be happy away from him.”

“Do you love him so much?” asked her father, sadly.

Coral still kept her eloquent eyes fastened on him, and her lips just parted to emit the single word “Yes;” but the tone in which it was uttered, and the look that accompanied it, were stronger confirmation than a volume of protestations could have been.

“You love him better than your father, whose life is bound up in yours, and better than your father’s God?”

“I loved him before I ever heard of my father,” said Coral, softly; “and that good God who is mine as well as my father’s, has made my heart and his grow together.”

“You think he loves you, then?” said her father, “but how could he help it?—We1l, Mignon, I do not deny that he has acted honourably and nobly towards you, but for all that, if I were to see him I might find him rough, coarse, and ignorant.”

Springing back from her father, to whom she had been clinging more closely than ever a minute before, Coral passionately interrupted him.

“Keefe is never coarse and rough,” she exclaimed; “he is gentle and kind to everything in the world; to the little children, to horses and cattle, to the squirrels and birds, to the ugliest and meanest thing that crawls. And he looks so brave, and so true and kind; I have never seen any one here that wouldn’t look mean and insignificant beside him. And he is not ignorant father; you must not judge him by me; he knows a great deal about books, and he knows other things that are better and nobler for a man to know.”

Her father smiled, though the smile was a sad one.

“You are a warm pleader, Coralie,” he said; “and a romantic girl, but romance will not last for ever,” and he sighed.

“Are truth and faithfulness and love romance?” said Coral; “if they are, I hope they will last with me for ever. I know people always talk as if romance was a false thing; but then it seems to me that it is those feelings and faiths I think the best and truest on earth they call romance.”

Again the Count sighed as he thought of that bright young spirit, so tender and so true, whose unselfish devotion he had found as real as any ever ridiculed as an impossible fiction when told in story or song.