Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/533



MAN who loves from his boyhood her who becomes his fate, hardly knows the nobility of his love, as does he who, from a lonely condition of which he thought well enough before, suddenly finds himself plunged into a new element and living the life of those already blest. With the first one, his love has grown as he has grown, and his weaknesses with him. It may be that love seldom conquers those weaknesses; but with the other love comes a heavenly tyrant and usurps the place of everything less noble; his heart is clean swept and garnished—a shrine for the object of his worship; he has undergone a purification, a sanctification that is scarcely less than that of a sacrament. It was so with me, I know, at least, when I first thought of wooing Margaret for my wife, and possession of her promise never made it otherwise.

To say that she was beautiful would fail to give even a pencilling of her presence; and just as impossible would it be for me to set down any categorical description of her loveliness; of the large, fair, pale face; the eyes, so gray and dark that they grew on you as you gazed, like the shades of evening from which the stars look out; of the features, which would have been sculptured had they been less instinct with pulsing and dilating life; of the tresses of finest, darkest hair, sweeping down the temples in countless curves; of the unspeakable sweetness of the smile—that smile which seemed to fill your heart and soul with sunshine and warmth. Never was there such another woman made as Margaret. Her mind, too, was no less peerless than her person. It had a trait like light itself, and gave color and vitality to every object that it rested on. Of humble birth, and with no means of education beyond those afforded by the village school and the church library, she had nevertheless cultivated herself to a point beyond that attained by many women when living a luxury of life and breathing the atmosphere of art.

It has always made me wonder, my relation with her, what she could have seen in me so to bestow herself as she did. I, myself, though still so young, was not entirely a boor; indeed, being a poor man, I was thought eccentric, perhaps because I was not a fool; but, though now sitting at my ease, a tolerably well-read man of wealth, having climbed easily by others' help, speculated largely and daringly, studied where I could and as I went, yet then I was only the master of an engine on the Great Interior Railway, running a night train across the State, and earning my living by the sweat of my brow, in soot and grime and smoke, and all in the midst of a wild relish of danger.