"No matter!" said the young man, with an impatient movement, as if to dismiss an unprofitable subject. "I shall have Sophie; my father's will can't deprive me of her. I don't want to be famous, nor to have a great reputation--except with her."
The old man was touched at this devotion, unreasonable and impracticable though it was. He laid his hand kindly on the invalid's big shoulder.
"I don't say but that a wife's a good exchange for the world, my boy; I'm glad you should feel it, too. But when you marry her, you promise to support her, as long as you have strength and health to do it. It's a natural and necessary consequence of your love for her"--and here the professor paused a moment to marvel at the position in which he found himself--stating the first axioms of life to such a man as this pupil of his; "and you should be unwilling to take her, as I certainly should be to give her, on any other terms. If your hands are empty, you must at any rate be able to show that they won't always continue so."
"Well, but I don't want to think about that just now; I can be a farmer, or a clerk; I can make a living with my body, if I can't with my mind; and I can write to Mrs. Vanderplanck, some time, and find out just how things are."
"Very well--very well! or perhaps I'd better write to her myself--well--and as long as you are on your back, there'll be no use in troubling you with business--that's certain! And perhaps things may turn out better than they look, in the end."
As Professor Valeyon pronounced this latter sentence, he smiled to himself pleasantly and mysteriously. He seemed to fancy he had stronger grounds for believing in a happy issue, than, for some reason, he was at liberty to disclose. And the smile lingered about the corners of his mouth and eyes, as if the issue in question were to be of that peculiarly harmonious kind usually supposed to be reserved for the themes of poems, or the conclusions of novels.
"I never was interested to hear of the every-day lives of men who have loved, and wanted to make their way in the world; for I never expected I should be such a man. Now, I'm sorry; it would have been useful to me, wouldn't it?"
"Perhaps it might," responded the old gentleman, musing at the change in the attitude of the young man's mind--once so self-sufficient and assertive, now so dependent and inexperienced. "Very few lives are bare and empty enough not to teach one something worth knowing. I know the events of one man's life," he added, after a few moments of thoughtful consideration; "perhaps it might lead to some good, if I were to tell them to yon."
"Did he marry a woman he loved?" demanded Bressant.
"You can judge better of that when you hear what happened before his marriage," returned the professor, apparently a little put out by the abruptness of the question. "He made several mistakes in life; most of them because he didn't pay respect enough to circumstances; thought that to adhere to fixed principles was the whole duty of a man: nothing to be allowed to the accidents of life, or to the various and unaccountable natures of men, their uncertainty, fallibility, and so on. One of the first resolutions he made--and he's never broken it, for when he grew wise enough to do so, the opportunity had gone by forever--was never to leave his native country. He wanted to prove to himself, and to everybody else whom it might concern, that a man of fair abilities might become learned and wise, without ever helping himself to the good things that lay beyond the shadow of his native flag. 'The majority of people have to live where they are born,' was his argument; 'I'll be their representative.' Well, that would seem all well enough; but it stood in his way twice--each time lost him an opportunity that has never come again--the opportunity to be distinguished, and perhaps great; and the opportunity to have a happy home, and a luxurious one. It was better for him, no doubt, that his life was a hard and disappointed one, instead of--as it might have been; he's had blessings enough, that's certain; but he has much to regret, too; the more, because the ill effects of a man's folly and willfulness fall upon his friends quite as often, and sometimes more heavily, than upon himself.
"He was a poor man in college, and an orphan. The property of his family had been lost in the War of 1812; from then till he was twenty-one, he had followed a dozen trades, and saved a couple of hundred dollars; and he'd picked up book-learning enough to enter the sophomore class. The first thing he did was to make a friend; he loved him with his whole heart; thought nothing was too good for him, and so on. He and his friend led the class for three years; and up to the time of the last examination, he was first and his friend second. In the examination they sat side by side; one question the friend couldn't answer; the other wrote it out for him; after the examination the two papers were found to be alike in the answer to that question, and the friend was summoned before the faculty, and asked if he had copied it. He denied it--said it had been copied from him; so he took the first rank in graduating, and the other was dropped several places."
"What became of their friendship after that?" inquired Bressant.
"He I'm telling you of never knew any thing of what his friend had done till long afterward. Well, the faculty and some of the wealthy patrons of the university determined to send the first scholar abroad, to finish his education: he accepted the offer eagerly, and sailed for Europe, without bidding his friend good-by. Afterward, the faculty made the same offer to him, on the consideration that he had stood so well, during his course, until the examination. But he declined it: it was contrary to his principle of never leaving his country."
"What sort of a man was the friend?" asked Bressant, who was paying close attention, with his hand at his ear.
"Clever, with a winning manner, and fine-looking; had a pleasant, easy voice; never lost his temper that I know of." The professor paused, perhaps to arrange his ideas, ere he went on. "The man I'm telling you of left the college-yard with as much of the world before him as lies between the fifteenth and twenty-fifth parallels of latitude, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He'd made up his mind to be a physician; and in a year he was qualified to enter the hospital; worked there four years, and, by the time he was twenty-nine, he had an office of his own and a good practice.
"At last, he fell in love with a beautiful woman; she was the daughter of one of his patients--a Southerner with a little Spanish blood in him. The young doctor had--under Providence--saved the man's life; and, since he himself came of a good family--none better--and had a respectable income, there wasn't much difficulty in arranging the match. The only condition was, that the father should never be out of reach of his daughter, as long as he lived."
"Was this Southerner rich?"
"Very rich; and a dowry would go with the daughter enough to make them more than independent for the rest of their lives. Well, just about that time, the friend who had gone to Europe came back. He'd done well abroad, and-was qualified for a high position at home. He was engaged to marry a stylish, aristocratic girl, who was not, however, wealthy. But he seemed very glad to see the doctor, and the doctor certainly was to see him, and invited him to stay at his house a while, and he introduced him into the house of his intended wife."
Here the professor broke off from his story, and, getting up from his chair, he passed two or three times up and down the room; stopping at the window to pull a leaf from the extended branch of a cherry-tree growing outside, and again, by the empty fireplace, to roll the leaf up between his finger and thumb, and throw it upon the hearth. When he returned to the bedside, he dropped himself into his chair with the slow, inelastic heaviness of age.
"The fellow played him a scurvy trick," resumed he, presently. "Exactly what he said or did will never be known, but it was all he safely could to put his friend in a bad light. It was because he wanted the young lady for himself; he was ambitious, and needed her money to help him on. What he said made a good deal of impression on the father; but the daughter wouldn't believe it then--at any rate, she loved the doctor still, and would, as long as she knew he loved her."
"Why didn't the other manage