The Bride of Fort Edward | Page 9

then, ere now?
Mait. Have you forgotten the fortune I wasted once on a summer's seat,
some few miles up, on the lake above? These Yankees did me the grace
to burn it, just as the war broke out.

Andre. Ay, ay, that was here. I had forgotten the whereabouts. Those
blackened ruins we passed last evening, perchance;--and the lady--my
wood-nymph, what of her?
Mait. Captain Andre, I beg your pardon, Sir. That sketch of yours
reminded me, by chance perhaps, of one with whom some painful
passages of my life are linked; and I said, in my haste, what were better
left unsaid. Do me the favor not to remind me that I have done so.
Andre. So--so! And I am to know nothing more of this smiling
apparition; nay, not so much as to speak her name? Consider, Maitland,
I am your friend it is true; but, prithee, consider the human in me. Give
her a local habitation, or at least a name.
Mait. I have told you already that the lady you speak of resides not far
hence. On the border of these woods you may see her home. I may
point it out to you securely, some few days hence;--to-night, unless you
would find yourself in the midst of the American army, this must
content you.
Andre. A wild risk for a creature like that! Have these Americans no
safer place to bestow their daughters than the fastnesses of this
wilderness?
Mait. It would seem so. Yet it is her home. Wild as it looks here, from
the top of that hill, where our men came out on the picket just now so
suddenly, you will see as fair a picture of cultured life as e'er your eyes
looked on. No English horizon frames a lovelier one.
Andre. _Here_? No!
Mait. Between that hill and the fort, there stretches a wide and beautiful
plain, covered with orchards and meadows to the wood's edge; and here
and there a gentle swell, crowned with trees, some patch of the old
wilderness. The infant Hudson winds through it, circling in its deepest
bend one little fairy isle, with woods enough for a single bower, and a
beauty that fills and characterizes, to its remotest line, the varied
landscape it centres; and far away in the east, this same azure

mountain-chain we have traced so long, with its changeful light and
shade, finishes the scene.
Andre. You should have been a painter, Maitland.
Mait. The first time I beheld it--one summer evening it was, from the
woods on the hill's brow;--we were a hunting party, I had lost my way,
and ere I knew it there I stood;--its waters lay glittering in the sunset
light, and the window-panes of its quiet dwellings were flashing like
gold,--the old brown houses looked out through the trees like so many
lighted palaces; and even the little hut of logs, nestling on the wood's
edge, borrowed beauty from the hour. I was miles from home; but the
setting sun could not warn me away from such a paradise, for so it
seemed, set in that howling wilderness, and----
Andre. Prithee, go on. I listen.
Mait. I know not how it was, but as I wandered slowly down the shady
road, for the first time in years of worldliness, the dream that had
haunted my boyhood revived again. Do you know what I mean,
Andre?--that dim yearning for lovelier beings and fairer places, whose
ideals lie in the heaven-fitted mind, but not in the wilderness it wakes
in; that mystery of our nature, that overlooked as it is, and trampled
with unmeaning things so soon, hides, after all, the whole secret of this
life's dark enigma.
Andre. But see,--our time is well-nigh gone,--this is philosophy--I
would have heard a love tale.
Mait. It was then, that near me, suddenly I heard the voice that made
this dull, real world, thenceforth a richer place for me than the gorgeous
dream-land of childhood was of old.
Andre. Ay, ay--go on.
Mait. Andre, did you ever meet an eye, in which the intelligence of our
nature idealized, as it were, the very poetry of human thought seemed
to look forth?

Andre. One such.
Mait.--That reflected your whole being; nay, revealed from its
mysterious depths, new consciousness, that yet seemed like a faint
memory, the traces of some old and pleasant dream?
Andre. Methinks the heavenly revelation itself doth that.
Mait. Such an eye I saw then shining on me. A clump of stately pines
grew on the sloping road-side, and, looking into its dark embrasure, I
beheld a group of merry children around a spring that gurgled out of the
hillside there, and among them, there sat a young girl clad in white, her
hat on the bank beside her, tying