Trifles for the Christmas Holidays | Page 9

over with a grin of delight. Transactions imbued with a depravity that
made me shudder, were narrated with a chuckle; chicaneries of a depth
and maliciousness positively devilish, were touched with a smirk. For
this he had lied and cheated; for this his wretched body grew lean for
want of food; for this all the world loathed him. In his youth poverty
crushed him; but his little girl, away at school, never knew the meaning
of the word. Widows went portionless, but she did not want; orphans
starved, her platter was always full. He had been spattered by the
coaches of the rich; but now his chariot, and her chariot, would take a
drive. They had called him Beast; but now they called him gentleman.
The hundreds who drank his wine and trifled with his sweets called him
gentleman, and hundreds more were ready to go down on their knees to
his own flesh and blood. Now was the time to enjoy, now the day of
happiness. Money was a drug; in his abundance, he could never want.
He had love, grandeur, troops of friends; now he would live a monarch.
Flushed with victory, his eyes blazed, his voice rang clear and loud in
its exultation, and his lank form swelled with defiance. Springing to his
feet, and clutching up a decanter, he waved it wildly around his head,
and, challenging God or man to mar such peace, shivered it on the
floor.
Wonder-stricken at the intensity of his vulgarity, and shocked at the

sacrilege, I left; and from that moment Hardy Gripstone became a study.
Every step in his tortuous course, every phase of his ostentation, every
enormity on good taste, was followed with ceaseless vigilance.
Excesses that would have startled the most thoughtless were pursued
with restless activity; absurdities that drew forth a shout of ridicule
were committed with provoking good humor. No freak seemed
exuberant, no folly preposterous, no extremity extravagance. The joy of
paternity, sinking deep into his nature, made every peculiarity more
glaringly apparent. Money had been his idol, its accumulation the
summit of his ambition; its reckless sacrifice in his daughter's honor
appeared the only adequate expression of his love. The intervals of his
devotion were passed in idle boasting, and to me he detailed every
incident. There was something really touching in the abject way in
which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances
connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the
traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have
blunted every idea of responsibility. He looked upon her as a superior
being, and her adornment as a sacred duty. The richness of her toilet,
the magnificence of her equipage, the glory of her beauty, became an
inexhaustible surprise and delight. The utter lack of congeniality, the
barrier of caste that divided them, was indescribably sad. Rapturous
admiration, gentle amazement, blind idolatry, meek bewilderment, the
one twisted by brutality to a living distortion, the other lifted by
refinement to the embodiment of womanly grace; and yet they were
father and daughter. To do her justice, she strove in every way to testify
her love and gratitude for her strange parent; the ties of blood asserted
themselves in her words and caresses, but they looked doubtfully out of
her eyes. Educated far away from him, and amid other associations, she
could not be blind to his faults and shortcomings. The social gulf that
divided them, though bridged by her sense of duty, was ever present in
her thoughts. I mourned over the remorseless avarice that made him
what he was; I almost regretted the culture that placed her so far above
him; but, knowing the rude shocks to her sensitive nature, the ruthless
trampling on every womanly instinct, I mourned for her the most.
Alas for the schemes of prosy men and women! when tender
Loveliness goes airing herself through shady lanes, frank young Valor

is seldom far off. The Eurydice may be only a school-girl, and Orpheus
a brave, manly boy in a blue coat; but there is a world of
heart-fluttering, for all that. The flush of conscious beauty blooming on
the cheek of one, is generally a shadow of the warm red that mantles
the face of the other. While Eurydice Gripstone mused in quiet nooks,
it was no fabled youth of magic lyre who sent the rhetoric and botany
waltzing through her brain; and when the fierce cry of "Lights out!"
hurried Jane Eyre under the pillow, it was no dream of impossible
mustaches that made her hear the clocks chime dismally and the cocks
crow for midnight.
When the long-looked-forward-to Commencement-day was at length
looked on, and our heroine tripped up to the platform to read her Essay
on Filial Affection, alas