A
HASTY
MARRIAGE.
beautiful "boudoir, " or parlor- I prefer the English word-furnished entirely in white and blue. A white carpet covered with wreaths of light-blue violets and forget-me-nots; window draperies of lace lined with silk, and furniture of damask and satin-wood; all blue and white, like the dress I wore, were reflected in the mirror above the marble mantle. There were books, and birds, and flowers, pictures, and music, and a sparkling fire lighted in the grate; but the room had no occupant till the others stood aside to let me pass.
I put my hand in my kind old friend’s, and we went in together. A little sofa was rolled before the fire, and she drew me upon it, with her arm about my waist. Walter Drummond stood beside us like a sullen guardian; and opposite, Mr. Harter leaned his elbow on the mantle, and looked at the group we made. I trembled when his eyes met mine, for I somehow knew that the beautiful room had been furnished for me that day, and that he was going to ask me to occupy it as its mistress. Yet when he spoke, it was something very different that he said.
Addressing me directly, as if there had been no other person present, in a hurried but most strait forward manner, he gave me the plainest history of himself, concealing nothing, and excusing nothing that it was needful we should hear. Perhaps few lives could have borne the test of so close a chronicle—no word was said in his own praise or favor, no effort made to gain sympathy or win credit; I never listened to such a frank confession. “You and your friends should know,” he said, “what the man is who is about to ask so much of you. To report alone you cannot trust, as I will prove to you; nor solely to the opinions gathered from testimony like this,” for he had offered a pile of letters and documents to Mr. M‘Donald and Walter Drummond, which the young lawyer was examining with keen, inimical eyes, the elder with anxious and cautious observation through his spectacles. These, it would seem, were satisfactory, for the careful scrutiny ended in their being tendered back with many assurances to Mr. Harter, who received them with a smile.
“After all, these papers,” he said, “tell you less of my life and character than I will tell you, or than common rumor has already told, and told mostly wrong. It is said that 1 am a man of low birth and no education, whese fortune has been gained by a lucky accident, and who is not wholly worthy of all he aspires to possess. The last is the only truth.
“If my education has been neglected, it was my fault alone, and not that of my father, an accomplished surgeon, spending always more than his large income in gratifying elegant and artistic tastes. From my birth I lived among luxuries, never, I fear, entirely paid for, and fancies gratified at an extraordinary sacrifice. My time, and that of my brother and sister, was spent at the best schools and academies. In my first cullege-year, my father died, leaving two motherless children, a rough, healthy, active boy, and a delicate little girl.
“His library, horses, carriages, and house, were swallowed up by his debts; the beautiful pictures and statues were sold; the scientific, literary, and artistic treasures he had so care- fully collected, were widely scattered, and after their sacrifice, much was still left unpaid. I saw the very end of the ruin and destruction, put my sister in the only place where I hoped she would be kindly cared for, and went to sea before the mast, to support her.
“The schedule of my father’s debts in my pocket, and the memory of the little life dependent upon mine, urged me to energy and industry. I was away for years, following fortune wherever others had seemed to find it—in India, Japan, and China, on the Pacific Coast, in the Black Sea. At first I heard often from home—during ‘he latter part of the time, not at all; but I was neither stimulated by tidings, nor unnerved by their absence—the stake was too great for that. I continued steadily to forward letters and remittances, and at last was able to come home. Neither letters-nor remittances had been touched—my sister was lying near her father and her brother; and her grave, thick-grown with grass and daisies, looked as old as theirs.
“I spent the sum that was to have brought us together, and given us again a happy home, in paying the last remaining debts of my father. Then again, poor, homeless, friendless, and forlorn, I went away to seek relief in the ceaseless struggle of existence at the very ends of the earth.
“The gold fields of Australia had just been discovered, and I repaired there with thousands of others. Alone, motiveless, with nothing to lose, and comparatively indifferent to gain, fortune singularly favored me. From a mere miner I became a proprietor, a merchant, a millionaire—and here only report will not have belied me, while it says all my earnings were honest ones. Weary of the rough colonial life, and of an existence devoted to selfish gain and accumulation, I remembered the education of my boyhood; and now that I was able to gratify those dormant tastes and tendencies, I traveled
