The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872

On reading the signature, Tchin-Sing could not repress an exclamation of surprise and delight. "The pearl," said he, "that is the precious jewel my mother saw glittering on my bosom. I must at once entreat this young girl's hand of her parents, for she is the wife appointed for me by the oracle."

As he was preparing to go, he suddenly remembered the dislike between the two families, and the prohibitions inscribed upon the tablet over the entrance. Determined to win his prize at any cost, he resolved to confide the whole history to his mother. Ju-Kiouan had also told her love to Madame Tou. The names of Pearl and Jasper troubled the good matrons so much that, not daring to set themselves against what appeared to be the will of the gods, they both went again to the temple of Fo.

The bronze oracle replied that this marriage was in reality the true interpretation of the dreams, and that to prevent it would be to incur the eternal anger of the gods. Touched by the entreaties of the mothers, and also by slight mutual advances, the two fathers gave way and consented to a reconciliation of the families. The two old friends, on meeting each other again, were astonished to find what frivolous causes had separated them for so many years, and mourned sincerely over all the pleasure they had lost in being deprived of each other's society. The marriage of the children was celebrated with much rejoicing, and the Jasper and the Pearl were no longer obliged to hold intercourse by means of a reflection on the water. The wall was removed, and the wavelets rippled placidly between the two pavilions on the lake.

    —H.S. Conant.

IN THE MOUNTAINS

A line of Walter Savage Landor's, a poet for poets, was an especial favorite with Southey, and, we believe, with Lamb. It occurs in "Gebir," and drops from the lips of one of its characters, who, being suddenly shown the sea, exclaims,

"Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?"

The feeling which underlies this line is generally the first emotion we have when brought face to face with the stupendous forms of Nature. It is the feeling inspired by mountains, the first sight of which is disappointing. They are grand, but not quite what we were led to expect from pictures and books, and, still more, from our own imaginations. The more we see mountains, the more they grow upon us, until, finally, they are clothed with a grandeur not, in all cases, belonging to them—our Mount Washingtons over-topping the Alps, and the Alps the Himmalayas. The poets assist us in thus magnifying them.

The American poets have translated the mountains of their native land into excellent verse. Everybody remembers Mr. Bryant's "Monument Mountain," for its touching story, and its clearly-defined descriptions of scenery.

Mr. Stedman has a mountain of his own, though perhaps only in Dream-land; and Mr. Bayard Taylor has a whole range of them, the sight of which once filled him with rapture:

"O deep, exulting freedom of the hills!
O summits vast, that to the climbing view
In naked glory stand against the blue!
O cold and buoyant air, whose crystal fills
Heaven's amethystine gaol! O speeding streams
That foam and thunder from the cliffs below!
O slippery brinks and solitudes of snow
And granite bleakness, where the vulture screams!
O stormy pines, that wrestle with the breath
Of every tempest, sharp and icy horns
And hoary glaciers, sparkling in the morns,
And broad dim wonders of the world beneath!
I summon ye, and mid the glare that fills
The noisy mart, my spirit walks the hills."

GLADNESS OF NATURE.—Midnight—when asleep so still and silent—seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the owls in their revelry—and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her clouds. The moping owl, indeed!—the boding owl, forsooth! the melancholy owl, you blockhead! why, they are the most cheerful, joy-portending, and exulting of God's creatures. Their flow of animal spirits is incessant—crowing cocks are a joke to them—blue devils are to them unknown—not one hypochondriac in a thousand barns—and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one utter a complaint.

THE NOONING

Mr. Darley's very characteristic picture on the opposite page needs no description, it so thoroughly explains itself, and realizes his intention. The following lines from Mary Howitt seem very appropriate to the sketch:

"O golden fields of bending corn,
How beautiful they seem!
The reaper-folk, the piled up sheaves,
To me are like a dream;
The sunshine and the very air
Seem of old time, and take me there."

A MANDARIN

From the French of Auguste Vitu

It was Saturday night, and the pavement sparkled with frost diamonds under flashing lights and echoing steps in the opera quarter. Tinkling carnival bells and wild singing resounded from all the carriages dashing towards Rue Lepelletier; the shops were only half shut, and Paris, wide awake, reveled in a fairy-night frolic.

And yet, Felix d'Aubremel, one of the bright applauded heroes of those orgies, seemed in no mood to answer their mad challenge. Plunged in a deep armchair, hands drooping and feet on the fender, he was sunk in sombre revery. An open book lay near him, and a letter was flung, furiously crumpled, on the floor.

An orphan at the age of twelve, Felix had watched his mother's slow death through ten years of suffering. The Marquis Gratien d'Aubremel, ruined by reckless dissipation, and driven by necessity, rather than love, into a marriage with an English heiress, Margaret Malden, deserted her, like the wretch he was, as soon as the last of her dowry melted away. A common story enough, and ending in as common a close. D'Aubremel sailed for the Indies to retrieve his fortune, and met death there by yellow fever. So that the sad lessons of Felix's family life stimulated to excess his innate leaning towards misanthropy—if that name may define a resistless urgency of belief in the appearances of evil, linked with a doubt of the reality of good. Probably, at heart, he believed himself incapable of a bad action, but he would take no oath to such a conviction, since by his theory every man must yield under certain circumstances, attacking powerfully his personal interest, while threatening slight danger of failure or detection. This style of thought, set off by a fair share of witty expression and ever-ready impertinence, gave Felix a kind of ascendancy in his circle of intimates—but naturally it gained him no friends. Common reputation grows out of words rather than actions, and Felix suffered the just penalty of his sceptical fancies. They cost him more than they were worth, as he had just learned by sad experience.

He had chanced to make the acquaintance of a rich manufacturer, Montmorot by name, whose daughter Ernestine was pleased with the devotion of a charming young fellow, who mingled the rather reckless grace of French cleverness with a reserved style and refined pride gained from the English blood of the Maldens. For his part, Felix really loved the girl, and had let his impatience, that very day, carry him into a step that failed to move the elder Montmorot's inflexibility. He refused absolutely to give his daughter to a man without fortune or prospects. Felix was crushed, his hopes all shattered at a blow, by this answer, though he had a thousand reasons to expect it. And at what a moment! A half-unfolded red ticket, stuffed with disgusting threats, peeped out from between the wall and his sofa. The officers of justice had paid him a little visit. He got into a passion with himself.

"Pshaw," he cried, "confound all scruples! If I had been less in love I should be Ernestine's husband now. With a pretty wife, one I am so fond of, too, I should have fortune, position, and the luxury indispensable to my life—now, I don't know where to lay my head to-morrow. To-morrow, at ten o'clock, the sheriff will seize everything—everything, from that Troyou sketch to that china monster, nodding his frightful sneering head at me. They will carry off this casket that was my father's—this locket, with the hair of—of—what the deuce was her name? Poor girl! how she loved me! And now all that is left of her vanishes—even her name!

"What, nothing? no hope? Not even one of those silly impulses that used to drive me out into the streets when everybody else was abed, with the firm conviction that at some crossing, in some gutter, some unknown deity must have dropped a fat pocket-book, on purpose for me! I believed in something, then—even in lost pocket-books. And now, now! I would commit no such follies as that, but I believe I could be guilty of even worse things, if crime, common, low, contemptible, shameful crime, were not forbidden to the son of the Marquis d'Aubremel and Margaret Malden.

"Oh, great genius!" he went on, taking up the open book near him, "great philosopher, called a sophist by the ignorant—how deep a truth you uttered in writing these lines, that I never read over without a shudder: 'Imagine a Chinese mandarin, living in a fabulous country three thousand leagues away, whom you have never seen and shall never see—imagine, moreover, that the death of this mandarin, this man, almost a myth, would make you a millionaire, and that you have but to lift your finger, at home, in France, to bring about his death, without the possibility of ever being called to account for it by any one; say, what would you do?'

"That fearful passage must have made many men dream—and does not Bianchon, that great materialist, so well painted by Balzac, confess that he has got as far as his thirty-third mandarin? What a St. Bartholomew of mandarins, if my philosopher's supposition could grow into a truth!"

Felix ceased his soliloquy, and bent his head to let the storm raised in his soul by the atheist philosopher pass over. His bad instincts, aroused, spoke louder at that instant than reason, louder than reality. His glance fell on the chimney-piece, where a porcelain figure, the grotesque chef d'oeuvre of some great Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin. The young man smiled. "Perhaps that is the likeness of a mandarin—bulbous nose, hanging cheeks, moustaches drooping like plumes, a peaked head, knotty hands—a regular deformity. Reflecting on the ugliness of that idiotic race, there is much to be urged by way of excuse for people who kill mandarins."

Some persistent thought evidently haunted Felix's mind. Again he drove it off, and again it beset him.

"Pshaw!" he exclaimed, after a last brief struggle, "I am alone, and out of sorts. I will amuse myself with a carnival freak, a mere theoretic and philosophic piece of nonsense. I have tried many worse ones. It wants a quarter to twelve. I give myself fifteen minutes to study my spells. Let me see, what mandarin shall I murder? I don't know any, and I have no peerage list of the Flowery Empire. Let me try the newspapers."

It was in the height of the English war with China. On the seventh column of the paper our hero found a proclamation signed by the imperial commissioners, Lin, Lou, Lun, and Li.

"Here goes for Li," he said to himself. "He is likely to be the youngest."

The clock began to strike, announcing the hour. Felix placed himself solemnly before the mirror, and said aloud, in a grave tone: "If the death of Mandarin Li will make me rich and powerful, whatever may come of it, I vote for the death of Mandarin Li." He lifted his finger—at that instant the porcelain figure rocked on its base, and fell in fragments at Felix's feet. The glass reflected his startled face. He thrilled for an instant with superstitious terror, but recollecting that his finger had touched the fragile figure, he accounted for it as an accident, and went to bed and to such repose as a debtor can enjoy with an execution hanging over his head.

Masks and dominos made the street merry under his window. The opera ball was unusually brilliant, experts said, and nothing made the Parisians aware that on the night of January 12th, 1840, Felix d'Aubremel had passed sentence of death on Chinaman Li, son of Mung, son of Tseu, a literate mandarin of the 114th class.

Nine months later Felix d'Aubremel was living in furnished lodgings in an alley off the Rue St. Pierre, and living by borrowing. The gentlemanly sceptic owed his landlady a good deal of money; his clothes were aged past wearing, and his tailor had long ago broken off all relations with him. The Marquis d'Aubremel was within a hairsbreadth of that utterly crushed state that ends in madness, or in suicide—which is only a variety of madness.

One morning while sitting in the glass cage that leads to the staircase of every lodging-house, waiting to beg another respite from his landlady, he took up a newspaper, and the following notice was lucky enough to catch his attention.

"Chiusang, 12th January, 1840. Hostilities have broken out between England and the Celestial Empire. The sudden and inexplicable death of Mandarin Li, the only member of the council who opposed the violent and warlike projects of Lin, led to unfortunate events. At the first attack the Chinese fled, with the basest want of pluck, but in their retreat they murdered several English merchants, and among them an old resident, Richard Maiden, who leaves an estate of half a million sterling. The heirs of the deceased are requested to communicate with William Harrison, Solicitor, Lincoln's Inn."

"My uncle!" cried Felix. "Alas, I have killed my uncle and Mandarin Li."

He had not a penny to pay for his traveling expenses to London; but, on producing his certificate of birth and the newspaper article, his landlady easily negotiated for him with an honest broker, who advanced him a thousand francs to arrange his affairs, without interest, upon his note for a trifle of eighteen hundred, payable in six weeks.

Eight days after reaching London, Felix, established in a fashionable hotel, was awaiting with nervous eagerness the first instalment of a million, the proceeds of a cargo of teas, sold under the direction of Mr. Harrison. He was too restless for thought, burning with impatience to take possession of his property, to handle his wealth, and, as it were, to verify his dream. Yet the fact was indisputable. Richard Malden's death, and his own relationship to the intestate had been legally proved and established. Felix d'Aubremel regularly and assuredly inherited a fortune, and he had no doubts nor scruples on that point.

A servant interrupted his reflections, announcing his solicitor's clerk. "Why does not Mr. Harrison come himself?" he was on the point of asking, but amazement at the clerk's appearance took away his breath. He was a shriveled little object, slight, bony, crooked and hideous, with a monstrous head and round eyes, a bald skull, a flat nose, a mouth from ear to ear, and a little jutting paunch that looked like a sack.

"I bring the Marquis d'Aubremel the monies he is expecting," said the man, and his voice, shrill and silvery, like a musical box or the bell of a clock, impressed Felix painfully. The voice grated on the nerves. "I have drawn a receipt in regular form," said Felix, extending his hand. But the solicitor's clerk leaned his back against the door, without stirring a step. "Well, sir," Felix exclaimed with a convulsive effort. The man approached slowly, scarcely moving his feet, as if sliding across the floor. His right hand was buried in his coat pocket; he held his head bent down, and his lips moved inaudibly. At last he pulled from his pocket a large bundle of banknotes, bills and papers, drew near the window, and began to count them carefully.

Felix was then struck by a strange phenomenon that might well inspire undefined terror. Standing directly in front of the window, the clerk's figure cast no shadow, though the sun's rays fell full upon it, and through his human body, translucent as rock crystal, Felix plainly saw the houses across the street. Then his eyes seemed to be suddenly unsealed. The clerk's black coat took colors, blue, green, and scarlet; it lengthened out into the folds of a robe, and blazed with the dazzling image of the fire-dragon, the son of Buddha; a lock of stiff grayish hair sprouted like a short tuft out of his yellowish skull; his round tawny eyes rolled with frightful rapidity in their sockets.