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SCENES

FROM AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL, BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SOUTH-WEST.'

AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN A FATHER AND HIS SONA CATASTROPHE-REMORSE. "THE love or hatred of brothers and sisters is more intense than the love or hatred existing between any other persons of the same sexes. Probably nothing so frequently causes divisions between those whom nature has blessed with the holy relationship of brother and sister, perhaps that it may be the depository of pure affection, as an unequal distribution of the affection of parents.'

'ACHILLE!'

H. MORE.

The young aspirant started from the contemplation of scenes of triumph and empire, carnage and blood the last too soon to be realized and beheld his father standing by his side, who had entered the library, and approached him unperceived. Seating himself in the recess of the window, he motioned his son to a chair, placed opposite to his own. The bearing of the veteran exile was at all times in the highest degree dignified and imposing. His was the brow, eye, and presence to command respect and receive homage.

The affection of Achille toward his father was not unmingled with sentiments of fear. But he was the only being before whom the proud eye of the boy quailed.

That his father loved him, he had never doubted. He knew that he was proud of him, his noble, fearless boy,' as he would term him, while parting his dark clustering locks from his handsome forehead, after he had performed some daring feat of boyhood. But when he spoke to Henri, the gratified and proud expression of his eyes softened under the influence of a milder feeling, and his smile would fade into a sweet but melancholy expression; nor would Achille have exchanged his inspiring language to him, his darling boy!' for the kind tone, and manner he involuntarily assumed when he would say, 'Henri, my beloved child, come and amuse me with your prattle!' nor would the tearful eye, as he gazed down into the upturned face of the amiable boy, have pleased his wild spirit like the enkindling glance of that admiring eye, when turned upon him in paternal pride. Achille translated his glance of pride into an expression of love, and sympathized with one so evidently regarded with an air of sorrow, if not pity, as his brother. If he gave the subject a moment's reflection, it resulted in the flattering conviction that he himself was the favorite son.

But on the morning which introduces him to our notice, he had to learn too painfully, that Henri was the favourite child of the old soldier's affection, and that so far from loving him but a little less, he loved him not. That look of affection which he had translated as an expression of compassion for the gentler nature of his brother, he had to learn was an expression of the intensest parental affection. In his brother, his father worshipped the image of his departed wife, and all his affection for her, which the cold hand of death had withered in its beauty and bloom, was renewed in his beloved Henri. He was doubly loved for his mother and for himself and there remained for Achille, so the sensitive and high spirited boy learned that day, no place in the affections of his sole surviving parent.

His father being seated, addressed him:

Achille, you are now of an age to enter the university, for admission to which the nature and extent of your studies eminently qualify you. In a few days the annual examination of candidates will take place, and in the interval you can select and arrange a library for your room, and collect what other conveniences you may require. You will leave in the first packet that passes down the river.'

This was a delightful announcement to the subject of it, and not wholly unexpected. To the university, that world in miniature, he had long looked forward with pleasurable anticipations. It was a field of action, at least, and he panted to enter upon it.

The two brothers had both prepared for admission into the same class, and he inquired if Henri was to accompany him.

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He is not,' replied the father, coldly and firmly.

He is certainly prepared, Sir!'

'Undoubtedly! But I have decided that he is to be my companion to Europe this season, as I fear his delicate constitution will not admit of his confining himself at present to sedentary pursuits.'

I was anticipating that happiness for myself,' replied Achille, chagrined at his father's preference for his brother, so unexpectedly manifested, not only by the words he uttered, but by his tone and manner. He had long known his intention to visit his native land, and expected to accompany him, although his expectations were founded rather on his own wishes, than any encouragement he had received from his parent.

Now that he learned his intention of taking Henri, instead of himself, he felt keenly the preference; and the coldness, if not severity, of manner he assumed in communicating his determination, offended his pride, whilst his decided partiality for his brother wounded his self-love. The old soldier was a man of few words, and his son was well aware, that, his resolution once formed, he was unbending. He knew that his brother was to go, and that he was to remain; and with a bitter and wounded spirit he turned his darkening brow from the penetrating gaze of his father, and looked forth upon the beautiful scene which lay outspread beneath the windows of the library.

A closing door roused him from his gloomy and sinful reverie, and turning, he found himself once more alone! No not quite alone! An evil spirit Jealousy! pregnant with dark thoughts and evil imaginings, was his companion. A long hour passed away, during which his first fierce conflict with his hitherto slumbering passions took place. The first suspicion that his brother was best loved, then entered his thoughts. Once admitted, it undermined, by its subtle logic, the better feelings of his heart. Doubts were strengthened to confirmations, suspicions magnified to certainties, in the rapid and prejudiced retrospect he took of his father's bearing towards his brother and himself, from the earliest period of his recollection.

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But an hour one short, but momentous hour for then was fixed the lever which moved the world of passions within him, with all their evil consequences- had expired, and the canker-worm of hatred, with its venomous fangs, was gnawing at the last slender fibre that bound him to his brother, when the hall door was thrown open, and the unsuspecting and innocent subject of his dark meditations bounded into the room, holding in his extended hand a gemmed locket.

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See, brother, see!' he exclaimed, in a loud and delighted tone, 'see what my dear father has presented me as a birth-day's gift!'

Achille raised his eyes and fixed them upon the sparkling locket which enclosed the miniature of an exceedingly beautiful female, with a form, cheek, and eye, radiant with feminine loveliness.

He recognised the portrait of their mother, which till that moment had ever been worn, as the holy pilgrim wears the sacred cross, next to the heart of his father. So dearly treasured had that sacred memento of his departed wife ever been, that he never was permitted to remove it from the mourning ribbon by which it was dependent from his neck. Now, he saw the cherished relic in the possession of his brother, a gift from him. His lip curled, and his dark eye became darker still at this stronger confirmation of his father's partiality, yet he neither spoke nor betrayed his feelings by any visible emotion; but the fires within his breast raged deeper still. Like pent-up flames, his pas sions gained vigour by the very efforts made to smother them.

For the first time in his life he looked upon Henri coldly, and without a smile of tenderness. He felt indeed, although his lips moved not with the biting words that rose to them, that the poison of his heart must have been communicated to his eyes; for, as his brother caught their unwonted expression, he suddenly checked himself, and the gay tones of his voice sunk subdued to a strange whisper, as he faintly inquired, at the same time placing his delicate hand upon his shoulder, 'if he were ill?'

'No' he replied, with an involuntary sternness that startled even himself.

The next moment he would have given worlds to recall that fatal monosyllable, and pronounce it over again, more gently; but it was too late. The sensitive boy recoiled as though he had encountered the eye of a basilisk; his forehead changed to a deadly hue, the blood fled from his cheeks, and he seemed about to sink upon the floor; but, suddenly recovering himself, he laughed, and the rich blood came back again, and his eye glanced brightly as he exclaimed, but half-assured: 'Brother, you did but try to frighten me you were not, in earnest, angry with me?'

His heart melted for a moment at this affectionate appeal, but with a strange perverseness he steeled it to insensibility.

Leave me to myself,' he roughly replied, I am not in the humour

to be trifled with.'

Mysterious inconsistency of will and action! He would have given his right hand, or plucked out his right eye, to have recalled the first angry word he uttered. In his own mind he did not will to speak thus harshly; yet, by a singular but frequent anomaly, his words and manner were directly in opposition to his will. The first word spoken in an angry mood, hewed out a broad pathway for legions.

As he uttered his last words, the tears gushed into Henri's eyes, and yielding to the influence of affection, he sprang forward and threw himself into his elder and beloved brother's arms, wept aloud, and sobbed out amidst his tears,

'Brother! Achille! wherein has Henri offended you?

An evil spirit now seemed indeed to have taken possession of him. With angry violence he thrust Henri from his embrace, while a curse

VOL. VIII.

5

sprang to his lips. The poor youth tottered and reeled, fell forward, striking his forehead, as he fell, violently against a marble pedestal upon which stood an alabaster statue of the Madonna, and the warm blood spouted from his gashed temples over the cold, white robes of the image.

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It was a spectacle of horror! - and the guilty being gazed wildly upon his prostrate brother, and thought of Abel and his murderer; upon the red-sprinkled image, and laughed, Ha! ha ha!' as maniacs laugh, at the fitness of his first offering—a mangled brother at the shrine of the virgin mother.

The momentary but terrific spell upon his reason passed away; and throwing himself upon the senseless boy, he attempted to stop the ebbing current of life as it trickled in a small red stream down his pale forehead, steeping his auburn curls in gore, at the same time, calling loudly and madly for assistance.

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His father, followed by the servants, rushed into the library.

Help Sir, my brother is dying!' he cried wildly.

The old man sprang forward and caught his bleeding child in his arms. His practised eye at once comprehended the extent of the injury he had sustained. He had received a deep cut in the shape of a crescent over the left eyebrow, yet not severe enough to endanger life. The free flow of the blood soon restored him to his senses, and opening his eyes, as his father, with a tender hand, staunched the bubbling blood, he fixed them upon his brother with an expression that eloquently spoke forgiveness.

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God pity me!' exclaimed the repentant and now broken-spirited boy; for that look went to his heart: and burying his face in his hands, he precipitately left the room.

The long and bitter hours of grief, remorse and shame, he suffered in the solitude of his own room, no tongue but his who has felt like him, can utter. He experienced sentiments of hatred for himself, a loathing and detestation that tempted him to put a period at once to his own existence. When he recalled the reproving yet forgiving look of his suffering and magnanimous brother, he felt degraded in his own eyes, fallen, lowly fallen, in his own self-esteem. That he must be in his brother's he was painfully aware, and for the first time he felt that the gentle-natured Henri was his superior.

A STUDENT-THE RETURN-GERTRUDE LANGUEVILLE-LOVE. 'PLACE the lever of Archimedes in the hands of love, and he will find the point on which to rest it. Perhaps love has caused more evil than ambition. Let us search from the cot of the humblest villager to the tent of Mark Antony, and we shall find it has been the pivot upon which some of the most affecting domestic, and many of the greatest historical, events have turned. Doubtless, that love which is elicited at the first sight of the object, is the most legitimate, the purest, and the most enduring.'

ANONYMOUS.

DAY closed in night, and night opened into morning, for many long and tedious weeks, and still the old soldier sat by the bed-side of his wounded child.

The generous boy, too honorable to prevaricate, yet too forgiving and fond of his brother to expose all the truth, had told him that he had

fallen against the pedestal, but not that Achille had thrust him against it.

Their father never knew the agency of Achille in the accident; yet, bearing testimony to the truth of the maxim, that suspicion is the handmaiden of guilt, Achille suspected that he was informed of all the circumstances connected with the act. This suspicion, giving its own tinge to the medium through which he viewed and commented upon his father's deportment toward him after the accident, led him to conclusions as unjust as they were unmerited by his parent. Acting from these conclusions, he shunned his society, and never entered his presence but with a sullen air of defiance.

Occasionally he visited the chamber of his brother, when, in answer to his frequent inquiries of the nurse, he learned that he slept; and pressing the fevered hand, or kissing the cheek of the sleeping sufferer, he would watch over him with the tenderness of a mother till the restless motions of the invalid, indicating the termination of his slumbers, or the heavy footsteps of his father ascending the stair-way in the hall, warned him to return to the seclusion of his own room, or the deeper solitudes of the forests.

A few months passed away, during which Achille became a student within the walls of a university not far from his paternal home; while his brother, entirely recovered, accompanied his parent on his transatlantic voyage.

The period of Achille's residence at the university afforded no incidents which exerted any influence over his subsequent years. It glided away pleasantly and rapidly. He was known by the professors as one, who, never in his study, or a consumer of midnight oil, yet always prepared for the recitation room; and by his fellows, as a young man of violent passions, honorable feelings, chivalrous in points of honor, a warm friend, and magnanimous enemy. Often violent and head-strong in his actions, he was just and equitable in his intercouse with those around him. With a love for hilarity and Tuscan pleasures, he never descended to mingle in the low debauches and nightly sallies, which, from time immemorial, have characterized the varieties of college life.

At the early age of nineteen, he received its honors, and bidding adieu to the classic walls within which he had passed so many happy hours the happiest of his life - he proceeded to an adjacent port, where he expected his father to disembark, on his return from his long residence abroad.

The little green coasting packet in that early day, when steam navigation had not superseded those teachers of patience to domestic voyagers, the sloop and schooner had passed up the river the previous evening. He crossed to the opposite shore, in a broad flat wherry, whose representative, in the shape of a neatly painted horseboat, propelled by the Ixion-like labor of a blind Rosinante, may still be seen plying frequently between the opposite shores.

The sun had just set in a sea of gold and crimson, and a rich mellow light hung like a veil of transparent gauze over land and water, when, after winding round one of the graceful bends of the romantic Kennebec, and ascending an abrupt and rocky eminence, up which the road wound, the beautiful and wooded glen, with the turretted chimnies

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