第51章

"I think, Miss Monson," he continued, after a very beautiful specimen of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been beaten in a libel suit, ''I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have endeavored to pay you, ever since Ihave been so fortunate as to have made your acquaintance?""I!--Upon my word, Mr. Thurston, I am not at all conscious of having been the object of any such attentions!""No?--That is ever the way with the innocent and single-minded! This is what we sincere and diffident men have to contend with in affairs of the heart. Our bosoms may be torn with ten thousand distracting cares, and yet the modesty of a truly virtuous female heart shall be so absorbed in its own placid serenity as to be indifferent to the pangs it is unconsciously inflicting!""Mr. Thurston, your language is strong--and--a little--a little unintelligible.""I dare say--ma'am--I never expect to be intelligible again. When the 'heart is oppressed with unutterable anguish, condemned to conceal that passion which is at once the torment and delight of life'--when 'his lip, the ruby harbinger of joy, lies pale and cold, the miserable appendage of a mang--' that is, Miss Monson, I mean to say, when all our faculties are engrossed by one dear object we are often incoherent and mysterious, as a matter of course."Tom Thurston came very near wrecking himself on the quicksands of the romantic school. He had begun to quote from a speech delivered by Gouverneur Morris, on the right of deposit at New Orleans, and which he had spoken at college, and was near getting into a part of the subject that might not have been so apposite, but retreated in time. By way of climax, the lover laid his hand on me, and raised me to his eyes in an abstracted manner, as if unconscious of what he was doing, and wanted to brush away a tear.

{Gouverneur Morris = American Federalist leader and diplomat (1752-1816)--a 1795 American treaty with Spain granted the United States the right of navigation on the Mississippi River and to deposit goods at New Orleans without paying customs duties}

"What a confounded rich old fellow the father must be," thought Tom, "to give her such pocket-handkerchiefs!"I felt like a wren that escapes from the hawk when the rogue laid me down.

Alas! Poor Julia was the dupe of all this acting. Totally unpracticed herself, abandoned by the usages of the society in which she had been educated very much to the artifices of any fortune-hunter, and vexed with Betts Shoreham, she was in the worst possible frame of mind to resist such eloquence and love. She had seen Tom at all the balls in the best houses, found no fault with his exterior and manners, both of which were fashionable and showy, and now discovered that he had a most sympathetic heart, over which, unknown to herself, she had obtained a very unlimited control.

"You do not answer me, Miss Monson," continued Tom peeping out at one side of me, for I was still at his eyes--"you do not answer me, cruel, inexorable girl!""What WOULD you have me say, Mr. Thurston?""Say YES, dearest, loveliest, most perfect being of the whole human family.""YES, then; if that will relieve your mind, it is a relief very easily bestowed."Now, Tom Thurston was as skilled in a fortune-hunter's wiles as Napoleon was in military strategy. He saw he had obtained an immense advantage for the future, and he forbore to press the matter any further at the moment. The "yes" had been uttered more in pleasantry than with any other feeling, but, by holding it in reserve, presuming on it gradually, and using it in a crisis, it might be worth--"let me see," calculated Tom, as he went whistling down Broadway, "that 'yes' may be made to yield at least a cool $100,000. There are John, this girl, and two little ones.

Old Monson is worth every dollar of $700,000--none of your skyrockets, but a known, old fortune, in substantial houses and lands--let us suppose the old woman outlive him, and that she gets her full thirds; THAT will leave $466,660. Perhaps John may get a couple of hundred thousand, and even THEN each of the girls will have $88,888.

If one of the little things should happen to die, and there's lots of scarlet fever about, why that would fetch it up at once to a round hundred thousand. I don't think the old woman would be likely to marry again at her time of life. One mustn't calculate too confidently on THAT, however, as I would have her myself for half of SUCH thirds."{full thirds = Old Monson's widow would under American common law receive a life interest in one-third of his real property, called a dower right, which would revert to his children if she died without remarrying.}