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Page 7
"We live . . . in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial
We should count time by heart-throbs,"
he must have passed through a period as long as that separating the
Siege of Troy from the "late unpleasantness." The afternoon came at
last, however. The party consisted, besides Darrow and his daughter,
Maitland and myself, of two young gentlemen with whom personally I
had but a slight acquaintance, although I knew them somewhat by
reputation. The younger one, Clinton Browne, is a young artist whose
landscapes were beginning to attract wide attention in Boston, and
the elder, Charles Herne, a Western gentleman of some literary
attainments, but comparatively unknown here in the East. There is
nothing about Mr. Herne that would challenge more than passing
attention. If you had said of him, "He is well-fleshed, well-groomed,
and intellectually well-thatched," you would have voiced the opinion
of most of his acquaintances.
This somewhat elaborately upholstered old world has a deal of mere
filling of one kind and another, and Mr. Herne is a part of it. To
be sure, he leaves the category of excelsior very far behind and
approaches very nearly to the best grade of curled hair, but, in
spite of all this, he is simply a sort of social filling.
Mr. Browne, on the other hand, is a very different personage. Of
medium height, closely knit, with the latent activity and grace of
the cat flowing through every movement and even stagnating in his
pose, he is a man that the first casual gaze instantly returns to
with sharpened focus. You have seen gymnasts whose normal movements
were slowly performed springs, just as rust is a slow combustion and
fire the same thing in less time. Well, Clinton Browne strongly
suggested that sort of athlete. Add to this a regularly formed,
clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful face, with a pair of wonderfully
piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black eyes, and one need not marvel
that men as well as women stared at him. I have spoken of his gaze
as "somewhat shifty," yet am not altogether sure that in that term
I accurately describe it. What first fastened my attention was this
vague, unfocussed, roving, quasi-introspective vision flashing with
panther-like suddenness into a directness that seemed to burn and
pierce one like the thrust of a hot stiletto, His face was
clean-shaven, save for a mere thumb-mark of black hair directly
under the centre of his lower lip. This Iago-like tab and the
almost fierce brilliancy of his concentrated gaze gave to his
countenance at times a sinister, Machiavellian expression that was
irresistible and which, to my thinking, seriously marred an otherwise
fine face. Of course due allowance must be made for the strong
prejudice I have against any form of beard. However, I'd wager a
box of my best liver-pills against any landscape Browne ever painted,
--I don't care if it's as big as a cyclorama,--that if he had known
how completely Gwen shared my views,--how she disliked the
appearance of bewhiskered men,--that delicately nurtured little
imperial would soon have been reduced to a tender memory,--that is
to say, if a physician can diagnose a case of love from such symptoms
as devouring glances and an attentiveness so marked that it quite
disgusted Maitland, who repeatedly measured his rival with the
apparent cold precision of a mathematician, albeit there was warmth
enough underneath.
This singular self-poise is one of Maitland's most noticeable
characteristics and is, I think, rather remarkable in a man of such
strong emotional tendencies and lightning-like rapidity of thought.
No doubt some small portion of it is the result of acquirement, for
life can hardly fail to teach us all something of this sort; still
I cannot but think that the larger part of it is native to him.
Born of well-to-do parents, he had never had the splendid tuition
of early poverty. As soon as he had left college he had studied law,
and had been admitted to the bar. This he had done more to gratify
the wishes of his father than to further any desires of his own, but
he had soon found the profession, so distasteful to him that he
practically abandoned it in favour of scientific research. True,
he still occasionally took a legal case when it turned upon
scientific points which interested him, but, as he once confessed
to me, he swallowed, at such times, the bitter pill of the law
for the sugar coating of science which enshrouded it. This legal
training could, therefore, it seems to me, have made no deep or
radical change in his character, which leads me to think that the
self-control he exhibited, despite the angry disgust with which I
know Browne's so apparent attentions to Gwen inspired him, must,
for the most part, have been native to him rather than acquired.
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