As when his first course is of misery.—Suckling.
Again the Jersey heights rose on the eye of Morton, and the woods and villas of Staten Island. Again the broad breast of New York harbor opened before him, sparkling in the June sun; the rugged front of the Castle, and the tapering spire of Trinity. He bethought him of his last return, and its unforgotten blackness threw its shadow across his mind. He turned, doubting and tremulous, towards the future; but here his horizon brightened as with the sunrise, shooting to the zenith its shafts of tranquil light.
Meanwhile, the telegraph had darted to Boston a notice that the approaching steamer had been signalled off the coast. Meredith took the night train to meet his friend; but, arriving, he learned that Morton was already on shore. Driving from one hotel to another, he found, at length, the latter's resting-place.
"Shall I take up your name, sir?"
"No, show me his room; I will go myself."
He knocked at the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, and a voice replied suddenly, like that of a man roused from a revery.
He entered; and at the next moment, Morton grasped his hand.
"You have found yourself again," said Meredith; "you have grown back again to your old look."
Morton's eye glistened.
"I think I know the handwriting of that letter. Miss Leslie's,—I will call her so still—it is hers, is it not?"
"Yes."
"She writes, I trust, what you hoped to hear."
"All that I hoped, and much more."
"I am glad of it from my heart. Fortune has been hard enough upon you. She was bound to pay you her score."
"She has done so with usury."
"Are you going to Boston this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"Then you have just two hours to spare. If you have any leisure for such sublunary matters, we had better get dinner at once. Romeo himself, at his worst case, asks his friend when they shall dine."
Three hours later, the eastward-bound steamer was ploughing the Sound, and Morton and Meredith paced her deck.
"I have told you now the whole history, from first to last. I need not ask you to forgive my having kept it secret from you so long."
"Why should you ask me? Every man has a right to his own secrets, and I like him the better for keeping them. Vinal, at all events, had good cause to thank you."
"He is dead; and his memory, if it will, had better die with him."
"You said in your letter that his agent was called Henry Speyer. I thought, at the time, that I had seen the name before; and a day or two since, I found it accidentally again. The newspapers, two months or more ago, mention a foreigner called Henry Speyer as an officer in this last piratical forray into Cuba. His party lost their way, fell into an ambuscade of government soldiers, and Speyer was shot through the head."
"He found a better end than his principal."
"And deserved a better one. A professed rascal is better than a pharisee."