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Beauty and The Beast-Part20_Bayard Taylor(1825-1878)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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Kissingen.



Otto Lindenschmidt's life, therefore, could not hide itself. Can

any life?



TWIN-LOVE.

When John Vincent, after waiting twelve years, married Phebe



Etheridge, the whole neighborhoodexperienced that sense of relief

and satisfaction which follows the triumph of the right. Not that



the fact of a true love is ever generally recognized and respected

when it is first discovered; for there is a perverse quality in



American human nature which will not accept the existence of any

fine, unselfish passion, until it has been tested and established



beyond peradventure. There were two views of the case when John

Vincent's love for Phebe, and old Reuben Etheridge's hard



prohibition of the match, first became known to the community. The

girls and boys, and some of the matrons, ranged themselves at once



on the side of the lovers, but a large majority of the older men

and a few of the younger supported the tyrannical father.



Reuben Etheridge was rich, and, in addition to what his daughter

would naturally inherit from him, she already possessed more than



her lover, at the time of their betrothal. This in the eyes

of one class was a sufficient reason for the father's hostility.



When low natures live (as they almost invariably do) wholly in the

present, they neither take tenderness from the past nor warning



from the possibilities of the future. It is the exceptional men

and women who remember their youth. So, these lovers received a



nearly equal amount of sympathy and condemnation; and only slowly,

partly through their quiet fidelity and patience, and partly



through the improvement in John Vincent's worldly circumstances,

was the balance changed. Old Reuben remained an unflinching despot



to the last: if any relenting softness touched his heart, he

sternly concealed it; and such inference as could be drawn from the



fact that he, certainly knowing what would follow his death,

bequeathed his daughter her proper share of his goods, was all that



could be taken for consent.

They were married: John, a grave man in middle age, weather-beaten



and worn by years of hard work and self-denial, yet not beyond the

restoration of a milder second youth; and Phebe a sad, weary woman,



whose warmth of longing had been exhausted, from whom youth and its

uncalculating surrenders of hope and feeling had gone forever.



They began their wedded life under the shadow of the death out of

which it grew; and when, after a ceremony in which neither



bridesmaid nor groomsman stood by their side, they united their

divided homes, it seemed to their neighbors that a separated



husband and wife had come together again, not that the relation was

new to either.



John Vincent loved his wife with the tenderness of an innocent man,

but all his tenderness could not avail to lift the weight of



settled melancholy which had gathered upon her. Disappointment,

waiting, yearning, indulgence in long lament and self-pity, the



morbid cultivation of unhappy fancies--all this had wrought its

work upon her, and it was too late to effect a cure. In the night



she awoke to weep at his side, because of the years when she had

awakened to weep alone; by day she kept up her old habit of



foreboding, although the evening steadily refuted the morning; and

there were times when, without any apparent cause, she would fall



into a dark, despairing mood which her husband's greatest care and

cunning could only slowly dispel.



Two or three years passed, and new life came to the Vincent farm.

One day, between midnight and dawn, the family pair was doubled;



the cry of twin sons was heard in the hushed house. The father

restrained his happy wonder in his concern for the imperilled life



of the mother; he guessed that she had anticipated death, and she




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