A jest may be the smallest pebble that was ever dropped into the sunny
mid-ocean of the mind; but sooner or later it sinks to a hard bottom, sooner
or later sends it ripples toward the shores where the caves of the fatal
passions yawn and roar for wreckage. It is the Comedy of speech that forever
dwells as Tragedy's fondest sister, sharing with her the same unmarked
domain; for the two are but identical forces of the mind in gentle and in
ungentle action as one atmosphere holds within itself unseparated the zephyr
and the storm.
The following afternoon O'Bannon was ambling back to town--slowly and
awkwardly, he being a poor rider and dreading a horse's back as he would
have avoided its kick. He was returning from the paper mill at Georgetown
whither he had been sent by Mr. Bradford with an order for a further supply
of sheets. The errand had not been a congenial one; and he was thinking now
as often before that he would welcome any chance of leaving the editor's
service.
What he had always coveted since his coming into the wilderness was the
young master's school; for the Irish teacher, afterwards so well known a
figure in the West, was even at this time beginning to bend his mercurial
steps across the mountains. Out of his covetousness had sprung perhaps his
enmity toward the master, whom he further despised for his Scotch blood, and
in time had grown to dislike from motives of jealousy, and last of all to
hate for his simple purity. Many a man nurses a grudge of this kind against
his human brother and will take pains to punish him accordingly; for success
in virtue is as hard for certain natures to witness as success in anything
else will irritate those whose nerveless or impatient or ill-directed grasp
it has wisely eluded.
On all accounts therefore it had fallen well to his purpose to make the
schoolmaster the dupe of a disagreeable jest. The jest had had unexpectedly
serious consequences: it had brought about the complete discomfiture of John
in his love affair; it had caused the trouble behind the troubled face with
which he had looked out upon every one during his illness.
The two young men had never met since; but the one was under a cloud; the
other was refulgent with his petty triumph; and he had set his face all the
more toward any further aggressiveness that occasion should bring happily to
his hand.
The mere road might have shamed him into manlier reflections.
It was one of the forest highways of the majestic bison opened ages before into what must
have been to them Nature's most gorgeous kingdom, her fairest, most magical
Babylon: with hanging gardensof verdure
everywhere swung from the tree-domes to the ground; with the earth one vast
rolling garden of softest verdure and crystal waters: an ancient Babylon of
the Western woods, most alluring and in the end most fatal to the luxurious,
wantoning wild creatures, which know no sin and are never found wanting.