MRS. MARCELLUS.
BY A GUEST AT HER SATURDAYS.
Allthe celebrated creatures whom Fate or the lecture-committee chance to bring to our town profess themselves amazed that Mrs. Marcellus should continue to make this little-celebrated locality her home. The comment has a double import, containing at once a compliment and the reverse. If therein be conveyed an intimation that Hurville as a place of residence is devoid of those varied opportunities for self-improvement, gayety and æsthetic culture which render existence in the great centres so diversified and so charming, or even should the insinuation go so far as to clearly express the indubitable fact that it is a crude, ragged little town, with a few staring red brick business-houses fronting each other on the muddy or dusty or frozen main street (according to the season), and a numerous colony of wooden cottages dotted around "promiscuous" as an outer fringe—nay, should Hurville even be apostrophized as a "hole," as it was once by a lecturer who came during the mud-reign and failed to draw a house,—why, even the most enthusiastic Hurvillian need take no offence. But whatever the town may be, think what our fellow-townswoman, Mrs. Marcellus, is! One of the greatest favorites our lecture-committee secures for us each year, a dramatic reader with a stentorian voice and a fine frenzy rolling around loose in his eye, expressed the whole thing in what I may call a Shakespearian nutshell by a happy paraphrase of the great bard. "It was not," said Mr. Blankenhoff, "that people appreciated Hurvilleless, but Mrs. Marcellusmore." That settled it.
I have been very frank, as you see, about Hurville, because, although many of our business-men, in a sort of small beer of local patriotism, insist upon taking up the utterly untenable position that Hurville is the only "live town" in the country outside of New York and Chicago, I am unable to recognize this astonishing vitality myself, and I always say that if Hurville is "live," I should like to know what something dead looks like, acts like, and especially buys and sells like. The commerce of the place has been completely stagnant for several years, and in Hurville, if ever anywhere, is it a mystery to one half the world how the other half lives. I believe both halves would now be one complete and thoroughly defunct whole were it not that the vital spark is kept alive in both sections by Mrs. Marcellus. Her position in a community so provincial, and in many respects so narrow-minded, as that of our little place, has always been an exceedingly singular one; yet she was lifted to the throne of leadership of our choicest circle on her arrival, and has wielded the sceptre uninterruptedly ever since, without the slightest breath of disaffection having arisen among her courtiers. When she first came to Hurville, fifteen years ago, she was a young widow of thirty, very handsome, very travelled, very cultured, very stylish and passably rich. She is all this yet, and much more that is good and lovable as well. On the left-hand side of the account there is nothing to make a blur except that she is now a motherly lady of forty-five, instead of being, as she was when she first came, just on the last step of the stairs where girlhood shuts the door in a woman's face finally—at thirty.
Her coming to Hurville was rather odd, and at first she had not the slightest intention of remaining. Her object in visiting the place was to negotiate the sale of the residence she now occupies, the best house in the town yet, and fifteen years ago considered a very imposing mansion—so much so that when the railroad came the heavy men of the community insisted on the track being laid in such a way that passengers inside the cars could get a full view of the Marcellus house as they whizzedby. The house was built for the father of Mrs. Marcellus's husband, a sharp old fellow who came to the town when the general impression prevailed that Hurville was going to make Chicago shut up shop, and ultimately to see the grass grow in what are still very thriving thoroughfares of the city of New York. Old Marcellus made all the money out of Hurville that the town will afford for the next half century at least, and died in the shanty he had always lived in just as the builders were putting the last touch on that elegant mansion, which was supposed to be but the first of a series of princely residences which when completed would make Fifth Avenue and Walnut street wonder what they were begun for if thus so early they were done for by the wealth and enterprise of Hurville. Old Marcellus's son never came to Hurville. He was educated abroad, and married this lady, a young New Yorker, at her home. He was in poor health and died in Paris, leaving his wife a good deal of property, including this house, and two little daughters to take care of.
She stayed a few weeks at the hotel of those days, a most comfortable one—for, though the building was of frame and the furniture old and shabby, travellers often say that the meals were better and the bed-linen cleaner and better aired than in the present imposing Dépôt Hotel—and finding no one willing or able to buy the Marcellus house at anything like its value, she one day astonished everybody by saying that the house was now withdrawn from sale and that she was going to live in it herself. What a sensation occurred when her furniture arrived! She had brought over all her elegant belongings from Paris, those being days when household effects which had been in use by Americans abroad for a year were passed free of duty at the custom-house. Even now you can scarcely find in any community a house more beautifully furnished than Mrs. Marcellus's. She still uses the things she brought from France, and never allows her head to be turned by any vagaries respecting house-decoration. Her pale-yellow satin drawing-room furniture is charming, a real reminiscence of Marie Antoinette's at the Little Trianon at Versailles. Bronzes and marbles of chaste and beautiful subjects, water-colors and oil-paintings signed by noted names, fresh flowers in lovely abundance at all seasons of the year,—oh, it is a rare home of beauty and culture! And the best of it is, as Mrs. Marcellus often tells us at her pleasant dinner-parties or her cozy Saturday evenings, that by living in Hurville she can enjoy this agreeable and ladylike mode of existence, can do what we know she does for the poor, can subscribe to all periodicals of the day in any way worthy, can entertain her friends often—to their great delight, all loudly exclaim—without being haunted by the slightest shadow of anxiety regarding her income. If she had continued to live in New York she would by this time probably be bankrupt, for a similar manner of living in that costly city would be a dozen times more expensive than it is in Hurville. As it is, she even lays up money; and when her daughters both married, as they did on the same day five years ago, Mrs. Marcellus astonished all the wedding-participants by announcing to them the growth of a plum to the credit of each which she had planted and preserved for them in the hothouse of an old reliable banker's safe in Boston.
I have mentioned Mrs. Marcellus's Saturday evenings. They are the sole means of intellectual exchange Hurville possesses. In fact, without them our mental condition must have degenerated long ere this into something analogous to that of the cabbage, for most of us are too poor to take trips to the cities to brush up our brains, and we have no public or private library worthy the name in the place. Of late even our lecture-course—which used to be renowned as one of the most successful in the country, for a small town—has dwindled down almost to nothing, the hard times affecting this as everything else. No, not everything: hard times make no difference in Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays, thank the powers! Every Saturday evening we gather around that yellow satin furniture, inspectonce more those oft-inspected pictures (always discovering new beauties in them), try to air a little art-jargon concerning the statuettes and bric-à-brac, look over the last new periodicals, sniff the flowers and say "How sweet!"—the women always asking how she keeps them with the gas, and Mrs. Marcellus always answering that she doesn't: she has them changed. At nine o'clock tea and etceteras are served up. The fine tea-service of rarest old blue Nankin is laid out upon a tablecloth of daintiest linen deeply embroidered with blue of a corresponding shade. Tea-cakes and pâtés whose ingredients are to be found in no cookery-book whatever greet the delighted and unexpectant palate. With her white, shapely, graceful hands Mrs. Marcellus tenders us these luscious lollipops and again and again refills the steaming bowl. At eleven o'clock precisely the neat and pretty maid, who always wears a white cap, brings in Mrs. Marcellus's small bedroom lamp; and this means good-night to visitors. These evenings are the pride and comfort of the town, and it is a point of honor with those of us who know we are welcome to attend every Saturday without intermission. Whenever the gathering chances to be small you may be sure that the cause of it is to be found in a weather-condition when to say "raining cats and dogs," "blowing great guns" or "snowing like Siberia" is to use a comparison quite feeble and inexpressive. But even on such occasions a few gentlemen always contrive to drop in. They are sent by their wives when these cannot come, and they always find Mrs. Marcellus her amiable, reposeful self, whom no chances of temperature can affect.
On a particularly stormy and disagreeable Saturday of the past winter I hesitated long about making my usual call. Not that I did not want to go, nor that I cared much for the weather, but it seemed to me impossible that on such a night Mrs. Marcellus should take the trouble to light her gas-jets (always supplemented by a large, softly-beaming oil-lamp for the centre-table) or ignite the splendid roaring fire of wood and coal mingled which, burning redly in a deep, low, richly colored grate of brass and steel, gives in winter the finishing touch of comfort and home-likeness to that delicious yellow satin drawing room. In summer the grate is entirely removed, and the vacant space is filled with flowering plants, tastefully framed by the hanging mantelpiece valance above and long, narrow, gracefully draped curtains at the sides, which take away all look of bareness from that central point of interest in every apartment, the fireplace. Yet the prospect of spending in my own cheerless room and quite alone the only evening of the week on which circumstances permit me to sit up at all late was scarcely flattering. I have to be at the store every morning before eight, and therefore on every night but Saturday I retire at an hour of a primitive earliness only equalled by that prevailing in well-regulated nurseries. On Sunday mornings I am able to sleep rather late, but pay for the privilege by the enforced juxtaposition of the heavy breakfast sausage with the tough dinner roast beef, my landlady, in a fit of the contraries, always advancing dinner many hours on the day when of all others it should be very much retarded, and would be if the digestive apparatus of the American people had any rights which the landlady of the period were bound to respect.
But these details have small bearing on the story I am relating. To resume: Driven out, in spite of the stormy weather, by the cheerlessness of my room, I hastened on the Saturday evening in question to seek the warm and comforting shelter of Mrs. Marcellus's abode. All was as serene within that model home as if the raging elements themselves had been subdued by the grand white hands of Mrs. Marcellus, and at her order had been stuffed with eiderdown and covered with yellow satin by a Paris upholsterer. How soothing to the rasped nerves was this interior—the crackling fire, the lights, the flowers, the soft rays from the lamp falling on the gray silk dress and the lace headdress of Mrs. Marcellus as she sat at the solid, large round centre-table with a basket ofgay-colored embroidery-silks before her! Besides myself there were five visitors, all gentlemen of course, and most of them individuals who are not much given to loquacity. The lack of conversation was somewhat marked. Still, no one felt any obligation to keep the ball of small talk rolling. Mrs. Marcellus says that when people come to see her she wants them to converse or to keep silent as the spirit moves. The wings of silence brooded over this gathering again and again, yet no one felt guilty. There were many pleasant and home-like sounds—the tintinnabulation of the teaspoons and sugar-tongs, the pricking of the needle through the stiff linen, the whirl of a book-leaf, the laying down of card upon card in the game of solitaire which some one was playing, the bloodless execution of a paper-knife cutting apart the sheets of a newly-arrived magazine, the rustling of the Saturday's local paper, delivered just at dusk and not opened till now, the fresh ink made doubly pungent in the warm atmosphere till it yielded to the pressure of the summer-like temperature and dried up—like the rest of us.
"It is odd," said Henry L. Thompkins at length, closing a novel which he had been reading by slow instalments at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays for the last year at least, and whose finis he had now reached, "that so many authors write love-stories."
"Why shouldn't they," said Mrs. Marcellus, "when so many readers like to peruse them?"
"Who likes to peruse them?"
"Why, you do, I should think, else you would have laid down that book long ago. You've been perfectly absorbed in it: there have been chapters which made your color come and go with their exciting interest. I've watched you;" and she shook her needle at him accusingly.
I scarcely remember how it was that when upon this the conversation became animated it instantly drifted into love-stories and love-affairs and jiltings and heart-breakings, and all the rest of it. Everybody had something to say which he fancied had never before been said about the tender passion; and suddenly a proposition fell from the lips of Mrs. Marcellus which certainly took the company by surprise. She said that she wished, just for curiosity's sake, every one present would tell her about the last love-affair he had had. It would really be fun: she wished they would. Objections and modest declinings were unanimous at first, of course, but our hostess insisted; and finally this conditional agreement was decided upon: that her desire should be acceded to, provided Mrs. Marcellus would relate her own experience in this line and tell the company the particulars ofherlast love-affair. She instantly consented, though I thought I detected a flying blush tinge her cheek at the rush of recollections brought about by the proposal.
The first autobiographer was Henry L. Thompkins himself. Mr. Thompkins is the principal banker of our place, and, from the almost dead level of Hurvillian impecuniosity, he is considered to be a man of colossal fortune. He is very well off in respect to wealth, and has been a widower for many years. In the grief and loneliness which engulfed him at the loss of his wife, he told us, he had sought solace in the warm affections of his sister, a widow lady with a large number of sons, and had recklessly adopted her boys and promised to be a father to them—an engagement which had placed him in such a position toward a lot of young spendthrifts that by actual experience he was now fully qualified to perform the part of the testy old uncle of Sheridan's plays, whose principal duty in life is to shake a stick in his nephew's face and exclaim, "Zounds! you young rascal!" or "Egad! you young dog!" But instead of one scapegrace nephew he had half a dozen to bleed him. During one of his visits to his sister, who lived in the West, he found there, also on a visit, a young lady who made a marked impression upon him. She was rather good-looking, kind, sensible and quiet in her ways. For her sake he lengthened his visit: every day her influence over him became stronger. On the final Sabbath of his stay it happened that of all the household he and she alone were able to attend service. The sermon had a distinctbearing on the sanctity of wedded life. As they walked home he resolved to sound her feelings on the subject of marriage. He began by saying that he was glad to see she was a friend of his family, because that empowered him to ask her this question: Would she like to become a member of it? She blushed, bit her lip and said, as Heaven was her judge, she would, but she had no fortune of her own, and she had seen too much of married life in poverty to dare to enter it under those circumstances. "Poverty!" exclaimed Mr. Thompkins: "you need have no fear of that. I will see that you have every comfort—indeed, every luxury." The girl was so startled she stood still in the street and gazed at him, tears flooding her handsome eyes. "Oh, Mr. Thompkins," she murmured, "you are the best man in the world, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I have felt from the first moment how really noble and generous you are; and it was only last evening I told Edward, when he took me to the Minstrels, that I believed if he'd muster up courage to ask his uncle for money enough to set him up in business, and tell him he wanted to marry and settle down, that you would do it." The only thing consoling about the affair was, that the girl never suspected anything. She married his eldest nephew, whom he has since set up in business three consecutive times (three consecutive failures following), and the couple are now rearing a plentiful crop of grand-nephews, who, though still young, have already developed to perfection the paternal eye for searching out the main chance, and invariably expect—nay, obstreperously claim—a full line of costly presents at Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving and all the anniversaries of everybody's birthday, wedding and demise.
We were very glad that Mr. Thompkins so framed the concluding sentence of his story as to allow us to laugh. We knew very well, from the character of the second speaker, that we should require all our store of thrills and shivers for his recital. He was a long, thin, red-headed man named McLaughlin, who by perseverance had absorbed the most of the leather and findings trade of Hurville and round about, but was always talking of the brilliant and exciting early days of his career, when, fired by a story he had read of the dangers and pleasures of life before the mast, he resolved to run away, and did run away, to sea. His love-story was a wild and inconsequent recital, with staccato stops, of an adventure he had when he was a sailor and his vessel lay in one of the ports of India for some weeks—at Calcutta, I think. Anyhow, there were tiger-skins mixed up in it, and elephants' tusks, and long, moist, horrible serpents trailing after people, and a house where his lady-love lived which was provided with traps and secret panels in the walls and other such trifles; and the lady-love was a native woman who desired to renounce the faith of her people for him, but was interfered with by a cochineal-colored father of a very unpleasant sort, who rampaged around twirling the lance he used in pig-sticking, and often finishing off his enemies with a poisoned creese, such as you read about. Of course there was nothing left for McLaughlin but to fight a duel with this unreasonable parent—a duel which suddenly became contagious, the whole population of Calcutta joining in it; the foreseen conclusion of the terrific narrative being of course that everybody was killed except McLaughlin. No one dared even to smile at this sanguinary catastrophe, for McLaughlin was really a fiery-tempered fellow, and on more than one occasion had been known to back his opinions by inserting his hand under his right coat-tail to find an additional argument wherewith to enforce a similarity of political views. Nevertheless, our hostess slyly asked if it could be possible that the native lady who had wished to relinquish the faith of her cochineal-colored fathers was the amiable—and she might have said, the essentially pale and milk-and-watery—lady who was known to the community as Mrs. McLaughlin, and who would have been, save for the storm, "one of ours" to-night. Mac said, Of course not; but what was the use of sitting down to talk about the jogtrot eventsof these later years, during which destiny and leather had bound him, as it were, to Hurville? He thought we wanted romance while we were about it.
No. 3 was our military man, an ex-brigadier-general who still wears the Kossuth hat of his grade, and who holds, to the satisfaction of all, the berth of postmaster at Hurville. Like most amateur army-officers, the general thinks that as regards military tactics he is a very Napoleon, and he has so impressed this opinion on Hurville that we know full well, though the country at large may not, exactly what brigadier-general it was by whom the stamping out of the rebellion was principally performed. In the various engagements which have taken place between the armies of Europe during the last decade none have had so satisfactory a termination as they might had our postmaster-general (if I may so compound him) been in command of the field. The French, for instance: it seems a great pity that that brilliant people should not have put themselves in communication with Hurville, if only by wire, at the time of the disastrous Prussian war. There was our general, every Saturday evening at Mrs. Marcellus's, winning the most stupendous victories for them on a large map of the seat of war, with little flags mounted on pins stuck all over it; and it was really exciting to see how the general caused the Prussian standard to retreat at Sedan, the tri-color advancing in triumph at the head of an overwhelming body of troops rushing upon the enemyen masse, hemming him in on all sides, while the stirring tones of an imaginary brass band entoned the glorious Marseillaise, its clarion cry proclaiming once again totout le mondethatles enfants de la patriehad won another victory forla grande nation. "Marchons! marchons!tum-ti-tum—and victory or death!" Oh dear! what a surprise it was to us all when the cable-despatch came announcing a very different termination to the fray at Sedan! At first we were incredulous. The brigadier clapped his hand to his head, seized the paper, ran with it into a corner and turned his back on us, that he might study the matter from the strategic point of view undisturbed by uninformed comment. When he returned he said he saw quite clearly how it was: the French had failed to advance their left flank—the despatches showed it—and there was the fatal error. The despatches also showed quite clearly that the French had no left flank to advance, nor right either, not to speak of any rear; but the general said he couldn't help that—they should have advanced their left flank: that was the only really soldier-like thing for them to do. When armies meet on the battle-field they should almost always (I think he said) advance their left flank. Again (to hasten to recent events), here were these puerile, unspeakable, unutterable heathens, the Turks. Vile as their moral status was, their military advantages were such that had they had among their pachas one man who possessed the slightest glimmering of a conception of the art of war they would not only have held Stamboul, but they would have advanced their left flank right into the heart of Russia and set the Crescent flag to flying from the tops of the palaces on the banks of the Neva.
Naturally, knowing his bellicose proclivities, we were fully prepared to hear that the general's love-affair was intimately connected with the war-period; for Mrs. Marcellus herself proposed that the general should follow Mr. McLaughlin's example and relate, not his last love-affair necessarily, but his most romantic one. Everybody present respected the active, self-helpful wife of the postmaster too much to desire, even for a joke, that the fine sentiments which drew such a woman into marriage should be made the theme of a story told by a fireside for the beguilement of a winter's evening. So the general started by saying that prior to courting and wedding his dear wife he had been led into an affair of the heart: with a contrite spirit he confessed that that affair was one which might have had the most fatal consequences. Luckily, his eyes were opened in time. But had circumstances been otherwise, had the government at Washington known the brink on which he stood, he who wasnow honored by his country's confidence to the extent of the postmastership of the town of Hurville might instead be figuring in the reprobatory annals of the republic's history along with Benedict Arnold and Major André. The conviction instantly spread among the listeners that we were now to learn that the general himself on some important occasion had failed to advance his left flank: if so, we should have him on the hip in future—the left hip, of course. But the dreadful episode occurred, it seemed, not on the battle-field, but during the leisure hours when nothing was astir in camp. It was no question of infantry, cavalry or artillery, but the old, old story of a pair of brown eyes. "She" was a Southern girl; they met by chance; he ordered her to walk under the flag; she smiled at him as she did so; stolen interviews followed; she swore to renounce her allegiance to the "Lost Cause" and accompany him to the North. Deceived by her promises, he told her when, how and at what time the corps was to strike tents and leave the locality—secret information. On the night prior to the morning they had fixed upon to go the order to march was countermanded, and the general hastened to his lady-love to tell her the change of plans. Thinking to give her a lover's surprise, he crept up to the veranda of her house on tip-toe and noiselessly peered into the parlor where his enchantress was wont to sit swinging away the heavy hours in the sweet dalliance of a rocking-chair. To his surprise, he found she was not alone: a Confederate officer stood by her side, his arm encircling her taper waist, his lips ever and anon tasting the honey that dwelt on hers. In intervals between these caresses the treacherous beauty poured into her lover's ear all she had gleaned about the change of base of the army from her too credulous brigadier. A movement made the next day by the Confederates showed they had formed designs in accordance with the information the girl imparted, but the Unionist plan having been altered the consequence was in no degree disastrous to our troops.
The termination of this story found the listeners all very silent. No one seemed to know what comment to make. From the pained expression of the brigadier's face it was evident that he still looked upon the experience as one which but for an accident might have brought danger to the country and shame and disgrace to himself. Mrs. Marcellus said, as usual, just the right word. She assured the general that she could not see in what way he had swerved from his duty as a loyal soldier in the affair, since the lady had won his confidence by the false assertion that she desired to renew her allegiance to the flag.
The editor now had the floor. The editor is of course the oracle of the community, and his newspaper, in the opinion of the entire population of Hurville—including himself—is an organ which for real power and earnest writing exceeds any of the monster dailies of the large cities, whose fame, stupidly enough, extends the length and breadth of the land, while theHurville Gazetteblushes unseen, claiming only an average circulation of two thousand; and some say this is an exaggerated figure. The editor's story was of course thoroughly characteristic—editorial, so to speak—the recital going straight to the point at issue without redundant phraseology or extraneous matter of any kind: it was, in fact, a report, as epigrammatic as a six-lined local paragraph, boiled down to the utmost limit of concentrated fact-essence. Yet the gist of the story greatly surprised us. He had become interested in an anonymous female contributor of love-poems sent every week to a newspaper he was then editing in the West. At length, by dint of perseverance, he had unveiled the incognita of the poetess, in time won her affections, and finally married her. The general impression was that this must refer to a former wife, of whom we had never heard, for every one knew the editor's better half to be a diligent housekeeper, patient mother, a ceaseless sewing-machinist, a walking encyclopædia of cookery-recipes, and the least literary woman of our set. Poetry she never read, and she had even been known to sneer at rhymesters, especially those of her own sex, who, she averred,might find some better and more profitable way of passing their time than scribbling nonsense. Yet this change of views, the editor now assured us, was due solely to the influence of time and a very large and uncommonly obstreperous family of boys.
The next speaker was the head of the firm of E.T. Perkins & Co., dry-goods merchants of the Perkins Block. An extremely religious though not a bigoted man, generous, good-natured and jovial, everybody likes him, and we all looked forward with pleasure to hearing his story. He seemed to have difficulty at first in remembering anything sufficiently unusual in its incidents to interest us; for, as he said, we all knew that he had married Mrs. Perkins when he was a clerk in the dry-goods store of her late father, and had succeeded to the business on his death, his wife giving great impetus to trade by her own extravagance in dress, which spread like a contagion among the other ladies of the town, who until then had been mostly satisfied with nice calicoes and cheap merinos. As for love-affairs, continued Mr. Perkins, if he had ever had any before he met Mrs. Perkins he couldn't remember them; but in afriendlyway a curious kind of thing had happened to him many years ago in New York, when he was in the white-goods department of one of the big wholesale houses. He was a very young man, not twenty-one, and trying hard to do right amid the trials and temptations of the great city. He was a church-member, and in aid of the funds of the church to which he belonged he had taken one winter a subscription to a course of lectures to be delivered in some hall down town which has now disappeared. Seats were reserved for ticket-holders; and so it happened that he found himself twice a week seated next a lady and her husband to whom he had been previously introduced by a friend after service one Sunday evening, but with whom he had had till then but a bowing acquaintance. Now they fell to chatting of course. He considered the lady very handsome, though older than himself—about thirty perhaps. She was of a full figure—might even have been called stout—with rosy cheeks, pouting lips, laughing black eyes, glossy hair, and a gay, pleasant manner that was very attractive. Her husband was very much the senior of his wife, and was cross, ugly, lame and asthmatic. Sometimes he would leave the hall in the middle of a lecture and go and sit outside in the cold till it was over, when he would join his wife, grumbling at everything in general and her in particular. During these absences Mr. Perkins and the lady had time to exchange many of their views on various subjects, which were found to be very much in accord. In brief, the acquaintance was so pleasant that young Perkins, at the last lecture of the course (the husband having stepped out), made bold to hint that he would be glad to have it continue, and would be happy to call, if agreeable. To his surprise, the lady whispered a few hurried words in his ear of a startling character. Her husband was exceedingly jealous—utterly without cause, of course—and the idea of a young gentleman calling at the house in a friendly way was one that was not to be entertained for an instant. This was a state of things such as young Perkins had never dreamed possible except in the exaggerated and wearisome pages of long-winded novels and unreadable poems in cantos. He immediately exalted himself into a hero of romance, nor was the sensation diminished when he felt the folds of a bit of note-paper slipped between his fingers as he shook hands with the lady at parting. When he returned home he made himself acquainted with the contents of the mysterious billetdoux, and the sentiment of adventure was heightened when he read therein a request which the lady must have written previously to coming to the lecture-hall, since it was in ink. She desired, she said, to bid him adieu before partingfor ever, and as it was impossible for her to do that at her own home, on account ofsomething, she had asked a friend of hers to let her see him atherhouse. The call must be made at rather anunusualhour—half-past six in the morning. She was going to see a departing friend to theboat, and she would stop in Hudson street on her way back.Now, what was more natural, continued Mr. Perkins, for a foolish young fellow to do than to go to the place on the day appointed? The hourwasrather unusual, and the morning being bitterly cold the experience was anything but pleasant. The friend's house proved to be in a very disagreeable neighborhood, and the parlor into which he was ushered was a small, musty room, with a dirty carpet on the floor, and otherwise furnished with a few cane-seat chairs and a rickety marble-topped centre-table, the place being rendered still more uninviting by a sheet-iron stove which belched forth volumes of smoke from the unwilling beginnings of a rebellious fire that had just been kindled in it. Mr. Perkins sat down in the cheerless apartment, and waited long, half numbed with cold. Having left his home so early, he was breakfast-less, and that fact did not render his condition any the more comfortable. The romance of the adventure oozed out of him from every pore in an almost perceptible stream. The absurdity of the situation became every moment more painfully apparent, when at length in walked the lady. But could this indeed be she? Why, she was completely changed. Instead of the gay, bright, trim, rosy, laughing, sparkling-eyed lady of the evenings, he beheld a stout, untidy, sallow-complexioned, faded-out woman of forty. She was old enough to be his mother—old enough to be ashamed of herself. Never was a youth's foolish illusion more quickly dispelled. He took her proffered hand listlessly, and declined the invitation to reseat himself, pleading the necessity for getting to the store at once. His exit must have been farcical in its abruptness. The most jealous husband in the world could have found no occasion for complaint in such conduct, unless indeed he had changed his views and objected to his wife being treated so cavalierly. The lady's billetdoux had indeed possessed the essential element of truth, as opposed to the fiction of poetry: they bade each other adieu before partingfor ever.
There may be little enough humor in this story, given thus barely, but Mr. Perkins's droll tone of voice and the mirthful twinkle in his eye kept us in peals of laughter while he related the adventure. The history gained an added zest from the frankness of the narrator, for it proved once again how little the gold of his nature was cheapened by the dross of an assumed ultra-holiness, which more than anything else is repulsive to young people when coming from a religious Mentor. "Wasyouever a little girl?" asks the pranksome Miss Lotta in one of her nursery-rhyme plays of a particularly cross and crabbed old grenadier of an aunt. A similar question was never propounded to Mr. Perkins. No boy in Hurville—even the copper-toed ruffians of the editor's wife—entertains any doubts of the unadulterated boyishness, at some remote period, of Mr. Perkins. His pious monitions and enthusiastic essays to lead the boys in the path of a noble manhood lose nothing from the knowledge.
It was now the turn of Mrs. Marcellus to speak. We peremptorily bade her unfold herself, as did Hamlet the Ghost. She smiled and craved a minute's grace in which to serve us all anew fresh jorums of the fragrant Kyshow Congou—a tea unparalleled which she imports herself direct from Oxford Circus in famed London Town—and when the incense of the fragrant brew rose on the ambient air of the yellow satin drawing-room our hostess desired us to rattle our teaspoons and clatter our cups and saucers with a will, as she thought, she said, that a little confusion would enable her to get through the recital with more courage. In spite of this request, the most unobtrusive mice could scarcely have been more noiseless than we as we listened to her narrative, not a word of which escaped our attentive ears.
"You know," began Mrs. Marcellus, "that it is now five years since the double wedding of my two darling daughters, parting from whom was such a dreadful cross for me to bear. Every mother knows how sharp a pang it gives to transfer to another, almost a stranger—a man whose very existence six months or a year before was unknown to us—thetreasured being whose smiles and tears have been since babyhood her mother's rain and sunshine. Ah me! if mothers suffer in this way at the marriage of one daughter, think how doubly great must the trial have been to me when I was called upon to relinquish both my girls at once—to see them both go away on the train, joyous and happy with the men of their choice, while nothing was left for me but to come back here into the empty house and begin a new plan of existence with the vivifying and soul-sustaining element of constant and ever-present love left out! I don't think any one in Hurville had the slightest glimmering of an idea of what I suffered."
Mr. Perkins, who sat next her, shook her hand in testimony of the appreciation of all Hurville of her kindness in never once remitting (in spite of her private feelings) the pleasant social gatherings which were so prized by the community; and all present gave audible assent to the unanimity of opinion on this head.
"You know that some two months before the double wedding I took my daughters to New York for the purpose of completing the purchases I considered necessary to furnish each with a suitable trousseau. Much had been bought here at Mr. Perkins's nice store, almost all the underclothing which was so much admired by their Boston friends when the girls arrived at their husbands' homes was made here by the neat fingers of our Hurville seamstresses, but there were a few things for which the New York style was necessary, or at least so the girls thought, and that was the same thing. We were in New York about ten days, and though every moment, except when we were asleep, was absorbed by the intricate duties of our shopping, my sense of approaching loneliness grew deeper and sadder, until it became so overwhelming that in spite of my efforts to conceal it from them I feared my daughters would observe my melancholy, and that it would cast a gloom over the last joyous days of their maidenhood. But they were too full of spirits and excitement to notice it, and attributed whatever was unusual in my manner to the exceptional fatigue of the occasion. Finally, our task seemed finished, and we started for home laden with purchases, leaving a number of unfinished orders, which were to be sent us by express when completed. We got to the dépôt rather late, and I found a long line of people standing before me at the ticket-office window. I was almost at the tail of an elongated serpent of humanity which wriggled forward with despairing slowness, and after standing a while I impatiently left the ranks and went to where my daughters were sitting. 'We shall never get all that baggage checked in time,' I said: 'I'm afraid we can't get off by this train.' At that moment a young gentleman who was awaiting his turn, and was only the second or third person from the window, leaned toward us and said to me, 'I'll get your tickets for you if you'll allow me. How many? Three?'—'Yes,' I answered: 'three for Hurville, please,' offering him the money. 'Never mind that now: wait till I bring you the tickets;' and I saw him pay for them out of his well-stuffed wallet. Of course I refunded, with many thanks, as soon as he brought the tickets, which he did in a minute or two, and I then hurried away to check the baggage, while the girls went on the train to secure seats together and get the conductor to let us face each other.
"We had a pleasant day for our journey, but the train was uncomfortably crowded. A succession of way-passengers, one after another, absorbed our vacant seat, and prevented the girls from indulging in that exchange of secret, and in general highly-laughable, confidences with which young people of their age are always bubbling over. Some of these local passengers were not very pleasant company, being frequently encumbered with market-baskets which were not only in everybody's way, but proclaimed by unmistakable odors the nature of their contents. Seeing that it was impossible for us to retain the fourth seat, and having learned from the conductor that there was no room in the parlor-car, it was really a great relief, as a certainty of escape from unpleasant companionship, when the same young gentleman whohad kindly helped me at the ticket-office came up and asked if we had any objection to his sitting there, as he had given up two seats in succession to ladies, and had been standing the most of the time since we left New York. Of course we assented, and for the first time I examined our fellow-traveller minutely. He was very good-looking—a blond, a style of coloring that I have always particularly admired in a man when it does not degenerate into effeminacy, as it certainly did not in this instance. In figure he was tall and slender, with the erect and graceful carriage of the accomplished soldier, not the awkward stiffness of the recruit. His eyes were a deep, rich blue, almost violet—eyes that in themselves would have been sufficient to make a woman's reputation for beauty: his long silken moustache shaded from blond to golden red, and was parted fanlike over his vermilion lips, fragrant and glowing with youth and health. His manners were essentially those of distinguished society, and his well-cut gray travelling-suit, his superlatively fine linen, his tiny gold watch-chain with a valuable pearl set in the slide, his fresh gloves, his dark-blue necktie carelessly twisted in a sailor's knot, his fine shoes fitting every curve of his aristocratic foot and covered by neat cloth gaiters buttoned at the side, his elegant travelling-rug rolled in a pair of Russia-leather straps, his stylish umbrella, his fine handkerchief embroidered evidently in Paris in quite a new way—a fac-simile of a seal in red wax, with a monogram and crest standing out upon it—above all, his silver-fitted travelling-bag, even finer than those we had priced at Tiffany's for one hundred and fifty dollars each,—all gave evidence of a position of something more than ease in regard to money; while his beautifully-white teeth, his exactly-parted hair, his scrupulously-tended hands, all spoke of that extreme care of the person which unmistakably indicates the habit of contact with people of dignity and good-breeding. Remember, friends, I did not judge my new friend from the point of view, naturally restricted, of Hurville. I looked at him from the summits of the forty centuries of civilization of the European capitals, and I at once adjudged him to be a man of the world and a gentleman.
"Of course we fell into conversation, and his tone of thought and mode of expression fully coincided with the elevated character of his appearance. He was English by descent, he told us, but American by birth. His reading had evidently been extensive, and his comments on every subject that arose showed that an original as well as a scholarly mind had been brought to bear upon it. Yet never was he so absorbed in the discussion as to neglect any of those attentions which are so agreeable, even so necessary, to ladies while travelling. His politeness was constantly on the alert, and his quick eye detected wants even before they were fully felt, much less spoken of.
"His journey might or might not be so long as ours. He had taken his ticket for a place he named, a small station in Pennsylvania, where his father's horses and carriage would be waiting to drive him to the town where their home was, a bustling lumber-centre back among the Alleghanies some twenty miles off the railway. His father was the owner of an immense tract of timber-land there, a property which had come into his hands many years ago in England as an offset to a very bad debt incurred by some scamp who had inherited it, but had never seen it and knew not whether it was valueless or the reverse. For thirty years his father had paid taxes on these unpromising forest-lands, and then suddenly there was a rush of enterprise in that direction and the property became a fortune. The timber was of the finest and the demand for it unlimited. He was his father's business-representative in the cities, and had been to Europe also, where he had visited their English relations, who were very high-toned and all that, but not quite so well off now as those of the family who were in the plebeian bustle of successful trade-enterprise in America—to wit, his father and himself. If the coachman and team were at the station when we arrived (we were to take supper there), he should go home withhim: if the man and horses werenotthere, he should find a telegram from his father, in which case he was to go on to Pittsburg, and would see us at breakfast in the morning at the place where we changed cars for Hurville.
"In the course of conversation I mentioned to him the peculiar and interesting circumstance which had called us to New York, the girls both blushing and ejaculating in a duet, 'Oh don't, mamma!' But I know so well the heart of youth, both male and female, that I did not think it right to expose this young man to a misconception in regard to the position of my girls, more especially as ever since he had joined us he had sat and gazed at the seat which I occupied with my younger daughter with a look in his eyes which betrayed the secret of an inward and sudden yearning which was almost pain. To my surprise, the announcement of the approaching wedding of both my girls produced no especial effect upon him. He seemed interested, and indulged in a little graceful badinage; but this was what struck me as so strange: every time he spoke to the girls he was smiling and gay and joking, but every time he turned his eyes on me his expression of face, his whole manner, changed. His gaze became riveted on my features, and his soulful eyes lingered there with a fixity that abashed and disconcerted me. I could not understand it. Why did he look at me so? Years had passed since last that sort of gaze had been fastened upon my face, for it was a gaze which unmistakably says, 'You have made an impression upon me which I cannot resist: everything about you is pleasing to me.' Try as I would to avoid this look, turn my head as I might to escape the gaze of those bewitching eyes—even when I closed my own and feigned sleep—still I felt their tender rays upon me, and never once did I find it otherwise.
"It is this point of the story, friends, where I feel confession so difficult. You who have known me for fifteen years, pursuing unswervingly the prosaic path of duty, will find it difficult to understand the power of the impression this stranger made upon my poor heart, widowed in its prime and at that moment about to be further robbed of all it had to love and cherish. All the years during which I had employed the most rigid rules of subjection over myself seemed to vanish like a mist. Every moment I felt more and more strongly a belief that this new-born passion was sincere, and knew that if it should really prove so the time when it would meet with full and grateful return on my part would not be far distant.
"So wore on the daylight hours. Dusk came early, and after the lamps were lit first one and then the other of my girls wrapped herself in her shawl, and cuddling together on one seat with the head of each on the other's shoulders, they both dropped asleep. He and I were now sitting side by side. For a long time neither spoke. I persistently stared out of the window at the flying landscape, almost invisible now in the increasing darkness; but I could feel, though I did not even glance at him, that he had turned in his seat, his elbow resting on the back of it, his cheek on his hand and his eyes on me. At length he bent over toward me, and in so low a tone of voice that the girls could scarce have heard it had they been awake he whispered, 'Will you permit me to say a few words to you?'
"'I have no objection,' I answered coldly—'always with the proviso that what you have to say to me is something which it will be no derogation of my dignity as a mother of grown daughters to hear.'
"'Could you, madam, for a moment believe me capable of saying anything unworthy you, unworthy myself?' he exclaimed reproachfully. 'Oh no: I do not think I have given you any cause to believe me other than a gentleman. I am not in search of a love-affair, believe me, nor have I hitherto been considered as at all of an impressionable nature. I am perhaps not quite so young as I look, and certainly the opportunity of meeting beautiful and fascinating women has not been lacking to me. I know scores of such, and still I have borne hitherto an unoccupied heart. Now, I— But I am tongue-tied: I fear to give offence. Iknow very well you would not let me tell you that you have inspired in me one of those passions which, born in an instant, often shape a whole destiny—that I love you as fondly as a man ever loved a woman. No, no, do not stop me. I say that I donotmake such assertions, because I know you would not allow me; but there is one thing I will make bold to do—one favor I must crave at your hands. Will you grant it?'
"'What is it?'
"'This: that you will let me count myself among your friends. Give me that foothold, and something I feel here in my innermost heart tells me that by it I may lift myself to a niche in yours which no other man now fills. Let time try the sincerity of what I say. All I ask of you is that if I ever come to Hurville (as I surely shall if I'm alive), you will allow me to call upon you merely as a friend: I ask no more.'
"'Are you sincere in this wish?'
"'As Heaven is my judge, I am. In less than an hour this train will arrive at the station where, in all probability, we shall have to part. I cannot endure to think that in a formal shake of the hand at a railway-dépôt you and I are going to separate, never perhaps to meet in this world again. Both of us have made plenty of such impromptu acquaintances before now, and have seen the end of them approach with the utmost indifference, and never given another thought to these chance friendships of a passing hour. But I feel in my innermost heart that this meeting between you and me was brought about by the hand of Providence itself, and for a purpose that we at this early stage of our knowledge of each other cannot divine. I will not, I cannot, see it fade away. Will you give me leave to come and see you at Hurville?'
"'With pleasure,' I replied.
"He sprang to my side as I assented, pressing against me so closely that I withdrew myself hastily lest it should become an open embrace. Yet even as I repulsed him he smiled fondly on me and said in a tender voice, 'Thank you, my friend: this is all I ask. I shall soon see you again, and I warn you I shall see you often. I am willing to take my chances for the future. Time will try me.'
"'Come, come!' I answered: 'these hints and insinuations are mere folly. It would be disingenuous in me to pretend not to understand them; but let them stop here: let us banish all nonsense. I am older than yourself by some years, and when you become better acquainted with me you will find that there is nothing in the least extraordinary about me. I am simply a middle-aged, might even be called an old, woman, wrapped up in a pleasant but very unromantic set of friends, and with all the love of my nature buried in the grave of a dead past, except what survives in the persons of those two sizable young ladies who sit nodding opposite.'
"'Every word you say,' he said, again drawing near to me in an affectionate way, 'but confirms the impression you first made upon me. I think you are a woman of the noblest nature, the soundest sense, the warmest heart, I ever met. I admire you as much, as deeply, as I respect you. But this you must permit me to say: you are doing yourself a great injustice by laying out for yourself a loveless future. You will feel the heart-void very powerfully when your daughters leave you. You arenotan old woman, even in years, while in appearance you are not even middle-aged: no one would dream of your being the mother of these young ladies. Now, is it right in a woman so exceptionally endowed with affections as you are to say you will never love again? Leave the future to take care of itself: you do not know what it has in store for you.'
"With that he pressed my hand, and I pressed his in return, and then drew away from him, and, covering my face with my veil, nestled, half frightened, half joyous, into the window-corner. The emotion he had caused me filled my eyes with tears, yet whether I shed them in happiness or sorrow I could not tell. There was the dead love, the girlhood's sweet dream so cruelly finished, my long conviction that on this earth never again would the delicious oneness of wedded life be mine. Could it reallybe that I had inspired in the bosom of this thoughtful young man the sentiments which lead to the devotion of one soul to another? Even as I questioned thus my inner self I raised my veil, and meeting the fixed gaze of those lovely eyes they smiled an assent, and I sank back, trembling in the ecstasy of my new-found joy.
"We arrived at the supper-station, and with his usual gentlemanly care our friend helped us from the car and escorted us into the supper-room. He seated us at a table, and turning down a chair for himself he whispered in my ear, 'I'll go now and see if there is a despatch for me. If there is I shall just have time to jump on the Western-bound train. That is it, there: it is only waiting for this connection. If there is no despatch and my father's man is here, I will come back and have supper with you before starting home. In any case I'll see you soon in Hurville.'
"I was too agitated to partake of food. I tried to sip some scalding tea, but could not, and rising from the table told the girls to pay for the supper when they had finished: they would find me outside on the platform. I heard the whistle of the departing westward train, and as its ponderous weight thundered over the gleaming rails I saw that he was in it, kneeling on a seat and peering anxiously out, trying, no doubt, to get a parting glimpse of me. Just as he was whirled away I saw the flutter of a handkerchief, and knew that at the last instant he had recognized me where I stood.
"'Where's our friend?' said one of the girls, who had now finished supper and come out. 'I thought he was going to have supper: he turned down a chair.'
"'He left on the Western-bound train,' I answered.
"'I suppose he got the despatch he expected and hadn't time to come in and say good-bye.'
"It was the first time a secret had ever come between me and my daughters. I felt distressed, and even guilty.
"'Girls,' said I when we were again seated in the train, 'what did you think of our travelling-companion?'
"My elder girl thought he was a perfect gentleman, evidently rich, very well bred, very handsome, and, strange to say with all this, a scholar. She had no doubt he moved in the best society wherever he went.
"My younger girl's impression was quite different. In spite of all he had told us about his wealthy father and his lumber-forests, she said she didn't believe but what if the truth were known he would be discovered to be a New York drummer in the button business or perhaps a Western man in the ham trade.
"'Well, my dears, I am going to tell you something about him that will surprise you. He is not what you have said, Minnie, nor what you have said, Jennie, nor what he himself said: he is simply nothing more nor less than a pickpocket!'
"The girls were first horrified, then they laughed: the farce of a thing is very apparent to heedless youth. No doubt the other youthful individual was laughing at the farcicality now. As for me, I could scarcely see the joke. The matter was not so serious as it might have been, however, for the bulk of my money was stitched in the bosom of my dress; but I had kept out about four hundred dollars to pay for a set of silverware which was not ready at the last moment, and that money my friend had seen in my pocket-book when I paid him for the tickets. I discovered the loss at the supper-table almost the instant he left my chair, and my rising and going outside was the natural impulse to stop a thief. I knew now only too well when the transfer had taken place: it was at that blissful moment when this new pattern of a Romeo had pressed up to the side of his silly and elderly Juliet in a tender half embrace. The youthful philosopher was quite right in saying I did not know what the future had in store for me: I had not the remotest conception that in less than an hour it would disclose to my dull mind that I had met a pickpocket in the guise and with the apparent feelings of a gentleman—not to say a lover."
The termination of this recital naturally drew forth comment. Henry L. Thompkins said he really thought better of his nephews now: at least, they never picked pockets. McLaughlin startled the company by declaring that he had met this very man some thirty-five years ago when he was lying off the Bahama Islands—he was sure of it: and even an exact computation, which showed conclusively that the individual in question could not have been born then, was not sufficient to shake him in his belief. Mr. Perkins observed that he hoped the young man might meet Christian influences, and so reform: it was a pity he could not have had Mrs. Marcellus's Christian friendship, for it might have been his salvation. The brigadier's conclusion was that the whole plan was a scheme of deep revenge which had a much broader basis than the mere purloining of a pocket-book. It was the old story of national hatred on the part of England. This man was of English derivation: that he was an American born was no matter—was, in fact, most probably untrue. But Englishmen could not bear, even after the lapse of a century, to think that this grand empire was not under the control of the British crown. The military facts connected with the war of the Revolution had been so galling: Washington's masterly strategy in always advancing his left flank had proved, as it ever must, the utter annihilation of the redcoats, and had occasioned a series of defeats hard then and now for the proud-spirited British nation to bear. Depend upon it, this pocket had been picked in a spirit of international revenge. When Cornwallis—
Here the editor advancedhisleft flank unexpectedly by asking Mrs. Marcellus if he might put the story in print: the fellow should really be hunted down, if possible, even at this late hour, and brought to punishment. But our hostess would not consent to this, and motioned to me with a smile to begin my confession. But just at that moment the good-night lamp was brought in, and never since then have stories been in order at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays.
Olive Logan.