“I saw her, on a nearer view,A spirit, yet a woman too,—Her household motions light and free,And steps of virgin liberty.A creature not too bright or goodFor human nature’s daily food,For transient pleasures, simple wiles,Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.”
“I saw her, on a nearer view,A spirit, yet a woman too,—Her household motions light and free,And steps of virgin liberty.A creature not too bright or goodFor human nature’s daily food,For transient pleasures, simple wiles,Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.”
“I saw her, on a nearer view,A spirit, yet a woman too,—Her household motions light and free,And steps of virgin liberty.A creature not too bright or goodFor human nature’s daily food,For transient pleasures, simple wiles,Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.”
“I saw her, on a nearer view,
A spirit, yet a woman too,—
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty.
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food,
For transient pleasures, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.”
John fancied he saw his little Lillie subdued into a pattern wife, weaned from fashionable follies, eagerly seeking mental improvement under his guidance, and joining him and Grace in all sorts of edifying works and ways.
The reader may see, from the conversations we have detailed, that nothing was farther from Lillie’s intentions than any such conformity.
The intentions of the married pair, in fact, ran exactly contrary to one another. John meant to bring Lillie to a sober, rational, useful family life; and Lillie meant to run a career of fashionable display, and make John pay for it.
Neither, at present, stated their purposes precisely to the other, because they were “honey-mooning.” John, as yet, was the enraptured lover; and Lillie was his pink and white sultana,—his absolute mistress, her word was law, and his will was hers. How the case was ever to be reversed, so as to suit the terms of the marriage service, John did not precisely inquire.
But, when husband and wife start in life with exactly opposing intentions, which, think you, is likely to conquer,—the man, or the woman? That is a very nice question, and deserves further consideration.
WE left Mr. and Mrs. John Seymour honey-mooning. The honey-moon, dear ladies, is supposed to be the period of male subjection. The young queen is enthroned; and the first of her slaves walks obediently in her train, carries her fan, her parasol, runs of her errands, packs her trunk, writes her letters, buys her any thing she cries for, and is ready to do the impossible for her, on every suitable occasion.
A great strong man sometimes feels awkwardly, when thus led captive; but the greatest, strongest, and most boastful, often go most obediently under woman-rule; for which, see Shakspeare, concerning Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar and Mark Antony.
But then all kingdoms, and all sway, and all authority must come to an end. Nothing lasts, you see. The plain prose of life must have its turn, after the poetry and honey-moons—stretch them out to their utmost limit—have their terminus.
So, at the end of six weeks, John and Lillie, somewhat dusty and travel-worn, were received by Grace into the old family-mansion at Springdale.
Grace had read her Bible and Fénelon to such purpose, that she had accepted her cross with open arms.
Dear reader, Grace was not a severe, angular, old-maid sister, ready to snarl at the advent of a young beauty; but an elegant and accomplished woman, with a wide culture, a trained and disciplined mind, a charming taste, and polished manners; and, above all, a thorough self-understanding and discipline. Though past thirty, she still had admirers and lovers; yet, till now, her brother, insensibly to herself, had blocked up the doorway of her heart; and the perfectness of the fraternal friendship had prevented the wish and the longing by which some fortunate man might have found and given happiness.
Grace had resolved she would love her new sister; that she would look upon all her past faults and errors with eyes of indulgence; that she would put out of her head every story she ever had heard against her, and unite with her brother to make her lot a happy one.
“John is so good a man,” she said to Miss Letitia Ferguson, “that I am sure Lillie cannot but become a good woman.”
So Grace adorned the wedding with her presence, in an elegant Parisian dress, ordered for the occasion, and presented the young bride with a set of pearl and amethyst that were perfectly bewitching, and kisses and notes of affection had been exchanged between them; and during various intervals, and for weeks past, Grace had been pleasantly employed in preparing the family-mansion to receive the new mistress.
John’s bachelor apartments had been new furnished, and furbished, and made into a perfect bower of roses.
The rest of the house, after the usual household process of purification, had been rearranged, as John and his sister had always kept it since their mother’s death in the way that she loved to see it. There was something quaint and sweet and antique about it, that suited Grace. Its unfashionable difference from the smart, flippant, stereotyped rooms of to-day had a charm in her eyes.
Lillie, however, surveyed the scene, the first night that she took possession, with a quiet determination to re-modernize on the very earliest opportunity. What would Mrs. Frippit and Mrs. Nippit say to such rooms, she thought. But then there was time enough to attend to that. Not a shade of these internal reflections was visible in her manner. She said, “Oh, how sweet! How perfectly charming! How splendid!” in all proper places; and John was delighted.
She also fell into the arms of Grace, and kissed her with effusion; and John saw the sisterly union, which he had anticipated, auspiciously commencing.
The only trouble in Grace’s mind was from a terrible sort of clairvoyance that seems to beset very sincere people, and makes them sensitive to the presence of any thing unreal or untrue. Fair and soft and caressing as the new sister was, and determined as Grace was to believe in her, and trust her, and like her,—she found an invisible, chilly barrier between her heart and Lillie. She scolded herself, and, in the effort to confide,became unnaturally demonstrative, and said and did more than was her wont to show affection; and yet, to her own mortification, she found herself, after all, seeming to herself to be hypocritical, and professing more than she felt.
As to the fair Lillie, who, as we have remarked, was no fool, she took the measure of her new sister with that instinctive knowledge of character which is the essence of womanhood. Lillie was not in love with John, because that was an experience she was not capable of. But she had married him, and now considered him as her property, her subject,—hers, with an intensity of ownership that should shut out all former proprietors.
We have heard much talk, of late, concerning the husband’s ownership of the wife. But, dear ladies, is that any more pronounced a fact than every wife’s ownership of her husband?—an ownership so intense and pervading that it may be said to be the controlling nerve of womanhood. Let any one touch your right to the first place in your husband’s regard, and see!
Well, then, Lillie saw at a glance just what Grace was, and what her influence with her brother must be; and also that, in order to live the life she meditated, John must act under her sway, and not under his sister’s; and so the resolve had gone forth, in her mind, that Grace’s dominion in the family should come to an end, and that she would, as sole empress, reconstruct the state. But, of course, she was too wise to say a word about it.
“Dear me!” she said, the next morning, when Grace proposed showing her through the house and delivering up the keys, “I’m sure I don’t see why you want to show things to me. I’m nothing of a housekeeper, you know: all I know is what I want, and I’ve always had what I wanted, you know; but, you see, I haven’t the least idea how it’s to be done. Why, at home I’ve been everybody’s baby. Mamma laughs at the idea of my knowing any thing. So, Grace dear, you must just be prime minister; and I’ll be the good-for-nothing Queen, and just sign the papers, and all that, you know.”
Grace found, the first week, that to be housekeeper to a young duchess, in an American village and with American servants, was no sinecure.
The young mistress, the next week, tumbled into the wash an amount of muslin and lace and French puffing and fluting sufficient to employ two artists for two or three days, and by which honest Bridget, as she stood at her family wash-tub, was sorely perplexed.
But, in America, no woman ever dies for want of speaking her mind; and the lower orders have their turn in teaching the catechism to their superiors, which they do with an effectiveness that does credit to democracy.
“And would ye be plased to step here, Miss Saymour,” said Bridget to Grace, in a voice of suppressed emotion, and pointing oratorically, with her soapy right arm, to a snow-wreath of French finery and puffing on the floor. “What I asks, Miss Grace, is,Whois to do all this? I’m sure it would take me and Katy a week, workin’ day and night, let alone the cookin’ and the silverand the beds, and all them. It’s a pity, now, somebody shouldn’t spake to that young crather; fur she’s nothin’ but a baby, and likely don’t know any thing, as ladies mostly don’t, about what’s right and proper.” Bridget’s Christian charity and condescension in this last sentence was some mitigation of the crisis; but still Grace was appalled. We all of us, my dear sisters, have stood appalled at the tribunal of good Bridgets rising in their majesty and declaring their ultimatum.
Two women talking“Whois to do all this?”
“Whois to do all this?”
Bridget was a treasure in the town of Springdale, where servants were scarce and poor; and, what was more, she was a treasure that knew her own worth. Grace knew very well how she had been beset with applications and offers of higher wages to draw her to various hotels and boarding-houses in the vicinity, but had preferred the comparative dignity and tranquillity of a private gentleman’s family.
But the family had been small, orderly, and systematic, and Grace the most considerate of housekeepers. Still it was not to be denied, that, though an indulgent and considerate mistress, Bridget was, in fact, mistress of the Seymour mansion, and that her mind and will concerning the washing must be made known to the young queen.
It was a sore trial to speak to Lillie; but it would be sorer to be left at once desolate in the kitchen department, and exposed to the marauding inroads of unskilled Hibernians.
In the most delicate way, Grace made Lillie acquainted with the domestic crisis; as, in old times, a prime minister might have carried to one of the Charleses the remonstrance and protest of the House of Commons.
“Oh! I’m sure I don’t know how it’s to be done,” said Lillie, gayly. “Mamma always got my things donesomehow. They alwaysweredone, and always must be: you just tell her so. I think it’s always best to be decided with servants. Face ’em down in the beginning.”
“But you see, Lillie dear, it’s almost impossible togetservants at all in Springdale; and such servants as ours everybody says are an exception. If we talk to Bridget in that way, she’ll just go off and leave us; and then what shall we do?”
“What in the world does John want to live in such a place for?” said Lillie, peevishly. “There are plenty of servants to be got in New York; and that’s the only place fit to live in. Well, it’s no affair of mine! Tell John he married me, and must take care of me. He must settle it some way: I shan’t trouble my head about it.”
The idea of living in New York, and uprooting the old time-honored establishment in Springdale, struck Grace as a sort of sacrilege; yet she could not help feeling, with a kind of fear, that the young mistress had power to do it.
“Don’t, darling, talk so, for pity’s sake,” she said. “I will go to John, and we will arrange it somehow.”
A long consultation with faithful John, in the evening, revealed to him the perplexing nature of the material processes necessary to get up his fair puff of thistledown in all that wonderful whiteness and fancifulness of costume which had so entranced him.
Lillie cried, and said she never had any trouble before about “getting her things done.” She was sure mamma or Trixie or somebody did them, or got them done,—she never knew how or when. With many tears and sobs, she protested her ardent desire to realize the Scriptural idea of the fowls of the air and the lilies ofthe field, which were fed and clothed, “like Solomon in all his glory,” without ever giving a moment’s care to the matter.
John kissed and embraced, and wiped away her tears, and declared she should have every thing just as she desired it, if it took the half of his kingdom.
After consoling his fair one, he burst into Grace’s room in the evening, just at the hour when they used to have their old brotherly and sisterly confidential talks.
“You see, Grace,—poor Lillie, dear little thing,—you don’t know how distressed she is; and, Grace, we must find somebody to do up all her fol-de-rols and fizgigs for her, you know. You see, she’s beenusedto this kind of thing; can’t do without it.”
“Well, I’ll try to-morrow, John,” said Grace, patiently. “There is Mrs. Atkins,—she is a very nice woman.”
“Oh, exactly! just the thing,” said John. “Yes, we’ll get her to take all Lillie’s things every week. That settles it.”
“Do you know, John, at the prices that Mrs. Atkins asks, you will have to pay more than for all your family service together? What we have this week would be twenty dollars, at the least computation; and it is worth it too,—the work of getting up is so elaborate.”
John opened his eyes, and looked grave. Like all stable New-England families, the Seymours, while they practised the broadest liberality, had instincts of great sobriety in expense. Needless profusion shocked them as out of taste; and a quiet and decent reticence in matters of self-indulgence was habitual with them.
Such a price for the fine linen of his little angel rather staggered him; but he gulped it down.
“Well, well, Gracie,” he said, “cost what it may, she must have it as she likes it. The little creature, you see, has never been accustomed to calculate or reflect in these matters; and it is trial enough to come down to our stupid way of living,—so different, you know, from the gay life she has been leading.”
Miss Seymour’s saintship was somewhat rudely tested by this remark. That anybody should think it a sacrifice to be John’s wife, and a trial to accept the homestead at Springdale, with all its tranquillity and comforts,—that John, under her influence, should speak of the Springdale life asstupid,—was a little drop too much in her cup. A bright streak appeared in either cheek, as she said,—
“Well, John, I never knew you found Springdale stupid before. I’m sure, wehavebeen happy here,”—and her voice quavered.
“Pshaw, Gracie! you know what I mean. I don’t mean thatIfind it stupid. I don’t like the kind of rattle-brained life we’ve been leading this six weeks. But, then, it just suits Lillie; and it’s so sweet and patient of her to come here and give it all up, and say not a word of regret; and then, you see, I shall be just up to my ears in business now, and can’t give up all my time to her, as I have. There’s ever so much law business coming on, and all the factory matters at Spindlewood; and I can see that Lillie will have rather a hard time of it. You must devote yourself to her,Gracie, like a dear, good soul, as you always were, and try to get her interested in our kind of life. Of course, all our set will call, and that will be something; and then—there will be some invitations out.”
“Oh, yes, John! we’ll manage it,” said Grace, who had by this time swallowed her anger, and shouldered her cross once more with a womanly perseverance. “Oh, yes! the Fergusons, and the Wilcoxes, and the Lennoxes, will all call; and we shall have picnics, and lawn teas, and musicals, and parties.”
“Yes, yes, I see,” said John. “Gracie,isn’tshe a dear little thing? Didn’t she look cunning in that white wrapper this morning? How do women do those things, I wonder?” said John. “Don’t you think her manners are lovely?”
“They are very sweet, and she is charmingly pretty,” said Grace; “and I love her dearly.”
“And so affectionate! Don’t you think so?” continued John. “She’s a person that you can do any thing with through her heart. She’s all heart, and very little head. I ought not to say that, either. I think she has fair natural abilities, had they ever been cultivated.”
“My dear John,” said Grace, “you forget what time it is. Good-night!”
“JOHN,” said Grace, “when are you going out again to our Sunday school at Spindlewood? They are all asking after you. Do you know it is now two months since they have seen you?”
“I know it,” said John. “I am going to-morrow. You see, Gracie, I couldn’t well before.”
“Oh! I have told them all about it, and I have kept things up; but then there are so many who want to seeyou, and so many things that you alone could settle and manage.”
“Oh, yes! I’ll go to-morrow,” said John. “And, after this, I shall be steady at it. I wonder if we could get Lillie to go,” said he, doubtfully.
Grace did not answer. Lillie was a subject on which it was always embarrassing to her to be appealed to. She was so afraid of appearing jealous or unappreciative; and her opinions were so different from those of her brother, that it was rather difficult to say any thing.
“Do you think she would like it, Grace?”
“Indeed, John, you must know better than I. Ifanybody could make her take an interest in it, it would be you.”
Before his marriage, John had always had the idea that pretty, affectionate little women were religious and self-denying at heart, as matters of course. No matter through what labyrinths of fashionable follies and dissipation they had been wandering, still a talent for saintship was lying dormant in their natures, which it needed only the touch of love to develop. The wings of the angel were always concealed under the fashionable attire of the belle, and would unfold themselves when the hour came. A nearer acquaintance with Lillie, he was forced to confess, had not, so far, confirmed this idea. Though hers was a face so fair and pure that, when he first knew her, it suggested ideas of prayer, and communion with angels, yet he could not disguise from himself that, in all near acquaintance with her, she had proved to be most remarkably “of the earth, earthy.” She was alive and fervent about fashionable gossip,—of who is who, and what does what; she was alive to equipages, to dress, to sightseeing, to dancing, to any thing of which the whole stimulus and excitement was earthly and physical. At times, too, he remembered that she had talked a sort of pensive sentimentalism, of a slightly religious nature; but the least idea of a moral purpose in life—of self-denial, and devotion to something higher than immediate self-gratification—seemed never to have entered her head. What is more, John had found his attempts to introduce such topics with her always unsuccessful.Lillie either gaped in his face, and asked him what time it was; or playfully pulled his whiskers, and asked him why he didn’t take to the ministry; or adroitly turned the conversation with kissing and compliments.
Sunday morning came, shining down gloriously through the dewy elm-arches of Springdale. The green turf on either side of the wide streets was mottled and flecked with vivid flashes and glimmers of emerald, like the sheen of a changeable silk, as here and there long arrows of sunlight darted down through the leaves and touched the ground.
The gardens between the great shady houses that flanked the street were full of tall white and crimson phloxes in all the majesty of their summer bloom, and the air was filled with fragrance; and Lillie, after a two hours’ toilet, came forth from her chamber fresh and lovely as the bride in the Canticles. “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” She was killingly dressed in the rural-simplicity style. All her robes and sashes were of purest white; and a knot of field-daisies and grasses, with French dew-drops on them, twinkled in an infinitesimal bonnet on her little head, and her hair was allcrépedinto a filmy golden aureole round her face. In short, dear reader, she was a perfectly got-up angel, and wanted only some tulle clouds and an opening heaven to have gone up at once, as similar angels do from the Parisian stage.
“You like me, don’t you?” she said, as she saw the delight in John’s eyes.
John was tempted to lay hold of his plaything.
“Don’t, now,—you’ll crumple me,” she said, fighting him off with a dainty parasol. “Positively you shan’t touch me till after church.”
John laid the little white hand on his arm with pride, and looked down at her over his shoulder all the way to church. He felt proud of her. They would look at her, and see how pretty she was, he thought. And so they did. Lillie had been used to admiration in church. It was one of her fields of triumph. She had received compliments on her toilet even from young clergymen, who, in the course of their preaching and praying, found leisure to observe the beauties of nature and grace in their congregation. She had been quite used to knowing of young men who got good seats in church simply for the purpose of seeing her; consequently, going to church had not the moral advantages for her that it has for people who go simply to pray and be instructed. John saw the turning of heads, and the little movements and whispers of admiration; and his heart was glad within him. The thought of her mingled with prayer and hymn; even when he closed his eyes, and bowed his head, she was there.
Perhaps this was not exactly as it should be; yet let us hope the angels look tenderly down on the sins of too much love. John felt as if he would be glad of a chance to die for her; and, when he thought of her in his prayers, it was because he loved her better than himself.
As to Lillie, there was an extraordinary sympathy of sentiment between them at that moment. John wasthinking only of her; and she was thinking only of herself, as was her usual habit,—herself, the one object of her life, the one idol of her love.
Not that she knew, in so many words, that she, the little, frail bit of dust and ashes that she was, was her own idol, and that she appeared before her Maker, in those solemn walls, to draw to herself the homage and the attention that was due to God alone; but yet it was true that, for years and years, Lillie’s unconfessed yet only motive for appearing in church had been the display of herself, and the winning of admiration.
But is she so much worse than others?—than the clergyman who uses the pulpit and the sacred office to show off his talents?—than the singers who sing God’s praises to show their voices,—who intone the agonies of their Redeemer, or the glories of theTe Deum, confident on the comments of the newspaper press on their performance the next week? No: Lillie may be a little sinner, but not above others in this matter.
“Lillie,” said John to her after dinner, assuming a careless, matter-of-course air, “would you like to drive with me over to Spindlewood, and see my Sunday school?”
“YourSunday school, John? Why, bless me! doyouteach Sunday school?”
“Certainly I do. Grace and I have a school of two hundred children and young people belonging to our factories. I am superintendent.”
“I never did hear of any thing so odd!” said Lillie. “What in the world can you want to take all that troublefor,—go basking over there in the hot sun, and be shut up with a room full of those ill-smelling factory-people? Why, I’m sure it can’t be your duty! I wouldn’t do it for the world. Nothing would tempt me. Why, gracious, John, you might catch small-pox or something!”
“Pooh! Lillie, child, you don’t know any thing about them. They are just as cleanly and respectable as anybody.”
“Oh, well! they may be. But these Irish and Germans and Swedes and Danes, and all that low class, do smell so,—you needn’t tell me, now!—that working-class smell is a thing that can’t be disguised.”
“But, Lillie, these are our people. They are the laborers from whose toils our wealth comes; and we owe them something.”
“Well! you pay them something, don’t you?”
“I mean morally. We owe our efforts to instruct their children, and to elevate and guide them. Lillie, I feel that it is wrong for us to use wealth merely as a means of self-gratification. We ought to labor for those who labor for us. We ought to deny ourselves, and make some sacrifices of ease for their good.”
“You dear old preachy creature!” said Lillie. “How good you must be! But, really, I haven’t the smallest vocation to be a missionary,—not the smallest. I can’t think of any thing that would induce me to take a long, hot ride in the sun, and to sit in that stived-up room with those common creatures.”
John looked grave. “Lillie,” he said, “you shouldn’tspeak of any of your fellow-beings in that heartless way.”
“Well now, if you are going to scold me, I’m sure I don’t want to go. I’m sure, if everybody that stays at home, and has comfortable times, Sundays, instead of going out on missions, is heartless, there are a good many heartless people in the world.”
“I beg your pardon, my darling. I didn’t mean, dear, thatyouwere heartless, but that what you saidsoundedso. I knew you didn’t really mean it. I didn’t ask you, dear, to go towork,—only to be company for me.”
“And I ask you to stay at home, and be company forme. I’m sure it is lonesome enough here, and you are off on business almost all your days; and you might stay with me Sundays. You could hire some poor, pious young man to do all the work over there. There are plenty of them, dear knows, that it would be a real charity to help, and that could preach and pray better than you can, I know. I don’t think a man that is busy all the week ought to work Sundays. It is breaking the Sabbath.”
“But, Lillie, I aminterestedin my Sunday school. I know all my people, and they know me; and no one else in the world could do for them what I could.”
“Well, I should think you might be interested inme:nobody else can do for me what you can, and I want you to stay with me. That’s just the way with you men: you don’t care any thing about us after you get us.”
“Now, Lillie, darling, you know that isn’t so.”
“It’s just so. You care more for your old missionary work, now, than you do for me. I’m sure I never knew that I’d married a home-missionary.”
“Darling, please, now, don’t laugh at me, and try to make me selfish and worldly. You have such power over me, you ought to be my inspiration.”
“I’ll be your common-sense, John. When you get on stilts, and run benevolence into the ground, I’ll pull you down. Now, I know it must be bad for a man, that has as much as you do to occupy his mind all the week, to go out and work Sundays; and it’s foolish, when you could perfectly well hire somebody else to do it, and stay at home, and have a good time.”
“But, Lillie, Ineedit myself.”
“Need it,—what for? I can’t imagine.”
“To keep me from becoming a mere selfish, worldly man, and living for mere material good and pleasure.”
“You dear old Don Quixote! Well, you are altogether in the clouds above me. I can’t understand a word of all that.”
“Well, good-by, darling,” said John, kissing her, and hastening out of the room, to cut short the interview.
Milton has described the peculiar influence of woman over man, in lowering his moral tone, and bringing him down to what he considered the peculiarly womanly level. “You women,” he said to his wife, when she tried to induce him to seek favors at court by some concession of principle,—“you women never care forany thing but to be fine, and to ride in your coaches.” In Father Adam’s description of the original Eve, he says,—
“All higher knowledge in her presence fallsDegraded; wisdom, in discourse with her,Loses, discountenanced, and like folly shows.”
“All higher knowledge in her presence fallsDegraded; wisdom, in discourse with her,Loses, discountenanced, and like folly shows.”
“All higher knowledge in her presence fallsDegraded; wisdom, in discourse with her,Loses, discountenanced, and like folly shows.”
“All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; wisdom, in discourse with her,
Loses, discountenanced, and like folly shows.”
Something like this effect was always produced on John’s mind when he tried to settle questions relating to his higher nature with Lillie. He seemed, somehow, always to get the worst of it. All her womanly graces and fascinations, so powerful over his senses and imagination, arrayed themselves formidably against him, and for the time seemed to strike him dumb. What he believed, and believed with enthusiasm, when he was alone, or with Grace, seemed to drizzle away, and be belittled, when he undertook to convince her of it. Lest John should be called a muff and a spoon for this peculiarity, we cite once more the high authority aforesaid, where Milton makes poor Adam tell the angel,—
“Yet when I approachHer loveliness, so absolute she seemsAnd in herself complete, so well to knowHer own, that what she wills to do or saySeems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“Yet when I approachHer loveliness, so absolute she seemsAnd in herself complete, so well to knowHer own, that what she wills to do or saySeems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“Yet when I approachHer loveliness, so absolute she seemsAnd in herself complete, so well to knowHer own, that what she wills to do or saySeems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“Yet when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
John went out from Lillie’s presence rather humbled and over-crowed. When the woman that a man loves laughs at his moral enthusiasms, it is like a black frost on the delicate tips of budding trees. It is up-hill work, as we all know, to battle with indolence and selfishness, and self-seeking and hard-hearted worldliness. Then the highest and holiest part of our nature has a bashfulnessof its own. It is a heavenly stranger, and easily shamed. A nimble-tongued, skilful woman can so easily show the ridiculous side of what seemed heroism; and what is called common-sense, so generally, is only some neatly put phase of selfishness. Poor John needed the angel at his elbow, to give him the caution which he is represented as giving to Father Adam:—
“What transports thee so?An outside?—fair, no doubt, and worthy wellThy cherishing, thy honor, and thy love,Not thy subjection. Weigh her with thyself,Then value. Oft-times nothing profits moreThan self-esteem, grounded on just and rightWell managed: of that skill the more thou knowest,The more she will acknowledge thee her head,And to realities yield all her shows.”
“What transports thee so?An outside?—fair, no doubt, and worthy wellThy cherishing, thy honor, and thy love,Not thy subjection. Weigh her with thyself,Then value. Oft-times nothing profits moreThan self-esteem, grounded on just and rightWell managed: of that skill the more thou knowest,The more she will acknowledge thee her head,And to realities yield all her shows.”
“What transports thee so?An outside?—fair, no doubt, and worthy wellThy cherishing, thy honor, and thy love,Not thy subjection. Weigh her with thyself,Then value. Oft-times nothing profits moreThan self-esteem, grounded on just and rightWell managed: of that skill the more thou knowest,The more she will acknowledge thee her head,And to realities yield all her shows.”
“What transports thee so?
An outside?—fair, no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honor, and thy love,
Not thy subjection. Weigh her with thyself,
Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed: of that skill the more thou knowest,
The more she will acknowledge thee her head,
And to realities yield all her shows.”
But John had no angel at his elbow. He was a fellow with a great heart,—good as gold,—with upward aspirations, but with slow speech; and, when not sympathized with, he became confused and incoherent, and even dumb. So his only way with his little pink and white empress was immediate and precipitate flight.
Lillie ran to the window when he was gone, and saw him and Grace get into the carriage together; and then she saw them drive to the old Ferguson House, and Rose Ferguson came out and got in with them. “Well,” she said to herself, “he shan’t do that many times more,—I’m resolved.”
No, she did not say it. It would be well for us all if wedidput into words, plain and explicit, many instinctiveresolves and purposes that arise in our hearts, and which, for want of being so expressed, influence us undetected and unchallenged. If we would say out boldly, “I don’t care for right or wrong, or good or evil, or anybody’s rights or anybody’s happiness, or the general good, or God himself,—all I care for, or feel the least interest in, is to have a good time myself, and I mean to do it, come what may,”—we should be only expressing a feeling which often lies in the dark back-room of the human heart; and saying it might alarm us from the drugged sleep of life. It might rouse us to shake off the slow, creeping paralysis of selfishness and sin before it is for ever too late.
But Lillie was a creature who had lost the power of self-knowledge. She was, my dear sir, what you suppose the true woman to be,—a bundle of blind instincts; and among these the strongest was that of property in her husband, and power over him. She had lived in her power over men; it was her field of ambition. She knew them thoroughly. Women are called ivy; and the ivy has a hundred little fingers in every inch of its length, that strike at every flaw and crack and weak place in the strong wall they mean to overgrow; and so had Lillie. She saw, at a glance, that the sober, thoughtful, Christian life of Springdale was wholly opposed to the life she wanted to lead, and in which John was to be her instrument. She saw that, if such women as Grace and Rose had power with him, she should not have; and her husband should be hers alone. He should do her will, and be her subject,—so shethought, smiling at herself as she looked in the looking-glass, and then curled herself peacefully and languidly down in the corner of the sofa, and drew forth the French novel that was her usual Sunday companion.
Lillie liked French novels. There was an atmosphere of things in them that suited her. The young married women had lovers and admirers; and there was the constant stimulus of being courted and adored, under the safe protection of a good-natured “mari.”
In France, the flirting is all done after marriage, and the young girl looks forward to it as her introduction to a career of conquest. In America, so great is our democratic liberality, that we think of uniting the two systems. We are getting on in that way fast. A knowledge of French is beginning to be considered as the pearl of great price, to gain which, all else must be sold. The girls must go to the French theatre, and be stared at by Frenchdébauchées, who laugh at them while they pretend they understand what, thank Heaven, they cannot. Then we are to have series of French novels, carefully translated, and puffed and praised even by the religious press, written by the corps of French female reformers, which will show them exactly how the naughty French women manage their cards; so that, by and by, we shall have the latest phase of eclecticism,—the union of American and French manners. The girl will flirt till twentyà l’Américaine, and then marry and flirt till fortyà la Française. This was about Lillie’s plan of life. Could she hope to carry it out in Springdale?
IT seemed a little like old times to Grace, to be once more going with Rose and John over the pretty romantic road to Spindlewood.
John did not reflect upon how little she now saw of him, and how much of a trial the separation was; but he noticed how bright and almost gay she was, when they were by themselves once more. He was gay too. In the congenial atmosphere of sympathy, his confidence in himself, and his own right in the little controversy that had occurred, returned. Not that he said a word of it; he did not do so, and would not have done so for the world. Grace and Rose were full of anecdotes of this, that, and the other of their scholars; and all the particulars of some of their new movements were discussed. The people had, of their own accord, raised a subscription for a library, which was to be presented to John that day, with a request that he would select the books.
“Gracie, that must be your work,” said John; “you know I shall have an important case next week.”
“Oh, yes! Rose and I will settle it,” said Grace. “Rose, we’ll get the catalogues from all the book-stores, and mark the things.”
“We’ll want books for the children just beginning to read; and then books for the young men in John’s Bible-class, and all the way between,” said Rose. “It will be quite a work to select.”
“And then to bargain with the book-stores, and make the money go ‘far as possible,’” said Grace.
“And then there’ll be the covering of the books,” said Rose. “I’ll tell you. I think I’ll manage to have a lawn tea at our house; and the girls shall all come early, and get the books covered,—that’ll be charming.”
“I think Lillie would like that,” put in John.
“I should be so glad!” said Rose. “What a lovely little thing she is! I hope she’ll like it. I wanted to get up something pretty for her. I think, at this time of the year, lawn teas are a little variety.”
“Oh, she’ll like it of course!” said John, with some sinking of heart about the Sunday-school books.
There were so many pressing to shake hands with John, and congratulate him, so many histories to tell, so many cases presented for consultation, that it was quite late before they got away; and tea had been waiting for them more than an hour when they returned.
Lillie looked pensive, and had that indescribable air of patient martyrdom which some women know how to make so very effective. Lillie had good generalknowledge of the science of martyrdom,—a little spice and flavor of it had been gently infused at times into her demeanor ever since she had been at Springdale. She could do the uncomplaining sufferer with the happiest effect. She contrived to insinuate at times how she didn’t complain,—how dull and slow she found her life, and yet how she endeavored to be cheerful.
“I know,” she said to John when they were by themselves, “that you and Grace both think I’m a horrid creature.”
“Why, no, dearest; indeed we don’t.”
“But you do, though; oh, I feel it! The fact is, John, I haven’t a particle of constitution; and, if I should try to go on as Grace does, it would kill me in a month. Ma never would let me try to do any thing; and, if I did, I was sure to break all down under it: but, if you say so, I’ll try to go into this school.”
“Oh, no, Lillie! I don’t want you to go in. I know, darling, you could not stand any fatigue. I only wanted you to take an interest,—just to go and see them for my sake.”
“Well, John, if you must go, and must keep it up, I must try to go. I’ll go with you next Sunday. It will make my head ache perhaps; but no matter, if you wish it. You don’t think badly of me, do you?” she said coaxingly, playing with his whiskers.
“No, darling, not the least.”
“I suppose it would be a great deal better for you if you had married a strong, energetic woman, like your sister. I do admire her so; but it discourages me.”
“Darling, I’d a thousand times rather have you what you are,” said John; for—
“What she wills to do,Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“What she wills to do,Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“What she wills to do,Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“What she wills to do,
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.”
“O John! come, you ought to be sincere.”
“Sincere, Lillie! I am sincere.”
“You really would rather have poor, poor little me than a woman like Gracie,—a great, strong, energetic woman?” And Lillie laid her soft cheek down on his arm in pensive humility.
“Yes, a thousand million times,” said John in his enthusiasm, catching her in his arms and kissing her. “I wouldn’t for the world have you any thing but the darling little Lillie you are. I love your faults more than the virtues of other women. You are a thousand times better than I am. I am a great, coarse blockhead, compared to you. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings this noon; you know, Lillie, I’m hasty, and apt to be inconsiderate. I don’t really know that I ought to let you go over next Sunday.”
“O John, you are so good! Certainly if you go I ought to; and I shall try my best.” Then John told her all about the books and the lawn tea, and Lillie listened approvingly.
So they had a lawn tea at the Fergusons that week, where Lillie was the cynosure of all eyes. Mr. Mathews, the new young clergyman of Springdale, was there. Mr. Mathews had been credited as one of the admirers of Rose Ferguson; but on this occasion hepromenaded and talked with Lillie, and Lillie alone, with an exclusive devotion.
“What a lovely young creature your new sister is!” he said to Grace. “She seems to have so much religious sensibility.”
“I say, Lillie,” said John, “Mathews seemed to be smitten with you. I had a notion of interfering.”
“Did you ever see any thing like it, John? I couldn’t shake the creature off. I was so thankful when you came up and took me. He’s Rose’s admirer, and he hardly spoke a word to her. I think it’s shameful.”
The next Sunday, Lillie rode over to Spindlewood with John and Rose and Mr. Mathews.
Never had the picturesque of religion received more lustre than from her presence. John was delighted to see how they all gazed at her and wondered. Lillie looked like a first-rate French picture of the youthful Madonna,—white, pure, and patient. The day was hot, and the hall crowded; and John noticed, what he never did before, the close smell and confined air, and it made him uneasy. When we are feeling with the nerves of some one else, we notice every roughness and inconvenience. John thought he had never seen his school appear so little to advantage. Yet Lillie was an image of patient endurance, trying to be pleased; and John thought her, as she sat and did nothing, more of a saint than Rose and Grace, who were laboriously sorting books, and gathering around them large classes of factory boys, to whom they talked with an exhausting devotedness.
When all was over, Lillie sat back on the carriage-cushions, and smelled at her gold vinaigrette.
“You are all worn out, dear,” said John, tenderly.
“It’s no matter,” she said faintly.
“O Lillie darling!doesyour head ache?”
“A little,—you know it was close in there. I’m very sensitive to such things. I don’t think they affect others as they do me,” said Lillie, with the voice of a dying zephyr.
“Lillie,it is not your duty to go,” said John; “if you are not made ill by this, I never will take you again; you are too precious to be risked.”
“How can you say so, John? I’m a poor little creature,—no use to anybody.”
Hereupon John told her that her only use in life was to be lovely and to be loved,—that a thing of beauty was a joy forever, &c., &c. But Lillie was too much exhausted, on her return, to appear at the tea-table. She took to her bed at once with sick headache, to the poignant remorse of John. “You see how it is, Gracie,” he said. “Poor dear little thing, she is willing enough, but there’s nothing of her. We mustn’t allow her to exert herself; her feelings always carry her away.”
The next Sunday, John sat at home with Lillie, who found herself too unwell to go to church, and was in a state of such low spirits as to require constant soothing to keep her quiet.
“It is fortunate that I have you and Rose to trust the school with,” said John; “you see, it’s my first duty to take care of Lillie.”
ONE of the shrewdest and most subtle modern French writers has given his views of womankind in the following passage:—
“There are few women who have not found themselves, at least once in their lives, in regard to some incontestable fact, faced down by precise, keen, searching inquiry,—one of those questions pitilessly put by their husbands, the very idea of which gives a slight chill, and the first word of which enters the heart like a stroke of a dagger. Hence comes the maxim,Every woman lies—obliging lies—venial lies—sublime lies—horrible lies—but always the obligation of lying.“This obligation once admitted, must it not be a necessity to know how to lie well? In France, the women lie admirably. Our customs instruct them so well in imposture. And woman is so naïvely impertinent, so pretty, so graceful, so true, in her lying! They so well understand its usefulness in social life for avoiding those violent shocks which would destroy happiness,—it is like the cotton in which they pack their jewelry.“Lying is to them the very foundation of language,and truth is only the exception; they speak it, as they are virtuous, from caprice or for a purpose. According to their character, some women laugh when they lie, and some cry; some become grave, and others get angry. Having begun life by pretending perfect insensibility to that homage which flatters them most, they often finish by lying even to themselves. Who has not admired their apparent superiority and calm, at the moment when they were trembling for the mysterious treasures of their love? Who has not studied their ease and facility, their presence of mind in the midst of the most critical embarrassments of social life? There is nothing awkward about it; their deception flows as softly as the snow falls from heaven.“Yet there are men that have the presumption to expect to get the better of the Parisian woman!—of the woman who possesses thirty-seven thousand ways of saying ‘No,’ and incommensurable variations in saying ‘Yes.’”
“There are few women who have not found themselves, at least once in their lives, in regard to some incontestable fact, faced down by precise, keen, searching inquiry,—one of those questions pitilessly put by their husbands, the very idea of which gives a slight chill, and the first word of which enters the heart like a stroke of a dagger. Hence comes the maxim,Every woman lies—obliging lies—venial lies—sublime lies—horrible lies—but always the obligation of lying.
“This obligation once admitted, must it not be a necessity to know how to lie well? In France, the women lie admirably. Our customs instruct them so well in imposture. And woman is so naïvely impertinent, so pretty, so graceful, so true, in her lying! They so well understand its usefulness in social life for avoiding those violent shocks which would destroy happiness,—it is like the cotton in which they pack their jewelry.
“Lying is to them the very foundation of language,and truth is only the exception; they speak it, as they are virtuous, from caprice or for a purpose. According to their character, some women laugh when they lie, and some cry; some become grave, and others get angry. Having begun life by pretending perfect insensibility to that homage which flatters them most, they often finish by lying even to themselves. Who has not admired their apparent superiority and calm, at the moment when they were trembling for the mysterious treasures of their love? Who has not studied their ease and facility, their presence of mind in the midst of the most critical embarrassments of social life? There is nothing awkward about it; their deception flows as softly as the snow falls from heaven.
“Yet there are men that have the presumption to expect to get the better of the Parisian woman!—of the woman who possesses thirty-seven thousand ways of saying ‘No,’ and incommensurable variations in saying ‘Yes.’”
This is a Frenchman’s view of life in a country where women are trained more systematically for the mere purposes of attraction than in any other country, and where the pursuit of admiration and the excitement of winning lovers are represented by its authors as constituting the main staple of woman’s existence. France, unfortunately, is becoming the great society-teacher of the world. What with French theatres, French operas, French novels, and the universal rush of American women for travel, France is becoming so powerful onAmerican fashionable society, that the things said of the Parisian woman begin in some cases to apply to some women in America.
Lillie was as precisely the woman here described as if she had been born and bred in Paris. She had all the thirty-seven thousand ways of saying “No,” and the incommensurable variations in saying “Yes,” as completely as the best French teaching could have given it. She possessed, and had used, all that graceful facility, in the story of herself that she had told John in the days of courtship. Her power over him was based on a dangerous foundation of unreality. Hence, during the first few weeks of her wedded life, came a critical scene, in which she was brought in collision with one of those “pitiless questions” our author speaks of.
Her wedding-presents, manifold and brilliant, had remained at home, in the charge of her mother, during the wedding-journey. One bright day, a few weeks after her arrival in Springdale, the boxes containing the treasures were landed there; and John, with all enthusiasm, busied himself with the work of unpacking these boxes, and drawing forth the treasures.
Now, it so happened that Lillie’s maternal grandfather, a nice, pious old gentleman, had taken the occasion to make her the edifying and suggestive present of a large, elegantly bound family Bible.
The binding was unexceptionable; and Lillie assigned it a proper place of honor among her wedding-gear. Alas! she had not looked into it, nor seen what dangers to her power were lodged between its leaves.