man pushing woman down“She saw him, with an angry frown, push Lillie from him.”
“She saw him, with an angry frown, push Lillie from him.”
“Mr. Endicott,” she said, “I have to ask a favor of you. Will you be so good as to excuse me from the ‘German’ to-night, and order my carriage?”
“Why, Miss Ferguson, what is the matter?” he said: “what has come over you? I hope I have not had the misfortune to do any thing to displease you?”
Without replying to this, Rose answered, “I feel very unwell. My head is aching violently, and I cannot go through the rest of the evening. I must go home at once.” She spoke it in a decided tone that admitted of no question.
Without answer, Harry Endicott gave her his arm, accompanied her through the final leave-takings, went with her to the carriage, put her in, and sprang in after her.
Rose sank back on her seat, and remained perfectly silent; and Harry, after a few remarks of his had failed to elicit a reply, rode by her side equally silent through the streets homeward.
He had Mr. Van Astrachan’s latch-key; and, when the carriage stopped, he helped Rose to alight, and went up the steps of the house.
“Miss Ferguson,” he said abruptly, “I have something I want to say to you.”
“Not now, not to-night,” said Rose, hurriedly. “I am too tired; and it is too late.”
“To-morrow then,” he said: “I shall call when you will have had time to be rested. Good-night!”
HARRY did not go back, to lead the “German,” as he had been engaged to do. In fact, in his last apologies to Mrs. Follingsbee, he had excused himself on account of his partner’s sudden indisposition,—a thing which made no small buzz and commotion; though the missing gap, like all gaps great and little in human society, soon found somebody to step into it: and the dance went on just as gayly as if they had been there.
Meanwhile, there were in this good city of New York a couple of sleepless individuals, revolving many things uneasily during the night-watches, or at least that portion of the night-watches that remained after they reached home,—to wit, Mr. Harry Endicott and Miss Rose Ferguson.
What had taken place in that little scene between Lillie and Harry, the termination of which was seen by Rose? We are not going to give a minute description. The public has already been circumstantially instructed by such edifying books as “Cometh up as a Flower,” and others of a like turn, in what manner and in what terms married women can abdicate the dignity of theirsex, and degrade themselves so far as to offer their whole life, and their whole selves, to some reluctant man, with too much remaining conscience or prudence to accept the sacrifice.
It was from some such wild, passionate utterances of Lillie that Harry felt a recoil of mingled conscience, fear, and that disgust which man feels when she, whom God made to be sought, degrades herself to seek. There is no edification and no propriety in highly colored and minute drawing of such scenes of temptation and degradation, though they are the stock and staple of some French novels, and more disgusting English ones made on their model. Harry felt in his own conscience that he had been acting a most unworthy part, that no advances on the part of Lillie could excuse his conduct; and his thoughts went back somewhat regretfully to the days long ago, when she was a fair, pretty, innocent girl, and he had loved her honestly and truly. Unperceived by himself, the character of Rose was exerting a powerful influence over him; and, when he met that look of pain and astonishment which he had seen in her large blue eyes the night before, it seemed to awaken many things within him. It is astonishing how blindly people sometimes go on as to the character of their own conduct, till suddenly, like a torch in a dark place, the light of another person’s opinion is thrown in upon them, and they begin to judge themselves under the quickening influence of another person’s moral magnetism. Then, indeed, it often happens that the graves give up theirdead, and that there is a sort of interior resurrection and judgment.
Harry did not seem to be consciously thinking of Rose, and yet the undertone of all that night’s uneasiness was a something that had been roused and quickened in him by his acquaintance with her. How he loathed himself for the last few weeks of his life! How he loathed that hot, lurid, murky atmosphere of flirtation and passion and French sentimentality in which he had been living!—atmosphere as hard to draw healthy breath in as the odor of wilting tuberoses the day after a party.
Harry valued Rose’s good opinion as he had never valued it before; and, as he thought of her in his restless tossings, she seemed to him something as pure, as wholesome, and strong as the air of his native New-England hills, as the sweet-brier and sweet-fern he used to love to gather when he was a boy. She seemed of a piece with all the good old ways of New England,—its household virtues, its conscientious sense of right, its exact moral boundaries; and he felt somehow as if she belonged to that healthy portion of his life which he now looked back upon with something of regret.
Then, what would she think of him? They had been friends, he said to himself; they had passed over those boundaries of teasing unreality where most young gentlemen and young ladies are content to hold converse with each other, and had talked together reasonably and seriously, saying in some hours what they really thought and felt. And Rose had impressed himat times by her silence and reticence in certain connections, and on certain subjects, with a sense of something hidden and veiled,—a reserved force that he longed still further to penetrate. But now, he said to himself, he must have fallen in her opinion. Why was she so cold, so almost haughty, in her treatment of him the night before? He felt in the atmosphere around her, and in the touch of her hand, that she was quivering like a galvanic battery with the suppressed force of some powerful emotion; and his own conscience dimly interpreted to him what it might be.
To say the truth, Rose was terribly aroused. And there was a great deal in her to be aroused, for she had a strong nature; and the whole force of womanhood in her had never received such a shock.
Whatever may be scoffingly said of the readiness of women to pull one another down, it is certain that the highest class of them have the feminineesprit de corpsimmensely strong. The humiliation of another woman seems to them their own humiliation; and man’s lordly contempt for another woman seems like contempt of themselves.
The deepest feeling roused in Rose by the scenes which she saw last night was concern for the honor of womanhood; and her indignation at first did not strike where we are told woman’s indignation does, on the woman, but on the man. Loving John Seymour as a brother from her childhood, feeling in the intimacy in which they had grown up as if their families had been one, the thoughts that had beenforced upon her of his wife the night before had struck to her heart with the weight of a terrible affliction. She judged Lillie as a pure woman generally judges another,—out of herself,—and could not and would not believe that the gross and base construction which had been put upon her conduct was the true one. She looked upon her as led astray by inordinate vanity, and the hopeless levity of an undeveloped, unreflecting habit of mind. She was indignant with Harry for the part that he had taken in the affair, and indignant and vexed with herself for the degree of freedom and intimacy which she had been suffering to grow up between him and herself. Her first impulse was to break it off altogether, and have nothing more to say to or do with him. She felt as if she would like to take the short course which young girls sometimes take out of the first serious mortification or trouble in their life, and run away from it altogether. She would have liked to have packed her trunk, taken her seat on board the cars, and gone home to Springdale the next day, and forgotten all about the whole of it; but then, what should she say to Mrs. Van Astrachan? what account could she give for the sudden breaking up of her visit?
Then, there was Harry going to call on her the next day! What ought she to say to him? On the whole, it was a delicate matter for a young girl of twenty to manage alone. How she longed to have the counsel of her sister or her mother! She thought of Mrs. Van Astrachan; but then, again, she did not wish to disturbthat good lady’s pleasant, confidential relations with Harry, and tell tales of him out of school: so, on the whole, she had a restless and uncomfortable night of it.
Mrs. Van Astrachan expressed her surprise at seeing Rose take her place at the breakfast-table the next morning. “Dear me!” she said, “I was just telling Jane to have some breakfast kept for you. I had no idea of seeing you down at this time.”
“But,” said Rose, “I gave out entirely, and came away only an hour after you did. The fact is, we country girls can’t stand this sort of thing. I had such a terrible headache, and felt so tired and exhausted, that I got Mr. Endicott to bring me away before the ‘German.’”
“Bless me!” said Mr. Van Astrachan; “why, you’re not at all up to snuff! Why, Polly, you and I used to stick it out till daylight! didn’t we?”
“Well, you see, Mr. Van Astrachan, I hadn’t anybody like you to stick it out with,” said Rose. “Perhaps that made the difference.”
“Oh, well, now, I am sure there’s our Harry! I am sure a girl must be difficult, if he doesn’t suit her for a beau,” said the good gentleman.
“Oh, Mr. Endicott is all well enough!” said Rose; “only, you observe, not precisely to me what you were to the lady you call Polly,—that’s all.”
“Ha, ha!” laughed Mr. Van Astrachan. “Well, to be sure, that does make a difference; but Harry’s a nice fellow, nice fellow, Miss Rose: not many fellows like him, as I think.”
“Yes, indeed,” chimed in Mrs. Van Astrachan. “I haven’t a son in the world that I think more of than I do of Harry; he has such a good heart.”
Now, the fact was, this eulogistic strain that the worthy couple were very prone to fall into in speaking of Harry to Rose was this morning most especially annoying to her; and she turned the subject at once, by chattering so fluently, and with such minute details of description, about the arrangements of the rooms and the flowers and the lamps and the fountains and the cascades, and all the fairy-land wonders of the Follingsbee party, that the good pair found themselves constrained to be listeners during the rest of the time devoted to the morning meal.
It will be found that good young ladies, while of course they have all the innocence of the dove, do display upon emergencies a considerable share of the wisdom of the serpent. And on this same mother wit and wisdom, Rose called internally, when that day, about eleven o’clock, she was summoned to the library, to give Harry his audience.
Truth to say, she was in a state of excited womanhood vastly becoming to her general appearance, and entered the library with flushed cheeks and head erect, like one prepared to stand for herself and for her sex.
Harry, however, wore a mortified, semi-penitential air, that, on the first glance, rather mollified her. Still, however, she was not sufficiently clement to give him the least assistance in opening the conversation, by the suggestions of any of those nice little oily nothings withwhich ladies, when in a gracious mood, can smooth the path for a difficult confession.
She sat very quietly, with her hands before her, while Harry walked tumultuously up and down the room.
“Miss Ferguson,” he said at last, abruptly, “I know you are thinking ill of me.”
Miss Ferguson did not reply.
“I had hoped,” he said, “that there had been a little something more than mere acquaintance between us. I had hoped you looked upon me as a friend.”
“I did, Mr. Endicott,” said Rose.
“And you do not now?”
“I cannot say that,” she said, after a pause; “but, Mr. Endicott, if we are friends, you must give me the liberty to speak plainly.”
“That’s exactly what I want you to do!” he said impetuously; “that is just what I wish.”
“Allow me to ask, then, if you are an early friend, and family connection of Mrs. John Seymour?”
“I was an early friend, and am somewhat of a family connection.”
“That is, I understand there has been a ground in your past history for you to be on a footing of a certain family intimacy with Mrs. Seymour; in that case, Mr. Endicott, I think you ought to have considered yourself the guardian of her honor and reputation, and not allowed her to be compromised on your account.”
The blood flushed into Harry’s face; and he stood abashed and silent. Rose went on,—
“I was shocked, I was astonished, last night, because I could not help overhearing the most disagreeable, the most painful remarks on you and her,—remarks most unjust, I am quite sure, but for which I fear you have given too much reason!”
“Miss Ferguson,” said Harry, stopping as he walked up and down, “I confess I have been wrong and done wrong; but, if you knew all, you might see how I have been led into it. That woman has been the evil fate of my life. Years ago, when we were both young, I loved her as honestly as man could love a woman; and she professed to love me in return. But I was poor; and she would not marry me. She sent me off, yet she would not let me forget her. She would always write to me just enough to keep up hope and interest; and she knew for years that all my object in striving for fortune was to win her. At last, when a lucky stroke made me suddenly rich, and I came home to seek her, I found her married,—married, as she owns, without love,—married for wealth and ambition. I don’t justify myself,—I don’t pretend to; but when she met me with her old smiles and her old charms, and told me she loved me still, it roused the very devil in me. I wanted revenge. I wanted to humble her, and make her suffer all she had made me; and I didn’t care what came of it.”
Harry spoke, trembling with emotion; and Rose felt almost terrified with the storm she had raised.
“O Mr. Endicott!” she said, “was this worthy of you? was there nothing better, higher, more manlythan this poor revenge? You men are stronger than we: you have the world in your hands; you have a thousand resources where we have only one. And you ought to be stronger and nobler according to your advantages; you ought to rise superior to the temptations that beset a poor, weak, ill-educated woman, whom everybody has been flattering from her cradle, and whom you, I dare say, have helped to flatter, turning her head with compliments, like all the rest of them. Come, now, is not there something in that?”
“Well, I suppose,” said Harry, “that when Lillie and I were girl and boy together, I did flatter her, sincerely that is. Her beauty made a fool of me; and I helped make a fool of her.”
“And I dare say,” said Rose, “you told her that all she was made for was to be charming, and encouraged her to live the life of a butterfly or canary-bird. Did you ever try to strengthen her principles, to educate her mind, to make her strong? On the contrary, haven’t you been bowing down and adoring her for being weak? It seems to me that Lillie is exactly the kind of woman that you men educate, by the way you look on women, and the way you treat them.”
Harry sat in silence, ruminating.
“Now,” said Rose, “it seems to me it’s the most cowardly and unmanly thing in the world for men, with every advantage in their hands, with all the strength that their kind of education gives them, with all their opportunities,—a thousand to our one,—to hunt downthese poor little silly women, whom society keeps stunted and dwarfed for their special amusement.”
“Miss Ferguson, you are very severe,” said Harry, his face flushing.
“Well,” said Rose, “you have this advantage, Mr. Endicott: you know, if I am, the world will not be. Everybody will take your part; everybody will smile on you, and condemn her. That is generous, is it not? I think, after all, Noah Claypole isn’t so very uncommon a picture of the way that your lordly sex turn round and cast all the blame on ours. You will never make me believe in a protracted flirtation between a gentleman and lady, where at least half the blame does not lie on his lordship’s side. I always said that a woman had no need to have offers made her by a man she could not love, if she conducted herself properly; and I think the same is true in regard to men. But then, as I said before, you have the world on your side; nine persons out of ten see no possible harm in a man’s taking every advantage of a woman, if she will let him.”
“But I care more for the opinion of the tenth person than of the nine,” said Harry; “I care more for what you think than any of them. Your words are severe; but I think they are just.”
“O Mr. Endicott!” said Rose, “live for something higher than for what I think,—than for what any one thinks. Think how many glorious chances there are for a noble career for a young man with your fortune, with your leisure, with your influence! is it for you towaste life in this unworthy way? If I had your chances, I would try to do something worth doing.”
Rose’s face kindled with enthusiasm; and Harry looked at her with admiration.
“Tell me what I ought to do!” he said.
“I cannot tell you,” said Rose; “but where there is a will there is a way: and, if you have the will, you will find the way. But, first, you must try and repair the mischief you have done to Lillie. By your own account of the matter, you have been encouraging and keeping up a sort of silly, romantic excitement in her. It is worse than silly; it is sinful. It is trifling with her best interests in this life and the life to come. And I think you must know that, if you had treated her like an honest, plain-spoken brother or cousin, without any trumpery of gallantry or sentiment, things would have never got to be as they are. You could have prevented all this; and you can put an end to it now.”
“Honestly, I will try,” said Harry. “I will begin, by confessing my faults like a good boy, and take the blame on myself where it belongs, and try to make Lillie see things like a good girl. But she is in bad surroundings; and, if I were her husband, I wouldn’t let her stay there another day. There are no morals in that circle; it’s all a perfect crush of decaying garbage.”
“I think,” said Rose, “that, if this thing goes no farther, it will gradually die out even in that circle; and, in the better circles of New York, I trust it will not be heard of. Mrs. Van Astrachan and I will appear publicly with Lillie; and if she is seen with us, and atthis house, it will be sufficient to contradict a dozen slanders. She has the noblest, kindest husband,—one of the best men and truest gentlemen I ever knew.”
“I pity him then,” said Harry.
“He is to be pitied,” said Rose; “but his work is before him. This woman, such as she is, with all her faults, he has taken for better or for worse; and all true friends and good people, both his and hers, should help both sides to make the best of it.”
“I should say,” said Harry, “that there is in this no best side.”
“I think you do Lillie injustice,” said Rose. “There is, and must be, good in every one; and gradually the good in him will overcome the evil in her.”
“Let us hope so,” said Harry. “And now, Miss Ferguson, may I hope that you won’t quite cross my name out of your good book? You’ll be friends with me, won’t you?”
“Oh, certainly!” said Rose, with a frank smile.
“Well, let’s shake hands on that,” said Harry, rising to go.
Rose gave him her hand, and the two parted in all amity.
HARRY went straightway from the interview to call upon Lillie, and had a conversation with her; in which he conducted himself like a sober, discreet, and rational man. It was one of those daylight, matter-of-fact kinds of talks, with no nonsense about them, in which things are called by their right names. He confessed his own sins, and took upon his own shoulders the blame that properly belonged there; and, having thus cleared his conscience, took occasion to give Lillie a deal of grandfatherly advice, of a very sedative tendency.
They had both been very silly, he said; and the next step to being silly very often was to be wicked. For his part, he thought she ought to be thankful for so good a husband; and, for his own part, he should lose no time in trying to find a good wife, who would help him to be a good man, and do something worth doing in the world. He had given people occasion to say ill-natured things about her; and he was sorry for it. But, if they stopped being imprudent, the world wouldin time stop talking. He hoped, some of these days, to bring his wife down to see her, and to make the acquaintance of her husband, whom he knew to be a capital fellow, and one that she ought to be proud of.
Thus, by the intervention of good angels, the little paper-nautilus bark of Lillie’s fortunes was prevented from going down in the great ugly maelstrom, on the verge of which it had been so heedlessly sailing.
Harry was not slow in pushing the advantage of his treaty of friendship with Rose to its utmost limits; and, being a young gentleman of parts and proficiency, he made rapid progress.
The interview of course immediately bred the necessity for at least a dozen more; for he had to explain this thing, and qualify that, and, on reflection, would find by the next day that the explanation and qualification required a still further elucidation. Rose also, after the first conversation was over, was troubled at her own boldness, and at the things that she in her state of excitement had said; and so was only too glad to accord interviews and explanations as often as sought, and, on the whole, was in the most favorable state towards her penitent.
Hence came many calls, and many conferences with Rose in the library, to Mrs. Van Astrachan’s great satisfaction, and concerning which Mr. Van Astrachan had many suppressed chuckles and knowing winks at Polly.
“Now, pa, don’t you say a word,” said Mrs. Van Astrachan.
“Oh, no, Polly! catch me! I see a great deal, but I say nothing,” said the good gentleman, with a jocular quiver of his portly person. “I don’t say any thing,—oh, no! by no manner of means.”
Neither at present did Harry; neither do we.
THE poet has feelingly sung the condition of
“The banquet hall deserted,Whose lights are fled, and garlands dead,” &c.,
“The banquet hall deserted,Whose lights are fled, and garlands dead,” &c.,
“The banquet hall deserted,Whose lights are fled, and garlands dead,” &c.,
“The banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled, and garlands dead,” &c.,
and so we need not cast the daylight of minute description on the Follingsbee mansion.
Charlie Ferrola, however, was summoned away at early daylight, just as the last of the revellers were dispersing, by a hurried messenger from his wife; and, a few moments after he entered his house, he was standing beside his dying baby,—the little fellow whom we have seen brought down on Mrs. Ferrola’s arm, to greet the call of Mrs. Follingsbee.
It is an awful thing for people of the flimsy, vain, pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking character of Charlie Ferrola, to be taken at times, as such people will be, in the grip of an inexorable power, and held face to face with the sternest, the most awful, the most frightful realities of life. Charlie Ferrola was one of those whose softness and pitifulness, like that of sentimentalists generally, was only one form of intense selfishness. Thesight of suffering pained him; and his first impulse was to get out of the way of it. Suffering that he did not see was nothing to him; and, if his wife or children were in any trouble, he would have liked very well to have known nothing about it.
But here he was, by the bedside of this little creature, dying in the agonies of slow suffocation, rolling up its dark, imploring eyes, and lifting its poor little helpless hands; and Charlie Ferrola broke out into the most violent and extravagant demonstrations of grief.
The pale, firm little woman, who had watched all night, and in whose tranquil face a light as if from heaven was beaming, had to assume the care of him, in addition to that of her dying child. He was another helpless burden on her hands.
There came a day when the house was filled with white flowers, and people came and went, and holy words were spoken; and the fairest flower of all was carried out, to return to the house no more.
“That woman is a most unnatural and peculiar woman!” said Mrs. Follingsbee, who had been most active and patronizing in sending flowers, and attending to the scenic arrangements of the funeral. “It is just what I always said: she is a perfect statue; she’s no kind of feeling. There was Charlie, poor fellow! so sick that he had to go to bed, perfectly overcome, and have somebody to sit up with him; and there was that woman never shed a tear,—went round attending to every thing, just like a piece of clock-work. Well, Isuppose people are happier for being made so; people that have no sensibility are better fitted to get through the world. But, gracious me! I can’t understand such people. There she stood at the grave, looking so calm, when Charlie was sobbing so that he could hardly hold himself up. Well, it really wasn’t respectable. I think, at least, I would keep my veil down, and keep my handkerchief up. Poor Charlie! he came to me at last; and I gave way. I was completely broken down, I must confess. Poor fellow! he told me there was no conceiving his misery. That baby was the very idol of his soul; all his hopes of life were centred in it. He really felt tempted to rebel at Providence. He said that he really could not talk with his wife on the subject. He could not enter into her submission at all; it seemed to him like a want of feeling. He said of course it wasn’t her fault that she was made one way and he another.”
In fact, Mr. Charlie Ferrola took to the pink satin boudoir with a more languishing persistency than ever, requiring to be stayed with flagons, and comforted with apples, and receiving sentimental calls of condolence from fair admirers, made aware of the intense poignancy of his grief. A lovely poem, called “My Withered Blossom,” which appeared in a fashionable magazine shortly after, was the out-come of this experience, and increased the fashionable sympathy to the highest degree.
Honest Mrs. Van Astrachan, however, though not acquainted with Mrs. Ferrola, went to the funeral withRose; and the next day her carriage was seen at Mrs. Ferrola’s door.
“You poor little darling!” she said, as she came up and took Mrs. Ferrola in her arms. “You must let me come, and not mind me; for I know all about it. I lost the dearest little baby once; and I have never forgotten it. There! there, darling!” she said, as the little woman broke into sobs in her arms. “Yes, yes; do cry! it will do your little heart good.”
There are people who, wherever they move, freeze the hearts of those they touch, and chill all demonstration of feeling; and there are warm natures, that unlock every fountain, and bid every feeling gush forth. The reader has seen these two types in this story.
“Wife,” said Mr. Van Astrachan, coming to Mrs. V. confidentially a day or two after, “I wonder if you remember any of your French. What is aliaison?”
“Really, dear,” said Mrs. Van Astrachan, whose reading of late years had been mostly confined to such memoirs as that of Mrs. Isabella Graham, Doddridge’s “Rise and Progress,” and Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest,” “it’s a great while since I read any French. What do you want to know for?”
“Well, there’s Ben Stuyvesant was saying this morning, in Wall Street, that there’s a great deal of talk about that Mrs. Follingsbee and that young fellow whose baby’s funeral you went to. Ben says there’s aliaisonbetween her and him. I didn’t ask him what ’twas;but it’s something or other with a French name that makes talk, and I don’t think it’s respectable! I’m sorry that you and Rose went to her party; but then that can’t be helped now. I’m afraid this Mrs. Follingsbee is no sort of a woman, after all.”
“But, pa, I’ve been to call on Mrs. Ferrola, poor little afflicted thing!” said Mrs. Van Astrachan. “I couldn’t help it! You know how we felt when little Willie died.”
“Oh, certainly, Polly! call on the poor woman by all means, and do all you can to comfort her; but, from all I can find out, that handsome jackanapes of a husband of hers is just the poorest trash going. They say this Follingsbee woman half supports him. The time was in New York when such doings wouldn’t be allowed; and I don’t think calling things by French names makes them a bit better. So you just be careful, and steer as clear of her as you can.”
“I will, pa, just as clear as I can; but you know Rose is a friend of Mrs. John Seymour; and Mrs. Seymour is visiting at Mrs. Follingsbee’s.”
“Her husband oughtn’t to let her stay there another day,” said Mr. Van Astrachan. “It’s as much as any woman’s reputation is worth to be staying with her. To think of that fellow being dancing and capering at that Jezebel’s house the night his baby was dying!”
“Oh, but, pa, he didn’t know it.”
“Know it? he ought to have known it! What business has a man to get a woman with a lot of babies round her, and then go capering off? ’Twasn’t the wayI did, Polly, you know, when our babies were young. I was always on the spot there, ready to take the baby, and walk up and down with it nights, so that you might get your sleep; and I always had it my side of the bed half the night. I’d like to have seen myself out at a ball, and you sitting up with a sick baby! I tell you, that if I caught any of my boys up to such tricks, I’d cut them out of my will, and settle the money on their wives;—that’s what I would!”
“Well, pa, I shall try and do all in my power for poor Mrs. Ferrola,” said Mrs. Van Astrachan; “and you may be quite sure I won’t take another step towards Mrs. Follingsbee’s acquaintance.”
“It’s a pity,” said Mr. Van Astrachan, “that somebody couldn’t put it into Mr. John Seymour’s head to send for his wife home.
“I don’t see, for my part, what respectable women want to be gallivanting and high-flying on their own separate account for, away from their husbands! Goods that are sold shouldn’t go back to the shop-windows,” said the good gentleman, all whose views of life were of the most old-fashioned, domestic kind.
“Well, dear, we don’t want to talk to Rose about any of this scandal,” said his wife.
“No, no; it would be a pity to put any thing bad into a nice girl’s head,” said Mr. Van Astrachan. “You might caution her in a general way, you know; tell her, for instance, that I’ve heard of things that make me feel you ought to draw off. Why can’t some bird of theair tell that little Seymour woman’s husband to get her home?”
The little Seymour woman’s husband, though not warned by any particular bird of the air, was not backward in taking steps for the recall of his wife, as shall hereafter appear.
SOME weeks had passed in Springdale while these affairs had been going on in New York. The time for the marriage of Grace had been set; and she had gone to Boston to attend to that preparatory shopping which even the most sensible of the sex discover to be indispensable on such occasions.
Grace inclined, in the centre of her soul, to Bostonian rather than New-York preferences. She had the innocent impression that a classical severity and a rigid reticence of taste pervaded even the rebellious department of feminine millinery in the city of the Pilgrims,—an idea which we rather think young Boston would laugh down as an exploded superstition, young Boston’s leading idea at the present hour being apparently to outdo New York in New York’s imitation of Paris.
In fact, Grace found it very difficult to find a milliner who, if left to her own devices, would not befeather and beflower her past all self-recognition, giving to her that generally betousled and fly-away air which comes straight from thedemi-mondeof Paris.
We apprehend that the recent storms of tribulationwhich have beat upon those fairy islands of fashion may scatter this frail and fanciful population, and send them by shiploads on missions of civilization to our shores; in which case, the bustle and animation and the brilliant display on the old turnpike, spoken of familiarly as the “broad road,” will be somewhat increased.
Grace however managed, by the exercise of a good individual taste, to come out of these shopping conflicts in good order,—a handsome, well-dressed, charming woman, with everybody’s best wishes for, and sympathy in, her happiness.
Lillie was summoned home by urgent messages from her husband, calling her back to take her share in wedding festivities.
She left willingly; for the fact is that her last conversation with her cousin Harry had made the situation as uncomfortable to her as if he had unceremoniously deluged her with a pailful of cold water.
There is a chilly, disagreeable kind of article, called common sense, which is of all things most repulsive and antipathetical to all petted creatures whose life has consisted in flattery. It is the kind of talk which sisters are very apt to hear from brothers, and daughters from fathers and mothers, when fathers and mothers do their duty by them; which sets the world before them as it is, and not as it is painted by flatterers. Those women who prefer the society of gentlemen, and who have the faculty of bewitching their senses, never are in the way of hearing from this cold matter-of-fact region; for them it really does not exist. Every phrase that meets theirear is polished and softened, guarded and delicately turned, till there is not a particle of homely truth left in it. They pass their time in a world of illusions; they demand these illusions of all who approach them, as the sole condition of peace and favor. All gentlemen, by a sort of instinct, recognize the woman who lives by flattery, and give her her portion of meat in due season; and thus some poor women are hopelessly buried, as suicides used to be in Scotland, under a mountain of rubbish, to which each passer-by adds one stone. It is only by some extraordinary power of circumstances that a man can be found to invade the sovereignty of a pretty woman with any disagreeable tidings; or, as Junius says, “to instruct the throne in the language of truth.” Harry was brought up to this point only by such a concurrence of circumstances. He was in love with another woman,—a ready cause for disenchantment. He was in some sort a family connection; and he saw Lillie’s conduct at last, therefore, through the plain, unvarnished medium of common sense. Moreover, he felt a little pinched in his own conscience by the view which Rose seemed to take of his part in the matter, and, manlike, was strengthened in doing his duty by being a little galled and annoyed at the woman whose charms had tempted him into this dilemma. So he talked to Lillie like a brother; or, in other words, made himself disagreeably explicit,—showed her her sins, and told her her duties as a married woman. The charming fair ones who sentimentally desire gentlemen to regard them as sisters do not bargain for any of thissort of brotherly plainness; and yet they might do it with great advantage. A brother, who is not a brother, stationed near the ear of a fair friend, is commonly very careful not to compromise his position by telling unpleasant truths; but, on the present occasion, Harry made a literal use of the brevet of brotherhood which Lillie had bestowed on him, and talked to her as the generality ofrealbrothers talk to their sisters, using great plainness of speech. He withered all her poor little trumpery array of hothouse flowers of sentiment, by treating them as so much garbage, as all men know they are. He set before her the gravity and dignity of marriage, and her duties to her husband. Last, and most unkind of all, he professed his admiration of Rose Ferguson, his unworthiness of her, and his determination to win her by a nobler and better life; and then showed himself to be a stupid blunderer by exhorting Lillie to make Rose her model, and seek to imitate her virtues.
Poor Lillie! the world looked dismal and dreary enough to her. She shrunk within herself. Every thing was withered and disenchanted. All her poor little stock of romance seemed to her as disgusting as the withered flowers and crumpled finery and half-melted ice-cream the morning after a ball.
In this state, when she got a warm, true letter from John, who always grew tender and affectionate when she was long away, couched in those terms of admiration and affection that were soothing to her ear, she really longed to go back to him. She shrunk from thedreary plainness of truth, and longed for flattery and petting and caresses once more; and she wrote to John an overflowingly tender letter, full of longings, which brought him at once to her side, the most delighted of men. When Lillie cried in his arms, and told him that she found New York perfectly hateful; when she declaimed on the heartlessness of fashionable life, and longed to go with him to their quiet home,—she was tolerably in earnest; and John was perfectly enchanted.
Poor John! Was he a muff, a spoon? We think not. We understand well that there is not awomanamong our readers who has the slightest patience with Lillie, and that the most of them are half out of patience with John for his enduring tenderness towards her.
But men were born and organized by nature to be the protectors of women; and, generally speaking, the stronger and more thoroughly manly a man is, the more he has of what phrenologists call the “pet organ,”—the disposition which makes him the charmed servant of what is weak and dependent. John had a great share of this quality. He was made to be a protector. He loved to protect; he loved every thing that was helpless and weak,—young animals, young children, and delicate women.
He was a romantic adorer of womanhood, as a sort of divine mystery,—a never-ending poem; and when his wife was long enough away from him to give scope for imagination to work, when she no longer annoyed him with the friction of the sharp little edges of her cold and selfish nature, he was able to see her once morein the ideal light of first love. After all, she was his wife; and in that one word, to a good man, is every thing holy and sacred. He longed to believe in her and trust her wholly; and now that Grace was going from him, to belong to another, Lillie was more than ever his dependence.
On the whole, if we must admit that John was weak, he was weak where strong and noble natures may most gracefully be so,—weak through disinterestedness, faith, and the disposition to make the best of the wife he had chosen.
And so Lillie came home; and there was festivity and rejoicing. Grace found herself floated into matrimony on a tide bringing gifts and tokens of remembrance from everybody that had ever known her; for all were delighted with this opportunity of testifying a sense of her worth, and every hand was ready to help ring her wedding bells.
IT is supposed by some that to become a mother is of itself a healing and saving dispensation; that of course the reign of selfishness ends, and the reign of better things begins, with the commencement of maternity.
But old things do not pass away and all things become new by any such rapid process of conversion. A whole life spent in self-seeking and self-pleasing is no preparation for the most august and austere of woman’s sufferings and duties; and it is not to be wondered at if the untrained, untaught, and self-indulgent shrink from this ordeal, as Lillie did.
The next spring, while the gables of the new cottage on Elm Street were looking picturesquely through the blossoming cherry-trees, and the smoke was curling up from the chimneys where Grace and her husband were cosily settled down together, there came to John’s house another little Lillie.
The little creature came in terror and trembling. For the mother had trifled fearfully with the great lawsof her being before its birth; and the very shadow of death hung over her at the time the little new life began.
Lillie’s mother, now a widow, was sent for, and by this event installed as a fixture in her daughter’s dwelling; and for weeks the sympathies of all the neighborhood were concentrated upon the sufferer. Flowers and fruits were left daily at the door. Every one was forward in offering those kindly attentions which spring up so gracefully in rural neighborhoods. Everybody was interested for her. She was little and pretty and suffering; and people even forgot to blame her for the levities that had made her present trial more severe. As to John, he watched over her day and night with anxious assiduity, forgetting every fault and foible. She was now more than the wife of his youth; she was the mother of his child, enthroned and glorified in his eyes by the wonderful and mysterious experiences which had given this new little treasure to their dwelling.
To say the truth, Lillie was too sick and suffering for sentiment. It requires a certain amount of bodily strength and soundness to feel emotions of love; and, for a long time, the little Lillie had to be banished from the mother’s apartment, as she lay weary in her darkened room, with only a consciousness of a varied succession of disagreeables and discomforts. Her general impression about herself was, that she was a much abused and most unfortunate woman; and that all that could ever be done by the utmost devotion of everybodyin the house was insufficient to make up for such trials as had come upon her.
A nursing mother was found for the little Lillie in the person of a goodly Irish woman, fair, fat, and loving; and the real mother had none of those awakening influences, from the resting of the little head in her bosom, and the pressure of the little helpless fingers, which magnetize into existence the blessed power of love.
She had wasted in years of fashionable folly, and in a life led only for excitement and self-gratification, all the womanly power, all the capability of motherly giving and motherly loving that are the glory of womanhood. Kathleen, the white-armed, the gentle-bosomed, had all the simple pleasures, the tendernesses, the poetry of motherhood; while poor, faded, fretful Lillie had all the prose—the sad, hard, weary prose—of sickness and pain, unglorified by love.
John did not well know what to do with himself in Lillie’s darkened room; where it seemed to him he was always in the way, always doing something wrong; where his feet always seemed too large and heavy, and his voice too loud; and where he was sure, in his anxious desire to be still and gentle, to upset something, or bring about some general catastrophe, and to go out feeling more like a criminal than ever.
The mother and the nurse, stationed there like a pair of chief mourners, spoke in tones which experienced feminine experts seem to keep for occasions like these, and which, as Hawthorne has said, give an effect asif the voice had been dyed black. It was a comfort and relief to pass from the funeral gloom to the little pink-ruffled chamber among the cherry-trees, where the birds were singing and the summer breezes blowing, and the pretty Kathleen was crooning her Irish songs, and invoking the holy virgin and all the saints to bless the “darlin’” baby.