Women, no doubt, undergo many wrongs, and are obliged to suffer many hardships, but seldom they alone. It is a world of trial, a world in which there are wrongs of all sorts, and sufferings of all kinds. We have lost paradise, and cannot regain it in this world. We must go through the valley of the shadow of death before re-entering it. You cannot make earth heaven, and there is no use in trying; and least of all can you do it by political means. It is hard for the poor wife to have to maintain a lazy, idle, drunken vagabond of a husband, and three or four children into the bargain; it is hard for the wife delicately reared, accomplished, fitted to adorn the most intellectual, graceful, and polished society, accustomed to every luxury that wealth can procure, to find herself a widow reduced to poverty, and a family of young children to support, and unable to obtain any employment for which she is fitted as the means of supporting them. But men suffer too. It is no less hard for the poor, industrious, hardworking man to find what he earns wasted by an idle, extravagant, incompetent, and heedless wife, who prefers gadding and gossiping to taking care of her household. And how much easier is it for the man who is reduced from affluence to poverty, a widower with three or four motherless children to provide for? The reduction from affluence to poverty is sometimes the fault of the wife as well as of the husband. It is usually their joint fault. Women have wrongs, so have men; but a woman has as much power to make a man miserable as a man has to make a woman miserable; and she tyrannizes over him as often as he does over her. If he has more power of attack, nature has given her more power of defence. Her tongue is as formidable a weapon as his fists, and she knows well how, by her seeming meekness, gentleness, and apparent martyrdom, to work on his feelings, to enlist the sympathy of the neighborhood on her side and against him. Women are neither so wronged nor so helpless asThe Revolutionpretends. Men can be brutal, and women can tease and provoke.
But let the evils be as great as they may, and women as greatly wronged as is pretended, what can female suffrage and eligibility do by way of relieving them? All modern methods of reform are very much like dram-drinking. The dram needs to be constantly increased in frequency and quantity, while the prostration grows greater and greater, till the drinker gets thedelirium tremens, becomes comatose, and dies. The extension of suffrage in modern times has cured or lessened no social or moral evil; and under it, as under any other political system, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer. Double the dram, enfranchise the women, give them the political right to vote and be voted for; what single moral or social evil will it prevent or cure? Will it make the drunken husband temperate, the lazy and idle industrious and diligent? Will it prevent the ups and downs of life, the fall from affluence to poverty, keep death out of the house, and prevent widowhood and orphanage? These things are beyond the reach of politics. You cannot legislate men or women into virtue, into sobriety, industry, providence. The doubled dram would only introduce a double poison into the system, a new element of discord into the family, and through the family into society, and hasten the moment of dissolution. When a false principle of reform is adopted, the evil sought to be cured is only aggravated. The reformers started wrong.They would reform the church by placing her under human control. Their successors have in each generation found they did not go far enough, and have, each in its turn, struggled to push it farther and farther, till they find themselves without any church life, without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be even a God. So, in politics, we have pushed the false principle that all individual, domestic, and social evils are due to bad government, and are to be cured by political reforms and changes, till we have nearly reformed away all government, at least, in theory; have well-nigh abolished the family, which is the social unit; and find that the evils we sought to cure, and the wrongs we sought to redress, continue undiminished. We cry out in our delirium for another and a larger dram. When you proceed on a true principle, the more logically and completely you carry it out the better; but when you start with a false principle, the more logical you are, and the farther you push it, the worse. Your consistency increases instead of diminishing the evils you would cure.
The conclusive objection to the political enfranchisement of women is, that it would weaken and finally break up and destroy the Christian family. The social unit is the family, not the individual; and the greatest danger to American society is, that we are rapidly becoming a nation of isolated individuals, without family ties or affections. The family has already been much weakened, and is fast disappearing. We have broken away from the old homestead, have lost the restraining and purifying associations that gathered round it, and live away from home in hotels and boarding-houses. We are daily losing the faith, the virtues, the habits, and the manners without which the family cannot be sustained; and when the family goes, the nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving. God made the family the type and basis of society; "male and female made he them." A large and influential class of women not only neglect but disdain the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential duties—the drudgery, they call it—of wives and mothers. This, coupled with the separate pecuniary interests of husband and wife secured, and the facility of divorcea vinculo matrirmoniiallowed by the laws of most of the States of the Union, make the family, to a fearful extent, the mere shadow of what it was and of what it should be.
Extend now to women suffrage and eligibility; give them the political right to vote and to be voted for; render it feasible for them to enter the arena of political strife, to become canvassers in elections and candidates for office, and what remains of family union will soon be dissolved. The wife may espouse one political party, and the husband another, and it may well happen that the husband and wife may be rival candidates for the same office, and one or the other doomed to the mortification of defeat. Will the husband like to see his wife enter the lists against him, and triumph over him? Will the wife, fired with political ambition for place or power, be pleased to see her own husband enter the lists against her, and succeed at her expense? Will political rivalry and the passions it never fails to engender increase the mutual affection of husband and wife for each other, and promote domestic union and peace, or will it not carry into the bosom of the family all the strife, discord, anger, and division of the political canvass?
Then, when the wife and mother is engrossed in the political canvass, or in discharging her duties as a representative or senator in Congress, a member of the cabinet, or a major-general in the field, what is to become of the children? The mother will have little leisure, perhaps less inclination, to attend to them. A stranger, or even the father, cannot supply her place. Children need a mother's care; her tender nursing, her sleepless vigilance, and her mild and loving but unfailing discipline. This she cannot devolve on the father, or turn over to strangers. Nobody can supply the place of a mother. Children, then, must be neglected; nay, they will be in the way, and be looked upon as an encumbrance. Mothers will repress their maternal instincts; and the horrible crime of infanticide before birth, now becoming so fearfully prevalent, and actually causing a decrease in the native population of several of the States of the Union as well as in more than one European country, will become more prevalent still, and the human race be threatened with extinction. Women in easy circumstances, and placing pleasure before duty, grow weary of the cares of maternity, and they would only become more weary still if the political arena were opened to their ambition.
Woman was created to be a wife and a mother; that is her destiny. To that destiny all her instincts point, and for it nature has specially qualified her. Her proper sphere is home, and her proper function is the care of the household, to manage a family, to take care of children, and attend to their early training. For this she is endowed with patience, endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympathetic nature, and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a queen in her own household, and to make home cheerful, bright, and happy. Surely those women who are wives and mothers should stay at home and discharge its duties; and the woman's rights party, by seeking to draw her away from the domestic sphere, where she is really great, noble, almost divine, and to throw her into the turmoil of political life, would rob her of her true dignity and worth, and place her in a position where all her special qualifications and peculiar excellences would count for nothing. She cannot be spared from home for that.
It is pretended that woman's generous sympathies, her nice sense of justice, and her indomitable perseverance in what she conceives to be right are needed to elevate our politics above the low, grovelling and sordid tastes of men; but while we admit that women will make almost any sacrifice to obtain their own will, and make less than men do of obstacles or consequences, we are not aware that they have a nicer or a truer sense of justice, or are more disinterested in their aims than men. All history proves that the corruptest epochs in a nation's life are precisely those in which women have mingled most in political affairs, and have had the most influence in their management. If they go into the political world, they will, if the distinction of sex is lost sight of, have no special advantage over men, nor be more influential for good or for evil. If they go as women, using all the blandishments, seductions, arts, and intrigues of their sex, their influence will tend more to corrupt and debase than to purify and elevate. Women usually will stick at nothing to carry their points; and when unable to carry them by appeals to the strength of the other sex, they will appeal to its weakness. When once they have thrown off their native modesty, and entered a public arena with men, they will go to lengths that men will not.Lady Macbeth looks with steady nerves and unblanched cheek on a crime from which her husband shrinks with horror, and upbraids him with his cowardice for letting "I dare not wait upon I would." It was not she who saw Banquo's ghost.
We have heard it argued that, if women were to take part in our elections, they would be quietly and decorously conducted; that her presence would do more than a whole army of police officials to maintain order, to banish all fighting, drinking, profane swearing, venality, and corruption. This would undoubtedly be, to some extent, the case, if, under the newrégime, men should retain the same chivalric respect for women that they now have. Men now regard women as placed in some sort under their protection, or the safeguard of their honor. But when she insists that the distinction of sex shall be disregarded, and tells us that she asks no favors, regards all offers of protection to her as a woman as an insult, and that she holds herself competent to take care of herself, and to compete with men on their own ground, and in what has hitherto been held to be their own work, she may be sure that she will be taken at her word, that she will miss that deference now shown her, and which she has been accustomed to claim as her right, and be treated with all the indifference men show to one another. She cannot have the advantages of both sexes at once. When she forgets that she is a woman, and insists on being treated as a man, men will forget that she is a woman, and allow her no advantage on account of her sex. When she seeks to make herself a man, she will lose her influence as a woman, and be treated as a man.
Women are not needed as men; they are needed as women, to do, not what men can do as well as they, but what men cannot do. There is nothing which more grieves the wise and good, or makes them tremble for the future of the country, than the growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; than the insubordination, the lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America. There is, with the children of this generation, almost a total lack of filial reverence and obedience. And whose fault is it? It is chiefly the fault of the mothers, who fail to govern their households, and to bring up their children in a Christian manner. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil example corrupts not a few of those who are well brought up. The country is no better than the town. Wives forget what they owe to their husbands, are capricious and vain, often light and frivolous, extravagant and foolish, bent on having their own way, though ruinous to the family, and generally contriving, by coaxings, blandishments, or poutings, to get it. They set an ill example to their children, who soon lose all respect for the authority of the mother, who, as a wife, forgets to honor and obey her husband, and who, seeing her have her own way with him, insist on having their own way with her, and usually succeed. As a rule, children are no longer subjected to a steady and firm, but mild and judicious discipline, or trained to habits of filial obedience. Hence, our daughters, when they become wives and mothers, have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children. Those habits and that character are acquired only in a school of obedience, made pleasant and cheerful by a mother's playful smile and a mother's love.We know we have not in this the sympathy of the women whose organ isThe Revolution. They hold obedience in horror, and seek only to govern, not their own husbands only, not children, but men, but the state, but the nation, and to be relieved of household cares, especially of child-bearing, and of the duty of bringing up children. We should be sorry to do or say anything which these, in their present mood, could sympathize with. It is that which is a woman's special duty in the order of providence, and which constitutes her peculiar glory, that they regard as their great wrong.
The duty we insist on is especially necessary in a country like ours, where there is so little respect for authority, and government is but the echo of public opinion. Wives and mothers, by neglecting their domestic duties and the proper family discipline, fail to offer the necessary resistance to growing lawlessness and crime, aggravated, if not generated, by the false notions of freedom and equality so widely entertained. It is only by home discipline, and the early habits of reverence and obedience to which our children are trained, that the license the government tolerates, and the courts hardly dare attempt to restrain, can be counteracted, and the community made a law-loving and a law-abiding community. The very bases of society have been sapped, and the conditions of good government despised, or denounced under the name of despotism. Social and political life is poisoned in its source, and the blood of the nation corrupted, and chiefly because wives and mothers have failed in their domestic duties, and the discipline of their families. How, then, can the community, the nation itself, subsist, if we call them away from home, and render its duties still more irksome to them, instead of laboring to fit them for a more faithful discharge of their duties?
We have said the evils complained of are chiefly due to the women, and we have said so because it grows chiefly out of their neglect of their families. The care and management of children during their early years belong specially to the mother. It is her special function to plant and develop in their young and impressible minds the seeds of virtue, love, reverence, and obedience, and to train her daughters, by precept and example, not to be looking out for an eligibleparti, nor to catch husbands that will give them splendid establishments, but to be, in due time, modest and affectionate wives, tender and judicious mothers, and prudent and careful housekeepers. This the father cannot do; and his interference, except by wise counsel, and to honor and sustain the mother, will generally be worse than nothing. The task devolves specially on the mother; for it demands the sympathy with children which is peculiar to the female heart, the strong maternal instinct implanted by nature, and directed by a judicious education, that blending of love and authority, sentiment and reason, sweetness and power, so characteristic of the noble and true-hearted woman, and which so admirably fit her to be loved and honored, only less than adored, in her own household. When she neglects this duty, and devotes her time to pleasure or amusement, wasting her life in luxurious ease, in reading sentimental or sensational novels, or in following the caprices of fashion, the household goes to ruin, the children grow up wild, without discipline, and the honest earnings of the husband become speedily insufficient for the family expenses, and he is sorely tempted to provide for them by rash speculation or by fraud, which, though it may be carried on for a while without detection, is sure to end in disgrace and ruin at last.Concede now to women suffrage and eligibility, throw them into the whirlpool of politics, set them to scrambling for office, and you aggravate the evil a hundred fold. Children, if suffered to be born, which is hardly to be expected, will be still more neglected; family discipline still more relaxed, or rendered still more capricious or inefficient; our daughters will grow up more generally still without any adequate training to be wives and mothers, and our sons still more destitute of those habits of filial reverence and obedience, love of order and discipline, without which they can hardly be sober, prudent, and worthy heads of families, or honest citizens.
We have thus far spoken of women only as wives and mothers; but we are told that there are thousands of women who are not and cannot be wives and mothers. In the older and more densely settled States of the Union there is an excess of females over males, and all cannot get husbands if they would. Yet, we repeat, woman was created to be a wife and a mother, and the woman that is not fails of her special destiny. We hold in high honor spinsters and widows, and do not believe their case anywhere need be or is utterly hopeless. There is a mystery in Christianity which the true and enlightened Christian recognizes and venerates—that of the Virgin-Mother. Those women who cannot be wives and mothers in the natural order, may be both in the spiritual order, if they will. They can be wedded to the Holy Spirit, and be the mothers of minds and hearts. The holy virgins and devout widows who consecrate themselves to God in or out of religious orders, are both, and fulfil in the spiritual order their proper destiny. They are married to a celestial Spouse, and become mothers to the motherless, to the poor, the destitute, the homeless. They instruct the ignorant, nurse the sick, help the helpless, tend the aged, catch the last breath of the dying, pray for the unbelieving and the cold hearted, and elevate the moral tone of society, and shed a cheering radiance along the pathway of life. They are dear to God, dear to the church, and dear to Christian society. They are to be envied, not pitied. It is only because you have lost faith in Christ, faith in the holy Catholic Church, and have become gross in your minds, of "the earth, earthy," that you deplore the lot of the women who cannot, in the natural order, find husbands. The church provides better for them than you can do, even should you secure female suffrage and eligibility.
We do not, therefore, make an exception from our general remarks in favor of those who have and can get no earthly husbands, and who have no children born of their flesh to care for. There are spiritual relations which they can contract, and purely feminine duties, more than they can perform, await them, to the poor and ignorant, the aged and infirm, the helpless and the motherless, or, worse than motherless, the neglected. Under proper direction, they can lavish on these the wealth of their affections, the tenderness of their hearts, and the ardor of their charity, and find true joy and happiness in so doing, and ample scope for woman's noblest ambition. They have no need to be idle or useless. In a world of so much sin and sorrow, sickness and suffering, there is always work enough for them to do, and there are always chances enough to acquire merit in the sight of Heaven, and true glory, that will shine brighter and brighter for ever.
We know men often wrong women and cause them great suffering by their selfishness, tyranny, and brutality; whether more than women, by their follies and caprices, cause men, we shall not undertake to determine. Man, except in fiction, is not always a devil, nor woman an angel. Since the woman's rights people claim that in intellect woman is man's equal, and in firmness of will far his superior, it ill becomes them to charge to him alone what is wrong or painful in her condition, and they must recognize her as equally responsible with him for whatever is wrong in the common lot of men and women. There is much wrong on both sides; much suffering, and much needless suffering, in life. Both men and women might be, and ought to be, better than they are. But it is sheer folly or madness to suppose that either can be made better or happier by political suffrage and eligibility; for the evil to be cured is one that cannot be reached by any possible political or legislative action.
That the remedy, to a great extent, must be supplied by woman's action and influence we concede, but not by her action and influence in politics. It can only be by her action and influence as woman, as wife, and mother; in sustaining with her affection the resolutions and just aspirations of her husband or her sons, and forming her children to early habits of filial love and reverence, of obedience to law, and respect for authority. That she may do this, she needs not her political enfranchisement or her entire independence of the other sex, but a better and more thorough system of education for daughters—an education that specially adapts them to the destiny of their sex, and prepares them to find their happiness in their homes, and the satisfaction of their highest ambition in discharging its manifold duties, so much higher, nobler, and more essential to the virtue and well-being of the community, the nation, society, and to the life and progress of the human race, than any which devolve on king or kaiser, magistrate or legislator. We would not have their generous instincts repressed, their quick sensibilities blunted? or their warm, sympathetic nature chilled, nor even the lighter graces and accomplishments neglected; but we would have them all directed and harmonized by solid intellectual instruction, and moral and religious culture. We would have them, whether rich or poor, trained to find the centre of their affections in their home; their chief ambition in making it cheerful, bright, radiant, and happy. Whether destined to grace a magnificent palace, or to adorn the humble cottage of poverty, this should be the ideal aimed at in their education. They should be trained to love home, and to find their pleasure in sharing its cares and performing its duties, however arduous or painful.
There are comparatively few mothers qualified to give their daughters such an education, especially in our own country; for comparatively few have received such an education themselves, or are able fully to appreciate its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and in general these schools only aggravate the evil to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished.The good religious sometimes follow educational traditions perhaps better suited to the social arrangements of other countries than of our own, and sometimes underrate the value of intellectual culture. They do not always give as solid an intellectual education as the American woman needs, and devote a disproportionate share of their attention to the cultivation of the affections and sentiments, and to exterior graces and accomplishments. The defects we hint at are not, however, wholly, nor chiefly, their fault; they are obliged to consult, in some measure, the tastes and wishes of parents and guardians, whose views for their daughters and wards are not always very profound, very wise, very just, or very Christian. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home training so necessary, and which can be given only by mothers who have themselves been properly educated; but they go as far as is possible in remedying the defects of the present generation of mothers, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral and religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities, and meet whatever may be their lot with brave hearts and without murmuring or repining.
We do not disguise the fact that our hopes for the future, in great measure, rest on these conventual schools. As they are multiplied, and the number of their graduates increase, and enter upon the serious duties of life, the ideal of female education will be come higher and broader; a nobler class of wives and mothers will exert a healthy and purifying influence; religion will become a real power in the republic; the moral tone of the community and the standard of private and public morality will be elevated; and thus may gradually be acquired the virtues that will enable us as a people to escape the dangers that now threaten us, and to save the republic as well as our own souls. Sectarians, indeed, declaim against these schools, and denounce them as a subtle device of Satan to make their daughters "Romanists;" but Satan probably dislikes "Romanism" even more than sectarians do, and is much more in earnest to suppress or ruin our conventual schools, in which he is not held in much honor, than he is to sustain and encourage them. At any rate, our countrymen who have such a horror of the religion it is our glory to profess that they cannot call it by its true name, would do well, before denouncing these schools, to establish better schools for daughters of their own.
Now, we dare tell these women who are wasting so much time, energy, philanthropy, and brilliant eloquence in agitating for female suffrage and eligibility, which, if conceded, would only make matters worse, that, if they have the real interest of their sex or of the community at heart, they should turn their attention to the education of daughters for their special functions, not as men, but as women who are one day to be wives and mothers—woman's true destiny.These modest, retiring sisters and nuns, who have no new theories or schemes of social reform, and upon whom you look down with haughty contempt, as weak, spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the political and social as well as for the moral and religious progress of the country, than you with all your grand conventions, brilliant speeches, stirring lectures, and spirited journals.
For poor working-women and poor working-men, obliged to subsist by their labor, and who can find no employment, we feel a deep sympathy, and would favor any feasible method of relieving them with our best efforts. But why cannot American girls find employment as well as Irish and German girls, who are employed almost as soon as they touch our shores, and at liberal wages? There is always work enough to be done if women are qualified to do it, and are not above doing it. But be that as it may, the remedy is not political, and must be found, if found at all, elsewhere than in suffrage and eligibility.
Miss Hamilton did not go down to dinner the first day; but when she heard Mr. Granger come in, sent a line to him, excusing herself till evening, on the plea that she needed rest. The truth was, however, that she shrank from first meeting the family at table, a place which allows so little escape from embarrassment.
Her door had been left ajar; and in a few minutes she heard a silken rustling on the stairs, then a faint tap; and at her summons there entered a small, lily-faced woman who looked like something that might have grown out of the pallid March evening. The silver-gray of her trailing dress, the uncertain tints of her hair, deepening from flaxen to pale brown, even the cobwebby Mechlin laces she wore, so thin as to have no color of their own—all were like light, cool shadows. This lady entered with a dainty timidity which by no means excluded the most perfect self-possession, but rather indicated an extreme solicitude for the person she visited.
"Do I intrude?" she asked in a soft, hesitating way. "Mr. Granger thought I might come up. We feared that you were ill."
Margaret was annoyed to feel herself blushing. There was something keen in this lady's beautiful violet eyes, underneath their superficial expression of anxious kindness.
"I am not ill, only tired," she replied. "I meant to go down awhile after dinner."
"I am Mrs. Lewis," the stranger announced, seating herself by the bedside. "My husband and I, and my husband's niece, Aurelia Lewis, live here. We don't call it boarding, you know. I hope that you will like us."
This wish was expressed in a manner sonaïveand earnest that Margaret could but smile in making answer that she was quite prepared to be pleased with everything, and that her only fear was lest she might disturb the harmony of their circle—not by being disagreeable in herself, but simply in being one more.
With a gesture at once graceful and kind, Mrs. Lewis touched Margaret's hand with her slight, chilly fingers. "You are the one more whom we want," she said; "we have been rejoicing over the prospect of having you with us. You do not break, you complete the circle."
Her quick ear had caught a lingering tone of pain; and she had already found something pathetic in that thin face and those languid eyes. Miss Hamilton did not appear to be a person likely to disturb the empire which this lady prided herself on exercising over their household.
"I know very little about the family," Margaret remarked. "Mr. Granger mentioned some names. I am not sure if they were all. And men never think of the many trifles we like to be told."
Her visitor sighed resignedly. "Certainly not—the sublime creatures! It is the difference between fresco and miniature, you know. Let me enlighten you a little. Besides those of us whom you have seen, there are only Mr. Southard, my husband, and Aurelia. We consider ourselves a very happy family. Of course, being human, we have occasional jars; but there is always the understanding that our real friendship is unimpaired by them. And we defend each other like Trojans from any outside attack. We try to manage so as to have but one angry at a time, the others acting as peacemakers. The only one who may trouble you is my husband. I am anxious concerning him and you."
With her head a little on one side, the lady contemplated her companion with a look of pretty distress.
"Forewarned is forearmed," suggested Miss Hamilton.
"Why, you see," her visitor said confidentially, "Mr. Lewis is one of those provoking beings who take a mischievous delight in misrepresenting themselves, not for the better, but the worse. If they see a person leaning very much in one way, they are sure to lean very much the other way. Mr. Southard calls my husband an infidel, whatever that is. There certainly are a great many things which he does not believe. But one half of his scepticism is a mere pretence to tease the minister. I hope you won't be vexed with him. You won't when you come to know him. Sometimes I don't altogether blame him. Of course we all admire Mr. Southard in the most fatiguing manner; but it cannot be denied that he does interpret and perform his duties in the preraphaelite style, With a pitiless adherence to chapter and verse. Still, I often think that much of his apparent severity may be in those chiselled features of his. One is occasionally surprised by some sign of indulgence in him, some touch of grace or tenderness. But even while you look, the charm, without disappearing, freezes before your eyes, like spray in winter. I don't know just what to think of him; but I suspect that he has missed his vocation, that he was made for a monk or a Jesuit. It would never do to breathe such a thought to him, though. He thinks that the Pope is Antichrist."
"And isn't he?" calmly asked the granddaughter of the Rev. Doctor Hamilton.
Mrs. Lewis put up her hand to refasten a bunch of honey-sweet tuberoses that were slipping from the glossy coils of her hair, and by the gesture concealed a momentary amused twinkle of her eyes.
"Oh! I dare say!" she replied lightly. "But such a dear, benignant old antichrist as he is! Ages ago, when we were in Rome, I was in the crowd before St. Peter's when the pope gave the Easter benediction. Involuntarily I knelt with the rest; and really, Miss Hamilton, that seemed to me the only benediction I ever received. I did not understand my own emotion. It was quite unexpected. Perhaps it was something in that intoxicating atmosphere which is only half air; the other half is soul."
Margaret was silent. She had no wish to express any displeasure; but she was shocked to hear the mystical Babylon spoken of with toleration, and that by a descendant of the puritans.
Mrs. Lewis sat a moment with downcast eyes, aware of, and quietly submitting to the scrutiny of the other—by no means afraid of it, quite confident, probably, that the result would be agreeable.
This lady was about forty years of age, delicate rather than beautiful, with a frosty sparkle about her. Her manner was gentleness itself; but one soon perceived something fine and sharp beneath; a blue arrowy glance that carried home a phrase otherwise light as a feather, a slight emphasis that made the more obvious meaning of a word glance aside, an unnecessary suavity of expression that led to suspicion of some pungent hidden meaning. But with all her airy malice there was much of genuine honesty and kind feeling. She was like a faceted gem, showing her little glittering shield at every turn; but still a gem.
"Aurelia is quite impatient to welcome you," she resumed softly. "You cannot fail to like her, when you happen to think of it. She is sweet and beautiful all through.
"Now I will leave you to take your rest, and read the note of which Mr. Granger made me the bearer. I hope to see you this evening."
Margaret looked after the little lady as she glided away, glancing back from the door with a friendly smile and nod, then disappeared, soundless save for the rustling of her dress. She listened to that faint silken whisper on the stairs, then to the soft shutting of the parlor door, two pushes before it latched. Then she read her note. It was but a line. "Rest as long as you wish to. But when you are able to come down, we all want to see you."
She went down to the parlor after dinner, and found the whole family there. There was yet so much of daylight that one gentleman, sitting in a western window, was reading the evening paper by it; but the stream of gaslight that came in from some room at the end of the longsuitemade a red-golden path across the darkened back-parlor, and caught brightly here and there on the carving of a picture, a curve of bronze or marble, or the gilding of a book-cover, and glimmered unsteadily over a winged Mercury that leaned out of the vague dusk and sparkle, tiptoe, at point of flight, with lifted face and glinting eyes.
Mr. Granger stood near the door by which Margaret entered, evidently on the watch for her; and at sight of him that slight nervous embarrassment inseparable from her circumstances, and from the unstrung condition of her mind and body, instantly died away. To her he was strength, courage, and protection. Shielded by his friendship, she feared nothing.
Mrs. Lewis and Dora met her like old friends; that florid gentleman with English side-whiskers she guessed to be Mr. Lewis; and she recognized that fine profile clear against the opaline west.
Mr. Southard came forward at once, scarcely waiting for an introduction.
"A granddaughter of the Rev. Doctor Hamilton?" he said with emphasis. "I am happy to see you."
Miss Hamilton received tranquilly his cordial salutation, and mentally consigned it to the manes of her grandfather.
Mr. Lewis got up out of his armchair, and bowed lowly. "Madam," he said with great deliberation, "I do not in the least care who your grandfather was. I am glad to seeyou."
"Thank you!" said Margaret.
The gentleman settled rather heavily into his chair again. He was one of those who would rather sit than stand. Margaret turned to meet his niece, who was offering her hand, and murmuring some word of welcome. She looked at Aurelia Lewis with delight, perceiving then what Mrs. Lewis had meant in saying that her husband's niece was sweet and beautiful all through. The girl radiated loveliness. She was a blonde, with deep ambers and browns in her hair and eyes, looking like some translucent creature shone through by rich sunset lights too soft for brilliancy. She was large, suave, a trifle sirupy, perhaps, but sweet to the core, had no salient points in her disposition, but a charmingly liquid way of adapting herself to the angles of others. If the looks and manners of Mrs. Lewis were faceted, those of her husband's niece were what jewelers' callen cabochon. What Aurelia said was nothing. She was not a reportable person. What shewaswas delicious.
"I remember Doctor Hamilton very well," Mr. Lewis said when the ladies had finished their compliments. "He was one of those men who make religion respectable. He held some pretty hard doctrines; but he believed every one of 'em, and held 'em with a grip. The last time I saw him was seven or eight years ago, just before his death. They had up their everlasting petition before the legislature here, for the abolition of capital punishment; and a committee was appointed to attend to the matter. I went up to one of their hearings. There were Phillips, Pierpont, Andrew, Spear, and a lot of other smooth-tongued, soft-hearted fellows who didn't want the poor, dear murderers to be hanged; and on the other side were Doctor Hamilton with his eyes and his cane, common sense, Moses and the decalogue. They had rather a rough time of it. Andrew called your grandfather an old fogy, over some one else's shoulders; and Phillips tilted over Moses, tables and all, with that sharp lance of his. But Doctor Hamilton stood there as firm as a rock, and beat them all out. He had the glance of an eagle, and a way of swinging his arm about, when he was in earnest, that looked as if it wouldn't take much provocation to make him hit straight out. Phillips said something that he didn't like, and the doctor stamped at him. Well, the upshot of the matter was, that capital punishment was not abolished that year, thanks to one tough, intrepid old man."
"My grandfather was very resolute," said Margaret, with a slight, proud smile.
"Yes," answered Mr. Lewis, "he would have made a prime soldier, if he hadn't made the mistake of being a doctor of divinity."
"The church needed his authoritative speech," said Mr. Southard, with decision. "To the minister of God belongs the voice of denunciation as well as the voice of prayer."
Mr. Lewis gave his moustache an impatient twitch.
Mr. Granger seized the first opportunity to speak aside to Margaret. "You like these people? You are contented?" he asked hastily.
"Yes, and yes," she replied.
"You think that you will feel at home when you have become better acquainted with them?" he pursued.
"It seems to me that I have always lived here," she answered, smiling. "There is not the least strangeness. Indeed, surprising things, if they are pleasant, never surprise me. I am always expecting miracles. It is only painful or trivial events which find me incredulous and ill at ease."
The chandeliers were lighted, and the windows closed; but, according to their pleasant occasional custom, the curtains were not drawn for a while yet. If any person in the street took pleasure in seeing this family gathering, they were welcome.
Mrs. Lewis broke a few sprays from a musk-vine over-starred with yellow blossoms, and twined them into a wreath as she slowly approached the two who were standing near a book-case. "Vive le roi!" she said, lifting the wreath to the marble brows of a Shakespeare that stood on the lower shelf.
Margaret glanced along a row of blue and brown covers, and exclaimed, "My Brownings! all hail! there they are!"
"You also!" said Mrs. Lewis, with a grimace. "Own, now, that they jolt horribly—that the Browning Pegasus is a racker, and that the Browning road up Parnassus is macadamized with—well, diamonds, if you will, but diamonds in the rough. True, the hoofs do make dents; they do dash over the ground with a four-footed trampling; but—" a shrug and a shiver completed the sentence.
"Mrs. Browning needs a lapidary," Mr. Granger said; "but her husband's constipated style is a necessity. His books are books of quintessences. At first I thought him suggestive; but soon perceived that he was stimulating instead. He seems to have brushed a subject. Look again, and you will see that he has exhausted it."
Margaret read the titles of the books, and in them read, also, something of the minds of her new associates. There were a few shining names from each of the great nations, and a good selection of English and American authors, the patriarchs in their places. She had a word for each, but thought, "I wonder why I like Lowell, almost in silence, yet like him best."
Near this was another case of books, all Oriental, or relating to the Orient. There were the Talmud and the Koran; there were hideous mythologies full of propitiatory prayers to the devil. There wereVathek, The Arabian Nights, Ferdousi, and a hundred others. Over this case hung an oval water-color of sea and sky with a rising sun blazing at the horizon, lighting with flickering gold a path across the blue, liquid expanse, and flooding with light the ethereal spaces. On a scroll beneath this was inscribed, "Ex Oriente Lux."
"Light and hasheesh," said Mr. Southard laughingly. "Don't linger there too long."
Mr. Granger called Dora to him. "What has my little girl been learning to-day?" he asked.
The little one's eyes flashed with a sudden, glorious recollection. "O papa! I can spell cup."
The father was suitably astonished.
"Is it possible? Let me hear."
The child raised her eyebrows, and played the coquette with her erudition. "You spell it," she said tauntingly.
Mr. Granger leaned back in his chair, and knitted his brows in intense study. "T-a-s-s-e, cup."
"No-o, papa," said the fairy at his knee.
"T-a-z-z-a, cup!" he essayed again.
Dora shook her flossy curls.
"T-a-z-a, cup!" he said desperately.
The child looked at him with tears in her eyes.
"Oh!" he said, "c-u-p, cup!" at which she screamed with delight.
"How blue it sounds," said Margaret. "Like a Canterbury bell with a handle to it."
A tray was brought in with coffee, which was Dora's signal to go to bed. She took an affectionate leave of all, but hid her face in Margaret's neck in saying good night.
"Who was the little girl in the picture?" she whispered.
"It was you, dear," was the reply.
"I keeped thinking of it this ever so long," said the child.
Her father always accompanied her to the foot of the stairs; and the two went out together, Dora clinging to his hand, which she held against her cheek, and he looking down upon her with a fond smile.
Margaret shrank with a momentary spasm of pain and terror, as she looked after them. How fearful is that clinging love which human beings have for each other! how terrible, since, sooner or later, they must part; since, at any instant, the hand of fate may be outstretched to snatch them asunder!
"Are you ill?" whispered Aurelia, touching her arm.
Margaret started, and recollected herself with an effort; then smiled without an effort; for the door opened, and Mr. Granger came in again, glancing first at her, then coming to sit near her.
"I have found out the origin of coffee," Mrs. Lewis said. "It is, or is capable of being, a Mohammedan legend. I will tell you. When Mother Eve, to whom be peace! fell, after her sin, from the seventh heaven, and was precipitated to earth, as she slipped over the verge of Paradise, she instinctively flung out her arm, and caught at a shrub with milk-white blossoms that grew there. It broke in her hand. She fell into Arabia, near Mocha. The branch that fell with her took root and grew, and had blossoms with five petals, as white as the beautiful Mother's five fingers. And that's the history of coffee. Aura, give me a cup without delay. That story was salt."
"Why should we not have sentiments with so wonderful a draught?" Mr. Granger said. "Propose anything. Shall I begin? I have been reading the European news. Victor Emmanuel is dawning like a sun over Italy. I propose Rome, the dead lion, with honey for Samson."
Mr. Lewis pushed out his underlip. He always scouted at republicans, red or black.
"I follow you," he said immediately, with a sly glance at Mr. Southard. "Rome, the rock that does not crack, though all the bores blast it."
There was a momentary pause, during which the eyes of the minister scintillated. Then he exclaimed, "Luther, the Moses at the stroke of whose rod the rock was rent, and the gospel waters loosed."
"Ah! Luther!" endorsed Mr. Lewis with an affectation of enthusiasm. "Greater than Nimrod, he built a Babel which babbles to the ends of the earth."
Mr. Southard flashed out, "Yes; and every tongue can spell the word Bible, sir!"
"And deny its plainest teachings," was the retort; "and vilify the hand that preserved it!"