It was a fearful night. I shall never forget it. Without, we heard the tramp of horses, the muffled sound of marching troops, the boom of cannon, the groan of the affrighted and maddened populace. WIthin, love still reigned, but accompanied by woe and desolation of heart. "Marie! my own Marie!" exclaimed my father, "God knows what this costs me; yet I must leave you; the people are frantic; they must have a commander. If I die, be brave as the Spartan women who rejoiced to see husband or son brought back upon his shield when he died for liberty. Only promise me one thing. If I perish, take our children to Les Deices. In Languedoc, where we were so happy, educate them for their country and for God." "I promise," said my mother; "but you must not die, you shall not die; I cannot live without you!" "You speak from the heart of love," said my father, with a quivering voice; "yet I know that you would not have me sit here, and not stretch out my hand, nor lift up my voice to save my country." "No!" said my mother. "Go, go! my beloved." As she spoke, the convulsions which shook her frame told how great was the sacrifice. My father arose to depart. "Oh, Marie! my Marie! my precious wife, the joy, the very life of my life, can it be that I shall never see thee more!" he exclaimed, turning back once again and bowing over my mother. "Frederick," he said, turning to my brother; "my boy, be a blessing to your mother; be brave, be noble, be true!" "Victoire!" he added, taking me into his arms, holding me close to his breast, "child of my heart, be like your mother!"
He said no more. The strong form bowed and shook.
As the door closed, my mother made no sound. The time for tears had passed. Drawing both of her children to her heart, she hastened to a window, and there, amid deepening darkness, looked down upon the most dire of all sights, a people revelling in blood. The great clocks of the city struck the last hour of night; still she stood in the same spot, her forehead pressed against the cold window-pane, with her children strained to her heart. The day dawned, and she had not stirred, although we, but half conscious of the woe which hung over us, in our childish weariness had fallen asleep.
The morning awoke without a smile. No gleam of sunshine shot athwart the sullen sky; through the leaden light we looked down upon a scene full of horror. The mob had spent the night in storming and entering the houses of the nobility. Many mansions were half demolished; their costly furniture, broken and defaced, lay piled upon the side-walks. The pavements were torn up and formed into barricades. Dead bodies, gory, ghastly, masses of human flesh, were lying thick amid the ruins. Women, with dishevelled hair, wringing their hands, shrieking and moaning piteously, wandered back and forth amid the dead; now bending over a wounded man, now holding up a livid corpse, seeking vainly perchance to recognise a beloved face. And still we heard the roar of cannon, the shout of officers, the fierce cries of the mob, mingled with the groans of the dying.
The conflict was between the nobility and the people. The soldiers were fighting for their king, the people for a phantom which they called liberty. But a little before noon we heard in universal acclaim, the shout "Vive la République!" The moment our mother heard this cry, she relinquished her hold upon us, and turned from the window for the first time. "Your father's fate is decided," she said. "I must go and see if he yet lives--Frederick, be a brave boy, and take care of your sister." "I will be brave," I cried. "Yes," she answered, "I might have known that you do not fear, you are your father's own child," and kissing us both, she went from the room. In a few moments we saw her slight form threading its way through the mass of rude and frantic beings
"O, dear!" said Frederick, "what shall we do if dear papa is dead?" "Do! we shall kill the wicked men who took his life," I answered, my little heart almost bursting with rage and grief. "That we could not do, Victoire, and if we could, it would be wicked, and it would not bring our dear papa back." "No, but I would like to hurt those cruel men just as bad as they hurt him," I answered. "It would be wrong, Victoire. Don't you remember mamma read last night about Christ, how He asked His Father to forgive the Jews even when they were piercing him?" "But I can't! I can't ask God to forgive these wicked soldiers--if they hurt only
We were awakened by the heavy tramp of feet in the halls below. "Dear papa, you have come," I murmured, half aroused from a dream, in which I had been clasped in his arms, and had heard his dear voice again call me his "brave little Victoire." Just then the door opened, and our mother entered. We hastened to meet her, but drew back aghast as we saw the change which had come over her since morning. Her garments were soiled and torn; the veil which she had worn was rent from her head; her hair fell in dishevelled masses below her waist; her face was like that of death; her eyes tearless and full of woe. Four soldiers followed her, bearing a body, which we instantly recognised as that of our father. They laid it upon the table, and without a word withdrew, shutting us in with our dead. Our mother's anguish found no relief in tears. She staunched the blood which flowed from his wounds, she lifted the mass of auburn curls from the chill brow; she clasped the stiff hands, she covered the white face with kisses,--but save an occasional groan breathed no sound. Frederick, too, hung over the body, moaning piteously; but I stood apart and shrieked in passionate, terrified grief. Two ideas possessed my soul. My noble father, the idol of my childish heart, my ideal of all beauty and perfection, a few hours before so full of generous life, of living love, was cold and dead; he could never speak,
When in Paris first sounded the cry of liberty, which penetrated into the very heart of the nation, drawing together the untaught and ardent lovers of their country from every providence of France, my paternal grandfather, then in the prime of his strength, left his inheritance of vineyards in the vales of Languedoc, and, hastening to the capital, joined the cause of the people. He was a true enthusiast for liberty. He hated the corrupt government which had entailed such a fearful curse upon his native land; but, unwilling that the unfortunate Louis, the radiant Antoinette, with their innocent children, should be sacrificed for the crimes of their ancestors, did all in his power to avert their gloomy fate. This brought upon him the hatred of the Jacobins; and when Robespierre came into possession of unlimited power, a speedy flight was all that saved him from lying down under the guillotine amid the thousand victims sacrificed to the new republic. He took refuge with his wife and child in America; and here our father, an only child, educated in the principles of a true democracy, grew up to manhood, a warm admirer of the institutions of his adopted country.
Shortly after his marriage to an American girl, he was called to France to take possession of the small remnant left of the once large inheritance of his fathers. It was when Napoleon's star was on the wane, before the government was again established, that he arrived in his native country. Notwithstanding his affection for America, he loved the land of his ancestors; and the hope that he should yet see it a healthful republic induced him to take up his residence in France. He foresaw and awaited the approaching crisis. And when, at last, the long smothered fires of the revolution burst forth anew in 1830, Henri Vernoid, as his father before him, became a champion for the people. He possessed the tragic energy, the enthusiasm, the chivalrous love of freedom which characterizes peculiarly the sons of southern France. The unison of a logical and disciplined intellect with these characteristics, eminently fitted him for a commander, and enabled him not only to lead, but to quell, the fury of the turbulent masses. He never used his eloquence to incite them to deeds of blood, but to prompt them to deliberate and temperate action. On the day in which he fell, his presence stilled the wild tumult of the people wherever he went. Amid this labor of love, he received a bayonet wound which caused his
In Père la Chaise, that peerless necropolis, where beauty and valor, where honor and dishonor, the lofty and lowly, find like repose, we buried our dead.
LES DELICES.{centered}A month had scarcely passed after our father's death before we found ourselves at Les Delices. If you cross the ocean, you can find it standing amid ripening vineyards in a delicious valley near where the arrowy Rhone flows into the southern sea. The Cevennes tower above it; some resting their cheeks of snow upon the farthest sky; others rising softly below, crowned with furs and girdled with vines. The Rhone, rushing from rocky fastnesses, pours its waters with mad impetuosity into the lap of this tranquil valley. On its banks, far as the eye can reach, you may see magnificent chateaux, picturesque cottages, and blossoming vineyards. The river is instinct with life. White-winged boats are for ever flitting by, while the boatman's song and the boatman's call make the music of its night and of its day.
Les Delices, half chateau, half cottage, with a single red turret, an overhanging roof and verandah, stands at the base of a mountain upon an eminence sloping down to the Rhone. Above it, upon the mountain side, the firs of Languedoc extend their great arms of shade. A cascade, leaping from a lofty gorge breaking upon the rock-ledges at its side, falls a rapid stream, watering the vineyard below. Manifold vines fasten to the low verandah, and, striving upward, cling with their delicate festoons and blossoms around the ruddy neck of the turret. Bountiful trees shade the lawn down to the river's brink; fountains play with a dreamy lull amid their shadows; quaint seats, arbors girdled with flowers, calm-faced statues, rest under their far-spreading boughs, perfect ideals of beauty and repose. At the entrance of the green arcade
In this perfect abode, in spite of our own grief and the woe-smitten face of our mother, we began to grow happy. Ours was the elastic heart of childhood, in which the sunshine of to-day absorbs the grief of yesterday. Only children, we were unconscious of the desolation which the sight of Les Delices brought to our mother's heart. Our father had adorned it with especial reference to her love for the beautiful. Here she spent the first years of her wedded life, which passed an unbroken dream of happiness. She left it, a proud and happy woman, with every earthly wish gratified in her noble husband and infant children. Now she had come back a widowed mother, a broken-hearted mourner, reminded at every step of the idolized dead. She taught us to believe that he was not far away, that he still loved and watched over his children, till gradually the horror connected with his violent death wore away, and our father became to us a spiritual friend--unseen, smiling upon our childish sports, and kissing our little brows amid our sweet night visions. Our mother gave us all the vintage time in which to recruit our health and spirits. Hand in hand, Frederick and I wandered through the vineyards, assisting the merry peasants to gather their delicious harvest. When the day was closing we would go to the village green, not far away, to watch their evening dance. There was no feasting nor drunkenness. Aged people and children in neat attire sat under the trees, while youths and maidens in holiday dress danced and sang upon the sward, blithe as birds in their native air.
But these glad days rapidly fled. The vintage was gathered. Fierce winds swept through the valley. The voice of music and of dancing was heard only by cottage hearths. And Frederick and I sat busy with our books, by our mother's side, in our beautiful but lonely home. She was fully competant to superintend our education. To her quick and retentive mind, study had ever been a pastime. She loved knowledge for itself, for the vast world of thought which it opened to her intellectual vision. And her daily life was a contradiction of the false assertion that the highest intellectual development unfits woman for domestic duty; for no art had she mastered so perfectly as the beautiful one which enabled her, at all times, to make a happy home. Our mother gave us a portion of every day to wander about our will. In these
To this retreat Frederick would bring a book, occasionally feeding his eyes upon the glory around him. To me books were a mockery. Beneath a tranquil sky, in the fragrant air, the insatiable demand of my nature for harmony was gratified. I was a child, and could not analyse my satisfaction. I did not know that in nature I beheld embodied the half-defined yet all-pervading idea of the Beautiful which haunted my childish brain. The many changes of the sky, the tints upon the clouds, the outline of every mountain, the hue of every flower, the light and shadow upon the foliage--every phase of the sublime picture which nature each day presented to my childish eyes, was as familiar to me as my mother's face. Within our home were a few rare works of art. The portraits of my father and mother, and the exquisite statue of a young girl, kneeling, clasping a wayside cross, her pure face uplifted to heaven, were my especial delight. Indeed, I never wearied in gazing upon them, and they grew upon my soul until they became a part of its being.
Amid the joy which I felt in studying them was born the desire to produce something which should be their kin. Could I not give a tangible form to the vague images of beauty which were for ever shifting before my mental vision? Many, many times I asked this question, until, one day, in the excitement of feeling, I resolved to try. I endeavored to draw the outline of the scene before my window, and, to my delight, succeeded beyond my hopes. I carried the rude sketch to my own little room, there to complete it at my leisure. And when, at last, it was finished, to my childish eyes it was the fac-simile of the mountains, the river, the valley, which lay outside our door. A new delight was now open to me, all the more keenly enjoyed because enjoyed in secret. For I had resolved to say nothing of my new art until I had produced something which should command the
Spring came with redundant and estatic life; summer, in voluptuous glory; and each season brought a joy to my life which it had never brought before. I had become a deeper student of nature. With the eye of an artist I watched the sun in scarlet, white, and violet flame, ascend above the dusky arch of the mountains--watched the gloud-armies marshal their hosts upon the blue plains of ether. When they rushed together at the zenith, and, from the blackness of darkness, sent their forked lightnings into the heart of the valley; when their thunders, leaping from the parapets of heaven, shook the foundations of the defiant hills, my whole nature expanded, the storm carnival seemed to make me great. After my mother had given me her good-night kiss, and
There was no picture to me so beautiful as my mother's face, as I saw it every day before me in its chastened loveliness. I was never weary of gazing upon the white brow, shaded with waves of brown hair; upon the hazel eyes, in which shone so serene a light; upon the mouth, in whose
"Why do you look at me so earnestly, child?" she inquired one day, as she lifted her eyes from a book which she was reading in the open air. I was lying at a little distance from her, under a tree, gazing intently into her face. "For nothing much, mamma," I answered, embarrassed to have my scrutiny observed. "There was a purpose in your look. Come here, Victoire." I reluctantly obeyed, vainly endeavoring to hide from sight the pencil and cards which I held in my hands. The anticipated exultation which was to attend the
I could never withstand the sweetness of my mother's manner. Every doubt died at the first sound of her melodious voice. "Let me go! Let me go! mamma, only a minute," I exclaimed, bursting from her embrace. I ran for my treasures, and in a moment returned to pour them all into her lap. I could not interpret every emotion which passed over her face, as she gazed at them one by one; but at last was certain that I read pleasure, unmistakable pleasure, in her eye. Yet she only said: "Do you like to draw, Victoire?" "Oh, yes, mamma; you must know that I do!" "I am glad that you are fond of it. I will give you lessons every day, if you please." "Will you, dearest mamma?" I exclaimed; "Will you teach me; and may Frederick learn too? Oh, how happy we shall be?" And with those words upon my lips, I bounded away in search of my brother.
I sang aloud for joy, as I ran on toward the little grove of firs where of late I had left him to spend many of his afternoons alone. I discovered him under one of the trees, and without waiting to reach his side, in my enthusiasm, exclaimed: "Frederick! I have learned to draw! Mamma says that I shall take lessons every day. Who knows but that I can learn to paint pictures as beautiful as those which hang in the parlor? Who knows but that I may go to Italy some day, and paint pictures which will live for ever!" Here I had reached my climax, and was obliged to stop. Frederick looked amazed at my suddden appearance and strange
"Frederick, what are you going to be when you get to be a man?" I suddenly asked. "I cannot tell," he said; "life does not flow as proudly through my veins as yours; but if I am never great, I hope that I may be good." "You will be both," I said, as I looked into his eyes and threw my arms around his neck. Heavy masses of chestnut curls clustered around the pure, high brow. A crimson flush played upon his cheek. His eyes, limpid grey, grew luminous with an unuttered thought.
"Frederick," again I asked, "what would you
From that hour, for his sake, I became interested in Demosthenes and Cicero, in Homer and Virgil; while he was only too ready to appreciate and to commend the crude sketches of my pencil. Our hours of recreation were too short in which to discuss our hopes and plans for the future. The days glided happily away till Frederick reached his eighteenth and I my fifteenth birthday.
"I am weak in delaying to speak to you upon an important
In the very heart of its tumultuous life, in the Rue St. Honoré, towered the gloomy dwelling which we now called home. To us, who had basked so long in the soft airs of vine-clad Languedoc, it seemed a very prison. The dingy walls, the narrow windows, presented a gloomy contrast to the bright, frescoed rooms of the home which we had left. The windows of the parlor opened into a tiny court paved with rude mosaics. In its centre stood a mouldy fountain whose basin was fringed with a narrow border of myrtle and violets. But my eye had so long been accustomed to the broad, tree-shaded, river-zoned lawn of Delices, with its statues, its fountains, its aromatic flowers, its sun-lighted nooks, I could see no beauty in this meagre little court. But how soon
Almost immediately after our arrival in Paris, Frederick entered the Academy, and I the studio of Monsieur Savone, an eminent artist. He was a grand old man, with a soul full of enthusiasm for all that is beautiful and good. His life had been consecrated to art. He had studied the beautiful in every form, both in foreign lands and in his own. My passion for painting won a place for me in his heart. He knew every fine picture in Paris, and resolved that my young eyes should feast upon the glorious productions of the masters. With delight I revert to those enchanted days when, with throbbing heart and trembling steps, I wandered with my master through the galleries of the Tuileries and of the Louvre. There I gazed upon the miraculous conceptions of sculptor and painter. There I beheld the embodiment of my own most glorious imaginings. Yet the divine forms and faces filled me with pain. They filled me with an insatiate longing, with an undying purpose to produce forms of beauty which, like them, would be immortal. This thought possessed me wholly, nerving me to ceaseless toil by day, filling all my dreams at night.
Thus the winter passed, and I had no eyes to see that our mother was often silent, and sometimes sad. Spring came, and I had ceased to pine for the green vales, for the purple vines, for the mountains, the river, the sunshine of Languedoc. In the tumult, the pride, the glory of the world's metropolis, I found that which seemed to feed my restless, ambitious spirit. I had ceased to despise the little court, with its dingy mosaics and mouldy fountain. It seemed pleasant now.
As the twilights lengthened almost every evening, Frederick and I wandered to the Champs Elysées.
There we sat one evening in June. We had wandered to
As we drew near our dwelling, we saw a person in white standing in one of the long windows which look out upon the court. It was our mother awaiting our return. In a moment we were in her arms. "The evening has been long, my dear ones," she said, folding us closely to her heart. "You must be weary; sit down and rest." She sat down in the open window, and we took a low seat upon either side,
She soon regained her composure; and still holding our hands in hers, she opened to us her heart. "I have long dreaded this hour," she said; "for I felt that you were unprepared for it. I fear that it has never entered your mind that the time is near when you will be motherless. Your father's death gave me a shock from which I have never recovered. I staunched the bleeding, but the wound has never healed. I felt that I must live for your sake, and for years the power of will has seemed sufficient to sustain life. At Les Delices everything reminded me of the happiest hours of my life. Here all reminds me of its own woe! I feared the consequences of coming to Paris, and the result has been worse than my fears. I came for your sakes, and I am glad that I came, for you have received great profit from your advantages. I feel that it is my destiny to die in Paris, and to lie down by your father's side. I have almost reached the verge of the grave. Only for you I mourn. I would love to walk with you through life, yet I am grateful that I have lived long enough to see your characters formed, to see you almost ready to step forth into the world, full of courage and hope, believing and trusting in God as your father." Thus she spoke amid our bursting sobs.
In the morning she wore her usually sweet exterior, and greeted us with her wonted smile. I entreated permission to remain with her, and so did Frederick. "No," she said; "No, I do not need you. I would have you improve your time until I do." With heavy hearts we went to our different scenes of study. For the first time in my life, Art yielded me no satisfaction. There were pictured faces around me upon which I had never gazed before without feeling a thrill of delight in every nerve, but on that day they had no power to charm. One thought possessed me. My mother must die. I tried to banish it, tried to hope, but in vain. There was something in her looks, in her tones--something in my own soul which whispered: "Your mother will die."
The banquet of summer ended. The garlands upon her crown withered. Autumn pierced the heart of nature, and it bled. She hung a veil of ensanguined mist over the face of the sun; she changed the sapphire heavens to amber; she filled the air with slumbrous melody; filled the universe with a dreamy glory, beautiful yet sorrowful to behold.
A year went by, and yet the old light had not come back to Frederick's face. He was not gloomy; but in the deep irides of his eyes I say a world of unspoken sorrow, saw such a look of want, such a look of longing, it often filled my eyes with tears to look at him. Unlike most young men of his age, he had no gay companions. I was aware of his having but a single intimate friend. During our mother's life, Frederick had not seemed to need even his society; but now he often came and spent his evenings in our quiet parlor. Henri Rochelle was a number of years Frederick's senior. He was a student of medicine, and, Frederick told me, distinguished in the academy for his superior scholarship and faultless character. I remember him as a finely formed man, with a cold face and a composed mien, calmly discussing by the hour the most abstruse scientific and metaphysical themes. His discourse had no personal interest to me. I never listened. I was glad to have him come because he interested Frederick. But, quietly sewing in one corner, I busied myself with my own dreams.
One fact impressed me strangely. After his departure Frederick always seemed more than usually depressed. Henri Rochelle always seemed to leave a shadow behind him which fell upon Frederick's heart. It was a mystery to me, for Frederick seemed warmly attached to Rochelle, and, notwithstanding the after shadow, sought his company unceasingly. If he had a sorrow apart from our mutual one, I resolved to find it out. Heretofore there had been no reserve between us. One had held no secret which the other had not shared. But there was one now, I knew. I thought that it must be something in connexion with his university life, and began to question him minutely of his experience as a student. In reply, he said: "I find that very few young men have had so little contact with the jostling, every-day world; very few who have always found their highest happiness in the society of a beloved mother. She well knew that there was nothing I needed so much as to pass through a hardening process in order to acquire a little more manhood. It has been a hard task. I am not manly now in my classmates' sense of the term. They ridicule me because I know nothing of their dissipated mode of life. They despise me because I will not join them in their revels. Many of them glory in their infidelity,
"You have not told me all," I said. "The students may annoy you. But there is a sorrow lying deeper in your heart. A new shadow has fallen upon your life. What is it?--you have ever trusted me, Frederick!" "Trust you? Victoire, I trust you as I do no other creature. But why confess all my weakness? You are too strong to feel it; you cannot understand it." "Don't talk of my strength, Frederick. Remember, I have not been tried. My weakness has not been gauged; and, for understanding, have you ever had a sorrow that I did not feel?" He did not answer, but the chestnut curls shuddered closer against my cheek.
At last he spoke, and every word came low and slow, as if born with a pang down deep in his heart: "Henri Rochelle has a sister. She is the embodiment of my life-long dream--one for whose sake I would willingly be blind to the rest of the universe, could I behold her before my eyes for ever. There, Victoire, you have it--my weakness, my sin."
I was not prepared for such a revelation. What sister ever is? I supposed that I was all the world to Frederick; and was annoyed, chagrined, to find myself mistaken. A spasm of jealousy curdled my heart at the thought of a rival. My father and mother in heaven, my art, my brother upon earth, absorbed the world of my affection. My deeper nature has never been touched.
As I look back to my then undeveloped heart, I wonder that I could sympathize with Frederick at all. I did so from intuition, not from experience. I had implored his confidence. I would not recoil from it now. "Why is it a sin to love one who is lovely?" I asked. "If I could see this lady I presume that I should love her myself. At least I should wish to paint her picture. Does she love you, Frederick?"
Again I felt the curls quiver against my cheek as he answered: "I know not. I only know that her eyes follow mine for ever, and her soul is in her eyes. But it is madness, it is sin. She is the affianced of another. In one month she will be wife, and to me the thought is hell."
"But why? If you love each other, why must she marry another?"
"It is the old tragedy, Victoire; the old tragedy which has been acted over and over since the world began. The father sells his child for gold, heedless that he sacrifices a living heart. Day and night she implores her mother to intercede with her father to save her from a man whom she loathes. But he is rich; he belongs to the nobility. Her father is unrelenting. There is no hope."
For the first time Frederick's sorrow was beyond the reach of my healing. It had struck deeper than I could penetrate. Of the pain of a love-wounded heart I knew nothing. My pleasures were purely æsthetic. My worshipping nature was content to adore the divine beings which sprang into passionless life beneath the creative hand of genius. Yet my very ignorance made me tender. I respected an emotion which I could not fathom. Long, long I pillowed that dear head upon my heart. How I loved him!
The day for the annual distribution of prizes in the Academy had come. Frederick, among the first scholars of his class, was to pronounce an oration. Nobility, royalty, the genius, the beauty of the capital had assembled. I had eyes but for two--Frederick and Beatrice Rochelle. She entered the hall with her brother. I recognised her instantly. How could I help it? She had a face which is seen but once in a life-time. Her eyes were liquid, lustrous, sad. The concentrated life of a soul, its love, its longing, its unfathomed yet immortal mystery, all seemed concentrated in those prophetic orbs. Young, I had only to look at her to see that her heart had outlived its years. No pang of jealousy stifled the pulses of my heart while I gazed upon her. Rather I longed to fold her to my heart, to call her "sister," to tell her I would love her for ever.
From her my eyes turned to Frederick; and, while I gazed upon him, I involuntarily stretched out my hand as if to break the barrier which kept asunder two beings whom the gods had created for each other. He leaned against a statue of Apollo, a breathing incarnation of more than Apollo's beauty. He belonged to that rare order of men who are beautiful without being effeminate. His was the exquisite outline, the effulgent beauty of the Greek. He dwelt in a tabernacle of etherial clay, which, while it shrouded, still emitted the spiritual fire burning within the soul's shekinah. It seemed
The stiff declamations, the noisy eloquence of his companions had ended. As he stepped forth upon the rostrum my breath seemed suspended. Every nerve was strained to its utmost tension; my very life seemed to depend upon his triumph. His voice rose clear as the fine ring of a silver trumpet--soft as the sigh of a lute. Up! up! it went through the fretted arches, up to the arabesque dome. So soft, so searching, so sweet it was, it was easy for me to imagine that a god was speaking. His theme was: "Representative Men of France." He presented Fénelon and Mirabeau in contrast, types of one race in different eras. Mirabeau, in his shaggy strength, his lion greatness, he portrayed in language strong as the soul whose fiery lineaments he depicted.
When he spoke of Fénelon his voice softened. His words, in their silvery flowing, became melodious as the life whose story they told. He compared the great powers of the universe--Intellect, Will, Soul. The supremacy of spirit over matter. He became enthusiastic. His features seemed transfigured. Light, such as I never say before upon a human face, hovered around his--but only for an instant. The raised hand fell. The poised form staggered. There was a gurgling sound, and blood, blood, burst from mouth and nostril in a crimson torrent. The soul was too strong for its casket--a blood-vessel had broken.
I cannot describe the scene which ensued. I indistinctly remember the confusion, the groans and cries of the audience. I only know that in a moment my brother was in my arms, and that Beatrice Rochelle was by my side, amid the crowd who had rushed to his assistance. Henri Rochelle was there also. His strong arms bore Frederick from the hall; he helped support the litter upon which he was borne to our home. "Ride with my sister," he said to me; and he gently led me to a carriage. In a moment I was by the side of Beatrice. We had no introduction. We needed none. Little she knew how well I knew her. Involuntarily I laid my hand in hers, as one gasping sob struggled from my convulsed heart. A change had come over her face. Its whiteness was now appalling; the woe in the gazelle eyes had become most piteous, most imploring.
When we reached the house I asked Beatrice to enter and await the arrival of her brother and of mine. I would have entreated her had it been necessary, but it was not. If I had not
These twin souls, between whom fate had thrown an impassable chasm, yet who saw life only in each other's eyes--they had mingled at last--mingled upon the border of the valley of shadows--so near, that the light from the other shore had fallen already upon their young faces, and their passionate human love seemed, even now, exalted into the glory of the divine.
But there was a coming back. There is always a
This was a new revelation to Henri Rochelle. Amazement, pain, were depicted upon his cold features as he stood apart and looked upon his sister and his friend. He did not interfere. He spoke not. He only looked.
The delirium vanished. The reality,
The wasting form, the hollow cough, again inhabited our dwelling. Winter had passed; so had spring; the summer had deepened, and there was no change for the better. "It is the only hope," said the old physician who had attended our mother. "The air of Languedoc, the scenes of childhood, may revive him; yet I have little hope; he is one of those whom the gods take early." I had but one thought now--how could I save my brother; how secure for him life and Beatrice? We gave up our apartments in the Rue St. Honoré. With tearful regret I lingered in the little mosaic court. The dusky myrtles, the pansies which I had once despised, were sacred now. They had brightened the last hours of my mother's life, and their faint aroma was grateful to the soul of Frederick. Association will make the dreariest spot precious. The soul can sanctify all things. It will link a beloved name with the commonest thing, and its love make that thing immortal. Frederick and Beatrice did not meet again. She, also, was ill--too ill to leave her room. And on this account her marriage was deferred. Yet every day Henri brought to Frederick some token from her heart. Silent, eloquent messages of love were exchanged between them until the day of our departure. On that morning Henri and Frederick talked long together. They seemed to cling to each other as if the precious conference was the last. Their tones were low and sometimes broken. Once I overheard these words: "Fill my place, Henry; love her for my sake and her own;" and also: "'Where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage,' you will meet. There will be no earthly bridal;" and the soft answer: "It is well."
The summer bowed beneath the burden of its prime. The trees drooped under the weight of garniture. The flowers were faint with their own perfume. The air from the southern seas, laden with the aroma of a thousand vineyards, swooned long before it reached the cool arms of the hills. Even the hours, freighted heavily with balm, moved slowly
He had not given up the hope of life without a fearful struggle. Who that is young, who that knows how to live, ever does? Who that just tastes the delirious draught, does not pant to drain it to the very lees! Frederick had prayed, yea, had agonized for life--for the life that he knew, the life which he felt in his own young veins, to do, to be, to suffer, to enjoy as a mortal
"It seems a long way back to life. This body will never be any better. Cease to expect it, Victoire, and resignation will take the place of your wearing anxiety." He said these words to me one evening in a wayside inn, as we rested by an open window, watching the sun shut his eye of glory behind the hills. His words struck an open wound in my heart. I gasped before I answered: "You, who have so
"Oh!" I exclaimed, "how can you speak thus! Are you willing to leave Beatrice, who loves you? Are you willing to leave me alone without a guide, without a comforter? A slight spasm passed over his face. "This," he said, "is the sting of death. I cling to my idols. But Beatrice will come to me.
There was hope in his words, yet my heart refused to be comforted. I was so intensely human, I could see no beauty in decay, no charm in death. I could feel no pleasure in the
The next day, just as twilight was dropping her first faint veil of shadows, we came in sight of Les Delices. How peacefully it slept in the lap of the valley! The ruddy turret gleamed through its redundant vines. There stood Ceres, my first dream of marble beauty. There tinkled the fountains, filling the air with softest euphony. There crowded the gorgeous midsummer flowers. There fell the cascade, now shrunken to a few silver threads, ever breaking, ever re-uniting over the mossy ledges of the rocks. Below swept the Rhone--bold, impetuous, glorious as ever; while above, the grand mountains stretched out their hoary hands in a perpetual benediction.
There were kind tenants to welcome us. But alas, the change! Where was our mother? Where the lost appliances of our home? As we passed the threshold, Frederick's eye glanced eagerly around as if in quest of some treasure missed. A shadow, then a gleam, passed over his transparent features. I saw that it was no longer home to him. He lay down upon a couch in the old room--the room in which his eyes first opened to the morning; the room in which his eyes first opened to the morning; the room which had first witnessed our baby-sports, our childish studies, our youthful conferences.
I sat by his side until he slumbered. Then I went out into the old garden, bending my steps toward the grove of firs. The moon had come up above the mountains, and turned the night into a paler day. In her full light the white brow of Ceres glowed like amber. The waters of the fountains seemed changed to jewels as they fell. The limpid threads of the cascade, trembling languidly over the rock ledges, looked like creeping veins of gold. Not a leaf stirred. Not a sound was heard save the lull of the fountains, the hoarse roll of the river, the calls of the boatmen coming at intervals through the trees. My eye took in every shade in nature, but I only saw it; it did not comfort me.
Three years before, I had left that spot a buoyant and believing child, with faith in the future unbounded. How had she fulfilled her promises! An orphan, I had come back to bury the last being I loved upon earth. This was my grief, my crushing sorrow. No thought of heaven, of the perfected life which he so joyfully anticipated, could lift from my soul
He seemed no longer to belong to earth. His mortal life was fused into one vision of a diviner existence. Of the mystery of death, of eternity, of God, of Christ, he seemed to have more than a human conception. I would hold my breath and listen. And there were moments, while hearkening to his words, that my earth-fettered soul seemed to rise into the atmosphere of spritual joy in which he breathed. But the cords would tighten again, and the bound heart fall back to its old level, moaning in anguish, while it looked hopelessly up to the beatific height toward which it had no power to soar. But the change watched for, dreaded, came. The last features became more painfully distinct, the eyes more fearfully brilliant; when around the mouth is seen a settling--that dreadful settling, that tension of muscle--telling of the grasp of the Destroyer.
On the evening of
"Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and world, from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God. We spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is that strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. I know that my Redeemer liveth, and
"'Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.' Beatrice!" It was his dear voice that spoke. And the depth of joy in the tone thrilled every fibre of my frame. His arms were outstretched; his eyes were uplifted, as if they saw other eyes; his countenance was radiated, glorified. A ray of celestial love swept over his features. The breast rose and fell in one convulsive struggle; there was a sigh--he had gone.
I thought he had fainted, and called wildly for help, for "water! water!" "Here is water," said a voice. It was not Nannette who spoke. By my side stood a stranger. He offered me water in a light urn which always stood upon the verandah, near the foot of the cascade. I bathed the dear brow; I laid the beloved head upon my breast; I covered the face with wildest kisses; I called him by every endearing name; I besought him to live--to live a little longer for my sake; that I could not, would not live without him. Madly I contended with the last enemy. He came not back. Vainly I cried: "My brother! my brother!"
How long I sat with the dead strained to my heart, I do not know. Nannette told me that it was a long time. Also she told me that we were not alone. That, beside our weeping tenants, a stranger stood there with folded arms and humid eyes. That it was he who loosened my strained arms from the dead body of my brother. When she came to this, I remembered the gentle grasp which opened my locked fingers, and the dark eyes which looked down into mine with such a depth of power; how I resisted him; and how, even then, those eyes subdued me, and I seemed powerless to
It was this stranger who composed Frederick's limbs; his hands which closed the lids over those glorious eyes for their last repose. Then he went silently away, no one knew whither. My grief had struck below the source of tears. I moved about as emotionless as a stone. Everything in the past, the present, the future, was a blank. "Frederick is dead." That was all I knew. I could not pray--Frederick is dead--what could I ask for now! I gathered white, unsullied flowers, laid them around his brow and upon his breast. I twined, again and again, the chestnut curls around my fingers as of old. I walked around his coffin. I sat beside it, and would not be called away. I wept not, I spoke not. I went out to the edge of the grove of firs, and watched the old man dig his grave--watched the shining spade cut down into the earth--marked the sides of the grave, so smooth and dark; looked down to its bottom, so narrow, and deep, and dreadful.
It was his request to be buried here. In his native earth, where the mountains could guard his rest; where the voice of the river, the surging arms of the firs, the lapse of fountains, the psalms of birds, and the sigh of the summer wind could sing his requiem in one grand symphony. The name of Vernoid was honored in that valley; and many came from afar to see the earth close over the last son of the race. Many eyes, which I never saw again, filled with tears (needed, perchance, for themselves and for their children), while they looked upon me in my tearless woe, alone in the world, an orphan girl whose feet had not touched their nineteenth summer.
Tears came at last, blessed tears! The day after his burial I stood beside his grave, my wild rebellion-crazing heart and brain--"Why must they die?" I cried. "The beautiful, the immortal! Why are they not transfigured before us, that our eyes might behold the glory of the incorruptible body? Why go down to darkness, and to the worm? Why pass through this loathsome gateway to enter the fields of paradise? Why do they not ascend softly, softly through the delicious ether, until they reach the bosom of the Infinite Father? Oh, why is Heaven so undefinable, so far away? Why does no golden ladder reach down from its celestial
Before his death, Frederick had revealed to me the state of our finances. In Les Delices our entire fortune was vested. The rent which we had received from the estate had not equalled our Paris expenses. After all incumbrances were paid, something would remain for me; but not a sum sufficient for my support. Henri Rochelle was to be our executor, and it was Frederick's request that I should write him immediately upon his decease. The illness of Beatrice prevented him from accompanying us to Languedoc. The day after the burial, I penned these words:
"Monsieur Rochelle--Frederick died August the first, at seven o'clock p.m. Victoire."
By the return mail I received this reply:
"Victoire! they ascended together. The souls which had learned to live for each other upon earth, are now one in the kingdom of Heaven. Beatrice died at ten minutes before seven, on the evening of August the first. The sanctified is now also the glorified. The one link which bound me to my family is broken. The child of a former marriage, I am now alone. Victoire, I have but one care, one love left in my heart--these are for
If this letter had dropped into my hand from the clouds, I should not have been more astonished. It aroused me from my apathy of woe. It made me look toward my future. Life stretched out before me. Life, not death, was my portion. Frederick had said that I had a destiny to fulfil; that good stars met in my horoscope. What was this destiny? Simply to marry? Marriage had not entered into my plan of life. My mind, entirely absorbed by another idea, had not reached out toward this Ultima Thule of a woman's hope. At present, art was more to me than lover or husband could possibly be. I had not the slightest intention of merging into a complacent matron, kept "low and wise" by chubby children and household care. The thought of submitting my will to the law of another, of allowing my individuality to become fused into that of one mere human being, to me was odious. I knew nothing of the self-abnegating love, which with infinite trust can look into the eye of a mortal and say--"Entreat me not to leave thee--whither thou goest I will go. Where thou diest will I die. There will I be buried. Naught but death can part thee and me."
No! Art was my chosen. I wished to live my own life, develop the soul which God had given me, without interference, without restriction. The accident of sex, the fact of being a woman did not make me less determined, nor less apsiring. Why did no mistress of sculpture and of painting sit enthroned in the centuries beside Phidias, and Angelo, and Raphael! Through all ages had woman beheld her own form upon every shrine of art, raised as thy synonym of immortal beauty, without panting to embody in artistic forms the soul of the beautiful which lived within her? No! Had genius a sex? I did not believe it. Sappho, Aspasia, Zenobia, Hypatia were types of the universal soul which burned as often in the breasts of women as of men.
"There are thousands now, Such women, but convention beats them down, You men have done it; how I hate you all. Ah! were I something great, I would shame you then, Who love to keep us children."
These thoughts and feelings, which sprang spontaneously in my own nature, and lived a strong life without any fostering from external circumstances, seemed entirely to possess me after reading the letter of Henri Rochelle. No girl was ever wholly displeased with her first love-letter. It was a strange, a sudden, a pleasant thought to me, that still the world contained one being who cared for me. Yet the letter chafed far more than it pleased. Its tone of calm assurance irritated me. The one sentence--"You are a woman and need a protector; who else can it be but your only brother's only friend?"--was enough to stir to its depths my defiant pride. Evidently, on my part, he thought marriage a necessity. A woman, I could not take care of myself; to whom else could I go but to him? "He shall see!" I exclaimed. "I
What he had said of my feelings concerning him was true. If through my girlish brain there had ever floated the face of an impossible hero, certainly it was not the face of Henri Rochelle. The profound respect with which I had ever regarded him, removed him far away from me. In the chilly vacuity which separated us, love could not breathe. He was cast in the Roman mould. A dominant will, a metallic intellect,
Henri Rochelle was one of a large class of men--men of the highest honor, of the rarest virtue, who still are seldom favorites with women. With all their goodness they repel. Yet it is not their excellence which makes them disagreeable, but their defects. They cannot descend to the particulars of suavity and grace of manner; to the unbought, ever longed-
Men, the opposite of Henri Rochelle, too often control the hearts of women. The world may follow them with hard names, and harder stories; still women love them--women who would start from the accusation of impurity as from a serpent's sting. They belong to the class of whom Byron says:--"There are some who have the reputation of being wicked, with whom we would be only too happy to spend our lives." The divine fire of poetry kindles their eye, glows in their words, inspires their whole being. A lambent eye, a word, a smile born upon beautiful lips, moves, subdues them. They may be harsh enough with men; but to women they are ever chivalric, tender. Their subtle penetration, their delicate flattery, their half disguised tenderness, their deference, and instinctive reverence of all that is womanly; the rich effluence of their hearts, sweetening even that in their nature which may be selfish or sinful, throw around women who enter the charmed circle of their personal life an irresistible fascination. Too often they exclaim in their madness of folly:
{centered}"Alas! I know not if guilt's in thy heart; I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art."
These are the men whose impulses conquer their principles. The human flower whose fragrance they exhale is blighted by their touch.
I had a week in which to think, and to gather strength to resist Henri Rochelle. I knew not how to trifle. I would not use artifice. And as I saw no medium between perfect submission and open rebellion, I resolved upon the latter. As my legal advisor, I resolved to obey him; as my brother's friend, as the brother of Beatrice, I cherished for him a kind and mournful regard. I was willing to think of him in any relation but as the guide of my life; that I resolved he should be--never!
He came; quiet, calm, gentle,
"It is pleasant to think of our lost ones," he said; "to us their names will ever be precious; but it is time that we speak of our own life, of our own future, that lies before us. We shall not love the departed less because we love each other more. It will not take long to settle your affairs, Victoire. This little estate, with its incumbrances, is your only inheritance. I will pay the mortgages; then it will be yours, free from all claims from others. My studies are completed. I am already established in my profession; I only want my wife, I only want you, Victoire. I feel already that you are mine."
This address was like him--direct, honest, certain. Evidently he had not thought of the possibility of a refusal.
"Monsieur Rochelle is very kind, but I cannot accept his kindness. I do not intend to marry. I have other plans," was my reply.
For an instant he seemed not to comprehend me. He looked bewildered. His mind, concentrated upon the certainty, was slow in staggering back to the idea of uncertainty. With my first words of refusal all my strength came. When I had looked forward to this moment I had grown weak and trembled. The crisis had come, and I felt strong enough to meet it. I felt that my decision was irrevocable. He had wounded my pride poignantly. Had I loved him, I could not accept an offer which made me so great a debtor. I was not one simply to be loved and taken. I was not passive. I would at least be wooed and won by the man I married. "I will not marry you," I thought, and believe I looked it, as I lifted my eye steadily to his.
He comprehended me now. The penetrating eye looked down into my soul. Affection, passion, trembled under the iron curb of will. In the deadly pallor which swept over the strong face, I saw the surge of feeling. "Victoire! do you know what you say?" he asked calmly.
"I always know what I say; and I know also that I will not marry you, Monsieur Rochelle."
"Why will you not marry me, Victoire?"
"Because I do not wish to marry any one; because I do not love you."
"When I wrote you," he replied, "I did not think that you had learned to love me. But, since my coming, your kind manner has been to me the acceptance of the proposal of my letter."
Here spoke the man, a true representative of most men. Few men can receive simple kindness from a girl without misconstruing it into something more--into a proof of their own intense personal power, or as the effervescence of her half-concealed passion. When a man points out a woman amid the crowd, gifted or beautiful, perchance, and says, "
To Henri Rochelle I said: "I met you as Beatrice's brother, as Frederick's friend; as such I regard you tenderly; but to think of you as a lover or as a husband, turns me to marble." Again he looked amazed. "Victoire," he asked, "will you look at this matter in the light of reason, if you cannot in that of affection?"
"Yes, I am happy to look at it in the light of my own reason."
"If I cannot convince you, I shall think that you have no
All that he said, doubtless, was true; yet he had not fathomed the nature which he addressed, or he would have chosen another mode to conquer; at least he would have left a few words out of his sentences, and have soothed down his tone of superiority a little. A few hours before he had seemed to me a noble and tender brother; now, I only recognised an antagonist. Still he went on--still in silence I listened, though every word which he uttered made me more determined not to submit.
"I abhor the marriage
The assured tone did not alter. It was this which fretted me. It said plainer than his words, "I am willing to wait, because I am certain that you will love me."
"Our ideas of what will constitute a happy marriage differ," I replied. "Before my fate is irrevocably sealed, I wish to feel that I
"Esteem, affection, are worth infinitely more than the impulsive love of a passionate heart. The love which is the after-growth of these qualities, alone is reliable; but you have the common girl-ideas. You are romantic, Victoire."
"Perhaps I am," I said, "but time will cure my exaggerations. I shall not marry in haste."
Again he looked astonished. Evidently I was not just what he had believed me to be. Where he had expected the pliancy of the girl, he met the hard obstinacy of a time-hardened woman. Frederick had been guided by his judgment and wishes; from his sister he had received perfect acquiescence, the submissive reverence which the "true woman" is supposed to yield involuntarily to man. He was utterly disappointed.
"You are very unlike Frederick," he said, abruptly. He
"No! I am not like him," I murmured; "but I am not to blame for my nature."
"Your nature is noble; you have only to learn to bring it into subjection--the great lesson of life is to be willing to submit."
"Submit! I will submit to God; but I know of no law which requires me to submit to you."
"No, not to me, but to your circumstances. God makes your circumstance."
"I see no circumstance which makes it necessary that I marry against my will."
"Young, poor, ignorant of the world, without a living relative, are not these circumstances which should influence you to accept a lawful protector?"
"Protector!" I said. "God is my protector. He can take care of me without human help. He has given me a purpose of my own. I have my own destiny to fulfil. My own consciousness is a safer guide than you can be, who know neither my powers nor my needs. I do not wish to marry, and you cannot compel me."
"Compel you?" And his voice, which had not varied in its calm kindness, was now painfully mournful. "I would never take to my heart a forced bride. I have only sought to convince you. I know that if you would only acquiesce, your feelings toward me would change. I confess I was not prepared for such a state of mind. It is unprecedented in my knowlege of women. Believe me, it is not a natural one. The heart of the real woman yearns for nothing so much as to be loved. In the love of a noble man, she receives her highest exaltation. The first love of my life, the love of a man's strong heart, I have offered you, Victoire, and you spurn it with contempt."
"No, I do not spurn your heart. I am humble when I think that you deem me worthy of your love. I only resist what to me seems your purpose to coerce me into a plan of life different from that which I have chosen. I place no light estimate upon love. I have a human heart, which yearns for affection; but it must not be too dearly bought. A portion
"You do not know yourself, Victoire," he said. "Your heart is an unsolved mystery. Art is a glorius mistress, but she cannot be to you, through all your life, either lover or husband. You might exist with no other friend, but it would not be life. Your nature would starve, and at last you would pine for the joy you had spurned, which had passed beyond your reach for ever."
"You do not know me, Monsieur Rochelle. You speak from the belief that all women are alike. You think only of your sister Beatrice, whom God made to show us what the angels are like. The human soul does not repeat itself. There are as many types of womanhood as of manhood. All men are not brave, and strong, and noble. All women are not weak, and soft, and loving. Athena sprang from the head of Jove in full armor. She was his equal in intellect and power. She delighted in the tumult of war. She was the leader of heroes. Her eye made Achilles tremble. The soul of her character was cold, reflective wisdom. Yet she was the patron of art, and delighted in the unbought graces of life. She represents one order of women. The world is full of Athenas."
"Athena represents a class of extreme women. But the world does not need Athena now."
"No! The world is old. Its morning freshness has departed. The lusty strength of its noon has vanished. The fiery life in its veins is spent. It wants to be warmed and nourished. It has no need of heroes now, but cries for weak and clinging things, to breathe new life into its withered soul. Aphrodite, the beautiful, the frail, the loving--light as the sea-foam from whence she sprung--
"Aphrodite alone would not satisfy me; not love and weakness, but tendernes combined with strength, constitutes my ideal of woman. Athena commands only my icy admiration. You are not Athena, Victoire."
"I am not Aphrodite."
"No, but there is more than
"You do not know me--I am a peaceful Athena, devoted to art."
"You do violence to yourself. You give supremacy to intellect; you would crush, kill the heart, yet you can never be Athena. Where is the majestic form? You are delicate and slender. Where are the classice bands of hair? Yours is silken and curling. Where the blue, frozen eye? Yours is dark and liquid, breathing softness as well as fire. Where the firm, strong lips? In yours, above the curve of pride, swells the fulness of feeling. Ah! you do not know yourself; but your hour will come. You will feel yet that to love and to be loved is, after all, the joy of life."
The strong mind was concentrated upon me now. I closed my eyes beneath his penetrating gaze. An image, that he did not see, rose under the drooped lids. That rich face, those profound eyes, those tones, low and tender, which had swayed me
There was a long silence. The trance of my new vision was too pleasant to be broken. It might be madness; I knew that it was, yet how sweet to dream! Henri Rochelle did not know that the foolish child was obeying her heart after all. But
Henri Rochelle saw before him an orphan girl to whom he wished to be husband, brother, friend. She was poor; he wished to satisfy every want. She loved the beautiful; he wished to surround her with beauty, to gratify every taste, to cultivate every gift, to love her as the best gift of his life, asking only in return that she should love and obey him--the two things which Victoire could not do. In that hour I could not enter the path which he opened to me and be true to my
There was a long silence; both hearts were busy.
"You have plans, Victoire; what are they?" at last he asked.
"I am going to America." This was too sudden, too great a suprise.
"Impossible! Are you mad?"
"No! I am perfectly sane."
"What--what will become of you?" There was more of sorrow than of anger in his tone.
"Have you no faith in God?" Monsieur Rochelle. "He will take care of me."
"He has not promised to take care of the presumptuous--but we will talk no longer," he added. "I see that your decision is unalterable. My duty yet remains. When do you wish to embark for America?"
"As soon as possible. I do not wish to spend the winter in France."
Another expression of deep pain passed over his face, but he only said: "Well, I will do all in my power to assist you."
"I trust you," was my answer.
And he did do all in his power. He began to make arrangements for my departure, as if
What chafed me most, I fancied that he pitied me--pitied my ignorance and folly. If there was no condecension in his once, twice, thrice, I saw it gather in his face, his eyes; fuse his whole expression--the old assurance, the calm look of certainty saying: "You are mine! You do not believe it; but you are mine. I am your destiny." He was unconscious of this look; but I knew it, and it made me defy him. In a few days he departed for Paris, promising to make speedy arrangements for the sale of Les Delices. He said that he was intimate with a gentleman belonging to the city, who wished to purchase such an estate, and with whom he was confident a bargain could be perfected. I received a letter at an early day--a business letter, terse, laconic as a lawyer's--stating that the gentleman whom he mentioned would purchase Les
I thought that nothing remained but to make my personal arrangements before my departure, when opposition arose in an unexpected quarter. Nannette, my old bonne, thought me "crazy." As I wished to be spared her lectures, I had not spoken of my plan for the future until it was perfectly defined in my own mind and ready to be consummated. Nannette had lived in the family from my mother's marriage, had nursed both Frederick and myself, and for years had indulged in all the loquacious liberty which is generally conceded as the especial privilege of old and faithful servants.
Mademoiselle
I was alone upon the ocean. The autumnal glories of the land were reflected in the resplendent colors of the sky and sea. The fitful clouds had wept their eyes dry, and now were out for a holiday. Soft, etheral, evanescent forms, their fleecy robes all fringed with flame, they chased each other over the sky. Some, softly swaying up and down, floated idly through the hyacinth sea; and some, dim in the zenith, seemed to beat with their invisible oars the crystalline walls of the far away
Since that hour I have loved a little girl, a melodious child, with prophetic eyes sad and soft, in their beautiful mystery, who, as she sat with her arms around her father's neck, gazing out upon the measureless waters, listening to the moan of the unresting waves, sighed in the sweet sympathy of her soul: "Poor old sea! poor old sea!" The child penetrated the ocean's history. She knew that it was old, she dreamed that it was sorrowful. Yet
But even ocean can forget its horrors--forget that it is old, and laugh above its sepulchres. To-night it looked young. Every wave seemed agile with youth, springing up in eager emulation to see which could toss highest its fringed cap of creamy spray. Ah! how could ocean look old, when bridges of rosy flame spanned it near and far away--when every grey wave was kindled with the glory of the emblazoned sky; more than earth can look old when she wraps around her aged form the virginal robes of spring! The last bridge was withdrawn, the last blazing spar submerged, the golden ship went down--down under the dark waves. Night crept over the deep; she quenched the glory of the sky; she lit her own twinkling beacons along the dim uppper shores. Still I sat upon the deck. Memories, yearnings came over me. My heart went back to France, to Les Delices--to its vineyard, its garden. I stood beside its fountains, lingered by its grave. I gazed into the fathomless world of Beatrice's eyes. I pillowed the head of my lost one upon my heart.
The great ship struck the colliding waters. It heaved and fell; it hissed through the swelling surge; its groan answerd the groan of the deep. Through the grey night my eyes wandered forth across the wilderness of waves--mighty, boundless! Vastness, sublimity, power, struck me chill with awe. An atom of life, unheeded, in the fierce clutch of the relentless sea, I was vanquished by the sense of my nothingness. What a waif upon the waters--what a waif to be tossed upon the bosom of life. And yet, ere I knew, again hope dawned within me. Courage grew. Endeavor, rooted, broad-based, seemed to make my centre. I became heroic. The night made me grand. Victory looked from the eyes of the stars. The gay young western world stretched forth its strong, free arms to receive me. My mother's land, the land of my father's love, the brave, the bold, the audacious, yet generous and glorious land--it had a place for me amid its workers.
No wonder that the ancients, with their subtle, spiritual vision, had descried, far away in the mythic west, a golden Atlantis. No wonder that Plato dreamed of it in his garden. That all generations of men, from the early twilight of time, had turned their faces toward the evening land; that the mines of Cypango, the jewelled walls of Cathay, flashed before the poet eyes of Columbus, when, in truth, upon the thither shore of Atlantic, America stretched away to the borders of sunset. The young land, which nurtured upon its beneficent bosom the weary, the hopeless, the hoping, the aspiring of all races, I believed had room for another in whose veins burned a life real, potent, yet disquieted--restless as the genius of the people whose land she sought. These were my dreams upon deck--these my dreams in sleep, when I lay rocked in my narrow berth, the great waves of ocean throbbing at my side.
It is very easy to suppose what we shall do at a certain time under certain imagined circumstances. To see ourselves very self-composed, very wise, rarely discreet, all self-sufficient. But, alas! when the occasion comes, it is just as easy to forget all our well-laid arrangements, to lose our equanimity, to shift from our balance, to find ourselves drifting hither and thither scarcely knowing what we are about. People of little imagination do not dream over emergencies;
In my visions I had often seen myself calm and self-possessed. When the reality came, when the great ship touched the wharf, when the dim and whirl of landing began, I was not quite the composed creature of my dreams. Friends were rushing to meet friends. Oh! what rejoicings and embracings, what kisses and tears I beheld, as people rushed into each other's arms! Happy beings led away their returned ones, to tell, in the sweet air of home, by the golden hearth-side, all the glad and sorrowful things which "happened since you went away." There was no greeting for me. I could have wept because there was none. It was a cold, gusty, leaden morning. The heavens were drab, the air was drab, the people looked drab in the dingy light. Not even sunshine, not even a genial air to say--"You are welcome." Alas! was my Atlantis a mirage? The unattainable land of visions--had it shifted farther away? On, on, still on did it lie, curtained with its own golden mist upon the dreamy borders of Hesperus?
Nannette, who had no visions, no anticipations; felt no disappointment, no misgivings, no fear. She simply looked at facts--stark, ungarnished facts. "Mademoiselle had run away to this country to seek her fortune. Nannette had come to take care of her. In Nannette's opinion Mademoiselle was a little crazy. She must look after Mademoiselle's trunks." This was the alpha and omega of Nannette's thought. She simply knew her duty, and went and did it. Nannette was wise.
In the meantime I swallowed the rising weakness, pressed back the gushing flood before it had filtered out a single tear. In less than an hour I found myself in a quiet apartment in a good hotel, looking from my window upon the sea of human life flowing through Broadway.
There was no cant in my prayers that night. No mock devotion as I bowed low at the feet of the Infinite Father. Wilful, sinful,
I brought a letter of introduction from M. Savonne to M. Petitman. My old teacher regarded him as a gentleman of wealth, taste, and of fine social position. The day after my arrival I despatched my letter and card, and cooly awaited a call from its recipient. M. Petitman came during the afternoon. I was summoned into the presence of a sleek, complacent, smiling man, with a smooth, pulpy face, and a shining , bald head. He possessed a great portion of what the English call "manner," which, I soon discovered, in him consisted of an odd mixture of Yankee inquisitiveness and Parisian politeness. He had a startling way of moving his bare scalp back and forth as if it were making a serious effort to open. He had the peculiar cringe of body which marks the sycophant; and he smiled and said "Ah," perpetually.
"Mademoiselle Victoire Vernoid, ah! I am most happy to meet a pupil of my dear friend, Monsieur Savonne. Happy, happy were the hours which I spent to Paris. I have a weakness for Paris, Mademoiselle Vernoid--ah."
All this was uttered with a most gracious obeisance.
"You have come to America to visit your relatives--ah, Mademoiselle?"
"No, sir. I have not a relative living."
"Ah! unfortunate, unfortunate; but you have friends whom you have come to see, ah?"
"I have not even an acquaintance in America. I have few friends living. My life has passed in great retirement."
This was a most impolite speech. A change, so slight that it was scarcely perceptible; still a change passed over the glistening pulp of M. Petitman's features. It betrayed
I came to these conclusions while waiting for M. Petitman's next remark. The bland smile was remanded back. Again the lips and the tongue said: "Ah, you have a definite plan for the future, have you not, Miss Vernoid?"
"Yes, sir; I have come to America to work as an artist."
"Ah, very commendatory."
"In my mother's native country I hope to earn fiends."
"Ah, doubtless you will do so. No people are more ready to acknowledge preserving talent than Americans. You will have to be patient, however, until you become known. You know our great Longfellow says:
{centered}"'Learn to labor and to wait.'""I am willing to labor, and expect to wait," was my curt reply.
The condescendingly patronizing manner which M. Petitman had suddenly assumed, instead of making me feel small and meek, was fast lifting me to a high altitude of contempt.
"If you are willing to labor and expect to wait, you are prepared for life, and need no assistance," was his amiable reply. "If you succeed, I will introduce you with great pleasure to many of my distinguished friends. Mrs. Petitman, who is passionately devoted to art, will then visit your studio. Ah! It would afford me pleasure to invite you to partake of the hospitalities of my house; but we are just now crowded with distinguished visitors--Professor Knowitall--you have heard of him, without doubt, even in France; Dr. Stuffhead--you probably heard his name; and the charming poetess, Miss Lillion Languish--you must have heard of
All this was said in a strange, hesitating tone, caused by the three desires struggling in his mind at once. The desire to mention his "distinguished" visitors, the desire to appear polite, and the special desire to remain unencumbered by the household presence of an unknown.
"M. Petitman does me great honor," I replied; "but under no circumstances could I accept his hospitality. If he will be kind enough to direct me to a private boarding-house, a quiet and refind home, he will confer the only favor I could possibly receive."
"Ah!" said the little man, suddenly radiating with benevolence, the oil of hypocrisy exuding through his unctuous skin: "It will afford me most exquisite pleasure to do you a favor. I am acquainted with a number of very genteel ladies who take a few very genteel persons into the bosom of their families. I think of one particularly, Mrs. Skinher; she accepts none but persons of the highest respectability. I will write you a note of introduction, Miss Vernoid, ah."
All names were alike to me. He wrote the note; I thanked him; and Mr. Petitman bowed himself out of my sight.
Why trouble you with particulars? I saw Mrs. Skinher, and, before another night, found myself established in an attic chamber of her house, with good old Nannette domesticated chamber of her house, with good old Nannette domesticated in the kitchen as "French pastry cook." This attic parlor with its small ante-room, happened to be the only unoccupied one. My first impression of it was pleasant. It seemed a retreat. High above the world, nearer heaven than most of the rooms in the house, it suited me. A carpet of small pattern and delicate tints covered the floor. Curtains of white muslin shaded the windows. The furniture was of black walnut. A few books were scattered upon the small centre table. Some simple engravings hung upon the wall. Mrs. Jenks observed that these attic rooms were usually occupied by students or literary people, who selected them because they were cheap, and because they were quiet; that Miss de Ray, a very literary lady, occupied the room opposite; that the one adjoining belonged to Signor Orsino, an Italian gentleman, a teacher of languages. Mrs. Skinher belonged to the community of respectable widows who maintain a genteel style of living by "keeping boarders." She preferred a large house, full of strangers paying for their trouble, to a small one in which she must live pinched and wait upon
Do you hate dinner-eating? I do. Poetry sits down at breakfast in the young morning, before the day comes, with its care and weariness. We come fresh from our dreams to our coffee, and its fragrance is sweeter than dreams. An hour hence we must be hard at work, but the hour has not yet come; we give the moment to luxury. We slowly drink while we scan the moment to luxury. We slowly drink while we scan the morning paper and chat about the news. We lean over our cup, and, slowly dipping up the nectar, let it drip over the side of the spoon, a liquid rosary, each drop counting some dear plan for the day, whose blossoms lean against the cheek of to-morrow. People generally look well at breakfast, rested and simple. A beautiful woman never looks lovelier than at his hour, when, perhaps, she fancies herself "not fit to be seen." More fascinating than in ball costume is she in her early simplicity, in her graceful rove, her delicate collar, with plain bands of shining hair. There is a charm about "tea." When the day has shut its tired eyes and departed. When we have laid our burden down at the feet of night, to be lifted only by the hand of another day. How fascinating is the tea-table--its snowy, glossy damask, its delicate plate, its light repast, its balmy tea, its loving faces! Our work is done. We have earned repose. Morpheus looks from the warm fire-shadows; and, behind, Somnus opens before our yearning eyes the ivory gate of dreams. Ah, tea is delightful! but dinner--dinner is sorded, sensual. Around it no graces hover. It is grand and unnatural. Everybody looks "dressed," self-conscious, and uncomfortable. Stuffed ducks and stuffed people! Who looks handsome at dinner? Your hands swell; your nose grows pink; your eyes grow little. I have little faith in "the feast of reason and the flow of soul" at dinner.
Such were my cogitations during the first two hours' sitting at Mrs. Skinher's dinner-table. Near me, "doing the honors" of a cold ham, sat a gentleman who, had he not been noticed, certainly would have been disappointed in his expectations and preparations. He was small, slight, and possessed the precise form of that ghostly image which we see in physiologies under the title of "consumptive." His long neck
These facts I discovered from the gentleman's remarks. Near by sat a lady whom he addressed as "Mrs. Wiggins." She was magnificently attired, with a diamond upon her finger, which, as she afterward assured me, was "of the purest water." A pair of fine-colored, fine-shaped eyes, rescued her face from positive ugliness. Even these, when they emerged from their artificial smiles in their naked light, had an expression sly, selfish, snakish. Her complexion was sallow; her long, narrow chin and thin lips, sinister. She referred often to--"When I was at
Next Mr. Wiggins sat a young man with an interesting face. He was pale, with a classic head, covered with a profusion of curling, dark hair. His eyes were full, lustrous, and wonderfully soft. They moved quickly with a startled look, as if half which they saw in the world alarmed them. Clear as translucent lakes reflecting every change upon the sky, they radiated every internal emotion, now kindling with sunshine, now deepening with shadow. Yet whatever its mood, the soul which looked from those crystal windows seemed pure, innocent as that of a little child.
Beside him sat a woman who I knew must be remarkable. She could make no pretensions to youth. Poor Miss De Ray--even now I sigh when I say it--must have been fifty! She was very tall, and very narrow, and gave one the idea of possessing no shoulders, but seemed all neck from her ears to her waist. Her face was sharp and wrinkled. Her large, restless eyes looked eager and anxious. Occasionally a wild light shot from them, which might have been fantacism, which might have been insanity, which might have been pain.
Then followed the politician of the table. He had red hair, which stood erect. And if any of the public journals had taken the trouble to caricature his face, they would have given it the bulldog look. With vociferous voice he defended his favorite demigod, and the last pet measure of "the administration." He gesticulated violently, sometimes bringing his knife, sometimes his clenched fist, down to the table in full force. He had a favorite remark which he offered to the company, generally without much reference to its connection: "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice--expect nothing and you'll never be disappointed." This reiterated trusim I afterwards learned referred to the fact that, though he married an heiress with golden visions of an easeful future, his wife, with an income of a cool five thousand a year, kept it safe under lock and key; so the gentleman could spend not a cent of it in attending political conventions, nor to pay political sharpers for the hope of an impossible office. Beside him sat a beautiful creature, a perfect embodiment of American feminine
"Mrs. Wiggins, I have been reading a delightful book today," said Mr. Bunkum. "I think it better adapted to a lady's capacity than any I have seen for a long time--Abbey's Child's History; have you read it?"
"No, I have not," simpered Mrs. Wiggins; "I shall be most happy to procure it if you recommend it, Mr. Bunkum."
"I do; ladies should know a little about history; and anything as profound as Macaulay it is not to be expected that they will read, or understand if they did."
At this remark the wild light shot from Miss De Ray's eyes, as she turned them full upon Mr. Bunkum. "Will Mr. Bunkum allow me to inquire if he thinks Macaulay's History beyond the comprehension of women?" she asked.
"I do. There is not one lady in a dozen who, if she commenced Macaulay, would have sufficient interest to read it through."
"You give woman little credit for intelligence, Mr. Bunkum."
"Intelligence! Miss De Ray; man does not need intelligence in woman; affection--affection is all-sufficient."
"You think that men should have a sufficiency of the former to supply both, do you not?"
"Certainly; of course. No man wishes to find an equal in his wife. In the lady who is to become Mrs. Bunkum, I require three essentials. Firstly, affection; secondly, beauty; thirdly, common sense. To a superior intellect I should decidedly object.
"Why! Mr. Bunkum."
"Because a woman does not need talent. The more she has, the more she detracts from her husband's glory. All that it is necessary for her to know it is his privelege to tell her."
There was an audible flutter among the ladies at the table, except for Mrs. Wiggins, who said benignly; "I agree with Mr. Bunkum. Ladies should not assume to know as much as gentlemen. What do you think of those who attempt to write books?" and her eyes turned a malicious glance toward Miss De Ray.
"I think," said Mr. Bunkum, with an abortive attempt to inflate his inverted chest, "that they would be much better employed washing their children's faces. But I cannot conceive how a woman, one worthy of the name, with the shrinking, the sensitiveness, the weakness inherent to her sex, could ever allow her name to appear in a public print; she cannot, and be a true woman."
"Does Mr. Bunkum believe that all American women, who are authors, to become such have sacrificed all that is best in their womanhood?" asked Miss De Ray.
"Precisely; that is precisely what I believe. A woman, possessing the true delicacy of her sex, will shrink from having her name even mentioned by strangers."
"What do you consider to be the duty of a true woman, Mr. Bunkum?"
"To obey and love her husband, to love and to care for her children, make up the whole duty of woman."
"These are a portion of her duties, Mr. Bunkum. But a true woman is one who nurtures every faculty which God has given her until her whole nature blossoms into symmetrical beauty. Such a woman is loving, obeying, naturally the laws of love. But affection cannot absorb all her powers. Man needs sustenance for his intellect as well as his heart. So does woman. The more comprehensive is her nature, the deeper her experience, the more profound her capacity to love."
"You are transcendental, Miss De Ray. I do not understand you; and I doubt if you understand yourself. We were speaking of female authorship. I am opposed to it in toto. For two reasons; firstly, women have not talent, genius, to write books of a high order; secondly, their books are not needed."
"Women have had everything to discourage them, and yet have there not been women whose works would do honor to any man?" asked Miss De Ray.
"None whose productions I would be willing to own. Madame De Stael, I suppose, you rank among the first.
"How disagreeable that would have been!" sighed Mrs. Wiggins.
"Yes, it would have been very distressing to you, Mr. Bunkum; but if you never have greater reason to be shocked with any member of your family, you will be very fortunte," said Miss De Ray.
"You need borrow no trouble on my account, Madam. I shall always be able to rule my own house. Before marriage, I intend that the future Mrs. Bunkum shall promise, in all things, to submit to the requirements of the gospel."
"She may claim the privilege of deciding for herself what the requirements of the gospel are. American women have a high spirit, and the same insatiate love for liberty which characterizes American men," said Miss De Ray.
"Grace conquers nature, Madam. The first lesson which I shall teach my wife, is that she must implicity obey; that my will is her law; that I am not only my own master, but that I am also hers. I shall owe her this lesson as my first duty. A husband is responsible for the salvation of his wife. Indeed, I think that it is only on account of her relation to man that woman is saved. I have made it a subject of deep study. I have searched the best Greek lexicons, and find no word in the original which convinces me that females are especially included in the plan of salvation. But gallantry impels me to place as large a construction as possible upon the designs of God. On the whole, I rather desire that the frailer half of humanity should be admitted into the celestial kingdom."
As Mr. Bunkum said these words, he bowed and stretched his thin lips over his ferocious jaw in a ghastly grin, which he intended as a most gracious smile for Mrs. Wiggins.
"I intend that the future Mrs. Bunkum shall be a very happy woman," he added. "I shall seem severe at first, while I am breaking her will, but afterwards I shall teach her to see the beauty there is in entire trust, in perfect submission. When our relations are perfectly adjusted, it will be my delight to supply all her wants without ever asking her what they are."
Poor Miss De Ray was keenly excited. She twitched nervously, and her eyelids trembled over her restless eyes. But the fretted soul in that jarred frame was no match for the bulldog force, the dogged assumption of the Rev. Jonathan Bunkum; and Miss De Ray wisely said no more. She left the table before dessert, and, as the door closed upon her, Mrs. Wiggins smiled superciliously. Often, while Mr. Bunkum had been speaking, I saw resentment, nay, defiance, shoot from her eye as from a live volcano; but it was wonderful how suddenly all fire would fall back, smothered in the crater, lost in the glare of Mr. Bunkum's smile. As Miss De Ray departed, she said to that august individual--"Are you aware that Miss De Ray is an authoress, Mr. Bunkum?"
"I am aware that she looks like one--female authors are usually frights," he replied. "It is the duty of every lady to be beautiful;" and the smile and bow which accompanied these words seemed to say to Mrs. Wiggins--"
She smirked consciously, and said: 'Oh! Mr. Bunkum, that is quite impossible for
"Well, if nature has not been kind, a woman need not make herself odious be turning into a
"Miss De Ray does not assume to be very profound. She writes children's books. She is now very busy with a silly thing which she calls the A-B-C-darian. She is very anxious to introduce it into all the public schools. For my part, I think her insane."
"Probably, or she would go and teach her brothers' and sisters' children, and leave the care of the public schools to those to whom they belong."
Thus ended the first sayings which I heard from the mouth of Rev. Jonathan Bunkum. He flourished his napkin, placed it in his silver ring with three pompous "Ahems!" and with a bow, left Mrs. Wiggins and the ham "alone in their glory."
While passing through the last hall, as I went to my room, a sound startled me and arrested my steps. I listened. It came from Miss De Ray's room, a deep, half-supposed, agonized sob. One followed another in slow, painful succession. It was the live sob of a convulsed heart. Within its compass seemed compressed the sorrow, the disappointment, the pain of a whole life. It smote my soul. I said to myself--"Mr. Bunkum may abuse female authors; Mrs. Wiggins may scorn you, if she pleases; I like you, poor Miss De Ray; and if I dared, would come in and tell you so." But, as it was, I entered my own silent retreat. I sat down and thought of Mr. Bunkum. He was a new specimen of a man to me. Did he represent the men of America? Did the free government engender tyrants? He was a tyrant, I knew. My last thought that night was Mr. Bunkum, after which I again devoted myself to eternal celibacy.
{centered}BOARDING-HOUSE LIFE.An indolent, objectless, listless life seemed that of the lady boarders. If their existence had an object, it must have been already attained, for they were guiltless of either physical or mental exertion. "Nothing to Do" was stamped alike upon their delicate hands, and upon their expressionless faces. In a room warmed to a tropical heat, upon a luxurious sofa, they would lie through all the day, reading the last sensation story, playing with the rings upon their waxen fingers, dreaming the softest, it may be the silliest of dreams. When night crept down into the beleaguered street, and the gas waved its banners of flame athwart the sombre walls of the houses, and flooded their rooms with radiance, they would languidly assume the dignity of martyrs, and allow themselves to be dressed for dinner. When variety came to their apartment it was usually in the form of a worn dressmaker, who, day after day, would sit before them, fashioning with weary fingers the most costly fabrics into faultless robes; or a lady splendidly attired would call to discuss the last opera, the last ball, the newest style, with all the prospective weddings and births within the circle of acquaintance. When the heavens
But on ill-omened days, when the sky was sulky and the very air fretful and teasing, the bad temper of the weather would steal like contagion into human hearts. Then no story book, no day dream, no new dress even, could restore the lost equilibrium of amiable dulness to the fair occupants of the sofas. They would suddenly become gregarious, and, congregating in different rooms, would serve up for each other's taste minute dishes of gossip and scandal. The last dinner talk, Mr. Bunkum, Miss DeRay, the looks, manners, and foibles of each absent person would be most thoroughly masticated. Then would follow more secret revelations. Snatches of private conversation overheard in halls; family secrets, which, in some mysterious way, had penetrated into feminine ears within inviolate closets; the deplorable state of feeling existing between Mr.--- and his wife; followed by commiseration, denunciation, and doubtful sighs. All were blamed, few praised, the world itself condemned, and the ladies would seperated, each meekly believing herself to be the only one of her acquaintance "fit to live." Some had children, but they were left entirely the the charge of nurses. Of the holy ministry of motherhood--the beautiful cares and hallowing joys of a home which make the sweetest life of every real woman--these ladies had read, but knew very little of them in reality, and cared less.
It was like transition from one world to another to pass from my Languedoc home to live in a New York boarding-house. The different phases of humanity afforded me entertainment, the dinner table-talk amusement, yet I instinctively felt that my actual life msut be lived in the silence of my
I commenced my picture. It absorbed me. I arose from my couch and sat down to it. I went mechanically to my meals, only to return to it. I ate in silence; simpering, hypocrisy, bombast, were nothing to me now; they neither disturbed nor amused me. I passed the lighted parlors, with their music and mirth; passed the ladies chatting in the halls, to return and gaze in silence into the dawning faces of my loved ones. Day by day they grew, gradually unfoldng into the warm lineaments of life beneath my touch, until at last these faces were no longer pictures but souls; and I seemed to breathe again in the living presence of the only beings whom I had ever loved.
Winter passed. The snows melted from the house-tops, falling in warm rain from the flooded eaves. From their sooty winter covering the pavements emerged clean and warm Cumulous clouds, radiant harbingers of pleasant weather,
I loved Union Park the best. I loved its bright patches of grass in which the dandelion showered its stars; its feminine maples, shaking their breezy skirts in the glad spring sunshine. And, when they were touched with hectic and leaned in love against each other, dying beautifully, meet types of the frailest and fairest of the human race who blossom and perish early, they touched my heart as nearly. There the fountain showered its liquid stars; there gay children gathered and frolicked in the sunshine; there birds warbled their sweetest idyls. I would sit in some sun-warmed spot and watch the little ones. Their music made me glad; their young life stirred my own. The pretty German Frauleins in white caps, who knew me because I smiled upon their bonny baby charges, would come, and holding up a patrician rosebud, say: "Isn't
April shut her tearful eyes. May laughed above the shoulder of her weeping sister. I saw the buds burst; I saw the young leaves come out to kiss the spring; saw the fountain bathe the feverish brow of the year's adolescent days; and simply to live, to drink in sun and song and odorous air, to thrill to the touch of the electric wind til every pulse seemed surcharged with a new magnetic life--only to breathe was ecstasy.
Summer came. The butterflies flitted away from the parlors below to the breezy hills and to the invigorating sea. Only the inhabitants of the attic remained. The attic's warbler, Miss De Ray, still pipled her languishing lyrics in the room opposite. Soft-eyed Orsino, the Italian teacher, still went and came from his daily tasks. While I, unchanged, sat a worshipper in the midst of my gods. No wonder Mrs. Skinher made the remark which she did: "I always have very
Orsino, the Italian teacher, was the young man whose face attracted my attention pleasantly at my first dinner at Mrs. Skinher's. There was something in his eyes which touched me. They did not move, they only touched me, stirring in my breast the slumbering pool of pity. I saw that he was one of those æolian-strung beings upon whom every passing influence can play, bringing out a wail or a melody. One of those unconscious human Christs who have come into the world to suffer for the follies and sins of others. I often met him upon the stairs, passed him in the halls, and we had learned to bow and smile upon each other, and that was all.
But one evening as I sat alone, as usual, looking at the growing faces upon the canvass before me, a shadow fell upon the threshold, and, looking up, I saw Orsino. He stood in the open door with a look of embarrassment upon his face, as if he hardly had decided whether to enter or withdraw. "Will the Signora pardon?" he asked, hesitatingly, as he caught my uplifted eye. "I have heard much of the Signora's picture; I have come to see it; I thought, perhaps, it would make me think of those I used to see in my own country."
"You are welcome," I replied; "but if you have looked upon the paintings of Italy, you will see little to please you in the work of an amateur."
"Ah, this is beauty!" he exclaimed, advancing, and gazing directly at the portrait of my mother--the same which won my childish love upon the walls of Les Delices. "This
I knew that one who had such eyes as Orsino must be a worshipper of the beautiful. He was not profuse in adulation; he did not tire me with exclamations of "How beautiful!" "Oh, how lovely!" but his changing check and enkindling eye betrayed a delicate appreciation more deliciously gratifying to me than a room full of compliments. I eagerly watched the impression which my own painting would make upon his susceptible mind--the one into which my utmost being was infused. When his eye fell upon it, he held his breath for an instant. He looked at Frederick, and, following the upturned eye, his gaze rested upon the mist-veiled face of Beatrice.
"Do you paint spirits?" he asked. "That is a spirit. What eyes! they were never made for earth. I wish that I could see such a pair of eyes in this world."
"They once looked upon the world; but they closed early, and no wonder."
He looked from my face to that of the Stranger. "Is this your brother?" he asked. "You have the same look in your eyes."
"No! he is not my brother. Do we look alike?"
"Yes, in your eyes. You look as if you thought of the same things."
"Perhaps we do."
I had painted that face faithfully, as it looked forth upon me from my own soul. Was it a likeness, or, after all, was it only a vision? Why had the eyes the expression of mine? Surely I had not intended to paint my own. So I thought, and in my thought forgot Orsino.
But he needed no words. Orsino had come to my studio, had stared and talked; he gazed, felt, in silence. Mrs. Wiggins had ascended to my attic, and, after looking at each face through her lorgnette, exclaimed: "My! how tiresome it must be to sit and paint all day; but you make pretty faces; I think that I will have you paint my portrait." And I had answered: "Thank you, Mrs. Wiggins. I do not paint portraits."
Rev. Jonathan Bunkum had asked cynically if he might compare my pictures with those of the Louvre, which he believed I had had the opportunity to study. He came, and, standing before the pictures, had delivered an essay of technical criticism, duly divided by naked "heads," from firstly to
What woman would want a fool for a husband, I thought; but only said: "We differ in opinion, Mr. Bunkum. Art opens a wide sphere to a woman, and I think that she has a nature large enough to fill it."
He departed with a look of amazement upon his face--that any woman should have the audacity to offer an opinion differing from that of Rev. Jonathan Edwards Bunkum.
But here had come a simple spirit, who in silence looked through the visible symbol to the invisible soul. Here was no affectation, no pretension. He simply gazed and felt. And I, in silence, accepted his unspoken sympathy.
Perhaps the gratitude in my heart shone in my eyes; for when I said, as he turned to depart--"Do not be in haste, Signor Orsino," his countenance suddenly radiated. If I cannot speak sincerely, I say nothing. If the eyes which look at me do not say, "You are welcome," my soul, without a word, retires back to itself. If I hold converse, it must be beside the warm fireside of the heart. I cannot stand shivering outside, muttering through barred windows. There were no bars across Orsino's windows. I looked straight through their limpid crystal into the fair, unpeopled world within. I saw a beautiful solitude there yet to be filled.
"Are you very lonely in this strange country?" I began.
"Ah! very, very!" and a shadow dropped over the soft eyes. "Italy is my own land; all whom I love are buried there."
"France is my own country; all my kindred are buried there." All whom I love, I was about to say; but, looking up, my eyes met those of the stranger upon the canvass. "You are alone in the world; how sad!" I said.
"Yes, I am an exile. My family are dead. No one lives who cares for me."
"I do," I was almost impelled to say, he looking so unfeignedly forlorn; but a "sense of propriety" repressed with frozen touch the warm, running ripple of natural sympathy.
"Is not the Signora alone?" he asked.
"Yes;" yet I had not thought of that before.
"Are you not lonely?"
"Ah, no; I have company in the faces of my friends."
"But they cannot speak to you; they have no voice; they cannot say: 'I love you!'"
"Yes, they do say 'I love you;' they say so with their eyes; every moment of the day they whisper this sweet story. No; I am seldom lonely; when I am, I go out into God's world. The sky smiles, the sea smiles, the flowers smile, the birds sing and tell me to be happy. Sunshine, balmy air, running water, make me glad; these no wealth can take from me; the are God's; so they are also mine; mine to enjoy and to love. My Father's own rich gifts. No, Signor Orsino, I am seldom sad, never miserable."
"Yet you have lost all your kindred."
These words awakened a single pang. It hurt me while I said: "Not lost, not lost! they have only passed into another country, a radiant one. They visit me sometimes, and I know when my work is done I shall go to them.
Was it really me, saying these words--I who one little year before had been so bitter in my rebellion? Yes, the very same; thus we pass from woe to resignation.
"I wish that I could be so happy," sighed Orsino.
"Why may you not be? You own the earth as well as I; besides, you are a man, and can go forth in the great world unquestioned. Don't you find anything to amuse you, to instruct you, to make you happy? Have you no friends?"
"A few among my countrymen. But we are all exiles; we are all sad. This is a great country, Signora, great and free. But Italy is in chains. We weep for our country; we cannot save our country."
I could appreciate this sorrow. The night of my father's death came back. I remembered how he died for his country. I recollected that I was the child of a hero.
"Poor, poor Italy!" I said, "no wonder that you weep for her; no wonder that you love her, if she is your mother."
"Your words are kind, Signora. It seems strange to hear kind words."
"Why, who dares to be cruel to you! You stand up a free man, in a free country, a gentleman and a scholar besides. Why do you speak as if every one was unkind?"
"Not unkind, but cold, cold; that is the word, Signora. America is a cold country. The American is cold. He lives for himself. He is in a great hurry. He hurries to be a boy; he hurries to be a man; he hurries to be rich; he hurries into the grave."
"Can't you hurry and keep in the crowd, Signor?"
"No, no, no. I feel different. I want not to hurry. God does not hurry. The American says: 'My life has a great object.' Very often the great object is himself. He says much about duty. Duty sometimes is a pious name for selfishness. He says: 'Life is a struggle; life is a battle; he must hurry.' If his friend dies, he says: 'Poor fellow,' but has not time to go to the funeral; he seizes another friend by the arm, and hastens on; and so he hurries, hurries, Signora, till all that is left of him is muscle and eyes. I cannot live so. I want not to hurry; I feel strange and alone."
He need not have told me this. You are alone, I thought; but did not say so. I only said: "You should have man friends."
Again he went on: "The Italian has a burning heart. His friendship is devotion, his love is idolatry. He tells it in the warm words of the South. The American does not understand him. If I should speak only words of friendship to an American lady, she would think that I was making love to her. She would draw back offended. I teach the languages. I have a large class. Many of them come from a distance; and when they return to their homes I know that I shall never see them again. When the time draws near I grow sad, I grow sick. I lose my appetite; I lose my flesh. This week I have lost ten pounds from grief. They have not lost one pound."
I laughed outright. "Signor, you will vanish soon, if you are going at such a rapid rate."
He was in serious earnest, yet he did not seem offended with my mirth. He knew it was mirth, not mockery. His words were despondent, mine joyous. We were fair examples of most of the complainers and comforters which are found in the world. His words oozed from the wounds of a hurt heart. Mine flowed from the fulness of health and the depth of a buoyant temperament.
In every nature capable of the deepest emotion, there is a silent, under-chord which only needs to be touched to send forth a wail of sadness. It is the faint, smothered cry of the immortal, trembling out amid the coarse hilarity of human life. There are beings so exquisitely organized that they seem one bare and aching nerve. Around them fold no harder tissues to blunt the agony which they feel from the ever-hurting pressure of external objects. Such a being trembles at the slightest touch, thrills to a look, may be wounded by a word. This is the organism of genius; and, when the creative
Such a soul was Orsino.
{centered}IMPROPRIETIES.A very unfortunate class is that which can never learn what the world calls "propriety." It seldom includes the world's greatest sinners, but always the world's sufferers. The law of God may be forgotten, but the law of Society must be obeyed. Yet Right has a deeper significance than Appearance; and the sin of the world is, that it seeks to seem, rather than to be good. The person who cherishes and covers sin in the soul is usually the one most deeply shocked at the slightest breach made in the bulwark of conventionalism. Innocence is its own shield; it does not need to have its hands tied with a thousand withes of custom in order to keep it from mischief. It is the impure of heart, the easily tempted, who need all the little chafing bands which society ties on so well. Society only says: "Hide. Sin as much as you please, but hide your sin." Alas! for the simple, sincere souls, who can never learn to be proper; who only ask, "Is it wrong? Is it right?" and then run into the face of the world's opinion. If they are sensitive (and they usually are), woe to their lacerated hearts. Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness will come forth from their dens in hell to punish their temerity. Woe also to those who go astray, be it ever so slightly. Society never says to such unfortunates; "Come! I will lead you into a less treacherous path; flowers will blossom there which are thornless; there you may breathe airs which are never deadly, and gather fruit which holds no lurking poison." No! It rises with a scorpion whip, and hunts its victim to the door of the grave. The lovely are sacrificed to the unlovely, the pure to the impure. Mrs. Grundy rules; gossip and scandal are her viceregents.
Mrs. Wiggins could despise and neglect her husband; could cherish evil thought in her heart till it looked like a demon through her eyes; still, to the world, Mrs. Wiggins was elegant and accomplished--one of the
As usual in such cases, the ones most concerned were the last to learn that they were the subjects of disparaging comment. The knowledge came to me very suddenly one evening. Orsino had spent an hour after dinner reading aloud in my studio. He had been reading from the German of Ludwig Uhland, and the melodious monody of "The Passage" haunted my heart after its reader had departed, and half sadly I murmured to myself two of its verses:--
{centered}"So, whene'er I turn my eye Back upon the days gone by, Saddening thoughts of friends come o'er me, Friends that closed their course before me.
{centered}But what binds us, friend to friend, But that soul with soul can blend? Soul-like were those hours of yore; Let us walk in soul once more."
The wind was sobbing outside of my window--the autumn wind, with almost the wail of winter in it. As I listened, there stole over me that first sweet sense of comfort, that feeling of gratitude for shelter and a home, which comes to us in the autumn, when perhaps for the first time we nestle up to a ruddy fire, saying: "How pleasant it seems;" then, sinking back in our chair, yield, unconsciously, body and soul, to its soothing glow and dreamy repose.
Thus I felt. For the first time in the season the anthracite in my little cathedral stove was all ablaze. I could fancy that a mimic sunset was streaming through its windows of isiu-glass. Every object in the room reflected its radiance. Golden veils of the faces of the pictures. Oh! it was golden all! The half sadness which Uhland's monody had stirred in my soul had sunk back quiescent, and I was peacefully happy when the door opened and Nannette entered. I saw at a glance that she had come to lecture me. She glided like a black shadow into my little palace of golden visions. I asked no questions. Why ask the clouds if they are going to rain, when they hang low and lowering above you?
I felt happy, doubtless looked so; and there is nothing more vexatious to some people than the fact that you look happy when they think you ought to look miserable. Nannette
"
"Folie! Non, ma chère Nannette."
"Non, Mademoiselle?"
"
"Ah, they say you be too much together," she groaned. "
"'They say?' Nannette, 'They say' tells all the lies which are told in the world. I like Signor Orsino very much. He comes and reads to me, because he is alone and so am I; because he is a beautiful reader and I praise him; because I am fond of the books which he reads; but I do not love him, and he does not love me. Will you believe what I say, Nannette?"
"Mademoiselle was carefully taught," was her ambiguous reply.
"What has that to do with my question, Nannette?"
"Madame taught Mademoiselle to behave with propriety at all times," she said, gazing steadfastly into the fire.
"Nannette! what do you mean? What have I done? Propriety! Am I not a model of propriety? More, I am a perfect recluse; I go nowhere, I see no company; I have not made an acquaintance outside of this house since I came to America."
"Better if you had not made some inside of it," she interrupted.
"Nannette, if you mean Signor Orsino, I must tell you that you are very silly. You don't know what you are talking about. Not a person in this house appreciates Signor Orsino. They don't know him, for he lives in a world higher than they have ever reached."
Of course Nannette did not understand this; but, fortunately, her head was so full of her subject, she could pay little attention to the words which came from mine.
"Madame Wiggins
"Bad? That will not make me bad, Nannette;" and the proud blood of many generations swept through my veins at the thought of being unjustly accused. "I am cross at you, sometimes, Nannette. I have been cross to-night; that is very bad, for you are my best friend,
"He can read to you in the parlor, Mademoiselle?"
"No, Nannette; he cannot. He tried to do so, but Mrs. Wiggins made it intolerabe. Her sly jests, her covert insinuations to those around, made it impossible that he could read or I listen. Now she slanders us, because we absent ourselves from her presence."
Mine was no uncommon case; the shrinking sensitiveness of innocence, unjustly judged, is often seized as the consciousness of guilt. I could not blame Nannette. The servants had heard Mrs. Wiggins, and with their limited range of topics, they had little else to talk about save the gossip of the house. And my poor old nurse had been tormented by hearing her foster-child made the subject of their careless comment. Good Nannette, with her French idea that a young man must not speak to a young woman save in the presence of a duenna, no wonder she was shocked.
The next afternoon, Orsino came, bringing the poems of Henirich Heine. Orsino had been in Germany, and was passionately fond of German literature; especially he liked the purest and most melodious of Heine's lyrics. I remember that he read man, one the--
{centered}LORELEI. {centered}{small caps}"I know not what it presages, This heart with sadness fraught; 'Tis a tale of olden ages That will not from my thought.
{centered}'The air grows cool and darkles; The Rhine flows calmly on; The mountain summit sparkles In the light of the setting sun."
He was an unconscious as usual. He had found a book which he knew that I would love as well as himself, and had come to read it. Whether proper or improper, he had never thought; therefore did not know. I took my work and sat down to listen. I seized my task and began very industriously, but it would fall from my relaxing fingers. My cheek would fall upon my upholding hand, until at last, leaning forward, I forgot everything in the poet's inspiration.
Orsino sat apart in his accustomed seat under the narrow window. He read long; the splendor of sunset fell upon his brow as the last words of the "Lorelei" died on his lips, and he laid down his book, leaned his face upon his hand, and looked up. Far below was the tumult, the grief, the sin, of the great city; the chafing mass of humanity moaning on--its far-away wail, fitful, dying, rose and fell, yet we heeded not its murmur. Above spread the glory of sunset, the promise of the open sky, and this was all that we could see. The eyes of Orsino seemed to penetrate heaven. An aura encircled his face and hallowed each beautiful feature. In spirit he had passed away from the book, from me, from himself. He was thinking, and his thoughts went out to the invisible. He made no sign, he spoke no word. The god in Orsino was dumb. The fact that this exquisite sensibility was always felt and never spoken, that the soul had no language by which it could convey its subtle and profound emotion, lent an inexpressible pathos to Orsino's character. There was a brow, an eye, a smile which told wondrous stories, but the lips never revealed them. Yet in his very dumbness he was closely allied to the spiritual. God's sublimest lessons come to us without a sound. Nature does not syllable her subtler teachings. Spirit may converse with spirit without an audible sign. I needed no articulate language to understand Orsino. I drank of the inspiration of his nature, although from his lips fell no winged words, betraying the mysterious beauty of the unfathomable world within. I felt an artist's delight in watching the endless variations of his face, and a woman's interest in following his soul's moods.
Thus I sat and watched him now, as the last sun rays quivered and faded on his brow; watched him in silence until he awoke from his dream. The last shaft of orange fire had pierced the attic window; glum, gray light now covered it instead. The golden vision of the sky had faded, and Orsino's soul had come back to the world. He started, looked around as if to assure himself of his identity and surroundings, stooped
Then for the first time it occurred to me that I had something special to say to Orsino, and that now was the time to say it.
"Signor Orsino," I said, "I am indebted to you for many delightful hours--the most delightful which I have spent in America. You will believe me, I hope, though I tell you that you must not come and read to me any more."
"Read to you no more! No more! Have I offended you, Signora?"
"Offended me! Never! That seems impossible."
"Then why may I not read to you, Signora?"
"It is not proper."
"Proper," he said, with a bewildered air. "Proper?"
Poor fellow--he was master of a number of languages, but this word did not belong to his vocabulary.
"No--it is highly improper, so the ladies of the house declare, for Signor Orsino to visit the room of Mademoiselle Vernoid."
"It is not wrong, Signora!"
"Wrong? No, there is no wrong about it; they would not care if there were, but they choose to consider it an impropriety, and that it must not be, and we must obey, Signor."
"Why? It is not wrong, Signora."
"Wrong or right is not the question," I said again.
His simple soul could think of no other. Conventionalities he knew nothing about.
"Society is full of whims, Signor Orsino; and though at heart we may be nobler for doing thus, for the sake of peace we cannot afford to trifle with them."
Orsino did not feel the force of my little speech, I concluded, from what he went on to say.
"When I left my country my heart was broken, and in this land I have found no one but you who has cared for me. No one else has cared for me enough to listen to me read. I have no mother, no brother, no sister, no wife. Why may I not come and read to you, Signora? Ah, America is a cold country. Americans have cold hearts. I am very sad."
He need not have told me this. Poor heart! one had only to look into his eyes to see that sadness had made them her perpetual home. It was a very little thing, a most trivial privilege, whose promised loss he was bewailing; but it was his
Orsino never came to read in my studio again. And because it was the last time, I have loitered over its memory lovingly. Sweet Mrs. Wiggins had her way.
Not very long after, one evening at the dinner table, I met the eyes of Orsino fixed upon me with a sad, almost a tearful expression. Well as I knew those eyes, I had never seen that expression in them before. Some new, strange experience had come to join Orsino. What can it be, I thought, as I stood a few moments after, looking up at the stars through my attic window. Just then came a low knock at my door, which I knew. In a moment more Orsino stood in the centre of the room, his slender figure erect, yet quivering with intense excitement, his great eye kindling and dilating with an unspoken revelation.
"Victoire!" he said (he never called me Victoire before), "I am going. I am going to Italy, to my own land. I could not go without coming to you, my sister."
"Going to Italy! and why do you go to Italy? You can do Italy no good; you are better off here," I said.
"Can you ask me why? Is there not hope? Will not Italy be free? Will she not be glorious as of old? Do not Mazzini and Garibaldi call? Fifty of my countrymen sail to-morrow, and I go with them. Rejoice, Victoire; I am going to fight for Italy. Rome shall be free."
"Rejoice! Don't ask me to rejoice. Don't ask anything so unreasonable. Signor Orsino, you are almost the only friend I have in the world. This moment I feel as if I would rather Italy stay as it is than lose you."
In perfect woman fashion, I forgot the universal in the personal.
"Oh, Victoire, you are not a Roman. The Pantheon is not yours, nor the Coliseum. You are not the daughter of an enslaved people, whose fathers were heroes, or you would not speak thus. Friendship is sweet, but liberty is sweeter. If I can die fighting for the liberty of Italy, I choose to die rather than live.
{centered}'How can a man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, For the temples of his gods?'"
{part of quote in previous paragraph}All men are sometimes eloquent. The enthusiasm enkindled by a great idea will lift a man out of his every day nature and manner into something sublime. So seemed Orsino now. I made no reply, for the image of my father, as I saw him last alive when about to depart on a similar errand, stood before me; and, for an instant, I felt like the child of a hero. But only for an instant; for then I saw him as I saw him last--gory, ghastly--and I shuddered.
"Victoire," said Orsino, and now his voice was low with the womanly tenderness of his nature; "Victore, give me this?" and he lifted one of the curls which fell upon my shoulders.
Without a word, I severed it and laid it in his hand. I had scarcely done this, when I started at a rapid pass he made with his hands, and, with the motion, a delicate chain of fretted gold fell around my neck. To it was appended an exquisitely wrought cross, piercing a tiny circlet of pearls in the form of a crown.
"Your emblem, Signora," he said, looking first at me, then at his gift encircling my throat. "This is mine;" and he held up in his hand a chain, the counterpart of the one he had given me; but, instead of a cross and crown, it held a mimic sword encircled with a golden wreath of laurel. "Amulets, both," he murmured.
"Victoire, Signora, sister
He pressed the tress of hair to his lips; and, taking both my hands, he gazed into my face as if his memory were taking it into everlasting keeping. Yet so rapid, so fervent were his movements, before I could speak he was gone. I never saw Orsino again.
In the morning no Orsino sat at breakfast. No Orsino came to dinner. No Orsino crossed me on the broad staircase or spoke to me in the hall. Orsino was gone. When I realized this, when I looked at his vacant chair, and missed the only pair of eyes which, amid the many there, had turned to mine with a look of affection, I was conscious, for the first time, that I had come to need that look, and to depend upon it for happiness as we do upon an every-day joy. Again came over me the dreary consciousness of loss; the feeling that all I had was taken; that nothing was left in the house or in the world for me.
Yet I did not love Orsino. Orsino did not fill my nature;
"The attic has lost one of its inhabitants, Miss Vernoid: you must be very lonely?" said Mrs. Wiggins at the table, with her most supercilious smile.
"Yes, I am very lonely," I said, perfectly indifferent to the construction placed upon my words, either by Mrs. Wiggins or the remainder of the company.
"Is there another one here whom I care for?" I said to myself, as my eye ran along the line of faces at the table till it fell on the wasted one of Miss De Ray. Alas, this forlorn face had always silently appealed to me; and, as I looked at it now in my own loneliness, my conscience smote me that I knew so little of its owner. Why had I not tried to kindle a little warmth in this chilly life; to make the world a little less desolate to one who seemed utterly alone in its midst? were questions which I asked myself, without receiving any satisfactory answer.
But if a dilapidated maiden of fifty, wrinkled and wild, was less an object of interest to a young girl than a young, intellectual man, it was exceedingly human, and only proves that in this respect, at least, the young girl had been true to her normal nature.
I had never been able to get on very far with Miss De Ray. I had made slight attempts to do so, embracing every available opportunity to inquire after her health, and to offer any little courtesy of word or act which might help to convince her that somebody was interested in her welfare. She seemed to accept slight attentions from any one gratefully, yet such was the shyness of her manner that, after the usual commonplaces had been exchanged, it seemed impossible to add another word. Usually she seemed absent and melancholy. If it had not been Mrs. Wiggins's opinion, I am inclined to think that I, too, should have thought her a little crazy. I had often invited her to my studio, yet she accepted the invitation but once; when coming up the stairs with me, she came in, looked at the pictures hurriedly, and, without comment upon any of them, with a sad, half smile, walked out. Certainly she possessed far less tongue power than is usually accredited to women of her class. She never invited me into her den, for den it was, and if the excessively hot weather of the summer had not forced her to open its door, in order that she might breathe, I never should have seen what a frightful little hole it was. Write, write, write! One could easly imagine that Miss De Ray had been born with a pen in her hand, and she had never relinquished it for a moment since.
Through the long, burning August days, she sat from early morning until far into the night, in the same spot bent over a little old table which held a pyramid of manuscripts, in which was excavated a slight hole, large enough to hold the sheet on which she wrote with as much zest as if the perpetuity of the universe depended on the worlds which it contained. How wretched the room looked! A tattered shade hung on the window. A small, bleared looking-glass hung on the wall. A scanty, ragged square of carpet was nailed on the middle of the floor, which was matted from beginning to end with old newspapers and disfigured manuscripts. A bed, a few chairs, with the old writing table in the centre of the room, completed with the furniture.
For the sake of Miss De Ray, and of literary ladies in general, I was glad that the Rev. Jonathan Bunkum had never seen this apartment. Directly opposite mine, in passing to and fro before its open door, it was impossible that I should not become thoroughly acquainted with its individuality; yet
Miss De Ray seemed to have no time for going out, and after I had given her undoubted proofs of good will, she ventured to ask me to post her letters at the nearest mail station, as I passed in my daily walk. Glad to do her this little service, every day for months I mailed for her letters directed to the most distinguished public men of the city and State, but, strange to say, never brought any back any replies, and never knew of the mail-carrier leaving any for her at the door. It was evident that Miss De Ray was absorbed in a literary work of vast importance to herself, if no one else. Could it be the A-B-C-darian which Mrs. Wiggins had said she wished to introduce into the public schools?
The winter had come, and for the first time in my life I found myself dreading the future. I had received my last remittance, and, with the utmost economy, this would not supply my wants beyond the spring. From the beginning, I had had reason to think of the time as near at hand when I should be entirely without resources; but while there was yet more money to come, that day had seemed far distant. I had all the faith which utter inexperience gives, that "something would happen" before my means utterly failed. My idea of what that something would be was vague, still I had an idea. My picture, already nearly completed, I intended to send into the annual exhibition of the Academy of Design, and, although I thought that no want would tempt me to sell it, the admiration which I fondly hoped it would win would give me reputation as an artist, and reputation, work. Foolish child! I smile pityingly upon her visions now. I had yet to learn that a paying reputation, most of all an artist's, comes only after long years of hard work and waiting; that his first great effort seldom establishes his fame or supplies him with the means of obtaining bread; that before these great ends are attained, usually the best years of his life have gone. Sanguine and believing as I was, as the writer advanced and my slight purse grew more and more slender, I began to think what
With all my faith in the good something which was to happen, I could not quite forget the fact that if the coming year copied the first, it would not be prolific of great results. In the programme of my American life, I had recorded for the first year even "a little fame, and at least friends." The year had gone, and I had neither. I had no acquaintances, to say nothing of friends, and I knew of no safe avenue to lead me to new desirable relationships. I was just beginning to learn that there is nothing more solitary or loveless than the life of a young worker, poor, unknown, cast friendless into a great city. I was learning very fast that fame and friends do not come at our bidding. That if they are ours at last, it is because they have been
But I had no just reason to accuse the world of neglect, and felt no inclination to do so. What had I done to deserve its praises? It was useless to deny it, I was living a very self-contained and selfish life. What effort I did make for any one
I sat philosophizing after this fashion one afternoon, rather ill at ease withal, when I heard Miss De Ray's door open, and instantly after a faint, nervous knock on mine. This was an unusual occurance, and, as I arose and opened it for her, I was glad to see one who needed kindness and friends more than myself. Talking with her, I thought, would make me feel more thankful. I welcomed her heartily, and, as I drew a chair for her near the fire, could not but observe how pinched, and cold, and miserable she looked. She coughed incessantly, and as I saw her wasted fram quiver to the grateful warmth of the fire, the thought struck me that Miss De Ray had none in her room that bitter day. It was evident that she had come to warm, not to talk, for she said nothing.
"How are you succeeding in your literay pursuits?" I asked, clumsily enough, eager to show my sympathy with her in the only subject in which I had any reason to suppose her to be interested.
She did not answer, and as I looked up I saw that she was weeping; she shook convulsively. I went up to her, laid my hand on her grey hair, drew her unresisting head to my breast, and there let her weep.
Poor grey head! since you lay a bouny wee thing on your mother's bosom who has ever petted, or smoothed, or loved you, I thought; while, like a soothed child, Miss De Ray wept on. At last she came to the consciousness of her strange position.
"You must think it very strange to see and hear me cry," she said. "But there is a tone in your voice so kind that it touched my heart. You must know that I am not used to kindness. I have felt a drawing towards you since I saw you first, for I felt that you have a kind feeling in your heart for me. I have not wanted to draw too near, lest I should chill you; for you know I am winter, and you are spring. I have wondered that you could feel any sympathy for me, you are so young and look as if you had been so tenderly reared. You don't know what it is to struggle on in the world alone, do you?"
"I don't know that I have a living relation; I have been alone for nearly two years."
"Well, it is hard to bury your friends; but to be alone, and old and poor, is harder still. After all, you don't know anything about the real struggle of life, my child--the fierce struggle for daily bread--and God grant that you never may."
I thought of my attenuated purse, but said nothing.
"As women are paid, it is hard for a woman to earn all that she eats, and wears, and needs. Do you suppose that I write for reputation or for pleasure, Miss Vernoid? If you believe Mr. Bunkum and Mrs. Wiggins, you must think that I belong to a very silly class. Half the world, at heart, are prejudiced against literary women. They fancy that they do from vanity what they are often compelled to do from necessity. They don't know that they write for bread. I write for bread, for shelter, for fire. Do you think that I would bend over a table, half frozen from morning till night, to write, if I could sit in a comfortable chair and sew or read instead? There is no life so comfortless as a naked literary one without the comfort of a cheerful home and of loving friends."
"Have you written all your life?" I asked.
"No, indeed. At your age, I didn't think of such a thing. I was a farmer's daughter, and taught a district school. When I commenced, I was full of energy and buoyant life. But as I taught on, year after year, in a little, close, unventilated school-house, 'boarding around,' enduring all sorts of fare, in all sorts of houses, and with all sorts of people, at last my health failed. My face grew sharp and wan. I lost my elasticity. I lost my spirits. I lost my appetite. I had a pain in my side and a cough, till at last I could scarcely realize that the forlorn and faded 'schoolma'am,' whom young women snubbed and old women pitied, and gentlemen took no notice of whatever, could be any relation to the red-lipped Mary De Ray, who used to laugh and sing, who was courted and kissed at sleigh rides and quiltings, and who dreamed such rosy dreams of husband, home, and cherub children. The 'schoolma'am' was the skeleton of that happy creature. She, in her physical and mental misery, was just what such a life makes hundreds of Mary De Rays every year. My father and mother were dead. My brothers were married to wives who could not be troubled with a sick, old maid sister-in-law; my physician said that I must leave school. Yet I must do something to live. In my long intercourse with children, I had learned to tell them stories for rewards at 'recess,' and for pastime in winter evenings, when the used to gather around me by their
"Perhaps your book is not a failure, after all," I said.
"Yes, it is. I have applied to all the principal men who are interested in education for their influence to introduce my 'A-B-C-darian' into the public schools, but with no effect. They are too busy to look at the book, or too indifferent. I am a stranger to most of them, and to those who know me I am only a grey-haired old maid, whose books and whose presence are both a nuisance. They don't know that while I have been writing it I had not a cent to pay my last month's board nor to buy a little coal to warm my stiff fingers; that, old and homeless, I have only pain and want and the grave in my future; if they knew all this, perhaps they would be kinder. Still, they who guard their wives and children so lovingly may think that a woman who has neither father, lover, nor husband, has no business in the world. I am sure I am willing to die. Earth is bleak to me. I hope that heaven is a warmer country."
And, with these words, the forlorn, grey head nestled closer to my heart.
Poor Miss De Ray! A woman with a child's heart, she aspired to no mission higher than to write books for children. Yet even she must be hunted with the cry "literary," and be made the daily butt of an evil woman and a conceited man. As I recalled in how many nameless yet diabolical ways they managed to torment her, my ire grew warm towards both, and I believe I could have seen Mrs. Wiggins and the Rev. Bunkum thrust into a bag and then into the Hudson, after the good old fashion, provided they were drawn out after a hearty ducking, upon the promise that, in the future, they would attend to their own little souls and leave those of other people alone.
But better thoughts came to me as I sat holding that sad head. I had money enough left to pay three months' board. Miss De Ray should have enough to pay for one. I lifted her up, went and counted the gold, came and slipped it softly into her
"No, no, no! I cannot accept. You are too good to me," she said.
"Miss De Ray, you must. It is yours. Go and pay Mrs. Skinher."
It was the only way, by a high, peremptory tone, to compel her to take it. There are tones of voice which admit of no gainsaying. You must flee or obey them. I had resolved that Miss De Ray shoud have the money; take it she must, take it she did.
The next morning Miss De Ray did not come down to breakfast. It was unusual, for the poor creature seemed to depend on her morning cup of coffee. Mrs. Skinher, who always seemed a degree more attentive to her boarders after having received their monthly stipend for the food and shelter which she gave them, told Nick, the waiter, to carry Miss De Ray her breakfast. Remembering her sensitive pain when even the servents saw the inside of her cheerless apartment, I offered to carry the cup of coffee and roll myself. Knocking at her door, I received no answer, and heard no sound; none, though the rap was repeated twice, thrice. Startled by the silence within, at last I ventured quietly to enter. Papers here, there, everywhere, were, as usual, the adornment of the little den. There was no fire, no coal visible to make one, although it was bitter gold. A slight elevation in the bed told me that a human form was there, and the thought came that God had kindly taken her. But no: the meed of suffering was not full. The last pangs of disease, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, were to be felt yet.
As I drew near, I saw that Miss De Ray was sleeping--a dull, disturbed, feverish sleep which did her no good. Presently she began to cough, and opening her eyes, saw me standing beside her bed, waiter in hand. Her eyes lighted up, but she looked miserable, sick, and wasted.
"I coughed all night, or I shouldn't have slept so late," she said.
"Drink this cup of coffee; it will do you good; then lie down till a fire is made and the room is comfortable. No wonder you cough."
"Well, I shan't long. I think that my coughing is almost over. It will be easy and pleasant to die now; God has given me one to care for me while I stay."
I looked at her to tell her that she was not going to die at
Miss De Ray did not rise that day. For many previous ones she had sat wrapped in a thin shawl, without any fire, in fierce mid-winter, a prey to the most terrible forebodings; the appalling dread of a most sensitive nature, shrinking from the thought of utter destitution, sinking down aghast at the approach of hunger, cold, wasting sickness, and the world's cold charity. I stayed with her till I saw her quietly asleep at night. A sympathizing human presence seemed to magnetize her into a peaceful quiet. Her restless eyes grew calm, and followed me with a look of tranquil love. During the day, at her request, I gathered up the masses of manuscript scattered about and committed them to the flames; all but a few rhymes, into which I saw was written her inmost life, which I asked to keep for her sake. She was deeply touched.
"No one ever cared for my verses before," she said.
I fear that I should not, if I had not cared for their author.
Most of the manuscripts which were burned had found their way into print. They were stories of miraculous boys, and of impossible girls, who, in the eyes of their doting fathers and mothers, managed to become full-fledged angels here below; while, in the eyes of other people, they were tedious, premature little saints, every drop of childhood crushed out of their hearts. A monstrosity upon human nature is the young hot-house ascetic who complacently proclaims: "I'm going to heaven when I die, cause I'm a good boy, and give my pennies to the heathen; but Johnny'll go to hell when he dies, cause he's bad, and spends his cents for candy."
Innocent Miss De Ray thought differently. In every story she had a marvel of child, who passed though the agonies of conviction and the ecstasies of conversion before it was old enough to know what either meant. Also a wonder of a little sinner whose mission seemed to be to torment the little Christian. Naughty Tom, Dick, and Harry, who read her
Miss De Ray never went down to the table again. Mrs. Wiggins and Mr. Bunkum never troubled her any more. The boarders missed her, and wondered what had become of Miss De Ray. I told them, what all might have known before, that Miss De Ray was in the last stages of consumption. Mrs. Wiggins said that people were never seized with the consumption so suddenly; that evidently it was only one of Miss De Ray's crazy freaks to attract attention. With a few questions of curiousity and ejaculations of wonder, all interest ended. None of the ladies felt equal to making an ascension to the attic.
The hearts of a few would have expanded with tears if they had realized Miss De Ray's condition; but they could not realize it without seeing her and her room. The established habit of self-indulgence seemed to render it impossible that they should overcome the inertia sufficiently to make so great an effort solely for the sake of another. To that forlorn couch neither friend nor kindred came.
But nature and God were kind. She prayed for release, and her desire was granted. As she drew near to the gate of the valley of shadows, "the rod and staff" were stretched forth for her support, and she seemed to forget the dark road of the past in the exceeding glory of the path which stretched before her. The vision of immortality was her consolation; and with their mortal eyes than to drop hopelessly from this sordid earth, an atom of dust into the bosom of nothing!
I received her last smile; her eyes were turned to mine when she died. The meagre yet bitter tragedy of her life ended with a smile. When I saw that she was dying, I went to Mrs. Skinher's room to inform her of the fact, but found that she was absent. Alone I watched the last struggle, closed the dying eyes, folded the dead hands on the becalmed breast--never more to heave with anxiety, pain, or sorrow.
All was over when I heard the click of Mrs. Skinher's lock. Trembling in every nerve with grief and excitement, I went out and encountered her in the hall, just as she was descending to her dinner-table in full costume.
"Miss De Ray is dead," I said, and burst into tears. Alone
"Dead! how disagreeable! I do hate to have people die in my house; it is so inconvenient."
As Mrs. Skinher said these words, she, in her elegant brocade, and velvet basque, and blonde coiffure, full of pink roses, looked as if she would never be guilty of so uncomfortable an act as dying.
"Has she left anything for funeral expenses?" she inquired.
"Not a cent."
"How provoking! Now I shall have to go to the Poor Commissioner, and have all the fuss of seeing her buried."
"Can't we raise the means in the house? If each lady would contribute a small sum, it could be done. It would be a mark of respect to one who deserved more than she received when alive."
"Nonsense! the most absurd nonsense! She is nothing to any one in this house. She belongs to the city poor; it is the duty of the city to bury her."
"She is a fellow creature," I venture to say; "a lonely, neglected fellow creature, who had no one to love her while she lived."
"That is not by fault nor yours, and it would not alter the fact whether we paid for her coffin or the city; and I am sure it will make no difference to her."
"It would make some difference to me if I thought that the city would pay for my coffin."
"Very well, you may buy her coffin if you please; I have other uses for my money;" and the brocade rustled with a most emphatic sound.
She began to descend; I heard the stir of her costly robes growing softer and softer at each receding flight of stairs, till it ceased altogether; then I leaned my head on the baluster and wept. The attic seemed so forsaken, so desolate; life seemed so dreadful, so lored with the hue of Miss De Ray's history; hearts so hard, cold, frozen! I thought of the career of the two women, Mrs. Skinher and Miss De Ray; both nearly of an age; both left dependant upon their personal exertion. One had succeeded, the other failed; one was rich, the other had just died a pauper. The world sneered at Miss De Ray, patronized and courted Mrs. Skinher. She was made of most common material, and in that consisted its excellence. Contact with the world did not hurt, it hardened and helped her. She had practical sense, business tact; she could make
Miss De Ray's fibre was too fine for life's common uses. Its rough friction made her sensitive and sore. The pressure of need, which had quickened Mrs. Skinher, crushed, killed her. "Poor creature!" the compassionate said, "she has no faculty to get on in this world."
"She is a silly old maid, who has taken to literature for the want of a husband," said the unfeeling, and to either class it was all the same whether she lived or died.
My sorrowful thoughts ended in one question: How can I save her from a beggar's funeral? I had resolved that no passer-by should sing for her:
"Rattle her bones over the stones, It's only a pauper whom nobody owns."
Hopelessly I thought of my own empty purse. Still I could give half of its contents; something
I resolved to go to Mrs. Forrest as soon as dinner was over. The light, and warmth, and fragrance of the dining hall would have been grateful, but I felt too sick and dreary to go near it.
I went back to the sepulchral room and ghastly corpse. Miss De Ray had given me the key to her trunk (the only article in the room which she owned), saying that I would find in it the articles necessary for her internment. On opening it I found that it contained little else. A few old-fashioned, faded garments lay on the top, while at the bottom of the trunk, carefully wrapped in a napkin, I found what I sought, a muslin cap and a muslin robe. Kneeling beside the bed, I unfolded it, fold by fold, till, coming to the last, something fell upon the floor which looked like a small book. Picking it up, I discovered it to be a miniature case. I opened it and two faces looked out upon mine. Both were young, and one
I waited until I knew that the gay dinner party had dispersed, and then descended to the parlor of Mrs. Forrest, knocking timidly on the door, for I had come to ask a favor, to me a new errand. Her sweet voice responded and I entered to find her lying on a sofa wheeled near the grate, the gas-light flickering on her pale, lovely face. Evidently she had not been down to dinner, for she still wore her rich morning
"Why don't you come oftener to see me?" she said, extending her little jewelled hand. "How I wish you would come and sit evenings. George is so often detained at the office, and I get so lonesome. Why don't you come?"
"I don't know why," I answered, "except it be that it has become so completely my habit to sit alone, it never occurs to me to visit. I only came now to ask a favor."
"A favor! how odd! You seem like one of those people who never need a favor, and who would be much happier granting than asking one. You know, if it is possible for me, it will delight me more than I can say."
"You can do me a great favor, a real kindness, Mrs. Forrest, and I knew that you would be glad to do both. Miss
"Oh, no, no! A woman, a sister has suffered and died in want above my very head, while I have been listless and complaining in all my luxury. I knew that Miss De Ray was sick, but I thought that she was not
And with this self-crimination, she rocked herself to and fro on the sofa in unaffected distress.
"You wrong yourself. Yours is the sweetest kind of usefulness, for you bless others without knowing it. Your face does that. It is because I knew that you are kind to everybody that I came to see you," I said to her.
"I have not been kind to Miss De Ray. I could not have been more carelessly cruel than to let her die without giving her one sisterly smile, one little comfort. I wonder why it was she always seemed so far away from me. I did not know how to talk to her when I saw her every day. It was my foolish fear that I could not please, I suppose. If I were not afraid to run the risk, I might comfort more forlorn hearts than I do. The funeral will be no trouble. George gave me a hundred dollar bill this morning to buy a dress pattern which I fancied at Stewart's. I am sure I don't want it. I have more than I can wear now, and I am tired of being fitted and fussed over by a dress-maker, though mine is one of the best women in the world, and I don't believe that George will mind. Will a hundred dollars be enough?"
Before I could reply, "George" entered the room; a young, handsome metropolitan, with laughing black eyes, and unexceptionable moustache, and that careless, graceful suavity of manner which bespeaks high breeding and an easy fortune.
"Why, pet," he said, turning from giving a cordial welcome to me, "what is the matter? You look as if some affliction had befallen you. Had some one else secured the dress pattern? or did Nell forget to come to go with you? If she did, it's too bad. But don't cry, and I'll pinch an hour out of to-morrow, to take a drive with you myself."
"Will you?" and her face shone transfigured with delight. "But, George, it isn't the dress. Nell
"Well, that is because you must look beautiful--you like to look beautiful, don't you, Rose? I never saw a woman but what did."
"I like to look beautiful to you, George."
"That you do, and always succeed. Then you have no objection to looking beautiful to Miss Vernoid, to sister Nell, to cousin Fred, and a host of others, have you? Come, confess, Puss; you know that you do?"
"Yes, George, I know that I like to look pretty; but I don't care about it now. I only care that I am of no use in the world, and live the most self-indulgent life possible."
"No use! Then music is of no use, nor flowers. You are useful in the manner that they are. You were born to be beautiful, to win worship and love. They are yours. You win without knowing it--you bless, when you think the least of blessing. Every one who loves you ascends to a higher level in order to meet your beautiful soul. Yet you fret in your pretty way, because your little white hands are not digging in some vulgar job of every-day usefulness. Don't you know, Rose, that the people, whom you hear making such a great fuss about doing good, are never the most useful? I don't care a fig about seeing my Rose chief lady directress of all the public city charities; to be beautiful and good as you are now is vastly more graceful. I declare your eyes are full of tears; Miss Vernoid, what is the matter?"
There was a just perceivable vibration of impatience in his tone when he made this interrogation, as if he thought that I had something to do with his darling's moist eyes.
"Miss Vernoid came in to tell me that Miss De Ray is dead. She died this afternoon, George. It makes me sad to think of her cheerless life, of her lonely death. Only think of it, George, aren't you sorry?"
"Sorry? I am very sorry that she had a bleak time of it when alive; but there is no sense in my feeling sorry that her condition is bettered. If there is a heaven, and I suppose that there is, why should I feel sorry because she has gone to it?"
"But if it were
"Oh no, George; that is why I have been talking. I want the hundred dollars which you gave for the new dress to buy her a good coffin and for funeral expenses. May I have them George--may I?"
"May you? The money is not mine. Have you been all this while getting courage to ask for the privilege of spending your own money in your own way? Take the hundred dollars, and another hundred, too, if you want them; only don't redden your beautiful eyes. I want to look at them, while I am eating my dinner."
Nick had already appeared with his tray of smoking viands, and I left the young husband to enjoy the privilege, of which he seemed never to weary--that of gazing at the rare yet fragile idol which absorbed the passionate worship of his heart.
In the morning we went together and selected a tasteful coffin, Mrs. Forrest giving directions to the undertaker for an ample funeral. How gentle was her voice, how serene her face, how ennobled her whole mien! She was a loving woman now; no longer the weary, listless lady of fashion. Gazing and listening, I forgot to mourn that the power of munificence had gone from me.
When it was whispered through the house that Mrs. Forrest was interested in Miss De Ray's funeral, said funeral suddenly became the fashion. The ladies who, before, had been entirely unequal to the task of ascending the attic stairs, immediately received an accession of strength, which bore them to that upper realm apparently without effort.
"Poor thing!" "Unfortunate creature!" and "If we had only known!" were ejaculations poured out around her coffin without stint. Mrs. Wiggins came, and, lifting her eyes, said with sanctimonious unction: "God is exceedingly obliging to have taken her. Not that she was in my way; not in the least. I am never annoyed by insignificant people. But as I said, God is obliging, because, of course, such a very queer person could be no very great addition to heaven. What an odious room! If I had known just how it looked, I should have been positive that she was crazy. As it was, you know I had my suspicions. Miss Vernoid, don't you observe that the corpse is offensive?"
It was a quiet and not utterly a heartless funeral. Two women shed tears of sincere sorrow beside the open grave of Miss De Ray.
Sweet Rose Forrest, gentle, beautiful and good, here, in epitome, let her story be told.
In one little year, from amid the many coffins in that great sombre warehouse, another was selected--one of rarest rosewood, silver-chased, satin-lined. The form laid in its softened shadow was not a faded one, but that of a young and most lovely woman. The richly embossed plate upon its cover said:--
{centered}ROSE FORREST, Aged 23.
An aristocratic assembly gathered at the splendid mansion which the young wife had called but a few months her home. There were no lack of mourners; and not the least sincere were the poor, whose wants that beloved one had relieved. Not much was it like the funeral which left the house of Mrs. Skinher one year before--the scanty funeral of the old and unloved one. Father, mother, brothers, sisters, lover, husband, bowed in their agony of grief over their lost idol. Why did she die, the beautiful, the adored!
But the old maid and the crowned wife have met upon one level of joy ere now.
{centered}ADVERSITY.Take not this cry upon your lips, lonely toiler--"No one cares for me." Never, until we see soul to soul, with no barrier
Where is the old, ever-present, ever watchful, ever-anticipating tenderness? Where the old eagerness at returning, the old lingering at going away! Where the rest, the blessedness, the bliss, your presence once gave? Where the trance of delight in which your loving nothings, your childish caresses, once enfolded in them--where? Now your tremulous love-words fall upon abstracted ears; your shy, faltering caresses are received with cold passivity, or endured with ill-disguised impatience, which even politeness cannot hide from your keenly-quickened vision. You are robbed, hopelessly robbed. Alone, shelterless, bereft in spirit, you call in anguish for what you have lost. Not God nor angels can restore it. You can never be avenged. They who defraud you, can they give back the boundless devotion, the worshipping love which you lavished? The all-embracing hope, the infinite trust in humanity, now hopelessly shattered? Can they restore to you the ravished bloom, the lost virginity of your morning soul? Never. The love with which you have so long enriched one you cannot quickly transfer; you cannot find satisfaction in new ties; you cannot worship at strange shrines.
No! If it is your saddest of fates to watch the growth of
The friend that we believed in beyond a doubt, the one whom we set apart from all others, saying: "In flood and peril, in anguish, in disgrace, I would trust in thee and rest in thee without a fear;" when the sore need comes, the elected friend drops off. Where the anticipated fealty? where in the magnanimous royalty of love, which was to have been our assurance, our support, our all, in the hour of our extremity? Where! Not in the soul in which we believed; perhaps not in the nature that we longed most to learn upon,--not there--and it is well.
Yet Truth and Love are in God's world, and they are ours. The universe holds no power that can defraud us of our inalienable portion; somewhere in the ages we shall find it. Not very far off, perhaps there is one whom we scarcely notice in the world's crowd; one to whom we give few thoughts, little love, if love at all; that one would die for us, aye, more, that one would live for us, a life of utter abnegation to all things, save the love which it pours in consecrated incense at our feet. If life leads us along the summer path of fortune, this soul will not intrude to whisper its worhship; but if she leaves us far down in the valley of sorrow, then we shall know that we have a friend; and, though all others forsake, we may say: "There is one who cares for me."
We cannot measure the cycle of a single soul; we cannot tell how widely embracing is that soul's atmosphere of attraction; we do not always know when we stand
Alas! yet the tropical heart languishes on in one imperishable summer, under the icy brain, whose wintry will can be melted never by the sunny efflux of a love-begotten spring. Over-leaning the frigid fastness of the mind, into each summer soul gazes the face of the other, lit with loving eyes. We know not how, we know not when, but there
"Each is naught to each, shall we be told; We are fellow-mortals, and naught beside.'
We know that we are more. Marvellous intuitions of all each soul is to the other float in upon the consciousness. Reason, with harshest gesture, says: "You lie, begone!" The imperative intuition, kindling to the brilliance of a blazing truth, cuts into the indestructible, central soul the calm reply: "I know." "I know that there are moments when the face of each flashes unbidden upon the other's thought; moments when the cool, soft hand of one would lie soothing as dew upon the burdened and burning brow of the other. There are hours when longings for the absent presence pierce the soul as the wondrous vision of unattainable joy, the unattainable presence could bring shifts across its horizon of tears, the mocking glory of the 'Might Have Been.'"
Through the wearing routine of life's common care, through the fretting friction of life's daily toil, penetrates to your heart the lightning knowledge that the abysmal solitude of the other's soul is palpitant with loving thoughts, aching to be ensphered in words of love for you; that its soundless silences thrill with inarticulate tones, which yearn to break upon your breast in floods of sacred tenderness, but doomed to moan on, void and voiceless for ever to your earthly ear.
How many would start in amazement if it were certainly revealed to them
Cease to sigh "No one cares for me," you of the pining heart, whose tired feet seem to walk so wearily in the dreary procession of the "unloved." Like the gauds of fortune, the prizes of friendship, the gifts of love are not so unequally bestowed as they sometimes seem; it is a part of the blindness of our mortal condition that we cannot see how fairly they are distributed. But we shall see. In the kingdom of heaven soul will meet soul, and say: "When you fainted under your mortal burden, when you wrestled with human fear, when you suffered and wept, and there were few to comfort and help you; when your days were long and lonesome, dreary with privation and care, and you wept because there was so little love in them, I was cognizant of your life from afar, yet you did not know it; I loved you with all the fervor of my humanity, yet you dreamed not of it; I would have enfolded and cherished you, but it was forbidden." In the calm liberty of the infinite, when our enfranchised souls shall have lifted the last veil from the face of mystery, remember
"No one cares for me," I said, sad and low, to myself, as I stood all alone the day after Miss De Ray's funeral, with my face leaning against the window-pane, gazing listlessly on the world below. The tense winter had culminated; its mailed heart had broken into floods of wild, desolating rain, pouring from the black roofs and rusty eaves, splashing in mad rivers along the muddy channels of the streets. Grey mountains of salted snow still lifted their unmelted summits in the way of horses and vehicles, to the misery of those whom they carried. In the garden courts, patches of black earth, with vagabond bits of dishes, broken kitchen wares, and household debris, which careless servants had swept out to be covered by the unsullied ermine of winter, now protruded stark and staring through their rent and melting mantles. The world looked dirty, disgusting, forlorn. Men looked forlorn under the glazed hats and drifting umbrellas. Women looked forlorn in bedrabbled skirts and soaked gaiters, flying in the arms of policemen over deluged crossings, cramming themselves into gorged six cent coaches. Little children looked forlorn with
"No one cares for me," again I murmured; and as I spoke the wind cried outside of the window like a homeless child. I shut my eyes. I saw Les Delices. Its blossoms were not dead, its fountains were not frozen, its statues were not swathed in ice, its tidal leaves did not surge around Frederick's grave. No. Before my second inmost sight it stood in the trance of a summer noon. The mountain summits burned in smoldering clouds of electric crimson. The cascade fell in sheets of crystallized sunshine--trailed its glory over blistering rocks, dropping at last on the cool hearts of purple mosses which waited its coming in the humid gorges of below. Again the fruits in the hands of Ceres flushed with mocking mellowness. More than ever the redolent flowers blushed above the mirrors of the fountains. Waters trickled in the throats of marble lillies--tinkled, gurgled in myriads of murmurous jets.
I saw a pomp of fruits, a blaze of blossoms; everywhere life was redundantly, royally riotous. The turret flamed scarlet through the effeminate vines, which bound it with their enervating arms, stifled it with ravishing yet poisonous perfume. The pines spread out their firmament of balm, exuding balsam from every odorous pore. The fervid winds seemed to faint, cloyed by the heavy fragrance which oozed from every vein in nature. The grave of Frederick's was embosomed in bloom; flowers, radiant enough to have blossomed in the gardens of the blessed, waved their censers over his rest, as if the elements which once fed the tissues of that beautiful body could only be transfigured into Nature's most perfect forms.
Silence reigned. No stir of human life disturbed the trance of the dumb midsummer carnival. The doors were closed and barred. Defiant creepers had covered with veils of impenetrable emerald the shut windows through which one once gazed the living faces of a dead family; aggressive weeds peered with brazen eye through the interstices of the verandah, and flaunted their flaming falchions over the marble
No one? Yes, one. Silent, deserted, desolate, first it stood before me, stepped in the torrid glory of that emblazoned noon; but soon I saw and felt the presence of a human soul. I saw, yes saw, the stranger, whose memory had filled my life. It was not the immobile, the impassive face upon my canvas; not a picture, nor a ghost, which I saw, but a living presence, in all the plentitude of imperial manhood, with passion, power, sorrow, love in the living eyes, which passed up the deserted walk of Les Delices. Once before he had entered that sacred precinct. Now, with folded arms, he gazed before it, reading the story which its stillness told. I saw him go to the grave of Frederick, attracted by the white marble cross at its head, which shone dazzingly in the overflowing sunlight. I saw him gather a flower from that grave, a flower itself the incarnation of colorless flame. I saw him return; saw him stand upon the spot where once he stood before; long he lingered there. I saw him drink from the urn, still standing moss-rimmed, at the foot of the cascade. Lingering, lingering I saw him depart; saw the rippling waves of green close behind his soundless feet as he passed slowly, slowly down the deserted path, going, going--whither?
This I saw. "You don't believe that I saw it?" Very well. "Did he tear his hair or weep?" Oh, no; he did nothing so absurd.
I opened my eyes. There was the narrow attic window, the grim, grey light, the dirty, rainy outisde world--
"No one cares for me." Again I moaned, and now there was an eternity of yearning in the cry.
What ailed me? A few weeks before I could have uttered these words with mocking indifference. I could have said them, shaking my head with a laughing defiance. What if no one did care for me, it was not so terrible a think to live alone. Besides, I never was alone. Art, nature, were my chosen, inseparable companions. My own soul seemed exhaustless in its opulence. I was drunken with the exuberant wine
Now the sating sweetness in my veins seemed shrunken, dead; the tropical wine of my young life spent, quaffed to the lees; the pure, luminous atmosphere of spirit dense with clouds, heavy, black.
For weeks I had not thought of myself--had thought of nothing but Miss De Ray. The object of my care taken, the reaction had come. Life could not seem to me quite that which it had been before I knew her. It was my first contact with a hard, actual experience. I had read of sad fates, of sorrowful, desolate lives; now I had both seen and felt how dreary such a life could be. Doubt, fear, had come unbidden, stretching forth despairing hands towards my future. Would it be my lot to live such a life, to die such a death?
I thought of Henri Rochelle. I saw his calm, cold face, kind in its very coldness. Would it not have been better (certainly it would have been wiser) to have accepted his offer? Should I not have been happier, as I should surely have been quieter, to have been now the matronly mistress of his home--the loved, the protected, the dependant wife? No; still I had strength enough to resist him. I did not want his home nor him. At least he should not know of the fulfilment of his prophecy; he should not have the triumph to see how soon, how very soon, I had grown tired, had fainted under the burden of my own life. I should not write to him. I should take excellent care to hide my future from him, if it was to be unfortunate. Besides, even he had ceased to care for me. The envelope, which brought the last remittance, brought no accompanying token, no word of kind remembrance, no anxious inquiry concerning my fate, no tender warning regarding my future; nothing but the bare blank money, and that the last.
"No one cares for me!" The last cry was wilder, more desolate than all. Then I saw that face, not on the canvas, but gazing in upon the eyes of my soul. At that moment Nannette entered.
"Nannette, tell me was it so? or did we dream it? Did a stranger come to us when Frederick was dying? Did he speak
"Non, non, Mademoiselle! How often must Mademoiselle be told. If only Mademoiselle had said that she saw the strange Monsieur then she might ask with propriety, then
"Where do you think that he came from, Nannette--from heaven?"
"Why would Mademoiselle blaspheme? From heaven? Humph! He came down the Rhone valley as other travellers did."
"Why do you think he went away so soon? Frederick dead, too?"
"Would Mademoiselle
"How did he go, Nannette?"
"Would Mademoiselle
"There, don't take on, Nannette; don't! I shall suprise you by suddenly growing wise some day. See if I don't. Just answer one more question,
"Well, well, Nannette; after all it
The days crawled away--yes, they crawled. My picture was complete. Love could suggest no alteration; it stood ready to be sent to the directors of the Academy of Design for their annual exhibition. I thought it strange that I felt so hopeless about it; I who had been so believing before. I
Once no bereavement could quite crush my elastic life. I shrank not, I only panted for life's coming contest. Now I felt equal to no endeavor; with everything to be done, I felt powerless to do anything. Once, everything had seemed possible to the patient hand and resolute heart; now, I felt no faith in myself; none scarcely in God. I felt nothing but a gloomy foreboding, a dread of life, a shrinking from the future, a willingness to die, because I felt an inability to live. From the hour in which I watched Miss De Ray die, my buoyant and exultant health seemed broken. Somewhat of the death chill of that moment seemed to have penetrated my own life. The long tension of brain and heart during the lonely watchings beside her bead, seemed broken at last in utter procrastination. The decay of her body seemed to have touched my own. Ah! it was a new sensation, when first I felt the virus of disease polluting the joyous current of my warm, young blood. Vainly I struggled to arrest its course; vainly I tried to shake off my lethargy. My torpid, aching limbs grew heavy as stone; icy chills crept through my veins; forked pains stabbed my brain, and punctured every nerve. One morning I fainted. I came back to consciousness only to feel that earth had shrunk far away from me; that the time when my life was a delight, when I had felt ambition and hope, belonged to another existence.
Could it be possible! Was I the same being who had felt life thrill and throb through her veins in ecstacy, the one to whom simple existence had been a delicious delirium? Now I could not move; I could not lift my hand; I could scarcely see. What was life, that which we call life, to me now? What is it to any of us, when we feel that it is no longer ours. Alas! how soon it slips away from us, this beautiful world. The eager project, the absorbing plan, the promise of success,
"Not to me, not to me!" I murmured. "I am weary; I am sick. I have no hope to-day. Life is nothing. Nothing, nothing, that which I called life. Was I ever one of earth's mad crowd? Did I ever chase such phantoms? With wild avidity did I struggle for an earthly prize? It looks little now; how little! Yet for that I wrought, for that suffered, believed, lived; I can strive no longer. Life has laid me down at the mouth of the dark river, aid has gone away and left me alone. And yet, yet I would live. Life, come back! In the cup within your hand, there must be a draught for me, something sweet, which I never yet have tasted. I am so weak I cannot stretch out my hand for it. Oh, pitying angels, come to me! Pour into my wasted veins the elixer of life! Let me live!"
{centered}THE COMING BACK.Let me live! With this cry upon my lips, I had drifted out helplessly, hopelessly into that chaos of disjointed dreams which men call madness. Torn by the fierce terror which had confronted me, spent by the agonized struggle through which I had passed with spectral foes, who had glared upon me with their green, chatoyant eyes, I was lashed back upon the shore of life, an abject creature, a worn and wasted creature. Very near me still surged the waters of Death. Hungry was their roar, but they could not engulf me again, those cold, clammy waves; not now, not now, for I was uplifted in the tender arms of the angel of life. My prayer had been answered, the words had been spoken: "You shall live." My obtuse sense heard not the whisper which came after: "Live! In the fulfilment of your prayer, accept the promise of your keenest agony."
I opened my eyes one morning--I knew that it was morning, because the pulses of the eastern sunshine were throbbing through my eastern window, dilating in ripples of gold over the pictured face of my mother which hung opposite. Through its baptism of flame, it looked down upon me, the holy eyes filled with the same anxious, foreboding tenderness with which they used to gaze upon me in my wayward childhood.
What ailed my arms? Wasted and lifeless they lay upon the coverlet, their veins shrunken and dry as if fever had sucked the last drop of life from their courses. When I remembered them last, not a line had fallen from their rounded mouldings, from their flexile, warm-tinted curves; true, then I folded them across my breast in my first utter loneliness, but the sickness which had entered the heart had not then invaded their young physical fulness of beauty. Then my hands, too, so delicately wrought; dimples slept in their unwasted surface; violet veins, fibrous wine-jets traced their whiteness; their blushing, tapering nails were rose petals dropped on snow; but now, now, they lay before me, old, wasted. Joints rose hard and stark where dimples had nestled. The veins had spread into one stagnant purple pool, suffusing even the wiry, corrugated muscles, their dark currents staining the shrivelled fingers and curling under the livid nails in blackened clots.
Slowly, lifelessly, I lifted that smitten hand to my head. Where now were the great drifts of hair? where the sweeping masses of defiant curls, which always would curl, and in their own way, in spite even of their wilful owner? Of burnished brown, in the sun flashing out the sheen of gold, was this hair of mine. How I had loved to fill its clinging rings with faint, bewildering perfumes, odors pressed from the hearts of roses; from veins of satingly sweet water-lilies, with the tears of violets and heliotropes, and then shake its loosened meshes about my face, until half intoxicted with its fragrance. With earth's own ravishing juices I had fed its opulent growth, cherished it with a woman's sacred pride, this woman's "glory" of sumptuous hair. But it was gone--I was discrowned. A few obstinate little rings clung closely to my damp forehead, but the tide of sweeping silken splendor had been swept utterly off by some ruthless power.
Slowly my hand pressed over my face; anxiously, painfully I questioned its identity. The eyes seemed to have settled back into cavernous vaults; the rounded outline of the cheek
I heard a sound, and, looking, there stood Kate, the chamber-maid, at the foot of the bed, leaning upon her broom, gazing intently upon me. She had been looking at me all the while, yet I had not seen her before.
"Kate, what's the matter?"
I did not know my own voice; it sounded broken and husky, as if all worn out.
"Mathar, indade! There's enough the mather wid
"What ails me, Kate?"
"A quare question, Miss. A brain faver has had howld of ye this many a day. Ye has been as crazy as a Bidlum lunatez, and yet ye're afthur knowin' nothin' about it? No one could do nothin' wid ye but me, and indade it was as much as iver I could do to hold ye. Ye had a mighty proud way of shakin' yousel'. You said ye wouldn't be held, and ye wouldn't. And 'twas well me arms were a bit stronger nor yourn."
"Why did you hold me, Kate?"
"Hold ye? It's pity ye're not afthur knowin'. Didn't I hold you to keep you from flyin' out of the windy, or somehin' as bad, 'cause ye was a perfect wild cat, that's why. You would go, an' you would go to Lice, to Lice, but whither it was varmin or a plece, ye meant, faith, I cudn't tell. You kept callin', and callin' some Fredrick, and some one ye called Bu-Buty, or some such outlandish name. And you talked of some one who kem only once. 'Why didn't he come agin?' ye kept askin'. Then ye had hapes and hapes of strange talk
"Oh, Kate! why didn't you stop me?"
"Stop ye! I would like to have seen the one that could a stopped ye! You was the craziest crathur I ever seen in all me life. Didn't I tell you no one could howld ye but mesel'? There allus was a flash in your eye. I seed it long enough ago--that it made no manner o' use to say no if you said yes, nor yes if you said no. Well, that flash turned into a stidy, burnin' coal, when you were a lunatez. In my notion, very quare eyes ye have, Miss. They have all sorts o' look in thim. I seen them look soft as a baby's, and they quite tuk the heart out of me."
"Never mind my eyes, Kate. I care nothing about them, nor their looks. Where is Nannette? Where
"Your
"I want my nurse, Nannette. She has taken care of me ever since I was born. Didn't she nurse me when I was ill, Kate?"
"She gave you into my keepin', Miss. Do you think she had nothin' to do but to stay wid ye all the blessed time, when she had pastry to make for all the house?"
"Kate, who cut off my hair? Who
My head felt strangely light, bereft of its beautiful burden. My debilitated mind toiled slowly from thought to thought, entirely absorbed for the moment by each one which possessed it.
"
"Who dared to cut off yer hair? Who, indade, but the leedy of the house hersel'. She said there was no sort of use to have such a mess of curls tumblin' and tossin' on a crazy
"She
"Do wid thim! Why she tuk thim off, to be sure. Ye don't suppose ye'r the only one in the house that would like to wear such currls, do ye? Oh, she's an ould sarpent!"
"Kate, will you ring for Nannette? I must see Nannette. She never left me so before."
"Well, she guv ye into my keepin'. 'Take care of me mam--me mam'--somethin'.' I've no power to spake your haythenish furren words. But I understood this 'take care of her.'"
A solemn, almost tender look now pervaded Kate's face; then, for the first time, the thought slowly dawned upon me that something might ail Nannette.
"Is Nannette sick? Tell me, Kate, if anything has befallen her? She is all that I have left in the world. If she should leave me I should be utterly alone."
"Don't, don't, in the name of the Virgin, don't spake to me in that voice; it goes into my sowl like a little child's cryin', that has no murther. Well, you are not goin' to die now, that's shure. I watched you all through the turnin' slape, and while I watched, I said me prayers as fast as iver I could; 'Hail Mary, full of Grace,' and the 'Prayer for the Dyin'.' The saints forgive me, that I said thim wid me eyes open. I was lookin' to see wather ye was comin' or goin', and now ye've come, I know ye won't go. Ye couldn't die now if ye tried. So it won't kill ye, if I till ye the whole truth."
"What truth, Kate?"
"Well, well, can't ye be afthur waitin' one blessed minut?" And Kate took a long breath and seemed with difficulty to swallow something in her throat, as if, though there was no danger of its killing me, the "whole truth" was not very easy to be told.
"Faith! I dun know what's ailin' me that I'm makin' such a fuss about spakin' a few wurrds. Now ye've come, ye can't go, that's sure. Only I've no wish to be botherin' ye--that's the truth as much as the orther. (Here Kate swallowed another lump in her throat.)
"Well, from the hour ye tuk crazy,
"Never mind the name, Kate; she meant me."
"Mint you! Who ilse could she mane? Wasn't her life bound up in ye? But oh, she tuk on terrible, cryin' and gronin' about her mam--her mam, sumethin'. Her mam, mam, sumethin', had been creezy ever since she was borned into the wurld. She was allus seein' strange sights, wid her eyes wide open; allus doin' quare things, and the quarest, creeziest thing she ever done was to come to this miserable counthrie; and indade it's the creeziest thing that I ever done mesel'. Sure wasn't I a hape better off at home! Wasn't me fayther a will-to-do farmer, that niver sent his gells out to sarvice! But I heard how in this counthrie the dollars sprouted in the streets as thick as potaties, and the fool that I was, I kem to see and make me fortin'."
"Yes, Kate, you'll tell me about it some time, please; but not now. Where's Nannette?"
"Can't ye be patient? As if I wasn't tellin', as fast as me tongue will let me, the truth, and the whole truth. Though the Lord knows, mesel' wud be the last 'un to tell it, if I hadn't watched ye through the turnin' slape, and seen ye come; so I know ye won't go, if I do tell the truth, and the whole truth."
"Tell me quick, Kate? What
"Wasn't I tellin' that she said her mam--mam,
"Oh, Kate! Kate!"
"Ye may well cry Kate. If it hadn't bin for Kate ye'd bin dead afore now. Isn't it me that's taken care of ye this many a day? Whin I was runnin' from room to room atindin' to the ladies' babyish wants, wouldn't I make thim wait while I run up to see how ye were gettin' on. Ye was quiet as a dead lam' part of the time, when the docthor had given ye morphus or white stuff wid some such name, for I wint for the dochtor mesel' and told him if I guv him my own wages he should be paid. No, indade! there was no one but Kate to tind to ye, poor young crathur. Blessed Missus Forran, the jawel, she kem as long as she could. Every blessed day she kem an' mixed drinks for yer hot throat wid her own white little hands. I seed her kiss your forehead, too, many and many a time, but as last her husband took her away to a fine great house he had bought. He said his wife was far too deliket to be thrubled with such a sight. Rose, says he, ye musn't go to that room no more. I'll hire some 'un to take care of Miss Ver--(I can't say yer outlandish neme.) Mr. Forran, sus I,
"Oh, Kate! ring for Nannette. Nannette can't be dead; though it seems long, very long, since I saw her last, my dear, dear
"Drame! drame it may be to ye. But do ye think that I've been tuggin' an' luggin' up an' down to wait on ye all these wakes in a drame? I tell ye I'm wide awake, and so ye will be afore long. Do ye thing I'd stan' here, lyin', when I didn't know what word might kill ye, although I felt shure ye wouldn't go, now ye'd come. Likely I dramed it! Didn't I help lay her out wid me own hands? Didn't I take her own money that she'd saved in the toe of a stockin' and go an' attind her funeral? Wasn't she taken to the church? an' didn't I hear grand mass said for the repose of her sowl?--and didn't more rale tears run out of me eyes than I though me whole body could howld? Wasn't I cryin' more for ye than for her, ye poor lorn lam'? I wish it was a drame"--and Kate fairly broke down, and her sobbing head found but an uncertain support on the handle of shaking broom.
"
Alone! I had fancied myself alone before. I had felt alone, never dreaming the while how much I leaned on the humble but faithful heart which had given all its life to me and mine. My soul just emerging from the shadow of death; my senses still torpid and weak through suffering; think not that in that moment I realized what I had lost, in the last, relic of my family. I could not make her dead. I still felt that it was all a dream. When we have possessed an object all of our life, when it has been so entirely our own, that we have scarcely thought of it as a positive blessing, and then it is suddenly, irrevocably taken from us, through time only we grow into a full consciousness of our loss. Not at first when the simple knowledge breaks upon us; not then, but in the days and weeks and years that come afterwards. When, amid our lifeway, we miss and sigh for the kindness, the unforgotten tenderness, which that lost one gave us; or when we recall in sad regretfulness our own lack of loving deeds, of soothing sympathy, of tender charity, weeping because of what
Do you fancy that my history is to be a cemetery lined with tombs from its morning to its evening gate? Remember, many die that one may learn how to live. There are beings over whose life no fierce storms ever sweep. Harmonious, benign, beautiful from their birth, nature's elect and the best beloved children, they need not the pangs of bereavement, the refining fires of anguish, to winnow their souls and make them pure. Untouched by heavy sorrow, unscathed by dire temptation, from a soft cradle through a sheltered summer path, they pass to a far off, peaceful grave, beloved in life, bewept in death, their earthly calm anticipating the endless calm of Paradise. We see such beings, we mark such lives; but not to all his creatures can the Father grant such discipline. There are torrid souls, whose sultry horizon is always scintillant
Days of darkness creep into every life, but not in the same seasons. There are lives which shut in night, across whose morning never swept a cloud. There are mornings heavy with storm upon whose blackness bursts the glory of a resplendent noon, followed by the mellow splendor of a tranquil afternoon and evening, which melts like a golden dream into the supernal atmosphere of heaven. My morning had not passed; the noon, the afternoon, the evening, were yet to come. Every support torn away, my nature stood alone. Now it could lean on the Everlasting Heart and learn how to live.
Kate was right. I had "come" and could not "go." The currents of life, for a while reversed, were calmly flowing back into their courses. Still weak, yet certain in their returning force, the sorrow which confronted my dawning consciousness did not drive them back to leave me dead in my desolation. No! Life had come back, and if Kate had filled another hour with horrors, the time had passed in which they might have killed me.
"Kate, what is that lying on the table? It looks like a letter;" I asked, the morning after my return to life, as I lay weak almost to lifelessness upon my pillow.
"Sure, an' it is a letthur. Didn't the post-man bring it when you was takin' on the wust? Faith, I forgot it, wid all
"Kate, I can read it," and the blood thrilled feebly around my heart with undefined hope and fear, for I knew that the bliss of heaven or the pangs of hell can be folded within a paper envelope. So can be an inane nothing, or a most quiet joy, such as I found in mine. The letter bore a foreign postmark, and came from Orsino. Kate propped my head and steadied the paper, which my enfeebled hand held so tremulously, while I read:
"VICTOIRE, SISTER:
"Orsino sends you greeting! a greeting baptized in the fervor of an Italian's heart. Italy, my mother, has snatched me once more to her embrace, and all my soul blossoms. Oh, Signora, could you behold me now, you would not know me. I am no longer sad, I no longer feel alone, I drink the air of Italy and am glad. In America I was in a wrong latitude. I did not belong to it; I could not live in it. I grew chilly; I grew cold; my nature shrivelled, because there was no gracious outside warmth to wake it, to kindle it, to make it grow. Change of place will transfigure a man until he don't know himself. In the wrong place no man is great, because he must be false to himself. His nature dwindles, his soul grows stagnant, his power dies. He is cramped, he wants room, he wants air, he wants liberty. In the right place all his nature grows; it blossoms, it bears fruit; it scatters all around it rich efflorescence. When he gets again in the right spot, how he curses himself for staying so long in the wrong. Why did I stay in that cold country? Why did I creep back and forth so long from my stupid task, while all the time the sun rose and set over Italy; while Italy cried for liberty, while Rome, my best beloved, languished on her purple hills, and wept to be free? Signora, still you see I talk much of myself. You taught me to do so by listening so sweetly; by always saying, 'Tell me more; I like to hear you.' I think of your great kindness with tears. I think of you, and am no longer glad. I have a strange feeling that you are in sorrow; you whom no sorrow seemed to touch. Do you look at your amulet? The pearls in mine burn like rubies; they have caught the color of my blood; they glow with the ardor of my hopes; only when I look at them and say, 'Victoire,' then all the ruby dies, the sardine glow goes out, the pearls grow pallid white, and I feel that you too have grown sad and
"ORSINO"
{right justified}I fell back upon my pillow from physical exhaustion. I should have made a sorry relay for the "Roman Legion."
{centered}GETTING WELL.May came and looked in through my window,--looked tenderly upon me with her adolescent eyes. The earth thrilled with her presence. In the arteries of myriad trees, in the veins of countless flowers, life was all astir, touched with her mystic magnetism. Impregnated by her seminal breath, dormant seeds quickened with new life, broke from the fructuous earth, new creations of beauty. Pallid flowers awoke in their humid homes under the dense, dappled leaves of the forest, and grew warm-hued in the warmth of her smile; garden bulbs, the cherished nurslings of household hands, pushed
Languid, helpless, still I lay, longing to behold the glory of the outer world. Zephyrs stole up from the little courts below, sweet with the odor of lilacs and magnolias, and as they touched my wasted temples, I wept with regret and gratitude. I knew that the month had brought the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. On my weary couch I saw distinctly its cloister-like rooms; felt the warmth, the dimness, the repose which pervaded them. There walked the poet to and fro, his eyes kindling with fine disapprobation, or lost in rapt admiration, as he gazed at some dream of beauty made palpable by the artist's hand. There sat the artist, listening with throbbing heart to the spontaneous words of praise or blame concerning the creation into which he had infused his deeper soul. There staked the critic, eager for the faults which he was about to proclaim to the world. There, lost in dreamy wonder, stood the fair young girl, daughter of poverty, perchance, who had denied herself of some needed comfort that she might feast her eye upon forms of beauty, such as visited her in dreams, but brightened not
My picture, my long dream of beauty, of love and of sorrow, was not there to challenge either condemnation or praise. No; it stood just where it stood when last I looked upon it before I passed into the weird realm of forgetfulness, when I beheld it with loving yet foreboding eyes. The day in which it should have been dawned upon me, yet I knew it not; the object of my labor, of my deepest love, was no more to me than if it had never existed. Was this the end of my dream? No, not the end.
As the long, lonely hours dragged away, leaving me still a prisoner, I learned to look, and to long for nothing so much as the face of Kate, my unwearied and unfailing friend. Many, many times a day, she came and covered me with her rough yet tender kindness. The fact that she had a special object of care, of solicitude, seemed to add much to her sense of personal dignity.
"What's the use o' livin," she said, "if you ben't of no use to nobody? I feels as if I'd somethin' to do, and was o' some account in the wurld, sin' she guv ye into my keepin'. Faith, I know I'm a dale happier. I uset to spind every spare minnut, fightin' with Nick the black sarpint. Now it's mesel that's somethin' better to do. Darlint, I would not care--no, I'd like it, to have the care of ye allus; to be takin' care of some un, gives me such a blessed feelin' here." And Kate clapped her broad hand on the capacious region where throbbed her great, warm, Irish heart.
I often wept when she had gone, thinking of my poor bonne. Poor Nannette! Why hadn't I been kinder, gentler, more thoughtful of her always? Had I cared for her, and
The hour of misfortune comes, and we find ourselves receiving every kindness from one upon whom we have no claims; one from whom we had the least right to expect sheltering care. Hard would have been my fate, utter my loneliness and my need, through that long, struggling convalescence, had it not been for the pity and womanly love of Kate, the Irish chambermaid.
I was dressed at last; another day, and I thought that I should be strong enough to walk out into the air. On that morning Mrs. Skinher called for the first time.
"You have had a long illness," she observed, as she smoothed the skirt of her gorgeous morning robe and seated herself. "A long illness, but you have had the best of care."
"Yes, Kate has been as kind as a mother."
"Kate! She could not have taken care of you without
"Oh, no; I could neither have expected nor have wished such a thing."
"But your tone gives all the credit to Kate. Kate is a lazy thing, and would rather be fussing in here, than doing her proper work."
"I don't think she is lazy, Mrs. Skinher."
"You don't think so? What do you know about it, pray? I think that I have some opportunity to understand the character of my servants. Kate
I did not disturb her complacent conclusion with a reply.
"Miss Vernoid, I suppose that you are aware you have contracted a large bill during your sickness?"
"What is its amount, Mrs. Skinher?"
"Something over three hundred dollars. A small sum, except to those who have no money. There is three months' board due. As you retained your room, and had the care of a nurse, I did not reduce the weekly charge; in justice to myself I should have charged more, but I did not. Then extras for coal and gas amount to something. Besides, here is the doctor's bill, which I paid myself. I did not wish Dr. Smirk to think that I kept a class of boarders who were not able to pay their physician. In all, it is three hundred and fifty dollars. Here is the bill, with all the charges." And she arose and handed it to me.
I came in to give you some advice," she added, resuming her seat. "I think that you need it. And to tell you that I am prepared to make the payment of this bill very easy for you. If you will transfer the ownership of these paintings to me, I will give you a receipt in full. Nothing could be easier."
"Nothing could be harder. I shall never sell these paintings. But I will leave them as security till I can earn money to pay you. I would as soon sell myself as my mother's picture."
"Fudge! I care nothing about your mother's picture, except that it is the handsome portrait of a handsome face, and would look well in my back parlor. The large painting I want for the front one. You are not in circumstances to be sentimental, Miss Vernoid. You might as well transfer the right of ownership at once. You will never redeem them. It needs no penetration to see that you are not one of the sort to make money. If you must earn your living, it will be a hand to mouth sort of business, I know. I don't believe that you have any more faculty to get on than Miss De Ray."
"If I have not, I shall not sell my pictures."
"Oh, no; such folks are always running into the face of their own interest. I suppose that you'd rather stay in debt; a pretty way to begin life! My advice to you is: live within your means. If you have only two cents, be content with what two cents will bring. People will respect you more for it, for you won't rob them. The little you have will be your own, and you can be as independant on a crust, if it's only
"I like your advice, all but the last sentence. I shall not transfer my paintings to you; but I will leave them as security for my debt. It is useless to ask me to sell them."
"It will be all the same to me in the end," she answered, exultingly. "When will
"Mrs. Skinher, will you be so good as to return the hair which you cutt off from my head during my illness."
She started. "Wasn't it my duty to cut it off? Did you ever hear of any one getting well of a brain fever with such a mop of hair on their head? If I hadn't cut it off, it would have dropped off, every hair of it. I did my duty."
"I am not impugning your motives, nor finding fault because you cut it, thought I had much rather it had dropped in my hands than have been shorn off when I did not know it. I only ask that you return it, Mrs. Skinher."
"Return it! Why, do you think that I have it? What should I want with your hair?"
"Nothing, I should think. So you will return it, will you not?"
"I am willing to help you in any reasonable way. It might make me a soft pincushion. I will give you five dollars for it."
"It is worth more than five dollars to me for its memories, and worth more than that to any one else who wants it. I am unwilling to sell it, Mrs. Skinher."
"A wonderful opinion you have of your hair," she said, red with anger and embarrassment. "I won't be mean. I will allow you ten dollars; but I want no words about it."
It was useless to attempt to further recover my lost treasure. Already Mrs. Skinher had had it transformed into a wig.
"Remember that these are all to be left," she said, with a deep emphasis on
Gone! I looked around upon my pictures, my silent sacred friends, and no tear rose to my eye. I knew that I could not lose them; they were too much a part of me to go from me for ever. I may part with you for a season, but you will all return to me again, I sad, with a smile of faith, darkened by no shadow of doubt.
A new purpose came into my heart, and with it new strength into my limbs, new vitality into my veins. I took up the morning paper which Kate had brought me, and commenced reading the "Wants." I had read but a little way when I came to this advertisement:
{smaller text}"At No. ____ street, respectable sewing girls, or ladies with limited means, will find a comfortable home for a moderate charge. Good references given and required."
I could not wait for the morrow to find the air, nor to know my destiny. With trembling steps I sought the city cars, and the cars conveyed me to the very threshold of the "comfortable home." I found it
"I cannot make the home as comfortable as I wish; but I do the best I can," she said. "The women who live here can afford to pay very little for their board. Some of them are rough. I fear that you would not find them the company you have been used to, still they are decent."
She seemed anxious lest I should expect more than she could give me. "I will try it. I ask only for quiet. I expect little."
"When will you come?"
"To-morrow."
In a few moments I was on my way back to Mrs. Skinher's.
Once more in my room, I made up a little package of keepsakes for Kate--a few wearing trinkets, and a small enraving of Raphael's Madonna, which I had seen her cross herself
"Sure, afthur all," she thought, "I had gone, and kilt meself."
"No," I said. "I shall never do anything so foolish. I love to live all too well; but I am going away, Kate. Here are some keepsakes for you, and some time--some time, Kate, I shall pay you for all your kindness to me. I love you, Kate, for your blessed heart; and shall never forget to be grateful. Come to No. ______ street and see me. If I ever have a home I'd like to take care of you, Kate!"
It was the last day of May that I left Mrs. Skinher's. The sun poured into my window, flooding all my pictured faces as I stood and looked at them for the last time. I took but one away. I carried in my hand, when I passed from that door, but one thing. It was a small medallion engraving of Correggio's Christ. All women love Christ. They come to God through Him. They feel their souls drawn towards Him through the divinest sympathy. Not so much by word as deed did Jesus prove his tender, loving compassion for women. "Daughter, thy sins are all forgiven thee; go and sin no more," were the words of the immaculate Master in the face of accusing, self-righteous, polluted men. No wonder that women followed Him from afar, touching the hem of His garment, that, by some mysterious power, a little of the God-life might be imparted to them; no wonder that Martha served Him; that Mary sat at His feet; no wonder that to-day, in the secret and silent places all over this grief-smitten earth, does the loving, longing, unfilled heart of woman pour its floods of infinite want into the bosom of the Lord and Saviour of her soul.
The sun suffused the marble vestibule with amber, as Nick opened the door for me for the last time. Brightly the sun shone on the marble steps; its gold gleamed through the shimmering maples, which shaded the broad, clean street with their refreshing green, their umbrageous, shifting shadows; the air was sweet with magnolias; and so, with my "dead Christ" in my hand, I went away.
{centered}ANOTHER BOARDING-HOUSE.Another transition! Another change, greater than had ever come to me before. Persons who, in travelling, have accidentally
Alas! what weary, haggard faces! Brows prematurely wrinkled and furrowed with care. The traces of hard passion, the sullen, vacant or brazen expression on the different faces, told how the fine temper of the soul had been destroyed in the fierce furnace of their struggling life. Evidently the women who sat there were on a level with their surroundings; they looked coarse and vulgar, or sick and unhappy. All sat bowed over their work, sewing vigorously, some with contracted brows in sullen silence, others discussed loudly some topic of vulgar life, while a few seemed to derive their entertainment from ridiculing a girl who sat in silence, quite apart from the rest. I listened to the dissonant voices, to the rude laughter, to the jests, and sickened with disgust. Perhaps this sickness suffused my face, for they looked at me askance, and with little welcome in the look.
"Guess Miss Grammar has got somebody to keep her company at last," said a red-haired, red-eyed, freckle-faced girl, turning towards the solitary one whom they were ridiculing.
"Where's your manners, Nance?" said a little pert, button-eyed girl, with a nose in the air.
"Hain't got none; they ain't needed here."
"Well, folks might as well be civil," answered Pert.
"Civil! ain't I civil, I'd like to know? You know well as me that Miss Grammar thinks that we ain't none of us good enough to keep her company. I reckoned she'd like to know somebody had come what was probably good enough in their own opinion, anyhow," said Nance, with a toss of her head towards me, which she intended should be very contemptuous, but which was only ridiculous.
"You'd better leave them that hain't hurt you alone," protested little Pert. "I don't blame Grammar a snap for cutting you."
"Oh, no, you don't; but you are mad as a hare when she cuts
"I know enough to carry all the airs I please," and with these words, the nose in the air went up higher, as if infinitely insulted.
I was greatly amused. In this circle, coarse as it was, caste had entered. Here, as everywhere else, society was struggling to sustain its distinctions. Already I had heard enough to know that the girl whom they called Grammar was the butt of the rest, and a glance at her revealed the reason. She looked as much out of place as would a seraph from heaven. A slight, willowy figure sat in the low wooden chair; a slender foot, with a proudly-curved instep, rested on the bare wooden stool; small, thin hands stitched on, without ceasing, the delicate fingers stained with the dark fabric which they were sewing. That foot would have looked more at home nestled in velvet cushions; that hand was fair and lovely enough to have been shaded by ethereal laces; just the fingers those to sweep over the keys of a piano, or the cords of a harp, or to touch with grace the artistic appliances of a sumptuous home. The head and face were wonderful. The head seemed too massive, too powerful for that slender body. The heavy braids of black shining hair, wound round and round it, rendered its classical contour still more striking. Intellect was embossed upon the pale, broad brow. Genius wept in the great dark, despairing eyes. With these features the positive beauty in the face ended. The lower portion was painful. The muscles around the mouth were tense, rigid--not with harshness; it was the tension of suffering, the
The rude thrusts of her companions seemed not to reach her. Had they spoken in a language which she could not understand she could not have sat more impassive, more unmoved. The calm, compressed lips relaxed neither in anger, in sarcasm, nor in scorn. The great eyes looked straight at the stitching, as if stitching comprehended the universe. This composure could only be the offspring of a strong character, of a great nature; it was not the child of inanity. If ever power, capacity to suffer; if ever soul was stamped upon the human face, it was upon hers. She could not have been more than twenty, yet to look in her eyes, you felt that she had lived centuries. I saw that her nature was self-poised and solitary; saw that she lived in a region apart from her companions; one that could not reach, nor even discern.
Still I sat by the shabby stand, studying this face, when a young girl tripped in, whom Nance instantly hailed as "Tip."
"Well, Miss Tip, have you come again to 'stonish us all?"
"Yes. Why not?" replied the young creature with a voice and laugh gay as a running brook.
"Why not! Well, if that isn't cool! Why shouldn't one sister set herself up for her learnin' and t'other for her beauty? I'll tell you just why: 'cause decent people don't like to be imposed on; that's why. For my part I feel as good as anybody."
"I'm glad that you do; why shouldn't you, Nancy?"
"Why shouldn't I? 'cause some folks think I ain't; some folks are so big feelin' they think nobody hain't so grand as they are. Let 'em stick up. I ask nothin' of nobody. I'm's good as the grandest lady what walks the street."
Tip had no reply for Nancy's most satisfactory estimate of herself. She had dropped a bundle upon the floor at Grammar's feet, and sat down upon the low stool before her.
"What did Mr. Bertram say?" asked Grammar, in a low tone.
"He said that he was sorry, but that he couldn't treat you any better than the other 'hands;'--that he must cut down the pay."
"What have you brought?"
"Satin vests, two shillings apiece."
"And he will sell them for ten dollars," said Grammar, and I saw the muscles around the white mouth quiver. "You will have to give up your music lessons, Hope."
"Never mind; I can help you the more. I have been thinking of it all the way back that I would help you more, and it will make me so happy."
"Hope, I don't want you to help me more."
"Oh, no, you don't want her to help you, do you? We all know'd that afore. You want to make a grand lady of Miss Tip, don't you? You want to marry her to a rich man, don't you? Then Aunt Grammar can take care of the children. She needn't work for other folks no more; she can put on as many airs as she pleases," shouted Nance, who had overheard Grammar's last words.
"If I ever do have a nice house, I'll invite all you girls to a tea party," said Tip.
"Oh, yes, you'd like to crow over us, perhaps, if we hadn't made as good markets," exclaimed Nance and Pert in a breath.
"No, indeed, but how good it would seem to have one nice tea all together. No frowy butter, no skippery cheese, no chalky milk; but tea with white sugar and cream, and strawberries, and biscuit white as snow. Wouldn't it be pleasant, girls?"
"A likely story," said Nance, in a milder tone, mollified by the epicurean picture in spite of herself. "Do you think that Aunt Grammar would allow any such doin's? She won't let you keep our company now; do you think that she'll let you do it then, when you live in a fine house of your own?" And Nancy's tone unconcsciously betrayed a faith in Tip's exalted destiny as well as in the life-long authority of Grammar.
During the conversation I had been gazing at Tip. No wonder that Nance had asked if she had come to astonish us. She astonished me with her rare, her radiant beauty. She was not more than fourteen. She stood on the mystic boundary which divides childhood from womanhood; dazzling as a child, I was lost in imagining what the glory of the woman would be. She wore a rose-pink calico dress, terminating at the ankle, displaying a petite, patrician foot, in a high, plain shoe. A mantle of muslin revealed the ariel outline of her undulating, girlish figure, while the broad flat upon her head shaded, yet exposed the beautiful features. Had her hair been fairer, she would have been a blonde, for her complexion
"Round her she made an atmosphere of light; The very air seemed brighter for her eyes, They were so soft, and beautiful, and rife With all we can imagine of the skies;" besides all that we dream over and long for in the loveliest of the earth.{belongs to previous to quote}
Tip's story of strawberries and cream, of "biscuits white as snow," was interrupted by a
After tea the girls returned to their tasks. I asked to be shown to my room. "My room!" I said again, as I stood alone gazing around it. "My room! Have I come to this?" "Yes, you have come to this," answered Fact. "You prayed for life; accept without a murmur what it gives you."
The chambers had been portioned into small sleeping closets. I stood in the midst of one of them. It was just large enough to hold a bed, a stand, a single chair, with sufficient useless space to hold a trunk. Thank God it had a window, which, though it looked out upon a reeking alley, was better than none. I knew in the day a few faint sunbeams would struggle down to bless me, and that, when I was very hungry for the sight, I could trust my face into the air and catch a glimpse, only a glimpse, of the azure heaven above the house tops. I hung my pictured Christ on the narrow strip of wall at the foot of my bed, where the divine eyes could greet me first on waking; where I could look into them, and gather courage and comfort to bear me through my weary days.
This done, I sat down upon the edge of my low cot and began to think. If I had found nothing else to arouse my interest, I should probably have fallen back upon the consideration of my miserable self and more miserable condition; but as it was I thought only of Grammar and Tip. So unlike, yet each so intensely interesting; the one so beautiful, the other so great. Who could they be? How had they come into such a place? Alas, that I was not rich that I might paint their faces, and take them and myself away from this hateful place. But as it was, I was sure that we should be friends and love each other. How I thanked God in humble gratitude that I had never found a spot so dark but that it held some bright thing; something to bless me; something that I could love.
My meditation was broken by the opening of the door in the adjoining room. There was only a thin partition between, so that I heard distinctly. Some of the girls were retiring for the night. In a moment I recognised the voices of the sisters who had absorbed my thought.
"This has been a sad day, Hope," said Grammar.
"Yes, a little sad; very sad for you; you fee everything so much, dear Morna. Don't feel so bad about the music lessons. I shall learn them some time, and if I let them rest a little while, I can help you so much more."
"Don't speak of helping me, again, Hope; don't! You know that every stitch which you take in that wretched sewing, only hinders you so much in your preparation for the situation which you are suited to fill. Don't speak again of helping me in that way; you know that I cannot bear it."
"Well, I won't, dear Morna, if you will believe in the 'good time coming."
"The good time? it has never come to us yet, Hope."
"But it
"You are young, Hope, and I don't know why, but you learn nothing of life even from its miseries."
"I never felt miserable, Morna. How can I, when our Father in Heaven is so kind. But I feel sad because you are so anxious about me. I have no fear. God
"Good! It is almost impossible to be good under some circumstances, at least for me. I cannot always be patient. I feel very rebellious to-night. I did not feel half so much so when I had to give up my own music, for then you could still continue yours. But now, to know that your lessons must be discontinued, because, work as we will, we cannot pay for them; to know that the harder we work the less we receive, and that it is all that we can possibly do to pay for our miserable shelter and unsatisfying food, seems a little more than I can silently bear. I want to believe, but to-night, I can't, that God is kind, that He rules this world justly. This moment I cannot feel that He does."
"Oh, Morna, what would our mother say to such words! If we can go to heaven, as she did, won't it be enough?"
"No! not as I now feel, it would not be enough. To go to heaven as she did would be torture. It is a great sorrow on my heart to-day that she who loved all beautiful things, who was all beauty and love herself, had nothing in this world but a hard, grinding life; nothing but poverty and pain, and died at last as -----. Oh! I cannot think of it; the thought makes me mad! Yet I am wicked, Hope, and I cannot help it. If God wanted me to grope through this world without seeing its glory or longing for its joy, He would have given
"Oh, Morna, I never heard you talk so before. Oh, how sad I am that you feel so bad. Don't wish me happier. I feel that I have everything when I think that I have such a sister. I thank God every day for you, Morna."
A deep groan was the only response. There was a long pause, in which I heard the deep, agonized breath of Morna. In a few moments the silence was broken by the voice of the child as she read these words:
{centered}"Now, no affliction for the present seemeth pleasant, but afterwards it worketh the peaceable fruits of righteousness."
{smaller text}"We want faith in the 'afterwards,' don't we, Morna?" asked the sweet, young voice.
"Yes, yes, that is what
I heard the rustling of their robes as they knelt down, and in a moment I heard Morna say, in a deep, low tone:
"Oh, Thou Great Eternal! who hast been sought after through all the ages; Thou, whose ways are past finding out, who coverest Thyself with mystery, as with a garment, yet commandest Thy creatures to call Thee Father; help us to call Thee by that precious name; help us to believe that Thou wilt not cast us utterly away. Help us to believe that Thou wilt forgive our sins, and accept us for the sake of Thy Beloved. We come to Thee for light, for our earthly way is very dark. We fear even the unseen hand which leads us, so impenetrable is the gloom before us. Let Thy light shine in upon us that we may see the way. Oh, give us grace to quell the wild cry of our hearts, to stifle the great insatiate want which it is no Thy will to satisfy. Give us patience, that we rebel not
Her voice seemed overwhelmed with the greatness of her thought. The last words were almost inarticulate; a low, imploring, yet half despairing cry, it died; then the voice of Hope broke the stillness; sweetly it murmured:
"Precious Saviour! We come to Thee as little children, because we love Thee. We know that Thou art our best friend, and we love to tell Thee our hearts. We are homeless lambs, knocking at the fold of the Good Sheperd. Oh, dear Jesus, let us in! Take us out of the cold; carry us in Thy bosom, oh, our Saviour! There evil cannot reach us; there we shall be carried white and blameless. We cast all our care upon Thee; for Thou carest for us. We lay our burden down at Thy feet. We know that Thou wilt lift us up, and lead us always. We know that we are sinful, but Thou art all-saving. O Christ! Thou hadst no earthly home; Thou hadst not where to lay Thy holy head. But now Thou art in Thy Father's House. There, there are many mansions. We believe that Thou hadst prepared one for us. Help us so to live, that with joy and gladness we may behold Thy face. O Jesus! bless Morna; comfort my dear, dear---"
Here the gentle voice broke under its burden of love; it dissolved in tears--such tears as angels weep. Yet how much those prayers comforted those hearts I knew when, a few moments after, broke upon the night the wondrous enchantment of their blended voices, singing low:
{centered}"Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly, While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high. Save me; oh, my Saviour hide! Till the storm of life is past, Safe into Thy heaven guide, Oh, receive my soul at last!"
I buried my head in my pillow and wept; wept as the peace of believing stole through all my soul. It was not more the words of that divine hymn than the spell of low music which stirred all the depths of my being. I had heard the best singers of the age, those who were making the melody of the century, yet I had listened to no human voices which had ever moved me like these. The singers of heaven would not have seemed more alien to that little room than did these sisters. The voice of Hope was sweet; the voice of Morna was more; it was pathos, it was passion, it was power; it was love, yearning, infinite, breaking in floods of melody, in low, impassioned, imploring gushes of music over the words of the hymn. It awoke everything in me; all that I had ever longed for, hoped for; lost sensations, buried dreams, all came thronging into my soul, while I listened to that voice. Yet over all fell the great peace. With the music still vibrating through my soul, I fell asleep.
Why must they dawn upon us, life's grim, gray mornings! Why must we come from the palaces of our dreams, from the gardens of Paradise, back to the hard tasks of the grinding day? The night is ideal; through her dusk aisles glide all fair and visionary forms; through her haunted halls troop all fantastic delights. It is one of the most painful of sensations to pass from some halcyon dream of sleep into the bald morning face of a new, forbidding reality. To open our eyes suddenly upon disagreeable surroundings, to gaze around, bewildered, only to wake up to the utter consciousness of the dreaded, hated, day-time task, which is waiting impatiently to sap our energy, to drink the very blood of youth and hope. The light of some mornings, how drearily, how dreadfully, how appalingly it dawns upon our shrinking senses! How we dread the day, how hateful is our work, how we sigh for the visions which have just left us! Not when health and hope are perfect--not then, do we dread the morning; but when we have grown weak and weary, when we feel inadequate for effort, when we shrink from life's daily contest, asking only rest--then we dread the dawning day.
I shrank from the naked truth of the next morning, as it gazed stark upon me through the gray light. Sickness and poverty had overtaken me; real life had seized me. I was their slave, and must obey. I must work; more, I must go and seek work. I endeavored to bring my enfeebled frame up to the demands of this though; still it moved languidly, so faint was it diminished vitality. How I missed my accustomed
As I opened my door at the call of the breakfast bell, I encountered Hope, just issuing through hers. How lovely she looked! I saw her, and felt a throb of gratitude that at least I had this fair creature to irradiate my dark path. She looked at me, and the soft eyes beamed and the little hand was outstretched.
"I don't know your name," she said, "but I am so glad that you have come. You will comfort Morna much. She will love you, I know. And your room next to ours? I didn't know that. I am glad."
"You say that Morna will love me; won't you a little too?"
"Oh, yes; but my love isn't worth so much as Morna's."
"Why not?"
"Oh, I'm a child. I haven't Morna's great soul. Morna garners all her love for a few, and such love! Mine couldn't be worth as much to any one."
"I love you and your sister very much already."
"You do? how glad I am. I must go and tell Morna. I thought that you would love
Descending into the sitting room, we found Morna in the very spot in which she sat the day before, her task already commenced. The other girls had descended to their breakfast.
"Morna, this lady says that she loves you," said Hope, leading me by the hand to her sister's low chair. The dark eyes were lifted to mine in one eager, questioning, penetrating glance; the great orbs grew dewy, the tense lines around the mouth relaxed, she stretched out her hand. "God has sent you," she murmured.
Bending down, I kissed her forehead. Hope held up her budding mouth.
These kisses sealed our blended destinies. In them a new epoch in three lives began.
{centered}VICTOIRE GOES TO WORK.--TRIES HARD TO BE SENSIBLE.I had been dreaming long enough. I had been sneered at for my dreams, too, that hurt me quite as much as their failure. After we have persisted in our own way, after we have marked
"I have failed." I said these words aloud and very slow, showing no pity to my writhing heart. I felt no tender sympathy, no compassion for myself. I had failed, and the failure was my own fault. In what respect had I shown any wisdom? I had not made a single effort to secure a paying employment. I had sat in my room, painted out a dream, spent all my money; now I was penniless; worse, I was miserably in debt, worn, and wasted with sickness. Shall life be a failure to-morrow, and to-morrow, because it is a failure to-day? Because this hour is a failure, shall it remain a failure to the end? Never! I answered.
Just then an arrow of sunlight flashed down the narrow alley-way, shot out into the window of my little closet where I stood, and quivered on the pearly crown of Orsino's amulet which hung upon my neck. The gray, foreshadowing dawn had deepened into a lustrous day. I had feared this day; I had quaked at the thought of it; for I knew that in it I must go forth and seek kindness from the hearts of strangers, and I dreaded a repulse. Then the consciousness came to me that in all my life I had never dreaded work; I had only shrunk from seeking it as a boon from others. The supercilious, inquisitive, or insolent look, bent upon me because I asked for "work," how could I brook that! Even if work were given to me with such a gaze, would it not be like me to cast it down in dire disdain, even if I knew that starvation waited for me at the door. Ah, my haughty soul! to bend it into the cramping arc of its every day action would be work enough for one poor creature! The dreaded day had come, bland, benign, beautiful it was. Its invisible fingers, dipped in balm, beckoned me out into the budding world to
Only a few hours before Morna had said: "God has sent you." I would accept these words as truth--as a blessed promise for the future. I would go and find work, and come with my toil, and sit down by the side of these girls, and be to them a sister.
I had been standing in bonnet and mantle all this time, a package of small drawings and paintings lying on the bed by my side. I took them in my hand, looked into the face of my pictured Christ with an inarticulate prayer, and went out. I had resolved to seek employment as a designer, and so took a package of my Paris sketches as specimens. Thanks to the philanthropy which has since opened a school of design for women, so that designing and engraving are no longer among her mooted tasks. Men are very suspicious of any new, untried employment for woman. They are fearful lest, in some way, it will make her encroach upon their masculine prerogatives. They have so long looked upon the working sisterhood as dish-washers, baby-tenders, shirt-makers, that they have learned to regard these as the only genuine female employments. They have little faith that woman would do any other work as well. But let a woman go quietly to work, without noise or pretension, to do the thing which she would, and if it so be that she does it well, and in a womanly way, though it may not be called "woman's work," she will find in men her warmest approvers and most generous friends. And it is a little odd, the man the most bitterly opposed to all female innovation in general, succumbs with a most suave grace to any such innovation in particular, if he only like the woman who, in her pretty way, is doing her best to widen a little the narrow circle of being which he calls her "sphere." If it is only "
Well, I found it was the common opinion that it was a great leap out of the common track for a woman to presume to be a designer or engraver.
"You don't look as if you could carry a stidy hand; and as
"If this is your opinion, I do not wish to work for you."
"Designing isn't woman's work, anyhow."
This was my first trial in asking for work. I left the establishment without even showing my specimens.
In the second, their "designers were all men," they politely said. "They employed only the best draughtsmen."
With a sinking heart and fainting steps I tottered towards the door of the third engraver. If I was to be rebuffed here, I knew not where else to turn.
"I would like to find employment as a designer; I have a few specimens to show you," I said, in a faltering voice, I fear, to a pleasant-looking gentleman, seated beside a desk in a cheerful counting-room.
He rose and politely offered me a chair. Then opened the package, took up Monsieur Savonne's letter which lay on the top. He read it, and glanced from the letter to me. "You have been ill?" he asked, gently.
I had a splendid front of contempt wherewith to meet harshness or insolence; but at the sound of these few kind words I felt all my soul dissolving. It was with difficulty I answered,
"Yes, very ill."
Eagerly I watched his face, as he looked over my sketches. It grew more and more pleasant, I thought.
"We have not been in the habit of employing lady designers; indeed, to find one, is very unusual," he said, at last. "But I am pleased with your designs; they are very original as well as beautiful. Here is a book which you may illustrate. I intended it for our best artist. If you do it satisfactorily, and I think that you will," he added, encouragingly, "you shall be paid all that we would have given him a handsome remuneration."
The revulsion of feeling after my agony of fear and suspense seemed greater than I could bear, without an outward demonstration. I could have kissed that man, who was neither young nor handsome, and it would have been the holy kiss of gratitude. I could have blessed him on my bended knees, yet did nothing so remarkable. I thanked him quietly, with tears in my eyes, and went away.
I went back not with the faltering step of my coming. I felt as if wings had burst forth from my feet. I did not walk--
Poor Mona Avondale! I soon learned why she was persecuted. Her tormentors could not forgive her superiority. Abuse is an involuntary tribute which base souls pay to great natures. If she had only felt insulated, if she had only retaliated, they would have enjoyed at least the variety of a quarrel. But this calmness, this loftiness of soul, this unuttered pity, seemed to them unpardonable. They hated a greatness which they could not equal, and affected to despise a nature, whose depth they could not fathom. Had she only answered proudly and disdainfully, she would have seemed more like one of their own kind. But while that classic head was embossed upon the air before them, while they beheld that calm, broad brow, and met the silent gaze of those spirit-searching eyes, they must feel that she was the native of a loftier sphere than the one in which they were born, and that she sat an alien in the midst of their low tribe. Because they knew this, they hated her. True, Morna answered not, complained not; yet it was this daily, petty persecution, this perpetual dropping, which made the ceaseless friction, the changeless agony, which wore youth, and elasticity, and life away. To have each day the dreary counterpart of its predecessor, to sit through the long hours cramped in one position, breathing a fetid atmosphere, shut away from God's sunshine and joy-inspiring air, was bad enough; but when to these miseries was added a stream of vulgar talk, low jests, horse laughs, and grating voices at times uttering words of imprecation, and even of abuse, was to endure a life which, at times at least, must have seemed intolerable.
With only a few exceptions, these poor girls seemed not to have a hope or an aspiration above the life which they lived. They had always drudged, and their mothers had drudged before them. They had never known any life but that of poverty in its most grinding forms. It is not the sad thing about such a life that it makes the hands hard and the body weary; the sadness is, that it steals from our being its tender, beautiful bloom; that it leaves no space or time for the spirit to grow; that it grinds existence down to one sordid material want, and encrusts the soul with selfishness. To work, to eat, to dress in some cheap finery, if possible to find a husband who would
The age holds out lofty opportunities for women to win culture and triumph in the sciences and arts; and yet to the great mass of the daughters of the poor, the drudgery of the kitchen, the wasting slavery of the "slop shop," is all that saves them from starvation or shame.
The summer wore on and the atmosphere of the sitting-room grew intolerable. Morna, Hope, and I took refuge in our little less intolerable closets up stairs. By looking out into the alley-way we could catch a glimpse of blue ether. Besides I had bought a white monthly rose and had set it in the open window. Once in a while a fragrant zyphyr would float over its odorous buds and lose itself unawares in the stifling closeness of the little chamber. It was full of vestal blossoms now, and although it stood in the window of a reeking alley, we would bury our faces in its fragrant bloom, and think of sunny gardens and wilderness of flowers. Sometimes a sunbeam lost its way down in the prisoning alley and would wander lovingly over Morna's white brow, and hide itself in the depths of Hope's lustrous hair.
As yet I knew nothing of these girls' history. I determined to know their story, and thought that the best way to find it out would be first to tell my own. I told them of Les Delices; pictured the mountains, the valleys, the Rhone; told of Paris. Never was story-teller blessed with more appreciative listeners. Hope's eyes grew radiant, and Morna's great orbs became luminous with unspoken interest.
"I have told you my story; now tell me yours," I said, one purple summer twilight, just as Morna folded up the second satin vest which her delicate hands had fashioned that day. How weary she looked; how pale; yet I thought not half as forlorn as when I first saw her two months before. I took her hand in mine. I lifted up the hot masses of hair from her tired brow. I soothed it and kissed it. "Come, Morna, tell me your story."
"My story?" she said, sadly. "There is no poetry, nor beauty, nor any story in
"Well, tell it; do. I can't tell how much I want to know how two such flowers as you are ever sprung up in such a doleful spot as this. How you ever found such a 'comfortable home.'"
"I am willing to tell you," she said; "but it can't interest you."
Then Hope came and took my other hand and laid her beautiful head on my lap, as we sat before the window, Morna and I, the white rose breathing between us.
{centered}MORNA'S STORY."I can't begin by telling of better days," she said, "for my father and mother were always poor. I can remember a time when we were comfortable, and those were our best days. Then we lived on the second floor of a great house which had once been grand, but now was let in tenements because its locality had ceased to be fashionable. My pleasantest recollections linger about this home in which my happiest hours were spent. There was one room hung with velvet paper of a rich, dark green, mottled all over with clusters of purple grapes. This was our 'best room.' Here the table was always set for tea; here at evening we awaited our father's return. My mother knew how to make everything look pretty; every article in the room was plain, but she had touched all with a poetic grace. I remember that there was a small book-case filled with books, and that over it hung a picture of Raphael. A stand always stood by the window filled with geraniums and monthly roses. Then there was a table covered with pretty books and trinkets; my mother's workstand and little cushioned rocking-chair and the cradle--for we always had a baby in the house--and that is why it was never lonely. White curtains hung upon the windows; a bright carpet covered the floor; and when the lamp was lit at night and the table set for tea; when the tea-kettle, which my mother kept as bright as gold, sang over the glowing coals and the tea urn filled the room with fragrance; when kitty purred on the rug, and baby crowed in the cradle; when
"But you see, Victoire, this home of ours was not much like Les Delices?"
"Never mind, dear; go on."
"At tea father and mother had so many pleasant things to tell each other. After prayers and the evening hymn, mother sat by the cradle and sewed; father read aloud, and I sat on a low stool at their feet and listened.
"My father was a book-keeper, and had only a limited salary to support a large family. While health remained he did this in comfort, and, besides, saved a little. He hoped to have enough at last to buy a cottage and garden in the suburbs of the city. This was his darling dream; a home, a sunny home all his own, radiant with wife and children, made the only picture of human joy on which he cared to dwell. His natural capacity fitted him to fill a much larger sphere than he ever occupied. But from early boyhood he had elbowed his way through the world's crowd alone. There was no tender voice to tell the orphan boy what he might be, or what good and great things he might do. And at last the sweet voices of desire within him grew silent, because there was no one to listen or to answer. The flower of genius unfolded in his soul, filling all the air around him with beauty; but it never basked in the sunshine of ease or leisure; even culture was denied it. So its blossoms were scattered around; they never ripened into fruit which the world could see. The world never knew that this flower filled all his being with fragrance, and to its undiscerning eye he lived and died 'only a common man.' He had a passion for music which he had little time to cultivate, but he played the flute very sweetly, and I can feel now how all his soul used to flow through its melody. Like most men, he fell in love too early, married, and found himself bearing the burden of poverty and of a family before he had sounded the depths or measured the breadth of his own nature, or its needs. Still I think that he was a happier and a better man than he would have been had he lived alone, a selfish, solitary life, filled only with the dreams of ambition.
"When I was a little more than six years old my father was taken ill. You know how ghastly it makes a home to have a father or mother sick. When my father was ill, all the light in the world seemed to go out. The green sitting room was
"In such an hour of sorrow, Hope was born. She was serene and beautiful from her birth, a Christ-child. The day on which she was born our father died. She was taken to his bedside, and I remember, as he touched the baby brow with his wasted fingers, kissed it with his icy lips, he turned away and groaned. Alas! he knew that he was dying; with the prescience of a spirit, he saw the future. I saw him lay down his head, and--die. My mother laid her face on the baby's silken hair and wept low, but as if her heart was broken. Four little children, I the eldest, went as mourners to our father's grave. We came back, and I can feel now the chill which struck me as I entered the deserted room and thought: 'No father! no father.'
"The ladies of the church to which my mother belonged came to see her. One, celebrated for her profession of piety, offered to take me as assistant nurse to her own infant. She told my mother that she would take good care of me. There
"I was never made for a servant; yet here, for my mother's sake, I submitted to the most pitiless tyranny. It was a hard lesson for a young child. It was hard to lug about, up and down stairs, a great lubber of a baby, till every joint in my poor little spine ached with excruciating pain. It was hard to be ordered about like a little slave by the children of Mrs. Dolittle. I could not understand why it was my lot to wait upon them; why I had to be treated by them as an inferior, while all the time they were coarse and rude to a degree which shocked me in every nerve.
"Once my feeling got the better of my patience, and I said to Master Puffer Dolittle, who threw his ball purposely from the third-story window, and then ordered me to carry the baby and go after it, 'I will not do it;' and to Miss Cillie Dolittle, who exclaimed: 'You must; you're our servant.' I said" 'I am as good as you, Miss Cillie Dolittle.' My insolence was immediately reported, and without delay I was ordered into the presence of Mrs. Dolittle, who said: 'Morna, you are a saucy little thing; a little impertinent, wicked huzzy
"'Because, ma'am, I think that I am.'
"'You do, do-o you! I'll teach you w-h-a-t you are!' she said, fiercely shaking me and slapping me without mercy. 'I will teach you better. You belong to a different class of beings. Your father lived and died a poor man. Mr. Dolittle is worth half a million. Never, never let me hear such words come from your mouth. How dare you compare yourself with my daughters, the Misses Dolittle?'
"In all that great house, there was no one to speak tenderly to the fatherless child, or to give her young, yearning heart one drop of the sweet affection which it so hopelessly craved. The hardest thing to bear was a basket filled with refuse food, which I was ordered to carry to my mother. Then I was filled with humiliation, shame, and rage. I remember when fairly outside of the gate, I set down the basket, or rather it fell from my trembling hand. Then I shook my little fist at the iron railing and cried:
"'I hate you, Mrs. Dolittle; I hate you. You are not half as good as my mother; you are not half as beautiful; yet you send victuals to her that you would not eat. When you die, I hope that the old devil will get you, Mrs. Dolittle.'
"Of course this rage was very impotent and slightly wicked, not at all in accordance with the Sabbath-school lesson which I learned every Sunday. It was also very natural and very genuine.
"I endured martyrdom with Mrs. Dolittle until I was twelve years old. Then I implored my mother to take me home and allow me to help her. By sewing all day and most of the night, she managed to support herself and her four children. I cannot tell you how she loved everything beautiful; to be surrounded by beauty had once been a necessity of her being; but now she only looked at narrow, naked walls, on bare floors, and wretched furniture; the green room, all flushed with purple grapes, fragrant with roses and geraniums, and bright with home's happy, loving faces, had gone. So had gone the old bloom from my mother's cheeks. Her eyes were too bright, and every vein showed in her white forehead and hands. But she never complained; and when I, in my rebellion,
"The cholera broke out in the city. It raged fearfully in our locality. I could not look out without seeing the hearse or the dead cart piled with ghastly, purple bodies. Men fell dead on the pavements. The streets grew silent, almost deserted. The gloom was awful. Close confinement, bad air, poor food made us early victims. Grace, Neddie, and Bel could do nothing for each other, only when our agony would let us, we looked into each other's eyes. They--yes
"Victoire, you see my life began to wither early; it grew bitter; it grew hateful. I wished only to die. I prayed for annihilation. I wanted to forget, and yet I lived and remembered. God's angels were abroad as well as his pestilence. Tender-eyed women walked unharmed amid the plague. They came to the wretched chamber where I lay almost lifeless. They warmed and nourished and nursed me. Hope nestled in my bosom, and for her sake I became willing to live.
"The great wave of death rolled by. Health and activity came back to the city. I had something to do. Hope was to be educated at all hazards; I, if possible. My father had designed
"Well, we denied ourselves of all save the barest necessaries of life in order to save a little money."
"You mean that you did, dear Morna; you never denied me anything," interrupted Hope.
"After my daily task was done, by taking a few hours from sleep I managed to study arithmetic, algebra, and at last geometry. I began the Latin grammar besides. I drew books from the city library, which I read on Sunday. Hope went to the public schools, and, besides, took music lessons. The desire to take lessons on the piano myself became almost a fever. My whole nature wept for expression. My bound soul moaned to assert itself to give some utterance to its own life of thought, of emotion, of suffering. I thought that in
"My teacher was a German gentleman, well trained in German University lore, who, as many Germans do, had given up his life to the science of music. He was a large, handsome man, in the depth of whose dark eyes seemed always to burn a low, lurid fire; yet how kindly they looked on me. He was thirty, perhaps; I was seventeen, as life is measured. I knew nothing of men. The only ones whom I knew well enough to speak to were my employers, who gave me work and paid me for it as I went and came. My teacher's voice was low and seductively sweet when he spoke to me; very unlike the sharp, metallic tones of my employer. It was only natural that I should prefer the former. It was only natural that its music fell pleasantly upon my cold, void ear, and soothingly on my aching heart, which from my mother's death seemed to have lain in my breast in a half dead slumber, conscious only of a nameless, never ceasing ache. Well, it was only natural that this new voice, so full of music, should stir my sleeping heart, and, in an indefinable way, awaken its long-hushed instincts. I knew nothing of analysing emotions then. I only felt, without the consciousness of knowledge, that mine were pleasant when I listened to that voice. He was very kind to me, this teacher of mine, and to some natures there is nothing so dangerous as a subtle, delicate kindness; they have thirsted for it so long and so hopelessly, that, when the taste the first draught, they are intoxicated with its sweetness.
"Nothing could have been more grateful to me than his manner, never oppressive, never intrusive, full of that gentle, chivalric deference, expressed in looks, tones, and actions, rather than words, which belongs only to men of the finest intuitions, who have sounded the depths of the womanly nature. Though I could only come for my lesson when my day's task was completed, in the twilight before I began my evening work; though I always came unattended; though he must have known by my dress that I was very poor; he never
"But I was shy and silent. Nowhere else did I feel quite so awkward, or quite so shabby, or quite so insignificant, as in his presence. He seemed so grand, so far removed from me, both by his acquirements, his genius, and his position. When I looked at him, all that was common, and miserable, and painful in my own lot crowded into my mind, and I grew oppressed, and wretched, and miserably embarrassed, until his gentle
"He was not long in discovering my passion for music. I learned rapidly. When my fingers touched the keys I felt inspired. After much urging, at last I ventured to let him hear my voice. 'You will make a great singer,' he exclaimed. 'Thousands will melt into tears at the sound of your voice. Why have you not let me hear it before?' My whole soul rose in tumult at his words. After that I sang every day. After the lesson he would play and sing some favorite air of mine, unasked. Sometimes the dusk stole down, unnoticed, and found me still listening, entranced, lost. Then he would kindly offer to accompany me to my home. But I always refused. I vowed that he should never see my home.
"He lent me books. He offered to teach me German, that I might read Goethe, and Schiller, and Klopstock in their originals. This was impossible. To study German I must relinquish music. Yet I read the books which he lent me--the philosophers of Germany; at last, the philosophers of France. My whole nature protested against much of their philosophy. I told my teacher this. He smiled. 'I wanted your opinion,' he said. 'I would not ask you to believe them.' He must
"One afternoon I came, weary and dispirited. Nearly all the previous night I had sat up and sewed in order to win the hours for my lesson. My overtasked nerves were in the relaxed condition which made me most susceptible to every external influence. Besides, I was sad and sick at heart. My course of lessons was almost completed. I had not half enough to pay another. How could I live without music now?
"I went through with my usual lesson. Then he played for me one of Beethoven's most melting symphonies. Physically too weak to restrain my emotion, I buried my face in my hands and wept, wept silently, yet it was the weeping of despair. He ceased. He rose from the piano and came to me. He laid his hand soothingly on my forehead, laid back the heavy hair, and said that nothing could grieve him more than to see grief in me. No sorrow could come to me that would not be his. He only asked the privilege of soothing it away. He sat down and took my hand. From the beginning he had grown gentler and gentler in his manner towards me, but never had he spoken in the tones of seductive tenderness which he uttered now.
"'There were souls made for each other,' he said, 'destined from the hour of their mortal birth to be the consolation and joy of each other. There was no human law which could seperate such souls. The law of nature was the law of God, and that law demanded that they should live for each other. He was willing, yea, he could not help, but live for me. Was he wrong in believing that I would live for him? From the first moment that he looked into my eyes he saw that my soul answered to his. Besides, I came to him in dreams. I was inwoven with all his music. I filled all his thought; I was enshrined in his heart. Had he not a place in mine? My beautiful soul was an alien in the cruel world; it needed a sweet spot to rest in; my nature was too fine to be jostled by the rude crowd; it would wound me in a thousand ways at every turn. A cruel fate had defrauded me of all that my nature most craved. My life should be filled with beauty. If
"My face lay hidden on my arm, which was flung over the back of my chair, when he came and sat down by my side and took so gently my other hand. At first I was only conscious of the sound of his voice penetrating me with its music. Then I became conscious that he was offering me sympathy; then I grew confused. What did he mean? Then like lightning his meaning flashed upon me.
"I lifted my face. I said: 'I wept at your music, for I was weary and sick, and it answered the moan of my heart. But because I weep, why should you come and offer me love, and cherishing, and household joy--you who have no right to bestow them? Do I understand you? Are you not married?'
"'Married! yes, I am married, as the world goes,' he said; 'but that is no reason why I may not love and protect you, whom I love more than any other woman upon earth. Morna,
"He had never spoken my name before. Now he uttered it, and the words which came after in a low, slow, distinct tone, whose music, rippling over every syllable, thrilled through my heart.
"To a nature all hungry for affection, there is no sound in all the universe so seductive in its sweetness as the words, 'I love you.' But quick after this thought came the damning one that now uttered to me; this declaration was an insult to all that was holy in womanhood. And the consciousness of a great wrong done to me sank like a stone through its ocean of tears, down, down, till it pressed hard and cold the bottom of my bruised heart.
"'You have no right to love me, or to ask for my love,' I said.
"This man had charmed me with the wondrous melody of his voice; there was a magnetism in his presence, a fascination in his surroundings, to me, so alone and so far below him. But I did not need affection so much, that I could even imagine the possibility of joy ever flowing from an unhallowed and unlawful passion.
"'I have a right to love all that is lovely,' he said; 'for this reason I love you. I acknowledge no God but Reason. This God assures me that it will be a greater act of mercy to give to a heart fainting for air, and sunshine, and song, the life which it needs, than to leave it to stifle and perish alone. Why not submit with a flood of sunny tears, like a dear child, saying to me the truth--"I will let you love me, because I am very much in need of being loved."'
"Still I was passing quietly towards the door, my heart all the while filled with a nameless terror.
"'Do you think to escape me, you slender thing?' he said, confronting me. The music in his voice was dead. It trembled with rage as well as passion.
"I lifted my eyes to his; the low smouldering fire had burst into a flame. I saw it and loathed him, and forgot that to me he had ever been gentle, or tender, or winning.
"'Stay!' he exclaimed, and his hand seized my shoulder like a vice. I uttered a faint cry, half from terror, half from pain.
"'Hush!' he said, with an alarmed look at the closed folding door. 'Be quiet! you should not have enraged me. Have I not ever been gentle and kind to you?' he murmured, in the old tone.
"It was too late. He had over-estimated his power. It was his music that I loved after all; its charm broken, he had no spell wherewith to allure me. I had reached the door, I tried to open it; to my dismay I found it locked. I hurried
"I had nearly reached the hall door, when I heard a voice on the stairs exclaim--'For heaven's sake, Carl, what is the matter?' 'Nothing dear, except that an insane girl screamed. One of my scholars has gone music-mad, that is all.' 'Well, I hope you'll prevent her coming here again, if she is going to scream like that. I thought some one was being murdered.'
"This conversation I heard as I rushed towards the door. I fled from the house as for my life. I turned neither to right nor left. I relaxed not my steps till I knelt by the little bed where Hope lay smiling in her sleep.
"I crept back to myself; my heart coiled up within itself, wounded, ready to die. I had been stabbed through my one joy. Music to me was holy. Yet the one who was blended with music in all my thought, was the only being who had ever attempted my ruin. I doubted all men. I feared them. I fled from their presence. I even doubted God. I called upon Him only for my mother's sake. I wept, I tried to believe. But all my nature seemed so cold and dead. Still that heavy sense of wrong seemed to press like a stone against the bruised fibres of my heart.
"The infidel books which he had given me to read had left in my soul a few drops of their subtle poison. Mystic philosophies and ideal theories of matter and mind, of God and His universe, would at times usurp the place of Christ and the Bible. Yet not always; there were hours when I clung to both as my dearest hope. One blessed lesson my last sorrow had taught me. I had learned how full of peril was the life of a young girl cast alone and friendless into a great city. I saw how, through their human need of sympathy and a little love, they are sometimes led on to fall. With infinite love and infinite trust, at last they yield to one who makes them the idol of an idle hour, only to weary of them, and cast them off at last, discrowned of youth and honor, to live a life of shame or to die 'one more unfortunate.' Had my woman's heart been a little more importunate for love, my moral sense a little less fearful of sin, might not I have been cast out like
"I no longer sought a knowledge of music. I sought nothing for myself--I cared only to educate Hope. It was Hope who kept alive the little light of faith in my heart."
"Oh, no; it was God's spirit, Morna," said Hope.
"Well, it was God's spirit, speaking through you. You helped me to believe. So the years have crawled away, each the dreary counterpart of the other. My heart has remained mute and unstirred ever since. Oh! it is a dreadful thing to feel Faith lying in your breast, dead, dead.
"But a change came with you, Victoire. The first moment I saw you, I felt that God had sent you. My heart is coming to life again. Faith may yet blossom like the rose.
"This is all. Now you will believe me, Victoire, that my story is as commonplace as it is wretched."
And Morna bent her head and touched her lips to the white rose, blooming between us. A just opening rose. I gathered and laid it in her bosom; then I culled another, a folded bud, unsullied as falling snow, and hid it in the meshes of Hope's purpling hair.
{centered}MORNA, HOPE, AND VICTOIRE LEAVE THE "COMFORTABLE HOME."It is the lot of some never to be positively happy; their nearest approach to it is resignation. They are ever resigned, but never glad. These are the beings who think profoundly, feel acutely, whose discerning, spiritual eye penetrates the abyss of the past and of the future. Their mental and moral faculties are broader and farther reaching, their sensibilities more acutely strung, more keenly alive, than those belonging to beings cast in a commoner mould. They seem to hear all things, see all things, feel all things, suffer all things. And this soul, to whom is given such power to see, and feel, and comprehend, dwelling as it does in the bosom of unrevealed mystery, shrinks back sad and baffled, bearing upon its heart too great a burden of profound thought to be ever lightly gay. This soul encircles all things; it turns in sadness from the unsolved problem of the physical universe, to muse and marvel over the phenomena of man; upon the prospects and possibilities,
To such a soul religion can be the only comforter. Happy is it if it receives this divine consoler. She says: "Now thou art embosomed in mystery, but in the hereafter thou shalt understand." If it can only lean upon the bosom of faith, the great soul is content to wait amid the blended harmony and discord of this transient life, until the glass which reveals darkly shall be removed. Then it knows that it shall "see eye to eye" with the Father of all mystery and of all knowledge. Such a soul had Morna--a soul that needed more than all things else an unwavering trust in the Infinite Power which overrules our destinies. Yet that which she needed most seemed often to elude, to shift far away from her. Her nature seemed to have but one lack, and that was faith; she questioned all things. She wanted to solve the problem of her own existence. Why had her Lord sent her into the world to suffer, and yet to make no sign? Why was her soul surcharged with silent and smothered power, which yet had no adequate expression? Why must her soul devour itself, because it had no outlet? Hungering for wisdom, beauty, love, why must her life be one long, unuttered want? Why must she for ever stifle so much that was loveliest in her? She asked these questions aloud but once, that first night in the little chamber. She never complained, or said: "I wish my lot were different." Yet I had only to know what she was, to know also what she suffered.
But as the long, hot, weary days dragged by, giving no rest from toil, no ease from care, to those delicate hands and tried young hearts, I could not help but ask sometimes--Why is it? As they sat before me, hour after hour, through the long days and longer weeks, those young and gifted creatures, stitching the very bloom and beauty of their being into the uncouth garments, for whose fashioning they received scarcely enough to keep body and soul together, I could not help saying--Why is it? Why so often are the obtuse and vulgar, who know only low material wants, garlanded with the world's rarest beauty, while to such souls as these, fitted by their ethereal organism to enjoy all eclectic blessings, life is measured, or rather stinted, narrow, meagre, and hateful--a taunting and
Who came to see me one day but Kate.
"A purty place this, for the like of ye!" she exclaimed, looking about in great disdain.
"It is good enough, Kate, till I can afford a better."
"It's a burnin' shame for the like of ye to be here. Indade an' it's mesel that would have a gran'er house than this. I'm afther thinkin' it's very shabby."
"Never mind, Kate, when I get a grand house, you shall come and live with me, and do just as you please, and stay as long as you live, if you want to."
"Indade!"
Kate spoke in a very incredulous tone, as if she had very small faith in my ability to obtain a grand house.
"If you don't get married, Kate, I hope that I can take care of you some time, and make your life very easy and pleasant."
"The vargin! what wild talk. As if I couldn't take care of mesel, and ye too, a hape better nor ye can take care of yoursel. I think that I'm afther seein' how ye take care of yoursel." And again she looked around the sitting-room of the "comfortable home" with an air of disgust. "Not even a soffy in the room for ye to rest your poor back on; a purty place for the like of ye."
"It's good enough and to spare! I'd like to know if Miss Victory is made of better stuff than other flesh and blood?" called out Nance Jones, who, as usual, overheard.
"It's good enough for ye, and too good! ye freckle-faced spalpeen, but it haint good enough for
I coaxed Kate to ascend to my little chamber with all expedition. I would as soon have seen two wild cats come together
It was a lovely afternoon, and Kate went with me to show me the spot where my poor Nannette rested in the Catholic cemetary across the river. It was a sheltered and quiet nook. No ruthless feet had profaned the spot, since they had laid her kind old head to sleep on its clay-cold pillow; yes, it was a peaceful and lovely spot. My first spare earnings paid for her grave-stone, and the bland sun of September smiled softly on the simple marble tablet which rose to the memory of Nannette, my dear bonne.
I found my employer all that he appeared at first; a generous and noble man. He criticized kindly, and commended wisely (which is rarely done), and encouraged, always by giving me good work and good wages. Already I was blessed beyond my improvident deservings, and began to taste the sweets of that noble independence which flows from a knowledge of having earned what you enjoy, from the consciousness of labor conscientiously performed and generously requited. Already my enfeebled pulses began to thrill with something akin to their old exultation.
The redemption of my pictures was the first object to be gained, and the early autumn saw one hundred dollars in the bank saved for that purpose. By the coming spring I hoped to pay the last cent due to Mrs. Skinher. To do this I knew that I must deny myself of all superfluities. I felt resigned to any privation, except that of spending the winter at the "comfortable home."
"Girls! I have thought of a new plan," I said one day to Morna and Hope.
Both pairs of eyes were turned upon me with wonder.
"There is no need of our living here. We can hire two rooms, and go and keep house together. We can sleep in our own bed, eat at our own table, and be as independent and happy as we please, and it will cost no more than to stay here."
"Oh! it would seem like a story in a book," said Hope, hanging around my neck.
"It seems too pleasant ever to be true," sighed Morna.
But it did come true. We rented two small rooms on the second floor of a tenement house, in a respectable, but, of course, very unfashionable street. Barren they looked to the
What a shabby little room it was. I scarcely thought of it then, but am fully aware of the fact now. It was such a relief to get away from the "comfortable home," from its ungenial air, from its coarse surroundings, and to find ourselves in a little nook all our own. Why, as we looked around it, we would as soon have thought of criticizing Paradise if we had suddenly found ourselves transported to its shelter of beauty. I had not forgotten that once I had been surrounded by the appliances of an easeful and elegant home; but that time seemed so far away, I had long ceased to compare it with my present, or to measure the worth of what I had once possessed. I compared the little room with nothing gone before, but loved it as a present home, and with a thankful heart came into it as to a blessed refuge. Its walls were only whitewashed walls; they could not have looked more blank and chilly than they did. Yet we did not see it. A few frameless sketches had taken the place of my old idols, with their softening glass and massive, golden-fretted mouldings. The rigid white curtains on the windows cast no rosy glow, no attempering shadow on the staring faces of my new pictures. There were no voluminous folds of gold and crimson damask, no floating waves of misty lace to be gathered into sculptured holders; but unrelenting in their stiff severity these white curtains fell over the high narrow windows. Artistic eyes saw that they lacked all dreamy grace, yet the satisfied heart suggested no improvement. A cheap yet neat carpet covered the floor; a single table, a few chairs, an easel, a book-case, and a cooking-range hid behind the fire screen, completed the appointments of the new home. I forget--the white rose tree stood in the window.
There was an ask-no-more look in Hope's eyes, and a world of content in Morna's, as we sat down to our first breakfast. A simple breakfast, yet to us how delicious were its warm, delicate rolls, its fresh egg omelet, the fragrant amber-crystal coffee! How refreshing to our eyes was the unsullied tablecloth, the pure white ware, free from a single flaw.
"All our own! Only think of it, girls; all this belongs to Avondale and Company!" And I looked around with probably an absurdly satisfied expression.
A tear glistened on Hope's long eye-lashes; it fell, a star of dew on the rose leaves of her cheeks, with a quick warm shower of dew-stars pattering after.
"I can't help it; I am so happy," she said, dashing them away with her little white hand.
"How beautiful everything is! How good God is! Oh! I am so happy!" And the sunlit shower fell faster. She thought to hide its brightness within the shadow of her exuberant curls, but failed. Then not knowing what else to do, she plunged her beautiful head first in Morna's lap, then in mine. "Would we forgive her for being so foolish? She couldn't help it; indeed she could not."
We were kissing our pet into assurance, telling her that she was the silliest little puss that ever did live, and we loved her the better for it, when we were interrupted by a hard, plump knock on the door.
I arose and opened it, and found standing before me in the narrow hall, an odd-looking boy with a teacup in his hand. He might have been twelve years old, and what was unusual enough for a city boy, was nearly as broad as he was long. His torn pantaloons were held up by one very imperious suspender, leaving his feet far in the rear; and very odd feet they were. One was clothed in a lady's gaiter, so much too long that the toe stood perpendicularly in the air, while the other wore a most stubbed and pugnacious boot. He had on a coat which, in the variety of its many colors, outvied the famous garment of the patriarch Joseph. Its innumerable round holes and zigzag tears were filled with bits of bright red and yellow flannel, and darned down on strips of variegated ribbon, or glaring calico, till it seemed slashed with the hues of the rainbow. In the mending of this coat, a luxuriant imagination had evidently exhausted itself. The same glowing and unchastened fancy, which excites feminine fingers to sew together innumerable bright little rags until they grow into "Rising Suns" and "Star of Bethlehem" patchwork quilts, destined to shed their effulgence over sweltering feather beds and snoring men and women in the pine-box houses of the rural districts.
The head which surmounted this coat was as unique as the garment itself. Rebellious, self-asserting hair stood erect from the low, square forehead in the most impudent and obstinate fashion. The eyes, like two very black and very shiny buttons, twinkled far back in a bed of fat; but the nose was the oddest of all--such a pug! The berry on the end of it red
"Please, ma'am," he began.
"Well, little boy, what will you have?"
"Please, ma'am."
"Well, please what?"
"Please, ma'am, will you lend my mamm half a cup o' sugar?"
"Who is mamm?"
"She's my mamm."
"But what is her name?"
"Her name is mamm."
"She must have another name."
"That's all the name I know on. I calls her mamm. Dad calls her mamm. The young 'uns call her mamm, all but Glory Ann--she can't talk straight, and calls her mum."
"What is your name?"
"George Washington Peacock."
"Then, little boy, your mother's name is Mrs. Peacock."
"I don't care a darn if it is. I know that she is my mamm, and that's 'nuff for me, I reckon."
"You shouldn't swear. Don't you know that it is wicked?"
"Mamm sez it's wicked; but I'd jest as soon be wicked as good. What's the difference? Hang it if I see any! Them what I've hearn called good are wus than t'other; meaner enuff sight. There's old Pharisee Pomp--he's prayin' wherever anybody'll listen--he's good, I s'pose; but he'll skin a chap alive and sell his skin for sixpence. There's Lazarus Lorn, is allers doin' a feller a good turn, but he's wicked. He gits drunk. I'd rather be wicked."
"You don't mean you would rather get drunk?"
"I likes to take my tip; of course I does. What's a young man gwine to do when t'other young man sez--'Take a treat?"
"Say no."
"I sez yes. I'll be hanged if I'm gwine to do without my tip for all the wimens in creation."
"Where do you live?"
"Up stairs. Where do you s'pose I hailed from? Mamm said: 'Give my compliments to the lady, and say please, ma'am, mamm wouldn't begin to neighbor so soon, but she must have some sugar in her tea. I'll send it down when dad brings some hum.' Darn it, I can't think of the rest. Mamm's speeches are so all-fired long."
"You are welcome to the sugar; but please say no more
By this time Morna stood beside me, her eyes overflowing with smiling wonder, while in the rear Hope was doing her best to supress her gurgling laughter, not at his vulgar words, but at the unmitigated oddness of his looks. In a moment more we heard the stamp of the masculine boot blending with the flapping of the feminine long-toed gaiter ascending the stairs below the newly-filled cup of sugar.
"Here is missionary work for you, Hope," I said, as we went back to our seat. "You needn't go outside the house to find a heathen."
"I will try to coax him to go to Sabbath-school with me next Sunday," she said.
Ever to be remembered is that first day spent in our little hired home--the first day of our maiden housekeeping. Birds under their leafy domes, in their summer nests, out in the free sunny air, never warbled with more delicious abandon than did Morna and Hope over their work. Hope's voice was just like a bird's, dilating, in its liquid sweetness; quivering with a thousand jubilant trills, it was the spontaneous outgushing of a heart surcharged with melody. Morna's voice--my hand trembles as I write of it, so sensibly does its marvellous refrain surge back upon my soul, till all my being thrills once more as it thrilled to her symphonies in those years long gone. Her voice was a soul, pouring into the ear of the Infinite, in wild and wondrous music, all the impassioned and immortal longing which a soul may feel, yet never tell in spoken or in rhythmed words. Her voice was worship--one of those rare voices which we sometimes hear floating apart from all the others through the reverential atmosphere of a country church, till we forget its prosaic surroundings, its commonplace faces, its tedious prayers and stupid sermons, while we tremble in rapt exaltation to the grand surges of triumphal praise, to the melting cadence of supplication, all vibrant with adoring love. Hers was one of those wondrous voices which flood with their marvellous melody the dusk arches of solemn minsters, which dilate through the forest-like aisles of old cathedrals, till the loftiest embrasure of gorgeous glass, till stony niche and moresque alcove, are permeated with its effluence of symphony; while a thousand reverent hearts, melted by its shivers of sweet sound, weep in silent rapture, or rise upon its impalpable pinions of harmony to the far-off, unimagined audience-chamber
Certainly on this day Morna did not think to make me weep, for her mood was a nearer approach to happiness than I had ever seen in her before, and her voice, as it rose and fell, floating far away, was wild and sweet as nature's own; not when it wails on desolate shores, or trails its moaning dirges across forsaken seas, or chants its melancholy anthems through the chill aisles of naked woods, but when it sings itself to rest on the palpitant hearts of deep-bosomed trees, or distils its dreamy music over gardens of imperishable bloom in the trance of summer noons or the golden calm of balmy summer nights. Thus she sang on this day; yet I remember, as I sat apart with my face turned towards the window, that the sunlight might fall upon the task before me as I worked and listened, the tears fell too upon the white card on which I was sketching. I have forgotten whether I chided myself for weakness or not; if I did it would have made no difference. My proud vitality of strength was broken; the strong, calm nerves sickness had weakened. I was much more easily moved by all things than I had once been; had grown more womanly, men would say. Still there was no morbid misery in the few tears which blotted
The day-time work was done, the simple tea ended, and we sat in the twilight, the purple gloaming; that mystic hour when day is departing and night has not come; when curtains, furniture, pictures, are revealed to us in violet light or crimson shadow; when the misty room seems peopled with dreamy phantoms; when books are a mockery and work a shame--that hour which should be consecrated to sacred converse or delicious thought. Well, in that hour we sat and talked--talked as girls will, not wisely of course; had we talked wisely we should not have been girls, but time-taught women, which we were not then quite.
Already we had grown self-indulgent. Morna and Hope took an hour from each evening to study French, and I--well, I had begun their portraits, and to this dear task also was given an hour, which shone like a star between the day and night-time tasks. We were talking of them, and of what we were "going to do," or be, some time in the marvellous future, when there came another knock on our door, a softer, a more lingering knock than had startled us in the morning. This time Morna responded to the call, and opening the door ushered in a great woman, who had a pleasant, sailing motion, like a full freighted ship. She carried a teacup in her hand, and announced herself as "Mrs. Peacock, ladies."
{centered}OUR NEW NEIGHBOR, MRS. PEACOCK.We asked Mrs. Peacock to be seated, and looked with a slight feeling of wonder into the face of George Washington's "mamm." She began: "Ladies, I have brought back your cup o' sugar. I hope George Washington asked for it with perliteness. I doz my best to make him perlite, but 'taint of much use. George Washington's different from all the rest of my children. I've a beautiful family of children; you must come up and see'em; but as I was saying, George Washington aint like none of the rest. I'm sorry to say he's marked. Yet I have all a mother's feelings for George Washington. I've had more trouble with him than with all the other nine together; 'deed they ain't no trouble. Oh! you must come up and see little Serepty Louizy. But as I was sayin', George Washington makes me worlds of trouble; me nor Mr. Peacock
Here Mrs. Peacock took breath, an act, however, which seemed entirely unnecessary. For she could talk the longest, without stopping, of any woman that I ever saw before or since.
"Well," she went on, "I've come down to 'gratulate myself and you on havin' good neighbors. You'll find me a good neighbor, an excellent neighbor. I prides myself on bein' a good neighbor. I am allers ready to ask a good turn, and I'm allers ready to do a good turn; that's what I call bein' a good neighbor. Besides, I give nobody a chance to feel neglected. I'm allers glad to make a friendly call; that's what I call bein' a good neighbor. And I 'gratulate myself that at last I've got some ladies to be a good neighbor to. As I married below my station, I've had to neighbor with some very common sort of folks; but I tell you I never for a minute forgot that I was Serepty Ann Green that was, or that Mrs. Serepty Ann Green Peacock I am. I thought I'd bring back the cup o' sugar, and apologize that George Washington wasn't more perlite. I listened at the top of the stairs, and know that he might a done better; he will say bad words--but you see he's marked; that's what's the matter with the poor child. I think he'll outgrow it. Besides, I came down to tell you, ladies, that you'll find in me a most excellent neighbor, and I expect to find the same in you."
The hour for the French lesson, the hour for the portraits went by, and still Mrs. Peacock's tongue moved on. It was not a trip-hammer tongue; oh, no! it rolled slowly, steadily, endlessly, like a well-oiled, well-poised wheel propelled by powerful machinery, which never paused, because it never grew weary. Her talk seemed interminable--an ocean with neither bottom nor shores. The long fringes of Hope's eyelids had begun to droop on the fair cheek. Morna leaned her head upon her hand with a look of pain; I had grown very tired of being a polite listener, when we were relieved from an unexpected quarter. A powerful baby shriek pierced the air, descending from the upper regions. "Oh! that's my baby! that's Serepty Louizy! Glory Ann has let her fall out of the cradle! Oh, that's mother's darling baby!" cried Mrs. Peacock, in a tone as near akin to agony as her comfortable voice could possibly assume. She rushed out of the room, leaving at least this impression behind her, that she was well satisfied with the world in general, and remarkably well satisfied with herself in particular.
Indeed, a most comfortable looking woman was Mrs. Peacock.
Mrs. Peacock's nerves were too deeply embedded in adipose to be easily reached by the fretting friction of every-day annoyance. What blessed nerves they were! they never ached, and were never sore. The only sensation which they seemed to know was the sensuous life which trickled through the unctuous ducts and creamy sacs of her vast body. There was not a wrinkle in Mrs. Peacock's face, not one. Not a crow-foot had dared to leave a track in the corners of her eyes. Her hair was warmly golden, flushed with red; her face golden, tinged faintly pink, mottled with patches of moth, which spotted its round surface, like the opaque blots which darken the golden face of the full-orbed moon. She had light blue, misty eyes, which swam in a dreamy haze, and one of those sensuous mouths in which the upper lip droops over the lower; mouths which seem made to enjoy good things to eat. Then she had a form swelling everywhere in curves, not an angle to be seen; little fat hands; such women always have fascinating hands.
Mrs. Peacock needed but three things to complete her happiness--a baby, a book, and plenty of food which she liked to eat. The two latter were necessary; the first was indispensable. Mrs. Peacock revelled in babies. She always had a baby, and she always wished to have a baby. She would as willingly have gone without her eyes two months of the year as to have gone for the same length of time without a baby. Not only was the little mewling, crooning, crying thing itself necessary to her happiness, but several of her lesser joys depended upon its existence.
If Mrs. Peacock had had no baby, she could have offered no plausible excuse for sitting from morning till night in a little broken, bumping, thumping rocking-chair, affected with a chronic squeak in one rocker, and a most execrable shriek in the other, quite sufficient to rack anybody less like a cushion than Mrs. Peacock's into a thousand pieces. Of course, if Mrs. Peacock had had no baby, she would have had no proper excuse for leaving her work undone. The only object in the universe for which Mrs. Peacock was capable of feeling
"Well, Mr. Peacock, you should consider the baby! Dear itty t'ing she takes all muzer's time, so she does; and so she should, muzer's darlin' baby!" she would exclaim in the mouth of Serepty Louizy, rocking and jumping her in a violent manner, drowning in noise and baby-talk poor Mr. Peacock's faint sermon on shirt buttons and the beauty of finding them on shirts; he, in the meantime, in silent and grim despair, fastening on that garment with crooked and corroded pins.
When Mr. Peacock found his hose without heels, which was also a frequent occurrence, and ventured to suggest to Mrs. Peacock the propriety of encasing them in a network of yarn: "Dear me! Mr. Peacock; do you forget the baby?" that lady would exclaim: "Of course you can't expect me to mend or to do anything but take care of my family, until it has grown out of the way; and I'm sure I don't know when that will be."
Mr. Peacock didn't know either; for to him the time when the family would be grown out of the way, seemed as far off as the millennium. Unconsciously the unfortunate man had learned to regard the little helpless inhabitant of the cradle as a dreaded rival, the foe to his daily and nightly comfort. Mr. Peacock could endure it in the day-time, but he did wish that he could sleep nights. The hourly wakings from pleasant dreams he bore like a hero at first, but twelve years of nightly nudgings had tired him out. He was very weary of being startled from pleasant dreams by the good-natured but peremptory call: "Mr. Peacock! Mr. Peacock! I declare if you ain't asleep! Don't you hear the baby cry? Mr. Peacock, do get up and get a light!" The baby was Mr. Peacock's Nemesis.
Mrs. Peacock belonged to that class of people who lie because they cannot help it. She would not have sat down and told a deliberate, wilful lie any sooner than the mass of catechism-taught women; still she managed to tell a great many lies nevertheless. Her brilliant and exhaustless fancy played around the simple, ungarnished truth, illuminating it with all the gauds of fiction. Thus all her statements outleaped the cramping boundaries of fact. Exaggeration was as natural as her breath, and having always indulged it as a habit, it had become a most imperious one, and she of course did not realize to what a very absurd extent she carried her misstatements. Had her powers received due cultivation, she would have made one of those ladies who write "
Mr. Peacock looked as composed and happy in his mind as a poor man who had had ten little Peacocks presented to him in a dozen years could be expected to look. As far as flesh and blood make a human being, he was a very faint shadow beside Mrs. Peacock; indeed it can't be denied that Mr. Peacock looked thin and nervous, and his black eyes, which were exactly like George Washington's, without George Washington's setting of fat, seemed restless and anxious. It must have been the thought of that everlasting baby which made them so. Mr. Peacock was not miserably poor. He held a subordinate position in a wholesale store, and his income was sufficient to support his family in a common way, with a little to spare, had it been more judiciously managed. George Washington drove a lucrative business in the streets as "newsboy;" and amid the hundreds of his fellows who smoked cigars, chewed vile tobacco, drank, swore, and yelled in the streets, there was not one who could throw his heels higher in the air, run faster in spite of his fat, scream worse English,
Hope's gentle soul seemed to be burdened with the thought of George Washington from the morning of his first appearing. "Would he go to Sunday-school with her?" she wondered. She was afraid that he was one of the boys whom she had heard screaming outside of the church on the Sabbath: "
"Yes," we said, of course. And before Saturday came, I yielded to Hope's entreaties to go up with her, just to see if George Washington
We found Mrs. Peacock's sitting-room to be just like herself. A gorgeous imagination, as coarse as it was luxuriant, seemed bursting from every nook and crevice. The tawdry white curtains were looped back with brilliant rags of ribbon, revealing paper shades of a very startling pattern, covered with castles and ships, men and wild beasts, in strange proximity and stunning relief. The whitewashed walls were hung with colored prints, patriotic, sanguinary, and sentimental; George Washington, "the Father of his Country," "Benjamin Franklin," and "Andrew Jackson," of course were there; so also were the "Battles of Bunker Hill" and "Lexington," in which were seen very fierce horses jumping in the air, men writhing on the ends of bayonets with torreats of blood spurting from their noses; and beside these pictured battles hung the "Soldier's Departure" and "Soldier's Return," in both of which was seen a ringleted lady, holding a very elaborate pocket-handkerchief, clinging to the neck of a tall gentleman in gold epaulettes, a blue coat, and tight white pants. The mantel was crowded with ornaments. In the centre stood the image of a huge old man, with his tongue hanging out as if in great distress, holding a clock face in the centre of his stomach. Besides, there were plaster of Paris vases filled with yellow lemons and red tomatoes; painted owls and animals, and queer old men and women. In one corner stood a table piled with dishes sadly mixed up with the remnants of breakfast; the stove, red with rust, held a standing army of pots and kettles; in a room adjoining, the nursery probably, the whole troop of little Peacocks were screaming, laughing, crying, and fighting, as it suited their mood; the happiest
"They hurried to Adolphe's chamber; they heard a groan as they opened the door; they found their son stretched on the bed, pale and haggard; on the table was a phial labelled 'poison;' the phial was empty.
"'My son! my son! you have not been so wicked. Speak! speak!'
"'Oh, I suffer tortures! Oh, I am dying. Leave me! Celeste has also taken poison; we could not live without each other. Cruel parents, we mock you and die!'--
"'Recover, recover, my son, and Celeste shall be yours,' said his mother, falling in hysterics."
Here Serepty Louizy gave evidence of her existence by a loud scream. Mrs. Peacock ceased reading, seized the young lady's toes one by one, singing: "This pig went to market, this pig stayed at home; this pig ate all the white bread, and this pig had none. This pig said, I'll--tell--mamma--when--she--comes--home." Serepty Louizy seemed infinitely amused, and became quiet. Mrs. Peacock resumed her reading:
"'Adolphe, traitor! where hast thou been!'
"'Merely shooting in the woods, my angel.'
"'What! without me? Fie! promise that this shall not happen again.'
"'Oh, dearest! too gladly do I promise. But, Celeste, three hours have I been seeking for you. Where have you hid yourself?'
"'Don't look so angry, my Adolphe. I was only directing the gardener to build a little arbor for you to read in. I meant it as a surprise.'
"'My own Celeste! three hours is an eternity without you. Promise not to leave me again.'
"'My own dearest, dearest Adolphe! how I love you. May my company ever be as dear to you.'"
Here Serepty Louizy thought it time to give another scream by way of interlude, louder and more protracted than before.
"What ails Muzer's ducky diamond? A wicked pin pricks her, so it does."
{the following paragraph is centered}"Rock-a-by, baby, on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock; When the bough bends the cradle will fall, Down'll come cradle, baby, and all."
Serepty Louizy became quiet, and again Mrs. Peacock read on:
"'Indeed, Adolphe, if the truth may be said, you have lately contracted a bad habit--you are getting a squint in your eye.'
"'Madame!' said Adolphe, prodigiously offended, hurrying to the glass.
"'Don't be angry, my love; I would not have mentioned it, if it did not get worse every day; it is yet to be cured; just put a wafer on the top of your nose and you will soon see straight.'
"'A wafer on the top of my nose! Much better put one on the tip of your chin, Celeste.'
"'My chin,' said Celeste, running to the glass. 'What do you mean, sir?'
"'Only that you have a very large wart there which it would be more agreeable to conceal.'
"'Sir!'
"'Madam!'
"'A wart on my chin, monster!'
"'A squint in my eye, fool!'
"'Yes; how could I ever love a man who squinted?'
"'Or I a woman with a wart on her chin!'
"'Sir, I shall not condescend to notice your insults.'
"'Madam, I despise your insinuations.'"
Serepty Louizy now thought it high time to enter upon a series of screeches, in comparison with which her former efforts were but feeble echoes. Evidently she had heard enough of that story, and did not mean to listen to any more. Mrs. Peacock began to rock and sing with accelerated violence. Thump, thump, squeak, squeak, was the refrain to her song:
{centered}"Hush, my dear! lie still and slumber, Holy angels guard thy bed, Heavenly blessings without number Fall on Serepty Louizy's head."
We thought the moment a good one to present ourselves.
"O laws! I'm glad to see you; glad you've begun to neighbor. Serepty Louizy has got a colic this mornin'; but I think she'll be better soon. Sit down," said Mrs. Peacock, as she turned and saw us advancing.
"Does she see the ladies! Muzer's baby dear?" she said, dancing Serepty Louizy in the air, who opened a pair of black eyes very like George Washington's and stared at us in baby wonder, her colic apparently entirely cured; while the flock of little Peacocks came rushing from the nursery to see the strangers.
"There, children, go back! Go back to play, mother's little dears. Don't cry, Glory Ann, and you shall have a sugar doll; George Washington will bring it to you. The children are so happy this mornin' I didn't hear you come in. You see that I has a beautiful family. Children is a great blessing. I pity every one that hasn't got any. Oh, did you hear me readin'? That's one of the most interestin' stories George Washington has brought me for a long time. One of Bulwer's stories for married people. 'True Ordeal of Love' is the name of it. Well, I like Bulwer; he goes to the root of matters. Of course he knows--hasn't he had 'sperience? Of course he knows that, if we've a mind to, we can look at one little fault in a person till we can't see nothin' else, till it covers them all over, and grows as big as Celeste's wart. He knows that folks dead in love can grow dreadfully tired of each other, if they're never apart. Bulwer knows all about it; he knows 'taint no use talkin' over natur's defects. As I sez to Mr. Peacock, Mr. Peacock, sez I, it 'taint no use makin' words over what can't be helped. Married folks don't ought to find fault with each other. It don't do no good. They take each other for better or worse, and if they find it's for worse, it don't make it better to go thro' the world growlin' and grumblin'. For my part, I think it's a great deal better to make the best of folks, instead of the worst on 'em. If they see you remember the good in them, they feel kind o' encouraged and keep growin' better and better; but if you keep talkin' of the bad, why they grow discouraged and think there aint a bit of use in tryin'. As I sez to Mr. Peacock, Mr. Peacock sez I, you needn't 'a married me if you didn't want to; of course you needn't; you might have married Susan Slasher; she wanted you bad enough, mercy knows. I needn't have married you; of course I needn't. Wasn't
We were thankful that the second for breathing had come; and Hope filled it by asking in a slightly tremulous voice, as if she had no right to put the question, if George Washington attended Sunday-school.
"Laws a day! I'm sorry to say it, but George Washington doesn't. As I was tellin' the other night, George Washington aint like none of my other children--George Washington is marked. I never could make him mind. He's got way beyond me or his father, and does jest as he pleases. Still I've all a mother's feelin's for him, poor boy. And I can't complain, he's very good to his mother in his way. See, he brought me all those books"--and she pointed to a bureau piled
At that juncture a very decided clatter was heard on the stairs, and in a moment more George Washington presented himself--looking just as odd in the face, but a little more civilized in costume, than when he presented himself at our door for a cup of sugar. The pugnacious boot was now accompanied by its masculine fellow, and the broad back was covered with a "hard times" coat all of one color. I concluded that on the former morning we had seen the young gentleman in his early
"Stop your yellin', Rep, you little porcupine," said the young gentleman, looking with considerable complacency, however, on this pocket edition of himself.
"Mamm, there's readin' enough to keep you till to-morrow. The Pirate of the Pacific's advertised; I'll git you that in the mornin'."
"George Washington, don't you see the ladies? Can't you be perlite?"
"No! darn it, I never learned."
"George Washington, won't you never stop swearin' and callin' me Mamm?"
"I swears and calls you Mamm behind folks's back, so I'll be hanged if I don't do it before their face. I doesn't want nobody think I'm better than I is."
"I wish you'd dress up nice and go to Sunday-school every Sunday, George Washington?"
"The d----l you do! Well, I shan't do it. I can spend my Sunday in a more satisfyin' manner. Sunday I yells the loudest, I lies the fastest, I makes the most money. Sunday's the day I sell so many
"These ladies have come in to ask you to go to Sunday-school, George Washington; I wish you'd be perlite."
George Washington moved uneasily. All the while he had been talking he had never looked at us once, and in spite of his loud, defiant tones, there was an undefined embarrassment in his manner, as if he himself was conscious of breathing very near a new foreign element.
"Wouldn't you like to go to Sunday-school with me?" asked Hope, in a half supplicating tone.
At the sound of that delicious voice, George Washington turned from the little old broken chair of his mother, which he had been jerking and twitching in a most unaccountable manner, and took in Hope from head to feet with his snapping eyes. They dilated with admiration to the utmost limit which the fat would allow.
"I'll be --- if I wouldn't," he said, slowly. "If you'll let me go with
"If you won't say bad words I'll be glad to have you go," said Hope.
"Darn it, I wouldn't if I could help it. I'd never say another just because
"Oh, George Washington; never mind if you are marked; you'll outgrow it. I never meant to discourage you, George Washington; never. It's against my principles, as I said to your father; ses I--"
"There, Mamm, there! don't begin one of your all-fired long speeches or you won't stop till night."
"Well, George Washington, you're a good boy to promise to go to Sunday-school," she said, encouragingly.
"No, I aint, neither. I wouldn't go now to please you. I go to please
"Well, you are a good boy to go to please her. It'll do you a great deal of good and larn you not to swear." Mrs. Peacock seemed determined that her son should not falter on the good track for lack of her approval. "You're my own darling
"Don't be silly, Mamm, don't. I won't kiss you, I'll be--if I will. If I can't kiss who I want to, I won't kiss nobody."
"Stop your noise, you little porcupine," he shouted angrily, shaking his fist, as if it were a relief to his dissatisfaction, at Miss Serepty Louizy, who was jumping and crowing on the pinnacle of baby glee, as if delighted with the fact that George Washington couldn't kiss the one whom he wanted to.
Sabbath came jubilant with its morning bells, the whole world seemed full of their nine o'clock music, when another loud round knock was heard on our door, and we opened it to behold George Washington Peacock, dressed in a new suit from head to toe. A bright red handkerchief tied his fat neck; a galvanized spread eagle blazed on his shirt bosom as a breast-pin; his wilful hair was oiled to softness; his black eyes twinkled with a new happiness. It was the event of his life when he stepped out upon the sidewalk beside Hope to go for the first time to Sabbath-school. We walked to church, rejoicing in our hearts that there was at least
Mrs. Peacock had never received into her luminous intelligence the full significance of the injunction of Solomon:
"Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbor's house, lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee."
Mrs. Peacock could visit and tend the baby as well as read and tend the baby; besides, Miss Serepty Louizy had all the strong likes and dislikes which a one year old young lady is entitled to have, and much preferred visiting to the little old excruciating rocking chair with the chronic squeak, or the monotonous sing-song of her mother's voice reading aloud some lachrymose story.
Dodging at the leaves with her baby fists, and bobbing her little black pate against the cover till the book shook so that her mother could not read, ceased to be a satisfactory revenge, after she had learned the sweetness of coming down stairs,
"Bess her itty heart! she wants to go and see the ladies, so se duz, and so se
"You see, ladies, I keep my promise not to let you feel neglected. My attention is proof of my 'preciation. Of course you know I didn't neighbor jest the same with nobody else in the house; I know a lady jest the minit I set my eyes on her, and for my part, I'm glad at last I've got some ladies to neighbor with. Next to children, there's no blessin' like good neighbors. As I married below my station, I've had to neighbor with them who wasn't ladies, but as I was tellin' you afore, I never forget that I was Serepty Ann--"
Here Serepty Louizy would think it high time to have her claims recognised, and, seeing no sugar-plums forthcoming, would begin to shriek her disappointment.
"Dear me, Serepty Louizy has got such a colic this morning. I don't see what ails the child, but she has it now every blessed day, 'specially in the early part. I brought her down to see if it wouldn't pacify her. Nothin' duz her so much good as to come down here, poor little thing. The likin' she has taken to you is surprisen."
By this time Serepty Louizy would be sucking her sugar-plums
"Tank de ladies, Serepty Louizy! muzer's darlin' baby must be perlite; tank de ladies for the sugar-plums!" Mrs. Peacock would exclaim, bobbing forward with her hand the little head covered with bristling black hair, as a tacit acknowledgment of favors received. But her effort to make Miss Serepty Louizy return thanks was always abortive, resulting only in a violent shriek and grabbing of the little hands for the retreating sugar-plums, which Serepty Louizy saw disappearing down "muzer's" throat.
"There, there, don't cry! muzer won't eat no more; muzer don't want baby's sugar-plums; no she don't" (a lie, of course).
"Poor little thing, she feels thankful, but she can't show perliteness cause she can't talk. The ladies won't hold nothin' agin her, muzer knows. She's got lots of love in her heart, only she don't know nothin' how to show it. You only ought to hear her cry to come down and see you every mornin'. All my children's is 'fectionate. There's George Washington, lud! how he's taken to Miss Hope. Why I never see nothin' like it. Miss Marna and Miss Victory, he thinks that you are both very fine, but that you can't hold a candle to Miss Hope for looks. Excuse me for being plain--it's my way. That's only what George Washington thinks. 'Taint no ways sartain he knows. Now he says I ain't handsome; p'haps I ain't now, but I
"But George Washington, if he
At about this stage in the daily narrative, the sugar-plums having all vanished through the agency of Mrs. Peacock and her infant daughter, the latter would commence a series of screeches for more. All in the house having been devoured, the young lady, Serepty Louizy, seemed to have an intuition that her cries would be unavailing until the next morning, and so consoled herself by shifting her desires to other objects, which she demanded just as vociferously as she had before the sugar-plums. There was not a portable article in the room that she did not want. She screamed for the few trinkets which it contained; she screamed for the white roses in the window; she screamed for my pencils and crayons; she screamed for the pictures on the wall, and for the pictures on the easel. She would jump in her mother's lap, trying to grasp the unattainable treasure, but her little hands with all their grabbing only clutched the air. Then she would stamp her mother's knee in rage, and the black hair would bristle all over her little head, until I, at least, no longer wondered why George Washington called her a porcupine. Her loving mother recognised in her paroxysms of temper only the severest agonies of colic, and when at last even Hope's sweet face looked worn; when Morna's was covered with a deadly pallor and her nerves strained to their utmost tension; when I was ready either to laugh or cry with mirth at Serepty's young face, or vexation at her tiresome noise; when the hubbub grew so dense that it could not be penetrated by Mrs. Peacock's "sez I," then that lady would depart with step as accelerated as her lymphatic temperament would allow, "to go and get some perry goric to ease Serepty Louizy's colic."
She would depart, but not for the day. No; there were a hundred things for which she "must run down just for a minute." She wanted half a cup of sugar. "It was impossible for her to drink her tea without sugar. She forgot to tell Mr. Peacock that she wanted sugar. Would we lend her a drawin' of tea? Mr. Peacock would bring some home at night." "Could we let her have jest a teaspoonful of starch? Mr.
Twilight would fold us in her purple pinions; the hour of charmed communion would come--the hour for the French lessons, the hour for the portrait; but instead of the quiet, the calm which had filled these hours with enchantment, the only hours which we could coax from toil to call our own, we would have Mrs. Peacock and her endless "sez I's." Thus was the sacred privacy of our home invaded, almost every hour of the night and day, by an amiable and yet most alien element. Because Mrs. Peacock was just the mooney, amiable woman that she was, was precisely the reason why she robbed us completely of so much precious time, which we owed to useful and ennobling employments. To a surly woman it would have been easy to have said, with a face of steel: "We are busy, and have no time to attend to you now." But to a woman sailing in dozens of times a day, with her face golden and bland as an unbeclouded moon, with only kindness in her eyes and in her heart, although we had not a moment to give her, it seemed impossible to say: "You are not welcome."
It is wonderful of how much of our life work, of how many priceless opportunities, of how many rare successes, are we
The "pleasant time" cost --- nothing. --- has nothing to do but to be amused. It will cost us a sleepless night of toil, a morrow of lassitude, and of over-work. In a whole week we can hardly bring up the arrears of the lost day. In the meantime our delinquency will incommode others, who can see no mortal reason why we are "behind-hand." We knew this when we sat down a martyr to listen to ---. We shall be perfectly aware of it to-morrow, when another --- is ready to monopolize the day; yet because we like both of these ---'s, in neither case will we have the moral courage to say: "I am glad to see you, but must leave you now; my duties are imperative." A great bane to men and women who work, and must work, is that class of persons who are always "dropping in," but rarely dropping out; who are calling to "stay just a minute," but who manage to stay the whole day; inopportune mortals, who never know when to come nor when to go. No wonder that Voltaire said: "The amount of time which people spend in talking is frightful." I thought the same while listening to Mrs. Peacock. From the sound of her voice there seemed to be no reprieve, no relief.
The only thing which she never exaggerated was her account of George Washington's devotion to Hope. When he stood before her, he seemed no longer to possess the characteristics of George Washington Peacock. He was no longer the gruff, swearing, ruffianly newsboy. The very needles of his hair seemed soothed and softened; his whole face grew more human. He was not rough, and loud, and long in speech to her; but answered in awkward, stammering confusion, and stood as one in a daze, as if dazzled and awed in the presence of a new and beautiful mystery.
We heard a loud clattering on the street-stairs one morning,
"Here she is; there she is! look at her, b'hoys; say agin, if you dares, that she ain't no handsomer than the wax figgers in the shop-windows what they put the shawls on and the gran' frocks on; say agin if you dare that she ain't no handsomer, you don't believe, than them dull wax things. Say it agin if you dare, and I'll take you into the street and give you a lickin', every one on ye; I'll be hanged if I don't. Now say it agin, if you dare."
George Washington made this proclamation standing in the door, pointing with his finger at Hope, who sat sewing, her long curls falling over her work. He was greatly excited; the end of his nose was redder than ever before, as if ready to burst with indignation. The remainder of the boys seemed to have no inclination to "say it agin;" perhaps they did not dare, for evidently George Washington was a champion-king among them, and they hardly cared to have a taste of his pugilistic quality. After gazing for a moment, one shouted, followed by all the rest in concert: "Yes, she's handsomer! Jack Peacock, you're right; she's handsumer than the wax figger. She's handsumer than any leddy we ever see in Broadway. Does that suit you, Jack?"
At this juncture Mrs. Peacock's door was opened, and she came down the stairs, followed by eight minor Peacocks, Serepty Louizy in her arms, screaming at the utmost limit of her voice, louder and yet louder as she drew nearer the realm of sugar-plums.
"Mercy on us! George Washington, what is the hallooin'?"
"Mamm,' taint none of your business. I wish you wouldn't allers be a 'pearin' round when you ain't wanted. Rep, you little owl, stop your screechin', or I'll help you stop," said George Washington, evidently nettled by the sudden inundating efflux of all his family constituents.
There was a just perceptible quivering in Mrs. Peacock's motherly voice, as if her motherly heart had been reached and slightly jarred, by George Washington's rude, unfilial reprimand, as she said: "I'll tell you one thing, George Washington, Miss Hope won't never take any notion to you at all, if you
For the first time in her life Mrs. Peacock had found the spring which, if only touched, reached George Washington's heart. He looked through the open door at Hope. He hung his head in silent shame. His companions had never seen their king, Jack, cowed before. They looked exultant, as if they would like to laugh, but did not dare, lest they should receive a thrashing for the same in less than five minutes. "Come, boys," said George Washington; and they went away much quieter than they came.
Hope was the daily recipient of George Washington's bounties. He never presented them to her face to face, yet never left room to doubt for whom they were intended. Mysterious newspapers, illustrated with all the wonders of the day, found their way under the door-sill during the hours of darkness. We would find them in the morning with "Miss Hope" scrawled on their white margin. In the same auspicious hour, we often found a portly bag hanging on the outside door-knob, labelled in glaring capitals: "Miss Hope." Upon exploring its depths, we usually found delights for the stomach, in the form of peanut candy, lozenges, peppermint drops, cracked nuts, and mottoes; or we found something pretty to wear; a comb, a cornelian cross, a little bottle of
It was mid-winter. For many days it had been fearfully cold. One night, after many hours of restless sleep, I woke with a choking sensation as if breath was departing, while Morna and Hope seemed to respire as if suffocating. It was a moonless night, very dark; I could not see, yet felt that the room was swimming in smoke. I started, as I saw a tongue of fire, a narrow, creeping tongue, curl along the crevice of the door.
"Girls! girls! I believe that the house is on fire," I said, quickly. They had wandered too far away on the other side of the gate of visions to be easily recalled.
"Girls! Morna, Hope, come! Do come! The house is on fire. Be quick, quick!"
They were awake now. Not a word was spoken; the certainty of an awful truth was upon us. It seemed not a second before we passed to the door, gasping for breath. It
"Quick, or those children will be burned in their beds," said Hope, as we three reached the stair leading to the next story together. In an instant more we were knocking at the door of the Peacocks.
"Mr. Peacock! Mr. Peacock!" we heard the lady call; "Mr. Peacock, I say."
"Well! well!"
"Don't you hear that dre'ful knockin'?"
"Do let me alone! You're allers hearin' knockins."
"The house is on fire! If you want to save yourselves, come quick."
Alas! Mr. and Mrs. Peacock were too busy talking about the probability and improbability of this "knockin'" to hear the agonized call. There was not a second to lose. I threw myself, with more force than I dreamed of possessing, against the door.
"There; I guess you'll believe
"Well, I'd like to know what
We were all in the room by this time. "The house is on fire! Unless you make haste the stairs will be in flames. Then there will be no way of escape, not even by the roof; for you know this building is higher than those around it. Can't we get these children out safe?"
"The house on fire!" murmured Mrs. Peacock, dreamily, as if the thought was swimming pleasantly over her oblivious senses. "The house on fire? Then our names will be in all the papers in the mornin'."
"The house is on fire! The Lord have mercy on us, for we
"The house on fire!" screamed George Washington, as he came rushing from another room. "Then it's time to go to yellin'."
"It is time to get a light. Will you find one, George Washington?" I asked. We had not been standing still all these seconds. We were taking the poor little Peacocks from their warm nests, as fast as six hands could in the dark. Mrs. Peacock had arrived at something like a state of consciousness, and was moving as fast as her capabilities would allow.
"Oh, George Washington, can't you save two of your little brothers and sisters? We will take the rest," implored Hope, as he produced a light.
"If I don't save nothin' else, I'll save
"George Washington! George Washington, my son! Oh, my boy!" cried Mrs. Peacock out of the window, forgetting the rapidly approaching flames, heedless for once of the screams of Serepty Louizy, thinking only of her first born. We were trying, with Mr. Peacock's aid, who was carrying Serepty Louizy, to marshal the crying, terrified children out of the room.
"George Washington! George Washington!" again cried Mrs. Peacock, leaning far out of the window. A voice came up through the darkness--his voice from the street far below:
"Mamm, stop your yellin'; take them young un's up onto the ruf as quick as blazes, or you're all goners. Oh, mamm, take care of
We all rushed to the hall. It was too late; we could not descend; the stairs were all ablaze. It had taken too long to get the family of twelve Peacocks fairly out of their nest. It was well that Mr. Peacock had not followed George Washington's example. Had he done so, he would have been shivered into a hundred pieces, for he had not George Washington's deep, easy cushions of flesh to fall upon; and if he had seen fit to have killed himself, what would
"Save them! Save them! Save them!" were the shouts which came up from below, as a ladder laid its blessed head against the smoking cornice. In another instant George Washington's head, half-buried in a fireman's hat, appeared. "I said I was comin'. Come, Miss Hope, come, Miss Hope, come! The fire is almost to the roof; no tellin' how soon the walls 'll fall. Come, Miss Hope!"
"Oh, George Washington! Don't you care nothin' about your mother, nor Serepty Louizy, nor---" cried his mother.
Hope took Mrs. Peacock's hand and walked with her carefully to the edge of the roof. "Save your mother, your father, all, before you ask me. I cannot, will not come, until the last," she whispered.
"I'm goin' to save them. I'm goin' to save them all! I only wants to save you fust. I wants to save
Mrs. Peacock had no intention of being saved last. Already with great apparent coolness she was stepping down upon the ladder with Serepty Louizy in her arms, calling: "Come, Mr. Peacock, bring along the children. Come, young ladies, there's time enough if you'll only hurry."
The ladder was fastened to the roof of an outbuilding in the rear. A man stood here, and another midway on the ladder, as George Washington brought them down; while an excited crowd of men, women, and children groaned, cried, and shouted upon the ground. The fire raged most furiously in the front of the building, where it originated, but pressed fast and hot upon the rear; piercing with a thousand glittering poniards the purple blackness of bursting smoke. Up and down, up and down, through the dense stifling air, passed George Washington in rapid succession, at each return shouting more wildly and despairingly for "Miss Hope," yet each time rushing away with the child which was proffered him, as if he felt that it was the only way by which he might at last save her. Eight children had passed down; the only one left was Glory Ann in her father's arms. There was not a moment to be lost.
"George Washington, here's Glory Ann; take her. Go, go, young ladies. I ain't the man to leave three ladies to burn alive on the top of a house, or to be smashed in the ruins," said Mr. Peacock.
"Think of your children. What could they do without
"We are not going to die here. The roof will neither burn nor fall while Hope stands on it. Go, Mr. Peacock!" I said. Mr. Peacock went, carrying Glory Ann down the tottering ladder. He left George Washington on its topmost round screaming, as if in his last agony: "Miss Hope, Miss Hope, Miss Hope! I won't live if you don't; I'll be d---d if I will."
Morna came; Hope came; we stood upon the ladder together. We had scarcely gained it when the fire, thick, gorgeous, grand in its fury, swept over the entire roof, and sent a thousand spears of forked flame up into the bloody air.
We felt the scorching heat in our faces. The ladder tottered under our feet; bright threads of fire curled around its bars; yet we passed down unharmed, and as we touched the ground, a great shout went up to heaven from the vast crowd which had seemed breathless in its silence a moment before.
George Washington rolled on the ground in a paroxysm of joy, laughing, crying, shouting in the same breath; Mrs. Peacock stood amid her group of little Peacocks as if utterly satisfied; but Mr. Peacock, poor man, might have looked happier. Shelter and food were proffered by a hundred voices, and only when I heard them did I begin to realize how great had been our exposure on that fiercely cold night. Mr. Peacock accepted the offer of a friend who lived near, and there was nothing better that we could do than to go with them and wait for the dawn.
It was deep morning when George Washington entered, looking much the paler for the exertions of the night before.
"Mamm, I hope you'll be suited now; you've got your name in the paper," he said, throwing her a morning journal. She was half asleep when he came in, but quickly emerged from her trance, and read aloud:
"A TENEMENT HOUSE in --- street was last night destroyed by fire. How the fire originated is not known. The second floor was occupied by three young ladies, designers by profession, whose names we have not learned. They lost everything but the garments which they wore. The apartments on the third floor were occupied by Mr. Peacock, his wife, and ten children. The entire family, as well as the lives of the young ladies, were saved through the heroism of a lad of twelve, the son of Mr. Peacock. The brave boy descended
"Well, it's worth a fire any day to have such a notice of you in the paper, and to have people what are somethin', speak of you with such great esteem. I haint a doubt but I'll have nicer things offered me now, than I had afore. That aint sayin' as I shall take 'em, though. Serepty Ann Green that was oughtn't to be takin' other folks' cast-offs. I allers knew my name would get into print. George Washington, come here and kiss your mother, you blessed boy."
"Mamm, I don't feel like kissin'," said George Washington, in a much softer tone than usual, looking around with an anxious, questioning look.
"Oh, yes; I knows who you're lookin' for. Allers thinkin' of Miss Hope, as if there wasn't nobody else in the world. Well, Miss Hope is sleepin' safe and sound; and I should think that you'd be glad to let her rest, George Washington."
In the meantime I had taken up the newspaper, as Mrs. Peacock had read the only article which contained any interest for her. I was looking over its columns in that listless, weary way which people have when they are preoccupied or troubled, and so glance at the daily news to dissipate their irksome thought, knowing of course that it can contain nothing of personal moment to them, and yet feeling a vague, undefined hope that it
"Mercy on us! What's the matter? You look as though you were dead, only your eyes. I couldn't look so scared, if the world fell to pieces," exclaimed Mrs. Peacock.
Did I really see it? Did I read aright? Yes, there it was, in clear print before my eyes:
"VICTOIRE V---: If you are in trouble or sorrow, remember that you have one friend, who must remain your friend while he lives. I know not your address, yet hope that this will meet your eyes. "HENRI R---."
{centered}HENRI ROCHELLE.If I was in "trouble or sorrow," Henri Rochelle was the very last person whom I wished to know it. Was I never to escape him? Was it impossible to elude his keen scent? Would he overtake me, confront me, hold me fast at last? These questions I asked as the newspaper hung in my nerveless hand, while I marvelled over the message which it contained for me. Why had he waited until he thought that the probabilities were all in favor of my being in trouble or sorrow, before he had announced his continued interest in my welfare? Why was this man, of all others, the one to remind me of my dependent and needy condition? Why was he, from whom I wished least to receive it, the first and only one to offer me succor and consolation? Was he to be cognizant of all my misfortunes? Was he in my destiny? After all, was his the soul towards which mine was tending--the elected haven into which the great tide of my being would inevitably flow? My fervid self, must it surge and surge against this rock-bound man only to settle at last becalmed and cold into the chill, deep reservoir of his unfathomed soul? A man of marked intellect, of rare culture, of family and of fortune, why was I not in haste to leave my life of poverty and obscurity, to become his dowered companion, his chosen and cherished wife? I was well aware I might look far and wait long to find another man in all respects his peer. The golden door of his mental palace seldom stood ajar, never swung wide open to pilgrims and wayfarers. Only the invited dared to intrude, and only a few of the elected ones who entered felt through every fibre of their being thoroughly warmed and welcomed.
Noble and good, why did this man repel? Not because I
It started at the imperious, uncompromising question, but answered quietly enough, No! I do not dislike him; perhaps I even like him a little. I cannot quite forget how noble he is, how kind, how true. His face with its clear cut, manly features, with its strong, calm meaning, often fills my thought, if it does not warm my love. I esteem him, I admire him. I --- yes, I think that I like him, but I do not love him. His nature is positive to mine. I feel it as a strong force, but it does not touch me soothingly. It does not subdue me, melt me, win me, like
Then my heart answered very slowly: "She does not need so much a shelter for her body as for her soul; it is her poor young heart that wants a home." You cannot give me that home. Henri Rochelle,
My voice aroused Mrs. Peacock, who had rocked herself and Serepty Louizy to sleep in a little chair, whose placid swaying movement made heavenly melody compared with her own lost one of diabolical memory. I was obliged to the recent fire for burning up that chair. I had never listened to it without a conviction that a little squeaking devil was imprisoned in each rocker.
"Lor'," said Mrs. Peacock in her most drowsy tone, "was you readin' or was you talkin' to yourself, Miss Victory?"
"I was talking to myself."
"You warn't!" she said, her eyes of skim-milk blue swimming in misty wonder. "Don't tell me such unlikely stuff. Why when I was Serepty Ann Green of Greentown, my aunt Jemimy Jane use't allers to say that if folks talked to theirselves, jest as sure as they were talkin' they were crazy, or goin' to be, which is jest the same."
"There are few people that have not a thread of insanity running through some portion of their nature; even you are slightly crazy, Mrs. Peacock."
"Me! me! Mercy on us, when I was Serepty -----"
Here she was prevented from repeating the information which I had ample reason to remember by this time (viz. that she belonged to the Greens of Greentown) by the entrance of Mr. Peacock, accompanied by a handsomely dressed, sweet-faced, middle-aged lady.
Mr. Peacock had been seeking another tenement. "He had succeeded in finding one which he hoped might do," he said. He thought that "the sooner they got into it the better, all round." The last remark was addressed especially and emphatically to Mrs. Peacock, who looked as if it was all the same to her easy soul if they
Here the stranger lady remarked that "she was glad to meet Mr. and Mrs. Peacock. She had read of their misfortune in the morning paper, and started immediately to find them. She was aware that the people who inhabited tenement-houses were the innocent victims of a mercenary system; that their
George Washington was lying upon the lounge, his face prone upon the cushion, where he had buried it in his disappointment at not finding Hope in the room, some hours before. Whether asleep or awake was not known to the company. Certainly he gave no visible token that the lady's kind compliment had penetrated into either ear's tympanum.
"Oh, yes, mother's darlin' son! My George Washington, you mean; that's him on the lounge. True enough he did save all his family an' three young ladies besides; that's one of 'em, Miss Victory. But he showed who was nearest an' dearest by savin' his mother an' this blessed derlin' baby fust," said Mrs. Peacock, treating Serepty Louizy to an unpleasant and unexpected leap in the air, in order to bring her into nearer proximity to the stranger; while the one-year-old young lady, after her usual mode of asserting her identity, began to scream in the lady's face.
"There! there! muzer's honey bee mustn't frighten the lady with her music; no she mustn't! there, there!" and Mrs. Peacock fell back to a violent but quiet rocking, still musical compared to her own lost household bump and thump.
"Yes, he saved his mother and this darlin' baby fust. At sech times natur' will have her way, an' show who's nearest an' dearest." (At these words a spasmodic twitching of the lounge-cushion proved conclusively to me that George Washington was not as sound asleep as he might have been.) "I'm sure you're a lady to remember my George Washington--yet 'taint no more than he deserves. You're a lady to remember us in our misfortin'; and though I ses it myself, I must say it, it ain't no more than we deserve. Folks allers should be thought of in misfortin'. Not that we've a favor to ask; no, not a favor; though I dusn't say we wouldn't accept one. People that have done the world as many favors as the Greens don't ought to be afraid to take a favor in misfortin'.
The lady's face now wore a surprised look, but she said: "I shall consider it a privilege to restore to yourself and children a few of the comforts which you have lost."
"Oh, yes, we've lost so many comforts, 'taint much use tryin' to 'place 'em again. We don't ask it of nobody. I'm sure I don't ask nobody to 'place my nice furnitur' that's burnt. I'm sure I don't ask, yet it does seem as if I couldn't get on with any that wasn't jest as nice. There's my beau'ful sofy burned to a crisp, the beau'ful sofy I brought from my father's coun----. Oh, you don't know that I belong to the Greens of ---."
"D--n it! (There, I didn't mean to say it. I told her I wouldn't.) Confound those Greens! Mamm, I wish you'd forget the name, so you couldn't never speak it again. The Greens ain't no better than the Peacocks, not a hair. I wouldn't give a cuss for the whole kit."
"George Washington, don't you see the lady?" said Mrs. Peacock, in a tone nearer consternation than I had ever heard her speak in before. She had thought George Washington asleep or she would not have dared to have referred to the Greens, or her father's country-seat, and was utterly unprepared for such an unexpected torpedo explosion. There upon the lounge sat George Washington, his black eyes looking as if they would explode with rage; every pugilistic hair on his head standing erect, the berry on the tip of his nose so red it seemed ready to fly in any direction.
"George Washington's just waked up. The fire has put him out of his mind a little;" his mother said apologetically to the stranger.
"I'm right in my mind, or I wouldn't know that you is lyin'. Mamm, what's the use of tellin' lies folks can look straight through? Anybody with two eyes in their head can see that you never had a gran' sofy. What's the use o' tryin' to make things out gran'er than they is? Don't you think other folks has eyes? What's the use o' lyin'? You know you never had a sofy worth sittin' on. You know the old shack you had never saw your father's. Didn't I buy it at a Chatham Square auction? Didn't I give just fifty cents for the old skeleton
Having concluded his speech, George Washington again buried his face in the lounge-cushion. Mr. Peacock, unfortunate man, looked as if his trials were greater than he could bear. Mrs. Peacock had relapsed into her usual stare of serenity.
"Mother's darlin' son is out of his mind; no wonder, after that dreadful jump. The lady will excuse him, mother knows."
"Umph!" groaned George Washington from the depth of the lounge-cushion.
The look of surprise on the lady's face by this time had deepened into amazement. Evidently the Peacocks differed slightly from any people whom she had ever met before.
"I hope that in time you will be able to procure another sofa as good as the one which you have lost," she said, quietly; "but there are many things which at present you need much more. I will send to your new address some bedding and comfortable clothing for your children, and if you will give me his measure, I will have a good new suit ordered for your son. And will you take this little gift from me, my boy, for being brave and noble? I hope that you will read it, remember it, and obey its precepts. Begin now to honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee," said the lady, going to George Washington, and taking from her muff a Bible bound richly in embossed velvet.
There was a sensitive cord somewhere in George Washington's soul which vibrated exquisitely to the sound of a sweet voice, to the rhythmic flow of melodious syllables. He was fascinated, subdued by the nameless charm outflowing from an harmonious presence, and from gentle, high-bred manners; yet in the midst of his very fascination the poor boy felt wofully ashamed because conscious of an utter want of these gracious gifts in himself.
He arose to his feet when the lady began to address him, but when he saw the Bible, he hung his head in great confusion.
"I don't deserve it; I knows I doesn't!" he exclaimed. "I doesn't deserve any such handsum talk, nor no sich handsum book. I'm a misrable chap, so I am. And I can't help it, cause Mamm ses I'm marked, and I believes I is. O dear, I'm such a mis-rab-ble chap!" Here the words began to blubber from his mouth, and the tears to bubble from his eyes, and again he plunged his face into the lounge-cushion.
"If you are as good as you can be, praying and trying all the time to be better, that is all that is required of you, my child," said the sweet lady soothingly, as she laid the Bible down by his side. Then remarking to Mrs. Peacock that the bedding should be sent to their new abode before night, with a gracious bow and winning smile, she gathered up her graceful robes and departed--one of God's human angels, whose lives of heavenly love save this city from the doom of Sodom.
She left a dreary blank in the room. Alas, when some people go, what a great want they leave behind them! A dead silence followed her departure. Mrs. Peacock, holding Serepty Louizy, swayed slowly back and forth, with her eyes shut, while Mr. Peacock looked as afflicted as usual.
"George Washington, I wish you didn't sass your mother afore folks," he said at last.
"I wish I didn't," sobbed George Washington from the lounge-cushion. "And I wish that Mamm didn't make me so blazin' mad, tellin' yarns that folks can see clean through that they ain't true. 'Tain't no use."
"No, I wish you wouldn't make us all silly and ridiculous afore folks, Miss Peacock," said her husband, deprecatingly. Whatever the internal weaknesses of his family might be, Mr. Peacock was too true a man to wish them to be made public.
"Lud!" said his wife, opening her eyes with perfect composure; "if you don't talk as if you thought you was somebody, nobody will treat you as if you was somebody."
Before night we separated from the Peacocks. In parting, Mrs. Peacock observed that she should still continue to neighbor; indeed she should. "A few blocks of houses wasn't agoin' to keep her from neighborin' with ladies. There was George Washington, we should probably see him every day; she didn't believe that he could live through a day without seein' Miss Hope;" adding, as her special private conviction, which we "mustn't mention for the world, that the Sunday-school was takin' effect, that George Washington was under a mighty powerful conviction for his sins; and, for her part, she should pray hard that the burden might be removed."