"Look at Letty," said I, succeeding at last in a laugh. And really Letty was comical to look at; she was regarding Josephine and me with her eyes wide open like two blue larkspur flowers, her little red lips apart, and her whole pretty surface face quite full of astonishment.
"Wasn't that a nice little tableau, Letty?" said Josephine, with preternatural coolness. "You looked so sleepy, I thought I'd wake you up with a bit of a scene from 'Lara Aboukir, the Pirate Chief'; you know we have a great deal of private theatricals at Baltimore; you should see me in that play as Flashmoria, the Bandit's Bride."
Letty rubbed her left eye a little, as if to see whether she was sleepy or not, and looked grave; for me, the laugh came easily enough now. Jo saw she had not quite succeeded, so she turned the current another way.
"Shall I tell your fortune now, Letty? Are you quite waked up?" said she.
"No, thee needn't, Cousin Jo; thee don't tell very good ones, I think."
"No, Letty, she shall not vex your head with nonsense. I think your fate is patent; you will grow on a little longer like a pink china-aster, safe in the garden, and in due time marry some good Friend,Thomas Dugdale, very possibly,and live a tranquil life here in Slepington till you arrive at a preacher-bonnet, and speak in meeting, as dear Aunt Allis did before you."
Letty turned pale with rage. I did not think her blonde temperament held such passion.
"I won't! I won't! I never will!" she cried out. "I hate Thomas Dugdale, Sarah! Thee ought to know better about me! thee knows I cannot endure him, the old thing!"
This climax was too much for Jo. With raised brows and a round mouth, she had been on the point of whistling ever since Letty began; it was an old, naughty trick of hers; but now she laughed outright.
"No sort of inspiration left, Sally! I must patch up Letty's fate myself. Flatter not yourself that she is going to be a good girl and marry in meeting; not she! If there's a wild, scatter-brained, handsome, dissipated, godless youth in all Slepington, it is on him that testy little heart will fix,and think him not only a hero, but a prodigy of genius. Friend Allis will break her heart over Letty; but I'd bet you a pack of gloves, that in three years you'll see that juvenile Quakeress in a scarlet satin hat and feather, with a blue shawl, and green dress, on the arm of a fast young man with black hair, and a cigar in his mouth."
"Why! where did thee ever see him, Josey?" exclaimed Letty, now rosy with quick blushes.
The question was irresistible. Jo and I burst into a peal of laughter that woke Friend Allis from her nap, and, bringing her into the parlor, forced us to recover our gravity; and presently Jo and I took leave.
Letty was an orphan, and lived with her cousin, Friend Allis. I, too, was alone; but I kept a tiny house in Slepington, part of which I rented, and Jo was visiting me.
As we walked home, along the quiet street overhung with willows and sycamores, I said to her, "Jo, how came you to know Letty's secret?"
"My dear, I did not know it any more than you; but I drew the inference of her tastes from her character. She is excitable,even passionate; but her formal training has allowed no scope for either trait, and suppression has but concentrated them. She really pines for some excitement;what, then, could be more natural than that her fancy should light upon some person utterly diverse from what she is used to see? That is simple enough. I hit upon the black hair on the same principle, 'like in difference.' The cigar seemed wonderful to the half-frightened, all-amazed child; but who ever sees a fast young man without a cigar?"
"I am afraid it is Henry Malden," said I, meditatively; "he is all you describe, but he is also radically bad; besides, having been in the Mexican war, he will have the prestige of a hero to Letty. How can the poor girl be undeceived before it is quite too late?"
"What do you want to undeceive her for, Sally? Do you suppose that will prevent her marrying Mr. Malden?"
"I should think so, most certainly!"
"Not in the least. If you want Letty to marry him, just judiciously oppose it. Go to her, and say you come as a friend to tell her Mr. Malden's faults, and the result will be, she will hate you, and be deeper in love with him than ever."
"You don't give her credit for common sense, Jo."
"Just as much as any girl of her age has in love. Did you ever know a woman who gave up a man she loved because she was warned against him?or even if she knew his character well, herself? I don't know but there are women who could do it, from sheer religious principle. I believe you might, Sarah. It would be a hard struggle, and wear you to a shadow in mind and body; but you have a conscience, and, for a woman with a heart as soft as pudding, the most thoroughly rigid streak of duty in you; none of which Letty has to depend on. No; if you want to save her, take her away from Slepington; take her to Saratoga, to Newport, to Washington; turn her small head with gayety: she is pretty enough to have a dozen lovers at any watering-place; it is only propinquity that favors Mr. Malden here."
"I can't do that, Josephine. I have not the means, and Miss Allis would not have the will, even if she believed in your prescription."
"Then Letty must stay here and bide her time. You believe in a special Providence, Sarah, don't you?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"Then cannot you leave her to that care? Circumstances do not work for you. Perhaps it is best that she should marry him, suffer, live, love, and be refined by fire."
My heart sunk at the prospect of these possibilities. Josephine put her arm round me. "Sally," said she, in her softest tone, "I grieved you, dear, this afternoon. I did not mean to. I grieved myself most. Please forgive me!"
"I haven't anything to forgive, Jo," said I. "What you said to me was true, painfully true,and, being so, for a moment pained me. I should have been much happier to be married, I know; but now I daren't think of it. I have lost a great deal. I have
"'lost my place, My sweet, safe corner by the household fire, Behind the heads of children';
"and yet I do not know that I have not gained a little. It is something, Jo, to know that I am not in the power of a bad, or even an ill-tempered man. I can sit by my fire and know that no one will come home to fret at me,that I shall encounter no cold looks, no sneers, no bursts of anger, no snarl of stinginess, no contempt of my opinion and advice. I know that now men treat me with respect and attention, such as their wives rarely, if ever, receive from them. Sensitive and fastidious as I am, I do not know whether my gain is not, to me, greater than my loss. I know it ought not to be so,that it argues a vicious, an unchristian, almost an uncivilized state of society; but that does not affect the facts."
"You frighten me, Sarah. I cannot believe this is always true of men and their wives."
"Neither is it. Some men are good and kind and gentle, gentle-men, even in their families; and every woman believes the man she is to marry is that exception. Jo,bend your ear down closer,I thought once I knew such a man,and,dear,I loved him."
"My darling!but, Sarah, why"
"Because, as you said, Josey, I was too old; I had seen too much; I would not give way to an impulse. I bent my soul to know him; I rang the metal on more than one stone, and every time it rang false. I knew, if I married him, I should live and die a wretched woman. Was it not better to live alone?"
"But, Sarah,if he loved you?"
"He did not,not enough to hurt himself; he could not love anything so much better than his ease as to suffer, Josey: he was safe. He thought, or said, he loved me; but he was mistaken."
"Safe, indeed! He ought to have been shot!"
"Hush, dear!"
There was a long pause. It was as when you lift a wreck from the tranquil sea and let it fall again to the depths, useless to wave or shore; the black and ghastly hulk is covered; it is seen no more; but the water palpitates with circling rings, trembles above the grave, dashes quick and apprehensive billows upon the sand, and is long in regaining its quiet surface.
"I wonder if there ever was a perfect man," said Jo, at length, drawing a deep sigh.
"You an American girl, Jo, and don't think at once of Washington?"
"My dear, I am bored to death with Washington ŕ l'Américain. A man! how dare you call him a man?don't you know he is a myth, an abstraction, a plaster-of-Paris cast? Did you ever hear any human trait of his noticed? Weren't you brought up to regard him as a species of special seraph, a sublime and stainless figure, inseparable from a grand manner and a scroll? Did you ever dare suppose he ate, or drank, or kissed his wife? You started then at the idea: I saw you!"
"You are absurd, Jo. It is true that he is exactly, among us, what demigods were to the Greeks,only less human than they. But when I once get my neck out of the school-yoke, I do not start at such suggestions as yours; I believe he did comport himself as a man of like passions with others, and was as far from being a hero to his valet-de-chambre as anybody."
By this time we were at home, and Jo flung her parasol on the bench in the porch, and sat down beside it with a gesture of weariness and disgust mingled.
"Why will you, of all people, Sarah, quote that tinkling, superficial trash of a proverb, so palpably French, when the true reason why a man is not a hero to his lackey is only because he is seen with a lackey's eyes, the sight of a low, convention-ridden, narrow, uneducated mind, unable to take a broad enough view to see that a man is a hero because he is a man, because he overleaps the level of his life, and is greater than his race, being one of them? If he were of the heroic race, what virtue in being heroic? it is the assertion of his trivial life that makes his speciality evident,the shadow that throws out the bas-relief. We chatter endlessly about the immense good of Washington's example: I believe its good would be more than doubled, could we be made, nationally, to see him as a human being, living on 'human nature's daily food,' having mortal and natural wants, tastes, and infirmities, but building with and over all, by the help of God and a good will, the noble and lofty edifice of a patriot manhood, a pure life of duty and devotion, sublime for its very strength and simpleness, heroic because manly and human."
The day had waned, and the sunset lit Josephine's excited eyes with fire: she was not beautiful, but now, if ever, beauty visited her with a transient caress. She looked up and met my eyes fixed on her.
"What is it, Sally?what do I look like?"
"Very pretty, just now, Jo; your eyes are bright and your cheek flushed: the sunshine suits you. I admire you tonight."
"I am glad," said she, naively. "I often wish to be pretty."
"A waste wish, Jo!and yet I have entertained it myself."
"It's not so much matter for you, Sarah; for people love you. And besides, you have a certain kind of beauty: your eyes are beautiful,rather too sad, perhaps, but fine in shape and tint; and you have a good head, and a delicately outlined face. Moreover, you are picturesque: people look at you, and then look again,and, any way, love you, don't they?"
"People are very good to me, Jo."
"Oh, yes! we all know that people as a mass are kindly, considerate, and unselfish; that they are given to loving and admiring disagreeable and ugly people; in short, that the millennium has come. Sally, my dear, you are a small hypocrite,or elseBut I think we won't establish a mutual- admiration society to-night, as there are only two of us; besides, I am hungry: let us have tea."
The next day, Josephine left me. As we walked together toward the landing of the steamer, Letty Allis emerged from a green lane to say good-bye, and down its vista I discerned the handsome, lazy person of Henry Malden, but I did not inform Letty of my discovery.
A year passed away,to me with the old monotonous routine; full of work, not wanting in solace; barren, indeed, of household enjoyments and vicissitudes; solitary, sometimes desolate, yet peaceful even in monotony. But this new spring had not come with such serene neglect to the other two of us three. Against advice, remonstrance, and entreaty from her good friends, Letty Allis had married Henry Malden, and, in attire more tasteful, but quite as far from Quakerism as Josephine had predicted, beamed upon the inhabitants of Slepington from the bow-window, or open door, of a cottage very ornée indeed; while the odor of a tolerable cigar served as Mr. Malden's exponent, wherever he abode. And to Josephine had come a loss no annual resurrection should repair: her mother was dead; she, too, was orphaned,for she had never known her father; her only sister was married far away; and I kept an old promise in going to her for a year's stay at least.
Aunt Boyle's property had consisted chiefly in large cotton mills owned by herself and her twin brother,who, dying before her, left her all his own share in them. These mills were on a noisy little river in the western part of Massachusetts,in a valley, narrow, but picturesque, and so far above the level of the sea that the air was keen and pure as among mountains. Mrs. Boyle had removed here from Baltimore, a few years before her own death, that she might be with her brother through his long and fatal illness; and, finding her health improved by change of air, had occupied his house ever since, until one of those typhoid fevers that infest such river-gorges at certain seasons of the year entered the village about the mills, when, in visiting the sick, she took the epidemic herself and died. Josephine still retained the house endeared to her by sad and glad recollections; and it was there I found her, when, after renting the whole of my little tenement at Slepington, I betook myself to Valley Mills at her request.
The cottage where she lived was capacious enough for her wants, and though plain, even to an air of superciliousness, without, was most luxurious within,made to use and live in; for Mr. Brown, her uncle, was an Englishman, and had never arrived at that height of Transatlantic ton which consists in shrouding and darkening all the pleasant rooms in the house, and skulking through life in the basement and attic. Sunshine, cushions, and flowers were Mr. Brown's personal tastes; and plenty of these characterized the cottage. A green terrace between hill and river spread out before the door for lawn and garden, and a tiny conservatory abutted upon the brink of the terrace slope, from a bay-window in the library, that opened sidewise into this winter-garden.
I found Jo more changed than I had expected: this last year of country life had given strength and elasticity to the tall and slender figure; a steady rose of health burned on either cheek; and sorrow had subdued and calmed her quick spirits.
I was at home directly, and a sweeter summer never glowed and blushed over earth than that which installed me in the Nook Cottage. Out of doors the whole country was beautiful, and attainable; within, I had continual resources in my usual work and in Jo's society: for she was one of those persons who never are uninteresting, never fatiguing; a certain salient charm pervaded her conversation, and a simplicity quite original startled you continually in her manner and ways. I liked to watch her about the house; dainty and fastidious in the extreme about some things, utterly careless about others, you never knew where or when either trait would show itself next. She was scrupulous as to the serving of meals, for instance,almost to a fault; no carelessness, no slight neglect, was admitted here, and always on the spotless damask laid with quaint china stood a tapered vase of white Venice glass, with one, or two, or three blossoms, sometimes a cluster of leaves, the spray of a wild vine, or the tasselled branch of a larch-tree jewelled with rose-red cones, arranged therein with an artist's taste and skill: but perhaps, while she sharply rebuked the maid for a dim spot on her chocolate-pitcher or a grain of sugar spilt on the salver, her white India shawl lay trailed over the divan half upon the floor, and her gloves fluttered on the doorstep till the wind carried them off to find her parasol hanging in the honeysuckle boughs.