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1836
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FULL THIRTY.
By Miss Sedgewick.
[p. 212]
‘In faith Lady, you have a merry heart.’
‘Yea my Lord, I thank it, poor fool, it keeps on the windy side of care.’
THE first visit I paid after coming to town this winter, (this, to New York, most disastrous winter of 1836) was to Mrs. Orme, and her daughter Augusta.
Augusta I knew well and loved. She is the very impersonation of the spirit of cheerfulness, if brightness, intelligence, youth and health should be the indicated attributes of that spirit. Mrs. Orme was a stranger to me except by report. She was a southern lady by birth, and had resided with her family for many years at New Orleans, and at her house there, and her plantation in the neighborhood, some of my friends had enjoyed that hospitality which the southern members of our great family so generously and so gracefully extend to their brethren of the north. She had had several children, healthy and promising till they approached the age of maturity, when they were in turn the victims of the bilious diseases of their native climate. The anxiety consequent upon these repeated losses, induced the mother to consent to a proposal that Augusta should go to the North, where a different climate might avert the anticipated danger. Augusta came to Massachusetts, and the separation that was to have been for one year, was, by various circumstances, prolonged to five. At
[p. 213]
the expiration of that period, her mother, having in the mean time lost two younger children, and buried her husband, came to the north with impaired health and a fortune reduced, but still ample for her wants. Here, either from the change of climate or the more potent influence of the re-union with her daughter, she was in a very few months so renovated, that she determined to remain at least till time (“Time, the consoler !” ) should render the local association with her sorrows less vivid. She had relatives in the fashionable circles of New York, who she thought would give éclat to Augusta's introduction to society, and this decided her to fix her residence in this city. No two persons, of the same sex and country, and both amiable and well principled, could be more different than my laughing, singing, self-relying friend Augusta, and her timid, nervous, dependent mother. This difference, in part constitutional, was confirmed by education. Education, though it may bend the tree, does not change its nature. In any classification of the human family, the mother and daughter belong to different orders; but this will, if I mistake not, be manifest in the circumstances I am about to relate.
I found them at one of the fashionable boardinghouses at the lower end of Broadway. Mrs. Orme received me with her usual gentle courtesy, Augusta with her usual animation. My first enquiries were as to their accommodations, fellow-boarders, &c.
‘Accommodations!’ replied Mrs. Orme, shrugging her shoulders, ‘we do as well as we can — you know, of course, that I am obliged to dispense with a private drawing-room.’
‘Yes,’ said Augusta, ‘but then we have such a delightful room — see what a nice place for my piano.’
[p. 214]
‘A nice place enough,’ said the mother in a sad tone, ‘but what is the use, Augusta, when there is no one to hear you?’
‘Nobody, mama!’ she replied, laughing, and rattling her fingers over the keys,’ when I have you and myself— where else should I find such admiring, patient listeners?’
‘Dear child!’ said her mother, ‘I believe she would be content in a prison.’
‘Your sound reasons for such faith, mama?’
Mrs. Orme turned to me, slightly blushing, as if she feared I might think she had overpraised her child. ‘I am sure,’ she said, ‘if you knew how well she bears her trials, you would not think I speak with a mother's partiality.’
‘Trials! mama,’ echoed Augusta.
‘Yes, my love — it certainly is a trial to be obliged to shut ourselves in our own room, or be liable to mix with any one who chooses to share the common drawing-room with us.’
‘A trial, mama!’
‘You may call it what you please, Augusta — I call it a trial.’
‘Well, I never once thought of it being disagreeable even.’
‘Then,’ continued the mother, still addressing me, ‘it is so very inconvenient not to have a servant of your own.’
‘It seems so to mama, because she has been accustomed to having so many; but the servants of the house, though somewhat resembling those spirits who 'will not come when you do call them,’ yet, when they do come, they are very civil and kind.’
[p. 215]
‘But they do not belong to me,’ urged Mrs Orme.
‘But do I not belong to you, mama?’ replied Augusta, and am I not always ready
‘To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds,’’ -----
‘Thou art a dainty spirit,’ thought I, as I looked on her bright face, sun-lit from the soul; and then to turn my friends’ thoughts from the evident discomforts of a boarding house, I asked if they had any agreeable inmates?
A list of them followed, by which it appeared they had the average fortune of persons so domiciliated. There were gentlemen and their wives, who had private drawing rooms — very kind they were to Augusta; but Mrs. Orme did not like to accept civilities which she could not return on equal terms. Then there were two or three pairs who were very much inclined to be sociable; but they were those sort of persons that one does not care to be intimate with.
‘Very good, kind persons, for all,’ interrupted Augusta.
‘There were some young merchants, very civil, --- but ---’
‘But merchants,’ said Augusta archly, ‘mama cannot divest herself of her southern prepossessions against all persons engaged in trade.’
‘That is not strange, Augusta, our prejudices are the last infirmities we get rid of.’
‘Just what Mr. Rayson said yesterday, and because, he said, not having any real foundation, you could not oppose truth to them.’
[p. 218]
‘There is a widow here,’ continued Mrs Orme, ‘a convenient sort of chronicler, who knows all the world, in all places and in all their affairs.’
‘And what she does not know,’ said Augusta, ‘she invents. Mamma, did you not overhear Mr. Rayson say to his next neighbour yesterday, when Mrs Wilson finished her long story about that poor man — I forget his name —that committed suicide, but she related every particular of the deed — not only the circumstances that preceded it, but the motives that led to it, and all that his wife said, and his father said, and his friends said, did you not hear Mr. Rayson whisper ‘founded on fact?’
‘Yes, I heard that, but I think there is no love lost between Mrs Wilson and Mr. Rayson.’
‘No, he can't like her, and of course she wont like him.’
‘There may have been some reason for her dislike — he is very satirical.’
‘I like such satire,’ said Augusta, ‘it only falls where it is provoked and deserved, for instance, this morning when those Englishmen were finding fault with every thing here, and blustering about every thing in that pattern little island of theirs, how aptly he quoted, from their own poet too — no, not theirs, ours — the world's,
‘Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day, night,
Are they not but in Britain— Pr'ythee, think
there's livers out of Britain.’
‘Who is this Mr. Rayson, Augusta, that seems such a prodigious favorite,’ I asked, and added to my friend Mrs Orme, ‘you must look out — these boarding-house likings are dangerous.’
[p. 217]
Augusta laughed, as is her wont on all occasions, and then said, ‘Even Mamma will not be alarmed at that danger — why dear lady, Mr. Rayson is an old bachelor.’
‘How old, Augusta?’
‘Oh, old as the hills —full thirty.’
I know that 'full thirty' seems to eighteen almost the extreme limit of human life, but I had known too, stranger things happen than the approach of these distant points; and so I told my young friend.
Augusta laughed again, and said unless Mr. Clement Rayson was an illustration of the old syllogism ‘I move or I do not move; I do not move, therefore I move,’ she did not see how they were to become acquainted; for he was the only person in the house, that had not, directly or indirectly, sought an introduction to them.
This was true. Clement Rayson, though not soured to the world, (he had no acidulating tendencies in his character,) was shy of it, and particularly distrustful of the fashionable world. He had his reasons, as our chronicling widow had told the Ormes, in a long spun out fiction that had, as is usual in such romances, a substratum of truth. This short and simple truth was, that at the all-believing age he had loved, and had plighted his troth to a beautiful girl who had deserted him for a man full fifty years old, but who was rich and fashionable, neither of which, at that period, was Clement Rayson. He had since acquired a moderate fortune. His lacerated affections were much longer than is usual in such cases, in the process of healing.
In the mean time he withdrew from society, and having no family ties in the city to counteract his disposition to solitude, it grew upon him. He appeared to have
[p. 218]
the peculiarities incident to the single condition — appeared—but never was there a spirit less exclusive, and more unselfish. One class, and one alone, was excluded from his sympathies — the fashionable. He thought them all heartless fainéants, ‘unproductive consumers,’ cumberers of the ground. He knew that Mrs Orme belonged to this class, and he perceived that to her the world had but two phases — the one enlightened, the other unenlightened; the fashionable, and the unfashionable. Of course, his orbit could never cross hers. But with this undeniable infirmity, Mrs Orme had so much gentleness, such feminine softness, so much of the spirit, as well as of the letter of politeness, that it was difficult to sustain a sturdy dislike towards her. At first, Augusta did not impress him agreeably. He admired her Hebe freshness, her well-turned features, and the good humour and animation that almost made her beautiful, but he thought she wanted the timidity and reserve that so becomes a young creature on the threshold of an unknown world, a world veiled in shadow, and beset with danger. But he misjudged my young friend. Her boldness arose from what some philosophers, of the German school, have called the ‘unconscious.’ She did not, if we may use the expression, feel herself, nor was she looking in others' faces to see her own image reflected there. The present was to her for action and enjoyment, and if the future brought dangers, (she apprehended none,) she had resolution and strength to overcome them. Her most happy temperament seemed a sort of charm, an amulet against the principle of evil, in all its proteus shapes. ‘Miss Orme is not troubled with bashfulness,’ whispered
[p. 220]
Mrs. Wilson to Clement Rayson, as Augusta, at a first request, sat down to the piano, and played with great expression, a Spanish national air.
A similar criticism had clouded the clearer atmosphere of Rayson's mind; but there are some persons whose touch always produces discord, and Mrs. Wilson was eminently one of these. ‘Miss Orme is not bashful,’ he replied somewhat testily, ‘but bashfulness as often springs from vanity, and a craving for admiration, as from delicacy and self-distrust.’
‘Bless me! I thought you did not admire Miss Orme.’
‘I do not know her.’
‘Of course you would if you admired her. She is not of the thistle order. Every one in the house has observed your distant manner to the Ormes.’
Clement Rayson was, as we have said, reserved: he liked no intruding observers within his own little world of feelings — of likings and dislikings; and towards Mrs. Wilson he had an antipathy, resembling that which is often cherished for the feline race, to which she seemed to him to belong. He was annoyed by her remark, but he did not choose to enter into a defence, or explanation, and therefore he remained silent. The shield of silence is the most effectual defence against a thorough gossip; and if generally resorted to, their offensive weapons would rest for want of use.
‘Of all people on earth,’ said Mrs Wilson, crossing the room and seating herself next Augusta Orme, who had already forgotten her musical triumph, and was absorbed in a book she had taken from the table, ‘of all people on earth, I detest your close-mouthed ones.'
‘Do you, Mrs. Wilson?— thought we were apt to like our opposites.’
[p. 220]
‘No inuendo, I trust, Miss Orme?’
‘Certainly not, I merely meant that you were communicative.’
This was so much more flattering a term than that suggested by the lady's conscience, that she took it as a compliment, and replied that she was naturally frank, and added that she thought Miss Orme and herself much alike.
‘Heaven forefend!’ thought Augusta, and laughed, a laugh that could not have stirred a feather on the ‘fretful porcupine,’ and therefore it did not ruffle the widow Wilson's plumes. On the contrary, she gave a proof of her graciousness by whispering —‘ How strange it is that Clement Rayson is so prejudiced against you!’
‘Is he? I am sorry for it.’
‘You do not look much disturbed.’ There was something almost provoking to our touchy lady in the serenity she could not cloud.
‘Why should I, Mrs. Wilson? I have done nothing that I am conscious of to create the prejudice, and therefore can do nothing to remove it. But I do sincerely wish the good man would get rid of it, for prejudices must be uncomfortable burdens, and Mr. Rayson seems a very clever and a very agreeable person to those he likes.’
Mrs. Wilson, finding the daughter impracticable, transferred her efforts to the mother, who, as she found, was more facile. It was no difficult achievement to make Mrs. Orme uncomfortable on any given subject, and the next time I saw her, I found her very much puzzled in solving the riddle of ‘that Mr. Clement Rayson's dislike to her and Augusta.’ Her consolation
[p. 221]
was, that he knew nobody that they knew, and therefore she did not see how it could very well do them any injury; but still it was dangerous to have an enemy, especially for a young lady just ‘coming out.’
All this fabric of Mrs. Wilson's mischievous brain would have been harmless, but that it augmented Mrs. Orme's horror of the society of boarding houses; infused a double quantity of coldness into her deportment towards Mr. Rayson; heightened the barriers between herself and the cleverest and best person in the family; confirmed our friend's prejudices against all fashionable people; and finally gratified widow Wilson's petty malignity against him. How true it is, that the lesser as well as the greater evils of life, are of our own creation!
In the mean while, Clement Rayson's eye (doubtless without the consent of his will) often turned towards Augusta's face, so bright with health and happiness. There is a peculiar charm in this sunny character, to men who have passed the zenith of youth. This may account for the devotion of sexagenarian bachelors to the youngest girls in company. We do not mean to implicate Rayson in any such foible; for, if guilty of the count in the indictment — if ‘full thirty,’ he was not much more. Regarding himself as a fixture in this aforesaid boarding house, he had surrounded himself with those rare comforts in this city, where persons rather alight than abide, provisions for permanence. He had his dressing-room, his sleeping apartments, and his library. [1]* This library adjoined the room occupied by
[p. 222]
Mrs. Orme and her daughter, and here, secure from observation, Clement Rayson would lay aside his book, to listen from beginning to end, to songs that he had often wished, with a certain licensed churl, ‘were impossible as well as difficult.’ He even began to entertain a secret fondness for Italian music, which he had deemed all monotonous, and like a certain friend of ours, had affected to believe, and dared to say, there was but one Italian song. Augusta had a collection of fine old English ballads. These she occasionally sung, and he heard them, every word, for her piano was placed against the wall that separated the two rooms. Of course her face was towards him, and often did he wish that this wall, like him who enacted ‘lime and and roughcast,’ in Pyramus and Thisbe,
‘----- having thus its part discharged so,
And being done, this wall away would go.’
that he might have a glimpse of the bright face behind. ‘That face,’ he said to himself, ‘that is like a gleam of sunshine to every thing it looks upon.’
‘I must have my library removed — I can never read a word here,’ thought he, as he smiled in silent response, to the merry peals of laughter that ever and anon came from that apartment over which a ‘dancing star’ seemed to him to preside. And as he listened to the cheerful tones
[p. 223]
that responded to Mrs. Orme's low monotonous voice, ‘how can she’ thought he, ‘resist such an influence! but she will soon be exposed to worse and more potent influences: to the parrotry, frivolity, and heartlessness of the world, and there this enchanting buoyancy of spirit, the mere virtue, perchance after all, of health of constitution! will soon be dimmed and lost.’ Alas! Augusta's buoyancy was soon to be tried by a very different pressure from that he anticipated, and a far heavier.
The evening of the sixteenth of December I passed with Mrs. Ornie and Augusta. They were both in a state of pleasurable excitement. The floor was strewn with boxes, and the table, sofa, and chairs were covered with dresses, caps, artificial flowers, and curious decorations just sent home in time for the gay season. Invitations had been sent out and accepted to parties and balls. Under what circumstances of overwhelming distress these invitations were soon after recalled, will long be remembered in the brilliant circles of our metropolis, where the bridal array was changed for mourning weeds.
Mrs. Orme was in all the flutter of indecision as to the dress to be selected for the coming out evening. She preferred the blue embroidered Seraphine crape which a friend had selected in Paris; she was certain, absolutely certain that it was perfectly new. There is magic in that word which may not convey its true import to the ears of our rustic reader. It does not mean simply that it is unworn, but that it is fresh from the inventive loom of a Paris milliner around whose head ‘such light visions float.’ While I was examining and
[p. 224]
duly admiring the blue Seraphine, Augusta put her veto upon it. She would not come out in a dress that would make her so conspicuous. In vain her mother urged the importance of the first impression — the coup de théatre. Augusta laid the Seraphine crape aside, and was wavering between a silk that her mother pronounced ‘the loveliest pink,’ and a white muslin, when a servant entered with a Camelia Japonica directed to Miss Orme. One pure, stately white flower sat upon the stalk, between two buds, like a queen between her maids of honor. ‘This decides me,’ exclaimed Augusta ‘my white muslin, and this Camelia in my hair.’
‘Who sent it?’ asked the mother. The servant did not know, and all that we could ascertain was that it had been left at the door by a man who merely said it was ordered at their green-house, but whether that green-house was Thorburn's, Smith's, or Hogg's, was uncertain, and Mrs. Orme concluded her enquiries by saying she was glad on the whole not to know, for she preferred Augusta should come out unshackled by even so slight an obligation as the gift of a flower imposed.
Augusta's curiosity, as was natural, was more excited than ours, and before the Camelia was deposited in a glass of water, she had run over the list of her gentlemen acquaintance, and in turn guessed all but — the right one.
People who are well advanced in life are prone to look upon its events and circumstances in the light of a shell enclosing a kernel, for their picking, the moral of the tale. And this kernel, like the jewel found by a certain classic bird, is apt to prove sweet or bitter, valueless or priceless, according to the character of the
[p. 225]
finder. This tendency must excuse the moralizing humor I fell into, on seeing my young friend so much engrossed and fluttered by the approach of this grand era of her life — her coming out.
‘If Augusta,’ thought I ‘rational, well educated, with a mind so well balanced that all its motions are harmonious, is thus affected by her advent, what a perilous moment it must be to those who are neither fitted by nature nor education, for the sudden transit from obscurity to notoriety. Inexperienced and unreflecting, what views must they have of the social laws, of their nature, of the objects of society, of the purposes and responsibilities of existence.’
Man has been justly called an imitative animal. Here we are, a young nation, set apart from the families of the old world, with every incitement to, and facility for making a new experiment in the economy of human life, and like the Chinese, who made the new shoes slip-shod, after the pattern, we copy the forms of European society, bad enough where they exist, but as ill adapted to our use as the slip-shod shoes to the wearer — as fantastical for us as a fan for an Iceland belle.
For example, in this working country, where the gentlemen must be at their offices and counting-houses by nine o'clock — where the domestic machine must stop, or the springs be set in motion by the mistress of the family before that hour, — with the pressure of this necessity upon us, we assemble at our evening parties at ten and eleven, because forsooth the fainéants of Europe do so! And for the same sufficient reason, our young ladies must have their comings out!
But what is to be done? How are their school-days and society compatible? The processes of nature are to be imitated. The dawn preludes the day: the bud slowly unfolds to the sun, gathering strength with every expanding leaf to bear its rays.
We are aware that there are no Quixotes more extravagant than those who preach revolutions in manners and customs; but where, as in our case, they are not the natural result of the condition of the people, may we not hope for modifications and ameliorations? for the dawn of a millennium on our social world, when the drawing-room shall no longer be an arena, where there is a short contest for a single prize, (what are the modes of that contest, and what the prize so obtained ? ) but shall become the social ground where men and women shall be players, as well as spectators, — where rational christian people may meet without a sacrifice of health or duty; and where young people and children shall come for the formation of their social character, and where all may enjoy on equal terms the very highest pleasure of our gregarious natures ? — But we beg pardon, our tale is becoming a homily.
Before the evening closed, I perceived, and with secret satisfaction, that Augusta manifested some weariness at her mother's endless anxieties upon the details of the coming evening, such as ‘whether they should go at ten or a quarter past ? — whether, in case Augusta were asked, she had best sing ? — whether there could be any objection to her waltzing, with her cousin ? — she waltzed so well! and sundry other momentous questions. When the field of vision is narrow, the objects are magnified. ‘Dear mamma,’ said Augusta, ‘pray leave these trifles to fate.’
[p. 227]
‘Life is made up of such trifles, my child.’
‘Mine shall not be,’ replied Augusta. Little did she think what a seal was soon to be set to this lightly uttered resolution.
The mercury was below zero, and as I walked briskly home I heard the first stroke of the bell that sounded the alarm of that fire which before morning laid so rich a portion of our city in ruins.
The bells rang at first, for the most part, unheeded, for as the Turk moves tranquilly amidst the plague, hardened by use, so we, familiarised to the every-day tocsin, pursue our usual avocations when it sounds throughout the city. But there were some who, on that memorable night, answered from the first with quickened pulses to the boding sound. They knew the firemen were exhausted by a severe labor of the preceding night, that their hose were frozen, and that there was no supply of water in the city. They reflected that the fire had broken out amidst packed warehouses, filled with combustibles; that the perfect dryness of the atmosphere and the extreme cold must accelerate its progress; but reason, fear, imagination, all fell far short in their anticipations of the horrid reality.
We have no intention to perpetrate such a presumption as an attempt to describe the scene would imply; we can only note the particulars — the spreading of the fire, quicker than thought, windward and leeward from house to house, and from street to street — the pillar of flame that shot up from the lofty dome of the Exchange — the crash of its falling — the calmness, though sublime courage of the men, who, with their casks of gunpowder proceeded through showers of sparks
[p. 228]
to the edifices marked for explosion — the momentary wavering of those edifices when the match was fired — the explosion — and at the very instant the stately pile was a prostrate mass of ruins — the consternation of the citizens— the firemen, the very men who had so often seemed the chartered masters of the devouring element, looking on, mute, paralyzed, impotent spectators — the piles and masses of merchandise moved twice and thrice, and finally consumed. Merchants hurrying from their up-town residences to the scene of action, and coaches bearing ladies to the spectacle!
The appearance to the more distant observer, to whom the flames looked like a solid wall against the clear blue sky, and the gems of Heaven, like celestial witnesses, calmly gazing on this mortal coil — all this will not be forgotten, and cannot be described. But there were instances of self-command, generosity, and heroism, the moral phœnixes which rose from the gross elemental fire that may be recorded by the humblest pen, and will at least live longer on the pages of an annual than in the columns of a forgotten newspaper.
One anecdote was given in the journals of the city, the day after the fire, which we have since heard from unquestionable witnesses, and which we shall repeat unvarnished. Who would try, by coloring, to add beauty or grace to such truth?
A gallant young man belonging to our navy, who a few days before, for some slight misdemeanor had been ejected from it, was busied with thousands in removing merchandise, when he heard piercing shrieks from a woman. He made his way to her. In the general distress she was little heeded. She seemed like a maniac.
[p. 229]
In answer to his demand of ‘what is the matter?’ she pointed to one of the burning houses and said, ‘my child is there!’ ‘In what part of the house?’ She was calmed by his interposition, and described the room in the third story. He darted towards the house. As he placed his foot on the threshold, the firemen adjured him to come back, and told him if he went on he could not return. They were attempting to force him back, but he sprang beyond their grasp, and unchecked by the flames that were crackling along the beams, he mounted to the apartment and entered it — the fire was glancing around the cornice of the room. — The child, a sturdy infant of some six or seven months, was awake, and holding up its hand before its eyes, and twining it around, delighted with the reflection of the flame, that in another moment would have reduced its little frame to ashes. His preserver caught the boy in his arms, and descended to the last landing place. The bannister was on fire. He hesitated—he had passed an open window — should he return and leap from that? — he might crush the child. So pressing against the wall, he rushed down uninjured, save the scorching of his coat — a scorch that will make it a precious relic.
Those who have never heard the spontaneous gushings from that holy fountain which is never quite dried in any heart, should have heard the shoutings and clappings of hands when the young man reappeared and placed the boy in his mother's arms — they should have seen how, for a moment, every other interest was suspended in admiration, and how the young hero, finishing his generous act with the only grace that could be added to
[p. 230]
it, modestly shrank from the tribute he had so well earned, and disappeared. [2 *]
The morning of the 17th found the city in indescribable anxiety, dismay, and bewilderment. No one could calculate the extent of the loss — the direct loss — no one dared to anticipate the loss from the bankruptcy of merchants, the failure of monied institutions, and the suspension of business and payments. All sympathy was directed to the merchants, for to few had it then occurred that the ruin would pass over the palace, and prostrate the cottage.
The first intimation I had of such a result was from a gentleman who said to me, ‘I fear your friend Mrs. Orme has lost every thing. I am told her agent Robert Smith invested all her property in fire insurance stock.’ I knew such ill news as this must have flown to her ears, and I determined immediately to go to her.
The streets were a wild exhibition of the horrible and the ludicrous — the strange motley that human affairs so often wear. Here were militiamen called out as guards, bustling along in all the mock importance of their brief authority, and there were firemen dragging themselves to their homes — looking like ghosts who had outstayed their time.
Here was timid, shivering poverty, stealing stealthily along, amid bales of blankets, and stacks of woolen goods, eyeing them wishfully from beneath the half lifted lid — and there, (a timely admonition!) were
[p. 231]
police-men dragging detected pilferers to justice. Here the merchant on whose face was written ‘sudden calamity has overtaken me,’ and beside him the bold beggar, her shoulders laden with piles of half consumed blankets, ends of shawls, and bits of silk that yesterday made a part of his countless wealth!
‘Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may'st spare the superflux to them
And show the Heavens more just.’
I crossed a street, making my way through carts, wagons, and coaches laden with boxes and cases of the richest merchandise, and turned out of my course to a point of view where a group of amateur spectators were gazing at the ruins — not with tearless eyes. We all stood for a few moments in profound silence looking at the standing fragments of walls — the smouldering piles of brick that covered thousands (millions?) of unconsumed and inaccessible property — at the fire still burning unresisted, because irresistible, towards the water's edge — at the ashes of to-day — the millions of yesterday. ‘This’ said a gentleman next me, ‘is the levelling system with a vengeance!’
‘Yes, but it is a levelling to teach levellers,’ replied another, ‘those ignorant and corrupt persons who would construct barriers between the rich and poor, out of their evil passions, must now acknowledge their mutual dependence — the demonstrated identity of their interests. The working men will realise that the enterprise and industry of the wealthy merchant feeds the channels of their prosperity. Heaven grant they may not long feel it from a loss of the supply.’
[p. 232]
‘The rascals! it's a good lesson for them.’ This bitter exclamation was made by one of those who look upon themselves as having a chartered right to their accidental prosperity, and who, as far as they can oppose the laws of Providence, obstruct those supplies of Heaven-directed bounty to the poor.
I turned from the idlers and pursued my course, winding as well as I might, along the walks encumbered with the various merchandise that comes from every explored corner of our globe to this great commercial mart; bales of cotton, piles of domestic goods — hard ware and porcelain — English woolens and Dutch toys— French silks and stacks of German baskets, &c, &c.— a volume might be filled with the specifications indicated by these et cetéras, but I have already abused the curiosity of my readers, if perchance they have any, in the fate of my heroine.
I found my friend Mrs. Orme, as I had feared, plunged into the depths of despair. She was pacing up and down her room. As I entered, she clasped her hands, exclaiming, ‘ruined ! — totally ruined!’
‘But my dear friend, your property was not surely all invested in fire insurance stock?’
‘Yes, all. At least, I have no reason to doubt it. — Of course you know, being totally unacquainted with business myself, [3]* I leave my affairs entirely to the discretion of my agent, and Mrs Wilson says she heard him say only last week that he had vested my money — all of it — in six different companies, so that I should be quite safe. I remember, too, he asked me about fire stock, and I told him it would make me uncomfortable
[p. 233]
whenever the bell rung. But he said something about the companies always making good dividends; and I have not thought of it since, till Mrs. Wilson came into my room at two o'clock, to prepare my mind, as she said. Mrs. Wilson blames Mr. Smith, and so do I.’
‘I did not controvert this position, for I know it is the most common solace of undisciplined minds, to impute the blame to another. ‘Where,’ I asked, ‘was Augusta?’
Her mother did not know. She believed she had gone out —‘Strange that she could go out, and leave me, at such a moment. She is a dear child, but she has one defect — it is a natural one, and she can not cure it. I do not blame her, but I often feel it. She wants sensibility. I dont mean to complain of her, but think how I must have felt to see her go, just as usual, about her ordinary avocations this morning. She even, once or twice, while she was putting away the things you saw here last night, sang! I suppose it was involuntary — but it is so strange — so unlike me!’
Mrs. Orme is not the only person that measures the qualities of others by her own, as if that were an infallible standard. I ventured to intimate that it was very fortunate for Augusta if she could meet such a reverse with firmness.
‘Firmness — oh, yes! but then do you know she has been- trying to convince me that it is not a calamity to weep for? that, I think, as Mrs. Wilson says, is carrying firmness a little too far; but she is a dear child, and, except in this blemish, every thing I could wish. And this perhaps spares her a great deal of suffering.’
[p. 234]
‘Useless suffering,’ thought I, ‘suffering never designed by him who chasteneth because he loveth.’
‘But where,' continued the mother, ‘can Augusta stay! It is not considerate of her, as Mrs. Wilson says, to leave me this morning.’
Her perplexities were ended by Augusta's entrance. Her face was beaming. ‘Good news, mama! she cried, ‘the last ten thousand remitted from New Orleans, is safe.’ She kissed her mother, and wiped the tears that flowed afresh at this unexpected intelligence.
‘These shall be the last tears this business costs you, mama; then turning round, she saw me, apologized for having overlooked me, and instinctively sought a shelter for the undue grief she knew her mother must have exhibited to me.
‘This horrid fire,’ she said, ‘has kept mama up all night, and made her so nervous!’
‘But are you certain you are rightly informed, Augusta?’ asked the mother, ‘Mrs. Wilson was so sure!’
‘Oh, Mrs. Wilson! I was sure from the moment that trumpery woman said it, it could not be so. Her reports, like dreams, go by contraries. But I was afraid, mama, of inspiring any false hope, so I resolved to go at once to Mr. Smith.’
‘And that was what you went out for ? — Dear child!’
I ventured to say, for I could not help it, ‘there are other manifestations of sensibility than passiveness and tears.’
‘I went first,’ continued Augusta, ‘to Mr. Smith's house, but, as I ought to have foreseen, he was not at home.’
[p. 235]
‘But surely, my child, you did not go alone down Wall street.’
‘No; fortunately, just as I was turning into Wall street, and thinking what a piece of work I should have to make my way, I met Mr. Clement Rayson. He stopped, and asked me where I was going, and begged leave to attend me. It was very kind of him, and amusing too, after we had sat opposite for three weeks, without speaking. Well, I found Mr. Smith with a face as long as my arm; but he seemed quite relieved, when I told him it was so much better than we expected, and assured him, mama, you would not care for the loss, since we had enough left.’
‘Enough!’ sighed the mother, who already began to shift her unhappiness from the total loss of their finances to their reduction.
Augusta did not hear her mother, or else, to turn the current of her thoughts, she said, ‘Oh, mama, Mr. Rayson has told me such a sad piece of news — quite enough to put the loss of property out of one's head. That beautiful, lovely woman, Mrs. Moreson, whom we saw at Dr. Hayward's, is dead. She died without a moment's warning, while her sister was dressing for her cousin's wedding.’
After the usual exclamations of sympathy and sorrow, Mrs. Orme said she supposed the parties, then, would be given up.
‘Yes, of course,’ replied Augusta, ‘and there is my beautiful Camelia must fade unseen.’
‘Your fit emblem, I fear, my child; for now, you cannot come out.’
‘But I can stay in, mama, without drooping. There
[p. 236]
are some hardy plants that do not need sunshine — I think I am one of those.’
And so it proved. A few days after, I was again with my friends, anxious to know what their arrangements were to be, for I was well aware that the income of ten thousand dollars could not maintain them in their present style of living — would not even pay their board. I found Mrs. Orme troubled and undecided — Augusta, strong and cheerful in her self-reliance.
‘You have come,’ she said, receiving me affectionately, ‘just in time to aid our deliberations. We find that we can live independently and pleasantly in the country on our present income.’
‘It comes very hard upon me, though,’ said Mrs. Orme, ‘for I have an antipathy to a country life.’
‘And therefore,’ continued Augusta, ‘I wish mama not to think of it. Her income is quite sufficient to secure her an agreeable town residence, and I should be ashamed of myself if I could not earn my own support. I have a double object in this. Mama has grown so nervous about losses, that she is afraid of being stripped of what remains; and I want to convince her, that even in that event we should do well enough.’
‘But how, my dear girl, can you earn your living?’
‘Oh, in twenty ways. I can turn governess.’
‘I utterly object to that,’ said the mother, ‘I have seen too many of them, and I know what dog's lives they lead.’
I ventured to suggest that I had seen some very happy ones.
‘I should have no fears on that score,’ said Augusta, ‘for I believe our own happiness is in our own hands;
[p. 237]
but then any employment that will separate me from mama, is objectionable. I can give music lessons; combine music and singing lessons, which would be very profitable.’
‘Dear child, dont use such words — they make me so nervous. I cannot consent to your giving music lessons, there is something so degrading in running from house to house, and selling your time to other people.’
‘This is what ninety-nine hundredths of the world do, mama, and I do not wish to be among the exempts. I would,’ she continued, addressing me, ‘open a school, but I am afraid I am too young to have children confided to my care.’
‘Pity you are not ‘full thirty,’ said I.
‘Ah,’ replied Augusta, ‘that reminds me of Clement Rayson. Last night I was speaking of that beautiful camelia, and I do suspect he knows where it came from, but he will not give me the least clew. He merely said it must be from some very young man, for they were addicted to such fooleries! That was a saying, was it not, that marked the sayer ‘full thirty ?’ — But what were we talking of— my occupation; it is not, like Othello's ‘gone’ — would that it were come!’
‘I have an excellent plan,’ interposed the mother, ‘if we can only persuade Augusta to adopt it. When summer comes, I shall be quite willing to make an experiment of country life. In the mean time, a very slight addition to our income would pay our expenses here without intrenching on our capital. Perhaps you do not know it, but Augusta excels in all sorts of ingenious, lady-like manufactures — worsted work in particu-
[p. 238]
lar. And she is so quick! she net the loveliest purse for Clement Rayson — all of it yesterday.’
‘I trust, Augusta,’ said I, ‘you marked it ‘full thirty,’ for ladies' favors are sometimes misinterpreted.’
‘Clement Rayson is past the danger of such coxcomberies,’ replied Augusta.
‘Now,’ resumed the mother, ‘Augusta could dispose of her work at the ‘Ladies' Depository,’ without the slightest exposure. The utmost delicacy is observed there, Mrs. Wilson tells me. By the way, Augusta, it just occurs to me that Mrs. Wilson must work for the Depository, how else could she afford to wear blond capes ? — but, as I was saying, she tells me that the names of those who deposite articles there, are religiously kept secret. Your orders are referred to numbers, not names.’
‘And why all this reserve?’ I innocently asked.
‘My dear friend, the institution is designed for ladies of reduced fortune, to enable them to dispose of their work without it ever being known that they work for their living.’ [4]*
I smiled, and Augusta said, ‘you think as I do, I am sure of it.’
‘And how is that, Augusta?’
‘Why, that these same reduced ladies might as well
[p. 239]
be ashamed of giving bread to their children, as of earning it for them; and that this very labor of which they are ashamed, is most creditable — perchance the most honorable act of their whole lives.’
‘Pity,’ I ventured to add, ‘it does not occur to them, that working for their living, places' them in the same category with the first in the land — the lawyer, the clergyman, the merchant, &c., — and rescues them from the helplessness and dependence into which misfortune usually casts females of their class.’
Those little understand the country they live in, who, by such an institution, virtually pronounce labor degrading, and virtually insult those of their sex, who professedly work for their living.’ [5]*
‘As you agree with me,’ resumed Augusta, ‘I hope you will persuade mama to let me do something more productive than lady-like work. I have three projects — pray dont laugh at me—if one fails, another may succeed, you know. When I was at school in Boston, I made some translations from the French and Spanish, for a work a friend of ours was publishing there. He paid me compliments on my success, which, making due allowance for his partiality, and gratitude, &c, allow me to aspire to the place of a hack translator to the Harpers, or some other publishing house here.’
I knew my young friend understood French and Spanish well, and wrote her own language with correctness and freedom. I gave my hearty concurrence to the plan.
[p. 240]
‘When I can't get work from a publisher, continued Augusta, ‘I can copy music — I can do that very rapidly. I have often copied songs for poor Stefani to sell to her scholars.’
‘Now for your third project, Augusta.’
‘You will think me a great braggart — but you know I must give an inventory of my commodities. When I was staying at Mr. Johnson's, he had an accumulation of law papers to be copied. Grace Johnson and I assisted him, and he gave me the credit of doing mine in right clerkly style. Mama herself taught me to write, and now, dear mama, I may pay you for the pains you took in forming my hand.’
‘It is the only thing, my child, I ever taught you.’
‘But, my dear Mrs. Orme, you have given her a firstrate education, and she is now going to prove to you that this is the safest investment of capital.’
My friend, propitiated by these agreeable truths, was evidently leaning our way, when a new difficulty occurred to her.
‘But how,’ she asked, ‘is Augusta to get this work? I had rather starve than she should go bustling about to book stores, music shops, and lawyers' offices.’
‘I have thought of all that, mama, and I mean to get Mr. Rayson to make inquiries for me. I shall ask the favor of him as freely as if he were my father.’
‘Your acquaintance, Augusta,’ said I, ‘with Clement Rayson, has made astonishing progress since the fire.’
‘Yes, our walk down Wall street, that morning, put us on a friendly footing at once, and ever since, he has been as kind to mama and me as possible. He has a very fine library, and he lends us his books, and obliges us in every possible way.’
[p. 241]
‘I knew,’ said I, ‘his library occupied the apartment next yours, and to tell you the truth, I was afraid your piano might annoy him — he is not fond of music.’
‘Oh pardon me ! indeed he is, for he has asked me again and again to play the songs I had unconsciously sung to him through the wall. I am sure you are wrong, no one seems to relish them as he does.’
I believed I was right, but I had the grace not to persist in saying so, while I admired the rare happiness of Augusta's mind, in being unsusceptible to small as well as great evils. Mrs. Orme, after a good deal of persuasion, more availing with her than reason, came into our plans, and I was deputed to engage Clement Rayson's friendly offices.
At my request, I was admitted to his library, where I unfolded my errand. I spoke of Augusta as I felt, and I am sure his heart responded, for never did I see his fine face so lit with animation, till I chanced to quote, as a sort of apology for the trouble we were giving him, the reason Augusta had assigned for the freedom she felt in applying to him. His countenance changed — he repeated my words with a vexed accent, ‘as soon as if I were her father! would she?’ At that moment, fortunately, Augusta commenced one of his favorite songs, and exorcised the evil spirit. He was all ear till she finished, and then reverting to our last words, ‘tell me,’ he asked, ‘honestly, do I look so desperately old?’
‘Oh no! two minutes ago, you might have passed for a gallant lover, who indited sonnets to his mistress' eye brow, and secretly sent her those orthodox love-tributes — bouquets!’ He blushed, and knocked down half a dozen books by a sudden movement of his arm. While
[p. 232]
he was replacing them, I added, ‘when my friends first came to this house, I confess you looked to me careworn— I might have taken you for full thirty.’
‘I am thirty-one precisely. That, however, is not quite old enough for Miss Augusta's father. However he added, wisely shifting the subject to a better point of view, ‘I am content to make any impression that affords me an opportunity of serving her. An admirable creature she is, and most fortunate!’
‘Admirable she certainly is, but I should not select this moment of her life to call her fortunate.’
‘Is she not plucked from the brink of fashionable life, and an opportunity afforded her of using her fine faculties to some purpose?’
Every man has his mania. I was aware of Clement Rayson's and forbore to oppose it.
Nothing could be more zealous, than was Rayson in procuring employment for Augusta. His zeal might have been stimulated by the certainty that if her earnings were intermitted, she and her mother must seek less expensive lodgings. So never a day passed over her head that she had not that prime blessing — plenty of work; and time to read, to sew, to walk, (how, in spite of the snow-storms, ice, slop, and avalanches of this worse than polar winter, has she daily achieved a two or three mile walk!) to play, and sing, and be agreeable; in short, to do every thing, even ‘lady-like work.’ Best of all was it, in her mother's opinion, that she found time to accept the civilities of certain fashionable people, whose attentions to her were no wise abated, by their knowledge of the fact that she worked for her living. Superior people are not superior to
[p. 243]
prejudices, but if truth can be fairly brought to bear upon them, it dissolves them as the direct rays of the sun melt away the ice. As a fashionable equipage that had brought visiters to the Ormes, drove away from the door, ‘there are exceptions to my rule,’ thought Clement Rayson. ‘I was wrong to involve a whole class in the opinion I had conceived of individuals of that class.’ For the first time it occurred to him, that the inconstancy of his early love might have been rather owing to some inherent defect in her, than to the influence of her fashionable associates. ‘After all,’ thus he concluded his mental reverie, ‘there is no character to be relied on but that which, instead of being subdued by circumstances, resists and controls them — a character like Augusta Orme's.’
When a man — be he full thirty — begins to make a young lady his standard of ideal perfection, the next act of his drama may be anticipated.
I knew my friends were getting on well, that Augusta was turning her industry to good account, often earning by mere copying three dollars a day, [6]* and that Mrs. Orme was enjoying the sense of independence and security naturally inspired by the exercise of her daughter's power, and satisfied they were happy, and being otherwise occupied, I had not seen them for more than a month when, one fine morning, a ring at the street door was followed by Augusta's appearance in my room. Her face was full of meaning. I could not guess what
[p. 244]
it meant. She was embarrassed too, the first time I had ever seen her so.
She untied and retied her bonnet, sat down, rose, and sat down again—then after a vain struggle burst into tears, the first I had ever seen flow from her bright eyes; and finally, throwing a letter into my lap exclaimed, ‘what a fool I am!’ and laughed.
‘That laugh at any rate, proves you are yourself,’ I said, ‘which I very much doubted.’
I read the letter. It was from Clement Rayson—the very ‘quotidian of love’ was upon him.
‘You find it hard to say no to so ardent a lover.’ No reply. ‘There is no evidence here,’ I continued, ‘that the climate of full thirty has chilled his heart.’
‘How can you always remind me of that foolish speech?’
‘Then you do not mean to say no?’
‘I mean to do just what you advise me—if ’ she added archly, and in her natural vein, ‘you advise me as I wish. Here is anothyer letter, and this it is that perplexes me.’ The second letter was brief, and like its precursor, unfit for quite sane readers. Therefore we copy it.
‘The enclosed I wrote two days ago, but had not the courage to send it to you. Necessity now makes me bold. Within the last hour I have received intelligence that obligers me to go to Europe—for two years! – perhaps longer—I must sail next week. I cast all on a single die—happiness or misery is before me. If I go alone, I go the most wretched outcast on earth.’
‘If you invest me with the right, I shall beg Mrs. Orme to go with us. Us! Am I not presumptuous?’
[p. 245]
My pencil was in my hand. 'Shall I cross out this us, Augusta?'
‘First tell me, do you not think it is quite too hasty?’
‘Why, let us see, your acquaintance began on the morning of the 17th of December. January, February, March — three months under the same roof, beginning with paternal protection on the one part, and filial confidence on the other—‘
‘Pray — if you love me, pray do not again advert to that, but tell me honestly, do you not think it is quite too short a time to have matured a sentiment to be relied on for life?’
‘Some fruits ripen wonderfully fast in some soils, and under certain influences.’
‘But you do think — I am sure of it from your repeated hints--’ now there was a tremulousness in her voice, as in the patient's when he discloses his worst symptom to his physician, ‘you do think the difference of age an objection?’
‘An inferior objection to thousands that are every day surmounted.’
Her face brightened. ‘And you think it possible perfectly to recover from a first love — from an attachment so strong as that which Clement confesses in his first foolish letter he long cherished for that jilt?’
‘Possible! every day's experience proves it to be very easy.’
‘There is no use’ she said, her pretty lips curling into their natural smile, ‘in urging any more objections, for you will certainly obviate them.’
‘Yes, Augusta, just as long as I see you urge them to be obviated. That decides the affair in my opinion.
[p. 246]
This affection which is the staple of life springs up and is matured under every variety of circumstances, character and condition. The only point to be settled, is that it exists in its purity and perfection. In this case, I am quite sure as to that point, so are you, my dear ; now run home and write a fit answer to this ‘foolish’ letter.’ She threw her arms around my neck. Love, like a fire kindled for a specific purpose, imparts its warmth to whatever approaches it. One propriety occurred to me that my young friend seemed to have overlooked. ‘Is mama propitious?’ I asked.
‘Not yet consulted, because I feared to tell her while there was the least uncertainty as to which way the scale would turn — Clement is such a prodigious favorite with her nowadays.’
‘Then all is well.’ A few days after, in obedience to a previous summons from Augusta, I joined a male friend, and we, with her mother, were the only witnesses of her marriage vows before the altar of Grace Church. She was dressed in the white muslin she had selected for her coming out, and a white camelia in her hair, so like the one presented to her for that occasion, that I at once came to the right conclusion — it was the gift of the same donor.
My friends had secured the best boon of human life, and therefore I resigned without a sigh the expectation that Augusta Orme would have gone on to illustrate my favorite theory — that a good education, and a well principled and happily balanced mind, will render a woman independent of the vicissitudes of fortune.
[*Notes]
[1]* Many persons suppose that a library is not a natural appurtenance for a merchant. This is a mistake. Our merchants constitute a cultivated class, and many among them indulge in the refined luxury of books, to an extent that would be incredible to those who have formed their opinion of the body from some of the impotent members. We happen to know that one of our merchants has a fine library at his house, and another, for his leisure moments at his counting house, where there are duplicates of books of reference — expensive editions of such works as Boyle's Dictionary. This is indeed the luxury of fortune — if that can be called luxury, which, as the political economists say, is reproduced by its consumption.
[2]* We have just heard that the President has fitly rewarded his heroism by a restoration to his place in the navy. An opportunity thus offered him, his promotion may be safely left in his own hands.
[3]* So are most women. Should they be so?
[4]* It is but justice to state that this institution, though originally set on foot for the purpose specified in the text, is no longer limited to that. With the exception of this one very objectionable feature, viz: the facility afforded for the indulgence of a false pride, and sickly sensibility, it is a most creditable institution, and, from the character of the ladies who manage it, we may hope that this imperfection will not long be permitted in deference to prejudices that should be exploded.
[5]* I once heard a young lady say of a gentleman, — a teacher of the learned languages — that he was ‘a charming person, but not in society.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Oh, he works for his living, you know.’ ‘Straws show,’&c.
[6]* Lest the example of our favorite should be impotent for want of credibility, we inform our young lady readers that we have known this amount of labour performed in six hours out of the twenty four , day after day, by a girl minus fifteen.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Full Thirty
Subject
The topic of the resource
The Great Fire of 1835, women and work, May-December romance.
Description
An account of the resource
A young woman and her mother find themselves in reduced circumstances after a fire that devastates New York City. The daughter is supported in her efforts to earn a living by an older female friend of the family, who narrates the story, and a mature bachelor who develops romantic feelings for the young woman.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, [edited by Samuel G. Goodrich], pp. 214-246.
Publisher
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Boston: Charles Bowen
Date
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1837 [pub. 1836]
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1836
As You Like It
bachelors
boarding house
camelias
class
coming out
Cymbeline
fashion
Female education
fire insurance stock
Grace Church
Harpers
heroism
King Lear
Ladies' Depository
marriage
May-December romance
Much Ado About Nothing
New York City
Pyramus and Thisbe
self reliance
Shakespeare
society
The 1835 Great Fire of New York
The Tempest
The Token and Atlantic Souvenir
the unconscious
Wall Street
women and work
-
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4fe5d227036542c5e896129f2f002164
Dublin Core
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Title
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1846
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1846.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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VARIETIES OF SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW YORK
-----
BY MISS CATHARINE M. SEDGWICK
-----
[p. 13]
One might imagine from the political equality of our people, from the diffusion of education, from the general condition (from which few are excepted) of business occupation, that we should find uniformity in social life; that there would be a sort of community of character and intercourse—that it would be in New York as it is in some other cities of our Union where in a similar condition of life every body knows every body. But it is not so. The social circles are as distinct as if the walls of caste were built around them. Each system has its sun, moon, stars of the first magnitude, and its own horizon. There are occasional transits made from one little world to another, but not enough to break up their distinctness.
A friend of mine, on a visit to New York, whose position gave him the entreé of various circles, communicated to me the following particular account of one of his evenings:
“My visit in your city being short,” he said, “I was compelled to make the most of it. I therefore accepted four or five invitations for an evening, which I could well do, as (the evenings being then at their longest) my social chart covered seven or eight hours. My first invitation was to take tea with a Mr. Ruscit, a mechanic, at five o’clock! Five o’clock, as you know, is the dinner-hour with the fashionable up-town family with whom I staid; so I dispensed with my dinner and took a substantial lunch of oysters and rolls at one o’clock, my dinner-hour at home. This hour, according with my habits and my notions of health, put me into high good humor and appetite too. I met my charming hostess going to her dining-room with her young people as I was passing out to my carriage, which, by the way, Ruscit had sent to me, saying, with delicate courtesy, (nature sometimes teaches better than Chesterfield,) that he wished to save as much of my time to himself as possible. ‘So you are going off to the barbarians!’ said my hostess. ‘How can Mr.----- go to much places?’ I heard one of my young friends ask as I shut the door.
“Ruscit himself received me at the door of a modest, comfortable dwelling in East Second street, and introduced me to his wife, who, having been born among the ‘Friends,” still retains their costume—so fitting the sobriety of middle age. Once seen it would be difficult to forget this good matron’s face. Not that there was anything very remarkable in the pure, fair, health-speaking skin, or any thing beautiful in feature or coloring, but there was the record of an ever-dominant kindness of heart, of a sweetness of disposition that had smoothed roughness and plucked out thorns from every body’s path, and that had made that great gain of life, ‘contentment with godliness.’
“There were some dozen persons assembled, including my host’s small family. The sparkling gem among them was his very lovely daughter who, as Ruscit whispered to me, was engaged to a young man present—a rising star in the literary world. This accounted probably for the rather rare books and new publications that were lying on the table. The furniture was plain, but there were three or four beautiful engravings hanging about the rooms. I was pleased to remark the absence of the too common mantle-furniture (even in our mechanics’ houses) of bronzed and gilded lamps and other similar decorations.
Instead of these there were casts, and very good ones, of Canova’s lions, plaster casts of two lovely Greek heads, and an erra cotta vase and pitcher of exquisite forms. My host saw me examining them. ‘I like,’ he said to me in a low voice, ‘to make such objects familiar to my children—they insensibly educate the eye and give them a taste for refined pleasures.’
“These people are not quite the ‘barbarians’ my hostess fancied them, I thought.
“The tea-table was spread in the adjoining parlor after the pattern of old-fashioned New England meals, whose substantial and abundant viands fitly closed a day of industry and temperance. There were tongue and smoked beef, bread and biscuits, and various cakes and sweetmeats—all of home manufacture. One might see by half a look at my good hostess that she was thoroughbred in all those little womanly domestic arts which mould into healthful and hospitable forms the raw materials of sugar and flour. Mrs. Ruscit was bred before the progress of civilization had brought down education to the humble levels of
[p. 14]
society. The worlds of science and art were terra incognita to her; but she was learned, for she was heaven-taught in the humanities that are after all the life of social life. She saw that every body was comfortably established at table. She was politely attentive to me as, for the moment, the guest to be honored, but it was plain that she gave far more thought to the comfort of a little humpbacked child of a friend who was seated at a side-table with the lovers. Her instincts told her that he might chance to be overlooked by them; and when the poor little child dropped one of her best China cups and broke it, she forgot the dignity of her station to go and comfort him. ‘Poor Johnny!’ I overheard her say, ‘don’t cry—it’s not the least matter; I have more of these cups than I want, Johnny.’
“Mrs. Ruscit had no high-bred indifference to the entertainment of her guests. She looked out for each and all—was afraid an elderly lady at table was crowded—bid her younger girls sit closer (the buxom lasses were too solid to pack well)—saw that her delicate preparations were offered to every one, and had a pleasure, in seeing them relished even by those who order their refection from Thompson and Weller.
“My host being interested in schools led me after tea to describing those I had seen abroad, and I perceived it was the habit of his family circle to listen to whatever was new and might be instructive to them. They were all flatteringly attentive except the young lovers, who would fall into a little by-talk. This seemed to disturb my serene friend Ruscit, and once I saw him touch the toe of his future son-in-law, and I caught a word or two of his reply, half said to the young beauty and half in excuse to the father. I think he quoted,
‘In the presence of lovely young Jessie,
Unseen is the lily, unheeded the rose.’
“I said my friend was interested in schools. He is by nature a friend of young people, and being a wise and reflecting man he feels the paramount importance of education in our country. He is a voluntary visitor of the public schools, is acquainted with their teachers, knows half the scholars by name, and all of them by heart. He gave me an account of his establishment. He has some twenty apprentices. ‘The years they are to pass with me,’ he said, ‘comprehend the sowing-season of their lives. They ought not to be devoted solely to the acquisition of their trades. It is not fitting that our young men should be bred like the mere automaton workmen of other countries; it is not fitting that any man should be so bred at this period of the world. I had small opportunity of school education myself. I cannot therefore be their instructor, but I pay them for extra work, and they thus acquire a little fund with which they pay their teachers. They have teachers of mathematics, chemistry, natural philosophy, drawing, music, and French and Spanish! I take upon myself the department of ethics. My boys have a court in which they are tried for offences against the lesser morals and manners. They appoint their own juries and make their own charges and defences, and quietly submit, with very rare exceptions, to the verdicts.*
“In the midst of my friend’s communication the carriage was announced, and I was obliged, most reluctantly, to break away and go off to my second party at half past seven. These are not quite ‘barbarians’ I thought, as the door of this hospitable and happy home closed upon me.
“My next engagement was at Mr. Mallark’s. This gentleman is in high standing in the legal profession. He is but recently a resident in your city, and having had rather a stormy life up to middle age, he seems now to love and seek tranquility. I found a few guests, and tea and coffee and their usual accompaniments, just being served. The lady of the house is like, alas! most of our women past the robustness of youth—an invalid; but her invalidism, instead of degenerating into fretfulness or inanity, is solaced and embellished by refined tastes. A few of the choicest, rarest plants—not neglected and never-blooming—but radiant with flowers, filled one of her windows. Some among them were brilliant tropical plants which she had brought from their West Indian homes, and which seemed not to miss their birthplace in our hot rooms, tended as they are by instructed, skillful and loving hands. Mrs. Mallark’s frequent visits to sea-shores and Southern climes had made her love whatever was native to them. She had cabinets filled with those exquisite shells which seem to have caught and retained in their polished prisons the sunbeams of the bright sea-shores whence they came. The drawing-rooms were enriched with curiosities from the farthest Indies, and furniture of the most curious workmanship from China. This I thought strange, as I knew my host had never been engaged in commerce and had no relations with commercial people. The riddle was solved as soon as I was made acquainted with my fellow guests. Some of them were missionaries, who had expended the strength of their days in the good service of God
[p.15]
and man at our antipodes. They were familiar with the spiritual wants of India and the celestial empire; their kind sympathies were as wide as the circle of humanity, but they knew little of the utilitarian activity about us. I doubt if they had ever heard the names of transcendentalism and Fourierism. They had nothing to do with the passing navigation between the Scylla and Charybdis of popular theorists—they had a holy land of their own, and one might be happier and wiser, and should be better for a glimpse at it.
“From Mallark’s, I passed to the drawing-room of Miss Evertson. It was her reception evening. I was admitted to a rather dimly lighted hall by a little portress, some ten or twelve years old, who led me to a small apartment to deposit my hat and cloak. There was no lighted staircase, no train attendant, none of the common flourish at city parties. “Up stairs, if you please, sir—front room for the ladies—back for the gentlemen;” no indication of an overturn or commotion in the domestic world; no cross father, worried mother, or scolded servants behind the scenes—not even a faint resemblance to the eating, worrying and tossing of ‘the house that Jack built.’ The locomotive was evidently not off the track; the spheres moved harmoniously. To my surprise, when I entered, I found two fair-sized drawing-rooms filled with guests, in a high state of social enjoyment. There was music, dancing, recitation and conversation. I met an intimate friend there, and availing myself of the common privilege of a stranger in town I inquired out the company. There were artists in every department—painting, poetry, sculpture and music. There I saw for the first time that impersonation of genius, Ole Bull. Even the histrionic art asserted its right to social equality there in the person of one of its honorable professors. You may think that my hostess, for one so young and so very fair, opened her doors too wide. Perhaps so, for though I detest the duenna system and believe that the unguarded freedom permitted to our young ladies far safer as well as more agreeable, yet I would rather have seen the mother of Miss Evertson present. Certainly no one ever needed an aegis less than my lovely hostess. She has that quiet delicacy and dignity of manners that is as a ‘glittering angel’ to exorcise every evil spirit that should venture to approach her. How without fortune or fashion she has achieved her position in your city, where every thing goes under favor of these divinities, I am sure I cannot tell. To be sure she has that aristocracy which supercedes all others—that to which prince and peasant instinctively bow—and though unknown in the fashionable world, you would as soon confound the exquisite work of a Greek sculptor with the wax figures of an itinerant showman as degrade her to the level of a conventional belle.
“Yet she does not open her house as a temple to worshipers of whom she is the divinity, but apparently simply to afford her acquaintances the hospitality of a place of social meeting. She retires behind her guests, and seems to desire to be the least observed of all observers. Though I belong, as you know, to the dullest category, and am an ‘old married man’—am not an artist, author or lion of any sort, but only ‘an innocent beast with a good conscience,’ my hostess was particularly kind to me, and I was so charmed with her and with the animated social life about her that I found myself outstaying all her guests, and at half past ten reluctantly took my leave—noting for the first time that the hours had passed away without the usual appliances of an evening party. I had supposed that war might as well be carried on without its munitions, officers as well live without their salaries, children as well go to bed without their suppers, as a party to go off without its material entertainment. But here was the song without the supper, not even those poor shadows of refreshments cakes and lemonade. Here was a young woman without ‘position’—to use the cant phrase—without any relations to the fashionable world, filling her rooms weekly with choice spirits, who came without any extraordinary expense of dress, who enjoyed high rational pleasures for two or three hours, and retired so early as to make no drafts on the health or spirits of the next day. I communicated my perplexity to a foreign acquaintance whom I met at Mrs. Booth’s.
“’Why,’ said he, ‘your fair friend has hit upon a favorite form of society common in the highest civilization. Miss Evertson’s soirees are Parisian—only not in Paris. Not in the world, with the exception of the United States, could a beautiful young woman take the responsibility unmatronized of such a ‘reception.’’
“My evening’s dissipation concluded at Mrs. Booth’s. The pulse of the beau monde had beaten high for a week with the expectation of Mrs. Booth’s party. This was partly owing to the splendor of her new house and her new furniture, and partly to the fashion and accomplishments of the lady, to whose modes of being and doing long foreign travel has given authority. Unfortunately, though three thousand miles from the Old World, we cannot have our independent customs, and in certain things we certainly favor the distasteful theories of the author of ‘the Vestiges of Creation,’ who develops the monkey into the man. There would be something remaining of our imitative progenitors to account for, some of our senseless imitations; such, for example, as going to parties at eleven o’clock, when, in our working-
[16]
day world we must rise and be at our business at nine. But this, en passant, I had plenty of leisure to moralize on the spectacle while my carriage awaited others that preceded it. When at last my coach door was opened, I found a covered and carpeted way was made from the front door to the curb-stone so that the daintiest dame had no shock from the cold pavement or the rough visitation of the Winter’s wind. The chieftain of your city police, a Magnus Koil in figure, guarded the passage and used his brief authority so well that he seemed more like the herald of a feudal castle than the orderly of a citizen.
“Gas and wax candles did their best to imitate ‘heaven’s own blessed light.’ The whole house was sweet with the perfume of flowers of all seasons and from the four quarters of the globe. The two splendid drawing-rooms, communicating after the stereotyped fashion by folding doors, were filled with the highest fashion of the city, with a sprinkling of strangers of distinction—and, that crowning grace to our republican parties—a prince and his attachés! Collinet’s band gave such eclat to the drawing-room and threw some of the guests, who had recently heard him in Paris, into such extacies that one might fancy he breathed the very air of that ‘divine capital’ from his little flageolet.
“You may not take my word for it, but it struck me the ladies were marked by that air of taste and elegance which is said to distinguish your New York women, and why should it not be so? for their dress is Parisian, and the Paris toilet gives law to the world. Still I must confess there seemed to me less beauty under all their exquisite coffures than I had seen among Miss Evertson’s unadorned guests. Perhaps the gas-light was too strong for dress to achieve its greatest miracle—making ‘age seem youth’—for there were world-worn faces where the couleur de rose had passed from every thing but the flowers and feathers.
“A buffet in an apartment in the rear of the drawing-room was embellished with costly silver, glass and china, and supplied throughout the evening with every species of ‘refreshment,’ substantial viands and delicacies, wrought up to such pitch of refinement that they seemed almost to be sublimated out of their materiality. In short nothing was wanting that expense, labor, and fashion could compass; but—the rooms were crowded, the air was loaded; few could hope to enjoy the primary hospitality of a seat; there was no conversation beyond the exchange of half a dozen conventional phrases; and while some twenty fortunate young ladies, who enjoyed the sweet security of parties, monopolized the dancing floor, others, novices in society, or from some other cause (certainly not because they were less pretty or less charming) remained pinioned to the wall silent observers. There were worn men of business dragged into this vortex by parental kindness, while their thoughts still lingered in the warehouse or in Wall street. A few husbands had come forth with reluctant conjugal courtesy; and mamas in plenty were there mere attachées to their daughters. There was no room for ease, no opportunity, were they ever so enriched for it, for conversation. These are the necessary conditions of a party in fashionable life, and its imitations. Mrs. Booth did all that could be done to relieve them. She manifested no ultra modish unconciousness of her guests, but, with the benevolence that has illustrated other places of durance, she ‘remembered the forgotten and attended to the neglected,’ applying, whenever she could, the balm of her sweet smile and opportune word. The desert has its diamond—she was something quite as precious in her drawing-room. Her husband too, with his frank and cordial manners, did all that could be done to preserve the geniality of his home in this ungenial crowd. No power can achieve impossibilities.
“I laid my head on my pillow between one and two o’clock and repassed in my mind the scenes of the evening. I wondered a little at the ‘social ambition’ I had often witnessed in your city—at the limitations of fashionable life, and more than all I marveled at the eager aspirations to attain its dazzling heights. I doubted even if the elevation were not rather apparent than real, and when I compared the social meetings at Miss Evertson’s, Mallark’s, and the ‘barbarian’ Ruscit’s, to the splendid fete at Mrs. Booth’s, it seemed to me that in present and after comfort, in actual enjoyment, and in what most marks the advancement of man and society, they had the superiority.
“You may smile at my rustic taste, but I confess that my thoughts finally settled down on my philanthropic friend Ruscit, his large-hearted wife, and their generous and modest hospitality.
“All conditions have their good and beauty. To my thinking, the flowers that grow in the shade are the sweetest.”
___________
* During the prevalence of the Asiatic cholera in New York, it became a question whether Mr. Ruscit and others seized with the panic should close their workshops. He decided to keep his open. The young men were busy in their working hours, and amusements were provided for their leisure. One among them wrote a drama—others painted and arranged scenery and costumes, and all had a part to perform. Not a case of cholera occurred—not a premonitory symptom—not even the usual Summer illness.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Varieties of Social Life in New York
Subject
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Entertaining and social manners in New York City.
Description
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The narrator, a self-described "old married man," compares and contrasts the entertainment offered in a single evening by a range of New Yorkers of different classes and ages.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
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Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1846, pp. 13-16.
Publisher
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Edited by John Inman and Robert A. West
Date
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1846
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L. Damon-Bach, Shawn Riggins, D. Gussman
Relation
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Collected in The Gem of the Season for 1849, 105-118. New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1849 [pub. 1848]. The Gem of the Season was reprinted as The Gallery of Mezzotints . . . for 1850. New York, 1850.
Language
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English
Type
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Document
"Lovely Young Jessie"
1846
Antonio Canova
China
class
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
domestic arts
education
fashion
hospsitality
hostess
India
Joseph Fourier
Lord Chesterfield
manners
missionaries
New York City
Ole Bull
Paris
Quakers
Robert Burns
Robert Chambers
sculpture
Scylla and Charybdis
Society of Friends
soirees
The Gem of the Season
transcendentalism
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Wall Street
West Indies
-
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af7499cb8850fa0b9be2b4453c2a99f5
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Title
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1847
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“Crescent Beach” By Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick [1847]
“Not upon us or ours the solemn angel
Hath evil wrought,
The funeral anthem is a glad evangel—
The good die not.” Whittier
In the summer of 183-, I passed a month at Crescent Beach. I find, on recurring to my note-book of that period, some passages that may now be published without offensive personality.
It was an unusually hot season, and the proximity of a delicious sea-shore to our great cities were never more enjoyed. Every day our citizens poured down from their streaming streets to bathe their wilted bodies and furrowed faces in the cool waves. There was a charming society that summer gathered at Crescent Beach—many an “immortal flower” among “human weeds.” There were beauties still pre-eminent, beauties returned unspoiled from the flatteries of foreign courts to fill the honored place of American matrons—their past a pleasant dream, their present a golden reality. There were the mothers and wives of statesmen holding the highest positions in the country, women whose intelligence, simplicity and kindly affability set in a bright aspect our democratic institutions. There were very pretty young women, content with the role of good mothers, surrounded by lovely children, bright wreaths of living flowers, chatting away the day good-humoredly over their worsted work and crochet needles. There were – and – who charmed away ennui with amateur music and heart-piercing ballads. There were, too, pretty young girls free from affection and coquetry, and intelligent young men, (Heaven be praised) exempt from conceit or coxcombry. There was the lawyer in his vacation—who can ever forget him! as he passed up and down the room, giving courteous, gentle word to old and young, and gladdening the evening social circle with wit and grace, in those silvery tones that have often made the “wonder mute” in our courts and halls of legislation. And there too was ----as bright and enjoying as he had been thirty years before, his merry laugh ringing on our ears and through our hearts like festal bells. God grant him more lustres, for to that soul of honor, that happy spirit which they will come crowned with “the respect that waits on age.”
There too was — bearing life’s burdens firmly and gracefully, while the freshness, sincerity and charm of youth were still upon her. Already she had bound up her golden sheaves of filial virtue, and, amidst the délassemens of a watering-place, was sowing seeds in young and loving hearts for future reapings.
There, too, were young mothers in retired rooms, keeping patient vigils over sick children, and sisters passing the live-long day in woodland paths and quiet walks along the sea-shore with their invalid brothers, having early waked from the “dream that life was beauty,” and found (without its casting a shadow over them) that “life is duty.”
There was chaff with the wheat. But, to all, the uses of this place seemed to be good. Dissipation and display were, by common consent, avoided. The beach walks in the glorious twilights, and the ocean, solemn as the presence of a divinity, had an elevating power over the lowest, the least susceptible.
I must proceed to relate a few circumstances that may not tend to prove this position, but rather to indicate that the inner rules the outer world.
The first day after my arrival, on going, in the evening, into the drawing-room,
“Who is that excessively pretty woman?” I inquired of an elderly gentleman.
“Which? all these young women are excessively pretty in my eyes!”
“She with a golden hue over her skin as if a sunbeam had lingered there.”
“Oh, that dark complexioned lively little French woman—Madame Joubert.”
“No, no, the one with the cap which the Graces seemed to have dropped on her head.”
“That little jewel? have you been here twelve hours without finding her out? That is Mrs. Louise Ryson, the subject of the curiosity, observation (inalveillance) and gossip of all the very good-natured ladies at Crescent Beach.”
“Mrs. Ryson,” I responded in a tone of some astonishment.
[213]
“Yes, Mrs. Ryson, married a second time, and the mother of that peerless child I saw you talking with as I came from the breakfast-room.”
“Is it possible? The child must be seven years old.”
“She is at least that, and wiser than her years. She has convinced me that Dickens’ little Nell is not an ideal, and that angel-spirits are sometimes invested with mortal mould, and sent to wander here for a little while on some heavenly mission. I expect on some bright morning to see Juliet unfold her wings and mount upward."
I looked at my friend, who was not addicted to romantic moods or sentimental notions. I saw he was earnest. “It was written on her forehead,” he continued, “as the Turkish fatalist would say. It is not only royal physiognomies, like Napoleon’s and Charles I.’s, that have a doom inscribed on them by nature; I have marked it on persons of obscure condition, and seen it realized. Sit down here by me and look attentively at that child. Is there not something over that most lovely face like a shadow on an opening flower?”
He drew me to the window, and we sat down by it. The lady had just entered the drawing-room and sunk on the sofa. She seemed looking for some expected person; when the child, who evidently was not that person, appeared at a farther door, looked round, and bounded towards her. “Dear mamma,” she said, “may I stay by you?” “Yes, Juliet, til I go out—I am going to drive.” “Can’t I go with you, mamma?” “No, Juliet, there’s no room.”
“There used always to be room, mamma.” A gentleman at this moment looked in at the door. My friend touched my arm. Mrs. Ryson’s face lighted. She half rose and sat down again as if afraid of attracting observation; the gentleman advanced towards her, they exchanged a few words in a low voice, he went up to the piazza, and she rose to go to her room. “Then I can’t go with you, mamma,” said the child in a saddened voice. “No, why do you tease me, Juliet! why can’t you go and amuse yourself as the other children do; you are so odd.”
“So I am,” said the child, dejectedly following her mother; “for there is nobody to mate with me.” The mother soon after came to the piazza in a very handsome hat and mantilla; was handed into the carriage by the gentleman who addressed her in the drawing-room, and drove off. In the meanwhile I had learned from my friend, who was an established lounger at Crescent Beach, all that he knew of Mrs. Ryson’s history.
She had been bred at one of our fashionable boarding schools, and had learned there just as much as might be expected, to prepare her for the serious duties and stern requisitions of life. She married at seventeen a man she loved, at eighteen she was a mother and a widow, and at twenty-two she was again married to a respectable prosperous merchant, a man of sound head and sound heart. Louis Ryson was attracted by her beauty and grace; but when he assumed the responsibility of her happiness and the support and protection of her unportioned child and herself through life, he believed she had sense enough to perform well a woman’s pat, that is to say, that she would be a credible, affectionate and domestic wife. As Mrs. Ryson and her companion drove off, Robert Liston, the friend whom I have quoted above, a man of shrewdness and experience, said to me, “there is an intrinsic difficulty in the case of our young married women. I mean those who have been fashionably educated and associated, and who have not (a few have) mind enough to lay their own course. They have accomplishments and tastes that belong to the class born to the dolce far niente life, or if you will allow me an illustration familiar to the ruder days of my youth, they have the ruffle without the shirt. Your sex has by nature more sensitiveness and more refinement than ours. This is developed by your education. You get glimpses into the world of art, you learn the caning about painting and sculpture, and the names of at least of the operas, composers and singers. Now, too, as your gods are unknown gods to us,—for the most part cotton and corn dealers, or importers of dry good, or if we chance to belong to the learned professions, still operatives,—delving all day, with no time to give to the mere embellishments of life,—so our young women are left to be amused by foreign men, who have, as I said, the ruffle without the shirt, or by those few idle men of fortune among us, who like Mrs. Ryson’s admirer, Rupert Reed, have time to acquire certain foreign graces, and time and leisure to practice foreign follies and vices, one of the worst of them being to profit by the coquetries of pretty, weak and very assailable young women, like poor Mrs. Louis Ryson.” Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the daily coaches. “There is the owner of the property we were speaking of,” continued my friend Liston, pointing to one of the gentlemen alighting from the coach, a man of some eight and twenty, with a fair open countenance, but remarkably destitute of that nicety and delicatȇsse to which ladies give the indefinable name of an ‘air.’
“Is that Mrs. Ryson’s husband?” I asked.
Liston smiled at my tone and replied, “That is, and a good honest fellow too; a man respected in his counting-house, and in Wall-street, and kind and affectionate in his own household; but he has no gift at making tableaux of life. You see the sort of person he is.” Little Juliet, who ever since her mother drove off had been standing listlessly by the railing, gazing in the direction her mother had gone, came forward at the arrival of the
[214]
coaches, to receive her step-father. He kissed her and asked ‘where was her mother?’ “She has gone to take a drive,” replied the child, in the manner that indicated she would rather not have had that answer to give.
“I am glad of it, it is a charming afternoon, but why did she not take you with her, Juliet?”
“There was not room.” It was evident to me that Juliet gave this answer because she had no art to give another. A painful blush overspread her face as she spoke. Ryson misinterpreted it. “Never mind, my dear,” he said, “you shall have a drive to-morrow, and here is something for you in the mean time,” and from a multitude of parcels, fresh fruit, fresh books, etc. with which he had loaded himself for his wife and her daughter, he took a huge one of candies. “Oh, papa, how kind you always are! Let me take some of your things to your room. Oh, here are mamma’s worsteds!”
“Yes, I went back for them, I had forgotten them in my hurry. No, dear, I’ll take them all in.” He turned as he was entering the door, and said, “Tell your mother, Juliet, when she comes, that I shall be in directly. I have promised a gentleman to play a game of billiards with him before tea.” Again he turned back and said, “There is a parcel of burnt almonds inside yours, for your mother. Don’t open that, Juliet, you know she particularly likes burnt almonds.”
“There is something very kindly in his voice,” said I to my friend, as Ryson passed in, “and an air of simplicity, frankness, and unconventionalism that particularly pleases me.”
“And are you not rather struck with his being remarkably unexacting, unjealous—the poor man never even asked with whom his wife had gone; he thinks no evil, and therefore fears none.”
“And perhaps has none to fear,” I replied, “the rust in our society is a good element.”
“And therefore,” said my friend, “should never be abused. Of all the birds of prey who hover over society and live by devouring the weak, the libertine is the most atrocious and most detestable. I have known Rupert Reed from his childhood. The rich inheritance that awaited him, instead of stimulating his parents to fit him for the great responsibility of using and dispensing, procured for him exemption from restraint. He had from nature a quick perception and strong will, but he grew up as ignorant as a clown, with the exception of some accomplishment in music. He had some taste for it, and it was the grace in request among the people he consorted with. At seventeen he came into possession of his immense fortune, and for three or four years he abandoned himself to a life of pleasure, so called. His constitution was then exhausted, and he ‘brought up,’ as they term it. He changed his field of action, he married a beautiful woman, and neglected her after six months; he became haut-ton, was exclusive in his habits; in the world, but not of it, he bestows his favors on those only who are distinguished for fashion, or beauty, or talent, r a certain caste. Now it is a brilliant actress, opera singer, or ballet-dancer; now a debutante in high life, and now the pretty wife of some confiding, working city merchant, whom accident has made the belle of a season at a watering-place. like poor Mrs. Ryson. He like eclat, and therefore he always marks as his prey such as are sparkling in sunshine.”
“But I am astonished that decent women should permit the advances of a man whose libertinism is so notorious as Rupert Reed’s!”
“My dear, innocent friend! I beg your pardon, and your sex’s, but when was reputed libertinism a bar to a man’s acceptance in society, provided he has a very large fortune, has an ultra and rather refined coxcombry, studies foreign conventional refinements, and bears a name (that potent supreme charm in our democratic society!) that has belonged to a fashionable dynasty for two or three generations. Besides, there is, it must be acknowledged, some charm peculiar to the individual. I am inclined to think it has something to do with animal magnetism. There are certain men and certain women too, whose attractions are inexplicable. This very Rupert Reed broke the heart and overclouded the destiny of a gifted young creature as far above him as the stars are above us. The facts came to me mysteriously, and I cannot communicate them. God help her! I never see his bloodless cheek without thinking that the curse I heard her father utter is eating ‘his life away!’”
I hope my readers will not conclude that my friend and I are merely cold and curious observers, analyzing and depicting our fellow-creatures as coolly as a naturalist does a fish. It does not become me to speak of myself; but of him I must say he has far more humanity than curiosity, far more of sorrow and pity than anger for human folly, and that excepting in his confidential communications with me, he maintained an apparent ignorance of the gossip in active circulation at Crescent Beach, in relation to poor little Mrs. Ryson and the reptile into whose web she was falling. I would forewarn my readers, too, against the trouble of looking on the map for Crescent Beach. It is only a name we have given to one of the sea-shores to which our citizens go down in herds during the hot summer months to refresh soul and body. Why not call things by their right names! Simply because we wish to invest with a slight veil of fiction circumstances which, having transpired some few years since, are already forgotten.
As I parted from my friend, Mrs. Clinly joined me. Mrs. Clinly is a star of magnitude, though declining from the ascendant, she has been a beauty;
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was younger once—is now a grandmother—and very young and very handsome for a grandmother. She still hovers round the precincts of the world she once shone upon, and by no very violent imagination might be supposed to be a spirit condemned to note and publish the follies in which she indulged, till they forsook her. She is called a very good-natured person, and so she is as far as an easy, careless deportment goes—a readiness to introduce a fashionable stranger, to do an acceptable office for a prominent actor on this scene—to impart a new fashion, or teach a new stitch. She has a quick recognition, and what seems a spontaneous smile for every passer-by, but when they have passed, listen, if you will, to her annotations—her treasured budget of private anecdotes—“They are pretty girls! but what a pity the men are shy of them!”
“Shy of them! I have observed no such thing!”
“Oh, they are, I assure you, on account of that old story about their mother; it is very wrong they should suffer for it, poor girls!”
“Lovely dress of Mrs. —’s. My husband says, he had rather look at her dresses than pay for them. I suppose he could afford it as well as poor Mr. ----.”
“Just observe” (behind her fan) “Mrs. Rollins and Mrs. Smith when they meet,”—the parties pass us, —“they did not even bow. Mrs. Smith has mentioned some little thing Mrs. Rollins said about Mrs. John Buller. How are you to-day, Mrs. Rollins?” she continued to that lady, who now approached us, and who I thought had, en passant, looked very much askance at Mrs. Smith.
“It’s a lovely day; did you bathe, Mrs. Rollins?”
“No; I haven’t been in my room all day. I detest living in public and going in herds that your people are so fond of!”
“Not in feeling. No, I assure you, I have lived too long abroad to identify myself with them. One gets one’s tastes so changed, that one can never be at ease here, I think. They talk of spies abroad—Lord bless me!—it seems you are all spies here! there is no freedom. You must do as everybody else does, and say what everybody else says. If you express an opinion that differs from others, on character, religion, or what not, it is repeated and garbled! If this were done in society comme il faut in Europe, the repeater would be sacrificed. Depend on it, mesdames,” she concluded, shrugging her shoulders, and darting a glance along the piazza, at the offending Mrs. Smith; “this tittle-tattle belongs to demi-civilization. I made some chance remark about that poor little Mrs. Ryson’s flirtation with Rupert Reed. I am sure I think none the worse of her—il faut l’amuser; but repeated, I am made to appear—what, you may imagine;” and she writhed a mouth that had once been pretty, into an expression of bitter resentment. At this moment, little Juliet came on the piazza, her face lightened, holding in one hand a bunch of fresh pond lilies (the exquisite lotus). “O! Your Mamma has returned from her drive; has she, my dear?” said Mrs. Clinly, who, if she had been Mrs. Ryson’s recording angel, or accusing sprit, could not have kept a more exact watch over her movements. “No,” replied Juliet, the passing ray of sunshine vanishing from her face; “do you think anything can have happened to mama, Mrs. Clinly?”
“Oh, no, my dear,” replied Mrs. Clinly, with a sly smile that expressed more than one should have thought in the presence of that innocent child. “Mr. Rupert Reed is a very safe driver for your mother—in one sense,” she added in a lowered voice, to Mrs. Rollins, who merely shrugged her shoulders, as if the insinuation were a very light matter. At his moment, Mrs. Duncan passed along, dispersing at the right hand and the left all the lilies she had not given to little Juliet. I have nothing special to tell of Mrs. Duncan, and yet I pause, as my memory goes back to that period as if a good angel were passing by me. I wish I had the power to describe her, and to make others feel, as I did then, the influence of her character. Mrs. Duncan was somewhere on that stage of pilgrimage of life between thirty and forty, when most women, if not worse by the experience of life have lost the freshness of their interest in it. Not so with dear Mrs. Duncan; she was as frank, fresh, confiding, and affectionate as a girl of sixteen, just—not from boarding school; no, there for the most part, there is a forcing process of world-experience, but—from a happy home. Mrs. Duncan reversed that ingenious chemical analysis that extracts poison from every earthly substance, and contrived to distil good from everybody and everything. It seemed to me that her sunny face, by a mysterious and improved daguerreotype, marked on her heart every line of beauty and form of loveliness, and left the rest—refuse to her. On her heart—Mrs. Clinly was stamped the kind, all-admiring person she would fain be; Mrs. Duncan was too unconventional to stand high with the aspirants to high fashion, of Crescent Beach. They spoke of her as a person laboring under some disqualification, as ‘poor Mrs. Duncan.’ Poor! She was one of those rich ones whose treasures are every hour accumulating where the moth of worldliness and the rust of selfishness do not corrupt. But as I
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was saying, Mrs. Duncan came floating towards us. She was a woman whose specific gravity would not have promised a floating motion, but no sylph moved lighter; it was buoyancy of a cheerful, unburdened spirit. She had a curly-headed boy in her arms, and two children running after her. She looked the type of loving charity. “You are such a favorite with the children, Mrs. Duncan,” said Mrs. Clinly. “I believe you keep them all in sugar-plums.”
“Any how, she has not given us sugar-plums to-day,” said one of the children, bristling. “We should not love some people, if they gave us all the sugar-plums in the world; should we, Jem?” added the boy. The children at Crescent Beach were franker than their parents.
“There’s your tea-bell; away with you, boys,” said Mrs. Duncan, who perceived their words were not sugar-plums to Mrs. Clinly. “It’s natural to me to love children,” she added, kissing them and pushing them off; “their noise never troubles me; there is a great difference in people about that; some mind it.”
“Oh, it is an intolerable nuisance!” exclaimed Mrs. Rollins. “There is no country, I believe, in the world, but this, where children are permitted en scene. But here, it is not men and women, but children, that are the actors on the world’s theatre. The drawing-room is a menagerie, and these young animals (whelps I won’t call them) are careering up and down, while the men and women are thrust to the wall.”
This was an evil we all had suffered under at Crescent Beach, and I believe all of us, excepting dear Mrs. Duncan, were ready to take up arms against this sea of children. “I don’t know how it is,” she said, “in other countries. I have never been there. My husband means to go as soon as he can arrange, but he has so many orphans under his care. It is not everybody you know, that is willing to be a guardian; it is always to fall on Mr. Duncan. Not but that it’s very pleasant; there are three girls who dine with us every Sunday, not at all connected either, who seem like our own children. But I hope the time will come when we can go. I may feel differently when I have seen as much of the world as Mrs. Rollins has. Now children don’t disturb me, they are so happy here. It’s their vacation you know, and they must have a little range.”
“But, dear Mrs. Duncan, their mothers are so shockingly negligent of them,” urged Mrs. Rollins.
“Are they?” replied Mrs. Duncan, with the accent of one does not accede, and will not contradict. “I have not observed that. There are no dangers for them here to run into, and they come here for their health and diversion, and they are so happy. It’s healthy to be happy; don’t you think so, Mrs. Rollins?”
“That may be,” replied Mrs. Rollins, “but I have no notion that we are to be sacrificed to make these little brats happy, or that they are any the happier for it. I tell you, Mrs. Duncan, if you and your husband ever achieve that voyage to Europe, you will see the benefit of discipline and subordination.”
She walked off with the air of one who as uttered an undeniable truth.
“She is a very peculiar woman,” said Mrs. Duncan, “but very agreeable—how much she has seen of the world!”
“Rather too much,” said I.
“Yes, she is very ill-natured,” said Mrs. Clinly.
“Of course she has her own views,” said Mrs. Duncan, “but I must think she is a good woman. She sits alone in her own room a great deal, and I don’t believe that any one who is not good likes to be alone.”
Mrs. Clinly made no reply but walked to the end of the piazza, to explore (as I, perhaps unjustly, believed) the road by which Mrs. Ryson was to return. “Mrs. Clinly and Mrs. Rollins do not seem like one another,” said Mrs. Duncan; “but I dare say they will in a few days, when they come to know one another better. I am not much accustomed to these public resorts, but it appears to me that one of the uses of coming to them is to do away prejudices. Now there are people here of such different religions; and poor Mrs. Rollins,--some of the ladies think she has no religion at all, because somebody overheard her say, one day, that she ‘believed Mr. Horatio Smith had gone to ---- (you know where), if there were such a place.’ Now, she reads her Bible every day, and of course she must believe there is the place she alluded to—“
“They are coming!” exclaimed Mrs. Clinly, returning to us and interrupting Mrs. Duncan’s charitable speculations.
“Who is coming?” asked Mrs. Duncan.
“Mrs. Ryson and her—”
Mrs. Duncan filled the hiatus according to her own honest impressions, and called out to Juliet, “Run, Juliet, love! there’s your mamma and papa!”
Juliet did not run, but remained drooping, like the beautiful lily she was picking to pieces.
“Dear child, don’t spoil that lily,” said Mrs. Duncan, “you know I gave them to you for your mamma’s hair.”
“I put mamma’s in water,” replied Juliet, “and this I kept for myself,” and raising her eyes, which I thought were filled with tears, though a dim smile flitted over her lips, “I think,” she added, “it feels pretty much as I do.”
“Why you dear little thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Duncan, “are you not well? have you a head-
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ache? Perhaps you have eaten something that does not agree with you.”
Juliet slid away from the kind lady, without replying, and joining her mother, who had alighted at the end of the piazza, and, her arm in Rupert Reed’s, was walking across it to the entrance door. Juliet said something in a low voice to her as they passed me. I did not hear her, but I was struck by Mrs. Ryson’s mounting color. I fancied Juliet had announced her father. Mrs. Ryson hastily withdrew her arm, and went to her own apartment.
At tea she appeared with her husband. They sat opposite to me. Mrs. Clinly on my right hand. “Our vis-à-vis does not look quite as animated and excited as we sometimes see her,” she whispered; and added, aloud, to her husband, “do you find Mrs. Ryson improving?”
“Not as I expected,” replied Mr. Ryson, “I have been laughing at her for getting the blues at Crescent Beach. To me, this is such a delightful change from the city, that I am half intoxicated with spirits.” And so it appeared, for he went on talking in a loud voice with the gentlemen around him, about the city-news, the arrival of the steamer, the rise of corn, etc., etc., while his pretty wife sat by him, languid and listless.
But a change had come over her, when two hours after I saw her in the drawing-room. She had added some pretty decorations to her dress, her color was heightened, and I saw that her husband felt a pleasurable and natural vanity, as, when leading her into the room, he heard her pointed out to some new comers as the prettiest woman in Crescent Beach. He walked up and down the room, his wife on one side, and Juliet on the other, a proud and happy man. “How do you like it here, my child,” he said.
“Not half so well as at home, papa.”
“You don’t? You are the girl for my money! But why, in the name of reason, do you not like it, Juliet? it seems to me you children have it all your own way.”
“I do not have it at all my own way,” said Juliet. “Before we came to Crescent Beach I was always with mamma, and mamma loved me better than any one, and now—”
“Hush, Juliet,” said her mother; “what nonsense are you talking. It was high time we should leave home, you were getting so selfish as to think I must be wholly devoted to you—body and soul.”
“Oh, my dear Juliet, you must not be selfish; there is nothing so disagreeable as selfishness!” said the loving step-father. Soon after, in the shuffling up of the company, I found myself on the sofa with the Rysons. Robert Liston, who had been one of a circle of waltzers, took a chair beside me. “Young America!” he exclaimed, with a deep, inward laugh, peculiar to himself. “There is,” he added, “something either very naïve, or frank, or daring, in some of our young ladies. I just heard Miss Lupton say to Ned Bristol, after whirling around with him in what we old-fashioned people should call a very close embrace, ‘Now, Mr. Bristol, why can’t you waltz like Rupert Reed. You come too near me! and you put your arm too far round!’ Waltzing may sanctify such remonstrances, but I fancy if Miss Lupton were to make these elegant remarks to a gentleman sitting by her, her father might feel bound to call him out. Oh, Lord! ‘what we are we know, but not what we shall be.’ I once thought the freedom of our young women guaranteed their purity.”
“You think differently now?”
“I would not trust to freedom alone. Those must be well broken animals that require neither reins nor blinders. And reins, surely, are of no use where such a mother as Mrs. Lupton holds them.”
“Anne, my love,” she said, as Bristol left her daughter to seek another partner “you are quite right, Bristol does not waltz comme il faut. Mr. Reed,” she said, “I am half mind to ask you to waltz with Anne; entre nous, I infinitely prefer she should waltz only with married men; and you waltz so—so differently from people in general.” Reed bowed to the compliment, and took out Miss Anne; and the chary mother has the pleasure of seeing her waltz with the most fashionable man in the room. I think little Juliet, who had nestled close to me, had, without understanding the purport of my friend’s remarks, a sort of feeling of his meaning, or perhaps it was the instinct give to the weakest creatures, by which they detect the presence of an enemy; for, soon after, when Rupert Reed asked her mother to waltz, the child said, impulsively, “Oh, don’t, mamma—don’t!”
“Juliet!” said her mother, in a tone of deep displeasure, and then turning to her husband, she added, “Mr. Ryson does not dance, and he is so seldom here, that much as I love waltzing I shall not waltz to-night.” There was a false tone in the voice—poor lady! her path had become a devious one.
“Oh, Mary!” said the good-natured husband, “waltz with Mr. Reed, by all means, if you like it. Live and let live, Mr. Reed, that’s my rule. I will go on the piazza, in the meantime, and smoke a cigar.” He went, and escaped many a whisper that might have enlightened him, as his wife went the giddy round with a glowing cheek and downcast eye.
The next evening just before sunset, I saw little Juliet sitting pensive and alone on the piazza, as I was crossing it to go down to the beach for my usual evening walk. I asked her to come with
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me, and she expressed her acquiescence by taking my hand and kissing it with a grace and gentleness that marked all she did. “This is a beautiful vesper-service, Juliet,” I said as we paced along over the compacted sands, from which the waves had just retreated. “Vesper-service! what does that mean?” She asked. I explained. She was silent for a few moments, while her fine hazel eye turned to the horizon, along with the black clouds lay like gigantic structures, castle and tower. The sky kindled around the sun, and he seemed to sink down into a field of fire that lit up these black masses, so that they shone like the temples of Peru, with their golden friezes, and incrustations of amethysts, rubies and sapphires. The heavens were tinged to the very zenith with gold, and red shading off to the faintest rose color; and the ocean, as far as we could see it, reflected the ruddy light.
I felt the child’s delicate little fingers pressing my hand more closely, she instinctively paused and gazed on the lines of surf, as the green arches rose, careering on, one after another, and threw off their bright crests. Juliet stood, as if entranced, and then turned her eyes to me, and would have spoken, but her habitual timidity overcame her impulse.
“What is it, Juliet,” I asked, “you were going to say something to me?”
“Yes,” she said, re-assured by my manner. “After you spoke of the vesper-service, I remembered my mother took me once to a vesper-service, and I was thinking how much better was the ocean than the organ; and it seems to me,” she added, turning her eager gaze to the feathery clouds, “as if there were millions of angels standing there, where the sun went down, and I can bear—almost, I mean—soft, low music coming from them, like a response to those deep ocean sounds. I have had some such thoughts before, when I walked here alone, but your speaking of the vesper-service made me understand them better!”
I said nothing. I would not encourage the imaginations of this child of seven years—I dared not repress them. I felt then—I feel now—that she may have held communion with the angel that stood before her Father’s face. I never saw anything human so angelic! We had already walked beyond the usual limit of the strollers on the beach, we paused again and looked oceanward, as those are wont to do who feel its mysterious charm. Troops of the little beach-bird, were chasing their prey, as the last refluent wave left it on the sand, where there was scarcely water enough to wet their claws, and yet enough to reflect the brilliant dyes of the sky, so that it looked as if they were running over a pearly pavement, and as the crested wave met them they spread their wings and mounted over them—‘skill triumphing over might!’ I thought. My little companion had another thought. “My cousin died last spring,” she said. “My cousin Sally Vore. I loved Sally dearly—these birds make me think of her—so she rose over all the waves that came against her.” The child’s voice trembled as she added, “I have nobody now, Sally is gone!”
“Nobody, my dear Juliet! your Mamma?”
“Oh yes, indeed, Mamma; but since we came here, Mamma—” her voice faltered, and she paused.
“Your Mamma is very much occupied here,” I said, “and so is every one. You will soon go home and then you will have your mamma all to yourself again; but it is time for us to turn, there is the evening star shining through that rosy haze—we are alone on the beach.” We turned around, and found we were not alone. Retracing our steps for a few moments we met Mrs. Ryson and Rupert Reed. They were neither of them habitual pedestrians, and were both evidently in that sort of absorption which makes one unmindful of time or space. Juliet sprang towards her mother. “Come home, mamma,” she said, “do come home, it’s late—come home with me.”
It was evident, that Mrs. Ryson felt a sudden revulsion in the tide of her feelings at the unexpected meeting with her child. She stood still for a half moment and looked around her like one that grasped the brink of a precipice, and then recovering herself she repulsed the little girl not ungently, and said, “Finish your walk with that lady, my dear; I shall finish up directly.” Juliet returned to my side, but she walked on silently and languidly, and often looking back. After a short time, she drew a long breath as if relieved from a pressure, and said, “Mamma has turned about—I do not like that Mr. Rupert Reed; do you?”
I answered heartily, “No, I do not.”
“And yet,” she resumed, “I should like him if it were not he—you are laughing at me—I mean if any one else did what he does I should like him. He has given mamma the loveliest case of perfumes, and a beautiful cross. I am sure it is he, for you know he is the only person mamma seems to know very well here; but perhaps I should not tell it—I have no one to talk to here, and I told you before I thought; and I am afraid mamma would not like it, for she has packed the things quite away at the bottom of her trunk!”
“O!” thought I, “are these things thrown into the scale with protestations and flatteries to buy a woman!—a wife!—a mother! My country-women! you have been marked for your purity, your conjugal virtue, your maternal devotion; you have been held worthy guardians of a holier temple than that kept by the ancient bestals—the temple of married love and purity. Be careful that you enter it with a full sense of its high
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duties, its inappreciable happiness, and infinite rewards. Keep your faith unsullied by a disloyal wish or thought, it will be the brightest jewel of your immortal crown. Let your virtues be as a circle of fire around you, that the serpent, in the form of a libertine, dare not approach. If he come adorned with foreign graces, accomplishments and refinements, he is still the reptile whose touch defiles. Do not admit him to your houses, nor tolerate him in your society! Resist the flood of foreign princesses and duchesses, who, when the glare of their position vanishes, are lower than the weak, tempted, and betrayed wretches of our streets, whom you would spurn from your thresholds.”
* * * * * *
A few days passed on; Mr. Ryson had gone to the South on business, and consequently his frequent runs to Crescent Beach were suspended. Mrs. Ryson seemed to lose all sense of observation of her absorption with her lover—as I am sorry to say Rupert Reed was called, by some of the ladies at Crescent Beach—who, if Mrs. Ryson had been on the brink of the grave with a fever, would not have spoken lightly of it; and yet the abyss yawning before her—and oh, how to be closed!—was infinitely worse, more hopeless than the grave. It was impossible to see her without feeling an interest in her fate. She was not yet five and twenty. Her face did not indicate strength of character, but had the positive beauty of perfect symmetry and coloring, and added to this a certain sweetness, affectionateness of innocence still hung about her, giving charm to the whole, like the fading light of the sinking sun. Besides, she was the mother of Juliet—this should have exorcised an evil spirit!
It was about ten o’clock Sunday morning, when I was walking with Mrs. Duncan on the piazza. Mrs. Duncan is the person in the world of whom if I had a favor to ask (without any claim but my want) I should have asked for it. So, I presume, thought Mrs. Ryson, for she came from her room and said, “I am obliged, Mrs. Duncan, to go suddenly to town to see a relative who is ill. I may be detained a day or two. Will you be kind enough to take charge of Juliet?”
“Oh, certainly, I shall be delighted, my husband and I both think she is the sweetest child we ever saw. I think it quite an honor to be entrusted with her. If I had had such a daughter, I should have been but a worshipper of idols; I could think of nothing else.”
Mrs. Ryson’s eyes were suddenly raised for the first time. They fell again, and a deadly paleness overspread her face. Mrs. Duncan did not seem to observe it. She was most unsuspicious of mortals. “How do you go to town,” she asked; “there is no coach on Sunday.”
“No, I am going in a private conveyance.”
“Alone! that’s not pleasant. Would you not like to have my husband go with you? He goes at any rate, to-morrow. I’ll run and speak to him.”
“No, no, don’t, I am not going alone. Mr. Reed—is—has offered to drive me—he is going to town on his way home.”
Mrs. Ryson turned away with a hasty farewell, and Mrs. Duncan called after her. “Where is Juliet, I want to tell the dear child how glad I am to have her for a little while.”
“She is bathing,” replied Mrs. Ryson, “She is not quite well; I thought she wanted it, and I persuaded her, much against her will.”
After she left us, “It’s a pity, it’s a pity she goes up with that man!” exclaimed Mrs. Duncan, in the voice of a sorrowing angel; “not that there is any real harm in it, but I fear some observations will be made. Everybody here is not charitable!” She touched my arm and pointed to the end of the piazza. There stood Rupert Reed’s equipage, his liveried servant, and Reed himself biting his nails with impatience.
I know not what I should have replied to Mrs. Duncan. Just at that moment our attention was attracted by an unusual noise at the beach. It was the bathing hour, and there were some commotion there—shrill screams mingled with the booming of the waves. In a moment the Beach-wagon, (the vehicle was so called that conveyed the bathers to and fro,) came driving up at most unusual speed, followed by people half dressed, or in bathing dresses. Something had happened, some cause of general consternation. The alarm spread, the people who were gathering in the drawing-room prepared for church, poured on to the piazza. At this moment, veiled, and shrinking from observation, Mrs. Ryson came through the front entrance. The wagon had reached the steps, and amidst exclamations of horror, the dead, drowned body of little Juliet was lifted out of it. The crowd parted, the mother saw her child, uttered a piercing shriek, and fainted on the floor!
Every measure was taken to restore life, but in vain. No one could tell how the accident had happened. Several ladies had seen Juliet go in; some had held her by the hand. The surf was not particularly strong, and no one had apprehended danger. No one had missed her til the man-bather saw her rising quite unconscious to the surface.
She had fulfilled her mission—she had saved her mother’s honor, and passed to immortality.
“O not when the death-prayer is said,
The life of life departs;
The body in the grave is laid,
Its beauty in our hearts.”
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Crescent Beach
Subject
The topic of the resource
Adultery, Summer, Vacation, Beach
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator tells a story about her vacation on a beach, focusing on a little girl’s relationship with her young mother and the mother’s adultery.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Sartain's Union Magazine [edited
by Caroline M. Kirkland] (November 1847): 212-19.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Sartain's Union Magazine
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1847
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Lucinda Damon-Bach; D. Gussman
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
Adultery
Beach
Charles Dickens
Charles I
children
Conjugal virtue
Death
drowning
Female education
Libertines
Libertinism
Little Nell
marriage
Napoleon
Peru
Ryson
Sartain's Union Magazine
Summer
swimming
Vacation
Vespers
Wall Street
waltzing