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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
1847
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
WIDOWHOOD.
BY MISS CATHARINE M. SEDGWICK.
“For thy dear sake, I will walk patiently
Through these long hours, nor call their minutes pain.”
--Frances Anne Butler.
[p. 165]
Many, many years have passed since I was called, with other loving friends, to witness the marriage of Emily Remson to Murray Winthrop. Never was there a better-sorted pair, nor a marriage under happier auspices. They had known each other from childhood; their parents, their grandparents, were friends. There was no element of discord in their natures — they were born to an inheritance of healthy minds and hearts. They were educated with sound views of life and duty. They had the same circle of interests, tastes, and inclinations. They might be strictly called homogeneous—everything in them blending in harmony. There was no difference between them (in these days of bold assertion, to the contrary, we are old-fashioned enough to believe there is a difference), but that which distinguishes the man from the woman. Milton has said it better than any one can say it after him —
[p. 166]
“For contemplation he, and valour form'd,
For softness she, and sweet, attractive grace.”
There could not be, there never were questions of " absolute rule" and " subjection" between them, for their wills were blended in one.
The families of both parties were present, and showers of prayers, and wishes, and sympathies consecrated the occasion. It was a general family festival — a “beautiful hour; when in every cloud stood a smiling angel, who, instead of rain-drops, showered down flowers.”
For fifteen years life fairly kept its promise to them. There was but one flaw in their happiness, and that I have often heard Emily cheerfully say, “I ought not to wish to escape from, and I do not ; there must be something — some earthy sediment in the clearest cup ; and what could I have easier to bear than the ill-health that seems to double my husband's tenderness, and stimulate his invention to open new sources of enjoyment to me.”
We often wish that our countrywomen had more health, more vigour, and more of the independence and self-reliance that spring from physical force. And the time is coming, when the want of these will cease to be their reproach, but, in the meanwhile, we thank God, that, as in all evil, there is some providential mitigation — a reflection of his love even in the tear-drop ; so the debility of our women is, in some slight degree, compensated by the gentleness, tenderness, and sympathy that accompanies it. If our wives lean, they find the strongest support — if they are weak and dependent, their husbands are, for the most part, considerate, generous, and devoted.
So, assuredly, was my friend Murray Winthrop. Emily
[p.167 ]
was a wife after the old Israelitish pattern, leaning in her very nature; “her desire was unto her husband”— desire, without the fear of patriarchal times. She was as free as if she were unyoked, for she had no wish independent of her husband's, and certainly no enjoyment without a partition with him. It was not that she lost her distinctive character, as certain colours are deadened by the proximity of stronger ones, but like a lesser stream, she blended with a fuller one — not losing her own power, but giving more force to his. She was not one of those silly, " just as Mr. So-and-so pleases" wives, or " I have not asked husband, but just as he thinks, I shall think." Emily thought and acted freely; the mainspring was in her heart, and that brought out the perfect accord. I have never seen a happier home than theirs — sanctified by the rites of religion, and cheerful with every social blessing and virtue.
Fifteen happy years passed on. They had six lovely children. They had not riches, but uniform prosperity. Winthrop had an honourable profession, and a certain income, and he delighted to surround his wife with every indulgence that could mitigate the evil of her ill-health. He could not afford a carriage, but a carryall with one horse, gave her the refreshment of a daily drive with her husband, more enjoying to her than if she had had a liveried coachman and half a dozen footmen in livery. Neither could they afford a country-seat, but they went for some happy weeks every summer to the sea-shore, or to the hill-country. They did not indulge in magnificent dinner-parties, but there was always a seat and a welcome for a friend at their table — and a good dinner, too, for Winthrop in his daily marketing, procured some dainty, to secure for Emily the blessing of a relished meal.
[p. 168]
She was sometimes unable to walk up and down stairs, but her husband carried her in his arms, and then, as she said, she was more to be envied than pitied.
I linger in their sunshine. The fifteen years were passed! Winthrop went to New Orleans to help a beloved and only brother through an entanglement with a fraudulent merchant. In order to extricate him, Winthrop pledged a large portion of his own property. If their lives were preserved, there was no risk of final loss ; and full of life and health, they scarcely thought of the contingency.
They sailed for New York. A tempest came on — The ship was dismasted and unmanageable. A part of the crew and passengers took to the boats ; Winthrop and his brother, by the captain's advice, remained on the wreck. Winthrop, at the moment they were lowering the boat, wrote in pencil on a card the following line to his wife, and gave it to one of the passengers who was abandoning the ship : — “In all events, trust in God, as I now do, my Emily. His will be done.”
The wreck went down in sight of the boats! They came to land. The news was sent to Emily by the passenger who transmitted to her her husband's last token, and she was plunged at once, without the poor preparation of an apprehension, from cheerful anticipations, into the desolation of widowhood. She would gladly have covered her face and died. The light of her life was gone. Not even her children reflected one ray of light to her. The impulse to action was lost — the springs of hope were dried up. No more smoothing of rough ways for her — no more anticipation of her wants — no more defence from hardship — no more providing — no more watching; no more companionship! She was alone! alone! How did that word strike, and strike upon her heart the knell
[p. 169]
of her departed life. The world was no longer the world she had lived in. Thick darkness had settled upon it. It was as if the sun had vanished, and the countless starry host had passed away. Day and night returned, but not to her came their sweet uses ; meal-times brought no refreshment; she lay down to wakeful nights and troubled dreams, and awoke to feel again, and again the first blow in all its activeness and freshness. Her children were as nothing to her. One blank despair had closed the access to all other passions. There was nothing left but a capacity for suffering. Where was her religion? — alas! alas! she had loved her husband supremely. She had forsaken her God — He had not forsaken her.
I have said that Emily derived no comfort from her children. In this I found some excuse for her, for it indicated to me that her mind had lost its balance, and that she had not the power to give herself to the holiest ministrations of nature. But there was one influence that seemed to reach her. Annie, her fourth child, a girl nine years old, had an uncommonly sweet voice, and when her mother was exhausted with mourning and watching, and her pulses were throbbing and every nerve was in tormenting action, she would send for Annie to sit by her bedside and sing to her. There was a magnetic influence in the child's tender voice. Her mother would become calm, and sometimes fall asleep. The poor little girl would sing on, infected with her mother's sadness, with tears in her eyes, no matter whether it were a verse from a hymn, or a stanza from a song. Her eldest sister Mary, a thoughtful girl, said to her one day, " I wish you very much, dear Annie, to learn two or three hymns through, and when you find mamma getting quiet, sing them to her." The docile child readily acquiesced. Mary, guided by the instincts of the
[p. 170]
highest feeling, selected the hymns, and on the next fitting occasion, when her poor mother was tranquilized, and the intervals between her heart-breaking sighs were longer, Annie sang the following beautiful hymn; she had till then sang those most familiar and hackneyed, and the words had flowed on the sound without producing any impression. The consciousness of having a purpose, varied the general monotony of her singing, and the first half line roused her mother's attention.
“Weep thou, O mourner ! but in lamentation
May thy Redeemer still remembered be;
Strong is his arm, the God of thy salvation,
Strong is his love to cheer and comfort thee.
“Cold though the world be in the way before thee,
Wail not in sadness, o'er the darkling tomb;
God in his love, siill watcheth kindly o'er thee,
Light shineth still above the clouds of gloom.
“Dimmed though thine eyes be with the tears of sorrow,
Night only known beneath the sky of time.
Faith can behold the dawning of a morrow
Glowing in smiles of love, and joy sublime.
“Change, then, mourner, grief to exultation ;
Firm and confiding may thy spirit be ;
Strong is his arm, the God of thy salvation ;
Strong is his love to cheer and comfort thee !"
Before Annie finished the hymn, her mother raised her head, and leaning on her elbow, she drank in every word, as if it were inspiration addressed by Heaven to her soul. When the child had finished, she drew her to her bosom and wept, for the first time, freely, tears that relieved her burdened heart —
[p. 171]
tears in which other thoughts than those of grief mingled. As soon as she could speak, she said, “Annie, sing that last verse to me again.”
Annie repeated it, and her mother repeated after her the last line —
“Strong is His love to cheer and comfort thee!”
“What love!” she added, “what patience — with me, a wretched rebel!”
“Oh, don't say so, mamma !” said Annie. “I have one more hymn to sing to you, that I think is beautiful; shall I sing it?”
“Yes; yes, dear child, sing on, and God grant me grace to hear,” she added, in mental prayer.
Annie sang “The Angels of Grief,” of Whittier, a poet who has given to his high poetic gifts the holiest consecration.
“With silence only as their benediction,
God's angels come
Where, in the shadow of a great affliction,
The soul sits dumb.
“Yet would we say what every heart approveth —
Our Father's will,
Calling to Him the dear ones whom he loveth,
Is mercy still.
“Not upon us or ours the solemn angel
Hath evil wrought;
The funeral anthem is a glad evangel;
The good die not.”
A few moments' silence followed. Emily then kissed her
[p. 172]
child, with a quiet tenderness that she had not before shown, and dismissed her. She did not remain in bed, sighing and lamenting, but she arose and passed the night in walking her chamber, or on her knees. She reproached herself bitterly. She felt that she had forgotten her religious profession — that she had denied her Lord in suffering her faith and love to be consumed in the furnace from which they should have come out purified. Now, for the first, it seemed to her that she received her husband's last words to her, — " Trust in God, as I now do, my Emily. His will be done." He, in his extremity, was willing, she thought. He rose above the storm — the tempest carried away my trust. He reposed in me — he thought, in that dreadful hour, that he might commit the children to my care. I have forgotten them, and every other duty — I have lain, like a vine torn from the tree that supported it, prostrate, withering, and dying, and I am a creature endowed with a capacity to do as well as to suffer. In my prosperity, I believed I was a Christian! — how have I sunk below the requirements of this profession. Have I been patient in tribulation? Have I submitted to the fellowship of suffering — of self-forgetfulness — of self-renunciation. No, no! I have thought only of myself. I have dared to expect that life should continue the joy it has been. And now, as I am resolved to look forward, and not back, God help me!
The next morning, to the astonishment of her children, Emily appeared among them. She took her accustomed place at table, and calmly served them. She even spoke to them of their father, and of the double duty that had now devolved upon her. She felt a faintness coming over, and desisted, wisely resolving to enter by degrees upon her new field of labour.
[p. 173]
Life had utterly changed to her. During her husband's life, she had been the object of constant indulgence, and a tenderness that fenced off not only evil, but whatever was uncomfortable and disagreeable. This is a false position; it cannot last. There is no petting in life. The school of Providence is a school of discipline and trial. Emily
“Had slept, and dreamed that life was beauty —
She waked, and found that life was duty.”
But this duty was to make her a higher and nobler being. Till now she had been gentle, sweet, and attractive, but loving a life of passive and indulged invalidism, she had had scarcely more to do with actual affairs, than the ladies of a Haram. If she had died then, she would have left no void but in the hearts of those that loved her. She had now to seal her sorrows up in her own breast; to endure patiently and silently her own loneliness; to make sunshine for others, while she felt that her whole life must wear out in chill dreary shadow. But she had religiously resolved, and she amazed her friends with her noiseless vigour. She found, on investigation, that her income was reduced to very narrow limits. She courageously and at once reduced her expenses to her means.
Some women deem it unfeminine to take care of their pecuniary affairs, and certainly their training and social arrangements are unfavourable to their qualification for this care. To Emily there was but one question; is this my duty? that ascertained she went forward and did it. She sought advice when she needed it, and aid where she required it, but, for the most part, she took care of her own concerns, and she “saw well to the ways of her household.”
She provided for the education of her children; she sighed
[p. 174]
to be obliged to renounce advantages for them which she had once counted upon as matters of course, but “It is well,” she said, — “the necessity of putting forth all their powers and making the most of all their means is better than Harvard for my boys, and the ‘first masters’ for my girls.” She now truly honoured her husband's memory, and justified his love.
She made her home a scene of cheerfulness to her children, a pleasant gathering-place to her friends.
What had become of the elegant leisure, the luxurious indolence of Emily Winthrop? They had given place to virtuous, productive activity. Where was the invalidism that all the appliances of love had but served to nurture?
No allopathy, homoeopathy, or hydropathy had been called in, but mental energy and heart-energy had supplied that wonderful power called nervous energy; and from day to day, and year to year her strength was equal to the demands upon it.
The young maiden invested with beauty and hope and promise, strikes our imagination. The happy wife has all our sympathies; but she who extracts patience and peace from her own privations, who converts her own weakness into strength for others, who in her own waste places produces flowers and fruits for them, who walks alone through rough places leaning on the Unseen — she — the sanctified widow — has our highest reverence.
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
Widowhood
Subject
The topic of the resource
Marriage, widowhood, faith, and resilience.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator tells the story of Emily Winthrop and her journey from wife to widow and bereavement to peace.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Mirror of Life, edited by Louisa C. Tuthill, Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1847, pp. 165-74.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Lindsay and Blakiston
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
D. Gussman
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
"Absence"
"Angels of Grief"
"I Slept and Dreamed that Life was Beauty"
1847
allopathy
duty
Ellen Sturgis Hooper
Frances Anne Butler
gift book
homeopathy
hurricane
hydropathy
hymns
invalid
Israelite
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Milton
Louisa C. Tuthill
marriage
Paradise Lost
patriarchy
Providence
religion
ship wreck
tempest
The Mirror of Life
widows
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425a518bf0416277ddf0fbfa47f9248b
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
1838
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
THE MAGIC LAMP.
______________
[p. 34]
“PRAY tell us a story, aunt,” said half a dozen young voices at once; “it’s Sunday evening, and you know you always tell us a story Sunday evening.”
“Well, if I must I must—what shall it be about?”
“Oh, anything! only let it end good,” cried one. “No, no. I say let it end horribly,” exclaimed another, “like your martyr stories. I like stories where all the people are killed, some way or other.”
“Well, I don’t love to have people killed,” said tender-hearted little Haddy. “I wish you would tell us a fairy story; but I suppose you won’t Sunday night.”
“No, Haddy, but I will tell you something like a fairy story—a story about a magic lamp.”
“Oh! Aladdin’s lamp I suppose you mean.”
“No. My lamp belonged to a Christian country, and was more useful, though not quite so entertaining, as Aladdin’s, I am afraid.” The children, however, were satisfied, and, gathering about their aunt, she began. “There was once a mother, a very young mother she was. She had in her childhood, like you, Haddy, loved fairy stories, and her mind was full of them; and as she sat looking at her infant daughter on her lap, ‘Oh,’ she thought, ‘how I should like to have lived in those times when kind fairies were present at the birth of a
[p. 35]
child, and each gave it some good gift; but you, my poor little girl, must plod on in the common way, and work, mind and hands, for everything you get.’ As she paused she heard a sound as of some one approaching. She saw no one, but presently a voice whispered in her ear, ‘Do not be startled, I am Nature, your mother, and your child’s—the mother of all. To all my children I give good gifts. Some bury them; some neglect them; some cast them away; some never find out that they possess them; and some, my faithful children, make the most of them. To your child I have given a most precious gift. It is an invisible lamp; you will only perceive it by its effects. If she is faithful in keeping it trimmed and burning, 1 will supply it with oil.’
“‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ said the surprised and happy mother; ‘but pray tell me how, if she does not see it, can she trim the lamp? How can she carry it unseen about her! May it not burn her?’ and many other questions she put which Dame Nature, no doubt, thought quite idle; for, without answering one of them, she merely said, ‘Give yourself no concern about these matters; experience will give your child all necessary instructions about the management of the lamp. If she fulfil her duty, be sure the oil shall not fail. If the lamp is kept in order, it will diffuse a light that every one loves; the old and the young, the happy and the miserable, the sick and the well, the rich and the poor, all will crave your daughter’s presence. Be content, ask no more, but observe and learn.’
“The voice was silent, and the mother saw, what
[p. 36]
she wondered she had not before noticed, a peculiar and beautiful light playing about her child’s countenance. It seemed to issue from her soft bright eyes, and to beam from the smile into which her pretty lips were for ever curling. ‘This is indeed Nature’s gift!’ thought she; ‘how poor are the imitations of art!’ She named the little girl Serena; and feeling that a child endowed with so precious a gift should have rare care, she did all a mother could do to make her good; she brought her up in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord.’ As Serena grew, the light of her lamp waxed stronger and stronger. One of its marvellous properties was, that, if not quite so powerful, its light was more observed and more beautiful when any misfortune befell its owner. Experience gave the promised instruction. The arts of preserving it were curious enough. Constant occupation, activity of body and mind, strict attention to the laws of health, especially eating moderately and drinking only pure water, were most conducive to its clear burning. Serena soon learned that it was miserably dimmed by disobedience to her mother, by hurting the feelings of a friend, or by any wrong doing whatever. These were the lessons that she learned from that sternest and best of teachers, experience; and most attentive was she in applying her knowledge to the management of the lamp, and well was she rewarded for her fidelity. The effect of the lamp seemed, indeed, like magic; she could learn a lesson in half the time by it that others could without it. By the light of her lamp she performed all her tasks as if they were pleasures, while others were grumbling and crying. She was better satisfied with an old dress by this precious light than
[p. 37]
other girls with the newest and prettiest without it. One might have fancied the colour of everything in life depended on the light that fell on it. Serena would sit out an evening with an old grand-aunt, deaf, and almost blind, she and the old lady as happy as happy could be by the light of the lamp, though Serena knew her companions were amusing themselves with dancing and all manner of gayety at the next house. She has stayed many a day, and day after day, in this same aunt’s sickroom, and the old lady said, with grateful tears in her eyes, ‘While Serena’s light falls on my pillow my drinks refresh me, my food nourishes me, and even my medicines taste less nauseous.’
“At school every one liked to get near her. If the girls were puzzled by a sum, or boggled in a composition, or baffled by a difficult piece of music, they would run to Serena, and they were sure, by the light of her lamp, to be able to overcome the difficulty. Even the domestics in her mother’s service found their work lighter when Serena was present. Indeed, it was at home that the lamp was brighest and most beautiful.
“As Serena grew up and took her part in the pleasures and business of the world, the light of her lamp was, of course, more diffused. It was visible in the midday sun, and in the darkest night how far it sent its beams! It added a charm to the most brilliant apartment; and, when Serena visited the humble dwellings of the poor and afflicted, it shone on their walls, played like sunshine over the faces of the children, and sent a ray of pleasure to the saddest, darkest heart.
“Serena had just entered her nineteenth year
[p. 38]
when she lost her mother; the dear parent who had supplied the place of father, brother, sister, and friend to her. In the bitterness of her grief Serena quite forgot her lamp. At her mother’s grave it went out.
“What a change was there now in her condition! She was alone in the home that had been so pleasant to her. The charm of her lamp was gone. She was so enveloped in gloom and darkness that none came near her but such as were moved by heavenly compassion. If she forced herself out, and those that loved her tenderly approached her, they gave her little pleasure, for she felt that, without her lamp, she gave them none. Strangers turned involuntarily from her; and children who had always flocked around her ran away at the first glimpse of her slow moving form and sad countenance. She lost all interest in life, and sat, with her hands folded, the picture of indolent grief. If her friends sympathized with her upon the loss of her lamp, she said she cared not, for that it was fitting it should go out for ever at her mother’s grave.
“One day, when she was sitting alone, she took up her Bible; and, as she turned from place to place, many a sentence sunk deep into her heart. She felt that she had been unsubmissive to the will of God, and that she was sinning against him in giving herself up to despair and uselessness.
“She now wished again for her lamp, that she might go about doing good; and as she meditated with deep contrition and anxiety she heard a voice, saying, “Serena, I pity thee. Thou hast, by thy want of faith and resignation to the will of God, lost the precious gift that Nature gave thee. Nature has not the power to relight thy lamp. I have.
[p. 39]
My name is Religion. Study that book on which thy hand resteth; obey its laws, and I will surely relight thy lamp; and in proportion to thy obedience will it become brighter and brighter, till it burns among those lights where ‘there is no night, and where they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord giveth them light.’
“Serena meekly bowed her head, and, with perfect faith in the promises of religion, resolved to obey her voice. She went forth to perform her neglected duties, and at once a feeble light from her rekindled lamp stole over her. All who knew her now hailed with joy her approach. All observed that the lamp burnt brighter, and with a steadier light, than when the oil was supplied by Nature. In due time she married; she had children. Manifold afflictions came upon her—who escapes them? Her husband lost his property. She buried two children in one grave. She became a widow. Still her lamp went not out. Religion kept the promise she makes to all who trust in her, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.’
“Old age came at last, and then, when Serena’s eyes were dimmed and her limbs feeble, so that she could no more walk abroad, how precious was the light of her lamp! Wherever she was, there her friends desired to be. Children, too, delighted to gather about her, and said they should love to be old, if they could have such a light as hers to enlighten them; and, finally, she sank to rest, blessing and blessed.”
_____________
“Pray tell us, aunt,” asked one of the girls, “what kind of oil was that in the Magic Lamp?”
“The oil of cheerfulness, my dear Grace.”
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
The Magic Lamp
Subject
The topic of the resource
Cheerfulness, inner light, Nature, religion.
Description
An account of the resource
An aunt tells her nieces and nephews the story of a girl named Serena and the magic lamp she receives from mother Nature.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
A Love Token for Children, Designed for Sunday-School Libraries., 34-39.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
New York: Harper & Brothers
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1838
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Robin Cadwallader, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Reprinted in The Jewel [edited by Emma F. Alston], 35-41, New York, 1844. Collected in Stories for Children [edited by Robin Cadwallader], 13-24, RMTK Books, 2016
Language
A language of the resource
English
1838
1844
A Love Token for Children
Aladdin
cheerfulness
Dame Nature
Emma F. Alston
fairy story
Juvenile fiction
religion
The Jewel
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1833
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Stories published in 1833.
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“The Bridal Ring” by Miss Sedgwick [1833].
The following account, received from a friend, we have ventured to transcribe, and prepare for publication.
It is now nearly three years since I was told that two travellers, an elderly gentleman and his daughter, had stopped at the principal inn of the village, and were like to be detained there a long time, by the illness of the young lady, whom our physician had pronounced to be threatened with a ‘course of fever.’ This I knew to be an opinion which our professor, of what Napoleon has so happily called ‘the conjectural art,’ was apt oracularly to intimate of every case which he did not comprehend, and moreover that his nostrums and confinement in a close room in most cases verified his prediction.
My humanity was awakened by the forlorn condition of the strangers, and, I may as well confess the infirmity, my curiosity was excited by all that I heard of them. I was reminded of the story of La Roche. Who that has ever read that most beautiful, and in this age of story writing, still unequalled tale, could hear of a father and daughter, detained at an inn, without enquiring into their condition? I could not, and I repaired to the tavern, secretly hoping to find that some resemblance to ‘Mademoiselle,’ or to the saintly La Roche, in my travellers, who seemed to me to have lightened upon our uneventful village, to sustain my almost famished appetite for romance. I was announced to the father, and admitted to the little parlor he occupied. My first glimpse of captain St. Clair put my imagination to flight. A more striking contrast to the meek, devout La Roche, could scarcely have been found. The captain had the erect and elaborate deportment that is the usual result of military breeding; the consequential etiquettical politeness that is rather a tribute to self-respect, than a deference to the subject of it. He was on the verge of old age, but without any thing of the gentleness, humility, and spirituality that so well becomes the old, and is the crown of those who have ‘fought a good fight.’
He received me politely, being, as he has since told me, struck with what Johnson calls the air of a ‘born gentleman;’ the only quotation from a book I ever heard from the captain. I apologized for my intrusion, by boasting of my talents as a nurse, and expressing an earnest wish to be of service to his daughter. The worn, broken and neglected, as it now was, there was one chord that vibrated to the touch, and that chord I had fortunately struck.
His courtesy, as formal, external, and military as his epaulettes, gave place to an expression of real feeling, as he conducted me to his daughter’s apartment.
Dear Arabella! after the lapse of three years of daily and confidential intercourse, can I recall my first impressions of the youthful stranger, who, even amidst the unbecoming shrouding of a sick bed, seemed to me one of the most lovely and graceful creatures I had ever seen. A small bible was lying open on her pillow, and beside it a freshly plucked white rose, whose leaves were not more soft nor fair than her cheek. Her night cap was untied and pushed back, and discovered such a wealth of hair as I have never seen equalled in hue or quality, unless it be in Miss Hall’s exquisite picture of the Greek girl, Garaphelia. Every one acknowledged the tenderness and sweetness that characterized Arabella’s beauty; cavillers sometimes said she wanted spirit and variety, but to me, there was an immeasurable power in the purity and elevation of her countenance, and her eye had the calm, mysterious, wonderful expression which reveals the deathless spirit that informs this soul speaking organ. Captain St. Clair communicated my errand to his daughter. She gave me her hand, and expressed her gratitude with an earnestness and simplicity that evinced her susceptibility to kindness. Her accent was slightly foreign. ‘My daughter,’ said captain St. Clair, ‘unhappily, cannot quite rid herself of her French accent. She has lived for the most part in the south of France, in the family of a protestant clergyman, a relative of her mother. Poor Belle! she has always been delicate, and I was flattered into the hope that a favorable climate would strengthen her, but it has been of no use, she still bends like a reed to every blast.’
‘My dear father is too anxious,’ said Miss St. Clair, looking at me with a smile—‘And can I help being anxious, madam,’ replied the captain, ‘when all the treasure I have on God’s earth—yes all—is in that frail casket.’
‘But you are too apprehensive papa—I had but a slight chill and fever, and papa must send for a physician, and then I must take medicine.’
‘And of course be sick, Miss St. Clair—I well understand all those sequences, if indeed they be not consequences. But as the doctor has humanely suspended his drugs to day, we will try what nursing and the sensitive powers of nature will do.’
Arabella gratefully accepted my proposition—the circumstances of sickness banish ceremony—my superior age inspired Arabella with a childlike confidence; her father was delighted with my success, and before the day was over, we were on the footing of intimate friends—and before a week had passed, she and her father were inmates of my house. I had learned their history, and become thoroughly acquainted with their characters.
Captain St. Clair, when considerably past forty, had married a lovely young woman, the daughter of a Swiss officer in the English service—she had died a few months after the birth of Arabella. The regiment to which captain St. Clair was attached, was ordered to the East Indies, and Arabella was left with her mother’s connections in the south of France. The captain, from a series of ill fortune, for such he esteemed his regiment being exempted from the desperate chances of war, wore away year after year, without promotion, and finally, when he had a reasonable expectation of a majority, he was superseded by a young officer. In his first disgust, he resigned his commission and returned to Europe; and being joined by his daughter in England, where his asperity had been increased by finding himself forgotten or slighted by the friends of his youth, he embarked for America, and withdrew from a country whose ingratitude, he thought, had severed the bonds of his allegiance. But, in spite of his resentment, the captain’s long cherished national partialities often broke forth. An Ethiopian will change his color before an Englishman ceases to be English—before he changes the first article of faith in his national creed—that England is the wisest, happiest, best portion of the habitable globe. Captain St. Clair’s strict adherence to this creed, atoned for his voluntary expatriation, though it manifested a discrepancy, (not very uncommon) between faith and practice. If he ever found a shadow of a fault in Arabella, he traced it to her French education, and whatever was wrong in America, was so because it was not English. I remember asking my new friends, before I knew them quite well enough to understand their biases, ‘if they had ever seen any thing so beautiful as our autumnal foliage? No pen,’ I added, in the fervor of my home bred admiration, ‘no pen can describe it; no painter dare copy it.’
‘No, madam, no, certainly not,’ replied the captain, ‘it is gaudy and unnatural—quite unlike any thing in England.’
I appealed to Arabella, if she did not think it magnificent. ‘I am not fond of brilliant colors’, she answered, ‘I am so used to the russet hue of our old trees at Clermont.’ How different are the same sentiments from different persons. Arabella turned away to hide the tear that had risen at the remembrance of her French home, while captain St. Clair graciously proceeded to inform me of the particulars in which English scenery far excelled ours.
Captain St. Clair was in quest of a place to fix his residence, when accident detained him in our village. The American world was all before him, and the advantage of being near me, as he kindly said, induced him to purchase a place in my neighborhood, that just suited his taste and finances. Clermont cottage, as Arabella named her new residence in memory of her former home, was about a mile from the village, on the borders of a pretty sheet of water, that she called a lake, and I am not therefore bound to give it its vulgar appellation. There is some virtue in names, and the new nomenclature which Arabella adopted at Clermont, graced the other refinements introduced there. The farm house became a cottage—a name to conjure with, and call up a thousand images of rural beauty. The front yard that sloped to the lake, after having the ambitious fence that enclosed it removed, became a lawn. The stoop, with no other alteration than a latticing of sweet briars and honey suckles, was converted into a piazza—and the pond, an appellation that recalls to mind pickerel and geese, became a lake—a name consecrated by poetry—one of the water privileges of the muses.
My friend seemed to have a mysterious tie to the innocent and beautiful in nature. Never have I seen the birds so tame as they were on the lawn at Clermont cottage, and the flowers that grew under Arabella’s culture were more graceful, had a sweeter odour, and a brighter tint—at least I thought so—than any other.
I have often wondered that Arabella’s reserved manners and secluded life did not give offence to the good people of the village. She never left her home, except to see me, or a visit of charity. Her superior elegance was tempered by a soft diffidence, that seemed to fall over it like a veil, increasing its charm, while it dimmed its lustre. She was religious, and yet, if I may be allowed the word, her religion was the most uncreeded I ever knew. The bible she never criticized, but believed with implicit faith. In our age and land of theological discussion, she could not always be so fortunate as to escape hearing controversy, but she listened to it as a child listens, silent and deferential it may be—but uninterested and uncomprehending. If ever appealed to, she modestly replied that having bred protestant in the midst of catholics, she had been instructed to avoid theological discussion, and to be content with feeling and practicing religion; and in these departments of our faith all acknowledged her superiority, although some might have regretted that she had not been indoctrinated in the mysteries of theology. To confess the truth, Arabella was rather ignorant in all departments of science. The little pedants of our infant schools, who rattle off their definitions of spheroids, rhomboids, and equilateral triangles, far surpassed her in science. She had a respectable acquaintance with history, but of politics she knew no more than a fair Circassian, though she read the newspapers aloud to her father from beginning to end. She was familiar with the best poets of England, Italy, and France—this was the extent of her erudition. She had an exquisite taste in poetry, and her sweet voice seemed to give it its natural vehicle of music. It was perhaps this sublimated aliment that gave a romantic cast to her mind. She had no taste for romance reading. Few works of this description had enough of nature and elevation for so pure and unperverted a mind as hers.
I used often to speculate with womanly solicitude, on Arabella’s future destiny. Her father, according to the common course of nature, could not long survive; Arabella was so tender, so relying in her character, that the protection, and dependence of conjugal life seemed essential to her, but where in our ‘working day world,’ and in the obscurity in which she lived, was she to find a person suited to her. How vain in our forecast!
A popular law school, which soon became celebrated from the reputation of the eminent professor who presided over it, was established in the village, about a year after captain St. Clair’s settlement among us. Pupils resorted hither from all parts of the United States. Among the rest came Wingfield Clayborne, a son of a former acquaintance of mine. Of course he was welcomed to all the hospitalities I could offer him. At my house he obtained the rare privilege of frequent intercourse with Arabella. I say, rare, for owing to captain St. Clair’s aristocratic demeanor, and Arabella’s reserve, and her unaffected and utter indifference to young men in their official character of beaux, the law students had no access to Clermont cottage. In vain were formal introductions, in vain poetic effusions to the lily, the snow drop and the snow berry, for by the name of these pure and cold emblems was she addressed. In vain, too, moonlight serenades—she remained as impassive as polar ice to the sunbeam. Tender and affectionate as my young friend was to me, as devoted as she was to her father, I sometimes doubted whether she possessed a due portion of that sensibility essential to the perfection of women. Alas! I was not long left to doubt.
Clayborne was at first sight struck with Arabella’s beauty and grace. He admired the refinement, and even the reserve of her manners. He had himself been partly educated abroad. He admired the refinement, and even the reserve of her manners. He had himself been partly educated abroad. He disliked excessively what he called the brusquerie of our northern ladies: laughed at their all-knowingness, and detested their independence and rationality. I defended my countrywomen, and asked Arabella if she did not think there was more of false refinement, than true sentiment in Clayborne’s fastidiousness. She replied that she had no skill at analyzing, but I saw by the deep suffusion on her cheek, that she understood Clayborne’s opinions, as they were meant as tribute to her. It was plain whatever Clayborne did not admire, he did devotedly admire my friend, and that her heart was filled with new emotions which she indulged without question or fear.
Clayborne’s tastes corresponded with hers, but I sometimes thought his were merely the offspring of a cultivated imagination. I feared, too, (but I was aware that I was somewhat jealous for my friend,) that Clayborne’s love was tinged and adulterated by gratified vanity. That he had the pride of a virtuoso, in attaining a gem that was unattainable to others. But I did not often criticise severely; I could not, Clayborne knew too well how to propitiate the few he cared to lease. I can now look back upon a thousand little flatteries that I then called attentions.
The captain’s heart too was soon completely won. He pronounced Clayborne the only accomplished man he had seen in America, which, ‘no doubt,’ he would add in one of his patriotic parentheses, ‘is owing to his having seen society in England.’ I believed him to be well principled, and I felt him to be excessively interesting, and regarding anxiously Arabella’s solitary condition; and casting a prudent eye on the future prospects of this well born and talented young man, I was gratified by his intense devotion to my friend; and I observed with satisfaction, the sudden flushing of her cheek and faltering of her voice at his approaching footstep. She dwelt on the passages of poetry he selected, cherished every flower he gave her, sung over his favorite songs, and betrayed by many other signs, infallible to a veteran eye, the existence of a sentiment of whose power over her she was not herself fully aware.
After a thousand indirect, but intelligible declarations, Clayborne made a formal avowal of his hopes; they were sanctioned by Arabella, and ratified by captain St. Clair.
Clayborne’s father was dead. He had no one to consult but a doting mother who had never denied him any thing. He showed me her letter in reply to one communicating his engagement. She assented to his wishes, and sent a polite assurance of future kindness to Miss St. Clair, but the letter concluded with an expression of disappointment that seemed to have been too pungent to be repassed, that her son had neglected the article of fortune, so important to him, in his matrimonial arrangement. The letter displeased me, I was displeased too, with his showing it to me, and for the first time, seeing Arabella’s lover in an unfavorable light, I fancied his ardor had abated since his certainty of possessing her affections. I began to analyse his character, to suspect that the element of his fastidiousness was pride, and that his demand of an intense devotion, an exclusive and all absorbing sentiment, proceeded, not as he fancied from sensibility, but from a purely human feeling, compounded of selfishness and vanity.
Not long after the engagement, a circumstance occurred that increased my concern, lest my pure and trustful friend, had lavished her heart on one unworthy of the treasure.
Captain St. Clair’s banker in London failed, and his narrow income was reduced to less than a hundred pounds sterling per annum. This, with the place he occupied, would have been an ample fortune to a New England father and daughter, who should have understood thoroughly what wonderful science, the worth of a shilling, and should have had the maxims of poor Richard, inwrought in the fabric of their characters. But though my friend was capable of any mode or degree of self denial, the art of turning a penny was an inscrutable to her as the art of the alchymist; and how, without some such legerdemain, was a luxurious table, and wine, his staff of life, to be provided for her father?
Captain St. Clair was prostrated by his misfortune. Arabella communicated to me his despondency. ‘If I could do any thing?’ said she, half enquiringly.
‘You can,’ I replied, ‘but how, my dear Arabella, with your feelings and your reserved manners, how can you meet the trials and mortifications of a sub-teacher in a boarding school, for instance?’
‘Oh, do not think so meanly of me,’ she said, ‘if my feelings disqualify me for my duties, the sooner I get rid of them the better.’
‘Then, my dear child, your troubles are at an end. Mrs. Butler, (Mrs. B. was the mistress of a successful school in the village,) has just parted with her teacher of music, your accomplishment in music will command the highest salary she can give.’
Arabella begged me to secure the place for her immediately, and said she would return home and make the plan acceptable to her father.
‘But Clayborne,’ said I, ‘he must first be consulted.’
Arabella hesitated for a moment, and then replied. ‘No; to consult him, would be to appeal to him. We will make our arrangements, and communicate them to him afterwards.’
The arrangement was quickly made. Mrs. Butler was liberal in her terms. The girls were enchanted with the expectation of having the lovely Miss St. Clair for their teacher, and the captain’s pride, after a slight hesitation, deferred to his necessities.
But Clayborne’s pride was invincible. He was at first indignant. He felt injured. He remonstrated with me, and entreated Arabella; the fatigues, vexations, and anxieties of a teacher seemed never to cross his mind but the degradation! ‘Arabella St. Clair, a teacher in a yankee school!’ he exclaimed, ‘at the call and beck of half bred girls; daughters of tailors and shoemakers!’ At first I laughed at his folly, and then treated it with the serious contempt it deserved. I even tried to solace his pride by reminding him of the illustrious persons that had been compelled by vicissitudes, to make their talents available in this way; I told him that throughout New England, even in our polished Metropolis, teachers were on the highest level; but he was unyielding, and so was my gentle friend. Her decision might be called pride too, but it was that ratified and rectifying principle that is sustained by conscience.
Her first and present duty was to her father. If, as Clayborne urged, she had consented to an immediate marriage, she must have left her father was a narrowed income to pine in solitude, and have encumbered Clayborne with a burden of expences, before he had finished the study of his profession. She did not waver for an instant, but entered on her new occupation with a vigor and grace that surprised even me, her fond friend.
One thing I noted; after this, Clayborne, though he had been a most passionate admirer of Arabella’s music, never asked her to play or sing. I once inconsiderately remarked this to her, she made no reply, but I perceived that her eyes filled with tears.
Months passed on. Arabella’s employment inevitably brought her into observation, and her beauty, grace and accomplishments were a constant theme. Clayborne’s passion, or at least its manifestations, became more ardent, and as the time for his return to his native state, drew night, he was possessed with a lover’s apprehensions and jealousies. He expressed a fear; it might have arisen from the conscious fallibility of his own affections, that he might be superseded. He entreated Arabella to permit their marriage to take place before his departure. He obtained her father’s consent, this gave authority to his entreaties, but Arabella resisted them, and resisted the pleadings of her own heart. Her resolution was fixed, never to leave her father while his well being depended on her exertions. In his selfish importunity he betrayed a doubt of her constancy. She meekly replied, that her fidelity to her father, should be her warrant that she could not prove faithless to him.
This was the only approach to a boast I ever heard from her lips. How well did her subsequent conduct justify it!
The evening preceeding Clayborne’s departure, the lovers passed on my piazza; I took care that they should not be molested by intruders. It was late when I heard his parting footsteps; I waited for Arabella, but she did not appear, and afraid that she would be exhausted by the indulgence of her feelings, I went to her. She stood where Clayborne had left her, leaning her head against one of the pillars of the piazza. Her hands were clasped and raised, and I perceived on her finger a diamond ring, which Clayborne had always worn, and which he had told me was given to him by his mother at the time of her second marriage. It had been his father’s bridal gift, and he had received it on condition that it should never be transferred, till he placed it on the finger of his bride. After a few days, and when I thought Arabella could bear a little bantering, I reminded her of this. She said nothing, but I never shall forget the sudden contraction of her brow, nor the deep painful blush that suffused her pale cheek and alabaster neck.
Clayborne wrote by every post. His letters, which I have since seen, were as impassioned, and almost as eloquent as Rousseau’s; they all began, ‘My beloved wife,’ and finished with ‘your devoted husband.’
After a while, they became more temperate, and contained such notices of his occupations and pleasures, as she could read to me. In less than six months the ‘beloved wife’ gave place to ‘dear Arabella,’ and the fever heat of the lover seemed to have subsided to the calm temperament of the friend. Arabella, till now, mindful of every present duty, devoted to the happiness of every one around her, became abstracted and almost melancholy; the faint but distinct rose like tinge on her cheek, faded to absolute and sickly paleness. She still gave lessons at the school, but with languor and effort.
One little month more passed away. She was sitting with me one day, when my servant brought her a letter. She read it, sat for a few moments as if she were petrified, then threw on her hat and shawl, and left me without a word of explanation. I did not for a long time know the contents of the letter. I have since seen it: what follows is an extract from it.
‘After long and painful reflection on the subject, my dear Arabella, I have come to the decision that it would be ungenerous in me, not to offer to release you from an engagement, in the shackles of which you are wasting your beautiful youth. Gifted creature! you may create your own destiny! while I, a poor devil of a lawyer, must go my daily round for ‘nought but provender.’ There was much more in the letter, but all ‘words, words’ without any distinct, or certainly apparent, meaning.
I transcribe the following passage from his next letter. ‘You are in the Melpomene vein, my dear Arabella, and since you have taken me so seriously, why seriously will be. I cannot see, I confess, why you should estimate promises made in a moment of excited, and extravagant feeling as indissolubly binding. I do not claim to be as deeply read in the code of sentiment as you are, but it seems to me to be a very plain dictate of common sense, the promises cannot be binding if the parties will mutually relinquish them. Why be tremulous over a fancied duty? I disdain to hold you bound by a by-gone promise, and henceforth release you from any obligation in any way contracted with me, and wish ‘as if we had never met.’
After this Arabella received at distant intervals, and answered letters from Clayborne, but his were burned as soon as read, and I could only guess at their contents. Her father was ignorant and unsuspicious of any change in her affairs. He imputed the change in Arabella’s appearance to Clayborne’s protracted absence, and sometimes wondered that the young man no longer forwarded him the southern newspapers, which he had at first done punctually. When I remarked to him that Arabella’s health seemed to be failing, he took the alarm, insisted that she should relinquish teaching, and acquiesced in my proposal that they should abandon the cottage and pass the winter with me. Arabella was still alive to every look and word of kindness, and she gratefully acceded to my wishes.
Not long after their removal to my house, I received a letter from Clayborne. He said he presumed I was aware that his engagement with Miss St. Clare was at an end, and he begged my influence to persuade her to relinquish and forward to him a diamond ring. ‘Miss St. Clair, he says, ‘will my dear madam pay deference to your opinion, and your good sense will at once perceive her weakness in retaining, from girlish sentiment, a ring which has no longer any significance to her, and is of incalculable moment to me, as the lady to whom I hope shortly to be united, for reasons which it is not necessary to communicate, insists on deferring our nuptials till he receives it. I would be the last to impute any baseness of mind to Miss St. Clair; but how am I to explain her obstinate retention of the pledge of a retracted vow.’
All the passions of my woman’s nature were roused. I could not comprehend why Arabella should permit such a request to be repeated, and I resolved if I had any influence with her, that no indulgence of memory or hope should delay the transmission of the ring to its most unworthy giver. It was a difficult task to approach the subject. Affectionate as Arabella was, and as trustful as a child on all other subjects, she had never even alluded to Clayborne since she first doubted his fidelity. I first spoke in hints. Arabella would not understand me. I then went directly and explicitly to the point. Bitterly have I since repented it! I read Clayborne’s letter to her. I reproached her with throwing away her life, in cherishing a hopeless passion for a most unworthy object. I besought her by every motive of pride and delicacy—I adjured her, as she would preserve my esteem and her own self respect, to relinquish the worthless pledge of false and broken vows.
She heard me out with an expression of dignity and gentleness. When I afterwards recalled it, I knew she had pitied me while I reproached her. When I finished, she collected all the energies of her soul to reply, and she did so in a low but sustained voice.
‘You too doubt me,’ she said, ‘but I will not blame you. Cannot you believe that I have sufficient reasons for retaining this ring. I cannot now communicate them. Your judgment might differ from mine, and I have no strength to oppose your arguments. Death alone can divorce me from this ring—it has long been in my eyes the signet of my death warrant. Clayborne will not have to wait long for it,’ she added, holding up her emaciated hand, and showing me the small guard she was obliged to wear to retain the ring on her slender finger. ‘When you send it to him, send it simply with a notice of my death.’
‘You have reproached me with cherishing a hopeless passion for a worthless object. Indeed you have mistaken me. My love for Clayborne was extinguished, when I discovered that he whom I love was a creature of my imagination—a creature of noble qualities and high aims; of pure, tender and disinterested affections, one whom neither events nor place, life nor death could change—but to improve.’
‘My dear friend, it was not continuing, but ceasing to love, that gave such a shock to my life. It was the sudden loss of that which was the sweet employment of my thoughts, the object of my efforts, the stimulant of my mind. In the first amazement of my grief I forgot that life was God’s gift, to be preserved and cherished, not for the object I should select, but for those it should please him to assign me. For this, I deserve your reproach. I selfishly shrunk from my duties; I permitted the feelings that were given me for benevolent uses to consume my life. I meditate much and bitterly on all this. And I trust that He who looks with a pitiful eye on the sins of his children, has forgiven me. I feel my death to be rapidly approaching; I dread it only for my poor father.’
For the first time, Arabella shed tears, she paused for a few moments, and wept in my arms, silently and freely.
‘I cannot,’ she resumed, ‘think of his loneliness and disappointment without anguish.’
I assured her that her father should want no kindness I could render. She replied, that she doubted not my kind disposition, ‘but who,’ she added, with characteristic truth and simplicity, ‘who, but his child can bear with all the infirmities of my poor old father?’
She requested me never again to speak to her of Clayborne. ‘I am not willing,’ she said, ‘to break the holy calm it has pleased God to grant me. Are you now satisfied with me, my dearest friend?’
I told her, ‘that I was certain she acted from the purest and most exalted motives.’ ‘Simply, from a sense of duty,’ she replied, and the conversation dropped there.
Afterwards, for many weeks, she constantly, though almost imperceptibly, declined. She made unceasing efforts to conceal the progress of her malady from her father. ‘I long to be at rest,’ she would say to me, ‘but for his sake, I will do and suffer whatever may prolong my life.’ And most patiently did she listen to medical advice, most cheerfully take every remedy prescribed. It had been her custom to play her father to sleep in the afternoon, and this she continued to do, even after she became so weak, that she secretly begged me to sit by her, and support her with my arm. Every day, till the very last week of her life, she sat or reclined on the sofa, till her father retired to bed, and then she was carried exhausted to her own apartment.
It was heart breaking to see one so generous in her affection, so true to her duties, the victim of a selfish and capricious passion. It is true, in spite of the poet of nature, and the millions that quote him, that many have died for love. Not of love, perhaps, for it is in its nature a sustaining and vivifying passion; but from the extinction of hope, of expectation, of purpose, of all that breathes a soul into life.
Clayborne, finding his letter to me ineffectual, addressed a similar one to captain St. Clair. The old man had, I believe, before this, gradually come to a right conclusion respecting the recreant love; but his pride and his feeling were too deeply wounded to allow him to speak on the subject. Never did I witness anything so fierce and frightful as his rage at Clayborne’s letter. He swore that he would rather have cut off his daughter’s hand and sent it, than to have waited for a second request for the ring. When the energy of his rage was spent, he wept like a child, and in this moment of weakness, I obtained a reluctant promise from him that he would not disturb Arabella with this grievous subject. He kept his promise, and when with her was apparently calm, but
‘The deepest ice that ever froze,
Can only o’er the surface close;
The living stream lies quick below,
And flows—and cannot cease to flow.’
A few more weeks passed on, and I received a southern newspaper. One passage was encircled by a pen line. It was the advertisement of Clayborne’s marriage with a Miss Wythe, a lady of whom I had heard as a beauty and a fortune. Of course, I burnt the paper without communicating its tidings. Arabella’s life was gently wearing away; each day left her with abated strength, but her spirit seemed to receive peace and courage, from the fountain of strength and joy to which it was so rapidly approaching. Even her father caught a ray from the light of that world that was opening upon his child. He was calm and gentle, and would listen, with a look almost devotional, to her intreaties that would be resigned to the will of God. He would walk in her room and sit by her bed hour after hour, and forget and forego his walk, his cigars, and his wine, and all those daily recurring indulgencies that had seemed to constitute his sum of life. I was sitting one evening beside Arabella. She had passed a day of extreme weakness, hardly discovering any consciousness, excepting once or twice when I read a few passages from the bible, and she looked up with a sweet smile of assent—the response of her spirit to the words of inspiration.
My servant, by mistake, admitted two of our neighbors, who, with some drops of benevolence, have a flood of curiosity that impels them to witness, wherever they can, the last conflict of humanity. Use has given them a sort of official right to intrude on deathbed scenes, and they go to them, con amore, like the wretched cummers in the ‘Bride of Lammermoor.’ When they entered, I was sitting beside Arabella, holding her hand in mine. Her beautiful hair lay in rich masses on the pillow. There was a slight contraction on her brow, and a quick and labored respiration; excepting these manifestations of the presence of the spirit, she was as serene as death itself. Mrs. Smith came to the bedside, and after standing there for a few moments, ‘she changes fast, I think ma’am,’ she said,— I answered by pointing to a seat at the farther end of the room. She turned to her companion and said ‘she still breathes, Patty, and that is all.’ They seated themselves on each side captain St. Clair; protracted anxiety seemed to have exhausted his sensibility. His eyes were half closed, and he was nearly unconscious of any external impressions. Yet it was curious to see the power of habit in his customary politeness. ‘It is a dying world, captain,’ said Mrs. Smith.
‘Yes, madam.’
‘And an uncommon dying season it has been,’ interposed Miss Patty—‘eleven deaths since Fast—no, I am wrong, widow Brown’s was the tenth, Miss Arabella’s will be the eleventh. It is a solemn time, captain.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘It is a dark world, captain,’ resumed Mrs. Smith, ‘and we are blind creatures. If Miss Arabella is prepared, we ought not to mourn for her.’
‘Madam?’
Here I interposed; I observed a slight tremulousness about Arabella’s mouth, that indicated she was not unnoticing, as I had supposed, and I hesitated no longer to request the woman to leave the room.
But their dull sense did not feel the instruments of torture they were handling. ‘If you should need us during the night, captain,’ said Miss Patty, ‘don’t hesitate to send for us.’
‘Need you!—for what, in Heaven’s name?’ asked the captain, for the first time speaking naturally.
‘To lay out your daughter, sir.’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed the wretched father; the woman left the apartment
Arabella gently pressed my hand, opened her eyes, and fixed them intently on me. ‘Am I dying,’ she asked, ‘tell me truly, I did not think it was so near, but I am not frightened.’
‘I believe, my dear child,’ I replied, ‘that you have little more to endure.’
‘God’s will be done,’ she said, ‘I am ready; one thing yet remains to do, and then I am perfectly ready.’ Her father approached the bedside at the sound of her voice. ‘This ring,’ she continued, feebly raising her hand, ‘was put on my finger on your piazza, the night before Clayborne’s departure. He feared my constancy, and he prayed me to kneel with him, and with God for our witness to exchange the marriage vow. I promised in the awful presence we had invoked, to wear this ring till death should divorce us.’
Her father heard her thus far, and then a flood that had been so long accumulating and fretting against its barriers, burst forth in imprecations and curses. Never shall I forget the deep heart rending groan, that Arabella, who had scarcely given an audible sight to her own injuries and sufferings, now uttered; never can I describe the energy with which she raised her head from the pillow, and clasping her arms around her father’s neck, drew his head down to her bosom, saying, ‘Oh father, as you hope to be forgiven; as you are thankful to God for giving peace to your dying child, take back those horrid words and forgive him—father, forgive him.’
‘I do—I do, my child.’
‘Dear father!’ she murmured, and pressed her lips to his burning cheek. A few moments after, I disengaged her clasped hands from her father’s neck, while yet the sweet smile, which the parted spirit had left there, hovered on her lips.
------------------------------‘Death should come,
Gently to one of the gentle mould like thee.
Close thy sweet eyes calmly and without pain;
And we will trust in God, to see thee yet again.’
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
The Bridal Ring
Subject
The topic of the resource
Women, Love, Death, Vow
Description
An account of the resource
Arabella, a young woman of particular musical talent and beauty, becomes engaged to Wingfield Clayborne. Clayborne falls out of love with her and requests the ring back. Arabella takes literally the vow she gave Clayborne and returns the ring only after ‘death do us part.’
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss Sedgwick
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
In The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, edited by S[amuel] G. Goodrich, 223-46 Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1833 [pub. 1832].
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Gray and Bowen
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1833
Contributor
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Lucinda Damon-Bach
Meghan Smith
Shawn Riggins
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
Arabella
Autumn
Clayborne
Clermont Cottage
Death
engagement
Love
religion
St. Clair
The Token and Atlantic Souvenir
Vow
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/f2847940db18b90bf1fec0088476a70f.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=ej7lIRt1wHf48frjUlUMwYj9r0kLF3Xsm3wkxqLzZ8hHlp7%7EqSKZaZHjUmzBn2FRyEfTV7xPqu1pPcKQgAW%7EMc4NmKcBI4LWlFKkrEfvywH92VukN0udawNO0PGlpGZAwvMmbrH0UaUP%7E6Ip6KqL6aFSLHN6HjFRKwNG1bSPFsZSnMyWJZMiOtcEHO-qnlyuhuCX%7EZP4P5jDPyIa4-tV1qTqvMDbtkXwTXNN-KRIJoNBpUFph0FwGgBB%7ExncKzVLhJ-csFRFtMQyYWhgHJ5XPrFtAOZkRyJZbY6FFp12cxNcnnjwBQE%7EdiePQaAE8MwUkINDsDIhp0M6EScTezjREQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
7c4762b788d343110df1c5293a51fcd9
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
1839
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
MATTY GORE.
BY MISS C. E. SEDGWICK. [sic]
“Say rather, all his thoughts now flowing clear,
From a clear fountain flowing, he looks round
And seeks for good; and finds the good he seeks.”
[p. 50]
“WHAT ails you, Matty, to sit moping at that window—are you counting the rain-drops that fall on the pavement?
“No, Harry, I was just thinking—that's all.”
“A penny for your thoughts!”
“I was thinking how dismal it is to live in a city! How pleasant it is to hear the soft dropping rain on the grass! and here it is nothing but patter, patter, patter on the dirty pavement; and, as I looked at the lamps that shed such a dim light through the watery air, and at those blank houses opposite with all their windows closed, I remembered how many times I had gone to our east window in the sitting-room at Fairtown, and seen the lights from Mr. Jessup's, and widow Allen's,
[p. 51]
and Deacon Milnor's, and fancied I could see the families, and what they were all about, and it seemed as if I could almost hear their voices. To my eye there is no life in these dwellings—they don't look like homes— nothing is right here; the stars don't look as they did through our clear air, and the thunder don't sound half so good as it did at Fairtown!”
“Why, Matty, you get the blues sitting here alone; if you would go to the theatre with me, and to the public balls, and Miss Wright's lectures, you would find something brighter than starlight, and quite as entertaining as Fairtown thunder.”
“O! Harry, my dear brother, it is your going to such places that makes me more than all wish we were back in Fairtown. I have heard of many young men who were first drawn aside from the narrow path, by going to those public places where so many bad people go. It is not easy for us, while we are young, Harry, to resist temptation, so it is best to fence ourselves about as well as we can.”
“Pray don't preach, Matty.”
“I won't, Harry; don't call it preaching; but do let me speak what is so heavy at my heart. I don't like your going to the theatre, but I would rather you would go there every night, than go to hear infidel lectures.”
“My dear child, you don't know any thing about it; ‘live and let live,’ Matty,—you go your way, and let me go mine.”
[p. 52]
“There is but one way, Harry.”
“That is an old fashioned notion, my dear; in this age of steamboats, and railroads, new ways are opened. Don't look so solemn, Matty, I don't wish to disturb your faith, and so I tell father.”
“O! Harry, that is not what I am afraid of, for I will hold fast that which is good; but disturbed I must be, when I see you and father seeking, as it were, darkness, and avoiding the light that has come into the world. I cannot reason, as the people do who come here and talk with father, and only cloud up the truth; but I feel, and believe.”
Harry, notwithstanding his resolution not to interfere with his sister's faith, could not forbear saying, “A common family division, my dear; 'the men reason— the women believe.”
“No, Harry, that is not fair, for we are required to give a reason for the faith that is in us; therefore faith in man or woman must have reason to support it.”
Matty was interrupted by her father's entrance. He looked displeased. This was unusual; for John Gore, though rough, was not irritable or churlish. He thrust the poker into the grate, and, without seeming to know what he was about, poked out every coal of a light, spring fire; and then turning to Matty he asked, “Are we not going to have tea to-night?”
“I understood you, sir, that you were not coming home to tea.”
[p. 53]
“Well, I suppose I can change my mind.”
“O, yes, sir," said Matty, setting herself eagerly about arranging the tea apparatus.
“And if I may, Miss Martha, it's a privilege I use only on small occasions.” Gore had not called his daughter Martha, half a dozen times in her life. She felt sure she had displeased him, and stopping before him, she said, with all the courage she could summon “Have I offended you, father?”
“Yes--no—make the tea, will you?”
Matty, pale and trembling, went to the little cup board for the tea canister, and her brother left the room whispering, as he went past her, “This storm has blown up from Fairtown, I guess.”
The tea was soon ready, and Matty sat down and poured out cup after cup, which her father swallowed without uttering a word. He rejected the bread and butter which Matty offered, and, in the hope of pleasing him, she set on the table a beefsteak pie. This was an article of food he particularly liked. His wife had excelled in preparing it, and had communicated her skill to Matty. This was the first she had made since their removal from Fairtown.
“Will you take a bit, father?” she asked; “Harry said it tasted just like mother's.”
“No!” he replied, and then added in a softened voice, “not to-night, Matty”—he hemmed and cleared his throat. “Like mother's, is it? your mother never
[p. 54]
disobeyed me. How long, Miss Martha, have you been keeping up a correspondence with Russel Milnor?”
“Simple truth” was Matty's “utmost skill.” “I have had no correspondence with Russel, sir,” she replied, “excepting that he has sent his kind remembrance to me, and I, mine to him.”
“Then this is his first letter, since we left Fairtown, is it?” and he took a letter from his pocket, and threw it across the table.
“It is, sir,” replied Matty, faintly, while her eyes filled and her cheeks glowed with the irrepressible feeling that is awakened in every woman's heart, by the sight of the first love-letter.
“You need not study the outside any longer,” resumed her father, and for the first time Matty raised her eyes, that had been downcast and fixed upon the letter, as he added, “I know every thing that is in it—I don't mean the love and nonsense, but the business part—it came in a letter to me. Why don't you break the seal?”
“I can't, sir,” she answered, and burst into tears. Various feelings struggled in Matty's tender heart. She knew what Russel's letter must contain, the first expression, in words, of a long-cherished affection. She knew that her father had strong prejudices against her lover, and that his prejudices were as rigid as his iron frame. She thought of her mother, and that if she were alive, she would share every feeling with fond
[p. 55]
sympathy; but now, in the trials that awaited her, there was no one to whom to look for sympathy; not even Harry; her dear and only brother, for he too had prejudices against Russel. Matty was of the ivy nature, dependence was habitual to her; but there is no strict analogy between a vegetable and rational existence. The weakest human soul is capable of receiving a divine energy, and if it mount heavenward it needs not to grasp an earthly support. “Hush up your tears, child,” said Gore, “my mind is settled; and you must settle yours, and cry or laugh afterwards, as the case may be. In the first place tell me, how happens it Russel stuck to farming! I thought the Education Society were going to run him over into a minister.”
“Russel was advised to that, sir; but he did not wish to put himself into a dependent situation, and he thought he might serve his Master as acceptably, by being a farmer, as if he were a minister.”
“Cant! but, however, there is some sense in it. There may be now and then an honest professor out of the pulpit; but it's all hypocrisy where there is a bounty paid. It seems Russel has laid up money enough to buy him a farm in Michigan. He has bought it, and now has the modesty to ask my leave to let you go out and help him take care of it. If you go, mark me! you go contrary to my wishes and my judgment; but I don't forbid it. I am not one of their religious folks,
[p. 56]
who think they have a divine right to lord it over the world. I believe that women, though they are far enough from being fit for it, have a right to independence; and, therefore, you are free to go; but if you go, never come back to my house again—never expect any help from me, be the case what it will; for Russel Milnor's wife's husband will be always the man that I can't abide. I don't set up any right over you. I am an enemy to all arbitrary authority—to father-craft, as well as kingcraft and priestcraft.” John was just as honest as others are when, giving way to the impulse of temper and prejudice, they fancy themselves acting in obedience to an established principle.
There had been an old feud between Deacon Milnor and John Gore, which eventuated in a long pending lawsuit. Gore finally gained the suit, and, as is common in country neighbourhoods, the general sympathy was with the losing party, and Gore, alienated from his old friends, transferred his residence from Fairtown to New York, where he still followed successfully the vocation of master-builder. Gore was a strong, though narrow-minded man. He saw clearly, but he looked through a knot-hole. He never had any religious faith, unless the accidental belief of his childhood might be dignified by that name. He had always treated lightly the faith of his wife, a meek
“Traveller between life and death.”
He took pride in differing from the strictly religious
[p. 57]
community in which he lived, and contracted a very common habit of looking at the abuses of religion, at the dishonour which the bigotries, pretensions, and lapses of its false professors cast upon it, while he was deaf and blind to the testimony, on every side, of its true disciples. After he went to town, he fell in with some clamorous skeptics, and had not the ability, or, alas! the inclination to resist their specious arguments. They were, like Gore, uninstructed men, but they could quote the names of Hobbes and Hume, and Gore's vanity pleased itself with the idea that his preconceived opinions were in accordance with these great mens'. Wo to the ignorant, who are not intrenched in the strongest hold of Christianity, a deep, heart-felt conviction of its truth, resulting from an experience of its adaptation to the wants of humanity!
Gore has hinted his theoretical respect for the “rights of women.” He had recently imbibed it from a certain eloquent lecturer, who has done them worse than doubtful service. The truth was, he looked upon the whole sex with a feudal eye; regarding women as liege subjects, if not “born thralls” of their natural lords; and if his new notions forced him to admit that they were possible equals, he had never yet doubted they were actual inferiors. John Gore's theories had made as yet no apparent difference in his mode of life; his industrious habits were fixed, and the external moralities were second nature to him; but that spiritual work of
[p. 58]
subduing the passions, disciplining the temper, and elevating the affections, John had never yet begun.
But while John Gore went on in his old track, the effect of their new associations on his son Harry, was but too obvious. He had cast aside the faith of his boyhood, but he was too much under the dominion of his senses, to adopt practically the theories of virtue inculcated by his new teachers. He had rejected his mother's pious instructions as nursery tales, and in his change of residence he had escaped from the vigilance and restraints of a moral community. He was destined to learn too late, or never to learn, that the only safe liberty for a young person, in the flush of life, is the liberty that follows self-conquest. Harry Gore was just two-and-twenty; handsome, with that frank and gay expression so captivating to young women, and with that manliness, reckless generosity and impulsive ardour, which altogether constitute the “whole-souled” character so attractive to young men. With these characteristics this unfortunate young man was introduced by his father to a society of skeptics; and by his young companions plunged into the second or third-rate dissipation of a great city. The character of his career might be foreseen; its sad particulars time alone could disclose.—But we forget that it is not Harry Gore's story we are writing. We left John Gore producing a miserable perplexity in his daughter's mind, by the annunciation of his
[p. 59]
wishes, his judgment, and his will. She saw that, by the terms of his opposition, she might follow her inclination without violating the letter of filial obedience; but the spirit of all her duties governed Matty Gore; and though we think she erred, she believed that in all circumstances the precept, “honour your parents,” required the surrender of her own wishes to her father's.
Accordingly, when she answered her lover's letter, which she did that sleepless night, while her tears almost blinded her, she made no secret of the state of her affections. She repeated all that had occurred that evening, and concluded by saying, that her duty was implicit submission to her father's wishes.
We have given merely the points of Matty's letter; the essence of such a letter is of too delicate a nature to be imparted.
To these points came, immediately, a reply from Russel Milnor, enclosed in a letter to Gore, in which he communicated the purport of that to his daughter. Russel said that he trusted he should be enabled to submit to a known duty, even though it required such a martyrdom as the relinquishment of Matty; but that his view of the case differed totally from her's. "You were twenty-one, the first day of this present month, Matty," he said, "and at that age the law allows men and women, if ever they were capable, to be capable of judging for themselves. If your father alleged any thing against my character, or any thing in my circum-
[p. 60]
stances, that formed a reasonable barrier to our union, it would be your duty to acquiesce; but where there is no such reason, I cannot think that parents have a right to control their children. They marry for themselves, not for their parents. In the course of nature they must long survive them. It is, then, their own concern, and they ought to act independently, according to their light, that is, according to the dictate of their best judgment, and of tried affection. Parents do not enough respect the rights of their children on this subject. They interfere by their wishes, their biases, and their manoeuvring. It is an inexpressible happiness when parents approve the choice of their children; but no right of theirs to direct or mar this choice. Our affections are amenable to God only, and when He has joined, man should not sunder them. I have not urged my wishes or my love, for beside that you know I should neither expect nor wish it to prevail against your sense of duty; that once settled in your mind, I am sure, wherever the sacrifice may fall, you will act in conformity to it.”
Before this letter arrived a sudden and great change had taken place in John Gore's domestic arrangements. He had placed at the head of his household a very pretty and flippant young woman, some months Matty's junior, whom he called his wife. Matty had painful reason to suspect that this marriage was merely one of those fragile, and evanescent ties substituted for the holy one of God's appointment, and advocated by a few
[p. 61]
of her father's new associates. Emboldened by that courage which religion alone could inspire in a timid girl, who had grown up in habitual awe of her father; she determined to know from himself the truth; and she took the first occasion, when neither the new Mrs. Gore nor Harry were present, to ask her father, "If he wished her to call his wife, mother?” John's eye fell, and a deeper hue dyed his sanguine cheek, as he an- swered; “Yes—no—that is to say, just as you like; a name does not signify.”
“That name seems to me,” replied Matty; “to signify more than all other words;” and while she spoke, the eye that she kept steadfastly fixed on him filled with tears, and his quailed under it; as that of the lower animals is said to do, beneath the intellectual ray of man. “Father,” she continued; “it is best to speak plain my meaning; I cannot profane that word mother. Is this person my mother in the eye of the law?”
“The law has nothing to do with the matter, and the gospel less,” cried Gore, recovering his usual tone. “She is my wife, according to her view, and my view; and if you don't like her for a mother, you need not make one of her; and that's the end on't.”
“O! father, it is not the end,” exclaimed Matty; in the earnestness of her feeling, forgetting her habitual quietness, and falling on her knees at his feet. “It is God's law you are violating; O! pray, pray, do not bring this shame on us all! this dishonour and misery
[p. 62]
on your old age! O! send her away, sir! Those men that come here, and scoff at all that's good and holy, have been a snare to your soul. Send her away, father, and let us go back to Fairtown; or, lay me down there by mother's grave.”
“Hush! Matty, my child; hush!” His voice was softened, and Matty proceeded. “Dear father, God has made misery to follow sin—even in this world—and there is a judgment to come—for the deeds done in the body, we must give account. What signifies all they say! we know, we feel it in ourselves; there is a heaven, and there is a hell.”
While Matty was speaking the last words, the door opened and Mrs. Gore, flushed with exercise, and the pleasurable excitement of a walk with her young gallant, Harry, entered. Harry divined the meaning of the scene and disappeared; and Mrs. Gore, with affected unconcern, echoed in a soft under tone, “Hell! bless my soul, Miss Matty! a big word for a mealy-mouthed young woman.”
Matty rose from her knees, and turned on the woman a look so full of sorrow, so beaming with the elevation of a spirit immeasurably above her, that she shrunk away abashed. Gore was dimly conscious of a feeling akin to that of a bully, when he is detected by a comrade in an act of cowardice; he rose, and blustered round the room, muttering something of “Matty's nonsense and superstition!”
[p. 63]
Poor Matty went to her own little room, and there remained, in tears and prayers, till she was roused by her father's voice calling her. She met him at the head of the stairs. He gave her Russel's letter, saying, “Russel acts above-board; I give him credit for this; it's his mother's blood, not his sneaking father's. I know, mainly, what is in his letter to you, by one he has written to me. He says what I said to you; that you have a right to follow your inclinations. I'll hold no woman in bondage. One thing that I said to you when Russel first proposed, I take back; the rest must stand. Circumstances alter cases; and now, if you marry Russel, you will not act against my wishes; but remember, Matty! no person that bears the name of Milnor shall ever enter my doors, or have a penny of my property. I have chosen my way, you are free to choose your's.”
There are periods when thoughts pass so rapidly, and the affections will work with such energy, that we seem in brief instants to have lived an age. This was such a moment to Matty. While her father was speaking, the prospect he opened before her, of leaving her wretched home, to live with him who would have made any desert home to her, seemed like a gleam of paradise; and then the thought of leaving her father to wear out his last days in sin and certain misery, closed the gate of happiness against her. “If I could but save him,” she said, mentally, “I would relinquish every
[p. 64]
earthly hope; I am weak, but for such a work, there is strength that will be made perfect in my weakness.” When he had finished speaking, she said in a very low but resolute voice; “Father, there is something nearer my heart than Russel; it is that you should do the right thing.”
“Stop there, Matty! you have taken me to task once, and that is once too many. Water won't run up hill; fathers won't be chidden by their children.”
“But once more, father, I beg you to hear me; but once more.”
“No, no!” he cried, but in a gentler voice; for he was softened; who could resist that earnest and most sweet countenance? “No, Matty! I must follow my light.”
“O! father; that light is darkness: hear me, I beseech you, in the name of God.”
“No, no, Matty! you are too superstitious; there is no use.”
“In the name of my mother, then.”
“You look now like her own self—speak—say quick what you have to say.”
“O! think that it is my mother pleading with you; think that you are back in those days when you believed in truth, and followed after good. Forgive me, forgive me, sir, but I must speak. I must pray you to repent and return to Him, who is ever ready to receive those who forsake their sins. Send away this bad woman,
[p. 65]
father! I will stay with you; I will never, never leave you. I will write to Russel that I have solemnly devoted myself to you. I will do every thing to make your home comfortable and cheerful; it will be neither, with this woman. I will watch over Harry, night and day; I will do all, with God's help, that child and sister can do.”
“You have not considered, Matty.”
“I have considered, sir; and resolved.”
“Well, let me go; let me go; I must consider too;” and he turned from his child, and with faltering steps, and a purpose that now faltered for the first time, retraced his way to his little parlour, while Matty returned to her own room, to strengthen her resolution with prayer; and so strengthened was she by this holy office, that she read Russel's letter with calmness, and sat down to write to him all that had occurred, with a conviction that he would acquiesce in the sacrifice they were to make. But her generosity was not to have its reward. If Gore had been left alone to the workings of conscience, and the gracious ministry of his awakened affections, he might have been saved; but his evil genius interposed. The woman who had led him away from domestic purity and peace, came in while his countenance was dark and agitated with the stormy conflict of right and wrong. With the quick instincts of her sex, she perceived the nature of his disturbance, and suspected
[p. 66]
the source of it. Her youth, beauty and art, soon enabled her to regain her ascendancy over the weak old man, who had nothing to oppose to her but the good feelings that his daughter had awakened. Faith and its securities were gone.
In the course of the morning the following brief note was brought to Matty by the servant girl.
“You've been a good child, and serviceable to me, Matty; and I give you the enclosed, (a hundred dollar note.) It is but justice to say I've nothing to complain of from you; but we've come to the parting point, Matty. It is best we should not have any good bye- ing. I am going out for the rest of the day. Pack and direct your things, and I will send them after you. You had best go to your aunt's before night, as I mistrust we should not all sleep well under the same roof.
“Your father, John Gore.”
Poor Matty! this was almost too much for her to bear. Religion even, cannot soothe the anguish that sin inflicts; the sin of those we love. Matty sat for some time stupified; suddenly she was roused by the thought that she might make an appeal to the woman, who seemed to her the personification of evil. She gained admittance to her room. She was dressed gayly, and was arranging some artificial flowers on her hat preparatory to a walk. She was flurried by the sight of the innocent girl; and she said—the most na-
[p. 67]
tural thing to say—looking at Matty's swollen eyes and colourless cheek; “You don't seem well, Miss Matty.”
“O! I am not well—I am sick—sick at heart;” and she was obliged to grasp the bed-post against which she stood for support.
It is useless to enter into the particulars of the conversation that ensued. Every thing that a pure woman and a devoted child could say, Matty urged; every argument of religion, she exhausted in vain.
There is no harder subject to deal with, than a young woman who has thrown down the bulwarks of religion, and defied the usages of society; not blinded and impelled by the impulses of passion, but a voluntary sacrifice to vanity and selfishness. Matty could not awaken her fears, for she felt secure in her young life; and she could not touch her affections, for their fountains were dried away. Wearied and sick at heart, the poor girl returned to her own room.
A less spiritual being would have been satisfied; would have felt that, having done her filial duty, she was free to indulge the yearnings of her heart. But to this good young person it was not so. She did not act simply with reference to quieting her own conscience. She felt that there must be a most bitter infusion in her cup, while the death of the soul was impending over her father and brother. Her letter to her lover was coloured by her sad feelings. She assented to his plans
[p. 68]
and appointed the time for their meeting; and then reverted to her deep anxieties in a prayer, that she might be patient and never without hope, in the greatest of all tribulations.
After leaving her father's house, she saw her brother repeatedly, but all her efforts to influence him were ineffectual. He did not listen seriously to her entreaties; he did not oppose her arguments with reason; but answered her only with bantering and ridicule; fruits of the lightest, the most hopeless soil.
----------
We resume our story at a period rather more than three years subsequent to Matty's separation from her father. He still occupied the comfortable house in Elm street, in which she had left him; but how changed was its interior! The simplicity, neatness, and precision that, under her regime, had seemed the type of her well-ordered mind, had given place to slatternliness, disorder, and finery. A crazy auction pier-table, with tarnished gilding, occupied the place of the spotless waxed mahogany table with falling leaves, a Fairtown friend. The old family Bible had disappeared, and in its stead was a vase of French flowers, with a cracked shade. The new Mrs. Gore had substituted for the honest, old windsor conveniences which she condemned as “too Presbyterian,” defaced and rickety mahogany chairs, that looked as if they had mouldered at a pawnbroker’s. Over the mantel-piece had hung,
[p. 69]
time out of mind, (for it was an heirloom from Matty's maternal ancestors,) the picture of a tree bearing symbolical fruit, each apple labelled with the name of one of the Christian graces. Its perpetual verdure was preserved by an angel who was watering it, while the evil one stood in the background menacing it with a scythe. This picture, which Matty looked upon with almost a Catholic’s love, had been much derided by Gore's new friends; and with a reluctance that he was half ashamed of, he had consented to the substitution of a tarnished chimney mirror.
But John Gore stood at bay, at the next proposed alteration. His fine young lady bought a tawdry French clock, which she insisted would serve for use and ornament too; instead of a faithful old family time-piece.
“The old clock,” urged Gore, “is as true as the sun.”
“That, my dear love, is of no consequence; we have town-clocks all about us that are regulated by the sun. At Fairtown this horrid old thing might have been useful; but in the city, you know, a clock is chiefly for looks.”
“Like every thing else!” muttered John. “They build their houses for looks, and they tumble down over their heads. They buy their furniture for looks; and it warps and snaps, and is good for nothing. They take their wives for looks, and they”-----
[p. 70]
“My dear, darling husband!”
John Gore suppressed the bitter words that were on his lips, but the tender deprecation of his wife had not the accustomed effect. Either his vanity had lost something of its susceptibility, or his lady (we cannot profane the name of wife) had worn out her poor arts of cajoling. He stood for some moments before the fire, silent, with his hands behind him, as was his wont, when a tempest was gathering; and then burst forth, calling his wife by her unchanged name, as he always did when displeased with her. “I warn you, Angeliky Foot”-----
“My dear Mr. Gore, pray say Angelica!”
He merely raised his voice a tone higher, as he resumed. “I warn you, Angeliky Foot, not to sell that clock; it's the only thing nowadays that keeps me peaceable; it was my father's; it marked the prayer-time, and the meal-time, and the play-time; when all I knew was to do my duty. It struck the hour for my marriage; it told the hour of my children's birth. In my Fairtown home, it was true to us, and we were true to that. When my wife died it sounded like a tolling bell. Well it might! well it might! Once, again, it tolled! when Matty passed that threshold! and well it might then too! And now, when all is ajar, and out of time, that still is true. Its old face, as it were, speaks to me; and there are times when its look of quiet, gone-by days, is all that keeps my temper from rising over
[p. 71]
bounds. So I warn you, Angeliky Foot, not to say another word of parting with it.”
Angelica Foot did not at that time; but at prudent intervals and fortunate moments she resumed the topic, and John Gore at last yielded, as many yield, to whom “carrying the day,” seems not worth the trouble of continued resistance. He yielded however only to a compromise. The old clock was removed up stairs, and out of sight, and the “bargain,” of what John descriptively designated as “a bit of French trumpery,” bought.
Not long after this change was made, John came home one day at his usual time. He was as punctual as the old clock, and had been so rigid in the enforcement of this observance upon Miss Angelica Foot, that she, aware of the importance of keeping on his blind side, had taken care that a domestic should supply her short-comings, and have Gore's meals ready for him, when she, on the pretext of a headache, was lying in bed, or strolling in Broadway, or sitting with a sick friend. On such occasions an alibi might have been proved, by such as saw her taking a drive, far out of town, with Harry Gore!
But, on the morning to which we allude, John came home and found his little parlour looking much like a slattern, when the morning light has dawned upon her coarse and dirty finery. Every thing was out of place. The lamps of the preceding night were still dimly burn-
[p. 72]
ing. His eye involuntarily turned towards the clock, to see if he had not mistaken the hour of the day. The pointers as usual were motionless. He muttered a malediction, and proceeded through the unswept entry, down stairs to the little basement room, where he was accustomed to find his meridian meal. There were no signs of it. He went to the kitchen. There was no apparent preparation for dinner. Gore heard voices above, from one of the chambers; he followed the sound and burst most unexpectedly upon his wife, Harry, and two female friends of hers, who had forgotten him and every thing else, in the excitement of preparing for a masquerade ball. In the most innocent circumstances, it is rather provoking to find those whose duty it is to minister to our necessities, occupied with their own pleasures. The masks, ribands, flowers, and finery of all sorts, with which the room was cluttered, operated on Gore's temper as the colour of scarlet does on some enraged animals. His fury broke forth in the most unmeasured expressions. The lady-friends escaped. “What do you here, at this time of day, sir!” he asked, turning fiercely to his son.
“What do I!” he answered, with affected calmness; “why, you know, sir, it's the hour when all regular labourers go home to their meals.”
“Regular! I wonder when you have done an hour's work, regular or irregular. I tell you, sir, what I have told you before; that I'll not have you loitering here
[p. 73]
with Angeliky Foot, when I am out of the house. ‘Children, obey your parents,’ is a law that I'll uphold while I have breath.”
“Ah, father!” replied Harry, uttering a biting truth, in a manner still gay and careless. “Ah, father, quoting Scripture! You can't expect, sir, your son will wear the yoke you have broken, and trampled under foot.” Anxious to be off, before a return blow could be given, he hurried on his surtout while speaking, and in his haste accidentally dropped from it an unsealed letter. The address to himself, caught John Gore's eye. “From Matty!” he exclaimed; “why did you not give me this?”
“I forgot it; it can't be of any consequence; only one of Matty's preachments, I guess.” Harry told the truth; he had forgotten it. The poor young man had rejected the high motives to virtue, and its sanctions; and in his present downward course of life, his affections were perishing for lack of nourishment.
The sight of a letter from Matty in the midst of all this discomfort and discord, went to John Gore's heart. He put on his spectacles to read it, but they were soon blurred, and he was obliged to take them off again, and again, to clear them before he could proceed. We must premise that Matty, scrupulous in the performance of her duties, had written to her father at regular intervals since their separation, without receiving or hoping for a return.
[p. 74]
"Fairmount, Michigan,20th June, 183-
“My Ever Dear Father.—I think so much of you that I must believe you have not quite forgotten me. O! what a good gift is memory! (“to the good it may be,” thought Gore;) how it peoples the wilderness with dear recollected forms! how it brings to life again the long past pleasures of childhood! the time that was, before any trouble or change had come! How it carries me back to those pleasant Saturday evenings, when every thing, having been done decently and in order, for in every thing mother went after Scripture rule, (Gore looked round on the litter of gauzes and tinsel, and heaved a deep sigh,) Harry and I sat down on our little benches beside her, and learned our Bible lesson for Sunday. They were always got before the clock struck eight; the dear old clock that told the coming on of happy mornings, and peaceful nights. I wonder if it keeps good time yet?
“But, dear father, I sat down, not to write of the past, but to tell you of our present condition; which, thanks to the Giver of all good, has much improved since my last. The failure of crops the first season was a disappointment, and the loss of stock occasioned by low and insufficient feed fell heavy upon us; but we did not murmur. I have one sorrow at heart, that always makes worldly troubles seem light; (“Matty's religion is no sham,” thought Gore;) and Russel says he has received too much good at the hand of the Lord, to mur-
[p.75]
mur at a little evil. Last year we should have done finely, but for Russel's long sickness; but that is past now, and we trust it has done a good work for us, in making us more fully realize the worth of that hope which sustained us, when the world seemed vanishing from us. Now every thing prospers around us. I can almost see the wheat and corn grow; for in this rich soil it does not take the whole summer, as it does at the east, to come to perfection. It seems as if the Al- mighty had made gardens in this wilderness; and, dear father, I often think that if you and Harry could stand in the door of our little loghouse here at Fairmount, and look over the prairie; all that part of it which is still untouched by the hand of man, that the sight of it would draw you near to Him who created it. Those who live in cities, where nothing but man's hand is seen, may forget God, especially if there be temptation about them, to lure the eye and enchant the ear; as in poor Harry's case; but here, father, with this vastness around us; this stillness—with nothing for the eye to see but the beautiful earth God has created, and the Heavens that declare his glory, His presence is felt, and the heart goes out to Him, as naturally as a little child to its parent. O! that you and Harry were here! My little Sybil is now twenty months old. I hardly ever speak her name without thinking of you, for you were the only person I ever heard call mother by that
[p. 76]
name; and I am sure, father, I seldom think of you without a prayer in my heart to God for your best good. (“Religion does make children faithful!” thought Gore.) Sybil already speaks quite plain; and in her morning and evening duty she is taught always to remember you, father! I have a little brother for her, just six months old. I should have given him your name, if I had thought it would be pleasing to you, to have your name joined with his father's. Please tell my brother, with my love, that I call him Harry. (An involuntary prayer escaped from John's lips, “The Lord make him another kind of a man!”) O, father! what a different feeling I have had for my parents since my children were born! Short-sighted creatures are we indeed, that we must stand just in the places of others, before we can see and feel as they do! Such are now my feelings, that I think, nay, I am sure, I would give up my life freely to have you brought to the faith and love of the gospel; and what is life to that eternal happiness which awaits the humblest followers of Jesus?
“But, dear father! I would not weary you. Pray do not get so tired of my letters that you will not read them; and pray let me beg you, once more, if any great good or great sorrow comes upon you, to let some word of it be sent to your ever affectionate and dutiful daughter, MATTY.”
[p. 77]
“Good! good! will any good ever come to me?” thought Gore, in the bitterness of his heart; and then a prayer—an aspiration should we not rather call it—rose from the depths of his soul. “O ! my child, my child! would that I were altogether such as you are!” This was the first gleam of light.
Time went on; and Gore's out-of-door life presented its accustomed aspect. His habits of industry were now almost his sole comfort. He was a skilled artisan, and in the busy and flourishing city of New York, his art found ample employment and large reward. His earnings were consumed by his idle son and exacting lady. Gore was generous in his nature, and parted with his money without a regret; but frugal in his own habits, and rational in his views of the uses of money, it irritated him to see it wasted, and worse than wasted. He became reserved in his supplies, and finally, a terrible suspicion having taken possession of his mind, he drove his son from his house, and reminded Angelica Foot that she was but a tenant at will; and that the light bond that united them could be broken at his pleasure. “At my pleasure, too,” thought Angelica. A few evenings after, Gore was on some business in a distant part of the city; he met two persons, veiled and muffled, who struck him, as he passed them, as resembling Harry and Angelica Foot. He stood still to observe them: then followed them a few steps; and then, cursing his own folly, and resolving that if he returned
[p. 78]
and found her gone, he would bar his doors forever against her; he resumed his homeward way. She was not in his house. “She will return to me, to-morrow,” he said, “as she has done before, and tell me she has been watching with her sick cousin; but I know now, what I then suspected! This surely is from the hand of God; it is fitting I should be punished by the child I led astray.”
It was a proof that Gore's conscience was awakened, that he turned from upbraiding others to a crushing consciousness of his own sins. Tears gushed from his eyes; his limbs seemed sinking under him; and he leaned against the mantel-piece for support, when a letter sealed with black, in Matty's hand, caught his eye. A longer interval than usual had passed since he had heard from her. He seized it eagerly.
It was of a date two years later than the one we have already transcribed. It had been written at intervals, “in affliction and anguish of heart; and,” as the blistered paper witnessed, “with many tears.” It began,
“MY EVER DEAR FATHER.—My last letter to you was written as soon as I could hold a pen, after the birth of my second son, my little Russel. Since then I have not written to you, because I have many misgivings that you have more than trouble enough of your own; and 1 know further, by what I feel, that there is that in a parent's heart which cannot be torn out of it; and that
[p. 79]
however contrary appearances may be, my sorrows would weigh upon you; though my sorrows are, I fear, far lighter than your own.” (“God knows they are, whatever they may be,” murmured Gore.) “After Russel's birth I fell into a low fever, which is apt to set in on such occasions, and after I got a little better of that, the doctor said I was threatened with a decline; and recommended a journey; and my dear husband, who has always set my health and comfort before every earthly possession, got a trusty woman to take care of our children, and took me down to Buffalo, by the lake, to return by land. The journey was greatly blessed to me, and every thing went as we desired, till, on our way home, we were overtaken by heavy rains, and delayed two weeks. A fatal delay for us. When we arrived at home, we found that the woman left in charge of our children, not being able to overstay the time she had engaged for, had gone and left our little family in the care of a young girl. In consequence of her ignorance and neglect, poor little Harry had taken cold, and was dreadfully ill with an inflammatory rheumatism, and my poor baby seemed pining away. It had pleased God to restore my strength, and I entered upon the care of my children with resolution and hope.
“The low lands were overflowed by the freshet, and the crops much injured. They required my husband's immediate care. He overworked himself, and his fatigue and the stagnant water in the coves brought on a
[p. 80]
terrible fever. Six weeks have passed since he took to his bed. The fever is broken; but, O! my dear father, he seems sinking away, and I look for the worst; humbly trusting that God will enable me to bear what he sees fit to lay on me.”
-----
“Ten days have passed, my dear father; God has been merciful to little Harry. He is on his feet again, though still pale and feeble. My dear husband is no better. O ! my heart and strength fail me, when I think of what is coming. When Russel sees me drooping, he says, with a sweet smile, ‘stay your heart on God, Matty;’ and I do. O, father! how can those bear life whose hearts are not so stayed?
“My baby revived after we got home, and seemed to be thriving again; and was a great comfort to his father. When the little creature was sleeping, his father would have the cradle beside his bed. It seemed as if there was something in the sight of such sweet innocence, composing to the spirit. Last week the little fellow had a bad turn again, and two days ago, when he was evidently dying, my husband would have me sit with him, by his bedside. Together we watched his last breathings. O! my dear father, I thought then—I think now —that if you had lost one of us in infancy, you would never have doubted there was another world. The smile of my boy as his closing eye met mine for the last time, might convert a soul to faith in Jesus; for it
[p. 81]
was a speaking confirmation of His words, ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ In that sweet smile there was love that cannot die; light beaming from immortality. We buried him the next day. The doctor was the only friend with us. He dug the grave under an oak tree, a few yards from our bed-room window. My husband selected the spot. He can see it, when he is raised on his bed. It is a trial, father, to a mother, to lay her child out of her arms into the cold earth; but there is in it no bitterness—no fear—no doubt. Believe me, dear father, for while I say it—I am sorely pressed upon —any thing may be borne, but sin and separation from God.”
(The letter dropped from Gore's hands; “That cannot!” he exclaimed; and in the anguish of his heart he cried aloud.)
-----
“Ten days have passed since my baby's death. My husband is sinking fast. The doctor told us yesterday, that our separation might take place at any moment. When he went out, Russel said, ‘This is much hardest for you, Matty. Rest on God's promises. He has never been known to forsake the widow and fatherless that put their trust in Him; we cannot be separated long; we know that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. I asked him if he had any directions to give about the children. ‘None,’ he said, ‘none; you will bring them
[p. 82]
up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I have no anxieties for them, Matty; I have for you; but I am trying to cast off this care.’ He has given me his advice as to all earthly matters; he seems to have forgot nothing.”
-----
“It is over. He died at sunrise this morning; he sat up, supported by the doctor; his last look was on that little green mound under the oak tree, and then at me. I had been alone with him all night. Never, father, did I witness such faith; such peace; such joy; and, I may add, such thought for others. Surely he had drank deep of his Saviour's spirit. Before the children were put to sleep last night, he would have them come and kneel down at the bedside, while he prayed with us for the last time. Father, he remembered you and Harry! 0! how he prayed that you might be brought to believe in Jesus; ‘the resurrection and the life.’ Father, you will! you will! I am too weak to write more, his words are all written on my heart.
‘We buried him yesterday. Kind friends came to help us. There was no clergyman; but we had prayers and hymns, and a fitting service; and we laid him there beside the baby, where they will rest together, till this mortal puts on immortality. O! father, what a frightful, fathomless abyss, must the grave be to an unbeliever!”
[p. 83]
“Ten days have passed; my strength is a little recruited. Every thing has been done as my husband wished. You know many things have gone against us in a worldly way, since we have been here. I have sold all the personal property except the bed, and a little silver, and other valuables bought with the hundred dollars you gave me, and paid our debt to the doctor, and all other debts. I have fifty dollars over, for my journey to Fairtown. My husband wished me to return there, as I can do nothing here. The land may be something for the children hereafter. I begin my journey to-morrow. The lateness of the season makes it imprudent to delay. I intend taking the steamboat at Detroit. Farewell, dear father, may God have mercy on us all!”
“Amen !—amen!” cried Gore, clasping his hands, while tears poured like rain down his cheeks. It was a sleepless but a blessed night to him. Silence and solitude are powerful enforcements of conscience. Gore had never felt the influence of religion. In his youth he lived more even than most young persons, in the outward world. He judged of causes by their effects. He compared Matty's course to his own, and to Harry's. In the midst of disappointments and grievous afflictions, she dwelt in the light of another world; she was borne up by an immortal principle; the fire did not consume her, nor the floods overwhelm her. What was
[p. 84]
Harry's condition; what his own, at this moment! Like Mackenzie's philosopher, Gore wished he had never doubted; but, unlike him, he doubted no longer. For the first time since he had come to man's estate, he, that night, bent his knees to his Creator!
The next morning, before going out to his affairs; he dismissed Angelica's servant, and determined to lock his door, to prevent that bad woman access to his house. He had received the night before two thousand dollars, in payment of a debt, too late to deposit it in the bank; his first errand out was to go there with it. On opening the desk where he had put the money, he found that it was gone. The desk had been opened by a false key. The loss of the money was no insignificant matter to Gore, but every other feeling was swallowed up in the horror of the belief that Harry was a participator in the robbery. He resolved at once, to keep it secret; he told it only to one friend. A secret should have but one keeper.
We return to Matty, who was driven, with her two children, in a wagon to Detroit. She passed the night there, before embarking in the steamboat, and was compelled to sleep in a room filled with emigrants; the women of half a dozen families, Scotch, Irish, and German. When she went to bed, she put her pocket, containing her pocket-book, with her little store of bank notes, under her pillow. Worn out with fatigue, and the watchful nights of many weeks, she slept soundly.
[p. 85]
In the morning the pocket-book was gone! Matty, unconscious of her loss, paid her bill from a purse in the pocket of her dress where she had a small sum for present use. Her box, containing her bed, &c, had been left on the wharf with the steamboat baggage; and Matty, knowing little of the ill chances of a traveller, had no further anxiety but to get herself and her children on board. As soon as they had put off, and her weak head, which had reeled with the confusion of the embarkation, had recovered a degree of steadiness, she went to look after her baggage. A trunk, containing her own and her children's apparel was forthcoming, but the box was left behind.
“This is a heavy loss to you, ma'am,” said a good-natured man, who had assisted her search. “Yes,” said Matty, with a melancholy smile which the man seemed truly to interpret; for he added; “but, Lord bless me, ma'am, I think you have met with greater.”
“I guess she has,” said little Sybil; “for she has lost father and the baby, and we are all alone!”
“Well, well!” said the man, brushing away a tear; “the greater burden makes the lesser one feel light— that's a comfort, anyhow.”
Poor Matty was destined to farther experience of the truth of her comforter's philosophy. It was not long before the crier called out to the passengers from Detroit, to “come to the Captain's office, and pay their passages!” Matty waited till the press was over, and
[p. 86]
then went forward. The captain told her the amount, and, taking her little boy in his arms, was addressing a kind word to him, when he perceived the mother turn suddenly very pale.
“My pocket-book is gone,” she said; “I have not a dollar left! What is to become of us?” Her sense of their utter destitution overcame her, and she covered her face with her hands, and sank down on a bench. The children crept into her lap, and put their arms around her. Sybil whispered, “Why, mother! Mother, you always say God will take care of us? Won’t he now, mother?”
The captain fixed his eye steadfastly on the poor mother. He was accustomed to every mode of imposition and evasion, but this was truth; he felt assured, and it went to his heart, as warm and generous as any man’s; and, despite his hackneyed life, untouched by cupidity, and incapable of selfish suspicion. His attention was for a moment called off by some applicants at the office; and when it again reverted to Matty, she had wiped away her tears, and said calmly, “You must excuse me, sir; I have been through great fatigue and trouble lately;” her voice faltered, and little Sybil interposed. “She means father and baby are dead, sir.” “I see plainly,” resumed Matty, “there is but one thing to be done; I must be set on shore at the first landing place.”
“Where were you bound, ma’am?” asked the cap-
[p. 87]
tain in a voice that indicated sympathy and respect. Matty told him. He inquired, “if she expected to find friends there.”
“It is my native place, sir,” she replied; loath to enter into further particulars.
“Then,” said the captain, “we must get you there as fast as steamers and canal-boats can take you. You are in no state to be put ashore, my friend, and left to shift for yourself.” He called to the chambermaid. “Give this lady No. 15,” he said, “and a settee, and see that she has every attention and comfort.” Then taking Sybil in his arms, and kissing her, he said; “God does take care of good little children, my dear.”
“And so do good men, too!” replied the child, returning his caress. The mother smiled through her tears. It was a smile full of sweetness, peace, and gratitude. She could not speak. The captain understood her. He replaced Sybil in her arms, and turned away. Matty retired to her berth; and there her full heart found utterance without the aid of voice.
Subsequently it occurred to her, that the contents of her box, if recovered, might afford a compensation to the captain, and she told him so. “There is not much of value in the box,” she said, “excepting a bed, but it is a very good one.”
“I do not doubt it,” he replied; “or that I shall recover it; but I shall sleep all the better on my own bed, for thinking you have got yours in safety. Say no
[p. 88]
more about it, Mrs. Milnor; it is not every trip, up or down the lake, I have a chance of doing a good turn to a person I respect so much as I do you.”
When they arrived at Buffalo, the captain himself attended her to the canal-boat, and got an assurance from its commander that Mrs. Milnor should be forwarded free of expense to Albany; and then giving her a basket, well packed with an ample store of good provisions, he took a kind leave. Subsequently the box, directed and forwarded by the captain, came safely into Matty's possession.
These particulars of the captain's humanity, we should fear, might prove tiresome if they were fictitious; but being true to the letter, we would do our part towards cherishing their memory, as one of the moral treasures of our race.
It was not from this benevolent captain alone that Matty experienced kindness. Wherever she needed it, it was extended to her. She arrived safely at Schenectady. Being much exhausted, she asked leave to remain for an hour in the canal-packet, after the passengers had left it. New arrangements were now to be made. She was to change her mode of travelling, and she dreaded going among the throng, and begging a passage in a rail-road car.
Her delicacy shrunk from this prolonged dependence, and she was half inclined to stop where she was, and seek employment. But her strength was inadequate to
[p. 89]
labour, “and surely,” she thought; “experience should teach me faith in my fellow-beings, and trust in Him who hath helped me thus far!” She resolved to proceed; when a person, who, like her, was lingering in the packet, asked her if she would like to look at a “New York paper?”
“Thank you—no!” said Matty; who had no very keen appetite for newspapers.
“But there is something quite awful and interesting there,” pursued the person, pointing to a heading,
“Farther Disclosures.”
Matty took it languidly; but so she did not read, what follows. “A second examination took place yesterday, of Angelica, alias Nancy Foot. She declared that she had not had any special altercation with Gore on the fatal night; nor since the previous morning, when the robbery first got wind. He had shared the money with her, believing it was, as she assured him, her savings from various largesses. It seems that the unfortunate youth, though deeply depraved, was struck with horror at the imputation of having robbed his own father. He said to Nancy, when he heard the police were in search of him, ‘It was well there was no hell hereafter; there was enough of it here!’ It seems more than probable, that his disbelief in a final retribution, concurring with his present degradation and alarm, impelled him to the horrible act of suicide.”
Matty read no farther; the paper dropped from her
[p. 90]
hands; she fainted and fell on the floor! The person who gave her the paper had left the cabin. “O! mother has died too!” screamed Sybil, and the little boy cried piteously. At this moment an old man entered the cabin door, and when Matty opened her eyes she found herself in her father's arms.
----------
John Gore has returned to his old home in Fairtown. The waxed table, the old clock, and the Bible are in their accustomed places. But the Bible no longer seems to Gore a mere piece of furniture. He reads it daily, and with the earnest and humble mind befitting him who knows he reads the oracles of the living God. He has but one sorrow, yet that admits no cure; and he never speaks of it. He lives in close friendship with the Milnors, “not having yet forgiven them,” he says, with a smile; “but having been forgiven by them!”
Matty now only shows she has suffered by her ready and deep sympathy with all who suffer. Her losses on earth are her treasures in heaven. She is the solace of her old father; the guide and delight of her loving and good children; the example of all worth in her humble neighbourhood; and though “poor, she maketh many rich.”
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
Matty Gore
Subject
The topic of the resource
Christian faith and the misfortunes that result from neglect of religion.
Description
An account of the resource
A young woman's Christian faith sustains her through life's trials, while her father's and brother's lack of faith and duty lead to unhappiness and tragedy.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. [Miss C. E. Sedgwick]
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The Religious Souvenir, edited by Lydia Howard Sigourney, pp. 50-90.
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New York: Scofield & Voorhies
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1840 [pub. 1839]
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D. Gussman
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Annual reissued as The Religious Souvenir. Hartford, Conn.: S. Andrus and Son, 1846.
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English
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Document
"Despondency Corrected"
1839
1840
bible
brothers
Buffalo
conversion
correspondence
daughters
Death
duty
Faith
farming
fathers
filial obedience
forgiveness
Frances Wright
frontier
God
housekeeping
illness
independence
lectures
letters
living in sin
Lydia Howard Sigourney
marriage
New York City
newspapers
parenthood
railroad
religion
robbery
suicide
The Religious Souvenir
William Wordsworth
women's rights
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1846
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Stories published in 1846.
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In the year 1273, and on as bright a day as ever shone, even on that bright land of Italy, two females issued from the bronze gate of the palace Lanbertazzi at Bologna. The one by her stature, her elastic step, rich dress, and close veiling, inspired the ideas of youth, beauty and rank. The other stood revealed, a sturdy serving-woman, who vigilantly watched and cared for the lady she attended. As they threaded their way, through one of the narrow passes which characterized those old fortress-like cities, to the grand square, the elder woman stretched her arm behind the younger as a sort of rampart to defend her from even the accidental touch of a passer-by.
Suddenly they heard the tramping of horses behind them, and the elder exclaimed, “Quick, my lady! Turn the corner; these precious gallants of our city, will think no more of trampling us under their horses’ hoofs, than if we were the grass made to be trodden on! There, now we are safe, for they cannot reach us here,” she added, following the young lady who sprang on the elevated pedestal of a cross. “Here how they come, by whether our people or old Orlando’s, who can tell?” At this moment, out poured from the narrow street, some fifty horsemen— horses and men so disguised by paint, caparison, dress and masks, that it would have seemed impossible for those who knew them best to recognize them.
It was market day in Bologna, and the square, though it was early morning, was already filled with peasantry. The crowd receded to the right and the left, but as the horsemen did not halt nor scarcely check the speed of their horses, it seemed inevitable that life would be sacrificed.
“Holy Virgin! Save the poor wretches!” cried the young lady, in a voice whose sweet tone was to her attendants like that of a lute to a brazen instrument.
To exclude the frightful peril from her sight, she put her hands before her eyes, just in time to save herself the torture of seeing a poor woman, who was walking forward with her back to the cavaliers, knocked down by one of them and ridden over by three others, whose horses, though they instinctively recoiled from the body, seemed to tread the life out of it. Loud exclamations burst out on every side. A cry of “Shame! Shame!” “Every bone in her body is broken!” “See the blood from her head!” “She is dead! “She is dead!” One of the cavaliers made a motion as if turning his horse’s head, but an urgent order from the leader of the troop checked this single movement of humanity, and turning out of the square into another narrow and devious passage, they rode unheeding on through the gates of the city in pursuit of some lawless adventure.
“Kneel not here, by dear lady Imelda,” said her attendant; “rise up and let us hasten to church and pray to Madonna for the soul so, without rush, sent out of this world.”
“Yes, yes, dear Nilla, but first,” she added, taking her purse from her pocket and giving it to her, “go in among these people, take this money and see what can be done for her body or soul. Oh, Nilla— Frederico was their leader. It is but half an hour ago that he came to me to tie that blood read band around his arm. I told him it was an evil omen.
“Was it Frederico? Then save thy money, for it will empty the coffers of the Lambertazzi to pay for the sins they brothers are heaping on their wild heads. Alas! That the young should think so long and judgment so far!”
“Nay, I tell thee go, Nilla, and offer aid!” said the young lady, with the air of one not to be disobeyed, even by a privileged nurse. “Money may buy bread and cataplasms, but it will not efface sin.” If it would, she thought as Nilla left her side, it were well that our nobles are rich; by precious. Oh, Frederico! My brother! God stay thy violent hand.
After a few moments, Nilla returned with the purse.
“There is no use,” she said, “in showing it there— she is not dead. She bids them carry her into Santa Maria, and lay her before the alter of Madonna. There where she has prayed all her life— there will she die.”
“We will follow her, Nilla.”
“Nay, my dear lady Imelda, we cannot. The alter is in the Giéréméi chapel, and I gathered from the words dropped, that this woman’s family are their followers.”
“Be it so. We have nought to do with their hates, Nilla; ours is a better part.”
“But if your father or your brothers hear you have been in that chapel, my lady?”
(Pg. 254)
“I care not— they pursue bloody work. We are vowed to our lady of mercy; follow me.”
The train bearing the body of the dying woman preceded them into the church of Santa Maria, and turning into the Giéréméi chapel they laid her on the floor before a richly decorated alter of the Virgin. A hundred wax lights were burning before it; a crucifix of silver and precious gems stood on it, surrounded by lamps, images and vases of the same precious metal. Over them hung a holy family fresh from the hands of Grotto, and below stood a sculptured sarcophagus containing a saint’s ashes; all bespoke the riches and devotion of the Giéréméi. Beside the alter was a sitting figure of the Madonna herself, with the infant Jesus in her arms, both sparking with jewels and surrounded with the votive offerings. To the pious Catholic the image of Madonna symbolizes all suffering, sympathy and love. From her sanctified heart radiates the whole circle of human affections. She is far enough above humanity for homage, and near enough for fellow-feeling and aid.
The priest officiating at the altar, continued his service without heeding the many feet that came clattering over the marble floor. Even the boy who waived the censer, gave not a swing the less for the spectacle of a violent death.
Imelda had thrown back her veil, and discovered a face resembling (if the traditionary portrait may be believed) the immortal Cenci of Guido. There was the same potency of purpose with the undimmed freshness of youth— the same ripeness for Heaven, with the intense susceptibility to human suffering. The crowd gave place to her, as if an angel were passing among them, and still closely attended by Nilla, she knelt beside the bleeding woman, and taking her veil off to staunch the wound, “Can nothing be done for you?” she asked.
The woman painfully strained open her failing eyelids, and a faint color returned to her ghastly cheek.
“No, no,” she answered, “I want nothing. Madonna has heard me— she smiles on me,” and she turned her eye lovingly to the compassionate face over the altar. “Day and night, lady, I have prayed that my weary life might end. This is joy to me, but wo to those by whom it cometh.”
Imelda shuddered.
“Perhaps,” she said, “You leave those behind you who can be served by such as are willing and able to serve them. Gold shall not be spared.”
“Gold! Oh! You cannot bring the dead to life if you filled their graves with gold— but stay, stay,” she added, and she clenched Imelda’s arm so that the blood trickled down her ermined glove; “I had two sons dearer to me than my life was even then when they made every minute of it glad; they were stabbed by the young Labertazzi on cold blood while they kept faithful ward and watch for old lord Boniface. Oh, they were good sons to me, but they were daring, hot blooded youths. Buy masses for their souls, lady— not for mine— not for mine. Madonna will take care of mine— it matters not for me.” Her voice sank away. “Pray for them, dear lady,” she added, in a whisper, “the prayers of saints are heard. Oh, bid the priest hasten to me!”
Imelda beckoned eagerly to the priest who had just finished the morning mass. He came, knelt on the other side, and performed the office for the dying. It was a rough sight for Imelda, that old woman struggling between life and death, her muscles stiffening and tremors and convulsions affecting her whole frame; but she did not shrink from it. She looked like an angel come to attend the parting spirit. Tresses of her bright hair disengaged by the removal of her veil had fallen over her cheek and neck on one side. Her cheek was deeply colored by her emotion, and her blue eyes glowed as she raised it with every amen ejaculated to the priest’s prayer.
“Is that angel or mortal!” said a young man, who had just risen from a brief prayer in a retired part of the chapel.
“Mortal, I trow, my lord,” replied the person addressed. “It is warm blood that colors that cheek, and that look of pity and sorrow is the common privilege of our humanity.”
“Whence comes she, Giovanni?” Surely we know all the beauties of Bologna, and I have seen those of Florence and Pisa, but never has my eye lighted on such as vision as this.”
“It is not, my lord, the pearl we have heard of, shit up in old Labertazzi’s oyster shell?”
“No, no, it cannot be.”
“Cannot! Your wish would say must not, my lord. But though kept like a nun in her cell, I have heard rumors of the young lady Imelda’s rare loveliness. Such a gem will sparkle through the cervices in the walls. They do say that her crafty father is plotting to match her with royalty.”
“But, Giovanni, this cannot be the lady Imelda. The Lambertazzi are dark me.”
“Nature has such freaks, my lord; the lily grows beside the night-shade.”
“My lord Boniface,” said an old man, advancing eagerly from the group, “Why stand ye here and poor Alexa dying? The mother of the boys who lost their lives for you at your palace gate.”
“Old Alexa!” God forgive me!” The thought that he had vowed to watch over and protect this most unfortunate woman, pierced his heart as he sprang toward her. She did not see him; her ears received no sound; a thick film was gathering over her eyes. She turned gasping toward Imelda and, nature rally for a last effort, she
(Pg. 255)
pressed her lips a small crucifix and giving it to Imelda, said, “Seek out my goof young lord Boniface; give him this sign of love and mercy— tell him to forgive the Lambertazzi. No revenge— no revenge for me!”
“I will— God so help me as I will.”
The agony passed from the dying woman’s face.
“She is dead,” exclaimed Nilla, “come away, my lady, quickly. I see the followers of the Giéréméi gathering. You are unveiled in their chapel!”
Imelda drew up her mantle close over her head and face and disappeared.
_______________
Bologna had long been harassed by the rival factions of the Labertazzi and the Giéréméi, its two most noble families. The Lambertazzi were at the head of the Ghibelines, their rivals commanded the Guelphs. Political, religious and domestic elements inflamed their feud. The spirit of democracy which then pervaded the Italian states governed Bologna. The nobles were still permitted to live within the same walls and sit in the same councils with the citizens, but they were subordinate to them and kept in check by them. The state was free, the factions still were governed by their respective chiefs. Gregory X had just dies, and the unhappy consequence of the removal of a pontiff, whose vigor and sanctity had bridled the hates and restrained the hostile tendencies of the times, was son obvious in new demonstrations of enmity between states and factions.
From this kindling of the fevered elements, came bright gold.
“In the height of the convulsions of its civil wars,” says the historian of the Italian republics, “Florence renewed architecture, sculpture and painting. It then produced the greatest poet Italy can yet boast; it restored philosophy to honor; it gave an impulse to science which spread through all the free states of Italy, and made the age of taste and the fine arts succeed to barbarism!”
“Whether these were the legitimate effects of contention may be questioned. Co-existence is sometimes mistaken for cause, and it is very difficult for human wisdom to solve the mysteries of human development. We know that after the thunderbolt the most delicate of flowers unfold, but is it not the simultaneous shower, and not the dissolving and destructive power, that brings them forth?
But these speculations are not for our narrow space. We know, from tradition, that the arts of the 14th century had touched the soul of Boniface Giéréméi to better issues than hatred and war; that though always ready and gallant defense, he was never forward to provoke a quarrel nor first to draw the sword. It is said he brought more painting with his father’s walls than battle trophies, and preferred the society of artists and learned men to the companionship of those whose exploits filled the mouths of the vulgar.
____________
“Dear Nilla,” said Imelda, “do not persuade me from my duty. I will do what I promised.”
“Yes, but can’t you see, my lady, that if you do it by my hand, it is the same as if your own dainty hand carried this crucifix to my lord Boniface? I will swear to you to do your bidding— to give this token it into the hand of the young lord; and to speak every word you shall tell me— not a syllable, not a letter more nor less.”
“But you are not me, Nilla.”
“No, my dear young lady, and the mischief is that the young lord knows the difference too well already. I shall never forget to my dying day how he looked at you were kneeling by old Alexa. He had better have been looking at her. Strange you did not see him, my lady.”
“Nilla!” Distrust not my word and obey me. Ask him to meet me in the upper cloister of San Georgio to-morrow morning when I come from confession after matins.”
Nilla well knew that her mistress’ gentleness was fortified by the characteristic energy of the Lambertazzi, and she obeyed; muttering to herself retrospective, the vainest of all, wishes. Oh if old Alexa had but dies in the street, or her young lady had but said her prayers at home! And where should she be if her lords, Frederico and Alberti, should know she had gone between their deadly enemy and their sister. They would think no more of poking cold steel into her than if she were a cat! Poor Nilla! It was a fatal embassy.
The next morning lord Boniface outwatched the stars, in the cloisters of San Georgio. Every minute seemed an hour and yet never were minutes so precious, for they were freighted with the most golden expectations of his life. He was to see again that face which seemed to him to vivify and make real the ideal beauty of art. He was to hear that voice which was the very concentration of music. He was to communicate, were it but for one brief moment, with a soul indicated by symbols. He was startled by every flutter of the breeze— his heart sank with every receding sound. The place of rendezvous was far retired within the intricate windings of San Georgio, and the day, which was pouring its full light on all Bologna, was still dim and shadowy in her cloisters.
At length a door, communicating with the interior of the church, opened and a form issued from it so wrapped in a full gray mantle that nothing but its stature and graceful movement could be perceived. But these were quite enough to assure Boniface that the lady Imelda was coming toward him. The agitation he could scarcely restrain contrasted with the assured step of the young lady who felt nothing but that she was performing a
(Pg. 256)
simple act of duty. She was conscious of a new interest in it when she was near enough to perceive for the first time the noble figure and soul lit countenance of the hereditary enemy of her house.
“Thanks, my lord,” she said “for granting a request that I was compelled to make by a promise to a dying woman.”
“Thanks from you, lady Imelda! Haven has my devoutest thanks that I am permitted this unhoped for meeting!”
“Nothing short of a sacred promise,” resumed Imelda, with a cold dignity that was meant to qualify the rapturous tone in which she was addressed, “would justify me in breaking through the observances of my sex and venturing to solicit a meeting with my hereditary enemy.”
“Enemy, lady Imelda! Love may come against our free will— enmity cannot.”
“That sacred promise,” continued Imelda, as if not hearing Boniface’s last words, “was given to Alexa, a client of your house. You, doubles, have heard the tragic circumstances of her death.”
“They could not long unknown to me, lady, where there are so many who live by feeding the feud between the Lambertazzi and my father’s house.”
“It is to avert the evil effect of these facts reaching you that I am here. Alexa’s last act,” she added, showing him the crucifix, “was to send you this symbol of our Lord and master’s submission to wrong and forgiveness of injuries, and by this token she prayed for you to forgive— not to revenge her death. We may not turn a deaf ear to the words of the dying; they stand on the threshold of the other world. Give good heed, I pray to you.”
“In aught else, lady, Alexa’s dying wish— your faintest word, should be law to me, but—”
“But you fear the reproach of your faction—or perhaps the scornful taunt of my brothers. These are vulgar fears, my lord. There is a nobler fear; fear above fear— a fear worthy of God’s creatures— a fear of violating his law. This takes the sting and reproach from every other fear.”
“Aye, lady, this is true; but truth fitter for these cloisters than the world we live in. He who should adopt it must exchange his good sword for the monk’s cowl.”
“Do you then reject this blessed sign?” said Imelda, once more extending to him Alexa’s crucifix.
“Nay, nay, sweet lady,” he relied, pressing his lips to it, and bringing them so nearly in contact with Imelda’s beautiful hand, that the spirituality of his devotion was somewhat questionable.
“I do not reject— I would fain accept it; but in doing so I should pledge myself to possible dishonor and disgrace. The death of Alexa pass as accidental till I am taunted with my forbearance, and then I must—”
“Must like other men— must come down to the level of their standard. Farewell, my lord. My errand is done.”
“One moment!” Listen to me, lady Imelda. Command me in aught I can do. I will go to the farthest verge of the world to serve you.”
“And yet for my prayer you will not do the duty that lies at your door.”
She turned to leave him; he followed her through the cloister. He entreated her to give him the crucifix on his promise to consecrate it to Madonna, and pray to her to enable him without loss of honor to obey Alexa’s last injunction.
What we have briefly summed up, Boniface contrived to dilate and involve, and Imelda found herself yielding, perhaps too willingly, to these little arts of delay, when she rejoined Nilla at the church door.
“Thanks to our lady!” she whispered; “You are come at last! Did you see him?”
“He was there before me.”
“So indeed he should be. Were you seen? Through all those long dark passages did no one see you? It were not well that you were seen alone there. Were you met? Are you struck deaf and dumb, my lady? Did you meet no one, I say?”
“No-yes-no-I think not.”
“The good Lord make me patient! You don’t hear a word I say. I have been a good hour on my knees praying to St. Ursula, and all the blessed saints that watch over young virgins, that no human eye, save that of lord Boniface, might fall on you; and, for aught you care, you may have met half Bologna. Call up your wits, dear my lady, and tell me what has happened in the last hour?”
“Hour, Nilla! It seems to me you may count on your fingers the minutes since we parted.”
“Humph!” ejaculated Nilla, as she thought that time had a different measure for an old woman waiting, and a young one talking with him of all Bologna’s youth most renowned for all manly graces. “Be it hours or minutes, my lady,” she added, “I care not which, but only if you were observed?”
“Only, I think, by father Jerome, whom I met as I returned from the cloister.”
“Father Jerome! Our lady forbid! All the gray mantles in Bologna would not hide you from father Jerome. He sees through stone walls. If he should have seen lord Boniface!”
Old Nilla was right. Father Jerome was, of all men, to be dreaded and shunned by Imelda. Born with strong passions and condemned by his priestly profession to a passionless life, he used the fuel which should have burned to ashes in the furnace of his holy order, to feed the fiery natures of
(Pg. 257)
the brothers Lambertazzi, and plied all his craftiness to stimulate their reckless pursuit of personal exaltation. It was their object to extinguish the only family that questioned their supremacy in Bologna. They were fitted for the stripes of barbaric times, natural “enemies of God, of pity and mercy.” Their rival was gifted with the qualities that belonged to the developments of civilized life. He was the friend of poets and philosophers, and the worshiper of art which had sprung forth in all her freshness and beauty from the conflicts of free Italy, like Venus from the tumultuous waves.
Imelda’s instinctive sympathy with him was most natural, perhaps inevitable. Her delicate nature had shrunk from the clang of her brothers’ armor and the clamor of their voices. She had devoted herself in the retirement of her own apartments to the study of science and poetry under the guidance of her father confessor, Silvio- a learned and holy man. Lord Boniface, already her ardent lover, had appeared to her as Ferdinand did to Miranda—
“A spirit—
A thing divine— for nothing natural
She ever saw so noble;”
and it was most certain that they had but met and parted when they felt that “both were in either’s power.” Love ripens fast in the land of the orange and the myrtle, and love in all lands is miraculously quick in device. The lovers contrived to meet going to confession or returning from mass. Few of these blissful meetings escaped the snaky eye of father Jerome. Did malice and envy stimulate his senses to preternatural acuteness? It seemed so when he overheard a whispering appointment they made to meet at a masked-ball. He communicated this appointment to the brothers.
“It is a safe opportunity,” he said.
“We can make out opportunity when we are ready to execute our vengeance,” replied the younger brother, Alberti.
“Yes, and expose yourself to expulsion from the city. Remember, my son, that the nobles no longer rule Bologna. That scum has risen to the top- the citizens above the noble.”
“Curse them! Yes,” muttered Frederico.
“Remember, too, that your sister’s lover is a favorite with our masters. He studies the courses of the stars with their sons and lavishes his gold on workers destined to their common use, and employment.”
“He earns their favor, then, methinks,” said Alberti.
“Yes, my son, their favor is no gratuity.”
“He shall pay another debt in another kind- at short reckoning,” growled Frederico.
“He who would steal your sister is a felon and deserves to pay this reckoning,” insinuated the priest, “but take heed, my son, if two to one you assault this gallant the blow will recoil on yourselves.”
“We need not two; my steel is sure, as you know, father,” said Alberti, glancing significantly at the priest. “I will follow him from the palace Ansiani. A felon merits a stab in the back.”
“But, Frederico, what does he merit who this stabs?” asked Alberti.
“My son,” interposed the priest, “the means are sanctified by the end. The executioner does God’s will when he takes the felon’s life.”
“Let Frederico then be the executioner- an open field and a fair fight for me. I’ll not meddle with this dark work,” and thus making his honest protest, Alberti left the priest and his less scrupulous brother to contrive their plan of assassination.
Father Jerome looked after Alberit with a drawing up of the brow and a drawing down of the mouth, expressive of contempt, and then said to Frederico, “I distinctly heard your sister’s”… he hesitated and added, “lover,” with an accent to indicate that a more offensive worked pressed on his lips, “say that he had a friend among the followers of the Ansiani, who would introduce him by a secret entrance which communicated with a passage from the court of the Eastern balcony; he could this enter the halls without a passport, and, once there, mingle unsuspected with the guests. You, forewarned that he is there, will easily identify him. His stature and grace are not common among out gallants of Bologna. While he is dallying with your sister you may glide into that passage and the slightest brush you can give him will be enough if- as I think you meant when you said your steel was ‘sure’ – you have it well anointed with the Saracen’s oil.”
“I have – all the posts of Heaven cannot save him from my extreme unction.”
“To night, then, as the bell of San Georgio tolls ten. But, my son, sport not, even in word, with the holy offices of the church.”
“No, father,” replied Frederico, with a loud laugh, that proved he had at least the merit of not flattering the priest by hypocrisy, “not while I have you to teach me reverence.”
Father Jerome had not yet quite reached the meridian of life. Under his priest’s cowl were hidden the worst passions of man. Before the vesper hour he had a private and long interview with Imelda. He told her plainly that her love was discovered, and that mortal danger threatened her lover; and then he darkly hinted at a means of escape. His hints she did not understand, for his foul thoughts passed over her pure mind like breath over the highest polished glass, leaving no stain, and when he came to state more plainly on what conditions he would save her lover’s life – she recoiled as if a venomous snake
(Pg. 258)
lay across her path. Her face, which had paled a moment before at thought of her lover’s peril, grew red with angry blood. Father Jerome quailed under her glance. She was silent till she could speak calmly.
“Go, priest,” she then said, “all life is in God’s hands— the most precious as the most worthless. My honor is in mine own trust. Leave my presence.”
Nilla found her mistress an hour after in an ague of terror. “Oh, why have you staid, Nilla?” she said. “Did you find him? What said he?”
“Why, firstly, I did not find him; a pretty chase my old legs have had of it over half Bologna.”
“Oh, Nilla, do not spend your breath talking of yourself.”
“Lord’s love! I have little breath to do any thing for myself.”
“What said he, Nilla!”
“Why, first, he said nothing.”
‘Nothing!”
“No, in truth. What should he say, till he had read your letter? But deal, my lady, why so red, and so white, and shaking as if you had a tertian ague on you?”
“Think not of me, Nilla? Say in a word is my lord coming?”
“Yes – is one word, he is coming?”
“Oh, then, Nilla, you must back to him; his life is threatened; he must not come ton-night.”
“Then, my sweet lady, he must escape the danger through some other mode then my croaking. He mounted his horse as I left him and bade me tell you he should ride till the time of meeting.”
“We are lost,,” cried Imelda, wringing her hands. “There is no help for us. They know he meets me ton-night. The Ansiani are his enemies – he will have no friends near him, and my brothers – my cruel brothers! That bad priest, Jerome, Nilla!”
“Set against him the good priest Silvio, my lady. The children of light should be a match for the children of darkness.”
“You are right, Nilla. Call father Silvio to me. If he be possible, truly he will find it.”
Silvio came, and listened pitifully to Imelda’s relation of her interview with Jerome. “God alone can help us, my child,” he said; “we know not how nor where the snare is spread, but He who delivereth the bird from the fowler can surely help if he seeth fit.”
“And is this all, father, that your wisdom can suggest to me?”
“For the present exigency, all, my poor child; but should you escape to-night, I will no longer oppose your lover’s prayer. Come to my cell at dawn to-morrow. I will perform the holy sacrament of marriage for you, and at the first suspicious moment you may escape and take refuge in Florence or Pisa. It is not fitting you should longer swell where the demons of hate – and worse than hate, beset you.”
“Is this your counsel, dear father Silvio?” exclaimed Imelda, while for a moment the sun seemed to break through the clouds and shine on her head, so radiant was she with hope. The light passed off as she flatteringly exclaimed, “But there is an abyss of danger, of despair to be overleaped before we reach this happiness. Go, dear, holy father, spend these fearful hours in prayer and vigil and penance for us. Here, take my purse; give all to the wretched, and here,” she added, stripping the brilliants from her fingers, “do what good you can with these; all I ask in place of them is my wedding ring.”
“God’s love is not bought with a price, dear daughter.”
“Oh, I know, I know – these jewels are but the earnest of what I will be and do if His protection be over us this night. Your blessing, dear father, and depart. I must dress and be first at the palace. They will not dare touch him in my presence.”
Alas! Poor Imelda knew not what bad men dare do!
While Imelda was kneeling before Madonna to fortify herself by prayer for the trials of the evening, Nilla was preparing for her toilet. “There, my lady,” she said, as Imelda came from her oratory, “there is your green robe embroidered with gold flowers, and buttoned from top to bottom with such diamonds as no family can boast in Bologna, save the Lambertazzi. You shake your head? Well, here is the azure silk knotted with the purest orient pearls. No, again? The silks are fresh from the riches looms of Florence. No married dame or maiden in Bologna has the like of them.”
“It matters not, Nilla. Give me a dress all of white – fitting for a bride or for the dead.”
“My dear lady!”
“Obey me, Nilla. Give me, too, my pearl collar, bracelets and head-gear.”
Nilla obeyed in silence and trembling, for she had had bad dreams the night before and her lady’s words seemed their interpretation. When Imelda was arrayed and surveyed herself in her Venetian glass, a blush of conscious beauty overspread her pale cheek. The luster of her white satin harmonized with the soft tints of her Italian complexion, and the dead white of pearls wreathed on her dark hair gave a look of life to the almost colorless hue of her white brow.
“Your eyes are dull to-night, my dear lady,” said Nilla, “but for that you would look a king’s bride.”
(Pg. 259)
“He who only shall make me a bride is a king by divine right, Nilla. Bring me my Persian veil; that will serve me at the altar or – for a winding sheet.”
___________
The festivities at the Ansiana palace had but begun when Imelda appeared there. As she entered leaning on the arm of her proud old father, every eye was curiously fixed on her. Her prolonged seclusion in her father’s palace and the rumor of her beauty had sharpened curiosity; but as she tenaciously kept the mask on her face attention was turned to other known beauties, and after a little while she escaped observation.
She soon found herself near a balcony toward which the dancers pressed for air and refreshment. She dropped her fan and a blue domino, who she had just noticed and eyed with intense interest, picked it up and restored it to her, saying, in a voice audible only to her, “The balcony will be empty when the dance begins – linger here till then.” She did so and in a few brief moments her plan was concerted with Lord Boniface, and their fate sealed.
The night wore on, the gayety increased, and the lovers again met, near the gallery by which Boniface had gained access to the palace, and by which he purposed to depart. Frederico was lurking there. There was a narrow passage from one saloon to another; out of this passage a door opened into the gallery. Imelda standing mid some ladies at the door of the saloon saw her lover approach his place of exit and saw that at the very bottom he raised his hand to open the door he was encountered by Alberti, in a black domino. “He who seeks a secret passage,” he said rudely in an undisguised voice, “is no friend to the house.”
“Who interferes with the liberty of the Ansiani guests is surely not their friend,” replied lord Boniface, in a voice that even Imelda would scarcely have recognized as his.”
“Then drop your mask, and verify your right to this liberty,” said Alberti, haughtily.
“Not at your bidding, most courteous gentleman, but since you guard this egress I will take any other that may be opened to the guests of our good old host,” and turning away, as if quite indifferent, he re-entered the saloon, encountered face to face, the old count Ansiani, and stopped, as if quite at east, to exchange courtesies with his host. His seeming coolness disconcerted and perplexed Alberti, who stood at a short distance behind him. Imelda with a fluttering heart watched every movement and heard every word. “Alberti, Alberti,” she said, eagerly, in a low voice, and pointing through the door to a lady in an adjourning apartment, “Pray, tell me, is not that the lady Julia!”
“By my faith, it is,” he replied, his attention completely diverted; “I have in vain sought her all the evening.”
“She has but just entered,” said Imelda, “or you would earlier have recognized her, for though her simple dress denies her princely rant her queenly bearing betrays it. I knew her only from your description, Alberti, or, perhaps, from the instinct of out coming relationship.”
“Bravo, Imelda!”
“Present me to her, Alberti. You promised it, and surely I deserve it.”
“You do – come with me.”
If Imelda had dared to look back, she would have seen that Boniface, profiting by the opportunity she had just procured for him, complied at the instant with the rule made by a jealous nobles of Bologna, that every guest, on taking leave of his host, should withdraw his mask. There being no eye on him but the old count’s, dulled with some seventy years wear, Boniface did this fearlessly, and walked slowly past Alberti and out to the grand stair-case. He had scarcely disappeared from the count’s sight when father Jerome whispered in his ear, “Does my lord suspect that the bold youth who but now took leave of him is the boasted Giéréméi?”
“Impossible!”
“My word – my oath for it.”
“Follow him. Give orders to my men to seize him; he shall pay dearly for this audacity.” He was followed, but perceiving this he had, after deliberately walking the stair-case, glided down to the light, passed the retainers of the Ansiani at the gate of their court, and, at the corner of the street, mounted a horse, which, with a trust servant, was awaiting him.”
At the dawn of the morning Imelda, closely muffled and attended only by Nilla, entered father Silvio’s cell. Her lover was awaiting her, and the good father performed the marriage rite. “My children,” he said, retaining in his their clasped hands, “these are such bonds as God’s priest may ratify – not accidental, imaginary or selfish, but wrought in the furnace of trial out of your hearts’ best affections; their temper is proof against all the shifting chances of life; death cannot dissolve them, and there, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, eternal shall be written on them.”
“Amen! Amen!” cried old Nilla. Father Silvio stood back, and Boniface clasping Imelda in his arms, whispered, “Courage, my love – my wife! One brief separation more, and then o earthly power shall divide us. Remain here one half hour, then father Silvio will meet me with you at the city gate. In Florence we shall find friends and safety, till the old wound that separates our families is healed.”
(Pg. 260)
“Go grant it!” she whispered, “but my heart bids me cling to you, with fearful prophecy.”
“Take courage, love,” he said, “it is but the shadow of past sorrow – we will soon get beyond it.” He left her, and in one half hour she followed with the good father and Nilla.
“Stop – stop, my lady,” said Nilla, who stumbled after her mistress’s fleet steps. “I saw the shadow of armed men behind the gate-way we just passed, and I am sure I saw father Jerome just slink behind that wall.”
Imelda, trembling, clung to Silvio’s arm.
“If it be they,” whispered father Silvio, “it is impossible to gain the gate – but we may evade them by artifice. Return, Nilla, as if you were seeking something dropped on the ground. Eye them closer, and if they be the brothers, still retrace your steps, and we will turn the next corner, gain the palace, and dispel their suspicions and be sage for the present.”
He then walked slowly on with Imelda, and before they reached the turn, the old woman had paused at the gate-way, and was receding beyond it.
“Patience, dear daughter,” said the priest, “you are baffled this time, but your husband’s vigilance will soon make another opportunity. If they follow lord Boniface to the gate he betrays nothing for he ill infer that you are intercepted, and he will only appear to them armed and equipped for a ride to the hills. We owe this to the diabolical malice and art of Jerome,” he thought as Imelda yielded to his counsel. “So, through life he has crossed and baffled me,” and his thoughts, like an electric flash, retraced the wrongs done him by the envious rival of his childhood – how he had closed against him the avenues of friendship, love and honorable fame, and driven him to seek refuge in the priest’s cell – the precinct of the tomb.
__________
One week passed away. The day was near its dawn, and Imelda was receiving the last embraces of her faithful nurse. “Dear Nilla,” she said, “take it not so hard; it is for present safety that we are separated – my lord says father Silvio urges too that we should be free, unembarrassed, in case of pursuit – you see,” she added with a faint smile, “that now I fear nothing. I have no foolish presentiment as before. When I put on my veil I thought it would prove my winding-sheet. If danger beset us, and Heaven please, a way of escape will be opened, and if not death since father Silvio assures me that there we cannot be separated. God’s love casts out all fear, dear Nilla.”
“It should – but –”
“Nay, nay, Nilla, not another word – time presses – the day is already dawning – you must not follow me one step. All depends on my passing unobserved and unheard through the long, dark galleries to the outer court; to that my lord has secured an entrance. Farewell, dear Nilla – to your prayers found us;” – and then hastily embracing her old friend, she left her in an agony of love and tears, (from which prayer exhales,) passed now swiftly, now slowly, along her perilous descent and gained the landing of the last stair-case – there she heard the ringing of a loud and hasty footstep mounting the winding stairs, and, in time, she darted into a broad niche in the wall, behind the pedestal of a statue. She caught a glimpse of the passing figure, and knew it to be Frederico. His appearance filled her with alarm and apprehension. She had believed her brothers were at Padua, and her flight had, in this belief, been fixed and hastily arranged. Could father Jerome, who seemed to have inscrutable power, have penetrated their secret plans? And was some fatal blow now preparing for them? Should she turn back and avoid the danger? No – for still her husband was in peril, and what was safety to her that did not include him! Her decision was made, and as the sound of the footsteps dies away, she sprang from her retreat, and hardly touching the stairs, passed down and turned to enter a narrow gallery that communicated with the private court. Frederico’s favorite dog, a fierce wolf-hound, was lying across the passage as if stealthily keeping it. He growled without moving. Poor Imelda had an unconquerable fear of dogs, and a particular terror of this brute of her brother’s, which had always seemed to her an impersonation of evil. She instinctively started back and remounted half the stairs before the instinct of fear yielded. Love – oh, how much stronger than fear – overcame. She retracted her steps, boldly stooped to the dog, spoke low and gently to him, looked him directly in the eye, stroked and patted him. There are strange and mysterious modes of communication between all intelligent beings. Our modern Mesmerite would probably sat the dog was magnetized. We cannot explain or name the cause – perhaps it is true that there is “un mystere de sympathie et d’affection entre touit ce qui respire sous le ciel.” Certain it it is, the animal became tractable, rose, stretched himself, “like an innocent beast and of a good conscience,” permitted Imelda to pass without molestation. She scarcely breathed again before she was in the court and in her husband’s arms where, for one instant, danger and fear, the past and future, were forgotten – the rapturous present filled brimmingly the whole of her life.
Such moments give us some notion of what may constitute the measurement of time in a more advanced condition of existence. Keenness of sensation, intensity of feeling takes place of duration – the point of time stretches backward and forward, with the velocity of light; and in the
(pg. 261)
retrospect, the rest of life is compacted into small space – a dark line of shadow along fields of light. We must be forgiven for pausing at this point – it was Imelda’s first and last of perfect human happiness.
A sound reached her ear that struck upon it like a death-knell. She uttered a piercing shriek and cried, “Fly – fly!” and at the same instant her brothers with their swords drawn rushed into the court.
“Stand back, Imelda!” shouted Frederico to his sister, who had planted herself steadfastly before her lord; “Stand back, I say, or through your body my sword shall pierce that villain – robber!”
“Imelda,” said her lover, gently putting her aside, “I can defend myself.”
Imelda sprang toward Alberti – “Oh, my brother,” she cried, putting both her hands upon his breast, “there is a drop of mercy in your hear – stand back. It is not manly two to one – get between them – he is no robber. He is my husband! My chosen lord!”
“Your husband, Imelda? Then let them have a fair fight. I’ll not make nor mar between them.”
The encounter was fierce and obstinate. Both parties were accomplished swordsmen, but Boniface, having but the single purpose of defending himself, armed with the righteous cause, was more adroit; an overmatch for his opponent maddened with conflicting passions. He defended himself at all points, till at the sight of his wife kneeling, her eyes raised and her arms outreached in an agony of supplication, his arm wavered and he failed to quite to parry a blow which aimed at his hear, grazed his shoulder, so that the blood followed.
“Enough! Enough!” cried Frederico, with a demonic howl, “you have poison in you for every drop of blood in your veins. You are welcome now to your husband!” he added to Imelda, driving his sword into its sheath. Her husband had already fallen fainting on the ground. “The work is done Alberti,” he concluded – “the day is breaking; we must be gone, or the city-guard on their last round will find us here.” He hastily disappeared.
“Cowardice and cruelty, are fit companions,” muttered Alberti, slowly following.
___________
The accomplished historian of Italian Republics this finishes his notice (which we have somewhat amplified) of this tragedy.
“The only mode of treatment which left any hope of curing the empoisoned wound, was sucking it while still bleeding. This, it is said, three years before Edward of England had been saved by the devoted Eleanor. Imelda undertook her sad ministry, and from the wound of her husband, she drew the poisoned blood which diffused through her own system the cause of sudden death. When her woman came to her they found her extended lifeless beside the dead body of the husband she had loved too well.”
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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Imelda of Bologna
Subject
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Romance, Tragedy, Italy
Description
An account of the resource
In the Italian city of Bologna, a tragedy unites Imelda with her family’s enemy, the lord Boniface. The two fall in love, but are plotted against by Imelda’s brothers. While Imelda and Boniface plan their escape from danger, Imelda’s brothers plan his death.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss Catharine M. Sedgwick
Source
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Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine [edited by John Inman and Robert A. West] (May 1846): 253-61.
Date
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1846
Contributor
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Shawn Riggins
Language
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English
Type
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Document
Publisher
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Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
Catholicism
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
Death
Faith
Italy
marriage
religion
Romance
Tragedy
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/cc61624c55eddd94f3626121fa0fb4fb.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=spG3SkESKu94ntwYAE7VrDr4KhykTNuV6-vI0T0uf-s4u5Eb8tnd-U5tl9n9NoYNgG6TUv33abowHuMesBY8JERChWfVYkEMvfmJrt-%7E%7EGf4mmKMBMhqUa3MhixSeQsrUfH0wceVhVs66vs5UTuOOf4GhW5-HcCUj5HFGkgOCcPy8sdbtz8XfrIsa84QGKcX8XggFP5bQkgeyTlmD3m2aeVgwjEj9Ap%7Ey2TgJUVuvWeuiZz-X9cAuUFBBU1a27gc3jtodIopGPfYrf5pe%7Elr5sKHMw%7EyPKUZVrhVxnVv5XGhQ7KAfof1gAgJfT2AgcWetOeCZq0KaJGIENXpSv9wKw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
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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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1840
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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EIGHTEEN HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT'S FAREWELL
TO THE GIRLS AT THE L**** SCHOOL.
_______________
"A garland shall be framed
By art and nature's skill,
Of sundry coloured flowers,
In token of good-will—
The blessed crown of glory,
And the hopes which us do fill."
It is not necessary to remind you, my dear girls, of the circumstances under which this “Farewell” was written; but a word to those to whom it might otherwise be incomprehensible. All my young readers know that the time that elapses between being ready for a pleasure and the actual arrival of the pleasure, is tedious, and seems never-ending. To fill up this chasm the Farewell was written. As it is the vocation of an old lady to advise, and (as you think, doubtless) the destiny of school girls to be advised, I ventured to infuse a little of this medicinal quality into my evening's entertainment. The girls gathered round me, and I began the reading with fear and trembling, lest, on this occasion, consecrated to festivity, I should offend some one's self-love, awake some discordant note. Never shall I forget the animation, the sweetness, and, I may add, the gratitude with which my little essay was received. Could there be a stronger proof of the candour and magnanimity of the circle whose merry voices still ring in my ears? If any were wanted, it is afforded in the wish expressed by one and all, that the "Farewell" should be printed in their book.
[40]
It was Newyear's eve, and the girls of a certain school somewhere between Georgia and Maine had put the last stroke and stitch to their gifts for the next day's fête. How many bright thoughts, kind thoughts, and hours of patient labour had been bestowed on them! how many hard-earned and more hardly-husbanded shillings had been expended on them !*[1 ] how many pleasures had been foregone for other's pleasures on that happy fête-day!
The celebration was to be held on the evening of Newyear's day. The beautiful custom of the German evergreen tree, with some little modification (an exotic must undergo some changes in a new soil and climate), has been planted in our home- ground for some four or five years, so that it has fairly taken root, and has its associations and fond memories. The Italians have a superstition that a transplanted tree will not thrive till it has been danced around. This acclimating process has not been neglected with our evergreen.
The girls had planted their tree for 1839. Their preparations, as I have said, were finished. They were assembled round the iron stove. The fire had been replenished for the last time by a certain little vestal, who supplies it as eagerly as any vestal ever fed the sacred fire. The howling winds
[41]
swept over the hills, and the lights were burning dimly, when a singular knocking was heard at the door that opened into the hall. The strokes were three times three, distinctly repeated. Every voice was hushed, every sleepy eye wide opened. Our girls were good and rational, and not more addicted than other girls of the nineteenth century to reading and believing ghost stories; but there was something new and ominous in the sound, and they very naturally hesitated to move, and probably would not have stirred till daylight, if Ariel, the youngest among them, "a dainty spirit," who never hesitated long, had not sprang forward and opened the door.
A woman (an old woman, as it seemed, from her tremulous voice and faltering step) entered. Her person was completely enveloped in a long gray serge cloak, and her head and face hidden by a little black bonnet and an impenetrable veil. Ariel started back. "You wish to see Mrs. ____?” she said.
"No."
"Mr. ____, then?"
"No; my visit is to you, young ladies. Shut the door, my child, and take your station among the rest." The girls were confounded; but, obeying the impulse of their habitual courtesy, several rose at the same moment to offer the stranger a chair. She declined the civility; and, leaning on a staff which she held in her right hand, and by the aid of which she seemed, with much difficulty, to sustain her tottering person, she began: "You see in me, my young friends, the dying year. The time of my departure is at hand. When the clock
[42]
strikes twelve I shall be no more. But I did not come here to sigh over my own mortality, but to prepare you to receive my successors in such a spirit that you will part with them without regret or remorse."
“I have watched over you through our twelve months' acquaintance. The knowledge you have acquired and the good you have done will survive my death. I carry with me the account of these your imperishable riches.
"Some among you have diligently used the opportunities I have afforded you. You have heaped treasures on treasures as the months passed on. There are others who have not seemed to realize that these opportunities were passing by, and that they and I should vanish together. But you have all, I say it with pride and pleasure, profited in some degree by my existence. So much have I become attached to you, that I could not quit the world without bidding you farewell, giving you my dying advice, and telling you a secret."
"A secret? a secret?" exclaimed the girls in a breath; and they all drew nearer to the old lady, who thus proceeded: "Dying people may be sincere without giving offence, and therefore I do not hesitate to tell you that your progress is hindered by certain faults, to which you are yourselves quite blind. These faults operate like weights or clogs, holding you back, and in every way impeding your advancement. It is your blindness to them that I beg you to cure before the coronation of my successor, her majesty Eighteen hundred thirty-nine."
"But how can we," asked little Ariel, " if we are unconscious of our faults? I am sure I can't, for one."
[43]
"I foresaw that answer from you, my Ariel," replied the old lady, in a voice that indicated a smile; "a strange word, that ever-ready can't of yours, for a little girl whose actions all say can. But, to proceed, I have provided against the difficulty you suggest, Ariel. I have brought in this vial a precious extract, which, if you will swallow it, will instantaneously remove the blindness to which I have alluded, and will, besides, have the marvellous effect of inciting you to rid yourselves of your faults, to detach those weights that so embarrass you." She placed a vial on the table. "Now for my secret," she resumed; "I have yet other visits to pay, and no time for delay.
"To-morrow evening (if you have before swallowed my extract), previous to your meeting round the evergreen tree, assemble in the southwest chamber of this mansion. In the centre of the apartment you will see a miraculous shrub, called pro omnibus vera, bearing flowers of all hues and all seasons. On their stems you will perceive to be written the names of the virtues of which each flower is the symbol. Pluck the flower which typifies the virtues most opposed to the fault my extract has revealed to you; place it in your bosom, and from it will distil a juice of such marvellous properties, that it will as surely (though more slowly) remove the fault as my extract will cure your blindness. One thing I have omitted. After you have plucked the flower, look steadfastly at the stem; if buds or blossoms unfold upon it, remember what they typify, and take them at their word. They may praise, but they will not flatter. Farewell, my dear girls," her voice faltered. "You
[44]
have been a garland of sweet, beautiful blossoms around my brow, may my successors hail the fruit. I grieve to say farewell!"
"Farewell!" responded the girls, as if they felt the solemnity of parting, but not the grief; this the young cannot feel at the departure of the old year. The door opened and shut, and the figure vanished for ever. The girls eagerly grasped the viol, and read the label, “Extract of religion, for the conscience.”
"Extract for the conscience !" exclaimed Laura. "I don't need that. I see my own faults plain enough, or weights, as the old lady called them."
"It will be safest, Laura, for each to take her share," said Livia, dryly.
"Pray don't take more than your share, Laura," interposed Leila, "for I shall need all mine."
"I rather guess you will to see your faults, Leila," said Belinda. "We want no extract to see the faults of others, and none of us ever saw yours, unless it be lisping, and some such trifles that it needs no miracle to cure."
"Oh, Belinda, the old lady didn't make any exceptions, and I am sure she was right not to except me: so let me swallow my share and done with it."
"I should like to prove the virtue of good Madam Eighteen hundred thirty-eight's prescription," said Belinda; " anything to help me on; ‘go-ahead’ is my motto, you know;" and Belinda boldly swallowed her portion.
Maria humbly said, "I think I feel my weights; but give me the vial; if I can get rid of them, I shall bless the old lady as long as I live."
"There's always something new going on in
[45]
this house !" cried Ariel; "something for all—us —girls to do. I wish the time would come when I shall go home, and have nothing to learn, and no more faults to cure."
"Amen!" cried Belinda, and "amen!" responded all the girls, none louder and none so merrily laughing at her own characteristic exclamations as little Ariel, who ended the joke by swallowing unfalteringly a double portion of the extract.
"You may give me my dose too," said Eloise, advancing timidly and shrinkingly, "though I know perfectly well it won't do me any good."
"And give me mine too," said Sabina, "for we ought all to do what the poor old woman requested."
"Livia," cried Belinda, "why don't you come forward? Come—here's your portion."
Livia approached reluctantly. "I know I need it as much as any of you," she said; "but I hate to take it, it makes me feel so horridly to be convinced of my faults; but it's 'no song, no supper' —no extract, no cure—so I'll take it."
"And so will I," said Julia. "I had as lief try it as not, though I am sure I have no need of it."
All now had honestly taken their portions, and they retired, but not for a long while to sleep. Their emotions and meditations must not be revealed. It is enough to say that those who had swallowed the extract boldly, and those who had taken it timidly, were equally surprised by the discoveries they made. The most humble and fearful had least reason to be shocked. Through the following day they were serious, but tranquil and happy; for, though assured of the
[46]
existence of the evil, they were also assured of the cure.
As evening approached there were whisperings and perturbations among them; but this, as the whole house was in a bustle, passed without observation.
The girls were dressed, the candles lighted, and some fancied they already heard the gingling bells of the sleighs that were to bring the dear friends from S**********. The moment for visiting the mysterious shrub must not be delayed, and with beating hearts the girls met in the passage that led to the southwest apartment. A brilliant light streamed through the crevices of the door. The most timid among them started back, shrinking from what they deemed supernatural. “Why are you afraid?” said Belinda, in a low, firm voice; "the flowers, you know, are the symbols of the virtues; light should come from them."
"Stop one moment, Belinda," cried Leila; "let me go in with you." "And me too, pray," said Livia; and each clung to her as Belinda slowly opened the door.
What a brilliant sight was that now before their eyes! A porcelain vase, as beautiful as Sévres china, stood in the centre of the room, bearing the miraculous shrub, whose branches were all blooming with different flowers, having their own peculiar hues, and sweet as if they were growing in the garden mould, and were wet with the dews of a June morning; from their leaves emanated a light soft as the light of the firefly; and along the stems ran a brilliant spiral flame that emitted no heat. The girls arranged themselves around, silent and almost breathless with admiration.
[47]
The true, fearless, and prompt Belinda was the first to speak. "Pro—omnibus—vera!" she said. "'Truth for all'—and here is truth for me;" and she plucked a fringed gentian.
"Oh, Belinda! that can't be yours," cried Leila. "Why, you know the gentian is the emblem of modesty—it certainly is—because, you know, it lingers behind the other flowers, and opens its eye so timidly."
Belinda shook her head. "I know very well what it means," she said. "Then why take it?" insisted her fond friend. "I am sure no one will dare to say you want modesty."
"No, dear Belinda, indeed you do not," said Livia. "And I don't think you do!" "And I am sure you do not!" reiterated all the girls.
"I am very glad you think so, girls; but I certainly do want deference, which is first cousin to modesty; and here you may see the word written in tiny letters on the stem. The moment I swallowed that infallible extract, I perceived that I had the habit of taking the lead on all occasions, and of too loudly asserting my opinions. Blessed little blue-eyed flower, I thank you! You shall be my flower, the emblem of the grace I need. But what is this?" she exclaimed, as a little stalk shot from the stem of the gentian, and from it unfolded the fragrant blossoms of the white jasmine.
"Oh, it's candour!" cried Leila, clapping her hands. "Do not you remember what the old lady said? ‘Look steadfastly at the stem; if buds or blossoms unfold upon it, remember what they typify, and take them at their word. They may praise,
[48]
but they will not flatter.’ The jasmine praises, but does not flatter you, Belinda; you are candid, and everything that is ' first cousin' to truth."
Little Ariel now sprang forward, her chameleon eyes becoming almost black, and absolutely glowing: "I may as well take my flowers first as last," she said.
"Flowers! Do you take two, Ariel?" asked Laura.
"Yes, I must have a double portion—it's too bad! Here is the violet; disinterestedness you see it means. There is no doubt of the goodness of the extract, girls." The girls might have thought it did not err in Ariel's case, but they did not say so. It is marvellous to see how gentle it makes us to others' faults to have our eyes opened to our own. "I hate to take this," resumed Ariel, breaking off a sprig of lavender, under whose green leaves was written gratitude. "I never suspected I wanted gratitude till I used the old lady's extract; and I do not, only when I am out of patience with my lessons, or break some rule, and throw the blame on Mrs. _____ , who is always so patient and kind; but I hope I shall be cured !"*[2] A sweet smile played over her lips, and forth from the lavender stem sprang the delicious flowers of the trailing arbutus, interspersed with small leaves of live-for-ever.
"You have come off very well, Ariel, after all," said Livia; "you have a double portion of virtues to match your double portion of faults."
[49]
"So I have!" replied Ariel, clapping her hands. "I know the arbutus means resolution, for it flowers amid snows; but what do these pretty little live-for-ever leaves mean?"
"Live-for-ever! Why, is that not another name for truth, Ariel?"
"Ah, Ariel," said Eloise, as she gently broke off her flower (also the arbutus), "the arbutus praises you, but me it admonishes. As soon as I swallowed the extract, I saw that in everything I wanted resolution."
"But see, Eloise," interrupted Belinda, "that mignionette coming out all over the coarse stem of the arbutus. The mignionette, you know, typifies tenderness and refinement: how well it suits you!"
Maria broke off a white rose, that had so perfectly unfolded every one of its pure leaves, that it scarcely needed the word frankness on its stem to interpret its meaning.
"Surely, Maria, that is not your flower!" cried Laura; "well, perhaps you are a little too shy— too reserved; but it is a reserve that springs from modesty."
"My extract did not tell me that, Laura," replied Maria; and, while she spoke, all along the rose's stem unfolded the fragrant flowers of the lily of the valley, emblem of humility.
"You see, girls, I did need the extract as well as the rest of you," said Leila, breaking off a golden amaranth.
"What does it mean?" "what does it mean?" exclaimed the girls in a breath; "I am sure we cannot guess." Leila held up the flower, and they, seeing the word hardiness, exclaimed, "The ex-
[50]
tract is true: Leila is a little over-sensitive—and there, see!" they added, " the flowers of the sensitive plant budding out, which signifies how quick she feels for others; and, bless us! there too is an arbutus: a fit companion for her sensitive flowers; for with you, Leila, feeling and action go together."
"None of you will doubt this belongs to me," said sweet Sabina, with a smile, as she broke off a crocus; "a flower that ventures into the still frosty air should typify the very opposite of ‘chicken-heartedness.’"
"We need no voice from poor dear eighteen hundred thirty-eight," said Livia, "to tell us this is your flower, Sabina; no extract to reveal it. But what is this winding round the stem? How true, too! Honeysuckle, type of lovingness."
Julia now languidly approached to select her flower. It was the beautiful clematis, symbol of elevation. "I knew, before I swallowed the extract," said Julia, "that I am content to be just what I am."
"Strange!" said Livia; "for here are the purple flowers of the bee-larkspur, symbol of diligence; strange, Julia, that you should be like the squirrel in a cage, content always to be at work, and never to go forward."
Two only were now left, and on these two, conspicuous among their companions, all eyes were fixed. Livia made a difficult effort, and broke off a careopsis, which, steadily blossoming as it does through the heats and showers of summer, the cold winds of autumn, and on the frosty borders of winter, is a fit type of imperturbableness. "A pretty
[51]
long word," said Livia, laughing, as she held up the stalk; "but you need not take the trouble to read it, girls; you are all acquainted with my irritableness." Before she had finished speaking the stalk of her careopsis was gemmed with daisies, and wound round and round with the pink convolvulis, types of generosity and affection.
"Never mind, Livia," said Belinda, kissing her, "we do not care for the careopsis; hut we all love the daisies and convolvulis."
A stalk of sweet-peas was the only flower left. Laura broke it off, slightly blushing, and courageously held it up, that all might see the word simplicity. As she did so, the bee-flower opened on the stem, and with it the rosemary, ancient type of that noble virtue, fidelity.
Their task was done, and they were all satisfied. They pressed the flowers to their bosoms, and one and all asked a leaf of Laura's rosemary, to remind them of their duty. Laura needed not to rob her flower of praise (so the girls called them) of a single leaf; for, at the wish expressed, rosemary was added to each bouquet.
"Now," said Livia, " quick, before the bell rings, for the evergreen tree; let us all go down and tell our story to Mrs. _____ , and show our flowers."
"Yes, yes, we will, we will," was the general exclamation; and suddenly appeared in each bouquet, overtopping every flower, the queenly white lily, type of magnanimity.
[Sedgwick’s notes]
* [1] It is the custom at the school to which I allude to allow to each girl, on the 1st of November, a certain sum, to be appropriated to Newyear's gifts. After that time, for every defective lesson, for every failure in the observance of the rules of the school and the social morals of the little community, a penny is forfeited. The young ladies are trusted with the keeping of their own accounts: but sometimes doubtful cases would occur; and I recollect, with much pleasure, to have oftener heard, in a deprecating voice, the appeal, "Must" L. or S. "lose a penny?” than "Must I?"
* [2] And in a rapid process of cure is our little favourite, for that favourite she is we cannot deny. Faults that consort with great energy, and are accompanied with perfect truth, we may confidently hope (if the subject is in good hands) will pass away with the impulsiveness of childhood.
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
Eighteen Hundred Thirty-Eight's Farewell
Subject
The topic of the resource
New Year's eve, girlhood, self-examination, the language of flowers.
Description
An account of the resource
A visit from a mysterious old woman on New Year's eve leads a group of school girls to try a truth serum that enables them to see their faults and virtues on the flowers of a magical bush.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria [by the author of "The Linwoods," "Poor Rich Man," "Love Token," "Live & Let Live," &c.]
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>Stories for Young Persons</em>, pp. 39-51.
Publisher
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New York: Harper & Brothers
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1940
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Collected in <em>Stories for Young Persons</em>, 1840, 39-51, reprinted 1841, 1842, 1846, 1855, 1860; reprinted 184? By the author of "The Linwoods," "Poor Rich Man," "Love Token," "Live and Let Live," &c. London: W. Smith. <br /><br />Also collected in <em>Pretty Little Stories for Pretty Little People</em> by Miss Sedgwick. London: William McKenny, 1849, pp. 40-55; reprinted 1850. <br /><br />Online in the Cairns Collection of American Women Writers. <em>Stories for Young Persons</em> ... New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840. HathiTrust Digital Library https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007092366 Accessed 22 July 2019.
Format
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Document
Language
A language of the resource
English
"language of flowers"
"pro omnibus vera"
"The Garland of Flora"
1840
affection
candor
candour
chicken-heartedness
Christmas
Christmas tree
conscience
deference
diligence
disinterestedness
elevation
faults
fidelity
flowers
frankness
generosity
ghosts
girlhood
girls
gratitude
hardiness
humility
imperturbableness
irritableness
Juvenile fiction
lovingness
magnanimity
modesty
New Year's Day
New Year's eve
old women
refinement
religion
resolution
school
secrets
simplicity
Stories for Young Persons
tenderness
truth
virtue
-
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f1621681b11166910481ad613cb34138
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
1828
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
CHRISTIAN CHARITY.
__________
“Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law and judgeth the law: but if thou judge the law thou art not a doer of the law but a judge.”
Dr. FRANKLIN said, with his characteristic wisdom and good feeling, that he was inclined to believe “there never was a good war nor a bad peace.” If this may be true of the civil affairs of men, how much more applicable is it to their religious concerns!
All true christians, of all parties and sects, lament that difference of opinion should give rise to discord, strifes, uncharitableness, and evil speaking. If then they feel that religion is wronged—that its bond of love is severed—that their master is wounded in the house of his friends—that their wars and fightings must proceed from bad passions, how careful should they be to guard against the extension of the evil! And particularly how scrupulous should those be who have the guidance of young maids and affect-
[PAGE 4]
tions not to impart to them their own unfavorable judgment of others. All will admit that they are fallible—they may err in judging a brother—and if they do err how fearful the responsibility of communicating this false judgment—this prejudice to a young mind, which ought to be nurtured in the spirit of the Gospel! in love and charitableness.
The principle we wish to instil is illustrated in the following short story.
SARAH ANSON was sitting with her aunt one day, when she heard a good deal of conversation between her aunt and a lady, who was on a visit to her, about “the orthodox.” When the visitor was gone, “Aunt Caroline,” said Sarah, “you are always talking about ‘orthodoxy,’ and ‘the orthodox.’ I wish you would tell me what you mean by ‘the orthodox?’”
“Why Sarah, I mean those who think they shall certainly be saved, and all the rest of the world will be condemned—that sort of people, that are for ever canting.”
“Canting—what is canting, aunt”
“Canting is talking about religion on all occasions, seasonable, and unseasonable, as the orthodox do.”
Sarah was silent for a few moments, but not being enlightened by her aunt’s replies, she was not satisfied, and she ventured to add—“Still, aunt, I do not know what you mean by the orthodox.”
“How stupid you are, Sarah!—Have you ever lived in this city all your life, and don’t know that Mr –’s and Mr –’s congregations are orthodox?”
[PAGE 5]
“No, aunt, I did not—I don’t remember,” she added with a sigh, “ever to have heard mamma speak the word orthodox—but now I hear you say so much about them, I should really like to know how they differ from other Christians.”
“Oh, they differ in every thing—they think all kinds of rational amusements a crying sin. They would have every body spend their whole lives in going to lectures and prayer-meetings, and always look solemn and dismal, and give every thing to missions.”
“Missions!” exclaimed Caroline—“there must be some missionaries that are not orthodox—that Mr. Stewart I was reading about to Lucy, could not be what you call orthodox, aunt Caroline.”
“Stewart—the missionary to the Sandwich Islands?—Oh yes, he was orthodox enough.”
Some one at this time called away her aunt, and Sarah was left revolving in her mind what she had said.
If Sarah had been like most children of eight years, she probably would have been quite satisfied with her aunt’s replies, and the seeds of prejudice, thus carelessly sown in her mind, might have taken root there; but Sarah’s mother had guarded her mind from prejudice, as a gardener would preserve his garden from the intrusion of poisonous weeds. She had not spoken to her of orthodoxy, but she had of prejudice. She had told her that very good people might be sadly prejudiced, as was Nathaniel the Israelite, in “whom there was no guile,” for he had said of Jesus “can any good come out of Naza-
[PAGE 6]
reth?” She had shown her how beautifully our Saviour had reproved the prejudice of the wicked Jews, by selecting, to illustrate the principle of true charity, not one of their own Pharisees who claimed preeminence in righteousness—not even one of their own nation, to whom they fancied the favour of the Father of all limited, but a Samaritan—a good Samaritan—one of a people most despised and hated by the Jews—a people who were the subjects of their national, and, as they believed, their just and authorized enmity.
Sarah’s mind, thus carefully guarded against the intrusion of uncharitable feeling, might be compared to that paradise which the flaming sword of the Cherubim defends from all bad spirits—and besides, happily, in the particular case of the orthodox, she had just taken an antidote against prejudice; she had been reading Stewart’s Journal to Lucy, an excellent young woman, who had been, till within a few weeks back, her attendant and nurse, and who was now rapidly declining with a consumption, the consequence, as was believed, of a too constant devotion to Sarah’s mother, who had recently died of the same fatal disease. Mr. Stewart’s beautiful description of his voyage, his apostolic devotion to the noblest enterprise of man,—the regeneration and reformation of his degraded fellow-beings,—had delighted Sarah, kindled her piety, and touched her heart to the very quick; and she was hurt and offended when her aunt spoke of him, and of the large class to which he belonged, with cold contempt.
[PAGE 7]
Little Sarah was one of the gentlest of human beings, and it seemed that to introduce any harsh feeling into her kind heart, was to break one of the strings of that fine instrument.
She determined now to appeal to Lucy for the information she had failed to obtain from her aunt. Accordingly, she went to her apartment, but when she found her friend looking much sicker than usual, she sat down on her bedside, mentally resolving not to trouble her with any questions, and after kissing her pale forehead, she took up a fan, and began fanning her, but she stopped often, figetted, and looked perplexed; and Lucy, who had been accustomed to watch her thoughts as they were expressed in her sweet open face, and who could read them there almost as plainly as if they were reflected in a mirror, said to her, “Something troubles you, Sarah—what are you thinking of, my child?”
Thus prompted, Sarah did not hesitate to say, “do you tell me, Lucy, what is the real meaning of orthodoxy.”
“Orthodoxy,” replied Lucy, with a faint smile; “certainly, I will as well as I know how; orthodoxy”—but here she paused, as she heard an approaching footstep, and then added, “wait a little while, Sarah—there is Mrs. Lumley; don’t say any thing abut it now, for she is orthodox.”
“Is she orthodox?’, exclaimed Sarah, her face brightening, for she knew Mrs. Lumley did not come within her aunt’s description of the orthodox. She was a poor widow, whose life had been marked by
[PAGE 8]
severe and multiplied sorrows, and she had borne them all with a meek and resigned spirit, cheerfully submitting to the privations of her Father in heaven inflicted, as a good child will bear to be deprived by a beloved parent of some dear possession.
When Mrs. Lumley entered, Lucy expressed great pleasure at seeing her, but said she was afraid she had stayed away from lecture to come to her.
“And what if I have, Lucy? I should make a poor use of the privelege of going to lecture, if I did not learn my duty there: It is God’s word, you know, ‘be ye doers of the word and not hearers only,’ and one of the first duties as well as a pleasure is it to do what I can for a sick friend. No, Lucy, I should not dare to enter my Father’s house, if I neglected a sick brother or sister by the way. But I am afraid you are not so well to-night, your breathing is difficult.
“Yes—I feel it to be so, and I must expect it to be even worse.”
“And yet, Lucy, you do not look frightened or troubled.”
“I thank God I am not, Mrs. Lumley. There has been a time when I shrunk from the prospect of death, when I lay for hours awake in the silent watches of the night, my heart throbbing at the thought that I must be laid in the grave; but now I feel there is no death to those who believe in the resurrection and the life—and I realize that what we call death, is but a passage to a better life. I am in the valley of the shadow of death, and I fear no evil, and it is be-
[PAGE 9]
cause the rod and the staff of my God support and comfort me.”
Lucy spoke in her usual tone of voice; there was something in its calmness that expressed the assurance of her faith, while the glow that lit up her face with a celestial brightness, made her look as if she had already entered into the joy of her Lord. Mrs. Lumley brushed the tears from her eyes. “It is truly wonderful to me, Lucy,” she said, “to see one so young, and so happy as you have been, so willing to go; but in all our trials, of every kind, we find the grace of God sufficient for us. I can say that I never felt so rich toward him, as when I have been bereft of earthly comfort.”
Sarah listened intently—her eye moved quickly from her friend to the widow, and tear after tear dropped on Lucy’s feverish hand, which she held pressed in hers. The patient sufferers, in sick chambers and in the dark paths of affliction, are the most affecting witnesses to the goodness of God, for they prove that he never forsakes his children. Lucy listened to their testimony, and laid it up in her heart.
A little bustle was now heard in the outer room, and two persons entered, one an old colored woman, who meekly remained standing at the door, and the other a tall Irish woman, who pressed forward with characteristic eagerness, and pouring half a dozen beautiful oranges from a bandanna handkerchief—“There, Lucy, dear,” said she, “they are Havanas—every one of them—I had them from Patrick Moon-
[PAGE 10]
ey, and sure they are fresh, for Pat has just stepped a shore.”
“Oh Peggy, many, many thanks; but you are too generous—you could not afford to buy so many for me.”
“Sure honey, don’t be after saying that—would not I have given the apple of my eye for them, if I could not have had them chaper? That would I do for you, dear, that’s been saint-like to me and mine, as poor Rose, that’s gone such a little bit before you, has often said—God above make the eating of them as pleasant to you, as the getting of them has been to me.” Then stooping down and kissing Lucy’s hand, and murmuring a prayer, and crossing herself, she left the room.
Lucy was affected with the honest creature’s gratitude, and she covered her eyes with her hand, and did not look up till Sarah whispered, “there is old Amy at the door.”
“Amy, is that you?” she then said—“come and sit by me, Amy, and tell me how you are nowadays.”
“I am but poorly,” said she, humbly curtsying, “but how is Miss Lucy?”
“Thank you, Amy, I trust I may say in the language of that good book you so well understand, ‘it is well with me.’”
“Ah, Miss Lucy, you put me in mind of what Elder Eton said to day, ‘them that walk with the Lord through life; the Lord will not leave them to go alone through the valley of the shadow of death.’”
“No, Amy—he does not; and it is no longer a
[PAGE 11]
dark valley when it is enlightened by his presence. But how do you get on in your worldly matters, my good friend?”
“O Miss Lucy, I don’t want to complain, but I miss your goodness, and that dear child’s mother’s, every day.”
“Does not Tom provide for you?”
“Tom—poor boy, he has been gone to sea six weeks.”
“And Sally?”
“Sally is a lost creature, Miss Lucy; she does nothing for me; and I can do nothing for her but pray for her.”
“Do you suffer for necessaries, Amy?”
“Sometimes, Miss Lucy.”
“Do you ever go hungry?”
“I can’t say but I do; but it will be but a little while, and I don’t mean to murmur.”
“Truly.” said Lucy, raising her eyes devoutly, “tribulation worketh patience ;” and then turning to Sarah, she added in a low voice, “when I am gone, remember poor old Amy—you are young for such a charge, but your mother’s disposition is in you. Now my good friends,” she added, “I believe you had best leave me: I am a little tired, but I shall sleep the better for your kind visits; good night—remember me in your prayers.” They both bade her good night, and Sarah, after lighting them down stairs, returned to Lucy, and again took her station at her bedside. “Now, my dear child,” said Lucy, “I will answer your question about orthodoxy.”
[PAGE 12]
“I remember when I was about your age, I was perplexed in the same way. I had lived two years with your mother, when I went to pay a visit to one of my aunts. She questioned me very closely about my place, and when she had found I had every reason to be satisfied and happy, she said, ‘But after all, Lucy, Mrs. Anson is a Unitarian, and your mother does very wrong to let you live with a Unitarian.’ I told her I did not know what she meant by a Unitarian, but if she meant anything that was not good, I was sure Mrs. Anson was not a Unitarian. ‘She is a Unitarian,’ she replied, ‘and it is a shame you are not put in an Orthodox family.’ When I returned home, I asked your mother what was the meaning of Unitarian and what of Orthodox. ‘You are not old enough yet, Lucy,’ she said to me, ‘to comprehend, if I were to endeavor to explain to you the differences of opinion from which different classes of Christians take their names, and I would not wish to have your attention turned to those matters wherein they disagree, but rather that you should fix it on those points where all who are named by the name of Christ agree; for among all sects, there are those who deal justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. Consider all those Christians, who manifest a love to their Heavenly Father, and obedience to his well beloved Son, our Saviour; and of such do not ask if they be a Presbyterian, Unitarian, Methodist or Catholic; but regard them as Christians, fellow-christians, servants, and friends of one Master, who has said—“by this ye shall know that ye are
[PAGE 13]
my disciples, that ye love one another.”’ This was your dear mother’s instruction to me, Sarah, and I did not neglect it. You see by those good Christians, who have visited me this evening, that I have friends who bear very different names. Mrs. Lumley is Orthodox, a member of the Park street Church; Peggy is a good Catholic; Amy is a Baptist, and I, you know, am a Unitarian; but we are all, I humbly trust, heirs of that blessed country toward which I am hastening.”
“Now Sarah, give me my opiate, and then sing me one of the Hymns you and your mother used to sing together. The opiate will, I hope, give some rest to my poor sick body—and your voice, raised in a praise to God, is always a sweet cordial to my mind. Sarah prepared the medicine and then reseating herself, and taking Lucy’s hand, she sang the following hymn of Beddome:
“Let party names no more
The Christian world o’erspread;
Gentile, and Jew, and bond, and free,
Are one in Christ their head.
Among the Saints on Earth
Let mutual love be found
Heirs of the same inheritance,
With mutual blessings crowned.
Envy and strife be gone,
And only kindness known,
Where all one common Father have,
One common Master own.
Thus will the church below
Resemble that above;
Where springs of purest pleasure rise,
And every heart is love.”
[PAGE 14]
“May this spirit ever govern your heart,” said Lucy, as she folded her arms around Sarah and bade her goodnight. Sarah’s selection of this particular hymn had gratified her, for it proved that though she had not attempted to give her any explanation of the different names by which Christians are called, she made her feel that charity and love will bound over the barriers, that the wicked passions or the false zeal of man has erected between different sects of Christians; that love is the essence of religion—love to God, and love to man.
----------
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
Christian Charity
Subject
The topic of the resource
Calvinism vs. Unitarianism, orthodoxy.
Description
An account of the resource
A young girl learns the difference between Calvinism and Unitarianism, but is nevertheless encouraged to be charitable to all Christians, regardless of particular affiliation.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. [By the author of Redwood.]
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
A Short Essay To Do Good, 4-14.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Stockbridge [Mass.] : Printed by Webster and Stanley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1828
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Michael Monescalchi; D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. A short essay to do good. Stockbridge [Mass.] : Printed by Webster and Stanley, 1828;
Repository Collection Development Department, Widener Library. HCL, Harvard University. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:7572801. Accessed 09 July 2019
Format
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Document
Language
A language of the resource
English
1828
A Short Essay to Do Good
African American
Baptist
Benjamin Beddome
Benjamin Franklin
Boston
Calvinism
Catholic
charity
Charles Samuel Stewart
Christianity
colored
Death
girls
Irish
James 4:11
Jesus
Jews
Juvenile fiction
missionaries
orthodoxy
Park Street Church
Pharisees
prejudice
Psalm 23
religion
Samaritans
Sandwich Islands
Unitarian
-
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3bd02176d8e31744eaa0d53a63344f10
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
1842
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1842.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
The Irish Girl.
By the author of “Hope Leslie,” &c.
“My peace is gone,
My heart is heavy;
I shall find it never
And never more.”
“Now sit down, Margaret, child, and rest you—here by my bedside. How comfortable my bed feels! It always has the right lay when you fix it, Margaret. Come, sit down; the work is all done up, and done as well as I could do it myself—even the outside of the teakettle is as clean as a china cup. It’s a mystery to me, Margaret, how you learned such tidy ways in a shanty.”
“It’s not always that I have lived in a shanty, Mrs. Ray.”
“Don’t turn your back to me, Margaret; draw your chair closer to my bed. I want to have a little talk with you, Margaret. I feel myself going down hill, and I don’t know how long I may be spared.”
“God forbid you should be taken, Mrs. Ray, dear—you, that are so good to them that’s near and them that’s far off.”
“You must not flatter me, Margaret,” said the old woman, in a tone of voice that indicated anything but displeasure.
“And do you think I’d be after flattering you, Mrs. Ray—you, that are mother-like to me? God knows you are kind, and it’s James says the same; and you know yourself James—God forgive him!—loves no Yankee besides you in the world.”
“But I mistrust, Margaret,” said the old lady, fixing her faded gray eye on the young creature, “I mistrust James’s sister can’t say the same.” Margaret’s cheek, ordinarily pale, turned to a deep crimson. The old lady cleared her voice and continued: “It’s no crime, nor nothing like it, Margaret, to love what’s good—hem—if what’s good is what’s suitable.” This seemed a mere common-placeism, but Margaret’s cheek turned pale again, and a tear trickled over it.
“You say you have not always lived in a shanty, Margaret, and that’s what l have said to our people. Says I to Sister Maxwell, ‘Margaret has had as good opportunities as the most of our mountain girls;’ says I, ‘ she can read handsomely— there’s few can read like her;’ says I, ‘I wish the minister could read so;’ says I, ‘ her reading sinks right down into the heart.’ ”
“Who is flattering now, Mrs. Ray, dear?”
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“Not I, Margaret—-’tis not our way to flatter.”
“Nor ours. God knows, Mrs. Ray, it’s what we feel we speak, be it good or bad.”
“Well, well, Margaret, I know some does call real kind heart-words flattery, but they are no such thing, I know—we won’t talk about that now. As I was saying, judging from your reading and writing, you have seen better days—haven’t you, Margaret?”
“Some ways they were better, and other ways not. I had an aunt was housekeeper at Lady Kavenagh’s—and my lady respected my aunt, and she would have me to come and live with her in the housekeeper’s room; and Miss Grace took a fancy to me, and taught me to read and write, and so forth.”
“Then, after all,” said Mrs. Ray, with manifest disappointment, “your parents have always lived in a shanty?”
“They lived in what we call a cabin, ma’am —thank God.”
“Margaret, you forget: I’ve often told you it’s not right to use the name of God in vain as you do. You should not say ‘thank God’ when you mean nothing by it.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Ray, dear, and I do mean something. I never think of my home in that cabin without thanking God in my heart, and God forgive me if I don’t thank him with my lips too. That cabin was my home, Mrs. Ray; there was a kind father and the kindest of mothers always working and caring for us. There it was my little sister—God bless her! —died; there was James, my mate, always glad to see me, and sorry to part from me; there was never a harsh word among us—we laughed and we cried together—what one loved, the other loved, and what one hated, all hated: hadn’t we what’s best in castle and palace, and not always found there? I’ve often thought, wouldn’t my Lady Kavenagh gladly change with-my mother, and rough it with loving hearts and happy faces?”
“Oh, I dare say, Margaret, ladies in the old countries have it hard enough, as everyone knows who reads the newspapers; but that is nothing to the purpose. What I want to come at, Margaret, is, would you—could you be content to live in a cabin again? You would hold your head above it, wouldn’t you?”
Margaret’s form dilated as she impulsively rose from her seat, and raising and clasping her hands, appealingly exclaimed, “God strike me dead, then, if I would! -- it was in a cabin that my father and mother that’s gone lived -- it was in a cabin that James and l grew up together, with one heart between us. Oh, Mrs. Ray, dear, God forgive you! -- it’s such a long time ago, I think you have forgotten what a happy thing it is to be a child at home, in your own father’s place—be it castle or cabin, it’s all the same.”
“Don’t be affronted, child, and don’t cry,” said kind Mrs. Ray, wiping her eyes, and somewhat overpowered by Margaret’s vehe—
[p. 131]
mence; “your feelings are natural, and quite right, but there is no need of such a hurricane. I am sure my sons and daughters love me and are dutiful to me, but it’s in a quiet, regular way.”
“And that’s the way of your people, Mrs. Ray, dear; but our feelings come in a storm, and you may as easy keep the winds that come howling over your Becket hills quiet, as keep them still -- but it’s not always we are feeling, and God forgive me if I have said anything to fret you—you, that are so kind to me.”
“It’s a satisfaction to be kind to you, Margaret, and I don’t like to leave my work half done—so sit down again. I'll be candid with you, Margaret, and you must be candid with me, and open your heart to me as if I were your own mother.”
“Ah, Mrs. Ray, dear!” Margaret kissed the old lady.
“I am going to use freedom, child: who gave you that blue guard-chain that you wear round your neck day and night?”
“Sure it was William Maxwell, then,” replied Margaret, in a voice scarce above her breath. Margaret was learning that some of our feelings, and those of the strongest too, are stillest.
“And what have you hanging by it, Margaret?”
Margaret answered by drawing out a small crucifix appended to the guard-chain, kissing it, and crossing herself. “0 Margaret, Margaret! That’s to be a cross to you indeed, I fear! I must tell you the truth; there is no thing William Maxwell’s parents have such a horror of as a Romanist, and there is nothing his father despises like an Irish person.”
“But it’s not William Maxwell that’s after fearing the one or despising the other,” said Margaret.
“No, that’s true. William is not a serious young man: he’s thought little about religion yet, one way or the other; but when he comes to consider, Margaret, he will feel, as we all do, that it’s a dreadful thing to be a Romanist, and pray to saints, and worship images, and so forth. And besides, I know William better than you do, Margaret—I’ve known him from his cradle—he’s my own sister’s son, and I love him, and he’s a pretty young man, but William has not resolution to go against his parent’s will, be it right or wrong. Take care, child, you’ve dropped your stitches. Now, Margaret, child, hear me patiently: consider, to-day is not forever, and them that’s young and soft like you, if their feelings are cast in one mould, they can be cast over in another.”
“Will ye speak plain what you are after saying to me, “Mrs. Ray, dear?”
“Be patient, child—slow and sure, you know. We can’t have everything just right in this world, Margaret: when one door is opened, another is shut—young folks must be conformable.” Margaret sighed with irrepressible impatience, and Mrs.
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Ray proceeded more directly: “It’s my opinion, Margaret, that William can nowhere find a likelier girl than you are. You have just the disposition to please Sister Maxwell, and Providence somehow seems to have set you down here, making the place for you, and you for the place, as it were; and somehow you have taken an unaccountable hold of my heart, and I can’t blame William; and so I was thinking, Margaret, as the railroad is almost done, the shanties will soon be broke up, and James will have to look for work elsewhere: you’ll have a good chance, as it were, to break up your connexions with all these people, and after a little while you will be no more an Irish girl than Belinda Anne Tracy.” Margaret’s face was turned quite away, or probably Mrs. Ray would not have proceeded: “And then as to your beads, your crucifix, your confessions, &c., the sooner you give them all up, the better, my child, for soul and body too” —
“Say no more, Mrs. Ray; God forsake me if I forsake Him, and deny my parents and my people, and cast off James—heart of my heart! Better for my soul, say ye! And what would be left of my soul if all faith towards God and love to man were out of it? Oh, Mrs. Ray, I would not have thought it of you!” The poor girl wept as if her heart were broken. Mrs. Ray tried in vain to soothe her. She no more argued or persuaded; she was ashamed that she had done either. Her strong innate sense of right triumphed over the prejudices of education and society; and having begun with proposing to her young friend to abjure her faith and forsake her people, she ended with respecting the loyalty that kept her true to both.
Little need be said in explanation of the relations and history of the parties introduced to our readers. Margaret O’Brien had belonged to one of the encampments of Irish that are found along the lines of our railroads, while those great works are constructing by the people who, driven forth from their own land by misery and multiplied oppressions, come here to do our roughest work, and share our bread and freedom. Their shanties, built for transient use, are constructed with the least possible expense and labour; and though perhaps adequate to their ideas of comfort, are a sad contrast to the humblest homes of our own people. There is little found in them besides strong, healthy bodies and warm hearts —the best elements of happiness in any home.
Would it not be well for our people to consider more maturely than they have yet done, the designs of, Providence in sending these swarms of Irish people among us? Is it not possible that their vehement feelings, ardent affections, and illimitable generosity might mingle with our colder, and (we say it regretfully)
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more selfish natures, to the advantage of both? And at any rate, by losing the opportunity of promoting their happiness, of binding them to us by the blessed links of humanity, are we not doing a wrong to our own souls? Can good be elected to them or to ourselves by condemning their nation and deriding their religion?
Margaret’s father lost his life while working on the Western Railroad by the blasting of a rock. Margaret’s mother was ill at the time: the shock of seeing his mangled body brought home without warning, occasioned, as was believed, her death. The report of the melancholy fate of these people spread through the neighbourhood, and Mrs. Ray, impelled by her Christian heart, went to look after the orphan girl. She was struck with the loveliness of her countenance, her sweet manners, and the superior decency of her habitation.
“Why,” said she afterward to the Maxwells, who expressed their surprise that she should take a girl from the shanties into her family, “it wasn’t like a shanty! They were not all herded together like cattle, as they commonly are, but the place was parted off into three rooms; there were bedsteads—rough, to be sure—and there were clean sheets and decent spreads; and they had some chairs; and Margaret a little table with a drawer, all made by her brother, and a work-basket, and everything tidy on it, and a picture hanging over it”—
“A picture! Some saint I dare say,” interrupted Maxwell, his lip curling.
“It might be, for aught I know,” replied Mrs. Ray, meekly, “but I should not think anyone need to be the worse for a saint—the picture of one, I mean, hanging up before them. I assure you, Brother Maxwell, everything had a becoming appearance; there was considerable earthenware and silver teaspoons, and it was evident they had lived like folks; and as to the poor orphan girl, she is as neat as the neatest of our Becket girls—Belinda Anne don’t exceed her—and she is so pretty spoken and pretty looking! and as I wanted help that would be company too, I was glad to get her; and her brother having to go to work on the next section, was glad to leave her in a suitable place for one so young and comely. I hope you don’t think I did wrong, Brother Maxwell,” concluded Mrs. Ray, who, though very apt to do right from her own impulses, was rather weakly nervous as to the judgment of others.
“You are an independent woman, and must judge for yourself, Mrs. Ray. Everybody knows ’tis my principle to keep clear of the Paddies. I neither eat nor drink with them, and I go not in nor out among them.”
“But you sell to them,” said Mrs. Ray, with a smile that faintly
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indicated what she did not say, and what she retained, because she was a woman of peace, and rarely struck a discord ant note. The complaints she had heard from these poor strangers and wayfarers in the land, of the exorbitant prices demanded by “Brother Maxwell” for his pork and potatoes, were fermenting in her mind.
“Yes, I sell to them—I take care of number one. As the Bible says, he that don’t provide for his own household is worse than an infidel.”
“I take that passage in another sense, Brother Maxwell; I provide for my family by buying of them: I buy Margaret’s services, and she throws in her love, and I would not change bargains with you.”
“And I should not be afraid to show books with you, Widow Ray,” retorted the sordid man.
“I don’t keep any books,” replied Mrs. Ray; “there are books where both accounts are kept, and where the widow’s will probably show fairest.”
Maxwell is one of those who bring dishonour on the good name of his people. His industry runs into anxious toil, his enterprise into avarice, his economy into miserliness, his sagacity into cunning, his self-preserving instincts into selfishness. Having one of the largest farms in Becket, his ruling passion is to make it larger. Enjoying and imparting never enter into his calculations; and, as was said of a far loftier person, “he had not so much joy in what he had, as trouble and agony for what he had not.” His only son and heir, William, though resembling his father, had an infusion of his mother’s more generous disposition—a sprinkling of her more attractive qualities. How the proportions were balanced, and which preponderated, will be seen by his conduct.
Margaret O’Brien was much less hopeful than most young people. Early changes and sorrows had superinduced a reflectiveness and sadness on the natural vehemence and cheerfulness of her character. Life seemed to her a dark and tangled path, and she shrunk from pursuing it. She had not yet learned that there is an inner light, which always shines on the patient soul. She was silent and abstracted all the day after her conversation with Mrs. Ray. She performed her usual domestic duties negligently. “I saw plainly,” Mrs. Ray afterward said, “that the poor girl’s heart was not in them; but then, Sister Maxwell, I was only thinking how pretty she looked, and what a blessing she would be to the man—be he who he would—that should marry her. Well, we are short-sighted creatures.”
As the day declined, Margaret became more restless. She was
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continually going to the door, and looking up the road. “Who are you expecting?” asked Mrs. Ray.
“It’s James I am looking for—he promised he would be down some day this week.” Margaret blushed deeply, conscious that, though telling the truth, it was not the whole truth. No James came. No approaching footstep, hoof, or wheel, broke the dismal silence that surrounded the widow’s dwelling. Margaret became more and more unquiet, and at last said she would go and meet James; “that would shorten the time; and if I am not at home at tea-time, don’t wait for me, Mrs. Ray, dear; it is not very far to the shanties, and if I should be late home, there is a bright moon to-night.”
Margaret was already on the threshold. Mrs. Ray called her back. “My child,” she said, “don’t stay out late; you know I am of an anxious make, and easily startled, and you are not looking yourself, Margaret, since our talk this morning; and I’m not superstitious, and don’t really believe in such things, but there has been one of the neighbor’s dogs howling unaccountably lately; and last evening I fully meant to put on my purple shawl, and when I came to take it off, it was my black one, trimmed with crape! I don’t believe in signs, but they make one feel—and if any evil were to happen to you, Margaret, I should feel just as wounded as if it were one of my own daughters.”
“God—the God of the fatherless—bless you, Mrs. Ray, dear, and keep all trouble far from your door.” Margaret kissed her old friend, and promised to return as early as possible, and that promise Mrs. Ray afterward said was a great comfort to her, for she was sure “she meant to keep it.” Margaret walked hastily up the road, and took a horse-path that, passing through a wood, led by a cross cut to the railroad.
Winter comes on prematurely in Becket, a high, cold mountain town. Though it was yet October, the glow and almost metallic brightness of our autumn foliage had passed away. The leaves, the summer’s wealth, lay in piles on the ground, or hung in sadly-thinned companies rustling on the branches; leaden clouds were driving over the sky, and snow falling in scattered flakes.
Margaret’s way lay along a leaping and gushing mountain-stream, which to the ear of the happy called up images of courage and joy, but to Margaret it may have sounded mournful and ominous. May, we say; but there is reason to think that the poor girl was deaf to the sympathies of nature; that her mind was possessed with one idea, and that it mattered not to her whether the voices of nature were cheering or sad. She did not even pause at “Hardy’s Rock,” though that had been her “trysting-tree.” This
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was a rock easy of access from the road, but precipitous towards the stream, with a broad, flat summit. The stream below it was dammed, partly by a natural accumulation of brush and stones brought from above, and partly by art, and it set back in a deep basin. The stream, swollen to a torrent by late rains, had overflowed the margin of the basin, and covered the little strip of level ground around it to the very edge of a steep cliff, whose pines and firs were darkly reflected in it. But a few weeks before Margaret had sat on this rock with William Maxwell, and while she listened to him, had woven a wreath for her bonnet of the asters and golden-rod that were now withered like her hopes.
Below the dam was a saw-mill belonging to William, and he often came down to it towards evening to see what work had been accomplished during the day. It was nearly two weeks since Margaret had seen him, and in that interval she had heard that, in rustic phrase, he was “paying attention” to a young girl, who, by the recent death of her father, had become sole proprietor of a farm adjoining Maxwell’s, and was heiress to herds, pasture-land, and much rural wealth. This young person was the Belinda Anne Tracy, of whom Mrs. Ray had spoken in the morning to Margaret with more meaning than met the ear. Uncertainty was intolerable to Margaret’s impatient Irish nature, and “It will now be ended!” she exclaimed, as, listening intently, she heard the tramp of William Maxwell’s horse long before she saw him. She was hidden by a projecting point of the rock, and he did not perceive her till he was arrested by her voice, not in a loud, but thrilling tone, pronouncing his name.
“Margaret! is it you? I did not think of meeting you, but I was going this evening to see you."
Margaret raised her eyes to his, and a gleam of pleasure shot through them, but they were quickly cast down again, and her lips trembled as she said, “There’s many a lonesome evening come and gone since I have seen you, William Maxwell.”
“That’s true, Margaret—and it is true, too, that a man may be in one place, and his heart in another.”
“Where was your heart then, William, when you was after going down to Westfield with Belinda Anne Tracy!”
“With you, Margaret, and with none but you, and that’s as true as that I stand here on this solid ground; but one can’t—that is—I mean—”
Margaret, with hurried and trembling hands, untied the guard-chain by which her crucifix was suspended, and kissing it, and then holding it up, she said, “I have sworn on this that I would know your true mind, William Maxwell; and if you respect yourself—if ever you respected me—if you respect this sign, of what
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is best and holiest—if you respect Him that’s above, then tell it to me.”
Maxwell felt the solemnity of the adjuration, and dared not evade it; and it may be that he was glad to be forced, by a superior will, to make a communication for which he had been in vain trying to summon resolution for the last two weeks.
“Margaret,” he began, in a faltering voice “it is true, as I have told you many times, I do love you as I never did, nor ever shall love another. I never spoke a false word to you: you are my first love, and you will be my last; but—but—there are others to consult; I am not free to follow my own wishes; the truth is, Margaret, my father has feelings about your people, and he never will give them up. He took a solemn oath before me and my mother: ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘I’ll cast you off forever if you marry one of the Paddy folks!’ My mother, you know, is sickly, and I am her only child; and if it went to this, it would break her heart, and so she told me— and, Margaret, if I can’t marry you, I don’t care who I marry; and so, this being the true state of the case, and no help for it that I can see, I have made as—as good as an engagement with Belinda Anne Tracy.”
Margaret kept her eye steadily fixed on him till he had finished. She then drew the guard chain from the crucifix, threw it away, and pressing the crucifix to her bosom, turned off without speaking a word. William followed her. “Margaret—Margaret,” he said, “do let us part friends; you cannot be more sorry than I am; only say you forgive me!” But he spoke in vain. Margaret made no reply, except by motioning to him to leave her; and, glad to escape from the piercing rebuke of that sweet countenance—more in sorrow than in anger—he mounted his horse and rode away, bearing with him—to be forever borne —the conviction that the heaviest visitation of his father’s anger would have been light in comparison with the sense of a violated faith to this loving, true-hearted orphan stranger.
Maxwell had but just disappeared when Margaret met her brother James. “Is it you, Margaret?” he said: “God’s blessing on you, then! but what are you fretting at!”
“I’m not fretting, James, dear.”
“Now, Margaret, what’s the use of telling me that, when you don’t so much as lift your eye to me, and your cheek is as white as that bit of muslin round your neck? Is it Mrs. Ray that’s been after chiding you?”
“Mrs. Ray! No, no, James; she’s every way like our own mother to me.”
“Margaret, my sister, my child—for you’ve neither father nor
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mother but me—I never yet spake his name to you; if it’s William Maxwell that frets you—if it’s true, as the boys say, that he’s false to you, I’ll break every bone in his body.”
“James! you’ll break my heart speaking so. Oh, James, dear, keep God’s peace, I pray you; it’s you only in the world I love now. It’s a black world. Good-night, James. You are far from your place, and you have been hard at work; don’t go farther with me.”
“I would not leave you, Margaret, dear, a step short of Mrs. Ray’s, but I have promised Mr. John Richards to meet him above the bridge there. l’ll come down tomorrow and remember, Margaret, we two are alone in the world; and for my sake, and for the sake of them that’s in their graves, keep up a brave heart. Good-night.”—“She did not answer me,” thought James. He stopped and looked after her till she was hidden from him by a turn in the road: “God’s heaviest curse will surely fall on him if he’s broke her heart, and she so young, and innocent, and beautiful to look upon!” Such blistering thoughts were in James’s mind till he joined Mr. Richards.
In the meantime Margaret retraced her steps along the margin of the stream till she reached again Hardy’s Rock. The heavy clouds had rolled down over the setting sun, and left the eastern sky, where the full moon was rising, cloudless. The moonbeams glanced athwart the firs, silvering their branches, and fell on the summit of the rock; the water under it was still in deep shadow. It was on this rock that, two months before, the moon shining as it now shone, but then on summer beauty, that Margaret met her lover
“With hinnied hopes around her heart,
Like simmer blossoms—”
there and then she had plighted faith with William Maxwell. Again she felt herself drawn to that spot—probably without any ill design—with only an intolerable sense of disappointment and misery. The scene brought back with intense vividness her past happiness. What it is to remember that under the pressure of present wretchedness, most have felt, and one has described in words never to be forgotten:
“Nessun maggior delore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria;”
James met Mr. Richards at the appointed place. After a few moments, he said, “James, you are thinking of one thing and talking of another. What is the matter?”
James confessed he was anxious; said he had just met his sister, and that he had left her to go home alone, that she
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seemed very unhappy—and he was sorry he had left her to go home alone. Mr. Richards is a young engineer of most kind and active sympathies. James had worked under him on the railroad, and he particularly liked him. He at once entered into the good brother’s feelings. “Let us walk down the road, James,” he said; “you can easily overtake your sister, and we can as well talk over our business walking as standing here.” Accordingly, they proceeded. When they reached the little bridge we have mentioned, Mr. Richards involuntarily paused and looked down the stream, which here and there seemed playing with the moonbeams. “Why, there is your sister, James,” he said, “sitting on Hardy’s Rock."
“The Lord bless ye! and so she is!” said James.
The words were scarcely uttered out of his lips when Margaret slid down the steep side of the rock into the pool beneath. James uttered a wild scream, and both young men ran down the road together at their utmost speed. The place was soonest accessible by the road, but that was winding, and the distance was full an eighth of a mile. When they reached the spot, a white muslin scarf Margaret had worn was floating on the water. Both jumped in. James, impelled by the instinct of his affection, forgot he could not swim, and Richards, to his dismay, saw him sinking. He dragged him out, bade him remain quiet, and plunging in again, he very soon brought up Margaret’s body. But the time had been fatally prolonged by poor James, and every effort to restore her was unavailing. A company of Irishmen coming from their work below joined them. They entered into the scene with hand, heart, and tongue. “Ha!” said one of them, “it was Judy yesterday was afther saying, ‘He’ll never marry Margaret’ -- maning William Maxwell. It’s that Thracy girl, with houses and lands, he’s afther. Curse the Yankees, there’s no sowl in them!”
“It’s not William Maxwell at all,” said another: “he’s a dacent young man; it’s his father’s rule upon him!” Richards bade them all be silent, saying it was no time now for such a discussion. “Sure that’s rasonable,” said one—“And sure I did not mane you at all, Mr. Richards,” said the man of the sweeping anathema, “for it’s an Irish heart you have, anyway, and that’s what all the boys say.”
James seemed to hear nothing. He was rubbing and kissing alternately one of Margaret’s hands that was firmly closed, and he at last succeeded in taking from it the crucifix which it firmly grasped. Just at this moment a man had alighted from a wagon, and was looking on. “The Almighty be praised!” cried James, pressing the disengaged crucifix vehemently to his lips. Mar-
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garet having died with it in her hand was to him a token of infinite good.
The looker on, at this action of James, turned to his companion in the wagon, saying -- “It’s only a Paddy girl,” * got in, and drove on. The Irishmen, who till then had been too much absorbed to notice him, looked up, and perceiving it was the elder Maxwell,, they uttered curses deep and loud, and threatening summary vengeance, they were following, when James interposed. “No, no,” he said, with fearful calmness, “lave him to me, boys—when her wake is over will be time enough.” Richards saw him turn away, murmur something in a low voice, lay the crucifix on Margaret’s hand, and kiss them both together.
Margaret was carried to the dwelling of an Irish friend; a priest was brought, and the ceremonies of their religion were strictly observed.
Immediately after the funeral, Mr. Richards, who had scarcely lost sight of James, took him aside—poor fellow, he looked as if he had lived twenty years in the three preceding days. “James,” he said, “tell me truly, did you not make a vow to revenge your sister’s death?”
“Sure I did that same, sir—on her crucifix, and on the poor, dead cold hand that held it. God forgive me—but could I help it? There she lay-- dead! -- dead! -- the sweetest flower that ever blossomed trampled under their feet—when I heard the very man that had done it say, ‘ it’s only a Paddy girl!’ Oh, Mr. Richards, my heart’s blood boiled, and my father and my mother it was, and all my people, I heard crying me on to vengeance, and I did swear to take their lives—father and son; and I have made confession of the same to Father Brady.”
“And that has saved you from this horrid crime, James”
“Not that, sir.”
“What then!”
“It’s just yourself, Mr. Richards—you and Mrs. Ray. --It was just your goodness to me that stilled the howling tempest in my breast -- and for your sake and Mrs. Ray’s, I forgave all your people. It was Margaret said—they were almost her last words—‘Mrs. Ray is every way mother-like to me;’ and didn’t I see the old lad after crying hot tears over her? Sure, Mr. Richards, if there were more like you and the old lady—God bless her!—there would be an end of cruelty and hate, and love would bind all hearts together—even your people’s and mine!”
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*This expression was in fact uttered by one of our people, and heard by the brother of the girl at such a moment as we have described.
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
"The Irish Girl"
Subject
The topic of the resource
Prejudice against Irish immigrants, Catholics, Protestants, love, Christian virtue.
Description
An account of the resource
A young Irish servant is in love with a man whose father will not let him marry her because she is a “Paddy girl.” The young woman drowns, shortly after learning of her beloved's decision to marry a non-Irish woman. Her brother vows revenge, but changes his mind.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
By the author of "Hope Leslie," &c.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Vol. X, P. 129-140
Publisher
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John L. O'Sullivan
Date
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February 1842
Contributor
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J. Robinson, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Also collected (with revisions) in:
The Dollar Magazine, Vol. II, 1842
Tales and Sketches, Series two, New York. 1842. P. 191-244
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1842
Becket
Catholics
crucifix
drowning
God
Immigrants
Irish
orphan
Pittsfield
prejudice
Protestants
Providence
railroad
religion
servant
shanty
snow
The United States Democratic Review
widow
-
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1850
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Stories published in 1850.
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"He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it"
There are incidents and combinations of circumstances in domestic life which, if faithfully recorded when they occur, would give to a succeeding age a more definite idea, a more lively impression of the spirit of bygone days than can be got from volumes of subsequent history. History, of necessity, deals mainly with public events and marked characters, exceptional from the mass of their contemporaries. We may compare its records to a map of Switzerland which gives you its stupendous mountains, its lakes, and rivers in dots and lines; while the domestic story is like a picture of Lauterbrunnen, with its characteristic narrow valley, its wonderful fall of the Staubach, its overhanging and converging cliffs, its Jungfrau in the background, and a single cottage, with its appurtenances of domestic utensils and commodities, telling the story of family life.
It is the conviction of the worth of such records that induces me to write the following story, some hints of which are taken from the archives of a Congregational church, which archives consist of a faithful record kept by its excellent minister for the space of fifty years. Some particulars are gathered from the generation that preceded me, persons not related by ties of blood to the parties, but connected with them by the vivid sympathies of village life. Other aid has been received from more apocryphal sources.
The names, alas! are now only on the rudely sculptured monuments of the burying-ground. We shall not take the liberty of using them. We shall for once designate the lower valley of the Housatonic by its euphonious Indian name Owasonook, instead of that given to it by the first Puritan settlers, who, in their designation, branded the virgin valley with a memorial of the "bank-note world," the old world of stocks and brokers.
This village of Owasonook has been favoured from the beginning. Missionaries were sent from Scotland to its aboriginal people. There, on the ample green where a village church now stands, and where generations are now laid in holy rest, Brainard expounded his doctrines, and there the excellent Sergeant ministered to his Indian congregation in their goodly show of broadcloth mantles, the gift of Queen Anne.
At the date of our humble story, Brainard had passed on to wilder tribes, Sergeant was gathered to his fathers, and a young man by the name of Stephen West, sound and zealous in doctrine, of good parts, and most gracious heart, was ordained over the small congregation of all the white people who then dwelt in the valley. There were then no dissenters from the established doctrine and independent government of the Puritan Church. The Baptists were unknown in New England. Methodism had not begun. Catholicism was held to be that faith over which the woman who sat on the seven hills reigned, and Episcopacy was in little better odour. The fathers of those days had no prophetic vision of the infinite diversity of shades of colour into which their religion was to be distributed among their descendants, from the deep dye of Papistry, to the faint outside shade, the evanescent and almost imperceptible hue of transcendentalism.
"Belief, not practice, was then prized at highest rate." Among the sturdiest in belief, the least scrupulous in practice, was Deacon Nathan Bay. I remember him well in his old age; that tall brawny figure, with broad and stooping shoulders, and short neck; that high intellectual brow, all written over with lines of calculation and craft; the cold gray eye, with bushy black brows that overhung them like thatch. His eyebrows were then still untouched by time. His hair was sabled and combed on each side of his face with a Pharisaical sleekness, that did not harmonize with his general air of cherished and allowed potentiality. His skin was as dark as a Spaniard's, his cheeks ploughed in deep furrows, his nose aquiline and rather handsome, his mouth sharklike. I believe he thus vividly lives in my imagination because, in my timid childhood, I have many a time felt my eyes spellbound to him, while he appeared to me the impersonation of the Schedoni of Mrs. Radcliffe's most terrible novel. I recoiled from him then—I have since had a sterner horror of him.
There was a little ewe-lamb dwelt under the rooftree of Deacon Bay, a fur-off orphan relative of his wife, who having a sufficient inheritance to indemnify the Deacon for all expenses on her account, he complied with his wife's wishes, and became her guardian and nominal protector. Jessie Blair was the child of godly parents; and the Deacon said he should have done the same by Jessie if she had been poor, for 'professora' should see to it, and fulfil the prophecy, that the seed of the righteous should never be seen begging their bread. The Deacon was scriptural in another point; no one harboured under his roof ever ate the bread of idleness. Jessie, who came there a petted (not spoiled) child, had her playful spirit soon sobered by the uniform routine of domestic toil. There is nothing duller, more soulless, than the daily recurrence and satisfaction of the lowest wants of our being. The pleasant lights of rural life were excluded from the Deacon's household, or rather converted to a dreary shadow, by the medium through which they passed. If he did not, like one of his contemporaries, marshal his children on Monday morning, and do up the week's whipping by an exactly equal and thorough application of the birch,* he kept down the spirit of his household more effectually by its mournful monotony. The Deacon's helpmate was a wife after the feudal pattern, of unquestioning conformity, and serflike obedience. The only indication that she was not merged in her husband—a drop of water lost in his ocean,—was a phraseology indicative of his distinct existence; as "the Deacon judges," and "the Deacon concludes." If her opinion were asked in divinity or ethics, her common reply was, "I don't know the Deacon's opinion, but I think as he thinks." This exemplary subject had one son of a former marriage, Isaac Remington. Isaac was a harmless young man of two or three and twenty. As far as quiet subserviency to the Deacon was concerned, he never escaped from his minority. He lives in tradition only as a still, steady, sleek youth, with a nose like the tower of Lebanon. Thus associated, the only fitting sustenance of poor Jessie's childhood was companionship with the chickens she fed, and the kittens that played in spite of the Deacon; and an occasional romp in the playtime at the village school.
Time went on, and in its progress unfolded manifold charms and graces in Jessie, so that when she reached the age of fifteen, when the half-open flower discloses its possible beauty, every eye turned admiringly and kindly on her.
There occurred about this time in the church, a revival of religion. Jessie, naturally enough, recoiled from religion as exhibited in the Deacon's family. Its cold formulas froze her spirit, but it as naturally melted in an atmosphere where she felt the influence of sympathy. Her gentle pastor received her confessions of her past opposition to the divine character with a joyful recognition of her perceptions of truth, and received her profession of submission and faith with tears of joy. Alas for poor Jessie! this faith and submission, so surely rewarded by their divine object, were destined to be cruelly tested by human tyranny.
Isaac was a subject of the same ' awakening" that brought Jessie into the fold, though there was never a term that seemed less applicable than this to Isaac. There was no vitality in the man—nothing to kindle, nothing to rouse, nothing to 'awake.' He passed through the examination to which young converts are subjected, he answered as others did, and was received to the communion of the church.
Not long after this there was a sort of curtain conversation between the Deacon and his wife to the following effect.
"Beauty is a temptation," observed the Deacon. This was a self-evident truth, and seemed a very inconsequential remark, but the good dame apparently did not think so. She looked up from her knitting with more expression than usual; there was meaning in her face; perhaps she anticipated something in the nature of a confession, for a hypocrite is not nearly so much a saint to his wife as a man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre. "It is best to clip the chicken's wings," continued the Deacon, "if you mean to keep the hen within bounds."
"Ah, ah, indeed!" said his wife with a tone of pleased comprehension, " the speckled hen's last brood got into the garden, and picked the seeds out of Jessie's flower-bed."
There was the dimmest smile at the corners of the Deacon's mouth. He proceeded: "It was a remarkable Providence that bound Jessie up in the same bundle with Isaac."
"There's many others in the same bundle," replied his literal wife; "there is scarce a lad in town that has not come in."
"True, it was a goodly harvest. But some stout shocks were not gathered in. There's Archy Henry among the reprobate—just such a spark as is like to catch a young girl's eye— a handsome build, and well-favoured, ruddy— plenty of brown hair — curling. I marked him at Colonel Davis's funeral singing out of the same psalm-book with Jessie. They both held on to the book, hands close together, and cheeks too near neighbours."
"Deacon, Jessie is but a child."
"In her sixteenth, wife—fast coming out of childhood. Notions grow apace at that age. 'Fast bind, fast find.' Would not you like Jessie for a daughter-in-law?"
"Why, if everything is suitable, and Isaac is of a coming disposition towards her—and she is willing—one of these days maybe I should."
The Deacon was of a temper to decree events, and let suitabilities take care of themselves.
"Willing!" he exclaimed, "what has a girl of fifteen to do but obey the will of her elders? I rather think you will find it 'suitable,' when I tell you that after deducting a reasonable sum for the cost of Jessie's board and education," (the actual outlay for her education had been two pounds, one shilling, and threepence) "she has one hundred pounds at interest."
"Dear me! a pretty fortune, Deacon!"
"Well, it is personal property, and will become Isaac's on the day they are married. Wait for Isaac's coming disposition!—Isaac is a dolt—saving your presence, ma'am. He says he 'never so much as thought on't,' the ninny !' But he won't object if father, mother, and Jessie consent.'"
To the astonishment of the congregation, a publishment of" intention of marriage between Isaac Remington and Jessie Blair," appeared on the church-door the next Sabbath. The tears that poor Jessie shed and the reluctance she felt were hidden in the secrecy of her own bosom and the privacy of her dreary home. She never doubted the duty of implicit obedience—she had no friend to authorize the rebellion of her own instincts. She did not suspect that her kind pastor had remonstrated with the Deacon on his consenting to the marriage of a child, too young to know her own mind; and in three weeks she received from him the marriage charge and benediction.
The union proved like many others, not unhappy, but a total waste. The seeds of virtue, of happiness, of progress in Jessie's character were like the seeds in the bosom of the earth, there to lie undeveloped and inactive to an unknown future—in this world it might be—it might be in another.
After six years of wedded life Isaac Remington died, and left Jessie a widow, just past her majority, with a boy five years old, with, as she believed, a property that, to her modest wants, was independence, and with the rational expectation of her son's succession to the Deacon's property. It was not then so much the custom as now for persons to endow charitable societies, and as the Deacon had no near relatives of his own, it was believed that he would transmit his hoarded gains to the heir of his wife.
The beautiful little widow naturally became at Isaac's death an object of close observation. The Deacon hardly waited for the funeral offices to be over, when he proposed that, as it was difficult for a young widow to be a widow indeed, Jessie should relinquish her independent home, and return to his watch and care. This she declined doing. She lived on a small farm on the borders of a lovely lake a little north of the village of Owasonook. Without probably being able to define why, she enjoyed the companionship of Nature, and grew to love as friends—as vital friends the forms of beauty around her. She declined the Deacon's proposition ;—he urged; she was resolute, and, to her amazement, he was gentle to her. He persisted, but with mildness. He often visited her. He always found it convenient, whenever he was in her neighbourhood, to drop in and ask how she was getting on, and often, to her astonishment, he brought her roses from the bushes she had planted at his door, or bunches of pinks from her bed in his garden, such pears as his crabbed trees bore, and early apples for her little Raphe.
"It's something new, your liking flowers, is it not, sir?" said Jessie to him, as she extended her hand to receive a nosegay he had brought to her. "Maybe so," he replied, detaining her hand for a moment, and pressing it, "but I love everything you love, Jessie." "Tones of voice express the affections," says Swedenborg. True, and bad as well as good ones. There was something in the tone, the manner, the look of Deacon Bay that was like a flash of lightning to a traveller in a dark night. To Jessie they revealed a danger and a terror that she had never dreamed of. The sagacious man read her face; he changed his manners, resumed his sanctimonious aspect and conversation, but still continued to urge Mrs. Remington's removal from the farm.
Jessie had been a widow rather more than a year and a day, when the Deacon, on entering the pathway that led to her dwelling, saw her with her little boy and Archy Henry going down the declivity behind her house to the lake. The just risen full moon lit up the western shore, so that the wave that rippled on the brink was like a silver rim to the lake. Bay followed the happy little company stealthily, like an unclean beast (as he was), watching his prey, and creeping behind a clump of young hemlocks, be continued to watch them there, as full of evil purpose as the evil spirit in Paradise. A paradise of beauty and innocence it was to this happy young pair.
The boat was so placed that it could not be reached dryshod. Henry swung the boy upon his shoulder and carried him to it; and after a little playful resistance on Jessie's part, he caught her in his arms, and placed her beside her boy. He then took off his overcoat, and put it under and around her feet, with perhaps not quite the grace of Raleigh, but with as respectful chivalry as the young courtier manifested to his royal mistress. The little boat was then pushed from its mooring, and was so gently rowed away, that it was long before the voices from it, in tones of tenderness and happiness, passed beyond Bay's hearing. His senses seemed endowed with preternatural acuteness to torment him. He went away brooding on ripening plans of mischief.
The next day he came again to the farm to remonstrate with Mrs. Remington on the bad economy of remaining there, when she might live free of cost in his house.
"I never did, sir, live in that way with you," she said, with a spirit that provoked the Deacon to reply.
"You have some one to back you, Jessie, or you would not dare to speak to me in this wise, and to hold out against the will of your elder, and your spiritual father as it were."
She blushed slightly, but she replied undaunted. "I am not alone, sir. I have that dear child, who will one day be a man—and, I trust, a staff for his mother to lean on."
"Well done! well done! But you had best consider what you are to lean on in the mean time." And then softening his tone to affected kindness, he added, "Perhaps you don't know that this place was bought with my partner's money, which might have been her son Isaac's, if he had survived her. You understand, Jessie? The deed was made out to me. The property is legally mine; she, you understand, being nobody—dead as it were—in the eye of the law; and though I mean it shall come into your boy's hands one day or other, in the mean time, and, following the golden rule, I shall take care of it, as if it were to all intents mine. I might make a pretty penny now, if I would," he added, with an indescribable expression of triumph and cupidity proper to his face. "This orchard and upland pasture, together with the joining tillage land, would make a master farm."
"What joining tillage land?" asked Jessie Remington eagerly.
"Why Archy Henry's farm," he answered, fixing his freezing eyes upon her; "I thought everybody knew that farm was mortgaged to me for more than it is worth—perhaps you did not?"
Poor Jessie! a fly caught in a spider's web was a faint type of her conscious misery and helplessness—the spider a fainter symbol of the gloating tyrant who now enjoyed his triumph over her. She sickened and turned away. But in another minute thoughts rose that overcame the fear of poverty, and she said courageously, "You can take possession here, sir, as soon as you please. I shall go at once."
"And come to my house, dearie?"
"No—no sir, never!"
"But you will, sweetheart," he said coaxingly, and drew her to him (she was standing near him), and would have kissed her, but instinctively she struck him on Ms face, and sprang from him, and her brave little boy catching his mother's feeling, without understanding it, hurled the wooden stool on which he had been sitting at the Deacon's head. The blow blinded and confused him for a moment. But when he rallied, he turned on mother and child such a look of black vengeance, that both instinctively shrank from him, and the mother, dragging the boy with her, escaped to an inner room, and bolted the door.
Wrath mastered every other passion in Bay's breast for the time.
"Unbolt your door," he cried. There was no reply. The poor mother and child were cowering together like frightened doves. "Hear me, you must," he continued. "You cannot help yourself—a pretty widow you—a hopeful professor! I have found out your plans—I have mine too, and we will see which is the strongest. Marry Archy Henry, and you will be ruined in this world—ruined in the next. Look for excommunication now, and poverty for ever. I saw you, you that could not so much as let me touch the ends of your dainty fingers, I saw you in Archy Henry's arms! Good-bye, Widow Remington"—he walked to the outer door, then returned, and added, "If you blab of what has taken place here to-day, no one will believe you—no one—and for every word you speak, I'll take revenge on Archy Henry— remember that! remember that!"
As the sound of his footsteps died away, Jessie Remington yielded to a burst of grief and despair. "Oh, don't cry, mother, dear mother," said her little boy, clasping his arms round her neck, "he is a bad man—I hate him —I always did hate him. When he first came in to-day, when you were up stairs, he asked me if Archy Henry was here last Saturday night. I would not tell him. I wish Archy would come every Saturday night, and every other night, and he, never—never!"
The mother fondly kissed the child, and I doubt not breathed a fervent Amen! Amen!
She revolved her miserable case. She now understood why Archy, who, she well knew had loved her from her childhood, long before that time when the Deacon had marked his I holding her hymn-book, had not yet since her freedom said one word of marriage, or by words declared his love to her. It needed no declaration. The current of his life, through all her married days, had flowed on without one beam of joy or hope. From the day of Remington's departure he had been a changed man; the cloud had passed from his brow, the gravity from his lips, and he had manifested, in every fitting way but by words, his reverence and tenderness for her.
"Matters have come to a crisis," was the result of her long reflection; "we must clearly understand each other, the sooner, the better."
The following evening Raphe's wish was fulfilled as it was most like to be, and Archy Henry came in, merely to bring a glass in which Jessie had sent some jelly to his invalid sister. "Why do you look so sad?" he asked Jessie, struck with her paleness and dejection.
"I have heard ill news," she replied, "and you, Archy, must tell me if it be wholly true. Is your farm mortgaged to Deacon Bay?"
"Yes."
"Should I be the last to know it, Archy?"
There was an undisguised tenderness in her voice and lovely face which overcame the resolution Henry had maintained, and mutual confessions and disclosures followed. They were like travellers on a perilous road, on whom the day dawns and the sun rises. The road may be more obstructed and perilous before than behind, but their hearts are strong and at peace. What obstructions, what perils can , appeal the spirits of young lovers in the first moments of avowed mutual love? A spell of enchantment is over their world—a spell of faith, hope, and joy.
When they descended from these sunny heights to the discussion of temporal affairs, it appeared that Archy's father, embarrassed by sickness and other misfortunes, had left his farm to his son encumbered by a mortgage to Deacon Bay—that the son had supported his aged mother, and met the many wants of a bedridden sister, and year after year paid the interest of the mortgage.
"More," he said, "till the last year I did not care to do, but since—since Raphe lost his father, I have been a stronger man—I have done two days' work in one, and now I see through the woods, and if I am but reasonably blessed for the three coming years, I shall be independent of the world and the Deacon, please God."
"Archy!"
"I do not speak profanely, Jessie—my heart is dancing, and I can't stand for p's and q's. As to this farm belonging to the Bays, I don't believe a word on't, nor do I care one stiver about it. I prefer that you should give me nothing that ever had any connexion with Bay or his household, but the name you bear, and the sooner you give that up to me the better. Oh, excuse me, I forgot little Raphe. You know I love him—I see nothing but you in him." Jessie did not resent this. She had no affectation of any sort, and certainly no pretension to sensitiveness on the score of her late husband; but Jessie was considerate in her love, and she meant not to increase Archy's heavy burdens, but patiently to wait till he had cleared off the mortgage. The point, however, was no farther mooted that evening. Our lovers were not "gravelled for lack of matter."
Mrs. Remington did not communicate the Deacon's injuries or threats. She had the grace of discretion, which all women (or all men) have not, and she had a certain feeling of obligation to him as deacon and church member, of which even his unworthiness had not divested her.
She addressed a letter to him, asking what property her late husband left, and how it was conditioned.
The following is a copy of his answer.
"WIDOW REMINGTON:—Received yours duly. In reply. Your husband held no property in his own name, his father having willed his whole estate, real and personal, to his worthy wife, now my companion. With the personal I purchased the farm on which you live. The deed, as you are apprised, stands in my name. The property will probably go to your son at my decease. You were possessed of one hundred pounds at the time of your marriage; sixty thereof was expended in apparel and in household furniture—twenty drawn by the late Isaac for housekeeping, and spent as you best know how—the remaining twenty I have paid out for the doctor's bill, Isaac's coffin, shroud, and grave-digging. My accounts are ready for exhibition to the Probate Court when called for.
"Yours to command.
"NATHAN BAY."
Enclosed in this paper was a document of a very different complexion, almost too base to be presented to our readers It concluded with "burn this."
"Burn it 1 indeed I will!" exclaimed Jessie, and, her face and neck mantling with indignation, she threw it into the fire. She kept the indignity to herself, and communicated to Henry only the business letter.
He was indignant at its style; believed there had been fraud, but he perceived it was covered up by legal forms, and he let the whole thing go—he was too happy to care. "I see the man's drift," he said. "He means to bring you back to his own house a dependent. He thinks if he can get possession of your child, j he holds you by the heartstrings. The boy J will have his spirit broken as your—his father j had—you will be oppressed—I shall be tortured —it is not right—it is no way suitable—there is but one course—thank God!" "Dear Archy!"
"Why should not I thank God, Jessie? You must consent to the publishment going up next Sunday."
"Not till I have consulted some one—remember, Archy, I am a church member—you are not. Let me speak to Mr. West."
"No—no—no. He is scrupulous. I am not a member—on your account I wish I were."
"Oh! on your own account, Archy!"
Archy assented. But when he learned that Mrs. Remington thought it more than probable that when the church were apprised of her intention of marrying out of their pale, she should be subjected to discipline, and delay would ensue, he proposed that they should forego the publication, and take advantage of their proximity to the state of New York, where the ceremony could be legally performed without the embarrassing prelude of a publication. This proposition she resisted. She felt in all simplicity of heart a reverence for the authorities of the church. To her it was the type of God's power and justice, and she trembled at the thought of incurring its displeasure. But her lover pleaded, her heart urged, and above all, the horror of being again brought into proximity to Bay terrified her, and she at last consented. The next day she, her little boy, and Archy Henry, drove over to a magistrate's on the border of New York, and the marriage ceremony was there duly performed. Thus the lamb was secured into the fold at the moment the wolf was sure of his prey. The Deacon's rage had none of the ordinary manifestations. To his good, unsuspecting pastor and to the church, he appeared the disappointed father, sorrowing after a godly sort.
A meeting of the church was immediately called. But before they met the pastor visited the offending member. He tried in vain to assume the tone of stern rebuke. His gentle heart failed him. Tears actually' streamed from his eyes as he told poor Jessie that her violation of the laws of God and the known rules of the church, to which she had promised submission when she took the solemn vows of membership, rendered her liable to the censure of the church, and excommunication from it.
She made no excuse—she offered no palliation—she said she was conscious she had done wrong.
"Would she," he asked, "confess in the middle aisle of the meeting-house, before the congregation of the people, that she had sinned, and gone in opposition to God's law, and the law of his holy church, in marrying an unsanctified man, one who lived in daily violation of God's law?"
"Oh no, sir, I cannot say that—that is not my view of my husband—he is not a member —that I am sure I grieve for, but he is better, sir, than some that are."
"That is not to the purpose, child; will you make the confession?"
"I cannot say, sir, that I am sorry to have Archy Henry for my partner for life; but for the manner of my marriage I am sorry, and I am willing humbly to confess it."
"That is not enough ;—solemn charges are before the church."
"What are they, sir?"
"That you received visits from your spark on Saturday nights."
"I did, sir, and I am not ashamed to own it."
"But, surely you know that Saturday night is held to be, and undoubtedly is, holy time."*
"Yes, sir, I know that Saturday night is a portion of the Sabbath, when we should not think our own thoughts. But, sir, I can truly say there was nothing dishonourable in the sight of man, or unholy in the sight of the Lord, that passed between Archy and me. Is this all?"
"No: it is said your husband habitually breaks the third commandment."
"But not blasphemously; thoughtlessly he does, but he knows it grieves me, and I think he will not again."
The good Doctor said there were other charges which had been confided to him, but as he trusted they would not be presented at the church meeting, he should not trouble her with them. He notified her that a meeting was appointed on a certain day near at hand, and he told her that she was expected to be present.
Poor Jessie! Her soul was disquieted—she reproached herself with not having walked worthy of her profession. The displeasure of the church was to her the sure sign of the displeasure of her Divine Master, and not all the arguments, the soothing, and the love of her husband could comfort her. She had two powerful reasons for making no disclosures in relation to the Deacon. She feared exciting the indignation of her husband, which once thoroughly provoked against the man he already doubted and disliked, could not be allayed; and she felt a religious reluctance to throw on the church the scandal of the Deacon's gross conduct. She would not involve the good in the scoffs the bad deserved.
The church met according to appointment. Mrs. Henry was present. Her youth and her docility conciliated many kind hearts in her favour. Her beauty, perhaps, told with some, —a beauty so softened and shaded by modesty, that not the oldest and most rigid thought it a duty to rebuke their instincts in its favour. Deacon Bay was present. He affected to take small part in the case, but he now and then craftily threw in an evil word that he meant to be lead in a wavering scale.
The meeting was divided. Some were for restoring her to full communion on her making the partial public profession she proffered. To this merciful party the pastor inclined. Deacon Bay and his few adherents were for immediate excommunication. Unanimity being unattainable, the meeting adjourned. While the clouds thus darkened over poor Mrs. Henry, she received a notice from Deacon Bay that she must remove from her present dwelling-house, and Henry was warned that the mortgage on his farm was about to be foreclosed, and that he must prepare to surrender it.
Temporal and spiritual ruin were raining down on the young couple, and to poor Mrs. Henry's susceptible conscience and excited imagination they came in the form of judgments for the violation of her church covenant. At this day. when old prestiges have melted away, it is as difficult to sympathize with Mrs. Henry as it would be to feel any serious concern for a child terrified at a shadow on his nursery wall. To her the trouble was a terrible reality. She was certainly more remarkable for tenderness of conscience than strength of mind. The austerest judgment of her brethren of the church was ratified by her own convictions. She seems, in concealing the wrongs of old Bay, to have forgotten the palliation they afforded her. She dared not take counsel or consolation from her husband. He was not a church-member, and therefore not qualified to give it. Still, as her truth was inflexible, she could not say she repented her marriage, and that she could not, to her diseased mind, was a sign of her reprobate state. Her health failed; she sunk into deep dejection; and when Deacon Bay came to notify her of another church meeting on her account, and said to her with a malignity worthy an inquisitor racking his victim, "God has put forth his hand against you"—" He has —he has!" she said,—hypocrisy had achieved its triumph over a pure and susceptible nature.
The pastor seems to have felt the deepest tenderness for the poor bewildered lamb of his flock. He sent his wife to bring her in his own chaise to the church-meeting.
Just before she entered Mrs. Henry's gate, she saw Archy Henry driving out of it with a load of furniture. Deacon Bay was at the moment passing in his wagon. Henry, irritated and confused, did not drive accurately, and his heavy wagon hit the Deacon's in a manner just gently to tip it over, and give the Deacon a somerset. They were both moving slowly at the time, and no great harm was done. The Deacon was exasperated, and no doubt secretly vowed vengeance, and thought with diabolical satisfaction that when Henry arrived at his home with his wife's chattels, he would find a lawyer taking possession of the premises in his, the Deacon's, name.
There was a full meeting of the church—not a member absent. Intimation of the pastor's state of mind were given in the opening prayer. He prayed that though their erring sister passed through the fire, it might not consume her, and through deep waters, they might not overwhelm her.
In the conclusion of his prefatory address to the meeting he said, "It was safer to imitate the Divine Being in mercy than in judgment."
"Who shall presume to stay his judgments?" said the lugubrious Deacon; "' whom the Lord smiteth is smitten.'"
And poor little Mrs. Henry seemed to verify his words.
Attenuated, pale, and trembling, she sat beside the dignified and erect figure of the pastor's wife, looking like a condemned and self-condemned culprit, who would fain call upon the rocks and mountains to hide her.
As a minister of the everlasting Gospel, and a member of the Congregational Church of New England, Stephen West, our revered pastor, had the most unqualified reverence for its institutions, and no monk of the thirteenth century was more unquestionably submissive to the rules and requirements of his order. But within this stern, artificial form beat a heart as true to the instincts and offices of love as is the needle to its pole.
"Brethren and sisters," resumed the pastor, "it is known to you that there has not been that unanimity in the case before you that usually attends our deliberations. The division has been perhaps more in feeling than opinion. It is natural," he said, his voice trembling, and the tears of his ever-ready sympathy flowing down his checks, "to feel for one in evident and deep distress of mind, and who, though as far as yet appeareth, she hath not sufficient grace to make the required concessions, hath not resisted the rebukes of conscience. And as her fault has not been of an aggravated nature, but such as one still young was greatly liable to, we may consider how far, without sacrificing duty, we may concede to our distressed sister. She is not, as you see, in a state of bodily health to be much questioned. I have had repeated interviews with her, and her request to me this morning was to state to you that she remains at the same point where you last left her,—she humbly asks the pardon of the ohurch for her violation of her church covenant, in having married in a manner contrary to their known rules. But truth obliges her to say that she does not and cannot repent of the choice she has made. The case is wholly before you. Any of the brethren who have remarks to make will please make them now, and will, I trust, feel called on to deal kindly as well as truly with our much-afflicted sister."
There was a murmuring of voices among the women, voices touched with sympathy; the pastor's wife was seen to pass her arm around Mrs. Henry, and draw her closer to her, and the hardest countenances of the brethren were softened. Bay looked around him, and beginning to feel that he had been playing a losing game, he made a bold and desperate move.
He rose, and after some stammering and hemming, he said," That as this was like to be the final discussion of the case of the backslidden member, he felt himself called on to state some aggravating circumstances which ho had withheld as long as there was any hope of bringing said member to a full confession of her wrongdoing. He felt it to be duty to tell the brethren and the sisters that said offender had not rushed upon the 'thick bosses' without warning, advice, and offer of needful help and support in her widowhood."
Till this moment Mrs. Henry's eyes had been downcast and her cheek blanched. Suddenly her colour rose, and an unwonted fire lit up her mild hazel eye, as she raised and fixed it on the Deacon. This was noticed by her friends, and it was also observed that his eye did not meet hers.
"My relation to her first husband," he continued, " made me her suitable guardian; I knew that her youth, widowhood, and comeliness exposed her to many temptations; I felt for her temporal necessities, and I offered her and her fatherless child a home in my house. This she rejected in a manner to make me surmise there was some covered sin, and when, after ascertaining the same, I went to deal with her as directed in Matthew, 18th chapter, 15th verse, and on, she, urged by her bad conscience, and doubtless tempted and incited thereto by Satan, struck me on the face."
"Deacon Bay!" exclaimed Mrs. Henry, involuntarily rising.
"Sit down, my child," said the Moderator, but in a tone too gentle for reproof, and she sat down overwhelmed with confusion. "Her child," continued the Deacon, "prompted, and seemingly justified by evil example, took up the three-legged oaken stool on which he was seated, and threw it at my head with such force, that I verily believe he was aided by the Evil One—ever ready to serve bad ends. So forceful was the blow, which, but for a just Providence, might have ended my life,—that I still carry the scar," he concluded, lifting the long sleek black locks from his swarthy brow, and showing a deep scar frightfully near to his temple. All eyes turned from him to Mrs. Henry, who was still steadily looking in her accuser's face.
At this moment there was a loud knocking at the door, and before it could be answered Archy Henry entered, his cheek and eye glowing with angry fires. There was a general sensation and movement through the assembly. Without heeding it, he strode to his wife's side. She laid her hand on his arm, and cast an imploring look on him.
"Don't be scared—don't be anxious," he whispered; "I know what I am about."
"This is an intrusion—very unsuitable, Mr. Archibald Henry," said the Moderator; "quite contrary to the rules of our church-meetings."
"I know it, sir," he answered, making a half and hurried reverence to the pastor, "but when a man's house is on fire he can't mind rules and regulations. I have promised to cherish and protect this woman, and I will, so help me God!"
"Is there no force here to put out this profane fellow?" asked Deacon Bay.
"No, none," replied Henry, "I'll trouble no one to answer that question but myself. I am nailed here, and you are nailed there, till my business is done. Do you know this handwriting ?" he continued, taking from his pocket a crumpled and weather-stained paper, and holding up the written side to the Deacon.
The Deacon was driven by surprise and dismay from every subterfuge. His bile rose, and his colour darkened to a mahogany hue. He made no answer.
"Do you know it?" reiterated Henry.
No reply.
"Perhaps you do, sir," he continued, approaching the desk, and holding it before the pastor, who at once bowed assent, "and you, sir, and you?" he added, showing it to the associate deacons. "Let me say one word, and then I will trouble you to hear me read it. I found this paper on removing a hencoop which had protected it from the weather. How it came there I know not, but I leave it to any member of this meeting to say if it has not been providentially preserved."
The paper in Henry's hand was that note from Bay to Jessie, which was taken by the draught up the chimney, when Mrs. Henry believed she had committed it to the flames. After whirling in the air it fell in an angle of the fence. A hencoop was accidentally set upon it. There it was destined to lie, as safely as if it were filed away in a pigeon-hole, till, in the general upturning of the moving, it came into the right hands. That this was really providential, it takes no great amount of faith to believe.
"This note," continued Henry, "was written by that man who stands there—that Deacon Nathan Bay. With permission, I will read it. It appears to have been enclosed in a business letter and begins thus:—
"This note is for more interesting matters. You were harsh yesterday, Jessie, but if you will come home, I will forgive and forget. It was not well to return a blow for a kiss—when one smiteth on the right cheek—you understand."
At this startling refutation of the Deacon's calumny, uttered not fifteen minutes before, a low sound arose more resembling a hiss than any ever before heard in a meeting of that solemn nature. Henry smiled bitterly, and proceeded.
"'You saw, Jessie, how bad example is followed. As crows the old, so crows the young. My head yet aches with the blow of that joint-stool. Your boy will be a limb, if he is not soon brought under nurture. Come back then, Jessie. The old woman is as good as nobody. You shall be true mistress of the house, possessor of heart and estate, and in due time, you and your boy heirs of all I possess. Isn't this better than marrying a penniless spark, beggaring your little chap, and drudging through your lifetime for a mother-in-law, and her bedridden gal? Burn this.'
"When this precious note was written," continued Henry, " Mrs. Remington was living on a farm which by some sort of legal huggermugger Nathan Bay claims as his. By like crafty measures he has spun his web round all the other property belonging to this little woman and her late husband. He threatened to turn her and her boy homeless and penniless upon the world. And when ho added insult to these injuries, she had no alternative but to marry a poor fellow whose father had been cheated out of house and home by this same Deacon Nathan Bay—church-member"—
"Stop, stop, Archy Henry!" cried the pastor, rising and striking his cane on the ground vehemently, "this is out of place—unseemly— it must go no farther"—
"Unseemly! Sir, should a villain be treated as one of the elect? Be patient with me one moment, sir—I do not—truly I do not mean any disrespect to you, or to any good person in this meeting; but, sir, is it not in place, and my bounden duty to rescue my wife, who has been driven to the edge of insanity by this wolf in sheep's clothing—Deacon Nathan Bay?" Henry paused for a moment. His indignation was felt to be righteous, and he was suffered to proceed. "For weeks that should have been the happiest of our lives, she has been bowed down, sorrowing and self-condemned— for what? for marrying me—not a church member to be sure—as Deacon Nathan Bay is —but an honest man, and one that hates a scoundrel—for marrying a poor fellow without a penny, with an afflicted mother and sister to be trusted to her care. If the manner seems to you hasty and indecorous, this document," he held up the Deacon's note, "informs you that she was driven by insult and fear to forego the usual forms and ceremonies. If she has violated the letter of your laws, who has better kept their spirit? Not by word or look has she betrayed, even to me, the insults and wrongs of this Deacon Nathan Bay. She has taken meekly, and as if she deserved them, reproof and exhortation—she has borne patiently the persecution, the malice, and the fiendish revenge of this man, who dares to hold up his head here as her accuser and judge. I don't know about your rules here, but I am sure she is, and will remain in good standing and full membership with the church above. I am sure there is not one of you, but in his own home and in his own heart thinks the better, and not the worse of her now under dealing, for the whole transaction on which you are deciding. Sir," he concluded, looking round, and marking, with evident satisfaction, the convinced and acquiescing expression on the faces of the church-members, "I do not now fear to leave our cause with you."
The church-meeting before separating passed a vote of oblivion and restoration to full membership in favour of Mrs. Jessie Henry.
The Deacon's case was deferred to future consideration. He subsequently passed through a course of discipline, professed and confessed all that could be required, and was restored to nominal membership, but stripped of the honours of his office, and deprived for ever, as hypocrites are, by the universal law of God, of the faith of all good men and true.
His ejection of Henry from his paternal property was prevented by a sagacious lawyer, who detected excessive charges in the Deacon's accounts, and fraudulent advantages taken by him. The Deacon, not daring to expose the facts to litigation, was glad to make concessions which rendered it easy for Henry to redeem the property. His little wife restored to tranquility, to self-esteem, and to her good standing in the church, realized a happiness rarely enjoyed in the married state.
Sedgwick's notes:
* The Doctor's own words—still on his records.
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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"Owasonook"
Subject
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Deception, Marital Property
Description
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A widower is deceived by a Deacon into believing she has been left nothing. When she marries a man outside of the church she is threatened with excommunication.
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Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Miss Sedgwick
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Sartain’s Union Magazine [edited by Caroline M. Korkland] NY. Vol. VI: p. 399-407
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Sartain's Magazine
Date
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June 1850
Contributor
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J. Robinson
Language
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English
Type
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Document
Ann Radcliffe
bible
marriage
New York
Queen Anne
religion
Sartain's Union Magazine
-
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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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1829
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Stories published in 1829.
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Text
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In the January number of the Miscellany, we promised to show how far little Mary Smith merited her royal title. We did not mean to imply that Queens were better—they are often not half as good as their subjects; but as no one is born to a title in our Republican country, it is supposed to be a badge of merit.
We left Mary's father on the eve of sailing for Europe. About a year after his departure, Mrs. Smith, who was living in her economical cottage in Brookline, received a visit from Mrs. Gray, a lady who had been her neighbor in Boston, and who had a beautiful country seat in Brookline. She brought with her, her daughter Helen, a girl about a year older than Mary. She was dressed very beautifully in a French Frock, sent to her, with many other presents, by her aunt, who resided in Paris.
Mary Smith was a very polite little girl—she had true politeness; the only politeness of any value. She attended to others from a real desire to make them happy. While her mother was talking with Mrs. Gray, she asked Helen if she would like to go out and see the pigeons
.
"No I thank you," said Helen.
"Perhaps you do not like pigeons," said Mary modestly; "will you go and see ray Bantam chickens? They are perfectly white and the cunningest things you ever saw. Will you go?"
"No I thank you."
"What is Miss Mary saying to you?" asked Helen's mother.
Helen ran to her and whispered loud enough to be heard, "She wants me to go out and see her pigeons; and I am afraid that I shall soil my frock and not be fit for the party."
"Oh, go my dear," said her mother, "if Miss Mary wishes it." Helen went; but not in a humour to be pleased with any thing. -As they went out, Mary took a basket from a shelf on the piazza, and when they were in the yard she said, "Now Helen, I will show you something;" and she took a handful of oats from her basket and strewed them on the ground, and whistled for her pigeons. They came from all points of the compass; from the roof of the house and the eves of the barn. As they descended, their beautiful throats glittered in the sun; and as they lighted they folded their wings to their graceful bodies.
"Oh are they not sweet creatures?" exclaimed Mary.
"Why, they are nothing but common pigeons; are they?" said Helen.
“I suppose they are called common pigeons," replied Mary.
"Then, my dear child, you can't expect we to admire them; we have so many kinds of uncommon ones."
"But do yours come like these, when you call them 1—Our Nancy says I put her in mind of Eve in Paradise calling down her birds."
"I wish Nancy could see ours once; to be sure they don't come down like yours, because papa keeps them confined, for fear we shall lose them. Some of them are beautiful ring-doves, and one kind we call blood pigeons, because they have a bright red stain on their white bosoms, and look as if they had just had a knife plunged into them."
"They must be very curious," said Mary. "I wish I had some like them."
"Oh my dear child," replied Helen, "I don't think it is very probable you can get them. Papa sent a great way for ours, and he says they cost quite a sum of money; but come Mary, if you have any thing more to show, you must make haste, for I would not be late at Anne Rush's for any thing. It is her birth day; and we expect a most elegant time."
Mary turned away from her pigeons without giving them her usual parting look of admiration, and passed by the coop where her bantam chickens were, without pointing them out to Helen. She did not know exactly why, but she did not want to show them, after what Helen had said about the pigeons.
"Would you like to see my little garden, Helen?" she asked.
"Yes—if you will make haste."
Mary led the way to the gate as quick as she could, and as soon as they entered, Helen laughed and said, " Why, what a little bit of a place."
"It is quite big enough for mother and I, and little Ben Lacy to take care of," said Mary, in a tone of slight displeasure: for she could not bear to have her garden, which was her pride and her delight, spoken of with contempt.
"You need not be angry Mary," said Helen; "come let us see what is in your garden."
"You do see, Helen, almost all I have—asters, and mary-golds, and cockscombs, and this pretty crimson dalia."
"Are these all?" asked Helen, scarcely looking at them.
"Almost all I have now; you know Helen, it is the fall of the year—and we cannot have such a very great variety of autumnal flowers; mother says so."
" Oh my dear child, you are very much mistaken—our green house is full of flowers now ; geraniums, and myrtles, and jessamines, and heliotropes, and three kinds of passion flowers, one perfumed—of course, you know, seeing so many at home, I cannot think much of these, which one sees in every garden patch by the road side. Oh, this cockscomb is decent!"—and she pulled off a very fine one; the finest in the garden.
Mary's heart beat hard when she saw Helen snap off the stalk: but she did not speak.
"I have nothing more to show you, Helen," she said, "but one tube-rose," and she turned round a high seringa bush, on the other side of which was the tube-rose.
"Oh yes," exclaimed Helen, “here is something really worth showing;" and as she said this, she plucked, without the slightest hesitation, from a fine grape vine, its only bunch of grapes.
Mary jumped up as if she had been shot; then walked away; and then as suddenly returned. She tried hard to help it, but in spite of her efforts the tears were running down her cheeks.
"Do pray take your grapes, Miss Mary," said Helen, bridling up.—" I had no idea a bunch of grapes was such a mighty affair—how should I, when we have bushels and bushels in our grapery."
"It is not for the grapes I care," said Mary, "but"—
"But what, child?"
"I had rather not tell you, if you please, Helen," replied Mary with a dignity that would have become a true Queen; "but I hope you will excuse my appearing rude to you."
Helen at this moment perceived that in her haste to devour the grapes, she had permitted the juice to run down on her precious frock. She was vexed with herself, and vexed with Mary; and she threw down the grapes, and trampled on them.
She was relieved from her awkward and disgraceful position by a call from the coachman, who told her that her mother was already in the carriage awaiting her. She ran off without bidding Mary good by.
Mary did not follow her; she stood bending over her grapes till she heard another carriage drive up to the door, and saw her aunt Ray, and her cousins, Julia and Mary, alight from it.
The girls ran to her, and embraced her most affectionately.
"Come back in the garden with us, Mary," they both said in a breath, and both exclaimed, as they entered, "How sweet pretty your flowers look! Oh Mary, mother is in such a hurry, we must tell you right off what we came for. Mother wants you to come and live with us this winter, and go to dancing-school with us. Oh how delightful it will be! We are to have cotillion parties ; and father says he will take us all to the theatre to see Aladdin, and we are all to spend Thanksgiving at uncle Henry's— but what is the matter, Mary? You do not seem at all pleased."
"Because you know, girls, I cannot go and leave mother."
"Ah, but that is the best of it—your mother is going too—mamma has come to persuade her."
"Oh that will be delightful," said Mary; and she forgot her grapes and her cockscomb, and every trouble on earth, and ran with her cousins to the house.
There they found their mothers so earnestly engaged in conversation, that they did not venture to interrupt them, but returned to the garden, and staid merrily talking till the girls went away. Their last parting words were, "We shall soon be together, and for the whole winter."
As the carriage drove away, Mary sprang up the door steps—ran into the parlor, and jumping into her mother's lap, she threw her arms around her neck, exclaiming, “Oh, how glad I am we are going to stay at Aunt Ray's."
"We are not going there, my dear Mary."
"Not going mother?" exclaimed Mary with a look and tone of dismay—"did not aunt Ray ask us?”
"Yes, she did ask us very kindly."
"And you are not going; and all the dismal winter I must stay here, where there is nothing pleasant."
"Nothing pleasant! my child, you forget your garden."
"In winter, mother, that is nothing; and beside, Helen Gray does not think it is pretty at all, now.
"And your Bantams, Mary, and your pet pigeons—have you forgotten them?"
"Why, they are nothing but common pigeons, mother; Helen says so. But why don't you go to aunt Ray's."
"I have good reasons my child, for not going; but you could not perfectly understand them if I were to tell them. You are a little unreasonable just now; but I trust you will soon be as happy as ever."
"No, mother—no! I never shall be happy again here. Julia and Mary are going to have pleasures all winter; and Helen Gray is living away in all her grandeur. Oh, I wish we were rich again, and had our carriage, and could ride away from this desert place."
Mrs. Smith was distressed at seeing Mary, usually as happy as a lamb frisking on the grass, so discontented and repining.
"My dear child," she said,” I am mortified to hear you express such wrong feelings and foolish wishes; and you really think riches would make us happier than we are?”
"I am sure of it; for then we should not have to live in the country."
"You said yesterday, Mary, you could live any where with me."
Mary coloured a little, but quickly replied, "So I could, mother; but that does not make it out that it is not far pleasanter to live in one place than another." Mary saw her mother looked very grave; and she thought of another reason, which she felt very sure her mother could not answer. "If we were rich, mother, we should have something to give away; but now, what good can we do?"
Mrs. Smith did not reply to her question, but she said, “Mary, something has curdled your sweet disposition to-day. Your head is full of wrong thoughts and false notions. But every body has them, old and young. Some are cured in one way, some in another; and some are never cured at all. I will not talk any more with you now. Get your hat, and we'll take a walk."
The result of this walk will be seen from Mary's letter to her brother.
"To his Majesty, King William; or what is far better, to my own dear brother, Will."
"I have a great deal to say to you, and cannot wait till you get home, though it will be so soon. Soon mother calls it; but to me it seems a great while.
"I have counted the time every way, and ciphered it into hours, minutes and seconds, but I can't shorten it—21 days, 504 hours, 30240 minutes, 1814400 seconds. Only think what a horrible number of seconds! Mother tells me that some great man says, 'an hour may be tedious; but cannot be long.' 1 guess if he had spent an hour waiting for his only darling brother, it would have seemed both tedious and long too. But then we can't expect great folks can know how little ones feel. "Now, William, as we agreed to tell one another every thing that happened, I am going to tell you how badly I behaved the other day; and the good way mother took to drive away all my cross, wrong feelings. Don't you wonder if there are any real children that talk so wise and so good, and always do just the right thing, if it be ever so difficult, as children do in books ? I guess there are no such children in the world; though they really seem alive in some of the books I have read. How I do run on without coming to my story; but some how or other, when I am writing to you, William, I think of so much to say, that I wish I had a pen that would write two lines at once—something like an old woman's tongue, I have heard of, that was fastened in the middle and talked at both ends. But to begin with my story. A certain young lady came here yesterday, I will only write her initials—H. G. She was dressed as fine as a toy shop doll. Mother says Mrs. Grey is almost the only mother in Boston that dresses her children fine. I think it is very silly of her. I will tell you one thing, William, that I have found out—and that is, that there are several grown up people very silly. Well, I wished to please H. and I offered to show her whatever we had that was pretty. In the first place, I called the pigeons; they never looked more beautiful—the sun shone on their necks and they glittered, and looked as if they had been dipped in a rainbow; but Miss H. did not admire them in the least; but tried to make me sick of them. I did not show her my little Bantams, for I knew she would scorn them too; but I led her to the garden, for I thought she could not possibly help admiring that. But no—my lady walked straight along the alley, as if she had neither nose nor eyes, though the flowers were on each side like a rich fringe—till she came near to my most beautiful cockscomb. It was the one you sowed the seeds of, the very last thing you did before you went away, after we carried your trunk to the gate, and while you was waiting for the stagecoach—you remember it. As we were both stooping over the flower bed, you dropped a tear on it. I thought of what Mr. Brown said in his sermon,' that tears often produced good fruits,' and if they did fruits, I did not see why they should not flowers ; so I took particular care of this one cockscomb, and watered it, and grubbed about it every day ; and to be sure it was the most superb one I ever saw— twice, yes, five times as big as our rooster's, that was frozen last winter.* By the way, I have made the funniest little fur-cap for my bantam cockscomb against next winter. Well, Miss H. marched up to this cockscomb, and snapped it off, as if it had been any common thing. I liked to have screamed out; but I kept my lips fast together, and we turned round the seringa and came full in view of my grape vine. Now you know this is my pet and darling, above every thing else. I never look at it without thinking how kind it was of Mr. Perkins to give us such a valuable vine, three years old! And what a tug you had of it bringing it home with all the soil about it; and how you taught me to take care of it, and told me Mr. Perkins said girls and ladies might take the whole care of grape vines, if they would. I never let any body touch it but myself. Every day I bid it good morning with my little trowel, and good night with my watering-pot; *and I have tied it up, and taken out all the false wood. It put out four bunches in the spring; but they all died away but one, and that was a grand one. I looked at it twenty times a day: it grew larger and larger, and the grapes seemed almost crowding one another off the stem, and they had turned purple, and were darker and brighter every day, and mother, and I, and Ben Lacy, all thought they would be just perfectly ripe when you came home. How do you think I felt then, William, when Helen Grey—I must write her name full out this time—jumped forward, and before I could speak, tore off the stem, and began to devour the grapes? I cried, I must own it. I could not possibly help it; and then she was affronted, and threw them down, and trod on them. As I told mother, it was a dreadful sight to see my beautiful grapes all covered with dirt, and trampled on! Mother says, after all, it is one of the lesser miseries of life. If that is the case, don't you hope we shall never have any of the greater, William 1 "As good luck would have it, H.'s mother called her, and they went away; and in their place came our dear Aunt, and Julia and Mary? as rich as Miss H.; but oh how different!— Aunt came to ask mother and I to pass the winter with her, but mother did not consent; and I was so disappointed, and had been so plagued with Helen, that I was cross as a cat, or, as mother says, unreasonable. I fretted about living at Brookline, and about being poor ; and what is worse, William—I will tell you all, for that is the bargain—I tried to excuse myself by turning it off upon our having so little to give away. Now that was not what made me feel so bad— it was not the real truth—and that was what mother cared most about; for you know she hates above all things to have us pretend to be better than we are. However, she did not scold me—that she never does—she did not talk to me either, then; but asked me to go and walk with her. We went down the green lane. It was just at evening, and you know ‘how sweet the hedge smells then—and there was an uncommon number of birds, and especially one bob o'lincoln, singing deliciously, what mother calls their evening hymn; but I don't think it sounds at all like a hymn. I began to think to myself that the country was a pretty decent place after all. Pretty soon we came in sight of Mrs. Warner's house. I must stop and tell you a little about her. She is a very poor woman; but not so very, very poor as some others, because she has a house, and a little land and a cow. Her husband died last spring, and left her with five children and his old bed-ridden mother to take care of. I said five, but I forgot the one in New York, who, she has lately heard, has the consumption. He is a very good young man, and used to help his mother a great deal; but now he has not even money enough to get home. As soon as mother turned towards the house—" There," said I, " if we were only as rich as we used to be, you could have brought Mrs. Warner money enough to send for her son." “Yes, Mary," she said,” but if we do all we can for the poor, we shall not so much regret what we cannot do. I spoke to Mrs. Grey about poor Mrs. Warner— she gives away a great deal of money, and I do not doubt she has stopped and left her something." By this time we got to the house and went in. Mrs. Warner did not appear at all, as she usually does: instead of stepping about quick, and smiling, and speaking pleasantly, she just bowed her head, and after she had set out the chairs for us, she went into the other room; to wipe the tears out of her eyes, I rather think, by their looks when she came back. Old Mrs. Warner, her mother in law, seemed really cross for the first time in her life, though when mother asked her how she was, she answered just the same she always does. 'Thank 'e, ma'am, little better than I was yesterday; but not quite so well as the day before.' I took up the baby and began to play with it; and then the old woman began to talk. You must know William, she is a queer old woman: she talks in such an old fashioned way, and never stops; and her teeth are all gone, and her nose and chin almost meet, and her head shakes all the time. But I will give you a specimen: I shan't put any commas and periods to the sentences, because she has neither pauses nor stops. 'I hope Miss Smith,' she began, ' you and Mary wont surmise we ant glad to see you because we seem so frusticated (frustered) I am sure you are both as pleasant to our sight as light to the eyes; butmy darter and I are as it were upset by a visit from Miss Grey and her gal an airy little piece she is (mother says she meant full of airs) she walked into the room here as if she had been coming into a kanel (kennel) and stood in the middle of the floor and held up her frock as if she were in a muddy road, to be sure Miss Warner had just been mopping and when the baby went up to look at her fine bag she cried out ' hands off hands off and when poor Jemmy come in all covered with mud from being knocked down by a big dog in the road her mother there that Miss Grey gave him ninepence and told him to buy some water to wash his face— Jemmy took the ninepence and chucked it out of the window and if it had been a goold guinea much as we want money I would have been glad to see him do the same when his mother was reflected on for occrdoingness is Miss Warner's besetment—(mother says that she meant that her daughter was too nice) and Ma'am knows the house and the children are always kept like silver—and I too—the Lord reward her—a poor bedridden old soul as I am and not her own mother—I hope ma'am wont be affronted for when I boil over I cant help the words coming out—Miss Grey may be ma'ams friend as she called herself but they are as different as black and white—she gave us money to be sure but that was nothing but an aggravation—she asked me if I had been confined to my bed long, and I told her ten years and I was nothing but an atomy (an anatomy) and I was going to show her my arm— and she said ' keep it under the blanket good woman it makes me sick at my stomach—many is the time ma'am has looked at it and rubbed it too with her soft hand, and I guess her stomach is full as weak as Miss Grey's ; but I can tell her her difficulty lies in her heart and not in her stomach—sick at her stomach indeed ! what does she expect to do when its the Lord's pleasure to send sickness to her and hers—and when I told her I had terrible turns of lethercdge (lethargy) her gal laughed out— but the crowner of all was she came up to the bed and said ' Goody do stop talking one minute, and let me see if your nose and chin really meet'—Does ma'am think money could pay for such insults? To be sure she gave my darter ten dollars and she wants it bad enough to getjpoor John home—but its the hardest piece of humiliation we ever experienced yet to take it from her—I tell you what it is Mary Smith that does ithe poor most good—a kind word kindly spoken—when your mother comes here and sits down by my bed and convarses with me about my difficulties and talks to my darter and the young ones jist like a book only more understandingly (intelligibly) and when you come down and read to me you read full equal to a church minister—and teach Jemmy and Sally their hymns and writing—that's what feels good to us—it seems as if you thought we had the same natur and I guess that is what Miss Grey never thought of—and if she were to make me a present of the bank of England I should not feel thankful for it."
"I have given you a pretty large sample of the poor woman's talk, but I had no idea how much paper it would fill. The hardest hearted thing of all was, Mrs. Grey's telling Mrs. Warner she ought to send her mother to the alms-house; and when Mrs. Warner told her she did not feel as if she could ever do that—' oh' says she, ' when poverty comes into the door, you should let your feelings fly up the chimney !' Mrs. Warner said, ' my feelings are my greatest comfort ma'am.' Mother says she believes this is true; for there was never any body who had better feelings.
“My letter is so very long I am afraid you will be tired; and I will only just tell you what mother said coming home, because I think it will do me good and may do you good too. I wish I could put mother's sweet voice into my letter; but you will remember well enough how it sounds.
" My dear child,' she said, ' old Mrs. Warner has answered the question you asked me before we came out: ' Mother, what good can we do, when we have nothing to give away?' It would be a grief indeed, Mary, if in losing our fortune we had lost the power of doing good. But you see there are charities the poor value more than the gift of money. In all our intercourse with the poor we should never forget they have, as old Mrs. Warner said, the same nature we have; the same faculties and affections; that the accidents of life, far more than our own merits, have placed them in one station, and us in another: that though they may have uncultivated minds in awkward bodies, yet those minds are immortal, like our own; those bodies, like ours, destined to suffer and perish. That the only difference our Creator and Judge will mark between us, will be the degrees of goodness; and when you think of Mrs. Grey, seeking her own pleasure, frivolous and selfish; and Mrs. Warner, humble and patient, and devoting her life to others, you will perceive the justice of the reverse in another world, of the condition in this. 'The high shall be cast down and the humble exalted.' Sympathy, Mary, is the key that unlocks all hearts. By sympathy I mean the feeling you have when you dismiss all thoughts of yourself, and enter into the feelings of another. It is my sympathy and yours, with this poor family that has won their hearts. I listen to all the old woman's tedious complaints. I enter into her daughter's sorrows and apprehensions and disappointments: and you my dear child, are patient in instructing the children: you show that you have their improvement at heart, because no weather keeps you at home, when the time comes for giving them their lessons. You do not carry them money; but you seldom So without a little basket of strawberries, or of some other fruit, or a bunch of flowers; and they see you take pleasure in their pleasure. 'Now Mary' you know it is not my habit to praise ourselves—I think it far better to go to others for examples of virtue when I am instructing you : but now I thought the best way to tell you what ' good we can do,' was to fix your mind on the good, the old woman says we have done.
“One thing, my child, let me caution you against. It is a vulgar notion that all rich people are selfish and cold hearted. I know many, many rich people who bestow their gifts so freely and so tenderly, that we may say they are ' like apples of silver in baskets of gold :' that is, that the manner and feeling with which they are given, are still more beautiful and valuable than the gift.'
"Dear William, I made a great many mistakes in writing down what mother said; but she corrected them for me; and the rest of my letter I have written without being helped at all. I hate to be helped; don't you?
“Mother has not yet told me why she does not go to aunt Ray's to spend the winter: but now my bad feelings have cleared off, I am sure she does right; and besides, as the old ladies say, I don't think it would be at all suitable to leave my family, (pigeons and bantams,) in the winter: and mother and I have a great many plans of reading and studying, and making new-year's gifts. But hush; I must not let out that secret. Writing to you, William, is just like opening the door of a bird-cage; everything that is in my heart flies out.
"21 days, 504 hours, 30240 minutes, 1814400 seconds, and then dear Will, you will return to your affectionate sister MARY.
"Postscript. Mother says you must not skip her little bit of a sermon when you read the letter; but I am not afraid—you are never tired of what mother says.—M. S.
"N. B. A pretty long letter, I think, for a girl not eight years old!—M. S,"
*Our young town readers may not know that the fowls are very apt to have their combs frozen in extreme cold weather.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
"Mary Smith"
Subject
The topic of the resource
Children's Fiction, Class Difference, Letter Writing, Republicanism
Description
An account of the resource
A young girl from a modest family is hurt by another young girl from a wealthy family.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine M.
Stockbridge, S.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Juvenile Miscellany V2 (edited by Mrs. LM [Lydia Maria] Child) Boston: p. 110-134
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Allen and Ticknor
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
May 1829
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
J. Robinson
Relation
A related resource
Sequel to “The Good Son” in Juvenile Miscellany (Jan. 1829): 217-29
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
Consumption
Country
Fall
Juvenile Miscellany
Nature
New York
religion
tears