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93d806ca3d019b9869b7eb19181cf95a
Dublin Core
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Title
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1845
Document
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Text
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AN INCIDENT AT ROME
____________________________
BY MISS C. M. SEDGWICK
[104]
During a sojourn of some months at Rome, Lady C---- kindly offered to take me in her droski to Tusculum, a drive, as nearly as I can recall the distance, of some dozen miles. Accordingly, on one of those days, (of which we have often a counterpart in our autumnal months,) when the sky is of its deepest blue, and so serene that the eye seems to penetrate depths never before revealed, we passed the gate of St. John Lateran and entered on the Appian Way. Most
“Things by season seasoned are,
To their right praise and true perfection.”
But to the Roman campagna change of season brings no change. In the spring when, elsewhere, there is a general resurrection of vegetable life – a joyous beginning of the procession of the year – this unchanging aspect of the campagna is most solemn. When all the rest of Italy, as far as nature is concerned, has the beauty, gladness and promise of youth, is in truth a paradise regained, there are here no springing corn, no budding vine-stalks, no opening blossoms, scarcely a bird’s note. Nature, elsewhere so active, so plastic, so full of hope, is here monumental – a record of the inexorable past.
But though there be no look of cheerful habitancy, there is a solemn beauty. You can scarcely turn your eye without a strong emotion, without involuntarily uttering a name that is a charmed word. “There is Soracte!” “There is Tivoli!” “There is the country of the Sabines!” “There are the beautiful Alban Hills!” Behind you is Rome with its natural elevations, its splendid domes, towers and obelisks, its brooding pines, and sad cypresses – surely the most picturesque, the most suggestive of cities. The vast solitudes around you are filled with records of Rome and its magnificent life-time; broken aqueducts sometimes extending for a quarter of a mile, and then standing in fragments of three or four, or perhaps a single arch. On every side are monuments and tombs, by which the poor tenants hoped to perpetuate their names. The high sepulchral grass waves around them, the stones are a blank, or if the name be preserved – as in the still nearly perfect tomb of Cecilia Metella – it is but a name, all the rest is left to conjecture.
Lady C---- had resided several winters at Rome, and was perfectly familiar with its antiquities, and generous in her communications, and so delightfully did the time pass away that we hardly seemed to have emerged from the Porta San Giovanni when we drove into the little town of Frascati. The landlord appeared at the carriage door, with the usual smiles and potency of an Italian host, and answering the ready “Yes – yes – my lady!” to all Lady C’s demands, (the chief one being a parlor with a pleasant prospect,) he ushered us into the house and up a dirty stairway, and opened the door and windows of a little parlor, exclaiming, “Ecco, ecco, mi ladi, ecco una bella veduta!” We rushed to the window, expecting a beautiful view of the campagna, but instead of that we could see nothing but the villainous little piazza we had just left, with the usual accompaniments of an Italian place, beggars and an idle rabble. Lady C. smiled, and turning to me said, “The house affords nothing better, or he would have given it to us,” and bowing to our host as if she were quite satisfied, he took her orders and left us to ourselves.
“At what are you smiling?” she said to me.
“At your un-English way of proceeding, my dear Lady C.
Pardon my impertinence, but it would have seemed to me more nationally characteristic if you had broken out upon our host for attempting to impose this piazza on you for a beautiful prospect.”
“But it is to his eye. You are right, my friend. I have lived long enough abroad to get rid of a few prejudices, and some inconvenient and very unwise English habits. I do not now conclude that a thing is of course wrong because it is not in our Island fashion; and I am just learning to endure with good temper what I cannot cure, and to find out that every country, I might almost say every creature, has a bright side, at which we may look and thank God. Truly I am often ashamed of my snarling, barking, arrogant countrymen.”
I was charmed with the candor of Lady C’s concession, but being well aware that such a concession is much of the nature of a personal humiliation, I turned the subject by asking Lady C. if she had been frequently at Frascati?
“Often.” she said, and the last time she was there was rather memorable, and she proceeded to relate the following story, some part of which I had heard from our consul at Naples. Three years before, letters had been received at Rome, and in those Italian cities most frequented by the English, requesting inquiries to be set foot for a certain Murray Bathurst, a young Englishman, who had come to the Continent early in the preceding spring, intending to make the tour of Italy chiefly on foot. His mother, a widow, had received letters from him as late as October. He was then on his return from Naples to Rome, purposing to embark at Civita Vecchia for Marseilles. The mother’s letters expressed the misery of her suspense and anxiety so touchingly that many persons became interested in her behalf. Her letters were enforced by others from persons of note. I remember Lady C. mentioned Wordsworth or Southey’s name. This adventitious aid could scarcely have been necessary to stimulate benevo-
[105]
lence. No adventitious aid would ever be in requisition if there were more of the human race like a certain little woman in Boston, who hearing an alarm given of a child being run over, rushed forward to rescue it with such signs of distress that a passer by asked, “Is it your child?” “No,” she replied, “but it is somebody’s child.” Diligent inquiries were made of the police, and the books of our consuls at the different cities examined. The result was that Murray Bathurst was traced from Milan to Naples, back to Rome, and thence to Civita Vecchia. His entrance from Rome into that most forlorn of all travelers’ depots was duly registered, and there all clew was lost. In vain were the registers of all the steamers and of every craft that left the port examined – there was no trace of him. It must have been the same Murray Bathurst that was noted elsewhere; for his tall, slender, un-English person, his large dark melancholy eyes, his pale complexion, and tangled long dark hair, were all so notable as to be recorded in the reports of the police. Many letters were written to the mother giving this unsatisfactory information, and expressive of condolence and regret that no more could be learned of the lost young man. In a little time the topic became trite, then was forgotten, and mother and son sunk into the oblivion of past things.
A year ran away, when one morning, just as Lady C. was sitting down to her solitary breakfast in the ---- palace, Mrs. Bathurst was announced. The name and its association had passed from Lady C’s memory. Mrs. Bathurst presented a letter of introduction, and said – “My apology for troubling you is that you are the only person in Rome whom I have ever seen before, and of whose interest and sympathy I feel assured.”
Lady C. was perplexed, but on glancing at the letter she expressed, I have no doubt with the graceful courtesy that characterized her, her readiness to serve Mrs. Bathurst in any mode she would suggest –“But where and when,” she asked, “have I had the pleasure of meeting you?”
“It is quite as natural that you should forget as that I should remember it – the meeting was accidental, but the place may serve to recall it to you. Do you remember, seventeen years ago, meeting a young woman in the widow’s weeds with a little boy, whose beauty I believe first attracted you, wandering about the Druidical remains at Stonehenge?”
“Perfectly – perfectly – and now, though certainly somewhat changed by time – more probably by recent sorrow – I recall your countenance. And that lovely boy, I am quite sure I should know him again. I never have forgotten his extraordinary look of curiosity and investigation as he wandered about amidst those stupendous ruins, nor the intelligent wonder with which he listened to our speculations.”
“And do you remember the subsequent evening we passed together at the inn, when our conversation turned on the antiquities of Italy, and you gave us some account of your then recent visit to Rome, and showed us many drawings in your port-folio, and gave my poor boy a beautiful sketch of one to the temples of Pæstum?”
“Yes, oh yes! and I remember being exceedingly surprised, and pleased, with the child’s extraordinary acquaintance with subjects of which few children of his age had ever heard.”
“Ah, it was then my pride, my fatal pride to instruct him on these subjects, which had always interested myself, and which had occupied much of my poor husband’s life. I developed prematurely, and most unwisely, his taste, and so concentrated his mind on the study of antiquities, that it became a passion. I was gratified by the development of what appeared to me extraordinary genius. Thus I fed the flame that was to consume my poor boy. I found too late that it was impossible to restore his mind to the interests natural, and of course healthy, to youth. My fortune was narrow. I lived with the most rigid economy to supply him with the means of education. He went to Oxford, where he acquitted himself honorably in all the prescribed studies. These were mere task work, except so far as the classics related to his favorite pursuits. His task done, he wasted his health in midnight antiquarian research. At the close of his college career we went into Devonshire at the invitation of my brother-in-law, Sidney Bathurst, to pass the winter.” At this point of her story Mrs. Bathurst paused, reluctant to indulge in the egotism of going into particulars not immediately connected with her loss, though greatly aggravating the calamity; but Lady C., full of sympathy, and not without curiosity, begging her not to omit any particular, she proceeded. “Sydney Bathurst had repaired the fallen fortunes of his family by a long residence in India. His mind was thoroughly mercantilized. He had rather a contempt for all young men, and such a thorough conviction of the unproductiveness of all learning, that my son’s pursuits did not shock him so much as I had feared. His only child, Clara Bathurst, was after his own heart, practical, cheerful even to gayety, careless of the past and future, and reflecting the present brightly as a mirror does sunshine. I soon perceived that her father’s design in inviting us was to give the young people an opportunity of falling in love. He naturally wished to transmit his fortune to one of his own name and family, and I – I trust without a covetous spirit – conscious that my son had no talent for acquitting fortune, was delighted with the prospect of his obtaining, with an amiable wife, the means of indulging his taste. Nothing – I am convinced of it – nothing goes right where fortune is the basis of a matrimonial project. Marriage is the Lord’s temple – the money-changers may not enter it with impunity. I must do myself the justice to say that fortune was not my primary object. I watched the indications of the young people’s affections with intense interest. There were few points of sympathy between them. My son seemed hardly to notice his cousin; at times, indeed, gleams from her sunny spirit entered his heart, but as if through a crack – no light was diffused there. With Clara the case was quite different. Affection is a woman’s atmosphere. We are flexible and clinging in our natures, and we attach ourselves to the nearest object. We lived in retirement. My
[106]
son had no competitor. He was gentle in his manners, refined, graceful – handsome. He had the reputation of learning and talent.
“Clara became quiet and thoughtful. She took to reading, and, poor girl! at last came to poring over the huge old books in which my son buried himself. She seemed winding herself into a sort of chrysalis condition, in the hope of a transition to come.
“The winter passed away without change to Murray. One idea absorbed him. Early in the spring he asked a private audience of his uncle, and when Mr. Sydney Bathurst was prepared to hear a disclosure harmonizing with his favorite project, my son modestly imparted his desire to come to Italy, his longing to explore the Etruscan remains whose riches were just then developing. He perceived his uncle’s astonishment, disappointment and displeasure, and he intimated that though poor he was independent. His purpose was to travel on foot, and he had ascertained by inquiries and calculation that the half of his annual allowance would pay for his meat, drink, and lodging, which should be all of the simplest.
“‘And how’, his uncle asked contemptuously, ‘was his rummaging and groping about the dusty old underground ruins of Italy fit him for any manly career? When was he to set about getting his living?’
“My son replied that what others called a living was superfluity to him, that he would not exchange his favorite pursuits for all England’s wealth – for himself he had no favor to ask but to be let alone; but that it would be an inexpressible comfort if, during the six months of his absence, he might leave me in my present happy situation – in the society of his cousin, whom he was sure I loved next to himself.
“‘The only sensible thing he said,’ exclaimed my brother-in-law, when he repeated to me the conversation, ‘Such folly is incomprehensible. But there is no use in interfering. Let him go his own way and take the consequence. Bread and water regimen in perspective is well enough, but, my word for it, he will be tired of it and Italy and its rubbish before six months are past.’
‘I will not go into more particulars of our conversation. I naturally defended my poor son, but I felt that Mr. Bathurst’s objections were sound. It ended in my acquiescing in Murray’s carrying out the plan he had made, and encountering the hardships he contemned, in the hope they would prove the best medicine for his diseased mind. But I was to learn that a mental, like a physical, condition which has been cherished and fortified by education cannot be changed by medicine. My son left us. Poor Clara, like Undine, had found a soul in the development of her affections. Her gayety was gone. So long as my son continued to write to us she read every thing she could lay her hands upon connected with the scene of his travels and the researches that particularly interested him. Since then she had read nothing. For a time she fell into a deep melancholy. From this she was roused, in part by my earnest entreaties, but more by the force of her own conscience. She is now a sort of lay sister of charity to the neighborhood, and she finds, as the wretched have always done, the surest solace for her own misfortunes in softening the miseries of others.”
So far Lady C. had told me Mrs. Bathurst’s story as she recalled it in her own words. Six months had elapsed since young Bathurst had been seen at Civita Vecchia. Mrs. Bathurst had come to Italy in the hope that she might obtain some clew that had escaped the less interested search of strangers. Her brother-in-law had supplied her amply with the means of traveling, and she had resolved never to abandon the pursuit while the least ray of hope remained. The circumstances on which she mainly rested her belief that nothing fatal had happened to her son were, that as he was of the Roman Catholic faith – that as he spoke Italian like a native, and as his complexion and features were much more like the Italian than his own northern race, he might for years wander about the less frequented parts of Italy without incurring the suspicion that he was a foreigner. She conjectured that on arriving at Civita Vecchia he had yielded to an unconquerable reluctance to leaving Italy. She had no very definite idea of what had since been his fate. She alternated between hope and despair without any reason but the condition of feeling she happened to be in. The source whence young Bathurst had derived his antiquarian enthusiasm was soon quite obvious to Lady C. The only mode of drawing Mrs. Bathurst from her sorrowful maternal anxieties was to plunge her into some obscure, unintelligible ruin in Rome. She preferred the dim Thermæ of Titus, Caracalla’s baths, or Sallust’s garden, to St. Peter’s, and the fragments of the palaces of the Cæsars to all the glories of the Vatican. But there were times when she was so steeped in grief, so near despair, that she seemed on the verge of insanity: and it was one evening after trying in vain to rouse and soothe her that Lady C. proposed a drive to Tusculum the next day. They accordingly set forth the next morning, and the mother seemed to be drawn away from her personal sorrows on this monumental road, for who, it is natural to ask here, can escape the common destiny of man “made to mourn?”
They drove into the little town of Frascati, and stopped at this same inn where Lady C. and myself were now discussing our cold chicken. The piazza was as thronged and noisy then as now, as these places always are in Italy, and most noisy in the meanest, poorest, lowest-fallen towns. As the ladies alighted screaming guides and clamorous beggars thronged about them. Mrs. Bathurst hurried into the inn. Lady C., more accustomed to the disagreeable juxtaposition of fleas, dirt and importunity, quietly stopped to make her bargain with a guide, and give, as is her custom, a small sum to the landlord to be dispensed to the poorest poor. Her eye was attracted by a lean and miserable man who stood behind the crowd, and apart from it, and who, pale, emaciated and haggard, with a threadbare cloak closely drawn around him, and seeming most of all to need charity, was apparently unobservant and unconcerned.
“My friend,” said Lady C. to the landlord, and
[107]
pointing to the man who had attracted her eye, “see to that poor wretch getting the largest share of my charity, and here,” she added, again opening her ever willing purse, “here is something more – get him a warm under-garment – he is shivering at this moment.”
“Ah, madame,” replied mine host, “he is well cared for; his senses are a little astray, and of such, you know, the Holy Virgin has special care. He wanders about from morning till night, and when, at evening, he comes into Frascati, there is not a churl in the town that would not give him a bed and lodging, though he never asks for either. He is innocent and quiet enough, poor fellow!”
“Has he no family – no relatives among you?” asked Lady C – but she received no reply – another carriage had drawn up, and the landlord with the ready civility of his craft was opening its door.
“Come with me to the other side of the house,” said Lady C. to Mrs. Bathurst, whom she found in a little back parlor overlooking the court. “Come with me and see a pensioner of the Holy Virgin – as our host assures me he is – a creature steeped in poverty, but without suffering, and with an aspect that having once looked upon you never can forget.” Before she had finished her sentence Lady C. was at the window of “la belle veduta,” overlooking the piazza. The throng of beggars was at the heels of the newly arrived gentry, and Lady C. looked about, for some time in vain, for the subject of her compassion. “Ah, there he goes!” she said, espying him. “Is there not a careless, objectless desolation in his very movement?”
“I do not see that he differs from the other beggars, except that he stoops, and has a less noble air than many of them.”
“My dear Mrs. Bathurst! But you do not see his face, and therefore cannot judge – poor fellow, he is taking to the sunny steps of the church like the rest of them, and there is languidly laying himself down to his best repose.”
After cold chicken and a bottle of wine at Frascati, the ladies proceeded on foot to Tusculum, preferring to be discommoded by a walk, somewhat too long, to the perpetual annoyance of clamorous yelling donkey drivers. After having gone up the long hill to Tusculum, they turned into the Ruffuiella, Lucien Bonaparte’s villa, and finding little to attract them in its formal adornments, they soon left it. As they turned toward the gate Lady C. exclaimed, “There is my poor friend again! he has taken the road to Tusculum; I hope we may cross his path there, I want you to see his face, if I do not mistake, it has a story, and a sad one.”
“I am ashamed to confess to you,” replied Mrs. Bathurst, “how little curiosity I feel about him; how little I am touched by all the misery I see here. My whole sentient being is resolved into one distressful feeling. At times, indeed, I am roused from it, and the thought that I am in Italy, sends a thrill of pleasure though my frame. Even here, in Tusculum, at this highest point of excitement, where, under ordinary circumstances, the very stones would burn my feet, my sorrow comes back upon me like a thunder-bolt.”
“Drive it away now, if possible,” said Lady C. “It is worth your while, I assure you, to possess your mind in this place – here is a cicerone who will give a name, right or wrong, whenever we ask for it. He told me the other day, in good faith, that the ciceroni all take their name from Cicero, who, in his day, showed the marvelous fine things here to strangers! I asked the fellow who this Cicero was, and he answered, un gran maestro, who taught little boys all the languages in the world, besides reading, writing, and arithmetic! * [*See Rome in the 19th century] A fair specimen of the veritable information of these gentry.”
The ladies proceeded under the conduct of their guide, to survey the broken walls called “la Scuola di ciceroni,” as some learned expounders conjecture from the philosophical academy, the institution of which at his own house, in Tusculum, is mentioned in one of Cicero’s letters.
Mrs, Bathurst’s antiquarian enthusiasm began to kindle, her eye dilated, and her pale cheek glowed. In a happy oblivion, for the moment, of her personal anxieties, she left Lady C. seated on the broken fragment of a column almost overgrown by weeds and grass, and followed her talking guide, to look at the reticulated walls of a row of houses, at a disinterred Roman pavement, and among a mass of ruins at the gradus of an amphitheater. While she was thus occupied, the poor pensioner of the Virgin emerged from a tangled thicket near Lady C., bearing and bending over a large flat stone, which he had hardly strength to carry, and with his eye riveted to it as if he were perusing it, he sat down on the ground apparently without observing her, near Lady C’s feet. The hair, as he studiously bent over the stone, hung in tangled masses over his face, so as to hide all but its outline. At this moment Lady C. heard Mrs. Bathurst approaching from behind. She pointed to the man, and signified to her not to disturb him. The guide misinterpreting her action, said “Fear nothing, my lady, he’s an innocent madman, who passes his time wandering about these ruins, digging and groping – half the world are somewhat in his way – the Virgin muddles their brains and sends them here to spend their money in poor old Italy. By St. Peter!” he continued, going close to the antiquary and bending over him, “he has found something worth while this time. What is it, my good fellow?”
The crazed man, after scraping away the plaster and rubbish that adhered to the stone, had found what he sought, an inscription, defaced, and so far obliterated that no mortal could make it out, but this in no sort abated his joy – it was an inscription made by hands that had mouldered for centuries. Whether it now or ever signified any thing he cared not. He clapped his hands, and as if for the first time conscious of the presence of others, he shook back his hair, and turned his eyes toward the ladies for sympathy – sympathy, the first and last want of human nature. His eyes met theirs – met Mrs. Bathurst’s – his mother’s. He did not move, but from the gush of blood over the
[108]
deathlike paleness of his cheek, and a slight tremor that suddenly pervaded his whole frame, it was evident he recognized her, and that he felt at the same moment his changed and strange condition. The mother knew her son at a glance, and exclaiming, “Murray!” sprung to him and enclosed him in her arms. A shout burst from him so loud and so protracted, that it seemed as if it must shiver his frame – his mother recoiled and sunk fainting in Lady C’s arms.
The story of the unfortunate antiquarian has been already too long and too particular, and I shall only briefly add what remains to be told. A perfect stupor succeeded to Murray Bathurst’s recognition of his mother, and his first consciousness of his wretched condition. A fever ensued – medical attendants – tender nursing most remedial, the comforts from which he had long been estranged, nature and youth all combined to do the work of restoration. With the return of reason, came a horror of the passion that had led him astray, and he became as impatient as he had been reluctant to leave Italy. He remembered that after reaching Civita Vecchia, he felt like a lover tearing himself from the object of his passion. His feet seemed to grow to the rich dust of Italy. Day after day he delayed taking the passage. After wandering about late one night, he remembered awaking in the morning with a high fever, and from that time his memory became more and more obscure. He had dim recollections of being transported from one place to another, of missing, one after another, his articles of dress – of dreams of hunger and thirst – and of finding jugs of water and bread by his bedside – finally, all became a blank, till he awoke in his mother’s arms. Mrs. Bathurst, fearful of a relapse into his old habits of mind, lost no time in leaving Italy. She had since kept Lady C. informed of the progress of her son’s cure, which she now believed to be radical. He had the good sense to avoid all books related to his disastrous passion, and every thing associated with it. His uncle had received him with open arms, comforting himself with the verification of his prognostics for the past trials of his nephew, and saying somewhat coarsely, that to be sure the hair of the same dog would cure the bite, if you ate hide and all.
A more fitting mistress than Italy had taken possession of the young man’s imagination, and health and cheerfulness were in her train. The last letter communicated the marriage of the cousins – and now Mrs. Bathurst said they could look back with tranquil minds, to that “beautiful region” where
“A spirit hangs o’er towns and farms,
Statues and temples, and memorial tombs.”
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
An Incident at Rome
Subject
The topic of the resource
English travelers in Italy, antiquarianism.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator, traveling in Italy, meets an English lady, who recounts the story of Mrs. Bathurst and her son Murray, a young antiquarian who goes mad while conducting research in Rome. He is eventually reunited with his mother and restored to sanity.
Creator
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C[atharine]. M[aria]. Sedgwick
Source
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Graham's Magazine [edited by George R. Graham], March 1845: 104-8.
Date
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1845
Contributor
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Gabriela Siwiec
D. Gussman
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1845
antiquarian
antiquities
beggars
Cicero
Frascati
Graham's Magazine
India
Italy
madness
marriage
merchants
Mothers
pride
Roman Catholic
Rome
sons
Southey
sympathy
Tusculum
Wordsworth
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https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/9ffcdc5b38235a0a6d1d7a9feaea7a6c.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=NBuOM2gZObUb3othf7be6Z6Th19LaBcKqlxVFWKnr7y8%7EPM2TS-qWLX8FtmQ5twl-xr3j2hKhgXA4F0I1ZBA-UwcO8OHxZBmWafBYFTiWZp%7EQQxKWGHoEh5ZFeFn6YpSVLQbrG5SanB424vPHOA4NVemRxfUQ9nNj%7EwNqxfqjZoRUSfWHBuW0u0BAoUcXGLyiwBwBDZJH-j5gRD0npv2k0jRKaqq3Cu9PmTDUu1nVUaVQUjzaSh39ezNo8xkA64BYkw2-6%7EnjSwRHINL9BpaY4dD7l9gUCy9B-Jvxn1KeatwsQx4NlaJxfzbLlLhKtrzZIlA%7E7s33oRoklCTrXsOdA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
0c1e03630cda1b6a2a27e28a456baa67
Dublin Core
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1829
Subject
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Stories published in 1829.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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The Good Son.
Mr. William Smith was a respectable merchant in Boston. He had two children, William and Mary; whom he used, in sport, to call his little King and Queen, after William and Mary, who once reigned in England.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Smith were wise and good people; and though they were very rich, and had but these two children, they were not treated with any improper indulgence, for having but two, Mr. Smith said, he could not afford to spoil them. Mr. Smith was engaged in extensive business; his property was, of course, at risk. After a long run of prosperity, he met with severe losses, and a failure was the consequence. He had so carefully managed his affairs, that he found, by giving up all his property, he could pay all his debts. He did not hesitate. His beautiful house in town— his country-seat— all his furniture— his horses and carriages, and every luxury that had been suitable to his prosperity, was disposed of. He determined again to enter into business; and in order to do this, he found it necessary to go to Europe, to remain for two or three years.
It was decided that Mrs. Smith should, in the mean time, go with her children to a neat cottage in Brookline, where they might live with great economy, till Mr. Smith’s return. William had been for a year at one of the best, and of course, most expensive schools in the country; and Mr. Smith deeply regretted the necessity of withdrawing him from it. William’s term at school was to expire on the last day of September. Mr. Smith was to sail for Europe on the previous 15th; consequently he did not expect to see his boy again. On the evening of the 14th, he was sitting in his rocking chair, looking in the fire, and seeming very sad, when little Mary took his hand, and said, “Do not let us be so dismal yet, father— you don’t go till to-morrow.”
“Ah, my dear Mary, you are at a happy age; you cannot realize any evil that will not come till to-morrow.”
“But I can realize good, papa, that will not come till a great many to-morrows are past. I am all the time thinking how happy we shall be when you get home again, and we are back in our own house, and Willie is here, and you call us your King and Queen again.”
But her father was too melancholy to be cheered even by that sweetest music to a parent’s ear— the happy tones of his child’s voice; he threw his handkerchief over his face, and remained silent. Little Mary placed her bench beside him, and sat down close to him, took his hand, and laid her smooth, warm cheek on it. After they had continued thus for some minutes, her father seemed to feel her tenderness, he removed the handkerchief from his face, took her on his knee, and kissing her, exclaimed, “Oh, my dear children, if it were not for you I could bear my misfortunes like a man !” At this moment, Mrs. Smith entered the parlor with a letter in her hand, and gave it to her husband. “I cannot read letters now,” he said, and threw the packet on the table—“Then I will read it to you,” replied his wife. “It is from Mr. Norton; and I believe contains one from William.” Mr. Norton was William’s teacher, and a particular friend of Mr. Smith. Mrs. Smith read aloud his letter, which was as follows:
“My dear friend, I enclose you a letter from our boy, which I have with difficulty persuaded him to write—like most boys, his tongue moves much more readily than his pen; and besides, I believe on this occasion he felt a little modesty, on the score of being the hero of his own tale—you will perceive that I kept from him as long as I could the news of your misfortune. He is a noble boy, my dear friend; and I am sure you must think the loss of fortune not worth minding, while heaven spares you such a child—you must not take him from me; I shall stand father to him in your absence. It will cost me little to supply all his wants; as freely as I give, so freely would I receive, if my child needed your kindness. William is an honor to my school—I cannot spare him. Never have I known a boy, of ten years of age, make such progress. God grant you a prosperous voyage, and safe return.
Yours very sincerely,
R. Norton
“There, Father, now you really smile, for all you are going tomorrow,” said little Mary.
“I have reason to smile, indeed, my dear child,” replied her father; “but now let us see what William says; poor little god, he is no great letter writer.” Mrs. Smith opened his letter, and taking from it a small roll in a white paper, she laid it on the table and proceeded to read as follows—but before giving the letter, we must beg our readers not to expect an elegant epistle. Writing a letter is a great task to most boys; and William disliked it as much as any child I ever knew. I have seen him sit for half an hour, biting his pen, and knitting his brow, and looking in deep distress, — when if he had only let his pen tell what his tongue would have spoken, he would have written a very agreeable letter, without any trouble. On this occasion however, he had a good deal to say, and the letter was written with much more ease than usual; so that on the whole this is rather a favorable specimen of his composition. But here it is, to speak for itself:
“Dear Father, — I am well, and very happy; and so I hope are Mother and Queen Mary; at least, I am very happy, only when I am thinking about your going so far away; but I have not much time for that, — I have so many lessons to get. When I go to bed I always think of you, and I should then feel very unhappy, but I fall to sleep so quick— I am sure it is not because I may tell you that I get on famously in all my studies, except my Latin, and I do tolerably well in that. I really do try, but it is awful hard; I think Greek would be easier. I am glad Mary is a girl, because she wont have to be plagued with learning Latin. Mr. Norton is very, very kind to me; and if you were not my father, I believe I should love him as well as I do you. I felt very bad when I heard you had sold our house and all of the furniture, though I could not think of any thing in particular that I cared much about, but the picture of Burgoyne’s surrender, and my crickets, that we used to call our thrones, and sit upon every evening, each side of Mother, while she told us a story. Oh, what good times we had! As soon as I grow up, I am determined to buy the picture back again, on account of grandfather’s having been at the battle of Saratoga, and having told me all about it.”
It was evident William had proceeded thus far very glibly; but here it appeared he had stopped, — had got his pen mended, — and had started again with more difficulty.
“My dear father, I have been thinking a very long time how I shall ask you to accept some money from me, but Mr. Norton says it in time my letter was finished, — and so I have written it plain out. It seems so strange for me, who have always had presents from you, to give you any thing. I never knew before how pleasant it was to give; I should think every body would give away all they had to spare. Mr. Norton says I must tell you how I came by my money. It is just two months since he told me you had failed; and explained to me what failing was. I cried a great deal; not because we should not be rich any more, — for I don’t care a fig about that; but Mr. Norton told me you were afraid you should not be able to pay your debts, and that I knew was dreadful; for you have talked to me so much about the shame of contracting debts which could not be paid, that I knew how you would feel. It seemed to me that I could bear any thing better than the thought of you having to be ashamed; and so when I went to bed, I lay awake till I hit on my plan— and, the next morning, I asked Mr. Norton if he did not want somebody to do Steve Summer’s work in the garden. Steve ran away last week, and went to sea. Mr. Norton said he did; and he did not know where to look for another boy. Then I asked him if he would hire me; Mr. Norton laughed and said he was afraid I could not do the work. ‘But, Sir,’ says I, ‘wont you please to let me try?’ ‘Why what do you want to work for? Says he. So I had to tell him that I wanted to help you pay your debts, father— then he stroked my head, and I thought he was going to consent; but he said you have a great many hard lessons to get, William; and all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. ‘ But, I told him, if it made Jack a dull boy, it should not make one of Will; and besides, I would call it my play and that would do just as well; and then he was so kind as to say he would hire me, if I would take my play-time, and would not slight any of my lessons.
From the first, I could weed full as well as Steve; but the hoeing was pretty hard, — and the first week I blistered my hands; but I did not let any body know it, and they soon hardened; and now they are worth something, I can tell you, father. At first, Bob Shaw and Sam Rogers were mad, because I would not go and play with them as usual; and once they called me ‘grub-worm,’ and made fun of me. Mr. Norton overheard them, and he told them what I was working for, and then they both came to me, and said they were very sorry; and ever since they help me, so that I can get done in time to play a little. They are capital fellows; and I hope their fathers will fail, so I can pay them for it. Mr. Norton says I must tell you that I have fairly earned the ten dollars, — that he should have been obliged to pay it to somebody else, if he had not to me; and he says I must tell you, I am a much neater workman than Steve. I hope you wont think I mean to brag father. It was very lucky for me, that it was summer time, because wages are at the highest then. I wonder people don’t always prefer to work in the summer, on that account.
I should like, sir, if you please, that you should pay Mr. Reed’s bill out of this money; because he has given me many a ride in his milk-cart, and because of poor little Harry Reed; for you know when he comes from the deaf and dumb asylum, Mr. Reed means to have him learn to paint, if he can afford it; but he says it costs a ‘master sight,’— I suppose he means a large sum of money. Oh! I am very glad now, that the meeting house Harry drew for me was not framed, for then you would have to sell it. I am afraid, my dear father, you wont have time to read this long letter— if you have not, you can take it, and read it on board ship, where, I suppose, you will have plenty of leisure, I did not know that I could write such a long letter. Give my love to dear mother, and queen Mary; and tell Mary that I am very glad she is going to have a garden at Brookline; for now I can advise her about it, and work in it too, — that is, when I am at home. My dear father, I shall try to do my duty, when you are gone; and every morning and every night, I shall pray to God to bless you. I used to forget my prayers sometimes, when I was a little boy; but now I never forget them, — how can I, when I have so much to ask of my Heavenly Father? After all, it is not so very hard to write a letter, when you have plenty to say. Good Bye, my dear, dear father.
Your ever affectionate son,
William Smith, Junior
Postscript. I don’t mean that I shall be glad to have the boys’ fathers fail; but if they do, I shall be glad to help them.
- W.S., Jr.
It may seem strange to some of our readers, who have never shed any tears but the tears of sorrow, that William’s letter should have drawn tears from his father’s and mother’s eyes; but they will find, by and by, that the happiest feelings they ever have, will make them weep. The first words that Mr. Smith uttered were, “Thank God! – thank God! — My boy is a treasure— worth all– and ten times all that I have lost— I said that if it were not for my children, I could bear my misfortunes like a man— I now feel, that with such children, I can bear any thing.” Mrs. Smith said nothing but she laid her head on little Mary’s shoulder, who had jumped into her lap while she was reading the letter, and, from her heart, she offered a silent thanksgiving to God, for the virtuous conduct of her boy.
Mr. Smith had paid all his debts when he received William’s present, and he determined, at once, that the money should be devoted to Harry Reed’s benefit; accordingly, he placed it to his account in the savings bank.
Oh! If children could look into their parents’ hearts, and see the sweet emotions, the delightful feelings, their good conduct produces, then, I think, they would be more earnest to improve every opportunity to do well.
In the next number of the Miscellany, we shall give some account of little Mary; and we hope to show, that she deserved her royal title as well as her brother— and to show, moreover, that there are other ways of doing good, than by bestowing money; though the virtuous poor envy the rich, that privilege, more, perhaps, than any other they possess.
Stockbridge. S.
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 Good Son
Subject
The topic of the resource
Financial loss, filial piety, the value of physical labor.
Description
An account of the resource
After a father's financial loss, his young son secretly works as a gardener while at boarding school to help earn money for his family.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
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The Juvenile Miscellany [edited by Lydia Maria Child] (January 1829): 217-29.
Date
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1829
Contributor
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Hannah L. Drew, L. Damon-Bach, D. Gussman
Language
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English
Type
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Document
1829
boys
Brookline
deafness
fathers
filial piety
financial loss
gardening
God
Juvenile fiction
Juvenile Miscellany
King William III
letter writing
letters
Lydia Maria Child
muteness
Queen Mary II
Saratoga
sons
Surrender of General Burgoyne
virtue
virtuous poor
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9318956458123efb124f4d2a4096f467
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
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Text
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THE DEFORMED BOY
“THE great Basil mentions a certain art of drawing many doves by anointing the wings of a few with a fragrant ointment, and so sending them abroad, that by the fragrancy of the ointment they may allure others unto the house whereof they are domestics.”
We would borrow a hint from the artifice of the ingenious bird-catcher, and record, for the benefit of some of our young friends, a few acts of particular goodness that have chanced to fall under our own observation, in the hope that their love of virtue may be augmented by contemplating its lovely aspects and certain results.
The example of gratitude which we are about to record, though it is derived from one of the very limited means and in humble life, will, it is hoped, serve to illustrate the duty so often and so ably enforced by our benevolent philosopher Franklin, the duty of looking upon our fellow-beings as all children of one parent—members of one family; so that, if we receive a favour from one individual which we cannot return, we should bestow it on some other member of the family, and thus, to use the doctor’s own expression, keep it “going round.”
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Much occurs to us to say on the uses and felicity of a grateful temper, but we are so well acquainted with the habits of our young friends, that we know they will skip the general remarks to get at the story, as nimbly as a little squirrel will leap over a heap of rubbish to grasp a single nut. To the story then.
In one of the small cities of Hudson there lived a Mrs. Aikin; a lady eminently blessed with affluence and happiness, and one who gratefully acknowledged the truth “freely ye have received,” and faithfully obeyed the admonition “freely give.”
On a bright but bitter cold morning in January, Mrs. Aikin’s family were assembled in the parlour to breakfast; a fine fire of hickory blazed on the hearth, and seemed to crackle defiance to the terrors of the cold, if indeed there was a crevice through which the cold could enter this snug and nicely calked parlour.
The family had just risen from their morning devotions; the servant was bearing in a tea-tray loaded with the hissing coffee-pot, tempting sausages, and a plate of buckwheat pancakes, when a violent ring at the door, thrice repeated, called everyone’s attention.
“Run, William, and open the door quickly,” said Mrs. Aikin; “I would not keep a dog on the outside of my door this morning.”
William obeyed and immediately returned, followed by a little fellow who ran, or, rather, waddled in after him. The child had short legs, a body disproportionately large, and a hump on his back. His head, though rather overgrown, was well formed, his hair light and curling, his skin very fair
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his eyes a deep clear blue, and his whole expression that of infantine sweetness and innocence. Such a head and face surmounting a deformed body looked somewhat like a beautiful fruit on a gnarled stalk. The boy seemed almost stiffened with the cold; but, regardless of himself, and apparently impelled by instinct, he ran up to Mrs. Aikin, and, grasping her gown, he said, with a voice so tremulous as to be almost inaudible, “Oh, ma’am, do come and see what ails mother!”
“Why, who is your mother, child? And who are you?” asked Mrs. Aikin.
“Oh, do come and see ma’am—now—quick. I am afraid mother will burn the house up, for she is lighting the fire with all our clothes; she does not act like mother; do—do come and see what ails her.”
Little Lucy Aikin, a rosy-cheeked, kind-hearted little girl, was at first impatient at the delay of her breakfast; but she soon forgot herself, and, apparently with the expectation of comforting the child, took a sausage, and, wrapping it nicely in a buckwheat cake, she offered it to him.
“No, no,” said he, bursting into cries that expressed impatience and grief, “no, I am not hungry. I was hungry last night, and we were all hungry. Mother said so; and she began to cry, but she isn’t crying now!”
“There is something very urgent in this case,” said Mrs. Aikin, turning to her husband. “Let William serve you and the children, and I will go with the child.”
Mr. Aikin assented, for he perceived the boy’s distress was deep and unaffected—how should it be
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otherwise! he was not, apparently, more than five or six years old.
Mrs. Aikin threw on her cloak, and, taking the child’s hand, he led her through a lane, which, running by the corner of her house, formed the communication between the street she lived upon and a street in the rear of that, where there were several one-story houses, or rather hovels, which had been erected as temporary habitations for the poorest class of people. Into one of the most wretched of these Mrs. Aikin followed her little conductor, and there she beheld a spectacle of misery that sufficiently explained the poor child’s distress. His mother sat on the hearth, with a pale, half-famished-looking infant in her arms, crying piteously, and seeking nourishment at her breast, where, alas! there was none. She was deliberately tearing up cotton frock, and throwing it, piece by piece, on the few embers that lay in the fireplace.
She rose on seeing Mrs. Aikin, as if from habitual good manners; and after looking round for a chair, she smiled and said, “Oh! I remember, they took my chairs; but pray be seated, ma’am. I have been trying,” she continued, “to kindle a fire to warm my baby and me; but my stuff is so light it goes out directly, and we don’t seem to get warm, ma’am.”
Mrs. Aikin perceived at a single glance at the poor woman’s burning cheeks and parched lips, that she was in the delirium of a fever. She approached her, and offered to take the child.
“Oh no,” she said, “not my baby; you know, when they took all the rest, they promised not to take my baby.”
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“But let me try to quiet her for you.”
“No, I thank you ma’am; she is only fretting for her breakfast.” She put the infant again to her breast; the child seized it with the eagerness of starvation, and then redoubled its cries.
“I make but a poor nurse,” said the mother, smiling faintly; “I think it does not agree with me to live without food. Do you think that can be reason my baby does not thrive, ma’am?’ and she raised her eyes to Mrs. Aikin, as if appealing for her opinion. The tears of compassion were streaming down Mrs. Aikin’s cheeks, and the poor woman, apparently from pure sympathy, burst into loud sobs. The little boy threw himself on a bed in a corner of the room, and, burying his head in the bedclothes, tried thus to suppress his cries.
Mrs. Aikin, aware that the wants of these sufferers would not justify a moment’s delay of the succor they needed, called the boy to her, and despatched him to her husband with a note, which she hastily wrote with a pencil on the back of a letter. While he was gone she had leisure to observe the extreme wretchedness of the apartment, in which there was not an article of furniture save a straw bed and its scanty covering. There were shreds of the garments strewed about the floor, the “light stuff” the poor crazed woman had been burning to warm her infant.
“Have you been long sick, my friend?” she asked, with the faint hope of obtaining a rational answer.
“Sick! Sick!” replied the mother; “yes, a good while—I have been sick a trifle—the intermittent and the typhus—but I believe I am getting the better of it all, for yesterday I felt quite hungry.”
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“And did you take anything?” asked Mrs. Aikin.
“Oh yes,” she answered, drawing near to Mrs. Aikin, and whispering with an air of great self-complacency, “I did indeed take something—all I had in the house-an excellent thing to blunt the edge of one’s appetite—laudanum—you know ma’am, it is doctor’s stuff and the doctors know how to cure an appetite.”
“God help you, poor woman!” exclaimed Mrs. Aikin.
“God help me!” reiterated the poor creature, with a piercing cry; “there is no help for me;” and she sunk on the side of the bed and wept freely. Mrs. Aikin was sensible that in this returning consciousness of her miseries there was a dawning of reason; she knew that her tears were a natural expression of feeling, and would afford her the quickest relief; and she permitted them to flow on without interrupting her.
In the mean time Mr. Aikin arrived, accompanied by a woman-servant laden with necessaries and refreshments, and a boy with a barrow of wood; a fire was kindled; nourishment was provided for the baby, and food offered to the deformed boy, who, now that he saw a relief at hand for his mother, ate ravenously. Cordials were administered to the mother; a physician was summoned, and a nurse provided for her; and, in short, everything was done that could be done, where there was benevolence to devise and ability to execute.
The lapse of a few days found Mrs. Shepard (for that was the poor woman’s name) quite recovered from the delirium into which she had been
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driven by sickness and extreme misery. She related to her benefactress the few particulars of her melancholy history. It was not an uncommon one, and we shall not detail it at length, for we would not cloud the cheerful faces of our young readers with unnecessary sadness.
Mrs. Shepard was the daughter of a respectable farmer; the youngest of a numerous family. She was married when very young to one of those miserable beings who are always meeting with disappointments and bad luck, those sure plagues of the idle and shiftless. Her husband had health, a good trade, and abundance of friends; but, as the proverb says, “Who can help those who won’t help themselves?” Shepard changed one branch of business for another; he moved from place to place, but he never left behind him the faults that caused the failure of all his enterprises.
He went in the beaten track from idleness to intemperance and to bad company; and finally, lost to all sense of duty, he abandoned his wife and little ones in a strange place, after a sheriff had stripped his wretched dwelling of the little wreck of furniture he possessed.
But Mrs. Shepard was not left to perish. In her greatest extremity, when there seemed no help, and sickness and the sight of her starving children had driven her to distraction, Heaven directed to her relief a kind and efficient friend. Mrs. Aikin’s discretion and good sense equaled her benevolence. She thought that as God is his kind providence had seen fit to exempt her from the sore evils of life, she was bound to testify her gratitude by doing all in her power to mitigate the sufferings of others.
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She remembered that our Saviour was familiar with our sorrows and acquainted with our griefs; and as it was not with her passing desire, but the rule of her life, to imitate him, she did not content herself with sending a servant with an inquiry or a gift to the poor, or with subscribing to charitable societies, but she visited the sick and the afflicted, and listened patiently to their very long, and often, to her as well as to others, very tiresome stories. She would enter with benevolent sympathy into the history of their cares and wants, and would even forget she had nerves while she gave her ear to the details of a loathsome sickness; in short, she never forgot the common people who have minds and hearts, and that often a more essential charity is done by fainting an influence over them than can be effected by pecuniary relief. We entreat our young friends to believe that, they will have treasures of kindness to impart far more valuable than Aladdin’s lamp. Fortunatus’ cap, or any gift of fay or fairy.
But we are digressing from our story—not uselessly, however, if we are strengthened the love of goodness in the breast of a single reader. Mrs. Aikin visited her humble friend every day till she was restored to comfortable health. It was then necessary that some means should be adopted for her permanent relief. She could be received with her children into the almshouse, but she preferred making any struggle to being dependant on public charity; “for that,” she said to Mrs. Aikin, “was what nobody took pleasure in giving, and no one was thankful for receiving.”
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After many consultations with her benefactress it was determined that she should hire a small cheap apartment, and take in sewing. Mrs. Aikin promised her constant aid, and performed more than she promised; and Mr. Aikin, who was one the aldermen of the city, obtained for her a small weekly stipend from the corporation, who find this a much better mode of aiding the industrious poor than removing them from the excitements and pleasures of their own homes to public institutions.
Mrs. Shepard’s health was infirm, and her means were scanty, but she was so diligent and economical that she maintained her children with decency.
With the present she was not only contented, but grateful; the past she had borne with fortitude and patience. “Many a time,” she said to Mrs. Aikin, “when I have been reduced almost to despair, those words, ‘Put thy trust in the Lord, he will never leave nor forsake thee,’ have come to my remembrance, and I have taken courage and gone on again. When Richard, my poor little crooked boy, was born, I had two children older than he: they were both sick with the whooping-cough; the baby, that is, Dick, took it; I was myself in a weakly way; we had none of us the necessary medicines nor food; both my boys died; my poor baby was neglected; he mastered the whooping-cough, and fell into the rickets, which ended in making him the little misshapen thing you see. But it seems as if God had tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, for a better, or, in the main a happier child there never was than Dicky.”
The good mother was not blinded, as fond moth-
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ers sometimes are, by partiality to unfortunate children; for Richard, or Dicky as he was familiarly, or rather Ducky as he was most commonly called, in an allusion to his short legs, Ducky was a perfect philosopher. Not a single crook of his little body had twisted his temper, or given one wrong turn to his disposition.
How much of his philosophy he owed to the faithful care of his mother, we leave to be estimated by those of our young readers who are so blessed as to possess parents who are continually watching over their morals and happiness. Mrs. Shepard was a poor woman, but she had received a good common education, the birthright alike of rich and poor in New-England, where she was brought up. She seldom found time to read a book herself; but devoted mothers can do that for their children which they cannot do for themselves; and Mrs. Shepard found, or made time to teach Richard to read before he could walk.
She would tie her baby into a chair beside her while she was washing, or ironing, or mending, and, at the same time, teach Dicky to repeat hymns and stories in verse which she had learned in her childhood. It was really a pleasing, and, at the same time, an affecting sight to see the little fellow, deprived as he was of the of the active pleasures usual at his age, sitting curled up on his chair, with his head unnaturally drawn down on his bosom, fix his bright, eager eye on his mother, repeat the words after her without missing a syllable, and chuckle with delight when he had mastered a couplet. Oh! who, when they see calamities thus mitigated, can help recalling that sentiment of
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Scripture, “He remembereth our infirmities and pititeth us, even as a father pitieth his children.”
But how did Dicky escape the fretfulness of temper which so often attend deformity? Surely not by learning hymns. No; though this occupation lightened many an hour, we cannot attribute such power to it. He had naturally a sweet and cheerful temper, but this would probably have given place to the irritability that so often attends and aggravates disease and privation but for the unceasing watchfulness and patience of his mother. If he ever got into a pet (as what child does not sometimes?), her rebuke was mildly spoken; and if the pet amounted to a passion, it was soon subdued by her firm, tranquil manner. The sound of her low gentle, and tender voice operated like oil thrown on the stormy waves, which is said to smooth their surface wherever it touches them.
Mrs. Aikin suggested to Richard’s mother that she might give him a useful occupation by teaching him to knit. She immediately improved the hint; Dick was delighted with his new employment, and soon became such a master of the knitting-needle that he might have rivalled almost any old woman in the country. He was sitting one day on his mother’s door-step, protected from the sun by the shadow of a fine elm-tree, finishing a pair of suspenders which Mrs. Aiken had bespoken for her son, when a company of boys came marching in military procession up the street.
The young soldiers were equipped with wooden muskets; their hats were garnished with cocks’ tails for plumes; half a dozen pocket-handkerchiefs tied together, decked with white paper stars and
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attached to a stick, formed their flag, their ”star-spangled banner,” and was as proudly carried by its bearer as more magnificent colours have been; a tin-kettle served for “a spirit-stirring drum,” and a “shrill fife” was blown by a sturdy little fellow, whose lungs seemed as inexhaustible as the windbags of old Æolus.
When they arrived opposite to Mrs. Shepard’s door, a proposal was made to halt under the elm-tree till their captain, Frank Hardy, should join them. “And, in the mean time, gentlemen,” called out mischievous little urchin in the rear, “let us give a salute to Miss Ducky Shepard, knitter to the light-infantry.”
“Hurrah for Miss Ducky!” shouted the boys, and the soldiers lowered their muskets, the standard-bearer waved his colours, and the little drummer beat a flourish. Dicky had at first entered into the sport, but now his countenance fell, he resumed his knitting which he had laid down, but his eyes were blurred with tears, his hands trembled, and his stitches dropped.
“Ah!” cried out the lieutenant, Miss Ducky don’t like your salute; never mind, Dick, Miss Ducky you shall be no longer. Gentlemen, fellow-soldiers, all who are for electing Miss Ducky captain, pro tem. will please hold up their right hands.” Fifty right hands were instantly elevated,” and another shout of “Hurrah for Captain Dick!” made the welkin ring.
As soon as the sounds had ceased, “Advance, Corporal Seation,” said the lieutenant, “and help me escort the captain to the head of his company.” The two boys took the unresisting child in their
[21]
arms and placed him at the head of their corps. “Turn out your toes captain,” said the lieutenant, touching Dicky’s short bow legs with his musket; “there, gentlemen, is a fine leg for a march!”
“Hold up your head, captain,” said the corporal; “there’s a captain to scare the enemy!” But poor little Dick could not hold up his head, and the tears that he had manfully repressed now gushed from his eyes and rolled down to his bosom.
At this critical moment there was a sudden movement in the ranks. “What is all this? said the real captain, Frank Hardy, springing on his lieutenant and corporal, and laying them on their marrow-bones. “Coward’s play, boys -- coward’s play; here, Dick, my little man, take my hand; brush away your tears, and I’ll see you righted.” Dick grasped the friendly hand that was extended to him, and Frank, after replacing him on the doorstep, instituted an inquiry into this cruel sport.
The eyes of the company were now turned to their popular commander, and all were preparing to trim their vessels whichever way he should cause the tide to set. He soon satisfied himself that the offence demanded an exemplary punishment; and, ordering his company to form into a hollow square, he made them a speech, full of eloquence and feeling, on the merits of Dicky and their own demerit, or, rather, the demerit of their ringleaders, for he skillfully contrived to make them the scapegoats, and to bind the offences of all the culprits on their backs. After the speech he proposed that the lieutenant and corporal should be degraded from their high command to the private ranks, and should be sentenced to pay a fine to Dicky of six cents each.
[22]
The sentence was passed by acclamation; the captain saw the decision enforced. The money which had been carefully husbanded for a treat after the day’s drill, was sullenly delivered into the commander’s hand, and reluctantly received from him by Dicky; reluctantly, for out little simple friend did not quite comprehend how “might made right;” and his feelings had been too deeply wounded to admit of consolation in this form. He was, however, in a degree comforted by the interposition of Captain Frank in his behalf; he felt that it conferred consequence on him, for Frank Hardy was a universal favourite among the boys; stout and active, good-humoured and kind-hearted, he was the champion of all the oppressed, and the corrector of all the wrongs in his neighborhood.
When the company marched away, poor Richard’s sorrows broke out afresh, and, running to his mother’s room, he threw the knitting on the floor, and said, in a voice half suppressed with sobs, “I never will touch that work again.”
“Why, what is the matter with you Dicky?” asked his mother; “I never saw you in such a flurry.”
Richard recounted, as well as he was able, the story of his wrong, and Mrs. Shepard listened with all a mother’s patience; and, when he concluded, she tried in vain to remove the impression from his mind that it was his “girl’s-work” that had been the cause of his mortification. “Hurrah for Miss Ducky, knitter to the light-infantry,” still sounded his ears, and drowned every argument she could urge. Shame, that most unpleasant feeling, was ever after most indissolubly associated
[23]
with his work. The most obedient of all good boys, he would resume his knitting in compliance with his mother’s commands, but he never took it up voluntarily--never again relished it. Thus was this poor little fellow deprived of an innocent and useful pastime by a company of unfeeling boys. Perhaps we ought rather to say inconsiderate, for young people are more apt to be thoughtless than cruel; and we believe that those who laughed loudest and longest at Dicky’s drool little figure, would have wept with the ingenuous sorrow of childhood if they could have known the pang their laugh inflicted.
Our young readers may have heard of the philosopher’s stone; there is an art that far exceeds the power ascribed to that gem of the alchemist: the art by which a good person extracts instruction from every event, however adverse, is certainly superior to that which transmutes base metal into gold.
The incident we have related made Mrs. Shepard fully aware of Richard’s susceptibility to the mortifications to which his deformity rendered him liable, and henceforward she constantly endeavoured to arm him with fortitude. It is unnecessary to recount all she said and did to accomplish this purpose. Perhaps it would not make much figure in print, for Mrs. Shepard was so quiet and simple in her way, that one would as soon expect (provided there was neither experience nor knowledge on the subject) a tree to grow from an acorn an any great effect to proceed from her efforts. She had good materials to work on, docile disposition and sweet temper; and so completely successful
[24]
was she, that Richard, as he grew older, bore all sorts of jibes and jokes without wincing, His sweet, enduring temper disarmed mischief of its sting, and converted ridicule into respect. At the Lancaster school, where he was monitor of a class composed of boys of every disposition, some much older, and all a head taller than himself, he was treated with as much deference as if he had been six feet high, and had had the limbs of Apollo.
Since the memorable day of the training, he had maintained a constant friendly intercourse with his champion, Frank Hardy. Dick would do anything on earth to serve Frank, and Frank was sword and shield to Dick. But, notwithstanding this strict alliance between them, they were in some respects widely different. Unfortunately, those good principles had not been instilled into Frank that prompted Richard to do right, as well from duty as from impulse. Frank’s mother was a widow, and he was her only child; and she indulged him excessively, or restrained him unreasonably, according to the humour she happened to be in, without any regard to the right of the case or his ultimate good.
Frank was what everybody calls a warm, good-hearted fellow with a bright, sunny face, and a merry disposition, that won his way to all hearts. He loved pleasure extravagantly, as was natural, for he was on all occasions contriver of the sport and master of the revels. On one fourth of July, he had planned a sailing excursion to a village in the vicinity. Each member of the party was to contribute half a dollar to the expenses, and poor Frank was in utter consternation when, on apply-
[25]
ing to his mother, in the confident expectation of obtaining the money, she denied it to him. He entreated and expostulated, but all in vain; she was out of humour, and if she had been a Midas she would not have given him the half dollar. Frank left her disappointed and mortified; he knew that his companions were awaiting him, and, ashamed to meet them and explain the cause of his inability to meet them and explain the cause of his inability to join them, he went in quest of Dick to bear his errand to them. He found him at a huckster’s shop, where he was in the habit of going in his leisure time, and making himself useful by performing small services.
Richard was alone in the shop, busily arranging some fruits which were to be placed in the window as specimens. “Oh!” he exclaimed, on seeing Frank, “what a royal day you have got for your sail.
“A royal day, indeed,” replied Frank, looking up wistfully to the bright, cloudless sky.
“You had better make haste, Frank, for the boys will be waiting for you. Jim Allen and Harry Upham went along half an hour ago. Jim bought twelve oranges of Mr. George, and Mr. George lent Harry his flute; two merrier fellows I never saw; and they told me, if I saw you, to hurry you on.”
“I am not going at all, Dick.”
“Not going at all!” exclaimed Richard, struck by the words and by the sorrowful tone in which they were uttered. “Are you sick, Frank?” he asked, looking with great concern in his friend’s face.
“No, not sick,” replied Frank, and half ashamed
[26]
that he had betrayed so much feeling on the subject, he averted his eye, and it fell on a newly-coined, glittering half dollar which was lying on the counter. “Oh if that half dollar were mine,” was his first, and, certainly, most natural thought. He turned again to the door--all the military of the town were out in honour of the day--drums were beating merrily, colours flying, and everybody, old and young, seemed to be animated with the spirit of the day. Frank looked down the street; he saw two or three of his young associates running towards the river. He again turned his eye to the tempting half dollar. Richard’s back was towards him--temptation pressed--opportunity favoured; one moment more of reflection, and he would have resisted, but he did not allow himself that moment; he grasped the half dollar, and, when Richard again turned, he was gone.
Richard wondered a little at the singular manner of his friend; but he was too intent on the task of his friend; but he was too intent on the task that had been assigned him to think much of it, till, his work being finished, he looked for the money, which had been left on the counter, in payment for a brush he had sold in the absence of George Sutton, the clerk, who had gone on an errand to the next street.
The poor child was trembling with the discovery of the loss when the clerk came in. “So, Dicky,” he said, “you have made a sale in my absence. I met Mrs. Lincoln’s servant with the brush. Where is the money, Dick?” he continued, unlocking the money-drawer, and standing ready to put in the half dollar.
“I have not got the money, Mr. George,” Richard replied, with a trembling voice.
[27]
“Not got it!” exclaimed Sutton; and a suspicion darted across his mind which he could not bear to harbour for a moment. “Not got it!” he repeated. “What does this mean, Dick; where is it?”
“I cannot tell,” said Richard, faltering so much that the words were scarcely articulate.
George Sutton sprang over the counter; took the poor child, who now shook like an aspen leaf, by the arm, and, looking steadily in his face, which blushed crimsons, he exclaimed, “What can have tempted you to steal that money?”
Richard started back --his face became pale as death--his little crooked form was drawn up to an expression of dignity, for it expressed truth and innocence. “Steal! Mr. George,” he said, and he now spoke with a firm voice; “you know I would not steal one penny for the whole world.”
“I don’t think you would, Dick- I can’t think you would,” replied George, touched by the child’s appeal, and more than half convinced by his fair, direct look. “I have always found you honest, boy, and true as the sun. But where is the money? Has any one been in the shop since the man bought the brush?”
Richard’s countenance again fell- again his voice faltered. “Oh do not ask me; I cannot tell you, Mr. George,” he said.
“But you must tell me, Dick, or you must never come into the shop again.”
“Then I never will come into it again,” replied Richard, “for I never will tell;” and, bursting into tears, he ran out of the shop, leaving the clerk utterly at a loss what construction to put on his conduct.
[28]
George Sutton, though not the proprietor of the shop, was the sole manager of its concerns. His master was engaged in another branch of business; and, knowing his clerk to be perfectly trustworthy, he confided the affairs of the shop entirely to him. Thus trusted, young Sutton felt the obligation to be very exact in the performance of his duties. His first determination was to expose the affair to his principal; but he had one of the kindest hearts in the world; he really loved poor little Dicky; and, believing him innocent, he could not bear to expose him to the bad opinion of a stranger; he therefore paid the half dollar out of his own pocket, and said not a word to anybody on the subject.
Richard returned home with his heart full. He passed without notice all the gay parade of “Independence” -- and there was enough of it to satisfy patriots and charm boys -- and entered his mother’s humble dwelling; and there he would probably have yielded to the inquiries she would naturally have made into the cause of the disturbance--for what boy of nine years could withstand the sympathy of a tender mother--but Mrs. Shepard was in no state to observe his agitation. She had been seized that morning with pains and agues, which were, as she well knew, the prelude to violent sickness.
Richard was instantly despatched for a physician, who came, but could not avert a terrible fever, which raged for four weeks, and then left this afflicted woman in a hopeless consumption.
Mrs. Aikin had removed the previous spring to the country; but, before her departure, she had ta-
[29]
ken care to recommend Mrs. Shepard to some of her friends, who were humane and active in their charities, and Mrs. Shepard’s wants were soon known and relieved, as far as benevolence could relieve them. Mrs. Aikin was informed of her humble friend’s situation, and she wrote her a kind letter, enclosing some money, and telling her to spare herself all anxiety about her little girl, for she would take her into her own family, and provide for her so long as she should want a home. Thus relieved from solicitude concerning her youngest child, all Mrs. Shepard’s anxiety centred in Richard. He was too young to be apprenticed to a trade and there was no person whom Mrs. Shepard had the right or the courage to ask to provide for him in the mean time.
Our young readers are, we trust, quite inexperienced in the sorrows of life: when they learn them, as learn them they must, may they have that spirit in which they can be borne--even the sorest of them--poverty, sickness, and death.
Better than many a long sermon on resignation and trust in the goodness of God--far better would it be if we could present to the mind’s eye the humble apartment of this Christian woman, when, conscious of the fast approach of death, and that this was perhaps her last opportunity of prayer with her children, she had, in the energy of her feeling, raised her weak and wasted form from the pillows which supported her. Richard and little Mary knelt by her bedside; she held their hands in hers; her raised eye gleamed brightly, for
“The immortal ray
is seen more clearly through the shrine’s decay;”
[30]
and, making a last effort, she uttered in a low but perfectly distinct voice, “My father in heaven, to thee I commit these little ones.” She paused, and closed her eyes--once more she opened them, smiled on her children with an expression of ineffable peace, and murmured in a low whisper, “God will provide;” her face was then slightly convulsed, she let go of their hands, and sunk back on the pillow.
The physician had stood unobserved in the door way; he now moved towards the bed, and exclaimed involuntarily, “She is gone!” Poor little Richard had never seen death before, but he knew what it all meant; he locked his arms around his mother’s neck, and sobbed out, “Mother--mother--mother!” till he could speak no longer; and his little sister, crying because her brother cried, repeated again and again, “Mother will speak to you when she wakes up, Dicky-- do stop crying.”
But we must pass over this scene and the two sad days that followed. The little girl was removed to the house of a friend of Mrs. Aikin, and was sent to that lady by the first conveyance that offered; and, without Richard’s knowledge, arrangements had been made for his being transferred to the almshouse immediately after the funeral.
There were but few persons who followed the remains of Mrs. Shepard to the grave; but if the hearts of those few had been laid open; it would have been seen that there was more honour paid to her humble, unquestionable virtue (if human esteem confers honour), than is rendered by many a sweeping procession, that attracts the eyes of multitudes with its unseemly parade. Among these
[31]
few followers was Frank Hardy; since the 4th of July he had never spoken with his little friend. He had some times seen him in the street; but conscience, that most uncomfortable companion to the guilty, conscience had led him to avoid Richard. Hardy had accidentally heard of Mrs. Shepard’s death, and his good feeling prevailing over every other, he went to the funeral and returned from the grave to the house, anxious to know how Richard was to be provided for. The physician and the clergyman also went home with the child; and, after consoling them as well as they are able, they told him that he was to go to the almshouse for the present.
“To the almshouse!” he exclaimed. “Oh, don’t take me to the almshouse.”
“But where will you go, Dicky?” asked the doctor.
“I have nowhere to go,” replied the child; “I will stay here; I an’t afraid to stay alone in mother’s room.”
“You cannot stay here, my poor boy; this room is not yours, you know; what objection have you to the almshouse?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I hate the almshouse. Everybody hates the almshouse;” and the poor little fellow turned from his friends, laid his head on his mother’s pillow, and wept bitterly. Frank Hardy stood aside, listening with concern to every word that was uttered; he now drew near to Richard and whispered “Why don’t you go, Dicky, and speak to Mr. George Sutton? He was always a friend to you.”
“He is not my friend now,” replied Richard, in
[32]
a voice which, though scarcely audible, reached Frank’s heart.
“What makes you think so, Dick?” asked Frank, so agitated that he hardly knew what he said. Richard raised his head from the pillow, and fixed his eye on Frank. “Frank,” he said, “Mr. George thinks that it was I that stole the half dollar from him last Independence.”
These few words revealed the whole state of case to Frank. He perceived that Richard had been suspected, and had voluntarily, magnanimously borne suspicion rather than betray him; his tenderest feelings had been awakened by the desolate condition of the afflicted child; and he now looked at him a sentiment of awe, for his little crooked body really seemed to him to contain a celestial spirit. “Oh, Dicky! You have been too good to me,” he exclaimed; and, unable to endure or repress his feelings, he ran out of the house.
The gentlemen told Richard that they could wait no longer for him, and he prepared to accompany them; but when he looked round upon his home for the last time, it seemed as if his heart would burst. If our young friends will consider what it is they love in their homes, they will not wonder at Richard’s grief. It surely is not a great house nor fine furniture; but it is the voice of kindness, and the unwearying, unchanging love of parents; the sports and caresses of brothers and sisters, and all the endearments that make a happy home a picture of Heaven. The doctor soothed, the clergyman wiped Richard’s eyes; and at last, succeeding in quieting him,
[33]
they led him between them to the almshouse, and, after many kind expressions of good-will, they left him there. The poor child slunk away into the corner of the large desolate apartment into which he had been conducted; he looked around upon the sullen, discontented faces of the strange throng that filled it, each taking his or her evening meal at a solitary board; he thought of the nice little cherry table at which he had been accustomed to participate the simple meal with his mother and sister, their hearts filled with thankfulness and cheerfulness, and their faces lit up with smiles. He did not, perhaps, institute precisely the comparison we have made, but it was the change--the change--that struck upon his heart. “I can’t--I won’t stay here,” he said to himself; “I had rather starve in the street than stay here.” Some supper was offered to him, but he declined it; and a little time after he stole unobserved into the passage, groped his way into the yard, run into the street, and was out of sight long before he was missed.
He knew not whither to bend his steps; scarcely knew where he was, till, looking up, he perceived that he was close to George Sutton’s shop; the recollection of the young man’s former kindness darted a ray of hope upon his darkened mind. It was perhaps more his pressing need of pity than any defined expectation of relief that made him ascend the steps; but there his heart failed him, and he sat down. He was wearied and exhausted; it was a frosty night early in November, and he was shivering with the cold. He felt utterly forsaken. He looked up to Heaven; the moon
[34]
was shining brightly; he thought of his mother; he remembered that he had seen her, when in the deepest distress, kneel down and pray to God, and rise up again comforted. He recollected her last words, “God will provide;” and he repeated the Lord’s prayer. He who feedeth the young ravens when they cry unto him, heard and answered the helpless child. Richard had scarcely said “Amen” when he was startled by the opening of the shop-door, and, rising on his feet, he saw Frank Hardy coming out of the shop.
“Oh Dicky, is that you?” he exclaimed. “Come in, come in; I have told everything to Mr. George, and he likes you better than ever, now; and I am sure,” he added, putting his arm around Richard’s neck, “I am sure I love you better than all the world besides.”
Richard was astounded; he knew not what to say, but he followed Frank into the shop. “Is that you, my good boy Dicky?” exclaimed George Sutton at the first glimpse of him; and, grasping his hand, he said,” you are an honest boy and a noble boy, Dick, and I always believed you were, in spite of appearances; but now Frank has made all clear, and, if he had known everything, he would have done you justice long before this, Dicky: reparation wipes out offences, and I’m sure you will forgive and forget all, especially when you see how Frank repents the past; bitterer tears has he shed than any that have dropped from your eyes, my poor boy.”
“That I have, indeed,” said Frank; “and, till this evening, I have never had one such real happy hour since Independence as I had before; but
[35]
I’m sure, Dicky, I never had a thought of the trouble I had brought you into. I have read on many a tombstone ‘an honest man’s the noblest work of God;’ but, for my part, I think an honest boy and such a little boy as you, Dick, that will bear to be suspected rather than expose a friend, is something nobler still.”
How long Frank would have run on thus, we know not, for happiness is very talkative; but he was interrupted by Richard. The sudden change from the outcast feeling with which he had sat on the door-step, from the solitude and the stillness of the night, to the lighted shop, friendly voices, and cheerful looks, overpowered him with a confused sense of happiness; he burst into tears; “I don’t know what it is makes me cry now,” said he, “for I feel very glad.”
“You have been tried too much to-day, Dicky,” replied George Sutton. “Sit here by the fire with Frank, while I go and bring you some supper; and then you shall go to bed, in the little back room, and in the morning we will see what can be done. I am not afraid,” he continued, as he opened the shop-door, “for all that has come and gone, to leave you and Frank in the shop together.”
When his kind friend returned, Richard ate his supper heartily; and when he snugged down in bed alongside of George Sutton, he thought again of his mother’s last words, and fell asleep repeating to himself “God will provide.”
_____
[36]
Eighteen months subsequent to the events we have related, Mrs. Aikin paid a visit to the place of her former residence. One of her first inquiries was for Richard Shepard. She was informed that she might hear of him at the store of George Sutton. She immediately went there, and found Mr. Sutton established in a well-furnished store of his own. As soon as she had introduced herself and made known her errand, Sutton called “Dicky;” and Richard came waddling into the shop as fast as his little legs could bring him, and delighted beyond expression at the sound of Mrs. Aikin’s voice. His eyes glistened, and his face brightened and smiled all over. After she had made many inquiries of him, had drawn from him a particular account of his mother’s last hours, and had told him that, with Mr. Sutton’s permission, she should take him into the country to pass a little time with his sister, she dismissed him.
When he was gone she inquired of Mr. Sutton if he continued as good a child as he had been.
“As good, ma’am? There can be no better; he is worth his weight in gold to me. He understands the shop business almost as well as I do myself; and he is so good-natured and obliging, and has such pleasant ways, and is, withal, such a droll-looking little chap, that he brings many a customer to the store.”
Mrs. Aikin thought, as she looked in Sutton’s honest, frank, and benevolent face, that he did not stand much in need of aid to attract good-will to the shop. “I understand,” she said “ of Richard’s account of himself, that he has been with you ever since his mother’s death. I do not quite see
[37]
how you could provide for him all that time; for I think you did not begin for yourself till last Spring.”
“I did not, ma’am; and I found it difficult to save enough out of my small wages to pay the boy’s board, though I got him boarded for a trifle. But I did make it out, without any miracle; it was only working a little harder and faring a little harder, and you know that is nothing, ma’am, after it is past.”
“But how,” asked Mrs. Aikin, “could you, in such circumstances, think of assuming such an expense?”
Sutton seemed for a moment greatly embarrassed by this question. He blushed deeply, and his eyes filled with tears. “I could not help it, ma’am,” he replied; “when I was five years old, my parents died, and left me, as I may say, on the street. Some kind people took me in, brought me up, and provided for me; and when this poor little motherless child came to me, I seemed to hear a voice saying, ‘Remember what was done for thee; go thou and do likewise.’”
_____
This is the real instance of that efficient gratitude which makes a favour “go round,” alluded to in the beginning of our story. It is neither exaggerated nor embellished by fiction; and we hope we have not misjudged in deeming it a fact worthy of being rescued from the oblivion that is too apt to pass upon the good as upon the bad actions of men.
One word more, and this humble tale is finish--
[38]
ed. Frank Hardy reaped all the benefit that is to be derived from virtuous associates. The friendly counsel of Sutton induced him to fix himself in a regular employment, and his subsequent upright conduct fully expiated his single offence. He never ceased to feel and manifest affection and gratitude to Richard; and he has been heard to say, that he was sure, if Solomon had known Dicky, he would have pronounced that, instead of four, “there be five things upon the earth which are little, but they are exceeding wise.”
We scarcely need add, that Richard was allowed the gratification of a visit to his sister; but our readers may have some pleasure in being told, that when the brother and sister again parted, Mrs. Aikin presented each of them a breastpin containing their mother’s hair, and on their reverses was inscribed, “God will provide.”
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 Deformed Boy
Subject
The topic of the resource
Charity, virtue, and honesty.
Description
An account of the resource
A poor young boy, whose legs have been affected by rickets, attracts the attention and charity of kind friends due to his good humor and virtue.
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
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<em>Stories for Young Persons,</em> pp. 9-38.
Publisher
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New York: Harper & Brothers
Date
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1840
Contributor
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Angie Lydon, Michael Nicosa, Cyntheara Tham, L. Damon Bach, D. Gussman
Relation
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Originally published as <em>The Deformed Boy. </em>By the author of "Redwood," &c. Brookfield: E. and G. Merriam Printers, 1826. <br />Reprinted as <em>The Deformed Boy.</em> By the author of "Redwood." Springfield: Merriam, Little & Co, 1831.<br />Collected in Stories for Young Persons, 1840, 9-38, 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.
Language
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English
Type
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Document
1840
4th of July
abandonment
Aeolus
Aladdin's lamp
almshouse
Apollo
benevolence
Benjamin Franklin
boyhood
charity
Christianity
Consumption
Cotton Mather
deathbed
deformity
fairy
Fortunatus' cap
funeral
gender roles
girls-work
God
gratitude
H. Gally Knight
Honesty
Independence Day
intemperance
juvenile literature
knitting
laudanum
literacy
Magnalia Christi Americana
marriage
Midas
Mothers
orphans
Ovid
philosopher's stone
poverty
prayer
Proverbs 30:24
Psalm 103
public assistance
public education
rickets
self reliance
sewing
shame
shopkeeper
sons
star-spangled banner
Stories for Young Persons
tears
virtue
widows
-
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c741cdc6bdbc9b7e616932a31ecb3897
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
Any textual data included in the document.
SKEPTICISM.
_____
"Mother," said little Frank D____, with an unusually anxious expression on his smooth round face, "I wish you would tell me what is the meaning of skeptical. I heard father say last evening, he wished Uncle Henry was not so skeptical; he thought it was a great misfortune. I know skeptic means one who does not believe in the Christian religion; but I know uncle does, so it can't be anything like that: so what does it mean, mother?”
"In the first place, my dear Frank, you are not quite accurate in your definition of a skeptic; you have fallen into a common error. Skepticism merely means doubt, and not actual unbelief. Persons are called skeptics who really disbelieve the Christian religion, and those are often called unbelievers who have not quite arrived at that unhappy point, but are in the distressing state of doubt—skepticism."
"Oh, then, I guess I know what father meant, because Uncle Henry never believes anything. Yesterday, when I told him I had been up every morning this winter before seven, he said, 'Are you sure of that, my boy?' 'Yes, sir,' said I, 'for I always look at the clock the moment I am dressed.' Then he turned right round to father, and asked him how many times he supposed I had been up this winter before eight o'clock; and father told
[p. 92]
him he might rely on my statement, for I was an accurate boy. And then, when Susan came in, he turned right round to her, and asked her if I was an early riser! And so he always does; he asks half a dozen people, and finally don't believe any more than when he began. I think father was quite right; it is a misfortune to be so skeptical."
"It is so, Frank; and I believe it is better to be sometimes deluded, sometimes deceived, and often disappointed, than to be always doubting. Faith in God is the first and greatest blessing and support in life; next to this is faith in man. By this I mean, my dear boy, faith in man's capacity to do and to suffer; reliance on the possible attainments of our fellow-creatures; trust in their truth, goodness, and affection. But, my dear Frank, I'm going on a little ahead of your understanding and years; so I will come back, and tell you there is a kind of skepticism to which young people and children are very much addicted."
"Pray, mother, what is that?" "Do you remember that last fall, when your cousin Anne was staying with us, your father and I tried to convince her that her low spirits, and constant headaches, and cold feet and hands, and constant shivering, were owing to her neglect of exercise?"
"Oh yes, I remember how you used to talk to her, and how she used to sit there in the rocking-chair in the corner with a shawl on, and her feet up on the stove, and never stir out with the rest of the girls."
“No; she said she did not believe in exercise; so she went on all winter till she got a severe ill--
[p. 93]
ness, and that cured her of her skepticism; now she believes, and takes regular exercise, and is perfectly well."
"Well, she got pretty well punished for her skepticism, mother."
"Yes, Frank; and you may rest assured that all such skepticism will be punished sooner or later."
"Do you remember, when John was at home from college how he used to lie on the divan all day and read? He was told over and over again that he was injuring his eyes. He was skeptical, and went on reading in the same way. Now he is obliged to give up study because his eyes are weak."
"Oh, mother, how could he do so?"
"How could he, Frank? I think I know a little boy whom his mother has found nailed down to his Arabian Nights till the daylight was quite gone; and when he was pretty sharply reproved, he would answer, ‘I don't believe it hurts my eyes at all.'"
"Oh, mother, I'll not do so again; I'll not be skeptical."
"How often have your father and I told Lawton West, that, unless he pays more regard to accuracy and truth, we can place no confidence in him? He says that of all things on earth he desires our confidence, and yet he is just as careless of the truth as ever. Is not Lawton skeptical?"
“I don't see that, mother; Lawton keeps on lying for ever; but I don't see how it is because he is skeptical."
"If, Frank, he believed what we say—if he actually realized as we do when we heartily believe
[p. 94]
that we could never place confidence in him, he would make an effort to reform. How do you think it is with Sarah? I tell her over and over again that she makes me most uncomfortable by her disorderly habits. She says, ‘Oh, aunt, I would not make you uncomfortable for the world;' and the next hour her shawl is on the floor, and her bonnet and gloves nowhere to be found. I tell Eliza, that if she eats candies and sweetmeats she will injure her teeth. She says directly she don't believe they hurt the teeth. Miss Smith complained to me the other day that she had a constant headache. I begged her to leave off drinking coffee. 'Oh, she did not believe,' she said, 'that coffee hurt her.' Mrs. Allen told me her little girl was getting very pale and thin. I advised her not to keep her so many hours in school. 'Oh,' she replied, ' I don't believe Mary will ever hurt herself with study.'"
"Seems to me, mother, everybody that you know is skeptical.”
"The truth is, my dear boy, persons are not disposed to believe when their belief must be followed by a change of conduct—by the conquest of an obstinate fault, a bad habit, or a strong appetite. Those are best and happiest who are most ready to believe in those who have more wisdom and experience than themselves, and who will act in conformity to their belief. First faith, and then works, Frank."
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
Skepticism
Subject
The topic of the resource
Skepticism vs. unbelief, faith vs. works.
Description
An account of the resource
A young boy has a conversation with his mother in order to understand the meaning of skepticism.
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
Stories for Young Persons, pp. 91-94.
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
1840
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Collected in Stories for Young Persons, 1840, pp. 91-94, 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.
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 1789-1867, and Cairns Collection of American Women Writers. Stories for Young Persons ... New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840. HathiTrust Digital Library https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007092366 Accessed 11 July 2019.
Format
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Document
Language
A language of the resource
English
1840
children
exercise
eyesight
Faith
juvenile literature
Mothers
reading
skepticism
sons
Stories for Young Persons
unbelief
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/806e9c78adc1c6a6a670877ecd9f6ac6.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Uvzg3B2CGLrjYjFFahjZHtURya-U13Rozq52gtuyUhLldKVQSZKvG9pRwVNGeNzHnL1sB7v9vlVcJHJI8N4nWnpR8vigR6toMkuBgEtGO3vASJyK5-zugx9dQQFIgcsRzhCqwHEFErbtjtZX3bOkH%7ESKMhD8NGXxDpjpLXyRng3l1G2gX3TFeuFNMVlHFJ4sEHVL8fssLRImpCk4MFrhsiWBd-4-WhEEV8sJV8TFHMnLFfV3b8KEiK4oDgaYLaSqoomufQSkGLcFuTxu-5xwi2W1seaXdx6wty1rwynMEn3x07ZwlUauUGgoMu1YcgOpnUWWtqQcGfuMk1QKUG8TrQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
10a95d6b33d1568c46862dcefeaee848
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
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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Marietza.
_____
Some of you, my dear girls, remember that, in November, 1837, our secluded home was visited by a stranger whom all the civilized world delight to honour, and that you soon found the honour, reverence, and observance due to the celebrated writer merged in your love for the woman.
You remember the story of the Greek girl Marietza which she told us one happy evening when you were permitted to gather round her in the little parlour. We can recall her sweet voice, the graces of her language, and the varying expression of her face while she related the startling incidents of the young girl's life, and recalled the vivid interest that a personal knowledge of her had excited.
These pleasant recollections will invest the story with a charm to you, which it cannot possess for my other readers, for whom the picture must be transferred from a painter's to a common light. But, as there are some pictures worth looking at in any light, I trust to my true and unadorned story to fix attention for a few moments.
You do not remember, my young readers, but you may have heard of the bloody war which the oppressed Greeks waged for their independence against their cruel masters the Turks. It was a long time before the Grecian island of
[53]
Scio took any part in the contest. The Turkish dominion was less felt there than in Greece. The island, as you will perceive if you look at your maps, lies almost under the shadow of the Asiatic coast. It has a rich soil, and in its happy days was so highly cultivated, so loaded with the fruits and flowers of that fortunate clime, that it is described as filled with gardens. There was a higher cultivation there, too, than that of the earth. There were schools and colleges, richly endowed, where the people of both sexes were instructed in the sciences, and in the accomplishments of the most civilized parts of Europe. The Sciots had an extensive commerce. They had resident merchants in the great commercial cities of Europe. They carried on nearly all the trade between Greece and the Turkish cities of Smyrna and Constantinople. Their wealth was deposited in these cities, as we may say, in the very coffers of the Turks; they had, therefore, much more to hazard by a war than their compatriots. Their civil government was in the hands of elders, who adminis- tered it mildly and prudently. Prudence is the virtue (par excellence) of elders. They do not rashly risk the security, prosperity, and ease of peace, for the present glory, and distant and doubtful advantages of war. But if a war can ever be approved by Heaven, it was the war waged by the Greeks for religion and liberty. The patriot Sciots could not very long remain passive spectators of the struggles of their countrymen; nor did they long wait before the aggressions of their masters gave them occasion and impulse.
In May, 1821, a small squadron of Ipsariots (pa-
[54]
triot Greeks) appeared off their coast. The aga, or military governor, immediately resorted to measures that had already been taken at other Greek islands of the Archipelago. He seized forty elders and bishops, and shut them up in the castle as hostages for the good conduct of the people.
A large number of troops was brought from the neighbouring coast of Asia Minor, and garrisoned in the island, and the inhabitants were subjected to their excesses and lawless depredations. Assassinations were frequent; the wealthy inhabitants were plundered on every side, till, stung to madness, there was an attempt made to rouse the people to resistance. But hard it was themselves to light the fire that was to consume their pleasant homes and sweep over their garden-lands, and they were still hesitating, when two adventurers, Burnia and Logotheti, from Samos landed on Scio with a small band of followers. The prudent elders made every effort to prevent the peasantry joining them. The aga took his measures—tyrants never hesitate—and, selecting his victims from the best families, he doubled the number of hostages. The aga expected aid from the Continent. The Sciots hoped the Greek fleet would come to their aid, but they hoped in vain. On the 22d of April a Turkish fleet of fifty sail anchored in the bay, and immediately began to bombard the town. The Sciots were deserted by their Samian friends, who seemed to have come among them, as the falcon returns to his species, to lure them into the hands of their enemies.
Scio became the scene of indescribable horrors. Its inhabitants, men, women, and children, were all
[55]
massacred. The houses were plundered and then burned, not one left standing excepting those belonging to the foreign consuls.
Three days passed before the Turks left the city to penetrate into the recesses of the island. The following passage is from an eyewitness who escaped. He wrote to his friend, "Oh God! what a spectacle did Scio present on this memorable occasion! On whatever side I cast my eyes, nothing but pillage, murder, and conflagration appeared. While some were occupied in plundering the villas of rich merchants, and others in setting fire to the villages, the air was rent with the mingled groans of men, women, and children who were falling under the swords and daggers of the infidels. The only exception made during the massacre was in favour of young women and boys, who were preserved to be afterward sold as slaves. Many of these young women, whose husbands had been butchered, were running to and fro frantic, with torn garments and dishevelled hair, pressing their trembling infants to their breasts, and seeking death as a relief from the fate that awaited them."
My dear girls, when you read such details, horrible but not exaggerated, of the miseries that have been suffered in our days, do you realize them? I believe not. The people are thousands of miles removed from you. They speak a foreign language. Their religion is not your religion; their customs and manners differ from yours. But all human beings are essentially alike; they have the same passions, affections, and wants, and their resemblance increases as they approach the same grade in civilization. The Sciots were an in-
[56]
structed and accomplished people. They were Christians. And if in imagination you will transfer the scenes above described to your own town and villages—to your own happy homes, and, if you can, picture to yourselves your fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, the subjects of these cruelties, your sympathies, I think, will no longer sleep!
But I am aware that the picture of a famishing Jewish mother, wandering with her child away from her fallen city, would affect you more than a crowded canvass, which should represent all the multitude of the Jews realizing the curses that had been denounced upon them, so I fancy that the story of Marietza will interest you more than the most minute history of the massacre at Scio.
Perhaps you consider yourselves already taken in by being compelled to read this prefatory bit of history, as the customers of the Yankee pedlar were, who, if they purchased one of his cheeses, were compelled to take also one of his grindstones. Pardon me—I will go to my story without farther delay. Ten days were given to slaughter. Gardeners and others, who had been seized and carried on board the Turkish ships, on the supposition that they could reveal hidden treasures, were, to the number of 500, hung! This was the signal for the execution of the hostages in the citadel. Many young women, with their children, had fled to the mountains and hidden themselves in caves, where numbers died of terror and hunger, and others lived on fearing a worse destiny. Among these was a noble Grecian lady, the mother of Marietza. Her husband and three sons had been massacred
[57]
before her eyes; and with the two remaining children, Marietza and a boy, she had, almost by miracle, escaped, and hid herself and them in a cave in the mountains. There they were discovered and dragged forth by the hair of their head. They hoped and prayed for death, but death was no longer the order of the day. They were reserved for market, put on board a Turkish ship, and conveyed to Alexandrea.*[1] They were exhorted and commanded by the man who called himself their owner to renounce their religion. They endured all sorts of petty persecution; but, wretched, wearied, weak, and young as they were, they remained steadfast.
The Greek religion is a modification of the
[58]
Roman Catholic, and does not essentially vary from it. It is difficult for you, my dear girls, to conceive the detestation that an oppressed people feel for the religion of their oppressors; but, 1 hope, not equally difficult to imagine the clinging you would feel to the religion that had made you patient in such tribulations as our poor Greek mother and her children had endured. They were still very young; Marietza, I think, about twelve, her brother a year older: and their mother, fearing they might yield to the threats or persuasions of their Turkish master, continually exhorted them to steadfastness. She soon had the saddest proof that her fears were groundless. She was standing with her children in the balcony of a house near the river, and overlooking it. Their Turkish tyrant was insisting that her boy should give some sign of faith in the Prophet. The boy refused; and, with all the fervour of his Greek nature, expressed his hatred of Mohammed, his faith, and his followers. The Turk struck him. The boy was maddened; and, springing to the ground, he ran to the river. Whether he intended to drown himself, or whether he merely obeyed an impulse to escape anywhere from the presence of the Turk, no one could tell; for, while his head was still above water, the Turk drew a pistol from his belt and shot him through the brain. The mother and sister saw this, and lived; and I have no doubt that, after the first horror was past, they blessed God the boy had escaped from the evils that still impended over them.
The sister of the Pacha of Egypt was then at Alexandrea. She was a Mohammedan fanatic, so
[59]
sincerely devoted to her religion that she bought captives to convert them to the Mohammedan faith. The master of Marietza, hoping the zealous lady would set a due value on the possibility of offering to the Prophet two such beautiful converts (for the mother was still handsome, and Marietza lovely as an Houri), took them to the princess's apartments. They had entered the court, but there was some delay in getting admission. While they stood on the steps, the shrinking, frightened girl leaning on her mother, who could have recognised in her drooping figure the same being who, but a few weeks before, was gayest among the gay girls of Scio, dancing on the sea-beach, by the moonlight and by the music of rustic pipes, the Romaika, their classic national dance? Who could imagine this figure, that looked now pale and fixed as if it were cut in stone, linked with other young and graceful forms, chasing in the evolutions of this poetic dance the retreating wave, boldly following it till it turned, then, as it chased her back, dashing off the foam from her winged feet? Yet this had been, and, in spite of Marietza's present despair, something very like it was again to be.
After a tedious waiting they were led to a small antechamber, where persons having business with the princess were passing and repassing. Some Greeks, who had been that morning bastinadoed for refusing to abjure their religion, were stretched on the floor writhing with pain. A very old man beckoned to Marietza. She threw aside her veil, and leaned respectfully towards him. "Do not think, my poor child," said he, " that you can suffer stripes as well as bonds. I am old, and death is
[60]
better for me than life ; and yet, when I felt the bastinado to-day, I bit my tongue through to save myself from saying, as they bade me, that their cursed Mohammed was the prophet of God. Confess him now, my poor child, and retract when you can. You are young—you will have time for repentance —time to hope for God's forgiveness."
"No, father, no," replied Marietza; "my mother has told me there is double guilt in sinning because you know God forgives sin! No; mother says we must be baptized with Christ's baptism—"
"Poor child, you are so young—you cannot endure it."
"I can, if it be God's will. See here; I have been trying what I can endure;" and she pushed up her muslin sleeve, and showed the old man where, while she had been standing there, she had, to prove her fortitude, and without shrinking, pinched her arm black. The old man uttered an exclamation of mingled pity and admiration. "Besides, it would be a double shame for me to turn infidel," she added, "for my name is Marietza."*[2]
"A curse upon ye, then !" said a brutal old Turk, spitting in her face in token of the hatred he bore her name. Another Turk, an old man too (there are good Samaritans in all nations), extended to her an embroidered handkerchief drenched in a delicious perfume. She wiped away the defilement, and the blood gushed from her heart to her cheek, and she raised her eyes, glowing with a silent prayer, as she remembered that her Saviour was spit upon.
[61]
At this moment,, when she looked as beautiful as one of Raphael's saints, two young Englishmen came from the audience-room. They stopped, riveted to the spot by Marietza's beauty. Her mother advanced and drew down her veil, and directly after their master signed to them to follow him to the presence of the princess. She was evidently so much struck with the extreme beauty of Marietza, that the cupidity of the Turk was excited, and he asked for her double the price he had intended. The princess refused it. He abated, but still insisted on extravagant terms; and at last, the princess, quite disgusted, told him that she would have nothing more to say to him; and, like many a grasping trader, bitterly repenting his avarice, he withdrew. The hearts of our poor captives sunk as they turned away. They had hoped to escape from the hateful presence of the murderer of their son and brother, and there had seemed something like escape from despair—something bordering on protection, in passing into the hands of one of their own sex.
The two young Englishmen were awaiting their return, and followed them at a respectful distance. Soon after they sought an interview with their Turkish master, and eagerly inquired of him the names, rank, and former condition of his captives. They ascertained that he had failed in his treaty with the princess; and also that, in consequence of this disappointment, he was prepared to lower his terms. The young friends were filled with pity for the captives, no doubt augmented by Marietza's beauty; for it must be confessed that beauty is a wonderful
[62]
inciter of a young man's compassion. One of the young men, Reginald Butler,*[3] was the son, as those who heard the story will remember, of a friend of the lady who told it to us. He was an only son, most beloved, and most worthy of love. His mother, a widow in easy circumstances, was residing with her daughters in England, while he was seeking (and finding, too) his fortune abroad. He was not, however, rich enough to pay the money demanded for the redemption of the captives; but he would not leave them in the Turk's hands, and he and his friend agreed to pay equal portions of the purchase-money. They did so, and Marietza and her mother were transferred to them. My dear young friends, you know so little of the evil in the world, that I trust you will hardly understand me when I say that Butler's associate looked on Marietza with too bold an eye; and Butler, fearing that some undue advantage might be taken of her helpless and dependant position, paid to his partner his portion of the purchase-money, and removed the mother and daughter to a little country-house in the neighbourhood of Alexandrea, where he provided them with every comfort and indulgence within his power to procure for them.
They had no common language in which they could hold communication; and these poor females, believing that they had only changed owners, were apprehending every possible, and even impossible evil. The terrors they had suffered, the starvation they had endured, and, more than all, the unnatu-
[63]
ral disruption of their dearest ties, had impaired their health and affected their imaginations, so that they were on the brink of insanity, and looking on every side for new dangers and miseries. Butler said that Marietza was so emaciated, that he sometimes thought, when he looked at her, she might disappear from his sight like the White Lady of Avenel. He bought a horse for her to ride, in the hope that the exercise and the fresh air would give new impulse to her young life; but she afterward said that, whenever he took her out, she thought he was going to conduct her to some wild place to murder her! He provided every delicacy the market afforded, and bought her the most delicious fruits; but poor Marietza for a long while rejected everything, tormented with the imagination that he was fatting her to kill her!
By degrees, both mother and daughter truly interpreted the language of his generosity and most assiduous kindness, and then there was no limit to their gratitude. The mother, content and grateful for the present, became in some good degree resigned to her calamities; and Marietza, with the elasticity of girlhood, returned to health, and all the brightness of health and hope as soon as she was relieved from the pressure of her fears. Then she rode and ate, and became as fat and as blooming as her benefactor desired. You perhaps know that in warm climates the person is earlier developed and the physical system sooner matured than in our cold land. At twelve Marietta had the attractive graces of a girl of sixteen. Her benefactor's benevolence was transmuted to love. He wrote to his mother in
[64]
England all the particulars of Marietza's story, confessed the state of his heart, and proposed to her to receive Marietza under her protection, and to give her an education fitting the wife of her son.
The project might have struck some elderly ladies as romantic, but Mrs. Butler sympathized perfectly with her son. She had entire confidence in the truth and steadfastness of his affections. She would have preferred, she said, that he would have married one of his own countrywomen; but, for the world, she would not thwart the wishes of one who had fulfilled all her wishes. Thrice blessed, my dear girls, is the mutual confidence of parents and children!
I do not know how Butler reconciled Marietza's mother to parting with her child; but you all know that mothers will make any personal sacrifice for the advantage of their children; and probably the hearts of both mother and child were so overflowing with gratitude to their benefactor, that they would have acquiesced in whatever he proposed, even their parting. Parted they were.
Marietza went to England, where she was received into Butler's family as if she had a natural claim to their love. She was at once daughter and sister. Her exquisite beauty, set off by her Greek costume and Oriental grace, riveted every eye; her enthusiasm, affectionateness, buoyancy of spirit, and the free and animated manner natural to her people—which no misfortunes could long depress, or conventionalism restrain, or even an English atmosphere damp—made her a perpetual spring of delight to every circle she entered. She was courted and flattered on every side. Men
[65]
richer, handsomer, and of higher rank than Reginald Butler were devoted to her; but her affections never for a moment wavered from him.
Fashion robbed her of some of her outward graces, for they took her to Paris, and submitted her to the levelling processes of dressmakers, milliners, and hairdressers; but the world did not invade her heart.
At the expiration of four or five years Butler came to England to claim his bride. His friends dreaded the meeting. He had suffered from a protracted illness. His face was sallow and furrowed, and he had become, not absolutely bald, but so near it as to look a score of years older than when Marietza parted from him.
"Do I not look to you shockingly changed, Marietza?" he asked, as soon as the first emotions of meeting were over. "Shockingly! No, not shockingly changed, Reginald. Your heart is not changed—nor is mine."
These words, uttered with all her characteristic fervour, satisfied her lover; and he was not in the least disturbed when she said, with a mischievous curl of her beautiful lips, "I have danced in London with prettier men than you, Reginald!"
Marietza betrayed an Oriental love of magnificence when the arrangements for the wedding were making. The Butlers were a quiet people, who disliked display and notoriety; but they yielded in this, as in everything, to Marietza. She would have the church bells rung, and a procession of carriages, as in her own country. Her lover lavished the most costly bridal gifts upon her, and she showed her trousseau to my friend with the sort
[66]
of ecstatic pleasure that a child has with its holyday gifts. She clapped her hands, and skipped over chairs and sofas. Immediately after their marriage they returned to reside in Alexandrea.
And here, if I had invented the story, I should leave it; for the wedding is the legitimate stopping- place in a tale, though in life but the beginning of its deepest interests.
Eighteen months after the departure of Butler with his beautiful young bride, his mother received a letter from him, informing her that Marietza had died in his arms with the plague!
This seems to you, my dear girls, a sad conclusion; and sad is always the disruption of happy domestic ties; but remember, it is but a passing sadness. Death is to the good the last of pain, and trial, and disappointment; and to the good, death opens the gates of immortality and felicity.
[Sedgwick’s notes]
* [1] The prisoners were for the most part sold in Smyrna and Constantinople. "On June 19th, an order came to the slave- market for the cessation of the sale; and the circumstances which are believed to have occasioned that order are singular, and purely Oriental. The island of Scio had been granted many years before to one of the sultanas as an appropriation, from which she derived a fixed revenue, and a title of interference in all matters relating to police and internal administration. The present patroness was Asma Sultana, sister of the sultan; and that amiable princess received about 200,000 piastres a year, besides casual presents, from her flourishing little province. When she was informed of its destruction, her indignation was natural and excessive; and it was directed, of course, against Valid, the pacha who had commanded the fort, and the capudan pacha, to whose misconduct she chiefly attributed her misfortune. It was in vain that that officer selected from his captives sixty young and beautiful maidens, whom he presented to the service of her highness. She rejected the sacrifice with disdain, and continued her energetic remonstrances against the injustice and illegality of reducing rajahs to slavery, and exposing them for sale in the public markets. The sultan at length yielded to her eloquence or importunity. A license, the occasion of hourly brutalities, was suppressed; and we have reason to believe that this act of care and unprecedented humanity may be attributed to the influence of a woman."— Waddington's Visit to Greece.
* [2] Marietza is the Greek for Mary, and the name is given in honour of the Virgin.
* [3] We have not given the true name, as that might not be agreeable to him if, by any strange accident, he should ever hear of the publication of his story.
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
Marietza
Subject
The topic of the resource
1822 Greek uprising on the island of Chios, cross-cultural romance.
Description
An account of the resource
A Greek/Chian girl witnesses the destruction of her home/island as a consequence of the 1822 uprising against Turkish domination, and subsequently marries her English protector.
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. 52-66.
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
1840
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Collected in <em>Stories for Young Persons</em>, 1840, 52-66, 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 />Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 1789-1867, and 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 11 July 2019.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Document
Language
A language of the resource
English
1840
Alexandria
captives
Chios
Christians
Constantinople
daughters
Death
Egypt
Englishmen
execution
Faith
girls
Good Samaritan
Greece
Greek Independence
Greek Orthodox
hostages
Houri
infidels
Jews
Juvenile fiction
London
marriage
massacre
Mohammed
Mothers
Muslims
Oriental
Ottoman Empire
Pacha
patriots
plague
Prophet
revolution
Romaika
Roman Catholic
Scios
Sir Walter Scott
Smyrna
sons
Stories for Young Persons
Turks
war
White Lady of Avenel
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1829
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Stories published in 1829.
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THE ELDER SISTER.
_____
‘Lucy loved all that grew upon the ground,
And loveliness in all things living found;
The gilded fly—the fern upon the wall
Were nature’s works, and admirable all.’
‘Yet not so easy was my conquest found,
I met with trouble ere with triumph crown’d.’
Crabbe.
[p. 99]
Mr Walsingham was seated at his family writing desk, absorbed in a literary labor, when Theresa, his eldest daughter, opened his door, advanced eagerly, paused for a moment, arrested by his deeply thoughtful aspect, and again advanced, as, without raising his eye from his paper, he stretched his hand towards her and smiled with that sweet parental smile that indicated the father was never quite merged in the student. ‘I would not have interrupted you, papa,’ said Theresa, ‘but I have something so very important to say to you.’
Mr Walsingham, now the sole parent of a numerous family of children, was as much accustomed as a mother to the communication of the manifold wants, that to the magnifying vision of a child are very important, and affection, and necessity,
[p. 100]
unerring teachers, had taught him the mother’s instinct, to enter completely into his children’s feelings—to stoop to their point of sight. ‘Come in, Theresa,’ he replied to his daughter’s request, ‘you interrupt me no more than the passing stream is interrupted by the shadow of the pretty flower that waves on its brink. What have you so important to say?——a letter! ——from whom?’
‘From dear Mrs Clifford, papa, and such a pressing invitation for me to pass a few days at Bellevue. Mr Walsingham took the letter, but before he had half read it, or at all replied to the eager petition of Theresa’s eyes, half a dozen of the younger children made a sortie from the nursery; as sturdy a little band of remonstrants as ever appeared before any tribunal. ‘Don’t let Theresa go! papa,—you must not let her go!’ they cried with a unanimous voice.
‘Softly, softly, my children—you shall all be heard in turn. Why not let her go, James?’
‘Because, papa, it is impossible for me to get my French lessons ready for Mr Rabbineau if Theresa does not assist me.’
‘Why should not Theresa go, Julia?’
‘Because, papa, my music master is as cross as thunder, when Theresa does not help me with my practising.’
‘Why should not Theresa go, Ellen?’
‘Because, papa, she has not made but just one complete suit for my new doll.’
[p. 101]
‘Why should not Theresa go, Ned?’
‘Because, papa, she has got to new cover my ball.’
‘And you, little Willie, have you any reason why you cannot let sister Theresa go away for a little while?’
‘Yes, indeed, papa,’ replied a bright eyed little cherub, climbing into his sister’s lap. ‘I can’t let her go, because she has done everything for me.’
‘They are unskilful petitioners, Theresa,’ said the father, his delight at the tribute each had involuntarily paid the sweet elder sister gleaming in his moistened eye. ‘Theresa does so much for us all, my dear children,’ he continued, ‘that I believe we must give her the pleasure of a visit to Bellevue.’ Theresa thanked her father warmly, and soon reconciled the minds of the young tribe to her departure, by shifting disappointment for expectation—easy juggling with juvenile subjects.
Theresa Walsingham is the eldest of eight children. At fourteen she met with that irreparable loss, one of the best of mothers. Her father, consulting only her good, and generously sacrificing his own strongest inclinations, sent her away from him for two years, to an institution where her education was successfully conducted. At sixteen she returned home to take the head of his family, and the place of mother, and elder sister, to the infant band. Theresa had no imposing personal qualifications for her official station. We have seen overgrown girls of
[p. 102]
sixteen, with grave aspect, and magisterial air, and solemn voice, and dignified movement, that looked as if, like Eve, they had been born grown up—with nothing of the dew and freshness—and, it may be, imperfection of the morning of life about them. Not so with Theresa. She is not a hair’s breadth above the medium feminine height; she has a child-like air and movement; a tender, flexible voice; a simplicity, impulsiveness, and gaiety of manner, that ‘betrays inexperience at every turn.’ There is nothing about her that demands respect, but every thing that inspires love. She is not a beauty, and yet who can look in that bright sweet face; at that clear laughing eye; that exquisitely compounded, ever varying red and white, that round dimpled cheek; that sweet tempered graceful mouth; that fair, waving, luxuriant hair—who can look at this combination, lighted up with intelligence, tenderly shaded by feeling, without forgetting the rule and art of criticism—feeling that she is beautiful.
Theresa came home to the care of a large family, without any very definite notion of what awaited her. She loved her father devotedly. The memory of her mother was so reverential and vivid, that it operated like her continual presence. But next to the ever-living fountain of love in her affectionate heart, Theresa’s best qualification for her arduous duties was a most happily constituted temper, a perpetual sunshine that brightened every thing around her. This may
[p. 103]
not be merit, but it is a singular physical felicity to have the instrument so perfect that no jar, no shock, no unskilful touch can put it out of tune, or bring forth a discordant note.
Theresa has ardent affections, and strong preferences in matters that all deem essential, but not a particle of sensibility to those trifles at which most persons are disquieted—and disquieted in vain. She cares not whether the day be cloudy or bright; she is unconscious even of the appalling difference between a southwest and northeast wind. Whether she rides or walks, within walking distance, is a matter of no moment to her. She can sit with the windows up or down, as suits the temperament of her companions. She can eat of any dish, cooked in any mode, with a keen relish. She is never discontented alone; never dissatisfied in company; never annoyed by a creaking hinge, or slamming door, or any other trial of delicate nerves. I have seen her sitting in the nursery, reading undisturbed, while her two little sisters, one on each side, were busy with her beautiful tresses, pulling and snarling them into masses which they called curls. The only notice she took of them was to imprint a half-conscious kiss on each warm ruddy cheek as it touched hers. It was a picture of childhood, love, grace, and beauty that a painter should have caught and preserved.
No wonder that her father should have delighted to see her sparkling cup of happiness full to the brim;
[p. 104]
that he took as much pleasure in attending her to Bellevue as she did in going there; that the tear which stole down her cheek at parting, opened a gushing fountain in his heart—a fountain of remembrance and hope.
Theresa was to pass the month of June with Mrs Clifford—the jubilee month of the year. Showers and sunshine were bringing forth the prettiest and freshest decorations of the face of nature; the birds were in full choir; the physical and animal world all alive to activity and joy.
Mrs Clifford lives on a highly cultivated farm, amidst the loveliest inland scenes of our country, fertilised and embellished by a river, that seems set, like a convex mirror, to catch and reflect every visible object. The mistress of this fair domain is a widow, just past the meridian of life, with a large fortune, and an only son. Her affections and interests do not, as is common in similar cases, all flow in the maternal channel, but are diffused like the bounties of heaven. She is the sun of her little system, and her benevolence is sent forth, like rays of light, in every direction, and to every object within her sphere. She is as genuine an amateur of happy human faces as the good Vicar of blessed memory, and she contrives always either to find or make them. She has the rare felicity of delighting her friends, and surrounding herself with grateful and satisfied dependants. She devotes herself to the business of making other people
[p. 105]
happy, with as much ardor as a lawyer pursues his profession. She is no reformer, and yet every body becomes more reasonable and amiable in her atmosphere. She has no single form of virtue, no Procrustes standard; and yet, by a kind of softening and harmonising influence, she assimilates every thing and every body to herself.
Mrs Clifford is never offended, or in the least annoyed by the peculiarities of any individual; on the contrary, she likes to cherish peculiarities, and bring them out, only taking care to place them in a favorable light. In this benevolent art of showing her friends in becoming lights, she excels any person I have ever known. But philanthropic as her temper is, she has her favorites, and first and chiefest among these is Theresa Walsingham. She loves Theresa, she says, for her mother’s sake, who was her friend; and for her father's, who is; and most of all, for her own sweet sake. There was a natural resemblance and accord between Mrs Clifford and her young friend. If Mrs Clifford had been blessed with a daughter, one would have expected to find her just what Theresa is; and not having one, it was natural for her to think of the only mode of supplying the defects of nature’s gifts. She had no definite plan, no formal design in inviting Theresa at this time to Bellevue; but as soon as she was quietly fixed there, she wrote to her son Newton, then an ostensible student at law in New York, to remind him that his absence had
[p. 106]
been already too long; that strawberries were ripe; that Bellevue had put on its company suit, its many colored robe, and that he must come home.
From this moment Theresa heard of nothing but Newton’s expected arrival. If an excursion was planned, or an extraordinary pleasure designed, it was deferred ’till Mr Clifford should come. Every thing was done, or left undone in reference to him. ‘It is dull enough at Bellevue just now, Theresa,’ Mrs Clifford said, and repeated, ‘but when Newton comes he will make it all up to us.’ ‘Yes,’ chimed in half a dozen cordial and sincere voices, ‘Newton is the soul of Bellevue, that he is.’
Fortunate and gifted must be that person who can sustain the excitation of spirits occasioned by the anticipation of an important arrival in the country!
Theresa was one morning rambling alone along the river’s side. She pursued a shaded footpath, ’till she came out upon a fisherman’s hut, on the very verge of the water. A rheumatic, sickly-looking girl was sitting at the door, making artificial flies for angling. They were executed with taste and sufficient skill, and Theresa, after a kind greeting, seated herself, and watched the progress of the girl’s work, and expressed her admiration of her success in no measured terms. Sympathy is the electric touch. Lilly, for that was the girl’s name, Lilly was delighted; never had her fingers worked more dexterously, and never did tongue speak more promptly than her’s replied to
[p. 107]
Theresa’s questions of how she learned her art, where she procured her materials, &c.
Mr Newton Clifford had been at all the trouble of getting an old German to come all the way from New York to teach her. Mr Newton had sent her full twenty dollars worth of materials. Mr Newton, God bless him—and the benediction was not uttered as a phrase of custom, but with an intonation of deep feeling—Mr Newton had done every thing for her father, and herself, and little Ben. ‘Had not Miss ever heard about Mr Newton Clifford and little Ben?’ Theresa confessed she had not; and Lilly dropped her work, and told with such minuteness and emotion, as called forth exclamations and even tears from her pretty auditor—how little Ben, her only brother, a smart daring little fellow, had paddled his father’s boat into the middle of the river; and how, in trying to regain the shore, he had fallen into the stream near the milldam; how Mr Newton, in spite of every body begging him, and screaming to him not to venture in so near the mill-dam—every body but herself—and she looked on and could not speak a word; how he had plunged in and grasped little Ben, but so near the dam, that they both went over together, Mr Newton’s arm fast clasped round Ben; and how he brought him to the shore, though both were like the dead when they got there!
Sensibility and gratitude are always eloquent, and what girl of seventeen would not be moved by a
[p. 108]
generous deed, achieved by a living hero of twenty? Day after day Theresa stole down to the fisherman’s cottage. She assisted Lilly at her pretty work; she even improved on the poor girl’s skill, and under reiterated promises of secrecy, helped her make a beautiful collection of flies, which were designed for a welcoming gift for Mr Newton Clifford.
Theresa’s lively imagination seized all the traits that were presented of Clifford by his partial friends, and combined from them a beautiful portrait, colored with the rich and delicate hues of her own genuine feeling, and pure and elevated taste. Was the portrait a likeness? Was this young dream to be verified by the reality? Was the ‘spirit of her imagination, resembling nothing she had seen in life, to be embodied in the heroic person—Newton Clifford?
Every successive day Clifford was expected, and each day’s mail brought some trivial excuse for his delay. A fortnight of the time allotted for Theresa’s visit had already expired. Mrs Clifl'ord’s habitual serenity was slightly overclouded, and there were moments when Theresa, to a keen observer, would have betrayed the condition of one who waits, the most unenviable state of the human mind.
She took one day her customary stroll to the fisherman’s hut. She had completely won Lilly’s heart; indeed, Theresa played the game of life so well, that she won all hearts.
[p. 109]
Her humble friend testified her affection, as women of every age and condition are apt to do, by setting the crown matrimonial on the brow of her favorite—and in this case it was, in her estimation, the crown of glory.
‘If matches are made in heaven,’ she said, as her busy fingers were plying at her work, ‘I know what is to happen.’
‘What do you mean, Lilly?’ asked Theresa, blushing at the slight disingenuousness of asking what she well knew.
‘Oh, Miss, you and Mr Newton are so much alike —you even look alike. To be sure, he is very tall, and you are short, but that difference there should be; and he is very dark, and you are pure red and white, and that difference there should be; and his hair is jet black, and yours a sunny brown; and his eyes are hazle, and yours are blue as the sky, and that difference is prettiest of all.’
Theresa laughed heartily, and asked, ‘Pray, where is the resemblance, Lilly?’
‘Oh, Miss, it’s that look.’
Lilly was right and true to nature in her perception of harmony in discords.
It was after this last walk and conversation that Theresa returned to Bellevue, and entered the house heated, flushed, and tired. She strolled into the parlor, and went up to the glass to adjust her hair, which had fallen in disorder over her neck and face,
[p. 110]
and reflected in the mirror she saw the figure of a young man stretched on the sofa, with a book in his hand, that had the aspect of a fresh novel. Theresa’s color, deep as it was, deepened to an impurpled crimson. She felt as if she were under a gorgon spell. She could not turn, and nothing, she felt, could be more awkward and silly than to remain as she was. She ventured a second glance at the image, and a third and scrutinising one, for she now perceived that the young gentleman was, or affected to be asleep. ‘This must be Newton Clifford,’ thought Theresa, ‘the figure, hair, complexion, features, all correspond exactly with the description, but, oh how unlike what I expected!’ and if she had been addicted to tears, she would have shed them at her disappointment; but Theresa’s temper was entirely of the l’allegro cast, and she laughed, laughed aloud and heartily. Clifford, for it was he, Clifford awoke, and his mother entering at the moment, after casting a look of surprise at Miss Walsingham and of reproof at the recumbent and nonchalant attitude of her son, formally introduced them to each other. Theresa whirled round on her toe, laughed again, and then flew away like a bird startled from its perch.
‘For heaven’s sake! my dear mother’ asked Clifford ‘who is this hoydenish Blowzabella?’
‘Who? have I not just introduced her to you, Newton? Theresa Walsingham.’
[p. 111]
‘Heaven forefend! I thought you said so, but I could not credit my ears. I expected to see Miss Walsingham a fashionable, thorough bred girl; this little rude concern looks as if she had just come in from a bout at haymaking—heighho! what time is it?' He looked at an exquisite little watch, that, suspended by a safety chain, was tucked into his waistcoat pocket; ‘Eleven o'clock; this country air is a delicious opiate, mother,’ and then yawning and falling back from his half recumbent posture on the sofa cushions, he relapsed into his broken slumbers, leaving Mrs Clifford looking and feeling much like a child, who has blown a soap bubble, seen it expand and brighten, and then suddenly vanish into thin air.
Mrs Clifford was not consoled by being able in part to guess the cause of Theresa’s merriment, for, even to a mother’s eye, there was an appalling disparity between the present appearance of her son and the beau-ideal that had been pourtrayed to Theresa.
Eight months before, Newton Clifford had gone to New York, simple but not rustic in his taste, dress and manners. His fortune and connections in life had cast him into the most fashionable society, and accident rather than choice had involved him in an intimacy with an ultra-fashionable young man of his own age, and a married lady of haut-ton. Both these persons, unfortunately for Clifford, happened to be gifted by nature with uncommon talent, which was all employed in giving to the follies and insipidities of fashion a
[p. 112]
certain interest, grace and brilliancy. The great philosophical truth that knowledge is power, is never more strikingly illustrated than by the influence that a woman of a certain age (that per se most uninteresting period of life) exercises over a young man of ardent feeling and lively imagination.
The narrow limits of our story will not permit us to enter into any of the details of Clifford’s fashionable training. Suffice it that he returned to Bellevue an ultraist of the beau-monde, disdaining whatever was simple and natural as much as a thorough-bred amateur of the Italian opera disdains sweet ‘wood notes wild.’ He was dressed in the extreme of the dominant fashion. We cannot describe the particulars, for we have no place in our memory for the coxcombries of five years since, but his whole array was equivalent to a Broadway exquisite of the present season. Oliver’s curled and frizzed imitation of Hyperion’s curls; the ‘boundless contiguity’ of hairs, called whiskers; the checked dishabille linen; the ‘Jubilee stock;’ the diamond studs; the webfooted (we presume to propose the descriptive epithet) the webfooted pantaloon; the person garnished with certain feminine favors, pretty trophies, such as fantastical emblematic finger rings, a porphyry smelling bottle, appended to the ribband of a quizzing glass; and filled with mousseline ambré or some other exquisite perfume; an almost (would it were quite so!) an almost invisible snuff box, with Irish blackguard;
[p. 113]
and in short all other marks of the most refined dandyism, imperceptible to an unpractised eye, and indescribable by an untechnical pen. And this was the person that, brought into sudden contrast with the heroic image in Theresa’s mind, placed her sweet fancies in so ludicrous a light, and put them to so disorderly a flight. Theresa had, in common with all rational beings, men and women, an instinctive aversion to the unmanly species called dandies—these poor and only worshippers of the image of humanity which they themselves have set up; a dull variety of the monkey race, bearing a resemblance to man, mortifying to the veritable lords of the creation, and no way honorable to themselves.
Dandyism was a sympathetic, not a constitutional disease with Clifford; this Theresa did not know, for she had only seen him when ‘the fit was on him,’ but his mother did. At another time she would have quietly waited for the paroxysm to pass off, but now she had wise and long cherished hopes at stake, and she felt too much either to be or to appear philosophical. Clifford’s sagacity had penetrated the secret of his mother’s wishes, without her having expressly communicated them, and knowing that he was a favorite of fortune, and being conscious of qualities that were at present quite hidden under his masquerade dress, and obscured by his temporary indifference to the simple pleasures of home and life, it was not an evidence of very extravagant self love that he
[p. 114]
should suspect Theresa of partaking his mother’s views, and should consequently be as shy of her as the bird of the decoy he has discovered to be set for him. Fortunately there was no pondering of the matter in our happy heroine’s gay and innocent heart; she was not disturbed by even a suspicion of Clifford's mental conclusions. Her elastic spirit soon rose from the first pressure of dissappointment, and she returned with her usual animation to her accustomed pleasures. She thought Mr Clifford a very conceited, disagreeable person; that Bellevue had been far pleasanter without him; that he was the last man in the world, that if she ever did marry (a supposition a young lady is apt to make mentally,) the last man in the world she would marry!
Theresa had yet to learn that there is nothing in this uncertain life more uncertain than the final resolution of a young lady of seventeen!
Clifford soon perceived that there was nothing affected nor equivocal in her indifference to him, and he was piqued by it. His natural tastes revived in the salutary atmosphere of home. He observed Theresa more attentively, and to observe was to feel the attraction of her loveliness. He caught himself, when he heard her laugh breaking forth in a distant part of the house, (never was a laugh more heartfelt and musical,) starting forward to listen, and involuntarily responding a faint echo; and once, when she was patting the neck of a spirited little black pony, on
[p. 115]
which she had been taking a solitary morning ride, he was betrayed into kissing, with real emotion, the whitest, most deeply dimpled and prettiest hand in the world.
These and some other trifling circumstances began to intimate that a change was coming ‘o’er the spirit of his dream;’ still he was not so deeply interested as to demonstrate Rosalind's infallible signs; the ‘hose ungartered,’ the ‘bonnet unbanded,’ the ‘shoe untied,’ the ‘careless desolation;’ but he was still ‘point device in all his accoutrements.’ A pastoral poet's hero may love without hope; but not so a fashionable young man of twenty one.
Newton Clifford’s love, for he did actually, and that in a few days, feel an irresistible attraction towards Theresa; his love was of the most confident nature. It was true that from day to day Theresa perceived more and more of his agreeable qualities coming out, and once or twice it crossed her mind that she should, if she had not expected so much—at times—she should think Newton Clifford quite interesting.
In the meantime the period of her visit was drawing to a close. Mrs Clifford, who was eagerly watching the signs of the times, wrote to Theresa's father to beg an extension of her visit; one week more was granted, but then the order of return was peremptory.
On the day before her departure, Theresa went to take leave of her friend Lilly. She had been to the cottage but once before since Clifford’s arrival. On
[p. 116]
that occasion she went to cull from the collection of flies designed for him, those she had made. The little fly manufacturer remonstrated, but in vain. Theresa possessed herself of them, and strewed them to the winds.
As she now approached the hut, she heard voices. Clifford was speaking in a tone of animated kindness to his poor protegé. ‘This is just what I fancied Clifford was before I saw him,’ thought Theresa, and that very thought made her pause at the threshold of the door, from an undefined feeling of awkwardness. While she stood there she heard Lilly say, ‘Here are some flies, Mr Newton, which I made for a present for you, if any thing can be called a present that I give to you.’ Clifford expressed his gratitude by admiring them extravagantly, and then selecting one, ‘This,’ he exclaimed, ‘is the very prettiest I ever saw. I can almost believe, with the poor little fish, that it is a real fly. If you could make me a dozen such as this, Lilly, for a friend of mine?’
Lilly stammered in her reply. ‘Oh!’ thought Theresa, who rightly conjectured that it was one of her own manfacture accidentally left among Lilly’s; ‘Oh, the silly girl will certainly betray me.’ Poor Lilly was confounded between the obligation of her promise to Miss Walsingham, on no account to betray her agency in the manufacture, the feminine desire of permitting the secret to evolve, and the necessity of confessing that she could not make flies equal to the specimen
[p. 117]
in Mr Clifford’s hand. In this dilemma she did what any other simple girl would have done, smiled, blushed, and faltered, and said she would do her very best for Mr Newton, but she could no way in the world make anything so pretty, her fingers were stiffened with the rheumatism, and besides, they were never handy enough for such a piece of work as that.’
‘Then you did not make this particular one, Lilly; who in the name of wonder did?’
Before Lilly could reply, and with the intention of preventing her, Theresa entered, but poor Lilly, far as she was from all duplicity, was betrayed by her surprise and confusion, into keeping the promise to the ear, and breaking it to the sense. She threw a speaking glance at Theresa, hung down her head, laughed outright, and turned away. Theresa blushed too, and was quite too much embarrassed, and provoked that she was embarrassed, to make any explanation, while Clifford with the utmost complacency bowed in acknowledgement to her, and taking out a small tablet case, deliberately placed the fly between its leaves.
‘At any rate,’ exclaimed Theresa, half amused and half vexed, and unintentionally verifying Newton’s fortunate conjecture, ‘at any rate‘. Mr Clifford, I did not mean that you should have it.’
‘Perhaps not. We anglers, Miss Theresa, can never foresee exactly which fish will bite when we bait our hook.’
[p. 118]
An older, a more scrupulous, or more fastidious lady than Theresa Walsingham, might have found something offensive in this ‘perhaps,’ this allusion to ‘angling’ and ‘baiting,‘ but it was not in character for her to weigh and sift words; she really did not perceive any particular meaning in Clifford’s; the secret being out, she had no farther concern about the matter. She had never seen him so animated, natural, and pleasing, and after chiding, Lilly for betraying her, and kindly slipping into her hand a farewell gift, she returned with Clifford to Bellevue, but not till Lilly had contrived to say aside to him— ‘Keep the fly for a luck-penny, as they call it, Mr Newton.’ Her eye followed them, till she lost sight of them under the shadows of the lindens that grew on the river’s side, she weaving, the while, the web of destiny, as dexterously as a ‘weird sister.’
It was not one of the fairest days of summer, but the spirits of seventeen and twenty-one are not tempered by the weathergage. A dyspeptic may look at the sky and the vane before he smiles, but our gay pair were in a humor to smile in spite of clouds or storms. Clifford was flattered and elated by the little incident of the morning. It had confirmed all his prepossessions. He had discovered that he was under the influence of Theresa’s attractions. He had made up his mind, at the first propitious moment to tell his love; that moment had arrived, and with it
[p. 119]
came, not doubts of his success, but some natural shrinkings.
He began by speaking of her return in a desperate tone of voice; she replied, but not in an according key.
‘Then you will have no regrets at leaving Bellevue?’ he said half reproachfully.
‘Indeed I shall! There is no place in the world l love so well, but home; and there is nobody I love so well as Mrs Clifford, but papa.’
‘Nobody!’ echoed Clifford with a look and tone of voice that was meant to convey a world of meaning; ‘can no one rival them in your heart, Theresa?’
‘Oh the children! of course; I doat on the children; and Willie, my pet Willie, oh, I shall never love any thing half so much as I love Willie.’
‘Are you quite certain of that?’ asked Clifford.
‘Yes perfectly,’ she replied in the same careless manner.
‘Is this coquetry, the first—last sin of a pretty woman, or is it truth and nature?’ thought Clifford; but before he had solved the riddle, and as they emerged from the shaded walk into the open grounds, they were joined by his mother, who coming from a different direction, was, like them, bending her steps towards home.
Her maternal eye read the deep interest that was legible on her son’s countenance; and Theresa’s cheek bright with exercise and spirits, spoke the confirma-
[p. 120]
tion of her hopes. ‘The dear child has reason to feel happy,’ was the mother’s thought, and vexed that she had interrupted a tête à tête that she believed could be verging but to one conclusion, she said something about ‘old people being in the way,’ and was hurrying past them; but Theresa slipt her arm into Mrs Clifford’s and detained her; ‘I do not know how it may be with old people,’ she said, ‘but I am sure any party is the pleasanter for having you in it.’ Mrs Clifford, half gratified at her favorite’s affection, and half vexed at the inopportune moment she had taken to evince it, was obliged to yield to the gentle constraint of Theresa’s arm, and walk beside her. But her mind, still on one thought intent, she gave Clifford a bunch of flowers she had been culling during her walk. ‘There,’ said she, ‘Newton, when I was young, lovers of common ingenuity would have discoursed with those flowers for an hour, without articulating a word.’
‘I am ignorant of their language, mother, but if you will teach me, I will endeavor to profit by your instructions.’
‘Attend to me then, and do not be looking at Theresa; she knows nothing at all of the matter. There is a passion flower, the emblem of hope; there a little bachelor’s button, “hope even in the depths of misery;” that hollow hearted fox glove is insincerity; that wild geranium, cruelty; the honey-
[p. 121]
suckle, fidelity; periwinkle, friendship, a poor article when you want love; the Lavender confession— “She, Lavender to him sent, owning her love,” Hope, cruelty, fidelity! &c. It would be a poor brain that could not make a moving tale from these cabalistic words.’
‘But,’ said Theresa in all simplicity, ‘there is no emblem for love, and that is the basis of all the rest.’
‘True, true, most true, my dear Theresa,’ replied Mrs Clifford, smiling, ‘but I passed over the rosebud, for I thought the simplest, most unlearned in the floral vocabulary, knew that meant a declaration of love; and so it should, for it unfolds into what is sweetest and most beautiful in nature.’
‘True love, ma’am, you mean?’ asked Theresa; and it was a bona fide enquiry.
Mrs Clifford laughed, Newton thrust the rosebud, which he seemed for the last minute to have been most critically examining, into his bosom, and they all mounted the steps to the piazza, where half a dozen of the family were assembled awaiting them.
The following morning was the morning of Theresa’s departure. Mrs Clifford, as she had before promised, and Mrs Clifford’s son, which had not before been indicated, were to attend her home. As they left the town of Bellevue, on their way to the pier, where they were to embark in the steamboat, Theresa turned to give one parting look to the beautiful flowers that in unlimited profusion embel-
[p. 122]
lished the place. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed ‘I wish I had thought to gather a bouquet to take with me.’
Clifford offered to repair her omission, and turned again up the avenue, and did not rejoin the ladies till they had nearly reached the shore. ‘Oh,’ said Theresa, as she took the flowers from him, ‘have you been gone so long and got nothing but buds! What possessed him,’ she continued, ‘to put in this little withered wild rosebud among these fresh ones?’ and she threw it away, and cooly tucked the stems of the rest under her belt riband; the withered bud was that which Clifford had the day before put into his bosom, and he had now added it to the bouquet; to him it seemed instinct with the feelings of the heart which had been throbing against it for the last twelve hours. Fortunately he had walked on, as if to look out for the boat, and did not hear her, but his mother did, and exclaimed in a tone of reproach ‘Theresa!’ Theresa thought her displeasure related solely to the bouquet. ‘Dear Mrs Clifford,’ she said, kissing her in her own affectionate manner, ‘do not be angry with me; there is, I own it, there is nothing so precious as moss rosebuds.’
Mrs Clifford always obeyed the French rule, ‘Whenever there are two interpretations of a phrase, receive the most agreeable.’ ‘My own dear, dear child!’ she exclaimed, returning Theresa’s embrace with a warmth and emotion she did not at all comprehend, and which was not rendered more intelligible
[p. 123]
by the delighted gaze, with which, as she turned, she perceived Clifford was surveying them. Some acquaintances appeared at this moment, and no farther explanation was then possible, as they were immediately transferred to the thronged deck of a steamboat. Theresa was in irrepressible spirits, and for this, Mrs Clifford and her son had but one interpretation. The one had perhaps forgotten, and the other never yet learned, that all deep emotions are serious. The truth was, Theresa had forgotten the conventional language of the rosebuds; her mind was preoccupied with home images; no brain-woven romance, but with filial thoughts of her beloved father, and of the eager eyes and glad hearts of the little tribe awaiting her. Such a heart as Theresa’s, so full of delicate, strong, and unchanging affections, was not to be lightly won, and this Clifford was yet to learn at the expense of well requited sacrifices.
Secure for the present in the estimate of all he had to confer, and in the assurance of a self-complacency that no disappointment had ever yet disturbed, he retired to a solitary corner of the cabin to enjoy in writing to her, a more exclusive and satisfactory communion with Theresa, than he could amid the throng that encompassed her on the deck.
The letter was a joyous rhapsody; the interpreter of his soul, ‘and faithful to its fires;’ full of blissful feelings and blissful hopes. He filled it, crossed it, enclosed, and sealed it with the well known device of
[p. 124]
a laurel leaf, and the motto, ‘Je no change qu’en mourant;’ a motto presumptuously applied to many a passion that has had even a briefer existence than a summer’s leaf.
Thus prepared, the letter awaited an auspicious moment for delivery. That moment arrived, when Clifford handed Theresa from the carriage that had conveyed her from the boat to her father’s door. ‘This speaks for me,’ he whispered, ‘I will be with you again in ten minutes.’ But joyous shouts and bounding steps were already ringing in Theresa’s ears, and she heard nothing else, and did not think again of Clifford, till in less than ten minutes he returned, expecting to find Theresa awaiting to reciprocate the expression of those sentiments of which he had just communicated the delightful certainty. She was there, seated on her father’s knee, recounting the pleasures of her jaunt; her pet Willie stood beside her on the sofa, his curly head lying fondly on her shoulder, and one little mischievous hand picking unheeded, one by one, the rosebuds from her waist, and throwing them on the floor, where two or three of the little urchins were dividing the spoil. The letter— the letter on which was suspended the destiny of life, had been dropped and forgotten by Theresa, who had never given it one glance, and if one thought, had supposed it to be one of the numerous unimportant packages belonging to her. Her sister Ellen, a busy, prying little daughter of Eve, had picked it
[p. 125]
up, torn off the seal, and at the moment Clifford entered was uttering a sort of jargon which she called reading it. Never, at any moment of her life, had Theresa looked more lovely than now, when her sweet face was lighted with the glow of those innocent and tender affections that are kindled at Nature’s altar, and inspired by the breath of the Almighty.
But Clifford had looked for something far more precious in his eyes, and mortified and disappointed, he was scarcely conscious of Mr Walsingham’s polite reception; hardly comprehended his words as he said, ‘You are deafened by the noisy joy of my children; they are half wild at the return of their elder sister; and I,’ he added, wiping his moistened eyes, ‘am hardly less a child than any one of them.’ Clifford in vain struggled to reply and to recover his self-possession. Fortunately, all were too much occupied with their own sensations to observe his, and he seized his unread letter, thrust it into his pocket, and made his escape.
__________
I know not what, if any, explanation followed, but three years subsequent I met the same parties at Bellevue. Clifford then with a slight abatement for a very youthful imagination, might have realized the
[p. 126]
early visions of Theresa. The few dregs of folly in his composition, had in the first fermentation risen to the surface, and worked off. How much he might have been indebted to the purifying influence of‘ ‘le grand sentiment,’ (for who shall define or limit its power,) we know not, but with all our preference for our heroine, we must confess he was worthy of her true and tender heart.'
Of his dandyism there was no relic, save the identical safety chain he had formerly worn; but instead of the fantastic watch appended to it, I discovered, (though it was scrupulously worn beneath the vest,) the little fly so elaborately wrought by Theresa, and of which, no doubt, he was well informed of the consecrating history. As to Theresa, she was unchanged; the same spontaneous flow of rich feelings, the same beautiful simplicity of character and naturalness, made more graceful, but not in the least impaired or obscured by the polish of the world.
One visible change indeed there was, and it was expressed in the quick mutations of Theresa’s beautiful color; in the tender drooping of her eye; in word and action. A stronger, deeper, more controlling sentiment had taken possession of her heart than filial love, or than the affectionate devotion of an Elder Sister.
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 Elder Sister
Subject
The topic of the resource
Family bonds, love, wooing, inner beauty.
Description
An account of the resource
A selfless daughter who has taken up her deceased mother's family duties is rewarded with a trip to visit a family friend, whose son develops romantic feelings for her.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
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The Youth's Keepsake
Publisher
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Boston: Carter and Hendee
Date
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1830 [pub. 1829]
Contributor
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Kristina Curtis, D. Gussman
Relation
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Collected (with revisions) as "The Eldest Sister" in Tales and Sketches, 183-203, 1835.
Language
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English
"As You Like It"
1829
Blowzabella
Broadway
Country
dandy
daughters
Eve
fathers
filial piety
fishing flies
George Crabbe
giftbooks
June
maternal death
Romance
Rosalind
Shakespeare
Siblings
sons
Tales and Sketches - First Series
the language of flowers
The Youth's Keepsake
widowers
widows
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/90ddd36606d1f4417a10541ec3fd5058.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=As-z4hN5aa5Fpu7E1hOaK-VPKVBDQE3zEv%7E%7EaDKW4i9Z8P2GX%7EeJWsDB4P9%7EP13zdDKAzv9EF-cw-tDo5R7Uqm5fPG-8ptHRL2nRAa%7EhB1GsMN1lBViZgZQhu5Kgz1uiuRXk8IgLlJBAO3YtnjXrWpd-sFbrsR6oweSIATQdfTRIulBT23WWhrDGu4zcjXCd4BBNyee6xFbiOLDnq-cgCvG7jFauIzB4MNjd2mJVynwDDC1OnqOPvrnLDTWCeDoDyUxFwpsMUzkOSUgoyyFke0wKLiRlssWdt3cv6RtWqKQ5BqXv6P3ZrDIuD2Vcj6xQiIrOWVvphMk6wn-SH9hiGQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
d23927c866712841f0197b805571fb9e
Dublin Core
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Title
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1842
Subject
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Stories published in 1842.
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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A HUGUENOT FAMILY.
By Miss C. M. Sedgwick.
[p. 144]
Louis XIV., in the beginning of his career, refrained from touching the privileges that had been conceded to the Protestants. He added nothing, but he took nothing away. By degrees, as the generous temper of youth wore off, and the bigotries infused by Anne of Austria and Mazarin came out, his course changed. Louis wanted indulgence in his licentious pleasures, and his confessor shut his eyes to his master’s profligate and changing loves, on condition that heresy should be extirpated. He wanted money for his costly wars, and from the industrious and virtuously frugal Protestants Colbert filled the royal coffers which were to be drained by the prodigal Louvois. The Huguenots were robbed of the fruits of their industry in their modest provincial homes, that the monarch might encompass himself with the pomp and pageantry which was then the grand “Cherry and Fair Star” spectacle of the world. “Every room is divinely furnished,” writes Madame de Sevigné from Versailles, “everything is magnificent. We rove from apartment to apartment without encountering heat or a press. The king, Madame Montespan, &c., &c., are engaged at a game; a thousand louis are thrown on the carpet; no other counters are used,” &c., &c.
This was a picture of the court when that portion of Louis’s subjects which had earned the golden counters were, by royal edicts, beset on every side with obstruction and disappointment. The avenues of industry were closed upon them; the dearest offices of domestic life were converted into sorrows. “Take care and make a fortune out of the sales of the Huguenot property,” writes Madame de Maintenon to a brother in a Protestant province— this “property” being the ancestral homes from which the Protestants were driven forth.
Some of the best blood in our own country is derived from these exiled Protestants, and in many a family are preserved traditions and legends that need no embellishment from fiction to awaken a thrilling interest. The following has at least the merit of being a true record of some of the harassing persecutions which the Protestants endured. We are anxious to preserve it as a proof that, through all these fiery trials, christian love (which must run in concentric circles) was, in some instances, maintained between Catholics and Reformers.
At the period of the events we are about to transcribe the persecution had not reached its height. The Dragonnades, when the licentious soldiery, fresh from the Spanish campaigns, were, like dogs of war, set upon the homes of the Huguenots to worry and waste at will, were not yet proclaimed; one after another of the guarantees of the edict of Nantes had been removed, but Louis had not yet come to that most despotic and impotent resolve of tyranny, “to have but one religion in his kingdom.”* [1 ]
But to our story. Arnauld d’Argile was the son of a gentleman of Languedoc, who by engaging in a profitable branch of manufactures, and living with simplicity and frugality, had amassed a large fortune. Arnauld, preferring the quiet enjoyment of a man of letters to the bustle with the profits of business, resigned a partnership in his father’s concerns, and all claims to the paternal inheritance, to the younger branches of his family, for a sufficient provision to secure to him independence and leisure. Arnauld proposed, at a convenient season, to take that domestic commodity, a wife. He had the notion, sufficiently prevalent now, but then universal, that the wife’s duty is limited to providing for the physical comfort of her husband, and that she is exempted by Providence from participation in his intellectual pursuits, and sympathy in his higher pleasures. Of course, at any time he might find some pretty rustic adequate to these moderate demands. But we are often as wide of the mark in casting the fashion of uncertain good as uncertain evil.
During an excursion into Switzerland, accident threw Arnauld into the society of the Baron de Villette and his daughter Emilie. Some romantic incidents brought them into intimate intercourse. The baron, though a Protestant himself, had, according to a contract with his wife, permitted her daughter to be educated in the Catholic faith, the religion of her mother. Madame de Villette died a year after her marriage, and her husband added to the fond affection of a father, for the child she left him, the devotion of a lover. When the Church, comprising all sects, was literally a church militant, and every inch of the religious world debateable ground, M. de Villette contented himself with maintaining his faith by the eloquence of his example. He committed his daughter’s religious education to her mother’s confessor, a worthy Franciscan, who, imitating her father’s forbearance, was more intent on making her a good Christian than a good Catholic. She was attended by
[p. 145]
Léonie, a worthy creature, who had been her mother’s nurse, and who loved M. de Villette so well as a master that she forgot he was a heretic. Thus left to the generous dictates of her own heart, Emilie grew up without suspicion of others’ faith, or bigotry in respect to her own. Her intimate companionship with her father led to tastes and pursuits not common to women of that period, and after a few months’ acquaintance with her, Arnauld d’Argile’s horizon had wonderfully enlarged; the rustic little housekeeper had vanished from his perspective, and a woman whom he could honor as well as love filled her place. By what process Mademoiselle de Villette’s mind was affected the family archives do not inform us, but in due time she joined the Reformers in the little Protestant church at Poitou, much to the grief of Father Clement, her confessor, and the scandal of the Church, and was soon after married to Arnauld d’Argile. As far as we can gather from her letters, and the few incidents recorded of the happy years that followed, the change of her faith seems rather to have been an emancipation from the shackles of rites and forms, and an enlargement of her charities, than any vehement abjuration of the old religion, or adoption of the new one. It was merely a passage to a simpler service, and a wider horizon of hope and love.
There are few entries in the log-book in fair weather. The family at the château de Villette remained in retirement and unbroken happiness. They lived unmolested themselves, extending their sympathy and aid to such of their church as suffered for their faith; and without question of creeds, to others who needed their charities. Father Clement continued to be, as he had always been, the Lady Emilie’s almoner; and in many a Catholic cottage penance was done for her, and prayers sent before many a saint’s shrine.
Madame d’Argile had but one child, a son named Eugene, who was entered in one of the few colleges of all those instituted by the Protestant noblesse which were yet permitted to remain.
We said that fourteen prosperous years followed, but on recurring to the records we find that a few months previous to this the Baron de Villette died, and that soon after a suit was instituted by one Camille Savery, his cousin, for the succession to his estate. This iniquitous claim was founded on a then recent la forbidding the descent of property to the issue of a marriage between a Catholic and Protestant, which law the plaintiff pretended invalidated Madame d’Argile’s right to her father’s property. But, however inalienable and indisputable was the justice of her title, there was little hope of sustaining it; the appeal was to a Catholic tribunal, and its decisions were uniformly against the Protestants. It was with little hope and with sad forebodings that Monsieur d’Argile prepared to leave his wife to go to Paris to defend her rights. His forebodings were not causeless. Emilie’s health and spirits had been much broken by her father’s death; she was now near a second confinement, and the harassed and uncertain state of their affairs converted her hopes into anxieties.
The eve of Monsieur d’Argile’s departure was the anniversary of a fête champêtre which the family de Villette had been accustomed to give to their dependants from time immemorial.
“A fête is not fitting these bothering times,” said Léonie; “give it to the go-by, my dear Lady Emilie; you are full of trouble with my master’s going away.”
“But Léonie, I have heard you say that the very best way to forget our own griefs and dry our own tears is to light smiles on others’ faces.”
“Perhaps I did say so—though that sounds a deal more like you than me, my lady; but there are exceptions to all cases, and indeed, you have not strength for it, and they know why, and that you’ll soon give the occasion for another guise fête than this.”
“Ah! Léonie!” Madame d’Argile checked the expression of forebodings naturally arising from her dejected spirits and infirm health, and merely added, “no fête can be so good as that which our fathers and our fathers’ fathers have enjoyed. No! this shall go forward; remember if the suit at Paris goes against us, this will be the last time that I preside over it. So, dear Léonie, see to the preparations. I will distribute the gifts when the dancing is over. Put the basket containing little Marie’s gear under the almond-trees.”
“Yes, my lady; but perhaps—I mean— that is—”
“What do you mean, Léonie?”
“I was just thinking, if the child Marie is not here, it will be no fête to my lady— that’s all.”
“You turning jealous, too, of my little favourite, Léonie?”
“No, truly, my lady, I am not; but there are those that, for every good turn you do her, would do her ten times an evil one. Dame Carmeau can’t forget that Marie’s mother was Master Eugene’s foster-mother.”
“Ah! Yes; I know Dame Carmeau thinks heretical blood is bad enough without being fed with heretical milk.”
“A fig cares she for that, my lady. All the babies born in France might feed and thrive on the milk of heretics, if she could get the silver spoons and silk gown that go to the foster-mother.”
“Well! You are right, Léonie; we must not provoke her envy; she is an ill-favoured creature, and, I fear, malicious. Marie shall have her apron and slippers with Dame Carmeau’s girls; after the fête is over will be enough to give her the basket and the gold chain Eugene has sent for her. Alas for these times, that make my favour of far more peril than advantage!”
The fête went on; there was dancing, and feasting, and general gayety. Madame d’Argile exerted herself to the utmost. She had a kind word for every one, and a special favour added to the customary gift. The painful conviction that this was
[p. 146]
the last time she should appear before her people as the representative of her house was not manifest in selfish sadness, but in unusual eagerness to promote their pleasures. So, in its very nature sun-like, bright and cheering is goodness.
“What is the meaning of tears in your eyes, Marie?” said Madame d’Argile to her little favourite.
“All this time you have not spoken to me, dear lady, and that is why I cannot help my tears.”
“Wipe them away; I never loved you better, Marie.”
This was enough. Marie joined the sports, and was the gayest of the gay. Madame d’Argile’s eye followed her. She had lived at the chateau as Eugene’s companion. She had shared his earliest studies; not that Madame d’Argile had any quixotic notions of educating the little peasant girl, but she served as whip, spur, and reward (if those discordant things may be conjoined) to Eugene. By this domestication at the castle she had acquired, in addition to the loveliest gifts of nature, a certain refinement of manners, which has well been styled one edge of the sword of aristocracy.
“Eugene has gone from us in good time for Marie,” said Monsieur d’Argile, apart to his wife; “we should have spoiled her for a peasant’s wife!”
“I wonder if that little minx Marie fancies she is made of porcelain,” said Dame Carmeau, “that she won’t let my boy Hugh touch her with the tips of his fingers. We’ll bring down their pride, before the sun rises again.”
The fête was over. Marie had received a basket piled with a year’s garments, and, dearer far than all these, she had got Eugene’s gold chain. She had kissed it, and kissed over and over again the hand that hung it around her neck, and had followed her mother, who had preceded her by half an hour, to her cottage home, a short distance from the château.
Monsieur d’Argile set out early the next morning for Paris. His wife was overcome by her foreboding fears at parting, and was still weeping when Dame Méru, Marie’s mother, entered her apartment, wringing her hands, and crying that her child was stolen from her. Madame d’Argile put aside her own sorrows to inquire into the poor mother’s.
What Méru, in her bold despair, called theft, was authorized by law. One of the edicts, now daily issued against the Protestants, authorized the seizing the child or children of any Huguenot found from under its parents’ roof, and placing it under Catholic tutelage, to be brought up in the true faith at the parents’ cost.
Little Marie, at Dame Carmeau’s instigation, had been seized on the preceding night, as she was returning from the castle, and was bound as a servant to the daughter of that evil-eyed and evil-hearted woman, the wife of a jailer in Poitu. There was no redress.*[ 2]
The first despatches from her husband brought Madame d’Argile information that the suit was decided against them, and that the influence of their relative, Marshal Schomberg, then second only in military renown to Turenne, and himself a Protestant, had secured to her, as the only attainable boon, the family plate and jewels. Madame d’Argile submitted to her loss of fortune with a fortitude which (we thank Heaven) is a virtue too common in women to be much wondered at or praised.
Another and heavier trial soon followed. The church within whose sacred cemetery Madame d’Argile’s father and his forefathers lay, was torn down, and its pastor ejected from his charge. It fell under the edict which ordained that all churches within whose walls a relapsed heretic worshipped or a Catholic had abjured his faith, should be razed to the ground. Madame d’Argile had there first publicly worshipped with the Reformers. It was enough. The churches of Montpelier, Poissan, Melguil, and Pignan, had fallen before it, on quite as frivolous pretexts.
These were but faint preludes to the shock that followed. Monsieur Martin assembled his frightened flock in the garden of the chateau on the following Sunday for worship. For this offence he was seized and sent to Paris, where he was (that being the penalty inflicted in such cases) to be led before the king’s palace with a rope round his neck, and then banished the kingdom. Madame d’Argile had forborne to acquaint her husband with this new calamity, and his first knowledge of it was at meeting the venerable old man thus led, and followed by a mob who treated him with every indignity. Monsieur d’Argile interposed by demanding of an officer of the guard the reason of this persecution. The officer answered him insolently; M. d’Argile retorted; the officer drew his sword; an encounter followed, and D’Argile received a fatal wound.
“Oh, what have you done?” cried Léonie, rushing into her mistress’s room, where she found her fainted and lying on the floor. “You have killed my lady.”
The messenger who had brought the fatal tidings stood aghast: he had been employed simply as a machine to carry the letter, and was ignorant of its contents. It was lying on the floor: neither he nor Léonie could read it. Happily, the heart needs no instructions to do its offices. Madame d’Argile was conveyed to her bed, and the common restoratives used, which so far produced their effect that she recovered from the fainting. On her return to partial consciousness she asked for the letter, and on seeing it exclaimed “It is not a dream, then—he is dead—Léonie, my husband is dead!” She struggled with her emotion, and for a moment was still,
[p. 147]
and then fell into sobbings, which were followed by convulsions. Léonie, strong-minded and strong-hearted, saw the danger that threatened her mistress, and took such measures as she could to avert it. She despatched a servant to Poitou for the physician, and another for the sage-femme, with such entreaties for speed as one makes when life or death is felt to hang on every minute. The servant, on arriving at the physician’s, found a parchment affixed to the door bearing the royal seal; the writing annexed to it he could not read. After repeated knockings he was admitted, and found the physician sitting amid his family and dependants, who were weeping around him, and he looked as if paralyzed by a sudden stroke. “Please, sir,” said the servant, “Madame d’Argile is ill.”
The physician did not move or raise his eyes, but said coldly, “I am sorry for it.”
“Sorry!” said the man, who had been accustomed to see the doctor breathless at the news of a finger-ache at the chateau; “and indeed ye must be something more than sorry. Léonie says my mistress must die if she has not your aid, and that right soon.”
“It matters not—I cannot go. I am forbidden to exercise my profession; the edict is nailed to my door. My patients must die, my family starve, because it pleased God I should be born and bred a Protestant. It was not of my own choosing.”
Nor was it like to be of his own keeping; but the history follows him no farther than to say that he wrote certain cabalistic prescriptions, which the servant carried to the apothecary. He found the ground before his door strewn with jars, unguents, pill-boxes, and gallipots; the door closed and barred, and a document affixed to it similar to that on the physician’s, which, with the comment of the ruin before him, he easily understood.
In the mean time Jean, the other servant, proceeded to the dwelling of Dame Alix, the midwife, which, luckily, was just without the gate. The evening was already considerably advanced. Dame Alix’s door and windows were barred and bolted; but the messenger, seeing a light through the crevices of an upper window, knocked sturdily, and was admitted by the old woman herself. When he told his errand, --
“Now God help us!” said the good creature, “that ever the day should come when I must say nay to my Lady Emilie—to her who never said nay to any human soul in need. The edict, as they call it, Jean, is nailed to my door, and it forbids me to help the women of my people by word or deed. They know that by tying up my hands they may kill two birds with one stone.
Jean represented the extraordinary urgency of the case; he told the dreadful news that had reached the chateau, and wept and wrung his hands as he spoke of the peril and helplessness of his mistress. It is a blessed truth, that whereas bad feeling is anti-social, good feeling is contagious. Alix wavered at the sight of Jean’s distress.
“It is a pity,” she said, “to sit here with folded hands and let her die. There may be two deaths; and if I lose my life, it is but one, and the fag end on’t, scarce worth the keeping, since I can no more earn bread for others as well as for myself. I’ll go, Jean; it’s my duty; and duty and God’s will are the same—there’s no mistake in that.”
Though a prison, the stocks, and a public whipping hung over her if she were discovered, Alix’s face brightened as soon as she had decided on the strong and right side, and she was soon mounted on the horse Jean had brought, and they proceeded towards the chateau through by-ways sheltered by close lines of mulberry-trees, and favoured by the darkness. As some ruggedness of the road obliged them to proceed more slowly—
“I have been thinking, Jean,” said the old woman. “It’s the year of our Lord 1662 [ 3] —just one hundred years since the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s eve—a black year in the calendar. It was on that cruel eve that my grandame was at the château on the same business I am going on now. It was the old baron’s grandmother that came into the world that night, and her father was massacred, and her mother, poor lady! died of a broken heart. Hark! is not that the tramping of horses?” They halted and listened, and, the sounds ceasing, they hastened onward, and soon emerged upon the highway, and approached the gate of the château by a long green archway, made by the interlacing of flexile branches of trees. As they wound around a turn in this arboured approach, they found themselves in the midst of mounted soldiers, drawn up close to the gate.
“Ha!” said their leader, seizing Jean’s bridle, “you ride fast, fellow. What is your business here?”
“We are servants belonging to the chateau; pray let us enter.”
“And who is master of the chateau?”
“Monsieur Arnauld d’Argile.”
“Ah ha! well and truly spoken! But when the bell of St. Agnes tolls twelve, the chateau passes to Monsieur de Savery, and so we are here to proclaim it.”
“Be it so: but for the love of mercy, let us pass. Leave the château in peace to-night, for–”
“Say not your mistress is ill!” whispered Alix, in time to break off the end of his sentence.
“No secrets from us, young woman,” cried the officer. “Let us see if your gallant fancies brown or fair for the companion of his night ride,” and, suiting the action to the word, he touched old Alix’s hood with the point of his rapier and pushed it off her face; as he did so, a straggling moonbeam fell on her white locks and wrinkled brow. An old woman is fair game; and, accordingly, the men gave a shout, which one of them ended by exclaiming, “By our Lady! It’s the old midwife Alix: how now, old beldame! did I not bar thy door yesterday, and affix an edict thereto that should put fetters on thy feet?” He added sundry scurvy jests relating to the multiplying heretics through her ministrations
[p. 148]
unfit to be copied from the mouldering paper on which they are recorded. Alix protested that she came not to practise her science, but, in default of a physician, to attend the lady of the château, who had been seized with convulsions; a sickness that might occur to man or child. The official replied with the deafness of heart incident to his calling, “We know not how true your excuse is: we neither make nor abrogate the law, we only execute it. Turn your horse’s head the other way, old mother. Gerard, lodge her in the prison, and report her to-morrow morning.”
Alix’s courage rose as her hope fell. “Jean,” she said. “Tell not the Lady Emilie what has befallen me: fifteen hundred seventy-two—sixteen hundred seventy-two! I told you so, Jean. On, caitiff! Conduct me to my lodging; such a night’s ride as this will make e’en a prison floor welcome to an old woman of threescore and ten.” No farther molestations being offered to Jean he entered the gate and proceeded immediately to inform Léonie of all that had befallen. Having no other help, Léonie fell back on her own resources. “You, Jean, go below,” she said, “and beseech these men, by the mothers that bore them, to do their office here quietly. Our dear lady has intervals when she asks for her husband and master Eugene, and a sudden sound sends her off into these fits again. God guide and teach me. I will myself let blood: that may save her.” Léonie had such assistance as the female servants of the chateau could give her, but she was too good a Christian and Catholic to trust alone to human aid. She had already despatched a servant to Father Clement, her mistress’s former confessor, to give him notice of her peril, well knowing the good man would pass his night in vigil and prayer for the wandering child he so well loved. She hung a crucifix at the head of the bed, and murmuring prayers to her favourite saints, she proceeded boldly in her duties, believing that each success was a prayer answered. Before morning dawned her fidelity was rewarded, a female child was born, and the mother, though with some alarming symptoms, sunk into deep repose.
(To be continued.)
-------------------
A HUGUENOT FAMILY.
By Miss C. M. Sedgwick.
(Concluded from page 148.)
[p. 189]
The officer, after taking possession of the cattle[4 ] in the name of Monsieur de Savery, returned to Poitou, and all remained quiet till towards evening, when Léonie was told that Monsieur Bertrand, Syndic of Poitou, demanded admittance to her mistress’s apartment. Léonie, with indefinite forebodings, descended to the hall, where she found the man of authority attended by two soldiers, and a curate bearing the Host.
“I have come,” said the syndic, “to enforce the salutary law which orders that a magistrate shall enter the apartment of every Protestant dangerously ill, and demand a renunciation of their heresies; and such righteous demand being continently complied with, a holy man is at hand to do the sacred offices.”
Léonie protested that the visitation could do her mistress no good, and might kill her. The syndic was inexorable. Léonie threw herself on the compassion of the curate, and entreated him to interfere.
“It will be to no purpose,” said the syndic; “law goeth before the Gospel in this case.”
“And villany before both,” cried Léonie, her indignation mastering her prudence; “but after that will come the gospel and its judgments; tell him so, Monsieur Curate. I know you, Master Syndic, and how you have pettifogged your way to the magistrate’s chair; and it is because my master has wrested from you your ill-gotten gains, and saved many an honest man from your clutches, that you hasten hither to wreak your vengeance on his falling house.”
“Give way, woman, said the syndic, pushing Léonie from the door, against which she had planted herself: “and you, Monsieur Curate, if this wolf in sheep’s clothing be of your flock, look to her. Show us your lady’s apartment,” he added, turning to a servant, who led the unwelcome visitor through a long corridor and into a chamber adjoining that of his mistress. There, against her door, stood a lad in a travelling cap and cloak, and with a pale and anxious countenance.
“My God! Eugene!” exclaimed Léonie, in a suppressed voice.
The colour suffused the boy’s cheek; he recognised Bertrand, and knew he was an intruder. Subduing his voice to a hoarse whisper, he advanced to the syndic and demanded why he was there?
“He is a villain! murderer! devil!” said Léonie. “He is forcing his way to your mother’s room; he will surely kill her.”
“He dare not enter there! he shall not. Back! on peril of your life!” cried Eugene, drawing his sword.
“Seize him, fellows!” said the syndic to his attendants.
“No, do not!” exclaimed Léonie, frightened at the consequence of her own imprudence. “He is a boy—a child. Eugene, my darling, put up thy sword; there is no use. Nay, nay, my good fellows, do not seize him.” She wrenched the weapon from Eugene’s hand, and holding it up to shield him, she besought him, for his mother’s sake, to save himself. She whispered a word to him, and added aloud, “begone! begone!”
The sword was wrested from her; she clutched the men by the hair like a wildcat, and while they were struggling for extrication Eugene disappeared.
This encounter had no tendency to soften the syndic. Léonie in vain entreated for a few preparatory moments with her mistress: finding her entreaties unavailing, she asked for penance, death, anything to save her mistress. The syndic, impatient of the delay, pushed her aside and opened the door; but he involuntarily stopped on the threshold. There is no heart quite obdurate to all those sorrows or joys that are common to all humanity. A mother with a new-born child is a sight to subdue a savage, to touch with reverence the rudest boor. Madame d’Argile, wakened by the noise, had raised her head from the pillow, put aside her curtain, and instinctively stretched one arm over her infant, which Léonie had left, enveloped in its baby covering, on the bed beside her. The light of the lamp fell on her bloodless face, and her eye and brow expressed bewilderment and inquiry. At the head of the bed, close to her, but concealed from his mother by the folds of the curtain, stood poor Eugene. The light glanced athwart his round cheek and rich, curling hair. The fire had gone out of his eyes; they were brimming with tears. The poor boy had intended to conceal himself, but, in passing by a private entrance to his mother’s apartment, the impulse to enter it was too strong to be resisted, and he looked now as if he were stationed by his mother’s bed to do an angel’s office; alas! without an angel’s power.
The syndic was the first to speak. “Madame Emilie d’Argile,” he said, “I come in the name of his majesty, Louis our King, and of our holy Church, of which he is the most gracious defender, to summon you, now on the brink of the grave,
[p. 190]
and in peril of eternal damnation, to renounce your errors, abjure your heresies, and return to the condescending love and grace which our venerable and holy church offers to the penitent.”
“What does he say, Léonie?” asked Madame d’Argile, sinking back on her pillow.
“I say,” replied the syndic, and he reiterated in a louder and harsher tone what he had already said.
Madame d’Argile seemed to have received but one idea. “If I am dying, Léonie,” she said, feebly, “why is not my husband here?”
Léonie made no reply, and the truth flashed on her mistress’s recollection. She pressed both hands to her head as if a thunderbolt had fallen there, and groaned, but did not speak. After a moment she looked up imploringly, saying, “Eugene! cannot I see him once more, Léonie?”
Eugene bit his lips, but neither spoke nor moved. “He will be here to-morrow, my dear lady.”
“Believe it not, Madame,” said the curate, stepping forward, and motioning to the syndic to withdraw. “Death has already laid his icy hand upon you. But fear him not; fear him only who can kill both soul and body. I open to you a way of escape. Will ye have me do my holy office, that ye may die in peace and hope?”
“I would die in peace and hope,” she faintly replied.
The curate drew a crucifix from his bosom; Eugene raised his hand in earnest deprecation; Léonie, crossing herself, gently repressed him, and said, “Dear Master Curate, she cannot rightly comprehend you; wait till the morning.”
“Wait, woman! where will her soul be then?”
Léonie’s lip quivered with the reply that rose to it, but her religious awe overpowered the strong impulses of affection, and she was silent. The priest held the crucifix before Madame d’Argile while he pronounced a solemn abjuration to repentance in a monotonous ecclesiastical tone.
Madame d’Argile’s mind seemed to have been in part stunned by her husband’s death, and in part paralyzed by her illness. It was powerless. All her recent impressions had vanished, and in their place her old associations returning, she drew the crucifix to her lips, and kissed it with a faint smile. This, to Léonie, the Catholic, seemed the consummation she had devoutly wished; she fell on her knees, and gave her mind half to earth and half to heaven, her eyes turning incessantly from Madame d’Argile to Eugene, and her lips moving in prayer. The priest proceeded, according to the prescribed ritual of the church, to repeat a formal renunciation of heresy, and at the close of each sentence he said, “And to this you assent, Emilie d’Argile?” She replied by a scarcely audible affirmative. When this part of the service was ended, Léonie became alarmed by signs of exhaustion which no experienced eye could mistake, and she entreated the priest to suspend the service, but he bade her be silent, and proceeded to repeat the articles of faith, ending each with “say ‘I believe;’” and each time Madame d’Argile faintly responded “I believe.” Poor Eugene! he looked like a martyr at the stake, as by turns love, despair, or indignation possessed him. The priest proceeded, and finally summed all up in the consoling doctrine that every son and daughter of the true Church inherited eternal life, and every heretic, by whatsoever name named, eternal damnation. As he concluded, Madame d’Argile, instead of responding “I believe,’ started from the half death of unconsciousness to life and intelligence. She fixed her eyes on the priest and on the symbols of his office. “What does this mean?” she asked. He affected not to notice her altered voice and expression, but proceeding, offered the consecrated wafer to her lips. She gently put it aside, saying, “Nay, good curate.”
“Daughter, beware of sacrilege! thou art damning thy soul with double damnation if thou now relapsest.”
“Has he tampered with me, Léonie?” I go with my account to God. He will not mark against me what I have unknowingly said or done; but do thou, Léonie, bear witness for me to my son that I die in our reformed faith. Tell him—tell my dear boy to keep his conscience void of offense towards God, and to live in love and charity with all men; and oh! dear Léonie, tell him that if, by the grace of God, he does so, his mother, bred a Catholic, dying a Protestant, believes it matters not by what name he is named; and for my baby—this little lamb—God guide and guard her. Lay her close to my bosom, Léonie.”
Léonie rose to do so. The priest pushed her rudely aside. “Madame d’Argile,” he said, “dost thou think of the manifold perils to which thou exposest thy children by refusing to make thy peace with the Church?”
“I commit them to God’s care.”
“Thou art obdurate. Dost thou know that by sacrilegiously rejecting and contemning this holy sacrament, thou dost, by a late edict, render thy dead body liable to be dragged through the street, and dishonoured like that of the guiltiest wretch that dies on the gibbet?”
“The body is but a cast-off garment.”
“But so it shall not seem to thy boy, when he sees thee dragged along the ground like a dead dog.”
“Wretch! begone! out of my mother’s presence!” cried Eugene, involuntarily starting forward, and, as he did so, oversetting a little table on which the crucifix stood, with a lamp, the sacred ointment, the chalice, and the host.
“Oh! Eugene, hush!” said Léonie, looking aghast at these consecrated things lying dishonoured on the ground. “Oh! on thy knees to the good curate.”
But Eugene did not even hear her: his mother’s arm was around him, his cheek was on hers, and both mother and son were unconscious of poor Léonie’s entreaties.
“Good curate,” she said, “you have had a
[p. 191]
mother, and she is dead. Pity the poor boy! Do not report what he has done! he so loves her—and she is dying. She is—alas! I know it—a sinner against the holy Church; but indeed, indeed, she is a saint in her own home.”
The curate vouchsafed not one word, but darting malicious glances at the bed, and angry ones at Léonie, he departed, Léonie muttering, as she closed the door after him, “He has far more dishonoured the cross than this poor fatherless boy; his is a black heart under a fair outside; all he cares for the converts is the price he gets for them.”* [ 5]
“My dear child, raise my head a little, and let me lay it on your breast,” said Madame d’Argile; “there—I breathe easier; I can speak to you now. It is God’s will, my dear boy—we must part.”
“Oh no! dear mother, it must not be! do not say so!”
“Yes, Eugene; and it is in mercy that God takes us.”
“Mercy! Oh mother!”
“Hear me, dear child; and if you love me, be more calm: your heart throbs so that I cannot rest my head on your breast, dear, if you do not quiet it.”
“I will, mother; I will try.”
“There is a cruel persecution opened upon us, Eugene, and God in infinite mercy removes your parents from it to the peace and love of Heaven. If I could I would stay with you, and with this poor little unconscious thing; but this is the weakness of a mother’s love; I could do nothing for you. Seek the truth, and hold fast to it, my dear boy.”
“Dear mother, I will; but how shall I be sure when I find it? our good pastor called one thing truth, and dear Father Clement another, and when I have no longer you nor my father to tell me which it is, what am I to do?”
“Hold fast ever, my dear child, to the great truth that is above all—love, supreme love to God, and self-sacrificing love to your fellow-creatures. This is the great unchanging truth. While you hold to this, God abideth with you, and you have no need of man’s direction. My strength is going fast; do you understand me, Eugene?”
“Yes, dear mother.”
“All evil will finally be overcome, but in the mean time there will be much sin and sorrow. If it be possible, Eugene, escape from this old world, and go to that fresh western land where you may serve God as your conscience directs.”
“Anything will be possible that you wish me to do, mother.”
“Thank God! I believe so, Eugene; but my poor baby—you can do nothing for her.”
“Oh! do not think so, dear mother. She will be all that I have left. God will help us, mother.”
“He will, my child, he will—take her little hand in yours—I commit you both to him.”
The hope that rose in the mother’s heart, above every fear, brightened her countenance, and lit her eye as she raised it in prayer that no words can express.
Léonie had admitted Father Clement by the private entrance, and he had heard the words of faith and love; the little sectarian mist that hung about the clear atmosphere of the good man’s soul was dissipated, and he involuntarily uttered the words that rose to his lips—they might have been the inspiration of his long fast, vigil, and prayers—“Daughter, thy sins are forgiven thee!”
“Dear Father Clement!” said Madame d’Argile, faintly, and taking his hand, “thank you for your parting blessing; there is but one faith, one hope on the deathbed; dividing lines end here.” She pressed his hand to her lips, and then her faithful servant’s, “my good Léonie.”
A deep silence followed. It was too late for the holy offices of the church, even if there had been any hope the patient would receive them; and the saintly, sorrow-stricken priest stood bent forward, his hands folded over his breast, and his eyes raised to heaven. Léonie knelt at the foot of the bed, her hands clasped and her tears pouring down like rain. The mother’s head still rested on the breast of her boy. His close set teeth and purple cheek betrayed his effort to suppress the tumult in his heart, and contrasted with the celestial peace on his mother’s countenance. No cloud of fear or anxiety hung over her clear brow; her hair was parted from it, and lay in rich dark tresses on her pillow. The dawn of immortality was on her, converting the paleness of death into light. The baby’s tiny hand was clasped in Eugene’s, and both rested on their mother’s breast; she raised them to her lips, and breathed her last breath upon them.
The first knell of death, the thrilling silence of the death-chamber, struck on Eugene. He turned to Father Clement, and from him to Léonie; neither spoke; their eyes were closed for a moment; then Léonie gently raised his mother’s head from his breast, and laid it back on the pillow, and Father Clement laid his hand on the poor boy’s throbbing temple, and said, “She is gone, my child.” Eugene buried his face in the clothes beside his mother, while his two faithful friends, kneeling before a crucifix, prayed for the departed with a fervour so sincere and so soothing that a Protestant might have envied them the faith that extended the exercise and power of affection beyond the grave.
On the day after Madame d’Argile’s death as little Marie, who, from living a life happy and free as the birds and flowers, had become the hard driven drudge of the Poitou prison, was doing one of her daily tasks, filling the water-jugs for the prisoners’ cells, she received a cuff on the side of her head (happily somewhat protected by masses of curls), followed by a surly “what are you spilling that water for? can’t you pour it in the jug as well?”
“No, I can’t, Master Arnaud,” she replied,
[p. 192]
dropping her pitcher, whose cool contents, flowing over her master’s feet and ankles, had no tendency to cool his temper. “I can’t,” she replied, striking one dimpled hand into the palm of the other; “I can’t, and I won’t—”
“Won’t! you impertinent little minx!” he cried, breaking off her sentence by striking her half a dozen blows, first on one side of her head, and then on the other.
“No, I won’t,” she resumed, unmoved by this brutality; “you may beat me, you may lay me dead at your feet, but I will never do another stroke for you or yours if you persist in refusing to let me go to the chateau to look once more upon my mistress Emilie before they bury her. Oh! that one so good and kind should ever be buried up in the ground!”
“You may think her well off if she can keep buried in the ground, for there she is already.”
“Buried already, and only dead yester-night! Nay, it cannot be; you only say this, Master Arnaud, just to keep me here.”
“Hussy! What need have I to lie to such as thee? have not I the strong hand, and the whip in it? No, no, I tell you, they shovelled your lady there into the grave at the dawn of day, for since the new edicts the heretic people may only bury their dead at dawn and twilight.”
“And is she buried? my dear, dear mistress! shall I never see her again? never? never?”
Poor little Marie gave way to tears and cries.
“What ails the girl? has she heard of it?” asked a man who just turned in at the street door, addressing Arnaud.
“Heard of what? anything new going on at the château? I thought all was done there.”
The new comer, in his eagerness to tell news, was heedless of Marie’s presence, to whom each word he uttered was a serpent’s tooth; and he proceeded to state that the magistrates had been informed by the curate of certain outrages against him, and the holy offices of the church, at the chateau. How Madame d’Argile had, in her last moments, refused and derided his services, and made a mock of the charities offered to her perishing soul. And how the boy, her son, instigated by her evil example, had committed the boldest sacrilege, strewing on the ground and trampling under foot the holiest symbols of the church, and had proceeded to offer the grossest indignities to its representative the curate. These enormities being duly considered, the occasion was deemed a fitting one for the most appalling manifestation of the power of the true church. Accordingly, an order was issued for disinterring the body of Madame Emilie d’Argile, and dragging it around the public square of Poitou. And that this vindictive vengeance might lack none of the accessories to give it the picturesque effect for which the French have been always rather remarkable, measures had been taken that the guard sent to the château to convey Eugene to prison should meet the procession in face of that edifice, that the loving boy might see the mother on whose bosom he had hung, whose every hair was to him a sacred relic, dragged at the tail of a cart round the public square of Poitou! And this was done that heretics might be brought back to the true faith in Jesus! Like acts have been done with a like purpose, by many sects called Christian!
“Here will be the best place to see the meeting,” said the jailer’s friend, in conclusion. “This young gallant will come into the square by that street, and his mother’s body by this,” pointing to the streets that, running parallel, entered the square on each side the prison; “and they will naturally halt in front of us, as the boy is to be given into your keeping. How the good people love a pretty show like this, now! they are gathering from all points; see them settling round St. John’s steps like flies round honey—a sweet sight it will be. See those old women hobbling up to the shrine of the Virgin— it may be to pray for her soul; her carriage never passed that alms wer’n’t thrown to them. Lord help us! see old Valet smiting his breast; he’s thinking of all she did for him when his boys were killed in the Spanish war. They’d better have left the poor lady in her grave, to my mind.”
Poor little Marie had been effectually silenced by the first words of this communication. Not a word, tear, or sob came from her. Shivering as if an ague had seized her, she stole across the apartment, and, climbing on to a stone window-seat, she opened a casement-window, and stretched her little body half out of it, looking wildly on one side and on the other. It was a touching sight to see that little dimpled, rosy, laughing, shouting, creature, impressed with horror, and colourless as marble. She had not long stood there when she heard a rush, and then a maddening shout, and a troop of mounted soldiers wheeled into the square, and halted before the jailer’s house. As there was some little manœuvering to clear the space before them, Marie saw Eugene stationed at the very front, every object removed that could intercept his view of the ghastly spectacle preparing for him; there he was, helpless, his hands bound behind him, and his bridle-rein held by soldiers. Then, on the other side, through the narrow street, came the sound of tramping horses, and every head turned that way, and every eye in that direction; all was silence and expectation; life seemed suspended this moment for the sensation of the next.
“Master Eugene!” screamed Marie, “shut your eyes! look not that way! Oh! hear what I say!”
Eugene looked wildly round, but he saw nothing; half a dozen horsemen had drawn up between him and Marie, and there was no familiar sound in her strained and terror-struck voice. A soldier struck her, blow after blow, on her head and shoulders, with the hilt of his sword, till, overcome by the general feeling, she too turned her eyes to the troop now pouring into the square. They came—all—but where were the spoils of the grave? not there! A general buzz of inquiry and exclamation
[p. 193]
rose from the crowd. Little Marie, overcome by the sudden revulsion of feeling, rolled back from the window on to the stone floor and fainted away.
It was a few evenings after, that this same child, in the dead of night, stole into the jailer’s apartment. She dreaded the man as a child dreads an ogre, and it was gratitude and feudal devotion, fortifying a love stronger than the love of life, which inspired a girl of ten years with courage to do what she was now bent on doing. The jailer was asleep in his bed. A lamp was suspended from the ceiling, which, sending a broad light in every direction, left no friendly shadow for a moment’s shelter. The keys, of which Marie was to possess herself, were under the jailer’s pillow. They were attached to a single ring made of a series of small, clear-toned bells, that rung at the slightest touch. Marie stood for a moment hesitating.
“If he should wake!” thought she. “Heaven grant good father Clement has well drugged his wine!” She slid her arm under his pillow. He started, muttered in his sleep, and turned. She did not move, nor even tremble, but firmly grasped the ring and pulled it towards her. The bells tinkled. The jailer threw off the bedclothes and cried “help!” but it was the cry of a troubled dream; and, assured of this, after a moment’s breathless listening to his heavy breathing, Marie drew out the keys, and muffling the bells in her apron, she glided out of the room. Away she went through, long dark corridors, and up and down winding stairs, till she came to an apartment doubly locked, barred, and bolted. She did her task with a hand so skillful and a step so light that she entered the cell without breaking the slumbers of the prisoner. Eugene’s cheek rested on his hand, in which he held a miniature of his mother, and the expression of his face was as peaceful and contented as if the illusions of his dream were a reality, and he were actually enfolded in his mother’s arms. “He could not sleep so,” thought Marie, “if he knew that poor Alix died on this straw he lies on, and died for the will to serve dear mistress Emilie!” She knelt down and wakened him with a kiss. A few sentences passed between them, and he rose and followed her out of the cell. She replaced the fastening, and after many turns and windings, they came to a secret door that opened into a subterranean passage, connecting the prison with a neighbouring monastery, a passage known only to a Father Clement and a few of his brotherhood. There Father Clement received him, and there, with many tears and embraces, Eugene parted from Marie, who returned and replaced the keys, and who, as she afterwards told, secretly laughed many a time at the general conclusion that the devil had spirited away the prisoner.
It was on the following night that Eugene stood with Father Clement under the cloister of St. Francois, beside his mother’s grave. “Here, my dear child,” said the good man, “she will rest in peace. Léonie and I foresaw what must happen. The coffin which you believed contained your mother’s body was buried in the Protestant burial-place beside her father. A sufficient weight was in it to delude those who bore it there. There, by a cruel order, it was unearthed, but, as you know, your mother’s precious body was not found within it. Here she lies beside her mother and her mother’s kindred.”
“But, dear Father Clement, do not you—does not your church, I mean, forbid consecrated ground to those she calls heretics?”
“She does, my son; but it seemeth to me that if the prayers and alms of the heathen man, Cornelius, went up as a memorial before God, that your mother’s life of good deeds has expiated her error of faith; perhaps, my child,” added the good father, with a faint smile, “unshed tears, tears stayed by love and charity, may wash out these light stains on the soul.”
It was not for his mother’s soul, but the precious sanctuary which once contained it, that Eugene was anxious. “And will she rest here, dear Father Clement?” he asked; “will no one dare—”
“Softly, my son: no one knows but Léonie and I, and Léonie, if she were drawn by wild horses, would not betray the secret. There will be no disturbance here till the great day when the dead shall rise from their graves. While I live, this shall be holy ground to me, and I will tend it with vigil and prayer.”
“Oh, Father Clement, you are not a Catholic—you are nothing but a Christian.”
Father Clement smiled through his tears. “Truly, my son,” he said, “I would be nothing else. Every other name by which Christ’s followers is called is subordinate to that, and I would that all others were abolished, and that his disciples were known and bound together, by that on earth, as they will be in heaven. But, my son, we must not linger; danger is here, safety hence.”
Eugene knelt beside the grave, he kissed the stone that covered it, and love and faith mingled in silent prayer. He was there but a moment, but it was one of those moments that gives its stamp to the whole of after life.
Our extracts, with the necessary amplifications, have extended beyond the limits prescribed to us, and we can only add that, strictly obeying Father Clement’s instructions, and sheltered by disguises, Eugene passed from one Protestant house to another till he embarked for England. The wreck of his maternal property, with his father’s small patrimony, were afterward transmitted to him; and keeping steadily in mind his mother’s dying wish, after getting his education in England, and, in consequence of the interposition of powerful friends being joined by Léonie, his young sister, and Marie, he associated with other Huguenot families who emigrated to America. After being a few years here, and forgetting or disregarding the conventional ranks of the old world, he married Marie, and, if we may judge by their descendants, secured the transmission of such beauty, wit, and worth as seldom goes by royal patent, though stamped with ducal coronet.
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1 [Author’s note] “Le roi commence à penser sérieusement à son salut, et à celui de ses sujets; si Dieu nous le conserve il n’y aura plus qu’ une religion dans son royaume. C'est le sentiment de Monsieur Louvois,” &c.—Lettres à la Contesse de St. Géran. [Translated by Elmore, et. al.: "The king starts to think seriously about his salvation and that of his subjects: if God intends it for us, there will only be one religion in his kingdom. This is Mr. Louvois' intuition. - Letters to the Countess of Saint Geran."]
2 [Author’s note] Madame de Maintenon, under authority of this law, took possession of the children of a Protestant uncle, and, adding hypocrisy to the cruelest treachery, pretended that she did it to express her gratitude to her aunt and benefactress!
3 [Editor’s note: Changed to “1672” in Tales and Sketches, 1844.]
4 [Editor’s note: Changed to “chateau” in Tales and Sketches, 1844.]
5 [Author’s note] The priest made lists of his converts, and in the margin marked the price affixed to each head, which was paid by the office appointed to receive these returns.
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
A Huguenot Family
Subject
The topic of the resource
Catholic persecution of French Protestants in the 17th century.
Description
An account of the resource
A story that chronicles the trials of the d’Argile family during the Catholic persecution of the Huguenots—French Protestants—in 1672 under the reign of the “Sun King,” Louis XIV.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Godey's Lady's Book [edited by Sarah Josepha Hale], September and October 1842, pp. 144-48 and 189-93.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1842
Contributor
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Jenifer Elmore, Miriam Alcala, Madison Brockman, Stephanie Daniels, Olivia Taylor, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Collected (with minor revisions) in Catharine Sedgwick, Tales and Sketches, Second Series, 249-89, New York: Harper & Bros., 1844; collected in Catharine Sedgwick, The Irish Girl and Other Tales, 54-94, London: Kent & Richards, and Edinburgh: J. Menzies, 1850.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1842
Catholic
childbirth
crucifix
Edict of Nantes
emigration
France
Godey's Lady's Book
heretic
Historical fiction
Huguenot
Louis XIV
Madame de Maintenon
Madame de Sevigne
Madame Montespan
martyrs
midwife
mother
New World
persecution
physician
Poitu
Prison
prison escape
Protestant
Sarah Josepha Hale
servants
sons
Tales and Sketches - Second Series
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/d543757e64d20051832c1f7892a50f14.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Uy4xASKWBVW6t59evAA31KTNHCBzzJ8ZHLT8Lh1bLD0nArWHmjW3fdHbLY7c%7EFLH5Xkr3VUurN0lKGEcufMb9yV5DrZkHztRMmJiBTIeyXSIwh1CA5UNoT56OPdG0v91A6o3%7EaOs4UudUzLcQw2NaGYM5bl6gRlpETbk4ivBNUaxDazQ4OP1pIMjO98RcG1ulSrYrAOdejaoFz-IG52itV5s3klMqDmL2dtvA3mD3nM3k38jqnED1dQIVL1XvHpZ-pxMuh15fcHYPwrmob8PuOJJvZWe-n8rDk7cxVydt%7Ep3Yw6LtD9HTJLzUQyBOdNikFQp-XDJPGgaHIVjC-CrfA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
f6c84f2dc6e15d27d3665e5e494c953e
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
1829
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1829.
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.
SCENE AT NIAGARA.
[p. 89]
THE vehement dashing of the rapids; the sublime falls; the various hues of the waters; the snowy whiteness and the deep and bright green; and the billowy spray that veils in deep obscurity the depths below; the verdant islands that interpose between the two falls half veiled in a misty mantle, and placed there, it would seem, that the eye and the spirit may repose on it; the little island on the bank of the American fall, that looks, amidst the commotion of the waters, like the sylvan vessel of a woodland nymph gaily sailing onward—or as if the wishes of the Persian girl were realized, and the “little isle had wings,” a thing of life and motion that the spirit of the waters had inspired.
The profound caverns, with their over arched rocks; the quiet habitations along the margin of the river—peaceful amid the uproar—as if a voice of the Creator had been heard, saying, “It is I, be not afraid,” – the green hill, with its graceful projections, that skirts and overlooks Table Rock; the deep and bright verdure of the foliage—every spear of grass that penetrates the crevices of the rock, gemmed by the humid atmosphere; the sparkling in the sunbeams; the rainbow that rests on the mighty torrent—a symbol of the smile of God upon his wondrous work.
“What is it, mother?” asked Edward, as he stood with his friend on Table Rock where they had remained gazing on the magnificent scene for fifteen minutes without uttering a syllable; “what is it, mother, that makes us all so silent?”
“It is the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters—it is this new revelation to our senses of his power and majesty, which ushers us, as it were, into his visible presence, and exalts our affections above language. This temple does not need a preacher.”—Sedgwick.
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
Scene at Niagara
Subject
The topic of the resource
Niagara Falls, nature, the sublime.
Description
An account of the resource
A description of Niagara Falls, followed by a conversation between and mother and son about the sublimity of nature and God.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Youth's Instructer, and Sabbath School and Bible Class Assistant. June 1829, vol. 1, issue 3, p. 89.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1829
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
In American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 2, EBSCOhost (accessed April 13, 2018).
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1829
Creator
God
juvenile literature
Mothers
Nature
Niagara Falls
revelation
sons
spirit
sublime
Table Rock
Youth's Instructer and Sabbath School and Bible Class Assistant