Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  I woke every morning with a strange, new thrill of joy. Was it so? Was she still in this world, or had this impossible, strange mirage of bliss risen like a mist and floated heavenward? I trembled when I thought how frail a thing human life is. Was it possible that she might die? Was it possible that an accident in a railroad car, a waft of drapery toward an evening lamp, a thoughtless false step, a mistake in a doctor’s prescription, might cause this lovely life to break like a bubble, and be utterly gone, and there be no more Eva, never, nevermore on earth? The very intensity of love and hope suggested the possibility of the dreadful tragedy that every moment underlies life; that with every joy connects the possibility of a proportioned pain. Surely love, if nothing else, inclines the soul to feel its helplessness and be prayerful, to place its treasures in a Father’s hand.

  Sometimes it seemed to me too much to hope for, that she should live to be my wife; that the fabulous joy of possession should ever be mine. Each morning I left my bunch of fresh violets with a greeting in it at her door, and assured myself that the earth yet retained her, and all day long I worked with the under-thought of the little boudoir where I should meet her in the evening. Who says modern New York life is prosaic? The everlasting poem of man and woman is as fresh there at this hour as among the crocuses and violets of Eden.

  A graceful writer, in one of our late magazines, speaks of the freedom which a young man feels when he has found the mistress and queen of his life. He is bound to no other service, he is anxious about no other smile or frown. I had been approved and crowned by my Queen of Love and Beauty. If she liked me, what matter about the rest?

  It did not disturb me a particle to feel that I was submitted to as a necessity, rather than courted as a blessing, by her parents. I cared nothing for cold glances or indifferent airs so long as my golden-haired Ariadne threw me the clue by which I threaded the labyrinth, and gave me the talisman by which to open the door. Once safe with her in her little “Italy,” the boudoir in which we first learned to know each other, we laughed and chatted, making ourselves a gay committee of observation on the whole world besides. Was there anybody so fortunate as we? and was there any end to our subject-matter for conversation?

  “You have no idea, Harry,” she said to me the first evening after our engagement had been declared, “what a time we’ve been having with Aunt Maria! You know she is mamma’s oldest sister, and mamma is one of the gentle, yielding sort, and Aunt Maria has always ruled and reigned over us all. She really has a way of ordering mamma about, and mamma I think is positively afraid of her. Not that she ‘s really ill-tempered, but she is one of the sort that thinks it’s a matter of course that she should govern the world, and is perfectly astonished when she finds she can’t. I have never resisted her before, because I have been rather lazy, and it’s easier to give up than to fight; and besides one remembers one’s catechism, and doesn’t want to rise up against one’s pastors and masters.”

  “But you thought you had come to a place where amiability ceased to be a virtue?” said I.

  “Exactly. Ida always said that people must have courage to be disagreeable, or they couldn’t be good for much; and so I put on all my terrors, and actually bullied Aunt Maria into submission.”

  “You must have been terrific,” said I, laughing.

  “Indeed, you ought to have seen me! I astonished myself. I told her that she always had domineered over us all, but that now the time had come that she must let my mother alone, and not torment her; that, as for myself, I was a woman and not a child, and that I should choose my lot in life for myself, as I had a right to do. I assure you, there was warm work for a little while, but I remained mistress of the field.”

  “It was a revolutionary struggle,” said I.

  “Exactly, — a fight at the barricades; and as a result a new government is declared. Mamma reigns in her own house and I am her prime minister. On the whole I think mamma is quite delighted to be protected in giving me my own way, as she always has. Aunt Maria has shaken dreadful warnings and threatenings at me, and exhausted a perfect bead-roll of instances of girls that had married for love and come to grief. You’d have thought that nothing less than beggary and starvation was before us; and the more I laughed the more solemn and awful she grew. She didn’t spare me. She gave me a sad character. I hadn’t been educated for anything, and I didn’t know how to do anything, and I had no strength; in short, she made out such a picture of my incapacities as may well make you tremble.”

  “I don’t tremble in the least,” said I. “I only wish we could set up our establishment to-morrow.”

  “Aunt Maria told me that it was ungenerous of me to get engaged to a man of no fortune, now when papa is struggling with these heavy embarrassments, and can’t afford the money to marry me, and set me up in the style he would feel obliged to. You see, Aunt Maria is thinking of a wedding twice as big as the Elmores, and a trousseau twice as fine, and a brown-stone front palace twice as high and long and broad as the Rivingtons’; and twice as many coupés and Park wagons and phaetons as Maria Rivington is to have; and if papa is to get all this for me, it will be the ruin of him, she says.”

  “And you told her that we didn’t want any of them?” said I.

  “To be sure I did. I told her that we didn’t want one of these vulgar, noisy, showy, expensive weddings, and that I didn’t mean to send to Paris for my things. That a young lady who respected herself was always supplied with clothes good enough to be married with; that we didn’t want a brown-stone palace, and could be very happy without any carriage; and that there were plenty of cheap little houses in unfashionable streets we could be very happy in; that people who really cared for us would come to see us, live where we would, and that those who didn’t care might keep away.”

  “Bravo, my queen! and you might tell her how Madame Récamier drew all the wit and fashion of Paris to her little brick-floored rooms in the old Abbey. People will always want to come where you are.”

  “I don’t set up for a Récamier,” she exclaimed, “but I do say that where people have good times, and keep a bright pleasant fireside, and are always glad to see friends, there will always be friends to come; and friends are the ones we want.”

  “Ah! we will show them how things can be done, won’t we?”

  “Indeed we will. I always wanted a nice little house all my own where I could show what I could do. I have quantities of pet ideas of what a home should be, and I always fancied I could make things lovely.”

  “If you couldn’t, who could?” said I, enchanted.

  “See here,” she added, “I have just begun to think what we have to start with. All the pictures in this little room are mine, bought with my own allowance; they are my very own. Pictures, you know, are a great thing, they half furnish a house. Then you know that six thousand dollars that grandmamma left me! Besides, sir, only think, a whole silver cream-pitcher and six tablespoons! Why, Harry, I’m an heiress in my own right, even if poor papa should come to grief.”

  Something in this talk reminded me of the far-off childish days when Susie and I made our play-houses under the old butternut-tree, and gathered in our stores of chestnuts and walnuts and laid our grave plans for life as innocently as two squirrels, and I laughed with a tear in my eye. I recounted to her the little idyl, and said that it had been a foreshadowing of her, and that perhaps my child-angel had guided me to her.

  “Some day you shall take me up there, Harry, and show me where you and she played together, and we will gather strawberries and lilies and hear the bobolinks,” she said. “How little the world knows how cheap happiness is!”

  “To those that know where to look for it,” said I.

  “I heard papa telling yon that half the estates on which good New England families live in comfort up there in the country don’t amount to more than five thousand dollars, yet they live well, and they have all those lovely things around them free. Here in this artificial city life people struggle and suffer to get money for things
they don’t want and don’t need. Nobody wants these great parties, with their candy pyramids and their artificial flowers and their rush and crush that tire one to death, and yet they pay as much for one as would keep one of those country houses going for a year. I do wish we could live there!”

  “I do too — with all my heart, but my work must lie here. We must make what the French call an interior here in New York. I shall have to be within call of printers and the slave of printers’ devils, but in summer we will go up into the mountains and stay with my mother, and have it all to ourselves.”

  “Do you know, Harry,” said Eva after a pause, “I can see that Sophie Elmore really does admire Sydney. I can’t help wondering how one can, but I see she does. Now don’t you hope she’ll get engaged to him?”

  “Certainly I do,” said I. “I want all nice people to be engaged if they have as good a time as we do. It’s my solution of the woman question.”

  “Well, do you know I managed my last interview with Sydney with reference to that? I made what you would call a split-shot in croquet to send him from me and to her.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Oh, don’t ask me to describe. There are ways of managing these men that are incommunicable. One can play on them as upon a piano, and I’ll wager you a pair of gloves that Sydney goes off after Sophie. She ‘s too good for him, but she likes him, and Sophie will make him a nice wife. But only think of poor Aunt Maria! It will be the last stroke that breaks the camel’s back to have the Elmores get Sydney.”

  “So long as he doesn’t get you, I shall be delighted,” said I.

  “Now only think,” she added, “this spring I was drifting into an engagement with that man just because I was idle, and blasée, and didn’t know what to do next, and didn’t have force enough to keep saying ‘No’ to mamma and Aunt Maria and all the rest of them.”

  “And what gave you force?”

  “Well, sir, I couldn’t help seeing that somebody else was getting very prettily entangled, and I felt a sort of philosophic interest in watching the process, and somehow —— you know — I was rather sorry for you.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, and I began to feel that anybody else would be intolerable, and you know they say there must be somebody.”

  “But me you could tolerate? Thank you for so much.”

  “Yes, Harry, I think you are rather agreeable. I couldn’t fancy myself sitting a whole evening with Sydney as I do with you. I always had to resort to whist and all sorts of go-betweens to keep him entertained; and I couldn’t fancy that I ever should run to the window to see if he were coming in the evening, or long for him to come back when he was on a journey. I ‘m afraid I should long quite the other way and want him to go journeys often. But Sophie will do all these things. Poor man! somebody ought to, for he wouldn’t be a bit satisfied if his wife were not devoted. I told him that, and told him that he needed a woman capable of more devotion than I could feel, and flattered him up a little — poor fellow, he took to it so kindly! And after a while I contrived to let fall a nice bit of a compliment I had once heard about him from a lady, who I remarked was usually a little fastidious, and hard to please, and you ought to have seen how animated he looked! A mouse in view of a bit of toasted cheese never was more excited. I wouldn’t tell him who it was, yet I sent him off on such a track that he inevitably will find out. That’s what I call sending Sophie a ball to play on. You see if they don’t have a great wedding about the time we have our little one!”

  CHAPTER XXXIX. CONGRATULATIONS, ETC.

  THE announcement of my engagement brought the usual influx of congratulations by letter and in person. Bolton was gravely delighted, shook my hand paternally, and even promised to quit his hermit hole and go with me to call upon the Van Arsdels.

  As to Jim, he raised a notable breeze among the papers. “Engaged! — you, sly dog, after all! Well! well! Let your sentimental fellows alone for knowing what they ‘re about. All your sighing, and poetry, and friendship, and disinterestedness and all that don’t go for nothing. Up to ‘biz’ after all! Well, you’ve done a tolerably fair stroke! Those Van Arsdel girls are good for a hundred thousand down, and the rest will come in the will. Well, joy to you, my boy! Remember your old grandfather.” Now there was no sort of use in going into high heroics with Jim, and I had to resign myself to being congratulated as a successful fortune-hunter, a thing against which all my resolution and all my pride had always been directed. I had every appearance of being caught in the fact, and Jim was prepared to make the most of the situation.

  “I declare, Hal,” he said, perching himself astride a chair, “such things make a fellow feel solemn. We never know when our turn may come. Nobody feels safe a minute; it’s you to-day and me to-morrow. I may be engaged before the week is out — who knows?”

  “If nothing worse than that happens to you, you needn’t be frightened,” said I. “Better try your luck. I don’t find it bad to take at all.”

  “Oh, but think of the consequences, man! Wedding journey, bandboxes and parasols to look after; beefsteaks and coffee for two; house rent and water taxes; marketing, groceries; all coming down on you like a thousand of brick! And then, ‘My dear, won’t you see to this?’ and ‘My dear, have you seen to that?’ and ‘My dear, what makes you let it rain?’ and ‘My dear, how many times must I tell you I don’t like hot weather?’ and ‘My dear, won’t you just step out and get me the new moon and seven stars to trim my bonnet?’ That’s what I call getting a fellow into business! It’s a solemn thing, Hal, now I tell you, this getting married!”

  “If it makes you solemn, Jim, I shall believe it,” I said. “Well, when is it to come off? When is the blissful day?”

  “No time fixed as yet,” said I.

  “Why not? You ought to drive things. Nothing under heaven to wait for except to send to Paris for the fol-de-rols. Well, I shall call up and congratulate. If Miss Alice there would take me, there might be a pair of us. Wouldn’t it be jolly? I say, Hal, how did you get it off?”

  “Get what off?”

  “Why, the question.”

  “You’ll have to draw on your imagination for that, Jim.”

  “I tell you what, Harry, I won’t offer myself to a girl on uncertainties. I ‘d pump like thunder first and find out whether she ‘d have me or not.”

  “I fancy,” said I, “that if you undertake that process with Miss Alice, you’ll have your match. I think she has as many variations of yes and no as a Frenchwoman.”

  “She doesn’t catch this child,” said Jim, “though she’s and no mistake. Soberly, she’s one of the nicest girls in New York — but Jim’s time isn’t come yet.

  ‘Oh, no, no! not for Joe,

  Not for Joseph, if he knows it,

  Oh, dear, no!’

  So now, Hal, don’t disturb my mind with these trifles. I’ve got three books to review before dinner, and only an hour and a half to do it in.”

  In my secret heart I began to wish that the embarrassments that were hanging over the Van Arsdel fortunes would culminate and come to a crisis one way or another, so that our position might appear to the world what it really was. Mr. Van Arsdel’s communications to me were so far confidential that I did not feel that I could allude to the real state of things even with my most intimate friends; so that while I was looked upon from the outside as the prospective winner of an heiress, Eva and I were making all our calculations for the future on the footing of the strictest prudence and economy. Everybody was looking for splendor and festivities; we were enacting a secret pastoral, in which we forsook the grandeurs of the world to wander forth hand in hand in paths of simplicity and frugality.

  A week after this I received a note from Caroline which announced her arrival in the city, and I lost no time in waiting on her and receiving her congratulations on my good fortune. Eva and Ida Van Arsdel were prompt in calling upon her, and the three struck up a friendship which grew with that tropical rapidity and luxuriance characte
ristic of the attachments of women. Ida and Caroline became at once bosom friends.

  “I’m so glad,” Eva commented to me, “because you and I are together so much now that I was afraid Ida might feel a little out in the cold; I have been her pet and stand-by. The fact is, I’m like that chemical thing that dyers call a mordant — something that has an affinity for two different colors that have no affinity for each other.

  I ‘m just enough like mamma and just enough like Ida to hold the two together. They both tell me everything, and neither of them can do without me.”

  “I can well believe that,” said I, “it is an experience in which I sympathize. But I am coming in now, like the third power in a chemical combination, to draw you away from both. I shouldn’t think they’d like it.”

  “Oh, well, it’s the way of nature! Mamma left her mother for papa — but Ida! — I’m glad for her to have so nice a friend step in just now — one that has all her peculiar tastes and motives. I wish she could go to Paris and study with Ida when she goes next year. Do you know, Harry, I used to think you were engaged to this cousin of yours? Why weren’t you?”

  “She never would have had me, — her heart was gone to somebody else.”

  “Why isn’t she married, then?”

  “Oh! the course of true love, you know.”

  “Tell me all about it.”

  “She never made me her confidant,” said I evasively. “Tell me who it was, at all events,” demanded she. “Bolton.”

  “What! that serious, elegant Bolton that you brought to call on us the other night? We all liked him so much! What can be the matter there? Why, I think he ‘s superb, and she ‘s just the match for him. What broke it off?”

  “You know I told you she never made me her confidant.”

  “Nor he, either?”

  “Well,” said I, feeling myself cornered, “I throw myself on your mercy. It’s another man’s secret, and I ought not to tell you, but if you ask me I certainly shall.”