University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

“WELL, Nelly, what are you thinking
of?” asked Annette Furniss, as the
sisters sat together in their scantily-furnished
chamber, a week after the scene described in
the preceding chapter. The evening was deepening,
and she closed the volume from which
she had been reading,—one of those exhibitions
of shallow but plausible skepticism with
which the weak and the perverse seek so frequently
to lull the stings of conscience,—and
as she moved listlessly from the window to the
bedside, to bury her face in the pillows,
repeated, “I say, what are you thinking of?
Why don't you speak?”

“Oh, I don't know,” answered the girl,
who remained at the window, one cheek resting

on her hand, and her attention divided
between the western clouds, and Surly, who
lay below.

“Do say something,” said Annette, petulantly;
“do, for charity's sake; I can't endure
my own thoughts any longer.”

“Come and sit by me: there was never a
sweeter sunset;” and the placid expression of
Nelly's face contrasted strangely with the
worn and restless appearance of Annette's, as,
suddenly sitting upright, she gazed upon her
fixedly. In a moment the troubled air grew
sorrowful, and she said reproachfully, but not
bitterly, “And so you have nothing to say to
me; well!”

“Netty, my dear sister!” and Nelly stooped
and kissed her, “I don't know what to say
that will comfort you;” and, more playfully,
she continued, “the patient cannot expect a
cure so long as she conceals her real disease
from the physician. And Netty, you know
that you have lately withdrawn the little confidence
you ever gave me, and when we talk
I feel that it is across some great gulf.”

Tears gathered slowly to the eyes of Annette,

and dropped silently off the long lashes,
for she did not wipe them; and Nelly felt
them on her face when, laying her head on
her sister's knees, she said, “I do not blame
you if you cannot mate yourself with me, you
are so much older and wiser than I;” and,
after a slight pause, listening toward the
adjoining chamber, “What's that?”

Annette turned her head in the direction
indicated, and said in her cold and calm tone,
“ 'Tis father, counting his money.”

There was a long silence, interrupted only
by the clinking of the silver. At length Annette,
placing her hand on the head of her
sister, said, “Nelly, you think me a strange
creature, and so I am, neither fit to live nor
die; but if you knew the influences that have
made me so! Oh, Nelly, you do know some
of them, but you do not know all the hardships,
and trials, and wrongs, and slights, that
have at last crushed out the little good that
was long ago in my nature; you know how
hard your life has been, but I have lived longer,
twelve years longer than you, and my
childhood and girlhood have left scarcely a

pleasant memory. Our parents, as you know,
were never what is termed poor; nevertheless,
I have suffered from hunger, and cold, and
nakedness.”

“Ah, Netty,” answered the sister, “do you
not fancy the deprivations incident to real
poverty?”

“No, I have slept in a garret so open that
the snows and winds blew over me, and all
the while worked like a bought slave. I have
thirsted for knowledge, and education has
been denied me; I have wished for society,
and am shut out from it by my ignorance and
ill-breeding, even more than by all other present
restraints. If these things had been or
were from necessity, I would not complain;
but to be mewed up in a ruin, and waste, and
die here, and for no earthly good”—

She stopped suddenly, pushed her hair from
her forehead, and, after a moment, resumed:
“The great blight of my life, Nelly, I have
not spoken of.”

Her sister looked as if startled with a new
apprehension.

“Oh, 't is nothing,” she went on, smiling,

“My heart is broken, that is all; and if I
could have chosen my own path of life, it
would not have been. Never mind, I do not
like to talk about it. But, never be so foolish
as to believe, no matter upon what grounds
that any man whose birth and education are
superior to yours, will marry you. Never,
Nelly, suffer yourself to be so deluded.”

She arose and walked to and fro in the
chamber, and Nelly recalled as she did so the
summer twilights, long past, when her gay
laugh rang out from among the flowers that
she had planted and tended with such care
(there were no flowers planted now), and when
she sat on the mossy door-step in the deeper
evening, more quietly, but not less happy,
speaking sometimes very low and tenderly in
answer to a voice as low and tender as her
own. This was all long ago, when Nelly was
a child, but she could remember that Annette
was gentle, and loving, and hopeful, that she
often kissed her, and talked to her of the
goodness and happiness and beauty that were
in the world.

“And for the desertion, Netty,” she said, at

last, “you think too hardly of our parents,
because they did not educate you to be the
wife of the man you loved; but that he ever
loved you is impossible, else he would not
have left you. Turn your reproaches where
they belong, and you will have gained in love
and respect for our father; he is an old man
now, and his grey hairs are very close to the
grave.”

“Yes, he is an old man, a miserly, miserable
old man! You are shocked, but truth is
truth, whether spoken of man or angel, and
truth is truth if not spoken at all. Yet I do
love my father, and pity him; but he will
not allow me to make him happy; he has
warped me from my bent as much as he
could; and now our natures are antagonistic,
and we were better apart than together.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have suffered, and struggled,
and starved here, as long as I can, and
if I can't free myself in one way I will in
another: by marrying Henry Graham, for
instance.”

Nelly smiled. “I know your pride and

ambition too well,” she said, “to fear such
an alliance.”

“Pride and ambition!” repeated Annette,
“I have no use for such words; look at me,”
and she turned toward her sister: “old, hopeless,
friendless, and heartless. I once had
dreams, indeed, but they were dreams. I am
learning to see things as they are. What
good will come to me in this old rookery? I
suppose I shall grow uglier, and older, and
bitterer, if that were possible. Look around,”
she said, enumerating some of the weightiest
names with which they were both familiar,
“will any of these people admit us to their
society on terms of equality? And why not?
God has endowed us as richly as them, and
more so; we are entitled by our wealth to their
position; but by vulgar habits and total ignorance
of the usages of cultivated men and
women we are exiled from them. What is
the use of hope?”

“I do not see as you do, my dear sister,”
said Nelly, and she proceeded to soften the
hard and naked truths before her, as only with
the mists that go up from a fountain of love

she could soften them. “Remember that when
our parents came here, as pioneers, they had
little but their hands and their hearts to
encourage them; a hard task they proposed
to themselves, and earnestly they wrought for
its accomplishment; no economy was too
rigid, no labor too severe, sustained and
encouraged as they were by the expectation
of one day surrounding themselves and us
with the elegances and refinements of life.
They did not see nor know that our natures
differed from theirs, and that the severe
schooling they gave us must embitter all our
years. Think of it, Netty; think of our
poor mother, pale, and patient, and hopeful,
more for us than for herself, making plans for
coming good even on her death-bed, and
going from us without having reaped any of
the pleasures that should reward a life of toil.
If she had lived we might have seen better
days. As it is, let us make the most of our
scanty means of enjoyment; life is short, let
us not embitter it more than we must.”

And differently as the sisters had spoken,
each had said the truth. On the death of his

wife, who had lovingly shared his hardships,
Mr. Furniss lost all care for everything; the
bright day he had looked forward to became
suddenly black; the joy almost within
his grasp was snatched away, and after
the first passionate flow of tender grief, only
bitterness mingled with his tears. The house,
unfinished at the loved one's death, was never
completed; the room in which the corpse was
laid was never furnished; and from the day
of her burial all previous accumulations shrunk
and wasted toward ruin.

The father saw the daughters unlike the
mother, and was displeased; naturally they
turned toward the gaieties of society, while
she had loved only her home; but I need not
enlarge: enough that, kept together by the
force of outward circumstances, they grew
further and further apart, till the house was
divided against itself, and the wretched monotony
forced upon the sisters was fretting out
the life of the one and the amiability of the
other. So, one thinking of new sacrifices
and new endeavors, and the other of better
fortune to be attained in some way—she

cared little what—they sat in the old chamber
late into the night.

“How hot your head is!” Annette said at
last, feeling Nelly's forehead burn against her
shoulder. She tried to choke back the short
dry cough, and smile. Annette softly closed
the window, and the sisters retired for the
night.