University of Virginia Library

11. CHAPTER XI.

Such was the home to which, after a year's
roving life among the Indians of the far west, Arnold
brought his friend for a summer's sojourn.
True, he liked not either of the sisters much, but it
was a place to which he could come freely when
it pleased him, and where he could remain as long
as he chose. He could throw himself on the divan
or the carpet, and, to the astonishment of Mrs.
Yancey, talk of the smart things he had said to the
fools he had met here and there, and of the thousand
things he could do if he only had a chance;
and the simple hearted woman thought it was a
great pity that those who were willing to do so
much for themselves and the world should have
so little opportunity, and that wealth and fame,

and a thousand charitable projects, must be foregone
when, but for this or that little condition, they
might be realized.

To have such an auditor was pleasant to Joseph
Arnold. Not every one to whom he told his high
aims and ambitions, with sighing for the untoward
accidents that crippled his faculties, was so credulous.

And this was not all a hypocritical pretense.
Though he had no faith in his power to begin a
great work now—this very hour, to-day, or next
week—he certainly had large confidence in his capacity
for doing something sometime, when one or
two successful fools should get out of his way, and
circumstances should give him but the slightest aid.
In other respects too Mrs. Yancey's house, though
so ill kept, and with every thing at loose ends, was
a good place for him: he could luxuriate in the
pantry, skim the cream from the milk basins,
purloin cold chicken, ham, and sauces, at pleasure;
and in such boyish habits, amid his great plans, he
very frequently indulged, making sad inroads in
Nanny's calculations for supper; and it was a terrible
annoyance to Eunice also, who thought him
worse than the “red men,” and “crushing his mind
as with a nightmare.”

But, in the most unfortunate instances, Mrs. Yancey
laughed as if a pleasant thing had happened,

saying Nanny would have to provide something
else, and if there were nothing, why William must
go and buy what would do when he came home
from work at night. It appeared, so the good woman
said, that some persons who never performed
any manual labor required more food than those
who worked right hard. “It depends on the organization
or something,” said Mrs. Yancey.

In this last return Joseph Arnold found a fresh
acquisition to his happiness in his young niece.
Gentle and loving and dutiful, considerate for
others, forgetful of self, no hardship was too wearying,
and no sacrifice too great, by which she could
do good to any one. In the garden, by the flowerbeds,
feeding the chickens, telling stories for the
children, in the kitchen, or in the field with her
father, she was busy, and cheerful and contented.
Her indolent and improvident mother relied upon
her judgment and skill, and so did the conceited
Eunice, mourning the while her deficiency of
mind.

To this little girl Arnold often talked—laying
aside his many affectations, and seeming, for the
time, the eccentric but not essentially weak or wrong-hearted
person he really was: proud yet humble,
self-sufficient yet helpless, careless of obtaining yet
stingy of possession, slovenly in dress and rustic in
manners yet despising the one and fostering the

other by unmanly and clownish behavior, and
quick to recognize the high and noble yet in many
respects still groveling and low.

To the sisters he presented his most formidable
aspect—sometimes, startling their prejudices by cold
and hard and antagonistic conclusions. He was
fond also of surprising them by the easy familiarity
with which he mentioned men and places they
knew little about, and by pronouncing with fluency
names of minerals, beasts and birds, with which
they were not acquainted, as though he supposed
himself speaking household words—all the while
feeling in his own heart that he was appearing very
far above them, and wonderfully well, withal. He
made occasions to tell of the different amphibia of
the tropics, as if he had passed years in the investigations
of that particular subject—as if their hearts
with one ventricle, and cold red blood, had been
under his dissecting knife, and their precise powers
of respiration had been ascertained by his successful
experiments. The simple terms reptile and serpent
he carefully avoided—testudo, draco, lacerta, rana,
amphisbæna, and cæcilia, sounded so much wiser
than frog, lizard, tortoise, &c. And while Mrs.
Yancey leisurely and laughingly picked wool—the
rain falling in her uncovered soap kettle beside the
door meantime, and spoiling her soap—wondering
at her brother's knowledge, and feeling what a pity

it was that chances were so against him; while
Eunice deploring his habitual negligence of the
mind, sat upright, communed with herself, or made
shirts for the Indians; while Nanny prepared the
dinner and milked the cows, and tended the baby;
and William, active and energetic, planned and
worked—Joseph Arnold indulged his appetite, in
the pantry, his passion for hunting, wherever there
were dogs and rabbits, and his ambition, in contradicting
one sister or surprising the other. Surely
no place could have been better suited for him, especially
with his friend Wurth at hand, to supply his
little necessities and acquiesce in all his plans and
assertions; a stronghold and comfortable place of
rest it was, and at present he troubled himself little
that circumstances prevented the accomplishment
of his great designs for the good of himself or the
world.

One day as he came in from the fields, in all the
pride of his sporting regalia, and—throwing in the
lap of Nanny a string of birds, with outstretched
wings and blood-speckled breasts—stretched himself
lazily on the lounge, a quiet but knowing smile
curled his lips, and evidently, from the manner of
his combing with his fingers his full beard—a trick
of his especial good humor—he felicitated himself
upon something of more than usual interest and
significance.

“Ask uncle Josey if that is all the game he
killed?” said Mrs. Yancey, speaking to the baby,
while she bent over it and gave it a sort of tickling
shake.

“Tell mother,” he replied, addressing the same
factitious medium, “that uncle Josey brought down
several small vertebrated quadrupeds, the which he
didn't choose to bag.”

“Is that what pleases you so much?” asked Eunice
with a disdainful toss of her wise head.

“No,” said Joseph, smiling as with a deeper
enjoyment, and surveying his sister as though in
some way she appeared ludicrous, while he bit the
purplish leaves of a wild plant he held in his hand
to keep back laughter, “no, that is not all, by any
manner of means, my delectable sister.”

Eunice folded her arms and walked straight out
of the room, letting her Indian shirt drag over the
face of her brother, who called after her to know if
she were gone for self-communion, and added with
a peculiar expressiveness of tone that he fancied
that duty had been accomplished for the day.

“What are you eating, uncle Josey?” asked Mrs.
Yancey, oblivious to the little passage between the
brother and sister.

“Some sort of bane; I like the taste of it;” and
the young man took another leaf in his mouth, as
if the eating of poison were a small thing to him,

continuing, as he did so, “yes, Nanny, this is a
deadly bane.”

“I have heard say,” said Mrs. Yancey, that
whatever the king-snake touches turns to poison—
do you believe it, Josey?”

“It seems very reasonable.”

“I think likely our old horse, Tommy, got hold
of some such thing, poor creature,” said the amiable
woman, and as she pitifully contemplated the case,
Joseph arose and silently left the house, thinking,
to himself, “What a silly woman my sister is!”
and feeling, for the moment, that he could not
breathe the same air with her.

But this does not explain his peculiar smile, nor
why Eunice felt it to be an offense. Since the arrival
of her brother, the views of the philosophical
and progressive young lady seemed to have undergone
some modification. She did not directly admit
this in conversation, but her ostentatious displays
of self-communion became less frequent; she
talked less of the consecration of her life to the
Indians; the idea was not yet abandoned, indeed,
for she wrought daily at the shirts, though no
longer close shut in her chamber, but in the family
group. And once she even hinted, in conversation
with Mr. Wurth, that it was barely possible, after
all, that the heart was worthy of some little regard,
as well as those purely intellectual faculties, to the

cultivation of which she had deemed it proper to
devote so large a portion of her valuable time.

At length, perhaps without any accurately defined
motive, she arranged the hair she had long
combed away from her temples, for the sake of
clearer perceptions, a little more after the usual
mode, rolling a small puff on either cheek, and
attaching it to the larger division with a side-comb.

It was the shrewd observance of this, and a
fancied detection of the motive, which caused the
offensive smile and good-humored accompaniment.

“Stranger things have happened,” said Arnold,
abruptly, as he returned from his solitary musing,
and seated himself by his elder sister, who sat on
the door-step, playing with the baby and two or
three cats.

“Stranger things than what, Josey?”

“I don't know what I was thinking about,” said
the brother.

“Likely enough it was old Tommy and the king-snake,”
said the sister, as she laughingly hugged
the baby in one arm, and a cat in the other.

“Oh, Nancy!” said the ever active husband,
who had just come in, and was taking a long whip
from the wall, “didn't you see that the pigs were
in the garden?”

“No, William, I didn't,” replied the wife. “I
have been busy scolding a little bit at the children;

for, don't you think; they got to playing with the
table, turning it up-side-down, and pretending it
was a stage-coach, and some of them horses, and
some passengers; and they hauled it about a little
too roughly, I suppose, for they broke off two more
of the legs, and I don't see how we are to eat with
a table with one leg.”

When the pigs were turned out of the garden,
the tired husband harnessed his horses to the
wagon and carried away the broken table to be
mended, and on his return his wife informed him
that while Nanny was milking, the tea-kettle boiled
dry, and the spout melted off: but they could
make tea in the dinner-pot.

And where was Miss Eunice? Communing with
herself, cultivating her mind, or reflecting on some
special consecration of her life, and what good was
likely to accrue to the world from her noble efforts
and example. She would have been ashamed to
confess that she was really thinking of none of
these things, but it must be admitted that her pretense
to this effect was but a disguise for a more
absorbing occupation of her thoughts.

She was in her chamber, as she was accustomed
to be at this hour, but not sitting in “statue-like
repose,” upright, and with arms across her bosom.
No, she was standing before a small glass, the face
of which had previously been turned to the wall,

arranging and reärranging her hair; and, when she
succeeded in pleasing herself, it might have been
noticed that the two little puffs were considerably
enlarged, and worn lower on the face; that a white
cape, with ruffles, was substituted for the plain
kerchief previously worn; and that a plain gold
ring—put aside in the period of her philosophie
musing respecting the dignity of her sex and the
objects of an ambition to which she should devote
herself, as a worldly gewgaw—had assumed its old
place on the first finger of her left hand.

When her toilet was completed she still hesitated,
apparently in dread of descending. Once or twice
she advanced to the stairs, and again retreated;
then descended a step or two, and, retiring, sat by
the window till—the tea having been boiled in the
dinner-pot—Nancy came up to call her.

“Nanny, how do I look?” she asked, in a tone
unusually sweet, for she seldom addressed the child
at all: she could not endure contiguity with one so
“totally deficient of intellectual cultivation.”

“Oh! aunt Euny,” she answered, in happy surprise,
“I never saw you look half so pretty.” And,
to her utter astonishment, the cold, uncompromising
aunt, stooped and softly kissed her.