 | II. Clovernook, or, Recollections of our
neighborhood in the West |  |
2. II.
The old clock had struck twelve, the embers were deep
under the ashes; where the heads of the household had been
sitting an hour before; the children had been duly taken up,
and duly scolded, and compelled to walk to bed half asleep, as
they were, in punishment for being so naughty—when Molly
and I, alone by the parlor fire—Mr. Pell having said, half an
hour before, “Good bye, good bye, good bye!”—entered on a
“private session.”
Night, whether moon-light or star-light, summer night or
spring night, is favorable to confessions; we feel a confidence
and security as we draw together, and the darkness shuts out
all the great world. Almost any two persons, under such circumstances,
will be more communicative than they would be in
the open noonday, and more especially if they feel mutually
aggrieved, as did Molly and I on this particular occasion; for, be
it remembered, we had not had our supper.
“It is too bad,” she said at length; “I have done enough for
Mrs. Trowbridge, I am sure, to merit a little favor once in a
year or two—have n't I helpt her, week in and week out, from
year's end to year's end? I was with her, with Hiram and the
Preacher and all, and I have helpt to move ten times if I have
once, and done time and again what no money would hire me
to do, and you see what thanks I get?” She was silent for a
moment, and then said abruptly, “Well, I shall not move
grandmother's old pots more than once more!”
“Ah, Mrs. Pell,” I said, laughing, and taking her hand,
“allow me to congratulate you!”
Molly did not smile as I had expected, but hid her face in
her hands and burst into tears. When the first tumult had
subsided, “I calmed her fears and she was calm,” and then she
“told her love with virgin pride.”
“When I was younger than now,” she began; “let me see,
it must be fif—, no, I don't know how long it is—well, it's no
matter”—she could not make up her mind to say it was even
more than fifteen years ago—“I lived with my grandmother;
it was in a lonesome old house, away from everybody else;
from our highest window we could see the smoke of one dwelling
and that was all; and living there at the same time was a
young man of the name of Philip Heaton. I have always
thought Philip the prettiest name in the world, but no matter
about that; I thought Philip Heaton the prettiest fellow I had
ever seen, as you can guess: he was so good to me, leaving his
own work to spade the garden beds, and milking the cows that
were refractory, and doing a thousand things that it will not
interest you to hear about. When the circuit preacher came
once a month, and there was a meeting in the old log school-house,
a mile and a half away, we never failed to go, and
what pleasant times they were! I think I remember distinctly
all the walks and rides we ever had together. Once I call
to mind he gathered me three speckled lilies—I know just
where they grew in the edge of a pond, where the grass
was coarse and heavy, and over which we walked on a log—I
have the withered things somewhere yet—the meadow we
crossed, and where we climbed the fences, the long strip of
Oh, I remember all, as though I had been there yesterday; and
just where we were when we said so and so; I could go back
and recount everything. Well, as I said, I thought Philip was
handsome—I thought he was good—in fact I loved him, and I
still think he loved me then. When grandmother was dead,
and the funeral was over, we first talked seriously of affection
and marriage. I was sitting alone in the great old-fashioned
parlor, thinking of one of our neighbors, a poor old woman,
who had told me I must not keep the sheet that had been over
the corpse—that it would bring ill-luck to me; and I suspected
she wished me to give it to her, as I afterwards did; I was
alone, thinking of this, and weighed down with a thousand
melancholy thoughts connected with the event that had deprived
me not only of a home but of the only real friend I had in the
world, when Philip joined me; for it was evening, and his work
was done. The November winds rattled the sash against which
I sat; I saw the vacant chair, and thought of the new grave;
and covering my face, I cried a long time; but it was not altogether
for the dead that my tears fell: Philip was going into a
distant city to make his fortune, I was to live with a distant
relative, and we should not see each other for a long time.
The cows we had petted and milked together were to be sold,
and the garden flowers would not be ours any more. `Maybe
we shall buy back the cows,' said Philip, `and get roots and
seeds of the same flowers,' for he was young and sanguine, and
love sees its way through all things; and when he kissed me,
and said it should be so, I thought it would. So I packed up
the old things that had fallen to me, and went to my new home,
with a world of sweet hopes and promises shut close in my
heart. It was a hard and lonesome life I led, but when from
that home I went to another and a worse one, I was kept up
with the old memory and the new hope.
“Philip prospered beyond all his expectations, and there began
to be prospects of buying the cows, sure enough, when
there came a few tremulous lines to inform me he was very ill.
I cannot tell, and it would be useless to do so if I could, what
were my sufferings; there never came another word nor sign;
charm of life was gone; no new lover ever displaced the old
one from my heart; but to-night—what do you think I heard
to-night! Why, that Philip Heaton is a rich man, and has
been married these—these—oh, a good while! Mr. Pell saw
him last summer, and he inquired about me—if I was married
—said I deserved to be—I was a good sort of a girl—and a
good deal more he said of me in the same way.” Alas, for
Molly! then and there vanished the last and only romance of
her existence.
I have not given the story in her precise language, for I cannot
remember that, but I have retained the spirit and the essential
facts of her not unparalleled experience. It needed no subsequent
observation for me to see how things stood, and how
they would end; how in the estimation of Mrs. Trowbridge
Molly did what she pleased, and when she pleased, and nothing
if she pleased; how she had all the advantages of a home and
a mother's care, and how she could get along better without
her. And I saw, too, how Molly thought she did herself a
thousand things no money would hire her to do; how she took
an interest in the house, as though it were all hers—getting
small thanks after all; how she sewed for others to earn her
scanty clothing; and how she had moved her heirlooms about
till she was tired, and had begun to take less romantic and
more practical views of things. She never said so precisely,
but I saw that a good home and an estimable man to care for
her were weighing heavily against an old dream; so that I was
not surprised when on entering her room one day I found her
standing before her grandmother's narrow looking-glass, carefully
dividing hair from hair, and now and then plucking one
that had a questionable hue; nor was it any surprise when
Kate told me, in a whisper, that in just seventeen days and
three hours and ten minutes Molly would become Mrs. Pell.
She had made accurate calculation, for the wedding day was in
her little life a great day indeed, as in fact it was to Mrs. Trowbridge;
whose laughter, for those intervening seventeen days, I
I think had scarcely a cessation.
Mr. Pell, meantime, became unusually nimble, hopping and
his words in a musical trill;—“wify, wify, wify!” he would
say sometimes, assuming the conjugal address before the conjugal
ceremony, and he was observed to wear his hat awry, and
to go abroad in a red boyish waistcoat which he probably had
not worn for years: and Molly I think was even more nice in
her choice of words than was her wont.
The night before the marriage, as we sat together before the
fire, she took from the shelf, and unfolded from a dozen careful
wrappers, an old volume, and shook into the ashes from betwixt
the leaves some broken remnants of flowers. She sighed
as she did so—they may have been the three lilies; in a moment
she smiled again, and twirling the marriage ring, and
looking from the window, observed that she could not think of
anything but the splendor of the queen of night! I thought it
was very likely.
All the preceding day Kate was in the seventh heaven; she
wore new calf-skin shoes and a new calico dress, and why should
she not be happy? Mrs. Trowbridge said a wedding seemed
to her one of the solemnest things in the world, but she laughed
all the while; she did not even say “well,” that Mr. Trowbridge
bought a new hat for the occasion, which he did not once
all that day move from his head.
I will not attempt a description of the wedding festivities.
It seemed to me half the folks in Clovernook were there. Sally
Blake came first, pleasant and useful as ever, and afterward
Miss Claverel, Miss Whitfield, poor Mrs. Troost with her ill-omened
gossip, and excellent Mrs. Hill, our old friend, with
kindlier prophecies of happiness, and Dr. Hayward, the family
physician, and a great many others, living in the neighborhood,
besides two or three smartish young grocers and produce dealers
from the city, with whom Mr. Pell had transactions “agreeable
and profitable all round.” Mrs. Trowbridge's children
were as noisy and ill-mannered as ever, the good woman
laughed at every observation made by herself, or the bride and
groom, or the guests, and Mr. Pell was smartly dressed and
looked unutterable and said incomprehensible things, all with
an air of self-satisfaction which gave ample assurance that he
Molly, she was attired very prettily, and seemed, or tried to
seem, the happiest woman in the house; but I could see once in a
while an involuntary seriousness in her eyes; and once, after
she had suddenly quitted the room for a moment, I thought I
saw signs of tears, driven back with a strong will—tears that
had come with unbidden memories from scenes where she had
walked in summer nights, so long ago—where beautiful hopes
were born, and buried, buried forever. As she entered the
room, her hand upon her breast, the angels might have heard
her say, “Be still, be still, oh turbulent heart!” and when she
led off a dance with Mr. Pell, she looked as if she had quite
forgot all the dreams ever dreamed by Molly Root.
These marriages of convenience are sad affairs, even among
the humble, with whom so many cares divide authority in
the heart. It is well when they are contracted by brave natures,
with unfaltering wills, looking backward for darkness and
forward for light, and never suffering the past to prevent the
clutching of every possible good in the present, or to cloud the
future so that its fartherest joys shall fail of inspiring continual
hope and strength.
Mr. and Mrs. Pell are well-to-do in the world; the “rise of
property,” indeed, has made them rich, and Molly sometimes
sends her carriage to bring Mrs. Trowbridge to tea, and gives
to Kate occasionally some cast-off dress or last year's finery,
which, made over, is to her as good as new. The reader will
understand why she remained so long unmarried, why at length
she became a wife; and those accustomed much to the conversations
of married ladies perhaps might hear without surprise
her frequent declaration, that “dear Mr. Pell” was her “first
and only love!”
—There they go! How those spanking grays, with their
shining harness, and the bright green and yellow barouche,
make the dust fly as they whirl by the Clovernook Hotel!
Mr. Pell says “It is the thing, the thing, precisely the thing!
Is n't it Molly, Molly, Molly!”
| II. Clovernook, or, Recollections of our
neighborhood in the West | |