 | CHAPTER XXXIX.
ACCEPTED AND ENGAGED. My wife and I, or, Harry Henderson's history |  |
39. CHAPTER XXXIX.
ACCEPTED AND ENGAGED.
AND so at last I was accepted, and my engagement
with Eva was recognized as a fait accompli.
In the family of my betrothed were all shades
of acquiescence. Mrs. Van Arsdel was pensively resigned
to me as a mysterious dispensation of Providence. Mr.
Van Arsdel, though not in any way demonstrative, showed
an evident disposition to enter into confidential relations
with me. Ida was whole-hearted and cordial; and Alice,
after a little reconnoitering, joined our party as a gay,
generous young girl, naturally disposed to make the best
of things, and favorably inclined toward the interests of
young lovers.
Mr. Trollope, in The Small House at Allington, represents
a young man just engaged, as feeling himself in the awkward
position of a captive led out in triumph, for exhibition.
The lady and her friends are spoken of as marching him
forth with complacency, like a prize ox with ribbons in his
horns, unable to repress the exhibition of their delight in
having entrapped him. One would infer from this picture
of life such a scarcity of marriageable men that the capture
even of such game as young Crosbie, who is represented to
be an untitled young man, without fortune or principle, is
an occasion of triumph.
In our latitudes, we of the stronger sex are not taught to
regard ourselves as such overpoweringly delightful acquisitions,
and the declaration of an engagement is not with us
regarded as evidence of a lady's skill in hunting. I did not,
as young Crosbie is said to have done, feel myself somehow
caught. On the contrary, I was lost in wonder at my good
fortune. If I had found the pot of gold at the end of the
could not have seemed to myself more as one who dreamed.
I wrote all about it to my mother, who, if she judged
by my letters, must have believed “Hesperian fables” true
for the first time in the world, and that a woman had been
specially made and created out of all impossible and fabulous
elements of joy. The child-wife of my early days,
the dream-wife of my youth, were both living, moving,
breathing in this wonderful reality. I tried to disguise
my good fortune—to walk soberly and behave myself
among men as if I were sensible and rational, and not
dazed and enchanted. I felt myself orbed in a magical
circle, out of which I looked pityingly on everybody that
was not I. A spirit of universal match-making benevolence
possessed me. I wanted everybody I liked to be
engaged. I pitied and made allowances for everybody that
was not. How could they be happy or good that had not
my fortune? They had not, they never could have, an
Eva. There was but one Eva, and I had her!
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
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 clew 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
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 was nothing of a housekeeper, 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
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 Mad.
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, bough 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
butternu 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 you 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 wan
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
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 wan't 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 blasé, 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.
ACCEPTED AND ENGAGED. My wife and I, or, Harry Henderson's history | |