University of Virginia Library

44. CHAPTER XLIV.
THE WEDDING JOURNEY.

A WEDDING journey,—what is it? A tour to all
the most expensive and fashionable hotels and
watering-places. The care of Saratoga trunks
and bonnet-boxes. The display of a fashionable wardrobe
made purposely for this object, and affording three altogether
new and different toilets a day.

Very well.

Doubtless all this may coexist with true love; and true
lovers, many and ardent, have been this round, and may
again, and been and be none the worse for it. For where
true love is, it is not much matter whatever else is or is not.

But when the Saratoga trunks, the three dresses a day,
and the display of them to Mrs. Grundy, have been the
substitute for love and one of the impelling motives to
marriage, or when they absorb all those means and resources
on which domestic comfort and peace should be
built during the first years of married life, then they are
simply in Scriptural phrase “the abomination of desolation,
standing where it ought not.”

Yet apart from that there is to me a violation of the
essential sacredness of the holiest portion of mortal life in
exposing it to the glare of everyday observation. It seems
as if there were something so wonderful and sacred in that
union by which man and woman, forsaking all others, cleave
to each other, that its inception requires quiet solitude, the
withdrawal from the common-place and bustling ways of
ordinary life.

The two, more to each other than all the world besides,
are best left to the companionship of nature. Carpets of

moss are better than the most elaborate of fashionable hotel
furniture; birds and squirrels are more suitable companions
than men and women.

Our wedding was a success, so far as cheerfulness and
enjoyment was concerned. The church had been garlanded
and made fair and sweet by the floral tributes of many
friendly hands. Jim Fellows and one or two of the other
acquaintances of the family had exerted themselves to
produce a very pretty effect. The wedding party was one
of relatives and near friends only, without show or parade,
but with a great deal of good taste. There was the usual
amount of weeping among the elderly female relatives,
particularly on the part of Aunt Maria, who insisted on
maintaining a purely sepulchral view of our prospects on
life.

Ever since the failure of Mr. Van Arsdel, Aunt Maria had
worn this aspect, and seemed to consider all demonstrations
of lightness of heart and cheerfulness on the part of
the family as unsuitable trifling with a dreadful dispensation.

But the presence of this funereal influence could not
destroy the gayety of the younger members, and Jim Fellows
seemed to exert himself particularly to whip up such
a froth and foam of merriment and jollity as caused the
day to be remembered as one of the gayest in our annals.

We had but one day's ride in the cars to bring us up to
the old simple stage route of the mountain country. During
this said day in the cars, under the tutelage of my
Empress, I was made to behave myself with the grimmest
and most stately reserve of manner. Scarcely was I allowed
the same seat with her, and my conversation with her, so
far as could be observed, was confined to the most unimpassioned
and didactic topics.

The reason for this appeared to be that having married
in the very matrimonial month of June, and our track lying
along one of the great routes of fashionable travel, we
were beset behind and before by enraptured couples, whose

amiable artlessness in the display of their emotions appeared
particularly shocking to her taste. On the row of seats
in front of us could be seen now a masculine head lolling
confidentially on a feminine shoulder, and again in the next
seat an evident bridal bonnet leaning on the bosom of the
beloved waistcoat of its choice in sweet security.

“It is perfectly disgusting and disagreeable,” she said
in my ear.

“My dear,” I replied, “I don't see as we can do anything
about it.”

“I don't see—I cannot imagine how people can make
such a show of themselves,” she said.

“Well, you see,” said I, “we are all among the parvenus
of married life. It isn't everybody that knows how to
behave as if he had always been rich—let us comfort ourselves
with reflections on our own superiority.”

The close of the day brought us, however, to the verge of
the mountain region where railroads cease and stages begin,
—the beautiful country, of hard, flinty, rocky roads, of
pines and evergreens of silvery cascades and brooks of
melted crystal, and of a society, as yet homely and heart-some,
and with a certain degree of sylvan innocence. At
once we seemed to have left the artificial world behind
us—the world of observers and observed. We sat together
on the top of the stage, and sailed like two birds of the
air through the tree-tops of the forest, looking down into
all the charming secrets of woodland ways as we went
on, and feeling ourselves delivered from all the spells and
incantations of artificial life. We might have been two
squirrels, or a pair of robins, or blue birds. We ceased to
think how we appeared. We forgot that there were an
outer world and spectators, and felt ourselves taken in and
made at home in the wide hospitality of nature. Highland,
where my mother lived, was just within a day's ride
of the finest part of the White Mountains. The close of a
charming leisurely drive upward brought us at night to
her home, and I saw her sweet face of welcome at the

door to meet us, and gave her new daughter to her arms
with confident pride.

The village was so calm, and still, and unchanged!
The old church where my father had preached, the houses
where still lived the people I had known from a boy, the
old store, the tavern with its creaking sign-post, and best
of all, Uncle Jacob's house, with its recesses and corners
full of books, its quiet rooms full of comfort, its traditions
of hospitality, and the deep sense of calm and rest that
seemed ever brooding there. This was a paradise where
I could bring my Eve for rest and for refuge.

What charming days went over our heads there! We
rambled like two school-children, hand in hand, over all the
haunts of my boyhood. Where I and my little child-wife
had gathered golden-hearted lilies, and strawberries, we
gathered them again. The same bobolink seemed to sit on
the top twig of the old apple tree in the corner of the
meadow and say “Chack, chack, chack!” as he said it when
Susie and I used to sit with the meadow grass over our
heads to watch him while he poured down on us showers
of musical dew drops. It seemed as if I had gone back to
boyhood again, so much did my inseparable companion
recall to me the child-wife of my early days. We were
both such perfect children, living in the enjoyment of
the bright present, without a care or a fear for the future.

Every day when we returned from our rambles and excursions
the benignant face of my mother shone down on
us with fullness of appreciation and joy in our joy; while
Uncle Jacob, still dry, quizzical, and active as ever, regarded
us with an undisguised complacency.

“You've done the right thing now, Harry,” he said to
me. “She'll do. You're a lucky boy to get such a one,
even though she is a city girl.”

Eva, after a little experience in mountain climbing, proceeded
to equip herself for it with feminine skill. Our
village store supplied her with material out of which with
wonderful quickness she constructed what she called a

mountain suit, somewhat of the bloomer order, but to
which she contrived to impart a sort of air of dapper grace
and fitness. And once arrayed in this she climbed with me
to the most impossible places, and we investigated the innermost
mysteries of rock, forest, and cavern.

My uncle lent me his horse and carriage, and with a
luncheon-basket well stored by my mother's providing care,
we went on a tour of exploration of two or three days
into the mountains, in the course of which we made ourselves
familiar in a leisurely manner with some of the
finest scenery.

The mutual acquaintance that comes to companions in
this solitude and face-to-face communion with nature, is
deeper and more radical than can come when surrounded
by the factitious circumstances of society. When the
whole artificial world is withdrawn, and far out of sight,
when we are surrounded with the pure and beautiful
mysteries of nature, the very best and most genuine
part of us comes to the surface, we know each other by
the communion of our very highest faculties.

When Eva and I found ourselves alone together in the
heart of some primeval forest, where the foot sunk ankle-deep
in a carpet of more exquisite fabric than any loom
of mortal workmanship could create, where the old fallen
trunks of trees were all overgrown with this exquisite
mossy tapestry, and all around us was a perfect broidery
and inlay of flower and leaf, while birds called to us
overhead, down through the flickering shadows of the
pine boughs, we felt our elves out of the world and in
paradise, and able to look back from its green depths with
a dispassionate judgment on the life we had left.

Then, the venture we had made in striking hands with
each other to live, not for the pomps and vanities of this
world, but for the true realities of the heart, seemed to us
the highest reason. Nature smiled on it. Every genuine
green thing, every spicy fragrant bush and tree, every
warbling bird, true to the laws of its nature, seemed to
say to us “Well done.”

“I suppose,” said Eva, as we sat in one of these mountain
recesses whence we could gain a view of the little
silvery cascade. “I suppose that there are a great many
people who look on me as a proper subject of pity. My
father has failed. I have married a man with no fortune,
except what he has in himself. We can't afford to spend
our honeymoon at Niagara, Saratoga, and the rest of the
show places; and we don't contemplate either going to
parties or giving them when we go back to New York.”

“Poor, poor Eva Van Arsdel! how art thou fallen!”
said I.

“Poor Aunt Maria!” said Eva. “I honestly and truly am
sorry for her. She really loves me in her way—the way
most people love you, which is to want you to be happy in
doing as they please. Her heart was set on my making an
astoundingly rich match, and having a wedding that
should eclipse all former weddings, and then becoming
a leader of fashionable society; and to have me fail of
all this is a dreadful catastrophe. I want somehow to
comfort her and make up with her, but she can't forgive
me. She kissed me at last with a stern and warning air
that seemed to say: `Well, if you will go to destruction,
I can't help it.”'

“Perhaps when she sees how happy we are, she will get
over it,” said I.

“No, I fear not. Aunt Maria can't conceive of anybody's
being happy that has to begin life with an ingrain
carpet on the floor. She would think it a positive indecorum
to be happy under such circumstances—a want of
a proper sense of the fitness of things. Now, I propose
to be very happy under precisely those circumstances, and
to try to make you so; consequently you see I shall offend
her moral sense continuously, and, as I said, I do wish it
weren't so, because I love Aunt Maria, and am sorry I
can't please her.”

“I suppose,” said I, “there is no making her comprehend
the resources we have in each other—our love of
just this bright, free, natural life?”

“Oh dear, no! All Aunt Maria's idea of visiting the
mountains would be having rooms at the Profile House
in the height of the season, and gazing in full dress at
the mountains from the verandahs. I don't think she
really cares enough for any thing here to risk wetting her
feet for it. I dare say the poor dear soul is lying awake
nights now, lamenting over my loss of what I don't care
for, and racking her brains how we may contrive to patch
up a little decent gentility.”

“And you are as free and gay as an oriole!”

“Certainly I am. All I wish is that we could live in
one of these little mountain towns, just as your mother
and uncle do. I love the hearty, simple society here.”

“Well,” said I, “as we cannot, we can only try to make
a home in New York, as simple-hearted, and kindly, and
unworldly as if we lived here.”

“Yes, and we can do that,” said she. “You have only
to resolve to be free, and you are free. Now, that is the
beauty of our being married. Alone, we are parts of
other families, drawn along with them—entrained, as the
French say: now we are married, we can do as we please;
we become king and queen of a new state. In our own house
we can have our own ways. We are monarchs of all
we survey.”

“True,” said I, “and a home and a family that has an
original and individual life of its own, is always recognized
in time as a fait accompli. You and I will be for the
future `The Hendersons;' and people will say the Hendersons
do this and that, or the the Hendersons don't do the
other. They will study us as one studies a new State.”

“Yes,” said she, taking up my idea in her vivacious
way, “and when they have ascertained our latitude and
longtitude, soil and productions, manners and customs,
they can choose whether they like to visit us.”

“And you are not in the least afraid of having it said,
`The Hendersons are odd?”' asked I.

“Not a bit of it,” replied Eva, “so long as the oddity

is some unusual form of comfort. For example, a sitting-room
like your uncle's, with its brass andirons and blazing
wood-fire, its books and work, its motherly lounges, would
be a sort of exotic in New York, where people, as a matter
of course, expect a pier-glass and marble slab, a somber
concatenation of cord and tassels and damask curtains,
and a given number of French chairs and ottomans,
veiled with linen covers, and a general funeral darkness
of gentility. Now, I propose to introduce the country sitting-room
into our New York house. Your mother already
has given me her wedding andirons—perfect loves—with
shovel and tongs corresponding; and I am going to have
a bright, light, free and easy room which the sunshine shall
glorify.”

“But you know, my love, wood is very dear in New
York.”

“So are curtains, and ottomans, and mirrors, and marble
slabs, and quantities of things which we shall do without.
And then, you see, we don't propose to warm our house
with a wood-fire, but only to adorn it. It is an altar fire
that we will kindle every evening, just to light up our
room and show it to advantage. How charming every
thing looks at your mother's in that time between daylight
and dark, when you all sit round the hearth, and the
fire lights up the pictures and the books, and makes every
thing look so dreamy and beautiful!”

“You are a little poet, my dear; it will be your specialty
to turn life into poetry.”

“And that is what I call woman's genius. To make life
beautiful; to keep down and out of sight the hard, dry,
prosaic side, and keep up the poetry—that is my idea of
our `mission.' I think woman ought to be, what Hawthorne
calls, `The Artist of the Beautiful.”'