University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE GOVERNOR'S FAMILY.

Let us go back to the previous evening, and down St.
Agnes-street, into the Governor's house, soon after the young
people have returned from the lecture.

This house, of a fashion forty years old, was large, three-story,
brick, surrounded by a portico, and pleasantly embayed
in trees, some dozen or fourteen rods from the street.

On this boisterous winter night, the family are gathered
in a spacious apartment, called the sitting-room. In the
centre of the room is a large mahogany table, carefully
covered with a damask counterpane, over which a solar
lamp sheds its strong light. Around the table are seated
the family, if we may except the Governor himself, who, in
front of a blazing wood fire, reclines in a rocking-chair, with
his feet on the jamb. The mother of the family, or, as she
is commonly known, Madam Dennington, controls one side
of the table, with her sewing spread before her. She has
also under her special control a spermaceti candle, and a
pair of silver snuffers, with which, in moments of excitement,
she makes energetic starts for the candle-wick. It
was not her wish to have the solar lamp. Her father, Judge
Weymouth, used candles, and she had used them for thirty
years; and they answered their purpose, and she was indisposed
to see their province invaded. She wore a turban,
out of regard to her mother. She was short, erect, and
retained that vigor of eye and dignity of manner for which
her family were celebrated.

About the table were the children and relatives of the
family. The governor had twelve children, of whom eleven
survived. The name of the deceased one, Agnes, was preserved
in the street on which they resided. Four were
married from home. The others, in order, were Roscoe,
Benjamin, Melicent, Barbara, Eunice, and two smaller ones,
who at this hour were abed. Roscoe was about twenty-six,
and the rest succeeded in due course of nature.

The relatives were Miss Rowena, a cousin of Madam's,
and Mrs. Melbourne, a lady reared in the family of the
Rev. Dr. Dennington, father of the Governor, and who, for
many years, had been a member of the household of the
latter.

Roscoe was addicted to bachelor habits, and bachelor
moods; he had no fondness for society, and a good education
he found scope for in the management of his father's
farm. Benjamin was a lawyer.

Madam was nervous, and, above all things, dreaded a
scene; and when the wind howled at the house, and shook
the windows, she started, as if one was coming. She was
religious, and seasoned her words with verses of Scripture.
She was industrious, and plied the needle assiduously; yet
not for herself, but for others; and not always for the work
to be done, but for the example to be set.

If she relished the old r/da/egime, she was charitable to the
new; and while she sought to preserve the times past, her
good sense and strong faith inspired her with interest in
those to come. She reverenced the clergy, and defended
the reformer.

Her daughters were passing from the flower of youth
into the beauty and richness of womanhood. Their dress
honored the simple taste of their mother; it was plain,
becoming, and neat without ornament. The two relatives

were benevolent looking people, whose happiness seemed to
consist in making the family happy.

Miss Rowena had a lively and jocose turn; while Mrs.
Melbourne was subject to depression of spirits, in which
moments her vision was hazy, and her feelings petulant.

We have said this was a large room; it had, also, an air
of great amenity and comfort. The lamp wrought a quiet
but deep illumination in all parts of it; the open fire was
cheerful; nay, it was inspiring, at such times as these, when
that well-meaning but stupid creature, with a cast-iron face,
has undertaken to perform for us the office of warmth and
sociability through the long months of winter, but which
the Governor, with a luxurious or an antiquated feeling,
summarily dismissed from his premises. Pictures garnished
the walls, a sofa invited to repose, a piano suggested music,
a stand in one corner was enriched with choice literature;
under one of the windows was a table, stocked with flower
pots, and bearing geraniums and roses in bloom, and many
plants whose living verdure was a shelter for the feelings
from the storm; the mantel-piece constituted a general news
office, and collected the papers, pamphlets, letters, for daily
distribution; above it was suspended a shell card-rack, the
more select depository of the lace-edged and enameled
missives of fashion and polite society. A large mirror, on
one wall, reproduced, in attractive vista, this pleasant scene,
and prolonged the interest which the room afforded to contemplation.

The Governor left his rocking-chair, and paced to and fro
on the back side of the room. He had always condemned
rocking-chairs, and now, in his advancing years, he would
not sit in one a great while at a time; thus keeping on good
terms his age and his principles. His hands locked behind
him under his dressing-gown, his head bent forwards, he

seemed to be in a brown study; — it was a passive habit.
He stopped against the window, and looked askance at the
storm, as if he were suspicious of it, but said nothing. He
had practised, all his life, the school-boy direction of not
speaking until he was spoken to; and, on the whole, not
without a certain advantage, since he acquired more than
he gave out, and not being over-communicative, he was
deemed very trustworthy; and since every one has some
things to say which he does not wish to have said again, it
follows that a silent man in society must gather up a vast
deal of confidence, like a well-regulated institution, in which
people like to vest their spare capital, knowing that it will
not break; — sometimes awfully like the sea, into which
malefactors hurl dead men's bodies, and even their frightful
bags of gold, knowing they will not rise again.

In the kitchen, if any of our readers are disposed to make
a further survey of the premises, is also what must now be
called an old-fashioned fire; yet one, judging from the size
of the sticks, destined to do good service yet, and of a sort
of wood that, without fruit in its living state, when brought
to the hearth, bears the richest flame-blossoms, and expires
in a ruddy, glowing crop of coals, — rock-maple. Here
were also a man-servant and a maid-servant; the one, in
one corner of the hearth, engaged, as probably fifty thousand
of our population are at this moment, reading a newspaper,
lamp in hand. The woman, modestly retired to the
other corner, at a small table, is turning an old silk dress
into a mantilla.

A fresh gust of wind, like a wave of the sea, struck the
house, and moaned piteously in every crevice of door and
window.

“God remember the poor!” said Madam, in an under but
earnest voice, without looking at anybody in particular; at

the same time hurrying the snuffers into the candle, as if
she would extinguish all the poverty in creation, and
pressing the cloth she was sewing with her left hand tightly
on the table, as if she were, in her own mind, stanching the
sorrows of the race.

“They will need some additional help,” added the Governor,
in a quiet way.

“Yes, indeed!” replied his wife; and she recited that
passage of Scripture which intimates how vain it is to bid
the destitute be warmed, without giving them what is
needful. Then she asked, “Has that wood gone to the
O'Conners?”

“I heard the crackling of it in their stove, this afternoon,”
said Melicent, “and saw the joyous glow of it in the faces
of the family.”

Once more the storm thwacked the house, to keep stirring
and active in its inmates the remembrance of humanity;
and, at this time, to give additional pathos to its proceedings,
it roared up and down the chimney, as it were mimicking,
in condensed reverberations, the hollow, unheeded
moan of universal wretchedness.

Madam acknowledged the force of this appeal; but she
was not to be thrown from her balance, and she snuffed the
candle with marked deliberation. Marked, in truth; —
Miss Rowena saw it, and nodded to Melicent across the
table; Mrs. Melbourne saw it, and grew sombre in the
face. Now, Mrs. Melbourne had a favorite horse, which
she was very tender of, all weathers. Moreover, this horse
had not once been mentioned in course of the evening; and
Mrs. Melbourne knew Madam was not thinking of it, and
this worried her. Not but that this lady had a regard for
the poor; she had, but she claimed an enlargement of sympathy
even to the bounds of the mute creation.

Madam kept to her own thoughts. Turning to her
grandchild, who sat in the corner, she said, “Alice Weymouth!
Alice Weymouth!” But the child was asleep.

“Asleep!” exclaimed madam, “asleep, under such
preaching as this? Asleep, when terror is calling, so
hoarse and mournful? Asleep, when love is summoning all
the elements to speak for it?” She did not say this loud
and boisterously, but with that subordination of manner
which never deserted her.

“I don't wonder the child sleeps,” said Mrs. Melbourne;
“she went half a mile, with a bed-blanket, before tea; and I
scruple if the horse in the stable has a shred to his back.”

There was a mixture of causticity and kindness in this
observation; she wished to reproach her cousin, and the
family in general, for their neglect of the brute, at the same
time seeking to shield the child from the apparent severity
of her grandmother. In all this, Mrs. Melbourne had the
habit of flattering herself she was peculiarly, nay, in a
double-fold, benevolent; and she took the flattery more to
heart, because it was wholly a matter of her own contrivance,
and no one helped her in it.

“Yes, yes,” continued Madam, “bed-blanket is warming
three, by this time; turkey sent yesterday stayed a whole
table-full of stomachs.” Here she raised her voice, as if she
were squaring accounts with the weather, and the weather
was a trifle deaf, and she meant her own side of the case
should be fairly put: “Milk is served regularly every morning;
have Peter's boys taken the cold meat?” Hereupon
the wind lulled. This gave Madam an opportunity to
declare there never was such a storm.

“We have had just such storms, every winter, for forty
years,” replied the Governor, quietly; “and you have said
the same thing,” he added, “this is now the fortieth time.”

There was no point, no sharpness, in this rejoinder; it was
only uttered as a pleasant reminiscence.

“Yes, indeed,” she replied, twisting a little in her chair,
but soon regaining her composure; “there is nothing new
under the sun. What has been, shall be.” Nor did she
rejoin this out of servile deference to the Governor, or
because she deemed the Scripture absolute authority on
every topic that might be broached; but a moment's reflection
recalled to mind those liberal views and permanent convictions
that lay deep in her nature, and which exciting
events, like the storm, seemed for the instant to obliterate.

These things passed with little or no notice. Miss Rowena
laughed through her hand; a smile rose to the surface
of the lips of Melicent, like a dolphin at play, and disappeared.
The room was bright, and all were tranquil. The
Governor went to bed; he went without a light, — he
always did so. He said it facilitated sleep, to go to the
place of recumbency through a long passage of darkness,
and not flash into slumber too suddenly. Benjamin had one
shoulder piled on the end of the table, and the paper as
near his eyes as possible, and his eyes as near the light;
— he was near-sighted, and wore glasses; — and his reading
was intense, and was evidently fighting its way into
something. Eunice had gone to the piano, and while
the storm was dashing at the keys of her mother's heart,
she was offering herself, eyes, ears, imagination, fingers, to
the service of a couple of bars of music, and seemed unmistakably
wishing that something would fling her bodily on
to the keys of her instrument; but there was reluctance, or
great short-coming, somewhere; there were but few reasonable
tones to be heard.

Benjamin laid down his paper, and his glasses on top of
it, and rubbed his right eye very hard with the knuckle of

his forefinger. “There is something in it,” said he, “if it
could only be got at.”

“I have no doubt there is,” answered Eunice, “but who
shall say what?”

“I have been thinking there might be,” said Barbara.

“What if there is?” interposed Mrs. Melbourne; “who
really cares?”

“Indeed, there is!” responded Madam; “and there are
a good many that care.”

“No doubt,” echoed Roscoe.

What should happen, at this instant, but that all these
persons were thinking of different things; Benjamin of
California gold, Eunice of her music, Barbara of Richard
Edney, Mrs. Melbourne of the horse, Madam of the poor,
and Roscoe of the effect of the cold on peach-trees. The
evening wore on, the lights dulled, the fire burnt low; and
these folk were becoming languid, and relapsing into a half-stupid,
half-unconscious state, in which the mind speaks out
as it were in sleep, or in intoxication; and each of them, by
a sort of hidden wire-pulling, exposed what had been on his
mind for the last fifteen minutes. They were in a jumble,
a laughable jumble; and when they began to explain, they
fell into a greater jumble, and laughed a good deal harder;
their thoughts twirled one another round, and tripped each
other's heels, — all in play. Their thoughts, secretly controlled
by the real harmony of their feelings, fell into
groups and circles, and a sort of wild polka gallopade;
but Barbara's thought, being the newest and strongest, got
the upper hand, and led off, with all the others following it;
and Barbara's thought was Richard Edney.

I dare say many of our readers have been having the
same thought; and since Richard Edney's name is so near
the Governor's Family, on the title-page, they are glad to

have it get in there at last, and perhaps wonder how it will
be treated. That is easily told; — it was laughed at. Miss
Rowena loved to laugh, and to be decorous too. To unite
these two things, she bit her lip. If we should say now she
bit her lip hard — the fact — it would only be saying she
laughed hard.

Eunice said she hoped he would find Asa Munk's; Barbara
hoped he would find work; Miss Rowena hoped so
too, and then he would not be out late evenings, frightening
people in strange places; Melicent desired that his innocence
and simplicity might not suffer.

“There would be great danger of it,” said Miss Rowena,
“if he had happened in St. Agnes-street.”

“What! what!” ejaculated Madam, quickly and nervously.
She folded up her work, and unfolded it. She
rolled the edge of it in her fingers, and unrolled it. Just as
she was going to bed, and the storm was subsiding, she was
not prepared for the introduction of a stranger, or a strange
topic; and while she commiserated any one in distress, she
was not quite prepared, at that late hour, to go in quest of
new objects.

“What is it?” she asked, emphatically; for all witnessed
her agitation, but none answered her directly. There
was a mixture of shame and suspense in their recollections
of what transpired; and what they said was as confused as
it was lively.

Alice Weymouth, the granddaughter, who had been of
the party to the lecture, related that they had met a drunken
man, or a tired man, or an old man, she hardly knew which;
nor whether he was young or old had she any clear impression;
and had left him to find his way, in an unknown
town. Mrs. Melbourne hinted they might have offered him
a bed. Madam, truly considerate as she was of the world

at large, shrank from the idea of an utter stranger in the
house; and in this very thing, Mrs. Melbourne, by pushing
her benevolence a little further than the rest, contrived to
keep up a little quarrel, and attain a brief triumph, on the
gentlest of topics, and with people whom, from the bottom
of her soul, she loved. It was her weakness. Miss Rowena
intimated that he might sleep with the hired man, who
would take care of him if he was likely to do mischief.

The young ladies drew their chairs about the fire;
Madam turned down the solar lamps, sent Alice to bed,
and admonishing her daughters not to make free with
strangers, or light of misery, went to her chamber.

The young ladies lifted the smooth folds of their hair over
their ears, undid their belts, and sat musing upon the
embers on the hearth.

“A liberal, hopeful, wise human voice, anywhere,” said
Melicent, “anywhere, is something; but there,” she went
on, “there, in that darkness, that solitude, with the storm
racketing and rending around it, and those weird shadows
behind it, and the bitter, sullen cold piercing it, — how very
strange it is!”

She thrust her fingers further under her hair, and raised
it higher over her ears, as if she would hear more of that
voice.

“Voices!” said Barbara. “Speech, a breath, a sigh, a
prolongation of feeling, a flight of wish, an impersonation;
without properties or relations; without the weights of
flesh and blood; without the temptations of accident or
position; without poverty, or ignorance, or vice; without
ill-nature or ill-breeding; without folly or prejudice; without
circumstance and without inevitability; — yes, voices
are well enough, and there is plenty of them.”

“I have no doubt there are some in my piano,” added

Eunice; “and, like the woman and her goose, I should like
to break it open and get at them.”

“Eunice!” cried one from the chamber, “is it not time
you were abed? Alice Weymouth would excuse you, but
it would be a trial to her feelings, which are a little tender
such a night as this.”

“There is a voice for you,” said Eunice, “right from the
pit of your mother's heart. The weather, that has chilled
every fibre of my fingers, has thawed out the great aorta of
her sensibilities. How do you like it? How did you use
to like it, when you were of my age, — snatching you away
from pleasant company, breaking up your tête-à-têtes with
the low fire, spoiling the pleasant feeling of your own independence
and womanhood, blasting the enchantment of a
novel or a moonlight, chasing you up stairs, and giving you
no rest till you slipped away from it beneath three heavy
coverlids?”

Eunice, as one of the younger children, still required, or
received, some motherly looking after. She was an obedient
child, and did what her mother wished her to do; she shut
the piano, kissed her sisters, and retired.

The two sisters, by this time, were left alone; one by one,
all had gone; the last footsteps on the stairs were heard,
the last door was shut, the last muffled creaking in the distant
chambers had died away.

But no gloom or sorrow remained, though but one candle
burned, and but a handful of coals were alive. The storm
was over; the atmosphere fell into repose; the moon
looked down upon the hills sleeping beneath their robes
whiter than Marseilles quilts, with a calm, gushing eye,
like a mother upon her little children in bed; and the clouds,
soft as summer, looked lovingly upon the moon. The parlor
could not be empty; for the moonlight came in at the

windows, and brought with it the shadows of the great
elms that stood before the house, the branches of which
went to extemporizing pretty patterns of things right
over the figures of the carpet, getting up a smart trial
between nature and art, and half persuading us of the
superiority of the first. More than this, the spirit of love
and the sense of a divine presence remained; parental and
brotherly kindnesses and attentions kept their place good;
gladness and joy still sat about the table; wisdom and reverence
held its seat in the great rocking-chair; the words
of the dead and the memories of the absent brooded among
them; and voices, — a thousand murmuring voices of beauty,
sweetness, ideality, ecstasy, — like a rivulet, flowed around
the piano.

These sisters were alike, and they were unlike. They
were about the same age, height and weight. Strangers
often mistook one for the other. They were fully and symmetrically
developed. Their constitutions had been reinforced
by exercise, and nurtured by work. With every
means of luxury, their habits were moderate. The features
of both had rather a Roman than a Grecian cast. They
were light complexioned, but Barbara retained throughout
an infusion of shadow deeper than Melicent; her eyes were
darker, her skin, and her hair. White was a becoming
color for both; while pink was the favorite fancy dress of
Barbara, and blue of Melicent. Melicent was the type of
perfect women; Barbara was a perfect woman: the beauty
of the one softened into the roundness of the whole;
that of the other was concentrated into the sharpness
of the individual. If you were acquainted with many
excellent women, you would fancy you had seen a dozen
Melicents to one Barbara. They had both been to the
same schools, they read the same books, and belonged

to the same church. In dietetics, Melicent drank coffee,
Barbara drank tea. In recreation, Barbara liked to waltz,
Melicent preferred the minuet. They were both Christians;
but Barbara sometimes speculated on the miracles,
— Melicent loved the Saviour; Barbara aspired after, and
sometimes stumbled in pursuit of, the infinities of the universe,
— Melicent delighted to yield herself to the serene,
unconscious currents of the immortal life; Melicent bore her
cross with the patience of a martyr, — Barbara carried off hers
more with the ease of a strong man. Barbara had more
ideality, — Melicent more purity; Barbara more impulse, —
Melicent more firmness. Melicent possessed force of character,
— Barbara power of manner. In filial devotion they
were equal; but Melicent staid at home when her mother
wished her to stay, and Barbara went abroad when her
mother wished her to go. Barbara would make a sacrifice
if her parents insisted; Melicent would make one after they
had ceased to insist. Barbara was more lively, — Melicent
more solid. Barbara could joke with the best of feelings;
when Melicent had the best of feelings, she could not joke.
In respect of humanity, Barbara was an Abolitionist, — Melicent
gave herself to the cause of Peace. Barbara had great
hope for the race, — Melicent a strong faith in it. Both
excelled in music; but Barbara preferred Beethoven, — Melicent,
Strauss. Barbara would create a deeper and stronger
impression, — Melicent a pleasanter and warmer sympathy.
Barbara would suggest a thousand thoughts to you, — Melicent
would transfuse you with a certain stillness and serenity
that would speedily fill with thoughts.

These sisters looked out on the moonlight; but they did
not go to the same window, nor did they put their arms
around each other, in the common glow of beautiful entranced
feeling. One went to a window on one side of the chimney,

—the other to the other. They spoke to each other, as it
were, through the chimney; each heart felt, and uttered,
and reflected back, the glorious world without, not to itself,
but that the other heart might hear. Barbara said, “O
Spirit of Eternal Beauty, keep me this night!” Melicent
responded, “O beautiful love of God, I am thine to-night!”

They set in place the chairs, wheeled back the sofa,
removed the lamp and damask cloth from the table, that it
might be ready for the servants to lay the breakfast in the
morning; exchanged the elegant, downy hearth-rug for an
obsolete, thread-bare one; raked up the fire, bolted the
door; and they too went to bed.

We offer this chapter to our readers, not because it contains
matter rare or striking; — it does not; it is of common
and familiar things; — and because it is of common and
familiar things, we write it. It is a simple picture of a
worthy American family, that we would like to preserve,
but which we are more anxious to present to our distant
readers.

American family! Patagonian? Esquimaux? Nay;
an United States of North American. Between a barbarism
on the one hand and a falsity on the other, we adopt the
falsity. A little euphuistic conformity is to be preferred to
a broken pate. We are not puissant enough to throw the
glove to national pride in favor of a proper nomenclature.
The force of this observation will be felt when we drop
down to the next.

Our distant readers. We mean the English, French,
German, Swedish. But more, much more. Philosophy
teaches that nothing is lost; and this tale must survive.
Morality urges the illimitableness of human influence;
wherefore we may calculate that some waye of kind appreciation
will cast these pages on the remotest shores. Now,

if license can be had from the Imperial Commission of
Turkey, and our friend, Ees Hawk Effendi, of Constantinople,
amidst other engagements, shall be able to complete
the translation, we hope to publish the book in that celebrated
metropolis.

But there are pirates in that region, who will undoubtedly
be on the alert, and use so favorable an occasion to
pounce upon the work, and translate it into the language of
contiguous nations, — say the Tartars, — where its circulation,
unimpeded by copy-right, must be immense.

Now, it is an established premise of history, that the Tartars,
or ancient Scythians, peopled Europe; that the Anglo-Saxons
and Normans came primarily from the banks of the
Caspian. Whence it follows that we, soi-disant Americans,
deduce our genealogy from a spot renowned as the home of
Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.

Consider, then, the pleasure of introducing a work like
this among our almost forgotten ancestors! With what
delight must they hail intelligence from their long-lost, but
still alive and well, trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific children!
With what eagerness will the ladies, God bless them! of
Samarcand, that famous city, order the numbers, as they
successively appear, done in silk paper — no other is used
there — in the book-stalls of the great bazaar of the place!
How exhilarating for the dear creatures, in loose, flowing
costume, with this volume in hand, to stroll into the valley
of the Sogd, where, says the old geographer, Ibn Haukal,
“we may travel for eight days, and not be out of one delicious
garden;” read to each other about their cousins, Richard
and Melicent, and Memmy and Bebby, under the shade
of the glorious plane-trees, and cool their transports in an
atmosphere of musk, which is exhaled indigenously from

the soil! How it must relieve the tedium of the caravan, to
have something of this sort to peruse on the way!

Then, to retrace our steps a few degrees, let us imagine
the ladies of Constantinople, in their frequent excursions on
the Bosphorus, in those ca/du/iks, the “neatest and prettiest
boats ever seen,” reclined on soft and meditative cushions,
and alternating the magnificent scenery around them with
glances at these simple, domestic pages; — would it not be a
fine idea?

But there is a cloud in this bright anticipation, — and that
is the point we would impress, — a cloud arising from the
misnomer just alluded to. Our Usbek relatives and Ottoman
friends will not understand the term, “American
Family.” They would naturally associate the Governor,
his kindred and contemporaries, with the Russians of
Alaska. A great mistake. Why not call them a New
England family? For the reason that they are not; but
are an United States of North American one.

This note, addressed, indeed, to our cognates and fellow-citizens,
will nevertheless fulfil its design as regards these
distant literary circles, and explain what would otherwise
be a kind of ethnical and geographical myth. And certainly,
if this volume is to go among the Tartars, we cannot
but be anxious that the introduction be as smooth and
unencumbered as possible.

It will not only shed light on the interesting topic of the
names of places, to which we may again refer; — it will
likewise support the propriety of certain matters that may
appear in the progress of these chapters.