 | Inklings of adventure |  |
LARKS IN VACATION.
1. CHAPTER I.
DRIVING STANHOPE PRO. TEM.
In the edge of a June evening in the summer vacation
of 1827, I was set down by the coach at the gate
of my friend Horace Van Pelt's paternal mansion; a
large, old-fashioned, comfortable Dutch house, clinging
to the side of one of the most romantic dells on
the North River. In the absence of his whole family
on the summer excursion to the Falls and Lakes,
(taken by almost every “well-to-do” citizen of the
United States,) Horace was emperor of the long-de-scended,
and as progressively enriched domain of one
of the earliest Dutch settlers, a brief authority which
he exercised more particularly over an extensive stud,
and bins No. 1 and 2.
The West was piled with gold castles, breaking up
the horizon with their burnished pinnacles and turrets,
the fragrant dampness of the thunder-shower that had
followed the heat of noon was in the air, and in a low
room, whose floor opened out so exactly upon the
shaven sward, that a blind man would not have known
when he passed from the heavily piled carpet to the
grass, I found Horace sitting over his olives and claret,
latest American hour,) and in despair of my arrival,
having dined without me. The old black cook was
too happy to vary her vacation by getting a second
dinner, and when I had appeased my appetite, and
overtaken my friend in his claret, we sat with the
moonlight breaking across a vine at our feet, and coffee
worthy of a filagree cup in the Bezestein, and debated,
amid a true embarras des richesses, our plans for the
next week's amusement.
The seven days wore on, merrily at first, but each
succeeding one growing less merry than the last. By
the fifth eve of my sojourn, we had exhausted variety.
All sorts of headaches and megrims in the morning,
all sorts of birds, beasts, and fishes for dinner, all sorts
of accidents in all sorts of vehicles, left us on the
seventh day out of sorts altogether. We were too discontended
Rasselases in the Happy Valley. Rejoicing
as we were in vacation, it would have been a relief to
have had a recitation to read up, or a prayer-bell to
mark the time. Two idle Sophomores in a rambling,
lonely old mansion, were, we discovered, a very insufficient
dramatis personœ for the scene.
It was Saturday night. A violent clap of thunder
had interrupted some daring theory of Van Pelt's on
the rising of champagne bubbles, and there we sat,
mum and melancholy, two sated Sybarites, silent an
hour by the clock. The mahogany was bare between
us. Any number of glasses and bottles stood in their
lees about the table; the thrice-fished juice of an
olive-dish and a solitary cigar in a silver case had been
thrust aside in a warm argument, and, in his father's
sacred gout-chair, buried to the eyes in his loosened
cravat, one leg on the table, and one somewhere in
the neighborhood of my own, sat Van Pelt, the cidolon
of exhausted amusement.
“Phil!” said he, starting suddenly to an erect position,
“a thought strikes me!”
I dropped the claret-cork, from which I was at the
moment trying to efface the “Margaux” brand, and
sat in silent expectation. I had thought his brains as
well evaporated as the last bottle of champagne.
He rested his elbows on the table, and set his chin
between his two palms.
“I'll resign the keys of this mournful old den to the
butler, and we'll go to Saratoga for a week. What
say?”
“It would be a reprieve from death by inanition,” I
answered, “but, as the rhetorical professor would
phrase it, amplify your meaning, young gentleman.”
“Thus: To-morrow is Sunday. We will sleep till
Monday morning to purge our brains of these cloudy
vapors and restore the freshness of our complexions.
If a fair day, you shall start alone in the stanhope,
and, on Monday night, sleep in classic quarters at Titus's
in Troy.”
“And you!” I interrupted, rather astonished at his
arrangement for one.
Horace laid his hand on his pocket with a look of
embarrassed care.
“I will overtake you with the bay colts in the
drosky, but I must first go to Albany. The circulating
medium—”
“I understand.”
II.
We met on Monday morning in the breakfast-room
in mutual spirits. The sun was two hours high, the
birds in the trees were wild with the beauty and elasticity
of the day, the dew glistened on every bough,
and the whole scene, over river and hill, was a heaven
of natural delight. As we finished our breakfast, the
light spattering of a horse's feet up the avenue, and
the stanhope. It was in beautiful order, and what
would have been termed on any pave in the world a
tasteful turn-out. Light cream-colored body, black
wheels and shafts, drab lining edged with green, dead-black
harness, light as that on the panthers of Bacchus—it
was the last style of thing you would have
looked for at the “stoup” of a Dutch homestead.
And Tempest! I think I see him now! his small inquisitive
ears, arched neck, eager eye, and fine, thin
nostril—his dainty feet flung out with the grace of a
flaunted ribbon—his true and majestic action and his
spirited champ of the bit, nibbling at the tight rein with
the exciting pull of a hooked trout—how evenly he
drew! how insensibly the compact stanhope, just
touching his iron-grey tail, bowled along on the road
after him!
Horace was behind with the drosky and black boy,
and with a parting nod at the gate, I turned northward,
and Tempest took the road in beautiful style. I
do not remember to have been ever so elated. I was
always of the Cyrenaic philosophy that “happiness is
motion,” and the bland vitality of the air had refined
my senses. The delightful feel of the reins thrilled me
to the shoulder. Driving is like any other appetite,
dependent for the delicacy of its enjoyment on the
system, and a day's temperate abstinence, long sleep,
and the glorious perfection of the morning, had put
my nerves “in condition.” I felt the air as I rushed
through. The power of the horse was added to my
consciousness of enjoyment, and if you can imagine a
centaur with a harness and stanhope added to his living
body, I felt the triple enjoyment of animal exercise
which would then be his.
It is delightful driving on the Hudson. The road is
very fair beneath your wheels, the river courses away
under the bold shore with the majesty inseparable
in its banks gives you, as you proceed, a constant
variety of pictures, from the loveliest to the most sublime.
The eagle's nest above you at one moment, a
sunny and fertile farm below you at the next,—rocks,
trees, and waterfalls, wedded and clustered as, it
seems to me, they are nowhere else done so picturesquely—it
is a noble river, the Hudson! And every
few minutes, while you gaze down upon the broad
waters spreading from hill to hill like a round lake, a
gaily-painted steamer with her fringed and white awnings
and streaming flag, shoots out as if from a sudden
cleft in the rock, and draws across it her track of
foam.
Well—I bowled along. Ten o'clock brought me
to a snug Dutch tavern, where I sponged Tempest's
mouth and nostrils, lunched and was stared at by the
natives, and continuing my journey, at one I loosed
rein and dashed into the pretty village of —, Tempest
in a foam, and himself and his extempore master
creating a great sensation in a crowd of people, who
stood in the shade of the verandah of the hotel, as if
that asylum for the weary traveler had been a shop for
the sale of gentlemen in shirt sleeves.
Tempest was taken round to the “barn,” and I ordered
rather an elaborate dinner, designing still to go
on some ten miles in the cool of the evening, and having,
of course, some mortal hours upon my hands.
The cook had probably never heard of more than
three dishes in her life, but those three were garnished
with all manner of herbs, and sent up in the best
china as a warranty for an unusual bill, and what with
coffee, a small glass of new rum as an apology for a
chasse cafe, and a nap in a straight back'd chair, I
killed the enemy to my satisfaction till the shadows of
the poplars lengthened across the barn-yard.
I was awoke by Tempest, prancing round to the
day en grand seigneur, I did not object to the bill,
which considerably exceeded the outside of my calculation,
but giving the landlord a twenty-dollar note,
received the change unquestioned, doubled the usual
fee to the ostler, and let Tempest off with a bend forward
which served at the same time for a gracious
bow to the spectators. So remarkable a coxcomb
had probably not been seen in the village since the
passing of Cornwallis's army.
The day was still hot, and as I got into the open
country, I drew rein and paced quietly up hill and
down, picking the road delicately, and, in a humor of
thoughtful contentment, trying my skill in keeping the
edges of the green sod as it leaned in and out from the
walls and ditches. With the long whip I now and
then touched the wing of a sulphur butterfly hovering
over a pool, and now and then I stopped and gathered
a violet from the unsunn'd edge of the wood.
I had proceeded three or four miles in this way,
when I was overtaken by three stout fellows, galloping
at speed, who rode past and faced round with a
peremptory order to me to stop. A formidable pitchfork
in the hand of each horseman left me no alternative.
I made up my mind immediately to be robbed
quietly of my own personals, but to show fight, if necessary,
for Tempest and the stanhope.
“Well, gentlemen,” said I, coaxing my impatient
horse, who had been rather excited by the clatter of
hoofs beside him, “what is the meaning of this?”
Before I could get an answer, one of the fellows
had dismounted and given his bridle to another, and
coming round to the left side, he sprang suddenly into
the stanhope. I received him as he rose with a well-placed
thrust of my heel which sent him back into the
road, and with a chirrup to Tempest, I dashed through
the phalanx and took the road at a top speed. The
there was no stopping in a hurry, and away sped the
gallant grey, and fast behind followed my friends in
their short sleeves, all in a lathering gallop. A couple
of miles was the work of no time, Tempest laying his
legs to it as if the stanhope had been a cobweb at his
heels; but at the end of that distance there came a
sharp descent to a mill-stream, and I just remember
an unavoidable mile-stone and a jerk over a wall, and
the next minute, it seemed to me, I was in the room
where I had dined, with my hands tied and a hundred
people about me. My cool white waistcoat was matted
with mud, and my left temple was, by the glass
opposite me, both bloody and begrimed.
The opening of my eyes was a signal for a closer
gathering around me, and between exhaustion and the
close air I was half suffocated. I was soon made to
understand that I was a prisoner, and that the three
white-frock'd highwaymen, as I took them to be, were
among the spectators. On a polite application to the
landlord, who, I found out, was a justice of the peace
as well, I was informed that he had made out my mittimus
as a counterfeiter, and that the spurious note I
had passed upon him for my dinner was safe in his
possession! He pointed at the same time to a placard
newly stuck against the wall, offering a reward for the
apprehension of a notorious practiser of my supposed
craft, to the description of whose person I answered,
to the satisfaction of all present.
Quite too indignant to remonstrate, I seated myself
in the chair considerately offered me by the waiter,
and listening to the whispers of the persons who were
still permitted to throng the room, I discovered, what
might have struck me before, that the initials on the
pannel of the stanhope and the handle of the whip had
been compared with the card pasted in the bottom of
my hat, and the want of correspondence was taken as
that I was quite too much of a dash for an
honest man, and that he had suspected me from first
seeing me drive into the village! I was sufficiently
humbled by this time to make an inward vow never
again to take airs upon myself if I escaped the county
jail.
The justice meanwhile had made out my orders,
and a horse and cart had been provided to take me to
the next town. I endeavored to get speech of his
worship as I was marched out of the inn parlor, but
the crowd pressed close upon my heels, and the dignitary-landlord
seemed anxious to rid his house of me.
I had no papers, and no proofs of my character, and
assertion went for nothing. Besides, I was muddy,
and my hat was broken in on one side, proofs of villany
which appeal to the commonest understanding.
I begged for a little straw in the bottom of the cart,
and had made myself as comfortable as my two rustic
constables thought fitting for a culprit, when the vehicle
was quickly ordered from the door to make way
for a carriage coming at a dashing pace up the road.
It was Van Pelt in his drosky.
Horace was well known on the road, and the stanhope
had already been recognized as his. By this
time it was deep in the twilight, and though he was instantly
known by the landlord, he might be excused
for not so readily identifying the person of his friend
in the damaged gentleman in the straw.
“Ay, ay! I see you don't know him,” said the landlord,
while Van Pelt surveyed me rather coldly; “on
with him, constables! he would have us believe you
knew him, Sir! walk in, Mr. Van Pelt! Ostler, look
to Mr. Van Pelt's horses! Walk in, Sir!”
“Stop!” I cried out in a voice of thunder, seeing
that Horace really had not looked at me, “Van Pelt!
stop, I say!”
The driver of the cart seemed more impressed by
the energy of my cries than my friends the constables,
and pulled up his horse. Some one in the crowd cried
out that I should have a hearing or he would “wallup
the comitatus,” and the justice, called back by this expression
of an opinion from the sovereign people, requested
his new guest to look at the prisoner.
I was preparing to have my hands untied, yet feeling
so indignant at Van Pelt for not having recognised
me that I would not look at him, when, to my surprise,
the horse started off once more, and looking back, I
saw my friend patting the neck of his near horse, evidently
not having thought it worth his while to take
any notice of the justice's observation. Choking with
rage, I flung myself down upon the straw, and jolted
on without further remonstrance to the county town.
I had been incarcerated an hour when Van Pelt's
voice, half angry with the turnkey and half ready to
burst into a laugh, resounded outside. He had not
heard a word spoken by the officious landlord, till after
the cart had been some time gone. Even then, believing
it to be a cock-and-bull story, he had quietly
dined, and it was only on going into the yard to see
after his horses that he recognized the debris of his
stanhope.
The landlord's apologies, when we returned to the
inn, were more amusing to Van Pelt than consolatory
to Philip Slingsby.
2. CHAPTER II.
SARATOGA SPRINGS.
It was about seven o'clock of a hot evening when
Van Pelt's exhausted horses toiled out from the Pine
Forest, and stood, fetlock deep in sand, on the brow
of the small hill overlooking the mushroom village of
Saratoga. One or two straggling horsemen were returning
late from their afternoon ride, and looked at
us, as they passed on their fresher hacks, with the curiosity
which attaches to new-comers in a watering-place;
here and there a genuine invalid, who had
come to the waters for life, not for pleasure, took advantage
of the coolness of the hour and crept down
the foot-path to the Spring; and as Horace encouraged
his flagging cattle into a trot to bring up gallantly
at the door of “Congress Hall,” the great bell
of that vast caravanserai resounded through the dusty
air, and by the shuffling of a thousand feet, audible as
we approached, we knew that the fashionable world
of Saratoga were rushing down, en masse, “to tea.”
Having driven through a sand-cloud for the preceding
three hours, and, to say nothing of myself, Van
Pelt being a man, who, in his character as the most
considerable beau of the University, calculated his first
impression, it was not thought advisable to encounter,
uncleansed, the tide of fashion at that moment streaming
through the Hall. We drove round to the side-door,
and gained our pigeon-hole quarters under cover
of the back-staircase.
The bachelors' wing of Congress Hall is a long, unsightly,
by four, and of an airiness of partition which enables
the occupant to converse with his neighbor three rooms
off, with the ease of clerks calling out entries to the
leger across the desks of a counting-house. The
clatter of knives and plates came up to our ears in a
confused murmur, and Van Pelt having refused to dine
at the only inn upon the route, for some reason best
known to himself, I commenced the progress of a long
toilet with an appetite not rendered patient by the
sounds of cheer below.
I had washed the dust out of my eyes and mouth,
and, overcome with heat and hunger, I knotted a cool
cravat loosely round my neck, and sat down in the one
chair.
“Van Pelt!” I shouted.
“Well, Phil!”
“Are you dressed?”
“Dressed! I am as pinguid as a pate foie gras—
greased to the eyelids in cold cream!”
I took up the sixpenny glass and looked at my own
newly washed physiognomy. From the temples to the
chin it was one unmitigated red—burned to a blister
with the sun! I had been obliged to deluge my head
like a mop to get out the dust, and not naturally remarkable
for my good looks, I could, much worse than
Van Pelt, afford these startling additions to my disadvantages.
Hunger is a subtle excuse-finder, however,
and, remembering there were five hundred people in
this formidable crowd, and all busy with satisfying their
appetites, I trusted to escape observation, and determined
to “go down to tea.” With the just-named
number of guests, it will easily be understood why it
is impossible to obtain a meal at Congress Hall, out of
the stated time and place.
In a white roundabout, a checked cravat, my hair
plastered over my eyes a la Mawworm, and a face like
door.
“The most hideous figure my eyes ever looked
upon!” was his first consolatory observation.
“Handsome or hideous,” I answered, “I'll not
starve! So here goes for some bread and butter!”
and leaving him to his “appliances,” I descended to the
immense hall which serves the comers to Saratoga, for
dining, dancing, and breakfasting, and in wet weather,
between meals, for shuttlecock and promenading.
Two interminable tables extended down the hall,
filled by all the beauty and fashion of the United States.
Luckily, I thought, for me, there are distinctions in this
republic of dissipation, and the upper end is reserved
for those who have servants to turn down the chairs
and stand over them. The end of the tables nearest
the door, consequently, is occupied by those whose
opinion of my appearance is not without appeal, if they
trouble their heads about it at all, and I may glide in,
in my white roundabout, (permitted in this sultry
weather,) and retrieve exhausted nature in obscurity.
An empty chair stood between an old gentleman
and a very plain young lady, and seeing no remembered
faces opposite, I glided to the place, and was soon lost
to apprehension in the abysm of a cold pie. The table
was covered with meats, berries, bottles of chalybeate
water, tea appurtenances, jams, jellies, and radishes,
and, but for the absence of the roast, you might have
doubted whether the meal was breakfast or dinner,
lunch or supper. Happy country! in which any one
of the four meals may serve a hungry man for all.
The pigeon-pie stood, at last, well quarried before
me, the debris of the excavation heaped upon my plate;
and, appetite appeased, and made bold by my half
hour's obscurity, I leaned forward and perused with
curious attention the long line of faces on the opposite
side of the table, to some of whom, doubtless I was to
My eyes were fixed on the features of a talkative
woman just above, and I had quite forgotten the fact
of my dishabille of complexion and dress, when two
persons entered who made considerable stir among
the servants, and eventually were seated directly opposite
me.
“We loitered too long at Barhydt's,” said one of
the most beautiful women I had ever seen, as she
pulled her chair nearer to the table and looked around
her with a glance of disapproval.
In following her eyes to see who was so happy as
to sympathize with such a divine creature even in the
loss of a place at table, I met the fixed and astonished
gaze of my most intimate friend at the University.
“Ellerton!”
“Slingsby!”
Overjoyed at meeting him, I stretched both hands
across the narrow table, and had shaken his arm nearly
off his shoulders, and asked him a dozen questions, before
I became conscious that a pair of large wondering
eyes were coldly taking an inventory of my person
and features. Van Pelt's unflattering exclamation
upon my appearance at his door, flashed across my
mind like a thunderstroke, and, coloring through my
burned skin to the temples, I bowed and stammered I
know not what, as Ellerton introduced me to his
sister!
To enter fully into my distress, you should be apprized
that a correspondence arising from my long and
constant intimacy with Tom Ellerton, had been carried
on for a year between me and his sister, and that, being
constantly in the habit of yielding to me in matters of
taste, he had, I well knew, so exaggerated to her my
personal qualities, dress, and manners, that she could
not in any case fail to be disappointed in seeing me.
off in Alabama, and never having hoped for the pleasure
of seeing her at all, I had foolishly suffered this
good-natured exaggeration to go on, pleased with seeing
the reflex of his praises in her letters, and, Heaven
knows, little anticipating the disastrous interview upon
which my accursed star would precipitate me! As I
went over, mentally, the particulars of my unbecomingness,
and saw Miss Ellerton's eyes resting inquisitively
and furtively on the mountain of pigeon bones
lifting their well-picked pyramid to my chin, I wished
myself an ink-fish at the bottom of the sea.
Three minutes after, I burst into Van Pelt's room,
tearing my hair and abusing Tom Ellerton's good nature,
and my friend's headless drosky, in alternate
breaths. Without disturbing the subsiding blood in his
own face by entering into my violence, Horace coolly
asked me what the devil was the matter.
I told him.
“Lie down here!” said Van Pelt, who was a small
Napoleon in such trying extremities; “lie down on
the bed, and anoint your phiz with this unguent. I see
good luck for you in this accident, and you have only
to follow my instructions. Phil Slingsby, surnburnt,
in a white roundabout, and Phil Slingsby, pale and well
drest, are as different as this potted cream and a dancing
cow. You shall see what a little drama I'll work
out for you!”
I lay down on my back, and Horace kindly anointed
me from the trachea to the forelock, and from ear to
ear.
“Egad,” said he, warming with his study of his proposed
plot as he slid his fore-fingers over the bridge of
my nose, “every circumstance tells for us. Tall man
as you are, you are as short-bodied as a monkey, (no
offence, Phil!) and when you sit at table, you are rather
an under-sized gentleman. I have been astonished
dinner in Commons' Hall. A thousand to one, Fanny
Ellerton thinks you a stumpy man.”
“And then, Phil,” he continued, with a patronising
tone, “you have studied minute philosophy to little
purpose if you do not know that the first step in winning
a woman to whom you have been overpraised, is
to disenchant her at all hazards, on your first interview.
You will never rise above the ideal she has formed, and
to sink below it gradually, or to remain stationary, is
not to thrive in your wooing.”
Leaving me this precocious wisdom to digest, Horace
descended to the foot of the garden to take a warm
bath, and overcome with fatigue, and the recumbent
posture, I soon fell asleep and dreamed of the great
blue eyes of Fanny Ellerton.
II.
The soaring of the octave flute in “Hail Columbia,”
with which the band was patriotically opening the ball,
woke me from the midst of a long apologetic letter to
my friend's sister, and I found Van Pelt's black boy
Juba waiting patiently at the bed-side with curling-tongs
and Cologne water, ordered to superintend my
toilet by his master, who had gone early to the drawing-room
to pay his respects to Miss Ellerton. With
the cold cream disappeared entirely from my face the
uncomfortable redness to which I had been a martyr,
and, thanks to my ebony coiffeur, my straight and plastered
locks soon grew as different to their “umquhile
guise” as Hyperion's to a satyr's. Having appeared
to the eyes of the lady, in whose favor I hoped to
prosper, in red and white, (red phiz and white jacket,)
I trusted that in white and black, (black suit and pale
viznomy,) I should look quite another person. Juba
was pleased to show his ivory in a complimentary
smile at my transformation, and I descended to the
my bosom.
Horace met me at the door.
“Proteus redivivus!” was his exclamation. “Your
new name is Wrongham. You are a gentle Senior,
instead of a bedeviled Sophomore, and your cue is to
be poetical. She will never think again of the monster
in the white jacket, and I have prepared her for
the acquaintance of a new friend, whom I have just
described to you.
I took his arm, and with the courage of a man in a
mask, went through another presentation to Miss Ellerton.
Her brother had been let into the secret by
Van Pelt, and received me with great ceremony as his
college superior; and, as there was no other person
at the Springs who knew Mr. Slingsby, Mr. Wrongham
was likely to have an undisturbed reign of it.
Miss Ellerton looked hard at me for a moment, but
the gravity with which I was presented and received,
dissipated a doubt if one had arisen in her mind, and
she took my arm to go to the ball-room, with an undisturbed
belief in my assumed name and character.
I commenced the acquaintance of the fair Alabamian
with great advantages. Received as a perfect
stranger, I possessed, from long correspondence with
her, the most minute knowledge of the springs of her
character, and of her favorite reading and pursuits,
and, with the little knowledge of the world which she
had gained on a plantation, she was not likely to penetrate
my game from my playing it too freely. Her
confidence was immediately won by the readiness
with which I entered into her enthusiasm and anticipated
her thoughts; and before the first quadrille was
well over, she had evidently made up her mind that
she had never in her life met one who so well “understood
her.” Oh! how much women include in that
apparently indefinite expression, “he understands me!”
The colonnade of Congress Hall is a long promenade
laced in with vines and columns, on the same
level with the vast ball-room and drawing-room, and,
(the light of heaven not being taxed at Saratoga,)
opening at every three steps by a long window into
the carpeted floors. When the rooms within are lit in
a summer's night, that cool and airy colonnade is
thronged by truants from the dance, and collectively
by all who have any thing to express that is meant for
one ear only. The mineral waters of Saratoga are no
less celebrated as a soporific for chaperons than as a
tonic for the dyspeptic, and while the female Argus
dozes in the drawing-room, the fair Io and her Jupiter
(represented in this case, we will say, by Miss Ellerton
and myself) range at liberty the fertile fields of
flirtation.
I had easily put Miss Ellerton in surprised good-humor
with herself and me during the first quadrille, and
with a freedom based partly upon my certainty of
pleasing her, partly on the peculiar manners of the
place, I coolly requested that she would continue to
dance with me for the rest of the evening.
“One unhappy quadrille excepted,” she replied,
with a look meant to be mournful.
“May I ask with whom?”
“Oh, he has not asked me yet; but my brother has
bound me over to be civil to him—a spectre, Mr.
Wrongham! a positive spectre.”
“How denominated?” I inquired, with a forced indifference,
for I had a presentiment I should hear my
own name.
“Slingsby—Mr. Philip Slingsby—Tom's fidus Achates,
and a proposed lover of my own. But you don't
seem surprised!”
“Surprised! E-hem! I know the gentleman!”
“Then did you ever see such a monster! Tom
told me he was another Hyperion. He half admitted
with him a year!”
“Giddy Miss Fanny Ellerton!—and never saw
him!”
“Never till to-night! He sat at supper in a white
jacket and red face, with a pile of bones upon his plate
like an Indian tumulus.”
“And your brother introduced you?”
“Ah you were at table! Well, did you ever see in
your travels a man so unpleasantly hideous?”
“Fanny!” said her brother, coming up at the moment,
“Slingsby presents his apologies to you for not
joining your cordon to night—but he's gone to bed with
a head-ache.”
“Indigestion, I dare say,” said the young lady.
“Never mind, Tom, I'll break my heart when I have
leisure. And now, Mr. Wrongham, since the spectre
walks not forth to-night, I am yours for a cool hour on
the colonnade.”
Vegetation is rapid in Alabama, and love is a weed
that thrives in the soil of the tropics. We discoursed
of the lost Pleiad and the Berlin bracelets, of the five
hundred people about us, and the feasibility of boiling
a pot on five hundred a year—the unmatrimonial sum
total of my paternal allowance. She had as many negroes
as I had dollars, I well knew, but it was my cue
to seem disinterested.
“And where do you mean to live, when you marry,
Mr. Wrongham?” asked Miss Ellerton, at the two
hundreth turn on the colonnade.
“Would you like to live in Italy?” I asked again, as
if I had not heard her.
“Do you mean that as a sequitur to my question,
Mr. Wrongham?” said she, half stopping in her walk;
and though the sentence was commenced playfully,
dropping her voice at the last word, with something, I
thought, very like emotion.
I drew her off the colonnade to the small garden
between the house and the spring, and in a giddy dream
of fear and surprise at my own rashness and success,
I made, and won from her, a frank avowal of preference.
Matches have been made more suddenly.
III.
Miss Ellerton sat in the music-room the next morning
after breakfast, preventing pauses in a rather interesting
conversation, by a running accompaniment
upon the guitar. A single gold thread formed a fillet
about her temples, and from beneath it, in clouds of
silken ringlets, floated the softest raven hair that ever
grew enamored of an ivory shoulder. Her's was a
skin that seemed woven of the lilly-white, but opaque
fibre of the magnolia, yet of that side of its cup turned
toward the fading sunset. There is no term in painting,
because there is no touch of pencil or color, that
could express the vanishing and impalpable breath that
assured the healthiness of so pale a cheek. She was
slight as all southern women are in America, and of a
flexile and luxurious gracefulness equalled by nothing
but the movings of a smoke curl. Without the elastic
nerve remarkable in the motions of Taglioni, she appeared,
like her, to be born with a lighter specific gravity
than her fellow-creatures. If she had floated
away upon some chance breeze you would only have
been surprised upon reflection.
“I am afraid you are too fond of society,” said Miss
Ellerton, as Juba came in hesitatingly and delivered
her a note in the hand-writing of an old correspondent.
She turned pale on seeing the superscription, and
crushed the note up in her hand, unread. I was not
sorry to defer the denouement of my little drama, and
taking up the remark which she seemed disposed to
forget, I referred her to a scrap-book of Van Pelt's,
some verses of my own, copied (by good luck) in that
sentimental Sophomore's own hand.
“Are these yours, really and really?” she asked,
looking pryingly into my face, and showing me my
own verses, against which she had already run a pencil
line of approbation.
“Peccavi!” I answered. “But will you make me
in love with my offspring by reading them in your own
voice.”
They were some lines written in a balcony at day-break,
while a ball was still going on within, and contained
an allusion (which I had quite overlooked) to
some one of my ever-changing admirations. As well
as I remember they ran thus:—
It breaks upon my fever'd eye!
How chides the calm and dewy air!
How chides the pure and pearly sky!
The stars melt in a brighter fire,
The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers;
They from their watch, in light retire,
While we in sadness pass from ours!
I turn from the rebuking morn,
The cold, grey sky and fading star,
And listen to the harp and horn,
And see the waltzers near and far;
The lamps and flowers are bright as yet,
And lips beneath more bright than they,—
How can a scene so fair beget
The mournful thoughts we bear away!
'Tis something that thou art not here,
Sweet lover of my lightest word!
'Tis something that my mother's tear
By these forgetful hours is stirr'd!
But I have long a loiterer been
In haunts where Joy is said to be;
And though with Peace I enter in,
The nymph comes never forth with me!
“And who was this `sweet lover,' Mr. Wrongham?
I should know, I think, before I go farther with so expeditious
a gentleman.”
“As Shelley says of his ideal mistress,
Or any earthly one—though ye are fair!'
which I have found, dear Miss Ellerton! But will you
read that ill-treated billet-doux, and remember that
Juba stands with the patience of an ebon statue waiting
for an answer.”
I knew the contents of the letter, and I watched the
expression of her face, as she read it, with no little
interest. Her temples flushed, and her delicate lips
gradually curled into an expression of anger and scorn,
and having finished the perusal of it, she put it into
my hand, and asked me if so impertinent a production
deserved an answer.
I began to fear that the eclaircissement would not leave
me on the sunny side of the lady's favor, and felt the
need of the moment's reflection given me while running
my eye over the letter.
“Mr. Slingsby,” said I, with the deliberation of an
attorney, “has been some time in correspondence with
you.”
“Yes.”
“And, from his letters and your brother's commendations,
you had formed a high opinion of his character,
and had expressed as much in your letters.”
“Yes—perhaps I did.”
“And from this paper intimacy he conceives himself
sufficiently acquainted with you to request leave to
pay his addresses.”
A dignified bow put a stop to my catechism.
“Dear Miss Ellerton,” I said, “this is scarcely a
this letter into my hand, you seemed to ask my opinion.”
“I did—I do,” said the lovely girl, taking my hand,
and looking appealingly into my face; “answer it for
me! I have done wrong in encouraging that foolish
correspondence, and I owe perhaps to this forward man
a kinder reply than my first feeling would have dictated.
Decide for me—write for me—relieve me from the first
burden that has lain on my heart since”—
She burst into tears and my dread of an explanation
increased.
“Will you follow my advice implicitly,” I asked.
“Yes—oh, yes!”
“You promise?”
“Indeed, indeed!”
“Well, then, listen to me! However painful the
task, I must tell you that the encouragement you have
given Mr. Slingsby, the admiration you have expressed
in your letters of his talents and acquirements, and the
confidences you have reposed in him respecting yourself,
warrant him in claiming as a right, a fair trial of
his attractions. You have known, and approved Mr.
Slingsby's mind for years—you know me but for a few
hours. You saw him under the most unfavorable auspices,
(for I know him intimately,) and I feel bound
in justice to assure you that you will like him much
better upon acquaintance.”
Miss Ellerton had gradually drawn herself up during
this splendid speech, and sat at last as erect and as
cold as Agrippina upon her marble chair.
“Will you allow me to send Mr. Slingsby to you?”
I continued, rising; “and suffer him to plead his own
cause?”
“If you will call my brother, Mr. Wrongham, I
shall feel obliged to you,” said Miss Ellerton.
I left the room, and hurrying to my chamber, dipped
locks over my eyes, slipped on a white roundabout,
and tied around my neck the identical checked cravat
in which I had made such an unfavorable impression on
the first day of my arrival. Tom Ellerton was soon
found, and easily agreed to go before and announce
me by my proper name to his sister, and treading
closely on his heels, I followed to the door of the
music-room.
“Ah, Ellen!” said he, without giving her time for
a scene, “I was looking for you. Slingsby is better,
and will pay his respects to you presently. And, I
say—you will treat him well, Ellen, and—and, don't
flirt with Wrongham the way you did last night!
Slingsby's a devilish sight better fellow. Oh here he
is!”
As I stepped over the threshold, Miss Ellerton gave
me just enough of a look to assure herself that it was
the identical monster she had seen at the tea-table,
and not deigning me another glance, immediately commenced
talking violently to her brother on the state of
the weather. Tom bore it for a moment or two with
remarkable gravity, but at my first attempt to join in
the conversation, my voice was lost in an explosion of
laughter which would have been the death of a gentleman
with a full habit.
Indignant and astonished, Miss Ellerton rose to her
full height, and slowly turned to me.
“Peccavi!” said I, crossing my hands on my bosom,
and looking up penitently to her face.
She ran to me, and seized my hand, but recovered
herself instantly, and the next moment was gone from
the room.
Whether from wounded pride at having been the
subject of a mystification, or whether from that female
caprice by which most men suffer at one period
or other of their bachelor lives, I know not—but I
crisis with which she ended her intimacy with
Mr. Wrongham. She proffered to forgive me, and
talked laughingly enough of our old correspondence,
but whenever I grew tender she referred me to the
“sweet lover,” mentioned in my verses in the balcony,
and looked around for Van Pelt. That accomplished
beau, on observing my discomfiture, began to find out
Miss Ellerton's graces without the aid of his quizzing-glass,
and I soon found it necessary to yield the pas
altogether. She has since become Mrs. Van Pelt,
and when I last heard from her was “as well as could
be expected.”
3. CHAPTER III.
MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON.
The last of August came sweltering in, hot, dusty,
and faint, and the most indefatigable belles of Saratoga
began to show symptoms of weariness. The stars
disappeared gradually from the ball-room; the bar-keeper
grew thin under the thickening accounts for
lemonades; the fat fellow in the black band, who
“vexed” the bassoon, had blown himself from the
girth of Falstaff to an “eagle's talon in the waist;”
papas began to be waylaid in their morning walks by
young gentlemen with propositions; and stage-coaches
that came in with their baggageless tails in the air, and
the driver's weight pressing the foot-board upon the
astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the
trim of a Venetian gondola, the driver's up-hoisted
figure answering to the curved proboscis of that sternladen
craft.
The vocation of tin-tumblers and water-dippers was
gone. The fashionable world (brazen in its general
habit) had drank its fill of the ferruginous waters.
Mammas thanked Heaven for the conclusion of the
chaperon's summer solstice; and those who came to
bet, and those who came to marry, “made up their
books,” and walked off (if they had won) with their
winnings.
Having taken a less cordial farewell of Van Pelt
than I might have done had not Miss Ellerton been
hanging confidingly on his arm, I followed my baggage
to the door, where that small epitome of the inheritance
awaited me as its ninth inside passenger. As
the last person picked up, I knew very well the seat to
which I was destined, and drawing a final cool breath
in the breezy colonnade, I summoned resolution and
abandoned myself to the tender mercies of the
driver.
The “ray of contempt” that “will pierce through
the shell of the tortoise,” is a shaft from the horn of a
new moon in comparison with the beating of an American
sun through the top of a stage-coach. This
“accommodation,” as it is sometimes bitterly called,
not being intended to carry outside passengers, has a
top as thin as your grandmother's umbrella, black, porous,
and cracked; and while intended for a protection
from the heat, it just suffices to collect the sun's
rays with an incredible power and sultriness, and exclude
the air that makes it sufferable to the beasts of
the field. Of the nine places inside this “dilly,” the
four seats in the corners are so far preferable that the
occupant has the outer side of his body exempt from
a perspirative application of human flesh, (the thermometer
at 100° of Fahrenheit,) while, of the three
middle places on the three seats, the man in the centre
of the coach, with no support for his back, yet buried
to the chin in men, women, and children, is at the
ninth and lowest degree of human suffering. I left
Saratoga in such a state of happiness as you might
suppose for a gentleman, who, besides fulfilling this
latter category, had been previously unhappy in his
love.
I was dressed in a white roundabout and trowsers
of the same, a straw hat, thread stockings, and pumps,
and was so far a blessing to my neighbors that I looked
cool. Directly behind me, occupying the middle of
the back seat, sat a young woman with a gratis passenger
in her lap, (who, of course, did not count
child of three years of age, whom she called John,
Jacky, Johnny, Jocket, Jacket, and the other endearing
diminutives of the namesakes of the great apostle.
Like the saint who had been selected for his patron,
he was a “voice crying in the wilderness.” This little
gentleman was exceedingly unpopular with his two
neighbors at the windows, and his incursions upon
their legs and shoulders in his occasional forays for
fresh air, ended in his being forbidden to look out at
either window, and plied largely with gingerbread to
content him with the warm lap of his mother. Though
I had no eyes in the back of my straw hat, I conceived
very well the state in which a compost of soft gingerbread,
tears, and perspiration, would soon leave the
two unscrupulous hands behind me, and as the jolts
of the coach frequently threw me back upon the
knees of his mother, I could not consistently complain
of the familiar use made of my roundabout and shoulders
in Master John's constant changes of position. I
vowed my jacket to the first river, the moment I could
make sure that the soft gingerbread was exhausted—
but I kept my temper.
How an American Jehu gets his team over ten
miles in the hour, through all the variety of sand, ruts,
clay-pits, and stump-thickets, is a problem that can
only be resolved by riding beside him on the box. In
the usual time we arrived at the pretty village of Troy,
some thirty miles from Saratoga, and here, having exchanged
my bedaubed jacket for a clean one, I freely
forgave little Pickle his freedoms, for I hoped never
to set eyes on him again during his natural life. I was
going eastward by another coach.
Having eaten a salad for my dinner, and drank a
bottle of iced claret, I stepped forth in my “blanched
and lavendered” jacket to take my place in the other
coach, trusting Providence not to afflict me twice in
on the whole, reconciled to my troubled dividend
of eternity. I got up the steps of the coach with as
much alacrity as the state of the thermometer would
permit, and was about drawing my legs after me upon
the forward seat, when a clammy hand caught me unceremoniously
by the shirt-collar, and the voice I was
just beginning to forget cried out with a chuckle,
“dada!”
“Madam!” I said, picking off the gingerbread from
my shirt as the coach rolled down the street, “I had
hoped that your infernal child —”
I stopped in the middle of the sentence, for a pair
of large blue eyes were looking wonderingly into mine,
and for the first time I observed that the mother of this
familiar nuisance was one of the prettiest women I
had seen since I had become susceptible to the charms
of the sex.
“Are you going to Boston, sir?” she inquired, with
a half-timid smile, as if, in that case, she appealed to
me for protection on the road.
“Yes, madam!” I answered, taking little Jocket's
pasty hand into mine, affectionately, as I returned her
hesitating look; “may I hope for your society so far?”
My fresh white waistcoat was soon embossed with a
dingy yellow, where my enterprising fellow-passenger
had thrust his sticky fist into the pockets, and my sham
shirt-bosom was reduced incontinently to the complexion
of a painter's rag after doing a sunset in gamboge.
I saw everything, however, through the blue eyes of his
mother, and was soon on such pleasant terms with
Master John, that, at one of the stopping places, I inveigled
him out of the coach and dropped him accidentally
into the horse-trough, contriving to scrub him
passably clean before he could recover breath enough
for an outcry. I had already thrown the residuum of
his gingerbread out of the window, so that his familiarities
We dropped one or two way-passengers at Lebanon,
and I was left in the coach with Mrs. Captain and
Master John Thompson, in both whose favors I made
a progress that, (I may as well depone,) considerably
restored my spirits—laid flat by my unthrift wooing at
Saratoga. If a fly hath but alit on my nose when my
self-esteem hath been thus at a discount, I have soothed
myself with the fancy that it preferred me—a drowning
vanity will so catch at a straw!
As we bowled along through some of the lovliest
scenery of Massachusetts, my companion, (now become
my charge,) let me a little into her history, and at the
same time, by those shades of insinuation of which women
so instinctively know the uses, gave me perfectly
to comprehend that I might as well economize my
tenderness. The father of the riotous young gentleman
who had made so free with my valencia waistcoat
and linen roundabouts, had the exclusive copyhold of
her affections. He had been three years at sea, (I think
I said before,) and she was hastening to show him the
pledge of their affections,—come into the world since
the good brig Dolly made her last clearance from Boston
Bay.
I was equally attentive to Mrs. Thompson after this
illumination, though I was, perhaps, a shade less enamoured
of the interesting freedoms of Master John.
One's taste for children depends so much upon one's
love for their mothers!
It was twelve o'clock at night when the coach rattled
in upon the pavements of Boston. Mrs. Thompson
had expressed so much impatience during the last few
miles, and seemed to shrink so sensitively from being
left to herself in a strange city, that I offered my services
till she should find herself in better hands, and, as
a briefer way of disposing of her, had bribed the coachman,
out of his way, and leave her at her husband's hotel.
We drew up with a prodigious clatter, accordingly,
at the Marlborough Hotel, where, no coach being expected,
the boots and bar-keeper were not immediately
forthcoming. After a rap “to wake the dead,” I set
about assisting the impatient driver in getting off the
lady's trunks and boxes, and they stood in a large
pyramid on the sidewalk when the door was opened.
A man in his shirt, three parts asleep, held a flaring
candle over his head, and looked through the half-opened
door.
“Is Captain Thompson up?” I asked rather brusquely,
irritated at the sour visage of the bar-keeper.
“Captain Thompson, sir?”
“Captain Thompson, sir!!” I repeated my words
with a voice that sent him three paces back into the
hall.
“No, Sir,” he said at last, slipping one leg into his
trowsers, which had hitherto been under his arm.
“Then wake him immediately, and tell him Mrs.
Thompson is arrived.” Here's a husband, thought I,
as I heard something between a sob and a complaint
issue from the coach window at the bar-keeper's intelligence.
To go to bed when he expected his wife and
child, and after three years' separation! She might as
well have made a parenthesis in her constancy!
“Have you called the captain?” I asked, as I set master
John upon the steps, and observed the man still
standing with the candle in his hand, grinning from ear
to ear.
“No sir,” said the man.
“No!” I thundered, “and what in the devil's name
is the reason?”
“Boots!” he cried out in reply, “show this gentleman
`forty-one.' Them may wake Captain Thompson
as likes! I never hearn of no Mrs. Thompson!”
Rejecting an ungenerous suspicion that flashed across
my mind, and informing the bar-keeper en passant, that
he was a brute and a donkey, I sprang up the staircase
after the boy, and quite out of breath, arrived at a
long gallery of bachelors' rooms on the fifth floor. The
boy pointed to a door at the end of the gallery, and
retreated to the bannisters as if to escape the blowing-up
of a petard.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
“Come in!” thundered a voice like a hailing trumpet.
I took the lamp from the boy, and opened the door.
On a narrow bed well tucked up, lay a most formidable
looking individual, with a face glowing with carbuncles,
a pair of deep-set eyes inflamed and fiery, and hair and
eyebrows of glaring red, mixed slightly with grey; while
outside the bed lay a hairy arm, with a fist like the end
of the club of Hercules. His head tied loosely in a
black silk handkerchief, and on the light stand stood a
tumbler of brandy-and-water.
“What do you want?” he thundered again, as I stepped
over a threshold and lifted my hat, struck speechless
for a moment with this unexpected apparition.
“Have I the pleasure,” I asked, in a hesitating voice,
“to address Captain Thompson?”
“That's my name!”
“Ah! then, captain, I have the pleasure to inform
you that Mrs. Thompson and little John are arrived.
They are at the door at this moment.”
A change in the expression of Captain Thompson's
face checked my information in the middle, and as I
took a step backward, he raised himself on his elbow,
and looked at me in a way that did not diminish my embarrassment.
“I'll tell you what, Mr. Milk-and-water,” said he,
with an emphasis on every word like the descent of a
sledge hammer; “if you're not out of this room in two
slam you through that window, or the devil take me!”
I reflected as I took another step backward, that if I
were thrown down to Mrs. Thompson from a fifth story
window I should not be in a state to render her the assistance
she required; and remarking with an ill-feigned
gaiety to Captain Thompson that so decided a measure
would not be necessary, I backed expeditiously over
the threshold. As I was closing his door, I heard the
gulp of his brandy-and-water, and the next instant the
empty glass whizzed past my retreating head, and was
shattered to pieces on the wall behind me.
I gave the “boots” a cuff for an untimely roar of
laughter as I reached the staircase, and descended, very
much discomfited and embarrassed, to Mrs. Thompson.
My delay had thrown that lady into a very moving state
of unhappiness. Her tears were glistening in the light
of the street lamp, and Master John was pulling away
unheeded at her stomacher, and crying as if he would
split his diaphragm. What to do? I would have offered
to take her to my paternal roof till the mystery
could be cleared up—but I had been absent two years,
and to arrive at midnight with a woman and a young
child, and such an improbable story—I did not think
my reputation at home would bear me out. The coachman,
too, began to swear and make demonstrations of
leaving us in the street, and it was necessary to decide.
“Shove the baggage inside the coach,” I said at last,
“and drive on. Don't be unhappy Mrs. Thompson!
Jocket, stop crying, you villain! I'll see that you are
comfortably disposed for the night where the coach
stops, Madam, and to-morrow I'll try a little reason
with Captain Thompson.—How the devil she can love
such a volcanic specimen!” I muttered to myself, dodging
instinctively at the bare remembrance of the glass
of brandy-and-water.
The coachman made up for lost time, and we rattled
quite inaudible. As we passed the door of my
own home, I wondered what would be the impression
of my respectable parent, could he see me whisking by,
after midnight, with a rejected woman and her progeny
upon my hands; but smothering the unworthy doubt
that re-arose in my mind, touching the legitimacy of
Master John, I inwardly vowed that I would see Mrs.
Thompson at all risks fairly out of her imbroglio.
We pulled up with a noise like the discharge of a load
of paving stones, and I was about saying something both
affectionate and consolatory to my weeping charge,
when a tall, handsome fellow, with a face as brown as
a berry, sprang to the coach-door, and seized her in his
arms! A shower of kisses and tender epithets left me
not a moment in doubt. There was another Captain
Thompson!
He had not been able to get rooms at the Marlborough,
as he had anticipated when he wrote, and presuming
that the mail would come first to the Post Office,
he had waited for her there.
As I was passing the Marlborough a week or two
afterwards, I stopped to inquire about Captain Thompson.
I found that he was an old West India captain,
who had lived there between his cruises for twenty
years more or less, and had generally been supposed a
bachelor. He had suddenly gone to sea, the landlord
told me, smiling at the same time, as if thereby hung a
tale if he chose to tell it.
“The fact is,” said Bonifiace, when I pushed him a
little on the subject, “he was skeared off.”
“What scared him?” I asked very innocently.
“A wife and child from some foreign port!” he answered
laughing as if he would burst his waistband,
and taking me into the back parlor to tell me the particulars.
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