University of Virginia Library

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,

wooden barrack, divided into chambers six feet
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

the sign of the “Rising Sun,” I stopped at Van Pelt's
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

be indebted for the pleasures of the coming fortnight.

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.

Believing her to be at that moment two thousand miles
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

every day these three years, at seeing you rise after
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

drawing-room, on the best terms with the coxcomb in
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

it himself, indeed; for to tell you a secret, I have corresponded
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,

which she had brought home with her, containing
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:—

“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,

It was but an apostrophe to the presentiment of that
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

question upon which I ought to speak, but by putting
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

my head into a bason of water, and plastered my long
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

never could bring Miss Ellerton again to the same interesting
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.”