5. V.
My aunt, Isabella Slingsby (now in heaven, with
the “eleven thousand virgins,” God rest her soul!),
was at this time, as at all others, under my respectable
charge. She would have said I was under hers—
but it amounts to the same thing—we lived together
in peace and harmony. She said what she pleased,
for I loved her—and I did what I pleased, for she
loved me. When Karl told me that Meeta's principal
objection to an elopement was the want of a matron,
I shut the teeth of my resolution, as they say in Persia,
and inwardly vowed my unconscious aunt to this
exigency. You should have seen Miss Isabella Slingsby
to know what a desperate man may be brought to
resolve on.
On a certain day, Count Von Raffle-off (as my witty
friend and ally, Tom Fane, was pleased to call the
handsome pedlar) departed with his pack and the
hearts of all the dressing-maids and some of their mistresses,
on his way to New York. I drove down the
road to take my leave of him out of sight, and give
him my last instructions.
How to attack my aunt was a subject about which
I had many unsatisfactory thoughts. If there was one
thing she disapproved of more than another, it was an
elopement; and with what face to propose to her to
run away with a baron's only daughter, and leave her
in the hands of a pedlar, taking upon herself, as she
must, the whole sin and odium, was an enigma I ate,
drank, and slept upon, in vain. One thing at last became
very clear—she would do it for nobody but me.
Sequitur, I must play the lover myself.
I commenced with a fit of illness. What was the
matter? For two days I was invisible. Dear Isabella!
it was the first time I had ever drawn seriously on thy
fallow sympathies, and, how freely they flowed at my
affected sorrows, I shame to remember! Did ever
woman so weep? Did ever woman so take antipathy
to man as she to that innocent old baron for his supposed
refusal of his daughter to Philip Slingsby? This
revival of the remembrance shall not be in vain. The
mignonette and roses planted above thy grave, dearest
aunt, shall be weeded anew!
Oh that long week of management and hypocrisy!
The day came at last.
“Aunt Bel!”
“What, Philip, dear?”
“I think I feel better to-day.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. What say you to a drive? There is the
stanhope.”
“My dear Phil, don't mention that horrid stanhope.
I am sure, if you valued my life—”
“Precisely, aunt—(I had taken care to give her a
good fright the day before)—but Tom Fane has offered
me his ponies and Jersey wagon, and that, you know,
is the most quiet thing in the world, and holds four.
So, perhaps—ehem!—you'll—ask Meeta?”
“Um! Why, you see, Philip—”
I saw at once, that, if it got to an argument, I was
perdu. Miss Slingsby, though a sincere Christian,
never could keep her temper when she tried to reason.
I knelt down on her footstool, smoothed away the false
hair on her forehead, and kissed her. It was a fascinating
endearment of mine, that I only resorted to on
great emergencies. The hermit tooth in my aunt's
mouth became gradually visible, heralding what in
youth had been a smile; and, as I assisted her in rolling
up her embroidery, she looked on me with an unsuspecting
affection that touched my heart. I made
a silent vow that if she survived the scrape into which
she was being inveigled, I would be to her and her
dog Whimsiculo (the latter my foe and my aversion)
the soul of exemplary kindness for the remainder of
their natural lives. I lay the unction to my soul that
this vow was kept. My aunt blessed me shortly before
she was called to “walk in white” (she had hitherto
walked in yellow), and as it would have been unnatural
in Whimsiculo to survive her, I considered his
“natural life” as ended with hers, and had him peacefully
strangled on the same day. He lies at her feet,
as usual, a delicate attention of which (I trust in Swedenborg)
her spirit is aware.
With the exception of “Tom Thumb” and “Rattler,”
who were of the same double-jointed family of
interminable wind and bottom, there was never perhaps
such a pair of goers as Tom Fane's ponies. My
aunt had a lurking hope, I believe, that the baron
would refuse Meeta permission to join us, but either
he did not think me a dangerous person (I have said
before he was a dull man), or he had no objection to
me as a son-in-law, which my aunt and myself (against
the world) would have thought the natural construction
upon his indifference. He came to the end of the
colonnade to see us start, and as I eased the ribands
and let the ponies off like a shot from a crossbow, I
stole a look at Meeta. The color had fled from cheek
and lip, and the tears streamed over them like rain.
Aunt Bel was on the back seat, grace à Dieu!
We met Tom at the foot of the hill, and I pulled
up. He was the best fellow, that Tom Fane!
“Ease both the bearing reins,” said I, “I am going
up the mountain.”
“The devil you are!” said Tom, doing my bidding,
however; “you'll find the road to the shakers much
pleasanter. What an odd whim! It's a perpendicular
three miles, Miss Slingsby. I would as lief be
hoisted up a well and let down again. Don't go that
way, Phil, unless you are going to run away with
Miss Von—”
“Many a shaft at random sent,”
thought I, and waving the tandem lash over the ears
of the ponies, I brought up the silk on the cheek of
their malaprop master, and spanked away up the hill,
leaving him in a range likely to get a fresh supply of
fuel by dinner-time. Tom was of a plethoric habit,
and if I had not thought he could afford to burst a
blood-vessel better than two lovers to break their hearts,
I should not have ventured on the bold measure of
borrowing his horses for an hour, and keeping them a
week. We have shaken hands upon it since, but it is
my private opinion that he has never forgiven me in
his heart.
As we wound slowly up the mountain, I gave Meeta
the reins, and jumped out to gather some wild flowers
for my aunt. Dear old soul! the attention reconciled
her to what she considered a very unwarrantable caprice
of mine. What I could wish to toil up that
steep mountain for? Well! the flowers are charming
in these high regions!
“Don't you see my reason for coming, then, aunt
Bella?”
“Was it for that, dear Philip?” said she, putting
the wild flowers affectionately into her bosom, where
they bloomed like broidery on saffron tapestry; “how
considerate of you!” And she drew her shawl around
her, and was at peace with all the world. So easily
are the old made happy by the young! Reader, I
scent a moral in the air!
We were at the top of the hill. If I was sane, my
aunt was probably thinking, I should turn here, and
go back. To descend the other side, and reascend
and descend again to the Springs, was hardly a sort of
thing one would do for pleasure.
“Here's a good place to turn, Philip,” said she, as
we entered a smooth broad hollow on the top of the
mountain.
I dashed through it as if the ponies were shod with
talaria. My aunt said nothing, and luckily the road
was very narrow for a mile, and she had a horror of a
short turn. A new thought struck me.
“Did you ever know, aunt, that there was a way
back around the foot of the mountain?”
“Dear, no; how delightful! Is it far?”
“A couple of hours or so; but I can do it in less.
We'll try;” and I gave the sure-footed Canadians the
whip, and scampered down the hills as if the rock of
Sisyphus had been rolling after us.
We were soon over the mountain-range, and the
road grew better and more level. Oh, how fast pattered
those little hoofs, and how full of spirit, and
excitement looked those small ears, catching the
lightest chirrup I could whisper, like the very spell of
swiftness! Pines, hemlocks and cedars, farmhouses
and milestones, flew back like shadows. My aunt sat
speechless in the middle of the back seat, holding on
with both hands, in apprehensive resignation! She
expected soon to come in sight of the Springs, and
had doubtless taken a mental resolution that if, please
God, she once more found herself at home, she would
never “tempt Providence” (it was a favorite expression
of hers) by trusting herself again behind such a pair
of fly-away demons. As I read this thought in her
countenance by a stolen glance over my shoulder, we
rattled into a village distant from Lebanon twenty
miles.
“There, aunt,” said I, as I pulled up at the door of
the inn, “we have very nearly described a circle.
Now, don't speak! if you do, you'll start the horses.
There's nothing they are so much afraid of as a woman's
voice. Very odd, isn't it? We'll just sponge
their mouths now, and be at home in the crack of a
whip. Five miles more, only. Come!”
Off we sped again like the wind, aunt Bel just venturing
to wonder whether the horses wouldn't rather go
slower. Meeta had hardly spoken; she had thoughts
of her own to be busy with, and I pretended to be fully
occupied with my driving. The nonsense I talked to
those horses, to do away the embarrassment of her silence,
would convict me of insanity before any jury in
the world.
The sun began to throw long shadows, and the short-legged
ponies figured like flying giraffes along the retiring
hedges. Luckily, my aunt had very little idea
of conjecturing a course by the points of the compass.
We sped on gloriously.
“Philip, dear! hav'n't you lost your way? It seems
to me we've come more than five miles since you
stopped” (ten at least), “and I don't. see the mountains
about Lebanon at all!”
“Don't be alarmed, aunty, dear! We're very high,
just here, and shall drop down on Lebanon, as it were.
Are you afraid, Meeta?”
“Nein!” she answered. She was thinking in German,
poor girl, and heart and memory were wrapped
up in the thought.
I drove on almost cruelly. Tom's incomparable
horses justified all his eulogiums; they were indefatigable.
The sun blazed a moment through the firs,
and disappeared; the gorgeous changes of eve came
over the clouds; the twilight stole through the damp
air with its melancholy gray; and the whippoorwills,
birds of evening, came abroad, like gentlemen in debt,
to flit about in the darkness. Everything was saddening.
My own volubility ceased; the whiz of the
lash, as I waved it over the heads of my foaming ponies,
and an occasional “Steady!” as one or the other
broke into a gallop, were the only interruptions to the
silence. Meeta buried her face in the folds of her
shawl, and sat closer to my side, and my aunt, soothed
and flattered by turns, believed and doubted, and was
finally persuaded, by my ingenious and well-inserted
fibs, that it was only somewhat farther than I anticipated,
and we should arrive “presently.”
Somewhere about eight o'clock the lights of a town
appeared in the distance, and, straining every nerve,
the gallant beasts whirled us in through the streets,
and I pulled up suddenly at the door of an hotel.
“Why, Philip!” said my aunt in a tone of unutterable
astonishment, looking about her as if she had
awoke from a dream, “this is Hudson!”
It was too clear to be disputed. We were upon the
North river, forty miles from Lebanon, and the steamer
would touch at the pier in half an hour. My aunt
was to be one of the passengers to New York, but she
was yet to be persuaded of it; the only thing now was
to get her into the house, and enact the scene as soon
as possible.
I helped her out as tenderly as I knew how, and, as
we went up stairs, I requested Meeta to sit down in a
corner of the room, and cover her face with her handkerchief.
When the servant was locked out, I took
my aunt into the recess of the window, and informed
her, to her very great surprise, that she had run away
with the baron's daughter.
“Philip Slingsby!”
My aunt was overcome. I had nothing for it but to
be overcome too. She sunk into one chair, and I into
the other, and burying my face in my hands, I looked
through my fingers to watch the effect. Five mortal
minutes lasted my aunt's wrath; gradually, however,
she began to steal a look at me, and the expression of
resentment about her thin lips softened into something
like pity.
“Philip!” said she, taking my hand.
“My dear aunt!”
“What is to be done?”
I pointed to Meeta, who sat with her head on her
bosom, pressed my hand to my heart, as if to suppress
a pang, and proceeded to explain. It seemed impossible
for my aunt to forgive the deception of the thing.
Unsophisticated Isabella! If thou hadst known that
thou wert, even yet, one fold removed from the truth,
—if thou couldst have divined that it was not for the
darling of thy heart that thou wert yielding a point
only less dear to thee than thy maiden reputation—
if it could have entered thy region of possibilities that
thine own house in town had been three days aired
for the reception of a bride, run away with by thy ostensible
connivance, and all for a German pedlar, in
whose fortunes and loves thou hadst no shadow of
interest—I think the brain in thee would have turned,
and the dry heart in thy bosom have broken with surprise
and grief!
I wrote a note to Tom, left his horses at the inn,
and at nine o'clock we were steaming down the Hudson,
my aunt in bed, and Meeta pacing the deck with
me, and pouring forth her fears and her gratitude in
a voice of music that made me almost repent my self
sacrificing enterprise. I have told the story gayly,
gentle reader! but there was a nerve ajar in my heart
while its little events went on.
How we sped thereafter, dear reader!—how the
consul of his majesty of Prussia was persuaded by my
aunt's respectability to legalize the wedding by his
presence—how my aunt fainted dead away when the
parson arrived, and she discovered who was not to be
the bridegroom and who was—how I persuaded her
she had gone too far to recede, and worked on her tenderness
once more—how the weeping Karl, and his
lame and lovely bride, lived with us till the old baron
thought it fit to give Meeta his blessing and some
money—how Tom Fane wished no good to the pedlar's
eyes—and lastly, how Miss Isabella Slingsby lived
and died wondering what earthly motive I could have
for my absurd share in these events, are matters of
which I spare you the particulars.
