University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.

The Tempest.

Anon.

You would have but an unjust impression of
that unhappy childhood of which I have already
revealed to you so much—that childhood which
perhaps has been remembered with tears which
would not let him write my sins sometimes, by
the angel who makes up the accounts between us
and our Father in Heaven—if I shrunk from recording
the most terrible of its scenes, which was
of subsequent occurrence. When I heard you
preach from that awful passage of His word which
describes the worst of ages as without natural affection
you will not wonder, after reading these recitals,
at my feeling that thus much of the prophecy had
been fulfilled in my miserable home. If I have
been too easily tempted by delusive promises of

peace—if for that life of love which is ever an object
of the true soul's intensest longing, I have hazarded
too much, and lost all that is most necessary
to such life—remember from what storm and gloom
I looked out on the shows by which I was tempted,
and what temptations! I speak not in extenuation
of my crime, of which there is One to judge truly,
and, for the years of my repentance, very kindly;
but for your just pride of your own intelligence,
and for the hope I have that still you will remember
me hereafter with some gentleness.

It was but a few days after that visit to my aunt
which I have mentioned so particularly, that my
father was brought home in a condition so frightful
that there was at once despair of his life. I remember
to-night, as I sit here alone by this wintry
fire, shining out against the panes which shield me
from the angry tempest of snow and hail—I remember
the oppressing sense of fear and wonder
with which I saw him conveyed to the gate of our
poor house, in his own little cart, which was half
filled with straw to save him as much as possible
from the tortures of a removal in that terrible state.
He was partly sheltered by an old broken umbrella,
and his forehead was bound with a cloth red with
his blood.

He scowled on me as they lifted him down, and
when I went close, and asked him what was the

matter, he thrust me roughly aside, with an oath
that made me tremble.

In a few moments I summoned courage to peer
in at the door, and then I saw my mother almost
overwhelmed in the momentary insanity of grief,
wringing her hands, shrieking, and weeping; but
she became more calm, and presently one of the
men approached her and whispered some words to
which she gave an affirmative answer, upon which
he came out to me and put his large right hand
upon my shoulder, saying that my father had been
in a brawl, and got the worst of it, that he would
die, may be, before Squire Davids could be got
there, and would certainly not live more than a day
or two. I joined then instinctively in the passionate
sorrow of my mother, not indeed that much
love was possible for one who never had evinced
a feeling of humanity for me, but that all was so
sudden, so strange, so terrible; and then the man
said, to comfort me, that I ought not to cry for it, as
I would be far better off, as well as my mother,
when the last nail was in his coffin. I forgot he
had not been to me as other fathers to their children
whom I knew, and shuddered at a speech
that even a fiend, I since have thought sometimes,
should never make to a child about a father; and
I pulled myself away from him—for he held me
with a tight rather than a friendly grasp—and

going to my accustomed play ground, under a low
cherry tree, where the grass was all trodden down,
I attempted to think of other things. It was in
vain, and I called the dog to me, and tried to
make him play with a stick, as I had done often
before, but he sullenly refused, and pressing his
nose to the door-sill he piteously howled and would
not be driven away.

As I sat thus weeping by myself, and at the
same time attempting to draw a picture of the dog
on the smooth bark of the tree, with a common
pencil I had found a few days previously, a youth,
who was passing in a chaise, drew up and asked me
why I was crying, and who taught me to make
pictures. At first I hid the lines with my apron,
but he spoke so kindly and praised my skill so
much that I withdrew it, and told him why I
cried. I had never seen any one so handsome
and well dressed as he, and I was quite astonished
and delighted when he took from his pocket a
small book of engravings, and a crayon, and gave
them both to me, saying, “You are a little genius,
and you must learn how to use them, and become
an artist.”

How quickly the world recognizes the creative
powers of him who has been nursed in the lap of
ease! how many hands reach out to aid the climbing
laurel toward his brows, that never have been

browned with the hot sun as he has toiled in fields,
nor furrowed with any slow shaping care, or the
quick mastery of a sudden sorrow. But the entitled
poor too often struggle for bays that are
heaped up on the undeserving rich; they grope
through obscure ways, hungry, like
with but the cloud and dread presentiment of greatness
on their souls. The soil of poverty smothers
the flowers of inspiration from the world's discovery,
or stifles songs that if unloosed might fill
with melody a thousand years. Yet the divine
faculties do not attain their best development when
led by luxury among bowers and fountains, so
often as when the darkest forms of wretchedness
drag them in chains through deserts, and over
crags, and down amid whatever is most to be feared,
or hated, in human life. “Wicked Angelo must
work in ceilings till he can only read with his
book above his head.” The roof of a prison kept
the eyes of Tasso from that nature which should
have fed his soul with beauty and with strength.
And what immortal visions have come, Dante, to
lone exiles, or, Gallileo, to those who watched the
stars through windows grated with impassable
iron! How many hearts are beating like death
watches in the dark—passing, unknown, out of
time—whose simple experience if unfolded would
draw away the eyes of the subtlest anatomists of
exalted passion from the most impressive pages in
all written art. Poets, the wings of whose fancy
beat exultingly up through the golden clouds
where my poor thoughts cannot climb, tell us of
immortal amaranths shadowing the green summits
of Fame's far mountain, but no such sweet
repose of joy has been disclosed in any life that
I have known, and if such sunshine as the children
of genius seek, be found except in rifts through
darkest clouds, haply it will be only in that day
which will come after the last night of all.

I cannot express to you the interest with which
the stranger's gifts inspired me, nor the influence
which his gentle words had on my efforts and aspirations
in all my succeeding years of childhood.

As I yet sat beneath the tree, turning the
leaves over and over, and backward and forward,
the man who had stopped to comfort me so strangely
returned, in company with my uncle. Both
seemed to have ridden very fast, for the nostrils
and flanks of their horses were specked with foam.

“Hi, hi!” said Squire Davids, seeing me, “can
you find nothing better to do?” The other person
came near, and, taking from his head the blue
woolen cap, which was old, and falling on one
side, wiped the perspiration from his face with his

sleeve, as he asked me whether my father was
ready for his shroud. He then inquired if I had
seen him, and, taking me by the hand, led me in,
telling my mother he had brought me to take a
last look.

After a partial examination of the injuries which
my father had received, Squire Davids shook his
head, and a whispered consultation followed, at the
conclusion of which it was announced as the general
opinion that a doctor must be sent for to come
from the city. This terrified me more than I had
been before, for I knew that when a doctor was
called from town the case was desperate. As to
who was called, I think that in their judgment it
made little difference, and the man in the blue cap,
who seemed officious, set out presently on the important
mission, saying, as he departed, “All the
doctors in the world cannot set him on his feet
again.”

“No sir, no sir,” responded one or two voices;
but Squire Davids said while there was life there
was hope, and the same voices said “Yes, sir, yes,
sir.” For myself, I remember that I felt very
much encouraged, as well as afraid, for I supposed
that though a regular physician was never summoned
but in extremity, he could perform miracles.

“Well,” said the squire to my mother, when
about to depart, “whether he lives or dies, you will

have your hands full; yes, whether he lives or dies,
you will have your hands full: so just get this
little girl ready, (here he laid his hand on my head)
and I'll take her home with me.”

With some tears—whether for me or for the
wretched state of things about her, I do not know—
the dress which had been my grandmother's, with
some other rudely made garments, constituting all
my wardrobe, were tied in a handkerchief which
my mother took from her neck, and which was, I
believe, all the one she had; and then, mounted
behind the old man, I was carried away, and sold,
as it were, into bondage.

I am sure I need not describe to you the life I
led at the house of my uncle. During the seven
years of my service, I saw my mother but once:
I was well provided for, she thought, and she was
satisfied.

Through every winter season I was sent to school,
where the books I used were those my uncle himself
had used when a boy, and I learned little from
them. But my teacher had seen something of the
world, and he taught in this obscure and lonely
place, a part of the time, to enable him to struggle
upward for the rest. He received only a pitiful
compensation, but the three richest men of the district
gave him board and lodging, and, with an old
trunk, and a bundle of books, he moved from place

to place. Our house was, of course, one of his
homes; and from his conversation and reading I
learned more than I did at school.

In the summer, I was often required to gain time
from my household routine for the performance of
extra tasks, such as dropping corn, and other duties
in the field. Sometimes John Dale and I rested
together in the shade, and, so long as we talked of
our work, of how soon we should get the seed in,
and how soon it would be up, and of the scarecrow
we should make of Aunt Elizabeth's plaid cloak
and the Squire's bell-crowned hat, we preserved
the most perfect unity of feeling. But when I told
some story learned of the schoolmaster, or exhibited
the new drawing I had made, the sympathy was
ended. So, as I grew older, there was accumulated
in my mind a world of thoughts and emotions of
which he had no knowledge. He was always very
kind to me, constructed swings for me, and brought
to me frequently the fairest apples and the ripest
berries—so I could not choose but love him—and
yet I preferred often to be alone. And when the
schoolmaster was with us, I sat on a low stool
by his side, with my knitting, (for I was never
suffered to be idle) and listened all the while he read
or talked to me, leaving John to decide upon the
color of the new cart, and the best time of the
moon for planting potatoes, according to the traditions

he had received from the old farmers of the
neighborhood.

The schoolmaster praised my drawings, too, and
all the summer, as lamb, or cow, or tree, took
natural shape beneath my pencil, I pleased myself
with anticipations of the surprise and pleasure he
would feel in my improvement. Nobody could
understand me so well as he, and the long winter
evenings seemed too short, when I sat in the blaze
of the heaped wood-fires with him. If he praised
me, I could not sleep all the night, but vague and
strange yearnings, that I can now better define,
alternately uplifted and cast me down.

I could see, in the starlight, visions of pictures,
glorious embodiments of all beautiful things of
which I had ever dreamed, and on the wind I
could hear murmurs of praise.

I would think, “I am mocked with laurels hung
above my reach; I have no power to climb, and no
hand will reach downward to help me up: it were
better to shut my eyes, and sink to the level of circumstances.”
And I would say sometimes, “John is
soundly asleep, acquiring strength for the tasks of
to-morrow—no waking visions haunt his pillow.”
But turn as I would to the real life before me,
there was another life outside the narrow continent
of being to which my experience was limited,
where, in spite of the actual and the probable,

irresistible influences compelled me to walk, and I
woke, after fitful and brief slumbers, with flushed
cheeks and a throbbing bosom, for which John's
honest pity, and my aunt's wholesome exercise in
the dairy, were no palliatives.

So the years came and went, and came and went
again; and childish fancies were lost in a no less
dreamy girlhood. I need not describe the little
phases of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, compassed
by the same dull round, and ending in the same
hopeless endurance. I needed not indeed to relate
to you all that I here have written, but I cannot
help but think that this various and humble experience
was a preparation for the fate to which I
am sorrowfully approaching; and if I could linger
long enough to unfold to you the hard privation,
and helpless ambition, that made up the history of
my childhood, you might at least, sometimes, turn
from the melancholy results to the molding influences,
and the media through which you see
would possibly present a softened shade.

My fifteenth birth-day was passed, and John called
me still a pretty girl. Neither tasks with my
needle, nor field nor household toil, had done me
much wrong in his opinion; and my little brown
hands were none the less pretty that they were
brown, nor my cheeks less lovely that their crimson
blushed not out of snow. Wan and faded as I am,

I can hardly trace my lineaments in the healthful
and rustic girl I was then. One day, when the
schoolmaster had just gone from us, and a wretched
and helpless feeling oppressed me, my uncle came
home with a letter for me—the first I ever received.
I had seen some two or three letters, perhaps, that
were sent at long intervals to Squire Davids, with
superscriptions in hieroglyphics covering the entire
surface, but an epistle neatly folded, and directed
in a hand that seemed to me the perfection of
writing, I now saw for the first time. A new
world seemed opening as I broke the seal and read
the mysterious communication.

By the death of a relation, my mother was
become heir to a decent competence, and I was
henceforth to live with her, in a pretty cottage not
fifty miles from the great city of which I had
dreamed ever since I was a little child. I was lost
in incredulous surprise for a time, but even before
the preparations for my departure were completed,
my first enthusiasm was gone. I was to leave the
roof-tree and the hearth-light that had sheltered
and warmed me for years, and I knew not what I
should obtain. Contending emotions filled my
heart. The bird that flies against his prison bars
will sometimes refuse freedom itself, when the cage
is open, and such a feeling was mine. I knew not
till then, how endeared to me were the old homestead,

and even the dumb brutes with whose aspects
I had become familiar.

It was a mild evening in April, and the trees
had scarcely leaves enough for shadows yet, when
I left the house to visit for the last time, probably,
the adjacent places I had loved the most. I had
turned from the grass bank where I had read
sometimes, and taken in my arms the young trees I
had tried to imitate in my poor drawings, and was
returning homeward, with my heart's sorrow dimming
my eyes, when, a little aside from my path,
sitting on a harrow sunken in the edge of a plowed
field, I saw John Dale. His attitude evinced his
sudden grief, and with an air of abandonment he
buried his face in his hands.

“Come, John,” I said, approaching him, and affecting
not to see his sorrow, “I am going home
now—won't you go with me?” He was startled,
for he had not seen me; but there came to his
cheek no flush of shame, and with a look half
beseeching and half reproachful he remained silent.
I could not go on, and after a moment's hesitation
I sat down beside him on the harrow. I tried to
talk of the sunset, of the budding trees, and all the
common things that had previously interested him.
With his hard and sun-burned hand he wiped the
tears from his eyes and listened, but he did not
smile, nor seem aware of his work, as with a small

stick he loosened from one tooth of the harrow the
moist earth.

At last I persuaded him into some conversation
of the farm he had bought, and was working to
pay for; but the attraction it had for him was
connected with me, and as I did not wish to discourage,
and thereby wound him, and could not
give him any hope, our words were formal, and
unsatisfactory to both, and we went homeward in
silence. “What have I done? where am I to go?”
were my thoughts on waking in the morning; but,
looking from the window, I saw the new cart,
which John had painted, waiting to carry me away.