 | CHAPTER III.
ANTECEDENTS. The guardian angel |  |
3. CHAPTER III.
ANTECEDENTS.
THE Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in
town. It was built on the east bank of the river, a
little above the curve which gave the name to Oxbow Village.
It stood on an elevation, its west gable close to the river's
edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the foot of the
slope behind it, woods at the east, open to the south, with a
great row of Lombardy poplars standing guard in front
of the house. The Hon. Selah Withers, Esq., a descendant
of one of the first colonists, built it for his own
residence, in the early part of the last century. Deeply
impressed with his importance in the order of things, he
had chosen to place it a little removed from the cluster of
smaller dwellings about the Oxbow; and with some vague
fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook the Rhine
and the Danube, he had selected this eminence on which
to place his substantial gambrel-roofed dwelling-house.
Long afterwards a bay-window, almost a little room of
itself, had been thrown out of the second story on the west
side, so that it looked directly down on the river running
beneath it. The chamber, thus half suspended in the air,
had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard;
and as the boys paddling about on the river would often
catch glimpses, through the window, of the little girl
dressed in the scarlet jacket she fancied in those days, one
of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it a name which became
current among the young people, and indeed furnished
to wit, “The Fire-hang-bird's Nest.”
If we would know anything about the persons now living
at the Withers Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more
commonly called of late years, we must take a brief inventory
of some of their vital antecedents. It is by no means
certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant
of these our corporeal frames. Nay, there is recorded
an experience of one of the living persons mentioned in
this narrative, — to be given in full in its proper place, —
which, so far as it is received in evidence, tends to show
that some, at least, who have long been dead, may enjoy a
kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in
these bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering
exclusively our own. There are many circumstances,
familiar to common observers, which favor this
belief to a certain extent. Thus, at one moment we detect
the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations
or others. There are times when our friends do
not act like themselves, but apparently in obedience to some
other law than that of their own proper nature. We all do
things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps
we have contenants in this house we live in. No less than
eight distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a
single female mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable
authority. In this light we may perhaps see the
meaning of a sentence, from a work which will be repeatedly
referred to in this narrative, viz.: “This body in
which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans
is not a private carriage, but an omnibus.”
The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr
record was obscure in some points; but the portrait, marked
“Ann Holyoake, burned by ye bloudy Papists, año 15..”
(figures illegible), was still hanging against the panel over
the fireplace in the west parlor at The Poplars. The following
words were yet legible on the canvas:—
“Thov hast made a couenant O Lord with mee and my
children forever.”
The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke
these words in a prayer she offered up at the stake, after
the fagots were kindled. There had always been a secret
feeling in the family, that none of her descendants could
finally fall from grace, in virtue of this solemn “covenant.”
There had been also a legend in the family, that the
martyred woman's spirit exercised a kind of supervision
over her descendants; that she either manifested herself
to them, or in some way impressed them, from time to
time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast his
lot with the emigrants, — of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant
in the third generation, when the Indians were about
to attack the settlement where she lived, — and of another,
just before he was killed at Quebec.
There was a remarkable resemblance between the features
of Ann Holyoake, as shown in the portrait, and the
miniature likeness of Myrtle's mother. Myrtle adopted
the nearly obsolete superstition more readily on this account,
and loved to cherish the fancy that the guardian
spirit which had watched over her ancestors was often near
her, and would be with her in her time of need.
The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in
the evil days of 1718. A careless expression in one of
her letters, that “ye Parson was as lyke to bee in league
great offence to godly people. There was no doubt that
some odd “manifestations,” as they would be called now-a-days,
had taken place in the household when she was a
girl, and that she presented many of the conditions belonging
to what are at the present day called mediums.
Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common
type of hearty, loud, portly men, who like to show
themselves at militia trainings, and to hear themselves
shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic sentiments at
town-meetings and in the General Court. He loved to
wear a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red
feather, in which the village folk used to say he looked as
“hahnsome as a piny,” — meaning a favorite flower of his,
which is better spelt peony, and to which it was not unnatural
that his admirers should compare him.
If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably
enough have sprung from the alliance a family of
moon-faced children, who would have dropped into their
places like posts into their holes, asking no questions of
life, contented, like so many other honest folks, with the
part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their wardrobe
of flesh and bones being furnished them gratis, and
nothing to do but to walk across the stage wearing it. But
Major Gideon Withers, for some reason or other, married a
slender, sensitive, nervous, romantic woman, which accounted
for the fact that his son David, “King David,” as
he was called in his time, had a very different set of tastes
from his father, showing a turn for literature and sentiment
in his youth, reading Young's “Night Thoughts,” and
Thomson's “Seasons,” and sometimes in those early days
writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded
now, as Musidora, as Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena,
as Adah and Zillah, have all sounded to young people in
their time, — ashes of roses as they are to us now, and as
our endearing Scotch diminutives will be to others by
and by.
King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly
because he was rich, and partly because he wrote hymns
occasionally, when he grew too old to write love-poems,
married the famous beauty before mentioned, Miss Judith
Pride, and the race came up again in vigor. Their son,
Jeremy, took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic girl,
who matured into a sad-eyed woman, and bore him two
children, Malachi and Silence, both of whom inherited her
temperament. When she died, he mourned for her bitterly
almost a year, and then put on a ruffled shirt and went
across the river to tell his grief to Miss Virginia Wild,
there residing. This lady was said to have a few drops of
genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain
that her cheek had a little of the russet tinge which a
Seckel pear shows on its warmest cheek when it blushes.
— Love shuts itself up in sympathy like a knife-blade in
its handle, and opens as easily. — All the rest followed in
due order according to Nature's kindly programme.
Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell
desperately in love with their daughter Candace, married
her, and carried her with him to India, where their first
and only child was born, and received the name of Myrtle,
as fitting her cradle in the tropics. So her earliest impressions,
— it would not be exact to call them recollections,
— besides the smiles of her father and mother, were of
dusky faces, of loose white raiment, of waving fans, of
of gorgeous flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas,
of gliding palanquins, and all the languid luxury of
the South. The pestilence which has its natural home in
India, but has journeyed so far from its birthplace in these
later years, took her father and mother away, suddenly, in
the very freshness of their early maturity. A relation of
Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to
America on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her
care, while still a mere infant, to her relatives at the old
homestead. During the long voyage, the strange mystery
of the ocean was wrought into her consciousness so deeply,
that it seemed to belong to her being. The waves rocked
her, as if the sea had been her mother; and, looking over
the vessel's side from the arms that held her with tender
care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the
rhythm of their movement became a part of her, almost
as much as her own pulse and breath.
The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral
traits which predominated in the conflict of mingled lives
lay in this child in embryo, waiting to come to maturity.
It was as when several grafts, bearing fruit that ripens at
different times, are growing upon the same stock. Her
earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her
father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been
mentioned, and more or less obscurely many others, came
uppermost in their time, before the absolute and total result
of their several forces had found its equilibrium in the
character by which she was to be known as an individual.
These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting,
some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the
Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put
born with her; and the battle of life was to be fought between
them, God helping her in her need, and her own
free choice siding with one or the other. The formal statement
of this succession of ripening characteristics need not
be repeated, but the fact must be borne in mind.
This was the child who was delivered into the hands of
Miss Silence Withers, her aunt on the father's side, keeping
house with her brother Malachi, a bachelor, already
called Old Malachi, though hardly entitled by his years to
such a venerable prefix. Both these persons had inherited
the predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother. Malachi,
the chief heir of the family property, was rich, but felt
very poor. He owned this fine old estate of some hundreds
of acres. He had moneys in the bank, shares in
various companies, wood-lots in the town, and a large tract
of Western land, the subject of a lawsuit which seemed as
if it would never be settled, and kept him always uneasy.
Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old
house, but nobody knew this for a certainty. In spite of
his abundant means, he talked much of poverty, and kept
the household on the narrowest footing of economy. One
Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and
then, did all their work; and the only company they saw
was Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as a relative, claimed a
home with them whenever she was so disposed.
The “little Indian,” as Malachi called her, was an awkward
accession to the family. Silence Withers knew no
more about children and their ways and wants than if she
had been a female ostrich. Thus it was that she found it
necessary to send for a woman well known in the place as
the first friend whose acquaintance many of the little people
of the town had made in this vale of tears.
Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art
of handling the young of her species with the soft firmness
which one may notice in cats with their kittens, — more
grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing her cubs. Myrtle
did not know she was held; she only felt she was lifted,
and borne up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly
cloud, and smiled accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at
home in her arms.
“As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life.
But where did them black eyes come from? Born in Injy,
— that 's it, ain't it? No, it 's her poor mother's eyes to be
sure. Does n't it seem as if there was a kind of Injin look
to 'em? She 'll be a lively one to manage, if I know anything
about childun. See her clinchin' them little fists!”
This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought
her rather severe countenance close to the child for inspection
of its features. The ungracious aspect of the woman
and the defiant attitude of the child prefigured in one brief
instant the history of many long coming years.
It was not a great while before the two parties in that
wearing conflict of alien lives, which is often called education,
began to measure their strength against each other.
The child was bright, observing, of restless activity, inquisitively
curious, very hard to frighten, and with a will
which seemed made for mastery, not submission.
The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was
committed was disposed to discharge her duty to the girl
faithfully and conscientiously; but there were two points
in her character and belief which had a most important
bearing on the manner in which she carried out her laudable
intentions. First, she was one of that class of human
beings whose one single engrossing thought is their own
personal welfare. The Roman Church recognizes this
class, and provides every form of specific to meet their
spiritual condition. But in so far as Protestantism has
thrown out works as a means of insuring future safety,
these unfortunates are as badly off as nervous patients
who have no drops, pills, potions, no doctors' rules, to follow.
Only tell a poor creature what to do, and he or she
will do it, and be made easy, were it a pilgrimage of a
thousand miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of
boiled ones; but if once assured that doing does no good,
the drooping Littlefaiths are left at leisure to worry about
their souls, as the other class of weaklings worry about their
bodies. The effect on character does not seem to be very
different in the two classes. Metaphysicians may discuss
the nature of selfishness at their leisure; if to have all her
thoughts centring on the one point of her own well-being
by and by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely
selfish; and if we are offended with that form of
egotism, it is no more than ten of the twelve Apostles
were, as the reader may see by turning to the Gospel of
St. Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the twenty-fourth
verse.
The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to
carry out a theory which, whatever might be its success in
other cases, did not work kindly in the case of Myrtle
Hazard, but, on the contrary, developed a mighty spirit of
antagonism in her nature, which threatened to end in utter
lawlessness. Miss Silence started from the approved doctrine,
that all children are radically and utterly wrong in
all their motives, feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as
they remain subject to their natural instincts. It was by
that the character of the human being she was moulding
was to be determined. The first great preliminary process,
so soon as the child manifested any evidence of intelligent
and persistent self-determination, was to break her
will.
There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion
from the teaching of Priest Pemberton, but it required a
colder and harder nature than his own to carry out many
of his dogmas to their practical application. He wrought
in the pure mathematics, so to speak, of theology, and left
the working rules to the good sense and good feeling of his
people.
Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to
apply the great doctrine, and it came at last in a very
trivial way.
“Myrtle does n't want brown bread. Myrtle won't
have brown bread. Myrtle will have white bread.”
“Myrtle is a wicked child. She will have what Aunt Silence
says she shall have. She won't have anything but
brown bread.”
Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood
mounted to her face, the child untied her little “tire,” got
down from the table, took up her one forlorn, featureless
doll, and went to bed without her supper. The next morning
the worthy woman thought that hunger and reflection
would have subdued the rebellious spirit. So there stood
yesterday's untouched supper waiting for her breakfast.
She would not taste it, and it became necessary to enforce
that extreme penalty of the law which had been threatened,
but never yet put in execution. Miss Silence, in obedience
to what she felt to be a painful duty, without any
the child up to the garret, and, fastening her so that she
could not wander about and hurt herself, left her to her
repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment when a plaintive
entreaty for liberty and food should announce that the evil
nature had yielded and the obdurate will was broken.
The garret was an awful place. All the skeleton-like
ribs of the roof showed in the dim light, naked overhead,
and the only floor to be trusted consisted of the few boards
which bridged the lath and plaster. A great, mysterious
brick tower climbed up through it, — it was the chimney,
but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals into.
The whole place was festooned with cobwebs, — not light
films, such as the housewife's broom sweeps away before
they have become a permanent residence, but vast gray
draperies, loaded with dust, sprinkled with yellow powder
from the beams where the worms were gnawing day and
night, the home of old, hairy spiders who had lived there
since they were eggs and would leave it for unborn spiders
who would grow old and huge like themselves in it,
long after the human tenants had left the mansion for a
narrower home. Here this little criminal was imprisoned,
six, twelve, — tell it not to mothers, — eighteen dreadful
hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw her hands, a
prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting,
but sullen and unsubdued. The Irishwoman, poor stupid
Kitty Fagan, who had no theory of human nature, saw her
over the lean shoulders of the spinster, and, forgetting all
differences of condition and questions of authority, rushed
to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and, with a tempest
of passionate tears and kisses bore her off to her own
fed from her best stores, until there was as much danger
from repletion as there had been from famine. How the
experiment might have ended but for this empirical and
most unphilosophical interference, there is no saying; but
it settled the point that the rebellious nature was not to be
subjugated in a brief conflict.
The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities
as she grew older. At the age of four years she was
detected in making a cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time,
and, on being reprimanded for so doing, laughed
out loud, so as to be heard by Father Pemberton, who
thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows upon the
child, and, to his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden
uprising of weak, foolish, grandfatherly feelings, that a
mist came over his eyes, and he left out his “ninthly” altogether,
thereby spoiling the logical sequence of propositions
which had kept his large forehead knotty for a week.
At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored
picture of Major Gideon Withers in the red sash and the
red feather of his exalted military office. It was then for
the first time that her Aunt Silence remarked a shade of
resemblance between the child and the portrait. She had
always, up to this time, been dressed in sad colors, as was
fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but happening one
day to see a small negro girl peacocking round in a flaming
scarlet petticoat, she struck for bright colors in her
own apparel, and carried her point at last. It was as if a
ground-sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the
burning plumage of some tropical wanderer; and it was
natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth should have called her
the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the fire-hang-bird's
Baltimore oriole.
At ten years old she had one of those great experiences
which give new meaning to the life of a child.
Her Uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking
for her at one time, but of late years his delusions had
gained upon him, and under their influence he seemed to
regard her as an encumbrance and an extravagance. He
was growing more and more solitary in his habits, more
and more negligent of his appearance. He was up late at
night, wandering about the house from the cellar to the
garret, so that, his light being seen flitting from window
to window, the story got about that the old house was
haunted.
One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left
alone in the house. Her uncle had been gone since the
day before. The two women were both away at the village.
At such times the child took a strange delight in
exploring all the hiding-places of the old mansion. She
had the mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the dead
and the living all to herself. What a fearful kind of pleasure
in its silence and loneliness! The old clock that Marmaduke
Storr made in London more than a hundred years
ago was clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century.
The featured moon on its dial had lifted one eye, as
if to watch the child, as it had watched so many generations
of children, while the swinging pendulum ticked them
along into youth, maturity, gray hairs, death-beds, —
ticking through the prayer at the funeral, — ticking without
grief through all the still or noisy woe of mourning, —
ticking without joy when the smiles and gayety of comforted
heirs had come back again. She looked at herself
pulled aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon
the heads of the house had slept until they died and were
stretched out upon it, and the sheet shaped itself to them
in vague, awful breadth of outline, like a block of monumental
marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the chisel.
She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of
her memorable punishment. A rusty hook projected from
one of the joists a little higher than a man's head. Something
was hanging from it, — an old garment, was it? She
went bravely up and touched — a cold hand. She did what
most children of that age would do, — uttered a cry and
ran down stairs with all her might. She rushed out of the
door and called to the man Patrick, who was doing some
work about the place. What could be done was done, but
it was too late.
Uncle Malachi had made away with himself. That was
plain on the face of things. In due time the coroner's verdict
settled it. It was not so strange as it seemed; but it
made a great talk in the village and all the country round
about. Everybody knew he had money enough, and yet
he had hanged himself for fear of starving to death.
For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some
years before, leaving his property to his sister Silence, with
the exception of a certain moderate legacy to be paid in
money to Myrtle Hazard when she should arrive at the
age of twenty years.
The household seemed more chilly than ever after this
tragical event. Its depressing influence followed the child
to school, where she learned the common branches of knowledge.
It followed her to the Sabbath-day catechisings,
where she repeated the answers about the federal headship
other technicalities which are hardly milk for babes, perhaps
as well as other children, but without any very profound
remorse for what she could not help, so far as she
understood the matter, any more than her sex or stature,
and with no very clear comprehension of the phrases which
the New England followers of the Westminster divines
made a part of the elementary instruction of young people.
At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly
enough to attract the eyes of the youth and older boys,
several of whom made advances towards her acquaintance.
But the dreary discipline of the household had sunk into her
soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for herself
which it was hard for friendship to penetrate. Bathsheba
Stoker was chained to the bedside of an invalid mother.
Olive Eveleth, a kind, true-hearted girl, belonged to another
religious communion; and this tended to render their meetings
less frequent, though Olive was still her nearest friend.
Cyprian was himself a little shy, and rather held to Myrtle
through his sister than by any true intimacy directly with
herself. Of the other young men of the village Gifted
Hopkins was perhaps the most fervent of her admirers, as
he had repeatedly shown by effusions in verse, of which,
under the thinnest of disguises, she was the object.
Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young
man of striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability,
had kept his eye on her of late; but it was generally supposed
that he would find a wife in the city, where he was
in the habit of going to visit a fashionable relative, Mrs.
Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place. She, at any rate,
understood very well that he meant, to use his own phrase,
“to go in for a corner lot,” — understanding thereby a
the old man had only given his money to Myrtle, Murray
Bradshaw would have made sure of her; but she was not
likely ever to get much of it. Miss Silence Withers, it
was understood, would probably leave her money as the
Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual director, should indicate, and
it seemed likely that most of it would go to a rising educational
institution where certain given doctrines were to be
taught through all time, whether disproved or not, and
whether those who taught them believed them or not, provided
only they would say they believed them.
Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she
made this disposition of her property, or pledged the word
of the Church that she should have plenary absolution.
But she felt that she would be making friends in Influential
Quarters by thus laying up her treasure, and that she
would be safe if she had the good-will of the ministers of
her sect.
Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen,
and, though not like to inherit much of the family property,
was fast growing into a large dower of hereditary beauty.
Always handsome, her features shaped themselves in a
finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her figure promised
a perfect womanly development, and her movements had
the grace which high-breeding gives the daughter of a
queen, and which Nature now and then teaches the humblest
of village maidens. She could not long escape the
notice of the lovers and flatters of beauty, and the time
of danger was drawing near.
At this period of her life she made two discoveries
which changed the whole course of her thoughts, and
opened for her a new world of ideas and possibilities.
Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the
garret had been a fearful place to think of, and still more
to visit. The stories that the house was haunted gained in
frequency of repetition and detail of circumstance. But
Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and explored its recesses
at such times as she could creep among them undisturbed.
Hid away close under the eaves she found an old trunk
covered with dust and cobwebs. The mice had gnawed
through its leather hinges, and, as it had been hastily
stuffed full, the cover had risen, and two or three volumes
had fallen to the floor. This trunk held the papers and
books which her great-grandmother, the famous beauty, had
left behind her, records of the romantic days when she was
the belle of the county, — story-books, memoirs, novels, and
poems, and not a few love-letters, — a strange collection,
which, as so often happens with such deposits in old families,
nobody had cared to meddle with, and nobody had
been willing to destroy, until at last they had passed out
of mind, and waited for a new generation to bring them
into light again.
The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin.
Under one of the boards which formed the imperfect flooring
of the garret was hidden an old leather mitten. Instead
of a hand, it had a fat fist of silver dollars, and a
thumb of gold half-eagles.
Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple
and secluded maiden. The books were hers to read as
much as any other's; the gold and silver were only a part
of that small provision which would be hers by and by, and
if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself. The tree
of the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into
her lap, and, without any serpent to tempt her, she took
thereof and did eat.
| CHAPTER III.
ANTECEDENTS. The guardian angel | |