University of Virginia Library

1. I.
AN ARRIVAL.

IT was one of the changing days of our Old-port
midsummer. In the morning it had
rained in rather a dismal way, and Aunt Jane
had said she should put it in her diary. It was
a very serious thing for the elements when
they got into Aunt Jane's diary. By noon the
sun came out as clear and sultry as if there
had never been a cloud, the northeast wind
died away, the bay was motionless, the first locust
of the summer shrilled from the elms, and
the robins seemed to be serving up butterflies
hot for their insatiable second brood, while
nothing seemed desirable for a human luncheon
except ice-cream and fans. In the
afternoon the southwest wind came up the bay,
with its line of dark-blue ripple and its delicious
coolness; while the hue of the water grew
more and more intense, till we seemed to be
living in the heart of a sapphire.

The household sat beneath the large western
doorway of the old Maxwell House, — the rear

door, which looks on the water. The house
had just been reoccupied by my Aunt Jane,
whose great-grandfather had built it, though it
had for several generations been out of the
family. I know no finer specimen of those
large colonial dwellings in which the genius
of Sir Christopher Wren bequeathed traditions
of stateliness to our democratic days. Its central
hall has a carved archway; most of the
rooms have painted tiles and are wainscoted to
the ceiling; the sashes are red-cedar, the great
staircase mahogany; there are pilasters with
delicate Corinthian capitals; there are cherubs'
heads and wings that go astray and lose themselves
in closets and behind glass doors; there
are curling acanthus-leaves that cluster over
shelves and ledges, and there are those graceful
shell-patterns which one often sees on old
furniture, but rarely in houses. The high front
door still retains its Ionic cornice; and the
western entrance, looking on the bay, is surmounted
by carved fruit and flowers, and is
crowned, as is the roof, with that pineapple in
whose symbolic wealth the rich merchants of
the last century delighted.

Like most of the statelier houses in that region
of Oldport, this abode had its rumors of

a ghost and of secret chambers. The ghost had
never been properly lionized nor laid, for Aunt
Jane, the neatest of housekeepers, had discouraged
all silly explorations, had at once required
all barred windows to be opened, all
superfluous partitions to be taken down, and
several highly eligible dark-closets to be nailed
up. If there was anything she hated, it was
nooks and odd corners. Yet there had been
times that year, when the household would have
been glad to find a few more such hiding-places;
for during the first few weeks the
house had been crammed with guests so closely
that the very mice had been ill-accommodated
and obliged to sit up all night, which had
caused them much discomfort and many audible
disagreements.

But this first tumult had passed away; and
now there remained only the various nephews
and nieces of the house, including a due proportion
of small children. Two final guests
were to arrive that day, bringing the latest
breath of Europe on their wings, — Philip
Malbone, Hope's betrothed; and little Emilia,
Hope's half-sister.

None of the family had seen Emilia since
her wandering mother had taken her abroad,

a fascinating spoiled child of four, and they
were all eager to see in how many ways the
succeeding twelve years had completed or corrected
the spoiling. As for Philip, he had
been spoiled, as Aunt Jane declared, from the
day of his birth, by the joint effort of all
friends and neighbors. Everybody had conspired
to carry on the process except Aunt
Jane herself, who directed toward him one of
her honest, steady, immovable dislikes, which
may be said to have dated back to the time
when his father and mother were married,
some years before he personally entered on the
scene.

The New York steamer, detained by the
heavy fog of the night before, now came in
unwonted daylight up the bay. At the first
glimpse, Harry and the boys pushed off in the
row-boat; for, as one of the children said, anybody
who had been to Venice would naturally
wish to come to the very house in a gondola.
In another half-hour there was a great entanglement
of embraces at the water-side, for
the guests had landed.

Malbone's self-poised easy grace was the
same as ever; his chestnut-brown eyes were
as winning, his features as handsome; his complexion,

too clearly pink for a man, had a sea
bronze upon it: he was the same Philip who
had left home, though with some added lines
of care. But in the brilliant little fairy beside
him all looked in vain for the Emilia they remembered
as a child. Her eyes were more
beautiful than ever, — the darkest violet eyes,
that grew luminous with thought and almost
black with sorrow. Her gypsy taste, as everybody
used to call it, still showed itself in the
scarlet and dark blue of her dress; but the
clouded gypsy tint had gone from her cheek,
and in its place shone a deep carnation, so
hard and brilliant that it appeared to be enamelled
on the surface, yet so firm and deep-dyed
that it seemed as if not even death could
ever blanch it. There is a kind of beauty
that seems made to be painted on ivory, and
such was hers. Only the microscopic pencil
of a miniature-painter could portray those
slender eyebrows, that arched caressingly over
the beautiful eyes, — or the silky hair of darkest
chestnut that crept in a wavy line along
the temples, as if longing to meet the brows, —
or those unequalled lashes! “Unnecessarily
long,” Aunt Jane afterwards pronounced them;
while Kate had to admit that they did indeed
give Emilia an overdressed look at breakfast,
and that she ought to have a less showy set to
match her morning costume.

But what was most irresistible about Emilia,
— that which we all noticed in this interview,
and which haunted us all thenceforward, — was
a certain wild, entangled look she wore, as of
some untamed out-door thing, and a kind of
pathetic lost sweetness in her voice, which
made her at once and forever a heroine of romance
with the children. Yet she scarcely
seemed to heed their existence, and only submitted
to the kisses of Hope and Kate as if
that were a part of the price of coming home,
and she must pay it.

Had she been alone, there might have been
an awkward pause; for if you expect a cousin,
and there alights a butterfly of the tropics,
what hospitality can you offer? But no sense
of embarrassment ever came near Malbone,
especially with the children to swarm over him
and claim him for their own. Moreover, little
Helen got in the first remark in the way of
serious conversation.

“Let me tell him something!” said the
child. “Philip! that doll of mine that you
used to know, only think! she was sick and

died last summer, and went into the rag-bag.
And the other split down the back, so there
was an end of her.”

Polar ice would have been thawed by this
reopening of communication. Philip soon had
the little maid on his shoulder, — the natural
throne of all children, — and they went in together
to greet Aunt Jane.

Aunt Jane was the head of the house, — a
lady who had spent more than fifty years in
educating her brains and battling with her ailments.
She had received from her parents a
considerable inheritance in the way of whims,
and had nursed it up into a handsome fortune.
Being one of the most impulsive of human beings,
she was naturally one of the most entertaining;
and behind all her eccentricities there
was a fund of the soundest sense and the tenderest
affection. She had seen much and varied
society, had been greatly admired in her
youth, but had chosen to remain unmarried.
Obliged by her physical condition to make herself
the first object, she was saved from utter
selfishness by sympathies as democratic as her
personal habits were exclusive. Unexpected
and commonly fantastic in her doings, often
dismayed by small difficulties, but never by

large ones, she sagaciously administered the
affairs of all those around her, — planned their
dinners and their marriages, fought out their
bargains and their feuds.

She hated everything irresolute or vague;
people might play at cat's-cradle or study
Spinoza, just as they pleased; but, whatever
they did, they must give their minds to it.
She kept house from an easy-chair, and ruled
her dependants with severity tempered by wit,
and by the very sweetest voice in which reproof
was ever uttered. She never praised them,
but if they did anything particularly well, rebuked
them retrospectively, asking why they
had never done it well before? But she treated
them munificently, made all manner of plans
for their comfort, and they all thought her the
wisest and wittiest of the human race. So did
the youths and maidens of her large circle;
they all came to see her, and she counselled,
admired, scolded, and petted them all. She
had the gayest spirits, and an unerring eye for
the ludicrous, and she spoke her mind with absolute
plainness to all comers. Her intuitions
were instantaneous as lightning, and, like that,
struck very often in the wrong place. She
was thus extremely unreasonable and altogether
charming.

Such was the lady whom Emilia and Malbone
went up to greet, — the one shyly, the
other with an easy assurance, such as she
always disliked. Emilia submitted to another
kiss, while Philip pressed Aunt Jane's hand, as
he pressed all women's, and they sat down.

“Now begin to tell your adventures,” said
Kate. “People always tell their adventures
till tea is ready.”

“Who can have any adventures left,” said
Philip, “after such letters as I wrote you all?”

“Of which we got precisely one!” said
Kate. “That made it such an event, after we
had wondered in what part of the globe you
might be looking for the post-office! It was
like finding a letter in a bottle, or disentangling
a person from the Dark Ages.”

“I was at Neuchâtel two months; but I had
no adventures. I lodged with a good pasteur,
who taught me geology and German.”

“That is suspicious,” said Kate. “Had he
a daughter passing fair?”

“Indeed he had.”

“And you taught her English? That is
what these beguiling youths always do in novels.”

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

“Lili.”

“What a pretty name! How old was she?”

“She was six.”

“O Philip!” cried Kate; “but I might
have known it. Did she love you very
much?”

Hope looked up, her eyes full of mild reproach
at the possibility of doubting any
child's love for Philip. He had been her betrothed
for more than a year, during which
time she had habitually seen him wooing every
child he had met as if it were a woman, —
which, for Philip, was saying a great deal.
Happily they had in common the one trait of
perfect amiability, and she knew no more how
to be jealous than he to be constant.

“Lili was easily won,” he said. “Other
things being equal, people of six prefer that
man who is tallest.”

“Philip is not so very tall,” said the eldest
of the boys, who was listening eagerly, and
growing rapidly.

“No,” said Philip, meekly. “But then the
pasteur was short, and his brother was a
dwarf.”

“When Lili found that she could reach the

ceiling from Mr. Malbone's shoulder,” said
Emilia, “she asked no more.”

“Then you knew the pastor's family also,
my child,” said Aunt Jane, looking at her kindly
and a little keenly.

“I was allowed to go there sometimes,” she
began, timidly.

“To meet her American Cousin,” interrupted
Philip. “I got some relaxation in the rules of
the school. But, Aunt Jane, you have told us
nothing about your health.”

“There is nothing to tell,” she answered. “I
should like, if it were convenient, to be a little
better. But in this life, if one can walk across
the floor, and not be an idiot, it is something:
That is all I aim at.”

“Is n't it rather tiresome?” said Emilia, as
the elder lady happened to look at her.

“Not at all,” said Aunt Jane, composedly.
“I naturally fall back into happiness, when
left to myself.”

“So you have returned to the house of your
fathers,” said Philip. “I hope you like it.”

“It is commonplace in one respect,” said
Aunt Jane. “General Washington once slept
here.”

“Oh!” said Philip. “It is one of that class
of houses?”

“Yes,” said she. “There is not a village in
America that has not half a dozen of them,
not counting those where he only breakfasted.
Did ever man sleep like that man? What
else could he ever have done? Who governed,
I wonder, while he was asleep? How he must
have travelled! The swiftest horse could
scarcely have carried him from one of these
houses to another.”

“I never was attached to the memory of
Washington,” meditated Philip; “but I always
thought it was the pear-tree. It must have
been that he was such a very unsettled person.”

“He certainly was not what is called a domestic
character,” said Aunt Jane.

“I suppose you are, Miss Maxwell,” said
Philip. “Do you often go out?”

“Sometimes, to drive,” said Aunt Jane.
“Yesterday I went shopping with Kate, and
sat in the carriage while she bought under-sleeves
enough for a centipede. It is always
so with that child. People talk about the
trouble of getting a daughter ready to be married;
but it is like being married once a month
to live with her.”

“I wonder that you take her to drive with
you,” suggested Philip, sympathetically.

“It is a great deal worse to drive without
her,” said the impetuous lady. “She is the
only person who lets me enjoy things, and now
I cannot enjoy them in her absence. Yesterday
I drove alone over the three beaches, and
left her at home with a dress-maker. Never
did I see so many lines of surf; but they only
seemed to me like some of Kate's ball-dresses,
with the prevailing flounces, six deep. I was
so enraged that she was not there, I wished to
cover my face with my handkerchief. By the
third beach I was ready for the madhouse.”

“Is Oldport a pleasant place to live in?”
asked Emilia, eagerly.

“It is amusing in the summer,” said Aunt
Jane, “though the society is nothing but a
pack of visiting-cards. In winter it is too dull
for young people, and only suits quiet old
women like me, who merely live here to keep
the Ten Commandments and darn their stockings.”

Meantime the children were aiming at
Emilia, whose butterfly looks amazed and
charmed them, but who evidently did not
know what to do with their eager affection.

“I know about you,” said little Helen; “I
know what you said when you were little.”

“Did I say anything?” asked Emilia, carelessly.

“Yes,” replied the child, and began to repeat
the oft-told domestic tradition in an
accurate way, as if it were a school lesson.
“Once you had been naughty, and your papa
thought it his duty to slap you, and you
cried; and he told you in French, because he
always spoke French with you, that he did not
punish you for his own pleasure. Then you
stopped crying, and asked, `Pour le plaisir de
qui alors?' That means `For whose pleasure
then?' Hope said it was a droll question for
a little girl to ask.”

“I do not think it was Emilia who asked that
remarkable question, little girl,” said Kate.

“I dare say it was,” said Emilia; “I have
been asking it all my life.” Her eyes grew
very moist, what with fatigue and excitement.
But just then, as is apt to happen in this world,
they were all suddenly recalled from tears to
tea, and the children smothered their curiosity
in strawberries and cream.

They sat again beside the western door, after
tea. The young moon came from a cloud and
dropped a broad path of glory upon the bay;
a black yacht glided noiselessly in, and anchored

amid this tract of splendor. The shadow
of its masts was on the luminous surface, while
their reflection lay at a different angle, and
seemed to penetrate far below. Then the departing
steamer went flashing across this bright
realm with gorgeous lustre; its red and green
lights were doubled in the paler waves, its four
reflected chimneys chased each other among
the reflected masts. This jewelled wonder
passing, a single fishing-boat drifted silently
by, with its one dark sail; and then the moon
and the anchored yacht were left alone.

Presently some of the luggage came from
the wharf. Malbone brought out presents for
everybody; then all the family went to Europe
in photographs, and with some reluctance came
back to America for bed.