University of Virginia Library

30. CHAPTER XXX.
WE BEGIN TO BE GROWN-UP PEOPLE.

WE begin to be grown-up people. We cannot always remain
in the pleasant valley of childhood. I myself, good
reader, have dwelt on its scenes longer, because, looking back on
it from the extreme end of life, it seems to my weary eyes so
fresh and beautiful; the dew of the morning-land lies on it, — that
dew which no coming day will restore.

Our childhood, as the reader has seen, must be confessed to
have been reasonably enjoyable. Its influences were all homely,
innocent, and pure. There was no seductive vice, no open or
covert immorality. Our worst form of roaring dissipation consisted
in being too fond of huckleberry parties, or in the immoderate
pursuit of chestnuts and walnuts. Even the vagrant associates
of uncertain social standing who abounded in Oldtown were
characterized by a kind of woodland innocence, and were not
much more harmful than woodchucks and squirrels.

Sam Lawson, for instance, though he dearly loved lazy lounging,
and was devoted to idle tramps, was yet a most edifying vagrant.
A profane word was an abomination in his sight; his
speculations on doctrines were all orthodox, and his expositions
of Scripture as original and abundant as those of some of the
dreamy old fathers. As a general thing he was a devout Sunday
keeper and a pillar of the sanctuary, playing his bass-viol to
the most mournful tunes with evident relish.

I remember being once left at home alone on Sunday, with an
incipient sore-throat, when Sam volunteered himself as my nurse.
In the course of the forenoon stillness, a wandering Indian came
in, who, by the joint influence of a large mug of cider and the
weariness of his tramp, fell into a heavy sleep on our kitchen
floor, and somehow Sam was beguiled to amuse himself by tickling
his nose with a broom-straw, and laughing, until the tears

rolled down his cheeks, at the sleepy snorts and struggles and
odd contortions of visage which were the results. Yet so tender
was Sam's conscience, that he had frequent searchings of heart,
afterward, on account of this profanation of sacred hours, and indulged
in floods of long-winded penitence.

Though Sam abhorred all profanity, yet for seasons of extreme
provocation he was well provided with that gentler Yankee litany
which affords to the irritated mind the comfort of swearing,
without the commission of the sin. Under great pressure of
provocation Sam Lawson freely said, “Darn it!” The word
“darn,” in fact, was to the conscientious New England mind a
comfortable resting-place, a refreshment to the exacerbated spirit,
that shrunk from that too similar word with an m in it.

In my boyhood I sometimes pondered that other hard word,
and vaguely decided to speak it, with that awful curiosity which
gives to an unknown sin a hold upon the imagination. What
would happen if I should say “damn”? I dwelt on that
subject with a restless curiosity which my grandmother certainly
would have told me was a temptation of the Devil. The
horrible desire so grew on me, that once, in the sanctity of my
own private apartment, with all the doors shut and locked, I
thought I would boldly try the experiment of saying “damn” out
loud, and seeing what would happen. I did it, and looked up
apprehensively to see if the walls were going to fall on me, but
they did n't, and I covered up my head in the bedclothes and
felt degraded. I had committed the sin, and got not even the
excitement of a catastrophe. The Lord apparently did not think
me worth his notice.

In regard to the awful questions of my grandmother's blue
book, our triad grew up with varying influences. Harry, as I
have said, was one of those quiet human beings, of great force in
native individuality, who silently draw from all scenes and things
just those elements which their own being craves, and resolutely
and calmly think their own thoughts, and live their own life, amid
the most discordant influences; just as the fluid, sparkling waters
of a mountain brook dart this way and that amid stones and rubbish,
and hum to themselves their own quiet, hidden tune.

A saintly woman, whose heart was burning itself away in the
torturing fires of a slow martyrdom, had been for the first ten
years of his life his only companion and teacher, and, dying,
had sealed him with a seal given from a visibly opened heaven;
and thenceforward no theologies, and no human authority, had
the power and weight with him that had the remembrance of
those dying eyes, and the sanctity of those last counsels.

By native descent Harry was a gentleman of the peculiarly
English stock. He had the shy reserve, the silent, self-respecting
pride and delicacy, which led him to keep his own soul as a
castle, and that interested, because it left a sense of something
veiled and unexpressed.

We were now eighteen years old, and yet, during all these
years that he had lived side by side with me in closest intimacy,
he had never spoken to me freely and frankly of that which I
afterwards learned was always the intensest and bitterest mortification
of his life, namely, his father's desertion of his mother
and himself. Once only do I remember ever to have seen him
carried away by anger, and that was when a coarse and cruel
bully among the school-boys applied to him a name which reflected
on his mother's honor. The anger of such quiet people
is often a perfect convulsion, and it was so in this case. He
seemed to blaze with it, — to flame up and redden with a delirious
passion; and he knocked down and stamped upon the boy
with a blind fury which it was really frightful to see, and which
was in singular contrast with his usual unprovokable good-humor.

Ellery Davenport had made good his promise of looking for
the pocket-book which Harry's father had left in his country-seat,
and the marriage certificate of his mother had been found
in it, and carefully lodged in the hands of Lady Lothrop; but
nothing had been said to us children about it; it was merely held
quietly, as a document that might be of use in time in bringing
some property to the children. And even at the time of this
fight with the school-boy, Harry said so little afterward, that the
real depth of his feeling on this subject was not suspected.

I have reason to believe, also, that Ellery Davenport did succeed
in making the father of Harry and Tina aware of the

existence of two such promising children, and of the respectability
of the families into which they had been adopted. Captain
Percival, now Sir Harry Percival, had married again in England,
so Ellery Davenport had informed Miss Mehitable in a
letter, and had a son by this marriage, and so had no desire to
bring to view his former connection. It was understood, I
believe, that a sum of money was to be transmitted yearly to the
hands of the guardians of the children, for their benefit, and that
they were to be left undisturbed in the possession of those who
had adopted them.

Miss Mehitable had suffered so extremely herself by the conflict
of her own earnest, melancholy nature with the theologic
ideas of her time, that she shrunk with dread from imposing
them on the gay and joyous little being whose education she
had undertaken. Yet she was impressed by that awful sense of
responsibility which is one of the most imperative characteristics
of the New England mind; and she applied to her brother
earnestly to know what she should teach Tina with regard to
her own spiritual position. The reply of her brother was characteristic,
and we shall give it here: —

The consequence of all this was, that Tina adopted in her glad
and joyous nature the simple, helpful faith of her brother, — the
faith in an ever good, ever present, ever kind Father, whose child
she was and in whose household she had grown up. She had a
most unbounded faith in prayer, and in the indulgence and tenderness
of the Heavenly Power. All things to her eyes were seen
through the halo of a cheerful, sanguine, confiding nature. Life
had for her no cloud or darkness or mystery.

As to myself, I had been taught in the contrary doctrines, —
that I was a disinherited child of wrath. It is true that this doctrine
was contradicted by the whole influence of the minister,
who, as I have said before, belonged to the Arminian wing of
the Church, and bore very mildly on all these great topics. My
grandmother sometimes endeavored to stir him up to more decisive
orthodoxy, and especially to a more vigorous presentation
of the doctrine of native human depravity. I remember once,
in her zeal, her quoting to him as a proof-text the quatrain
of Dr. Watts: —

“That, madam,” said Dr. Lothrop, who never forgot to be the
grand gentleman under any circumstances, — “that, madam, is
not the New Testament, but Dr. Isaac Watts, allow me to remind
you.”

“Well,” said my grandmother, “Dr. Watts got it from the
Bible.”

“Yes, madam, a very long way from the Bible, allow me to
say.”

And yet, after all, though I did not like my grandmother's
Calvinistic doctrines, I must confess that she, and all such as
thought like her, always impressed me as being more earnestly
religious than those that held the milder and more moderate
belief.

Once in a while old Dr. Stern would preach in our neighborhood,
and I used to go to hear him. Everybody went to hear
him. A sermon on reprobation from Dr. Stern would stir up a
whole community in those days, just as a presidential election
stirs one up now. And I remember that he used to impress
me as being more like a messenger from the other world than
most ministers. Dr. Lothrop's sermons, by the side of his, were
like Pope's Pastorals beside the Tragedies of Æschylus. Dr.
Lothrop's discourses were smooth, they were sensible, they were
well worded, and everybody went to sleep under them; but
Dr. Stern shook and swayed his audience like a field of grain
under a high wind. There was no possibility of not listening
to him, or of hearing him with indifference, for he dealt in assertions
that would have made the very dead turn in their graves.
One of his sermons was talked of for months afterward, with a
sort of suppressed breath of supernatural awe, such as men would
use in discussing the reappearance of a soul from the other
world.

But meanwhile I believed neither my grandmother, nor Dr.
Stern, nor the minister. The eternal questions seethed and
boiled and burned in my mind without answer. It was not my
own personal destiny that lay with weight on my mind; it was
the incessant, restless desire to know the real truth from some unanswerable
authority. I longed for a visible, tangible communion
with God; I longed to see the eternal beauty, to hear a friendly
voice from the eternal silence. Among all the differences with
regard to doctrinal opinion, I could see clearly that there were
two classes of people in the world, — those who had found God
and felt him as a living power upon their spirits, and those who
had not; and that unknown experience was what I sought.

Such, then, were we three children when Harry and I were in
our eighteenth year and Tina in her fifteenth. And just at this
moment there was among the high consulting powers that regulated
our destiny a movement as to what further was to be done
with the three that had hitherto grown up together.

Now, if the reader has attentively read ancient and modern
history, he will observe that there is a class of women to be
found in this lower world, who, wherever they are, are sure to be
in some way the first or the last cause of everything that is going
on. Everybody knows, for instance, that Helen was the great
instigator of the Trojan war, and if it had not been for her we
should have had no Homer. In France, Madame Récamier was,
for the time being, reason enough for almost anything that any
man in France did; and yet one cannot find out that Madame
Récamier had any uncommon genius of her own, except the
sovereign one of charming every human being that came in her
way, so that all became her humble and subservient subjects.
The instance is a marked one, because it operated in a wide
sphere, on very celebrated men, in an interesting historic period.
But it individualizes a kind of faculty which, generally speaking,
is peculiar to women, though it is in some instances exercised
by men, — a faculty of charming and controlling every person
with whom one has to do.

Tina was now verging toward maturity; she was in just that
delicious period in which the girl has all the privileges and
graces of childhood, its freedom of movement and action, brightened
with a sort of mysterious aurora by the coming dawn
of womanhood; and everything indicated that she was to be one
of this powerful class of womankind. Can one analyze the charm
which such women possess? I have a theory that, in all cases,
there is a certain amount of genius with it, — genius which does
not declare itself in literature, but in social life, and which devotes
itself to pleasing, as other artists devote themselves to
painting or to poetry.

Tina had no inconsiderable share of self-will; she was very
pronounced in her tastes, and fond of her own way; but she had
received from nature this passion for entertaining, and been

endowed with varied talents in this line which made her always,
from early childhood, the coveted and desired person in every
circle. Not a visage in Oldtown was so set in grimness of care,
that it did not relax its lines when it saw Tina coming down the
street; for Tina could mimic and sing and dance, and fling back
joke for joke in a perfect meteoric shower. So long as she entertained,
she was perfectly indifferent who the party was. She
would display her accomplishments to a set of strolling Indians,
or for Sam Lawson and Jake Marshall, as readily as for any one
else. She would run up and catch the minister by the elbow as
he solemnly and decorously moved down street, and his face always
broke into a laugh at the sight of her.

The minister's lady, and Aunt Lois, and Miss Deborah Kittery,
while they used to mourn in secret places over her want of
decorum in thus displaying her talents before the lower classes,
would afterward laugh till the tears rolled down their cheeks and
their ancient whalebone stays creaked, when she would do the
same thing over in a select circle for them.

We have seen how completely she had conquered Polly, and
what difficulty Miss Mehitable found in applying the precepts of
Mrs. Chapone and Miss Hannah More to her case. The pattern
young lady of the period, in the eyes of all respectable
females, was expressed by Lucilla Stanley, in “Cœlebs in
Search of a Wife.” But when Miss Mehitable, after delighting
herself with the Johnsonian balance of the rhythmical sentences
which described this paragon as “not so much perfectly beautiful
as perfectly elegant,” — this model of consistency, who always
blushed at the right moment, spoke at the right moment, and
stopped at the right moment, and was, in short, a woman made to
order, precisely to suit a bachelor who had traversed the whole
earth, “not expecting perfection, but looking for consistency,” —
when, after all these charming visions, she loooked at Tina,
she was perfectly dismayed at contemplating her scholar. She
felt the power by which Tina continually charmed and beguiled
her, and the empire which she exercised over her; and, with
wonderful good sense, she formally laid down the weapons of
authority when she found she had no heart to use them.

“My child,” she said to her one day, when that young lady
was about eleven years of age, “you are a great deal stronger
than I. I am weak because I love you, and because I have been
broken by sorrow, and because, being a poor old woman, I don't
trust myself. And you are young and strong and fearless; but
remember, dear, the life you have to live is yours and not mine.
I have not the heart to force you to take my way instead of your
own, but I shall warn you that it will be better you should do so,
and then leave you free. If you don't take my way, I shall do
the very best for you that I can in your way, and you must take
the responsibility in the end.”

This was the only kind of system which Miss Mehitable was
capable of carrying out. She was wise, shrewd, and loving, and
she gradually controlled her little charge more and more by
simple influence, but she had to meet in her education the
opposition force of that universal petting and spoiling which
everybody in society gives to an entertaining child.

Life is such a monotonous, dull affair, that anybody who has
the gift of making it pass off gayly is in great demand. Tina
was sent for to the parsonage, and the minister took her on his
knee and encouraged her to chatter all sorts of egregious nonsense
to him. And Miss Deborah Kittery insisted on having her
sent for to visit them in Boston, and old Madam Kittery over
whelmed her with indulgence and caresses. Now Tina loved
praises and caresses; incense was the very breath of her nostrils;
and she enjoyed being fêted and petted as much as a cat enjoys
being stroked.

It will not be surprising to one who considers the career of this
kind of girl to hear that she was not much of a student. What
she learned was by impulses and fits and starts, and all of it immediately
used for some specific purpose of entertainment, so
that among simple people she had the reputation of being a prodigy
of information, on a very small capital of actual knowledge.
Miss Mehitable sighed after thorough knowledge and discipline
of mind for her charge, but she invariably found all Tina's
teachers becoming accomplices in her superficial practices by
praising and caressing her when she had been least faithful,

always apologizing for her deficiencies, and speaking in the most
flattering terms of her talents. During the last year the schoolmaster
had been observed always to walk home with her and
bring her books, with a humble, trembling subserviency and
prostrate humility which she rewarded with great apparent contempt;
and finally she announced to Miss Mehitable that she
“did n't intend to go to school any more, because the master
acted so silly.”

Now Miss Mehitable, during all her experience of life, had
always associated with the men of her acquaintance without ever
being reminded in any particular manner of the difference of sex,
and it was a subject which, therefore, was about the last to enter
into her calculations with regard to her little charge. So she
said, “My dear, you shold n't speak in that way about your
teacher; he knows a great deal more than you do.”

“He may know more than I do about arithmetic, but he
does n't know how to behave. What right has he to put his old
hand under my chin? and I won't have him putting his arm
round me when he sets my copies! and I told him to-day he
should n't carry my books home any more, — so there!”

Miss Mehitable was struck dumb. She went that afternoon
and visited the minister's lady.

“Depend upon it, my dear,” said Lady Lothrop, “it 's time to
try a course of home reading.”

A bright idea now struck Miss Mehitable. Her cousin, Mr.
Mordecai Rossiter, had recently been appointed a colleague with
the venerable Dr. Lothrop. He was a young man, finely read,
and of great solidity and piety, and Miss Mehitable resolved to
invite him to take up his abode with them for the purpose of assisting
her educational efforts. Mr. Mordecai Rossiter accordingly
took up his abode in the family, used to conduct family
worship, and was expected now and then to drop words of good
advice and wholesome counsel to form the mind of Miss Tina.
A daily hour was appointed during which he was to superintend
her progress in arithmetic.

Mr. Mordecai Rossiter was one of the most simple-minded,
honest, sincere human beings that ever wore a black coat. He

accepted his charge in sacred simplicity, and took a prayerful
view of his young catechumen, whom he was in hopes to make
realize, by degrees, the native depravity of her own heart, and
to lead through a gradual process to the best of all results.

Miss Tina also took a view of her instructor, and without any
evil intentions, simply following her strongest instinct, which was
to entertain and please, she very soon made herself an exceedingly
delightful pupil. Since religion was evidently the engrossing
subject in his mind, Tina also turned her attention to it,
and instructed and edified him with flights of devout eloquence
which were to him perfectly astonishing. Tina would discourse
on the goodness of God, and ornament her remarks with so
many flowers, and stars, and poetical fireworks, and be so rapt
and carried away with her subject, that he would sit and listen
to her as if she was an inspired being, and wholly forget the
analysis which he meant to propose to her, as to whether her
emotions of love to God proceeded from self-love or from disinterested
benevolence.

As I have said, Tina had a genius for poetry, and had employed
the dull hours which children of her age usually spend
in church in reading the psalm-book and committing to memory
all the most vividly emotional psalms and hymns. And
these she was fond of repeating with great fervor and enthusiasm
to her admiring listener.

Miss Mehitable considered that the schoolmaster had been an
ill-taught, presumptuous man, who had ventured to take improper
liberties with a mere child; but, when she established this connection
between this same child and a solemn young minister, it
never occurred to her to imagine that there would be any embarrassing
consequences from the relation. She considered Tina
as a mere infant, — as not yet having approached the age when
the idea of anything like love or marriage could possibly be
suggested to her.

In course of time, however, she could not help remarking that her
cousin was in some respects quite an altered man. He reformed
many little negligences in regard to his toilet which Miss Tina
had pointed out to him with the nonchalant freedom of a young

empress. And he would run and spring and fetch and carry in
her service with a zeal and alertness quite wonderful to behold.
He expressed privately to Miss Mehitable the utmost astonishment
at her mental powers, and spoke of the wonderful work of
divine grace which appeared to have made such progress in her
heart. Never had he been so instructed and delighted before
by the exercises of any young person. And he went so far as to
assure Miss Mehitable that in many things he should be only too
happy to sit at her feet and learn of her.

“Good gracious me!” said Miss Mehitable to herself, with a
sort of half start of awakening, though not yet fully come to
consciousness; “what does ail everybody that gets hold of
Tina?”

What got hold of her cousin in this case she had an opportunity
of learning, not long after, by overhearing him tell her
young charge that she was an angel, and that he asked nothing
more of Heaven than to be allowed to follow her lead through
life. Now Miss Tina accepted this, as she did all other incense,
with great satisfaction. Not that she had the slightest idea of
taking this clumsy-footed theological follower round the world
with her; but having the highest possible respect for him, knowing
that Miss Mehitable and the minister and his wife thought
him a person of consideration, she had felt it her duty to please
him, — had taxed her powers of pleasing to the utmost, in his own
line, and had met with this gratifying evidence of success.

Miss Mehitable was for once really angry. She sent for her
cousin to a private interview, and thus addressed him: —

“Cousin Mordecai, I thought you were a man of sense when
I put this child under your care! My great trouble in bringing
her up is, that everybody flatters her and defers to her; but I
thought that in you I had got a man that could be depended
on!”

“I do not flatter her, cousin,” replied the young minister,
earnestly.

“You pretend you don't flatter her? did n't I hear you calling
her an angel?”

“Well, I don't care if I did; she is an angel,” said Mr. Mordecai

Rossiter, with tears in his eyes; “she is the most perfectly
heavenly being I ever saw!”

“Ah! bah!” said Miss Mehitable, with intense disgust; “what
fools you men are!”

Miss Mehitable now, much as she disliked it, felt bound to have
some cautionary conversation with Miss Tina.

“My dear,” she said; “you must be very careful in your
treatment of Cousin Mordecai. I overheard some things he said
to you this morning which I do not approve of.”

“O yes, Aunty, he does talk in a silly way sometimes. Men
always begin to talk that way to me. Why, you 've no idea the
things they will say. Well, of course I don't believe them; it 's
only a foolish way they have, but they all talk just alike.”

“But I thought my cousin would have had his mind on better
things,” said Miss Mehitable. “The idea of his making love to
you!”

“I know it; only think of it, Aunty! how very funny it is!
and there, I have n't done a single thing to make him. I 've
been just as religious as I could be, and said hymns to him, and
everything, and given him good advice, — ever so much, — because,
you see, he did n't know about a great many things till I
told him.”

“But, my dear, all this is going to make him too fond of you;
you know you ought not to be thinking of such things now.”

“What things, Aunty?” said the catechumen, innocently.

“Why, love and marriage; that 's what such feelings will
come to, if you encourage them.”

“Marriage! O dear me, what nonsense!” and Tina laughed
till the room rang again. “Why, dear Aunty, what absurd ideas
have got into your head! Of course you can't think that he 's
thinking of any such thing; he 's only getting very fond of
me, and I 'm trying to make him have a good time, — that 's
all.”

But Miss Tina found that was not all, and was provoked
beyond endurance at the question proposed to her in plain terms,
whether she would not look upon her teacher as one destined in
a year or two to become her husband. Thereupon at once the

whole gay fabric dissolved like a dream. Tina was as vexed at
the proposition as a young unbroken colt is at the sight of a
halter. She cried, and said she did n't like him, she could n't
bear him, and she never wanted to see him again, — that he was
silly and ridiculous to talk so to a little girl. And Miss Mehitable
sat down to write a long letter to her brother, to inquire what
she should do next.