University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
WHAT SHE THINKS OF IT.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 706EAF. Page 019. In-line Illustration. Image of a woman holding flowers in her apron and reading a small card she is holding in one hand. The caption reads, "From John, good fellow."]

SPRINGDALE was
one of those beautiful
rural towns whose
flourishing aspect is a
striking exponent of the
peculiarities of New-England
life. The ride
through it presents a
refreshing picture of
wide, cool, grassy streets,
overhung with green
arches of elm, with rows
of large, handsome
houses on either side,
each standing back from
the street in its own retired
square of gardens,
green turf, shady trees,
and flowering shrubs. It
was, so to speak, a little
city of country-seats. It
spoke of wealth, thrift, leisure, cultivation, quiet,
thoughtful habits, and moral tastes.

Some of these mansions were of ancestral reputation,
and had been in the family whose name they bore for
generations back; a circumstance sometimes occurring
even in New-England towns where neither law nor
custom unites to perpetuate property in certain family
lines.

The Seymour house was a well-known, respected
mansion for generations back. Old Judge Seymour,
the grandfather, was the lineal descendant of Parson
Seymour; the pastor who first came with the little
colony of Springdale, when it was founded as a church
in the wilderness, amid all the dangers of wild beasts
and Indians.

This present Seymour mansion was founded on the
spot where the house of the first minister was built by
the active hands of his parishioners; and, from generation
to generation, order, piety, education, and high
respectability had been the tradition of the place.

The reader will come in with us, on this bright June
morning, through the grassy front yard, which has
only the usual New-England fault of being too densely
shaded. The house we enter has a wide, cool hall running
through its centre and out into a back garden,
now all aglow with every beauty of June. The broad
alleys of the garden showed bright stores of all sorts
of good old-fashioned flowers, well tended and kept.
Clumps of stately hollyhocks and scarlet peonies;
roses of every hue, purple, blush, gold-color, and
white, were showering down their leaves on the grassy
turf; honeysuckles climbed and clambered over arbors;

and great, stately tufts of virgin-white lilies exalted
their majestic heads in saintly magnificence. The
garden was Miss Grace Seymour's delight and pride.
Every root in it was fragrant with the invisible blossoms
of memory, — memories of the mother who loved
and planted and watched them before her, and the
grandmother who had cared for them before that.
The spirit of these charming old-fashioned gardens is
the spirit of family love; and, if ever blessed souls
from their better home feel drawn back to any thing on
earth, we think it must be to their flower-garden.

Miss Grace had been up early, and now, with her
garden hat on, and scissors in hand, was coming up the
steps with her white apron full of roses, white lilies,
meadow-sweets, and honeysuckle, for the parlor-vases,
when the servant handed her a letter.

“From John,” she said, “good fellow;” and then she
laid it on the mantel-shelf of the parlor, while she
busied herself in arranging her flowers.

“I must get these into water, or they will wilt,” she
said.

The large parlor was like many that you and I have
seen in a certain respectable class of houses, — wide,
cool, shady, and with a mellow old tone to every thing
in its furniture and belongings. It was a parlor of the
past, and not of to-day, yet exquisitely neat and well-kept.
The Turkey carpet was faded: it had been part
of the wedding furnishing of Grace's mother, years ago.
The great, wide, motherly, chintz-covered sofa, which
filled a recess commanding the window, was as different

as possible from any smart modern article of the name.
The heavy, claw-footed, mahogany chairs; the tall
clock that ticked in one corner; the footstools and
ottomans in faded embroidery, — all spoke of days
past. So did the portraits on the wall. One was of a
fair, rosy young girl, in a white gown, with powdered
hair dressed high over a cushion. It was the portrait
of Grace's mother. Another was that of a minister in
gown and bands, with black-silk gloved hands holding
up conspicuously a large Bible. This was the remote
ancestor, the minister. Then there was the picture of
John's father, placed lovingly where the eyes seemed
always to be following the slight, white-robed figure of
the young wife. The walls were papered with an old-fashioned
paper of a peculiar pattern, bought in France
seventy-five years before. The vases of India-china
that adorned the mantels, the framed engravings of
architecture and pictures in Rome, all were memorials
of the taste of those long passed away. Yet the
room had a fresh, sweet, sociable air. The roses and
honeysuckles looked in at the windows; the table
covered with books and magazines, and the familiar
work-basket of Miss Grace, with its work, gave a sort
of impression of modern family household life. It
was a wide, open, hospitable, generous-minded room,
that seemed to breathe a fragrance of invitation and
general sociability; it was a room full of associations
and memories, and its daily arrangement and ornamentation
made one of the pleasant tasks of Miss
Grace's life.

She spread down a newspaper on the large, square
centre-table, and, emptying her apronful of flowers
upon it, took her vases from the shelf, and with her
scissors sat down to the task of clipping and arranging
them.

Just then Letitia Ferguson came across the garden,
and entered the back door after her, with a knot of
choice roses in her hand, and a plate of seed-cakes
covered with a hem-stitched napkin. The Fergusons
and the Seymours occupied adjoining houses, and were
on footing of the most perfect undress intimacy. They
crossed each other's gardens, and came without knocking
into each other's doors twenty times a day, apropos
to any bit of chit-chat that they might have, a question
to ask, a passage in a book to show, a household receipt
that they had been trying. Letitia was the most
intimate and confidential friend of Grace. In fact, the
whole Ferguson family seemed like another portion of
the Seymour family. There were two daughters, of
whom Letitia was the eldest. Then came the younger
Rose, a nice, charming, well-informed, good girl, always
cheerful and chatty, and with a decent share of ability
at talking lively nonsense. The brothers of the family,
like the young men of New-England country towns
generally, were off in the world seeking their fortunes.
Old Judge Ferguson was a gentleman of the old
school, — formal, stately, polite, always complimentary
to ladies, and with a pleasant little budget of old-gentlemanly
hobbies and prejudices, which it afforded
him the greatest pleasure to air in the society of his

friends. Old Mrs. Ferguson was a pattern of motherliness,
with her quaint, old-fashioned dress, her elaborate
caps, her daily and minute inquiries after the health of
all her acquaintances, and the tender pityingness of her
nature for every thing that lived and breathed in this
world of sin and sorrow.

Letitia and Grace, as two older sisters of families,
had a peculiar intimacy, and discussed every thing together,
from the mode of clearing jelly up to the
profoundest problems of science and morals. They
were both charming, well-mannered, well-educated,
well-read women, and trusted each other to the uttermost
with every thought and feeling and purpose of
their hearts.

As we have said, Letitia Ferguson came in at the
back door without knocking, and, coming softly behind
Miss Grace, laid down her bunch of roses among the
flowers, and then set down her plate of seed-cakes.

Then she said, “I brought you some specimens of
my Souvenir de Malmaison bush, and my first trial of
your receipt.”

“Oh, thanks!” said Miss Grace: “how charming those
roses are! It was too bad to spoil your bush, though.”

“No: it does it good to cut them; it will flower all
the more. But try one of those cakes, — are they
right?”

“Excellent! you have hit it exactly,” said Grace;
“exactly the right proportion of seeds. I was hurrying,”
she added, “to get these flowers in water, because
a letter from John is waiting to be read.”

“A letter! How nice!” said Miss Letitia, looking
towards the shelf. “John is as faithful in writing as if
he were your lover.”

“He is the best lover a woman can have,” said Grace,
as she busily sorted and arranged the flowers. “For
my part, I ask nothing better than John.”

“Let me arrange for you, while you read your letter,”
said Letitia, taking the flowers from her friend's hands.

Miss Grace took down the letter from the mantelpiece,
opened, and began to read it. Miss Letitia,
meanwhile, watched her face, as we often carelessly
watch the face of a person reading a letter.

Miss Grace was not technically handsome, but she
had an interesting, kindly, sincere face; and her friend
saw gradually a dark cloud rising over it, as one
watches a shadow on a field.

When she had finished the letter, with a sudden
movement she laid her head forward on the table
among the flowers, and covered her face with her
hands. She seemed not to remember that any one
was present.

Letitia came up to her, and, laying her hand gently
on hers, said, “What is it, dear?”

Miss Grace lifted her head, and said in a husky
voice, —

“Nothing, only it is so sudden! John is engaged!”

“Engaged! to whom?”

“To Lillie Ellis.”

“John engaged to Lillie Ellis?” said Miss Ferguson,
in a tone of shocked astonishment.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 706EAF. Page 026. In-line Illustration. Image of a woman with her head buried in her hands, face against a table. Another woman is leaning over her. There is an open letter sitting on the table. The caption reads, "She laid her head forward on the table."]

“So he writes me. He is completely infatuated by
her.”

“How very sudden!” said Miss Letitia. “Who
could have expected it? Lillie Ellis is so entirely
out of the line of any of the women he has ever
known.”

“That 's precisely what 's the matter,” said Miss
Grace. “John knows nothing of any but good, noble
women; and he thinks he sees all this in Lillie Ellis.”

“There 's nothing to her but her wonderful complexion,”

said Miss Ferguson, “and her pretty little coaxing
ways; but she is the most utterly selfish, heartless
little creature that ever breathed.”

“Well, she is to be John's wife,” said Miss Grace,
sweeping the remainder of the flowers into her apron;
“and so ends my life with John. I might have known
it would come to this. I must make arrangements at
once for another house and home. This house, so
much, so dear to me, will be nothing to her; and yet
she must be its mistress,” she added, looking round on
every thing in the room, and then bursting into tears.

Now, Miss Grace was not one of the crying sort, and
so this emotion went to her friend's heart. Miss
Letitia went up and put her arms round her.

“Come, Gracie,” she said, “you must not take it so
seriously. John is a noble, manly fellow. He loves
you, and he will always be master of his own house.”

“No, he won't, — no married man ever is,” said Miss
Grace, wiping her eyes, and sitting up very straight.
“No man, that is a gentleman, is ever master in his
own house. He has only such rights there as his wife
chooses to give him; and this woman won't like me,
I 'm sure.”

“Perhaps she will,” said Letitia, in a faltering voice.

“No, she won't; because I have no faculty for lying,
or playing the hypocrite in any way, and I shan't approve
of her. These soft, slippery, pretty little fibbing
women have always been my abomination.”

“Oh, my dear Grace!” said Miss Ferguson, “do let
us make the best of it.”

“I did think,” said Miss Grace, wiping her eyes,
“that John had some sense. I wasn't such a fool, nor
so selfish, as to want him always to live for me. I
wanted him to marry; and if he had got engaged to
your Rose, for instance... O Letitia! I always did so
hope that he and Rose would like each other.”

“We can't choose for our brothers,” said Miss Letitia,
“and, hard as it is, we must make up our minds to love
those they bring to us. Who knows what good influences
may do for poor Lillie Ellis? She never has
had any yet. Her family are extremely common sort
of people, without any culture or breeding, and only
her wonderful beauty brought them into notice; and
they have always used that as a sort of stock in
trade.”

“And John says, in this letter, that she reminds him
of our mother,” said Miss Grace; “and he thinks that
naturally she was very much such a character. Just
think of that, now!”

“He must be far gone,” said Miss Ferguson; “but
then, you see, she is distractingly pretty. She has just
the most exquisitely pearly, pure, delicate, saint-like look,
at times, that you ever saw; and then she knows
exactly how she does look, and just how to use her
looks; and John can't be blamed for believing in her.
I, who know all about her, am sometimes taken in by
her.”

“Well,” said Miss Grace, “Mrs. Lennox was at Newport
last summer at the time that she was there, and she
told me all about her. I think her an artful, unscrupulous,

unprincipled woman, and her being made mistress
of this house just breaks up our pleasant sociable life
here. She has no literary tastes; she does not care for
reading or study; she won't like our set here, and she
will gradually drive them from the house. She won't
like me, and she will want to alienate John from me, —
so there is just the situation.”

“You may read that letter,” added Miss Grace, wiping
her eyes, and tossing her brother's letter into Miss
Letitia's lap. Miss Letitia took the letter and read it.
“Good fellow!” she exclaimed warmly, “you see just
what I say, — his heart is all with you.”

“Oh, John's heart is all right enough!” said Miss
Grace; “and I don't doubt his love. He 's the best,
noblest, most affectionate fellow in the world. I only
think he reckons without his host, in thinking he can
keep all our old relations unbroken, when he puts a new
mistress into the house, and such a mistress.”

“But if she really loves him” —

“Pshaw! she don't. That kind of woman can't love.
They are like cats, that want to be stroked and caressed,
and to be petted, and to lie soft and warm; and they
will purr to any one that will pet them, — that 's all.
As for love that leads to any self-sacrifice, they don't
begin to know any thing about it.”

“Gracie dear,” said Miss Ferguson, “this sort of
thing will never do. If you meet your brother in this
way, you will throw him off, and, maybe, make a fatal
breach. Meet it like a good Christian, as you are.
You know,” she said gently, “where we have a right

to carry our troubles, and of whom we should ask
guidance.”

“Oh, I do know, 'Titia!” said Miss Grace; “but I
am letting myself be wicked just a little, you know, to
relieve my mind. I ought to put myself to school to
make the best of it; but it came on me so very suddenly.
Yes,” she added, “I am going to take a course
of my Bible and Fénelon before I see John, — poor
fellow.”

“And try to have faith for her,” said Miss Letitia.

“Well, I 'll try to have faith,” said Miss Grace; “but
I do trust it will be some days before John comes down
on me with his raptures, — men in love are such fools.”

“But, dear me!” said Miss Letitia, as her head
accidentally turned towards the window; “who is this
riding up? Gracie, as sure as you live, it is John
himself!”

“John himself!” repeated Miss Grace, becoming
pale.

“Now do, dear, be careful,” said Miss Letitia. “I 'll
just run out this back door and leave you alone;”
and just as Miss Letitia's light heels were heard going
down the back steps, John's heavy footsteps were coming
up the front ones.