University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
WILL SHE LIKE IT?

“JOHN,” said Grace, “when are you going out again
to our Sunday school at Spindlewood? They are
all asking after you. Do you know it is now two
months since they have seen you?”

“I know it,” said John. “I am going to-morrow.
You see, Gracie, I couldn't well before.”

“Oh! I have told them all about it, and I have kept
things up; but then there are so many who want to
see you, and so many things that you alone could
settle and manage.”

“Oh, yes! I 'll go to-morrow,” said John. “And,
after this, I shall be steady at it. I wonder if we
could get Lillie to go,” said he, doubtfully.

Grace did not answer. Lillie was a subject on which
it was always embarrassing to her to be appealed to.
She was so afraid of appearing jealous or unappreciative;
and her opinions were so different from those of
her brother, that it was rather difficult to say any
thing.

“Do you think she would like it, Grace?”

“Indeed, John, you must know better than I. If

anybody could make her take an interest in it, it would
be you.”

Before his marriage, John had always had the idea
that pretty, affectionate little women were religious and
self-denying at heart, as matters of course. No matter
through what labyrinths of fashionable follies and dissipation
they had been wandering, still a talent for
saintship was lying dormant in their natures, which it
needed only the touch of love to develop. The wings
of the angel were always concealed under the fashionable
attire of the belle, and would unfold themselves
when the hour came. A nearer acquaintance with
Lillie, he was forced to confess, had not, so far, confirmed
this idea. Though hers was a face so fair and pure
that, when he first knew her, it suggested ideas of
prayer, and communion with angels, yet he could not
disguise from himself that, in all near acquaintance
with her, she had proved to be most remarkably “of
the earth, earthy.” She was alive and fervent about
fashionable gossip, — of who is who, and what does
what; she was alive to equipages, to dress, to sightseeing,
to dancing, to any thing of which the whole
stimulus and excitement was earthly and physical. At
times, too, he remembered that she had talked a sort
of pensive sentimentalism, of a slightly religious nature;
but the least ideas of a moral purpose in life — of self-denial,
and devotion to something higher than immediate
self-gratification — seemed never to have entered
her head. What is more, John had found his attempts
to introduce such topics with her always unsuccessful.

Lillie either gaped in his face, and asked him what time
it was; or playfully pulled his whiskers, and asked him
why he didn't take to the ministry; or adroitly turned
the conversation with kissing and compliments.

Sunday morning came, shining down gloriously
through the dewy elm-arches of Springdale. The green
turf on either side of the wide streets was mottled and
flecked with vivid flashes and glimmers of emerald, like
the sheen of a changeable silk, as here and there long
arrows of sunlight darted down through the leaves
and touched the ground.

The gardens between the great shady houses that
flanked the street were full of tall white and crimson
phloxes in all the majesty of their summer bloom, and
the air was filled with fragrance; and Lillie, after a
two hours' toilet, came forth from her chamber fresh
and lovely as the bride in the Canticles. “Thou art all
fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” She was killingly
dressed in the rural-simplicity style. All her robes
and sashes were of purest white; and a knot of field-daisies
and grasses, with French dew-drops on them,
twinkled in an infinitesimal bonnet on her little head,
and her hair was all créped into a filmy golden aureole
round her face. In short, dear reader, she was a perfectly
got-up angel, and wanted only some tulle clouds
and an opening heaven to have gone up at once, as
similar angels do from the Parisian stage.

“You like me, don't you?” she said, as she saw the
delight in John's eyes.

John was tempted to lay hold of his plaything.

“Don't, now, — you 'll crumple me,” she said, fighting
him off with a dainty parasol. “Positively you
shan't touch me till after church.”

John laid the little white hand on his arm with pride,
and looked down at her over his shoulder all the way
to church. He felt proud of her. They would look at
her, and see how pretty she was, he thought. And so
they did. Lillie had been used to admiration in church.
It was one of her fields of triumph. She had received
compliments on her toilet even from young clergymen,
who, in the course of their preaching and praying, found
leisure to observe the beauties of nature and grace in
their congregation. She had been quite used to knowing
of young men who got good seats in church simply
for the purpose of seeing her; consequently, going to
church had not the moral advantages for her that it has
for people who go simply to pray and be instructed.
John saw the turning of heads, and the little movements
and whispers of admiration; and his heart was
glad within him. The thought of her mingled with
prayer and hymn; even when he closed his eyes, and
bowed his head, she was there.

Perhaps this was not exactly as it should be; yet let
us hope the angels look tenderly down on the sins of
too much love. John felt as if he would be glad of a
chance to die for her; and, when he thought of her in
his prayers, it was because he loved her better than
himself.

As to Lillie, there was an extraordinary sympathy of
sentiment between them at that moment. John was

thinking only of her; and she was thinking only of herself,
as was her usual habit, — herself, the one object of
her life, the one idol of her love.

Not that she knew, in so many words, that she, the
little, frail bit of dust and ashes that she was, was her
own idol, and that she appeared before her Maker, in
those solemn walls, to draw to herself the homage and
the attention that was due to God alone; but yet it was
true that, for years and years, Lillie's unconfessed yet
only motive for appearing in church had been the display
of herself, and the winning of admiration.

But is she so much worse than others? — than the
clergyman who uses the pulpit and the sacred office to
show off his talents? — than the singers who sing God's
praises to show their voices, — who intone the agonies
of their Redeemer, or the glories of the Te Deum,
confident on the comments of the newspaper press on
their performance the next week? No: Lillie may be
a little sinner, but not above others in this matter.

“Lillie,” said John to her after dinner, assuming a
careless, matter-of-course air, “would you like to drive
with me over to Spindlewood, and see my Sunday
school?”

“Your Sunday school, John? Why, bless me! do
you teach Sunday school?”

“Certainly I do. Grace and I have a school of two
hundred children and young people belonging to our
factories. I am superintendent.”

“I never did hear of any thing so odd!” said Lillie.
“What in the world can you want to take all that trouble

for, — go basking over there in the hot sun, and be
shut up with a room full of those ill-smelling factory-people?
Why, I 'm sure it can't be your duty! I
wouldn't do it for the world. Nothing would tempt
me. Why, gracious, John, you might catch small-pox
or something!”

“Pooh! Lillie, child, you don't know any thing about
them. They are just as cleanly and respectable as anybody.”

“Oh, well! they may be. But these Irish and Germans
and Swedes and Danes, and all that low class, do
smell so, — you needn't tell me, now! — that working-class
smell is a thing that can't be disguised.”

“But, Lillie, these are our people. They are the
laborers from whose toils our wealth comes; and we
owe them something.”

“Well! you pay them something, don't you?”

“I mean morally. We owe our efforts to instruct
their children, and to elevate, and guide them. Lillie,
I feel that it is wrong for us to use wealth merely as
a means of self-gratification. We ought to labor for
those who labor for us. We ought to deny ourselves,
and make some sacrifices of ease for their good.”

“You dear old preachy creature!” said Lillie. “How
good you must be! But, really, I haven't the smallest
vocation to be a missionary, — not the smallest. I
can't think of any thing that would induce me to take
a long, hot ride in the sun, and to sit in that stived-up
room with those common creatures.”

John looked grave. “Lillie,” he said, “you shouldn't

speak of any of your fellow-beings in that heartless
way.”

“Well now, if you are going to scold me, I 'm sure I
don't want to go. I 'm sure, if everybody that stays at
home, and has comfortable times, Sundays, instead of
going out on missions, is heartless, there are a good
many heartless people in the world.”

“I beg your pardon, my darling. I didn't mean,
dear, that you were heartless, but that what you said
sounded so. I knew you didn't really mean it. I
didn't ask you, dear, to go to work, — only to be company
for me.”

“And I ask you to stay at home, and be company
for me. I 'm sure it is lonesome enough here, and you
are off on business almost all your days; and you might
stay with me Sundays. You could hire some poor,
pious young man to do all the work over there. There
are plenty of them, dear knows, that it would be a real
charity to help, and that could preach and pray better
than you can, I know. I don't think a man that is busy
all the week ought to work Sundays. It is breaking the
Sabbath.”

“But, Lillie, I am interested in my Sunday school.
I know all my people, and they know me; and no one
else in the world could do for them what I could.”

“Well, I should think you might be interested in me:
nobody else can do for me what you can, and I want
you to stay with me. That 's just the way with you
men: you don't care any thing about us after you
get us.”

“Now, Lillie, darling, you know that isn't so.”

“It 's just so. You care more for your old missionary
work, now, than you do for me. I 'm sure I never
knew that I 'd married a home-missionary.”

“Darling, please, now, don't laugh at me, and try to
make me selfish and worldly. You have such power
over me, you ought to be my inspiration.”

“I 'll be your common-sense, John. When you get
on stilts, and run benevolence into the ground, I 'll pull
you down. Now, I know it must be bad for a man,
that has as much as you do to occupy his mind all the
week, to go out and work Sundays; and it 's foolish,
when you could perfectly well hire somebody else to do
it, and stay at home, and have a good time.”

“But, Lillie, I need it myself.”

“Need it, — what for? I can't imagine.”

“To keep me from becoming a mere selfish, worldly
man, and living for mere material good and pleasure.”

“You dear old Don Quixote! Well, you are altogether
in the clouds above me. I can't understand a
word of all that.”

“Well, good-by, darling,” said John, kissing her,
and hastening out of the room, to cut short the interview.

Milton has described the peculiar influence of woman
over man, in lowering his moral tone, and bringing him
down to what he considered the peculiarly womanly
level. “You women,” he said to his wife, when she
tried to induce him to seek favors at court by some
concession of principle, — “you women never care for

any thing but to be fine, and to ride in your coaches.”
In Father Adam's description of the original Eve, he
says, —

Something like this effect was always produced on
John's mind when he tried to settle questions relating
to his higher nature with Lillie. He seemed, somehow,
always to get the worst of it. All her womanly graces
and fascinations, so powerful over his senses and imagination,
arrayed themselves formidably against him,
and for the time seemed to strike him dumb. What
he believed, and believed with enthusiasm, when he
was alone, or with Grace, seemed to drizzle away, and
be belittled, when he undertook to convince her of it.
Lest John should be called a muff and a spoon for this
peculiarity, we cite once more the high authority aforesaid,
where Milton makes poor Adam tell the angel, —

John went out from Lillie's presence rather humbled
and over-crowed. When the woman that a man loves
laughs at his moral enthusiasms, it is like a black frost
on the delicate tips of budding trees. It is up-hill work,
as we all know, to battle with indolence and selfishness,
and self-seeking and hard-hearted worldliness. Then
the highest and holiest part of our nature has a bashfulness

of its own. It is a heavenly stranger, and
easily shamed. A nimble-tongued, skilful woman can
so easily show the ridiculous side of what seemed
heroism; and what is called common-sense, so generally,
is only some neatly put phase of selfishness. Poor
John needed the angel at his elbow, to give him the
caution which he is represented as giving to Father
Adam: —

But John had no angel at his elbow. He was a
fellow with a great heart, — good as gold, — with upward
aspirations, but with slow speech; and, when not
sympathized with, he became confused and incoherent,
and even dumb. So his only way with his little pink
and white empress was immediate and precipitate flight.

Lillie ran to the window when he was gone, and saw
him and Grace get into the carriage together; and then
she saw them drive to the old Ferguson House, and
Rose Ferguson came out and got in with them. “Well,”
she said to herself, “he shan't do that many times
more, — I 'm resolved.”

No, she did not say it. It would be well for us all
if we did put into words, plain and explicit, many instinctive

resolves and purposes that arise in our hearts,
and which, for want of being so expressed, influence us
undetected and unchallenged. If we would say out
boldly, “I don't care for right or wrong, or good or evil,
or anybody's rights or anybody's happiness, or the
general good, or God himself, — all I care for, or feel
the least interest in, is to have a good time myself,
and I mean to do it, come what may,” — we should be
only expressing a feeling which often lies in the dark
back-room of the human heart; and saying it might
alarm us from the drugged sleep of life. It might
rouse us to shake off the slow, creeping paralysis of
selfishness and sin before it is for ever too late.

But Lillie was a creature who had lost the power
of self-knowledge. She was, my dear sir, what you
suppose the true woman to be, — a bundle of blind
instincts; and among these the strongest was that of
property in her husband, and power over him. She had
lived in her power over men; it was her field of ambition.
She knew them thoroughly. Women are called ivy;
and the ivy has a hundred little fingers in every inch of
its length, that strike at every flaw and crack and weak
place in the strong wall they mean to overgrow; and
so had Lillie. She saw, at a glance, that the sober,
thoughtful, Christian life of Springdale was wholly opposed
to the life she wanted to lead, and in which John
was to be her instrument. She saw that, if such
women as Grace and Rose had power with him, she
should not have; and her husband should be hers alone.
He should do her will, and be her subject, — so she

thought, smiling at herself as she looked in the looking-glass,
and then curled herself peacefully and languidly
down in the corner of the sofa, and drew forth the
French novel that was her usual Sunday companion.

Lillie liked French novels. There was an atmosphere
of things in them that suited her. The young
married women had lovers and admirers; and there
was the constant stimulus of being courted and adored,
under the safe protection of a good-natured “mari.”

In France, the flirting is all done after marriage, and
the young girl looks forward to it as her introduction
to a career of conquest. In America, so great is our
democratic liberality, that we think of uniting the two
systems. We are getting on in that way fast. A
knowledge of French is beginning to be considered as
the pearl of great price, to gain which, all else must be
sold. The girls must go to the French theatre, and
be stared at by French débauchées, who laugh at them
while they pretend they understand what, thank
Heaven, they cannot. Then we are to have series of
French novels, carefully translated, and puffed and
praised even by the religious press, written by the
corps of French female reformers, which will show them
exactly how the naughty French women manage their
cards; so that, by and by, we shall have the latest
phase of eclecticism, — the union of American and
French manners. The girl will flirt till twenty à
l'Américaine, and then marry and flirt till forty à la
Française. This was about Lillie's plan of life. Could
she hope to carry it out in Springdale?