University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
A CRISIS.

ONE of the shrewdest and most subtle modern
French writers has given his views of womankind
in the following passage: —

This is a Frenchman's view of life in a country where
women are trained more systematically for the mere
purposes of attraction than in any other country, and
where the pursuit of admiration and the excitement of
winning lovers are represented by its authors as constituting
the main staple of woman's existence. France,
unfortunately, is becoming the great society-teacher of
the world. What with French theatres, French operas,
French novels, and the universal rush of American
women for travel, France is becoming so powerful on

American fashionable society, that the things said of
the Parisian woman begin in some cases to apply to
some women in America.

Lillie was as precisely the woman here described as
if she had been born and bred in Paris. She had all
the thirty-seven thousand ways of saying “No,” and
the incommensurable variations in saying “Yes,” as completely
as the best French teaching could have given it.
She possessed, and had used, all that graceful facility,
in the story of herself that she had told John in the
days of courtship. Her power over him was based on
a dangerous foundation of unreality. Hence, during
the first few weeks of her wedded life, came a critical
scene, in which she was brought in collision with one
of those “pitiless questions” our author speaks of.

Her wedding-presents, manifold and brilliant, had
remained at home, in the charge of her mother, during
the wedding-journey. One bright day, a few weeks
after her arrival in Springdale, the boxes containing
the treasures were landed there; and John, with all
enthusiasm, busied himself with the work of unpacking
these boxes, and drawing forth the treasures.

Now, it so happened that Lillie's maternal grandfather,
a nice, pious old gentleman, had taken the
occasion to make her the edifying and suggestive
present of a large, elegantly bound family Bible.

The binding was unexceptionable; and Lillie assigned
it a proper place of honor among her wedding-gear.
Alas! she had not looked into it, nor seen what
dangers to her power were lodged between its leaves.

But John, who was curious in the matter of books,
sat quietly down in a corner to examine it; and on the
middle page, under the head “Family Record,” he
found, in a large, bold hand, the date of the birth of
“Lillie Ellis” in figures of the most uncompromising
plainness; and thence, with one flash of his well-trained
arithmetical sense, came the perception that, instead of
being twenty years old, she was in fact twenty-seven,
— and that of course she had lied to him.

It was a horrid and a hard word for an American
young man to have suggested in relation to his wife,
If we may believe the French romancer, a Frenchman
would simply have smiled in amusement on detecting

this petty feminine ruse of his beloved. But American
men are in the habit of expecting the truth from respectable
women as a matter of course; and the want
of it in the smallest degree strikes them as shocking.
Only an Englishman or an American can understand
the dreadful pain of that discovery to John.

The Anglo-Saxon race have, so to speak, a worship
of truth; and they hate and abhor lying with an energy
which leaves no power of tolerance.

The Celtic races have a certain sympathy with
deception. They have a certain appreciation of the
value of lying as a fine art, which has never been more
skilfully shown than in the passage from De Balzac we
have quoted. The woman who is described by him as
lying so sweetly and skilfully is represented as one of
those women “qui ont je ne sais quoi de saint et de
sacré, qui inspirent tant de respect que l'amour,” — “a
woman who has an indescribable something of holiness
and purity which inspires respect as well as love.” It
was no detraction from the character of Jesus, according
to the estimate of Renan, to represent him as
consenting to a benevolent fraud, and seeming to work
miracles when he did not work them, by way of increasing
his good influence over the multitude.

But John was the offspring of a generation of men
for hundreds of years, who would any of them have
gone to the stake rather than have told the smallest
untruth; and for him who had been watched and
guarded and catechised against this sin from his cradle,
till he was as true and pure as a crystal rock, to have

his faith shattered in the woman he loved, was a terrible
thing.

As he read the fatal figures, a mist swam before
his eyes, — a sort of faintness came over him. It
seemed for a moment as if his very life was sinking
down through his boots into the carpet. He threw
down the book hastily, and, turning, stepped through
an open window into the garden, and walked quickly
off.

“Where in the world is John going?” said Lillie,
running to the door, and calling after him in imperative
tones.

“John, John, come back. I haven't done with you
yet;” but John never turned his head.

“How very odd! what in the world is the matter
with him?” she said to herself.

John was gone all the afternoon. He took a long,
long walk, all by himself, and thought the matter over.
He remembered that fresh, childlike, almost infantine
face, that looked up into his with such a bewitching air
of frankness and candor, as she professed to be telling
all about herself and her history; and now which or
what of it was true? It seemed as if he loathed her;
and yet he couldn't help loving her, while he despised
himself for doing it.

When he came home to supper, he was silent and
morose. Lillie came running to meet him; but he
threw her off, saying he was tired. She was frightened;
she had never seen him look like that.

“John, what is the matter with you?” said Grace at

the tea-table. “You are upsetting every thing, and
don't drink your tea.”

“Nothing — only — I have some troublesome business
to settle,” he said, getting up to go out again. “You
needn't wait for me; I shall be out late.”

“What can be the matter?”

Lillie, indeed, had not the remotest idea. Yet she
remembered his jumping up suddenly, and throwing
down the Bible; and mechanically she went to it, and
opened it. She turned it over; and the record met
her eye.

“Provoking!” she said. “Stupid old creature! must
needs go and put that out in full.” Lillie took a paper-folder,
and cut the leaf out quite neatly; then folded
and burned it.

She knew now what was the matter. John was
angry at her; but she couldn't help wondering that he
should be so angry. If he had laughed at her, teased
her, taxed her with the trick, she would have understood
what to do. But this terrible gloom, this awful
commotion of the elements, frightened her.

She went to her room, saying that she had a headache,
and would go to bed. But she did not. She
took her French novel, and read till she heard him
coming; and then she threw down her book, and began
to cry. He came into the room, and saw her leaning
like a little white snow-wreath over the table, sobbing
as if her heart would break. To do her justice,
Lillie's sobs were not affected. She was lonesome and
thoroughly frightened; and, when she heard him coming,

her nerves gave out. John's heart yearned towards
her. His short-lived anger had burned out; and he
was perfectly longing for a reconciliation. He felt as if
he must have her to love, no matter what she was. He
came up to her, and stroked her hair. “O Lillie!” he
said, “why couldn't you have told me the truth?
What made you deceive me?”

“I was afraid you wouldn't like me if I did,” said
Lillie, in her sobs.

“O Lillie! I should have liked you, no matter
how old you were, — only you should have told me
the truth.”

“I know it — I know it — oh, it was wrong of me!”
and Lillie sobbed, and seemed in danger of falling into
convulsions; and John's heart gave out. He gathered
her in his arms. “I can't help loving you; and I can't
live without you,” he said, “be you what you may!”

Lillie's little heart beat with triumph under all her
sobs: she had got him, and should hold him yet.

“There can be no confidence between husband and
wife, Lillie,” said John, gravely, “unless we are perfectly
true with each other. Promise me, dear, that
you will never deceive me again.”

Lillie promised with ready fervor. “O John!” she
said, “I never should have done so wrong if I had only
come under your influence earlier. The fact is, I have
been under the worst influences all my life. I never
had anybody like you to guide me.”

John may of course be excused for feeling that
his flattering little penitent was more to him than

ever; and as to Lillie, she gave a sigh of relief. That
was over, “anyway;” and she had him not only safe,
but more completely hers than before.

A generous man is entirely unnerved by a frank
confession. If Lillie had said one word in defence,
if she had raised the slightest shadow of an argument,
John would have roused up all his moral principle
to oppose her; but this poor little white water-sprite,
dissolving in a rain of penitent tears, quite washed
away all his anger and all his heroism.

The next morning, Lillie, all fresh in a ravishing
toilet, with field-daisies in her hair, was in a condition
to laugh gently at John for his emotion of yesterday.
She triumphed softly, not too obviously, in her power.
He couldn't do without her, — do what she might, —
that was plain.

“Now, John,” she said, “don 't you think we poor
women are judged rather hardly? Men, you know,
tell all sorts of lies to carry on their great politics and
their ambition, and nobody thinks it so dreadful of
them.”

“I do — I should,” interposed John.

“Oh, well! you — you are an exception. It is not
one man in a hundred that is so good as you are.
Now, we women have only one poor little ambition, —
to be pretty, to please you men; and, as soon as
you know we are getting old, you don't like us. And
can you think it 's so very shocking if we don't come
square up to the dreadful truth about our age? Youth
and beauty is all there is to us, you know.”

“O Lillie! don't say so,” said John, who felt the
necessity of being instructive, and of improving the
occasion to elevate the moral tone of his little elf.
“Goodness lasts, my dear, when beauty fades.”

“Oh, nonsense! Now, John, don't talk humbug.
I 'd like to see you following goodness when beauty
is gone. I 've known lots of plain old maids that were
perfect saints and angels; and yet men crowded and
jostled by them to get the pretty sinners. I dare
say now,” she added, with a bewitching look over
her shoulder at him, “you 'd rather have me than
Miss Almira Carraway, — hadn't you, now?”

And Lillie put her white arm round his neck, and
her downy cheek to his, and said archly, “Come, now,
confess.”

Then John told her that she was a bad, naughty girl;
and she laughed; and, on the whole, the pair were
more hilarious and loving than usual.

But yet, when John was away at his office, he
thought of it again, and found there was still a sore
spot in his heart.

She had cheated him once; would she cheat him
again? And she could cheat so prettily, so serenely,
and with such a candid face, it was a dangerous talent.

No: she wasn't like his mother, he thought with a
sigh. The “je ne sais quoi de saint et de sacré,”
which had so captivated his imagination, did not cover
the saintly and sacred nature; it was a mere outward
purity of complexion and outline. And then Grace, —
she must not be left to find out what he knew about

Lillie. He had told Grace that she was only twenty, —
told it on her authority; and now must he become an
accomplice? If called on to speak of his wife's age,
must he accommodate the truth to her story, or must
he palter and evade? Here was another brick laid on
the wall of separation between his sister and himself.
It was rising daily. Here was another subject on which
he could never speak frankly with Grace; for he must
defend Lillie, — every impulse of his heart rushed to
protect her.

But it is a terrible truth, and one that it will not hurt
any of us to bear in mind, that our judgments of our
friends are involuntary.

We may long with all our hearts to confide; we may
be fascinated, entangled, and wish to be blinded; but
blind we cannot be. The friend that has lied to us
once, we may long to believe; but we cannot. Nay,
more; it is the worse for us, if, in our desire to hold the
dear deceiver in our hearts, we begin to chip and hammer
on the great foundations of right and honor, and
to say within ourselves, “After all, why be so particular?”
Then, when we have searched about for all the
reasons and apologies and extenuations for wrong-doing,
are we sure that in our human weakness we shall not
be pulling down the moral barriers in ourselves? The
habit of excusing evil, and finding apologies, and wishing
to stand with one who stands on a lower moral
plane, is not a wholesome one for the soul.

As fate would have it, the very next day after this
little scene, who should walk into the parlor where

Lillie, John, and Grace were sitting, but that terror of
American democracy, the census-taker. Armed with
the whole power of the republic, this official steps with
elegant ease into the most sacred privacies of the family.
Flutterings and denials are in vain. Bridget and
Katy and Anne, no less than Seraphina and Isabella,
must give up the critical secrets of their lives.

John took the paper into the kitchen. Honest old
Bridget gave in her age with effrontery as “twinty-five.”
Anne giggled and flounced, and declared on her
word she didn't know, — they could put it down as they
liked. “But, Anne, you must tell, or you may be sent
to jail, you know.”

Anne giggled still harder, and tossed her head:
“Then it 's to jail I 'll have to go; for I don't know.”

“Dear me,” said Lillie, with an air of edifying
candor, “what a fuss they make! Set down my age
`twenty-seven,' John,” she added.

Grace started, and looked at John; he met her eye,
and blushed to the roots of his hair.

“Why, what 's the matter?” said Lillie, “are you
embarrassed at telling your age?”

“Oh, nothing!” said John, writing down the numbers
hastily; and then, finding a sudden occasion to
give directions in the garden, he darted out. “It 's so
silly to be ashamed of our age!” said Lillie, as the
census-taker withdrew.

“Of course,” said Grace; and she had the humanity
never to allude to the subject with her brother.