University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.

IF John managed to be happy without Lillie in
Springdale, Lillie managed to be blissful without
him in New York.

“The bird let loose in Eastern skies” never hastened
more fondly home than she to its glitter and gayety, its
life and motion, dash and sensation. She rustled in all
her bravery of curls and frills, pinkings and quillings, —
a marvellous specimen of Parisian frostwork, without
one breath of reason or philosophy or conscience to
melt it.

The Follingsbees' house might stand for the original
of the Castle of Indolence.

It was not without some considerable profit that
Mrs. Follingsbee had read Balzac and Dumas, and had

Charlie Ferrola for master of arts in her establishment.
The effect of the whole was perfect; it transported one,
bodily, back to the times of Montespan and Pompadour,
when life was all one glittering upper-crust, and pretty
women were never troubled with even the shadow of
a duty.

It was with a rebound of joyousness that Lillie found
herself once more with a crowded list of invitations,
calls, operas, dancing, and shopping, that kept her
pretty little head in a perfect whirl of excitement,
and gave her not one moment for thought.

Mrs. Follingsbee, to say the truth, would have been a
little careful about inviting a rival queen of beauty into
the circle, were it not that Charlie Ferrola, after an attentive
consideration of the subject, had assured her that a
golden-haired blonde would form a most complete and
effective tableau, in contrast with her own dark rich
style of beauty. Neither would lose by it, so he said;
and the impression, as they rode together in an elegant
open barouche, with ermine carriage robes, would be
“stunning.” So they called each other ma sœur, and
drove out in the park in a ravishing little pony-phaeton
all foamed over with ermine, drawn by a lovely pair
of cream-colored horses, whose harness glittered with
gold and silver, after the fashion of the Count of Monte
Cristo. In truth, if Dick Follingsbee did not remind
one of Solomon in all particulars, he was like him in
one, that he “made silver and gold as the stones of the
street” in New York.

Lillie's presence, however, was all desirable; because

it would draw the calls of two or three old New York
families who had hitherto stood upon their dignity, and
refused to acknowledge the shoddy aristocracy. The
beautiful Mrs. John Seymour, therefore, was no less
useful than ornamental, and advanced Mrs. Follingsbee's
purposes in her “Excelsior” movements.

“Now, I suppose,” said Mrs. Follingsbee to Lillie
one day, when they had been out making fashionable
calls together, “we really must call on Charlie's wife,
just to keep her quiet.”

“I thought you didn't like her,” said Lillie.

“I don't; I think she is dreadfully common,” said
Mrs. Follingsbee: “she is one of those women who can't
talk any thing but baby, and bores Charlie half to death.
But then, you know, when there is a liaison like mine
with Charlie, one can't be too careful to cultivate the
wives. Les convenances, you know, are the all-important
things. I send her presents constantly, and send
my carriage around to take her to church or opera, or
any thing that is going on, and have her children at my
fancy parties: yet, for all that, the creature has not a
particle of gratitude; those narrow-minded women
never have. You know I am very susceptible to people's
atmospheres; and I always feel that that creature is just
as full of spite and jealousy as she can stick in her skin.”

It will be remarked that this was one of those idiomatic
phrases which got lodged in Mrs. Follingsbee's
head in a less cultivated period of her life, as a rusty
needle sometimes hides in a cushion, coming out unexpectedly
when excitement gives it an honest squeeze.

“Now, I should think,” pursued Mrs. Follingsbee,
“that a woman who really loved her husband would be
thankful to have him have such a rest from the disturbing
family cares which smother a man's genius, as a
house like ours offers him. How can the artistic nature
exercise itself in the very grind of the thing, when this
child has a cold, and the other the croup; and there is
fussing with mustard-paste and ipecac and paregoric, —
all those realities, you know? Why, Charlie tells me
he feels a great deal more affection for his children when
he is all calm and tranquil in the little boudoir at
our house; and he writes such lovely little poems about
them, I must show you some of them. But this creature
doesn't appreciate them a bit: she has no poetry
in her.”

“Well, I must say, I don't think I should have,” said
Lillie, honestly. “I should be just as mad as I could
be, if John acted so.”

“Oh, my dear! the cases are different: Charlie has
such peculiarities of genius. The artistic nature, you
know, requires soothing.” Here they stopped, and
rang at the door of a neat little house, and were ushered
into a pair of those characteristic parlors which show
that they have been arranged by a home-worshipper, and
a mother. There were plants and birds and flowers,
and little genre pictures of children, animals, and household
interiors, arranged with a loving eye and hand.

“Did you ever see any thing so perfectly characteristic?”
said Mrs. Follingsbee, looking around her as
if she were going to faint.

“This woman drives Charlie perfectly wild, because
she has no appreciation of high art. Now, I sent her
photographs of Michel Angelo's `Moses,' and `Night
and Morning;' and I really wish you would see where
she hung them, — away in yonder dark corner!”

“I think myself they are enough to scare the owls,”
said Lillie, after a moment's contemplation.

“But, my dear, you know they are the thing,” said
Mrs. Follingsbee: “people never like such things at
first, and one must get used to high art before one
forms a taste for it. The thing with her is, she has no
docility. She does not try to enter into Charlie's
tastes.”

The woman with “no docility” entered at this moment,
— a little snow-drop of a creature, with a pale,
pure, Madonna face, and that sad air of hopeless firmness
which is seen unhappily in the faces of so many
women.

“I had to bring baby down,” she said. “I have no
nurse to-day, and he has been threatened with croup.”

“The dear little fellow!” said Mrs. Follingsbee, with
officious graciousness. “So glad you brought him
down; come to his aunty?” she inquired lovingly, as
the little fellow shrank away, and regarded her with
round, astonished eyes. “Why will you not come to
my next reception, Mrs. Ferrola?” she added. “You
make yourself quite a stranger to us. You ought to
give yourself some variety.”

“The fact is, Mrs. Follingsbee,” said Mrs. Ferrola,
“receptions in New York generally begin about my

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 706EAF. Page 233. In-line Illustration. Image of a young woman holding a baby. She is standing in a doorway at the bottom of some stairs. The caption reads, "I had to bring baby down."] bed-time; and, if I should spend the night out, I should
have no strength to give to my children the next day.”

“But, my dear, you ought to have some amusement.”

“My children amuse me, if you will believe it,” said
Mrs. Ferrola, with a remarkably quiet smile.

Mrs. Follingsbee was not quite sure whether this
was meant to be sarcastic or not. She answered,

however, “Well! your husband will come, at all
events.”

“You may be quite sure of that,” said Mrs. Ferrola,
with the same quietness.

“Well!” said Mrs. Follingsbee, rising, with patronizing
cheerfulness, “delighted to see you doing so well;
and, if it is pleasant, I will send the carriage round to
take you a drive in the park this afternoon. Good-morning.”

And, like a rustling cloud of silks and satins and
perfumes, she bent down and kissed the baby, and
swept from the apartment.

Mrs. Ferrola, with a movement that seemed involuntary,
wiped the baby's cheek with her handkerchief,
and, folding it closer to her bosom, looked up as if
asking patience where patience is to be found for the
asking.

“There! didn't I tell you?” said Mrs. Follingsbee
when she came out; “just one of those provoking,
meek, obstinate, impracticable creatures, with no adaptation
in her.”

“Oh, gracious me!” said Lillie: “I can't imagine
more dire despair than to sit all day tending baby.”

“Well, so you would think; and Charlie has offered
to hire competent nurses, and wants her to dress herself
up and go into society; and she just won't do it,
and sticks right down by the cradle there, with her
children running over her like so many squirrels.”

“Oh! I hope and trust I never shall have children,”
said Lillie, fervently, “because, you see, there 's an end

of every thing. No more fun, no more frolics, no more
admiration or good times; nothing but this frightful
baby, that you can't get rid of."

Yet, as Lillie spoke, she knew, in her own slippery
little heart, that the shadow of this awful cloud of
maternity was resting over her; though she laced and
danced, and bid defiance to every law of nature, with a
blind and ignorant wilfulness, not caring what consequences
she might draw clown on herself, if only she
might escape this.

And was there, then, no soft spot in this woman's
heart anywhere? Generally it is thought that the throb
of the child's heart awakens a heart in the mother, and
that the mother is born again with her child. It is so
with unperverted nature, as God meant it to be; and
you shall hear from the lips of an Irish washer-woman
a genuine poetry of maternal feeling, for the little one
who comes to make her toil more toilsome, that is
wholly withered away out of luxurious circles, where
there is every thing to make life easy. Just as the
Chinese have contrived fashionable monsters, where
human beings are constrained to grow in the shape of
flower-pots, so fashionable life contrives at last to grow
a woman who hates babies, and will risk her life to be
rid of the crowning glory of womanhood.

There was a time in Lillie's life, when she was sixteen
years of age, which was a turning-point with her,
and decided that she should be the heartless woman
she was. If at that age, and at that time, she had
decided to marry the man she really loved, marriage

might indeed have proved to her a sacrament. It might
have opened to her a door through which she could
have passed out from a career of selfish worldliness
into that gradual discipline of unselfishness which a
true love-marriage brings.

But she did not. The man was poor, and she was
beautiful; her beauty would buy wealth and worldly position,
and so she cast him off. Yet partly to gratify her
own lingering feeling, and partly because she could not
wholly renounce what had once been hers, she kept up
for years with him just that illusive simulacrum which
such women call friendship; which, while constantly
denying, constantly takes pains to attract, and drains
the heart of all possibility of loving another.

Harry Endicott was a young man of fine capabilities,
sensitive, interesting, handsome, full of generous impulses,
whom a good woman might easily have led to a
full completeness. He was not really Lillie's cousin,
but the cousin of her mother; yet, under the name of
cousin, he had constant access and family intimacy.

This winter Harry Endicott suddenly returned to the
fashionable circles of New York, — returned from a
successful career in India, with an ample fortune. He
was handsomer than ever, took stylish bachelor lodgings,
set up a most distracting turnout, and became a
sort of Marquis of Farintosh in fashionable circles.
Was ever any thing so lucky, or so unlucky, for our
Lillie? — lucky, if life really does run on the basis of
French novels, and if all that is needed is the sparkle
and stimulus of new emotions; unlucky, nay, even

gravely terrible, if life really is established on a basis of
moral responsibility, and dogged by the fatal necessity
that “whatsoever man or woman soweth, that shall he
or she also reap.”

In the most critical hour of her youth, when love
was sent to her heart like an angel, to beguile her from
selfishness, and make self-denial easy, Lillie's pretty
little right hand had sowed to the world and the flesh;
and of that sowing she was now to reap all the disquiets,
the vexations, the tremors, that go to fill the
pages of French novels, — records of women who marry
where they cannot love, to serve the purposes of selfishness
and ambition, and then make up for it by loving
where they cannot marry. If all the women in America
who have practised, and are practising, this species of
moral agriculture should stand forth together, it would
be seen that it is not for nothing that France has been
called the society educator of the world.

The apartments of the Follingsbee mansion, with
their dreamy voluptuousness, were eminently adapted
to be the background and scenery of a dramatic performance
of this kind. There were vistas of drawing-rooms,
with delicious boudoirs, like side chapels in a
temple of Venus, with handsome Charlie Ferrola gliding
in and out, or lecturing dreamily from the corner
of some sofa on the last most important crinkle of the
artistic rose-leaf, demonstrating conclusively that beauty
was the only true morality, and that there was no sin but
bad taste; and that nobody knew what good taste was
but himself and his clique. There was the discussion,

far from edifying, of modern improved theories of society,
seen from an improved philosophic point of view;
of all the peculiar wants and needs of etherealized beings,
who have been refined and cultivated till it is the
most difficult problem in the world to keep them comfortable,
while there still remains the most imperative
necessity that they should be made happy, though the
whole universe were to be torn down and made over to
effect it.

The idea of not being happy, and in all respects as
blissful as they could possibly be made, was one always
assumed by the Follingsbee clique as an injustice to be
wrestled with. Anybody that did not affect them
agreeably, that jarred on their nerves, or interrupted
the delicious reveries of existence with the sharp saw-setting
of commonplace realities, in their view ought
to be got rid of summarily, whether that somebody
were husband or wife, parent or child.

Natures that affected each other pleasantly were to
spring together like dew-drops, and sail off on rosy
clouds with each other to the land of Do-just-as-you-have-a-mind-to.

The only thing never to be enough regretted, which
prevented this immediate and blissful union of particles,
was the impossibility of living on rosy clouds, and
making them the means of conveyance to the desirable
country before mentioned. Many of the fair
illuminatœ, who were quite willing to go off with
a kindred spirit, were withheld by the necessities of
infinite pairs of French kid gloves, and gallons of

cologne-water, and indispensable clouds of mechlin and
point lace, which were necessary to keep around them
the poetry of existence.

Although it was well understood among them that
the religion of the emotions is the only true religion,
and that nothing is holy that you do not feel exactly
like doing, and every thing is holy that you do; still
these fair confessors lacked the pluck of primitive
Christians, and could not think of taking joyfully the
spoiling of their goods, even for the sake of a kindred
spirit. Hence the necessity of living in deplored marriage-bonds
with husbands who could pay rent and
taxes, and stand responsible for unlimited bills at Stewart's
and Tiffany's. Hence the philosophy which allowed
the possession of the body to one man, and of the soul
to another, which one may see treated of at large in
any writings of the day.

As yet Lillie had been kept intact from all this sort
of thing by the hard, brilliant enamel of selfishness.
That little shrewd, gritty common sense, which enabled
her to see directly through other people's illusions, has,
if we mistake not, by this time revealed itself to our
readers as an element in her mind: but now there is to
come a decided thrust at the heart of her womanhood;
and we shall see whether the paralysis is complete, or
whether the woman is alive.

If Lillie had loved Harry Endicott poor, had loved
him so much that at one time she had seriously balanced
the possibility of going to housekeeping in a little
unfashionable house, and having only one girl, and hand

in hand with him walking the paths of economy, self-denial,
and prudence, — the reader will see that Harry
Endicott rich, Harry Endicott enthroned in fashionable
success, Harry Endicott plus fast horses, splendid equipages,
a fine city house, and a country house on the
Hudson, was something still more dangerous to her
imagination.

But more than this was the stimulus of Harry Endicott
out of her power, and beyond the sphere of her
charms. She had a feverish desire to see him, but he
never called. Forthwith she had a confidential conversation
with her bosom friend, who entered into
the situation with enthusiasm, and invited him to her
receptions. But he didn't come.

The fact was, that Harry Endicott hated Lillie now,
with that kind of hatred which is love turned wrong-side
out. He hated her for the misery she had caused
him, and was in some danger of feeling it incumbent
on himself to go to the devil in a wholly unnecessary
manner on that account.

He had read the story of Monte Cristo, with its
highly wrought plot of vengeance, and had determined
to avenge himself on the woman who had so tortured
him, and to make her feel, if possible, what he had felt.

So, when he had discovered the hours of driving
observed by Mrs. Follingsbee and Lillie in the park, he
took pains, from time to time, to meet them face to face,
and to pass Lillie with an unrecognizing stare. Then
he dashed in among Mrs. Follingsbee's circle, making
himself everywhere talked of, till they were beset on all

hands by the inquiry, “Don't you know young Endicott?
why, I should think you would want to have him
visit here.”

After this had been played far enough, he suddenly
showed himself one evening at Mrs. Follingsbee's, and
apologized in an off-hand manner to Lillie, when reminded
of passing her in the park, that really he wasn't thinking
of meeting her, and didn't recognize her, she was so
altered; it had been so many years since they had met,
&c. All in a tone of cool and heartless civility, every
word of which was a dagger's thrust not only into her
vanity, but into the poor little bit of a real heart which
fashionable life had left to Lillie.

Every evening, after he had gone, came a long, confidential
conversation with Mrs. Follingsbee, in which
every word and look was discussed and turned, and
all possible or probable inferences therefrom reported;
after which Lillie often laid a sleepless head on a hot
and tumbled pillow, poor, miserable child! suffering her
punishment, without even the grace to know whence it
came, or what it meant. Hitherto Lillie had been walking
only in the limits of that kind of permitted wickedness,
which, although certainly the remotest thing
possible from the Christianity of Christ, finds a great
deal of tolerance and patronage among communicants
of the altar. She had lived a gay, vain, self-pleasing
life, with no object or purpose but the simple one to get
each day as much pleasurable enjoyment out of existence
as possible. Mental and physical indolence and
inordinate vanity had been the key-notes of her life.

She hated every thing that required protracted thought,
or that made trouble, and she longed for excitement.
The passion for praise and admiration had become to
her like the passion of the opium-eater for his drug, or
of the brandy-drinker for his dram. But now she was
heedlessly steering to what might prove a more palpable
sin.

Harry the serf, once half despised for his slavish
devotion, now stood before her, proud and free, and
tantalized her by the display he made of his indifference,
and preference for others. She put forth every
art and effort to recapture him. But the most dreadful
stroke of fate of all was, that Rose Ferguson had come
to New York to make a winter visit, and was much
talked of in certain circles where Harry was quite intimate;
and he professed himself, indeed, an ardent
admirer at her shrine.