University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.
THE VAN ASTRACHANS.

THE Van Astrachans, a proud, rich old family, who
took a certain defined position in New-York life
on account of some ancestral passages in their family
history, had invited Rose to spend a month or two with
them; and she was therefore moving as a star in a very
high orbit.

Now, these Van Astrachans were one of those cold,
glittering, inaccessible pinnacles in Mrs. Follingsbee's
fashionable Alp-climbing which she would spare no expense
to reach if possible. It was one of the families
for whose sake she had Mrs. John Seymour under her
roof; and the advent of Rose, whom she was pleased
to style one of Mrs. Seymour's most intimate friends,
was an unhoped-for stroke of good luck; because there
was the necessity of calling on Rose, of taking her out
to drive in the park, and of making a party on her
account, from which, of course, the Van Astrachans
could not stay away.

It will be seen here that our friend, Mrs. Follingsbee,
like all ladies whose watch-word is “Excelsior,” had a
peculiar, difficult, and slippery path to climb.

The Van Astrachans were good old Dutch-Reformed
Christians, unquestioning believers in the Bible in
general, and the Ten Commandments in particular, —
persons whose moral constitutions had been nourished
on the great stocky beefsteaks and sirloins of plain old
truths which go to form English and Dutch nature.
Theirs was a style of character which rendered them
utterly hopeless of comprehending the etherealized species
of holiness which obtained in the innermost circles
of the Follingsbee illuminati. Mr. Van Astrachan
buttoned under his coat not only many solid inches of
what Carlyle calls “good Christian fat,” but also a
pocket-book through which millions of dollars were
passing daily in an easy and comfortable flow, to the
great advantage of many of his fellow-creatures no less
than himself; and somehow or other he was pig-headed
in the idea that the Bible and the Ten Commandments
had something to do with that stability of things which
made this necessary flow easy and secure.

He was slow-moulded, accurate, and fond of security;
and was of opinion that nineteen centuries of Christianity
ought to have settled a few questions so that they
could be taken for granted, and were not to be kept
open for discussion.

Moreover, Mr. Van Astrachan having read the
accounts of the first French revolution, and having
remarked all the subsequent history of that country,
was confirmed in his idea, that pitching every thing
into pi once in fifty years was no way to get on in the
affairs of this world.

He had strong suspicions of every thing French, and
a mind very ill adapted to all those delicate reasonings
and shadings and speculations of which Mr. Charlie
Ferrola was particularly fond, which made every thing
in morals and religion an open question.

He and his portly wife planted themselves, like two
canons of the sanctuary, every Sunday, in the tip-top
highest-priced pew of the most orthodox old church in
New York; and if the worthy man sometimes indulged
in gentle slumbers in the high-padded walls of his slip,
it was because he was so well assured of the orthodoxy
of his minister that he felt that no interest of society
would suffer while he was off duty. But may Heaven
grant us, in these days of dissolving views and general
undulation, large armies of these solid-planted artillery
on the walls of our Zion!

Blessed be the people whose strength is to sit still!
Much needed are they when the activity of free inquiry
seems likely to chase us out of house and home, and
leave us, like the dove in the deluge, no rest for the
sole of our foot.

Let us thank God for those Dutch-Reformed churches;
great solid breakwaters, that stand as the dykes in their
ancestral Holland to keep out the muddy waves of
that sea whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

But let us fancy with what quakings and shakings of
heart Mrs. Follingsbee must have sought the alliance
of these tremendously solid old Christians. They were
precisely what she wanted to give an air of solidity to
the cobweb glitter of her state. And we can also see

how necessary it was that she should ostentatiously
visit Charlie Ferrola's wife, and speak of her as a darling
creature, her particular friend, whom she was doing
her very best to keep out of an early grave.

Charlie Ferrola said that the Van Astrachans were
obtuse; and so, to a certain degree, they were. In
social matters they had a kind of confiding simplicity.
They were so much accustomed to regard positive
morals in the light of immutable laws of Nature, that
it would not have been easy to have made them understand
that sliding scale of estimates which is in use
nowadays. They would probably have had but one
word, and that a very disagreeable one, to designate a
married woman who was in love with anybody but her
husband. Consequently, they were the very last people
whom any gossip of this sort could ever reach, or to
whose ears it could have been made intelligible.

Mr. Van Astrachan considered Dick Follingsbee a
swindler, whose proper place was the State's prison, and
whose morals could only be mentioned with those of
Sodom and Gomorrah.

Nevertheless, as Mrs. Follingsbee made it a point of
rolling up her eyes and sighing deeply when his name
was mentioned, — as she attended church on Sunday
with conspicuous faithfulness, and subscribed to charitable
societies and all manner of good works, — as she
had got appointed directress on the board of an orphan
asylum where Mrs. Van Astrachan figured in association
with her, that good lady was led to look upon her with
compassion, as a worthy woman who was making the

best of her way to heaven, notwithstanding the opposition
of a dissolute husband.

As for Rose, she was as fresh and innocent and dewy,
in the hot whirl and glitter and glare of New York, as
a waving spray of sweet-brier, brought in fresh with all
the dew upon it.

She really had for Lillie a great deal of that kind of
artistic admiration which nice young girls sometimes
have for very beautiful women older than themselves;
and was, like almost every one else, somewhat bejuggled
and taken in by that air of infantine sweetness and
simplicity which had survived all the hot glitter of her
life, as if a rose, fresh with dew, should lie unwilted in
the mouth of a furnace.

Moreover, Lillie's face had a beauty this winter it had
never worn: the softness of a real feeling, the pathos of
real suffering, at times touched her face with something
that was always wanting in it before. The bitter waters
of sin that she would drink gave a strange feverish
color to her cheek; and the poisoned perfume she would
inhale gave a strange new brightness to her eyes.

Rose sometimes looked on her and wondered; so
innocent and healthy and light-hearted in herself, she
could not even dream of what was passing. She had
been brought up to love John as a brother, and opened
her heart at once to his wife with a sweet and loyal
faithfulness. When she told Mrs. Van Astrachan that
Mrs. John Seymour was one of her friends from Springdale,
married into a family with which she had grown
up with great intimacy, it seemed the most natural

thing in the world to the good lady that Rose should
want to visit her; that she should drive with her, and
call on her, and receive her at their house; and with
her of course must come Mrs. Follingsbee.

Mr. Van Astrachan made a dead halt at the idea of
Dick Follingsbee. He never would receive that man
under his roof, he said, and he never would enter his
house; and when Mr. Van Astrachan once said a thing
of this kind, as Mr. Hosea Biglow remarks, “a meeting-house
wasn't sotter.”

But then Mrs. Follingsbee's situation was confidentially
stated to Lillie, and by Lillie confidentially stated
to Rose, and by Rose to Mrs. Van Astrachan; and it
was made to appear how Dick Follingsbee had entirely
abandoned his wife, going off in the ways of Balaam
the son of Bosor, and all other bad ways mentioned in
Scripture, habitually leaving poor Mrs. Follingsbee to
entertain company alone, so that he was never seen at
her parties, and had nothing to do with her.

“So much the better for them,” remarked Mr. Van
Astrachan.

“In that case, my dear, I don't see that it would do
any harm for you to go to Mrs. Follingsbee's party on
Rose's account. I never go to parties, as you know;
and I certainly should not begin by going there. But
still I see no objection to your taking Rose.”

If Mr. Van Astrachan had seen objections, you never
would have caught Mrs. Van Astrachan going; for she
was one of your full-blooded women, who never in her
life engaged to do a thing she didn't mean to do: and

having promised in the marriage service to obey her
husband, she obeyed him plumb, with the air of a
person who is fulfilling the prophecies; though her
chances in this way were very small, as Mr. Van Astrachan
generally called her “ma,” and obeyed all her
orders with a stolid precision quite edifying to behold.
He took her advice always, and was often heard naively
to remark that Mrs. Van Astrachan and he were always
of the same opinion, — an expression happily defining
that state in which a man does just what his wife tells
him to.