University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.
WEDDING BELLS.

SOME weeks had passed in Springdale while these
affairs had been going on in New York. The
time for the marriage of Grace had been set; and she
had gone to Boston to attend to that preparatory shopping
which even the most sensible of the sex discover
to be indispensable on such occasions.

Grace inclined, in the centre of her soul, to Bostonian
rather than New-York preferences. She had the innocent
impression that a classical severity and a rigid
reticence of taste pervaded even the rebellious department
of feminine millinery in the city of the Pilgrims, —
an idea which we rather think young Boston would
laugh down as an exploded superstition, young Boston's
leading idea at the present hour being apparently to
outdo New York in New York 's imitation of Paris.

In fact, Grace found it very difficult to find a milliner
who, if left to her own devices, would not befeather
and beflower her past all self-recognition, giving to her
that generally betousled and fly-away air which comes
straight from the demi-monde of Paris.

We apprehend that the recent storms of tribulation

which have beat upon those fairy islands of fashion
may scatter this frail and fanciful population, and send
them by shiploads on missions of civilization to our
shores; in which case, the bustle and animation and the
brilliant display on the old turnpike, spoken of familiarly
as the “broad road,” will be somewhat increased.

Grace however managed, by the exercise of a good
individual taste, to come out of these shopping conflicts
in good order, — a handsome, well-dressed, charming
woman, with everybody's best wishes for, and sympathy
in, her happiness.

Lillie was summoned home by urgent messages from
her husband, calling her back to take her share in wedding
festivities.

She left willingly; for the fact is that her last conversation
with her cousin Harry had made the situation
as uncomfortable to her as if he had unceremoniously
deluged her with a pailful of cold water.

There is a chilly, disagreeable kind of article, called
common sense, which is of all things most repulsive
and antipathetical to all petted creatures whose life has
consisted in flattery. It is the kind of talk which sisters
are very apt to hear from brothers, and daughters from
fathers and mothers, when fathers and mothers do their
duty by them; which sets the world before them as it
is, and not as it is painted by flatterers. Those women
who prefer the society of gentlemen, and who have the
faculty of bewitching their senses, never are in the way
of hearing from this cold matter-of-fact region; for them
it really does not exist. Every phrase that meets their

ear is polished and softened, guarded and delicately
turned, till there is not a particle of homely truth left
in it. They pass their time in a world of illusions;
they demand these illusions of all who approach them,
as the sole condition of peace and favor. All gentlemen,
by a sort of instinct, recognize the woman who lives by
flattery, and give her her portion of meat in due season;
and thus some poor women are hopelessly buried, as
suicides used to be in Scotland, under a mountain of
rubbish, to which each passer-by adds one stone. It is
only by some extraordinary power of circumstances
that a man can be found to invade the sovereignty of
a pretty woman with any disagreeable tidings; or, as
Junius says, “to instruct the throne in the language of
truth.” Harry was brought up to this point only by
such a concurrence of circumstances. He was in love
with another woman, — a ready cause for disenchantment.
He was in some sort a family connection; and
he saw Lillie's conduct at last, therefore, through the
plain, unvarnished medium of common sense. Moreover,
he felt a little pinched in his own conscience by
the view which Rose seemed to take of his part in the
matter, and, manlike, was strengthened in doing his
duty by being a little galled and annoyed at the woman
whose charms had tempted him into this dilemma. So
he talked to Lillie like a brother; or, in other words,
made himself disagreeably explicit, — showed her her
sins, and told her her duties as a married woman. The
charming fair ones who sentimentally desire gentlemen
to regard them as sisters do not bargain for any of this
sort of brotherly plainness; and yet they might do it
with great advantage. A brother, who is not a brother,
stationed near the ear of a fair friend, is commonly
very careful not to compromise his position by telling
unpleasant truths; but, on the present occasion, Harry
made a literal use of the brevet of brotherhood which
Lillie had bestowed on him, and talked to her as the
generality of real brothers talk to their sisters, using
great plainness of speech. He withered all her poor
little trumpery array of hothouse flowers of sentiment,
by treating them as so much garbage, as all men know
they are. He set before her the gravity and dignity of
marriage, and her duties to her husband. Last, and
most unkind of all, he professed his admiration of Rose
Ferguson, his unworthiness of her, and his determination
to win her by a nobler and better life; and then
showed himself to be a stupid blunderer by exhorting
Lillie to make Rose her model, and seek to imitate her
virtues.

Poor Lillie! the world looked dismal and dreary
enough to her. She shrunk within herself. Every
thing was withered and disenchanted. All her poor
little stock of romance seemed to her as disgusting as
the withered flowers and crumpled finery and half-melted
ice-cream the morning after a ball.

In this state, when she got a warm, true letter from
John, who always grew tender and affectionate when
she was long away, couched in those terms of admiration
and affection that were soothing to her ear, she
really longed to go back to him. She shrunk from the

dreary plainness of truth, and longed for flattery and
petting and caresses once more; and she wrote to John
an overflowingly tender letter, full of longings, which
brought him at once to her side, the most delighted of
men. When Lillie cried in his arms, and told him
that she found New York perfectly hateful; when she
declaimed on the heartlessness of fashionable life, and
longed to go with him to their quiet home, — she was
tolerably in earnest; and John was perfectly enchanted.

Poor John! Was he a muff, a spoon? We think
not. We understand well that there is not a woman
among our readers who has the slightest patience with
Lillie, and that the most of them are half out of patience
with John for his enduring tenderness towards her.

But men were born and organized by nature to be
the protectors of women; and, generally speaking, the
stronger and more thoroughly manly a man is, the more
he has of what phrenologists call the “pet organ,” — the
disposition which makes him the charmed servant of
what is weak and dependent. John had a great share
of this quality. He was made to be a protector. He
loved to protect; he loved every thing that was helpless
and weak, — young animals, young children, and
delicate women.

He was a romantic adorer of womanhood, as a sort
of divine mystery, — a never-ending poem; and when
his wife was long enough away from him to give scope
for imagination to work, when she no longer annoyed
him with the friction of the sharp little edges of her
cold and selfish nature, he was able to see her once more

in the ideal light of first love. After all, she was his
wife; and in that one word, to a good man, is every
thing holy and sacred. He longed to believe in her and
trust her wholly; and now that Grace was going from
him, to belong to another, Lillie was more than ever his
dependence.

On the whole, if we must admit that John was weak,
he was weak where strong and noble natures may most
gracefully be so, — weak through disinterestedness,
faith, and the disposition to make the best of the wife
he had chosen.

And so Lillie came home; and there was festivity
and rejoicing. Grace found herself floated into matrimony
on a tide bringing gifts and tokens of remembrance
from everybody that had ever known her; for
all were delighted with this opportunity of testifying a
sense of her worth, and every hand was ready to help
ring her wedding bells.