The Minister's Wooing. Stowe Harriet Beecher
among thriving folks. He was wastefully generous, – insisted on treating every poor dog that came in his way, in any foreign port, as a brother, – absolutely refused to be party in cheating or deceiving the heathen on any shore, or in skin of any colour, – and also took pains, as far as in him lay, to spoil any bargains which any of his subordinates founded on the ignorance or weakness of his fellow-men. So he made voyage after voyage, and gained only his wages and the reputation among his employers of an incorruptibly honest fellow.
To be sure, it was said that he carried out books in his ship, and read and studied, and wrote observations on all the countries he saw, which Parson Smith told Miss Dolly Persimmon would really do credit to a printed book; but then they never were printed, or, as Miss Dolly remarked of them, they never seemed to come to anything – and coming to anything, as she understood it, meant standing in definite relations to bread and butter.
George never cared, however, for money. He made enough to keep his mother comfortable, and that was enough for him, till he fell in love with Katy Stephens. He looked at her through those glasses which such men carry in their souls, and she was a mortal woman no longer, but a transfigured, glorified creature, – an object of awe and wonder. He was actually afraid of her; her glove, her shoe, her needle, thread, and thimble, her bonnet-string, everything, in short, she wore or touched became invested with a mysterious charm. He wondered at the impudence of men that could walk up and talk to her, – that could ask her to dance with such an assured air. Now he wished he were rich; he dreamed impossible chances of his coming home a millionnaire to lay unknown wealth at Katy’s feet; and when Miss Persimmon, the ambulatory dressmaker of the neighbourhood, in making up a new black gown for his mother, recounted how Captain Blatherem had sent Katy Stephens ‘’most the splendidest India shawl that ever she did see,’ he was ready to tear his hair at the thought of his poverty. But even in that hour of temptation he did not repent that he had refused all part and lot in the ship by which Captain Blatherem’s money was made, for he knew every timber of it to be seasoned by the groans and saturated with the sweat of human agony. True love is a natural sacrament; and if ever a young man thanks God for having saved what is noble and manly in his soul, it is when he thinks of offering it to the woman he loves. Nevertheless, the India-shawl story cost him a night’s rest; nor was it till Miss Persimmon had ascertained, by a private confabulation with Katy’s mother, that she had indignantly rejected it, and that she treated the captain ‘real ridiculous,’ that he began to take heart. ‘He ought not,’ he said, ‘to stand in her way now, when he had nothing to offer. No, he would leave Katy free to do better, if she could; he would try his luck, and if, when he came home from the next voyage, Katy was disengaged, why, then he would lay all at her feet.’
And so George was going to sea with a secret shrine in his soul, at which he was to burn unsuspected incense.
But, after all, the mortal maiden whom he adored suspected this private arrangement, and contrived – as women will – to get her own key into the lock of his secret temple; because, as girls say, ‘she was determined to know what was there.’ So, one night, she met him quite accidentally on the sea-sands, struck up a little conversation, and begged him in such a pretty way to bring her a spotted shell from the South Sea, like the one on his mother’s mantelpiece, and looked so simple and childlike in saying it, that our young man very imprudently committed himself by remarking, that, ‘When people had rich friends to bring them all the world from foreign parts, he never dreamed of her wanting so trivial a thing.’
Of course Katy ‘didn’t know what he meant, – she hadn’t heard of any rich friends.’ And then came something about Captain Blatherem; and Katy tossed her head, and said, ‘If anybody wanted to insult her, they might talk to her about Captain Blatherem,’ – and then followed this, that, and the other, till finally, as you might expect, out came all that never was to have been said; and Katy was almost frightened at the terrible earnestness of the spirit she had evoked. She tried to laugh, and ended by crying, and saying she hardly knew what; but when she came to herself in her own room at home, she found on her finger a ring of African gold that George had put there, which she did not send back like Captain Blatherem’s presents.
Katy was like many intensely matter-of-fact and practical women, who have not in themselves a bit of poetry or a particle of ideality, but who yet worship these qualities in others with the homage which the Indians paid to the unknown tongue of the first whites. They are secretly weary of a certain conscious dryness of nature in themselves, and this weariness predisposes them to idolize the man who brings them this unknown gift. Naturalists say that every defect of organization has its compensation, and men of ideal natures find in the favour of women the equivalent for their disabilities among men.
Do you remember, at Niagara, a little cataract on the American side, which throws its silver sheeny veil over a cave called the Grot of Rainbows? Whoever stands on a rock in that grotto sees himself in the centre of a rainbow-circle, above, below, around. In like manner, merry, chatty, positive, busy, housewifely Katy saw herself standing in a rainbow-shrine in her lover’s inner soul, and liked to see herself so. A woman, by-the-by, must be very insensible who is not moved to come upon a higher plane of being, herself, by seeing how undoubtingly she is insphered in the heart of a good and noble man. A good man’s faith in you, fair lady, if you ever have it, will make you better and nobler even before you know it.
Katy made an excellent wife: she took home her husband’s old mother, and nursed her with a dutifulness and energy worthy of all praise, and made her own keen outward faculties and deft handiness a compensation for the defects in worldly estate. Nothing would make Katy’s bright eyes flash quicker than any reflections on her husband’s want of luck in the material line. ‘She didn’t know whose business it was, if she was satisfied. She hated these sharp, gimlet, gouging sort of men that would put a screw between body and soul for money. George had that in him that nobody understood. She would rather be his wife on bread and water than to take Captain Blatherem’s house, carriages, and horses, and all, – and she might have had ’em fast enough, dear knows. She was sick of making money when she saw what sort of men could make it,’ – and so on. All which talk did her infinite credit, because at bottom she did care, and was naturally as proud and ambitious a little minx as ever breathed, and was thoroughly grieved at heart at George’s want of worldly success; but, like a nice little Robin Redbreast, she covered up the grave of her worldliness with the leaves of true love, and sang a ‘Who cares for that?’ above it.
Her thrifty management of the money her husband brought her soon bought a snug little farm, and put up the little brown gambrel-roofed cottage to which we directed your attention in the first of our story. Children were born to them, and George found, in short intervals between voyages, his home an earthly paradise. He was still sailing, with the fond illusion, in every voyage, of making enough to remain at home, – when the yellow fever smote him under the line, and the ship returned to Newport without its captain.
George was a Christian man; – he had been one of the first to attach himself to the unpopular and unworldly ministry of the celebrated Dr. H., and to appreciate the sublime ideality and unselfishness of those teachings which then were awakening new sensations in the theological mind of New England. Katy, too, had become a professor with her husband in the same church, and his death, in the midst of life, deepened the power of her religious impressions. She became absorbed in religion, after the fashion of New England, where devotion is doctrinal, not ritual. As she grew older, her energy of character, her vigour and good judgment, caused her to be regarded as a mother in Israel; the minister boarded at her house, and it was she who was first to be consulted in all matters relating to the well-being of the church. No woman could more manfully breast a long sermon, or bring a more determined faith to the reception of a difficult doctrine. To say the truth, there lay at the bottom of her doctrinal system this stable corner-stone, – ‘Mr. Scudder used to believe it, – I will.’ And after all that is said about independent thought, isn’t the fact that a just and good soul has thus or thus believed, a more respectable argument than many that often are adduced? If it be not, more’s the pity, – since two-thirds of the faith in the world is built on no better foundation.
In time, George’s old mother was gathered to her son, and two sons and a daughter followed their father to the invisible – one only remaining