The Minister's Wooing. Stowe Harriet Beecher
at the beginning of this chapter, we have filled it with descriptions and meditations, – and now we foresee that the next chapter will be equally far from the point. But have patience with us; for we can write only as we are driven, and never know exactly where we are going to land.
CHAPTER III
A quiet, maiden-like place was Mary’s little room. The window looked out under the overarching boughs of a thick apple orchard, now all in a blush with blossoms and pink-tipped buds, and the light came golden-green, strained through flickering leaves, – and an ever-gentle rustle and whirr of branches and blossoms, a chitter of birds, and an indefinite whispering motion, as the long heads of orchard-grass nodded and bowed to each other under the trees, seemed to give the room the quiet hush of some little side chapel in a cathedral, where green and golden glass softens the sunlight, and only the sigh and rustle of kneeling worshippers break the stillness of the aisles. It was small enough for a nun’s apartment, and dainty in its neatness as the waxen cell of a bee. The bed and low window were draped in spotless white, with fringes of Mary’s own knotting. A small table under the looking-glass bore the library of a well-taught young woman of those times. The ‘Spectator,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ Shakspeare, and ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ stood for the admitted secular literature, and beside them the Bible and the works then published of Mr. Jonathan Edwards. Laid a little to one side, as if of doubtful reputation, was the only novel which the stricter people in those days allowed for the reading of their daughters: that seven-volumed, trailing, tedious, delightful old bore, ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ – a book whose influence in those times was so universal, that it may be traced in the epistolary style even of the gravest divines. Our little heroine was mortal, with all her divinity, and had an imagination which sometimes wandered to the things of earth; and this glorious hero in lace and embroidery, who blended rank, gallantry, spirit, knowledge of the world, disinterestedness, constancy, and piety, sometimes walked before her, while she sat spinning at her wheel, till she sighed, she hardly knew why, that no such men walked the earth now. Yet it is to be confessed, this occasional raid of the romantic into Mary’s balanced and well-ordered mind was soon energetically put to rout, and the book, as we have said, remained on her table under protest, – protected by being her father’s gift to her mother during their days of courtship. The small looking-glass was curiously wreathed with corals and foreign shells, so disposed as to indicate an artistic eye and skilful hand; and some curious Chinese paintings of birds and flowers gave rather a piquant and foreign air to the otherwise homely neatness of the apartment.
Here in this little retreat, Mary spent those few hours which her exacting conscience would allow her to spare from her busy-fingered household-life; here she read and wrote and thought and prayed; – and here she stands now, arraying herself for the tea company that afternoon. Dress, which in our day is becoming in some cases the whole of woman, was in those times a remarkably simple affair. True, every person of a certain degree of respectability had state and festival robes; and a certain camphor-wood brass-bound trunk, which was always kept solemnly locked in Mrs. Katy Scudder’s apartment, if it could have spoken, might have given off quite a catalogue of brocade satin and laces. The wedding-suit there slumbered in all the unsullied whiteness of its stiff ground broidered with heavy knots of flowers; and there were scarfs of wrought India muslin and embroidered crape, each of which had its history, – for each had been brought into the door with beating heart on some return voyage of one who, alas! should return no more. The old trunk stood with its histories, its imprisoned remembrances, – and a thousand tender thoughts seemed to be shaping out of every rustling fold of silk and embroidery, on the few yearly occasions when all were brought out to be aired, their history related, and then solemnly locked up again. Nevertheless, the possession of these things gave to the women of an establishment a certain innate dignity, like a good conscience, so that in that larger portion of existence commonly denominated among them ‘every day,’ they were content with plain stuff and homespun. Mary’s toilet, therefore, was sooner made than those of Newport belles of the present day; it simply consisted in changing her ordinary ‘short-gown and petticoat’ for another of somewhat nicer materials, a skirt of India chintz and a striped jaconet short-gown. Her hair was of the kind which always lies like satin; but, nevertheless, girls never think their toilet complete unless the smoothest hair has been shaken down and rearranged. A few moments, however, served to braid its shining folds and dispose them in their simple knot on the back of the head; and having given a final stroke to each side with her little dimpled hands, she sat down a moment at the window, thoughtfully watching where the afternoon sun was creeping through the slates of the fence in long lines of gold among the tall, tremulous orchard-grass, and unconsciously she began warbling, in a low, gurgling voice, the words of a familiar hymn, whose grave earnestness accorded well with the general tone of her life and education: —
‘Life is the time to serve the Lord,
The time t’ insure the great reward.’
There was a swish and rustle in the orchard-grass, and a tramp of elastic steps; then the branches were brushed aside, and a young man suddenly emerged from the trees a little behind Mary. He was apparently about twenty-five, dressed in the holiday rig of a sailor on shore, which well set off his fine athletic figure, and accorded with a sort of easy, dashing, and confident air which sat not unhandsomely on him. For the rest, a high forehead shaded by rings of the blackest hair, a keen, dark eye, a firm and determined mouth, gave the impression of one who had engaged to do battle with life, not only with a will, but with shrewdness and ability.
He introduced the colloquy by stepping deliberately behind Mary, putting his arms round her neck, and kissing her.
‘Why, James!’ said Mary, starting up and blushing, ‘Come, now!’
‘I have come, haven’t I?’ said the young man, leaning his elbow on the window-seat and looking at her with an air of comic determined frankness, which yet had in it such wholesome honesty that it was scarcely possible to be angry. ‘The fact is, Mary,’ he added, with a sudden earnest darkening of the face, ‘I won’t stand this nonsense any longer. Aunt Katy has been holding me at arm’s length ever since I got home; and what have I done? Haven’t I been to every prayer-meeting and lecture and sermon, since I got into port, just as regular as a psalm-book? and not a bit of a word could I get with you, and no chance even so much as to give you my arm. Aunt Katy always comes between us and says, “Here, Mary, you take my arm.” What does she think I go to meeting for, and almost break my jaws keeping down the gapes? I never even go to sleep, and yet I am treated in this way! It’s too bad! What’s the row? What’s anybody been saying about me? I always have waited on you ever since you were that high. Didn’t I always draw you to school on my sled? didn’t we always use to do our sums together? didn’t I always wait on you to singing school? and I’ve been made free to run in and out as if I were your brother; – and now she is as glum and stiff, and always stays in the room every minute of the time that I am there, as if she was afraid I should be in some mischief. It’s too bad!’
‘Oh, James, I am sorry that you only go to meeting for the sake of seeing me; you feel no real interest in religious things; and besides, mother thinks now I am grown so old that – Why, you know, things are different now, – at least, we mustn’t, you know, always do as we did when we were children. But I wish you did feel more interested in good things.’
‘I am interested in one or two good things, Mary, – principally in you, who are the best I know of. Besides,’ he said quickly, and scanning her face attentively to see the effect of his words, ‘don’t you think there is more merit in my sitting out all these meetings, when they bore me so confoundedly, than there is in your and Aunt Katy’s doing it, who really seem to find something to like in them? I believe you have a sixth sense, quite unknown to me, for it’s all a maze, – I can’t find top, nor bottom, nor side, nor up, nor down to it, – it’s you can and you can’t, you shall and you shan’t, you will and you won’t, – ’
‘James!’
‘You needn’t look at me so. I’m not going to say the rest of it. But, seriously, it’s all anywhere and nowhere to me; it don’t touch me, it don’t help me, and I think it rather makes me worse; and then they tell me it’s because I’m a natural man, and the natural man understandeth