The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866. Various
fourth generation, and spring then, like a creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors;—so, I have sometimes fancied, the better and truer nature of voluptuaries and tyrants was sifted down through the years, and purified in our little New England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical blood refined and ennobled in my mother into royalty.
A broad and liberal culture had moulded her; she knew its worth, in every fibre of her heart; scholarly parents had blessed her with their legacies of scholarly mind and name. With the soul of an artist, she quivered under every grace and every defect; and the blessing of a beauty as rare as rich had been given to her. With every instinct of her nature recoiling from the very shadow of crimes the world winks at, as from a loathsome reptile, the family record had been stainless for a generation. God had indeed blessed her; but the very blessing was a temptation.
I knew, before she left me, what she might have been, but for the merciful and tender watch of Him who was despised and rejected of men. I know, for she told me, one still night when we were alone together, how she sometimes shuddered at herself, and what those daily and hourly struggles between her nature and her Christianity meant.
I think we were as near to one another as mother and daughter can be; but yet as utterly different. Since I have been talking in such lordly style of those miserable Jameses and Charleses, I will take the opportunity to confess that I have inherited my father's thorough-going democracy,—double measure, pressed down and running over. She not only pardoned it, but I think she loved it in me, for his sake.
It was about a year and a half, I think, after he died, that she sent for Aunt Alice to come to Creston. "Your aunt loves me," she said, when she told us in her quiet way, "and I am so lonely now."
They had been the only children, and they loved each other,—how much, I afterwards knew. And how much they love each other now, I like to think,—quite freely and fully, and without shadow or doubt between them, I dare to hope.
A picture of Aunt Alice always hung in mother's room. It was taken down years ago. I never asked her where she put it. I remember it, though, quite well; for mother's sake I am glad I do. For it was a pleasant face to look upon, and a young, pure, happy face,—beautiful too, though with none of the regal beauty crowned by my mother's massive hair, and pencilled brows. It was a timid, girlish face, with reverent eyes, and ripe, tremulous lips,—weak lips, as I remember them. From babyhood, I felt a want in the face. I had, of course, no capacity to define it; it was represented to me only by the fact that it differed from my mother's.
She was teaching school out West when mother sent for her. I saw the letter. It was just like my mother:—"Alice, I need you. You and I ought to have but one home now. Will you come?"
I saw, too, a bit of a postscript to the answer,—"I'm not fit that you should love me so, Marie."
And how mother laughed at it!
When it was all settled, and the waiting weeks became at last a single day, I hardly knew my mother. She was in her early married years; she was a girl; she was a child; she was every young thing, and merry thing, that she could have ever been. So full of fitful moods, and little fantastic jokes! such a flush on her cheeks too, as she ran to the window every five minutes, like a child! I remember how we went all over the house together, she and I, to see that everything looked neat, and bright, and welcome. And how we lingered in the guest-room, to put the little finishing touches to its stillness, and coolness, and coseyness. The best spread on the bed, and the white folds smoothed as only mother's fingers could smooth them; the curtain freshly washed, and looped with its crimson cord; the blinds drawn, cool and green; the late afternoon sunlight slanting through, in flecks upon the floor. Flowers, too, upon the table. I remember they were all white,—lilies of the valley, I think; and the vase of Parian marble, itself a solitary lily, unfolding stainless leaves. Over the mantle she had hung the finest picture in the house,—an "Ecce Homo," and an exquisite engraving. It used to hang in grandmother's room in the old house. We children wondered a little that she took it up stairs.
"I want your aunt to feel at home, and see home things," she said. "I wish I could think of something more to make it pleasant in here."
Just as we left the room she turned and looked into it. "Pleasant, isn't it? I am so glad, Sarah," her eyes dimming a little. "She's a very dear sister to me."
She stepped in again to raise a stem of the lilies that had fallen from the vase, and lay like wax upon the table, then she shut the door and came away.
That door was shut just so for years; the lonely bars of sunlight flecked the solitude of the room, and the lilies faded on the table. We children passed it with hushed footfall, and shrank from it at twilight, as from a room that held the dead. But into it we never went.
Mother was tired out that afternoon; for she had been on her feet all day, busied in her loving cares to make our simple home as pleasant and as welcome as home could be. But yet she stopped to dress us in our Sunday clothes,—and no sinecure was it to dress three persistently undressable children; Winthrop was a host in himself. "Auntie must see us look our prettiest," she said.
She was a picture herself when she came down. She had taken off her widow's cap and coiled her heavy hair low in her neck, and she always looked like a queen in that lustreless black silk. I do not know why these little things should have made such an impression on me then. They are priceless to me now. I remember how she looked, framed there in the doorway, while we were watching for the coach,—the late light ebbing in golden tides over the grass at her feet, and touching her face now and then through the branches of trees, her head bent a little, with eager, parted lips, and the girlish color on her cheeks, her hand shading her eyes as they strained for a sight of the lumbering coach. She must have been a magnificent woman when she was young,—not unlike, I have heard it said, to that far-off ancestress whose name she bore, and whose sorrowful story has made her sorrowful beauty immortal. Somewhere abroad there is a reclining statue of Queen Mary, to which, when my mother stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong that the by-standers clustered about her, whispering curiously. "Ah, mon Dieu!" said a little Frenchman, aloud, "c'est une résurrection."
We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and Winthrop and I; for the spirit of her own excitement had made us completely wild. Winthrop's scream of delight when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught the first sight of the old yellow coach, might have been heard a quarter of a mile.
"Coming?" said mother, nervously, and stepped out to the gate, full in the sunlight that crowned her like royal gold.
The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.
"Why, she hasn't come!" All the eager color died out of her face. "I am so disappointed!" speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly into the house.
Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,—I was the oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us, instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my years were. "Sarah, I don't understand. You think she might have lost the train? But Alice is so punctual, Alice never lost a train. And she said she would come." And then, a while after, "I don't understand."
It was not like my mother to worry. The next day the coach lumbered up and rattled past, and did not stop,—and the next, and the next.
"We shall have a letter," mother said, her eyes saddening every afternoon. But we had no letter. And another day went by, and another.
"She is sick," we said; and mother wrote to her, and watched for the lumbering coach, and grew silent day by day. But to the letter there was no answer.
Ten days passed. Mother came to me one afternoon to ask for her pen, which I had borrowed. Something in her face troubled me vaguely.
"What are you going to do, mother?"
"Write to your aunt's boarding-place. I can't bear this any longer," sharply. She had already grown unlike herself.
She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of mail.
It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked for it. I remember everything that happened that day. I came home early from school. Mother was sewing at the parlor window, her eyes wandering from her work, up the road. It was an ugly day.