Marion Harland's Autobiography. Marion Harland
by my proper name—“pretend to tell me that nobody helped you with this sum?”
“Nobody!” I uttered, made bold by innocence.
“Ha-a-a-a!” malevolence triumphant in the drawl waxing into a snarl. “As I happened to see you and your sister last night in the hall, and heard you ask her to show you how to do it, that tale won’t go down, my lady.”
“She didn’t help me—” I began, eagerly.
“Silence!” thumping the slate upon the table, and scowling ferociously. “How dare you lie to me?”
I glanced at Mea in an agony. She arose in her place, pale to the lips, albeit she had never felt his wrath, but her voice was firm:
“I only told her the sum was not right. I did not tell her what part of it was wrong.”
The blending of snarl and smile was something to be recollected for all time. The smile was for her, the snarl for me.
“It is natural that your sister should try to defend you. But will you please tell me, Miss Pert, what more help you could have wanted than to be told by somebody who knew—as your sister did—that your sum was wrong? Of course, you could rub out and begin again. But for her you would not have tried a second time. Bring that sponge here!”
I obeyed.
“Take that slate!”
He made as if he would not contaminate his hand by passing it to me, laying it on the table and pointing a disdainful finger at it.
Again I obeyed.
“Now, Miss Deceitful, wipe every figure off that slate, and never try any such cock-and-bull story upon me again as long as you live! I am too old a bird to be caught with your chaff!”
He laughed aloud in savage glee, dismissed the class with a wave of his hand, and called up the next.
I was turned back to Short Division, with the added stigma of intentional deception and cheating shadowing me.
Nearly fifteen years after our first tutor withdrew his baleful presence from our home, my husband was urging upon my brother Herbert the claims of the ministry of reconciliation as the profession to which the younger man was evidently called by nature and by Providence. Herbert looked up with the frank smile those who knew him will never forget. It was like the clear shining of the sweetest and purest soul ever committed to mortal keeping.
“ ‘Plato! thou reasonest well!’ There is but one argument you have not bowled over. I registered an oath—as bitter as that Hamilcar exacted of Hannibal—when I was a boy, that I would thrash that cur Tayloe within an inch of his life as soon as I should be big enough to do it. And it wouldn’t be quite the thing to flog a brother clergyman. If anything could keep me out of the pulpit, it would be the fact that he is in it. That fellow’s cruelties scarred my memory for life, although I was not seven years old when I knew him.”
In dismissing the disagreeable theme, I offer this bit of testimony to the truth of my story of the reign of terror neither of us ever forgave.
VIII
CALM AFTER STORM—OUR HANDSOME YANKEE GOVERNESS—THE NASCENT AUTHOR
Among the treasured relics of my youth is a steel engraving in a style fashionable sixty years agone.
It appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book, then in the heyday of well-merited popularity. My mother was one of the earliest subscribers. Every number was read aloud in the family circle gathered on cool evenings about my mother’s work-stand. We had no ready-made furniture. This piece was made to order, of solid mahogany, and is, in the seventy-fifth year of a blameless life, in active use in my eldest daughter’s household.
Cousin Mary, living on Erin Hill, in her stepfather’s house, took Graham’s Magazine—Godey’s only rival. She likewise subscribed for the Saturday Evening Courier, and exchanged it regularly with my mother for the Saturday Evening Post—all published in Philadelphia. The New York Mirror, edited by N. P. Willis, George P. Morris, and Theodore S. Fay, was another welcome guest in both families. For Sunday reading we had the New York Observer, The Watchman and Observer, The Presbyterian—religious weeklies that circulated in the neighborhood for a fortnight, and were then filed for future reference. We children had Parley’s Magazine sent to us, as long ago as I can recollect, by our grandmother. After the death of her second husband, the good old deacon, and her removal to Virginia, which events were coeval with the Tayloe dynasty, our father subscribed for Parley’s.
We had all the new books that he adjudged to be worth buying and reading, watching eagerly for anything from Dickens, Marryat, and Cooper, and devouring with avidity not excited by any novel, Stephens’s Travels in Arabia Petrea and in Central America, Bruce’s Travels in Abyssinia, and the no less enchanting tales Mungo Park was telling the world of his adventures in the Dark Continent.
“The chamber” was a big room on the first floor, and adjoined the dining-room—so big that the wide high-poster, curtained and ceiled with gayly figured chintz, in a far corner, left three-fourths of the floor-space unoccupied. My mother’s bureau (another heirloom) looked small beside the bed; a lounge was between the front windows; rocking-chairs stood here and there; thick curtains, matching the bed-hangings, shut out wintry gusts, and a great wood fire leaped and laughed upon the pipe-clayed hearth from the first of November to the middle of March. A blaze of dry sticks was kindled there every morning and evening up to July 4th. The younger children were dressed and undressed there on cool days. Our mother held, in advance of her contemporaries, that an open fire was a germ-killer.
Why do I single out that particular engraving for a place in these reminiscences?
It graced the first page of the November number of Godey’s Lady’s Book. The evening was wild with wind and blustering rain, the fire roaring defiance as the loosely fitting sashes rattled and the showers lashed the panes. There were five of us girls, and each had some bit of handiwork. To sit idle while the reading went on was almost a misdemeanor.
Dorinda Moody, Virginia Lee Patterson, Musidora Owen, Mea, and myself were classmates and cronies. My mother was reader that evening, and as she opened the magazine at the frontispiece, Virginia Patterson and I called out:
“Why, that is a picture of Miss Wilson!”
We all leaned over the stand to look at the engraving, which my mother held up to general view.
“It is like her!” she assented.
The young lady across the table blushed brightly in uttering a laughing disclaimer, and my mother proceeded to explain the extreme improbability of our hypothesis. Then she read the story, which, to the other girls, settled the matter. It was called “Our Keziah,” and began by telling that the title of the portrait was a misnomer. It was no “fancy sketch,” but a likeness of “Our Keziah.”
Silenced but not convinced, I restrained the impulse to tell my mates that stories might be made out of nothing. I knew it, and so did my only confidante, the handsome governess from Massachusetts, who had been installed in our school-room since June.
Mr. Tayloe had gone back to the theological factory to prosecute the studies that were to fit him to proclaim the gospel of love and peace. On the last day of the session he had preached us a short sermon, seated in his chair at the head of the room, twirling the seal dangling from his watch-chain; his legs crossed, the left hand tucked between them; his brows drawn together in the ugly horseshoe we knew well and dreaded much.
He must have descanted darkly upon the transitoriness of earthly joys and the hard road to heaven, for every girl in school was in tears except Mea and myself.
As for