Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863
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The days slipped into weeks, and they were busy, one and all, ordering
Effie's wardrobe; for, however much I took the lead, she was the elder
and was to be brought out. My mother never meant to bring _me_ out, I
think,--she could not endure the making of parade, and the hearing
the Thomsons and Lindsays laugh at it all, when 't was but for such a
flecked face,--she meant I should slip into life as I could. We had had
the seamstresses, and when they were gone sometimes Mrs. Strathsay came
and sat among us with her work;--she never pricked finger with fell
or hem, but the heaviest task she took was the weaving of the white
leaf-wreaths in and out the lace-web before her there,--and as we
stitched, we talked, and she lent a word how best an old breadth could
be turned, another gown refitted,--for we had to consider such things,
with all our outside show of establishment.
Margray came running through the garden that afternoon, and up where we
sat, and over her arm was fluttering no end of gay skirts and ribbons.
"I saved this pink muslin--it's real Indian, lascar lawn, fine as
cobweb--for you, Alice," she said. "It's not right to leave it to the
moths,--but you'll never need it now. It shall be Effie's, and she'll
look like a rose-bud in it,--with her yellow locks floating."
"Yes," said I.
"You'll not be wanting such bright things now, child; you'll best wear
grays, and white, and black."
"Indeed, then, I sha'n't," I said. "If I'm no longer lovely myself, I'll
be decked out in braw clothes, that I may please the eye one way or
another."
"No use, child," sighed my mother 'twixt her teeth, and not meaning for
me to hear.
"So would I, Ailie," said Mary Strathsay, quickly. "There's much in fine
fibres and soft shades that gives one the womanly idea. You're the best
shape among us all, my light lissomeness, and your gowns shall fit it
rarely. Nay, Margray, let Alice have the pink."
"Be still, Mary Strathsay!" said my mother. "Alice will wear white this
summer; 'tis most suitable. She has white slips and to spare."
"But in the winter?" urged the other. "'Twill be sad for the child, and
we all so bright. There's my pearl silk,--I'm fairly tired of it,--and
with a cherry waist-piece"----
"You lose breath," said my mother, coldly and half vexed.
So Mary Strathsay bit her lip and kept the peace.
"Whisht now, child, your turn will come," said Margray, unfolding a
little bodice of purple velvet, with its droop of snowy Mechlin. "One
must cut the coat according to the cloth. That's for Effie,--gayly my
heart's beat under you," laying it down and patting it on one side,
lovingly. "There, if white's the order of the day, white let it be,--and
let Mrs. Strathsay say her most, she cannot make other color of this,
and she shall not say me nay. That's for Alice." And she flung all the
silvery silk and blonde lace about me.
"Child, you'll sparkle!" whispered Mary Strathsay in my ear, hastening
to get the glittering apparel aside, lest my mother should gainsay us.
But Mrs. Strathsay did not throw us a glance.
"You're ill-pleased, Effie," said Margray; for our little beauty,
finding herself so suddenly the pet, had learned to toss her head in
pretty saucy ways.
"Not a speck!" Effie answered up. "'Twas high time,--I was thinking."
Margray laughed, and took her chin 'twixt thumb and finger, and tried
to look under the wilful lids that drooped above the blue light in her
eyes.
"You're aye a faithful pet, and I like you clannish. Stand by them that
stands by you, my poor man used to say. You shall put on as fine a gown,
and finer, of my providing, the day you're wedded."
"I'll gie ye veil o' siller lace,
And troth ye wi' a ring;
Sae bid the blushes to your face,
My ain wee thing!"
sang Mary.
"I want none of your silver lace," said Effie, laughing lightly, and we
little dreamed of the girl's thought. "I'll have that web my mother has
wrought with myrtle-leaf and blossom."
"And 'twas begun for me," said Mary, arching her brows, and before she
thought.
"You,--graceless girl!" said my mother. "It's no bridal veil will ever
cross your curls!"
"Surely, mother, we've said too much,--you'll overlook old scores."
"'T is hard forgetting, when a perverse child puts the hand to her own
hurt."
"No hurt to me. You would not have had me take a man at his word when he
recked not what he said."
"Tsh! Tsh! Charles Seavern would have married you. And with the two
brothers gone, he's an earl now,--and you flung him off. Tsh!"
"I never saw the time, mother, solemnly as I've told you, when his right
hand knew what his left hand did,--what with his champagne-suppers, your
Burgundy, and Johnny Graeme's Jamaica. He'd have been sorely shocked
to wake up sober in his earldom some fine morning and find a countess
beside him ready-made to his hand."
"You spared him!" said my mother. And in a minute she added, softwise,
"Ay, were that all!"
"Ah," said Mary, "but I'll take the next one that asks me, if it's only
to save myself the taunts at home! You thought you were winning to a
soft nest, children, where there were nought but larks and thrushes and
maybe nightingales,--and we're all cuckoos.
"'Cuckoo! cuckoo! sweet voice of Spring,
Without you sad the year had been,
The vocal heavens your welcome ring,
The hedge-rows ope and take you in,
Cuckoo! cuckoo!
"'Cuckoo! cuckoo! O viewless sprite,
Your song enchants the sighing South,
It wooes the wild-flower to the light,
And curls the smile round my love's mouth,
Cuckoo! cuckoo!'"
"Have done your claver, Mary!" cried Margray. "One cannot hear herself
think, for the din of your twittering!--I'll cut the sleeve over
crosswise, I think,"--and, heedless, she herself commenced humming, in
an undertone, '"Cuckoo! cuckoo!'--There! you've driven mother out!"
Mary laughed.
"When I'm married, Ailie," she whispered, "I'll sing from morn till
night, and you shall sit and hear me, without Margray's glowering at us,
or my mother so much as saying, 'Why do you so?'"
For all the time the song had been purling from her smiling lips, Mrs.
Strathsay's eyes were laid, a weight like lead, on me, and then she had
risen as if it hurt her, and walked to the door.
"Or when you've a house of your own," added Mary, "we will sing together
there."
"Oh, Mary!" said I, like the child I was, forgetting the rest, "when I'm
married, you will come and live with me?"
"You!" said my mother, stepping through the door and throwing the words
over her shoulder as she went, not exactly for my ears, but as if the
bubbling in her heart must have some vent. "And who is it would take
such a fright?"
"My mother's fair daft," said Margray, looking after her with a
perplexed gaze, and dropping her scissors. "Surely, Mary, you shouldn't
tease her as you do. She's worn more in these four weeks than in as many
years. You're a fickle changeling!"
But Mary rose and sped after my mother, with her tripping foot; and in a
minute she came back laughing and breathless.
"You put my heart in my mouth, Mistress Graeme," she said. "And all for
nothing. My mother's just ordering the cream to be whipped. Well, little
one, what now?"
"It's just this dress of Margray's,--mother's right,--'t will never do
for me; I'll wear shadows. But 't will not need the altering of a hair
for you, Mary, and you shall take it."
"I think I see myself," said Mary Strathsay, "wearing the dress Margray
married Graeme in!" For Margray had gone out to my mother in her turn.
"Then it's yours, Effie. I'll none of it!"
"I'm finely fitted out, then, with the robe here and the veil there!
bridal or burial, toss up a copper and which shall it be?" said Effie,
looking upward, and playing with her spools like a juggler's oranges.
And here Margray came back.
She sat in silence a minute or two, turning her work this way and that,
and then burst forth,--
"I'd not stand in your shoes for much, Alice Strathsay!" she cried,
"that's certain. My mother's in a rare passion, and here's Sir Angus
home!"
"Sir Who?" said Effie puzzled; "it was just Mr. Ingestre two years ago."
"Well, it's been Sir Angus a twelvemonth now and more,--ever since old
Sir Brenton went, and he went with a stroke."
"Yes," said Mary, "it was when Angus arrived in London from Edinboro',
the day before joining his ship."
"And why didn't we ever hear of it?"
"I don't just remember, Effie dear," replied Margray, meditatively,
"unless 't were--it must have been--that those were the letters lost
when the Atlantis went down."
"Poor gentleman!" said Mary. "It was one night when there was a division
in the House, and it divided his soul from his body,--for they found him
sitting mute as marble, and looking at their follies and strifes with
eyes whose vision reached over and saw God."
"For shame, Mary Strathsay, to speak lightly of what gave Angus such
grief!"
"Is that lightly?" she said, smoothing my hair with her pretty pink
palms till it caught in the ring she wore. "Never mind what _I_ say,
girlie; it's as like to be one word as the other. But I grieved for him.
He's deep and quiet; a sorrow sinks and underlies all that's over, in
the lad."
"Hear her!" said Margray; "one would fancy the six feet of the Ingestre
stature were but a pocket-piece! The lad! Well, he'll put no pieces in
our pockets, I doubt," (Margray had ever an eye to the main chance,)
"and it's that angers my mother."
"Hush, Margray!" I heard Mary say, for I had risen and stolen forth.
"Thou'lt make the child hate us all. Were we savages, we had said less.
You know, girl, that our mother loved our father's face in her, and
counted the days ere seeing it once more; and having lost it, she
is like one bewildered. 'T will all come right. Let the poor body
alone,--and do not hurt the child's heart so. We're right careless."
I had hung on tiptoe, accounting it no meanness, and I saw Margray
stare.
"Well," she murmured, "something may be done yet. 'T will go hard, if by
hook or crook Mrs. Strathsay do not have that title stick among us"; and
then, to make an end of words, she began chattering anent biases
and gores, the lace on Mary Campbell's frill, the feather on Mary
Dalhousie's bonnet,--and I left them.
I ran over to Margray's, and finding the boy awake, I dismissed his
nurses the place, and stayed and played with him and took the charge
till long past the dinner-hour, and Margray came home at length, and
then, when I had sung the child asleep again, for the night, and Margray
had shown me all the contents of her presses, the bells were ringing
nine from across the river, and I ran back as I came, and up and into my
little bed, and my heart was fit to break, and I cried till the sound of
the sobs checked me into silence. Suddenly I felt a hand fumbling down
the coverlid, and 't was Nannie, my old nurse, and her arm was laid
heavily across me.
"Dinna greet," she whispered, "dinna greet and dull your een that are
brighter noo than a' the jauds can show,--the bonny blink o' them! They
sha' na flout and fleer, the feckless queans, the hissies wha'll threep
to stan' i' your auld shoon ae day! Dinna greet, lass, dinna!"
But I rose on my arm, and stared about me in all the white moonlight of
the vacant place, and hearkened to the voices and laughter rippling up
the great staircase,--for there were gallants in belike,--and made as if
I had been crying out in my sleep.
"Oh, Nurse Nannie, is it you?" I said.
"Ay, me, Miss Ailie darling!"
"Sure I dream so deeply. I'm all as oppressed with nightmare."
But with that she brushed my hair, and tenderly bathed my face in the
bay-water, and fastened on my cap, and, sighing, tucked the coverlid
round my shoulder, and away down without a word.
The next day was my mother's dinner-party. She was in a quandary about
me, I saw, and to save words I offered to go over again and stay with
the little Graeme. So it came to pass, one time being precedent of
another, that in all the merrymakings I had small share, and spent the
greater part of those bright days in Margray's nursery with, the boy, or
out-doors in the lone hay-fields or among the shrubberies; for he
waxed large and glad, and clung to me as my own. And to all kind Mary
Strathsay's pleas and words I but begged off as favors done to me, and I
was liker to grow sullen than smiling with all the stour.
"Why, I wonder, do the servants of a house know so much better than the
house itself the nearest concerns of shadowy futures? One night the
nurse paused above my bed and guarded the light with her hand.
"Let your heart lap," she said. "Sir Angus rides this way the morrow."
Ah, what was that to me? I just doubled the pillow over eyes and ears to
shut out sight and hearing. And so on the morrow I kept well out of the
way, till all at once Mrs. Strathsay stumbled over me and bade me, as
there would be dancing in the evening, to don my ruffled frock and be
ready to play the measures. I mind me how, when I stood before the glass
and secured the knot in my sash, and saw by the faint light my loosened
hair falling in a shadow round me and the quillings of the jaconet, that
I thought to myself how it was like a white moss-rose, till of a sudden
Nannie held the candle higher and let my face on me,--and I bade her
bind up my hair again in the close plaits best befitting me. And I crept
down and sat in the shade of the window-curtains, whiles looking out at
the soft moony night, whiles in at the flowery lighted room. I'd heard
Angus's coming, early in the afternoon, and had heard him, too, or e'er
half the cordial compliments were said, demand little Alice; and
they told him I was over and away at Margray's, and in a thought the
hall-doors clashed behind him and his heels were ringing up the street,
and directly he hastened home again, through the gardens this time, and
saw no sign of me;--but now my heart beat so thickly, when I thought of
him passing me in the dance, that, could I sit there still, I feared
'twould of itself betray me, and that warned me to question if the hour
were not ready for the dances, and I rose and stole to the piano and
sat awaiting my mother's word. But scarcely was I there when one came
quietly behind me, and a head bent and almost swept my shoulder; then he
stood with folded arms.
"And how long shall I wait for your greeting? Have you no welcome for
me, Ailie?"
"Yes, indeed, Sir Angus," I replied; but I did not turn my head, for as
yet he saw only the back of me, fair and graceful perchance, as when he
liked it.
He checked himself in some word.
"Well, then," he said, "give it me, tell it me, look it me!"
I rose from my seat and shifted the piece of music before me,--turned
and gazed into his eyes one long breathing-space, then I let the lids
fall,--waited a minute so,--and turned back ere my lip should be all in
a quiver,--but not till his head bent once more, and a kiss had fallen
on those lids and lain there cool and soft as a pearl,--a pearl that
seemed to sink and penetrate and melt inwardly and dissolve and fill my
brain with a white blinding light of joy. 'Twas but a brief bit of the
great eternities;--and then I found my fingers playing I knew not how,
and heard the dancers' feet falling to the tune of I knew not what.
While I played there, Margray sat beside me, for the merriment was
without now, on the polished oak-floor of the hall, and they being few
but familiars who had the freedom of the house, (and among whom I had
had no need but to slip with a nod and smile ere gaining my seat,) she
took out her needle and set a stitch or two, more, perhaps, to cover
her being there at all than for any need of industry; for Margray loved
company, and her year of widowhood being not yet doubled, and my mother
unwilling that she should entertain or go out, she made the most of that
at our house; for Mrs. Strathsay had due regard of decency,--forbye she
deemed it but a bad lookout for her girls, if the one of them danced on
her good-man's grave.
"I doubt will Sir Angus bide here," said Margray at length; for though
all his boyhood she had called him by every diminutive his name could
bear, the title was a sweet morsel in her unaccustomed mouth, and she
kept rolling it now under her tongue. "Mrs. Strathsay besought him,
but his traps and his man were at the inn. Sir Angus is not the lad he
was,--a young man wants his freedom, my mother should remember."
And as her murmur continued, my thoughts came about me. They were like
birds in the hall; and all their voices and laughter rising above the
jingle of the keys, I doubted was he so sorry for me, after all. Then
the dancing broke, I found, though I still played on, and it was some
frolicsome game of forfeits, and Angus was chasing Effie, and with
her light step and her flying laugh it was like the wind following a
rose-flake. Anon he ceased, and stood silent and statelier than Mrs.
Strathsay's self, looking on.
"See Sir Angus now," said Margray, bending forward at the pictures
shifting through the door-way. "He'd do for the Colossus at
what-you-may-call-it; and there's our Effie, she minds me of a
yellow-bird, hanging on his arm and talking: I wonder if that's what my
mother means,--I wonder will my mother compass it. See Mary Strathsay
there! She's white and fine, I'll warrant; see her move like a swan on
the waters! Ay, she's a lovesome lass,--and Helmar thought so, too."
"What are you saying of Mary Strathsay? Who _don't_ think she's a
lovesome lass?"
"Helmar don't _now_,--I'll dare be sworn."
"Helmar?"
"Hush, now! don't get that maggot agait again. My mother'd ban us both,
should her ears side this way."
"What is it you mean, Margray dear?"
"Sure you've heard of Helmar, child?"
Yes, indeed, had I. The descendant of a bold Spanish buccaneer who came
northwardly with his godless spoil, when all his raids upon West-Indian
seas were done, and whose name had perhaps suffered a corruption at our
Provincial lips. A man--this Helmar of to-day--about whom more strange
tales were told than of the bloody buccaneer himself. That the walls of
his house were ceiled with jewels, shedding their accumulated lustre of
years so that never candle need shine in the place, was well known. That
the spellbound souls of all those on his red-handed ancestor's roll were
fain to keep watch and ward over their once treasures, by night and
noon, white-sheeted and faint in the glare of the sun, wan in the moon,
blacker shadows in the starless dark, found belief. And there were those
who had seen his seraglio;--but few, indeed, had seen him,--a lonely
man, in fact, who lived aloof and apart, shunned and shunning, tainted
by the curse of his birth.
"Oh, yes," I said, "of Helmar away down the bay; but the mate of our
brig was named Helmar, too."
Margray's ivory stiletto punched a red eyelet in her finger.
"Oh, belike it was the same!" she cried, so loud that I had half to
drown it in the pedal. "He's taken to following the sea, they say."
"What had Helmar to do with our Mary, Margray?"
"What had he to do with her?" answered Margray in under-voice. "He fell
in love with her!"
"That's not so strange."
"Then I'll tell you what's stranger, and open your eyes a wee. She fell
in love with him."
"Our Mary? Then why didn't she marry him?"
"Marry Helmar?"
"Yes. If my mother wants gold, there it is for her."
"He's the child of pirates; there's blood on his gold; he poured it
out before my mother, and she told him so. He's the making of a pirate
himself. Oh, you've never heard, I see. Well, since I'm in for it,--but
you'll never breathe it?--and it's not worth while darkening Effie
with it, let alone she's so giddy my mother'd know I'd been giving it
mouth,--perhaps I oughtn't,--but there!--poor Mary! He used to hang
about the place, having seen her once when she came round from Windsor
in a schooner, and it was a storm,--may-happen he saved her life in it.
And Mary after, Mary'd meet him at church, and in the garden, and on the
river; 't was by pure chance on her part, and he was forever in the way.
Then my mother, innocent of it all, went to Edinboro', as you know, and
I was married and out of the reach, and Mary kept the house those two
months with Mrs. March of the Hill for dowager,--her husband was in
the States that summer,--and Mrs. March is no more nor less than
cracked,--and no wonder he should make bold to visit the house. My
mother'd been home but a day and night, 's you may say, when in walks my
gentleman,--who but he?--fine as a noble of the Court, and Mary presents
him to Mrs. Strathsay as Mr. Helmar of the Bay. Oh, but Mrs. Strathsay
was in a stound. And he began by requesting her daughter's hand. And
that brake the bonds,--and she dashed out sconners of wrath. Helmar's
eyes flashed only once, then he kept them on the ground, and he heard
her through. 'T was the second summer Seavern's fleet was at
the harbor's mouth there, and a ship of war lay anchored a mile
downriver,--many's the dance we had on it's deck!--and Captain Seavern
of late was in the house night and morn,--for when he found Mary offish,
he fairly lay siege to her, and my mother behind him,--and there was
Helmar sleeping out the nights in his dew-drenched boat at the garden's
foot, or lying wakeful and rising and falling with the tide under her
window, and my mother forever hearing the boat-chains clank and stir.
She's had the staple wrenched out of the wall now,--'t was just below
the big bower-window, you remember. And when Mary utterly refused
Seavern, Seavern swore he'd wheel his ship round and raze the house to
its foundations: he was--drunk--you see. And Mary laughed in his face.
And my mother beset her,--I think she went on her knees to her,--she led
her a dreadful life," said Margray, shivering; "and the end of it all
was, that Mary promised to give up Helmar, would my mother drop the suit
of Seavern. And at that, Helmar burst in: he was like one wild, and he
conjured Mary,--but she sat there stone-still, looking through him with
the eyes in her white, deadly face, as though she'd never seen him, and
answering no word, as if she were deaf to sound of his voice henceforth;
and he rose and glared down on my mother, who stood there with her white
throat up, proud and defiant as a stag at bay,--and he vowed he'd darken
her day, for she had taken the light out of his life. And Angus was by:
he'd sided with Helmar till then; but at the threat, he took the other
by the shoulder and led him to the door, with a blue blaze in those
Ingestre eyes, and Helmar never resisted, but fell down on his face on
the stones and shuddered with sobs, and we heard them into the night,
but with morning he was gone."
"Oh! And Mary?"
"'Deed, I don't think she cares. She's never mentioned his name. D'you
mind that ring of rubies she wears, like drops of blood all round the
hoop? 'Twas his. She shifted it to the left hand, I saw. It was broken
once,--and what do you think she did? She put a blow-pipe at the
candle-flame, and, holding it up in tiny pincers, soldered the two ends
together without taking it off her finger,--and it burning into the
bone! Strathsay grit. It's on her white wedding-finger. The scar's
there, too.--St! Where's your music? You've not played a note these five
minutes. Whisht! here comes my mother!"
How was Helmar to darken my mother's day, I couldn't but think, as I
began to toss off the tune again. And poor Mary,--there were more scars
than I carried, in the house. But while I turned the thoughts over,
Angus came for me to dance, and Margray, he said, should play, and my
mother signed consent, and so I went.
But 'twas a heavy heart I carried to and fro, as I remembered what I'd
heard, and perhaps it colored everything else with gloom. Why was Angus
holding my hand as we glided? why was I by his side as we stood? and as
he spoke, why was I so dazzled with delight at the sound that I could
not gather the sense? Oh, why, but that I loved him, and that his noble
compassion would make him the same to me at first as ever,--slowly,
slowly, slowly lowering, while he turned to Effie or some other
fair-faced lass? Ah, it seemed to me then in a rebellious heart that my
lot was bitter. And fearful that my sorrow would abroad, I broke into a
desperation of gayety till my mother's hand was on my arm. But all the
while, Angus had been by, perplexed shadows creeping over his brow;--and
in fresh terror lest my hidden woe should rise and look him in the
face, all my mother's pride itself shivered through me, and I turned my
shoulder on him with a haughty, pettish chill.
So after that first evening the days and nights went by, went by on
leaden wings; for I wanted the thing over, it seemed I couldn't wait,
I desired my destiny to be accomplished and done with. Angus was ever
there when occasion granted,--for there were drives and sails and
rambles to lead him off; and though he'd urge, I would not join them,
not even at my mother's bidding,--she had taught me to have a strange
shrinking from all careless eyes;--and then, moreover, there were
dinners and balls, and them he must needs attend, seeing they were given
for him,--and I fancy here that my mother half repented her decree
concerning the time when I should enter society, or, rather, should
_not_,--yet she never knew how to take step in recedure.
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