Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860

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Now see the face,--not small, either; lips with no particular outline,
but melting, and seeming as if they would stain yours, should you touch
them. No matter about the rest, except the eyes. Do you meet such eyes
often? You wouldn't open yours so, if you did. Note their color now,
before the ray goes. Yellow hazel? Not a bit of it! Some folks say
topaz, but they're fools. Nor sherry. There's a dark sardine base, but
over it real seas of light, clear light; there isn't any positive color;
and once when I was angry, I caught a glimpse of them in a mirror, and
they were quite white, perfectly colorless, only luminous. I looked like
a fiend, and, you may be sure, recovered my temper directly,--easiest
thing in the world, when you've motive enough. You see the pupil is
small, and that gives more expansion and force to the irides; but
sometimes in an evening, when I'm too gay, and a true damask settles in
the cheek, the pupil grows larger and crowds out the light, and under
these thick, brown lashes, these yellow-hazel eyes of yours, they are
dusky and purple and deep with flashes, like pansies lit by fire-flies,
and then common folks call them black. Be sure, I've never got such eyes
for nothing, any more than this hair. That is Lucrezia Borgian, spun
gold, and ought to take the world in its toils. I always wear these
thick, riotous curls round my temples and face; but the great braids
behind--oh, I'll uncoil them before my toilet is over.

Probably you felt all this before, but didn't know the secret of it.
Now, the traits being brought out, you perceive nothing wanting; the
thing is perfect, and you've a reason for it. Of course, with such an
organization, I'm not nervous. Nervous! I should as soon fancy a dish of
cream nervous. I am too rich for anything of the kind, permeated utterly
with a rare golden calm. Girls always suggest little similitudes to me:
there's that brunette beauty,--don't you taste mulled wine when you see
her? and thinking of yourself, did you ever feel green tea? and find me
in a crust of wild honey, the expressed essence of woods and flowers,
with its sweet satiety?--no, that's too cloying. I'm a deal more like
Mendelssohn's music,--what I know of it, for I can't distinguish
tunes,--you wouldn't suspect it,--but full harmonics delight me as they
do a wild beast; and so I'm like a certain adagio in B flat, that Papa
likes.

There now! you're perfectly shocked to hear me go on so about myself;
but you oughtn't to be. It isn't lawful for any one else, because praise
is intrusion; but if the rose please to open her heart to the moth, what
then? You know, too, I didn't make myself; it's no virtue to be so fair.
Louise couldn't speak so of herself: first place, because it wouldn't
be true; next place, she couldn't, if it were; and lastly, she made her
beauty by growing a soul in her eyes, I suppose,--what you call good.
I'm not good, of course; I wouldn't give a fig to be good. So
it's not vanity. It's on a far grander scale; a splendid
selfishness,--authorized, too; and papa and mamma brought me up to
worship beauty,--and there's the fifth commandment, you know.

Dear me! you think I'm never coming to the point. Well, here's this
rosary;--hand me the perfume-case first, please. Don't you love heavy
fragrances, faint with sweetness, ravishing juices of odor, heliotropes,
violets, water-lilies,--powerful attars and extracts, that snatch your
soul off your lips? Couldn't you live on rich scents, if they tried to
starve you? I could, or die on them: I don't know which would be best.
There! there's the amber rosary! You needn't speak; look at it!

Bah! is that all you've got to say? Why, observe the thing; turn it
over; hold it up to the window; count the beads,--long, oval, like some
seaweed bulbs, each an amulet. See the tint; it's very old; like clots
of sunshine,--aren't they? Now bring it near; see the carving, here
corrugated, there faceted, now sculptured into hideous, tiny, heathen
gods. You didn't notice that before! How difficult it must have been,
when amber is so friable! Here's one with a chessboard on his back, and
all his kings and queens and pawns slung round him. Here's another
with a torch, a flaming torch, its fire pouring out inverted. They are
grotesque enough;--but this, this is matchless: such a miniature woman,
one hand grasping the round rock behind, while she looks down into some
gulf, perhaps, beneath, and will let herself fall. Oh, you should see
_her_ with a magnifying-glass! You want to think of calm, satisfying
death, a mere exhalation, a voluntary slipping into another element?
There it is for you. They are all gods and goddesses. They are all here
but one; I've lost one, the knot of all, the love of the thing. Well!
wasn't it queer for a Catholic girl to have at prayer? Don't you wonder
where she got it? Ah! but don't you wonder where I got it? I'll tell
you.

Papa came in, one day, and with great mystery commenced unrolling,
and unrolling, and throwing tissue papers on the floor, and scraps of
colored wool; and Lu and I ran to him,--Lu stooping on her knees to look
up, I bending over his hands to look down. It was so mysterious! I began
to suspect it was diamonds for me, but knew I never could wear them, and
was dreadfully afraid that I was going to be tempted, when slowly, bead
by bead, came out this amber necklace. Lu fairly screamed; as for me, I
just drew breath after breath, without a word. Of course they were for
me;--I reached my hands for them.

"Oh, wait!" said papa. "Yone or Lu?"

"Now how absurd, papa!" I exclaimed. "Such things for Lu!"

"Why not?" asked Lu,--rather faintly now, for she knew I always carried
my point.

"The idea of you in amber, Lu! It's too foreign; no sympathy between
you!"

"Stop, stop!" said papa. "You shan't crowd little Lu out of them. What
do you want them for, Lu?"

"To wear," quavered Lu,--"like the balls the Roman ladies carried for
coolness."

"Well, then, you ought to have them. What do you want them for, Yone?"

"Oh, if Lu's going to have them, I _don't_ want them."

"But give a reason, child."

"Why, to wear, too,--to look at,--to have and to hold for better, for
worse,--to say my prayers on," for a bright idea struck me, "to say
my prayers on, like the Florence rosary." I knew that would finish the
thing.

"Like the Florence rosary?" said papa, in a sleepy voice. "Why, this
_is_ the Florence rosary."

Of course, when we knew that, we were both more crazy to obtain it.

"Oh, Sir," just fluttered Lu, "where did you get it?"

"I got it; the question is, Who's to have it?"

"I must and will, potential and imperative," I exclaimed, quite on fire.
"The nonsense of the thing! Girls with lucid eyes, like shadowy shallows
in quick brooks, can wear crystallizations. As for me, I can wear
only concretions and growths; emeralds and all their cousins would
be shockingly inharmonious on me; but you know, Lu, how I use Indian
spices, and scarlet and white berries and flowers, and little hearts and
notions of beautiful copal that Rose carved for you,--and I can wear
sandal-wood and ebony and pearls, and now this amber. But you, Lu,
you can wear every kind of precious stone, and you may have Aunt
Willoughby's rubies that she promised me; they are all in tone with you;
but I must have this."

"I don't think you're right," said Louise, rather soberly. "You strip
yourself of great advantages. But about the rubies, I don't want
anything so flaming, so you may keep them; and I don't care at all about
this. I think, Sir, on the whole, they belong to Yone for her name."

"So they do," said papa. "But not to be bought off! That's my little
Lu!"

And somehow Lu, who had been holding the rosary, was sitting on papa's
knee, as he half knelt on the floor, and the rosary was in my hand. And
then he produced a little kid box, and there lay inside a star with a
thread of gold for the forehead, circlets for wrist and throat, two
drops, and a ring. Oh, such beauties! You've never seen them.

"The other one shall have these. Aren't you sorry, Yone?" he said.

"Oh, no, indeed! I'd much rather have mine, though these are splendid.
What are they?"

"Aqua-marina," sighed Lu, in an agony of admiration.

"Dear, dear! how did you know?"

Lu blushed, I saw,--but I was too much absorbed with the jewels to
remark it.

"Oh, they are just like that ring on your hand! You don't want two rings
alike," I said. "Where did you get that ring, Lu?"

But Lu had no senses for anything beyond the casket.

If you know aqua-marina, you know something that's before every other
stone in the world. Why, it is as clear as light, white, limpid, dawn
light; sparkles slightly and seldom; looks like pure drops of water,
sea-water, scooped up and falling down again; just a thought of its
parent beryl green hovers round the edges; and it grows more lucent and
sweet to the centre, and there you lose yourself in some dream of vast
seas, a glory of unimagined oceans; and you say that it was crystallized
to any slow flute-like tune, each speck of it floating into file with
a musical grace, and carrying its sound with it. There! it's very
fanciful, but I'm always feeling the tune in aqua-marina, and trying to
find it,--but I shouldn't know it was a tune, if I did, I suppose. How
magnificent it would be, if every atom of creation sprang up and said
its one word of abracadabra, the secret of its existence, and fell
silent again. Oh, dear! you'd die, you know; but what a pow-wow! Then,
too, in aqua-marina proper, the setting is kept out of sight, and you
have the unalloyed stone with its sea-rims and its clearness and steady
sweetness. It wasn't the stone for Louise to wear; it belongs rather
to highly-nervous, excitable persons; and Lu is as calm as I, only so
different! There is something more pure and simple about it than about
anything else; others may flash and twinkle, but this just glows with an
unvarying power, is planetary and strong. It wears the moods of the sea,
too: once in a while a warm amethystine mist suffuses it like a blush;
sometimes a white morning fog breathes over it: you long to get into the
heart of it. That's the charm of gems, after all! You feel that they are
fashioned through dissimilar processes from yourself,--that there's a
mystery about them, mastering which would be like mastering a new life,
like having the freedom of other stars. I give them more personality
than I would a great white spirit. I like amber that way, because I know
how it was made, drinking the primeval weather, resinously beading each
grain of its rare wood, and dripping with a plash to filter through and
around the fallen cones below. In some former state I must have been a
fly embalmed in amber.

"Oh, Lu!" I said, "this amber's just the thing for me, such a great
noon creature! And as for you, you shall wear mamma's Mechlin and that
aqua-marina; and you'll look like a mer-queen just issuing from the
wine-dark deeps and glittering with shining water-spheres."

I never let Lu wear the point at all; she'd be ridiculous in it,--so
flimsy and open and unreserved; that's for me;--Mechlin, with its
whiter, closer, chaste web, suits her to a T.

I must tell you, first, how this rosary came about, any way. You know
we've a million of ancestors, and one of them, my great-grandfather, was
a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves; but once
he fetched to his wife a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old,
and wilder than the wind. She spoke no word of English, and was full
of short shouts and screeches, like a thing of the woods. My
great-grandmother couldn't do a bit with her; she turned the house
topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the
jewels out of the settings, killed the little home animals, spoiled the
dinners, pranced in the garden with Madam Willoughby's farthingale and
royal stiff brocades rustling yards behind,--this atom of a shrimp,--or
balanced herself with her heels in the air over the curb of the well,
scraped up the dead leaves under one corner of the house and fired
them,--a favorite occupation,--and if you left her stirring a mess in
the kitchen, you met her, perhaps, perched in the china-closet and
mumbling all manner of demoniacal prayers, twisting and writhing and
screaming over a string of amber gods that she had brought with her
and always wore. When winter came and the first snow, she was furious,
perfectly mad. One might as well have had a ball of fire in the house,
or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the ancient
quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds, and as Captain
Willoughby was returning, his wife packed the sprite off with him,--to
cut, rip, and tear in New Holland, if she liked, but not in New
England,--and rejoiced herself that she would find that little brown
skin cuddled up in her best down beds and among her lavendered sheets no
more. She had learned but two words all that time,--Willoughby, and the
name of the town.

You may conjecture what heavenly peace came in when the Asian went out,
but there is no one to tell what havoc was wrought on board ship; in
fact, if there could have been such a thing as a witch, I should believe
that imp sunk them, for a stray Levantine brig picked her--still agile
as a monkey--from a wreck off the Cape de Verdes and carried her into
Leghorn, where she took--will you mind, if I say?--leg-bail, and
escaped from durance. What happened on her wanderings I'm sure is of
no consequence, till one night she turned up outside a Fiesolan villa,
scorched with malaria fevers and shaken to pieces with tertian and
quartan and all the rest of the agues. So, after having shaken almost to
death, she decided upon getting well; all the effervescence was gone;
she chose to remain with her beads in that family, a mysterious tame
servant, faithful, jealous, indefatigable. But she never grew; at ninety
she was of the height of a yard-stick,--and nothing could have been
finer than to have a dwarf in those old palaces, you know.

In my great-grandmother's home, however, the tradition of the Asian
sprite with her string of amber gods was handed down like a legend, and,
no one knowing what had been, they framed many a wild picture of the
Thing enchanting all her spirits from their beads about her, and calling
and singing and whistling up the winds with them till storm rolled round
the ship, and fierce fog and foam and drowning fell upon her capturers.
But they all believed, that, snatched from the wreck into islands of
Eastern archipelagoes, the vindictive child and her quieted gods might
yet be found. Of course my father knew this, and when that night in the
church he saw the girl saying such devout prayers on an amber rosary,
with a demure black slave so tiny and so old behind her, it flashed
back on him, and he would have spoken, if, just then, the ray had not
revealed the great painting, so that he forgot all about it, and when at
last he turned, they were gone. But my father had come back to America,
had sat down quietly in his elder brother's house, among the hills where
I am to live, and was thought to be a sedate young man and a good match,
till a freak took him that he must go back and find that girl in Italy.
How to do it, with no clue but an amber rosary? But do it he did,
stationing himself against a pillar in that identical church and
watching the worshippers, and not having long to wait before in she
came, with little Asian behind. Papa isn't in the least romantic; he is
one of those great fertilizing temperaments, golden hair and beard, and
hazel eyes, if you will. He's a splendid old fellow! It's absurd to
delight in one's father,--so bread-and-buttery,--but I can't help it.
He's far stronger than I; none of the little weak Italian traits that
streak me, like water in thick, syrupy wine. No,--he isn't in the least
romantic, but he says he was fated to this step, and could no more have
resisted than his heart could have refused to beat. When he spoke to the
devotee, little Asian made sundry belligerent demonstrations; but he
confronted her with the two words she had learned here, Willoughby and
the town's name. The dwarf became livid, seemed always after haunted by
a dreadful fear of him, pursued him with a rancorous hate, but could not
hinder his marriage. The Willoughbys are a cruel race. Her only revenge
was to take away the amber beads, which had long before been blessed
by the Pope for her young mistress, refusing herself to accompany my
mother, and declaring that neither should her charms ever cross the
water,--that all their blessing would be changed to banning, and that
bane would burn the bearer, should the salt-sea spray again dash round
them. But when, in process of Nature, the Asian died,--having become
classic through her longevity, taking length of days for length of
stature,--then the rosary belonged to mamma's sister, who by-and-by sent
it, with a parcel of other things, to papa for me. So I should have had
it at all events, you see;--papa is such a tease I The other things were
mamma's wedding-veil, that point there, which once was her mother's, and
some pearls.

I was born upon the sea, in a calm, far out of sight of land, under
sweltering suns; so, you know, I'm a cosmopolite, and have a right to
all my fantasies. Not that they are fantasies at all; on the contrary,
they are parts of my nature, and I couldn't be what I am without them,
or have one and not have all. Some girls go picking and scraping odds
and ends of ideas together, and by the time they are thirty get quite a
bundle of whims and crotchets on their backs; but they are all at sixes
and sevens, uneven and knotty like fagots, and won't lie compactly,
don't belong to them, and anybody might surprise them out of them. But
for me, you see, mine are harmonious, in my veins; I was born with them.
Not that I was always what I am now. Oh, bless your heart! plums and
nectarines, and luscious things that ripen and develop all their
rare juices, were green once, and so was I. Awkward, tumble-about,
near-sighted, till I was twenty, a real raw-head-and-bloody-bones to all
society; then mamma, who was never well in our diving-bell atmosphere,
was ordered to the West Indies, and papa said it was what I needed, and
I went, too,--and oh, how sea-sick! Were you ever? You forget all about
who you are, and have a vague notion of being Universal Disease. I have
heard of a kind of myopy that is biliousness, and when I reached the
islands my sight was as clear as my skin; all that tropical luxuriance
snatched me to itself at once, recognized me for kith and kin; and mamma
died, and I lived. We had accidents between wind and water, enough to
have made me considerate for others, Lu said; but I don't see that I'm
any less careful not to have my bones spilt in the flood than ever
I was. Slang? No,--poetry. But if your nature had such a wild, free
tendency as mine, and then were boxed up with proprieties and civilities
from year's end to year's end, may-be you, too, would escape now and
then in a bit of slang.

We always had a little boy to play with, Lu and I, or rather
Lu,--because, though he never took any dislike to me, he was absurdly
indifferent, while he followed Lu about with a painful devotion. I
didn't care, didn't know; and as I grew up and grew awkwarder, I was the
plague of their little lives. If Lu had been my sister instead of my
orphan cousin, as mamma was perpetually holding up to me, I should have
bothered them twenty times more; but when I got larger and began to be
really distasteful to his fine artistic perception, mamma had the sense
to keep me out of his way; and he was busy at his lessons, and didn't
come so much. But Lu just fitted him then, from the time he daubed
little adoring blotches of her face on every barn-door and paling, till
when his scrap-book was full of her in all fancies and conceits, and he
was old enough to go away and study Art. Then he came home occasionally,
and always saw us; but I generally contrived, on such occasions, to do
some frightful thing that shocked every nerve he had, and he avoided me
instinctively as he would an electric torpedo; but--do you believe?--I
never had an idea of such a thing, till, when sailing from the South,
so changed, I remembered things, and felt intuitively how it must have
been. Shortly after I went away, he visited Europe. I had been at home a
year, and now we heard he had returned; so for two years he hadn't seen
me. He had written a great deal to Lu,--brotherly letters they were,--he
is so peculiar,--determining not to give her the least intimation of
what he felt, if he did feel anything, till he was able to say all. And
now he had earned for himself a certain fame, a promise of greater; his
works sold; and if he pleased, he could marry. I merely presume this
might have been his thought; he never told me. A certain fame! But
that's nothing to what he will have. How can he paint gray, faint,
half-alive things now? He must abound in color,--be rich, exhaustless:
wild sea-sketches,--sunrise,--sunset,--mountain mists rolling in turbid
crimson masses, breaking in a milky spray of vapor round lofty peaks,
and letting out lonely glimpses of a melancholy moon,--South American
splendors,--pomps of fruit and blossom,--all this affluence of his
future life must flash from his pencils now. Not that he will paint
again directly. Do you suppose it possible that I should be given
him merely for a phase of wealth and light and color, and then
taken,--taken, in some dreadful way, to teach him the necessary and
inevitable result of such extravagant luxuriance? It makes me shiver.

It was that very noon when papa brought in the amber, that he came for
the first time since his return from Europe. He hadn't met Lu before. I
ran, because I was in my morning wrapper. Don't you see it there, that
cream-colored, undyed silk, with the dear palms and ferns swimming all
over it? And all my hair was just flung into a little black net that
Lu had made me; we both had run down as we were when we heard papa. I
scampered; but he saw only Lu; and grasped her hands. Then, of course, I
stopped on the baluster to look. They didn't say anything, only seemed
to be reading up for the two years in each other's eyes; but Lu dropped
her kid box, and as he stooped to pick it up, he held it, and then took
out the ring, looked at her and smiled, and put it on his own finger.
The one she had always worn was no more a mystery. He has such little
hands! they don't seem made for anything but slender crayons and
watercolors, as if oils would weigh them down with the pigment; but
there is a nervy strength about them that could almost bend an ash.

Papa's breezy voice blew through the room next minute, welcoming him;
and then he told Lu to put up her jewels, and order luncheon, at which,
of course, the other wanted to see the jewels nearer; and I couldn't
stand that, but slipped down and walked right in, lifting my amber, and
saying, "Oh, but this is what you must look at!"

He turned, somewhat slowly, with such a lovely indifference, and let his
eyes idly drop on me. He didn't look at the amber at all; he didn't look
at me; I seemed to fill his gaze without any action from him, for
he stood quiet and passive; my voice, too, seemed to wrap him in a
dream,--only an instant; though then I had reached him.

"You've not forgotten Yone," said papa, "who went persimmon and came
apricot?"

"I've not forgotten Yone," answered he, as if half asleep. "But who is
this?"

"Who is this?" echoed papa. "Why, this is my great West Indian magnolia,
my Cleopatra in light colors, my"----

"Hush, you silly man!"

"This is she," putting his hands on my shoulders,--"Miss Giorgione
Willoughby."

By this time he had found his manners.

"Miss Giorgione Willoughby," he said, with a cool bow, "I never knew
you."

"Very well, Sir," I retorted. "Now you and my father have settled the
question, know my amber!" and lifting it again, it got caught in that
curl.

I have good right to love my hair. What was there to do, when it snarled
in deeper every minute, but for him to help me? and then, at the
friction of our hands, the beads gave out slightly their pungent smell
that breathes all through the Arabian Nights, you know; and the perfumed
curls were brushing softly over his fingers, and I a little vexed and
flushed as the blind blew back and let in the sunshine and a roistering
wind;--why, it was all a pretty scene, to be felt then and remembered
afterward. Lu, I believe, saw at that instant how it would be, and moved
away to do as papa had asked; but no thought of it came to me.

"Well, if you can't clear the tangle," I said, "you can see the beads."

But while with delight he examined their curious fretting, he yet saw
me.

I am used to admiration now, certainly; it is my food; without it I
should die of inanition; but do you suppose I care any more for those
who give it to me than a Chinese idol does for--whoever swings incense
before it? Are you devoted to your butcher and milkman? We desire only
the unpossessed or unattainable, "something afar from the sphere of
our sorrow." But, though unconsciously, I may have been piqued by this
manner of his. It was new; not a word, not a glance; I believed it
was carelessness, and resolved--merely for the sake of conquering, I
fancied, too--to change all that. By-and-by the beads dropped out of the
curl, as if they had been possessed of mischief and had held there of
themselves. He caught them.

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