Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

in himself more and more in proportion as his old chum, who after his marriage and return to the city urged him to spend an occasional evening with him and his wife. But he continued inflexible, and so remained to his friend's Lizzie an invisible although real personage, whom she always spoke of as "Poor Dick!" Often in moments of reflection she half regretted having been the means of estranging the two men, and rendering the life of one so lonely and gloomy. In her impulsive moods she formed many a scheme for going to Dick himself and pleading for a renewal of the old-time intimacy; but her plans ended, as did James's attempts, in nothing more effectual than a sigh and Poor Dick!" This state of things remained unchanged until at the end of a year James and Lizzie had a daughter born to them. When the baby was a week old they decided she should be named Ricarda.

"

“That's as near being Richard as a girl can hope to come," laughed James. 'If this little cherub does not bring poor Uncle Dick to his senses we will give him up for good, or for bad rather."

Lizzie was already beginning to grow strong again, and James made a final appeal to his friend to come and do homage to his little namesake; but Dick did not come.

A few days after this Lizzie complained of feeling ill; the physician came, and, leaving some trifling remedy, predicted that her ill feeling would pass off in a short time. But she continued to grow worse, and late in the evening her husband hurried away again for the doctor. When he returned he found his wife dead in her nurse's arms.

The blow had come too suddenly and unexpectedly for him to feel the sharpness of the pain in that moment. Numbed and paralyzed, he fell by her bedside, stretching his arms helplessly across her body. After a time some friends gathered in the room, and the stricken man was helped to his feet. He staggered against the wall, his face white as the dead one before him, and, slowly drawing his hand across his brow as if to sweep away some terrible vision, he sank into a chair with a great sob-the echo of a heart-break.

Some hours later, as the cold gray dawn was breaking, James wrote on a card the three words, "Lizzie is dead," and sent a messenger with it to Lane's room. Dick read the message, and sat for some time absorbed in reverie. A sense of remorse stole into his heart, and pierced it like a dagger. He looked at the clock over the chimney, and his eye fell upon a calendar. "It is still November," he said. Poor Jim!" and drawing on his cloak, and pulling his

[ocr errors]

hat well down over his eyes, he passed into the street, and walked in the direction of his friend's house.

Upon being admitted, and informing the servant who he was, he was shown into a room where lay the dead wife.

By her side, like a statue, stood James. Lane approached him, and, standing a little distance removed, looked for the first time on Lizzie's face. The dignity death had added to the sweetness it wore in life held him as if entranced. He began to comprehend in a vague way the source of delight her face must have been to her husband. If any bitterness had been in his heart toward her it vanished in this supreme moment. When he turned to James, who seemed all unheedful of his presence, he was startled at the change that had passed over him, so rapid and terrible is the work that suffering sometimes in a few hours achieves. At that sight of him all his old sympathy and love for his comrade overflowed in his heart, filled his eyes, and trembled on his lips. Putting his hand on his shoulder, he could only command himself to speak the one word, "Jim." But that was enough. The touch of his hand and the tone of his voice were the stricken man's salvation. Tears for the first time found their way to soften the anguish in his eyes, and to melt the tension that seemed to bind his brain like a vise.

"Poor Dick!" he sobbed, and the two men were in each other's embrace. In this moment of strength yielding to tears and tenderness, the old bond of union was welded anew.

For many days thereafter Mygatt James seemed like a hopelessly broken man. It was Dick who attended to the funeral, and went with him to bear back to the little New England church from where a year before he had led her a happy bride the now dead wife and mother, to listen to the sad burial service, and to lay the precious form away in the cold earth of the early winter. And it was Dick who, after their return, found a cozy house, into which they all went to live-little Ricarda, her nurse, James, and himself.

II.

RICHARD LANE had predicted truly, so far as his friend was concerned, that no man passed through the matrimonial gate who ever returned the same man as before. Although Mygatt James recovered his old strength, and fulfilled his daily round of duties with his characteristic quickness and energy, he was still a very greatly changed man. There were but rare intervals when appeared any gleam of his old-time lightness and gayety. From out the gay, light-hearted, and dashing gallant had been born a grave,

sober, dignified man, courteous, reserved, neat, and quiet in his dress, and bearing himself toward others with a thoughtful kindness that seemed ineffable in its sweetness. Richard Lane, too, had changed, but in a reverse way. He had grown daily more youthful in spirit, and had displayed more than ever before the vivacity and frolicsomeness that rightly belong to the young, but which had prematurely parted with him to give room to gravity and seriousness. This change in him may have been the result of an unconscious effort on his part to cheer and brighten his friend, or have come from the companionship of Ricarda, who had grown to be as dear to him, he fancied, as she was to her father. Healthy and pretty from the day of her birth, she had daily grown more and more winsome, and so wild with joyous life as to sometimes cause her father to sigh, who seemed never to forget at what a costly price she had come to him.

46

"We will do everything for her ourselves," Dick in his enthusiasm would often say. When a man who has taste chooses to exercise it, it is always better than a woman's. So little Sister Ricarda will be the most exquisitely robed of all maidens who have ever been born." And his eyes grew critical and observant, like a mother's, to note children's costumes. But his keen sense of fitness kept him always within the realm of simplicity.

"She is too dainty for gewgaws," he would say when the nurse and father would yield to the child's whims for necklace, and ear-rings, and artificial flowers with which she saw other children tricked out.

"You are not a young heathen, dearie, to have holes punched through your ears," he would say to her for she was already five years old'and you are to grow up free and brave, and chains on your neck and arms will not do, for such things are for slaves. But you may have all the roses-all the real live roses your arms can hold, and stick them where you please; but never the made roses that only smell of the paint-pot." And, as Dick was "odd judge" in the case, his decisions ruled.

Naturally, as time passed on, and Ricarda was nearing her tenth year, the question of her education became a not infrequent topic of discussion between the two men.

"If she is to be our ideal woman," said Dick, "she must turn all her faces to the sun,' in order to be symmetrically developed. She must be strong-minded, but not masculine-minded. She must know Greek and French, physiology and Kent's Commentaries-something, perhaps, of music and art; know how to sew, talk, and walk. She knows now, as all children do, how to walk,

and some plan must be hit upon in order for her not to lose this primal grace of motion, as in the transition from girlhood to womanhood the art somehow seems to be lost. Perhaps 'tis the long frock, the petticoat that works the mischief. At all events, we will keep her for many a year yet in the clipped skirts of an English touriste."

"I am afraid," observed her father, "that in your symmetrical education her character will be so evenly and smoothly developed as to have no projections left in it on which to hang a marked idea. For my part, I like enough of ruggedness, even in a woman's character, to give her individuality and save her from insipidity."

"Yea, Jim, and so do I; but I've a horror of bigotry, and bigotry is a one idea run into the ground or the moon. Look at the girls whose entire teens are poured into music like candles into a mold-a lead-pencil-shaped existence-in which everything is directed to thumping keys. When I join the army of reformers I shall 'move' for a society to save young girls from the maw of the music-teacher, the martyrdom of the piano, which consumes their years for study, leaving nine tenths of them at twenty mere mechanical performers of trash, with no power to add anything to the real value of music, and which as an art is soon lost if not made professional."

"He who loves not music is a beast of one species" smilingly quoted James.

"Yes, and he who overloves it is a beast of another, whose brain is smaller than a nightingale's, and his heart than a lizard's,'" quickly added Lane. "I think it well enough for a girl to know enough of music, if she learns it readily, to amuse herself; but to expect her to apply herself to that for which she has no special genius is a robbery of her birthright. It is just as bad as to require the same thing of boys, although there is more sense in teaching them music than girls, because they keep up their practice better."

"It is a well-known fact," observed James, with a humorous hint at sarcasm, “that no individuals are so capable of rightly bending the twig' as maids and bachelors. If but their theories could be carried out, the children of this world would be models."

"And there's more truth than sarcasm in that, too!" retorted Dick. "Parents are blinded and biased by parental fondness and prejudice, while uncles and aunts' observe with clearer judgment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a child makes simpletons of the father and mother, who hold it up to the world with faces inflated with pride, crying, 'Ecce homo!' as though infants were not the commonest product in the world, and the least interesting."

[ocr errors]

But, after all, Dick, to be a wife and mother seems to be the ultimatum in a woman's life, and, as Ricarda will undoubtedly one day be one or both, should not her education be directed with that in view?"

"I don't see what that should have to do in shaping it. Make her first as complete a woman as we can, and let the marriage business take care of itself. I have the greatest admiration for some of those old Italians and Hollanders who made learned women of their daughterslearned beyond anything we have nowadays. I confess I don't like to converse much with women. If our talk touches upon anything of magnitude, I am constantly in fear of going beyond their depth. If they are professional women, and really know one thing well, they become so outrageously like men in their petty jealousies of others of their ilk as to be intolerable. And a woman, above all things, should be large-hearted and gracious."

"I haven't observed that literary women are narrow and jealous. There are Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Sand, Martineau, and women of that class."

"True; neither are scientific women like Somerville or Herschel. Neither are lawyers, preachers, nor authors eternally at sword-point, attacking each other's methods. But look at artists, musicians, and doctors! It is strange that what is supposed to refine and elevate the race, and ameliorate its hideousness and pain, should make of its masters such cats and dogs." "Perhaps Ricarda will have a scientific turn," said her father.

She

"I hope so," replied Dick; a turn for something that will save her from the Hemans theory of 'love, 'tis woman's whole existence.' I'm not an experienced fellow, as you know, Jim, but, in thinking a good deal about Ricarda's future, I have speculated and observed not a little; and one conclusion that I've arrived at is this: in marriage a woman is placed at great disadvantage compared with her husband, because her all is staked on love, while his is not. This makes the balance between them uneven. goes up, gushes over, and for the first six months wonders, and has her little spells of weeping at her husband's comparative indifference for the demonstrations attending love-making. Because he doesn't kiss, caress, and shower upon her endearing epithets every other moment, he falls short of her ideal of things, and she thinks something is wrong, and it is only after a long and painful experience that she learns that, while he loves as deeply as does she, there are also for him other things in life to be thought of. He may be as deep in love as water in a well, yet he tires of a daily going through with the love

alphabet. He likes things to be taken for granted. He wants his wife to accept his 'unutterable devotions' as the man did who pinned his prayers at the head of his bed, and upon retiring and rising would say, 'Lord, behold my sentiments.' So I hold that if a woman has an aim in life, distinct from love, but consonant with it, she will be the happier as a wife, and give her husband more happiness too, because she is made by it more companionable. Love feeding continually upon itself must consume itself. Like everything else, it must have space, air, and soil, in which to strike deep and broad its roots, and shake out its branches to the sun. The difference between the love of a woman of broad culture and that of one who knows nothing but to love, and wants to do nothing but to love, is like that between an oak in an open field and a Jerusalem cherry-tree in a geranium-pot."

James smiled quietly throughout his friend's talk, and then said:

"It is clear that you have never been afflicted with a grande passion, Dick."

"No, and I never want to be. People of the grande passion sort are the ones who get divorces. They rise in love, instead of fall in it— their head is first immersed, and they're made blind, deaf, and dumb, to everything else. I'd rather get it as the Baptist does his immersion, feet first."

"As regards the Hemans theory," said James, "you might go further, and pronounce love, being 'in man's life a thing apart,' as fallacious, as I know it so to be. A man's life is spun of many threads, but lying underneath-it may be from view-but interweaving and brightening all the others, it runs like a band of gold, the one strong, enduring, unrusted, and unfading thread among them. I suppose there are as many theories of the ideal woman now-of the Venus of to-dayas in the olden times. While your Italian prince makes a savante of his daughter, an Austrian nobleman educates his protégée on an entirely different plan: he removes from her everything practical, teaches her only illusions and to delude; to flit through life like a butterfly resting upon nothing more than a flower; to sing, to love, to display her beauty, and to do all with an entraînement, for life is short, and time flees.' Although some great men have married their cooks, and others their housemaids, yet I apprehend they found in those women the very kind of companionship or comradeship they most needed, and which they nowhere else found. Just what it is in a woman that endears her beyond all expression to a man, is the subtilest of all things. It can not be defined, and while emanating from a hundred sources, maybe, can not be said to be the product of any one of them. All women are

lovable to all men in some degree. I never saw one yet, no matter how debauched in life, in whom I could not find something to love. I remember that my mother and my wife were women; that all we have of good in us we owe to the love of women for us. We must do all we can to elevate the standard of women, because upon their nobility rests our manhood. I believe that. And at the same time I believe that the development of a woman, in character and life, depends largely upon the perfectness of her relations to man as wife and mother. You never knew Lizzie, and so could form no idea of what it was in her that so bound me to her, and will always bind me. She was a country girl without liberal opportunities for education; refined in manners, taste, and speech. She was trusting, loving, and true to those she could trust; had a nice discrimination of character, and did not hesitate to manifest her likes and dislikes. She was accomplished in all household duties; was diligent, discreet, modest. That was what she was as a girl, and what she was as a woman. She loved those she loved to the heart-breaking point, and yet she was not demonstrative. She grew into my heart, and I think, yes, I know, no one could ever take her place. I have often met women more accomplished, handsomer, and more dazzling, who were for the time to me what she could never be, but I never met one whose qualities of heart and life I would like to have exchanged for hers. I thoroughly believe in educating woman to the furthermost point—"

"Because," interrupted Dick, "she is so lovable, you would have her gracious qualities spread out like a sticking-plaster to cover as much as possible of the masculine ugliness that defaces the world."

"No, not that; but because the development of her mind in no sense shrinks her heart. The divine Spirit has taken care of that since her creation, and, although she be a princess of wit and learning, she is just as ready now to follow the man she loves into ruin as was Eve to follow Adam from the island to the mainland, as recorded in the Vedas. As an illustration, there was Maria Schurmanns, that most learned and famous woman of Holland, who imperiled even her good name for a worthless adventurer."

66

'She's queer!" ejaculated Dick, rising. “Woman's a queerity! She's a sphinx, the source of the Nile. She's the arithmetic that makes two and two five. She's the creature that men will fight for and die for, but won't open their university doors to. I've always been puzzled amid all this rattletybang of the emancipation of the sex, why she hasn't been emancipated always, seeing that she has had a woman for her mother. All down through the ages, where a woman shines

out like a star in the night, we find that it has been her father who has polished her to splendor, and never her mother. When a woman has exerted herself in anybody's behalf it has been for a man. If she snatched anybody from the bulrushes, it was a Moses; if she saved anybody's head from the tomahawk, 'twas a John Smith's. She's an unaccountable piece, Jim. I reckon the fellow who fights shy of her shows the better part of valor.-Hello, Ricarda!" He sprang forward with outstretched arms, as the child bounded in for her good-night kisses. "You're a second little Mrs. Browning, all eyes and curls. We have been talking about great women like her, and sweet souls like you, and all sorts of women. Now, what kind of a woman do you mean to be to be a chemist like papa, a banker like Uncle Dick, a cook, or a baker, or candlestick-maker?” "I think I'll be a Catholic priest," merrily laughed the child. "My bonne says they sit in a box, and people come to them and tell them everything they do. After a while I'd have enough queer things to make a book of, which I'd sell for a million dollars, and then I'd buy a big balloon, and we would go driving through the air like fun, and may be cut a slice off the moon. Bonne says she believes it is made of silver, and quite as large as an omnibus wheel; and that why it is sometimes black, and we can't see it, is because the fairies who polish it are awfully tiny creatures, and can only clean a little space at a time, and as soon as they get it to shine all over it begins on one edge to grow dim again."

Both men laughed, and Ricarda with them.

"I didn't believe it, either," she went on, as if they had in so many words expressed a disbelief in the bonne's theory. "But when we sail up in our balloon we will fire a cannon ball at it, and listen if it rings."

"But that might kill the fairies," suggested her father. At this Ricarda looked grave, and saying thoughtfully, "I never heard of a dead fairy," gave and took her "good-nights," and left the room.

"There are no kisses like a child's," remarked Dick. The father made no reply. He remembered whose lips were as sweet and free in their abandon of love for him as little Ricarda's.

III.

THE years rolled on, and Ricarda's education progressed according to the most improved methods agreed upon by the two men. She walked and skated in winter; rode on horseback and romped in hay-fields in the summer days, and so well paired her hours of study with recreative ones, that at sixteen she was as symmetrical in her mental and physical development as ever

Dick had desired she might be. Although she was tall, her dresses had never reached farther than to the tops of her boots; her form, half defined under her finely-cut princess frock, had the full, free, delightful outlines that only nature, when unconfined, succeeds in fashioning. She were her hair as of yore, in flowing curls, and was so naïve, innocent, and free, that no one thought of her as a young lady.

[ocr errors]

She will be an exquisite woman one day," Dick would say; but the one day" seemed afar off. In addition to the thorough instruction she received from special tutors, she had acquired quite a knowledge of practical chemistry from her father, with whom in his laboratory she had spent many an hour; while Dick had initiated her into the charms and mysteries of botany and natural history, in which he was both an enthusiast and an unusually well-versed student. This gave them many a romp in the country together, when Dick would say, "You will never, never write, talk, or think yourself out, and be like an empty egg-shell, so long as you know the country, and

adore it."

As Ricarda entered upon her sixteenth year, the frequently-discussed question, to what school she should be sent, demanded final decision; for at sixteen she would be ready for the "higher education," and must go to college.

Dick argued for Michigan or Cornell University, whose doors were then open or ajar for girls; but the father's choice was for a school exclusively for girls.

"Ricarda's sixteen years," he said, "have been spent mostly with us two men. She has seen, felt, and heard largely through a masculine coloring of the senses. She has heard talk of books, government, finance, sciences, and the like. Of what interests women as a rule-the chatter of society, fashion, domesticity, art, and music-she is more ignorant than of the excavations in Nineveh. Now I maintain, Dick, that a purely masculine education is as bad for a girl as would be a purely feminine one for a boy. Womanliness is the same thing in quality as manliness. A certain vigor and robustness in it form its charm in men ; a certain softness and gentleness in it, that in women. Just the idea I wish to convey is, that a certain amount of contact and association with women is as necessary for the womanly development of a girl as is the reverse for a boy. Then, too, I confess to an appreciation, you may term it a 'weakness,'" he interlarded smilingly-" to an appreciation of the witchingness that belongs to feminine coquetryto the tie of a ribbon, the folds of drapery, the jauntiness of hat, the trimness of boot and glove -the indescribable details of toilet that do adorn beauty, and make it as much more beautiful as

the beauty of a fine jewel is enhanced by a suitable setting. Moreover, Ricarda's education thus far has been what may be termed purely solid and robust. I would be sorry indeed to have her develop into a woman so utterly gone daft-to use one of your words-with an enthusiasm for learning of any sort as to be unmindful of what she wears, and how she wears it. A slovenly woman of brains like Lady Adair, for example, just returned to England, who wore the same linen collar for a week, and never added a brooch or ribbon to conceal the fourteen pinholes she made in it in that length of time, may be both admirable and lovable in a certain way, but not in all. We exhaust half our love and admiration in trying to get over such defects in person and dress. The only poet I have ever known personally wore his finger-nails long and full of dirt; and, although his poems are exquisite and rich in beauty, and he himself a most interesting man, yet whenever I think of him, the first picture presented to my mind is a double row of finely-shaped finger-nails, overlapping so many rows of earthworks. In proportion as a person is great intellectually, so in proportion his sense of fitness in outward appearance should be just. Instead of excusing untidiness or a peculiarity in dress carried to conspicuousness, as an 'eccentricity,' it should be branded as a streak of moral idiocy. The truth is, that such eccentricities do not so much arise from the absorption of the mind in greater things as in an overweening vanity, that at once seeks refuge and expression in something uncommon and fantastic. In short, my friend, I will be pleased to see our Ricarda reading betimes 'The Mirror of Fashion' as well as the Popular Science Monthly' or Fortnightly Review.'"

[ocr errors]

"Très bien," commented Dick, as James signified a lull on his part. You mean, you would have her flit with butterflies and bobolinks these four years to come, in order to harmonize her, womanize her, or neutralize her, for having soared so long with eagles, or, perhaps I should say, nested so long with owls. I think parents who educate their daughters at home, or in a way in which the girls have no knowledge of boardingschool life, make a mistake. True, the girls may learn tricks and pranks, and pounds of nonsense, and perhaps deceit and diplomacy, in student wise. Yet the ignorance of such associations, the lack of such human friction upon the mind and manners, of the self-control and self-reliance gained in such discipline, give the college- or seminary-bred girl an immense advantage over the home-trained one. The purity that is simply the result of ignorance is a very lame duck. It may pass current in the heavenly land, but here below it is well to be forearmed in being

« AnkstesnisTęsti »