Miss Mehitable returned to the parlor, and sat down to ponder over her fire; and the result of her ponderings shall be given in a letter which she immediately began writing, at the green-covered table.
CHAPTER XIX.
MISS MEHITABLE’S LETTER, AND THE REPLY, GIVING FURTHER HINTS OF THE STORY.
MY DEAR BROTHER: – Since I wrote you last, so strange a change has taken place in my life that even now I walk about as in a dream, and hardly know myself. The events of a few hours have made everything in the world seem to me to as different from what it ever seemed before as death is from life.
Not to keep you waiting, after so solemn a preface, I will announce to you first, briefly, what it is, and then, secondly, how it happened.
Well, then, I have adopted a child, in my dry and wilted old age. She is a beautiful and engaging little creature, full of life and spirits, – full of warm affections, – thrown an absolute waif and stray on the sands of life. Her mother was an unknown Englishwoman, – probably some relict of the retired English army. She died in great destitution, in the neighboring town of Needmore, leaving on the world two singularly interesting children, a boy and a girl. They were, of course, taken in charge by the parish, and fell to the lot of old Crab Smith and his sister, Miss Asphyxia, – just think of it! I think I need say no more than this about their lot.
In a short time they ran away from cruel treatment; lived in a desolate little housekeeping way in the old Dench house; till finally Sam Lawson, lounging about in his general and universal way, picked them up. He brought them, of course, where every wandering, distressed thing comes, – to Deacon Badger’s.
Now I suppose the Deacon is comfortably off in the world, as our New England farmers go, but his ability to maintain general charges of housekeeping for all mankind may seriously be doubted. Lois Badger, who does the work of Martha in that establishment, came over to me, yesterday afternoon, quite distressed in her mind about it. Lois is a worthy creature, – rather sharp, to be sure, but, when her edge is turned the right way, none the worse for that, – and really I thought she had the right of it, to some extent.
People in general are so resigned to have other folks made burnt sacrifices, that it did not appear to me probable that there was a creature in Oldtown who would do anything more than rejoice that Deacon Badger felt able to take the children. After I had made some rather bitter reflections on the world, and its selfishness, in the style that we all practise, the thought suddenly occurred to me, What do you, more than others? And that idea, together with the beauty and charms of the poor little waif, decided me to take this bold step. I shut my eyes, and took it, – not without quaking in my shoes for fear of Polly; but I have carried my point in her very face, without so much as saying by your leave.
The little one has just been taken up stairs and tucked up warmly in my own bed, with one of our poor little Emily’s old nightgowns on. They fit her exactly, and I exult over her as one that findeth great spoil
Polly has not yet declared herself, except by slamming the door very hard when she first made the discovery of the child’s presence in the house. I presume there is an equinoctial gale gathering, but I say nothing; for, after all, Polly is a good creature, and will blow herself round into the right quarter, in time, as our northeast rain-storms generally do. People always accommodate themselves to certainties.
I cannot but regard the coming of this child to me at this time as a messenger of mercy from God, to save me from sinking into utter despair. I have been so lonely, so miserable, so utterly, inexpressibly wretched of late, that it has seemed that, if something did not happen to help me, I must lose my reason. Our family disposition to melancholy is a hard enough thing to manage under the most prosperous circumstances. I remember my father’s paroxysms of gloom; they used to frighten me when I was a little girl, and laid a heavy burden on the heart of our dear angel mother. Whatever that curse is, we all inherit it. In the heart of every one of us children there is that fearful black drop, like that which the Koran says the angel showed to Mahomet. It is an inexplicable something which always predisposes us to sadness, but in which any real, appreciable sorrow strikes a terribly deep and long root. Shakespeare describes this thing, as he does everything else –
“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me, – you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ‘t is made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.”
You have struggled with it by the most rational means, – an active out-of-door life, by sea voyages and severe manual labor. A man can fight this dragon as a woman cannot. We women are helpless, – tied to places, forms, and rules, – chained to our stake. We must meet him as we can.
Of late I have not been able to sleep, and, lying awake all night long in darkness and misery, have asked, if this be life, whether an immortal existence is not a curse to be feared, rather than a blessing to be hoped, and if the wretchedness we fear in the eternal world can be worse than what we sometimes suffer now, – such sinking of heart, such helplessness of fear, such a vain calling for help that never comes. Well, I will not live it over again, for I dare say you know it all too well. I think I finally wore myself out in trying to cheer poor brother Theodore’s darksome way down to death. Can you wonder that he would take opium? God alone can judge people that suffer as he did, and, let people say what they please, I must, I will, think that God has some pity for the work of his hands.
Now, brother, I must, I will, write to you about Emily though you have said you never wished to hear her name again. What right had you, her brother, to give her up so, and to let the whole burden of this dreadful mystery and sorrow come down on me alone? You are not certain that she has gone astray in the worst sense that a woman can. We only know that she has broken away from us and gone, – but where, how and with whom, you cannot say, nor I. And certainly there was great excuse for her. Consider how the peculiar temperament and constitution of our family wrought upon her. Consider the temptations of her wonderful beauty, her highly nervous, wildly excitable organization. Her genius was extraordinary; her strength and vigor of character quite as much so. Altogether, she was a perilously constituted human being, – and what did we do with her? A good, common girl might have been put with Uncle and Aunt Farnsworth with great advantage. We put her there for the simple reason that they were her aunt and uncle, and had money enough to educate her. But in all other respects they were about the most unsuited that could be conceived. I must say that I think that glacial, gloomy, religious training in Uncle Farnsworth’s family was, for her, peculiarly unfortunate. She sat from Sunday to Sunday under Dr. Stern’s preaching. With a high-keyed, acute mind, she could not help listening and thinking; and such thinking is unfortunate, to say the least.
It always seemed to me that he was one of those who experiment on the immortal soul as daring doctors experiment on the body, – using the most violent and terrible remedies, – remedies that must kill or cure. His theory was, that a secret enemy to God was lying latent in every soul, which, like some virulent poisons in the body, could only be expelled by being brought to the surface; and he had sermon after sermon, whose only object appeared to be to bring into vivid consciousness what he calls the natural opposition of the human heart,
But, alas! In some cases the enmity thus aroused can never be subdued; and Emily’s was a nature that would break before it would bow. Nothing could have subdued her but love, – and love she never heard. These appalling doctrines were presented with such logical clearness, and apparently so established from the Scriptures, that, unable to distinguish between the word of God and the cruel deductions of human logic, she trod both under foot in defiant despair. Then came in the French literature, which is so fascinating, and which just now is having so wide an influence on the thinking of our country. Rousseau and Voltaire charmed her, and took her into a new world. She has probably gone to France for liberty, with no protection but her own virgin nature. Are we at once to infer the worst, when we know so little? I, for one, shall love her and trust in her to the end; and if ever she should fall, and do things that I and all the world must condemn, I shall still say, that it will be less her fault than that of others; that she will be one of those who fall by their higher, rather than their lower nature.
I have a prophetic instinct in my heart that some day, poor, forlorn, and forsaken, she will look back with regret to the old house where she was born: and then she shall be welcome here. This is why I keep this solitary old place, full of bitter and ghostly memories; because, as along as I keep it, there is one refuge that Emily may call her own, and one heart that will be true to her, and love her and believe in her to the end.
I think God has been merciful to me in sending me this child to be to me as a daughter. Already her coming has been made a means of working in me that great moral change for which all my life I have been blindly seeking. I have sought that conversion which our father taught us to expect as alchemists seek the philosopher’s stone.
What have I not read and suffered at the hands of the theologians? How many lonely hours, day after day, have I bent the knee in fruitless prayer that God would grant me this great, unknown grace! For without it how dreary is life!
We are in ourselves so utterly helpless, – life is so hard, so inexplicable, that we stand in perishing need of some helping hand, some sensible, appreciable connection with God. And yet for years every cry of misery, every breath of anguish, has been choked by the logical proofs of theology; – that God is my enemy, or that I am his; that every effort I make toward Him but aggravates my offence; and that this unknown gift, which no child of Adam ever did compass of himself, is so completely in my own power, that I am every minute of my life to blame for not possessing it.
How many hours have I gone round and round this dreary track, – chilled, weary, shivering, seeing no light, and hearing no voice! But within this last hour it seems as if a divine ray had shone upon me, and the great gift had been given me by the hand of a little child. It came in the simplest and most unexpected manner, while listening to a very homely hymn, repeated by this dear little one. The words themselves were not much in the way of poetry; it was merely the simplest statement of the truth that in Jesus Christ, ever living, ever present, every human soul has a personal friend, divine and almighty.
This thought came over me with such power, that it seemed as if all my doubts, all my intricate, contradictory theologies, all those personal and family sorrows which had made a burden on my soul greater than poor Christian ever staggered under, had gone where his did, when, at the sight of the Cross, it loosed from his back and rolled down into the sepulchre, to be seen no more. Can it be, I asked myself, that this mighty love, that I feel so powerfully and so sweetly, has been near me all these dark, melancholy years? Has the sun been shining behind all these heavy clouds, under whose shadows I have spent my life?
When I laid my little Tina down to sleep to-night, I came down here to think over this strange, new thought, – that I, even I, in my joyless old age, my poverty, my perplexities, my loneliness, am no longer alone! I am beloved. There is One who does love me, – the One Friend, whose love, like the sunshine, can be the portion of each individual of the human race, without exhaustion. This is the great mystery of faith, which I am determined from this hour to keep whole and undefiled.
My dear brother, I have never before addressed to you a word on this subject. It has been one in which I saw only perplexity. I have, it is true, been grieved and disappointed that you did not see your way clear to embrace the sacred ministry, which has for so many generations been the appointed work of our family. I confess for many years I did hope to see you succeed, not only to the library, but to the work of our honored, venerated father and grandfather. It was my hope that, in this position, I should find in you a spiritual guide to resolve my doubts and lead me aright. But I have gathered from you at times, by chance words dropped, that you could not exactly accept the faith of our fathers. Perhaps difficulties like my own have withheld you. I know you too well to believe that the French scepticism that has blown over here with the breath of our political revolution can have had the least influence over you. Whatever your views of doctrines may be, you are not a doubter. You are not – as poor Emily defiantly called herself – a deist, an alien from all that our fathers came to this wilderness to maintain. Yet when I see you burying your talents in a lonely mountain village, satisfied with the work of a poor schoolmaster, instead of standing forth to lead our New England in the pulpit, I ask myself, Why is this?
Speak to me, brother! Tell me your innermost thoughts, as I have told you mine. Is not life short and sad and bitter enough, that those who could help each other should neglect the few things they can do to make it tolerable? Why do we travel side by side, lonely and silent, – each, perhaps, hiding in that silence the bread of life that the other needs? Write to me as I have written to you, and let me know that I have a brother in soul, as I have in flesh.
Your affectionate sister,
M.R.
MY DEAR SISTER: – I have read your letter. Answer it justly and truly how can I? How little we know of each other in outside intimacy! But when we put our key into the door of the secret chamber, who does not tremble and draw back? – that is the true haunted chamber!
First, about Emily, I will own I am wrong. It is from no want of love, though, but from too much. I was and am too sore and bitter on that subject to trust myself. I have a heart full of curses, but don’t know exactly where to fling them; and, for aught I see, we are utterly helpless. Every clew fails; and what is the use of torturing ourselves? It is a man’s nature to act, to do, and where nothing can be done, to forget. It is a woman’s nature to hold on to what can only torture, and live all her despairs over. Women’s tears are their meat; men find the diet too salty and won’t take it.
Tell me anything I could do and I ‘ll do it; but talk I cannot – every word burns me. I admit every word you say of Emily. We were mistaken in letting her go to the Farnsworths, and be baited and tortured with ultra-Calvinism; but we were blind, as we mortals always are, – fated never to see what we should have done, till seeing is too late.
I am glad you have taken that child, – first, because it ‘s a good deed in itself, and, secondly, because it ‘s good for you. That it should have shed light on your relations to God is strictly philosophical. You have been trying to find your way to Him by definitions and by logic; one might as well make love to a lady by the first book of Euclid. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” That throb of protecting, all-embracing love which thrilled through your heart for this child taught you more of God than father’s whole library. “He that loveth not knoweth not God.” The old Bible is philosophical, and eminent for its common sense. Of course this child will make a fool of you. Never mind; the follies of love are remedial.
As to a system of education, it will be an amusement for you to get that up. Every human being likes to undertake to dictate for some other one. Go at it with good cheer. But, whatever you do, don’t teach her French. Give her a good Saxon-English education; and; if she needs a pasture-land of foreign languages let her learn Latin, and, more than that, Greek. Greek is the morning-land of languages, and has the freshness of early dew in it which will never exhale.
The French helped us in our late war: for that I thank them; but from French philosophy and French democracy, may the good Lord deliver us. They slew their Puritans in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the nation ever since has been without a moral sense. French literature is like an eagle with one broken wing. What the Puritans did for us English people, in bringing in civil liberty, they lacked. Our revolutions have been gradual. I predict that theirs will come by and by with an explosion.
Meanwhile, our young men who follow after French literature become rakes and profligates. Their first step in liberty is to repeal the ten commandments, especially the seventh. Therefore I consider a young woman in our day misses nothing who does not read French. Decorous French literature is stupid, and bright French literature is too wicked for anything. So let French alone.
She threatens to be pretty, does she? So much the worse for you and her. If she makes you too much trouble by and by, send her up to my academy, and I will drill her, and make a Spartan of her.
As to what you say about religion, and the ministry, and the schoolmaster, what can I say on this sheet of paper? Briefly then. No, I am not in any sense an unbeliever in the old Bible. I would as soon disbelieve my own mother. And I am in my nature a thorough Puritan. I am a Puritan as thoroughly as a hound is a hound, and a pointer a pointer, whose pedigree of unmixed blood can be traced for generations back. I feel within me the preaching instinct, just as the hound snuffs, and the pointer points; but as to the pulpit in these days, – well, thereby hangs a tale.
What should I preach, supposing I were a minister, as my father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather were before me? What they preached was true to them, was fitted for their times, was loyally and sincerely said, and of course did a world of good. But when I look over their sermons, I put an interrogation point to almost everything they say; and what was true to them is not true to me; and if I should speak out as honestly as they did what is true to me, the world would not understand or receive it, and I think it would do more harm than good. I believe I am thinking ahead of the present generation, and if I should undertake to push my thoughts I should only bother people, – just as one of my bright boys in the latter part of the algebra sometimes worries a new beginner with his advanced explanations.
Then again, our late Revolution has wrought a change in the ministry that will soon become more and more apparent. The time when ministers were noblemen by divine right, and reigned over their parishes by the cocked hat and gold-headed cane, is passing away. Dr. Lothrop, and Dr. Stern, and a few others, keep up the prestige, but that sort of thing is going by; and in the next generation the minister will be nothing but a citizen; his words will come without prestige, and be examined and sifted just like the words of any other citizen.
There is a race of ministers rising up who are fully adequate to meet this exigency; and these men are going to throw Calvinism down into the arena, and discuss every inch of it, hand to hand and knee to knee, with the common people; and we shall see what will come of this.
I, for my part, am not prepared to be a minister on these terms. Still, as I said, I have the born instinct of preaching; I am dictatorial by nature, and one of those who need constantly to see themselves reflected in other people’s eyes; and so I have got an academy here, up in the mountains, where I have a set of as clear, bright-eyed, bright-minded boys and girls as you would wish to see, and am in my way a pope. Well, I enjoy being a pope. It is one of my weaknesses.
As to society, we have the doctor, – a quiet little wrinkled old man, a profound disbeliever in medicines, who gives cream-of-tartar for ordinary cases, and camomile tea when the symptoms become desperate, and reads Greek for his own private amusement. Of course he does n’t get very rich, but here in the mountains one can afford to be poor. One of our sunsets is worth half a Boston Doctor’s income.
Then there ‘s the lawyer and squire, who draws the deeds, and makes the wills, and settles the quarrels; and the minister, who belongs to the new dispensation. He and I are sworn friends; he is my Fidus Achates. His garden joins mine, and when I am hoeing my corn he is hoeing his, and thence comes talk. As it gets more eager I jump the fence and hoe in his garden, or he does the same to mine. We have a strife on the matter of garden craft, who shall with most skill outwit our Mother Nature, and get cantelopes and melons under circumstances in which she never intended them to grow. This year I beat the parson, but I can see that he is secretly resolved to revenge himself on me when the sweet corn comes in. One evening every week we devote to reading the newspaper and settling the affairs of the country. We are both stanch Federalists, and make the walls ring with our denunciations of Jacobinism and Democracy. Once a month we have the Columbian Magazine and the foreign news from Europe, and then we have a great deal on our hands; we go over affairs, every country systematically, and settle them for the month. In general we are pretty well agreed, but now and then our lines of policy differ, and then we fight it out with good courage, not sparing the adjectives. The parson has a sly humor of his own, and our noisiest discussions generally end in a hearty laugh.
So much for the man and friend, – now for the clergyman. He is neither the sentimental, good parson of Goldsmith, nor the plaintive, ascetic parish priest of Romanism, nor the cocked hat of the theocracy, but a lively, acute, full-blooded man, who does his duty on equal terms among men. He is as single-hearted as an unblemished crystal, and in some matters sacredly simple; but yet not without a thrifty practical shrewdness, both in things temporal and things spiritual. He has an income of about two hundred and fifty dollars, with his wood. The farmers about here consider him as rolling in wealth, and I must say that, though the parsonage is absolutely bare of luxuries, one is not there often unpleasantly reminded that the parson is a poor man. He has that golden faculty of enjoying the work he does so utterly, and believing in it so entirely, that he can quite afford to be poor. He whose daily work is in itself a pleasure ought not to ask for riches: so I tell myself about my school-keeping, and him about his parish. He takes up the conversion of sinners as an immediate practical business, to be done and done now; he preaches in all the little hills and dales and hollows and brown school-houses for miles around, and chases his sinners up and down so zealously, that they have, on the whole, a lively time of it. He attacks drinking and all our small forms of country immorality with a vigor sufficient to demolish sins of double their size, and gives nobody even a chance to sleep in meeting. The good farmers around here, some of whom would like to serve Mammon comfortably, are rather in a quandary what to do. They never would bear the constant hounding which he gives them, and the cannonades he fires at their pet sins, and the way he chases them from pillar to post, and the merciless manner in which he breaks in upon their comfortable old habit of sleeping in meeting, were it not that they feel that they are paying him an enormous salary, and ought to get their money’s worth out of him, which they are certain they are doing most fully. Your Yankee has such a sense of values, that, if he pays a man to thrash him, he wants to be thrashed thoroughly.
My good friend preaches what they call New Divinity, by which I understand the Calvinism which our fathers left us, in the commencing process of disintegration. He is thoroughly and enthusiastically in earnest about it, and believes that the system, as far as Edwards and Hopkins have got it, is almost absolute truth; but, for all that, is cheerfully busy in making some little emendations and corrections, upon which he values himself, and which he thinks of the greatest consequence. What is to the credit of his heart is, that these emendations are generally in favor of some original-minded sheep who can’t be got into the sheep-fold without some alteration in the paling. In these cases I have generally noticed that he will loosen a rail or tear off a picket, and let the sheep in, it being his impression, after all, that the sheep are worth more than the sheep-fold.
In his zeal to catch certain shy sinners, he has more than once preached sermons which his brethren about here find fault with, as wandering from old standards; and it costs abundance of bustle and ingenuity to arrange his system so as to provide for exceptional cases, and yet to leave it exactly what it was before the alterations were made.
It is, I believe, an admitted thing among theologians, that, while theology must go on improving from age to age, it must also remain exactly what it was a hundred years ago.
The parson is my intimate friend, and it is easy for me to see that he has designs for the good of my soul, for which I sincerely love him. I can see that he is lying in wait for me patiently, as sometimes we do for trout, when we go out fishing together. He reconnoiters me, approaches me carefully, makes nice little logical traps to catch me in, and baits them with very innocent-looking questions, which I, being an old theological rat, skilfully avoid answering.
My friend’s forte is logic. Between you and me, if there is a golden calf worshipped in our sanctified New England, its name is Logic; and my good friend the parson burns incense before it with a most sacred innocence of intention. He believes that sinners can be converted by logic, and that, if he could once get me into one of these neat little traps aforesaid, the salvation of my soul would be assured. He has caught numbers of the shrewdest infidel foxes among the farmers around, and I must say that there is no trap for the Yankee like the logic-trap.
I must tell you a story about this that amused me greatly. You know everybody’s religious opinions are a matter of discussion in our neighborhood, and Ezekiel Scranton, a rich farmer who lives up on the hill, enjoys the celebrity of being an atheist, and rather values himself on the distinction. It takes a man of courage, you know, to live without a God, and Ezekiel gives himself out as a plucky dog, and able to hold the parson at bay. The parson, however, had privately prepared a string of questions which he was quite sure would drive Ezekiel into strait quarters. So he meets him the other day in the store.
“How’s this, Mr. Scranton? They tell me that you ‘re an atheist!”
“Well, I guess I be, Parson,” says Ezekiel, comfortably.
“Well, Ezekiel, let ‘s talk about this. You believe in your own existence, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What! Not believe in your own existence?”
“No, I don’t.” Then, after a moment, “Tell you what, Parson, ain’t a going to be twitched up by none o’ your syllogisms.”
Ezekiel was quite in the right of it; for I must do my friend the parson the justice to say, that, if you answer one of his simple-looking questions, you are gone. You must say B after saying A, and the whole alphabet after that.
For my part, I do not greatly disbelieve the main points of Calvinism. They strike me, as most hard and disagreeable things do, as quite likely to be true, and very much in accordance with a sensible man’s observation of facts as they stand in life and nature. My doubts come up, like bats, from a dark and dreadful cavern that underlies all religion, natural or revealed. They are of a class abhorrent to myself, smothering to my peace, imbittering to my life.
What must he be who is tempted to deny the very right of his Creator to the allegiance of his creatures? – who is tempted to feel that his own conscious existence is an inflicted curse, and that the whole race of men have been a set of neglected, suffering children, bred like fish-spawn on a thousand shores, by a Being who has never interested himself to care for their welfare, to prevent their degradation, to interfere with their cruelties to each other, as they have writhed and wrangled into life, through life, and out of life again? Does this look like being a Father in any sense in which we poor mortals think of fatherhood? After seeing nature, can we reason against any of the harshest conclusions of Calvinism, from the character of its Author?
Do we not consider a man unworthy the name of a good father who, from mere blind reproductive instinct, gives birth to children for whose improvement, virtue, and happiness he makes no provision? And yet does not this seem to be the way more than half of the human race actually comes into existence?
Then the laws of nature are an inextricable labyrinth, – puzzling, crossing, contradictory; and ages of wearisome study have as yet hardly made a portion of them clear enough for human comfort; and doctors and ministers go on torturing the body and the soul, with the most devout good intentions. And so forth, for there is no end to this sort of talk.
Now my friend the parson is the outgrowth of the New England theocracy, about the simplest, purest, and least objectionable state of society that the world ever saw. He has a good digestion, a healthy mind in a healthy body; he lives in a village where there is no pauperism, and hardly any crime, – where all the embarrassing, dreadful social problems and mysteries of life scarcely exist. But I, who have been tumbled up and down upon all the shores of earth, lived in India, China, and Polynesia, and seen the human race as they breed like vermin, in their filth and their contented degradation, – how can I think of applying the measurements of any theological system to a reality like this?
Now the parts of their system on which my dear friend the parson, and those of his school, specially value themselves, are their explanations of the reason why evil was permitted, and their vindications of the Divine character in view of it. They are specially earnest and alert in giving out their views here, and the parson has read to me more than one sermon, hoping to medicate what he supposes to be my secret wound. To me their various theories are, as my friend the doctor once said to me, “putting their bitter pill in a chestnut-burr; the pill is bad, – there is no help for that, – but the chestnut burr is impossible.”
It is incredible, the ease and cheerfulness with which a man in his study, who never had so much experience of suffering as even a toothache would give him, can arrange a system in which the everlasting torture of millions is casually admitted as an item. But I, to whom, seriously speaking, existence has been for much of my life nothing but suffering, and who always looked on my existence as a misfortune, must necessarily feel reasonings of this kind in a different way. This soul-ache, this throb of pain, that seems as if it were an actual anguish of the immaterial part itself, is a dreadful teacher, and gives a fearful sense of what the chances of an immortal existence might be, and what the responsibilities of originating such existence.
I am not one of the shallow sort, who think that everything for everybody must or ought to end with perfect bliss at death.; On the contrary, I do not see how anything but misery in eternal ages is to come from the outpouring into their abyss, of wrangling, undisciplined souls, who were a torment to themselves and others here, and who would make this world unbearable, were they not all swept off in their turn by the cobweb brush of Death.
So you see it ‘s all a hopeless muddle to me. Do I then believe nothing? Yes, I believe in Jesus Christ with all my heart, all my might. He stands before me the one hopeful phenomenon of history. I adore him as Divine, or all of the Divine that I can comprehend; and when he bids me say to God, “Our Father which art in heaven,” I smother all my doubts and say it. Those words are the rope thrown out to me, choking in the waters, – the voice from the awful silence. “God so loved the world that he gave his own Son.” I try to believe that he loves this world, but I have got only so far as “Help thou mine unbelief.”
Now, as to talking out all this to the parson, what good would it do? He is preaching well and working bravely. His preaching suits the state of advancement to which New England has come; and the process which he and ministers of his sort institute, of having every point in theology fully discussed by the common people, is not only a capital drill for their minds, but it will have its effect in the end on their theologies, and out of them all the truth of the future will arise.
So you see my position, and why I am niched here for life, as a schoolmaster. Come up and see me some time. I have a housekeeper who is as ugly as Hecate, but who reads Greek. She makes the best bread and cake in town, keeps my stockings mended and my shirt-ruffles plaited and my house like wax, and hears a class in Virgil every day, after she has “done her dinner-dishes.” I shall not fall in love with her, though. Come some time to see me, and bring your new acquisition.
Your brother,
JONATHAN ROSSITER.
I have given these two letters as the best means of showing to the reader the character of the family with whom my destiny and that of Tina became in future life curiously intertwisted.
Among the peculiarly English ideas which the Colonists brought to Massachusetts, which all the wear and tear of democracy have not been able to obliterate, was that of family. Family feeling, family pride, family hope and fear and desire, were, in my early day, strongly-marked traits. Genealogy was a thing at the tip of every person’s tongue, and in every person’s mind and it is among my most vivid remembrances, with what a solemn air of intense interest my mother, grandmother, Aunt Lois, and Aunt Keziah would enter into minute and discriminating particulars with regard to the stock, intermarriages, and family settlements of the different persons whose history was under their consideration. “Of a very respectable family,” was a sentence so often repeated at the old fireside that its influence went in part to make up my character. In our present days, when every man is emphatically the son of his own deeds, and nobody cares who his mother or grandmother or great-aunt was, there can scarcely be an understanding of this intense feeling of race and genealogy which pervaded simple colonial Massachusetts.
As I have often before intimated, the aristocracy of Massachusetts consisted of two classes, the magistracy and the ministry; and these two, in this theocratic State, played into each other’s hands continually. Next to the magistrate and the minister, in the esteem of that community, came the schoolmaster; for education might be said to be the ruling passion of the State.
The history of old New England families is marked by strong lights and deep shadows of personal peculiarity. We appeal to almost every old settler in New England towns, if he cannot remember stately old houses, inhabited by old families, whose histories might be brought to mind by that of Miss Mehitable and her brother. There was in them a sort of intellectual vigor, a ceaseless activity of thought, a passion for reading and study, and a quiet brooding on the very deepest problems of mental and moral philosophy. The characteristic of such families is the greatly disproportioned force of the internal, intellectual, and spiritual life to the external one. Hence come often morbid and diseased forms of manifestation. The threads which connect such persons with the real life of the outer world are so fine and so weak, that they are constantly breaking and giving way here and there, so that, in such races, oddities and eccentricities are come to be accepted only as badges of family character. Yet from stock of this character have come some of the most brilliant and effective minds in New England; and from them also have come hermits and recluses, – peculiar and exceptional people, – people delightful to the student of human nature, but excessively puzzling to the every-day judgment of mere conventional society.
The Rossiter family had been one of these. It traced its origin to the colony which came out with Governor Winthrop. The eldest Rossiter had been one of the ejected ministers, and came from a good substantial family of the English gentry. For several successive generations there had never been wanting a son in the Rossiter family to succeed to the pulpit of his father. The Rossiters had been leaned on by the magistrates and consulted by the governors, and their word had been law down to the time of Miss Mehitable’s father.
The tendency of the stately old families of New England to constitutional melancholy has been well set forth by Dr. Cotton Mather, that delightful old New England grandmother, whose nursery tales of its infancy and childhood may well be pondered by those who would fully understand its far-reaching maturity. As I have before remarked, I have high ideas of the wisdom of grandmothers, and therefore do our beloved gossip, Dr. Cotton Mather, the greatest possible compliment in granting him the title.
The ministers of the early colonial days of New England, though well-read, scholarly men, were more statesmen than theologians. Their minds ran upon the actual arrangements of society, which were in a great degree left in their hands, rather than on doctrinal and metaphysical subtilties. They took their confession of faith just as the great body of Protestant reformers left it, and acted upon it as a practical foundation, without much further discussion, until the time of President Edwards. He was the first man who began the disintegrating process of applying rationalistic methods to the accepted doctrines of religion, and he rationalized far more boldly and widely than any publishers of his biography have ever dared to let the world know. He sawed the great dam and let out the whole waters of discussion over all New England, and that free discussion led to all the shades of opinion of our modern days. Little as he thought it, yet Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were the last results of the current set in motion by Jonathan Edwards.
Miss Mehitable Rossiter’s father, during the latter part of his life, had dipped into this belt of New Divinity, and been excessively and immoderately interested in certain speculations concerning them. All the last part of his life had been consumed in writing a treatise in opposition to Dr. Stern, another rigorous old cocked-hat of his neighborhood, who maintained that the Deity had created sin on purpose, because it was a necessary means of the greatest good. Dr. Rossiter thought that evil had only been permitted, because it could be overruled for the greatest good; and each of them fought their battle as if the fate of the universe was to be decided by its results.
Considered as a man, in his terrestrial and mundane relations, Dr. Rossiter had that wholesome and homely interest in the things of this mortal life which was characteristic of the New England religious development. While the Puritans were intensely interested in the matters of the soul, they appeared to have a realizing sense of the fact that a soul without a body, in a material world, is at a great disadvantage in getting on. So they exhibited a sensible and commendable sense of the worth of property. They were especially addicted to lawful matrimony, and given to having large families of children; and, if one wife died, they straightway made up the loss by another, – a compliment to the virtues of the female sex which womankind appear always gratefully to appreciate.
Parson Rossiter had been three times married; first, to a strong-grained, homely, highly intellectual woman of one of the first Boston families, of whom Miss Mehitable Rossiter was the only daughter. The Doctor was said to be one of the handsomest men of his times. Nature, with her usual perversity in these matters, made Miss Mehitable an exact reproduction of all the homely traits of her mother, with the addition of the one or two physical defects of her handsome father. No woman with a heart in her bosom ever feels marked personal uncomeliness otherwise than as a great misfortune. Miss Mehitable bore it with a quaint and silent pride. Her brother Jonathan, next to herself in age, the son of a second and more comely wife, was far more gifted in personal points, though not equal to his father. Finally, late in life, after a somewhat prolonged widowhood, Parson Rossiter committed the folly of many men on the downhill side of life, that of marrying a woman considerably younger than himself. She was a pretty, nervous, excitable, sensitive creature, whom her homely elder daughter, Miss Mehitable, no less than her husband, petted and caressed on account of her beauty, as if she had been a child. She gave birth to two more children, a son named Theodore, and a daughter named Emily, and then died.
All the children had inherited from their father the peculiar constitutional tendency to depression of spirits of which we have spoken. In these last two, great beauty and brilliant powers of mind were united with such a singular sensitiveness and waywardness of nature as made the prospect for happiness in such a life as this, and under the strict requirements of New England society, very problematical.
Theodore ran through a brilliant course in college, notwithstanding constant difficulties with the college authorities, but either could not or would not apply himself to any of the accepted modes of getting bread and butter which a young man must adopt who means to live and get on with other men. He was full of disgusts, and repulsions, and dislikes; everything in life wounded and made him sore; he could or would do nothing reasonably or rationally with human beings, and, to deaden the sense of pain in existence, took to the use of opiates, which left him a miserable wreck on his sister’s hands, the father being dead.
Thus far the reader has the history of this family, and intimations of the younger and more beautiful one whose after fate was yet to be connected with ours.
Miss Mehitable Rossiter has always been to me a curious study. Singularly plain as she was in person, old, withered, and poor, she yet commanded respect, and even reverence, through the whole of a wide circle of acquaintance; for she was well known to some of the most considerable families in Boston, with whom, by her mother’s side, she was connected. The interest in her was somewhat like that in old lace, old china, and old cashmere shawls; which, though often excessively uncomely, and looking in the eyes of uninterested people like mere rubbish, are held by connoisseurs to be beyond all price.
Miss Mehitable herself had great pride of character, in the sense in which pride is an innocent weakness, if not a species of virtue. She had an innate sense that she belonged to a good family, – a perfectly quiet conviction that she was a Bradford by her mother’s side, and a Rossiter by her father’s side, come what might in this world. She was too well versed in the duties of good blood not to be always polite and considerate to the last degree to all well-meaning common people, for she felt the noblesse oblige as much as if she had been a duchess. And, for that matter, in the circles of Oldtown everything that Miss Mehitable did and said had a certain weight, quite apart from that of her really fine mental powers. It was the weight of past generations, of the whole Colony of Massachusetts; all the sermons of five generations of ministers were in it, which to a God-fearing community is a great deal.
But in her quaint, uncomely body was lodged, not only a most active and even masculine mind, but a heart capable of those passionate extremes of devotion which belong to the purely feminine side of woman. She was capable of a romantic excess of affection, of an extravagance of hero-worship, which, had she been personally beautiful, might perhaps have made her the heroine of some poem of the heart. It was among the quietly accepted sorrows of her life, that for her no such romance was possible.
Men always admired her as they admired other men, and talked to her as they talked with each other. Many, during the course of her life, had formed friendships with her, which were mere relations of comradeship, but which never touched the inner sphere of the heart. That heart, so warm, so tender, and so true, she kept, with a sort of conscious shame, hidden far behind the intrenchments of her intellect. With an instinctive fear of ridicule, she scarcely ever spoke a tender word, and generally veiled a soft emotion under some quaint phrase of drollery. She seemed forever to feel the strange contrast between the burning, romantic heart and the dry and withered exterior.
Like many other women who have borne the curse of marked plainness, Miss Mehitable put an extravagant valuation on personal beauty. Her younger sister, whose loveliness was uncommon, was a sort of petted idol to her, during all her childish years. At the time of her father’s death, she would gladly have retained her with her, but, like many other women who are strong on the intellectual side of their nature, Miss Mehitable had a sort of weakness and helplessness in relation to mere material matters, which rendered her, in the eyes of the family, unfit to be trusted with the bringing up of a bright and willful child. In fact, as regarded all the details of daily life, Miss Mehitable was the servant of Polly, who had united the offices of servant-of-all-work, housekeeper, nurse, and general factotum in old Parson Rossiter’s family, and between whom and the little willful Emily grievous quarrels had often arisen. For all these reasons, and because Mrs. Farnsworth of the neighboring town of Adams was the only sister of the child’s mother, was herself childless, and in prosperous worldly circumstances, it would have been deemed a flying in the face of Providence to refuse her, when she declared her intention of adopting her sister’s child as her own.
Of what came of this adoption I shall have occasion to speak hereafter.
CHAPTER XX.
MISS ASPHYXIA GOES IN PURSUIT, AND MY GRANDMOTHER GIVES HER VIEWS ON EDUCATION
WHEN Miss Asphyxia Smith found that both children really had disappeared from Needmore so completely that no trace of them remained, to do her justice, she felt some solicitude to know what had become of them. There had not been wanting instances in those early days, when so large a part of Massachusetts was unbroken forest, of children who had wandered away into the woods and starved to death; and Miss Asphyxia was by no means an ill-wisher to any child, nor so utterly without bowels as to contemplate such a possibility without some anxiety.
Not that she in the least doubted the wisdom and perfect propriety of her own mode of administration, which she had full faith would in the end have made a “smart girl” of her little charge. “That ‘ere little limb did n’t know what was good for herself,” she said to Sol, over their evening meal of cold potatoes and boiled beef.
Sol looked round-eyed and stupid, and squared his shoulders, as he always did when this topic was introduced. He suggested, “You don’t s’pose they could ‘a’ wandered off to the mountains where Bijah Peters’ boy got lost?”
There was a sly satisfaction in observing the anxious, brooding expression which settled down over Miss Asphyxia’s dusky features at the suggestion.
“When they found that ‘ere boy,” continued Sol, “he was all worn to skin and bone; he ‘d kep’ himself a week on berries and ches’nuts and sich, but a boy can’t be kep’ on what a squirrel can.”
“Well,” said Miss Asphyxia, “I know one thing; it ain’t my fault if they do starve to death. Silly critters, they was; well-provided for, good home, good clothes, plenty and plenty to eat. I ‘m sure you can bear witness ef I ever stinted that ‘ere child in her victuals.”
“I ‘ll bear you out on that ‘ere,” said Sol.
“And well you may; I ‘d scorn not to give any one in my house a good bellyful,” quoth Miss Asphyxia.
“That ‘s true enough,” said Sol; “everybody ‘ll know that.”
“Well, it ‘s jest total depravity,” said Miss Asphyxia. “How can any one help bein’ convinced o’ that, that has anything to do with young uns?”
But the subject preyed upon the severe virgin’s mind; and she so often mentioned it, with that roughening of her scrubby eyebrows which betokened care, that Sol’s unctuous good-nature was somewhat moved, and he dropped at last a hint of having fallen on a trace of the children. He might as well have put the tips of his finger into a rolling-mill. Miss Asphyxia was so wide-awake and resolute about anything that she wanted to know, that Sol at last was obliged to finish with informing her that he had heard of the children as having been taken in at Deacon Badger’s, over in Oldtown. Sol internally chuckled, as he gave the information, when he saw how immediately Miss Asphyxia bristled with wrath. Even the best of human beings have felt the transient flash when anxiety for the fate of a child supposed to be in fatal danger gives place to unrestrained vexation at the little culprit who has given such a fright.
“Well, I shall jest tackle up and go over and bring them children home agin, at least the girl. Brother, he says he don’t want the boy; he wa’n’t nothin’ but a plague; but I ‘m one o’ them persons that when I undertake a thing I mean to go through with it. Now I undertook to raise that ‘ere girl, and I mean to. She need n’t think she ‘s goin’ to come round me with any o’ her shines, going over to Deacon Badger’s with lying stories about me. Mis’ Deacon Badger need n’t think she ‘s goin’ to hold up her head over me, if she is a deacon’s wife and I ain’t a perfessor of religion. I guess I could be a perfessor if I chose to do as some folks do. That ‘s what I told Mis’ Deacon Badger once when she asked me why I did n’t jine the church. ‘mis’ Badger,’ says I, ‘perfessin ain’t possessin, and I ‘d ruther stand outside the church than go on as some people do inside on ‘t.'”
Therefore it was that a day or two after, when Miss Mehitable was making a quiet call at my grandmother’s, and the party, consisting of my grandmother, Aunt Lois, and Aunt Keziah, were peacefully rattling their knitting-needles, while Tina was playing by the river-side, the child’s senses were suddenly paralyzed by the sight of Miss Asphyxia driving with a strong arm over the bridge near my grandmother’s.
In a moment the little one’s heart was in her throat. She had such an awful faith in Miss Asphyxia’s power to carry through anything she undertook, that all her courage withered at once at sight of her. She ran in at the back door, perfectly pale with fright, and seized hold imploringly of Miss Mehitable’s gown.
“O she ‘s coming! she ‘s coming after me. Don’t let her get me!” she exclaimed.
“What ‘s the matter now?” said my grandmother. “What ails the child?”
Miss Mehitable lifted her in her lap, and began a soothing course of inquiry; but the child clung to her, only reiterating, “Don’t let her have me! she is dreadful! Don’t!”
“As true as you live, mother,” said Aunt Lois, who had tripped to the window, “there ‘s Miss Asphyxia Smith hitching her horse at our picket fence.”
“She is?” said my grandmother, squaring her shoulders, and setting herself in fine martial order. “Well, let her come in; she ‘s welcome, I ‘m sure. I ‘d like to talk to that woman! It ‘s a free country, and everybody’s got to speak their minds,” – and my grandmother rattled her needles with great energy.
In a moment more Miss Asphyxia entered. She was arrayed in her best Sunday clothes, and made the neighborly salutations with an air of grim composure. There was silence, and a sense of something brooding in the air, as there often is before the outburst of a storm.
Finally, Miss Asphyxia opened the trenches. “I come over Mis’ Badger, to see about a gal o’ mine that has run away.” Here her eyes rested severely on Tina.
“Run away!” quoth my grandmother, briskly; “and good reason she should run away; all I wonder at is that you have the face to come to a Christian family after her, – that ‘s all. Well, she is provided for, and you ‘ve no call to be inquiring anything about her. So I advise you to go home, and attend to your own affairs, and leave children to folks that know how to manage them better than you do.”
“I expected this, Mis’ Badger,” said Miss Asphyxia, in a towering wrath, “but I ‘d have you to know that I ain’t a person that ‘s going to take sa’ace from no one. No deacon nor deacon’s wife, nor perfesser of religion, ‘s a goin’ to turn up their noses at me! I can hold up my head with any on ’em, and I think your religion might teach you better than takin’ up stories agin your neighbors, as a little lyin’, artful hussy ‘ll tell.” Here there was a severe glance at Miss Tina, who quailed before it, and clung to Miss Mehitable’s gown. “Yes, indeed, you may hide your head,” she continued, “but you can’t git away from the truth; not when I ‘m around to bring you out. Yes, Mis’ Badger, I defy her to say I hain’t done well by her, if she says the truth; for I say it now, this blessed minute, and would say it on my dyin’ bed, and you can ask Sol ef that ‘ere child hain’t had everything pervided for her that a child could want, – a good clean bed and plenty o’ bedclothes, and good whole clothes to wear, and her belly full o’ good victuals every day; an’ me a teachin’ and a trainin’ on her, enough to wear the very life out o’ me, – for I always hated young uns, and this ere’s a perfect little limb as I ever did see. Why, what did she think I was a goin’ to do for her? I did n’t make a lady on her; to be sure I did n’t: I was a fetchin’ on her up to work for her livin’ as I was fetched up. I had n’t nothin’ more ‘n she; an’ just look at me now; there ain’t many folks that can turn off as much work in a day as I can, though I say it that should n’t. And I ‘ve got as pretty a piece of property, and as well seen to, as most any round; and all I ‘ve got – house and lands – is my own arnin’s, honest, so there! There ‘s folks, I s’pose, that thinks they can afford to keep tavern for all sorts of stragglers and runaways, Injun and white. I never was one o’ them sort of folks, an’ I should jest like to know ef those folks is able, – that ‘s all. I guess if ‘counts was added up, my ‘counts would square up better ‘n theirn.”
Here Mis Asphyxia elevated her nose and sniffed over my grandmother’s cap-border in a very contemptuous manner, and the cap-border bristled defiantly, but undismayed, back again.
“Come now, Mis’ Badger, have it out; I ain’t afraid of you! I ‘d just like to have you tell me what I could ha’ done more nor better for this child.”
“Done!” quoth my grandmother, with a pop like a roasted chestnut bursting out of the fire. “Why, you ‘ve done what you ‘d no business to. You ‘d no business to take a child at all; you have n’t got a grain of motherliness in you. Why, look at natur’, that might teach you that more than meat and drink and clothes is wanted for a child. Hens brood their chickens, and keep ‘m warm under their wings; and cows lick their calves and cosset ’em, and it ‘s a mean shame that folks will take ’em away from them. There ‘s our old cat will lie an hour on the kitchen floor and let her kittens lug and pull at her, atween sleeping and waking, just to keep ’em warm and comfortable, you know. ‘T ain’t just feedin’ and clothin’ back and belly that ‘s all; it ‘s broodin’ that young creeturs wants; and you hain’t got a bit of broodin’ in you; your heart ‘s as hard as the nether mill-stone. Sovereign grace may soften it some day, but nothin’ else can; you ‘re a poor, old, hard, worldly woman, Miss Asphyxia Smith: that’ what you are! If Divine grace could have broken in upon you, and given you a heart to love the child, you might have brought her up, ’cause you are a smart woman, and an honest one; that nobody denies.”
Here Miss Mehitable took up the conversation, surveying Miss Asphyxia with that air of curious attention with which one studies a human being entirely out of the line of one’s personal experience. Miss Mehitable was, as we have shown, in every thread of her being and education an aristocrat, and had for Miss Asphyxia that polite, easy tolerance which a sense of undoubted superiority gives, united with a shrewd pleasure in the study of a new and peculiar variety of the human species.
“My good Miss Smith,” she observed, in conciliatory tones, “by your own account you must have had a great deal of trouble with this child. Now I propose for the future to relieve you of it altogether. I do not think you would ever succeed in making as efficient a person as yourself of her. It strikes me,” she added, with a humorous twinkle of her eye, “that there are radical differences of nature, which would prevent her growing up like yourself. I don’t doubt you conscientiously intended to do your duty by her, and I beg you to believe that you need have no further trouble with her.”
“Goodness gracious knows,” said Miss Asphyxia, “the child ain’t much to fight over, – she was nothin’ but a plague; and I ‘d rather have done all she did any day, than to ‘a’ had her round under my feet. I hate young uns, anyway.”
“Then why, my good woman, do you object to parting with her?”
“Who said I did object? I don’t care nothin’ about parting with her; all is, when I begin a thing I like to go through with it.”
“But if it is n’t worth going through with,” said Miss Mehitable, “it ‘s as well to leave it, is it not?”
“And I ‘d got her clothes made, – not that they ‘re worth so very much, but then they ‘re worth just what they are worth, anyway,” said Miss Asphyxia.
Here Tina made a sudden impulsive dart from Miss Mehitable’s lap, and ran out of the back door, and over to her new home, and up into the closet of the chamber where was hanging the new suit of homespun in which Miss Asphyxia had arrayed her. She took it down and rolled the articles all together in a tight bundle, which she secured with a string, and, before the party in the kitchen had ceased wondering at her flight, suddenly reappeared, with flushed cheeks and dilated eyes, and tossed the bundle into Miss Asphyxia’s lap. “There ‘s every bit you ever gave me,” she said; “I don’t want to keep a single thing.”
“My dear, is that the proper way to speak?” said Miss Mehitable, reprovingly; but Tina saw my grandmother’s broad shoulders joggling with a secret laugh, and discerned twinkling lines in the reproving gravity which Miss Mehitable tried to assume. She felt pretty sure of her ground by this time.
“Well, it ‘s no use talkin’,” said Miss Asphyxia, rising. “If folks think they ‘re able to bring up a beggar child like a lady it ‘s their lookout and not mine. I was n’t aware,” she added, with severe irony, “that Parson Rossiter left so much of an estate that you could afford to bring up other folks’ children in silks and satins.”
“Our estate is n’t much,” said Miss Mehitable, good-naturedly “but we shall make the best of it.”
“Well, now, you just mark my words, Miss Rossiter,” said Miss Asphyxia, “that ‘ere child will never grow up a smart woman with your bringin’ up; she ‘ll jest run right over you, and you ‘ll let her have her head in everything. I see jest how ‘t ‘ll be; I don’t want nobody to tell me.”
“I dare say you are quite right, Miss Smith,” said Miss Mehitable; “I have n’t the slightest opinion of my own powers in that line; but she may be happy with me, for all that.”
“Happy?” repeated Miss Asphyxia, with an odd intonation, as if she were repeating a sound of something imperfectly comprehended, and altogether out of her line. “O, well, if folks is goin’ to begin to talk about that, I hain’t got time; it don’t seem to me that that ‘s what this ‘ere world’s for.”
“What is it for, then?” said Miss Mehitable, who felt an odd sort of interest in the human specimen before her.
“Meant for? Why, for hard work, I s’pose; that ‘s all I ever found it for. Talk about coddling! it ‘s little we get o’ that, the way the Lord fixes things in this world, dear knows. He ‘s pretty up and down with us, by all they tell us. You must take things right off, when they ‘re goin’. Ef you don’t, so much the worse for you; they won’t wait for you. Lose an hour in the morning, and you may chase it till ye drop down, you ‘ll never catch it! That ‘s the way things goes, and I should like to know who’s a going to stop to quiddle with young uns? ‘T ain’t me, that ‘s certain; so, as there ‘s no more to be made by this ‘ere talk, I may’s well be goin’. You ‘re welcome to the young un, ef you say so; I jest wanted you to know that what I begun I ‘d ‘a’ gone through with, ef you had n’t stepped in; and I did n’t want no reflections on my good name, neither, for I had my ideas of what ‘s right, and can have ’em yet, I s’pose, if Mis’ Badger does think I ‘ve got a heart of stone. I should like to know how I ‘m to have any other when I ain’t elected, and I don’t see as I am, or likely to be, and I don’t see neither why I ain’t full as good as a good many that be.”
“Well, well, Miss Smith,” said Miss Mehitable, “we can’t any of us enter into those mysteries, but I respect your motives, and would be happy to see you any time you will call, and I ‘m in hopes to teach this little girl to treat you properly,” she said, taking the child’s hand.
“Likely story,” said Miss Asphyxia, with a short, hard laugh. “She ‘ll get ahead o’ you, you ‘ll see that: but I don’t hold malice, so good morning,” – and Miss Asphyxia suddenly and promptly departed, and was soon seen driving away at a violent pace.
“Upon my word, that woman is n’t so bad, now,” said Miss Mehitable, looking after her, while she leisurely inhaled a pinch of snuff.
“O, I ‘m so glad you did n’t let her have me!” said Tina.
“To think of a creature so dry and dreary, so devoid even of the conception of enjoyment in life,” said Miss Mehitable, “hurrying through life without a moment’s rest, – without even the capacity of resting if she could, – and all for what?”
“For my part, mother, I think you were down too hard on her,” said Aunt Lois.
“Not a bit,” said my grandmother, cheerily. “Such folks ought to be talked to; it may set her to thinking, and do her good. I ‘ve had it on my heart to give that woman a piece of my mind ever since the children came here. Come here, my poor little dear,” said she to Tina, with one of her impulsive outgushes of motherliness. “I know you must be hungry by this time; come into the buttery, and see what I ‘ve got for you.”
Now there was an indiscreet championship of Miss Tina, a backing of her in her treatment of Miss Asphyxia, in this overflow, which Aunt Lois severely disapproved, and which struck Miss Mehitable as not being the very best thing to enforce her own teachings of decorum and propriety.
The small young lady tilted into the buttery after my grandmother, with the flushed cheeks and triumphant air of a victor and they heard her little tongue running with the full assurances of having a sympathetic listener.
“Now mother will spoil that child, if you let her,” said Aunt Lois. “She ‘s the greatest hand to spoil children; she always lets ’em have what they ask for. I expect Susy’s boys ‘ll be raising Cain round the house; they would if it was n’t for me. They have only to follow mother into that buttery, and out they come with great slices of bread and butter, any time of day, – yes, and even sugar on it, if you ‘ll believe me.”
“And does ’em good, too,” said my grandmother, who reappeared from the buttery, with Miss Tina tilting and dancing before her, with a confirmatory slice of bread and butter and sugar in her hand. “Tastes good, don’t it, dear?” said she, giving the child a jovial chuck under her little chin.
“Yes, indeed,” said Miss Tina; “I ‘d like to have old nasty Sphyxy see me now.”
“Tut, tut! my dear,” said grandmother; “good little girls don’t call names”; – but at the same time the venerable gentlewoman nodded and winked in the most open manner across the curly head at Miss Mehitable, and her portly shoulders shook with laughter, so that the young culprit was not in the least abashed at the reproof.
“Mother, I do wonder at you!” said Aunt Lois, indignantly.
“Never you mind, Lois; I guess I ‘ve brought up more children than ever you did,” said my grandmother, cheerily. “There, my little dear,” she added, “you may run down to your play now, and never fear that anybody ‘s going to get you.
Miss Tina, upon this hint, gladly ran off to finish an architectural structure of pebbles by the river, which she was busy in building at the time when the awful vision of Miss Asphyxia appeared; and my grandmother returned to her buttery to attend to a few matters which had been left unfinished in the morning’s work.
“It is a very serious responsibility,” said Miss Mehitable, when she had knit awhile in silence, “at my time of life, to charge one’s self with the education of a child. One treats one’s self to a child as one buys a picture or a flower, but the child will not remain a picture or a flower, and then comes the awful question, what it may grow to be, and what share you may have in determining its future.”
“Well, old Parson Moore used to preach the best sermons on family government that ever I heard,” said Aunt Lois. “He said you must begin in the very beginning and break a child’s will, – short off, – nothing to be done without that. I remember he whipped little Titus, his first son, off and on, nearly a whole day, to make him pick up a pocket-handkerchief.”
Here the edifying conversation was interrupted by a loud explosive expletive from the buttery, which showed that my grandmother was listening with anything but approbation.
“FIDDLESTICKS!” quoth she.
“And did he succeed in entirely subduing the child’s will in that one effort?” said Miss Mehitable, musingly.
“Well, no. Mrs. Moore told me he had to have twenty or thirty just such spells before he brought him under; but he persevered, and he broke his will at last, – at least so far that he always minded when his father was round.”
“FIDDLESTICKS!” quoth my grandmother, in a yet louder and more explosive tone.
“Mrs. Badger does not appear to sympathize with your views,” said Miss Mehitable.
“O, mother? Of course she don’t; she has her own ways and doings, and she won’t hear to reason,” said Aunt Lois.