A Case of Organic Affection.
by Fitz Hugh Ludlow (uncredited).
Originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.17 #102 (Nov 1858).
I.
It was glorious June at the summer resort of Old Babyland. Bathing the world about that placid place in rose, and gold, and luxurious shadow; thrilling the ear with bee murmurs and the sighs of grain swept by the gales afield; beaming in the ripples of the close-by lake, with a smile that said, "Come lie on my breast—be kissed by me!" flooding with a peaceful yet earnest sense of delicious life, all men, women, boys, girls, babies, trees—universal being, that dwelt in the fragrant tranquillity of Old Babyland!
Oh, that was a beautiful place! Good people who go to the springs—surf-floundering public whom I love—ye who do all summer the same things ye have been doing all winter, in hotter places and with less room to do them in, perennial six-times-a-day dressers, bore-martyred, bill-distressed, mosquito-bitten, sulphur-drenched souls—envy me! For Old Babyland is a nook among the mountains, far, far up on the very top of Sullivan County, where fashion cometh not, but home-happiness goeth with you—where nature has never been dethroned, and civilization sits from June to September at her feet, drinking in her eloquent music, learning her wise, sweet lessons with a joyful meekness. To the wide piazzas of the Mansion House, close by the singing ripples and the thickets of laurel-rose, among the highland birches, and beeches, and evergreens, solaced by the birds and the echoes of Kaw-na-ong-ga, "The lake that ever is silver-white," come the fathers, the mothers, the young men and maidens, and the little children, to live their too short three months of hearty simplicity, loving one another, each truthful with each, gathering cheek-roses and eyedew, and growing strong for the labors that must meet them again on the autumn verge of Old Babyland. To be there, oh my friends, was like taking a run out into Paradise for a short vacation from natural depravity.
Old Babyland was a surprise to me—altogether. All day I had been jolted in an ancient stage over a road described by an Irish friend of mine as being half-way up the second hill before you were down the first—along all sorts of highly dangerous and picturesque precipices—through tan bark peelings, all overflowed by black tarns; where the great dead trees stood like monster, unsheeted ghosts, shivering, ankle deep, in the chill waters of Styx, as they waited for a Charon who would not come. And of a sudden, at sundown, we burst without warning upon Old Babyland; right out of the dense, dark pines, as one might say, pop! or that other word of traditional celerity, the name of the late John Robinson.
It was like feeling in the pocket of a queer, old, cast-off pair of pantaloons, and pulling out a gold eagle. To an author, that would be a delightful surprise; but not so great a one as this exquisite place, with all its specialities of lake and cloud, beautiful, natural women, manly men, wild, little, happy children, and hearty welcome.
On the day after I arrived there, the Old Babylanders had "a celebration." I forget what it was for, but no matter; they had them almost all the time, and on the slightest provocation. Sometimes somebody's birthday was the auspicious occasion; then again it was a new wharf for the pleasure-boats, which, by the unbounded munificence and sleepless industry of somebody else among the gentlemen, had been erected for the Old Babylanders, and must be consecrated with speeches, feasting, and song. The beauty of Old Babyland was this peculiarity—that we all looked through rose-colored, convex spectacles at every little pleasant thing, till it seemed big and beautiful enough to be commemorated by perpetual libations. I verily believe that if Mr. W. Dubbleyew, one of the most distinguished of our community, had bought a new pair of boots without keeping it very private, we should all of us have taken him out with us six miles to a grove behind a potato patch, and made him put them on, in connection with a congratulatory address, an original poem, and six songs composed for the occasion to popular airs. After which, we should probably have had a corn-roast and some lemonade.
The day of this particular celebration opened clear and fair. Kaw-na-ong-ga was more silvery than ever. The breeze was a delicious southeastern. All nature appeared ready for the picnic with us.
That is the difference between town and country happinesses. Be jolly in the woods, and all out-doors will seem going on your good time with you. But who ever expects Stewart's, or Tiffany's, or Haughwout's to show any exhilaration at the fact that he is going to hear Gazzaniga in "Linda," or to Mrs. Feudejoie's grand fancy ball?
Amidst these sympathetic surroundings I frisked along, the gayest of the gay. An author getting up his susceptibility to the picturesque, washing the mussed soul he had worn through all the winter galas of town in the great bath of forest ether, blue-ing it in that sky which is warranted to take out all sallowness.
There were two detachments to our picnic party that day—No. 1, the Oldsters; No. 2, the Youngsters—a state of things which seldom occurred at Old Babyland, where we were all children for the summer, and wrinkles dropped out of their significancy as territorial boundaries of life, becoming only ideal lines of latitude and longitude. But to-day the children took it into their little heads to picnic by themselves—to see how it would seem to have their own particular jollity; and, as an eminent favor, they made me the only exception among the big ones, and took me along because I could tell mouse-stories.
In a little; cramped, baby hand, with the letters snugging up grotesquely against one another like rows of hastily-stacked muskets, the sagest and most executive of my juveniles had prepared the following programme for the day:
PROGRAMME—(A Fac-simile).
1. Getting our things on and Walking there
2 fixing the Table and entertaining each other
3. A Mouse-story, from Mr. Charles Washington Bird.
4 A harty laugh.
5. A song from Mr. C. w. Bird
6. Oats peas beans and Barley grows
7th, Getting ready to go home
8. Going Home.
II.
I had finished my mouse-story, and was answering as fast as I could all sorts of questions as to what became of the little fellow afterward, and whether his tail, which had been cut off by the trap, ever grew out again, when I saw a very pretty face peering out with a look of intense interest from a clump of rhododendrons which concealed the rest of its possessor. The children caught a glimpse of it at the same time, and jumped up from their seats on the dead pine-leaves, crying, "Clear out—go away—you're grown up!"
Elsie Landon—that was the interloper's name—emerged from her screen, and lifting her little white hands in pleading gesture, said,
"Please—please—let me stay here with you. I like it so much—and I am not very big."
That last was true. It was equally true that she was not very little. And truer yet, if there can be any comparative of that adjective, that had you been asked whether she was child or woman, you would not have known where to put her. Whether she was a child with one of those wonderful body-outstripping minds, or a woman with a great unsoiled heart that had not forgotten its snatches of cradle talk with the angels, I don't know to this day.
But as she stood there—a visible fact to be disposed of by the rigid youngster-judges—I doubt whether any such philosophic analysis much occupied their minds. She looked so very young just then, as she stood pleading, that the instinct rather than the logic of the children said, "Let her stay!" So she staid.
Her age, as we count years, was eighteen. Her form, the freshly blossomed woman; her height, five feet; her complexion, marble struck through with rose flush. Pygmalion's statue wife wore the same when she first woke in his arms to know she was a woman. Her hair, dark, waving, glossy brown, drooped low behind. Eyes of the same dye, large, long lashed, and thoughtful. Her nose just aquiline enough not to be Grecian; her mouth, rose-buds that kissed each other, but altogether too varying from the unrestrained wood-laugh to the grave look of puzzle when she said, "Why! do you think so?" to be measured like the ruins in a guide-book. I told you of her little white hands—shall I speak of the twinkling wondrous little feet? The ferns that she flitted over were kissed by them and did not tell. Nor will I. Though a little foot, and an ankle that melts into it out of its own smallness, are not the least gifts of a beautiful girl. And Elsie Landon was beautiful.
Now I hope you will know why I thought, as the girl sat leaning her round, shining little head against the trunk of the birch whose root served her as chair, that she was an object very well worth being looked at.
"What in the world put it in your brain to come here among the babies?" said I. "The grown-up people are all dying to hear you sing; and there are at least six very good-looking young gentlemen among their party, any one of whom would give his best trout rod for the pleasure of showing you some new walk through the woods, or a blossomy bank that was particularly retired and romantic. Yet here you are with the children!"
"I was a child myself not a day ago," answered Elsie Landon; "and, do you know, I believe I never got quite over it. At home, in New York, when they want me to come down stairs and entertain company, just as like as not I will be sailing paper-boats, and making believe the pictures on the bottom of the bowl are a sea-buried city, just like the pretty Norman story. I sometimes blow bubbles too—though you mustn't tell any one. I know it is dreadfully improper."
It was very natural that, under the circumstances, I should have done just as I did. The tremendous yawning chasm between twenty-five and eighteen made me feel very paternal. The children were not noticing they had come to that part of their programme marked as the "harty laugh," and needed no assistance from us; so I took the little white hand in mine as a favorite gray-headed uncle might have done, kept it there, caressing it tenderly, and said,
"Yes, Elsie, you need an older, an experienced person, who has seen a great deal of the world, to advise you, to teach you—somebody like—like me—for instance." Whereupon I felt, and perhaps looked, a hundred years old.
"Oh, that is the very thing!" cried Elsie, clapping her hands; "the very thing I have wanted, oh, so long! And may I always come to you when I don't know what to do? When papa keeps on smoking and says, 'Just as you please, dear,' and mamma never stops knitting endless Shetland shawls, but answers, 'Ask your father'—may I come then?"
Exactly, that was the very time. And I would always tell her the infallibly right thing to do or say. I, the dispassionate and reliable Delphi, aged a quarter of a century. It was settled. And it would be splendid.
Just then all the children got through their hearty laugh and began to cry out, looking over the shoulder of little Julia Post, the infant manager who held the programme, "A song—a song, from Mr. C. Washington Bird!"
I sing a very good baritone—have taken a prominent part in several private operas—why was it, then, that my voice faltered in the cadenzas of the frog that would a wooing go without any regard to the peculiar preferences of his mother? Probably because I was somewhat oppressed by the responsibility of having become the counselor of Old Babyland's prettiest girl on the first day of my acquaintance with her.
When I had concluded the last trill—dwelling with delightful effect upon the "Hey, says Anthony Roly!"—we all stood up in a ring upon the pine leaves and had "Oats peas beans." Oh, such frank exhibitions of preference! such guileless selections of the best loved, without fear of outsiders! Why in the world must children alone possess this charming gift of genuine loving and free confession? I believe that, when the golden age comes back again, the poor, young, honest book-keeper down town, the author who has only brains, will come up to dance "Oats peas beans" with their best beloved in Madison Square, and manfully call the young ladies into the ring to chant the child-marriage lay together with a maturer meaning; while the retired brokers and brokeresses, who own the maids, now no longer frowning, will gild the choral scene with ratifying smiles. But that is kept for the by-and-by.
At last I found myself standing in the middle—an object to be kissed and wedded. The little girl who had called me in just grazed my lips with her own and then ran away. After which, with one shout, my young Old Babylanders cried that I must call for some one.
"Little Mary Post!" No—Mr. Bird's mustache would scratch her. "Lizzie Lincoln, then!" She had been kissed enough for one day. I declare—it was a regular conspiracy—all the little girls excused themselves, and, before I knew it, I had named the whole ring, clear around to Elsie Landon. As I came to her I stopped and hesitated—she stood there, blushing at the prospective possibility of being kissed, and looked the woman to such a degree that, had her application been made then, the children would have denied her leave to stay, as being utterly too grown up. Really, for a minute I didn't know what to do. But, boys and girls, all the ring down to the tiniest, began to clamor for my choice, crying, "Take her! take her!" and that decided me to regard it as child-play, and do as I would have done fifteen years before. I clasped the timid white hand in my own, and led Elsie into the middle, saying, "Are you willing? It is all play, you know—besides, I am to be your monitor, and it pleases them so."
Pleases them!—venerable hypocrite cf one score and five! Yet a downright fib would have been hardly too much depravity to risk for such a chance.
"Open the ring
And take her in,
And kiss her when you've got her in!"
So our lips met. Well was it that the children laughed and thought it good sport—well was it that that laughter woke me up from my dream of ravishment—or, so far as Mr. Charles Washington Bird had any thing to say upon the subject, we should have been kissing there even unto this day—a monument as enduring as Lot's wife, and several billion times as pleasant.
For as the honey-bee dallies with the larkspur, and flirts about the spires, and just bends the tall spear of the golden rod, but, coming to the purple-stamened lily, absolutely lavishes himself thereon, and dies singing within her wondrous sweet abode, with a sense of long-sought fitness found at last, so did I—(who in my wanderings had kissed Illyrian girls under their plane-trees between moonlight and the Adrian Sea, maidens of Madrid through the jalousies whose blissfully tormenting bars let in nothing else but starlight; yea, let me speak the truth though my ears be boxed—one or two of my own sweet countrywomen also)—kiss Elsie Landon. For those lips of hers—I could swear it—were an untasted fountain, kept pure and nectarine for me to come to them; and I had come. My only grief was that I had ever kissed any one before.
Very rosy, and much prettier thereby, Miss Landon stood on the outside of the ring again, and the little holder of the programme declared the fact that the glass of this day's celebration had now been drained to the dregs numbers 7 and 8—"Getting ready to go home" and "Going home"—which performances time accomplished.
That evening I sat on the broad piazza of the Old Babyland Mansion House, smoking my plantation. I was buried in the deepest thought. The laugh of fox-and-geese playing children thrilled at my very elbow—the gay promenaders marched hither and thither behind me, singing as they went. And from far off on the lake came the shrill cry of rowers trying the cove and headland echoes. I noticed none of them. Suddenly came a little footfall close by my chair, and a pathetic young face, half in shadow, half in moonlight, bent over my shoulder,
"Are you sick to-night, Mr. Bird?"
I started, and saw Elsie.
"No, I am not sick, thank you, but asking myself questions. And having been brought up to be dutiful to my superiors, I have the habit of being so to myself, and always listen very profoundly till I have a right to answer. But this question I can't answer myself—perhaps you can. Let me get you a chair—here—sit down, please."
"Oh, thank you! Now for your catechism."
"Very well—here it is. I kissed you to-day—you were not angry?"
"No—that is—yes—no—I mean no; but I am afraid papa and mamma would think it was very improper."
"Very well answered for No. 1. Now for No. 2. Were you ever kissed before by any gentleman since you have been a woman?"
"What a funny question on the part of saucy Mr. Bird!"
"Never mind; answer it, unless you have great objections. I ask because I very much want to know."
"I was always as much a woman as I am now; except, perhaps, that there was a time when it would not have made me blush to be kissed. Since then, nobody ever did it but papa, till you. Does that do?"
"Perfectly; and I am very much obliged to you."
"But why did you want to know?"
"I hope, certainly, to tell you some time. Just now, shall we walk with the rest?"
"If you please, I should like to."
My own questioning was at an end. I knew what I had suspected, and I resolved that, come what might, so far as a kind Providence and Mr. C.W. Bird could co-operate harmoniously, nobody thenceforth but I should kiss Elsie Landon. The resolution was quickly taken, and strengthened by an hour's walk thereafter, in which her little soft hand was drawn more closely than utility demanded against the lid of the heart which kept the resolution in.
III.
The father of Elsie Landon was a mighty queer old gentleman. One of those men whose constitution is so mixed with antagonist elements that you wonder how they ever manage to get a unanimous vote of their faculties upon any action of life. He was rich, very rich; such people often are; but how they succeed in business is a problem. His manner was as vacillating as this: He would suddenly snatch up a chair, pound it down in four or five places, look at his watch, whistle, and finally conclude to stand up. Elsie's improprieties he frequently treated by saying, "Horrible! really I seem to be in a bad dream! Well, I shall have to confine you to your room; go, reflect. Why, bless me! here are the horses at the door. Elsie, wouldn't you like to ride 'round the lake, my love?"
So he was in every thing. At that time I used to think, however, that the prevailing tendency of the creature was bad—savage—if any thing prevailing could be asserted of such a character. For he made Elsie cry half a dozen times a day, by blurting out upon her in his fierce way, or thwarting some little child-woman taste of hers, whose delicacy he could not appreciate; and many a time did I wish that Solomon had left some maxim appropriate to the regulation of paternal relations as well as filial, like "Spare the rod, and spoil the papa." In which case I should have liked to be Elsie's proxy.
I was in love with his daughter. I loved her as child—I loved her as woman—and that love was all the broader and deeper for attaching itself to all the multitudinous lights and shades of her nature in both aspects. But then, the old gentleman was worth—nobody knew how much; and I—nobody knew how little. Simply a good-looking gentleman with brains, who had published.
I tell you, the question how I should ever get her was a puzzle. It looked at me at dinner from the Landon family, across the castor; it lay like a handful of toast-crumbs in my bed at night; it accompanied me, like a bad prism, in the rowing parties at night, and sallowed the moonlight. And still the lips that I had kissed in "oats peas beans"—that in some clime where the stars blessed lovers I would kiss for evermore—seemed growing, day by day, further off from my possession, airier and yet airier possibilities.
I was beginning to think favorably of the bottom of Lake Kaw-na-ong-ga as a permanent residence.
At last something happened. It was about a week after the celebration—the celebration in particular, for the Old Babylanders had got up a dozen since that—that I rowed across the lake, entirely by myself, to a secluded spot among the evergreens of the further bank, known among our pleasantly grandiloquent community as Lion's Den. Had the name been a true indication of its character, I should have hastened there with more cheerful alacrity. I felt as if a large fellow, of the tawny species, who had not been at dinner for three days, would be grateful company in my present state of mind.
One of those many light-draught Old Babyland boats, which a child could manage alone, was there before me, beached on the bright sand under the spruces. And on the stern-seat lay—as our venerable and jolly Old Babyland commodore used to say, in advertising waifs at the breakfast-table—"a splendid lady's gipsy hat, for which an owner was wanted."
I entered Lion's Den. No lion was there—but Elsie Landon, thrown down in abandon among the ferns, and crying bitterly.
For a moment I doubted whether to beat retreat as an intruder, or stay as a comforter. But the young girl heard my step, and as she looked up her face of startled hopelessness decided me. I drew near her, and in a gentle voice said, "Miss Landon—Elsie—have you forgotten the counselor to whom you were to come in trouble?"
Her great brown eyes looked up questioningly through their cloud, and she answered, "I wonder if you could help me?"
"To any extent, dear child. Try me and see!"
"Very well, then. You are the trouble." I started.
"Yes. The children have been talking all over the house about our—our—'oats peas beans' doings, and they have come to papa's ears. Oh! he went on dreadfully, I can tell you! He said it was the most shockingly improper thing he had ever heard of. In New York State he said that no ceremony was necessary to marry people; the least confession that you took each other was enough; and in this disgraceful country—so he talked—it was whiz! bang! and you were married before your own eyes without knowing it. Then said he, 'Farewell forever—depart, undutiful child—leave my gray hairs in shame, and be his—the penniless one's. You are married to him already!' Oh dear, dear, it is dreadful!" And she wept again as if her heart would break.
"Is it dreadful, dear little Elsie, to be married to me?"
"Yes, indeed, in that way which is so improper, and to any one who don't love you, but was in play. Oh, oh! do you know law? Am I your wife?"
"No, you are not now. But if you never are I shall not have any."
"What, Mr. Bird!"
"Only this. That I kissed you last Thursday. It was the first time you had been kissed since—well, since you were less a child than you are now, in some respects. At that time I made myself two promises. One was, that you should never kiss any body else; another was, that I never would kiss any girl but you. If I can't keep the first, then I will the last. Elsie Landon, you are all I have in the world—do you love me? Which promise shall I keep?"
"Keep the first." So faintly and timidly was it spoken, that the words seemed to fall on their very threshold, driven back from a portal closed by my own lips. And the kiss was long—for it was in loneliness, and how sweet those things are!
My inner Daniel was at peace with his lions.
"Let us be married this very day; let us run away to do it; let it be a clandestine match."
These were the very words I spoke, in spite of long precedent, in the teeth of gray authority, and notwithstanding the saw, old as the hills, that runaway matches are unhappy ones; for I never yet saw the man or the woman wretched in such a marriage that would not have been equally so in any; and I have been groomsman at two affairs of that sort which have turned out admirably—deliciously. You may depend upon it, no man ever induces a girl to run away with him unless they both love one another so much that they are, before Heaven, man and wife already—barring the case of some hypocritical he-lover in search of money, when it is the fault of the family that he wasn't kicked out in the earliest stage of the proceedings, before matters became serious.
But I did not mean to preach a sermon. I will only say that, tearfully but not reluctantly, Elsie consented to flee with me from her domineering father and the mother who was his serf. Both loved, but, thank Heaven, not like me!
IV.
Our going was by night. Twelve o'clock saw us behind the bays that for nearly an hour had been waiting us on the hill beyond the Mansion House. A word to the driver, and we were on our way to the railroad—a way twenty-five miles long.
Nestling against the heart for which she had given all things, Elsie rode snugly wrapped in my great traveling cloak, undistinguishable from me, as an emblem of our oneness which was shortly to be. And I called to mind how many times I had stood on station platforms to see the night trains come in, and beholding through the windows strong man-forms, each with his best loved so deliciously ensconced in his bosom of protection, had said in bitterness, "When will this be for me? Ah, Heaven! shall I always journey by night and alone?" And now—thing most unlooked for!—it was for me.
Do you ask if, through the clatter of fast hurrying hoofs, the forest sighings, and the beating of our close-pressed hearts, something like a cold, sharp voice was not audible, asking that bad question, "How will you live, sweet fools?" Perhaps so, but it was answered reverently and thus: "He who made love will care for the loving." We did not permit that first consciousness of mutual possession to be a thing of pangs.
The sky was on the hither edge of its morning gray when we came to the railroad. There were still two hours before the next train; we devoted them to two of the necessary vital functions, breakfast and getting married. But, for fear of surprise, we did the last first; and astonishing a very worthy country clergyman from his pillow, persuaded him to perform the ceremony, in a state bordering on somnambulism. At six o'clock a.m., while the old Babylanders were still as unconscious, if not as innocent, of marrying and giving in marriage as the angels, my wife, by the sanctities of oats peas beans and our own love, became so by the permission of the Rev. Gideon Plum.
You would have laughed to see the little house we began life in in New York. Just this side of Central Park (I write from Clinton Place) there is a vast territory, you know, which haut ton doth not inhabit. Fifth Avenue comes up to it, close by the Reservoir, splendid with freestone and wonderful cornices almost to the very brink, then stops abruptly, scents it with its rose-and-heliotrope-educated nose, and goes no further. Or, if it may be said to go further, it is from that instant a ruined spendthrift and loafer, out at its elbows, malchaussé, its last vest of green turf at pawn to the goats, and altogether nasty and melancholy. It is a tract of country to which Civilization has never pushed with her voice of "Get out of that!" to the pigs and the shanties. Don't turn up your nose again, Fifth Avenue!—we didn't live there. I was going on to say that three blocks this side of that, and out of its miasma, on the west side of town, there lies a middle land whose beauties as a place of residence, I venture to say, not a dozen of those people know who are waiting in some big house down town, sneered at as not at all "chic," till they can afford to live in a tall narrow one on the Avenue, which is. Willows and elms of age unregistered hang over it; it has a cabinet-picture glimpse of the North River on one side; there is cool grass there that would throw Landor into ecstasies; and though it be not mid-city, it shares meekly the Corporation benedictions of Croton and gas.
It was a little bit of a stone-faced brick house, left ready furnished by a family whose parent had been elevated by a sudden rise in his professional butter and cheese, and who thereupon moved toward the centre of things to live in style. It was cheap, retired—wore honey-suckles, Wistaria and Madeira vines from the eaves down to the last post of the step-railing—and it was home.
In her blue morning dress, at the head of our first breakfast-table, Elsie was a sight to admire. The nervous, bird-like way in which her little white hand flitted from tea-urn to milk-pitcher—the executive gravity with which she measured lump after lump with the tongs "to make it just right"—the matronly air with which she counseled "our girl" to put less soda in the next batch of muffins, were altogether such exhilarating experiences, that I jumped up and kissed her twice when she handed me my tea-cup. I couldn't make up my mind what it was like that I had seen somewhere until toward the close of breakfast, when she said, "Charlie!"
"Well, dear?"
"Doesn't this remind you of an old Babyland celebration?"
V.
All men in New York have to endure, as well as their wives, that marital hiatus called going down town. I especially, for I was a hard-working sub-editor on $1500 a year. While I was gone Elsie amused herself by studying Mrs. Child's "Wife's Kitchen Collaborator," playing on the piano (fortunately there was one), crotcheting and embroidering rainbow-hued surprises for my birthday, and writing to let me know she was well and lonely, by Boyd's express. Our choicest books we saved to read together in the evening.
As one of her notes has to do with the story, I publish by permission the following extract from it:
"One of the queerest old organ-grinders I ever saw has just gone away from under the window. I sat behind the blinds for five minutes listening to him play that Neapolitan air of yours that I love so much, 'Io te voglio ben' assajo;' and then I threw the blinds open and told him, in pretty good Italian, to wait till I ran and got my purse. He didn't seem to understand it at all; but when I came back, what do you think the impudent fellow was doing? He had actually set down his organ, and was standing on top of it looking in at the parlor window and taking a leisurely survey of all the furniture! I can tell you, dear, that I was scared! I said 'Go away, bad one!' in all the languages I knew but English, and in a loud, deep voice, but he didn't budge. Then I said it in English, but it seemed to make him feel so badly that I was sorry I did. A tear rolled down his cheek, he pulled out a very fine cambric handkerchief (do you think he stole it?), but put it back again in a hurry and wiped his eyes with an old Kossuth hat. Then he took a cigar out of his vest, lit it with a match, shouldered his hand-organ, and went away. The children next door wanted him to play, but he wouldn't. I guess he is crazy."
I took that view of the subject myself, and did not feel at all of the opinion that he would be there again. But lest he should be troublesome any more, I feed the policeman whose beat was close by to look after him. For an evening or two after that, I heard, on coming home to my little wife, no more complaints of the impertinent music-miller. I believe it was on the third or fourth evening that Elsie told me he had been there again.
"What! passed the policeman?"
"No, he came from the other direction this time. Before I knew it, as I sat sewing, there came a ring at the bell. Joanna was busy down stairs, so I went to the door. There he stood, grizzlier and more ragged than before, and I was so frightened that he only had time to stick this old torn paper in my hand before I locked the door in his face. Here it is, read it."
On the little dirty scrap were these words:
"Not bi angri, ladi! In mi contri hav littel girl moch same to yeu. I du yeu no bad—let luk at yeu and plai tu yeu—that al I want."
"Well," continued Elsie, "what do you think I did?"
"Why, let him stand outside and play, I suppose, love."
"No, I opened the door—he was still standing there—and told the poor old fellow to come in. He sat here in the parlor and played several tunes for me. It wasn't a very good organ, but it made him happy to turn it for me, so I let him do it. He looked very tired too, so I had Joanna make him a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I couldn't help thinking all the time how very improper poor dear papa would have thought it if he had been here. By-the-way, Charlie, love, do you think he and mamma can have got our letter, asking to be forgiven?"
"I don't know, Elsie dear," I replied, somewhat sadly; "at any rate, I'm sure they haven't answered it. But what else about the grinder? I'm afraid you've put yourself in danger. Some of those men are great impostors and burglars."
"I hope not; do you think so? Well, I'll never do it again then. After he had played out all his airs, he began to cry again; but I said, 'Don't—please don't—poor man!' and handed him a quarter. Then he stopped crying, and laughed—and, would you believe it?—actually laid the money on his thumb nail, and very quietly filliped it out into the middle of the room. I was puzzled whether to be provoked or to laugh myself. But he must be crazy."
Just then my eye caught a brown shred lying on the carpet under the sofa.
"Where did he sit, Elsie?"
"Over there—on the sofa—but why do you ask?"
"Because he's left one of his dirty rags behind him," said I, getting up and going to remove it on the point of my penknife.
I stooped down, picked up the offending fragment, but before I rang for Joanna to put it in the fire, was prompted by a morbid impulse to look at it, and see exactly how dingy the organ-grinder really was. I held it up to the gas.
"Why! What—what—really? Bless my soul!"
It was a $100 bill on the Goodascash Bank!
I looked at my wife, and my wife looked at me. She, with a face of childlike puzzle—I, with one of gathering wrath. At last I broke forth. "Oh, the rascally counterfeiter! Thank Heaven, we found it before he could inform on us—get a policeman to search the house—and divert pursuit from himself to us by laying the crime on our shoulders!"
"But he seemed such a kind-hearted old man; perhaps he dropped it, husband dear, and it may be a great loss to him."
"What! An organ-grinder go around dropping $100 bills? I rather think not, my precious Elsie! I will tear it up and get danger out of the way."
"Hadn't you better see whether it's good first, Charlie?"
"Dear me, no! But—well, on the whole, yes." So I put it in my pocket, determining to ascertain on the morrow, though I had little doubt as to the character of the note.
Going down town in the morning I found the equivocal paper perfectly genuine, and coming back, left it with my wife to restore to the grinder should he return again, at the same time entreating her under no pretext to let him enter the house. What impostors those Italians were, pretending to be so poor, and having $100 bills to lose!
VI.
The next pretty event I have to chronicle, is my having come home one night to find one of the parlor window panes smashed. Elsie had been crying. She said the organ man had been there again. She showed him the bill, and signed to him that it was his. He answered, in pretty distinct English, "No such thing!"—then tore off a strip of the lining of his coat—tied up a young paving-stone in it—fired it through the sash, and left her, laughing at his brutal exploit as if it were good fun. Poor little timid wife! she had been so agitated as not to dare venture down stairs till I came.
A sweet state of things met us in the parlor. Broken glass all over the floor—fragments of putty on the chair seats by the window—and that confounded crazy Italian's big sling reposing on the carpet under the chandelier. I picked it up, untied it to throw out the stone, and with that last what do you think tumbled into my hand? "Why, another $100 bill, very likely."
Wrong for once in your life, dear Sir—a $500 one.
Words can not measure our stupefaction.
At last I remembered that I was twenty-five and Elsie eighteen, and the revival of that old thought of grave responsibility made me feel that it was my duty to be calm, collected, and to say something.
I drew my little wife upon my knee, and said,
"Darling Elsie, do you recollect how on the night of our drive from Old Babyland to our wedding, I said to you, thinking of the future, 'He who made love will care for the loving!' See how unexpectedly those words are fulfilled! One good, simple-hearted man who did his duty by the brook Cherith had ravens for his marketers. The same goodness blesses us, only changing the fashion of its agents. We did what our hearts told us to do in marrying when we loved. And now, though father and mother have forsaken us—lo, an organ-grinder is our raven!"
I wound up this pretty little sermon by adding,
"But an organ-grinder who throws away $600 is a very dangerous person to be at large. He is probably an exile—some friend of Mazzini, who has had his fortune saved by friends in Italy—and now that he has come into possession of it, has gone mad with the too sudden favor of fortune. If he comes again, we will have him arrested and take care of him."
Elsie agreed with me, that as he had hitherto observed pretty marked intervals in coming, it would be a good plan for me to get furlough, if I could, from the office of the semi-weekly Lightning-Rod of Freedom, and stay at home to watch with her on the following Tuesday, when, if we had calculated our comet's path correctly, he would be around again.
I obtained the leave easily, from the senior editor of that widely-read sheet, and rejoiced in my first week-day at home since marriage. How sweet do those habitual ten-hours-a-day divorces make the Sunday, the holiday of any kind, to the married man who loves his wife as he did his sweet-heart! I would not, in this world, pass all day with my wife the year round, however independent I might be of labor and down town, for it is necessary to be somewhat with active men to keep robust the manliness that women love. Yet the Sunday—the Christmas—the chance rest once in a while—oh! that has ever been heaven to me for my wife's sake! May it always be!
We spent our hours together preciously in planning for the future—getting better acquainted with each other's secret preferences—reading and waiting for the organist. And in the course of that day I discovered the only thing that the childlike heart of my wife had ever kept from me. In spite of all her love to me she had cried (just a little, she said) every day that I had been gone, to think of the father and the mother that were dear to her, in spite of the hard unappreciation of the one, and the weak-minded laissez-faire of the other. Besides, she had not received a line in answer to her tender letter of explanation and entreaty; which fact savored somewhat, it must be acknowledged, of parental obduracy.
The day wore on without a sign of our lyrical itinerant. So we gave him up, and at sunset sat down to tea, in that little doll's dining-room of ours at the end of the hall. The herald-breeze of twilight beginning to hasten from the great unstained sea, ran thrilling freshly through the big willow in front, and we left the street door open to welcome its coming. There was no danger in that, for I could look clear into the court-yard from where I sat, and see any intruder who might enter.
"I am afraid," said Elsie, tenderly, as, after we pushed back our chairs, she came and sat upon my lap, "that you think I am sorry I ran away with you. I ain't—no, not one bit. But it would be so charming if they could come—just as they might in a dream—papa and mamma, and say it was not improper after all."
Then, not the conscience cries, but the woman. All the better; the tears of that fountain are more easily dried. "Let us trust and pray, darling, and hope for the best. Heh! Halloa! Oh, bless my soul! As I live, the organ-grinder! Better late than never!"
Right into my talk with Elsie did he burst with the "Rat-catcher's Daughter." Not outdoors either; for while my wife, sitting on my lap, had shut out the street-view, he had stolen through unperceived, and when I rushed into the parlor, there he stood, impudent varlet! resting his stridulous engine on the piano, and pumping away at it with utter frigidity.
"Out with you, rascal! Quick!" was all I could command myself sufficiently to say in a voice of fierce indignation. The only reply made by this venerable offender was to deposit his organ on the floor, rush toward my wife, seize her in his ragged arms, and, O Heavens! give her a kiss that resounded like the ventilating of a bottle of Sillery.
For a moment I seemed in a nightmare, and then, quick as thought, I had him by the collar, and was dragging him to the door. He got a purchase on the lintel, whirled himself around on his heel, caught me likewise in his embrace, and buried his apostolic beard in my bosom. Really there was no doing any thing with such an affectionate villain!
For fear of contagion from this lazzarone I disengaged myself, and getting in front of my wife, let him have his own way for a little while, to see how far he would go. The first thing was to kick his organ over on its beam-ends. The next was to plunge his hands into two cavities in his breeches which seemed to extend downward as far as the knee-pans, and return them perfectly splendescent with gold and silver coin of all denominations. Then he rained this treasure around profusely—on the pier-table, the carpet, the sofas, the chairs.
"Moonstruck Rothschild! bottomless aureous abyss on a craze! desist instantly, or Bloomingdale awaits thee!"
No answer again save acts. As one plucks a fowl off came the apostolic beard. Down went the old Kossuth hat upon the carpet. One jerk, and lo, no more mustache!
And lo, yet more, like an erratic beam of sunlight, dawned upon us—Elsie's father! In another moment she lay upon his breast. And the only words they both spoke were, "Forgive all the past!"
"Children," said the old gentleman, in a broken voice, when he had commanded himself sufficiently to wipe away together the tears and the solution of sienna which Italicized him—"Children, I have been a very bad father to Elsie—"
"No, no! Oh, don't talk so, dear papa!"
"Silence! how dare you?—that is to say, you are mistaken, my lamb; I have been very bad—very bad. But I have learned a lesson I shall never forget. Bird, be kinder to her than I have been. Understand her; don't stick your big man-finger into the clock-work of her heart and try to alter the spring. I did—that made her run down, or run away, which is the same thing. Elsie, your mother wants to see you again. You can bring Charles with you if you like. Live with us—solace our declining years. Oh! by-the-way, have you got any thing in the house to eat? That cursed organ makes a man devilish hungry! I'll stay to tea—let me see; no, I won't!—yes, yes, on the whole, I will. Two lumps to the cup, Elsie! Charles, you dog, aren't you ashamed, not to ask me if you might, instead of sneaking off in a two-horse wagon? Aren't we having fine weather, though?"
I recommend that house on the upper west side of town to any who want a home cheap: it is to let, as we live at old Mr. Landon's. That is, except during the summer months, which we always spend at the lake side in Old Babyland. Besides "we," the first person plural, there also now goes with us the third person singular—and a very singular little boy he is, like his grandpa. Though only four years old, he has the most eccentric proclivity toward playing "oats peas beans," and kissing the little girls on more private occasions. Where he gets the propensity I am sure I can't tell.
Finally, I recommend to all my young friends who wish to be well-off in this life, to marry a girl whose papa is likely to have an organic affection.