Originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.19 #111 (Aug 1859).
Sunset poured its gracious splendors over sea and sky, fading out of glory into gloom, and one star after another throbbed into its place, and panted with light; but still we all lingered among the rocks on the shore—a gay and picturesque party from the great hotel on the hill above us. Ellen Bond, her delicate aquiline features and smooth brown hair relieved against the black rock where she leaned her beautiful head, the belle of Newton and of Hill Beach; Mrs. Ford, a demure little widow, much more gay and girlish than any of her girl-friends when she chose to forsake her rôle, but just now as pensive as her piquant face permitted, and apparently thinking of the deceased Solomon Ford, who died five years ago in the odor of million-ty (forgive the new coinage, words will sometimes grow of necessity); Miss Hall, a dark and proper maiden lady, as prim, and orthodox, and canonical, and rubrical, and conservative as—she liked to be; Marian Hall, a young lady; Gratia Henningsen, my father's ward and an orphan, a tall girl, with a varying face, dressed in dark gray, now solely distinguished from the shore and stones by the drapery of a carnation-colored shawl, that clung to her pliant figure and caressingly defined its unconscious grace of position. She completed the ladies' part of our circle; and here and there were scattered Steele the artist, jovial and genial; Edwin Vernon the clergyman, delicate, refined, rich, and extremely punctilious; Frank Ledyard, a dolorous, hairy little man, who wrote poetry as a profession, and talked weak wickedness and strong sentiment, just now attitudinizing on the rocks at Ellen Bond's feet, and gazing up into her fair and subtle face like an entranced spaniel; Mr. Gaius Clark, a very excellent young man from New York, a merchant; Mr. Griffing, a senior of Yale's last fruitage; and I, a do-nothing just then, son of John Hamilton Fanning, M.C. from Massachusetts, wearing my father's name and spending his plentiful money, otherwise noway like him—clear-headed, strong, steady, magnanimous man that he was! These were the men. Steele sat facing us all, swinging his feet from a perch on top of a great rock; Mr. Vernon sat near Gratia, looking at her over his white neckcloth with an air at once benign and uneasy; Mr. Griffing talked mitigated misanthropy, high art, and didactic literature to Marian Hall, interspersing frequent quotations from Mrs. Hemans; Mr. Gaius Clark sucked the top of his cane, now and then removing it to utter an assenting word, all the responses that Miss Hall's fluent moralities and theses required in what she called conversation; and I sat at Mrs. Ford's feet, keeping sympathetic silence with her pensiveness, not that I was mourning for Solomon Ford, if she was. So we sat, growing slowly visible in a calm light that grew brighter and colder in the east till at length the round disc of the full moon lifted itself with the slow motion of perfect power across the heaving sea-line, and the ocean was paved with sudden weltering silver to our feet. Every body became silent for an instant, the half-articulate waves whispered to each other with a rushing hush among the stones, and a low wind rustled the sea-grass on the shore behind us.
"Oh, isn't that—! That is!"
We were indebted to Miss Marian for the characteristic remark. Ben Steele looked stony for one second, and then began to whistle "Villikens and his Dinah."
"Oh!" ejaculated Ellen Bond.
"Why don't you swear?" drawled the poet.
She looked at him as if she could have—at him; and answered with a tone of strict propriety:
"It isn't right to swear, Mr. Ledyard."
"I'm sure you wanted to do it, Miss Bond, at that profane creature Steele; why, was it any worse to say than to think? Now I swear to relieve my mind; it lets the feeling express itself and go, instead of working about and making me uncomfortable."
"Then I should have been profane as well as Mr. Steele, and somebody else would have sworn at me, and the evil would have spread."
"Evil always spreads," sententiously remarked Mr. Vernon.
"Nothing could be evil from such lips as Miss Bond's!" languished in the deepest drawl from Ledyard.
Gratia Henningsen's attitude changed, as if she stirred because a thought stirred her; she always moved so, her soul swayed her perpetually, like a bee in a flower.
"Mr. Steele!" said she, in her deep, uncertain contralto voice, "why are you turning your back to the moon?"
"Because I had rather look at the group before me, Miss Gratia."
"Saul among the prophets!" Mrs. Ford serenely sniffed. "Mr. Steele complimentary?"
"Not at all, Madame, to some of you over there! don't you know that moonlight is a traitor? Come here, Fanning; the rest of you sit still!" I obeyed.
"Now look at them," said he, in a voice inaudible to them, "moonlight brings out the spiritual expression of a face like no other light; you are a face-reader; take your book up and interpret."
"Not aloud!" said I.
"Oh no!" laughed Mr. Steele, "unless you are in a hurry to lose all your friends."
I looked at Ellen Bond; the delicate outline was sharp, the eyelids cold and critical, wanting color, the cheek was unimpressible as that of a statue, and in the lines of her usually reserved and defiant lips now lurked a very spider-line of cunning, unscrupulous yet weak; and her round chin betrayed in its unshadowed curve traits of pure earthiness. I did not like her. Frank Ledyard looked like a low style of pirate; such as miss of being peaceful tailors by reason of a weak ferocity that unfits them for any thing very good or intensely bad.
Miss Hall's dark face deepened into the likeness of Bloody Mary's morose and seamed visage; Gaius Clark, with his peaked beard, only wanted the proper adjuncts to have stood for John Rodgers in the primer, smirking with Puritanism and paternity, over his Geneva band and the fagots.
Marian Hall became a doll, washed of its charming pinkness. Mr. Griffing needed nothing but reducing and condensing to have made just such a Noah as lives, blandly wooden and grim, in the Ark of toy-shops.
Mrs. Ford's retroussé nose and full lips lost their widowed meekness and developed the sauciness of a grisette, sparkling in her inquisitive eyes, and coquetting in the play of her pretty foot under the floating folds of her aerial black dress. Mr. Vernon should have lain back on the rocks and folded his hands on his breast, a mild, chalk saint, ready for worshipers, got up regardless of æsthetic expense; conscientious, cautions, but chalk—altogether hopeless of achieving or inspiring any Prometheus.
Gratia changed most of all; her face grew quite different from its daylight mask, pale, variable, and irregular; every shadow brought out a depth of expression singularly unusual in a woman's face; the defined lips were full of tender power; the eyes brilliant with clear darkness, as amethysts sometimes are; the broad brow, outlined with heavy bands of hair, carried a legend of strength and energy; and the fine moulding of the lower face told of swift intellect and purity, the look of a moth that eyes the burning lamp through a window-pane, with eager diamond eyes and beating wings; ardent but unscathed worshiper of Isis unapproachable. She was something more than beautiful.
"What is it that the moon plays traitor in, Mr. Steele?" said Mrs. Ford.
"In all your faces, Madame," he answered. "I've been entertaining Fanning with the aspect of your characters instead of your faces!"
"My gracious!" giggled Miss Marian, "what a dreadful idea!"
"Never mind, my dear," curtly remarked the widow, "we're not to be looked at in that way, on the best authority; don't you know men think that
"'Women have no characters at all.'"
"You misquote, Madame," interposed Mr. Steele; "it is, 'Most women,' and most women are not here to-night—only a few."
The little equivoque puzzled Mrs. Ford into a moment's silence, and before she recovered Mr. Vernon remarked, clerically, "Women have done too much for the Church to have Pope's slander accepted."
"Women have done too much for their children for a woman's son to have written it!" indignantly seconded Gratia. Steele took off his hat; I knew why, for I knew his mother, and what she had done for him.
"Pope was a poor, crooked devil!" condescendingly remarked Mr. Ledyard. "Women didn't like him; so he revenged himself by abusing them."
Gratia's face grew cold, but she did not speak.
"There is nothing true in this world," said Mr. Griffing, in a bland aside to Marian Hall. "Men are swayed by such paltry motives that the hiss or laughter of the crowd are alike worthless."
Marian looked puzzled and pityingly on this child of affliction who suffered for want of sympathy; Gratia Henningsen laughed; the quiet of her face broke into one flash of amusement that lit even those "intricate eyes," but subsided before any one but Steele and I perceived it. I could feel him shaking in concert as I leaned against his knee.
"He might have had the respect of women, if not their affection," grimly satirized Miss Hall.
"Hang respect!" heartily groaned Mr. Ledyard.
"Amen!" said Ben Steele, with a broad grin.
"Really, gentlemen—" began Miss Hall, in a lady-like rage.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Hall, with all my heart," said Steele, irresistibly honest and good-humored. "I never can hear Ledyard make a fervent remark about any thing without adding my benediction to it. It's such a sign of grace in the fellow!"
"Look here, Steele," began Ledyard. "Never mind though, old fellow, now; wait a bit. Miss Hall, I beg your pardon, too. The fact is, I do sometimes speak my mind before ladies, from my extreme impulsiveness of nature—" ("Impulsiveness of ginger-pop!" growled Steele, under his breath, parenthetically)— "when I ought not to. Understand me to apologize for the manner, not the matter, of my remark. The poet must ever prefer sympathy to admiration; the shelter of the valley to the cold glory of the mountain-peak. Love is life; respect is—"
"Sunday clothes," interrupted Steele.
Every body but Miss Hall and Gaius Clark laughed. Miss Hall coldly said the evening was growing damp, and presently rose to return to the hotel. Marian, of course, followed; Mr. Clark and Mr. Griffing attending. I could hear the sharp nasal tones of the latter youth spouting Carlyle and Byron as he receded along the beach, facing the south wind, that brought his voice back to us; and in the intervals a pretty little giggle, or an interjectional "How perfectly sweet!" "Isn't that beautiful?" from Miss Marian.
We sat still for a moment after they went. Mr. Vernon fidgeted a little, and cleared his throat twice, but did not speak. Ellen Bond's keen eye visited him and fathomed his intention. For her own reasons she broke the silence with her clear, fluent tones, tinged with artfully innocent wonder:
"Would you really like better to be loved than respected, Mr. Ledyard?"
"I really like brandy better than skim-milk, Miss Bond."
Gratia turned her face and looked at him.
"Why don't he curl right up?" said Steele, softly, to me, seeing that I saw and understood the look.
"I don't know how a woman can love a man she does not respect," said Ellen Bond, with a thoughtful and vestal expression.
"Wh-ew!" muttered Steele, to himself.
Mr. Vernon turned his approving face toward Miss Bond, whose dropped eyes did not seem to perceive him, and beamed upon her with a very sufficient and admiring regard.
"Indeed you apprehend the question from the right point, Miss Bond. Your feminine instinct quite silences our men's arguments. You have vindicated your sex nobly."
"Oh! Mr. Vernon," replied she, with the perfectest mask of sweet modesty, "all women think as I do on that subject, I am sure."
"Do you think so, Miss Henningsen?" said Steele, in a very audible voice.
"No," said Gratia, simply.
Mr. Vernon looked shocked. He had been evidently much interested in her, as, indeed, every body was who ever met her. Ellen Bond knew it; and she had fixed on Mr. Vernon for her own prey, waiting patiently for a time to spread her net not in vain. I believe she knew Gratia did not care for him; whether it would have made any difference if she had, I can not tell. Miss Bond was not cruel naturally, but she was not magnanimous—few women are—and she saw no good reason why she should give up a good match to any body else, merely because they wanted it; nor, to do her justice, had she feeling enough herself to understand what might have been the pangs of a sensitive woman in losing even such aman as Mr. Vernon. Now she spoke with a nice tone of polite and virtuous indignation:
"Gratia! You could not love a bad man, I am sure."
"I think it's very possible I could and should," said Gratia, with calm honesty.
Mr. Vernon coughed—he really sighed, but was ashamed of it; so he coughed.
"Well, I am sure I never could," said Miss Bond. "The very idea is revolting. I don't believe you could either, Gratia."
Mr. Vernon smiled with deeper admiration upon the charity that dropped so balm-like from those beautiful lips.
"But I could," said Gratia, in a very steady and self-reliant voice. "I don't think love depends on respect, or even admiration."
"Then you think it quite an irrational impulse, Miss Henningsen?" said Mr. Vernon.
"Nonsense!" interrupted Mrs. Ford, till just now unaccountably silent. "Have not you lived long enough, Mr. Vernon, to know men and women are always fools when they're in love?"
Gratia disregarded this remark, as she had a right to, and went directly on to answer Mr. Vernon's question:
"No, Sir; I consider it a divine impulse, vindicating its divinity in every form of love by flowing over the faults and follies of its objects. A mother does not cease to love her child because it is wayward or deformed; a sister clings to her sister against every opposition of sin or circumstance; friend bears with friend, so loving as to cover 'a multitude of sins;' why should the only other love known to humanity be less self-forgetful, less powerful? God himself 'so loved the world,' as we know."
Mr. Vernon was silenced. Steele took off his hat again; but Gratia did not see it. Ellen Bond uttered one of those pleasing little sophisms that choke one with their dusty sweetness, like buckwheat honey.
"But we are not angels yet, my dear; we poor women aren't all as good as you; we need somebody to look up to and support us; every body is not as independent as you are, Gratia."
Gratia did not answer. Her face returned to its deep quiet in the moonlight. Mrs. Ford yawned and consulted her tiny glittering watch.
"Ten o'clock, I declare! I am matron of the party and send you all home directly. To think of sitting here discussing love by moonshine to this hour!—really it is stupid. I have been asleep!"
Mr. Steele offered her his arm. Mr. Vernon helped Ellen Bond from her position on the rocks, called by a small shriek she uttered as her foot tried to slip in descending. He was nearer than I, and reached her first; indeed, I did not hasten. Gratia had lost her handkerchief, and looking for it among the stones, and wrapping her refolded shawl closely about her, delayed us a little, so that we were last of all our party on the hard and sea-scented shore. She held my arm as few women know how, for real aid, and with the unintended flattery of reliance and trust. Neither of us spoke on the way home except once, when we caught the cadences of Ellen Bond's pure soprano voice floating high and clear in a Latin hymn, arranged from one of Mozart's masses—part of her artillery against the minister.
"Why do you never sing with Miss Bond?" said I.
"Our voices do not chord at all," said Gratia.
I left her at the door of the house, and having myself an out-lodging in a cottage, where my room boasted a piazza-door of its own and a night-latch, I went over and lit my lamp, hunted for a cigar, put on my slippers, and being any thing but sleepy, repaired to the piazza, where I tilted myself up against the wall in a comfortable arm-chair to have a smoke as well as a self-catechizing.
It is not the modern custom for sentiment to develop itself in sentimental surroundings. If I had been Strephon I might have perched myself on a damp rock, with a pipe (not of tobacco), and tweedled my feelings out in music; but as I was only John Hamilton Fanning, "a Massachusetts citizen" of the nineteenth century, I preferred a good cigar and an easy seat when I was going to think of my lady-love. For I suppose I was in love with Gratia Henningsen then. I thought I was. I had known her well for three years after she first came to my father's house to live, an orphan with some small property; a tall, shy, sensitive girl of fourteen, neither pretty nor plain, gentle, intelligent, kind-hearted, but always odd, eccentric, and singularly independent of aid or counsel, especially from me, a student at Harvard, coming home to Boston whenever I pleased,
and never once the oftener for any attraction of Gratia's; for she did not attract me. Boys either worship poised and developed talent in a woman their senior and superior, or extreme physical beauty, and that was not Gratia's gift. When I graduated, at twenty-one, she was seventeen. I left home for a foreign university, extended my leave of absence to travel, and after five years returned to find my father's ward a woman, cultivated, attractive, magnetic; not beautiful, but of the Hermione order:
"If it be, as they said, she is not fair,
Beauty's not beautiful to me."
In short, I fell in love with her, after the fashion of young men, not enough to risk all for all, but enough to make me balance the chances of a refusal before I dared ask. Gratia's manner was peculiar to me. To almost every one else she was cordial on a sudden meeting after absence; real delight danced in her large eyes and thrilled her voice. When I came home she was shy, grave, speechless, apparently impassive. She rarely asked me to do any thing for her, but was always seeking out and doing some little thing for me; nothing obtrusive, either from the manner of its doing or its importance, but a quiet supplying of small wants, a sort of gracious dew of ministration, such as a mother sheds on a child's daily life. She knew and remembered all my tastes, and altogether unconsciously guided herself by them. If I expressed a wish, or rather a liking, that she should sing or read any thing, it was sure to be done; but if I told her to do a thing with the slightest assumption of authority, such as spoiled children sometimes will use, she rebelled at once, fired with pride and wrath, resisted every wish I suggested as compromise, and treated me literally de haut en bas, till I altogether submitted and begged her pardon, when she generally broke down into the most fervent humility, and asked me to forgive her for being so cross and contumacious.
Did she love me? The question might have baffled wiser heads than mine. I resolved to watch her carefully while we staid at Hill Beach, for my mother had come to spend six weeks there, and Gratia, of course, with her. So, with that sole result of my midnight meditation, I went to bed, and rose in the morning to put my intention into action. And I did watch carefully, feeling more and more every day how much depended on the result, and more and more how little I could depend upon any thing I saw for encouragement.
Gratia's manner never changed. She was calmly civil to Mr. Vernon; gracious and genial to Mr. Steele, who, I should have said before, came to the Beach with his sick wife. As for the other gentlemen, they fared according to their dues; for she was as candid in action as in speech. Frank Ledyard was one of the few people to whom she was habitually cool and proud. She could not endure affectation, and his was peculiarly offensive. A harmless, kindhearted little creature, with the poetic faculty gracefully developed as his only remarkable point, he thought it fine to be wicked, and only made himself disgusting. Gratia dropped him when she could, and extinguished him when he forced himself upon her.
It was a match-making summer at the Beach. Before its close Mrs. Ford was engaged to Gaius Clark. Ledyard offered himself to Marian Hall, and was taken into consideration. This was unexpected to all of us; yet, on looking at it calmly, after the first amusement passed, it was not so strange. She was the only woman there who really looked up to Ledyard, believed in his being a great and wicked poet—a high Byronic man, quite out of her simple comprehension; and it would have pleased almost any man as much as it intoxicated our whiskery little friend to be followed by a pair of such soft eyes wherever he went, or whatever he did, with awful admiration; to have his utterances received as oracles by the prettiest sea-shell ears; and his arrival hailed by rosy signals fluttering on a face always garlanded with peach-blossom and pearl. Vanity was his special masculine trait, and it rioted in this new field. He did not doubt the result of his probation, and he had no need to. Mr. Griffing offered himself to both Ellen Bond and to Marian; and, doubly refused, consoled himself by general flirtations of an extremely cynical and remorseless nature. Mr. Vernon became very devoted to Gratia, who froze his passion before it could speak by the most resolute hauteur; and Ellen Bond caught his heart "in the rebound," as somebody says.
The season drew near its close, and still I doubted. One moonlight night in early September I found Gratia sitting on the rocks by the shore alone. She never was afraid to go where she chose, and sometimes her hardihood made me anxious for her. To-night I sat down beside her, and was welcomed as usual, silently, but with a smile. Neither of us spoke, and, strangely enough, I did not think of my plans or myself. The soft languor of the ocean's breath stole over the rock like a caress; a warm wind came across the Gulf Stream, and bathed us in the Nereids' summer, the lull of life, the rest of nerve and sense and brain.
I do not know what subtle consciousness of the truth inspired me, but I became suddenly audacious; I folded my arm about Gratia; she did not repel me; she dropped her beautiful head on my shoulder! Don't expect to hear what we said, for to this hour I can not tell myself; only that the heart of the rose told us its secret of perfume, and we went back to the house no more full of gay or thoughtful speech, but in a silence like the stillness of dawn. In it was the break of day to us.
In November we were married, and as Gratia was not altogether strong, we went South to pass the winter, and returned in May to New York, where I took upon myself the harness of business in Wall Street, and Gratia ruled over our household, the mildest and firmest of sovereigns.
I can not say that I became so used to my wife's presence and affection that love cooled off into that mild friendship recommended by novels. Something always charmed and captivated me more and more about her. She was not verbally demonstrative like other women, she rarely called me any thing but "John," in the most matter-of-fact accent; but if I slept, as I sometimes did, after a fatiguing day, on the sofa, she would wait till I seemed unconscious, bring her little quaint chair to my side, and sit looking at me till I woke; all unconscious herself how often I feigned sleep to see her pretty pantomime of tenderness. Or she would fling herself on the floor beside my chair, and rest her head on the arm, content to stay so hour after hour, if only my hand sought her hair and caressed its silky bands, or reposed quietly upon that shining surface. Rarely, very rarely, when I used my best persuasions to draw from her some word of love—a capricious amusement I confess—she would say only "dear!" but with such unutterable intonation as made that one syllable a rapture, and gave it more force to content me than the wildest protestations of passion from any other lips could have carried. For that Judas-phrase of matrimony "My dear!" never passed Gratia's lips. She hated it as I did, and never either of us used the expression; nor even heard it from others without a certain inward cringing at its possibilities.
Then my wife was scrupulous about her dress. I never saw her otherwise than delicately neat, and in well-chosen and becoming colors. Every detail was punctilious in freshness and fitness, and a certain picturesque charm was imparted to her simplest costume by her graceful figure, her pure taste, and the colors that her style demanded. It was a perpetual compliment to feel that so lovely a woman daily adorned herself for my pleasure, felt my admiration a full recompense, thought of me when I was away, and rejoiced in my return! You perceive, dear reader, I am neither more nor less than a man!
And yet I grew into the knowledge, day after day, that Gratia was infinitely my superior; not merely in those holy feminine instincts that are common to women, or in quickness of intuition, but in real scope of mind; in judgment; in that rare trait in women, power to plan a course of action with contingent resources. But I did not regret this knowledge; I was too well aware of Gratia's humility to fear that she would usurp authority, or exalt herself in consciousness if not in action; but had either of these possibilities come to pass in her heart, her exceeding sweetness of temper would have given them no room to act. There was never any jar between us—no jealousy, no dispute, no recrimination. I have seen marriage a purgatory without purifying in its fires; I have seen it like hell except for limitations of existence; I have seen it altogether earthly; and there have been brief raptures, cut short in their full promise by death, that are heaven-like while they endure. But my marriage life was likest what Swedenborg tells us of the states after death, where men who gravitate toward goodness are taken in charge of a good angel and divinely educated up to higher and higher planes of spiritual beauty; for my wife taught without intention, by her lovely life. All that I feared was that I should, in spite of myself, learn to tyrannize over such a want of self-assertion as she showed, and become hateful to myself in that tyranny even more than to her. Perhaps this would have ensued had she been merely lovely and gentle; but there was a certain spirit and piquancy in every thing she said and did, that vitalized, as it were, all her life from hour to hour, and kept me always expecting, because I never knew certainly what was to come.
And I was deeper in love with her than ever! The frail passion that impelled me to seek her for my own I looked back upon almost with amusement, and wondered how I could have supposed myself in love when as yet I knew scarce a thousandth part of her nature or her power. It was love, no doubt, that I held for the girl; but if that was love, what was it that I felt now for my wife?
Nearly three years after our marriage Gratia fell very ill; night and day for a week she was in danger, and her recovery was slow and insecure. The physician ordered her to the sea-side as soon as she could be moved, and I took her home to my mother in June; returning, as my business demanded me, to the house that almost seemed a stranger's without Gratia. The summer crept slowly away. I missed my wife more and more; the careless servants needed her eye upon them; dust gathered thickly wherever it should not have been; the formal furniture, arranged in order, suggested ideas of a funeral; and the solitary meal I took at home was ill-cooked and worse served. No flowers of a warm day, no fires in the chill of rain, no perfume, or grace, or vivid color, such as she diffused in the house she inhabited, wherever or whatever it was, but a comfortless shelter, whose luxuries were dreary aids to existence—an empty nest, from which bird and brood had flown.
I was not able to leave my business all that summer. A financial crisis impended over the country; day by day I saw its blackness gathering afar off, and knew it must soon sweep across every merchant, far and near, with ruin and desolation. Could I escape? What would my wife do? Still it was impossible for her to return to the city; the physician forbade it at peril of her life; and worse than all, she was forbidden to write, even to me. My only information was gleaned from my mother's weekly epistles, and was scarcely ever any thing but a statistic bulletin of symptoms and prescriptions.
At last the storm began. Some madness pervaded all the business men I knew, when the pressure was at its height, and trouble could do no more. A strange and frantic revelry possessed us—a new "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." We formed and arranged a "Desperate Club," met every day or two for "fun," as the outsiders said. Was that "fun" that drove the most temperate of us to drink for the sake of forgetting, and to gamble for the chance of eluding ruin in directer shape? Sorrowful fun! miserable mirth! thorns that pierced while they crackled; forgetfulness whose price was decency, delicacy, and self-respect! I, perhaps, resisted as long as any one of my comrades the degradation of giving way to these temptations; but at length I too fell.
One night in October the last hope of my firm gave way. We were helplessly bankrupt; every thing gone, and gone without redress. That night I went to the Club; drank for the sake of drowning past, present, and future; drank till I ceased to be a man and became a beast; till I was forced to be carried home in an opportune cart, and dragged into my dusty, desolate, unaired bedroom; dropped upon my bed; undressed by the rude hands of a contemptuous servant; and left in the dead stupor of drunken sleep, careless if I woke in heaven or hell. But at length I did awake. The sun of a late October afternoon streamed into the half-curtained window; my head throbbed with pain, and weak shame choked in my throat. I scarce dared open my eyes, yet I did open them. The room was odorous with that most spiritual scent the breath of tea-roses; a fresh and warm atmosphere displaced the dusty chill of yesterday; every article of furniture had returned to its graceful arrangement and exquisite neatness; a vase of white tea-roses stood on a little ebony table in the window; a tiny wood fire sparkled and snapped on the hearth; and leaning against the mantle-piece, in an attitude more pensive and oppressed than ever any Caryatide wore, stood Gratia! the long folds of her white wrapper outlining her little figure, and her fair face restored to the full oval of health, yet pale and sad—for me! How I hated her! how I cringed and quivered with dread of meeting those eyes! how gladly would I have crept away from that room unseen, and disappeared forever and ever, rather than encounter the silent contempt or the dignified remonstrances of my wife! I shut my eyes again and feigned sleep; but she had felt my look—she knew my thought. I scarce heard the light step that crossed the room, before both her arms were round me, her face laid on my hot cheek, and her sweet, cheerful voice—steady as a flute-note—said in my ear,
"Aren't you glad to see me back again, John?"
That was all the reproach or scorn she ever measured out to me!
And I spared her my confessions then; I was all broken down with past care and recklessness. I was too ill to rise for more than one week; but Gratia was there, to nurse, to amuse, to reign over me and mine; through all never manifesting, by look or sign, that I had fallen from her esteem or forfeited an atom of her affection.
One day I asked her if she had ever met any of our old friends at the Beach, and she answered,
"Yes; I met Ellen Bond—Mrs. Vernon."
"And how do they get on together?"
"I'm afraid not very well, John. Mr. Vernon has been seared by some scandal or other, tried in an Ecclesiastical Court, and silenced. His property is sufficient for his support, so they do not suffer; but I don't think Ellen is very forbearing with him. It is annoying to be where they both are; for she seems to despise him, and makes no secret of it; while he still clings to her enough to make her taunts and innuendoes especially enraging. Poor man!"
Gratia sighed as she said this, and I echoed the sigh, remembering the night at Hill Beach when we talked about love.
When I was able to sit up and attend to business, I found that my father had come on while I was ill, and settled my affairs as far as any thing could be settled where every thing seemed reeling and toppling to fall. I had not been allowed to see him, lest I should suspect his errand, and overexert myself to aid or explain. Gratia's property was inalienably secured to her by her father's will; and after much consultation we resolved to go out to California, and, taking a farm as near the coast as practicable, begin life again after our brief experiment.
This plan was put in operation, and the new spring saw us far on our way Westward. Travel, the surest test of temper, never shook my wife's bright and sweet nature; she took the inconveniences with most childlike amusement, and enjoyed the novelties with the same fresh spirit. Nor was she daunted by the lonely log-hut that was all the shelter we found at our journey's end. Under her quick hands it assumed a home-like aspect in the briefest time; and not long after re-echoed the most home-like sounds—the crying and crowing of a child, and the sweet broken nonsense of a mother's baby-tongue.
Our farm flourished as only those Pacific lands can; our gold grew on the surface, and saved us digging or washing of ores; our log-hut disappeared, to make room for an elegant and convenient house, that tells of its mistress, and praises her to every eye that sees its inner arrangements or delights in the garlanded vines and roses without.
I never go out or come in without a happy consciousness of her presence: I know well how much she must find in me that sinks below her wishes or her dreams. I know when any of my follies or weaknesses become visible to her, for I feel in my own mind their recoil of self-contempt, and I know that she perceives them before I can. But her eye never changes; her lip never curls. I only know that I have been a fool by the deeper glow of a smile when I turn toward her, or the rare caress granted unasked, as if her heart rejoiced and exulted in its overflowing depths; careless of my want, except so far as it afforded space for fuller and deeper tenderness; careless of my incapacity, save as the measure of her power to hide it; forgetting, forgiving—bearing all things, hoping all things, believing all things; for "love never faileth."
I sat last night upon the broad steps of the piazza that surrounds our house. Eastward the snowy mountains stood on the horizon, with rose-flushed summits and trailing robes of forest folded over valleys far below; the splendid outlines glittered in their aerial height like the very battlements of heaven, and reflected in tenderer tints the glories of a Pacific sunset, that rioted in color through the whole abundant and exultant clouds of the west. I heard my child saying his evening prayer to Gratia. He, too, with wandering eye, caught the glory of the glittering hills, and stopped to ask if heaven, where "Our Father" lives, was like that—"so pretty?"
"Who told you about heaven being pretty, Alex?" inquired his mother, who does not believe in encouraging the theological inquiries of small children.
"Papa did; I asked him. Mamma, can I go to heaven some day?"
"I hope so, Alex."
"But won't you take me, mamma?"
"I can't take you, dear!"
"Why, papa said you was goin' to take him, and I ain't near so big as he is."
"Hush! Alex; you don't recollect what papa said."
"Yes, Sir! I do," persisted the boy. "I asked him if he was ever there, so's to know it was pretty? 'nd he said he was goin' some day, because—because—I guess, I 'spect, mamma, he said—because you helped him!"
Gratia stopped him with kisses.
But he told the truth!