It was the "grand hop" night at the headquarters of Newport fashion.
Sarah, characteristically indifferent to gaieties "made to order," had
determined not to appear below. The air of her room was fresh and pure,
and a book, yet unread, lay under the lamp upon her table. Her sister
and mother had withdrawn to dress, when Jeannie's curly head peeped in
at Mrs. Hammond's door. Her features wore a most woe-begone expression.
"What has gone wrong, Jeannie?" inquired Sarah.
"Why, mamma says that I will be in her way if I go into the ball-room;
and it will be so stupid to stay out the whole evening, while all the
other girls can see the dancing and dresses, and hear the music. And
sister Lucy says that children are 'bores' in company."
"A sad state of affairs, certainly! Perhaps I may persuade mother to
let you go."
"Yes; but if she does, she will sit close against the wall with a lot
of other fat old ladies, and they will talk over my head, and squeeze
me almost to death, besides rumpling my dress; and I so want to wear my
tucked pink grenadine, sister!"
"And you would like to have me to go down with you; is that it?"
Jeannie's eyes beamed delightedly. "Oh, if you only would!"
Sarah looked down into the eager face and saw, in anticipation, her own
little Belle imploring some boon, as important to her, as easy to be
granted by another as this, and consented with a kiss.
"Run away and bring your finery here! Mother is too busy to attend to
you. Mary can dress you."
The order was obeyed with lightning speed; and Sarah, still holding
in the excited child the foreshadowing of her darling's girlhood,
superintended the toilet, while she made herself ready.
"What shall I wear, Jeannie?" she asked carelessly, holding open the
door of her wardrobe.
"Oh, that lovely fawn-colored silk, please! the one with the black
lace flounces! It is the prettiest color I ever saw; and I heard Mrs.
Greyling tell another lady the night you wore it, when brother Lewis
was here, you know, that it was one of the richest dresses in the room,
modest as it looked, and that the flounce must have cost a penny!"
"Probably more!"
Sarah proceeded to array herself in the fortunate robe that had won the
praises of the fashionably distinguished Mrs. Greyling. Her abundant
dark hair was lighted by two coral sprigs, which formed the heads of
her hair-pins, and, handkerchief and gloves in hand, she was taking
a last survey of Jeannie's more brilliant costume, when there came a
knock at the door.
"Mr. Benson!" said Mary, unclosing it.
"May I come in?" he asked.
The tidy Mary had removed all trace of the recent tiring operations
from the apartment, which was a compound of parlor and dressing-room, a
necessary adjunct to the small chamber and smaller nursery, leading out
of it, at the side and rear.
"You may!" replied Sarah. "Here is an aspirant for ball-room honors,
who awaits your approval."
"Mademoiselle, que vous etes charmante! I am penetrated with profound
admiration!" exclaimed the teasing brother-in-law, raising his hands in
true melodramatic style.
Jeannie laughed and blushed until her cheeks matched the grenadine.
"Mrs. Hunt told me that you had changed your mind, and intended
to grace the festive scene with your presence," continued Philip,
addressing Sarah. "She and Lucy are there, and the dancing has begun.
I came to escort you and our fair debutante here--that is, unless some
one else has offered his services and been accepted."
"That is not likely, since Mr. Hammond left us in your care. Do not
your fourfold duties oppress you?"
"Not in the least. If all my charges were as chary of their calls upon
me as you are, my time would hang heavily upon my hands. No one would
imagine, from your reluctance to be waited upon, that you had been
spoiled at home. If Mr. Hammond were here now, he would tell you to
draw that shawl"--
"It is an opera cloak!" interrupted Jeannie.
"A ball-cloak to-night, then, is it not? I was saying that, although
the night is not cool for sea air, you had better wrap that mantle
about your chest and throat as we go out."
Just outside the door a waiter passed them with a note in his hand. He
stopped, on seeing Philip.
"Mr. Benson! I was on my way to your rooms with this, sir."
Philip stepped back within the parlor to read it by the light. It was a
line from a friend who had just arrived at another hotel notifying him
of this fact. It required no reply, and, leaving it upon the table, he
rejoined his companions.
"See mamma! Isn't it just as I said?" whispered Jeannie, as she
established herself beside her sister in a comfortable corner that
commanded a view of the spacious hall and its gay, restless sea of
figures.
Sarah smiled at discovering her mother sandwiched between two portly
dowagers; one in purple, the other in lavender silk; all three bobbing
and waving in their earnest confabulations, in a style that presented
a ludicrously marked resemblance to the gesticulations of a group of
Muscovy ducks, on the margin of a mud-puddle, held by them in their
capacity of a joint-stock company.
"I see that Lucy has taken the floor," observed Philip. "She will not
thank me for any devoirs I could render her for the next three hours.
If they get up anything so humble as quadrilles, may I ask the pleasure
of your company for the set?"
"If you wish it--and my dress is not too grave in hue"--
"And too decorous in its make, you were about to add, I presume;" he
finished the sentence bluntly. "It forms a refreshing contrast to the
prevailing style around us."
Lucy here flitted into sight, and her very bare arms and shoulders
pointed her husband's strictures. A stool, brought into the room for
the use of some child or invalid looker-on of the festivities, now
stood empty under Sarah's chair, and Philip, espying it, seized upon
and drew it forth. When seated, his mouth was nearly on a level with
Sarah's ear.
"This is pleasant!" he said. "We are quite as much isolated from the
rest of mankind as if we were sitting among the heathery hillocks on
Deal Beach. You do not love the visions of those tranquil sunny days as
I do. You never allude to them voluntarily. Yet you have had less to
convert your dreams into every-day actualities, tedious and prosaic,
than I have. I stand in direful need of one of the old lectures,
inculcating more charity, and less study of complex motives and biassed
tendencies in the machine we call Man. Begin! I am at your mercy."
"I have forgotten how to deliver them. I am out of practice."
"That is not surprising. Your husband is behind the age he lives
in--and so are you. You two would make Barnum's fortune, could he ever
persuade the public of your idiosyncrasies."
"What are you talking about?"
"Look around and through this room, and you will understand one
part of my meaning. Do you remark the preponderance of married over
single belles? and that the most tenderly deferential cavaliers are
husbands, and not dancing with their wives? I could point out to you
three men, leaders of the ton in this extremely reputable, eminently
moral assembly, who, it is whispered among the knowing ones, are
married, and, having left their domestic associations for a season of
recreation, boldly attach themselves to certain stylish young ladies
here, and challenge observation, defy public censure, by their marked
and increasing devotion. I meet them strolling along the beach in the
morning; riding together in the afternoon; and when not engaged in this
evening exhibition of toilet and muscle, you will find them pacing the
moon or star-lit piazza, or, perchance, again sentimentalizing on the
shore until the witching hour draws near."
"You surprise me!"
"You have no right to be surprised. You have the same thing continually
before you in your city. Every fashionable hotel or boarding-house
can supply you with such flirtations by the dozen. A married woman
who declines the polite services of all gentlemen, except her husband
and near relatives, is a prude, with false scruples of propriety
and delicacy. Let her legal partner complain--he is cried out upon
as a despot, and you can trust the sweet angel of an abused wife to
elude his vigilance--violence, she terms it--for the future, without
altering her conduct in aught else. Do you see that pretty woman in
blue--the one with the madonna-like face? Her tyrant is here but once
a week--from Saturday until Monday--then hies back to the business he
loves as well as she does her pleasure. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, and the forenoon of Saturday, any mustachioed puppy
may walk, talk, drive, and flirt with her--bask in the rays of those
liquid orbs. When the rightful lord appears, she is demure as a nun,
patient as a saint, dutiful as Griselda, to him and him alone. Do you
begin to understand why I congratulated you upon having a husband
of the olden stamp? Why, I do from my heart felicitate my friend
Hammond upon having gained, as a helpmeet, one of that nearly obsolete
species--Woman!"
Sarah's embarrassment was painful and but indifferently concealed. She
felt that it was barely excusable, in consideration of his fraternal
relation to her, for Philip to speak so plainly of this social blemish;
and altogether unpardonable, while he did not, or could not, prevent
his wife's participation in the questionable gaieties he assailed
so unsparingly. Reply she could not, without implicating Lucy in
her reprobation, and he must perceive her difficulty. This was the
trouble that lay uppermost. At her heart's core, the uneasy feeling
she ever experienced in conversation with him; the stirring of the
entombed love, of whose actual death she had horrible misgivings;
the incongruous blending of past emotion with present duty, were now
aggravated by the enforced acceptance of unmerited praise. Her woman's
instinct, her experience as a wife, told her that the cause of the
sinful recklessness, the contempt of the true spirit of the marriage
tie, was not the fruit merely of the vanity and thirst for adulation,
to which it was properly attributed. With the recollection of her own
life, the education she had received at home, the hateful, yet even to
her independent spirit, resistless decrees of society, there swelled up
within her bosom something akin to Philip's bitter cynicism. Under this
spur, she spoke.
"And from these signs of the times, you would argue an inherent
degeneracy of womanhood--a radical change in its composition, such
as some anatomists tell us has taken place in the structure of our
bodies--our blood--our very teeth. A dentist, who filled a tooth for me
the other day, imparted divers scientific items of information to me
that may illustrate your position. 'Enamel, madam, is not what enamel
was in the days of our ancestors!' he affirmed pathetically; 'the
color, the very ingredients of the bone, the calcareous base of the
teeth, differ sadly from the indestructible molars of fifty years ago.'
At this passage of his jeremiade, he chanced to touch the nerve in the
unhappy 'molar' he was excavating, and I am persuaded that I suffered
as really as my grandmother would have done, had she sat in my place."
She paused, and beat time with her fingers on Jeannie's shoulder to the
wild, varying waltz that swept the giddy crowd around the room in fast
and flying circles.
"Your analogy asserts, then, that at heart women are alike in all ages?"
"Why not, as well as men?"
"Then why does not action remain the same, if that be true?"
"Because custom--fashion, if you prefer this name--an unaccountable,
irresponsible power--owing its birth oftenest to accident or caprice,
says, 'Do this!' and it is done! be it to perpetrate a cravat-bow, a
marriage, or a murder!"
Another pause--in which music and dancers seemed sweeping on to sweet
intoxication--so joyous in their abandon were the gushing strains; so
swift the whirl of the living ring. The fingers played lightly and
rapidly on Jeannie's plump shoulder--then rested on a half-beat.
"Yes!" She was looking towards the crowd, but her eye was fixed, and
her accents slow and grave. "Hearts live and hearts love, while time
endures. The heart selects its mate in life's springtime, with judgment
as untaught as that of the silly bird that asks no companion but the
one the God of Nature has bestowed upon it. But you see not, my good
brother"--she faced him, a smile wreathing her lip--a strange glitter
in her eye--"see you not to what woeful disorders these untrained
desires, this unsophisticated following out of unregulated affections
would give rise? It would sap the foundations of caste; level all
wholesome distinctions of society; consign the accomplished daughters
of palatial halls--hoary with a semi-decade of years--to one-story
cottages and a maid-of-all work; doom nice young men to the drudgery of
business for the remainder of their wretched lives, to maintain wives
whose dowries would not keep their lily-handed lords in French kids
for a year; cover managing mammas with ignominy, and hasten ambitious
papas to their costly vaults in--as Dickens has it--'some genteel place
of interment.' Come what may of blasted hopes and wrecked hearts, the
decencies of life must be observed. Every heart has its nerve--genuine,
sensitive, sometimes vulgarly tenacious of life--but there are
corrosives that will eat it out; fine, deadly wires, that can probe
and torture and extract it. And when the troublesome thing is finally
gotten rid of, there is an end to all obstacles to judicious courtships
and eligible alliances!" She laughed scornfully, and Philip recoiled,
without knowing why he did so, as he heard her.
"That is all very well, when the nature of the contract is understood
on both sides," he said, gloomily. "I doubt, however, whether the
beautiful economy of your system will be appreciated by those whose
living hearts are bound to the bloodless plaster-casts you describe."
"These accidents will occur in spite of caution on the part of the
best managers of suitable marriages. By far the larger proportion of
the shocks inflicted upon polite circles arise from this very cause.
Pygmalion grows weary of wooing his statue, and wants sympathy in his
disappointment and loneliness."
The dance was ended. The fantastic variations of the waltz were
exchanged for a noble march--pealing through the heated rooms like a
rush of the healthful sea-breeze. The spark died in Sarah's eye. Her
voice took its habitual pitch.
"I have permitted myself to become excited, and, I am afraid, have said
many things that I had no right to think--much less to utter. If my
freedom has displeased you, I am sorry."
"The error--if error there were--was mine," rejoined Philip. "I led the
conversation into the channel; you, after awhile, followed. I believe
there is no danger of our misunderstanding each other."
"Darby and Joan! good children in the corner!" cried Lucy, flushed
with exercise and radiant with good humor, as she promenaded past them
leaning on the arm of a young West Pointer, a native Southerner and an
acquaintance of Philip's. If his wife must flirt and frolic, he was
watchful that she did not compromise him by association with doubtful
characters. On several occasions, the advances of gay gentlemen, whose
toilets were more nearly irreproachable than their reputations, had
been checked by his cool and significant resumption of the husband's
post beside the belle, and, if need existed, by the prompt withdrawal
of the unwilling lady from the scene. The cadet laughed, and, convinced
that she had said a witty thing, Lucy swam by.
"The common sense of our tropes, rodomontades, and allegories is this!"
said Philip, biting his lip, and speaking in a hard tone. "The only
safe ground in marriage is mutual, permanent affection. You meant to
convey the idea that if each of these dressy matrons, humming around
our ears, had a sincere, abiding love for her husband--and each of
these gallant benedicts the right kind of regard for his wedded
Beatrice, the vocation of us corner censors would be gone?"
"Well said, Mr. Interpreter!" she responded, in affected jest.
"This point settled, will you take my arm for a turn through the room
before the next set is formed? They are talking of quadrilles. I shall
claim your promise if a set is made up, unless you are not courageous
enough to brave the public sneer by dancing with your brother. Come,
Jeannie, and walk with us."
Two sets of quadrilles were arranged at different ends of the saloon.
Philip led Sarah through one, with Lucy--who considered it a capital
joke--and her partner vis-a-vis to them, Jeannie, meanwhile, remaining
by her mother.
The summer nights were short; and, when the dance was over, Sarah
intimated to her younger sister the propriety of retiring. Mrs. Hunt's
head ached, and she esteemed the sacrifice comparatively light,
therefore, that she, too, had to leave the revels and accompany the
child to her chamber. Sarah's apartments were on the same floor,
several doors further on. Having said "Good-night" to the others,
she and Philip walked slowly along the piazza, light as day in the
moonbeams, until they reached the outer room, the parlor.
"I hope you will experience no ill effects from your dissipation,"
said Philip, in playful irony. "In a lady of your staid habits, this
disposition to gaiety is alarming. Absolutely eleven o'clock! What
will Hammond say when he hears the story? Good-night! Don't let your
conscience keep you awake!"
Sarah opened the door softly, that she might not startle the
baby-sleeper in the inner room. The lamp was shining brightly, and by
it sat--her husband!