The sofas and ottomans were covered with crimson velvet; the morning sun
streamed through folds of rich stuff, that tempered and warmed its
light; the tread was unheard on the thick carpet, and the glowing coal
sent a cheerful smile over the ample apartments.
Alice and Louisa Stanwood were employed much like other young ladies of
their age, hemming long, mysterious slips of muslin, or embroidering in
worsted, and now and then chatting of the last night’s party, or the
gayeties of the coming evening. They were pretty, and rich, and young,
and gay, and admired, and happy. They knew they had complexions and
figures to be both studied and improved—at all events, not to be
injured by the adoption of awkward habits. They were fully alive to the
merits of the last new bonnet, and had their own opinions touching the
“Elssler fling,” and the harmonies of Ole Bull. What with dressing and
calling, and dining and driving, with parties, balls, and social
cotillions; with sleeping good, long, renovating night’s sleep, and
perhaps a little siesta after dinner, really the months, and even the
years, went by with astonishing rapidity.
They had already whirled Alice into her twentieth and Louisa into her
eighteenth winter. (Our city belles do not count life by summers,) yet
placid smiles dwelt on their unruffled features, and even thought had
passed, zephyr-like, over their brows, nor left a mark behind. Their
laugh had a joyousness born of the present, in which neither hope nor
memory had share. They had had no time to think, to feel, to suffer. But
that there was suffering in the world they knew very well. They knew it
by reading history, and the newspapers; nay, they knew, too, there was
suffering of many sorts, and often and often had they dropped the
sympathetic tear over the sentimental woes which the “cunning hand” of
genius portrayed in the novel of the day.
Madam Stanwood, the grandmother of these fair girls, reclined in the
easiest of easy chairs, her feet imbedded in the yielding “brioche,” and
by her side her little reading stand, on which she had just laid down
her book and spectacles. Her pale and composed features, her comely
attire, her dignified deportment, had all that makes age winning and
respectable; and the fond glances with which she regarded her
grandchildren, spoke not less her readiness to sympathize with youth,
than youth’s tenderness and respect for her; for we do, indeed, “receive
but what we give,” and rarely is there an instance of heartfelt sympathy
with the young, that is not cheerfully and sincerely answered.
“The history of any individual, if it were faithfully written out, would
be an epic poem,” said Madam Stanwood, repeating the last lines she had
been reading. “What do you think of that, my dears? Does it not startle
you to look at the faces you meet in the streets, and think of the
history that is so unwritten on them?”
“Undoubtedly it would, grandma, if we ever thought of reading faces;
but, really, I must think there is more poetry than truth in the remark;
I should sooner complain of the entire want of meaning in the faces and
lives of those I meet, than be alarmed at the announcement of a history
in them.”
“I declare,” said the ever laughing Louisa, “I wish something would
happen to startle and confound us among our ‘dear five hundred friends,’
even a little bit of a volcano in our domestic circle would not be
amiss. Such an event, now, as Mary Ware’s elopement! Think what a
shaking that gave our faculties! why it lasted us full a week for steady
talking.”
“Well, I don’t see but Alice or I must be packing up a small bundle, and
getting a farewell letter ready for you, just for the sake of variety,”
said the grandmother, gayly.
The door opened and admitted a tall and very much dressed woman, who
advanced with much liveliness, and greeted the trio.
The usual topics that fill out a ten minutes’ fashionable call were
discussed with great spirit and volubility by all the ladies; the guest
repeated in her farewell, the vivacious interest of her salutation, and
tripped lightly down to her carriage.
“There, grandmother—there is a face! Now, where is the epic poem to
which it is the index?” said Alice.
“What do you read, my dears?”
“I read,” said Alice, “a life spent in much the same round of calls and
visits as she has been making this morning. A mind fully occupied with
the genealogies of all the families in Philadelphia, that are at all
worth knowing. I dare say she knows more now about my grandfather than I
do myself—she does, to be sure, if she knows any thing.” Alice stopped,
and Louisa added,
“I have read something, dear grandmother, that is more objectionable
than gayety in Mrs. Ellicott’s face. Gayety I love dearly in old
people—I love yours—”
“Calling Mrs. Ellicott ‘old people,’ Louisa! you are certainly stark
mad! with all those long white teeth glittering defiance of such a
calumny.”
“Gently! gently!” said Madam Stanwood; “teeth to the contrary
notwithstanding, Mrs. Ellicott is my senior by some years.”
“But how different!” exclaimed Alice, warmly, “how different her gayety
and yours—as different as lightning and sunshine—”
“Nay, Alice,” said Madam Stanwood, in a serious tone, “I must protest
against being compared or contrasted with Mrs. Ellicott. I asked you
what you read in _her_ face. A capability, at least, of feeling and
suffering?”
“You will think me satirical, grandmother; but she does make other
people suffer so much, that—but I wont say it—and yet that hard face,
those authoritative manners, that ever smiling mouth, put them
altogether, she is just one of those persons I should think born not to
suffer any thing, nor to feel much for any body.”
Madame Stanwood looked at the placid face, which had just expressed so
harsh an opinion, with a melancholy smile.
“Come hither, Alice—and you, Louisa; let me teach you not to guess from
the froth on the tossing wave, what is the deep calm that lies a
thousand fathoms below. Long may it be before you know from the quick
sympathy of experience, to detect the sigh under the smile, or to see
how the lonely tears quench the conventional sparkles that seemed so
brilliant.”
The young girls drew near, awed by the serious and almost sad demeanor
of their relative.
“Something you said, Louisa—something that touched long silent chords
in my heart. They do not make music there—they are, as your song says,
‘echoes of harp-strings, broken long ago.’ But it was of Mrs. Ellicott
we were talking. I happen to know a circumstance which, as yet, is
concealed from her nearest friends, except her medical adviser. This
woman, so gay, so social, so alive to all that she feels or fancies her
duty to society, had, only six months ago, the assurance of her
physician, backed by the opinions of the first practitioners in New
York, that her recovery is hopeless—absolutely hopeless.”
“Her recovery, grandmother!—is she ill?”
“She looks well—does she not? Well, she is consuming of a cancer. She
has been hoping that a surgical operation might relieve her, until last
June, when the result of ‘a consultation’ was announced to her, that at
her advanced age it would probably be fatal. Her resolution was taken.
She insisted on knowing the probable length of her life, if the disease
took its course, and then forbade any allusion to it hereafter. Her own
sisters, who are in the house, do not know it. She is as cheerful and as
gay as ever. ‘Let no tears be shed for me while I live,’ she said, ‘mine
are sorrows which would only be doubled by sharing them.’”
“That was noble!” exclaimed Alice. “Oh, how cruel, how unjust I was to
her! and in the very point where she most deserves praise; for I own to
you, her interest in all about her, struck me as particularly frivolous
and unworthy in a woman of her age.” And Alice, in her generous haste to
atone for her injustice, was in some danger of falling in love with what
was, in truth, the exceptionable manner of Mrs. Ellicott.
“She is like Lady Delacour, Alice,” said Louisa, “don’t you remember, in
Belinda?”
“As like as most facts are to fancies,” said Madam Stanwood, “Mrs.
Ellicott, destitute of all Lady Delacour’s grace and fascination, has a
simple, and almost sturdy moral strength, which gives dignity to an
otherwise uninteresting character. She is not acting for point or effect
at all, but expressing simply a disinterestedness and regard for others,
which, under the circumstances, I own, inspires me with more respect
than most martyrdoms.”
“There is the door bell!” exclaimed Louisa, “now, Alice, let us study
characters, instead of talking nonsense.”
The gay Mrs. Lewis was not the counterpart of the gay Mrs. Ellicott, but
the young girls looked wistfully at her, as if they, for the first time,
felt the possibility that, “seeing, they might not see nor understand.”
The smile and the voice, though cordial, seemed not heartfelt. For the
first time they missed a sincerity, a truthfulness in the tones about
them; and they silently listened, with watchful eyes, while their
grandmother talked on with their visiter.
When she, too, had gone, and the gay laugh, and “good morning!” had died
in the quiet room, Louisa broke silence.
“Dear me, grandmother! I feel as if I were treading on a volcano! I
shan’t dare to step on the surface of society for fear of breaking in
upon burning lava somewhere! I declare, this notion of people having two
natures is very terrible—it quite takes away my composure.”
“And yet you have two, Louisa.”
“I, grandmother!—and where is the other, then?”
“Very soundly sleeping, my love—but some arrow, whether of joy or wo,
will waken it to a life of its own. In good time—in good time. Let it
rest—that other self of yours; ’twill spring up, full grown, and
panoplied, some day. But tell me, Alice, how have you read Mrs. Lewis? I
saw you studying her face as if you never saw it before.”
“I am ashamed to tell you how little I made out—merely that she was
good-natured, and happy, and laughing all the day long.”
“So we live, my Alice; and the life that is deepest leaves no traces on
our faces or manners. Society is not to be bored with individual joys or
sorrows; and Mrs. Lewis has the good sense and taste to make lively
visits to her friends, who have neither leisure nor desire to study the
under tones in her laugh, or to see that tears and smiles wear the same
channels in the face.”
“But has Mrs. Lewis’s really been an eventful life?” said Alice. “I have
only known her as a woman who has been struggling somewhat to maintain
her position in society, and not so rich as she would like, perhaps; but
she always appears just the same, as if nothing had ever troubled her
much.”
“Her life,” answered Madam Stanwood, gravely, “has been one of
extraordinary mental vicissitude, though outwardly it has seemed rather
uneventful. Take from her history the very common one of the loss of
property, the habitual cheerfulness that has soothed, sustained, and
encouraged her husband under repeated and continual losses. At one time
he lost three ships in the same storm; he was prostrated, as men so
often are under these reverses; but she constantly had her bright smile
and ready sympathy—and that was every thing to his sick heart. Take the
energy with which, in early life, she struggled against poverty, and has
made herself almost, by mere strength of will, all that she was and is,
and this, my dear children, implies a warfare that you cannot dream of,
far less realize. Take away these minor events in her character, there
is still something which makes her very interesting to me. She is
childless. The prattle of her nursery ceased long ago; and the chill of
death seems on the room which is now never opened. Her last child lived
to be three or four years old; and she told me, not long since, that she
never saw a door open, that she did not unconsciously turn toward it ‘to
see her little Edith come in;’ that she never, never was out of her mind
for a moment. There is something inexpressibly sad to me in her gay
face, so haunted, like the Egyptian banquet, by the image of the dead.
It is not so with us in general; what we have suffered we bury in our
memories, and we keep the graves green sodden down in our hearts, and
even in thought but strew flowers on them. But this presence of a grief
perpetually with and about her, I have pitied her that she must live! I
am certain I respect and love her, that she lives so disinterestedly as
she does.”
“Grandmother,” said Louisa, after a hesitating pause, “has your life
been an eventful one at all? I only know of you that you used not to be
so cheerful as you are now; but since our mother’s death—”
“She has been our mother ever since we knew what it could mean to need
one,” said Alice, fondly kissing her withered hand; “but, dearest
grandmother, your face is a sealed book to us, too; you look very calm,
you are very cheerful always—and yet who knows—”
Alice stopped thoughtfully, and then looking at Madam Stanwood, she saw
that her eyes were tearful, and that with a strong effort she was
endeavoring to preserve her composure. Placing her hand lightly on
Alice’s mouth, to prevent her speaking, she said, with a smile,
“The day promises so fairly, my daughters, if you like, we will drive to
see an old acquaintance, and on the way I will tell you some of those
passages in my life, which I know you want to hear of, but from the
relation of which I have always shrunk. Time has lessened the vividness
of much I have suffered; but what we feel early in life, we feel late
with a clearness it is difficult to account for. But you ought to know
something of the history of your grandmother, and although I do not
intend to give you a full memoir to-day, and perhaps never, I will talk
with you somewhat of old days and feelings. In an hour we will go, and
until then I shall be engaged in my own room.”
Alice and Louisa looked wistfully at each other, as their aged relative
withdrew, but uttered not a word. Often and often they had wished, and
hoped, and guessed, till they were weary of guessing what grandmamma’s
life had been—for they were a little curious, though not reflective;
and many a time a chance word or two had puzzled their young heads not a
little; but hardly had they dared to hope that they ever should know, at
all events, not before they were twenty-five—quite old women—any thing
about it; and now that they were to know, _really_, it was quite too
important a subject to trifle upon. So Louisa, with her mouth very much
drawn down at the corners, and her eyebrows proportionably arched,
withdrew to her room, as much like Madam Stanwood as possible, while
Alice relapsed into her grandmother’s easy-chair. Reflection in an
easy-chair is apt to glide into reverie, and thence the transition to
sleep is not uncommon; and Alice was waked out of marvelous dreams, by
the announcement that the carriage waited for her.
The day was fine and clear, though a little cold, and as the
carriage-wheels rolled almost noiselessly over the smooth, hard road, it
seemed the very afternoon of all the world for story-telling. Yet Madam
Stanwood looked silently out on the landscape before them, and the young
girls did not venture to speak. At last they stopped at a house where
they were a good deal acquainted.
The Williamses were all at home; and a right gay set of young people
they were: then there were their father and mother, and Mrs. Williams’
brother, old Colonel Morgan, who was always ready for a frolic, and the
two Miss Dundasses, from Richmond. They had a very gay call. The two
Miss Stanwoods flirted desperately with the old colonel, and the two
Miss Dundasses beat him about the room with bouquets of bright flowers;
and there was such laughing, till the tears ran, with old Mr. Williams,
and such gentle and sympathizing laughter among the old ladies, and such
heartfelt fun among all, that it was with some effort the Stanwoods at
last left the resounding parlor for the silent carriage.
Silent it became as soon as the doors were closed, and the soft,
crackling sound of the wheels brought the old associations of painful
thought and anxious expectation.
At last Madam Stanwood spoke: but the words seemed rather the repetition
of a record than the expression of thought.
“Saturday, the 20th of May, 1780.”
The girls listened eagerly, but no further sound escaped her. The faint
color came and went on her faded cheek, her eyes closed, and the spirit
within seemed unable to utter its mournful remembrances.
“I thought I could tell you,” she said at last, “but it will not come to
my tongue—and perhaps it is best so—for why should your young hearts
be baptized with sorrow before their time? And besides, all, every thing
within and without is so different now. I scarcely recognize myself as I
look back to that day. _The dark day._ You have heard of it, and the
reason of it—but in those times we were not given to philosophizing.
Yes, all is so changed. The skies I played under are no longer the same.
They bent over a young, hopeful heart then, so blue, so clear—now they
still bend over me, but they promise rest to the weary soul, and they
speak soothingly of a better land.
“The brook behind my father’s house, in which my bared feet daily waded,
turns the wheel of a factory; the trees that shaded our log cabin are
metamorphosed into three-story houses; the country has turned into a
town—and not more has the form changed than the spirit. The minds of
men, trained and inured to suffering, patient, sturdy, vigorous,
watchful—those were men, indeed!”
Madam Stanwood’s face, usually so benignly thoughtful, lighted up as she
spoke, and she looked at the eager faces of her granddaughters with a
smile. The most painful part, the beginning, had been surmounted, and
she went on, less however to them than to herself.
“The twentieth of May! yes, on that day, I had reached my fifteenth
birthday—on that day I met my lover for the last time. He had been
drafted for a soldier. Every heart, men’s, women’s, and children’s, too,
beat but to one tune, and that was their country’s freedom. We never
dreamed then of detaining friend, husband, father or lover, when that
country called. You know the country had been bleeding at every pore
then for years. My father was a stern old man, who had been in the ‘old
French war.’ My mother had been reared in a fort, and had daily loaded
and handed the musket to her husband as he shouldered his axe or his
scythe for his daily labor. Her sister had been carried into captivity
by the Indians, and lived there among them for years before she escaped
to her home. Arms, fighting, wounds, were household words with us. Judge
if we were likely to think a moment of detaining Edward, though the day
was fixed for our marriage. We were to have been married in June, and
now it was May.
“How long it is since that day! how much has come and gone since then!
and I live to tell it! It was but a few years after that the world shook
with the French Revolution—and a few years more—that man of a bloody
age, the expression of all that is evil and great in human nature, rose
and shocked his race, comet-like, with his fierce glare, and then set
forever. Our own calm Washington sleeps in his heart-honored grave, and
the sighs of a grateful people whisper in the cedars above it—but then,
he was living, acting, and inspiring all about him with the indomitable
courage and heroic patience that animated himself. The terrors and
events that stirred our hearts to agony were nigh us, even at our doors,
and strong as we might be in patriotic feeling, almost every family
could count its victims. I was young in years, but we grew old early
then, and my mother had held her first child in her arms at fifteen
years old.
“It was early in the morning—at early dawn—when I parted from him. He
held me to his bosom that was covered with the simple uniform—so
associated in my mind with all that was best and noblest on earth—and
my bosom beat with pride as well as grief. I also could sacrifice
something to my country.
“Well—that day—it wore on drearily, so drearily as you can never know;
and in the afternoon some neighbors came in to talk of the army, and the
destination of the regiment which had just left us. It was long after
dinner—nearly two o’clock. So depressed and wretched did I feel, that
when I lifted my head from my arms, where I was leaning, and gazed out
on the sky, I was more soothed than startled at its strange appearance.
The air seemed absolutely heavy with a darkness that came on like an
army. But my thoughts had been of darkness and blood, and a sadness I
could not shake off. Presently they all saw and felt it too. They sprang
to the door, but it was not a storm, it was not cloudy, but just
dark—the cattle came lowing into the yard, the birds flew to their
nests, the fowls were already on their roosts. I cannot describe to you
the consternation of our household. Superstitious persons are not
wanting in any age, and you may guess that many read in the supernatural
gloom a foreboding of disaster to our arms. That the day of judgment was
approaching was a more common feeling, and a good many went to the
minister’s house in their terror, that they might be listening to
prayer. I don’t remember that I thought about it much, but it was a
relief to see the sky light up as it did after two or three hours, and
see nature going on her accustomed routine.
“We had no mails then, you know, my dears, and often months went on, and
on, and brought no tidings to us, but what we learned from general
rumor, or some chance straggler from the army. Then would come a letter
from Edward, filled with all his former love, but giving no hope of his
immediate return to us. Then came the project of besieging New York, and
then volunteers would not do, nor new soldiers. The country demanded men
who knew and could bear the fatigues of war. Oh! my children! you read
and hear of the glory of war, and of the soldier who sweetly breathes
his last for his country: true, the battle-field is terrible to think
of, but there the groans are those of the dying, and humanity, shocked
at her own barbarity, stanches the wounds, and tearfully holds the head
that a few hours before she was frantic to lay in a bloody grave. But
for the living death that many of our soldiers suffered before the war
was over, there has been no such sympathy. The privation of clothing, of
the commonest sort, the unshod feet, wearily and bleedingly marching
over the snow, the shivering form, half covered by the tattered uniform,
crouching over the fire in the wretched huts of the north, were scarcely
less destructive than the withering heat, and wasting famine of the
southern troops. Fortunately Edward did not go south until the winter,
so that though he wrote of battle, he did not of sickness, and I hoped
still.
“When I next heard from him he was stationed at New London. You know
that terrible story, my daughters. You know that Arnold, the wretch,
whom to name is to execrate forever in American bosoms, ‘Arnold the
traitor,’ was sent to besiege it. He had four times the number of men
that were in the fort. He attacked it on three sides at once, and though
our men fought like lions, it must have been in vain. They fought in
full view of their homes, of all that was dear to them in the world.
Judge if they did not fight. Judge if they did not pour out their blood
like water, while there was any hope. But at last they gave way—they
laid down their arms. And then—they were basely murdered as they stood!
Such a massacre was not known elsewhere, thank Heaven! during our whole
struggle. It is enough to make one shrink from all that bears the name
of man.”
Here Madam Stanwood paused. She had sketched rather than related so far,
and the fair girls listened with a pained and eager interest. Most of
what she had alluded to was new to them, and as they looked on one who
had personally known and suffered in what had to them been only a dry
“history,” she seemed transformed in their eyes. Oh! the “unwritten
history” of that placid face! The written one of that heart, whose every
fibre had been woven in one long web of anxiety and sorrow, and dyed in
the blood of the loved and lost one! For now they saw that Edward must
have been one of those who fell in that massacre. Their eager and
tearful faces expressed the sympathy they did not else utter, and their
aged relative understood it. She went on quietly.
“All is not yet told, my daughters. I heard that Edward had fallen, and
years passed away, and still I heard nothing from him more. Then I
married Mr. Stanwood—and then—and then Edward returned.”
“Returned!” exclaimed both the girls in a breath.
“Yes, he returned. The massacre was not complete. Somebody became
satisfied with blood, and proposed a respite, and about forty were left
living, and taken prisoners to New York. Edward lived through a long,
dreadful fever, alone, without aid or attendance of any sort. Then he
was sent with a hundred others to a prison-ship. God forbid your dear
hearts should be saddened with all he underwent there. We heard it all.
He returned to his family at last, with broken health, broken fortune—”
“And a broken heart! ah, grandmother!”
“No, his heart was not broken. What he felt I never knew, for he learned
my marriage before he came back, and we never met for years. My
children, my story will have been told you quite in vain, if it does not
show you that hearts must live and act, and fulfill present duties, with
what fortitude they may, and _not_ break—nor ‘brokenly live on.’ God
gave me the strength for which I prayed, to perform my duty to my
husband and children, and to set aside from my heart an image which no
longer fitted such a temple. I have long ago ceased to look at him with
any eyes but those of friendly interest, though the recall of so much
that is connected with grief is of course painful, and you see
yourselves that he is both gay and social, and by no means inclined to
play the despairing lover.”
“We see!” they again spoke in a breath.
“Yes, you have seen him this afternoon. Edward—_Colonel Edward Morgan_.
And here we are at home, my loves, an hour past dinner-time.”
* * * * *