[Illustration: NEW NEIGHBORS.
_"Who can have taken the Ferguses' house, sister?" said a brisk little
old lady, peeping through the window blinds._--p. 7.]
WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS:
OR,
THE RECORDS OF AN UNFASHIONABLE STREET.
(_Sequel to "My Wife and I."_)
_A NOVEL._
BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
_Author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "My Wife and I," etc._
With Illustrations.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK:
J. B. FORD & COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT A.D. 1875
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET 7
II.--HOW WE BEGIN LIFE 23
III.--THE FAMILY DICTATOR AT WORK 30
IV.--EVA TO HARRY'S MOTHER 42
V.--AUNT MARIA ROUSES A TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT 52
VI.--THE SETTLING OF THE WATERS 69
VII.--LETTERS AND AIR-CASTLES 78
VIII.--THE VANDERHEYDEN FORTRESS TAKEN 86
IX.--JIM AND ALICE 95
X.--MR. ST. JOHN 103
XI.--AUNT MARIA CLEARS HER CONSCIENCE 115
XII.--"WHY CAN'T THEY LET US ALONE?" 131
XIII.--OUR "EVENING" PROJECTED 144
XIV.--MR. ST. JOHN IS OUTARGUED 152
XV.--GETTING READY TO BEGIN 160
XVI.--THE MINISTER'S VISIT 173
XVII.--OUR FIRST THURSDAY 178
XVIII.--RAKING UP THE FIRE 192
XIX.--A LOST SHEEP 197
XX.--EVA TO HARRY'S MOTHER 201
XXI.--BOLTON AND ST. JOHN 207
XXII.--BOLTON TO CAROLINE 214
XXIII.--THE SISTERS OF ST. BARNABAS 221
XXIV.--EVA TO HARRY'S MOTHER 227
XXV.--AUNT MARIA ENDEAVORS TO SET MATTERS RIGHT 232
XXVI.--SHE STOOD OUTSIDE THE GATE 243
XXVII.--ROUGH HANDLING OF SORE NERVES 253
XXVIII.--REASON AND UNREASON 262
XXIX.--AUNT MARIA FREES HER MIND 270
XXX.--A DINNER ON WASHING DAY 274
XXXI.--WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT 285
XXXII.--A MISTRESS WITHOUT A MAID 296
XXXIII.--A FOUR-FOOTED PRODIGAL 307
XXXIV.--GOING TO THE BAD 317
XXXV.--A SOUL IN PERIL 328
XXXVI.--LOVE IN CHRISTMAS GREENS 339
XXXVII.--THEREAFTER? 350
XXXVIII.--"WE MUST BE CAUTIOUS" 357
XXXIX.--SAYS SHE TO HER NEIGHBOR--WHAT? 365
XL.--THE ENGAGEMENT ANNOUNCED 369
XLI.--LETTER FROM EVA TO HARRY'S MOTHER 375
XLII.--JIM'S FORTUNES 387
XLIII.--A MIDNIGHT CAUCUS OVER THE COALS 399
XLIV.--FLUCTUATIONS 407
XLV.--THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 414
XLVI.--WHAT THEY ALL SAID ABOUT IT 418
XLVII.--"IN THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS" 430
XLVIII.--THE PEARL CROSS 439
XLIX.--THE UNPROTECTED FEMALE 448
L.--EVA TO HARRY'S MOTHER 461
LI.--THE HOUR AND THE WOMAN 465
LII.--EVA'S CONSULTATIONS 469
LIII.--WEDDING PRESENTS 474
LIV.--MARRIED AND A' 478
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
I.--NEW NEIGHBORS _Frontispiece._
"_'Who can have taken the Ferguses' house, sister?' said a
brisk little old lady, peeping through the window blinds._"
PAGE
II.--TALKING IT OVER 73
"_Come now, Puss, out with it. Why that anxious brow?
What domestic catastrophe?_"
III.--THE DOMESTIC ARTIST 131
"_A spray of ivy that was stretching towards the window had been
drawn back and was forced to wreathe itself around a picture._"
IV.--WICKEDNESS, OR MISERY? 197
"_Bolton laid his hand on her shoulder, and, looking down
on her, said: 'Poor child, have you no mother?'_"
V.--CONFIDENCES 287
"_In due course followed an introduction to 'my wife,' whose
photograph Mr. Selby wore dutifully in his coat-pocket._"
VI.--GOING TO THE BAD 327
"_The sweet-faced woman calls the attention of her husband.
He frowns, whips up the horse, and is gone.... Bitterness
possesses Maggie's soul.... Why not go to the bad?_"
VII.--SKIRMISHING 341
"_'I like your work,' he said, 'better than you do mine.'
'I didn't say that I didn't like yours,' said Angie, coloring._"
VIII.--A MIDNIGHT CAUCUS 400
"_'There, now he's off,' said Eva ... then, leaning back,
she began taking out hair-pins and shaking down curls and
untying ribbons as a preface to a wholly free conversation._"
WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS.
_CHAPTER I._
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET.
"Who can have taken the Ferguses' house, sister?" said a brisk little
old lady, peeping through the window blinds. "It's taken! Just come
here and look! There's a cart at the door."
"You don't say so!" said Miss Dorcas, her elder sister, flying across
the room to the window blinds, behind which Mrs. Betsey sat discreetly
ensconced with her knitting work. "Where? Jack, get down, sir!" This
last remark was addressed to a rough-coated Dandie Dinmont terrier,
who had been winking in a half doze on a cushion at Miss Dorcas's
feet. On the first suggestion that there was something to be looked at
across the street, Jack had ticked briskly across the room, and now
stood on his hind legs on an old embroidered chair, peering through
the slats as industriously as if his opinion had been requested. "Get
down, sir!" persisted Miss Dorcas. But Jack only winked contumaciously
at Mrs. Betsey, whom he justly considered in the light of an ally,
planted his toe nails more firmly in the embroidered chair-bottom, and
stuck his nose further between the slats, while Mrs. Betsey took up
for him, as he knew she would.
"Do let the dog alone, Dorcas! _He_ wants to see as much as anybody."
"Now, Betsey, how am I ever to teach Jack not to jump on these chairs
if you will always take his part? Besides, next we shall know, he'll
be barking through the window blinds," said Miss Dorcas.
Mrs. Betsey replied to the expostulation by making a sudden diversion
of subject. "Oh, look, look!" she called, "that must be _she_," as a
face with radiant, dark eyes, framed in an aureole of bright golden
hair, appeared in the doorway of the house across the street. "She's a
pretty creature, anyway--much prettier than poor dear Mrs. Fergus."
"Henderson, you say the name is?" said Miss Dorcas.
"Yes. Simons, the provision man at the corner, told me that the
house had been bought by a young editor, or something of that sort,
named Henderson--somebody that writes for the papers. He married Van
Arsdel's daughter."
"What, the Van Arsdels that failed last spring? One of our mushroom
New York aristocracy--up to-day and down to-morrow!" commented Miss
Dorcas, with an air of superiority. "Poor things!"
"A very imprudent marriage, I don't doubt," sighed Mrs. Betsey. "These
upstart modern families never bring up their girls to do anything."
"She seems to be putting her hand to the plough, though," said Miss
Dorcas. "See, she actually is lifting out that package herself! Upon
my word, a very pretty creature. I think we must take her up."
"The Ferguses were nice," said Mrs. Betsey, "though he was only a
newspaper man, and she was a nobody; but she really did quite answer
the purpose for a neighbor--not, of course, one of our sort exactly,
but a very respectable, lady-like little body."
"Well," said Miss Dorcas, reflectively, "I always said it doesn't do
to carry exclusiveness too far. Poor dear Papa was quite a democrat.
He often said that he had seen quite good manners and real refinement
in people of the most ordinary origin."
"And, to be sure," said Mrs. Betsey, "if one is to be too particular,
one doesn't get anybody to associate with. The fact is, the good old
families we used to visit have either died off or moved off up into
the new streets, and one does like to have _somebody_ to speak to."
"Look there, Betsey, do you suppose that's Mr. Henderson that's coming
down the street?" said Miss Dorcas.
"Dear me!" said Mrs. Betsey, in an anxious flutter. "Why, there are
_two_ of them--they are both taking hold to lift out that bureau--see
there! Now _she's_ put her head out of the chamber window there, and
is speaking to them. What a pretty color her hair is!"
At this moment the horse on the other side of the street started
prematurely, for some reason best known to himself, and the bureau
came down with a thud; and Jack, who considered his opinion as now
called for, barked frantically through the blinds.
Miss Dorcas seized his muzzle energetically and endeavored to hold
his jaws together, but he still barked in a smothered and convulsive
manner; whereat the good lady swept him, _vi et armis_, from his
perch, and disciplined him vigorously, forcing him to retire to his
cushion in a distant corner, where he still persistently barked.
"Oh, poor doggie!" sighed Mrs. Betsey. "Dorcas, how can you?"
"How can I?" said Miss Dorcas, in martial tones. "Betsey Ann
Benthusen, this dog would grow up a perfect pest of this
neighborhood if I left him to you. He _must_ learn not to get up
and bark through those blinds. It isn't so much matter now the
windows are shut, but the _habit_ is the thing. Who wants to have
a dog firing a fusillade when your visitors come up the front
steps--barking-enough-to-split-one's-head-open," added Miss Dorcas,
turning upon the culprit, with a severe staccato designed to tell upon
his conscience.
Jack bowed his head and rolled his great soft eyes at her through a
silvery thicket of hair.
"You are a _very_ naughty dog," she added, impressively.
Jack sat up on his haunches and waved his front paws in a deprecating
manner to Miss Dorcas, and the good lady laughed and said, cheerily,
"Well, well, Jacky, be a good dog now, and we'll be friends."
And Jacky wagged his tail in the most demonstrative manner, and
frisked with triumphant assurance of restored favor. It was the usual
end of disciplinary struggles with him. Miss Dorcas sat down to a bit
of worsted work on which she had been busy when her attention was
first called to the window.
Mrs. Betsey, however, with her nose close to the window blinds,
continued to announce the state of things over the way in short jets
of communication.
"There! the gentlemen are both gone in--and there! the cart has driven
off. Now, they've shut the front door," etc.
After this came a pause of a few moments, in which both sisters worked
in silence.
"I wonder, now, _which_ of those two was the husband," said Mrs.
Betsey at last, in a slow reflective tone, as if she had been maturely
considering the subject.
In the mean time it had occurred to Miss Dorcas that this species of
minute inquisition into the affairs of neighbors over the way was
rather a compromising of her dignity, and she broke out suddenly from
a high moral perch on her unconscious sister.
"Betsey," she said, with severe gravity, "I really suppose it's no
concern of ours _what_ goes on over at the other house. Poor dear
Papa used to say if there was anything that was unworthy a true lady
it was a disposition to gossip. Our neighbors' affairs are nothing to
us. I think it is Mrs. Chapone who says, 'A well-regulated mind will
repress curiosity.' Perhaps, Betsey, it would be well to go on with
our daily reading."
Mrs. Betsey, as a younger sister, had been accustomed to these sudden
pullings-up of the moral check-rein from Miss Dorcas, and received
them as meekly as a well-bitted pony. She rose immediately, and,
laying down her knitting work, turned to the book-case. It appears
that the good souls were diversifying their leisure hours by reading
for the fifth or sixth time that enlivening poem, Young's _Night
Thoughts_. So, taking down a volume from the book-shelves and opening
to a mark, Mrs. Betsey commenced a sonorous expostulation to Alonzo on
the value of time. The good lady's manner of rendering poetry was in a
high-pitched falsetto, with inflections of a marvelous nature, rising
in the earnest parts almost to a howl. In her youth she had been held
to possess a talent for elocution, and had been much commended by the
amateurs of her times as a reader of almost professional merit. The
decay of her vocal organs had been so gradual and gentle that neither
sister had perceived the change of quality in her voice, or the
nervous tricks of manner which had grown upon her, till her rendering
of poetry resembled a preternatural hoot. Miss Dorcas beat time with
her needle and listened complacently to the mournful adjurations,
while Jack, crouching himself with his nose on his forepaws, winked
very hard and surveyed Miss Betsey with an uneasy excitement, giving
from time to time low growls as her voice rose in emphatic places;
and finally, as if even a dog's patience could stand it no longer, he
chorused a startling point with a sharp yelp!
"There!" said Mrs. Betsey, throwing down the book. "What is the reason
Jack _never_ likes me to read poetry?"
Jack sprang forward as the book was thrown down, and running to Mrs.
Betsey, jumped into her lap and endeavored to kiss her in a most
tumultuous and excited manner, as an expression of his immense relief.
"There! there! Jacky, good fellow--down, down! Why, how odd it is!
I can't think what excites him so in my reading," said Mrs. Betsey.
"It must be something that he notices in my intonations," she added,
innocently.
The two sisters we have been looking in upon are worthy of a word
of introduction. There are in every growing city old houses that
stand as breakwaters in the tide of modern improvement, and may be
held as fortresses in which the past entrenches itself against the
never-ceasing encroachments of the present. The house in which the
conversation just recorded has taken place was one of these. It was a
fragment of ancient primitive New York known as the old Vanderheyden
house, only waiting the death of old Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden and her
sister, Mrs. Betsey Benthusen, to be pulled down and made into city
lots and squares.
Time was when the Vanderheyden house was the country seat of old Jacob
Vanderheyden, a thriving Dutch merchant, who lived there with somewhat
foreign ideas of style and stateliness.
Parks and gardens and waving trees had encircled it, but the city
limits had gained upon it through three generations; squares and
streets had been opened through its grounds, till now the house itself
and the garden-patch in the rear was all that remained of the ancient
domain. Innumerable schemes of land speculators had attacked the old
place; offers had been insidiously made to the proprietors which would
have put them in possession of dazzling wealth, but they gallantly
maintained their position. It is true their income in ready money was
but scanty, and their taxes had, year by year, grown higher as the
value of the land increased. Modern New York, so to speak, foamed and
chafed like a great red dragon before the old house, waiting to make a
mouthful of it, but the ancient princesses within bravely held their
own and refused to parley or capitulate.
Their life was wholly in the past, with a generation whose bones had
long rested under respectable tombstones. Their grandfather on their
mother's side had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence;
their grandfather on the paternal side was a Dutch merchant of some
standing in early New York, a friend and correspondent of Alexander
Hamilton's and a co-worker with him in those financial schemes by
which the treasury of the young republic of America was first placed
on a solid basis. Old Jacob did good service in negotiating loans in
Holland, and did not omit to avail himself of the golden opportunities
which the handling of a nation's wealth presents. He grew rich and
great in the land, and was implicitly revered in his own family as
being one of the nurses and founders of the American Republic. In the
ancient Dutch secretary which stood in the corner of the sitting-room
where our old ladies spent their time were many letters from noted
names of a century or so back--papers yellow with age, but whose
contents were all alive with the foam and fresh turbulence of what was
then the existing life of the period.
Mrs. Betsey Benthusen was a younger sister and a widow. She had been a
beauty in her girlhood, and so much younger than her sister that Miss
Dorcas felt all the pride and interest of a mother in her success,
in her lovers, in her marriage; and when that marriage proved a
miserable failure, uniting her to a man who wasted her fortune and
neglected her person, and broke her heart, Miss Dorcas received her
back to her strong arms and made a home and a refuge where the poor
woman could gather up and piece together, in some broken fashion, the
remains of her life as one mends a broken Sèvres china tea cup.
Miss Dorcas was by nature of a fiery, energetic temperament, intense
and original--precisely the one to be a contemner of customs and
proprieties; but a very severe and rigid education had imposed on her
every yoke of the most ancient and straitest-laced decorum. She had
been nurtured only in such savory treatises as Dr. Gregory's _Legacy
to his Daughters_, Mrs. Chapone's _Letters_, Miss Hannah More's
_Coelebs in Search of a Wife_, Watts _On the Mind_, and other good
books by which our great grandmothers had their lives all laid out for
them in exact squares and parallelograms, and were taught exactly what
to think and do in all possible emergencies.
But, as often happens, the original nature of Miss Dorcas was apt to
break out here and there, all the more vivaciously for repression, in
a sort of natural geyser: and so, though rigidly proper in the main,
she was apt to fall into delightful spasms of naturalness.
Notwithstanding all the remarks of Mrs. Chapone and Dr. Watts about
gossip, she still had a hearty and innocent interest in the pretty
young housekeeper that was building a nest opposite to her, and a
little quite harmless curiosity in what was going on over the way.
A great deal of good sermonizing, by the by, is expended on gossip,
which is denounced as one of the seven deadly sins of society; but,
after all, gossip has its better side: if not a Christian grace, it
certainly is one of those weeds which show a good warm soil.
The kindly heart, that really cares for everything human it meets,
inclines toward gossip, in a good way. Just as a morning glory throws
out tendrils, and climbs up and peeps cheerily into your window, so
a kindly gossip can't help watching the opening and shutting of your
blinds and the curling smoke from your chimney. And so, too, after
all the high morality of Miss Dorcas, the energetic turning of her
sister to the paths of propriety, and the passage from Young's _Night
Thoughts_, with its ponderous solemnity, she was at heart kindly
musing upon the possible fortunes of the pretty young creature across
the street, and was as fresh and ready to take up the next bit of
information about her house as a brisk hen is to discuss the latest
bit of crumb thrown from a window.
Miss Dorcas had been brought up by her father in diligent study of
the old approved English classics. The book-case of the sitting-room
presented in gilded order old editions of the _Rambler_, the
_Tattler_, and the _Spectator_, the poems of Pope, and Dryden, and
Milton, and Shakespeare, and Miss Dorcas and her sister were well
versed in them all. And in view of the whole of our modern literature,
we must say that their studies might have been much worse directed.
Their father had unfortunately been born too early to enjoy Walter
Scott. There is an age when a man cannot receive a new author or a
new idea. Like a lilac bush which has made its terminal buds, he has
grown all he can in this life, and there is no use in trying to force
him into a new growth. Jacob Vanderheyden died considering Scott's
novels as the flimsy trash of the modern school, while his daughters
hid them under their pillows, and found them all the more delightful
from the vague sensation of sinfulness which was connected with their
admiration. Walter Scott was their most modern landmark; youth and
bloom and heedlessness and impropriety were all delightfully mixed up
with their reminiscences of him--and now, here they were still living
in an age which has shelved Walter Scott among the classics, and reads
Dickens and Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.
Miss Dorcas had been stranded, now and then, on one of these "trashy
moderns"--had sat up all night surreptitiously reading _Nicholas
Nickleby_, and had hidden the book from Mrs. Betsey lest her young
mind should be carried away, until she discovered, by an accidental
remark, that Mrs. Betsey had committed the same delightful impropriety
while off on a visit to a distant relative. When the discovery became
mutual, from time to time other works of the same author crept into
the house in cheap pamphlet editions, and the perusal of them was
apologized for by Miss Dorcas to Mrs. Betsey, as being well enough,
now and then, to see what people were reading in these trashy times.
Ah, what is fame! Are not Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope on their
inevitable way to the same dusty high shelf in the library, where they
will be praised and not read by the forthcoming _jeunesse_ of the
future?
If the minds of the ancient sisters were a museum of by-gone ideas,
and literature, and tastes, the old Vanderheyden house was no less a
museum of by-gone furniture. The very smell of the house was ghostly
with past suggestion. Every article of household gear in it had grown
old together with all the rest, standing always in the same spot,
subjected to the same minute daily dusting and the same semi-annual
house-cleaning.
Carlyle has a dissertation on the "talent for annihilating rubbish."
This was a talent that the respectable Miss Dorcas had none of.
Carlyle thinks it a fine thing to have; but we think the lack of it
may come from very respectable qualities. In Miss Dorcas it came
from a vivid imagination of the possible future uses to which
every decayed or broken household article might be put. The pitcher
without nose or handle was fine china, and might yet be exactly the
thing for something, and so it went carefully on some high perch of
preservation, dismembered; the half of a broken pair of snuffers
certainly looked too good to throw away--possibly it might be the
exact thing needed to perfect some invention. Miss Dorcas vaguely
remembered legends of inventors who had laid hold on such chance
adaptations at the very critical point of their contrivances, and
so the half snuffers waited years for their opportunity. The upper
shelves of the closets in the Vanderheyden house were a perfect
crowded mustering ground for the incurables and incapables of
household belongings. One might fancy them a Hotel des Invalides of
things wounded and fractured in the general battle of life. There were
blades of knives without handles, and handles without blades; there
were ancient tea-pots that leaked--but might be mended, and doubtless
would be of some good in a future day; there were cracked plates and
tea-cups; there were china dish-covers without dishes to match; a
coffee-mill that wouldn't grind, and shears that wouldn't cut, and
snuffers that wouldn't snuff--in short, every species of decayed
utility.
Miss Dorcas had in the days of her youth been blest with a brother of
an active, inventive turn of mind; the secret crypts and recesses of
the closets bore marks of his unfinished projections. There were all
the wheels and weights and other internal confusions of a clock, which
he had pulled to pieces with a view of introducing an improvement into
the machinery, which never was introduced; but the wheels and weights
were treasured up with pious care, waiting for _somebody_ to put them
together again. All this array of litter was fated to come down from
its secret recesses, its deep, dark closets, its high shelves and
perches, on two solemn days of the year devoted to house-cleaning,
when Miss Dorcas, like a good general, looked them over and reviewed
them, expatiated on their probable capabilities, and resisted
gallantly any suggestions of Black Dinah, the cook and maid of all
work, or Mrs. Betsey, that some order ought to be taken to rid the
house of them.
"Dear me, Dorcas," Mrs. Betsey would say, "what is the use of keeping
such a clutter and litter of things that nothing can be done with and
that never can be used?"
"Betsey Ann Benthusen," would be the reply, "you always were
a careless little thing. You never understood any more about
housekeeping than a canary bird--not a bit." In Miss Dorcas's view,
Mrs. Betsey, with her snow white curls and her caps, was still a
frivolous young creature, not fit to be trusted with a serious opinion
on the nicer points of household management. "Now, who knows, Betsey,
but some time we may meet some poor worthy young man who may be
struggling along as an inventor and may like to have these wheels and
weights! I'm sure brother Dick said they were wonderfully well made."
"Well, but, Dorcas, all those cracked cups and broken pitchers; I do
think they are dreadful!"
"Now, Betsey, hush up! I've heard of a kind of new cement that they
are manufacturing in London, that makes old china better than new;
and when they get it over here I'm going to mend these all up. You
wouldn't have me throw away _family_ china, would you?"
The word "_family_ china" was a settler, for both Mrs. Betsey and Miss
Dorcas and old Dinah were united in one fundamental article of faith:
that "the _Family_" was a solemn, venerable and awe-inspiring reality.
What, or why, or how it was, no mortal could say.
Old Jacob Vanderheyden, the grandfather, had been in his day busy
among famous and influential men, and had even been to Europe as a
sort of attaché to the first American diplomatic corps. He had been
also a thriving merchant, and got to himself houses, and lands,
and gold and silver. Jacob Vanderheyden, the father, had inherited
substance and kept up the good name of the family, and increased and
strengthened its connections. But his son and heir, Dick Vanderheyden,
Miss Dorcas's elder brother, had seemed to have no gifts but those of
dispersing; and had muddled away the family fortune in all sorts of
speculations and adventures as fast as his father and grandfather had
made it. The sisters had been left with an income much abridged by
the imprudence of the brother and the spendthrift dissipation of Mrs.
Betsey's husband; they were forsaken by the retreating waves of rank
and fashion; their house, instead of being a center of good society,
was encompassed by those ordinary buildings devoted to purposes of
trade whose presence is deemed incompatible with genteel residence.
And yet, through it all, their confidence in the rank and position
of their family continued unabated. The old house, with every bit of
old queer furniture in it, the old window curtains, the old tea-cups
and saucers, the old bedspreads and towels, all had a sacredness
such as pertained to no modern things. Like the daughter of Zion in
sacred song, Miss Dorcas "took pleasure in their dust and favored the
stones thereof." The old blue willow-patterned china, with mandarins
standing in impossible places, and bridges and pagodas growing up, as
the world was made, out of nothing, was to Miss Dorcas consecrated
porcelain--even its broken fragments were impregnated with the sacred
flavor of ancient gentility.
Miss Dorcas's own private and personal closets, drawers, and baskets
were squirrel's-nests of all sorts of memorials of the past. There
were pieces of every gown she had ever worn, of all her sister's
gowns, and of the mortal habiliments of many and many a one beside
who had long passed beyond the need of earthly garments. Bits of
wedding robes of brides who had long been turned to dust; fragments
of tarnished gold lace from old court dresses; faded, crumpled,
artificial flowers, once worn on the head of beauty; gauzes and
tissues, old and wrinkled, that had once set off the triumphs of the
gay--all mingled in her crypts and drawers and trunks, and each had
its story. Each, held in her withered hand, brought back to memory the
thread of some romance warm with the color and flavor of a life long
passed away.
Then there were collections, saving and medicinal; for Miss Dorcas
had in great force that divine instinct of womanhood that makes her
perceptive of the healing power inherent in all things. Never an
orange or an apple was pared on her premises when the peeling was not
carefully garnered--dried on newspaper, and neatly stored away in
paper bags for sick-room uses.
There were closets smelling of elderblow, catnip, feverfew, and dried
rose leaves, which grew in a bit of old garden soil back of the house;
a spot sorely retrenched and cut down from the ample proportions
it used to have, as little by little had been sold off, but still
retaining a few growing things, in which Miss Dorcas delighted. The
lilacs that once were bushes there had grown gaunt and high, and
looked in at the chamber windows with an antique and grandfatherly
air, quite of a piece with everything else about the old Vanderheyden
house.
The ancient sisters had few outlets into the society of modern New
York. Now and then, a stray visit came from some elderly person who
still remembered the Vanderheydens, and perhaps about once a year they
went to the expense of a carriage to return the call, and rolled up
into the new part of the town like shadows of the past. But generally
their path of life led within the narrow limits of the house. Old
Dinah, the sole black servant remaining, was the last remnant of a
former retinue of negro servants held by old Jacob when New York was a
slave State and a tribe of black retainers was one of the ostentations
of wealth. All were gone now, and only Dinah remained, devoted to the
relics of the old family, clinging with a cat-like attachment to the
old place.
She was like many of her race, a jolly-hearted, pig-headed, giggling,
faithful old creature, who said "Yes'm" to Miss Dorcas and took her
own way about most matters; and Miss Dorcas, satisfied that her way
was not on the whole a bad one in the ultimate results, winked at her
free handling of orders, and consented to accept her, as we do Nature,
for what could be got out of her.
"They are going to have mince-pie and broiled chicken for dinner over
there," said Mrs. Betsey, when the two ladies were seated at their own
dinner-table that day.
"How in the world did you know that?" asked Miss Dorcas.
"Well! Dinah met their girl in at the provision store and struck up an
acquaintance, and went in to help her put up a bedstead, and so she
stopped a while in the kitchen. The tall gentleman with black hair
_is_ the husband--I thought all the while he was," said Mrs. Betsey.
"The other one is a Mr. Fellows, a great friend of theirs, Mary
says----"
"Mary!--who is Mary?" said Miss Dorcas.
"Why, Mary McArthur, their girl--they only keep one, but she has a
little daughter about eight years old to help. I wish we had a little
girl, or something that one might train for a waiter to answer
door-bells and do little things."
"Our door-bells don't call for much attention, and a little girl is
nothing but a plague," interposed Miss Dorcas.
"Dinah has quite fallen in love with Mrs. Henderson," said Mrs.
Betsey; "she says that she is the handsomest, pleasantest-spoken lady
she's seen for a great while."
"We'll call upon her when they get well settled," said Miss Dorcas,
definitively.
Miss Dorcas settled this with the air of a princess. She felt that
such a meritorious little person as the one over the way ought to be
encouraged by people of good old families.
Our readers will observe that Miss Dorcas listened without
remonstrance and with some appearance of interest to the items about
minced pie and broiled chicken; but high moral propriety, as we all
know, is a very cold, windy height, and if a person is planted on it
once or twice a day, it is as much as ought to be demanded of human
weakness.
For the rest of the time one should be allowed, like Miss Dorcas, to
repose upon one's laurels. And, after all, it is interesting, when
life is moving in a very stagnant current, even to know what your
neighbor has for dinner!
_CHAPTER II._
HOW WE BEGIN LIFE.
(_Letter from Eva Henderson to Isabelle Courtney._)
My Dear Belle: Well, here we are, Harry and I, all settled down to
housekeeping quite like old folks. All is about done but the _last
things_,--those little touches, and improvements, and alterations
that go off into airy perspective. I believe it was Carlyle that
talked about an "infinite shoe-black" whom all the world could not
quite satisfy so but that there would always be a next thing in the
distance. Well, perhaps it's going to be so in housekeeping, and
I shall turn out an infinite housekeeper; for I find this little,
low-studded, unfashionable home of ours, far off in a tabooed street,
has kept all my energies brisk and busy for a month past, and still
there are more worlds to conquer. Visions of certain brackets and
lambrequins that are to adorn my spare chamber visit my pillow
nightly, while Harry is placidly sleeping the sleep of the just. I
have been unable to attain to them because I have been so busy with
my parlor ivies and my Ward's case of ferns, and some perfectly
seraphic hanging baskets, gorgeous with flowering nasturtiums that
are now blooming in my windows. There is a dear little Quaker dove of
a woman living in the next house to ours who is a perfect witch at
gardening--a good kind of witch, you understand, one who could make a
broomstick bud and blossom if she undertook it--and she has been my
teacher and exemplar in these matters. Her parlor is a perfect bower,
a drab dove's nest wreathed round with vines and all a-bloom with
geraniums; and mine is coming on to look just like it. So you see all
this has kept me ever so busy.
Then there are the family accounts to keep. You may think that isn't
much for our little concern, but you would be amazed to find how much
there is in it. You see, I have all my life concerned myself only with
figures of speech and never gave a thought about figures of arithmetic
or troubled my head as to where money came from, or went to; and when
I married Harry I had a general idea that we were going to live with
delightful economy. But it is astonishing how much all our simplicity
costs, after all. My account-book is giving me a world of new ideas,
and some pretty serious ones too.
Harry, you see, leaves every thing to me. He has to be off to his
office by seven o'clock every morning, and I am head marshal of
the commisariat department--committee of one on supplies, and all
that--and it takes up a good deal of my time.
You would laugh, Belle, to see me with my matronly airs and graces
going my daily walk to the provision-store at the corner, which is
kept by a tall, black-browed lugubrious man, with rough hair and a
stiff stubby beard, who surveys me with a severe gravity over the
counter, as if he wasn't sure that my designs were quite honest.
"Mr. Quackenboss," I say, with my sweetest smile, "have you any nice
butter?"
He looks out of the window, drums on the counter, and answers "Yes,"
in a tone of great reserve.
"I should like to look at some," I say, undiscouraged.
"It's down cellar," he replies, gloomily chewing a bit of chip and
casting sinister glances at me.
"Well," I say, cheerfully, "shall I go down there and look at it?"
"How much do you want?" he asks, suspiciously.
"That depends on how well I like it," say I.
"I s'pose I _could_ get up a cask," he says in a ruminating tone; and
now he calls his partner, a cheerful, fat, roly-poly little cockney
Englishman, who flings his h's round in the most generous and reckless
style. His alert manner seems to say that he would get up forty casks
a minute and throw them all at my feet, if it would give me any
pleasure.
So the butter-cask is got up and opened, and my severe friend stands
looking down on it and me as if he would say, "This also is vanity."
"I should like to taste it," I say, "if I had something to try it
with."
He scoops up a portion on his dirty thumbnail and seems to hold it
reflectively, as if a doubt was arising in his mind of the propriety
of this mode of offering it to me.
And now my cockney friend interposes with a clean knife. I taste the
butter and find it excellent, and give a generous order which delights
his honest soul; and as he weighs it out he throws in, gratis, the
information that his little woman has tried it, and he was sure I
would like it, for she is the _tidiest_ little woman and the _best_
judge of butter; that they came from Yorkshire, where the pastures
round were so sweet with a-many violets and cowslips--in fact, my
little cockney friend strays off into a kind of pastoral that makes
the little grocery store quite poetic.
I call my two grocers familiarly Tragedy and Comedy, and make Harry a
good deal of fun by recounting my adventures with them. I have many
speculations about Tragedy. He is a married man, as I learn, and I
can't help wondering what Mrs. Quackenboss thinks of him. Does he ever
shave--or does she kiss him in the rough--or has she given up kissing
him at all? How did he act when he was in love?--if ever he was in
love--and what _did_ he say to the lady to induce her to marry him?
How did he look when he did it? It really makes me shudder to think of
such a mournful ghoul coming back to the domestic circle at night. I
should think the little "Quacks" would all run and hide. But a truce
to scandalizing my neighbor--he may be better than I am, after all!
I ought to tell you that some of my essays in provisioning my garrison
might justly excite his contempt--they have been rather appalling to
my good Mary McArthur. You know I had been used to seeing about a
ten-pound sirloin of beef on Papa's table, and the first day I went
into the shop I assumed an air of easy wisdom as if I had been a
housekeeper all my life, and ordered just such a cut as I had seen
Mamma get, with all sorts of vegetables to match, and walked home
with composed dignity. When Mary saw it she threw up her hands and
gave an exclamation of horror--"Miss Eva!" she said, "when will we
get all this eaten up?" And verily that beef pursued us through the
week most like a ghost. We had it hot, and we had it cold; we had it
stewed and hashed, and made soup of it; we sliced it and we minced it,
and I ate a great deal more than was good for me on purpose to "save
it." Towards the close of the week Harry civilly suggested (he never
finds fault with anything I do, but he merely _suggested_) whether it
wouldn't be better to have a little variety in our table arrangements;
and then I came out with the whole story, and we had a good laugh
together about it. Since then I have come down to taking lessons of
Mary, and I say to her, "How much of this, and that, had I better
get?" and between us we make it go quite nicely.
Speaking of neighbors, my dear blessed Aunt Maria, whom I suppose you
remember, has almost broken her heart about Papa's failing and my
marrying Harry and, finally, our coming to live on an unfashionable
street--which in her view is equal to falling out of heaven into
some very suspicious region of limbo. She almost quarreled with us
both because, having got married contrary to her will, we would also
insist on going to housekeeping and having a whole house to ourselves
on a back street instead of having one little, stuffy room on the back
side of a fashionable boarding house. Well, I made all up with her
at last. If you _will_ have your own way, and persist in it, people
_have to_ make up with you. You thus get to be like the sun and moon
which, though they often behave very inconveniently, you have to make
the best of; and so Aunt Maria has concluded to make the best of Harry
and me. It came about in this wise: I went and sat with her the last
time she had a sick headache, and kissed her, and bathed her head, and
told her I wanted to be a good girl and did really love her, though I
couldn't always take her advice now I was a married woman; and so we
made it up.
But the trouble is that now she wants to show me how to run this
poor little unfashionable boat so as to make a good show with the
rest of them, and I don't want to learn. It's easier to keep out of
the regatta. My card-receiver is full of most desirable names of
people who have come in their fashionable carriages and coupés, and
they have "oh'd" and "ah'd" in my little parlors, and declared they
were "quite sweet," and "so odd," and "_so_ different, you know;"
but, for all that, I don't think I shall try to keep up all this gay
circle of acquaintances. Carriage-hire costs money; and when paid
for by the hour, one asks whether the acquaintances are worth it.
But there are some real noble-hearted people that I mean to keep.
The Van Astrachans, for instance. Mrs. Van Astrachan is a solid lump
of goodness and motherliness, and that sweet Mrs. Harry Endicott is
most lovable. You remember Harry Endicott, I suppose, and what a
trump card he was thought to be among the girls, one time when you
were visiting us, and afterwards all that scandal about him and that
pretty little Mrs. John Seymour? She is dead now, I hear, and he has
married this pretty Rose Ferguson, a friend of hers; and since his
_wife_ has taken him in hand, he has turned out to be a noble fellow.
They live up on Madison avenue quite handsomely. They are among the
"_real_ folks" Mrs. Whitney tells about, and I think I must keep them.
The Elmores I don't care much for. They are a frivolous, fast set, and
what's the use? Sophie and her husband, my old friend Wat Sydney, I
keep mainly because she won't give me up. She is one of the clinging
sort, and is devoted to me. They have a perfect palace up by the
park--it is quite a show-house, and is, I understand, to be furnished
by Harter. So, you see, it's like a friendship between princess and
peasant.
Now, I foresee future conflicts with Aunt Maria in all these
possibilities. She is a nice woman, and bent on securing what she
thinks my interest, but I can't help seeing that she is somewhat
"A shade that follows wealth and fame."
The success of my card-receiver delights her, and not to improve such
opportunities would be, in her view, to bury one's talent in a napkin.
Yet, after all, I differ. I can't help seeing that intimacies between
people with a hundred thousand a year and people of our modest means
will be full of perplexities.
And then I say, Why not try to find all the neighborliness I can on my
own street? In a country village, one finds a deal in one's neighbors,
simply because one must. They are there; they are all one has, and
human nature is always interesting, if one takes it right side out.
Next door is the gentle Quakeress I told you of. She is _nobody_
in the gay world, but as full of sweetness and loving kindness as
heart could desire. Then right across the way are two antiquated old
ladies, very old, very precise, and very funny, who have come in state
and called on me; bringing with them the most lovely, tyrannical
little terrier, who behaved like a small-sized fiend and shocked them
dreadfully. I spy worlds of interest in their company if once I can
rub the stiffness out of our acquaintance, and then I hope to get the
run of the delightfully queer old house.
Then there are our set--Jim Fellows, and Bolton, and my sister Alice,
and the girls--in and out all the time. We sha'n't want for society.
So if Aunt Maria puts me up for a career in the gay world I shall hang
heavy on her hands.
I haven't much independence _myself_, but it is no longer _I_, it is
_We_. Eva Van Arsdel alone was anybody's property; Mamma talked her
one way, her sister Ida another way, and Aunt Maria a third; and among
them all her own little way was hard to find. But now Harry and I have
formed a firm and compact _We_, which is a fortress into which we
retreat from all the world. I tell them all, _We_ don't think so, and
_We_ don't do so. Isn't that nice? When will you come and see us?
Ever your loving
EVA.
_CHAPTER III._
THE FAMILY DICTATOR AT WORK.
From the foregoing letter our readers may have conjectured that the
natural self-appointed ruler of the fortunes of the Van Arsdel family
was "Aunt Maria," or Mrs. Maria Wouvermans.
That is to say, this lady had always considered such to be her
mission, and had acted upon this supposition up to the time that Mr.
Van Arsdel's failure made shipwreck of the fortunes of the family.
Aunt Maria had, so to speak, reveled in the fortune and position
of the Van Arsdels. She had dictated the expenditures of their
princely income; she had projected parties and entertainments; she
had supervised lists of guests to be invited; she had ordered dresses
and carriages and equipages, and hired and dismissed servants at
her sovereign will and pleasure. Nominally, to be sure, Mrs. Van
Arsdel attended to all these matters; but really Aunt Maria was the
power behind the throne. Mrs. Van Arsdel was a pretty, graceful,
self-indulgent woman, who loved ease and hated trouble--a natural
climbing plant who took kindly to any bean-pole in her neighborhood,
and Aunt Maria was her bean-pole. Mrs. Van Arsdel's wealth, her
station, her éclat, her blooming daughters, all climbed up, so to
speak, on Aunt Maria, and hung their flowery clusters around her, to
her praise and glory. Besides all this, there were very solid and
appreciable advantages in the wealth and station of the Van Arsdel
family as related to the worldly enjoyment of Mrs. Maria Wouvermans.
Being a widow, connected with an old rich family, and with but a
small fortune of her own and many necessities of society upon her,
Mrs. Wouvermans had found her own means in several ways supplemented
and carried out by the redundant means of her sister. Mrs. Wouvermans
lived in a moderate house on Murray Hill, within comfortable proximity
to the more showy palaces of the New York nobility. She had old
furniture, old silver, camel's hair shawls and jewelry sufficient to
content her heart, but her yearly income was far below her soul's
desires, and necessitated more economy than she liked. While the Van
Arsdels were in full tide of success she felt less the confinement of
these limits. What need for her to keep a carriage when a carriage and
horses were always at her command for the asking--and even without
asking, as not infrequently came to be the case? Then, the Van Arsdel
parties and hospitalities relieved her from all expensive obligations
of society. She returned the civilities of her friends by invitations
to her sister's parties and receptions; and it is an exceedingly
convenient thing to have all the glory of hospitality and none of the
trouble--to have convenient friends to entertain for you any person
or persons with whom you may be desirous of keeping up amicable
relations. On the whole, Mrs Wouvermans was probably sincere in the
professions, to which Mr. Van Arsdel used to listen with a quiet
amused smile, that "she really enjoyed Nelly's fortune more than if it
were her own."
"Haven't a doubt of it," he used to say, with a twinkle of his eye
which he never further explained.
Mr. Van Arsdel's failure had nearly broken Aunt Maria's heart. In
fact, the dear lady took the matter more sorely than the good man
himself.
Mr. Van Arsdel was, in a small dry way, something of a philosopher. He
was a silent man for the most part, but had his own shrewd comments
on the essential worth of men and things--particularly of men in the
feminine gender. He had never checked his pretty wife in any of her
aspirations, which he secretly valued at about their real value; he
had never quarreled with Aunt Maria or interfered with her sway in his
family within certain limits, because he had sense enough to see that
she was the stronger of the two women, and that his wife could no more
help yielding to her influence than a needle can help sticking to a
magnet.
But the race of fashionable life, its outlays of health and strength,
its expenditures for parties, and for dress and equipage, its
rivalries, its gossip, its eager frivolities, were all matters of
which he took quiet note, and which caused him often to ponder the
words of the wise man of old, "What profit hath a man of all his labor
and the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun?"