After breakfast, on our way to anchor at Antigua for the night, we saw
in the distance the towering cone of Nevis, the "Gorgeous Isle" of
Alexander Hamilton's birth and the famous scene of Lord Nelson's
marriage. It has fallen from its proud estate of former years into
poverty and neglect, but it is still marvelously beautiful to the eye.
We sat on deck reading, or at least glancing drowsily over the pages
of our books to the sapphire sea and the emerald forests of the island
shores with a never-ceasing delight. There were three Roman Catholic
priests on board, also four Protestant missionaries, one of them with
a wife and a family of charming children--Samuel, Naomi, Esther,
Daniel. Piously they were named and never once did they bring contempt
on the Holy Scriptures! From below in a far end of the boat we could
hear echoes of gospel hymns in some little cabin where a
Sunday-morning service was being held.
Dorothea gave a deep sigh.
"It is all so peaceful, Charlotte! One day just like another and all
beautiful and tranquil. We haven't seen anybody hurry since we left
New York. Do you remember Rudyard Kipling saying, when he came back
there after a long absence, that he was afraid to step slowly lest the
man behind him should walk up his back? Nobody ever seems nervous in
these islands. The natives can be ragged and hungry without being much
concerned. Work never appears to be a delight to them for its own
sake, but only as a means to get food. I feel slip--slip--slipping
into a heavenly state of coma. Does anything ever stir the tropics
except hurricanes and earthquakes, I wonder? How can women fight for
suffrage in this climate? How can a man be awakened to great
ambitions?"
"Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis and passed all his boyhood and
youthful days on what is now our own St. Croix," I said.
"Yes, but he wasn't Washington's aide-de-camp nor secretary of the
treasury in the tropics!"
"True; nevertheless, when he was Nicholas Cruger's bookkeeper at the
age of twelve he wrote to an American friend: 'I contemn the groveling
condition of a clerk to which my fortunes condemn me, and I would
willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my
station.... My youth excludes me from any hope of immediate
preferment, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity.' You see the
yeast was stirring, even in the tropics, Dolly!"
"Well, I feel no yeast stirring in me," she said languidly. "All the
morning I have been trying to recapture a certain 'Ode to a Cow'
written by a man of action in a country hotel where mother and I were
sojourning last summer. I could have echoed it when I first regarded
the inhabitants of these islands, and now anybody might say it of me,
for I grow more and more cow-like with every passing day. It runs this
way:
"'ODE TO A CUD-CHEWING COW
"'Why, Cow, art thou so satisfied,
So well content with all things here below,
So meek, so lazy, and so awful slow?
Dost thou not know that men's affairs are mixed?
That grievously the world needs to be fixed?
That nothing we can do has any worth?
That life is care and trouble and untowardness?
Prit, Cow! This is no time for idleness!
The cud thou chewest is not what it seems.
Get up and moo! Tear round and quit thy dreams!'"
By this time Dorothea was asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded
her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her
pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts of her probable
future.
Sunday on shipboard is a good day for reflections and heart-searchings.
My own problem, after all, is not so baffling as Dolly's. She is as
loyal as a charming and sensible girl can be to a mother like Mrs.
Valentine, whose soul, if the truth were told, is about the size of a
mustard-seed. A frivolous, useless, bird-minded woman is Dolly's
mother; a woman pecking at life as a canary pecks at its cuttlefish,
simply to sharpen its bill. How the girl can respect her I cannot
imagine! I suppose flesh calls to flesh and she loves her without too
much analysis, but they seem to have come to the parting of the ways.
It is Dolly's highest self that is in love with Marmaduke Hogg, and I
don't believe she will sacrifice it to a maternal whim and call it
filial obedience. Perhaps the absence that makes the heart grow
fonder is working like a philter in this journey planned by Mrs.
Valentine with a far different purpose.
"Let her go with you, Charlotte," she begged me with tears in her
eyes. "I must get her away from this attractive but undesirable young
man! That absurd uncle who didn't want his name to die out must have
been a lunatic or an imbecile. Why shouldn't such a vulgar name become
extinct? And to think that my exquisite Dorothea--whose figure and
eyelashes have been remarked by royalty--to think that she should be
expected to graft herself on to that family tree of all others! To
think that she may take that name herself and, for aught we know, add
half a dozen more to the list; all boys, probably, who would marry in
course of time and produce others, piling Hoggs on Hoggs, as it were!
It is like one of those horrible endless chains that are condemned by
the government!"
I gave way to peals of laughter at this impassioned speech, evidently
annoying Mrs. Valentine, who expected sympathy. I tried to placate her
with reference to the poet of the name which had none but delightful
associations in Scotland.
"Then if they choose to defy me and marry each other, let them go and
live in Scotland!" she snapped.
"Would you have minded Dolly's marrying Lord Bacon?" I asked.
This gave her food for thought.
"No," she said reflectively, "for, of course, he was a lord, which is
something."
"But how about the associations?"
"I can't explain, but somehow they are not as repulsive to me," she
insisted. "I always think of bacon cooked, not raw, and--the other is
alive!"
As for my own difficulty, it is, after all, a conventional one. I
cannot bear the idea of marrying my employer; a man known by sight and
reputation to everybody in Washington, while I am a relatively unknown
person without fortune, kith, or kin. The thought brings to mind
sensational headlines in cheap newspapers regarding the wedding of
some aged millionaire with his youthful stenographer, and the
consequent alarms of his household; or the alliance of some scion of a
wealthy house with a trained nurse of obscure lineage and vaulting
ambition. I am all alone in the world, and though my father, who died
when he was only five and twenty, left me but the barest support, I
have gloried in my independence and rejoiced in my modest successes.
My people on both sides were of good stock. Even the Winthrops could
climb my family tree and find no bad fruit on it, but the world will
say: "What a splendid match for Charlotte Clifford." ... "I wonder how
Ellen Winthrop will take it?" ... "I shouldn't have thought Clive
Winthrop would marry his secretary, somehow, though there's nothing
against her; but he could look higher!"
The world would be quite right. It is a splendid marriage for
Charlotte Clifford, and Clive Winthrop could look higher. He is my
superior and that is the reason I love him. That he loves me proves
that there is something in me that will rise to his level. All the
same, I wrote him when I came away that I could never cross the bridge
between us (there is a bridge, although he does not see it) until I
was no longer his secretary and until I was sure his sister would
welcome me into the household that has been so harmonious and
delightful to every human being that has ever crossed its threshold.
Nobody could equal Ellen Winthrop as a hostess, with her fine,
spirited face, lovely even at seventy; her gift of repartee, her
stately manner, her simple, trailing dress, always of black or gray,
and always reaching the floor, when most of the feminine world looks,
in its best clothes, as if mounted on stilts, with a skimpy,
semi-detached tail wriggling its silly length behind! I could never
scale the heights on which the splendid Ellen perpetually dwells, but
I could sit at the foot of them and admire with all my heart, and
perhaps that attitude, if fully understood, might win her affection.
* * * * *