"Believe in God and yourself, and do the best you can."
In Hendrik on the Hudson, fifty miles from New York, there was, winter
before last, a certain "patent seamless."--
But a hooped skirt with a history, touching and teaching, is no theme
for flippancy; so, by your leave, I will unwind my story tenderly, and
with reverential regard for its smooth turns of sequence.
The Wimples, of whom Sally is the last, were among the oldest and most
respectable of Hendrik families. Sally's father, Mr. Paul Wimple, had
been a publisher in good standing, and formerly did a flourishing
business in New York; but seven years ago he failed, and so, quite
penniless, his health sadly broken, his cheerfulness and energy all
gone with his fortunes, without heart for any new beginning, he
returned to Hendrik, his native place.
There, the friends of his youth, steadfast and generous, pitying his
sad plight, and having perfect faith in his unimpeached integrity,
purchased--principally at the sale in bankruptcy of his own effects--a
modest stock of new and second-hand books and magazines, together with
some stationery and a few fancy articles in that line, and
reestablished him in the humble but peaceful calling of a country
bookseller. They called his shop "The Hendrik Athenaeum and Circulating
Library," and all the county subscribed; for, at first, the Wimples
were the fashionable charity, "the Wimples were always so very
respectable, you know," and Sally was such a sweet girl that really it
was quite an interesting case. Mrs. Splurge forthwith began improving
the minds of her girls to the extent of three full annual subscriptions
for Josephine, Adelaide, and Madeline respectively; and that triplet of
fair students, who, separately or conjointly, were at all times
competent to the establishment of a precedent for the graceful
charities of Hendrik good society, handsomely led off with a ten-dollar
investment in "fountain" pens, "cream-laid assembly note,"
motto-wafers, Blessington envelopes "with crest and initial," ivory
tablets, pencil-sharpeners, and ink-erasers.
But all their munificence came to nought. Mr. Paul Wimple's heart was
broken,--as they say of any weary Sysiphus who lies down by his stone
and sleeps forever;--so he died.
Poor little Sally! The first thing she did was to disappoint her
friends, and shock the decencies of Hendrik; for it had been agreed on
all sides that "the poor dear thing would take on dreadfully, or else
fret herself into fits, or perhaps fall into one of them clay-cold,
corpsy swoons, like old Miss Dunks has regular every 'revival.'" But
when they came, with all their tedious commonplaces of a stupid
condolence not wholly innocent of curiosity, Sally thanked them with
dry eyes and prudent lips and quiet nerves, and only said she thought
she should do very well after she had set the house to rights and slept
awhile. The sewing-circle of that week was a coroner's inquest on
Sally's character, and "ungrateful," "cold-blooded," "indecent," "worse
than a hypocrite," were not the hardest epithets in the verdict of the
jury.
But Sally set the place to rights, and bade her father's old friends to
the funeral, and buried him with all the money that was in the house,
neither asking nor accepting aid from any; and with the poor pittance
that her severe conscience could afford her sorrow she procured some
cheap material of the doleful sort and went into the most unbecoming of
"full mourning." When she made her appearance in church,--which she
did, as usual, the very first Sunday after the funeral,--that plainest
of bonnets and straitest of black delaines, unadorned save by the
old-fashioned and dingy lace-cape, descended through many shifts of
saving from her long-ago-dead-and-gone mother, were so manifestly a
condescending concession to the conventionalities or superstitions of
Hendrik, and said so plainly, "This is for your 'decencies,'--it is all
that I can honestly spare, and more than you should demand,--my life is
mourning enough,"--that all the congregation bristled at the affront.
Henceforth Miss Wimple--no longer dear Sally, or even Miss Sally, but
sharp "Miss Wimple"--had that pew to herself.
Now I believe it was not generally known in Hendrik that Miss Wimple
had narrowly escaped being a very pretty girl. She was but just in her
nineteenth year when her father died. Her features were regular, her
expression lovely, her complexion, before trouble nipped the roses of
her cheeks, full of the country's freshness. She had tender eyes,
profoundly overshadowed by long, pensive lashes; in the sweet lines of
her very delicate mouth a trace of quiet pride was prettily blended
with thoughtfulness, and a just-forming smile that was always
melancholy. Her feet were little, and her hands were soft and white;
nor had toil and sorrow, and the weariness, and indifference to self,
that come of them, as yet impaired the symmetry of her well-turned
shape, or the elasticity of her free and graceful carriage. Her
deportment was frank and self-reliant, and her manners, though
reserved, far from awkward; her complete presence, indeed, compelled
consideration and invited confidence.
In her father's lifetime, she had sought, on occasions of unwonted
cheerfulness, to please him with certain charming tricks of attire; and
sometimes, with only a white rose-bud gleaming through the braided
shadows of her hair, lighted herself up as with a star; then, not a
carping churl, not an envious coquette in Hendrik, but confessed to the
prettiness of Sally Wimple.
But now there was no longer a grateful life for her white rose-star to
brighten; so she sat down, in her loneliness and sombre unbecomingness,
between her forlorn counters with their pitiful shows of stock, and let
her good looks go by, entertaining only brave thoughts of duty,--till
she grew pale "and fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces,"
so that "how anybody could see the least beauty in that distressing
Miss Wimple" began to be with many a sincere and almost reasonable
expression of surprise, instead of a malicious sin against knowledge.
She waited for customers, but they seldom came,--often, from opening to
window-barring, not one; for the unwilting little martyr of the Hendrik
Athenaeum and Circulating Library had made herself a highly
disapproved-of Miss Wimple by her ungrateful and contumacious behavior
at her father's death, even if the hard and sharp black lines of that
scrimped delaine had not sufficed to turn the current of admiration,
interest, and custom. Besides, the attractions of her slender stock
were all exhausted. She had not the means of refreshing it with pretty
novelties and sentimental toys in that line,--with albums and
valentines, fancy portfolios and pocket-secretaries, pearl paper-knives
and tortoise-shell cardcases, Chinese puzzles and _papier-maché_
checker-boards. Nor was the Library replenished "to keep up with the
current literature of the day"; its last new novel was a superannuated
dilapidation; not one of its yearly subscribers but had worked through
the catalogue once and a half.
Since the funeral, and especially since the inauguration of the
delaine, Mrs. Marmaduke Splurge had been less alive to the necessity of
improving the minds of her girls; and that virginal ten-dollar
investment had provided Josephine, Adelaide, and Madeline with supplies
of small arms and ammunition enough for a protracted campaign of
epistolary belligerence, interrupted by hair-strokes of coquettish
diplomacy.
In the flaunting yellow house on the hill the widow and daughters of
the late Marmaduke Splurge, Esq., railroad-director and real-estate
broker, fondled and hated each other. Mrs. Marmaduke was a
well-preserved woman, stylish, worldly-minded, and weak. Miss
Josephine, her eldest, was handsome, patronizing, _passée_, and a
sentimental fool; Miss Adelaide, who came next, was handsome,
eccentric, malicious, and sly; and Miss Madeline, the youngest, was
handsome, distinguished-looking, intellectual, passionate, and proud.
Mrs. Marmaduke's heart was set on marrying her daughters
"advantageously," and she gave all of her narrow mind to that thankless
department. Josephine insisted on a romantic attachment, and pursued a
visionary spouse with all the ardor and obstinacy of first-rate
stupidity. Adelaide had the weakness to hate Josephine, the shrewdness
to fear Madeline, and the viciousness to despise her mother; she
skilfully and diligently devoted herself to the thwarting of the
family. Madeline waited, only waited,--with a fierceness so dangerously
still that it looked like patience,--hated her insulting bondage, but
waited, like Samson between the pillars upon which the house of Dagon
stood, resolved to free herself, though she dragged down the edifice
and were crushed among the wreck.
Mrs. Marmaduke talked tediously of the trials and responsibilities of
conscientious mothers who have grown-up daughters to provide for, was
given to frequent freshets of tears, consumed many "nervous pills" of
the retired-clergyman-whose-sands-of-life-have-nearly-run-out sort, and
netted bead purses for the Select Home for Poor Gentlemen's Daughters.
Josephine let down her back hair dowdily, partook recklessly of poetry
and pickles, read inordinately in bed,--leaning all night on her
elbow,--and was threatened with spinal curvature and spiritualism.
Adelaide set invisible little traps in every nook and cranny, every
cupboard and drawer, from basement to attic, and with a cheerful,
innocent smile sat watching them night and day. Madeline, fiercely
calm, warned off the others, with pale lips and flashing eyes and
bitter tongue, resenting _en famille_ the devilish endearments she so
sweetly suffered in company; but ever as she groped about in her soul's
blindness she felt for the central props of that house of Dagon.
All the good society of Hendrik said the Splurges were a charming
family, a most attached and happy family, lovely in their lives and in
death not to be divided, and that they looked sweetly in hoops. And yet
the Splurges had but few visitors; the young women of the neighborhood,
when they called there, left always an essential part of their true
selves behind them as they entered, and an ornamental part of their
reputations when they took their departure; nor were the young men
partial to the name,--for Josephine bored them, and Adelaide taunted
them, and Madeline snubbed them, and Mrs. Marmaduke pumped them, and
the combined family confounded them. Only Mr. Philip Withers was the
intimate and encouraged _habitué_ of the house.
Mr. Philip Withers was the very man for the looser principles of
Hendrik,--a fine gentleman's fine son, and his only one, who, by the
death of his father, had come, whilst he was yet very young, into a
pretty property in the neighborhood,--a sort of idyllic man of the
world, with considerable cleverness, a neat miscellaneous education,
handsome person, effective clothes, plausible address, mischievous
brilliancy of versatile talk, a deep voice, two or three
accomplishments best adapted to the atmosphere of sentimental women,
graceful self-possession, small feet, nice hands, striking attitudes, a
subduing smile, magnetic whisper, Machiavellian tact, and French
morals. He could sing you into tears, and dance you into love, and talk
you into wonder; when he drew, you begged for his portrait by himself,
and when he wrote, you solicited his autograph.
Mr. Philip Withers had taken his moustache to foreign parts, and done
the Continent sophisticatedly. He was well-read in cities, and had
brought home a budget of light, popular, and profusely illustrated
articles of talk on an equivocal variety of urban life, which he
prettily distributed among clovery pastorals, Wordsworthian ballads, De
Coverly entertainments, Crayon sketches, and Sparrowgrass Papers, for
the benefit of his country subscribers. From all of which you have no
doubt gathered by this time that Mr. Philip Withers was a graceful
scamp, and a friend of the Splurges,--who had money, which Mr. Philip
Withers had not; for he had been a munificent patron of elegant
pleasures abroad, and since his return had erected an addition to his
father's house in the shape of a pair of handsome mortgages, as a
proprietor of romantic tastes in architecture might flank his front
door with mediaeval donjons.
Mrs. Marmaduke made much of that good-looking and delightful Withers.
Though not a pious man, in the formal sense of the term, she felt sure
he was religious according to that stained-glass and fragrant religion
of the tastes which is an essential attribute of every gentleman,--that
is, of every well-born man of cultivated preferences and sensitive
antipathies,--and she had no doubt that gentlemen's souls could be
saved by that arrangement just as satisfactorily, and so much more
gracefully. She only wished, my dear, you could hear Mr. Withers
express himself on those subjects,--his ideas were so delightfully
"your deal, my love"--clear, his illustrations so sweetly pretty, and
his manner so earnest; really, he stirred her like--"hearts, did you
say?--a trump."
Josephine Splurge contented herself with letting down her back hair for
Mr. Withers and making eyes at him.
"Good-morrow to the guileless Genevieve!"--Withers delighted in
dispensing equivocal nothings to the dowdy Muse of the sofa and back
hair.--"Charming weather!"
"There, you bewildering Joseph Surface, you need not go on,--I know
what you are going to say, and I will neither be flattered nor
fascinated. Come, confess now, like a dear candid creature, throw off
your irresistibly bewitching mask, and own that your sentiments are all
rhetoric."
"Josy, dear," Adelaide would insinuate, "what a wonderful memory you
have!--so well managed, too! Now whom _did_ you hear say that?"
Josephine was wont to declare that the Admirable Crichton lived again
in that kaleidoscopic creature; but he was so dazzling, so bewildering,
so dangerous, that to converse with him was like having fireworks in
one's boudoir.
With Madeline Withers was on strange terms, if any terms at all. She
threatened to him in the middle of his best stories, smiled quietly
when he preached, yawned to his poetical recitations, left the room
when he sang, mistook the subjects of his sketches with a
verisimilitude of innocence that often deceived even himself, was
silent and sneered much whenever he was present. And all these
rudenesses she performed with a successful air of genuine abstraction;
they never failed of their intention by being overdone, or by being too
_directly_ directed at him.
Remarks seldom passed between these two; when they did, Withers spoke
always first, and Madeline replied briefly and with politeness. And yet
there were occasions when a sharp-sighted and suspicious observer might
have detected a strange discomposure in Madeline's conduct in the
presence of Withers,--when, indeed, she seemed to be laboring under
irritability, and proneness to singular excitement, which began with
his entrance and disappeared with his departure. At such times she
would break her haughty quiet with fierce sallies upon her sisters; but
Withers stung her back into silence with sharp and telling retorts,--as
you may have seen a practised beast-tamer in a cage flog an angry
tigress, when her eyes flashed, and her ears were set back, and she
unsheathed her horrid claws, and lashed her sides, and growled with all
the appalling fee-faw-fum of the jungle,--flog her back into her
corner, with nought more formidable than a lady's riding-whip, dainty,
slender, and sharp. But Withers administered the chastisement with such
devilish grace that it was unperceived, save by the quick, shrewd
Adelaide perhaps, who perceived everything,--but never _saw_, nor ever
spoke. If you could have beheld the lips and the eyes of Madeline, on
such occasions, you would have cursed this Philip Withers, or beaten
him to her feet.
Between Withers and Adelaide the relations were plainer; indeed, before
the small Splurge set they appeared as avowed lovers. Toward "Addy"
Withers was all elegant devotion and gracious gallantry, knight-like in
his chivalric and debonair devoir.
For Withers Addy was, openly, all deference and tenderly wistful
solicitude, but in secret not all security and exultation. Even while
it seemed high triumph in her heart's camp, her well-drilled eyes and
ears were still on guard, and her hidden thoughts lay upon their arms.
Still it wore the aspect of a lyric match, and the hearts of humbler
Hendrik lovers set it to music.
"For other guests," Withers seemed to say,
"I wile the hours with tale or song,
Or web of fancy, fringed with careless rhyme;
But how to find a fitting lay for thee,
Who hast the harmonies of every time?"
And Addy _looked_,
"Thou art to me most like a royal guest,
Whose travels bring him to some humble roof,
Where simple rustics spread their festal fare,
And, blushing, own it is not good enough.
"Bethink thee, then, whene'er thou com'st to me,
From high emprise and noble toil to rest,
My thoughts are weak and trivial, matched with thine,
But the poor mansion offers thee its best."
So Mrs. Marmaduke exalted her horn and exceedingly magnified her
manoeuvring office. On the strength of it, she treated herself to
profuse felicitations and fished among her neighbors for more.