AS I before remarked, Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited company to tea.
Strictly speaking, it is necessary to begin with the creation of the
world, in order to give a full account of anything. But for popular
use, something less may serve one’s turn, and therefore I shall let
the past chapter suffice to introduce my story, and shall proceed to
arrange my scenery and act my little play on the supposition that you
know enough to understand things and persons.
Being asked to tea in our New England in the year 17— meant something
very different from the same invitation in our more sophisticated days.
In those times, people held to the singular opinion, that the night
was made to sleep in; they inferred it from a general confidence they
had in the wisdom of Mother Nature, supposing that she did not put out
her lights and draw her bed-curtains, and hush all noise in her great
world-house without strongly intending that her children should go to
sleep; and the consequence was, that very soon after sunset, the whole
community very generally set their faces bedward, and the tolling of
the nine-o’clock evening-bell had an awful solemnity in it, sounding
to the full. Good society in New England in those days very generally
took its breakfast at six, its dinner at twelve, and its tea at six.
‘Company tea,’ however, among thrifty, industrious folk, was often
taken an hour earlier, because each of the inviteés had children to
put to bed, or other domestic cares at home, and as in those simple
times people were invited because you wanted to see them, a tea-party
assembled themselves at three and held session till sundown, when each
matron rolled up her knitting-work and wended soberly home.
Though Newport, even in those early times, was not without its families
which affected state and splendour, rolled about in carriages with
armorial emblazonments, and had servants in abundance to every turn
within-doors, yet there, as elsewhere in New England, the majority of
the people lived with the wholesome, thrifty simplicity of the olden
time, when labour and intelligence went hand in hand in perhaps a
greater harmony than the world has ever seen.
Our scene opens in the great old-fashioned kitchen, which, on ordinary
occasions, is the family dining and sitting room of the Scudder family.
I know fastidious moderns think that the working-room, wherein are
carried on the culinary operations of a large family, must necessarily
be an untidy and comfortless sitting-place; but it is only because they
are ignorant of the marvellous workings which pertain to the organ
of ‘faculty,’ on which we have before insisted. The kitchen of a New
England matron was her throne-room, her pride; it was the habit of her
life to produce the greatest possible results there with the slightest
possible discomposure; and what any woman could do, Mrs. Katy Scudder
could do _par excellence_. Everything there seemed to be always done,
and never doing. Washing and baking, those formidable disturbers of
the composure of families, were all over within those two or three
morning-hours when we are composing ourselves for a last nap,—and
only the fluttering of linen over the green-yard, on Monday mornings,
proclaimed that the dreaded solemnity of a wash had transpired. A
breakfast arose there as by magic; and in an incredibly short space
after, every knife, fork, spoon, and trencher, clean and shining, was
looking as innocent and unconscious in its place as if it never had
been used and never expected to be.
The floor,—perhaps, sir, you remember your grandmother’s floor, of
snowy boards sanded with whitest sand; you remember the ancient
fireplace stretching quite across one end,—a vast cavern, in each
corner of which a cozy seat might be found, distant enough to enjoy
the crackle of the great jolly wood-fire; across the room ran a
dresser, on which was displayed great store of shining pewter dishes
and plates, which always shone with the same mysterious brightness;
and by the side of the fire a commodious wooden ‘settee,’ or settle,
offered repose to people too little accustomed to luxury to ask for a
cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden times, the old, clean, roomy New
England kitchen! Who that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in one
has not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, its coolness? The
noon-mark on its floor was a dial that told of some of the happiest
days; thereby did we right up the shortcomings of the solemn old clock
that tick-tacked in the corner, and whose ticks seemed mysterious
prophecies of unknown good yet to arise out of the hours of life. How
dreamy the winter twilight came in there!—as yet the candles were not
lighted,—when the crickets chirped around the dark stone hearth, and
shifting tongues of flame flickered and cast dancing shadows and elfish
lights on the walls, while grandmother nodded over her knitting-work,
and puss purred, and old Rover lay dreamily opening now one eye and
then the other on the family group! With all our ceiled houses, let us
not forget our grandmothers’ kitchens!
But we must pull up, however, and back to our subject-matter, which is
in the kitchen of Mrs. Katy Scudder, who has just put into the oven,
by the fireplace, some wondrous tea-rusks, for whose composition she
is renowned. She has examined and pronounced perfect a loaf of cake
which has been prepared for the occasion, and which, as usual, is done
exactly right. The best room, too, has been opened and aired,—the white
window-curtains saluted with a friendly little shake, as when one says,
‘How d’ye do?’ to a friend; for you must know, clean as our kitchen
is, we are genteel, and have something better for company. Our best
room in here has a polished little mahogany tea-table, and six mahogany
chairs, with claw talons grasping balls; the white sanded floor is
crinkled in curious little waves, like those on the sea-beach; and
right across the corner stands the ‘buffet,’ as it is called, with its
transparent glass doors, wherein are displayed the solemn appurtenances
of company tea-table. There you may see a set of real China teacups,
which George bought in Canton, and had marked with his and his wife’s
joint initials,—a small silver cream-pitcher, which has come down
as an heirloom from unknown generations,—silver spoons and delicate
China cake-plates, which have been all carefully reviewed and wiped on
napkins of Mrs. Scudder’s own weaving.
Her cares now over, she stands drying her hands on a roller-towel in
the kitchen, while her only daughter, the gentle Mary, stands in the
doorway with the afternoon sun streaming in spots of flickering golden
light on her smooth pale-brown hair,—a _petite_ figure, in a full
stuff petticoat and white short-gown, she stands reaching up one hand
and cooing to something among the apple-blossoms,—and now a Java dove
comes whirring down and settles on her finger,—and we, that have seen
pictures, think, as we look on her girlish face, with its lines of
statuesque beauty,—on the tremulous, half-infantine expression of her
lovely mouth, and the general air of simplicity and purity,—of some old
pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin. But Mrs. Scudder was thinking
of no such Popish matter, I can assure you,—not she! I don’t think you
could have done her a greater indignity than to mention her daughter
in any such connection. She had never seen a painting in her life, and
therefore was not to be reminded of them; and furthermore, the dove was
evidently, for some reason, no favourite,—for she said, in a quick,
imperative tone, ‘Come, come, child! don’t fool with that bird, it’s
high time we were dressed and ready,’—and Mary, blushing, as it would
seem, even to her hair, gave a little toss, and sent the bird, like
a silver fluttering cloud, up among the rosy apple-blossoms. And now
she and her mother have gone to their respective little bedrooms for
the adjustment of their toilets, and while the door is shut and nobody
hears us, we shall talk to you about Mary.
Newport at the present day blooms like a flower-garden with young
ladies of the best _ton_,—lovely girls, hopes of their families,
possessed of amiable tempers and immensely large trunks, and capable of
sporting ninety changes in thirty days, and otherwise rapidly emptying
the purses of distressed fathers, and whom yet travellers and the world
in general look upon as genuine specimens of the kind of girls formed
by American institutions.
We fancy such a one lying in a rustling silk _négligé_, and, amid
a gentle generality of rings, ribbons, puffs, laces, beaux, and
dinner-discussion, reading our humble sketch;—and what favour shall
our poor heroine find in her eyes? For though her mother was a world
of energy and ‘faculty,’ in herself considered, and had bestowed on
this one little lone chick all the vigour and all the care and all the
training which would have sufficed for a family of sixteen, there were
no results produced which could be made appreciable in the eyes of
such company. She could not waltz, or polk, or speak bad French, or
sing Italian songs; but, nevertheless, we must proceed to say what was
her education and what her accomplishments.
Well, then, she could both read and write fluently in the
mother-tongue. She could spin both on the little and the great wheel,
and there were numberless towels, napkins, sheets, and pillow-cases in
the household store that could attest the skill of her pretty fingers.
She had worked several samplers of such rare merit, that they hung
framed in different rooms of the house, exhibiting every variety and
style of possible letter in the best marking-stitch. She was skilful
in all sewing and embroidery, in all shaping and cutting, with a quiet
and deft handiness that constantly surprised her energetic mother, who
could not conceive that so much could be done with so little noise.
In fact, in all household lore she was a veritable good fairy; her
knowledge seemed unerring and intuitive: and whether she washed or
ironed, or moulded biscuit or conserved plums, her gentle beauty seemed
to turn to poetry all the prose of life.
There was something in Mary, however, which divided her as by an
appreciable line from ordinary girls of her age. From her father she
had inherited a deep and thoughtful nature, predisposed to moral
and religious exaltation. Had she been born in Italy, under the
dissolving influences of that sunny, dreamy clime, beneath the shadow
of cathedrals, and where pictured saints and angels smiled in clouds of
painting from every arch and altar, she might, like fair St. Catherine
of Siena, have seen beatific visions in the sunset skies, and a silver
dove descending upon her as she prayed; but, unfolding in the clear,
keen, cold New England clime, and nurtured in its abstract and positive
theologies, her religious faculties took other forms. Instead of lying
entranced in mysterious raptures at the foot of altars, she read and
pondered treatises on the Will, and listened in rapt attention while
her spiritual guide, the venerated Dr. H., unfolded to her the theories
of the great Edwards on the nature of true virtue. Womanlike, she felt
the subtle poetry of these sublime abstractions which dealt with such
infinite and unknown quantities,—which spoke of the universe, of its
great Architect, of men, of angels, as matters of intimate and daily
contemplation; and her teacher, a grand-minded and simple-hearted man
as ever lived, was often amazed at the tread with which this fair young
child walked through these high regions of abstract thought,—often
comprehending through an ethereal clearness of nature what he had
laboriously and heavily reasoned out; and sometimes, when she turned
her grave, childlike face upon him with some question or reply, the
good man started as if an angel had looked suddenly out upon him from
a cloud. Unconsciously to himself, he often seemed to follow her, as
Dante followed the flight of Beatrice, through the ascending circles of
the celestial spheres.
When her mother questioned him, anxiously, of her daughter’s spiritual
estate, he answered, that she was a child of a strange graciousness
of nature, and of a singular genius; to which Katy responded, with a
woman’s pride, that she was all her father over again. It is only now
and then that a matter-of-fact woman is sublimated by a real love; but
if she is, it is affecting to see how impossible it is for death to
quench it; for in the child the mother feels that she has a mysterious
and undying repossession of the father.
But, in truth, Mary was only a recast in feminine form of her father’s
nature. The elixir of the spirit that sparkled within her was of that
quality of which the souls of poets and artists are made; but the keen
New England air crystallizes emotions into ideas, and restricts many
a poetic soul to the necessity of expressing itself only in practical
living.
The rigid theological discipline of New England is fitted to produce
rather strength and purity than enjoyment. It was not fitted to make
a sensitive and thoughtful nature happy, however it might ennoble and
exalt.
The system of Dr. H. was one that could only have had its origin in a
soul at once reverential and logical,—a soul, moreover, trained from
its earliest years in the habits of thought engendered by monarchical
institutions. For although he, like other ministers, took an active
part as a patriot in the Revolution, still he was brought up under the
shadow of a throne; and a man cannot ravel out the stitches in which
early days have knit him. His theology, was, in fact, the turning to
an invisible Sovereign of that spirit of loyalty and unquestioning
subjugation which is one of the noblest capabilities of our nature.
And as a gallant soldier renounces life and personal aims in the cause
of his king and country, and holds himself ready to be drafted for a
forlorn hope, to be shot down, or help make a bridge of his mangled
body, over which the more fortunate shall pass to victory and glory, so
he regarded himself as devoted to the King Eternal, ready in His hands
to be used to illustrate and build up an Eternal Commonwealth, either
by being sacrificed as a lost spirit or glorified as a redeemed one,
ready to throw not merely his mortal life, but his immortality even,
into the forlorn hope, to bridge with a never-dying soul the chasm over
which white-robed victors should pass to a commonwealth of glory and
splendour, whose vastness should dwarf the misery of all the lost to an
infinitesimal.
It is not in our line to imply the truth or the falsehood of those
systems of philosophic theology which seem for many years to have been
the principal outlet for the proclivities of the New England mind,
but as psychological developments they have an intense interest. He
who does not see a grand side to these strivings of the soul cannot
understand one of the noblest capabilities of humanity.
No real artist or philosopher ever lived who has not at some hours
risen to the height of utter self-abnegation for the glory of the
invisible. There have been painters who would have been crucified to
demonstrate the action of a muscle,—chemists who would gladly have
melted themselves and all humanity in their crucible, if so a new
discovery might arise out of its fumes. Even persons of mere artistic
sensibility are at times raised by music, painting, or poetry to a
momentary trance of self-oblivion, in which they would offer their
whole being before the shrine of an invisible loveliness. These hard
old New England divines were the poets of metaphysical philosophy,
who built systems in an artistic fervour, and felt self exhale from
beneath them as they rose into the higher regions of thought. But
where theorists and philosophers tread with sublime assurance, woman
often follows with bleeding footsteps;—women are always turning from
the abstract to the individual, and feeling where the philosopher only
thinks.
It was easy enough for Mary to believe in _self_-renunciation, for
she was one with a born vocation for martyrdom; and so, when the
idea was put to her of suffering eternal pains for the glory of God
and the good of being in general, she responded to it with a sort of
sublime thrill, such as it is given to some natures to feel in view of
uttermost sacrifice. But when she looked around on the warm, living
faces of friends, acquaintances, and neighbours, viewing them as
possible candidates for dooms so fearfully different, she sometimes
felt the walls of her faith closing round her as an iron shroud,—she
wondered that the sun could shine so brightly, that flowers could
flaunt such dazzling colours, that sweet airs could breathe, and little
children play, and youth love and hope, and a thousand intoxicating
influences combine to cheat the victims from the thought that their
next step might be into an abyss of horrors without end. The blood of
youth and hope was saddened by this great sorrow, which lay ever on
her heart,—and her life, unknown to herself, was a sweet tune in the
minor key; it was only in prayer, or deeds of love and charity, or in
rapt contemplation of that beautiful millennial day which her spiritual
guide most delighted to speak of, that the tone of her feelings ever
rose to the height of joy.
Among Mary’s young associates was one who had been as a brother to
her childhood. He was her mother’s cousin’s son,—and so, by a sort of
family immunity, had always a free access to her mother’s house. He
took to the sea, as the most bold and resolute young men will, and
brought home from foreign parts those new modes of speech, those other
eyes for received opinions and established things, which so often shock
established prejudices,—so that he was held as little better than an
infidel and a castaway by the stricter religious circles in his native
place. Mary’s mother, now that Mary was grown up to woman’s estate,
looked with a severe eye on her cousin. She warned her daughter against
too free an association with him,—and so—— We all know what comes to
pass when girls are constantly warned not to think of a man. The most
conscientious and obedient little person in the world, Mary resolved
to be very careful. She never would think of James, except, of course,
in her prayers; but as these were constant, it may easily be seen it
was not easy to forget him.
All that was so often told her of his carelessness, his trifling, his
contempt of orthodox opinions, and his startling and bold expressions,
only wrote his name deeper in her heart,—for was not his soul in peril?
Could she look in his frank, joyous face, and listen to his thoughtless
laugh, and then think that a fall from a mast-head, or one night’s
storm, might——Ah, with what images her faith filled the blank! Could
she believe all this and forget him?
You see, instead of getting our tea ready, as we promised at the
beginning of this chapter, we have filled it with descriptions and
meditations,—and now we foresee that the next chapter will be equally
far from the point. But have patience with us; for we can write only as
we are driven, and never know exactly where we are going to land.