My uncle sat on one side the fireplace, my mother on the other; and I,
at a small table between them, prepared to note down the results of
their conference; for they had met in high council, to assess their
joint fortunes,--determine what should be brought into the common stock
and set apart for the Civil List, and what should be laid aside as a
Sinking Fund. Now my mother, true woman as she was, had a womanly love
of show in her own quiet way,--of making "a genteel figure" in the eyes
of the neighborhood; of seeing that sixpence not only went as far as
sixpence ought to go, but that, in the going, it should emit a mild but
imposing splendor,--not, indeed, a gaudy flash, a startling Borealian
coruscation, which is scarcely within the modest and placid
idiosyncracies of sixpence,--but a gleam of gentle and benign light,
just to show where a sixpence had been, and allow you time to say
"Behold!" before
"The jaws of darkness did devour it up."
Thus, as I once before took occasion to apprise the reader, we had
always held a very respectable position in the neighborhood round our
square brick house; been as sociable as my father's habits would permit;
given our little tea-parties, and our occasional dinners, and, without
attempting to vie with our richer associates, there had always been so
exquisite a neatness, so notable a housekeeping, so thoughtful a
disposition, in short, of all the properties indigenous to a well-spent
sixpence, in my mother's management, that there was not an old maid
within seven miles of us who did not pronounce our tea-parties to be
perfect; and the great Mrs. Rollick, who gave forty guineas a year to a
professed cook and housekeeper, used regularly, whenever we dined at
Rollick Hall, to call across the table to my mother (who therewith
blushed up to her ears) to apologize for the strawberry jelly. It is
true that when, on returning home, my mother adverted to that flattering
and delicate compliment, in a tone that revealed the self-conceit of the
human heart, my father--whether to sober his Kitty's vanity into a
proper and Christian mortification of spirit, or from that strange
shrewd ness which belonged to him--would remark that Mrs. Rollick was of
a querulous nature; that the compliment was meant, not to please my
mother, but to spite the professed cook and housekeeper, to whom the
butler would be sure to repeat the invidious apology.
In settling at the Tower, and assuming the head of its establishment, my
mother was naturally anxious that, poor battered invalid though the
Tower was, it should still put its best leg foremost. Sundry cards,
despite the thinness of the neighborhood, had been left at the door;
various invitations, which my uncle had hitherto declined, had greeted
his occupation of the ancestral ruin, and had become more numerous since
the news of our arrival had gone abroad; so that my mother saw before
her a very suitable field for her hospitable accomplishments,--a
reasonable ground for her ambition that the Tower should hold up its
head as became a Tower that held the head of the family.
But not to wrong thee, O dear mother! as thou sittest there, opposite
the grim Captain, so fair and so neat,--with thine apron as white, and
thy hair as trim and as sheen, and thy morning cap, with its ribbons of
blue, as coquettishly arranged as if thou hadst a fear that the least
negligence on thy part might lose thee the heart of thine Austin,--not
to wrong thee by setting down to frivolous motives alone thy feminine
visions of the social amenities of life, I know that thine heart, in its
provident tenderness, was quite as much interested as ever thy vanities
could be, in the hospitable thoughts on which thou wert intent. For,
first and foremost, it was the wish of thy soul that thine Austin might,
as little as possible, be reminded of the change in his fortunes,--might
miss as little as possible those interruptions to his abstracted
scholarly moods at which, it is true, he used to fret and to pshaw and
to cry Papa! but which nevertheless always did him good, and freshened
up the stream of his thoughts. And, next, it was the conviction of
thine understanding that a little society and boon companionship, and
the proud pleasure of showing his ruins and presiding at the hall of his
forefathers, would take Roland out of those gloomy reveries into which
he still fell at times. And, thirdly, for us young people, ought not
Blanche to find companions in children of her own sex and age? Already
in those large black eyes there was something melancholy and brooding,
as there is in the eyes of all children who live only with their elders.
And for Pisistratus, with his altered prospects, and the one great
gnawing memory at his heart,--which he tried to conceal from himself,
but which a mother (and a mother who had loved) saw at a glance,--what
could be better than such union and interchange with the world around
us, small though that world might be, as woman, sweet binder and blender
of all social links, might artfully effect? So that thou didst not go,
like the awful Florentine,--
"Sopra for vanita che par persona,"--
"over thin shadows that mocked the substance of real forms," but rather
it was the real forms that appeared as shadows, or vanita.
What a digression! Can I never tell my story in a plain,
straightforward way? Certainly I was born under Cancer, and all my
movements are circumlocutory, sideways, and crab-like.