With the assembling of our friends in the Hall on that Christmas
afternoon our story enters upon a new phase,—one, too, in which Mary
Rolfe will figure more prominently than she has hitherto done. Of her
friend Alice—Alice with the merry-glancing hazel eyes—the reader has,
I trust, a tolerably clear conception. The picture we have of her is a
pleasant one, I think,—a picture drawn not by me, but by herself. But
from Mary—shy, reserved, and shrinking as she is—we can expect no such
boon. Her portrait must be my work.
And first, I must repeat that she was Alice’s closest friend. When their
acquaintance began, it would be hard to say. Their mothers before them
were warm friends, and had been so fortunate as to have their homes,
after marriage, separated only by one of Richmond’s peaceful streets; so
that, even in long clothes, Alice and Mary, introduced by their
respective nurses, had contracted such intimacy as might be gained by a
reciprocal fumbling of each other’s noses and the poking of pink fingers
into blinking eyes. Across this street, a few years later, these little
crafts had made voyages innumerable; beneath its branching trees
trundled their unsteady hoops, and along its not very crowded sidewalk
had swung proudly, hand in hand, one bright October day, going to their
first school. And ever since that day they have been going, so to speak,
hand in hand. One circumstance, no doubt, that contributed much to
binding their hearts together, was the fact that they were only
daughters; so that each was, as it were the adopted sister of the other.
But what, above all things, as I have suggested elsewhere, rendered a
warm friendship between them both possible and lasting, was the
singularly sharp contrasts presented by their characters. Two girls more
radically unlike in disposition it would be hardly possible to find.
Now, among other traits of Mary’s character, totally lacking in Alice,
was one of importance for my purposes, in that it was destined to make
her play a considerable rôle amid the scenes to be pictured in the
ensuing pages. It was a trait that goes by different names. According to
some of her acquaintance,—kindred spirits they were,—Mary was full of
enthusiasms, while to others of the hard-headed, practical type, she
seemed sentimental. I, as umpire, must compromise by admitting that she
was certainly what is called romantic. And I was about to bring in a
little cheap philosophy to explain that this was due to the vast amount
of novels and poetry with which she had stuffed her head, when I
recalled the fact that some of the most clear-headed, energetic, and
every way admirable women that I have known devoured every novel that
they could lay their hands on. I, therefore, abandon the reflection,
uncopyrighted, to such moralizers and others as have leisure to explain
things of which they know nothing. But the fact was as I have stated it;
Mary was a thoroughly romantic, or, if you will, sentimental young
person, though I regret to have to say so. For it will lower her in your
estimation, I fear, when I make known to you, by a few illustrations,
what I mean by saying she was romantic.
It is more necessary for me to do this than would appear to the average
contemporary reader. For it is more than likely that the expression, a
romantic young female, will be totally unintelligible in your day, or,
rather, that it will have an entirely different meaning from that which
those words convey to us. You, too, of course, will not be without your
romantic virgins,—that is to say, maidens of tender years, who,
standing upon the hither brink of that dark and troublous sea called
life, and watching the pitching and tossing of the numberless barks that
have gone before,—who, seeing some struggling amid the breakers, others
going to pieces on the reefs, still others drifting, dismantled and
shattered, upon a shore already thick-strewn with wrecks,—yet love to
dream of smooth and sunny paths across that pitiless waste of
waters,—if—if only the Ideal Pilot may be found.
Yes, your girls will have their ideals,—but what ideals?
I cannot tell; but very different, doubtless, from ours. We have but to
glance at here a page and there a page of the past records of the race,
to feel quite sure that woman’s ideal man has varied much in the tide of
time. Passing by prehistoric man, lest I wound the susceptibilities of
such as claim that he never existed, and coming forward to the days of
Homer, we must suppose that the sentimental daughters of the literary
gentlemen of that day—the chiefs, to wit, who patronized the blind
bard—for rhapsody divine bartering the prosaic but sustaining bacon—we
must reckon it as probable that these young women yearned—if yearning
were in vogue at that early period—yearned to be led from the parental
roof by some Achilles of a youth, tall, broad-chested, agile as a
panther, strong as a lion, with thews of steel, soul of adamant, eye of
consuming fire. Juvenal, again, if we may pluck a leaf at random, tells
us that, in his day, a sentimental married woman who would shriek at a
mouse, let us say, was capable of braving the sea in a leaky old hulk,
eloping with all that was left of a gladiator after twenty years’
hacking in the arena. And now, making a spring forward into the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, we find the ideal of the upper ten
dozen of New York society, for example, to be a nice young man who parts
his hair and his name in the middle, leads in the “german”[1] and gets
all his “things”[2] in London. [And this sufficed till but recently. Of
late, however, as I read in the papers, the best society of New York has
grown more exacting, and no one need now aspire to be looked upon as a
lion—a knight without fear and without reproach—unless, after devoting
for some years half his time and all his mind, as it were, to the art,
he can “handle the reins” well enough to pass for a real stage-driver.
The ’bus-drivers themselves, however, whimsically enough, are not held
in half the estimation of their imitators and rivals (just as
mock-turtle soup is deemed by many superior to the genuine decoction).
They may actually be hired at two dollars a day, more or less, and seem
positively glad to get that, being to all outward seeming entirely
unconscious of the glamour attaching to their ennobling art.][3]
But to judge by the books they devoured with such eagerness, and the
heroes they thought so captivating, the ideals, thirty years ago, of the
Virginia young women—I may not speak for others—were very different
from any of those above depicted. At that period the influence of
Byron’s powerful genius was still plainly discernible in many works of
fiction, especially those by female authors. Now, just ascertain
cordials lose all their piquancy by being diluted, so the morbid
creations of Byron’s unhealthy muse emerged, after passing through the
alembic of female fancy, very pale heroes indeed; pale, in truth, in a
double sense. For, at one time, I remember, a bloodless countenance was
about all that was required to constitute a hero over whom all our girls
went mad. The fellow was invariably dismally cold and impassive “in
outward seeming;” but the authoress would contrive to suggest to the
reader, by a hint here and there, that this coldness was in outward
seeming only,—that this stern, haughty possessor of the broad, pallid
brow (against which he ever and anon pressed his hand as though in pain)
was the clandestine owner of feelings fit to be compared only to a
stream of lava,—a cold crust above, concealing a fiery flood beneath;
an iceberg, in a word, with a volcano in its bosom. There are no such
icebergs, I believe, and it is equally certain that there are no such
men; and I used to think, in those days, that if there were such, and
one of this type were found hanging around a girl, the circumstance
would afford her big brother’s boot legitimate occasion for an honorable
activity. And I still think that this heroic treatment, as the faculty
would term it, would find its justification, at least from a sanitary
point of view. For it is to be remarked that in romances infested with
this form of hero, there was, among the heroines, a veritable epidemic
of brain-fever; whatever that may be. But the young ladies of my
acquaintance, assigning jealousy as the source of these ferocious
sentiments, could not be brought to my way of thinking; and of all of a
certain bevy of girls with whom I associated, I believe that Mary Rolfe
was furthest gone in her adoration of these august animals that dwelt
apart.
Now, although a romantic temperament has its
compensations,—compensations so varied and so valuable that, on the
whole, it must be regarded as a blessing,—yet its dangers are as
obvious. For of what avail is an Ideal without its Counterpart? Now, it
is in searching for and finding this Counterpart that lies the danger to
a girl of imaginative turn,—the danger, in plain English, of falling in
love without a just and reasonable regard for the loaves and fishes of
this prosaic world.
Now, even from the preliminary and partial sketch of the Don already
made, you will see (though less clearly than when the drawings shall
have been completed and the colors rubbed in) that he was a man likely
to make a vivid impression on the imagination of a girl like Mary. I
should be sorry, indeed, to have you suppose that such likelihood arose
from any resemblance on his part to the type of novel-hero so
fascinating to her imagination. And yet he appealed to that imagination
most strongly. Of course the mystery surrounding him had much to do with
this. Of late she had found herself continually asking herself who he
could be. Was he a Virginian? Hardly, else some one would know him.
Then, why had he come to Virginia? Was he an English nobleman,
travelling incognito? Perhaps! But no! from several observations that he
had let drop, he could scarcely be that. He was a gentleman, certainly;
but then, what need has a gentleman of mystery? Had he committed any—?
Impossible! And so, _da capo_,—who can he be? More than once she had
caught herself stamping her little foot and muttering impatiently, “What
is he to me?” But his image kept returning to her mind. The truth is,
she was getting what the girls used to call, in those days,
“interested,”—a word which means far more with women than with us men.
“In love” is what we should call it; but that is an expression which
women are chary of using, unless of men. According to their philosophy,
it is tacitly assumed that, as it is not the proper thing for a woman to
fall in love until she has been asked to, she never does; and I believe
this to be true, as a rule. In fact, it seems to me that falling in
love, as it is called, is, with women, a purely voluntary act. When
entreated to lose their hearts they lose them, should it seem judicious,
all things considered, so to do; if not, not. But as in Latin grammar,
so in life: there are exceptions to all rules; and while, in nine cases
out of ten, women are guided by judgment and reason, men impelled by
passion and instinct, in their matrimonial ventures, yet there is, after
all, a tenth case (all my readers are tenth cases if they will) where a
woman, deluded by her imagination, wrecks her life on breakers that
seemed, to others at least, too apparent to need a beacon. Nor are the
weaker sisters most liable to blunders of this kind; for it seems to me
that I have remarked that gifted women are most apt to throw themselves
away on men entirely unworthy of them; led captive by the ideals their
own hearts have fashioned; making gods of stocks and stones.
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[1] Dance of the period.
[2] Clothes.
[3] If our fierce Bushwhacker could but witness the annual parade of our
New York Coaching Club, he would be heartily ashamed of this venomous
passage.—_Ed._