THE PLACE AND PEOPLE.
Joseph Asten's nature was shy and sensitive, but not merely from a habit
of introversion. He saw no deeper into himself, in fact, than his moods
and sensations, and thus quite failed to recognize what it was that kept
him apart from the society in which he should have freely moved. He felt
the difference of others, and constantly probed the pain and
embarrassment it gave him, but the sources wherefrom it grew were the
last which he would have guessed.
A boy's life may be weakened for growth, in all its fibres, by the
watchfulness of a too anxious love, and the guidance of a too
exquisitely nurtured conscience. He may be so trained in the habits of
goodness, and purity, and duty, that every contact with the world is
like an abrasion upon the delicate surface of his soul. Every wind
visits him too roughly, and he shrinks from the encounters which brace
true manliness, and strengthen it for the exercise of good.
The rigid piety of Joseph's mother was warmed and softened by her
tenderness towards him, and he never felt it as a yoke. His nature
instinctively took the imprint of hers, and she was happy in seeing so
clear a reflection of herself in his innocent young heart. She prolonged
his childhood, perhaps without intending it, into the years when the
unrest of approaching manhood should have led him to severer studies and
lustier sports. Her death transferred his guardianship to other hands,
but did not change its character. Her sister Rachel was equally good and
conscientious, possibly with an equal capacity for tenderness, but her
barren life had restrained the habit of its expression. Joseph could not
but confess that she was guided by the strictest sense of duty, but she
seemed to him cold, severe, unsympathetic. There were times when the
alternative presented itself to his mind, of either allowing her
absolute control of all his actions, or wounding her to the heart by
asserting a moderate amount of independence.
He was called fortunate, but it was impossible for him consciously to
feel his fortune. The two hundred acres of the farm, stretching back
over the softly swelling hills which enclosed the valley on the east,
were as excellent soil as the neighborhood knew; the stock was
plentiful; the house, barn, and all the appointments of the place were
in the best order, and he was the sole owner of all. The work of his own
hands was not needed, but it was a mechanical exhaustion of time,—an
enforced occupation of body and mind, which he followed in the vague
hope that some richer development of life might come afterwards. But
there were times when the fields looked very dreary,—when the trees,
rooted in their places, and growing under conditions which they were
powerless to choose or change, were but tiresome types of himself,—when
even the beckoning heights far down the valley failed to touch his fancy
with the hint of a broader world. Duty said to him, "You must be
perfectly contented in your place!" but there was the miserable,
ungrateful, inexplicable fact of discontent.
Furthermore, he had by this time discovered that certain tastes which he
possessed were so many weaknesses—if not, indeed, matters of reproach—in
the eyes of his neighbors. The delight and the torture of finer
nerves—an inability to use coarse and strong phrases, and a shrinking
from all display of rude manners—were peculiarities which he could not
overcome, and must endeavor to conceal. There were men of sturdy
intelligence in the community; but none of refined culture, through whom
he might have measured and understood himself; and the very qualities,
therefore, which should have been his pride, gave him only a sense of
shame.
Two memories haunted him, after the evening at Warriner's; and, though
so different, they were not to be disconnected. No two girls could be
more unlike than Lucy Henderson and Miss Julia Blessing; he had known
one for years, and the other was the partial acquaintance of an evening;
yet the image of either one was swiftly followed by that of the other.
When he thought of Lucy's eyes, Miss Julia's hand stole over his
shoulder; when he recalled the glossy ringlets of the latter, he saw,
beside them, the faintly flushed cheek and the pure, sweet mouth which
had awakened in him his first daring desire.
Phantoms as they were, they seemed to have taken equal possession of the
house, the garden, and the fields. While Lucy sat quietly by the window,
Miss Julia skipped lightly along the adjoining hall. One lifted a fallen
rose-branch on the lawn, the other snatched the reddest blossom from it.
One leaned against the trunk of the old hemlock-tree, the other
fluttered in and out among the clumps of shrubbery; but the lonely green
was wonderfully brightened by these visions of pink and white, and
Joseph enjoyed the fancy without troubling himself to think what it
meant.
The house was seated upon a gentle knoll, near the head of a side-valley
sunk like a dimple among the hills which enclosed the river-meadows,
scarcely a quarter of a mile away. It was nearly a hundred years old,
and its massive walls were faced with checkered bricks, alternately red
and black, to which the ivy clung with tenacious feet wherever it was
allowed to run. The gables terminated in broad double chimneys, between
which a railed walk, intended for a look-out, but rarely used for that
or any other purpose, rested on the peak of the roof. A low portico
paved with stone extended along the front, which was further shaded by
two enormous sycamore-trees as old as the house itself. The evergreens
and ornamental shrubs which occupied the remainder of the little lawn
denoted the taste of a later generation. To the east, an open turfy
space, in the centre of which stood a superb weeping-willow, divided the
house from the great stone barn with its flanking cribs and
"over-shoots;" on the opposite side lay the sunny garden, with gnarled
grape-vines clambering along its walls, and a double row of tall old
box-bushes, each grown into a single solid mass, stretching down the
centre.
The fields belonging to the property, softly rising and following the
undulations of the hills, limited the landscape on three sides; but on
the south there was a fair view of the valley of the larger stream, with
its herd-speckled meadows, glimpses of water between the fringing trees,
and farm-houses sheltered among the knees of the farther hills. It was a
region of peace and repose and quiet, drowsy beauty, and there were few
farms which were not the ancestral homes of the families who held them.
The people were satisfied, for they lived upon a bountiful soil; and if
but few were notably rich, still fewer were absolutely poor. They had a
sluggish sense of content, a half-conscious feeling that their lines
were cast in pleasant places; they were orderly, moral, and generally
honest, and their own types were so constantly reproduced and fixed,
both by intermarriage and intercourse, that any variation therein was a
thing to be suppressed if possible. Any sign of an unusual taste, or a
different view of life, excited their suspicion, and the most of them
were incapable of discriminating between independent thought on moral
and social questions, and "free-thinking" in the religious significance
which they attached to the word. Political excitements, it is true,
sometimes swept over the neighborhood, but in a mitigated form; and the
discussions which then took place between neighbors of opposite faith
were generally repetitions of the arguments furnished by their
respective county papers.
To one whose twofold nature conformed to the common mould,—into whom,
before his birth, no mysterious element had been infused, to be the
basis of new sensations, desires, and powers,—the region was a paradise
of peaceful days. Even as a boy the probable map of his life was drawn:
he could behold himself as young man, as husband, father, and
comfortable old man, by simply looking upon these various stages in
others.
If, however, his senses were not sluggish, but keen; if his nature
reached beyond the ordinary necessities, and hungered for the taste of
higher things; if he longed to share in that life of the world, the
least part of which was known to his native community; if, not content
to accept the mechanical faith of passive minds, he dared to repeat the
long struggle of the human race in his own spiritual and mental growth;
then,—why, then, the region was not a paradise of peaceful days.
Rachel Miller, now that the dangerous evening was over, was shrewd
enough to resume her habitual manner towards her nephew. Her curiosity
to know what had been done, and how Joseph had been affected by the
merry-making, rendered her careful not to frighten him from the subject
by warnings or reproaches. He was frank and communicative, and Rachel
found, to her surprise, that the evening at Warriner's was much, and not
wholly unpleasantly, in her thoughts during her knitting-hours. The
farm-work was briskly forwarded; Joseph was active in the field, and
decidedly brighter in the house; and when he announced the new
engagement, with an air which hinted that his attendance was a matter of
course, she was only able to say:—
"I'm very much mistaken if _that's_ the end. Get agoing once, and
there's no telling where you'll fetch up. I suppose that town's girl
won't stay much longer,—the farm-work of the neighborhood couldn't stand
it,—and so she means to have all she can while her visit lasts."
"Indeed, Aunt," Joseph protested, "Elwood Withers first proposed it, and
the others all agreed."
"And ready enough they were, I'll be bound."
"Yes, they were," Joseph replied, with a little more firmness than
usual. "All of them. And there was no respectable family in the
neighborhood that wasn't represented."
Rachel made an effort and kept silence. The innovation might be
temporary, and in that case it were prudent to take no further notice;
or it might be the beginning of a change in the ways of the young
people, and if so, she needed further knowledge in order to work
successfully against it in Joseph's case.
She little suspected how swiftly and closely the question would be
brought to her own door.
A week afterwards the second of the evening parties was held, and was
even more successful than the first. Everybody was there, bringing a
cheerful memory of the former occasion, and Miss Julia Blessing, no
longer dreaded as an unknown scrutinizing element, was again the life
and soul of the company. It was astonishing how correctly she retained
the names and characteristics of all those whom she had already met, and
how intelligently she seemed to enjoy the gossip of the neighborhood. It
was remarked that her dress was studiously simple, as if to conform to
country ways, yet the airy, graceful freedom of her manner gave it a
character of elegance which sufficiently distinguished her from the
other girls.
Joseph felt that she looked to him, as by an innocent natural instinct,
for a more delicate and intimate recognition than she expected to find
elsewhere. Fragments of sentences, parenthetical expressions, dropped in
her lively talk, were always followed by a quick glance which said to
him: "We have one feeling in common; I know that _you_ understand me."
He was fascinated, but the experience was so new that it was rather
bewildering. He was drawn to catch her seemingly random looks,—to wait
for them, and then shrink timidly when they came, feeling all the while
the desire to be in the quiet corner, outside the merry circle of
talkers, where sat Lucy Henderson.
When, at last, a change in the diversions of the evening brought him to
Lucy's side, she seemed to him grave and preoccupied. Her words lacked
the pleasant directness and self-possession which had made her society
so comfortable to him. She no longer turned her full face towards him
while speaking, and he noticed that her eyes were wandering over the
company with a peculiar expression, as if she were trying to listen with
them. It seemed to him, also, that Elwood Withers, who was restlessly
moving about the room, was watching some one, or waiting for something.
"I have it!" suddenly cried Miss Blessing, floating towards Joseph and
Lucy; "it shall be _you_, Mr. Asten!"
"Yes," echoed Anna Warriner, following; "if it could be, how
delightful!"
"Hush, Anna dear! Let us keep the matter secret!" whispered Miss
Blessing, assuming a mysterious air; "we will slip away and consult;
and, of course, Lucy must come with us."
"Now," she resumed, when the four found themselves alone in the
old-fashioned dining-room, "we must, first of all, explain everything to
Mr. Asten. The question is, where we shall meet, next week. McNaughtons
are building an addition (I believe you call it) to their barn, and a
child has the measles at another place, and something else is wrong
somewhere else. We cannot interfere with the course of nature; but
neither should we give up these charming evenings without making an
effort to continue them. Our sole hope and reliance is on you, Mr.
Asten."
She pronounced the words with a mock solemnity, clasping her hands, and
looking into his face with bright, eager, laughing eyes.
"If it depended on myself—" Joseph began.
"O, I know the difficulty, Mr. Asten!" she exclaimed; "and really, it's
unpardonable in me to propose such a thing. But isn't it possible—just
possible—that Miss Miller might be persuaded by us?"
"Julia dear!" cried Anna Warriner, "I believe there's nothing you'd be
afraid to undertake."
Joseph scarcely knew what to say. He looked from one to the other,
coloring slightly, and ready to turn pale the next moment, as he
endeavored to imagine how his aunt would receive such an astounding
proposition.
"There is no reason why she should be asked," said Lucy. "It would be a
great annoyance to her."
"Indeed?" said Miss Blessing; "then I should be _so_ sorry! But I caught
a glimpse of your lovely place the other day as we were driving up the
valley. It was a perfect picture,—and I have such a desire to see it
nearer!"
"Why will you not come, then?" Joseph eagerly asked. Lucy's words seemed
to him blunt and unfriendly, although he knew they had been intended for
his relief.
"It would be a great pleasure; yet, if I thought your aunt would be
annoyed—"
"I am sure she will be glad to make your acquaintance," said Joseph,
with a reproachful side-glance at Lucy.
Miss Blessing noticed the glance. "_I_ am more sure," she said,
playfully, "that she will be very much amused at my ignorance and
inexperience. And I don't believe Lucy meant to frighten me. As for the
party, we won't think of that now; but you will go with us, Lucy, won't
you,—with Anna and myself, to make a neighborly afternoon call?"
Lucy felt obliged to accede to a request so amiably made, after her
apparent rudeness. Yet she could not force herself to affect a hearty
acquiescence, and Joseph thought her singularly cold.
He did not doubt but that Miss Blessing, whose warm, impulsive nature
seemed to him very much what his own might be if he dared to show it,
would fulfil her promise. Neither did he doubt that so much innocence
and sweetness as she possessed would make a favorable impression upon
his aunt; but he judged it best not to inform the latter of the possible
visit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------