_THE SISTER._
GRACE SEYMOUR was a specimen of a class of whom we are happy to say New
England possesses a great many.
She was a highly cultivated, intelligent, and refined woman, arrived
at the full age of mature womanhood unmarried, and with no present
thought or prospect of marriage. I presume all my readers, who are in
a position to run over the society of our rural New-England towns, can
recall to their minds hundreds of such. They are women too thoughtful,
too conscientious, too delicate, to marry for any thing but a purely
personal affection; and this affection, for various reasons, has not
fallen in their way.
The tendency of life in these towns is to throw the young men of the
place into distant fields of adventure and enterprise in the far
Western and Southern States, leaving at their old homes a population in
which the feminine element largely predominates. It is not, generally
speaking, the most cultivated or the most attractive of the brethren
who remain in the place where they were born. The ardent, the daring,
the enterprising, are off to the ends of the earth; and the choice of
the sisters who remain at home is, therefore, confined to a restricted
list; and so it ends in these delightful rose-gardens of single women
which abound in New England,—women who remain at home as housekeepers
to aged parents, and charming persons in society; women over whose
graces of conversation and manner the married men in their vicinity go
off into raptures of eulogium, which generally end with, “Why hasn’t
that woman ever got married?”
It often happens to such women to expend on some brother that stock of
hero-worship and devotion which it has not come in their way to give to
a nearer friend. Alas! it is building on a sandy foundation; for, just
as the union of hearts is complete, the chemical affinity which began
in the cradle, and strengthens with every year of life, is dissolved
by the introduction of that third element which makes of the brother a
husband, while the new combination casts out the old,—sometimes with a
disagreeable effervescence.
John and Grace Seymour were two only children of a very affectionate
family; and they had grown up in the closest habits of intimacy. They
had written to each other those long letters in which thoughtful people
who live in retired situations delight; letters not of outward events,
but of sentiments and opinions, the phases of the inner life. They had
studied and pursued courses of reading together. They had together
organized and carried on works of benevolence and charity.
The brother and sister had been left joint heirs of a large
manufacturing property, employing hundreds of hands, in their vicinity;
and the care and cultivation of these work-people, the education of
their children, had been most conscientiously upon their minds. Half
of every Sunday they devoted together to labors in the Sunday school
of their manufacturing village; and the two worked so harmoniously
together in the interests of their life, that Grace had never felt the
want of any domestic ties or relations other than those that she had.
Our readers may perhaps, therefore, concede that, among the many
claimants for their sympathy in this cross-grained world of ours, some
few grains of it may properly be due to Grace.
Things are trials that try us: afflictions are what afflict us; and,
under this showing, Grace was both tried and afflicted by the sudden
engagement of her brother. When the whole groundwork on which one’s
daily life is built caves in, and falls into the cellar without one
moment’s warning, it is not in human nature to pick one’s self up, and
reconstruct and rearrange in a moment. So Grace thought, at any rate;
but she made a hurried effort to dash back her tears, and gulp down
a rising in her throat, anxious only not to be selfish, and not to
disgust her brother in the outset with any personal egotism.
So she ran to the front door to meet him, and fell into his arms,
trying so hard to seem congratulatory and affectionate that she broke
out into sobbing.
“My dear Gracie,” said John, embracing and kissing her with that
gushing fervor with which newly engaged gentlemen are apt to deluge
every creature whom they meet, “you’ve got my letter. Well, were not
you astonished?”
“O John, it was so sudden!” was all poor Grace could say. “And you
know, John, since mother died, you and I have been all in all to each
other.”
“And so we shall be, Gracie. Why, yes, of course we shall,” he said,
stroking her hair, and playing with her trembling, thin, white hands.
“Why, this only makes me love you the more now; and you will love my
little Lillie: fact is, you can’t help it. We shall both of us be
happier for having her here.”
“Well, you know, John, I never saw her,” said Grace, deprecatingly,
“and so you can’t wonder.”
“Oh, yes, of course! Don’t wonder in the least. It comes rather
sudden,—and then you haven’t seen her. Look, here is her photograph!”
said John, producing one from the most orthodox innermost region,
directly over his heart. “Look there! isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is a very sweet face,” said Grace, exerting herself to be
sympathetic, and thankful that she could say that much truthfully.
“I can’t imagine,” said John, “what ever made her like me. You know
she has refused half the fellows in the country. I hadn’t the remotest
idea that she would have any thing to say to me; but you see there’s no
accounting for tastes;” and John plumed himself, as young gentlemen do
who have carried off prizes.
“You see,” he added, “it’s odd, but she took a fancy to me the first
time she saw me. Now, you know, Gracie, I never found it easy to get
along with ladies at first; but Lillie has the most extraordinary way
of putting a fellow at his ease. Why, she made me feel like an old
friend the first hour.”
[Illustration: “It _is_ a very sweet face.”]
“Indeed!”
“Look here,” said John, triumphantly drawing out his pocket-book, and
producing thence a knot of rose-colored satin ribbon. “Did you ever
see such a lovely color as this? It’s so exquisite, you see! Well, she
always is wearing just such knots of ribbon, the most lovely shades.
Why, there isn’t one woman in a thousand could wear the things she
does. Every thing becomes her. Sometimes it’s rose color, or lilac, or
pale blue,—just the most trying things to others are what she can wear.”
“Dear John, I hope you looked for something deeper than the complexion
in a wife,” said Grace, driven to moral reflections in spite of herself.
“Oh, of course!” said John: “she has such soft, gentle, winning ways;
she is so sympathetic; she’s just the wife to make home happy, to
be a bond of union to us all. Now, in a wife, what we want is just
that. Lillie’s mind, for instance, hasn’t been cultivated as yours
and Letitia’s. She isn’t at all that sort of girl. She’s just a dear,
gentle, little confiding creature, that you’ll delight in. You’ll form
her mind, and she’ll look up to you. You know she’s young yet.”
“Young, John! Why, she’s seven and twenty,” said Grace, with
astonishment.
“Oh, no, my dear Gracie! that is all a mistake. She told me herself
she’s only twenty. You see, the trouble is, she went into company
injudiciously early, a mere baby, in fact; and that causes her to have
the name of being older than she is. But, I do assure you, she’s only
twenty. She told me so herself.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Grace, prudently choking back the contradiction
which she longed to utter. “I know it seems a good many summers since I
heard of her as a belle at Newport.”
“Ah, yes, exactly! You see she went into company, as a young lady,
when she was only thirteen. She told me all about it. Her parents were
very injudicious, and they pushed her forward. She regrets it now.
She knows that it wasn’t the thing at all. She’s very sensitive to the
defects in her early education; but I made her understand that it was
the _heart_ more than the head that I cared for. I dare say, Gracie,
she’ll fall into all our little ways without really knowing; and you,
in point of fact, will be mistress of the house as much as you ever
were. Lillie is delicate, and never has had any care, and will be only
too happy to depend on you. She’s one of the gentle, dependent sort,
you know.”
To this statement, Grace did not reply. She only began nervously
sweeping together the _débris_ of leaves and flowers which encumbered
the table, on which the newly arranged flower-vases were standing. Then
she arranged the vases with great precision on the mantel-shelf. As she
was doing it, so many memories rushed over her of that room and her
mother, and the happy, peaceful family life that had hitherto been led
there, that she quite broke down; and, sitting down in the chair, she
covered her face, and went off in a good, hearty crying spell.
Poor John was inexpressibly shocked. He loved and revered his sister
beyond any thing in the world; and it occurred to him, in a dim wise,
that to be suddenly dispossessed and shut out in the cold, when one has
hitherto been the first object of affection, is, to make the best of
it, a real and sore trial.
But Grace soon recovered herself, and rose up smiling through her
tears. “What a fool I am making of myself!” she said. “The fact is,
John, I am only a little nervous. You mustn’t mind it. You know,” she
said, laughing, “we old maids are like cats,—we find it hard to be put
out of our old routine. I dare say we shall all of us be happier in the
end for this, and I shall try to do all I can to make it so. Perhaps,
John, I’d better take that little house of mine on Elm Street, and set
up my tent in it, and take all the old furniture and old pictures, and
old-time things. You’ll be wanting to modernize and make over this
house, you know, to suit a young wife.”
“Nonsense, Gracie; no such thing!” said John. “Do you suppose I want
to leave all the past associations of my life, and strip my home bare
of all pleasant memorials, because I bring a little wife here? Why,
the very idea of a wife is somebody to sympathize in your tastes; and
Lillie will love and appreciate all these dear old things as you and
I do. She has such a sympathetic heart! If you want to make me happy,
Gracie, stay here, and let us live, as near as may be, as before.”
“So we will, John,” said Grace, so cheerfully that John considered the
whole matter as settled, and rushed upstairs to write his daily letter
to Lillie.