_THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE._
IF John managed to be happy without Lillie in Springdale, Lillie
managed to be blissful without him in New York.
“The bird let loose in Eastern skies” never hastened more fondly home
than she to its glitter and gayety, its life and motion, dash and
sensation. She rustled in all her bravery of curls and frills, pinkings
and quillings,—a marvellous specimen of Parisian frostwork, without one
breath of reason or philosophy or conscience to melt it.
The Follingsbees’ house might stand for the original of the Castle of
Indolence.
“Halls where who can tell
What elegance and grandeur wide expand,—
The pride of Turkey and of Persia’s land?
Soft quilts on quilts; on carpets, carpets spread;
And couches stretched around in seemly band;
And endless pillows rise to prop the head:
So that each spacious room was one full swelling bed.”
It was not without some considerable profit that Mrs. Follingsbee had
read Balzac and Dumas, and had Charlie Ferrola for master of arts in
her establishment. The effect of the whole was perfect; it transported
one, bodily, back to the times of Montespan and Pompadour, when life
was all one glittering upper-crust, and pretty women were never
troubled with even the shadow of a duty.
It was with a rebound of joyousness that Lillie found herself once
more with a crowded list of invitations, calls, operas, dancing, and
shopping, that kept her pretty little head in a perfect whirl of
excitement, and gave her not one moment for thought.
Mrs. Follingsbee, to say the truth, would have been a little careful
about inviting a rival queen of beauty into the circle, were it not
that Charlie Ferrola, after an attentive consideration of the subject,
had assured her that a golden-haired blonde would form a most complete
and effective tableau, in contrast with her own dark rich style of
beauty. Neither would lose by it, so he said; and the impression, as
they rode together in an elegant open barouche, with ermine carriage
robes, would be “stunning.” So they called each other _ma sœur_, and
drove out in the park in a ravishing little pony-phaeton all foamed
over with ermine, drawn by a lovely pair of cream-colored horses, whose
harness glittered with gold and silver, after the fashion of the Count
of Monte Cristo. In truth, if Dick Follingsbee did not remind one of
Solomon in all particulars, he was like him in one, that he “made
silver and gold as the stones of the street” in New York.
Lillie’s presence, however, was all desirable; because it would draw
the calls of two or three old New York families who had hitherto stood
upon their dignity, and refused to acknowledge the shoddy aristocracy.
The beautiful Mrs. John Seymour, therefore, was no less useful than
ornamental, and advanced Mrs. Follingsbee’s purposes in her “Excelsior”
movements.
“Now, I suppose,” said Mrs. Follingsbee to Lillie one day, when they
had been out making fashionable calls together, “we really must call on
Charlie’s wife, just to keep her quiet.”
“I thought you didn’t like her,” said Lillie.
“I don’t; I think she is dreadfully common,” said Mrs. Follingsbee:
“she is one of those women who can’t talk any thing but baby, and bores
Charlie half to death. But then, you know, when there is a _liaison_
like mine with Charlie, one can’t be too careful to cultivate the
wives. _Les convenances_, you know, are the all-important things. I
send her presents constantly, and send my carriage around to take
her to church or opera, or any thing that is going on, and have her
children at my fancy parties: yet, for all that, the creature has not a
particle of gratitude; those narrow-minded women never have. You know
I am very susceptible to people’s atmospheres; and I always feel that
that creature is just as full of spite and jealousy as she can stick in
her skin.”
It will be remarked that this was one of those idiomatic phrases which
got lodged in Mrs. Follingsbee’s head in a less cultivated period of
her life, as a rusty needle sometimes hides in a cushion, coming out
unexpectedly, when excitement gives it an honest squeeze.
“Now, I should think,” pursued Mrs. Follingsbee, “that a woman who
really loved her husband would be thankful to have him have such a
rest from the disturbing family cares which smother a man’s genius,
as a house like ours offers him. How can the artistic nature exercise
itself in the very grind of the thing, when this child has a cold, and
the other the croup; and there is fussing with mustard-paste and ipecac
and paregoric,—all those realities, you know? Why, Charlie tells me he
feels a great deal more affection for his children when he is all calm
and tranquil in the little boudoir at our house; and he writes such
lovely little poems about them, I must show you some of them. But this
creature doesn’t appreciate them a bit: she has no poetry in her.”
“Well, I must say, I don’t think I should have,” said Lillie, honestly.
“I should be just as mad as I could be, if John acted so.”
“Oh, my dear! the cases are different: Charlie has such peculiarities
of genius. The artistic nature, you know, requires soothing.” Here they
stopped, and rang at the door of a neat little house, and were ushered
into a pair of those characteristic parlors which show that they have
been arranged by a home-worshipper, and a mother. There were plants and
birds and flowers, and little _genre_ pictures of children, animals,
and household interiors, arranged with a loving eye and hand.
“Did you ever see any thing so perfectly characteristic?” said Mrs.
Follingsbee, looking around her as if she were going to faint.
“This woman drives Charlie perfectly wild, because she has no
appreciation of high art. Now, I sent her photographs of Michel
Angelo’s ‘Moses,’ and ‘Night and Morning;’ and I really wish you would
see where she hung them,—away in yonder dark corner!”
“I think myself they are enough to scare the owls,” said Lillie, after
a moment’s contemplation.
“But, my dear, you know they are the thing,” said Mrs. Follingsbee:
“people never like such things at first, and one must get used to high
art before one forms a taste for it. The thing with her is, she has no
docility. She does not try to enter into Charlie’s tastes.”
The woman with “no docility” entered at this moment,—a little snow-drop
of a creature, with a pale, pure, Madonna face, and that sad air of
hopeless firmness which is seen unhappily in the faces of so many women.
“I had to bring baby down,” she said. “I have no nurse to-day, and he
has been threatened with croup.”
“The dear little fellow!” said Mrs. Follingsbee, with officious
graciousness. “So glad you brought him down; come to his aunty?” she
inquired lovingly, as the little fellow shrank away, and regarded
her with round, astonished eyes. “Why will you not come to my next
reception, Mrs. Ferrola?” she added. “You make yourself quite a
stranger to us. You ought to give yourself some variety.”
“The fact is, Mrs. Follingsbee,” said Mrs. Ferrola, “receptions in New
York generally begin about my bed-time; and, if I should spend the
night out, I should have no strength to give to my children the next
day.”
[Illustration: “I had to bring baby down.”]
“But, my dear, you ought to have some amusement.”
“My children amuse me, if you will believe it,” said Mrs. Ferrola, with
a remarkably quiet smile.
Mrs. Follingsbee was not quite sure whether this was meant to be
sarcastic or not. She answered, however, “Well! your husband will
come, at all events.”
“You may be quite sure of that,” said Mrs. Ferrola, with the same
quietness.
“Well!” said Mrs. Follingsbee, rising, with patronizing cheerfulness,
“delighted to see you doing so well; and, if it is pleasant, I will
send the carriage round to take you a drive in the park this afternoon.
Good-morning.”
And, like a rustling cloud of silks and satins and perfumes, she bent
down and kissed the baby, and swept from the apartment.
Mrs. Ferrola, with a movement that seemed involuntary, wiped the baby’s
cheek with her handkerchief, and, folding it closer to her bosom,
looked up as if asking patience where patience is to be found for the
asking.
“There! didn’t I tell you?” said Mrs. Follingsbee when she came out;
“just one of those provoking, meek, obstinate, impracticable creatures,
with no adaptation in her.”
“Oh, gracious me!” said Lillie: “I can’t imagine more dire despair than
to sit all day tending baby.”
“Well, so you would think; and Charlie has offered to hire competent
nurses, and wants her to dress herself up and go into society; and she
just won’t do it, and sticks right down by the cradle there, with her
children running over her like so many squirrels.”
“Oh! I hope and trust I never shall have children,” said Lillie,
fervently, “because, you see, there’s an end of every thing. No more
fun, no more frolics, no more admiration or good times; nothing but
this frightful baby, that you can’t get rid of.”
Yet, as Lillie spoke, she knew, in her own slippery little heart, that
the shadow of this awful cloud of maternity was resting over her;
though she laced and danced, and bid defiance to every law of nature,
with a blind and ignorant wilfulness, not caring what consequences she
might draw down on herself, if only she might escape this.
And was there, then, no soft spot in this woman’s heart anywhere?
Generally it is thought that the throb of the child’s heart awakens
a heart in the mother, and that the mother is born again with her
child. It is so with unperverted nature, as God meant it to be; and
you shall hear from the lips of an Irish washer-woman a genuine poetry
of maternal feeling, for the little one who comes to make her toil
more toilsome, that is wholly withered away out of luxurious circles,
where there is every thing to make life easy. Just as the Chinese have
contrived fashionable monsters, where human beings are constrained to
grow in the shape of flower-pots, so fashionable life contrives at last
to grow a woman who hates babies, and will risk her life to be rid of
the crowning glory of womanhood.
There was a time in Lillie’s life, when she was sixteen years of age,
which was a turning-point with her, and decided that she should be
the heartless woman she was. If at that age, and at that time, she
had decided to marry the man she really loved, marriage might indeed
have proved to her a sacrament. It might have opened to her a door
through which she could have passed out from a career of selfish
worldliness into that gradual discipline of unselfishness which a true
love-marriage brings.
But she did not. The man was poor, and she was beautiful; her beauty
would buy wealth and worldly position, and so she cast him off. Yet
partly to gratify her own lingering feeling, and partly because she
could not wholly renounce what had once been hers, she kept up for
years with him just that illusive simulacrum which such women call
friendship; which, while constantly denying, constantly takes pains to
attract, and drains the heart of all possibility of loving another.
Harry Endicott was a young man of fine capabilities, sensitive,
interesting, handsome, full of generous impulses, whom a good woman
might easily have led to a full completeness. He was not really
Lillie’s cousin, but the cousin of her mother; yet, under the name of
cousin, he had constant access and family intimacy.
This winter Harry Endicott suddenly returned to the fashionable circles
of New York,—returned from a successful career in India, with an ample
fortune. He was handsomer than ever, took stylish bachelor lodgings,
set up a most distracting turnout, and became a sort of Marquis of
Farintosh in fashionable circles. Was ever any thing so lucky, or so
unlucky, for our Lillie?—lucky, if life really does run on the basis of
French novels, and if all that is needed is the sparkle and stimulus of
new emotions; unlucky, nay, even gravely terrible, if life really is
established on a basis of moral responsibility, and dogged by the fatal
necessity that “whatsoever man or woman soweth, that shall he or she
also reap.”
In the most critical hour of her youth, when love was sent to her heart
like an angel, to beguile her from selfishness, and make self-denial
easy, Lillie’s pretty little right hand had sowed to the world and
the flesh; and of that sowing she was now to reap all the disquiets,
the vexations, the tremors, that go to fill the pages of French
novels,—records of women who marry where they cannot love, to serve
the purposes of selfishness and ambition, and then make up for it by
loving where they cannot marry. If all the women in America who have
practised, and are practising, this species of moral agriculture should
stand forth together, it would be seen that it is not for nothing that
France has been called the society educator of the world.
The apartments of the Follingsbee mansion, with their dreamy
voluptuousness, were eminently adapted to be the background and
scenery of a dramatic performance of this kind. There were vistas
of drawing-rooms, with delicious boudoirs, like side chapels in a
temple of Venus, with handsome Charlie Ferrola gliding in and out,
or lecturing dreamily from the corner of some sofa on the last most
important crinkle of the artistic rose-leaf, demonstrating conclusively
that beauty was the only true morality, and that there was no sin but
bad taste; and that nobody knew what good taste was but himself and
his clique. There was the discussion, far from edifying, of modern
improved theories of society, seen from an improved philosophic point
of view; of all the peculiar wants and needs of etherealized beings,
who have been refined and cultivated till it is the most difficult
problem in the world to keep them comfortable, while there still
remains the most imperative necessity that they should be made happy,
though the whole universe were to be torn down and made over to effect
it.
The idea of not being happy, and in all respects as blissful as they
could possibly be made, was one always assumed by the Follingsbee
clique as an injustice to be wrestled with. Anybody that did not
affect them agreeably, that jarred on their nerves, or interrupted
the delicious reveries of existence with the sharp saw-setting of
commonplace realities, in their view ought to be got rid of summarily,
whether that somebody were husband or wife, parent or child.
Natures that affected each other pleasantly were to spring together
like dew-drops, and sail off on rosy clouds with each other to the land
of Do-just-as-you-have-a-mind-to.
The only thing never to be enough regretted, which prevented this
immediate and blissful union of particles, was the impossibility of
living on rosy clouds, and making them the means of conveyance to the
desirable country before mentioned. Many of the fair _illuminatæ_, who
were quite willing to go off with a kindred spirit, were withheld by
the necessities of infinite pairs of French kid gloves, and gallons
of cologne-water, and indispensable clouds of mechlin and point lace,
which were necessary to keep around them the poetry of existence.
Although it was well understood among them that the religion of the
emotions is the only true religion, and that nothing is holy that you
do not feel exactly like doing, and every thing is holy that you do;
still these fair confessors lacked the pluck of primitive Christians,
and could not think of taking joyfully the spoiling of their goods,
even for the sake of a kindred spirit. Hence the necessity of living in
deplored marriage-bonds with husbands who could pay rent and taxes, and
stand responsible for unlimited bills at Stewart’s and Tiffany’s. Hence
the philosophy which allowed the possession of the body to one man, and
of the soul to another, which one may see treated of at large in any
writings of the day.
As yet Lillie had been kept intact from all this sort of thing by the
hard, brilliant enamel of selfishness. That little shrewd, gritty
common sense, which enabled her to see directly through other people’s
illusions, has, if we mistake not, by this time revealed itself to our
readers as an element in her mind: but now there is to come a decided
thrust at the heart of her womanhood; and we shall see whether the
paralysis is complete, or whether the woman is alive.
If Lillie had loved Harry Endicott poor, had loved him so much that
at one time she had seriously balanced the possibility of going to
housekeeping in a little unfashionable house, and having only one girl,
and hand in hand with him walking the paths of economy, self-denial,
and prudence,—the reader will see that Harry Endicott rich, Harry
Endicott enthroned in fashionable success, Harry Endicott plus fast
horses, splendid equipages, a fine city house, and a country house on
the Hudson, was something still more dangerous to her imagination.
But more than this was the stimulus of Harry Endicott out of her power,
and beyond the sphere of her charms. She had a feverish desire to see
him, but he never called. Forthwith she had a confidential conversation
with her bosom friend, who entered into the situation with enthusiasm,
and invited him to her receptions. But he didn’t come.
The fact was, that Harry Endicott hated Lillie now, with that kind of
hatred which is love turned wrong-side out. He hated her for the misery
she had caused him, and was in some danger of feeling it incumbent
on himself to go to the devil in a wholly unnecessary manner on that
account.
He had read the story of Monte Cristo, with its highly wrought plot of
vengeance, and had determined to avenge himself on the woman who had so
tortured him, and to make her feel, if possible, what he had felt.
So, when he had discovered the hours of driving observed by Mrs.
Follingsbee and Lillie in the park, he took pains, from time to time,
to meet them face to face, and to pass Lillie with an unrecognizing
stare. Then he dashed in among Mrs. Follingsbee’s circle, making
himself everywhere talked of, till they were beset on all hands by the
inquiry, “Don’t you know young Endicott? why, I should think you would
want to have him visit here.”
After this had been played far enough, he suddenly showed himself one
evening at Mrs. Follingsbee’s, and apologized in an off-hand manner to
Lillie, when reminded of passing her in the park, that really he wasn’t
thinking of meeting her, and didn’t recognize her, she was so altered;
it had been so many years since they had met, &c. All in a tone of
cool and heartless civility, every word of which was a dagger’s thrust
not only into her vanity, but into the poor little bit of a real heart
which fashionable life had left to Lillie.
Every evening, after he had gone, came a long, confidential
conversation with Mrs. Follingsbee, in which every word and look
was discussed and turned, and all possible or probable inferences
therefrom reported; after which Lillie often laid a sleepless head
on a hot and tumbled pillow, poor, miserable child! suffering her
punishment, without even the grace to know whence it came, or what it
meant. Hitherto Lillie had been walking only in the limits of that
kind of permitted wickedness, which, although certainly the remotest
thing possible from the Christianity of Christ, finds a great deal
of tolerance and patronage among communicants of the altar. She had
lived a gay, vain, self-pleasing life, with no object or purpose but
the simple one to get each day as much pleasurable enjoyment out of
existence as possible. Mental and physical indolence and inordinate
vanity had been the key-notes of her life. She hated every thing that
required protracted thought, or that made trouble, and she longed
for excitement. The passion for praise and admiration had become
to her like the passion of the opium-eater for his drug, or of the
brandy-drinker for his dram. But now she was heedlessly steering to
what might prove a more palpable sin.
Harry the serf, once half despised for his slavish devotion, now stood
before her, proud and free, and tantalized her by the display he made
of his indifference, and preference for others. She put forth every
art and effort to recapture him. But the most dreadful stroke of fate
of all was, that Rose Ferguson had come to New York to make a winter
visit, and was much talked of in certain circles where Harry was quite
intimate; and he professed himself, indeed, an ardent admirer at her
shrine.