_WEDDING BELLS._
SOME weeks had passed in Springdale while these affairs had been going
on in New York. The time for the marriage of Grace had been set; and
she had gone to Boston to attend to that preparatory shopping which
even the most sensible of the sex discover to be indispensable on such
occasions.
Grace inclined, in the centre of her soul, to Bostonian rather than
New-York preferences. She had the innocent impression that a classical
severity and a rigid reticence of taste pervaded even the rebellious
department of feminine millinery in the city of the Pilgrims,—an idea
which we rather think young Boston would laugh down as an exploded
superstition, young Boston’s leading idea at the present hour being
apparently to outdo New York in New York’s imitation of Paris.
In fact, Grace found it very difficult to find a milliner who, if left
to her own devices, would not befeather and beflower her past all
self-recognition, giving to her that generally betousled and fly-away
air which comes straight from the _demi-monde_ of Paris.
We apprehend that the recent storms of tribulation which have beat
upon those fairy islands of fashion may scatter this frail and fanciful
population, and send them by shiploads on missions of civilization to
our shores; in which case, the bustle and animation and the brilliant
display on the old turnpike, spoken of familiarly as the “broad road,”
will be somewhat increased.
Grace however managed, by the exercise of a good individual taste,
to come out of these shopping conflicts in good order,—a handsome,
well-dressed, charming woman, with everybody’s best wishes for, and
sympathy in, her happiness.
Lillie was summoned home by urgent messages from her husband, calling
her back to take her share in wedding festivities.
She left willingly; for the fact is that her last conversation with her
cousin Harry had made the situation as uncomfortable to her as if he
had unceremoniously deluged her with a pailful of cold water.
There is a chilly, disagreeable kind of article, called common sense,
which is of all things most repulsive and antipathetical to all petted
creatures whose life has consisted in flattery. It is the kind of talk
which sisters are very apt to hear from brothers, and daughters from
fathers and mothers, when fathers and mothers do their duty by them;
which sets the world before them as it is, and not as it is painted by
flatterers. Those women who prefer the society of gentlemen, and who
have the faculty of bewitching their senses, never are in the way of
hearing from this cold matter-of-fact region; for them it really does
not exist. Every phrase that meets their ear is polished and softened,
guarded and delicately turned, till there is not a particle of homely
truth left in it. They pass their time in a world of illusions; they
demand these illusions of all who approach them, as the sole condition
of peace and favor. All gentlemen, by a sort of instinct, recognize the
woman who lives by flattery, and give her her portion of meat in due
season; and thus some poor women are hopelessly buried, as suicides
used to be in Scotland, under a mountain of rubbish, to which each
passer-by adds one stone. It is only by some extraordinary power of
circumstances that a man can be found to invade the sovereignty of a
pretty woman with any disagreeable tidings; or, as Junius says, “to
instruct the throne in the language of truth.” Harry was brought up
to this point only by such a concurrence of circumstances. He was in
love with another woman,—a ready cause for disenchantment. He was in
some sort a family connection; and he saw Lillie’s conduct at last,
therefore, through the plain, unvarnished medium of common sense.
Moreover, he felt a little pinched in his own conscience by the view
which Rose seemed to take of his part in the matter, and, manlike, was
strengthened in doing his duty by being a little galled and annoyed
at the woman whose charms had tempted him into this dilemma. So he
talked to Lillie like a brother; or, in other words, made himself
disagreeably explicit,—showed her her sins, and told her her duties
as a married woman. The charming fair ones who sentimentally desire
gentlemen to regard them as sisters do not bargain for any of this
sort of brotherly plainness; and yet they might do it with great
advantage. A brother, who is not a brother, stationed near the ear of
a fair friend, is commonly very careful not to compromise his position
by telling unpleasant truths; but, on the present occasion, Harry made
a literal use of the brevet of brotherhood which Lillie had bestowed
on him, and talked to her as the generality of _real_ brothers talk
to their sisters, using great plainness of speech. He withered all
her poor little trumpery array of hothouse flowers of sentiment, by
treating them as so much garbage, as all men know they are. He set
before her the gravity and dignity of marriage, and her duties to her
husband. Last, and most unkind of all, he professed his admiration of
Rose Ferguson, his unworthiness of her, and his determination to win
her by a nobler and better life; and then showed himself to be a stupid
blunderer by exhorting Lillie to make Rose her model, and seek to
imitate her virtues.
Poor Lillie! the world looked dismal and dreary enough to her. She
shrunk within herself. Every thing was withered and disenchanted. All
her poor little stock of romance seemed to her as disgusting as the
withered flowers and crumpled finery and half-melted ice-cream the
morning after a ball.
In this state, when she got a warm, true letter from John, who always
grew tender and affectionate when she was long away, couched in those
terms of admiration and affection that were soothing to her ear, she
really longed to go back to him. She shrunk from the dreary plainness
of truth, and longed for flattery and petting and caresses once
more; and she wrote to John an overflowingly tender letter, full of
longings, which brought him at once to her side, the most delighted of
men. When Lillie cried in his arms, and told him that she found New
York perfectly hateful; when she declaimed on the heartlessness of
fashionable life, and longed to go with him to their quiet home,—she
was tolerably in earnest; and John was perfectly enchanted.
Poor John! Was he a muff, a spoon? We think not. We understand well
that there is not a _woman_ among our readers who has the slightest
patience with Lillie, and that the most of them are half out of
patience with John for his enduring tenderness towards her.
But men were born and organized by nature to be the protectors of
women; and, generally speaking, the stronger and more thoroughly
manly a man is, the more he has of what phrenologists call the “pet
organ,”—the disposition which makes him the charmed servant of what is
weak and dependent. John had a great share of this quality. He was made
to be a protector. He loved to protect; he loved every thing that was
helpless and weak,—young animals, young children, and delicate women.
He was a romantic adorer of womanhood, as a sort of divine mystery,—a
never-ending poem; and when his wife was long enough away from him to
give scope for imagination to work, when she no longer annoyed him with
the friction of the sharp little edges of her cold and selfish nature,
he was able to see her once more in the ideal light of first love.
After all, she was his wife; and in that one word, to a good man, is
every thing holy and sacred. He longed to believe in her and trust her
wholly; and now that Grace was going from him, to belong to another,
Lillie was more than ever his dependence.
On the whole, if we must admit that John was weak, he was weak where
strong and noble natures may most gracefully be so,—weak through
disinterestedness, faith, and the disposition to make the best of the
wife he had chosen.
And so Lillie came home; and there was festivity and rejoicing. Grace
found herself floated into matrimony on a tide bringing gifts and
tokens of remembrance from everybody that had ever known her; for all
were delighted with this opportunity of testifying a sense of her
worth, and every hand was ready to help ring her wedding bells.