MY DAUGHTERS.
THE room to which Judge Burnham presently escorted his bride was very
unlike that parlor. As she looked about her, on the exquisite air of
beauty which prevailed, and the evidences of refined and cultured
taste, scattered with lavish hand, she was touched with the thought
that her tastes had been understood and remembered, in each minute
detail.
“How very lovely this is!” she said, as her foot rested on the soft
velvet carpet, with its wildwood vines trailing in rich colors over the
floor.
“I knew you would like it,” Judge Burnham said, with a gratified
smile. “It reminded me of you, and, indeed, the entire room has seemed
to me to be full of your presence. I enjoyed arranging it. I think I
could have gratified your tastes in regard to the rest of the house,
Ruth, if you had let me.”
“Oh, I know you could,” she answered, earnestly. “It was not that I
did not trust your taste—and perhaps I made a mistake; but I meant it
right, and you must help me to bring right out of it.”
She did not realize it, but this little concession to his possible
better judgment helped her husband wonderfully.
“We will make it come right,” he said, decidedly. “And now I will leave
you to rest a little, while I go down and discover whether this house
is inhabited to-day.”
With the door closing after him seemed to go much of Ruth’s courage.
This exquisite room was a rest to her beauty-loving eyes and heart.
But it contrasted most strangely with the life below stairs; and, when
she thought of that room below, it reminded her of all there was yet
to meet and endure, and of the newness of the way, and the untried
experiments which were to be made, and of her own weakness—and her
heart trembled, and almost failed her. Yet it must not fail her; she
_must_ get strength.
Well for Ruth that she knew in what place to seek it. Instead of taking
a seat in the delicately-carved and gracefully-upholstered easy-chair,
which invited her into its depths, she turned and knelt before it.
Perhaps, after all, there are more dangerous experiences than those
which, in coming to a new home, to take up new responsibilities, lead
us to feel our utter weakness, and bring us on our knees, crying to the
strong for strength.
Judge Burnham’s entrance, nearly an hour afterward, found Ruth resting
quietly in that easy chair, such a calm on her face, and such a light
in her eyes, that he stopped on the threshold, and regarded her with a
half-pleased, half-awed expression, as he said:
“You look wonderfully rested! I think my easy chair must be a success.
Will you come down now, to a farm-house supper? Please don’t see any
more of the strange things than you can help. I tried to get the girls
to come up, and so avoid some of the horrors of a meeting below
stairs; but they are too thoroughly alarmed to have any sense at all,
and I had to abandon that plan.”
“Poor things!” said Ruth, compassionately. “Am I so very formidable?
It must be dreadful to feel frightened at people. I can’t imagine the
feeling.”
He surveyed her critically, then laughed. He had some conception of
what a vision she would be to the people down-stairs. She had not
changed her travelling dress, which was of rich dark silk, fitted
exquisitely to her shapely form, and the soft laces at throat and
wrist, brightened only by a knot of ribbon of the most delicate tint
of blue, completed what, to Judge Burnham’s cultured taste, seemed the
very perfection of a toilet.
“You do not frighten me,” he said. “I can manage to look at you
without being overwhelmed. I shall not answer for anybody else. Ruth,
I have obeyed you to the very letter. In a fit of something very like
vexation, I resolved not to lift a finger to change the customs of the
house, leaving you to see them, according to your desire, as they
were. The result is we haven’t even a table to ourselves, to-night. The
whole of that insufferable family, cat and all, are ready to gather,
with us, around their hospitable board. I am sorry, now, that I was so
very literal in my obedience.”
“I am not,” Ruth said, and her tone was quiet, and had a sound in it
which was not there when he left her. It served to make him regard her
again, curiously.
Then they went down-stairs to the kitchen! Ruth was presently seated
at the long table, alarmingly near to the stove which had cooked the
potatoes that graced the evening meal—boiled potatoes, served in
their original coats! to be eaten with two-tined steel forks, the
same forks expected to do duty in the mastication of a huge piece of
peach-pie!—unless, indeed, she did as her husband’s daughters were
evidently accustomed to doing, and ate it with her knife. There were,
at that table, Farmer Ferris, in his shirt-sleeves, himself redolent
of the barn and the cow-house; his wife, in a new, stiff, blue and
red plaid calico, most manifestly donned to do honor to the occasion;
two boys, belonging to the Ferris household, in different degrees of
shock-headed, out-at-the-elbow disorder, and the aforesaid apparition
in pink calico, the gray cat still hugged to her heart, and eating milk
from the same saucer, at intervals; and, lastly, the two daughters of
the House of Burnham.
Those daughters! The strongest emotion which Ruth found it in her
heart to have for them, on this first evening, was pity. She had never
imagined anything like the painful embarrassment which they felt. They
sat on the edges of their chairs, and, when engaged in trying to eat,
tilted the chairs forward to reach their plates, and rested their
elbows on the table to stare, when they dared to raise their frightened
eyes to do so. Their father had performed the ceremony of introduction
in a way which was likely to increase their painful self-consciousness.
“Girls,” he had said, and his voice sounded as if he were summoning
them to a trial by jury; “this is Mrs. Burnham.” And they had stood up,
and essayed to make little bobbing courtesies, after the fashion of
fifty years ago, until further pressed by Mrs. Ferris, who had said,
with a conscious laugh:
“For the land’s sake, girls! do go and shake hands with her. Why, she
is your ma now.”
But Judge Burnham’s haughty voice had come to the rescue:
“If you please, we will excuse them from that ceremony, Mrs. Ferris,”
he had said. “Mrs. Burnham, please be seated.” And he had drawn back
her chair with the courtesy of a gentleman and the inward fury of a
lion. In truth, Judge Burnham was ashamed of and angry with himself,
and I am glad of it; he deserved to be. Instead of asserting his
authority, and making this meeting and this first meal together
strictly a family matter, and managing a dozen other little details
which he could have managed, and which would have helped wonderfully,
he had angrily resolved to let everything utterly alone, and bring Ruth
thus sooner and more decisively to seeing the folly, and the utter
untenableness of her position. But something in the absolute calm of
her face, this evening—a calm which had come to her since he left her
in their room alone—made him feel it to be more than probable that she
would not easily, nor soon, abandon the position which she had assumed.
The ordeal of supper was gotten through with easier than Ruth had
supposed possible—though truth to tell, the things which would have
affected most persons the least, were the hardest for her to bear. She
had not entirely risen above the views concerning refinement which she
had expressed during the early days of Chautauqua life; and to eat with
a knife when a fork should be used, and to have a two-tined steel fork,
instead of a silver one, and to have no napkin at all, were to her
positive and vivid sources of discomfort—sources from which she could
not altogether turn away, even at this time. I am not sure, however,
that, in the trivialities, she did not lose some of the real trials
which the occasion certainly presented.
Directly after the supper was concluded, with but a very poor attempt
at eating on Ruth’s part, Judge Burnham led the way to that dreadful
parlor, interposing his stern voice between the evident intention of
the daughters to remain in the kitchen:
“I desire that you will come immediately to the parlor.”
As for Ruth and himself, they did not retreat promptly enough to
escape Mrs. Ferris’ stage-whisper:
“For the land’s sake, girls! do go quick; I’m afraid he will bite you
next time. I wonder if she is as awful cross as he is? She looks it,
and more too.”
In the midst of all the tumult of thought which there might have been,
Ruth found herself trying to determine which was the most objectional
expression of the two, Mrs. Judge Erskine’s favorite “Land alive!”
or Mrs. Ferris’ “For the land’s sake!” Where do Americans get their
favorite expletives, anyway?
She had not much time to query, for here were these girls, sitting each
on the edge of one of the solemn cane-seated chairs, and looking as
thoroughly miserable as the most hard-hearted could have desired. What
was she to say to them, or would it be more merciful to say nothing
at all? Ruth felt an unutterable pity for them. How miserably afraid
they were of their father! How entirely unnatural it seemed! And it
could not be that he had ever been actually unkind to them? It was just
a system of severe letting alone, combined with the unwisdom of the
Ferris tongue which had developed such results. Between the intervals
of trying to say a few words to them, words which they answered with
solemn “Yes, ma’ams,” Ruth tried to study their personal appearance.
It was far from prepossessing; yet, remembering Susan, and the
marvelous changes which the “ivy-green dress,” fitted to her form, had
accomplished, wondered how much of their painful awkwardness was due to
the utter unsuitability of their attire, and the uncouth arrangement of
their _coiffures_.
The elder of the two was tall and gaunt, with pale, reddish, yellow
hair—an abundance of it, which she seemed to think served no purpose
but to annoy her, and was to be stretched back out of the way as far
and as tightly as possible. Her shoulders were bent and stooping; her
pale, blue eyes looked as though, when they were not full of dismayed
embarrassment, they were listless, and her whole manner betokened that
of a person who was a trial to herself, and to every one with whom she
came in contact.
People, with such forms and faces, almost invariably manage to
fit themselves out in clothing which shows every imperfection to
advantage. This girl was no exception; indeed, she seemed to have
succeeded in making an exceptional fright of herself. Her dress was
of the color and material which seemed to increase her height, and
bore the marks of a novice in dress-making about every part of it.
To increase the effect it was much too short for her, and showed to
immense disadvantage a pair of strong, thick country boots, which might
have been excellent for tramping over plowed ground in wet weather.
The younger sister was a complete contrast in every respect. Her
form can only be described by that expressive and not very elegant
word “chunky.” From her thick, short hair, down to her thickly-shod
feet, she seemed to be almost equally shapeless and graceless; fat,
red cheeks; small, round eyes shining out from layers of fat; large,
ill-shaped hands; remarkably large feet, apparently, or else her shoes
were, and arrayed in a large plaided dress of red and green, which was
much too low in the neck and much too short-waisted, and was absolutely
uncouth! Swiftly, silently, Ruth took in all these details. And she
took in, also, what her husband had never known—that a large portion
of this uncouthness was due to the outward adornings or disguisings,
which is what persons devoid of taste sometimes succeed in making of
their dress.
In the midst of her musings there came to her a new idea. It dawned
upon her in the form of a question. Why should she, a lady of fashion
and of leisure, and of such cultured taste that she was an acknowledged
authority among her friends, on all matters pertaining to the esthetic,
be in so marked a manner, for the second time in her short life,
brought face to face with that form of ill-breeding which troubled her
the most? Not only face to face with it, but put in such a position
that it was her duty to endure it patiently and show kindly interest in
the victims? Was it possible? And this thought flashed upon her like
a revelation—that she had been wont to make too much of this matter;
that she had allowed the lack of culture in these directions to press
her too sorely. Now, do you know that this was the first time such a
possibility had dawned on Ruth Burnham? So insensible had been her
yielding to the temptation which wealth and leisure brings, to give
too much thought and too high a place to these questions of dress and
taste, that, as I say, she had not been conscious of any sin in that
direction, while those who looked on at her life had been able to see
it plainly, and in exaggerated form!
I suspect, dear friend, that you, at this moment, are the victim of
some inconsistency which your next-door neighbor sees plainly, and
which, possibly, injures your influence over her, and you are not
conscious of its development. Now, that is a solemn thought, as well
as a perplexing one, for what is to be done about it? “Cleanse thou me
from secret faults,” prayed the inspired writer. May he not have meant
those faults so secret that it takes the voice of God to reveal them to
our hearts?
At least to Ruth Burnham, sitting there in that high-backed rocker,
looking at her husband’s daughters, the thought came like the voice of
God’s Spirit in her heart. She had come very near to that revealing
Spirit during the last two hours—rather he had made his presence known
to her. She was in a hushed mood, desiring to be led, and she plainly
saw that even this exhibition of uncouthness could be a discipline to
her soul, if she would but allow its voice. You are not to understand
that she, therefore, concluded uncouthness and utter disregard of
refined tastes to be necessary outgrowths of Christian experience, or
to be in the least necessary to a higher development of Christian life.
She merely had a glimpse of what it meant, to be in a state of using
this world as not abusing it. The thought quickened her resolutions
in regard to those neglected girls thus thrown under her care, and,
I have no doubt, that it toned her voice when she spoke to them. I
believe it not irreverent to say that the very subject upon which she
first addressed them was chosen for her, all unconsciously to herself,
by that Ever-present Spirit, to whom nothing that an immortal soul can
say, appears trivial, because he sees the waves of influence which are
stirred years ahead by the quiet words.
Just what the two frightened girls expected from her would have been,
perhaps, difficult for even themselves to explain. For years all their
intercourse with their father had consisted in a series of irritated
lectures, delivered in a sharp key, on his part, and received in a
frightened silence by them. He had been utterly disappointed with
them in every respect, and he had not failed to show it, and they
had not failed to seek for sympathy by pouring the story of their
grievances into Mrs. Ferris’ willing ears. The result was that she
had but increased their terror in and doubt of their father. Added to
this, she had all the ignorant superstition of her class in regard to
step-mothers, if, indeed the views of this sort of people shall be
called by no harsher name than superstition. The new-comer had been,
during the last week, most freely discussed in the Ferris household,
and the result had been what might have been expected. Therefore, it
was with unfeigned amazement and with the demonstrations of prolonged
stares, that Ruth’s first suddenly spoken sentence broke the silence
which the others were feeling keenly.
“Your hair looks as though it would curl, naturally; did you ever try
it?”
This to the elder girl, whose whole face reddened under the
astonishment produced by the query, and who, as I said, could only
stare for a moment. Then she said:
“Yes, ma’am, I did once; long time ago.”
“And didn’t you like the appearance?”
A more vivid blush and a conscious laugh was the answer. Then she added:
“Why, yes, well enough; but it was such a bother, and nobody to care.”
“Oh, it is very little trouble.” Mrs. Burnham answered, lightly,
“when you understand just how to manage it. I think natural curls are
beautiful.”