How I wished I could give Mr. Lewis some hint of what had passed between
his wife and myself! But that I could not do. Besides that it was always
best to let matrimonial improvements originate with the parties
themselves, I had an inability to interfere usefully. I could talk to
her a little,--not at all to him. He seemed fond and proud of her as she
was, and her dissatisfaction with herself was a good sign. It was
strange to me, accustomed to intellectual sympathy, that he could do
without that of his wife. But I suppose he had come to feel that she
would not understand him, and so did not try to hit her apprehension,
much less to raise or cultivate her intellect. He had lived too long at
the South.
Her moral nature was very oddly developed, showing how starved and
stunted some of the faculties, naturally good, become without their
proper nourishment. As, intellectually, she seemed not to comprehend
herself, except that she had a vague sense of want and waste, so, from
the habit of occupying herself with the external, she had not only a
keen sense of the beautiful in outward form, but as ready a perception
of character as could consist with a want of tact. Adaptation she
certainly had. Tact she could not have, since her sympathies were so
limited and her habit so much of external perception and appreciation.
All this desolate tract in her nature might yet possibly be cultivated.
But thus far it had never been. Beyond a small circle of thoughts and
feelings, she was incapable of being interested. She didn't say, "Anan!"
but she looked it.
There was the same want of comprehension, I may call it, in reference to
propriety of conduct. A certain nobleness, and freedom from all that was
petty and cold, kept her from coquetry. At the same time she had a
womanish vanity about her admirers, and entire freedom in speaking of
them. In vain I endeavored to insinuate the unpleasant truth, that the
fervency of her adorers was no compliment to her. She could not
understand that she ought to shrink from the implied imputation of such
manifestations.
Somewhat out of patience, one day, at her pleasure in receiving a
bouquet of rare flowers from one of these adorers, I said,--
"Isn't this the person who you said professed an attachment to you, or
rather sent heliotrope to you and told you it meant _je vous aime?_"
"The very man!" said she, smiling.
"Then I am sure you are, as I should be, sadly mortified at his
continuing these attentions."
"I don't see why I should be mortified," said she, "He may be, if he
likes."
"You know what the poet says, Lulu, and it is excellent sense,--
'In part she is to blame that has been tried,
He comes too near that comes to be denied.'"
The crimson tide rippled over her forehead at this, but it was only a
passing disturbance, and she answered sweetly,--
"I don't think you are quite fair," as if she had been playing at some
game with me.
Apparently, too, she had as little religious as moral sense, though she
called herself a member of the Church, and said she was confirmed at
twelve years old.
But once, in speaking of Mr. Lewis's going to church, she told me,
"William has no religion at all." Much in the same way she would have
said he had not had luncheon. A strange responsibility, if he felt it,
had this William, a man nearly forty years old, for this young creature
not yet twenty-three, and with powers so undeveloped and a character so
unbalanced!
In the ten days we passed together I often wished I could have known her
early, or that I now had a right to say to her what I would. However,
perhaps I overestimated the influence of outward circumstances.
We parted rather suddenly, and in the next three years they were mostly
in Cuba, while my husband was called to leave Weston for a larger field
of usefulness.
We had lived more than a year in Boston, and it was in the autumn of
1833 that I sat alone by a sea-coal fire, thinking, and making out faces
in the coal. I was too absorbed to hear the bell ring, or the door open,
till I felt a little rustle, and a soft, sudden kiss on my lips. I was
no way surprised, for Lulu's was the foremost face in the coals. Mr.
Lewis was close behind her, with my husband. As soon as the astral was
lighted, we gazed wistfully for a few moments at each other. Each looked
for possible alteration.
"You have been ill!"
"And you have had something besides Time."
We had had grief and bereavement. Mr. Lewis had been very ill, and very
near death, with the fever of the country. It had left traces on his
worn face, and thinned his already thin enough figure.
But a greater change had come over Mrs. Lewis. Personally, she was
fuller and handsomer than ever. She had the same grace in every motion,
the same lulling music in her sweet voice. But a soul seemed to be born
into that fine body. The brown eyes were deeper, and the voice had
thrills of feeling and sentiment. For all that, she had the same
incompleteness that she had when I last saw her, and an inharmoniousness
that was felt by the hearer whenever she spoke. It was very odd, this
impression I constantly had of her; but they were to remain in Boston
through the winter, and I supposed time would develop the mystery to me.