A SUMMER IN
LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE
By
Mrs. A. D. T. WHITNEY
1866, 1894
To
THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND
MARIA S. CUMMINS
AND OF DAYS AMONG THE MOUNTAINS MADE
BEAUTIFUL BY HER COMPANIONSHIP
I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE STORY
PREFACE TO REAL FOLKS SERIES.
"Leslie Goldthwaite" was the first of a series of four, which grew from
this beginning, and was written in 1866 and the years nearly following;
the first two stories--this and "We Girls"--having been furnished, by
request, for the magazine "Our Young Folks," published at that time with
such success by Messrs. Fields, Osgood & Co., and edited by Mr. Howard
M. Ticknor and Miss Lucy Larcom. The last two volumes--"Real Folks" and
"The Other Girls"--were asked for to complete the set, and were not
delayed by serial publication, but issued at once, in their order of
completion, in book form.
There is a sequence of purpose, character, and incident in the four
stories, of which it is well to remind new readers, upon their
reappearance in fresh editions. They all deal especially with girl-life
and home-life; endeavoring, even in the narration of experiences outside
the home and seeming to preclude its life, to keep for girlhood and
womanhood the true motive and tendency, through whatever temporary
interruption and necessity, of and toward the best spirit and shaping of
womanly work and surrounding; making the home-life the ideal one, and
home itself the centre and goal of effort and hope.
The writing of "The Other Girls" was interrupted by the Great Fire of
1872, and the work upon the Women's Relief Committee, which brought
close contact and personal knowledge to reinforce mere sympathy and
theory,--and so, I hope, into this last of the series, a touch of
something that may deepen the influence of them all to stronger help.
* * * * *
I wish, without withdrawing or superseding the special dedication of
"Leslie Goldthwaite" to the memory of the dear friend with whom the
weeks were spent in which I gathered material for Leslie's "Summer," to
remember, in this new presentation of the whole series, that other
friend, with whom all the after work in it was associated and made the
first links of a long regard and fellowship, now lifted up and reaching
onward into the hopes and certainties of the "Land o' the Leal."
I wish to join to my own name in this, the name of Lucy Larcom, which
stands representative of most brave and earnest work, in most gentle,
womanly living.
ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY.
Milton, 1893.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. THE GREEN OF THE LEAF
II. WAYSIDE GLIMPSES
III. EYESTONES
IV. MARMADUKE WHARNE
V. HUMMOCKS
VI. DAKIE THAYNE
VII. DOWN AT OUTLEDGE
VIII. SIXTEEN AND SIXTY
IX. "I DON'T SEE WHY"
X. GEODES
XI. IN THE PINES
XII. CROWDED OUT
XIII. A HOWL
XIV. "FRIENDS OF MAMMON"
XV. QUICKSILVER AND GOLD
XVI. "WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US?"
XVII. LEAF-GLORY
A SUMMER IN LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
THE GREEN OF THE LEAF.
"Nothing but leaves--leaves--leaves! The green things don't know enough
to do anything better!"
Leslie Goldthwaite said this, standing in the bay-window among her
plants, which had been green and flourishing, but persistently
blossomless, all winter, and now the spring days were come.
Cousin Delight looked up; and her white ruffling, that she was daintily
hemstitching, fell to her lap, as she looked, still with a certain wide
intentness in her eyes, upon the pleasant window, and the bright, fresh
things it framed. Not the least bright and fresh among them was the
human creature in her early girlhood, tender and pleasant in its
beautiful leafage, but waiting, like any other young and growing life,
to prove what sort of flower should come of it.
"Now you've got one of your 'thoughts,' Cousin Delight! I see it
'biggening,' as Elspie says." Leslie turned round, with her little green
watering-pot suspended in her hand, waiting for the thought.
To have a thought, and to give it, were nearly simultaneous things with
Cousin Delight; so true, so pure, so unselfish, so made to give,--like
perfume or music, which cannot be, and be withheld,--were thoughts with
her.
I must say a word, before I go further, of Delight Goldthwaite. I think
of her as of quite a young person; you, youthful readers, would
doubtless have declared that she was old,--very old, at least for a
young lady. She was twenty-eight, at this time of which I write; Leslie,
her young cousin, was just "past the half, and catching up," as she said
herself,--being fifteen. Leslie's mother called Miss Goldthwaite,
playfully, "Ladies' Delight;" and, taking up the idea, half her women
friends knew her by this significant and epigrammatic title. There was
something doubly pertinent in it. She made you think at once of nothing
so much as heart's-ease,--a garden heart's-ease, that flower of many
names; not of the frail, scentless, wild wood-violet,--she had been
cultured to something larger. The violet nature was there, colored and
shaped more richly, and gifted with rare fragrance--for those whose
delicate sense could perceive it. The very face was a pansy face; with
its deep, large, purple-blue eyes, and golden brows and lashes, the
color of her hair,--pale gold, so pale that careless people who had
perception only for such beauty as can flash upon you from a crowd, or
across a drawing-room, said hastily that she had _no_ brows or lashes,
and that this spoiled her. She was not a beauty, therefore; nor was she,
in any sort, a belle. She never drew around her the common attention
that is paid eagerly to very pretty, outwardly bewitching girls; and she
never seemed to care for this. At a party, she was as apt as not to sit
in a corner; but the quiet people,--the mothers, looking on, or the
girls, waiting for partners,--getting into that same corner also, found
the best pleasure of their evening there. There was something about her
dress, too, that women appreciated most fully; the delicate textures,
the finishings--and only those--of rare, exquisite lace, the perfect
harmony of the whole unobtrusive toilet,--women looked at these in
wonder at the unerring instinct of her taste; in wonder, also, that they
only with each other raved about her. Nobody had ever been supposed to
be devoted to her; she had never been reported as "engaged;" there had
never been any of this sort of gossip about her; gentlemen found her,
they said, hard to get acquainted with; she had not much of the small
talk which must usually begin an acquaintance; a few--her relatives, or
her elders, or the husbands of her intimate married friends--understood
and valued her; but it was her girl friends and women friends who knew
her best, and declared that there was nobody like her; and so came her
sobriquet, and the double pertinence of it.
Especially she was Leslie Goldthwaite's delight. Leslie had no sisters,
and her aunts were old,--far older than her mother; on her father's
side, a broken and scattered family had left few ties for her; next to
her mother, and even closer, in some young sympathies, she clung to
Cousin Delight.
With this diversion, we will go back now to her, and to her thought.
"I was thinking," she said, with that intent look in her eyes, "I often
think, of how something else was found, once, having nothing but leaves;
and of what came to it."
"I know," answered Leslie, with an evasive quickness, and turned round
with her watering-pot to her plants again.
There was sometimes a bit of waywardness about Leslie Goldthwaite; there
was a fitfulness of frankness and reserve. She was eager for truth; yet
now and then she would thrust it aside. She said that "nobody liked a
nicely pointed moral better than she did; only she would just as lief
it shouldn't be pointed at her." The fact was, she was in that sensitive
state in which many a young girl finds herself, when she begins to ask
and to weigh with herself the great questions of life, and shrinks shyly
from the open mention of the very thing she longs more fully to
apprehend.
Cousin Delight took no notice; it is perhaps likely that she understood
sufficiently well for that. She turned toward the table by which she
sat, and pulled toward her a heavy Atlas that lay open at the map of
Connecticut. Beside it was Lippincott's Gazetteer,--open, also.
"Traveling, Leslie?"
"Yes. I've been a charming journey this morning, before you came. I
wonder if I ever _shall_ travel, in reality. I've done a monstrous deal
of it with maps and gazetteers."
"This hasn't been one of the stereotyped tours, it seems."
"Oh, no! What's the use of doing Niagara or the White Mountains, or even
New York and Philadelphia and Washington, on the map? I've been one of
my little by-way trips, round among the villages; stopping wherever I
found one cuddled in between a river and a hill, or in a little seashore
nook. Those are the places, after all, that I would hunt out, if I had
plenty of money to go where I liked with. It's so pleasant to imagine
how the people live there, and what sort of folks they would be likely
to be. It isn't so much traveling as living round,--awhile in one home,
and then in another. How many different little biding-places there are
in the world! And how queer it is only really to know about one or two
of them!"
"What's this place you're at just now? Winsted?"
"Yes; there's where I've brought up, at the end of that bit of railroad.
It's a bigger place than I fancied, though. I always steer clear of the
names that end in 'ville.' They're sure to be stupid, money-making
towns, all grown up in a minute, with some common man's name tacked on
to them, that happened to build a saw-mill, or something, first. But
Winsted has such a sweet, little, quiet, English sound. I know it never
_began_ with a mill. They make pins and clocks and tools and machines
there now; and it's 'the largest and most prosperous post-village of
Litchfield County.' But I don't care for the pins and machinery.
It's got a lake alongside of it; and Still River--don't that sound
nice?--runs through; and there are the great hills, big enough to put on
the map, out beyond. I can fancy where the girls take their sunset
walks; and the moonlight parties, boating on the pond, and the way the
woods look, round Still River. Oh, yes! that's one of the places I mean
to go to."
Leslie Goldthwaite lived in one of the inland cities of Massachusetts.
She had grown up and gone to school there, and had never yet been thirty
miles away. Her father was a busy lawyer, making a handsome living for
his family, and laying aside abundantly for their future provision, but
giving himself no lengthened recreations, and scarcely thinking of them
as needful for the rest.
It was a pleasant, large, brown, wooden house they lived in, on the
corner of two streets; with a great green door-yard about it on two
sides, where chestnut and cherry trees shaded it from the public way,
and flower-beds brightened under the parlor windows and about the porch.
Just greenness and bloom enough to suggest, always, more; just sweetness
and sunshine and bird-song enough, in the early summer days, to whisper
of broad fields and deep woods where they rioted without stint; and
these days always put Leslie into a certain happy impatience, and set
her dreaming and imagining; and she learned a great deal of her
geography in the fashion that we have hinted at.
Miss Goldthwaite was singularly discursive and fragmentary in her
conversation this morning, somehow. She dropped the map-traveling
suddenly, and asked a new question. "And how comes on the
linen-drawer?"
"O Cousin Del! I'm humiliated,--disgusted! I feel as small as
butterflies' pinfeathers! I've been to see the Haddens. Mrs. Linceford
has just got home from Paris, and brought them wardrobes to last to
remotest posterity! And _such_ things! Such rufflings, and stitchings,
and embroiderings! Why, mine look--as if they'd been made by the
blacksmith!"
The "linen-drawer" was an institution of Mrs. Goldthwaite's; resultant,
partly, from her old-fashioned New England ideas of womanly industry and
thrift,--born and brought up, as she had been, in a family whose
traditions were of house-linen sufficient for a lifetime spun and woven
by girls before their twenty-first year, and whose inheritance, from
mother to daughter, was invariably of heedfully stored personal and
household plenishings, made of pure material that was worth the laying
by, and carefully bleached and looked to year by year; partly, also,
from a certain theory of wisdom which she had adopted, that when girls
were once old enough to care for and pride themselves on a plentiful
outfit, it was best they should have it as a natural prerogative of
young-ladyhood, rather than that the "trousseau" should come to be, as
she believed it so apt to be, one of the inciting temptations to
heedless matrimony. I have heard of a mother whose passion was for
elegant old lace; and who boasted to her female friends that, when her
little daughter was ten years old, she had her "lace-box," with the
beginning of her hoard in costly contributions from the stores of
herself and of the child's maiden aunts. Mrs. Goldthwaite did a better
and more sensible thing than this; when Leslie was fifteen, she
presented her with pieces of beautiful linen and cotton and cambric, and
bade her begin to make garments which should be in dozens, to be laid
by, in reserve, as she completed them, until she had a well-filled
bureau that should defend her from the necessity of what she called a
"wretched living from hand to mouth,--always having underclothing to
make up, in the midst of all else that she would find to do and to
learn."
Leslie need not have been ashamed, and I don't think in her heart she
was, of the fresh, white, light-lying piles that had already begun to
make promise of filling a drawer, which she drew out as she answered
Cousin Delight's question.
The fine-lined gathers; the tiny dots of stitches that held them to
their delicate bindings; the hems and tucks, true to a thread, and
dotted with the same fairy needle dimples (no machine-work, but all
real, dainty finger-craft); the bits of ruffling peeping out from the
folds, with their edges in almost invisible whip-hems; and here and
there a finishing of lovely, lace-like crochet, done at odd minutes, and
for "visiting work,"--there was something prettier and more precious,
really, in all this than in the imported fineries which had come,
without labor and without thought, to her friends the Haddens. Besides,
there were the pleasant talks and readings of the winter evenings, all
threaded in and out, and associated indelibly with every seam. There was
the whole of "David Copperfield," and the beginning of "Our Mutual
Friend," ruffled up into the night-dresses; and some of the crochet was
beautiful with the rhymed pathos of "Enoch Arden," and some with the
poetry of the "Wayside Inn;" and there were places where stitches had
had to be picked out and done over, when the eye grew dim and the hand
trembled while the great war news was being read.
Leslie loved it, and had a pride in it all; it was not, truly and only,
humiliation and disgust at self-comparison with the Haddens, but some
other and unexplained doubt which moved her now, and which was stirred
often by this, or any other of the objects and circumstances of her
life, and which kept her standing there with her hand upon the
bureau-knob, in a sort of absence, while Cousin Delight looked in,
approved, and presently dropped quietly among the rest, like a bit of
money into a contribution-box, the delicate breadths of linen cambric
she had just finished hemstitching and rolled together.
"Oh, thank you! But, Cousin Delight," said Leslie, shutting the drawer,
and turning short round, suddenly, "I wish you'd just tell me--what you
think--is the sense of that--about the fig-tree! I suppose it's awfully
wicked, but I never could see. Is everything fig-leaves that isn't out
and out fruit, and is it all to be cursed, and why _should_ there be
anything but leaves when 'the time of figs was not yet'?" After her
first hesitation, she spoke quickly, impetuously, and without pause, as
something that _would_ come out.
"I suppose that has troubled you, as I dare say it has troubled a great
many other people," said Cousin Delight. "It used to be a puzzle and a
trouble to me. But now it seems to me one of the most beautiful things
of all." She paused.
"I can_not_ see how," said Leslie emphatically. "It always seems to me
so--somehow--unreasonable; and--angry."
She said this in a lower tone, as afraid of the uttered audacity of her
own thought; and she walked off, as she spoke, towards the window once
more, and stood with her back to Miss Goldthwaite, almost as if she
wished to have done, again, with the topic. It was not easy for Leslie
to speak out upon such things; it almost made her feel cross when she
had done it.
"People mistake the true cause and effect, I think," said Delight
Goldthwaite, "and so lose all the wonderful enforcement of that acted
parable. It was not, 'Cursed be the fig-tree because I have found
nothing thereon;' but, 'Let _no fruit_ grow on thee, henceforward,
forever.' It seems to me I can hear the tone of tender solemnity in
which Jesus would say such words; knowing, as only he knew, all that
they meant, and what should come, inevitably, of such a sentence. 'And
presently the fig-tree withered away.' The life was nothing, any longer,
from the moment when it might not be, what all life is, a reaching
forward to the perfecting of some fruit. There was nothing to come, ever
again, of all its greenness and beauty, and the greenness and beauty,
which were only a form and a promise, ceased to be. It was the way he
took to show his disciples, in a manner they should never forget, the
inexorable condition upon which all life is given, and that the barren
life, so soon as its barrenness is absolutely hopeless, becomes a
literal death."
Leslie stood still, with her back to Miss Goldthwaite, and her face to
the window. Her perplexity was changed, but hardly cleared. There were
many things that crowded into her thoughts, and might have been spoken;
but it was quite impossible for her to speak. Impossible on this topic,
and she certainly could not speak, at once, on any other.
Many seconds of silence counted themselves between the two. Then Cousin
Delight, feeling an intuition of much that held and hindered the young
girl, spoke again. "Does this make life seem hard?"
"Yes," said Leslie then, with an effort that hoarsened her very voice,
"frightful." And as she spoke, she turned again quickly, as if to be
motionless longer were to invite more talk, and went over to the other
window, where her bird-cage hung, and began to take down the glasses.
"Like all parables, it is manifold," said Delight gently. "There is a
great hope in it, too."
Leslie was at her basin, now, turning the water faucet, to rinse and
refill the little drinking-vessel. She handled the things quietly, but
she made no pause.
"It shows that, while we see the leaf, we may have hope of the fruit, in
ourselves or in others."
She could not see Leslie's face. If she had, she would have perceived a
quick lifting and lightening upon it; then a questioning that would not
very long be repressed to silence.
The glasses were put in the cage again, and presently Leslie came back
to a little low seat by Miss Goldthwaite's side, which she had been
occupying before all this talk began. "Other people puzzle me as much as
myself," she said. "I think the whole world is running to leaves,
sometimes."
"Some things flower almost invisibly, and hide away their fruit under
thick foliage. It is often only when the winds shake their leaves down,
and strip the branches bare, that we find the best that has been
growing."
"They make a great fuss and flourish with the leaves, though, as long as
they can. And it's who shall grow the broadest and tallest, and flaunt
out, with the most of them. After all, it's natural; and they _are_
beautiful in themselves. And there's a 'time' for leaves, too, before
the figs."
"Exactly. We have a right to look for the leaves, and to be glad of
them. That is a part of the parable."
"Cousin Delight! Let's talk of real things, and let the parable alone a
minute."
Leslie sprang impulsively to her bureau again, and flung forth the linen
drawer.
"There are my fig-leaves,--some of them; and here are more." She turned,
with a quick movement, to her wardrobe; pulled out and uncovered a
bonnet-box which held a dainty headgear of the new spring fashion, and
then took down from a hook and tossed upon it a silken garment that
fluttered with fresh ribbons. "How much of this outside business is
right, and how much wrong, I should be glad to know? It all takes time
and thoughts; and those are life. How much life must go into the leaves?
That's what puzzles me. I can't do without the things; and I can't be
let to take 'clear comfort' in them, as grandma says, either." She was
on the floor, now, beside her little fineries; her hands clasped
together about one knee, and her face turned up to Cousin Delight's. She
looked as if she half believed herself to be ill-used.
"And clothes are but the first want,--the primitive fig-leaves; the
world is full of other outside business,--as much outside as these,"
pursued Miss Goldthwaite, thoughtfully.
"Everything is outside," said Leslie. "Learning, and behaving, and
going, and doing, and seeing, and hearing, and having. 'It's all a
muddle,' as the poor man says in 'Hard Times.'"
"I don't think I can do without the parable," said Cousin Delight. "The
real inward principle of the tree--that which corresponds to thought and
purpose in the soul--urges always to the finishing of its life in the
fruit. The leaves are only by the way,--an outgrowth of the same
vitality, and a process toward the end; but never, in any living thing,
the end itself."
"Um," said Leslie, in her nonchalant fashion again; her chin between her
two hands now, and her head making little appreciative nods. "That's
like condensed milk; a great deal in a little of it. I'll put the
fig-leaves away now, and think it over."
But, as she sprang up, and came round behind Miss Goldthwaite's chair,
she stopped and gave her a little kiss on the top of her head. If Cousin
Delight had seen, there was a bright softness in the eyes, which told of
feeling, and of gladness that welcomed the quick touch of truth.
Miss Goldthwaite knew one good thing,--when she had driven her nail.
"She never hammered in the head with a punch, like a carpenter," Leslie
said of her. She believed that, in moral tool-craft, that finishing
implement belonged properly to the hand of an after-workman.