Toward the latter end of the winter there arrived at the parsonage the
new mistress,--in the person of Miss Eliza Johns, the elder sister of
the incumbent, and a spinster of the ripe age of three-and-thirty. For
the last twelve years she had maintained a lonely, but matronly, command
of the old homestead of the late Major Johns, in the town of Canterbury.
She was intensely proud of the memory of her father, and of _his_ father
before him,--every inch a Johns. No light cause could have provoked her
to a sacrifice of the name; and of weightier causes she had been spared
the trial. The marriage of her brother had always been more or less a
source of mortification to her. The Handbys, though excellent plain
people, were of no particular distinction. Rachel had a pretty face,
with which Benjamin had grown suddenly demented. That source of
mortification and of disturbed intimacy was now buried in the grave.
Benjamin had won a reputation for dignity and ability which was
immensely gratifying to her. She had assured him of it again and again
in her occasional letters. The success of his Election Sermon had been
an event of the greatest interest to her, which she had expressed in an
epistle of three pages, with every comma in its place, and full of
gratulations. Her commas were _always_ in place; so were her stops of
all kinds: her precision was something marvellous. This precision had
enabled her to manage the little property which had been left her in
such a way as to maintain always about her establishment an air of
well-ordered thrift. She concealed adroitly all the shifts--if there
were any--by which she avoided the reproach of seeming poor.
In person she was not unlike her father, the Major,--tall, erect, with a
dignified bearing, and so trim a figure, and so elastic a step even at
her years, as would have provoked an inquisitive follower to catch sight
of the face. This was by no means attractive. Her features were thin,
her nose unduly prominent; and both eye and mouth, though well formed,
carried about them a kind of hard positiveness that would have
challenged respect, perhaps, but no warmer feeling. Two little curls
were flattened upon either temple; and her neck-tie, dress, gloves, hat,
were always most neatly arranged, and ordered with the same precision
that governed all her action. In the town of Canterbury she was an
institution. Her charities and all her religious observances were
methodical, and never omitted. Her whole life, indeed, was a discipline.
Without any great love for children, she still had her Bible-class; and
it was rare that the weather or any other cause forbade attendance upon
its duties. Nor was there one of the little ones who listened to that
clear, sharp, metallic voice of hers but stood in awe of her; not one
that could say she was unkind; not one who had ever bestowed a childish
gift upon her,--such little gifts as children love to heap on those who
have found the way to their hearts.
Sentiment had never been effusive in her; and it was now limited to
quick sparkles, that sometimes flashed into a page of her reading. As
regarded the serious question of marriage, implying a home, position,
the married dignities, it had rarely disturbed her; and now her
imaginative forecast did not grapple it with any vigor or longing. If,
indeed, it had been possible that a man of high standing, character,
cultivation,--equal, in short, to the Johnses in every way,--should woo
her with pertinacity, she might have been disposed to yield a dignified
assent, but not unless he could be made to understand and adequately
appreciate the immense favor she was conferring. In short, the suitor
who could abide and admit her exalted pretensions, and submit to them,
would most infallibly be one of a character and temper so far inferior
to her own that she would scorn him from the outset. This dilemma,
imposed by the rigidity of her smaller dignities, that were never
mastered or overshadowed either by her sentiment or her passion, not
only involved a life of celibacy, but was a constant justification of
it, and made it eminently easy to be borne. There are not a few maiden
ladies who are thus lightered over the shoals of a solitary existence by
the buoyancy of their own intemperate vanities.
Miss Johns did not accept the invitation of her brother to undertake the
charge of his household without due consideration. She by no means left
out of view the contingency of his possible future marriage; but she
trusted largely to her own influences in making it such a one, if
inevitable, as should not be discreditable to the family name. And under
such conditions she would retire with serene contentment to her own more
private sphere of Canterbury,--or, if circumstances should demand, would
accept the position of guest in the house of her brother. Nor did she
leave out of view her influence in the training of the boy Reuben. She
cherished her own hopes of moulding him to her will, and of making him a
pride to the family.
There was of course prodigious excitement in the parsonage upon her
arrival. Esther had done her best at all household appliances, whether
of kitchen or chamber. The minister received her with his wonted
quietude, and a brotherly kiss of salutation. Reuben gazed wonderingly
at her, and was thinking dreamily if he should ever love her, while he
felt the dreary rustle of her black silk dress swooping round as she
stooped to embrace him. "I hope Master Reuben is a good boy," said she;
"your Aunt Eliza loves all good boys."
He had nothing to say; but only looked back into that cold gray eye, as
she lifted his chin with her gloved hand.
"Benjamin, there's a strong look of the Handbys; but it's your forehead.
He's a little man, I hope," and she patted him on the head.
Still Reuben looked--wonderingly--at her shining silk dress, at her hat,
at the little curls on either temple, at the guard-chain which hung from
her neck with a glittering watch-key upon it, at the bright buckle in
her belt, and most of all at the gray eye which seemed to look on him
from far away. And with the same stare of wonderment, he followed her up
and down throughout the house.
At night, Esther, who has a chamber near him, creeps in to say
good-night to the lad, and asks,--
"Do you like her, Ruby, boy? Do you like your Aunt Eliza?"
"I d'n know," says Reuben, "She says she likes good boys; don't you like
bad uns, Esther?"
"But you're not _very_ bad," says Esther, whose orthodoxy does not
forbid kindly praise.
"Didn't mamma like bad uns, Esther?"
"Dear heart!" and the good creature gives the boy a great hug; it could
not have been warmer, if he had been her child.
The household speedily felt the presence of the new comer. Her
precision, her method, her clear, sharp voice,--never raised in anger,
never falling to tenderness,--ruled the establishment. Under all the
cheeriness of the old management, there had been a sad lack of any
economic system, by reason of which the minister was constantly
overrunning his little stipend, and making awkward appeals from time to
time to the Parish Committee for advances. A small legacy that had
befallen the late Mrs. Johns, and which had gone to the purchase of the
parsonage, had brought relief at a very perplexing crisis; but against
all similar troubles Miss Johns set her face most resolutely. There was
a daily examination of butchers' and grocers' accounts, that had been
previously unknown to the household. The kitchen was placed under strict
regimen, into the observance of which the good Esther slipped, not so
much from love of it, as from total inability to cope with the magnetic
authority of the new mistress. Nor was she harsh in her manner of
command.
"Esther, my good woman, it will be best, I think, to have breakfast a
little more promptly,--at half past six, we will say,--so that prayers
may be over and the room free by eight; the minister, you know, must
have his morning in his study undisturbed."
"Yes, Marm," says Esther; and she would as soon have thought of flying
over the house-top in her short gown as of questioning the plan.
Again, the mistress says,--"Larkin, I think it would be well to take up
those scattered bunches of lilies, and place them upon either side of
the walk in the garden, so that the flowers may be all together."
"Yes, Marm," says Larkin.
And much as he had loved the little woman now sleeping in her grave, who
had scattered flowers with an errant fancy, he would have thought it
preposterous to object to an order so calmly spoken, so evidently
intended for execution. There was something in the tone of Miss Johns in
giving directions that drew off all moral power of objection as surely
as a good metallic conductor would free an overcharged cloud of its
electricity.
The parishioners were not slow to perceive that new order prevailed at
the quiet parsonage. Curiosity, no less than the staid proprieties which
governed the action of the chief inhabitants, had brought them early
into contact with the new mistress. She received all with dignity and
with an exactitude of deportment that charmed the precise ones and that
awed the younger folks. The bustling Dame Tourtelot had come among the
earliest, and her brief report was,--"Tourtelot, Miss Johns's as smart
as a steel trap."
Nor was the spinster sister without a degree of cultivation which
commended her to the more intellectual people of Ashfield. She was a
reader of "Rokeby" and of Miss Austen's novels, of Josephus and of
Rollin's "Ancient History." The Miss Hapgoods, who were the
blue-stockings of the place, were charmed to have such an addition to
the cultivated circle of the parish. To make the success of Miss Johns
still more decided, she brought with her a certain knowledge of the
conventionalisms of the city, by reason of her occasional visits to her
sister Mabel, (now Mrs. Brindlock of Greenwich Street,) which to many
excellent women gave larger assurance of her position and dignity than
all besides. Before the first year of her advent had gone by, it was
quite plain that she was to become one of the prominent directors of the
female world of Ashfield.
Only in the parsonage itself did her influence find its most serious
limitations,--and these in connection with the boy Reuben.