Chapter XIV: Preface (14)

I arose, and, with one hand on my heart, bowed profoundly every time the crowd clapped its multitudinous hands. It was a glorious moment. I longed to meet the publisher face to face, and tell him how profoundly his generosity had touched my soul; but, with that modesty which ever accompanies true merit, he kept in the background, and hid away from the thanks my soul was panting to give.

Oh, Sisters, I wish you had been here in a body to see how this great white house--a half a mile or so long--was turned into a snow-white palace by the flood of fire in front of it. Then the sea--the great, heaving sea--on the other side of the road, was red as blood, and bright as gold, when the flames shot highest. I tell you, the golden gates of the New Jerusalem could not have been more beautifully luminous.

Earth, sea, and air were kindled with light, and full of shooting-stars for a whole hour. Then, as the fires began to wane, and the jewels to melt, two great, tall balloons, striped red, white, and blue, were illuminated, and sent sailing up and up in the air, each with a trail of shooting-stars dropping along its path. Up and up, higher and higher, the balloons rose, with a slow, graceful movement, and drifted away to sea--away, away, away--till they shone like little stars, and went out in the distance.

Then a great shout went up from the pleased multitude, which increased to frenzy when I once more showed myself.

My white hat was on; the feather floated out in the air like a banner. In my hand I held a fan. In the fervor of my emotion I pressed it against my bosom. The people saw it, and the storm of applause that burst from them fairly took me off my feet. Emotion overcame me; I retired from that long stoop.

Cousin E. E. followed me. She hasn't been herself since the camp-meeting; and when I asked her if it was not a beautiful ovation, she shook her head and answered, that all flesh was grass, which I don't believe any more than I believe that grass is flesh, which I know is not the fact, each being itself independent grass and independent flesh.

"Well," says I, "call it grass, or anything you please, but wasn't the whole thing perfectly gorgeous."

"Yes," says she, "it was a pretty compliment to the ladies of the hotel."

Sisters, that jealous, provoking woman said "ladies of the hotel," not "the lady of the hotel." She is an aggravating creature, sometimes; I do believe she is jealous of the homage which is lavished on your missionary. At any rate speeches like this look like it. Don't you think so?

I said nothing. A tart reply trembled on my tongue, but the atmosphere of that camp-meeting still clung to me, and I forbore to rebuke her.

Sisters, I was too lenient; somehow or other E. E. has spread her selfish idea through this hotel. The ladies were all carried away by the fireworks--no, excuse me, that would be dangerous to such as had tindery tempers, but they could talk of nothing else, and made a great fuss about the compliment paid to them. To them--as if any man who has an appreciative soul would think of diffusing a compliment among a crowd of ten thousand people; but the vanity and presumption of some females are just disgusting. But for the secret consciousness that no one could have been intended but myself, their conceit would provoke me. As it is, let them have their conceity illusions. Others may think what they please, but I have an inner consciousness that is satisfaction enough.

LXXXVIII.

LET HIM GO.

Dear sisters:--You know, or can guess, at the anxious state of mind in which a sensitive female-woman must have found her experiences since the great Grand Duke left this country. I am told that the Imperial Court of Russia is hard to please in the way of marrying its sons--that nobility is not considered enough, and nothing but the child of an emperor or of a king will satisfy the pride of Czar Alexander.

But emperors are not to be found, like huckleberries, in the woods, and those among them that have lots and lots of children can't always find mates ready cut-out and made-up for all of them in the very uppermost crust of all the world.

When emperors are scarce, and imperial children plentiful, is it strange that some of them should be sent to a free country, where the highest royalty in all the world is to be found waiting for orders.

Republics have but one kingly order, that of individual genius, which ranks above kings all over the world, and is aspired to by queens, whenever a queen is gifted with superior ambition, as little Victoria Guelph was when she wrote her book of travels, and the life of her first-class husband.

That which a queen hankers after, the son of an emperor may be glad to mate himself with. Is it wonderful, then, that a Grand Duke of all the Russias should aspire to the first feminine genius of a free land, and to a certain modest extent receive encouragement from her?

A union between an archduke and the first lady writer of this country--excuse me, but truth is stranger than fiction--was a consummation that you as a Society ought to expect, and this nation, in its administrative capacity, ought to have insisted upon. If an aspiring and unprotected female cannot receive the support of her own Government, where can she go for it.

Sisters, this union between Sprucehill and Russia is a great national question, which ought to have agitated this country from the shores of the two oceans, the Mississippi and Rocky Mountains inclusive.

There has been considerable of an internal rumbling sort of a convulsion, earthquaky and threatening, in various sections, which ought to have given timely warning of what the true national feeling was; but somehow Russia don't seem to understand it, and I'm beginning to think that there is secret treason here at home--deep, double-dyed treason--of which your missionary is the object.

It is a shameful fact that the Government has taken no sort of interest in an engagement which would have linked the two great social centres of Russia and Sprucehill in a close and loving union.

From the day my Alexis had an interview with President Grant my heart-history has been allowed to drag like a lazy funeral train. Before, all was bright and luminous, with beautiful aspirations; but from that time suspense has coiled around me, hope has flared up, blinked, and almost died out. I did not understand it then. It seemed to me that fickleness was in the heart of the great Grand Duke.

But I did him a cruel injustice. If our two hearts and destinies are severed, it has been by the underground machinations of this Administration. General Grant saw what was going on, and has cruelly circumvented two young and unsophisticated hearts that were knitting together, like ivy round an oak sapling.

I am determined on it. The country shall hear of my wrongs. Sprucehill shall have redress for the insult put upon her favorite daughter. In all that General Grant has done in the way of omission, nothing approaches the inactivity which has wrung my heart, as wet blankets are twisted in the strong hands of a washerwoman.

_He_ has not written me a line. His letters must have been interrupted. Evil machinations have been at work. The Government detectives are everywhere scattering slanders and distrust. I shouldn't wonder a bit if they have been to our old homestead on Sprucehill, mousing among church registers, and interviewing family physicians. Well, let them. Since I learned to write, some figures have been changed in the old Family Bible, and, thank goodness! old Doctor Perry is dead. The keenest detective won't find much difference between 1830 and 1850. It only requires that the curve of the three should be rubbed out, and a dash sharpened to a point added. If they look for eighteen hundred and thirty there, I can tell them it isn't to be found. Let them search--that's all!

This was my state of mind three days ago. Now I am revivified with extra animation. Hope has perched on my white hat and sits there waving its feather like a pennant.

I am glad from the bottom of my heart that I didn't follow the duke across the ocean. After all a duke is only a man, hard to catch and expensive to cage. Why should we trouble ourselves about princes and dukes and lords, when we have the most genuine of all manly articles right under our feet. Dukes are scarce and hard to scare up, but there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. That's my motto to-day.

LXXXIX.

DONE UP IN A HURRY.

Sisters:--the atmosphere of Long Branch is propitious, not to say exhilarating, for close by this half-mile of a hotel is another, crowded full at this time of the year, in which we can hear fiddling and dancing every night of the week. The hotels at watering-places are celebrated for several things, particularly low ceilings, widows, youngish ladies, and girls like our Cecilia, who wonder every day of their lives how their mothers ever got along decently till they were born to tell them how.

Well, the most enterprising of these hotel accompaniments are the widows. Their superior advantages of experience is just overpowering, and these advantages are used with unscrupulous freedom. I say this with feeling, being one of the class that suffers from such unwarrantable competition.

A widow was in the hotel I have spoken of. Yes, what might be called two widows rolled into one, for she had put two husbands into their little beds, and tucked in the sods comfortably before she came to Long Branch in search of a third.

Sisters, she found him; her little traps and lines and baits had been all out to no sort of purpose for three or four weeks. She danced in the parlor, exhibited all the lines of a plumptitudinous figure at the bowling alley, which is a place I never saw, but have heard about; walked on the beach with a Leghorn hat on, curled up at the ears, and in front too, and Japanese umbrella, brown outside and yellow in the interior, which looked as if she had lots of money and meant to put it on the market with a dash.

There was a great deal said about this widow. Some observed that she was handsome. Some said she wasn't--mostly ladies. Some observed how graceful she was, at which others smiled and shook their heads. One person persisted in it that she was awful rich--two or three hundred thousand dollars, at least. Then that was contradicted. Forty thousand was more than any one could prove she had. Others persisted that her wealth, like her virtues, was unlimited. In fact, being a widow, she made the best of it and let people talk, minding her snares and traps and things all the same.

Last week a strange man came to that hotel. It was Saturday morning, and the first object that his eyes fell upon at breakfast was this widow, without the sign of a cap, and with a long curl straggling down to one shoulder, very fluffy and enticing. He looked at the curl; then his eyes wandered up to the widow's face. That face had smiled through a couple of matrimonial campaigns, and received the first battery of admiring eyes with a sweet, downcast look, innocent as blanc-mange. Then she lifted her eyes with slow modesty, and glanced wonderingly at her admirer, as if she were sort of bewildered by his looking so much that way.

The stranger did not smile, but a light came over his face when he caught that childlike glance. Then both these innocent creatures fell to eating. Then he happened to look up again. So did she--a romantic coincidence that sort of affinitized them to a great extent, before anybody saw what was going on.

After breakfast the stranger hunted up some one who knew him and the widow also. An introduction brought the two halves of that pair of scissors together, and the blades fitted beautifully. All they wanted was the rivet. But wait.

At twelve o'clock that day the stranger ventured to ask a favor. Would the widow give him a little music?

The widow said she would. The sweetness of a whole boiling of maple sugar was in her smile as she sat down by the parlor piano, and sent her two little hands fluttering over it like a pair of white pigeons with love-letters under their wings.

The widow flew her fingers; the widow looked at the stranger from under her eyelashes, and her voice thrilled through him till he began to think of magnolias and mocking-birds and other ornamental things which soften a man's feelings down to the fluffiness of a feather bed.

When she had done singing, he asked her to walk with him on the beach. She gave another slow lift of her eyelashes, said she would, and ran upstairs after the Leghorn and the Japanese umbrella, brown and yellow, with as many bones in it as the first April shad.

They walked the beach up and down, she leaning heavier and heavier on his arm at each turn. Then they sat down on the sand with their faces to the sea, and held the umbrella so as to shade off the people on the bank--they didn't care for the sun a bit--and in that condition they sat and talked and talked and talked.

By and by he got up from the sand. She lifted her eyes with a pitiful look of helplessness. He reached out his hand, and she rose to it gracefully, like a trout to a fly. The hand clung to his more than a minute after she got up--the sand was so uneven, you see. The stranger bore this with Christian fortitude, and really seemed as if he rather liked it. In fact, he encouraged her to hold on; and she did, with her sweet widowed face lifted to his just long enough to set his heart off like a windmill, when she dropped it again.

When they came up the flight of wooden steps that leads down from the bank, both her white hands were clasped over his arm as loving as the soft paws of a kitten, and he looked like a fellow that had been out shooting doves, and had come in with his net full.

They went in to lunch, and ate spring chickens; then they ended off with silly-bubs, which is a sweet froth that melts to nothing on the tongue--delicious, but not exactly hearty food.

Two hours after lunch, the stranger asked the widow to ride out with him; which she did, in the puffiest and silkiest of dresses, and with a lace parasol, lined with pink, between her and the sun. This was one of her snares, for she depended on that pink lining for her blushes, having left them a good way behind her somewhere about the first wedding.

The drive was paradisical. They talked, they smiled, they said the loveliest little things to each other with delicious reciprocity. He drove, and divided his manly attentions between her and the horses, giving her a generous share, which was creditable to him as a man.

It was nearly twelve o'clock that night when those two people went up to their neglected couches--nothing but a widow would have stood the shock of such impropriety among the critical of her sex; but she didn't care a mite.

Early the next morning, which was Sunday, these two persons were seen coming out of the little cubby-houses under the beach in the queerest sort of dresses--I cannot describe them, because, up to this time, beach flirtations have been forbidden subjects with me.

But they came out on the beach, clasped hands, and walked right into the biggest waves they could find.

What she said to him there I cannot tell, but by and by they came back to the hotel, the sneakiest-looking creatures you ever set your two eyes on.

I don't know when it was that she brought him to the point, but the widow had netted him so close that he didn't even try to flounder.

That night there was sacred music in the hotel parlor, and, somehow, a minister of the Gospel dropped in, with a white cravat on, and waited for something, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

He hadn't been there long before the strange gentleman came in with a swallow-tailed coat on, a white vest and cravat, with ball-gloves on his hands.

Hanging on to his arm was that widow, in a long, white dress, that streamed after her in windrows, and with a shower of lace falling over her.

The minister got up, and opened his book. The people hanging about hushed their talk, and in less than ten minutes a third gold ring was chucked over the other two that weighed down the widow's finger, and she walked off with number three as proud as a white peacock.

It took this widow just two days and part of a night to spring her traps and draw her hooks--but, then, she was a widow.

Sisters, there is a good deal of commotion in our hotel just now. Rural single ladies talk of going over to the other place.

I had a little hankering in that direction at first, but, come to think it over, mean to stay where I am. It isn't the house that has done this, but the bland atmosphere of Long Branch. If that sort of thing is indigenous to the place--and I mean to test it thoroughly--Russia is welcome to the Grand Duke; a whole-souled American is good enough for me. Besides, Russia is an awful cold place, and I don't think I ever could bring myself to eat cabbage-soup or the roe of a sturgeon.

Sisters, if this sort of thing lies in the atmosphere, don't you think it would be a good thing for the whole Society to come down here next summer? A generous diffusion of masculine energy into the course might be a desirable change. For my part, I don't mean to leave this place till frost comes. I believe this thing is going to be an epidemic at the Branch, and when contagions rage I am sure to catch any disease that is going. I have had the measles twice, and two pretty severe tugs with the scarlet-fever. In fact, I was celebrated, as a child, for catching double. One thing is certain--I never ran away because a disease was catching, and I'm not going to do it here. On the contrary, I am making over one of my old alpaca skirts into a bathing-dress. If I know myself I shall fight it out on that line, if it takes all winter.