Part 27 (2/2)

And so, with a humbled heart, I set myself to the ”trivial round, the common task,” that gave me, indeed, much room for self-denial and patience, but gave me, too, the peace that impatience and resistance never would have brought. Much there was, indeed, of error and folly, many mistaken steps and struggles of conscience, much sinning and repenting, but, on the whole, it was a straighter and a safer path than a pleasanter one would have been. There was, in truth, little danger of being in love with the world, seen from the stand-point I had been placed in.

Home continued pretty much as usual. Of my aunt and Josephine, we of the study and the nursery saw comparatively little. As the season advanced, and the gaiety increased, there was not much time, of course, at my aunt's command for any but the most imperative home duties; this being Josephine's first winter in New York, it was a thing of the highest moment to bring her out properly, and no sacrifice was considered too great. Not that she neglected her household, or regular duties; at whatever hour she may have returned home the night before, my Aunt Edith never failed to appear at breakfast punctually; never failed to hear Esther repeat her Collect, and glance over Grace's theme; never failed to overlook the grocer's, baker's, and butcher's accounts; to visit in person daily, kitchen, laundry, butler's pantry, nursery, and study; to keep, in short, that eye over her entire establishment that it required to preserve its matchless order and regularity. No wonder that my aunt looked haggard and worn; no wonder that unwelcome wrinkles were writing themselves on her brow, and that her rounded figure was fast losing its roundness. To serve one master is as much as one human being is capable of. In the miserable attempt to serve two, how many wrecks of soul and body are daily wrought.

I said we saw very little of my aunt; it seemed very little, for her daily visits to us, though regular, were of necessity hurried, and at meals she was generally either preoccupied and thoughtful, or busy with Phil in arrangements and plans for the pressing demands of society.

Josephine, now-a-days, had her breakfast sent to her room, and was not ordinarily visible before twelve o'clock. Then came visiting hours; and at dinner, though, when they did not dine out, we enjoyed the society of my aunt, and Josephine, and Phil, still it seemed to me, they were all rather listless and stupid; but perhaps they were only reserving their energies for the evening. After study hours, sometimes, and just before my bed-time, I would go down to Josephine's room by particular request, and a.s.sist her at her toilette; her new maid, Frances, being, she declared, the clumsiest, stupidest thing that ever breathed, and having a most unbearable trick of bursting into tears whenever she was scolded, which, I suppose, deprived Josephine of all pleasure in her attendance.

My services suited her better, and I often had the honor of superseding Frances. Not that I minded it at all; it was the only glimpse I had into the gay world that I was as yet so ignorant of. I liked to array Josephine in her elegant Parisian dresses, to arrange the drooping flowers in her glossy black hair, and to clasp the rich bracelets on her arms. Grace, on these occasions, was strictly forbidden the room; late hours, dissipation and fatigue had not materially improved Josephine's temper; and her pert young sister's allusions to bones, necks a la gridiron, etc., tried her beyond endurance; and mamma interposing, Grace, for once, was kept at bay. I will not deny a vague feeling of regret and longing, as I watched my cousin's floating drapery downstairs, and thought of the gay scene she was starting for; and as Phil wrapped her light cloak around her, and whispered his honest praises in her ear, as she followed her mother to the door, and I turned back to my lonely little room, it did seem to me that there was great need of faith to believe that her lot and mine were ordered by the same unerring and impartial Wisdom.

Our lessons went on pretty much as at first. With Mr. Olman, I was rather a check upon Grace, and the poor man began to regard me with something like grat.i.tude. He was a good teacher, and gave me plenty of work, for which I, in my turn, was grateful. Our French lessons, it appeared to me, were rather a hollow mockery, Mdlle. Berteau, our preceptress, being a chatty little woman, who spent one-half her time in gossiping with Grace about Paris and pretty things, and the other half in helping her write the exercises she had been too lazy to prepare the night before. I also found later, that mademoiselle had been in the habit of supplying her young pupil surrept.i.tiously with some rather questionable French literature. Upon a threat of disclosing this circ.u.mstance to mamma, Grace made me a solemn promise to renounce it; but I must confess I never felt any great security about its fulfillment.

Our German proved rather more satisfactory. Mr. Waschlager, a strapping, burly, bearded fellow, with a loud voice and considerable energy of manner, inspired Miss Grace with much greater respect than delicate Mr.

Olman, with his nervousness and tremor. His imperfect knowledge of our mother-tongue, also, rendered any sly innuendoes quite powerless to annoy him, and Grace's very strikingly imperfect knowledge of _his_ maternal mode of speech, put it quite out of her ability to insult him, if she had dared. So that, with the exception of having ordinarily to write her exercises for her, and give her the benefit of my researches in the dictionary at the last moment, I enjoyed my German lesson very much, and made quite rapid advances in that language.

A week or two before my arrival, Esther's daily governess (from all accounts a miserably weak and injudicious person) had been dismissed, having been found entirely incompetent to manage her young charge; and, till another should be procured, I had asked my aunt if I should not teach her for an hour or two every day. The offer had been very gladly accepted, and, somehow, after a week or two, all question of obtaining a new governess had died out, and Essie and her lessons had quietly devolved on me. I did not mind it very much; the child was good enough, and, with a little coaxing, got on tolerably well; but it was rather hard always to be tied down to that duty for the hours that I invariably felt most like reading or sewing, both of which occupations I found entirely incompatible with the due direction of Miss Esther's early mathematical efforts, and the proper supervision of her attempts at penmans.h.i.+p. I had the benefit of her society at other hours also; she kept pretty closely at my side during my leisure moments, favored by my vicinity to the nursery, and was my invariable companion in my walks: Grace never walked, except when ordered out under pain of her mother's displeasure, and Felicie was, of course, only too glad to s.h.i.+ft the duty of exercising Miss Esther upon me. And as my aunt had a prejudice against full carriages, she and Josephine were generally considered a sufficient burden for the horses on Sunday, and Grace being commonly threatened with headache on that day, Esther and I were left to ourselves in the matter of church; and finding one not far distant, that had some free seats within its ample limits, we profited by the discovery, and pretty constantly filled two of them; Esther holding fast to my dress, never for a moment letting go of it through service or sermon; at times it seemed to me, as I caught her strange troubled eyes fixed on the rich colors of the chancel window, or the misty blue of the vaulted roof, that ”her heart was envious of her eye,” and she clung to me, uncertain and hesitating, as her one tie to earth. I never could quite make out the child; with all her pettishness, and very willful and trying naughtiness, there were moods and fancies about her that thoroughly puzzled me. The only way, I found, was to be as patient as possible with the one, and humor the other as far as was practicable.

I introduced her to her Prayer-book frequently at church, but to little effect; she would obey for the moment, then the book would drop unheeded from her hand, and she would presently be gazing dreamily before her again. Never letting go my dress, she would slip down on her knees when the others did, but when I glanced at her, it was always to find that strange wistful look on her upturned face, that always gave me a vague feeling of uneasiness. She was by no means a precocious child--rather a backward and undeveloped one; but sometimes she startled me with questions that were as much beyond what I had expected of her, as they were beyond me to answer lucidly.

Besides our dislike of Felicie and our liking for Trinity Chapel, there was another bond of sympathy between my little cousin and me, and that was, our cordial antipathy to ”company” days and times. Not that we ever had much personal interest in them, but the moral atmosphere of the house, for the whole of the day on which one of my aunt's elaborate dinner-parties occurred, was extremely grating to our nerves. My aunt was always a little more decided and hurried, Josephine a shade more imperious, Grace perter, Felicie more hateful, John more given to short answers--in fact, no member of the household but felt oppressed by the coming event. Grace and I dined with Esther at ”the little dinner” at one, on such occasions, and all we saw of the contents of the carriages that, about six, began to roll up to the door, was seen from over the bal.u.s.ters of the third-story staircase. My aunt, it is true, had at first proposed to me to put on my new silk, and come downstairs, but it seemed to me that the invitation was rather lukewarm, and she agreed with me very readily in thinking that for this winter, it was better for me to stay altogether out of society.

”You will be all the fresher when you do appear, my love,” said my aunt Edith.

So, _par consequent_, I saw but little of the visitors at the house, though, through Grace, and the general table talk and accidental meetings in the parlor, I kept the run of the most intimate and familiar ones. Among the gentlemen, there was a Captain McGuffy, an army friend of Phil's, who was a good deal at the house, princ.i.p.ally noticeable for his appet.i.te and his moustache. Also, a stale old beau named Reese, who was a kind of heir-loom in fas.h.i.+onable families, handed down from mother to daughter along with other antique and valued relics, to grace their entree into society. He had been an admirer of my aunt Edith's in her opening bloom, but was now made over to Josephine, by that unselfish parent, to swell the list of the younger one's retainers. Besides these, there was a Mr. Wynkar, very young and very insignificant, endured princ.i.p.ally, I fancied, for his utility; and a young Frenchman, who was quite new on the tapis, and much the rage.

But it was a fact patent even to my simplicity, that Mr. Rutledge was, _par excellence_, the most courted and desired guest in Gramercy Square.

For him, Josephine's smiles came thickest and sweetest, and the daring freedom of speech and wit that characterized her bearing with Phil and his military _confrere_, were, in his presence, toned down into a spirited, but most taking coquetry, and the anxious frown on Aunt Edith's brow was smoothed away whenever John announced, ”Mr. Rutledge, madam.” That those announcements were very frequent, could never cease to be a matter of interest to me, though there seemed little excuse for my feeling any deeper personal concern in them than John himself. Being always expected to retire directly from dinner to the study, we of course lost all evening visitors, and in the daytime, it was even less likely that we should encounter any one from the parlor. More than once, on dinner-party nights, I had stood so near him, that I could have whispered and he would have heard; shrinking down in the shadow of the landing-place, I had watched him leave the dressing-room slowly, always walking through the upper hall very leisurely, and looking attentively around. But the darkness of that upper landing-place would baffle even his keen eye; my very heart would stand still--the breath would not pa.s.s my parted lips, and there would be no danger that his quick ear should discover that which I would have died rather than he should have known.

I would watch him down the stairs, see him pause a moment before the parlor-door, then, as he opened it, there would come, for an instant, the gay clamor of many voices, the rustling of silks, the ringing of laughter, then in an instant shut again, and I would creep back to my dark and cheerless little room with a heart that, had I been older and less humble, would have been bitter and resentful, but as it was, was only aching and sad. I often wondered whether, if that bracelet had not been fastened irrevocably on my arm, I should have taken it off?

Whether, if I could, I would have put far out of sight, all souvenirs of that happy visit, that n.o.body seemed to remember now but me. Whether it would have been any easier to forget, if I could have broken my promise as he most a.s.suredly had broken his. Of course he had broken it; the only folly had been in my ever expecting him to remember such a jest an hour after it was spoken. A one-sided friends.h.i.+p, indeed it was, upon reflection, a very absurd friends.h.i.+p, between an ignorant school-girl and an elegant, high-bred, cultivated gentleman, and one who, as Grace said one day at the table, if he wasn't the coolest and most indifferent of men, would be a perfect lion in society.

”He's too _jeuced_ stiff and haughty to be tolerated,” said Mr. Wynkar, who, with Capt. McGuffy and Phil, was dining with us in such _pet.i.t comite_, that it was not considered necessary to exclude the juniors from the board.

”You and he arn't intimate, then,” said Grace, with a sly laugh, which Josephine rather encouraged in a quiet way.

”I never could see,” said Capt. McGuffy, from under his moustache, ”what everybody finds in that man so remarkable. He has a tolerably correct idea of a horse, and rides pretty well; but beyond that, I think he's rather a stick.”

Grace elevated her eyebrows, and Mr. Wynkar went on to say, ”that for his part, he thought there was nothing about him but his money and his family. Rutledge was a good name, and he was, without doubt, the best match in society.”

”Match!” exclaimed the captain. ”He's no more idea of marrying than a monk. I pity the girl that sets her affections on his establishment.

_Ma foi_! She'd about as well make _beaux yeux_ at the bronze general in Union Square. Her chance of making an impression would be about as good.”

”McGuffy's right,” said Phil, warmly. ”If everybody knew as much as he does, they'd let Mr. Rutledge alone, and turn their attention to subjects that would pay better.”

”Army men upon a thousand a year, for instance,” said Josephine, under her breath, and with an irritated contraction of the brow.

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