Part 4 (1/2)
But in writing about Mr. Hempstead, I have neglected his sister. Miss Hempstead was a tall, fine-looking young girl, with, however, a strikingly foreign appearance for an American _pur sang_. She was born, she told me, in Belize, Central America, where her father was United States Consul. A tropical sun had given her a complexion of Spanish darkness, heightened by large black eyes and jet black hair--the exact counterpart, Ida afterwards told me, of her brother, who was often mistaken for a Cuban.
When the period of the consulate of Mr. Hempstead pere was over, he had become so much attached to Belize, that he decided to make it his future residence. His daughter said she could not imagine what he found to like in the place, for between earthquakes and yellow fever, one was in a continual state of terror; there was no society, the population being almost entirely negro, and no schools; consequently the children of the few white resident families were obliged to go to England or to the United States to be educated.
Miss Hempstead was sent to London, and five or six years of the discipline of a first-cla.s.s English school have made her quite different from the fully fledged society queens who graduate from our Murray Hill _pensionnats_ at sixteen or so. A little English reserve to tone down somewhat their sparkling natures is all that our bewitching American girls need to make them perfect, but I fear they will for several years yet bear the stigma of, ”Charming, but too wild.”
CHAPTER V.
Sunday in the Country--Proximity of a Meeting-house--How we pa.s.s our Sundays--The House in the Woods--Ida's Glen--Mrs. Greeley's Favorite Spring--The Children's Play-house--Gabrielle's Pets--Travelling in 1836--New York Society--Mr. Greeley's Friday Evenings--Mrs. Greeley as a Bride--Her Accomplishments--A Letter concerning Mr. Greeley's Wedding.
_June 16_.
Sunday is, I think, a very _triste_ day in the country (low be it spoken). I cannot remain longer than an hour at church, for the Ma.s.s is a low one, and the sermon consists of fifteen minutes of plain, practical instruction, unembellished by rhetoric, to the congregation.
The church, it is true, is four miles distant, but Gabrielle's aristocratic ponies, Lady Alice and The d.u.c.h.ess, fairly fly over the ground--up or down hill, it is immaterial to them--and consequently, I find myself, when my religious duties are over, with many idle hours upon my hands.
The croquet b.a.l.l.s and mallets, our ”Magic Rings,” and other out-of-door games, are put away in the ”children's play-house,” a little white hut on the borders of the croquet ground, where Ida and dear little Raffie used to keep their toys, and where Gabrielle in later days housed her menagerie of pets.
The piano, too, is not only closed, but locked, for the flesh is weak, and I fear the temptation of the beautiful cold keys. It may be the baneful effect of a foreign education, but I cannot see that there would be any evil result from a little music on Sundays. However, we have a Dissenting church for a next-door neighbor, and the residents of Chappaqua are chiefly Quakers, who frown upon the piano as an unG.o.dly instrument; so with a sigh, I replace in my portfolio that grand hymn that in 1672 saved the life of the singer, Stradella, from the a.s.sa.s.sin's knife, and a beautiful Ave Maria, solemn and chaste in its style as though written by St. Gregory himself, but composed and dedicated to me by mamma's friend, Professor F. L. Ritter.
My pretty bits of fancy work with their bright-colored silks, the tiny needle-book worked while in Munich in an especially pretty st.i.tch, and in the Bavarian colors--blue and white--and my Bavarian thimble--silver and amethyst--are put away in a bureau drawer, for although a Catholic, I do not imitate our Lutheran maid, who spends her Sundays in sewing and knitting.
Plato and Kohlrausch, our week-day sustenance, do not come certainly under the head of Sunday reading, although I see nothing objectionable in them; but after all, one requires, I think, a change of literature on Sundays as well as a different dress, and an extra course at dinner.
”What shall we do?” says Gabrielle.
We have each written a letter or two, for Sunday is, I am sure, every one's letter-writing day, and now we put on our broad-brimmed garden hats, with their graceful tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of gauze and c.r.a.pe, and stroll off to the spicy pine grove, where we sit down on the dry spines, and Arthur repeats to us quaint bits from some of the rare old books he read in the British Museum three years ago, or entertains us with some of his own adventures when travelling on foot over beautiful France and Italy, and ”Merrie England.”
Ida and I, however, wandered away from the others this morning, and strolled up to the dear old house in the woods where she pa.s.sed her childhood. This is, to my mind, the sweetest and most picturesque spot upon the entire estate, and I do not wonder that Aunt Mary, with her keen love for the beautiful in Nature, her indifference to general society, and her devotion to her children, to study, and to reflection, preferred the quiet seclusion of her home shut in by evergreens, with the deep ravine, and the joyous little brook at her feet, to the most superb mansion that graces our magnificent Hudson.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The House in the Woods.]
One of the purest springs on the place is in the ravine, or ”Ida's Glen,” as uncle christened it long ago. Here at the foot of the long wooden staircase is a basin of natural rock, and flowing into it is the sweetest, coolest water in the world. This water Aunt Mary always preferred to any other on the place--even to the spring at the foot of the side-hill, so celebrated in the campaign times as the spot where uncle and his visitors would stop to ”take a drink,” when returning from a walk. Exquisite in her neatness, Aunt Mary would frequently order the basin of her favorite spring to be well purified by a thorough scrubbing with brush and soap, followed by a prolonged rinsing with water. During her illness last fall, she frequently asked to have a pitcher of water brought from this spring, which she always especially relished.
That uncle shared his wife's partiality for this spring is evident by his description of it in his ”Recollections”:
”In the little dell or glen through which my brook emerges from the wood wherein it has brawled down the hill, to dance across a gentle slope to the swamp below, is _the_ spring,--pure as crystal, never-failing, cold as you could wish it for drink in the hottest day, and so thoroughly shaded and sheltered that, I am confident, it was never warm, and never frozen over. Many springs upon my farm are excellent, but this is peerless.”
The house in the woods was built by uncle to suit Aunt Mary's taste, and very comfortable and complete it is. Uncle says of it:
”It is not much--hastily erected, small, slight, and wooden, it has at length been almost deserted for one recently purchased and refitted on the edge of the village; but the cottage in the woods is still my home, where my books remain, and where I mean to garner my treasures.”
The house consists of two stories with that most necessary addition to a country house, a broad piazza. To the right stands a white cottage, built for the servants. Almost in front of the house is a large boulder, moss-grown and venerable. This, Aunt Mary would not have removed, for she loved Nature in its wildest primeval beauty, and now the rock is a.s.sociated with loving memories of Raffie's little hands that once prepared fairy banquets upon it, with acorn-cups for dishes; but now those baby hands have long since been folded quietly in the grave.
The little play-house, that has since been removed to the croquet-ground, once stood not far from this rock, and has been used, as I said, by Gabrielle as a menagerie for her pets. A strange a.s.sortment they often were for a little girl. Inheriting her mother's exquisite tenderness of feeling towards helpless animals, Gabrielle would splinter and bandage up the little legs of any baby robin or sparrow that had met with an accident from trying its wings too early, would nurse it till well, and then let it fly away. At one time she had in the play-house a little regiment of twelve toads, a red squirrel, and a large turtle. Aunt Mary never wished her to cage her pets, as she thought it cruel; consequently they had the range of the play-house, and Gabrielle fed them very conscientiously. She ought, however, to have followed the example of St. Francis, who used to preach to animals and insects when he had no human audience, and given her pets a daily dissertation upon brotherly love and tolerance, for they did not, I regret to say, live together in the Christian harmony that distinguished Barnum's Happy Family. The result was, that one day when Gabrielle went to minister to their physical wants, she found only a melancholy _debris_ of little legs. Her supposition was that the turtle had consumed the toads and then died of dyspepsia, and that the squirrel had by some unknown means escaped from the play-house, and returned to primeval liberty.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Children's Play House.]
Forgetting this sad experience, Gabrielle endeavored at another time to bring up a snake and a toad in the way they should go (this time in an empty hen-coop); but the snake certainly did depart from it, and astonished the family much by gliding into the kitchen with the unhappy toad in his mouth. Poor Gabrielle's feelings can be imagined. She endeavored courageously to wrest the toad from its enemy's jaws, but all in vain; she was obliged to see the hapless creature consumed by the snake.
Mamma has often described Aunt Mary to me as she looked when she first met her. The portrait mamma draws of her as a bride would scarcely be recognized by those who only knew her after long years of weary illness had
”Paled her glowing cheek.”