The Minister's Wooing

CHAPTER XV

‘And now, Mary,’ said Mrs. Scudder, at five o’clock the next morning, ‘to-day, you know, is the doctor’s fast, and so we won’t get any dinner, and it will be a good time to do up all our little odd jobs. Miss Prissy promised to come in for two or three hours this morning, to alter the waist of that black silk, and I shouldn’t be surprised if we could get it all done and ready to wear by Sunday.’

We will remark, by way of explanation to a part of this conversation, that our doctor, who was a specimen of life in earnest, made a practice through the greater part of his pulpit course of spending every Saturday as a day of fasting and retirement in preparation for the duties of the Sabbath.

Accordingly, the early breakfast things were no sooner disposed of than Miss Prissy’s quick footsteps might have been heard pattering in the kitchen.

‘Well, Miss Scudder, how do you do this morning? and how do you do, Mary? Well, if you aint the beaters! up just as early as ever, and everything cleared away! I was telling Miss Wilcox that there didn’t ever seem to be anything done in Miss Scudder’s kitchen, and I did verily believe you made your beds before you got up in the morning. Well, well; wasn’t that a party last night!’ she said, as she sat down with the black silk and prepared her ripping-knife. ‘I must rip this myself, Miss Scudder; for there’s a great deal in ripping silk, so as not to let anybody know where it has been sewed.

‘You didn’t know that I was at the party, did you? Well, I was. You see, I thought I’d just step round there to see about that money to get the doctor’s shirt with, and there I found Miss Wilcox with so many things on her mind, and says she, “Miss Prissy, you don’t know how much it would help me if I had somebody like you just to look after things a little here;” and says I, “Miss Wilcox, you just go right to your room and dress, and don’t you give yourself one minute’s thought about anything, and you see if I don’t have everything just right.” And so there I was in for it, and I just stayed through; and it was well I did, for Dinah, she wouldn’t have put ne’er enough egg in the coffee if it hadn’t been for me. Why, I just went and beat up four eggs with my own hand, and stirred ’em into the grounds.

‘Well, but really; wasn’t I behind the door, and didn’t I peep into the supper-room! I saw who was a-waitin’ on Miss Mary. Well, they do say he’s the handsomest, most fascinating man; why, all the ladies in Philadelphia are in a perfect quarrel about him; and I heard he said that he hadn’t seen such a beauty, he didn’t remember when.’

‘We all know that beauty is of small consequence,’ said Mrs. Scudder. ‘I hope Mary has been brought up to feel that.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Miss Prissy; ‘it’s just like a fading flower; all is to be good and useful, and that’s what she is; and I told ’em that her beauty was the least part of her, though I must say that dress did fit like a biscuit, if it was my own fitting. But, Miss Scudder, what do you think I heard ’em saying about the good old doctor?’

‘I am sure I don’t know,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘I only know they couldn’t say anything bad.’

‘Well, no, not bad exactly,’ said Miss Prissy; ‘but they say he’s getting such strange notions in his head; why, I heard some of ’em say he was going to come out and preach against the slave trade; and I’m sure I don’t know what Newport folks will do if that’s wicked; there aint hardly any money here that’s made any other way: it’ll certainly make a great noise and talk, and make everybody angry; and I hope the Doctor aint a-going to do anything of that sort.’

‘I believe he is, Miss Prissy,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘he thinks it’s a great sin that ought to be rebuked, and I think so too,’ she said, bracing herself resolutely; ‘that was Mr. Scudder’s opinion when I first married him, and it’s mine.’

‘Oh, ah, yes. Well, if it’s a sin, of course,’ said Miss Prissy; ‘but then, dear me! Why, just think how many great houses are living on it. Why, there’s General Wilcox himself, and he’s a very nice man; and then there’s Major Seaforth; and why, I could count you off now a dozen – all our very first people. Why, Doctor Styles doesn’t think so, and I’m sure he’s a good Christian. Doctor Styles thinks it’s a dispensation for giving the light of the gospel to the Africans; why, now I’m sure, when I was a-working at Deacon Stebbins’, I stopped over Sunday once, ’cause Miss Stebbins she was weakly; ’twas when she was getting up after Samuel was born. No, on the whole, I believe ’twas Nehemiah, ’cause I remember he had curly hair; but any way, I remember I stayed there, and I remember as plain as if ’twas yesterday, just after breakfast, how a man went driving by in a chaise, and the Deacon, he went out and stopped him for travelling on the Lord’s day (’cause, you know, he was a justice of the peace), and who should it be but Tom Seaforth, and he told the Deacon his father had got a shipload of negroes just come in, and the Deacon he just let him go, ’cause I remember he said that was a plain work of necessity and mercy.1 Well now, who would have thought it? I believe the Doctor is better than most folks; but then the best people may be mistaken, you know.’

‘The Doctor has made up his mind that it’s his duty,’ said Mrs. Scudder. ‘I’m afraid it’ll make him very unpopular; but I, for one, shall stand by him.’

‘Oh, certainly, Miss Scudder, you’re doing just right, exactly. Well, there’s one comfort, he’ll have a great crowd to hear him preach, ’cause as I was going round through the entries last night, I heard ’em talking about it; and Colonel Burr said he should be there, and so did the General, and so did Mr. What’s-his-name there, that senator from Philadelphia. I tell you you’ll have a full house.’

It was to be confessed that Mrs. Scudder’s heart rather sank than otherwise at this announcement, and those who have felt what it is to be almost alone in the right, in the face of all the ‘first families’ of their acquaintance, may perhaps find some compassion for her; since after all, truth is invisible, but ‘first families’ are very evident. First families are often very agreeable, undeniably respectable – fearfully virtuous; and it takes great faith to resist an evil principle which incarnates itself in the suavities of their breeding and amiability; and therefore it was that Mrs. Scudder felt her heart heavy within her, and could with a very good grace have joined the Doctor’s Saturday fast.

As for the Doctor, he sat the while tranquil in his study, with his great Bible and his Concordance open before him, culling, with that patient assiduity for which he was remarkable, all the terrible texts which that very unceremonious and old-fashioned book rains down so unsparingly on the sin of oppressing the weak. First families, whether in Newport or elsewhere, were as invisible to him as they were to Moses during the forty days that he spent with God on the Mount. He was merely thinking of his message, thinking only how he should shape it so as not to leave one word of it unsaid, not even imagining in the least what the result of it was to be: he was but a voice, but an instrument, – a passive instrument through which an Almighty will was to reveal itself: and the sublime fatalism of his faith made him as dead to all human considerations as if he had been a portion of the immutable laws of nature herself.

So the next morning, although all his friends trembled for him when he rose in the pulpit, he never thought of trembling for himself: he had come in the covered way of silence from the secret place of the Most High, and felt himself still abiding under the shadow of the Almighty. It was alike to him whether the house was full or empty. Whoever were decreed to hear the message would be there; whether they would hear or forbear was already settled in the counsels of a mightier will than his: he had the simple duty of utterance.

The ruinous old meeting-house was never so radiant with station and gentility as on that morning: a June sun shone brightly, the sea sparkled with a thousand little eyes, the birds sang all along the way, and all the notables turned out to hear the Doctor.

Mrs. Scudder received into her pew, with dignified politeness, Colonel Burr, and Colonel and Madame de Frontignac.

General Wilcox and his portly dame, Major Seaforth, and we know not, what not of Vernons and De Wolfs, and other grand old names were present there. Stiff silks rustled, Chinese fans fluttered, and the last court fashion stood revealed in bonnets; everybody was looking fresh and amiable: a charming and respectable set of sinners come to hear what the Doctor would find to tell them about their transgressions.

Mrs. Scudder was calculating consequences, and, shutting her eyes on the too evident world about her, prayed that the Lord would overrule all for good: the Doctor prayed that he might have grace to speak the truth, and the whole truth.

We have yet on record, in his published works, the great argument of that day, through which he moved with that calm appeal to the reason, which made his results always so weighty.

‘If these things be true,’ he said, after a condensed statement of the facts of the case, ‘then the following terrible consequences, which may well make all shudder and tremble who realize them, force themselves upon us, that all who have had any hand in this iniquitous business, whether directly or indirectly, or have used their influence to promote it, or have consented to it, or even connived at it, or have not opposed it by all proper exertions of which they are capable – all these are in a greater or less degree chargeable with the injuries and miseries which millions have suffered and are suffering, and are guilty of the blood of millions who lost their lives by this traffic in the human species. Not only the merchants who have been engaged in this trade, and the captains who have been tempted by the love of money to engage in this cruel work, and the slaveholders of every description, are guilty of shedding rivers of blood, but all the legislatures who have authorized, encouraged, or even neglected to suppress it to the utmost of their power, and all the individuals in private stations who have in any way aided in this business, consented to it, or have not opposed it to the utmost of their ability, have a share in this guilt. This trade in the human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended. This town has been built up and flourished in times past at the expense of the blood, the liberty, and the happiness of the poor Africans; and the inhabitants have lived on this, and by it have gotten most of their wealth and riches. If a bitter woe is pronounced on him who buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong (Jer. xxii. 13), to him who buildeth a town by blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity (Hab. ii. 12), to the bloody city (Ezek. xxiv. 6), what a heavy, dreadful woe hangs over the heads of all those whose hands are defiled by the blood of the Africans – especially the inhabitants of this state and this town, who have had a distinguished share in this unrighteous and bloody commerce!’ He went over the recent history of the country; expatiated on the national declaration so lately made, that all men are born equally free and independent, and have a natural and inalienable right to liberty, and asked with what face a nation declaring such things could continue to hold thousands of their fellow-men in abject slavery.

He pointed out signs of national disaster which foreboded the wrath of heaven: the increase of public and private debts; the spirit of murmuring and jealousy of rulers among the people; divisions and contentions and bitter party alienations; the jealous irritation of England constantly endeavouring to hamper our trade; the Indians making war on the frontiers; the Algerines taking captive our ships, and making slaves of our citizens; all evident tokens of the displeasure and impending judgment of an offended justice.

The sermon rolled over the heads of the gay audience deep and dark as a thunder-cloud which in a few moments changes a summer sky into heaviest gloom. Gradually an expression of intense interest and deep concern spread over the listeners; it was the magnetism of a strong mind, which held them for a time under the shadow of his own awful sense of God’s almighty justice.

It is said that a little child once described his appearance in the pulpit by saying, ‘I saw God there, and I was afraid.’

Something of the same effect was produced on the audience now, and it was not till after sermon, prayer, and benediction were all over, that the respectables of Newport began gradually to unstiffen themselves from the spell, and to look into each other’s eyes for comfort, and to reassure themselves that after all they were the first families, eminently respectable, and going on in the good old way the world had always gone, and that the Doctor, of course, was a Radical and a fanatic.

When the audience streamed out, crowding the broad aisle, Mary descended from the singers’ seat, and stood with her psalm book in hand, waiting at the door to be joined by her mother and the Doctor. She overheard many hard words from people who an evening or two before had smiled so graciously upon them. It was, therefore, with no little determination of manner that she advanced and took the Doctor’s arm, as if anxious to associate herself with his well-earned unpopularity; and just at this moment she caught the eye and smile of Colonel Burr, as he bowed gracefully, yet not without a suggestion of something sarcastic in his eye.

CHAPTER XVI

We suppose the heroine of a novel, among other privileges and immunities, has a prescriptive right to her own private boudoir, where, as a French writer has it, ‘she appears like a lovely picture in its frame.’

Well, our little Mary is not without this luxury, and to its sacred precincts we will give you this morning a ticket of admission. Know, then, that the garret of this gambrel-roofed cottage had a projecting window on the seaward side, which opened into an immensely large old apple-tree, and was a look-out as leafy and secluded as a robin’s nest.

Garrets are delicious places, in any case, for people of thoughtful, imaginative temperament. Who has not loved a garret in the twilight days of childhood, with its endless stores of quaint, cast-off, suggestive antiquity, – old worm-eaten chests, – rickety chairs, – boxes and casks full of old comminglings, out of which, with tiny, childish hands, we fished wonderful hoards of fairy treasure? What peep-holes, and hiding-places, and undiscoverable retreats we made to ourselves, – where we sat rejoicing in our security, and bidding defiance to the vague, distant cry which summoned us to school, or to some unsavoury every-day task! How deliciously the rain came pattering on the roof over head, or the red twilight streamed in at the window, while we sat snugly ensconced over the delicious pages of some romance, which careful aunts had packed away at the bottom of all things, to be sure we should never read it! If you have anything, beloved friends, which you wish your Charlie or your Susie to be sure and read, pack it mysteriously away at the bottom of a trunk of stimulating rubbish, in the darkest corner of your garret; – in that case, if the book be at all readable, one that by any possible chance can make its way into a young mind, you may be sure that it will not only be read, but remembered to the longest day they have to live.

Mrs. Katy Scudder’s garret was not an exception to the general rule. Those quaint little people who touch with so airy a grace all the lights and shadows of great beams, bare rafters, and unplastered walls, had not failed in their work there. Was there not there a grand easy-chair of stamped-leather, minus two of its hinder legs, which had genealogical associations through the Wilcoxes with the Vernons, and through the Vernons quite across the water with Old England? and was there not a dusky picture, in an old tarnished frame, of a woman of whose tragic end strange stories were whispered, – one of the sufferers in the time when witches were unceremoniously helped out of the world, instead of being, as now-a-days, helped to make their fortune in it by table-turning?

Yes, there were all these things, and many more which we will not stay to recount, but bring you to the boudoir which Mary has constructed for herself around the dormer-window which looks into the whispering old apple-tree.

The enclosure was formed by blankets and bed-spreads, which, by reason of their antiquity, had been pensioned off to an undisturbed old age in the garret, – not common blankets or bed-spreads, either, – bought, as you buy yours, out of a shop, – spun or woven by machinery, – without individuality or history. Every one of these curtains had its story. The one on the right, nearest the window, and already falling into holes, is a Chinese linen, and even now displays unfaded, quaint patterns of sleepy-looking Chinamen, in conical hats, standing on the leaves of most singular herbage, and with hands for ever raised in act to strike bells, which never are struck and never will be till the end of time. These, Mrs. Katy Scudder had often instructed Mary, were brought from the Indies by her great-great-grandfather, and were her grandmother’s wedding-curtains, – the grandmother who had blue eyes like hers, and was just about her height.

The next spread was spun and woven by Mrs. Katy’s beloved Aunt Eunice, – a mythical personage, of whom Mary gathered vague accounts that she was disappointed in love, and that this very article was part of a bridal outfit, prepared in vain, against the return of one from sea, who never came back, – and she heard of how she sat wearily and patiently at her work, this poor Aunt Eunice, month after month, starting every time she heard the gate shut, every time she heard the tramp of a horse’s hoof, every time she heard the news of a sail in sight, – her colour, meanwhile, fading and fading as life and hope bled away at an inward wound, – till at last she found comfort and reunion beyond the veil.

Next to this was a bed-quilt pieced in tiny blocks, none of them bigger than a sixpence, containing, as Mrs. Katy said, pieces of the gowns of all her grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and female relatives for years back, – and mated to it was one of the blankets which had served Mrs. Scudder’s uncle in his bivouac at Valley Forge, when the American soldiers went on the snows with bleeding feet, and had scarce anything for daily bread except a morning message of patriotism and hope from George Washington.

Such were the memories woven into the tapestry of our little boudoir. Within, fronting the window, stands the large spinning-wheel, one end adorned with a snowy pile of fleecy rolls, – and beside it, a reel and a basket of skeins of yarn, – and open, with its face down on the beam of the wheel, lay always a book, with which the intervals of work were beguiled.

The dusky picture of which we have spoken hung against the rough wall in one place, and in another appeared an old engraved head of one of the Madonnas of Leonardo da Vinci, a picture which to Mary had a mysterious interest, from the fact of its having been cast on shore after a furious storm, and found like a waif lying in the sea-weed; and Mrs. Marvyn, who had deciphered the signature, had not ceased exploring till she found for her, in an Encyclopædia, a life of that wonderful man, whose greatness enlarges our ideas of what is possible to humanity, – and Mary, pondering thereon, felt the sea-worn picture as a constant vague inspiration.

Here our heroine spun for hours, and hours with intervals, when, crouched on a low seat in the window, she pored over her book, and then, returning again to her work, thought of what she had read to the lulling burr of the sounding wheel.

By chance a robin had built its nest so that from her retreat she could see the five little blue eggs whenever the patient brooding mother left them for a moment uncovered. And sometimes, as she sat in dreamy reverie, resting her small, round arms on the window-sill, she fancied that the little feathered watcher gave her familiar nods and winks of a confidential nature, – cocking the small head first to one side and then to the other, to get a better view of her gentle human neighbour.

I dare say it seems to you, reader, that we have travelled, in our story, over a long space of time, because we have talked so much, and introduced so many personages and reflections; but, in fact, it is only Wednesday week since James sailed, and the eggs which were brooded when he went are still unhatched in the nest, and the apple-tree has changed only in having now a majority of white blossoms over the pink buds.

This one week has been a critical one to our Mary: in it she has made the great discovery that she loves; and she has made her first step into the gay world; and now she comes back to her retirement to think the whole over by herself. It seems a dream to her, that she who sits there now reeling yarn in her stuff petticoat and white short-gown is the same who took the arm of Colonel Burr amid the blaze of wax-lights, and the sweep of silks and rustle of plumes. She wonders dreamily as she remembers the dark, lovely face of the foreign madame, so brilliant under its powdered hair and flashing gems, – the sweet, foreign accents of the voice, – the tiny, jewelled fan, with its glancing pictures and sparkling tassels, whence exhaled vague and floating perfumes; then she hears again that manly voice, softened to tones so seductive, and sees those fine eyes with the tears in them, and wonders within herself that he could have kissed her hand with such veneration, as if she had been a throned queen.