Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861




Where morals are loose, piety is seldom in excess. But there are a
half-dozen of churches in Washington, besides preaching every Sunday
in the House of Representatives. The relative size and cost of the
churches, as compared with the Public Buildings, indicates the true
object of worship in Washington. Strange to say, the theatre is smaller
than the churches. Clerical and dramatic entertainments cannot compete
with the superior attractions of the daily rows in Congress and the
nightly orgies at the faro-banks. Heaven is regarded as another
Chihuahua or Sonora, occupied at present by unfriendly Camanches, but
destined to be annexed some day. In the mean time, a very important
election is to come off in Connecticut or Pennsylvania. That must be
attended to immediately. Such is piety in Washington.

The list of the unique prodigies of Washington is without limit. But
marvels heaped together cease to be marvellous, and of all places in
the world a museum is the most tiresome. So, amid the whirl and roar
of winter-life in Washington, when one has no time to read, write, or
think, and scarcely time to eat, drink, and sleep, when the days fly by
like hours, and the brain reels under the excitement of the protracted
debauch, life becomes an intolerable bore. Yet the place has an intense
fascination for those who suffer most acutely from the _tedium vitae_ to
which every one is more or less a prey; and men and women who have lived
in Washington are seldom contented elsewhere. The moths return to the
flaming candle until they are consumed.

In conclusion, it must be admitted that Washington is the Elysium of
oddities, the Limbo of absurdities, an imbroglio of ludicrous anomalies.
Planned on a scale of surpassing grandeur, its architectural execution
is almost contemptible. Blessed with the name of the purest of men, it
has the reputation of Sodom. The seat of the law-making power, it is the
centre of violence and disorder which disturb the peace and harmony
of the whole Republic,--the chosen resort for duelling, clandestine
marriages, and the most stupendous thefts. It is a city without commerce
and without manufactures; or rather, its commerce is illicit, and its
manufacturers are newspaper-correspondents, who weave tissues of fiction
out of the warp of rumor and the web of prevarication. The site of the
United States Treasury, it is the home of everything but affluence. Its
public buildings are splendid, its private dwellings generally squalid.
The houses are low, the rents high; the streets are broad, the crossings
narrow; the hacks are black, the horses white; the squares are
triangles, except that of the Capitol, which is oval; and the water is
so soft that it is hard to drink it, even with the admixture of alcohol.
It has a Monument that will never be finished, a Capitol that is to have
a dome, a Scientific Institute which does nothing but report the rise
and fall of the thermometer, and two pieces of Equestrian Statuary
which it would be a waste of time to criticize. It boasts a streamlet
dignified with the name of the river Tiber, and this streamlet is of the
size and much the appearance of a vein in a dirty man's arm. It has a
canal, but the canal is a mud-puddle during one half the day and an
empty ditch during the other. In spite of the labors of the Smithsonian
Institute, it has no particular weather. It has the climates of all
parts of the habitable globe. It rains, hails, snows, blows, freezes,
and melts in Washington, all in the space of twenty-four hours. After a
fortnight of steady rain, the sun shines out, and in half an hour the
streets are filled with clouds of dust. Property in Washington is
exceedingly sensitive, the people alarmingly callous. The men are
fine-looking, the women homely. The latter have plain faces, but
magnificent busts and graceful figures. The former have an imposing
presence and an empty pocket, a great name and a small conscience.
Notwithstanding all these impediments and disadvantages, Washington
is progressing rapidly. It is fast becoming a large city, but it must
always remain a deserted village in the summer. Its destiny is that of
the Union. It will be the greatest capital the world ever saw, or
it will be "a parched place in the wilderness, a salt land and not
inhabited," and "every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and
wag his head."




MIDSUMMER AND MAY.


[Concluded.]

Spring at last stole placidly into summer, and Marguerite, who was
always shivering in the house, kept the company in a whirl of out-door
festivals.

"We have not lived so, Roger," said Mrs. McLean, "since the summer when
you went away. We all follow the caprice of this child as a ship follows
the little compass-needle."

And she made room for the child beside her in the carriage; for Mr.
Raleigh was about driving them into town,--an exercise which had its
particular charm for Marguerite, not only for the glimpse it afforded of
the gay, bustling inland-city-life, but for opportunities of securing
the reins and of occasioning panics. Lately, however, she had resigned
the latter pleasure, and sat with quiet propriety by Mrs. McLean.
Frequently, also, she took long drives alone or with one of the
children, holding the reins listlessly, and ranging the highway
unobservantly for miles around.

Mrs. Purcell declared the girl was homesick; Mrs. Heath doubted if
the climate agreed with her: she neither denied nor affirmed their
propositions.

Mr. Heath came and went from the city where her father was, without
receiving any other notice than she would have bestowed on a peaceful
walking-stick; his attentions to her during his visits were unequivocal;
she accepted them as nonchalantly as from a waiter at table. On the
occasion of his last stay, there had been a somewhat noticeable change
in his demeanor: he wore a trifle of quite novel assurance; his supreme
bearing was not mitigated by the restless sparkle of his eye; and in
addressing her his compliments, he spoke as one having authority.

Mrs. Laudersdale, so long and so entirely accustomed to the reception
of homage that it cost her no more reflection than an imperial princess
bestows on the taxes that produce her tiara, turned slowly from the
apparent apathy thus induced on her modes of thought, passivity lost in
a gulf of anxious speculation, while she watched the theatre of events
with a glow, like wine in lamplight, that burned behind her dusky eyes
till they had the steady penetration of some wild creature's. She may
have wondered if Mr. Raleigh's former feeling were yet alive; she may
have wondered if Marguerite had found the spell that once she found,
herself; she may have been kept in thrall by ignorance if he had ever
read that old confessing note of hers: whatever she thought or hoped or
dreaded, she said nothing, and did nothing.

Of all those who concerned themselves in the affair of Marguerite's
health and spirits, Mr. Raleigh was the only one who might have solved
their mystery. Perhaps the thought of wooing the child whose mother
he had once loved was sufficiently repugnant to him to overcome the
tenderness which every one was forced to feel for so beautiful a
creation. I have not said that Marguerite was this, before, because,
until brought into contrast with her mother, her extreme loveliness was
too little positive to be felt; now it was the evanescent shimmer of
pearl to the deep perpetual fire of the carbuncle. Softened, as she
became, from her versatile cheeriness, she moved round like a moonbeam,
and frequently had a bewildered grace, as if she knew not what to make
of herself. Mr. Raleigh, from the moment in which he perceived that she
no longer sought his company, retreated into his own apartments, and was
less seen by the others than ever.

Returning from the drive on the morning of Mrs. McLean's last recorded
remark, Mr. Raleigh, who had remained to give the horses in charge to a
servant, was about to pass, when the _tableau_ within the drawing-room
caught his attention and altered his course. He entered, and flung his
gloves down on a table, and threw himself on the floor beside Marguerite
and the children. She appeared to be revisited by a ray of her old
sunshine, and had unrolled a giant parcel of candied sweets, which their
mother would have sacrificed on the shrine of jalap and senna, the
purchase of a surreptitious moment, and was now dispensing the brilliant
comestibles with much ill-subdued glee. One mouth, that had bitten off
the head of a checkerberry chanticleer, was convulsed with the
acidulous tickling of sweetened laughter, till the biter was bit and a
metamorphosis into the animal of attack seemed imminent; at the hands of
another a warrior in barley-sugar was experiencing the vernacular for
defeat with reproving haste and gravity; and there was yet another
little omnivorous creature that put out both hands for indiscriminate
snatching, and made a spectacle of himself in a general plaster of
gum-arabic-drop and brandy-smash.

"Contraband?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"And sweet as stolen fruit," said Marguerite. "Ursule makes the
richest comfits, but not so innumerable as these. Mamma and I owe our
sweet-tooth and honey-lip to bits of her concoction."

"Mrs. Purcell," asked Mr. Raleigh, as that lady entered, "is this little
banquet no seduction to you?"

"What are you doing?" she replied.

"Drinking honey-dew from acorns."

"Laudersdale as ever!" ejaculated she, looking over his shoulder. "I
thought you had 'no sympathy with'"----

"But I 'like to see other folks take'"----

"Their sweets, in this case. No, thank you," she continued, after this
little rehearsal of the past. "What are you poisoning all this brood
for?"

"Mrs. Laudersdale eats sweetmeats; they don't poison her," remonstrated
Katy.

"Mrs. Laudersdale, my dear, is exceptional."

Katy opened her eyes, as if she had been told that the object of her
adoration was Japanese.

"It is the last grain that completes the transformation, as your
story-books have told; and one day you will see her stand, a statue
of sugar, and melt away in the sun. To be sure, the whole air will be
sweetened, but there will be no Mrs. Laudersdale."

"For shame, Mrs. Purcell!" cried Marguerite. "You're not sweet-tempered,
or you'd like sweet dainties yourself. Here are nuts swathed in syrup;
you'll have none of them? Here are health and slumber and idle dreams
in a chocolate-drop. Not a chocolate? Here are dates; if you wouldn't
choose the things in themselves, truly you would for their associations?
See, when you take up one, what a picture follows it: the plum that has
swung at the top of a palm and crowded into itself the glow of those
fierce noon-suns; it has been tossed by the sirocco, it has been steeped
in reeking dew; there was always stretched above it the blue intense
tent of a heaven full of light,--always below and around, long level
reaches of hot shining sand; the phantoms of waning desert moons have
hovered over it, swarthy Arab chiefs have encamped under it; it
has threaded the narrow streets of Damascus--that city the most
beautiful--on the backs of gaunt gray dromedaries; it has crossed the
seas,--and all for you, if you take it, this product of desert freedom,
torrid winds, and fervid suns!"

"I might swallow the date," said Mrs. Purcell, "but Africa would choke
me."

Mr. Raleigh had remained silent for some time, watching Marguerite as
she talked. It seemed to him that his youth was returning; he forgot his
resolves, his desires, and became aware of nothing in the world but her
voice. Just before she concluded, she grew conscious of his gaze, and
almost at once ceased speaking; her eyes fell a moment to meet it, and
then she would have flashed them aside, but that it was impossible;
lucid lakes of light, they met his own; she was forced to continue it,
to return it, to forget all, as he was forgetting, in that long look.

"What is this?" said Mrs. Purcell, stooping to pick up a trifle on the
matting.

"_C'est a moi!_" cried Marguerite, springing up suddenly, and spilling
all the fragments of the feast, to the evident satisfaction of the
lately neglected guests.

"Yours?" said Mrs. Purcell with coolness, still retaining it. "Why do
you think in French?"

"Because I choose!" said Marguerite, angrily. "I mean--How do you know
that I do?"

"Your exclamation, when highly excited or contemptuously indifferent, is
always in that tongue."

"Which am I now?"

"Really, you should know best. Here is your bawble"; and Mrs. Purcell
tossed it lightly into her hands, and went out.

It was a sheath of old morocco. The motion loosened the clasp, and the
contents, an ivory oval and a cushion of faded silk, fell to the floor.
Mr. Raleigh bent and regathered them; there was nothing for Marguerite
but to allow that he should do so. The oval had reversed in falling, so
that he did not see it; but, glancing at her before returning it, he
found her face and neck dyed deeper than the rose. Still reversed, he
was about to relinquish it, when Mrs. McLean passed, and, hearing the
scampering of little feet as they fled with booty, she also entered.

"Seeing you reminds me, Roger," said she. "What do you suppose has
become of that little miniature I told you of? I was showing it to
Marguerite the other night, and have not seen it since. I must have
mislaid it, and it was particularly valuable, for it was some nameless
thing that Mrs. Heath found among her mother's trinkets, and I begged it
of her, it was such a perfect likeness of you. Can you have seen it?"

"Yes, I have it," he replied. "And haven't I as good a right to it as
any?"

He extended his arm for the case which Marguerite held, and so touching
her hand, the touch was more lingering than it needed to be; but he
avoided looking at her, or he would have seen that the late color had
fled till the face was whiter than marble.

"Your old propensities," said Mrs. McLean. "You always will be a boy. By
the way, what do you think of Mary Purcell's engagement? I thought she
would always be a girl."

"Ah! McLean was speaking of it to me. Why were they not engaged before?"

"Because she was not an heiress."

Mr. Raleigh raised his eyebrows significantly.

"He could not afford to marry any but an heiress," explained Mrs.
McLean.

Mr. Raleigh fastened the case and restored it silently.

"You think that absurd? You would not marry an heiress?"

Mr. Raleigh did not at once reply.

"You would not, then, propose to an heiress?"

"No."

As this monosyllable fell from his lips, Marguerite's motion placed
her beyond hearing. She took a few swift steps, but paused and leaned
against the wall of the gable for support, and, placing her hand upon
the sun-beat bricks, she felt a warmth in them which there seemed to be
neither in herself nor in the wide summer-air.

Mrs. Purcell came along, opening her parasol.

"I am going to the orchard," said she; "cherries are ripe. Hear the
robins and the bells! Do you want to come?"

"No," said Marguerite.

"There are bees in the orchard, too,--the very bees, for aught I
know, that Mr. Raleigh used to watch thirteen years ago, or their
great-grand-bees,--they stand in the same place."

"You knew Mr. Raleigh thirteen years ago?" she asked, glancing up
curiously.

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Very well."

"How much is very well?"

"He proposed to me. Smother your anger; he didn't care for me; some one
told him that I cared for him."

"Did you?"

"This is what the Inquisition calls applying the question?" asked Mrs.
Purcell. "Nonsense, dear child! he was quite in love with somebody
else."

"And that was----?"

"He supposed your mother to be a widow. Well, if you won't come, I shall
go alone and read my 'L'Allegro' under the boughs, with breezes blowing
between the lines. I can show you some little field-mice like unfledged
birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then glittering eyes and cleft
fangs."

Marguerite was silent; the latter commodity was _de trop_. Mrs. Purcell
adjusted her parasol and passed on.

Here, then, was the whole affair. Marguerite pressed her hands to her
forehead, as if fearful some of the swarming thoughts should escape;
then she hastened up the slope behind the house, and entered and hid
herself in the woods. Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother. Of course, then,
there was not a shadow of doubt that her mother had loved him. Horrible
thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it seemed
that she loathed him,--that she despised the woman who had given him
regard. The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation; there was
no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was alone and
forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But that could not be
forever. As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old words, old
looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what long years of
silent suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning the
other; she saw how her mother's haughty calm might be the crust on a
lava-sea; she felt what desolation must have filled Roger Raleigh's
heart, when he found that she whom he had loved no longer lived, that he
had cherished a lifeless ideal,--for Marguerite knew from his own lips
that he had not met the same woman whom he had left.

She started up, wondering what had led her upon this train of thought,
why she had pursued it, and what reason she had for the pain it gave
her. A step rustled among the distant last-year's leaves; there in the
shadowy wood, where she did not dream of concealing her thoughts, where
it seemed that all Nature shared her confidence, this step was like
a finger laid on the hidden sore. She paused, a glow rushed over her
frame, and her face grew hot with the convicting flush. Consternation,
bitter condemnation, shame, impetuous resolve, swept over her in one
torrent, and she saw that she had a secret which every one might touch,
and, touching, cause to sting. She hurried onward through the wood,
unconscious how rapidly or how far her heedless course extended. She
sprang across gaps at which she would another time have shuddered; she
clambered over fallen trees, penetrated thickets of tangled brier, and
followed up the shrunken beds of streams, till suddenly the wood grew
thin again, and she emerged upon an open space,--a long lawn, where the
grass grew rank and tall as in deserted graveyards, and on which the
afternoon sunshine lay with most dreary, desolate emphasis. Marguerite
had scarcely comprehended herself before; now, as she looked out on the
utter loneliness of the place, all joyousness, all content, seemed wiped
from the world. She leaned against a tree where the building rose before
her, old and forsaken, washed by rains, beaten by winds. A blind slung
open, loose on a broken hinge; the emptiness of the house looked through
it like a spirit. The woodbine seemed the only living thing about
it,--the woodbine that had swung its clusters, heavy as grapes of
Eshcol, along one wall, and, falling from support, had rioted upon the
ground in masses of close-netted luxuriance.

Standing and surveying the silent scene of former gayety, a figure
came down the slope, crushing the grass with lingering tread, checked
himself, and, half-reversed, surveyed it with her. Her first impulse was
to approach, her next to retreat; by a resolution of forces she remained
where she was. Mr. Raleigh's position prevented her from seeing the
expression of his face; from his attitude seldom was anything to be
divined. He turned with a motion of the arm, as if he swung off a
burden, and met her eye. He laughed, and drew near.

"I am tempted to return to that suspicion of mine when I first met you,
Miss Marguerite," said he. "You take shape from solitude and empty air
as easily as a Dryad steps from her tree."

"There are no Dryads now," said Marguerite, sententiously.

"Then you confess to being a myth?"

"I confess to being tired, Mr. Raleigh."

Mr. Raleigh's manner changed, at her petulance and fatigue, to the old
air of protection, and he gave her his hand. It was pleasant to be the
object of his care, to be with him as at first, to renew their former
relation. She acquiesced, and walked beside him.

"You have had some weary travel," he said, "and probably not more than
half of it in the path."

And she feared he would glance at the rents in her frock, forgetting
that they were not sufficiently infrequent facts to be noticeable.

"He treats me like a child," she thought. "He expects me to tear my
dress! He forgets, that, while thirteen years were making a statue of
her, they were making a woman of me!" And she snatched away her hand.

"I have the boat below," he said, without paying attention to the
movement. "You took the longest way round, which, you have heard, is the
shortest way home. You have never been on the lake with me." And he was
about to assist her in.

She stepped back, hesitating.

"No, no," he said. "It is very well to think of walking back, but it
must end in thinking. You have no impetus now to send you over another
half-dozen miles of wood-faring, no pique to sting, Io."

And before she could remonstrate, she was lifted in, the oars had
flashed twice, and there was deep water between herself and shore. She
was in reality too much fatigued to be vexed, and she sat silently
watching the spaces through which they glanced, and listening to the
rhythmic dip of the oars. The soft afternoon air, with its melancholy
sweetness and tinge of softer hue, hung round them; the water, brown and
warm, was dimpled with the flight of myriad insects; they wound among
the islands, a path one of them knew of old. From the shelving rocks a
wild convolvulus drooped its twisted bells across them, a sweet-brier
snatched at her hair in passing, a sudden elder-tree shot out its creamy
panicles above, they ripped up drowsy beds of folded lily-blooms.

Mr. Raleigh, suddenly lifting one oar, gave the boat a sharp curve and
sent it out on the open expanse; it seemed to him that he had no right
thus to live two lives in one. Still he wished to linger, and with now
and then a lazy movement they slipped along. He leaned one arm on the
upright oar, like a river-god, and from the store of boat-songs in his
remembrance sang now and then a strain. Marguerite sat opposite and
rested along the side, content for the moment to glide on as they were,
without a reference to the past in her thought, without a dream of the
future. Peach-bloom fell on the air, warmed all objects into mellow
tint, and reddened deep into sunset. Tinkling cow-bells, where the kine
wound out from pasture, stole faintly over the lake, reflected dyes
suffused it and spread around them sheets of splendid color, outlines
grew ever dimmer on the distant shores, a purple tone absorbed all
brilliance, the shadows fell, and, bright with angry lustre, the planet
Mars hung in the south and struck a spear, redder than rubies, down the
placid mirror. The dew gathered and lay sparkling on the thwarts as they
touched the garden-steps, and they mounted and traversed together the
alleys of odorous dark. They entered at Mr. Raleigh's door and stepped
thence into the main hall, where they could see the broad light from the
drawing-room windows streaming over the lawn beyond. Mrs. Laudersdale
came down the hall to meet them.

"My dear Rite," she said, "I have been alarmed, and have sent the
servants out for you. You left home in the morning, and you have not
dined. Your father and Mr. Heath have arrived. Tea is just over, and
we are waiting for you to dress and go into town; it is Mrs. Manton's
evening, you recollect."

"Must I go, mamma?" asked Marguerite, after this statement of facts.
"Then I must have tea first. Mr. Raleigh, I remember my wasted
sweetmeats of the morning with a pang. How long ago that seems!"

In a moment her face told her regret for the allusion, and she hastened
into the dining-room.

Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite had a merry tea, and Mrs. Purcell came and
poured it out for them.

"Quite like the days when we went gypsying," said she, when near its
conclusion.

"We have just come from the Bawn, Miss Marguerite and I," he replied.

"You have? I never go near it. Did it break your heart?"

Mr. Raleigh laughed.

"Is Mr. Raleigh's heart such a delicate organ?" asked Marguerite.

"Once, you might have been answered negatively; now, it must be like the
French banner, _perce, troue, crible,"--

"Pray, add the remainder of your quotation," said he,--"_sans peur et
sans reproche_."

"So that a trifle would reduce it to flinders," said Mrs. Purcell,
without minding his interruption.

"Would you give it such a character, Miss Rite?" questioned Mr. Raleigh
lightly.

"I? I don't see that you have any heart at all, Sir."

"I swallow my tea and my mortification."

"Do you remember your first repast at the Bawn?" asked Mrs. Purcell.

"Why not?"

"And the jelly like molten rubies that I made? It keeps well." And she
moved a glittering dish toward him.

"All things of that summer keep well," he replied.

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