Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  A blue ribbon was drawn through to finish, and tied in a little butterfly bow up high among the gold, on the left side; and then, after the dainty fingers had been into the basin again, the dazzle-blue merino went on, and the snowy down borderings were fastened about throat and arms, and-there was Rachel Holley ready for the sleigh-ride. And what do you think will become of Mark Hinsdale now?

  Poor little Rachel! I had to bring you up here to see her, without telling you why. You must needs have had this one unspoiled glimpse of her glad beauty. Even Mark Hinsdale was not to see it after all,-just so,-to-night.

  She turned round with her candle in her hand, to go downstairs. A rapid step came up as she opened her door. Roxana’s frightened face met hers.

  “O Rachel, for the land’s sake hurry down! Your ma!”

  Mrs. Holley was “taken faint,” as Roxana called it. They gave her brandy, and sent the boy, Silas, for the doctor. Rachel rubbed her mother’s hands, and sent Roxy for the hot brick from the oven, to put to her cold feet. She bathed her head with bay-water, and gave her carefully some drops of hartshorn to smell at. And then, while she came slowly back to something thing like her usual frail, delicate life again, yet with a new, strange look that shot a fearful intuition straight to Rachel’s heart, and made it seem an unreckoned duration of experience since she had tied on her blue ribbon so unconsciously there upstairs,-a look as of one who leaves the door, but turns back for a thing yet to be fetched or done,-Rachel sat, and knelt, and stood, by or over her, tending, and listening, and whispering, and making little loving signs, for half an hour, alone with her, while they waited. For Mrs. Holley had feebly motioned to Roxana to go away.

  I cannot tell you of that half-hour. It was a half-hour between two dear souls; a little time God gave them to live in,-to go back into from either side and meet in, as the heart and secret and fulness of their years together, by and by, when they should be outwardly parted.

  There are points of experience where all things gather. Eternity is in them. They are like the three short years of the Lord Christ’s ministering to the world.

  When Mark Hinsdale came, Mrs. Holley had fallen into a brief sleep.

  Mark thought it was some beautiful, tender-sad angel who came so softly through the shadow of the sitting-room to meet him, and stood in the firelight in her azure robes with shining borders. For there was something glorified, uplifted above the shock and the fear, in Rachel’s face, strong and full of love from that supreme communion.

  “Mother is going to die,” she said, putting her hand in Mark’s, and raising that look, that he never forgot, to his.

  “Oh, no!” he said with the first pitying impulse, keeping hold of the hand. “Is she worse? She will be better again, as she has been. Don’t be frightened.”

  “I’m not frightened. I see. O Mark!” she said suddenly, as one tender heartbreak from their deep, brief talk came over her,-”she said-she-shook me once-when I was a little child,-and she asked me to forgive her!”

  And the human grief broke forth in passionate tears. Mark put his arm around her, as she stood and trembled with her sobs.

  “Don’t cry! don’t cry, Rachel!” was all he could say to her.

  And Dr. Sylva came in and found them so.

  Squire Holley was away from home, attending to some law business. Instead of going to North Denmark, Mark Hinsdale drove his fast bay colt all night over the road to Hartford, and brought the squire back next morning in time to see his wife.

  The next time Mark saw Rachel, it was in a black dress at her mother’s burial.

  Dr. Sylva was a sympathetic man, and a bit of a friendly old gossip. He was touched and interested by what he had seen, and he could not help talking about it. He told how good Mark Hinsdale had been, and how plain it was that all was settled between him and Rachel. “And the sooner it’s made fast the better,” he said. “Squire Holley’s rich enough to take them both right in at home. And I guess that’s the way it will be. He won’t want to part with his girl; and yet he’s no kind of a man to be left in charge of her, all alone, though he’s first-rate for the deestrict.”

  And that was the way that everybody came to have it that Mark Hinsdale and Rachel Holley were engaged.

  CHAPTER V.

  NOBODY knew at the sleigh-ride dance what was happening. They all wondered and wondered, between the cotillons, and in hands across, and up and down the reels, what had become of Mark and Rachel. Some thought one thing, and some another, according to their own characteristics. Jeff Fleming said Mark was in one of his clouds somewhere, and had forgotten to come down. Nettie Sylva guessed they had some little muss: they would come in late, maybe, with some excuse, just in time, perhaps, for the pairing-off. Jane quietly remembered Mrs. Holley, and thought she might have needed Rachel; but nobody imagined any thing like the truth. There is no one whom all the world looks upon as more a fixture in the world, than a confirmed invalid.

  Nettie Sylva had tied her face up in a cloud, and told Horace he must not talk to her, coming over; she had a toothache yesterday, and was afraid of it again. What with that, and dropping her muff out of the sleigh and making him go back for it through the snowdrifts, and taking it into her head to carry the whip and touching up the gay little mare with it almost every time Horace did say any thing, she got over the ground, according to her notion of it, pretty well. The rest of the programme had been carried out very nearly as she had indicated it to Jane. She had been a long time settling the exact position of the tea-roses in her bright, silky crimps, and in making them “stay put;” for tea-rosebuds, everybody knows, are the loveliest and most unmanageable of blossoming things,-they are so tipsy with their own rich beauty; and, by the time she came down from the little gallery dressing-room attached to the dancing-hall, she found Horace in the passage below, tolerably cold, and in a fair state of provokableness. Everybody else, nearly, had gone in.

  “Have you been ready long?” she asked sweetly, taking his arm. “But then you didn’t have tea-rosebuds to fix in your hair! Let’s make haste now: they’ll be engaging for all the dances, and I don’t want to be left out in the cold.”

  That last clause was a sudden impish inspiration.

  “I suppose not. Nobody does,” said Horace, with an enunciation as if his words were just stiffening with frost as he spoke them, and were too much congealed to flow further after those five.

  “Why, you ‘re all nipped up!” said Nettie, turning round at him. “Your nose is blue. You’d better go right to the fire, and get warm.’

  And with that, she dropped his arm as they got inside the door, and let herself be surrounded, at the instant of his half withdrawal, by two or three eager claimants for dancing promises.

  The second dance, and the third, and the fourth, she gave. Nobody asked for the first, of course; that was supposed, according to sleigh-ride etiquette, to be Horace’s.

  When she had reached as far as five, she looked round to see where Horace was. He was standing by the big wood fire, half-way down the hall; warming his nose, probably, as she had bidden him.

  “Good boy!” she said slyly to herself, under her breath, and laughed.

  Then she slipped off, quite at the opposite side, and along to a far corner, where she seated herself demurely.

  The first set was forming. Clarissa Dunmore was standing up there in the corner, with her brother Elisha. Nettie got behind Miss Dunmore’s more’s wide skirts,-for Clarissa only had a new best dress once in three years, and wore the fashion out,-and hid herself. She chattered with Miss Clarissa as she came back and forth, and made her miss half the figures.

  “Why ain’t you dancing?” was Miss Clarissa’s natural question.

  “Oh, I’m getting ready! Hands across! Why don’t you mind? There’s Nat Kinsley, waiting!”

  Nettie knew she could always manage Miss Clarissa.

  Clarissa was an old maid and didn’t know it. She had never stopped to think about it. She had only had four best dresses since she began
to keep house for her brother after their mother died; and she had gone about with him to all the sleigh-rides and huskings and apple-bees, ever since, quite naturally; for neither of them had anybody else to go with. Clarissa thought her time hadn’t come, if she thought any thing, and kept on patiently; not expecting to be “run after much,” because she had never been a beauty; but just accepting things as they were, and putting a piece of daphne odora, off her big bush, into her back hair, just where she had put it twelve years ago, and setting off contentedly with Elisha every time there was a merry-making, and seeing it all through, with him to depend upon, and to talk it over with afterward.

  “Elisha was real clever and good about seein’ to,” she said: “she didn’t know what girls did that didn’t have brothers.”

  They danced as much as they wanted to; for “they always had one another, if nobody else came along.” And they really supposed they had “been to the party,” as much as anybody else. Some people take the world at large in that way, and think they have been to it too.

  After the cotillon was over, Nettie scudded round again, and got on to the opposite side, met the girls, Jane Burgess and three or four others whom she knew best, who all supposed, of course, that she had been dancing. Then she came up face to face with Horace Vanzandt, just as she meant to do.

  “Oh!” she cried. “Why where have you been? I didn’t see any thing of you all through the set. Have you got warm yet?”

  “I hope you had a pleasant dance,” said Horace grimly.

  “Dance! why, I didn’t dance. Of course not. I sat over there in the corner all the time. Nobody asked me. I haven’t had a soul to speak to but Clarissa Dunmore and Elisha. I’m getting cold now.”

  “Nettie!” said Horace, in a low, strong voice, “what does all this mean?”

  “I don’t-know-I’m sure!” said Nettie, with wide-open brown eyes. “What does it? I-supposed”-

  “What?”

  “Well,-if you will make me say it,-that you might possibly have asked me to dance, yourself; and so I waited.”

  There could not be any thing more utterly simple than Nettie’s look lifted up to Horace Vanzandt’s face.

  “If that is all, come and dance now,” said Horace, holding out his hand, with a very grave face. It was earnest with him: he could not stop for jests, scarcely for courtesies.

  “Oh, now I’m engaged! For this, and the next, and the next, and the next. And, besides, I think it would be proper to say ‘sorry’ or ‘please,’ or something!”

  And Nettie went off with Jeff Fleming. “Jeff was bright,” she said: “she always had a good time with Jeff Fleming,” she told Jane.

  Horace Vanzandt went and asked Jane.

  Somehow, when Nettie was very bad, he had an impulse toward Jane Burgess for friendly comfort. Jane knew Nettie so well, and always had something kind and excusing to say, that made him feel better.

  “I can’t make Nettie out to-night,” he said, while he and Jane waited at the side.

  “You never can,” said Jane. “That’s just what she means. If you didn’t try you’d do better.”

  “But why does she treat me so? She went off and made me think she had been dancing, and then came back and put me in the wrong because I hadn’t asked her. She makes me-mad; and then she won’t give me any excuse for a quarrel; nothing to take hold of, I mean.”

  “Don’t look for it. Take it as if it were all right. It is only a part of the frolic. Nettie is a good girl, only she isn’t quite ready to sober down. You mustn’t-hurry her.”

  Jane colored up as she said this. It was the nearest to a taking-for-granted of Horace’s wish and meaning toward Nettie, that she had ever come to in any of their tacit confidences.

  They had to chass now, and Horace could not say any more until the figure was over. He thought what a nice quiet partner Jane was, as he came back to her, and met her clear, friendly look and pleasant smile. It rested him to be with her a while. She was like fair, level road, after ups and downs, jolts and pitches. But then that, he supposed, was because he didn’t care so much. What was it that kept him beating back and forth helplessly, among the thorns and tangles of Nettie’s tricks and whims?

  “I wish she would grow more like you, Jane. Can’t you make her? You are together so much.”

  “You wouldn’t like her half so well,” said Jane, smiling at his question. It did not seem so surprising a question to her, doubtless, as it would have done if she had not known in her quiet way that she was a pattern. To her mind there was only one sort of woman that was worth while, or that ever ought to be; and she meant to be that woman right straight through. Of course Nettie would be better if she could make her a little more after the same type; but then she spoke truth and wisdom in saying that Horace-at this stage of his experience, at least-would not have liked her half as well.

  “See how pretty she is this minute! And sweet and happy too: there isn’t a bit of real malice in it. It’s all fun.”

  Nettie was flying out across the hall in a long gallopade chass, her color bright, her dark eyes like two winter stars, and a merry gleam of glittering teeth between the red parted lips.

  She came quite up to them as they stood.

  “I shan’t have a dance left,” she said, in a gay, quick whisper to Jane, as she gave her a little whirl, and then took her partner’s hand again.

  “If anybody else wants one,” she added, over her shoulder, “he’d better make haste. But it’s a reel next; and I won’t engage for reels, ever!”

  “You heard?” said Jane.

  “Yes. She meant me to.”

  “Of course she did. That’s the good of her. She has kept the reel on purpose.”

  “She always keeps the reels. She likes to set them scrambling. And I won’t scramble. “For all that, he got beside her when the quadrille ended. Jane managed it partly, perhaps, in choosing her seat.

  “Will you dance with me now?” said Horace, when the reel was called. And Nettie gave him her hand with an exquisite little docile, nestling, good-child movement to his side. Nettie was lovely all through that reel, and the next, which came in two dances more. “I always like my best dances in the middle of the evening,” she said. “The first ones are dreary.” And Horace grew content under her smiles, as he had done a hundred times before, and let by-gones be by-gones, as Nettie always told him he ought; although she did confess to Jane Burgess that the by-gones were never more than twenty-four hours old before they began again.

  Jane herself could hardly tell what to make of Nettie, when she declared to her in the “join hands” of Money Musk, that she “didn’t more than half like it, after all: she believed if he would only stay mad, once, long enough to give her a real little scare, she should like him better than she ever had done yet.”

  “But he knows you don’t mean it. He could see you didn’t, the minute he quieted down. Besides, I told him so.”

  “You did! You were nicely set to work! Now I shall have it all to do over again!”

  She did it in the pairing-off.

  The pairing-off was the last dance of all. Nettie had been down to supper,-and I wish I could tell you all about that supper, such as is only had in a country tavern, at a country sleigh-ride; its roast chickens and ducks, its whipped creams and plum-cakes, its custards and quince jellies, its nuts and apples, and cheese and crullers; its hot coffee, thick with cream, and its champagne cider; its regular sitting down, pair and pair; its plentiful helpings; its jokes and its fortune-tellings and its philopenas, with apple-parings and apple-namings, and double almonds. I should like to tell you all; but there will not be room for every thing, and I can’t: I can only tell you, as I began to do, that Nettie behaved beautifully,-as beautifully as Nature and little children do before some grand outburst of mischief; and she came up again radiant and benign, and danced the “Rustic” with Horace, with Clarissa rissa Dunmore, whom she had made him take for his other partner. And Horace said to himself how good-natured and thoughtful that w
as of her for the poor thing, after all.

  But when the pairing-off came!

  That is a round dance; not what we call a round dance here in the city, but a dance formed in a ring.

  No one takes a partner: they all go up one by one and take places independently,-a young man and a young woman alternately; though I will not say there may not be some mutual management to get tolerably near each other in certain cases. Yet that is not sure to avail, either; for it rests with the manager to call out as he pleases, “Ladies to the right, gentlemen to the left!” or the reverse. And then follows something like the old Swiss dance,-a forward and back, a turning round, a passing on; so that, one after another, each lady meets every gentleman. And as they meet,-by settled agreement, by some quick, mutual understanding, or by deliberate asking and assent, as the case may be,-they pair off, here and there; chass together out from the ring and round the circle, and to places, successively, in a long line gradually formed from the top of the room, for contra-dance; and then a merry hands-across, down, the middle and up again, down the outside and up the middle,-a scamper to the end,-and all repeated peated, as long as any couple cares to keep it up, finishes, with its gay tumult, the evening.

  Horace Vanzandt placed himself in the ring next but three to Nettie. Nat Kinsley, Elisha Dunmore, and Jo Greenleaf were between. She wouldn’t take either of them, he thought.