But Jeff Fleming gave the word, “Ladies to the left!” and behold the whole circle was between them! He could only trust now to her love of fun and dancing, and the likelihood of her coquetting all round the set before she took up with any.
He watched at every turn; she made seven or eight, and then she met Jeff Fleming. How she did it nobody knew, of the three most interested; least of all, perhaps, Jeff himself, who certainly had thought of nothing until that moment but of looking out for Jane. But just as he gave his hands to Nettie, in the turn, he met a sudden, shy, merry, mischievous, wistful little glance-he was conscious of the least possible lingering as they came around,-of a little tremulous poise of her pretty figure; their eyes encountered again, with a flash of fun in both; and away out to the far side with a sweep, down again toward the lessening circle around, and up to the head of the hall triumphantly, the naughty couple ran away with each other before the assembled eyes of Greyford and North Denmark.
Horace made a few turns more, and then broke out of the ring and sat down. That, also, the dancers were at liberty to choose. That made the more fun. Two or three others got tired, or foresaw that it might be policy, and did the same; Jane paired off with Elisha Dunmore; and Clarissa, trotting round patiently to the end, expecting nothing but the dance, was left out, odd, at last; and, nothing troubled, went quietly off to the dressing-room, to find her hood and rubbers comfortably before the crowd came up.
Down at the door, when all was over, Horace met Nettie Sylva, in her wraps, nothing visible in her face but two brilliant, provoking eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Horace! but I don’t dare ride in that cutter again. My toothache has come back; and so I’m going with Mr. Dunmore in his chaise-top. You’ll take Clarissa, won’t you?”
CHAPTER VI.
A LETTER.
NEW YORK, Dec.1, 1870.
DEAR NETTIE,-I think I was right in leaving Greyford without giving you notice. The fact is, if I had told you, I am afraid I should not have come. You have great power over me; so much that I have run away from it. I cannot bring myself to submit any longer to be treated as you treat me, even by one whom I admire as much as you, and of whom I think as much as I do of you. And I found that I was man enough to quietly pack up and go; and so I did.
Now that I am here, and established, it is right again that I should tell you about it. And still I am conscious that you will perhaps be displeased, and will not care to know. However, I am assistant book-keeper at Fylings & Co.’s Works. They do many kinds of manufacturing in iron, and they rent parts of their building, together with the use of steam-power, to mechanics; so that the fact is, the place is a sort of paradise to me. If I should ever go to heaven, I sometimes fancy I shall find my part of it fitted up with all kinds of machinery and tools, one eternal buzz of gearing and belts, and lathes and planers, and all manner of artificers in brass and iron. My patron saint is St. Tubal Cain, I guess. I have already scraped acquaintance with a wiry little man, with great, thoughtful eyes, who is working all day, and thinking all day and all night too, upon a new type-setting and distributing machine.
I have seen Rachel two or three times. Poor girl! She was always so bright and happy that I never imagined she had such depth and intensity of feeling. And her mother had been ill so long, and her hold on life was so very frail, that I should have reasoned that her departure would have been a comfort rather than a sorrow. But all the way from Greyford she was so sad and silent that I could not talk to her. And when last evening I said something about her mother, she trembled so much and cried so much that I was frightened. I cried a little too. I don’t know but I ought to be ashamed of it, but I never yet saw tears of real sorrow without contributing a few. I don’t remember crying on my own account, either, since I was small enough to cry at being whipped. I don’t know why it was, but I somehow felt that in some way or other, something about Mark had been the reason of Rachel’s leaving Greyford. And yet I can’t see why; for everybody was noticing how kind Mark was, and how suitable it would be if they should be married at once and go to the Squire’s to live. But she would not say a word about Mark; and though I can’t tell what made me know, I did know, that she did not wish to. I am sorry for Mr. Holley, left alone in the old house. But then he is one of those who find a great deal to satisfy their minds in their business; so he will do very well.
I have read this over. I have left out, I guess, the things I would have liked best to say. But, Nettie, I don’t know how you would take them. And I am waiting to hear what you say to me. I suppose I have everybody’s ordinary privilege to say that I am
Truly yours-haven’t I?
HORACE VANZANDT.
THE ANSWER.
HARTFORD, Dec. 7, 1870.
DEAR HORACE,-Your letter was forwarded to me from Greyford, and so I could not answer any sooner.
It was extremely kind of you to reveal to me the place of your abode, in case I should be anxious to know. I should be very proud to believe that I had so much influence over you as you kindly intimate. But if your letter can be relied upon, you will not miss me very much as long as you can have a machine to turn round and round.
I was not so much surprised to hear of your going to New York as if you had never spoken of it to me. And I do not know why you should imagine that I would have remonstrated with you. You write as if I were a kind of evil genius whom you found it necessary to avoid. This I assure you is a mistake. I am truly your friend. But I hope I should not have distressed you by crying as Rachel did, if you had been brave enough to come and tell me what you were going to do.
As you have told me about your situation, I suppose I may tell you about mine. I am staying with my Aunt Helen, helping her keep house, and taking lessons in singing and the piano, besides hers in housekeeping. Aunt Helen wanted me to come, and Mrs. Sylva did not object, though father did.
It will always give me pleasure to hear from you.
NETTIE.
P. S. Jeff Fleming is in Hartford now. He came with me. He is real good company. He is clerk in a store, and they say he has been making some first-rate speeches before the Sons of Temperance perance. Nobody knew he was so smart-except me. I always said he was bright. He is quite attentive, which is very proper to his old friend, all alone here in the busy city.
I am so glad you are comforting poor Rachel. She is so good that I only wonder she should need any comfort. When you see her give her my best love.
You will, perhaps, be interested to hear that Mark Hinsdale has gone to Boston to live, and that Jane Burgess has gone there too. I don’t know exactly what they are doing; but no doubt Rachel will hear from Mark, and tell you all about. Jeff Fleming has not heard yet, except that Jane is visiting her sister, Mrs. Bardles, and is having a kind of holiday. It is as if a mine had exploded under us six, and flung us helter-skelter, six ways for Sundays. I suppose it will all be right, however; fates will be served out to us, I guess, at the rate of about six to the half-dozen. That will be just right: a fate apiece.
NETTIE.
Now, the intelligent reader will have observed that these two letters were like the stories of forests and enchantments drear, which Milton speaks of,-
“Where more is meant than meets the ear.”
They afforded no bad specimens, in fact, of topics which shine by their absence. Horace did not tell Nettie that he was grieved by her conduct or sorry for his own. Nor did Nettie tell any thing of the kind to Horace. Like two Yankees, as they were, they were talking about the weather and the crops, instead of coming right down to their bargain.
Horace’s letter did not surprise Nettie particularly, for he had often talked to her of his schemes of fortunes to be made in the city; but hers did somewhat startle him, and it annoyed him too. But it was his own fault; for he had written, in his displeasure, a stiffish and rather presuming letter, to tell the truth. What business had he to assume that it was such a mighty concern of hers whether he left Greyford or not? And then the innuendo, twice over, that she
must profess a deep interest in his goings-on or else he wouldn’t say a word about them! It was not a very judicious piece of diplomacy, truly.
If it had told the whole truth, however, instead of telling not half, but one-third of it, so to speak, it would have been still less judicious; that is, always supposing that Master Horace had intended to propitiate. But the young gentleman had thought fit to conceal from Nettie a still more striking expression of that emotional sympathy which he had described than that which he did mention. The fact is, that, quite carried away by poor Rachel’s tears, Horace had at parting quietly put his arm round her and kissed her,-on the forehead, I mean, in a beautifully brotherly way; and the poor girl, nervous and fluttered, did not think of resisting.
In short, though Horace was not exactly conscious of it, his letter was cold and irritating, well calculated to provoke Nettie, who, whatever she might be in the depths of her nature, was a sufficiently high-spirited and independent puss, little disposed to be ordered about by anybody. The proof of this, indeed, had already come to pass before Horace wrote, although he knew nothing of it; and not mistrusting any such state of things, this it was which startled him as aforesaid.
One fine day, then, a short time after the evening of the dance at North Denmark, Dr. Sylva brought home the news of Horace’s departure, with a good deal of perturbation in his kindly old heart as to its bearings upon his daughter’s happiness. He gave it first to his wife, along with an open letter, and he requested the good lady to transfer the two to Nettie; for he had a vague idea that where there’s any thing uncomfortable, women should be dealt with by women. N. B. It’s a great mistake!
Mrs. Sylva was a little hampered by consideration tions like these about either happiness or circumspection; being one of those well-meaning and thick-skinned persons who blurt right out whatever occurs to them to say, and look with the most honest surprise at any one who talks about hurting people’s feelings. She marched straightway to the foot of the stairs, and bawled out,-
“Nettie! Nettie! here’s Horace Vanzandt he’s gone to New York ‘long with Rachel Holley, n’ here’s a letter for you f’m Hartford!”
Nettie, busy in her own room, felt her heart give a jump, and then it sank with that painful lost feeling that sudden bad news brings. But as she was alone, nobody saw her; and she turned first pale and then red; and the tears filled her eyes, and she succeeded in preventing them from running over; and it was with a delay scarcely perceptible that she ran downstairs and received the letter, answering her step-mother’s communication very composedly with,-
“Well, Horace Vanzandt has been talking long enough about going, and it’s time he went, I’m sure!”
She very soon read her aunt’s letter, and very promptly accepted its invitation, much against the wishes of the worthy doctor. But Nettie argued with much briskness and force that this was exactly the occasion she had been waiting for to take some finishing lessons in singing and on the piano, and moreover in the ways of the “Old Hartford Housekeepers;” a generation of ancient dames who are traditionally reported to have possessed mighty secrets of the kitchen and of the pantry, as efficacious in their way as those Runic rhymes which could cleave mountains and shiver good steel swords.
We will, however, let her get to Hartford by herself,-it is a safe and easy journey,-while we communicate to the reader the experiences, indispensable to the understanding of the remainder of our tale, of Horace and Rachel in New York.
A great city is a great solitude. Within it, little settlements grow up here and there, as in a new country, of those who are neighbors by location, and who do or may become acquaintances or friends by intercourse. Sometimes these are established in some group of houses not very far apart from each other; sometimes the whole is included under one roof, like the nests of the sociable grossbeaks that we used to read about in the natural history.
These single-roof birds’-nests are sometimes found in boarding-houses; and it happened that our two Connecticut young folks drifted into one where, for the time being at least, all the birds in their little nests agreed. For it is too often that we see the shameful sight (we beg good Doctor Watts’s pardon for imbedding one of his “inspired poems,” as some admiring divine calls them, into our poor flat prose) of all the children of such a family falling out and chiding and fighting.
People in the city, again, and things in the city, are like those in the country, with the effects of density and excitement superadded. They are “fired up” very high by the sharp stimulus of their purposes and the further stimulus of the competition which makes every day a fight-not merely a struggle, but a fight-for life. They are magnetized, too, each by all the others. At night, from miles away on the Palisades or down the Bay, you can see a dusky red glare that caps the whole of the great city like a low-lying lurid cloud brooding down upon it. It is the generalized result and remainder of the millions of lights that are burning there, and that fill all the air above them with this red glow. Exactly such a lurid, dim, hot glow of mental and physical excitement incessantly broods over the city.
Now, the condition of things in which Horace and Rachel found themselves was a twofold state. They underwent the excitement of New York, and were of course in more or less danger from it. Many of the places of abode which were suited to their means would for various reasons have concentrated and re-enforced this excitement and this danger. Even as it was, they did not escape entirely from it. It happened that certain countervailing influences, together with such resisting qualities as the two young persons possessed within themselves, saved them from any serious harm.
It was Rachel who had told Horace where to look for his city home.
“Come to Mrs. Worboise’s with me,” she had said. “I shall go there; and, if you don’t like, then you can go away after a little while.”
So he went. No danger that he should go away! Poor Mrs. Worboise! Her difficulty was, that she could not make people go away. As long as he staid in New York he abode with the plump, laughing, crying, soft-hearted motherly baby of a woman; and if he were to live there for centuries, he would never have thought of going away, nor for ten thousand years. Indeed, Jim Fellows, then a reporter, who was staying there at the time, used to shock the two serious boarders, Miss Doddle and Mrs. Pogey, every little while, by singing to the piano-forte in the parlor a naughty parody on a good Methodist camp-meeting hymn:-
When we’ve been here ten thousand years,
A stuffing just like fun,
Each greedy sinner will eat more dinner
Than if he’d just begun.
“You’ll surely be bankrupt, dame,” Fellows would say. “No human being can set such a good table and take such care of boarders as you do and not be ruined.”
And Mrs. Worboise would laugh her jolly, musical laugh, as cheery as a schoolgirl’s, despite her fifty years and widowhood, and say, oh, she guessed not!
“But you know you will,” persevered the teasing youth, on one of these occasions, not long after Rachel and Horace had enlisted under her banner: “how much does that pompous old Judge De Forest owe you now? Four hundred and fifty dollars, isn’t it?”
“I do wish he would do something for me,” said Mrs. Worboise, “that’s a fact. He promises to pay half next Saturday, though.”
“Mrs. Worboise,” said Fellows, lifting his forefinger at the landlady in a stern and awful manner, “now answer me a straight question, upon your conscience and honor. Hasn’t he made you that very promise every week for three months?-what?”
Poor Mrs. Worboise blushed as rosy as the evening ing clouds. She had one of those very fine, clear-tinted, transparent skins that never grow muddy nor rough, and her cheeks were as smooth as a plump little girl’s, and she blushed as easily. Besides, she was caught. Fellows, a very perspicacious personage, had hit upon the exact nature of the Judge’s financial relations with Mrs. Worboise: they had caused the poor landlady many a secret tear, and many an unconcealed one too, for that matter; for she cried at
least as easily as she laughed. She laughed now; but there was a perceptible uneasiness in the laugh, and she said, with an effort,-
“Well, Mr. Fellows, if all my boarders were as honest and regular as you are, in spite of all your naughty words, I should get along very well.”
“Naughty words, indeed!” responded the young gentleman with a mighty affectation of anger. “I defy you to refer to a single improper expression.”
“But you are very irreverent, Mr. Fellows!”
“That’s only because I always say my prayers in secret, dame,”-he almost always called her dame. “And you do take cheating so easily, that it’s evident it’s what you are for. It’s a great shame that I don’t cheat you; so it is. Do you know, Mrs. Worboise,” he continued, suddenly changing his tone to one of embarrassment, “I am greatly troubled to raise some money to-day. Could you possibly let me have fifty dollars until Saturday? It would save me from real distress.”
“Why, yes indeed, you dear boy!” cried out Mrs. Worboise; and the tears stood in her great soft brown eyes, ready to run over at his trouble; “and more too. Here,”-and she drew out a pocket-book. “But remember Saturday; for in-deed I must have it then: I have promised it on the rent; and I’m sadly behind.”
She was eagerly counting out the bills; but Fellows burst out laughing, whereat she looked up in the most innocent surprise imaginable, and saw that she was deluded.
“Oh, that’s a shame!” she said. “You bad man!”
“Yes,” said the reporter gravely, “no doubt you think so. That’s just like a woman. But if you thought some of your money had been a great help to me, nothing would make you think me bad.”
“Now, stop!” said the landlady. “Go along. You know how much I like you. But I want Rachel to help me now about some sewing; and you must go away.”
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