CHAPTER VII.
THE winter weeks fled rapidly away, their days and evenings crowded full and over-full of duties and of pleasures, all acting with strange new stimulus upon the clean and healthy but rural and inexperienced natures of Horace and Rachel. They were both of them finely organized, mentally as well as physically, both widely awake to whatever was about them, and sensitively impressible by it. Horace, moreover, possessed much more executive ability-i.e., energetic good sense-than is at all usual or to be expected of people who have the gift of invention. Rachel, on her part, had more of the peculiar faculties which make a mechanic, than would have been expected of a woman, and particularly of one so very delicately fibred and of such introverted mental habits and almost excessively spiritualizing tendencies.
As for Horace, he was pretty well occupied by his book-keeping, by his own efforts at inventing, and by a course of study which he was very sensibly pursuing, in the principles of natural philosophy losophy and in the history of mechanics and invention. Still, he had a superabounding flow of life and spirits; and it was with immense eagerness and curiosity and keen enjoyment that he accepted all sorts of suggestions from master Jim Fellows, to go and see, or go and help do, one and another of the multifarious things and occurrences that a city reporter has to hunt up, or witness, or join in.
Rachel’s situation was as similar to his, perhaps, as a young woman’s could be under the circumstances. She had not, it is true, such exacting and peremptory and regular daily duties to drive her, as those which bound Horace to stand at a desk and compute and make entries so many hours every day on pain of breach of contract, reprimand from a stern employer, and angry expulsion from a respectable and comfortably paid post. When young women do have such external forces about them, they train about as readily, perhaps, into what are called “business habits,” as young men; but they seldom have them.
She was nominally making a winter’s visit to Mrs. Worboise, who was what may be called a half-aunt. That is, Mrs. Worboise was half-sister to Squire Holley; so that if she had had a daughter, such daughter would have been Rachel’s half-cousin; the two girls having in common only one instead of two, out of their eight grandparents. Such relationships are the most convenient in the world. Brother and sister, or parent and child, are under a tremendous conventional imperative to be fond of each other, no matter how entirely unsuitable their tastes and feelings and views and pursuits may be. But half cousinships, for instance, and the like, can be made just as much or just as little of as you choose, and nobody thinks of saying a word.
Not that Mrs. Worboise was a person who took such things into account. Indeed, the dear little woman was an inexhaustible fountain of pure love and tenderness, which flowed forth upon good and evil almost as the Lord’s warm sunshine falleth alike upon both. She had been for a long time coaxing Rachel to come and make her a visit; indeed, ever since the decease of her lord, the late Mr. Worboise, had, by a natural enough train of circumstances, launched her upon the troubled and perilous career of a New York boarding-house keeper’s life-for which she was just as fit as any other little soft trustful baby would be to rule a gang of Apache Indians on horseback in all their war-paint and howls. So Rachel had delayed, and perhaps would never have come, had it not been for the explosion, as Nettie called it in her letter to Horace, which had tossed their little six-fold company in such diverse directions.
Rachel, although she had all those rarer beautiful qualities which belong to a young lady in a book, still, like most other people, had a good deal of human nature in her. She therefore in the course of time gradually recovered from that extreme grief which had overcome her at her mother’s death. She began at once to go to church with Mrs. Worboise, who had been brought up a strict Calvinistic Presbyterian, and she was speedily snapped up by the enterprising Sunday-school superintendent, who happened to meet both the ladies together, as a teacher. She likewise dutifully attended the Thursday evening female prayer-meeting which was maintained with preternatural obstinacy by Mrs. Dr. Blewbly, the minister’s wife, along with a few other of the sterner class of ladies, against the terrific onslaughts of Satan as he appeared in the guise of obstructions arising from city life. Mrs. Pogey and Miss Doddle were two of this earnest band; and Mrs. Worboise used to go regularly with them, because they took her, and Rachel used to go too, because Mrs. Worboise asked her.
Being as aforesaid a dexterous maiden, Miss Rachel quickly came into great request in the house in all things which have respect unto the cutting and fitting of dresses, and, indeed, in whatever pertains to the domain of needlework generally ally. She was already a pretty good workwoman on the sewing-machine, and she at once assumed the whole charge of all such matters for Mrs. Worboise herself, greatly lightening the toils of that overloaded and hard-working lady. Indeed, it was really only fair for her to insist upon remitting to Rachel the money which the latter tendered her at the end of a three-months’ sojourn, aside from the fact that said sojourn was nominally a visit.
Then there were lectures or concerts or sights of some kind every evening. Then Miss Rachel had a course of reading too, no less than Horace; though it was one which some would judge not so useful. Indeed, that practical young gentleman grumbled a little in a careful manner,-for somehow he found himself very cautious about expressing any opposition to Rachel’s more peculiar peculiarities-at the books she devoured so very eagerly. So would most of us perhaps. Yet, after all, it is pretty often true that the reading which we enjoy most does us most good. At any rate, other reading does not usually do us much good, for usually we won’t read it. Rachel read eagerly a number of biographies and other works by and about medival and other mysticists; Jacob Bhmen, Madame Guyon, and so forth. She worked through a good deal of Swedenborg. She tried a good many Spiritualist publications, but could not manage more than two or three of them; and she read industriously at a number of religious and serious periodicals which came to the house. And lastly, she adopted a shrewd suggestion of Horace’s own. He, being a bit of a philosopher, though to tell the truth his dealings with Nettie did not always seem entirely philosophical, had a little theory about the faculties which constitute inventiveness; and he urged Rachel to try and see whether the same correct eye and hand that enabled her to fit a waist so accurately, and to judge so unerringly of sizes and proportions in cutting patterns and economizing materials, would not stand her in good stead in learning decorative design.
He had judged truly. The very suggestion of the Free School of Design at Cooper Union made her cheeks flush with delight. She went and returned home from her first attendance in a high state of pleasurable excitement. The superintendent said, she reported, that she did capitally; and she worked away, first with copies and so on, until she had mastered the handling of her pencil, and then, with constantly growing pleasure, in doing real work “from the round,” and from original subjects; and in pursuance of another wise suggestion of Horace’s she began therewith to make herself acquainted as well as she could with the history of her new avocation, finding endless pleasure in it; most of all, by the way, in tracing out those numberless connections and interminglings of ornament and religion which show such a necessary unison between the instinct of beauty and the instinct of worship.
In all these pursuits of Rachel’s, she was greatly aided and abetted by a Mrs. Erling, who was boarding in the house. Her husband was extant,-which is not always the case with ladies’ husbands in New York,-but he was hardly seen in the house at all. He was an under-sized, blackish-looking, dried-apple sort of man, a managing clerk in a large law-office, very busy indeed, and, sooth to say, about as little fitted to accompany his yoke-fellow along the pathways which she preferred, as could well be. He, however, like a man of sense, made the best of it, let her have her own way, and devoted himself wholly to his own affairs. He hardly said a word at breakfast, shot off as soon as it was over, and was never seen again at all until next morning by anybody but his wife, unless he chanced to be fallen in with about twe
lve o’clock by some belated inmate, who discovered him unobtrusively entering by means of his night-key, or silently gliding upstairs like an uncommonly short, lean, and dark-complexioned ghost.
Mrs. Erling, however, was strangely different from him. She was a frail and almost translucent looking woman, still young, with a singularly pure and ethereal face, exceeding delicate in outline, very fair, with wonderfully limpid, soft eyes, which were surprisingly dark for one all whose other physical traits imported whiteness, and which therefore impressed you with the idea that they belonged to some one else.
She was every way such a person as you may fancy one of Baron Reichenbach’s “sensitives” to have been, but without the positive sickness which seems to have been part of their professional outfit. Without being exactly a “Spiritualist,” this Mrs. Erling was profoundly interested, and pretty well read, in the history-it has no philosophy yet-of that singular ghostly invasion (to admit for the moment its own claims) during the last quarter of a century which has chosen that name, and also in a great range of reading on related subjects, including the mystics already spoken of, remote inquiries about the earliest heretics and heretical sects, Gnostics and Manicheans, for instance, the purer heathen religions, magic, and so on. Rachel was naturally disposed to the wondering part of religious experiences, and of course found herself very ready to follow Mrs. Erling through her spiritual old curiosity shop.
At the same time, her whole religious training, and the naturally elevated tone of her own thoughts, kept her awake to the immeasurably superior purity, grandeur, and wonderfulness of Christianity. Thus, she was in no great danger from her forays into wonderland, though you could never have thought it, to listen to the heart-breaking lamentations of Miss Doddle and Mrs. Pogey, who were morally certain, and indeed stated in so many words, that Satan was evidently lying in wait for the young girl, and greatly desiring to have her, that he might sift her as wheat.
While time fled rapidly as aforesaid, other matters, without exactly fleeing, just went on as usual. Any of Mrs. Worboise’s guests who chose, cheated her; and there were too many who did. Among these was old Judge De Forest, who was a disgraceful old humbug, not to put too fine a point upon it. He, as well as Horace, was an inventor, but of what, nobody seemed distinctly to know. He was a large, portly, red-faced man, very oily and voluble of speech, habitually talking of such astronomical sounding totals as millions of dollars, very energetic in wordy advocacy of all manner of what are called “advanced and reformatory” views; and he wore a frill to his shirt, chewed a good deal of tobacco in a rather juicy way, and walked with a gold-headed cane. He had some place or places which he called “of business,” and he usually went to them. He spent a good deal of time, however, in his room,-he had one of the best rooms in the house,-at work at what seemed like mechanical drawing, with a big board, great sheets of white paper, pencils, and things; but at any hints respecting the said employment, he pursed up his mouth with great dignity, and assumed an air of haughty reserve quite wonderful to see, only intimating that it was impossible to discuss the higher secrets of science with ordinary folks.
Naturally enough, living so near together, and with so much that was in common in their ways of thinking, Horace and Rachel became more and more intimate, and more confidential and unreserved in exchanging thoughts. Rachel’s unvarying sweetness of temper, and her unconscious unworldliness, diffused around her an atmosphere of rest which was exquisitely delightful to the young man, worried and as it were storm-tossed beyond expression as he had so often been with the turbulent unreasonableness of Nettie Sylva. His correspondence with this latter young lady, as may have been conjectured, had much the qualities after which Master Slender aspired in his proposed marriage relation with Miss Anne Page; there was no great love in the beginning (of the correspondence, of course), and it pleased. Heaven to decrease it upon better acquaintance. It dwindled rapidly; and indeed quickly became practically extinct, yet without either amicable explanation or unkind word. The fact is, like the seed in the parable, because it had no root, it withered away.
So. Horace waited on Rachel whenever she wanted an escort, and spent very many pleasant hours in reading or talking with her in the parlor or in Mrs. Worboise’s own neat little sitting-room. She was as glad of his company as he was of hers; and he found a new and keen pleasure in seeing the dainty tact with which she used to manuvre to escape from Jim Fellows or from the Judge, either as conversation-mate or escort, and to shelter herself under the wing of him, Horace. After some-narrow escapes in such enterprises as these, from dilemmas which would have entailed either direct fibs or open refusals, Miss Rachel bethought herself of a device that is old enough, no doubt, but which Horace happened not to have thought of; and it gave him a degree of pleasure whose depth surprised himself. Perhaps there is no human bliss more inexpressible than that of him to whom a lovely woman unconsciously reveals that she prefers him. What Rachel proposed posed was an engagement. Not that, reader; another sort. It was a standing prior engagement as escort; so that she might always say with truth that she had to go with him.
CHAPTER VIII.
DID space permit, I should like to trace pretty fully the experiences of the year which Horace and Rachel thus spent in New York City. They were many and significant; for even so short a period as a year, during which we live broad, is evidently equal to a long one during which we live narrow, even on the principles of board measure. Mr. Tennyson has said very much the same thing, in his terse maxim of comparative chronology about “fifty years of Europe” and “a cycle of Cathay.” The thing is impossible, however; it would fill a book. The winter passed, and the spring came, with its abominably filthy streets, and the uprising again of all the evil smells that defile our greatest city. Dirtier fifty years of New York than a cycle of Cologne, I really believe. But the little band of pilgrims at Mrs. Worboise’s boarding-house lived through it, although their landlady’s delicately clean housekeeping probably made the streets worse to them than to anybody else. The months passed on; the mud and smells of spring were succeeded by the dust and smells of summer. But the discomforts of the close and uncleanly city were often relieved by the little excursions that Horace or Jim,-now promoted, by the way, to an editorial post in the office of “The Great Democracy,”-used to organize at least once a week; sometimes to Fort Lee and the wooded summits of the Palisades; sometimes to the heights of Staten Island above the Narrows, where the dismantled old circular sandstone tower of Fort Richmond stands in a comatose state among the trees, or looking vacantly down upon the enormous modern water-battery below. Sometimes they went over to Greenwood; or rambled along the beach in the vicinity of Fort Hamilton,-though the beauties of the seashore thereabouts, and on Staten Island as well, are too often profaned and ruined by the sad remains of some defunct horse or dog, greatly destructive of all romance. And the Central Park was always open; a blessed parenthesis of sweet air and wholesome nature let in among the brick and stone, wholesome and refreshing as a cool sleep between hot, weary days; Rachel and Mrs. Erling particularly used to pass many a delightful half-day there; sometimes near the Mall and the Lake and the shrubbery above it, sometimes in the less frequented and quieter regions at the northern part of the Park.
The four quarters of the completed year went by; the cool nights of the last part of August foretold the coming of cool days in September, and in due time the cool days came. It was on one of these days that Horace, coming down to breakfast as usual, discerned upon the pleasant face of the landlady, obvious and unusually disfiguring traces of weeping. By this time Horace had established himself very strongly in the affections of Mrs. Worboise, who indeed had come to lean upon him very much as a widow does upon her grown-up son. She was fond of Jim Fellows, too, for the endless vagaries and quips of that rather fantastic person had a curious fascination for her. But she was rather afraid of him, or at least she never felt quite sure about him; while the more delicate tact and more respectful kindness of Horace had drawn her very
near to him. It was therefore neither impertinent nor inquisitive for him to beckon her away from the breakfast-table a moment, before he departed to his business, and when she had accompanied him into the parlor, to ask her plainly what was the matter.
The poor little lady sat down on the sofa, and spoke. Horace was affected by her grief, for, as he said himself, he could scarcely help crying, tall, strong fellow as he was, when he saw the tears of another; and yet he could not help a sense of the ludicrous as Mrs. Worboise told her little story, her large soft eyes looking straight into his, and the tears coming out one after another close to her little pink nose, and pursuing each other down her soft cheeks until they fell into her lap, while so easily and fluently did she cry, that not a single sob interfered with her speech.
“O Horace! I don’t know what I shall do. I can’t get any money from Mr. De Forest; and he owes me all by himself enough to pay almost a quarter’s rent. And the landlord says he won’t wait any longer; and if I don’t pay up in full by the first of October, and a month in advance besides, he must have all my furniture as security, and I must leave the house on the first of November too. I suppose he ought to have his money; but it’s very hard! I don’t think he ought to take away every thing I have in the world!”
Now, Horace was what you may call a natural husband. That is, he had plenty of sense and energy, abundance of sympathy, and the proper tact of a man; which is, in cases like this, rather to support with fit encouragement than to add grief to grief.
“It’s a great shame, Mrs. Worboise. But now, don’t you feel bad until to-morrow, at any rate. I have something in my mind that will very likely help you. So cheer up, and keep up your courage. We’ll see you safe through, Providence permitting.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 420
