The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860

"Before you have shuffled off mortality for the whole party, sit down under this hedge,–here is an opportune bench,–and give me accounts from the day of my departure."

"Dear me, Roger, as if that were possible! The ocean in a tea-cup? Let me see,–you had a flirtation with Helen that summer, didn't you? Well, she spent the next winter at the Fort with the Purcells. It was odd to miss both her and Mrs. Laudersdale from society at once. Mrs. Laudersdale was ill; I don't know exactly what the trouble was. You know she had been in such an unusual state of exhilaration all that summer; and as soon as she left New Hampshire and began the old city-life, she became oppressed with a speechless melancholy, I believe, so that the doctors foreboded insanity. She expressed great disinclination to follow their advice, and her husband finally banished them all. It was a great care to him; he altered much. McLean surmised that she didn't like to see him, while she was in this state; for, though he used to surround her with every luxury, and was always hunting out new appliances, and raising the heavens for a trifle, he kept himself carefully out of her sight during the greater part of the winter. I don't know whether she became insufferably lonely, or whether the melancholy wore off, or she conquered it, and decided that it was not right to go crazy for nothing, or what happened. But one cold March evening he set out for his home, dreary, as usual, he thought; and he found the fire blazing and reddening the ceiling and curtains, the room all aglow with rich shadows, and his wife awaiting him, in full toilet, just as superb as you will see her tonight, just as sweet and cold and impassible and impenetrable. At least," continued Mrs. McLean, taking breath, "I have manufactured this little romance out of odds and ends that McLean has now and then reported from his conversation. I dare say there isn't a bit of it true, for Mr. Laudersdale isn't a man to publish his affairs; but I believe it. One thing is certain: Mrs. Laudersdale withdrew from society one autumn and returned one spring, and has queened it ever since."

"Is Mr. Laudersdale with you?"

"No. But he will come with their daughter shortly."

"And with what do you all occupy yourselves, pray?"

"Oh, with trifles and tea, as you would suppose us to do. Mrs. Purcell gossips and lounges, as if she were playing with the world for spectator. Mrs. Laudersdale lounges, and attacks things with her finger-ends, as if she were longing to remould them. Mrs. McLean gossips and scolds, as if it depended on her to keep the world in order."

"Are you going to keep me under the hedge all night?"

"This is pretty well! Hush! Who is that?"

As Mrs. McLean spoke, a figure issued from the tall larches on the left, and crossed the grass in front of them,–a woman, something less tall than a gypsy queen might be, the round outlines of her form rich and regular, with a certain firm luxuriance, still wrapped in a morning-robe of palm-spread cashmere. In her hand she carried various vines and lichens that had maintained their orange-tawny stains under the winter's snow, and the black hair that was folded closely over forehead and temple was crowned with bent sprays of the scarlet maple-blossom. As vivid a hue dyed her cheek through warm walking, and with a smile of unconscious content she passed quickly up the slope and disappeared within the doorway. She impressed the senses of the beholder like some ripe and luscious fruit, a growth of sunshine and summer.

"Well," said Mrs. McLean, drawing breath again, "who is it?"

"Really, I cannot tell," replied Mr. Raleigh.

"Nor guess?"

"And that I dare not."

"Must I tell you?"

"Was it Mrs. Laudersdale?"

"And shouldn't you have known her?"

"Scarcely."

"Mercy! Then how did you know me? She is unaltered."

"If that is Mrs. Purcell, at the window, she does not recognize me, you see; neither did –. Both she and yourself are nearly the same; one could not fail to know either of you; but of the Mrs. Laudersdale of thirteen years ago there remains hardly a vestige."

If Mrs. McLean, at this testimony, indulged in that little inward satisfaction which the most generous woman may feel, when told that her color wears better than the color of her dearest friend, it must have been quickly quenched by the succeeding sentence.

"Yes, she is certainly more beautiful than I ever dreamed of a woman's being. If she continues, I do not know what perfect thing she will become. She is too exquisite for common use. I wonder her husband is not jealous of every mote in the air, of rain and wind, of every day that passes over her head,–since each must now bear some charm from her in its flight."

Mr. Raleigh was talking to Mrs. McLean as one frequently reposes confidence in a person when quite sure that he will not understand a word you say.

An hour afterward, Mrs. Purcell joined Mrs. McLean.

"So that is Mr. Raleigh, is it?" she said. "He looks as if he had made the acquaintance of Siva the Destroyer. There's nothing left of him. Is he taller, or thinner, or graver, or darker, or what? My dear Kate, your cousin, that promised to be such a hero, has become a mere man-of-business. Did you ever burn firecrackers? You have probably found some that just fizzed out, then." And Mrs. Purcell took an attitude.

"Roger is a much finer man than he was, I think,–so far as I could judge in the short time we have seen each other," replied Mrs. McLean, with spirit.

"Do you know," continued Mrs. Purcell, "what makes the Laudersdale so gay? No? She has a letter from her lord, and he brings you that little Rite next week. I must send for the Colonel to see such patterns of conjugal felicity as you and she. Ah, there is the tea-bell!"

Mr. Raleigh was standing with one hand on the back of his chair, when Mrs. Laudersdale entered. The cheek had resumed its usual pallor, and she was in her customary colors of black and gold. She carried a curiously cut crystal glass, which she placed on the sideboard, and then moved toward her chair. Her eye rested casually for a moment on Mr. Raleigh, as she crossed the threshold, and then returned with a species of calm curiosity.

"Mrs. Laudersdale has forgotten me?" he asked, with a bow. His voice, not susceptible of change in its tone of Southern sweetness, identified him.

"Not at all," she replied, moving toward him, and offering him her hand quietly. "I am happy at meeting Mr. Raleigh again." And she took her seat.

There was something in her grasp that relieved him. It was neither studiedly cold, nor absurdly brief, nor traitorously tremulous. It was simply and forgetfully indifferent. Mr. Raleigh surveyed her with interest during the light table-talk. He had been possessed with a restless wish to see her once more, to ascertain if she had yet any fraction of her old power over him; he had all the more determinedly banished himself from the city,–to find her in the country. Now he sought for some trace of what had formerly aroused his heart. He rose from table convinced that the woman whom he once loved with the whole fervor of youth and strength and buoyant life was no more, that she did not exist, and that Mr. Raleigh might experience a new passion, but his old one was as dead as the ashes that cover the Five Cities of the Plain. He wondered how it might be with her. For a moment he cursed his inconstancy; then he feared lest she were of larger heart and firmer resolve than he,–lest her love had been less light than his; he could scarcely feel himself secure of freedom,–he must watch. And then stole in a deeper sense of loneliness than exile and foreign tongues had taught him,–the knowledge of being single and solitary in the world, not only for life, but for eternity.

The evening was passed in the recitation of affairs by himself and his cousins alone together, and until a week completed its tale of dawns and sunsets there was the same diurnal recurrence of question and answer. One day, as the afternoon was paling, Rite came.

Mr. Raleigh had fallen asleep on the vine-hidden seat outside the bay-window, and was awakened, certainly not by Mrs. Laudersdale's velvets trailing over the drawing-room carpet. She was just entering, slow-paced, though in haste. She held out both of her beautiful arms. A little form of airy lightness, a very snow-wreath, blew into them.

"O ma maman! Est ce que c'est toi," it cried. "O comme tu es douce! Si belle, si molle, si chère!" And the fair head was lying beneath the dark one, the face hidden in the bent and stately neck.

Mr. Raleigh left his seat, unseen, and betook himself to another abode. As he passed the drawing-room door, on his return, he saw the mother lying on a lounge, with the slight form nestled beside her, playing with it as some tame leopardess might play with her silky whelp. It was almost the only portion of the maternal nature developed within her.

It seemed as if the tea-hour were a fated one. Mr. Raleigh had been out on the water and was late. As he entered, Rite sprang up, half-overturning her chair, and ran to clasp his hand.

"I did not know that you and Mr. Raleigh were acquainted," said Mrs. McLean.

"Oh, Madam, Mr. Raleigh and I had the pleasure of being shipwrecked together," was the reply; and except that Mrs. Laudersdale required another napkin where her cup had spilled, all went on smoothly.

Mrs. Laudersdale took Marguerite entirely to herself for a while. She seemed, at first, to be like some one suddenly possessed of a new sense, and who did not know in the least what to do with it; but custom and familiarity destroyed this sentiment. She did not appear to entertain a doubt of her child's natural affection, but she had care to fortify it by the exertion of every charm she possessed. From the presence of dangerous rivals in the house, an element of determination blended with her manner, and she moved with a certain conscious power, as if wonderful energies were but half-latent with her, as if there were kingdoms to conquer and crowns to win, and she the destined instrument You would have selected her, at this time of her lavish devotion to Marguerite, as the one woman of complete capability, of practical effective force, and have declared that there was nothing beyond her strength. The relation between herself and her child was certainly as peculiar as anything else about them; the disparity of age seemed so slight that they appeared like sisters, full of mutual trust, the younger leaning on the elder for support in the most trivial affairs. They walked through the woods together, learned again its glades and coverts, searched its early treasure of blossoms; they went out on the lake and spent long April afternoons together, floating about cove and inlet of island-shores; they returned with innocent gayety to that house which once the mother, in her moment of passion, had fancied to be a possible heaven of delight, and which, since, she had found to be a very indifferent limbo. For, after all, we derive as much happiness from human beings as from Nature, and it was a tie of placid affection that bound her to the McLeans, not of sympathetic union, and her husband was careful never to oppress her with too much of his society. Whether this woman, who had lived a life of such wordless emotion, who had never bestowed a confidence, suddenly blossomed like a rose and took the little new-comer into the gold-dust and fragrance of her heart, or whether there was always between them the thin impalpable division that estranged the past from the present, there was nothing to tell; it seemed, nevertheless, as if they could have no closer bond, had they read each other's thoughts from birth.

That this assumption of Marguerite could not continue exclusive Mr. Raleigh found, when now and then joined in his walks by an airy figure flitting forward at his side: now and then; since Mrs. Laudersdale, without knowing how to prevent, had manifested an uneasiness at every such rencontre;–and that it could not endure forever, another gentleman, without so much reason, congratulated himself,–Mr. Frederic Heath, the confidential clerk of Day, Knight, and Company,–a rather supercilious specimen, quite faultlessly got up, who had accompanied her from New York at her father's request, and who already betrayed every symptom of the suitor. Meanwhile, Mrs. McLean's little women clamorously demanded and obtained a share of her attention,–although Capua and Ursule, with their dark skins, brilliant dyes, and equivocal dialects, were creatures of a more absorbing interest.

One afternoon, Marguerite came into the drawing-room by one door, as Mr. Raleigh entered by another; her mother was sitting near the window, and other members of the family were in the vicinity, having clustered preparatory to the tea-bell.

Marguerite had twisted tassels of the willow-catkins in her hair, drooping things, in character with her wavy grace, and that sprinkled her with their fragrant yellow powder, the very breath of spring; and in one hand she had imprisoned a premature lace-winged fly, a fairy little savage, in its sheaths of cobweb and emerald, and with its jewel eyes.

"Dear!" said Mrs. Purcell, gathering her array more closely about her. "How do you dare touch such a venomous sprite?"

"As if you had an insect at the North with a sting!" replied Marguerite, suffering it, a little maliciously, to escape in the lady's face, and following the flight with a laugh of childlike glee.

"Here are your snowflakes on stems, mamma," she continued, dropping anemones over her mother's hands, one by one;–"that is what Mr. Raleigh calls them. When may I see the snow? You shall wrap me in eider, that I may be like all the boughs and branches. How buoyant the earth must be, when every twig becomes a feather!" And she moved toward Mr. Raleigh, singing, "Oh, would I had wings like a dove!"

"And here are those which, if not daffodils, yet

"'Come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty,'"

he said, giving her a basket of hepaticas and winter-green.

Marguerite danced away with the purple trophy, and, emptying a carafe into a dish of moss that stood near, took them to Mrs. Laudersdale, and, sitting on the footstool, began to rearrange them. It was curious to see, that, while Mrs. Laudersdale lifted each blossom and let the stem lie across her hand, she suffered it to fall into the place designated for it by Marguerite's fingers, that sparkled in the mosaic till double wreaths of gold-threaded purple rose from the bed of vivid moss and melted into a fringe of the starry spires of winter-green.

"Is it not sweet?" said she then, bending over it.

"They have no scent," said her mother.