The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863

Mine, that, so long has glowed and burned,
With passions into ashes turned,
Now covers and conceals its fires.

O little souls, as pure and white
And crystalline as rays of light
Direct from heaven, their source divine!
Refracted through the mist of years,
How red my setting sun appears,
How lurid looks this soul, of mine!

MRS. LEWIS

A STORY IN THREE PARTS

PART III

XI

When we returned from our journey, Lulu was among the first to greet us, and with a cordial animation quite unlike the gentle, dawdling way she used to have. Indeed, I was struck the first evening with a new impulse, and a healthful mental current, that gave glow and freshness to everything she said. Mr. Lewis was gone to Cuba, she told us, and would be away a month more, but "George" was with her continually, and the days were all too short for what they had to do. She seemed to have attacked all the arts and sciences simultaneously, and with an eagerness very amusing to see. George had begun a numismatic collection for her, and she had made out an historic table from the coins, writing down all that was most important under each king's reign. George had brought home some fine specimens of stones, and had interested her much in mineralogy. George liked riding, and had taught her to ride; and she now perpetually made her appearance in her riding-habit and little jockey-cap, wishing she could do something for me here or there. George moulded, and taught her to mould; and she was dabbling in clay and plaster of Paris all the morning. George painted beautifully in water-colors, and taught her to sketch from Nature, which she often did now, in their rides, when the days were pleasant enough. George not only thrummed a Spanish guitar, but liked singing; so music went on with wonderful force and improvement. Nothing that George liked better than botany, metaphysics, and micrology. And now Lulu was screaming at dreadful dragons' heads on a pin's point, or delighted with diamond-beetles and spiders' eyes. She fairly revelled in the new worlds that were opened to her eager eye and hungry mind. No more long, tiresome mornings now. Every hour was occupied. Intelligent smiles dimpled her beautiful mouth; the weary, unoccupied, childish look vanished from her eyes; and her talk was animated and animating. For though she might not tell much that was new, she told it in a new way and with the fresh light of recent experience. Thus she became in a wonderfully short time a quite different woman from the Lulu of the early winter.

We acknowledged that she was become an agreeable companion. In a few weeks of home-education her soul had expanded to a tropical and rich growth. This we were talking over one night, when Lulu had been with us, and when George had come for her and extinguished us with his great hearty laugh and abundant health and activity, as the sun's effulgence does a house-candle.

"I don't like that Remington, either," said the minister, after we were left in this state of darkness.

"But, surely, he has given Lulu's mind a most desirable impulse and direction. How glad Mr. Lewis will be to see her so happy, so animated, and so sensible, when he comes home!"

"If that makes him happy, he could have had it before, I suppose. But do you notice anything unhealthy in this mental cultivation,—anything forced in this luxuriant flowering? Now the light of heaven expands the whole nature, I hold, into healthy and proportioned beauty. If anything is lacking or exuberant, the influence is not heavenly, be sure. What do you think of this statement?"

"Very sensible, but very Hebrew to me."

"I never thought Lulu's were 'household eyes,'—but now she never speaks of husband or children, of house or home. Now that is not a suitable mental condition. Let us hope that this intellectual effervescence will subside, and leave her some thoughtfulness and care for others, and the meditation which will make her accomplishments something to enrich and strengthen, rather than excite and overrun her mind."

"Ah! well, it is only a few weeks, not more than six, since she found out she had a soul. No wonder she feels she has been such a laggard in the race, she must keep on the gallop now to make up for lost time."

"But,—about the husband and children?"

"Oh, they will come in in due time and take their true place. She is a young artist, and hasn't got her perspectives arranged. Be sure they will be in the foreground presently," said I, cheerfully.

"Let us hope so. For a wife, mother, and house-mistress to be racing after so many ologies, and ignoring her daily duties, is a spectacle of doubtful utility to me."

To tell the truth, this want of domestic interest had often struck me also. One day, as we were talking about my children, Lulu had said that she believed herself destitute of the maternal instinct; for although she liked to see the children, of course, yet she did not miss them when away from her. And after the death of young Lewis, which happened while they were at Cuba, and which distressed my Johnnie so much that he could not for a long time bear either books or play, for want of his beloved playmate, his mother, apparently, did not lament him at all.

"I never liked to have him with me," she said to me,—"partly, I suppose, because he reminded me of Montalli, and of a period of great suffering in my life. I should be glad never to think of him again. But William seemed to love and pity him always. Gave him his name, and always treated him like an only and elder son. And William is fond of the little girls, too. I don't mean that I am not fond of them, but not as he is. He will go and spend a week at a time playing and driving with them."

Indeed, she very often reminded me of Undine in her soulless days.

As she scarcely went into society, during the absence of Mr. Lewis, Lulu had time for all this multifarious culture that I have been describing, and she was gradually coming also to reason and reflect on what she read and heard, though her appetite for knowledge continued with the same keenness. Her artistic eye, which naturally grouped and arranged with taste whatever was about her, stood her in good stead of experience; and with a very little instruction, she was able to do wonders in both a plastic and pictorial way.

One day she showed me a fine drawing of the Faun of Praxiteles, with some verses written beneath. The lines seemed to me full of vigor and harmony. They implied and breathed, too, such an intimacy with classical thought, that I was astonished when, in answer to my inquiry, she told me she wrote them herself.

"How delighted Mr. Lewis will be with this!" I exclaimed, looking at the beautifully finished drawing; "to think how you have improved, Lulu!"

"You think so?" she answered, with glistening eyes. "I, too, feel that I have, and am so happy!"

"I am sure Mr. Lewis will be so, too," I continued, persistently.

She answered in a sharp tone, dropping her eyes, and, as it were, all the joy out of them,—

"Surely, I have told you often enough that Mr. Lewis hates literary women! I am not goose enough to expect him to sympathize with any intellectual pursuits of mine. No. Fatima in the harem, or Nourmahal thrumming her lute under a palm-tree, is his belle-idéale; failing that, a housekeeper and drudge."

I cannot describe the scorn with which she said this. She changed the subject, however, at once, instead of pursuing it as she would formerly have done, and soon after left me for a drive over Milton Hills with George, with a hammer and sketch-book in the chaise.

Mr. Lewis's business in Cuba was prolonged into May. He had estates there, and desired to dispose of them, Lulu said, so that they might for the future live entirely at the North, which they both liked better.

I could not help seeing that her affections drifted farther and farther every week from their lawful haven, and I wished Mr. Lewis safe back again and overlooking his Northern estates. I guessed how, through her pride of awakened intellect, Lulu's gratitude had wrought a deep interest in her cousin. He had rescued her from the idleness and inanity of her daily life, pointed out to her the broad fields of literary enjoyment and excellence, and inevitably associated his own image with all the new and varied occupations with which her now busy days were filled. The poetry she read he brought to her; the songs she sang were of his selection. His mind and taste, his observations and reflections, were all written over every page she read, over every hour of her life. She had been on a desert island in her intellectual loneliness. She could hardly help loving the hand that had guided her to the palm-tree and the fountain, especially when she glanced back at the long sandy reach of her life.

Naturally enough, I watched and distrusted Mr. Remington, who was a man of the world, and knew very well what he was about. Of all things, he dearly loved to be excited, occupied, and amused. Of course, I was not disturbed about his heart, nor seriously supposed he would get into any entanglement of the affections and the duties of life, but I thought he might do a great deal of harm for all that.

At last, in the middle of May, Mr. Lewis returned, having failed in his desired arrangement for a permanent residence in New England. The first evening I saw them together without company, I perceived that he was struck with the new life in Lulu's manner and conversation. He watched and listened to her with an astonishment which he could not conceal.

I never saw anything like jealousy in Mr. Lewis's manner, either at this time, or before. He was always tender and dignified, when speaking to or of her. If he felt any uneasiness now, he did not betray it. In looking back, I am sure of this. Afterwards, in company, where he might be supposed to be proud of his wife, he often looked at her with the same astonishment, and sometimes with unaffected admiration. He could not help seeing the great change in her,—that the days were taken up with rational and elegant pursuits, and that the hours were vocal with poetry and taste. The illuminating mind had brought her tulip beauty into a brighter and more gorgeous glow, and her movements were full of graceful meaning. Everything was touched and inspired but the heart. I don't know that he felt this, or that he missed anything. She had the same easy self-possession in his presence which she had always had,—the same pet names of endearment. It was always "Willie, dear," or "Yes, my love," which makes the usual matrimonial vocabulary, and which does not reward study. But he always looked at her with a calm delight, perfectly satisfied with all she said and did, and with a Southern indolence of mind and body, that precluded effort. I think he never once lost entire confidence in her, or was jealous of the hand that had unlocked such mental treasures for her.

Meanwhile her eager lip quaffed the bright cup so cautiously presented, and drained it with ever new delight. If it was mingled with delicate flattery, it only sparkled more merrily; and if there were poison there, I am sure she never guessed it, even when it burnt in her cheek or thrilled in her dancing veins.

XII

The Lewises, with Mr. Remington and a large party of pleasure-seekers, went about this time on a tour to Quebec and the Falls of Montmorency. They decided to shut their house in Boston, and Lulu asked me if I would employ and look after a protégée of hers, in whom she took some interest. The woman was a tolerable seamstress, she said, and would come to me the next day. She knew nothing about her except that she was poor and could sew.

When the woman came in, I was puzzled to think where I could have seen her, which I was sure I had done somewhere, though I could not recall the where or when. In answer to my particular inquiries, as she could give me no references, she told me her husband was living, but was sick and could do nothing for his family,—in fact, that she and three children were kept alive by her efforts of various sorts. These were, sewing when she could get it, washing and scrubbing when she could not. She was very poorly dressed, but had a Yankee, go-ahead expression, as if she would get a living on the top of a bare rock.

Still puzzling over the likeness in her face to somebody I had known, I continued to ask questions and to observe face, manner, and voice, in hope to catch the clue of which I was in search. When she admitted that her husband's intemperance had lost him his place and forbade his getting another, and said his name was Jim Ruggles, "a light broke in upon my brain." I remembered my vision of the fresh young girl who had sprung out on our path like a morning-glory, on our way to New York seven years before. The poor morning-glory was sadly trodden in the dust. It hadn't done "no good," as the driver had remarked, to forewarn her of the consequences of marrying a sponge. She had accepted her lot, and, strangely enough, was quite happy in it. There could be no mistake in the cheerful expression of her worn face. Whatever Jim might be to other people, she said, he was always good to her and the children; and she pitied him, loved him, and took care of him. It wasn't at all in the fashion the Temperance Society would have liked; for when I first went to the house, I found her pouring out a glass of strong waters for him, and handing it to his pale and trembling lips herself. As soon as I was seated, she locked bottle and glass carefully. Before I left her, she had given him stimulants of various sorts from the same source, which he received with grateful smiles, and then went on coughing as before.

"It's no time now for him to be forming new habits," said she, in answer to my open-eyed surprise; "and it's best he should have all the comfort and ease he can get. As long as I can get it for him, he shall have it."

She spoke very quietly, but very much as if the same will of her own which had led her to marry Jim Ruggles, when a gay, dissipated fellow, kept her determined to give him what he wanted, even to the doubtful extreme I saw. So she struggled bravely on during the next four weeks of Jim's existence, keeping herself and her three children on hasty pudding, and buying for Jim's consumptively craving appetite rich mince-pies and platefuls of good rich food from an eating-house hard by. At the end of the four weeks he died most peacefully and suddenly, having not five minutes before swallowed a glass of gin sling, prepared by the loving hand of his wife, and saying to her, with a firm, clear voice, and a grateful smile, "Good Amy! always good!" So the weak man's soul passed away. And as Amy told me about it, with sorrowful sobs, I was not ready to say or think she had done wrong, although both her conduct and my opinion were entirely uncanonical.

Before Mrs. Lewis returned, Amy was one day at my room and asked me when I expected her back.

"Is Mr. Lewis with her, Ma'am?" said she, hesitatingly.

"Of course; at least, I suppose so. Why, what makes you ask?" said I, with surprise at her downcast eyes and flushed face.

"I heard he had gone away. And that—that Mr. Remington was there with her. But you know about it, most likely."

"No, I know nothing about it, Amy."

"It was their old cook told me, Mrs. Butler. And she said,—oh! all sorts of things, that I am sure couldn't be true, for Mrs. Lewis is such a kind, beautiful woman! I couldn't believe a word she said!"

In my quality of minister's wife, and with a general distrust of cooks' opinions, I told Amy that there was always scandal enough, and it was a waste of time to listen to it. But after she left me, I confess to a whole hour wasted in speculations and anxious reflections on Amy's communication, and also to having taken the Dominie away from his sermon for a like space of time to consider the matter fully.