Rutledge Part 27

"As mademoiselle pleases," answered Felicie, with a very wicked look, and a very sweet voice.

Esther at length accepted my overtures, and consented to heal her bosom's woe with a picture-book and a bon-bon out of my trunk. I shut the door between my room and the nursery very tight, and gradually Essie's fretful unhappiness relaxed into something like childish enjoyment, in the comparative cheerfulness of my room, and the exertions I made for her entertainment. She possessed the characteristic, very rare and invaluable among children, of being easily amused, and also of continuing amused for a long while, with the same thing. So it happened, that the picture-book did not pall upon her taste, nor the bon-bon lose its charm, for two full hours, and she was still sitting demure as a kitten beside me, while I worked and occasionally explained to her the pictures, when Aunt Edith entered. She had evidently forgotten the occurrence of the morning, and seemed very well pleased to find us both so well provided for. After looking about the room, and ascertaining that I had everything that I needed, she sat down by the fire, and resumed the estimate she had been interrupted in making up last night.

The conscious blood dyed my cheeks, the faltering words found only awkward and constrained utterance; the more my aunt tried to read me, the more blurred and unreadable did I become. She tried me upon all possible questions--school, and its studies and routine; Rutledge, and my visit there; the journey, and my escort. Upon all points, I was equally unsatisfactory, and the interview had but one decisive result, which I attained only by great effort. I had determined that whenever I should have a chance, I would ask a favor of my aunt; and this appearing a fitting opportunity, with many misgivings and much trepidation, I propounded it to her; and was unspeakably relieved and surprised to find that she not only acquiesced in, but most cordially approved of the motion. It was to the effect, that for this winter, I should be excused from going at all into society, and might be allowed to study and improve myself.

The proposal, I saw, relieved my aunt's mind from some weight that had enc.u.mbered it. She agreed with me most heartily in considering it much the most judicious course. I was really too young to go into society; she had never ceased to regret having brought out Josephine so early; next winter I should be so much better fitted to enjoy it, etc. The plans for the employment of my time were very soon arranged. I was to share Grace's French and German lessons, and to read history and philosophy with her, under the guidance of one Mr. Olman, a young and inexpensive professor of literature and the belles-lettres, who came three times a week. My hours of study and recitation were all distinctly marked out, and it was agreed I should begin that very day. Grace was sent to bring me her French grammar and show me the lesson, and after lunch, we were summoned to the study (a small front room on the second story), to meet Mr. Olman, our literary professor.

Certainly, if I had looked upon Grace as a marvel of sharpness last night, my respect for her in that regard, suffered no diminution after seeing the manner in which she slipped through Mr. Olman's literary fingers, and came out triumphant at the end of the two hours, without the vaguest idea of what he had been laboring at. She hated history, philosophy, and the belles-lettres, and never thought of preparing the abstracts and reviews that he requested; and as he was unspeakably afraid of her himself, she found no difficulty in eluding the detested tasks. He was a slim young man, dressing in black and wearing spectacles--very nervous and very much given to blushing. Indeed, his face, at the end of the lesson, was ordinarily of a violent _rose de chine_ color, and his hands so trembling and cold, that it was a great relief to me when he succeeded in collecting his books and papers and getting on his overcoat. I never saw so merciless a persecution; the slyest, "cutest," and the most nave way of tripping him up in the full tide of his discourse, and then bewailing her mistake; never by any chance omitting an opportunity of making him blush and putting him in an agony of nervousness. I am certain, so acutely did he suffer at her hands, that if in an unguarded moment he had been brought to acknowledge who of all others he most detested and dreaded, he would have answered, unhesitatingly, "my pupil, from two to four, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday."

Indignant as I felt at Grace, it was no easy matter to keep from laughing at the results of her pertness and _aplomb;_ and notwithstanding Mr. Olman was evidently a well-read and cultivated scholar, I antic.i.p.ated in these lessons more of pain than of pleasure; and although I determined to apply myself thoroughly to all he directed, still, four o'clock was, and would, I feared, continue to be, a release.

At dinner, that evening, Grace gave the bulletin of "Mr. Olman's latest," and though her mother reproved her, no one thought it necessary to discourage her by not laughing. Phil's "Ha! ha!" was honest and unequivocal; he meant, he declared, some day to secrete himself under the piano, and see Grace put the professor to rout and confusion. He hated professors, for his part, and he'd like to see 'em all put to rout and confusion.

"Professors arn't in your line, are they, Phil?" said Grace, with a laugh.

"I beg, Phil," exclaimed Josephine, "that you'll never present yourself unexpectedly to that wretched man. I am sure he'd swoon at the sight of your breadth of shoulder and length of limb. You'd make at least three of him."

"Say four," put in Grace. "The professor doesn't weigh an ounce over thirty-five pounds. I asked him, the other day, apropos of ancient weights and measures, if he'd ever been weighed, and what the result was."

"You saucy child," said Phil, "I wonder he didn't box your ears."

"No danger of that," responded Grace, complacently. "The professor knows better than to quarrel with his bread and b.u.t.ter; he knows that pupils don't grow on every bush, and it would take a great deal more than that to provoke him into a retort. He only bites his lips, and grows red in the face, and says, 'This is irrelevant, Miss Churchill.'"

"Upon my word," said Josephine, with a sneer, "by the time the poor man finishes your education, I think he'll be fit to be translated to his reward, without any further sojourn in the church militant. No honest council would deny him canonization after such a fiery trial."

"Poor old Mabire must have a high place by this time, if his reward is at all proportioned to his sufferings," said Grace, slily. "You remember, Josephine, how sweet you used to be to that old man? I liked to listen at the study door, and hear him walk up and down the floor, and grind his teeth and gasp, 'C'est trop, c'est trop!' I suppose the bread-and-b.u.t.ter question prevented his speaking to mamma; but, really, you must confess, he was a victim! Now _I_ never go the lengths of biting and scratching, but always confine myself to"----

"Grace, _mon ange_," cried Josephine, flushing up angrily, "if you don't want to be sent to take your meals in the nursery, you had better learn to be less pert and"----

"Truthful's the word you want, dear," drawled Grace, unconcernedly.

"It's the last word I should think of applying to you," retorted her sister.

"_Tout doucement, cherie!_" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Grace, squeezing up her mouth.

But at this juncture, mamma, who had been engaged in opening some notes and cards of invitation that John had brought in, now becoming aroused to a sense of the impending storm, came to the rescue, and in a few cutting words used up everybody present, Phil and myself included, and restored a forced peace; and during the remainder of the meal, Josephine sulked, Phil looked heartily distressed, and I felt miserably uncomfortable, Grace alone preserving an unmoved and complacent demeanor. It was just as we had finished dessert, that there came a ring at the bell that made me start. Foolish as it was, I had been listening to the bell all day, with a vague kind of hope that it would prove of interest to me; and when John presented a card to my aunt, which contained the only familiar name to me in this strange place, and, in fact, the only name I cared to see, I really feared that Grace's quick ear would catch the loud throbbing of my heart, as she surely did catch the quick blush on my cheeks.

"It is Mr. Rutledge," said my aunt. "Josephine, will you go into the parlor, and I will join you in a moment? Phil, may I ask you to look over that deed we were speaking of this morning? The library is vacant; I suppose you do not want to be interrupted. And you, young ladies (to Grace and me), will find a good fire in the study, and an excellent chance for preparing your German for to-morrow. Mr. Waschlager, you know, comes at ten on Thursdays."

Josephine, with a coquettish look in the gla.s.s, hurried off to the parlor; Phil accepted his lot with a resigned sigh; Grace grumblingly obeyed, and I followed her, biting my lips, and struggling to keep back the tears of disappointment, as I heard, through the half open door, a familiar voice and laugh, that my homesick ear had been longing for all day.

CHAPTER XIX.

----"Sweet heaven, she takes me up As if she had fingered me, and dog-eared me, And spelled me by the fire-side, half a life!

She knows my turns, my feeble points."

E.B. BROWNING.

Christmas came and pa.s.sed; my birthday came and pa.s.sed; the holidays were "over and done," and we were busily at work again with our various professors; and, in my heart, I acknowledged that I liked work better than play in my new home. Sundays and holidays were the times that tried my soul. I do not mean in church; Christmas anthems, Christmas hopes and aspirations had never before touched me so deeply as now, when there was so much of dullness and coldness in the world outside. In church I did not feel my loneliness so much, but it was the coming back to the frivolity and uncongeniality of home that left the greatest blank. I do not mean to suggest, that during all these weeks I had been as pining and heartsick as I had been on the first day of my initiation. That day, it is true, had been a fair index of the rest, but the acute disappointment and pain had worn off, and I had learned to make the best of it, and to go through my daily routine with a less heavy, but perhaps an emptier and less hoping heart. "The ox, when he is weary, treads surest." I was weary and unhopeful, and so, perhaps, trod more safely the somewhat devious and perplexing path that lay before me. If the subduing effect of a keenly felt and unkind disappointment, and a miserable loneliness and want of sympathy, had not kept my impetuosity and self-will in check, I perhaps should not have pa.s.sed with so little injury through scenes that were quite new and bewildering to me. As it was, I was sad enough to think, sober enough to choose, and yet young and elastic enough not to be crushed by the weight of my trial, but to bow and fit myself to the yoke. I reasoned in a way that was childish in its simplicity, and yet wise in its unworldliness.

"I have been very presumptuous and vain," I thought. "I have fancied myself the companion and friend of one who, by forgetting me, has shown me my mistake, while there was yet time to correct it. I have been indulging in a very foolish, though a very happy, dream; but as long as he knows nothing of it, I am certain I can conquer it in time, and be more humble for the rest of my life. I have not found much sympathy or love in the only home I shall probably ever have; I don't suppose I shall ever be particularly happy again, but there is something higher than mere happiness that I can try to gain, and make myself worthy of that communion of saints in which I have been taught to believe; stretching through earth and heaven, of all kindreds and peoples and tongues, among whom I have no present comrade, it is true, but there is one saint at rest, who has no other care than her child's peace--who loved me better than all the world beside, when she was here--who will not forget her love and tenderness in the rest that she has entered into."

And so, with a humbled heart, I set myself to the "trivial round, the common task," that gave me, indeed, much room for self-denial and patience, but gave me, too, the peace that impatience and resistance never would have brought. Much there was, indeed, of error and folly, many mistaken steps and struggles of conscience, much sinning and repenting, but, on the whole, it was a straighter and a safer path than a pleasanter one would have been. There was, in truth, little danger of being in love with the world, seen from the stand-point I had been placed in.

Home continued pretty much as usual. Of my aunt and Josephine, we of the study and the nursery saw comparatively little. As the season advanced, and the gaiety increased, there was not much time, of course, at my aunt's command for any but the most imperative home duties; this being Josephine's first winter in New York, it was a thing of the highest moment to bring her out properly, and no sacrifice was considered too great. Not that she neglected her household, or regular duties; at whatever hour she may have returned home the night before, my Aunt Edith never failed to appear at breakfast punctually; never failed to hear Esther repeat her Collect, and glance over Grace's theme; never failed to overlook the grocer's, baker's, and butcher's accounts; to visit in person daily, kitchen, laundry, butler's pantry, nursery, and study; to keep, in short, that eye over her entire establishment that it required to preserve its matchless order and regularity. No wonder that my aunt looked haggard and worn; no wonder that unwelcome wrinkles were writing themselves on her brow, and that her rounded figure was fast losing its roundness. To serve one master is as much as one human being is capable of. In the miserable attempt to serve two, how many wrecks of soul and body are daily wrought.

I said we saw very little of my aunt; it seemed very little, for her daily visits to us, though regular, were of necessity hurried, and at meals she was generally either preoccupied and thoughtful, or busy with Phil in arrangements and plans for the pressing demands of society.

Josephine, now-a-days, had her breakfast sent to her room, and was not ordinarily visible before twelve o'clock. Then came visiting hours; and at dinner, though, when they did not dine out, we enjoyed the society of my aunt, and Josephine, and Phil, still it seemed to me, they were all rather listless and stupid; but perhaps they were only reserving their energies for the evening. After study hours, sometimes, and just before my bed-time, I would go down to Josephine's room by particular request, and a.s.sist her at her toilette; her new maid, Frances, being, she declared, the clumsiest, stupidest thing that ever breathed, and having a most unbearable trick of bursting into tears whenever she was scolded, which, I suppose, deprived Josephine of all pleasure in her attendance.

My services suited her better, and I often had the honor of superseding Frances. Not that I minded it at all; it was the only glimpse I had into the gay world that I was as yet so ignorant of. I liked to array Josephine in her elegant Parisian dresses, to arrange the drooping flowers in her glossy black hair, and to clasp the rich bracelets on her arms. Grace, on these occasions, was strictly forbidden the room; late hours, dissipation and fatigue had not materially improved Josephine's temper; and her pert young sister's allusions to bones, necks a la gridiron, etc., tried her beyond endurance; and mamma interposing, Grace, for once, was kept at bay. I will not deny a vague feeling of regret and longing, as I watched my cousin's floating drapery downstairs, and thought of the gay scene she was starting for; and as Phil wrapped her light cloak around her, and whispered his honest praises in her ear, as she followed her mother to the door, and I turned back to my lonely little room, it did seem to me that there was great need of faith to believe that her lot and mine were ordered by the same unerring and impartial Wisdom.

Our lessons went on pretty much as at first. With Mr. Olman, I was rather a check upon Grace, and the poor man began to regard me with something like grat.i.tude. He was a good teacher, and gave me plenty of work, for which I, in my turn, was grateful. Our French lessons, it appeared to me, were rather a hollow mockery, Mdlle. Berteau, our preceptress, being a chatty little woman, who spent one-half her time in gossiping with Grace about Paris and pretty things, and the other half in helping her write the exercises she had been too lazy to prepare the night before. I also found later, that mademoiselle had been in the habit of supplying her young pupil surrept.i.tiously with some rather questionable French literature. Upon a threat of disclosing this circ.u.mstance to mamma, Grace made me a solemn promise to renounce it; but I must confess I never felt any great security about its fulfillment.

Our German proved rather more satisfactory. Mr. Waschlager, a strapping, burly, bearded fellow, with a loud voice and considerable energy of manner, inspired Miss Grace with much greater respect than delicate Mr.

Olman, with his nervousness and tremor. His imperfect knowledge of our mother-tongue, also, rendered any sly innuendoes quite powerless to annoy him, and Grace's very strikingly imperfect knowledge of _his_ maternal mode of speech, put it quite out of her ability to insult him, if she had dared. So that, with the exception of having ordinarily to write her exercises for her, and give her the benefit of my researches in the dictionary at the last moment, I enjoyed my German lesson very much, and made quite rapid advances in that language.

A week or two before my arrival, Esther's daily governess (from all accounts a miserably weak and injudicious person) had been dismissed, having been found entirely incompetent to manage her young charge; and, till another should be procured, I had asked my aunt if I should not teach her for an hour or two every day. The offer had been very gladly accepted, and, somehow, after a week or two, all question of obtaining a new governess had died out, and Essie and her lessons had quietly devolved on me. I did not mind it very much; the child was good enough, and, with a little coaxing, got on tolerably well; but it was rather hard always to be tied down to that duty for the hours that I invariably felt most like reading or sewing, both of which occupations I found entirely incompatible with the due direction of Miss Esther's early mathematical efforts, and the proper supervision of her attempts at penmanship. I had the benefit of her society at other hours also; she kept pretty closely at my side during my leisure moments, favored by my vicinity to the nursery, and was my invariable companion in my walks: Grace never walked, except when ordered out under pain of her mother's displeasure, and Felicie was, of course, only too glad to shift the duty of exercising Miss Esther upon me. And as my aunt had a prejudice against full carriages, she and Josephine were generally considered a sufficient burden for the horses on Sunday, and Grace being commonly threatened with headache on that day, Esther and I were left to ourselves in the matter of church; and finding one not far distant, that had some free seats within its ample limits, we profited by the discovery, and pretty constantly filled two of them; Esther holding fast to my dress, never for a moment letting go of it through service or sermon; at times it seemed to me, as I caught her strange troubled eyes fixed on the rich colors of the chancel window, or the misty blue of the vaulted roof, that "her heart was envious of her eye," and she clung to me, uncertain and hesitating, as her one tie to earth. I never could quite make out the child; with all her pettishness, and very willful and trying naughtiness, there were moods and fancies about her that thoroughly puzzled me. The only way, I found, was to be as patient as possible with the one, and humor the other as far as was practicable.

I introduced her to her Prayer-book frequently at church, but to little effect; she would obey for the moment, then the book would drop unheeded from her hand, and she would presently be gazing dreamily before her again. Never letting go my dress, she would slip down on her knees when the others did, but when I glanced at her, it was always to find that strange wistful look on her upturned face, that always gave me a vague feeling of uneasiness. She was by no means a precocious child--rather a backward and undeveloped one; but sometimes she startled me with questions that were as much beyond what I had expected of her, as they were beyond me to answer lucidly.

Besides our dislike of Felicie and our liking for Trinity Chapel, there was another bond of sympathy between my little cousin and me, and that was, our cordial antipathy to "company" days and times. Not that we ever had much personal interest in them, but the moral atmosphere of the house, for the whole of the day on which one of my aunt's elaborate dinner-parties occurred, was extremely grating to our nerves. My aunt was always a little more decided and hurried, Josephine a shade more imperious, Grace perter, Felicie more hateful, John more given to short answers--in fact, no member of the household but felt oppressed by the coming event. Grace and I dined with Esther at "the little dinner" at one, on such occasions, and all we saw of the contents of the carriages that, about six, began to roll up to the door, was seen from over the bal.u.s.ters of the third-story staircase. My aunt, it is true, had at first proposed to me to put on my new silk, and come downstairs, but it seemed to me that the invitation was rather lukewarm, and she agreed with me very readily in thinking that for this winter, it was better for me to stay altogether out of society.

"You will be all the fresher when you do appear, my love," said my aunt Edith.

So, _par consequent_, I saw but little of the visitors at the house, though, through Grace, and the general table talk and accidental meetings in the parlor, I kept the run of the most intimate and familiar ones. Among the gentlemen, there was a Captain McGuffy, an army friend of Phil's, who was a good deal at the house, princ.i.p.ally noticeable for his appet.i.te and his moustache. Also, a stale old beau named Reese, who was a kind of heir-loom in fashionable families, handed down from mother to daughter along with other antique and valued relics, to grace their entree into society. He had been an admirer of my aunt Edith's in her opening bloom, but was now made over to Josephine, by that unselfish parent, to swell the list of the younger one's retainers. Besides these, there was a Mr. Wynkar, very young and very insignificant, endured princ.i.p.ally, I fancied, for his utility; and a young Frenchman, who was quite new on the tapis, and much the rage.

But it was a fact patent even to my simplicity, that Mr. Rutledge was, _par excellence_, the most courted and desired guest in Gramercy Square.

For him, Josephine's smiles came thickest and sweetest, and the daring freedom of speech and wit that characterized her bearing with Phil and his military _confrere_, were, in his presence, toned down into a spirited, but most taking coquetry, and the anxious frown on Aunt Edith's brow was smoothed away whenever John announced, "Mr. Rutledge, madam." That those announcements were very frequent, could never cease to be a matter of interest to me, though there seemed little excuse for my feeling any deeper personal concern in them than John himself. Being always expected to retire directly from dinner to the study, we of course lost all evening visitors, and in the daytime, it was even less likely that we should encounter any one from the parlor. More than once, on dinner-party nights, I had stood so near him, that I could have whispered and he would have heard; shrinking down in the shadow of the landing-place, I had watched him leave the dressing-room slowly, always walking through the upper hall very leisurely, and looking attentively around. But the darkness of that upper landing-place would baffle even his keen eye; my very heart would stand still--the breath would not pa.s.s my parted lips, and there would be no danger that his quick ear should discover that which I would have died rather than he should have known.

I would watch him down the stairs, see him pause a moment before the parlor-door, then, as he opened it, there would come, for an instant, the gay clamor of many voices, the rustling of silks, the ringing of laughter, then in an instant shut again, and I would creep back to my dark and cheerless little room with a heart that, had I been older and less humble, would have been bitter and resentful, but as it was, was only aching and sad. I often wondered whether, if that bracelet had not been fastened irrevocably on my arm, I should have taken it off?

Whether, if I could, I would have put far out of sight, all souvenirs of that happy visit, that n.o.body seemed to remember now but me. Whether it would have been any easier to forget, if I could have broken my promise as he most a.s.suredly had broken his. Of course he had broken it; the only folly had been in my ever expecting him to remember such a jest an hour after it was spoken. A one-sided friendship, indeed it was, upon reflection, a very absurd friendship, between an ignorant school-girl and an elegant, high-bred, cultivated gentleman, and one who, as Grace said one day at the table, if he wasn't the coolest and most indifferent of men, would be a perfect lion in society.

"He's too _jeuced_ stiff and haughty to be tolerated," said Mr. Wynkar, who, with Capt. McGuffy and Phil, was dining with us in such _pet.i.t comite_, that it was not considered necessary to exclude the juniors from the board.

"You and he arn't intimate, then," said Grace, with a sly laugh, which Josephine rather encouraged in a quiet way.

"I never could see," said Capt. McGuffy, from under his moustache, "what everybody finds in that man so remarkable. He has a tolerably correct idea of a horse, and rides pretty well; but beyond that, I think he's rather a stick."

Grace elevated her eyebrows, and Mr. Wynkar went on to say, "that for his part, he thought there was nothing about him but his money and his family. Rutledge was a good name, and he was, without doubt, the best match in society."

"Match!" exclaimed the captain. "He's no more idea of marrying than a monk. I pity the girl that sets her affections on his establishment.

_Ma foi_! She'd about as well make _beaux yeux_ at the bronze general in Union Square. Her chance of making an impression would be about as good."

"McGuffy's right," said Phil, warmly. "If everybody knew as much as he does, they'd let Mr. Rutledge alone, and turn their attention to subjects that would pay better."

"Army men upon a thousand a year, for instance," said Josephine, under her breath, and with an irritated contraction of the brow.