Men, Women, and Ghosts Part 1

Men, Women, and Ghosts.

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

No News.

None at all. Understand that, please, to begin with. That you will at once, and distinctly, recall Dr. Sharpe--and his wife, I make no doubt.

Indeed, it is because the history is a familiar one, some of the unfamiliar incidents of which have come into my possession, that I undertake to tell it.

My relation to the Doctor, his wife, and their friend, has been in many respects peculiar. Without entering into explanations which I am not at liberty to make, let me say, that those portions of their story which concern our present purpose, whether or not they fell under my personal observation, are accurately, and to the best of my judgment impartially, related.

n.o.body, I think, who was at the wedding, dreamed that there would ever be such a story to tell. It was such a pretty, peaceful wedding! If you were there, you remember it as you remember a rare sunrise, or a peculiarly delicate May-flower, or that strain in a simple old song which is like orioles and b.u.t.terflies and dew-drops.

There were not many of us; we were all acquainted with one another; the day was bright, and Harrie did not faint nor cry. There were a couple of bridesmaids,--Pauline Dallas, and a Miss--Jones, I think,--besides Harrie's little sisters; and the people were well dressed and well looking, but everybody was thoroughly at home, comfortable, and on a level. There was no annihilating of little country friends in gray alpacas by city cousins in point and pearls, no crowding and no crush, and, I believe, not a single "front breadth" spoiled by the ices.

Harrie is not called exactly pretty, but she must be a very plain woman who is not pleasant to see upon her wedding day. Harrie's eyes shone,--I never saw such eyes! and she threw her head back like a queen whom they were crowning.

Her father married them. Old Mr. Bird was an odd man, with odd notions of many things, of which marriage was one. The service was his own. I afterwards asked him for a copy of it, which I have preserved. The Covenant ran thus:--

"Appealing to your Father who is in heaven to witness your sincerity, you .... do now take this woman whose hand you hold--choosing her alone from all the world--to be your lawfully wedded wife. You trust her as your best earthly friend. You promise to love, to cherish, and to protect her; to be considerate of her happiness in your plans of life; to cultivate for her sake all manly virtues; and in all things to seek her welfare as you seek your own. You pledge yourself thus honorably to her, to be her husband in good faith, so long as the providence of G.o.d shall spare you to each other.

"In like manner, looking to your Heavenly Father for his blessing, you ... do now receive this man, whose hand you hold, to be your lawfully wedded husband. You choose him from all the world as he has chosen you.

You pledge your trust to him as your best earthly friend. You promise to love, to comfort, and to honor him; to cultivate for his sake all womanly graces; to guard his reputation, and a.s.sist him in his life's work; and in all things to esteem his happiness as your own. You give yourself thus trustfully to him, to be his wife in good faith, so long as the providence of G.o.d shall spare you to each other."

When Harrie lifted her s.h.i.+ning eyes to say, "I _do_!" the two little happy words ran through the silent room like a silver bell; they would have tinkled in your ears for weeks to come if you had heard them.

I have been thus particular in noting the words of the service, partly because they pleased me, partly because I have since had some occasion to recall them, and partly because I remember having wondered, at the time, how many married men and women of your and my acquaintance, if honestly subjecting their union to the test and full interpretation and remotest bearing of such vows as these, could live in the sight of G.o.d and man as "lawfully wedded" husband and wife.

Weddings are always very sad things to me; as much sadder than burials as the beginning of life should be sadder than the end of it. The readiness with which young girls will flit out of a tried, proved, happy home into the sole care and keeping of a man whom they have known three months, six, twelve, I do not profess to understand. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. But that may be because I am fifty-five, an old maid, and have spent twenty years in boarding-houses.

A woman reads the graces of a man at sight. His faults she cannot thoroughly detect till she has been for years his wife. And his faults are so much more serious a matter to her than hers to him!

I was thinking of this the day before the wedding. I had stepped in from the kitchen to ask Mrs. Bird about the salad, when I came abruptly, at the door of the sitting-room, upon as choice a picture as one is likely to see.

The doors were open through the house, and the wind swept in and out. A scarlet woodbine swung lazily back and forth beyond the window. Dimples of light burned through it, dotting the carpet and the black-and-white marbled oilcloth of the hall. Beyond, in the little front parlor, framed in by the series of doorways, was Harrie, all in a cloud of white. It floated about her with an idle, wavelike motion. She had a veil like fretted pearls through which her tinted arm shone faintly, and the shadow of a single scarlet leaf trembled through a curtain upon her forehead.

Her mother, crying a little, as mothers will cry the day before the wedding, was smoothing with tender touch a tiny crease upon the cloud; a bridesmaid or two sat chattering on the floor; gloves, and favors, and flowers, and bits of lace like h.o.a.r frost, lay scattered about; and the whole was repictured and reflected and reshaded in the great old-fas.h.i.+oned mirrors before which Harrie turned herself about.

It seemed a pity that Myron Sharpe should miss that, so I called him in from the porch where he sat reading Stuart Mill on Liberty.

If you form your own opinion of a man who might spend a livelong morning,--an October morning, quivering with color, alive with light, sweet with the breath of dropping pines, soft with the caress of a wind that had filtered through miles of suns.h.i.+ne,--and that the morning of the day before his wedding,--reading Stuart Mill on Liberty,--I cannot help it.

Harrie, turning suddenly, saw us,--met her lover's eyes, stood a moment with lifted lashes and bright cheeks,--crept with a quick, impulsive movement into her mother's arms, kissed her, and floated away up the stairs.

"It's a perfect fit," said Mrs. Bird; coming out with one corner of a very dingy handkerchief--somebody had just used it to dust the Parian vases--at her eyes.

And though, to be sure, it was none of my business, I caught myself saying, under my breath,--

"It's a fit for life; for a _life_, Dr. Sharpe."

Dr. Sharpe smiled serenely. He was very much in love with the little pink-and-white cloud that had just fluttered up the stairs. If it had been drifting to him for the venture of twenty lifetimes, he would have felt no doubt of the "fit."

Nor, I am sure, would Harrie. She stole out to him that evening after the bridal finery was put away, and knelt at his feet in her plain little muslin dress, her hair all out of crimp, slipping from her net behind her ears,--Harrie's ears were very small, and shaded off in the colors of a pale apple-blossom,--up-turning her flushed and weary face.

"Put away the book, please, Myron."

Myron put away the book (somebody on Bilious Affections), and looked for a moment without speaking at the up-turned face.

Dr. Sharpe had spasms of distrusting himself amazingly; perhaps most men have,--and ought to. His face grew grave just then. That little girl's clear eyes shone upon him like the lights upon an altar. In very unworthiness of soul he would have put the shoes from off his feet. The ground on which he trod was holy.

When he spoke to the child, it was in a whisper:--

"Harrie, are you afraid of me? I know I am not very good."

And Harrie, kneeling with the shadows of the scarlet leaves upon her hair, said softly, "How could I be afraid of you? It is _I_ who am not good."

Dr. Sharpe could not have made much progress in Bilious Affections that evening. All the time that the skies were fading, we saw them wandering in and out among the apple-trees,--she with those s.h.i.+ning eyes, and her hand in his. And when to-morrow had come and gone, and in the dying light they drove away, and Miss Dallas threw old Grandmother Bird's little satin boot after the carriage, the last we saw of her was that her hand was clasped in his, and that her eyes were s.h.i.+ning.

Well, I believe that they got along very well till the first baby came.

As far as my observation goes, young people usually get along very well till the first baby comes. These particular young people had a clear conscience,--as young people's consciences go,--fair health, a comfortable income for two, and a very pleasant home.

This home was on the coast. The townspeople made shoes, and minded their own business. Dr. Sharpe bought the dying practice of an antediluvian who believed in camomile and castor-oil. Harrie mended a few stockings, made a few pies, and watched the sea.

It was almost enough of itself to make one happy--the sea--as it tumbled about the sh.o.r.es of Lime. Harrie had a little seat hollowed out in the cliffs, and a little scarlet bathing-dress, which was surprisingly becoming, and a little boat of her own, moored in a little bay,--a pretty sh.e.l.l which her husband had had made to order, that she might be able to row herself on a calm water. He was very thoughtful for her in those days.

She used to take her sewing out upon the cliff; she would be demure and busy; she would finish the selvage seam; but the sun blazed, the sea shone, the birds sang, all the world was at play,--what could it matter about selvage seams? So the little gold thimble would drop off, the spool trundle down the cliff, and Harrie, sinking back into a cus.h.i.+on of green and crimson sea-weed, would open her wide eyes and dream. The waves purpled and silvered, and broke into a mist like powdered amber, the blue distances melted softly, the white sand glittered, the gulls were chattering shrilly. What a world it was!

"And he is in it!" thought Harrie. Then she would smile and shut her eyes. "And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that Moses'

face shone, and they were afraid to come nigh him." Harrie wondered if everybody's joy were too great to look upon, and wondered, in a childish, frightened way, how it might be with sorrow; if people stood with veiled faces before it, dumb with pain as she with peace,--and then it was dinner-time, and Myron came down to walk up the beach with her, and she forgot all about it.

She forgot all about everything but the bare joy of life and the sea, when she had donned the pretty scarlet suit, and crept out into the surf,--at the proper medicinal hour, for the Doctor was very particular with her,--when the warm brown waves broke over her face, the long sea-weeds slipped through her fingers, the foam sprinkled her hair with crystals, and the strong wind was up.

She was a swift swimmer, and as one watched from the sh.o.r.e, her lithe scarlet shoulders seemed to glide like a trail of fire through the lighted water; and when she sat in shallow foam with suns.h.i.+ne on her, or flashed through the dark green pools among the rocks, or floated with the incoming tide, her great bathing-hat dropping shadows on her wet little happy face, and her laugh ringing out, it was a pretty sight.

But a prettier one than that, her husband thought, was to see her in her boat at sunset; when sea and sky were aflame, when every flake of foam was a rainbow, and the great chalk-cliffs were blood-red; when the wind blew her net off, and in pretty petulance she pulled her hair down, and it rippled all about her as she dipped into the blazing West.

Dr. Sharpe used to drive home by the beach, on a fair night, always, that he might see it. Then Harrie would row swiftly in, and spring into the low, broad buggy beside him, and they rode home together in the fragrant dusk. Sometimes she used to chatter on these twilight drives; but more often she crept up to him and shut her eyes, and was as still as a sleepy bird. It was so pleasant to do nothing but be happy!

I believe that at this time Dr. Sharpe loved his wife as unselfishly as he knew how. Harrie often wrote me that he was "very good." She was sometimes a little troubled that he should "know so much more" than she, and had fits of reading the newspapers and reviewing her French, and studying cases of hydrophobia, or some other pleasant subject which had a professional air. Her husband laughed at her for her pains, but nevertheless he found her so much the more entertaining. Sometimes she drove about with him on his calls, or amused herself by making jellies in fancy moulds for his poor, or sat in his lap and discoursed like a bobolink of croup and measles, pulling his whiskers the while with her pink fingers.

All this, as I have said, was before the first baby came.

It is surprising what vague ideas young people in general, and young men in particular, have of the rubs and jars of domestic life; especially domestic life on an income of eighteen hundred, American const.i.tutions and country servants thrown in.

Dr. Sharpe knew something of illness and babies and worry and watching; but that his own individual baby should deliberately lie and scream till two o'clock in the morning, was a source of perpetual astonishment to him; and that it,--he and Mrs. Sharpe had their first quarrel over his persistence in calling the child an "it,"--that it should _invariably_ feel called upon to have the colic just as he had fallen into a nap, after a night spent with a dying patient, was a phenomenon of the infant mind for which he was, to say the least, unprepared.

It was for a long time a mystery to his masculine understanding, that Biddy could not be nursery-maid as well as cook. "Why, what has she to do now? Nothing but to broil steaks and make tea for two people!" That whenever he had Harrie quietly to himself for a peculiarly pleasant tea-table, the house should resound with sudden shrieks from the nursery, and there was _always_ a pin in that baby, was forever a fresh surprise; and why, when they had a house full of company, no "girl," and Harrie down with a sick-headache, his son and heir should of _necessity_ be threatened with scarlatina, was a philosophical problem over which he speculated long and profoundly.

So, gradually, in the old way, the old sweet habits of the long honeymoon were broken. Harrie dreamed no more on the cliffs by the bright noon sea; had no time to spend making scarlet pictures in the little bathing-suit; had seldom strength to row into the sunset, her hair loose, the bay on fire, and one to watch her from the sh.o.r.e. There were no more walks up the beach to dinner; there came an end to the drives in the happy twilight; she could not climb now upon her husband's knee, because of the heavy baby on her own.