Pink and White Tyranny Part 3

"John engaged to Lillie Ellis?" said Miss Ferguson, in a tone of shocked astonishment.

"So he writes me. He is completely infatuated by her."

"How very sudden!" said Miss Let.i.tia. "Who could have expected it?

Lillie Ellis is so entirely out of the line of any of the women he has ever known."

"That's precisely what's the matter," said Miss Grace. "John knows nothing of any but good, n.o.ble women; and he thinks he sees all this in Lillie Ellis."

"There's nothing to her but her wonderful complexion," said Miss Ferguson, "and her pretty little coaxing ways; but she is the most utterly selfish, heartless little creature that ever breathed."

"Well, _she_ is to be John's wife," said Miss Grace, sweeping the remainder of the flowers into her ap.r.o.n; "and so ends my life with John. I might have known it would come to this. I must make arrangements at once for another house and home. This house, so much, so dear to me, will be nothing to her; and yet she must be its mistress," she added, looking round on every thing in the room, and then bursting into tears.

Now, Miss Grace was not one of the crying sort, and so this emotion went to her friend's heart. Miss Let.i.tia went up and put her arms round her.

"Come, Gracie," she said, "you must not take it so seriously. John is a n.o.ble, manly fellow. He loves you, and he will always be master of his own house."

"No, he won't,--no married man ever is," said Miss Grace, wiping her eyes, and sitting up very straight. "No man, that is a gentleman, is ever master in his own house. He has only such rights there as his wife chooses to give him; and this woman won't like me, I'm sure."

"Perhaps she will," said Let.i.tia, in a faltering voice.

"No, she won't; because I have no faculty for lying, or playing the hypocrite in any way, and I shan't approve of her. These soft, slippery, pretty little fibbing women have always been my abomination."

"Oh, my _dear_ Grace!" said Miss Ferguson, "do let us make the best of it."

"I _did_ think," said Miss Grace, wiping her eyes, "that John had some sense. I wasn't such a fool, nor so selfish, as to want him always to live for me. I wanted him to marry; and if he had got engaged to your Rose, for instance ... O Let.i.tia! I always did so _hope_ that he and Rose would like each other."

"We can't choose for our brothers," said Miss Let.i.tia, "and, hard as it is, we must make up our minds to love those they bring to us. Who knows what good influences may do for poor Lillie Ellis? She never has had any yet. Her family are extremely common sort of people, without any culture or breeding, and only her wonderful beauty brought them into notice; and they have always used that as a sort of stock in trade."

"And John says, in this letter, that she reminds him of our mother,"

said Miss Grace; "and he thinks that naturally she was very much such a character. Just think of that, now!"

"He must be far gone," said Miss Ferguson; "but then, you see, she is distractingly pretty. She has just the most exquisitely pearly, pure, delicate, saint-like look, at times, that you ever saw; and then she knows exactly how she does look, and just how to use her looks; and John can't be blamed for believing in her. I, who know all about her, am sometimes taken in by her."

"Well," said Miss Grace, "Mrs. Lennox was at Newport last summer at the time that she was there, and she told me all about her. I think her an artful, unscrupulous, unprincipled woman, and her being made mistress of this house just breaks up our pleasant sociable life here.

She has no literary tastes; she does not care for reading or study; she won't like our set here, and she will gradually drive them from the house. She won't like me, and she will want to alienate John from me,--so there is just the situation."

"You may read that letter," added Miss Grace, wiping her eyes, and tossing her brother's letter into Miss Let.i.tia's lap. Miss Let.i.tia took the letter and read it. "Good fellow!" she exclaimed warmly, "you see just what I say,--his heart is all with you."

"Oh, John's heart is all light enough!" said Miss Grace; "and I don't doubt his love. He's the best, n.o.blest, most affectionate fellow in the world. I only think he reckons without his host, in thinking he can keep all our old relations unbroken, when he puts a new mistress into the house, and such a mistress."

"But if she really loves him"--

"Pshaw! she don't. That kind of woman can't love. They are like cats, that want to be stroked and caressed, and to be petted, and to lie soft and warm; and they will purr to any one that will pet them,--that's all. As for love that leads to any self-sacrifice, they don't begin to know any thing about it."

"Gracie dear," said Miss Ferguson, "this sort of thing will never do.

If you meet your brother in this way, you will throw him off, and, maybe, make a fatal breach. Meet it like a good Christian, as you are. You know," she said gently, "where we have a right to carry our troubles, and of whom we should ask guidance."

"Oh, I do know, 't.i.tia!" said Miss Grace; "but I am letting myself be wicked just a little, you know, to relieve my mind. I ought to put myself to school to make the best of it; but it came on me so _very_ suddenly. Yes," she added, "I am going to take a course of my Bible and Fenelon before I see John,--poor fellow."

"And try to have faith for her," said Miss Let.i.tia.

"Well, I'll try to have faith," said Miss Grace; "but I do trust it will be some days before John comes down on me with his raptures,--men in love are such fools."

"But, dear me!" said Miss Let.i.tia, as her head accidentally turned towards the window; "who is this riding up? Gracie, as sure as you live, it is John himself!"

"John himself!" repeated Miss Grace, becoming pale.

"Now do, dear, be careful," said Miss Let.i.tia. "I'll just run out this back door and leave you alone;" and just as Miss Let.i.tia's light heels were heard going down the back steps, John's heavy footsteps were coming up the front ones.

CHAPTER III.

_THE SISTER_.

Grace Seymour was a specimen of a cla.s.s of whom we are happy to say New England possesses a great many.

She was a highly cultivated, intelligent, and refined woman, arrived at the full age of mature womanhood unmarried, and with no present thought or prospect of marriage. I presume all my readers, who are in a position to run over the society of our rural New-England towns, can recall to their minds hundreds of such. They are women too thoughtful, too conscientious, too delicate, to marry for any thing but a purely personal affection; and this affection, for various reasons, has not fallen in their way.

The tendency of life in these towns is to throw the young men of the place into distant fields of adventure and enterprise in the far Western and Southern States, leaving at their old homes a population in which the feminine element largely predominates. It is not, generally speaking, the most cultivated or the most attractive of the brethren who remain in the place where they were born. The ardent, the daring, the enterprising, are off to the ends of the earth; and the choice of the sisters who remain at home is, therefore, confined to a restricted list; and so it ends in these delightful rose-gardens of single women which abound in New England,--women who remain at home as housekeepers to aged parents, and charming persons in society; women over whose graces of conversation and manner the married men in their vicinity go off into raptures of eulogium, which generally end with, "Why hasn't that woman ever got married?"

It often happens to such women to expend on some brother that stock of hero-wors.h.i.+p and devotion which it has not come in their way to give to a nearer friend. Alas! it is building on a sandy foundation; for, just as the union of hearts is complete, the chemical affinity which began in the cradle, and strengthens with every year of life, is dissolved by the introduction of that third element which makes of the brother a husband, while the new combination casts out the old,--sometimes with a disagreeable effervescence.

John and Grace Seymour were two only children of a very affectionate family; and they had grown up in the closest habits of intimacy. They had written to each other those long letters in which thoughtful people who live in retired situations delight; letters not of outward events, but of sentiments and opinions, the phases of the inner life.

They had studied and pursued courses of reading together. They had together organized and carried on works of benevolence and charity.

The brother and sister had been left joint heirs of a large manufacturing property, employing hundreds of hands, in their vicinity; and the care and cultivation of these work-people, the education of their children, had been most conscientiously upon their minds. Half of every Sunday they devoted together to labors in the Sunday school of their manufacturing village; and the two worked so harmoniously together in the interests of their life, that Grace had never felt the want of any domestic ties or relations other than those that she had.

Our readers may perhaps, therefore, concede that, among the many claimants for their sympathy in this cross-grained world of ours, some few grains of it may properly be due to Grace.

Things are trials that try us: afflictions are what afflict us; and, under this showing, Grace was both tried and afflicted by the sudden engagement of her brother. When the whole groundwork on which one's daily life is built caves in, and falls into the cellar without one moment's warning, it is not in human nature to pick one's self up, and reconstruct and rearrange in a moment. So Grace thought, at any rate; but she made a hurried effort to dash back her tears, and gulp down a rising in her throat, anxious only not to be selfish, and not to disgust her brother in the outset with any personal egotism.

So she ran to the front door to meet him, and fell into his arms, trying so hard to seem congratulatory and affectionate that she broke out into sobbing.

"My dear Gracie," said John, embracing and kissing her with that gus.h.i.+ng fervor with which newly engaged gentlemen are apt to deluge every creature whom they meet, "you've got my letter. Well, were not you astonished?"

"O John, it was so sudden!" was all poor Grace could say. "And you know, John, since mother died, you and I have been all in all to each other."

"And so we shall be, Gracie. Why, yes, of course we shall," he said, stroking her hair, and playing with her trembling, thin, white hands.

"Why, this only makes me love you the more now; and you will love my little Lillie: fact is, you can't help it. We shall both of us be happier for having her here."

"Well, you know, John, I never saw her," said Grace, deprecatingly, "and so you can't wonder."

"Oh, yes, of course! Don't wonder in the least. It comes rather sudden,--and then you haven't seen her. Look, here is her photograph!"

said John, producing one from the most orthodox innermost region, directly over his heart. "Look there! isn't it beautiful?"