5 became a matter of certain religious interest, since all the parties therein were church members. But in vain did all the gossips lay their heads together. Nothing was known beyond the bare facts that at the last minute Hannah Blair had 'gin the mitten' to Charley Mayhew, and he had then and there disappeared. His store was sold to a new-comer from Grenville Center, who was not communicative perhaps because he had nothing to telland Charley dropped out of daily talk before long, as one who is dead and buried far away, as we all do, after how brief a time, how vanishing a grief. As for the 15 Blairs, they endured in stoical silence, and made no sign. Sunday saw both the old people in their places early; nobody looked for Hannah, but before the bell ceased its melancholy toll, just before Parson Day 20 ambled up the broad aisle, her slender figure, straight and still as ever, came up to her seat in the square pew. True her face was colorless; the shadow of death lingered there yet; and though her eyes 25 shone with keener glitter than ever, and her lips burned like a scarlet streak, an acute observer would have seen upon her face traces of a dreadful conflict, lines around the mouth that years of suffering 30 might have grown; a relaxation of the muscles about the eye and temple; a look as of one who sees only something afar off, who is absent from the body as far as, consciousness goes. There she sat, 35 through short prayer and long prayer, hymn, psalm, and sermon, and the battery of looks both direct and furtive that assailed her, all unmoved. And at home it was the same - utterly listless, cold, si- 40 lent, she took up her life again; day by day did her weary round of household duties with the same punctilious neatness and dispatch spun and knit and turned cheeses, for her mother had been broken 45 down visibly for a time by this strange and sad catastrophe, and was more incapable than ever in her life before of earnest work, so Hannah had her place to supply in part as well as her own. We hear of 50 was pretty. bright, and successful; the woman who must endure; for them are those secret agonies no enthusiasm gilds, no hope assuages, no sympathy consoles. God alone stoops to this anguish, and He not always, for there is a stubborn pride that will not lift its eyes to heaven lest it should be a tacit acknowledgment that they were fixed once upon poor earth. For these remains only the outlook daily les10 sening to all of us the outlook whose vista ends in a grave. martyrs of the stake, the fagot, the arena, the hunger-maddened beasts, the rising tide, the rack, and our souls shudder, our flesh creeps; we wonder and adore. I think the gladdest look of her life would 55 have illuminated Hannah Blair's face had it been possible now to exchange her endurance for any of these deaths; but it is But the unrelenting days stole on; their dead-march with monotonous tramp, left traces on even Hannah's wretched, haughty soul. They trampled down the past in thick dust; it became ashes under their feet. Her life from torture subsided into pain; then into bitterness, stoicism, contempt at last into a certain tread-mill of indifference; only not indifference from the strong cruel grasp she still found it needful to keep upon thought and memory: once let that iron hand relax its pressure, and chaos threatened her again: she dared not. Lovers came no more to Hannah; a certain instinct of their sure fate kept them away; the store of linen and cotton she had gathered her mother's careful hands had packed away directly in the great garret. The lavender silk, the cardinal, the big bonnet, had been worn to church year after year in the same spirit in which a Hindoo woman puts on her gorgeous garments and her golden ornaments for suttee. Mrs. Blair looked on in solemn wonder, but said not a word. Nor were these bridal robes worn threadbare ten years after, when another change came to Hannah's life; when Josiah Maxwell, a well-to-do bachelor from Newfield, the next village, was recommended to her, and came over to try his chance. Josiah was a personable, hale, florid man of forty; generous, warmhearted; a little blustering perhaps, but thoroughly good, and a rich man for those days. He had a tannery, a foundry, and a flourishing farm. Newfield was a place of great water-privileges, sure to grow; it sleepy, mullein-growing farms of Wingfield had in them no such cheer or life. Hannah was thirty years old; the matter was set before her purely as a matter of business. Josiah wanted a pious, capable wife. He had been too busy to fall in love all his life; now he was too sensible (he thought), so he looked about him a garden, such a loom and wheel, such spotless linen, such shiny mahogany; there was never a hole in her husband's garments or a button off his shirt; the one 5 thing that troubled her was that her husband, good, honest, tender man, had during their first year of married life fallen thoroughly in love with her; it was not in his genial nature to live in the house a calmly, after royal fashion, and hearing good report of Hannah Blair, proceeded to make her acquaintance and visit her. She too was a rational woman; feeling she had long set aside as a weak indulgence of the flesh; all these long and lonely years had taught her a lesson - more than one. She had learned too that a nature as strong, as dominant, as full of power and pride as hers must have some outlet or 10 year with even a cat and not love it. Hanburn itself out, and here was a prospect offered that appealed to her native instincts, save and except that one so long trodden under foot. She accepted Mr. Maxwell; listened to his desire for a short 15 engagement favorably; took down the stores prepared for a past occasion from the chests in the garret, washed and bleached them with her own hands; and purchased once more her bridal attire, 20 somewhat graver, much more costly than before a plum-colored satin dress, a white merino shawl, a hat of chip with rich white ribbons. Moll Thunder, who served as chorus to this homely tragedy, was at 25 hand with her quaint shrewd comment, as she brought Mrs. Blair her yearly tribute of hickory nuts the week before the wedding. 30 He! He! She look pretty much fine; same as cedar tree out dere, all red vine all ober; nobody tink him ole cedar been lightnin'-struck las' year. He! he! Hain't got no heart in him- pretty much holler.' One bright October day Hannah was 35 married. Parson Day's successor performed the ceremony in the afternoon, and the happy couple went home to Newfield in a gig directly. Never was a calmer bride, a more matter-of-fact wedding. 40 Sentiment was at a discount in the Blair family; if David felt anything at parting with his only child, he repressed its expression; and since that day her mother never could forget, Hannah had wrought 45 in poor Mrs. Blair's mind a sort of terror toward her that actually made her absence a relief, and the company of the little 'bound girl' she had taken to bring up a pleasant substitute for Hannah's stern, 50 quiet activity. Everybody was suited; it was almost a pleasure to Mrs. Maxwell to rule over her sunny farm-house and become a model to all back-sliding housekeepers about her. Her butter always 55 'came,' her bread never soured, her hens laid and set, her chickens hatched, in the most exemplary manner; nobody had such nah was a handsome woman and his wife: what could one expect? But she did not expect it; she was bored and put out by his demonstrations; almost felt a cold contempt for the love he lavished on her, icy and irresponsive as she was, though all the time ostentatiously submissive. Josiah felt after a time that he had made a mistake; but he had the sense to adapt himself to it, and to be content, like many another idolator, with worship instead of response. Not even the little daughter born in the second year of their marriage thawed the heart so long frost-sealed in Hannah's breast; she had once worshiped a false god, and endured the penalty; henceforward she would be warned. Baby was baptized Dorothy, after her father's dead mother, and by every one but Hannah that quaint style was softened into Dolly. Never was a child better brought up, everybody said a rosy, sturdy, saucy little creature, doing credit to fresh air and plain food; a very romp in the barn and fields with her father, whom she loved with all her warm, wayward heart; but alas! a child whose strong impulses, ardent feeling, violent temper, and stormy will were never to know the softening, tempering sweetness of real mother love. She knew none of those tender hours of caressing and confidence that even a very little child enjoys in the warmth of any mother heart, if not its own mother's; no loving arms clasped her to a mother's bosom to soothe her babygriefs, to rest her childish weariness. There were even times when Hannah Maxwell seemed to resent her existence; to repel her affection, though her duty kept her inexorably just to the child. Dolly was never punished for what she had not done, but always for nearly everything she did do, and services were exacted from her that made her childhood a painful memory to all her later life. Was there butter or eggs wanted from Wingfield on any emergency? at five years old 5 Dolly would be mounted on the steady old the extreme, as well in present resistance as in certainty of results; for as soon as poor Dolly reached home, after another silent drive, she was invariably taken into the spare bedroom and soundly whipped for being restless in meeting. And, adding insult to injury, after dinner, enjoyed with the eager appetite of a healthy child used to three meals on a week-day, she was required to repeat that theological torture, the Assembly's Catechism, from end to end. But in spite of all this, partly because Sunday came only once a week, partly because of her father's genial nature and devoted affection for his girl, which grew deeper and stronger constantly, Dolly did not miss of her life as many a morbid character might have in her place. She grew up a rosy, sunny, practical young woman, with a dominant temper toward everybody but her mother. Plump, healthy, and pretty, her cheeriness and usefulness would have made her popular had she been a poor man's daughter; and by this time Josiah Maxwell was the richest man in town, so Dolly had plenty of lovers, and in due time married a fine young fellow, and settled down at home with her parents, who were almost as much pleased with Mr. Henderson as was their daughter. But all this time Mrs. Maxwell preserved the calm austerity of her manner, even to her child. She did her duty by Dolly. She prepared for her marriage with liberal hand and unerring judgment, but no caress, no sympathetic word, no slightest expression of affection soothed the girl's agitated heart or offered her support in this tender yet exciting crisis of her life. Hannah Maxwell made her life a matter of business - it had been nothing else to her for years; it was an old habit at sixty; and she was well over that age when one day Dolly, rocking her first baby to sleep, was startled to see her mother, who sat in her upright chair reading the county paper, fall quietly to the floor and lie there. Baby was left to fret while her mother ran to the old lady and lifted her spare thin shape to the sofa; but she did not need to do more, for Mrs. Maxwell's eyes opened and her hand clasped tight on Dolly's. Do not call any one,' she whispered faintly, and leaning on her daughter's shoulder, her whole body shook with agonized sobs. At last that heart of granite had broken in her breast; lightning-struck so long ago, now it crumbled. With her head still on Dolly's kind arm, she told her then and there the whole story of her one love, her solitary passion, and its fatal ending. She still kept to herself the contents of that anonymous letter, only declaring that she knew, and the writer must have been aware she would know, from the handwriting as well as the 10 circumstances detailed, who wrote it, and that the information it conveyed of certain lapses from virtue on the part of Charles Mayhew must be genuine. 'Oh, Dolly,' groaned the smitten woman, 15 'when he stood under my window and called me, I was wrung to my heart's core. The pains of hell got hold upon me. I was upon the floor, with my arms wound about the bed rail and my teeth shut like 20 a vice, lest I should listen to the voice of nature, and going to the window to answer him, behold his face. Had I seen him I must have gone down and done what I thought a sin; so I steeled myself 25 to resist, although I thought flesh would fail in the end; but it did not. I conquered then and after. Oh, how long it has been! I meant to do right, Dolly, but to-day, when I saw in the paper that he died last week in a barn over Goshen way, a lonely drunken pauper-Dolly, my 5 heart came out of its grave and smote me. Had I been a meeker woman, having mercy instead of judgment, I might have helped him to right ways. I might have saved him I loved him so.' The last words struck upon her hearer with the force of a blow, so burning, so eager, so intense was the emphasis: 'I loved him so!' Ah, who could ever know the depths out of which that regretful utterance sprang! 'Dear mother, dear mother,' sobbed Dolly, altogether overcome by this sudden revelation of gulfs she had never dreamed of a heart which, long repressed, convulsively burst at last, and revealed its bleeding arteries. 'Dear, good mother, don't feel so don't! You meant right. Try to forgive yourself. If you made a mistake then, try to forget it now. Try to believe it was all for the best - do dear.' The Galaxy, January, 1875. FITZ JAMES O'BRIEN (1828-1862) The biography of O'Brien is of short story texture, as if it were one of his own creations,mysterious, swift, dramatic. He was twenty-four when he suddenly appeared in New York, an Irishman who had been educated in Dublin University and then had squandered a liberal patrimony in London; he was thirty-four when he died in one of the earlier skirmishes of the war. The ten years of his Bohemian life in New York City, years of excited literary plans, Celtic in their magnificence, of happy-go-lucky literary adventure with congenial souls, of floods of poetry poured into the newspapers and magazines, need not be dwelt upon. He would be remembered only as a picturesque episode but for two or three of his short stories that are now seen to have marked distinct steps in the evolution of that important literary form. He added to Poe's art fervor and convincingness and dramatic power. The tales are all in the Poe land of the horrible and the highly imaginative, but they are humanized. They are romantic in spirit but realistic in detail. The story What was It' is laid in a New York boarding house; The Wondersmith' has within it biting pictures of the city slums. From O'Brien it was but a step to the more human fictional art of the seventies. |