Phemie Frost's Experiences Part 20

Being imbued with morality from the Hub, they only set an example of easy distances.

It takes a good, solid foundation of religion for even a born Vermonter to stand against a sudden rush of money. This man seemed to start fair.

He began his life with _us_. Next he went to Boston, the very spring and fountain of high moral ideas, where every law has a higher law to nullify it. He left his better half in the salubrious atmosphere, where she performed her domestic duties alone, while he was toiling down Erie railroad stock, and promulgating sweet sounds from the Grand Opera House. Bound together in conjugal sympathy, by ever-vibrating telegraph wires, what could have been more satisfactory and highly fas.h.i.+onable than these hymeneal relations?

This is what Cousin Dempster has been saying to me with a queer smile on his lips, and something that seems almost sarcastic in his voice.

Says he, "If this way of life is persisted in, and is held respectable in social circles, who has a right to find fault when sin and sorrow spring out of it? Who among the thousands who abandon honorable homes for personal pleasures shall dare to condemn him?

"Look over the list of outgoing steamers any month in the year, and see how large a proportion of husbands and wives travel together. Society, so slanderous in other things, is wickedly tolerant here, and makes a thousand excuses for the separation of married people.

"Children must be educated. Just as if a free-born American boy or girl can't learn all he or she is capable of knowing in his own native land!

Just as if any woman, who loves her husband and means to be a good mother, would listen for a moment to the idea of taking her family into foreign parts while her husband is tied down to business at home.

"Married people, who love each other, live together--temptations are serpent-like, but they seldom creep upon a hearthstone kept warm by domestic affection.

"Parents who are willing to live apart for the sake of their children, and call it a sacrifice to duty, may not know that they are hypocrites, but other people know it. Scandal thrives upon such things, and where scandal thrives domestic happiness perishes.

"The marriage relations are the soul of our social life; relax them, take away one grain of their holiness, and you blast the blossom from which wholesome fruit can spring. When love and truth dies out of marriage, its vitality is gone. G.o.d forgive the men and the women who dare to hold the most beautiful tie that links soul to soul, as a wisp of flax, to be rent or burned at the will of our most evil pa.s.sions.

"Can any human being make laws for himself and trample under foot those which have been for ages laid down by society, without meeting, sooner or later, with rebuke, and perhaps, ruin? Evil pa.s.sions arouse evil pa.s.sions. The profligacy and power of gold is sometimes most dangerous in a generous nature. In the hot suns.h.i.+ne of overwhelming good fortune, fiery pa.s.sions are sure to thrive and tend to a poisonous growth. War is the mother of licentiousness. How much that men should avoid, and women shudder at, has sprung out of the civil war, which ebbs and flows even yet on the borders of our land! In that war men learned to be daring in other things than brave deeds, and women learned to be shameless, and glory in free speech, free actions, and free laws of their own devising.

"These thoughts are forced from me by the violent death of a man who had the brain and the heart to be an honor to our State, whose capacity and cordial good-nature might have gained him the love of better men than he ever knew in his brief and fiery career, and who had the brain to accomplish great things in the future."

I listened with breathless attention to what Cousin Dempster said. He spoke with feeling. I didn't think there was so much in the man. He got up from his chair and began to walk the room.

"I cannot dwell upon this man's wildly brilliant career," says he, "without a feeling of melancholy. Here existed the capacities of a great man, perfect health, wonderful energy, struggling aspirations toward the right--which he might hereafter have reached--generous impulses running wild, strong affections, and overweaning ambition, all turbulent ostentations almost barbaric, and all hurled into nothingness by the blow of one bitter enemy.

"As he had lived, so they carried him to his grave, arrayed gorgeously in his coffin, lying in high state, not by the sacred altar of a church, but in the Grand Opera House, which had so long been the centre of his magnificence. Buried in flowers snow-white, as if gathered for the tomb of a vestal, glittering with gold, with clouds of perfume floating over him--in all the pomp of a monarch he was taken from New York, and carried for a last resting-place to Vermont.

"I wish it had been otherwise. Living as he did, dying as he did, with the ruin of so many lives involved in his fate, that last journey should have been taken in simplicity and quietness. The lesson his death conveys is too solemn for display, too mournful for anything but stillness. The elements of a great man left Vermont only a few years ago; New York has sent back the ruins. Let them rest in peace."

Sisters, I did not think it possible that Cousin Dempster could get so fearfully earnest; his conversation has filled me with thoughts too solemn for careless utterance. In this man's death I hear a cry for merciful consideration--a solemn warning--a protest against the headlong speed with which this generation is trampling respectability under foot.

This man's death is a subject of gossip now, when it should be a subject of mournful regret.

I do not speak here of the man who killed him, or the cause of his death. One is a subject that no lady would care to discuss. The other is in the hands of the law, which should be a sanctuary for the accused.

The evidence has been heard thoroughly, and a jury has decided on it, merciful or not, its verdict is final.

But for Cousin Dempster, I should not have made this death the subject of a report, but some things that he has said startled me. Is it true that the alienation and separation of married people has become so easy and so fas.h.i.+onable? Can a husband and wife live apart months, years, and still keep up a pretence or the reality of affection, and be honored as respectable? I, for one, have no patience with such things. To me, marriage is a beautiful inst.i.tution.

Do not smile, sisters; I am not thinking of the great Grand Duke now. In fact I am not thinking of myself at all. Cousin Dempster's earnestness has impressed me with apprehension and melancholy; he places this subject before me in a new light.

The man who is dead was in the full vigor of his life. The poor wept for him; he was good to them, and they believed that he had a kind heart.

Sometimes that heart went back to the prayers of his mother. Had time been given him, something tender and good might have found a n.o.ble growth in his nature. We do not yet know, and never shall know, what he might have been.

XXVIII.

SHE WOULD GO.

Dear sisters:--I have had a glorious and a refres.h.i.+ng season. I have felt, in the depths of my soul, that the eyes, of all Vermont were on me in a reflective way. As the moon is sometimes permitted to s.h.i.+ne before the sun goes down, I have added the light of my little feminine luminary to the flood of public homage that surrounds the greatest and best man that our State ever gave to the world.

Sat.u.r.day night, February third, was Horace Greeley's birthday. A gentleman up-town, who thinks the world of that smartest of good men, just made a house-warming on the occasion, and invited so many artists and poets, and editors and statesmen, and people that Providence had labelled as something particular, that it is a wonder the roof wasn't blown off with the yeasting of so much genius.

Of course the beauty and talent of old Vermont, wherever it could be found, was hunted up, and invited with unusual enthusiasm. Where beauty and talent could be found united in one person--modesty forbids me to point out an instance--of course an especial compliment was paid. My invitation had a picture of the man, whose birthday we went to celebrate, in the middle of the writing--a real good likeness, that I mean to put in a locket and wear round my neck in honor of this self-made man and of my own native State, which may have double cause to glorify herself when the sixty-first birthday of another person just standing in front of the Temple of Fame, with her foot on the threshold, shall come round. I say nothing, but in the female line Vermont has laid up oceans of future glory for herself.

Well, the day came. Once more I drew forth my pink silk dress, and ironed out the flounces; one of them got a little scorched, but I looped up the spot with a bow and a bunch of roses, and found the scorch an artistic improvement. I twisted my hair in corkscrews over night, and slept with my eyes wide open, contented as a kitten, though the pull was tremendous. I frizzed up the other woman's hair, for which I had paid ten dollars in the Sixth Avenue, and made ready for the occasion over night in a general way.

Of course Cousin Dempster and his wife were invited, being _my_ cousins, and so saturated with the family genius, that people are constantly expecting it to break out, which it hasn't yet, except in a general way.

But Cousin D. made lots of money in the war, and money is thought almost as much of as talent by some people. Still, between ourselves, I don't think they would have been invited if they hadn't come from Sprucehill; which is taking a literary position next to the Hub since our Society has begun to publish my humble reports.

Well, just at nine o'clock, if you had been in front of my boarding-house you might have seen a splendid carriage standing at the door, and that coachman, in his fur collar and cuffs, sitting high up on the driver's seat, and scrouching his head down while a storm of sleet and snow beat over him.

If you had looked toward the house, three or four eager and curious faces might have been seen flat against every front window as a certain dignified and queenly person came slowly down the steps, with a white opera-cloak folded over her magnificent person, and a pink silk long train bunched up under it, lining-side out.

The moment that carriage-door shut with an aristocratic bang you might have seen those faces turn from the window and look at each other--then noses turned up at sympathizing noses, giving out audible sniffs of that envy which the wonderful endowments of some persons are apt to engender in the inferior female mind.

But if you had looked into that carriage you would have seen it packed comfortably as a robin's nest in blossom time. There was my pink dress floating round me in rosy billows; there was Cousin E. E.'s corn-colored moire antique swelling like a balloon on her side; and there was Cousin Dempster rising like a black exclamation point up from one corner, and _that child_ drumming her blue kid-boots against the seat in another corner, and snarling because a gust of sleet came in with me before the fellow outside could shut the door.

When I saw her, my blood riled in a minute.

"Why, Cousin Dempster," says I, "children were not invited."

"Children, indeed!" says the child, giving her head a fling: "I suppose Cousin Frost thinks that nothing but old maids can be young ladies--the idea!"

"Daughter!" almost shrieked Cousin Emily E., a-catching her breath, and giving a frightened look over my way.

"My child, how can you be so rude?" says Cousin Dempster, stamping down among the fur robes, and mas.h.i.+ng my foot under the sole of his boot.

I said nothing, but sat in dignified silence, wis.h.i.+ng those two persons to feel that it was impossible the creature could mean me, but I trembled all over with righteous indignation, and wondered why that Bible benefactor, King Herod, had limited himself to boys, when he had such a glorious chance to sweep creatures like that out of existence in the female line. Oh! if I had been a Bible potentate!

"She was so anxious to go, being born in Vermont," says Cousin Emily Elizabeth; "it seems as if she knew Mr. Greeley."

"Reads the _Tribune_ every day," chimes in Cousin Dempster, giving me a pleading look.

"I'll thank you to take the heel of your boot off my foot, if you have held it there long enough," says I, with the firmness of a martyr and the dignity of an empress.

This wilted the whole party into silence, and we drove on, with the hail pelting against the windows, and lowering clouds inside.

All at once we got into a long line of carriages, and moved on as if we were going to a funeral instead of a birthday. Then the carriage stopped, the door was flung open, and we stepped under a long tent that stretched from the front door down a flight of stone steps and across the sidewalk. A carpet ran down the steps to the carriage, and we walked up that into the house; then through a hall, and upstairs, where we took off our cloaks and t.i.tivated up a little in a room half full of ladies, and blocked up with cloaks and things. I let down Cousin E. E.'s dress, and she let down mine; then we shook each other out, took an observation of each other from head to foot, tightened the b.u.t.tons of our gloves, and went into the hall.

There stood Cousin Dempster, with his white gloves on, and a white cravat with lace edges around his neck, looking _so_ gentlemanly. We went downstairs Indian file, for a stream of people were going down on one side all crimlicued off most gorgeously; and another stream was going up, with cloaks and hoods on, so there was no locking arms till we got into the lower hall. Then we just tackled in. I took one arm, E. E.

took the other, and _that creature_ followed after, looking like an infantile Black Crook in her short muslin skirts and bunched-up sash.