L'Arrabiata and Other Tales Part 15

WALTER'S LITTLE MOTHER.

On a still spring night, that had followed on a stormy day, a young woman sat alone by her little lamp, watching and wakeful, although in every other room of that old house, the lights had been put out above an hour before.

It was in a narrow street of a little northern town, and not a footstep was to be heard, save the watchman's, who stopped from time to time, under the one lighted window, to sing out with especial emphasis, his warning to be careful of fire and light. The cas.e.m.e.nt was not closed, and the lamp flickered in the night wind, that blew chill into the room, stealing as it pa.s.sed, the fragrance of the hyacinths that were blooming in the window. But the girl did not close the cas.e.m.e.nt; she only drew her large brown shawl still closer about her shoulders, and remained pensively looking over the book on her lap, towards the sleeping town beyond; listening to the clock upon the tower as it struck the successive quarters.

Opposite the deep old arm-chair in which she was reclining, a table had been laid with a clean white cloth, and a little tea-kettle was singing merrily beside a simple supper of cold meats, set out with a dainty neatness that almost amounted to elegance. An arm-chair had been drawn close to the single cover.

There was no other symptom of petticoat government in that large low room. Discolored copper-plates, sketches in oils, fragments of antique marbles, covered the walls, and lay about enc.u.mbering the furniture, in artistical confusion. An old stove of green potter; had been crowned by a Corinthian capital, blackened by the smoke and dust of years. Now, at this quiet hour of the night, when the lamp in the centre left the comers of the room in darkness, this motley a.s.semblage almost haunted one. The most incongruous things had been placed so close together, as to make them all look strange.

The clock struck eleven. With a movement of impatience, the young woman rose, and throwing down the little blue volume of which she had been absently turning over the leaves, she went to the window and looked out. Her earliest youth was past, and her countenance bore the stamp of a resolute soul, that has suffered, and struggled, and ended by becoming indifferent to evanescent charms. Yet if you looked longer at that serious face, you could see that such charms had been intended for it when Nature cast those features; but that life and fate had been too hard for her, and blighted their original promise. Eyes and brow were of the purest cut; the contour of cheek and throat was broad and sweeping. Even a slight trace of the small-pox here and there, had not deteriorated from the delicacy of her profile. One breath of youthfulness, of gladness, of carelessness, and that severe mouth would have softened into loveliness.

Even now, her countenance completely changed, as her watchful ear at last discerned the echo of a footstep on the pavement, coming up to the door, and a suppressed voice, humming a valse tune, as the key was being turned in the lock.

"At last!" she murmured, as she drew back from the window; "and late enough;--and what can make him sing? A gla.s.s too much, perhaps, and for all my pains and patience, I shall only have to preach him sober."

She listened to the step upon the stairs, it was steady, elastic, noiseless. "Not so bad after all," she said, with a sigh of relief, "but that he should have taken to singing--?"

The door opened, and a fine-grown young fellow of about nineteen came in, with a kindly salutation.

"How are you, little mother?" he said, taking off his cap, and smoothing back the tangles of his thick flaxen hair. "Why did you sit up for me? I told you I should be late. It was our last dancing lesson for the winter, and they made a sort of ball of it. If some of our young ladies and gentlemen had not been of such very tender years, we should have been at it still. But not a few of our partners were prematurely carried off, by their respective nursery maids;--a fact they would not have owned for worlds--and so we had to break up without dancing in the morning. You have been nodding a bit, I hope?"

"Not I, my son," she said, in a quiet tone. "Care keeps mothers awake at home, when grown-up sons and daughters go racketing to b.a.l.l.s and parties. However I believe I should have done wiser in going to bed, than in sitting up here with my teapot, waiting for light-footed young gentlemen who, I perceive, have already quenched their thirst at a less insipid tap than my domestic teapot."

"You perceive, do you little mother?" he answered gaily, disposing of his long limbs under the little table as well as their length admitted of; "and how do you perceive that?"

"This how: you never walked home singing in your life before; and we cannot attribute any ordinary cause, to an effort of nature so extraordinary as to produce what it never had. To be sure, the production was accordingly."

He laughed. "What a wonderfully sagacious little mother! your perceptions are correct as far as you see, but you don't see far enough. I confess to some disturbance somewhere, but not in the upper works, as you suppose. His wors.h.i.+p the burgermeister's mild punch is brewed with far too careful a consideration of the tender years of upper tertia, to do much mischief among us other fellows. Altogether, the refreshments affect the sober system, and I am afraid your provender here will have to suffer for it I abominate the trash and sweet-stuff they feed a fellow with at parties. Come, little mother, just give us a spoonful more rum in this tea, and cure one giddiness with another. For, as I said before, there is something wrong about me.

I _am_ hard hit."

He looked at her in mock distress, with a saucy sparkle in his deep blue eyes. "Walter," she began, in some dismay, "what have you been about? I trust you have not----?"

The young fellow helped himself to a slice of bread and meat, and fell to his supper with a ponderous gravity, that was meant to cover a shade of embarra.s.sment.

"I suppose no man can escape his fate," he said, chewing away with prosaic complacency, "sooner or later, there always must be a first time; and when a fellow comes to be nineteen, it becomes an affair of _amour propre_ to do as others do, and fall in--" he hesitated and she laughed.

"In love?--I do believe this foolish fellow is trying to persuade himself and me, that he has fallen in love!"

"No less;" returned the lad, swallowing the tea she had poured out for him at a gulp; "I am afraid there is every symptom of that fatal malady."

"Most prominent symptoms: a very unusual appet.i.te; and twelve bars of a valse, sung so false, as to make the very muscle model in the corner stop his ears, if he could move his hands. May I enquire to whom these miracles are to be attributed?"

A sly look of mystery came over his bright face; of which indeed the chief charm was this first freshness and frankness of early youth.

"Guess," he said; "you see at present I am too intent on filling my mouth, for any very coherent confession to come out of it."

And he fell to work again, and filled his plate, and cut large pieces off a bright pink ham. She had drawn her arm-chair close to the table, and looked quietly into his eyes.

"As if there were much to guess!--when one has the honor of knowing every one of the young ladies, and more of their giddy partner and his strong points (and his weak ones)--than he himself!--and we know him to be an aspiring young man, for whom the best of all things is but just good enough--and in every thing that beguiles young fools to folly, who is there among our maidens that can vie with the daughter of our most wors.h.i.+pful and puissant Burgermeister?--Did I not lay hands on a certain drawing board a few days ago, that was ornamented with the name of Flora in choicest arabesques?"

"Your tea is strong, little mother, but your prophetic sense is weak;"

said the young man with an affectation of pomposity; "of course I do not attempt to deny"--he proceeded with a pa.s.sing blush--"that I really did at one time admire that smooth-faced little viper, who can slip so cleverly through a thousand things that would pose a man--and besides I may as well confess that I felt less provoked at my own mistakes, because it amused me to persuade myself that it was love that made me stupid, as it has made many a cleverer man before me. But to-night my eyes were opened, and I saw that between us two there never could be any question of love. If a certain muslin dress were but transparent enough for us to look into her left side, we should discover nothing, I lay my life, but a pair of ball-tablets and the last No. of the 'Modes'."

"And may I enquire what there is to justify a young gentleman in harbouring such dire suspicions? Is a helpless young woman to be argued out of her heart, simply because she may not hold it ready when certain persons ask her."

"Proofs--we have proofs of what we advance;" returned the lad very seriously; "I do not profess to be any very extraordinary judge of character--in fact I suffered myself to be made a fool of for a time.

All this winter, you should have seen how this little Dalilah walked round my beard,--to use a figure of speech, for this trifle of yellow down is barely enough to swear by yet.

"Though I do dance deplorably, and never know whether it is a valse or schottisch, or whether I am to begin with the right foot or the left, still I was the acknowledged favorite. I was the eldest and biggest of the company, and might be looked upon as a full-grown man and champion." "A pike among the small fry;" observed his listener.

"As you please; she took me as full measure, and I let her--There _are_ feminine perceptions," and he smiled good-humouredly, "which would fail to discern my manhood, even if I were to grow right through the ceiling, and look down upon them from the mazes of a bristling beard."

"Certainly," she retorted; "you are my own little Walter, and will be, if you live to be a grandfather. I shall always feel maternally responsible for your faults and follies--and there is every prospect of your keeping these maternal feelings in practice to the last day of your life."

"Very possibly;" and he laughed again. "But to-day I really did do you credit, I a.s.sure you, and was an honor to my education. Our ball queen, you must know, proud minx! found me all at once too mean for even the meanest services of her slaves. There was a young gentleman from the bar, who had been so condescending as to join us. When I came in, with my plain frock-coat and cotton gloves, he was pleased to take his eye-gla.s.s, and to stare at me from head to foot. He was in tails, and light-coloured kids, and naturally took the s.h.i.+ne out of me, and would you have believed it?--she would hardly vouchsafe to let me take the tips of her fingers!--Oh! woman! woman, false and fair----"

"No sweeping condemnations, I beg."

"Oh! no. Heaven forbid! Of course there are angels among Eve's daughters. Some--angels with flaming swords. Others--simply angels, wearing their little wings neatly folded under innocent muslin dresses--"

"As--for instance--?"

"While I was still standing, turning to stone at the a.s.sertion that Fraulein Flora had already disposed of all her dances, my indignant eye chanced to light upon a face I had overlooked before--perhaps because it could not ogle and grin as some can--and now I saw a pair of large soft eyes pitifully fixed on mine, which seemed to say: 'Why did you never look our way before?--we could have warned you long ago, to beware of icebergs,' &c. &c.--all that eyes can say. So I resolved to be a fool no longer, and I walked across the room, look you, with a dignity--"

"I see!"--she interrupted drily; "I see him, as he walks over half a dozen dresses, turning over as many chairs as he could find in his way."

"Not this time, you unnatural mother, who are always ready to believe the worst of your own son! I tell you, I walked up to Lottchen Klas with the dignity of a prince--"

"Lottchen Klas, is it? A mother's blessing on your choice, my son!" she said with great solemnity. "If this be your first love, it is not of a disquieting nature. This is not likely to prove too absorbing--this will scarcely keep you from better things. I only beg you will put no nonsense into that poor child's head, do you hear?"

"I don't know what you take me for," he said with honest naivete. "I did not say a word to her that I might not as well have said to a woman of seventy."

"She will have been much edified by your conversation."

"Hm;--" he said; "_she_ began--she seemed to see that I could not be contented to go on poking here, and never be more than a very middling house-painter or decorator--that I had rather do anything, or go anywhere, to get to a proper school, and have an architect's education.

How she knew, I can't say, but she began--"

"And you could not leave off, as I know you."

"Of course not, and she didn't want to; _she_ did not find it tiresome; and then, between whiles, we danced; and I never thought I had been so clever at it. You can't think how well she managed to keep me in order; so that we hardly ever got out of time, and got through the quadrille part of the business with only one very small confusion. Ah! she is a sweet creature! and divinely good!--and I really don't believe I ever could find a more suitable opportunity to fall in love. Look here,"--and he pulled out a handful of bows and cotillion badges from his waistcoat: "All these are to be put in the fire. Only this one crimson bow was hers: and this is to be carefully kept, and laid under my pillow to-night, and I am much mistaken if I do not find myself over head and ears in love when I awake in the morning!"

"So that is still to come?" she said, pa.s.sing her hand playfully over his hair, "Alas! poor youth, I fear you may have long to wait!

To-morrow is Sunday, and when you get to your drawingboard, you are most likely to find a slender shaft, or a well-proportioned capital, more attractive than all the Lottchens ever born; and indeed my son, it is not a pity! You have plenty of time before you yet."

She sat silent for a while, and thoughtfully staring at the little blue flame of the tea-kettle, that had been singing a merry treble to her voice. He too was silent, sighed, and shoved away his empty plate.

"Little mother," he said at last; "I daresay you are right. At least, I suppose you should know more about these things than I do. Tell me honestly now, in strictest confidence, as a mother should speak to a grown-up son: how long is it since you loved your first love?--And why did nothing come of it, as in general, they say, nothing ever did, does, or can come of anybody's first love?"