Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859

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"Upon my word, Miss Scudder," began Burr, "I cannot imagine what
representations our mutual friend may have been making. I assure you,
our intercourse has been as irreproachable as the most scrupulous could
desire."

"Irreproachable!--scrupulous!--Mr. Burr, you know that you have taken
the very life out of her. You men can have everything,--ambition,
wealth, power; a thousand ways are open to you: women have nothing but
their heart; and when that is gone, all is gone. Mr. Burr, you remember
the rich man who had flocks and herds, but nothing would do for him but
he must have the one little ewe-lamb which was all his poor neighbor
had. Thou art the man! You have stolen all the love she had to
give,--all that she had to make a happy home; and you can never give
her anything in return, without endangering her purity and her
soul,--and you knew you could not. I know you men _think_ this is a
light matter; but it is death to us. What will this woman's life be?
one long struggle to forget; and when you have forgotten her, and are
going on gay and happy,--when you have thrown her very name away as a
faded flower, she will be praying, hoping, fearing for you; though all
men deny you, yet will not she. Yes, Mr. Burr, if ever your popularity
and prosperity should leave you and those who now flatter should
despise and curse you, she will always be interceding with her own
heart and with God for you, and making a thousand excuses where she
cannot deny; and if you die, as I fear you have lived, unreconciled to
the God of your fathers, it will be in her heart to offer up her very
soul for you, and to pray that God will impute all your sins to her,
and give you heaven. Oh, I know this, because I have felt it in my own
heart!" and Mary threw herself passionately down into a chair, and
broke into an agony of uncontrolled sobbing.

Burr turned away, and stood looking through the window; tears were
dropping silently, unchecked by the cold, hard pride which was the evil
demon of his life.

It is due to our human nature to believe that no man could ever have
been so passionately and enduringly loved and revered by both men and
women as he was, without a beautiful and lovable nature;--no man ever
demonstrated more forcibly the truth, that it is not a man's natural
constitution, but the _use_ he makes of it, which stamps him as good or
vile.

The diviner part of him was weeping, and the cold, proud demon was
struggling to regain his lost ascendency. Every sob of the fair,
inspired child who had been speaking to him seemed to shake his
heart,--he felt as if he could have fallen on his knees to her; and yet
that stoical habit which was the boast of his life, which was the sole
wisdom he taught to his only and beautiful daughter, was slowly
stealing back round his heart,--and he pressed his lips together,
resolved that no word should escape till he had fully mastered himself.

In a few moments Mary rose with renewed calmness and dignity, and,
approaching him, said,--

"Before I wish you good-morning, Mr. Burr, I must ask pardon for the
liberty I have taken in speaking so very plainly."

"There is no pardon needed, my dear child," said Burr, turning and
speaking very gently, and with a face expressive of a softened concern;
"if you have told me harsh truths, it was with gentle intentions;--I
only hope that I may prove, at least by the future, that I am not
altogether so bad as you imagine. As to the friend whose name has been
passed between us, no man can go beyond me in a sense of her real
nobleness; I am sensible how little I can ever deserve the sentiment
with which she honors me. I am ready, in my future course, to obey any
commands that you and she may think proper to lay upon me."

"The only kindness you can now do her," said Mary, "is to leave her. It
is impossible that you should be merely friends;--it is impossible,
without violating the holiest bonds, that you should be more. The
injury done is irreparable; but you _can_ avoid adding another and
greater one to it."

Burr looked thoughtful.

"May I say one thing more?" said Mary, the color rising in her cheeks.

Burr looked at her with that smile that always drew out the confidence
of every heart.

"Mr. Burr," she said, "you will pardon me, but I cannot help saying
this: You have, I am told, wholly renounced the Christian faith of your
fathers, and build your whole life on quite another foundation. I
cannot help feeling that this is a great and terrible mistake. I cannot
help wishing that you would examine and reconsider."

"My dear child, I am extremely grateful to you for your remark, and
appreciate fully the purity of the source from which it springs.
Unfortunately, our intellectual beliefs are not subject to the control
of our will. I have examined, and the examination has, I regret to say,
not had the effect you would desire."

Mary looked at him wistfully; he smiled and bowed,--all himself again;
and stopping at the door, he said, with a proud humility,--

"Do me the favor to present my devoted regard to your friend; believe
me, that hereafter you shall have less reason to complain of me."

He bowed, and was gone.

An eye-witness of the scene has related, that, when Burr resigned his
seat as President of his country's Senate, an object of peculiar
political bitterness and obloquy, almost all who listened to him had
made up their minds that he was an utterly faithless, unprincipled man;
and yet, such was his singular and peculiar personal power, that his
short farewell-address melted the whole assembly into tears, and his
most embittered adversaries were charmed into a momentary enthusiasm of
admiration.

It must not be wondered at, therefore, if our simple-hearted, loving
Mary strangely found all her indignation against him gone, and herself
little disposed to criticize the impassioned tenderness with which
Madame de Frontignac still regarded him.

We have one thing more that we cannot avoid saying, of two men so
singularly in juxtaposition as Aaron Burr and Dr. Hopkins. Both had a
perfect _logic_ of life, and guided themselves with an inflexible
rigidity by it. Burr assumed individual pleasure to be the great object
of human existence; Dr. Hopkins placed it in a life altogether beyond
self. Burr rejected all sacrifice; Hopkins considered sacrifice as the
foundation of all existence. To live as far as possible without a
disagreeable sensation was an object which Burr proposed to himself as
the _summum bonum_, for which he drilled down and subjugated a nature
of singular richness. Hopkins, on the other hand, smoothed the
asperities of a temperament naturally violent and fiery by a rigid
discipline which guided it entirely above the plane of self-indulgence;
and, in the pursuance of their great end, the one watched against his
better nature as the other did against his worse. It is but fair, then,
to take their lives as the practical workings of their respective
ethical creeds.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

NEW ENGLAND IN FRENCH EYES.

We owe our readers a digression at this point, while we return for a
few moments to say a little more of the fortunes of Madame de
Frontignac, whom we left waiting with impatience for the termination of
the conversation between Mary and Burr. "_Enfin, chere Sybille_," said
Madame de Frontignac, when Mary came out of the room, with her cheeks
glowing and her eye flashing with a still unsubdued light, "_te voila
encore_! What did he say, _mimi_?--did he ask for me?"

"Yes," said Mary, "he asked for you."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him that you wished me to excuse you."

"How did he look then?--did he look surprised?"

"A good deal so, I thought," said Mary.

"_Allons, mimi_,--tell me all you said, and all he said." "Oh," said
Mary, "I am the worst person in the world; in fact, I cannot remember
anything that I have said; but I told him that he must leave you, and
never see you any more."

"Oh, _mimi_, never!"

Madame de Frontignac sat down on the side of the bed with such a look
of utter despair as went to Mary's heart.

"You know that it is best, Virginie; do you not?"

"Oh, yes, I know it; _mais pourtant, c'est dur comme la mort_. Ah,
well, what shall Virginie do now?"

"You have your husband," said Mary.

"_Je ne l'aime point_," said Madame de Frontignac.

"Yes, but he is a good and honorable man, and you should love him."

"Love is not in our power," said Madame de Frontignac.

"Not every kind of love," said Mary, "but some kinds. If you have a
kind, indulgent friend who protects you and cares for you, you can be
grateful to him, you can try to make him happy, and in time you may
come to love him very much. He is a thousand times nobler man, if what
you say is true, than the one who has injured you so."

"Oh, Mary!" said Madame de Frontignac, "there are some cases where we
find it too easy to love our enemies."

"More than that," said Mary; "I believe, that, if you go on patiently
in the way of duty, and pray daily to God, He will at last take out of
your heart this painful love, and give you a true and healthy one. As
you say, such feelings are very sweet and noble; but they are not the
only ones we have to live by;--we can find happiness in duty, in
self-sacrifice, in calm, sincere, honest friendship. That is what you
can feel for your husband."

"Your words cool me," said Madame de Frontignac; "thou art a sweet
snow-maiden, and my heart is hot and tired. I like to feel thee in my
arms," she said, putting her arms around Mary, and resting her head
upon her shoulder. "Talk to me so every day, and read me good cool
verses out of that beautiful Book, and perhaps by-and-by I shall grow
still and quiet like you."

Thus Mary soothed her friend; but every few days this soothing had to
be done over, as long as Burr remained in Newport. When he was finally
gone, she grew more calm. The simple, homely ways of the cottage, the
healthful routine of daily domestic toils, into which she delighted to
enter, brought refreshment to her spirit. That fine tact and exquisite
social sympathy, which distinguish the French above other nations,
caused her at once to enter into the spirit of the life in which she
moved; so that she no longer shocked any one's religious feelings by
acts forbidden by the Puritan idea of Sunday, or failed in any of the
exterior proprieties of religious life. She also read and studied with
avidity the English Bible, which came to her with the novelty of a
wholly new book in a new language; nor was she without a certain
artistic appreciation of the austere precision and gravity of the
religious life by which she was surrounded.

"It is sublime, but a little _glaciale_, like the Alps," she sometimes
said to Mary and Mrs. Marvyn, when speaking of it; "but then," she
added, playfully, "there are the flowers,--_les roses des Alpes_,--and
the air is very strengthening, and it is near to heaven,--_faut
avouer_."

We have shown how she appeared to the eye of New England life; it may
not be uninteresting to give a letter to one of her friends, which
showed how the same appeared to her. It was not a friend with whom she
felt on such terms, that her intimacy with Burr would appear at all in
the correspondence.

* * * * *

"You behold me, my charming Gabrielle, quite pastoral, recruiting from
the dissipations of my Philadelphia life in a quiet cottage, with most
worthy, excellent people, whom I have learned to love very much. They
are good and true, as pious as the saints themselves, although they do
not belong to the Church,--a thing which I am sorry for; but then let
us hope, that, if the world is wide, heaven is wider, and that all
worthy people will find room at last. This is Virginie's own little,
pet, private heresy; and when I tell it to the Abbe, he only smiles;
and so I think, somehow, that it is not so very bad as it might be.

"We have had a very gay life in Philadelphia, and now I am growing
tired of the world, and think I shall retire to my cheese, like
Lafontaine's rat.

"These people in the country here in America have a character quite
their own, very different from the life of cities, where one sees, for
the most part, only a continuation of the forms of good society which
exist in the Old World.

"In the country, these people seem simple, grave, severe, always
industrious, and, at first, cold and reserved in their manners towards
each other, but with great warmth of heart. They are all obedient to
the word of their minister, who lives among them just like any other
man, and marries and has children.

"Everything in their worship is plain and austere; their churches are
perfectly desolate; they have no chants, no pictures, no
carvings,--only a most disconsolate, bare-looking building, where they
meet together, and sing one or two hymns, and the minister makes one or
two prayers, all out of his own thoughts, and then gives them a long,
long discourse about things which I cannot understand enough English to
comprehend.

"There is a very beautiful, charming young girl here, the daughter of
my hostess, who is as lovely and as saintly as St. Catharine, and has
such a genius for religion, that, if she had been in our Church, she
would certainly have been made a saint.

"Her mother is a good, worthy matron; and the good priest lives in the
family. I think he is a man of very sublime religion, as much above
this world as a great mountain; but he has the true sense of liberty
and fraternity; for he has dared to oppose with all his might this
detestable and cruel trade in poor negroes, which makes us, who are so
proud of the example of America in asserting the rights of men, so
ashamed for her inconsistencies.

"Well, now, there is a little romance getting up in the cottage; for
the good priest has fixed his eyes on the pretty saint, and discovered,
what he must be blind not to see, that she is very lovely,--and so, as
he can marry, he wants to make her his wife; and her mamma, who adores
him as if he were God, is quite set upon it. The sweet Marie, however,
has had a lover of her own in her little heart, a beautiful young man,
who went to sea, as heroes always do, to seek his fortune. And the
cruel sea has drowned him; and the poor little saint has wept and
prayed, till she is so thin and sweet and mournful that it makes one's
heart ache to see her smile. In our Church, Gabrielle, she would have
gone into a convent; but she makes a vocation of her daily life, and
goes round the house so sweetly, doing all the little work that is to
be done, as sacredly as the nuns pray at the altar. For you must know,
here in New England, the people, for the most part, keep no servants,
but perform all the household work themselves, with no end of spinning
and sewing besides. It is the true Arcadia, where you find cultivated
and refined people busying themselves with the simplest toils. For
these people are well-read and well-bred, and truly ladies in all
things. And so my little Marie and I, we feed the hens and chickens
together, and we search for eggs in the hay in the barn. And they have
taught me to spin at their great wheel, and at a little one too, which
makes a noise like the humming of a bee.

"But where am I? Oh, I was telling about the romance. Well, so the good
priest has proposed for my Marie, and the dear little soul has accepted
him as the nun accepts the veil; for she only loves him filially and
religiously. And now they are going on, in their way, with preparations
for the wedding. They had what they call 'a quilting' here the other
night, to prepare the bride's quilt,--and all the friends in the
neighborhood came;--it was very amusing to see.

"The morals of this people are so austere, that young men and girls are
allowed the greatest freedom. They associate and talk freely together,
and the young men walk home alone with the girls after evening parties.
And most generally, the young people, I am told, arrange their
marriages among themselves before the consent of the parents is asked.
This is very strange to us. I must not weary you, however, with the
details. I watch my little romance daily, and will let you hear further
as it progresses.

"With a thousand kisses, I am, ever, your loving

"Virginie."

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CONSULTATIONS AND CONFIDENCES.

Meanwhile, the wedding-preparations were going on at the cottage with
that consistent vigor with which Yankee people always drive matters
when they know precisely what they are about.

The wedding-day was definitely fixed for the first of August; and each
of the two weeks between had its particular significance and value
precisely marked out and arranged in Mrs. Katy Scudder's comprehensive
and systematic schemes.

It was settled that the newly wedded pair were, for a while at least,
to reside at the cottage. It might have been imagined, therefore, that
no great external changes were in contemplation; but it is astonishing,
the amount of discussion, the amount of advising, consulting, and
running to and fro, which can be made to result out of an apparently
slight change in the relative position of two people in the same house.

Dr. H. really opened his eyes with calm amazement. Good, modest soul!
he had never imagined himself the hero of so much preparation. From
morning to night, he heard his name constantly occurring in busy
consultations that seemed to be going on between Miss Prissy and Mrs.
Deacon Twitchel and Mrs. Scudder and Mrs. Jones, and quietly wondered
what they could have so much more than usual to say about him. For a
while it seemed to him that the whole house was about to be torn to
pieces. He was even requested to step out of his study, one day, into
which immediately entered, in his absence, two of the most vigorous
women of the parish, who proceeded to uttermost measures,--first
pitching everything into pie, so that the Doctor, who returned
disconsolately to look for a book, at once gave up himself and his
system of divinity as entirely lost, until assured by one of the
ladies, in a condescending manner, that he knew nothing about the
matter, and that, if he would return after half a day, he would find
everything right again,--a declaration in which he tried to have
unlimited faith, and which made him feel the advantage of a mind
accustomed to believing in mysteries. And it is to be remarked, that on
his return he actually found his table in most perfect order, with not
a single one of his papers missing; in fact, to his ignorant eye the
room looked exactly as it did before; and when Miss Prissy eloquently
demonstrated to him, that every inch of that paint had been scrubbed,
and the windows taken out, and washed inside and out, and rinsed
through three waters, and that the curtains had been taken down, and
washed, and put through a blue water, and starched, and ironed, and put
up again,--he only innocently wondered, in his ignorance, what there
was in a man's being married that made all these ceremonies necessary.
But the Doctor was a wise man, and in cases of difficulty kept his mind
to himself; and therefore he only informed these energetic
practitioners that he was extremely obliged to them, accepting it by
simple faith,--an example which, we recommend to all good men in
similar circumstances.

The house throughout was subjected to similar renovation. Everything in
every chest or box was vigorously pulled out and hung out on lines in
the clothes-yard to air; for when once the spirit of enterprise has
fairly possessed a group of women, it assumes the form of a "prophetic
fury," and carries them beyond themselves. Let not any ignorant mortal
of the masculine gender, at such hours, rashly dare to question the
promptings of the genius that inspires them. Spite of all the treatises
that have lately appeared, to demonstrate that there are no particular
inherent diversities between men and women, we hold to the opinion that
one thorough season of house-cleaning is sufficient to prove the
existence of awful and mysterious difference between the sexes, and of
subtile and reserved forces in the female line, before which the lords
of creation can only veil their faces with a discreet reverence, as our
Doctor has done.

In fact, his whole deportment on the occasion was characterized by
humility so edifying as really to touch the hearts of the whole synod
of matrons; and Miss Prissy rewarded him by declaring impressively her
opinion, that he was worthy to have a voice in the choosing of the
wedding-dress; and she actually swooped him up, just in a very critical
part of a distinction between natural and moral ability, and conveyed
him bodily, as fairy sprites knew how to convey the most ponderous of
mortals, into the best room, where three specimens of brocade lay
spread out upon a table for inspection.

Mary stood by the side of the table, her pretty head bent reflectively
downward, her cheek just resting upon the tip of one of her fingers, as
she stood looking thoughtfully _through_ the brocades at something
deeper that seemed to lie under them; and when the Doctor was required
to give judgment on the articles, it was observed by the matrons that
his large blue eyes were resting upon Mary, with an expression that
almost glorified his face; and it was not until his elbow was
repeatedly shaken by Miss Prissy, that he gave a sudden start, and
fixed his attention, as was requested, upon the silks. It had been one
of Miss Prissy's favorite theories, that _"that dear blessed man had
taste enough, if he would only give his mind to things"_; and, in fact,
the Doctor rather verified the remark on the present occasion, for he
looked very conscientiously and soberly at the silks, and even handled
them cautiously and respectfully with his fingers, and listened with
grave attention to all that Miss Prissy told him of their price and
properties, and then laid his finger down on one whose snow-white
ground was embellished with a pattern representing lilies of the valley
on a background of green leaves. "This is the one," he said, with an
air of decision; and then be looked at Mary, and smiled, and a murmur
of universal approbation broke out.

"_Il a de la delicatesse_," said Madame de Frontignac, who had been
watching this scene with bright, amused eyes,--while a chorus of loud
acclamations, in which Miss Prissy's voice took the lead, conveyed to
the innocent-minded Doctor the idea, that in some mysterious way he had
distinguished himself in the eyes of his feminine friends; whereat he
retired to his study slightly marvelling, but on the whole well
pleased, as men generally are when they do better than they expect; and
Miss Prissy, turning out all profaner persons from the apartment, held
a solemn consultation, to which only Mary, Mrs. Scudder, and Madame de
Frontignac were admitted. For it is to be observed that the latter had
risen daily and hourly in Miss Prissy's esteem, since her entrance into
the cottage; and she declared, that, if she only would give her a few
hints, she didn't believe but that she could make that dress look just
like a Paris one; and rather intimated that in such a case she might
almost be ready to resign all mortal ambitions.

The afternoon of this day, just at that cool hour when the clock ticks
so quietly in a New England kitchen, and everything is so clean and put
away that there seems to be nothing to do in the house, Mary sat
quietly down in her room to hem a ruffle. Everybody had gone out of the
house on various errands. The Doctor, with implicit faith, had
surrendered himself to Mrs. Scudder and Miss Prissy, to be conveyed up
to Newport, and attend to various appointments in relation to his outer
man, which he was informed would be indispensable in the forthcoming
solemnities. Madame de Frontignac had also gone to spend the day with
some of her Newport friends. And Mary, quite well pleased with the
placid and orderly stillness which reigned through the house, sat
pleasantly murmuring a little tune to her sewing, when suddenly the
trip of a very brisk foot was heard in the kitchen, and Miss Cerinthy
Ann Twitchel made her appearance at the door, her healthy glowing cheek
wearing a still brighter color from the exercise of a three-mile walk
in a July day.

"Why, Cerinthy," said Mary, "how glad I am to see you!"

"Well," said Cerinthy, "I have been meaning to come down all this week,
but there's so much to do in haying-time,--but to-day I told mother I
_must_ come. I brought these down," she said, unfolding a dozen snowy
damask napkins, "that I spun myself, and was thinking of you almost all
the while I spun them, so I suppose they aren't quite so wicked as they
might be."

We will observe here, that Cerinthy Ann, in virtue of having a high
stock of animal spirits and great fulness of physical vigor, had very
small proclivities towards the unseen and spiritual, but still always
indulged a secret resentment at being classed as a sinner above many
others, who, as church-members, made such professions, and were, as she
remarked, "not a bit better than she was." She had always, however,
cherished an unbounded veneration for Mary, and had made her the
confidante of most of her important secrets. It soon became very
evident that she had come with one on her mind now.

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