The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859
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Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859
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"I have sent away my carriage, Mary, and come to stay with you. You want
me--_n'est ce pas?_" she said, coaxingly, with her arms round Mary's
neck; "if you don't, _tant pis!_ for I am the bad penny you English
speak of,--you cannot get me off."
"I am sure, dear friend," said Mary, earnestly, "we don't want to put
you off."
"I know it; you are true; you _mean_ what you say; you are all good real
gold, down to your hearts; that is why I love you. But you, my poor
Mary, your cheeks are very white; poor little heart, you suffer!"
"No," said Mary; "I do not suffer now. Christ has given me the victory
over sorrow."
There was something sadly sublime in the manner in which this was
said,--and something so sacred in the expression of Mary's face that
Madame de Frontignac crossed herself, as she been wont before a shrine;
and then said, "Sweet Mary, pray for me; I am not at peace; I cannot get
the victory over sorrow."
"What sorrow can you have?" said Mary,--"you, so beautiful, so rich, so
admired, whom everybody must love?"
"That is what I came to tell you; I came to confess to you. But you
must sit down there" she said, placing Mary on a low seat in the
garret-window; "and Virginie will sit here," she said, drawing a bundle
of uncarded wool towards her, and sitting down at Mary's feet.
"Dear Madame," said Mary, "let me get you a better seat."
"No, no, _mignonne_, this is best; I want to lay my head in your
lap";--and she took off her riding-hat with its streaming plume, and
tossed it carelessly from her, and laid her head down on Mary's lap.
"Now don't call me Madame any more. Do you know," she said, raising her
head with a sudden brightening of cheek and eye, "do you know that there
are two _mes_ to this person?--one is Virginie, and the other is
Madame de Frontignac. Everybody in Philadelphia knows Madame de
Frontignac:--she is very gay, very careless, very happy; she never has
any serious hours, or any sad thoughts; she wears powder and diamonds,
and dances all night, and never prays;--that is Madame. But Virginie is
quite another thing. She is tired of all this,--tired of the balls, and
the dancing, and the diamonds, and the beaux; and she likes true people,
and would like to live very quiet with somebody that she loved. She is
very unhappy; and she prays, too, sometimes, in a poor little way,--like
the birds in your nest out there, who don't know much, but chipper and
cry because they are hungry. This is your Virginie. Madame never comes
here,--never call me Madame."
"Dear Virginie," said Mary, "how I love you!"
"Do you, Mary,--_bien sur?_ You are my good angel! I felt a good impulse
from you when I first saw you, and have always been stronger to do right
when I got one of your pretty little letters. Oh, Mary, darling, I have
been very foolish and very miserable, and sometimes tempted to be very,
very bad! Oh, sometimes I thought I would not care for God or anything
else!--it was very bad of me,--but I was like a foolish little fly
caught in a spider's net before he knows it."
Mary's eyes questioned her companion, with an expression of eager
sympathy, somewhat blended with curiosity.
"I can't make you understand me quite," said Madame de Frontignac,
"unless I go back a good many years. You see, dear Mary, my dear angel
mamma died when I was very little, and I was sent to be educated at the
Sacre Coeur, in Paris. I was very happy and very good, in those days;
the sisters loved me, and I loved them; and I used to be so pious, and
loved God dearly. When I took my first communion, Sister Agatha prepared
me. She was a true saint, and is in heaven now; and I remember, when I
came to her, all dressed like a bride, with my white crown and white
veil, that she looked at me so sadly, and said she hoped I would never
love anybody better than God, and then I should be happy. I didn't think
much of those words then; but, oh, I have since, many times! They used
to tell me always that I had a husband who was away in the army, and who
would come to marry me when I was seventeen, and that he would give me
all sorts of beautiful things, and show me everything I wanted to see in
the world, and that I must love and honor him.
"Well, I was married at last; and Monsieur de Frontignac is a good brave
man, although he seemed to me very old and sober; but he was always kind
to me, and gave me nobody knows how many sets of jewelry, and let me
do everything I wanted to, and so I liked him very much; but I thought
there was no danger I should love him, or anybody else, better than God.
I didn't _love_ anybody in those days; I only liked people, and some
people more than others. All the men I saw professed to be lovers, and I
liked to lead them about and see what foolish things I could make them
do, because it pleased my vanity; but I laughed at the very idea of
love.
"Well, Mary, when we came to Philadelphia, I heard everybody speaking of
Colonel Burr, and what a fascinating man he was; and I thought it would
be a pretty thing to have him in my train,--and so I did all I could to
charm him. I tried all my little arts,--and if it is a sin for us women
to do such things, I am sure I have been punished for it. Mary, he was
stronger than I was. These men, they are not satisfied with having the
whole earth under their feet, and having all the strength and all the
glory, but they must even take away our poor little reign;--it's too
bad!
"I can't tell you how it was; I didn't know myself; but it seemed to me
that he took my very life away from me; and it--was all done before I
knew it. He called himself my friend, my brother; he offered to teach me
English; he read with me; and by-and-by he controlled my whole life. I,
that used to be so haughty, so proud,-I, that used to laugh to think
how independent I was of everybody,--I was entirely under his control,
though I tried not to show it. I didn't well know where I was; for he
talked friendship, and I talked friendship; he talked about sympathetic
natures that are made for each other, and I thought how beautiful it all
was; it was living in a new world. Monsieur de Frontignac was as much
charmed with him as I was; he often told me that he was his best
friend,--that he was his hero, his model man; and I thought,----oh,
Mary, you would wonder to hear me say what I thought! I thought he was a
Bayard, a Sully, a Montmorenci,--everything grand and noble and good.
I loved him with a religion; I would have died for him; I sometimes
thought how I might lay down my life to save his, like women I read of
in history. I did not know myself; I was astonished I could feel so; and
I did not dream that this could be wrong. How could I, when it made me
feel more religious than anything in my whole life? Everything in the
world seemed to grow sacred. I thought, if men could be so good and
admirable, life was a holy thing, and not to be trifled with.
"But our good Abbe is a faithful shepherd; and when I told him these
things in confession, be told me I was in great danger,--danger of
falling into mortal sin. Oh, Mary, it was as if the earth had opened
under me! He told me, too, that this noble man, this man so dear, was a
heretic, and that, if he died, he would go to dreadful pains. Oh, Mary,
I dare not tell you half what he told me,--dreadful things that make me
shiver when I think of them! And then he said that I must offer myself a
sacrifice for him; that, if I would put down all this love, and overcome
it, God would perhaps accept it as a satisfaction, and bring him into
the True Church at last.
"Then I began to try. Oh, Mary, we never know how we love till we try to
unlove! It seemed like taking my heart out of my breast, and separating
life from life. How can one do it? I wish any one would tell me. The
Abbe said I must do it by prayer; but it seemed to me prayer only made
me think the more of him.
"But at last I had a great shock; everything broke up like a great,
grand, noble dream,--and I waked out of it just as weak and wretched as
one feels when one has overslept. Oh, Mary, I found I was mistaken in
him,--all, all, wholly!"
Madame de Frontignac laid her forehead on Mary's knee, and her long
chestnut hair drooped down over her face.
"He was going somewhere with my husband to explore, out in the regions
of the Ohio, where he had some splendid schemes of founding a state; and
I was all interest. And one day, as they were preparing, Monsieur de
Frontignac gave me a quantity of papers to read and arrange, and among
them was a part of a letter;--I never could imagine how it got there; it
was from Burr to one of his confidential friends. I read it, at first,
wondering what it meant, till I came to two or three sentences about
me."
Madame de Frontignac paused a moment, and then said, rising with sudden
energy,--
"Mary, that man never loved me; he cannot love; he does not know what
love is. What I felt he cannot know; he cannot even dream of it, because
he never felt anything like it. Such men never know us women; we are as
high as heaven above them. It is true enough that my heart was wholly in
his power,--but why? Because I adored him as something divine, incapable
of dishonor, incapable of selfishness, incapable of even a thought that
was not perfectly noble and heroic. If he had been all that, I should
have been proud to be even a poor little flower that should exhale away
to give him an hour's pleasure; I would have offered my whole life to
God as a sacrifice for such a glorious soul;--and all this time, what
was he thinking of me?
"He was _using_ my feelings to carry his plans; he was admiring me like
a picture; he was considering what he should do with me; and but for
his interests with my husband, he would have tried his power to make me
sacrifice this world and the next to his pleasure. But he does not know
me. My mother was a Montmorenci, and I have the blood of her house in my
veins; we are princesses;--we can give all; but he must be a god that we
give it for."
Mary's enchanted eye followed the beautiful narrator, as she enacted
before her this poetry and tragedy of real life, so much beyond what
dramatic art can ever furnish. Her eyes grew splendid in their depth
and brilliancy; sometimes they were full of tears, and sometimes they
flashed out like lightnings; her whole form seemed to be a plastic
vehicle which translated every emotion of her soul; and Mary sat and
looked at her with the intense absorption that one gives to the highest
and deepest in Art or Nature.
"_Enfin,--que faire_?" she said at last, suddenly stopping, and drooping
in every limb. "Mary, I have lived on this dream so long!--never thought
of anything else!--now all is gone, and what shall I do? I think,
Mary," she added, pointing to the nest in the tree, "I see my life in
many things. My heart was once still and quiet, like the round little
eggs that were in your nest;--now it has broken out of its shell, and
cries with cold and hunger. I want my dream again,--I wish it all
back,--or that my heart could go back into its shell. If I only could
drop this year out of my life, and care for nothing, as I used to! I
have tried to do that; I can't; I cannot get back where I was before."
"_Would_ you do it, dear Virginie?" said Mary; "would you, if you
could?"
"It was very noble and sweet, all that," said Virginie; "it gave me
higher thoughts than ever I had before; I think my feelings were
beautiful;--but now they are like little birds that have no mother; they
kill me with their crying."
"Dear Virginie, there is a real Friend in heaven, who is all you can ask
or think,--nobler, better, purer,--who cannot change, and cannot die,
and who loved you and gave Himself for you."
"You mean Jesus," said Virginie. "Ah, I know it; and I say the offices
to him daily, but my heart is very wild and starts away from my words.
I say, 'My God, I give myself to you!'--and after all, I don't give
myself, and I don't feel comforted. Dear Mary, you must have suffered,
too,--for you loved really,--I saw it;--when we feel a thing ourselves,
we can see very quick the same in others;--and it was a dreadful blow
to come so all at once."
"Yes, it was," said Mary; "I thought I must die; but Christ has given me
peace."
These words were spoken with that long-breathed sigh with which
we always speak of peace,--a sigh that told of storms and sorrows
past,--the sighing of the wave that falls spent and broken on the shores
of eternal rest.
There was a little pause in the conversation, and then Virginie raised
her head and spoke in a sprightlier lone.
"Well, my little fairy cat, my white doe, I have come to you. Poor
Virginie wants something to hold to her heart; let me have you," she
said, throwing her arms round Mary.
"Dear, dear Virginie, indeed you shall!" said Mary. "I will love you
dearly, and pray for you. I always have prayed for you, ever since the
first day I knew you."
"I knew it,--I felt your prayers in my heart. Mary, I have many thoughts
that I dare not tell to any one, lately,--but I cannot help feeling that
some are real Christians who are not in the True Church. You are as true
a saint as Saint Catharine; indeed, I always think of you when I think
of our dear Lady; and yet they say there is no salvation out of the
Church."
This was a new view of the subject to Mary, who had grown up with the
familiar idea that the Romish Church was Babylon and Antichrist, and
who, during the conversation, had been revolving the same surmises with
regard to her friend. She turned her grave, blue eyes on Madame
de Frontignac with a somewhat surprised look, which melted into a
half-smile. But the latter still went on with a puzzled air, as if
trying to talk herself out of some mental perplexity.
"Now, Burr is a heretic,--and more than that, he is an infidel; he has
no religion in his heart,--I saw that often,--it made me tremble for
him,--it ought to have put me on my guard. But you, dear Mary, you love
Jesus as your life. I think you love him just as much as Sister Agatha,
who was a saint. The Abbe says that there is nothing so dangerous as to
begin to use our reason in religion,--that, if we once begin, we never
know where it may carry us; but I can't help using mine a very little. I
must think there are some saints that are not in the True Church."
"All are one who love Christ," said Mary; "we are one in Him."
"I should not dare to tell the Abbe," said Madame de Frontignac; and
Mary queried in her heart, whether Dr. H. would feel satisfied that she
could bring this wanderer to the fold of Christ without undertaking
to batter down the walls of her creed; and yet, there they were, the
Catholic and the Puritan, each strong in her respective faith, yet
melting together in that embrace of love and sorrow, joined in the
great communion of suffering. Mary took up her Testament, and read the
fourteenth chapter of John:--
"Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have
told you. I go to prepare a place for you; and if I go and prepare a
place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where
I am, there ye may be also."
Mary read on through the chapter,--through the next wonderful prayer;
her face grew solemnly transparent, as of an angel; for her soul was
lifted from earth by the words, and walked with Christ far above all
things, over that starry pavement where each footstep is on a world.
The greatest moral effects are like those of music,--not wrought out by
sharp-sided intellectual propositions, but melted in by a divine fusion,
by words that have mysterious, indefinite fulness of meaning, made
living by sweet voices, which seem to be the out-throbbings of angelic
hearts. So one verse in the Bible read by a mother in some hour of
tender prayer has a significance deeper and higher than the most
elaborate of sermons, the most acute of arguments.
Virginie Frontignac sat as one divinely enchanted, while that sweet
voice read on; and when the silence fell between them, she gave a long
sigh, as we do when sweet music stops. They heard between them the soft
stir of summer leaves, the distant songs of birds, the breezy hum when
the afternoon wind shivered through many branches, and the silver sea
chimed in. Virginie rose at last, and kissed Mary on the forehead.
"That is a beautiful book," she said, "and to read it all by one's self
must be lovely. I cannot understand why it should be dangerous; it has
not injured you.
"Sweet saint," she added, "let me stay with you; you shall read to me
every day. Do you know I came here to get you to take me? I want you to
show me how to find peace where you do; will you let me be your sister?"
"Yes, indeed," said Mary, with a cheek brighter than it had been for
many a day; her heart feeling a throb of more real human pleasure than
for long months.
"Will you get your mamma to let me stay?" said Virginie, with the
bashfulness of a child; "haven't you a little place like yours, with
white curtains and sanded floor, to give to poor little Virginie to
learn to be good in?"
"Why, do you really want to stay here with us," said Mary, "in this
little house?"
"Do I really?" said Virginie, mimicking her voice with a start of her
old playfulness;--"_don't_ I really? Come now, _mimi_, coax the good
mamma for me,--tell her I shall try to be very good. I shall help you
with the spinning,--you know I spin beautifully,--and I shall make
butter, and milk the cow, and set the table. Oh, I will be so useful,
you can't spare me!"
"I should love to have you dearly," said Mary, warmly; "but you would
soon be dull for want of society here."
"_Quelle idee! ma petite drole!_" said the lady,--who, with the mobility
of her nation, had already recovered some of the saucy mocking grace
that was habitual to her, as she began teasing Mary with a thousand
little childish motions. "Indeed, _mimi_, you must keep me hid up here,
or may-be the wolf will find me and eat me up; who knows?"
Mary looked at her with inquiring eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, Mary,--I mean, that, when _he_ comes back to Philadelphia, he
thinks he shall find me there; he thought I should stay while my husband
was gone; and when he finds I am gone, he may come to Newport; and I
never want to see him again without you;--you must let me stay with
you."
"Have you told him," said Mary, "what you think?"
"I wrote to him, Mary,--but, oh, I can't trust my heart! I want so much
to believe him, it kills me so to think evil of him, that it will never
do for me to see him. If he looks at me with those eyes of his, I am all
gone; I shall believe anything he tells me; he will draw me to him as a
great magnet draws a poor little grain of steel."
"But now you know his unworthiness, his baseness," said Mary, "I should
think it would break all his power."
"_Should_ you think so? Ah, Mary, we cannot unlove in a minute; love is
a great while dying. I do not worship him now as I did. I know what he
is. I know he is bad, and I am sorry for it. I should like to cover
it from all the world,--even from you, Mary, since I see it makes you
dislike him; it hurts me to hear any one else blame him. But sometimes I
do so long to think I am mistaken, that I know, if I should see him, I
should catch at anything he might tell me, as a drowning man at straws;
I should shut my eyes, and think, after all, that it was all my fault,
and ask a thousand pardons for all the evil he has done. No,--Mary, you
must keep your blue eyes upon me, or I shall be gone."
At this moment Mrs. Scudder's voice was heard, calling Mary below.
"Go down now, darling, and tell mamma; make a good little talk to her,
_ma reine_! Ah, you are queen here! all do as you say,--even the
good priest there; you have a little hand, but it leads all; so go,
_petite_."
Mrs. Scudder was somewhat flurried and discomposed at the
proposition;--there were the _pros_ and the _cons_ in her nature, such
as we all have. In the first place, Madame de Frontignac belonged to
high society,--and that was _pro_; for Mrs. Scudder prayed daily against
worldly vanities, because she felt a little traitor in her heart that
was ready to open its door to them, if not constantly talked down. In
the second place, Madame de Frontignac was French,--there was a _con_;
for Mrs. Scudder had enough of her father John Bull in her heart to have
a very wary look-out on anything French. But then, in the third place,
she was out of health and unhappy,--and there was a _pro_ again; for
Mrs. Scudder was as kind and motherly a soul as ever breathed. But
then she was a Catholic,--_con_. But the Doctor and Mary might convert
her,--_pro_. And then Mary wanted her,--_pro_. And she was a pretty,
bewitching, lovable creature,--_pro_.--The _pros_ had it; and it was
agreed that Madame de Frontignac should be installed as proprietress of
the spare chamber, and she sat down to the tea-table that evening in the
great kitchen.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE DECLARATION.
The domesticating of Madame de Frontignac as an inmate of the cottage
added a new element of vivacity to that still and unvaried life. One
of the most beautiful traits of French nature is that fine gift of
appreciation, which seizes at once the picturesque side of every
condition of life, and finds in its own varied storehouse something to
assort with it. As compared with the Anglo-Saxon, the French appear to
be gifted with a _naive_ childhood of nature, and to have the power that
children have of gilding every scene of life with some of their own
poetic fancies.
Madame de Frontignac was in raptures with the sanded floor of her little
room, which commanded, through the apple-boughs, a little morsel of a
seaview. She could fancy it was a nymph's cave, she said.
"Yes, _ma Marie_, I will play Calypso, and you shall play Telemachus,
and Dr. H. shall be Mentor. Mentor was so very, very good!--only a
little bit--_dull_," she said, pronouncing the last word with a wicked
accent, and lifting her hands with a whimsical gesture like a naughty
child who expects a correction.
Mary could not but laugh; and as she laughed, more color rose in her
waxen cheeks than for many days before.
Madame de Frontignac looked as triumphant as a child who has made its
mother laugh, and went on laying things out of her trunk into her
drawers with a zeal that was quite amusing to see.
"You see, _ma blanche_, I have left all Madame's clothes at
Philadelphia, and brought only those that belong to Virginie,--no
_tromperie_, no feathers, no gauzes, no diamonds,--only white dresses,
and my straw hat _en bergere_, I brought one string of pearls that was
my mother's; but pearls, you know, belong to the sea-nymphs. I will trim
my hat with seaweed and buttercups together, and we will go out on
the beach to-night and get some gold and silver shells to dress _mon
miroir_."
"Oh, I have ever so many now!" said Mary, running into her room, and
coming back with a little bag.
They both sat on the bed together, and began pouring them out,--Madame
de Frontignac showering childish exclamations of delight.
Suddenly Mary put her hand to her heart as if she had been struck with
something; and Madame de Frontignac heard her say, in a low voice of
sudden pain, "Oh, dear!"
"What is it, _mimi?_" she said, looking up quickly.
"Nothing," said Mary, turning her head.
Madame de Frontignac looked down, and saw among the sea-treasures a
necklace of Venetian shells, that she knew never grew on the shores of
Newport. She held it up.
"Ah, I see," she said. "He gave you this. Ah, _ma pauvrette_" she said,
clasping Mary in her arms, "thy sorrow meets thee everywhere! May I be a
comfort to thee!--just a little one!"
"Dear, dear friend!" said Mary, weeping. "I know not how it is.
Sometimes I think this sorrow is all gone; but then, for a moment, it
comes back again. But I am at peace; it is all right, all right; I would
not have it otherwise. But, oh, if he could have spoken one word to me
before! He gave me this," she added, "when he came home from his first
voyage to the Mediterranean. I did not know it was in this bag. I had
looked for it everywhere."
"Sister Agatha would have told you to make a rosary of it," said Madame
de Frontignac; "but you pray without a rosary. It is all one," she
added; "there will be a prayer for every shell, though you do not count
them. But come, _ma chere_, get your bonnet, and let us go out on the
beach."
That evening, before going to bed, Mrs. Scudder came into Mary's room.
Her manner was grave and tender; her eyes had tears in them; and
although her usual habits were not caressing, she came to Mary and put
her arms around her and kissed her. It was an unusual manner, and Mary's
gentle eyes seemed to ask the reason of it.
"My daughter," said her mother, "I have just had a long and very
interesting talk with our dear good friend, the Doctor; ah, Mary, very
few people know how good he is!"
"True, mother," said Mary, warmly; "he is the best, the noblest, and yet
the humblest man in the world."
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