Part 13 — THE THREE CALLS.

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BY H. L. JONES.

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The sofas and ottomans were covered with crimson velvet; the morning sun streamed through folds of rich stuff, that tempered and warmed its light; the tread was unheard on the thick carpet, and the glowing coal sent a cheerful smile over the ample apartments.

Alice and Louisa Stanwood were employed much like other young ladies of their age, hemming long, mysterious slips of muslin, or embroidering in worsted, and now and then chatting of the last night’s party, or the gayeties of the coming evening. They were pretty, and rich, and young, and gay, and admired, and happy. They knew they had complexions and figures to be both studied and improved—at all events, not to be injured by the adoption of awkward habits. They were fully alive to the merits of the last new bonnet, and had their own opinions touching the “Elssler fling,” and the harmonies of Ole Bull. What with dressing and calling, and dining and driving, with parties, balls, and social cotillions; with sleeping good, long, renovating night’s sleep, and perhaps a little siesta after dinner, really the months, and even the years, went by with astonishing rapidity.

They had already whirled Alice into her twentieth and Louisa into her eighteenth winter. (Our city belles do not count life by summers,) yet placid smiles dwelt on their unruffled features, and even thought had passed, zephyr-like, over their brows, nor left a mark behind. Their laugh had a joyousness born of the present, in which neither hope nor memory had share. They had had no time to think, to feel, to suffer. But that there was suffering in the world they knew very well. They knew it by reading history, and the newspapers; nay, they knew, too, there was suffering of many sorts, and often and often had they dropped the sympathetic tear over the sentimental woes which the “cunning hand” of genius portrayed in the novel of the day.

Madam Stanwood, the grandmother of these fair girls, reclined in the easiest of easy chairs, her feet imbedded in the yielding “brioche,” and by her side her little reading stand, on which she had just laid down her book and spectacles. Her pale and composed features, her comely attire, her dignified deportment, had all that makes age winning and respectable; and the fond glances with which she regarded her grandchildren, spoke not less her readiness to sympathize with youth, than youth’s tenderness and respect for her; for we do, indeed, “receive but what we give,” and rarely is there an instance of heartfelt sympathy with the young, that is not cheerfully and sincerely answered.

“The history of any individual, if it were faithfully written out, would be an epic poem,” said Madam Stanwood, repeating the last lines she had been reading. “What do you think of that, my dears? Does it not startle you to look at the faces you meet in the streets, and think of the history that is so unwritten on them?”

“Undoubtedly it would, grandma, if we ever thought of reading faces; but, really, I must think there is more poetry than truth in the remark; I should sooner complain of the entire want of meaning in the faces and lives of those I meet, than be alarmed at the announcement of a history in them.”

“I declare,” said the ever laughing Louisa, “I wish something would happen to startle and confound us among our ‘dear five hundred friends,’ even a little bit of a volcano in our domestic circle would not be amiss. Such an event, now, as Mary Ware’s elopement! Think what a shaking that gave our faculties! why it lasted us full a week for steady talking.”

“Well, I don’t see but Alice or I must be packing up a small bundle, and getting a farewell letter ready for you, just for the sake of variety,” said the grandmother, gayly.

The door opened and admitted a tall and very much dressed woman, who advanced with much liveliness, and greeted the trio.

The usual topics that fill out a ten minutes’ fashionable call were discussed with great spirit and volubility by all the ladies; the guest repeated in her farewell, the vivacious interest of her salutation, and tripped lightly down to her carriage.

“There, grandmother—there is a face! Now, where is the epic poem to which it is the index?” said Alice.

“What do you read, my dears?”

“I read,” said Alice, “a life spent in much the same round of calls and visits as she has been making this morning. A mind fully occupied with the genealogies of all the families in Philadelphia, that are at all worth knowing. I dare say she knows more now about my grandfather than I do myself—she does, to be sure, if she knows any thing.” Alice stopped, and Louisa added,

“I have read something, dear grandmother, that is more objectionable than gayety in Mrs. Ellicott’s face. Gayety I love dearly in old people—I love yours—”

“Calling Mrs. Ellicott ‘old people,’ Louisa! you are certainly stark mad! with all those long white teeth glittering defiance of such a calumny.”

“Gently! gently!” said Madam Stanwood; “teeth to the contrary notwithstanding, Mrs. Ellicott is my senior by some years.”

“But how different!” exclaimed Alice, warmly, “how different her gayety and yours—as different as lightning and sunshine—”

“Nay, Alice,” said Madam Stanwood, in a serious tone, “I must protest against being compared or contrasted with Mrs. Ellicott. I asked you what you read in her face. A capability, at least, of feeling and suffering?”

“You will think me satirical, grandmother; but she does make other people suffer so much, that—but I wont say it—and yet that hard face, those authoritative manners, that ever smiling mouth, put them altogether, she is just one of those persons I should think born not to suffer any thing, nor to feel much for any body.”

Madame Stanwood looked at the placid face, which had just expressed so harsh an opinion, with a melancholy smile.

“Come hither, Alice—and you, Louisa; let me teach you not to guess from the froth on the tossing wave, what is the deep calm that lies a thousand fathoms below. Long may it be before you know from the quick sympathy of experience, to detect the sigh under the smile, or to see how the lonely tears quench the conventional sparkles that seemed so brilliant.”

The young girls drew near, awed by the serious and almost sad demeanor of their relative.

“Something you said, Louisa—something that touched long silent chords in my heart. They do not make music there—they are, as your song says, ‘echoes of harp-strings, broken long ago.’ But it was of Mrs. Ellicott we were talking. I happen to know a circumstance which, as yet, is concealed from her nearest friends, except her medical adviser. This woman, so gay, so social, so alive to all that she feels or fancies her duty to society, had, only six months ago, the assurance of her physician, backed by the opinions of the first practitioners in New York, that her recovery is hopeless—absolutely hopeless.”

“Her recovery, grandmother!—is she ill?”

“She looks well—does she not? Well, she is consuming of a cancer. She has been hoping that a surgical operation might relieve her, until last June, when the result of ‘a consultation’ was announced to her, that at her advanced age it would probably be fatal. Her resolution was taken. She insisted on knowing the probable length of her life, if the disease took its course, and then forbade any allusion to it hereafter. Her own sisters, who are in the house, do not know it. She is as cheerful and as gay as ever. ‘Let no tears be shed for me while I live,’ she said, ‘mine are sorrows which would only be doubled by sharing them.’ ”

“That was noble!” exclaimed Alice. “Oh, how cruel, how unjust I was to her! and in the very point where she most deserves praise; for I own to you, her interest in all about her, struck me as particularly frivolous and unworthy in a woman of her age.” And Alice, in her generous haste to atone for her injustice, was in some danger of falling in love with what was, in truth, the exceptionable manner of Mrs. Ellicott.

“She is like Lady Delacour, Alice,” said Louisa, “don’t you remember, in Belinda?”

“As like as most facts are to fancies,” said Madam Stanwood, “Mrs. Ellicott, destitute of all Lady Delacour’s grace and fascination, has a simple, and almost sturdy moral strength, which gives dignity to an otherwise uninteresting character. She is not acting for point or effect at all, but expressing simply a disinterestedness and regard for others, which, under the circumstances, I own, inspires me with more respect than most martyrdoms.”

“There is the door bell!” exclaimed Louisa, “now, Alice, let us study characters, instead of talking nonsense.”

The gay Mrs. Lewis was not the counterpart of the gay Mrs. Ellicott, but the young girls looked wistfully at her, as if they, for the first time, felt the possibility that, “seeing, they might not see nor understand.” The smile and the voice, though cordial, seemed not heartfelt. For the first time they missed a sincerity, a truthfulness in the tones about them; and they silently listened, with watchful eyes, while their grandmother talked on with their visiter.

When she, too, had gone, and the gay laugh, and “good morning!” had died in the quiet room, Louisa broke silence.

“Dear me, grandmother! I feel as if I were treading on a volcano! I shan’t dare to step on the surface of society for fear of breaking in upon burning lava somewhere! I declare, this notion of people having two natures is very terrible—it quite takes away my composure.”

“And yet you have two, Louisa.”

“I, grandmother!—and where is the other, then?”

“Very soundly sleeping, my love—but some arrow, whether of joy or wo, will waken it to a life of its own. In good time—in good time. Let it rest—that other self of yours; ’twill spring up, full grown, and panoplied, some day. But tell me, Alice, how have you read Mrs. Lewis? I saw you studying her face as if you never saw it before.”

“I am ashamed to tell you how little I made out—merely that she was good-natured, and happy, and laughing all the day long.”

“So we live, my Alice; and the life that is deepest leaves no traces on our faces or manners. Society is not to be bored with individual joys or sorrows; and Mrs. Lewis has the good sense and taste to make lively visits to her friends, who have neither leisure nor desire to study the under tones in her laugh, or to see that tears and smiles wear the same channels in the face.”

“But has Mrs. Lewis’s really been an eventful life?” said Alice. “I have only known her as a woman who has been struggling somewhat to maintain her position in society, and not so rich as she would like, perhaps; but she always appears just the same, as if nothing had ever troubled her much.”

“Her life,” answered Madam Stanwood, gravely, “has been one of extraordinary mental vicissitude, though outwardly it has seemed rather uneventful. Take from her history the very common one of the loss of property, the habitual cheerfulness that has soothed, sustained, and encouraged her husband under repeated and continual losses. At one time he lost three ships in the same storm; he was prostrated, as men so often are under these reverses; but she constantly had her bright smile and ready sympathy—and that was every thing to his sick heart. Take the energy with which, in early life, she struggled against poverty, and has made herself almost, by mere strength of will, all that she was and is, and this, my dear children, implies a warfare that you cannot dream of, far less realize. Take away these minor events in her character, there is still something which makes her very interesting to me. She is childless. The prattle of her nursery ceased long ago; and the chill of death seems on the room which is now never opened. Her last child lived to be three or four years old; and she told me, not long since, that she never saw a door open, that she did not unconsciously turn toward it ‘to see her little Edith come in;’ that she never, never was out of her mind for a moment. There is something inexpressibly sad to me in her gay face, so haunted, like the Egyptian banquet, by the image of the dead. It is not so with us in general; what we have suffered we bury in our memories, and we keep the graves green sodden down in our hearts, and even in thought but strew flowers on them. But this presence of a grief perpetually with and about her, I have pitied her that she must live! I am certain I respect and love her, that she lives so disinterestedly as she does.”

“Grandmother,” said Louisa, after a hesitating pause, “has your life been an eventful one at all? I only know of you that you used not to be so cheerful as you are now; but since our mother’s death—”

“She has been our mother ever since we knew what it could mean to need one,” said Alice, fondly kissing her withered hand; “but, dearest grandmother, your face is a sealed book to us, too; you look very calm, you are very cheerful always—and yet who knows—”

Alice stopped thoughtfully, and then looking at Madam Stanwood, she saw that her eyes were tearful, and that with a strong effort she was endeavoring to preserve her composure. Placing her hand lightly on Alice’s mouth, to prevent her speaking, she said, with a smile,

“The day promises so fairly, my daughters, if you like, we will drive to see an old acquaintance, and on the way I will tell you some of those passages in my life, which I know you want to hear of, but from the relation of which I have always shrunk. Time has lessened the vividness of much I have suffered; but what we feel early in life, we feel late with a clearness it is difficult to account for. But you ought to know something of the history of your grandmother, and although I do not intend to give you a full memoir to-day, and perhaps never, I will talk with you somewhat of old days and feelings. In an hour we will go, and until then I shall be engaged in my own room.”

Alice and Louisa looked wistfully at each other, as their aged relative withdrew, but uttered not a word. Often and often they had wished, and hoped, and guessed, till they were weary of guessing what grandmamma’s life had been—for they were a little curious, though not reflective; and many a time a chance word or two had puzzled their young heads not a little; but hardly had they dared to hope that they ever should know, at all events, not before they were twenty-five—quite old women—any thing about it; and now that they were to know, really, it was quite too important a subject to trifle upon. So Louisa, with her mouth very much drawn down at the corners, and her eyebrows proportionably arched, withdrew to her room, as much like Madam Stanwood as possible, while Alice relapsed into her grandmother’s easy-chair. Reflection in an easy-chair is apt to glide into reverie, and thence the transition to sleep is not uncommon; and Alice was waked out of marvelous dreams, by the announcement that the carriage waited for her.

The day was fine and clear, though a little cold, and as the carriage-wheels rolled almost noiselessly over the smooth, hard road, it seemed the very afternoon of all the world for story-telling. Yet Madam Stanwood looked silently out on the landscape before them, and the young girls did not venture to speak. At last they stopped at a house where they were a good deal acquainted.

The Williamses were all at home; and a right gay set of young people they were: then there were their father and mother, and Mrs. Williams’ brother, old Colonel Morgan, who was always ready for a frolic, and the two Miss Dundasses, from Richmond. They had a very gay call. The two Miss Stanwoods flirted desperately with the old colonel, and the two Miss Dundasses beat him about the room with bouquets of bright flowers; and there was such laughing, till the tears ran, with old Mr. Williams, and such gentle and sympathizing laughter among the old ladies, and such heartfelt fun among all, that it was with some effort the Stanwoods at last left the resounding parlor for the silent carriage.

Silent it became as soon as the doors were closed, and the soft, crackling sound of the wheels brought the old associations of painful thought and anxious expectation.

At last Madam Stanwood spoke: but the words seemed rather the repetition of a record than the expression of thought.

“Saturday, the 20th of May, 1780.”

The girls listened eagerly, but no further sound escaped her. The faint color came and went on her faded cheek, her eyes closed, and the spirit within seemed unable to utter its mournful remembrances.

“I thought I could tell you,” she said at last, “but it will not come to my tongue—and perhaps it is best so—for why should your young hearts be baptized with sorrow before their time? And besides, all, every thing within and without is so different now. I scarcely recognize myself as I look back to that day. The dark day. You have heard of it, and the reason of it—but in those times we were not given to philosophizing. Yes, all is so changed. The skies I played under are no longer the same. They bent over a young, hopeful heart then, so blue, so clear—now they still bend over me, but they promise rest to the weary soul, and they speak soothingly of a better land.

“The brook behind my father’s house, in which my bared feet daily waded, turns the wheel of a factory; the trees that shaded our log cabin are metamorphosed into three-story houses; the country has turned into a town—and not more has the form changed than the spirit. The minds of men, trained and inured to suffering, patient, sturdy, vigorous, watchful—those were men, indeed!”

Madam Stanwood’s face, usually so benignly thoughtful, lighted up as she spoke, and she looked at the eager faces of her granddaughters with a smile. The most painful part, the beginning, had been surmounted, and she went on, less however to them than to herself.

“The twentieth of May! yes, on that day, I had reached my fifteenth birthday—on that day I met my lover for the last time. He had been drafted for a soldier. Every heart, men’s, women’s, and children’s, too, beat but to one tune, and that was their country’s freedom. We never dreamed then of detaining friend, husband, father or lover, when that country called. You know the country had been bleeding at every pore then for years. My father was a stern old man, who had been in the ‘old French war.’ My mother had been reared in a fort, and had daily loaded and handed the musket to her husband as he shouldered his axe or his scythe for his daily labor. Her sister had been carried into captivity by the Indians, and lived there among them for years before she escaped to her home. Arms, fighting, wounds, were household words with us. Judge if we were likely to think a moment of detaining Edward, though the day was fixed for our marriage. We were to have been married in June, and now it was May.

“How long it is since that day! how much has come and gone since then! and I live to tell it! It was but a few years after that the world shook with the French Revolution—and a few years more—that man of a bloody age, the expression of all that is evil and great in human nature, rose and shocked his race, comet-like, with his fierce glare, and then set forever. Our own calm Washington sleeps in his heart-honored grave, and the sighs of a grateful people whisper in the cedars above it—but then, he was living, acting, and inspiring all about him with the indomitable courage and heroic patience that animated himself. The terrors and events that stirred our hearts to agony were nigh us, even at our doors, and strong as we might be in patriotic feeling, almost every family could count its victims. I was young in years, but we grew old early then, and my mother had held her first child in her arms at fifteen years old.

“It was early in the morning—at early dawn—when I parted from him. He held me to his bosom that was covered with the simple uniform—so associated in my mind with all that was best and noblest on earth—and my bosom beat with pride as well as grief. I also could sacrifice something to my country.

“Well—that day—it wore on drearily, so drearily as you can never know; and in the afternoon some neighbors came in to talk of the army, and the destination of the regiment which had just left us. It was long after dinner—nearly two o’clock. So depressed and wretched did I feel, that when I lifted my head from my arms, where I was leaning, and gazed out on the sky, I was more soothed than startled at its strange appearance. The air seemed absolutely heavy with a darkness that came on like an army. But my thoughts had been of darkness and blood, and a sadness I could not shake off. Presently they all saw and felt it too. They sprang to the door, but it was not a storm, it was not cloudy, but just dark—the cattle came lowing into the yard, the birds flew to their nests, the fowls were already on their roosts. I cannot describe to you the consternation of our household. Superstitious persons are not wanting in any age, and you may guess that many read in the supernatural gloom a foreboding of disaster to our arms. That the day of judgment was approaching was a more common feeling, and a good many went to the minister’s house in their terror, that they might be listening to prayer. I don’t remember that I thought about it much, but it was a relief to see the sky light up as it did after two or three hours, and see nature going on her accustomed routine.

“We had no mails then, you know, my dears, and often months went on, and on, and brought no tidings to us, but what we learned from general rumor, or some chance straggler from the army. Then would come a letter from Edward, filled with all his former love, but giving no hope of his immediate return to us. Then came the project of besieging New York, and then volunteers would not do, nor new soldiers. The country demanded men who knew and could bear the fatigues of war. Oh! my children! you read and hear of the glory of war, and of the soldier who sweetly breathes his last for his country: true, the battle-field is terrible to think of, but there the groans are those of the dying, and humanity, shocked at her own barbarity, stanches the wounds, and tearfully holds the head that a few hours before she was frantic to lay in a bloody grave. But for the living death that many of our soldiers suffered before the war was over, there has been no such sympathy. The privation of clothing, of the commonest sort, the unshod feet, wearily and bleedingly marching over the snow, the shivering form, half covered by the tattered uniform, crouching over the fire in the wretched huts of the north, were scarcely less destructive than the withering heat, and wasting famine of the southern troops. Fortunately Edward did not go south until the winter, so that though he wrote of battle, he did not of sickness, and I hoped still.

“When I next heard from him he was stationed at New London. You know that terrible story, my daughters. You know that Arnold, the wretch, whom to name is to execrate forever in American bosoms, ‘Arnold the traitor,’ was sent to besiege it. He had four times the number of men that were in the fort. He attacked it on three sides at once, and though our men fought like lions, it must have been in vain. They fought in full view of their homes, of all that was dear to them in the world. Judge if they did not fight. Judge if they did not pour out their blood like water, while there was any hope. But at last they gave way—they laid down their arms. And then—they were basely murdered as they stood! Such a massacre was not known elsewhere, thank Heaven! during our whole struggle. It is enough to make one shrink from all that bears the name of man.”

Here Madam Stanwood paused. She had sketched rather than related so far, and the fair girls listened with a pained and eager interest. Most of what she had alluded to was new to them, and as they looked on one who had personally known and suffered in what had to them been only a dry “history,” she seemed transformed in their eyes. Oh! the “unwritten history” of that placid face! The written one of that heart, whose every fibre had been woven in one long web of anxiety and sorrow, and dyed in the blood of the loved and lost one! For now they saw that Edward must have been one of those who fell in that massacre. Their eager and tearful faces expressed the sympathy they did not else utter, and their aged relative understood it. She went on quietly.

“All is not yet told, my daughters. I heard that Edward had fallen, and years passed away, and still I heard nothing from him more. Then I married Mr. Stanwood—and then—and then Edward returned.”

“Returned!” exclaimed both the girls in a breath.

“Yes, he returned. The massacre was not complete. Somebody became satisfied with blood, and proposed a respite, and about forty were left living, and taken prisoners to New York. Edward lived through a long, dreadful fever, alone, without aid or attendance of any sort. Then he was sent with a hundred others to a prison-ship. God forbid your dear hearts should be saddened with all he underwent there. We heard it all. He returned to his family at last, with broken health, broken fortune—”

“And a broken heart! ah, grandmother!”

“No, his heart was not broken. What he felt I never knew, for he learned my marriage before he came back, and we never met for years. My children, my story will have been told you quite in vain, if it does not show you that hearts must live and act, and fulfill present duties, with what fortitude they may, and not break—nor ‘brokenly live on.’ God gave me the strength for which I prayed, to perform my duty to my husband and children, and to set aside from my heart an image which no longer fitted such a temple. I have long ago ceased to look at him with any eyes but those of friendly interest, though the recall of so much that is connected with grief is of course painful, and you see yourselves that he is both gay and social, and by no means inclined to play the despairing lover.”

“We see!” they again spoke in a breath.

“Yes, you have seen him this afternoon. Edward—Colonel Edward Morgan. And here we are at home, my loves, an hour past dinner-time.”