Act 5 — WOODLAWN:

OR THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MEDAL.

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BY F. E. F., AUTHOR OF A “MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE,” ETC.

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’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.

Campbell.

“What are you thinking of so intently, Annie?” asked Kate Leslie, of her cousin. “You have not spoken for the last half hour.”

Annie roused herself and answered with a smile, “Only of last night’s Opera. Nothing very important, you see.”

“And what of the Opera?” pursued Kate. “Come, I should like to hear a genuine, unsophisticated opinion of our most fashionable city amusement.”

“I was thinking less of the music, Kate!” returned Annie, “than of the audience.”

“And of the audience?” persisted Kate.

“Well, Kate, if you will have it, I was only thinking how happy and gay they all looked. What a different world it was from any I had ever seen before; and thinking what a difference of fate there was between those elegant-looking girls who sat opposite, and myself.”

“Ah! the Hautons, they are fortune’s favorites indeed. They have every thing, fortune, family, fashion—and elegant, high-bred looking things they are. They called yesterday and left a card for you; but Mrs. Hauton told mamma last night that they were moving out to Woodlawn, and hoped we would return the visit there. I should like it of all things, for the place is magnificent, and I am told they entertain delightfully. We have always visited in the city, but have never before been invited out of town. As soon as Mrs. Hauton is settled there, I presume we shall hear from her. Fanny Elliot spent a week with them last summer, and she said it was a continued round of dinner and evening-parties all the time. Beside invited guests, they have always preparations made for unexpected company. The table is laid every day as for a dinner-party, with silver, and I don’t know how many men in attendance. And then they have a billiard-room and library, and green-house and horses—and all in the handsomest style.”

“And an opera-box in town,” said Annie, with something that approached a sigh.

“Oh, yes, an opera-box, and every thing else you can think of. They live in the city in the winter, and their parties are always the most elegant of the season. The girls dress exquisitely, too. They import most of their things; and, in short, I don’t know any one I’d rather be than one of those Hautons.”

Annie, who lived in the quiet little village of C——, where her father, the principal lawyer in the place, could just manage to maintain his family in a plain, comfortable, but rather homespun way, was rather dazzled by this picture of the Hautons; and her heart quite died within her at the idea of paying a visit among such grand people. She looked upon Kate’s fearlessness on the subject with some surprise. But then Kate, she remembered, was “used to such people.” But how should she, a little village-girl, appear among these fashionables. Then her dress, (that first thought among women,) she almost hoped Mrs. Hauton would forget to follow up her invitation.

A few days after, however, Kate entered the room, saying, “Here is a note from Mrs. Hauton, Annie, as I expected. She wishes us to pass a few days at Woodlawn. Mamma desired me to show it to you before she answered it. So what do you say?”

“Just what you do, of course,” replied Annie. “They are almost strangers to me, you know; so you must decide for us both. I am ready to accept or refuse—”

“Oh, my dear,” interrupted Kate, quickly, “I would not have you refuse on any account. I am particularly glad, for your sake, that the invitation should have come while you are with us. Indeed, Annie, I consider you quite in luck that we are asked just at this time.”

“How long are we to stay?” inquired Annie.

“We are invited from Monday to Wednesday, in English style,” replied Kate, “which I like. Of all things I hate that indefinite period of ‘as long as you find it agreeable,’ when half your time is spent in trying to find out how long you are expected to remain, and your hostess is equally occupied in endeavoring to ascertain when you mean to go.”

Annie’s eyes dilated with surprise at this definition of city hospitality, which sounded to her fresh country ears and primitive ideas as somewhat remarkable, but concluding that her cousin was in jest, she smiled as she said,

“Is it usual to fix a time for your friends’ departure as it is for their coming, Kate?”

“No,” answered Kate. “I wish it were. It would not, then, be such a formidable matter to ask them.”

“Are you in earnest?” asked Annie, looking up surprised.

“To be sure I am,” replied Kate. “You don’t know what a bore it is to have a place near the city, Annie, and to have people coming forever, without an idea when they are going.”

“Then why do you ask them at all, if you don’t want them?” inquired Annie.

“Oh, because you must,” said Kate. “Some expect it, to others you owe civilities; and its all very well if the time of their going was only fixed. Two or three days for people you don’t care for, and who don’t care for you, is long enough.”

“Plenty, I should think,” answered Annie, emphatically. “And I should not think, Kate, there was any danger of guests under such circumstances remaining longer.”

“Much you know of it, my dear!” said Kate, in a droll tone of despair. “The less you care for them, and the greater the bores, the longer they stay. But papa and mamma have such old-fashioned notions of hospitality, that they wont adopt this new style of naming the days of the invitation. The Hautons understand the matter better.”

“Come, Annie,” said Kate, the next day, “as we are to breakfast at Woodlawn, we shall have no time to do any thing in the morning, so we may as well pack our trunk now. I suppose you’ll ride out in your gray barège,” she continued, as she opened the wardrobe to take down some of her own and her cousin’s dresses.

Now as this gray barège was one of Annie’s two best dresses, and which she was accustomed to think quite full dress, she hesitated, and said, with some surprise,

“My gray barège for the morning?”

“Yes, it will do very well,” continued Kate, supposing her hesitation proceeded from diffidence as to its being too plain. “The simpler a breakfast-dress the better; and gray is always a good unnoticeable color.”

Annie almost gasped. If she was to begin with her barège for breakfast, what should she do for dinner. But Kate proceeded with,

“Take the sleeves out of your book-muslin, Annie, and that will do for dinner. You are always safe in white, and I suppose they will supply us with Camelias from the green-house for our heads.”

“Book-muslins, short sleeves, and Camelia’s for dinner.” Annie’s heart beat high between expectation and fear. She almost wished the visit over, and yet would not have given it up for the world.

Monday morning arrived, and an hour’s drive brought them to Woodlawn. And as they drove up through the beautiful avenues of elms, and stopped before a very large, handsome house, which commanded a beautiful lawn, Annie felt that the place quite equalled her expectations.

Mrs. Hauton received them with great politeness, made a slight apology for her “lazy girls,” who were not yet down, and showed them into the breakfast-room before the young ladies made their appearance.

They came gliding in presently, looking very elegant and high-bred, dressed in the finest white lawn negligées, with the prettiest little thread-lace caps on their heads; their whole toilet exquisitely fine, simple, and recherché, so that poor Annie felt at once the value and consolation of the expression, “unnoticeable,” that Kate had applied to her barège, and which had rather astonished her at the time.

They did not seem to feel called upon to apologize for their not being ready to receive their guests, but only found it “very warm,” asked at what time they left the city, and were quite shocked at the early hour they mentioned, and thought it “must have been very disagreeable,” and it was evident from their manner that they would not have risen so early to come and see them.

The conversation became general, if that can be called conversation which consisted of some remarks upon the long-continued drought from Mrs. Hauton, with rejoinders as to the heat and dust of the city, from Mrs. Leslie. Mr. Leslie inquired something about the state of the crops of Mr. Hauton, and Mr. Hauton asked a question or two about the new rail-road. The young ladies kept up a little scattering small-talk, consisting chiefly of questions as to who had left town, and who remained yet in the city, and where the Leslies were going, etc., all of which Annie would have thought very dull, if she had not been too much oppressed by the novelty and elegance of every thing around her to dare to think at all.

After breakfast a walk was proposed through the garden, and Mrs. Hauton, with Mrs. Leslie, walking on before, the young ladies followed. Mrs. Hauton commenced a long story about her head gardener, who had behaved, she said, “very ungratefully in leaving her for a place where he could get higher wages, when she had dismissed the man she had, to take him, because he had offered to come on lower terms, and after she had kept him for a year, he had now left her, for the very wages she had given her first man; but they are all so mercenary,” she concluded with saying.

Annie could not help thinking that if a rich woman like Mrs. Hauton thought so much of additional wages, it was not surprising that her gardener, who probably had a family depending on him, did not value them less; nor did she see the call upon his gratitude for having been engaged at less than his worth.

Then Mrs. Hauton proceeded to tell Mrs. Leslie how many men they kept at work on the place, and how much they gave them a day, and at what an enormous cost they kept up the green-house, which “was, after all, of no use to them, as they spent their winters in the city, and the girls had more bouquets sent to them than they wanted.” And then followed her complaints of the grapery, which were equally pathetic, and all was excessively pompous and prosy.

Annie was in admiration of her aunt’s good breeding, which supplied her with patience and attention, and suitable rejoinders to all Mrs. Hauton’s enumeration of the calls on her purse, and the plagues of her wealth. Indeed, Annie began rather to doubt whether her aunt could be as tired as she at first thought she must be, she kept up the conversation with so little appearance of effort. She did not herself listen to the half of it, but whenever she did, she always found it was some long story about the dairy-woman, who would do what she should not, or the price of the luxuries by which they were surrounded, which Mrs. Hauton seemed to think a great imposition that they could not have for nothing.

Meantime the Miss Hautons kept up a languid complaint of the heat, and asked Kate if she did not find it “horrid.” And when Annie stopped to look at some beautiful and rare flowers, and asked their name, they replied they did not know, “the gardener could tell her,” and seemed rather annoyed at her stopping in the sun to look at them, and wondered at her curiosity about any thing so uninteresting. Annie was something of a botanist, and would gladly have lingered over other plants that were new to her, for the garden was under the highest cultivation; but she saw that it was an interruption to the rest of the party, and they sauntered on.

She could not help, however, pausing again with an exclamation of delight before a moss rose-tree in full bearing, when Miss Hauton said, somewhat sarcastically,

“You are quite an enthusiast in flowers, Miss Cameron.”

“I am very fond of them,” replied Annie, coloring at the tone in which the remark was made; “Are not you?”

“No,” replied the young lady, carelessly, “I don’t care for them at all. I like a bouquet well enough in the winter. It finishes one’s dress, but I don’t see the use of them at all in summer.”

“Oh, I hate them,” added her sister, almost pettishly. “They are such a plague. People who come out are always wanting some; and then the gardener is to be sent for, and he always grumbles at cutting them, and half the time he has not cord to tie them up, and papa sends me to the house for some. If I had a place, I would not have a flower on it; but mamma says the gardener has not any thing to do but to attend to the garden, so she will have flowers.”

“Why, certainly, my dear,” said Mrs. Hauton, who caught this last remark, “what should we pay Ralston such wages to do nothing. He gets his money easy enough now. If he had merely the green-house to take care of, I think it would be too bad.”

So flowers were cultivated, it seemed, chiefly that the gardener might not gain his living without “the sweat of his brow.”

As they came within sight of the river, to which the lawn sloped, Annie proposed that they should walk down to it; but the young ladies assured her at once that she would find it “very disagreeable;” and asking if they were not tired, turned their footsteps toward the house.

They returned to the drawing-room, and after a little dawdling conversation, Miss Hauton took down her embroidery frame, and began to sort worsteds, while Miss Fanny produced a purse and gold beads, of which she offered to show Kate the stitch.

Kate congratulated herself in the depths of her heart, that she had had foresight to arm herself with some needles and silk, and felt equal to all the emergencies of the morning; but poor Annie, one of whose accomplishments had not been to spend money and waste time in fancy work, could only offer to assist Miss Hauton in winding worsteds, by way of doing something.

Fortunately for Mrs. Leslie, Mrs. Hauton’s stream of talk was unceasing. She told innumerable and interminable stories (at least so they seemed to Annie) of the impositions of poor people; was very indignant at the sums they were called upon to give, and highly excited at the prices which were demanded of them, and which she thought people in more moderate circumstance were not asked. But more indignant yet was she when, on some occasions, they had not been treated with more prompt attention, and had superior comforts to others who were not as rich as themselves. She only, it seemed, expected to be put on a level with poorer people when the paying was in question. She evidently had an idea that the knowledge of her wealth was to procure her civilities which she was very angry at being called upon to pay for.

Annie thought it the longest morning she had ever passed; and when the servants announced the luncheon, she awoke as from a nightmare.

Gathering round the table, everybody ate, not from appetite, but ennui. Mrs. Hauton continued her stream of talk, (for, apparently, she had no sense of fatigue,) which now turned upon the hot-house and the price of her forced fruits.

Another hour passed in the drawing-room, in the same way, and Annie happening to be near a table, on which lay some books, took up a new review in which she was soon absorbed. After reading a few pages she (being the first person who had looked into it) was obliged to cut the leaves, when she heard Miss Hauton say, in the same scornful tone in which she had pronounced her an enthusiast in flowers,

“Miss Cameron is literary, I see;” and Annie, coloring, again dropped the book, and returned to her wearisome place on the sofa.

Kate found to her great delight that company was expected to dinner, and when the preparation-bell rang, the girls, almost in a state of exhaustion, retired to dress.

“Kate,” exclaimed Annie, “I am almost dead. I don’t know what has tired me so, but I feel as if I had been in an exhausted receiver.”

Kate laughed.

“You should have brought some work with you, Annie. If you had only been counting stitches, as I have been, you don’t know what a support it would have been to you under Mrs. Hauton’s talk. She is intolerable if you listen to her—but that I did not do. However, take courage. The Langtrees and Constants, and Merediths, are coming to dinner. Here, let me put this wreath of honeysuckle in your hair. There, it’s very becoming; only, Annie, you must not look so tired,” she continued, laughing, “or I am afraid you’ll make no conquests. And Constant and Meredith are coming with their sisters.”

After half an hour’s free and unconstrained chat, and conscious of a pretty and becoming toilet, refreshed and invigorated for a new attempt in society, Annie accompanied her aunt and cousin again to the drawing-room.

The new comers had arrived; a stylish-looking set—the girls in full dress, the young men so whiskered and mustachioed that Annie was surprised to hear them speak English. They were received with great animation by the Hautons, who seemed to belong to that class of young ladies who never thoroughly wake but at the approach of a gentleman.

The young men glanced slightly at Annie, and Mr. Meredith even gave her a second look. He thought her decidedly pretty, and a “new face,” which was something; but after a remark or two, finding she “knew nobody,” and did not belong to the clique, the trouble of finding topics of mutual interest seemed greater than he thought her worth, and so he turned to Miss Hauton; and Annie soon found herself dropped from a conversation that consisted entirely of personal gossip.

“So, the wedding has come off at last,” said Susan Hauton to Mr. Constant. “I hope the Gores are satisfied now. Were you there? How did Mr. Langley look?”

“Resigned,” replied the young man, slightly shrugging his shoulders.

Susan laughed, though at what Annie could not very well perceive, and continued with,

“And the bride—how did she look?”

“As brides always do—charmingly, of course,” he replied, languidly. “You ladies, with your veils, and flowers, and flounces, may set nature herself at defiance, and dare her to recognize you such as she made you.”

“If Fanny Gore looked charming,” said Ellen Hauton, sarcastically, “I think it might have puzzled more than dame Nature to recognize her. I doubt whether Mr. Langley would have known her under such a new aspect.”

“I think we may give him credit for differing from others on that point,” said Kate. “A woman has a right to be thought pretty once in her life, and Cupid’s blind, fortunately.”

“Cupid may be, but Mr. Langley is not,” replied Miss Hauton, in the same careless, sneering tone. “It’s a shameful take in.”

“A take in!” repeated Kate, with surprise.

“Yes, certainly,” replied Miss Hauton. “He did not want to marry her.”

“Then why did he?” asked Kate. “He was surely a free agent.”

“No, he was not,” persisted Miss Susan. “The Gores would have him; they followed him up, and never let him alone until they got him.”

“Do you believe,” returned Kate, with some spirit, “that any man is to be made to marry against his will? There’s no force can do it.”

“But the force of flattery,” said young Meredith; “is a very powerful agent, Miss Leslie.”

“Then,” said Kate, laughing, “every match is a ‘take in,’ on that ground. Is not every bride flattered till she feels as if she had entered a new state of being? Is not every girl turned, for the time being, into a beauty? Do you suppose any body ever yet fell in love on the truth?”

“No, indeed,” replied the gentleman. “Truth’s kept where she should be, at the ‘bottom of a well.’ A most ill-bred personage, not fit for ‘good society,’ certainly.”

Then the conversation branched off to other matches, and to Annie’s surprise she heard these high-bred, delicate looking girls, talk of their friends making “dead sets” and “catches,” and of young men being “taken in,” in a style that struck her as decidedly vulgar. Kate, to turn the subject, asked Mr. Constant if he had been to the opera the night before.

“I looked in,” he replied. “Vita was screaming away as usual.”

“Oh, is not she horrid?” exclaimed Miss Hauton.

“The opera’s a bore,” pursued her sister. “Caradori’s detestable and Vita a horror. I hope they’ll get a new troupe next winter. I am sick of this set.”

“I thought you were fond of the opera,” remarked Kate. “You are there always.”

“Yes; we have a box, and one must go somewhere; but I was tired to death before the season was half over. Here, Mr. Meredith, hold this silk for me,” she continued, calling to the young gentleman, who was looking out of the window, meditating the possibility of making his escape to the refreshment of a cigar.

“That’s right, make him useful, Miss Hauton,” said Mr. Constant, as the reluctant Meredith declared himself most happy and honored in being so employed; but he set his back teeth firmly, and with difficulty suppressed a yawn, which was evident in spite of his efforts to conquer it. Miss Hauton’s animation, however, was more than a match for his indifference. He was not to be let off. Young ladies, and high-bred ones too, will sometimes pin young gentlemen, whether or no. It’s bad policy; for Annie heard him say, as he afterward escaped and walked off the piazza with his friend, and a cigar in his mouth,

“What bores these girls are, with their confounded worsteds and nonsense.”

The evening passed in pretty much the same way. Much gossip, varied with some very bad music, for Miss Hauton sang, and, like most amateurs, would undertake more than she could execute. Annie thought of the “screamer Vita” and that “horrid Caradori,” and wondered that ears that were so delicate, so alive to the smallest fault in the music of others, should have so little perception of their own sins of commission.

“Oh,” said Kate, as they retired to their room at night, “did not the Hauton’s ‘Casta Diva’ set your teeth on edge? Such an absurdity, for a girl like her to attempt what few professional persons can sing. You look tired to death, Annie, and no wonder, for, between you and I, these Hautons are very common girls. Strange! I’ve known them for years, and yet never knew them before. Dress and distance make such a difference.”

“They seem to have so little enjoyment in anything,” remarked Annie. “Every thing seems, in their phrase, ‘a bore.’ Now, to us in the country, every thing is a pleasure. I suppose it is because we have so little,” she continued, smiling, “that we must make the most of it.”

“Well,” said Kate, doubtfully, as if the idea was quite new to her, “is not that better than to be weary with much?”

“And yet you would laugh at one of our little meetings,” replied Annie, “where we talk of books, sing ballads, and sometimes dance after the piano.”

“That is primitive, to be sure,” said Kate, with something of contempt in her heart for such gothic amusements.

“It’s pleasant, at any rate,” thought Annie, as she laid her head on her pillow and remembered, with infinite satisfaction, that she had only one day more to stay among these very fine, very common people.

“And is it possible,” she thought, “that I should be such a fool as to envy them because they looked gay and graceful across the opera house? And half of the rest of them are, doubtless, no better. Oh for one pleasant, spirited talk with Allan Fitzhugh.” And then her mind traveled off to home and a certain clever young lawyer, and she fell asleep dreaming she was in C——, and was once again a belle, (as one always is in one’s dreams,) and awoke to another dull day of neglect and commonplaces, to return home more disenchanted of the gay world and its glitter, more thoroughly contented than she ever would have been with her own intelligent and animated home, had she not passed three days at Woodlawn, amid the dullness of wealth, unembellished by true refinement or enlightened by a ray of wit.

But it was all right. To Annie had been given that which she most appreciated; to the Hautons all that they were capable of enjoying.

Would either party have changed? No. The pity was mutual, the contempt was mutual, and the satisfaction of both sides as complete as ever falls to the lot of mortals. Annie had seen the other side of the medal, and the Hautons did not know there was another side to be seen.