A SUMMER IN
LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE
By
Mrs. A. D. T. WHITNEY
1866, 1894
To
THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND
MARIA S. CUMMINS
AND OF DAYS AMONG THE MOUNTAINS MADE
BEAUTIFUL BY HER COMPANIONSHIP
I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE STORY
PREFACE TO REAL FOLKS SERIES.
"Leslie Goldthwaite" was the first of a series of four, which grew from
this beginning, and was written in 1866 and the years nearly following;
the first two stories - this and "We Girls" - having been furnished, by
request, for the magazine "Our Young Folks," published at that time with
such success by Messrs. Fields, Osgood & Co., and edited by Mr. Howard
M. Ticknor and Miss Lucy Larcom. The last two volumes - "Real Folks" and
"The Other Girls" - were asked for to complete the set, and were not
delayed by serial publication, but issued at once, in their order of
completion, in book form.
There is a sequence of purpose, character, and incident in the four
stories, of which it is well to remind new readers, upon their
reappearance in fresh editions. They all deal especially with girl-life
and home-life; endeavoring, even in the narration of experiences outside
the home and seeming to preclude its life, to keep for girlhood and
womanhood the true motive and tendency, through whatever temporary
interruption and necessity, of and toward the best spirit and shaping of
womanly work and surrounding; making the home-life the ideal one, and
home itself the centre and goal of effort and hope.
The writing of "The Other Girls" was interrupted by the Great Fire of
1872, and the work upon the Women's Relief Committee, which brought
close contact and personal knowledge to reinforce mere sympathy and
theory, - and so, I hope, into this last of the series, a touch of
something that may deepen the influence of them all to stronger help.
* * * * *
I wish, without withdrawing or superseding the special dedication of
"Leslie Goldthwaite" to the memory of the dear friend with whom the
weeks were spent in which I gathered material for Leslie's "Summer," to
remember, in this new presentation of the whole series, that other
friend, with whom all the after work in it was associated and made the
first links of a long regard and fellowship, now lifted up and reaching
onward into the hopes and certainties of the "Land o' the Leal."
I wish to join to my own name in this, the name of Lucy Larcom, which
stands representative of most brave and earnest work, in most gentle,
womanly living.
ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY.
Milton, 1893.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. THE GREEN OF THE LEAF
II. WAYSIDE GLIMPSES
III. EYESTONES
IV. MARMADUKE WHARNE
V. HUMMOCKS
VI. DAKIE THAYNE
VII. DOWN AT OUTLEDGE
VIII. SIXTEEN AND SIXTY
IX. "I DON'T SEE WHY"
X. GEODES
XI. IN THE PINES
XII. CROWDED OUT
XIII. A HOWL
XIV. "FRIENDS OF MAMMON"
XV. QUICKSILVER AND GOLD
XVI. "WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US?"
XVII. LEAF-GLORY
A SUMMER IN LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
THE GREEN OF THE LEAF.
"Nothing but leaves - leaves - leaves! The green things don't know enough
to do anything better!"
Leslie Goldthwaite said this, standing in the bay-window among her
plants, which had been green and flourishing, but persistently
blossomless, all winter, and now the spring days were come.
Cousin Delight looked up; and her white ruffling, that she was daintily
hemstitching, fell to her lap, as she looked, still with a certain wide
intentness in her eyes, upon the pleasant window, and the bright, fresh
things it framed. Not the least bright and fresh among them was the
human creature in her early girlhood, tender and pleasant in its
beautiful leafage, but waiting, like any other young and growing life,
to prove what sort of flower should come of it.
"Now you've got one of your 'thoughts,' Cousin Delight! I see it
'biggening,' as Elspie says." Leslie turned round, with her little green
watering-pot suspended in her hand, waiting for the thought.
To have a thought, and to give it, were nearly simultaneous things with
Cousin Delight; so true, so pure, so unselfish, so made to give, - like
perfume or music, which cannot be, and be withheld, - were thoughts with
her.
I must say a word, before I go further, of Delight Goldthwaite. I think
of her as of quite a young person; you, youthful readers, would
doubtless have declared that she was old, - very old, at least for a
young lady. She was twenty-eight, at this time of which I write; Leslie,
her young cousin, was just "past the half, and catching up," as she said
herself, - being fifteen. Leslie's mother called Miss Goldthwaite,
playfully, "Ladies' Delight;" and, taking up the idea, half her women
friends knew her by this significant and epigrammatic title. There was
something doubly pertinent in it. She made you think at once of nothing
so much as heart's-ease, - a garden heart's-ease, that flower of many
names; not of the frail, scentless, wild wood-violet, - she had been
cultured to something larger. The violet nature was there, colored and
shaped more richly, and gifted with rare fragrance - for those whose
delicate sense could perceive it. The very face was a pansy face; with
its deep, large, purple-blue eyes, and golden brows and lashes, the
color of her hair, - pale gold, so pale that careless people who had
perception only for such beauty as can flash upon you from a crowd, or
across a drawing-room, said hastily that she had _no_ brows or lashes,
and that this spoiled her. She was not a beauty, therefore; nor was she,
in any sort, a belle. She never drew around her the common attention
that is paid eagerly to very pretty, outwardly bewitching girls; and she
never seemed to care for this. At a party, she was as apt as not to sit
in a corner; but the quiet people, - the mothers, looking on, or the
girls, waiting for partners, - getting into that same corner also, found
the best pleasure of their evening there. There was something about her
dress, too, that women appreciated most fully; the delicate textures,
the finishings - and only those - of rare, exquisite lace, the perfect
harmony of the whole unobtrusive toilet, - women looked at these in
wonder at the unerring instinct of her taste; in wonder, also, that they
only with each other raved about her. Nobody had ever been supposed to
be devoted to her; she had never been reported as "engaged;" there had
never been any of this sort of gossip about her; gentlemen found her,
they said, hard to get acquainted with; she had not much of the small
talk which must usually begin an acquaintance; a few - her relatives, or
her elders, or the husbands of her intimate married friends - understood
and valued her; but it was her girl friends and women friends who knew
her best, and declared that there was nobody like her; and so came her
sobriquet, and the double pertinence of it.
Especially she was Leslie Goldthwaite's delight. Leslie had no sisters,
and her aunts were old, - far older than her mother; on her father's
side, a broken and scattered family had left few ties for her; next to
her mother, and even closer, in some young sympathies, she clung to
Cousin Delight.
With this diversion, we will go back now to her, and to her thought.
"I was thinking," she said, with that intent look in her eyes, "I often
think, of how something else was found, once, having nothing but leaves;
and of what came to it."
"I know," answered Leslie, with an evasive quickness, and turned round
with her watering-pot to her plants again.
There was sometimes a bit of waywardness about Leslie Goldthwaite; there
was a fitfulness of frankness and reserve. She was eager for truth; yet
now and then she would thrust it aside. She said that "nobody liked a
nicely pointed moral better than she did; only she would just as lief
it shouldn't be pointed at her." The fact was, she was in that sensitive
state in which many a young girl finds herself, when she begins to ask
and to weigh with herself the great questions of life, and shrinks shyly
from the open mention of the very thing she longs more fully to
apprehend.
Cousin Delight took no notice; it is perhaps likely that she understood
sufficiently well for that. She turned toward the table by which she
sat, and pulled toward her a heavy Atlas that lay open at the map of
Connecticut. Beside it was Lippincott's Gazetteer, - open, also.
"Traveling, Leslie?"
"Yes. I've been a charming journey this morning, before you came. I
wonder if I ever _shall_ travel, in reality. I've done a monstrous deal
of it with maps and gazetteers."
"This hasn't been one of the stereotyped tours, it seems."
"Oh, no! What's the use of doing Niagara or the White Mountains, or even
New York and Philadelphia and Washington, on the map? I've been one of
my little by-way trips, round among the villages; stopping wherever I
found one cuddled in between a river and a hill, or in a little seashore
nook. Those are the places, after all, that I would hunt out, if I had
plenty of money to go where I liked with. It's so pleasant to imagine
how the people live there, and what sort of folks they would be likely
to be. It isn't so much traveling as living round, - awhile in one home,
and then in another. How many different little biding-places there are
in the world! And how queer it is only really to know about one or two
of them!"
"What's this place you're at just now? Winsted?"
"Yes; there's where I've brought up, at the end of that bit of railroad.
It's a bigger place than I fancied, though. I always steer clear of the
names that end in 'ville.' They're sure to be stupid, money-making
towns, all grown up in a minute, with some common man's name tacked on
to them, that happened to build a saw-mill, or something, first. But
Winsted has such a sweet, little, quiet, English sound. I know it never
_began_ with a mill. They make pins and clocks and tools and machines
there now; and it's 'the largest and most prosperous post-village of
Litchfield County.' But I don't care for the pins and machinery.
It's got a lake alongside of it; and Still River - don't that sound
nice? - runs through; and there are the great hills, big enough to put on
the map, out beyond. I can fancy where the girls take their sunset
walks; and the moonlight parties, boating on the pond, and the way the
woods look, round Still River. Oh, yes! that's one of the places I mean
to go to."
Leslie Goldthwaite lived in one of the inland cities of Massachusetts.
She had grown up and gone to school there, and had never yet been thirty
miles away. Her father was a busy lawyer, making a handsome living for
his family, and laying aside abundantly for their future provision, but
giving himself no lengthened recreations, and scarcely thinking of them
as needful for the rest.
It was a pleasant, large, brown, wooden house they lived in, on the
corner of two streets; with a great green door-yard about it on two
sides, where chestnut and cherry trees shaded it from the public way,
and flower-beds brightened under the parlor windows and about the porch.
Just greenness and bloom enough to suggest, always, more; just sweetness
and sunshine and bird-song enough, in the early summer days, to whisper
of broad fields and deep woods where they rioted without stint; and
these days always put Leslie into a certain happy impatience, and set
her dreaming and imagining; and she learned a great deal of her
geography in the fashion that we have hinted at.
Miss Goldthwaite was singularly discursive and fragmentary in her
conversation this morning, somehow. She dropped the map-traveling
suddenly, and asked a new question. "And how comes on the
linen-drawer?"
"O Cousin Del! I'm humiliated, - disgusted! I feel as small as
butterflies' pinfeathers! I've been to see the Haddens. Mrs. Linceford
has just got home from Paris, and brought them wardrobes to last to
remotest posterity! And _such_ things! Such rufflings, and stitchings,
and embroiderings! Why, mine look - as if they'd been made by the
blacksmith!"
The "linen-drawer" was an institution of Mrs. Goldthwaite's; resultant,
partly, from her old-fashioned New England ideas of womanly industry and
thrift, - born and brought up, as she had been, in a family whose
traditions were of house-linen sufficient for a lifetime spun and woven
by girls before their twenty-first year, and whose inheritance, from
mother to daughter, was invariably of heedfully stored personal and
household plenishings, made of pure material that was worth the laying
by, and carefully bleached and looked to year by year; partly, also,
from a certain theory of wisdom which she had adopted, that when girls
were once old enough to care for and pride themselves on a plentiful
outfit, it was best they should have it as a natural prerogative of
young-ladyhood, rather than that the "trousseau" should come to be, as
she believed it so apt to be, one of the inciting temptations to
heedless matrimony. I have heard of a mother whose passion was for
elegant old lace; and who boasted to her female friends that, when her
little daughter was ten years old, she had her "lace-box," with the
beginning of her hoard in costly contributions from the stores of
herself and of the child's maiden aunts. Mrs. Goldthwaite did a better
and more sensible thing than this; when Leslie was fifteen, she
presented her with pieces of beautiful linen and cotton and cambric, and
bade her begin to make garments which should be in dozens, to be laid
by, in reserve, as she completed them, until she had a well-filled
bureau that should defend her from the necessity of what she called a
"wretched living from hand to mouth, - always having underclothing to
make up, in the midst of all else that she would find to do and to
learn."
Leslie need not have been ashamed, and I don't think in her heart she
was, of the fresh, white, light-lying piles that had already begun to
make promise of filling a drawer, which she drew out as she answered
Cousin Delight's question.
The fine-lined gathers; the tiny dots of stitches that held them to
their delicate bindings; the hems and tucks, true to a thread, and
dotted with the same fairy needle dimples (no machine-work, but all
real, dainty finger-craft); the bits of ruffling peeping out from the
folds, with their edges in almost invisible whip-hems; and here and
there a finishing of lovely, lace-like crochet, done at odd minutes, and
for "visiting work," - there was something prettier and more precious,
really, in all this than in the imported fineries which had come,
without labor and without thought, to her friends the Haddens. Besides,
there were the pleasant talks and readings of the winter evenings, all
threaded in and out, and associated indelibly with every seam. There was
the whole of "David Copperfield," and the beginning of "Our Mutual
Friend," ruffled up into the night-dresses; and some of the crochet was
beautiful with the rhymed pathos of "Enoch Arden," and some with the
poetry of the "Wayside Inn;" and there were places where stitches had
had to be picked out and done over, when the eye grew dim and the hand
trembled while the great war news was being read.
Leslie loved it, and had a pride in it all; it was not, truly and only,
humiliation and disgust at self-comparison with the Haddens, but some
other and unexplained doubt which moved her now, and which was stirred
often by this, or any other of the objects and circumstances of her
life, and which kept her standing there with her hand upon the
bureau-knob, in a sort of absence, while Cousin Delight looked in,
approved, and presently dropped quietly among the rest, like a bit of
money into a contribution-box, the delicate breadths of linen cambric
she had just finished hemstitching and rolled together.
"Oh, thank you! But, Cousin Delight," said Leslie, shutting the drawer,
and turning short round, suddenly, "I wish you'd just tell me - what you
think - is the sense of that - about the fig-tree! I suppose it's awfully
wicked, but I never could see. Is everything fig-leaves that isn't out
and out fruit, and is it all to be cursed, and why _should_ there be
anything but leaves when 'the time of figs was not yet'?" After her
first hesitation, she spoke quickly, impetuously, and without pause, as
something that _would_ come out.
"I suppose that has troubled you, as I dare say it has troubled a great
many other people," said Cousin Delight. "It used to be a puzzle and a
trouble to me. But now it seems to me one of the most beautiful things
of all." She paused.
"I can_not_ see how," said Leslie emphatically. "It always seems to me
so - somehow - unreasonable; and - angry."
She said this in a lower tone, as afraid of the uttered audacity of her
own thought; and she walked off, as she spoke, towards the window once
more, and stood with her back to Miss Goldthwaite, almost as if she
wished to have done, again, with the topic. It was not easy for Leslie
to speak out upon such things; it almost made her feel cross when she
had done it.
"People mistake the true cause and effect, I think," said Delight
Goldthwaite, "and so lose all the wonderful enforcement of that acted
parable. It was not, 'Cursed be the fig-tree because I have found
nothing thereon;' but, 'Let _no fruit_ grow on thee, henceforward,
forever.' It seems to me I can hear the tone of tender solemnity in
which Jesus would say such words; knowing, as only he knew, all that
they meant, and what should come, inevitably, of such a sentence. 'And
presently the fig-tree withered away.' The life was nothing, any longer,
from the moment when it might not be, what all life is, a reaching
forward to the perfecting of some fruit. There was nothing to come, ever
again, of all its greenness and beauty, and the greenness and beauty,
which were only a form and a promise, ceased to be. It was the way he
took to show his disciples, in a manner they should never forget, the
inexorable condition upon which all life is given, and that the barren
life, so soon as its barrenness is absolutely hopeless, becomes a
literal death."
Leslie stood still, with her back to Miss Goldthwaite, and her face to
the window. Her perplexity was changed, but hardly cleared. There were
many things that crowded into her thoughts, and might have been spoken;
but it was quite impossible for her to speak. Impossible on this topic,
and she certainly could not speak, at once, on any other.
Many seconds of silence counted themselves between the two. Then Cousin
Delight, feeling an intuition of much that held and hindered the young
girl, spoke again. "Does this make life seem hard?"
"Yes," said Leslie then, with an effort that hoarsened her very voice,
"frightful." And as she spoke, she turned again quickly, as if to be
motionless longer were to invite more talk, and went over to the other
window, where her bird-cage hung, and began to take down the glasses.
"Like all parables, it is manifold," said Delight gently. "There is a
great hope in it, too."
Leslie was at her basin, now, turning the water faucet, to rinse and
refill the little drinking-vessel. She handled the things quietly, but
she made no pause.
"It shows that, while we see the leaf, we may have hope of the fruit, in
ourselves or in others."
She could not see Leslie's face. If she had, she would have perceived a
quick lifting and lightening upon it; then a questioning that would not
very long be repressed to silence.
The glasses were put in the cage again, and presently Leslie came back
to a little low seat by Miss Goldthwaite's side, which she had been
occupying before all this talk began. "Other people puzzle me as much as
myself," she said. "I think the whole world is running to leaves,
sometimes."
"Some things flower almost invisibly, and hide away their fruit under
thick foliage. It is often only when the winds shake their leaves down,
and strip the branches bare, that we find the best that has been
growing."
"They make a great fuss and flourish with the leaves, though, as long as
they can. And it's who shall grow the broadest and tallest, and flaunt
out, with the most of them. After all, it's natural; and they _are_
beautiful in themselves. And there's a 'time' for leaves, too, before
the figs."
"Exactly. We have a right to look for the leaves, and to be glad of
them. That is a part of the parable."
"Cousin Delight! Let's talk of real things, and let the parable alone a
minute."
Leslie sprang impulsively to her bureau again, and flung forth the linen
drawer.
"There are my fig-leaves, - some of them; and here are more." She turned,
with a quick movement, to her wardrobe; pulled out and uncovered a
bonnet-box which held a dainty headgear of the new spring fashion, and
then took down from a hook and tossed upon it a silken garment that
fluttered with fresh ribbons. "How much of this outside business is
right, and how much wrong, I should be glad to know? It all takes time
and thoughts; and those are life. How much life must go into the leaves?
That's what puzzles me. I can't do without the things; and I can't be
let to take 'clear comfort' in them, as grandma says, either." She was
on the floor, now, beside her little fineries; her hands clasped
together about one knee, and her face turned up to Cousin Delight's. She
looked as if she half believed herself to be ill-used.
"And clothes are but the first want, - the primitive fig-leaves; the
world is full of other outside business, - as much outside as these,"
pursued Miss Goldthwaite, thoughtfully.
"Everything is outside," said Leslie. "Learning, and behaving, and
going, and doing, and seeing, and hearing, and having. 'It's all a
muddle,' as the poor man says in 'Hard Times.'"
"I don't think I can do without the parable," said Cousin Delight. "The
real inward principle of the tree - that which corresponds to thought and
purpose in the soul - urges always to the finishing of its life in the
fruit. The leaves are only by the way, - an outgrowth of the same
vitality, and a process toward the end; but never, in any living thing,
the end itself."
"Um," said Leslie, in her nonchalant fashion again; her chin between her
two hands now, and her head making little appreciative nods. "That's
like condensed milk; a great deal in a little of it. I'll put the
fig-leaves away now, and think it over."
But, as she sprang up, and came round behind Miss Goldthwaite's chair,
she stopped and gave her a little kiss on the top of her head. If Cousin
Delight had seen, there was a bright softness in the eyes, which told of
feeling, and of gladness that welcomed the quick touch of truth.
Miss Goldthwaite knew one good thing, - when she had driven her nail.
"She never hammered in the head with a punch, like a carpenter," Leslie
said of her. She believed that, in moral tool-craft, that finishing
implement belonged properly to the hand of an after-workman.
CHAPTER II.
WAYSIDE GLIMPSES
I have mentioned one little theory, relating solely to domestic thrift,
which guided Mrs. Goldthwaite in her arrangements for her daughter. I
believe that, with this exception, she brought up her family very
nearly without any theory whatever. She did it very much on the
taking-for-granted system. She took for granted that her children were
born with the same natural perceptions as herself; that they could
recognize, little by little, as they grew into it, the principles of the
moral world, - reason, right, propriety, - as they recognized, growing
into them, the conditions of their outward living. She made her own life
a consistent recognition of these, and she lived _openly_ before them.
There was never any course pursued with sole calculation as to its
effect on the children. Family discussion and deliberation was seldom
with closed doors. Questions that came up were considered as they came;
and the young members of the household perceived as soon as their elders
the "reasons why" of most decisions. They were part and parcel of the
whole régime. They learned politeness by being as politely attended to
as company. They learned to be reasonable by seeing how the _reason_
compelled father and mother, and not by having their vision stopped
short at the arbitrary fact that father and mother compelled them. I
think, on the whole, the Goldthwaite no-method turned out as good a
method as any. Men have found out lately that even horses may be guided
without reins.
It was characteristic, therefore, that Mrs. Goldthwaite - receiving one
day a confidential note proposing to her a pleasant plan in behalf of
Leslie, and intended to guard against a premature delight and eagerness,
and so perhaps an ultimate disappointment for that young lady - should
instantly, on reading it, lay it open upon the table before her
daughter. "From Mrs. Linceford," she said, "and concerning you."
Leslie took it up, expecting, possibly, an invitation to tea. When she
saw what it really was, her dark eyes almost blazed with sudden, joyous
excitement.
"Of course, I should be delighted to say yes for you," said Mrs.
Goldthwaite, "but there are things to be considered. I can't tell how it
will strike your father."
"School," suggested Leslie, the light in her eyes quieting a little.
"Yes, and expense; though I don't think he would refuse on that score.
I should have _liked_" - Mrs. Goldthwaite's tone was only half, and very
gently, objecting; there was an inflection of ready self-relinquishment
in it, also - "to have had your _first_ journey with me. But you might
have waited a long time for that."
If Leslie were disappointed in the end, she would have known that her
mother's heart had been with her from the beginning, and grown people
seldom realize how this helps even the merest child to bear a denial.
"There is only a month now to vacation," said the young girl.
"What do you think Mr. Waylie would say?"
"I really think," answered Leslie, after a pause, "that he would say it
was better than books."
They sat at their sewing together, after this, without speaking very
much more, at the present time, about it. Mrs. Goldthwaite was thinking
it over in her motherly mind, and in the mind of Leslie thought and hope
and anticipation were dancing a reel with each other. It is time to tell
the reader of the what and why.
Mrs. Linceford, the elder married daughter of the Hadden family, - many
years the elder of her sisters, Jeannie and Elinor, - was about to take
them, under her care, to the mountains for the summer, and she kindly
proposed joining Leslie Goldthwaite to her charge. "The mountains" in
New England means usually, in common speech, the one royal range of the
White Hills.
You can think what this opportunity was to a young girl full of fancy,
loving to hunt out, even by map and gazetteer, the by-nooks of travel,
and wondering already if she should ever really journey otherwise. You
can think how she waited, trying to believe she could bear any decision,
for the final determination concerning her.
"If it had been to Newport or Saratoga, I should have said no at once,"
said Mr. Goldthwaite. "Mrs. Linceford is a gay, extravagant woman, and
the Haddens' ideas don't precisely suit mine. But the mountains, - she
can't get into much harm there."
"I shouldn't have cared for Newport or the Springs, father, truly," said
Leslie, with a little hopeful flutter of eagerness in her voice; "but
the real mountains, - O father!"
The "O father!" was not without its weight. Also Mr. Waylie, whom Mr.
Goldthwaite called on and consulted, threw his opinion into the favoring
scale, precisely as Leslie had foreseen. He was a teacher who did not
imagine all possible educational advantage to be shut up within the four
walls of his or any other schoolroom. "She is just the girl to whom it
will do great good," he said. Leslie's last week's lessons were not
accomplished the less satisfactorily for this word of his, and the
pleasure it opened to her.
There came a few busy days of stitching and starching, and crimping and
packing, and then, in the last of June, they would be off. They were to
go on Monday. The Haddens came over on Saturday afternoon, just as
Leslie had nearly put the last things into her trunk, - a new trunk,
quite her own, with her initials in black paint upon the russet leather
at each end. On the bed lay her pretty balmoral suit, made purposely for
mountain wears and just finished. The young girls got together here, in
Leslie's chamber, of course.
"Oh, how pretty! It's perfectly charming, - the loveliest balmoral I ever
saw in my life!" cried Jeannie Hadden, seizing upon it instantly as she
entered the room. "Why, you'll look like a hamadryad, all in these wood
browns!"
It was an uncommonly pretty striped petticoat, in two alternating shades
of dark and golden brown, with just a hair-line of black defining their
edges; and the border was one broad, soft, velvety band of black, and a
narrower one following it above and below, easing the contrast and
blending the colors. The jacket, or rather shirt, finished at the waist
with a bit of a polka frill, was a soft flannel, of the bright brown
shade, braided with the darker hue and with black; and two pairs of
bright brown raw-silk stockings, marked transversely with mere
thread-lines of black, completed the mountain outfit.
"Yes; all I want is" - said Leslie, stopping short as she took up the hat
that lay there also, - last summer's hat, a plain black straw, with a
slight brim, and ornamented only with a round lace veil and two bits of
ostrich feather. "But never mind! It'll do well enough!"
As she laid it down again and ceased speaking, Cousin Delight came in,
straight from Boston, where she had been doing two days' shopping; and
in her hand she carried a parcel in white paper. I was going to say a
round parcel, which it would have been but for something which ran out
in a sharp tangent from one side, and pushed the wrappings into an odd
angle. This she put into Leslie's hands.
"A fresh - fig-leaf - for you, my dear."
"What _does_ she mean?" cried the Haddens, coming close to see.
"Only a little Paradise fashion of speech between Cousin Del and me,"
said Leslie, coloring a little and laughing, while she began, somewhat
hurriedly, to remove the wrappings.
"What have you done? And how did you come to think?" she exclaimed, as
the thing inclosed appeared: a round brown straw turban, - not a staring
turban, but one of those that slope with a little graceful downward
droop upon the brow, - bound with a pheasant's breast, the wing shooting
out jauntily, in the tangent I mentioned, over the right ear; all in
bright browns, in lovely harmony with the rest of the hamadryad costume.
"It's no use to begin to thank you, Cousin Del. It's just one of the
things you re always doing, and rejoice in doing." The happy face was
full of loving thanks, plainer than many words. "Only you're a kind of a
_sarpent_ yourself after all, I'm afraid, with your beguilements. I
wonder if you thought of that," whispered Leslie merrily, while the
others oh-oh'd over the gift. "What else do you think I shall be good
for when I get all those on?"
"I'll venture you," said Cousin Delight; and the trifling words conveyed
a real, earnest confidence, the best possible antidote to the
"beguilement."
"One thing is funny," said Jeannie Hadden suddenly, with an accent of
demur. "We're all pheasants. _Our_ new hats are pheasants, too. I don't
know what Augusta will think of such a covey of us."
"Oh, it's no matter," said Elinor. "This is a golden pheasant, on brown
straw, and ours are purple, on black. Besides, we all _look_ different
enough."
"I suppose it doesn't signify," returned Jeannie; "and if Augusta thinks
it does, she may just give me that black and white plover of hers I
wanted so. I think our complexions _are_ all pretty well suited."
This was true. The fair hair and deep blue eyes of Elinor were as pretty
under the purple plumage as Jeannie's darker locks and brilliant bloom;
and there was a wonderful bright mingling of color between the golden
pheasant's breast and the gleaming chestnut waves it crowned, as Leslie
took her hat and tried it on.
This was one of the little touches of perfect taste and adaptation which
could sometimes make Leslie Goldthwaite almost beautiful, and was there
ever a girl of fifteen who would not like to be beautiful if she could?
This wish, and the thought and effort it would induce, were likely to be
her great temptation. Passably pretty girls, who may, with care, make
themselves often more than passable, have far the hardest of it with
their consciences about these things; and Leslie had a conscience, and
was reflective for her age, - and we have seen how questions had begun to
trouble her.
A Sunday between a packing and a journey is a trying day always. There
are the trunks, and it is impossible not to think of the getting up and
getting off to-morrow; and one hates so to take out fresh sleeves and
collars and pocket-handkerchiefs, and to wear one's nice white skirts.
It is a Sunday put off, too probably, with but odds and ends of thought
as well as apparel.
Leslie went to church, of course, - the Goldthwaites were always regular
in this; and she wore her quiet straw bonnet. Mrs. Goldthwaite had a
feeling that hats were rather pert and coquettish for the sanctuary.
Nevertheless they met the Haddens in the porch, in the glory of their
purple pheasant plumes, whereof the long tail-feathers made great
circles in the air as the young heads turned this way and that, in the
excitement of a few snatched words before they entered.
The organ was playing; and the low, deep, tremulous rumble that an organ
gives sometimes, when it seems to creep under and vibrate all things
with a strange, vital thrill, overswept their trivial chat and made
Leslie almost shiver. "Oh, I wish they wouldn't do that," she said,
turning to go in.
"What?" said Jeannie Hadden, unaware.
"Touch the nerve. The great nerve - of creation."
"What queer things Les' Goldthwaite says sometimes," whispered Elinor;
and they passed the inner door.
The Goldthwaites sat two pews behind the Haddens. Leslie could not help
thinking how elegant Mrs. Linceford was, as she swept in, in her rich
black silk, and real lace shawl, and delicate, costly bonnet; and the
perfectly gloved hand that upheld a bit of extravagance in Valenciennes
lace and cambric made devotion seem - what? The more graceful and
touching in one who had all this world's luxuries, or - almost a mockery?
The pheasant-plumed hats went decorously down in prayer-time, but the
tail-feathers ran up perker than ever, from the posture; Leslie saw
this, because she had lifted her own head and unclosed her eyes in a
self-indignant honesty, when she found on what her secret thoughts were
running. Were other people so much better than she? And _could_ they do
both things? How much was right in all this that was outwardly so
beguiling, and where did the "serving Mammon" begin?
Was everything so much intenser and more absorbing with her than with
the Haddens? Why could she not take things as they came, as these girls
did, or seemed to do? - be glad of her pretty things, her pretty looks
even, her coming pleasures, with no misgivings or self-searchings, and
then turn round and say her prayers properly?
Wasn't beauty put into the world for the sake of beauty? And wasn't it
right to love it, and make much of it, and multiply it? What were arts
and human ingenuities for, and the things given to work with? All this
grave weighing of a great moral question was in the mind of the young
girl of fifteen again this Sunday morning. Such doubts and balancings
begin far earlier, often, than we are apt to think.
The minister shook hands cordially and respectfully with Mrs. Linceford
after church. He had no hesitation at her stylishness and fineries.
Everybody took everybody else for granted; and it was all right, Leslie
Goldthwaite supposed, except in her own foolish, unregulated thoughts.
Everybody else had done their Sunday duty, and it was enough; only she
had been all wrong and astray, and in confusion. There was a time for
everything, only her times and thoughts would mix themselves up and
interfere. Perhaps she was very weak-minded, and the only way for her
would be to give it all up, and wear drab, or whatever else might be
most unbecoming, and be fiercely severe, mortifying the flesh. She got
over that - her young nature reacting - as they all walked up the street
together, while the sun shone down smilingly upon the world in Sunday
best, and the flowers were gay in the door-yards, and Miss Milliken's
shop was reverential with the green shutters before the windows that
had been gorgeous yesterday with bright ribbons and fresh fashions; and
there was something thankful in her feeling of the pleasantness that was
about her, and a certainty that she should only grow morose if she took
to resisting it all. She would be as good as she could, and let the
pleasantness and the prettiness come "by the way." Yes, that was just
what Cousin Delight had said. "All these things shall be added," - was
not that the Gospel word? So her troubling thought was laid for the
hour; but it should come up again. It was in the "seeking first" that
the question lay. By and by she would go back of the other to this, and
see clearer, - in the light, perhaps, of something that had been already
given her, and which, as she lived on toward a fuller readiness for it,
should be "brought to her remembrance."
Monday brought the perfection of a traveler's morning. There had been a
shower during the night, and the highways lay cool, moist, and dark
brown between the green of the fields and the clean-washed, red-brick
pavements of the town. There would be no dust even on the railroad, and
the air was an impalpable draught of delight. To the three young girls,
standing there under the station portico, - for they chose the smell of
the morning rather than the odors of apples and cakes and
indescribables which go to make up the distinctive atmosphere of a
railway waiting-room, - there was but one thing to be done to-day in the
world; one thing for which the sun rose, and wheeled himself toward that
point in the heavens which would make eight o'clock down below. Of all
the ships that might sail this day out of harbors, or the trains that
might steam out of cities across States, they recked nothing but of this
that was to take them toward the hills. There were unfortunates,
doubtless, bound elsewhere, by peremptory necessity; there were people
who were going nowhere but about their daily work and errands; all these
were simply to be pitied, or wondered at, as to how they could feel
_not_ to be going upon a mountain journey. It is queer to think, on a
last Thursday in November, or on a Fourth of July, of States where there
may not be a Thanksgiving, or of far-off lands that have no Independence
day. It was just as strange, somehow, to imagine how this day, that was
to them the culminating point of so much happy anticipation, the
beginning of so much certain joy, could be otherwise, and yet be