The Minister's Wooing

‘Greatness of mind and nobleness, their seatBuild in her loftiest, and create an aweAbout her as a guard angelic placed.’

The next morning, Colonel Burr called at the cottage. Mary was spinning in the garret, and Madame de Frontignac was reeling yarn, when Mrs. Scudder brought this announcement.

‘Mother,’ said Mary, ‘I wish to see Mr. Burr alone; Madame de Frontignac will not go down.’

Mrs. Scudder looked surprised, but asked no questions. When she was gone down, Mary stood a moment reflecting; Madame de Frontignac looked eager and agitated. ‘Remember and notice all he says, and just how he looks, Mary, so as to tell me; and be sure and say that “I thank him for his kindness yesterday;” we must own he appeared very well there; did he not?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mary; ‘but no man could have done less.’

‘Ah! but Mary, not every man could have done it as he did; now don’t be too hard on him, Mary; I have said dreadful things to him; I am afraid I have been too severe. After all, these distinguished men are so tempted; we don’t know how much they are tempted; and who can wonder that they are a little spoiled; so, my angel, you must be merciful.’

‘Merciful!’ said Mary, kissing the pale cheek and feeling the cold little hands that trembled in hers.

‘So you will go down in your little spinning toilette, ma mie; I fancy you look as Joan of Arc did when she was keeping her sheep at Doremi. Go, and God bless thee!’ and Madame de Frontignac pushed her playfully forward.

Mary entered the room where Burr was seated, and wished him good morning, in a serious and placid manner, in which there was not the slightest trace of embarrassment or discomposure.

‘Shall I have the pleasure of seeing your fair companion this morning?’ said Burr, after some moments of indifferent conversation.

‘No, sir; Madame de Frontignac desires me to excuse her to you.’

‘Is she ill?’ said Burr, with a look of concern.

‘No, Mr. Burr, she prefers not to see you.’ Burr gave a start of well-bred surprise; and Mary added: —

‘Madame de Frontignac has made me familiar with the history of your acquaintance with her; and you will therefore understand what I mean, Mr. Burr, when I say that, during the time of her stay with us, we would prefer not to receive calls from you.’

‘Your language, Miss Scudder, has certainly the merit of explicitness.’

‘I intend it shall have, sir,’ said Mary, tranquilly; ‘half the misery of the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly, and in a spirit of love.’

‘I am gratified that you insert the last clause, Miss Scudder; I might not otherwise recognize the gentle being whom I have always regarded as the impersonation of all that is softest in woman. I have not the honour of understanding in the least the reason of this apparently capricious sentence, but I bow to it in submission.’

‘Mr. Burr,’ said Mary, walking up to him, and looking him full in the eyes with an energy that for the moment bore down his practised air of easy superiority, ‘I wish to speak to you for a moment, as one immortal soul should to another, without any of those false glosses and deceits which men call ceremony and good manners. You have done a very great injury to a lovely lady, whose weakness ought to have been sacred in your eyes. Precisely, because you are what you are, – strong, keen, penetrating, able to control and govern all who come near you; because you have the power to make yourself agreeable, interesting, fascinating, and to win esteem and love, – just for that reason you ought to hold yourself the guardian of every woman, and treat her as you would wish any man to treat your own daughter. I leave it to your own conscience whether this is the manner in which you have treated Madame de Frontignac.’

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

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

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

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

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

In a few moments Mary rose with renewed calmness and dignity, and approaching him, said, ‘Before I wish you a good morning, Mr. Burr, I must ask pardon for the liberty I have taken in speaking so very plainly.’

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

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

Burr looked thoughtful.

‘May I say one thing more?’ said Mary, the colour rising in her cheeks.

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

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

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

Mary looked at him wistfully; he smiled and bowed, all himself again; and stopping at the door, he said, with a proud humility, ‘Do me the favour to present my devoted regard to your friend; believe me, that hereafter you shall have less reason to complain of me.’ He bowed and was gone.

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

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

We have one thing more that we cannot avoid saying of two men so singularly in juxtaposition, as Aaron Burr and Dr. Hopkins.

Both had a perfect logic of life, and guided themselves with an inflexible rigidity by it. Burr assumed individual pleasure to be the great object of human existence; and Dr. Hopkins placed it in a life altogether beyond self. Burr rejected all sacrifice, Hopkins considered sacrifice as the foundation of all existence. To live as far as possible without a disagreeable sensation was an object which Burr proposed to himself as the summum bonum, for which he drilled down and subjugated a nature of singular richness. Hopkins, on the other hand, smoothed the asperities of a temperament naturally violent and fiery by a rigid discipline, which guided it entirely above the plane of self-indulgence; and, in the pursuance of their great end, the one watched against his better nature as the other did against his worse. It is but fair, then, to take their lives as the practical workings of their respective ethical creeds.

CHAPTER XXXIII

‘Enfin, chère Sibylle,’ said Madame de Frontignac when Mary came out of the room with her cheeks glowing and her eyes flashing with a still unsubdued light. ‘Te voilà encore! What did he say, mimi? did he ask for me?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘he asked for you.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him that you wished me to excuse you.’

‘How did he look then? Did he look surprised?’

‘A good deal so, I thought,’ said Mary.

‘Allons, mimi, tell me all you said and all he said.’

‘Oh,’ said Mary, ‘I am the worst person in the world; in fact, I cannot remember anything that I have said; but I told him that he must leave you and never see you any more.’

‘Oh, mimi! never!’

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

‘You know that that is best, Verginie, do you not?’

‘Oh! yes, I know it; but it is like death to me! Ah, well, what shall Verginie do now?’

‘You have your husband,’ said Mary.

‘I do not love him,’ said Madame de Frontignac.

‘Yes; but he is a good and honourable man, and you should love him.’

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

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

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

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

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

Thus Mary soothed her friend; but every few days this soothing had to be done over, as long as Burr remained in Newport. When he was finally gone, she grew more calm. The simple, homely ways of the cottage, the healthful routine of daily domestic toils, into which she delighted to enter, brought refreshment to her spirits. That fine tact and exquisite social sympathy which distinguishes the French above other nations, caused her at once to enter into the spirit of the life in which she moved; so that she no longer shocked any one’s religious feelings by acts forbidden to the Puritan idea of the sabbath, or failed in any of the exterior proprieties of religious life.

She also read and studied with avidity the English Bible, which came to her with the novelty of a wholly new book, and in a new language; nor was she without a certain artistic valuation of the austere precision and gravity of the religious life by which she was surrounded.

‘It is sublime, but a little “glaciale,” like the Alps,’ she sometimes said to Mary and Mrs. Marvyn, when speaking of it; ‘but then,’ she added, playfully, ‘there are the flowers —les roses des Alpes; and the air is very strengthening, and it is near to heaven —il faut avouer.’

We have shown how she appeared to the eye of New England life; it may not be uninteresting to give a letter to one of her friends, which showed how the same appeared to her.

It was not a friend with whom she felt on such terms that her intimacy with Burr would furnish any allusions to her correspondence.

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

‘We have had a very gay life in Philadelphia, and now I am growing tired of the world, and think I shall retire to my cheese, like La Fontaine’s rat. These people in the country here in America have a character quite their own; very different from the life of cities, where one sees, for the most part, only a continuation of the forms of good society which exist in the old world.

‘In the country these people seem simple, grave, severe; always industrious; cold and reserved in their manners towards each other, but with great warmth of heart. They are all obedient to the word of their priest, whom they call a minister, and who lives among them just like any other man, and marries and has children. Everything in their worship is plain and austere. Their churches are perfectly desolate; they have no chants, no pictures, no carvings; only a most disconsolate, bare building, where they meet together and sing one or two hymns, and the minister makes one or two prayers all out of his own thoughts; and then gives them a long, long discourse about things which I cannot understand English enough to comprehend.

‘There is a very beautiful, charming young girl here, the daughter of my hostess, who is as lovely and as saintly as St. Catharine, and has such a genius for religion that if she had been in our Church she would certainly have made a saint. Her mother is a respectable and worthy matron, and the good priest lives in the family. I think he is a man of very sublime religion, as much above this world as a great mountain; but he has the true sense of liberty and fraternity, for he has dared to oppose with all his might this detestable and cruel trade in poor negroes; which makes us, who are so proud of the example of America in asserting the rights of man, so ashamed for her inconsistencies.

‘Well, now, there is a little romance getting up in the cottage; for the good priest has fixed his eyes on the pretty saint, and has discovered, what he must be blind not to see, that she is very lovely. And so, as he can marry, he wants to make her his wife; and her mamma, who adores him as if he were God, is quite set upon it. The sweet Marie, however, has had a lover of her own in her little heart, a beautiful young man who went to sea, as heroes always do, to seek his fortune. And the cruel sea has drowned him, and the poor little saint has wept and prayed her very life out on his grave; till she is so thin, and sweet, and mournful, that it makes one’s heart ache to see her smile. In our Church, Gabrielle, she would have gone into a convent; but she makes a vocation of her daily life, and goes round the house so sweetly, doing all the little work that is to be done, as sacredly as the nuns pray at the altar. For you must know, here in New England the people for the most part keep no servants, but perform all the household work themselves, with no end of spinning and sewing besides. It is the true Arcadia, where you find refined and cultivated natures busying themselves with the simplest toils. For these people are well-read and well-bred, and truly ladies in all things. And so, my little Marie and I, we feed the hens and chickens together, and we search for eggs in the hay in the barn; and they have taught me to spin at their great wheel, and a little one, too, which makes a noise like the humming of a bee. But where am I? Oh, I was telling about the romance. Well, so the good priest has proposed for my Marie, and the dear soul has accepted him, as the nun accepts the veil; for she only loves him filially and religiously. And now they are going on, in their way, with preparations for the wedding. They had what they call “a quilting” here the other night, to prepare the bride’s quilt, and all the friends in the neighbourhood came – it was very amusing to see. The morals of this people are so austere that young men and girls are allowed the greatest freedom. They associate and talk freely together, and the young men walk home alone with the girls after evening parties. And most generally the young people, I am told, arrange their marriages among themselves before the consent of the parents is asked. This is very strange to us. I must not weary you, however, with the details. I watch my little romance daily, and will let you hear further as it progresses.

‘With a thousand kisses, I am ever your loving

‘Verginie.’

CHAPTER XXXIV

Meanwhile wedding proceedings were going on at the cottage with that consistent vigour with which Yankee people always drive operations when they know precisely what they are about. The wedding-day was definitively fixed for the 1st of August, and every one of the two weeks between had its particular significance and value precisely marked out and arranged in Mrs. Katy Scudder’s comprehensive and systematic schemes. It was settled that the newly-wedded pair were, for a while at least, to reside at the cottage. It might have been imagined, therefore, that no great external changes were in contemplation; but it is astonishing to see the amount of grave discussion, the amount of consulting, advising, and running abstractedly to and fro, which can be made to result out of an apparently slight change in the relative position of two people in the same house.

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

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

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

Mary stood by the side of the table, her pretty head bent reflectively downward, her cheek just resting upon the tip of one of her fingers, as she stood looking thoughtfully through the brocades at something deeper that seemed to lie under them; and when the Doctor was required to give judgment on the articles, it was observed by the matrons that his large blue eyes were resting upon Mary with an expression that almost glorified his face; and it was not until his elbow was repeatedly shaken by Miss Prissy that he gave a sudden start and fixed his attention as was requested upon the silks. It had been one of Miss Prissy’s favourite theories, that ‘that dear blessed man had taste enough if he would only give his mind to things;’ and in fact the Doctor rather verified the remark on the present occasion, for he looked very conscientiously and soberly at the silks, and even handled them cautiously and respectfully with his fingers, and listened with grave attention to all that Miss Prissy told him of their price and properties, and then laid his finger down on one whose snow-white ground was embellished with a pattern representing lilies of the valley on a background of green leaves. ‘This is the one,’ he said, with an air of decision, and then he looked at Mary and smiled, and a murmur of universal approbation broke out. A chorus of loud acclamations, in which Miss Prissy’s voice took the lead, conveyed to the innocent-minded Doctor the idea that in some mysterious way he had distinguished himself in the eyes of his feminine friends, whereat he retired to his study, slightly marvelling, but on the whole well pleased, as men generally are when they do better than they expect; and Miss Prissy, turning out all profaner persons from the apartment, held a solemn consultation, to which only Mary, Mrs. Scudder, and Madame de Frontignac were admitted; for it is to be observed that the latter had risen daily and hourly in Miss Prissy’s esteem since her entrance into the cottage, and she declared that if she only would give her a few hints, she didn’t believe but that she could make that dress look just like a Paris one, and rather intimated that in such a case she might almost be ready to resign all mortal ambitions.