Chapter Four

by Mrs. Elizabeth Prentiss
Edited by Amber Moeller

The season this year was unusually gay, and Horace plunged into it headlong. Everybody wanted him at their dancing parties, their private theatricals, their musical festivals; his tall, graceful figure was an ornament and his gay sallies passed for keenest wit. He had to meet Georgiana repeatedly, but his air of lofty indifference kept her at a distance, while it secretly vexed her, for she had, thus far, found no one to take his place. But he went home from these day scenes out of spirits, and in spite of himself had his hours of reflection, when there came to him uncomfortable intimations that he was not living the true life for which he was born.

"Well," he would reply, "if a man lives In the world he must be of it. Some may spend their time in driving mission-schools and Sunday-schools, and all that sort of thing, but we can't all be doing it, any more than we can all be ministers and fall to preaching. I am as strict as most young fellows; father doesn't think so, it is true, but the world has got ahead of him, and had none of his old-fashioned ways. It does not hurt me to go to the theatre, or to dance, or to play a harmless game of cards; in fact, I feel that I ought to take my own independent course in such matters. I am as regular at church at any of them; if I do not go to prayer-meetings it is because there are so few evenings in the week and because I do not enjoy them. And as to taking a class in a mission-school, as Aunt Jane is always saying I ought, why, I should have to get up an hour earlier than I do usually, and it is bad enough as it is. And at any rate I can't do it just now, for it would set everybody to talking and saying how my trials had been blessed to me; and that I couldn't stand."

Now, there was a man of a sorrowful countenance and of a sorrowful spirit away off in a little country town, praying for his only son at these very moments, and his prayers were going to prevail. The knowledge that his boy, his dead wife's boy, was living a worldly, useless life, in defiance of the training he had had, and the vows he had taken upon himself, had crushed out what little gladness he ever had in him, and that was not much. He believed that Horace was really regenerate, and that his soul would be saved at last; but that did not give him much, if it did any, relief, when he set it off against the awful fact that he was not, in any sense, living for the glory of God, but simply to and for himself. And ever and anon when he was pleading for his son with strong crying and tears, there would surge up in the soul of that son unwelcome, painful thoughts; recollections of his mother and his mother's teachings, faint yearnings for a faith and a practice like hers. He wist not whence they came, nor what a fearful risk he ran when he resisted and stifled them.

It was Sunday, and as usual, when he went to church regularly anywhere, he sat with Aunt Jane in her pew. He had a bad habit of wandering about from church to church, with no special preference for any one, and she had not seen him at hers for some weeks. He behaved himself now with great outward devotion; took off his glove reverently, as his mother had taught him to do, as he sat at the sacramental table and received the sacred bread and wine, and joined in the hymns with apparent fervor. Aunt Jane's heart yearned for him; how much this festival meant to her--how little to him! And as she silently prayed for him, he felt the old discomfort creeping over him, the sense of unrest experienced, at times, at least, by every human soul that tries to satisfy its infinite longings and yearnings with finite things. "Will you come home with me to tea?" she whispered, after a little struggle with herself; for in her present mood his soul and hers would not be likely to come into very close contact.

"Anything but a boarding-house on a Sunday evening," he said, rather ungraciously, she thought. How many there were in that church who would have felt it a privilege to spend this quiet evening with her whose cheerful piety and wise words made her such a delightful companion to those who loved her. And he was only going to do it to get rid of the time! Well, she meant to keep her hold on Emily Wheeler's boy: one of these days he would thank her for it.

So they walked away together; he a little silent and preoccupied; she bright and happy and talkative, and ready to fill his empty cup from her full one, if he would only let her. And after tea, when they were alone together, she won from him the whole story about Georgiana, and listened to all his tiresome expressions of disgust and vexation, a good deal as an angel would have done.

"You see, Aunt Jane, she had made me lose all faith in women; that's the hard part of it. For she certainly lured me on with such pretty little ways, such adoring little glances! Oh, you needn't ascribe all this to my vanity; her manner is indescribable, but it was such as no high-minded girl could possibly fall into with a man she meant to reject."

"I do not doubt it," was the reply. "And I can perhaps explain to you why you were so deluded by it. For the time, and in a certain way, she really liked you, and instead of concealing that liking, as, under the circumstances, she was bound to do, she made the very most of it."

"But can girls conceal such liking?" he asked.

"Can they?" repeated Aunt Jane. "Why give them motives strong enough and they could hide and stifle their souls for ever. And the most sacred instincts call them to do so; for it is not an unheard of thing for girls to give their hearts unasked, and yet in impenetrable secrecy."

"Do tell me something more about the dear creatures!" cried Horace. "It is delightful to think there may be a lovely maiden dying for me somewhere. I'm sure," he added, suddenly changing his careless tone for a serious one, "I wish there was."

"I do not see what good that would do you," said Aunt Jane. "But I sincerely wish and pray that you may find a true-hearted, loving, Christian woman to wife, Horace. You need it sadly. You are frittering away your life now, and need to have a new element infused into it. Or rather, two elements."

"And what are they?"

"I dare not tell you, because you have protested against my preaching what you call sermons."

"Notwithstanding, say on," he returned.

"You need first, love of God. Don't interrupt me; I know you profess to love Him now. But you cannot pretend that this is the inspiration of your life.

"No," he said, laughing, to hide his embarrassment; "I certainly cannot and do not."

"And in the second place you want love to a pure, true woman, who will make a home for you with her love."

"That is true enough, at all events," he said, relieved that the dreaded "sermon" had been so brief. "But allowing that such a being as you describe exists on earth, where am I to find her? And if I find, what am I to do with her? Take her to my boarding house?"

"By no means. Get a house and live in it with her."

"You might just as well say get a fortune, and share it with her. You know that I cannot afford it."

"I know that you have often said so, and to be sure, you cannot take a house in a fashionable neighborhood, furnish it richly, and establish a fashionable young lady in it. But if you would once make up your mind that these mere outside advantages do not touch the inner life in a single point; that you want wife and children, and not upholstery and style, I believe you could settle down in a happy home forthwith."

The heart hidden away under the waistcoat gave a great throb at the words wife and children;--Horace was not spoiled by the life he had been leading, though tainted by it.

"All you say about my needing a home is true, Aunt Jane," he replied, "and you might say the same of every young man in the city. But every year makes our case more hopeless. Getting married is as formidable as getting to heaven; for my part I have about given up all hope of attaining either. Why, the ring a man offers his betrothed when she promises to be his must not be valuable as the pledge of his affection, or as a sacred relic of his past life, but intrinsically costly, so that his Amanda can say to all her bosom friends, ‘Behold now many hundreds dollars' worth of Arthur's love I wear upon my finger?"

He spoke bitterly, and turned his mother's ring about as it hung on his watch-chain.

"And then," he pursued, as Aunt Jane was silent, "comes the wedding! and that involves another visit to the jeweler's, and so on and so on; Amanda must have her rich dresses and give her elegant entertainments, and Arthur chooses she should; but if he happens to be poor, what then?"

"What then?" cried Aunt Jane, "why let him adapt himself to his poverty. Did Eve ask Adam to give her a palace to live in when he had mother but a garden? And are there to be no weddings save diamond weddings--no homes save in ceiled houses?"

"It is all very well to talk," he said, glancing around the tastefully adorned room in which they sat. "But you, who have always been used to refinement and luxury, do not know how essential they are."

"I know that I, a poor girl married a poor man," returned Aunt Jane. "And he took me to a home in which his love was my sole luxury, and mine my only refining influence. And how gladly I would go back with him this day, leaving behind me all that his long years of labor have won for me, into that homely home, if I might but go there with him in poverty instead of weeping for him amid this wealth! Oh! men make such mistakes! such fearful remediless mistakes! They sacrifice the lives on which other lives hang, under the delusion that when they are gone money can satisfy the aching, empty hearts they leave behind them."

This was the first time she had ever made the slightest allusion to a sorrow that had cast first a great shadow and then a great illumination upon her life. An illumination; for a shadow implies a sun.

"You must go now," she said, after a moment, "for I have got a little off the track, and don't know just when it was. But come again as soon as you like, and meanwhile, God bless you!" She gave him her hand with her usual bright smile, and he went away without a word.

To be continued ...

« Return to Aunt Jane's Hero