Chapter Three

by Mrs. Elizabeth Prentiss
Edited by Amber Moeller

Horace Wheeler had stood up years before, in the little village church, and confessed Christ before men. He was then not much more than a boy, and had very indefinite notions as to what this step implied and involved. Indeed, he had been urged into it by his mother, whose delicate health made it probable that she would not live to see him safely through the perils of early youth, and who felt that she could die in peace if she could leave him in the sheltering bosom of the Church she loved. She died soon after he entered college, and so he lost the letters that would have counseled and stimulated and blessed him. Shall we say he lost her prayers, also? God only knows. His father, a grave, hard, good man, prayed for, but rarely wrote to him; he had never had either sister or brother.

Perhaps, all this made old Mrs. Faulkner peculiarly dear to him, when on his establishing himself in this great city, she became to him almost a mother. But all he knew of religion was what his own meager experience had taught him, and all he knew of young women he had learned in society. And he had, so far, got very little comfort out of either. So now when he marched smarting and stinging out of Miss Fitzsimmons's ceiled house, he never once thought of such a thing as making the pain she had cost him a religious discipline; nor did he fly to the genial presence of other ladies in the hope of finding solace in their society. On the contrary, he fell to generalizing in this style:

"They're all alike, and I knew it, and yet have been and made a fool of myself. All they care for or think of is dress and show and fashion. There isn't enough heart in the whole concern to make one warm, manly heart. If you could put diamond rings on their fingers, and give them palaces to live in, and let them drive about in carriages, they may condescend to let you sit at the same table, and escort them whithersoever they would go. But offer them your unknown mane, and your faithful, honest heart, and they'll laugh in your face!

"To think how they'll get their heads together and discuss me, and giggle and cackle, as only girls and geese can! I can see that simpering Harriet Foot, Georgiana's crony and toady, swallowing the whole story, and then running to her crony."

He went back to his room, lighted it, pulled off his boots and tossed them spitefully against the wall, jerked on his slippers and flung himself into a chair. If he had had a fire to poke at, that would have been of some consolation; he could have knocked the coals out of the grate and picked them up with the tongs, and fancied each of them to be Georgiana Fitzsimmons as he did so. But the room was warmed by hot pipes, and offered him no employment, no relief to his troubled thoughts. He believed himself to be a very wretched, much abused man, mistaking the storm of passion that swept across his soul, and the bitter mortification under which he suffered, for the pangs of a broken, disappointed heart.

Much abused he certainly was, but not so very wretched, for a cigar quite soothed and comforted him, and he went to bed in due time, and slept better than Georgiana did, after all the sweet things she had been eating.

And while he was dressing he began to congratulate himself that he had got off so well, though he still twinged at the remembrance of the way in which a girl five years younger than himself had shown her superiority in worldly wisdom.

When he reached his office he found a note from Aunt Jane awaiting him, in which she asked him to drop in "accidentally" that evening. He thought he might as well go and get laughed at, and have it over with, and sent an amusing reply, in which he promised to do all sorts of accidental things, adding that Miss Fitzsimmons had given him the mitten, and that it was a very warm mitten indeed, and that now he should never marry unless Aunt Jane herself would take pity on him.

At eight o'clock he was ushered into her home-like domains, and found himself, to his great disgust, at a sewing circle. He had got himself up quite nicely, considering how wretched he was, and looked very handsome and attractive as he made his way through a little crowd of girls, busy in dressing dolls. They had already dressed thirty-two, who stood in rows on the piano, leaning against each other for support, and looking like sixteen pair of twins; and were engaged on as many more. Several young men lounged about the room, pretending to help, and making all sorts of absurd remarks, which the maidens deemed very witty. After speaking to Aunt Jane, Horace took a seat among the rest, and fell into a bantering talk with those near him, while he cynically looked at this array of pretty, fresh girls, whom, in his heart, he regarded as so many embryo flirts. A little creature sat apart from the rest, who, he was sure, had not yet left school: she was at work upon a crying baby, which she was getting into long clothes. He would not have given her a look or a thought, for she sat with her back to him and was quite absorbed in her task, but that she faced a mirror, which faithfully reflected her. It amused him to watch her thus off her guard, with a sweet matronly look gradually stealing over her almost childish face as the baby became every moment more life-like in her hands. At last she had given it a final touch, and secure from observation, as she fancied herself, went into rapture over this pretty mockery of a human child, kissing, fondling and playing with it just as a young mother caresses and sports with her baby of flesh and blood--her baby with a soul.

"The little thing has got a heart of her own," mused Horace, looking curiously on, "but she won't have one long. It will be called out of her as soon as she goes into that charming sphere called society." His lip curled at the thought, and at that moment she looked up and saw that he had been observing and was despising her. He saw her face crimson painfully, knew that she had misunderstood the contempt of his glance, and was shocked at himself for his carelessness. But he did a right-minded, manly thing, which was just like him, when he rose and made his way to her and said, frankly and warmly:

"I played the spy, it is true, but I did not dream that I sat in such a position that there was the least chance of detection."

"If people will do silly, childish things, they must expect to be laughed at," she said.

"But I was not laughing at you," said Horace; "I was admiring you with all my might."

"That is a very likely story," she said, a little comforted, and a good deal reassured by his manner, but she went off with her baby, leaving him ready to burst with repressed amusement, for all the time they had stood talking together, she had been pressing its little round, unconscious cheek against her own hardly less round. His instinct told him not to follow her, and he said to himself besides, that she was not much more than a child, and so he tried to make himself agreeable to those who were older.

This was a different set of girls from that in which he had been idling for two or three years. Each of them lived for a purpose; perhaps not quite consciously, certainly not very grandly; but their Sunday work in a mission school had given them a degree of elevation above mere triflers. They were in great glee this evening, for they were getting ready for a Christmas festival, and the doll-dressing being now over, Aunt Jane ushered them into the dining room, where, seated at a long table, they were to fill cornucopias with sugar plums. And the broken-hearted Horace caught the spirit of these unspoiled girls; a man who could afford to get married might be happy with almost any of them he said to himself, but, of course, he was not that man. Though he had tucked a cottage into the program in which Georgiana was to figure, he had never thought of such a thing as living in one; it wasn't the style, nowadays, and a brown stone house was more to his taste.

When the company broke up, and while the girls were getting into their sacks and hats, he had a few moments with Aunt Jane, who, to his great relief, made no allusion to his discomforted condition, but thanked him for coming, and asked him to see one more of her young friends safely home. Observing his little heroine of the baby scene standing near, he offered her his services as an escort.

"No, I am not going anywhere," she said; "I am making Aunt Jane a visit."

"Aunt Jane!" he repeated; "then you and I are cousins."

"Indeed we are not, for she is not really my aunt; I only call her so, because I love her so, and because she lets me."

"That makes our relationship doubly near," he said laughingly, "for she is not my aunt, either; I call her so, because I love her so, and because she lets me."

He repeated her words and manner of speaking them so perfectly, that she thought, as before, that he was secretly laughing at her; but she looked up and said gently:

"We country girls come to the city expecting to say and do foolish things, and get laughed at for our pains."

"But why will you persist in fancying that I am laughing at you, my dear little cousin?" he cried, and he was going on to add, patronizingly, "on the contrary I really like you," when his eye wandered from her sweet upturned face to her two little plump hands, and he saw that they were so red as they were plump.

"She's nothing but a stupid little country girl, after all," he said to himself, "though where she picked up such lady-like manners, it would be hard to guess;" so then he took himself off and thought of her no more.

But she thought of him a good many times, wondered who he was, hoped he would come again, knew three minutes after she got to church or into any public place where he was there, and was always expecting to meet him in the street when she walked out. In spite of all which, she had a charming visit at Aunt Jane's, and went home at the end of three weeks, where she was nearly eaten up by those who were glad to get her and her useful hands back again, even though they were red.

Well, Horace Wheeler, you had a great mistake when you let her slip out of your hands. This sweet, loving, Christian girl would have aroused the feeble Christian life now almost dead in your soul, and made a home for you of which any man might be proud. And so Aunt Jane would have said, if she had had a chance, but he did not give her one. He kept away from her week after week; her little sermons, as he called them, were of all things most repugnant to him. He had been drinking at broken fountains, but felt sure that the world had some new ones which sooner or later would quench his thirst.

To be continued ...

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