Pink and White Tyranny: Chapter 6

Chapter 6

HONEY-MOON, AND AFTER.

We left Mr. and Mrs. John Seymour honey-mooning. The honey-moon, dear
ladies, is supposed to be the period of male subjection. The young
queen is enthroned; and the first of her slaves walks obediently in
her train, carries her fan, her parasol, runs of her errands, packs
her trunk, writes her letters, buys her any thing she cries for, and
is ready to do the impossible for her, on every suitable occasion.

A great strong man sometimes feels awkwardly, when thus led captive;
but the greatest, strongest, and most boastful, often go most
obediently under woman-rule; for which, see Shakspeare, concerning
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

But then all kingdoms, and all sway, and all authority must come to
an end. Nothing lasts, you see. The plain prose of life must have its
turn, after the poetry and honey-moons--stretch them out to their
utmost limit--have their terminus.

So, at the end of six weeks, John and Lillie, somewhat dusty and
travel-worn, were received by Grace into the old family-mansion at
Springdale.

Grace had read her Bible and F�nelon to such purpose, that she had
accepted her cross with open arms.

Dear reader, Grace was not a severe, angular, old-maid sister,
ready to snarl at the advent of a young beauty; but an elegant and
accomplished woman, with a wide culture, a trained and disciplined
mind, a charming taste, and polished manners; and, above all, a
thorough self-understanding and discipline. Though past thirty, she
still had admirers and lovers; yet, till now, her brother, insensibly
to herself, had blocked up the doorway of her heart; and the
perfectness of the fraternal friendship had prevented the wish and
the longing by which some fortunate man might have found and given
happiness.

Grace had resolved she would love her new sister; that she would look
upon all her past faults and errors with eyes of indulgence; that she
would put out of her head every story she ever had heard against her,
and unite with her brother to make her lot a happy one.

"John is so good a man," she said to Miss Letitia Ferguson, "that I am
sure Lillie cannot but become a good woman."

So Grace adorned the wedding with her presence, in an elegant Parisian
dress, ordered for the occasion, and presented the young bride with a
set of pearl and amethyst that were perfectly bewitching, and kisses
and notes of affection had been exchanged between them; and during
various intervals, and for weeks past, Grace had been pleasantly
employed in preparing the family-mansion to receive the new mistress.

John's bachelor apartments had been new furnished, and furbished, and
made into a perfect bower of roses.

The rest of the house, after the usual household process of
purification, had been rearranged, as John and his sister had always
kept it since their mother's death in the way that she loved to see
it. There was something quaint and sweet and antique about it, that
suited Grace. Its unfashionable difference from the smart, flippant,
stereotyped rooms of to-day had a charm in her eyes.

Lillie, however, surveyed the scene, the first night that she took
possession, with a quiet determination to re-modernize on the very
earliest opportunity. What would Mrs. Frippit and Mrs. Nippit say to
such rooms, she thought. But then there was time enough to attend to
that. Not a shade of these internal reflections was visible in
her manner. She said, "Oh, how sweet! How perfectly charming! How
splendid!" in all proper places; and John was delighted.

She also fell into the arms of Grace, and kissed her with effusion;
and John saw the sisterly union, which he had anticipated,
auspiciously commencing.

The only trouble in Grace's mind was from a terrible sort of
clairvoyance that seems to beset very sincere people, and makes them
sensitive to the presence of any thing unreal or untrue. Fair and soft
and caressing as the new sister was, and determined as Grace was to
believe in her, and trust her, and like her,--she found an invisible,
chilly barrier between her heart and Lillie. She scolded herself, and,
in the effort to confide, became unnaturally demonstrative, and said
and did more than was her wont to show affection; and yet, to her own
mortification, she found herself, after all, seeming to herself to be
hypocritical, and professing more than she felt.

As to the fair Lillie, who, as we have remarked, was no fool, she
took the measure of her new sister with that instinctive knowledge of
character which is the essence of womanhood. Lillie was not in love
with John, because that was an experience she was not capable of.
But she had married him, and now considered him as her property, her
subject,--_hers_, with an intensity of ownership that should shut out
all former proprietors.

We have heard much talk, of late, concerning the husband's ownership
of the wife. But, dear ladies, is that any more pronounced a fact than
every wife's ownership of her husband?--an ownership so intense
and pervading that it may be said to be the controlling nerve of
womanhood. Let any one touch your right to the first place in your
husband's regard, and see!

Well, then, Lillie saw at a glance just what Grace was, and what her
influence with her brother must be; and also that, in order to live
the life she meditated, John must act under her sway, and not under
his sister's; and so the resolve had gone forth, in her mind, that
Grace's dominion in the family should come to an end, and that she
would, as sole empress, reconstruct the state. But, of course, she was
too wise to say a word about it.

"Dear me!" she said, the next morning, when Grace proposed showing her
through the house and delivering up the keys, "I'm sure I don't see
why you want to show things to me. I'm nothing of a housekeeper, you
know: all I know is what I want, and I've always had what I wanted,
you know; but, you see, I haven't the least idea how it's to be done.
Why, at home I've been everybody's baby. Mamma laughs at the idea of
my knowing any thing. So, Grace dear, you must just be prime minister;
and I'll be the good-for-nothing Queen, and just sign the papers, and
all that, you know."

Grace found, the first week, that to be housekeeper to a young
duchess, in an American village and with American servants, was no
sinecure.

The young mistress, the next week, tumbled into the wash an amount of
muslin and lace and French puffing and fluting sufficient to employ
two artists for two or three days, and by which honest Bridget, as she
stood at her family wash-tub, was sorely perplexed.

But, in America, no woman ever dies for want of speaking her mind; and
the lower orders have their turn in teaching the catechism to their
superiors, which they do with an effectiveness that does credit to
democracy.

"And would ye be plased to step here, Miss Saymour," said Bridget to
Grace, in a voice of suppressed emotion, and pointing oratorically,
with her soapy right arm, to a snow-wreath of French finery and
puffing on the floor. "What _I_ asks, Miss Grace, is, _Who_ is to do
all this? I'm sure it would take me and Katy a week, workin' day and
night, let alone the cookin' and the silver and the beds, and all
them. It's a pity, now, somebody shouldn't spake to that young
crather; fur she's nothin' but a baby, and likely don't know any
thing, as ladies mostly don't, about what's right and proper."
Bridget's Christian charity and condescension in this last sentence
was some mitigation of the crisis; but still Grace was appalled. We
all of us, my dear sisters, have stood appalled at the tribunal of
good Bridgets rising in their majesty and declaring their ultimatum.

Bridget was a treasure in the town of Springdale, where servants were
scarce and poor; and, what was more, she was a treasure that knew
her own worth. Grace knew very well how she had been beset with
applications and offers of higher wages to draw her to various hotels
and boarding-houses in the vicinity, but had preferred the comparative
dignity and tranquillity of a private gentleman's family.

But the family had been small, orderly, and systematic, and Grace the
most considerate of housekeepers. Still it was not to be denied, that,
though an indulgent and considerate mistress, Bridget was, in fact,
mistress of the Seymour mansion, and that her mind and will concerning
the washing must be made known to the young queen.

It was a sore trial to speak to Lillie; but it would be sorer to be
left at once desolate in the kitchen department, and exposed to the
marauding inroads of unskilled Hibernians.

In the most delicate way, Grace made Lillie acquainted with the
domestic crisis; as, in old times, a prime minister might have carried
to one of the Charleses the remonstrance and protest of the House of
Commons.

"Oh! I'm sure I don't know how it's to be done," said Lillie, gayly.
"Mamma always got my things done _somehow_. They always _were_ done,
and always must be: you just tell her so. I think it's always best to
be decided with servants. Face 'em down in the beginning."

"But you see, Lillie dear, it's almost impossible to _get_ servants
at all in Springdale; and such servants as ours everybody says are an
exception. If we talk to Bridget in that way, she'll just go off and
leave us; and then what shall we do?"

"What in the world does John want to live in such a place for?" said
Lillie, peevishly. "There are plenty of servants to be got in New
York; and that's the only place fit to live in. Well, it's no affair
of mine! Tell John he married me, and must take care of me. He must
settle it some way: I shan't trouble my head about it."

The idea of living in New York, and uprooting the old time-honored
establishment in Springdale, struck Grace as a sort of sacrilege;
yet she could not help feeling, with a kind of fear, that the young
mistress had power to do it.

"Don't, darling, talk so, for pity's sake," she said. "I will go to
John, and we will arrange it somehow."

A long consultation with faithful John, in the evening, revealed to
him the perplexing nature of the material processes necessary to get
up his fair puff of thistledown in all that wonderful whiteness and
fancifulness of costume which had so entranced him.

Lillie cried, and said she never had any trouble before about "getting
her things done." She was sure mamma or Trixie or somebody did them,
or got them done,--she never knew how or when. With many tears and
sobs, she protested her ardent desire to realize the Scriptural idea
of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field, which were fed
and clothed, "like Solomon in all his glory," without ever giving a
moment's care to the matter.

John kissed and, embraced, and wiped away her tears, and declared she
should have every thing just as she desired it, if it took the half of
his kingdom.

After consoling his fair one, he burst into Grace's room in the
evening, just at the hour when they used to have their old brotherly
and sisterly confidential talks.

"You see, Grace,--poor Lillie, dear little thing,--you don't know how
distressed she is; and, Grace, we must find somebody to do up all her
fol-de-rols and fizgigs for her, you know. You see, she's been _used_
to this kind of thing; can't do without it."

"Well, I'll try to-morrow, John," said Grace, patiently. "There is
Mrs. Atkins,--she is a very nice woman."

"Oh, exactly! just the thing," said John. "Yes, we'll get her to take
all Lillie's things every week; That settles it."

"Do you know, John, at the prices that Mrs. Atkins asks, you will have
to pay more than for all your family service together? What we have
this week would be twenty dollars, at the least computation; and it is
worth it too,--the work of getting up is so elaborate."

John opened his eyes, and looked grave. Like all stable New-England
families, the Seymours, while they practised the broadest liberality,
had instincts of great sobriety in expense. Needless profusion shocked
them as out of taste; and a quiet and decent reticence in matters of
self-indulgence was habitual with them.

Such a price for the fine linen of his little angel rather staggered
him; but he gulped it down.

"Well, well, Oracle," he said, "cost what it may, she must have it as
she likes it. The little creature, you see, has never been accustomed
to calculate or reflect in these matters; and it is trial enough to
come down to our stupid way of living,--so different, you know, from
the gay life she has been leading."

Miss Seymour's saintship was somewhat rudely tested by this remark.
That anybody should think it a sacrifice to be John's wife, and a
trial to accept the homestead at Springdale, with all its tranquillity
and comforts,--that John, under her influence, should speak of the
Springdale life as _stupid_,--was a little drop too much in her cup. A
bright streak appeared in either cheek, as she said,--

"Well, John, I never knew you found Springdale stupid before. I'm
sure, we _have_ been happy here,"--and her voice quavered.

"Pshaw, Gracie! you know what I mean. I don't mean that _I_ find
it stupid. I don't like the kind of rattle-brained life we've been
leading this six weeks. But, then, it just suits Lillie; and it's so
sweet and patient of her to come here and give it all up, and say not
a word of regret; and then, you see, I shall be just up to my ears in
business now, and can't give up all my time to her, as I have. There's
ever so much law business coming on, and all the factory matters at
Spindlewood; and I can see that Lillie will have rather a hard time of
it. You must devote yourself to her, Gracie, like a dear, good soul,
as you always were, and try to get her interested in our kind of life.
Of course, all our set will call, and that will be something; and
then--there will be some invitations out."

"Oh, yes, John! we'll manage it," said Grace, who had by this time
swallowed her anger, and shouldered her cross once more with a womanly
perseverance. "Oh, yes! the Fergusons, and the Wilcoxes, and the
Lennoxes, will all call; and we shall have picnics, and lawn teas, and
musicals, and parties."

"Yes, yes, I see," said John. "Gracie, _isn't_ she a dear little
thing? Didn't she look cunning in that white wrapper this morning? How
do women do those things, I wonder?" said John. "Don't you think her
manners are lovely?"

"They are very sweet, and she is charmingly pretty," said Grace; "and
I love her dearly."

"And so affectionate! Don't you think so?" continued John. "She's a
person that you can do any thing with through her heart. She's all
heart, and very little head. I ought not to say that, either. I think
she has fair natural abilities, had they ever been cultivated."

"My dear John," said Grace, "you forget what time it is. Good-night!"

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