CHAPTER I.
No, I do not know by what accident it was that Edward Ross came to spend a week in August at the Columbia Hotel, at Hermon Springs.
No, and I do not know by what accident it was that all the Verneys were there. The home of the Verneys is at Painted Post, as I suppose you know. But this year the Verneys took a holiday for a month at the Columbia Hotel, and while they were away from home the ceilings were whitened, the house was painted inside and out, and new railings were added to the outside steps at the side door.
What I do know is that it was at the Columbia Hotel that Edward Ross first saw Psyche, who was the youngest daughter of the Verney household. All the world of the Columbia Hotel had gone across to the Solferino House, which was the other side of the way. There was a hop at the Solferino House, and the general public had gone to the hop. Ross had arrived late, the only passenger by that little one-horse railway from Hudson. He came into the great drawing-room, and thought he was alone. But he was not alone. Psyche, youngest of the Verney girls, was at the piano, not playing, but looking over some music which the Jeffrey girls had left there.
If you had asked the gossips of the hotel why Psyche did not go to the hop where all her older sisters had gone, you would have been told that she was but the half-sister of the other Verneys; that since her mother died, these three older sisters had held a hard rein on poor Psyche; that some one of them had laid down the law that there were so many of them they must not all go together to any frolic. In the interpretation of this law, Psyche always stayed at home if the party were pleasant, and one or two of the older sisters stayed if it were likely to be stupid. This is what the gossips of the hotel would have said, and this is what I believe.
Anyway, it happened that on this particular evening Edward Ross threw himself at length on a long sofa in the drawing-room, not knowing that any one was there; and little Psyche, not knowing that he had come in, crooned over the Jeffreys' music, and at last picked out something from Mercadante which she had never seen before, and which did not seem to her very difficult, and, after she had read the whole page down, tried it, and tried it again, in her resolute, wide-awake, very satisfactory way.
The third time she tried she was quite well pleased with her own success, and this time, as she came down to the last staff, upon that first page, Edward Ross's hand appeared on the top of the page, ready to turn it over. Psyche neither screamed nor flinched. She nodded simply: she was under the inspiration of the music now, and she played well. She played the whole piece through. Then he thanked her, and she thanked him. She played a good deal for him that evening. He brought down his William Morris and showed it to her, and read to her some of the best things in it. And so they spent two hours together very nicely, and by the time the madding crowd came back from the Solferino House, Psyche was not in the least sorry that she had not gone to the hop, and Edward Ross was very glad she had not gone.
There is a lovely little burn or brook which runs through a shady ravine behind the Columbia House, I forget what they call it. It might be called the Lovers' Brook or the Maiden's Home or the Fairy's Bath, or anything that verdant seventeen thought sweet enough. Age cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite variety. Edward Ross found no difficulty in making up a party of the young people at the hotel to go on a picnic up this brook the next day. By some device he made Agnes Verney think she would stay at home to flirt with an old West Indian, who was far too gouty to go even to the first fall. This left the pretty Psyche free to go. And she went, in the charming adornment of the unadorned simplicity of her pretty mountain walking-dress. And there were quite as many gentlemen as there were ladies, to help at all the hard fords and to lift them at all the steep climbings. So Priscilla Verney had her cavalier, and Polly Verney, whom the young men called "Bloody Mary," had her Philip, and the Garner girls were taken care of, and the Spragues and the Dunstables. For every girl, there was a young man; and if at most of the separating places Edward Ross and my pretty Psyche were together, it was not that they did not their full duty by society; for they did.
And a very pleasant day it was. That day Jabez Sprague asked Ann Garner to marry him, and she refused him point-blank: that made it a very pleasant day to her. That day Tunstall Dunstable asked Martha Jeffrey to marry him, and she said she would: that made it a very pleasant day to her. They all came home at five or six in the afternoon, very bright and jolly most of them, and those who were not bright and jolly pretended they were. Edward Ross had not asked Psyche to marry him, but I believe they had enjoyed the day as much as any one.
He had found out that this simple, shy, pretty little thing, who was snubbed in the household, who was left in the cold in their arrangements, and seemed to have no friends, had, all the same, a sweet, happy, contented temper; that she had her own notions and enthusiasms about books and men and duties; that she could not be made to say that yellow was white, or even that crimson was scarlet; that she never said she understood a thing but could not express herself, or that she knew a thing unless she did know it. He found a woman of principle under the form and method and semblance of a child.
And she had found out a man as fond of ferns as she was, who knew every fern in this glen, and every fern like it in the Himalayas; a man as fond of music as she was, who could not play as well as she could, and yet he had heard Chopin play, had seen "The Huguenots" in Paris, and had dined with Lang and Bennett and the Abbé Liszt himself. This man loved her heroes, though he had travelled in a stage-coach with Wendell Phillips, and had helped Mr. Sumner look up the authorities for one of his speeches. This man could quote twenty lines of Tennyson to her one, he had met Christina Rossetti at a party; and yet he really deferred to Psyche's own recollection of a stanza of Mrs. Browning's which he had quoted wrong. Psyche was not used to men who dared show their enthusiasm, who dared confess their ignorance, who dared speak as if it were a matter of course to trust God's love, and who owned they had other objects in life than making money. Psyche and Edward Ross returned to the hotel after a very happy day.
The next day Edward Ross brought out the largest and best apparatus for water-color work that Psyche or any of the girls had ever seen. And before long it proved that, though one "had no talent for drawing," and another "could not sketch from nature," and another "could not do landscape," and another "hated trees," that on the broad piazza of the Columbia House five or six of them, Psyche included, could spend a very pleasant morning, under his directions, reproducing, after a fashion, on various blocks and in various books, the outlines of the blue Hoosac Mountains and of the valleys between. And my pretty Psyche went far beyond any of the rest, because she did as she was bid; she had no conceit about her own ways; she waited till her teacher could attend to her; she did not want to attract the attention of all the gentlemen on the piazza; and she was not gabbling all the time she was working. So that day they had a very happy day.
It is not within the space assigned to this story to tell how pleasantly the rainy morning passed when Edward Ross read the "Earthly Paradise" aloud to them, nor to describe the excursion which he organized to Williams College Commencement, nor the party which he made to see the Shakers, nor the evening concert of vocal and instrumental music which he arranged, and for which he had such funny bills printed at Pittsfield. No; these and the other triumphs of that week, long remembered, shall be unrecorded.
Of its history, this is all that shall be told: that on Saturday Edward Ross told Psyche that he loved her more than he loved his own life. She told him that she loved him more than she loved hers. And so it was that, in the exquisite joy of the new discovery of what life is and what it is for, Edward Ross accompanied the Verneys on their way home to Painted Post on Monday. There he asked for and there he gained the consent of Psyche's father for their speedy marriage.
On Tuesday he had to go home to Boston, for his holiday was over. It was a bitter parting, as you may imagine, between him and his Psyche, who had never been separated for more than ten hours at a time till now. For the last farewell Psyche took him on her favorite walk at Painted Post. It is only less beautiful than the "Vestal's Glade," or whatever we determined to call that burnie at Hermon.
"Dear Psyche," said he to her, "your life is mine henceforth, and mine is yours. God knows I have but one wish and one prayer henceforth, and those are to make you happy. It is because I wish that you may be happy that I ask one thing now. Do you think you can grant it? It is a very great thing to ask."
"Can I?" said the proud girl. "Why, darling, you do not know me yet." She had never called him "darling" till an hour before.
"You must not promise till you know," said Edward Ross.
"I can promise and I will promise now. There is nothing you think right to ask which I shall not think it right to do."
"Dearest, I do think this is right; I know it is right. It is because I know it, because we shall be ten thousand times happier, and because I shall be ten thousand times better for it, that I ask it. I would not dream of it but for your sake—" And he paused.
"Why do you stop, my dear Edward? I have promised. What shall I do?"
"Dearest, you are to do nothing. Simply, you are not to ask what my daily duty is, and you are not to ask me to introduce you to my friends. It separates me less from my sunbeam than most men's cares. Without knowing it, you can help me in a thousand ways in it. But to know what it is will only bring care on you and grief on me. Can we not live, as you trust me and as I love you, without my worrying you with these petty cares?"
"Is that all?" said Psyche, with her pretty laugh. "Why, darling, if it were to sweep the street-crossing,—as in that funny story you told us,—I would sweep too. If it were to keep a gambling-table, you would not have asked me to marry you. It is something honorable, that I know, because you are my own Edward. Why need I know anything more?"
And he kissed her, and she kissed him; and they went home to his little lunch; and then the express swept by, with Jim Fisk in uniform, as it happened, in a palace-car. And so Edward Ross went to Boston and made ready for his wedding.