MY MOTHER PUT IT ON.
BY MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY.
IT was old Boston—Boston forty years and more ago,—and it was New Year’s morning.
We had lived in our new house in one of the lately laid-out, airy neighborhoods over on the West Hill since June. Before that, we lived in Pearl street, where all the great warehouses are now, and where the other great warehouses were burned down,—melted into strange, stone monuments of ruin,—in the terrible fire, six years ago from now. Down in Pearl street, in a large house with a garden to it, and a wonderful staircase inside that had landings with balustraded arches through to other landings, and which was a sublimity and delight to me that the splendid stairways in Roman palaces can scarcely equal now,—still lived my best and beautiful friend, Elizabeth Hunter. I thought in those days all Elizabeths were beautiful, because I knew two who had fair, delicious complexions, sweet, deep-cornered mouths, and brown hair. My hair was light and straight and fine; it looked thin and cold to me by side of theirs.
On this New Year, I was to go and spend the day with Elizabeth. My father and my brother Andrew were to come to dinner. My mother was an invalid, and could not bear the cold and the fatigue. But she had my pretty dress all ready for me, a soft, blue merino—real deep-sky blue,—with trimming to the tucks and hem and low neck-band and sleeve-bindings of dark carbuncle-colored velvet ribbon in a raised Greek pattern. You may think it looked queer; but it didn’t; it was very pretty and becoming.
Before I was to go, however, there was ever so much other New Year delight to keep the time from seeming long. Father and Andrew were going down to the whip-factory in Dock square, to choose for Andrew the longest-lashed toy-whip, with the gayest snapper and the handsomest handle, that he could pick out there. And afterward they were going to a great toy-shop, to buy me the wax doll I had been promised.
I did not care to choose my doll, as Andrew would choose his whip. I had a kind of real little-mother feeling about that. I would rather have what came to me, what my father brought me. I wanted it to be mine from the first minute I saw it, without any doubt, or any chance to choose otherwise. If I had looked and hesitated among dozens of them, and picked out one, I should always have felt as if I had left some child behind that maybe ought to have been mine, and that I had not quite whole chosen any one. So I was content to stay with my mother, and run down from her with the quarter and half dollars to the watchman and the carrier and the scavenger and the milkman, when they came with their expectation of a little present. What dear old simple days those were, when we had a family regard for our milkman, our watchman, our scavenger!
Meanwhile, I was to be dressed.
I had just got on my blue morocco slippers, that looked so funny with my striped dark calico morning-frock, when the bell, that I thought I had done answering with the silver fees, rang loudly again. Marcella, our housemaid, called me from the foot of the nursery stairs.
“It’s somebody for you, Miss Emmeline,” she said, and I thought she meant another man for money. I took the last quarter from the little wallet father had filled for me, and ran down. But it was the tall black servant from the Hunters. And he had in his hand a pretty paper box tied with a silk cord.
“Mrs. Hunter’s compliments and love, miss, to you and to your ma; and she hopes you’ll wear something she has made for you just like Miss Elizabeth’s, to-day.”
I took the box, made a little courtesy to him, and said, “Please thank Mrs. Hunter, and say I wish her a happy New Year, and here’s a happy New Year for you.” For I thought he couldn’t help seeing the silver quarter, and thinking it was for him; and father had told me to “use my judgment,” and I certainly wanted to give it to him the minute I saw he had come all the way with a present for me. Elizabeth and I liked Jefferson very much; he gave us macaroons and prunes and almonds from the pantry, and he swung us in the swing in the great drying-room. He made me a fine bow, and thanked me, and said he should keep my quarter for luck.
So I ran up to my mother, and kissed her—for somehow whenever anything pleasant came to me I always kissed my mother—and we opened the box. It was a beautiful blue silk braid net, with a long blue ribbon run through to tie it round the head with.
“O, mother!” I cried, “it’s a long ribbon, for flying ends!” I was so glad; for I had no curls like Elizabeth’s and I thought flying ribbons would seem like them a little, and I had never worn any.
“It is very pretty,” said my mother; “but I think, dear, with your short hair, a short bow would look better.”
She did not tell me that my face was narrow and my nose was long, and that I couldn’t possibly look like Elizabeth Hunter, even with flying ends. I know it now, as I have found out a good many things that I didn’t understand at the time.
I was disappointed; too disappointed to say anything; and before I spoke, mother, who had put the net over my hair, and drawn the ribbon, tied a butterfly bow with it over my left ear, and snipped the ends into short dovetails with her small bright toilet scissors.
I choked a little in my throat, and the tears came into my eyes.
“Did you care so much?” asked mother tenderly, and kissed me again. “But it is a great deal prettier for you so; trust me, dear.”
I did not speak then, for I couldn’t; but I tried to swallow the choke and the tears; mother who was always kind, had been so dearly kind to me that day. And Andrew came running up the stairs just then, and bounced in at the door; and there was my dear wax-baby in his arms, and I was a happy little mother; and what happy little mother, with her baby born on New Year’s morning cares how her cap is tied?
The baby was dressed in a pretty white slip and a bib; and there was a blanket with pink scalloped edges, to wrap it in.
“There were dollies a good deal older, and some all grown up,” said Andrew; “but father thought you’d want to have it a real baby, and let it grow. And it opens and shuts its eyes. See here! There! it’s gone to sleep; and now look at my whip!” He pulled it out from under his arm, whence it trailed behind him, and cracked it gloriously with its yellow snappers, right over my baby’s head.
“O, And! Be careful! Give her right to me. Boys don’t know how to tend babies, you know. But you’re real good; and your whip is splendid!”
“Guess I am! Brought her right straight along, and didn’t care a mite, and three boys hollered after me, ‘’Fore I’d be a girl, and carry a rag-baby!’ I just kept her with one hand and cracked my whip with the other, and looked right ahead, as if they wasn’t anywhere!”
I put my arms round his neck, and hugged him and the baby and the whip all together; for my Andie always was a hero, and loved me. He brought me my greatest gift pleasures, and my happiest surprises. Father always took him into the plan, if Andie hadn’t already begged it for me,—whenever there was one. I think our parents had that notion about son and daughter, and what the little man and woman should be to each other. Mother used to set me to do all the little cheery, comfortable home-things for Andie. Andie brought me my wax doll when I was seven years old; he walked down to Jones’s, with father, the day he was seventeen, and brought me home my real, gold watch. I always mended Andie’s stockings after I was old enough,—and quite little girls were old enough in those days; and I made pan ginger-bread for his supper when he was coming home cold from coasting on the Common; and I read to him when he was sick with sore throat and saved money to fill his bag with white alleys when marble-time came round. Andie and I used to promise never to get married, but to keep house with each other when we were grown up. I have never got married; but Andie has been lying in the gray stone tomb at Mount Auburn for thirty years.
My mother hurried me a little now; for Marcella was ready.
We walked down across the Common, Marcella and I; she was to leave me at the door. There was a biting wind, with snow-needles in it; and the path was deep with half-trodden snow; but I was warm in my cloth pelisse with gray fur cape and border,—my quilted bonnet edged with fur, and my thick little mocasins with gray fur round the ankles.
I was perfectly happy till Mrs. Hunter unfastened my things by the large parlor fire, and lifted off my bonnet carefully.
Elizabeth, with her dimpled face, her sweet-set mouth, her brown curls among which the long blue ribbon floated,—for the net was a mere matter of ornament, and lay light and loose over the hair, held only by the ribbon band simply tied at the left temple,—was standing by, impatient to get me out and begin our day.
“Why, where are the long ends?” she said. And then I immediately felt as if all there was of me was that one little, short-chopped, butterfly bow.
“Mother thought—” I began, and there stopped. My lips trembled a little, and I blushed hot.
Mrs. Hunter looked sorry. “Was she quite particular?” she asked, after an instant. “Because I have another ribbon. Just for to-day, perhaps, because you like to be like Lizzie? It would be a pity not to please the child,” she said to Mrs. Marchand, her sister, who was there. She was drawing the blue ribbon from her pretty round, carved worktable, and she put out her hand to untie my little bow.
Then it came over me. I started back. “Please! No! Please not, Mrs. Hunter. Thank you—a great deal—” I stammered, in a hurry, and afraid I was dreadfully impolite,—“but mother put it on!”
I wouldn’t have had that bow with the dovetailed ends untied, that minute, for all the world.
A singular expression, I thought, passed between the faces of the two ladies. Mrs. Hunter leaned down from her chair, reached my hand, drew me to her again, and kissed me. “You are a dear little thing,” she said to me. “The little souls know best,” she said to her sister.
“When the little souls are—” but Mrs. Marchand did not say what.
I wondered why Mrs. Hunter, while she praised me,—but it was not praise either; it was better than that,—should have looked as if she pitied me so. I couldn’t think it was for the sake of the ribbon. No, indeed: I know now what it was.
We had a beautiful time. Of course I had brought my baby, and I secretly thought it was a great deal cunninger and prettier than Elizabeth’s, that she had had ever since her last birthday, and that really looked quite old and common to me now, though she had kept it so nice, and I had admired it so.
Father and Andrew came to dinner; and after dinner we had forfeits, and Hunt the Ring, and Magical Music, and Still Palm. There were three other children who came to spend the afternoon.
I was very happy. There was a hidden corner in my heart that kept warming up every now and then, as if mother and I had a secret together, and we were whispering it to each other across the wide, cold city. Elizabeth’s pretty hair and long blue ribbons flew this way and that in the merry play and running; and I noticed them just as I always had, and I knew that there was nothing pretty about my short, plain, light-colored hair, and I did think that flying ends would have been a comfort if I could have had them in the first place; but there was something beyond comfort in the loyalty of wearing that butterfly bow which nobody need touch or try to change for me, since—because she thought it best for me to wear it so—my mother had put it on!
I HAD BROUGHT MY BABY.
I ran straight up to her dressing-room the minute we got home. She sat there in her white flannel wrapper before the fire. I threw my arms around her and laid my head down on her lap.
“Now untie the little bow,” I said: and she asked: “Did my little girl wear it all the day for my sake?”
She understood. We had been whispering to each other’s thought across all the cold, wide city.
“Mother,” I asked her, after I said my prayers, and before I said goodnight, “why did I have such a Rocky-Mountain kind of a face? Why couldn’t God have given me a pretty, flat face? Can you tell?”
“God didn’t see best to make you handsome, dear; but He will make you beautiful, if you will let Him, his own way. And I don’t think,” she added, more lightly, and laughing a sweet laugh, “that my Emmie’s face could be a flat one! It wouldn’t suit her at all; and I love this a great deal better!”
When I was seventeen years old, my mother had been dead eight years. I had a stepmother.
That was horrible, you think? Wait till you hear.
When my father—a graver, silenter, but not less kind and gentle man—brought home at last this lady, as truly, I think, for our sakes as his own,—he called us to them both as they sat together on the long velvet sofa in the library. I remember the moment, and the look of everything as if it were just now. It was a September midday; they had been married in church, and we had all come straight home; there was no company,—“this day was for themselves and the children,”—and dinner was going on, almost just as usual, in the dining room beyond.
The lady, whom we had seen but few times,—her home had been at a distance in the country,—was dressed in a plain violet silk; and now her bonnet was off, her dark hair looked homelike and simple, just parted away over her low, pleasant forehead and twisted richly behind; and her face,—I never forget that about it,—was watching the door when we came in.
My father said to me, being the girl and the oldest,—“Emmeline, I hope you will be the happier for this day, and I believe you will, from this day forward as long as you and my wife shall live.” He fell, unpremeditatedly, into the words of the Solemn Service that had been spoken over them; it was as if he had married us two, in our new relation, to each other.
He said to Andrew—“My boy knows what men owe to women; he and I must do our best and manliest for these two. We four are a family now.”
The new wife stretched out a hand to each of us. She slipped her arm round me, and drew me to her side, while she held Andrew’s hand upon her knee. The face that looked into mine was very wistful and kind; it almost seemed to beseech something of me. It asked leave to be loving.
We children did not know what to say. I felt uneasy not to speak at all. I believe I smiled a little, shyly. Then I asked—
“What shall I call you, please?”
“What shall they call you, Lucy?” asked my father.
“Call me ‘step-mamma,’” was the answer; and I think he was utterly surprised.
“I will not take their mother’s name away,” she said. “I will not be instead of her. I will be called just what I want to be; a step, a link, between her and them. I will try and do for her what she would have done if she had stayed.”
“Then I think I’ll call you ‘For-mamma,’” said straight-spoken Andrew. “I think that will do very well.”
We all laughed; and it relieved the feeling. “Thank you, Andrew,” said our step-mamma. “That is a great help at the very beginning. I believe we shall understand each other.”
For my part I only kissed her. By the way she kissed me back, I knew it was her first act “for” my mother.
So we began to love her, and we called her “step-mamma.” People thought it very odd, and we never explained it to them. We let our relation explain itself. But among ourselves, the familiar, privileged, lovely name was “For-mamma.” That we kept this sign through so many years,—the years of our troublesome, probative childhood,—tells more than any story of the years could tell.
I only wanted to say a little bit of what she was to me at seventeen; and how my mother’s very words came again to me through her, as by an accepted mediation.
I went with her to a large party; my very first large grown-up party.
My old friend, Elizabeth Hunter, was a bride this winter. I had been bridesmaid at her wedding; that was the beginning of my coming out, earlier than I should otherwise have done.
What a plain little bridesmaid I had been, to what an exquisite vision of a bride! I remember thinking as we, the bridal party, walked through the long rooms, when all was gay, and ceremony was broken through at supper-time—when the rooms rustled with the turning of the groups to look after her and the murmur went along about her beauty—“What difference ought it to make, that she is the beauty, and that I can never be,—so long as the beauty is and we all feel it?” Yet the strange difference was there, and the cross of my beauty-loving nature was that I in my own being and movement, could never hold and represent it.
I looked at myself when I had dressed for this large party. The lovely blue silk—the delicate lace—the white roses—they almost achieved prettiness enough of themselves; and I suppose I looked as nice as I could; but there were still the too prominent brows, the nose too big for the eyes, the lips too easily parted over the teeth fine and white, but contributing to the excess of profile, or middle-face, that had made me call it Rocky-Mountain outline when I was a child.
I went down to my step-mamma’s room. She, in her ruby-colored satin, was fairer at thirty-eight than I at seventeen. I sat watching her as she put pearl earrings into her ears.
“For-mamma,” I said, “I don’t believe I shall ever care much for parties. And it will be for a very mean and selfish reason, too.—I think it is only pretty people who can enjoy them much.”
She laid down the second pearl hoop on the table, and came to me.
“Emmie,” she said, “I know it is a hard thing for a woman who loves all lovely things, not to be very beautiful herself. The dear Lord has not made you very beautiful, in mere features. But can’t you wear a plain face awhile, because He has given it to you to wear, and trust to Him to make it lovely in his way and season?”
My step-mamma hardly ever said anything so direct as this to me, about religion. She only lived her religion in a pleasant, comfortable, unassuming way, and kept a light shining by which I saw—without her flashing it upon me like a dark-lantern—into any little selfish or God-forgetful course of my own life. Now, these words came to me—across ten years—the very words said to me in that same room, at that same hour of night.... Why—it was the very night! We were going to a New Year’s party.
A great heart-beat came up in my throat, and the tears pressed up together into face and eyes, while I felt the kindling of my own look, and saw what it must be by the answering color and the light in hers.
I put my hands out and reached them round her waist as she stood close to me in her beautiful glowing dress, under which a more beautiful heart was glowing brighter. “I cannot tell you two apart, Mamma and For-mamma!” I said.
We went together to the party. For-mamma had to put her one pearl hoop in her pocket after she got there, for she had forgotten the other on her dressing table. And what that party was to me I wonder if any grand, lovely, tender church-service ever was to anybody, more or better!
I had a quiet time, compared to some girls who were always rushed after, and rushing through the gay dances. I was politely asked, and I did dance; but not every time; that was as it always was with me. But all the beauty and all the gladness in the whole room was mine; for it was all “the dear Lord’s,” and He was giving it as He would. “Passing it round,” I couldn’t help thinking—was it irreverent, I wonder—as the sweet, rich confections were passed round, that were meant, a share in turn, for all. My turn would come. And for my plain, still, Rocky-Mountain face that I was wearing now,—there was a secret between me and some Heart that thought of me across whatever cold and emptiness of wintry way might seem to lie between, like that which had been when in my childish disappointment I wore the simple bit of ribbon that “my mother had put on.”
There came a time when I had to give up other beauty. To recognise that it was not for me,—yet. Not in all this long, waiting world, as other people have it. That was harder; yet it was all one. It seemed to me that some people were given at their birth a kind of ticket that opened to them all paradises; and that others were thrust forth, unaccredited, into a life whose most beautiful doors would be shut, one after another, in their faces.
THE GROWN-UP EMMELINE.
I had to content myself with a fate like my face; a plain pleasantness without great, wonderful delight. A Rocky-Mountain aspect of living, that seemed hard and rough until I got into the heart of it, and let it shut out the fair champaigns, and then it showed me its own depth, and height, and glory.
There was one long, heavy time when For-mamma and I were separated for years. For-mamma was a widow, now; we four that had been a family together were we two here and they two there; they three, in the other home. And my grandmother, in her feeble, querulous, uncomfortable old age, had nobody to come and live with her and “see her through,” as she said. At nearly the same time, For-mamma’s sister died, and there were five little children to be cared for. I thought she would never get away from that duty, though mine might see an end. But a new wife came there after a good while, as For-mamma—I hope it was as she came—had come to us; and then grandmother died, and nobody could say otherwise than that it was a release. I did not say so; I hate to hear people say that; it is so apt to mean a release for those who outlive. There are long dyings, and brief ones; when it is over, we go back to the well time to measure our loss. Grandmother’s dying began almost twenty years before, when her nerves gave out, and her comfort in living was over, and people began to lose patience with her. I looked back to that time, and thought what a bright handsome woman, fond of her own way but with such a fine capable way, I could recollect her.
I had tried to do my duty; it was a piece of life that the same Love had put on me that I had learned—a little—to believe in as a mother’s; and now it was over—“through,” and For-mamma and I came together again, so gladly!
I suppose everybody thinks we are very fortunate people, and perfectly happy; for we have plenty of money, and can do all the pleasant things that can be done with money, for ourselves and for others. I suppose many persons think that my five years with Grandmother Cumberland were paid for in the fifty thousand dollars that she left me. I know that they were paid for as they went along, and as I found myself able and cheerful to live them.
For-mamma and I are happy; I do not think we shall ever leave each other now so long as we both may live. I often think how my father joined us together with those words.
We have a lovely and dear home, and friends to fill it when we want them; we have happy errands to many who get some happiness through our hands; we have travelled together, and seen glorious and wonderful things; we read and think, we sing and sew, we laugh and talk and are silent together; we do not let each other miss or want. But, for all this we have each—and both together—our troubles to bear, that would not have been worthy to be called troubles if they had stirred in us so slightly as to have been forgotten long ago.
We only bear them as things grown tender to us by their very pain and pressure, because of Some One who will say to us when we go home to Him:
“Did my dear child wear it all the day for My Sake?”
AFTERWARDS.
Once, down in the night, but a blinded thing:—
Now, the great gold light and the beautiful wing!
