CHAPTER XI.
Anomalies of the War for the Union—The Watering-place rush of 1863—A White-Mountain Party disembarking at Littleton—Who filled the Concord Coach—The Vanderlyns—Shoddy on its travels—Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and his Family—"H. T.," and an Excitement.
The War for the Union has been unlike all other great struggles, throughout, in nearly every characteristic that can be named. Unnatural in its inception, the rebellion has seemed to have the power of making unnatural many of the details through which and in spite of which it has been carried forward—of changing character and subverting all ordinary conditions. There have been anomalies in the field: still more notable anomalies in society. Unflinching bravery and stubborn devotion to the fighting interests of the country have been found blended, in the same man, with pecuniary dishonesty which seemed capable of pillaging a death-chamber. The greatest military ability has been found conjoined with such inactivity and tardiness as to paralyze action and destroy public patience. Rapidity of movement has been discovered to be wedded to such Utopian want of understanding or such culpable recklessness as to make movement not seldom a blunder instead of a stroke of policy. Times which threatened disaster have brought triumph; and the preparations made to celebrate a victory have more than once been employed in concealing a defeat. All things have been mixed in estimation. The Copperhead, detestable on account of his view of the national duty, has yet compelled some portion of respect by his real or affected reverence for a perilled Constitution; the Radical, worthy of all credit for his active spirit and uncompromising position, has yet deserved contempt for a narrowness of view which made him almost as dangerous as disloyalty could have done; and the Conservative, that man of the golden mean, that hope of the nation in many regards, has bargained for a part of the abuse which he has received from either extreme, by faulting the active measures of both and offering meanwhile no active, practical course to supply their stead.
But amid the general anomaly perhaps fashionable (or would-be fashionable) society, and the world of ease and amusement, have supplied the most interesting and the most astounding study of all. The status of the "non-productive classes" is and has been, during most of the struggle, literally inverted, and the conditions of costly enjoyment have been changing as rapidly as if we were rioting through a carnival instead of breasting a rebellion. No nation ever carried on such a war as that waged by this loyal people; and no nation ever spent so much blood and treasure in accomplishing the same comparative results. Naturally, in view of the personal bereavement, it might have been expected that society should be quiet in its amusements and low-toned in all its conversation: naturally, a people bleeding at every pecuniary pore for the public good, might have been expected to diminish personal expenditure and husband those resources on the holding-out of which so much must eventually depend. Instead of this, society, with the craped banners and the muffled drums every day appealing to eye and ear, has grown continually louder in its tone and more pronounced and even blatant in its mirth; and reckless personal expenditure has quite kept place with any general waste that the highwaymen or incapables of government had power to entail. The theatre and the circus have never before been so full, the opera has never before been so generally patronized. Babylon could never have rioted more luxuriously on the very night before its fall, than have the people of our great cities dined, ridden, danced and bathed themselves in seas of costly music, any day since the first three months of the rebellion ended.
Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may have grown desolate or deserted—the buildings of the White Sulphur and the Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the White Mountains, the Cattskills and the Alleghanies, of the high, pure air and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,—all have been, with the exception of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring, button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the beach—on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars. Add to all this the rise of exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold rates for passages abroad, which have together almost checked the summer exodus to the Old World,—and there is no longer reason to wonder at the watering-place crowds and the summer gayeties which have made carnival throughout the loyal States and filled the wallets of enterprizing landlords.
The year of grace 1863 saw an earlier beginning to the summer hegira than any other late year had done, as before its close it saw houses over-crowded, waiters overworked, and cots at a premium, from Casco to Cresson. The smoke had not yet rolled away from Gettysburgh when "the great North River travelling-trunk" began its perambulations; and by the middle of July everybody who was anybody (except a few in the city of New York, temporarily frightened or hindered by the riots) was gone from the great cities, and they were given over to the temporary occupancy of those laboring starlings who could not "get out," and the ever ebbing and flowing wave of transient visit.
All this as a necessary reminder of the period and a back-ground to the incidents so soon to follow,—and because the course of narration, at this juncture, leads us for a time to one of the favorite shrines of American summer pilgrimage and into the whirl of that literal storm of fashion and curiosity which eddies and sweeps, all summer long, around the peaks of the White Mountains—the Alps of Eastern America.
It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York, Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness to suffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its reinforcement at Wells River.
Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal, if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen resident Europeans—English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of season—people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the other,—among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but one thought in their pilgrimage—Mount Washington,—were bustling in for the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still four heavy stage-loads—not less than forty to fifty persons—going on to the crowded Profile House that evening.
Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer view than was probably taken of them by many of their fellow-passengers; and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.
On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.
The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans—the widow and children of a man of large wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class of loyal Marylanders,—and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends and brothers; and this summer tour, which was to include Saratoga and Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.
Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had evidently been handsome in her youth—with those splendid brown eyes that must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her appearance—especially pride of look and action,—spoke of wealth, the habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her own "set" and whom she considered her equals,—but that she would be any thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom she chanced to fall into feud.
Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature, indeed, was that head of hair—fine, silken, but perfectly massive in profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded. At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the great charm of her presence; but those who had the good fortune to be many hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.
The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling, verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.
This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a mercantile list of his chattels.
The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn and her mother. All of one family—that second triad: Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame. The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face, bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not have made the least pretension. She was only a little overdressed, for travelling—her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was arrayed—shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the record—arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which—well, we may say with truth that they relieved her face; with a braided mantle of white merino that might have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, ætat ten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.
This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later period)—this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two, with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances (more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials "P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding favorably on the quadrupeds,—sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the Republicans.
So far Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been uninterruptedly successful—the monarch as well as architect of his own fortune. But at that period (the three months before) he had suddenly been made aware that every man has his fate and the end of his career of supremacy. Mrs. P. B. Cunningham had proved herself his fate and put a sudden end to his supremacy. That lady, all the while emerging, had emerged, from the dust and darkness of lower fortune, and become a fashionable butterfly. She had ordered him to buy a four-story brown-stone front, finer than any that he owned, on one of the up-town streets not far from the Avenue; and he had obeyed. She had ordered him to discard his old clothes, and he had obeyed again, though with a sincere reluctance. She had changed his name to Brooks Cunninghame, (observe the e!) her own to Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that of Mary Ann to Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame, and that of the male scion of the house, ætat ten as aforesaid, to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame. The door-plate of the new house could not be arranged in accordance with the new programme, for door-plates had been voted vulgar and abandoned by the creme de la creme; but the family cards had been made to bear all the blushing honors in steel engraving and round-hand. This done, the requisite jewelry bought, and some other little arrangements perfected which may develop themselves in due time, the lady had informed Mr. Brooks Cunninghame that both the health and the dignity of the family required summer recreation, and dragged him away on that tour of which we have the privilege of witnessing one of the progresses.
Some reference has been made to the array, rather gorgeous than otherwise, of Miss Marianna, for dusty travel. A few words which had passed between the three heads of the family at one of the Boston hotels that morning, may give a little insight into the philosophy of this arrangement. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, yet retaining a little of the common-sense of his dirt-cart days, had ventured to suggest that "Mary Ann mought wear her commoner duds to ride in, for thim fineries 'ud be spiled before night wid the dust intirely;" and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, alike indignant at a suggestion so smacking of low life and grieved to find that her husband would persist in retaining a few touches of the brogue of which she had cured herself and her children so triumphantly,—had answered with a sort of verbal two-edged sword that did fatal execution on both the others:
"Brooks Cunninghame, you'd better keep your mouth shut if you can't open it without letting out some of that low Irish! One would think you drove a dirt-cart yit! And you, my dear"—to Marianna (the mother had been "posting herself" in some of the phrases of "good society," as well as in some other things which may also yet develop themselves)—"you, my dear, put on the very best o' them things that you've got! Ain't we rich, I should like to know? We may see a good many folks to-day, in them cars, and who knows whether you mightn't lose a beau that'd take a fancy to you, if you went slouchin' around with your old things on? Dress up, my dear!"
Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had succumbed; Miss Marianna had "dressed up," as per order; and collective Shoddy was thus far on its way, without accident, towards the first halting-place in the grand tour of the mountains.
But what of the observer who has more than once before been mentioned, and who sat in the corner of the front seat, half buried under the voluminous skirts of two ladies who have nothing whatever to do with this narration, but looking so steadily (people who have habitually ridden in those Concord coaches know that the front is another back, and that the occupants of the front and back seats face each other)—looking so steadily, we say, at every permissible opportunity, into the sweet face of Clara Vanderlyn? He was a man of apparently thirty years of age, rather tall and very vigorous-looking even if slight, with curling dark hair, almost or quite black, and worn short, the face finely cut and showing no beard except a close, full moustache of raven blackness, the complexion (brow and all, as could be noticed when he lifted his hat from his head, as he often did, for coolness) of such a dark clear brown as to mark him of Southern birth or blood, clothes of thin dark gray material, with a round tourist hat and a duster, the small hands gloved in summer silk, and the whole appearance and manner that of a gentleman, used to good society, and very probably professional. He had been reading, nearly all the way up from Worcester, some of the other passengers noticed—though it must be confessed that a part of his reading had been over the top of the book at that attractive large type formed by a pretty human face; and no blame is intended to be cast upon Clara Vanderlyn when we say that that young lady had more than once met the evidently admiring glance of so fine-looking a man, with the little tinge of color that was becoming, but without any expression upon her face or any thought in her mind, resenting any more than returning an admiration which she believed that she had a right to receive and any gentleman to pay thus respectfully. He had spoken but seldom, during the ride, in such a way that any person then present had heard him; but once he had taken (or made) occasion to apologize to Miss Vanderlyn and her mother for being thrown against their seat by the motion of the car while walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality, which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction "Cincinnati."
While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them. Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead, and of Washington, grander still, towering far away over the White range, and with all the other accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention of any except the most blasé and ennuyée traveller, in the grandeur of the scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering, four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy foot on the brake.
Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.
Half an hour from the foot of the mountain the coach went rapidly up a sharp ascent in the road, then dashed down again at full gallop, striking one of those necessary nuisances known as "breakwaters" when a few yards from the top, with a shock that sent the coach-body leaping on its leathern jacks like a yawl-boat in a heavy surf, made some of the outsiders on the top shout and hold on merrily to keep from being whirled off into one of the side-ravines, and created such a state of affairs inside the vehicle, generally, as effectually broke up the monotony. That shock drove the head of Mrs. Vanderlyn back against the leathern cushions with a force seriously damaging to the crown of her bonnet, brought a slight scream from Clara, who was frightened for the instant, made the troublesome Master Brooks Brooks yell and dash a dirty hand into the dress of each of the ladies who had the honor of the same seat, and elicited from Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and her husband one of those brief but very significant marital displays which were no doubt afterwards to edify so many. Whether the lady had ascertained that fashionable people must always fall and faint under any sudden excitement, or whether the shock really frightened as well as unseated her, is a matter of no consequence: certain it is that she at that juncture threw up her hands and rolled up her eyes, gave one scream that degenerated into a groan, rolled from her seat and subsided into the bottom of the coach, under the feet of "H. T.," in what seemed to be a fit of some description. Miss Marianna, really alarmed, with the affectionate if not classic words, "Oh, mammy!" made a grab at that lady, clutching the back of her hat and tearing it from the head it crowned, while Master Brooks Brooks changed his yell into a howl and Mr. Brooks Cunninghame stooped down, terror in his face and his hands feeling around at the bottom of the vehicle for any portion of what had been his wife, with the affectionate but not politic inquiry: "Is it kilt ye are, Bridget?"
Not politic?—no, certainly not! A stronger word might be applied without risk to the unfortunate expression. Among the changes in family polity not before indicated, had been an indignant throwing over of her very honest name of "Bridget" by the wife of the horse-contractor, and the adoption of "Julia" in its stead. More than one curtain-lecture had poor Mr. Brooks Cunninghame endured, before leaving New York, on the necessity of avoiding any blunder in that regard, when they should be "away from home"; and he had not escaped without severe drill and many promises of perfection in his part. And now to have forgotten the adopted "Julia" and used the tell-tale "Bridget" at the very moment of the family's entering upon their first essay in fashionable watering-place life, was really a little too much for patience not entirely angelic.
Both the poets and the romancers tell of cases in which some word of heart-broken affection, uttered at the instant when the death-film was stealing over the eyes of the beloved one, has had power to strike the dulled sense and call back for a moment the fleeting life when it had escaped far beyond the reach of any other sound. Something of the same character—not quite so romantic, perhaps, but quite as real,—was developed in the present instance. The woman may have been falling into an actual faint; but if so, that offensive word pierced through the gathering mists of insensibility, and she crawled out from the entanglement of legs before any effectual aid could be afforded her, and with such a look of contempt and hatred burning full upon her unfortunate husband that he must have felt for the moment as if placed directly under the lens of a sun-glass at focus. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame shrank into his number eleven patent-leathers, and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame "swatted" herself (there is no other word in or out of the language that will quite so well express the act) down on the seat with an air that implied a wish for some one's head being beneath her at that juncture. Her glance had not at all softened, nor had "H. T." ceased looking out of the window or Clara Vanderlyn (behind her) yet taken her handkerchief from her mouth, when the female Cunninghame said, in what she thought very honeyed accents:
"Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, I wish you would find some other time to go and call me nicknames, than when I am jolted out of my seat in that way and a'most dead!"
The stroke of policy was a fine one, and even the thick head of Mr. Brooks Cunninghame recognized the necessity of following it up—an act which he performed thus gracefully and with a look intended for one of the staring ladies on the front seat:
"Yes, mim, her name isn't Bridget at all at all, but Julia. It's only a bit of a way I have of jokin' wid her, mim!"
This was satisfactory, of course—absolutely conclusive; and so Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame grew mollified by degrees; the redness which had come into the face of Miss Marianna gradually faded out; Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame took occasion to manifest his filial fondness by reaching over and hugging his mother with hands just re-coated with candy dug out of his capacious pocket; and the Concord coach, with its consorts, rolled and jolted and swayed along, up and down the mountain road to its destination.