Chapter IV
What the buried archives are to the archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.
In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.
Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widow belonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.
But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.
Mrs. K—— took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.
Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. The two undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.
When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife’s kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.
There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was not a man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.
Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child’s future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.
The man who was most actively interested in the little girl’s future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K——, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously; but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.
The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly that well may be translated happily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world’s goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.
There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K—— had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cherishing sentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival’s child,—ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!
It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby’s girlhood experiences.
“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.
“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have made oodles of money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.
“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What I want to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,
“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.
“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.
“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.
“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is not reluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.
“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’
“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.
“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.
“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”
Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial home among the hills of Vermont.
“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.
“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.
“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none too deeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”
Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.
“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”
Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.
“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herself from them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed, unasking spirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.
“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.
“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself, ‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear, damnable curiosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.
“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided she cares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”
It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.
“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”
Three years later she wrote again:
“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.
“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”
To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.
”My dear Aunt:
“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.
“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.
“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.
“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginning unknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.
“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.
“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.
“Yours gratefully,
”Charlotte Ponsonby.”