It was the month and the year when for the first time there was a Confederacy, with a President to be prayed for, or else against. Stirring era! No lack of interesting items for the father to read aloud from his Weekly; Nancy, the young wife busy with her sewing, was as deeply interested as he himself in the doings at Fort Sumter. Her comments on Lincoln and Davis were no less keen than his. With eyes now bent on her work, a fine linen handkerchief to be hemmed on four sides, and now returning to the child seated on the braided rug at her feet, she still had time and thought to give to her husband’s reading; at twenty-three, she rejoiced to be living in portentous times. And pray do not imagine that because the home was remote from great cities, the mother necessarily comported herself as a poor rustic creature, or as one unfamiliar with the counsels of “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Her ample gown was of the finest cashmere, triple-dyed of a deep rose-color, and it was well spread out upon a hoop-skirt which she managed with the kind of skill that a rose in full bloom must employ when keeping its petals in order.
The guests at the birthday feast had been a pair of grandparents, a young uncle and aunt, and a ten-year-old girl from the farmhouse down the road. The little girl, brave in her well-flounced, orange-spotted purple delaine, wore pantalets that had been made much too long for her, in anticipation of some prodigious growth which had not taken place; and these had been starched too stiffly, so that she creaked audibly during locomotion. But she was very happy at the party; and though her costume might appear but ill-suited to the rigors of a Vermont winter, it must be remembered that in those days female attire had no commerce with common sense. Promptly at half-past five her mother came for her, bustling competently into the house, with an accompaniment of impatient sleigh-bells outside; and she glanced with undisguised curiosity at the spread table, not yet cleared away, the birthday cake with its heathenish three candles, and the young heir himself.
“They say he hain’t never been punished none?”
Nancy flushed, and held back an angry answer. She was aware that the subject had already been torn to tatters by the village gossips. “Punished? No, not yet.”
“I want to know! Wal, I guess he’s needed it, afore now!” The farm-wife was emphatic; but there was motherly love as well as village curiosity in her scrutiny of little Samuel. “Looks jest like a young American flag, don’t he? Them blue pants, and red cheeks, and eyes stickin’ out so kinda starry. But all childern needs punishments,” she chirped. “They’re all of ’em limbs of Satan. I’ve had seven, and I guess I know.” She cast an eagle eye on the pantalets of her first “limb.” “Them Hamburg points allus ketch up every mite of dust,” she lamented, as she tucked her child under a buffalo robe and drove away through the snow.
“Wal, she knows a lot, if she knows all she thinks she doos,” was the grandmother’s placid comment, as she and the aunt cleared away the feast. “Nancy has no call to mind her.” It was evident that Nancy was a creature lovingly set apart in that little world. Having borne the brunt of the birthday preparations, she was not allowed to put on her all-enveloping kitchen apron again, but was forced down into her own chair in the bright sitting-room. Rather early, because of the bitter weather, the guests had gone, and the family was left to itself in a loving intimacy precious to each of the three.
The young mother’s face, softly banded with dark hair, rose flower-like above a lace collar, fastened at the throat by a large elliptical shell cameo representing Ganymede teasing the eagles of Jupiter. To the wearer that brooch was a pleasing and a precious thing. It had been her mother’s, and had been bought in Rome by her father, our first American translator of Tasso. Whether or not as an aid to his own understanding of the Italian poet, the New England scholar had married a gentle Sicilian girl, and Nancy herself had been born in Rome and christened Annunziata, an outlandish name that American relatives, after the scholar’s return, had promptly transformed into Nancy. And all her life Nancy had been conscious, not without joy, of her twofold nature as a New Englander and an Italian. Nancy and Annunziata were both of them under her skin. She never knew which one triumphed the oftener. In the kitchen, Nancy, perhaps; in the sitting-room, Annunziata.
That evening, as she sewed her fine seam, the ample roseate sleeves of her gown and the white undersleeves flowing beneath them moved in and out of the lamplight in a kind of stately melody as for a minuet. Watching the child at his carving, she hoped and dreamed for him the life beautiful, the life of a sculptor. Had Raphael been there, she would have been a Madonna; a Madonna of the hoop-skirt, but not of the rocking-chair. No, indeed! The chair she sat in was one that her husband had made and carved for her, after a drawing in an ancient book on Italian furniture; its beauty and strength were a constant delight to her. And even without the chair, and the Ganymede, and the crimson curtains, it would have been evident that this young pair were among the aristocrats of the village; they felt that they belonged to the only aristocracy the place permitted, the aristocracy of mind. They had more books than the minister even. And no doubt Nancy’s birth in Rome, that far-off city where the Pope lives, had added a secretly savored pagan touch to the picture the hamlet had made of her.
Still more than the woman with her Madonna vision, the man exulted in the child’s rapt industry. With vigilant eye he noted the process of creation. A cat, it seemed; Samuel was carving a cat; no, the cat! Once in a while, as if to refresh a memory perhaps somewhat dimmed by his three years’ stay among mortals, Samuel would glance toward Pharaoh, the great green-eyed old black torn; but mostly his head with its long fair curls was bent over his work. Samuel was not copying a cat; he was rather evolving the cat from the deeps of his inner consciousness. Samuel’s cat was not the lithe and lordly beast of Barye, nor yet the affable companion that Frémiet has given to the world; it was rather a cat of the Egyptians, the mystery of cathood incarnate. And just as Michelangelo knew that an angel slept in his marble block, so Samuel knew that all cathood crouched within a wooden chip. The father, seeing the child’s difficulty in separating the cat-mass from the scrap of board in his tiny hand, would gladly have performed the rude preliminaries. But the boy had drawn back, and clasping the wood to his chest, had said firmly, in his usual way of speaking only the key-words of a situation, “Self do all!” Samuel knew no baby-talk. From his mother and her New England forbears (scholars, theologians, translators, and the like) he had inherited a great fund of words fit to be spoken, and from his father a passion for perfection in all things. He had a natural longing to say things rightly, and so saved his larynx for the essential syllables. The father, well-pleased with that confident “Self do all,” returned to his reading. But Samuel, rather than Fort Sumter, filled his mind that night.