Ernest Linwood; or, The Inner Life of the Author

by Caroline Lee Hentz

I felt the deepest, most unbounded gratitude for my benefactress; but there was nothing abject in it. I knew that giving did not impoverish her; that the food I ate was not as much to her as the crumbs that fell from my mother's table; that the room I occupied was but one in a suite of elegant apartments; yet this did not diminish my sense of obligation. It lightened it, however, of its oppressive weight.

My room was next to Edith's. The only difference in the furniture was in the color of the hangings. The curtains and bed drapery of mine were pink, hers blue. Both opened into an upper piazza, whose lofty pillars were wreathed with flowering vines, and crowned with Corinthian capitals. Surely my love for the beautiful ought to have been satisfied; and so it was,—but it was long, long before my heart opened to receive its influence. The clods that covered my mother's ashes laid too heavily upon it.

Mrs. Linwood had a great deal of company from the city, which was but a short journey from Grandison Place. As they were mostly transient guests, I saw but little of them. My extreme youth, and deep mourning dress, were sufficient reasons for withdrawing from the family circle when strangers enlarged it. Edith was three years older than myself, and was of course expected to assist her mother in the honors of hospitality. She loved society, moreover, and entered into its innocent pleasures with the delight of a young, genial nature. It was difficult to think of her as a young lady, she was so extremely juvenile in her appearance; and her lameness, by giving her an air of childish dependence, added to the illusion caused by her fair, clustering ringlets and infantine rosiness of complexion. She wanted to bring me forward;—she coaxed, caressed, and playfully threatened, nor desisted till her mother said, with grave tenderness—

"The heart cannot be forced, Edith; Gabriella is but a child, and should be allowed the freedom of a child. The restraints of social life, once assumed, are not easily thrown aside. Let her do just as she pleases."

And so I did; and it pleased me to wander about the lawn; to sit and read under the great elm-tree; to make garlands of myrtle and sweet running vine flowers for Edith's beautiful hair; to walk the piazza, when moonlight silvered the columns and covered with white glory the granite walls, while the fountain of poetry down in the depths of my soul welled and trembled in the heavenly lustre.

It pleased me to sit in the library, or rather to stand and move about there, for at that time I did not like to sit anywhere but on the grass or the oaken bench. The old poets were there in rich binding, all the classics, and the choicest specimens of modern literature. There were light, airy, movable steps, so as to reach to the topmost shelves, and there I loved to poise myself, like a bird on the spray, peeping into this book and that, gathering here and there a golden grain or sweet scented flower for the garner of thought, or the bower of imagination.

There were statues in niches made to receive them,—the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, in their cold, severe beauty, all passionless and pure, in spite of the glowing mythology that called them into existence. There were paintings, too, that became a part of my being, I took them in with such intense, gazing eyes. Indeed, the house was lined with them. I could not walk through a room without stopping to admire some work of genius, some masterpiece of art.

I over-heard Dr. Harlowe say to Mrs. Linwood, that it was a pity I were not at school, I was so very young. As if I were not at school all the time! As if those grand old books were not teachers; those breathing statues, those gorgeous paintings were not teachers; as if the noble edifice itself, with its magnificent surroundings, the billowy heave of the distant mountains, the glimpses of the sublime sea, the fair expanse of the beautiful valley, were not teachers!

Oh! they little knew what lessons I was learning. They little knew how the soul of the silent orphan girl was growing within her,—how her imagination, like flowers, was nourished in stillness and secrecy by the air and the sunshine, the dew and the shower.

I had other teachers, too, in the lonely churchyard; very solemn they were, and gentle too, and I loved their voiceless instructions better than the sounding eloquence of words.