There, I have recorded it, and now I will try to turn my mind from it--I will try to write to Alston a cheery letter, a pious fraud.
When you told me, dearest Alston, that my letters were to take the form of a journal, I remember thinking of the passage in our pet book, the Vicar of Wakefield, in which Dr. Primrose describes the vicissitudes of primroses' existence, and summoning them up in migrations from the blue bed to the brown. My journal, if I keep it at all within the actual sense of the term, would record nothing more strange or exciting. I migrate from the nursery to the parlour, from the parlour to the park, from the park to the nursery; but my chief sojourn is in the latter place. I never could have imagined that a baby could give one so much to do, even when one is assisted, as I am, by the most capable of nurses, concerning whom I have a lot to tell you presently; neither could I have believed that a baby could be so interesting. We made up our minds, you remember, that we were not going to plague our neighbours, and make fools of ourselves, by advancing the claims of this remarkable infant to be quite the finest, the most intelligent, and the most precocious that ever existed. Bearing this resolution in mind, I endeavoured to be a very rational mother, but I protest, quite genially, that I do not want any society except baby's, until the kind Fates send me that of baby's papa.
The child has become so strong and healthy that I am no longer in the least uneasy about her; therefore she is a pure unmitigated pleasure to me; and the real truth is that if I am to tell you all about my daily life, I fear you will suffer from the plethora of baby. Of course, I read and work, and visit and receive some people sometimes--not many and not often; and, of course, I get out and do some shopping. I bought the loveliest pelisse, yesterday, that ever was seen out of Paris, and I believe it came from there; and then, again, even shopping has come to mean baby--the pelisse was for her, not for me. I play the piano, sometimes, a little--nurse says baby is beginning to take notice of music. But after all this is not my life, you know; it is only the outside of it, and one shell is very like another.
Of course I miss you frightfully, more and more every day, but I do not feel helpless. I made up my mind, you know, that I never would yield to that helpless feeling, from which I have seen so many women suffer who are guarded as I am by the care and love and generosity of good men, from every trouble from which one human being can shield another, and so I have kept my promise made to myself. When there is anything to make up my mind about, I make up my mind promptly; when there is anything to do, I do it at once, to the best of my ability; if I make mistakes I don't fret over them, but I think I shall manage them better next time, and I don't get discouraged. I daresay I shall see in the end how very good for me this parting between us proved. Don't suppose I am going back upon what you laughed at me for, and called my jealous susceptibility. I have got over all that, but I really am going to say that you will find me ever so much more useful, ever so much more of a companion; because I shall have had this little interval for exercising my judgment as well as my taste, for exerting my discretion as well as gratifying my fancies. Hitherto, your indulgence and affection have limited me to the less useful and less strengthening of these processes; so when you come home, dearest Alston, you will have to tell me all about business, and you will find I shall understand it quite as well, and take quite as much pleasure in it, as in our old discussions on books and music and pictures and acting.
Writing that word 'acting' reminds me of our baby's new nurse--rather an inconsequent style of writing this, you will perhaps say, for a woman who is claiming a newly-developed talent for business; but it is what you asked for. Baby's nurse is the oddest woman, and such a treasure! I will tell you how she came to me, and really it is not out of proportion, for it was certainly the most striking event in my life since you left me. She came in answer to my advertisement--she was the first candidate, her name is Bessie Jenkins, her husband is somewhere in the Western States. They had misfortunes, and were obliged to part for a while, like ourselves. I suppose it was that likeness in unlikeness which attracted me towards the good woman from the first. She spoke with a hearty love and a hearty sorrow of her absent husband and her dead baby, only a day or two dead when she came to me, and I shall never forget her face when she took our little Mary in her arms, and saw how delicate the child was. The very way she said: 'This won't do you don't understand babies, ma'am;' put aside the food which Jessie and I had been messing up unskilfully; and made some mysterious alterations in the way the child's clothes were put on, made me feel that the right person had been sent to me. Dr. Clark just looked at her and said, 'She will do; make sure of her, Mrs. Griswold;' and I asked her if she could come to me at once--if she could stay that very night; she said she would, and went and fetched her things on the spot.
We are quite friends--we were from the beginning--and she takes almost as much care of me as of little Mary; even that she does cleverly, and has avoided making any jealousy or confusion in the house, which was just what I dreaded, you know, when the doctor told me I must have a nurse. Mrs. Jenkins is a good-looking woman, tall, large, active, with a very fair skin, and fine, honest, gray eyes. She says she does not know exactly how old she is, and I believe her--she looks about five-and-twenty; she is very well spoken for a woman of her class, and not at all ignorant. We have long talks in the nursery and in our drives--for I never go out without nurse and baby; it is so horribly dull to drive out alone; and I find I learn a good deal from her about the realities of life as they exist for women who have not been taken the care of that you have taken of me.
After all, dearest Alston, what a very little bit of trouble I have known in my life--just those dark days when poor papa's affairs went badly, and you came and brightened them up with that blessed, steady light which has shone on all my pathway since. Why are people's history so different? Is mine to be always an exception? Some time before you left me, and when I was much less thoughtful than I am now, I have occasionally felt afraid that I was too happy; there seemed such deep peace, of such settled certainty, in our lives. I hardly understand all the talk in books and in speech about the turbulence and the transitoriness and the perpetual change which mark human existence all over the world; while your absence has taken away that deep tranquillity, it has not touched, of course, the real happiness of my life. I would not have you think me discontented, and, perhaps, this little shake is good for me--will be good for us both. This is a lesson which Mrs. Jenkins, in her good, quiet, homely, honest way, impresses on me very often. It does one good to see a person who has had plenty of trouble of a sternly material kind, as well as a great sorrow, bear them with the ready submission and cheerful courage of this poor woman; and many a time when I see her with our baby in her arms and at her breast, where her dead child once lay, I ask myself how I should have faced such a life as hers.
I have said before that we are great friends; she has formed a really strong affection for me--it is like the kind of thing one hears about the Irish people in old times. I fancy she would not shrink from any sacrifice for me. She is extremely curious about you, and never tired of hearing me tell how I came to know you first, and the story of my girlhood; and I talk to her about all these things; so you will have no difficulty in believing that our new nurse is an exceptional person, and that, though she is homely in speech and manner, there is no real inferiority in her. Don't laugh at me when I say that I am quite sure you and she will be great friends. There is, at least, one very strong bond of union between you: Mrs. Jenkins has a ruling passion--it is for the drama. I found that out very soon.
You know we agreed that the nursery was to be made into a very pretty and cheerful room, so that baby's nurse, if we had the good fortune to find a good one, should be thoroughly comfortable, and feel herself at home. Looking about through the house for such things as I could spare to ornament her domain, on the day after Mrs. Jenkins's arrival, I came upon a lot of photographs in a drawer in the study--they were likenesses of all the actors and actresses whom, I verily believe, you have seen in the whole course of your life. I had no notion you had such a collection; and you need not be frightened, I have not deprived you of them, I have only taken such as have duplicates--there are a good many. I put them all into the photograph-book which belonged to me when I was a girl, and made it over for nursery use. Who knows how soon Mrs. Jenkins will find out that her wonderful nurseling takes notice of pictures as well as of music? Two or three days after, I asked her if she liked her rooms, if she was quite comfortable, and so forth. She replied, with great delight, that she had never been so comfortable in her life, and expressed peculiar pleasure at finding some pictures about. I found she had been eagerly investigating the contents of the photograph-book, and she surprised me not a little by running glibly over the names of all the portraits. As I hadn't written them in--for one very good reason among others, that I had no notion of who are represented by several of their numbers--I could not understand how she came to know who all these theatrical ladies and gentlemen were. It came out then; the theatre is a celestial vision to Mrs. Jenkins; to see a play is the greatest enjoyment of which she is capable.
She says that she knows a good play from a bad one as well as any one in the world, and is a first-rate judge of acting; but she would much rather see a bad play than none at all, which I take as a mark of enthusiasm, if true, that does not justify much faith in her critical faculty. I think she knows every play that has been produced in New York in her time. If she hasn't seen she has read them; she knows all about the 'castes,' as she calls it, is a perfect chronicle of the successes and the failures of the actors and actresses who have come here from London and Paris, and has, among her possessions, a huge scrap-book, of which she is inordinately proud, crammed with newspaper critiques, squibs, old playbills, and gaudy woodcuts, which represent her prime favourites as it is devoutly to be hoped they never did appear upon any stage. Mrs. Jenkins is not an American by birth; she was born in Hampshire and reared in London; and though she has been in America since her fifteenth year, she seems to have enjoyed a good deal of her favourite amusement even at that early age. I am, however, positive that she was never employed in any capacity in connection with the stage herself, if only because she speaks of the fact with considerable regret.