“It was pity, only, that drew your heart to mine; you do not love me. I have known it a long while since. At first, the discovery gave me a pang keener than death; but I have had a long and bitter struggle with myself, and have conquered. It is not your fault that you cannot love me. To the many voices of your heart, which cry, ‘Give, give,’ my response is weak and unsatisfying. Your wife should be gifted. She should sympathise with you in your intellectual pursuits. She should stimulate your pride, as well as your love. Such an one is Charley’s mother. Your heart has already wed her, and as God is my witness, I have ceased to blame you. We cannot help our affections. I cannot help loving you, though I know her mysterious power over your heart. I have seen your struggles, your generous self-reproaches, in some sudden outburst of kindness toward me, after the indulgence of some bright dream, in which I had no share. Dear Grey, she is worthy of your love. She has a heart, noble, good and true; a heart purified by suffering. I see it in every line she writes. Should I not survive the birth of my infant, I could give your happiness into her keeping without a misgiving, though I have never looked upon her face.”
Little Hetty’s noble heart has long since ceased to throb with joy or pain. To her husband’s breast is folded the babe, for whose little life her own was yielded up. Threads of silver prematurely mingle amid his ebon locks; for memory writes only on bereaved hearts the virtues of the dead, while, with torturing minuteness, she pictures our own short-comings, for which, alas! we can offer no atonement but our tears.
AUNT HEPSY.
It was a comical little old shop, “Aunt Hepsy’s,” with its Lilliputian counter, shelves and stove, and its pigmy assortment of old-fashioned ginghams, twilled cambrics, red flannels, factory cotton and homespun calicoes; its miniature window, with its stock of horn-combs and candy, tin horses and peppermint drops, skeins of yarn and Godfrey’s Cordial, gaudy picture books, and six-penny handkerchiefs, from whose center Lafayette and George Washington smiled approbatively upon the big A’s and little A’s printed round the border.
“Aunt Hepsy;” so every brimless-hatted urchin in the neighborhood called her, though it would have puzzled them worse than the multiplication table, had you asked them why they did so. Year in and year out, her ruddy English face glowed behind the little shop window. Sometimes she would be knitting a pair of baby’s socks, sometimes inventing most astonishing looking bags out of rainbow fragments of silk or ribbon. Sometimes netting watch-guards, or raveling the yarn from some old black stocking, to ornament the “place where the wool ought to grow,” on the head of some Topsy doll she was making. Sometimes comforting herself with a sly pinch of snuff, or, when sunbeams and customers were scarce, nodding drowsily over the daily papers.
Aunt Hepsy had been a beauty, and her pretty face had won her a thriftless husband, of whom champagne and cigars had long since kindly relieved her. And though Time had since forced her to apply to the perruquier, he had gallantly made atonement by leaving her in the undisputed possession of a pair of very brilliant black eyes. Add to this a certain air of coquetry, in the fanciful twist of her gay-colored turban, and the disposal of the folds of her lace kerchief over her ample English bust—and you have a faithful daguerreotype of “Aunt Hepsy.”
From the window of her little shop she could look out upon the blue waters of the bay, where lay moored the gallant ships, from whose tall masts floated the stars and stripes, and whose jolly captains might often be seen in Aunt Hepsy’s shop, exchanging compliments and snuff, and their heavy voices heard, recounting long Neptune yarns, and declaring to the buxom widow that nothing but the little accident of their being already spliced for life, prevented their immediately spreading sail with her for the port of Matrimony. Aunt Hepsy usually frowned at this, and shook her turbaned head menacingly, but immediately neutralized it, by offering to mend a rip in their gloves, or replace a truant button on their overcoats.