"Hoity toity!" exclaimed the mother, quite as much surprised as nettled at this original and forcible way of stating a domestic fact. "What has become of your modesty? Do you mean to insult both your father and myself?"
"No!" said the young girl, in a sharper tone and with her words cut off much shorter and more decidedly than was her habit. While those plump little white fingers had been toying with the leaves of the book, sitting there in the twilight, heart and hand had evidently both been busy, and they had produced any other effect rather than making their owner more tractable. "No! mother, no! But I tell you, once for all, that the match you are talking of is hateful! I have tried to keep still while the affair seemed at some distance, but now that you bring it closer it fills my whole being with disgust! Do drop it if you do not wish to drive me mad or make me disobedient. Oh, mother!" and the whole manner of the young girl seemed to change and melt in a moment, as she rose hastily from her chair, ran to that on which her mother was seated, threw herself on her knees with her arms around her parent, and buried her face in the sheltering lap,—"oh mother! do be my friend instead of my enemy, in this! I cannot—indeed I cannot marry that man!"
There are a good many things they think they cannot do—these young girls—and they never know themselves until they are tried. Perhaps it may not always be well to try them to their full capacity, however!
What Mrs. Maria Owen might have answered to this appeal, under other circumstances, is uncertain. She was, or intended to be, a good and tender mother, and would have cut off her right hand rather than do any thing which could make against the ultimate happiness of her daughter; and she really, at that moment, must have caught a glimpse of the fact that the heart of the young girl was very much interested in her refusal. But if there was any sentiment which the worthy woman entertained more deeply than another, it was the belief that Judge Owen, her husband, was the most wonderful man in the world. She thought of him with pride when his portly figure disappeared down the steps of a morning, when he was starting to go to "Court." She thought of him with a respect amounting to reverence when she contemplated him sitting
"At once mild and severe,
On his seat of dooming,"
(to quote good old Esaias Tegner) a local Rhadamanthus from whose judgment there could not be any possible appeal (although, sooth to say, there were a good many appeals, and quite effectual ones, from the very unimportant decisions to which only his authority extended). And when he came home at night, after dispensing justice for the whole day (to wit—three hours on the average) she looked with almost holy reverence on his broad brow, under which there must lie such a store of legal knowledge, and thought what a blessed and honored woman she was to have been allowed to mate with so much wisdom and so much dignity.
Does this sound like sneering at the wife's pride and devotion? If so, let there be a word to qualify it. God knows that there are not too many women who respect and look up to their husbands, and that the sanctity and the happiness of the domestic circle would be much seldomer invaded if there was more of this feeling. Only those poor women, on an average, make such terrible mistakes as to the instances that should demand or allow the full indulgence of this pride; and miserable humbugs are looked up to and worshipped so much of the time, while those who could deserve and should command that feeling are treated with indifference or even despised by inferior minds to which they have been mated! They do not "manage these things" any "better in France," probably; but they manage them ill enough in republican America at about this period, and the result is not a pleasant or even a moral one!
The check to any possible motherly concession to the weakness of Emily, which Mrs. Owen experienced on this occasion, arose from the coming of the ponderous man of law, whose heavy footstep and loud cough were at that moment heard in the hall. Had the daughter been less absorbed than she was in her own feelings, she too might have heard those tokens of the Judge's presence; and had she been as wise as her mother, any further discussion of the subject would have been stopped and the coming catastrophe averted.
Either she did not observe or she was too much absorbed to heed who heard her, for at the very moment when Judge Owen, a large-framed, portly, broad-browed, iron-gray man of fifty, entered the back parlor and stood full in the presence of his wife and daughter, the latter was looking up to her mother with clasped hands and half sobbing out a repetition of her former declaration: "I cannot—indeed I cannot marry that man!"
"Hush! Emily, hush!—no more of this!" said the mother, half in hope that her husband might not have caught the words; but she was widely mistaken. The ears so much in the habit of listening to the least quaver in the tone of a witness's voice, were not to be trifled with in the present instance.