There was the tradition that Miss Peabody had been affianced to the great romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who soon after their engagement discovered that her younger sister, Sophia, was his true affinity. With perfect sweetness and generosity, Elizabeth yielded her lover to her sister and, as long as they lived, devoted herself to the Hawthornes and their children.
It takes a pretty big woman to do that!
A friend of Miss Peabody’s once dreamed that she had a baby, which she soon mislaid, finding it long after shut up between the pages of a big volume, where she had put it for a bookmark. In her later years, she looked like a female Pickwick; you could read the record of her blameless life in her benign face. Though she was a hard worker, she was never able “to put anything by”, probably because so much of her work was for the causes and reforms she served so whole-heartedly. In her last years, when she was too feeble to work, my mother was very anxious about her future. Miss Peabody reassured her, however.
“My dear friend,” she began, “I have been thinking to-day how much better off I am than Croesus (a well-known millionaire). He and I left the country town where we were both born, on the same day, and came to Boston to seek our fortunes. Croesus made a great deal of money, but in such a questionable manner that he no longer finds it pleasant to live in Boston and has moved to a distant state where public opinion doesn’t trouble itself about the origin of his fortune. I, on the other hand, live on happily in Boston, supported by an income provided by my old scholars.”
Croesus probably would not have agreed with her summing up of the case, but, as their two faces rise out of the limbo of these early memories, old Elizabeth’s, all alight with innocence and enthusiasm, smiles at me, while Croesus looks coolly and cannily at me, with the hard eyes and tight mouth of a miser.
The Hawthornes were very poor in their early married life at Concord. They could not afford to keep a servant, and divided the housework between them. One day Mrs. Hawthorne, happening to be near the pantry, where her husband was doing his share of the morning’s work, heard him exclaim, as he threw down the knife he had been cleaning:
“Thank God, that’s the last of those damned knives!”
This impressed the young wife so much that she managed soon after to employ a domestic. Shortly after, Pegasus, released from the butcher’s cart, spread his wings and carried Hawthorne far above household drudgery, for not long after this “The Scarlet Letter” was written.
I do not remember ever having seen Hawthorne, but I have a strong impression of how he looked, from my mother’s description of him. She spoke of his great reserve and shyness, of his beauty and especially of his eyes, “like blue-gray sapphires.”
The spell he cast over my childhood is strong as ever. He first introduced me to the friends from Hellas and made me free of the enchanted circle of Greek mythology. For many years I held the absurd belief that his genius created the characters in Tanglewood Tales, where I first read of Midas and the Golden Touch, of Perseus, Medusa, the Graiae, and Bellerophon. Nowhere, I still believe, is the story of Baucis and Philemon and their immortal guests more beautifully told than in Tanglewood Tales. These two volumes, in Ticknor and Field’s familiar brown bindings, were in the nursery bookcase, and made me early familiar with Hawthorne’s name. Chancing upon “The Scarlet Letter” one day in my father’s library, I read the great romance with the same avidity with which I had devoured the children’s stories. I was too young to understand the significance of the Letter itself; the story held me no less entranced because I missed the inner meaning. It is a great mistake to think that children must understand things to enjoy them; mystery, above all else, appeals to them.