Not Like Other Girls

by Rosa Nouchette Carey

There was no doubt that Mr. Drummond had fully enjoyed his visit. Nevertheless, as he left Brooklyn, and set his face towards the White House, his manner changed, and his face became somewhat grave.

He had told himself that he owed it to his pastoral conscience to call on Mrs. Cheyne; but, notwithstanding this monition, he disliked the duty, for he always felt on these occasions that he was hardly up to his office, and that this solitary member of his flock was not disposed to yield herself to his guidance. He was ready to pity her if she would allow herself to be pitied; but any expression of sympathy seemed repugnant to her. Any one so utterly lonely, so absolutely without interest in existence, he had never seen or thought to see; and yet he could not bring himself to like her, or to say more than the mere commonplace utterances of society. Though he was her clergyman, and bound by the sacredness of his office to be specially tender to the bruised and maimed ones of his flock, he could not get her to acknowledge her maimed condition to him, or to do anything but listen to him with cold attention, when he hinted vaguely that all human beings are in need of sympathy. Perhaps she thought him too young, and feared to find his judgments immature and one-sided; but certainly his visits to the White House were failures. Mrs. Cheyne was still young enough and handsome enough to need some sort of chaperonage: and though she professed to mock at conventionality, she acknowledged its claims in this respect by securing the permanent services of Miss 119 Mewlstone—a lady of uncertain age and uncertain acquirements. It must be confessed that every one wondered at Mrs. Cheyne and her choice, for no one could be less companionable than Miss Mewlstone.

She was a stout, sleepy-looking woman, with a soft voice, and in placidity and a certain cosyness of exterior somewhat resembled a large white cat. Some people declared she absolutely purred, and certainly her small blue eyes were ready to close on all occasions. She always dressed in gray,—a very unbecoming color to a stout person,—and when not asleep or reading (for she was a great reader) she seemed always busy with a mass of soft fleecy wool. No one heard her ever voluntarily conversing with her patroness. They would drive together for hours, or pass whole evenings in the same room, scarcely exchanging a word. “Just so, my dear,” she would say, in return to any observation made to her by Mrs. Cheyne. “Just so Mewlstone,” a young wag once nicknamed her.

People stared incredulously when Mrs. Cheyne assured them her companion was a very superior woman. They thought it was only her satire, and did not believe her in the least. They would have stared still more if they had really known the extent of Miss Mewlstone’s acquirements.

“She seems so stupid, as though she cannot talk,” one of Mrs. Cheyne’s friends said.

“Oh, yes, she can talk, and very well too,” returned that lady, quietly, “but she knows that I do not care about it; her silence is her great virtue in my eyes. And then she has tact, and knows when to keep out of the way,” finished Mrs. Cheyne, with the utmost frankness; and, indeed, it may be doubted whether any other person would have retained her position so long at the White House.

Mrs. Cheyne was no favorite with the young pastor, nevertheless she was an exceedingly handsome woman. Before the bloom of her youth had worn off she had been considered absolutely beautiful. As regarded the form of her features, there was no fault to be found, but her expression was hardly pleasing. There was a hardness that people found a little repelling,—a bitter, dissatisfied droop of the lip, a weariness of gloom in the dark eyes, and a tendency to satire in her speech, that alienated people’s sympathy.

“I am unhappy, but pity me if you dare!” seemed to be written legibly upon her countenance; and those who knew her best held their peace in her presence, and then went away and spoke softly to each other of the life that seemed wasted and the heart that was so hardened with its trouble. “What would the world be if every one were to bear their sorrows so badly?” they would say. “There is something heathenish in such utter want of resignation. Oh, yes, it was very sad, her losing her husband and children, but it all happened four or five years ago; and you know”—And here people’s voices dropped a little ominously, 120 for there were vague hints afloat that things had not always gone on smoothly at the White House, even when Mrs. Cheyne had her husband. She had been an only child, and had married the only survivor of a large family. Both were handsome, self-willed young people; neither had been used to contradiction. In spite of their love for each other, there had been a strife of wills and misunderstandings from the earliest days of their marriage. Neither knew what giving up meant, and before many months were over the White House witnessed many painful scenes. Herbert Cheyne was passionate, and at times almost violent; but there was no malice in his nature. He stormed furiously and forgave easily. A little forbearance would have turned him into a sweet-natured man; but his wife’s haughtiness and resentment lasted long; she never acknowledged herself in the wrong, never made overtures of peace, but bore herself on every occasion as a sorely-injured wife, a state of things singularly provoking to a man of Herbert Cheyne’s irritable temperament.

There was injudicious partisanship as regarded their children: while Mrs. Cheyne idolized her boy, her husband lavished most of his attentions on the baby girl,—“papa’s girl,” as she always called herself in opposition to “mother’s boy.”

Mrs. Cheyne really believed she loved her boy best, but when diphtheria carried off her little Jane also, she was utterly inconsolable. Her husband was far away when it happened: he had been a great traveller before his marriage, and latterly his matrimonial relations with his wife had been so unsatisfactory that virtual separation had ensued. Two or three months before illness, and then death, had devastated the nursery at the White House, he had set out for a long exploring expedition in Central Africa.