Belford's Magazine, Vol II, No. 10, March 1889

by Various

A YOUNG GIRL'S IDEAL.

There are people one meets with now and then who seem so perfectly fitted to their age and condition that it is difficult and almost painful to imagine them in any other—some old ladies, for instance, so sweet-faced, cheery-hearted, and placid-minded that one rebels against the reflection that they were ever crude, impulsive girls or busy matrons; and some busy matrons there are whose supply of energy and capacity seems so admirably to equal the demands made upon it that, for them, girlhood and old age appear to be alike—states of lacking opportunity; and, in the third place, there are crude, impulsive girls who wear these attributes so blithely that one does not want to think of them developed and matured.

Of these was Kate Severn, aged eighteen—a tall, brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired creature, so richly and freshly tinted that these three shades blended, in a beautiful harmony, in a face of rounded lines and gracious curves such as belong alone to the lovely time of youth. She was an affectionate and dutiful daughter to her widowed mother, whose only child she was, and yet almost everyone who heard Kate Severn talked about at all heard her called cold, the basis of this appellation being a disinclination to the society and attentions of young gentlemen, which, in a girl of her age and appearance, seemed a positive eccentricity. She had had this trait from a child, when she would fly into sudden rages and fight and scratch the little boys who called her their sweetheart; and it had grown with her growth. Every summer, when she and her mother would come back to the old country-place, near the dull little town of Marston, where all the summers of her life had been spent, this determination to avoid the society of young men was more resolutely set forth by her looks and tones. It was not so aggressive as formerly, for she had acquired a fine dignity with her advancing girlhood, and was too proud not to avoid the danger of being called ridiculous. Therefore, her resentment of all masculine approaches was now quiet and severe, where it had once been angry and vehement; but it was as positive as ever, as the youth of Marston had reason to know. They said they didn't mind it, but they did immensely. A favorite remark among them was that, if she could stand it, they could—and stand it she did, magnificently. Who that saw her, driving her smart trap and strong bay horse along the country roads of Marston, with rein taut and whip alert, her erect and beautiful figure strikingly contrasted with her little mother's bent and fragile one, could suppose for one instant that it mattered an atom to her whether those were men or wooden images that walked the streets of Marston or drove about its suburbs, having their salutes to the tall cart returned by a swift, cool bow from its driver, who disdained to rest her handsome eyes upon them long enough to discern the half-indignant, half-admiring gazes with which they looked after her.

She was not, at heart, an unsocial creature, and in her childhood had been rather a favorite with the girls who came in contact with her, but she always was unlike them; and this dissimilarity now constituted a distinct isolation for her, since the fact that she had herself no beaux,—to use the term in vogue in Marston society,—and took no interest in hearing of those of her girl friends, left the latter much at a loss for topics, and forced upon Kate herself the conviction that she had not the power of interesting them. Dr. Brett, the country doctor who was her mother's physician and chief friend when she came to her country home, used to try to adjust matters for Kate, and made many praiseworthy efforts to promote a spirit of sociability between her and the young people of Marston, each and every one of which was a flat failure. At last he had given up in despair and let the matter drop, for Kate, in this her eighteenth summer, was more difficult, as well as taller, straighter, and handsomer, than ever. So reflected Dr. Brett as he drove homeward from his first visit to the Severns, feeling a good deal cheered by the recurrence into his humdrum life of this attractive mother and daughter, who received him into their home with a cordiality and friendliness enjoyed by a few people only. Mrs. Severn was an invalid, and unequal to seeing much company; and Kate, though the very opposite of an invalid, had contrived, as I have shown, to cut herself off from society—in Marston, at least—rather effectually. She liked Dr. Brett, and seemed always glad to see him—a departure in his favor which he was not old enough to relish altogether. Still, the gods had provided him a pleasant spot of refreshment in the midst of a rather dull professional routine, and he gladly made the most of it. Kate, who was extremely fastidious, criticized him severely to her mother, and regretted very often that a man who had some capabilities should neglect his appearance as he did—allowing his face and hands to get so sunburned, his hair to grow so long, and his clothes to look so shabby and old-fashioned.

Perhaps the reason that she was so hard upon good Dr. Brett was accounted for by the fact that this man-repudiating young lady carried about in her mind a beautiful ideal of her own, of whose existence, even in this immaterial form, no being in the world besides herself had a suspicion. His appearance, in truth, was wholly and entirely ideal, but he was founded on fact, and that fact was a certain manuscript which five years ago she had fished up from an old box in the garret. This garret had been for generations the receptacle for all the old, disused belongings of the Severns; and it had been Kate's delight, from childhood up, to explore its old chests and trunks, and invent for herself vivid stories of the old-time ladies and gentlemen to whom had belonged these queer old gowns and uniforms—these scant petticoats and meagre waists, and these knee-breeches and lace-trimmed coats. There were spinning-wheels and guitars to suggest poses for the women, and cocked hats and swords for the men. As she grew older, these childish games lost part of their charm for her, and these mere suits and trappings of the creatures of her imagination gave her such a sense of lack that she turned to some old papers in one of the boxes, in the hope that she might get some light upon the spirits and souls that had animated them. In her own fair young body there had arisen certain insistent demands which there was nothing in the life she led to supply. The tortures of the Inquisition would not have drawn this confession from her; but so indeed it was, and I must have sketched the personality of this young lady very clumsily indeed if it has not appeared that, beneath this independent, self-sufficing surface, there was a heart full of romance and sentiment, a feeling all the stronger for being denied a vent.

It was an era in Kate Severn's life—that rainy day in late summertime, when she found in the garret the old roll of manuscript from which was formulated the ideal that afterward so wholly took possession of her. It was a budget of closely written sheets, on blue paper turned white at the edges with age. The ink used must have been of exceptionally good quality, for it was still dark and distinct. The writing was clear, and done with a very fine pen—but there were evidences of haste. This, however, was not to be wondered at, for the subject was an exciting one, and Kate pictured to herself, with enthusiasm, the exquisite young gentleman (whom she promptly invested with the blue-velvet, lace-ruffled coat, and the handsome hat and sword which were among the paraphernalia of the attic) bending his ardent, impassioned gaze over the sheets on which were written such beautiful, fervent, reverential love-words. It was not in the form of a letter, though it was a direct appeal, or, rather, a sort of aspiration, from the heart of a man for the love of a woman. There was not a name in it from beginning to end, and there was a sort of impersonal tone in it that made Kate believe that it was addressed to an imagined woman instead of a known one. This thought occurred to her even in that first breathless perusal, and all the subsequent ones (which were countless, for she was subject to certain moods in which this old manuscript was her only balm) confirmed it. In consequence of this conviction, she did a most un-Kate-like thing. It required only a slight effort of that powerful imagination of hers to put herself in the place of this loved and importuned lady; and she actually went so far as to compose and indite answer after answer to this fond appeal—impassioned outpourings of a heart which was full and had to be emptied. These she would lock away in her desk, along with the precious blue manuscript—and read and amplify from time to time.

She had never told anyone about the finding of this manuscript, though she had questioned her mother frequently and closely about the various contents of the attic boxes, only to hear repeated the statement that they were all belongings of the Severns, and had been in the house long before her occupancy. So this precious manuscript, it must appear, was written by some by-gone relative of her father, who, it pleased her to believe, had died with all these beautiful aspirations unfulfilled. That was a thought that smiled upon far more than the picture of her ideal hero comfortably settled as a commonplace husband and father, with degenerate modern descendants. So Kate, who had no lovers in reality, made the most of this impalpable essence of one. And really he suited her much better. She could endow him with all the attributes that she admired, and even alter these at will, as her state of mind changed or her tastes developed, and a real lover could never have kept pace with her so well. Then, too, she could imagine him as beautiful and elegant as she desired—and she loved beauty and elegance in a man so much that she had never seen one yet who came up to her standard. She invested him with the most gorgeous changes of apparel—the blue velvet coat in the old trunk being one of his commonest costumes. It is true that it did not occur to her that, to fit the wishes of the manuscript to the time of the knee-breeches and lace ruffles, etc., suggested the propriety of his expressing himself in old English, while that of the blue manuscript was quite modern; but an anachronism or two of this sort was a trifling matter in so broad a scheme as hers. One effect of the finding of the paper was to make Miss Kate far more than ever scrupulous in her person, and gentle and courteous in her ways, for, although she had no superstitious idea that he really saw her out of the spirit-world, still it was her pride and pleasure to be what she knew he would have her to be. So she dressed herself in very charming gowns, with a slight expression of old-timeness about them that was not unnatural, and wore her severe, scant coifs and little folded kerchief with a prim grace that was a matter of contemporaneous benefit. Her mother and Dr. Brett got the most of it, for out-of-doors her dress was necessarily conventional, and out-of-doors, also, she encountered so many antagonistic elements that she was often made to feel that her bearing and state of mind were not such as her loyal knight would have approved. That he was a person of the gentlest heart, the kindest nature, the most loving spirit, no one who read those heartfelt words of his could doubt. Very often he would interrupt his rhapsodies to his lady-love to prostrate himself before himself, at the thought of his unworthiness to ask the love of so divine and perfect a being as her whom he addressed. How great, then, was the necessity laid upon her who had appropriated these addresses to be circumspect in thought and act!

So Kate grew every day more sweet and winning, until Dr. Brett began to wonder how he could ever have thought her hard and conceited—as he confessed to himself, with abasement, that he had. She felt that her knight and lover would have wished her to be kind to this poor, lonely old doctor, who was so good to the sick and humble about him, and led such a cheerless, companionless, bachelor existence; and she used to make his cup of tea in the evenings when he would drop in to see her mother at the close of a hard day's work, and minister to his comfort in a manner that was certainly new to her. Before the finding of that manuscript, it was little enough that she had cared about his comfort; but now it seemed of real importance to her. The more his country-made clothes, and sun-burned hands, and awkward, heavy shoes grated on her, the more it came home to her how she would be pleasing some one who wore velvet coats, with rich lace ruffles that bordered tapering white hands, and with shapely feet encased in fine silk stockings and fine diamond-buckled slippers—if he could see her! Hers was quite a happy love affair, and she had no occasion to mourn her lover dead, as she had not known him living—so, as yet, he had brought only pleasure into her life.

It was at the age of sixteen that Kate had found the blue manuscript, and so her affaire was a matter of two years' date when she returned to Marston on the occasion of her eighteenth summer. The blue-coated knight had held his own with inviolate security during those two years, and Kate was as indifferent as ever to the approaches of the youth and valor of Marston. So she and her mother settled quickly down into the routine of the old dull life. The usual visitors called, but they, too, were dull, and therefore undisturbing, and life flowed monotonously on. It was only a little less quiet existence than the one she led in winter in the city, for she never went to parties, and not often to the theatre unless there happened to be some unusual musical attraction; and her friends and relatives, of whom there were quite a number, gave her up as an incorrigibly queer girl, whom no one need try and do anything for. It is true she had her music and painting lessons there, which were some variety and diversion, but she practised both here in the country; and the life, on the whole, pleased her better. Her eccentricity, as it was called, was commented on by fewer people, and she had more time for those delicious reveries over the old blue manuscript. She loved, on rainy days, when it was not too warm up there, to steal off to the garret and look at the blue coat, and the sword, and hat, etc., and feel herself a little nearer, in that way, to her knight. It seemed a very lonely time indeed, when she looked back to the years and days before the finding of the manuscript. It had introduced an element into her life almost as strong as reality. And yet there were times—and they came oftener, now that womanhood was ripening—when a great emptiness and longing got hold of her, and the blue manuscript, which had once been so sufficient, would not satisfy her. She hugged it closer to her heart than ever, though, and all it represented to her. She often told herself it suited her a great deal better than marriage, which she had always looked upon as a grinding and grovelling existence for a woman, and expressed and felt a fine superiority to. It was quite too commonplace and humdrum an affair for her, and she told herself, with emphasis and distinctness, that she was quite content with an ideal love. And yet, to mock her, came the thought of the pictured domestic life which the blue manuscript had so tenderly described—with such longings for the fireside, the home circle, the family love that she held in scorn. She got the old blue paper and read it over, and those words of winning tenderness brought the tears to her eyes. She found herself half wishing, for his sake, while a numb pain seized her heart for herself, that he had lived to realize these sweet dreams of home and domestic love. If that was so, her ideal was gone, and how could she do without it, seeing she had nothing else? The tears became too thick, the pain in her throat was unsupportable, she felt the great sobs rising, and, springing up, she rushed down the stairs, flew to her room, bathed her face and adjusted her toilet, and then went down to make tea for her mother and Dr. Brett, after which she played away the spirit of sadness and unrest with all the gay and brilliant music she knew. By bed-time she was her own calm self, and the next day she regarded her strange mood with wonder, but she could not forget that it had been, and she was horribly afraid of its recurrence.

One morning she was driving herself alone in her pretty cart along a shady road that ran outside the town, when she recognized Dr. Brett's buggy and horse fastened to a tree near a small shady house. This was nothing to surprise her, for he was always working away on poor and helpless people who couldn't pay him, and she would have passed on without giving the matter a second thought, but that, just as she got to the dilapidated little gate, a woman rushed out of the house, with a girl of about fourteen after her, both of them screaming and throwing their hands about in a way that caused Kate's horse to take fright and gave her all she could do to control him for the next few minutes. He ran for a little way straight down the road, but she soon got him in hand and turned back to inquire into the cause of the trouble. The two females were still whooping and gesticulating in the yard, and the scene had been furthermore enlivened by the addition of three or four dirty and half-clothed children, who were also crying. Just as Kate came up, Dr. Brett appeared in the doorway, with his coat off and a very angry expression on his face. He caught hold of the woman and gave her an energetic shake, telling her to hold her tongue and control her children; and just at this point he looked up and caught sight of Kate, gazing down upon the scene from the top of her pretty cart, whose horse was now as quiet as a lamb.