BY A GUEST AT HER SATURDAYS.
All the celebrated creatures whom Fate or the lecture-committee chance to bring to our town profess themselves amazed that Mrs. Marcellus should continue to make this little-celebrated locality her home. The comment has a double import, containing at once a compliment and the reverse. If therein be conveyed an intimation that Hurville as a place of residence is devoid of those varied opportunities for self-improvement, gayety and æsthetic culture which render existence in the great centres so diversified and so charming, or even should the insinuation go so far as to clearly express the indubitable fact that it is a crude, ragged little town, with a few staring red brick business-houses fronting each other on the muddy or dusty or frozen main street (according to the season), and a numerous colony of wooden cottages dotted around "promiscuous" as an outer fringe—nay, should Hurville even be apostrophized as a "hole," as it was once by a lecturer who came during the mud-reign and failed to draw a house,—why, even the most enthusiastic Hurvillian need take no offence. But whatever the town may be, think what our fellow-townswoman, Mrs. Marcellus, is! One of the greatest favorites our lecture-committee secures for us each year, a dramatic reader with a stentorian voice and a fine frenzy rolling around loose in his eye, expressed the whole thing in what I may call a Shakespearian nutshell by a happy paraphrase of the great bard. "It was not," said Mr. Blankenhoff, "that people appreciated Hurville less, but Mrs. Marcellus more." That settled it.
I have been very frank, as you see, about Hurville, because, although many of our business-men, in a sort of small beer of local patriotism, insist upon taking up the utterly untenable position that Hurville is the only "live town" in the country outside of New York and Chicago, I am unable to recognize this astonishing vitality myself, and I always say that if Hurville is "live," I should like to know what something dead looks like, acts like, and especially buys and sells like. The commerce of the place has been completely stagnant for several years, and in Hurville, if ever anywhere, is it a mystery to one half the world how the other half lives. I believe both halves would now be one complete and thoroughly defunct whole were it not that the vital spark is kept alive in both sections by Mrs. Marcellus. Her position in a community so provincial, and in many respects so narrow-minded, as that of our little place, has always been an exceedingly singular one; yet she was lifted to the throne of leadership of our choicest circle on her arrival, and has wielded the sceptre uninterruptedly ever since, without the slightest breath of disaffection having arisen among her courtiers. When she first came to Hurville, fifteen years ago, she was a young widow of thirty, very handsome, very travelled, very cultured, very stylish and passably rich. She is all this yet, and much more that is good and lovable as well. On the left-hand side of the account there is nothing to make a blur except that she is now a motherly lady of forty-five, instead of being, as she was when she first came, just on the last step of the stairs where girlhood shuts the door in a woman's face finally—at thirty.
Her coming to Hurville was rather odd, and at first she had not the slightest intention of remaining. Her object in visiting the place was to negotiate the sale of the residence she now occupies, the best house in the town yet, and fifteen years ago considered a very imposing mansion—so much so that when the railroad came the heavy men of the community insisted on the track being laid in such a way that passengers inside the cars could get a full view of the Marcellus house as they whizzed by. The house was built for the father of Mrs. Marcellus's husband, a sharp old fellow who came to the town when the general impression prevailed that Hurville was going to make Chicago shut up shop, and ultimately to see the grass grow in what are still very thriving thoroughfares of the city of New York. Old Marcellus made all the money out of Hurville that the town will afford for the next half century at least, and died in the shanty he had always lived in just as the builders were putting the last touch on that elegant mansion, which was supposed to be but the first of a series of princely residences which when completed would make Fifth Avenue and Walnut street wonder what they were begun for if thus so early they were done for by the wealth and enterprise of Hurville. Old Marcellus's son never came to Hurville. He was educated abroad, and married this lady, a young New Yorker, at her home. He was in poor health and died in Paris, leaving his wife a good deal of property, including this house, and two little daughters to take care of.
She stayed a few weeks at the hotel of those days, a most comfortable one—for, though the building was of frame and the furniture old and shabby, travellers often say that the meals were better and the bed-linen cleaner and better aired than in the present imposing Dépôt Hotel—and finding no one willing or able to buy the Marcellus house at anything like its value, she one day astonished everybody by saying that the house was now withdrawn from sale and that she was going to live in it herself. What a sensation occurred when her furniture arrived! She had brought over all her elegant belongings from Paris, those being days when household effects which had been in use by Americans abroad for a year were passed free of duty at the custom-house. Even now you can scarcely find in any community a house more beautifully furnished than Mrs. Marcellus's. She still uses the things she brought from France, and never allows her head to be turned by any vagaries respecting house-decoration. Her pale-yellow satin drawing-room furniture is charming, a real reminiscence of Marie Antoinette's at the Little Trianon at Versailles. Bronzes and marbles of chaste and beautiful subjects, water-colors and oil-paintings signed by noted names, fresh flowers in lovely abundance at all seasons of the year,—oh, it is a rare home of beauty and culture! And the best of it is, as Mrs. Marcellus often tells us at her pleasant dinner-parties or her cozy Saturday evenings, that by living in Hurville she can enjoy this agreeable and ladylike mode of existence, can do what we know she does for the poor, can subscribe to all periodicals of the day in any way worthy, can entertain her friends often—to their great delight, all loudly exclaim—without being haunted by the slightest shadow of anxiety regarding her income. If she had continued to live in New York she would by this time probably be bankrupt, for a similar manner of living in that costly city would be a dozen times more expensive than it is in Hurville. As it is, she even lays up money; and when her daughters both married, as they did on the same day five years ago, Mrs. Marcellus astonished all the wedding-participants by announcing to them the growth of a plum to the credit of each which she had planted and preserved for them in the hothouse of an old reliable banker's safe in Boston.
I have mentioned Mrs. Marcellus's Saturday evenings. They are the sole means of intellectual exchange Hurville possesses. In fact, without them our mental condition must have degenerated long ere this into something analogous to that of the cabbage, for most of us are too poor to take trips to the cities to brush up our brains, and we have no public or private library worthy the name in the place. Of late even our lecture-course—which used to be renowned as one of the most successful in the country, for a small town—has dwindled down almost to nothing, the hard times affecting this as everything else. No, not everything: hard times make no difference in Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays, thank the powers! Every Saturday evening we gather around that yellow satin furniture, inspect once more those oft-inspected pictures (always discovering new beauties in them), try to air a little art-jargon concerning the statuettes and bric-à-brac, look over the last new periodicals, sniff the flowers and say "How sweet!"—the women always asking how she keeps them with the gas, and Mrs. Marcellus always answering that she doesn't: she has them changed. At nine o'clock tea and etceteras are served up. The fine tea-service of rarest old blue Nankin is laid out upon a tablecloth of daintiest linen deeply embroidered with blue of a corresponding shade. Tea-cakes and pâtés whose ingredients are to be found in no cookery-book whatever greet the delighted and unexpectant palate. With her white, shapely, graceful hands Mrs. Marcellus tenders us these luscious lollipops and again and again refills the steaming bowl. At eleven o'clock precisely the neat and pretty maid, who always wears a white cap, brings in Mrs. Marcellus's small bedroom lamp; and this means good-night to visitors. These evenings are the pride and comfort of the town, and it is a point of honor with those of us who know we are welcome to attend every Saturday without intermission. Whenever the gathering chances to be small you may be sure that the cause of it is to be found in a weather-condition when to say "raining cats and dogs," "blowing great guns" or "snowing like Siberia" is to use a comparison quite feeble and inexpressive. But even on such occasions a few gentlemen always contrive to drop in. They are sent by their wives when these cannot come, and they always find Mrs. Marcellus her amiable, reposeful self, whom no chances of temperature can affect.
On a particularly stormy and disagreeable Saturday of the past winter I hesitated long about making my usual call. Not that I did not want to go, nor that I cared much for the weather, but it seemed to me impossible that on such a night Mrs. Marcellus should take the trouble to light her gas-jets (always supplemented by a large, softly-beaming oil-lamp for the centre-table) or ignite the splendid roaring fire of wood and coal mingled which, burning redly in a deep, low, richly colored grate of brass and steel, gives in winter the finishing touch of comfort and home-likeness to that delicious yellow satin drawing room. In summer the grate is entirely removed, and the vacant space is filled with flowering plants, tastefully framed by the hanging mantelpiece valance above and long, narrow, gracefully draped curtains at the sides, which take away all look of bareness from that central point of interest in every apartment, the fireplace. Yet the prospect of spending in my own cheerless room and quite alone the only evening of the week on which circumstances permit me to sit up at all late was scarcely flattering. I have to be at the store every morning before eight, and therefore on every night but Saturday I retire at an hour of a primitive earliness only equalled by that prevailing in well-regulated nurseries. On Sunday mornings I am able to sleep rather late, but pay for the privilege by the enforced juxtaposition of the heavy breakfast sausage with the tough dinner roast beef, my landlady, in a fit of the contraries, always advancing dinner many hours on the day when of all others it should be very much retarded, and would be if the digestive apparatus of the American people had any rights which the landlady of the period were bound to respect.
But these details have small bearing on the story I am relating. To resume: Driven out, in spite of the stormy weather, by the cheerlessness of my room, I hastened on the Saturday evening in question to seek the warm and comforting shelter of Mrs. Marcellus's abode. All was as serene within that model home as if the raging elements themselves had been subdued by the grand white hands of Mrs. Marcellus, and at her order had been stuffed with eiderdown and covered with yellow satin by a Paris upholsterer. How soothing to the rasped nerves was this interior—the crackling fire, the lights, the flowers, the soft rays from the lamp falling on the gray silk dress and the lace headdress of Mrs. Marcellus as she sat at the solid, large round centre-table with a basket of gay-colored embroidery-silks before her! Besides myself there were five visitors, all gentlemen of course, and most of them individuals who are not much given to loquacity. The lack of conversation was somewhat marked. Still, no one felt any obligation to keep the ball of small talk rolling. Mrs. Marcellus says that when people come to see her she wants them to converse or to keep silent as the spirit moves. The wings of silence brooded over this gathering again and again, yet no one felt guilty. There were many pleasant and home-like sounds—the tintinnabulation of the teaspoons and sugar-tongs, the pricking of the needle through the stiff linen, the whirl of a book-leaf, the laying down of card upon card in the game of solitaire which some one was playing, the bloodless execution of a paper-knife cutting apart the sheets of a newly-arrived magazine, the rustling of the Saturday's local paper, delivered just at dusk and not opened till now, the fresh ink made doubly pungent in the warm atmosphere till it yielded to the pressure of the summer-like temperature and dried up—like the rest of us.
"It is odd," said Henry L. Thompkins at length, closing a novel which he had been reading by slow instalments at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays for the last year at least, and whose finis he had now reached, "that so many authors write love-stories."
"Why shouldn't they," said Mrs. Marcellus, "when so many readers like to peruse them?"