Mrs. Cortland, the wife of the New York capitalist, who resides there three months in the summer, a stout, refined, tight-gloved, graciously condescending lady, gives a metropolitan tone to L—— society. Mr. Cortland, an easy-going, easy-tempered man in private life, but reported to be hard as flint in business matters, seldom finds time to leave New York, and his visits to L—— are uncertain. His country house, a large, handsome mansion with well-kept grounds, croquet-lawn, coach-house, and stables, is on the highest ground in the village; and Mrs. Cortland occupies without dispute the highest ground socially. It is an imperial elevation, after the manner of the saying attributed to Cæsar. A call on Mrs. Cortland is the event of a week, and a return call from her is a matter not to be lightly treated. How have I seen this good Mrs. Allen, my landlady, prepare her best room for the grand occasion, and Mrs. Harley speculate about it with well-assumed indifference a whole afternoon. One or two other magnates from Boston, scattered through L—— and adjacent townships, save Mrs. Cortland from complete exhaustion by contact with the village people during the summer.
Then there is the local aristocracy, consisting of the wife of the Congregational pastor ex-officio, and Mrs. Parsons, the wife of “Squire” Parsons, who owns a small bucket-factory near L——. These two ladies maintain a strict alliance, offensive and defensive, with Mrs. Cortland during the summer. Then come the middle classes, comprising Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Harley, the young doctor’s wife—a stranger and somewhat snubbed by the autochthonous élite—and the well-to-do farmers’ wives. Finally, we have the profanum vulgus, the tail of L—— society, or, to speak more correctly, those whom society does not recognize—some farmers’ wives whose husbands were too much in debt to allow them to keep up appearances; one or two hapless women who sold milk in a wagon to the neighboring towns, and drove the wagon themselves; and the village washerwoman, who went around doing “chores.” I think I have exhausted the classification of the social strata of L——. I observed that the men eschewed as much as possible the aristocratic distinctions made by their wives, and were apt to resent by silence or the assumption of an unwonted bluntness the empty airs and loud voice with which some vulgar rich man from a neighboring large town would sometimes stride through the village.
Wanderers and waifs, destined apparently to be at some time drawn into the great caldron of city life—perhaps to their own destruction—were not wanting in L——. I have said that the women were not remarkable for beauty. But there was one exception. A girl belonging to one of the most destitute families in the village, by one of those whims of nature which are not uncommon, was gifted with a face and figure to attract even an unobservant eye, and which seemed out of place in that quiet and homely neighborhood. The mother, a poor, struggling woman with a growing-up family of all ages, managed to live somehow by the days’ work and occasional assistance given her by the well-to-do families. The father was living, but spent most of his time in the county jail for drunkenness. The daughter of whom I speak was about nineteen or twenty years of age; tall, of fair complexion, with a naturally elegant carriage and a proud and almost defiant air, as if she resented the caprice of fortune which had placed her in that lowly station. She had the art of dressing well with limited means, which some women possess to the envy of others. On Sundays and at picnics she outshone the more expensively-dressed daughters of the farmers. She had been, and perhaps still is, the maid at the village inn. It may be imagined that gossip was not idle about this poor girl, thus singularly placed and dangerously gifted. Dreadful quarrels had taken place between the father and mother about the girl’s staying at the hotel; the drunken father, with a true sense of what was becoming, insisting that she should leave, the mother as strenuously maintaining that she should remain. The beauty of the girl herself was not of that domestic type I have elsewhere noticed in the mother and her babe I saw in Mrs. Allen’s parlor, but of that showy, restless, naturally haughty stamp which presaged storm, perhaps disaster. It is this class misfortune follows and the great cities sweep into their net. Poverty often makes vice of that which, under happier fortunes, might have been attractive virtue. Absit omen. May this rustic beauty find a happier, if more homely, destiny as the wife of some honest farmer in L——!
The summer passed, week after week. I fished, I walked, I rode, I read, I loitered. The barley ripened on the hill behind the farm-house, and a golden tint began to spread over the distant fields. The apples grew large and ruddy on one side where the sun struck the laden branch in the orchard. The tassels of the corn showed purple. August blazed. The doves flew thirstily to the large blue pump, and perched on the edges of the horse-trough after the farmer watered his horse at mid-day. The bees hummed three at a time in the big yellow cups of the squash-vines. Have you ever observed of that homely vegetable how ingeniously and dexterously it fastens its daring and aggressive vines to the ground as it shoots out over the close-cut grass? Stoop down among the after-math, or rowen, as it is called in New Hampshire, and you will see that at the inosculation of each successive joint of the vine, where it throws out its tendrils and blossoms, it also thrusts forth slender, white, curling ligaments that twist, each of them, tightly around a tiny tuft of the short grass. Thus it moors itself, as if by so many delicate living cables, to the bosom of the life-giving earth.
I might, if space allowed, tell of my fishing ventures, and how one glorious morning we rode out of L—— in a big yellow wagon with three horses—a party of seven of us, ladies and gentlemen, from the village—to make the ascent of Mt. Monadnock. This is the lion of all the country round. Parties are made up every week to climb its rugged summit. Over the hills and rolling ground we gaily rattled. Through the sandy country roads, where the branches of the trees met overhead and made dim aisles of verdure, we smoothly sped. And then what panting, laughing, climbing, shrill screaming, as we toiled up the winding path from the half-way house to the top of the mountain! What a magnificent, boundless view repaid us! The day was clear. To the north, Mt. Kearsarge and rolling ranges of mountains; to the southeast, a diversified surface of country spreading onwards far as the eye could reach towards the unseen ocean; to the south, Mt. Wachusett; below us woods, valleys, and lakes. A feeling of awe creeps over one in these mountain solitudes.
As to the fishing, I will confess that to me, who had thrown a fly over more than one Canadian river, and had killed my twenty-pound salmon on the Nipisiquit, loafing with a pole in a boat over a lily-covered pond for a half-pound pickerel was not tremendously exciting sport. But what mattered it? The mornings were soft and wooing; the woods were full of mysterious shadows; the water was limpid as if Diana and her nymphs bathed there in the spectral moonlight. Life passed smoothly and agreeably. I sought no more.
The blackberries began to ripen, first one by one and then in sable clusters, in the pastures. The days were growing shorter. The twilight sank more quickly into night. September approached, and I began to look for the appearance of my friend Jones. I had seen Miss Cortland two or three times coming from or going to the meeting-house on Sunday mornings, when all the beauty and fashion of L—— for miles around rode up in buggies, carryalls, or open wagons; but I had never met her to be introduced to her—a little imperial beauty, with a fresh and rosy color, and a mouth shaped like Cupid’s bow, that needed only to smile to conquer.
On a bright September morning, when the surrounding atmosphere was clear as a bell, but a thin haze still clung about Mt. Monadnock and the far-off mountains, Jones rode over on the stage-coach from the railroad station and joined me at L——. He asked eagerly about Miss Cortland.
Was she in the village?
Yes.