Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

These fine people were expecting a guest to dinner that afternoon, who would have been a skeleton at any possible banquet of Harrington’s, could he have known that such a guest was in town. Mr. Atkins’s usual dinner hour was two o’clock, but on this occasion it had been postponed to four, while the merchant was showing the guest a few of the lions.

It was within an hour of the dinner-time, and the servants in the kitchen were sweltering over the preparation of the meal in the hottest possible hurry, and the greatest possible trepidation, lest anything should be overdone or underdone, or in any way done wrong. For they had been duly impressed with the magnitude of the occasion, and they were trembling lest the magnitude of the occasion should be disgraced by their humble efforts.

Meanwhile Good Society was filled with soft tremors in the drawing-room above. He had not come yet, but he was coming. Anxious eyes glanced occasionally out at the front windows on Mount Vernon street, to see if he was approaching. Eager ears listened momently for the slightest intimation of a pull at the bell-wire. Palpitating hearts leaped at every footfall in the highly respectable street, and Good Society was in a steady flutter of delicious expectation.

Good Society, then and there represented by Mrs. Atkins, Miss Atkins, Miss Julia Atkins, Mr. Thomas Atkins, and Mr. Horatio Atkins; and elsewhere represented by the highly respectable father of this highly respectable family, Mr. Lemuel Atkins, was not so honored every day in the week—by no means. Distinguished gentlemen had come there to dine with us; Count Blomanosoff, when he was in Boston, had come there to dine with us; Lord Hawbury and Lord Charles Chawles, when they were in Boston, had come there to dine with us; and eminent clergymen, and able lawyers, and distinguished senators, and even a Massachusetts Governor, had come there to dine with us. But a rich Southern gentleman—oh! A child of the sunny South—ah! A gallant and chivalrous son of Louisiana, who owns an immense plantation, and nobody knows how many of his fellow creatures—decidedly; it is the next thing to having Mr. Webster to dine with us.

The drawing-room in which the so highly honored family were assembled in eager expectation, was a large oblong square, papered with purple and gold-spotted paper, and full of gaudy furniture. There were two chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, all gilt and glitter; gilt sconces, with cut glass globes, on the walls; a profusion of gold-framed pictures and engravings; large mirrors over the mantels and between the windows; red velvet, and blue velvet, and green velvet arm-chairs and sofas, all around; a huge piano; vases; ormolu tables; tables of sienna marble; statuettes on brackets; a bust of Mr. Webster on a pedestal; divers ornaments in all directions; a vivid, huge-figured Brussels carpet on the floor; and yellow and purple curtains to the windows. Taste, not in its dying agonies, but murdered outright and horribly stone dead, was the prevailing sentiment of the entire apartment.

Judged by a rigorous artistic eye, the same estheticide was chargeable upon the drawing-room’s occupants. They were all excessively à-la-mode in their general appearance, and evidently of the highest respectability. Mrs. Atkins, the mother—who sat languidly leaning in the corner of a velvet sofa, with her cheek resting on her fingers—was a fair-haired, waxen-faced lady of middle age, with pallid-blue eyes, a snub nose, a rabbit mouth half open, and a receding chin. She was expensively arrayed in full dress of changeable silk, with many flounces; wore a lace cap, and had a general air of weak good-nature and dawdling insipidity, enervating to behold. Miss Atkins, the eldest daughter, who occupied the other end of the sofa, was a yellow-haired, waxen-faced young lady of at least twenty-five; the living suggestion of what her mother had been at her age; with a chin even more receding, a nose as snub, eyes as pallidly blue, the same drooping rabbit mouth, and the same air of mild vapidity and hopeless enervation. She was also expensively attired, in deep blue satin, cut low in the neck, and fitting closely to her full and shapely bosom. Julia, the younger daughter, was an ultra fashionable miss of sweet sixteen; with a bold, saucy face, smooth dark hair, a short, broad nose, hard, black eyes, a prude’s mouth, and a great length and breadth of flat circular jaw. The two young men, who were standing like highly respectable caryatides, at opposite corners of the mantel, were snobs of the purest water, both in dress and manner. They were got up in the English style; for, like some of the highly respectable Bostonians, they cherished a noble passion for that sort of Anglicism caricatured by Mr. Punch. Their black trowsers were of the tightest, on legs the slimmest; their black dress coats were close in the body, large in the sleeves, and small in the tail; their vests were very short, their collars high and stiff, and each wore the Joinville neck-tie, a horizontal bar of silk reaching from ear to ear, to the successful adjustment of which, as Punch observed about that time, a man had to give his whole mind. Whatever mind the two young Atkinses possessed, had evidently been wholly given, for the neck-ties were alarmingly perfect, and constituted, in fact, an incontestable triumph of mind over matter. In the solitude of their aspiring souls, the young men worshipped the memory of Lord Hawbury and Lord Charles Chawles, and moulded their whiskers after the style of whiskerage patronized by those eminent nobles. It mattered not that the vulgar rumor had crossed the Atlantic that Lord Hawbury, immediately on his return to his ancestral acres, had been clapped into limbo by a low British tradesman, on account of certain pounds, shillings and pence owed by him the said Hawbury to him the said low tradesman. It mattered not that the still vulgarer rumor had crossed the Atlantic that Lord Charles Chawles, that bright, consummate flower of the British aristocracy, who had deigned to honor our humble homes with his august presence, had got into a row in a theatre just after his return to London—had, in the coarse language of the London newspapers, which love to hawk at merit, got drunk; cruelly insulted a poor ballet-dancer behind the scenes; cruelly beat and trod upon the manager, who had ventured a remonstrance; had thereupon been borne away, roaring and fighting, to the nearest station-house, from whence he had emerged in the morning, to incur the reprimand of a magistrate, and pay a brawler’s fine. What mattered such reports as these? mere evidence of the rush and outbreak of a fiery mind of general assault, as Horatio felicitously said, quoting from Hamlet, when the rumor reached him. Whiskers were whiskers still, and so Horatio trimmed the sandy crop which was his own, after the Hawbury model. The result was a scraggy mutton-chop, depending big end down, in tawny, straggling moss of hair from Horatio’s cheeks, and between these manly hirsute ornaments loomed a bald, flat, tallowy, superficial face, with an air of sullen emptiness upon it; with short brown hair, parted behind, and on the side, and brushed forward around it; with a low, broad forehead; dull, boiled blue eyes; a strong, short nose; a thin, lineless, resolute mouth; and a great expanse of chin and jaw, bolder than, but like, his younger sister’s. Mighty in whiskerage and hair, and on the Lord Charles Chawles model, was Horatio’s brother Thomas. Hair, tawny-brown in color, parted on the left, sloping up and off crescendo to fall in a mass on the right side, and bunching off in a round, full tuft of lesser quantity on the other side. This, as the lob-sided crown of a puffy face, with the younger sister’s chin and jaw. Eyes, close together, hard, black and insolent; short nose, a compromise between snub and straight, with a lift in the nostrils, as if it snuffed offence; mouth, a short, stern, small horseshoe curve, cusps down; and under this, on the broad and long flat chin, a tawny short imperial, and over this, curving down from the centre of the nose and rounding up the cheeks, in a military pothook, the gallant whiskerage of Lord Charles Chawles. Over the whole face an expression of sternly supercilious insolence, inspiring to behold. A fine young man—two fine young men indeed; models of their kind; full of the pride of caste and all its callousness. Destined to be citizens of the highest respectability, when their wild oats—and they were wild—were sown and come to the hard and selfish harvest. Already they had begun, and begun well. Furnished with their father’s money, they had their club, their boon-companions, their mistresses, their fast horses, and drank and drove and gamed and revelled in a manner hardly outdone by Lord Hawbury and Lord Charles Chawles themselves. They were, moreover, stanch young Whigs—Union men, Constitution men, Law and Order men, Fugitive Slave Law men, sound on the goose in every conceivable particular. Proof of their devotion to their country, they had only the Saturday before, foregone their customary drive on the Cambridge road, foregone their supper and wine at Porter’s, and stayed in town to hear Mr. Webster at Faneuil Hall, and even now, Thomas, the younger and more ardent spirit, was a little hoarse from cheering on that memorable occasion. Proof again of their devotion to their country, which always meant in one form or another the Southern-Slavery part of their country, here they were, nobly sacrificing their customary drive, to muster with the rest of the family and greet the ardent son of the sunny South, the gallant and chivalrous Southern gentleman then expected, and not yet come.

He was coming, though, for while this interesting group, properly stilted for the occasion, were waiting and chatting, a strenuous pull at the bell-wire was heard, with the answering jingle of the hall bell.

“That’s him, be Jove!” exclaimed Thomas, straightening up on his slim legs, and adjusting the bows of his neck-tie, while he looked with military sternness at the drawing-room door.

Horatio, who, with the laudable desire to add brilliancy, as was his wont on company days, to the dinner-table conversation, had been diligently storing his memory with the quaint sayings of Charles Lamb—for Charles Lamb is quite the ton with the young Boston aristocracy, as Alexander Pope is with the old—laid the book, which he had brought down to study till the last minute, on the mantel behind a large vase, and with a glance into the mirror behind him to see that his neck-tie was all right, assumed a dignified and graceful attitude, with his left thumb inserted in his vest pocket, and his head turned solemnly toward the door. Mrs. Atkins, without moving, cast a glance along her flounces, and made sure in her mind that she was seated so as to be able to rise gracefully when the guest appeared. Her eldest daughter, with a little soft palpitation at heart, for the guest might be a bachelor or a widower, and she was ready to fall in love with any child of the sunny South, or son of the icy North, who had money and social position, also cast an eye at her ample skirts, and a mind’s eye at her capabilities for rising. The other daughter, Julia, started bolt upright in her chair, and with her hard, black eyes fixed on the door as though she would look through the panels, listened intently.