CHAPTER III

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MOTHER AND DAUGHTER--LOVE, HATE, AND DISOBEDIENCE--JUDGE OWEN IN A STORM--AUNT MARTHA AND HER RECORD OF UNLOVING MARRIAGE AND WEDDED OUTRAGE.

It was a very pleasant picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen, wife of Judge Owen of the ----th District Court, was looking just at twilight of a June evening; but something in that picture, or its surroundings, did not seem to please her; for her comely though matronly face was drawn into an expression of displeasure, and the little mice about the wainscot, if any there were, might occasionally have heard her foot patting the floor with impatience and vexation.

The time has been already indicated. The place was the back parlor of Judge Owen's house, on a street not far from the Harlem River--the window open and the parlor opening into a neat little yard, half garden and half conservatory, with glimpses over the unoccupied lots beyond, of the junction of Harlem River with the Sound, up which the Boston boats had only a little while before disappeared on their way eastward, and where a few white sails of trading-schooners and pleasure-boats could yet be seen through the gathering twilight.

But this did not comprise all the picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen looked; for in the window, with the last rays of the dying daylight falling upon face and figure, sat her daughter Emily, listlessly toying with the leaves of a book that she had been reading until the light grew too indistinct, and with a slight pout on her lip and an expression of dissatisfaction generally distributed over her pretty face, which showed that her own vexation and that of her mother had some kind of connection more or less mysterious. The face was not only pretty, as every one could see,--but softly rounded, womanly and most loveable while yet girlish, as only those could fully realize who had known something of the comparative characters of women. The eyes (in a better light) were hazel, with a depth and transparency which made the very thought of a mean action in her presence apparently impossible; the cheek that showed against the fading light had been rounded to perfection in the soft atmosphere floating about eighteen, as a peach is rounded and colored by the genial air and sunshine of late summer: the heavy masses of hair that had partially fallen out of their confinement and swept down to her shoulders, were scarcely darker than nut-brown; and the hand toying with the book would have shown, even without a better glimpse of the half recumbent figure, that that figure was of medium height, fully rounded and delicately voluptuous. It is not to be supposed that Emily Owen knew quite all this of herself. Some others realized all her perfections, however, as will more fully and at large appear (to use the conveyancers' phraseology); and for the purposes of this narrative it is necessary to have the lady distinctly before us.

And now what had caused the shadow on the matronly face of Mrs. Owen, and the pout on the red lip of Emily? The old--old story: told over at some period or other in almost every household on earth. Old eyes and young eyes, seeing very differently; old hearts and young hearts, beating to very different tunes, and informing the whole being with very different aspirations. There was a love--there was a dislike--and there was a certain amount of parental solicitude and determination--excellent materials from which to construct a serious disagreement and an eventual family row. Not Hecate, when she threw "eye of newt and tail of frog" into the infernal brew on the blasted heath, could have been more certain of the final nature of her compound, than may the presiding genius of any "well regulated family" be of the eventual result when the two acids of love and hate are brought chemically together in the heart of budding womanhood.

There was a certain John Boadley Bancker, a man of a family exceedingly respectable, though decayed, who had himself been a speculator in lands and stocks and amassed more or less money, and who was popularly understood to have been intrusted by Major General Governor Morgan with the authority of Colonel and the permission to raise a regiment for the war. There was a certain Frank Wallace, a young man of no particular family that any one had ever heard mentioned, a fellow of infinite jest and agreeableness, but very little money and no commission at all except to make love when necessary and extract as much comfort as possible from the passing hour,--who carried on a small printing business which just made him a comfortable livelihood, in a narrow street within a stone's throw of the Museum. It was the bounden duty of Miss Emily Owen, seeing that the portly Judge, her father, and the pleasant matron, her mother, had formed the very highest opinion of one of these gentlemen, to fall in love with him as quickly as possible. Of course she had contracted for him a most unconquerable aversion! It was her bounden duty to ignore the other, even if she did not hate and despise him--seeing that he found no other friend in her family: could there have been a stronger guaranty for her going madly in love with the scapegrace?

A moment after the period when we saw them sitting in silence and mutual discomfort, mother and daughter resumed the conversation which had brought about that state of feeling.

"You will be sorry for what you have said, Emily!" said the mother.

"So will you, for what _you_ have said!" was the reply of the daughter, with that species of iteration which displays no wit but a great deal of earnestness.

"You know, as well as I do, that your father has set his heart upon this match," continued the mother, "and you know how much he is in the habit of allowing others to oppose him."

"Yes, I know," replied the young girl, "and I know one thing more."

"Indeed! and what is that?" asked the mother, with the slightest perceptible shade of a sneer in her voice.

"--That both you and my father made a serious blunder in bringing _me_ into the world, if you meant to get along entirely without opposition!"

"Hoity toity!" exclaimed the mother, quite as much surprised as nettled at this original and forcible way of stating a domestic fact. "What has become of your modesty? Do you mean to insult both your father and myself?"

"No!" said the young girl, in a sharper tone and with her words cut off much shorter and more decidedly than was her habit. While those plump little white fingers had been toying with the leaves of the book, sitting there in the twilight, heart and hand had evidently both been busy, and they had produced any other effect rather than making their owner more tractable. "No! mother, no! But I tell you, once for all, that the match you are talking of is hateful! I have tried to keep still while the affair seemed at some distance, but now that you bring it closer it fills my whole being with disgust! Do drop it if you do not wish to drive me mad or make me disobedient. Oh, mother!" and the whole manner of the young girl seemed to change and melt in a moment, as she rose hastily from her chair, ran to that on which her mother was seated, threw herself on her knees with her arms around her parent, and buried her face in the sheltering lap,--"oh mother! do be my friend instead of my enemy, in this! I cannot--indeed I cannot marry that man!"

There are a good many things they think they cannot do--these young girls--and they never know themselves until they are tried. Perhaps it may not always be well to try them to their full capacity, however!

What Mrs. Maria Owen might have answered to this appeal, under other circumstances, is uncertain. She was, or intended to be, a good and tender mother, and would have cut off her right hand rather than do any thing which could make against the ultimate happiness of her daughter; and she really, at that moment, must have caught a glimpse of the fact that the heart of the young girl was very much interested in her refusal. But if there was any sentiment which the worthy woman entertained more deeply than another, it was the belief that Judge Owen, her husband, was the most wonderful man in the world. She thought of him with pride when his portly figure disappeared down the steps of a morning, when he was starting to go to "Court." She thought of him with a respect amounting to reverence when she contemplated him sitting

"At once mild and severe, On his seat of dooming,"

(to quote good old Esaias Tegner) a local Rhadamanthus from whose judgment there could not be any possible appeal (although, sooth to say, there _were_ a good many appeals, and quite effectual ones, from the very unimportant decisions to which only his authority extended). And when he came home at night, after dispensing justice for the whole day (to wit--three hours on the average) she looked with almost holy reverence on his broad brow, under which there must lie such a store of legal knowledge, and thought what a blessed and honored woman she was to have been allowed to mate with so much wisdom and so much dignity.

Does this sound like sneering at the wife's pride and devotion? If so, let there be a word to qualify it. God knows that there are not too many women who respect and look up to their husbands, and that the sanctity and the happiness of the domestic circle would be much seldomer invaded if there was more of this feeling. Only those poor women, on an average, make such terrible mistakes as to the instances that should demand or allow the full indulgence of this pride; and miserable humbugs are looked up to and worshipped so much of the time, while those who could deserve and should command that feeling are treated with indifference or even despised by inferior minds to which they have been mated! They do not "manage these things" any "better in France," probably; but they manage them ill enough in republican America at about this period, and the result is not a pleasant or even a moral one!

The check to any possible motherly concession to the weakness of Emily, which Mrs. Owen experienced on this occasion, arose from the coming of the ponderous man of law, whose heavy footstep and loud cough were at that moment heard in the hall. Had the daughter been less absorbed than she was in her own feelings, she too might have heard those tokens of the Judge's presence; and had she been as wise as her mother, any further discussion of the subject would have been stopped and the coming catastrophe averted.

Either she did not observe or she was too much absorbed to heed who heard her, for at the very moment when Judge Owen, a large-framed, portly, broad-browed, iron-gray man of fifty, entered the back parlor and stood full in the presence of his wife and daughter, the latter was looking up to her mother with clasped hands and half sobbing out a repetition of her former declaration: "I cannot--indeed I cannot marry that man!"

"Hush! Emily, hush!--no more of this!" said the mother, half in hope that her husband might not have caught the words; but she was widely mistaken. The ears so much in the habit of listening to the least quaver in the tone of a witness's voice, were not to be trifled with in the present instance.

"Hey? What is this?" asked the Judge, in a tone that admitted of no trifling in the answer.

"Nothing--that is--Emily was talking of--" began the abashed wife, with a stammer.

"Of--_I_ know," said the father, who had heard quite enough of his daughter's words to know without asking, and who was more behind the curtain than his wife, in some other respects. "I heard what this school-girl muttered. She _cannot_ marry the man whom I intend she _shall_ marry, and she has taken this opportunity, when she supposed I was absent, to acquaint you with her determination."

"Not determination," said the mother, willing to smooth affairs as much as possible--"say wish."

"No, mother, determination!" said the young girl, springing to her feet with an energy which was really not an ordinary part of her nature,--under the impression that now, if ever, was the time to give utterance to her true sentiments. "Father used the right word--determination! I cannot marry Boad Bancker, and I won't! There you have it!"

There was nothing classic or even romantic in the young lady's mode of expression, or the nickname which she bestowed upon her would-be lover; but they were at least natural, which is something gained in this world of pretences and deceptions.

"You won't? and why, I should like to know?" broke in the Judge, for the moment surprised out of the violence that might have resulted, by the very audacity of the declaration.

"Because he is hateful, and ugly, and I do not like him, and--" answered Miss Emily, with a charming return to the system of the school-girl which she had just been called by her father.

"Silence!" thundered Judge Owen, who had recovered from the blow and thought that he had a refractory juryman or an insolent attorney to put down. "Silence! I have had enough of this. John Boadley Bancker is the man I have selected for your husband. He belongs to an excellent family, has wealth enough to keep a wife in comfort and even luxury, and has lately proved himself a true patriot by springing up at the call of the President--" (Judge Owen had by this time forgotten his indignation, and fancied himself for the moment addressing an immense assemblage at Union Square or in the Park)--"by springing up at the call of the President, girding on his--"

"--Shoulder-straps!" put in Miss Emily, who had recovered from her agitation and began to be mischievous the moment her father began to be didactic and ponderous. Whether he heard the interpolation or not, is somewhat doubtful.

"--Girding on his sword," the Judge went on, "and marching--"

"--Up and down Broadway!" put in the young girl, in a second parenthesis, not more audible than the other.

"That is, he has not marched, but is going to march to the seat of war, to fight for--"

"--The niggers!" again and finally interpolated the incorrigible, who had somehow managed to get a peep behind the curtain of national affairs and to see towards what the great struggle seemed tending.

"--For the defence of the country," the Judge concluded his peroration. Then he went on with the pith of his remark, to the effect that the girl who could be mad enough and disobedient enough to refuse the hand of such a man as _that_, might go to--mumble--mumble--mumble--for she could never more be daughter of his!

By this time Emily had recovered her equanimity, and almost her spirits, and her mother shared in the feeling of relief, for the explosion had not been half so violent as expected. But there are pauses in storms, the moment before the coming of the most destructive blasts of all, and the temper of Judge Owen was gusty. Miss Emily fancied that the whole ought to be said while the subject was under discussion, and, to use a vulgarism, she "put her foot in it."

"Boad Bancker," she said (she had the common weakness of supposing that the use of a nickname belittled the person spoken of)--"Boad Bancker may be a soldier, but nobody knows it. I know he is a fool; and he is a miserable humbug, pretending to be a young man, when he is as old as _you_, Pa!"

If Judge Owen had a weakness unworthy one of the shining lights of the bench, it lay in thinking that his fifty years were only thirty, and that he was yet a young man. Other men than the Judge have labored under the same delusion, and found sick rooms and decrepitude necessary to disabuse them. Probably nothing in his daughter's power to utter would have made him so angry. He had only muttered before--this time he thundered.

"Old! You are talking about age, are you, you shameless, impertinent hussy--insulting _me_ as well as my friends, are you! I know you, and by G--" (he was a dignitary of the legal profession, and he was speaking in the presence of his wife and daughter; but the truth must be recorded)--"I know what you are driving at, and I'll break you of your fancy or I'll break your stubborn neck! You don't like Bancker, the husband _I_ pick out for you, because he is not a beardless boy, and you choose to consider him _old_. And you think I will permit you to encourage that miserable beggar, Frank Wallace, because he is _young_! Let me see one more sign of familiarity between him and yourself, and I will kick him out of the house, as I would a dog--and you may go after him! Do you hear me? Now look out!" And the Judge rang the bell for the servant, scolded her for not lighting the gas that no one had before wished lighted, and stormed out of the room, leaving his wife to follow him, and his daughter to drop again into her chair and muse over the pleasant prospect for after-life lying so broadly before her.

But if the young girl had passed through an agitating and unpleasant scene, and if the prospects for her future life had been sensibly narrowed within the preceding half hour, the depths of her being had not been stirred as they were to be before she slept. Perhaps she had occupied the position of depression into which she had fallen, in the chair by the window, with her head upon her hand, for five minutes--a bitter sea of thought surging through her mind, and her flash of resolution so giving way before her father's terrible anger, that she felt almost ready to sacrifice her happiness, life, every thing, to obey him and secure peace--when a hand was laid gently upon her shoulder, and the quiet face of Aunt Martha, framed in its widow's cap, peered into her own.

"Oh, Aunt, I am so glad you have come down! I was so lonely and so wretched!" broke out Emily, the moment she felt the touch and saw the face.

"I have been down some time, sitting in the front parlor by the window, and trying to make music out of that very-badly-cracked hand-organ that was playing on the other side of the way," said the widow, taking her seat by the young girl's side. Perhaps five-and-forty years had passed over the widowed younger sister of Judge Owen, who made her home in a quiet upper chamber of his house. But they had not much thinned her tall and magnificent form, or entirely destroyed, though they had completely _subdued_, the quiet beauty of her face, which must once have been strikingly like that of her niece. She had been in youth the underling of her family, as her elder brother had been the tyrant; and it was perhaps a fitting sequel, that at this period of her life she should have become, to some small extent, a pensioner on his bounty, as well as a peacemaker in his household.

"You have been in the front parlor some time?" echoed her niece, surprised. "Then you must have heard--"

"I heard quite enough," was the answer, as Aunt Martha possessed herself of both the young girl's hands, and finally drew down the nut-brown head so that it rested upon her bosom. "I heard a few of your words--enough to tell me what are your feelings toward the man whom they wish to make your husband. I heard your father's fierce resolution, and I made my own."

"And what was that?" asked the young girl, rising from her recumbent position, and showing something of the surprise she felt at hearing her gentle and pliant aunt speak of forming resolutions. She had cause to be more surprised in a moment.

"What was my resolution?" echoed Aunt Martha. "A strange one, perhaps, but one quite as immovable as my big brother's!"

"Yes, yes--tell me, Aunt, _dear_ Aunt!" pleaded Emily, feeling that there was some shadow of hope in such words from such a source.

"My resolution?" said the placid woman, placid now no longer, but starting to her feet, speaking with rapid energy, and seeming, for the moment, half a foot taller than usual--"My resolution is that you shall never marry the man whom I have heard you say that you loathe and detest--not if sacrificing myself can save you--not if I can prevent the wrong, by even taking his life!"

"Aunt! Aunt I what are you saying!" broke out the young girl, surprised, and even horrified. "Do not say so, Aunt, for heaven's sake! I _do_ dislike Col. Bancker; I cannot marry him without misery; but his life! You do not know what words you use."

"Do I not?" said the aunt, and there was a bitterness in her tone which her niece had never before heard there, and which perhaps no one else had heard there for many a long year. "Do I not? His life--pshaw! what is his life, or the life of any man, compared to some other lives that are sacrificed without punishment or even the knowledge of any crime being committed!"

"Aunt, dear Aunt, it is for me that you are saying this, and you know that I thank you; but you are excited, you are not yourself--"

"I _am_ myself--perhaps for the first time in years!" said the widow, the tones of her voice still betraying the same bitterness. "In the last half hour I have lived over again half a life-time of misery. Close that door!" And she pointed to the door leading into the front parlor, with a gesture of command that shamed her brother's most forcible attempt at dignity. Her niece closed the door, and stepped back to her chair. The aunt retained her standing position, and a part of the time walked the floor of the little back parlor with strides that the shorter limbs of Emily could not have compassed, as she went on:

"I had you close that door because I did not wish to speak to the whole house: though the whole house might hear me without disadvantage to themselves. You do not know why I am so much excited: I will tell you. That man--your father and my brother--did an unwise thing in recalling the past by that brutal speech and that rough oath; but he did recall it, and he must take the consequences. I have said that you should not marry that man whom you detest, and you shall not--no matter how I prevent it! But do not mistake me, Emily! I am not arranging that you shall marry another man, and one whom your parents dislike. That is your business, not mine."

"I will not marry against my parents' will or against yours," said Emily, as her aunt paused for a moment--"only prevent my marrying this man whom I dislike, without doing any crime!"

"Hush, and listen to _me_!" said the aunt, almost sternly. "Do you think that it is of yourself alone that I am speaking? No--I am thinking and speaking more of myself than of you. Do you guess the riddle? No, you cannot. Emily, _I have myself once married a man whom I loathed, and I know what it means!_"

"You, Aunt? good heavens!" was the pitying reply of the young girl, while the usually placid widow, occasionally with both hands to her head as if in severe suffering, still walked the room as she spoke.

"You begin to understand me, and you begin to perceive how that man threatening to marry _you_ to a man you hate, has opened again the wounds of my own sacrifice--a sacrifice _he_ made nearly twenty years ago--heaven forgive him! Richard West was a gambler and a libertine. There was an indefinable something which told me as much, very soon after I met him. He was tall and fine-looking, and he had political influence. My brother had a motive for courting him. He carried out that object by introducing him to _me_. I can scarcely say that I loved elsewhere, though I certainly had a preference. From the first I had a dislike to West, which soon grew into absolute aversion. Meanwhile I was allowing myself to be more and more in his company, and my whole family, with my big brother at their head, were importuning me to marry him. I was a little reckless and did not know myself; and I think it was more to get clear of his importunities and theirs, than for any other purpose, that I at last permitted myself to be engaged to him. I hated to be teased--I had no other settled hope in the world--and so I promised to marry a man whom I despised. Are you listening?"

"Yes, dear Aunt, listening with my whole heart as well as my ears!" said the young girl, creeping up to her as she made a momentary pause, and taking one of her aunt's hands in both of her own. Strange to say, the aunt did not permit her hand to be retained. She drew it away as if for the moment she had no care for human sympathy,--and went on with her agitated walk and her narration.

"I had a shuddering horror of the marriage, very soon after my engagement was formed, though I knew nothing, except from my own perception, against the character of West. That feeling grew as the marriage day approached, and I found that instead of schooling myself to meet with calmness what was now inevitable, every day increased an aversion which was both mental and physical. I commenced to make my wedding clothes. I began to think that I would rather be making my shroud. And yet I worked on, stolidly, and bore the caresses of the man who was so soon to be my husband. He grew warmer and warmer in his manifestations as the marriage day approached. I suppose he thought he was flattering and pleasing me! God help him, if he did! I was handsome, I know it--and the sensualist began to gloat over the charms he would so soon have in possession. I began to think how soon the slimy worms would crawl over me! At length all this culminated. West was fool enough to take me one night to the Old Park Theatre, where Ellen Tree was then playing. She played _Julia_, in "The Hunchback," and I heard her make that agonized appeal to _Master Walter_ and allude to the expected horrors of an unloving marriage-bed. My eyes were opened. I saw it all, now, as I had never done before. It was not alone my existence and my mentality that I must sacrifice, but my _body_. That too was to be given up! To what horrible profanation and outrage was I to be subjected! My head grew dizzy and my eyes blind. I shared in the torments of _Julia_--I was _Julia_ herself. I was on the brink of a precipice, with hell beneath me and devils goading me on to the leap. I went home stunned and half crazed. West spoke to me, but I believe that I never answered him a word. If I could have killed him suddenly and without reflection, I should have done it.

"The next day I implored my brother to assist me in breaking the hateful engagement. He refused, insultingly, and threatened me with a ruined reputation and the scorn of every one who knew me, if, after being so notoriously engaged to West, and in his private society so much, the marriage should now be broken off. I had no one else to whom to appeal, and appeal to my _bridegroom_ would have been worse than useless. I could not combat every thing and everybody. My God! my God!--that I should have given up!--but I did. I went on finishing my wedding-clothes, with only a week between me and their use. Oh how I shuddered as my needle ran over the soft white laces and ruffles! They were to deck my dainty limbs for _outrage_--such outrage as I did not then know--and such as you can only dream. I only saw before me a vague horror, but that horror was enough to set me on the dizzy verge of madness, of suicide or of _murder_.

"A week went by, and in the presence of a minister of God I swore to a lie. Richard West swore to another, for he was no more capable of love than of honor. Then followed what, woman though you already are, I cannot tell you of--prostitution, outrage, that left me a poor dishonored _thing_--my womanhood a curse, and the creeping horror of physical repugnance to a loathsome touch my bridal portion! God forgive those who forced me to this! God forgive them!--I do not know that _I_ ever can! Ten years afterwards I saw one happy day--the first since my engagement. It was when Richard West was shot down in a gambling-house by one of his victims, and brought home dead!

"Now, Emily, you know, better than any other living, the heart of the woman who is supposed to be so calm and placid! Now you can have some idea what I have suffered to-night, when I saw the same pit opening for _you_? Do you understand me? Have I said enough?"

"Enough, dear, dear Aunt, but not one word too much! I understand you, I know you, now! Oh, save me, save me at any sacrifice from this marriage!" And the young girl was sobbing in the arms of Aunt Martha, who now that her story was told grew her gentle self again, and smoothed down the brown hair with a promise of aid and sympathy which was not likely to be forfeited.

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