Part 4
I am come to y^e laste Entrie I shall ever putt downe in y^s Booke, and needes must y^t I putt it downe quicklie, for all hath Happ'd in so short a Space, y^t my Heade whirles w. thynkinge of it. Y^e after-noone of Yesterdaye, I set about Counterfeittinge of a Head-Ache, & so wel did I compasse it, y^t I verilie thinke one of y^e Twinnes was mynded to Stay Home & nurse me.--All havinge gone off, & Clarence on his waye to Islipp, I sett forth for y^e Churche, where arriv'd I founde it emptie, w. y^e Door open.--Went in & writh'd on y^e hard Benches a 1/4 of an Houre, when, hearinge a Sounde, I look'd up & saw standinge in y^e Door-waye, Katherine Ffrench.--She seem'd muche astonished, saying You Here! or y^e lyke.--I made Answer & sayde y^t though my Familie were greate Sinners, yet had they never been Excommunicate by y^e Churche.--She sayde, they colde not Putt Out what never was In.--While I was bethynkinge me wh. I mighte answer to y^is, she went on, sayinge I must excuse Her, She wolde goe upp in y^e Organ-Lofte.--I enquiring what for? She sayde to practice on y^e Organ.--She turn'd verie Redd, of a warm Coloure, as She sayde this.--I ask'd Do you come hither often? She replyinge Yes, I enquir'd how y^e Organ lyked Her.--She sayde Right well, when I made question more curiously (for She grew more Redd eache moment) how was y^e Action? y^e Tone? how manie Stopps? Wh^at She growinge gretelie Confus'd, I led Her into y^e Churche, & show'd Her y^t there was no Organ, y^e Choire beinge indeede a Band, of i Tuninge-Forke, i Kitt, & i Horse-Fiddle.--At this She fell to Smilinge & Blushinge att one Tyme.--She perceiv'd our Errandes were y^e Same, & crav'd Pardon for Her Fibb.--I tolde Her, If She came Thither to be Witness at her Frend's Weddinge, 'twas no greate Fibb, 'twolde indeede be Practice for Her.--This havinge a rude Sound, I added I thankt y^e Starrs y^t had bro't us Together. She sayde if y^e Starrs appoint'd us to meete no oftener y^n this Couple shoude be Wedded, She was wel content. This cominge on me lyke a last Buffett of Fate, that She shoude so despitefully intreate me, I was suddenlie Seized with so Sorrie a Humour, & withal so angrie, y^t I colde scarce Containe myselfe, but went & Sat downe neare y^e Doore, lookinge out till Clarence shd. come w. his Bride.--Looking over my Sholder, I sawe y^t She wente fm. Windowe to Windowe within, Pluckinge y^e Blossoms fm. y^e Vines, & settinge them in her Girdle.--She seem'd most tall and faire, & swete to look uponn, & itt Anger'd me y^e More.--Meanwhiles, She discours'd pleasantlie, askinge me manie questions, to the wh. I gave but shorte and churlish answers. She ask'd Did I nott Knowe Angelica Roberts was Her best Frend? How longe had I knowne of y^e Betrothal? Did I thinke 'twolde knitt y^e House together, & Was it not Sad to see a Familie thus Divided?--I answer'd Her, I wd. not robb a Man of y^e precious Righte to Quarrell with his Relations.--And then, with meditatinge on y^e goode Lucke of Clarence, & my owne harde Case, I had suche a sudden Rage of peevishnesse y^t I knewe scarcelie what I did.--Soe when She ask'd me merrilie why I turn'd my Backe on Her, I made Reply I had turn'd my Backe on muche Follie.--Wh. was no sooner oute of my Mouthe than I was mightilie Sorrie for it, and turninge aboute, I perceiv'd She was in Teares & weepinge bitterlie. Wh^at my Hearte wolde holde no More, & I rose upp & tooke Her in my arms & Kiss'd & Comforted Her, She makinge no Denyal, but seeminge gretelie to Neede such Solace, wh. I was not Loathe to give Her.--Whiles we were at This, onlie She had gott to Smilinge, & to sayinge of Things which even y^is paper shal not knowe, came in y^e Dominie, sayinge He judg'd We were the Couple he came to Wed.--With him y^e Sexton & y^e Sexton's Wife.--My swete Kate, alle as rosey as Venus's Nape, was for Denyinge of y^is, butt I wolde not have it, & sayde Yes.--She remonstrating w. me, privilie, I tolde Her She must not make me Out a Liar, y^t to Deceave y^e Man of God were a greavous Sinn, y^t I had gott Her nowe, & wd. not lett her Slipp from me, & did soe Talke Her Downe, & w. suche Strengthe of joie, y^t allmost before She knewe it, we Stoode upp, & were Wed, w. a Ringe (tho' She Knewe it nott) wh. belong'd to My G. father. (Him y^t Cheated Her^n.)--
Wh. was no sooner done, than in came Clarence & Angelica, & were Wedded in theyre Turn.--The Clergyman greatelie surprised, but more att y^e Largenesse of his Fee.
This Businesse beinge Ended, we fled by y^e Trayne of 4-1/2 o'cke, to y^is Place, where we wait till y^e Bloode of all y^e Ffrenches have Tyme to coole downe, for y^e wise Mann who meeteth his Mother in Lawe y^e 1^st tyme, wil meete her when she is Milde.--
And so I close y^is Journall, wh., tho' for y^e moste Parte 'tis but a peevish Scrawle, hath one Page of Golde, wh^on I have writt ye laste strange Happ wh^by I have layd Williamson by y^e Heeles & found me y^e sweetest Wife y^t ever
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stopp'd a man's Mouthe w. kisses for writinge of Her Prayses.
TWO BUCKETS IN A WELL.
By N. P. Willis.
(_From "People I Have Met" (now out of print)._)
"Five hundred dollars a year!" echoed Fanny Bellairs, as the first silver gray of the twilight spread over her picture.
"And my art," modestly added the painter, prying into his bright copy of the lips pronouncing upon his destiny.
"And how much may that be, at the present rate of patronage--one picture a year, painted for love!"
"Fanny, how can you be so calculating!"
"By the bumps over my eyebrows, I suppose. Why, my dear coz, we have another state of existence to look forward to--old man-age and old woman-age! What am I to do with five hundred dollars a year, when my old frame wants gilding--(to use one of your own similes)--I sha'n't always be pretty Fanny Bellairs!"
"But, good Heavens! we shall grow old together!" exclaimed the painter, sitting down at her feet, "and what will you care for other admiration, if your husband see you still beautiful, with the eyes of memory and habit."
"Even if I were sure he would so look upon me," answered Miss Bellairs, more seriously, "I cannot but dread an old age without great means of embellishment. Old people, except in poetry and in very primitive society, are dishonored by wants and cares. And, indeed, before we are old--when neither young nor old--we want horses and ottomans, kalydor and conservatories, books, pictures, and silk curtains--all quite out of the range of your little allowance, don't you see!"
"You do not love me, Fanny!"
"I do--and will marry you, Philip--as I, long ago, with my whole heart, promised. But I wish to be happy with you--as happy, quite as happy, as is at all possible, with our best efforts, and coolest, discreetest management. I laugh the matter over sometimes, but I may tell you, since you are determined to be in earnest, that I have treated it, in my solitary thought, as the one important event of my life--(so indeed it is!)--and, as such, worthy of all forethought, patience, self-denial, and calculation. To inevitable ills I can make up my mind like other people. If your art were your only hope of subsistence--why--I don't know--(should I look well as a page?)--I don't know that I couldn't run your errands and grind your paints in hose and doublet. But there is another door open for you--a counting-house door, to be sure--leading to opulence and all the appliances of dignity and happiness, and through this door, my dear Philip, the art you would live by comes to pay tribute and beg for patronage. Now, out of your hundred and twenty reasons, give me the two stoutest and best, why you should refuse your brother's golden offer of partnership--my share, in your alternative of poverty, left for the moment out of the question."
Rather overborne by the confident decision of his beautiful cousin, and having probably made up his mind that he must ultimately yield to her, Philip replied in a lower and more dejected tone:
"If you were not to be a sharer in my renown, should I be so fortunate as to acquire it, I should feel as if it were selfish to dwell so much on my passion for distinction, and my devotion to my pencil as a means of winning it. My heart is full of you--but it is full of ambition, too, paradox though it be. I cannot live ignoble. I should not have felt worthy to press my love upon you--worthy to possess you--except with the prospect of celebrity in my art. You make the world dark to me, Fanny! You close down the sky, when you shut out this hope! Yet it shall be so."
Philip paused a moment, and the silence was uninterrupted.
"There was another feeling I had, upon which I have not insisted," he continued. "By my brother's project, I am to reside almost wholly abroad. Even the little stipend I have to offer you now is absorbed of course by the investment of my property in his trading capital, and marriage, till I have partly enriched myself, would be even more hopeless than at present. Say the interval were five years--and five years of separation!"
"With happiness in prospect, it would soon pass, my dear Philip!"
"But is there nothing wasted in this time? My life is yours--the gift of love. Are not these coming five years the very flower of it!--a mutual loss, too, for are they not, even more emphatically, the very flower of yours? Eighteen and twenty-five are ages at which to marry, not ages to defer. During this time the entire flow of my existence is at its crowning fulness--passion, thought, joy, tenderness, susceptibility to beauty and sweetness--all I have that can be diminished or tarnished, or made dull by advancing age and contact with the world, is thrown away--for its spring and summer. Will the autumn of life repay us for this? Will it--even if we are rich and blest with health, and as capable of an unblemished union as now? Think of this a moment, dear Fanny!"
"I do--it is full of force and meaning, and, could we marry now, with a tolerable prospect of competency, it would be irresistible. But poverty in wedlock, Philip--"
"What do you call poverty? If we can suffice for each other, and have the necessaries of life, we are not poor! My art will bring us consideration enough--which is the main end of wealth, after all--and, of society, speaking for myself only, I want nothing. Luxuries for yourself, Fanny--means for your dear comfort and pleasure--you should not want if the world held them, and surely the unbounded devotion of one man to the support of the one woman he loves, _ought_ to suffice for the task! I am strong--I am capable of labor--I have limbs to toil, if my genius and my present means fail me, and, oh, Heaven! you could not want!"
"No, no, no! I thought not of want!" murmured Miss Bellairs, "I thought only--"
But she was not permitted to finish the sentence.
"Then my bright picture for the future _may_ be realized!" exclaimed Philip, knitting his hands together in a transport of hope. "I may build up a reputation, with _you_ for the constant partner of its triumphs and excitements! I may go through the world, and have some care in life besides subsistence, how I shall sleep, and eat, and accumulate gold; some companion, who, from the threshold of manhood, shared every thought--and knew every feeling--some pure and present angel who walked with me and purified my motives and ennobled my ambitions, and received from my lips and eyes, and from the beating of my heart against her own, all the love I had to give in a lifetime. Tell me, Fanny! tell me, my sweet cousin! is not this a picture of bliss, which, combined with success in my noble art, might make a Paradise on earth for you and me?"
The hand of Fanny Bellairs rested on the upturned forehead of her lover as he sat at her feet in the deepening twilight, and she answered him with such sweet words as are linked together by spells known only to woman--but his palette and pencils were, nevertheless, burned in solemn holocaust that very night, and the lady carried her point, as ladies must. And, to the importation of silks from Lyons, was devoted, thenceforth, the genius of a Raphael--perhaps! Who knows?
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The reader will naturally have gathered from this dialogue that Miss Fanny Bellairs had black eyes, and was rather below the middle stature. She was a belle, and it is only belle-metal of this particular description which is not fusible by "burning words." She had mind enough to appreciate fully the romance and enthusiasm of her cousin, Philip Ballister, and knew precisely the phenomena which a tall _blonde_ (this complexion of woman being soluble in love and tears) would have exhibited under a similar experiment. While the fire of her love glowed, therefore, she opposed little resistance, and seemed softened and yielding, but her purpose remained unaltered, and she rang out "No!" the next morning, with a tone as little changed as a convent-bell from matins to vespers, though it has passed meantime through the furnace of an Italian noon.
Fanny was not a designing girl, either. She might have found a wealthier customer for her heart than her cousin Philip. And she loved this cousin as truly and well as her nature would admit, or as need be, indeed. But two things had conspired to give her the unmalleable quality just described--a natural disposition to confide, first and foremost, on all occasions, in her own sagacity, and a vivid impression made upon her mind by a childhood of poverty. At the age of twelve she had been transferred from the distressed fireside of her mother, Mrs. Bellairs, to the luxurious roof of her aunt, Mrs. Ballister, and, her mother dying soon after, the orphan girl was adopted, and treated as a child; but the memory of the troubled hearth at which she had first learned to observe and reason, colored all the purposes and affections, thoughts, impulses, and wishes of the ripening girl, and to think of happiness in any proximity to privation seemed to her impossible, even though it were in the bosom of love. Seeing no reason to give her cousin credit for any knowledge of the world beyond his own experience, she decided to think for him as well as love him, and, not being so much pressed as the enthusiastic painter by the "_besoin d'aimer et de se faire aimer_," she very composedly prefixed, to the possession of her hand, the trifling achievement of getting rich--quite sure that if he knew as much as she, he would willingly run that race without the incumbrance of matrimony.
The death of Mr. Ballister, senior, had left the widow and her two boys more slenderly provided for than was anticipated--Phil's portion, after leaving college, producing the moderate income before mentioned. The elder brother had embarked in his father's business, and it was thought best on all hands for the younger Ballister to follow his example. But Philip, whose college leisure had been devoted to poetry and painting, and whose genius for the latter, certainly, was very decided, brought down his habits by a resolute economy to the limits of his income, and took up the pencil for a profession. With passionate enthusiasm, great purity of character, distaste for all society not in harmony with his favorite pursuit, and an industry very much concentrated and rendered effective by abstemious habits, Philip Ballister was very likely to develop what genius might lie between his head and hand, and his progress in the first year had been allowed, by eminent artists, to give very unusual promise. The Ballisters were still together, under the maternal roof, and the painter's studies were the portraits of the family, and Fanny's picture, of course, much the most difficult to finish. It would be very hard if a painter's portrait of his liege mistress, the lady of his heart, were not a good picture, and Fanny Bellairs on canvas was divine accordingly. If the copy had more softness of expression than the original (as it was thought to have), it only proves that wise men have for some time suspected, that love is more dumb than blind, and the faults of our faultless idols are noted, however unconsciously. Neither thumb-screws nor hot coals--nothing probably but repentance after matrimony--would have drawn from Philip Ballister, in words, the same correction of his mistress's foible that had oozed out through his treacherous pencil!
Cupid is often drawn as a stranger pleading to be "taken in," but it is a miracle that he is not invariably drawn as a portrait-painter. A bird tied to the muzzle of a gun--an enemy who has written a book--an Indian prince under the protection of Giovanni Bulletto (Tuscan for John Bull),--is not more close upon demolition, one would think, than the heart of a lady delivered over to a painter's eyes, posed, draped, and lighted with the one object of studying her beauty. If there be any magnetism in isolated attention, any in steadfast gazing, any in passes of the hand hither and thither--if there be any magic in _ce doux demi-jour_ so loved in France, in stuff for flattery ready pointed and feathered, in freedom of admiration, "and all in the way of business"--then is a lovable sitter to a love-like painter in "parlous" vicinity (as the new school would phrase it) to sweet heart-land! Pleasure in a vocation has no offset in political economy as honor has ("the more honor the less profit"), or portrait-painters would be poorer than poets.
And, _malgré_ his consciousness of the quality which required softening in his cousin's beauty, and _malgré_ his rare advantages for obtaining over her a lover's proper ascendency, Mr. Philip Ballister bowed to the stronger will of Miss Fanny Bellairs, and sailed for France on his apprenticeship to Mammon.
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The reader will please to advance five years. Before proceeding thence with our story, however, let us take a Parthian glance at the overstepped interval. Philip Ballister had left New York with the triple vow that he would enslave every faculty of his mind and body to business, that he would not return till he had made a fortune, and that such interstices as might occur in the building up of this chateau for felicity should be filled with sweet reveries about Fanny Bellairs. The forsworn painter had genius, as we have before hinted, and genius is (as much as it is any one thing) the power of concentration. He entered upon his duties, accordingly with a force and patience of application which soon made him master of what are called business habits, and, once in possession of the details, his natural cleverness gave him a speedy insight to all the scope and tactics of his particular field of trade. Under his guidance, the affairs of the house were soon in a much more prosperous train, and, after a year's residence at Lyons, Philip saw his way very clear to manage them with a long arm and take up his quarters in Paris. "_Les fats sont les seuls hommes qui aient soin d'eux mêmes_," says a French novelist, but there is a period, early or late, in the lives of the cleverest men, when they become suddenly curious as to their capacity for the graces. Paris, to a stranger who does not visit in the Faubourg St. Germain, is a republic of personal exterior, where the degree of privilege depends, with Utopian impartiality, on the style of the outer man; and Paris, therefore, if he is not already a Bachelor of Arts (qu?--_beau's Arts_), usually serves the traveller as an Alma Mater of the pomps and vanities.
Phil. Ballister, up to the time of his matriculation in _Chaussée d'Antin_, was a romantic-looking sloven. From this to a very dashing coxcomb is but half a step, and, to be rid of the coxcombry and retain a look of fashion, is still within the easy limits of imitation. But--to obtain superiority of presence, with no apparent aid from dress and no describable manner, and to display, at the same time, every natural advantage in effective relief, and, withal, to adapt this subtle philtre, not only to the approbation of the critical and censorious, but to the taste of fair women gifted with judgment as God pleases--this is a finish not born with any man (though unsuccessful if it do not seem to be), and never reached in the apprenticeship of life, and never reached at all by men not much above their fellows. He who has it, has "bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere," for he must know, as a chart of quicksands, the pronounced models of other nations; but to be a "picked man of countries," and to _have been_ a coxcomb and a man of fashion, are, as a painter would say, but the setting of the palette toward the making of the _chef-d'oeoeuvre_.
Business prospered, and the facilities of leisure increased, while Ballister passed through these transitions of taste, and he found intervals to travel, and time to read, and opportunity to indulge, as far as he could with the eye only, his passion for knowledge in the arts. To all that appertained to the refinement of himself, he applied the fine feelers of a delicate and passionate construction, physical and mental, and, as the reader will already have included, wasted on culture comparatively unprofitable, faculties that would have been better employed but for the meddling of Miss Fanny Bellairs.
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