It was no “fancy sketch,” but a likeness of “Our Keziah.”
Silenced but not convinced, I restrained the impulse to tell my mates that stories might be made out of nothing. I knew it, and so did my only confidante, the handsome governess from Massachusetts, who had been installed in our school-room since June.
Mr. Tayloe had gone back to the theological factory to prosecute the studies that were to fit him to proclaim the gospel of love and peace. On the last day of the session he had preached us a short sermon, seated in his chair at the head of the room, twirling the seal dangling from his watch-chain; his legs crossed, the left hand tucked between them; his brows drawn together in the ugly horseshoe we knew well and dreaded much.
He must have descanted darkly upon the transitoriness of earthly joys and the hard road to heaven, for every girl in school was in tears except Mea and myself.
As for my wicked self, as I privately confessed subsequently to my father’s young partner, “Thad” Ivey—“I could think of nothing but Franklin’s grace over the whole barrel.” In the ten months of his incumbency of the tutorship, the incipient divine had never so much as hinted to one of us that she had a soul.
“I suppose I ought to say that it is like returning thanks over the empty barrel,” I subjoined, encouraged by my interlocutor’s keen relish of the irreverent and impertinent comment upon the scene of the afternoon. “Thad” and I were great friends, and I had an idea that our views upon this subject did not differ widely.
Mrs. Willis D., our nearest neighbor, was with my mother, and when the tear-bedraggled procession from the school-room filed into the porch where the two friends were sitting with three other of the villagers, and Virginia Winfree threw herself into her aunt’s arms with a strangled sob of: “Oh, Aunt Betty, he did preach so hard!”—the dry-eyed composure of the Hawes girls was regarded with disfavor.
“Your daughters have so much fortitude!” remarked one, mopping her girl’s eyes with a compassionate handkerchief.
Another, “They show wonderful self-control for their age.”
Even our sensible mother was slightly scandalized by what she “hoped,” deprecatingly, “was not want of feeling.”
Tears were fashionable, and came easily in those early times, and weeping in church was such a godly exercise that conversation or exhortation upon what was, in technical phrase, “the subject of religion,” brought tears as naturally as the wringing of a moist sponge, water.
“What did you cry for?” demanded I, scornfully, of Anne Carus, when I got her away from the porch party. “You hate him as much as I do!”
“Oh—I don’t—know!” dubiously. “People always cry when anybody makes a farewell speech.”
So the Reverend-that-was-to-be Tayloe took his shadow from our door and his beak from out my heart. The quotation is not a mere figure of speech.
The handsome Yankee governess opened the door of a new life for me. Some of the parents complained that she “did not bring the children on as fast as Mr. Tayloe had done.” Me, she inspired. I comprehended, as by a special revelation, that hard study might be a joy, and gain of knowledge rapture. With her I began Vose’s Astronomy, Comstock’s Natural Philosophy, and Lyell’s Elements of Geology, and revelled in them all. Her smile was my present reward, and when she offered to join me in my seemingly aimless rambles in the woods and “old fields,” I felt honored as by a queen’s favor. We sat together upon mossy stumps and the banks of the brook I had until then called “a branch” in native Virginian dialect—talking! talking! talking! for hours, of nymphs, hamadryads, satyrs, and everything else in the world of imagination and nature.
She wrote poetry, and she kept a diary; she had travelled in ten states of the Union, and lived in three different cities; and she never tired of answering questions as to what she had seen in her wanderings. Her nature was singularly sweet and sunny, and I never, in all the ten months of our intimacy, saw in language and deportment aught that was not refined and gentle.
With her I began to write school “compositions.” The “big girls” wrote them under the Tayloe régime—neat little essays upon “The Rose,” “The Lily,” “Morning,” “Night,” and all of the Four Seasons. Never a syllable had I lisped to one of them of the growing hoard of rhymes, tales, and sketches in the shabby, corpulent portfolio I had fashioned with my own fingers and kept in the bottom of a trunk under flannel skirts and last year’s outgrown frocks.
I brought them out of limbo to show to Miss Wilson, by timid degrees, and new manuscripts as fast as they were written. She praised them, but not without discrimination. She suggested topics, and how to treat them. I never carried an imperfect lesson to her in class. Intellect and heart throve under her genial influence as frost-hindered buds under May sunshine.
“The Fancy Sketch” was so like her it was natural I should refuse to believe the resemblance accidental. It was as plain as day to my apprehension that the unknown artist had seen her somewhere, and, unseen by her, had dogged her footsteps until he fixed her face in his mind’s eye, then transferred it to canvas.
It was a shock when the probability of his pursuit of her to Virginia, avowing his passion and being rewarded by the gift of her hand, was dissipated by the apparition of a matter-of-fact personage, McPhail by name, who was neither poet nor artist. He had been betrothed to our governess for ever so long. He spent a fortnight at the “Old Tavern,” opposite our house, and claimed all of the waking hours she could spare from school duties.
The finale of the romance was that she went back to the North at the end of her year’s engagement with us, and married him, settling, we heard, in what sounded like an outlandish region—Cape Neddick, on the Maine coast.
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