Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861

"Contraband?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"And sweet as stolen fruit," said Marguerite. "Ursule makes the richest comfits, but not so innumerable as these. Mamma and I owe our sweet-tooth and honey-lip to bits of her concoction."

"Mrs. Purcell," asked Mr. Raleigh, as that lady entered, "is this little banquet no seduction to you?"

"What are you doing?" she replied.

"Drinking honey-dew from acorns."

"Laudersdale as ever!" ejaculated she, looking over his shoulder. "I thought you had 'no sympathy with'"–

"But I 'like to see other folks take'"–

"Their sweets, in this case. No, thank you," she continued, after this little rehearsal of the past. "What are you poisoning all this brood for?"

"Mrs. Laudersdale eats sweetmeats; they don't poison her," remonstrated Katy.

"Mrs. Laudersdale, my dear, is exceptional."

Katy opened her eyes, as if she had been told that the object of her adoration was Japanese.

"It is the last grain that completes the transformation, as your story-books have told; and one day you will see her stand, a statue of sugar, and melt away in the sun. To be sure, the whole air will be sweetened, but there will be no Mrs. Laudersdale."

"For shame, Mrs. Purcell!" cried Marguerite. "You're not sweet-tempered, or you'd like sweet dainties yourself. Here are nuts swathed in syrup; you'll have none of them? Here are health and slumber and idle dreams in a chocolate-drop. Not a chocolate? Here are dates; if you wouldn't choose the things in themselves, truly you would for their associations? See, when you take up one, what a picture follows it: the plum that has swung at the top of a palm and crowded into itself the glow of those fierce noon-suns; it has been tossed by the sirocco, it has been steeped in reeking dew; there was always stretched above it the blue intense tent of a heaven full of light,—always below and around, long level reaches of hot shining sand; the phantoms of waning desert moons have hovered over it, swarthy Arab chiefs have encamped under it; it has threaded the narrow streets of Damascus—that city the most beautiful—on the backs of gaunt gray dromedaries; it has crossed the seas,—and all for you, if you take it, this product of desert freedom, torrid winds, and fervid suns!"

"I might swallow the date," said Mrs. Purcell, "but Africa would choke me."

Mr. Raleigh had remained silent for some time, watching Marguerite as she talked. It seemed to him that his youth was returning; he forgot his resolves, his desires, and became aware of nothing in the world but her voice. Just before she concluded, she grew conscious of his gaze, and almost at once ceased speaking; her eyes fell a moment to meet it, and then she would have flashed them aside, but that it was impossible; lucid lakes of light, they met his own; she was forced to continue it, to return it, to forget all, as he was forgetting, in that long look.

"What is this?" said Mrs. Purcell, stooping to pick up a trifle on the matting.

" C'est à moi! " cried Marguerite, springing up suddenly, and spilling all the fragments of the feast, to the evident satisfaction of the lately neglected guests.

"Yours?" said Mrs. Purcell with coolness, still retaining it. "Why do you think in French?"

"Because I choose!" said Marguerite, angrily. "I mean—How do you know that I do?"

"Your exclamation, when highly excited or contemptuously indifferent, is always in that tongue."

"Which am I now?"

"Really, you should know best. Here is your bawble"; and Mrs. Purcell tossed it lightly into her hands, and went out.

It was a sheath of old morocco. The motion loosened the clasp, and the contents, an ivory oval and a cushion of faded silk, fell to the floor. Mr. Raleigh bent and regathered them; there was nothing for Marguerite but to allow that he should do so. The oval had reversed in falling, so that he did not see it; but, glancing at her before returning it, he found her face and neck dyed deeper than the rose. Still reversed, he was about to relinquish it, when Mrs. McLean passed, and, hearing the scampering of little feet as they fled with booty, she also entered.

"Seeing you reminds me, Roger," said she. "What do you suppose has become of that little miniature I told you of? I was showing it to Marguerite the other night, and have not seen it since. I must have mislaid it, and it was particularly valuable, for it was some nameless thing that Mrs. Heath found among her mother's trinkets, and I begged it of her, it was such a perfect likeness of you. Can you have seen it?"

"Yes, I have it," he replied. "And haven't I as good a right to it as any?"

He extended his arm for the case which Marguerite held, and so touching her hand, the touch was more lingering than it needed to be; but he avoided looking at her, or he would have seen that the late color had fled till the face was whiter than marble.

"Your old propensities," said Mrs. McLean. "You always will be a boy. By the way, what do you think of Mary Purcell's engagement? I thought she would always be a girl."

"Ah! McLean was speaking of it to me. Why were they not engaged before?"

"Because she was not an heiress."

Mr. Raleigh raised his eyebrows significantly.

"He could not afford to marry any but an heiress," explained Mrs. McLean.

Mr. Raleigh fastened the case and restored it silently.

"You think that absurd? You would not marry an heiress?"

Mr. Raleigh did not at once reply.

"You would not, then, propose to an heiress?"

"No."

As this monosyllable fell from his lips, Marguerite's motion placed her beyond hearing. She took a few swift steps, but paused and leaned against the wall of the gable for support, and, placing her hand upon the sun-beat bricks, she felt a warmth in them which there seemed to be neither in herself nor in the wide summer-air.

Mrs. Purcell came along, opening her parasol.

"I am going to the orchard," said she; "cherries are ripe. Hear the robins and the bells! Do you want to come?"

"No," said Marguerite.

"There are bees in the orchard, too,—the very bees, for aught I know, that Mr. Raleigh used to watch thirteen years ago, or their great-grand-bees,—they stand in the same place."

"You knew Mr. Raleigh thirteen years ago?" she asked, glancing up curiously.

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Very well."

"How much is very well?"

"He proposed to me. Smother your anger; he didn't care for me; some one told him that I cared for him."

"Did you?"

"This is what the Inquisition calls applying the question?" asked Mrs. Purcell. "Nonsense, dear child! he was quite in love with somebody else."

"And that was–?"

"He supposed your mother to be a widow. Well, if you won't come, I shall go alone and read my 'L'Allegro' under the boughs, with breezes blowing between the lines. I can show you some little field-mice like unfledged birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then glittering eyes and cleft fangs."

Marguerite was silent; the latter commodity was de trop . Mrs. Purcell adjusted her parasol and passed on.

Here, then, was the whole affair. Marguerite pressed her hands to her forehead, as if fearful some of the swarming thoughts should escape; then she hastened up the slope behind the house, and entered and hid herself in the woods. Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother. Of course, then, there was not a shadow of doubt that her mother had loved him. Horrible thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it seemed that she loathed him,—that she despised the woman who had given him regard. The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation; there was no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was alone and forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But that could not be forever. As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old words, old looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what long years of silent suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning the other; she saw how her mother's haughty calm might be the crust on a lava-sea; she felt what desolation must have filled Roger Raleigh's heart, when he found that she whom he had loved no longer lived, that he had cherished a lifeless ideal,—for Marguerite knew from his own lips that he had not met the same woman whom he had left.