Aftermath

In the home where we are hastening,
In our eternal Home on High,
See that you be not rivalled
By the girl with only one eye.[2 - Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote that she had "composed" this poem. It is known to be the work of another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and produced a version of her own.J. L. A.]

Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age—a boy, enormously fat—whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her mother had been decoyed by the general. Further to satirize the similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of yellow ribbon.

Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby's daughter. There is a real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy's true place in nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated with thick tissues of blubber. If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in deep.

Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open letter in her hand.

"Oh, read it!" she cried, her face kindling with glory.

It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the Louisville Journal accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of Kentucky poetesses. The title of the poem was, "My Lover Kneels to None but God."

"I infer from this," I said, gravely, "that your lover is a Kentuckian."

"He is," cried Sylvia. "Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!"

"Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I continued, mildly, "upon having such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion."

"Never!" cried Sylvia. "I would spurn him as chaff!"

"Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued, further, "you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something new to parse."

Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.

"Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in Virgil and Homer. And if he could do that then, think what he must he able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!"

I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr. Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was based upon the fact that he could not parse it.

There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.

This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the collar over his head and was gone. Whither and how long no one knew; but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs. Walters's house—poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head. Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney. Glancing down this, he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and friendly a passage. His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but in Mrs. Walters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could white it, and he dripping with soot. Here the ground beneath him was of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter. In the course of his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.

It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom. She threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted outward.

"Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank with bewilderment. Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been her bed. Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes blazing green with defiance.

She slammed and locked the door.

"Run for the sheriff!" she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought her market basket; and she followed him as he fled.

"What is it, Mrs. Walters?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and bringing the handcuffs.

"There's somebody in my bed!" she cried, wringing her hands. "I believe it's the devil."

"It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing; for by this time we were all gathered together.

"What a dear 'coon!" said the sewing-girl.

"Oh, Mrs. Walters! You are like Little Red Riding-hood!" said Sylvia.

"I can't arrest a 'coon, madam!" exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck at being made ridiculous.

"Then arrest the carpenter!" cried poor, unhappy, excited Mrs. Walters, bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder.

And among us all Georgiana was the only comforter. She laid aside her own work for that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her desperately wounded neighbor, and at nightfall, over the bed, now peaceful and snowy once more, she spread a marvellous priceless quilt that she had long been making to exhibit at the approaching World's Fair in New York.

"Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtime, "it seems to me that things happen in order to show you off."

"Only think!" Georgiana replied; "she will never get into bed again without a shiver and a glance at the chimney. I begrudge her the quilt for one reason: it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in it."

"Did she tell you that she had had those bedclothes ever since her marriage?"

"Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very long."

"How long should you think?"

"Oh, well—about a minute."

"And yet she certainly has the clearest possible idea of Mr. Walters. I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers."

"Or perhaps wish to."

III

The end of August—the night before my marriage.

Several earthquakes have lately been felt in this part of the globe. Coming events cast their shocks before.

The news of it certainly came like the shock of an earthquake to many people of the town, who know perfectly well that no woman will allow the fruit and flowers to be carried off a place as a man will. The sagacious old soul who visits me yearly for young pie-plant actually hurried out and begged for a basketful of the roots at once, thus taking time—and the rhubarb—by the forelock. And the old epicurean harpy whose passion is asparagus, having accosted me gruffly on the street with an inquiry as to the truth of my engagement and been quietly assured, how true it was, informed me to my face that any man situated as happily as I am was an infernal fool to entangle himself with a wife, and bade me a curt and everlasting good-morning on the spot. Yet every day the theme of this old troubadour's talk around the hotels is female entanglements—mendacious, unwifely, and for him unavailing.

Through divers channels some of my fellow-creatures—specimens of the most dreadful prose—have let me know that upon marrying I shall forfeit their usurious regard. As to them, I shall relapse into the privacy of an orchard that has been plucked of its fruit. But my wonderment has grown on the other hand at the number of those to whom, as the significant unit of a family instead of a bachelor zero, I have now acquired a sterling mercantile valuation. Upon the whole, I may fairly compute that my relation to the human race has been totally changed by the little I may cease to give away and by the less that I shall need to buy.

And Mrs. Walters! Although I prefer to think of Mrs. Walters as a singer, owing to her unaccountable powers of reminiscential vocalization, I have upon occasion classified her among the waders; and certainly, upon the day when my engagement to Georgiana transpired, she waded not only all around the town but all over it, sustained by a buoyancy of spirit that enabled her to keep her head above water in depths where her feet no longer touched the bottom.

It was the crowning triumph of this vacant soul's life to boast that she had made this match; and for the sake of giving her so much happiness, I think I should have been willing to marry Georgiana whether I loved her or not.

So we are all happy: Sylvia, who thus enters upon a family right to my flowers and to the distinction of being the only Miss Cobb; Dilsy, who, while gathering vegetables about the garden, long ago began to receive little bundles of quilt pieces thrown down to her with a smile and the right word from the window above; and Jack, who is to drive us on our bridal-trip to the Blue Lick Springs, where he hopes to renew his scientific studies upon the maxillary bones. I have hesitated between Blue Lick and Mud Lick, though to a man in my condition there can be no great difference between blue and mud. And I had thought of the Harrodsburg Springs, but the negro musicians there were lately hurried off to Canada by the underground railway, out of which fact has grown a lawsuit for damages between the proprietor and his abolitionist guest.

A few weeks ago I intrusted a secret to Georgiana. I told her that before she condescended to shine upon this part of the world—now the heavenlier part—I had been engaged upon certain researches and discoveries relating to Kentucky birds, especially to the Kentucky warbler. I admitted that these studies had been wretchedly put aside under the more pressing necessity of fixing the attention of all my powers, ornithological and other, upon her garden window. But as I placed specimens of my notes and drawings in her hand, I remarked gravely that after our marriage I should be ready to push my work forward without delay.

All this was meant to give her a delightful surprise; and indeed she examined the evidences of my undertaking with devouring and triumphant eagerness. But what was my amazement when she handed them back in silence, and with a face as white as though as fragrant as a rose.

"I have distressed you, Georgiana!" I cried, "and my only thought had been to give you pleasure. I am always doing something wrong!"

She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow, as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares. Then she sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap.

"You have shared your secret with me," she said, solemnly, at length. "I'll share mine with yon. It is the only fear that I have ever felt regarding our future. It has never left me; and what you have just shown me fills me with terror."