Marjorie Daw
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Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> Marjorie Daw
Transcript prepared by Susan L. Farley.
Majorie Daw
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I.
DR. DILLON TO EDWARD DELANEY, ESQ., AT THE PINES.
NEAR RYE, N.H.
August 8, 1872.
My Dear Sir: I am happy to assure you that your anxiety is without
reason. Flemming will be confined to the sofa for three or four
weeks, and will have to be careful at first how he uses his leg. A
fracture of this kind is always a tedious affair. Fortunately the
bone was very skilfully set by the surgeon who chanced to be in the
drugstore where Flemming was brought after his fall, and I
apprehend no permanent inconvenience from the accident. Flemming is
doing perfectly well physically; but I must confess that the
irritable and morbid state of mind into which he has fallen causes
me a great deal of uneasiness. He is the last man in the world who
ought to break his leg. You know how impetuous our friend is
ordinarily, what a soul of restlessness and energy, never content
unless he is rushing at some object, like a sportive bull at a red
shawl; but amiable withal. He is no longer amiable. His temper has
become something frightful. Miss Fanny Flemming came up from
Newport, where the family are staying for the summer, to nurse him;
but he packed her off the next morning in tears. He has a complete
set of Balzac's works, twenty-seven volumes, piled up near his
sofa, to throw at Watkins whenever that exemplary serving-man
appears with his meals. Yesterday I very innocently brought
Flemming a small basket of lemons. You know it was a strip of
lemonpeel on the curbstone that caused our friend's mischance.
Well, he no sooner set is eyes upon those lemons than he fell into
such a rage as I cannot adequately describe. This is only one of
moods, and the least distressing. At other times he sits with bowed
head regarding his splintered limb, silent, sullen, despairing.
When this fit is on him--and it sometimes lasts all day--nothing
can distract his melancholy. He refuses to eat, does not even read
the newspapers; books, except as projectiles for Watkins, have no
charms for him. His state is truly pitiable.
Now, if he were a poor man, with a family depending on his daily
labor, this irritability and despondency would be natural enough.
But in a young fellow of twenty-four, with plenty of money and
seemingly not a care in the world, the thing is monstrous. If he
continues to give way to his vagaries in this manner, he will end
by bringing on an inflammation of the fibula. It was the fibula he
broke. I am at my wits' end to know what to prescribe for him. I
have anaesthetics and lotions, to make people sleep and to soothe
pain; but I've no medicine that will make a man have a little
common-sense. That is beyond my skill, but maybe it is not beyond
yours. You are Flemming's intimate friend, his fidus Achates. Write
to him, write to him frequently, distract his mind, cheer him up,
and prevent him from becoming a confirmed case of melancholia.
Perhaps he has some important plans disarranged by his present
confinement. If he has you will know, and will know how to advise
him judiciously. I trust your father finds the change beneficial?
I am, my dear sir, with great respect, etc.
II.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING, WEST 38TH STREET,
NEW YORK.
August 9, 1872.
My Dear Jack: I had a line from Dillon this morning, and was
rejoiced to learn that your hurt is not so bad as reported. Like a
certain personage, you are not so black and blue as you are
painted. Dillon will put you on your pins again in two to three
weeks, if you will only have patience and follow his counsels. Did
you get my note of last Wednesday? I was greatly troubled when I
heard of the accident.
I can imagine how tranquil and saintly you are with your leg in a
trough! It is deuced awkward, to be sure, just as we had promised
ourselves a glorious month together at the sea-side; but we must
make the best of it. It is unfortunate, too, that my father's
health renders it impossible for me to leave him. I think he has
much improved; the sea air is his native element; but he still
needs my arm to lean upon in his walks, and requires some one more
careful that a servant to look after him. I cannot come to you,
dear Jack, but I have hours of unemployed time on hand, and I will
write you a whole post-office full of letters, if that will divert
you. Heaven knows, I haven't anything to write about. It isn't as
if we were living at one of the beach houses; then I could do you
some character studies, and fill your imagination with groups of
sea-goddesses, with their (or somebody else's) raven and blonde
manes hanging down their shoulders. You should have Aphrodite in
morning wrapper, in evening costume, and in her prettiest bathing
suit. But we are far from all that here. We have rooms in a
farm-house, on a cross-road, two miles from the hotels, and lead
the quietest of lives.
I wish I were a novelist. This old house, with its sanded floors
and high wainscots, and its narrow windows looking out upon a
cluster of pines that turn themselves into aeolian harps every time
the wind blows, would be the place in which to write a summer
romance. It should be a story with the odors of the forest and the
breath of the sea in it. It should be a novel like one of that
Russian fellow's--what's his name?--Tourguenieff, Turguenef,
Turgenif, Toorguniff, Turgenjew--nobody knows how to spell him. Yet
I wonder if even a Liza or an Alexandra Paulovna could stir the
heart of a man who has constant twinges in his leg. I wonder if one
of our own Yankee girls of the best type, haughty and spirituelle,
would be of any comfort to you in your present deplorable
condition. If I thought so, I would hasten down to the Surf House
and catch one for you; or, better still, I would find you one over
the way.
Picture to yourself a large white house just across the road,
nearly opposite our cottage. It is not a house, but a mansion,
built, perhaps, in the colonial period, with rambling extensions,
and gambrel roof, and a wide piazza on three sides--a self-
possessed, high-bred piece of architecture, with its nose in the
air. It stands back from the road, and has an obsequious retinue of
fringed elms and oaks and weeping willows. Sometimes in the
morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn
from that part of the mansions, a young woman appears on the piazza
with some mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a
book. There is a hammock over there--of pineapple fibre, it looks
from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and has
golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress
looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is
chaussee like a belle of the time of Louis Quatorze. All this
splendor goes into that hammock, and sways there like a pond-lily
in the golden afternoon. The window of my bedroom looks down on
that piazza--and so do I.
But enough of the nonsense, which ill becomes a sedate young
attorney taking his vacation with an invalid father. Drop me a
line, dear Jack, and tell me how you really are. State your case.
Write me a long, quite letter. If you are violent or abusive, I'll
take the law to you.
III.
JOHN FLEMMING TO EDWARD DELANEY.
August 11, 1872.
Your letter, dear Ned, was a godsend. Fancy what a fix I am in--I,
who never had a day's sickness since I was born. My left leg weighs
three tons. It is embalmed in spices and smothered in layers of
fine linen, like a mummy. I can't move. I haven't moved for five
thousand years. I'm of the time of Pharaoh.
I lie from morning till night on a lounge, staring into the hot
street. Everybody is out of town enjoying himself. The brown-stone-
front houses across the street resemble a row of particularly ugly
coffins set up on end. A green mould is settling on the names of
the deceased, carved on the silver door-plates. Sardonic spiders
have sewed up the key-holes. All is silence and dust and
desolation. --I interrupt this a moment, to take a shy at Watkins
with the second volume of Cesar Birotteau. Missed him! I think I
could bring him down with a copy of Sainte-Beuve or the
Dictionnaire Universel, if I had it. These small Balzac books
somehow do not quite fit my hand; but I shall fetch him yet. I've
an idea that Watkins is tapping the old gentleman's Chateau Yquem.
Duplicate key of the wine-cellar. Hibernian swarries in the front
basement. Young Cheops up stairs, snug in his cerements. Watkins
glides into my chamber, with that colorless, hypocritical face of
his drawn out long like an accordion; but I know he grins all the
way down stairs, and is glad I have broken my leg. Was not my evil
star in the very zenith when I ran up to town to attend that dinner
at Delmonico's? I didn't come up altogether for that. It was partly
to buy Frank Livingstone's roan mare Margot. And now I shall not be
able to sit in the saddle these two months. I'll send the mare down
to you at The Pines--is that the name of the place?
Old Dillon fancies that I have something on my mind. He drives me
wild with lemons. Lemons for a mind diseased! Nonsense. I am only
as restless as the devil under this confinement--a thing I'm not
used to. Take a man who has never had so much as a headache or a
toothache in his life, strap one of his legs in a section of water-
spout, keep him in a room in the city for weeks, with the hot
weather turned on, and then expect him to smile and purr and be
happy! It is preposterous. I can't be cheerful or calm.
Your letter is the first consoling thing I have had since my
disaster, ten days ago. It really cheered me up for half an hour.
Send me a screed, Ned, as often as you can, if you love me.
Anything will do. Write me more about that little girl in the
hammock. That was very pretty, all that about the Dresden china
shepherdess and the pond-lily; the imagery a little mixed, perhaps,
but very pretty. I didn't suppose you had so much sentimental
furniture in your upper story. It shows how one may be familiar for
years with the reception-room of his neighbor, and never suspect
what is directly under his mansard. I supposed your loft stuffed
with dry legal parchments, mortgages, and affidavits; you take down
a package of manuscript, and lo! there are lyrics and sonnets and
canzonettas. You really have a graphic descriptive touch, Edward
Delaney, and I suspect you of anonymous love-tales in the
magazines.
I shall be a bear until I hear from you again. Tell me all about
your pretty inconnue across the road. What is her name? Who is she?
Who's her father? Where's her mother? Who's her lover? You cannot
imagine how this will occupy me. The more trifling, the better. My
imprisonment has weakened me intellectually to such a degree that I
find your epistolary gifts quite considerable. I am passing into my
second childhood. In a week or two I shall take to India rubber
rings and prongs of coral. A silver cup, with an appropriate
inscription, would be a delicate attention on your part. In the
mean time, write!
IV.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING.
August 12, 1872.
The sick pasha shall be amused. Bismillah! he wills it so. If the
story-teller becomes prolix and tedious--the bow-string and the
sack, and two Nubians to drop him into the Piscataqua! But truly,
Jack, I have a hard task. There is literally nothing here--except
the little girl over the way. She is swinging in the hammock at
this moment. It is to me compensation for many of the ills of life
to see her now and then put out a small kid boot, which fits like a
glove, and set herself going. Who is she, and what is her name? Her
name is Daw. Only daughter if Mr. Richard W. Daw, ex-colonel and
banker. Mother dead. One brother at Harvard, elder brother killed
at the battle of Fair Oaks, ten years ago. Old, rich family, the
Daws. This is the homestead, where father and daughter pass eight
months of the twelve; the rest of the year in Baltimore and
Washington. The New England winter too many for the old gentleman.
The daughter is called Marjorie--Marjorie Daw. Sounds odd at first,
doesn't it? But after you say it over to yourself half a dozen
times, you like it. There's a pleasing quaintness to it, something
prim and violet-like. Must be a nice sort of girl to be called
Marjorie Daw.
I had mine host of The Pines in the witness-box last night, and
drew the foregoing testimony from him. He has charge of Mr. Daw's
vegetable-garden, and has known the family these thirty years. Of
course I shall make the acquaintance of my neighbors before many
days. It will be next to impossible for me not to meet Mr. Daw or
Miss Daw in some of my walks. The young lady has a favorite path to
the sea-beach. I shall intercept her some morning, and touch my hat
to her. Then the princess will bend her fair head to me with
courteous surprise not unmixed with haughtiness. Will snub me, in
fact. All this for thy sake, O Pasha of the Snapt Axle-tree!. . .
How oddly things fall out! Ten minutes ago I was called down to the
parlor--you know the kind of parlors in farm-houses on the coast, a
sort of amphibious parlor, with sea-shells on the mantel-piece and
spruce branches in the chimney-place--where I found my father and
Mr. Daw doing the antique polite to each other. He had come to pay
his respects to his new neighbors. Mr. Daw is a tall, slim
gentleman of about fifty-five, with a florid face and snow-white
mustache and side-whiskers. Looks like Mr. Dombey, or as Mr. Dombey
would have looked if he had served a few years in the British Army.
Mr. Daw was a colonel in the late war, commanding the regiment in
which his son was a lieutenant. Plucky old boy, backbone of New
Hampshire granite. Before taking his leave, the colonel delivered
himself of an invitation as if he were issuing a general order.
Miss Daw has a few friends coming, at 4 p.m., to play croquet on
the lawn (parade-ground) and have tea (cold rations) on the piazza.
Will we honor them with our company? (or be sent to the guard-
house.) My father declines on the plea of ill-health. My father's
son bows with as much suavity as he knows, and accepts.
In my next I shall have something to tell you. I shall have seen
the little beauty face to face. I have a presentiment, Jack, that
this Daw is a rara avis! Keep up your spirits, my boy, until I
write you another letter--and send me along word how's your leg.
V.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING.
August 13, 1872.
The party, my dear Jack, was as dreary as possible. A lieutenant of
the navy, the rector of the Episcopal Church at Stillwater, and a
society swell from Nahant. The lieutenant looked as if he had
swallowed a couple of his buttons, and found the bullion rather
indigestible; the rector was a pensive youth, of the daffydowndilly
sort; and the swell from Nahant was a very weak tidal wave indeed.
The women were much better, as they always are; the two Miss
Kingsburys of Philadelphia, staying at the Seashell House, two
bright and engaging girls. But Marjorie Daw!
The company broke up soon after tea, and I remained to smoke a
cigar with the colonel on the piazza. It was like seeing a picture,
to see Miss Marjorie hovering around the old soldier, and doing a
hundred gracious little things for him. She brought the cigars and
lighted the tapers with her own delicate fingers, in the most
enchanting fashion. As we sat there, she came and went in the
summer twilight, and seemed, with her white dress and pale gold
hair, like some lovely phantom that had sprung into existence
out of the smokewreaths. If she had melted into air, like the
statue of Galatea in the play, I should have been more sorry than
surprised.
It was easy to perceive that the old colonel worshipped her and she
him. I think the relation between an elderly father and a daughter
just blooming into womanhood the most beautiful possible. There is
in it a subtile sentiment that cannot exist in the case of mother
and daughter, or that of son and mother. But this is getting into
deep water.
I sat with the Daws until half past ten, and saw the moon rise on
the sea. The ocean, that had stretched motionless and black against
the horizon, was changed by magic into a broken field of glittering
ice, interspersed with marvellous silvery fjords. In the far
distance the Isle of Shoals loomed up like a group of huge bergs
drifting down on us. The Polar Regions in a June thaw! It was
exceedingly fine. What did we talk about? We talked about the
weather--and you! The weather has been disagreeable for several
days past--and so have you. I glided from one topic to the other
very naturally. I told my friends of your accident; how it had
frustrated all our summer plans, and what our plans were. I played
quite a spirited solo on the fibula. Then I described you; or,
rather, I didn't. I spoke of your amiability, of your patience
under this severe affliction; of your touching gratitude when
Dillon brings you little presents of fruit; of your tenderness to
your sister Fanny, whom you would not allow to stay in town to
nurse you, and how you heroically sent her back to Newport,
preferring to remain alone with Mary, the cook, and your man
Watkins, to whom, by the way, you were devotedly attached. If you
had been there, Jack, you wouldn't have known yourself. I should
have excelled as a criminal lawyer, if I had not turned my
attention to a different branch of jurisprudence.
Miss Marjorie asked all manner of leading questions concerning you.
It did not occur to me then, but it struck me forcibly afterwards,
that she evinced a singular interest in the conversation. When I
got back to my room, I recalled how eagerly she leaned forward,
with her full, snowy throat in strong moonlight, listening to what
I said. Positively, I think I made her like you!
Miss Daw is a girl whom you would like immensely, I can tell you
that. A beauty without affectation, a high and tender nature--if
one can read the soul in the face. And the old colonel is a noble
character, too.
I am glad that the Daws are such pleasant people. The Pines is an
isolated spot, and my resources are few. I fear I should have found
life here somewhat monotonous before long, with no other society
than that of my excellent sire. It is true, I might have made a
target of the defenceless invalid; but I haven't a taste for
artillery, moi.
VI.
JOHN FLEMMING TO EDWARD DELANEY.
August 17, 1872.
For a man who hasn't a taste for artillery, it occurs to me, my
friend, you are keeping up a pretty lively fire on my inner works.
But go on. Cynicism is a small brass field-piece that eventually
bursts and kills the artilleryman.
You may abuse me as much as you like, and I'll not complain; for I
don't know what I should do without your letters. They are curing
me. I haven't hurled anything at Watkins since last Sunday, partly
because I have grown more amiable under your teaching, and partly
because Watkins captured my ammunition one night, and carried it
off to the library. He is rapidly losing the habit he had acquired
of dodging whenever I rub my ear, or make any slight motion with my
right arm. He is still suggestive of the wine-cellar, however. You
may break, you may shatter Watkins, if you will, but the scent of
the Roederer will hang round him still.
Ned, that Miss Daw must be a charming person. I should certainly
like her. I like her already. When you spoke in your first letter
of seeing a young girl swinging in a hammock under your chamber
window, I was somehow strangely drawn to her. I cannot account for
it in the least. What you have subsequently written of Miss Daw has
strengthened the impression. You seem to be describing a woman I
have known in some previous state of existence, or dreamed of in
this. Upon my word, if you were to send me her photograph, I
believe I should recognize her at a glance. Her manner, that
listening attitude, her traits of character, as you indicate them,
the light hair and the dark eyes--they are all familiar things to
me. Asked a lot of questions, did she? Curious about me? That is
strange.
You would laugh in your sleeve, you wretched old cynic, if you knew
how I lie awake nights, with my gas turned down to a star, thinking
of The Pines and the house across the road. How cool it must be
down there! I long for the salt smell in the air. I picture the
colonel smoking his cheroot on the piazza. I send you and Miss Daw
off on afternoon rambles along the beach. Sometimes I let you
stroll with her under the elms in the moonlight, for you are great
friends by this time, I take it, and see each other every day. I
know your ways and your manners! Then I fall into a truculent
mood, and would like to destroy somebody. Have you noticed anything
in the shape of a lover hanging around the colonel Lares and
Penates? Does that lieutenant of the horse-marines or that young
Stillwater parson visit the house much? Not that I am pining for
news of them, but any gossip of the kind would be in order. I
wonder, Ned, you don't fall in love with Miss Daw. I am ripe to do
it myself. Speaking of photographs, couldn't you manage to slip
one of her cartes-de-visite from her album--she must have an album,
you know--and send it to me? I will return it before it could be
missed. That's a good fellow! Did the mare arrive safe and sound?
It will be a capital animal this autumn for Central Park.
Oh--my leg? I forgot about my leg. It's better.
VII.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMIMG.
August 20, 1872.
You are correct in your surmises. I am on the most friendly terms
with our neighbors. The colonel and my father smoke their afternoon
cigar together in our sitting-room or on the piazza opposite, and I
pass an hour or two of the day or the evening with the daughter. I
am more and more struck by the beauty, modesty, and intelligence of
Miss Daw.
You asked me why I do not fall in love with her. I will be frank,
Jack; I have thought of that. She is young, rich, accomplished,
uniting in herself more attractions, mental and personal, than I
can recall in any girl of my acquaintance; but she lacks the
something that would be necessary to inspire in me that kind of
interest. Possessing this unknown quality, a woman neither
beautiful nor wealthy nor very young could bring me to her feet.
But not Miss Daw. If we were shipwrecked together on an uninhabited
island--let me suggest a tropical island, for it costs no more to
be picturesque--I would build her a bamboo hut, I would fetch her
bread-fruit and cocoanuts, I would fry yams for her, I would lure
the ingenuous turtle and make her nourishing soups, but I wouldn't
make love to her--not under eighteen months. I would like to have
her for a sister, that I might shield her and counsel her, and
spend half my income on old threadlace and camel's-hair shawls. (We
are off the island now.) If such were not my feeling, there would
still be an obstacle to my loving Miss Daw. A greater misfortune
could scarcely befall me than to love her. Flemming, I am about to
make a revelation that will astonish you. I may be all wrong in my
premises and consequently in my conclusions; but you shall judge.
That night when I returned to my room after the croquet party at
the Daw's, and was thinking over the trivial events of the evening,
I was suddenly impressed by the air of eager attention with which
Miss Daw had followed my account of your accident. I think I
mentioned this to you. Well, the next morning, as I went to mail my
letter, I overtook Miss Daw on the road to Rye, where the post-
office is, and accompanied her thither and back, an hour's walk.
The conversation again turned to you, and again I remarked that
inexplicable look of interest which had lighted up her face the
previous evening. Since then, I have seen Miss Daw perhaps ten
times, perhaps oftener, and on each occasion I found that when I
was not speaking of you, or your sister, or some person or place
associated with you, I was not holding her attention. She would be
absent-minded, her eyes would wander away from me to the sea, or to
some distant object in the landscape; her fingers would play with
the leaves of a book in a way that convinced me she was not
listening. At these moments if I abruptly changed the theme--I did
it several times as an experiment--and dropped some remark about my
friend Flemming, then the sombre blue eyes would come back to me
instantly.
Now, is not this the oddest thing in the world? No, not the oddest.
The effect which you tell me was produced on you by my casual
mention of an unknown girl swinging in a hammock is certainly as
strange. You can conjecture how that passage in your letter of
Friday startled me. Is it possible, than, that two people who have
never met, and who are hundreds of miles apart, can exert a
magnetic influence on each other? I have read of such psychological
phenomena, but never credited them. I leave the solution of the
problem to you. As for myself, all other things being favorable, it
would be impossible for me to fall in love with a woman who listens
to me only when I am talking of my friend!