John Munroe Bell had been a lawyer in Albany, State of New York, and as such had thriven well.He had thriven well as long as thrift and thriving on this earth had been allowed to him.But the Almighty had seen fit to shorten his span.
Early in life he had married a timid, anxious, pretty, good little wife, whose whole heart and mind had been given up to do his bidding and deserve his love.She had not only deserved it but had possessed it, and as long as John Munroe Bell had lived, Henrietta Bell--Hetta as he called her--had been a woman rich in blessings.
After twelve years of such blessings he had left her, and had left with her two daughters, a second Hetta, and the heroine of our little story, Susan Bell.
A lawyer in Albany may thrive passing well for eight or ten years, and yet not leave behind him any very large sum of money if he dies at the end of that time.Some small modicum, some few thousand dollars, John Bell had amassed, so that his widow and daughters were not absolutely driven to look for work or bread.
In those happy days when cash had begun to flow in plenteously to the young father of the family, he had taken it into his head to build for himself, or rather for his young female brood, a small neat house in the outskirts of Saratoga Springs.In doing so he was instigated as much by the excellence of the investment for his pocket as by the salubrity of the place for his girls.He furnished the house well, and then during some summer weeks his wife lived there, and sometimes he let it.
How the widow grieved when the lord of her heart and master of her mind was laid in the grave, I need not tell.She had already counted ten years of widowhood, and her children had grown to be young women beside her at the time of which I am now about to speak.
Since that sad day on which they had left Albany they had lived together at the cottage at the Springs.In winter their life had been lonely enough; but as soon as the hot weather began to drive the fainting citizens out from New York, they had always received two or three boarders--old ladies generally, and occasionally an old gentleman--persons of very steady habits, with whose pockets the widow's moderate demands agreed better than the hotel charges.And so the Bells lived for ten years.
That Saratoga is a gay place in July, August, and September, the world knows well enough.To girls who go there with trunks full of muslin and crinoline, for whom a carriage and pair of horses is always waiting immediately after dinner, whose fathers' pockets are bursting with dollars, it is a very gay place.Dancing and flirtations come as a matter of course, and matrimony follows after with only too great rapidity.But the place was not very gay for Hetta or Susan Bell.
In the first place the widow was a timid woman, and among other fears feared greatly that she should be thought guilty of setting traps for husbands.Poor mothers! how often are they charged with this sin when their honest desires go no further than that their bairns may be "respectit like the lave." And then she feared flirtations; flirtations that should be that and nothing more, flirtations that are so destructive of the heart's sweetest essence.
She feared love also, though she longed for that as well as feared it;--for her girls, I mean; all such feelings for herself were long laid under ground;--and then, like a timid creature as she was, she had other indefinite fears, and among them a great fear that those girls of hers would be left husbandless,--a phase of life which after her twelve years of bliss she regarded as anything but desirable.But the upshot was,--the upshot of so many fears and such small means,--that Hetta and Susan Bell had but a dull life of it.
Were it not that I am somewhat closely restricted in the number of my pages, I would describe at full the merits and beauties of Hetta and Susan Bell.As it is I can but say a few words.At our period of their lives Hetta was nearly one-and-twenty, and Susan was just nineteen.Hetta was a short, plump, demure young woman, with the softest smoothed hair, and the brownest brightest eyes.She was very useful in the house, good at corn cakes, and thought much, particularly in these latter months, of her religious duties.Her sister in the privacy of their own little room would sometimes twit her with the admiring patience with which she would listen to the lengthened eloquence of Mr.Phineas Beckard, the Baptist minister.
Now Mr.Phineas Beckard was a bachelor.
Susan was not so good a girl in the kitchen or about the house as was her sister; but she was bright in the parlour, and if that motherly heart could have been made to give out its inmost secret--which however, it could not have been made to give out in any way painful to dear Hetta--perhaps it might have been found that Susan was loved with the closest love.She was taller than her sister, and lighter; her eyes were blue as were her mother's; her hair was brighter than Hetta's, but not always so singularly neat.She had a dimple on her chin, whereas Hetta had none; dimples on her cheeks too, when she smiled; and, oh, such a mouth! There; my allowance of pages permits no more.
One piercing cold winter's day there came knocking at the widow's door--a young man.Winter days, when the ice of January is refrozen by the wind of February, are very cold at Saratoga Springs.In these days there was not often much to disturb the serenity of Mrs.
Bell's house; but on the day in question there came knocking at the door--a young man.
Mrs.Bell kept an old domestic, who had lived with them in those happy Albany days.Her name was Kate O'Brien, but though picturesque in name she was hardly so in person.She was a thick-set, noisy, good-natured old Irishwoman, who had joined her lot to that of Mrs.Bell when the latter first began housekeeping, and knowing when she was well off; had remained in the same place from that day forth.She had known Hetta as a baby, and, so to say, had seen Susan's birth.