A Rivermouth Romance

A Rivermouth Romance, by
Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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Title: A Rivermouth Romance
Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23358]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A
RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE ***

Produced by David Widger

A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901

I.
At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front door
of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town of
Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not
open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who
immediately closed it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with
an embarrassed air on the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive
glance up at the second-story windows, passed hastily down the street
towards the river, keeping close to the fences and garden walls on her
left.
There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements,
though there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret
herself. She was a plump, short person, no longer young, with
coal-black hair growing low on the forehead, and a round face that
would have been nearly meaningless if the features had not been
emphasized--italicized, so to speak--by the small-pox. Moreover, the
brilliancy of her toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis
untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon,
whichever one that was) in all her glory was not arrayed like Miss
Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She wore a light-green,
shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow crape bonnet
profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta artificial flowers.
In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly risen sun,
ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point blank on the
top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an imposing
spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in spite of the
bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden walls and
fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near the wharves,
in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning splendor,
if so bold a figure is permissible.

Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine moved slowly up
Anchor Street, fingered noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on
either side, and drained the heeltaps of dew which had been left from
the revels of the fairies overnight in the cups of the morning-glories.
Not a soul was stirring yet in this part of the town, though the
Rivermouthians are such early birds that not a worm may be said to
escape them. By and by one of the brown Holland shades at one of the
upper windows of the Bilkins mansion--the house from which Miss
Margaret had emerged--was drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral
nightcap looked out on the sunny street. Not a living creature was to be
seen, save the dissipated family cat--a very Lovelace of a cat that was
not allowed a night-key--who was sitting on the curbstone opposite,
waiting for the hall door to be opened. Three quarters of an hour, we
repeat, had passed, when Mrs. Margaret O'Rourke, née Callaghan,
issued from the small, dingy house by the river, and regained the
door-step of the Bilkins mansion in the same stealthy fashion in which
she had left it.
Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr.
Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of the
premises before the family were up, and got herself
married--surreptitiously and artfully married, as if matrimony were an
indictable offence.
And something of an offence it was in this instance. In the first place
Margaret Callaghan had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins
family, and the old people--there were no children now--had rewarded
this long service by taking Margaret into their affections. It was a piece
of subtile ingratitude for her to marry without admitting the worthy
couple to her confidence. In the next place, Margaret had married a
man some eighteen years younger than herself. That was the young
man's lookout, you say. We hold it was Margaret that was to blame.
What does a young blade of twenty-two know? Not half so much as he
thinks he does. His exhaust-less ignorance at