Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 39, January, 1861 | Page 8

drive on the morning of Mrs. McLean's last recorded remark, Mr. Raleigh, who had remained to give the horses in charge to a servant, was about to pass, when the tableau within the drawing-room caught his attention and altered his course. He entered, and flung his gloves down on a table, and threw himself on the floor beside Marguerite and the children. She appeared to be revisited by a ray of her old sunshine, and had unrolled a giant parcel of candied sweets, which their mother would have sacrificed on the shrine of jalap and senna, the purchase of a surreptitious moment, and was now dispensing the brilliant comestibles with much ill-subdued glee. One mouth, that had bitten off the head of a checkerberry chanticleer, was convulsed with the acidulous tickling of sweetened laughter, till the biter was bit and a metamorphosis into the animal of attack seemed imminent; at the hands of another a warrior in barley-sugar was experiencing the vernacular for defeat with reproving haste and gravity; and there was yet another little omnivorous creature that put out both hands for indiscriminate snatching, and made a spectacle of himself in a general plaster of gum-arabic-drop and brandy-smash.
"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