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

what to make of
herself. Mr. Raleigh, from the moment in which he perceived that she
no longer sought his company, retreated into his own apartments, and
was less seen by the others than ever.
Returning from the 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?"