The Courtship of Susan Bell | Page 4

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