The Europeans | Page 9

observation made by a young girl
who came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled about
in the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road. The
flowering shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in the
abundant light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms--
they were magnificent trees--seemed to thicken by the hour; and the
intensely habitual stillness offered a submissive medium to the sound
of a distant church-bell. The young girl listened to the church-bell; but
she was not dressed for church. She was bare-headed; she wore a white
muslin waist, with an embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress
was of colored muslin. She was a young lady of some two or three and
twenty years of age, and though a young person of her sex walking
bare-headed in a garden, of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in
the nature of things, never be a displeasing object, you would not have
pronounced this innocent Sabbath-breaker especially pretty. She was

tall and pale, thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and perfectly
straight; her eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of seeming at
once dull and restless--differing herein, as you see, fatally from the
ideal "fine eyes," which we always imagine to be both brilliant and
tranquil. The doors and windows of the large square house were all
wide open, to admit the purifying sunshine, which lay in generous
patches upon the floor of a wide, high, covered piazza adjusted to two
sides of the mansion--a piazza on which several straw-bottomed
rocking-chairs and half a dozen of those small cylindrical stools in
green and blue porcelain, which suggest an affiliation between the
residents and the Eastern trade, were symmetrically disposed. It was an
ancient house--ancient in the sense of being eighty years old; it was
built of wood, painted a clean, clear, faded gray, and adorned along the
front, at intervals, with flat wooden pilasters, painted white. These
pilasters appeared to support a kind of classic pediment, which was
decorated in the middle by a large triple window in a boldly carved
frame, and in each of its smaller angles by a glazed circular aperture. A
large white door, furnished with a highly-polished brass knocker,
presented itself to the rural-looking road, with which it was connected
by a spacious pathway, paved with worn and cracked, but very clean,
bricks. Behind it there were meadows and orchards, a barn and a pond;
and facing it, a short distance along the road, on the opposite side,
stood a smaller house, painted white, with external shutters painted
green, a little garden on one hand and an orchard on the other. All this
was shining in the morning air, through which the simple details of the
picture addressed themselves to the eye as distinctly as the items of a
"sum" in addition.
A second young lady presently came out of the house, across the piazza,
descended into the garden and approached the young girl of whom I
have spoken. This second young lady was also thin and pale; but she
was older than the other; she was shorter; she had dark, smooth hair.
Her eyes, unlike the other's, were quick and bright; but they were not at
all restless. She wore a straw bonnet with white ribbons, and a long, red,
India scarf, which, on the front of her dress, reached to her feet. In her
hand she carried a little key.

"Gertrude," she said, "are you very sure you had better not go to
church?"
Gertrude looked at her a moment, plucked a small sprig from a
lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away. "I am not very sure of
anything!" she answered.
The other young lady looked straight past her, at the distant pond,
which lay shining between the long banks of fir-trees. Then she said in
a very soft voice, "This is the key of the dining-room closet. I think you
had better have it, if any one should want anything."
"Who is there to want anything?" Gertrude demanded. "I shall be all
alone in the house."
"Some one may come," said her companion.
"Do you mean Mr. Brand?"
"Yes, Gertrude. He may like a piece of cake."
"I don't like men that are always eating cake!" Gertrude declared,
giving a pull at the lilac-bush.
Her companion glanced at her, and then looked down on the ground. "I
think father expected you would come to church," she said. "What shall
I say to him?"
"Say I have a bad headache."
"Would that be true?" asked the elder lady, looking straight at the pond
again.
"No, Charlotte," said the younger one simply.
Charlotte transferred her quiet eyes to her companion's face. "I am
afraid you are feeling restless."