Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 December 1876 — ONE NEW YEAR IN A THOUSAND. [ARTICLE]

ONE NEW YEAR IN A THOUSAND.

Betty Wilmarth—and a quaint, piquant little beauty she was. They used to call her a changeling; for where she found that Spanish face of hers, nobody knows. Somewhere far back in her ancestry, it may be, an old beauty bequeathed it; but out of a race of blondes her face had blossomed as dark and rich as the pictures of those Spanish women where the lovely colors seem to be retiring every day farther into the shade of the canvas—a golden, tawny skin with a crushed crimson on the cheek; delicate features, with a fine curve to the thin nostril and a short one to the red lip, that gave a glimpse of little white teeth; and great black eyes, whose Hash only the long, black, shading lashes subdued to a soft glow. Yes, Betty Wilmarth was a beauty, and somehow as fascinating as beautiful; full of innocent caprices that set you to wondering what would be the next, and kept your interest alive; with a temper that struck sparks, but which was in the next moment all sweetness; impulsive, warm-hearted, a charming, willful piece, setting her lovers by the ears, and making all the other girls devoutly wish she would be married and done , with it; for of course there was no chance for anybody else so long as Betty Wilmarth was around. But Betty Wilmarth was in no sort of hurry to marry; one by one, she filliped oft’ her lovers lightly as thistle-down. Petted and caressed and indulged to death, as people said, she declared she wanted neither to be an old man’s darling nor a young man’s slave; and old lovers consoled themselves, and new lovers took their turn, and she was heart-whole and happy, singing her way through life, and counting her twenty years in the sunshine as a child might count a row of brilliant

beads. But one of these lovers was not to be filliped off as lightly as the rest; and that was her mother’s young step-cousin. Will Maunder. He had come down to Freneborough from his mountain home in the deep forests, after the disastrous fire that left him only the bare rock for his inheritance; and where, save for his mother, and some old goodies, he had never seen a woman; and Betty had struck him as a goddess might have struck a clown. Not that Will Maunder was a clown by any means—his mother, a lady who carried her ladyhood into the woods, had attended to all that; and a certain wild grace and rude courtesy accompanied his every action. But he was a brawny, longlegged, stalwart fellow, for all that, and his fair face had been sun-kissed with many a freckle, and his fair hair curled close to his head in tight rings; but Betty knew nothing about any Greek head with Close curls of the same description, and would have liked it no better if she had; and, of all things, she despised freckles. Bhe had an ideal of the face and form and mind and manners that were to win her on some distant day—a day distant enough to borrow enchantment—a slender knightly shape, perhaps, a perfect countenance, long auburn locks—- “ discolored, as if a crown Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where A sharp while line divided clean the hair, Glossy above, glossy below.” She would not have liked it all if she had seen it so; and if she had but known it, the massive limbs and shoulders of Will Maunder were much more like the Ancient knights she dreamed about than possibly could be this absurd and puny ideal she had set up. “ The days of chivalry are over now,” said Betty, with a sigh. “ Mighty disagreeable, cold, cheerless, dangerous, and uncomfortable days you would have found them,” said Will. “ Cheerless or not, they’re over.” “ What makes you say so, Betty,” he asked, from where he sat at her feet. *? Oh, because they are!” she answered, throwing up her pretty arms and clasping them above her head, as she leaned it back. among the honey-suckles, and

looked asiweet as they, and made poor Will's heart beat with looking at her. “ Oh, because they are! Who would dare great adventures for anybody now—scale castles, kill giants, enter the dens of wild beasts—” “ I would—for you, Betty.” “Oh dear me I How tired I am of hearing you say so! They would, for any body. Now please don’t. Will dear, any more! There are no castles here; I don't want anything of wild beasts; and you’re a giant yourself, you know.” “ I wish I wasn’t, Betty. I’d change with that little Hop-o’-my-thumb, Fred flammls, if— ” “Oh, that shrimp! Ido detest him—he’s such a—such a spoon!” “I thought you didn’t like slang, Betty.” “I don’t—from anybody else.” “ But if you use it yourself, you’ve no right—’’ ! “Oh dear me! if only those criticised who were perfect themselves, what a delightful, easy-going "world it would bo! It seems to me, Will Maunuer, that you are always finding some fault with me, and—’’ “ You’ve not been used to it. I don’t see any fault in you, Betty,” he added, presently. “Oh, there, there, Will! Do be still with your mooning! Come in and sing this new song with me; it needs a great rolling bass.” And so Will would go in and sing with her, his voice trembling as he heard hers; would go out and walk with her, to be left for the next gallant that sought her side; would be hen abject slave, waiting on her least wish and every breath, and would get no thanks for his pains. “ Why isn’t it enough for him that I like him as he is?” shewouldbay. “ He’s all very well for a cousin—a little too good for a step-cousin; but I should as soon think of falling in love with a satyr. He’s like the great Newfoundland, always tumbling at your feet.” And so she would go on, while she looked in the glass at night and made her toilette for sleep—the only time the little witch had for much confidential conversation with herself —and lightly troubled by the parting look of his sad, reproachful eyes, that would return to her like a haunting shade. “I declare if I were a man I would have some spiritand then very likely she began singing—as she combed out her long hair where a line of sparks followed the comb, and knowing that Will heard every word where he sauntered up and down the garden—‘“lf I were a lover, and wooing would go. Would I fall on my knees and entreat of her? Nol I would bend from my saddle and snatch her slim waist. And be off to mv eyrie In galloping haste!’ ’’

“And if you did,” Will would mutter, beneath the window, “there’d be the very deuce to pay!” It was when affairs were in this posture, Will pursuing, and with the vantageground of residence in the house, Betty retreating, yet half relenting, that Mr. Valerino, the young exile, came to Freneborough to give lessons in music and in his native tongue. Of course his supposed story fired the Freneborough heart —the feminine auricle of it —and all the romance of Betty’s dreams rose to meet it. As for the young exile himself, he was the very creature of romance—so tall and pale and dark and melancholy; his immense dusky eyes seemed full of the strange, sad memories of wonderful adventure and experience in the Apennines, and on the Campagna, and among the brigands of the Romagna; and the light of heroic days and nights made, as one might say, a halo round him as he walked.

Certainly, now, it was hardly Mr. Valerino’s fault; he never said he was an exile; he never said he was a patriot; he never whispered of conspiracies among old ruins and in the Catacombs; he couldn’t help being tall and pale and melancholy ; and there was no reason why he should mention that his father haa for forty years played the piccolo in the orchestra of a New York theater. If people chose to take him up and make his way easy for him, it seemed all right and natural. After he discovered the reason, his lessons being nearly through, and his vanity too sensitive for an explanation, he quietly left town on ending his engagements. But meanwhile this little Betty Wilmarth was frightfully beautiful—to a man who knew she was as much forbidden to him as though she lived in one of the fixed stars. It was very pleasant to receive the admiration of such a being; he had not the strength of mind to undeceive her; and Betty went on, making a simpleton of herself, studying, and conversing of such Italian literature as was a terra incognita to the teacher; asking the youth unanswerable conundrums concerning Italian history, which he evaded with what she deemed a delicacy of reticent modesty; and when she saw the slender, sinuous shape of the young exile, and the proud, sad beauty of his face, beside Will Maunder’s burly thews and sinews, his bluff and common-place honesty of countenance, she grew impatient at the contrast, and wondered at herself to think she had once been almost on the psint of relenting and being kind to Will. It annoyed her, at that time, even to look at Will: the sight of him may have been a reproach for her folly; his hearty ways offended—so much higher breeding there seemed to be in the insinuating air of the Italian; and then his affection irritated her, for she was on the point of a grand poetic passion for an unhappy exile whose consolation she was to be. And thus the man who belonged already to her prosaic every-day life, and would have bound her down to it—the life she had always known, without a charm of imagination, of the unknown, or the ideal iu it, and toward whom she felt a kindness might possibly grow kinder, and make her yield one day to his persistence if he were still here to continue it —that man was becoming intolerable, and she wished him out of her way. And out of her way she became determined he should go. j ” She couldn't stroll with Mr. Valerino down a lonely lane, talking nonsense far too high for the youth’s comprehension, but there was Will just stepping over a fence, or lying under a tree, or very possibly laughing at her —if he was not angry. What right had he to be angry ? She had never given him any! She couldn't go into the church on a weekday, and take her seat in a peW alone, to hear Mr. Valerino practicing in the organloft, and making roof and rafters ring and vibrate with delicious melody, but there was Will before her, in the porch. “I like music, too,” said Will. Shecouldn’t pass an evening with a friend, where Mr. Valerino was one of the company, but as soon as the time for parting came, the bell rang, and there was Will to act as escort and spare Mr. Valerino the trouble. Once, on such an occasion, she gave her arm to the exile, and suffered Will to stalk on in silence beside them, while she talked a broken lingo of Italian phrases with the yourg mamer, which, for the time being, she relt, put Will Maunder

entirely outside the pale of civilization. I won’t be supervised in this cried Betty to herself, for her sisters were not of fit age to receive the confidence. “ It’s as bad as having a spy at one’s feet. I can’t endure it another day, and I shall tell him so!" And, unfortunately, just as she was irately brooding over these wrongs, her father sent for "her, that he might ascertain her feelings in regard to a proposition he was inclined to make Will —a proposition to take him into business, allowing him an interest now for his work and oversight, and finally retiring in his favor. Owing to her mother’s ill health, her father had fallen into a habit of consulting Bettv rather than disturb the invalid, sufficiently occupied with her ailments. “ Oh, father, father! You don’t mean that you ever thought of doing such a silly thing!” cried Betty, in free disgust. “And when he pesters me so! I never should have another day’s peace in my life. You might just as well put me In prison, with a spy and a master over me. Oh no, indeed! Give him any thing, but send him away. Start him in business in Australia, buy him a farm in the West, but don’t, father, pray don’t keep him here.”

And Betty’s voice settled it. Mr. Wilmarth told his wife’s young step-cousin that he had changed bis mind, and had no place for him in his business, but knew of an opening, and would establish him in it, in a Western city. “Is it Betty’s wish ?” said Will. And he refused the proffer; and one evening, catching Betty’s hand, as he bid her good-by, and lifting it to his lips with a kiss that burned in upon it, he left the place, and buried himself, unknown, among the Southern mountains with some flock of sheep. One might suppose Betty would have been satisfied then. Not she. She was as restless as a bird. Perhaps she missed the pleasure of having Will behold her conquests; perhaps she missed the adoring slave; perhaps she missed the constant, tender service. A month afterward, when Mr. Valerino drew his lessons to a close, and betook himself to other fields—vexing and mortifying her, it may be, but not grieving her a particle—she certainly missed the old friendship and sympathy, the kindness in which she could confide and with which she could advise; and little Betty Wilmarth’s black lashps were wet with tears that she could not account for, and that surely she never dreamed she would be shedding because Will Maunder was away. She had reason, presently, to miss that kindness to some purpose. Her father was in that same year thrown from his wagon; and he lav but partly conscious for weeks afterward, and for months he never left his room nor quite recovered his intelligence. In those weeks and months unfaithful clerks and bookkeepers enriched themselves and impoverished Mr. Wilmarth; and when he finally recovered, it was to the wreck of what had once bid fair to become a great fortune. “If Will Maunder had been with me,” said Mr. Wilmarth, “ strangers and hounds would have had no chance to fleece me!”

It was true. Betty heard it with a shiver. She had thought as much many a time, yet had put the thought away; but new, her father declaring it so, seemed to make the fact sure. And why was not Will with her father ? For no reason but that she had in reality driven him away. Then they owed all tneir misfortunes to her headstrong folly! If Wjll Maunder—noble, patient, forgiving, honest Will Maunder—had been in her father’s business, this disaster would never have overtaken it; her father would not be beginning life over again in his old age: her mother need not have relinquished her nurse; her sisters would not be dependent on a distant relative for the charity of their receipted school bills; she herself would not be cramped and pinched, turning old clothes, warming old food, doing the work that servants in plenty had always done for her before; listening still to these tiresome lovers, that did not forsake her beauty because poverty had joined their throng. If crying would have brought him back, Will Maunder could have sailed to Betty on a flood of tears; but tears being useless, Betty scorned to shed them. She had no idea where he was, except for the vague rumor that spoke of him as sheepraising somewhere in the Carolinas. If she had, having sent him off in her prosperity, she could not call him back in her calamity. So she braced herself to bear her trials as she might, and to bear them, as she sometimes said to herself, in a way that Will would have approved; and she laughed bitterly at herself to think of the sentimental idiot she had been, and of the innocent young Italian on whom she had poured out the burden of her vain fancies; and her clear dark cheeks reddened redder than their wont at thought of the light in which the clear-headed Will must have held her infatuation.

Betty’s cheeks, though, had never lost their carnation; she was no older than before, so far as her beauty was concerned; only into the radiant face there had stolen anew expression, perhaps called out by the necessity of so much tenderness toward her sick father and disconsolater mother, perhaps by he longing for a once neglected presence, the hope, growing more patient, that it might yet return—the sense, growing daily more humble, that nothing had befallen her but what she sadly deserved. And then the long war broke out, and in all its course no word of Will. She thought he might be in it. She was sure that his blood must be stirred. She looked for his name in the bulletins, in the promoted, in the dead and missing, in the discharged, in the forlorn-hopes; she longed to do something for him, now that it was impossible—to encourage him, to help him, if she could only once find his name. She never did.' And when at last peace was declared, there came through the obscure channels in which all such news runs, not to be verified, and yet too authentic for disbelief, the report that he had been a conscript of the Confederates, had fallen in his first battle, and had died in hospital. And her act had killed him! Betty Wilmarth sat down that day in despair. For what had she been born, when, out of her insignificance, she had wrought such evil as this? A murderess—that was ■What she was! The murderess, too, of the best friend a woman ever had. By a whim, a mere whim,; she had brought disaster and ruin on her family—she had brought a strong man down to his grave. By a whim? No, oh no! By the blackness of her heart! And it was in sackcloth and ashes that she sat while summer and autumn crept by. She loathed herself. She felt that even God must loathe her; every one must loathe her that knew her as Will Maunder’s murderess. The earth was dark; for her the sun ceased to shine; the faces of all she saw were blanks, they seemed to belong to people of another race; there was nobody of her race—a woman with the blood of her best friend on her hands! Day after days Cm seemed to gather, thicker and er, Over the world; it was a place of

graves; all those that wont by were born only to suffer and die—to suffer and die, and after death the judgment! And then, her thoughts getting too much for her, Betty would start up and walk for miles, to wa'k off the horror that oppressed her. the horror that made life seem not worth living; that made life seem impossible to live, and yet did not let her dare to die. Nothing was any pleasure to Betty now. Her father’s affairs had brightened; they had retaken their old house; her mother’s health was restored; the girls had come from school, content and happy, and ready to take Betty’s scepter where she dropped it. But she was pleased for their sakes—for herself it made no difference. The color had forsaken her sweet cheeks at length; her eyes were dim with her long crying; she sat for hours together staring straight before her, conscious of nothing what ever but that she had been the death of Will Maunder.

How she missed him now at every turn! the ready smile, the tender word, the helping deed, the admiring look, the persuasion that she could do nothing wrong! If he were only here in her trouble, he would clear it all away, as a strong west wind blows the buds. But, no;«she would be having no trouble if she had not sent W ill out of reach; she would see him again neither here nor hereafter, for the place where Will Maunder went with his white soul would be no place for his murderess. How strong he was, in those dead and gone days! how generous, how brave and true! and all tor her it might have been. And she had been blind till the need of his daily care had made her turn and look • and now it was too late. When the first snow-storm of the winter came, and she remembered that it was heaping his unknown grave, the cold terror of it chilled her marrow. All the gay Christmas season that he. used to like so much she sat in darkness. She forgot her father, and all the need of household cheer, and it was only when she saw the pitying faces down-stairs that she resolved to forget herself, her sin and her grief, and help them all to gather what sweetness there was in this life she had found sb bitter. And she made her New-Year’s gifts ready, and helped her young sisters decorate the rooms and the simple table they could spread, and lent them her dainty ornaments that she used to value so, and that now, at twenty-five, she was done with.

It was a great white snow-storm, though —a fierce, driving, drifting snow-storm—-that wrapped earth and sky when that day dawned, beginning the eventful year. They would be friends indeed who adventured through it. The girls and their chosen companions, nevertheless, were just as gay in the parlors as they could have been in the sunniest of weather, imaging arrivals, and, when nobody arrived, receiving each other in turn, as if there were a procession of callers at the door. They were none of them so sweet, so willful, so charming, as poor little Betty had been; not one of them had the dark rich beauty that belonged to her yet; they never would have the train of gallants at the door that used to cross its threshold for Betty’s sake. She wondered what they found to laugh at; in all the wide sad world there was nothing at which she could smile; the very blowing of the gale, the whirling of the snow and sleet through the white, cold heavens, seemed only to answer her own misery. She sat in the little side parlor off the others, staring through the window with her wild and wretched gaze, though, for appearances, a book lay open in her lap. Her thoughts had gone upon their long flight; and after the first grate and jar of it upon her, she heard nothing of the laughing and twittering, of the suspended music, and the opening and shutting doors. The ioyousness of the day, like sunshine leaking through storm, was nothing to her; she noted none of the fragrance of the flowers, none of the gay cries of the echoing voices; her thoughts were under that snow-heaped sod with Will. It seemed to her that if she could only once see him, and see him alive, the very relief would kill her; but, oh, how hard it would be to go if he were in the breathing world! She longed for him back with fresh longings to take the stain and burden off from her; and then she longed for him back that he might just put his arms round her and take her, that she might rest in his presence. Why had she never loved him till he was lost ? And now he would never know it. “ Oh, Will, Will, Will!” she cried —and cried half aloud, all unaware—“ if you only knew how I loved you! If you only forgave me—” And there the words were stayed by a p lir of bearded lips, the arms she had wearied for were about her, her head was pillowed on a breast — D:d the dead walk? did the grave surrender, then? Had he come from Heaven to take her, to forgive her? Was it Will—with her fath er, with her sisters, crowding in behind him ? Had he never died at all, but gone back from hospital to sheep-farm, and only come at last, drawn by some wild magnetism in the strength of her longing for him? Thd questions surged through her mind as the snow-flakes surged outside; and then it seemed that he must be some great accusing apparition, come only to destroy her; the world was reeling blackly away from her, and it was, maybe, nothing but the kisses on her lips that held her firm to life, that called her back to light and joy in Will Maunder’s arms, on this one New-Year's in a thousand.— Harriet Prucott Spofford, in Harper'» Bazar.

—Mrs. Julia Ward Howe conducted the Thanksgiving services at the Unitarian Church in Newport, R. I. Her text' was taken from the story of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as other men were. In her view, neither as a nation nor as individuals can Americans properly thank God after this fashion. We should, rather, in view of His great gifts and mercies, feel ourselves overcome with penitence, like the publican, and cry, “ God be merciful to America, a sinner.’’ ————• «» —The way in which Gov. Chamberlain drifted into South Carolina is described by a correspondent of the Boston Journal as follows: “An old college friend of Chamberlain was drowned in Charleston harbor. He weEt there to settle his affairs. That visit ended in his leasing an abandoned plantation and in entering ■pon the untried life of a planter. He was soon elected a member of the convention which framed the present Constitution of the State.” —Charles Fenno Hoffman, a noted literateur of the old Knickerbocker Magazine days, recently reported dead, is still living at the age of seventy, in the State Lunatic Asylum at Harrisburg, and his insanity is less obtiusive than for many years. It is now twenty-six years since his retirement from the world.—Pitteburgh Commercial. The brain may devise laws for the blood; but a hot temper leaps over a eold decree.— Shakcepeare.