Uncle Tom's Cabin
of love from others than a thoroughly selfish woman; and the more
unlovely she grows, the more jealously and scrupulously she exacts
love, to the uttermost farthing. When, therefore, St. Clare began to
drop off those gallantries and small attentions which flowed at first
through the habitude of courtship, he found his sultana no way ready to
resign her slave; there were abundance of tears, poutings, and small
tempests, there were discontents, pinings, upbraidings. St. Clare was
good-natured and self-indulgent, and sought to buy off with presents
and flatteries; and when Marie became mother to a beautiful daughter,
he really felt awakened, for a time, to something like tenderness.
St. Clare’s mother had been a woman of uncommon elevation and purity of
character, and he gave to his child his mother’s name, fondly fancying
that she would prove a reproduction of her image. The thing had been
remarked with petulant jealousy by his wife, and she regarded her
husband’s absorbing devotion to the child with suspicion and dislike;
all that was given to her seemed so much taken from herself. From the
time of the birth of this child, her health gradually sunk. A life of
constant inaction, bodily and mental,—the friction of ceaseless ennui
and discontent, united to the ordinary weakness which attended the
period of maternity,—in course of a few years changed the blooming
young belle into a yellow faded, sickly woman, whose time was divided
among a variety of fanciful diseases, and who considered herself, in
every sense, the most ill-used and suffering person in existence.
There was no end of her various complaints; but her principal forte
appeared to lie in sick-headache, which sometimes would confine her to
her room three days out of six. As, of course, all family arrangements
fell into the hands of servants, St. Clare found his menage anything
but comfortable. His only daughter was exceedingly delicate, and he
feared that, with no one to look after her and attend to her, her
health and life might yet fall a sacrifice to her mother’s
inefficiency. He had taken her with him on a tour to Vermont, and had
persuaded his cousin, Miss Ophelia St. Clare, to return with him to his
southern residence; and they are now returning on this boat, where we
have introduced them to our readers.
And now, while the distant domes and spires of New Orleans rise to our
view, there is yet time for an introduction to Miss Ophelia.
Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some
cool village, the large farmhouse, with its clean-swept grassy yard,
shaded by the dense and massive foliage of the sugar maple; and
remember the air of order and stillness, of perpetuity and unchanging
repose, that seemed to breathe over the whole place. Nothing lost, or
out of order; not a picket loose in the fence, not a particle of litter
in the turfy yard, with its clumps of lilac bushes growing up under the
windows. Within, he will remember wide, clean rooms, where nothing ever
seems to be doing or going to be done, where everything is once and
forever rigidly in place, and where all household arrangements move
with the punctual exactness of the old clock in the corner. In the
family “keeping-room,” as it is termed, he will remember the staid,
respectable old book-case, with its glass doors, where Rollin’s
History,[1] Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and
Scott’s Family Bible,[2] stand side by side in decorous order, with
multitudes of other books, equally solemn and respectable. There are no
servants in the house, but the lady in the snowy cap, with the
spectacles, who sits sewing every afternoon among her daughters, as if
nothing ever had been done, or were to be done,—she and her girls, in
some long-forgotten fore part of the day, “_did up the work_,” and for
the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you would see them,
it is “_done up_.” The old kitchen floor never seems stained or
spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various cooking utensils,
never seem deranged or disordered; though three and sometimes four
meals a day are got there, though the family washing and ironing is
there performed, and though pounds of butter and cheese are in some
silent and mysterious manner there brought into existence.
[1] _The Ancient History_, ten volumes (1730-1738), by the French
historian Charles Rollin (1661-1741).
[2] _Scott’s Family Bible_ (1788-1792), edited with notes by the
English Biblical commentator, Thomas Scott (1747-1821).
On such a farm, in such a house and family, Miss Ophelia had spent a
quiet existence of some forty-five years, when her cousin invited her
to visit his southern mansion. The eldest of a large family, she was
still considered by her father and mother as one of “the children,” and
the proposal that she should go to _Orleans_ was a most momentous one
to the family circle. The old gray-headed father took down Morse’s
Atlas[3] out of the book-case, and looked out the exact latitude and
longitude; and read Flint’s Travels in the South and West,[4] to make
up his own mind as to the nature of the country.
[3] _The Cerographic Atlas of the United States_ (1842-1845), by
Sidney Edwards Morse (1794-1871), son of the geographer, Jedidiah
Morse, and brother of the painter-inventor, Samuel F. B. Morse.
[4] _Recollections of the Last Ten Years_ (1826) by Timothy Flint
(1780-1840), missionary of Presbyterianism to the trans-Allegheny
West.
The good mother inquired, anxiously, “if Orleans wasn’t an awful wicked
place,” saying, “that it seemed to her most equal to going to the
Sandwich Islands, or anywhere among the heathen.”
It was known at the minister’s and at the doctor’s, and at Miss
Peabody’s milliner shop, that Ophelia St. Clare was “talking about”
going away down to Orleans with her cousin; and of course the whole
village could do no less than help this very important process of
_talking about_ the matter. The minister, who inclined strongly to
abolitionist views, was quite doubtful whether such a step might not
tend somewhat to encourage the southerners in holding on to their
slaves; while the doctor, who was a stanch colonizationist, inclined to
the opinion that Miss Ophelia ought to go, to show the Orleans people
that we don’t think hardly of them, after all. He was of opinion, in
fact, that southern people needed encouraging. When however, the fact
that she had resolved to go was fully before the public mind, she was
solemnly invited out to tea by all her friends and neighbors for the
space of a fortnight, and her prospects and plans duly canvassed and
inquired into. Miss Moseley, who came into the house to help to do the
dress-making, acquired daily accessions of importance from the
developments with regard to Miss Ophelia’s wardrobe which she had been
enabled to make. It was credibly ascertained that Squire Sinclare, as
his name was commonly contracted in the neighborhood, had counted out
fifty dollars, and given them to Miss Ophelia, and told her to buy any
clothes she thought best; and that two new silk dresses, and a bonnet,
had been sent for from Boston. As to the propriety of this
extraordinary outlay, the public mind was divided,—some affirming that
it was well enough, all things considered, for once in one’s life, and
others stoutly affirming that the money had better have been sent to
the missionaries; but all parties agreed that there had been no such
parasol seen in those parts as had been sent on from New York, and that
she had one silk dress that might fairly be trusted to stand alone,
whatever might be said of its mistress. There were credible rumors,
also, of a hemstitched pocket-handkerchief; and report even went so far
as to state that Miss Ophelia had one pocket-handkerchief with lace all
around it,—it was even added that it was worked in the corners; but
this latter point was never satisfactorily ascertained, and remains, in
fact, unsettled to this day.
Miss Ophelia, as you now behold her, stands before you, in a very
shining brown linen travelling-dress, tall, square-formed, and angular.
Her face was thin, and rather sharp in its outlines; the lips
compressed, like those of a person who is in the habit of making up her
mind definitely on all subjects; while the keen, dark eyes had a
peculiarly searching, advised movement, and travelled over everything,
as if they were looking for something to take care of.
All her movements were sharp, decided, and energetic; and, though she
was never much of a talker, her words were remarkably direct, and to
the purpose, when she did speak.
In her habits, she was a living impersonation of order, method, and
exactness. In punctuality, she was as inevitable as a clock, and as
inexorable as a railroad engine; and she held in most decided contempt
and abomination anything of a contrary character.
The great sin of sins, in her eyes,—the sum of all evils,—was expressed
by one very common and important word in her
vocabulary—“shiftlessness.” Her finale and ultimatum of contempt
consisted in a very emphatic pronunciation of the word “shiftless;” and
by this she characterized all modes of procedure which had not a direct
and inevitable relation to accomplishment of some purpose then
definitely had in mind. People who did nothing, or who did not know
exactly what they were going to do, or who did not take the most direct
way to accomplish what they set their hands to, were objects of her
entire contempt,—a contempt shown less frequently by anything she said,
than by a kind of stony grimness, as if she scorned to say anything
about the matter.
As to mental cultivation,—she had a clear, strong, active mind, was
well and thoroughly read in history and the older English classics, and
thought with great strength within certain narrow limits. Her
theological tenets were all made up, labelled in most positive and
distinct forms, and put by, like the bundles in her patch trunk; there
were just so many of them, and there were never to be any more. So,
also, were her ideas with regard to most matters of practical
life,—such as housekeeping in all its branches, and the various
political relations of her native village. And, underlying all, deeper
than anything else, higher and broader, lay the strongest principle of
her being—conscientiousness. Nowhere is conscience so dominant and
all-absorbing as with New England women. It is the granite formation,
which lies deepest, and rises out, even to the tops of the highest
mountains.
Miss Ophelia was the absolute bond-slave of the “_ought_.” Once make
her certain that the “path of duty,” as she commonly phrased it, lay in
any given direction, and fire and water could not keep her from it. She
would walk straight down into a well, or up to a loaded cannon’s mouth,
if she were only quite sure that there the path lay. Her standard of
right was so high, so all-embracing, so minute, and making so few
concessions to human frailty, that, though she strove with heroic ardor
to reach it, she never actually did so, and of course was burdened with
a constant and often harassing sense of deficiency;—this gave a severe
and somewhat gloomy cast to her religious character.
But, how in the world can Miss Ophelia get along with Augustine St.
Clare,—gay, easy, unpunctual, unpractical, sceptical,—in short,—walking
with impudent and nonchalant freedom over every one of her most
cherished habits and opinions?
To tell the truth, then, Miss Ophelia loved him. When a boy, it had
been hers to teach him his catechism, mend his clothes, comb his hair,
and bring him up generally in the way he should go; and her heart
having a warm side to it, Augustine had, as he usually did with most
people, monopolized a large share of it for himself, and therefore it