- Chapter I.
John Brightly jumped out of bed. He filled his short and stout pantaloons with a pair of legs proportionable, and ran to the window.
Nothing to be seen through the thick frost upon the panes, until he had breathed himself a round eye-hole bearing upon his thermometer.
That erect little sentry had an emphatic fact to communicate to the scrutinizing eye of John Brightly. It was a very frigid fact, and made the eye that perceived it shiver a little. But the temperature of Brightly’s mind was perpetual summer. The iciest ideas admitted into his brain became warmed and melted by the sunny spirits there; and so it was with this cold fact which the cold mercury fired at him through its cold glass barrel.
“Zero!” said he, “a sharp zero, Mrs. Brightly!”
A pretty, delicate, anxious face, lifted itself from the pillow by the side of its fellow, still depressed in the middle and high at the sides as her husband’s head had left it.
“Zero!” rejoined a voice sweet, but feeble. “I should think by your tone that you had just seen the earliest bluebird. I have half a mind to go into a rage with you, John, for being so utterly contented.”
“When you have your first rage, Mary Brightly, I shall have my first discontent. But I cannot scold Zero when I see what a wonderful artist he is. Look at this window. See this magic frost-landscape. It is a beautiful thought that such exquisite fancies are always in the air waiting to be discovered.”
“The chill finds the latent pictures, as sorrow makes poets sing.”
“Well said! We each owe the other one. And what did you dream of last night, Mrs. Brightly?
“Nothing.”
“Yes; you must have dreamed of the tropics, and breathed out palms and vines and tree-ferns in your dreams.”
“As the girl in the fairy-tale dropped pearls and diamonds when she spoke. Perhaps I did. But how did you detect me?”
“Here they are all upon the windows, just as you exhaled them. Here on this pane is a picture, crowded as a photograph of a jungle on the Amazon. Here are long feathery bamboos, drooping palms, stiff palms, and such a beautiful bewilderment of vines and creepers by a river sparkling in the sunshine. And here, hullo! Here is an alligator done in ice, nabbing an iced boa-constrictor. Delicious! Do come and see, Mary!”
“Zero forbids,” said she, with a pretty shiver. “I’ll see them with your eyes, John.”
“Well. And while you were dreaming out this enchanted vision, I must have been snoring forth my recollections of the forests of Maine. Here they are on the next pane by way of pendant and contrast. ‘This is the forest primeval.’ Here are pines in full feather and pines without a rag on their poor bare branches, pines lying on the ground, and pines that fell half-way and were caught in the arms of brother pines. Pines, hemlocks, and the finest arbor-vitæ I ever saw, all crusted with glittering ice and hanging over a mountain lake. I think I like this better than the tropics. Do come, Mrs. Brightly.”
“Zero doubly forbids my going to a colder climate. But it is delightful to be here, warm and comfortable, and listen to your raptures.”
“Mary,” said Brightly, turning to her with a grave and tender manner.
“What, John?”
I find a different picture on the next pane. Do you remember or two dear little ones?”
“Do we remember them?” she asked with tearful eyes.
“God knows we do! And here among these lovely frost-pictures I find a memorial of them. Shall I describe it?”
“Yes, dear John,” said she, by this time weeping abundantly.
“I see a little promontory jutting into a great river. Evergreens grow about the edges. The top is nearly clear. It is a graveyard, Mary. In one corner, under a hemlock heavy with snow, and within a railing, I see two simple white stones, such as are put over children’s graves. It is strangely like a scene that we have looked at very sadly together. Shall I read the names I almost fancy I decipher upon the stones?
“Do, dear John,” she said between her sobs. “All memories of them are beautiful to me.”
“John, son of John and Mary Brightly, drowned at eight years of age, while endeavoring to rescue his drowning sister Mary. ‘In death they were not divided.’”
Brightly took his wife’s hand very tenderly, as in this grave, formal way he recalled their domestic tragedy.
“We do not repine, my love,” said he.
He was a singularly sturdy, bold, energetic-looking man; almost belligerent indeed, except that an expression of frank good-nature showed that, though warlike, he would not wage war unless on compulsion, and when peace was impossible. His face was round and ruddy, his hair light, his eyes dark blue, his figure of the middle height, and solid as if he was built to carry weight. Evidently a man to make himself heard and felt, one to hit hard if he hit at all. It was a shrewd and able face, and if it had a weakness, it was that there was too much frankness, too much trustfulness, too little reserve in it. A rough observer would hardly have suspected this burly, boyish, exuberant man of thirty of so much delicacy of feeling and tenderness as he had shown in this interview with his wife.
“We do not repine, my love, for their loss,” he repeated.
“I am sometimes very lonely, John,” she hesitatingly said. “Our little Mary was growing just old enough to be a companion to me; and John too, — I do not know which I loved best.”
“I must find you,” said Brightly, in his cheerful tone, “a nice little maiden or a fine little fellow to adopt.”
“O if you would!” she exclaimed.
“Which shall it be?” he asked with a business air. He occupied himself in erasing with his breath the picture which had recalled their bereavement.
As the frost vanished, the scenery without appeared. No very vast or very attractive view. Most of the respectable citizens of New York have similar landscape privileges. Brightly’s bedroom window was perforated in the front of a handsome precipice of brown freestone. It looked down upon a snowy ravine, planted alternately with lamp-posts and ailanthus-trees; opposite was another long precipice of brown stone, evidently excavated into dwellings for the better class of troglodytes.
“Are you serious, John?” asked Mrs. Brightly, drying her tears.
“Certainly,” says he. “What do I live and work for except that my wife shall have everything she wants?”
“Don’t claim to be too disinterested! I am sure you are dying to have me approve your scheme.”
“I think we are both growing excited about it. But let us come to a conclusion. Which shall it be, boy or girl?”
“Boys are so merry and noisy in a solitary house,” said Mrs. Brightly, thinking of her son.
“Girls are so gentle and quiet,” Brightly returned.
“But then I am so afraid boys will get riotous companions, and be taught to smoke pipes.”
“And girls must learn music and flirtation.”
Each parent was evidently trifling away tears. The loss of their children was a bitter chapter in their history. They dared no more than glance at it, for fear their childless life should seem but idle, aimless business.
“We must draw lots,” said Brightly, assuming a serio-comic air.
Mrs. Brightly, still couchant, watched smiling, while he took a clothes-broom and selected two straws.
“Graver matters have been decided by lot,” said Brightly. “Draw, Mary. If you get the shorter straw, it’s a girl; if the longer, a boy.”
She coquetted a little, and finally selected her straw. They compare them carefully.
She had drawn a girl.
“I do hereby bind myself and mortgage my property,” said Brightly, holding up his hand, as if he were taking a judicial oath, “to present to Mrs. John Brightly of the City of New York, on or before the 31st of December instant, one attractive and intelligent damsel not over fourteen years of age; to be by her, the said donee Brightly, adopted and brought up to the best of her knowledge and belief, either as daughter, step-daughter, companion, or handmaiden, as to the said Brightly may seem good. And thereto I plight the my troth.”
Mrs. Brightly laughed at this pledge. “but how are you going to find her, John?” she asked.
“I always find the things I look for; unless they find me as soon as they know I’m in search of them.”
“Success will spoil you some of these days.”
“Not if I lose what I prize success for. But this new child of ours shall be a new spur to me.”
“She must be an orphan, John, or she will not love us as much as we shall love her.”
“An orphan of course. I think I shall put an advertisement in the paper to this effect: — Wanted to adopt. An orphan of poor but respectable parentage, beautiful as a cherub, clean as a new-laid egg, with a character of docility and determination in equal parts; eyes blue, voice tranquil, laugh electric; one whose heart sings and heels dance spontaneously; a thing of beauty willing to be a joy forever in the house of a prosperous banker, where she will be spoiled all day by the mistress and spoiled from diner to bedtime by the master. No Irish, orange-girls, or rag-babies need apply.”
“It is impossible not to be in good spirits when you are, John,” said the little wife. “How doleful I should be all day, unless you compelled me to begin my morning with a course of laughter!”
“I don’t know any better medicine,” said he. “I take all I can get, and give all I can. Well; you approve of my advertisement?”
“As a description of what we want, it is perfect.”
“I will pop it into the paper to-day, and to-morrow morning there will be a deadlock of dirty children in this street, and a deadlock of dirty parents up and down the cross streets, for half a dozen blocks, — parents and children all waiting to be adopted. By the way, Mary,” Brightly rattled on, “ you must plunge into Zero, and dress and give me my breakfast in a hurry.”
“O John, when will you have made money enough not to be in a hurry any more?”
“When I have hurried through my hurries. But I must be early in Wall Street this morning, for another reason. This talk about advertisements reminds me that I have advertised for an office-boy. I dare say there are a hundred juvenile noses flattening against my windows already. It will be deadlock there, too, by the time I get down. I am afraid poor Broke will be quite bewildered out of his wits, if he arrives first.”
“Is Mr. Broke coming to dinner to-morrow?”
“Yes; he would not miss his Christmas with us. The others are all coming, I suppose?”
“Every one. The two Knightlys, Uncle Furbish and Amelia, Dr. Netherlands, and Mrs. Purview and her son.”
“And I hope you mean to have a good dinner for us, Mrs. Brightly.”
“Certainly. Did I ever fail? And your Christmas dinners, John, for all the poor people that expect them from us, are they ordered?”
“Not yet. That is another reason for me to despatch. The pick of the market will be all gone, if I am late. Now then, My dear, one spasm, and you are up.”