Hurrying Girls into Marriage.
We were sitting on the grass below the school-house—a dozen girls of us—with our books about us, when old Mr. Duzenberry drove past in his square, gray buggy. His maiden daughter, Becky Jane, sat beside him with a basket of eggs in her lap and a jar of apple-butter nicely steadied and kept in place between her feet. In those years we liked only people with pretty faces; a homely face, with irregular features, was very distasteful and repulsive. Young girls generally give free expression to their likes and dislikes, and no sooner had the Duzenberry buggy fairly passed us, than we all began making comments. Bessie Glindon said, “Oh, I’d rather die than be an old maid like Becky Jane! I’d marry Lanky Fisher first.” At this we shouted with laughter. Lanky was an old widower with six children, two of them deaf and hair-lipped; and he had no trade, but went round splitting clapboards, cleaning wells, husking corn, and doing odd jobs, for farmers. Then we all made remarks, and said funny things which we are glad to have forgotten. Becky Jane was very homely. Even her pastor said of her, “She is humly—too humly by all odds!” Bessie’s mother said to her: “I’d be so sorry to see you an old maid, looking like Becky Jane Duzenberry. I want you to get married the first chance, dear, for fear of having you on my hands like an unmarketable piece of goods.” This was spoken compassionately, and impressed itself upon the mind of the young girl. Is it any wonder that a girl with this repulsive picture held up before her daily, should accept and welcome any escape from such a fate? But this was years and years ago. Pretty Bessie Glindon! with the words, “This will be your portrait if you do not marry,” constantly sounding in her ears, the result is easily foretold. One morning at school, Nabby Parsons leaned over, and whispered: “Did you know Bess had a beau last night? One of Ryder’s boys took her home from the bee, and there was a light in their front room for more than an hour after.” “One of Ryder’s boys.” How indefinite! How he was esteemed could be determined by that way of expressing it. Bessie’s family was one of the best in the neighborhood, and we girls felt as if there wasn’t a boy in our town good enough to be Bessie’s gallant. The Ryder’s could raise better crops than any other farmers, they always got better prices—had better horses, more young cattle, and could get more premiums at the county fairs than all the other farmers put together. When that was said, the whole story was told. So, for more than two years, “one of Ryder’s boys” escorted Bessie to all the spelling-schools, exhibitions, picnics, fairs, paring-bees, sleigh-rides, singing-schools and night-meetings. And then one golden Sabbath morning as we sat about the church doors under the falling and quaking October leaves, waiting for the folks to gather in from the far-off country homes, reached by grassy, country lanes and by-roads, through laid-down bars and creaking farm-gates—the Glindon carriage, which had once been a capacious stage-coach, drove up, containing old man and mother Glindon, and the two sleek boys in roundabouts and wide, white collars. Where was Bessie? Our little school-mate Bessie, with her fluttering blue ribbons that somehow crept coquettishly out and floated over her shoulders? Bessie, with her white skirts and trim ankles, whom all the boys hurried to lift out, all aglow and a-flutter, as she sailed down and alighted on the green sward under the beautiful church-yard trees? Cousin Meltha Howard slipped up to Mrs. Glindon, and extending her gloved hand, said: “Where under the sun is Bessie! Nothin’ serious I hope, Sister Glindon?” “Well, no—I can’t say as ther’ is, and I can’t say as ther’ isn’t,” was the vague reply; and then her lower lip wavered about queerly, and she perked up her head and stretched her neck this way and that, and finally fell to dusting her bombazine gown with wonderful zeal. Just then old Mrs. Whittaker, she that was Anthony Summer’s first wife’s half sister, came round the corner, smelling and chewing at a handful of rank, bristling spearmint, and she stopped suddenly with, “The lawful sakes! Where’s darter Betsy, I wonder!” “She’ll come bimeby,” said her mother, reaching over and helping herself to a sprig of the mint. “Why I’d think the old creeturs, Jack and Fan, ’d hardly traveled without the full load! They’re so used to you and the squire on one seat, and Betsey and the boys on t’other—have been all these years o’ church-goin’—that it must ’pear strange even to the very bosses,” mumbled the good old woman. Deacon Lathrop always hemmed when it was time for people to come indoors. We all heard him “Ahem!” but just then who should come jilting over the bridge across Dunder Creek, but Bessie Glindon, the bride, and “one of Ryder’s boys”—Elnathan, the rosy, round, robust one—the bridegroom. We were all startled out of our wits. He wore white gloves and a new cravat with a ribbon bow set on in front. He looked as though he felt the responsibility of the married state. He clutched the lines as he drove the old mare that his mother rode a half-dozen years before he was born, when she took her webs of linsey and half-sleyed to the weavers—rode, sitting on a bag of filling while another bagful of warp lay across her lap. He hung to the lines as a drowning man would hang to a floating plank. Oh, this was years and years ago! Bessie was dressed in white, with pink ribbon loosely tied around her waist. Her bonnet was a little straw, trimmed with pink and white flowers. We can see her as she looked that autumn morning when the sunshine came down, softly filtered through a hazy air—dear little Bess! We heard the clear “Ahem” of the deacon, and it had a hint of reprimand in it. And the mother, who had held up before her child-daughter the dreary picture of an old maid like Becky Jane Duzenberry—she walked up the aisle before the shyly, wedded pair, looking six feet high in stature that day—a bold, big, triumphant, stamping gait, it seems to us now after all these many years, with an air which seemed to say, “My daughter is married and safe from the stigma that some of you will have if you don’t bestir yourselves.” We have no words to tell how this hasty and ill-advised marriage surprised us. We loved the dear, sprightly girl so well; a mere child, she was undisciplined, inexperienced, unwomanly. Well, well. To-day Bessie is the wife of a prosperous farmer. This is what the world says. He has gone on raising great crops, improving his stock, enriching his broad and beautiful fields, making “splendid” bargains, grinding the poor, cheating his neighbors, lying awake nights planning how to overreach and undermine, and use unjustifiable means to secure his ends and bring about results that he desires. Linked to a groveling nature like this, there was no soul-growth in store for our little school-mate. The riches that bring joy and contentment to lesser souls was not hers. “The spring-time of her childish years lost its sweet perfume.” It was not long after her marriage that Bessie learned there was incompatibility of tastes, habits—that there were different ways of thinking and acting, and child as she was, she hurried off to the sheltering beech-tree above the spring-house and cried as if her heart would break. It was so strange to be scolded by him—the very look out of his angry eyes frightened her, as he flung out his muscular arm with a round brown fist on the end of it! Of course, she reasoned, it was only a gesture, a way of emphasizing his words—his father, old Nathan Ryder, always did that way in religious meetings when he “took up his cross” and told how he loved his “Master,” and how he was “climbing up Zion’s hill,” and how he wanted to “walk in the golden streets of the city above, where never no more pain and sorrow would come any more.” Bessie couldn’t get used to being scolded. When “one of Ryer’s boys”—her husband—opened the humble little cage in the early morning and let her pet robin-red-breast fly away, she felt as if she never could forgive the injury. When he took down his rifle and shot the mother squirrel whose young family nested in the hollow place in the forks of the old spice-apple, at the back door, she thought he was a brute, and we are sorry to say that she told him so without any hesitancy. When he pulled up the five-fingered ivy-vine, the luxuriant, massy,61fluttering beauty that she had trained over the porch and summer-kitchen, and around the hired man’s bed-room window, she could hardly contain the wrath that flashed in her eyes, burned in her cheeks, and trembled in her tearful voice. When he took the crying baby of a few months’ old out of her arms at night and dashed a dipperful of cold water into its face and bosom to “let it see who was the master,” her grief was voiceless, and spent itself in bitter tears. When he took the fleecy, little pink-and-white hood, with its puffs of dainty rosettes and pretty bows of bright ribbon—the one really beautiful article of baby-wear that she had brought home from the city, elated over her purchase—when he returned it and selected one of solid navy blue with green fringe all around it, and woolen cord and tassel for ornament, she could have thrown the ugly thing into the canal, in her disappointment and humiliation. Little things like these came up between the man and his wife, and they showed plainly the gulf betwixt them. Oh, it was pitiful—and will be pitiful, as long as the world stands, and as long as young women rush into marriage so thoughtlessly, so injudiciously! Bessie stands not alone. Wives, hundreds of them, could take her by the hand, and looking into each other’s eyes they could read meanings without one word of uttered speech. They could meet as sisters bound by one common tie. Sympathy would unite them; compassion would draw them closer together, and their very bondage would make them friends. There can hardly be many true marriages when elderly women compassionately say to young girls, “You’d better be looking out for a husband! Handsome girls have so many chances that they won’t have after awhile. Only a few more years, and then if you aren’t married you will be an old maid for sure.” Nor can there be when kindly-disposed people throw out wily suggestions such as: “Oh, you and John would make such a good match!” “What a nice convenient house and home the girl gets who marries John!” “If I were a girl, I’d set my cap for that nice, steady, pious, good fellow.” “You could get him if you used a little bit of good management.” “He thinks the world of you, but he is so modest and humble—the love of the moth for the star you know.” Or so long as people who should know better will continue to fling sarcastic remarks toward unmarried women, such as, “Oh, well, she is an old maid, that must be taken into account!” when any little peculiarity of disposition is mentioned. These things all have a tendency to drive young and thoughtless girls into marriage. Just as little jibes, and hints, and advice, and the fear of being called by the name of old maid, hurries many of them into ill-assorted marriages. Why, so common is this state of affairs, that if you were to tell an ordinary girl of sixteen that she would not be married at the age of twenty-two, she would mope and cry over the hopelessness of her case! It is a common belief among girls that there is nothing worth living for after twenty but marriage, and that every woman who reaches twenty-five unmarried is booked as that dreadful thing, an “old maid,” and that nothing short of miraculous intervention can rescue her from that dreadful condition. Poor little frivolous things! it is the conduct springing from such motives that so often causes remarks which flush the faces of women of beautiful character and disposition.—Arthur’s Home Magazine.