Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/114

106 (such is the fickle nature of women) she took a fancy to change it for another which she liked better still. She was also taught to call her grandparents papa and mamma; and though, while a child, she continued to address Miss Cornelia by the title of “Aunty,” this respectful custom, as the relative difference between her age and the elder spinster’s gradually diminished, was suffered, at the latter’s special request, to fall into disuse, and give place to the designation of sister. The few new-comers to Belfield, therefore, were never apt to suspect that Helen Bugbee was not really the Doctor’s own slaughter; and even the neighbors forgot that her name had ever been changed, except when the gossips sometimes put each other in mind of it.

The older she grew the more Helen resembled her mother, as the ladies always used to exclaim when they came to take tea with Mrs. Bugbee. Some of the village folks, who were in the habit, so common with old people, of thinking that the race is continually degenerating, I have heard express the opinion that Helen was never so handsome as her mother had been. But I have seen a portrait of Miss Amelia Bugbee, for which she sat just before her wedding, and which, I am assured, was, in the time of it, called a wonderful likeness; I also knew Miss Helen Talcott Bugbee when she was not far from her mother’s age at the time the picture was taken; and though Miss Amelia must have been a very sweet young lady, of extraordinarily good looks, I used to think, for my part, that Helen was much handsomer than the portrait; although people of a different taste might very properly have preferred the less haughty expression of the face depicted on the canvas.

It was not strange that Helen was petted and humored as much as was well for her. But her disposition being naturally docile and amiable, she was not to be easily spoiled. Be that as it may, however, when she had grown to be a woman, there were, I dare say, no less than fifty young men who knew her well, any one of whom would have jumped at the chance to get her for a wife, and made but little account of the risk of her turning out a shrew. To be sure, when I first knew her, she had rather a high and mighty way with her, at which some people took offence, calling her proud and disdainful; but those whom she wished to please never failed to like her; and I used to observe she seldom put on any of her lofty airs when she spoke to unpresuming people, especially if they were poor or in humble circumstances.

Though the indulgence of all her whims and fancies by her doting grandparents was a danger of no small magnitude, Helen encountered a still greater peril in the shape of a vast store of novels, poems, and romances, which Miss Cornelia had accumulated, and to which she was continually making additions. In that young lady’s bedchamber, where Helen slept, there was a large bookcase full of these seductive volumes; even the upper shelves of the wardrobe closet, and a cupboard over the mantel, were closely packed with them; and there was not one of them all which Helen had not read by the time she was fifteen. Thus, in spite of natural good sense, strengthened and educated by much wise and wholesome instruction, she grew up with an imagination quite disproportioned to her other mental faculties; so that, in some respects, she was almost as romantic in her notions as her Aunt Cornelia, who, at forty, used to prefer moonlight to good honest sunshine, and would have heard with an emotion of delight that the mountains between Belfield and Hartford were infested by a band of brigands, in picturesque attire, with a handsome chief like Rinaldo Rinaldini, or haunted by two or three dashing highwaymen, of the genteel Paul-Clifford style. Indeed, the ideal lover, to whom for many years Miss Cornelia’s heart was constant as the moon, was a tall, dark, mysterious man, with a heavy beard and glittering eyes, who, there is every reason to suspect, was either a corsair, a smuggler, or a bandit chief.