Marjorie Daw
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I.
DR. DILLON TO EDWARD DELANEY,
ESQ., AT THE PINES. NEAR RYE, N.H.
August 8, 1872.
My Dear Sir: I am happy to assure you that your anxiety is without reason. Flemming
will be confined to the sofa for three or four weeks, and will have to be careful at first
how he uses his leg. A fracture of this kind is always a tedious affair. Fortunately the
bone was very skillfully set by the surgeon who chanced to be in the drugstore where
Flemming was brought after his fall, and I apprehend no permanent inconvenience from
the accident. Flemming is doing perfectly well physically; but I must confess that the
irritable and morbid state of mind into which he has fallen causes me a great deal of
uneasiness. He is the last man in the world who ought to break his leg. You know how
impetuous our friend is ordinarily, what a soul of restlessness and energy, never content
unless he is rushing at some object, like a sportive bull at a red shawl; but amiable withal.
He is no longer amiable. His temper has become something frightful. Miss Fanny
Flemming came up from Newport, where the family are staying for the summer, to nurse
him; but he packed her off the next morning in tears. He has a complete set of Balzac’s
works, twenty-seven volumes, piled up near his sofa, to throw at Watkins whenever that
exemplary serving-man appears with his meals. Yesterday I very innocently brought
Flemming a small basket of lemons. You know it was a strip of lemon-peel on the
curbstone that caused our friend’s mischance. Well, he no sooner set is eyes upon those
lemons than he fell into such a rage as I cannot adequately describe. This is only one of
moods, and the least distressing. At other times he sits with bowed head regarding his
splintered limb, silent, sullen, despairing. When this fit is on him — and it sometimes
lasts all day — nothing can distract his melancholy. He refuses to eat, does not even read
the newspapers; books, except as projectiles for Watkins, have no charms for him. His
state is truly pitiable.
Now, if he were a poor man, with a family depending on his daily labor, this
irritability and despondency would be natural enough. But in a young fellow of twenty-
four, with plenty of money and seemingly not a care in the world, the thing is monstrous.
If he continues to give way to his vagaries in this manner, he will end by bringing on an
inflammation of the fibula. It was the fibula he broke. I am at my wits’ end to know what
to prescribe for him. I have anaesthetics and lotions, to make people sleep and to soothe
pain; but I’ve no medicine that will make a man have a little commonsense. That is
beyond my skill, but maybe it is not beyond yours. You are Flemming’s intimate friend,
his fidus Achates. Write to him, write to him frequently, distract his mind, cheer him up,
and prevent him from becoming a confirmed case of melancholia. Perhaps he has some
important plans disarranged by his present confinement. If he has you will know, and will
know how to advise him judiciously. I trust your father finds the change beneficial? I am,
my dear sir, with great respect, etc.
II.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN
FLEMMING, WEST 38TH STREET,
NEW YORK.
August 9, 1872.
My Dear Jack: I had a line from Dillon this morning, and was rejoiced to learn that
your hurt is not so bad as reported. Like a certain personage, you are not so black and
blue as you are painted. Dillon will put you on your pins again in two to three weeks, if
you will only have patience and follow his counsels. Did you get my note of last
Wednesday? I was greatly troubled when I heard of the accident.
I can imagine how tranquil and saintly you are with your leg in a trough! It is deuced
awkward, to be sure, just as we had promised ourselves a glorious month together at the
sea-side; but we must make the best of it. It is unfortunate, too, that my father’s health
renders it impossible for me to leave him. I think he has much improved; the sea air is his
native element; but he still needs my arm to lean upon in his walks, and requires some
one more careful that a servant to look after him. I cannot come to you, dear Jack, but I
have hours of unemployed time on hand, and I will write you a whole post-office full of
letters, if that will divert you. Heaven knows, I haven’t anything to write about. It isn’t as
if we were living at one of the beach houses; then I could do you some character studies,
and fill your imagination with groups of sea-goddesses, with their (or somebody else’s)
raven and blonde manes hanging down their shoulders. You should have Aphrodite in
morning wrapper, in evening costume, and in her prettiest bathing suit. But we are far
from all that here. We have rooms in a farmhouse, on a cross-road, two miles from the
hotels, and lead the quietest of lives.
I wish I were a novelist. This old house, with its sanded floors and high wainscots, and
its narrow windows looking out upon a cluster of pines that turn themselves into aeolian
harps every time the wind blows, would be the place in which to write a summer
romance. It should be a story with the odors of the forest and the breath of the sea in it. It
should be a novel like one of that Russian fellow’s — what’s his name? — Tourguenieff,
Turguenef, Turgenif, Toorguniff, Turgenjew — nobody knows how to spell him. Yet I
wonder if even a Liza or an Alexandra Paulovna could stir the heart of a man who has
constant twinges in his leg. I wonder if one of our own Yankee girls of the best type,
haughty and spirituelle, would be of any comfort to you in your present deplorable
condition. If I thought so, I would hasten down to the Surf House and catch one for you;
or, better still, I would find you one over the way.
Picture to yourself a large white house just across the road, nearly opposite our
cottage. It is not a house, but a mansion, built, perhaps, in the colonial period, with
rambling extensions, and gambrel roof, and a wide piazza on three sides—a self-
possessed, high-bred piece of architecture, with its nose in the air. It stands back from the
road, and has an obsequious retinue of fringed elms and oaks and weeping willows.
Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn
from that part of the mansions, a young woman appears on the piazza with some
mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over
there — of pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is
eighteen, and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress
looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is chaussee like a belle of
the time of Louis Quatorze. All this splendor goes into that hammock, and sways there
like a pond-lily in the golden afternoon. The window of my bedroom looks down on that
piazza — and so do I.
But enough of the nonsense, which ill becomes a sedate young attorney taking his
vacation with an invalid father. Drop me a line, dear Jack, and tell me how you really are.
State your case. Write me a long, quite letter. If you are violent or abusive, I’ll take the
law to you.
III.
JOHN FLEMMING TO EDWARD
DELANEY.
August 11, 1872.
Your letter, dear Ned, was a godsend. Fancy what a fix I am in — I, who never had a
day’s sickness since I was born. My left leg weighs three tons. It is embalmed in spices
and smothered in layers of fine linen, like a mummy. I can’t move. I haven’t moved for
five thousand years. I’m of the time of Pharaoh.
I lie from morning till night on a lounge, staring into the hot street. Everybody is out
of town enjoying himself. The brown-stone-front houses across the street resemble a row
of particularly ugly coffins set up on end. A green mould is settling on the names of the
deceased, carved on the silver door-plates. Sardonic spiders have sewed up the key-holes.
All is silence and dust and desolation. — I interrupt this a moment, to take a shy at
Watkins with the second volume of Cesar Birotteau. Missed him! I think I could bring
him down with a copy of Sainte-Beuve or the Dictionnaire Universel, if I had it. These
small Balzac books somehow do not quite fit my hand; but I shall fetch him yet. I’ve an
idea that Watkins is tapping the old gentleman’s Chateau Yquem. Duplicate key of the
wine-cellar. Hibernian swarries in the front basement. Young Cheops up stairs, snug in
his cerements. Watkins glides into my chamber, with that colorless, hypocritical face of
his drawn out long like an accordion; but I know he grins all the way down stairs, and is
glad I have broken my leg. Was not my evil star in the very zenith when I ran up to town
to attend that dinner at Delmonico’s? I didn’t come up altogether for that. It was partly to
buy Frank Livingstone’s roan mare Margot. And now I shall not be able to sit in the
saddle these two months. I’ll send the mare down to you at The Pines — is that the name
of the place?
Old Dillon fancies that I have something on my mind. He drives me wild with lemons.
Lemons for a mind diseased! Nonsense. I am only as restless as the devil under this
confinement—a thing I’m not used to. Take a man who has never had so much as a
headache or a toothache in his life, strap one of his legs in a section of water-spout, keep
him in a room in the city for weeks, with the hot weather turned on, and then expect him
to smile and purr and be happy! It is preposterous. I can’t be cheerful or calm.
Your letter is the first consoling thing I have had since my disaster, ten days ago. It really
cheered me up for half an hour. Send me a screed, Ned, as often as you can, if you love
me. Anything will do. Write me more about that little girl in the hammock. That was very
