My Uncle Florimond

Both of my parents died while I was still a baby; and I passed my childhood at the home of my father's mother in Norwich Town--which lies upon the left bank of the river Yantic, some three miles to the north of Norwich City, in Eastern Connecticut.

My father's mother, my dear old grandmother, was a French lady by birth; and her maiden name had been quite an imposing one--Aurore Aline Raymonde Marie Antoinette de la Bourbonnaye. But in 1820, when she was nineteen years old, my grandfather had persuaded her to change it for plain and simple Mrs. Brace; from which it would seem that my grandfather must have been a remarkably persuasive man. At that time she lived in Paris with her father and mother, who were very lofty, aristocratic people--the Marquis and Marquise de la Bourbonnaye. But after her marriage she followed her husband across the ocean to his home in Connecticut, where in 1835 he died, and where she had remained ever since. She had had two children: my father, Edward, whom the rebels shot at the Battle of Bull Run in July, 1861, and my father's elder brother, my Uncle Peter, who had never married, and who was the man of our house in Norwich.

The neighbors called my Uncle Peter Square, because he was a lawyer. Some of them called him Jedge, because he had once been a Justice of the Peace. Between him and me no love was lost. A stern, cold, frowning man, tall and dark, with straight black hair, a lean, smooth-shaven face, thin lips, hard black eyes, and bushy black eyebrows that grew together over his nose making him look false and cruel, he inspired in me an exceeding awe, and not one atom of affection. I was indeed so afraid of him that at the mere sound of his voice my heart would sink into my boots, and my whole skin turn goose-flesh. When I had to pass the door of his room, if he was in, I always quickened my pace and went on tiptoe, half expecting that he might dart out and seize upon me; if he was absent, I would stop and peek in through the keyhole, with the fascinated terror of one gazing into an ogre's den. And, oh me! what an agony of fear I had to suffer three times every day, seated at meals with him. If I so much as spoke a single word, except to answer a question, he would scowl upon me savagely, and growl out, “Children should be seen and not heard.” After he had helped my grandmother, he would demand in the crossest tone you can imagine, “Gregory, do you want a piece of meat?” Then I would draw a deep breath, clinch my fists, muster my utmost courage, and, scarcely louder than a whisper, stammer, “Ye-es, sir, if you p-please.” It would have come much more easily to say, “No, I thank you, sir,”--only I was so very hungry. But not once, in all the years I spent at Norwich, not once did I dare to ask for more. So I often left the table with my appetite not half satisfied, and would have to visit the kitchen between meals, and beg a supplementary morsel from Julia, our cook.

Uncle Peter, for his part, took hardly any notice whatever of me, unless it was to give me a gruff word of command--like “Leave the room,” “Go to bed,” “Hold your tongue,”--or worse still a scolding, or worst of all a whipping. For the latter purpose he employed a flexible rattan cane, with a curiously twisted handle. It buzzed like a hornet as it flew cutting through the air; and then, when it had reached its objective point--mercy, how it stung! I fancied that whipping me afforded him a great deal of enjoyment. Anyhow, he whipped me very often, and on the very slightest provocation: if I happened to be a few minutes behindhand at breakfast, for example, or if I did not have my hair nicely brushed and parted when I appeared at dinner. And if I cried, he would whip all the harder, saying, “I'll give you something to cry about,” so that in the end I learned to stand the most unmerciful flogging with never so much as a tear or a sob. Instead of crying, I would bite my lips, and drive my fingernails into the palms of my hands until they bled. Why, one day, I remember, I was standing in the dining-room, drinking a glass of water, when suddenly I heard his footstep behind me; and it startled me so that I let the tumbler drop from my grasp to the floor, where it broke, spilling the water over the carpet. “You clumsy jackanapes,” he cried; “come up-stairs with me, and I'll show you how to break tumblers.” He seized hold of my ear, and, pinching and tugging at it, led me up-stairs to his room. There he belabored me so vigorously with that rattan cane of his that I was stiff and lame for two days afterward. Well, I dare say that sometimes I merited my Uncle Peter's whippings richly; but I do believe that in the majority of cases when he whipped me, moral suasion would have answered quite as well, or even better. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was one of his fundamental principles of life.

Happily, however, except at meal hours, my Uncle Peter was seldom in the house. He had an office at the Landing--that was the name Norwich City went by in Norwich Town--and thither daily after breakfast and again after dinner, he betook himself. After supper he would go out to spend the evening--where or how I never knew, though I often wondered; but all day Sunday he would stay at home, shut up in his room; and all day Sunday, therefore, I was careful to keep as still as a mouse.

He did not in the least take after his mother, my grandmother; for she, I verily believe, of all sweet and gentle ladies was the sweetest and the gentlest. It is now more than sixteen years since she died; yet, as I think of her now, my heart swells, my eyes fill with tears, and I can see her as vividly before me as though we had parted but yesterday: a little old body, in a glistening black silk dress, with her snowy hair drawn in a tall puff upward from her forehead, and her kind face illuminated by a pair of large blue eyes, as quick and as bright as any maiden's. She had the whitest, daintiest, tiniest hands you ever did see; and the tiniest feet. These she had inherited from her noble French ancestors; and along with them she had also inherited a delicate Roman nose--or, as it is sometimes called, a Bourbon nose. Now, as you will recollect, the French word for nose is nez (pronounced nay); and I remember I often wondered whether that Bourbon nose of my grandmother's might not have had something to do with the origin of her family name, Bourbonnaye. But that, of course, was when I was a very young and foolish child indeed.

In her youth, I know, my grandmother had been a perfect beauty. Among the other pictures in our parlor, there hung an oil painting which represented simply the loveliest young lady that I could fancy. She had curling golden hair, laughing eyes as blue as the sky, ripe red lips just made to kiss, faintly blushing cheeks, and a rich, full throat like a column of ivory; and she wore a marvelous costume of cream-colored silk, trimmed with lace; and in one hand she-held a bunch of splendid crimson roses, so well painted that you could almost smell them. I used to sit before this portrait for hours at a stretch, and admire the charming girl who smiled upon me from it, and wonder and wonder who she could be, and where she lived, and whether I should ever have the good luck to meet her in proper person. I used to think that perhaps I had already met her somewhere, and then forgotten; for, though I could not put my finger on it, there was something strangely familiar to me in her face. I used to say to myself, “What if after all it should be only a fancy picture! Oh! I hope, I hope it isn't.” Then at length, one day, it occurred to me to go to my grandmother for information. Imagine my surprise when she told me that it was a portrait of herself, taken shortly before her wedding.

“O, dear! I wish I had been alive in those days,” I sighed.

“Why?” she queried.

“Because then I could have married you,” I explained. At which she laughed as merrily as though I had got off the funniest joke in the world, and called me an “_enfant terrible_”--a dreadful child.

This episode abode in my mind for a long time to come, and furnished me food for much sorrowful reflection. It brought forcibly home to me the awful truth, which I had never thought of before, that youth and beauty cannot last. That this young girl--so strong, so gay, so full of life, with such bright red lips and brilliant golden hair--that she could have changed into a feeble gray old lady, like my grandmother! It was a sad and appalling possibility.

My grandmother stood nearly as much in awe of my Uncle Peter as I did. He allowed himself to browbeat and bully her in a manner that made my blood boil. “Oh!” I would think in my soul, “just wait till I am a man as big as he is. Won't I teach him a lesson, though?” She and I talked together for the most part in French. This was for two reasons: first, because it was good practice for me; and secondly, because it was pleasant for her--French being her native tongue. Well, my Uncle Peter hated the very sound of French--why I could not guess, but I suspected it was solely for the sake of being disagreeable--and if ever a word of that language escaped my grandmother's lips in his presence, he would glare at her from beneath his shaggy brows, and snarl out, “Can't you speak English to the boy?” She never dared to interfere in my behalf when he was about to whip me--though I knew her heart ached to do so--but would sit alone in her room during the operation, and wait to comfort me after it was over. His rattan cane raised great red welts upon my skin, which smarted and were sore for hours. These she would rub with a salve that cooled and helped to heal them; and then, putting her arm about my neck, she would bid me not to mind it, and not to feel unhappy any more, and would give me peppermint candies and cookies, and tell me long, interesting stories, or read aloud to me, or show me the pictures in her big family Bible. “Paul and Virginia” and “The Arabian Nights” were the books I liked best to be read to from; and my favorite picture was one of Daniel iii the lion's den. Ah, my dear, dear grandmother! As I look back upon those days now, there is no bitterness in my memory of Uncle Peter's whippings; but my memory of your tender goodness in consoling me is infinitely sweet.

No; if my Uncle Peter was perhaps a trifle too severe with me, my grandmother erred in the opposite direction, and did much to spoil me. I never got a single angry word from her in all the years we lived together; yet I am sure I must have tried her patience very frequently and very sorely. Every forenoon, from eight till twelve o'clock, she gave me my lessons: geography, history, grammar, arithmetic and music. I was neither a very apt nor a very industrious pupil in any of these branches; but I was especially dull and especially lazy in my pursuit of the last. My grandmother would sit with me at the piano for an hour, and try and try to make me play my exercise aright; and though I always played it wrong, she never lost her temper, and never scolded. I deserved worse than a scolding; I deserved a good sound box on the ear; for I had shirked my practising, and that was why I blundered so. But the most my grandmother ever said or did by way of reproof, was to shake her head sadly at me, and murmur, “Ah, Gregory, Gregory, I fear that you lack ambition.” So very possibly, after all, my Uncle Peter's sternness was really good for me as a disagreeable but salutary tonic.