This story appeared in the Charlotte Gazette, Feb. 28, 1895 after being picked up from the New York Ledger (at a time when comic valentines were common but beginning to wane). The author, J.L. Harbour, appears to be a prolific late 19th century to early 20th century writer. By one account, he had written over 600 short stories by 1902. A sketch of his life written the same year states, "He began to send original stories, such as brought to view and tended to correct life's inharmonies, lapses and weaknesses, to eastern journals, and among others to the Youth's Companion, whose editors recognized his gift even in its immaturity."
This short work appears to have been written before he became widely known for "Papa and the Boy" and "The Mourning Veil," but it provides a glimpse of his writing style and sensibilities in humor and character studies. Like many other authors we have investigated here, his work has generally been forgotten by today's readers, but there is an abundance of material ripe for more investigation by an intrepid literary historian. As this story should be out of copyright in the US due to its age, it has been reprinted in full for your enjoyment. Read on!
A VALENTINE ROMANCE, BY J. L. HARBOUR.
"I'd just like to know who in the land of the livin’ ever sent me that thing! I just would like to know!" Lucinda Dyke sat in her big wooden rocking-chair, with her bonnet and shawl still on, although she was one of the most methodical of spinsters and made it a rule to put her gloves, bonnet and shawl away, neatly and carefully, the moment she entered her house. But on this occasion she had sunk hastily into the rocking-chair with even her gloves on.
She had been to the village postoffice, and, to her unspeakable amazement, had received a valentine. She had not even remembered that it was St. Valentine’s Day until she had passed one of the village shop-windows, hanging full of valentines, and she had said to herself when she saw them: “Dear me! I thought that silly and redikilous[sic] custom of sending valentines had about died out. Such nonsense as it is! But I guess only children and fools do it.”
Five minutes later, Mr. Moses Moss, the village postmaster, handed Miss Dyke a square, highly embossed white envelope through the little postoffice window. "I guess somebody sent you a valentine, Miss ’Cindy,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody’s been so silly,” she replied, a little tartly. She was rarely given to joking, and she always resented jokes having even remote reference to affairs of the heart. She acknowledged herself to be ‘‘touchy” on this point, and she felt offended when she knew that it was really a valentine that she held in her hands. She dropped it quickly into the black-cloth handbag she carried, her face flushing crimson with indignation. She was so disconcerted by receiving the valentine that she forgot to ask for the postage stamps and envelopes she had come to the office for, but marched out very primly and stiffly, giving the door of the postoffice a sharp little bang behind her.
She felt quite sure that Moses Moss was watching her through the one little front window of the postoffice, and she held her head very high and swung her black alpaca skirts scornfully as she walked away. “I wish to the laud I’d torn the thing into a thousand pieces right before him!” she said, as she turned the corner. “He likely knows who sent it, as he’s the postmaster and familiar with ev’rybody’s writin’. An’ Mose is such an old gossip he’d be sure to tell the parson who sent it if he’d seen me tear it up. Wish I had.”
Her brown eyes were none the less beautiful because of the angry sparkle in them, and the flush of crimson on either cheek was very becoming to Miss Lucinda. She found her scissors, the moment she entered her house, and cut off an end of the envelope with a snap. Then she drew out a dainty little creation in pink and blue and gold on a foundation of white, satiny paper, with an edge of paper lace. She held it out at arms’ length, in her gloved hands. Her eyes fairly glittered now, and the crimson flush on her cheeks deepened. “Whoever sent me that thing is a fool!” she said. Then she held the valentine a little nearer, and said, scornfully: '“Humph! Hearts with arrers run through ’em, an’ nasty little Cupids an’ weddin’-bells—the idea of it! It’s a perfect in-sult! When a woman gets to be forty-three years old, as I am, the less she thinks of Cupids an’ weddin’-bells an’ such nonsense, the better off she is. I’ve a good mind to put the thing into the fire, and— what’s this? Poetry, as I’m a sinner !”
The valentine had suddenly opened in her hands, and, in gilt letters, with a gold heart above and below it, was this verse:
“Mercies !” cried Miss Dyke, as she let the valentine fall into her lap, while her arms fell limply to her sides and she almost gasped for breath. Presently she said slowly, nodding her bonneted head to and fro: “I—just —wonder —who — did — send — mo — that—silly—thing? Some mischievous school-boy, likely. But, no; he’d sent me one o’ them nasty comics with a picture of an old maid on it with a nose a yard long and a sassy verse printed on it. I never saw that writing before, that I know of.”
She took up the envelope and scrutinized the address carefully. "No," she said, “I never saw that writing before. Now, if I knew who sent me that thing, I’d send it right back with a note, telling ’em just what I thought of ’em. I vow I would!”
She put the valentine back into the envelope and gave it a spiteful little toss over to a small stand near her. Then she rose briskly, took off her bonnet and shawl, exchanged her black alpaca for a gray mohair house-dress and a crisp white apron with wide-crocheted lace on it, and sat down by the little stand with a piece of half-finished sewing in her hands. The valentine fell to the floor at her feet, when she took up her sewing. She let it lay where it had fallen for several minutes, while she stitched away in silence, drawing the thread through the cloth with quick, short jerks.
Suddenly she stooped and picked up the valentine. “How did that silly verse go?” she said, as she drew the valentine from its envelope. “Such stuff as it is anyhow!” She read it again and again, heedless of the fact that the cat was snarling up dreadfully the contents of her workbasket. “I know what I’m going to do,” she said, suddenly. “I’m going back to the postoffice and make Moses Moss tell me whose handwritin’ that is on the envelope. He’ll know, and he’ll tell me, too. Mose always was a good-natured fellow, and he’ll tell me if he knows. I’ve just the faintest s’picion that old Jasper Hoyt may have sent me this. They say he’s half cracked to marry again, and his first wife not six months in her grave. La! I want it flying back to him with as sassy a letter as ever ho got, if I find Jasper Hoyt did send it.
“Or it may be that it came from Silas Lawson. Some think he wants to marry ’cause he’s painted and fixed up his place so, and got himself some decent duds. He’ll never marry me. It may have come from Judson Sparks, and there ain’t no one I’d sooner send it flying buck to than him. He worried his first wife into her grave, and he’d never get the chance to worry me there, not if he’d get down on his bended knees and begged me to have him. John Gleeson may have sent it for—but I’ll just go and find out of the postmaster who did send it. I’m just curious to know.”
But there was something more than mere curiosity in Miss Lucinda’s lonely heart as she walked back to the postoffice. Not for the world would she have admitted it even to herself, but there was a feeling of pleasure as well as of curiosity in her breast now. She could not dismiss the doggerel lines of that verse from her mind! "‘Say: “Yes!” Say: “Yes!” My Valentine," she repeated, reproaching and scorning herself for her weakness in doing so, and saying stoutly to herself: ‘‘The man don’t live that I’d say; ‘Yes’ to; no, he don’t. What a big goose I am anyhow.”
She reached the postoffice. The postmaster was alone in the neatly kept little room. He was a short, stout, kindly-looking man of almost fifty years. He had childish-blue eyes and a round, honest face, a little inclined toward effeminacy in some of its outlines. The softness and sweetness of his voice were surprising when one looked at his swelling chest and broad shoulders. Everybody knew and everybody liked Moses Moss. Lucinda Dyke had known him all of her life, and she had never called him anything but “Moses” or “Mose.” Now she said quickly, eager to do her errand before any one came in : “See here, Moses, I want to ask a favor of you.”
“All right, ’Cindy. Ask away.”
“You know that some great goose had no more sense than to send me a valentine?” Moses’s smooth, round cheeks crimsoned.
“I knew you got one a while ago,” he said.
“Think of it! The idea! Well, now Moses, I want you to, tell me whose handwritin’ that is.” She laid the envelope before him. He looked at it and then at her, the womanish blush deepening in his cheeks. “You know, don’t you?” asked Miss Lucinda. “I felt sure you would, you being postmaster and seeing ev’rybody’s handwriting so much. You know that, don’t you?”
“What you want to know for, ’Cindy?”
“Well, because I do,” she said, quite sharply, “If it come from the person I s’pact it come from, he’ll get it back in short order.”
“Whom do you suspect, ’Cindy ?”
“I ain’t going to say.”
“It may be ag'in the Gov’ment Postoffice laws for me to tell without a written order from the Postoffice Gen’ral.”
“Stuff, Moses! Moses, how’s he going to know, anything about it? And, do you s’ppse the Postoffice Gen’ral and the President and his Cabinet is going to hang you if you should happen to tell an old maid who sent her a silly valentine? You know better than that! Did Jas Hoyt send-it?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“It ain’t Sile Lawson's handwriting?”
“No.”
“Nor Judson Sparks’s?”
“No, ’Cindy.”
“Did John Gleeson send it?"
“It ain’t his writing.”
“Well, who in creation did send it?”
“You’ll get mad if I tell you.”
“Well, 1 won’t get mad at you, anyhow, Moses.”
“Sure not, ’Cindy?” He was leaning over a little counter, now looking up into her face with an eager, pleading, searching look. “You sure not, ’Cindy ?" he asked again.
“No, of course not,” she said. “Why should I? I-I—why, Moses Moss!” She stepped back with a wild, frightened look. Something in his face and manner startled her.
“’Cindy,” he said.
“Why, I—well?”
“I sent it, 'Cindy.”
"Good Lor’! Mose Moss!”
“I did, 'Cindy. I— Wait a moment, 'Cindy !” She would have fled from the postoffice, but he reached across, the counter and caught both her hands in his, saying eagerly: “I did,'’Cindy! I did ! I sent it.”
“Let me go, Moses Moss!”
“You won’t send it back, ’Cindy?”
“I—I--why, Moses Moss!”
“You won’t—dear?”
“Oh, mercy!”
“Say you won’t.”
“Well, I—I—won’t -there.”
“Oh, ’Cindy, I’ve wanted for months and months to say what that poetry verse said, but I ain’t dared to say it myself. I am lonely, and you must be, too, ’Cindy. You’ll say ‘yes' to that verse, won’t you, ’Cindy?”
“I—I—let me think. Oh, there comes old Mrs. Duke into the office. Let go my hands. She’ll tell it all over town before sunset, if she saw you holding my hands, I must go. I must go.”
She jerked her hands away; and Moses called out after her: “If it’s ‘yea,’ ’Cindy, when I go by to supper, you be settin’ by your front winder, with that red ribbon bow in your hair, that you had on to the church social last night. Please, ’Cindy.”
She made no reply, but hurried but with crimson cheeks and shining eyes.
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| Arnold Genthe, photographer. Woman wearing a pink dress with a pink bow in her hair, courtesy Genthe photograph collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. |
“Maybe somebody sent her a valentine,” said Martha, with a little tittering laugh, never dreaming that she had guessed aright.
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