just like me, and think I am fortunate to have married a man who will
let me do as I choose. I don't see why it isn't sensible: you will be
living exactly as you were before you married, as to home affairs; and
since it was a good thing for you to know something about housekeeping
then, I can't imagine why you shouldn't go on with it now, since it
makes me miserable, and I am wasting a fine business talent while I do
it. What do we care for people's talking about it?"
"It seems to me that it is something like women's smoking: it isn't
wicked, but it isn't the custom of the country. And I don't like the
idea of your going among business men. Of course I should be above going
with you, and having people think I must be an idiot; they would say
that you married a manufacturing interest, and I was thrown in. I can
foresee that my pride is going to be humbled to the dust in every way,"
Tom declared in mournful tones, and began to shake with laughter. "It is
one of your lovely castles in the air, dear Polly, but an old brick mill
needs a better foundation than the clouds. No, I'll look around, and get
an honest, experienced man for agent. I suppose it's the best thing we
can do, for the machinery ought not to lie still any longer; but I mean
to sell the factory as soon as I can. I devoutly wish it would take
fire, for the insurance would be the best price we are likely to get.
That is a famous letter from Alice! I am afraid the captain has been
growling over his pay, or they have been giving too many little dinners
on board ship. If we were rid of the mill, you and I might go out there
this winter. It would be capital fun."
Mary smiled again in an absent-minded way. Tom had an uneasy feeling
that he had not heard the end of it yet, but nothing more was said for a
day or two. When Mrs. Tom Wilson announced, with no apparent thought of
being contradicted, that she had entirely made up her mind, and she
meant to see those men who had been overseers of the different
departments, who still lived in the village, and have the mill put in
order at once, Tom looked disturbed, but made no opposition; and soon
after breakfast his wife formally presented him with a handful of keys,
and told him there was some lamb in the house for dinner; and presently
he heard the wheels of her little phaeton rattling off down the road. I
should be untruthful if I tried to persuade any one that he was not
provoked; he thought she would at least have waited for his formal
permission, and at first he meant to take another horse, and chase her,
and bring her back in disgrace, and put a stop to the whole thing. But
something assured him that she knew what she was about, and he
determined to let her have her own way. If she failed, it might do no
harm, and this was the only ungallant thought he gave her. He was sure
that she would do nothing unladylike, or be unmindful of his dignity;
and he believed it would be looked upon as one of her odd, independent
freaks, which always had won respect in the end, however much they had
been laughed at in the beginning. "Susan," said he, as that estimable
person went by the door with the dust-pan, "you may tell Catherine to
come to me for orders about the house, and you may do so yourself. I am
going to take charge again, as I did before I was married. It is no
trouble to me, and Mrs. Wilson dislikes it. Besides, she is going into
business, and will have a great deal else to think of."
"Yes, sir; very well, sir," said Susan, who was suddenly moved to ask so
many questions that she was utterly silent. But her master looked very
happy; there was evidently no disapproval of his wife; and she went on
up the stairs, and began to sweep them down, knocking the dust-brush
about excitedly, as if she were trying to kill a descending colony of
insects.
Tom went out to the stable and mounted his horse, which had been waiting
for him to take his customary after-breakfast ride to the post-office,
and he galloped down the road in quest of the phaeton. He saw Mary
talking with Jack Towne, who had been an overseer and a valued workman
of his father's. He was looking much surprised and pleased.
"I wasn't caring so much about getting work, myself," he explained;
"I've got what will carry me and my wife through; but it'll be better
for the young folks about here to work near home. My nephews are wanting
something to do; they were going to Lynn next week. I don't say but I
should like to be to work in the old place again. I've sort of missed
it, since we shut down."
"I'm sorry I was so long in overtaking you," said Tom, politely, to his
wife. "Well, Jack, did Mrs. Wilson tell you she's going to start the
mill? You must give her all the help you can."
"'Deed I will," said Mr. Towne, gallantly, without a bit of
astonishment.
"I don't know much about the business yet," said Mrs. Wilson, who had
been a little overcome at Jack Towne's lingo of the different rooms and
machinery, and who felt an overpowering sense of having a great deal
before her in the next few weeks. "By the time the mill is ready, I will
be ready, too," she said, taking heart a little; and Tom, who was quick
to understand her moods, could not help laughing, as he rode alongside.
"We want a new barrel of flour, Tom, dear," she said, by way of
punishment for his untimely mirth.
If she lost courage in the long delay, or was disheartened at the steady
call for funds, she made no sign; and after a while the mill started up,
and her cares were lightened, so that she told Tom that before next pay
day she would like to go to Boston for a few days, and go to the
theatre, and have a frolic and a rest. She really looked pale and thin,
and she said she never worked so hard in all her life; but nobody knew
how happy she was, and she was so glad she had married Tom, for some men
would have laughed at it.
"I laughed at it," said Tom, meekly. "All is, if I don't cry by and by,
because I am a beggar, I shall be lucky." But Mary looked fearlessly
serene, and said that there was no danger at present.
It would have been ridiculous to expect a dividend the first year,
though the Nagasaki people were pacified with difficulty. All the
business letters came to Tom's address, and everybody who was not
directly concerned thought that he was the motive power of the
reawakened enterprise. Sometimes business people came to the mill, and
were amazed at having to confer with Mrs. Wilson, but they soon had to
respect her talents and her success. She was helped by the old clerk,
who had been promptly recalled and reinstated, and she certainly did
capitally well. She was laughed at, as she had expected to be, and
people said they should think Tom would be ashamed of himself; but it
soon appeared that he was not to blame, and what reproach was offered
was on the score of his wife's oddity. There was nothing about the mill
that she did not understand before very long, and at the end of the
second year she declared a small dividend with great pride and triumph.
And she was congratulated on her success, and every one thought of her
project in a different way from the way they had thought of it in the
beginning. She had singularly good fortune: at the end of the third year
she was making money for herself and her friends faster than most people
were, and approving letters began to come from Nagasaki. The Ashtons had
been ordered to stay in that region, and it was evident that they were
continually being obliged to entertain more instead of less. Their
children were growing fast, too, and constantly becoming more expensive.
The captain and his wife had already begun to congratulate themselves
secretly that their two sons would in all probability come into
possession, one day, of their uncle Tom's handsome property.
For a good while Tom enjoyed life, and went on his quiet way serenely.
He was anxious at first, for he thought that Mary was going to make
ducks and drakes of his money and her own. And then he did not exactly
like the looks of the thing, either; he feared that his wife was growing
successful as a business person at the risk of losing her womanliness.
But as time went on, and he found there was no fear of that, he
accepted the situation philosophically. He gave up his collection of
engravings, having become more interested in one of coins and medals,
which took up most of his leisure time. He often went to the city in
pursuit of such treasures, and gained much renown in certain quarters as
a numismatologist of great skill and experience. But at last his house
(which had almost kept itself, and had given him little to do beside
ordering the dinners, while faithful old Catherine and her niece Susan
were his aids) suddenly became a great care to him. Catherine, who had
been the main-stay of the family for many years, died after a short
illness, and Susan must needs choose that time, of all others, for being
married to one of the second hands in the mill. There followed a long
and dismal season of experimenting, and for a time there was a
procession of incapable creatures going in at one kitchen door and out
of the other. His wife would not have liked to say so, but it seemed to
her that Tom was growing fussy about the house affairs, and took more
notice of those minor details than he used. She wished more than once,
when she was tired, that he would not talk so much about the
housekeeping; he seemed sometimes to have no other thought.
In the early days of Mrs. Wilson's business life, she had made it a rule
to consult her husband on every subject of importance; but it had
speedily proved to be a formality. Tom tried manfully to show a deep
interest which he did not feel, and his wife gave up, little by little,
telling him much about her affairs. She said that she liked to drop
business when she came home in the evening; and at last she fell into
the habit of taking a nap on the library sofa, while Tom, who could not
use his eyes much by lamp-light, sat smoking or in utter idleness before
the fire. When they were first married his wife had made it a rule that
she should always read him the evening papers, and afterward they had
always gone on with some book of history or philosophy, in which they
were both interested. These evenings of their early married life had
been charming to both of them, and from time to time one would say to
the other that they ought to take up again the habit of reading
together. Mary was so unaffectedly tired in the evening that Tom never
liked to propose a walk; for, though he was not a man of peculiarly
social nature, he had always been accustomed to pay an occasional
evening visit to his neighbors in the village. And though he had little
interest in the business world, and still less knowledge of it, after a
while he wished that his wife would have more to say about what she was
planning and doing, or how things were getting on. He thought that her
chief aid, old Mr. Jackson, was far more in her thoughts than he. She
was forever quoting Jackson's opinions. He did not like to find that she
took it for granted that he was not interested in the welfare of his own
property; it made him feel like a sort of pensioner and dependent,
though, when they had guests at the house, which was by no means seldom,
there was nothing in her manner that would imply that she thought
herself in any way the head of the family. It was hard work to find
fault with his wife in any way, though, to give him his due, he rarely
tried.
* * * * *
But, this being a wholly unnatural state of things, the reader must
expect to hear of its change at last, and the first blow from the enemy
was dealt by an old woman, who lived near by, and who called to Tom one
morning, as he was driving down to the village in a great hurry (to post
a letter, which ordered his agent to secure a long-wished-for ancient
copper coin, at any price), to ask him if they had made yeast that week,
and if she could borrow a cupful, as her own had met with some
misfortune. Tom was instantly in a rage, and he mentally condemned her
to some undeserved fate, but told her aloud to go and see the cook. This
slight delay, besides being killing to his dignity, caused him to lose
the mail, and in the end his much-desired copper coin. It was a hard day
for him, altogether; it was Wednesday, and the first days of the week
having been stormy the washing was very late. And Mary came home to
dinner provokingly good-natured. She had met an old school-mate and her
husband driving home from the mountains, and had first taken them over
her factory, to their great amusement and delight, and then had brought
them home to dinner. Tom greeted them cordially, and manifested his
usual graceful hospitality; but the minute he saw his wife alone he said
in a plaintive tone of rebuke, "I should think you might have remembered
that the servants are unusually busy to-day. I do wish you would take a
little interest in things at home. The women have been washing, and I'm
sure I don't know what sort of a dinner we can give your friends. I wish
you had thought to bring home some steak. I have been busy myself, and
couldn't go down to the village. I thought we would only have a lunch."
Mary was hungry, but she said nothing, except that it would be all
right,--she didn't mind; and perhaps they could have some canned soup.
She often went to town to buy or look at cotton, or to see some
improvement in machinery, and she brought home beautiful bits of
furniture and new pictures for the house, and showed a touching
thoughtfulness in remembering Tom's fancies; but somehow he had an
uneasy suspicion that she could get along pretty well without him when
it came to the deeper wishes and hopes of her life, and that her most
important concerns were all matters in which he had no share. He seemed
to himself to have merged his life in his wife's; he lost his interest
in things outside the house and grounds; he felt himself fast growing
rusty and behind the times, and to have somehow missed a good deal in
life; he had a suspicion that he was a failure. One day the thought
rushed over him that his had been almost exactly the experience of most
women, and he wondered if it really was any more disappointing and
ignominious to him than it was to women themselves. "Some of them may be
contented with it," he said to himself, soberly. "People think women are
designed for such careers by nature, but I don't know why I ever made
such a fool of myself."
Having once seen his situation in life from such a standpoint, he felt
it day by day to be more degrading, and he wondered what he should do
about it; and once, drawn by a new, strange sympathy, he went to the
little family burying ground. It was one of the mild, dim days that come
sometimes in early November, when the pale sunlight is like the pathetic
smile of a sad face, and he sat for a long time on the limp,
frost-bitten grass beside his mother's grave.
But when he went home in the twilight his step-mother, who just then was
making them a little visit, mentioned that she had been looking through
some boxes of hers that had been packed long before and stowed away in
the garret. "Everything looks very nice up there," she said, in her
wheezing voice (which, worse than usual that day, always made him
nervous); and added, without any intentional slight to his feelings, "I
do think you have always been a most excellent housekeeper."
"I'm tired of such nonsense!" he exclaimed, with surprising indignation.
"Mary, I wish you to arrange your affairs so that you can leave them for
six months at least. I am going to spend this winter in Europe."
"Why, Tom, dear!" said his wife, appealingly. "I couldn't leave my
business any way in the"--
But she caught sight of a look on his usually placid countenance that
was something more than decision, and refrained from saying anything
more.
And three weeks from that day they sailed.
_Miss Debby's Neighbors_
There is a class of elderly New England women which is fast dying
out:--those good souls who have sprung from a soil full of the true New
England instincts; who were used to the old-fashioned ways, and whose
minds were stored with quaint country lore and tradition. The fashions
of the newer generations do not reach them; they are quite unconscious
of the western spirit and enterprise, and belong to the old days, and to
a fast-disappearing order of things.
But a shrewder person does not exist than the spokeswoman of the
following reminiscences, whose simple history can be quickly told, since
she spent her early life on a lonely farm, leaving it only once for any
length of time,--one winter when she learned her trade of tailoress. She
afterward sewed for her neighbors, and enjoyed a famous reputation for
her skill; but year by year, as she grew older, there was less to do,
and at last, to use her own expression, "Everybody got into the way of
buying cheap, ready-made-up clothes, just to save 'em a little trouble,"
and she found herself out of business, or nearly so. After her mother's
death, and that of her favorite younger brother Jonas, she left the farm
and came to a little house in the village, where she lived most
comfortably the rest of her life, having a small property which she used
most sensibly. She was always ready to render any special service with
her needle, and was a most welcome guest in any household, and a most
efficient helper. To be in the same room with her for a while was sure
to be profitable, and as she grew older she was delighted to recall the
people and events of her earlier life, always filling her descriptions
with wise reflections and much quaint humor. She always insisted, not
without truth, that the railroads were making everybody look and act of
a piece, and that the young folks were more alike than people of her own
day. It is impossible to give the delightfulness of her talk in any
written words, as well as many of its peculiarities, for her way of
going round Robin Hood's barn between the beginning of her story and its
end can hardly be followed at all, and certainly not in her own dear
loitering footsteps.
On an idle day her most devoted listener thought there was nothing
better worth doing than to watch this good soul at work. A book was held
open for the looks of the thing, but presently it was allowed to flutter
its leaves and close, for Miss Debby began without any apparent
provocation:--
"They may say whatever they have a mind to, but they can't persuade me
that there's no such thing as special providences," and she twitched her
strong linen thread so angrily through the carpet she was sewing, that
it snapped and the big needle flew into the air. It had to be found
before any further remarks could be made, and the listener also knelt
down to search for it. After a while it was discovered clinging to Miss
Debby's own dress, and after reharnessing it she went to work again at
her long seam. It was always significant of a succession of Miss Debby's
opinions when she quoted and berated certain imaginary persons whom she
designated as "They," who stood for the opposite side of the question,
and who merited usually her deepest scorn and fullest antagonism. Her
remarks to these offending parties were always prefaced with "I tell
'em," and to the listener's mind "they" always stood rebuked, but not
convinced, in spiritual form it may be, but most intense reality; a
little group as solemn as Miss Debby herself. Once the listener ventured
to ask who "they" were, in her early childhood, but she was only
answered by a frown. Miss Debby knew as well as any one the difference
between figurative language and a lie. Sometimes they said what was
right and proper, and were treated accordingly; but very seldom, and on
this occasion it seemed that they had ventured to trifle with sacred
things.
"I suppose you're too young to remember John Ashby's grandmother? A good
woman she was, and she had a dreadful time with her family. They never
could keep the peace, and there was always as many as two of them who
didn't speak with each other. It seems to come down from generation to
generation like a--_curse!_" And Miss Debby spoke the last word as if
she had meant it partly for her thread, which had again knotted and
caught, and she snatched the offered scissors without a word, but said
peaceably, after a minute or two, that the thread wasn't what it used
to be. The next needleful proved more successful, and the listener asked
if the Ashbys were getting on comfortably at present.
"They always behave as if they thought they needed nothing," was the
response. "Not that I mean that they are any ways contented, but they
never will give in that other folks holds a candle to 'em. There's one
kind of pride that I do hate,--when folks is satisfied with their selves
and don't see no need of improvement. I believe in self-respect, but I
believe in respecting other folks's rights as much as your own; but it
takes an Ashby to ride right over you. I tell 'em it's the spirit of the
tyrants of old, and it's the kind of pride that goes before a fall. John
Ashby's grandmother was a clever little woman as ever stepped. She came
from over Hardwick way, and I think she kep' 'em kind of decent-behaved
as long as she was round; but she got wore out a doin' of it, an' went
down to her grave in a quick consumption. My mother set up with her the
night she died. It was in May, towards the latter part, and an awful
rainy night. It was the storm that always comes in apple-blossom time. I
remember well that mother come crying home in the morning and told us
Mis' Ashby was dead. She brought Marilly with her, that was about my own
age, and was taken away within six months afterwards. She pined herself
to death for her mother, and when she caught the scarlet fever she went
as quick as cherry-bloom when it's just ready to fall and a wind strikes
it. She wa'n't like the rest of 'em. She took after her mother's folks
altogether.
"You know our farm was right next to theirs,--the one Asa Hopper owns
now, but he's let it all run out,--and so, as we lived some ways from
the stores, we had to be neighborly, for we depended on each other for a
good many things. Families in lonesome places get out of one supply and
another, and have to borrow until they get a chance to send to the
village; or sometimes in a busy season some of the folks would have to
leave work and be gone half a day. Land, you don't know nothing about
old times, and the life that used to go on about here. You can't step
into a house anywheres now that there ain't the county map and they
don't fetch out the photograph book; and in every district you'll find
all the folks has got the same chromo picture hung up, and all sorts of
luxuries and makeshifts o' splendor that would have made the folks I
was fetched up by stare their eyes out o' their heads. It was all we
could do to keep along then; and if anybody was called rich, it was only
because he had a great sight of land,--and then it was drudge, drudge
the harder to pay the taxes. There was hardly any ready money; and I
recollect well that old Tommy Simms was reputed wealthy, and it was told
over fifty times a year that he'd got a solid four thousand dollars in
the bank. He strutted round like a turkey-cock, and thought he ought to
have his first say about everything that was going.
"I was talking about the Ashbys, wasn't I? I do' know's I ever told you
about the fight they had after their father died about the old house.
Joseph was married to a girl he met in camp-meeting time, who had a
little property--two or three hundred dollars--from an old great uncle
that she'd been keeping house for; and I don't know what other plans she
may have had for spending of her means, but she laid most of it out in a
husband; for Joseph never cared any great about her that I could see,
though he always treated her well enough. She was a poor ignorant sort
of thing, seven years older than he was; but she had a pleasant kind of
a face, and seemed like an overgrown girl of six or eight years old. I
remember just after they was married Joseph was taken down with a quinsy
sore throat,--being always subject to them,--and mother was over in the
forenoon, and she was one that was always giving right hand and left,
and she told Susan Ellen--that was his wife--to step over in the
afternoon and she would give her some blackberry preserve for him; she
had some that was nice and it was very healing. So along about half-past
one o'clock, just as we had got the kitchen cleared, and mother and I
had got out the big wheels to spin a few rolls,--we always liked to spin
together, and mother was always good company;--my brother Jonas--that
was the youngest of us--looked out of the window, and says he: 'Here
comes Joe Ashby's wife with a six-quart pail.'