[Illustration:
The figure standing close behind him scarcely breathed.
_Frontispiece._ Page 192.
]
Rena’s Experiment
BY
MARY J. HOLMES
[Illustration: [Logo]]
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1901, 1904,
BY MRS. MARY J. HOLMES.
[_All rights reserved._]
_Rena’s Experiment._ _Issued August, 1904._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Nannie’s Well 9
II. The Farm-House 30
III. Rena’s Letter to Tom Giles 43
IV. Reginald and Tom 49
V. The Burdicks 67
VI. The First Evening 80
VII. The Call 94
VIII. Confidences and Communings 125
IX. Colin McPherson’s Call 136
X. The Dinner-Party 146
XI. Drifting 161
XII. Tom and Rena at the Well 171
XIII. Rex and Irene 185
XIV. Rex and Colin 198
XV. “Man Proposes, but God Disposes” 206
XVI. The Letter 217
XVII. Rex and Sam 225
XVIII. The Trained Nurse 234
XIX. Rex and Rena 243
XX. In the Sick-Room 261
XXI. Rex’s Experiment 272
XXII. Irene 288
XXIII. Conclusion 299
Rena’s Experiment
CHAPTER I
NANNIE’S WELL
A tall, angular woman, wearing a sun-bonnet and a big work apron which
nearly covered her short dress, stood on the fence calling, “Charlotte
Ann! Charlotte Ann! Charlotte Ann Parks! Where be you? Don’t you know
it’s ’most noon, and the table not set? and Miss Bennett’s very
partic’lar about her digester; and there’s a letter from the two summer
boarders who are coming!”
The woman’s voice, strong and clear, went echoing down a grassy lane
which led to a small grove, or thicket, of pine-woods in which was a
shallow well, now seldom used except during a summer drought, when the
cattle, which fed in the pasture-land around the woods, were watered
from it. The old bucket and curb had fallen apart, and pieces of them
were lying on the ground; but around the well were large, flat stones,
one of which projected beyond the others a foot or more, so that a
person standing upon it could look directly down into the centre of the
water below. And it was on this projection that Charlotte Ann Parks was
standing when her mother’s voice came warning her that it was nearly
noon, that the table was not set, that Miss Bennett was particular about
her “digester,” and there was a letter from the summer boarders.
Charlotte Ann, or Lottie, as she was usually called by all except her
mother, heard the call, but paid no attention. Her ear was strained to
catch the first sound of the town clock in the village two miles away
which would tell her that it was noon, and her eyes were fixed intently
upon the small square mirror she held in her hand as nearly over the
centre of the well as possible. She was trying a charm, or a _trick_, as
it was designated in the rural district of Oakfield, where the
traditions of a century ago had been handed down from generation to
generation, and believed in, or discarded, according to the
susceptibility of the people for the marvellous. Lottie always scoffed
at the stories told of her great-grandmother’s time before the
Revolution, when armies were seen passing and repassing in the heavens
and the snow was like blood in the light of the Auroras; when houses
were haunted and wizened old witch women rode through the air on
broomsticks, or held their weird vigils in the woods which studded the
wild New England coast. All this superstition had mostly died with the
old people, whose gravestones in the Oakfield cemetery were sunken deep
in the ground and so covered with mold and moss that it was impossible
to read the date of their birth or death. A few oldtime customs,
however, still clung to the young people, because of the romance
attaching to them, rather than from any real faith in their efficacy.
One of these had to do with the well in the pine-grove and the tragedy
connected with it, the story of which I heard on the summer afternoon
when I alighted at the little country station of Oakfield, dusty and
tired, and wondering how I was to get to the place of my destination.
I was a stenographer and bookkeeper in a large city firm, and was
overworked in body and brain. Sleep and appetite had both forsaken me,
and I was sinking into a state of semi-invalidism, with little strength
and less ambition. Rest I must have and a change of air, and when I saw
an advertisement saying that Mrs. Eli Parks, who lived near the
sea-coast and two miles from town, wanted summer boarders, and that her
rooms were large and cool and quiet, and her house a hundred years old,
I said: “That is the place for me; the fashionable world has not invaded
Mrs. Parks. I can rest there. I will write her at once.”
I did write her, with the result that on a day in early July I was
standing by my trunk and asking the station master if there was no means
of conveyance for strangers who visited Oakfield?
“Why, yes,” he said; “of course there is. We ain’t so far behind as
that. There’s a ’bus from town, here mostly for the trains. I don’t know
why ’tain’t here now, only there don’t many come at this hour, or if
they are comin’ they telegraph. Want to go to Miss Parks’? Well, you are
in luck. That young chap there lives next to her. He’ll take you in his
rig and I’ll send your traps bimeby. Hallo, you Sam! Come here!”
At the agent’s call a young man, or boy, reined up suddenly, and I was
soon driving with him along the pleasant country road toward Mrs.
Parks’. The agent had introduced him as Sam Walker, and I found him
inclined to be very sociable and ready to give me many items of interest
concerning the neighborhood and its people.
“See that big stone house on the hill?” he asked, pointing to a large,
gray-looking building in the distance with tall pillars in front and a
square tower on the corner. “Well, that’s the McPherson place—the
richest man in town—or his half-brother was, and Mr. Colin has it in
trust for a young man—Reginald Travers—who is visiting there now; some
relation to old Sandy, I believe, and a big swell. He has money of his
own, they say; and he’ll get a pile more bimeby. That’s the luck of some
folks.”
He was not very lucid in his remarks, but by questioning him I managed
to learn that the house, of which he seemed very proud, had been the
property of Sandy McPherson, a Scotchman and eccentric old man, who had
lived to be ninety and had died a few months before, leaving quite a
fortune to his half-brother, Colin, thirty years his junior. Colin was
also to have the use of the house as long as he lived, and at his death
it was to belong to the “swell young man,” provided he married somebody,
Sam did not know whom. Some girl, he s’posed. Men mostly did marry girls
and anybody would be a fool to give up the McPherson house and the money
which went with it. “It was an awful funny will old Sandy made, and had
something to do with a love affair when he was young. Seemed queer that
he could ever have been in love, he looked so old and his hair was so
white, and his head kept shaking, and hands, too. Awful nice man,
though, and had the biggest funeral you ever seen,” Sam said.
I was not particularly interested in Sandy McPherson’s funeral, and was
silent until Sam asked suddenly, “Do you believe in _tricks_?” as he
came in sight of a pine-grove in the distance.
I said I didn’t know what he meant by “tricks,” as I had never heard of
one, and in a way he explained what he meant.
“Lots of young people are always trying ’em at the well in the middle of
the woods. There’s a queer love-story, and a true one—old Sandy’s
love-story—connected with it. Want to hear it?”
I was forty, and presumably past the age of romance, but I did want to
hear the story, which I afterward heard two or three times, and which I
give in my own words rather than in those of Sam, who rambled a good
deal and threw in various opinions of his own concerning the parties
interested.
Sixty or seventy years before that July day Sandy McPherson had been a
rich young farmer in the neighborhood and looked up to and respected by
every one. He was not very handsome, with his light hair and eyes and
freckled face, but his money and great kindness of heart made amends for
what he lacked in his personal appearance, and there was scarcely a girl
in the town who would not gladly have taken him with his freckled face,
light hair and Scotch brogue. When his choice fell upon Nannie Wilkes
much wonder was expressed at her indifference to his suit and her
preference for Jack Bryan, a handsome, rollicking young man, who played
fast and loose with all the girls, and with none more so than with
pretty Nannie Wilkes, until he heard that in a fit of pique she had
accepted Sandy and was to be married in a month. Then his real love for
her showed itself, and many were the arguments used to dissuade her from
her promise. But Nannie was firm. She had pledged her word to Sandy and
would keep it. She did not care so very much for him, she said; he had
too many freckles and talked with a brogue, but her mother was anxious
for the match and he was rich, and could give her a piano and solid
silver tea-set, and carryall with a top to it and two horses, to say
nothing of his handsome house. Jack could give her nothing but a very
humble home with his half-blind mother and a salary as grocer’s clerk at
eighteen dollars a week. And so the wedding day drew on apace, and
Nannie’s gowns were being made by a seamstress who went to Boston twice
a year and was consequently posted on fashions.
Nearly every night Sandy went to Nannie’s home, where the girl’s eyes,
full of unshed tears, seldom met his glance, and her little hands lay in
his great warm ones, cold and passive, with no return of the loving
pressure he gave them. On the nights when he was not with her Nannie sat
in the pine-woods, with Jack’s arm around her and Jack’s face very near
her own, while he pleaded with her to give up the marriage with Sandy
and take him instead. He could not give her a piano nor silver tea-set,
nor carryall with a top to it, but he could buy her a buggy. One had
been offered him at a bargain. And he’d get her a melodeon, and his
mother had lots of old china, and he would work like a beaver in the
garden and yard to make them more like the McPherson grounds. But
neither the second-hand buggy, nor the melodeon, nor the old china
appealed to Nannie, who only shook her head.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said to her at last, when all his arguments had
failed to elicit from her anything more than, “I’ve given my word and I
can’t break it. You should have spoken this way sooner.”
“I’ll tell you what. Try a trick at the well. I know how they do it. My
aunt did it once, and mother, too. I heard them talking about it, and
mother declared she saw father’s face and nearly fell into the well.
Hold a mirror over the well at exactly noon when the sun shines down
into it, and wish that you may see the face of the one you are to marry.
If my face looks in the glass by yours, I’m the chap. If Sandy’s, then
Sandy it is, and I’ve no more to say. Try it to-morrow noon. Will you?”
Nannie had little faith in the experiment, of which she had heard
before, but to please Jack she promised, and the next day as it drew
near the hour of noon when the oracle was supposed to be propitious, she
stood leaning over the curb, holding in her hands a small mirror, into
which her white face was looking anxiously for the one which was to
appear beside it just as the sun touched the meridian and shone down
upon the water. She had said she had no faith in the charm, but in her
room before she started on her errand she had knelt in an agony of tears
and prayed that it might be Jack instead of Sandy. Somewhat comforted
with a belief that God would hear her, and it would be Jack, she stole
down to the woods and stood watching and waiting till the noonday sun
shining through a clearing in the pines struck the waters below.
Jack had fully intended to be on the spot hiding behind a tree which
grew near, and when Nannie was absorbed in her task he meant to steal
cautiously behind her on the carpet of soft pine-needles, which would
give no sound, and by looking over the curb let his face appear beside
hers in the mirror; then, before she recovered from her surprise, he
could retreat backward, and when discovered declare he had just come
upon the scene. But an unforeseen accident kept him away, and only a
blackbird and bobolink among the pines saw the trembling girl, whose
nerves were strained to their utmost, and whose disordered imagination
grew more and more disordered as floating clouds flitted across the sun,
shutting out some of its brightness. Then she fancied that shadowy
lineaments were forming upon the mirror, that a pair of eyes were
looking at her, and they were not the brown laughing eyes of Jack, but
the blue ones of Sandy, whose rugged features spread themselves beside
her own, while she stood riveted to the spot, her pale lips whispering,
“It is Sandy, God help me!”
After that there was no wavering, and Jack’s arguments and ridicule had
no power to move her. She knew what she had seen. It was Sandy. She
could not defy fate, and the wedding was appointed for Thursday night,
when the McPherson house was to be thrown open and the marriage-feast
held there after the ceremony.
Half the town was bidden and Sandy was the happiest of men, and on
Wednesday evening, which he had spent with Nannie, he told her that the
carryall had come and she was to have her first ride in it when she went
to church as bride the next Sunday. The piano had also come, and a
silver tea-set and a Brussels carpet for the great room, with lace
curtains and a pier-glass in which she could see herself from her head
to her feet; “and you will be the bonniest wife in the whole world and I
the happiest man,” he said.
Nannie listened without a word, or smile, or sign that she heard. At
parting, however, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him, and
said:
“I think you the best man in the world, and I thank you for all you have
done for me. Always remember that; but I am not good enough for you.”
Sandy laughed his broad, good-humored laugh, which always grated a
little on Nannie, as he paid her one kiss with many, and held her close
for a moment.
“Not good enough for me, my pearl, my lily! I wish I were half as good
as you,” he said, and the thought kept him laughing during his walk
home, which lay through the woods and past the well, at which he stopped
to look, as his hired man had told him the curb was a little shaky.
“I’ll have it fixed after the wedding. Just now I can think of nothing
but that and Nannie,” he said, as he continued his way home, trying to
whistle, an accomplishment in which he was not an expert.
Arrived at home and alone in his room, he said to himself, “To-morrow at
this time she will be here, my very own,” and he stretched out his arms
to embrace an imaginary form with brown hair and soft-gray eyes, and
cheeks like the summer roses.
Alas for the morrow and the anguish it brought! and alas for the young
girl who at midnight, when the moon was high in the heavens, stood again
by the fatal well, looking down into its depths with despair in her eyes
and determination in her face! She could not marry Sandy, and she could
not brave the world’s censure if she did not, and so she chose the
coward’s part, to die. There was a hurried look around her, a thought of
Jack, and a prayer to be forgiven, and then the cold, dark waters closed
over her with a splashing, gurgling sound, and Nannie Wilkes had gone
out into the great unknown, away from Sandy and away from Jack—both
dreaming of her and both waking on the morrow to a horror which filled
them with dismay. A note was found in her room which read:
“I cannot marry Sandy because I love Jack. I have wanted to do right and
cannot. I tried the charm at the well, hoping it would be Jack’s face I
saw, but it was Sandy’s which came and stood by mine in the mirror. I
saw it so plain, and I cannot marry him, and so I must die. I shall not
jump into the well. I can push the curb aside, it is so loose, and shall
slip down the stones into the water, so as not to be bruised. Tell Sandy
I am sorry and hope he will forget me and take some girl for his wife
better than I am. Tell Jack—but, no, don’t tell him anything, except
that I loved him and died for him. Good-by.”
It was Sandy who took her from the well and laid her on the soft bed of
needles under the pines, wringing the water from her dripping garments
and her long hair which clung to her face and which he put back behind
her ears, saying nothing except, “Poor little Nannie! If you had told
me, you would not have been lying here dead. Poor Nannie! I wish I had
known.”
He even tried to comfort Jack, whose grief at first was violent and
noisy, but like such grief, was easily consoled when another pretty face
caught his fancy. They buried Nannie in the McPherson lot, for Sandy
would have it so, and he bought the headstone and put upon it simply,
“Nannie, Aged 19.” Then he went about his usual business, with a pain in
his heart which time never fully healed. Naturally domestic in his
nature, he wanted a home, with wife and children in it, and after a few
years he married a Mrs. Travers, a young widow with an only son. He
seemed happy, but Nannie was never forgotten, and not an hour of his
life that he did not see her in fancy as she was when he kissed her in
the moonlight, and again when he laid her upon the pine-needles, cold
and dead, but with a look of peace on her face as if at the very last
there had been upon her lips a prayer for forgiveness which God had
heard and answered. When his wife died, which she did within two years
of his marriage, the great house was so silent and lonely that he soon
married again, and this time a cousin of Nannie’s, who, like his first
wife, was a widow, with an only child, a little daughter, so that he had
two stepchildren to whom he gave a father’s care and love.
What came next after his second marriage is not essential to the story.
His wife died. His stepchildren were married and had families of their
own to the second generation, when they, too, died, and still old Sandy
lived on, his only companion now his half-brother Colin, who had come
from Scotland to join him. One by one the descendants of his wives died
and were scattered until in his last years, when nearly ninety, he knew
of only one, and that was Reginald Travers, great-grandson of his first
wife, in whom he felt no particular interest, until Reginald, who had
heard of the rather eccentric old man, came to call upon him and claim
relationship through the great-grandmother, dead years and years ago.
Something in the young man pleased the older one, who kept him for weeks
and finally conceived the idea of making him heir to a part of his
fortune, which had grown steadily and was greater than his brother would
care for. Colin, to whom he broached the subject, and who, being so much
younger, was his right hand and left hand and brain, made no objections,
but said:
“Why leave everything to Reginald? There may be some member of the other
branch of your family. You had two wives, you know, and one was Nannie’s
cousin.”
“To be sure; to be sure, I did,” Sandy answered, rubbing his bald head
as if to recall an incident of more than fifty years ago. “You see I
lived with Susie so short a time, and that girl of hers was married so
young that things slip my mind, and sometimes it seems as if I was never
married at all. Nothing is real but Nannie, who is as fresh in my mind
as she was that last night when I kissed her for the last time. Poor
little Nannie! and Susie was her cousin and looked some like her. There
must be somebody somewhere related to her. I wish you’d hunt it up.”
Colin was accustomed to hunt up things for his brother, and as a
result of this investigation he found that Irene Burdick, the
great-granddaughter of Mrs. Sandy McPherson the second, who was a
relative of Nannie, was an orphan, with some means of her own, and was
living with her aunt in New York, and also that she was spending a
part of the summer in New London. Greatly to Colin’s surprise, the
morning after he had imparted this information to his brother, he
found him with his valise packed and himself dressed for a journey.
“I’m going to New London,” he said, “going, incog., for a look at Ireny.
She has some of Nannie’s blood in her. Pretty thin by this time, running
through so many channels, it is true, but if she suits me, all right; if
not, all right, the same.”
He went to New London and registered as Mr. McPherson. He thought the
Sandy might betray him, forgetting that his name was as strange to Irene
Burdick as hers was to him. She was at the hotel with her aunt and he
saw her in the dining-room and on the piazza and in the water, where she
could swim like a duck, and he watched her with a strange stir in his
heart as he thought, “She is some relation to Nannie. Poor little
Nannie, dead more than sixty years ago.”
She was small, and thin, and brown-haired, and pale-faced, but her
dark-gray eyes were wondrously beautiful, and once, when they flashed
upon him as she ran past him on the beach in her dripping garments, he
saw, or thought he saw, a look like Nannie, while the voice which said
to him, “I beg your pardon,” as she whisked past him was certainly like
the voice he had never forgotten.
“Nannie’s eyes and voice have come down through all these years, and
Ireny will do,” he said.
He did not make himself known to her, as he stood a little in awe of her
aunt, a typical New York woman, but he watched the girl for a week, and
after his return home, made one of the strangest wills ever put upon
record.
To his brother Colin he gave fifty thousand dollars, with the use of the
house and farm until it was taken possession of by the young people,
Reginald Travers and Irene Burdick, with whom he was to make his home as
long as he lived, and to whom he willed the remainder of his fortune, in
case they married each other, said marriage not to take place until both
had had plenty of time in which to consider it and know their own minds.
If either of them preferred some one else, he or she was to receive
twenty thousand dollars, and the rest go to the other party. If the
disaffection was mutual and neither cared for the other, each was to
have ten thousand dollars, and the remainder of the property was to go
half to Colin and half for the support of different missions named in
the will. If both parties were agreeable to each other and the one died
before the marriage took place, the survivor was to have the whole.
This will Sandy drew up himself after an immense amount of thought and
many sleepless nights and consultations with Colin, who knew something
of law and made some corrections and suggestions. When at last it was
finished, duly executed and witnessed, Sandy put it with his private
papers, telling no one except Colin, who had questioned the propriety of
a will which might induce the young couple to marry whether they liked
each other or not.
“That’s so,” Sandy said, recalling with a shudder his experience with
Nannie. “They must not only be agreed, but they must love each other.
There must be no one-sided affair. I’ll make that plain,” and he wrote a
note which he put with his will, addressed to Reginald and Irene,
charging them, as they hoped for happiness in this world and heaven in
the next, not to enter into matrimony with each other unless their
hearts were in it. “For be ye well assured that if any persons are
joined together otherwise than as God’s word doth allow, their marriage
is not lawful,” he wrote in conclusion. This sentence from the
prayer-book Sandy knew by heart as he did the whole of the marriage
ceremony. He had gone through with it twice and had repeated it to
himself many and many a time when he thought it was to be Nannie
standing by his side. This done he felt that he had performed his duty
to his two wives by trying to bring their great-grandchildren together
and giving them his money. It was due them, he thought, because Nannie
had always stood between them and himself, and Irene was a distant
relative and had her eyes and voice, and he ought to leave her
something, as he must show respect to both his wives.
When he was first engaged to Nannie he had a very good likeness made of
her by an artist sketching in the neighborhood, and after her death this
was enlarged into a life-sized portrait, said by those who had known the
girl to be very natural, especially the eyes. This picture hung in the
drawing-room between the portraits of the first and second Mrs.
McPherson, who looked rather stiff and prim and wholly unlike Nannie,
with her soft brown hair and grayish-blue eyes, which followed one with
a wistful, pathetic look, whose meaning Sandy understood as he had not
when she was living. Many times a day Sandy stood before the portrait,
studying the face and comparing it with that of the girl seen in New
London. “They are alike,” he would say to himself, feeling more and more
satisfied with his will. Several cautious inquiries he made at intervals
with regard to Irene, hearing always the same report that she was sweet
and pure and womanly; “not burdened with brains enough to make her
strong-minded, but she is altogether lovely,” one of her teachers wrote
to him of her; and he was satisfied in the belief that he had done well
for the young couple, and he was planning to bring them together without
their knowing his intentions, when death came suddenly, and on his
ninetieth birthday he was found dead in his bed, with a lock of Nannie’s
hair on the table beside him, and under his pillow a miniature of her,
which had been made in Dresden from a photograph of the portrait in the
drawing-room. They buried the miniature and the hair with the old man
beside poor Nannie and between her and his first wife. They found the
will and the whole town buzzed with its contents, wondering who Irene
Burdick was and how she would take it and how Reginald Travers would
take it. Colin wrote to him with regard to it and invited him to visit
the McPherson place again, but decided to wait before sending a copy to
Irene, who was travelling in Europe. Then public curiosity abated a
little and waited for what would come next. Nothing came at once. Irene
remained abroad and no one knew anything of her. Reginald attended to
his business, if he had any, while Colin lived his lonely life at the
McPherson place and the affairs in the town went on as usual.
With Sandy’s death, however, a fresh impetus had been given to the
interest felt by the young people in the charmed well where Nannie had
ended her life.
“Beats all what fools some of us are,” Sam said, as he finished his
story, adding that the swell young man visiting at the McPherson place
was Reginald Travers, and “didn’t speak to nobody often, though when he
did he was nice as a pin.”
Then he stopped for a moment on the top of a hill for me to look down
upon the pine-woods in which was the well which bore Nannie’s name.
“I don’t believe there’s more than one or two girls hereabouts, or boys
either, who hasn’t tried a trick at that well,” he said. “Why, there’s a
little box in a hollow pine tree and in it is a small square mirror to
hold over the water when the sun is right overhead. I call it rot, and I
don’t believe Lottie has ever done such a silly thing.”
“Who is Lottie?” I asked, and the crimson on his face and the look in
his eyes told me what she was to him before he replied.
“Oh, don’t you know? She’s Charlotte Ann, Widow Parks’ girl. I call her
Lottie for short. There she is now, in the yard, and that’s the house,
with the li-locks in front, and that is our house beyond, with the high
board fence. Father and Widow Parks don’t agree very well. Get up,
Beauty.”
He chirruped to his horse, who took us quickly to the old-fashioned
house, whose open doors, and windows with white curtains blowing in and
out, and the odor of roses and pinks and lilacs in the garden and yard
gave promise of the comfort and rest it was mine to enjoy for two long,
happy months.