LITTLE PAUL.
The autumn following Carl’s visit to us passed with little to break the
monotony of our lives. Miss Errington wrote occasionally, full of
solicitude with regard to Katy’s music, which was progressing so rapidly
as to astonish both Fan and myself, and even Mrs. Hathern, who was a
thorough and exacting teacher. Jack wrote often and Fan answered when
she felt like it. She had not yet made up her mind to be the wife of a
poor man, and until she did she could not encourage Jack in his
foolishness. Col. Errington did not write again and his proposal of
marriage remained unanswered.
“I am very well as I am, and quite chummy with Mrs. Hathern, who has
really contributed a great deal to our bodily comfort. I do not want a
change as much as I did, and as long as I have two strings to my bow and
can choose either at any moment, I am content,” she said, and took the
good the gods had provided and laughed over Jack’s love-letters, which
were becoming importunate and impatient as he longed for something to
work for and hope for and keep his courage up.
As for the household, it moved on with a regularity which no one but
Mrs. Hathern could have achieved.
One or two jars there were when Phyllis’s turban was frightfully awry
and Norah’s shoes could be heard all over the house; but, for the most
part, they were on amicable terms and both united in their antipathy to
Julina, who was growing more airy and important every day, and more
disinclined to believe in that portion of the catechism which bade her
to be content with the condition of life to which it had pleased God to
call her. “Who would ever get on in the world if they followed that
injunction?” she said, and what was our democratic government good for
if it didn’t give everyone an equal chance to rise if he had the brain
and will to do so? And she meant to rise. She had once had her fortune
told by a clairvoyant in Boston who predicted that she would some day be
a great lady, with money and influence at her command. This she
communicated confidentially to Fan and me as the secret of her ambition
and belief in the future. And at last there came a rift in the
clouds,—an opening through which she caught a glimpse of the future she
felt so sure of. Her father died suddenly, and the letter which brought
the news enclosed one from an aunt in France inviting Julina, who was
her namesake, to visit her for as long a time as she chose to stay. Here
was her opportunity, and she took it and left us at once, so full of her
aunt’s chateau, which, she said, was not far from Fontainebleau, that
she came near forgetting to mourn for her father, who had never been
much to her.
Two or three weeks later Carl wrote that he had seen her in Boston and
that she was to sail for Havre in a few days. Afterwards he sent us a
list of passengers on a French steamer, and among them was the name
_Mademoiselle Julina Smythe_, who for years passed completely out of our
knowledge and then reappeared in a most unexpected manner.
Christmas came and went, and the winter glided into spring and spring
into the first days of June, when the world,—or, at least, that part
which Lovering represented,—was full of the beauty and brightness and
fragrance of early summer. Never before had our grounds and garden been
as lovely and attractive as they were now. Money and taste can do almost
everything, and Mrs. Hathern had both, and had expended them freely upon
The Elms, which she meant to make the show place in the county. It was
exceedingly pretty now, with its grassy lawn, its urns and baskets of
various designs and sizes, its rustic chairs and stands for books or
work or tea, and its garden full of flowers. After all, it was not a bad
thing that father did when he married Mrs. Haverleigh, who had brought
us so much luxury and to whom we were getting quite reconciled. She had
been so much softer and more companionable since Carl’s visit and our
talk with her of The Boy that I began to like her; while Fan, who was
slow to change her mind, admitted that things might be worse, and if——.
There is nearly always an “if” in every cup of happiness, and ours was
so unlooked-for and seemed so undesirable that for a time we refused to
accept it as dutiful daughters ought to have done. But there was no
alternative; we could not run away, for there was no place to run to,
and after a while we made up our minds to submit as gracefully as we
could to the inevitable.
In due time a trained nurse arrived from Boston, and a few days later
father went in and out of his bed-chamber with an anxious look and
frequent demands on Phyllis, who, in her excitement, forgot to put on
her turban and seemed like one distraught as she hovered between the
kitchen and the sick-room; while Fan and I, with Katy between us, sat
under an elm in the farthest part of the grounds and waited, wondering
what Carl would say when he heard the news. Norah brought us our lunch,
which we ate on the little willow table where we had often had our tea.
Her face was cloudy and her shoes creaked even on the grass, showing us
her opinion of the matter. I remember so well every incident of that
long day,—the glints of sunshine through the trees, the scent of the
flowers, the blue of the sky, the twitter and almost human talk of two
robins teaching their young ones to fly, and, at last, as the evening
wore on and we heard the town clock strike two, Phyllis coming to us
across the lawn, her face all aglow with the news she had to tell.
“You’ve done got a little brudder,” she said, “an’ oh! my Lord, he’s dat
small. I reckon he could wear one of Miss Katy’s doll dresses. Will you
come to the house and I’ll fotch him to you?”
“No, thank you,” Fan said, with a disdainful toss of her head. “I am in
no hurry to see my little brother.”
What Fan did, I generally did, and against my better judgment I, too,
sat still, but asked, “How is Mrs. Hathern?”
“Mighty bad, I s’pecs, by the way old Mas’r looks and that Boston nuss.
She hasn’t seen her baby at all an’ she’s as white as a piece of paper,
and keeps moanin’ like.”
“Do you think she will die?” Fan asked, with a ring in her voice which
reminded me of the days when we were watching by The Boy.
“Oh, de good Lord forbid!” was Phyllis’s ejaculation. “What could we do
with a new bawn baby and the mother dead?”
What, indeed, and why was he sent to us, we asked ourselves, as we sat
watching Phyllis going swiftly across the lawn with Katy in advance.
Katy was happy, and her first exclamation as she sped away from us was,
“Oh, I am so glad, and can I see him now?”
I don’t know how long Fan and I sat discussing the situation, she
threatening to answer Col. Errington’s letter and I proposing to make
the best of what could not be helped. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps it
was more, when Phyllis appeared again, holding her apron to her eyes
with one hand and beckoning us wildly with the other.
“Mrs. Hathern is done took wus, and has as’t for you,” she said.
In an instant we were on our feet, flying towards the house, Fan, as
usual, outstripping me and thinking with remorse of the bitter things
she had said of the innocent baby, whose plaintive wail we heard as we
entered the hall. In every woman’s heart, be she ever so bad and hard,
there is a motherly instinct which, under certain conditions, will
assert itself. We were neither very hard nor very bad. We were only
rebelling as grown-up daughters sometimes do against the introduction in
their midst of a baby, and especially when that baby is the offspring of
a stepmother. We had not wanted the stepmother, and we didn’t want the
baby; but when its faint cry came to us Fan clutched my arm and
whispered, “Oh, Ann, hear the poor little thing. I hope its mother won’t
die.”
It seemed to me very probable that she would, when I entered her room
and saw her lying there so motionless upon her pillows, with every
particle of her bright color gone from her face, which looked pinched
and haggard and old for a woman of only forty. She had never seemed more
than thirty-five. Her eyes were closed and we might have thought her
asleep, but for a fluttering of the lids and a movement of her hand as
the rustle of our dresses broke the stillness of the room. Katy, who had
been fondling the baby, which a negro woman was caring for in an
adjoining room, had joined us, and when she saw the white face so
changed from what it had been the previous night, when it looked the
picture of health, she ran up to father, who was sitting at the side of
the bed, and cried out, “Oh, papa, what is it? What makes her look so?
Is she very sick?”
A warning sh—— came from the nurse, who was moistening the patient’s
lips with some stimulant; but at the sound of Katy’s voice, Mrs. Hathern
moved slightly and opened the great black eyes of which we had stood so
much in awe. There was nothing to fear from them now, and it seemed to
me there was in them a look of wonderful tenderness and love as they
rested upon the little girl who was bending close to her.
“Katy,” she said, putting her hand upon the curly head which nestled
down beside her as Katy asked again, “Are you very sick, mamma, and do
you know about the baby? We’ve got one in the other room. Old Chloe
brought him this morning, with a heap of clothes. I’m so glad.”
A faint smile showed around Mrs. Hathern’s mouth and her hand pressed
more heavily upon the golden curls.
“Yes, Katy,” she said, very low as if talking were an effort, “I know
about the baby, and I want you to love him and care for him if I should
go away. Will you, Katy?”
Just so, ten years before, Katy’s mother, in that very room, had spoken
to Fan and me, and the scene came back to us so vividly,—the young
mother dying and commending to us the little life which had just begun
and had since grown to be a part of our whole being. Now it was another
mother, and Katy to whom the charge was given, and for a moment I think
we both felt chagrined that we should be forgotten; but only for a
moment. Turning her eyes towards us, they shone with a strange light of
satisfaction as she said, in detached sentences, “Fanny and Annie, I am
glad you have come. I want to tell you it was my way that was in fault,
not my heart, and I am sorry for all that has gone wrong. You like Carl;
try and like my little baby. I know he is not welcome, and when I am
gone he may be still less so; he is not to blame. Perhaps God will take
him with me; if not, be kind to him, for his father’s sake, and—” She
stopped a few moments as if tired out and then resumed, as her eyes
wandered around the room, “Where is Fanny?”
“Here I am,” Fan answered, sitting down upon the edge of the bed and
taking in hers the cold, clammy hand which was moving restlessly. “Here
I am; do you want to tell me something?”
“Yes. About the little baby. Would you object to calling him _Paul
Haverleigh_, after The Boy?”
“No, no; I’d like it,” Fan answered with a choking voice, for, with that
subtle intuition which we cannot define, she felt the dark shadow
stealing into the room and settling upon the features of our stepmother.
“In my wish to do right, I went wrong with Paul. I know it now, and am
sorry. I shall tell him when I see him, and tell him of you. Keep Carl
straight. He has fine instincts, but is easily influenced and may be led
astray if the temptation comes in pleasant guise. If he falls it will be
a woman who lures him on. Keep him as much as possible under your
influence and Annie’s. I wish I might see him again, but—” Here her mind
began to wander. “It’s getting late. Katy ought to go to bed.
Good-night, Katy. I have loved you more than you know.”
She lifted herself up and kissed the bright face bent down to hers, and
then lay back upon her pillow as if utterly exhausted.
“Must I go to bed before the sun is down?” Katy whispered to her father,
who shook his head and held her closely to him.
It was hours yet before the sun would set, and as they dragged slowly on
we watched the dying woman who talked of many things strange to us. Of
her first husband and her early home in Maine, and the school-house
under the hill with the girls and boys she had known and played with
there. They were old men and women now, she said, and their faces were
tired and worn as if life had been hard to bear, and she had so much
wanted to help them in some way. Then she spoke of Paul and we learned
more of him from her ravings than we had known before, and saw more of
the motives and principles which had actuated her conduct. Neither were
bad, but strict almost to severity. Then she talked of Carl and Katy and
father and ourselves, who, she said, did not understand her, but she
never mentioned the little baby so soon to be left motherless. He had
come into her life so recently and his coming had brought her so low
that she seemed to have forgotten him entirely. She grew very quiet at
last and fell asleep, while Fan, who always rose to the occasion, took
her post at the bedside, bidding the nurse take the rest she needed so
much. It was not a long vigil we kept, for as the sun was setting Mrs.
Hathern awoke and began to move her hands over the bedclothes as if in
quest of something.
“Where is it? Do you know?” she said to Fan, who, divining her meaning,
went to the next room where the baby was sleeping in Phyllis’s lap.
Fan had not seen it yet and she scarcely glanced at it now, but she
lifted it very carefully in her arms and brought it to its mother.
“Look,” she said. “It’s the baby.”
Very curiously the sick woman looked first at Fan and then at the child,
but the mist of death had gathered too thickly on her brain for her to
realize the truth. The baby was a puzzle she could not solve.
“Whose is it? Yours?” she asked, putting her hand upon its head.
“No,” Fan answered very gently. “It is your baby,—little Paul. Don’t you
remember?”
There was a struggle between reason and delirium, but the soul was
drifting away too far for any real consciousness or memory. Only the
name of Paul arrested and held it for a moment.
“Little Paul,” she whispered, with a smile. “Yes, he was a pretty boy
when I took him; bigger than this one. Whose did you say it is? And who
are you?”
Her hand still lay on the baby’s head, but her eyes were closed. She was
going fast and Fan knew it, and in an ecstasy of grief and terror held
the baby face close to the white lips and said, “_Mother_, _mother_, it
is your baby. Kiss him once, that I may tell him. It is little Paul.”
She had never before called Mrs. Hathern _mother_, and now it came from
her involuntarily, born of her pity for the dying woman and helpless
child. But it produced a wonderful effect. Quickly the eyes unclosed and
were illumined with a strange light as they beamed upon Fan.
“You called me _mother_,” she said, “and it brings things back to me and
makes me glad. Thank you, Fanny. Hold the baby nearer while I kiss him
for the first and last time. Little Paul, my little Paul.”
She put her arms around the boy, kissed him twice and never spoke again,
although she lived until the early dawn of the next day, and then died
as peacefully as if going to sleep.
It was I who went with father on the long, sad journey to Mt. Auburn,
where the costly monuments and signs of grandeur everywhere were in
striking contrast to the simple cemetery on the hillside where she had
expressed a wish not to be buried; but when the ceremony of interment
was over and we turned away, leaving our dead there alone, I felt that
when my time should come I should far rather lie down under the
whispering pines, within sight of the lights of home, than be left in
that “beautiful city of the dead.” The family monument was tall and
grand, and beside the husband’s name was that of “Paul Haverleigh, who
died in Lovering, Va., March, 1863, aged 18 years.” I did not know
before that it was there, and when I saw it I was conscious of an added
feeling of respect and regret for the woman whose real worth I had,
perhaps, not fully appreciated.
Carl had met us in Albany, so stunned by the shock of his mother’s death
that he scarcely spoke at all, and never asked a question until after
the burial and I was alone with him at the Revere, where we stopped, as
his mother’s house was rented. I do not think he had shed a tear, but
his face was very pale and there were dark circles under his eyes as he
sat down by me and said: “Now, Annie, tell me about it. Why did mother
die? What was the matter?”
I looked at him in some surprise and asked, “Do you really know
nothing?”
“Nothing,” he answered, “except the telegram saying she was dead. I
supposed her perfectly well. She wrote to me last week as usual. It must
have been terribly sudden.”
“It was sudden,” I said. “It was almost like well to-day and dead
to-morrow.”
“But what was it?” he asked, a little impatiently, and I replied, “Carl,
don’t you know there is a little baby at The Elms, your brother and
mine, who cost your mother her life?”
“A baby? Your brother and mine? It is not true,” he exclaimed, springing
to his feet and staring at me as if in some way I were to blame.
“It is true,” I said. “There is a baby at The Elms, born a few hours
before your mother died, and Fan is caring for it. That’s why she didn’t
come. She held it for your mother to kiss before she died. ‘My little
Paul,’ she called it, and those were the last words she ever spoke. ‘My
little Paul.’”
Whether it was the memory of the Paul whose grave was under the Virginia
pines, or the thought of his dying mother kissing her little boy, or
both, I cannot tell; but something unlocked the flood-gates of Carl’s
tears, and laying his head on my shoulder he sobbed bitterly, while I
tried to comfort him.
“Don’t, Annie,” he said, “don’t speak to me; don’t try to stop me. I
must cry. I am so glad to cry. I couldn’t at first for the something
that choked me so, when I heard mother was dead.”
He grew calm at last, and began to talk naturally, inquiring after Fan
and Katy, and Norah and Phyllis, but saying nothing of the baby. Nor
during the few days we stayed in Boston did he ever speak of it of his
own accord. He evinced, however, a good deal of interest in, as well as
knowledge of, business matters, which were necessarily discussed by my
father. By the conditions of the Haverleigh will Carl was now sole heir
of his father’s fortune, which was larger than we had supposed. Knowing
that he had inherited her love for luxury and expenditure, his mother
had purposely kept from him the exact amount of his father’s estate,
which, now that he knew it, filled his mind more than the very small
amount which little Paul was to have by will from his mother. From the
income of her husband’s money Mrs. Hathern had only saved a few
thousands, which were hers to do with as she pleased, and these, by a
will made a few weeks before her death, she had left equally to my
father and their child, should he live; so, while Carl counted his money
by hundreds of thousands, little Paul had scarcely three. My father had
the same and all the furniture which had been taken to The Elms. I do
not think the discrepancy between his fortune and that of his brother
occurred to Carl.
The baby was something wholly unexpected and whose existence he could
not realize. The money was _his_ father’s, not little Paul’s, and he
accepted it as a matter of course, assuming, as it seemed to me, a
slight air of importance as the heir to so much wealth. He was very kind
to us, and very generous during our stay in Boston, paying all our bills
and insisting upon taking us everywhere, or, rather, taking me. Father
had no heart to go, but I was young, and the sights of Boston were new
and wonderful, and I went wherever Carl took me. Sometimes he spoke of
his mother and always with great affection, but he never mentioned Paul
until the day we left when he brought me a silver rattle, which he said
was for “the little shaver,” who, he presumed, would be a lot of bother
to us.
“Indeed, he will not,” I answered, rather hotly, for I was irritated by
his indifference. “He is a dear little thing, and so you will think when
you come to us in July.”
“I don’t believe I shall come,” he said, hesitatingly, and without
looking directly at me.
“Not come!” I repeated. “Oh, Carl, we have anticipated your visit so
much that you must not disappoint us. Your mother wanted us to see a
great deal of you, and Fan and I will do all we can to make you happy.
You said you liked Virginia and us.”
“So I do,” he answered. “I like you immensely, but you see mother’s not
being there will make it so sad, and then a lot of the boys are going to
camp out in the Adirondacks and want me to go with them. It will not
take all summer, though, and, perhaps, I’ll run down for a week or two
at the last; so don’t look so gloomy, sister mine. I do love you and Fan
and Katy dearly, and I did have a grand time at The Elms; but you see
mother is gone, and I like change and new faces,—a new one for every day
of the year, if I could have it. Bad in me, I know; but I was born that
way, and can’t help it.”
He didn’t seem quite like the Carl of the previous year. He was
older,—more mature, more like a young man of twenty-one than a boy of
seventeen. But he kissed me very affectionately at parting, and sent his
love, with a shell comb, to Fanny, a doll for Katy, a red silk
handkerchief for a turban for Phyllis, and a new gown to Norah.
These, with the silver rattle, I brought to our home, which seemed very
desolate without the ruling spirit which had kept us at so high pressure
that, although we had not at first liked it, we missed it, now it was
gone, more than we had thought possible.
“I really don’t know when to go to bed, or get up, or what I ought to do
when I am up,” Fan said, with a half sob as we talked matters over the
night after my return.
She had dismissed the nurse as too expensive an article to keep. She
knew that the money which had been spent so lavishly for us all must
cease with Mrs. Hathern’s death, and when I told her what had been left
to father, she said, “For his sake I wish it might have been more; he is
growing old and his practice is nothing. For ourselves I don’t care. We
learned a good many useful lessons from Mrs. Hathern, and I hope we
shall not fall back into our old slipshod ways. We have certainly gained
something by her coming here,—orderly habits, and _our baby_.”
There was a world of tenderness in her voice as she said “our baby” and
bent over the cradle where he was sleeping. He was so small that I was
half afraid to touch him lest he should break in my hands like some
brittle toy; but Fan took to him naturally, constituting herself his
nurse and exulting over every sign of growing intellect or physical
strength as if she had been his mother. What Carl would think of him was
a question we often asked ourselves as we counted the weeks he was to
spend in the Adirondacks, and then began to look for his coming. But we
looked in vain. Following the Adirondacks was an excursion to the White
Mountains, which lasted so long that at its close only a few days
remained in which to visit us before returning to Andover, and he hardly
thought it would pay to take the long journey for so short a time. He
wrote to us often long chatty letters full of affection and promises to
spend the whole of the next long vacation with us. But the long vacation
came and went and was succeeded by another and another, and still Carl
did not come.
PART II.—FANNY AND JACK.
CHAPTER I.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
AFTER FIVE YEARS.
It is a question whether one can truly love more than once. I do not
think a woman can. But men are different and seem capable of many loves.
If anyone doubts this let him recall the number of widows and widowers
among his acquaintance, and see if there are not fifty per cent. more of
the former than of the latter. Three women had called my father husband
and I believe he had loved them all devotedly, but whether it was the
suddenness of the blow, or because he missed the force and energy which
had kept him going, the death of the last Mrs. Hathern crushed him
completely, and made him an old man at once.
“I don’t know what ails me, girls, but since your mother died I don’t
seem to have any life or ambition left. I am like a clock which has run
down and can’t be wound up again,” he would say to us when he came in
from a walk into town or country where he still had a few patients of
the old school.
He had never spoken to us of Mrs. Hathern as our mother while she lived;
but now that she was dead he always mentioned her in that way, and we
humored him, and sometimes called her so ourselves, and petted and made
much of him, and felt that, like him, we were ships without rudders and
didn’t know how to run ourselves. Especially was this the case with
Phyllis, who needed whip and spur to keep her in the harness.
“I ’clars to goodness I don’t know nothin’ now the missus isn’t here to
boss,” she said, as she sat on the bench outside the cabin door, her
feet stretched out in front of her, her hands idly folded on her lap,
her ironing neglected and her irons cooling on the hearth.
Only Norah kept her balance and went steadily on her way, her shoes
creaking a good deal and her sharp tongue often lashing Phyllis when she
got too far out of line. For three or four months Norah staid with us
and then, as it was impossible for us to pay her the wages she had been
receiving, she left us for Boston. But not until she had everything in
what she called “apple pie order,” an expression which, I think, must
belong exclusively to the east, as it was a favorite with Mrs. Hathern,
and I have never heard it elsewhere. Owing to her delicate health Mrs.
Hathern had deferred the spring cleaning, which she intended to take in
hand as soon as her illness was over. But death snatched her away and it
was left for Norah to carry out her plans, which she did with a
vengeance. Everything was turned topsy-turvey, as it had been the year
before when Mrs. Hathern was the presiding genius of brush and broom and
soap suds. There was, however, this difference, there were no carpenters
and masons and plumbers blocking the way, or hired negroes either.
Knowing the low state of our finances Norah did everything herself with
the little help she could extort from Phyllis. That functionary had
taken to violent fits of short breath when there was more than usual to
do. “Physicy,” she called it, and she had it badly now and wheezingly
protested against so much useless cleaning. A little dirt was healthy,
she said, and privately we sympathized with her, and were glad when
Norah told us that we needn’t go through with quite so much in the fall.
Boston folks didn’t as a rule.
“Wash the windows; wipe the fly-specks from the paint; air everything,
and give the rest a lick and a promise and let it go till spring, when
mabby I’ll visit you and see to the annual clean myself,” she said.
Then, as a happy inspiration seized her, she added: “There are a few
things you must see to every day, and as I know you won’t remember ’em
all I’ll write ’em down.”
The result of this was a long document so full of what we were to do and
not to do that I felt dizzy and bewildered as I read it, and then passed
it on to Fan, who, with no fancy for housekeeping, threw it aside. This
morning while looking over a trunk of old papers I came across that
sheet of foolscap, written nearly thirty years ago, yellow with age,
blurred and blotted and wonderful for composition and orthography. There
were tear stains upon it, too, as I re-read it and thought of all which
had happened since the autumnal day when Norah first brought it to me
and asked me to nail it up in the pantry where it could be seen every
day. I will give a few extracts: “Fust and fornenst, don’t let Phyllis
make a pig-sty of my kitchen. I’ve kept it so clane that I can _need
bred_ in it anywhere; don’t let her get pot black all over the table,
and greese on the floor; don’t let her leave the kittles on the range
till they bile dry, specially the Te kittle. Ittle leek, and hev to be
mended, an’t costs money; an’ there an’t no Miss Hathern to pay the
bills now; don’t let her put the wash biler away till she’s wiped it and
the cover dry, or the close will be all iron rust; don’t let her open
all the draffs and pile the cole on till the griddles is red hot, an’
the fire all going up the chimly. Ittle warp ’em an’ spile the range.
Make her hang up the broom, or stand it on end. Ittle last longer. An’
ef I’se you, I wouldn’t use gilt ege chany every day as Miss Hathern
did. You’se them tothers. An’ don’t let Phyllis jab her big black thum
into that mended place on the vegetable dish. Ittle break sure. An’
don’t let her slat her things round everywhere in my nice kitchen. Tell
her Miss Hathern will appear to her some nite if she does. That’ll fetch
her. She’s afraid of spooks.”
All this, and much more, Norah wrote, and I promised to follow her
instructions as well as I could. Then one morning in October the ‘bus
which had brought her to us came to take her away. Lifting the baby from
his cradle she cried over and kissed him and, assuring us that he was
not long for this world, he looked so _pimpin_, she put him back and
said good-bye and went away, while we watched her as far as we could see
her with swelling hearts and tearful eyes, wondering how we should get
on without her.
The next morning I read her instructions to Phyllis. She had moved her
belongings from her cabin into the kitchen, which already began to show
signs of a new administration. Seated upon an inverted wash tub she
listened to my reading with sundry snorts and shakes of her head until
her turban fell off and lay upon the floor.
“For de Lord’s sake, chile, is you that soft to think I can ‘member all
dem things. No, sor; but nebber you mind, honey, I’se no fool, if I is a
brack nigger. I’se kep’ my eyes open more’n you thinks an’ learned a
heap of dem Boston ways. You’ll see; don’t you worry, nor come speerin’
’round de kitchen. Jess stay in de parlor whar ladies belong, an’ I’ll
run de ranch! I’se cap’n now.”
She adjusted her turban, picked up the mop and the broom, put them
together behind the door, where Norah’s sunbonnet used to hang, and
began to bustle about with the activity of a young girl. Norah’s
instructions I pinned up, as I said I should, but they were all lost on
Phyllis except the possibility of Mrs. Hathern’s return if things were
too much mixed; that troubled her. For several nights when we were up
with our baby we saw a light in the cabin where she slept. When
questioned about it she owned to keeping a candle burning “So as to see
de missus if she comes. I’se not gwine to be took unawares, nor be so
unmanneredly as to let her stumble roun’ in de dark.”
“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “if it is dark she can’t see the litter.”
“Dat’s so, honey, I hain’t thought of dat,” was Phyllis’s rejoinder, and
that night there was no candle burning in Phyllis’s room, but the door
we knew was barricaded and the window nailed down to keep out Norah
quite as much as Mrs. Hathern.
The superstitious old woman had been detected so often by the former in
her little attempts to deceive that she had come to look upon her with a
kind of awe as one gifted with second sight, who might pounce upon her
in bodily shape quite as readily as Mrs. Hathern in ghostly form. With
Norah’s departure the last link was severed which bound us to the new
life, and I am ashamed to confess how quickly and unconsciously we took
up the old one. It was so easy to do it, with Phyllis anticipating all
our wants and encouraging us in our indolence. We breakfasted when we
felt like it; had dinner and supper at all hours, while the kitchen
gradually came to look like anything but a place where Norah could knead
her bread on the floor. Phyllis’s handiwork was everywhere. There was
pot black on the sink, and grease on the floor. Her big black thumb had
_jabbed_ out the broken piece in the vegetable dish, and the hot
tomatoes had been spilled, some on the carpet and some down Fan’s back.
The wash boiler had been discarded for an iron kettle, and was filled
with a variety of articles, conspicuous among which were father’s
boot-jack and blacking brush. The griddles on the range were red most of
the time and began to warp and crack; the kettles burned dry; the tea
kettle leaked and was mended so often that father at last mildly
protested, saying it was cheaper to get a new one, which he could ill
afford as his bill at the hardware store was already a large one. Then I
tried to take the helm. There were a good many battles with Phyllis,
who, however, succumbed so far as to have one day in each week for
_clarin up_, “and the Lord himself couldn’t ax more’n that ef she was
workin’ for him,” she said.
In the midst of all our difficulties our baby was never for a moment
forgotten or neglected. Norah had called him _pimpin_, by which she
meant delicate, and so he was. But he was a beautiful child, with wavy
hair, and eyes a cross between blue and gray, a complexion like wax and
the prettiest ways, which made us all his slaves. It was Fan who devoted
herself to him, while I wrestled with the house. When he began to talk,
her name, or an attempt at it, was the first word he tried to speak. He
had often heard us spoken of as “_Fan-and-Ann_,” and with a quickness
and persistence for which he was remarkable, he caught it and applied it
to her alone. “_Fan-er-nan_” he always called her, while, for some
reason known only to himself, I was _Annie-mother_, although I didn’t
take half the care of him that she did. As soon as we thought he could
understand we told him of his mother, and when he asked us where she was
Fan answered “In Paradise,” and tried to make him repeat the word after
her.
“Oh, my lan!” came derisively from Phyllis, who was within hearing. She
didn’t “b’lieve in ‘dat ar _pair-o’-dice_,’” she said, and when next she
was alone with the little fellow she took him in her lap, gave him a
lump of sugar and said to him, “Don’t you let ’em fool you about dat ar
_pair-o’-dice_. Dar ain’t no sich place. Your mar’s sperrit is in
heaven, and her body in Boston.”
After that he always insisted that his mother had gone to heaven in
Boston. He knew that Carl was in Boston, and saw no reason why his
mother should not be there too. We told him a great deal of Carl, who
became to him a kind of imaginary hero, and whom he always remembered in
his prayers, asking that God would bless “brother Tarl, make him a good
boy, and keep him _straight_.” Mrs. Hathern’s dying injunction had been
“Keep Carl straight,” and as we never saw him Fan hoped a baby’s prayers
might accomplish what we had no means of doing, and taught the words to
Paul. Carl was in Harvard, doing fairly well for a young man of his
means and tastes. He had plenty of money, and was fond of luxury and
“larks,” and sometimes wrote us letters which made our hair stand on
end. It was usually Fan who took up the cudgels and berated him for what
she called his “goings on.” He always answered good-humoredly, telling
her she was too prudish and knew nothing of the world, living as she did
in that out of the way place.
“Not that Lovering isn’t lovely,” he added, “and I’d like nothing better
than to live with you in the charming old home I remember with so much
pleasure.”
He always addressed us as “My dear sisters,” and signed himself, “Your
loving brother.”
“Words,—nothing but words, which are so cheap,” Fan would say
derisively. “If we are so dear, and the old house so charming, why does
he never come near us. I tell you there is something wrong about Carl.
He is fickle and fast.”
I feared so, too; but there was a very warm spot in my heart for Carl,
whom I always defended, while Katy would never hear a word of censure
against him. He was her hero as well as Paul’s, and she would rather he
would be fast than stupid, she said. Just before he was graduated he
sent a most cordial invitation for us all to come east and see him take
his degree.
“I have been in a good many scrapes,” he wrote, “but have managed to
slip out. I always have my lessons and shall come off with some honor,
and I want you here to share it. So, pack up your best clothes. I shall
want my sisters to look well, and some of the Boston girls are stunners.
Bring Phyllis and the baby, and I will quarter you all in my house in
Boston, with Norah to superintend. Did I tell you that I took the house
when the last tenant’s lease expired, and had it refurnished from top to
toe, and put Norah there to keep it for me? Quite a comfortable
bachelor’s home you will find it.”
“Oh, how I’d like to go,” I exclaimed, remembering the pleasant house
looking out upon the Common, and feeling a great desire to see Boston
and Carl again.
But the thing was impossible. It was five years now since Mrs. Hathern
died, and every year we had been growing poorer. Father’s practice was
gone, or nearly so, and the few thousands left him by his wife had been
drawn upon so many times that there was not much now to draw from. The
trip to Boston was not to be thought of, and Fan answered the letter,
declining the invitation.
He was sorry, he wrote in reply, adding that as we were not coming he
should give a swell dinner in his house to his classmates and have a
“high old time.”
As it chanced Jack was in Boston on business and meeting Carl
accidentally was persuaded to be present at the dinner, which surpassed
anything he had ever seen.
“The flowers alone and decorations must have cost hundreds of dollars,”
he wrote to Fan; “and there were dishes whose name I never heard before
and which I never care to taste again. Everyone was in evening dress but
myself, who felt rather countryfied and out of place in my business
clothes. But Carl was the same old kind-hearted boy, and made me feel
perfectly at home and treated me as his honored guest. We sat down at
nine and did not get up till two in the morning. Even then some of them
did not get up at all for they were under the table, and lying round
loose anywhere, and I shouldn’t like to tell Fan how many empty wine
bottles were carried out by the waiters; but this I will say, I turned
my glass down every time, although I know I was thought a milksop for
doing it.”
This was at the time the great temperance crusade was beginning to sweep
over the land, and Fan was head and front of the movement in Lovering.
She had led a band of women into some of the lowest saloons and been
threatened with eggs and brickbats, but had held her own bravely and won
respect and attention where, at first, she met with coarse language and
derisive jeers. Jack’s letter roused her to a pitch of white heat and
she wrote to Carl, asking what his mother would say could she have
looked upon the drunken revel, and if he didn’t think himself about as
mean and low as he well could be for acting so entirely at variance with
his mother’s wishes.
Carl’s reply was good-humored and apologetic. He was a cad, he said, to
break his promise to his mother, but he positively had never been tipsy.
“I suppose, though, I can drink more than most fellows and not be
affected by it,” he wrote. “But that is no excuse, and to prove that I
am in earnest I have taken the pledge and shall keep it, too, as bravely
as Jack Fullerton did that night. I never respected a man more in my
life than I did him, even while chaffing him a little and calling him an
old maid. He is the right kind of stuff, and I don’t see why you don’t
marry him.”
“Carl’s advice is good,” I said. “Why don’t you marry Jack?”
There was an upward turn of Fan’s chin as she answered me—
“Poor, too poor. I can struggle with poverty at home but when I have one
of my own I must have some luxuries. So I’ll wait awhile. I am only
twenty-five, if old Granny Baker did say at the sewing society that ‘it
was time them Hathern girls were married, as they are gettin’ to be old
maids.’ Old maids, indeed! Do I look like one?”
She had never been more beautiful and attractive than she was then in
the full bloom of her womanhood. Jack thought so, too, and often asked
her to be his wife, while she as often answered him in a manner which,
while it did not mean yes, certainly was not a decided no.
CHAPTER II.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
THE FEVER.
That summer our town was visited with typhoid fever in its most
malignant form. Jack’s mother was among the first to take it, and in
their fear of the disease her servants forsook her, and as nurses were
scarce Jack was left alone with her until Fan joined him and together
they cared for her until she died. A week later our father was smitten
with the terrible scourge, which found him an easy prey. He had never
been himself since Mrs. Hathern died, and now it seemed to me as if he
gladly lay down upon the bed from which he was never to rise again.
“I am so tired,—so tired!” he said, as he folded his thin hands like a
child going to sleep, and scarcely moved or spoke again until toward the
last when he asked that we send for Carl. “I want to see him,” he said;
“there’s something very winsome about Carl, and I must talk to him about
the little boy!”
Jack, who had been with us all the time, hiding his own pain to comfort
us, telegraphed to Carl’s address in Boston. It was Norah who replied,
and her answer was so like her that we could not repress a smile as we
read it: “He is scurripin’ around the country, the Lord only knows
where, but I’ll find him,—sure.”
When we told father he said very faintly, “I shall not be here when he
comes, but tell him that I have loved him like a son, and he must avoid
temptation. He is easily lead. Tell him, too, about the boy.”
All the next day and the next we watched for some message from Carl, but
none came. The third day, however, a telegram reached us from Norah
saying, “I’ve run him down at last in Canada.” That evening there was
another from Carl, saying, “Shall start to-morrow morning.”
Oh, how hard our father tried to live until Carl reached us. It was a
fierce struggle between death and an indomitable will, and it was a
question which would conquer. Jack kept up his courage and ours.
“If he left Boston at nine, as he probably did, he is in New York by
this time,” he would say; and, later on, “He is in Washington now, and
will be in Richmond to-morrow morning;” then the line of prevision was
broken and we knew no more until the next day at noon, when there came a
message from Richmond: “Train late. Have just arrived. Will be with you
at four. Carl.”
Fan read it to our father, whose eyes shone for a moment with an eager
light, while his paralyzed tongue tried to speak. But he had drifted too
far away for anything to hold him longer, and when the old clock in the
church tower struck one he was dead. I cannot describe our anguish as we
kissed his cold, white face in the last good-bye, while his eyes, to the
very last, looked so lovingly at us and his pale lips tried to whisper
his farewell. Even now, after many years, my heart throbs with pain as
every incident of that day comes back to me. The warm sunshine, the
scent of the flowers, the song of the robin, the hum of the bees, the
low murmur of voices in the room where the undertaker and his assistants
were at work, Jack going in and out, occasionally consulting us but
mostly doing what he thought best, and later on going with the phaeton
and Black Beauty to meet Carl, while Fan and I sat on the piazza waiting
for him just as we waited years before when he surprised us by coming on
foot across the field and in at the rear door. Now he came more
decorously, with Paul in his lap, one arm around his neck and his curly
head nestling on Carl’s shoulder, while he talked continually. Paul had
gone with Jack to the station, eager to meet his brother; but when a
tall young man, dressed in the height of fashion, stepped upon the
platform and came briskly towards him, he drew back, until Jack said,
“That’s he that’s your brother; go and speak to him.”
Then he ran forward and looking shyly up at the stranger, said, “Is you
my brother Carl? I’m Paul, and papa’s dead and Fan-er-Nan and
Annie-mother and Katy has cried themselves sick.”
With the exception of a few presents at Christmas and an occasional
mention of him in his letters Carl had never evinced any interest in
Paul. But no one could withstand that upturned face and the little hands
held out in welcome, and lifting the child in his arms Carl kissed him
lovingly.
“Yes, I’m Carl,” he said, “and your brother, if you are really Paul;
but, zounds! how you have grown. I have imagined you still a baby. What
a stupid I must be.”
After that the acquaintance progressed rapidly, and the two were on the
best of terms by the time the phaeton drew up to the door and Carl
sprang out to meet us. The same Carl in some respects we had known as a
boy, and in others so very different. Broad-shouldered, perfectly
formed, six feet tall, with a heavy mustache, and an unmistakable _air
distingué_, he impressed us for a moment as he had little Paul, and I
felt half afraid of him. That feeling, however, vanished the moment I
heard his voice, full of sympathy, as he kissed us and said, “I am sorry
that I did not get here sooner. I’d give so much to see him alive once
more. He was the best man I ever knew.”
I was crying and could not answer him. Just what Fan said I do not know,
until I heard her exclaim, “Katy Hathern, why are you here? I told you
not to get up.” Aside from the grief at the loss of our father there was
a terrible fear haunting us lest Katy was coming down with the fever.
For two or three days she had complained of her head, and just after
father died she had been seized with a nervous chill. The doctor, whom
we called at once, had ordered her to bed, and his face was very grave
as he prescribed for her. She had refused to go to bed, saying she was
only tired; but we persuaded her to lie down upon the couch in her room
where I supposed she was until I saw her standing in the doorway, her
eyes unusually bright and a deep flush upon her cheeks. She had been
very small as a child, seeming younger than she really was; but within
the last two or three years she had shot up rapidly, until at fifteen
she was taller than either Fan or myself, with the loveliest face I have
ever seen. Fan was beautiful, with a brilliant, glowing beauty like the
gorgeous flowers of autumn, while Katy was fair as a lily, with a
complexion like the pink-and-white shells fresh from the sea. Her eyes
were large and blue as a bit of summer sky, the heavy brows and long
lashes making them seem darker than they really were. Her hair, once
almost yellow, was now a golden brown, with auburn tints upon it when
seen in certain lights, and fell in curls upon her neck. No stranger
ever looked at Katy once that did not look again, and now, as she
appeared in the doorway, the purity of her complexion heightened by the
black dress she wore, and her lips parted with a smile of welcome to
Carl, it was not surprising that he sprang to his feet exclaiming,
“Great Scott! This can’t be Katy! Why, I’ve always thought of you as a
little girl in pantelets tumbling into the frog pond, and by Jove! I’ve
brought you a _doll_.”
He had both her hands in his and was looking at her with eyes which
seemed to take in every point of beauty and gloat over it as over some
rare treasure found unexpectedly. He had kissed Fan and me, but he did
not kiss Katy. Possibly she saw the glowing fire in his eyes which I
saw, and did not like it, or it might have been the mention of the
_doll_ which put her upon her dignity, and when he stooped as if to kiss
her she drew her head back with a sideways movement natural to her when
surprised or displeased. She was very gracious to him, however, and let
him lead her to a seat while he sat down beside her and talked, to us,
still looking at her as if he would never tire of her fair girlish
beauty. Then suddenly the color left her face, her head began to droop,
and finally rested on his shoulder. She had fainted from her weakness
and over-exertion. It was Carl who carried her up stairs and laid her
upon the bed, from which she did not rise again until the summer was on
the wane and there was a foreshadowing of the September haze upon the
hills and woods of Lovering.
What passed during the next few days after Katy’s faint was very vague
and misty. I seemed like one in a horrible nightmare, my heart torn with
anguish for the living and sorrow for the dead. The latter we buried
with as little ceremony as possible. Letters of sympathy we had in
abundance, but many of our friends were ill and others were too much
afraid of the terrible scourge to come near us when they heard there was
a fresh case in our midst. So, only the clergyman, the bearers, Jack,
Paul, Fan and myself and Phyllis went across the field to the hillside
where, under the pines, we buried our father beside Charlie and The Boy.
Even Carl was not with us. Katy had been delirious from the first and
clung to him as if he were her mother. She knew the moment he left the
room and was only quiet when he sat by her, as he did almost constantly,
scarcely giving himself time to eat or sleep.
“We can’t let Katy die,” he said, and everything which could be done to
save the life so dear to us was done.
We had a trained nurse from Richmond and a physician who came every
other day, while the doctor from Lovering came almost every hour, it
seemed to me. This was Carl’s idea. He had taken the matter in charge
and was spending his money like water. We had a colored woman in the
kitchen to help Phyllis and he would have hired another if we had let
him. Incidentally, we learned that a party of friends were waiting for
him to join them in Montreal. But he telegraphed to them, “My sister is
very ill and I cannot come.” He called her his sister, but his manner
towards her was that of the tenderest of lovers. Many times I saw him
kiss her forehead when she was more than usually restless, and once he
pressed his lips to hers, from which the feverish breath came
scorchingly.
“Are you not afraid?” I asked, and he answered promptly, “Afraid? No.
Nothing about Katy can be infectious, and I would kiss her if I knew I
should have the fever a hundred times.”
We tried in vain to keep Paul from the room. He was perfectly infatuated
with Carl, who, in his absorption, paid little attention to the child.
But that did not matter. Paul was not to be repressed. He would put his
little hands into Carl’s and hold it fast until the young man was
compelled to notice him. By some means unknown to us he had unearthed
the high chair in which Katy had done penance so many times, and
dragging it into the sick-room placed it where it would be most out of
the way. Here he would sit in spite of us, watching Carl as he bent over
the fever-stained face and restless head upon the pillow.
“Does you sink God will let Katy die?” he once asked, as the disease
progressed and the hope in our hearts was nearly gone.
“No, she shall not die!” Carl answered, fiercely, and Paul continued, “I
prays every night and morning that God will make her well. Does you
pray, broder Carl?”
“Oh, Paul, I am too wicked to pray. God wouldn’t hear me, but he will
you. Keep on, and if she lives I’ll give you a much prettier riding pony
than Black Beauty ever was,” Carl said.
After that, when Paul was not in the sick-room, we found him on his
knees at all hours of the day praying that Katy might live.
“And she will, you bet,” he horrified me by saying, as he came from a
dark corner where he had been earning his pony.
“Oh, Paul! Where did you get that dreadful word?” I asked.
It was Fan who explained. That morning as she was entering Katy’s room,
she saw Carl stoop to kiss the sick girl and heard Paul, who was as
usual seated in his high chair, ask “Does you love her very much?”
“You _bet_,” was the answer inadvertently given; then, as he met Fan’s
eyes full of reproach, Carl hastened to say, “I beg your pardon. You see
we fellows use a lot of slang when alone, and it came from me unawares.
I hope that you will excuse me, and that no harm is done.”
He was looking at Paul, who had caught the expression, as he caught
everything out of the common, and who, in spite of our remonstrances,
used it continually until Fan shut him up in the meal room, from which
he emerged penitent and cured.
For weeks Katy hovered between life and death and went so far down the
dark valley that we once thought she had left us forever. But she came
back again, and after a few days it became evident that the crisis was
past and she would live if her strength was sufficient for the struggle.
For days she lay perfectly still with her eyes closed and her face as
white as the pillow her shorn head rested upon. We had cut off her hair
when her fever and delirium were at their height, for it seemed to
trouble her, and she looked like a little child again, with her thin
face and short curls clustering around her forehead. Suddenly one
evening when we thought her sleeping, she opened her eyes and looked
wonderingly at us. Then in a voice so low that we could scarcely hear
her, she said, “What has happened, and why are you all in here, and why
am I in bed? Am I very ill?” Then as her eyes fell upon Carl they
lighted up with something of their old brilliancy, and her voice was
steadier as she said, “Oh, Carl, you here? Yes, I remember now; but it
seems so long ago.”
“Yes, darling, I am here,” Carl said, laying his hand on her white
cheeks, which flushed quickly.
They were scarlet a moment later when Paul, who had climbed upon the
bed, chimed in: “He’s been here ever so long and tissed you, oh so many
times, I seen him, and once he cried when he so’t you was dead, and he’s
goin’ to div me an ittle pony ’cause I prayed so much for God to make
you well. I love Carl, don’t you?”
He had blurted out everything, and I glanced nervously at Carl to see
how he would take it. He only laughed and said something about “Little
pitchers telling all they knew,” and adding, “Why shouldn’t a fellow
kiss his sister if he wants to?”
Instantly Katy’s eyes looked searchingly into his with an expression
which told me that for her had commenced the old, old story, which has
gone on since Adam and Eve first dwelt in Eden, and will go on as long
as there is a tongue to tell it, or an ear to listen to it. But how was
it with Carl, the young man of the world, with unbounded wealth at his
command and his choice of any fair girl in the set to which he belonged?
Did he really care for Katy, except as a brother might care for a sister
as lovely as she was? and if he cared now, was he not of too fickle a
nature to carry her image with him until time had developed her from a
girl of fifteen into a full-grown woman?
Rumors had come to us in various ways of numerous flirtations which
meant nothing to him and were dropped as soon as the first glamour was
worn away and there were fresh fields to glean. From what we had seen of
him we could understand how with his face and voice and manner he had
only to stretch out his hand and gather almost any flower, just to
inhale its sweetness for an hour and then drop it for another. Would he
trifle with our Katy, or was it really only a brother’s affection he was
giving to her? These questions Fan and I asked ourselves many times
during the days of Katy’s convalescence, when Carl was with her so
constantly, and we saw the brightness in her eyes when he came into her
room, bringing fruit and flowers and books to read, but, most of all,
bringing himself. There were drives in the leafy woods as she grew
stronger, and walks to the cemetery on the hill side, where we often saw
them sitting side by side upon the seat under the pines, his arm
sometimes around her waist and her head upon his shoulder.
“Is he making love to her, and shall we let it go on? She is too young,”
Fan would say, and calling Paul she would give him some flowers for the
graves and tell him he might stay as long as he chose.
The chances were that Paul, who always wanted to go where Carl and Katy
went, had already been there and been gotten rid of in some way, but
delighted with his commission he would start across the field to execute
it.
“Halloo, youngster, who told you to come here after I sent you back?”
Carl said to him once, when Katy’s hand lay in his and her eyes were
shining like diamonds.
“Fan-er-Nan send me,” Paul replied. “I’ve bringed flowers for papa’s
grave an’ Charlie’s an’ The Boy’s, an’ my two first mammas, an’ I’m
goin’ to stay.”
A few incidents like this broke up the walks to the cemetery, and, as if
divining our suspicions, Carl’s manner to Katy changed a little and was
more like that of a brother than of a lover. Katy was not one who
carried her thoughts on her face, or talked much of her inner feelings.
She was more reticent and self-contained than either Fan or myself, and
if she noticed a change in Carl she gave no sign of it. But when about
the middle of September he told us one morning at breakfast that he had
letters from Boston requiring his immediate presence there, and that he
must start the next day, her checks where the roses were beginning to
bloom again became a shade paler, and there was a troubled look in her
eyes whenever they rested on Carl. He seemed very cheerful and went
whistling about the house as he made his preparations for his departure.
He had paid every bill contracted during Katy’s illness, had bought a
pretty white pony for Paul as a reward for his prayers, and done many
things for our comfort.
That night,—the last he was to spend with us,—Fan found an opportunity
to speak to him alone, reminding him of his mother’s dying message and
what our father had said of his being easily influenced. With a laugh in
which there was some bitterness, he replied, “Oh, bother, don’t you fear
for me. I’m all right. Lots of us fellows have sprees but we do nothing
bad. I shall sow my wild oats early and settle into a model married man.
You’ll see!”
There was a thought of Katy in Fan’s mind, and she replied, “Not for
years yet; and, Carl, be careful what kind of girls you consort with.
Choose the purest and best. Remember that your mother said, ‘If Carl
falls, it will be a woman that tempts him.’”
Then for the first time Carl showed real irritation.
“Who has been talking to you?” he said. “Has that old cat, Miss
Errington, of Washington, been writing things to you? She was in Boston
last winter and I met her several times. She was visiting in a house
where I often called; there were three pretty girls there and once they
chaffed me before her about a French grisette with whom they said I
corresponded. It was just this way; you remember Julina?”
“Yes,” Fan said.
“Well,” Carl continued, “she wrote me a letter in French. She has been
in Paris five years and must be perfect in the language. She was with
her aunt, Madame Du Bois, who keeps a pension. She addressed me as ‘My
dear Carl,’ and signed herself ‘Your devoted Julina.’ I am so poor a
French scholar that I couldn’t make it all out, and got a fellow to help
me, and by Jove he told of it to these girls as a joke on me, and I was
hectored until I almost hated the name Julina. I didn’t answer her
letter; upon my word I didn’t.”
“I know nothing about Julina and care less,” Fan replied, “but Miss
Errington did write me that you were something of a flirt, and I should
know that if she had not written it.”
Again Carl seemed irritated and answered warmly, “I don’t know what you
mean. Can’t a fellow enjoy himself with a pretty girl who enjoys herself
with him? I like them all, and the one I am with last I like the best.
It is my nature. I can’t help it; but I’d burn my hands to the bone
before I would wrong any girl, or knowingly deceive her. I have given no
woman reason to think my attentions more than those of a friend, and if
she thought so it was her own fault and because she did not understand
me.”
At this moment Katy entered the room. She had heard his last words, and
there was a look of surprise in her eyes for a moment; then they
suddenly hardened and her manner was more like that of a Grande Duchesse
than our simple-hearted Katy as she took the chair he brought her, and
bending over her with his hand on her shoulder stroked her hair and
said, “You look pale, are you tired?”
Leaning her head against the back of the chair Katy closed her eyes as
if she were tired, but really to repress the tears which in her weak
state came so easily. Months after, when Carl’s letters, at first so
long and frequent, had become like angel’s visits, “short and far
between,” she said to me, hesitatingly, “I thought Carl liked me just as
Jack likes Fanny. He never said so, it is true, but he acted it, and I
was pleased and happy. There is something about him which wins you in
spite of yourself. Hypnotism, perhaps. But I am over it now. I know he
does not care for me as I did for him.”
She spoke sadly, and I felt a throb of indignation against Carl, who
had, unwittingly, perhaps, thrown a shadow on Katy’s life. She was young
in years, but old in much which makes mature womanhood, and the
attentions of a man like Carl could not fail to impress her with a
deeper feeling than sisters feel for brothers. He still wrote her
occasionally,—bright, chatty letters, full of protestations of affection
for herself and all of us, and telling her of a life of which she knew
nothing. But he didn’t come again, and he seemed at last to have passed
out of our lives, into which another exciting interest had entered.
CHAPTER III.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
THE ENGAGEMENT.
The winter succeeding father’s death was a hard one for us. Our effort
to economize and still not seem to do so was a struggle, and probably
did not deceive anyone. Jack understood all our needs and straits and
helped us wherever he could,—not in money, but in many ways where a
man’s advice and assistance are invaluable. He was now agent for a large
firm which paid him well, and as he was traveling only a part of the
time we saw a great deal of him, and the evenings when he was not with
us seemed monotonous and long. Sometimes when the days were fine and he
had leisure for it he took long walks with Fan in the woods, and when
they came back I used to notice a brightness in his manner and a look in
Fan’s eyes which I had not seen there before. Christmas week and the one
following he was in town, negotiating a sale for his mother’s house.
When he left it was early on the morning train, and that night, when Fan
and I were alone in our room and she was brushing her glossy hair, she
turned suddenly to me and said, “I have promised to marry Jack. Didn’t
you notice that he looked more like an idiot than usual?”
I was standing by my dressing bureau with my back to her, so that she
could not see the whiteness of my face as I put my hand upon my heart,
where for a moment there was the sharpest pain I had ever known or ever
shall again. I had expected this would come sometime and I thought I was
prepared, but now that it had come, I found myself a weak, wicked woman,
loving a man who was to marry my sister, and who, under no
circumstances, could ever have cared for me. Rallying in a moment and
laughing at her likening him to an idiot, I replied, “You forget I have
not seen him since I left you with him last night in the parlor and went
to bed with a headache. I suppose it was after I came up stairs.”
“Yes,” she nodded, and after a moment went on; “What a great awkward
baby of a fellow he is. Why he almost cried when I consented to marry
him, and went off into a tantrum which frightened me and made me half
wish I hadn’t said yes. I do believe if I were to go back on him now it
would kill him.”
“Go back on him!” I said. “You could never do that. Go back on Jack; the
best and noblest man that ever lived!”
She had drawn her long hair across her face, and through it her black
eyes looked curiously at me as she said, “I believe _you_ are in love
with Jack, or could easily be, and I wish it were you instead of me.
Don’t stare at me as if you thought me a fiend. I like him; sometimes I
think I love him. I dare say I should love him desperately if there were
any danger of losing him, but I can’t help wishing he had more style,
and more money. He is a gentleman, of course, but he has not the manner
of Carl or Col. Errington. Half a dozen times I have been on the point
of accepting the latter. You know his letter is still unanswered; but,
you don’t know that in his letter of sympathy after father died there
was a slip I did not show you. Just four words, “Are you still
considering?” That shows he has remembered all these years, and since we
have had so hard a struggle with poverty my thoughts have more than once
turned to him, or rather to what he could give me.”
“Fan Hathern!” I exclaimed, indignantly. “You are not worthy the love of
a good man like Jack, and I am half tempted to tell him so.”
“I wish you would; but you needn’t knock things over before you do it,”
she answered, with the utmost unconcern, as in my excitement I ran
against the table on which the lamp was standing. “You know the plateau
on the hill where the Ponsonby mansion stood before it was burned?” she
continued. “Well, it is for sale, and Jack is going to buy it and build
a pretty cottage on it with all the modern improvements. He was just
like a boy talking about it. He has more money than I supposed, or will
have, when his mother’s estate is settled, and his salary is good. So we
shall begin housekeeping in fine style for Lovering, but—bah, nothing to
what I would like.”
I was never so angry with Fan in my life as I was that night when she
showed me the heartless side of her, and I staid angry for two or three
days until Jack came with a plan for the cottage he was going to build
on the Ponsonby plateau. Then I forgave her when I saw her eyes light up
as she lifted her face to be kissed and sat down close to him, while
with one arm around her waist he explained the plan to us both. It was
as nearly perfect as could be, especially the square hall with the
fireplace, the deep window seats and the broad staircase, with the
landing where his mother’s tall clock was to stand. There were to be bay
windows and alcoves and verandas, above and below, and a room for Katy,
and Paul, and myself whenever we chose to stay there, which he hoped
would be very often. He _was_ like a boy in his enthusiasm and Fan
caught the spirit, too, and began to furnish the different rooms in a
manner which took my breath away. Jack had thought to use some of his
mother’s furniture, but Fan promptly vetoed the idea. It was too old
fashioned, she said. She must have everything fresh and new, and she
fitted up room after room, one with pink, one with blue, one with red.
Her own, with the bay window overlooking the town and the valley and
hills beyond, was to be of white enameled wood, with touches of gold
here and there, while the window itself was bewildering with its white
silk canopy and fringe of gold, its fleecy curtains and soft cushioned
window stools and chairs.
If Jack had known Fan as well as I did he would have understood that
much of her talk was for effect, that she never expected to have a house
furnished as she was furnishing it in fancy. Unfortunately, he was apt
to take things literally, and as he saw his pocket-book emptied and
himself heavily in debt if he carried out her plans, he gasped a little
and said, “That would be lovely, but I am afraid I can’t afford it all
at first. Sometime we will have it, but now we must cut the garment
according to the cloth.”
Instantly Fan’s face clouded. She lost her interest in the plan, and
nearly lost it in Jack, who was, however, too supremely happy to notice
it. She had promised to be his wife the next Christmas, when the house
which was now on paper would be ready for her, and knowing that he would
sooner die than break his word to her, he believed in and trusted her,
and I never saw any human being more happy than he seemed on the nights
when he used to come to us, bringing so much sunshine with his kindness
and thoughtfulness that the winter did not seem half as long and dreary
as we thought it would be with our father gone. We missed him
everywhere, it is true; but as far as possible Jack filled his place,
planning for us, transacting all our business, and collecting many a
dollar which but for him we could never have recovered. Occasionally we
heard from Carl, who wrote that he was studying law and was as steady as
an old clock. Once Norah wrote asking if Phyllis had done this and that
and presuming she hadn’t. Then she spoke of Carl, of whom she was very
proud. “About the firstest young man in Boston,” she said, “with all the
girls after him. But he don’t seem to hanker in particular for none of
’em. He has a way, though, of makin’ ’em all b’lieve she’s the one. But,
good land, ’taint wuth no girl’s while to set her heart on him. He’s
like a wind-mill, turnin’ and turnin’. He’s stiddy, though, and keeps
middlin’ good hours—for Boston.”
This was encouraging so far as Carl was concerned, but there was a
shadow on Katy’s face, and for several days we missed the music of her
voice as she moved rather dejectedly around the house, apparently
pondering Norah’s words, “Tain’t wuth no girl’s while to set her heart
on Carl.”
CHAPTER IV.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.
Owing to some defect found in the title to the Ponsonby plateau after
Jack had bargained for it, there was a delay of two or three months and
it was the first of June before the way was clear for him to begin his
new house. As he meant to superintend it himself and work with his own
hands as much as possible there was ample time to finish it before
Christmas, the day appointed for the wedding. After many consultations
and a great deal of walking around the plateau to get the very best
point for views in every direction, it was decided to build the cottage
a little to the north of the spot where the Ponsonby house had stood.
This necessitated a new cellar, and on the morning when the work was to
commence Jack came to us and said, “I wish you’d all come up and see the
first furrow turned. It will be something like laying the corner stone.”
As the day was one of Phyllis’s “clarin’ up” days we were glad to escape
from the discomfort of it, and deciding to have a kind of picnic we took
our lunch with us, and sitting down on a bit of broken wall in the
shadow of a dogwood tree Katy, Paul and I looked on while Fan and Jack
steadied the plow and drove the horses around the ground staked out for
the cellar.
“Don’t this make you think of Romulus and Remus building Rome? I don’t
believe, though, that Jack will kill me if I jump over the wall,” Fan
said, laughingly, as she let go the plow and bounding over the furrow
came up to where we were sitting, flushed with exercise and seemingly
very happy.
When the horses had done all they could and the workmen had taken the
cellar in hand we sat down to our lunch, which was nearly finished when
we heard the sound of voices coming up the hill and a moment after a
gentleman and lady came into view, walking very leisurely, but
quickening their steps when they saw us.
“Colonel and Miss Errington,” Fan exclaimed. “What evil genius sent them
here to-day!”
Was it an evil genius, or good, or was it fate which sent them there? I
often asked myself afterwards, when a great happiness and a great sorrow
followed as the result of their coming.
“Here you are! What a climb, and how tired and hot I am,” Miss Errington
said, as, after shaking hands with us, she dropped down upon the nearest
big stone and began to fan herself.
It was years since we had seen either the Colonel or his sister, but it
did not seem to me that they had changed much. Both were a little
stouter, perhaps, and there were a few white hairs in the Colonel’s
side-whiskers, worn after the English fashion. Otherwise he was the same
tall, elegant man, with a military look and air, and the same cold, hard
expression in his eyes which, as they had always done, softened when
they rested on Fan. Every color became her, but to me she had never been
as handsome as since she had worn black. It toned down her brilliant
color, and made her look more womanly and lovable. That day her dress
was a thin muslin, which showed her white neck and arms, and she had
pinned some white roses at her throat and fastened some in her hair “to
scratch Jack when he tries to kiss me,” she said, but really because she
inwardly chafed against black and wanted some color to relieve it.
The Colonel was very polite to me, and said to Katy, “Upon my soul, how
you have grown!” and “What little shaver is this?” to Paul. Then he took
Fan’s hand and held it much longer than he had held mine, and looked at
her until she shrank from him and moved nearer to Jack. Miss Errington
was explaining that, as they were in Richmond and had not seen us in
years, they had decided to surprise us with a call.
“We drove from the station to the house,” she said, “and found your
factotum, Phyllis, asleep on the front piazza with mop and pails and
broom at her side. It was a work of time to rouse her, but when she was
fairly awake she was profuse in her excuses, saying she was that tired
in her bones that she “had done drapped asleep arsidentally,” and also
that you were all digging the cellar for Mas’r Jack’s and Miss Fanny’s
new house, from which I infer that congratulations are _en règle_, or
are you already married?”
“No, oh no!” Fan exclaimed, while Jack put his hand on her shoulder with
an air of proud ownership and said, “Not yet, but I invite you to our
wedding next Christmas.”
“Christmas! That’s a long way off,” the Colonel rejoined, his manner
changing at once from one of indifference, or disappointment, or both,
to one almost hilarious. I was told that I looked younger than when he
last saw me. Katy was delicately complimented on her wonderful beauty.
Paul was taken up and set upon the highest bit of wall, which he made
believe was a horse, and Fan was reminded of the saucy things she said
to him when he first invaded our house as a Federal officer with his
soldiers, and asked if she hated them all now as much as she did then.
“I should if they came on the same errand,” was her reply, and then
walking slowly around the broken ground the Colonel asked if _that_ was
to be the size of the house?
“Yes, and you’d be surprised to know how much room there will be in it,”
Jack said, beginning eagerly to explain that here was the hall, there
the dining-room, there the library and sitting-room, and “upstairs,
right here, with the bay window, where we get the finest view, our
room,” he added, with a world of love and tenderness on the words _our
room_.
“Ah, yes, I see; all very fine,” the Colonel rejoined, with a look I did
not like, it seemed so like the look a snake might give the bird it
meant to destroy. “And what do you intend to call this Paradise? You
Southerners, like the English, usually have names for your places,” was
his next question, to which Jack replied, “We haven’t thought so far as
that. The people who used to live here called the place The Plateau, but
I’d like something else. Suppose you name it.”
“How would ‘The House that Jack built’ do?” the Colonel said, in an
ironical tone which irritated me, but which was lost sight of by the
rest because of Paul, who, catching the words “The House that Jack
built,” began at once to repeat the rhyme which he knew by heart.
“Bravo, young man!” the Colonel said, patting the child’s head, while
Fan suggested that we return to The Elms, where we could offer a cup of
tea to our guests.
Jack excused himself, as he must stay with his men, and the rest of us
went slowly down the hill, Miss Errington, Katy, Paul and myself in
advance, the Colonel and Fan in the rear, walking very slowly and
engaged in what seemed a very animated conversation. Phyllis had
finished her “clarin’ up,” donned her Sunday dress and turban, and in
anticipation of our return was moulding biscuits for tea. It was served
on the rear porch, where the clematis and honeysuckle shielded us from
the heat of the June sun, and after it was over Miss Errington asked
Katy to sing for her. The song was followed by another and another,
during which the Colonel, who cared little for music, walked up and down
the long piazza with Fan, whose cheeks were very red when she at last
joined us at my call.
Miss Errington was going to Saratoga in August and would like to take
Katy with her if Fan and I were willing. As all important decisions were
usually left to Fan I beckoned her to us. Before she could reply to the
proposition, which Miss Errington repeated, the Colonel interposed,
“That’s a capital idea, but why not invite Miss Fanny also? You can
chaperon two young ladies as well as one, and I am sure she would like
to see something of the north she affects to hate.”
This suggestion was warmly seconded by Miss Errington, while Fan stood
irresolute. I did not think she would accept without seeing Jack, and
was surprised when she said at last, “I should like it so much if Miss
Errington really wants me.”
Miss Errington did want her, and as I was not consulted it was arranged
that Fan and Katy should go to Washington the last week in July and from
there to Saratoga in company with Miss Errington. Nothing had been said
of the Colonel’s going, and when I asked what he meant to do, he
replied, “Oh, stay at home; Saratoga is not to my taste.”
It was later than usual that night when Jack came to us, more tired than
I had ever seen him. He had worked harder than any of his men, he said,
as he leaned back in his chair and asked where Fan was. She was putting
Paul to bed, and it was Katy who told him of the proposed trip.
“Fanny going!” he repeated, his face flushing for a moment, and then
turning paler than before. She had just come in, and going up to him
began to smooth his hair and forehead, saying, “You poor boy, you are
all tired out. You ought not to work so hard. Let those lazy negroes do
it. Yes, I thought I’d go; it is a good chance to see a little of the
world before I settle down into a Joan. You don’t care, do you?”
She was still manipulating his hair, with her face very near to his and
something so coaxing in her voice that a man less in love than Jack
would have yielded to it and granted what she wished.
“I am glad to have you go, if it pleases you,” he said. “Only I thought
you might like to be here and watch the house as it progresses. But
you’ll be back before we get to the rooms.”
“Oh, yes,” she answered very promptly. “I shall be back before you reach
the rooms. It is only for August, and I have always wanted to see
Saratoga.”
“Is the Colonel going?” Jack asked and Fan answered, “No, indeed, and
I’m glad; I think him horrid and so patronizing.”
The fact that the Colonel was not to make one of the party reconciled
Jack to Fan’s absence more than anything else, and in spite of his
fatigue he grew very cheerful and quite like himself as the evening wore
on. That night in our room there was a spirited discussion between Fan
and myself with regard to her proposed trip, I arguing that for Jack’s
sake she should stay at home, and she declaring she would not. It was
the only bit of life she’d ever see, she said, and she meant to take it.
She’d never been beyond the smoke of our chimney, and after she was
married she should of course settle down, just as all the Lovering women
did, into a domestic drudge. Poverty was hateful, and she was glad she
was for once going to know how rich people lived and play rich herself.
The next morning she was very pliable and sweet, and spent half the day
at The Plateau with Jack whom she brought home with her to supper, and
then sat with him alone on the piazza until the clock struck eleven and
old Phyllis appeared on the scene in wonderful night-gear, with a tallow
dip in her hand, saying she “had done hearn sunthin’, and thought mebby
thar was burgles in the house.”
CHAPTER V.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
SEEING THE WORLD.
It was the last week in July when Fan and Katy left us for Washington.
Jack, Paul and I went to the station with them, waving and kissing our
hands to them as long as we could see them standing upon the rear
platform and waving to us. How often now do I recall Fanny as she was
then starting out to see the world. Although twenty-six she scarcely
looked more than twenty, so lightly had the years touched her bright
face and starry eyes, which tears made softer and lovelier as she said
good-bye to us. With wonderful skill and some help from the fashion
plates she had remodeled her wardrobe, adding a little to it as we could
afford, but refusing the money Jack offered her, saying he knew she must
need it and he wanted her to hold her own among the fashionables she was
to meet.
“No, Jackey, dear,” she said, “I can’t take money from you now; but when
I am your wife, it will not be safe to offer it to me. And don’t you
worry, I shall hold my own.”
At first she wrote three times a week to Jack, and her letters were very
satisfactory, judging from his manner after receiving them. To me she
wrote once a week, but it was from Katy that I had the most reliable
information. They had reached Washington safely, and been met by Colonel
and Miss Errington in a superb turnout, with coachman and footman in
livery. The house was more elegant than anything Katy had ever imagined,
and all its appointments of service and servants were perfect, and Fan
adapted herself to everything with the air of a duchess born to the
purple. Both the Colonel and his sister were very kind and had taken
them everywhere in and around Washington, which was a beautiful city,
but so hot that after a week’s sojourn they were glad to leave it for
Saratoga. At the very last moment the Colonel had decided to go with
them. He had said he couldn’t be hired to spend a month in that
frivolous place, but when in the morning they came down to breakfast
there was his baggage with theirs in the hall waiting for the
expressman, and he was in his light traveling suit giving directions.
They were stopping at the United States, where they had a suite of rooms
on the second floor, parlor, three bedrooms, dressing-rooms and
bath-rooms, and were quite the distinguished guests of the house. After
she had been in Saratoga two or three weeks Katy wrote again.
“We know everybody worth knowing and everybody knows us and are very
polite and attentive, notwithstanding our plain black gowns, which
contrast so strongly with the elegant dresses worn morning, noon and
night, any one of which must have cost more than all our simple
wardrobe. There is a story going the rounds that we were very wealthy
before the war,—that being on the frontier we were overrun by both
armies, our house burned, our negroes stolen, and that we lost all we
had. Fan, they say, was a fierce rebel, and with a revolver once kept
Col. Errington and his whole regiment at bay when he tried to quarter
his men upon us. All this fiction seems to make the people think more of
us. Funny, isn’t it? Fan is the belle of the season and more flattered
and complimented and sought after than any young lady here. And you
don’t know how beautiful she is even in her simple black lawn and linen
collar, with her brilliant complexion, her eyes like diamonds and her
smile which brings every man to her feet. You ought to see her sitting
in one of the big chairs on the piazza, or in the hall, surrounded by
half a dozen admirers of all ages from sixteen to sixty. She knows the
right word to say to each one, and keeps them all on the _qui vive_,
while the Colonel, who is always very near, looks on with an expression
which says as plain as words can say, ‘Don’t go too far, gentlemen. It
will do no good.’ His attentions are constant and so delicate and marked
that people begin to associate their names together, and I have been
asked if they were not engaged. I said no, decidedly, and told them
about Jack, whom she is to marry at Christmas. In less than twenty-four
hours, so fast does gossip travel here, I overheard one lady tell
another that the eldest Miss Hathern was engaged to a wealthy Virginia
planter who lived near Richmond.
“‘That splendid girl engaged to a farmer,’ the second lady exclaimed,
and her friend replied, ‘No, a planter.’
“‘Oh, that will do,’ the other said, in a satisfied tone, ‘as if there
were any difference between a planter and a farmer except the spelling.’
Do you see any?
“That night Fan and I quarrelled for the first time in our lives. She
said that I had no business to tell that she was engaged and spoil her
fun, and I said she had no business to flirt so outrageously with
everybody, and that if she didn’t quit it I’d write to Jack. Then she
began to cry and wish she was dead. She didn’t see why when a glimpse of
the world was given her to enjoy she couldn’t be allowed to enjoy it in
her own way, and if she chose to have a taste of the world, the flesh
and the devil, meaning the Colonel, she didn’t know why I should
interfere. She intended to marry Jack, but she meant to have a good time
first before settling down in dull old Lovering, which she hated. Then
her mood changed and she acknowledged that she was wrong, and that night
she wrote Jack the longest letter she has written since we came here,
and the most loving, I dare say. The next day she was as shy and demure
as a nun, which sent the whole pack after her fiercer than ever, but she
cut them dead and kept close to the Colonel as if for protection, and
drove with him to the lake and didn’t get back until ten o’clock. She
was gone with him again this afternoon, and the people crowded on to the
piazza to see them off in his stylish turnout,—the finest here by far.”
This letter troubled me greatly, and I wondered what Jack would think of
it. I remembered the long letter he had received and how happy he had
looked after it. I had seen him reading it at least three different
times, until I felt sure he must know it by heart. After that her
letters were very short, both to him and to me. She had not time to
write much, she said, she was kept in such a whirl, which grew dizzier
as the season drew near its close. She never mentioned the Colonel, or
any other gentleman in particular, but was loud in her praise of Katy,
whose flowerlike beauty, she said, had turned the heads of half the men
in Saratoga.
“And her voice,” she wrote; “people rave about it as if she were Patti
herself. It seems the Diva sang here once years ago, when she was about
Katy’s age, and a woman who heard her says she likes Katy’s voice better
and that she is far prettier, she is so fair and sweet and unconscious
of her great gift. I have let her sing twice in public for some
charities; they are always getting up something of that sort and levying
on any talent there may be here. Prejudiced as I am against the stage I
was proud of Katy, she was so modest and unaffected, and received the
applause of the people so shyly and sweetly. Miss Errington has a plan
in her mind for keeping Katy in Washington and giving her lessons. She
will probably write you about it. I shall oppose it if there is a
_career_ behind it. I have not yet reached a point where I want my
sister a public character, with her photographs in the shop windows, and
horrid wood-cuts of her in the papers. I intend to have her at The
Plateau a good deal of the time to keep me from stagnating. Just think
of it! Only Jack and me, sitting there alone, admiring each other! Well,
nothing can blot out the remembrance of the good time I am having now
seeing the world, and there is so much to see and enjoy, if one only had
money.
“I hoped at one time Carl might join us. Katy has had a few lines from
him; did she tell you? He has gone with a party to some outlandish place
beyond the Rockies. There are some people here from Boston who know him
well and speak highly of him. They say, however, that he is a little too
much inclined to forget the friends of yesterday for those of to-day. We
know that, don’t we? An uncle on his father’s side has recently died and
left him what we should think a fortune. So he is richer now than ever.
I wish we had an uncle to die and leave us some money. But, alas! if we
ever had an uncle he was dry as dust long ago.
“Miss Errington came in just here and proposed that, instead of going
back to Washington, we take a trip to Quebec and Montreal and Chicago,
returning by way of the Falls and New York, where, she says, I can buy
my wedding trousseau. That last sounds fine, don’t it? I wonder if she
suspects how poor we really are and how little there is for a trousseau.
I don’t believe that, all told, we can get together a hundred dollars
without drawing on the small sum we have in the bank in Richmond, or
selling Black Beauty. It may come to that yet. And what do you think of
the plan? Katy is crazy to go, and I am just as anxious. I see no reason
why we should not, and I have virtually said we would, provided you do
not object too strenuously, and you are too unselfish an old darling to
do that. And so is Jack. How is the dear boy? ‘Working like an ox to get
the nest ready for his bird,’ he wrote me. Oh, Jack, Jack! How good he
is; far too good for me! His letters always make me cry. I feel my
unworthiness so after reading them. I really mean to settle down into
the best and most domestic of wives after I have seen the world.
“A gentleman has sent up for me to drive with him, so good-bye. We shall
leave here within a week.
“Lovingly, FAN.”
CHAPTER VI.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
FURNISHING THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.
It was no use to protest against the journey which would keep Fan and
Katy from home four or five weeks longer, and all Jack and I could do
was to make the best of it. Jack looked very sober when we talked it
over together.
“I am glad for her to enjoy herself and see the world, as she calls it,”
he said, smiling sadly; “but I miss her so much. I am always wanting to
ask her advice and know if what I am doing suits her. You will have to
take her place in that respect.”
He was looking so tired and pale that night that even Phyllis noticed it
and asked, “What has done happened to Mas’r Jack; he don’t look so
peart-like as he did? Is he frettin’ for Miss Fanny? She don’t or’to go
to the ends of the airth an’ her the same as merried. No man would bar
it.”
Phyllis and I were thrown so much together for companionship that she
usually told me what she thought.
“‘Pears mos’ like she was never comin’ back,” she said more than once,
and in spite of myself I was haunted by a similar presentiment, which
followed me everywhere, and made me very kind and pitiful towards Jack.
He was working very hard, and with his labor and under his supervision
the house was going up faster than ever a house went up before in
Lovering. The walls were all enclosed and the rooms divided off
according to the plan, which Jack often brought to me, asking if I could
suggest any change. I could not. It was perfect as it was. New houses
were not common in Lovering. This was the first since the war, and to me
it seemed the quintessence of all that was pretty and desirable. Nearly
every day all through September and on into October I went with Paul to
The Plateau to watch the work as it progressed, and to please Jack, who
said that he got on better when I was there,—that I seemed a part of Fan
herself, and if he couldn’t have her I was next best. This might be
called a questionable compliment, but I was grateful for crumbs. I doubt
if Fan on her western tour, which finally extended as far as Colorado
and Salt Lake City, was much happier than I was those long autumn days,
when I sat in a niche in the wall and watched Jack busy with his men, of
whom there were at least a dozen, so anxious was he to surprise Fan when
she came home. How kind and attentive he was, coming often to me and
trying to shield me from the sun if it were too warm, or from the wind
if it blew cold from the woods or hills.
“You don’t know what a comfort it is to have you here,” he said to me
one cool morning in October as he sat down beside me, pulling my shawl
over my shoulder and unconsciously letting his hand rest there a moment
as a brother might have done. “I wish you were going to live with Fanny
and me. We need you to balance our nervousness and excitement, you are
so quiet and self-contained. It will be a happy man who gets you,
Annie.”
“Oh, Jack,” was all I said, as I drew away from him and turned my head
that he might not see the waves of crimson on my face, or hear the loud
beating of my heart as I could hear it.
Not for worlds would I have let him know that the girl he thought so
self-contained and quiet loved him with a love far more enduring than
any which Fan had ever given to him. It was a sin, I knew, or soon would
be, and I fought against it with all my might, only to find it growing
stronger as the days went by and the time drew near when he would be the
husband of my sister. My only resource when his spell was over me was to
talk to him of Fan,—where she was, what she was doing, what she was
seeing, and when she would be home. To all this he responded readily,
especially the coming home, and how he meant to surprise her.
One day in October when I went with Paul to The Plateau he met me with a
beaming face. Some land of his near Richmond, which he had scarcely
thought worth anything, had been bought by a gentleman from the north,
who was going to put two or three houses upon it.
“I feel rich,” he said,—“so rich that I am going to commit the
extravagance of buying lace curtains, the real sort, not shams, a
moquette carpet and upright Steinway for the parlor. That will please
Fanny. She likes moquettes, they tread so softly, and I know she will
like a piano. I heard her say that no house was furnished without one.
Don’t you approve?” he continued, as I did not answer.
A moquette, at the prices they then brought with us, was an
extravagance, while the Steinway was a superfluity. Fan had taken a few
lessons and could play simple music. But she didn’t care for it and
seldom tried the superb instrument which Mrs. Hathern had brought from
Boston. Under these circumstances it seemed to me that the money he must
pay for a Steinway could be better expended, and I said so, giving as a
reason that Fan was not much of a musician.
“Yes, she is,” Jack answered quickly; “I’ve heard her sing Bonny Doon
when she actually brought tears, I was so sorry for the chap who wrote
it. Burns, wasn’t it? That’s my favorite, words and all. And the way
Fanny sang it. I want to hear it again in this room; and Dixie. How she
can rattle that off; and Fisher’s Hornpipe, and Money Musk. They are
worth all the classics in the world, and Bonny Doon is a hundred times
better than the hifalutin things you hear at concerts, when the singer
almost turns black in the face, and wiggles and twists and stands on
tiptoe as if she were going up bodily with her voice, which, when it
gets up as far as it can go ends with a screech like she was in a fit.
No, sir! Give me the good, old-fashioned tunes such as Fan can play.”
Evidently Jack’s taste for music was not cultivated, and I laughed
merrily at his tirade against fashionable singing, and then watched him
as he drummed on the window stool in imitation of playing a piano, and
whistled the air of Bonny Doon. I knew he would buy the moquette and the
Steinway, and said no more to discourage him.
“Now come up to _our_ room,” he said, after he had finished Bonny Doon
and tried a few notes of Suwanee River, another of his favorites.
I followed him up to what was to be his sleeping-room, and which he
never entered without removing his hat as reverently as if it had been a
church. It was a sacred place to him, and the one he meant to make the
most attractive in the house.
“Fanny will sit here a great deal,” he said, “because the view is so
fine, and then she can see me coming up the hill on my way home. I know
just how she will look and can see her now, watching and waiting, and
throwing me kisses. What is that they sing in the prayer meetings?” and
he began to hum,
“Will anyone then at the beautiful gate,
Be watching and waiting for me.”
He was very musical that afternoon because he was so happy, and Fan was
very real to him watching by the window as he came up the hill to what
would be Paradise because she was in it. Do the hearts of men like Jack
break more easily when betrayed? I do not know, but I remember thinking
that God would hardly forgive the woman who played false to one who
trusted her as Jack trusted Fan.
“She spoke of having this room all white and gold,” he said, “and I am
going to finish it up in white wood, polished to look like marble with
faint lines of gilt in it. There’s a chamber set in Richmond, part
willow work and part white wood, with scrolls of gold here and there,
and on the headboard a medallion, with the figure of a little girl in
crimson cloak, with the hood brought over her head and looking just as
Fanny looked years ago when a child and I drew her to school on my sled
that winter we had so much snow. The eyes of the girl in the medallion
smile at me just as Fanny’s did when I looked back at her to see how she
liked it. Don’t you remember? You were there, too.”
I did remember very well the day when Fanny had her first sled ride, and
in her new cloak, which was scarlet instead of crimson, looked like a
little queen as she sat on the sled, while I trudged at her side in the
snow, proud of that privilege, and especially proud when, on going up a
hill which was nearly bare, Jack let me help him pull her, and told me I
made a very nice little filly. He had asked Fan to get off in the
steepest place, where the snow had melted and made it muddy, and she had
stormed and kicked and said she wouldn’t, telling him he was her slave
and was to do her bidding. He had been her slave ever since, and I had
trudged beside them and was trudging still, with, God knows, no envy or
bitterness in my heart because of the drudgery, or that Fan was always
preferred before me, but often with the thought of the joy it would be
to be loved by a man like Jack Fullerton.
“Yes, I remember it,” I said, and he continued, “I do want to buy that
set, but if I get the moquette and the Steinway it is beyond my pile at
present, unless—”
He stopped and his face beamed as with a sudden inspiration. He had
taken his watch from his pocket to see what time it was, and was looking
at it intently. It was a stem-winder and very handsome, and Jack was
very proud of it. I suspected what was in his mind, but said nothing,
lest I might be mistaken. As it was getting late and growing rather cool
I left him settling in his mind where the different pieces of furniture
would stand provided he bought the coveted set. Outside in the yard I
found Paul, who had preferred to stay with the workmen while I went
through the rooms with Jack. In climbing over the broken wall he had
fallen upon his back or side and was crying, saying it hurt him to walk.
No bones were broken, nor were any of his limbs sprained that I could
find, and after a while he signified his readiness to go home, limping a
little but utterly refusing the poultice which Phyllis made that night
and which was big enough to encircle his entire body. The next morning
he seemed all right, except for an occasional halt in walking, and I
forgot the incident entirely in the greater interest of
house-furnishing.
A week later Jack, who had been to Richmond, came to me one night and
told me the moquette and piano and lace curtains and chamber set were
bought and paid for, and would be at The Plateau in a few days. Glancing
at his vest I saw that the gold chain was gone, and in its place was a
black ribbon, and then I knew what he had done.
“What time is it, please?” I asked.
Flushing and hesitating he finally drew out a plain silver watch and
held it up to me.
“Yes, I’ve gone and done done it, as Phyllis would say,” he said,
laughingly. “I’ve sold my gold watch and bought me a silver one, which
keeps just as good time. Fan always told me I was too fond of
jewelry,—that my big chain looked flashy. She’ll be pleased with the
black ribbon, and that child in the medallion is so like her. Seems as
if she would speak to me and say ‘Get up, old nigger,’ just as Fan did
the day I drew her on my sled.”
There was no use in protesting, now that the deed was done. So I said
nothing, and after a moment Jack exclaimed, as he put his hand in his
pocket, “By Jove I came near forgetting it; I have a letter for you,
which I found in the office as I came down. It is addressed in Fanny’s
handwriting and mailed in New York. They are so far on their way home,
and must be here soon. I wonder she didn’t write to me, too. What does
she say? It’s a fat one, any way; there’s something in it from Katy
probably,” he continued, as he saw me take out a note and glance at it
before commencing to read the letter.
I knew it was not always safe to read Fan’s letters aloud, and I ran my
eyes hastily over this one, while Jack waited impatiently. The travelers
were in New York at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Fanny was wild over what
she had seen and was seeing, especially on Broadway, where she had done
a little shopping.
“Such lovely things,” she wrote, “but so expensive, and my purse is so
very small. Why, one suit, such as I want, will take my entire fund. I
have set my heart on a cloth dress, tailor made, which is awfully
stylish, and will do to wear all winter, to mill and to meeting,—to call
in and to receptions,—only there will not be any in Lovering, where the
people have as much as they can do to get enough to eat without throwing
away their money on frivolities. More’s the pity; and how stupid I shall
find it after seeing the world. Don’t be surprised if some day, when you
come up to The Plateau, you find me dangling from a beam in the cellar.
If so, put on my headstone ‘Died of a broken neck, caused by _ennui_.’
But what nonsense. Let’s come to business, at once. I _must_ have more
money, and this is what you are to do, ‘Sell Black Beauty.’
“Oh,” I gasped, with a feeling similar to what I might have felt if she
had said “Sell Phyllis.”
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Jack asked, and without stopping to
think, I replied, “She wants to sell Black Beauty to buy her a
tailor-made gown.” “Sell Black Beauty, her pony! Never!” Jack exclaimed,
while I read on:
“I don’t ride him very often now, and when I am married I shall have
less use for him. He is getting old any way, seventeen or eighteen, and
eating his head off. I am very fond of him, and there’s a big lump in my
throat when I think of parting with him, but that gown is so ravishingly
pretty and so becoming, and I want it so much. Old Mrs. Arthur has asked
me for Black Beauty a number of times. He is just right to amble around
the neighborhood with her on his back or in the phaeton behind him. She
will take good care of him and pet him more than I do. Go and see her,
Annie, and if she’ll give a hundred dollars,—that’s what she offered
last summer,—take it, and send at once before the gown is gone. You
don’t know how swell I feel driving to Arnold’s and Stewart’s and Lord
and Taylor’s in Miss Errington’s handsome carriage, with two black men
in livery, nor how obsequious they are at these places to those who come
in carriages. Do you remember a copy which a Yankee schoolmaster set for
me years ago, and which we thought so funny, ‘Money makes the mare go?’
It is true, and the more money you have the faster the mare goes. ‘Fan
is an idiot!’ I think I hear you say. Perhaps I am, but idiot or not,
sell Black Beauty and send me the money.
“When am I coming home? I really don’t know for sure. In time to be
married, I suppose. Miss Errington suggests that whatever dress-making I
have to do be done in Washington under her supervision and by her
dressmaker, who comes to the house. If I do this I shall, of course,
stay longer than I at first intended. Tell Jack not to fret. He will
have enough of me after we are married. How is the house progressing?
And how is Paul’s lameness? Better, I hope. Miss Errington, to whom I
read your letter, made me very nervous by suggesting that his fall might
result in hip disease. That would be dreadful. Paul a cripple! It can’t
be; Miss Errington is always seeing scare-crows. She is exceedingly
kind, however, and will send a note in this letter asking if she can
keep Katy during the winter and give her every advantage for musical
instruction. I have consented, and you may as well. Katy will of course
go home for Thanksgiving, and Miss Errington has invited herself to
accompany her,—or rather us,—when we come.
“Did I tell you the Colonel was to sail for Europe the 3d of November in
the Celtic? As she will wish to see him off you may expect us the
25th,—three days before Thanksgiving. That is Miss Errington’s plan. She
just came in to give me her note.
“Lovingly,
“FAN.”
“P. S. I shall write Jack to-morrow.”
I read parts of this letter to Jack, skipping what I thought he ought
not to hear. He looked very grave when I finished it, and said, “She is
putting off her coming as long as she can. It is three weeks to the
25th. Does dress-making take so long?”
It took a good while, I told him, although Fan could not have a great
deal to do. Then I spoke of Black Beauty, lamenting that he must be
sold. We have had him so long that he seemed like one of us, with human
instincts and affections.
“Isn’t there some other way of getting that tailor gown, if she must
have it?” I said, looking up at Jack, whose face wore an expression
different from any I had ever seen there.
I thought he consigned the tailor-made gown to perdition, but was not
sure, he spoke so low. What I did understand was that Black Beauty would
not be sold to Mrs. Arthur, and that I was to do nothing about it until
I saw him again. Then he went away, seeming a good deal excited for
Jack, and banged the door so hard behind him that Paul, who had been
sitting very quietly in his high chair, asked “Is Jack mad?”
This reminded me of what Fanny had said of possible hip disease, and I
remembered with a pang that Paul had not played horse on father’s cane
quite as much, or run quite as fast since that fall on The Plateau. When
I questioned him, however, he said he had no pain except once in a while
when he was tired and then “something hurts me here,” and he put his
hand low down on his back. I was not quite reassured, and determined to
consult the village doctor the next time I saw him. Then I read Fan’s
letter again, feeling as if an incubus had dropped from me because the
Colonel was going abroad. Fan had never mentioned him before, but there
had always been in my mind an undefinable feeling of uneasiness as if he
were a dark shadow falling between her and Jack.
It was two days before I saw the latter again and when he came he was in
a very different mood. He had received Fan’s letter of four pages
crossed and so full of love and pretty sayings that if he could he would
have bought her ten tailor-made gowns.
“I was a brute the last time I was here,” he said, “I was so
disappointed that Fanny was not coming sooner. Old Mrs. Arthur can’t
have Black Beauty, for I’ve bought him myself. I can’t part with him.
I’ve had too many plans of riding through the woods and around the
country with Fanny at my side. She never looks better than when on
Beauty’s back. Here is the money.”
He held out a hundred dollar bill, which I was to send at once and ask
no questions as to where he got it. I think he borrowed it and at first
refused to take it, but he overruled my objections, and that night it
was on its way to New York. Four days later an answer came to Jack and
to me. The gown was bought, and Jack was the dearest, most indulgent
fellow in the world, and she was beginning to be very impatient to see
him and all of us. They were going to Washington the next day and in two
weeks were coming home. It was the nicest letter she had written in some
time, and Jack went off whistling to The Plateau, where the house was
nearly completed, so far as masons, carpenters and painters were
concerned. The plastering was dry and the paint nearly so. Phyllis had
cleared up the rubbish, and cleaned the windows and floors, which were
ready for the carpets, which, with the furniture, were standing about
everywhere in boxes and bales. Nearly all Lovering had been over the
house, pronouncing it perfect.
“Wait till it is furnished and we give a house-warming; then see what
you think,” Jack said, as he piloted party after party through all the
rooms but the one which was too sacred for common eyes to see and
comment upon. “Our room,” where the bedstead with the medallion was to
be set up, and Fanny was to be waiting and watching for him as he came
over the hill.
“Alas, alas, for the dreams which come,
And alas for the dreams which go;
Leaving only an aching heart
Crushed with a sudden blow.”
CHAPTER VII.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
THE 25TH OF NOVEMBER.
The beginning of the day was bright and fair, with no cloud in the blue
sky, and the warmth of the Indian summer filled the hazy air. The close
was dark and cold and rainy, and left me a half-crazed woman, scarcely
knowing what I did or said, while Jack was as broken and blighted as
some tall tree which the storm has torn up by the roots and cast
helpless upon the ground. During the last two weeks only short letters
had come to Jack from Fanny, while to me she had written at length,
telling me how glad she was at the prospect of coming home.
“I reckon too much sight-seeing and dissipation have made me nervous, or
bilious, or both,” she wrote. “I am not myself at all, either waking or
sleeping. In fact I don’t sleep. I, who used to drop off the moment my
head touched the pillow, now toss for hours without losing
consciousness, thinking—thinking—of everything, of the past, the
present, and the future, until my brain seems actually broiling. Oh, the
future! Don’t ever get married, Annie. It’s dreadful,—not being quite
certain of anything except that you are not half good enough for the man
who loves and trusts you so fully. I wish Jack were not so good. Wish he
were more like me. There would then be something like equality. But
now,—Annie, did you ever have a horrid nightmare in which you were more
awake than asleep, because you could see and hear and feel, but had no
power to move, although you knew there was something creeping towards
you slowly, surely, with its arms stretched out to enfold you? If you
could cry out the spell would be broken, but you can’t, and you lie
there dead, as it were, waiting for the end you cannot ward off. That is
my condition, and will be until I am under our Virginia skies and
breathing Virginia air at home with you.
“We have fixed upon Monday the 25th for starting, and as we do not reach
Richmond until night you will not see us until Tuesday morning. Shall I
be awake then, I wonder; or, will the creeping shadow have me in its
embrace? Pray for me, Annie. I need it more than you know; why, I
actually feel like asking Phyllis to _rassle in prar_ for me, I am in
such a state. I wish we were coming sooner, but Miss Errington wants to
see her brother off. You know he sails the 23d, and she is going to New
York with him on Friday. If I could, I’d start for Lovering to-morrow.”
This was a part of Fan’s letter. The rest was full of fun and jokes and
anticipations of the Thanksgiving dinner she was to eat at home, with
some directions to Phyllis how to cook it, and one or two allusions to
“the house that Jack built,” and which she knew she should like. She
closed with: “Your wretched sister, who knows how Paul felt when he
wrote to the Romans, chap. 7, verse 15, ‘What I would, that I do not;
but what I hate, that do I.’ If as good a man as Paul whiffled round
like that, what can you expect of a weak, wicked girl like Fan Hathern?”
This letter troubled me a great deal at first. What did it mean? What
could it mean except that as the time drew near Fan shrank from giving
up her girlish life and becoming the wife of Jack Fullerton. If this
were so I had no patience with her. After a little reflection, however,
I concluded that, as she had hinted, too much sight-seeing and
dissipation had unsettled her mind and liver, making her both bilious
and morbid. She would be all right again when once in the quiet,
healthful atmosphere of home; and dismissing all anxiety from my mind, I
began to make preparations for the Thanksgiving dinner at which Miss
Errington and Jack were to be present. In this Phyllis was quite as much
interested as myself. For weeks she had had a turkey fattening in a
little pen, and every time she fed it she informed it how many days more
it had to live before she cut off its head, and how many hours it would
probably take to roast it, information which must have been very
exhilarating to the bird, if it could have understood it. After her
fashion she had cleaned the house, which, borrowing a term which she had
heard from Mrs. Hathern and Norah O’Rourke, was in apple pie order.
“Yankee apple pie, too,” she said, when telling me how much soap and
water she had used. “I only give the kitchen a lick and a promise, as
nobody ’ll meddle thar but myself,” she said.
I expressed my approbation of the cleaning, although I knew that in all
human probability she had not raised a window when she washed it, and
that if Mrs. Hathern could have walked in to investigate she would have
found the dust piled high on the top of the doors where Phyllis had not
thought to look. But Mrs. Hathern was where neither moth nor rust
corrupt, nor dust gathers on the golden walls, and Phyllis was mistress
of the kitchen. The room which father had occupied had not been slept in
since he died, but we arranged it now for Jack, who was to spend the
night of Thanksgiving with us. Carl’s room was to be given to Miss
Errington, and both were in readiness, as was everything else so far as
I knew, and I was looking forward anxiously to the coming Tuesday, when
our house would be filled with the sound of laughter and happy voices.
I had not been feeling very well and was, besides, so busy with my own
affairs that I had not been to The Plateau for a week. I knew Jack was
there early and late, with men and women both, pushing matters as fast
as possible, and that some of the rooms were settled. Sunday he was out
of town, but Monday morning he came to The Elms on his way to The
Plateau, figuratively walking upon air, he was so elated. I think I
never saw a happier light in any eyes than shone in Jack’s, or heard a
more joyful ring in any human voice than there was in his as he bade me
good morning, and added, “They will soon be on their way. Hurrah!”
Catching up Paul he swung him on his shoulder and carried him two or
three times across the wide hall. Then, putting him down and rubbing his
hands together, he continued: “I tell you, Annie, the house is a daisy,
and so she will think. Four of the rooms are settled,—square hall,
dining-room, parlor and _our_ room,—and I am coming round in my buggy
this afternoon to take you up there. I’ve had fires in all the grates to
dry out any dampness, and everything is perfect. The bedrooms and
kitchen and such like are not settled, but they soon will be. I have
ordered a range just like yours and expect it every day, and,—do you
know _who_ is to be the high cockolorum in the kitchen?”
I could not guess, and he continued: “No darkies for me, but the real
article from Yankee land,—Miss Norah O’Rourke! What do you think of
that?”
“Norah,” I exclaimed; “Norah!”
“Yes, Norah,” he replied. “We have had quite a brisk correspondence,
Norah and I. She wrote me three or four weeks ago, confidentially,
saying Carl was tired of keeping up his big establishment in
Boston,—that he was going to rent it and travel. That would throw her
out of a home. Next to Boston she liked The Elms, and would come back,
provided that _lazy, sozzlin’ nigger_ wasn’t here. I think that’s the
way she put it. She couldn’t abide the blacks, with their shiftlessness,
she said, and it wasn’t healthy to be with them. Her temper was never
the sweetest at its best, and they riled her so, slattin’ things round,
and _het_ her blood so hot that she was apt to break out all over with a
kind of rash. I am using her vernacular as far as possible; but to come
to the point. If you hadn’t Phyllis and would dispose of any colored
gentry you might have and wanted her, she would come for a price within
your means. She could afford it, as she had recently got a pension of
eight dollars a month on account of her brother Mike, who was killed at
Gettysburg. I don’t believe she was ever really dependent upon him for
support, and don’t quite understand how she got it. Somebody did some
tall swearing. But that’s not my matter. If I were to swear a blue
streak from here to Washington, I couldn’t get a pension. Was on the
wrong side of the fence. But to proceed. If you had Phyllis, I was to
say nothing. If you hadn’t, I was to ask you if you wanted her. You had
Phyllis. I said nothing, but remembering to have heard Fan say that she
would give more for Norah’s little finger than for Phyllis’s whole body,
so far as order and neatness were concerned, I wrote to Norah, telling
her my prospects and asking her how she would like to live with us.
‘Tip-top,’ she said, and she will be here within a week,—go right into
the house and have it all in readiness from stem to stern by Christmas.
For once I am in luck, and Fan is coming to-morrow. Do you realize it?
To-morrow we shall see her. I can hardly wait. Be ready this afternoon
at two sharp. _Au revoir._”
As he went down the steps two at a time he was singing:
“Never morning dawned so gaily,
Never sky such radiance wore.”
Alas, alas! I don’t know why I have written these two words, and so
anticipated the denouement. I should not have done it had I not been
nearing the almost tragedy with which the day, which dawned so gaily,
closed.
CHAPTER VIII.—ANNIE’S STORY CONTINUED.
AT THE PLATEAU.
Precisely at two o’clock Jack was at the door, and a few minutes after
we were driving rapidly through the town toward The Plateau. Jack had
put on his best clothes, as it was a half holiday with him, he said, and
he looked very handsome and animated as he talked constantly of Fanny,
recalling many incidents of her childhood, and trying to decide just
when he made up his mind that she was the one girl in all the world for
him.
“I reckon,” he said, “it was the first time I went off to the war with
my company, and she stood on the horse block throwing kisses to us and
waving a red shawl she had tied to a broom handle. Most of the boys were
in love with her, and I think it was her fierce patriotism which kept
our courage up, when it might otherwise have cooled. I remember once
when we were waiting for a battle to begin, a comrade who stood beside
me said, ‘What are you thinking of, Jack?’ I _was_ thinking of Fan, but
I replied, ‘Nothing; what are you thinking of?’ ‘Nothing,’ was his
answer. Just then there came the opening roar of cannon, with the order
for our company to move on. Simultaneously we both shouted, ‘Hurrah for
the South, and Fanny Hathern.’ The comrade was poor Tom Allen, who was
killed in that battle, and Fan’s name was the last upon his lips. I
never told her, and never shall. I don’t think she cared for him, and I
have sometimes been afraid she did not care for me as I do for her. But
she will. I shall be so kind to her and try to make her so happy that
she must love me after awhile, if she does not at first. I am a sort of
country clown, I suppose, and not at all like the high-toned chaps she
has been consorting with; but I do believe my heart is in the right
place,—that is, my intentions are good.”
He was silent a moment,—then turning towards me he continued: “You know
the best and the worst of me, if anybody does, and I feel like making
you a kind of confessor, or rather confidant, as to how I feel and what
I mean to do. Shall I, Annie-mother?”
This name by which Paul called me Jack had taken up since he had been so
much at The Elms, saying it suited me, I was such a motherly little
woman, with a manner which made everyone confide in and trust me. I
liked the name as used by Paul, to whom I was a kind of mother, but I
did not quite like to have Jack call me thus. It made me feel so much
older than I really was,—older than he, and a great deal older than Fan,
who, Phyllis said, was really my senior by half an hour. I had never
given any sign that it was distasteful to me, nor did I now. I merely
said, “I am sure you have nothing to confess.”
“Well, not exactly that. It is more a confidence as to what I mean to
do,” he said. “I am all strung up to a pitch of nervousness or
exhilaration, and must talk to somebody. This morning when I woke up,
and the sun was just rising over the woods, and I felt so light and
airy, I asked myself what it was? What had happened, or what was going
to happen? Then I remembered that Fanny was coming to-morrow, and that
in just a month she would be my wife. I was so thankful and happy that I
wanted to do something. You know I’m not very religious, like you and
Fan, and I’m not a praying man. I say the prayers in church with the
rest of the people, but half the time I’m thinking of something else,
and once in a while I go to sleep during the Litany. But I am going to
turn over a new leaf, and this morning I went down on my knees and
thanked God for Fanny, and asked that I might make her happy, and that
she might come safely home to me, and I promised to be a better man and
join the church and have family prayers just as your father did, and ask
a blessing at the table as mother did. Fanny will like that, I am sure.
You don’t know how peaceful and quiet I felt after that. Why, it seemed
as if I really had been talking to some one who heard and answered me,
and the future looks so bright that if I were in one of Phyllis’s
_pra’r_ meetings I believe I should shout. I can readily understand how
she works herself up to having the power. I could have it in a little
while.”
We were going up the hill to The Plateau by this time, and in Jack’s
face there was the rapt expression of one who had talked with God as
friend talks with friend, and been made the better for it. The sky,
which in the morning had been so clear, had gradually been growing grey
and overcast, until the sun was hidden from view, and in the west a bank
of clouds was rising rapidly and threatening rain. It was growing
chilly, too, and as a cold breeze came down the hill, Jack urged his
horse on until we came upon the house which looked so pretty and
attractive, with all the debris cleared away and the grounds brought up
somewhat to their former condition when it was the show place of the
town.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Jack said, helping me to alight, and then marching me
round to look at a view we had both seen a thousand times, but which was
always new to him because Fanny’s eyes were to see it daily.