THE TRACY DIAMONDS
BY
MRS. MARY J. HOLMES
AUTHOR OF
“TEMPEST AND SUNSHINE,” “’LENA RIVERS,” “THE ENGLISH ORPHANS,” “PAUL
RALSTON,” “GRETCHEN,” ETC., ETC.
[Illustration: logo]
NEW YORK
_G. W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_
MDCCCXCIX
COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1899,
BY MRS. MARY J. HOLMES,
[_All rights reserved_.]
_The Tracy Diamonds._
CONTENTS.
PART ONE.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Prospect House 7
II. The Cause of the Battle 15
III. Uncle Zach and Craig Mason 24
IV. Mr. and Mrs. Dalton 32
V. The Tragedy 36
VI. Expected Guests 49
VII. The Tracys 57
VIII. Alice 67
IX. Waiting for T’other One 78
X. Alice and Jeff 83
XI. Alice and Craig 91
XII. A Coquette 98
XIII. On the North Piazza 105
XIV. The Diamonds 115
XV. The Drive 121
XVI. The Return Home 132
XVII. Progress 138
XVIII. Browning 144
XIX. What Time Told 157
XX. In the Haunted House 168
XXI. The Denouement 180
XXII. What Followed 189
XXIII. The Close of the Season 204
XXIV. Craig’s Visit 212
XXV. In the Red School House 216
XXVI. The Last Act of Part One 222
PART TWO.
I. Fanny and Roy 228
II. Mrs. Prescott 239
III. Ancestry 246
IV. Inez 256
V. In the Yosemite 268
VI. At Prospect Cottage 275
VII. On the Road to Clark’s 290
VIII. Mark Hilton 300
IX. Mark and Tom 308
X. Inez and Her Father 314
XI. Mark and Helen 320
XII. Fanny and Inez 330
XIII. The Sisters 337
XIV. Roy 343
XV. At the Last 356
XVI. Mark and Tom 363
XVII. In Ridgefield 370
XVIII. Dotty’s Funeral 376
XIX. Odds and Ends 383
THE TRACY DIAMONDS.
PART I AND PROLOGUE.
CHAPTER I.
THE PROSPECT HOUSE.
The time was a hot July morning, with the thermometer at 85 in the
shade, and rising. Not a leaf was stirring, and the air seemed to quiver
with the heat of midsummer. The fog, which, early in the day, had hung
over the meadows and the river, had lifted, and was floating upward in
feathery wreaths towards a misty cloud in which it would soon be
absorbed. Even the robins, of which there were many in the vicinity of
the Prospect House, felt the effects of the weather and sat lazily upon
the fence or the branches of the trees in which their nests were hidden.
Only the English sparrows showed signs of life, twittering in and out of
the thick ivy which covered the walls of what had once been a church,
and was now used for public offices. It was a morning in which to keep
quiet and cool if possible. “The hottest on record,” Uncle Zach Taylor,
the proprietor of the Prospect House, said, as he examined the
thermometer and wondered “What on earth Dot was thinking of to raise
Cain generally in such weather.” The house was in a state of upheaval,
and looked as if the annual cleaning was about to commence on a gigantic
scale. In the back yard carpets were being beaten by two men, with the
perspiration rolling down their faces, on the south and west piazzas
furniture of every description was standing,—bureaus and washstands,
tables, chairs and couches, with two or three old-time pictures in
old-time frames. One was a representation of the famous Boston Tea
Party. The Dartmouth, Elinor and Beaver were in close proximity to each
other, their decks swarming with Indians breaking open chests and
shovelling tea into the water. The others were family portraits,
evidently husband and wife—she, small and straight and prim, in a high
crowned cap with a wide frill shading her face—he, large and tall, with
a black stock, which nearly touched his ears, and his forefingers joined
together and pointing in a straight line at the right knee, which was
elevated above the left. “A kind of abandoned position,” Uncle Zach was
accustomed to say to his guests when calling their attention to this
portrait of his wife’s great-grandfather, who assisted at the Tea Party,
and gave, it was said, the most blood-curdling whoop which was heard on
that memorable night. A blue cross on the figure of a man on the deck of
the Dartmouth indicated which Zacheus had decided was his wife’s
ancestor.
He was very proud of the pictures. “Wouldn’t take fifty dollars for em.
No, sir,—and I don’t believe I’d take a hundred. Offer it, and see,” he
frequently said. But no one had offered it, and they still hung in their
respective places in the best room of the hotel except when, as was the
case this morning, they were brought out and placed at a safe distance
from the scene of confusion around them.
There were brooms and mops and scrubbing brushes and pails and the smell
of soap suds in the vicinity of the wing at the west end of the hotel,
where the fiercest battle was raging. Four women, with their sleeves
rolled up and towels on their heads, were making a terrible onslaught on
something, no one could tell what, for there was neither dust nor dirt
to be seen.
“But, Lord land, it’s Dot’s way to scrub, and you can no more stop her
than you can the wind. She’s great on cleaning house, Dot is, and you
can’t control wimmen, so I let ’em slide,” Uncle Zach said to a young
man whom, after his examination of the thermometer, he found on the
north piazza, fanning himself with a newspaper and occasionally sipping
lemonade through a straw and trying to get interested in Browning’s
Sordello. After reading a page or two and failing to catch the meaning,
he closed the book and welcomed Uncle Zach with a smile as he sank
panting into a rocking chair much too large for him, for he was as small
of stature as the Zacheus for whom he was named, and whose clothes he
might have worn had they been handed down to so late a date as the 19th
century. “This I call comfortable, and somethin’ like it. How be you
feelin’ to-day? You don’t look quite as pimpin as you did two weeks ago,
when you come here,” he said to the young man, who replied that he
didn’t feel pimpin at all,—that the air was doing him good, and in a
short time he hoped to be as well as ever.
Had you looked on the hotel register you would have seen the name, Craig
Mason, Boston, and above it that of Mrs. Henry Mason, his mother. Craig
had never been very strong, and during his college course at Yale, had
applied himself so closely to study that his health had suffered from
it, and soon after he was graduated he had come to Ridgefield, hoping
much from the pure air and quiet he would find there. Nor could he have
found a more favorable spot for nerves unstrung and a tired brain.
Just where Ridgefield is does not matter. There is such a place, and it
lies on the Boston and Albany Railroad, which keeps it in touch with the
world outside and saves it from stagnation. It is a typical New England
town, full of rocks and hills and leafy woods, through which pleasant
roads lead off and up to isolated farmhouses, some of them a hundred
years old and more, and all with slanting roofs, big chimneys and low
ceilings and little panes of glass.
These are the houses from which the young generation, tired of the
barren soil and hard labor which yields so little in return, emigrates
to broader fields of action and a more stirring life, but to which the
father and the mother, to whom every tree and shrub is dear, because
identified with their early married life, cling with a tenacity which
only death can sever.
A river has its rise somewhere among the hills, and there are little
ponds or lakes where in summer the white lilies grow in great profusion,
and where in winter the girls and boys skate on moonlight nights, and
men cut great blocks of ice for the Prospect House, which in July and
August attracts many city people to its cool, roomy quarters. The house
was built before the railroad was thought of, and in the days when
stages plied between Boston and Albany and made it their stopping place
for refreshments and change of horses. It was called a tavern when
Zacheus Taylor brought his wife Dorothy there and became its owner.
“Taylor’s Tavern” he christened it, and that name was on the creaking
black sign in large white letters, and the little man always rubbed his
hands together with pride when he looked at it and remembered that _he_
was the _Taylor_ whose name could be distinctly seen at a distance as
you came up the street either from the east or the west. “A kind of
beacon light,” he used to say, “tellin’ the played out traveler that
there is rest for the weary at Taylor’s tavern.”
It was a pleasant sight to see him greet his guests with the cheery
words, “Glad to see you. How are you? All fired tired, I know. Walk
right in to the settin’ room. Dotty has got dinner most ready. Dotty is
my wife, and I am Mr. Taylor,” with a nod towards the spot where
Taylor’s Tavern swung. But if he were the _Taylor_, Dorothy was to all
intents and purposes the _Tavern_,—the man of the house, who had managed
everything from the time she took possession of her new home and began
to understand that a clearer head was needed than the one on her
husband’s shoulders if they were to succeed. Her head was clear, and her
hands willing, and Taylor’s Tavern became famous for its good table, its
clean beds and general air of homely hospitality. As years went by a few
city people began to ask for board during the summer, and with their
advent matters changed a little. There were finer linen and china and
the extravagance of a dozen solid silver forks to be used only for the
city boarders, and, when they were gone, to be wrapped in tissue paper
and put carefully away in a piece of old shawl on a shelf in a closet
opening from Mrs. Taylor’s sleeping room. Uncle Zacheus submitted to the
silver forks and china and linen, but when, as his wife grew more
ambitious, she told him that “Taylor’s Tavern” was quite too old
fashioned a name for their establishment, and suggested changing it to
“Prospect House,” he resisted quite stoutly for him. The change would
necessitate a new sign, and “Taylor’s Tavern” would disappear from
sight. It was in vain that he protested, saying it would be like putting
away a part of himself. Dorothy was firm and carried her point, as she
usually did. The sign was taken down and the sign post, too, for the new
name was to be over the principal entrance to the house, as it was in
cities.
The sign post Zacheus had carried to the barn and put up in a loft as a
family relic and reminder of other days. The signboard with “Taylor’s
Tavern” upon it was laid reverently away in the garret in a big hair
trunk which had belonged to his mother and held a few things which no
one but himself often saw, for Dolly did not interfere with the trunk.
Carefully wrapped in a pocket handkerchief was a baby’s white blanket,
and pinned on it was a piece of paper with “Johnny’s Blanket” written
upon it. Johnny was a little boy who died when only three days old and
his father had taken the blanket and put it away in the trunk with some
articles sacred to boyhood, such as a pair of broken skates, a woolen
cap, a cornstalk fiddle, withered and dried, but kept for the sake of
the brother who made it and who had sailed away to Calcutta as cabin boy
in a ship which was lost with all on board. Giving up the sign was
harder than any one suspected, and when he felt more than usually
snubbed he would go up to the hair trunk and look at it with affection
and regret and as nearly as he was capable of it with a feeling that it
embodied all the real manhood he had known since his marriage and with
its disappearance his identification with the place had disappeared,
leaving him a figure-head, known as, Uncle Zach, or Mrs. Taylor’s
husband.
She was never really unkind to him. She merely ignored his opinions, and
brought him up rather sharp at times when he displeased her. Henpecked
him, the neighbors said, while he called it “running her own canoe.”
“Not very hefty,” was the most she ever said of him to any one, and
whether she meant mentally, or physically, or both, she did not explain.
“Shiftless as the rot, with no more judgment or git up than a child,”
was the worst she ever said to him, and he accepted her opinion as
infallible and worshipped her as few women are worshipped by the man
they hold in leading strings. She had been his Dot, or Dotty, when she
was Dorothy Phelps and measured only half a yard round her waist, and he
called her Dot still when she weighed two hundred and could throw him
across the street. What she did was right, and after the burial of
“Taylor’s Tavern” in the hair trunk he seldom objected to what she
suggested, and when she told him she was going to improve and enlarge
the house and make it into something worthy of its name, he told her to
go ahead, and bore without any outward protest the discomfort of six
weeks’ repairing, when carpenters and masons, plumbers and painters,
transformed the old tavern into a comparatively modern structure of
which Mrs. Taylor was very proud.
“I can advertise now with a good stomach,” she said, and every spring
there appeared in the Boston papers and Worcester _Spy_ and Springfield
_Republican_, a notice setting forth the good qualities of the Prospect
House and laying great stress upon its rooms and views. If the
advertisement was to be believed, every woman could have a large corner
room, with the finest view in all New England.
To some extent this was true; not all could have corner rooms, but all
could have splendid views. If you faced the north you looked out upon
what farmers call a mowing lot, where early in the summer the grass grew
fresh and green, with here and there a sprinkling of cowslips, and later
on lay on the ground in great swaths of newly mown hay, filling the air
with a delicious perfume. Beyond were sunny pasture lands and wooded
hills, and in the distance the church spires of North Ridgefield, with
the smoke of its manufactories rising above the tree tops. If your room
faced the east you looked up a long broad street, lined on either side
with old-time houses, whose brass knockers and Corinthian pillars told
of a past aristocracy before the steam engine thundered through the town
and the whistle of a big shoe shop on a side street woke its employees
at six o’clock and called them to work at seven. Here, nearly touching
each other across the street, are gigantic elms, which tradition says
were planted on the day when news of the Declaration of Independence
reached the patriotic town of Ridgefield. Liberty elms they are called,
and they stretch along for nearly a mile from east to west, and, making
a detour, spread their long branches protectingly across the Mall which
leads into the Common. To the south is the railroad and the Chicopee
winding its way through green meadows to a larger river which will take
it to the Sound and thence to the sea whose waters bathe another
continent. If your room was at the west you looked at your right on
grassy hills, dotted with low roofed houses and on pastures where
spoonwood and huckleberries grow. At your left the headstones of the
cemetery gleam white among the evergreens and tell where Ridgefield’s
dead are sleeping, the tall monuments keeping guard over the gentry of
brass knocker and Corinthian pillar memory, and the less pretentious
stones marking the last resting place of the middle class, the
bourgeois,—for Ridgefield draws the line pretty close, and blue blood
counts for more than money. Near the willows and close to a wall so wide
that the children walk upon it as they go to and from school are the old
graves, whose dark, century stained stones have 17— upon them and are
often visited by lovers of antiquity. Some of those who sleep there must
have heard the guns of the Revolution and helped to plant the Liberty
Elms which keep guard over them like watchful sentinels. The Ridgefield
people are very proud of their old graves and their cemetery generally,
especially the granite arch at the entrance with the words upon it:
“UNTIL THE MORNING BREAKS AND THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY.”
This arch, with its background of marble and evergreens, is a prominent
feature in the view from the west rooms of the Prospect House, and it
was in these rooms that the battle of brooms and mops and soap suds was
raging so fiercely on the hot July morning when our story opens.