MISS GRIP
She is active, stirring, all fire,
Cannot rest, cannot tire.
BROWNING.
Within ten days after the despatch of the doctor’s letter it was
answered in person by the colonel’s maiden aunt, who, after many
misadventures, reached Promontory Hall in the afternoon of a very bitter
cold January day.
Miss Agrippina de Crespigney, called by her familiars Miss Grip, was a
slight, wiry little woman, with a dark skin, sharp nose and chin, small,
keen, brilliant black eyes, tightly curled, bright black hair, and a
trim figure, clothed in a close black cashmere gown, with stiff white
linen collar and cuffs—a tough little body she was, whose sixty years of
life’s hard buffeting had not seemed to have saddened, weakened or in
any other way aged, but rather matured, hardened and strengthened.
For now, in the very depth of one of the hardest winters that ever was
known here, she had undertaken an arduous journey of more than twelve
hundred miles, from the green savannahs of the “Sunny South” to the
frozen regions of the icy North, traveling without rest, both day and
night, by railroads, stage-coaches, and tavern hacks, and at length
arrived at her destination, none the worse for her performance, without
showing the slightest sign of suffering from cold or from fatigue.
The last half-day of her hard week’s journey had been peculiarly trying.
She had reached St. Inigoes by stage-coach, early in the morning. After
a hasty breakfast she had started in the springless carryall belonging
to the inn, for the Promontory. When she reached the shore she had to
wait hours there for the tide to ebb before she could cross over the
neck of land that connected the island cape to the main.
Even then the passage was difficult and dangerous from the piled up
blocks of ice that lay across the road.
“I really thought that I was coming to a habitable part of the globe, at
least; but this is Nova Zembla! Just Nova Zembla and nothing else! A
waste fragment of a continent, flung out as useless into an arctic sea!”
said Miss Grip, as the old carriage pitched and tumbled along the narrow
ice-encumbered isthmus towards the snow-clad promontory.
“I hab heern it called a many hard names, Miss, but I nebber heered it
called Dissemblance afore,” replied the negro driver.
“Well, then, hold your tongue and mind your horses, or you’ll upset me,”
rather irrelevantly concluded Miss Grip.
When the rickety carryall drew up before the old iron gate in the old
stone wall that enclosed the stern-looking gray-stone house, Miss Grip
gave voice once more.
“Is it a police-station, or a penitentiary, or a warehouse, or a fort,
or something of the sort? This never was meant for a gentleman’s private
residence.”
But she did not even wait to cross the threshold before she seized the
reins of government. As soon as she alighted from the carryall she began
to issue her orders to the driver.
“Take the carriage around to the stables—of course there are stables and
you must find them—put up the carriage, feed and water the horses, then
come around to the kitchen. You must get your supper before you go back.
Stop! take my trunk off first and bring it up into the house.”
The driver began to obey these orders as the brisk little woman ran up
the steps and sounded an alarm on the iron knocker.
Laban opened the door, and the driver carried in the trunk and put it
down on the hall floor and departed about his other business.
“How is your master?” sharply demanded Miss Grip of the astonished
negro.
“Jes’ de same,” replied the man, as if the answer had been rapped out of
him.
“How the same?”
“Onsensible.”
Miss Grip immediately took off her bonnet and shawl, and flung them on
the hat-rack, saying:
“Show me the way up through this old jail to the den where your master
lies.”
The man looked daggers at the insolent little woman, but he obeyed her,
and led the way to the spacious upper chamber where the patient lay,
watched by old Mrs. Lindsay and patient little Glo’.
Miss Agrippina nodded silently to the nurse, then kissed the child and
sent her out of the room, saying that a sick room was no wholesome place
for a little girl.
Now that Miss De Crespigney had come to take her proper place at the
bedside of her suffering nephew, good Mrs. Lindsay found herself at
liberty to return home and look after her own little affairs.
The child wept at parting with her old friend, and said:
“I know there is no work to do at the landing while all this snow and
ice is piled up everywhere; but, oh, do please to send David Lindsay to
see me sometimes. I shall be so lonesome when you are gone.”
The gentle old dame promised to do so, and went away to look for Laban
to row her over to the little isle.
This though a very short, was not always a very safe trip, at this
season of the year, when floating blocks of ice endangered the little
boat, and it was only by watchfulness and skill that it was ever
accomplished safely.
From that hour Miss Grip administered the government of Promontory Hall.
She was an accomplished nurse and housekeeper, and not at all an
unkindly woman, notwithstanding her quick ways. She held a consultation
with the doctor on his next visit, and learned from him the facts of the
case, of which she would not inquire of the servants or even permit them
to speak.
“It was the most unhappy marriage I ever heard of. But then I always
knew Marcel would make a mess of it,” was her only comment on the story.
Then she devoted herself to her sick nephew, who, in his delirium, was
always holding imaginary conversations with his lost wife, and sealing a
reconciliation, such as in the past had always followed one of their
quarrels.
Even Miss Grip would sometimes smile and sometimes weep to hear him say:
“I know it, my dear. I knew you did not mean all that you said. I knew
you were excited. Yes, I know, for all that, you love me, Eusebie.
There, say no more about it, dear. Let us try to forget it,” and so
forth, for hours, until exhaustion and stupor would follow.
It was a long illness. The February thaw had come and melted the
“iceberg,” as Miss Grip called the snow-clad promontory, before Marcel
de Crespigney passed the crisis of his fever, and then he was so weak in
mind as well as body that another month passed away before he had
gradually recovered strength enough to sit up in his easy-chair and
converse a little.
Next, when he was able to bear a sustained discourse, he gave Miss Grip
his own version of the fatal quarrel that had precipitated the
catastrophe, not sparing himself in the least, but heaping bitter
reproaches upon his own head, as he had done from the first.
“Yet,” said Miss Agrippina, “I cannot see that you were so much to
blame. But, in any case, it is of no use to look back. All that you can
do now is to atone in the future for what you have done amiss in the
past. She has left you no child of her own; but she has left a little
niece whom she loved. Be a good father to that orphan.”
“I will do so,” answered De Crespigney, very meekly.
“And now, Marcel, take my advice: Whatever else you do, don’t make a
fool of yourself again by getting married. Such a bookworm as you has no
business with a wife. So, don’t be a fool.”
“I will not,” sighed the colonel, obediently.
When he grew stronger still he sent for the little portable cabinet in
which his lost wife was accustomed to keep her papers, and he had it
placed upon a stand between his easy-chair and the open wood fire, and
he went through her letters, with the intention of burning all of them,
lest they should by unforeseen accident fall into other hands.
And here he found what newly awoke his grief and his remorse. It was her
last will, duly drawn up, signed, sealed, and witnessed, in which she
bequeathed to him the whole of her real and personal estate. Folded in
with this document was a letter, dated some time back, and addressed to
her husband, to be opened after her death. It seemed to have been
written just after one of their fierce quarrels and sorrowful
reconciliations. In it she wrote:
“I feel that some day I shall die suddenly in some one of my mad fits
of excitement. I feel that when that shall have happened without time
for reconciliation, I shall want to speak to you from the other life.
I shall want to reach my hand across the great gulf that will divide
us and be reconciled to you from the other life. But that may not be
my privilege, so I write to you now, and leave with you, for that
time, what I feel that I shall want to say to you then.”
And here followed a most pathetic plea for a charitable construction of
her confessed infirmities of temper and a prayer for the merciful
remembrance of her love. She said not one word about the will she had
made securing all her property to him; she was silent on that subject,
as if she thought it of little importance compared to the theme upon
which she wrote, her own morbid, maddened affections.
The letter so agitated the convalescent that he suffered a relapse of
several days’ duration.
As the spring advanced, however, he improved in health, strength and
spirits. The season was early that year, so that by the middle of March
every vestige of ice and snow had disappeared, and by the first of April
the fields were green with grass and the trees blossoming for fruit. And
then Marcel de Crespigney was able to sit out on the front porch and
enjoy the resurrection of nature with a new sense of life.
Meanwhile the business on the fishing landing was opening briskly, and,
among other workmen, David Lindsay found a plenty to do, patching boats
and mending nets and clearing beaches.
Again little Gloria went daily down to the old sea-wall and sat and read
to her playmate while he mended old seines or netted new ones. She read
to him the school histories of Rome, Greece and England, while the
hungry mind of the boy swallowed and assimilated them all.
Under the shadow of the old sea-wall the life of the children was an
idyl in Arcadie until one unhappy day, when their innocent affection
fell under the notice of Miss Agrippina de Crespigney, and shocked that
lady’s sense of propriety in the most outrageous manner.
She was giving the poor old manor house a fit of the severest
hydrophobic convulsions, which she called a spring cleaning, turning
every trunk, box, wardrobe, closet and store-room inside out, and
raising dust that had rested undisturbed for ages, when, thinking that
she needed more help, she determined to walk down to the landing, where,
she was told, the fisher-boy was at work, and to send him to fetch his
grandmother to her assistance. When she reached the old sea-wall and
stood in the breach, this is what she saw before her:
A little fire kindled on the sands, and some fresh fish laid on the
coals to broil; a little napkin spread on a flat stone, with two Little
blue-edged plates and green-handled knives and forks, a bunch of
radishes, a bunch of onions, and two rolls of wheat bread, and lastly,
the two children sitting, side by side, in the old boat, reading from
the same book.
Miss Agrippina raised up both her hands in speechless amazement. Then
controlling herself, she forbore all reproaches to the little,
unconscious offender, and only saying: “Gloria, my love, your uncle
wants you. Go right home,” came calmly down to the scene.
Quite innocent of any impropriety, the little girl rose obediently, and
saying:
“I am sorry, David Lindsay, that I cannot stay and take dinner with you
to-day; but poor uncle, you know! I must go to him directly; you must
take the book along with you and read it at home to-night,” she ran
lightly along, tripped over the broken wall, and home.
Miss Agrippina turned to dispatch the boy on his errand after his
grandmother.
David promptly left his culinary preparations, unmoored his boat, and
rowed rapidly for the isle.
And so the children’s little, innocent _al fresco_ feast was spoiled;
but that was nothing to what happened afterwards.