EUNICE HURD.
In this pretty room Mrs. Lander found a woman who had for years acted
partly as her maid, partly as a general superintendent of the household.
This person was some years older than herself, with plenty of gray in
her red hair, and a greenish tinge in her eyes, which had all the
watchfulness of a cat’s without the slumbrous softness peculiar to that
animal.
The woman had no sign of grief on her hard face, but turned upon her
mistress with the sharp vigilance of a fox.
“Is it true?” she said. “All sunk or buried—is it true?”
“Yes, Eunice, it is true,” was the faint answer.
“Dreadful death! No wonder you look white,” said the woman with curt
sympathy. “What’ll become of us, I should like to know?”
“Eunice.”
“Well, I listen.”
“Put on your bonnet and shawl, then walk to the telegraph station just
as fast as you can.”
“What about, Eliza Landers? I ain’t used to being sent on errands, and
won’t agree to it, nohow.”
“It must be done; I can trust no one else just now. Got your things. It
is only a message that I must send to New York.”
The woman arose and went out. Mrs. Landers sat down to her writing table
and wrote this message for Eben Stone:
“Get me all the facts of this terrible disaster. Learn everything, and
come to me at once. A messenger has gone to you, but in my grief I gave
him no instructions. If it is true, be here to-morrow at the latest. I
can do nothing without you.”
“Take this,” she said, when Eunice returned, “and tell them to send it
at once.”
Eunice took the paper and went out, reading it as she walked.
“Make out that word for me—she writes like spider tracks—what is it?”
she said, addressing John, whom she met on the stairs.
John read the message, and went away heartily ashamed of his suspicions.
Eunice threw a glance at him over her shoulder and proceeded on her
errand smiling grimly. That woman understood her mistress thoroughly,
and served her well.
“This will give me time, which is everything,” reflected the widow as
she saw Eunice crossing the lawn with her quick, springy step. “He
cannot go about town, gather up facts and reach this place before
to-morrow. That secures twenty-four hours. If I could but force myself
into composure now. This tremor is what men call nervousness, I suppose.
How it shakes one! But an iron will should make iron nerves. I cannot
afford to be weak; but when I think of my girl—my bright, proud girl,
how I long to lie down and moan the pain out of my heart.”
She looked out of the window, pausing there in her restless walk, and
saw Eunice coming up from the station with the straw bonnet pushed back
on her head and walking forward with great, rapid strides. How coarse
and vulgar she looked with the velvet grass and the glow of richly
grouped flowers all around her. It was the wonder of Mrs. Lander’s
friends that she had kept this woman about her person so long. Without
taste in dress or kindness as a servant, even, she had for years and
years managed to make herself of consequence to this luxurious woman in
a way that no one could understand.
While Mrs. Lander stood by the window, Eunice came into the room,
treading down the moss-like pile of the carpet with her heavy shoes. The
widow was singularly fastidious about these things, but she never
rebuked Eunice, who just then flung off her shawl with a jerk that swept
a Parian vase, all frosted over with snow-flowers, from a console close
by, and dashed it into fragments.
“That comes of crowding up everything with trash that’s of no more use
than moonshine,” she snarled, casting vicious glances at her mistress.
“I wish you’d call somebody to sweep up the splinters—I’m out of breath,
and won’t.”
Mrs. Lander stooped down and began to gather up the fragments herself.
If she intended a rebuke by this action, it was a failure, for the woman
shot one of the largest fragments toward her mistress with the toe of
her shoe while untying her bonnet.
“As well you as I,” she muttered, trampling another fragment to white
powder in the carpet. “I sent your message, and all the house knows that
I’ve done it—a thing that you’d never have thought of with all your
brains.”
“That was well. I am glad of it,” Mrs. Lander answered, apparently
unconscious of her servant’s insolence.
“You want something else of me, I suppose, by the meek way you take
things,” continued the maid. “What is it?”
“Eunice!”
“Well, what is it, I say agin?”
“You have not practised writing much lately, I suppose?”
“Not a bit—who accuses me of it?”
“But you have not forgotten how, entirely, have you?”
“That depends on how much on it is to be done.”
“You can write your name, I dare say.”
“Which name?” questioned Eunice.
“The name you are known by here,” answered Mrs. Lander.
“Never signed it more than twice in my life—felt like a thief—if the old
folks had been alive wouldn’t a done it. But, after all, a woman must
earn her bread and butter in some way, now what was that you wanted. Now
come to the mark—what is it you’re driving at?”
“Eunice, you have always been faithful to me.”
“Of course I have—why not?”
“But the secrets we have had together were nothing compared to this.”
“Well, out with it. Don’t beat this bird around the bush—it’s of no
use.”
Mrs. Lander took the will from her bosom and held it open before her
maid.
“You can read writing, I know. Try and understand that,” she said, in a
hoarse whisper.
Eunice read the paper from beginning to end twice over with the
carefulness of a lawyer. Then she dropped the hand which held it to her
side and looked into the white face of her mistress, which was half
averted.
“Well, I understand it.”
“You are no coward, Eunice.”
“No; but here are three of these catecornered bits of paper. Who does
the other belong to? A good deal depends on that.”
“Your brother—is he about the stables now?”
“I reckon so, his supply of whisky has been kept up regular as you
ordered.”
“But is he sober?”
“He’s always sober when his drink comes regular. I’ve told you so fifty
times.”
“Eunice, can we trust him?”
“I can, and that’s enough.”
“I will speak to him.”
“That’s what you haven’t done these three months, and Josh feels it
awfully, I can tell you.”
“Is it so long? But he never comes near the house.”
“Because his business is in the stables.”
“Well, bring him here this evening after the rest are in bed.”
“No I won’t; he stomps like a horse, and they’d hear him stombling up
the marble stairs. Go into his room yourself. It’s over the
carriage-house; he sleeps there alone. You walk like a cat, and I’ll try
the pussy-dodge for once in a pair of your quilted silk slippers. My
feet are small as yours, if I have got sandy hair and high shoulders.”
Mrs. Lander mused deeply for a minute, during which she took the paper
from Eunice and folded it again, then she said, with a strange oblivion
of her servant’s rude speech:
“Perhaps you are right, Eunice; Joshua so seldom comes to the house,
that it might cause remark; but you must see him first.”
“Of course I must.”
“I will never forget this act of devotion,” said the lady, with feeling.
“I don’t mean that you shall,” was the curt rejoinder. “But I want to
know one thing before we go a single step further. Is there such a thing
as a genuine goose-quill pen on these premises. I wouldn’t use one of
them steel or gold things to save—no, I don’t think I’d do it to save
myself from getting married, or you from being just as poor as I am,
lady as you are. And as for Josh—”
“There is not a pen of the kind in the house, Eunice, I am sure.”
“Then we may as well shut up shop. If there was a goose on the premises,
now, I’d soon manufacture a pen worth while. Goodness, now I’ve just
thought of it. There’s my white fan, that I’ve had ever since you got—”
“Eunice!”
“True as the bible. Well, as I was saying about the fan—it’s got enough
quills in it for a dozen pens; so that hash is settled. Just hunt up
that little gimcrack knife with the gold handle, that you keep in what
you call the dressing-case, and sharpen it up well before I come back.”
Mrs. Lander opened her dressing-case and let out a bright glitter of
gold from its scent bottles and pomade boxes, while she took out a
little knife and began to sharpen it, obedient as a child to the curt
directions of her own servant. Her hand trembled a little in the
operation, for she was a woman and a mother, after all—terribly
bereaved, and, though intensely selfish, not altogether without natural
feeling. Eunice came back directly with an old fan, which had once been
white, in her hands. This she tore apart with something that sounded
almost like a sigh.
“He gave me this the day you bought him off with a hundred dollar bill
and sent him arter that other girl. I’ve kept it nigh upon twenty-five
years, and now it’s got to be torn up for you agin. It had a pink ribbon
in it once, but that consarned young-un of yours tore it out for a
doll’s sash—the little—”
“Oh, Eunice, Eunice!—Don’t, don’t!—She is dead, she is dead!” cried the
mother, with a sharp outburst of anguish.
“So she is,” answered Eunice, pausing in her work of destruction on the
fan. “I’d forgotten that. Well, don’t shiver and shake so. I didn’t mean
it. Here now, try and see if you can make a pen worth while, and do stop
taking on—it fidgets me like anything.”
The quill which Eunice held out was a forlorn looking thing, pierced
with a wire which had left its rust behind and moth-eaten in its
plumage, but the heart of that strange creature yearned after it with
coarse tenderness, for it had been a keepsake from the sole lover of her
long barren life—the only possession she had connected with a sentiment.
When the pretty knife in Mrs. Lander’s hand rasped its way through the
quill, the pang of regret which rose in that hard bosom ended in a
growl, half rage, half pain.
“Give it to me,” she said, “you cut like a butcher. That’s no way to
make a pen.”
Eunice snatched the quill and knife—crowded herself up close to a window
with her back to her mistress, and fashioned a rude pen, which was
pointed on her thumbnail.
“There,” she said, locking both pen and knife in the dressing-case,
“that job’s done. Now I’ll go and find Josh. But do chirk up a little,
that tallowy face fairly makes me sick. Take something, now do.”
She searched among the crystal toilet bottles in the next room for some
restorative, for her mistress was faint and exhausted, but found nothing
to satisfy her, and went to her own room for a huge bottle of camphor,
which was the only stimulant she had faith in. When she returned Mrs.
Lander lay back in her chair, with closed eyes, lips perfectly bloodless
and quivering with distress.
“This won’t do—so just come out of it,” cried Eunice, in a rage. “I
scorn and despise a person who gives up half way. There, there, if that
don’t bring you right up to the mark, nothing on earth will.”
Eunice dashed a quantity of camphor into the hollow of her palm as she
spoke and held it under Mrs. Lander’s nose, spite of the faint struggles
made against it.
“Fainting away—I never saw you mean enough for that before. What has
come over you?—getting childish in your old age?”
“Oh, Eunice, don’t reproach me. Just that moment I realized so keenly
that she was dead, and I all alone in the world,” said the poor mother.
“All alone; ain’t I with you?”
A broken sigh was all the answer Eunice got for this consolatory
suggestion.
“There, thank you, I am better now, Eunice. Take the bottle away, it
strangles me.”
“Of course, but it has brought you to just as I expected. Now lie down
while I go and have a talk with Josh. If I find you in that way when I
come back, don’t ask me to help you out, for I won’t.”