PAUL RALSTON.
=A Novel.=
BY
MRS. MARY J. HOLMES,
AUTHOR OF
“’LENA RIVERS,” “GRETCHEN,” “MARIAN GREY,” “MEADOW BROOK,” “TEMPEST AND
SUNSHINE,” ETC., ETC.
[Illustration: [Logo]]
NEW YORK:
_G. W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_.
MDCCCXCVII.
COPYRIGHT, 1896 AND 1897,
BY MRS. MARY J. HOLMES.
[_All rights reserved._]
_Paul Ralston._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Miss Phebe Hansford 7
II. Paul Ralston 18
III. Paul’s News 33
IV. The Percys 39
V. Clarice 47
VI. Elithe’s Photograph 51
VII. In Samona 64
VIII. The Stranger at Deep Gulch 69
IX. At “The Samona” 82
X. Miss Hansford’s Letter 89
XI. Getting Ready for Oak City 96
XII. On the Road 101
XIII. On the Boat 107
XIV. In Oak City 118
XV. Miss Hansford and Elithe 122
XVI. The Days which Followed 129
XVII. Getting Acquainted 139
XVIII. Elithe and Clarice 146
XIX. Miss Hansford in Boston 156
XX. At the Tennis Court 164
XXI. News from Jack 169
XXII. The Waltz 176
XXIII. Preparations 183
XXIV. The Shadow Begin to Fall 186
XXV. The Shadow Deepens 193
XXVI. The Tragedy 202
XXVII. Elithe and Jack Percy 210
XXVIII. Poor Jack 218
XXIX. Elithe’s Interview with Clarice 228
XXX. The Funeral 237
XXXI. The Arrest 242
XXXII. In Prison 258
XXXIII. Outside the Prison 270
XXXIV. Ready for the Trial 281
XXXV. The First Day of the Trial 291
XXXVI. The Second Day of the Trial 303
XXXVII. Free 325
XXXVIII. Excitement 332
XXXIX. Where He Was 341
XL. Farewell 352
XLI. Tom, You Did It! 356
XLII. The Second Trial 363
XLIII. After Eighteen Months 375
XLIV. Last Glimpse of Oak City 387
PAUL RALSTON.
CHAPTER I.
MISS PHEBE HANSFORD.
She was standing in the doorway of her cottage, in Oak City, one morning
in May, watching the early boat as it came slowly up to the wharf and
counting the passengers who landed from it. There were twenty in
all,—some with their bags and umbrellas, walking briskly away in
different directions, as if they knew where they were going and were in
a hurry to get there,—while a few, who evidently did not know where they
were going, stopped to parley with two or three hackmen on the stand in
front of a hotel. These were undoubtedly strangers seeking information
with regard to accommodations, and Miss Hansford decided that the season
was likely to be a good one when people began to arrive so early. By a
good season she meant her rooms full of lodgers, with plenty of money
coming to her weekly, and not as was the case the previous
summer,—barely enough to pay her taxes and insurance. As yet most of the
cottages were closed and looked gloomy and somber, with their barred
doors and boarded windows and no stir of life around them. But there
were signs of the coming summer in the warm spring air which blew up
from the sea. Crocuses and daffodils were blossoming in the borders and
hyacinths in the beds in the parks, where the grass was fresh and green,
and in a short time the place would shake off its winter lethargy and be
alive and gay once more. Like many other people, Miss Hansford’s bones
were her barometer. Whatever they indicated, whether physically or of
matters outside her own personality, was pretty sure to come to pass,
and as she counted the people crossing the pier she was conscious of a
sudden exhilaration of spirits which boded well for the future. From
living alone more than half the time she had acquired a habit of talking
to herself, and frequently indulged in long conversations of questions
and answers, in which she sometimes differed as sharply from her
imaginary interlocutor or respondent as she would have done had they
been real flesh and blood.
Seating herself upon the piazza, which extended on three sides of her
cottage, and still watching the boat now moving out to sea, she said
aloud: “Yes, I begin to feel it in my bones that it’s going to be an
uncommon summer. Something out of the usual run. I don’t know, though,
why I need be so anxious. I’ve enough to carry me through, and more,
too, and I don’t want ’em to fight over the little there will be left
when I’m gone. There ain’t many to fight, either. The nearest of kin is
Roger, and I vowed I wouldn’t give him a thing when he married Lucy
Potter.”
Here Miss Hansford paused in her soliloquy and changed her position a
little, moving her left knee across her right and rolling her calico
apron around her hands, which worked nervously as she recalled her old
home in Ridgefield, a pretty inland town among the New England hills. In
the cemetery there a host of Hansfords were lying,—her grandparents, her
father and mother, her brothers and sisters,—sixteen in all,—and she had
followed them one by one to their graves until there was only left her
nephew, the recreant Roger, who had married Lucy Potter. For a few
minutes Miss Hansford’s face was shadowed with memories of the
farm-house, whose windows looked across the meadow and the river to the
graves in the cemetery; then, brightening up with the thought that there
was “no use in crying for spilt milk,” she returned to her talk of the
coming season, which her bones told her was to be a profitable one.
“If the Methodists have as big a camp-meeting as they had last year, and
the Baptists do anything at all, and the teachers come to the Institute,
and the hotels are full, things’ll be lively for a spell,” she said,
“and I wouldn’t wonder if I rented all my rooms, even to the back
chamber, where a tall body can’t stand straight except in the centre.
Folks mostly don’t take to it, because there’s no view from the windows,
except the oak woods. Can’t see the water at all; seems as if inlanders
were daft on the sea. If they had lived as long as I have, year in and
year out, in sound of its fretting and moaning, from morning till night
and night till morning; and if they could see it in winter when a storm
is raging over it and the waves break on the shore with a noise like
thunder, they’d sing another song than ‘The sea, the sea, the beautiful
sea.’ It’s pretty, though, when it’s calm and still and there’s fifty or
a hundred sails in sight, as I have counted when the yachts were
anchored near here. Oak City ain’t as fashionable as Newport or
Narragansett Pier, but it’s a mighty good place to rest in, and there
isn’t a prettier spot on the whole coast from Maine to Florida,
especially on a morning like this.”
Miss Hansford was waxing eloquent on the subject of Oak City, and quite
forgot her rolls burning in the oven and her tea-kettle boiling dry on
the stove, as she sat enjoying the view. She had seen it hundreds of
times, but it never struck her as quite as fair as it did now, when
earth and sky seemed laughing in the brightness and warmth of early May.
The ocean was smooth as glass, with white sails dotting its surface in
the distance and looking like great wings, as they moved slowly out of
sight, or in. To her left a long, hazy line showed where the mainland
lay, and between that and the island a thin wreath of smoke told where
the boat was disappearing. In front of her, between Oceanside and the
Heights, as the two divisions of the town were called, Lake Wenona and
Lake Eau Claire sparkled in the sunshine,—the two connected by a narrow
strip of land called the Causeway, and neither of them larger than a
good-sized mill pond. She had seen them lashed into fury when a wild
storm was sweeping the Atlantic coast, and seen them again, covered with
boats filled with gay young people when the season was at its height and
the place full of visitors. There was a small skiff now on Lake Eau
Claire, rowed by a young man whose form seemed familiar to her.
“Who in the world can that be?” she thought, regretting that she had not
on her far-seeing spectacles, which brought objects at a long distance
distinctly within her range of vision. “Land o’ Goshen!” she exclaimed,
as the boat came nearer. “I believe my soul it’s Paul Ralston. When did
he get home, I’d like to know? I was up to the Ralston house last week,
and Mrs. Drake wasn’t expectin’ the folks for some time. She was just
beginning to air and clean that queer place in the basement cellar,—the
Smuggler’s room. She said Paul was going to fit it up as a kind of
billiard and smoking room this summer, because ’twas cool and quiet.
They’ve got one room for billiards now upstairs, and I don’t see what
they want of another. I call it wicked to waste so much money on a place
to knock balls and smoke and play cards in, for it’ll come to that with
all the young bucks who go there. Oh, my land, how times has changed
since I was young, and such things as cards and billiard balls belonged
to the evil one! Now they belong to everybody,—professors and all.”
In her lament over the degeneracy of the age, the good woman rocked back
and forth, but kept her eyes upon the boat, which was heading for the
shore. Miss Hansford was always spoken of as a _character_ and was
better known than any permanent resident in Oak City. Indeed, she was a
part of the city, and had seen it grow from a few tents clustered around
the camp grounds to its present proportions and modern usages, to which
she did not take kindly. When a girl she had come from her home in
Ridgefield with a party of young people as gay and thoughtless as
herself to attend the annual camp-meeting, which was beginning to
attract a good deal of attention. The site for the camp-meeting had been
chosen by the Methodists, partly for its delightful situation, and
partly for its entire seclusion from anything worldly which would
disturb the mind and hinder the good work. The only house then upon the
Heights was known as the Ralston House, which had been built for many
years, and, with its huge chimney and square look-out on the roof, was a
landmark for the surrounding country. Many strange stories were told of
it and its first owner, old Captain Ralston, whose ship, the Vulture,
had sailed to all parts of the world, and finally gone down in a wild
storm off the Banks of Newfoundland. The house itself was said to have
been a rendezvous for smugglers and a hiding place for their goods. But
with the sinking of the Vulture and the death of the captain, who went
down with it, the stories ceased, and when the first camp-meeting was
held the great house was occupied by the elders and those who could
afford to pay for the rooms. On the Oceanside a few straggling dwellings
were springing up near the grounds and the shore, but for the most part
the accommodations were of the crudest kind. People brought their own
provisions and beds, and camped upon the ground and under trees and felt
that they were worshiping God far more acceptably than if the blue sky
above them had been the dome of some expensive church and the hard
benches upon which they sat in its luxuriously cushioned pews.
At first the whole thing struck Phebe as grotesque, but youth is not apt
to be very critical, especially if having a good time, and as she
usually had a good time she enjoyed everything immensely after the first
surprise wore off, and slept in a tent with the rain sometimes dripping
on her face, and ate coarse fare from board tables, and watched the
proceedings with feelings of curiosity and amusement and half contempt
for what seemed to her emotional and senseless. The church in which she
had been brought up did not worship that way, and, with something of a
Pharisaical feeling, she was one night listening to an elder noted for
piety and eloquence, who was exhorting some people near her to a better
life. Considering herself as a spectator and no part of the
congregation, she did not expect to be addressed. Anxious seats and
extemporaneous prayers were not for one reared as she had been, and when
the elder, who for some time had had her in his mind, turned suddenly
towards her and asked if she were a Christian, she colored with
confusion and alarm and answered, hurriedly: “No, so; no, sir; I am an
Episcopalian.”
Something like a smile flitted across the elder’s face, as he said:
“More’s the pity for you and your church,” and then passed on, leaving
the girl, who was not a Christian because she was an Episcopalian, to
the tender mercies of her companions. Young people are apt to be
relentless where ridicule is concerned, and Phebe was jeered at and
chaffed until in desperation she declared her intention to go forward
for prayers the next time an invitation was given. New and strange
feelings were beginning to influence her, and when at last she knelt
with others to be prayed for it was more in sober earnest than in fun.
There was something in this religion after all, and as she never did
anything by halves, she tested it until she proved its reality, and went
back to her home in Ridgefield an avowed Methodist. To the father and
mother, equally as conscientious as herself, it seemed almost sacrilege
that their daughter, born and brought up in the tenets of the church,
should embrace another faith, or at least another form of worship. But
Phebe was firm. Episcopacy, with its ritual and ceremonious dignity,
would never appeal to her again. She liked better the stir and life of
the Methodists. It was something real,—something to take hold of, and
she liked their style of dress as more consistent with a Christian life.
She could pray better in a plain gown than in a silk one, and she
stopped curling her hair and laid aside her jewelry and her ribbons, and
went every year to Oak City, where she was one of the most zealous
workers, and was known as Sister Phebe. As long as her parents lived she
stayed with them in Ridgefield, going with them occasionally to St.
John’s, which, she thanked her stars, was _low_, as she understood the
term, but going oftener to the plain wooden building on the shore of
Podunk Pond, where for many years the Methodists held their services.
When her father and mother were both dead and there was nothing to keep
her in Ridgefield, she moved to Oak City, and, building herself a
cottage on the Heights, lived mostly alone, except for the lodgers who
came to her when the camp-meeting was in progress. The religious
atmosphere of the place suited her, and, could she have had her way,
nothing more exciting than the annual camp-meeting would have found
entrance there. But the town was destined to grow, and as it increased
in size, and hotels and handsome cottages were built on the Heights and
Oceanside, and the streets were full of fashionably dressed people and
stylish turnouts, she shook her head disapprovingly. She had renounced
the world, the flesh and the devil twice, she said. Once by proxy when
baptized in infancy in the Episcopal church, and again when, not holding
her first baptism valid, she had been immersed in Podunk Pond, when the
thermometer was nearly at zero and the wind was blowing a gale. It was a
satisfaction to remember this. It seemed to make her a kind of martyr
for endurance, and to freeze out any microbes of temptation which might
assail her afterwards.
In the sanctity of Oak City she lived a long time before the world, the
flesh and the devil came to confront her with a persistence she could
not resist. Fashion and folly, as she called every innovation upon her
ideas of right, crowded thick and fast into the pretty town, until the
camp-meeting was a secondary matter, and ignored by two-thirds of the
guests, who, if they attended the services at all, did so from
curiosity, or because it was pleasant to while away an hour or so in the
huge open tabernacle built upon the spot where the first tent had been
set up many years before for the worship of God. Miss Hansford, as one
of the oldest residents, was a power in the community, and her opinion
carried great weight in her own church, but she found herself stranded
and helpless in the society which knew not Joseph, or, knowing, did not
care. It was in vain that she lifted up her voice against the dances at
the hotels, the roller-skating at the rink, the play-acting at the
Casino, the ocean bathers in suits which she said made even her blush to
look at, and, worst of all, the band, which on Sunday afternoons gave
what was called a sacred concert in the open air,—concerts which crowds
attended, but which Miss Hansford bitterly denounced. A device of Satan,
she called them, and resolutely stopped her ears with cotton to shut out
the profane sounds which floated across Lake Wenona to where she sat
reading her Bible and deploring the sins of the times. But neither her
prayers nor her disapproval availed to stem the tide so fast setting in
towards Oak City. The dancing went on in the hotels, the skating in the
rink, the play-acting in the Casino, the flirting in the streets, while
the bathing suits of the ladies grew shorter and lower each year, until
they reminded her of a picture of a ballet girl which a mischievous boy
had once sent her as a valentine, and which she had promptly burned.
Owing to the influence of a few New Yorkers and Bostonians, who came to
Oak City every summer, spending their money freely and introducing many
innovations in the old-established customs, the place was booming. A
little church, holding the faith in which she was reared, was built
under the shadow of one of the largest hotels. “Fashion’s Bazaar,” Miss
Hansford called it, but she watched its growth with a strange interest,
and a feeling as if something she had loved and lost were being restored
to her. Unsolicited, she gave a hundred dollars towards its erection for
the sake of her dead father and mother, and she never heard the sound of
the bell calling the people to service without a wave of memory taking
her back to the days of her childhood, and the broken bit of wall in the
apple orchard, where she used sometimes to sit and listen to the chimes
of St. John’s echoing across the river and the meadowland. Laid
carefully away in her bureau drawer was the Prayer Book her mother had
used, and, pressed between the leaves, was a rose taken from her
mother’s hand as she lay in her coffin. Miss Hansford had not seen the
book for a long time, but on the day of the consecration she took it
from its hiding place, removed the folds of tissue paper and the
handkerchief in which it was wrapped, and sat down to follow the morning
service. She had once known it by heart, and she found herself repeating
it now instead of reading it, while a feeling she had not experienced in
years came over her as her lips pronounced the familiar words. There
were passages in the book marked by her mother’s hand, and on the
margin, at the commencement of the baptismal service for infants, was
written: “June ——, 18——. Little Phebe was christened to-day. God keep
her safe in His fold.”
On this and the marked passages and the faded rose Miss Hansford’s tears
fell like rain, and with them much of her intolerance of other people’s
opinions was washed away. When a girl she had sung in the choir, and
now, as she glanced a second time at the grand old Te Deum, she began
unconsciously to sing the opening sentence: “We praise Thee, O God; we
acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!”
Whether she would have gone on to the end will never be known, for
suddenly there came an interruption to her devotions. She had shut the
door against any possible intruder, but the window was open, and through
it came a mocking laugh and the words, “If I’se you, I’d join the
Salvation Army, only your voice is a little cracked.”
It was the same boy who had sent her the valentine the previous
winter,—Jack Percy, from Washington, and her special aversion. Her first
impulse was to throw her Prayer Book at him, but he was beyond her reach
and running rapidly towards the avenue, his laugh coming back to her as
he ran, and making her shake with rage.
“May the Lord punish that boy as he deserves,” she said, as she wrapped
her book in its folds of paper and replaced it in her bureau drawer.
“He’s riled me all up, just as I was beginning to feel as if I had been
to meetin’, or church, I s’pose I ought to call it,” she continued, as
she opened her doors and went about her accustomed work.
Whether it was the service in the Prayer Book which did it, or the sight
of her mother’s handwriting, or the faded flower, Miss Hansford
gradually grew softer, and while religiously striving to live up to her
principles, she became more tolerant of the world as she saw it around
her. She still drew the line on dancing and play-acting and cards as
emanating directly from the bottomless pit, but the sacred concerts were
less obnoxious, and, instead of stopping her ears with cotton when the
band played on Sunday, she sometimes found herself listening to it and
nodding her head to the strains if they chanced to be familiar. With all
her peculiarities, she was so thoroughly kind-hearted and loyal to her
friends, that she was generally popular with those who knew her best. A
few ridiculed her and resented her inordinate curiosity with regard to
their affairs, of which she often seemed to know more than they did
themselves. She had a wonderful faculty for remembering everybody’s age.
She knew how much they were worth; how they made their money; who they
were, and what they sprang from, and, by means of her far-seeing
spectacles, with which she attended to her neighbor’s business, and her
near-seeing ones, with which she attended to her own, she managed to
keep a pretty firm hold on the affairs and conduct of the people around
her.
On the morning when she is first introduced to the reader she had
satisfied herself with regard to the number of passengers who came on
the boat; had decided who most of them were, and then centered her
interest on Paul Ralston, whose unexpected appearance surprised her a
little. She prided herself on her intimacy with the Ralstons, and
usually knew where they were, and what they were doing. Paul, she
supposed, was in Europe, or possibly on the ocean; yet, here he was,
fastening his boat and coming up the pathway across the park towards her
cottage.
“For the land’s sake, I believe he’s coming here, and I looking like a
fright, with this old apron on, and my sleeves rolled up,” she
exclaimed, and, hastily entering the house, she put down her sleeves,
exchanged her calico apron for a clean white one, took her tea-kettle
off the stove, and was in the wide doorway ready to greet the young man,
who came bounding up the steps two at a time and grasped her hand warmly
with his cheery, “Hello, Aunt Phebe! How are you?”