PAUL RALSTON.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered, fine-looking young man of twenty-three
or twenty-four, with a frank, open countenance and a magnetism of voice
and smile and manner which made every one his friend with whom he came
in contact. City born and proud of being a Bostonian, he was still very
fond of the country, and especially of Oak City, where he was just as
polite and kind to the poorest fisherman on the beach as to the
Governor’s son when he was there. Everybody knew him, and everybody
liked him, especially Miss Hansford, with whom he was a great favorite.
As a rule she didn’t think much of boys, and sometimes wondered why the
Lord ever made them, or having made them, why He did not keep them shut
up until they were men before turning them loose upon the community.
Naturally boys didn’t like her, and many were the pranks played upon her
by the mischief-loving lads, with Jack Percy at their head as
ringleader. Him Miss Hansford detested as much as she liked Paul
Ralston. She had known the latter since he wore wide collars and
knickerbockers and stole her one watermelon from her bit of garden at
the rear of her house. This garden was her pride, and she nursed her few
flowers and vegetables and fruits with the utmost care, contriving
various snares and traps as pitfalls for the marauding boys, who thought
her garden and its contents lawful prey, and plundered it accordingly.
Only one melon had rewarded her care, and this she watched vigilantly as
it ripened in the August sun. Jack Percy was late in coming that summer,
and to his absence she felt she owed the preservation of her cherished
melon. Jack came at last on the afternoon boat, a guest of the Ralstons,
whose acquaintance she had not then made. The next morning her melon was
gone, and in the soft, sandy soil around the bed were the marks of two
pairs of feet, and Miss Hansford had no hesitancy in fixing upon Jack
Percy as one of the culprits. She knew of his arrival, and that he was
visiting the Ralstons. Unquestionably Paul was the other delinquent.
“Birds of a feather flock together, and I’ve no doubt one is as bad as
t’other. I wish I had ’em by the nape of the neck,” she was thinking,
when a shadow fell upon the floor, and, turning from her breakfast
table, which she was clearing, she saw a boy standing in the doorway
with an immense watermelon in his arms and a frightened look in his blue
eyes, which, nevertheless, confronted her steadily, as he said: “I am
Paul Ralston, from Boston, and I live in the Ralston House.”
“Yes, I know you are Paul Ralston, and that you live in the Ralston
House, but I don’t know as that makes you any better than if you lived
in a hovel,” was Miss Hansford’s ungracious reply, at which the boy
colored a little, and then went on: “I don’t s’pose it does. I didn’t
tell you where I lived to make you think better of me. I only wanted you
to know who I was, for I stole your watermelon last night after you were
asleep.”
“How d’ye know I was asleep?” Miss Hansford asked. Paul did not dare
tell her of the whispered comment of his companion: “Hear the old
she-dragon go it. A cannonade can’t wake her,” but there was a twinkle
in his eyes as he replied: “We—or I heard you snore.”
No one likes to be told they snore, and Miss Hansford was not an
exception. With a toss of her head she replied: “A likely story. You
must have good ears. How did you get over the piece of barbed wire I put
in the grass to keep just such tramps as you out of my melon patch?”
“I fell over it and tore my trousers; that’s the way mother found out
what I’d done. Father whaled me good,” the boy said, still holding the
melon, which Miss Hansford had not offered to take.
“Served you right, and I s’pose he made you buy the melon and bring it
to me,” was Miss Hansford’s comment, while something in the face of the
boy appealed to her in his favor.
“He didn’t know a thing about it,” Paul said. “I bought it with my own
money,—saved to buy me a fishing rod. I thought it out last night when I
couldn’t sleep.”
“Your conscience troubled you, I hope,” Miss Hansford said, taking the
melon from him at last, and thinking as she did so what a fine, large
one it was.
She was beginning to soften, and Paul knew it, and was not half as much
afraid of her as when he first came in, his knees knocking together with
fear of what might befall him. Jack Percy, his coadjutor in the theft,
had ridiculed the idea of making restitution and confession.
“The old woman is awful,” he said, “and will thrash you worse than your
father did. I know her. She threw hot water on me once when I was tying
a piece of paper to her cat’s tail. They say she keeps red pepper and
fire crackers for dogs and boys.”
Paul was not to be persuaded from his purpose.
“I’ll risk her any way,” he said, while Jack rejoined: “Don’t bring me
into the scrape. She’ll never forget it, for she hates me like pizen
now.”
Paul promised not to implicate his friend, and as soon as he thought the
fresh melons were in market he bought the finest one he could find and
took it to Miss Hansford, feeling glad now that he had done so. She had
thrown neither hot water, nor red pepper, nor fire crackers at him. Her
face was not half as vinegary as it had been at first, and when she
spoke of his conscience there was a roguish smile around his mouth as he
replied: “I s’pose it ought to have troubled me, and it did some, but
what kept me awake was the awful stomach-ache, which nearly bent me up
double. I ate too much melon, and it wasn’t very good,—wasn’t ripe, nor
half so sweet as this one I’ve brought you. I told ’em I wanted the very
best, and made ’em plug it to be sure. It’s first rate. Cut it, and
see.”
Miss Hansford was not one to capitulate at once, and she answered,
rather stiffly: “You ought to have had stomach-ache. ’Twill teach you a
lesson, maybe. Do you go to Sunday-school?”
“Yes’m,” Paul replied, and Miss Hansford continued: “’Piscopal, I
s’pose?”
“Yes’m.”
“What do you learn?”
“Oh! my duty to my neighbor, and things,” Paul said, wondering if he was
to be put through his catechism, and how he would come out of the
ordeal.
He believed he would rather take his chance with fire crackers. Miss
Hansford’s next remark reassured him.
“Umph! I know all about that catechism. A deal of good your duty to your
neighbor has done you. What’s the eighth commandment?”
Paul repeated the _seventh_; then, seeing the look of disgust in Miss
Hansford’s face, and realizing his mistake, he involuntarily began the
response: “Lord have mercy upon us!” but got no farther, for the
ludicrousness of the whole affair overcame every other feeling, and he
burst into a peal of laughter, so merry and so boyish that Miss Hansford
laughed with him in spite of herself.
“Better go home and learn which is which of the commandments,” she said,
“but tell me first who was with you, and why he isn’t here too. I saw
his tracks,—bigger than yours. I b’lieve ’twas Jack Percy, and that he
put you up to it. Was it Jack?”
Instantly the expression of Paul’s face changed, and was more like that
of a man of twenty than a boy of ten.
“I can’t tell you who was with me,” he said. “I promised I wouldn’t, and
I’ve never told a lie. He didn’t put me up to it, either. He didn’t know
the melon was here till I told him. He was sick, too,—sicker than I. I’m
sorry I did it. I’m not half a bad sort of feller, and I hope you’ll
forgive me. Will you?”
Miss Hansford had cut the melon in two, and, putting a big slice of the
red, juicy fruit on a plate, she offered it to Paul and said: “I’ll
think about it. Sit down and eat a piece.”
“No, thanks. No more melon for me,” he replied, and, feeling sure he was
forgiven, he bade her good morning and went whistling off in the
direction of the woods, where Jack Percy was lying under a clump of
oaks, waiting to hear the result of the interview.
“Well, what did she say? I see you have escaped alive,” he said, as Paul
joined him. “Rich, wasn’t it?” he continued, rolling in the sand and
kicking as Paul related his experience. “I don’t wonder the old lady
looked daggers at the commandment business. I wish I could have seen
her, and I did. I say, Paul,” and Jack stopped rolling, and, creeping up
under the shade of the bushes, went on, very soberly for him: “I went to
sleep while waiting for you, and had the queerest dream. I thought Miss
Hansford killed you or me,—seemed more as if it was _me_, although I
could see it all; could see the one who lay here dead, just where I am
lying, and could hear the talking ’round him, and see Miss Hansford, the
most scared of them all, trying to lift me up and saying he isn’t
dead,—he mustn’t be dead. It was _me_ then, and I woke up with a kind of
cramp in my stomach,—some of that confounded melon is there yet. Guess I
had a kind of nightmare, but it seemed awful real. I shouldn’t wonder if
she did kill me some time, she hates me so.”
“No, she won’t; her bark is a heap worse than her bite. Why, we got to
be right chummy, and she offered me some of the melon. I really like the
old lady,” Paul said, while Jack made a grimace, and then lay perfectly
still, with his hands folded under his head, thinking of the dream which
had so impressed him.
Meanwhile Miss Hansford, who had watched Paul until he disappeared from
sight, was talking to herself about him as she went about her morning
work.
“That’s a fine boy,” she said, “if he did steal my watermelon, and I’d
trust him any where, if he don’t know the eighth commandment. I b’lieve
t’other one was Jack Percy,—the worst limb I ever knew. Calls the
camp-meetin’ a circus and _me_ the clown! I’d like to——”
She jammed a griddle down hard on the stove in token of what she’d like
to do to the reprobate Jack, who had dreamed that she killed him under
the scrub oaks. Then she turned her thoughts to the Ralstons. It was
only that summer that they had taken possession of the big house on the
knoll overlooking the sea. Carpenters had been there at work early in
May, removing walls inside to throw the rooms together, cutting the
windows down to the floor, building piazzas and porches and bay windows
here and there, until the house was so changed that there was little
left of the original except the look-out on the roof and the immense
chimney, which Mrs. Ralston clung to for the sake of the fireplaces, and
because there was nothing like it on the Island. Once she thought to
tear down the inclosure to the smugglers’ room in the cellar, entrance
to which was through a concealed door under a closet stairs, but Paul,
who was with her, begged her to leave it for his play-room. He knew all
the stories of his ancestor, who was said to have filled the place from
time to time with smuggled goods, which were sold at a high price and
made the old sea captain rich. This, however, was so many years before
that the smuggler taint had died out, except as some ill-natured people
revived the story, with a sneer at the Ralston wealth, the foundation of
which was laid in the cellar of the Ralston House. Paul, boy-like, was
rather pleased with the idea of so renowned an ancestor, and, during his
stay in Oak City, while the repairs were going on, used to spend half
his time on the roof, pretending that he was watching for the Vulture
returning from its long voyage and tacking about here and there until a
white flag from the look-out told that the coast was clear. The other
half of his time he spent in the Smugglers’ room, playing at hiding from
the police, while Tom Drake, a boy about his own age, and son of the man
who had charge of the place, acted the part of policeman and thundered
for admittance against the door of the basement. Was there an influence
in the atmosphere surrounding the two boys which prompted them to play
at what in many of its details became a reality in after years. I think
so, for I believe there comes to many of us at times a glimpse of what
seems familiar, because we have been unconscious actors in something
like it before. To Paul, however, only the present was tangible, and he
enjoyed it thoroughly and played at smugglers and pirates and robbers
and prisoners, in the queer room built around the big chimney.
For a little time the Ralstons returned to Boston, while the finishing
touches were given to the house. Then they came back for the summer and
there were signs of life everywhere around the handsome place.
Occasionally Miss Hansford met the Ralston carriage with the Judge and
his wife, a dainty little lady with a sweet, gentle face showing under
her hat, which Miss Hansford decided was too youthful for a woman of her
age to wear. As a rule, Miss Hansford did not take kindly to people who
owned houses or cottages in Oak City, and only spent a few weeks in the
summer there, bringing with them an assumption of superiority over their
neighbors in the shape of horses and carriages and servants and city
ways, which she did not like. They were pretty sure to be “stuck-ups” or
nobodies.
Of the two she preferred the former. There had never been much money in
the Hansford line, but there was plenty of blood of the bluest sort.
Miss Hansford had the family tree at her fingers’ ends, and not a twig
would she lop off, much less the branches reaching back to Oliver
Cromwell and Miles Standish and a feudal lord in Scotland who held his
castle days and weeks against a besieging party. At the Ralstons she
first looked doubtfully. The old smuggler, whose bones were whitening
off the Banks of Newfoundland, was not a desirable appendage, but to
offset him was an ancestor who had heard the Indian war cry and helped
to empty the chests of tea into the ocean on the night of the Boston Tea
Party, while another had died at the battle of Bunker Hill, and these
two atoned for shiploads of contraband goods and made the Ralstons
somebody. Paul Miss Hansford had scarcely seen, except as he galloped
down the avenue on his pony, until he came to ask forgiveness and make
restitution. Then she was surprised to find how her heart went out to
the boy, and after he was gone she began to consider the propriety of
calling upon his mother.
“I don’t s’pose she cares whether I call or not,” she thought, “but I am
about the oldest settler on the Island, and then if Miss Ralston returns
it, it’ll be something to tell Mrs. Atwater, who has so much to say
about her friends in Hartford.”
With all her war against the flesh, Miss Hansford had her weaknesses and
ambitions, and one of the latter was to know and be known by Mrs.
Ralston. This was an easy matter, for there was not a kinder-hearted or
more genial woman in the world, and when she heard from her maid that
Miss Phebe Hansford was in the drawing-room she went at once to meet
her, and by her graciousness of manner put her at her ease and disarmed
her of all prejudice there might have been against her. Miss Hansford
was taken over the house to see the improvements and given a cup of tea
and treated, as she told Mrs. Atwater when describing her call, “as if
she and Miss Ralston were hand and glove.” The watermelon was not
mentioned until just before Miss Hansford left, when Paul came in,
accompanied by Jack Percy, who at sight of the woman sitting up so prim
in a high-backed chair, with her far-seeing spectacles on, slunk out of
sight. Paul, on the contrary, came forward, and, doffing his cap,
offered her his hand.
“You have seen my son before?” Mrs. Ralston said, in some surprise, when
Paul left the room.
“Why, yes. Didn’t he tell you about the melon he brought in place of the
one——,” she was going to add “——he stole,” but something in Mrs.
Ralston’s manner checked the harsh word before it was uttered.
Mrs. Ralston, however, understood, and her face flushed slightly as she
replied: “I knew he took your melon, but not that he carried you
another. I am very glad. Paul means to be a good boy. I hope you forgave
him?”
“I did,” Miss Hansford exclaimed, “and I like him, too. I’m
cross-grained, I know, but I’ve a soft spot somewhere, and your boy’s
touched it and brought me here to see his mother. I hope we’ll be
friends. I am a homely old woman with homely ways, and I hain’t anything
like this,” glancing around the elegantly furnished drawing-room, “but
I’ll be glad to see you any time.”
“I will surely come,” Mrs. Ralston said, offering her white hand covered
with rings such as Miss Hansford considered it wicked to wear.
They did not look quite so sinful on Mrs. Ralston, who ever after was a
queen among women as Paul was a king among boys. When Jack Percy’s
mother came to the seashore and took him home Paul and Miss Hansford
became fast friends. He called her “Aunt Phebe” and ate her ginger
cookies and fried cakes and apple turnovers and huckleberry pies, and
raced through her yard, and sometimes through her house, with his dog,
Sherry, at his heels, upsetting things generally and seldom stopping to
put in its place the stone tied in one corner of the netting which was
tacked over the door to keep the flies out. This was a fashion followed
by many of the cottagers whose doors were too wide to admit of screens.
But Paul in his haste did not often think of it, and after a few
attempts to make him remember the stone Miss Hansford gave it up and
only held her breath when he came in like a whirlwind and out again as
rapidly.
“Bless the boy, he goes so fast that the flies are blown away before
they have a chance to get in,” she would say after one of his raids, as
she put the netting back and picked up the books and papers, and
sometimes things of more value which Sherry’s bushy tail had brushed
from the table in his rapid transit through her rooms. Neither Paul nor
Sherry could do wrong, and she waited anxiously for his coming to Oak
City in the summer, and said good-bye to him with a lump in her throat
when he went away.
Once by special invitation she spent a week with the Ralstons in Boston.
“The tiredest week she ever knew,” she said to Mrs. Atwater after her
return. “Kept me on the go all the time,—to Bunker Hill Monument, up
which I clum every step,—then to Mt. Auburn and Harvard, where Paul is
to go to college; then to the Old South Church, and the Picture Gallery,
and if you’ll b’lieve it,” she added in a whisper, “they wanted me to go
to a play at the Boston Museum Theatre, where they said everybody went,
church members and all.”
“I hope you resisted,” Mrs. Atwater said in an awful tone of voice.
“No, I didn’t. I went,” Miss Hansford replied. “’Twas ‘Uncle Tom’ they
played, and I was that silly that I cried when little Eva died, and I
wanted to kill Legree. ’Twas wrong, I know, and I mean to confess it
next class meetin’.”
“You or’to,” Mrs. Atwater said, with a great deal of dignity as she left
the house.
Miss Hansford did confess it in a speech so long and so descriptive of
the play that the people sitting in judgment upon her forgot their
censure in the interest with which they listened to her.
“I’ve made a clean breast of it, and you can do what you like,” she
said, as she finished and sat down.
They did nothing except to express disapproval of such things in general
and to hope the offense would not be repeated, as it was a bad example
for the young when a woman of her high religious principles went to a
theatre. Paul, who happened to be in Oak City, was sitting by her, his
face a study as he listened to what was a revelation to him. In a way
they were censuring Miss Hansford, and just before the close of the
meeting he startled them all by rising to his feet and saying: “You
needn’t blame her. I teased her to go, and it isn’t wicked either to see
‘Uncle Tom.’ Everybody goes,—father and mother and everybody,—and they
are good and pray every day.”
No one could repress a smile at the fearlessness of the boy in defending
Miss Hansford, whose eyes were moist as she laid her hand on his head
and whispered: “Hush, Paul; you musn’t speak in meeting.”
“Why not?” he answered aloud. “The rest do, and I’m going to stand up
for you through thick and thin.”
He was only a boy, but he represented the Ralstons. To attend a theatre
under their auspices was not so very bad, and the good people absolved
their sister from wrongdoing and shook hands heartily with her champion
when the services were over. After that Miss Hansford’s devotion to Paul
was unbounded, and she watched him lovingly and proudly as he grew to
manhood and passed unscathed through college, leaving a record blackened
with only a few larks such as any young man of spirit might have, she
said, when comparing him with Jack Percy, who was with him in Harvard
for a while, and then quietly sent home. Paul’s vacations were mostly
spent in Oak City, until he was graduated. He then went abroad with his
father and mother for a year, and the house on the Island was closed,
except as the rear of it was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Drake, who looked
after the premises in the absence of the family. Miss Hansford, who
missed him sadly, was anticipating his coming again much as a mother
anticipates the return of her son. She did not, however, expect him so
soon, as no news had been received of his arrival in New York, and she
was surprised and delighted when he came upon her so early and so
suddenly,—taking her breath away, she told him, as she led him into the
house, looking at him to see if foreign travel had changed him any.