Although Miss Theodora disliked visiting, every summer she and Ernest
spent a month at Nahant with her cousin, Sarah Somerset. She herself
would have preferred the quiet independence of a New Hampshire country
farm, but she thought it her duty to give Ernest this yearly
opportunity of seeing his relatives in the intimacy possible only at
their summer homes. This was before the days of Beverly's popularity,
when almost every one at Nahant was cousin to every one else. Even the
people at the boarding houses belonged to the little group held to have
an almost inherent right to the rocky peninsula.
Both the little boy, therefore, and Miss Theodora were made much of by
their kinsfolk; and the child thought these summer days the happiest of
the year.
In other ways Miss Theodora was occasionally remembered by her
relatives. Once she was asked to spend a whole year in Europe as
chaperone to two or three girls, her distant cousins. Even if she could
have made up her mind to leave Ernest, I doubt whether she would have
accepted the invitation. She had almost determined never to go abroad
again, preferring to hold sacred the journey that she and her parents
and John had made two or three years before their troubles began.
For the most part, then, Miss Theodora repelled all attempts at intimacy
made by her relatives. Unreasonable though she knew herself to be, she
believed that she could never care so much for her cousins since they
had all in such curious fashion--like swallows in winter--begun to
migrate southward to the Back Bay. At first she felt as bitter as was
possible for a person of her amiable disposition, when she saw people
whom no necessity impelled leaving their spacious dwellings on the Hill
for the more contracted houses on the flat land beyond the Public
Garden.
Yet if Miss Theodora pitied her degenerate kin, how much more did they
pity her! "Poor Theodora," some of them would say. "I don't see how she
manages to get along at all. If she sold that house, with the interest
of the money she and Ernest could board comfortably somewhere. Even as
it is, she might let a room or two; but no--I suppose that would hardly
do. Well, she must be dreadfully pinched."
Notwithstanding these well meant fears, Miss Theodora got along very
well. The greatest sacrifice of pride that she had to make came when she
found that she must send Ernest to a public school. Yet even this
hardship might have been worse. "It isn't as if he were a girl, you
know," she said half apologetically to Sarah Somerset. "Although he may
make a few undesirable acquaintances, he will have nothing to do with
them when he goes to Harvard." For Miss Theodora's plans for Ernest
reached far into the future, even beyond his college days, and she must
save all that was possible out of her meagre income.
Public or private school was all the same to Ernest; or perhaps his
preference, if he had been asked to express it, would have been
decidedly for the big brick schoolhouse, with its hosts of boys. What
matter if many of these boys were rough and unkempt. Among them all he
could always find some suitable companions. His refined nature chose the
best; and if the best in this case did not mean rich boys or those of
well-known names, it meant boys of a refinement not so very unlike that
possessed by Ernest himself.
One day he came home from school later than usual, with his eye black
and blue, and one of the pockets of his little jacket hanging ripped and
torn.
"Why, what is the matter, Ernest?" cried his aunt; "have you been
fighting?"
"Well, not exactly fighting, but kind of fighting," he replied, and
"kind of fighting" became one of the joking phrases between aunt and
nephew whenever the latter professed uncertainty as to his attitude on
any particular question.
"You see, it was this way," and he began to explain the black eye and
the torn pocket.
"There were two big mickies--Irish you know--bothering two little
niggers--oh, excuse me! black boys--at the corner of our school; so I
just pitched in and gave it to them right and left. But they were bigger
than me, and maybe I'd have got whipped if it hadn't been for Ben Bruce.
He just ran down the school steps like a streak of lightning, and you
should have seen those bullies slink away. They muttered something about
doing Ben up some other day; but I guess they'll never dare touch him."
Now, Ben Bruce, two or three classes ahead of Ernest in school, was a
hero in the eyes of the younger boy. Ben was famous as an athlete, and
Ernest, in schoolboy fashion, could never have hoped for an intimacy
with one so greatly his superior in years and strength had not this
chance encounter thrown them together. Ben appreciated the younger boy's
manliness, and the two walked together down the hill, as a rearguard to
the little negroes. The latter, too much amazed at the whole encounter
even to speak, soon ran down a side street to their homes, and Ben and
Ernest, if they did not say a great deal to each other at that time,
felt that a real friendship had begun between them.
Miss Theodora heard Ernest's account of the affair with mixed feelings.
She was glad that her boy had shown himself true to the principles of an
Abolition family; yet she wished that circumstances had made a contact
with rough boys impossible for him. She was not altogether certain that
she approved the intimacy with Ben, whose family belonged to an outside
circle of West Enders with which she had hardly come into contact
herself.
An expression of her misgivings drew forth a remonstrance from Miss
Chatterwits: "Why, you know Ben Bruce's father's grandfather was on
General Washington's staff; they've got his sword and a painting in
their front parlor." As Miss Chatterwits was an authority as to the
biography of the meanest as well as the most important resident on the
Hill, her approbation of the Bruces may have inclined Miss Theodora
toward Ben. Yet, had he had no other recommendation, the boy's own good
manners would have gone far to impress Miss Theodora in his favor.
Ernest never knew just how meagre his aunt's income was. He thought it
chiefly lack of taste that led her to wear those queer, scant gowns.
Year after year she drew upon an apparently inexhaustible store of
changeable silks and queer plaided stuffs. Then she wore little tippets
and small, flat hats, and in summer long black lace mitts, "like nobody
else wears," sighed poor little Ernest one day, as he asked his aunt why
she never bought anything new.
Yet even Miss Theodora's limited purse might occasionally have afforded
her a new gown, had she not been well content with what she already had.
She could not wish more, she reasoned, than to have her old-fashioned
garments remodeled from year to year by good Miss Chatterwits.
Miss Chatterwits, who had sewed in the family from the days of Miss
Theodora's childhood, lived in one of those curious short lanes off
Revere street. It was a great comfort to Miss Theodora to have her come
for a day's sewing with her queer green workbag dangling from her arm,
with her funny little corkscrew curls bobbing at every motion of her
funny little head. While she sewed, Miss Chatterwits kept her nimble
tongue at work, lamenting the changes that had come to the old West End.
She knew the region well, and understood the difference between the old
residents and those newer people who were crowding in.
"It's shameful that the Somersets should think so little of themselves
as to move from Chestnut to Beacon Street; and their new house isn't
even opposite the Public Garden, but away up there beyond Berkeley
Street. How aping the names of those Back Bay streets are,--Berkeley and
Clarendon and Dartmouth,--as though American names wouldn't have done
better than those English imitations! Well, Miss Theodora, we have
Pinckney and Revere named after good American men, and Spruce and Cedar
for good American trees. I wouldn't live on one of those new-fangled
streets, not if they'd give it to me."
Then Miss Theodora, almost driven to apologize for her misguided
relatives, little as she sympathized with them herself, would reply in
words that she must have seen in some of the newspapers: "Well, I
suppose the growth of the city's population makes it necessary for--"
"Fudge!" Miss Chatterwits would interrupt, "the West End seems to have
room enough for lodging and boarding house keepers; and I guess it's big
enough for true Boston folks. It just makes me furious to see "Rooms to
Let," "Table Board, $3.50 per week," stuck up in every window on some
streets. Goodness knows, I hope the Somersets like their neighbors out
there on the Back Bay. I hear anybody with money enough can buy a house
there." And a tear seemed ready to fall from her eyes.
[Illustration]