THE FAMILY DISGRACED
It was on Thanksgiving Day--of all times!--that the blow fell.
We thought a great deal of Thanksgiving on Groundnut Hill. No grief,
or change, or low estate was ever allowed to interfere with our joyous
feasting, nor I hope with our thankfulness. If the latter ever did fail
it was not because our dear ones had gone away to the better land, or
because the wolf--that dreadful, traditional wolf--was nearing our
door; it was when Dave came home at that Thanksgiving time!
At first we were delighted, although we younger ones soon recognized
the fact that his explanation of his change of plans was embarrassed
and unsatisfactory. Cyrus’ face had darkened as soon as Dave opened
the door, although he was genial with the good-will of the season
and, we more than half suspected, from the fact that Alice Yorke was
spending the Thanksgiving holidays with Estelle. It quite took away
one’s breath to think that Cyrus would look twice at a girl, but we
all saw, or fancied we did, that he thought Alice Yorke different
altogether from other girls.
Cyrus didn’t think that Dave had any right to come home without asking
leave anyway. And perhaps he ought not, since he had arranged to stay
with Rob, who was not strong enough to bear the journey home, having
just recovered from a severe bout with his old enemy, asthma, which we
had hoped, and the doctor thought, he had outgrown.
Thanksgiving eve was rainy and blustering. After nightfall the rain
changed to sleet and was flung against the windows by angry gusts
of wind. Dave had walked from the station, and he looked as if he
were clad in a glittering coat of mail when he opened the back door
directly into the great kitchen. I thought the glitter was what made
his face look so pale.
We had come out into the kitchen after supper, Estelle and Alice Yorke
and I, for Hiram Nute had come up on his semi-annual visit, and we had
not quite outgrown our childish delight in inspecting his wares. Always
at Thanksgiving Loveday permitted him to accept grandma’s standing
invitation to pay a visit to the farm. There was a regular ceremony
attending these visits, arranged, I am sure, by Loveday.
He presented grandma with a bottle of essense of peppermint, one of us
girls with a bottle of perfumery of his own manufacture--selection of
the receiver presumably made by Loveday,--and Cyrus with a bottle of
bear’s oil for the hair. This latter presentation must have been, we
thought, a concession made by Loveday to his own weakness, for she well
knew that Cyrus’ whole soul revolted from hair oil. I was convinced of
Cyrus’ growth in grace when I saw him receive this tribute amiably and
only surreptitiously present it to Leander Green.
Another inevitable ceremony attending the Thanksgiving visit was
Hiram’s tuning of the old parlor organ, which had been relegated to
the hall as long ago as when mother’s piano had come into the parlor.
Cyrus played on it, sometimes, by ear, and we used it when the choir
rehearsed at our house; and Loveday felt a comfortable pride in having
Hiram keep it in good order. Hiram was a Jack-of-all-trades. He called
it having “a talent for combernations.”
“This trade or that may fail ye, but get ye a good combernation and
there ye be,” Hiram was continually saying.
The hair was growing sparse and gray on Hiram’s long, narrow head in
these days, and his Adam’s apple was more prominent, but otherwise he
was the Hiram of our childhood and I for one had never ceased to hail
his coming with delight.
The bottle of perfumery had been presented to Octavia this year.
Loveday insisted upon strict impartiality, although Octavia was known
to be of the opinion that the best of all smells is no smell. And
Cyrus--Cyrus, who never condescended to linger in the kitchen--had come
out ostensibly to receive his bear’s oil, really as I believed, because
Alice Yorke was there.
He was actually making a little joke about the hair oil--Cyrus, who in
all his twenty-eight years had scarcely been known to make a joke--and
his dark, ascetic face was all alight as his eyes rested on Alice
Yorke, when the door opened suddenly and Dave stood there in the suit
of glittering mail that seemed to make his face so white.
Cyrus’ face darkened like a thunder-cloud, but he had to seem to share
in the delight that we all showed. Every one ought to be at home
Thanksgiving eve, and Dave was such a dear, lovable fellow, even if we
older ones had never quite rid ourselves of the feeling that he was
not one of us and that we didn’t quite understand him. We assailed him
with a confused chorus of questions. How had he happened to come, after
all? Was Rob better? And why did he not come, too? And why had he not
let us know he was coming, that we might meet him at the station?
He was embarrassed and reticent, but then Dave was always provokingly
reserved at times. It remained uncertain whether Rob was better or
not, and why he didn’t come, too. But then Rob’s illness was always a
painful subject to Dave; it was a Damon and Pythias affair with those
two, an affection that had grown with their growth and strengthened
with their strength.
When Uncle Horace had persisted in his determination to send Rob away
to school, somewhat against his will, having apparently changed his
mind about the advantages of a college education and being certainly
ambitious for Rob, as he had never been for himself, we knew that he
depended upon Dave to take care of him. He never admitted this, for he
was sensitive about Rob’s delicacy of constitution and as severe and
exacting with him as if he were strong.
Dave was a big blond fellow now, as tall as Uncle Horace, and so
healthy and handsome and wholesome that it did one’s heart good to look
at him. I could see, sometimes, that the contrast between Dave and his
puny Rob cut Uncle Horace to the heart.
The dear boy was a little queer and constrained to-night. For a while
his manner cast a chill even upon my heart, and I am the optimistic
one. But I reflected that it is not easy to explain yourself to a
whole kitchen full of people and before a strange girl with the very
brightest eyes you ever saw! And it is, of course, still less easy when
your severe older half-brother, who acts as your mentor and pays your
bills, is frowning at you in plain sight of the bright eyes.
When grandma had given him her welcome the color came into the dear
boy’s face, and I was proud to have Alice Yorke see how handsome he
was. We of the first family were all plain. We all have a nose that
belongs to the Partridge stock and we don’t like it any the better
because it is said to have come to this country in the first ship after
the Mayflower. It is a nose that has certainly shown the true Pilgrim
spirit of persistence. Dave and Estelle both have features of classic
regularity. Indeed a summer visitor to Palmyra had scandalized Loveday
by calling Dave a young Greek god. She said that “if he wa’n’t always
all that a boy ought to be she didn’t want it said that he favored
heathen mythologers.”
Alice Yorke had never seen him. She was a new friend of Estelle’s,
having only lately come to Palmyra to live. Her father was a doctor
and had taken the practice of old Dr. Fogg, who had been gathered to
his fathers the summer before. She was just Estelle’s age--eighteen--a
brunette with irregular features, a little “tip-tilted” nose and a
wide mouth, with tiny uneven milk-white teeth. Nothing about her was
remarkable except a pair of black eyes that were deep and soft and
bright, all at once. She had a fascinating little lisp and seemed
simple-hearted and childlike. Loveday said that she had “a way with
her.” The quality which we call charm is always indescribable.
We were merry enough that night, and if I caught sight now and then of
a cloud upon Dave’s face, it was generally when Cyrus’ near-sighted
eyes were fixed upon him in a severely scrutinizing way that they had.
Alice Yorke had a light and sweet little voice, full of sentiment, such
as I have only heard elsewhere in so great a degree in an Irish voice,
and which one, strangely, never hears except in a youthful voice. She
sang the old songs and hymns that grandma liked, “Flow Gently, Sweet
Afton,” “Mary of the Wild Moor,” “How Happy is the Man Who Hears
Instruction’s Warning Voice,” and “Gently Lord, Oh, Gently Lead Us.”
And grandma joined in at the last, in her high-keyed, quavering old
voice, which still had a pathetic trace of sweetness, like that which
lingers in the higher tones of a worn-out harp.
Cyrus sang, too, and his strong bass seemed to uphold the light
soprano, as the ether upholds the fluttering bird.
“I have such a slight voice,” Alice Yorke said, turning to Cyrus at the
close of a song with a pretty deprecating air.
“But I never heard a sweeter one,” he answered. And we did think that
Cyrus was coming on!
I caught the flicker of a smile under Dave’s blond moustache--a very
imposing moustache for nineteen, but in fact Dave was almost twenty.
Cyrus caught the flicker also, and I saw the color leap up under his
dark skin. In almost any other family there would have been some
chaffing. I said to myself that if Rob had come home he might have led
Dave into some such enormity, for Dave, big as he was, could still be
led as Estelle had led him; and Rob was no respecter of persons. But,
in truth, we had never found our brother Cyrus a person with whom to
jest.
Later we had Leander in with his fiddle--which he always called “she”
and regarded with great affection--and Hiram Nute to sing “My Love is
Like a Red, Red Rose,” and “Wandering Willie,” in a clear, high tenor,
which cracked a little on the upper notes.
And none of us were merrier than grandma, to whom Dave’s coming had
been a delightful surprise. Although she leaned upon Cyrus, and his
devotion was a beautiful thing to see, and was fond of every one of her
grandchildren, yet, as we all knew, it was Dave who was the very pulse
of her heart. It was long before we saw her so merry again!
Uncle Horace came to the Thanksgiving next day, and Parson Grover, who
was a widower now, and had Marilla Gooch to keep house for him--and
she was suspected by Loveday of frying his beefsteak and not properly
airing his sheets. Then there were Great-Uncle Silas, grandmother’s
brother, and his wife, old and childless, and Cousin Sarah Saunders and
her seven children from the Port.
Grandma sat with Cyrus on one side of her and Dave on the other, and a
pink flush like the rose of youth burned in her soft, seamy cheeks.
Uncle Horace, at the foot of the table, had the minister on one side of
him and on the other Dr. Yorke, Alice’s father, a snowy-haired little
man whose black eyes were as keen as his daughter’s were bright.
Parson Grover said a lengthy grace; it was a habit of his and one not
to be foregone at Thanksgiving, of course. It was the grace after meat
that grandfather always preferred--because it was easier to get the
children into a subdued and devotional mood after a meal than before.
Parson Grover alluded to each one of us almost by name. He returned
thanks for our joy in the unexpected return of the noble youth who had
shown by his coming that his most highly prized pleasures were found by
the home hearthstone “and in the affections of his family.”
I peeped--I may as well confess it. Dave did always so dislike to be
brought into notice in that way, and he had now become accustomed to
less primitive manners than those of Palmyra and unused to dear Parson
Grover’s fatherly familiarity.
I had expected that he would look disturbed but I was not prepared
for the white misery in his face. He sprang to his feet almost before
Parson Grover had said Amen.
“I can’t listen to that--that about me, you know,” he said, and it was
evident that there was a boyish lump in his throat, although he held
his voice so firm.
“I ought to have told before why I came home, but I hated to spoil the
Thanksgiving. You must not take it too hard, grandma, there are others
to do honor to--to grandpa and the old name”--now the young voice
shook--“but I--I have been expelled from college.”
A great shock is always more or less benumbing. We stared at him
incredulously. There was even a feeble smile upon grandma’s face. She
did not seem to understand at all. Since Dave was speaking it must be
something pleasant to hear. If anything had happened to Dave at college
it must be something that would make us proud. She looked over her
glasses inquiringly at the faces around the table, and what she saw
there made the faint pink color waver in her cheeks.
“What were you saying, Davy dear? Rob isn’t worse? You didn’t come home
to bring ill news? If--if they haven’t treated you well at college----”
Uncle Horace coughed, the hard, dry cough that spoke volumes and was
his most characteristic utterance. It was a kind of résumé and reminder
of all the dismal prophecies he had ever uttered. There was even a
faint smile flickering about his thin mouth, as if he enjoyed the
situation.
I flashed an irate glance at him, but what did he care? He cracked
an almond between his long, powerful fingers, and continued to smile
in the dead, oppressive silence that followed Dave’s confession. I
positively did not dare to look at Cyrus.
“It’s more than you think, grandma. They have sent me away from the
college. I can never go back. I wish--I wish I could have kept you from
feeling so!”
He said it with a boyish stammering and I recalled the day when Miss
Raycroft and the committee had sent him home from the Palmyra school.
Poor Dave! would he always be a boy? I did not yet realize that it must
be a serious offense that he had committed, a far more serious one than
the drawing of Miss Raycroft on the blackboard in the guise of the old
woman who was going to sweep the cobwebs from the sky!
“It was a pity not to think of that before,” said Cyrus in a cold, hard
voice.
“I have been a disgrace to you; whatever you choose to say to me is all
right,” said Dave, and his own voice was a little hard. “Perhaps it
would have been better for me to go away somewhere, far enough for you
never to hear of me again. But it seemed to me more the part of a man,
and for grandma’s sake, too, for me to face the music. Perhaps there
will be something that a fellow of my brawn and muscle can do in the
shipyard. At least I am not weak physically.”
By this time grandma had gone to his side, giving great thumps with her
cane and making it fly so that I feared for the dishes, and Cyrus got a
whack upon his knee. She hung upon Dave’s arm--she was so tiny a body
that it seemed as if he might almost put her into his pocket--and she
stroked his large hand with her two small ones.
“If they have treated you badly they shall answer for it! The best boy,
always, and Deacon Partridge’s grandson! Some evil-minded, envious
person has done you harm. Cyrus will see to it! Cyrus will set it
right!”--for by this time Cyrus had become the Grand Mogul to grandma.
She stood there, stroking and patting his hand and saying comforting
words. It was a little absurd, of course, and a deep flush had swept
over Dave’s pale face, but I saw Alice Yorke’s beautiful eyes fill with
tears.
“You are mistaken, grandma. The college authorities are quite right,
from their point of view. What I did was against the rules.” It looked
like a flush of shame that now so deeply dyed Dave’s face--such a
boyish face in spite of the moustache!
Grandma’s sweet face blanched under his look. Its childish expression
seemed to vanish and the old, serious dignity to come back.
“Was it against--against God’s rules, Davy?” she asked, and although
her voice was firm I could see her small frame tremble as she awaited
his answer.
“I--I can’t say, grandma.” He said this hesitatingly and after a moment
of dead silence.
Cyrus drew a long hard breath and the gleam of hope faded out of his
face; it had been hope and my heart warmed to Cyrus. Nothing could
deepen the cynical certainty that had appeared in Uncle Horace’s face,
from the first, but he glowered at Dave now in an annihilating way from
under his shaggy eyebrows. There was neither consideration nor mercy
for Dave to be expected from him. He would not have shown them to his
son, for whom it was evident that he had a strong feeling in his own
hard way.
“You will know all about it from the President,” Dave continued, with
an effort that made his young voice hard and cold like Uncle Horace’s
own. “There is no appeal to be made. Nothing can be said that will do
any good. I am simply expelled and disgraced.”
“And ruined for life!” broke in Uncle Horace bitterly. He was looking
moodily into his plate and he seemed unconscious of the presence of
others; in fact, Uncle Horace never cared before whom he spoke his mind.
Cyrus hastily rose and drew grandma’s arm within his own.
“Perhaps it would be better to leave the discussion of this family
affair until some more fitting occasion,” he said, with his most
chilling dignity. “One can’t help feeling that a little better taste
might have been shown in choosing a time for the confession of
disgrace.” He added this in a low tone to Dave, but every one whose
ears were at all sharp could hear it.
“I rather think you’re right about that,” said Dave, in a voice that he
would not soften and which therefore sounded defiant. “I didn’t intend
to make a scene, but it seemed to me that what Mr. Grover said of me
obliged me to own up. It came out before I thought.”
“A little theatrical scene often arouses sympathy,” Uncle Horace
remarked with his cool sneer. And grandma burst into tears, the
pitiful, feeble tears of old age.
“Now, Horace, aren’t you ashamed?” quavered Great-Uncle Silas, who
was ninety and tender of heart. “Phoebe, don’t you take on so! (to
grandma). Boys will be boys. ’Twas peccydilloes, I’ll warrant; nothing
but peccydilloes.”
“I never heard anything but good reports of the French children,” said
Cousin Sarah Saunders, in a dry tone. “At least, not since they were
young ones. It ’peared to me they had done remarkable well considering.”
Cousin Sarah Saunders had had many misfortunes and was not of the kind
that sweetens in adversity. She was “real good in sickness, if she did
carry her pincushion inside out,” Loveday said.
“My dear, dear friend,” said Parson Grover, with a quaver in his
voice. “I think our friend is right in suggesting that we should use
gentleness and--and consideration in dealing with the young and not
condemn unheard----”
“We have been waiting to hear,” interrupted Uncle Horace, finishing his
nuts. No one but he would have interrupted Parson Grover.
“I cannot deny,” said the minister mildly, “that it is a trying
misfortune for a family that has always carried itself so honorably and
uprightly, but--but the boy seems so frank and manly! May we not hope
there are extenuating circumstances?”
Cyrus had taken grandma out of the dining-room and the others were
following, Estelle walking proudly, her arm within Dave’s. She was not
very tall--we did not think that she had quite gotten her full growth,
although she was eighteen--but her fair head was finely set and her
hauteur was quite impressive.
The minister’s gentle, placating voice went on as we went out of the
room and the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” on Leander’s
fiddle came from the kitchen as a curious accompaniment. For long
afterwards I could not hear that air without having the pang of that
moment vaguely repeated.
Grandma retired to her own room, and Estelle disappeared with Dave.
Uncle Horace, with a sudden change of manner, endeavored to draw the
minister and Uncle Silas and Dr. Yorke into a political discussion,
in which effort he was seconded by Cyrus, who was not, however, as
successful as the older man in feigning to be wholly forgetful of the
painful episode and quite at his ease.
Cousin Sarah Saunders rambled on inconsequently, with reminiscences of
the disastrous results of second marriages and second families. She
addressed herself to Alice Yorke and to whomsoever would listen, and I
knew that Cyrus, while he struggled to preserve his dignity, was being
stabbed by small thorns. But that knowledge went only a little way
toward making me forgive him for being so hard to Dave.
None of the guests stayed long. Cousin Sarah Saunders and her seven
were the last to go, and I hastened their departure a little by loading
them down with nuts and cake and candy.
As soon as the door closed upon them I hastened to find Dave and
Estelle, leaving Uncle Horace and Cyrus to a conference which they
evidently did not wish to share with any one.
Dave’s door was locked and he would not open it.
“Go away now, Bathsheba, do go away!” came in a hoarse, muffled tone.
When anything went wrong with the aliens they had always wanted to have
it out by themselves, while the rest of us, even Cyrus as a boy, shared
our woes. I found Estelle prone upon her bed. The face she turned to
me was flushed and miserable, but not tear-stained.
“Did he tell you?” she cried. “Such dreadful things! Going to races and
borrowing money to pay his bets! Those are the things that they accuse
him of. And he won’t deny them!”
I dropped upon a chair and could not speak for trembling.
“There’s some reason why he won’t deny them!” said Estelle in a shrill,
excited voice, that one would hardly have recognized as hers.
“He was always that way. He always owned up. Some small boys would have
said they didn’t mean the old woman with the broom for Miss Raycroft,”
I said, sharply referring to the earlier trouble at school.
“You don’t mean that you believe he did those dreadful things?” cried
Estelle, springing to her feet.
“He--he was always so easily led,” I stammered. “He would never mean to
do wrong, but--but so few people do mean to do wrong!”
I felt that my conclusion was both lame and irritating; but had we not
always felt and known that Dave had not a strong character, that what
he would become must depend largely upon the influences that surrounded
him? Who should know this better, I thought, than the little sister who
had kept him--generally in a salutary way--under her thumb?
“He’s a dear boy,” I added feebly, while Estelle’s indignation held her
speechless, “but too easily led.”
“If you believe those things of Dave you are no sister of mine!” cried
Estelle. She drew herself up to her full height and hurled her words at
me as if they were so many javelins.
I felt unaccountably abashed before her, considering that she was my
younger half-sister, over whom I had exercised a motherly care and
always snubbed in an elderly fashion when I thought proper. And yet I
was not so subdued as to be willing to part with my reason and common
sense for the sake of retaining Estelle’s sisterly regard. So I felt
it to be the wisest course to retreat as speedily as possible from her
room.
But it was such a wretched and angry young face upon which I closed the
door that I could not refrain from opening it again to say:
“We don’t know yet, Estelle. He may not be to blame! Wait until we
know.”
“I know now, because I know Dave!” the angry young voice called after
me.