Her parents objected to leaving their work; each suggested that the
other had better go; but they both came at Clementina's urgence. Her
father laughed and her mother frowned when she told them what Mrs.
Lander wanted, from the same misgiving of her sanity. They partly
abandoned this theory for a conviction of Mrs. Lander's mere folly when
she began to talk, and this slowly yielded to the perception that she
had some streaks of sense. It was sense in the first place to want to
have Clementina with her, and though it might not be sense to suppose
that they would be anxious to let her go, they did not find so much want
of it as Mrs. Lander talked on. It was one of her necessities to talk
away her emotions before arriving at her ideas, which were often found
in a tangle, but were not without a certain propriety. She was now,
after her interview with Clementina, in the immediate presence of these,
and it was her ideas that she began to produce for the girl's father and
mother. She said, frankly, that she had more money than she knew what to
do with, and they must not think she supposed she was doing a favor, for
she was really asking one.
She was alone in the world, without near connections of her own, or
relatives of her husband's, and it would be a mercy if they could let
their daughter come and visit her; she would not call it more than a
visit; that would be the best thing on both sides; she told of her great
fancy for Clementina the first time she saw her, and of her husband's
wish that she would come and visit with them then for the winter. As for
that money she had tried to make the child take, she presumed that they
knew about it, and she wished to say that she did it because she was
afraid Mr. Lander had said so much about the sewing, that they would
be disappointed. She gave way to her tears at the recollection, and
confessed that she wanted the child to have the money anyway. She ended
by asking Mrs. Claxon if she would please to let her have a drink of
water; and she looked about the room, and said that they had got it
finished up a great deal, now, had not they? She made other remarks upon
it, so apt that Mrs. Claxon gave her a sort of permissive invitation to
look about the whole lower floor, ending with the kitchen.
Mrs. Lander sat down there while Mrs. Claxon drew from the pipes a glass
of water, which she proudly explained was pumped all over the house by
the wind mill that supplied the power for her husband's turning lathes.
“Well, I wish mah husband could have tasted that wata,” said Mrs.
Lander, as if reminded of husbands by the word, and by the action of
putting down the glass. “He was always such a great hand for good, cold
wata. My! He'd 'a liked youa kitchen, Mrs. Claxon. He always was such
a home-body, and he did get so ti'ed of hotels. For all he had such an
appearance, when you see him, of bein'--well!--stiff and proud, he was
fah moa common in his tastes--I don't mean common, exactly, eitha--than
what I was; and many a time when we'd be drivin' through the country,
and we'd pass some o' them long-strung-out houses, don't you know, with
the kitchen next to the wood shed, and then an ahchway befoa you get
to the stable, Mr. Landa he'd get out, and make an urrand, just so's
to look in at the kitchen dooa; he said it made him think of his own
motha's kitchen. We was both brought up in the country, that's a fact,
and I guess if the truth was known we both expected to settle down and
die thea, some time; but now he's gone, and I don't know what'll become
o' me, and sometimes I don't much care. I guess if Mr. Landa'd 'a seen
youa kitchen, it wouldn't 'a' been so easy to git him out of it; and
I do believe if he's livin' anywhe' now he takes as much comfo't in
my settin' here as what I do. I presume I shall settle down somewhe's
before a great while, and if you could make up youa mind to let your
daughta come to me for a little visit till spring, you couldn't do a
thing that 'd please Mr. Landa moa.”
Mrs. Claxon said that she would talk it over with the child's father;
and then Mrs. Lander pressed her to let her take Clementina back to
the Middlemount with her for supper, if they wouldn't let her stay the
night. After Clementina had driven away, Mrs. Claxon accused herself to
her husband of being the greatest fool in the State, but he said that
the carriage was one of the Middlemount rigs, and he guessed it was all
right. He could see that Clem was wild to go, and he didn't see why she
shouldn't.
“Well, I do, then,” his wife retorted. “We don't know anything about the
woman, or who she is.”
“I guess no harm'll come to Clem for one night,” said Claxon, and Mrs.
Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of
her anxiety. She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the
whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not
got round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be
thought of first. He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the
light of his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and
her motives than he had been before.
When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought
of something in the nature of credentials. It was the letter from her
church in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she
wished she might unite with the church in any place where she happened
to be stopping. It did not make a great impression upon the Claxons,
who were of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the
Episcopal church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves.
They said they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if
Mrs. Lander did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him,
and the rector was brought at once.
He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old
Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism,
advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New
England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and
exactions of the native temperament. On the ecclesiastical side he was
conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered
as he was simple-hearted. He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a
clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a
belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer's
tan on his face and hands. He pronounced the church-letter, though quite
outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability,
and he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs.
Lander poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference
to this or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second
hand. He had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality;
it was enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she
professed to be.
“You must think,” he said, laughing, “that we are over-particular; but
the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be
sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good.”
“Of cou'se,” said Mrs. Lander. “I should be just so myself abort her.”
“I don't know,” he continued, “that I've ever said how much we think of
her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is
not present.
“She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl
as she can without knowing it. She has a great deal of common-sense, and
we all want her to have the best chance.”
“Well, that's just the way I feel about her, and that's just what I mean
to give her,” said Mrs. Lander.
“I am not sure that I make myself quite clear,” said the rector. “I
mean, a chance to prove how useful and helpful she can be. Do you think
you can make life hard for her occasionally? Can you be peevish and
exacting, and unreasonable? Can you do something to make her value
superfluity and luxury at their true worth?”
Mrs. Lander looked a little alarmed and a little offended. “I don't know
as I undastand what you mean, exactly,” she said, frowning rather with
perplexity than resentment. “But the child sha'n't have a care, and her
own motha couldn't be betta to her than me. There a'n't anything money
can buy that she sha'n't have, if she wants it, and all I'll ask of her
is 't she'll enjoy herself as much as she knows how. I want her with me
because I should love to have her round; and we did from the very fust
minute she spoke, Mr. Lander and me, both. She shall have her own money,
and spend it for anything she pleases, and she needn't do a stitch o'
work from mohnin' till night. But if you're afraid I shall put upon
her.”
“No, no,” said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.
When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of
certain of Mrs. Lander's references by letters to Boston, he said to
Clementina's father and mother, “There's only one danger, now, and that
is that she will spoil Clementina; but there's a reasonable hope that
she won't know how.” He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh
misgiving, which Claxon expressed. “The way I look at it is like this. I
don't want that woman should eva think Clem was after her money. On the
face of it there a'n't very much to her that would make anybody think
but what we was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood
that we wa'n't that kind. But I don't seem to see any way of tellin'
her.”
“No,” said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, “that would be
difficult.”
“It's plain to be seen,” Mrs. Claxon interposed, “that she thinks a good
deal of her money; and I d' know but what she'd think she was doin' Clem
most too much of a favor anyway. If it can't be a puffectly even thing,
all round, I d' know as I should want it to be at all.”
“You're quite right, Mrs. Claxon, quite right. But I believe Mrs. Lander
may be safely left to look out for her own interests. After all, she has
merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her. It will be a good
opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it may
bring her the chance of placing herself in life. We have got to consider
these things with reference to a young girl.”
Mrs. Claxon said, “Of cou'se,” but Claxon did not assent so readily.
“I don't feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light. If
the chance don't come to her, I don't want she should go huntin' round
for it.”
“I thoroughly agree with you,” said the rector. “But I was thinking that
there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is
no chance at all.”
“I guess that's so,” Claxon owned with a laugh. “Well, I guess we can
leave it to Clem to do what's right and proper everyway. As you say,
she's got lots of sense.”
From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but
husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of
common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties
which he had abandoned. She fretted under the load, and expressed an
exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of
any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her
clothes ready for leaving home. She said finally that she presumed they
were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the
more she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn't like, she could
come home. By this time her husband was in something of that insensate
eagerness to have the affair over that people feel in a house where
there is a funeral.
At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her
father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off.
Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her
talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up.
Her father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the
Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander's hand baggage and took the final
fee she thrust upon him. When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory
about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been
inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background,
where she could not see into it from the outside. He said that he had
felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like. But
he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in
it, and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them. He
owned that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.
“I guess,” said his wife, grimly, “we're a passel o' fools to let her
go. Even if she don't like, the'a, with that crazy-head, she won't be
the same Clem when she comes back.”
They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as
they drove home behind Claxon's self-broken colt: a creature that had
taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example
to its kind in sobriety and industry.
The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having
seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up
before a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her. She had
seen them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform,
and waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them,
but they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.
At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house. Not to
have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same
again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could
bear.
The rector's wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting
hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of
this world's kingdoms than a clergyman's wife ought ever to see, even
for another. She decided that Clementina's chances of making a splendid
match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she
contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with
her native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe,
where Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her. If she did not take her
to Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and
this would serve the same end, though more indirectly.
Mr. Richling scoffed at this ideal of Clementina's future with a
contempt which was as little becoming to his cloth. He made his wife
reflect that, with all her inherent grace and charm, Clementina was an
ignorant little country girl, who had neither the hardness of heart nor
the greediness of soul, which gets people on in the world, and repair
for them the disadvantages of birth and education. He represented that
even if favorable chances for success in society showed themselves to
the girl, the intense and inexpugnable vulgarity of Mrs. Lander would
spoil them; and he was glad of this, he said, for he believed that the
best thing which could happen to the child would be to come home as
sweet and good as she had gone away; he added this was what they ought
both to pray for.
His wife admitted this, but she retorted by asking if he thought such a
thing was possible, and he was obliged to own that it was not possible.
He marred the effect of his concession by subjoining that it was no more
possible than her making a brilliant and triumphant social figure in
society, either at home or in Europe.