INTRODUCING MORE OF THE CHARACTERS.
Hetherton Place was nearly a mile distant from the village, and on the
side of a hill, the ascent of which was so gradual that on reaching the
top one was always surprised to find himself so far above the
surrounding country, of which there were most delightful views. Turn
which way you would the eye was met with lovely landscape pictures of
grassy meadows and plains, of wooded hill-sides, sloping down to the
river’s brink and stretching away to the sandy shores of the ponds or
little lakes, which, when the morning sun was shining on them, sparkled
like so many diamonds, in the sunny valley of Merrivale, where our story
opens.
Merrivale was not a very large or very stirring town, for its sons and
daughters had a habit of turning their backs upon the old home and
seeking their fortunes in the larger cities or in the West, where nature
seems to be kinder and more considerate to her children, in that her
harvests there yield richer stores with less of that toil of the hands
and sweat of the brow so necessary among the rocky hills of New England.
There were no factories in Merrivale, for the waters of the
lazily-flowing Chicopee were insufficient for that, but there were
shoe-shops there, and the men who worked in them lived mostly in small,
neat houses on Cottage Row, or on the new streets which were gradually
creeping down the hill to the river and the railroad track, over which
almost every hour of the day heavily-laden trains went rolling on to the
westward.
Years and years ago, when the Indians still lurked in the woods around
Merrivale, and bears were hunted on Wachuset Mt., and the howl of the
wolf was sometimes heard in the marshy swamp around old Cranberry Pond,
the entire town, it is said, was owned by the Hethertons, who traced
their ancestry in a direct line back as far as the Norman conquest.
Theirs of course was the bluest blood in Merrivale, and theirs the
heaviest purse, but purses will grow light in time, and blood grow weak
as well, and the Hetherton race had died out one by one, until, so far
as anybody knew, there was but a single member remaining, and he as good
as dead, for any good he did to the people of Merrivale. For nearly
twenty-three years Frederick Hetherton had lived abroad, and during that
time, with one exception, he had never communicated with a single
individual except his lawyers, the Beresfords—first Henry, the elder,
who had been his friend and colleague, and, after his death, with
Arthur, who succeeded to his brother’s business.
When Frederick first came home from college he was a dashing, handsome
young man, with something very fascinating in his voice and manner; but
to the young girls of Merrivale he was like the moon to the humble brook
on which it shines, but always looks down. They could watch, and admire,
and look up to him from a distance, but never hope for anything like an
intimate recognition, for the Hethertons held themselves so high that
very few were admitted to the charmed circle of their acquaintance.
Mrs. Hetherton, Frederick’s mother, had come from the vicinity of
Tallahassee, and with the best blood of Florida in her veins, was, if
possible, more exclusive than her husband, and labored assiduously to
instill her notions into the mind of her son.
After her death, however, whether it was that he found life at Hetherton
Place too lonely, or that he missed her counsels and instructions, he
was oftener with the young people of Merrivale; and rumors were at last
afloat of frequent meetings between the heir of Hetherton and Margaret
Ferguson, whose father was a stone mason, but a perfectly honest,
upright, and respectable man, and whose mother was then familiarly known
in the community as the Aunt Peggy who sold root beer and gingerbread in
the summer time, and Boston brown bread and baked beans in the winter.
During Mrs. Hetherton’s life-time her carriage had occasionally stopped
before the shop door while she bartered with Peggy for buns and cakes,
but anything like social intercourse with the Fergusons the lady would
have spurned with contempt.
Great, therefore, was her astonishment when Col. Paul Rossiter, who had
been educated at West Point, and whom, in a way, she acknowledged as her
equal, fell in love with and married Mary Ferguson, who was the child of
her father’s first marriage, and in no way related to Peggy, and who was
quite as well educated as most of the girls in town, and far prettier
than any of them. The Fergusons were all good-looking, and Mary’s
dazzling complexion and soft blue eyes caught the fancy of Col. Rossiter
the first time he reined his horse in front of the shop where root beer
and gingerbread were sold.
Col. Rossiter at the time was thirty-five or more, and had never evinced
the slightest interest in any one of the opposite sex. Indeed, he rather
shunned the society of ladies and was looked upon, by them as a very
peculiar and misanthropical person. He belonged to a good family, was an
orphan and rich, and had no one’s wishes to consult but his own; and so,
after that first call at Peggy’s establishment, when Mary entertained
and waited upon him, it was remarked that he seemed very fond of root
beer, and that it took him some time to drink it, for his chestnut mare
was often tied before the shop door for half an hour or more, while he
sat in the little room where Mary was busy with the shoes she stitched,
or _closed_, as they called it, for the large shop near by. At last the
gossip reached Mrs. Hetherton, whose guest the colonel was, and who felt
it her duty to remonstrate seriously with the gentleman. The colonel
listened to her in a dazed kind of way, until she said, although no harm
would come to _him_, he certainly could not wish to damage the girl’s
good name by attentions which were not honorable.
Then he roused up, and without a word of reply, started for town, and
entering Peggy’s shop, strode on to the back room, where Mary sat with
her gingham apron on and her hands besmeared with the shoemaker’s wax
she was obliged to use in her work. They were, nevertheless, very pretty
hands, small, and white, and dimpled, and the colonel took them both
between his own, and before the astonished girl knew what he was about,
he asked her to be his wife, and told her how happy he would make her,
provided she would forsake all her family connections and cleave only
unto him.
“I do not mean that you are never to see them,” he said, “but anything
like intimacy would be very undesirable, for there would be a great
difference between your position as my wife and theirs, and——”
He did not finish the sentence, for Mary had disengaged her hands from
his by this time, and he always insisted that she struck at him, as she
rose from her seat and, with flashing eyes, looked him straight in the
face, while she said:
“Thank you, Col. Rossiter. You have said enough for me to understand you
fully. You may be proud, but I am prouder still, and I decline your
offer, which, the way you made it, was more an insult than an honor. I
know I am poor, and that father is only a day laborer, but a better,
truer, worthier man never lived, and I hate you for thinking to make me
ashamed of him; while his wife, though not my mother, has always been
kind to me, and I will never turn my back upon her, never! The man who
marries me will marry my family too, or at least, will recognize them. I
wish you good-morning, sir,” and she walked from the room with all the
hauteur of an offended duchess, leaving the crest-fallen colonel alone,
and very much bewildered and uncertain as to what had happened.
It came to him at last that he was refused by Mary Ferguson, the girl
who stitched shoes for a living, and whose stepmother made and sold root
beer.
“Is the girl crazy?” he asked himself, as he precipitately left the
house. “Does she know what she is doing to refuse me, who would have
made her lady! and she says she hates me, because I will not marry her
family. Well, well, it’s my first experience at love-making, and I think
it will be my last.”
But it was not, for Mary Ferguson’s blue eyes had played the very
mischief with the colonel’s heart-strings, and he could not give her up,
and the next day he told her so in a letter of three pages, which she
promptly returned to him, with the words:
“The man who marries me must recognize my family.”
A week went by, and then the colonel sent his love a letter of six
pages, in which he capitulated generally. Not only would he recognize
the family, but in proof thereof, he would buy the large stone house
called the Knoll, which was at present unoccupied, and he had heard was
for sale. Here they would live, in the summer at least, and during the
winter she might like Boston for a change, but he would not insist upon
anything which did not meet her approval. All he wanted was herself, and
that he must have.
This was a concession, and Mary, who, while standing by her family, had
not been insensible to the good fortune offered her, surrendered, and in
less than a month was Mrs. Colonel Rossiter, and mistress of the
handsome stone house, where her father was always made welcome, and her
stepmother treated with kindness and consideration.
We have dwelt thus long upon the wooing and wedding of the colonel,
because the Rossiters and Fergusons have as much to do with this story
as the Hethertons, and because the marriage of Mary Ferguson was the
means of bringing about another marriage, without which Reinette, our
dainty little queen, could never have been the heroine of this romance.
Mary would hardly have been human if her sudden elevation to riches and
rank had not affected her somewhat. It did affect her to a certain
extent, though the villagers, who watched her curiously, agreed that it
did not turn her head, and that she fitted wonderfully well in her new
place.
“Acts for all the world as if she was born to that grandness, and ain’t
an atom ashamed of me nuther,” Mrs. Peggy said, never once suspecting
that Mrs. Rossiter, as she mingled more and more in her husband’s world,
did sometimes shiver, and grow cold and faint at her old-fashioned ways
and modes of speech.
As for the father he enjoyed to the full seeing his daughter a lady, but
laughed at her endeavors to change and polish him.
“’Tain’t no use, Mollie,” he would say. “You can’t make a whistle of a
pig’s tail, and you can’t make a gentleman of me. My hard old hands have
worked too long in stone and mortar to be cramped up in gloves or to
handle them wide forks of yourn. I shall allus eat with my knife; it
comes nateral-like and easy, and shall drink my tea in my sasser. But I
like to see you go through with the jimcracks, and think you orter, if
the colonel wants you to. You allus had the makin’ of a lady, even when
your hands, where the diamonds is now, was cut and soiled with hard
waxed ends, and nobody’ll think the wus of you, unless it’s some
low-minded, jealous person who, when they see you in your best silk
gownd may say how you was once poor as you could be, and closed nigger
shoes for a livin’. That’s human nater, and don’t amount to nothin’.
But, Mollie, though you can’t lift Peggy nor me, there’s your sister
Margaret growin’ up as pretty and smart a gal as there is in Merrivale.
You can give her a hist if you will, and mebby she’ll make as good a
match as you. She’s the prettiest creetur I ever see.”
And in this John Ferguson was right, for Margaret was even more
beautiful than her sister Mary. To the same dazzling purity of
complexion, and large, lustrous blue eyes, she added a sweetness of
expression and a softness of manner and speech unusual in one who had
seen so little of the world. Mrs. Rossiter, who was allowed to do
whatever she pleased, acted upon her father’s suggestion and had her
sister often with her, and took her to Boston for a winter, and to
Saratoga for a season, and it was in the Rossiter carriage that
Frederick Hetherton first remarked the fresh, lovely young face which
was to be his destiny. He might, and probably had, seen it before in
church, or in the shop where he occasionally went for beer, but it had
never struck him just as it did, when, framed in the pretty bonnet, with
the blue ribbons vieing with the deeper, clearer blue of the large
bright eyes which flashed a smile on him as he involuntarily lifted his
hat.
Fred Hetherton was very fond of pretty faces, and it was whispered that
he did not always follow them for good, and there were rumors afloat of
large sums of money paid by his father for some of his love affairs,
but, however that might be, his intentions were always strictly
honorable with regard to Margaret Ferguson. At first his pride rebelled
a little, for he was quite as proud as any of the Hethertons, and he
shrank from Aunt Peggy more than Mr. Rossiter had done. But Margaret’s
beauty overcame every scruple at last, and when his father, who had
heard something of it in town, asked him if it were true that he was
running after old Ferguson’s daughter, he answered boldly, “Yes, and I
intend to make her my wife.”
A terrible scene ensued, and words were spoken which should never have
passed between father and son, and the next day Fred Hetherton was
missing from his home and Margaret Ferguson was missing from hers, and
two days later Aunt Peggy went over to Hetherton Place and claimed
relationship with its owner by virtue of a letter just received from her
daughter who said she was married the previous day, and signed herself
“Margaret Hetherton.” Then the father swore his biggest oaths, said his
son was his no longer, that he was glad his wife had died before she
knew of the disgrace, and ended by turning Peggy from his door and
bidding her never dare claim acquaintance with him, much less
relationship. What he wrote to his son in reply to a letter received
from him announcing his marriage no one ever knew, but the result of it
was that Frederick determined to go abroad at once, and wrote his father
to that effect, adding that with the fortune left him by his mother he
could live in luxury in Europe, and asked no odds of any one. This was
true, and Mr. Hetherton had no redress, but walked the floors of his
great lonely rooms foaming with rage and gnashing his teeth, while the
Fergusons were crying over the letter sent to them by Margaret, who was
then in New York, and who wrote of their intended departure for Europe.
She was very happy, she said, though she should like to come home for a
few days and bid them good-by, but Frederick would not allow it. She
would write them often, and never, never forget them. Then came a few
lines written on shipboard, and a few more from Paris, telling of
homesickness, of Frederick’s kindness, and the pearls and blue silk
dress he had bought her. Then followed an interval of silence, and when
Margaret wrote again a change seemed to have come over her, and her
letters were stilted and constrained like those of a person writing
under restraint, but showed signs of culture and improvement. She was
still in Paris, and had masters in French and music and dancing, but of
her husband she said very little, except that he was well, and once that
he had gone to Switzerland with a party of French and English, leaving
her alone with a waiting-maid whom she described as a paragon of
goodness.
To this letter Mrs. Rossiter replied, asking her sister if she were
really content and happy, but there came no response, and nothing more
was heard from Margaret until she wrote of failing health and that she
was going to Italy to see what a milder climate would do for her. Weeks
and weeks went by, and then Mr. Hetherton himself wrote to Mr. Ferguson
as follows:
“GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, May 15th, 18—.
“_Mr. Ferguson._—Your daughter Margaret died suddenly of consumption
in Rome, the 20th of last month, and was buried in the Protestant
burying ground.
“Yours,
“F. HETHERTON.”
Nothing could be colder or more unsatisfactory than were these brief
lines to the sorrowing parents, to whom it would have been some comfort
to know how their daughter died, and who was with her at the last, and
if she had a thought or word for the friends across the water, who would
never see her again. But this solace was denied them, for though Mrs.
Rossiter wrote twice to the old address of Mr. Hetherton in Paris, she
never received a reply, and the years passed on, and the history of poor
Margaret’s short married life and death was still shrouded in mystery
and gloom, when General Hetherton died without a will; and, as a
matter-of-course, his property went to his only child, who, so far as
the people knew, had never sent him a line since he went abroad.
Upon the elder Mr. Beresford, who had been the general’s legal adviser,
devolved the duty of hunting up the heir, who was found living in Paris
and who wrote to Mr. Beresford, asking him to take charge of the estate
and remit to him semi-annually whatever income there might be accruing
from it. The house itself was to be shut up, as Frederick wrote that he
cared little if the old rookery rotted to the ground. He never should go
back to live in it: never return to America at all, but he would neither
have it sold or rented, he said. And so it stood empty year after year,
and the damp and mold gathered upon the roof, and the boys made the
windows a target for stones and brick-bats, and the swallows built their
nests in the wide-mouthed chimneys, and, with the bats and owls flew
unmolested through the rooms, where once the aristocratic Mrs. Hetherton
trailed her velvet gowns; and the superstitious ones of Merrivale said
the place was haunted and avoided it after nightfall, and over the whole
place there brooded an air of desolation and decay.
Then the elder Beresford died, and Arthur, who was many years younger,
succeeded him in business and took charge of the Hetherton estate, and
twice each year wrote formal letters to Mr. Hetherton, who sent back
letters just as formal and brief, and never vouchsafed a word of
information concerning himself or anything pertaining to his life in
France, notwithstanding that Mrs. Rossiter once sent a note in Mr.
Beresford’s letter, asking about her sister’s death, but to this there
was no reply, except the message that she died in Rome as he had
informed her family at the time.
Thus it is not strange that the letter to Mr. Beresford announcing his
return to America, and speaking of his daughter, was both a surprise and
revelation, for no one had ever dreamed there was a child born to poor
Margaret before her death. In fact, the Fergusons themselves had almost
forgotten the existence of Mr. Hetherton, and had ceased to speak of
him, though John, who had now been dead four years or more had talked
much in his last sickness of Margaret, and had said to his wife:
“Something tells me you will yet be brought very near to her. I don’t
know exactly how, but in some way she’ll come back to you; not Maggie
herself perhaps, but something; it is not clear quite.”
And now at last she was coming back in the person of a daughter, but
grandma Ferguson did not know it yet. Only Mr. Beresford and Philip held
the secret, for Col. Rossiter counted for nothing, and these two were
driving toward Hetherton Place on the warm June afternoon of the day
when our story opens.