great man, dropped in one after the other; but the situation was not
unpleasing to him, and he even exerted himself to win their liking,
which was the easiest thing in the world. He told Mrs. Carter that he
had come on behalf of his quondam servant, Drusilla Elms, whose name, he
was sorry to say, his cook had forgotten; but now she remembered it, and
could give her the very highest character, and he should be sorry if
their carelessness had lost the poor girl so excellent a place. He
listened to the tale of the grandmother's rheumatism, and even made some
confidences in return about his own. He talked about the soldiers'
lending libraries with Aunt Caroline, and promised to write to a friend
of his in the regulars on the subject. In his imposing presence the
great-aunt sat silently attentive. He had met Isabel's late husband, and
he took much notice of her children. He said Winnie was a fine little
lad, but would be better for a frolic with other boys. Could he not come
over and spend a Saturday afternoon with them at South Boston, and his
boys would take him on the water? Oh, yes; they were very careful, and
quite at home in a boat. Yes, he would go with them himself, if Mrs.
Dale would prefer it; and then the invitation was given and accepted--no
unmeaning, general one, but a positive promise for Saturday next, and
the one after if it rained. Of course, he should be charmed to have some
of the ladies come, too. Miss Carter would, perhaps, for she knew the
way. He did not take leave till his horse, to Winnie's ecstatic delight,
had pawed a large hole in the ground; and a chorus of praise arose
behind him from every tongue but Marian's.
Colonel Hayward said nothing about his visit at home; but as he stood
after returning from his long ride, for which the boys had observed that
he had equipped himself with much more than ordinary care, smoking a
meditative cigar before the crackling little fire which the afternoon
east wind of a Boston May rendered so comfortable, he was roused by his
nephew Bob's voice:
"Really, Uncle Rob, our bachelor housekeeping is getting into a hopeless
muddle!" Then, as his uncle said nothing: "I am afraid--I am really
afraid that one of us will have to marry."
"Marry yourself, then, you young scamp, and be hanged to you; you have
my full consent if you can find a girl who will be fool enough to take
you."
"Of course, I could not expect _you_ to make the sacrifice; but though I
am willing--entirely for your sake, I assure you--I shall not render it
useless by asking some giddy and inexperienced girl. I shall seek some
mature female, able and willing to cope with them----"
"Them?"
"The spiders. I have long known that they spun webs of immense size in
and about our unfortunate dwelling; but I was not prepared to find that
they attached them to our very persons." As he spoke he drew into sight
a fabric hanging to the back of his uncle's coat. It was circular in
shape, about the size of a dinner-plate, white in colour, and
ingeniously woven out of thread in an open pattern with many
interstices, by one of which it had fastened itself to the button at the
back of the Colonel's coat as firmly as if it grew there.
"What the ----!" I spare my readers the expletives which, with the
offending waif, the Colonel hurled at his nephew as the young man and
his brothers exploded in laughter.
* * * * *
"I never was so surprised!" cried Mrs. Treadwell.
"I did not think anything in the matrimonial line could surprise you!"
cried her husband.
"Not often; but Colonel Hayward and Marian Carter! I could hardly
believe it. Mrs. Carter herself seems perfectly amazed, though of course
she's delighted. I suppose she had given up all idea of Marian's
marrying."
"She is a sweet little thing," said Mr. Treadwell; "I wonder she has not
been married long ago."
"I thought he was a confirmed old bachelor," said the lady; "I wonder
where he met her! I wonder whatever made him think of her! I hope
they'll be happy, but I don't know. Marian is a good girl, but she has
so little sense!"
"I should think any man ought to be happy with Miss Carter," said the
gentleman, warmly; "I only hope he'll make her happy. Hayward's a very
good fellow, but he'll frighten that little creature to death the first
time he swears at her."
"Colonel Hayward is a _gentleman_, William; he would never swear before
a lady."
"I wouldn't trust him--when she's his wife."
* * * * *
Nevertheless, Mrs. Robert Hayward has not yet been placed in danger of
such a catastrophe, not even when her husband has been laid up with
rheumatic gout. To be sure, her ministrations on those occasions were
more soothing than those of the boys. Perhaps she was even a little
disappointed in her craving for excitement, and her new household ran
almost too smoothly. The boys gave no trouble, though they were aghast
on first hearing that the Colonel really contemplated matrimony, and Bob
reproached himself in no measured terms for having drawn attention to
the "work of Arachne," and driven his uncle to rush madly upon fate. But
Marian made it her particular request that things should go on as
before, which pleased her bridegroom, though he had never dreamed of any
change; and when they came to know her, she pleased the boys as well.
"It's easy enough to get on with Aunt Marian," Bob would say; "she's
such a dear little fool! She swallows everything men tell her, no matter
how outrageous, and thinks if we want the moon, we must have it. If
only Minna would turn out anything like her! But no; they are ruining
all the girls now with their colleges. I doubt if Aunt Marian isn't the
last of her day and generation."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
WHY I MARRIED ELEANOR
It has often been remarked that if every man would truthfully tell how
he wooed and won his wife, the world would be the gainer by a number of
romances of real life which would put to shame the novelist's skill.
"How" is the word usually employed in such cases, and, indeed, properly
enough. There are a number of marriages where the reason is sufficiently
palpable, and where any stronger one fails there is the all-sufficing
one of propinquity. But none of these were allowed in the case of my
marriage with Eleanor. Why did I do it? was the absorbing nine days'
wonder; for, as was unanimously and justly observed, if it were a matter
of propinquity alone, why did I not marry----? But I anticipate.
To begin at the beginning, then, and to tell my tale as truthfully as if
I were on oath; there was no reason why Eleanor, or any other girl,
should not have married me. I was by all odds the best match in New
England, being the only son and heir of Roger Greenway, third of the
name. Whether my father could ever have made a fortune any more than I
could is doubtful; but he inherited a considerable estate, so well
invested that it only needed letting alone to grow, and for this he had
the good sense. Large as it was when I came into it, it was more than
doubled by my prospective wealth on the other side, for my mother was
the oldest of the four daughters of old Jonathan Carver, the last of the
Massachusetts vikings whose names were words of power in the China seas.
My father was an elderly man when he married, and my mother was no
longer young. She and her sisters were handsome, high-bred women, with
every accomplishment and virtue under the sun. They did not, to use the
vulgar phrase, marry off fast. Indeed, the phrase and the very idea
would have shocked them. They were beings of far too much importance to
be so lightly dealt with. When, only a few years before her father's
death, Louisa married Roger Greenway, it was allowed by their whole
world to be a most fitting thing; and when I appeared in due season, the
old gentleman was so delighted that he made a will directly, tying up
his whole estate as tightly as possible for future great-grandchildren.
Some years after his death, my Aunt Clara, the second daughter, married
a Unitarian clergyman of good family, weak lungs, aesthetic tastes, and
small property, who never preached. He lived long enough to catalogue
all our family pictures and bric-a-brac, and arrange the "Carver
Collection" for the Art Museum, and then died of consumption soon after
my own father, leaving no children. By the time these events had passed
with all due observances, Aunt Frances and Aunt Grace thought it was
hardly worth while to marry; there had been a sufficient number of
weddings in the family, and they were very comfortable together--and
then how could they ever want for an object, with that fine boy of dear
Louisa's to bring up? We all had separate households; but my aunts were
always at "Greenways," my place on the borders of Brookline and West
Roxbury, which my father had bought when young and spent the greater
part of his life in bringing to a state of perfection; and my mother and
I were apt to pass the hottest summer months at Manchester-by-the-Sea,
where Aunt Clara, during her married life, had reared a little fairy
palace of her own; and to spend much of the winter at the great old
Carver house on Mount Vernon Street, which Jonathan Carver had left to
his unmarried daughters for life.
I was the first object of four devoted and conscientious women. The
results were different from what might have been expected. The world
said I would be spoiled, and then marvelled that I was not; but my
mother's and aunts' conscientiousness outran their devotion, and they
all felt, though they would not acknowledge it to each other, that I had
rather disappointed them. I grew up a big, handsome young fellow enough,
very young-looking for my age, with a trick of blushing like a girl at
anything or nothing, which gave me much pain, though it won upon all the
old ladies, who said it showed the purity of my mind and the goodness of
my heart.
By the way in which my moral qualities were always selected for praise,
it will be divined that but little could be said for my intellectual.
Had I been a few steps lower on the social ladder, something might have
been said against them. It was only by infinite pains on my own part and
that of the highly salaried tutor who coached me, that I was ever
squeezed through Harvard University. I did squeeze through, and with an
unblemished moral record; my Aunt Clara, the pious one of the family,
said it might have been worse, and my mother, to whom my commencement
day was a blessed release from four years of perpetual worry, said she
was highly gratified at the way in which dear Roger had withstood the
temptations of college life. For this I deserved no credit. The
temptations of which she thought were none to me. Where would have been
the excitement of gambling, when I had nothing to lose? and one brought
up from infancy in an atmosphere of fastidious refinement the baser
female attractions repelled at once, before they had the chance of
charming. I hated tobacco, and liquor of all kinds made me deadly sick.
A more subtle snare was set for me.
Time slipped away for the first few years after I left college. We all
went to Europe and returned. I pottered a little about my place, and
discharged social duties, and such few local political ones as a
position like mine entails even in America. I did not know why I did not
do more, or what more to do. I did not think I was stupid exactly; it
seemed to me that I could do something, if I only knew what. Perhaps I
was slow--I certainly was in thought; but sometimes I startled myself by
hasty action before I thought at all, which gave me a dim consciousness
of the presence of my "genius." My mother's expectations had just begun
to take an apologetic turn, when my Aunt Frances, the clever one of the
family, put forward a bright idea. She said that it was all very well
for a young man who had his own way to make in the world to wait awhile;
a man with my opportunities could never be in a satisfactory position to
employ them until he was married. While I remained single there must
always be speculations, expectations, and reports. Once let me be
married, and all these worries, troublesome and distracting at present,
would receive their proper quietus. The sisters all applauded her
penetration, and all said with one voice that if Roger were to marry, he
could not do better than--but I anticipate again.
Greenways and the neighbouring estates were large, and the only very
near neighbours we had were the Days and the Beechers; in fact, they
were both my tenants. When my father bought the place there was an old
farm-house on it, which, though it stood rather near the spot where he
wished to build, was too well built and too picturesque to pull down.
Old Sanderson, our head gardener for many a year, lived there with his
wife, and their house, with its own pretty garden and little greenhouse,
was one of my favourite haunts when a child. When the old couple died,
nearly at the same time, Sanderson had long left off active work, and
his deputy and successor, Macfarlane, lived in another house some
distance off. My mother said of course she could never put him into the
Garden House with all those children; she could never put another
servant there at all; she hated to pull it down; she did not know what
to do with it. My Aunt Grace, the impulsive one of the family, broke in,
and all the others followed suit with, "Why would it not be just the
thing for Katharine Day?"
Katharine Day had been Katharine Latham, an old school friend of my Aunt
Grace. She was the daughter of a country clergyman, a pretty woman of
fascinating manners, and her relations were very well bred, though poor.
The friendship was an excellent thing for her; I don't mean to say that
it was not so for my aunt also, for I never knew a woman who could pay
back a social debt to a superior more gracefully than Mrs. Day. She was
always a little pitied as not having met with her deserts in marriage,
though Mr. Day was a handsome man, with good connections and a fine
tenor voice. He had some kind of an office with a very fair salary, but
his wife said, and it was a thing generally understood, that they were
very poor. They felt no shame, rather a sort of pride, in getting along
so well in spite of it. They went everywhere, and all her richer friends
admired Mrs. Day for being such a good manager, and dressing and
entertaining so beautifully on positively nothing, and showed their
admiration by deeds as well as words. One paid Phil's college expenses,
another took Katie abroad, and they were always having all kinds of
presents. They were invited everywhere in the height of the season, and
always had tickets for the most reserved of reserved seats. My mother,
or my guardian, for her, let them have the Garden House at a mere
nothing of a rent, but we said that it was really a gain for us, they
would take such beautiful care of it.
Phil Day, though he was some years younger than I, was my classmate in
college, and graduated far ahead of me. My mother was consoled for his
superiority by thinking what a nice intimate friend he was for me. That
he was my intimate friend was settled for me by the universal verdict.
In reality I did not like him at all, but it would have been unkind to
be as offish as I must have been to keep him from being always at my
house, sailing my boats, riding my horses, playing at my billiard-table,
smoking my cigars, and drinking my wines, as naturally as if he had been
my brother, albeit I had a suspicion that these luxuries were not as
harmless to Phil as they were to me. He was a clever, handsome fellow,
and very popular. What I really disliked in him was his being such a
terrible snob, but this was an accusation that it seemed particularly
mean for me to make against him, even to my own mind.
Phil's sister Katie was worth a dozen of him. She was a beautiful
creature, tall and lithe, with a rich colour coming and going under a
clear olive skin, and starry dark eyes that seemed to shoot out rays of
light for the whole length of her long lashes. She was highly
accomplished, and always exquisitely dressed. Mrs. Day said it did not
cost much, for dear Katie was so clever at making her own clothes. To be
sure, she could not make her boots and gloves, her fans and furs, and
these were of the choicest. Their price would have made a large hole in
her father's salary, but probably he was never called upon to pay
it--for I know my Aunt Grace, for one, thought nothing of giving her a
whole box of gloves at a time. Katie inherited all her mother's
fascination of manner and practical talent, and, like her, well knew how
to pay her way. She was a great pet of my mother and aunts. She poured
out tea, and sang after dinner, helped in their charity work, and chose
their presents. They had an idea that I could marry whom I pleased, but
I knew they felt I could not do better than marry Katie. It was their
opinion, and that of every one else, that she deserved a prize in the
matrimonial line. Providence evidently designed that she should get one,
for, as all her friends remarked, "If Katie Day could do so beautifully
with so little, what could she not do if she were rich?" Providence as
evidently had destined me for the lucky man, and even the other young
men bowed to manifest destiny in the united claims of property and
propinquity.
The Beechers lived a little farther off the other way. About them and
their dwelling there was no glamour of boyish memories. The bit of land
on which it stood had always cut awkwardly into ours, and my father had
longed to buy it; but it had some defect in the title which could not be
set right until the death of some old lady in the country. She died at
last just about the time that he did, and in the confusion caused by his
sudden death the land was snapped up by O'Neil, an Irishman, who turned
a penny when he could get a chance by levying blackmail upon a
neighbourhood--buying up bits of land, building tenement houses on them,
and crowding them with the poorest class of his country people, on the
chance of being bought off at last at an exorbitant rate by the
neighbouring proprietors.
In this present case O'Neil had mistaken his man. My guardian and first
cousin once removed, John Greenway, was the last person alive to screw a
penny out of. He would have borne any such infliction himself with
Spartan firmness; judge with what calmness he endured it for a ward. He
built a high wall on O'Neil's boundary, planted trees thickly around
that, and then proceeded to harass the unhappy tenants by every means
within his power and the letter of the law, so that they ran away in
hordes without waiting for quarter-day. O'Neil failed at last, and my
guardian bought in the concern for a song. Before this, however, O'Neil,
in desperate straits, had made a few cheap alterations in the house,
advertised it as a "gentleman's residence," and let it to the Beechers,
who were only too glad to get so well-situated a house so low.
Mr. Beecher was well educated and of a good family, though he had no
near relations who could do anything for him. He had married early a
young lady much in the same condition, and had done but poorly in life,
hampered in all his efforts by a delicate wife and a large family. When
we bought the place I had not attained my legal majority; but I was old
enough to have my wishes respected, and I said positively that I would
not have him turned out. As I used to meet the poor old fellow--not that
he was really old, though he looked to me a perfect Methuselah--with his
grey head and shining, well-brushed coat, trotting to the station, a
good mile and a half off, at seven in the morning, through winter's cold
and summer's heat; and back again after dark, for nine months in the
year, my heart used to ache for him. But I could not tell him so, and of
course there was precious little I could do for him. My mother and aunts
were eminently charitable, but what could they do for Mrs. Beecher? Her
hours and ways and thoughts were not as theirs. She did not come very
often when they invited her, nor seem to enjoy herself very much when
she did. There was but little use in taking her rare flowers and
hothouse grapes, and they could not send her food and clothes as if she
were a poor person. The Beecher house had a garden of its own, out of
which Mr. Beecher, with a little help from his boys, contrived to get
their fruit and vegetables, though it always looked in very poor order.
We were thankful that it was so well shut out from our view, and poor
Mrs. Beecher was equally thankful that her boisterous boys and crying
babies were so well shut in. My mother did not approve of her much, and
said she must lack method not to get on better. Jonathan Carver's
daughters had been so trained by their father that any one of them could
have stepped into his counting-house and balanced his books at a
minute's warning. They kept their own accounts, down to the last mill,
by double entry, and were fond of saying that if you only did this you
would always be able to manage well. They were most kind-hearted, when
they saw their way how to be, but they had been so harassed from
childhood up by begging letter-writers and agents for societies that
they had a horror of leading people to expect anything from them; and
as the Beechers evidently expected nothing, it was best that they
should be left in that blissful condition. They were indeed painfully
overwhelmed by their obligations in the matter of the house. I made the
rent as low as I decently could, and put in improvements whenever I had
the chance. I used to rack my brains to think what more I could do for
them; but in all my wildest dreams it never occurred to me that I might
give them a lift by marrying Eleanor.
Eleanor was their oldest child, and a year or two younger than Katie
Day. She was really as plain as a girl has any right to be. She had the
light eyelashes and freckles which often mar the effect of the prettiest
red hair, and hers was not a pretty shade, but very common carrots. Her
features and her figure were not bad exactly, and her motions had
nothing awkward--one would never have noticed them in any way. It might
have been better for her had she been strikingly ugly. Anything striking
is enough for some clever girls to build upon; but whether Eleanor were
clever or stupid, no one knew or cared to know. She was a good girl, and
helped her mother, and looked after the younger children;--but then, she
had to. Her very goodness was a mere matter of course, and had nothing
for the imagination to dwell upon. She was not a bit more helpful to
her mother than Katie Day was to hers; and if Katie's path of duty led
to trimming hats and writing notes, and Eleanor's to darning the
children's stockings and washing their faces, why, that was no fault in
the one nor merit in the other.
I felt very sorry for Eleanor, when I thought of her at all, which was
not often, but I could do even less for her than for her father. We used
to invite them when we gave anything general, but they did not always
come, and when we sent them tickets they often could not use them. They
had not many other invitations, and could seldom accept any, on account
of the cost of clothes and carriage hire. My mother, of course, could
not take them about much, for there were our own family and the Days,
whom she took everywhere, and who enjoyed going so much. I always asked
Eleanor to dance, but as she was dreadfully afraid of me, I fear it gave
her more pain than pleasure. She did not dance well, and I could not
expect my friends to follow my example. Phil Day, indeed, once declared
that he "drew the line at Eleanor Beecher." I remember longing to kick
him for the speech, and that was the liveliest emotion I ever felt in
connection with her.