One day, many years ago, the old Judge Pyne house wore an unwonted look
of gayety and youthfulness. The high-fenced green garden was bright with
June flowers. Under the elms in the large shady front yard you might see
some chairs placed near together, as they often used to be when the
family were all at home and life was going on gayly with eager talk and
pleasure-making; when the elder judge, the grandfather, used to quote
that great author, Dr. Johnson, and say to his girls, “Be brisk, be
splendid, and be public.”
One of the chairs had a crimson silk shawl thrown carelessly over its
straight back, and a passer-by, who looked in through the latticed gate
between the tall gate-posts with their white urns, might think that this
piece of shining East Indian color was a huge red lily that had suddenly
bloomed against the syringa bush. There were certain windows thrown wide
open that were usually shut, and their curtains were blowing free in the
light wind of a summer afternoon; it looked as if a large household had
returned to the old house to fill the prim best rooms and find them full
of cheer.
It was evident to every one in town that Miss Harriet Pyne, to use the
village phrase, had company. She was the last of her family, and was by
no means old; but being the last, and wonted to live with people much
older than herself, she had formed all the habits of a serious elderly
person. Ladies of her age, something past thirty, often wore discreet
caps in those days, especially if they were married, but being single,
Miss Harriet clung to youth in this respect, making the one concession
of keeping her waving chestnut hair as smooth and stiffly arranged as
possible. She had been the dutiful companion of her father and mother in
their latest years, all her elder brothers and sisters having married
and gone, or died and gone, out of the old house. Now that she was left
alone it seemed quite the best thing frankly to accept the fact of age,
and to turn more resolutely than ever to the companionship of duty and
serious books. She was more serious and given to routine than her elders
themselves, as sometimes happened when the daughters of New England
gentlefolks were brought up wholly in the society of their elders. At
thirty-five she had more reluctance than her mother to face an
unforeseen occasion, certainly more than her grandmother, who had
preserved some cheerful inheritance of gayety and worldliness from
colonial times.
There was something about the look of the crimson silk shawl in the
front yard to make one suspect that the sober customs of the best house
in a quiet New England village were all being set at defiance, and once
when the mistress of the house came to stand in her own doorway, she
wore the pleased but somewhat apprehensive look of a guest. In these
days New England life held the necessity of much dignity and discretion
of behavior; there was the truest hospitality and good cheer in all
occasional festivities, but it was sometimes a self-conscious
hospitality, followed by an inexorable return to asceticism both of diet
and of behavior. Miss Harriet Pyne belonged to the very dullest days of
New England, those which perhaps held the most priggishness for the
learned professions, the most limited interpretation of the word
“evangelical,” and the pettiest indifference to large things. The
outbreak of a desire for larger religious freedom caused at first a most
determined reaction toward formalism, especially in small and quiet
villages like Ashford, intently busy with their own concerns. It was
high time for a little leaven to begin its work, in this moment when the
great impulses of the war for liberty had died away and those of the
coming war for patriotism and a new freedom had hardly yet begun.
The dull interior, the changed life of the old house, whose former
activities seemed to have fallen sound asleep, really typified these
larger conditions, and a little leaven had made its easily recognized
appearance in the shape of a light-hearted girl. She was Miss Harriet’s
young Boston cousin, Helena Vernon, who, half-amused and half-impatient
at the unnecessary sober-mindedness of her hostess and of Ashford in
general, had set herself to the difficult task of gayety. Cousin Harriet
looked on at a succession of ingenious and, on the whole, innocent
attempts at pleasure, as she might have looked on at the frolics of a
kitten who easily substitutes a ball of yarn for the uncertainties of a
bird or a wind-blown leaf, and who may at any moment ravel the fringe of
a sacred curtain-tassel in preference to either.
Helena, with her mischievous appealing eyes, with her enchanting old
songs and her guitar, seemed the more delightful and even reasonable
because she was so kind to everybody, and because she was a beauty. She
had the gift of most charming manners. There was all the unconscious
lovely ease and grace that had come with the good breeding of her city
home, where many pleasant people came and went; she had no fear, one had
almost said no respect, of the individual, and she did not need to think
of herself. Cousin Harriet turned cold with apprehension when she saw
the minister coming in at the front gate, and wondered in agony if
Martha were properly attired to go to the door, and would by any chance
hear the knocker; it was Helena who, delighted to have anything happen,
ran to the door to welcome the Reverend Mr. Crofton as if he were a
congenial friend of her own age. She could behave with more or less
propriety during the stately first visit, and even contrive to lighten
it with modest mirth, and to extort the confession that the guest had a
tenor voice, though sadly out of practice; but when the minister
departed a little flattered, and hoping that he had not expressed
himself too strongly for a pastor upon the poems of Emerson, and feeling
the unusual stir of gallantry in his proper heart, it was Helena who
caught the honored hat of the late Judge Pyne from its last
resting-place in the hall, and holding it securely in both hands,
mimicked the minister’s self-conscious entrance. She copied his pompous
and anxious expression in the dim parlor in such delicious fashion that
Miss Harriet, who could not always extinguish a ready spark of the
original sin of humor, laughed aloud.
“My dear!” she exclaimed severely the next moment, “I am ashamed of your
being so disrespectful!” and then laughed again, and took the affecting
old hat and carried it back to its place.
“I would not have had any one else see you for the world,” she said
sorrowfully as she returned, feeling quite self-possessed again, to the
parlor doorway; but Helena still sat in the minister’s chair, with her
small feet placed as his stiff boots had been, and a copy of his solemn
expression before they came to speaking of Emerson and of the guitar. “I
wish I had asked him if he would be so kind as to climb the
cherry-tree,” said Helena, unbending a little at the discovery that her
cousin would consent to laugh no more. “There are all those ripe
cherries on the top branches. I can climb as high as he, but I can’t
reach far enough from the last branch that will bear me. The minister is
so long and thin”—
“I don’t know what Mr. Crofton would have thought of you; he is a very
serious young man,” said cousin Harriet, still ashamed of her laughter.
“Martha will get the cherries for you, or one of the men. I should not
like to have Mr. Crofton think you were frivolous, a young lady of your
opportunities”—but Helena had escaped through the hall and out at the
garden door at the mention of Martha’s name. Miss Harriet Pyne sighed
anxiously, and then smiled, in spite of her deep convictions, as she
shut the blinds and tried to make the house look solemn again.
The front door might be shut, but the garden door at the other end of
the broad hall was wide open upon the large sunshiny garden, where the
last of the red and white peonies and the golden lilies, and the first
of the tall blue larkspurs lent their colors in generous fashion. The
straight box borders were all in fresh and shining green of their new
leaves, and there was a fragrance of the old garden’s inmost life and
soul blowing from the honeysuckle blossoms on a long trellis. It was now
late in the afternoon, and the sun was low behind great apple-trees at
the garden’s end, which threw their shadows over the short turf of the
bleaching-green. The cherry-trees stood at one side in full sunshine,
and Miss Harriet, who presently came to the garden steps to watch like a
hen at the water’s edge, saw her cousin’s pretty figure in its white
dress of India muslin hurrying across the grass. She was accompanied by
the tall, ungainly shape of Martha the new maid, who, dull and
indifferent to every one else, showed a surprising willingness and
allegiance to the young guest.
“Martha ought to be in the dining-room, already, slow as she is; it
wants but half an hour of tea-time,” said Miss Harriet, as she turned
and went into the shaded house. It was Martha’s duty to wait at table,
and there had been many trying scenes and defeated efforts toward her
education. Martha was certainly very clumsy, and she seemed the clumsier
because she had replaced her aunt, a most skillful person, who had but
lately married a thriving farm and its prosperous owner. It must be
confessed that Miss Harriet was a most bewildering instructor, and that
her pupil’s brain was easily confused and prone to blunders. The coming
of Helena had been somewhat dreaded by reason of this incompetent
service, but the guest took no notice of frowns or futile gestures at
the first tea-table, except to establish friendly relations with Martha
on her own account by a reassuring smile. They were about the same age,
and next morning, before cousin Harriet came down, Helena showed by a
word and a quick touch the right way to do something that had gone wrong
and been impossible to understand the night before. A moment later the
anxious mistress came in without suspicion, but Martha’s eyes were as
affectionate as a dog’s, and there was a new look of hopefulness on her
face; this dreaded guest was a friend after all, and not a foe come from
proud Boston to confound her ignorance and patient efforts.
The two young creatures, mistress and maid, were hurrying across the
bleaching-green.
“I can’t reach the ripest cherries,” explained Helena politely, “and I
think that Miss Pyne ought to send some to the minister. He has just
made us a call. Why, Martha, you haven’t been crying again!”
“Yes’m,” said Martha sadly. “Miss Pyne always loves to send something to
the minister,” she acknowledged with interest, as if she did not wish to
be asked to explain these latest tears.
“We’ll arrange some of the best cherries in a pretty dish. I’ll show you
how, and you shall carry them over to the parsonage after tea,” said
Helena cheerfully, and Martha accepted the embassy with pleasure. Life
was beginning to hold moments of something like delight in the last few
days.
“You’ll spoil your pretty dress, Miss Helena,” Martha gave shy warning,
and Miss Helena stood back and held up her skirts with unusual care
while the country girl, in her heavy blue checked gingham, began to
climb the cherry-tree like a boy.
Down came the scarlet fruit like bright rain into the green grass.
“Break some nice twigs with the cherries and leaves together; oh, you’re
a duck, Martha!” and Martha, flushed with delight, and looking far more
like a thin and solemn blue heron, came rustling down to earth again,
and gathered the spoils into her clean apron.
That night at tea, during her handmaiden’s temporary absence, Miss
Harriet announced, as if by way of apology, that she thought Martha was
beginning to understand something about her work. “Her aunt was a
treasure, she never had to be told anything twice; but Martha has been
as clumsy as a calf,” said the precise mistress of the house. “I have
been afraid sometimes that I never could teach her anything. I was quite
ashamed to have you come just now, and find me so unprepared to
entertain a visitor.”
“Oh, Martha will learn fast enough because she cares so much,” said the
visitor eagerly. “I think she is a dear good girl. I do hope that she
will never go away. I think she does things better every day, cousin
Harriet,” added Helena pleadingly, with all her kind young heart. The
china-closet door was open a little way, and Martha heard every word.
From that moment, she not only knew what love was like, but she knew
love’s dear ambitions. To have come from a stony hill farm and a bare
small wooden house, was like a cave-dweller’s coming to make a permanent
home in an art museum, such had seemed the elaborateness and elegance of
Miss Pyne’s fashion of life; and Martha’s simple brain was slow enough
in its processes and recognitions. But with this sympathetic ally and
defender, this exquisite Miss Helena who believed in her, all
difficulties appeared to vanish.
Later that evening, no longer homesick or hopeless, Martha returned from
her polite errand to the minister, and stood with a sort of triumph
before the two ladies, who were sitting in the front doorway, as if they
were waiting for visitors, Helena still in her white muslin and red
ribbons, and Miss Harriet in a thin black silk. Being happily
self-forgetful in the greatness of the moment, Martha’s manners were
perfect, and she looked for once almost pretty and quite as young as she
was.
“The minister came to the door himself, and returned his thanks. He said
that cherries were always his favorite fruit, and he was much obliged to
both Miss Pyne and Miss Vernon. He kept me waiting a few minutes, while
he got this book ready to send to you, Miss Helena.”
“What are you saying, Martha? I have sent him nothing!” exclaimed Miss
Pyne, much astonished. “What does she mean, Helena?”
“Only a few cherries,” explained Helena. “I thought Mr. Crofton would
like them after his afternoon of parish calls. Martha and I arranged
them before tea, and I sent them with our compliments.”
“Oh, I am very glad you did,” said Miss Harriet, wondering, but much
relieved. “I was afraid”—
“No, it was none of my mischief,” answered Helena daringly. “I did not
think that Martha would be ready to go so soon. I should have shown you
how pretty they looked among their green leaves. We put them in one of
your best white dishes with the openwork edge. Martha shall show you
to-morrow; mamma always likes to have them so.” Helena’s fingers were
busy with the hard knot of a parcel.
“See this, cousin Harriet!” she announced proudly, as Martha disappeared
round the corner of the house, beaming with the pleasures of adventure
and success. “Look! the minister has sent me a book: Sermons on _what_?
Sermons—it is so dark that I can’t quite see.”
“It must be his ‘Sermons on the Seriousness of Life;’ they are the only
ones he has printed, I believe,” said Miss Harriet, with much pleasure.
“They are considered very fine discourses. He pays you a great
compliment, my dear. I feared that he noticed your girlish levity.”
“I behaved beautifully while he stayed,” insisted Helena. “Ministers are
only men,” but she blushed with pleasure. It was certainly something to
receive a book from its author, and such a tribute made her of more
value to the whole reverent household. The minister was not only a man,
but a bachelor, and Helena was at the age that best loves conquest; it
was at any rate comfortable to be reinstated in cousin Harriet’s good
graces.
“Do ask the kind gentleman to tea! He needs a little cheering up,”
begged the siren in India muslin, as she laid the shiny black volume of
sermons on the stone doorstep with an air of approval, but as if they
had quite finished their mission.
“Perhaps I shall, if Martha improves as much as she has within the last
day or two,” Miss Harriet promised hopefully. “It is something I always
dread a little when I am all alone, but I think Mr. Crofton likes to
come. He converses so elegantly.”