Ef ther’ ain’t a flare-up in _this_ haouse ’fore long, I miss _my_
guess,” said Alvira, as she kneaded the pie-crust, and pulled it out
between her floury fingers to measure its consistency. “Ole Sabriny’s
got her back up this time to stay.”
“Well, let ’em flare, says I. ’Taint none o’ aour business, Alviry.”
“I knaow, Milton; but still it seems to me she might wait at least till
th’ corpse was aout o’ th’ haouse.”
“What’s thet got to dew with it?”
The callousness of the question must have grated upon the hired-girl,
for she made no reply, and slapped the dough over on the board with an
impatient gesture.
It was near the close of a fair day, late in May, and the reddened
sunlight from the West would have helped to glorify any human being
less hopelessly commonplace than Milton Squires as he sat in its full
radiance on the doorstep, peeling and quartering apples over a pan which
he held between his knees. This sunlight, to reach him, painted
with warm tints many objects near at hand which it could not make
picturesque. The three great barns, standing in the shadow to the south,
were ricketty and ancient without being comely, and the glare only made
their awkward outlines and patched, paintless surfaces the meaner; the
score of lean cows, standing idly fetlock-deep in the black mire of
the barnyard, or nipping the scant tufts of rank grass near the trough,
seemed all the dingier and scrawnier for the brilliancy of the light
which covered them; the broken gate, the bars eked out with a hop-pole,
the wheelbarrow turned shiftlessly against a break in the wall, the
mildewed wellcurb, with its antiquated reach--all seemed in this glow of
dying day to be conscious of exhibiting at its worse their squalid side.
The sunset could not well have illumined, during that hour at least, a
less inspiring scene than this which Alvira, looking out as she talked,
or the hired man, raising his head from over the apples, could see from
the kitchen door of Lemuel Fairchild’s farm-house. But any student of
his species would have agreed that, in all the uninviting view, Milton
was the least attractive object.
As he rose to empty his pan within, and start afresh, he could be
seen more fully. He was clumsily cased from neck to ankles in brown
over-alls, threadbare, discolored, patched, with mud about the knees and
ragged edges lower down. He wore rubber boots, over the bulging legs
of which the trousers came reluctantly, and the huge feet of these
were slit down the instep. His hat had been soft and black once; now it
seemed stiffened with dirt, to which the afternoon milking had lent a
new contribution of short reddish hair, and was shapeless and colorless
from age. His back was narrow and bent, and his long arms terminated
in hands which it seemed sinful to have touch anything thereafter to be
eaten. Viewed from behind, Milton appeared to be at least fifty. But his
face showed a somewhat younger man, despite its sun-baked lines and the
frowzy beard which might be either the yellow of unkempt youth or the
gray of untidy age. In reality he was not yet thirty-six.
He slouched out now with a fresh lot of apples, and, squatting on the
door-stone, resumed the conversation.
“I s’pose naow Sissly’s gone, ther’ won’t be no livin’ under th’ same
roof with Sabriny fer any of us. Ther’ ain’t nobuddy lef’ fer her to
rassle with ’cep’ us. Ole Lemuel’s so broken-up, he won’t dare say his
soul’s his own; ’n John--well, Lize Wilkins says she heerd him say he
didn’t know’s he’d come to th’ funer’l ’t all, after th’ way him ’n’
Sabriny hed it aout las’ time he was here.”
“I wasn’t talkin’ o’ _them!_” said Alvira, slapping the flour from her
hands’ and beginning with the roller; “it’d be nothin’ new, her tryin’
to boss _them_. But she’s got her dander up naow agin somebuddy that
beats them all holler. They won’t no Richardsons come puttin’ on airs
’raoun’ here, an’ takin’ th’ parlor bedroom ’thaout askin’, not ef
th’ ole lady knaows herself--’n’ I guess she does.”
“What Richardsons?” asked Milton. “Thought Sissly was th’ last of
’em--thet they wa’n’t no more Richardsons.”
“Why, man alive, ain’t Albert’s wife a Richardson, th’ daughter of
Sissly’s cousin--you remember, that pock-pitted man who kep’ th’ fast
hoss here one summer. Of course she’s a Richardson--full-blooded! When
she come up from th’ train here this mornin’, with Albert, I see by th’
ole lady’s eye ’t she meant misch’f. I didn’t want to see no raow,
here with a corpse in th’ haouse, ’n’ so I tried to smooth matters
over, ’n’ kind o’ quiet Sabriny daown, tellin’ her thet they had to
come to th’ fu-ner’l, ’n’ they’d go ’way soon’s it was through with,
’n’ that Albert, bein’ the oldest son, hed a right to th’ comp’ny
bed-room.”
“’N’ what’d she say?”
“She didn’t say much, ’cep’ thet th’ Richardsons hed never brung
nothin’ but bad luck to this haouse, ’n’ they never would, nuther.
’N’ then she flaounced upstairs to her room, jis’s she allus does when
she’s riled, ’n’ she give Albert’s wife sech a look, I said to m’self,
‘Milady, I wouldn’t be in _your_ shoes fer all yer fine fixin’s.’”
“Well, she’s a dum likely lookin’ woman, ef she _is_ a Richardson,” said
Milton, with something like enthusiasm. “Wonder ef she wears one o’ them
low-necked gaowns when she’s to hum, like th’ picters in th’ _Ledger_.
They say they all dew, in New York.”
“Haow sh’d I knaow!” Alvira sharply responded. “I got enough things to
think of, ’thaout both’rin’ my head abaout city women’s dresses. ’N’
you ought to hev, tew. Ef you’n’ Leander’d pay more heed to yer work,
’n’ dew yer chores up ship-shape, ’n’ spen’ less time porin’ over
them good-fer-nothin’ story-papers, th’ farm wouldn’t look so run-daown
’n’ slaouchy. Did yeh hear what Albert said this mornin’, when he
looked ’raoun’? ‘I swan! ’ he said, ‘I b’lieve this is th’ seediest
lookin’ place ’n all Northern New York.’ Nice thing fer him to hev to
say, wa’n’t it!”
“What d’ I keer what _he_ says? He ain’t th’ boss here, by a jug-full!”
“’N’ more’s th’ pity, tew. He’d make yeh toe th’ mark!”
“Yes, ’n’ Sabriny’d make it lively fer his wife, tew. Th’ ole
fight ’baout th’ Fairchileses ’n’ th’ Richardsons wouldn’t be a
succumstance to thet. Sissly’d thank her stars thet she was dead ’n’
buried aout o’ th’ way.”
These two hired people, who discussed their employer and his family with
that easy familiarity of Christian names to be found only in Russia
and rural America, knew very well what portended to the house when the
Richardson subject came up. Alvira Roberts had spent more than twenty
years of her life in the thick of the gaseous strife between Fairchild
and Richardson. She was a mere slip of a girl, barely thirteen, when she
had first hired out at the homestead, and now, black-browed, sallow from
much tea-drinking, and with a sharp, deep wrinkle vertically dividing
her high forehead, she looked every year of her thirty-five. Compared
with her, Milton Squires was a new comer on the farm, but still there
were lean old cows over yonder in the barnyard, lazily waiting for the
night-march to the pastures, that had been ravenous calves in their
gruel-bucket stage when he came.
What these two did not know about the Fairchild family was hardly worth
the knowing. Something of what they knew, the reader ought here to be
told.