Lemuel Fairchild, the bowed, gray-haired, lumpish man who at this time
sat in the main living room within, feebly rocking himself by the huge
wood-stove, and trying vaguely as he had been for thirty-six hours
past, to realize that his wife lay in her final sleep in the adjoining
chamber, had forty-odd years before been as likely a young farmer as
Dearborn County knew. He was fine-looking and popular in those days, and
old Seth Fairchild, dying unexpectedly, had left to this elder son his
whole possessions--six hundred acres of dairy and hop land, free and
clear, a residence much above the average farm-house of these parts, and
a tidy sum of money in the bank.
The contrast now was sweeping. The Fairchild’s house was still the
largest residential structure on the Burfield road, which led from
Thessaly across the hills to remote and barbarous latitudes, but respect
had long since ceased to accrue to it upon the score of its size. To
the local eye, it was the badge and synonym of “rack and ruin;” while
sometimes strangers of artistic tastes, chancing to travel by this
unfrequented road, would voice regrets that such a prospect as opened to
the vision just here, with the noble range of hills behind for the first
time looming in their true proportions, should be spoiled by such a
gaunt, unsightly edifice, with its tumble-down surroundings, its staring
windows cheaply curtained with green paper, and its cheerless, shabby
color--that indescribable gray with which rain and frost and Father Time
supplant unrenewed white. The garden, comprising a quarter-acre to the
east of the house, was a tangled confusion of flowers and weeds and
berry-bushes run wild, yet the effect somehow was mean rather than
picturesque. The very grass in the yard to the west did not grow
healthfully, but revealed patches of sandy barrenness, created by feet
too indifferent or unruly to keep the path to the barns.
Yet the neighbors said, and Lemuel had come himself to feel, that the
blame of this sad falling off was not fairly his. There had been a fatal
defect in the legacy.
The one needful thing which the Hon. Seth Fairchild did _not_ leave his
elder son was the brains by means of which he himself, in one way
or another, had gathered together a substantial competency, won two
elections to the State Senate, and established and held for himself the
position of leading citizen in his town--that most valued and intangible
of American local distinctions. But while Lemuel’s brown hair curled
so prettily, and his eyes shone with the modest light of wealthy and
well-behaved youth, nobody missed the brains. If there was any change in
the management of the farm, it passed unnoticed, for all attention was
centred on the great problem, interesting enough always when means seeks
a help-meet, but indescribably absorbing in rural communities, where
everybody knows everybody and casual gallants never come for those
luckless damsels neglected by native swains--Whom will he marry?
It boots not now to recall the heart-burnings, the sad convictions that
life would henceforth be a blank, the angry repinings at fate, which
desolated the village of Thessaly and vicinity when Lemuel, returning
from a mid-winter visit to Albany, brought a bride in the person of a
bright eyed, handsome and clever young lady who had been Miss Cicely
Richardson. He had known her, so they learned, for some years--not only
during his school-days at the Academy there, but later, in what was
mysteriously known in Thessaly as “society,” in whose giddy mazes he had
mingled while on a visit to his legislative sire at the Capital City.
No, it is not worth while to dwell upon the village hopes rudely
destroyed by this shock--for they are dim memories of the far, far past.
But to one the blow was a disappointment not to be forgotten, or to grow
dim in recollection. Miss Sabrina Fairchild was two years younger than
her brother in age--a score of years his senior in firmness and will.
She had only a small jointure in her father’s estate, because she had
great expectations from an aunt in Ohio, in perpetual memory of whose
anticipated bounty she bore her scriptural name, but she was a charge on
her brother in that she was to have a home with him until she chose
to leave it for one of her own. I doubt not that her sagacious father
foresaw, from his knowledge of his daughter, the improbability that this
second home would ever be offered her.
Miss Sabrina, even at this tender age, was clearly not of the marrying
kind, and she grew less so with great steadiness. She was at this early
date, when she was twenty-four, a woman of markedly strong character, of
which perhaps the most distinct trait was family pride.
There has been a considerable army of State Senators since New York
first took on the honors of a Commonwealth, and unto them a great troop
of daughters have been born, but surely no other of all these girls
ever exulted so fondly, nay, fiercely, in the paternal dignity as did
Sabrina. She knew nothing of politics, and little of the outside world;
her conceptions of social possibilities were of the most primitive sort;
one winter, when she went to Albany with her father, and was passed in
a bewildered way through sundry experiences said to be of a highly
fashionable nature, it had been temporarily apparent to her
own consciousness that she was an awkward, ignorant, red-armed
country-girl--but this only for one wretched hour or so. Every mile-post
passed on her homeward ride, as she looked through the stage window,
brought restored self-confidence, and long before the tedious journey
ended she was more the Senator’s daughter than ever.
Through this very rebound from mortification she queened it over
the simpler souls of the village with renewed severity and pomp. The
itinerant singing master who thought to get her for the asking into his
class in the school-house Wednesday evenings, was frozen by the amazed
disdain of her refusal. When young Smith Thurber, the kiln-keeper’s son,
in the flippant spirit of fine buttons and a resplendent fob, asked her
to dance a measure with him at the Wallaces’ party, the iciness of her
stare fairly took away his breath.
Something can be guessed of her emotions when the brother brought home
his bride. With a halfcowardly, half-kindly idea of postponing the
trouble certain to ensue, he had given Sabrina no warning of his
intention, and, through the slow mails of that date, only a day’s
advance notice of his return with Mrs. Lemuel. The storm did not burst
at once. Indeed it may be said never to have really burst. Sabrina
was not a bad woman, according to her lights, and she did nothing
consciously to make her sister-in-law unhappy. The young wife had a
light heart, a sensible mind and the faculty of being cheerful about
many things which might be expected to annoy. But she had some pride,
too, and although at the outset it was the very simple and praiseworthy
pride of a well-meaning individual, incessant vaunting of the Fairchilds
quite naturally gave a family twist to it, and she soon was able to
resent slights in the name of all the Richardsons.
After all, was she not in the right? for while the grass was scarcely
green on the grave of the first Fairchild who had amounted to anything,
there were six generations of Richardsons in Albany chronicles alone who
had married into the best Dutch families of that ancient, aristocratic
town, to say nothing of the New England record antedating that
period. Thus the case appeared to her, and came gradually to have more
prominence in her mind than, in her maiden days, she could have thought
possible.
So this great Forty Years’ War began, in which there was to be no single
grand, decisive engagement, but a thousand petty skirmishes and little
raids, infinitely more vexatious and exhausting, and was waged until the
weaker of the combatants, literally worn out in the fray, had laid down
her arms and her life together, and was at peace at last, under the
sheet in the darkened parlor.
The other veteran party to the feud, her thin, iron-gray hair half
concealed under a black knit cap, her bold, sharp face red as with
stains of tears, sat at the window of her own upper room, reading her
Bible. If Milton and Alvira had known that she was reading in Judges,
they might have been even more confident of a coming “flare-up.”