NEIGHBORING philosophers who cared, from curiosity or a loftier motive,
to study the Fairchild domestic problem, in all its social and historic
ramifications, generally emerged from the inquiry with some personal
bias against Miss Sabrina, tempered by the conclusion that, after all,
there was a good deal to be said on the old lady’s side.
Certainly, as the grim old maid in the rusty bombazine gown and
cap, which gave a funereal air even to the red plaid shawl over her
shoulders, sat at her upper window, and tried through a pained and
resentful chaos of secular thoughts to follow the Scriptural lines,
there was an extremely vivid conviction uppermost in her mind that
justice had been meted out neither to her nor to the Fairchilds. She
would have repelled indignantly, and honestly enough too, the charge
that there was any bitterness in her heart toward the sister-in-law
whose burial was appointed for the morrow. She had liked poor Cicely, in
her iron-clad way, and had wept genuine tears more than once since her
death. Indeed, her thoughts--and they were persistent, self-asserting
thoughts which not even her favorite recital of Gideon’s sanguinary
triumph could keep back--ran more upon the living than upon the dead.
And what gloomy, melancholy thoughts they were! They swept over two
score of years, the whole gamut of emotion, from the pride and hope of
youth to the anguish of disappointed, wrathful, hopeless old age, as
her hand might cover all there was of sound in music by a run down her
mother’s ancient spinet which stood, mute and forgotten, in the corner
of the room. Her brother, this brother whom satirical fate had made
a Lemuel instead of a Lucy or a Lucretia, a man instead of a woman as
befitted his weakness of mind and spirit--had begun life with a noble
heritage. Where was it now? He had been the heir to a leading position
among the men of his county. What was he now? The Fairchilds had been as
rich, as respected, as influential as any Dearborn family. Who did them
honor now?
The mental answers to these questions blurred Miss Sabrina’s spectacles
with tears, and Gideon’s performance with the lamps seemed a tiresome
thing. She laid the Book aside, and went softly down stairs to her
brother, who sat, still rocking in his late wife’s high, cushioned
arm-chair, disconsolate by the stove.
There were also in the room his oldest son and this son’s wife, sitting
dumbly, each at a window, making a seemly pretence of not being bored by
the meagre prospect without. They looked at their aunt in that far-off
impassive manner with which participants in a high pageant or solemn
observance always regard one another. There was no call for a greeting,
since they had already exchanged whispered salutations, earlier in the
day. Miss Sabrina glanced at the young wife for an instant--it was not a
kindly glance. Then her eyes turned to the husband, and while surveying
him seemed suddenly to light up with some new thought. She almost
smiled, and her tight pressed lips parted. Had they followed the
prompting of the brain and spoken, the words would have been:
“Thank God, there is still Albert!”
Albert Fairchild would have been known in any company, and in any guise,
I think, for a lawyer. The profession had its badge in every line and
aspect of his face, in every movement of his head, and, so it seemed, in
the way he held his hands, in the very tone of his voice. His face
was round, and would have been pleasant, so far as conformation and
expression went, had it not been for the eyes, which were unsympathetic,
almost cold. Often the rest of his countenance was wreathed in amiable
smiles; but the eyes smiled never. He had looked a middle-aged man for
a decade back, and casual acquaintances who met him from year to year
complimented him on not growing old, because they saw no change. In fact
he had been old from the beginning, and even now looked more than his
age, which lacked some few months of forty. He was growing bald above
the temples, and, like all the Fairchilds, was taking on flesh with
increasing years. Nothing could have better shown the extremity of poor
Sabrina’s woe than this clutching at the relief afforded by the sight of
Albert, for she was not on good terms with him. Albert had been born and
reared through boyhood at a time when the farm was still prosperous
and money plenty. He had been educated far beyond the traditions of his
sires, and was the first University man of his family, so far as was
known. He had been given his own bent in all things, before he settled
down to a choice of profession, and then, at considerable expense, had
been secured a place with one of the greatest legal firms in New York
City. For years the first fruits of the soil, the cream off all the
milk--so the Aunt’s mingled scriptural and dairy metaphors ran--had
been his. And what return had they had for it? He had become a sound,
successful lawyer, with a handsome income, and he had married wealth as
well. Yet year after year, as the fortunes of the Fairchild homestead
declined, he had never interfered to prevent the fresh mortgage being
placed--nay, had more than once explicitly declined to help save it.
“Agriculture is out of date in this State,” she had heard him say once,
with her own ears, “Better let the old people live on their capital, as
they go along. It’s no use throwing good money after bad. Farm land here
in the East is bound to decrease in value, steadily.”
This about the homestead--about the cradle of his ancestors! Poor old
lady, had the Fairchilds been sending baronial roots down through all
this soil for a thousand years, she couldn’t have been more pained or
mortified over Albert’s callous view of the farm which her grandfather,
a revolted cobbler from Rhode Island, had cleared and paid for at ten
cents an acre.
Then there was his marriage, too. In all the years of armed neutrality
or tacit warfare which she and Cicely had passed together under one
roof, they had never before or since come so near an open and palpable
rupture as they did over a city-bred cousin of Cicely’s--a forward,
impertinent, ill-behaved girl from New York, who had come to the farm on
a visit some ten years before, and whose father was summoned at last
to take her away because otherwise she, Sabrina, threatened to herself
leave the house. There had been a desperate scene before this conclusion
was reached. Sabrina had stormed and threatened to shake the dust of the
homestead from off her outraged sandals. Cicely for the once had stood
her ground, and said she fancied even worse things than that might
happen without producing a universal cataclysm. Lemuel had almost wept
with despair over the tumult. The two older boys, particularly John, had
not concealed their exuberant hope that their maiden Aunt might be taken
at her word, and allowed to leave. And the girl herself, this impudent
huzzy of a Richardson, actually put her spoke in too, and said things
about old cats and false teeth, which it made Sabrina’s blood still boil
to recall.
And it was this girl, of all others in the world, whom Albert must go
and marry!
Yet Sabrina, in her present despondent mood, felt herself able to rise
above mere personal piques and dislikes, if there really was a hope for
the family’s revival. She was not very sanguine about even Albert, but
beyond him there was no chance at all.
John, the second brother, had talent enough, she supposed. People said
he was smart, and he must be, else he could scarcely have come in his
twenty-eighth year to be owner and editor of the Thessaly _Banner of
Liberty_, and put in all those political pieces written in the first
person plural, as if he had the power of attorney for all Dearborn
county. But then he was mortally shiftless about money matters, and
they did say that since his wife’s death--a mere school-teacher she had
been--he had become quite dissipated and played billiards. Besides she
was at open feud with him, and never, never would speak to him again,
the longest day _he_ lived! So that settled John.
As for Seth, the youngest of the brothers, it is to be doubted if she
would have thought of him at all, had he not come in at the moment. He
had been down to the village to get some black clothes which the tailor
had constructed on short notice for him, and he, too, passed through the
sitting room to the stairs with the serious look and the dead silence
which the awful presence imposes.
Then she did think of him for a moment, as she stood warming her fingers
over the bald, flat top of the stove--for though bright and warm enough
outside, the air was still chilly in these great barns of rooms.
Seth was indisputably the handsomest of all the Fairchilds, even
handsomer than she remembered his father to have been--a tall, straight,
broadshouldered youth, who held his head well up and looked everybody
in the face with honest hazel eyes. He had the Richardson complexion, a
dusky tint gained doubtless from all those Dutch intermarriages of which
poor Cicely used to make so much, but his brown hair curled much as
Lemuel’s used to curl, only not so effeminately, and his temper was as
even as his father’s had been, though not so submissive or weak. His
hands were rough and coarse from the farm work, and his walk showed
familiarity with ploughed ground, but still he had, in his way, a more
distinguished air than either Albert or John had ever had.
Looking him over, a stranger would have been surprised that his aunt
should have left him out of her thoughts of the family’s future--or
that, once pausing to consider him, she should have dropped the idea
so swiftly. But so it was. Miss Sabrina felt cold and aggrieved toward
Albert, and she came as near hating John as a deeply devout woman safely
could. She simply took no account of Seth at all, as she would have
expressed it. To her he was a quiet, harmless sort of youngster, who
worked prettily steadily on the farm, and got on civilly with people.
She understood that he was very fond of reading, but that made no
special impression on her.
If she had been asked, she would undoubtedly have said that Seth was
her favorite nephew--but she had never dreamed of regarding him as a
possible restorer of the family glories.
“Is yer oven hot enough?” she asked Alvira in the kitchen, a minute
later. “If they’s anything I _dew_ hate, it’s a soggy undercrust.”
“I guess I kin manage a batch o’ pies by this time,” returned the
hired-girl with a sniff. Through some unexplained process of reasoning,
Alvira was with the Fairchilds as against the Richardsons, but she was
first of all for herself, against the whole human race.
“Milton gone aout with the caows?” asked the old lady, ignoring for the
once the domestic’s challenge. “When he comes back, he ’n’ Leander
better go over to Wilkinses, and get what chairs they kin spare. I
s’pose there’ll be a big craowd, ef only to git in and see if there’s
any holes in our body-Brussels yit, ’n’ haow that sofy-backed set in
the parlor’s holdin’ out. Poor Cicely! I think they better bring over
the chairs tonight, after dusk. What people don’t see they can’t talk
abaout.”
“Heard Milton say he was goin’ to borrer some over at Warren’s,”
remarked Alvira, in a casual way, but looking around to see how the idea
affected Miss Sabrina.
“Well he jis’ won’t!” came the answer, very promptly and spiritedly.
“If every mortal soul of ’em hes to stan’ up, he won’t! I guess Lemuel
Fairchild’s wife can be buried ’thaout asking any help from Matildy
Warren. I wouldn’t ask her if ’twas th’ las’ thing I ever did.”
“But Annie sent word she was comin’ over fus’ thing in th’ mornin’, so’s
to help clear up th’ breakfast things. If she’s good enough fer that, I
don’t see why you need be afeered o’ borryin’ her chairs.”
“They ain’t her chairs, and you knaow it, Alviry. I ain’t got a word to
say agin’ Annie Fairchild, but when it comes to her gran’ mother, I kin
ride a high horse as well’s she kin. After all the trouble she made my
family, the sight of a single stick of her furnitur’ here’d be enough to
bring the rafters of this haouse daown over my head, I do believe!”
“Well, of course, ‘tain’t none o’ my business, but seems to me there’ll
be a plaguey slim fun’r’l when _your_ turn comes if you’re goin’ to keep
up all these old-woman’s fights with everybody ’raound abaout.”
“Naow Alviry!” began Miss Sabrina, in her shrillest and angriest tone;
then with a visible effort, as if remembering something, she paused and
then went on in a subdued, almost submissive voice, “You knaow jis’ haow
Matildy Warren’s used us. From the very day my poor brother William ran
off with her Jenny--and goodness knaows whatever possessed him to dew
it--thet old woman’s never missed a chance to run us all daown--ez
ef she oughtn’t to been praoud o’ th’ day a Fairchild took up with a
Warren.”
“Guess you ain’t had none the wu’st of it,” put in Alvira, with sarcasm.
“Guess your tongue’s ’baout as sharp as her’n ever was. B’sides she’s
bed-ridden naow, ’n’ everybody thought she wouldn’t get threw th’
spring. ’N’ ef Seth’s goin’ to make up to Annie, you ought to begin to
smooth things over ’fore she dies. There’s no tellin’ but what she
mightn’t leave the farm away f’m th’ girl at th’ last minute, jis’ to
spite you.”
“Yeh needn’t talk as if _I_ wanted her pesky farm!”
“Oh, well now, you knaow what I mean’s well’s I dew. What’s th’ use
o’ harpin’ on what yer brother William did, or what ole Matildy said,
’fore I was born, when you knaow th’ tew farms jine, and yer heart’s
sot on havin’ ’em in one--Yes, ’fore I was born,” repeated the
domestic, as if pleased with the implication of juvenility.
Miss Sabrina hesitated, and looked at Alvira meditatively through her
spectacles, in momentary doubt about the propriety of saying a sharp
thing under all the circumstances; but the temptation was not to be
resisted. “’N’ you ain’t percisely a chicken yourself, Alviry,” she
said and left the kitchen.
Later, when Milton had returned from the pasture, and hung about the
kitchen, mending the harness that went with the democrat-wagon while
waiting for Leander to return from the cheese factory, Alvira remarked:
“Seems ’if Sabriny’d lost all her sper’t this last day or tew. Never
see sech a change. She don’t answer up wuth a cent. I shouldn’t be
s’prised if she didn’t tackle Albert’s wife after all. Oh yes, ’n’ you
ain’t to go to Warren’s for them chairs. Sa-briny’s dead-set agin that.”
“What’s up?” asked Milton, “Hez Seth broke off with Annie?”
“Don’t knaow’s they ever was anything particular to break off. No, ’t
’aint that; it’s the same raow ‘tween the two ole women. Goodness
knaows, I’m sick ’n’ tired of hearin’ ’baout it.”
“No, but ain’t Seth ’n’ Annie fixed it up?” persisted Milton; “Daown’t
th’ corners they say it’s all settled.” Then he mutteringly added, as
he slouched out to meet Leander, who drove up now with a great rattle of
empty milk-cans. “I wish’t _I_ was in Seth’s shoes.”
“Oh, you _dew_, dew yeh!” said Alvira, thus left to herself.