Lemuel Fairchild sat still, smoking his wooden pipe, and looking
absently, straight ahead, into the papered wall. This habit of gazing at
nothing was familiar to them all, and when, at Isabel’s suggestion, the
three young people started for a stroll through the orchard path, they
left him entirely without ceremony. This was growing to be the rule; no
one in the family now consulted him, or took the trouble to be polite
to him. He seemed to have become in his own house merely an article of
animated furniture, of not much more importance than the rough-furred
sickly old cat who dozed his life away back of the stove.
He sat thus in solitude for some time, blankly studying the grotesque
patterns in the old-fashioned wall-paper, and drawing mechanically at
the pipe in his mouth, unconscious that no smoke came. Thus Miss Sabrina
found him when, after a more than ordinarily sharp passage at arms with
Alvira, she returned from the Kitchen.
“I swaow! thet girl gits wuss tempered ’n’ more presumin’ ev’ry day o’
her life,” she exclaimed.
“Who--Annie?” asked her brother, rousing himself as if from a nap.
“Annie! nao! who’s talkin’ abaout _her?_”
“Oh nothin’, unly I was thinkin’ ’baout Annie--‘baout her ’n’ Seth,
yeh knaow,” answered Lemuel, apologetically.
“Well, what abaout ’em?” The query was distinctly aggressive in tone.
“Oh, nothin’ much. I was sort o’ thinkin’--well, _you_ knaow S’briny,
haow Sissly used to lot on their makin’ a match of it--’n’ I was kine
o’ wond’rin’ ef this here notion o’ Seth’s goin’ away wouldn’t knock it
all in th’ head.”
“Well?” Miss Sabrina’s monosyllabic comment had so little of sympathy
or acquiescence in it, that Lemuel continued in an injured tone and with
more animation, not to say resolution:
“Well, I’ve hed kine of an idea o’ goin’ over ’n’ talkin’ it over with
M’tildy. Mebbe that’ll be the best thing to dew.”
“Oh _you_ think so, dew yeh? Thet’s all th’ pride _you’ve_ got lef’, is
it? I think I see _my_self goin’ hangin’ raound Matildy Warren, beggin’
her to let her granddaughter marry a Fairchild! I’m ashamed of yeh,
Lemuel.”
“I don’ see, much, what ther’ is to be ashamed on.” He added, with the
faintest shadow of a grin on his face. “’N’ b’twixt you ’n’ me, I
don’t see ’s there’s so blamed much fur me to be praoud abaout, nuther.
‘Tain’t’s if I was goin’ to ask a favor o’ M’tildy, at all. She ’n’
Sissly used to talk ‘baout the thing’s if ’twas settled. ’N’ now’t
she’s gone, ’n’ Seth’s talkin’ o’ quittin’ th’ farm, seems to me it’d
be the sensible thing to kind o’ fine aout ef M’tildy wouldn’t offer th’
young folks her farm, ef they’d stay.”
“_Very_ well, sir. Hev’ yer own way,” answered Miss Sabrina, with stern
formality. “You allus _would_ hev yer own way--and yeh kin go muddle
things up to yer heart’s content, for all o’ me!”
Lemuel watched his sister march to the stairs door and close it
decisively behind her. He was accustomed of old to this proof of her
wrath; as far back as he could remember it had been Sabrina’s habit
to figuratively wash her hands of unpleasant complications on the
ground-floor by slamming this self-same door, and going up to sulk in
her own room. She did it as a young girl, in the first months of her
disagreements with his young wife; it seemed to him a most natural
proceeding now, when they were both old, gray-headed people.
Just now, it was a relief to him that she had gone, for if she had
stayed he might not have had the courage to put his thoughts into
actions. As it was he took his hat from its nail back of the kitchen
door, and started across-lots for the Warren homestead.
*****
There was no danger of not finding Mrs. Warren at home. For seven or
eight years she had scarcely stirred beyond her own door, and for the
past eighteen months she had been bed-ridden. The front door was
opened to Mr. Fairchild by a young slip of a girl, one of the brood of
daughters with which a neighboring poor family was weighted down, and
all of whom had been driven to seek work at any price among the farmers
of the vicinity. It seemed as if there was a Lawton girl in every other
farmhouse the whole length of the Burfield road.
The girl ushered him into the gloomy hall, gloomier than ever now in the
gathering twilight, and unceremoniously left him there, while she went
to announce his presence. He heard through a door ajar at the end of the
hall a thin, querulous voice ask, “Which one of the Fairchilds is it?”
and the girl’s reply “The old man.”
Then the servant returned to him and with a curt “Come ahead,” led him
to the mistress of the house, who lay in her bed-home, in a recess off
the living room.
Mrs. Matilda Warren had never been what might be called a popular woman
in the neighborhood. She and her husband, the latter dead now for many
years, had come from Massachusetts. They were educated people in a
sense, and had not mingled easily with their rougher neighbors.
The widow Warren had, after her daughter’s escapade, carried this
exclusiveness to a point which the neighborhood found disagreeable.
Gradually she had grown into the recluse habit, and younger generations
on the hillside, eking out the gossip of their elders with fancies of
their own, born of stray glimpses of her tall, gaunt figure and pale
face, came to regard her with much that same awe which, two centuries
before, reputed witches had for children, young and old.
Something of this feeling Lemuel himself was conscious of, as he stood
before her. The coverlet came up close under her arms. She wore a
wrapper-dress of red flannel. As he entered she raised herself, with an
evidently cruel effort, upon her elbow, dragging the pillow down to
aid in supporting her shoulder. She panted with this exertion as she
confronted him. Her scanty white hair was combed tightly back from her
forehead, and bound in place with a black-velvet band; a natural parting
on the side of the hair gave the withered face a suggestion of juvenile
jauntiness, in grotesque, jarring contrast with the pale blue eyes
which glittered from caverns of dark wrinkles, and the sunken, distorted
mouth. She had changed so vastly since their last meeting that Lemuel
stood bewildered and silent, staring at her.
She spoke first. “I’m trying to think--it must be twenty year since
we’ve met, Lemuel Fairchild.”
“Nigh onto that, M’tildy,” he replied, turning his hat in his hands.
“I didn’t expect ever to lay eyes on you again, I couldn’t come to you,
and wouldn’t if I could, and I didn’t dream you would ever show your
face here.” The aged woman said this in a high, sharp voice, speaking
rapidly and with an ungracious tone.
Lemuel fidgetted with his hat and moved his feet uneasily on the
dog-skin rug. “Yeh needn’t be afeered, M’tildy, I wouldn’t hev come naow
ef it hadn’t been somethin’ partikler ’baout Annie.”
The invalid raised her shoulder from the pillow with a sudden movement,
and bent her head forward. “What’s happened to her? Is she hurt? Tell
me, quick!”
“Oh nao, they ain’t nothin’ th’ matter with her. It’s unly ’baout her
’n’ Seth. I kine o’ thought we ought to talk it over ’n’ see haow
the land lay. That’s all.”
“Oh that’s it, is it? _Samantha!_”
Betrayed out of her shrewdness by the suddenness of the summons the
servant girl made her immediate appearance through the hall door.
“Yes, I knew you were listening, you huzzy,” said Mrs. Warren grimly.
“You get along up stairs, go into Annie’s room, an’ make a noise of some
sort on the melodeon till I call you. Not too much noise, mind; jest
enough so I can know you’re up there.” As the girl left the room, the
invalid explained: “What she don’t hear, the rest of the Lawtons won’t
know. That family’s as good as a detective force for the whole county.”
Then, in a less amiable tone: “You might as well set down. What is it
about my girl an’ Seth?”
As Lemuel awkwardly seated himself near the bedside and prepared to
answer, a wailing, discordant series of sounds came from the floor
above. The knowledge that the girl was creating this melancholy noise
to order, and on his account, confused his thought and he found himself
stating the case much more baldly than he had intended. “The fact is,”
he said, stroking his hat over his knee, “Seth’s thinkin’ o’ goin’ away
to Tecumsy--Albert’s got him a place there--’n’ so I s’pose it’ll be
all up b’twixt him ’n’ Annie.”
The grandmother never took those light, searching eyes off her visitor’s
face. He felt himself turning uncomfortably red under their malevolent
gaze, I and wished she would speak. But she said nothing. At last he
explained, deferentially:
“I thought it’d only be right to tell yeh. I know Sissly ’n’ you use
to talk abaout th’ thing. Th’ way she use to talk, speshly jis’ ’fore
she died, it ’peared ‘s if you tew hed it all settled. But Albert’s
goin’ to take th’ farm, it seems, ’n’ Seth, he’s fig’rin’ on goin’
away to be a neditor, ’n’ it looks to me’s if th’ hull plan’d fell
threw.”
Still no reply from the bed. He added, helplessly “Don’t it kind o’ seem
so to you, M’tildy?”
The wretched discords from the chamber above mocked him. The witch-like
eyes from the shadows of the recess began to burn him. It was growing
into the dusk, but the eyes had a light of their own, a cold, steely,
fierce light. Would she never speak? How he regretted having come!
“I’ll tell you what seems to me, Lemuel Fairchild,” she said at last,
not speaking so rapidly now, and putting a sharp, finishing edge on each
of her words. “It seems to me that there’s never been but one decent,
honorable, likely human bein’ in your whole family an’ she came into it
by the mistake of marrying you. I blame myself for not remembering the
blood that was in you all, an’ for thinking that this youngest son of
yours was different from the rest. I forgot that he was a Fairchild like
the others, an’ I forgot what I owed that family of men, so mean and
cowardly and selfish that they have to watch each other like so many
hyenas. An’ so you’ve come to tell me that Seth has turned out like his
father, like his uncle, like all of his name, eh? The more fool I, to
need to be told it!”
Lemuel’s impulse was to rise from his chair, and bear himself with
offended dignity, but the glitter in the old woman’s eyes warned him
that the attempt would be a failure. He scowled, put his hat on the
other knee, crossed his legs, pretended to be interested in the antics
of a kitten which was working havoc with a ball of yarn at his feet.
Finally he said:
“You ain’t fair to Seth. He’s a good boy. He ain’t said nothin’ nor done
nothin’ fer yeh to git mad at. Fer that matter, you never was fair to
any of us, ’cept Sissly.”
“Fair! _Fair!_” came the answer promptly, and in a swifter measure.
“Hear the man! Why, Lemuel Fairchild, you know that you cheated your own
brother out of the share in that farm that was his by all rights as much
as yours. You _know_ that your father intended you both to share alike,
that he died too suddenly to make a new will and that you grabbed
everything under a will made when your brother William was thought to be
too sickly to ever raise. You _know_ that you let him grow up an idle,
worthless coot of a fellow, an’ then encouraged him--yes, don’t deny it,
encouraged him I say--to make a fool of my daughter, and run away with
her.
“You knew I wouldn’t look at him as a suitor for Jenny; but you thought
I would be soft enough, once they were married, to give him my farm, an’
you counted on getting it away from him afterwards, just as your father
got the Kennard farm before you. You egged him on into the trouble,
an’ you let him die in it, without help. Oh _I_ know you, Lemuel
Fairchild--I know your breed!
“Your _wife_ was a good woman--a million times better than you deserved.
_She_ knew the wrongs that had been done me, an’ Annie, an’ her poor
ne’er-do-well of a father before her; _she_ was anxious to make them
good, not I. It was she who talked, year after year, when she ran over
here on the sly to visit me, of squaring everything by the young folk’s
marriage. For a long time I didn’t like it. I distrusted the family,
as, God knows, I had reason to. But all that I heard of Seth was in his
favor. He was hardworking, patient, even-tempered, so everyone said.
What little I saw of him I liked. An’ I felt sorry for him, too, knowing
how dear he was to his mother, and yet how helpless she was to give
him advantages, an’ make something besides a farm-drudge out of him.
So little by little, I gave in to the idea, an’ finally it became mine
almost as much as Cecily’s.
“As for Annie, I don’t know how much she has grown to care for him;
I’m afraid she’s known about our talks, and lotted on ’em, though if
anything has passed between them she would have told me. For she’s a
good girl--a _good_ girl--and she’ll stand by me, never fear, and say
as I say now, that it’s good riddance! D’ye mind? Good riddance to bad
rubbish--to your whole miserable, conniving, underhanded family! There
ain’t an honest hair in your head, Lemuel Fairchild, and there never
was. And you can go back to them that sent you, to your old catamaran of
a sister and your young sneak of a son, and tell ’em what I think of
them, and you, and the whole caboodle of you, that ruined and killed my
Jane, and made me a broken old woman before my time, and now tries to
break my grand-daughter’s heart! And the longest day you Jive, don’t
ever let me lay eyes on you again. That’s all!”
Lemuel groped his way out again through the dark hall, to the front
door. The groaning discords from upstairs rose to a triumphant babel of
sound as he knocked against the hat-rack, and fumbled for the latch, as
if to emphasize and gloat over his discomfiture. The cold evening air,
after the sweltering heat of the sick-room, was a physical relief, but
it brought no moral comfort.
Old Lemuel was much pained, and even more confused, by the hard words to
which he had had to listen. They presented a portrait of himself which
he felt to be in no way a likeness, yet he could not say wherein a
single line should be altered. He knew that he was not a bad man;
he felt conscious of having done no special wrong, intentionally, to
anybody; he had always tried to be fair and square and easy-going with
everybody: yet the mischief of it was that all these evil things
which the witchlike M’tildy had piled at his door were of indubitable
substance, and he could not prove, even to himself, much less to her,
that they did not belong there. It was a part of the consistently vile
luck of his life that all these malignant happenings should be charged
up against him, and used to demonstrate his wickedness. He had not
enough mental skill or alertness to sift the unfair from the true in the
indictment she had drawn, or to put himself logically in her place, and
thus trace her mistakes. He only realized that all these events which
she enumerated had served to convince Mrs. Warren that he was a villain.
The idea was a new one to him, and it both surprised and troubled him to
find that, as he thought the matter over he could not see where she was
particularly wrong. Yet a villain he had certainly never intended to
be--never for a moment. Was this not cruelly hard luck?
And then there was this business about Seth. He had meant it all in
the friendliest spirit, all with the best of motives. And how she had
snapped him up before he had a chance to explain, and called him a
scoundrel and his boy a sneak, and driven him from the house! Here was a
muddle for one--and Sabrina had said he would make a muddle of it, as
he had of everything else, all through his life. The lonely, puzzled,
discouraged old man felt wofully like shedding tears, as he approached
his own gate--or no, it was Albert’s gate now--and passed the young
people chatting there, and realized what a feeble old fool they all must
think him.