AUNT JANE.
“Sing Hey! when I preside.”
It may not be a very dignified admission, but one of the main causes
that led to my being at present on board the _Alaska_, bound for
Queenstown, was the incompatibility of my temper with that of my Aunt
Jane.
In self-extenuation, I may mention that I had for the last twelve months
lived in her house, and had thus had ample opportunity of verifying the
opinion expressed by many of her most intimate friends--“That Jane
Farquharson was the salt of the earth, but as such was better when
taken in very small quantities.”
She was a Scotchwoman of the most inflexible type. Twenty-five years of
sojourn in the United States had modified none of her insular
prejudices, and my mother, who was her youngest sister, had never, even
during her married life, lost belief in the awfulness of her authority.
The Farquharsons were a family whose pedigree was longer than their
purse; and when her younger brother, my Uncle James, had been compelled
to sell the paternal acres and emigrate to California, my aunt had
uprooted herself from her native land and followed his fortunes, in the
full conviction that he, excellent young man though he was, would become
altogether a castaway if once allowed out of range of her vigilant eye.
They were orphans, and Aunt Jane, having imposed upon herself the
duties of both parents, took my mother with her to the Far West, where
she maintained on my uncle’s ranch the straitest traditions of the
elders.
Uncle James never married. Aunt Jane’s vigilance had been so
conscientiously unremitting that no daughter of Heth had ever disputed
with her the position of mistress of Farquharson’s ranch. But the
precautionary measures that had preserved Uncle James from the snares of
matrimony were a distinct failure in my mother’s case. With the
unexpected revolt of a weak nature, she defied her elder sister, and
committed the incredible enormity of getting married.
Men--with the exception of a legendary Scotch minister, who, if
tradition spoke truly, had not long survived his betrothal to Aunt
Jane--were regarded by her as the natural foes of cleanliness, economy,
and piety. And of all men she considered Irishmen to be the epitome of
their sex’s atrocities.
It must, then, be admitted that Fate dealt hardly with Aunt Jane, when,
one summer afternoon, her sister Helen came to her and told her that she
had that morning been married to Owen Sarsfield, the good-looking
Irishman who, a few months before, had entered into partnership with
their brother. My mother has often described the scene to me--how she
had found Aunt Jane grimly darning her brother’s socks; how she had
received the news at first in terrible silence; and then how on my
mother, white and trembling, had fallen the thunders of her wrath.
“That ne’er-do-weel Irishman! A creature that ’tis well known had to
leave his home for Heaven only knows what wickedness! Did you never hear
that a bad son makes a bad husband? I was right when I warned James
against having anything to do with a vagabond scamp such as he is, and
told him no good would come of handling money that had doubtless been
won at the gaming-table!”
To all this, and much more, my mother did not attempt a reply; she
thought she knew more of Owen Sarsfield than her sister did. She and her
husband settled down in another house on the ranch, and, notwithstanding
their proximity to Aunt Jane, they were very happy.
My father, in spite of Aunt Jane’s insinuations to the contrary, was an
Irish gentleman of good family, and the money which he had put into the
farm had been honestly come by. Perhaps my mother never knew the exact
reason of his leaving Ireland. She only told me that money troubles had
led to a quarrel with his father, Theodore Sarsfield, of Durrus, in the
county Cork. He had no sisters, and his younger and only brother,
Dominick, had sided with my grandfather against him, so that during the
fifteen years he had spent in America he was as much cut off from his
home as if he had been on another planet. The little that he knew of it
was gathered from a few misspelt letters, written by one Patrick Roche,
a special retainer of his in the old days at Durrus.
These reached him at long intervals, and usually announced some event
connected with the Sarsfield family. In this way he heard of his
brother’s marriage, which took place three or four years before his own.
Then shortly afterwards, towards the end of the Irish famine, came the
news that “The young misthris was ded, and she just after havin’ a fine
young son; ’twas what the peepel war all saying that the hard times kilt
her.”
My mother used sometimes to take these letters from a little old green
velvet bag in which she hoarded many valueless treasures, and give them
to me to read. And I well remember the yellow worn papers, with the
half-foreign smell of turf-smoke lingering about them. I did not then
dream of how, in after-years, when that same smell of turf-smoke became
very familiar, it would recall the hours I spent when a child, sitting
in the shade of the verandah beside my mother’s rocking-chair, and
poring with subdued excitement over these messages from the other side
of the world.
The last letter which my father received was as urgent as it was brief.
“HONORED MASTHER OWEN” (it began, without any of the usual preamble
of good wishes),
“The owld masther is very sick. You’d do well to cum home. Ther is
them that sayes he’s askin’ for you, and God knows maybe ’tis the
change for deth that’s on him. The family is very poor this while
back. The big house do be mostly shut up; only owld Peggy Hourihane
within in the house and her daughter mindin’ the child. Me father
and mother is ded. I will gos ’list for a sojer. God help us; these
are bad times.
“Your faithful servant,
“PATRICK ROCHE.”
On getting this letter, my father started at once for Ireland. I was at
this time about a year old, a very ugly and stubborn little baby, so
Aunt Jane has often told me; and when my mother held me high above the
sunflowers at the gate, to kiss my hand to my father as he drove away, I
only beat her upon the head and screamed for the pussy.
That was the last chance I ever had of seeing my father. He wrote to my
mother from New York, and again from Queenstown--short dispirited
letters; the latter saying that he had caught a bad cold, and felt the
change from a Californian to an Irish winter very severely. A week
afterwards came another letter in a strange handwriting. It was from my
Uncle Dominick, and it told my mother, not unkindly, the news that she
never quite recovered from. The cold which my father had spoken of had
turned to pleurisy, and he had died in a hotel in Queenstown the day
after he landed. The writer said that, owing to the unfortunate
relations that existed between him and his brother, he had not been
aware of his marriage till letters that he had found in his possession
informed him of the fact. He now forwarded them to her, with his
brother’s few personal effects, and remained, hers faithfully, D.
Sarsfield.
The next mail brought a second letter from my Uncle Dominick. Since he
last wrote, my grandfather had died; and by the terms of his will, in
consequence of my father having predeceased him, the property and house
of Durrus passed to the second son, the writer himself. “Had my father
known that my brother had married,” wrote my uncle, he might possibly
have made an alteration in the terms of the will; but as Owen had never
seen fit to make any communication on the subject, no such provision was
made. “The property has suffered much during the recent famine, but, as
I feel sure that it would have been in accordance with my father’s
wishes, I have ventured to place a small sum to your credit at the Bank
of Ireland, with directions to forward it to your order.”
My mother never allowed the correspondence thus begun with my Uncle
Dominick to drop altogether, and once or twice a year she would devote a
couple of mornings to the toilful compilation of a letter to the
brother-in-law whom she had never seen. Looking back now, I think there
was something very touching in the confident way in which she relied on
his interest in those annals of my childhood which filled her letters. I
came upon them long afterwards, and read them with a strange mingling of
feeling, very different from the wonder and longing with which I, in
those childish days, saw them despatched on the first stage of their
long journey, and wished that I could accompany them into the post-bag’s
grimy recesses, and go to Durrus too.
I had a very happy childhood. Either my mother or Uncle James could
single-handed have spoiled the best of children, and their joint
efforts being devoted to giving me everything I wished for, I should,
had it not been for Aunt Jane, have lived a life of lawless enjoyment.
The result of their long years of subjugation was a secret exultation in
the undaunted front which I bore towards my aunt, and at a very early
age I had learnt to recognize the fact that we three were confederates
against a common despot. Uncle James was my most daring ally, and at his
instigation I committed some of my most signal and spirited
misdemeanours. By the time I was sixteen, I had become, under his
supervision, a young lady of varied, if unusual, attainments. I could
catch and saddle my own horse; I could guide a steam-plough; I could
make some attempt at Latin verse; I knew a little about the rotation of
crops, and a good deal of Shakespeare and Walter Scott. Aunt Jane
herself took charge of my music, and I spent a daily hour of suffering
at a piano as upright and unsympathetic as she was, learning from the
frayed, discoloured pages of her music-books, the old-fashioned marches,
and “Scotch airs with variations,” that had formed the taste of two
generations of Farquharsons.
I think my mother would have been satisfied to let me grow up as I was
then doing, knowing nothing of the usual more elegant accomplishments of
young ladies; and it was owing to Aunt Jane’s abhorrence of my “tom-boy
tricks” that the first great change in my life was made. The climax came
one early summer morning, when, possessing myself of Uncle James’s gun,
I crept out to try and slay one of the big “jack-rabbits” that abounded
on the ranch.
My aunt from her bedroom window saw the whole performance--the
stalking; the unseemly grovellings and crawlings through the long grass;
the deliberate aim; and, finally, the stealthy but triumphant return
with the spoil.
That very day it was decided that my mother and I were to go forthwith
to Boston, there to abide with a cousin of my mother’s, until such time
as some of the high literary polish of that city should be imparted to
me.
“Perhaps Rachel Campbell will be given patience to bear with her wild
heathen-like ways,” Aunt Jane had said; and my poor mother had answered
with a sigh--
“Theo is always good to me, dear Jane; but I dare say you are right, and
it will be best for us to go away.”
So my mother and I set out on our long journey, little thinking that we
should never see Farquharson’s Ranch again.
Towards the end of our second year in Boston Uncle James died. His horse
fell with him, throwing him on his head, and he only lived for a few
hours afterwards, never recovering consciousness. He left all his
property to my mother and my aunt; and the latter, having sold the
ranch, came to live with us in Boston.
My uncle’s death was the first trouble that I had ever known; but in the
near future a still greater one awaited me. I was barely twenty-two when
my mother’s unexpected death seemed to bring the whole world to a
standstill. I do not like to look back to the desolate days which
followed. She was all I had in the world to love, and Aunt Jane’s stern,
undemonstrative nature would admit me to no fellowship of sorrow.
I dare say it may have been my own fault, but after a time I found the
change from my mother’s unexacting governance to Aunt Jane’s rule
becoming intolerable.
“Theodora has been quite ruined by poor Helen,” she used, I believe, to
say to her friends. “She will do nothing now but what is right in her
own eyes. I shudder to think what will become of her.”
Either my aunt’s temper or mine had disimproved with advancing years,
and each day I found it harder to avoid a breach of the peace. At length
a diatribe upon “the fearful irreverence to my elders which I had learnt
in this godless town,” ending with reflections upon my mother’s
indulgence, aroused me to angry rejoinder.
I was trying to simmer down in my own room after the encounter, and in
my stormy trampings to and fro in that limited apartment, I had twice
upset a photograph of a plump and smiling little boy that stood on my
table.
“That horrid little Willy Sarsfield!” I said, delighted to find
something on which to expend my wrath; “he is always tumbling down!”
The picture had been my mother’s, one which, at her request, had been
sent to her by my Uncle Dominick many years before; and as for the
second time I picked it up and put it in its place, an idea came to me.
“Why should I not go to Durrus?” I said.
I did not wait for a calmer moment, but, seating myself at the table, I
immediately began a letter to my Uncle Dominick. My hand shook from the
excitement of my suddenly taken resolution and from a sense of its
temerity, but I was at least able to make my meaning clear. I had, I
said, since I was a child, longed to visit Durrus, and see my father’s
relations; but hitherto this had been impossible to me. Now, however, I
was comparatively alone in the world, and if my uncle would allow me to
pay him a visit, nothing remained to prevent my doing so.
That evening I told my aunt of the step I had taken. The heat of her
altercation with me had not yet died out in her, and, though she was, as
she said, beyond measure astounded, her pride did not permit her to
remonstrate.
“You can do as you please, Theodora. As your mother did not see fit to
leave me the control of your fortune, I do not presume to give an
opinion as to your movements. I trust, however, that you may not have
cause to regret the headstrong self-will which has made you unable to
content yourself in a quiet and God-fearing household.”
During the days of waiting for an answer from my uncle, Aunt Jane
preserved the same demeanour of distant disapproval, and I began to
feel that to leave her house with the weight of her displeasure still
hanging over me, would be a strong measure. The morning at length came
on which I tore open an envelope with the Irish post-mark, and read to
her the ceremonious letter in which Uncle Dominick intimated his and his
son’s great pleasure at the prospect of a visit from me.
“Very good; then I suppose you will start without delay.” Her cold voice
quavered unexpectedly at the end of the sentence, and, looking up in
astonishment, I saw in her hard grey eyes an unmistakable moisture. “I
had no wish to drive you out, Theodora.”
“I know, Aunt Jane,” I broke in, in hasty penitence; “I never thought
that for an instant.”
But she hurried away before I could get any further, saying
inarticulately, as she left the room, “God bless you, child, wherever
you go.”
After this Aunt Jane made no further comment on what had taken place,
but we found ourselves on a more friendly footing than we had ever been
before; and when I said good-bye to her, I did so with the knowledge
that I could always rely on her undemonstrative, but steadfast
affection.
This is the history of how, on the 18th of October, 188-, I came to be
reclining in a deck chair on board the s.s. _Alaska_, two hours from
Queenstown.
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