[Illustration: 9098]
ERHAPS you think that is a queer title for a chapter. You would not
think it queer at all if you had known her, for that is exactly what she
was, and now and then it is just as well to call people by their right
names. She was not old, however, in the sense of being wrinkled and
white-haired and thin. Sometime, when somebody has been very kind to
you, and has done you a “good turn” in real reliable fashion, haven't
you just rushed up to them and exclaimed, “You dear old thing,” as
if any mere young thing would be quite incapable of such a deed of
loving-kindness? Well, in just the sense of being very kind and very
reliable, Aunt Frances was old, and in no other. To be sure, she was
nearing her fiftieth birthday, and there was a generous sprinkling of
gray hair on her temples, but the gray hair only made her face softer
and sweeter, and her heart was no older than bonny Kate's.
Well, Aunt Frances sat knitting in a high-backed rocker on the wide step
in front of the Van Vleet's door, a step that was made from one great
unhewn stone, but whose roughnesses had been rounded down by the rains
and storms of a hundred summers and winters. On the edge of the step,
with his back against one of the large tubs of hydrangea which flanked
the wide door-step on either side, sat Harry Avery. He had been silent
for a long while. He was trying to get his courage up to say something
to Aunt Frances, something that he knew it would grieve her to hear, and
she had had so much to bear lately, he could not easily bring himself to
it. “Aunt Frances,” he said, at last, “I know you'll be sorry about it,
but I think I shall have to go away to-morrow.”
“Why, Harry, what do you mean?” while the tears gathered as quickly in
her kind eyes as the clouds of an April shower darken an April sky, “and
besides, where will you go?”
“Home, I suppose,” and then it would have been an easy thing for Harry,
grown fellow that he was, to have mustered a few honest tears on his own
account.
“You see I am not willing to stay here any longer since you have to pay
my board. And then you have so little money coming in now.”
“But the Van Vleets only allow me to pay a very small sum, and, Harry,
you are such a comfort to me. Starlight's a dear, good boy, but he is
not old enough for me to burden him with all my troubles as I do you.
Tell me this, do you want to go home?”
“No, I do not want to go home in the least. You know what I mean. I'd
give a great deal to see father and mother and the youngsters; but
there's nothing for me to do in New London--that is, not the sort of
work that I think I am equal to, and, after leaving it the way I did, I
hate to go back empty-handed. Then, I'm sure, father would much rather
I'd find something to do in New York. He believes there is a good deal
more of a chance for a fellow here.”
[Illustration: 0100]
“And you have heard of nothing, Harry; nothing whatever?” Aunt Frances
let her knitting fall in her lap, and looked straight at Harry as she
spoke. There was something strange about this direct look from Aunt
Frances. It seemed to compel the exact truth from everybody, even from
Pat, the Van Vleets' hired man, who did not ordinarily hesitate in
telling an untruth if it would make things more comfortable. And so
Harry did not even succeed in making an evasive reply, as he should like
to have done, but just answered, very simply and honestly: “Yes, Aunt
Frances, I did hear of something--a clerkship in a lawyer's office--but
I decided not to take it.”
“Decided not to take it? Why, that is the very position you said you
would like above all others!”
“Did I say that? well, fellows are queer sometimes, aren't they?”
“Harry Avery, there is something mysterious about all this. What was the
name of the lawyer?”
“Oh, no matter, Auntie! The whole matter's decided. I made up my mind
not to take it, and that ends it.”
Aunt Frances was not to be silenced in this fashion. She had a right to
search this matter out, and search it she would. “Harry,” as if she were
speaking to some little child, “Harry, look me right in the eyes, and
tell me, was it Colonel Hamilton?”
Yes but Harry looked off at the river. He had not the sort of courage
to look Aunt Frances “right in the eyes,” as she bade him, for if there
was a man anywhere whom she had a right thoroughly to despise, surely
it was Colonel Hamilton--Colonel Hamilton, whose skilful reasoning had
deprived her of the home that was almost as dear to her as life itself.
“Is the position still open to you?” Aunt Frances was now gazing off to
the river, and with the mark of deep thinking on her face. “If it is,
you must take it. Colonel Hamilton is a great lawyer. It is as fine
an opening as you could possibly desire. I, for one, have no notion
of standing in your light, Harry, and you must not do yourself the
injustice of standing in your own.”
“But, Aunt Frances--”
“No, don't interrupt me, Harry; only listen, like a good boy, and do
just as I tell you. Take the 'Gretchen' first thing in the morning, go
straight to Colonel Hamilton's office, and apply for the place. Tell
him all about yourself, and answer every question he may ask in the most
straightforward manner, but do not volunteer the information that you
are a relative of mine. It would not do you any good and it might do
harm--that is, it might incline the Colonel less kindly toward you.
Unless some one has gotten ahead of you, you will secure the place, I
am sure of it, and no one will be more glad for you than just my very
self.”
“Aunt Frances,” said Harry, watching the needles that were again
flashing in the afternoon sunlight, “you are the dearest old trump that
ever knitted stockings for a fool of a fellow like me.”
“If I thought this stocking was really to grace a fool's leg”--and Aunt
Frances feigned great seriousness--“not another stitch would I take;
but, begging your pardon, you would have been a fool indeed if you had
not told me about all this, although I perfectly understand that your
motives for not telling me were anything but foolish. No, Harry; somehow
I am sure it is only providential that you should have heard of this
place. Promise to try for it.”
“I promise,” and Harry's lightened heart unconsciously betrayed itself
in voice and look. He had wanted the situation, oh! so much, more than
he would admit even to himself, but he had decided he must forego any
attempt to secure it. It would be, he thought, at too great a cost to
Aunt Frances's feelings, and he simply must not ask it.
“Look, Harry,” she said, shading her eyes with one hand, “isn't that the
Boniface boat about a mile to the left of the point?”
“Yes, it is,” Harry answered, merely glancing in that direction; “but
tell me one thing before I go down to the wharf: tell me, Aunt Frances,
do you think Colonel Hamilton an unprincipled man?”
“Unprincipled! Why, Harry, do you suppose for a single moment that I
would urge you to seek a situation under him if I thought that? No, I
believe that he honestly felt that the English ought to be allowed to
keep possession of the houses that we had abandoned, and so perhaps it
was only natural that when Captain Wadsworth took his case to him, he
should bring all his eloquence, which is very great, to bear on that
side of the question. Nevertheless I confess, as that eloquence cost me
my home, I cannot but feel pretty sore about it, and would go a long way
out of my way to avoid meeting him, brave officer and brilliant lawyer
as he is.”
Harry felt considerably relieved by this assertion, and strolled down
to the boat-landing with even more admiration for “darling old Aunt
Frances” than he had ever felt before. It was so unusual, he thought, to
find a woman who could reason fairly, independent of her heart.
But Aunt Frances was not quite so 'independent of her heart,'
as Harry put it, as Harry and the rest of the world thought, and for the
very good reason that her heart was as big as herself. And so when Harry
had left her, what did she do but lay aside her knitting, go straight up
to her own little room in one of the gable ends of the house, shut the
door of it, and then, sitting down in a low little rocking-chair, bury
her face in her hands and cry. It had not been by any means an easy
thing for her to urge Harry to seek a position under a man who had
wrought her so much harm, but it had been her plain duty, at whatever
cost to herself, and she had done it. Now when Aunt Frances cried, it
was because that great heart of hers had had one little ache crowded
upon another little ache till it could bear no more, and then the hot
tears _must_ (there was no choice at all in the matter) be allowed
to flow for a while and ease it. But for all this, do not think for
a moment that Aunt Frances was an unhappy sort of person. Each little
experience of her life and of the lives of others had a very deep
significance for her, because she believed with all her heart that God
watches over every life and guides it, and no one who believes that
can ever be unhappy long at a time; life is to them too beautiful and
earnest. But this was the way of it with Aunt Frances: she had a great
capacity for loving, if you understand what that means, but she did not
have as much of a chance to spend that love as many another, who had not
half as much to spend. She would always be Miss Frances Avery, she felt
sure of that; yet what a tender, loving wife she could have made for
somebody! She should never have any one nearer to her than Harry and
Starlight (bless their hearts!) but oh, what a mother she might have
been with her great passionate love for little children! And so it was
that Aunt Frances trod the round of the life God had sent her, because
He had sent it, contentedly and happily, and yet it would happen now and
then that some thoughtless word or deed would almost unaccountably set
one little spot to aching, and something else would set another, till
her heart was all one great ache, and the pent-up tears must come. Aunt
Frances could always tell perfectly well when there was need to retreat
to the little room in the gable, the little room that had been hers now,
for the two years since she had fled from her own home across the river;
and while she sat there on the step with Harry she knew well enough what
she should do the moment he was gone. It was not that she did not mean
every word she said to him; it was only that somehow that little talk
had overcharged the brave heart.
Afterward, when the Boniface's boat had touched at the dock and all the
Van Vleets were flocking out of doors to welcome them, Aunt Frances was
in their midst, with the sunshine of her presence all the brighter
for the storm of troubled feelings that had just swept over it, but
Josephine Boniface thought she saw just the faintest trace of recent
tears in Aunt Frances's eyes as she stooped to kiss her. “Dear old Aunt
Frances,” she whispered, as she put her arm about her neck, “I would
give all the world ever to be such a blessed ministering angel as you
are to everybody.
“Why, Josephine, darling, what foolishness,” whispered Aunt Frances; but
it needed only those few sweet words to banish even the trace of tears,
and to make her thoroughly light-hearted once again.