Mother Carey walked down the village street one morning late in August,
while Peter, milk pail in hand, was running by her side and making
frequent excursions off the main line of travel. Beulah looked
enchanting after a night of rain, and the fields were greener than they
had been since haying time. Unless Mr. Hamilton were away from his
consular post on a vacation somewhere on the Continent, he should have
received, and answered, Bill Harmon's letter before this, she was
thinking, as she looked at the quiet beauty of the scene that had so
endeared itself to her in a few short months.
Mrs. Popham had finished her morning's work and was already sitting at
her drawing-in frame in the open doorway, making a very purple rose with
a very scarlet centre.
"Will you come inside, Mis' Carey?" she asked hospitably, "or do you
want Lallie Joy to set you a chair on the grass, same as you had
last time?"
"I always prefer the grass, Mrs. Popham," smiled Mrs. Carey. "As it's
the day for the fishman to come I thought we'd like an extra quart of
milk for chowder."
"I only hope he'll make _out_ to come," was Mrs. Popham's curt response.
"If I set out to _be_ a fishman, I vow I'd _be_ one! Mr. Tubbs stays to
home whenever he's hayin', or his wife's sick, or it's stormy, or the
children want to go to the circus!"
Mrs. Carey laughed. "That's true; but as your husband reminded me last
week, when Mr. Tubbs disappointed us, his fish is always fresh-caught,
and good."
"Oh! of course Mr. Popham would speak up for him!" returned his wife. "I
don't see myself as it makes much diff'rence whether his fish is good or
bad, if he stays to home with it! Mebbe I look on the dark side a little
mite; I can't hardly help it, livin' with Mr. Popham, and he
so hopeful."
"He keeps us all very merry at the Yellow House," Mrs. Carey ventured.
"Yes, he would," remarked Mrs. Popham drily, "but you don't git it
stiddy; hopefulness at meals, hopefulness evenin's, an' hopefulness
nights!--one everlastin' stiddy stream of hopefulness! He was jest so as
a boy; always lookin' on the bright side whether there was any or not.
His mother 'n' father got turrible sick of it; so much sunshine in the
house made a continual drouth, so old Mis' Popham used to say. For her
part, she said, she liked to think that, once in a while, there was a
cloud that was a first-class cloud; a thick, black cloud, clean through
to the back! She was tired to death lookin' for Ossian's silver linin's!
Lallie Joy's real moody like me; I s'pose it's only natural, livin' with
a father who never sees anything but good, no matter which way he looks.
There's two things I trust I shan't hear any more when I git to
heaven,--that's 'Cheer up Maria!' an' 'It's all for the best!' As for
Mr. Popham, he says any place'll be heaven to him so long as I ain't
there, callin' 'Hurry up Ossian!' so we have it, back an' forth!"
"It's a wonderful faculty, seeing the good in everything," sighed Mrs.
Carey.
"Wonderful tiresome," returned Mrs. Popham, "though I will own up it's
Ossian's only fault, and he can't see his own misfortunes any clearer
than he can see those of other folks. His new colt run away with him
last week and stove the mowin' machine all to pieces. 'Never mind,
Maria!' he says, 'it'll make fust-rate gear for a windmill!' He's out in
the barn now, fussin' over it; you can hear him singin'. They was all
here practicin' for the Methodist concert last, night, an' I didn't
sleep a wink, the tunes kep' a-runnin' in my head so! They always git
Ossian to sing 'Fly like a youthful hart or roe, over the hills where
spices grow,' an' I tell him he's too old; youthful harts an' roes don't
fly over the hills wearin' spectacles, I tell him, but he'll go right on
singin' it till they have to carry him up on the platform in a
wheeled chair!"
"You go to the Congregational church, don't you, Mrs. Popham?" asked
Mrs. Carey. "I've seen Lallie and Digby at Sunday-school."
"Yes, Mr. Popham is a Methodist and I'm a Congregationalist, but I say
let the children go where they like, so I always take them with me."
Mrs. Carey was just struggling to conceal her amusement at this
religious flexibility on Mrs. Popham's part, when she espied Nancy
flying down the street, bareheaded, waving a bit of paper in the air.
"Are you 'most ready to come home, Muddy?" she called, without coming
any nearer.
"Yes, quite ready, now Lallie has brought the milk. Good morning, Mrs.
Popham; the children want me for some new enterprise."
"You give yourself most too much to 'em," expostulated Mrs. Popham; "you
don't take no vacations."
"Ah, well, you see 'myself' is all I have to give them," answered Mrs.
Carey, taking Peter and going to meet Nancy.
"Mother," said that young person breathlessly, "I must tell you what I
didn't tell at the time, for fear of troubling you. I wrote to Mr.
Hamilton by the same post that Mr. Harmon did. Bill is so busy and such
a poor writer I thought he wouldn't put the matter nicely at all, and I
didn't want you, with all your worries, brought into it, so I wrote to
the Consul myself, and kept a copy to show you exactly what I said. I
have been waiting at the gate for the letters every day for a week, but
this morning Gilbert happened to be there and shouted, 'A letter from
Germany for you, Nancy!' So all of them are wild with curiosity; Olive
and Cyril too, but I wanted you to open and read it first because it may
be full of awful blows."
Mrs. Carey sat down on the side of a green bank between the Pophams'
corner and the Yellow House and opened the letter,--with some
misgivings, it must be confessed. Nancy sat close beside her and held
one edge of the wide sheets, closely filled.
"Why, he has written you a volume, Nancy!" exclaimed Mrs. Carey. "It
must be the complete story of his life! How long was yours to him?" "I
don't remember; pretty long; because there seemed to be so much to tell,
to show him how we loved the house, and why we couldn't spend Cousin
Ann's money and move out in a year or two, and a lot about ourselves, to
let him see we were nice and agreeable and respectable."
"I'm not sure all that was strictly necessary," commented Mrs. Carey
with some trepidation.
This was Lemuel Hamilton's letter, dated from the office of the American
Consul in Breslau, Germany.
MY DEAR MISS NANCY,--As your letter to me was a purely
"business" communication I suppose I ought to begin my reply:
"Dear Madam, Your esteemed favor was received on the sixth
inst. and contents noted," but I shall do nothing of the sort.
I think you must have guessed that I have two girls of my own,
for you wrote to me just as if we were sitting together side
by side, like two friends, not a bit as landlord and tenant.
Mother Carey's eyes twinkled. She well knew Nancy's informal epistolary
style, and her facile, instantaneous friendliness!
Every word in your letter interested me, pleased me, touched me.
I feel that I know you all, from the dear mother who sits in
the centre--
"What does he mean by that?"
"I sent him a snap shot of the family."
"_Nancy_! What for?"
"So that he could see what we were like; so that he'd know we were fit
to be lifelong tenants!"
Mrs. Carey turned resignedly to the letter again.
From the dear mother who sits in the centre, to the lovable
little Peter who looks as if he were all that you describe
him! I was about his age when I went to the Yellow House to
spend a few years. Old Granny Hamilton had lived there all her
life, and when my mother, who was a widow, was seized with a
serious illness she took me home with her for a long visit.
She was never well enough to go away, so my early childhood
was passed in Beulah, and I only left the village when I was ten
years old, and an orphan.
"Oh, dear!" interpolated Nancy. "It seems, lately, as if nobody had both
father and mother!"
Granny Hamilton died soon after my mother, and I hardly know who
lived in the house for the next thirty years. It was my
brother's property, and a succession of families occupied it
until it fell to me in my turn. I have no happy memories
connected with it, so you can go ahead and make them for
yourselves. My only remembrance is of the west bedroom, where
my mother lived and died.
"The west bedroom; that isn't the painted one; no, of course it is the
one where I sleep," said Mrs. Carey. "The painted one must always have
been the guest chamber."
She could only move from bed to chair, and her greatest pleasure
was to sit by the sunset window and look at the daisies and
buttercups waving in that beautiful sloping stretch of field
with the pine woods beyond. After the grass was mown, and that
field was always left till the last for her sake, she used to
sit there and wait for Queen Anne's lace to come up; its tall
stems and delicate white wheels nodding among the grasses.
"Oh! I do _like_ him!" exclaimed Nancy impetuously. "Can't you _see_
him, mother? It's so nice of him to remember that they always mowed the
hayfield last for his mother's sake, and so nice of him to think of
Queen Anne's lace all these years!"
Now as to business, your Cousin Ann is quite right when she
tells you that you ought not to put expensive improvements on
another person's property lest you be disturbed in your
tenancy. That sort of cousin is always right, whatever she
says. Mine was not named Ann; she was Emma, but the principle
is the same.
"Nancy!" asked Mrs. Carey, looking away from the letter again, "did you
say anything about your Cousin Ann?"
"Yes, some little thing or other; for it was her money that we couldn't
spend until we knew we could stay in the house. I didn't describe her,
of course, to Mr. Hamilton; I just told him she was very businesslike,
and yes, I remember now, I told him you said she was a very fine person;
that's about all. But you see how clever he is! he just has 'instinks,'
as Mr. Popham says, and you don't have to tell him much about anything."
If you are intending to bring the water from the well into the
house and put a large stove in the cellar to warm some of the
upper rooms; if you are papering and painting inside, and
keeping the place in good condition, you are preserving my
property and even adding to its value; so under the
circumstances I could not think of accepting any rent in
money.
"No rent! Not even the sixty dollars!" exclaimed Nancy.
"Look; that is precisely what he says."
"There never was such a dear since the world began!" cried Nancy
joyously. "Oh! do read on; there's a lot more, and the last may
contradict the first."
Shall I tell you what more the Careys may do for me, they who
have done so much already?
"So much!" quoted Nancy with dramatic emphasis. "Oh, he _is_ a dear!"
My son Tom, when he went down to Beulah before starting for
China, visited the house and at my request put away my
mother's picture safely. He is a clever boy, and instead of
placing the thing in an attic where it might be injured, he
tucked it away,--where do you think,--in the old brick oven of
the room that is now, I suppose, your dining room. It is a
capital hiding-place, for there had been no fire there for fifty
years, nor ever will be again. I have other portraits of her
with me, on this side of the water. Please remove the one I
speak of from its wrappings and hang it over the mantel shelf
in the west bedroom.
"My bedroom! I shall love to have it there," said Mother Carey.
Then, once a year, on my mother's birthday,--it is the fourth of
July and an easy date to remember,--will my little friend Miss
Nancy, or any of the other Careys, if she is absent, pick a
little nosegay of daisies and buttercups (perhaps there will
even be a bit of early Queen Anne's lace) and put it in a vase
under my mother's picture? That shall be the annual rent paid
for the Yellow House to Lemuel Hamilton by the Careys!
Tears of joy sprang to the eyes of emotional Nancy. She rose to her feet
and paced the greensward excitedly.
"Oh, mother, I didn't think there could be another such man after
knowing father and the Admiral. Isn't it all as wonderful as a fairy
story?"
"There's a little more; listen, dear."
As to the term of your occupancy, the Careys may have the Yellow
House until the day of my death, unless by some extraordinary
chance my son Tom should ever want it as a summer home.
"Oh, dear! there comes the dreadful 'unless'! 'My son Tom' is our only
enemy, then!" said Nancy darkly.
"He is in China, at all events," her mother remarked cheerfully.
Tom is the only one who ever had a bit of sentiment about
Beulah, and he was always unwilling that the old place should
be occupied by strangers. The curious thing about the matter
is that you and yours do not seem to be strangers to me and
mine. Do you know, dear little Miss Nancy, what brought the
tears to my eyes in your letter? The incident of your father's
asking what you could do to thank the Yellow House for the
happy hour it had given you on that summer day long ago, and the
planting of the crimson rambler by the side of the portico. I
have sent your picture tying up the rose,--and it was so
charming I was loath to let it go,--with your letter, and the
snap shot of the family group, all out to my son Tom in China.
He will know then why I have let the house, to whom, and all
the attendant circumstances. Trust him never to disturb you
when he sees how you love the old place. The planting of that
crimson rambler will fix Tom, for he's a romantic boy.
"The planting of the rose was a heavenly inspiration if it does 'fix
Tom!' We'll call Tom the Chinese Enemy. No, we'll call him the Yellow
Peril," laughed Nancy in triumph.
I am delighted with the sample of paper you have chosen for the
front hall.
"I don't see why you didn't go over to Germany yourself, Nancy, and take
a trunk of samples!" cried Mrs. Carey, wiping the tears of merriment
from her eyes. "I can't think what the postage on your letter must have
been."
"Ten cents," Nancy confessed, "but wasn't it worth it, Muddy?--Come,
read the last few lines, and then we'll run all the way home to tell the
others."
Send me anything more, at any time, to give me an idea of the
delightful things you are doing. I shall be proud if you honor
me with an occasional letter. Pray give my regards to your
mother, whom I envy, and all the "stormy petrels," whom I envy
too.
Believe me, dear Miss Nancy,
Yours sincerely,