It was upon the evening after this interview with Mr. Stamps that Tom broached to his young companion a plan which had lain half developed in his mind for some time.
They had gone into the back room and eaten together the supper Mornin had prepared with some extra elaboration to do honour to the day, and then Sheba had played with her doll Lucinda while Tom looked on, somewhat neglecting his newspaper and pipe in his interest in her small pretence of maternity.
At last, when she had put Lucinda to sleep in the wooden cradle which had been her own, he called her to him.
“Come here,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”
She came readily and stood at his knee, laying her hands upon it and looking up at him, as she had had a habit of doing ever since she first stood alone.
“How would you like some new rooms?” he said, suggestively.
“Like these?” she answered, a pretty wonder in her eyes.
“No,” said Tom, “not like these—bigger and brighter and prettier. With flowers on the walls and flowers on the carpets, and all the rest to match.”
He had mentioned this bold idea to Molly Hollister the day before, and she had shown such pleasure in it, that he had been quite elated.
“It’s not that I need anything different,” he had said, “but the roughness and bareness don’t seem to suit her. I’ve thought it often when I’ve seen her running about.”
“Seems like thar ain’t nothin’ you don’t think of, Tom,” said Molly, admiringly.
“Well,” he admitted, “I think about her a good deal, that’s a fact. She seems to have given me a kind of imagination. I used to think I hadn’t any.”
He had imagination enough to recognise at the present moment in the child’s uplifted face some wistful thought she did not know how to express, and he responded to it by speaking again.
“They’ll be prettier rooms than these,” he said. “What do you say?”
Her glance wandered across the hearth to where the cradle stood in the corner with Lucinda in it. Then she looked up at him again.
“Prettier than this,” she repeated, “with flowers. But don’t take this away.” The feeling which stirred her flushed her childish cheek and made her breath come and go faster. She drew still nearer to him.
“Don’t take this away,” she repeated, and laid her hand on his.
“Why?” asked Tom, giving her a curious look.
She met the look helplessly. She could not have put her vague thought into words.
“Don’t—don’t take it away,” she said again, and suddenly laid her face upon his great open palm.
For a minute or two there was silence. Tom sat very still and looked at the fire.
“No,” he said at length, “we won’t take it away.”
In a few days, however, it was well known for at least fifteen miles around the Cross-roads that Tom D’Willerby was going to build a new house, and that it was going to be fitted up with great splendour with furniture purchased at Brownsboro.
“Store carpetin’ on every floor an’ paper on every wall,” said Dave Hollister to Molly when he went home after hearing the news. “An’ Sheby’s a-goin’ with him to choose ’em. He says he’ll bet fifty dollars she has her notions about things, an’ he’s a-goin to hev ’em carried out, fer it’s all fer her, an’ she’s the one to be pleased.”
It was not many weeks before the rooms were so near completion that the journey to Brownsboro was made, and it was upon this day of her first journeying out into the world that Sheba met with her first adventure. She remembered long afterwards the fresh brightness of the early morning when she was lifted into the buggy which stood before the door, while Mornin ran to and fro in the agreeable bustle attendant upon forgetting important articles and being reminded of them by shocks. When Tom climbed into his seat and they drove away, the store-porch seemed quite crowded with those who watched their triumphant departure. Sheba looked back and saw Mornin showing her teeth and panting for breath, while Molly Hollister waved the last baby’s sunbonnet, holding its denuded owner in her arms. The drive was a long one, but the travellers enjoyed it from first to last. Tom found his companion’s conversation quite sufficient entertainment to while away the time, and when at intervals she refreshed herself from Mornin’s basket and fell asleep, he enjoyed driving along quietly while he held her small, peacefully relaxed body on his knee, quite as much as another man might have enjoyed a much more exciting occupation.
“There’s an amount of comfort in it,” he said, reflectively, as the horse plodded along on the shady side of the road, “an amount of comfort that’s astonishing. I don’t know, but I’d like to have her come to a standstill just about now and never grow any older or bigger. But I thought the same thing three years ago, that’s a fact. And when she gets to blooming out and enjoying her bits of girl finery there’ll be pleasure in that too, plenty of it.”
She awakened from one of these light sleeps just as they were entering Brownsboro, and her delight and awe at the dimensions and business aspect of the place pleased Tom greatly, and was the cause of his appearing a perfect mine of reliable information on the subject of large towns and the habits of persons residing in them.
Brownsboro contained at least six or seven hundred inhabitants, and, as Court was being held, there were a good many horses to be seen tied to the hitching-posts; groups of men were sitting before the stores and on the sidewalks, while something which might almost have been called a crowd was gathered before the Court-house itself.
Sheba turned her attention to the tavern they were approaching with a view to spending the night, and her first glance alighted upon an object of interest.
“There’s a big boy,” she said. “He looks tired.”
He was not such a very big boy, though he was perhaps fourteen years old and tall of his age. He stood upon the plank-walk which ran at the front of the house, and leaned against the porch with his hands in his pockets. He was a slender, lithe boy, well dressed in a suit of fine white linen. He had a dark, spirited face, and long-lashed dark eyes, but, notwithstanding these advantages, he looked far from amiable as he stood lounging discontentedly and knitting his brows in the sun.
But Sheba admired him greatly and bent forward that she might see him better, regarding him with deep interest.
“He’s a pretty boy,” she said, softly, “I—I like him.”
Tom scarcely heard her. He was looking at the boy himself, and his face wore a troubled and bewildered expression. His gaze was so steady that at length the object of it felt its magnetic influence and lifted his eyes. That his general air of discontent did not belie him, and that he was by no means an amiable boy, was at once proved. He did not bear the scrutiny patiently, his face darkened still more, and he scowled without any pretence of concealing the fact.
Tom turned away uneasily.
“He’d be a handsome fellow if he hadn’t such an evil look,” he said. “I must have seen him before; I wonder who he is?”
There were many strangers in the house, principally attenders upon the Court being held. Court week was a busy time for Brownsboro, which upon such occasions assumed a bustling and festive air, securing its friends from less important quarters, engaging in animated discussions of the cases in hand, and exhibiting an astonishing amount of legal knowledge, using the most mystical terms in ordinary conversation, and secretly feeling its importance a good deal.
“Sparkses” was the name of the establishment at which the travellers put up, and, being the better of the two taverns in which the town rejoiced, Sparkses presented indeed an enlivening spectacle. It was a large frame house with the usual long verandah at the front, upon which verandah there were always to be seen customers in rocking-chairs, their boots upon the balustrade, their hands clasped easily on the tops of their heads. During Court week these customers with their rocking-chairs and boots seemed to multiply themselves indefinitely, and, becoming exhilarated by the legal business transacted around them, bestirred themselves to jocularity and argument, thus adding to the liveliness of the occasion.
At such periods Mr. Sparkes was a prominent feature. Attired in an easy costume seemingly composed principally of suspenders, and bearing a pipe in his hand, he permeated the atmosphere with a business-like air which had long stamped him in the minds of his rural guests as a person of administrative abilities rarely equalled and not at all to be surpassed.
“He’s everywhar on the place, is Sparkes,” had been said of him. “He’s at dinner, ’n supper, ’n breakfast, ’n out on the porch, ’n in the bar, an’ kinder sashiatin’ through the whole thing. Thet thar tavern wouldn’t be nothin’ ef he wasn’t thar.”
It was not to be disputed that he appeared at dinner and breakfast and supper, and that on each appearance he disposed of a meal of such proportions as caused his countenance to deepen in colour and assume a swelled aspect, which was, no doubt, extremely desirable under the circumstances, and very good for the business, though it could scarcely be said to lighten the labour of Mrs. Sparkes and her daughters, who apparently existed without any more substantial sustenance than the pleasure of pouring out cups of coffee and tea and glasses of milk, and cutting slices of pie, of which they possibly partook through some process of absorption.
To the care of Mrs. Sparkes Tom confided his charge when, a short time after their arrival, he made his first pilgrimage for business purposes.
“She’s been on the road all day,” he said, “and I won’t take her out till to-morrow; so if you don’t mind, I’ll leave her with you until I come back. She’ll be all right and happy, won’t you, Sheba?”
Secretly Sheba felt some slight doubt of this; but in her desire to do him credit, she summed up all her courage and heroically answered that she would, and so was borne off to the dining-room, where two girls were cutting bread and slicing ham for supper. They were Mrs. Sparkes’s daughters, and when they saw the child, dropped their knives and made a good-natured rush at her, for which she was not at all prepared.
“Now, mother,” they cried, “whar’s she from, ’n who does she b’long to?”
Mrs. Sparkes cast a glance at her charge, which Sheba caught and was puzzled by. It was a mysterious glance, with something of cautious pity in it.
“Set her up in a cheer, Luce,” she said, “’n give her a piece of cake. Don’t ye want some, honey?”
Sheba regarded her with uplifted eyes as she replied. The glance had suggested to her mind that Mrs. Sparkes was sorry for her, and she was anxious to know why.
“No,” she answered, “no, thank you, I don’t want any.”
She sat quite still when they put her into a chair, but she did not remove her eyes from Mrs. Sparkes.
“Who does she b’long to, anyhow?” asked Luce.
Mrs. Sparkes lowered her voice as she answered:
“She don’t b’long to nobody, gals,” she said. “It’s thet little critter big Tom D’Willerby from Talbot’s Cross-roads took to raise.”
“Ye don’t say. Pore little thing,” exclaimed the girls. And while one of them stooped to kiss her cheek, the other hurriedly produced a large red apple, which she laid on the long table before her.
But Sheba did not touch it. To hear that she belonged to nobody was a mysterious shock to her. There had never seemed any doubt before that she belonged to her Uncle Tom, but Mrs. Sparkes had quite separated her from him in her statement. Suddenly she began to feel a little tired, and not quite so happy as she had been. But she sat still and listened, rendered rather tremulous by the fact that the speakers seemed so sure they had reason to pity her.
“Ef ever thar was a mystery,” Mrs. Sparkes proceeded, “thet thar was one; though Molly Hollister says D’Willerby don’t like it talked over. Nobody knowed ’em, not even their names, an’ nobody knowed whar they come from. She died, ’n he went away—nobody knowed whar; ’n the child wasn’t two days old when he done it. Ye cayn’t tell me thar ain’t a heap at the back o’ that. They say D’Willerby’s jest give himself up to her ever since, an’ ’tain’t no wonder, nuther, for she’s a’ out ’n out beauty, ain’t she, now? Just look at her eyes. Why don’t ye eat yer apple, honey?”
Sheba turned towards the window and looked out on the porch. A bewildering sense of desolation had fallen upon her.
“I don’t want it,” she said; and her small voice had a strange sound even in her own ears. “I want Uncle Tom. Let me go out on the porch and see if he’s coming.”
She saw them exchange rapid glances and was troubled afresh by it.
“D’ye reckin she understands?” the younger daughter said, cautiously.
“Lordy, no!” answered the mother; “we ain’t said nothin’. Ye kin go ef ye want to, Sheba,” she added, cheerfully. “Thar’s a little rocking-cheer that ye kin set in. Help her down, Luce.”
But she had already slipped down and found her way to the door opening out on to the street. The porch was deserted for a wonder, the reason being that an unusually interesting case was being argued in the Court-house across the street, where groups of men were hanging about the doors. The rocking-chair stood in a corner, but Sheba did not sit down in it. She went to the steps and stood there, looking out with a sense of pain and loneliness still hanging over her; and at last, without knowing why, only feeling that they had a dreary sound and contained a mystery which somehow troubled her, she began to say over softly the words the woman had used.
“She died and he went away, nobody knows where. She died and he went away, nobody knows where.”
Why those words should have clung to her and made her feel for the moment desolate and helpless, it would be difficult to say, but as she repeated them half unconsciously, the figures of the woman who had died and the man who had wandered so far away alone, that he seemed to have wandered out of life itself, cast heavy shadows on her childish heart.
“I am glad,” she whispered, “that it was not Uncle Tom that went away.” And she looked up the street with an anxious sigh.
Just at this moment she became conscious that she was not alone. In bending forward that she might see the better, she caught sight of someone leaning against the balustrades which had before concealed him—the boy, in short, who was standing just as he had stood when they drove up, and who looked as handsome in a darkling way as human boy could look.
For a few seconds the child regarded him with bated breath. The boys she had been accustomed to seeing were not of this type, and were more remarkable for gifts less ornamental than beauty. This boy with his graceful limbs and haughtily carried head, filled her with awe and admiration. She admired him so much, that, though her first impulse was to run away, she did not obey it, and almost immediately he glanced up and saw her. When this occurred, she was greatly relieved to find that his gloom did not lead him to treat her unkindly, indeed, he was amiable enough to address her with an air of one relenting and condescending somewhat to her youth.
“Didn’t you know I was here?” he asked.
“No,” Sheba answered, timidly.
“Whom are you looking for?”
“For my Uncle Tom.”
He glanced across the street, still keeping his hands in his pockets and preserving his easy attitude.
“Perhaps he is over there,” he suggested.
“Perhaps he is,” she replied, and added, shyly, “Are you waiting for anyone?”
He frowned so darkly at first, that she was quite alarmed and wished that she had run away as she had at first intended; but he answered, after a pause:
“No—yes;” he said, “yes—I’m waiting for my father.”
He did not even speak as the boys at the Cross-roads spoke. His voice had a clear, soft ring, and his mode of pronunciation was one Tom had spent much time in endeavouring to impress upon herself as being more desirable than that she had heard most commonly used around her. Up to this time she had frequently wondered why she must speak differently from Mornin and Molly Hollister, but now she suddenly began to appreciate the wisdom of his course. It was very much nicer to speak as the boy spoke.
“I haven’t any father,” she ventured, “or any mother. That’s queer, isn’t it?” And as she said it, Mrs. Sparkes’s words rushed into her mind again, and she looked up the street towards the sunset and fell into a momentary reverie, whispering them to herself.
“What’s that you are saying?” asked the boy.
She looked at him with a rather uncertain and troubled expression.
“It was only what they said in there,” she replied, pointing towards the dining-room.
“What did they say?”
She repeated the words slowly, regarding him fixedly, because she wondered if they would have any effect upon him.
“She died and he went away, nobody knows where. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, staring at her with his handsome, long-lashed eyes. “Lots of people die and go away.” Then, after a pause, in which he dropped his eyes, he added:
“My mother died two years ago.”
“Did she?” answered Sheba, wondering why he looked so gloomy again all at once. “I don’t think I ever had any mother, but I have Uncle Tom.”
He stared at her again, and there was silence for a few minutes. This he broke by asking a question.
“What is your name?” he demanded.
“De Willoughby,” she replied, “but I’m called Sheba.”
“Why, that’s my name,” he said, surprisedly. “My name is De Willoughby. I—Hallo, Neb——”
This last in a tone of proprietorship to a negro servant, who was advancing towards them from a side-door and who hurried up with rather a frightened manner.
“Ye’d best get ready ter start right away, Mars Ralph,” he said. “He’s wake at las’, an’ der’s de debbil to pay, a-cussin’ an’ roarin’ an’ wantin’ opium; an’ he wants to know whar ye bin an’ what ye mean, an’ ses de hosses mus’ be at de do’ in ten minits. Oh, de cunnel he’s in de wustest kin’ o’ humour, dar’s no doin’ nuffin right fer him.”
“Tell him to go to h——” burst forth the lad, flying into a rage and looking so wickedly passionate in a boyish way that Sheba was frightened again. “Tell him I won’t go until I’m ready; I’ve been dragged round till I’m sick of it, and——”
In the midst of his tempest he checked himself, turned about and walked suddenly into the house, the negro following him in evident trepidation.
His departure was so sudden that Sheba fancied he would return and say something more to her. Angry as he looked, she wished very much that he would, and so stood waiting wistfully.
But she was doomed to disappointment. In a few minutes the negro brought to the front three horses, and almost immediately there appeared at the door a tall, handsome man, who made his way to the finest horse and mounted it with a dashing vault into the saddle.
He had a dark aquiline face like the boy’s, and wore a great sweeping mustache which hid his mouth. The boy followed, looking wonderfully like him, as he sprang into his own saddle with the same dare-devil vault.
No one spoke a word, and he did not even look at Sheba, though she watched him with admiring and longing eyes. As soon as they were fairly in their seats the horses, which were fine creatures, needing neither whip nor spur, sprang forward with a light, easy movement, and so cantered down the street towards the high road which stretched itself over a low hill about a quarter of a mile away.
Sheba laid her cheek against the wooden pillar and looked after them with a return of the sense of loneliness she had felt before.
“He went away,” she whispered, “nobody knows where—nobody knows where.”
She felt Tom’s hand laid on her shoulder as she said the words, and turned her face upward with a consciousness of relief, knowing she would not be lonely any longer.
“Have I been gone long?” he asked. “Where’s Mrs. Sparkes?”
“She’s in there,” Sheba answered, eagerly, “and I’ve been talking to the boy.”
“To the boy?” he repeated. “What boy?”
“To the one we saw,” she replied, holding his hand and feeling her cheeks flush with the excitement of relating her adventure. “The nice boy. His name is like mine—and his mother died. He said it was De Willoughby, and it is like mine. He has gone away with his father. See them riding.”
He dropped her hand and, taking a step forward, stood watching the receding travellers. He watched them until they reached the rising ground. The boy had fallen a few yards behind. Presently the others passed the top of the hill, and, as they did so, he turned in his saddle as if he had suddenly remembered something, and glanced back at the tavern porch.
“He is looking for me,” cried Sheba, and ran out into the brightness of the setting sun, happy because he had not quite forgotten her.
He saw her, waved his hand with a careless, boyish gesture and disappeared over the brow of the hill.
Tom sat down suddenly on the porch-step. When Sheba turned to him he was pale and his forehead was damp with sweat. He spoke aloud, but to himself, not to her.
“Good Lord,” he said, “it’s De Courcy and—and the boy. That was why I knew his face.”
When they went in to supper later on, there was a great deal of laughing and talking going on down the long table. Mr. Sparkes was finishing a story as they entered, and he was finishing it in a loud voice.
“They’re pretty well known,” he said; “an’ the Colonel’s the worst o’ the lot. The nigger told me thar’d been a reg’lar flare-up at the Springs. Thar was a ball an’ he got on a tear an’ got away from ’em an’ bust right into the ballroom an’ played Hail Columby. He’s a pop’lar man among the ladies, is the Colonel, but a mixtry of whiskey an’ opium is apt to spile his manners. Nigger says he’s the drunkest man when he is drunk that the Lord ever let live. Ye cayn’t do nothin’ with him. The boy was thar, an’ they say ’twas a sight ter see him. He’s his daddy’s son, an’ a bigger young devil never lived, they tell me. He’s not got to the whiskey an’ opium yet, an’ he jes’ takes his’n out in pride an’ temper. Nigger said he jest raved an’ tore that night—went into the Colonel’s room an’ cussed an’ dashed round like he was gone mad. Kinder shamed, I reckin. But Lord, he’ll be at it himself in ten years from now. It’s in the blood.”
“Who’s that you’re talking of?” asked Tom from his end of the table. He had not recovered his colour yet and looked pale as he put the question.
“Colonel De Willoughby of Delisleville,” answered Mr. Sparkes. “Any kin o’ your’n? Name’s sorter like. He jest left here this evenin’ with his boy an’ nigger. They’ve ben to Whitebriar, an’ they’re on their way home.”
“I saw them ride over the hill,” said Tom. “I thought I wasn’t mistaken in the man. I’ve seen him before.”
But he made a very poor supper, and a shadow seemed to have fallen upon his cheery mood of the morning. Sheba recognised this and knew, too, that her new friend and his father were in some vague way responsible for it, and the knowledge oppressed her so that when they sat out upon the porch together after the meal was over, she in her accustomed place on his knee, she grew sad under it herself and, instead of talking as usual, leaned her small head against his coat and watched the few stars whose brightness the moon had not shut out.
She went to bed early, but did not sleep well, dreaming dreary dreams of watching the travellers riding away towards the sunset, and of hearing the woman talk again. One of the talkers seemed at last to waken her with her voice, and she sat up in bed suddenly and found that it was Tom, who had roused her by speaking to himself in a low tone as he stood in a flood of moonlight before the window.
“She died,” he was saying; “she died.”
Sheba burst into a little sob, stretching out her hands to him without comprehending her own emotion.
“And he went away,” she cried, “nobody knows where—nobody knows where—” And even when he came to her hurriedly and sat down on the bedside, soothing her and taking her in his arms to sink back into slumber, she sobbed drearily two or three times, though, once in his clasp, she felt, as she had always done, the full sense of comfort, safety, and rest.
The New England town of Willowfield was a place of great importance. Its importance—religious, intellectual, and social—was its strong point. It took the liberty of asserting this with unflinching dignity. Other towns might endeavour to struggle to the front, and, indeed, did so endeavour, but Willowfield calmly held its place and remained unmoved. Its place always had been at the front from the first, and there it took its stand. It had, perhaps, been hinted that its sole title to this position lay in its own stately assumption: but this, it may be argued, was sheer envy and entirely unworthy of notice.
“Willowfield is not very large or very rich,” its leading old lady said, “but it is important and has always been considered so.”
There was society in Willowfield, society which had taken up its abiding-place in three or four streets and confined itself to developing its importance in half a dozen families—old families. They were always spoken of as the “old families,” and, to be a member of one of them, even a second or third cousin of weak mind and feeble understanding, was to be enclosed within the magic circle outside of which was darkness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. There were the Stornaways, who had owned the button factory for nearly a generation and a half—which was a long time; the Downings, who had kept the feed-store for quite thirty years, and the Burtons, who had been doctors for almost as long, not to mention the Larkins, who had actually founded the Willowfield Times, and kept it going, which had scarcely been expected of them at the outset.
Their moral, mental, and social gifts notwithstanding, there was nothing connected with the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins of such importance as their antiquity. The uninformed outsider, on hearing it descanted upon, might naturally have been betrayed into the momentary weakness of expecting to see Mr. Downing moulder away, and little old Doctor Burton crumble into dust.
“They belong,” it was said, with the temperateness of true dignity, “to our old families, and that is something, you know, even in America.”
“It has struck me,” an observing male visitor once remarked, “that there are a good many women in Willowfield, and that altogether it has a feminine tone.”
It was certainly true that among the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins, the prevailing tone was feminine; and as the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins comprised Willowfield society, and without its society Willowfield lost its significance, the observing male visitor may not have been far wrong. If mistakes were made in Willowfield society, they were always made by the masculine members of it. It was Mr. Stornaway who had at one time been betrayed into the blunder of inviting to a dinner-party at his house a rather clever young book-keeper in his employ, and it was Doctor Burton who had wandered still more glaringly from the path of rectitude by taking a weak, if amiable, interest in a little music teacher with a sweet, tender voice, even going so far as to request his family to call upon her and ask her to take tea with them. It was Mr. Downing, who, when this last incident occurred and created some sensation, had had the temerity to intimate that he thought the Doctor was entirely in the right; though, to be sure, he had afterwards been led to falter in this opinion and subside into craven silence, being a little gentleman of timorous and yielding nature, and rather overborne by a large and powerful feminine majority in his own household. Mr. Larkin was, it is to be regretted, the worst of the recreant party, being younger and more unmanageable, having not only introduced to public notice certain insignificant though somewhat talented persons in the shape of young men and women who talked well, or sang well, or wielded lively pens, but had gone to the length of standing by them unflinchingly, demanding civility for them at the hands of his own family of women in such a manner as struck a deadly blow at the very foundations of the social structure. But Mr. Larkin—he was known as Jack Larkin to an astonishing number of people—was a bold man by nature and given to deeds of daring, from the fatal consequences of which nothing but the fact that he was a member of one of the “old families” could have saved him. As he was a part—and quite a large part—of one of these venerable households, and, moreover, knew not the fear of man—or woman—his failings could be referred to as “eccentricities.”
“Mr. Larkin,” Mrs. Stornaway frequently observed, with long-suffering patience, “is talented but eccentric. You are never quite sure what he will do next.”
Mrs. Stornaway was the head and front of all Willowfield’s social efforts, and represented the button factory with a lofty grace and unbending dignity of demeanour which were the admiration and envy of all aspirants to social fame. It was said that Mrs. Stornaway had been a beauty in her youth, and there were those who placed confidence in the rumour. Mrs. Stornaway did so herself, and it had been intimated that it was this excellent lady who had vouched for the truth of the statement in the first instance; but this report having been traced to a pert young relative who detested and derided her, might have had its origin in youthful disrespect and malice.
At present Mrs. Stornaway was a large blonde woman whose blondness was not fairness, and whose size was not roundness. She was the leader of all religious and charitable movements, presiding with great vigour over church matters, fairs, concerts, and sewing societies. The minister of her church submitted himself to her advice and guidance. All the modest members of the choir quailed and quavered before her, while even the bold ones, meeting her eye when engaged in worldly conversation between their musical efforts, momentarily lost their interest and involuntarily straightened themselves.
Towards her family Mrs. Stornaway performed her duty with unflinching virtue. She had married her six daughters in a manner at once creditable to herself, themselves, and Willowfield. Five of them had been rather ordinary, depressed-looking girls, who, perhaps, were not sorry to obtain their freedom. The sixth had narrowly escaped being dowered with all the charms said to have adorned Mrs. Stornaway’s own youth.
“Agnes is very like what I was at her age,” said her mother, with dignity; and perhaps she was, though no one had been able to trace any resemblance which had defied the ravages of time.
Agnes had made a marriage which in some points was better than those of her sisters. She had married a brilliant man, while the other five had been obliged to make the best of things as far as brilliancy was concerned. People always said of John Baird that he was a brilliant man and that a great career lay before him. He was rather remarkable for a curious subtle distinction of physical good looks. He was not of the common, straight-featured, personable type. It had been said by the artistic analyst of form and line that his aspect did not belong to his period, that indeed his emotional, spirited face, with its look of sensitiveness and race, was of the type once connected with fine old steel engravings of young poets not quite beyond the days of powdered hair and frilled shirt-bosoms.
“It is absurd that he should have been born in America and in these days,” a brilliant person had declared. “He always brings to my mind the portraits in delightful old annuals, ‘So-and-so—at twenty-five.’”
His supple ease of movement and graceful length of limb gave him an air of youth. He was one of the creatures to whom the passage of years would mean but little, but added charm and adaptability. His eyes were singularly living things—the eyes that almost unconsciously entreat and whose entreaty touches one; the fine, irregular outline of his profile was the absolute expression of the emotional at war with itself, the passionate, the tender, the sensitive, and complex. The effect of these things was almost the effect of peculiar physical beauty, and with this he combined the allurements of a compelling voice and an enviable sense of the fitness of things. He never lost a thought through the inability to utter it. When he had left college, he had left burdened with honours and had borne with him the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow-students. He had earned and worn his laurels with an ease and grace which would be remembered through years to come.
“It’s something,” it was once said, “to have known a fellow to whom things came so easily.”
When he had entered the ministry, there had been some wonder expressed among the men who had known him best, but when he preached his first sermon at Willowfield, where there was a very desirable church indeed, with whose minister Mrs. Stornaway had become dissatisfied, and who in consequence was to be civilly removed, the golden apple fell at once into his hand.
Before he had arrived he had been spoken of rather slightingly as “the young man,” but when he rose in the pulpit on the eventful Sunday morning, such a thrill ran through the congregation as had not stirred it at its devotions for many a summer day. Mrs. Stornaway mentally decided for him upon the spot.
“He is of one of our oldest families,” she said. “This is what Willowfield wants.”
He dined with the Stornaways that day, and when he entered the parlour the first figure his eyes fell upon was that of Agnes Stornaway, dressed in white muslin, with white roses in her belt. She was a tall girl, with a willowy figure and a colourless fairness of skin, but when her mother called her to her side and Baird touched her hand, she blushed in such a manner that Mrs. Stornaway was a little astonished. Scarcely a year afterward she became Mrs. Baird, and people said she was a very fortunate girl, which was possibly true.
Her husband did not share the fate of most ministers who had presided over Mrs. Stornaway’s church. His power over his congregation increased every year. His name began to be known in the world of literature; he was called upon to deliver in important places the lectures he had delivered to his Willowfield audiences, and the result was one startling triumph after another. There was every indication of the fact that a career was already marked out for him.
Willowfield looked forward with trepidation to the time when the great world which stood ready to give him fame would absorb him altogether, but in the meantime it exerted all its power of fascination, and was so far successful that the Reverend John Baird felt that his lines had indeed fallen in pleasant places.
But after the birth of her little daughter his wife was not strong, and was so long in regaining vitality that in the child’s second year she was ordered abroad by the physician. At this time Baird’s engagements were such that he could not accompany her, and accordingly he remained in America. The career was just opening up its charmed vistas to him; his literary efforts were winning laurels; he was called upon to lecture in Boston and New York, and he never rose before an audience without at once awakening an enthusiasm.
Mrs. Baird went to the south of France with her child and nurse and a party of friends, and remained there for a year. At the termination of that time, just as she thought of returning home, she was taken seriously ill. Her husband was sent for and went at once to join her. In a few months she had died of rapid decline. She had been a delicate girl, and a far-off taint of consumption in her family blood had reasserted itself. But though Mrs. Stornaway bewailed her with diffuse and loud pathos and for a year swathed her opulence of form in deepest folds and draperies of crape, the quiet fairness and slightness which for some five and twenty years had been known as Agnes Stornaway, had been a personality not likely to be a marked and long-lingering memory.
The child was placed with a motherly friend in Paris. For a month after his wife’s death Baird had been feverishly, miserably eager to return to America. Those about him felt that the blow which had fallen upon him might affect his health seriously. He seemed possessed by a desperate, morbid desire to leave the scene of the calamity behind him. He was restless and feverish in his anxiety, and scarcely able to endure the delay which the arrangement of his affairs made necessary. He had not been well when he had left Willowfield, and during his watching by his wife’s bedside he had grown thin and restless-eyed.
“I want to get home. I must get home,” he would exclaim, as if involuntarily. His entire physical and mental condition were strained and unnatural. His wife’s doctor, who had become his own doctor as his health deteriorated, was not surprised, on arriving one day, to find him prostrated with nervous fever. He was ill for months, and he rose from his sick-bed a depressed shadow of his former self and quite unable to think of returning to his charge, even if his old desire had not utterly left him with his fever. He was absent from Willowfield for two years, and when at length he turned his face homeward, it was with no eagerness. He had passed through one of those phases which change a man’s life and being. If he had been a rich man he would have remained away and would have lived in London, seeing much of the chief continental cities. As it was, he must at least temporarily return to Willowfield and take with him his little girl.
On the day distinguished by his return to his people, much subdued excitement prevailed in Willowfield. During the whole of the previous week Mrs. Stornaway’s carriage had paid daily visits to the down-town stores. There was a flourishing New England thrift among the Stornaways, the Larkins, the Downings, and the Burtons, which did not allow of their delegating the ordering of their households to assistants. Most of them were rigorous housewives, keen at a bargain and sharp of tongue when need be, and there was rarely any danger of their getting less than their money’s worth.
To celebrate his arrival, Mrs. Stornaway was to give an evening party which was to combine congratulatory welcome with a touch of condolence for the past and assurance for the future.
“We must let him see,” said Mrs. Stornaway, “that Willowfield has its attractions.”
Its attractions did not present themselves as vividly to John Baird as might have been hoped, when he descended from the train at the depot. He had spent two or three days in Boston with a view to taking his change gradually, but he found himself not as fully prepared for Willowfield as he could have wished. He was not entirely prepared for Mrs. Stornaway, who hurried towards them with exultation on her large, stupid face, and, after effusive embraces, bustled with them towards an elderly woman who had evidently accompanied her.
“See, here’s Miss Amory Starkweather!” she exclaimed. “She came with me to meet you. Just see how Annie’s grown, Miss Amory.”
Miss Amory was a thin woman with a strong-featured countenance and deep-set, observing eyes. They were eyes whose expression suggested that they had made many painful discoveries in the course of their owner’s life.
John Baird rather lighted up for a moment when he caught sight of her.
“I am glad to see you, Miss Amory,” he said.
“Thank you,” she answered. “I hope you are as well as you look.”
“We’re so delighted,” Mrs. Stornaway announced, as if to the bystanders. “Everybody in Willowfield is so delighted to have you back again. The church has not seemed the same place. The man who took your place—Mr. Jeramy, you know—you haven’t any idea how unpopular——”
“Excuse me,” said Baird, “I must speak to Latimer. Where is Latimer, Annie?”
“Who is Latimer?” asked Mrs. Stornaway.
“Excuse me,” said Baird again, and turning back towards the platform, he disappeared among the crowd with Annie, who had clung to his hand.
“Why, he’s gone!” proclaimed Mrs. Stornaway. “But where’s he gone? Why didn’t he stay? Who’s Latimer?”
“Latimer!” Miss Amory echoed, “you ought to know him. His family lives in Willowfield. He is the man who was coming home to take charge of the little church at Janway’s Mills. He has evidently crossed the Atlantic with them.”
“Well, now, I declare,” proclaimed Mrs. Stornaway. “It must be the man who took his sister to Europe. It was a kind of absurd thing. She died away—the girl did, and people wondered why he did not come back and how he lived. Why, yes, that must be the man.” And she turned to look about for him.
Miss Amory Starkweather made a slight movement.
“Don’t look,” she said. “He might not like to be stared at.”
“They’re quite common people,” commented Mrs. Stornaway, still staring. “They live in a little house in a side street. They had very silly ideas about the girl. They thought she was a genius and sent her to the School of Art in Boston, but it wasn’t long before her health failed her. Ah! I guess that must be the man talking to Mr. Baird and Annie. He looks as if he would go off in a consumption.”
He was a tall, hollow-chested man, with a dark, sallow face and an ungainly figure. There were suggestions of both ill-health and wretchedness in his appearance, and his manner was awkward and embarrassed. Two human beings more utterly unlike each other than himself and the man who held his hand could not possibly have been found. It was Baird who held his hand, not he Baird’s, and it was Baird who seemed to speak while he listened, while with his free hand he touched the hair of the child Annie.
“Well,” remarked Mrs. Stornaway, “Mr. Baird seems to have taken a fancy to him. I don’t think he’s attractive myself. Are they going to talk to him all day?”
“No,” said Miss Amory, “he is going now.”
He was going. Baird had released his hand and he was looking in a gloomy, awkward way at Annie, as if he did not know how to make his adieux. But Annie, who was a simple child creature, solved the difficulty for him with happy readiness. She flung both her small arms about his ungainly body and held up her face.
“Kiss me three times,” she said; “three times.”
Latimer started and flushed. He looked down at her and then glanced rather timidly at Baird.
“Kiss her,” said Baird, “it will please her—and it will please me.”
Latimer bent himself to the child’s height and kissed her. The act was without grace, and when he stood upright he was more awkward and embarrassed than ever. But the caress was not a cold or rough one, and when he turned and strode away the flush was still on his sallow cheek.