CHAPTER XIV.—BACK ON THE FARM.
The farm seemed very little like home to Seth, now that he was back once more upon it. He could neither fit himself familiarly into such of the old ways as remained nor altogether appetize the changes which he felt rather than discerned about him.
Of all these alterations his father’s disappearance was among the least important. Everybody had grown out of the habit of considering Lemuel as a factor in any question. Nobody missed him now that he was gone, or felt that it was specially incumbent to pretend to do so—nobody save Aunt Sabrina. Those who cared to look closely could see that the old maid was shaken by her weak brother’s death, and that, though she said little or nothing about it, an augmented sense of loneliness preyed upon her mind. For the rest, the event imposed a day or two of solemnity, some alterations of dress and demeanor, a sombre journey with a few neighbors to the little burial plot beyond the orchard—and then things resumed their wonted aspect.
To the young journalist this aspect was strange and curious. The farm had put on a new guise to his eyes. It was as if some mighty hand and brush had painted it all over with bright colors. It was not only that the house had been restored and refurnished, that new spacious buildings replaced the ancient barns, that the fences had been rebuilt, the farm yard cleaned up and sodded, the old well-curb and reach removed—the very grass seemed greener, the bending of the boughs more graceful, the charm of sky and foliage and verdure far more apparent. The cattle were plumper and cleaner; there were carriage horses now, with bright harness and sweeping tails, and a costly black mare for the saddle, fleet as the wind: the food on the table was more uniformly toothsome, and there were now the broad silver-plated forks to which Seth had somewhat laboriously become accustomed in his Tecumseh boardinghouse. He admired all these changes, in a way, but somehow he could not feel at home among them. They were attractive, but they were alien to the memories which, in his crowded, bricked-up city solitude, had grown dear to him.
There were droll changes among the hired people. For one thing, they no longer all ate at the table with the family. An exception was made in favor of Milton Squires, who had burst through the overalls chrysalis of hired-manhood, and had become a sort of superintendent. He had not learned to eat with a fork, and he still talked loudly and with boisterous familiarity at the table, reaching for whatever he wanted, and calling the proprietor “Albert,” and his aunt “Sabriny.” He did not bear his social and industrial promotion meekly. He bullied the inferior hired men—Leander had a colleague now, a rough, tow-headed, burly young fellow named Dana Pills-bury—and snubbed loftily the menials of the kitchen. This former haunt scarcely knew him more, and his rare conversations with Alvira were all distinctly framed in condescension. This was only to be expected, for Milton wore a black suit of store-clothes every day, with a gold-plated watch chain and a necktie, and met the farmers round about on terms of practical equality. He was reputed to be a careful and capable manager; his wrath was feared at the cheese-factory; his judgment was respected at the corners’ store. Naturally, such a man would feel himself above kitchen associations.
Of course this defection evoked deep wrath in Alvira’s part of the house, some overflowings of which came to Seth’s notice before he had been a day at the farm. Alvira was not specially changed to the young man’s eyes—indeed her sallow, bilious visage, dark snapping eyes and furrowed forehead seemed the most familiar things about the homestead, and her acidulous tones struck a truer note in his chords of memory than did any other sound.
Aunt Sabrina, wrapped as of old in her red plaid shoulder shawl, but seemingly less erect and aggressive, spent most of her time in the kitchen, ostentatiously pretending to pay her board by culinary labor. Behind her back Alvira was wont to say to her assistant, a slatternly young slip from the ever-spreading Lawton family tree, that the old lady only hindered the work, and that her room would be better than her company. But when Aunt Sabrina was present, Alvira was customarily civil, sometimes quite friendly. The two were drawn together by community of grievance.
They both hated Isabel, with her citified notions, her forks and napkins, and stuck-up airs generally. It had pleased Aunt Sabrina’s mood to regard herself as included in the edict which ordained that servants should eat in the kitchen, and only the sharpest words she had ever heard Albert speak had prevented her acting upon this. She had come to the family table, then, but always with an air of protest; and she had a grim pleasure in leaving her napkin unfolded, month after month, and in keeping everybody waiting while she paraded her inability to eat rapidly or satisfactorily with the new fangled “split spoon.”
She and Alvira had a never-failing topic of hostile talk in the new mistress. To judge by their threats, their jibes and their angry complaints, they were always on the point of leaving the house on her account. So imminent did an outbreak seem to Seth, when he first heard their joint budget of woes and bitter resolves, that he was frightened, but the Lawton girl reassured him. They had talked just like that, she said, every day since she had been there, which would be “a year come August,” and she added scornfully: “They go away? You couldn’t chase ’em away with a clothes-pole!”
The two elderly females had another bond of sympathy, of course, in Milton’s affectation of superiority.
They debated this continually, though as Sabrina had the most to say about her niece-in-law, with Alvira as a sympathetic commentator, so the hateful apotheosis of the whilom hired-man was recognized to be Alvira’s special and personal grievance, in girding at which Sabrina bore only a helping part.
Seth accounted for this by calling up in recollection an old vague understanding of his youth that Milton was some time going to marry Alvira. He could remember having heard this union spoken of as taken for granted in the family. Doubtless Alvira’s present attitude of ugly criticism was due to the fear that Milton’s improved prospects would lead him elsewhere. The Lawton girl indeed hinted rather broadly to him that there were substantial grounds for Alvira’s rage. “I’d tear his eyes out if I was her, and he wouldn’t come up to the scratch,” she said, “after all that’s happened.” Seth understood her suggestion, but he didn’t believe it. The Lawtons were a low-down race, anyway. He had seen one of the girls at Tecumseh once, a girl who had gone utterly to the bad, and this sister of hers seemed a bold, rude huzzy, with a mind prone to mean suspicions.
It was a relief to go back again to the living-room, where Isabel was, and he both verbally and mentally justified her gentle hint that the kitchen was not a good place for young men to spend their time.
“You have no idea,” she said, letting her embroidery fall in her lap for the moment, “how ruinous to discipline and to household management generally this country plan of making companions of your servants is. I had to put a complete stop to it, very soon after I came. There would be no living with them otherwise. There’s not much comfort in living with them as it is, for your Aunt sits out in the kitchen all day long, pretending that she is abused and encouraging them to think that they are ill-used too. She makes it very hard for me—harping all the time on my being a Richardson, just as she did with your mother.
“Then there’s Milton. I did not want to make any difference between him and the other hired people, but your brother insisted on it—on having him at the table with us, and treating him like an equal. He is as coarse and rough and horrid as he can be, but it seems that he is very necessary on the farm, and your brother leaves so much to him and relies so much on him that I couldn’t help myself. He hasn’t got to calling me ‘Isabel’ yet, but I expect him to begin every day of my life. You can’t imagine what an infliction it is to see him eat—or rather, to hear him, for I try not to look.”
Isabel took up her work again, and Seth looked at her more closely than he had done before. She sat at the window, with the full summer light on her bright hair and fair, pretty face. Her tone had been melancholy, almost mournful; looking at her, Seth felt that she was not happy, and more—for he had never supposed her to be particularly happy—that she was bitterly disappointed with the result of the farm experiment. She had not said so, however, and he was in doubt whether it would be wise for him to assume it in his conversation.
“Albert seems to thrive on country fare,” he said, perhaps unconsciously suggesting in his remark what was turning in his mind—that she herself seemed not have thrived. The rounded outlines of her chin and throat were not so perfect as he remembered them. She looked thin and tired now, in the strong light, and there was no color to speak of in her face.
“Oh, yes!” she said, with that falling inflection which is sister to the sigh, and keeping her eyes bent upon her work, “he grows fat. I did not imagine that a man who had always been so active, who was so accustomed to regular office work and intellectual professional pursuits, could fall into idle ways so easily. But it is always a bore to him now when he has to go down to New York at term time. Once or twice he has had a coolness with his partners because he failed to go at all. I shouldn’t be surprised if he gave New York up altogether. He talks often of it—of practising at Tecumseh instead. Oh, and that reminds me. You can tell. What relation does Tecumseh bear to this place? I know they have some connection in his mind, because he spoke once of the ‘pull’—whatever that may mean—being a Tecumseh lawyer would give him here. I know they are not in the same county, for I looked on the map. Whatever it is, that would be his purpose in going there, I am curious to learn. You know,” she added, with a smile and tone pathetic in their sarcasm, “a wife ought to be interested in whatever concerns her husband.”
“They are in the same Congressional district,” Seth replied. “There are three counties in the district, Dearborn (where we are now), Jay, which lies east of us, and then Adams, which is a long, narrow county, and runs off South of Dearborn. Tecumseh is away at the extreme southern end of Adams county. Perhaps that is what you have in mind.”
“It is what he has in mind,” she said.
“But how does Albert fill his time here—what does he do?”
“In about equal parts,” she made answer, lifting her eyes again, with the light of a little smile in them now, “he reads novels here in the house, and drives about the neighborhood. What time he is not in the easy-chair upstairs, devouring fiction, he is in his buggy on the road. He won’t let me have anybody up from New York, even of the few I know, but he has developed a wonderful taste for striking up acquaintances here. He must by this time know every farmer for twenty miles around. First of all, in buying his stock when he took the farm, he spread his purchases around in the queerest way—getting a cow from this man, a colt from another, a pig here and a bull there. Milton and he went together, and they must have driven two hundred miles, I should think, collecting the various animals.
“I didn’t understand it at first, but I begin to now. He wanted to establish relations with as many men here as he could. And the farmers he invites here to dinner—you should see them! Sometimes I think I shall have to leave the table. It’s all I can do, often, to be decently civil to them, rough, vulgar men, unwashed and untidy, whom he waylays out on the road and brings in. He thinks I ought to exert myself to make them feel at home, and chat with them about their wives and children, and ugh! call on them and form friendships with them. But I draw the line there. If he enjoys bringing them here, why I can’t help it; and if he likes to drive about, and be hail-fellow-well-met with them, that is his own affair. But——”
She stopped, and Seth felt that the silence was eloquent. He began to realize that his pretty sister-in-law was in need of sympathy, and to rank himself, with indignant fervor, on her side.
Annie Fairchild came in. Seth had seen and spoken with her several times, during the period of his father’s death and funeral, but hurriedly and in the presence of others. Her appearance now recalled instantly the day of the fishing trip—a soft and pleasant memory, which during his year’s exile had at times been truly delicious to him.
The women thought of it too, now, and talked of it, at Seth rather than to him, and with a playful spirit of badinage. As of old, Isabel did most of the talking. Annie had become quite a woman, Seth said to himself, as she took off her hat, tidied her hair before the glass, and laughingly joined in the conversation. She talked very well, too, but she seemed always to think over her words, and there appeared to be in her manner toward him a certain something, intangible, indefinite, which suggested constraint. He could feel, though he could not explain, it.
During his stay in Tecumseh he had seen almost nothing of the other sex. There were often some young women at the boarding-house, but he had not got beyond a speaking acquaintance at the table with any of them, in the few instances where his shyness had permitted even that. His year in a city had improved him in many ways. He could wear good clothes now without awkwardness; he spoke readily among men, and with excellent choice of language; he knew how to joke without leading the laughter himself. But he had had no chance to overcome by usage his diffidence in female company, and he had not been quite at ease in his mind since Annie came in. She seemed to make a stranger of him.
He thought upon this, and felt piqued at it. He wondered, too if he was not sitting clumsily in his chair—if it was not impolite in him to cross his legs. Gradually, however, he grew out of his reserve. It dawned upon him that Annie was timorous, nervous, about the impression she was making on him, and that Isabel listened with real respect and deference to what he had to say. He grew bold, and took the lead of the conversation, and the two women followed meekly. It was a delightful sensation. He said to himself: “It is the easiest thing in the world, once you make the plunge. I could talk with women now in the finest drawing room in the land.” He sat back in his chair, and told them some anecdotes about Mr. Samboye, from which somehow they gathered the notion that he was at the best coordinate in rank with Seth. They were more than ever proud of their relative, who had so rapidly conquered a high and commanding position for himself in that mystic, awesome sphere of journalism. Seth expanded and basked in this admiration.
He had heretofore found the evenings on the farm stupidly tedious. To sit at the big table till bed time, reading by the light of a single kerosene lamp, or exchanging dry monosyllables with Albert, offered a dismal contrast to the cheerful street lamps, the bright store-windows, the noise and gaiety and life of the places of evening resort in Tecumseh. But this evening revealed a far more attractive side of country life than he had known before. Annie stayed after tea, and the three played dominoes. Albert seemed somewhat out of sorts, but they did not mind his silence in the least. They chatted gaily over their games, and time flew so merrily and swiftly, that Seth was surprised when Annie said she must leave, and he discovered that it was a quarter to ten.
“How pleasantly the evening has passed,” Isabel said, and smiled at him, and Annie answered, “Hasn’t it! I don’t know when I have enjoyed myself so much—” and she, too, smiled at him.
The old walk over the fields, down the poplar lane, to see Annie home—how like the old times it seemed! And yet how far away they were! Sometimes in these bye-gone walks, as they came up now in Seth’s memory, he and Annie had been almost like lovers—not indeed, in words, but in that magnetic language which the moon inspires. It occurred to neither of them to saunter slowly, now. They walked straight ahead, and there were no “flashes of eloquent silence.” Their conversation was all of Isabel.
“Not as happy as she expected!” said Annie, repeating a question of Seth’s; “you can’t guess how wretched she is! Sometimes it’s all she can do to keep from breaking down. I am literally the only person she has to talk to, that she cares about, week in and week out. Albert is away a great deal. I don’t think he is much company when he is home. She did try, when she first came, to make some acquaintances round about, among the well-to-do farmers’ wives. But she couldn’t bear them, and they said she was stuck up, and so that came to nothing. She doesn’t get on at all with Aunt Sabrina, either. Poor girl! she is so blue at times that my heart aches for her. Of course she wouldn’t let you see it. Besides she has been ever so much more cheerful since you came. I do hope you will stay as long as you can—just for her sake.”
She added this explanation with what sounded to Seth’s ear like gratuitous emphasis. The disposition rose swiftly within him to resent this.
“You are very careful,” he said, “to have me understand that it’s for her sake you want me to stay.” Then he felt, even while the sound of his voice was in the air, that he had made a fool of himself.
His cousin did not accept the individual challenge. “No, of course we are all glad to see you. You know we are. But she specially needs company; it’s a mercy to her to have somebody to brighten her up a little. Really, I get anxious about her at times. I try to run over as much as I can, but then I have grandmother to tend, you know.”
“How is the old lady, by the way? And oh—tell me, Annie, what it was that all at once set her against me so. You remember—the day before we went fishing, and Isabel saved my life.”
The answer did not come immediately. In the dim starlight Seth could see that his cousin’s face was turned away, and he guessed rather than saw that she was agitated.
“I will tell you,” she said at last, nervously, “why grandmother—or, no, I will not tell you! You have no right to ask. Don’t come any further, I am near enough to the house now. Good night.”
She had hurried away from him. He watched her disappear in the darkness, then turned and walked meditatively home.
He was not so sure as he had been that it was easy to understand women.
CHAPTER XV.—MR. RICHARD ANSDELL.
It was no light task to spend a vacation contentedly on the farm. There were thousands of city people who did it, and seemed to enjoy it, but Seth found it difficult to understand how they contrived to occupy themselves. What work on a farm meant, he knew very well; but the trick of idling in the country was beyond him. It was too hot, in these July days, for driving much, and besides, Albert rarely invited him into the buggy when the grays were brought around to the step. The two brothers saw little of each other, in fact. It was not precisely a coolness, but Albert seemed to have other things on his mind beside fraternal entertainment. The old pastime of fishing, too, failed him. In the renovation of the house his fine pole and tackle had somehow disappeared, and he had no money wherewith to replace them. He had entered upon his vacation unexpectedly, at a time when he happened to be particularly short of cash—and there was something in Albert’s manner and tone which rendered it impossible to apply to him, even if pride had not forbidden it.
There was, it is true, the increasing delight of being in Isabel’s company, but alongside this delight grew a doubt—a doubt which the young man shrank from recognizing and debating, but which forced its presence upon his mind, none the less—a doubt whether it was the part of wisdom to encourage too much of a friendship with his sister-in-law. This friendship had already reached a stage where Aunt Sabrina sniffed at its existence, and she hinted dimly to Seth of the perils which lurked in the lures of a citified siren, with an expression of face and a pointedness of emphasis which clearly had a domestic application. There was nothing in this, of course, but the insensate meddlesomeness of a disagreeable old maid, Seth said to himself, but still it annoyed him.
More serious, though, was his suspicion—lying dormant sometimes for days, then suddenly awakened by a curt word or an intent glance—that Albert disliked to see him so much with Isabel. Often this rendered him extremely nervous, for Isabel had no discretion (so the young man put it to himself) and displayed her pleasure in his society, her liking for him, quite as freely in her husband’s presence as when they were alone. There was nothing in this, either, only that it made him uneasy. Hence it came about that, just when one set of inclinations most urgently prompted him to stay about the house, another set often prevailed upon him to absent himself. On these occasions he generally walked over to Thessaly, and chatted with John.
“John and I have so much to talk about, you know, being both newspaper men,” he used to say, with a feeling that he owed an explanation of some sort to Isabel. “And then I can see the daily papers there. That gets to be a necessity with a journalist—as much so as his breakfast.”
“I scarcely dare to read a paper now,” Isabel once replied. “It drives me nearly mad with longing to get back among people again. I only read heavy things, classic poetry and history—and then, thank Heaven, there is this embroidery.”
It was at John’s, or rather on the way there, that Seth met one day a man of whom he was in after life accustomed to say, “He altered the whole bent of my career.” Perhaps this was an exaggerated estimate of the service Richard Ansdell really rendered Seth; but it is so difficult, looking back, to truly define the influence upon our fortunes or minds by any isolated event or acquaintance, and moreover, gratitude is so wholesome and sweet a thing to contemplate, and the race devotes so much energy to civilizing it out of young breasts, that I have not the heart to insist upon any qualification of Seth’s judgment.
Mr. Ansdell at this time was nearly forty years of age, and looked to be under thirty. He was small, thin-faced, clean-shaven, dark of skin and hair, with full, clear eyes, that by their calmness of expression curiously modified the idea of nervousness which his actions and mode of speech gave forth. He was spending his fortnight’s vacation in the vicinity, and he was strolling with his friend the school-teacher, Reuben Tracy, toward the village when Seth overtook them. Seth and Reuben had been very intimate in the old farm days—and here was a young man to the latent influence of whose sobriety of mind and cleanliness of tastes he never fully realized his obligation—but since his return they had not met. After greetings had been exchanged, they walked together to the village, and to the Banner of Liberty office.
It was the beginning of the week, and publication day was far enough off to enable John to devote all his time to his visitors. There was an hour or more of talk—on politics, county affairs, the news in the city papers, the humors and trials of conducting a rural newspaper, and so forth. When they rose to go, John put on his hat, and said he would “walk a ways” with them. On the street he held Seth back with a whispered “Let us keep behind a bit, I want to talk to you.” Then he added, when the others were out of hearing:
“I have got some personal things to say, later on. But—first of all—has Albert said anything since to you about the farm?”
“Not a word.”
“Well, I have been thinking it all over, trying to see where the crookedness comes in—for I feel it in my bones that there is something crooked. But I am not lawyer enough to get on to it. I’ve had a notion of putting the whole case to Ansdell, who’s a mighty bright lawyer, but then again, it seems to be a sort of family thing that we ought to keep to ourselves. What do you think?—for after all, it is mostly your affair.”
“I can’t see that Albert isn’t playing fair. It must be pretty nearly as he says—that he has put as much money in the farm as it was worth when he took it. It’s true that father’s will leaves it to him outright—and that wasn’t quite as Albert gave us to understand it should be—but Albert pledges us that our rights in it shall be respected, and it seems to me that that is better than an acknowledged interest in a bankrupt farm would be, which we hadn’t the capital to work, and which was worthless without it.”
“Perhaps you are right.” John paused for a moment, then began again in a graver tone: “There’s something else. How are you getting on on the Chronicle?”
“Oh, well enough; I get through my work without anybody’s finding fault. I suppose that is the best test. A fellow can’t do any more.”
“That is where you are wrong. ‘A fellow’ can do a great deal more. And when you went there I, for one, expected you were going to do a deuced sight more. You have been there now—let’s see—thirteen months. You are doing what you did when you went there—sawing up miscellany, boiling down news notes, grinding out a lot of departments which the office boy might do, if his own work weren’t more important. In a word you’ve just gone on to the threshold, and you’ve screwed yourself down to the floor there—and from all I hear you are likely to stay there all your life, while other fellows climb over your head to get into the real places.”
“From all you hear? What do you mean by that—who’s been telling you about me?”
“That you shan’t know, my boy. It is enough that I have heard. You haven’t fulfilled your promise. I thought you had the makings of a big man in you; I believed that all you needed was the chance, and you would rise. You were given the chance—put right in on the ground floor, and there you are, just where you were put. You haven’t risen worth a cent.”
“What do you expect a fellow to do? Get to be editor-in-chief in thirteen months? What could I do that I haven’t done? There have been no vacancies, so no one has climbed over my head. I’ve done the work I was set to do—and done it well, too. What more can you ask?”
Seth spoke in an aggrieved tone, for this attack seemed as unjust as it had been unexpected.
John replied, “Now keep cool, youngster! Nobody expected you to get to be editor-in-chief in thirteen months, so don’t talk nonsense. And I am not blaming you for not getting promotion, when there have been no vacancies. What I do mean, if you want to know, is that you have failed to make a good impression. You are not in the line of promotion. Workman doesn’t say to himself when he thinks of you ‘There’s a smart, steady, capable young man on whom we can count, who’s able to go as high as we are able to put him.’ No! instead of that he says—but no, never mind. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“Oh, you are mighty considerate, all at once,” retorted Seth, angrily. “Go on! Say what you were going to say! What is it that Workman says, since you’ve been spying on me behind my back?”
“Now you are talking like a fool,” said the elder brother, keeping his temper. “I haven’t been spying on you. I have only been commenting on facts which have come to my knowledge without seeking and which were brought to me by one who has your interests at heart. I have only been talking to you as I ought to talk, with the sole idea of benefiting you, helping you. If you don’t want to hear me, why I can shut up.”
Seth did not reply for a minute or so; then he growled moodily: “Go ahead! Let’s hear it all.”
“The ‘all’ can be said in a few words. You have been wasting your time. I grant that you have done your work well enough to escape blame—but what credit is there in that? a million mechanics do that every day. Instead of improving yourself, elevating and polishing yourself, by good reading, by studying the art of writing, above all by choosing your associates among men who are your superiors, and from whom you can learn, you have settled down in a Dutch beer saloon, making associates out of the commonest people in town, and having for your particular chum that rattle-headed loafer Tom Watts. Do you suppose Mr. Workman doesn’t know this? Do you suppose he likes it, or that it encourages him to hope for your future?”
Seth was silent longer than ever, this time. When he spoke it was to utter something which he instantly regretted: “I haven’t been able to gather from your old friends that you were altogether a bigot, yourself, on the subject of beer, when you were my age.”
Fortunately John did not get angry; Seth honestly admired and envied his elder brother’s good temper as he heard the reply:
“That’s neither here nor there. Perhaps I did a good many things that I want you to avoid. Besides, there was nothing in me. I am good enough as far as I go, but if I had worked on a daily paper till my teeth all fell out, I should never have got any higher than I was. With you it is different; you can go up to the head of the class if you are a mind to. But the beer saloon isn’t the way—and Tom Watts isn’t the guide.”
“He is the only friend I have got. What was I to do? It is easy enough to talk, John, about my knowing good people and all that, but how? That is the question? It isn’t fair to blame me as you do. All the men like Workman and Samboye—I suppose you mean them—hold themselves miles above me. Do you suppose I’ve ever seen the inside of their houses or of their club? Not I! You dump a young countryman in a strange city, new at his work, without knowing a solitary soul—and then you complain because he gets lonesome, and makes friends with the only people who show any disposition to be friendly with him. Do you call that fair play?”
“Well, there’s something in that,” John replied, meditatively. “Some time I’m going to write a leader on the organized indifference of modern city society to what becomes of young men who deserve its good offices and drift into beer saloons because they are not forthcoming. It would make the Banner immensely solid with orthodox people.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted me to go to the Young Men’s Christian Association, I suppose?”
“No-o, I don’t know that I would. I don’t know, after all, that you could have done much differently. But you’ve done enough of it, do you understand? You have served your time; you have taken your diploma. It is time now to quit. And I can put you on to a man, now, who will help you on the other tack. Do you see Ansdell, ahead there?”
“Yes;—is he the man who told you about Workman and me?”
John ignored the question. “Ansdell is one of the cleverest men going; he’s head and shoulders over anybody else there is in Tecumseh, or in this part of the State. For you to know him will be a college education in itself. He is more than a big lawyer, he is a student and thinker; more than that, he is a reformer; best of all, he is a man of the world, who has sown more wild oats than would fill Albert’s new bins, and there’s not an atom of nonsense about him. He knows about you. We’ve talked you over together. He understands my idea of what you ought to be, and he can help you more than any other man alive—and what is more he will.”
“It was he who told you about me, wasn’t it?” Seth persisted.
“If you will know, it was and it wasn’t. All he said was that he had heard Workman speak of you; that he had got the idea from his tone that you were not making the most of your opportunities; that he thought this was a great pity; and that if he could be of any use to you he would be very glad. That is all—and not even your sulkiness can make anything but kindness out of it.”
This practically ended the dialogue, for the others had stopped to let the brothers come up, and John shortly after left the party.
The three men had a long stroll back to the hillside road, with a still longer lounge on the grass under the elms by the bridge. Seth watched and listened to this swarthy, boyish-looking mentor who had, so to speak, thrust himself upon him, very closely, as was natural. Did he like him? It was hard, he found, to determine. Mr. Ansdell was extremely opinionated. He seemed to have convictions on almost every subject, and he clung to them, defended them, expanded them, with almost tearful earnestness. His voice was as strong and powerful as his figure was diminutive; he talked now chiefly about the Tariff, which he denounced with a vibrating intensity of feeling. Seth knew nothing about the Tariff, or next to nothing, but he admired what Ansdell said, mainly because it was said so well. But he grew quite enthusiastic in his endorsement when he heard his Editor, Mr. Samboye, used as a typical illustration of the dishonesty with which public men treated that question. After that he felt that it would be easy to make friends with Mr. Ansdell.
CHAPTER XVI.—DEAR ISABEL.
It was the last day but one of Seth’s vacation on the farm. He was not sorry, although the last week, by comparison, had been pleasant enough. He had seen a good deal of Mr. Ansdell, who interested him extremely, and who had come for him three or four times for long walks in the fields. He sat now in the living room near Isabel, dividing his attention between her and his book—one of Albert’s innumerable novels. The desultory conversation mixed itself up with the unfolding work of fiction so persistently that he presently gave over the attempt to read, and drew his chair nearer to his sister-in-law. It was raining outside, and wet weather always made her want to talk. She said:
“Tell me, Seth, if you have noticed any change in Alvira.”
“No, I can’t say that I have. In fact, she seems to me the one person about the place who has not altered a bit.”
“See what eyes men have! Why, she has grown ages older. She goes about now muttering to herself like an old, old woman. And the way she looks at one, sometimes, it is enough to give one the chills. I tell Albert often that I am almost afraid to have her in the house.”
Seth chuckled audibly, in good-natured derision. “What a mountain out of a mole hill! Why Alvira has glared at people that way, with her little black-bead eyes, ever since I was a boy. She doesn’t mean anything by it,—not the least in the world. The trouble is, Isabel, that you let your imagination run away with you. You are desperately lonesome here, and you amuse yourself by conjuring up all sorts of tragic things. You will have Aunt Sabrina a professional witch next thing you know, and Milton a mystic conspirator, and this plain old clap-boarded farm house a castle of enchantment.”
He had never before assumed even this jocose air of superiority over his blond sister-in-law, and he closed his sentence in some little trepidation lest she should resent it. But no, she received it with meekness, and only protested mildly against the assumption underneath.
“No, I am sure there is something in it. She is brooding about Milton. Not in any sentimental way, you know, but it used to be understood, I think, that they were to marry, and now he carries himself way above her. Why, I can remember, as long ago as when I visited here that summer, when we were all boys and girls and cousins together, I heard your mother say they would make a match of it some time. But now he avoids the kitchen and her. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, for me to be speculating in this way about the love affairs of the servants. But you are driven to it here. You have no idea how grateful one gets to be, here in the country, for the smallest item of human gossip.”
Seth was still considering whether it was possible for him, in careful language, to suggest his own—or rather the Lawton girl’s—view of the Milton-Alvira affair, when Isabel spoke again:
“Speaking of gossip, there is something I have been tempted half a dozen times to mention to you—something I heard almost every day during the little time that the women round-about were calling on me. You will guess what I mean—the talk about you and Annie.”
Seth did not immediately answer, and she continued:
“Of course, you know, Seth, that I wouldn’t speak of it if I thought it would be distasteful to you. But I know it used to be the idea that you two were marked for each other. I have heard ever so much about it since we have lived here. And yet you don’t seem to me to be at all like lovers—hardly even like affectionate cousins. I think she has rather avoided the house since you have been here, although that, of course, may be only imagination. She is such a dear, good girl, and I am so fond of her, but still I can hardly imagine her as your wife. You don’t mind my speaking about it, do you?”
Seth was still at a loss what to say, or, better, how to say it. While she had been speaking the contrast between the two young women, which had been slumbering in his mind for a year, had risen vividly before him. The smile, half-deprecating, half-inviting, with which she looked this last question at him, as she laid the everlasting embroidery down, and leaned slightly forward for a reply, gave the final touch to his vanishing doubts.
“Mind your speaking about it? No, no, Isabel.” He scarcely knew his own voice, it was so full of cooing softness. “I am glad you did—for—for who has a better right? No, there is nothing in the gossip. Our people—my mother, her grandmother—had it in mind once, I believe, but Annie and I have never so much as hinted at it between ourselves. Ever since mother’s death old Mrs. Warren has, however, taken a deep dislike to me—you remember how she forbade Annie to go with us on that fishing trip—but even without that——”
“Ah, I shan’t forget that fishing trip,” Isabel whispered, still with the tender smile.
“Nor I, you may be very sure.” The caressing tone of his voice sounded natural to him now. “As I was saying, even if we two young people had once thought of the thing, I fancy it would be different now, anyway. Then, I was going to be a farmer. Now, of course, that is all changed. My career is in the city, in circles where Annie would not be at home. She is a dear, good girl, as you say: nobody knows that better than I do. But you must admit she is—what shall I say?—rural. Now that I have got my foot on the ladder, there is no telling how far I may not climb. It would be simply suicide to marry a wife whom I perhaps would have to carry up with me, a dead weight.”
The youngster was not in the least conscious of the vicious nonsense he was talking. In the magnetic penumbra of Isabel’s presence his words seemed surcharged with wisdom and good feeling. And the young woman, too, who was four years his senior, and who should have known better, never suspected the ridiculous aspect of the sentiments to the expression of which she listened with such sweet-faced sympathy. We are such fools upon occasion.
“Besides, there is no reason why I should think of marriage at all, for a long time to come—at least not until I have made my way up in my profession a bit. When the time does come, it will be because I have found my ideal—for I have an ideal, you know, a very exalted one.”
He looked at her keenly, blushing as he did so, to discover if she had caught the purport of his words; then he addressed himself, with an absence of verbal awkwardness at which he was himself astonished, to making it more clear.
“I mean, Isabel, that my brother has won a prize which would make anything less valuable seem altogether worthless in my eyes. If there is not another woman in the world like my brother Albert’s wife, then I shall never marry.”
“Brother Albert’s wife” looked up at the speaker for an instant—a glance which seemed to him to be made of smiles, sadness, delight, reproach and many other unutterable things; then she bent over her work, and he fancied that the pretty fingers trembled a little between the stitches. There was a minute of silence, which seemed a half hour. At last she spoke:
“Does your brother impress you as being a particularly happy man? I won’t ask a similar question about his wife.”
Seth found it necessary to stand up, to do this subject justice. “No!” he answered. “He doesn’t deserve such a wife. But because one man is incapable of appreciating a treasure which he has won, it’s no reason why another man shouldn’t—shouldn’t say to himself ‘I will either marry that kind of woman or I’ll marry none.’ Now, is it, Isabel?”
“Perhaps this wife is not altogether the treasure you think she is,” the young woman answered, with the indirection of her sex.
Seth found words entirely inadequate to express his dissent. He could only smile at her, as if the doubt were too preposterous to be even suggested, and walk up and down in front of her.
Still intent upon her work, and with her head inclined so that he saw only a softened angle of face beneath the crown of glowing light-hued hair, she made answer, speaking more slowly than was usual with her, and with frequent pauses:
“I don’t think you know all my story, though it is a part of your family’s history on both sides. You remember my father—a sporting, horse-racing man of the world, and you know that my mother died when I was a baby. You knew me here, one summer, as a visiting cousin, and we played and quarrelled as children do. Now you know me again as your brother’s wife—but that is all. You know nothing of the rest—of how my father, proud about me as he was common in other things, kept me mewed up among governesses and housekeepers in one part of the house, while his flash companions rioted in another part; of how my wretched, chafing girlhood was spent among servants and tutors, with not so much as a glimpse of the world outside, like any Turkish girl; of how, when your brother, because he was a cousin, did become the one friend of my father’s who might be invited into the drawing room, and be introduced to me, and took a fancy that he would like to marry me, I welcomed even such a chance for emancipation, and almost cried for joy; and of how I woke up afterward—no, this is what you do not know.” There was a considerable pause here. “And I do not know why I tell this to you now, except that I want you to understand.”
“I do understand, Isabel.”
As a matter of fact he did not understand at all, but he thought he did, which, for present purposes, came to the same thing.
“And you can realize,” she went on, “how I feel at the thought of staying here the rest of my life—or, even if we go elsewhere—of having my life mapped out for me without any regard to my wishes and aspirations, while you are just pluming your wings for soaring, and can fly as high as you like with no one to gainsay you. Oh, what it must be to be a man!” She was looking up at him now, with enthusiasm supplanting the repining in her eyes. “And you love your work, so, too! You are so clever and capable! You can be anything you like in your profession—and it is impossible that I should ever be anything that I want to be.”
A month ago, when he first came to the farm, this calm assumption of his ability to carve whatever part he desired out of the journalistic cake would have fallen upon Seth like cruel and calculated sarcasm. As it was, he winced a little under its exaggeration, but the substance pleased him. He squared his shoulders unconsciously as he answered:
“Well, I am only at the threshold as yet, but if there is any such thing as doing it, I am going to push my way on. It doesn’t seem so easy always, when you are right in the thick of the fight, but now, after my rest here, I feel like an eagle refreshed. I am full of new ideas and ambitions. I owe a good deal of it to Ansdell, I suppose. You never saw such a fellow for making everybody believe as he does, and take an exalted view of things, and long to be doing something great. John prescribed him to me as a doctor would some medicine, and I took him more or less under protest, but I feel immensely better already.”
Isabel took only a languid interest in the inspiring qualities of this prodigy, and reverted to her own grievance:
“Yes, you will go and conquer your position. I will stay here and count those miserable poplars across the road—did you ever see a more monotonous row?—and work anti-macassars for no one to see, and mope my heart out. Why, do you know, I haven’t one single correspondent!”
The full enormity of the situation thus revealed was lost upon Seth, who had never written more than half-a-dozen letters in his life, and did not see why people who did not have to write letters should want to do so. But he said “Indeed!” as compassionately as he could.
“No, not one. I did think you might have taken pity on me, but for all the year that you have been away, I have never heard a word from you.”
“I wrote once or twice to Albert,” Seth answered, tentatively, to occupy time until he could turn around in his mind the immense suggestion involved in this complaint.
“Yes, and I used to hear at the breakfast table—‘Oh, by the way, Aunt Sabrina, Seth sends his love to you and Isabel—’ only this and nothing more! What is the good of having a literary man in the family, if he doesn’t write you long, nice letters?” The vista which had flashed itself before Seth’s mental vision was filled with dazzling light. He could not mask the exultation in his voice as he asked:
“Do you really want me to write to you?”
“You ought not to have waited to be asked,” she said, smiling again. “Yes, you shall write me—and long letters too, mind—as often as you like.” She added after a moment’s pause, in which both had been turning over the same idea, “You needn’t be afraid of writing too often. The bundle from the post office always comes to me in the morning, hours before he gets downstairs. Dana brings it up when he comes back from the cheese-factory, and it never goes into any one’s hands but mine. Beside, henceforth I shall watch for it all the more carefully.”
Next morning Seth prepared once again to leave the homestead, but this time with a light heart and a gay demeanor. A month’s absence had served so to remodel his views of the Chronicle, that he already felt himself to be a personage of importance, in its control. He had been constantly spoken of in the village as “one of the editors” of that journal, and found so much pleasure in the designation that he had come to use it in thinking of himself. He felt himself fired, too, with new enthusiasm and power by his talks with Ansdell, and he believed, not only that he saw where his past errors had lain, but that he knew now the trick of success. Above all, he was to write long letters to Isabel, and receive answers equally long and nice from her, and—this gave him an especial sense of delight—it was all to be a secret between them.
The sun shone brightly, too, after the rain, as if to be in harmony with his mood. Albert was more affable than he had been before, and after breakfast, and while the carriage was being brought around, gave him some cigars for the journey, and a $20 bill for pocket money. These were pleasant preludes to a little brotherly conversation.
“I wish you would hurry up and get to have a say on the Chronicle as soon as you can, Seth,” said the lawyer, holding him by the lappel in fraternal fashion. “You can help me there, help me very materially. I am going to be nominated for Congress in this district next year—don’t whisper about it yet, but I’ve got it solid. I haven’t let any grass grow under my feet since I moved here, and they can’t beat me in the Convention. But the Chronicle can do a good deal in the election, and I look to you for that. I am not going to Washington without knowing my business after I get there. There is a big thing on hand, big for me, big for you too. Good-bye now, my boy; I must get upstairs to my writing. You won’t forget!”
No, Seth promised, very cordially and heartily, he would not forget.
When his traps had been piled again into the carriage, and he said good-bye to his Aunt and to Alvira, no Isabel was to be seen. She had been at breakfast, but had subsequently disappeared. Seth went into the living room—no one was there. He opened the door to the stairs and called out her name—no answer. As he closed the door again, he heard the faintest tinkle imaginable from a piano key. He had not thought of the parlor, which was ordinarily unused, but he hastened to it now. Isabel stood at the instrument, her head bowed; her finger still pressing the key. She turned with a dear little exclamation, which might be either of surprise or satisfied expectancy, and held out her hand.
“So you wouldn’t go, after all, without saying good-bye to me!”
“Why, Isabel, you know better!” answered Seth, still very downright for his years. He was actually pained at her having fancied him capable of such a thing, and while he held her hand, he looked at her with mild reproach in his eyes.
“Oh, do I?” she answered, rather inconsequently. Then she sighed, and bowed her fair head again. “Have you given it a thought at all—how lonely it will be after you are gone for—for those who are left behind? I can’t bear to think of it—I came in here because I couldn’t stand and see the horses at the door, and the preparations for your going. It is as if the tomb door were swinging back on me again. I am foolish, I know—” here the words were much hampered in their flow by incipient sobs—“but if you could realize my position—the awful desolation of it, the—the—” She broke down altogether, and, with the disengaged hand, put her handkerchief to her eyes.
Seth had never seen a young and beautiful woman in tears before, off the stage, but his racial instincts served him in the emergency. He gently took her hand down again, holding them both, now, in his. He told her, again surprising himself by the smoothness and felicity of his words, how delightful she had made his visit, how deeply he prized her sympathy and compassionated her lot, and how the pangs of regret at parting were only solaced by the thought that she had permitted him to write. Then he kissed her—and hurried out to the carriage.
The handsome, high-bitted grays made short work of the drive to Thessaly station, where John was waiting to have a parting word, so that Seth scarcely had time to collect his thoughts and settle accounts with himself, before the train started. Three hours later when he got off at Tecumseh, he had progressed no further in his work of striking a moral balance than:
“After all, she is my cousin as well as my sister-in-law.”