The President of the United States, that year, had publicly professed himself of the opinion that “the maintenance of pacific relations with all the world, the fruitful increase of the earth, the rewards accruing to honest toil throughout the land, and the nation’s happy immunity from pestilence, famine, and disastrous visitations of the elements,” deserved exceptional recognition at the hands of the people on the last Thursday in November. The Governor of the State went further, both in rhetorical exuberance and in his conception of benefits received, for he enumerated “the absence of calamitous strife between capital and labor,” “the patriotic spirit which had dominated the toilers of the mine, the forge, the factory, and the mill, in their judicious efforts to unite and organize their common interests,” and “the wise and public-spirited legislation which in the future, like a mighty bulwark, would protect the great and all-important agricultural community from the debasing competition of unworthy wares”—as among the other things for which everybody should be thankful.
There were many, no doubt, who were conscious of a kindly glow as they read beneath the formal words designating the holiday, and caught the pleasant and gracious significance of the Thanksgiving itself—strange and perverted survival as it is of a gloomy and unthankful festival. There were others, perhaps, who smiled a little at his Excellency’s shrewd effort to placate the rising and hostile workingmen’s movement and get credit from the farmers for the recent oleomargarine bill, and for the rest took the day merely as a welcome breathing spell, with an additional drink or two in the forenoon, and a more elaborate dinner than was usual.
In the Lawton household they troubled their heads neither about the text and tricks of the proclamations nor the sweet and humane meaning of the day. There were much more serious matters to think of.
The parable of the Prodigal Son has long been justly regarded as a model of terse and compact narrative; but modern commentators of the analytical sort have a quarrel with the abruptness of its ending. They would have liked to learn what the good stay-at-home son said and did after his father had for a second time explained the situation to him. Did he, at least outwardly, agree that “it was meet that we should make merry and be glad”? And if he consented to go into the house, and even to eat some of the fatted calf, did he do it with a fine, large, hearty pretence of being glad? Did he deceive the returned Prodigal, for example, into believing in the fraternal welcome? Or did he lie in wait, and, when occasion offered, quietly, and with a polite smile, rub gall and vinegar into the wayfarer’s wounds? Alas, this we can only guess.
Poor Ben Lawton had been left in no doubt as to the attitude of his family toward the prodigal daughter. A sharp note of dissent had been raised at the outset, on the receipt of her letter—a note so shrill and strenuous that for the moment it almost scared him into begging her not to come. Then his better nature asserted itself, and he contrived to mollify somewhat the wrath of his wife and daughters by inventing a tortuous system of lies about Jessica’s intentions and affairs. He first established the fiction that she meant only to pay them a flying visit. Upon this he built a rambling edifice of falsehood as to her financial prosperity, and her desire to do a good deal toward helping the family. Lastly, as a crowning superstructure of deception, he fabricated a theory that she was to bring with her a lot of trunks filled with costly and beautiful dresses, with citified bonnets and parasols and high-heeled shoes, beyond belief—all to be distributed among her sisters. Once well started, he lied so luxuriantly and with such a flowing fancy about these things, that his daughters came to partially believe him—him whom they had not believed before since they could remember—and prepared themselves to be civil to their half-sister.
There were five of these girls—the offspring of a second marriage Lawton contracted a year or so after the death of baby Jessica’s mother. The eldest, Melissa, was now about twenty, and worked out at the Fairchild farm-house some four miles from Thessaly—a dull, discontented young woman, with a heavy yet furtive face and a latent snarl in her voice. Lucinda was two years younger, and toiled in the Scotch-cap factory in the village. She also was a commonplace girl, less obviously bad-tempered than Melissa, but scarcely more engaging in manner. Next in point of age was Samantha, who deserves some notice by herself, and after her came the twins, Georgiana and Arabella, two overgrown, coarse, giggling hoydens of fifteen, who obtained intermittent employment in the button factory.
Miss Samantha, although but seventeen, had for some time been tacitly recognized as the natural leader of the family. She did no work either in factory or on farm, and the local imagination did not easily conceive a condition of things in which she could find herself reduced to the strait of manual labor. Her method, baldly stated, was to levy more or less reluctant contributions upon whatever the rest of the family brought in. There was a fiction abroad that Samantha stayed at home to help her mother. The facts were that she was only visible at the Law-ton domicile at meal-times and during inclement weather, and that her mother was rather pleased than otherwise at this being the case.
Samantha was of small and slight figure, with a shrewd, prematurely-sapient face that was interesting rather than pretty, and with an eye which, when it was not all demure innocence, twinkled coldly like that of a rodent of prey. She had several qualities of mind and deportment which marked her as distinct from the mass of village girls; that which was most noticeable, perhaps, was her ability to invent and say sharp, comical, and cuttingly sarcastic things without herself laughing at them. This was felt to be a rare attainment indeed in Thessaly, and its possession gave her much prestige among the young people of both sexes, who were conscious of an insufficient command alike over their tongues and their boisterous tendencies. Samantha could have counted her friends, in the true, human sense of the word, upon her thumbs; but of admirers and toadies she swayed a regiment. Her own elder sisters, Melissa and Lucinda, alternated between sulky fear of her and clumsy efforts at propitiation; the junior twins had never as yet emerged from a plastic state of subordination akin to reverence. Samantha’s attitude toward them all was one of lofty yet observant criticism, relieved by lapses into half-satirical, half-jocose amiability as their pay-days approached. On infrequent occasions she developed a certain softness of demeanor toward her father, but to her mother she had been uniformly and contemptuously uncivil for years.
Of this mother, the second Mrs. Lawton, there is little enough to say. She was a pallid, ignorant, helpless slattern, gaunt of frame, narrow of forehead, and bowed and wrinkled before her time. Like her husband, she came of an ancestry of lake and canal boatmen; and though twenty odd years had passed since increasing railroad competition forced her parents to abandon their over-mortgaged scow and seek a living in the farm country, and she married the young widower Ben Lawton in preference to following them, her notions of housekeeping and of existence generally had never expanded beyond the limits of a canal-boat cabin. She rose at a certain hour, maundered along wearily through such tasks of the day as forced themselves upon her, and got to bed again as early as might be, inertly thankful that the day was done. She rarely went out upon the street, and still more rarely had any clothes fit to go out in. She had a vague pride in her daughter Samantha, who seemed to her to resemble the heroines of the continued stories which she assiduously followed in the Fireside Weekly, and sometimes she harbored a formless kind of theory that if her baby boy Alonzo had lived, things would have been different; but her interest in the rest of the family was of the dimmest and most spasmodic sort. In England she would have taken to drink, and been beaten for it, and thus at least extracted from life’s pilgrimage some definite sensations. As it was, she lazily contributed vile cooking, a foully-kept house, and a grotesque waste of the pittances which came into her hands, to the general squalor which hung like an atmosphere over the Lawtons.
The house to which Jessica had come with her father the previous afternoon was to her a strange abode. At the time of her flight, five years before, the family had lived on a cross-road some miles away; at present they were encamped, so to speak, in an old and battered structure which had been a country house in its time, but was now in the centre of a new part of Thessaly built up since war. The building, with its dingy appearance and poverty-stricken character, was an eyesore to the neighborhood, and everybody looked hopefully forward to the day when the hollow in which it stood should be filled up, and the house and its inhabitants cleared away out of sight.
Jessica upon her arrival had been greeted with constrained coolness by her stepmother, who did not even offer to kiss her, but shook hands limply instead, and had been ushered up to her room by her father. It was a low and sprawling chamber, with three sides plastered, and the fourth presenting a time-worn surface of naked lathing. In it were a bed, an old chest of drawers, a wooden chair, and a square piece of rag carpet just large enough to emphasize the bareness of the surrounding floor. This was the company bedroom; and after Ben had brought up all her belongings and set them at the foot of the bed, and tiptoed his way down-stairs again, Jessica threw herself into the chair in the centre of its cold desolation, and wept vehemently.
There came after a time, while she still sat sobbing in solitude, a soft rap at her door. When it was repeated, a moment later, she hastily attempted to dry her eyes, and answered, “Come in.” Then the door opened, and the figure of Samantha appeared. She was smartly dressed, and she had a half-smile on her face. She advanced readily toward the chair.
“Don’t you know me?” she said, as Jessica rose and looked at her doubtfully in the fading light. “I’m Samantha. Of course, I’ve grown a good deal; but Lord! I’d have known you anywhere. I’m glad to see you.”
Her tone betrayed no extravagance of heated enthusiasm, but still it was a welcome in its way; and as the two girls kissed each other, Jessica choked down the last of her sobs, and was even able to smile a little.
“Yes, I think I should have known you,” she replied. “Oh, now I look at you, of course I should. Yes, you’ve grown into a fine girl. I’ve thought of you very, very often.”
“I’ll bet not half as often as I’ve thought of you,” Samantha made answer, cheerfully. “You’ve been living in a big city, where there’s plenty to take up your time; but it gets all-fired slow down here sometimes, and then there’s nothing to do but to envy them that’s been able to get out.”
Samantha had been moving the small pieces of luggage at the foot of the bed with her feet as she spoke. With her eyes still on them she asked, in a casual way:
“Father gone for the rest of your things? It’s like him to make two jobs of it.”
“This is all I have brought; there is nothing more,” said Jessica.
“What!”
Samantha was eying her sister with open-mouthed incredulity. She stammered forth, after a prolonged pause of mental confusion:
“You mean to say you ain’t brought any swell dresses, or fancy bonnets, or silk wrappers, or sealskins, or—or anything? Why, dad swore you was bringing whole loads of that sort of truck with you!” She added, as if in angry quest for consolation: “Well, there’s one comfort, he always was a liar!”
“I’m sorry if you’re disappointed,” said Jessica, stiffly; “but this is all I’ve brought, and I can’t help it.”
“But you must have had no end of swell things,” retorted the younger girl. “It stands to reason you must. I know that much. And what have you done with ’em?” She broke out in loud satire: “Oh, yes! A precious lot you thought about me and the rest of us! I daresay it kept you awake nights, thinking about us so much!”
Jessica gazed in painful astonishment at this stripling girl, who had regarded her melancholy home-coming merely in the light of a chance to enjoy some cast-off finery. All the answers that came into her head were too bitter and disagreeable. She did not trust herself to reply, but, still wearing her hat and jacket, walked to the window and looked out down the snowy road. The impulse was strong within her to leave the house on the instant.
Samantha had gone away, slamming the door viciously behind her, and Jessica stood for a long time at the window, her mind revolving in irregular and violent sequence a score of conflicting plans and passionate notions. There were moments in this gloomy struggle of thought when she was tempted to throw everything to the winds—her loyalty to pure-souled Annie Fairchild, her own pledges to herself, her hopes and resolves for the future, everything—and not try any more. And when she had put these evil promptings behind her, that which remained was only less sinister.
As she stood thus, frowning down through the unwashed panes at the white, cheerless prospect, and tearing her heart in the tumultuous revery of revolt, the form of a man advancing up the road came suddenly under her view. He stopped when he was in front of the Lawton house, and looked inquiringly about him. The glance which he directed upwards fell full upon her at the window. The recognition was mutual, and he turned abruptly from the road and came toward the house. Jessica hurriedly took off her hat and cloak. Reuben Tracy had come to see her!
It was her stepmother who climbed the stairs to notify her, looking more lank and slatternly than ever, holding the bedroom door wide open, and saying sourly: “There’s a man down-stairs to see you already,” as if the visit were an offence, and Jessica could not pretend to be surprised. “Yes, I saw him,” she answered, and hurried past Mrs. Lawton, and down to the gaunt, dingy front room, with its bare walls, scant furniture, and stoveless discomfort, which not even Samantha dared call a parlor.
She could remember afterward that Reuben stood waiting for her with his hat in his left hand, and that he had taken the glove from his right to shake hands with her; and this she recalled more distinctly than anything else. He had greeted her with grave kindness, had mentioned receiving notice from the Fairchilds of her coming, and had said that of course whatever he could do to help her he desired to do. Then there had been a pause, during which she vaguely wavered between a wish that he had not come, and a wild, childish longing to hide her flushed face against his overcoat, and weep out her misery. What she did do was to point to a chair, and say, “Won’t you take a seat?”
“It is very kind of you to come,” she went on, “but—” She broke off suddenly and looked away from him, and through the window at the snow-banks outside. “How early the winter has closed in,” she added, with nervous inconsequence.
Reuben did not even glance out at the snow. “I’m bound to say that it isn’t very clear to me what use I can be to you,” he said. “Of course, I’m all in the dark as to what you intend to do. Mr. Fairchild did not mention that you had any definite plans.”
“I had thought some of starting a milliner’s shop, of course very small, by myself. You know I have been working in one for some months at Tecumseh, ever since Mrs. Fairchild—ever since she—”
The girl did not finish the sentence, for Reuben nodded gravely, as if he understood, and that seemed to be all that was needed.
“That might do,” he said, after a moment’s thought, and speaking even more deliberately than usual. “I suppose I ought to tell you this doesn’t seem to me a specially wise thing, your coming back here. Don’t misunderstand me; I wouldn’t say anything to discourage you, for the world. And since you have come, it wasn’t of much use, perhaps, to say that. Still, I wanted to be frank with you, and I don’t understand why you did come. It doesn’t appear that the Fairchilds thought it was wise, either.”
“She did,” answered Jessica, quickly, “because she understood what I meant—what I had in mind to do when I got here. But I’m sure he laughed at it when she explained it to him; she didn’t say so, but I know he did. He is a man, and men don’t understand.”
Reuben smiled a little, but still compassionately. “Then perhaps I would better give it up in advance, without having it explained at all,” he said.
“No; when I saw your name on the sign, down on Main Street, this afternoon, I knew that you would see what I meant. I felt sure you would: you are different from the others. You were kind to me when I was a girl, when nobody else was. You know the miserable childhood I had, and how everybody was against me—all but you.”
Jessica had begun calmly enough, but she finished with something very like a sob, and, rising abruptly, went to the window.
Reuben sat still, thinking over his reply. The suggestion that he differed from the general run of men was not precisely new to his mind, but it had never been put to him in this form before, and he was at a loss to see its exact bearings. Perhaps, too, men are more nearly alike in the presence of a tearful young woman than under most other conditions. At all events, it took him a long time to resolve his answer—until, in fact, the silence had grown awkward.
“I’m glad you have a pleasant recollection of me,” he said at last. “I remember you very well, and I was very sorry when you left the school.” He had touched the painful subject rather bluntly, but she did not turn or stir from her post near the window, and he forced himself forward. “I was truly much grieved when I heard of it, and I wished that I could have talked with you, or could have known the circumstances in time, or—that is to say—that I could have helped you. Nothing in all my teacher experience pained me more. I—”
“Don’t let us talk of it,” she broke in. Then she turned and came close beside him, and lifted her hand as if to place it on his shoulder by a frank gesture of friendship. The hand paused in mid-air, and then sank to her side. “I know you were always as good as good could be. You don’t need to tell me that.”
“And I wasn’t telling you that, I hope,” he rejoined, speaking more freely now. “But you have never answered my question. What is it that Seth Fairchild failed to understand, yet which you are sure I will comprehend? Perhaps it is a part of your estimate of me that I should see without being told; but I don’t.”
“My reason for coming back? I hardly know how to explain it to you.”
Reuben made no comment upon this, and after a moment she went on:
“It sounds unlikely and self-conceited, but for months back I have been full of the idea. It was her talk that gave me the notion. I want to be a friend to other girls placed as I was when I went to your school, with miserable homes and miserable company, and hating the whole thing as I hated it, and aching to get away from it, no matter how; and I want to try and keep them from the pitch-hole I fell into. That’s what I want—only I can’t explain it to you as I could to her; and you think it’s silly, don’t you? And I—begin to think—so—myself.”
Reuben had risen now and stood beside her, and put his hand lightly on her shoulder as she finished with this doleful confession. He spoke with grave softness:
“No, not silly: it seems to me a very notable kind of wisdom. I had been thinking only of you, and that you could live more comfortably and happily elsewhere. But it seems that you were thinking of matters much greater than your own. And that surprises me, and pleases me, and makes me ashamed of my own view. Think you silly? My dear child, I think you are superb. Only”—he spoke more slowly, and in a less confident tone—“unfortunately, though it is wisdom to do the right thing, it doesn’t always follow that it is easy, or successful for that matter. You will need to be very strong, in order to stand up straight under the big task you have undertaken—very strong and resolute indeed.”
The touch of his hand upon her shoulder had been more to Jessica than his words, the line of which, in truth, she had not clearly followed. And when he ended with his exhortation to robust bravery, she was conscious of feeling weaker than for months before. The woman’s nature that was in her softened under the gentle pressure of that strong hand, and all the nameless feminine yearnings for wardenship and shelter from life’s battle took voice and pleaded in her heart. Ah, yes! he spoke of her being strong, and the very sound of his voice unnerved her. She could not think; there was no answer to be made to his words, for she had scarcely heard them. No reply of any kind would come to her lips. In place of a mind, she seemed to have only a single sense—vast, overpowering, glorious—and that was of his hand upon her shoulder. And enwrapped, swallowed up in this sense, she stood silent.
Then lo! the hand was gone, and with a start her wits came back. The lawyer was buttoning his overcoat, and saying that he must be going.
She shook hands with him mechanically, in confused apprehension lest she should think of nothing more to say to him before he departed. She followed him to the hall, and opened the front door for him. On the threshold the words she wanted came to her.
“I will try to be strong,” she said, “and I thank you a thousand times for coming.”
“Now, you will let me help you; you will come to me freely, won’t you?” Reuben said as he lifted his hat.
“Good-by,” answered Jessica, slowly, as she closed the door.
The church-bells rang out next morning through a crisp and frosty air. A dazzling glare of reflected sunshine lay on the dry snow, but it gave no suggestion of warmth. The people who passed on their way to Thanksgiving services walked hurriedly, and looked as if their minds were concentrated on the hope that the sexton had lighted the fire in the church furnace the previous day. The milkman who stopped his sleigh just beyond the house of the Law-tons had to beat off a great rim of chalk-white ice with the dipper before he could open his can.
The younger members of the Lawton family were not dependent upon external evidences, however, for their knowledge that it was bitterly cold. It was nearly noon when they began to gather in the kitchen, and cluster about the decrepit old cooking-stove where burned the only fire in the house. A shivering and unkempt group they made, in the bright daylight, holding their red hands over the cracked stove-lids, and snarling sulkily at the weather and one another when they spoke at all.
Jessica had slept badly, and, rising early and dressing in self-defence against the cold, had found her father in the act of lighting the kitchen fire. An original impulse prompted her to kiss him when she bade him good-morning; and Ben, rising awkwardly from where he had been kneeling in front of the grate, looked both surprised and shamefacedly gratified. It seemed ages since one of his daughters had kissed him before.
“It’s a regular stinger of a morning, ain’t it?” he said, blowing his fingers. “The boards in the sidewalk jest riz up and went off under my feet like pistols last night, when I was coming home.” He added with an accent of uneasiness: “Suppose you didn’t hear me come in?”
He seemed pleased when she shook her head, and his face visibly lightened. He winked at her mysteriously, and going over to a recess in the wall, back of the woodbox, dragged out a lank and dishevelled turkey of a dingy gray color, not at all resembling the fowls that had been presented to him the previous day.
“Trouble with me was,” he said, reflectively, “I shot four turkeys. If I hadn’t been a bang-up shot, and had only killed one, why, I’d been all right. But no, I couldn’t help hitting ’em, and so I got four. Of course, I hadn’t any use for so many: so I got to raffling ’em off, and that’s where my darned luck come in.” He held the bird up, and turned it slowly around, regarding it with an amused chuckle. “You know this cuss ain’t one of them I shot, at all. You see, I got to raffling, and one time I stood to win nine turkeys and a lamp and a jag of firewood. But then the thing kind o’ turned, and went agin me, and darn me if I didn’t come out of the little end of the horn, with nothing but this here. Sh-h!—M’rye’s coming. Don’t say nothing to her. I told her I earnt it carrying in some coal.”
Mrs. Lawton entered the room as her husband was putting back the turkey. She offered no remarks beyond a scant “mornin’!” to Jessica, and directed a scowl toward Lawton, before which he promptly disappeared. She replied curtly in the negative when Jessica asked if there was anything she could do; but the novelty of the offer seemed to slowly impress her mind, for after a time she began to talk of her own accord. Ben had come home drunk the night before, she said; there wasn’t anything new in that, but it was decidedly new for him to bring something to eat with him. He said he’d been carrying in coal, which was her reason for believing he had been really shaving shingles or breaking up old barrels. He couldn’t tell the truth if he tried—it wasn’t in him not to lie. The worst of his getting drunk was he was so pesky good-natured the next day. Her father used always to have a headache under similar conditions, and make things peculiarly interesting for everybody round about, from her mother at the helm of the boat to the nigger-boy and the mule on the tow-path ahead. That was the way all other men behaved, too: that is, all who were good for anything. But Ben, he just grinned and did more chores than usual, and hung around generally, as if everybody was bound to like him because he had made a fool of himself.
This monologue of information and philosophy was not delivered consecutively, but came in disjointed and irrelevant instalments, spread over a considerable space of time. There was nothing in it all which suggested a reply, and Jessica did not even take the trouble to listen very attentively. Her own thoughts were a more than sufficient occupation.
The failure of the experiment upon which she had ventured was looming in unpleasant bulk before her. Every glance about her, every word which fell upon her ears, furnished an added reason why she was not going to be able to live on the lines she had laid out. Viewed even as a visit, the experience was hateful. Contemplated as a career, it was simply impossible. Rather than bear it, she would go back to Tecumseh or New York; and rather than do this, she would kill herself.
Too depressed to control her thoughts, much less to bend them definitely upon consideration of some possible middle course between suicide and existence in this house, Jessica sat silent at the back of the stove, and suffered. Her evening here with her sisters seemed to blend in retrospect with the sleepless night into one long, confused, intolerable nightmare. They had scarcely spoken to her, and she had not known what to say to them. For some reason they had chosen to stay indoors after supper—although this was plainly not their habit—and under Samantha’s lead had entered into a clumsy conspiracy to make her unhappy by meaning looks, and causeless giggles, and more or less ingenious remarks directed at her, but to one another. Lucinda had indeed seemed to shrink from full communion with this cabal, but she had shown no overt act of friendship, and the three younger girls had been openly hostile. Even after she had taken refuge in her cold room, at an abnormally early hour, her sense of their enmity and her isolation had been kept painfully acute by their loud talk in the hall, and in the chamber adjoining hers. Oh, no!—she was not even going to try to live with them, she said resolutely and with set teeth to herself.
They straggled into the kitchen now, and Lucinda was the only one of them who said “good-morning” to her. Jessica answered her greeting almost with effusion, but she would have had her tongue torn out rather than allow it to utter a solitary first word to the others. They stood about the stove for a time, and then sat down to the bare kitchen table upon which the maternal slattern had spread a kind of breakfast. Jessica took her place silently, and managed to eat a little of the bread, dipped in pork fat. The coffee, a strange, greasy, light-brown fluid without milk, she could not bring herself to touch. There was no butter.
After this odious meal was over Samantha brought down a cheap novel, and ensconced herself at the side of the stove, with her feet on a stick of wood in the oven. The twins, after some protest, entered lazily upon the task of plucking the turkey. Lucinda drew a chair to the window, and began some repairs on her bonnet. For sheer want of other employment, Jessica stood by the window for a time, looking down upon this crude millinery. Then she diffidently asked to be allowed to suggest some changes, and Lucinda yielded the chair to her; and her deft fingers speedily wrought such a transformation in the work that the owner made an exclamation of delight. At this the twins left their turkey to come over and look, and even Samantha at last quitted the stove and sauntered to the window with an exaggerated show of indifference. She looked on for a moment, and then returned with a supercilious sniff, which scared the twins also away. When the hat was finished, and Lucinda had tried it on with obvious satisfaction, Jessica asked her to go for a little walk, and the two went out together.
There was a certain physical relief in escaping from the close and evil-smelling kitchen into the keen, clear cold, but of mental comfort there was little. The sister had nothing beyond a few commonplaces to offer in the way of conversation, and Jessica was in no mood to create small-talk. She walked vigorously forward as far as the sidewalks were shovelled, indifferent to direction and to surroundings, and intent only upon the angry and distracting thoughts which tore one another in her mind. It was not until the drifts forced them to turn that she spoke.
“I always dread to get downright mad: it makes me sick,” she exclaimed, in defiant explanation to the dull Lucinda, who did not seem to have enjoyed her walk.
“If I was you, I wouldn’t mind ’em,” said the sister.
“You just keep a stiff upper lip and tend to your own knitting, and they’ll be coming around in no time to get you to fix their bonnets for ’em. I bet you Samanthy’ll have her brown plush hat to pieces, and be bringing it to you before Sunday.”
“She’ll have to bring it to me somewhere else, then. To-day’s my last day in that house, and don’t you forget it!”
Jessica spoke with such vehemence that Lucinda could only stare at her in surprise, and the town girl went excitedly on: “When I saw father yesterday, I was almost glad I’d come back; and you—well, you’ve been decent to me, too. But the rest—ah-h!—I’ve been swearing in my mind every second since they came into the kitchen this morning. I was all for tears yesterday. I started out crying at the dépôt, and I cried the best part of last night; but I’ve got all through. Do you mind? I’m through! If there’s got to be any more weeping, they’re the ones that’ll do it!”
She ground her teeth together as she spoke, as if to prevent a further outpouring of angry words. All at once she stopped, on some sudden impulse, and looked her half-sister in the face. It was a long, intent scrutiny, under which Lucinda flushed and fidgeted, but its result was to soften Jessica’s mood. She resumed the walk again, but with a less energetic step, and the hard, wrathful lines in her face had begun to melt.
“Probably there will be no need for any one else to weep,” she said, ashamed of her recent outburst. “God knows, I oughtn’t to want to make anybody unhappy!” Then after a moment’s silence she asked: “Do you work anywhere?”
“I’ve got a job at the Scotch-cap factory as long as it’s running.”
“How much can you earn there?”
“Three dollars a week is what I’m getting, but they’re liable to shut down any time now.”
Jessica pondered upon this information for a little. Then she put another question, with increased interest. “And do you like it at home, with the rest of them, there?”
“Like it? Yes, about as much as a cat likes hot soap. It’s worse now a hundred times than it was when you lit out. If there was any place to go to, I’d be off like a shot.”
“Well, then, here’s what I wanted to ask you. When I leave it, what’s the matter with your coming with me? I mean it. And I’ll look after you.” The girl’s revolt against her new and odious environment had insensibly carried her back into the free phraseology of her former life. As this was equally familiar to Lucinda’s factory-attuned ear, it could not have been the slang expression at which she halted. But she did stop, and in turn looked sharply into Jessica’s face. Her own cheeks, red with exposure to the biting air, flushed to a deeper tint. “You better ask Samantha, if that’s your game,” she said. “She’s more in your line. I ain’t on that lay myself.”
Before Jessica had fairly comprehended the purport of this remark, her sister had started briskly off by herself. The town girl stood bewildered for a moment, with a little inarticulate moan of pained astonishment trembling on her lips. Then she turned and ran after Lucinda.
“Wait a minute!” she panted out as she overtook her. “You didn’t understand me. I wouldn’t for a million dollars have you think that of me. Please wait, and let me tell you what I really meant. You’ll break my heart if you don’t!”
Thus adjured, Lucinda stopped, and consented to fall in with the other’s slower step. She let it be seen plainly enough that she was a hostile auditor, but still she listened. As Jessica, with a readier tongue than she had found in Reuben Tracy’s presence the day before, outlined her plan, the factory-girl heard her, first with incredulity, then with inter-est, and soon with enthusiasm.
“Go with you? You just bet I will!” was the form of her adhesion to the plan, when it had been presented to her.
The two young women extended their walk by tacit consent far beyond the original intention, and it was past the hour set for the dinner when they at last reluctantly entered the inhospitable-looking domicile. Its shabby aspect and the meanness of its poverty-stricken belongings had never seemed so apparent before to either of them, as they drew near to it, but it was even less inviting within.
They were warned that it would be so by their father, whom they encountered just outside the kitchen door, chopping up an old plank for firewood. Ben had put on a glaringly white paper collar, to mark his sense of the importance of the festival, and the effect seemed to heighten the gloom on his countenance.
“There’s the old Harry to pay in there,” he said, nodding his head toward the door. “Melissa’s come in from the farm to spend the day, because she heard you was here, Jess, and somehow she got the idee you’d bring a lot of dresses and fixings, and she wanted her share, and got mad because there wasn’t any; and Samantha she pitched into her about coming to eat up our dinner, and M’rye she took Melissa’s part, and so I kind o’ sashayed out. They don’t need this wood any more’n a frog needs a tail, but I’m going to whack ’er all up.”
The Thanksgiving dinner which shortly ensued had a solitary merit: it did not last very long. But hurried as it was, Jessica did not sit it out. The three sisters with whom she was not friendly had been quarrelling, it seemed, with Melissa, the heavy-browed and surly girl who worked out at the Fair-child farm, but all four combined in an instant against the new-comers. Lucinda had never shone in repartee, and, though she did not shrink from bearing a part in the conflict to which she suddenly found herself a party, what she was able to say only made matters worse. As for Jessica, she bit her lips in fierce restraint, and for a long time said nothing at all. Melissa had formally shaken hands with her, and had not spoken a word.
When the thin turkey was put upon the table, and Mrs. Lawton had with some difficulty mangled it into eight approximately equal portions, a period of silence fell on the party—silence broken only by sounds of the carnivora which are not expected at the banquets of the polite. Even this measly fowl, badly cooked and defiled by worse than tasteless dressing though it was, represented a treat in the Lawton household, and the resident members fell upon it with eager teeth. Melissa sniffed a trifle at her portion, to let it be seen that they were better fed out on the farm, but she ate vigorously none the less. It was only Jessica who could summon no appetite, and who sat silent and sick at heart, wearily striving at the pretence of eating in order not to attract attention. She was conscious of hostile glances being cast upon her from either side, but she kept her eyes as steadily as she could upon her plate or on her father, who sat opposite and who smiled at her encouragingly from time to time.
It was one of the ungracious twins who first attained the leisure in which to note Jessica’s failure to eat, and commented audibly upon the difficulty of catering to the palates of “fine ladies.” The phrase was instantly repeated with a sneering emphasis by Samantha, which was the signal for a burst of giggling, in which Melissa joined. Then Samantha, speaking very distinctly and with an ostentatious parade of significance, informed Melissa that young Horace Boyce had returned to Thessaly only the previous day, “on the very train which father went down to meet.” This treatment of Melissa as a vehicle for the introduction of disagreeable topics impressed the twins as a shrewd invention, and one of them promptly added:
“Yes, M’liss’, and who do you think called here yesterday? Reuben Tracy the lawyer. He was there in the parlor for half an hour—pretty cold he must have found it—but he wasn’t alone.”
“Oh, yes, we’re getting quite fashionable,” put in Samantha. “Father ought to set out a hitching-post and a carriage-block, so that we can receive our callers in style. I hope it will be a stone one, dad.”
“And so do I,” broke in Lucinda, angrily, “and then I’d like to see your head pounded on it, for all it was worth.”
“Well, if it was,” retorted Samantha, “it would make a noise. And that’s more than yours would.”
“You shut up!” shouted Ben Lawton, with the over-vehemence of a weak nature in excitement. “Hain’t you got no decency nor compassion in ye? Has she done any harm to you? Can’t you give her a chance—to—to live it down?”
While the echoes of this loud, indignant voice were still on the air, Jessica had pushed her chair back, risen, and walked straight to the door leading up-stairs. She looked at nobody as she passed, but held her pale face proudly erect, though her lips were quivering.
After she had opened the door, some words seemed to come to her, and she turned.
“Live it down!” she said, speaking more loudly than was her wont, to keep her faltering voice from breaking. “Live it down! Why, father, these people don’t want me to live at all!”
Then she closed the door and was seen no more that day.
Either through the softening influence of the Thanksgiving festival upon litigious natures, or by reason of the relaxing reaction from over-feasting, it happened that no clients of any kind visited Reuben Tracy’s law office next day. He came down early enough to light his own fires in both the inner and outer rooms—an experience for which he had been prepared by long observation of the effect produced by holidays upon his clerk—and he sat for a couple of hours by the stove, with his feet on the table and a book in his lap, waiting for Horace Boyce to keep the appointment. The book was an old collection of Carlyle’s earlier essays, and Reuben liked it better, perhaps, than any other member of his library family. He had not read it through, and there was a good deal in it which he seemed likely never to read. But there were other portions, long since very familiar to his mind and eye, which it was his habit to go over again whenever he had nothing else to do. The rough, thought-compelling diction rested his brain, by some curious rule of paradox. In the front of the volume he had written, “Not new books, but good books,” an apothegm adapted from a preface of an old English play which had pleased him.
He was indolently ruminating on the wealth of epithet with which the portrait of Cagliostro is painted, when his expected visitor arrived. He laughed aloud at some whimsical conceit that this association of people suggested, and tossed the book aside as he rose.
“I’ve been killing time,” he said, still smiling, “by reading about the prize impostor of the eighteenth century. You know it?—The Diamond Necklace. I like to read it. For good, downright swindling and effrontery there’s nothing anywhere like that fellow.”
Horace glanced at the book as he shook hands and took off his overcoat. He said nothing, but made a mental note that Reuben had come to know about Carlyle after everybody else had ceased reading him.
The two young men sat down together, and their talk for the first hour or so was of business matters. Reuben made clear what his practice was like, its dimensions, its profits, and its claims upon his time. The railroad business had come to him through the influence of his old friend Congressman Ansdell, of Tecumseh, and was very important. The farmers in the vicinity, too, had brought him the bulk of their patronage in the matter of drawing deeds and mortgages—most frequently the latter, he was sorry to say—because he was a farmer’s son. This conveyancing work had grown to such proportions, and entailed such an amount of consultation, that he had been more and more crowded out from active court practice, which he was reluctant to abandon. This was his reason for thinking of a partner. Then the conversation drifted into discussion of Horace’s fitness for the place, and his proper share in the earnings of the firm. They went over for dinner to the Dearborn House, where Reuben lived, before this branch of the talk was concluded. Upon their return, over some cigars which Horace thought very bad, they made more headway, and arrived at an understanding satisfactory to both. Reuben printed the firm name of “Tracy & Boyce” on a blotter, to see how it would look, and Horace talked confidently of the new business which the long connection of his family with Thessaly would bring to them.
“You know, they’ve been here from the very beginning. My great-grandfather was county judge here as far back as 1796, almost the first one after the county was created. And his son, my great-uncle, was congressman one term, and assemblyman for years; and another brother was the president of the bank; and my grandfather was the rector of St. Matthew’s; and then my father being the best-known soldier Dearborn sent out during the war—what I mean is, all this ought to help a good deal. It’s something to have a name that is as much a part of the place as Thessaly itself. You see what I mean?”
Horace finished with an almost nervous query, for it had dawned upon him that his companion might not share this high opinion of the value of an old name and pedigree. Come to think of it, the Tracys were nobody in particular, and he glanced apprehensively at Reuben’s large, placid face for signs of pique. But there was none visible to the naked eye, and Horace lighted a fresh cigar, and put his feet up on the table beside those of his new partner.
“I daresay there’s something in that,” Reuben remarked after a time. “Of course there must be, and for that matter I guess a name goes for more in our profession than it does anywhere else. I suppose it’s natural for people to assume that jurisprudence runs in families, like snub-noses and drink.” As soon as he had uttered this last word, it occurred to him that possibly Horace might construe it with reference to his father, and he made haste to add:
“I never told you, I think, about my own career. I don’t talk about it often, for it makes a fellow sound like Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times—the chap who was always bragging about being a self-made man.”
“No; I’d like to hear about it,” said Horace. “The first I remember of you was at the seminary here.”
“Well, I was only fifteen years old then, and all the story I’ve got dates before that. I can just remember when we moved into this part of the world—coming from Orange County. My father had bought a small farm some fifteen miles from here, over near Tyre, and we moved onto it in the spring. I was about five. I had an older brother, Ezra, and two younger ones. There was a good deal of hard work to do, and father tried to do it all himself, and so by harvest time he was laid up; and the men who came and got in the crops on shares robbed us down to the ground. When winter came, father had to get up, whether he was well enough or not, and chop wood for the market, to make up for the loss on harvesting. One evening he didn’t come home, and the team was away all night, too, with mother never going to bed at all, and then before daybreak taking Ezra to carry a lantern, and starting through the drifts for our patch of woods. They found my father dead in the forest, crushed under a falling tree.
“I suppose it was a terrible winter. I only dimly remember it, or the summer that followed. When another winter was coming on, my mother grew frightened. Try the best she knew how, she was worse off every month than she had been the month before. To pay interest on the mortgage, she had to sell what produce we had managed to get in, keeping only a bare moiety for ourselves, and to give up the woodland altogether. Soon the roads would be blocked; there was not enough fodder for what stock we had, nor even food enough for us. We had no store of fuel, and no means of staving off starvation. Under stern compulsion, solely to secure a home for her boys, my mother married a well-to-do farmer in the neighborhood—a man much older than herself, and the owner of a hundred-acre farm and of the mortgages on our own little thirty acres.
“I suppose he meant to be a just man, but he was as hard as a steel bloom. He was a prodigious worker, and he made us all work, without rest or reward. When I was nine years old, narrow-chested and physically delicate, I had to get up before sunrise for the milking, and then work all day in the hay-field, making and cocking, and obliged to keep ahead of the wagon under pain of a flogging. Three years of this I had, and I recall them as you might a frightful nightmare. I had some stray schooling—my mother insisted upon that—but it wasn’t much; and I remember that the weekly paper was stopped after that because Ezra and I wasted too much time in reading it.
“Finally my health gave out. My mother feared that I would die, and at last gained the point of my being allowed to go to Tyre to school, if I could earn my board and clothes there. I went through the long village street there, stopping at every house to ask if they wanted a little boy to do chores for his board and go to school. I said nothing about clothes after the first few inquiries. It took me almost all day to find a place. It was nearly the last house in the village. The people happened to want a boy, and agreed to take me. I had only to take care of two horses, milk four cows, saw wood for three stoves, and run errands. When I lay awake in my new bed that night, it was with joy that I had found such a kind family and such an easy place!
“I went to school for a year, and learned something—not much, I daresay, but something. Then I went back to the farm, alternating between that and other places in Tyre, some better, some worse, until finally I had saved eight dollars. Then I told my mother that I was going to Thessaly seminary. She laughed at me—they all laughed—but in the end I had my way. They fitted me out with some clothes—a vest of Ezra’s, an old hat, trousers cut perfectly straight and much too short, and clumsy boots two sizes too big for me, which had been bought by my stepfather in wrath at our continual trouble in the winter to get on our stiffened and shrunken boots.
“I walked the first ten miles with a light heart. Then I began to grow frightened. I had never been to Thessaly, and though I knew pretty well from others that I should be well received, and even helped to find work to maintain myself, the prospect of the new life, now so close at hand, unnerved me. I remember once sitting down by the roadside, wavering whether to go on or not. At last I stood on the brow of the hill, and saw Thessaly lying in the valley before me. If I were to live a thousand years, I couldn’t forget that sight—the great elms, the white buildings of the seminary, the air of peace and learning and plenty which it all wore. I tell you, tears came to my eyes as I looked, and more than once they’ve come again, when I’ve recalled the picture. I remember, too, that later on in the day old Dr. Burdick turned me loose in the library, as it were There were four thousand books there, and the sight of them took my breath away. I looked at them for a long time, I know, with my mouth wide open. It was clear to me that I should never be able to read them all—nobody, I thought, could do that—but at last I picked out a set of the encyclopaedia at the end of the shelf nearest the door, and decided to begin there, and at least read as far through the room as I could.”
Reuben stopped here, and relighted his cigar. “That’s my story,” he said after a pause, as if he had brought the recital up to date.
“I should call that only the preface—or rather, the prologue,” said Horace.
“No; the rest is nothing out of the ordinary. I managed to live through the four years here—peddling a little, then travelling for a photographer in Tecumseh who made enlarged copies of old pictures collected from the farm-houses, then teaching school. I studied law first by myself, then with Ansdell at Tecumseh, and then one year in New York at the Columbia Law School. I was admitted down there, and had a fair prospect of remaining there, but I couldn’t make myself like New York. It is too big; a fellow has no chance to be himself there. And so I came back here; and I haven’t done so badly, all things considered.”
“No, indeed; I should think not!” was Horace’s hearty comment.
“But I see the way now, I think,” continued Reuben, meditatively, “to doing much better still. I see a good many ways in which you can help me greatly.”
“I should hope so,” smiled young Mr. Boyce. “That’s what I’m coming in for.”
“I’m not thinking so much of the business,” answered Reuben; “there need be no borrowing-of trouble about that. But there are things outside that I want to do. I spoke a little about this the other day, I think.”
“You said something about going into politics,” replied Horace, not so heartily. The notion had already risen in his mind that the junior member of the new partnership might be best calculated to shine in the arena of the public service, if the firm was to go in for that sort of thing.
“Oh, no! not ‘politics’ in the sense you mean,” explained Reuben. “My ambition doesn’t extend beyond this village that we’re in. I’m not satisfied with it; there are a thousand things that we ought to be doing better than we are, and I’ve got a great longing to help improve them. That was what I referred to. That is what has been in my mind ever since my return. You spoke about politics just now. Strictly speaking, ‘politics’ ought to embrace in its meaning all the ways by which the general good is served, and nothing else. But, as a matter of fact, it has come to mean first of all the individual good, and quite often the sacrifice of everything else. This is natural enough, I suppose. Unless a man watches himself very closely, it is easy for him to grow to attach importance to the honor and the profit of the place he holds, and to forget its responsibilities. In that way you come to have a whole community regarding an office as a prize, as a place to be fought for, and not as a place to do more work in than the rest perform. This notion once established, why, politics comes naturally enough to mean—well, what it does mean. The politicians are not so much to blame. They merely reflect the ideas of the public. If they didn’t, they couldn’t stand up a minute by their own strength. You catch my idea?”
“Perfectly,” said Horace, politely dissembling a slight yawn.
“Well, then, the thing to do is to get at the public mind—to get the people into the right, way of regarding these things. It is no good effecting temporary reforms in certain limited directions by outbursts of popular feeling; for just as soon as the public indignation cools down, back come the abuses. And so they will do inevitably until the people get up to a calm, high level of intelligence about the management of such affairs as they have in common.”
“Quite so,” remarked Horace.
“Of course all this is trite commonplace,” continued Reuben. “You can read it in any newspaper any day. My point is in the application of it. It’s all well enough to say these things in a general way. Everybody knows they are true; nobody disputes them any more than the multiplication-table. But the exhortation does no good for that very reason. Each reader says: ‘Yes, it’s too bad that my neighbors don’t comprehend these things better;’ and there’s an end to the matter. Nothing is effected, because no particular person is addressed. Now, my notion is that the way to do is to take a single small community, and go at it systematically—a house-to-house canvass, so to speak—and labor to improve its intelligence, its good taste, its general public attitude toward its own public affairs. One can fairly count on at least some results, going at it in that way.”
“No doubt,” said the junior partner, smiling faintly.
“Well, then, I’ve got a scheme for a sort of society here—perhaps in the nature of a club—made up of men who have an interest in the town and who want to do good. I’ve spoken to two or three about it. Perhaps it is your coming—I daresay it is—but all at once I feel that it is time to start it. My notion is it ought to establish as a fundamental principle that it has nothing to do with anything outside Thessaly and the district roundabout. That is what we need in this country as much as anything else—the habit of minding our own immediate business. The newspapers have taught us to attend every day to what is going on in New York and Chicago and London and Paris, and every other place under the sun except our own. That is an evil. We have become like a gossiping woman who spends all her time in learning what her neighbors are doing, and lets the fire go out at home. Now, I like to think this can be altered a good deal, if we only set to work at it. You have been abroad; you have seen how other people do things, and have wider notions than the rest of us, no doubt, as to what should be done. What do you say? Does the idea attract you?”
Horace’s manner confessed to some surprise. “It’s a pretty large order,” he said at last, smilingly. “I’ve never regarded myself as specially cut out for a reformer. Still, there’s a good deal in what you say. I suppose it is practicable enough, when you come really to examine it.”
“At all events, we can try,” answered Reuben, with the glow of earnestness shining on his face. “John Fairchild is almost as fond of the notion as I am, and his paper will be of all sorts of use. Then, there’s Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a splendid fellow, and Dr. Lester, and the Rev. Mr. Turner, and a number of others more or less friendly to the scheme. I’m sure they will all feel the importance of having you in it. Your having lived in Europe makes such a difference. You can see things with a new eye.”
Horace gave a little laugh. “What my new eye has seen principally so far,” he said, with an amused smile running through his words, “is the prevalence of tobacco juice. But of course there are hundreds of things our provincial people could learn with profit from Europe. There, for example, is the hideous cooking done at all the small places. In England, for instance, it is a delight to travel in the country, simply because the food is so good in the little rural inns; our country hotel here is a horror. Then the roads are so bad here, when they might be made so good. The farmer works out his road tax by going out and ploughing up the highway, and you break your carriage-wheels in the task of smoothing it down again. Porters to carry one’s luggage at railway stations—that’s something we need, too. And the drinking of light beers and thin, wholesome wines instead of whiskey—that would do a great deal. Then men shouldn’t be allowed to build those ugly flat-topped wooden houses, with tin eaves-troughs. No people can grow up to be civilized who have these abominations thrust upon their sight daily. And—oh, I had forgotten!—there ought to be a penal law against those beastly sulphur matches with black heads. I lit one by accident the other night, and I haven’t got the smell of it out of my nostrils yet.”
Horace ended, as he had begun, with a cheerful chuckle; but his companion, who sat looking abstractedly at the snow line of the roofs opposite, did not smile.
“Those are the minor things—the graces of life,” he said, speaking slowly. “No doubt they have their place, their importance. But I am sick at heart over bigger matters—over the greed for money, the drunkenness, the indifference to real education, the neglect of health, the immodesty and commonness of our young folks’ thought and intercourse, the narrowness and mental squalor of the life people live all about me—”
“It is so everywhere, my dear fellow,” broke in Horace. “You are making us worse by comparison than we are.”
“But we ought to be so infinitely better by comparison! And we have it really in us to be better. Only nobody is concerned about the others; there is no one to check the drift, to organize public feeling for its own improvement. And that”—Reuben suddenly checked himself, and looked at his new partner with a smile of wonderful sweetness—“that is what I dream of trying to do. And you are going to help me!”
He rose as he spoke, and Horace, feeling his good impulses fired in a vague way by his companion’s earnestness and confidence, rose also, and stretched out his hand.
“Be sure I shall do all I can,” he said, warmly, as the two shook hands.
And when young Mr. Boyce went down the narrow stairway by himself, a few minutes later, having arranged that the partnership was to begin on the approaching 1st of December, he really fancied himself as a public-spirited reformer, whose life was to be consecrated to noble deeds. He was conscious of an added expansion of breast as he buttoned his fur coat across it, and he walked down the village street in a maze of proud and pleasant reflections upon his own admirable qualities.