“I am very glad that I can at last tell you something definite with regard to the business which brought me to Boston, and which will soon be happily completed. You remember the Mrs. Haverleigh whom I attended last fall through a dangerous illness? Well, the admiration I conceived for her then has since ripened into what, if I were a younger man, I should call love.”
“Love!” Fan repeated, scornfully. “Love! and he almost sixty years old. If he were not my father, I’d call him a fool!”
“No fool so big as an old fool!” came explosively from Phyllis, whose turban seemed bristling with rage as she spoke out exactly what was in my mind.
“You here?” Fan said, angrily. “Go away about your business.”
But Phyllis did not budge. She was a part of us. What concerned us concerned her, and in this crisis she meant to stand by us and learn the best or worst there was to learn.
“Where was I?” Fan asked, and Jack, who did not look as disturbed as I thought he ought, suggested, “Love!”
“Oh yes: ‘ripened into love.’ Ripened into fiddlesticks,” Fan said, and read on:
“When I left home I was not quite certain as to the result of my errand, but I am now. Mrs. Haverleigh has consented to marry me on Thursday evening of this week at eight o’clock, and I am writing this in the hope it may reach you that evening, and that you will send me your congratulations, in spirit at least. Mrs. Haverleigh is a remarkable woman,—very fine-looking, and about forty, I imagine, although she does not look it. I have never asked her age. She has traveled extensively,—is well educated, and belongs to some of the best families of New England. Indeed, I believe she traces her ancestry back in a direct line to Miles Standish of the Mayflower.”
“I never could bear Standish. What business had he to think of Priscilla when he had had a Rose?” Fan said, with an upward tilt of her nose. “Best families in New England! Humbug! as if that made her any better. Don’t we belong to some of the best families in the south?”
Then she read on:
“She is a member of several clubs and societies, and has most excellent ideas with regard to bringing up children. In this respect she will be invaluable in training little Katy, who I think manages herself mostly.”
“I don’t want to be trained,” Katy interrupted, with a whimper.
“And you are not going to be trained either,” Fan said, drawing the child close to her. Then she added:
“Let’s see what other virtue this paragon possesses. Oh, yes:”
“She is also, an incomparable housekeeper,—thorough in every thing, and will relieve you of all care.”
“Hm! I didn’t know we had any care; Phyllis takes all that,” Fan said.
“Dat’s so, honey,” came from Phyllis, who was standing behind her, stiff as a stake, while Fan continued:
“She is wealthy, too, and inclined to be very generous with me. She knows my circumstances perfectly, and how the war impoverished us, and has made over to me more than enough to pay my debts and have something left.”
“Very unmanly in father to take her money. I must say I am disappointed in him in more ways than one,” was Fan’s next remark, before continuing:
“I do not yet understand why she is willing to leave her handsome house in Boston and come to our plain, run-down home, but she is, and as soon as possible she will have sent to us a part of her furniture, together with her cook and housemaid and probably a coachman. This will be a great help to Phyllis, who is getting old, and who, while she does well for us, can hardly meet the requirements of a Boston housekeeper.”
“For de Lord’s sake, has ole Mas’r done gone perfec’ly daff over dat widder? Me getting ole! who knows how ole I am? I don’t, nor Mas’r either. What for dat woman bringin’ white trash down har to boss me? I not stan’ it!” Phyllis broke in with a flourish of the knives and forks she had in her hand, one of which flew off at right angles and came near hitting Jack in the head.
“Got it,” he said laughingly, as he picked up the knife and replaced it on the table, while Fan turned to Phyllis and said, “You here yet? Didn’t I tell you to leave long ago?”
“Yes, honey, but I’s har jess de same, an’ I’s gwine to stay, too, an’ spress my ‘pinion of dis yer Massachusetts woman fotchin’ her truck whar I’s sarved this forty year, an’ never started to run away but onet, when de sojers tell me de fine stories of freedom. What does I want of freedom? Nothin’. I’d be sold down de river to-day to sarve you, but I won’t be,—what you call it,—trampled on by dem whites. No, sir!” and here she turned to Jack, shaking her fist at him. “No, sir! An’ shoo’s you bawn, ef dey tries it, dar’ll be wah! Yes, wah! Wus than t’other, an’ dis time it’ll be de Federates an’ not de Fed’s who beats. Bet your soul on dat. Now I’ve had my say; I’se gwine.”
She nearly shook off her turban, which stood up almost a foot as she marched out of the room, followed by Jack’s hearty, “Three cheers for Phyllis! Good for you!”
“Is there more?” I asked, as Phyllis disappeared, and Fan continued:
“We are going to New York and Washington, and shall reach home in ten days or two weeks at the most. Will telegraph you when to expect us. I need not ask you to receive your new mother cordially and kindly. As ladies and my daughters you can hardly do otherwise. You will love her when you know her. I should like you to call her mother, but if you feel that you cannot, I shall not insist. Katy, of course, will address her as mamma. She has never had a daughter and will take to the child at once. She has a son who is now at Andover, but who will spend his summer vacation with us. He is fifteen or sixteen,—a fine, handsome lad, with all the polish and manner of twenty-five. He seems delighted with the prospect of having sisters. He calls you that already and is especially desirous to see little Katy, whose photograph I have with me and have shown him. He is here this evening and sends his love, and says tell you he expects a great deal of pleasure with you in the summer. His name is Carl. Mrs. Haverleigh, also, wishes to be kindly remembered. If you care to write to me, direct to Ebbett House, Washington.
After the reading of the letter there was silence for a few moments, broken only by the sound of the rain which was still falling heavily, the crackling of the pine knots on the hearth and the ticking of the clock. Glancing up at it at last Fan said, “They were to be married at eight. There is a difference of time between Boston and Richmond. The ceremony is over, and we have lost our father.”
Then she began to cry and I cried with her, while Jack tried to comfort us, telling us to look on the bright side,—that it might not be so bad after all. We had had one stepmother and loved her, and we might love another.
“That was very different from a Boston woman, who belongs to clubs and societies and has views, and all that,” Fan said. “We did love Katy’s mother. She was like us, and didn’t want to turn the house upside down with her raging housekeeping, as this woman will. She was easy-going, and she gave us Katy.”
Putting her arm around the little girl, Fan drew her closely to her with a gesture as if shielding her from some threatened danger. Assured that she was not to be trained, Katy looked upon the marriage rather favorably, and smoothing Fan’s hair caressingly, she said, “Don’t cry, the new mother will be nice, and then there’s brother Carl. I am so glad for him. I’ve wanted a brother ever since Charlie died, and after you told me to pray for what I wanted, I did pray, first for a doll that shut its eyes, and I got it,—then for a hoop, and I got it,—and then for a boy-brother, and we’ve got him. I get everything I want.”
Katy’s faith in prayer was very strong, and Fan, who had taught her this faith, could not discourage it now, although wishing that her prayers had taken some other object than a boy-brother.
That night on our way to bed we stopped for a moment at father’s room, the door of which stood open. In the winter, when there was no company in the house, it was really our living room, where most of our evenings were spent. Our father liked it warm when he came in at night, and there was always a bright fire on the hearth, with his arm-chair and slippers on one side, and next it the stand, with his book and paper and spectacles upon it, for he often read aloud to us, with Katy’s bright head resting on his knee, while Fan and I sewed, or embroidered, sitting on the settee rocker opposite him. This was all over now. A stranger had come between us, who would sit by father’s side while his children shifted for themselves. Some such thoughts as these were in our minds when we stepped into the room which we had taken so much pains to make attractive for his home coming.
“I wish we had let it alone,—must and all,” Fan said. “I am glad we couldn’t buy a new chamber set. Let her bring her own, as I dare say she will. I mean to take my pink pin cushion away. I didn’t put it here for her.”
But she left it. I knew she would, as she always subsided into quiet after a storm. We sat up late that night talking the matter over, and decided finally to make the best of it for father’s sake and never let him, nor any one but Jack, know that the new wife was not acceptable. We couldn’t deceive Phyllis, however, nor console her either, and for two days she went about the house with the tears dropping from her nose and running down her cheeks. “It was not so much the missus she ’jected to,” she said, “though it was bad enough to be sot on and bossed around by a stranger when she had been fust so long. It was the po’ white trash comin’ down with their a’rs that she couldn’t stan’, an’ wouldn’t. She’d run away fust! an’ if they sot the dogs on her she’d drown herself in the river; then see how ole mas’r’d feel when they brought her home drownded like a rat!”
Notwithstanding there was nothing to run from Phyllis was always threatening to run when disturbed or displeased, but had never contemplated suicide before, and now, in her pity for herself and for us when she should be fished from the river, limp and dead, she forgot the new mistress in a measure, and on the second day asked if she hadn’t better wash the windows again in master’s room. The marriage was generally known by this time, but no one congratulated us and few spoke of it at all. Evidently, it did not meet with approbation. Always perverse and contradictory, this silence on the part of our friends made Fan angry, and turned the tide in favor of the stranger. “Father had a right to marry if he chose, and the neighbors were very impudent to object,” she said, and, greatly to my surprise, she began to evince a good deal of interest in the coming of Mrs. Hathern. To Katy the new mother was to be mamma, but to us, Mrs. Hathern, and it seemed to me Fan took special pains to repeat the name as often as possible.
“I am trying to get used to it, but oh, how I hate it all. I’ll not let people know though,” she said to me, with quivering lips, and then she broke down and sobbed hysterically, declaring that she’d run away with Phyllis and drown herself, or marry Col. Errington. She hadn’t answered his letter yet, but she would that very day.
Possibly she might have done so if the post had not brought us a letter mailed in Andover and directed in a large boyish hand to “The Misses Hathern.” It was from Carl, who wrote:
“I am awfully glad that you are my sisters, and I am going to tell you about the wedding. I was there and saw your father endow my mother with all his worldly goods and heard her promise to obey him. She won’t do it, though, you bet. They mostly never do, I guess, and mother least of all. They seem happy as clams; so I suppose old people can be in love as well as young. I shouldn’t like mother to know I said that. She’d be mad as a hornet. She thinks she’s young, but she will be forty next birthday. She is a very handsome woman though. I never wanted mother to marry. She has had offers as thick as huckleberries, and I kicked at them all until I saw your father, and then I gave in and told her that she might. I like him immensely and I’m going to like you, especially little Katy, she’s so lovely. Your father showed me her photograph, and finally gave it to me, I begged so hard. I’ve shown it to the boys, and made them green with envy by telling them of the good times I am to have next summer in the Virginia woods and hills and in the old house with you. I hate the city, and like the country, and always wanted to go south. I was sorry I was not old enough to enlist in the army;—not to shoot anybody, but to see the country. I suppose you were rebels. Well, that’s right. I should have been, too, if I had been born south; but I’m a northerner, and yelled myself hoarse when I heard our men were in Richmond. I was in the country, and I and a lot more boys stole so many dry-goods boxes and barrels and wood for a bonfire that one old copperhead, whose chicken coop we took, had us arrested. Between you and I,—you and me, I mean,—I don’t believe your father is more than half a reb, or he wouldn’t sit so quiet and hear mother rake the south. She’s peppery. I said to her it wasn’t good form, and she told me to shut up, and I shut! I generally do when she tells me to.
“I wish you’d write to me. I like girls immensely, and they like me, but only one has ever written to me, and that didn’t count. It was Julina Smith,—mother’s maid,—two or three years older than I am. I’m fifteen. She is rather spoony, and made me a pair of slippers and sent them to me with a letter in which she called me ‘Dear Carl,’ and ended with ‘Your loving Julina.’ The slippers were well enough, if she wanted to give them to me, but the loving Julina was a little too much. I tore the letter up, and when I went home and she made eyes at me I told her to dry up, and she dried. I believe mother intends taking her to Virginia, and if she does you will have to set on her, I can tell you.
“It is nearly class-time and I must stop. I am studying Greek and Latin and a lot more stuff, and expect to enter Harvard when I know enough. And now, in the words of the divine Julina, or Julienne as she’d like to be called, seeing there’s French blood in her,
“P. S. I guess you’ll like me. Girls generally do, although they say I am fickle and pretend a lot I don’t mean. But I mean it at the time. I can’t always keep up to concert pitch when the concert is over, nor keep smelling a rose after its perfume is gone. Now that sounds rather poetical and neat, don’t it?
This letter, over which we laughed till we cried, helped to turn our thoughts from the dreaded stepmother to the bright, frank boy, whom we felt sure we should like, during the concert, at least, and while the perfume of the rose lasted. Fan read most of the letter to Phyllis, who, at its commencement, stood with her hands on her hips, her elbows elevated and her nose in the air. But before its close her nose and elbows came down and a broad smile broke over her face.
“Bress de boy!” she said. “‘Pears like mas’r Charlie, only in course ’taint to be ’spected he’s so peart-like seein’ he’s from de norf, whar dey’s all so onery.”
“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “he is from Boston, and must have a heap of Boston culture.”
“What’s dat ar?” Phyllis asked, but Fan did not explain, and left Phyllis wondering if Boston culture was ‘catchin’.
The two weeks which Dr. Hathern had mentioned as the longest possible time before his return were nearly up, and his daughters were daily expecting some message from him telling when he would be home. They had become somewhat accustomed to thoughts of the new mother and the new order of things she was to inaugurate, and felt that there might be some compensation.
“It will be rather fine to have a posse of servants,—white ones, too,” Fan said. “We shall quite outshine the Lovering people with our style. Coachman,—that means carriage and horses,—cook, maid, besides Phyllis, who, I suppose, will be the laundress. That will give us all the white skirts and dresses we want. I dote on white skirts.”
Fan was rather luxurious in her tastes and would have liked nothing better than fresh white skirts and linen every day, and would have had them, too, but for her compassion on Phyllis, who usually had a “fetched misery in her back” on Monday, and a worse one on ironing day, if there were too many frillicks, as she called them, in the wash. The prospect of new furniture was not, on the whole, displeasing, although they were greatly attached to the solid old-fashioned things which had belonged to their mother. Still it would not be out of place to excel their neighbors, inasmuch as they were what Phyllis termed the “fustest family in town.” On the whole, they began to feel quite reconciled to the marriage, and took a good deal of pains to make the house as attractive as possible for the bride. They had Phyllis’s word that it was as clean as soap and water and her two hands could make it, and as they never thought of peering into corners they contented themselves with little changes here and there, which they thought were artistic.
It was now May and the garden was full of early flowers, with which they meant to brighten the rooms at the last.
A letter had come from Miss Errington, who had noticed among the arrivals at the Ebbitt House the names of Dr. Samuel Hathern and wife, Lovering, Va., and as she knew there was but one Lovering in Virginia, and but one Dr. Samuel Hathern in Lovering, she felt sure it was their father with a new wife and had ventured to call.
“They received me in their private parlor,” she wrote, “and I was charmed with your father. Such a genial, courtly gentleman of the old school and so proud of his bride. She is a very handsome, well-preserved woman, and is au fait in everything pertaining to etiquette,—and knows how to dress perfectly. She has a good deal of Boston manner, and I should say decided views on most things. I imagine there may be a little Scotch blood in her, which accounts for a certain accent in her speech. She seems to be well educated, and, like myself, is very fond of music. Indeed, she is quite up in that, and, remembering little Katy’s wonderful voice, I spoke of it and said I hoped she might have every facility in the way of music. She assured me she would see to it, and what she says she means; there is no doubt of that. On the whole, you are to be congratulated on having a superior woman for a stepmother.”
There was a good deal more of irrelevant matter, with one or two allusions to her brother, who was about going abroad on business. But over this the sisters passed hastily. Their interest centered in the mother.
“Scotch descent,—Boston manners and views. I knew she had views,” Fan said, with a toss of her head. “She is woman’s rights and runs an abolition society, I dare say, or did before the war. Fine musician; I wish Miss Errington would mind her business about Katy. I wonder what madam will think of our old rattle-trap of a piano. Very likely she will bring us a Steinway or a Chickering.”
This letter, instead of reassuring the sisters, made them rather uneasy with regard to the cultivated woman with views. What would she think of them, who had scarcely been outside of Lovering, and who knew so little of the world?
“I reckon I shall hate her, after all,” Fan thought, as she began to pull herself together and to remember sundry acts of abandon and bits of slang in which she sometimes indulged and which would be hard to give up.
Annie, on the contrary, who never shocked anyone, and whom her sister called a flat iron, or a flat, from her propensity to smooth matters and make the best of them, began to feel again her old dread of the new mother and to wonder how one so inferior as herself would impress so much superiority. The next day there came a telegram from their father, who was in Richmond and would be home the following evening at six o’clock. There was also a letter from Jack, who wrote hurriedly:
“Dear Fan-and-Ann. Veni, vidi, vici. Brush up your Latin and translate, but make it third person, with she, instead of first. To be brief: I called at the Spotswood this evening, and looking over the register, as I often do, saw in your father’s handwriting ‘Dr. Samuel Hathern and wife, Lovering, Va.’ In a jiff I sent up my card, and in another jiff I was shaking hands with Mrs. Hathern, who received me as if I were her son, or brother, and nearly looked me through with those eyes of hers which see everything. Whether they are black or blue, white or gray, I can’t tell, but I think they are black. You can’t get away from them; they follow you like the eyes of some portraits I have seen,—my grandmother’s for instance, which hangs in our dining-room. I never could steal a lump of sugar or poke my thumb into the honey pot because she was always looking at me. Just so with Mrs. Hathern. She lights on you and holds you and seems to be going clear down to a fellow’s boots and reading his inmost thoughts. She is handsome and stylish and had on the best fitting dress I ever saw. Looked as if she were run into it. I’ve no doubt she is a blood relation of Miles Standish and all the other chaps who came over in the Mayflower. She is very dignified but not exactly like our Southern ladies. Maybe it is her voice, which is strong and full and decided, and would make you jump if you were doing anything bad. To-morrow I am to have the honor of driving with her around the town and showing her the nakedness of the land, and I assure you it is very naked. I could shed buckets full of tears over the ruins of our once fair city, but it’s no good crying for spilt milk. Better go to work and get some more. She wishes to go first to Libby Prison. Think of it! I a Reb, and she a Fed, hob-nobbing in that place. She must have forgotten herself when she said to me with so much concern in her voice, ‘I trust you were never so unfortunate as to be a prisoner there.’
“I think even Fan would have been pleased with my dignified manner as I replied, ‘Madam, I had the honor to wear the grey, and there was no possibility of my being a prisoner in Libby.’
“‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ she said, with a look which made me feel like a cut-throat and murderer, and as if I ought to have been in Libby, or some worse place, all my life.
“Then her eyes lighted up and a most wonderful smile broke out over her face, changing its expression entirely. I think that smile must have won your father. It made even me feel kind of so-so,—queer-like, you know. He seems very proud and fond of her. Calls her ‘Matty,’ and once when she thought I did not hear her she called him ‘Sam’!”
“Disgusting!” Fan exclaimed. “Sam! our father, Dr. Hathern! Sam, indeed! I knew she was vulgar, with all of her Standish blood. Sam! The idea!”
After this Fan had scarcely patience to finish the letter, which had but little more in it of the bride.
The next morning the young ladies were up betimes. As a rule they were not early risers, especially when their father was away. Nine and even ten o’clock sometimes found them in bed, while Phyllis kept their breakfast warm and made no signs of protest, unless there was a greater amount of work than usual and she was very tired. Then to herself she would call them onery and shiffless, and wonder what their poor mother would say if she knew how no-count they were, lyin’ bed hours after sun up. The morning after the receipt of the telegram, however, they were up with the sun and found Phyllis preparing the most appetizing breakfast she could think of, and occasionally wiping away a big tear before it dropped from her nose.
“De po’ lambs should have one more meal in peace before the missus come,” she said, as she served her cream toast and corn muffins and urged them to eat.
Katy was the only one who did justice to the muffins and toast. Fanny and Annie could only make a pretense of eating, and when breakfast was over Fanny said with a hysterical laugh, “I am going to the graves to tell mother and Charlie and the boy who is coming to-day. I don’t believe they know.”
A moment later she was walking rapidly across the field to the hillside cemetery, where she staid for a long time.
What she said to the dead, if anything, no one ever knew. When she came back there were traces of tears on her face, but otherwise she was calm.
“Do you know,” she said to Annie, “that the boy seems very near to me this morning. I can see his great blue eyes looking wistfully at me as they did when he said ‘Don’t let her find me.’ Do as I will, they follow me as if they wanted to tell me something.”
Annie was accustomed to her sister’s theory that the dead are cognizant of what interests us, and only shivered a little as she replied, “I am glad I am not haunted with dead eyes. It is enough to think of the living ones which Jack says see everything, and will be sure to know if these rooms are not in order.”
Annie, who was more practical and more housewifely in her instincts than Fanny, was already at work and had brought from the garden and yard quantities of flowers,—roses and peonies and snowballs and lilies,—which lay heaped upon the dining-room table, with every vase and bowl and available pitcher in the house. Fan’s forte was decoration, and she at once went to work with a will, fashioning the flowers into bouquets and whistling as she worked, sometimes Dixie, and sometimes John Brown’s Body, which last she said was probably the bride’s favorite. If the boy’s eyes haunted her they acted as a stimulant, urging her on until the house was full of flowers and odorous with perfume. The last room visited was Charlie’s, where the uniforms of grey and blue were hanging, over one the stars and stripes,—over the other, the stars and bars. This was a sacred spot. Fan never whistled there, nor sung, and she stepped softly and spoke low as she put the bowl of forget-me-nots on the stand under the faded coats, where the bloodstains of Charley and the boy were showing. It seemed to her that many eyes were upon her now, and she began to feel nervous as she gently patted the pillow over which Charlie’s head used to lie, and where the boy’s had lain when he shouted a tiger for her and died.
“Poor boy!” she said to herself, as she left the room, “Had you no friends, and shall we never know who you were, or where you came from?”
After the early dinner they laid the table for supper, bringing out the best linen and china and glass, wondering where the mother would choose to sit that first night. It had been Annie’s prerogative to preside over the coffee urn. This must, of course, eventually be given up, and might as well be done first as last. So the Dresden plate, the one pearl handled knife and fork, both heirlooms from their grandmother, and kept mostly to look at, were put with the tea-cups and saucers, and the arm-chair their mother and Katy’s had used was wheeled to its place. For a moment both Fanny and Annie stood by it with a hand upon it, while Annie said, “I wonder if mother knows or cares.”
“Knows! Yes,” Fanny replied, “but does not care. In Heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, so, what is it to her if father brings home as many wives as the Mormons,—four at once, I have heard. It is only we that care.”
When everything was in readiness the sisters went all over the house, feeling a kind of pride in it, with its wide hall in the centre, its two large rooms on either side, and its broad piazza, shaded with honeysuckles, clematis and woodbine, and a beautiful wild rose or eglantine, struggling with the three and throwing out masses of color against the dark leaves of its neighbors. It was an ideal Virginia home, and the Boston woman, with all her culture and views and advanced ideas must find it so, the sisters thought as they finished their inspection and sat down to wait for the train. Katy, who had been as much interested in the preparations as any one, had made two small bouquets which she put on her father’s bureau, with a card under each. On one was scrawled in a child’s almost illegible hand, “For papa, from Katy;” on the other, “From Katy to Mamma.” She was happy, and in her white dress and blue sash, with her fair hair falling around her shoulders in soft curls she made a lovely picture as she flitted from room to room, now consulting the kitchen clock, now the one in the dining-room and wondering if they would never come. At last the whistle was heard in the distance coming nearer and nearer and finally ceasing as the train drew up to the station. Fifteen minutes passed, seeming to the sisters an age, and the village ‘bus stopped at the gate, followed by the express wagon on which were two huge Saratoga trunks, a large valise and a hat box.
“Ought we go and meet them?” Annie said, in a whisper.
“No,” Fan replied. “It is enough for Katy to go.”
She was running down the walk, and with a glad cry threw herself into her father’s arms. Then, at a word from him, she gave her hand to the lady at his side, who stooped and kissed her. It had never yet occurred to her that every body did not love her and want her, and she held tightly to the lady on one side and to her father on the other, and so went hippity-hopping up the walk, telling them that the old cat had six kittens and the speckled hen thirteen chickens; that the house was beautiful with roses and things, and she had made two bouquets herself.
It was a very cold, callous heart which could withstand Katy, and Mrs. Hathern’s face wore a soft and pleased expression as she looked down at the little girl and then up at the two young ladies who had come out upon the piazza and whom the doctor presented to her as “My daughters, Fanny and Annie.”
She had taught a district school in a small town in Maine,—had been preceptress in a young ladies’ seminary in Calais,—a music teacher and organist in Portland,—and the wife and widow of Thomas Haverleigh, of Bangor, whom she had married mostly for his money, and for the broader field it would give her. Some years after his death she moved to Boston, where her restless, energetic nature found full scope in the many clubs and societies of which she became an active member. Her marriage with Dr. Hathern was a surprise to her friends, who knew how unlike the two were to each other. He was gentle, refined, wholly unselfish and rather weak where decided action was necessary; she strong, determined, and self-assured, with a will which no one could bend except her son Carl, and he sometimes failed. There could scarcely have been two people more unlike and possibly this dissimilarity of disposition was what attracted each to the other until both believed they were in what the lady called a middle-aged kind of love. In a letter to a friend she likened it to the Indian summer, which is often more satisfactory than the fervid heat of the real summer days. Whether it were Indian summer or June the doctor did not stop to consider. He was infatuated and only knew that he was supremely happy and never more so than when he reached home and was presenting his bride to his daughters. They were nervous and constrained, but she was wholly at her ease, while her eyes, which Jack said saw everything, did not belie his statement. They were very large and black and bright and took the two girls in at a glance, from their heads to their feet, making them feel rather uncomfortable. Fanny thought with some uneasiness of two missing buttons on her boots, while Annie remembered a little rent in her underskirt and wondered if it were visible.
“I am glad to see you and hope we shall be friends. Which is Fanny, and which Annie?” Mrs. Hathern said, and her voice seemed to fill the whole house, it was so distinct and decided, with a tone in it which some might call an accent, but which Fan-and-Ann pronounced a brogue, when comparing notes with regard to it.
Had she been a public speaker she could have thrown it into the farthest corner of the largest hall, but her hearers would not have said it was a pleasant voice. It was too self-assured and too full of a conviction that the opinions it expressed were the only opinions worth expressing.
Like most cold impassive natures she was not at all demonstrative and although quick to see and speak of whatever was wrong, or out of place, she seldom praised or expressed herself pleased with anything. That she made no comment was, she thought, a sufficient proof that she did not disapprove. Gush was especially distasteful to her, and she was glad not to meet it in her step-daughters.
She knew they must be nervous, but they were ladylike and quiet and received her kindly. They told her which was Fanny and which Annie, saying laughingly, “we are better known as Fan-and-Ann.” One took her satchel, the other her shawl, as they led the way into the house and showed her to her room. Fan, who was watching her closely, saw how rapidly her eyes traveled from one object to another, lighting finally upon an immense spider’s web in a corner, which had probably been there a week, as there were two or three dead flies already in it, and a freshly captured fourth was making a loud protest against its capture.
“Can I do anything for you?” Fan asked, with a view to draw attention from the offending web.
“No, thanks, I can get along quite well by myself,” was the reply, and acting upon the hint the girls left her alone and went to their father, who was seeing to the baggage, and whom they nearly knocked down as they seized him around the neck and smothered him with kisses.
“Why—why—why; bless my soul! What’s all this whirlwind for? and crying, too,” the Doctor said, folding them in his arms and feeling his own eyes moisten a little.
“We didn’t half tell you how glad we are to have you home, and we don’t mean to cry,” Fan said; “and we are not going to again; but just this little minute I can’t help it.”
“Yes, yes; there, there,” the doctor replied, patting first one head and then the other, “there’s nothing to cry about, I assure you, except for joy. She’s a very remarkable woman, and the wonder is that she could care for an old codger like me. We are going to be very happy, all of us. She has some elegant furniture coming, which will make the old house quite like a palace. You know you have wanted new furniture a long time.”
“Oh, father,” Fanny cried. “We would rather have you than all the fine furniture in the world; but we are going to be good; indeed we are.”
She was hugging him again with her arms around his neck on one side of him, while Annie’s were on the other, when they were startled with a call for Sam, which came echoing down the hall like the peal of a clarionet, making the four clinging arms drop suddenly, while the doctor struggled into an upright position and answered, “Yes, Matty, I am coming.”
Mrs. Hathern had removed her bonnet and investigated the room, deciding, with a radical woman’s quickness what changes she would make when her furniture came; deciding, too, that the windows had not been half washed and the window stools not at all, judging from the dust and dried leaves upon them. Then with her umbrella she demolished the big spider’s web and was proceeding to attack a smaller one in the vicinity of the bell rope, which she tried with no effect, when Katy came dancing into the room, her blue eyes showing the admiration she felt for her new mamma, whose grey dress and steel buttons she began to finger caressingly.
“I like you,” she said and moved by an impulse she could not resist Mrs. Hathern stooped and kissed the lovely face with something like a real mother feeling in her heart.
But nothing could change her nature, which was to discipline and mould whatever needed moulding and disciplining. So, when Katy, wishing to call attention to her gift of flowers, said to her, “Have you seen my flowers. I give ’em to you.” She answered promptly, “You mean you gave them to me. Little girls must learn to use good grammar. Yes, I see them; they are very pretty, but be careful or you will upset the vase and spill the water; better run out now, while I make my toilet.”
It was not so much the words as the tone with which they were spoken, which brought a slight shadow to Katy’s face as she started for the door, followed by Mrs. Hathern, who looked out into the hall in time to see the tableau at the farther end.
“Not as emotionless and impassive as I thought,” she said to herself, understanding it perfectly, and interrupting it with her call for Sam. She was given to the use of pet names; she had called her first husband Tom, and knew no reason why she should not call her second Sam. At first he rather liked it. He had been Sam when a boy, and it made him feel young again. But when he heard it in the presence of his daughters, it sounded differently, for he felt their disapproval of it.
“I can’t open my satchel,” she said, when he came to her. “Something is wrong with the lock, and how can I get some hot water. I have tried the bell three times with no response.”
In her voice there was something the doctor had not heard before, and, like Katy, he felt a passing shadow on his spirits, but he hastened to undo the lock of the satchel and said, apologetically: “Oh, yes, the bell. I knew the cord was broken. I will see to it at once, and the hot water, too. I’ll go for Phyllis to fetch it, I haven’t seen her yet.”
He found Phyllis in a mood which could not be described as angelic. She had spent an hour or so in clearing up her kitchen; had mopped the floor; shoved into dark corners pots, kettles, skillets and brooms, and arrayed herself in her red flowered gown and white apron, with her highest turban on her head. If her master had come alone, she would have gone with his daughters to greet him, but with a new mistress it was not to be thought of. “She reckoned she knowed her place,” she said; “whar she was raised niggers didn’t put on no a’rs. Marster would done fotch the new Misses to her, in course.” But as time went by and neither mistress nor master appeared, her wrath began to wax hot and to manifest itself in her own peculiar way.
“Whar is the use,” she reasoned, “clarin’ up an’ hidin’ things whar I can’t find ’em, if my lady is too fine to come inter de kitchen. No, sir! I’ll jess have ’em handy agin.”
Pots and kettles and skillets were brought from their hiding place and set down promiscuously on the hearth. The broom and mop followed next, and the duster was aimed at the door behind which it belonged, just escaping contact with the doctor’s head as he appeared. He had heard from his daughters of Phyllis’s propensity to throw things when on what they called a rampage, and concluded she was on one now.
“Ho, Phyllis,” he said in his cheery way. “What’s up, and why haven’t you come to welcome your new mistress?”
He offered her his hand, which Phyllis grasped firmly.
“I’se mighty glad to see you, Mas’r,” she said, “an’ I’se gwine to do my duty, but for de dear Lord’s sake whar was de sense for a new Misses. Et kind of upsots one to think of dem t’others what’s dead an’ gone.”
This was the first real set-back the doctor had received, and it hurt his pride that his servant should disapprove of what seemed to him so desirable. But in his usual kind way he soothed the old negress, who assured him again that she meant to do her duty and bar everything for his sake and the young misseses. Filling a pitcher with hot water, which took a few minutes to heat, she followed him to his room, where Mrs. Hathern stood with a hint of a cloud on her face at the long delay, and because the pitcher had a broken nose and a suspicion of pot black on the handle. She prided herself on never losing her temper to the extent of showing it in her voice or manner. In a quiet, determined way she could sting with her tongue and smile while she did it. Bowing graciously to Phyllis she said, “I thought perhaps you had forgotten the hot water, and I have washed me in cold, but you can leave the pitcher, and please wipe off that black spot which you probably did not see.”
Phyllis explained, as she rubbed off the pot black, that “de water bilin’ in de tea kettle was hard as rocks and not fit for ladies to wash in, an’ she had to blow up the fi’ to heat some soff.” Then, putting the pitcher down with a thump she bounced out of the room. She had taken Mrs. Hathern’s measure, and Mrs. Hathern had taken hers, and neither was very satisfactory.
“She ain’t no mo’ like Miss Carline or Miss Nellie than I’m like Mas’r General Lee,” she said, and there was a stormy look in her eyes when she went in at last to wait upon the table, where Mrs. Hathern presided as easily as if she had all her life sat in the arm-chair she was the third to occupy.
She was a woman of theories and maxims to which she adhered rigidly. Among these were, “Early to bed and early to rise,”—“An hour in the morning is worth two at night,” and so forth. Accordingly, the next morning at six o’clock she was out upon the piazza looking very cool and handsome in her gown of lavender and white, open in front to show her embroidered petticoat as was the fashion of the time. Everything about her dress and person was spotless, and she impressed one with the idea that she had just been scrubbed and ironed. Her hair was never out of place; her collars and cuffs never soiled, or her garments crumpled or torn. Cleanliness she held next to godliness, and shiftlessness and untidiness next to sin. Born and reared amid the thrift and energy and activity of New England, she had no idea of or sympathy with the happy-go-lucky manner of living in the Hathern family, with Phyllis at its head. Hearing no stir, and seeing no signs of life in the dining-room, except a few flies busy with some crumbs left on the cloth the night before, she found her way to the kitchen, where Phyllis was very leisurely making preparations for breakfast. Later on, before presenting herself at the table, she was intending to don her Sunday apparel, but now, as the morning was very hot, her dress might be described as decolleté. A faded calico skirt, which scarcely reached her bare ankles, and a loose, thin sacque which showed all the creases and curves of her portly figure, comprised her entire make-up as she stood with her back to the door, stirring her batter for griddle cakes, and all unconscious of the foe bearing down upon her.
With a warning cough Mrs. Hathern stepped across the threshold, so startling the old negress that she dropped the egg she was about to break into the batter.
“Oh, my Lord, how you done skeered me,” she exclaimed, lifting both hands, in one of which was the dripping spoon. “Does you want anything, honey?”
Phyllis was very religious, and a leader at the meetings held in some of the freedmen’s cabins, where pandemonium usually reigned and the Lord was entreated as if he were deaf, or asleep. She had attended one of these the previous night, and on her way home had told a crony whom she met how she had rassled in pra’r, and had asked others to rassel, too, that she might have grace to do her duty. As a result of her rassling she was in quite a conciliatory frame of mind, and the word honey came from her involuntarily.
“I am not one of the young ladies, I am Mrs. Hathern,” the latter said, holding up her dainty skirts as she walked around the broken egg and the pots and kettles which Phyllis had not yet put away. “What time do you usually have breakfast?” she asked, and Phyllis replied, “Oh, we ain’t perticular, mos’ any time when dey gits up,—eight, nine,—sometimes ten,—jess as happens.”
Mrs. Hathern looked aghast. Such habits as these she was not prepared for, and she would not allow them either.
“Very well,” she said, “that may have answered in the past; for the future we will have breakfast in the summer at seven, sharp,—and at eight in the winter.”
In Phyllis’s astonishment the second egg, which she had brought from the cupboard, was in danger of following its companion.
“In de Lord’s name, how’s you gwine to git de young ladies up, or marster, either so airly. Why, it’ll take a hoss team to do it,” she said, and Mrs. Hathern replied, “I shall see to that, and you will see to the breakfast until my cook comes, when she will take your place.”
Phyllis bridled at once and her turban began to topple on one side. But she remembered her duty, and asked, very respectfully, “When is she comin’?”
“Very soon, I hope, and a housemaid with her,—both capable servants, who are accustomed to keep everything in order. The sight of your kitchen would drive them crazy. Do you always cook by a fireplace? Have you no stove?”
Phyllis snorted,—a sure sign that she was forgetting her duty.
“Stove!” she repeated. “One dem squar’ black things, a burnin’ and blisterin’ your han’s! No sir! Ole Miss Fullerton done got one before de wah, and dat fool of a Rache buil’d de fi’ in de oven, an when de smoke an’ de fi’ bust out, she screeched so dat Mas’r Hathern went over an’ put it out, an’ tole ’em whar to make de fi’. He’s from de norf, whar all such truck as stoves comes from, an’ he larf fit to split his sides when he seen de fi’ in de oven. No, sir! No stove for me!”
“Such shiftlessness!” was Mrs. Hathern’s mental comment, as she went back to the piazza where she found her husband, and sat down to wait for breakfast with what patience she could command and to think how she could best change the habits of this “sozzling household.”
That was what she called it in the first letter she wrote her son, telling him to go at once to her house and expedite the departure of Norah and Julina. He was also to order the best range in Boston and have it sent to her immediately, with all necessary furnishing.
“Think of a big fireplace,” she wrote, “with a crane and tin ovens and pots and kettles and spiders and the water pail, with a gourd on the top, all in a clutter, and a huge negress, weighing at least two hundred, standing in the midst, with nothing on but a short petticoat and loose sacque! That is what I found the first morning when I went to the kitchen to see if breakfast were ready. We didn’t have it until eight o’clock, and that was too early for Miss Fanny, who did not appear until we were nearly through. I have ordered it for seven hereafter. I cannot begin too soon to change the loose habits the girls have acquired from having had so many blacks to wait upon them before the war, and depending wholly upon Phyllis since. She almost breathes for them, and they let her. To do her justice she looks very respectable when she comes into the dining-room and she waits at table remarkably well. It is a very pleasant, roomy house, with wide verandas above and below, broad hall in the centre, with fireplace in one corner, and doors opening at either end. But it is greatly run down,—old, faded carpets and rickety furniture—and in the bedroom I intend for you a broken-legged bureau, propped up on a brick. We should call this second class at the north, but they are really among the first people in the town, and don’t seem to know how dilapidated they are, or if they do they are too proud to show it. I refer now to the girls. The Doctor admits that things are not quite as they ought to be. He is a thorough gentleman, and I am more and more convinced of the wisdom of my choice. Fanny and Annie are bright, pretty girls, especially Fanny, who is the ruling spirit and mouth-piece for her sister. Katy, the youngest, is a beauty, but spoiled. I do not think she knows what restraint is, but I must restrain her, and mould her as a child should be moulded. She will then make a splendid woman. The twins are, I fear, beyond my control. Fanny certainly is, and there is a fire in her black eyes I should not care to rouse. I forgot to tell you that there is a wide lawn in front of the house, with a long avenue leading to the street, shaded with elms and maples. The garden is full of flower beds bordered with old-fashioned box, and there are roses and honeysuckles and running vines everywhere. In the rear a grassy lane leads to the woods, which at times during the war were full of soldiers, both northern and southern. The war still broods like a plague over Virginia, although I cannot help feeling that some of the people make it an excuse for what is only the result of years of indolence and indifference to anything like thrift and energy.”
Carl’s answer to this letter was prompt and characteristic. “I went to the house,” he wrote, “meeting Julina in the street. She informed me that Miss O’Rourke was giving a lunch to some of her friends, and had sent her after oil for the salad. So you see, ‘when the cat’s away the mice will play.’ Norah seemed as meek as Moses when she saw me, and if a lunch was in progress she gave no sign of it. Perhaps Julina lied; it’s like her. Miss O’Rourke informed me that after getting the house ready for the new tenant, she must visit her grandmother and ‘rest up’ before going south, and Julina will ‘rest up’ with her. So I don’t know when you will see their ladyships. What a delightful picture you give of the Elms. Double piazzas, wide hall, big rooms, avenues, gardens, roses and woods, to say nothing of pots and kettles and pans and a 200-pounder, all huddled together in the kitchen, and a bureau propped up with a brick! I like that. It reminds me of our first visit to the sea shore, with a cottage full of broken furniture, and so leaky that when it rained we had to set with washtubs over our heads. What a field you have in which to exercise your executive ability and love of change; but don’t go to bossing little Katy, or make her sit in chairs and go to bed without her supper, as you did me, and don’t introduce that new order of ‘early to bed and early to rise’ until I have had a chance to enjoy the old easy-going régime you hold in so much contempt. Let the girls sleep, if they want to. I remember how you used to snake Paul and me out of bed at the most unearthly hours until he ran away, and I got weakly and the doctor told you I must have all the sleep I could get. How I hated the early bird which caught the worm, or rather the worm for getting up to be caught. I am going to like the girls, and shall probably fall in love with all three; that’s my way, you know. Perhaps Katy is too young. Eight isn’t she? while the twins are eighteen. I am nearly sixteen, am five feet ten and trying to raise a beard. Not an infant, you see.”
This letter was not altogether satisfactory to Mrs. Hathern, whose usual smooth brow was somewhat wrinkled and whose voice and manner had an increase of energy and decision when she went back to the posse of negroes at work in different parts of the house. There was a great upheaval in progress, which Annie, who was an eye-witness to it in all its details, will describe in another chapter.
My coadjutor, the Author, has told how the new mother came home to us on a lovely May afternoon, when we had made the old house bright with flowers and schooled ourselves to receive her as our father’s wife should be received by his daughters. We had heard she was a remarkable woman and a handsome woman, and we were not disappointed. She was handsome, with the brightest and blackest eyes I ever saw,—dark, glossy hair,—not one of which ever dared get out of place,—brilliant complexion and regular features, if I except her nose, which inclined upward a little, and her chin, which receded in proportion as her nose went up. And she was remarkable, too, and so different from any type of woman we had ever seen that she took our breath away, and for a few days we were in a state of collapse and bewilderment. She was a highly educated woman, bristling all over with views and theories and maxims, one of which was “never to let the grass grow under her feet, if there was anything to do.” And she didn’t let it grow, but plunged at once into the midst of a domestic cyclone, which not only swept away for the time being all our comfort, but, also, the good opinions we had entertained of ourselves as housekeepers and young ladies of judgment.
We had never dreamed that we were as shiftless and no account and dilapidated a set as we came to believe ourselves in the new light shed upon us and our surroundings. We knew that our furniture was old and our carpets worn, but we had a pride in and an affection for them because they had belonged to our mother, and we thought the house was clean, and we told Mrs. Hathern so when she suggested a regular tear up such as was customary in New England twice a year. For answer to our assertion that we had been scrubbed from attic to cellar she smiled a pitying kind of smile at our ignorance, and rubbing her hand over the top of a door brought off an amount of black which appalled us. We had never thought of looking on the top of doors for dirt. But her eyes went everywhere, and she went with them and wrote against us “weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Everything was wrong, especially in the kitchen, where, she said, Norah O’Rourke would not stay a day. Privately, Fan and I thought she was more than half afraid of Norah O’Rourke, whom she quoted so constantly and for whom it seemed to us our hitherto quiet house was turned inside out. Two carpenters were brought into the kitchen, where an extra window was cut so that Norah O’Rourke could have more light and air; a new cupboard was built for Norah O’Rourke’s iron utensils, which Phyllis had kept anywhere, so that they were handy; there was a sink for Norah O’Rourke’s dish-washing, and stationary tubs for Norah O’Rourke’s laundrying. The ceiling was whitewashed; the walls painted a light drab and the floor snuff color, and when everything was in readiness for Norah O’Rourke, except the range which had not come, that lady’s quarters were certainly a great improvement upon the dark, dingy room where Phyllis had reigned supreme so long.
Just what her position in the household was to be when Norah O’Rourke arrived we did not know, as Mrs. Hathern was reticent on that point. That she didn’t like Phyllis, and Phyllis didn’t like her, was an assured fact, but there was as yet no open rupture between them. Mrs. Hathern was evidently trying to control her temper, while Phyllis was conscientiously striving to do her duty. I think she rassled in pra’r at the night meetings a great many times during the toss up, which extended from the kitchen to the house proper, where, as Fan wrote to Jack, “The old Harry held high carnival.” Had I then read Jane Carlyle’s life and letters, as I have since, I should have sympathized with her fully in her despair and discomposure when her lord came home full of bile and raised Cain generally. As it was with that house at No. 5 Cheyne Row, so it was with our house under the Elms. Carpets came up, curtains came down, furniture was banished to the attic to make room for the new that was coming. Paper was torn from the walls and lay in long mouldy strips upon the floor. Pails of suds, with mops and brooms and brushes and four colored women who had been pressed into service in order to expedite matters, were everywhere, together with plumbers and painters and upholsterers and paper-hangers brought from Richmond to assist in the mélee.
In her cambric dress and white apron, which never showed a particle of soil, and a dainty little cap, with a lavender bow, perched on the top of her head, Mrs. Hathern moved among her forces like a brigadier-general, urging them on as they had never been urged before in their lives. The women, however, baffled her. They were not accustomed to the Yankee quick step, and if she left one washing a window while she went to look after another, she was very apt on her return to find the window washer setting in a rocking chair or rummaging through a bureau drawer. Dire were the complaints she made about the blacks. She was a rank abolitionist during the war, she said, but if she had known what a good-for-nothing race they were, she shouldn’t have troubled herself about them, and she’d like nothing better now than to thrash them if she could. But they were free and her ekles one of them told her during a hot controversy over a window which was washed three times before it suited.
Had there been nothing except a battle between Boston energy and Virginia slowness, Fan and I might have enjoyed it, knowing that out of the confusion order would finally come, but a more serious matter was daily confronting us in the shape of little Katy’s misdemeanors. We never knew before that she had any, but now we found that of all children to get into mischief and tear her clothes she was the worst. She enjoyed the commotion and was always in the thickest of it. Naturally she soiled her dress and apron and hands, for which she was promptly reproved and punished. Sometimes she was made to sit for an hour or more in a high chair near the bureau in father’s bedroom. For diversion she was told to commit either the collect for the day, or several verses in the Bible, beginning with the sermon on the mount, the number of verses varying according to the heinousness of her offense. Sometimes, if the rent in her dress were longer and the soil worse than usual, she was sent to bed and kept there until morning supperless, unless Phyllis surreptitiously conveyed a paper parcel into her window by standing on a stool and using a pitchfork. Once, when overcome with sleep, she fell off the chair and was only saved a hard blow on her head by the open Bible which fell under it. Then Fan interfered, and holding the sobbing child in her arms appealed to her father, asking if so much discipline were necessary.
During the war father had never been quite sure on which side he stood, and now he was equally undecided, until Mrs. Hathern said, in that cool, rasping voice, which always irritated me, “My dear, I am sorry to be the cause of any trouble between you and your daughters, but really you must decide at once which is to take charge of Katy, Miss Fanny or myself. The child is a dear little creature, but needs restraining. Sitting in a chair, or lying in bed, does not hurt her physically. I always corrected Carl that way, and——”
She stopped suddenly as if she had left some name unsaid, and it seemed to me that she flushed a little.
Her hand was on father’s arm rubbing a speck of dirt she saw there, as she waited for his answer.
“Yes, certainly, certainly,” he said, hesitatingly, “Katy is our baby, and I suppose we have spoiled her; naturally it is a mother’s place to take charge of her. Be as easy with her as you can, and you, Katy, be good.”
So Katy was ordered back to the chair until she had committed all the Blesseds which she did not already know in the sermon on the mount. There was only one of these and she was soon at liberty, and as she had the sunniest nature I ever knew she was in a few minutes at her play again under the Elms, making believe she was in church singing the grand old Te Deum with that clear, wonderful voice which made the workmen stop to listen, while Mrs. Hathern said to us, “Miss Errington was right. Katy has great capabilities. I know something of music myself, and when my piano comes I shall take her in hand.”
“May the Lord help Katy if the madam takes her in hand more than she has already done,” Fan said to me when we were alone and she could give vent to her wrath. “I tell you what it is, father is an imbecile and she is a tyrant, and I won’t stand it. I’ll marry Col. Errington. You’ll see.”
It was five weeks since Mrs. Hathern came home, and late June was queening it over the woods and hills of Lovering, and the lawn and the garden were full of flowers and beauty. The house, with its new coat of paint, was quite another place from the one we had known from childhood. Then it was brown and weather stained; now it was white, with green blinds, and looked very clean and fresh and cool in the summer sunlight, with the luxurious vines clinging to its sides and the huge columns of the piazzas. Inside the change was greater still. Plumbers, painters, upholsterers, carpenters and negroes had departed. The furniture had come and we scarcely knew ourselves with our carpets of Brussels and moquette, our sofas and chairs of brocade and rosewood, our long mirrors and lace draperies, and, more than all, the costly paintings which in their Florentine frames adorned the walls of the drawing room and hall. We were very fine, and our neighbors came in crowds to see and admire and congratulate us upon our prosperity. Mrs. Hathern had plenty of money and spent it lavishly upon us all, and there is no doubt that we were really greatly improved in every way by the introduction of Boston standards and Boston ways. But on Fan’s part and mine there was always a regret for the good old easy-going times when things were at haphazard and we did as we pleased, with no one but Phyllis to dictate to us. She was still doing her duty, but doing it in a cabin across the back yard. The range had come and had been set up, and Mrs. Hathern had done her best to initiate Phyllis into its mysteries. But either she couldn’t or wouldn’t learn, and in despair she had been allowed to carry her pots and kettles and skillets and ovens to the cabin, where there was a fireplace in which she could potter as she pleased, until the arrival of Miss Norah O’Rourke, who understood the range in all its ramifications. She was still visiting her grandmother and resting up, but she was expected in a few days, together with Julina, in whom Fan and I felt considerable interest as the girl who had made love to Carl. He, too, was expected soon and had sent on a box containing a most heterogenous collection, which he had called his Lares and Penates,—fishing tackle, bathing suits, an air-gun, a student’s cap, sporting pictures cut from sporting papers, old books and photographs, and some handkerchiefs and gloves which were never bought for him and in which there still lingered a delicate perfume,—the whole not worth the cost of the express, his mother said.
But she unpacked them carefully and put them in his room, the pleasantest bed-chamber in the house and the one we had always used for guests. This she appropriated without consulting us. Indeed, she had never consulted us but once and that, with regard to the disposition of some of the old furniture, the piano and the pictures of our mother and Katy’s. These last had hung in father’s room, where he could see them the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning, and we had prided ourselves upon them because they were fair likenesses of the sweet-faced women who had once reigned as mistresses at the Elms and because they were our only oils.
“They may be good likenesses, but they are badly done,—mere daubs,” Mrs. Hathern said, when calling our attention to them by asking where we would like to have them put. The space they occupied was wanted for her own portrait, life-size, taken in Paris and gorgeous in cream satin, low neck and pearls. “Three Mrs. Hatherns in one husband’s bed-chamber are too many,” she said, and we agreed with her and removed the daubs to our own room, where we were sitting when Carl’s box was being unpacked.
Katy was looking on and prattling constantly, while her stepmother occasionally reproved her for being so curious and asking so many questions. Something was wanted from below stairs and Mrs. Hathern went to fetch it, leaving Katy alone. A moment after the child came running to us with two photographs which she had found in a book. One, the freshest and newest, was that of a bright, handsome boy of twelve or thirteen, with a happy, laughing expression in his brown eyes which told of a sunny disposition and perfect content with life as he found it. The other was the picture of a boy two or three years older, with something the same features, but a worried, anxious expression as if life were not all a holiday. That they were related we were sure, and that one was a poor relation we felt equally sure.
“Carl,” I said to Fan, indicating the younger face.
“Yes, Carl,” she answered, but her gaze was riveted upon the other,—the sad, browbeaten face,—whose great wide open blue eyes looked into ours with a wistful, pleading expression we had seen somewhere and could not recall. “Who is he, and what makes me feel as if I were looking upon some body dead?” Fan asked just as the soft swish of Mrs. Hathern’s gown was heard and she appeared at the door, saying in the low tone which always made Katy shiver and think of the high chair, “Katy, did you take two photographs from Carl’s room?”
“Yes, mamma. I wanted to show ’em to Fan and Ann,” Katy said, reaching her hand to us for them.
I gave mine up, saying as I did so, “This I am sure is Carl. He is a very handsome boy.”
But Fan kept hers, fascinated by the mournful eyes which held her as the Ancient Mariner held his unwilling hearer.
“Yes, this is Carl, and he is a handsome boy,” Mrs. Hathern replied, taking the photograph from me.
“And who is this?” Fan asked, surrendering hers at last.
I did not think of it then, but it came to me afterwards that Mrs. Hathern’s voice was not quite natural as she replied, “That is Carl’s cousin Paul, who once lived with us.”
“Where is he now?” was Fan’s next question, and Mrs. Hathern replied, “I don’t know. I think he is dead. He went to the war, and never came back.”
She left the room and we were alone, as Katy had already gone. We were sitting near an open window looking north, and simultaneously our eyes went across the field to the hillside cemetery where the headstones of Charlie and The Boy showed white amid the growth of flowering shrubs and fragrant evergreens; then they came back and confronted each other with a questioning look of terror and surprise. Fan was the first to speak. Leaning forward she whispered to me, “Mrs. Hathern is Aunt Martha!”
“Yes,” I said. “She is Aunt Martha,” and I felt myself grow faint and sick as I said it.
We had conceived such a contempt for the woman whose image had haunted our dying boy’s pillow that the shock was very great when we learned that she was with us, a part of us, our father’s wife. We felt more and more sure of it as we recalled the few words The Boy had dropped with regard to himself. When we asked his name he had said he was one of the Apostles, and that was Paul. He had spoken of a Carlyle as younger than himself.
That was Carl, and there seemed nothing wanting to complete the chain of evidence except to know Mrs. Hathern’s real name. From the window we saw father in the lane mounting his horse preparatory to visiting a patient.
Slipping down the back stairs Fan went up to him and after stroking the horse’s neck a moment said, “By the way, father, what is Mrs. Hathern’s real name? You call her Matty. Is it Matilda?” “No, child, Martha. I thought you knew,” was the reply, and in a moment Fan was back again, pirouetting around the room and beating the air as if she were crazy.