SETH’S BROTHER’S WIFE

Ef ther’ ain’t a flare-up in this haouse ’fore long, I miss my guess,” said Alvira, as she kneaded the pie-crust, and pulled it out between her floury fingers to measure its consistency. “Ole Sabriny’s got her back up this time to stay.”

“Well, let ’em flare, says I. ’Taint none o’ aour business, Alviry.”

“I knaow, Milton; but still it seems to me she might wait at least till th’ corpse was aout o’ th’ haouse.”

“What’s thet got to dew with it?”

The callousness of the question must have grated upon the hired-girl, for she made no reply, and slapped the dough over on the board with an impatient gesture.

It was near the close of a fair day, late in May, and the reddened sunlight from the West would have helped to glorify any human being less hopelessly commonplace than Milton Squires as he sat in its full radiance on the doorstep, peeling and quartering apples over a pan which he held between his knees. This sunlight, to reach him, painted with warm tints many objects near at hand which it could not make picturesque. The three great barns, standing in the shadow to the south, were ricketty and ancient without being comely, and the glare only made their awkward outlines and patched, paintless surfaces the meaner; the score of lean cows, standing idly fetlock-deep in the black mire of the barnyard, or nipping the scant tufts of rank grass near the trough, seemed all the dingier and scrawnier for the brilliancy of the light which covered them; the broken gate, the bars eked out with a hop-pole, the wheelbarrow turned shiftlessly against a break in the wall, the mildewed wellcurb, with its antiquated reach—all seemed in this glow of dying day to be conscious of exhibiting at its worse their squalid side. The sunset could not well have illumined, during that hour at least, a less inspiring scene than this which Alvira, looking out as she talked, or the hired man, raising his head from over the apples, could see from the kitchen door of Lemuel Fairchild’s farm-house. But any student of his species would have agreed that, in all the uninviting view, Milton was the least attractive object.

As he rose to empty his pan within, and start afresh, he could be seen more fully. He was clumsily cased from neck to ankles in brown over-alls, threadbare, discolored, patched, with mud about the knees and ragged edges lower down. He wore rubber boots, over the bulging legs of which the trousers came reluctantly, and the huge feet of these were slit down the instep. His hat had been soft and black once; now it seemed stiffened with dirt, to which the afternoon milking had lent a new contribution of short reddish hair, and was shapeless and colorless from age. His back was narrow and bent, and his long arms terminated in hands which it seemed sinful to have touch anything thereafter to be eaten. Viewed from behind, Milton appeared to be at least fifty. But his face showed a somewhat younger man, despite its sun-baked lines and the frowzy beard which might be either the yellow of unkempt youth or the gray of untidy age. In reality he was not yet thirty-six.

He slouched out now with a fresh lot of apples, and, squatting on the door-stone, resumed the conversation.

“I s’pose naow Sissly’s gone, ther’ won’t be no livin’ under th’ same roof with Sabriny fer any of us. Ther’ ain’t nobuddy lef’ fer her to rassle with ’cep’ us. Ole Lemuel’s so broken-up, he won’t dare say his soul’s his own; ’n John—well, Lize Wilkins says she heerd him say he didn’t know’s he’d come to th’ funer’l ’t all, after th’ way him ’n’ Sabriny hed it aout las’ time he was here.”

“I wasn’t talkin’ o’ them!” said Alvira, slapping the flour from her hands’ and beginning with the roller; “it’d be nothin’ new, her tryin’ to boss them. But she’s got her dander up naow agin somebuddy that beats them all holler. They won’t no Richardsons come puttin’ on airs ’raoun’ here, an’ takin’ th’ parlor bedroom ’thaout askin’, not ef th’ ole lady knaows herself—’n’ I guess she does.”

“What Richardsons?” asked Milton. “Thought Sissly was th’ last of ’em—thet they wa’n’t no more Richardsons.”

“Why, man alive, ain’t Albert’s wife a Richardson, th’ daughter of Sissly’s cousin—you remember, that pock-pitted man who kep’ th’ fast hoss here one summer. Of course she’s a Richardson—full-blooded! When she come up from th’ train here this mornin’, with Albert, I see by th’ ole lady’s eye ’t she meant misch’f. I didn’t want to see no raow, here with a corpse in th’ haouse, ’n’ so I tried to smooth matters over, ’n’ kind o’ quiet Sabriny daown, tellin’ her thet they had to come to th’ fu-ner’l, ’n’ they’d go ’way soon’s it was through with, ’n’ that Albert, bein’ the oldest son, hed a right to th’ comp’ny bed-room.”

“’N’ what’d she say?”

“She didn’t say much, ’cep’ thet th’ Richardsons hed never brung nothin’ but bad luck to this haouse, ’n’ they never would, nuther. ’N’ then she flaounced upstairs to her room, jis’s she allus does when she’s riled, ’n’ she give Albert’s wife sech a look, I said to m’self, ‘Milady, I wouldn’t be in your shoes fer all yer fine fixin’s.’”

“Well, she’s a dum likely lookin’ woman, ef she is a Richardson,” said Milton, with something like enthusiasm. “Wonder ef she wears one o’ them low-necked gaowns when she’s to hum, like th’ picters in th’ Ledger. They say they all dew, in New York.”

“Haow sh’d I knaow!” Alvira sharply responded. “I got enough things to think of, ’thaout both’rin’ my head abaout city women’s dresses. ’N’ you ought to hev, tew. Ef you’n’ Leander’d pay more heed to yer work, ’n’ dew yer chores up ship-shape, ’n’ spen’ less time porin’ over them good-fer-nothin’ story-papers, th’ farm wouldn’t look so run-daown ’n’ slaouchy. Did yeh hear what Albert said this mornin’, when he looked ’raoun’? ‘I swan! ’ he said, ‘I b’lieve this is th’ seediest lookin’ place ’n all Northern New York.’ Nice thing fer him to hev to say, wa’n’t it!”

“What d’ I keer what he says? He ain’t th’ boss here, by a jug-full!”

“’N’ more’s th’ pity, tew. He’d make yeh toe th’ mark!”

“Yes, ’n’ Sabriny’d make it lively fer his wife, tew. Th’ ole fight ’baout th’ Fairchileses ’n’ th’ Richardsons wouldn’t be a succumstance to thet. Sissly’d thank her stars thet she was dead ’n’ buried aout o’ th’ way.”

These two hired people, who discussed their employer and his family with that easy familiarity of Christian names to be found only in Russia and rural America, knew very well what portended to the house when the Richardson subject came up. Alvira Roberts had spent more than twenty years of her life in the thick of the gaseous strife between Fairchild and Richardson. She was a mere slip of a girl, barely thirteen, when she had first hired out at the homestead, and now, black-browed, sallow from much tea-drinking, and with a sharp, deep wrinkle vertically dividing her high forehead, she looked every year of her thirty-five. Compared with her, Milton Squires was a new comer on the farm, but still there were lean old cows over yonder in the barnyard, lazily waiting for the night-march to the pastures, that had been ravenous calves in their gruel-bucket stage when he came.

What these two did not know about the Fairchild family was hardly worth the knowing. Something of what they knew, the reader ought here to be told.

CHAPTER II.—THE STORY OF LEMUEL.

Lemuel Fairchild, the bowed, gray-haired, lumpish man who at this time sat in the main living room within, feebly rocking himself by the huge wood-stove, and trying vaguely as he had been for thirty-six hours past, to realize that his wife lay in her final sleep in the adjoining chamber, had forty-odd years before been as likely a young farmer as Dearborn County knew. He was fine-looking and popular in those days, and old Seth Fairchild, dying unexpectedly, had left to this elder son his whole possessions—six hundred acres of dairy and hop land, free and clear, a residence much above the average farm-house of these parts, and a tidy sum of money in the bank.

The contrast now was sweeping. The Fairchild’s house was still the largest residential structure on the Burfield road, which led from Thessaly across the hills to remote and barbarous latitudes, but respect had long since ceased to accrue to it upon the score of its size. To the local eye, it was the badge and synonym of “rack and ruin;” while sometimes strangers of artistic tastes, chancing to travel by this unfrequented road, would voice regrets that such a prospect as opened to the vision just here, with the noble range of hills behind for the first time looming in their true proportions, should be spoiled by such a gaunt, unsightly edifice, with its tumble-down surroundings, its staring windows cheaply curtained with green paper, and its cheerless, shabby color—that indescribable gray with which rain and frost and Father Time supplant unrenewed white. The garden, comprising a quarter-acre to the east of the house, was a tangled confusion of flowers and weeds and berry-bushes run wild, yet the effect somehow was mean rather than picturesque. The very grass in the yard to the west did not grow healthfully, but revealed patches of sandy barrenness, created by feet too indifferent or unruly to keep the path to the barns.

Yet the neighbors said, and Lemuel had come himself to feel, that the blame of this sad falling off was not fairly his. There had been a fatal defect in the legacy.

The one needful thing which the Hon. Seth Fairchild did not leave his elder son was the brains by means of which he himself, in one way or another, had gathered together a substantial competency, won two elections to the State Senate, and established and held for himself the position of leading citizen in his town—that most valued and intangible of American local distinctions. But while Lemuel’s brown hair curled so prettily, and his eyes shone with the modest light of wealthy and well-behaved youth, nobody missed the brains. If there was any change in the management of the farm, it passed unnoticed, for all attention was centred on the great problem, interesting enough always when means seeks a help-meet, but indescribably absorbing in rural communities, where everybody knows everybody and casual gallants never come for those luckless damsels neglected by native swains—Whom will he marry?

It boots not now to recall the heart-burnings, the sad convictions that life would henceforth be a blank, the angry repinings at fate, which desolated the village of Thessaly and vicinity when Lemuel, returning from a mid-winter visit to Albany, brought a bride in the person of a bright eyed, handsome and clever young lady who had been Miss Cicely Richardson. He had known her, so they learned, for some years—not only during his school-days at the Academy there, but later, in what was mysteriously known in Thessaly as “society,” in whose giddy mazes he had mingled while on a visit to his legislative sire at the Capital City. No, it is not worth while to dwell upon the village hopes rudely destroyed by this shock—for they are dim memories of the far, far past.

But to one the blow was a disappointment not to be forgotten, or to grow dim in recollection. Miss Sabrina Fairchild was two years younger than her brother in age—a score of years his senior in firmness and will. She had only a small jointure in her father’s estate, because she had great expectations from an aunt in Ohio, in perpetual memory of whose anticipated bounty she bore her scriptural name, but she was a charge on her brother in that she was to have a home with him until she chose to leave it for one of her own. I doubt not that her sagacious father foresaw, from his knowledge of his daughter, the improbability that this second home would ever be offered her.

Miss Sabrina, even at this tender age, was clearly not of the marrying kind, and she grew less so with great steadiness. She was at this early date, when she was twenty-four, a woman of markedly strong character, of which perhaps the most distinct trait was family pride.

There has been a considerable army of State Senators since New York first took on the honors of a Commonwealth, and unto them a great troop of daughters have been born, but surely no other of all these girls ever exulted so fondly, nay, fiercely, in the paternal dignity as did Sabrina. She knew nothing of politics, and little of the outside world; her conceptions of social possibilities were of the most primitive sort; one winter, when she went to Albany with her father, and was passed in a bewildered way through sundry experiences said to be of a highly fashionable nature, it had been temporarily apparent to her own consciousness that she was an awkward, ignorant, red-armed country-girl—but this only for one wretched hour or so. Every mile-post passed on her homeward ride, as she looked through the stage window, brought restored self-confidence, and long before the tedious journey ended she was more the Senator’s daughter than ever.

Through this very rebound from mortification she queened it over the simpler souls of the village with renewed severity and pomp. The itinerant singing master who thought to get her for the asking into his class in the school-house Wednesday evenings, was frozen by the amazed disdain of her refusal. When young Smith Thurber, the kiln-keeper’s son, in the flippant spirit of fine buttons and a resplendent fob, asked her to dance a measure with him at the Wallaces’ party, the iciness of her stare fairly took away his breath.

Something can be guessed of her emotions when the brother brought home his bride. With a halfcowardly, half-kindly idea of postponing the trouble certain to ensue, he had given Sabrina no warning of his intention, and, through the slow mails of that date, only a day’s advance notice of his return with Mrs. Lemuel. The storm did not burst at once. Indeed it may be said never to have really burst. Sabrina was not a bad woman, according to her lights, and she did nothing consciously to make her sister-in-law unhappy. The young wife had a light heart, a sensible mind and the faculty of being cheerful about many things which might be expected to annoy. But she had some pride, too, and although at the outset it was the very simple and praiseworthy pride of a well-meaning individual, incessant vaunting of the Fairchilds quite naturally gave a family twist to it, and she soon was able to resent slights in the name of all the Richardsons.

After all, was she not in the right? for while the grass was scarcely green on the grave of the first Fairchild who had amounted to anything, there were six generations of Richardsons in Albany chronicles alone who had married into the best Dutch families of that ancient, aristocratic town, to say nothing of the New England record antedating that period. Thus the case appeared to her, and came gradually to have more prominence in her mind than, in her maiden days, she could have thought possible.

So this great Forty Years’ War began, in which there was to be no single grand, decisive engagement, but a thousand petty skirmishes and little raids, infinitely more vexatious and exhausting, and was waged until the weaker of the combatants, literally worn out in the fray, had laid down her arms and her life together, and was at peace at last, under the sheet in the darkened parlor.

The other veteran party to the feud, her thin, iron-gray hair half concealed under a black knit cap, her bold, sharp face red as with stains of tears, sat at the window of her own upper room, reading her Bible. If Milton and Alvira had known that she was reading in Judges, they might have been even more confident of a coming “flare-up.”

CHAPTER III.—AUNT SABRINA.

NEIGHBORING philosophers who cared, from curiosity or a loftier motive, to study the Fairchild domestic problem, in all its social and historic ramifications, generally emerged from the inquiry with some personal bias against Miss Sabrina, tempered by the conclusion that, after all, there was a good deal to be said on the old lady’s side.

Certainly, as the grim old maid in the rusty bombazine gown and cap, which gave a funereal air even to the red plaid shawl over her shoulders, sat at her upper window, and tried through a pained and resentful chaos of secular thoughts to follow the Scriptural lines, there was an extremely vivid conviction uppermost in her mind that justice had been meted out neither to her nor to the Fairchilds. She would have repelled indignantly, and honestly enough too, the charge that there was any bitterness in her heart toward the sister-in-law whose burial was appointed for the morrow. She had liked poor Cicely, in her iron-clad way, and had wept genuine tears more than once since her death. Indeed, her thoughts—and they were persistent, self-asserting thoughts which not even her favorite recital of Gideon’s sanguinary triumph could keep back—ran more upon the living than upon the dead.

And what gloomy, melancholy thoughts they were! They swept over two score of years, the whole gamut of emotion, from the pride and hope of youth to the anguish of disappointed, wrathful, hopeless old age, as her hand might cover all there was of sound in music by a run down her mother’s ancient spinet which stood, mute and forgotten, in the corner of the room. Her brother, this brother whom satirical fate had made a Lemuel instead of a Lucy or a Lucretia, a man instead of a woman as befitted his weakness of mind and spirit—had begun life with a noble heritage. Where was it now? He had been the heir to a leading position among the men of his county. What was he now? The Fairchilds had been as rich, as respected, as influential as any Dearborn family. Who did them honor now?

The mental answers to these questions blurred Miss Sabrina’s spectacles with tears, and Gideon’s performance with the lamps seemed a tiresome thing. She laid the Book aside, and went softly down stairs to her brother, who sat, still rocking in his late wife’s high, cushioned arm-chair, disconsolate by the stove.

There were also in the room his oldest son and this son’s wife, sitting dumbly, each at a window, making a seemly pretence of not being bored by the meagre prospect without. They looked at their aunt in that far-off impassive manner with which participants in a high pageant or solemn observance always regard one another. There was no call for a greeting, since they had already exchanged whispered salutations, earlier in the day. Miss Sabrina glanced at the young wife for an instant—it was not a kindly glance. Then her eyes turned to the husband, and while surveying him seemed suddenly to light up with some new thought. She almost smiled, and her tight pressed lips parted. Had they followed the prompting of the brain and spoken, the words would have been:

“Thank God, there is still Albert!”

Albert Fairchild would have been known in any company, and in any guise, I think, for a lawyer. The profession had its badge in every line and aspect of his face, in every movement of his head, and, so it seemed, in the way he held his hands, in the very tone of his voice. His face was round, and would have been pleasant, so far as conformation and expression went, had it not been for the eyes, which were unsympathetic, almost cold. Often the rest of his countenance was wreathed in amiable smiles; but the eyes smiled never. He had looked a middle-aged man for a decade back, and casual acquaintances who met him from year to year complimented him on not growing old, because they saw no change. In fact he had been old from the beginning, and even now looked more than his age, which lacked some few months of forty. He was growing bald above the temples, and, like all the Fairchilds, was taking on flesh with increasing years. Nothing could have better shown the extremity of poor Sabrina’s woe than this clutching at the relief afforded by the sight of Albert, for she was not on good terms with him. Albert had been born and reared through boyhood at a time when the farm was still prosperous and money plenty. He had been educated far beyond the traditions of his sires, and was the first University man of his family, so far as was known. He had been given his own bent in all things, before he settled down to a choice of profession, and then, at considerable expense, had been secured a place with one of the greatest legal firms in New York City. For years the first fruits of the soil, the cream off all the milk—so the Aunt’s mingled scriptural and dairy metaphors ran—had been his. And what return had they had for it? He had become a sound, successful lawyer, with a handsome income, and he had married wealth as well. Yet year after year, as the fortunes of the Fairchild homestead declined, he had never interfered to prevent the fresh mortgage being placed—nay, had more than once explicitly declined to help save it.

“Agriculture is out of date in this State,” she had heard him say once, with her own ears, “Better let the old people live on their capital, as they go along. It’s no use throwing good money after bad. Farm land here in the East is bound to decrease in value, steadily.”

This about the homestead—about the cradle of his ancestors! Poor old lady, had the Fairchilds been sending baronial roots down through all this soil for a thousand years, she couldn’t have been more pained or mortified over Albert’s callous view of the farm which her grandfather, a revolted cobbler from Rhode Island, had cleared and paid for at ten cents an acre.

Then there was his marriage, too. In all the years of armed neutrality or tacit warfare which she and Cicely had passed together under one roof, they had never before or since come so near an open and palpable rupture as they did over a city-bred cousin of Cicely’s—a forward, impertinent, ill-behaved girl from New York, who had come to the farm on a visit some ten years before, and whose father was summoned at last to take her away because otherwise she, Sabrina, threatened to herself leave the house. There had been a desperate scene before this conclusion was reached. Sabrina had stormed and threatened to shake the dust of the homestead from off her outraged sandals. Cicely for the once had stood her ground, and said she fancied even worse things than that might happen without producing a universal cataclysm. Lemuel had almost wept with despair over the tumult. The two older boys, particularly John, had not concealed their exuberant hope that their maiden Aunt might be taken at her word, and allowed to leave. And the girl herself, this impudent huzzy of a Richardson, actually put her spoke in too, and said things about old cats and false teeth, which it made Sabrina’s blood still boil to recall.

And it was this girl, of all others in the world, whom Albert must go and marry!

Yet Sabrina, in her present despondent mood, felt herself able to rise above mere personal piques and dislikes, if there really was a hope for the family’s revival. She was not very sanguine about even Albert, but beyond him there was no chance at all.

John, the second brother, had talent enough, she supposed. People said he was smart, and he must be, else he could scarcely have come in his twenty-eighth year to be owner and editor of the Thessaly Banner of Liberty, and put in all those political pieces written in the first person plural, as if he had the power of attorney for all Dearborn county. But then he was mortally shiftless about money matters, and they did say that since his wife’s death—a mere school-teacher she had been—he had become quite dissipated and played billiards. Besides she was at open feud with him, and never, never would speak to him again, the longest day he lived! So that settled John.

As for Seth, the youngest of the brothers, it is to be doubted if she would have thought of him at all, had he not come in at the moment. He had been down to the village to get some black clothes which the tailor had constructed on short notice for him, and he, too, passed through the sitting room to the stairs with the serious look and the dead silence which the awful presence imposes.

Then she did think of him for a moment, as she stood warming her fingers over the bald, flat top of the stove—for though bright and warm enough outside, the air was still chilly in these great barns of rooms.

Seth was indisputably the handsomest of all the Fairchilds, even handsomer than she remembered his father to have been—a tall, straight, broadshouldered youth, who held his head well up and looked everybody in the face with honest hazel eyes. He had the Richardson complexion, a dusky tint gained doubtless from all those Dutch intermarriages of which poor Cicely used to make so much, but his brown hair curled much as Lemuel’s used to curl, only not so effeminately, and his temper was as even as his father’s had been, though not so submissive or weak. His hands were rough and coarse from the farm work, and his walk showed familiarity with ploughed ground, but still he had, in his way, a more distinguished air than either Albert or John had ever had.

Looking him over, a stranger would have been surprised that his aunt should have left him out of her thoughts of the family’s future—or that, once pausing to consider him, she should have dropped the idea so swiftly. But so it was. Miss Sabrina felt cold and aggrieved toward Albert, and she came as near hating John as a deeply devout woman safely could. She simply took no account of Seth at all, as she would have expressed it. To her he was a quiet, harmless sort of youngster, who worked prettily steadily on the farm, and got on civilly with people. She understood that he was very fond of reading, but that made no special impression on her.

If she had been asked, she would undoubtedly have said that Seth was her favorite nephew—but she had never dreamed of regarding him as a possible restorer of the family glories.

“Is yer oven hot enough?” she asked Alvira in the kitchen, a minute later. “If they’s anything I dew hate, it’s a soggy undercrust.”

“I guess I kin manage a batch o’ pies by this time,” returned the hired-girl with a sniff. Through some unexplained process of reasoning, Alvira was with the Fairchilds as against the Richardsons, but she was first of all for herself, against the whole human race.

“Milton gone aout with the caows?” asked the old lady, ignoring for the once the domestic’s challenge. “When he comes back, he ’n’ Leander better go over to Wilkinses, and get what chairs they kin spare. I s’pose there’ll be a big craowd, ef only to git in and see if there’s any holes in our body-Brussels yit, ’n’ haow that sofy-backed set in the parlor’s holdin’ out. Poor Cicely! I think they better bring over the chairs tonight, after dusk. What people don’t see they can’t talk abaout.”

“Heard Milton say he was goin’ to borrer some over at Warren’s,” remarked Alvira, in a casual way, but looking around to see how the idea affected Miss Sabrina.

“Well he jis’ won’t!” came the answer, very promptly and spiritedly. “If every mortal soul of ’em hes to stan’ up, he won’t! I guess Lemuel Fairchild’s wife can be buried ’thaout asking any help from Matildy Warren. I wouldn’t ask her if ’twas th’ las’ thing I ever did.”

“But Annie sent word she was comin’ over fus’ thing in th’ mornin’, so’s to help clear up th’ breakfast things. If she’s good enough fer that, I don’t see why you need be afeered o’ borryin’ her chairs.”

“They ain’t her chairs, and you knaow it, Alviry. I ain’t got a word to say agin’ Annie Fairchild, but when it comes to her gran’ mother, I kin ride a high horse as well’s she kin. After all the trouble she made my family, the sight of a single stick of her furnitur’ here’d be enough to bring the rafters of this haouse daown over my head, I do believe!”

“Well, of course, ‘tain’t none o’ my business, but seems to me there’ll be a plaguey slim fun’r’l when your turn comes if you’re goin’ to keep up all these old-woman’s fights with everybody ’raound abaout.”

“Naow Alviry!” began Miss Sabrina, in her shrillest and angriest tone; then with a visible effort, as if remembering something, she paused and then went on in a subdued, almost submissive voice, “You knaow jis’ haow Matildy Warren’s used us. From the very day my poor brother William ran off with her Jenny—and goodness knaows whatever possessed him to dew it—thet old woman’s never missed a chance to run us all daown—ez ef she oughtn’t to been praoud o’ th’ day a Fairchild took up with a Warren.”

“Guess you ain’t had none the wu’st of it,” put in Alvira, with sarcasm. “Guess your tongue’s ’baout as sharp as her’n ever was. B’sides she’s bed-ridden naow, ’n’ everybody thought she wouldn’t get threw th’ spring. ’N’ ef Seth’s goin’ to make up to Annie, you ought to begin to smooth things over ’fore she dies. There’s no tellin’ but what she mightn’t leave the farm away f’m th’ girl at th’ last minute, jis’ to spite you.”

“Yeh needn’t talk as if I wanted her pesky farm!”

“Oh, well now, you knaow what I mean’s well’s I dew. What’s th’ use o’ harpin’ on what yer brother William did, or what ole Matildy said, ’fore I was born, when you knaow th’ tew farms jine, and yer heart’s sot on havin’ ’em in one—Yes, ’fore I was born,” repeated the domestic, as if pleased with the implication of juvenility.

Miss Sabrina hesitated, and looked at Alvira meditatively through her spectacles, in momentary doubt about the propriety of saying a sharp thing under all the circumstances; but the temptation was not to be resisted. “’N’ you ain’t percisely a chicken yourself, Alviry,” she said and left the kitchen.

Later, when Milton had returned from the pasture, and hung about the kitchen, mending the harness that went with the democrat-wagon while waiting for Leander to return from the cheese factory, Alvira remarked:

“Seems ’if Sabriny’d lost all her sper’t this last day or tew. Never see sech a change. She don’t answer up wuth a cent. I shouldn’t be s’prised if she didn’t tackle Albert’s wife after all. Oh yes, ’n’ you ain’t to go to Warren’s for them chairs. Sa-briny’s dead-set agin that.”

“What’s up?” asked Milton, “Hez Seth broke off with Annie?”

“Don’t knaow’s they ever was anything particular to break off. No, ’t ’aint that; it’s the same raow ‘tween the two ole women. Goodness knaows, I’m sick ’n’ tired of hearin’ ’baout it.”

“No, but ain’t Seth ’n’ Annie fixed it up?” persisted Milton; “Daown’t th’ corners they say it’s all settled.” Then he mutteringly added, as he slouched out to meet Leander, who drove up now with a great rattle of empty milk-cans. “I wish’t I was in Seth’s shoes.”

“Oh, you dew, dew yeh!” said Alvira, thus left to herself.

CHAPTER IV.—THE TWO YOUNG WOMEN.

The young girl whose future had been settled down at the corners, came along the road next morning toward the Fairchild house, all unconscious of her destiny. She lived in a small, old-fashioned farm-dwelling back in the fields, alone with her grandmother, and although there was a bitter feud between the heads of the two houses, it had not stopped her from being a familiar and helpful figure in her uncle’s homestead.

Annie Fairchild was a country girl in some senses of the term, calm-faced, clear-eyed, self-reliant among her friends, but with a curious disposition toward timidity in the presence of strangers. She was held to be too serious and “school-ma’am-ish” for pleasant company by most rural maidens of her acquaintance, and the few attempts of young farmers of the country-side to establish friendly relations with her had not been crowned with conspicuous success. It could scarcely be said that she was haughty or cold; no one could demonstrate in detail that her term of schooling in a far-off citified seminary had made her proud or uncivil; but still she had no intimates.

This was the more marked from the fact that she was a pretty girl—or if not precisely pretty, very attractive and winning in face. No other girl of the neighborhood had so fine and regular a profile, or such expressive, dark eyes, or so serenely intelligent an expression. It had been whispered at one time that Reuben Tracy, the school-master, was likely to make a match of it with her, but this had faded away again as a rootless rumor; by this time everybody on the Burfield road tacitly understood that eventually she was to be the wife of her cousin Seth, when it “came time for the two farms to join.” And she had grown accustomed long since to the furtive, half-awed, half-covetous look which men cast upon her, without suspecting the spirit of reluctant renunciation underlying it.

She met Milton Squires on the road, close in front of the Fairchild’s house, this morning, and, nodding to him, passed on. She did not particularly note the gaze he bent upon her as she went by, and which followed her afterward, almost to the Fairchild gate. If she had done so, and could have read all its meaning, she would not have gone on with so unruffled a face, for it was a look to frighten an honest young woman—an intent, hungry, almost wolfish look, unrelieved by so much as a glimmer of the light of manliness.

But she was alike unconscious of his thoughts and of the gossip he had heard at the corners. Certainly no listener who followed her to the gate, where she encountered Seth at work screwing on a new hinge, would have gathered from the tone or words of the greeting on either side any testimony to confirm the common supposition that they were destined for each other.

“Good morning, Seth,” she said, halting while he dragged the great gate open for her, “you’re all through breakfast, I suppose?”

“No, I think Albert and his wife are at the table still. We didn’t call them when the rest got up, you know. They’re not used to country ways.”

“Anybody else here?”

“No, except John.”

“Oh, I’m so glad he came. That Lize Wilkins has been telling everybody he wouldn’t come on Sabrina’s account. And it would have looked so bad.”

“Yes, Lize Wilkins talks too much. All John ever said was that he wouldn’t stay here in the house any more than he could help. It’s too bad he can’t get along better with Aunt; it would make things so much pleasanter.”

“How’s your father, Seth? He seemed at first to take it pretty hard.”

“He appeared a little brighter yesterday, after Albert came, but he’s very poorly this morning. Poor old man, it makes a sad difference with him—more I suppose than with us boys, even with me, who never have been away from her hardly for a day.”

“Yes, Seth, a boy outgrows his mother, I suppose, but for an old couple who have lived together forty years a separation like this must be awful. I shall go up to the house now.”

Seth followed her with his eyes as she walked up the road, past the old-fashioned latticed front door with its heavy fold of crape hanging on the knocker, and turned from sight at the corner of the house; and the look in his face was soft and admiring, even if it was hardly loverlike. In his trouble—and he felt the bereavement most keenly—it seemed restful and good to have such a girl as Annie about, Indeed, a vague thought that she had never before seemed so sweet and likeable came to him, as he turned again to the hinge, and lightened his heart perceptibly, for almost the last words his mother had spoken to him had been of his future with Annie as his wife.

“You will have the farm before long, Seth,” she said, smiling faintly as he stroked her pale hair—somehow to the last it never grew grey—and looked at her through boyish tears, “and Annie will bring you the Warren farm. Her grandmother and I have talked it over many a time. Annie’s a good girl, there’s no better, and she’ll make my boy a good, true wife.”

For a year or two back Seth had understood in a nebulous way that his parents had an idea of his eventually marrying Annie, but his mother’s words still came to him in the form of a surprise. First, it had been far from his thoughts that old Mrs. Warren, Annie’s invalid grandmother, would listen to such a thing, much less plan it. There was a bitterness of long standing between the two families, he knew. His father’s younger brother—a halfbrother—named William Fairchild, had married Mrs. Warren’s only daughter under circumstances which he had never heard detailed, but which at least had enraged the mother. Both William and his wife had died, out West he believed, years and years ago, leaving only this girl, Annie Fairchild, who came an orphan to the grandmother she had never seen before, and was reared by her. In this Mrs. Warren and his aunt Sabrina had found sufficient occasion for a quarrel, lasting ever since he could remember, and as he had always understood from his aunt that her battle was in defense of the whole family, he had taken it for granted that he not less than the other Fairchilds was included in Mrs. Warren’s disfavor. He recalled, now, indeed, having heard Annie say once or twice that her grandmother liked him; but this he had taken in a negative way, as if the grandmother of the Capulets had remarked that of all the loathed Montagus perhaps young Romeo was personally the least offensive to her sight.

And second, he was far from being in a Romeo’s condition of heart and mind. He was not in love with Annie for herself—much less for the Warren farm. To state plainly what Seth had not yet mustered courage to say in entire frankness even to himself, he hated farming, and rebelled against the idea of following in his father’s footsteps. And the dreams of a career elsewhere which occupied the mutinous thoughts Seth concealed under so passive an exterior had carried him far away from the plan of an alliance with the nice sort of country cousin who would eventually own the adjoining farm. So in this sense, too, his mothers dying words were a surprise—converting into a definite and almost sacred desire what he had supposed to be merely a shapeless fancy.

Not all this crossed his mind, as he watched Annie till she disappeared, and then turned back to his work. But the sight of her had been pleasant to him, and her voice had sounded very gentle and yet full of the substance of womanliness—and perhaps his poor, dear mother’s plan for him, after all, was the best.

The gate swinging properly at last, there was an end to Seth’s out-door tasks, and he started toward the house. The thought that he would see Annie within was distinct enough in his mind, almost, to constitute a motive for his going. At the very door he encountered his brother Albert’s wife, coming out, and stopped.

Isabel Fairchild was far from deserving, at least as a woman, the epithets with which Aunt Sabrina mentally coupled her girlhood. There was nothing impertinent or ill-behaved about her appearance, certainly, as she stood before Seth, and with a faint smile bade him good-morning.

She was above the medium height, as woman’s stature goes, and almost plump; her hair, much of which was shown in front by the pretty Parisian form of straw hat she wore, was very light in color; her eyes were blue, a light, noticeable blue. She wore some loose kind of black and gray morning dress, with an extra fold falling in graceful lines from her shoulders to her train, like a toga, and she carried a dainty parasol, also of black and gray, like the ribbons on her dark hat. To Seth’s eyes she had seemed yesterday, when he saw her for the first time, a very embodiment of the luxury, beauty, refinement of city life—and how much more so now, when her dingy traveling raiment had given place to this most engaging garb, so subdued, yet so lovely. It seemed to him that his sister-in-law was quite the most attractive woman he had ever seen.

“I thought of going for a little stroll,” she said, again with the faint, half-smile. “It is so charming outside, and so blue and depressing in the house. Can I walk along there through the orchard now?—I used to when I was here as a girl, I know—and won’t you come with me? I’ve scarcely had a chance for a word with you since we came.”

The invitation was pleasant enough to Seth, but he looked down deprecatingly at his rough chore clothes, and wondered whether he ought to accept it or not.

“Why, Seth, the idea of standing on ceremony with me! As if we hadn’t played together here as children—to say nothing of my being your sister now!”

They had started now toward the orchard, and she continued:—

“Do you know, it seems as if I didn’t know anybody here but you—and even you almost make a stranger out of me. Poor Uncle Lemuel, he is so broken-down that he scarcely remembers me, and of course your Aunt and I couldn’t be expected to get very intimate—you remember our dispute? Then John, he’s very pleasant, and all that, but he isn’t at all like the John I used to look up to so, the summer I was here. But you—you have hardly changed a bit. Of course,” she made haste to add, for Seth’s face did not reflect unalloyed gratification at this, “you have grown manly and big, and all that, but you haven’t changed in your expression or manner. It’s almost ten years—and I should have known you anywhere. But John has changed—he’s more like a city man, or rather a villager, a compromise between city and country.”

“Yes, I’m a countryman through and through, I suppose,” said Seth, with something very like a sigh.

“John has seen a good deal of the world they tell me, and been on papers in large cities. I wonder how he can content himself with that little weekly in Thessaly after that.”

“I don’t think John has much ambition,” answered Seth, meditatively. “He doesn’t seem to care much how things go, if he only has the chance to say what he wants to say in print. It doesn’t make any difference to him, apparently, whether all New York State reads what he writes, or only thirty or forty fellows in Dearborn County—he’s just as well satisfied. And yet he’s a very bright man, too. He might have gone to the Assembly last fall, if he could have bid against Elhanan Pratt. He will go sometime, probably.”

“Why, do you have an auction here for the Assembly?”

“Oh, no, but the man who’s willing to pay a big assessment into the campaign fund can generally shut a poor candidate out John didn’t seem to mind much about being frozen out though—not half so much as I did, for him. Everybody in Thessaly knows him and likes him and calls him ‘John,’ and that seems to be the height of his ambition. I can’t imagine a man of his abilities being satisfied with so limited a horizon.”

“And, you, Seth, what is your horizon like?” asked Isabel.

They had entered the orchard path, now, and the apple blossoms close above them filled the May morning air with that sweet spring perfume which seems to tell of growth, harvest, the fruition of hope.

“Oh, I’m picked out to be a countryman all the days of my life I suppose.” There was the sigh again, and a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as well.

“Oh, I hope not—that is, if you don’t want to be. Oh, it must be such a dreary life! The very thought of it sets my teeth on edge. The dreadful people you have to know: men without an idea beyond crops and calves and the cheese-factory; women slaving their lives out doing bad cooking, mending for a houseful of men, devoting their scarce opportunities for intercourse with other women to the weakest and most wretched gossip; coarse servants who eat at the table with their employers and call them by their Christian names; boys whose only theory about education is thrashing the school teacher, if it is a man, or breaking her heart by their mean insolence if it is a woman; and girls brought up to be awkward gawks, without a chance in life, since the brighter and nicer they are the more they will suffer from marriage with men mentally beneath them—that is, if they don’t become sour old maids. I don’t wonder you hate it all, Seth.”

“You talk like a book,” said Seth, in tones of unmistakable admiration. “I didn’t suppose any woman could talk like that.”

“I talk as I feel always, when I come into contact with country life, and I get, angry with people who maunder about its romantic and picturesque side. Where is it, I should, like to know?”

“Oh, it isn’t all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course——“—here he hesitated a little—“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kin all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course——” here he hesitated a little—“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kind o’ run down.”

“No, Seth, it isn’t that; the trail of the serpent is over it all—rich and poor, big and little. The Nineteenth century is a century of cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age—and the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul, but this isn’t the century.”

“But Webster was a farm boy, and so was Lincoln and Garfield and Jackson—almost all our great men. Hardly any of them are born in cities, you will find.”

“Oh, the country is just splendid to be born in, no doubt of that; but after you are born, get out of it as soon as you can.”

“I don’t know as I can leave Father very well,” said Seth slowly, and as if in deep thought.

They walked to the end of the pasture beyond the orchard, to within view of the spot where all the Fairchilds for three generations had been laid, and where, among the clustering sweet-briars and wild-strawberry vines Milton had only yesterday dug a new grave. The sight recalled to both another subject, and no more was said of country life as they returned to the house. Indeed, little was said of any sort, for Seth had a thinking mood on. Nothing was very clear in his mind perhaps, but more distinctly than anything else he felt that existence on the farm had all at once become intolerable.

CHAPTER V.—THE FUNERAL.

The American farm-house funeral is surely, of all the observances with which civilized man marks the ending of this earthly pilgrimage, the most pathetic. The rural life itself is a sad and sterile enough thing, with its unrelieved physical strain, its enervating and destructive diet, its mental barrenness, its sternly narrowed groove of toil and thought and companionship—but death on the farm brings a desolating gloom, a cruel sense of the hopelessness of existence, which one realizes nowhere else. The grim, fatalist habit of seizing upon the grotesque side, which a century of farm life has crystallized into what the world knows as American humor, is not wanting even in this hour; and the comforting conviction of immortality, of the shining reward to follow travail and sorrow, is nowhere more firmly insisted upon than among our country people. But the bleak environment of the closed life, the absence of real fellowship among the living, the melancholy isolation and vanity of it all, oppress the soul here with an intolerable weight which neither fund of sardonic spirits nor honest faith can lighten.

Something of this Isabel felt, as the mid-day meal was hurried through, on Alvira’s sharp intimation that the room couldn’t be cleared any too soon, for the crowd would begin coming now, right along. There were three strangers at the table—though they seemed to be scarcely more strangers than the members of her husband’s family—of whom two were clergymen.

One of these, who sat next to her, was the Episcopalian minister at Thessaly, a middle-aged, soft sort of man, with short hair so smooth and furry that she was conscious of an impulse to stroke it like a seal-skin, and little side-whiskers which reminded her of a baby brush. He impressed her as a stupid man, but in that she was mistaken. He was nervous and ill at ease, first because he could not successfully or gracefully use the narrow three-tined steel fork with a bone handle that had been given him, and second, because he did not understand the presence of the Rev. Stephen Bunce, who sat opposite him, offensively smacking his lips, and devoting to loud discourse periods which it seemed might better have been employed in mastication.

If quiet Mr. Turner was ill at ease, the Rev. Stephen was certainly not. He bestrode the situation like a modern Colossus. The shape of his fork did not worry him, since he used it only as a humble and lowly adjunct to his knife. The presence of Mr. Turner too, neither puzzled nor pained him. In fact, he was rather pleased than otherwise to have him there, where he could talk to him before sympathetic witnesses, and make him realise how the man of the people who had a genuine call towered innately superior to mere beneficed gentility. “Beneficed gentility”—that was a good phrase, and he made a mental note of it for future use; then—the temptation was too strong—he bundled it neck and crop into the florid sentence with which he was addressing Albert—and looked at the Episcopalian to watch its effect.

Mr. Turner was occupied with his javelin-shaped fork, and did not seem to hear it.

Mr. Bunce suspected artifice in this, and watched the rector’s meek face for a sign of secret confusion. After a moment he said, with his full, pompous voice at its loudest and most artificial pitch:—

“Ah, Mr. Turner, this is a sad occasion!”

The rector glanced up with some surprise, for he had not expected this overture, and answered “Yes, truly it is; extremely sad.”

“Yet it is consoling to feel that even so sad an occasion can be converted into a means of grace, a season of spiritual solace as it were.”

Mr. Turner only nodded assent to this; he felt that the whole company around the table, hired people and all, were eagerly watching him and the burly, bold-faced preacher opposite, as if they were about to engage in gladiatorial combat.

But Mr. Bunce would not permit the challenge to be declined. He stroked his ochre-hued chin whisker, looked complacently around the board, and asked:

“I s’pose you’ve brought your white and black riggins’ along, eh? Or don’t you wear ’em except in Church?”

There was a pained look in Mr. Turner’s face; he made a little gesture toward the folding doors leading to the parlor, beyond which lay the dead, and murmured:

“It will be better, will it not, to speak of these matters together, after dinner?”

Again the Rev. Stephen glanced around the table, looking especially toward Miss Sabrina for approval, and remarked loftily:

“There is no need of concealment here, sir. It is all in the family here. We all know that the Mother in Israel who has departed was formerly of your communion, and if she wanted to have you here, sir, at her funeral, why well and good. But the rest of this sorrowin’ family, sir, this stricken household, air Baptists—”

“I declare! there’s the Burrells drivin’ into the yard, a’ready!” said Alvira, rising from her chair abruptly. “If you’re threw we better hustle these things aout, naow; you women won’t more’n have time to dress ’fore they’ll all be here.”

The interruption seemed a welcome one to everybody, for there was a general movement on both sides of Mr. Bunce, which he, with his sentence unfinished, was constrained to join.

The third stranger, a small, elderly man with a mobile countenance and rusty black clothes, drew himself up, put on a modifiedly doleful expression, and, speaking for the first time, assumed control of everything:

“Naow, Milton, you ’n’ Leander git the table aout, ’n’ bring in all the extry chairs, ’n’ set ’em ’raound in rows. Squeeze ’em pooty well together in back, but the front ones kind o’ spread aout. You, Miss Sabriny, ’n’ the lady”—indicating Isabel with his thumb—“’n’ Annie’d better go upstairs ’n’ git yer bonnets on, ’n’ things, ’n’ go ’n’ set in the room at the head o’ the stairs. You men, tew, git your gloves on, ’n’ naow be sure ’n’ have your hankch’fs in some pocket where you can git at ’em with your gloves on—’n’ have your hats in your hands, ‘n’ then go ’n’ set with the ladies. Miss Sabriny, you’ll come daown arm-in-arm with yer brother, when I call, ’n’ then Albert ’n’ his wife, ’n’ John with Annie, ’n’ Seth with—pshaw, there’s odd numbers. Well, Seth can come alone. And dew keep step comin’ daown stairs!”

“’N’ naow, gents,” turning to the Rev. Mr. Turner, “your gaown’s in the fust room to the right on the landin’, and if you”—addressing Mr. Bunce—“will go up with him, and arrange ’baout the services, so’s to come daown together—it’ll look pootier than to straggle in by yourselves,—’n’ you, Milton, ain’t you got somethin’ besides overalls to put on?”

Thus the autocrat cleared the living room. Then, going around through the front hall, he entered the parlor to receive, with solemn dignity and a fine eye to their relative social merit, the first comers.

These were almost exclusively women, dressed in Sunday garb. As each buggy or democrat wagon drove up inside the gate, and discharged its burden, the men would lead the horses further on, to be hitched under or near the shed, and then saunter around to the kitchen side of the house, where cider was on tap, and other men were standing in the sunshine, chewing tobacco and conversing in low tones, while the women from each conveyance went straight to the front door, and got seats in the parlor as close to the coffin as possible. The separation of the sexes could hardly have been more rigorous in a synagogue. There were, indeed two or three meek, well-brushed men among the women, sitting, uncomfortable but resigned, in the geranium-scented gloom of the curtained parlor, but, as the more virile brethren outside would have said, they were men who didn’t count.

The task of the undertaker was neither light nor altogether smooth. There were some dozen chairs reserved, nearest the pall, for the mourners, the clergymen and the mixed quartette expected from Thessaly. Every woman on entering made for these chairs, and the more unimportant and “low-down” she was in the rural scale of social values, the more confidently she essayed to get one of them. With all of these more or less argument was necessary—conducted in a buzzing whisper from which some squeak or guttural exclamation would now and again emerge. With some, the undertaker was compelled to be quite peremptory; while one woman—Susan Jane Squires, a slatternly, weak-eyed creature who presumed upon her position as sister-in-law of Milton, the hired man—had actually to be pushed away by sheer force.

Then there was the further labor of inducing all these disappointed ones to take the seats furthest back, so that late comers might not have to push by and over them, but efforts in this direction were only fitful at the best, and soon were practically abandoned.

“Fust come, fust sarved!” said old Mrs. Wimple. “I’m jes ez good ez them that’ll come bimeby, ’n’ ef I don’ mind their climbin’ over me, you needn’t!” and against this the undertaker could urge nothing satisfactory.

In the intervals of that functionary’s activity, conversation was quite general, carried on in whispers which, in the aggregate, sounded like the rustle of a smart breeze through the dry leaves of a beach tree. Many women were there who had never been in the house before—could indeed, have had no other chance of getting in. These had some fleeting interest in the funeral appointments, and the expense incident thereto, but their chief concern was the furnishing of the house. They furtively scraped the carpet with their feet to test its quality, they felt of the furniture to see if it had been re-varnished, they estimated the value of the curtains, speculated on the cost of the melodeon and its age, wondered when the ceiling had last been whitewashed. Some, who knew the family better, discussed the lamentable decline of the Fairchilds in substance and standing within their recollection, and exchanged hints about the endemic mortgage stretching its sinister hand even to the very chairs they were sitting on. Others, still more intimate, rehearsed the details of the last and fatal illness, commented on the character of individuals in the family, and guessed how long old Lemuel would last, now that Cicely was gone.

In the centre of these circling waves of gossip lay the embodiment of the eternal silence. Listening, one might fain envy such an end to that living death of mental starvation which was the lot of all there, and which forced them, out of their womanhood, to chatter in the presence of death.

The singers came. They were from the village, belonging to the Congregational church there, and it was understood that they came out of liking for John Fairchild. None of the gathering knew them personally, but it was said that the contralto—the woman with the bird on her bonnet, who took her seat at the melodeon—had had trouble with her husband. A fresh buzz of whispering ran round. Some stray word must have reached the contralto, for she colored and pretended to study the music before her intently, and, later, when “Pleyel’s Hymn” was being sung, she played so nervously that there was an utter collapse in the sharps and flats of the third line, which nearly threw the singers out.

The undertaker now stalked in, and stood on tiptoe to see if the back room was also filled. He had been out with the men at the kitchen door, fixing crape on the arms of six of the best dressed and most respectable looking farmers in an almost jocular mood, and drilling them affably in their duties; drinking cider, exchanging gossip with one or two acquaintances, and conducting himself generally like an ordinary mortal. He had now resumed his dictatorship.

Most of the men had followed him around to the front of the house, and clustered now in the hall, or in a group about the outer door, holding their hats on a level with their shoulders.

A rustle on the stairs told that the mourners were descending. Then came the strains of the melodeon, and the singing, very low, solemn and sweet.

A little pause, and the full voice of the Baptist preacher was heard in prayer—then in some eulogistic remarks. What he said was largely nonsense, from any point of view, but the voice was that of the born exhorter, deep, clear-toned, melodious; there seemed to be a stop in it, as in an organ, which at pathetic parts gave forth a tremulous, weeping sound, and when this came not a dry eye could be found. He was over-fond of using this effect, as are most men possessing the trick, but no one noticed it, not even Isabel, who from sitting sternly intolerant of the whispering women around her, and indignant at Mr. Bunce for his dinner performance, found herself sobbing with all the rest when the tremulo stop was touched.

There was more singing, this time fine, simple old “St. Denis” and then the bearers were summoned in.

The men asked one another in murmurs outside if the Episcopal clargyman was to take no part in the services. Within, Mrs. Wimple went straighter to the point. She plucked him by the sleeve of his robe and leaning over with some difficulty, for she was a corpulent body, whispered to the hearing of a score of her neighbours:

“What air you here fer, mister, if you ain’t goin’ to say nor dew nothin’?”

“I officiate at the grave,” he had said, and then regretted all the remainder of the day having answered her at all.

On the return of the procession from the little knoll where the slate and marble tomb-stones of long dead Fairchilds bent over the new brown mound, Annie and Seth walked together. There was silence between them for a time, which he broke suddenly.

“It’s all very hard, Annie, for you know how much mother and I loved each other. But, truly, the hardest thing of all is to think of staying here among these narrow dolts. While she was here I could stand it. But I can’t any more.”

Annie said nothing. She felt his arm trembling against hers, and his voice was strained and excited. What could she say?

“They’re not like me,” he went on; “I have nothing in common with them. I hate the sight of the whole of them. I never realised till to-day how big a gulf there was between them and me. Didn’t you see it—what a mean, narrow-contracted lot they all were?”

“Who do you mean, Seth?”

“Why all of them. The Burrells, the Wimples, old Elhanan Pratt, old Lyman Tenney, that fellow Bunce—the whole lot of them. And the women too! Did you watch them—or, what’s worse, did you hear them? I wonder you can bear them yourself, Annie, any more than I can.”

“Sometimes it is hard, Seth, I admit; when I first came back to grandma from school it was awfully hard. But then I’ve got to live here, and reconcile myself to what the place offers,—and, after all, Seth, they are well-meaning people, and some of them are smart, too, in their way.”

“Oh, well-meaning—in their way,—yes! But I haven’t got to live here, Annie, and I haven’t got to reconcile myself, and I won’t That’s the long and short of it. I can make my living elsewhere—perhaps more than my living—and be among people who don’t make me angry every time I set eyes on them. And I can find friends, too, who feel as I do, and look at things as I do, instead of these country louts who only know abominable stories, and these foolish girls—who—who—”

“Nobody can blame you to-day, Seth, for feeling blue and sore, but you ought not to talk so, even now. They’re not all like what you say. Reuben Tracy, now, he’s been a good friend and a useful friend to you.”

“Yes, Rube’s a grand, good fellow, of course. I know all that. But then just take his case. He’s a poor schoolmaster now, just as he was five years ago, and will be twenty years from now. What kind of a life is that for a man?”

“And maybe the girls are—foolish, as you started to say, but—”

“Now, Annie, don’t think I m’eant anything by that, please! I know you’re the dearest girl and the best friend in the world. Truly, now, you won’t think I meant anything, will you?”

“No, Seth, I won’t” said Annie softly. It was her arm that trembled now.

CHAPTER VI.—IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY.

MISS Sabrina sat by her accustomed window an hour after the return from the grave, waiting for Albert. The mourning dress, borrowed for the occasion from a neighbor, was cut in so modern a fashion, contrasted with the venerable maiden’s habitual garments, that it gave her spare figure almost a fantastic air. The bonnet, with its yard of dense, coarse ribbed crape, lay on the table at her elbow, beside her spectacles and the unnoticed Bible. Miss Sabrina was ostensibly looking out of the window, but she really saw nothing. She was thinking very steadily about the coming interview with her nephew, and what she would say to him, and wondering, desponding, hoping about his answers.

The door opened, and Albert entered. “You wanted to see me, Aunt, so Annie said,” he remarked! gravely, in a subdued tone.

She motioned him to a chair and answered, in a solemn voice curiously like his own: “Yes, there’s some things I want to say to you, all by yourself.”

They sat for some moments in silence, the lawyer watching his aunt with amiable forbearance, as if conscious that his time was being wasted, and she, poor woman, groping in a novel mental fog for some suitable phrases with which to present her views. Under Albert’s calm, uninspiring gaze those views seemed to lose form, and diminish in intelligence as much as in distinctness. It had all been so clear to her mind—and now she suddenly found it fading off into a misty jumble of speculations, mere castles in the air. She had expected to present an unanswerable case lucidly and forcibly to her lawyer nephew; instead, it seemed increasingly probable that he would scout the thing as ridiculous—and, what was worse, be justified in so doing. So it was that she finally made her beginning doubtingly, almost dolefully:

“Of course I dunno haow you feel abaout it, Albert, but I can’t help thinking something ought to be settled abaout th’ farm, while yer here.”

“Settled? How settled?’’ asked Albert. There was a dry, dispassionate fibre in his voice which further chilled her enthusiasm.

“Why—well—you knaow—what I mean, Albert,” she said, almost pathetically. It was so hard to know just how to say things to Albert.

“On the contrary, I don’t in the least know what you mean. What do you want settled about the farm? What is there to settle about it?”

“Oh, nothin’, ef yeh don’t choose to understand” said Miss Sabrina.

Another period of silence ensued. Albert made a movement as if to rise, and said:

“If there is’nt anything more, I think I’ll go down again.”

There was an artificial nicety of enunciation about this speech, which grated on the old lady’s nerves. She squared her shoulders and turned upon her nephew.

“Naow what’s the use of bein’ mean, Albert? Yeh dew knaow what I’m thinking of, jis’ ez well ez I dew! Yeh unly want to make it ez hard fer me to tell yeh as yeh possibly kin. I s’pose thet’s the lawyer of it!”

Albert smiled with all his face but the eyes, and slightly lifting his hands from his fat knees, turned them palms up, in mute deprecation of his aunt’s unreasonableness. The gesture was as near the shoulder-shrug as the self-contained lawyer ever permitted himself to go. It was a trifle, but it angered the old maid enough to remove the last vestige of hesitation from her tongue:

“Well, ef yeh don’t knaow what I mean, then I’ll tell yeh! I mean that ef th’ Fairchilds are goin’ to be a Dearborn caounty fam’ly, ’n’ hole their heads up amongst folks, ther’s got to be a change o’ some sort right away. Your father’s let everything slide year after year, till there’s pesky little lef’ naow to slide on. He’s behine hand agin in money matters, even with th’ Pratt mortgage on top of t’others. What’s wuss, it’s in everybody’s maouth. They’ve left him off th’ board at th’ cheese-factory this year, even; of course they say, it’s cuz he never ’tended th’ meetin’s—but I knaow better! It’s jis cuz Lemuel Fairchild’s goin’ deown hill, ’n’ the farm’s goin’ to rack ’n’ ruin, ’n’ ev’rybuddy knaows it. Jis’ think of it? Why, ’twas th’ Fairchilds made that cheese-factory, ’n’ it’s allus gone by aour name, ’n’ we used to sen’ th’ milk of a hundred ’n’ thirty caows there—almost as much as all th’ rest of ’em put togither—’n’ ez I said to Leander Crump, when he was squirmin’ raound tryin’ to make me b’lieve they didn’t mean nothin’ by droppin’ Lemuel aout o’ th’ board, says I—‘nobuddy ever ’spected a table spoonful o’ water in aour milk!’—’n’ he colored up, I tell yeh!”

“No doubt” said Albert, impassively.

Miss Sabrina paused to mentally retrace her argument, and see if this remark had any special bearing. She could discover none, and grew a little angrier.

“Well, then, th’ question’s right here. My father, your grand father, made a name fer hisself, and a place for his fam’ly, here in Dearborn caounty, second to nobuddy. Fer years ’n’ years I kin remember thet th’ one question people ast, when it was proposed to dew anything, was ‘what does Seth Fairchild think ’baout it?’ He went to th’ Senate twice; he could ’a gone to Congress from this dees-trick time ’n’ time agin, if he’d be’n a mine to. Ev’rybuddy looked up to him. When he died, all of a suddent, he lef’ Lemuel th’ bes’ farm, th’ bes’ stock, th’ bes’ farm haouse, fer miles raound. Well, thet’s forty year ago. I’ve lived here threw it all. I’ve swallered my pride every day in th’ week, all thet time. I’ve tried to learn myself a humble spirit—but I’ve hed to see this place, and the fam’ly, going daown, daown, daown!”

There were tears in the old maid’s eyes now, as she spoke, tears of mortification and revolt against her helplessness, for she seemed to read the failure of her appeal in the placid face of her nephew, with its only decent pretence of interest. She went on, with a rising voice:

“You knaow a little of haow things hev’ gone, though you’ve allus took precious good pains to knaow ez little ez yeh could. You knaow that when you were a boy you were a rich man’s son, with yer pony, ’n’ yer dancin’ lessons, ’n’ yer college eddica-tion; ’n’ yer mother dressed well, ’n’ had a kerridge, ’n’ visited with th’ bes’ people of Albany, people who were my friends tew when I used to go to Albany with yer grandfather. ’N’ what hev we come to? Yer mother slaved her life aout, lost all her ambition, lost all her pride, saw things goin’ to th’ dogs and didn’t knaow haow to stop ’em—sakes forbid thet I should say anything agin Sissly; she did all she could; p’raps ’twould ’ev gone different if she’d be’n a different kine o’ woman, p’raps not; there’s no use talkin’ ’baout thet. ’N’ ef I’d hed my say, tew, maybe things’d be’n different; but its ez it is, ’n’ it’s no use cryin’ over spilt milk.

“Father never meant to be hard with me. When he lef’ me nothin’ but a living aout o’ th’ farm, he expected, everybuddy expected, my Aunt Sabrina’d leave me a clean sixty thaousand dollars when she died. She was an ole woman, ’n’ a widow, ’n’ she hed no childern. She’d allus promised my father thet if I was named after her—confaound her name!—I shaould be her heir. ’N’ then, Iess’n a year after his death, what does the old huzzy up ’n’ do but marry some fortune hunter young enough to be her son, ’n’ give him every cent she hed in the world. He led her a fine dance of it, tew, ’n’ serve her right! But there I was, lef ’thaout a thing ’cep a roof over my head.

“’N’ then Lemuel, nothin’ ud do but he must go to Californy when the gold cry riz, ’n’ no sooner’d he git there than he was homesick ’n’ hed to come back; ’n’ when he got back, ’n’ begun to hear what fortunes them who’d gone aout with him were a making, than he must start aout again. But where it’d be’n wilderness a few months b’fore, he faound cities naow, ’n’ ev’ry chance took up; then he got robbed o’ all his money, ’n’ hed to borrer, ’n’ then he took chills ’n’ fever off th’ isthmus, n’ hed to lay in quarantine fer weeks, on ’caount o’ th’ yellah fever; it’d be’n a poor year on the farm, ’n’ when he got back, it took ev’ry cent of his ready-money to set himself right.

“From thet day to this, his Californy luck hez stuck to him like death to a nigger, tell here, to-day, the Fitches don’t think it wuth while to come to your poor mother’s fun’ral—I kin remember Lije Fitch when he was glad enough to beg beans o’ my father fer seed—’n’ I’m wearing borrered mournin’ of Sarah Andrewses, a mile tew big for me!”

“It seems to me I’ve been told all this a good many times, Aunt Sabrina,” said Albert, as his aunt stopped and glared at him trembling with the excitement of her peroration. “There’s nothing very-pleasant in it, for either of us, to listen to or talk about; but I don’t see that there’s anything more than I’ve heard over and over again, except about your having on another woman’s dress, and I don’t assume that I am expected to interfere about that!”

Poor Miss Sabrina was too deeply moved, and too much in earnest, to note the sarcastic levity underlying the lawyer’s conclusion. She caught only the general sense of a negative response, and looked at her nephew steadily with a gaze half-indignant, half appealing.

“Then you won’t dew anything, ay?” she asked at last.

“Oh, I am very far from saying that. That’s another thing. You send for me, saying that you have an important communication to make to me—at least, I assume that it is important, from the circumstances surrounding the request. I come, and you first insist that I know as well as you do what you mean, and then, when I demur, you rehearse all the unfortunate details of my father’s failure in life. I suggest that these are already tolerably familiar to me, and this mild statement you construe as a definite refusal on my part to do something—what, I don’t know.”

“I declare, Albert, you better send in a bill fer givin’ me this consultation. I never knew a son who could take his father’s ruin ’n’ his fam’ly’s disgrace so cool, before. I s’pose that’s th’ lawyer of it, tew!”

“Perhaps it’s an advantage that some one of the family should keep cool, Aunt, and look at things one by one, in their true relation. Now, if you have any proposition to make to me, any plan to present for my consideration, I should like to hear it—because really this other style of conversation is profitless beyond description. In a word, what do you want me to do?”

“What do I want yeh to do?” The old maid leaned forward and put a thin, mitted hand on Albert’s knee, looking eagerly into his face, and speaking almost shrilly. “I want yeh to take this farm, to come here to live, to make it a rich gentleman’s home agin! to put the Fairchilds up once more where my father left ’em.”

“Yes?” was the provokingly unenthusiastic response.

Miss Sabrina felt that she had failed. She put her spectacles on, and took the Bible into her lap, as if to say that she washed her hands of all mundane matters. But it did not suit Albert to regard the interview as closed.

“There is one thing you don’t seem to see at all, Aunt,” he said. “That is, that Dearborn County is relatively not altogether the most important section of the Republic, and that it is quite possible for a man to win public recognition or attain professional distinction in other communities which might reconcile him to a loss of prestige here. It may sound like heresy to you, but I am free to admit that the good opinion of the business men of New York City, where I am regarded as a successful sort of man, seems to me to outweigh all possible questions as to how I am regarded by Elhanan Pratt and Le-ander Crump and—and that Baptist gentleman, for instance, whom you had here to-day. The world has grown so large, my dear aunt, since your day, that there are thousands upon thousands of Americans now who go all their lives without ever once thinking about Dearborn County’s opinion. Of course I can understand how deeply you must feel what you regard as a social decline in the eyes of your neighbours. But truly, it does not specially affect me. They are not my neighbours; if I seem to them to be of less importance than I was in my boyhood, when I had a pony, I can’t help it, and I am sure I don’t want to. Frankly, to use my mother’s old phrase, I don’t care a cotton hat for their opinion good, bad, or indifferent. It is this, I think, which you leave out of your calculation.”

Miss Sabrina had listened, with the Book opened only by a finger’s width. The elaborate irony of her nephew’s words had escaped her, but she saw a gleam of hope in his willingness to discuss the matter at all.

“But then this is the home o’ the Fairchilds; the fam’ly belongs to Dearborn Caounty; father was allus spoken of ez Seth Fairchild o’ Dearborn, jis’ as much ez—ez Silas Wright o’ Dutchess.”

“Of course that last is a powerful argument,” said Albert with a furtive smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “But, after all, the county family idea doesn’t seem to attract me much. Why, aunt, do you know that your grandfather Roger was a journeyman shoemaker, who walked all the way here from Providence. There was nothing incongruous in his son becoming a Senator. Very well; if you have a state of society where sudden elevations of this sort occur, there will inevitably be corresponding descents—just as lean streaks alternate with fat in the bacon of commerce. The Fairchilds went up—they, come down. They have exhausted the soil. Do you see?”

“Nao! I don’t see a bit! ’N’ I b’lieve at heart you’re jis’ ez praoud ez I be!”

“Proud? Yes! Proud of myself, proud of my practice, proud of my position. But proud because three or four hundred dull countrymen, seeing my cows sleek, my harness glossy, my farm well in order, and knowing that my grandfather had been a State Senator, would consider me a ‘likely ’ man—no, not at all.”

Albert rose at this to go, and added, as he turned the door-knob:

“As soon as he’s equal to it, Aunt Sabrina, I’ll get father to go over his affairs with me, and I’ll try and straighten them out a trifle. I dare say we can find some way out of the muddle.”

“But yeh won’t take up the thing yerself? Yeh won’t dew what I wanted yeh tew?”

The lawyer smiled, and said: “What really? Come here and be a farmer?”

Miss Sabrina had risen, too, and came toward her nephew. “No” she said, “not a farmer. Be a country gentleman, ’n’—’n’—a Congressman!” Albert smiled again, and left the room. He smiled to himself going down the stairs, and narrowly escaped forgetting to change his expression of countenance when he entered the living room, where were sitting people who had not entirely forgotten the fact that it was a house of mourning.

For Albert had a highly interesting idea in his mind, both interesting and diverting. Curiously enough, he had begun developing it from the moment when his aunt first disclosed her ambition for him. At the last moment, in a blind way she had suggested the first political office that entered her mind as an added bribe. She could not know that her astute nephew had, from the first suggestion of her plan, been trying to remember whether it was Jay and Adams Counties, or Jay and Morgan, that were associated with Dearborn in the Congressional district; or that, when she finally in despair said “Be a country gentleman and a Congressman,” his brain had already turned over a dozen projects in as many seconds, every one Congressional.

CHAPTER VII.—THE THREE BROTHERS.

After the early supper of stale bread, saltless butter, dark dried apple sauce, and chippy cake had been disposed of, Lemuel returned to his rocking chair by the stove, Aunt Sabrina and Isabel took seats, each at a window, and read by the fading light, and Albert put on his hat, lighted a cigar, and went out. His brother John stood smoking a pipe in the yard, leaning against the high well-curb, his hands deep in his pantaloons pocket, and his feet planted far to the front and wide apart. Seth was coming from the barns toward the well, with a bucket in his hand. Albert walked across to the curb, and the three brothers were alone together for the first time in years.

“It does one good to be out of doors such an evening as this,” said Albert. “It seems to me it would be better if father would get out in the open air more, instead of sitting cooped up over that stove all the while.”

“When a man’s been out in the open air, rain or shine, snow or blow, for fifty years, he ought to have earned the right to stay inside, if he wants to. | That’s about the only reward there is at the end of a farmer’s life,” answered Seth, turning the calfbucket upside down beside John, and sitting on it. Seth had his old clothes on once more, and perhaps there was some consciousness of the contrast between his apparel and that of his black-clad brethren in the truculent tone of his reply.

John had nodded at Albert on his approach, and thrust his feet a trifle further forward. He still stood silent, looking meditatively at the row of poplars on the other side of the road through rings of pipe smoke.

“So you don’t think much of farm work, eh?” said Albert.

“Who does?” replied Seth, sententiously.

A considerable period of silence ensued. Albert had never had a very high idea of his younger brothers’ conversational qualities, and had rarely known how to talk easily with them, but to-night it seemed a greater task than ever. He offered them cigars, in a propitiatory way. Seth accepted and lit one; John said “Thanks, I prefer a pipe,” and silence reigned again.

It was twilight now, and in the gathering dusk there was no sign of motion about, nor any sound save the tinkle of a sheep-bell in the pasture opposite.

John’s pipe burned out, and Albert pressed a cigar upon him again.

“I want you to try them,” he said, almost pleadingly, “I’m sure you’ll like them. They are a special brand the steward at the Union League gets for me.”

This time John consented, and he seemed to feel that the act involved a responsibility to talk, for he said, with an effort at amiability as he struck a match:

“Your wife seems to be looking very well.”

“Yes, Isabel’s health is perfect, and it always benefits her to get out in the country. That’s a kind of Irishism isn’t it? I mean it makes her good health more obvious.”

“Good health is a great thing,” John answered.

The conversation was running emptings again, almost at the start. Albert made a heroic effort to strengthen it.

“Well, this is a regular quakers’ meeting,” he said, briskly. “We see each other so seldom, we are almost strangers when we do meet. I want to be frank with you, come now, and you should be frank with me. You have something on your minds, I can see. Isn’t it something I ought to know?”

Seth spoke again: “Perhaps on the evening of one’s mother’s funeral it isn’t to be expected that even brothers should feel chatty.”

The village journalist felt the injustice of this comment from the youngster.

“No, Seth,” he said, “Don’t snap Albert up in that fashion. I dare say he feels the thing, in his own way, as much as the rest of us. You are right, Albert; there is something, and I’ll tell you plainly what it is. Do you see those poplars over there? In the morning their shadows Come almost to our front door. Father planted them with his own hands. When I was a boy, I used to play over there, and climb up on to the bolls, and pretend I was to build houses there, like in Swiss Family Robinson. Well, that land passed out of our hands so long ago—it’s been an old story for years. Do you see the roof of the red school-house over back of the hill?” turning toward the South. “Or no, the light is too poor now, but you know where it is. When I used to cut ’cross lots to school there, I went the whole way over father’s land. Now, if I wanted to go there, how many people would I trespass on, Seth?”

Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York

SETH’S BROTHER’S WIFE

A Study Of Life In The Greater New York

By Harold Frederic

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

1887

TO

MY MOTHER