CHAPTER XXII.THE NEWS AT SCHUYLER HILL.
It came to them one sultry August morning, when the thermometer was 90 degrees in the shade, and the air was like a furnace even before nine o’clock. Breakfast was very late that morning, and Mrs. Tiffe was furious. She had committed the extravagance of broiled chicken and muffins, which of course were spoiled, and she had herself been up since four o’clock and was in a melting condition, in spite of the thinnest muslin she could find and the coolestgarments she could wear. Miss Rossiter had not slept well, and, as was her custom after a restless night, she loitered in bed, and dawdled over her toilet and bath, and took so much time in dressing, that the clock was striking nine when she at last entered the dining-room, followed by the three girls and their governess, all panting and inveighing against the weather, except Emma. She liked it. Naturally chilly and cold, the heat suited her, and her face alone was pleasant and contented as she took her seat at the table and attacked the cold chicken and half-warm, heavy muffins, which her dyspeptic aunt could not eat.
“Bring me a slice of dry toast,” Miss Rossiter said to Martha, the waitress, who, on returning with the toast, brought two letters for Miss Julia, bearing foreign post-marks.
“From father and Godfrey,” Julia said. “Excuse me, please, while I read them.”
Leaning back in her chair she broke the seal of her father’s first and read a few lines, then with a start which nearly upset her cup of chocolate, she exclaimed:
“Oh, horrible, girls! Aunt Christine, listen,—father——”
“Martha, you can go, now,” she said suddenly, remembering the girl, who departed to the kitchen, where the news was already known, and where the servants stood open-mouthed around Perry, who was reading the letter his master had sent to him.
“What is it, Julia?” Miss Rossiter asked, when Martha was gone, and Julia, whose eyes had run at lightning speed over the contents of the letter, replied:
“Father is going to be married to a Miss Edith Lyle, Aunt Sinclair’s hired companion. You remember he mentioned her once before as living at Oakwood. Hear what he says of her: ‘She is a lady of good family, the daughter of a clergyman, the friend and companion of my deceased sister, your late Aunt Sinclair. She possesses many accomplishments, and is what I consider a very remarkable personage.’ (How like father that sounds!) ‘And I expect that all due deference will be paid to her byevery member of my household.’ (He has underscoredthat.) ‘Please break the news to your Aunt Christine, and tell Mrs. Tiffe to see that all the rooms in the south wing are made ready for Mrs. Schuyler. I have written to Perry about refurnishing them, but Tiffe must superintend it a little——’
“Oh, dreadful, I believe I am going to faint,—my hartshorn, Emma, please,” Miss Rossiter gasped.
The hartshorn was found, and two palm-leaf fans were brought into requisition, and then Miss Rossiter spoke again, this time hysterically and in tears.
“My poor sister, to be so insulted! A hired companion! and she was a Rossiter! Oh, I cannot bear it, my poor disgraced nieces, my heart is breaking for you.”
“But, Aunt Christine, he says she is a lady, the daughter of a clergyman,” Emma said, soothingly,—hers the only voice raised in defence of the intruder,—the interloper,—the adventuress,—as Miss Rossiter termed the expected bride.
Emma’s heart had throbbed painfully at the thought of a new mother, but it was natural for her to defend whatever she believed abused, and she spoke up for the unknown Edith, until Julia, who had been reading Godfrey’s letter, uttered a cry of bitter anger and scorn, and said, sternly:
“Hush, Em, you don’t know what you are talking about; a lady, indeed, and the daughter of a clergyman! A woman of forty, with a limp, and glass eye, and cracked voice, is a nice mother to bring us!”
“A wha-at?” Miss Rossiter gasped, while Alice and Emma both exclaimed simultaneously: “A limp and a glass eye! What do you mean? Let me see;” and looking over Julia’s shoulder Alice read aloud what Godfrey had written.
Godfrey had said, “The sight of her will take your breath away,” and in fact the very thought of her did that, and for full a minute after the letter was read there was not a sound heard in the room where the indignant and confounded ladies sat, each staring blankly at the other, and neither able to speak or move. Miss Rossiter was the first to stir, and with a moaning cry, “I cannot bear it,” she went into violent hysterics, andMartha was called in, and the poor lady was taken to her room, where she tried, one after another, every bottle of medicine in her closet, but to no effect; even the Crown Bitters failed, and she sank upon the bed, shivering with cold, and asking for shawls and blankets on that August day, with a temperature of ninety degrees in the shade.
Perhaps Miss Rossiter herself had not been aware how much Colonel Howard was to her, or how hard it would be to see another woman there in her sister’s place. She had too much sense to believe she would ever fill it, yet the first smart had been that of disappointment and a sense of wrong to herself, while the second was a keen pang of mortification and anger, that if he must choose another he had chosen that caricature on womanhood described so graphically by Godfrey. It is true she did not quite believe him literally. Neither did his sisters, who sat in the library with white faces and tearful eyes. Julia was wrathful and defiant, and was already in a state of fierce rebellion against the woman of forty with the crack in her voice. So much she believed, but the limp and glass eye were too thoroughly Godfrey’s to be trusted.
“Probably the woman is lame and wears glasses,” she said, when she could trust herself to speak at all, “and perhaps she squints, but I have no faith in the glass eye. Godfrey made that up. Father is not the man to marry such a monster, and then expect us to pay all due deference to her. The idea of my deferring to such a woman. I hate her. I’ll poison her, the wretch!”
Julia Schuyler was terrible in her wrath, and with that expression in her flashing eyes and about the white quivering lips, she looked equal to anything, and Edith might well have trembled could she have seen the dark-faced girl, who, with clenched fists, threatened to poison her. Julia would not of course acknowledge that she really had murder in her heart, but she felt outraged, and insulted, and disgraced, and as if she must do something to avert the horrible evil threatening them all. But what could she do? To oppose her will to her father’s was like trying to move a mountain of stone with her puny strength. The mountainwould not be hurt, and only she would suffer from the attempt.
There was no help, no hope, and when her anger had spent itself she burst into tears and sobbed passionately, just as Emma had done from the first, but with this difference, she cried from wrath and indignant mortification, while Emma’s tears were more for the dead mother whose place was to be filled, and whose death it seemed to her now had only been yesterday.
The governess, who knew that remark of any kind from herself would be resented as impertinent, wisely said nothing, while Alice, too, was silent, except as she occasionally said to Julia, “It is too bad, and I am sorry for you; sorry for us all.”
Looking upon Godfrey as her own especial property, Alice felt that whatever affected the Schuylers affected her, and she was sorry accordingly for this thing about to happen, but it did not hurt her as it did Julia and Emma, who must call the strange woman mother, and who wept on until Miss Rossiter sent for them to come to her room together with Miss Creighton. She had taken some brandy, and felt better, though her heart was aching still with a dreary sense of loss, and disappointment, and disgrace, if half Godfrey had written was true, and half was all that any stretch of her imagination would allow her to believe, and when the young girls entered the room she said to them:
“I have sent for you to talk over this dreadful thing, and to say that I do not credit all Godfrey’s story. He is a sad boy to exaggerate, you know. Still, let the woman be what she may, we do not want her here where we have been so happy.”
Miss Rossiter’s voice faltered a little, but soon recovering herself, she continued:
“No, we do not want her here; and I for one declare war,—war to the knife!”
She spoke bitterly now, and her black eyes flashed with contemptuous scorn.
“But Aunt Christine,” Emma said, “it is father’s house, and he will not let you treat her badly.”
“Nor shall I,” Miss Rossiter said, loftily; “I shall let her alone severely, and leave as soon as possible after her arrival.Nor shall I leave my sister’s daughters with the adventuress. I’ve been thinking it over, and have concluded to rent or buy a place in New York, and set up housekeeping for myself, in which case you will go with me, and leave your father to enjoy life with his low-born bride.”
“Father wrote she was a lady, and Godfrey says we shall like her,” Emma quickly interposed, feeling that for herself she preferred staying with the “adventuress” to living with Aunt Christine.
Julia, on the contrary, was caught with the house in New York. The city was far more to her taste than the dull country, and, with a withering glance at her sister, she said:
“I’m ashamed of you, Em, that you cannot appreciate auntie’s offer, but speak, instead, for that woman. I, for one, am greatly obliged to auntie, and shall go with her to New York?”
“And I, too, if she will have me. I’d rather live anywhere than at Uncle Calvert’s,” Alice said; “and I hope the house will be near the Park. Won’t it be nice, though?”
“Yes, I mean to have it nice,” Miss Rossiter said, warming into something like enthusiasm as she thought of a home of her own. “I shall furnish it elegantly, and have a reception every week, with littlerecherchédinner parties for our circle.”
Julia began to be interested, and hoped she should see a little society before she was quite forty, while Alice resolved to be married from that house near the Park, instead of “Uncle Calvert’s poky little bandbox down on Washington Square.”
And while the three ladies planned and talked of the new house in the city, each was conscious of a pang as she thought of leaving the delightful place, where was so much of comfort and luxury, with no shadow of care or trouble. And of the three, Miss Rossiter felt it the most keenly. Naturally indolent and fond of her ease, she had enjoyed her sister’s house, and hated much to leave it, but the fiat had gone forth.
There was to be a new mistress at Schuyler Hill, whose name was not Rossiter, and she must go. She settled that point atonce, and then said to the young girls by way of caution, for pride in her brother-in-law was still strong within her:
“I think it will be better not to mention Godfrey’s letter,—that is, not to speak of the woman’s personal appearance, which may not be so bad as we fear. Let her show for herself what she is. We must tell, of course, of the expected marriage, but we need say nothing further.”
In this reasonable advice all three of the girls concurred, and yet through some agency it was soon rumored all over Hampstead that the new lady of Schuyler Hill wasdeformed, and homely and poor, and the hired companion of the late Mrs. Sinclair, and that Miss Rossiter had declared war to the knife, while Julia talked of poison, and Emma cried day and night and would not be comforted. Who told all this, nobody knew. Possibly it was the governess, and possibly Mrs. Tiffe, who bristled all over those days with importance and secret exultation over her routed and discomfited foe, poor Miss Rossiter. Mrs. Tiffe had had her letter from Col. Schuyler, and Perry, her son, had his also, in which were numerous instructions with regard to the refurnishing of the rooms in the south wing. “All the rooms,” the colonel had said, and he was minute in his directions with regard to the corner room with the bay-window overlooking the river and the mountains beyond. This was to be Mrs. Schuyler’s boudoir, or private sitting-room, and was to be fitted up in drab and pale rose pink, while the sleeping-room, which was separated from it by bath-room and dressing-closet, was to be furnished with blue, and the little room beyond, where the colonel kept his books and private papers, was to be green and oak.
“Let everything be new and in the latest style,” the colonel wrote to Perry. “You can get men up from New York who will know just what is needful, while the ladies and your mother will give you the benefit of their advice and good taste, so I shall expect to find everything perfect when I come.”
To Mrs. Tiffe the colonel wrote, saying that from past experience he knew he could rely upon her, and hoped she would give the matter her own personal supervision, in which case itwould be right. Thus flattered and trusted and deferred to, Mrs. Tiffe espoused the cause of the new wife, and hurrahed for the coming change of government at Schuyler Hill. Anything was preferable to Miss Rossiter, and Mrs. Tiffe cared little whether Edith walked with two crutches or one, provided she freed her from the enemy.
“My son will obey orders to the letter,” she said, crisply, when Julia asked what Perry meant to do. “If the colonel says the south wing must be cleared and refurnished, it will be, and Miss Rossiter may as well vacate to-day as to-morrow. There’s no time to be lost in dawdling.”
Now, the corner room, with the wide bay-window, was the room of all others which Miss Rossiter preferred, and she had appropriated it to herself and held possession of it in spite of Mrs. Tiffe’s broad hints that there were other apartments in the house besides the “very best chamber.” But she must give it up now, and with many a sigh of regret she saw Kitty gather up her bottles of medicine, her boxes of pills, her wine and her brandy, and galvanic battery, and bear them to another closet on the opposite side of the house, away from the river and mountains, where her only view was the little town, which she detested, and the hill rising darkly behind it. It was hard, and Miss Rossiter felt very much injured and aggrieved, and cried softly to herself, and thought very bitter things of that woman who had brought her to this strait, and for whom the house was being turned upside down.
Mrs. Tiffe was already at work with her maids in the south wing taking up carpets, removing furniture, washing windows, and in the room just vacated by Miss Rossiter burning coffee, and sugar, and paper by way of removing the smell of drugs with which the apartment was permeated. But do what she would the faint odor of valerian was still perceptible, making the good woman “sick as a dog,” as she expressed it, and bringing into requisition as a last experiment burnt feathers, which, combined with the valerian, made the atmosphere of the place unbearable.
“Paint will do it and nothing else,” was Mrs. Tiffe’s finalverdict, as she retreated to the open window and leaned out for a breath of pure air.
Not the slightest interest did either of the ladies show in the changes being made, but Mrs. Tiffe and her son felt themselves equal to the task until it came to selecting carpets, and furniture and curtains in New York. Then Perry said some one ought to go with him and not let him take the entire responsibility.
But neither Miss Rossiter, nor Julia, nor Alice, made any response, and the probability was that he would go alone until the morning came, when Emma appeared at breakfast in her walking-dress and announced her intention to accompany Perry.
“Somebody ought to go for father’s sake,” she said; “and if no one else will, I must. I shall stop at Uncle Calvert’s and get auntie to help me.”
To this there was no open opposition. Miss Rossiter had the toothache and could not talk, while Julia merely raised her eyebrows in token of her surprise; and Alice said:
“You are certainly very kind, Em, and forgiving, to be so much interested for that woman.”
“It isn’t for that woman; it’s for father, and because I know he wishes it,” Emma replied, as she put on her hat and shawl and started with Perry for New York.
She was gone three days, and at the end of that time four men appeared at Schuyler Hill and commenced the work of measuring, repainting and frescoing the rooms intended for the bride. Then in due time came the carpets, and the lambrequins, and the lace curtains, and the furniture, and more men to see that everything fitted and was as it should be.
“Handsome enough for the queen herself,” Mrs. Tiffe said, when all was done, and she walked complacently through the suite of rooms, sniffing occasionally as she passed the open closet, to see if there lingered yet the faintest approach to valerian or drug of any kind.
There did not. Paint and varnish had killed all that, and the air of the rooms was pure and sweet as the rooms themselveswere beautiful and attractive. I used those days to be occasionally at the great house, and, as I never presumed upon my acquaintance with the ladies, or tried to force myself upon their notice, they treated me with a good deal of kindness, and seemed to like my society. So when, one Saturday morning after the repairs were finished, I met Miss Julia in the village, and she said, in her usual half-cordial, half-indifferent tone, “What an age it is since you were to see us. Suppose you come round this afternoon, and have a game of croquet, and stay to dinner,” I accepted the invitation, and at about 4 p.m. rang the bell at Schuyler Hill.
I did not suppose I was very early, especially as we were to play croquet; but the ladies, who always slept after lunch, were not yet dressed, and so I went with Mrs. Tiffe to the kitchen, to see some jelly she had been making, and which had “come beautifully.” As I was about returning to the parlor she said to me:
“Don’t you want to see them rooms?”
I knew what she meant, and answered that I did.
Taking me first into the green room, where the oak leaves in the rich velvet carpet looked as if you might pick them up, Mrs. Tiffe opened the doors through, and asked what I thought of the effect. It was beautiful beyond anything I had dreamed. Especially was I delighted with the parlor, where the carpet was of that soft chiné pattern so tasteful and exquisite; and the furniture was delicate drab, with trimmings of pale rose pink. There were rare pictures on the wall, and curtains of finely-wrought lace before the windows, with lambrequins of rose pink satin to match the furniture, while cushions, and easy-chairs, and ottomans, and inlaid tables, which almost told their price themselves, were scattered about in such a way as to give the room an air of cosey, home-like comfort as well as elegance.
How lovely it all was, and how like a dream it seemed to be looking at it, and knowing that it was real and not a mere illusion! Then, as I remembered what I had heard of the bride’s deformity and plainness, I thought it such a pity that the occupant of these rooms should not be lovely like them, and a fitting ornament for so much grandeur.
Lady Emily, with her pale, sallow face and expressionless eyes, would have looked better there, I said, or even Miss Rossiter herself, who when dressed and feeling well was still very attractive, and when I went down stairs and found her sitting on the veranda, in her white cambric dress, with the scarlet shawl she wore so much wrapped around her, her glossy black hair becomingly arranged, with a single white flower among the heavy braids, I thought the colonel would have done far better to have taken her than the bride he had chosen.
We had a very quiet, stupid, six-hand game of croquet, and the dinner was quieter, stupider still, for all the ladies seemed preoccupied and disinclined to talk. Not a word was said of the marriage by any one until I was leaving, when Emma came up to me, and whispered softly:
“They are in New York. We had a telegram this afternoon.”
She did not say whotheywere, but I pressed her hand in token of my sympathy, for I knew thattheyhad reference to the new mistress of Schuyler Hill.