CHAPTER XVIIIGREAT-UNCLE SAMUEL
Surprising events were not over for Rose. The next morning as she was dusting the sitting-room, with a lighter heart than she had thought could ever again be hers, a carriage drew up at the small white gate, from which an old gentleman alighted and came nimbly along the narrow, flagged walk, tapping the stones smartly with his gold-headed cane.
“Is this Mrs. Blossom?” he asked in a thin, brisk voice as she answered his knock on the green-paneled door, where Rose had stood with fluttering heart so few months before. “Then I suppose you are the person who wrote concerning a young girl supposed to be the daughter of Kate Jarvis and James Shannon.”
At that moment he caught sight of Rose. “Bless my heart!” he exclaimed, stepping in. “If there isn’t the child now! Kate’s own daughter; I’d have known her anywhere.The very picture of what her mother was at her age. Bless me!” and he rubbed his thin face, flushed with the chill of the ride from Byfield and wrinkled like a withered apple, with a great white silk handkerchief.
“Turn around to the light, child,” he directed Rose, not heeding Mrs. Blossom’s invitation to lay aside his wraps. “I want to get a good look at you. Yes,” lifting her chin and moving her head from side to side, “clear Jarvis and no mistake—the color of the hair and eyes, the turn of the head and all. I’m thankful you’re no Shannon, though Jim looked well enough as far as that went.
“Dear, dear,” to Mrs. Blossom, “to think that Brother Robert’s daughter, the little Kate I have held on my knee many a time, should be grown and married and dead, and this be her child. It’s difficult, madam, to realize such changes; it makes one feel that he is growing old, upon my word it does.”
Rose, on her part, was looking at him intently. “I believe it is your picture in the locket,” and running upstairs she quickly returned with it open in her hand.
He drew out his eye-glasses. “Yes, that is my picture. Quite a good-looking fellow I was in those days. Kate was my only niece, and I gave her the locket on her eighteenth birthday. And so she always kept it, and you have it still. Well, well!”
“And had my mother an Aunt Sarah?” questioned Rose.
“Yes, her mother’s only sister, Sarah Hartly.”
“I have a Bible she gave my mother, with ‘To Kate from Aunt Sarah,’ written inside.”
“Well,” with a little chuckle, “I’m surprised to know that she ever gave anybody anything.”
“Clear Jarvis and no mistake.”—Page237.
“Clear Jarvis and no mistake.”—Page237.
“Clear Jarvis and no mistake.”—Page237.
“I haven’t thanked you yet,” and he turned again to Mrs. Blossom, “for the interest you have shown in the matter. Indeed I was so surprised when I received the letter from the minister who married Kate, who still lives in Fredonia, inclosing yours to him, and the first word concerning Kate for fifteen years, that I haven’t recovered from it yet. And now to find another Kate, as you may say; why, it makes me feel as though I hadlost my reckoning, and the world had rolled back thirty years.”
“And did you not know then that Rose’s mother was dead?”
“No. Since her foolish, runaway marriage to Jim Shannon, sixteen years ago, I had not heard a word either from or about her, till your letter, and you know how little that told. Since her mother’s death the lawyer in charge of the business has made every effort to find a trace of Kate or her heirs, but in vain. Of the events of her later life I know nothing whatever, not even when or where she died.”
“It was when I was quite a little girl,” answered Rose, “and in a city that I now think was Chicago.”
“I gather from Mrs. Blossom’s letter that your father was also dead. Is that so?”
“Yes; he died a little while after mamma.”
“A fortunate circumstance for you,” with a nod to Mrs. Blossom. “And where have you been all this time; and why if you had your mother’s marriage certificate didn’t you try to find your friends, or somebody before this try to find them for you?”
In the meantime, Mr. Samuel Jarvis, the old gentleman, as he talked, had by degrees taken off his muffler, fur-lined overcoat, fur cap and gloves, and accepted the comfortable rocker before the fire. Now in answer to his question, made though it was in a somewhat testy fashion, Rose related to him her story, recalling all the details she could remember of her mother, while Great-Uncle Samuel rubbed his eyes with his big silk handkerchief and murmured, “Poor Kate, poor Kate!”
When she came to her residence with Madam Atheldena Sharpe, his tone changed to one of horrified protest. “Kate’s baby in the hands of a travelling clairvoyant; exhibited like a Punch and Judy Show; who ever heard of such a thing!” As she told of the exposure, and her desertion by Madam Sharpe, the bitterness and misery of which she had never forgotten, he bristled with indignation. “Kate’s baby with nowhere to go and nothing to eat; alone, afraid, and hungry! Could it be possible!”
All excited as she was, and stimulated still more by his interest, Rose gave to her storya certain dramatic force. Her keen sense of the ludicrous gave some humorous touches even to her description of Mrs. Hagood. When it came to her trouble with that lady she hesitated a moment, and then gave a most dramatic account of the closing scene, as well as of her flight, her encounter with Ben Pancost, and the help he had given her.
“True Jarvis spirit!” cried Great-Uncle Samuel, rubbing his hands. “Kate’s baby climbed out of the window in the night; tramped off all alone. Just think of it! And that boy, I’d like to meet him!”
But when she came to tell of her appearance at the Blossom home, and the kindness which she had there received, he insisted on shaking hands with the whole family in turn. “Bless me,” he exclaimed, “to think you have done all this for Kate’s baby. Who ever heard anything like it?”
Her stay at the Fifields’, including as it did the accusation made against her there, was a subject so fresh and painful to Rose, and seemed to her from the fact of the suspicion to involve her in such a disgrace that when she came to it she flushed, hesitated,and Mrs. Blossom, seeing her embarrassment, came to the rescue and related the circumstances that had led to the bringing out of the locket, and the accidental discovery of the marriage certificate inside it.
To Rose’s great surprise Great-Uncle Samuel did not seem to regard the fact that she had been charged with theft as anything particularly shameful; indeed he treated it with decided indifference. “They need not have worried,” with a lofty tone, “as to her being a low-bred child, the Jarvises are as good blood as you will often find. And to think,” sadly, “that the locket I gave Kate should have served a purpose neither of us ever dreamed of.”
“And why was it you didn’t know anything about my mother?” asked Rose.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Blossom, “that is a question I was just going to ask.”
“As I said before, when she ran away with Jim Shannon she cut herself off from all her friends. Poor Kate, how much suffering she brought on herself by her wilfulness! And yet I don’t think the blame was all hers. If her father had lived I’m certainit would never have happened; but her mother was a woman who wanted to bend every one and everything to her will. And Kate was an uncommonly high-spirited girl, impulsive and a trifle headstrong, but generous, affectionate, and everybody’s favorite; a girl that it needed some tact to manage, and her mother hadn’t a particle of tact. So when Kate fell in love with Jim Shannon she made a bad matter worse instead of better. Enough was said to Kate but she wouldn’t believe a word of it. I told her myself that he drank like a fish, and she only held up her head and said that he might have been a trifle wild, as any number of other young men had been, but that he was going to be entirely different. Well, it was the old story, marry him she would and did. And when she wrote to her mother asking if she could come home, Mary sent word back that she might, but her husband could never cross her threshold. Of course that made Jim mad, and Kate wrote at once that whoever received her must receive her husband also. Her mother sent that letter back to her, and there it all ended. In less thana week they were on their way West, and Kate never wrote a word home again.
“Some of her girl friends had a few letters from her, very bright at first, and telling how happy she was in her new home, but these soon stopped. I don’t deny that I was a good deal put out with her at first, but I understood her silence only too well. If life had gone smoothly with her she would have written, but as it was, she knew that whatever she had to endure she had brought it on herself, and she would bear it alone.
“Kate’s mother was a proud woman, too. From the day Kate left she never mentioned her name, nor would she let any one mention it to her; but I believe that secretly she lived in the expectation and hope of her return. It was like her when she died, five years ago, not to leave any will, and the lawyer has advertised, and tried in every way to find some trace of Kate. And now, like the spring in the locket, all at once unexpectedly it opens and everything is clear and plain.”
He turned abruptly to Rose, who had been listening intently to all that concerned hermother. “What did they say your name was, Rose? I ought to remember that, when I was a little boy in school if there was a little girl we liked very much we used to write on a slate,
“‘The rose is red,The violet blue,Sugar is sweet,And so are you,’
“‘The rose is red,The violet blue,Sugar is sweet,And so are you,’
“‘The rose is red,The violet blue,Sugar is sweet,And so are you,’
“‘The rose is red,
The violet blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you,’
and hold it up for her to see. Now, Rose, when I speak of the property your grandmother has left you may think you are going to be an heiress. And I want to tell you the first thing that you will be nothing of the kind. My brother left everything to his wife, and she had no more business sense than that cat, so when she died there was very little left. I don’t know the exact amount but somewhere about three thousand dollars. The proofs are sufficient that you are Kate’s child, so there will be no trouble there. But you understand that there isn’t enough for you to go to seaside summer resorts, or to fly very high in the fashionable world.”
Rose laughed outright. “Why, I don’tknow anything about either seaside summer resorts, or the fashionable world, and never expect to.”
“Just as well; it’s a pity more women, young and old, can’t say the same. But as I was going to say, if you are willing to use strict economy there will be enough to take care of you at least till you are through school.”
Rose’s eyes sparkled with joy. “Oh, if there is only enough for that it is all I ask! Once I have education to teach I can take care of myself.”
“That sounds like Kate. And if you are like her as much as you look I sha’n’t fear for you.”