PAUL RALSTON.
PAUL RALSTON.
PAUL RALSTON.
PAUL RALSTON.
CHAPTER I.MISS PHEBE HANSFORD.
She was standing in the doorway of her cottage, in Oak City, one morning in May, watching the early boat as it came slowly up to the wharf and counting the passengers who landed from it. There were twenty in all,—some with their bags and umbrellas, walking briskly away in different directions, as if they knew where they were going and were in a hurry to get there,—while a few, who evidently did not know where they were going, stopped to parley with two or three hackmen on the stand in front of a hotel. These were undoubtedly strangers seeking information with regard to accommodations, and Miss Hansford decided that the season was likely to be a good one when people began to arrive so early. By a good season she meant her rooms full of lodgers, with plenty of money coming to her weekly, and not as was the case the previous summer,—barely enough to pay her taxes and insurance. As yet most of the cottages were closed and looked gloomy and somber, with their barred doors and boarded windows and no stir of lifearound them. But there were signs of the coming summer in the warm spring air which blew up from the sea. Crocuses and daffodils were blossoming in the borders and hyacinths in the beds in the parks, where the grass was fresh and green, and in a short time the place would shake off its winter lethargy and be alive and gay once more. Like many other people, Miss Hansford’s bones were her barometer. Whatever they indicated, whether physically or of matters outside her own personality, was pretty sure to come to pass, and as she counted the people crossing the pier she was conscious of a sudden exhilaration of spirits which boded well for the future. From living alone more than half the time she had acquired a habit of talking to herself, and frequently indulged in long conversations of questions and answers, in which she sometimes differed as sharply from her imaginary interlocutor or respondent as she would have done had they been real flesh and blood.
Seating herself upon the piazza, which extended on three sides of her cottage, and still watching the boat now moving out to sea, she said aloud: “Yes, I begin to feel it in my bones that it’s going to be an uncommon summer. Something out of the usual run. I don’t know, though, why I need be so anxious. I’ve enough to carry me through, and more, too, and I don’t want ’em to fight over the little there will be left when I’m gone. There ain’t many to fight, either. The nearest of kin is Roger, and I vowed I wouldn’t give him a thing when he married Lucy Potter.”
Here Miss Hansford paused in her soliloquy and changed her position a little, moving her left knee across her right and rolling her calico apron around her hands, which worked nervously as she recalled her old home in Ridgefield, a pretty inland town among the New England hills. In the cemetery there a host of Hansfords were lying,—hergrandparents, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters,—sixteen in all,—and she had followed them one by one to their graves until there was only left her nephew, the recreant Roger, who had married Lucy Potter. For a few minutes Miss Hansford’s face was shadowed with memories of the farm-house, whose windows looked across the meadow and the river to the graves in the cemetery; then, brightening up with the thought that there was “no use in crying for spilt milk,” she returned to her talk of the coming season, which her bones told her was to be a profitable one.
“If the Methodists have as big a camp-meeting as they had last year, and the Baptists do anything at all, and the teachers come to the Institute, and the hotels are full, things’ll be lively for a spell,” she said, “and I wouldn’t wonder if I rented all my rooms, even to the back chamber, where a tall body can’t stand straight except in the centre. Folks mostly don’t take to it, because there’s no view from the windows, except the oak woods. Can’t see the water at all; seems as if inlanders were daft on the sea. If they had lived as long as I have, year in and year out, in sound of its fretting and moaning, from morning till night and night till morning; and if they could see it in winter when a storm is raging over it and the waves break on the shore with a noise like thunder, they’d sing another song than ‘The sea, the sea, the beautiful sea.’ It’s pretty, though, when it’s calm and still and there’s fifty or a hundred sails in sight, as I have counted when the yachts were anchored near here. Oak City ain’t as fashionable as Newport or Narragansett Pier, but it’s a mighty good place to rest in, and there isn’t a prettier spot on the whole coast from Maine to Florida, especially on a morning like this.”
Miss Hansford was waxing eloquent on the subject ofOak City, and quite forgot her rolls burning in the oven and her tea-kettle boiling dry on the stove, as she sat enjoying the view. She had seen it hundreds of times, but it never struck her as quite as fair as it did now, when earth and sky seemed laughing in the brightness and warmth of early May. The ocean was smooth as glass, with white sails dotting its surface in the distance and looking like great wings, as they moved slowly out of sight, or in. To her left a long, hazy line showed where the mainland lay, and between that and the island a thin wreath of smoke told where the boat was disappearing. In front of her, between Oceanside and the Heights, as the two divisions of the town were called, Lake Wenona and Lake Eau Claire sparkled in the sunshine,—the two connected by a narrow strip of land called the Causeway, and neither of them larger than a good-sized mill pond. She had seen them lashed into fury when a wild storm was sweeping the Atlantic coast, and seen them again, covered with boats filled with gay young people when the season was at its height and the place full of visitors. There was a small skiff now on Lake Eau Claire, rowed by a young man whose form seemed familiar to her.
“Who in the world can that be?” she thought, regretting that she had not on her far-seeing spectacles, which brought objects at a long distance distinctly within her range of vision. “Land o’ Goshen!” she exclaimed, as the boat came nearer. “I believe my soul it’s Paul Ralston. When did he get home, I’d like to know? I was up to the Ralston house last week, and Mrs. Drake wasn’t expectin’ the folks for some time. She was just beginning to air and clean that queer place in the basement cellar,—the Smuggler’s room. She said Paul was going to fit it up as a kind of billiard and smoking room this summer, because ’twascool and quiet. They’ve got one room for billiards now upstairs, and I don’t see what they want of another. I call it wicked to waste so much money on a place to knock balls and smoke and play cards in, for it’ll come to that with all the young bucks who go there. Oh, my land, how times has changed since I was young, and such things as cards and billiard balls belonged to the evil one! Now they belong to everybody,—professors and all.”
In her lament over the degeneracy of the age, the good woman rocked back and forth, but kept her eyes upon the boat, which was heading for the shore. Miss Hansford was always spoken of as acharacterand was better known than any permanent resident in Oak City. Indeed, she was a part of the city, and had seen it grow from a few tents clustered around the camp grounds to its present proportions and modern usages, to which she did not take kindly. When a girl she had come from her home in Ridgefield with a party of young people as gay and thoughtless as herself to attend the annual camp-meeting, which was beginning to attract a good deal of attention. The site for the camp-meeting had been chosen by the Methodists, partly for its delightful situation, and partly for its entire seclusion from anything worldly which would disturb the mind and hinder the good work. The only house then upon the Heights was known as the Ralston House, which had been built for many years, and, with its huge chimney and square look-out on the roof, was a landmark for the surrounding country. Many strange stories were told of it and its first owner, old Captain Ralston, whose ship, the Vulture, had sailed to all parts of the world, and finally gone down in a wild storm off the Banks of Newfoundland. The house itself was said to have been a rendezvous for smugglers and a hiding place for theirgoods. But with the sinking of the Vulture and the death of the captain, who went down with it, the stories ceased, and when the first camp-meeting was held the great house was occupied by the elders and those who could afford to pay for the rooms. On the Oceanside a few straggling dwellings were springing up near the grounds and the shore, but for the most part the accommodations were of the crudest kind. People brought their own provisions and beds, and camped upon the ground and under trees and felt that they were worshiping God far more acceptably than if the blue sky above them had been the dome of some expensive church and the hard benches upon which they sat in its luxuriously cushioned pews.
At first the whole thing struck Phebe as grotesque, but youth is not apt to be very critical, especially if having a good time, and as she usually had a good time she enjoyed everything immensely after the first surprise wore off, and slept in a tent with the rain sometimes dripping on her face, and ate coarse fare from board tables, and watched the proceedings with feelings of curiosity and amusement and half contempt for what seemed to her emotional and senseless. The church in which she had been brought up did not worship that way, and, with something of a Pharisaical feeling, she was one night listening to an elder noted for piety and eloquence, who was exhorting some people near her to a better life. Considering herself as a spectator and no part of the congregation, she did not expect to be addressed. Anxious seats and extemporaneous prayers were not for one reared as she had been, and when the elder, who for some time had had her in his mind, turned suddenly towards her and asked if she were a Christian, she colored with confusion and alarm and answered, hurriedly: “No, so; no, sir; I am an Episcopalian.”
Something like a smile flitted across the elder’s face, as he said: “More’s the pity for you and your church,” and then passed on, leaving the girl, who was not a Christian because she was an Episcopalian, to the tender mercies of her companions. Young people are apt to be relentless where ridicule is concerned, and Phebe was jeered at and chaffed until in desperation she declared her intention to go forward for prayers the next time an invitation was given. New and strange feelings were beginning to influence her, and when at last she knelt with others to be prayed for it was more in sober earnest than in fun. There was something in this religion after all, and as she never did anything by halves, she tested it until she proved its reality, and went back to her home in Ridgefield an avowed Methodist. To the father and mother, equally as conscientious as herself, it seemed almost sacrilege that their daughter, born and brought up in the tenets of the church, should embrace another faith, or at least another form of worship. But Phebe was firm. Episcopacy, with its ritual and ceremonious dignity, would never appeal to her again. She liked better the stir and life of the Methodists. It was something real,—something to take hold of, and she liked their style of dress as more consistent with a Christian life. She could pray better in a plain gown than in a silk one, and she stopped curling her hair and laid aside her jewelry and her ribbons, and went every year to Oak City, where she was one of the most zealous workers, and was known as Sister Phebe. As long as her parents lived she stayed with them in Ridgefield, going with them occasionally to St. John’s, which, she thanked her stars, waslow, as she understood the term, but going oftener to the plain wooden building on the shore of Podunk Pond, where for many years the Methodists held their services. When her fatherand mother were both dead and there was nothing to keep her in Ridgefield, she moved to Oak City, and, building herself a cottage on the Heights, lived mostly alone, except for the lodgers who came to her when the camp-meeting was in progress. The religious atmosphere of the place suited her, and, could she have had her way, nothing more exciting than the annual camp-meeting would have found entrance there. But the town was destined to grow, and as it increased in size, and hotels and handsome cottages were built on the Heights and Oceanside, and the streets were full of fashionably dressed people and stylish turnouts, she shook her head disapprovingly. She had renounced the world, the flesh and the devil twice, she said. Once by proxy when baptized in infancy in the Episcopal church, and again when, not holding her first baptism valid, she had been immersed in Podunk Pond, when the thermometer was nearly at zero and the wind was blowing a gale. It was a satisfaction to remember this. It seemed to make her a kind of martyr for endurance, and to freeze out any microbes of temptation which might assail her afterwards.
In the sanctity of Oak City she lived a long time before the world, the flesh and the devil came to confront her with a persistence she could not resist. Fashion and folly, as she called every innovation upon her ideas of right, crowded thick and fast into the pretty town, until the camp-meeting was a secondary matter, and ignored by two-thirds of the guests, who, if they attended the services at all, did so from curiosity, or because it was pleasant to while away an hour or so in the huge open tabernacle built upon the spot where the first tent had been set up many years before for the worship of God. Miss Hansford, as one of the oldest residents, was a power in the community, and her opinion carried great weight in her own church, but she found herselfstranded and helpless in the society which knew not Joseph, or, knowing, did not care. It was in vain that she lifted up her voice against the dances at the hotels, the roller-skating at the rink, the play-acting at the Casino, the ocean bathers in suits which she said made even her blush to look at, and, worst of all, the band, which on Sunday afternoons gave what was called a sacred concert in the open air,—concerts which crowds attended, but which Miss Hansford bitterly denounced. A device of Satan, she called them, and resolutely stopped her ears with cotton to shut out the profane sounds which floated across Lake Wenona to where she sat reading her Bible and deploring the sins of the times. But neither her prayers nor her disapproval availed to stem the tide so fast setting in towards Oak City. The dancing went on in the hotels, the skating in the rink, the play-acting in the Casino, the flirting in the streets, while the bathing suits of the ladies grew shorter and lower each year, until they reminded her of a picture of a ballet girl which a mischievous boy had once sent her as a valentine, and which she had promptly burned.
Owing to the influence of a few New Yorkers and Bostonians, who came to Oak City every summer, spending their money freely and introducing many innovations in the old-established customs, the place was booming. A little church, holding the faith in which she was reared, was built under the shadow of one of the largest hotels. “Fashion’s Bazaar,” Miss Hansford called it, but she watched its growth with a strange interest, and a feeling as if something she had loved and lost were being restored to her. Unsolicited, she gave a hundred dollars towards its erection for the sake of her dead father and mother, and she never heard the sound of the bell calling the people to service without a wave of memory taking her back to thedays of her childhood, and the broken bit of wall in the apple orchard, where she used sometimes to sit and listen to the chimes of St. John’s echoing across the river and the meadowland. Laid carefully away in her bureau drawer was the Prayer Book her mother had used, and, pressed between the leaves, was a rose taken from her mother’s hand as she lay in her coffin. Miss Hansford had not seen the book for a long time, but on the day of the consecration she took it from its hiding place, removed the folds of tissue paper and the handkerchief in which it was wrapped, and sat down to follow the morning service. She had once known it by heart, and she found herself repeating it now instead of reading it, while a feeling she had not experienced in years came over her as her lips pronounced the familiar words. There were passages in the book marked by her mother’s hand, and on the margin, at the commencement of the baptismal service for infants, was written: “June ——, 18——. Little Phebe was christened to-day. God keep her safe in His fold.”
On this and the marked passages and the faded rose Miss Hansford’s tears fell like rain, and with them much of her intolerance of other people’s opinions was washed away. When a girl she had sung in the choir, and now, as she glanced a second time at the grand old Te Deum, she began unconsciously to sing the opening sentence: “We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!”
Whether she would have gone on to the end will never be known, for suddenly there came an interruption to her devotions. She had shut the door against any possible intruder, but the window was open, and through it came a mocking laugh and the words, “If I’se you, I’d join the Salvation Army, only your voice is a little cracked.”
It was the same boy who had sent her the valentine theprevious winter,—Jack Percy, from Washington, and her special aversion. Her first impulse was to throw her Prayer Book at him, but he was beyond her reach and running rapidly towards the avenue, his laugh coming back to her as he ran, and making her shake with rage.
“May the Lord punish that boy as he deserves,” she said, as she wrapped her book in its folds of paper and replaced it in her bureau drawer. “He’s riled me all up, just as I was beginning to feel as if I had been to meetin’, or church, I s’pose I ought to call it,” she continued, as she opened her doors and went about her accustomed work.
Whether it was the service in the Prayer Book which did it, or the sight of her mother’s handwriting, or the faded flower, Miss Hansford gradually grew softer, and while religiously striving to live up to her principles, she became more tolerant of the world as she saw it around her. She still drew the line on dancing and play-acting and cards as emanating directly from the bottomless pit, but the sacred concerts were less obnoxious, and, instead of stopping her ears with cotton when the band played on Sunday, she sometimes found herself listening to it and nodding her head to the strains if they chanced to be familiar. With all her peculiarities, she was so thoroughly kind-hearted and loyal to her friends, that she was generally popular with those who knew her best. A few ridiculed her and resented her inordinate curiosity with regard to their affairs, of which she often seemed to know more than they did themselves. She had a wonderful faculty for remembering everybody’s age. She knew how much they were worth; how they made their money; who they were, and what they sprang from, and, by means of her far-seeing spectacles, with which she attended to her neighbor’s business, and her near-seeing ones, with which she attended toher own, she managed to keep a pretty firm hold on the affairs and conduct of the people around her.
On the morning when she is first introduced to the reader she had satisfied herself with regard to the number of passengers who came on the boat; had decided who most of them were, and then centered her interest on Paul Ralston, whose unexpected appearance surprised her a little. She prided herself on her intimacy with the Ralstons, and usually knew where they were, and what they were doing. Paul, she supposed, was in Europe, or possibly on the ocean; yet, here he was, fastening his boat and coming up the pathway across the park towards her cottage.
“For the land’s sake, I believe he’s coming here, and I looking like a fright, with this old apron on, and my sleeves rolled up,” she exclaimed, and, hastily entering the house, she put down her sleeves, exchanged her calico apron for a clean white one, took her tea-kettle off the stove, and was in the wide doorway ready to greet the young man, who came bounding up the steps two at a time and grasped her hand warmly with his cheery, “Hello, Aunt Phebe! How are you?”