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,whenI 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,youneedn’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’sallvery 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. Whatcouldshe 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’tyousee 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 itishard, 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 Iwon’tThat’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 girlsare—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.
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 yehdon’tknaow 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,Itell 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 weremyfriends 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 hedmysay, 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 aboutthat!”
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’sanother 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, andthismild 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.Inever knew a son who could take his father’s ruin ’n’ his fam’ly’s disgrace so cool, before. I s’posethat’sth’ 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.
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.
“Iwantyou 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; thereissomething, 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?”
“Ferguson owns the clover meadow, and Pratt has the timothy meadow, and what we used to call the berry patch belongs to Sile Thomas; he’s begun to build a house on it.”
“Precisely. Why even the fence close to where mother’s grave is, divides ours from another man’s land now.”
“Sabrina spoke to me about all this this afternoon,” said Albert hesitatingly, “and I tried, as I often have before, to make her understand that that must be the natural course of affairs, so long as the East tries to compete with the West in farming.”
“Well that may be all right, but Elhanan Pratt seems to manage to compete with the West, as you call it, and so do the Fergusons and all the rest of them. We are the only ones who appear to get left, every time. Of course, it’s somebody’s fault. Father’s been a poor manager, no use of denying that. But that doesn’t make it any the easier to bear. Father hardly knows which way to turn for ours from another man’s now. Money; he might have scraped through the year if hops had had a good season, but at nine cents a pound it was hardly worth while to take them to the depot. You can’t clear expenses at less than eleven cents. And then if he does have a fairly decent year, his hop-pickers are always the most drunken, idle gang of them all, who eat their heads off, and steal more fruit and chickens than they pick boxes, and if anybody’s hops are spoiled in the kiln, you can bet on their being Fairchild’s, every time. And three years ago, it was the hop merchant who failed, just at the opportune moment, and let Father in for a whole years’ profit and labor. Of course, it’s all bad luck, mismanagement, whatever you like to call it, and it can’t be helped, I suppose. But it makes a man sour, and it broke poor mother’s heart. And then here’s Seth.”
“Oh, never mind me, I can stand it, I guess, if the rest can. I’m not complaining” came from the figure on the bucket—only dimly to be seen now, in the shadow of the curb, and the increasing darkness.
“Here’s Seth,” continued John, without noting the disclaimer. “You and I hadsomeadvantages—of course, mine were not to be compared with yours, but still I was given a chance, such as it was and I don’t know that I would trade what I learned at work during college years for a college education—but this poor boy, who’s thought about him, who’s given him a chance to show what’s in him? He’s been allowed to come up as he could, almost like any farm laborer. His mother tried to do her little, but what spirit did she have for it, and what time did the drudgery here give him? Thank God! He’s had the stuff in him to work at education himself, and he’s got the making of the best man of us three. But it’s no thanks to you. Andthat’swhy we feel hard, Albert. Nobody supposes you could make a good farmer and manager out of father; nobody blames you for a bad hop season, or the dishonesty of Biggs. But I do say that of us three brothers there’s one who frets and worries over the thing, and though he’s a poor man, does all he can afford to do, and more too, to help make it better; and there’s another, young, ambitious, capable, whose nose is held down to the grindstone, and the best years of whose life are being miserably spent in a hopeless wrestling with debt and disaster; and there’s a third brother, the oldest brother, rich, easy, enjoying all the luxuries of life, who don’t give a damn about it all!That’swhat I say, and if you don’t like it, you needn’t!”
The silence which ensued was of the kind that can be felt. The two cigars at the corners of the old curb glowed intermittently in the darkness. John’s had gone out during his speech, and as he re-lighted it, the glare of the match showed an excited, indignant face. There was no room for doubt, after the momentary exhibit which the red light made, that John was very much in earnest.
Albert was thinking laboriously on his answer. Meantime, he said, to fill the interval “Do you like the cigar?”
“Yes; a fifteen center, isn’t it?”
Albert had it in his mind to say truthfully that he paid $180 per thousand, but the fear of invidious comparisons rose before him in time, and he said “About that, I think.”
He waited a moment, still meditating, and threw out another stop-gap: “It’s curious how the rhetorical habit grows on a man who writes leading articles. I noticed that you used three adjectives every time, the regular cumulative thing, you know.”
“Maybe so; it would be more to the purpose to hear what you think about the spirit of my oration; the form doesn’t matter so much.”
“Well, I will tell you, John,” said Albert, slowly, still feeling his way, “to speak frankly, no doubt there’s a good deal in what you say. I feel that there is. But you ought to consider that it isn’t easy for a man living in a great city, immersed in business cares, and engrossed in the labors of his profession, to realise all these things, and see them as you, who are here on the ground, see them. It’s hardly fair to attack me as heartless, when you present these facts to me for the first time.”
“For the first time! You ought to have seen them for yourself without presenting. And then you said Sabrina had often discussed the subject with you.”
“Oh, but her point of view is always family dignity, the keeping up of the Fairchilds’ homestead in baronial state, and that sort of thing. You should have heard her this afternoon, telling me how her fathers name used to be coupled with Dearborn County, just as Silas Wright’s was with Dutchess—either Dutchess or Delaware, I forget which she said—but it was very funny.”
“Sabrina and I haven’t spoken for I don’t know how long, and we’re not likely to again in a hurry, but for all that I’m bound to say I wish some others of the family had as much pride as she’s got,” said John. “Whatever else she may be, she’s as loyal and as faithful to the family idea, as jealous of the family’s name, as any old Spanish grandee. And I confess the Silas Wright thing doesn’t seem funny to me at all—any fellow with the right kind of a heart in him would feel that it was deucedly pathetic—the poor old maid clinging through the shipwreck to that one spar of support—the recollection of a time when her father was bigger than his county. Such things oughtn’t to be laughed at.”
Albert lost his patience. “Confound it, man, do you want to force me into a quarrel—this night of all others! By George, was there ever such a brace of brothers! I come out here to get you by yourselves, to talk over with you some plans that have occurred to me for setting things right here—and I haven’t had a civil answer yet from either of you. First it’s the youngster who scowls and snarls at me, and then you read me lofty lectures on my behavior, and then both together in concerted condemnation. No wonder I come rarely to the farm! It’s enough to sicken any man of family ties, to be bullyragged in this way. I’ve a good mind to tell you you can all go to the devil, and be hanged to you!”
The figure on the bucket rose to its feet with a spring, so energetically that there seemed a menace in the action. The village editor restrained this movement with a quiet hand, and a whispered “Keep cool, Seth.” Then he said with exaggerated calmness of voice:
“Personally, perhaps I shouldn’t mind much if you did. But there are others to look after, and so, before you do, it might be worth while to learn what the fine alternative was to have been. It would be a great pity to not even to hear these noble plans with which you were primed, you say, when you came out.”
“But you must admit, John, that you and Seth tonight have been enough to try the patience of a saint.”
“Oh, yes, we admit that. Go on!”
“Well, you’ve made it a little difficult for me to develop my plans—they were scarcely formed in my mind. In a general way, I wanted to consult you about freeing the farm, perhaps buying back some of the original land that has gone, putting the house in shape again, improving the stock, placing Father and Sabrina beyond the chance of ever being embarrassed again—and—and—doing something for Seth.”
“Nobody wants you—” began the impatient Seth.
“Youngster,youshut up!” said John, again using the quieting hand. “Do you really mean all this, Albert?”
“I should scarcely have spoken in detail as I have, otherwise,” answered the lawyer loftily.
“Well, this—” said John, “this takes a fellow’s breath away.”
“If you hadn’t been in such haste to impute bad motives and convict me without judge or jury, perhaps the effect of my plans might not have been so overpowering.”
“Yes, we did you an injustice, Albert, clearly we did. We were full of the idea that all these troubles rolled off you like water off a duck’s back. It seems that was our mistake. But—what’s your scheme?”
“Definitely, I have none, except to do all I can, in the way we may decide will be best all around. I have been thinking some of coming to live here myself, say from May to November of each year, and taking the farm into my own hands.”
“H’m—m! That might have its advantages, perhaps—but——”
“Oh, I know what you mean. If I do, everybody’s rights shall be respected. We’ll fix that beyond question, to your satisfaction, before a thing is done.”
“I don’t care about myself, particularly; you know that: but then there’s Seth, you know—we’ve always figured on the farm as his. It’s true he don’t want to be a farmer, that he hates the whole thing, but still that represents all his capital, so to speak, and—”
“My dear John, that shall all be arranged. I am a childless man—probably always shall be. As long as Father lives the farm shall remain in his name. Either his will can be in my favor, or I can manage the farm as a trustee for all three of us, after he’s gone. In either case, you shall both be protected in turn by my will—absolutely protected. Meantime, what do you want me to do for Seth? What does he want to do?”
“Nothing needs to be done for me,” began Seth, “I can—”
“Now, youngster,willyou be quiet!” said John, in mock despair. “I’ll tell you what you can do for Seth, and do easily. Get him a place on some decent newspaper, in New York or one of the larger cities of the State, and let him have money enough to eke out a small salary at first, so that he can begin at editorial work instead of tramping up through the reporter’s treadmill, as I had to. That’s all Seth’ll ask, and it will be the making of him.”
“Begin at editorial work—Seth? Nonsense!”
“No nonsense about it. For two years back Seth has been doing some of the best work on my paper—work that’s been copied all over the State.”
“Bless my soul, what a literary family we are!” said the lawyer. “Does Aunt Sabrina write, too? Perhaps those love poems you have on the last page are hers.”
John continued without noticing the interjection. “Do you remember that long article on Civil Service Reform we had in theBannerlast January?”
“I don’t think I do, John. To be frank, although we enjoy having you send us theBannerimmensely, occasionally it happens that the stress of professional duties compels me to miss reading a number.”
“Well that article was reprinted in all the big papers, from Boston to Chicago. I never knew any other thing from a little village paper to travel so far, or attract so much attention. I had lots of letters about it, too. That article was Seth’s—all his own. I didn’t change a word in it. And he’s hardly seen any thing of the world yet, either.”
The lawyer was heard chuckling, when John’s voice died away in the darkness. The cigars had long since burned out, and the men could with difficulty see one another. The two younger brothers waited, the one surprised, the other increasingly indignant, to learn the cause of Albert’s hilarity.
“Do you realise, John,” he said at last, with merriment still in his voice, “what a delightful commentary on Civil Service Reform your words make. The best article on that doctrine is written by a youngster who has never left the farm, who doesn’t know the difference between a Custom House and a letter-box on a lamp-post! Ho, ho, I must tell that to Chauncey when I see him.”
An hour later, John and Seth still leaned against the mossy curb, smoking and talking over the words of their elder brother, who sometime before had gone in to avoid the dew-fall.
“I wonder if wehavemisjudged him, after all,” said Seth. “I’m almost ashamed to accept his favors, after the way I pitched into him.”
“I wonder what his scheme really is,” mused the more experienced village editor.