PART II.
The October sun was shining brightly into the windows of a handsome drawing room in New York, where two young people were talking earnestly together. The girl was scarcely twenty and looked younger. She was short and slight and dainty and sweet, with beautiful blue eyes which laughed when she laughed and gave a wonderful brightness to her face. There was something peculiar in their expression which was rapid and searching and made the young man beside her wonder if what they saw in him boded good or ill to his suit. He was twenty-two, tall and straight and broad shouldered, with something in his voice and features and manner which reminded one of the July morning twenty-three years before when Craig Mason sat on the north piazza of the Prospect House and talked to Alice Tracy. To one who had been in Ridgefield that summer there would have come back the scent of the new mown hay and the perfume of the white pond lilies Alice wore in her belt, and in the young man’s eyes he would have seen a likeness to Alice’s eyes, with thicker lashes and heavier brows.
After this the reader scarcely need be told that the young man was the son of Craig and Alice, born abroad where his parents had spent much of their time since their marriage, with occasional visits to America. Alice had been delighted with the old world, and as Craig’shealth was better there they had staid on and on,—sometimes in Paris where their son Roy was born, sometimes in Switzerland, sometimes in Italy, and once for a winter in Cairo, and again in London, where Craig’s mother died. They had brought her back to Boston, and tired of wandering with no particular home, had decided to settle down quietly for a time at least. But not in the house Craig had looked at for himself and Helen. Nothing could have induced him to take that at any price. He preferred his mother’s old home, which, if not in so fashionable a part of the city, was dear to him for its associations with his boyhood and manhood and mother. Here they had lived for three years, two of which Roy had spent at Harvard, where he had entered as a Junior, studying hard in order to be graduated with honor, and still managing to join in a good many athletic sports and to fall in love with his pretty half cousin, Fanny Prescott, a pupil in a private school. She had thought him a boy at first and played with and teased him unmercifully, now sending him from her in a rage and then luring him back with a trick of her eyes which we have seen before. She had not inherited all her mother’s dazzling beauty and but little of her nature. In her frankness and perfect truthfulness she resembled Alice. Her Sundays when at school had been spent with the Masons, and thus Roy had every facility for falling in love with her. But while she kept him at fever heat with her innocent coquetries she gave him no encouragement. Once, when he said, “I must and will speak seriously to you,” she called him a big boy and told him to wait till he had his diploma and a mustache. He had them both now; the mustache was a very small one, which some might think did not add to his face. Thediploma, received in June, wasen regle, and he had come for the serious talk.
He had not seen her since May, at which time she had been called home by the sudden illness and death of her father, Judge Prescott. As it was so near the close of the term she had not returned to school, but had spent the summer with her mother at a quiet place among the Adirondacks. She did not know that he was coming but was glad to see him, and led him to a sofa on which they both sat down. Then her manner changed suddenly to one of shyness and almost shamefacedness as she moved away from him and put a sofa cushion between them. She was in mourning for her father and the black brought out the purity of her complexion and the brightness of her eyes which filled with tears when Roy spoke of her father and his grief when he heard he was dead.
“Don’t talk of him. I can’t bear it yet. Talk of something else, please,” she said, and Roy plunged at once into the object of his visit, reminding her that he had his diploma and his mustache, and now he wanted her love.
“Oh, Roy, it’s too bad in you to spoil our good times as friends. As lovers we might quarrel, and then we are cousins,” she said.
“Only seconds, which does not count,” Roy answered, moving nearer to her, while she put another cushion between them so that only her shoulders and head were visible.
Roy was of a more ardent nature than his father, and there was no stiffness or hesitancy in his wooing when once he was fairly under way.
“You can pile up the cushions till I can’t see you at all,” he said, “but it will not prevent you from hearingme tell you that I love you and have ever since I saw you in short dresses, with your hair down your back.”
For a time Fanny listened with her face bent down, and when she turned it to him there was a troubled look upon it and her lips quivered as she said, “I do care for you, Roy, and always have; but I must not any more. You will not want me to either when you know what I do.”
“What do you know?” he asked, beginning to slide his hand under the cushions.
“Have you never heard anything bad about me or mother?” she asked, and Roy answered, with so sudden a movement that one of the cushions fell to the floor.
“Bad about you, or your mother? Never. I would have thrashed any one who insinuated anything against you. What do you mean?”
“I am not Fanny Prescott,” the girl said with a sob in her voice.
“The deuce you are not! Who are you, then, if you are not your father’s daughter?” Roy asked, and Fanny replied, “I am my father’s daughter, but my father was not Judge Prescott, as I thought. I never knew it till he died last May. Mother had to tell me then on account of some business matters and it almost broke my heart, I was so fond of him and so proud of being his daughter and he was so kind to me. I held his hand when he died and kissed him and called him father and didn’t suspect the truth. I don’t think you will care for me when you know all. I have always heard the Masons were very proud.”
“And I have always heard the Tracys were very proud. Greek meeting Greek, you see,” Roy rejoined. “But go ahead. Let’s hear the story. Nothing can ever change my love for you. Who are you? Who was your father?”
“Have you ever heard of the Prospect House in Ridgefield, Mass.?” Fanny asked, and Roy answered briskly, “I guess I have. It was there father met my mother, twenty-three years ago. I had heard piles about it and the funny little landlord before I went there this last summer with father and mother. We had a fancy to drive through the country, stopping where night overtook us, and the second day we reached the Prospect House, which looks rather old fashioned beside the fine hotel which has been built on the Common. I wanted to stop there but nothing could keep father from the Prospect House, and I was glad we went there. I wish you could see the landlord, Uncle Zach they call him. He is an old man with such a fat body and short legs and round good natured face, and what do you think he called his wife?”
Fanny could not guess, and Roy continued, “Dot, and Dotty, and I’ll bet she weighs two hundred, and is nearer eighty than seventy. Think of calling her Dotty! There is love of the right sort, isn’t it? But I shall love you just as well when you weigh three hundred and are ninety, as I do now.”
His hand had gotten quite under the cushion and had one of Fanny’s.
“You hurt,” she said, as he gave it a hard squeeze. “And you must not hold it either. You don’t know at all who I am. Did they mention Mark Hilton at the Prospect House?”
“Why, yes, I think they did,” Roy said slowly, as if trying to recall something which had slipped his memory. “Father and mother and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were talking and I heard that name I am sure. When I joined them they stopped suddenly, as if they did not care tocontinue the conversation. Who was he, anyway? Some scamp?”
“He was my father,” Fanny said defiantly.
“Your father! Great Scott, why didn’t you say so?” Roy exclaimed.
“You needn’t swear if he was my father,” Fanny answered, beginning to cry.
The second cushion had followed the first to the floor by this time and Roy had his arm around Fanny, to whom he said, “Don’t cry. Great Scott isn’t a swear. I only said it because I must say something. What of Mark Hilton?”
“He was clerk at the Prospect House, and none the worse for that. The Vanderbilts and Astors and a lot more people did not have as good a beginning,” Fanny said, and Roy replied, “Of course not. Very few of us can boast of high-toned beginnings. My great-grandfather was a carpenter.”
“Pho!” Fanny said, with a laugh which had not much mirth in it. “I can beat that on a grandmother when I get to her. I don’t think a carpenter at all bad.”
“Neither do I,” Roy said, “and I don’t care if your father was a tinker. Tell me about him.”
“You see, it was this way,” Fanny began. “My mother was at the hotel the same summer with your father and mother. Mr. Hilton was very handsome and very tall and very nice. I know he was nice,” and she emphasized her words with sundry nods of her head as a warning that she was not to be disputed.
“Of course he was nice, or he couldn’t have been your father,” Roy said, and Fanny continued, “Mother, you know, is very handsome now. She was beautiful then,—a belle and an heiress and a great catch. She’d had I don’t know how many offers, fifty maybe, and she hasa book with all their names in it. I tried to have her show it to me once and she wouldn’t. She keeps it to remind her of other days when she feels depressed. Grandma Tracy thought she ought to marry the President, or somebody like him, but she loved my father and the same as eloped with him. She came to New York in the morning on an errand. He came in the evening and they were married the next day. Grandma wouldn’t forgive them, or see my mother until after she was divorced. I think that word has a bad sound, and I am ashamed of it, but I am telling you everything just as I made mother tell me. I was ill for weeks after it, and thought everybody who looked at me was thinking about it.”
“What a foolish little girl,” Roy said, trying to pull her head down upon his shoulder. “Lots of people are divorced and nothing is thought of it. It is quite the fashion.”
“I don’t care if they are,” Fanny replied. “I think it is wicked, and told mother so. Don’t hold my head down. I am going to keep it up as long as I can. By and by I shall want to hang it so low,—oh, so low!”
“Not on account of a divorce,” Roy said, and Fanny rejoined, “That isn’t all; there is something a great deal worse. Father and mother went to Chicago and were very happy for a while,—then not so happy, and then not happy at all. Mother says she was more to blame than he. She liked attention and had it, and that made him jealous, and she used to tell him that she stooped when she married him, and taunted him with what I’m going to tell you about by and by. I was six months old and don’t remember it of course,—their quarrelling. I mean. He loved me, I know.”
“I am sure he did,” Roy interrupted her, giving her atthe same time a squeeze which she did not seem to notice, she was so absorbed in her story.
“Once mother told him she wished he would go away and never come back, and he did go, and never came back. There was a boy living with them,—Jefferson Wilkes, in whom my father was interested and who had come to them from the Prospect House. Jeff, they called him, and he went with my father. After a while mother instituted proceedings for a divorce on the ground of desertion and incompatibility and psychological repulsion. Do you know what that is?”
“I know what it isn’t,” Roy said, kissing the face which began to look very pitiful as the story progressed.
“Mother knew where father was for a time and sent him a copy of the divorce. He replied, ‘I congratulate you on your freedom. You will not have any trouble in filling my place. You are young enough and handsome enough to have twenty-two more offers. Jeff and I are off for the mines in Montana. Tell the baby, when she is old enough to understand, that, bad as I was, I loved her. Mark Hilton.’
“I was ill with diphtheria when mother received the note,—so ill that the papers, when commenting on the divorce, said that I was dead. Six months later mother saw an account of a terrible accident in some mines in Montana. In the list of killed was my father’s name, but there was no mention of Jeff. Mother tried to learn the particulars, but could not, and after a while she came back to New York deserted, divorced and widowed, but still very beautiful. We lived with grandma, a proud old lady, who had never received my father. She is dead now and I do not remember her. Among mother’s friends was Judge Prescott, whom she used to know, and who, I think, wanted her before she married myfather. When I was two and a half years old she married him and at his request I took his name. I was christened Frances, but he did not like that name and I was called Fanny to please him. I like it better than Frances, don’t you?”
Roy would have liked any name which belonged to her and said so, while she continued: “You were in Europe when all this happened and knew nothing about it as you are not much older than I am.”
“Two years,” Roy said, kissing her again, while she tried to disengage herself from him, but could not, for a lock of her hair had become frightfully entangled in a button of his coat.
It took some time to disentangle it and Fanny was obliged to lie quietly upon Roy’s arm, with her face upturned to him so temptingly that not to kiss it occasionally was impossible for one of his temperament.
“Roy Mason!” she exclaimed, “You must not kiss and squeeze me the way you are doing, and I not able to get away, with my hair all snarled up in your buttons. It is mean in you, and I’ll call mother if you don’t stop. I believe she is in the next room, listening, perhaps.”
“Let her listen. She was young once,” Roy said, going on very deliberately, while Fanny, from necessity, lay passive on his arm.
When the hair business was settled she moved away from him, and picking up a cushion put it between them again.
“I was telling you about Judge Prescott, whom I called my father, although now I have a faint recollection of a time when there was no gentleman in our house,” she said. “When he died mother told me everything. I don’t think she meant to tell me the whole dreadful story, but she gave some hints and I would not let herstop. I said I’d go to Ridgefield and inquire, and so she had to tell me, and if there is more to know I do not care to hear it. I feel now as if my life had been all a lie. Fanny Prescott, indeed! When I am really Fanny Hilton, and that is not the worst of it. Stop, Roy! You shallnottouch me again till I’m through,” she said, as Roy’s arm came over the cushion toward her hand.
“Did you ever hear of a haunted house in Ridgefield, where a woman in a white gown and blue ribbons walks at night and a drowning man calls for ’Tina. That’s the woman’s name, and she sat still and let him drown, and a baby cries at all hours for its mother? That is ’Tina, too,—who—who—was hung!”
“By Jove, that’s a corker for a story!” Roy replied. “I never heard of it before, but I like haunted houses, with women in white and blue ribbons and cries for ’Tina, who was hung! Tell me about it, and what it has to do with you.”
In as few words as possible Fanny told the story of the Dalton tragedy as she had heard it from her mother, while Roy listened with absorbing interest.
“What do you think now of the great-great-granddaughter of ’Tina?” Fanny asked when the story was ended.
“I think her the sweetest, dearest little girl in all the world, and do not care a continental for the woman in white and blue ribbons, or the haunted house. You say there is only a cellar hole there now and that it belongs to you or your mother,” Roy answered, throwing the cushion half way across the room and putting both arms around Fanny, who was crying, but who sat very still while he went on, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do when we are married. We will build a pretty cottage there,—a real up to date one, with bay windows and wide piazzas and give’Tina a chance to perambulate under cover rainy nights. You say she takes such times to walk in preference to pleasant weather. I should think that white dress would be rather frayed and draggled and the blue ribbons slimpsy by this time.”
He was making light of the matter and a load was lifted from Fanny’s heart, for she had dreaded telling him the story which had weighed so heavily upon her since she heard it.
“It is so kind in you, Roy, not to care about that hanging,” she said. “I have felt the rope around my neck so many times and have dreamed that I was ’Tina. I must look like her. She was blue eyed and fair-haired and small, just like me, who am not a bit like mother. Her grave is in the Ridgefield cemetery, ’Tina’s I mean, and mother sat there on the wall right by it when father told her the story. He didn’t keep anything back, and held his head just as high when he said, ‘My great-grandmother was hung.’ His grandfather was the baby who cried for its mother. I’ve heard that, too, when I have been awake in the night and been so sorry for it. Mother says my father was very tall and fine looking, and that I have some of his ways with my eyes and hands. I have dreamed of him so often since she told me, and sometimes it seems to me he is not dead. There is no proof except that notice in the paper and a letter mother had from the mines saying some of the bodies were so crushed they could not be recognized, and as my father was known to be in the mine and never seen again, it was highly probable he was dead. Oh, if I could find him! I think you’d better hunt for him than to be building a cottage to keep ’Tina from the rain!”
She spoke lightly now. Roy evidently didn’t care andthe tragedy which had cast so dark a shadow on her life when she heard of it began to lessen in its proportions.
“I hear mother,” she said at last. “I thought she was in the next room, but she is a little deaf. I don’t believe she has heard all the foolish things you have said to me. Mother, here is Roy,” she continued, as the heavy portieres parted and her mother stood before her.
Naturally twenty-three years had changed her somewhat. The freshness and grace of youth were gone, with much of her brilliant complexion. Her dark hair was sprinkled with grey, and her eyes had lost some of the sparkle which had lured so many suitors to her side, but she was a very beautiful woman still, whom strangers looked at a second time, inquiring who she was. She had at first rebelled against wearing widow’s weeds, but when she saw how becoming they were to her she became quite reconciled to her mourning and was beginning to feel reconciled to her widowhood, which gave her the freedom she had not enjoyed since her second marriage. She had paid a full penalty for her heartless act and had repented of her folly. There had been a year of so of perfect happiness with Mark Hilton and then the restraints of married life began to weary her. It had been her boast that because her husband knew her so well he could never find fault with her, and there she was mistaken.
He was fond of her and proud of her and glad to seeher admired as long as the admiration was unsought, but when with the little arts she knew so well she tried to attract attention his jealousy was aroused, and gradually there came to be stormy scenes between them,—bitter quarrels when things were said on both sides which it was hard to forget. Finding that with all his apparent unconcern he was sore on the subject of his antecedents Helen used that as a lash and often reminded him of the difference in their social positions and the depth to which she stooped when she married him. Then they quarreled more fiercely than ever and the baby was made the instrument of goading Mark to madness. That it had a drop of blood in its veins which could be traced back to a scaffold was often a source of regret with Helen coupled with a wish that she had married Craig Mason instead of throwing herself away on a hotel clerk, with no family connections. Mark was not naturally bad-tempered; neither was Helen. They were simply wholly unsuited to each other. They had married in haste, trampling upon the rights and happiness of Craig Mason without remorse, and as a natural sequence reaped the consequence of their sin.
At last, after a sharp altercation in which Helen expressed a wish that she had never seen her husband, he left her, taking Jeff with him and leaving a note saying he should not return as he was tired of the life he was living. Urged on by her mother, who had never accepted Mark as a son-in-law, a divorce was easily obtained and Helen free from the tie which had become so distasteful to her. Chancing to know that Mark was in Denver she sent him a copy of the divorce and received in return the note of which Fanny had told Roy. After that she knew no more of him until she heard of a terrible explosion in some mine in Montana. Among thekilled was Mark Hilton’s name. Then in an agony of remorse she tried to verify the report. What she learned was that none of the bodies could be identified, they were so bruised and burned. Mark was known to have been in the mine and never seen after. Of Jeff nothing was known. He might, or might not, have been in the mine. In all human probability Mark was dead, and the divorce, of which she did not like to think, need not have been obtained. She was free without it and always spoke of herself to her friends as a widow, although she wore no black. If any of her old tenderness for Mark Hilton returned to her at times she gave no sign and was outwardly unchanged, except that she was very quiet and shunned society rather than courted it.
At her mother’s request she returned to her home in New York and there at last met again the Walter Prescott whose name had been in her blue book as her possible husband before she met Craig Mason. In some respects he was like Craig, undemonstrative, caring little for society and much for books. He had never forgotten Helen and soon fell again under her spell. He knew of her divorce and would rather it had not been, but her beauty conquered him and she became his wife and mistress of one of the finest establishments in New York. With Judge Prescott, whom she respected and feared, she lived very comfortably. He was not a man to tolerate any nonsense. His wife, like Caesar’s, must be above reproach, and from the first he was master of the situation.
Helen was very fond of Fanny, who was as unlike her as it was possible for a child to be unlike its mother. “She has not a feature like me, nor like her father, either, unless it is something in the expression of her eyes and the gesture of her hands,” she often thought, as she studiedFanny’s face and wondered where she got her blue eyes and fair hair and the delicacy of her complexion and form. “I believe she gets it a hundred years back from ’Tina,” she sometimes said, and then for a while rebelled against the heritage she had given her lovely daughter. “She shall never know of it,” she thought, and kept it to herself until Judge Prescott’s death, when it seemed necessary to tell Fanny of her real father.
Seizing upon something inadvertently spoken, Fanny, who was persistent and determined, never rested until she knew the whole story as her mother knew it. Over the father killed in the mines she wept bitterly, while the tragedy filled her with horror and for a time she refused to see anyone lest they should read in her face the secret which was making her life miserable. She had been so proud of being a Prescott and proud of her supposed father that it was hard to find herself suddenly stranded with no father, no name of which to boast, and she had dreamed many a night of the scaffold and of ’Tina, whom she was sure she resembled. “What will Roy say when he knows,” had been in her thoughts all the long summer while she was with her mother in the quiet mountain resort. That Roy loved her she knew and that he would sometime tell her so she was sure. “And when he does I must tell him everything and he will not care for me any more,” she thought. He had declared his love. She had told him everything, and he did not care; he could even jest about ’Tina and talk of a cottage to shield her from the weather. The revulsion of feeling was great, and Fanny’s face was radiant with happiness, when Mrs. Prescott appeared suddenly in the door.
With a mother’s intuition Mrs. Prescott had foreseen the probable result of Roy’s intimacy with her daughter, and nothing could please her more than to see Fannyhis wife and connected with the Mason family. Consequently when she entered the room and saw Fanny’s confusion and Roy’s exultation she guessed the truth and was prepared to hear all Roy had to say, as in a straight-forward, manly way he told her what his wishes were and asked her consent.
“Has she told you everything?” Mrs. Prescott said. “Your parents know it all, of course. They were a part of the drama played that summer which seems to me ages ago. Nor can I realize that I am the person who was guilty of that heartless escapade.”
She was thinking of Craig Mason, while Fanny, who knew nothing of that page in her mother’s life, thought only of her father, and said, “Oh, mother, you are not sorry you married my father? You can’t be, if you love me. Where would I have been if you hadn’t married him? He was nice, I know he was.”
The brave little girl, who was fighting down all her pride of family and birth, would be loyal to the father she had never known and it touched her mother closely.
“I was thinking of the way I married him,” she said, sitting down by Fanny and smoothing her hair, which was still a good deal disordered from contact with Roy’s buttons and coatsleeves. “One always regrets the foolishness of youth which might have been avoided.”
Turning now to Roy she continued, “When I married Judge Prescott it was his wish that Fanny should take his name, and mine to forget the past so far as possible. Your parents were abroad, but I wrote asking them to be reticent on the matter.”
“And they have been,” Roy answered quickly. “I never heard of Mr. Hilton until to-day; nor of his grandmother; nor do I care how many he had, nor how they died. I dare say half of mine ought to have been hung,if the truth were known. That has nothing to do with my love for Fanny. I want her, and right off, too,—the sooner the better. Father and mother knew my business here. I talked it all over with them and they would rather have Fanny for a daughter than anyone they know. When can I take her?”
He was very impetuous, and Mrs. Prescott could not repress a sigh as she looked at his flushed, eager face and remembered her own youth so far in the past.
“You can have my daughter,” she said, “but not yet. She is not quite twenty and you are only twenty-two, both children in experience. You must wait a year at least; that will soon pass. I cannot spend another winter in this climate. I have tried Florida and do not like it, and have decided upon California, and Fanny will go with me. In June or July we shall visit the Yosemite, and when we return home it will be time to think of bridal festivities.”
She was very firm, as she usually was when her mind was made up. All summer she had been planning this trip to California, intending, either on her way there, or on her return, to visit the mines in Montana where Mark had met his death. She would not like to admit to anyone the great desire she had to see some of the people who had known him and, if possible, to learn what had become of Jeff. For a brief space of time she had loved Mark passionately, and she always thought of him now with regret for the bitter things she had said to him. He had once told her there was in him, about equally balanced, the making of an angel or a devil, and a woman’s hand would turn the scale. She had turned it and sent him to destruction, and the widow’s weeds she wore were almost as much for Mark Hilton as for the courtly Judge Prescott. Sometimes in her sleep she heard Mark’s voicecalling to her from beyond the Rockies and bidding her come to him with their child. Again she sat with him in the ghost-haunted room in Ridgefield and promised to prove false to the vows made to Craig only the night before. On such occasions she would wake suddenly, bathed with perspiration and thank God it was all a dream. She did not wish Mark back. Their paths diverged more widely now than when they separated. It was her treatment of him which she regretted, and her many sleepless nights and restless days had undermined her health, until a change was necessary. She must go to California and Roy must wait for his bride until another year.
“Why can’t I go with you? You need some man to take care of you, especially in the Yosemite, where the brigands are so thick that the stages are stopped every few days,” Roy said.
But Mrs. Prescott was not afraid of the brigands, and didn’t need a man as an escort, and Roy was compelled to acquiesce in waiting a year, which seemed to him as endless. Mrs. Prescott promised to bring Fanny to Boston before leaving for California, and with this to comfort him he left New York the following day, anxious to carry the glad news of his engagement to his father and mother. He made very short work of it.
“I have asked Fanny to be my wife, and she has consented,” he said. “She is not Fanny Prescott at all, but Fanny Hilton. I know all about it, ’Tina and all, and don’t care.”
Craig and Alice did not care, either. To them it was an old story nearly forgotten, and they congratulated their son and at once forwarded a letter to Helen inviting her and Fanny to spend Thanksgiving with them.
CHAPTER III.ANCESTRY.
It was a large dinner party assembled on Thanksgiving day to do honor to the little bride-elect, who bore herself with great dignity when the engagement was announced and congratulations heaped upon her and Roy. She would have liked to have been known by her real name, Hilton, but her mother objected, and as neither Roy nor his parents saw the necessity for the explanation it would involve she yielded to their judgment and was Fanny Prescott, as she had always been. Her mother could only stay for a few days in Boston, and on the morning of her departure Fanny said to Roy, who was to accompany them, “Let’s stop at Ridgefield over a train. I want to see where father used to live. Mother can go on without us. Will you?”
Roy was willing, and when the village ’bus in Ridgefield went up the hill from the 10 o’clock train it carried two young people who were looking about them as curiously as people were looking at them. Ridgefield had not grown much within twenty-three years, but there had been some changes. An electric car now connected it with Worcester and the intermediate towns and this gave it a thriftier appearance. A few houses had been added in the side streets and a new and large hotel built on the Common. In front of this the driver stopped, while a smart clerk came hurrying out.
“Not here. Take us to the Prospect House,” Roy said.
The clerk looked surprised as he turned on his heel, while the driver whipped up his horses, wondering whysuch swells, as his passengers undoubtedly were, should prefer the Prospect House to the Tremont. But it was none of his business, and he was soon at the Prospect House, which looked rather shabby and uninviting, with an air of neglect everywhere visible. The Tremont had killed it, and in his old age Uncle Zacheus had little heart to compete with his rival. A few boarders still clung to him, but transients were very rare, and when Roy and Fanny alighted from the ’bus and came up the walk he was greatly excited and called loudly to Dot to hurry up as somebody was coming. His welcome was cheery, as of old, as he advanced to meet the young couple.
“Glad to see you; yes, I be. Want a room? For one, or two? just married, ain’t you?” he said, not remembering Roy at all in his flurry.
“No, oh no!” Fanny exclaimed, blushing crimson. “We are not married, and have only stopped over a train to see where father used to live. I am Mark Hilton’s daughter, and I want you to show me his room and his office and everything, and then we are going to the cellar hole and the grave, and everywhere.”
Uncle Zacheus was at first too astonished to speak and stared open-mouthed at the girl whose blue eyes fascinated and confused him, they were so bright and large and clear, and seemed to take in everything at once within their vision. His wife, who had stopped to slip on a clean white apron and smooth her hair before going to receive her guests, now appeared on the scene, and, at sight of her, Uncle Zach recovered his speech so far as to give vent to his usual ejaculation. “Wall, I’ll be dumbed! Yes, I will!” he said, advancing toward Fanny and offering his hand.
For an instant she drew back. She had not expectedwhat she found. Everything was so different from her life that it was hard to associate her father with this place and this queer little man making so free with her. A look from Roy reassured her and she gave her hand to Mr. Taylor, who nearly crushed it before he let go his hold. Roy was explaining now and talking to Mrs. Taylor, who remembered him having been there with his father and mother, and finally succeeded in conveying that fact to her husband’s rather hazy mind.
“Don’t I remember them young folks who was here a few years ago? Wall, I guess I do, and this is their boy and girl? I don’t understand it,” he said; then, as it began to dawn upon him more clearly, he continued, addressing himself to Fanny, “I know now; you are Mark’s girl, but you don’t look like him, unless it’s some trick with your eyes,—nor like your mother, neither. Who are you like, I wonder?”
He was scanning her very closely, and without at all considering what she was saying, Fanny answered him: “Perhaps I am like father’s great-grandmother, ’Tina. Did you ever see her?”
“Bless my soul, child; how old do you take me to be?” and Uncle Zach burst into a hearty laugh. “I’m only eighty-three, and Miss Dalton,—that’s ’Tina,—has been dead a hundred and twenty years; but I believe youarelike her. They say she was han’som’ as a picter, with blue eyes and yaller hair and clingin’ ways.”
Fanny was not particularly pleased to have her resemblance to ’Tina discussed, and Roy, who wished to change the conversation, said abruptly, “Can we go into the office where Mr. Hilton used to spend his time?”
“Certainly, and all over the house, too,” Mr. Taylor replied, leading the way to the office, where Fanny examined everything and sat in every chair and looked overthe register of years ago which was brought out for her to see.
Turning back to the summer when her mother was there her tears fell fast on the yellow page, where traces of her father’s handwriting seemed to bring him near to her. Uncle Zacheus was crying, too. He did a good deal of that in his old age, but he apologized for it to Fanny, saying, “You must excuse me. I always cry when I think of Mark,—the best clerk a man ever had in a hotel, and when I heard he was dead, I cried myself sick. Didn’t I Dot? And Jeff wasn’t mentioned in the notice. He ain’t dead. No, sir! I’m always expectin’ him home. He’ll come before I die. Yes, marm! You want to see where your pa slep’? You shall; yes, marm! but ’tain’t no great of a place. You see them was good days, with the house so full that Mark had to sleep where he could catch it, close to the office; here ’tis.”
He threw open the door of a very small and plainly furnished room, at which Fanny looked askance, mentally comparing it with her own and her mother’s luxurious sleeping apartments. But she wouldn’t flinch, and stroked the pillow and smoothed the patchwork coverlet and tried hard to keep her tears from falling again. Everything was so different from what her father’s surroundings ought to have been. Even the saloon her mother had occupied and the pictures of Dot’s ancestors failed to impress her. Everything was scrupulously clean, but the furniture was old, the carpets were faded, the paper was dingy, and there was everywhere an air from which she shrank. Accustomed to every luxury money could buy, she was an aristocrat to her finger tips, and the Prospect House, as she saw it on that November day, was not at all to her taste.
“Now, let’s go to the ruin and the grave,” she said toRoy, who shrugged his shoulders, thinking he was bound on a rather gruesome business.
“I shall have to ask the way to both places, as I believe they lie in different directions,” he said, and turning to Mr. Taylor he began to make inquiries as to the best way of reaching the Dalton ruin and the cemetery and where to find ’Tina’s grave.
“Want to see that suller?” Uncle Zacheus exclaimed. “Why, all the timbers has fell in and there’s nothin’ left but a hole. I wonder it hain’t been sold afore now, though nobody wants it, there’s so much stuff told to this day about the ghost. They say she carries a candle now. In my opinion she’s enough to do repentin’, without spookin’ round where she used to live. I beg your pardon, Miss Hilton. I forgot I was speakin’ of your grandmarm, who lived more than a hundred years before you,” he said to Fanny, who was pale to her lips.
She knew he meant no harm and tried to smile, but it was a pitiful kind of smile, which made Roy’s heart ache for her.
“Poor little Fan,” he said, when they were out in the street. “This is a hard day for you. Hadn’t you better give up the ruin?”
“No;” she said resolutely. “I want to see what my father called his ancestral hall. It was there he asked mother to marry him. I made her tell me all about it. They sat on an old settee, and there were rats in the room. Oh, this must be where we turn, and there is the curb to the well they threw him in,” she added, as they reached the lane which led to the ruin.
When walking through the village Fanny had kept apart from Roy, but now she clung closely to him as they went down the road till they came to what was once the front entrance to the house. Window frames, doorposts, heavy joists and portions of the roof lay piled together, with the dried remnants of the last summer’s weeds showing among the debris. The day was not cold for November, but the sky was leaden and there was a feeling of rain in the air. The trees were bare and the dead leaves lay in the path, or were piled against the fence and wall. There was no place to sit down and Fanny would not have sat if there had been. She was in a kind of dream, going over in imagination the events of more than a century ago. At last Roy brought her back to reality by kicking at a part of what might have been a pier to the wall and which, giving way, went crashing down into the cellar.
“What a pile of rubbish and what a place for ’Tina to promenade! I don’t wonder she brings a candle. She would certainly break her neck in the dark if it had not already been broken,” he said, without a thought as to how the last of his remark sounded.
But Fanny thought, and with a plaintive cry said to him, “Oh, Roy, how can you joke about my grandmother? You’d feel differently if she were yours.”
“She is mine,” Roy replied, “or is going to be, and what I said about her neck was rather mean. Honestly, though, Fan, you are too morbid over an affair which everybody has forgotten and for which you are in no way responsible. Let’s get away from here.”
“Wait till I’ve looked in the well,” Fanny replied.
She went to the well and leaning over the curb looked down, shuddering at the thought of a human body struggling there and calling for help.
“I am ready now for the grave,” she said, when her investigation of the well was finished.
“Must we go there?” Roy asked, rather dubiously.
“Yes, we must. I owe it to father. They are his peopleand mine,” Fanny answered, and the two retraced their steps through the village to the Prospect House, where Uncle Zach stood on the piazza and said to them, “Dotty’s getting dinner ready for you when you come back from the cemetry. Turn to your right and foller close to the wall clear down to the corner. They’re sunk in some, I guess.”
They found the graves without any difficulty, but, as Mr. Taylor had said, they were sunken and neglected. No one had cared for them since Mark went away. The grass around them was never cut and now lay in dry clumps upon them. The rose bush Mark had planted was dead and a huge burdock stood in its place. The headstones were weather-beaten and discolored, and that of ’Tina had partially fallen over. Fanny went down upon the ground and read the name “Christine Dalton.” There was nothing to tell where she was born or where she died, and in her nervous, morbid state Fanny found herself pitying the woman who had gone to her grave dishonored and despised.
“Nobody ever shed a tear for you, I dare say, but I will,” she said, and sitting upon the stone where her mother had sat with Mark Hilton when he told her the story of ’Tina, she began to cry very low to herself, so that Roy might not hear and laugh at her. “Where is he?” she said, when she had paid sufficient respect to ’Tina, and looking up, missed him from her side.
She saw him at last in the distance standing near the monument of Gen. Allen, and his loud call came to her across the rows of graves which intervened.
“I say, Fan, ar’n’t you some connection to Gen. George Allen, who served in the Revolutionary War, was wounded at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, and did a lot more things, and died regretted by friend and foe?”
She did not answer, and he continued, “Come away from that damp, lonesome place. I got chilly there myself. Come up here and visit another ancestor, who, perhaps, wasn’t any more respectable than those you are mooning over, but he has a stunner for a monument and an obituary as long as my arm.”
Fanny was getting tired and cold, and went up the slope to where Roy was waiting for her.
“Yes, that is mother’s grandfather,” she said, rather cheerfully, as she looked at the monument and read the inscription upon it.
There was some difference between this costly stone and well-kept enclosure where a number of Allens were lying and the sunken, neglected graves under the shadow of the wall, and Fanny felt the difference, and her spirits began to rise in the vicinity of the Allens, who represented the aristocracy of the cemetery. Both belonged to her, the grand monument and the sunken graves, the Allens and the Daltons,—but the Allens were the nearest of kin,—they were like what she was born to and had been accustomed to all her life and she felt a thrill of pride on reading the eulogy on her great-grandfather, who had rendered such service to his country and been so highly esteemed by his fellow-citizens.
“Good blood there, of the bluest kind,” Roy said, teasingly. “It ought to make amends for forty ’Tinas.” Then, as the shrill whistle from the shoe shop came echoing across the fields, he continued: “Twelve o’clock; time we were going, if you have seen enough of your ancestors. I’m getting hungry.”
He was very practical and led Fanny so adroitly from what he called “an ancestral fit” that she was quite herself by the time they reached the Prospect House. Mrs. Taylor had prepared a most appetizing dinner for them,which she served upon a small round table placed near a window and the stove, where they could have both warmth and light. All her best things were on duty and Fanny, who found the dinner excellent, began to change her mind with regard to the hotel. In the summer it must be very pleasant, especially on the broad piazzas, and perhaps she should come again, she said to Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, as she bade them good bye.
“Bless you, child, I hope you will,” Uncle Zacheus replied, holding her hand and trying to keep back his tears which his wife told him he needn’t shed so often unless he had softening of the brain, of which they were signs. “It is good for my old eyes to see young people. There don’t many come since they built the big stone tavern on the Common. I began to run down when Mark went away. A good feller, that, and I cry when I think of him dead. I can’t help it if ’tis sign of soff’nin’. I remember the old days when Mark and your mother and this young man’s father and mother was here and the house was full of young voices and courtin’ and love-makin’ from mornin’ till night. Your young man,—I know he is yourn by the way he looks at you,—has a good face like his father and mother. You’ll be happy with him, and he’ll be happy with you. Your face ain’t like nobody’s, but makes me think of some flower that is ever so sweet and lovely and modest,—I can’t remember the name. ’Tain’t a rose, nor a pink, nor a piney.”
Roy laughed, and suggested, “Lily of the Valley.”
“I swan, that’s it. Lily of the Valley,” Uncle Zach returned, and continued, “I s’pose I must say good bye and God bless you and make you happy. Good bye.”
He turned to leave them, when Fanny took his hand again,—the one her mother had kissed years ago—and pressed her lips upon it just as Helen had done.
“I’ll surely come again,” she said, and then hurried away, for it was getting near train time and they were going to walk.
That kiss was too much for Uncle Zach. Softening of the brain or no softening of the brain he must cry, and he did, while his wife derided him for his weakness.
“I shall cry if I want to,” he said, evincing considerable spirit for him. “I never told you of it, but her mother kissed my hand three and twenty years ago when she went away and I’ve never seen her since, and never shall, nor this little girl, neither. She will come, maybe, but I shan’t be here. I’m wearin’ out. There’s more ails me than sofnin’ of the brain. I’m old,—most eighty-four. I’m slippin’ away from you, Dotty, and from the places I love so well.”
Here his feelings so overcame him that he cried like a child, while his wife, touched by the sight of his tears, tried to comfort him.
“No you ain’t slippin’ away,” she said. “You’ll see ’em again. You are good for ten years more, and so am I, and I am seventy-eight. Wipe up, there’s somebody comin’.”
He wiped up, and under the combined effects of a traveller who wanted dinner and Dotty’s assurance of ten years longer lease of life he was quite cheerful until he heard the rumble of the train which was to take Roy and Fanny away. Then a sense of loneliness came over him again and he kept whispering to himself, “Good bye, good bye, Mark’s gal and Craig’s boy. I shall never see you again. Good bye.”