Sybil Knox; or, Home again, a story of to-day

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

CHAPTER I. "ITS it really the last time ? "

'It is really the last time," said Mrs. Knox, "and you cannot think how hard it is to say so, for you have no such experience."

The place was one of the handsome rooms of the United States Minister in Rome ; the time was as one of his evening parties came to a close. The people were Mrs. Sybil Knox and John Coudert. She had made her headquarters in Rome now for four winters, and was about to return to America after an absence of seven years. He had been in Rome twice — for the Easter festivities of two years, that is. To be candid with the reader, he had come the second time because, in all his work and all his play of the summer and autumn, his mind had run back to this charming woman, and he was bold enough to try again to find what was the secret of the fascination.

"I think," said he, " that our people here, the Americans — tlie colony, as they call them on the other side — had relied upon you as one of the permanent people, the fixtures. You will be sadly missed by such people ; and by the other kind, such people as I, who have tasted your hospitality."

"You are all very good," said she, hardly smiling, indeed almost sadly. " It is a hard business, as all good-byes are. But I do not like to have people tell me they thought I was going to stay here I am sure I have always flown my colors. There is my father's Loyal Legion badge, now ; you see I wear it to-night, as I always do. And whenever there has been a chance I have soared with the spread eagle."

"Oh," said Mr. Coudert, "no one thinks anybody is going to stay here more than one more winter."

" And then next year never comes, any more than to-morrow comes. But I — I almost went last year." Then she paused, and said, rather resolutely, "I wish you would say to anybody and everybody that, while I like Italy and have enjoyed it to the full, I have stayed here really by accident. First— well, you do not know — it seemed every year as if Mr. Knox were, getting better, and he always thought one more year would establish him. Then, when it was all over, my mother came ; then, you know, my sisters came. But I have always been beating my wings against the cage, though it is so large and so pretty. I shall let the girls go to Naples with your party, and when you come back the last strap will be tight around the last balla, and I shall be waiting on the steps of the palace. I shall not suffer them to come in to look for a lost handkerchief. ' Over the seas and far away,' " and now she succeeded in smiling.

"Are you quite so sure you will like it at first ? " said he doubtfully.

"Can you say that? Everybody else has said that, and I am fairly angry. As if I were a girl when I came away ! If anybody knows America I do."

"Very likely," said Mr. Coudert. "But nobody does know America. The New Engenders hardly know New England, and they do not know what a ranch is, or a prairie. They believe in nothing ten miles beyond New York. As poor Lord Salisbury said, the scale of the maps is so small. The New Yorkers think they know New York, and do not knew even that. Far less do they know the South, or what is to come from the Pacific shore. The other day I saw in a ' leading newspaper ' a great head-line about ' Smoky Pittsburg.' The man did not know that for four or five years the sky above Pittsburg has been like the sky above the Campagna. Indeed, if you know America to-day you do not know it to-morrow."

" That is why one wants to live there," said she proudly, and looking, as he thought, more charming than ever in her enthusiasm. "And why one wants to be there before one is quite hoary with age. You see I must go soon."

"You will find it hard to choose another Rome," persisted he.

" They tell me there are sixteen on the list

SYBIL KNOX.

of post-offices," she answered,-- laughing, "besides Roma and New Rome. But I shall not try any of these. I have no choice to make between cities."

"If you had, you would choose "Washington. After Florence and Geneva, Washington is the most charming city in the world."

"Seville?" asked she; "or what's the matter with Damascus? "

"They are not in America," said he, catching her own tone of the minute before. "But if you are not going to any of these, where is it ? You do not mean to be a ranchera, or the Lady Bountiful of a bonanza farm in Dakota?"

" No, I shall not, though I have thought of that and thought seriously. For I should like to be of use somewhere. And really, Mr. Coudert, I am not quite a fool. I do know enough to — well, I can draw a cheque and I can sign a receipt for my dividends. Before my father died he called me his confidential clerk. An4 I am one of the women who would really like something to do."

He told her that he remembered she said something of the sort before,, one day, when they had all made a party to Tivoli together. He knew in his own heart that it was this sort of ability to enter into affairs, as one who was of them and could be in them, which gave something of the charm which so many men found in her bright talk. And, at the same time, he shuddered when he compared her mentally with two or three " women of affairs" whom he had seen in his own country or in England, trying to show men that they are not fools, and hardly succeeding — the women who move " to lay on the table," or to " refer to a committee of the whole."

"Life is life," he said. "Of course the whole thing is comparative. I have put as much work on the slicing the section of the cell of a fern, and mounting it on a slide, as Mr. Gladstone puts into a treaty with Russia. And the good God cares as truly for the one as He does for the other. I suppose the Dakota bonanza farm does not much astonish Him."

It was John Coudert's willingness to talk seriously which had interested Mrs. Knox in him the first time she saw him ; and which, indeed, distinguished him from the average of travelling Americans who stopped to do Rome, before they went on to do Pompeii and Sorrento. She was not unused to that habit of talk of his, and she knew it was genuine.

"You have it precisely," said she. "My principality is larger than the Prince of Monaco's, I believe. It is smaller than a Dakota wheat farm. It is ' two hundred acres of woodland, be the same more or less ; two hundred acres of pasture-land, be the same more or less ; and one hundred and five acres of arable land, or meadow, be the same more or less ; together with ^the homestead and barns and offices.' " All this she drawled out with admirable Yankee intonation, as if she were about to offer it for sale at auction. " If it were described in an English novel they would say it was 'all in a ring fence.' For the truth is that it was a military grant made to one Gershom Wood and his brother, after Queen Anne's War ; and so it came down to my father. I could have told you the boundaries once, they are so simple : ' Beginning at a stake and stones on the south side of Powder Horn Hill,' and so on.

"The homestead is to be my palazzo. The arable land will give me my duty, and the woodland will be my burden. You must all pray for me when you go to St. Peter's, that I may not die land-poor."

"I am not afraid of that," said he, without restraining a tone of admiration. " Somebody in the next town will develop a factory of hairsprings for watches; and then you will show that the charcoal from red oak is the only charcoal for their temper, and when I next see you you will be a bonanza queen in Madison Avenue, who has developed a nabobry from unknown qualities of carbon. No fear of being land-poor. But "

" Always ' but,' Mr. Coudert."

"But," he went on, "I have lived in such a place. I have seen my mother fight with beasts in such a place." He was even bitter now. " Have you really asked yourself what it is to be alone in the centre of six hundred and forty acres, ' be the same more or less,' — to meet no one for a month who does not

SYLIL KNOX. 9

ask you if Mrs. Barrett would not be wiser if she turned the skirt of her frock, and who does not wonder why the doctor paints his buggy green when it was black before % "

"And why not?" she replied a little fiercely. " The Countess yonder was discussing with me just now the shade of the Princess's velvet, whether ashes of roses was as becoming to her as Parma violet. Gossip is gossip. I am very tired of it here, and I do not believe it would be worse at Washington, or Cranberry Centre. At all events, I mean to try."

She was so eager, even so angry, as she spoke, that John Coudert knew he had struck home, and that he had touched the raw spot of which she herself was conscious. For himself, he believed that the eternal gossip which he satirized had brought his mother to her grave. He knew perfectly well that the reason why his sisters and he had agreed, with one consent, to sell [their fine old home, was that no one of them could abide the daily drizzle of that gossip, its summer showers, or its winter hail. Because his sisters were afraid of it, they were spending winters in what he called disreputable attics in Paris — which were really rooms in elegant French pensions — and they sometimes spent summers, taking their chances of the gossip, at Elberon or Long Branch. He had not probed Mrs. Knox's wound without some memory of other wounds, and of what had come of them.

And so it was, in less than a fortnight from the time when she had been talking with John Coudert at the Minister's, Mrs. Knox found herself on the after-deck of the fast steamer Tropic, on her fourth day out from Queenstown, on ber way to America. This time she was not talking with John Coudert, but with another pleasant man, Judge Kendrick of Wisconsin. His wife, poor soul ! was lying in her long chair, wrapped with rugs, speechless, and almost without sight or hearing, as she courageously bore her half-recovery from seasickness. Mrs. Knox' s young people were all below in their wretchedness. For herself, she was as well as ever, was happy that the thing was one-third over, and glad to renew her acquaintance with the Kendricks, which had begun a year or two before, on the slope of Vesuvius.

" Yes, the world is a small world, in a way," said she, and then, hardly expecting to be answered, "it is in a way a very big one."

" So small," said he, "that when you meet a man once you may be sure that you will meet him again — yes, or a woman. I met you at Vesuvius, ergo I meet you on the Tropic."

" I like to believe it," said she, " and let us hope that the spell may last after you have looked in on Milwaukee and I on my woodlots. But I suppose there is in the notion a little of the Caesar's boat element. It is like my Aunt Huldah's aphorism."

"I know Csesar and his boat, but I had not the pleasure of Aunt Huldah's acquaintance."

" No \ What a pity ! I thought everybody knew Aunt Huldah. Aunt Huldah said she had observed that if she lived through March she always lived through the year. It was like Caesar's saying that his boats never upset. He was in a leaky one on the Ides of March."

" Yes, he was ; but Aunt Huldah does not laugh me out of my certainty that all things are double, as it says in the Bible "

" If you buy it in Oxford."

"Yes, or at the Queen's printing-house. Tell me, if all things are not double, why I put down a letter from General Knox to George Washington the minute before I came on deck to meet you."

" Or why I ate one of Kendrick's biscuits in my stateroom before I came up to meet you."

"Excellent!" he said. "I confess I was astonished that you remembered our names so perfectly. It cannot be that you will succeed so well in New York. How long since you have seen the Battery ? ' '

" Do not tell any one, but it is seven years — seven years and more. And sometimes it seems a thousand," and she sighed.

" Are you prepared to be interviewed ? Five boats lying at quarantine, with the reporters of the Argus, the Tribune, the World, the Herald, and the Ring-Tailed Roarer, to inquire how Mrs. Knox bore the passage, on what train she will leave, and whether she is favorably impressed by America."

"I shall shelter myself behind you and Mrs. Kendrick. They will be writing as fast as they can the answers to the questions, whether you approve of the original package decision, whether you stop at the Saratoga convention before going home, and whether you mean to offer yourself for the Presidency, or to wait for a nomination."

"No," he said, with pretended sadness, "I shall not be interviewed. I am one of themselves. Foxes do not talk to foxes, nor newspaper men to newspaper men."

"No? That is new."

"As true as new. Mr. Blaine would have been President long ago had he not began life as an editor. As it was, not an editor between thirty and seventy but said in his heart, ' Jim Blaine President ? I might as well be President myself.' "

" How natural that is ! And how fortunate for women that they do not have to think of being President. To tell you the honest truth,

Judge Kendrick, there are a thousand things in which women's talk and their thoughts differ from men's."

"I have always said so," said he, "but I have never heard but two women say it. You are one, and the other was twenty years old ; I was very much in love with her."

"Mrs. Kendrick, your husband is telling tales about you."

" No, my dear Mrs. Knox, I hear him. He is talking about Bertha Angevine. It is not safe for him to tell how much he was in love with me."

" What insight she has," said her husband, in a stage whisper, "when I gave her such a mere hint to guess from. It was Bertha Angevine, long since Mrs. Dr. Abernethy, or Louis, or Camomile. I said that men had very little chance to think things out. It was only at church, when the sermon was long, that a man could carry out a line of thought. She said she had noticed that, but that women had lots of time, when they were sewing."

"It was true," said Mrs. Knox. "It was true— then. But now, alas ! — now, they do

STBIL KNOX. 15

not sew much. They ' put out their sewing,' and it is done by steam or electricity, and they "

" Go to weddings, my friend Haliburton tells me."

"Do what?"

" Haliburton says that if his church is opened for the wedding of a little mouse of a button-hole maker, married to the third assistant of the fourth clerk of the bottle-washer — two people who have not lived a week in Boston, and are married in church only because they hate the woman who keeps her boarding-house — Haliburton says that even at such a wedding as that, though it were Monday morning at eleven o'clock, his large church would be crowded. And Halibur ton's inference is that the average American woman, after ' her education is finished,' has nothing in the world to do."

"I don't know," said Mrs. Knox doubtfully, after a moment; "I should have said that the trouble was the other way". The American girls," after they have left school, have seemed to me to be ' on a drive,' as the lumbermen say. I have not seen them in their homes for ten years. Bat they have talked to me when they were in Rome. What with their lessons, and causes, and Saturday clubs, and their charities, and their voting for the school committee, and their helping dear papa, and helping dear mamma, and at the same time going to Newport, and maintaining their relations to society — germans in the evening, and going to whist classes in the morning — I should not think they had much time to go to any weddings but their own."

" All I can say is," he replied, " that Tuttle told me the other day that all the street-car connection of the West End of Boston was deranged because a pretty girl was married at Trinity Church, and that things did not come to their bearings till an hour after Dr. Brooks blessed them. Perhaps that is Boston. I always heard that Boston was founded by church people, only I thought it was of another kind."

But Mrs. Knox did not listen ; so soon as she could speak without interrupting him, she pointed with her closed parasol at the cold sun, which was making a wretched effort to peer through the fog. "Why in the world is it there ? Why is the sun in the west at ten o'clock in the morning?"

Sure enough the sun was on the starboard quarter. The ship was — not aiming at it, but going that way, somewhat to the left of the sun.

"Is it the sun? It must be the sun," said the Judge. But a queer, creeping feeling came over them all, as if for once the sun in these foggy days had risen in the west. He ran forward to find an officer and inquire. He came back blank enough. Something had happened to the screw, or its connections. If was not thought wise to go on. The ship happened to be governed by a captain, and not by a caucus. She had, therefore, been headed back to Ireland without consultation of the passengers. They would be notified in good time. Meanwhile this information had been given to the Judge, because there was no reason why it should be hidden.

"A week more !" groaned poor Mrs. Kendrick.

"A week more ! " said her husband, in a tone quite as abject ; " and what will become of the meeting of the Full Bench, I am sure I do not know."

"A week more!" said Mrs. Knox, more wretched than either. Here was her brother waiting for her in New York ; here were twenty appointments with trustees— nay, here were invitations which she had given, and which had been accepted by friends, at the reestablished home. "A week more ! " she said dismally. "The bottom is out from my tub. All my calculations are out of order."

"And what will they say when the Tropic does not arrive ? " said poor Mrs. Kendrick.

All the same, all parties had to accept the universe, whether they wanted to or no. In this case very few of them wanted to. There were one or two waifs of fortune who were glad to have the Tropic Steamship Company feed them for eighteen days instead of nine, for the same sum of money. There were two pair of young lovers who thought moonlight on deck "perfectly splendid," and who, in a false astronomy, supposed that,'*while they were at sea, the moon would not change. For the rest, it seemed impossible to adapt themselves to the new conditions. But it was not impossible, and somehow or other they adapted.

Pour days brought them back to Queenstown Harbor, and, as it was ordered, as they came to anchor in the bay, and the first officer went up with his tidings, the Antarctic, of the same line with them, came in, anchored opposite them, and sent for her American mails. She was on her outward voyage. A boat was at once sent across to her to know what chances there were for passage. But the reply was unpromising. The captain would give up his stateroom to any party of four. There were two berths for two men in staterooms only half peopled. " That is the whole ! " This was the doleful reply of the surgeon. With absolute promptness, savoring of the western side of the Mississippi, Judge Kendrick claimed the captain's stateroom before any one else had begun to think about it. Two travelling salesmen took the two berths in the same way. The Kendrick girls ran downstairs to tell their mother, and to pack their stateroom luggage.

All else, as they knew, must come by another vessel. Before the tug with the mails had delivered them, the boat was ready, and the Judge' s party were bidding good-bye. As Mrs. Kendrick took her place, somewhat shaken by the descent of the landing-ladder, she found, to her amazement, Mrs. Knox seated there already.

"Not a word," whispered Mrs. Knox. "I am a second-class passenger. Never fear. In the second class there is always room for one more."

A half-sovereign in one place and a sovereign in another had settled all this while the others were packing. Mrs. Knox was sitting on the extensor which held her worldly goods, and trusted in the officers of the Tropic that the rest would follow. She ran upon the deck of the Antarctic with the Kendricks, and disappeared.

She was wholly right in her surmise. For a -second-class passenger, as for one in the steerage, there is always room for one more.

Chapter II

A FIVE-DOLLAR gold piece, well bestowed - in the hands of the woman steward who had the oversight of second-class women, gave to Mrs. Knox a quiet berth, where her neighbor overhead was a frightened German woman, who became, as we shall see, her fast friend. For the rest, if it were not for the name second-class, which nobody likes, she was as well off as is the average traveller on any steamer of any line. She could not order a Welsh rarebit at midnight. But she would not have ordered one had she been a first-class voyager. The table was not very good, nor would it have been very good under any circumstances. The bed was clean, thanks to the five-dollar piece, and, as Mrs. Knox observed, it was a little larger than hers had been in the stateroom of the Tropic. The people whom she met at meals were all women, and all spoke German. As she

spoke German, too, this did not in itself so much matter. In fact, she was tired to death by the rush of the last week in Europe ; she knew she should spend fifteen hours of each twenty-four flat on her back, and, as it happened in this particular case, she had more air and bigger quarters in this part of her enterprise than she had before.

It would have been quite impossible, as she well knew, to make this* second-class passage tolerable for an instant in the eyes of any of her large party excepting herself. Indeed, there were too many of them for any movement which required such promptness. But, more than this, her nieces looked forward to the voyage home as one more lottery in the experience of travel. It would not be fair to say that they looked forward to a week of mild or exciting flirtation, after their seasickness was over, but, at the very least, it was — well, let us say, an untried adventure : who there might be, whom one might meet, with a clean deck, long walks, and chances, by the hour, of talk in extension chairs. It was easy enough for Mrs. Knox to charge the escort men with the removal of her trunks in the hold, which, of course, could not be found now. For herself, her stateroom "plunder" must answer her purposes till all should come together again in America.

Bertha Berlitz, the frightened German woman in the upper berth, who had been terribly seasick already in the little experience of the sea since she sailed, was going to America in that sad search for, a lost husband which repeats itself so often, in the romance of two continents. The sympathy and experienced kindness of Sybil Knox worked their inevitable way with the forlorn woman, and on the second day she was persuaded to sip a part of a cup of tea, to take a few spoonfuls of oatmeal porridge, and, at last, to try her feet again upon the deck. The experiment was a joy to her little girl, a nice, jolly little madchen of six or seven years, who had vanquished her seasickness, child-fashion, in a couple of hours, and had been won over to absolute confidence in Sybil Knox by that lady's skill in creating paper dolls, and by the dramatic interest of the conversations which she made them maintain with one another. The mother was, of course, grateful for such kindness, to her little girl, though she was more shy than words can describe ; she yielded slowly to absolute kindness, and told to her new friend her history and her hopes.

It had been a pure love-match, that was clear enough. And, until he left for America, there had been no break, there was no rival, there was no falsehood. - A handsome boy and a pretty girl in a village in the Hartz Mountains — all just like a scene in an opera, or_a story by Grimm. He was a forester in the government employ, but he was of the kind of forester which is at the bottom, and not the kind which is at the top. That distinction reigns in forestry as in all the other vocations of feudal countries. That is to say, there is one sort of people who do the hard work and have poor pay. And there is another sort of people, who wear a little or much gold lace on their clothes, who ride about on horses, tell the other people what to do, though they don't know so much about it, and have good pay. After their dear little Rudolph died Gerhard had said he would have no more of it.

He said the boy was the same as if he had starved to death. This was not true, as poor Bertha explained volubly. But it was true that Rudolph had not had the same food or the same comfort as he would have had were he a baron's son. Nay, the baron's son, a sickly boy, was alive when Bertha told all this sad tale. Any way, Rudolph's death had made Gerhard unhappy and discontented. He said he knew all there was to be known about forests, and that a new country where there are forests was the place for him. So he left her and Clarchen with the grandfather and grandmother, and with two hundred thalers he went to America to make ready for them to come.

And there had been letters — five letters — all which poor, half-widowed Bertha had, wrapped up in a piece of parchment, and then slipped all together in a red-flannel bag. Not on the first, nor the second, nor the third day, but before the voyage was over, these precious letters were entrusted to Mrs. Knox, that she might, if she could, solve the mystery why there were no more.

Alas! there is always one solution, when there are no more, in such cases — the solution which, of course, poor Bertha would not state in words, nor, indeed, would Sybil Knox. First, there were two letters from New Bergen, a little place not far from New York, where he had found work, at what seemed marvellous wages, as a gardener. Then there was one from New Pfalz, in the State of New York, more inland. Then he had worked his way to Rochester, and was at work in a nursery. There were enthusiastic stories of the peaches and pears and plums which Clarchen was to eat when she came over. There was no hint of declining interest. There was nothing from which that "other woman" could be suspected, who is so apt to appear when an ocean has come into a drama. But the second Rochester letter spoke of an engagement to go to the West, with yet another nurseryman. She was still to write to Rochester, for he would be back when her letter came. Then there was one letter written on the train, and dated "Liberty" — just a line to say that he was well. Of this letter, alas, the cover and postmark had been lost. And these were all.