The Gayworthys: a story of threads and thrums

Front matter

I

Jggl

UK* A^b Commiss ton

Contents

I. Dr. Gatwoetht's Women Folks •••••••••• 7

II. Down among the Company 20

III. Peekin' and Habkin* 29

Chapter I. Doctor Gayworthy's Women Folks

Did you ever eat strawberry short-cake? If not, I am afraid I cannot put you in the way of that delight, further than to tell you that it is a delicious mystery of cuisine, known among certain dwellers in certain hill counties of New England, where the glorious scarlet berry blushes indigenous and profuse all over pasture slopes and mountain-sides at the early outburst of the short and fervid summer. A mystery, the manner of whose compounding is a grand, masonic secret among the skilful and initiated few ; for it is not every farmer's wife or daughter, you must know, who has passed that high degree which entitles her to call her neighbors together for such annual regale and marvel.

I can tell you this only ; that on the June day wherefrom I date this story, in the great, snowy-clean, pewter-shining kitchen of the Gayworthys, solemn preparations were toward ; that on the broad dresser stood a huge pan, heaped high with the glowing fruit, wherefrom the whole house was redolent of rich, wild fragrance ; that beside it, on either hand, waited, in plentiful supply, flour of the whitest, and cream of the yellowest ; and that, somehow, by a deft putting of this and that together, the mighty result was to come.

Huldah Brown stood, bare-armed and waiting, before the whole ; and looked calculatingly upon the gathered material.

" It 's an awful lot, to be sure ; but then they '11 every soul of 'em come, from all pints of the compass ; and when they 're scalt and mashed, they do s'rink down ! "

Huldah' s utterance must stand, in all its horrible ambiguity, as to who or what was to be " scalt and mashed." I may not venture to throw light on one point, lest I trespass, with unwar tanted illumination upon another.

" And there 's a manifest providence, comin' across the chipyard ! "

The " manifest providence " was a sharp-nosed, little, elderly woman, in a striped sun-bonnet, with a three-quart tin pail fall of strawberries, which she changed from one hand to the other, wearily, as she came up to the open door.

" Miss Vorse ! " cried Huldah, from the stair-foot : " I b'lieve my soul, we haint got berries enough, arter all ! "

" You don't think it, Huldah ! " came back, in a sharp explosive consternation.

"Well, I do then!" returned Huldah, "and here's Widder Horke jest comin' along with a pailful. I call that clear luck ! "

"See what she asks for 'em. I'll be down in a minute." Huldah Brown knew very well at which end to present a suggestion. The way to bring people to your own conclusion is to give them, not your last thought, but your first.

Huldah startled her mistress with the selfsame doubt that had startled herself, and then brought forward the " manifest providence."

Up stairs, in the white bedroom, were gathered the four ladies of the house; or, in country parlance, "all Dr. Gayworthy's women-folks." Mrs. Keuben Gair, Mrs. Prudence Vorse, and the two young, unmarried sisters, Joanna and Eebecca.

I mention first Mrs. Keuben'Gair. Because, though she cannot claim the precedence of seniority, she holds the stronger right of paramount importance among the sisters ; and is at this moment the centre and oracle of their group, as they stand, leaning eager faces in between the white festoons of dimity, about the great, old-fashioned, high-posted bedstead, whereon lie unfolded and displayed certain purchases, which the city lady has from time to time been commissioned by letter and pattern to make, and upon whose fashion and quality she enlarges with all the eloquence of a perfect au-f ait-ism.

Mrs. Eeuben Gair came up from Selport two days since, for her yearly summer visit in Hilbury. And so, the Hilbury season has begun, and the Gayworthys are giving their first summer party, and strawberry short-cake is the chief nominal attraction ; while " from all pints of the compass they '11 be sure to come," although there were no short-cake at all ; since Mrs. Keuben will be to be Been, in her new bright green silk, of the freshest Selport style ; and every soul (feminine) will be enabled to go home, having taken mental measurement and specification thereof, and knowing precisely the number of breadths in the skirt, and the width of the seven little " crossway " ruffles that garnish it.

The Gayworthy sisters have made an early toilet, and the house is in early festival trim, and there has been ample time for the production and discussion of the long-expected fineries

Mrs. Vorse, or " sister Prue," is a woman of five and thirty, who looks to have taken life hard. She made " no great of a match " some fifteen years ago, and has come back within the four last past, to keep house for the old doctor, who is her step-father only, — her mother, his second wife, having been a widow with this one child, — while her young half-sisters have been away at school. Her son, Gershom Vorse, then a boy of eight, came with her, and here they still abide, greatly to the comfort of the worthy doctor, whose household Prudence guides in the true spirit of her name, and to the welcome enfranchisement of Joanna and Eebecca ; not altogether, either, to the dissatisfaction of Mrs. Reuben, notwithstanding that the sisterhood between them is one of courtesy and association only ; Mrs. Gair, although the younger, being the child of the first Mrs Gayworthy ; and thus, as she could not help remembering, at times, with a certain touch of jealous restlessness as connected with the present, and an as certain, but halfexamined complacency as regarded the contingencies of the future, " really no relation at all."

" A double family of girls was quite enough in all conscience ; and then, there was Prue's great boy ! " Very clumsy and illjudged, to be sure, this latter circumstance, on the part of Prue.

The world, as I have intimated, had been hard work for Prudence Vorse. Things had not fallen in comfortably or fortunately for her, as they do for some. She had had ten years of trying at life which was not life. If she wanted anything, every nerve was to be strained to get it. The people about her, instead of being aelps to her wishes, were so many obstacles for her to overcome. She had always been heading straight against a stone wall ; the more, because it had never been in her nature .to take any circuitous way Her face had got a hard directness and determination n it, so. Her voice had laid aside its softer modulations, and taken a short, strong, uncompromising tone. Her look, her movement, her whole bearing, had a searchingness, a promptness, a decision, almost aggressive, in them.

Many a woman hardens or sharpens, through the opposing or grinding of unkindly circumstance, who else might have been gentle, restful, round with grace in soul and lineament, through nestling lo^s ingly among loving influences. Ah, well ! God sees !

Mrs. Gair, on the contrary, has been one of those for whom alj 'hings smile ; who have the world on their own terms ; who have always pleasant weather for their pleasant plans, and timely tern pest to make impossible that which they may not care to do. This, at least, was the look her life wore to others ; she herself knew her own unsatisfactions, as we all do ; whether hers were noble or ig. noble discontents may be shown as we shall turn the coming pages.

There are only five years between her and her step- sister, as they stand there together ; the one in her glistening, summer-bright robe, fresh and new as the new leaves of June ; with round, fair face unlined by any perplexity, and hair untouched of autumn, dressed fearlessly in the simple style of the time ; the other in her wellkept dress of not too costly black, having that air of unusedness which a black silk dress, produced only upon state occasions, may keep through whatever vicissitudes of passing fashion and fading gloss,— new always in its owner s idea however shabby it may come to be to eyes of others ; cappy head-dress, that, although it is to the regularly instituted cap what spring eye-glasses are to spectacles, yet is, like them, the beginning of an acknowledgment ; and the face that tells its ten years story as I have hinted ; — who could have believed in but that five years' difference? ,

Joanna and Rebecca are young ; wearing the look that only early girlhood wears, — unwritten of any past, — expectant of all future possibilities. What need to describe them ? Round, laughing, and fair. — the one ; slight, brown, delicate, serious-eyed, — the other ; that is all. The years of their lives — perhaps the pages of this story — shall develop or contradict whatever prophecy you may read in two such faces.

Meanwhile, this sketch of the four is but a daguerreotype, flashed in an instant; the instant wherein Widow Horke still pauses ipon the door-stone, and busy Huldah Brown, who, you may be certain, will not wait there long, yet lingers at the stair-foot.

And sister Prue smooths her new cap that has been brushed a litle awry by the cotton fringes of the bed-hangings, and hastens down stairs with a great white apron tied on over the best black silk, a,nd sleeves turned up, to superintend the strawberry short-cake ; &nd Mrs. Reuben Gair, craving help of her two young sisters, lays shawls and muslins and ribbons and patterns carefully back into the great travelling trunk ; which being locked, she plunges into the far recesses of the dark, narrow closet that runs back between the chambers their full length, lest half Hilbury may get accidental glimpse or confidentially crave full sight of these new summer things that have come from Selport.

" You're tired, I guess? " says Huldah Brown to the widow, as Mrs. Vorse < omes down the stairs

" Tired ! " answers Widow Horke, emphatically. " I'm all ^one ! I don't know where."

DOCTOR GAYWORTHY'S WOMEN FOLKS. H

" Walk in and sit down," says the quick, smart voice of Pru* fence Vorse, " while Huldah measures the berries. Three quarts ? I don't want more 'n two. They 'd be clear wasted. I guess Mrs. Hartshorne '11 take the other. Ten cents ! I have n't paid but six this week past."

So speaking, Mrs. Vorse led the way, pail in hand, across the kitchen toward the dresser, by the end of which, with a voluminous sigh, Widow Horke sunk into a seat.

" They 're wuth that, to me," pleaded the latter, with a low whine, the diminuendo of her sigh.

Mrs. Vorse turned short round, and pushed the pail toward her across the corner of the board.

" Very well, then," was the prompt decision, " the best thing you can do is just to take 'em right home and eat 'em. They won't be so valuable to anybody else, at that rate."

Mrs. florke laughed faintly, as literally at her own expense.

" You 're allers jest so queer," she said. " Well, seein' its you, I 'spose I must let you have 'em."

" Just as you like. Six cents is a fair price." And Mrs. Vorse went over into the pantry, where she kept odd change in a blue mug, and brought back, presently, the twelve cents, and something beside, wrapped in a brown paper.

" That '11 help out your supper," said she, never minding that the plum cake was worth five times the difference in the disputed price of the strawberries. Mrs. Vorse was not stingy. But she had certain rules which she never let herself off from. She might pve away, but she never would pay an exorbitant price. She had an uncompromising sense of justice which carried itself out into the least details.

" Sarah Grair !" she cried sharply, as a child of seven, sashed, pantaletted, and bronze-booted, running in before Mrs. Eeuben, and across to the tempting dresser, straightway " thrust in a thumb and pulled out a plum," from Widow Horke's tin pail, — "if you want strawberries, take 'em out of the pudding dish ! They 're paid for, and those aint ! " and she deliberately put a berry from said pudding-dish back into the pail.

4 'Lord' a massy ! ejaculated the widow, laughing genuinely this time, with a double tickle of Mrs. Prue's oddity and the aroma of plum cake, " if anybody ever heerd the like ! You do hev the eingl'rest notions, Miss Vorse."

" So it seems to me," remarked Mrs. Reuben Gair, as the strawberry picker took up her pail and departed across the chip-yard. "And they don't appear always to be quite consistent ; did n't I hear you beating the poor woman dawn in her price a minute ago ? "

" That 's just where the consistency is," retorted her step-sister. M Right's right, either way. — She may be poor," continued Mrs Prudence, " and she may be a widow woman ; and she may be rheumatic, winters ; and she may live all alone down there by Gibson's clearing ; but that aint any reason why she should put it all on to the price of a mess of strawberries. When I give, I give ; and when I buy, I buy. — Sarah G-air !" she cried again, suddenly, to the small, starched, ribboned, and beruffled creature who by this time was peeping in furtively at the pantry door, within which, on the ample shelves, stood the whole bountiful variety and array of country delicacies that were to sustain the ancient honor of the Gay worthy table, " don't you make up your mind to sponge-cake from the beginning, this time, and eat five pieces, as you did at the Fairbrother's ! "

The child drooped down from head to foot, from her glad, eager attitude, in a moment ; and a shame that only rebuked childhood knows, dreaming of nought more shameful than the present fault whereof it stands convicted, rushed over her, hot and scarlet.

" Mrs. Fairbrother asked me," she murmured faintly, " and ma won't let me eat plum cake."

"If Mrs. Fairbrother asked you five times, three times you should have said, 'No, I thank you.' "

" But," persisted the culprit, more confidently now, feeling suddenly to have the great Angel, Truth, upon her side, " she asked me if I wanted some more : and I did ! "

Aunt Prue was silent.

" You should have said 'No, I thank you/ all the same," admonished the mother. " It was n't polite."

11 Polite ! " cried aunt Prue, aside. " Better tell her not to be greedy."

" And what do you suppose all those people think of you now ? "

Mrs. Gair flung this last shaft, — a great battle-axe of world'sopinion against a mere gnat of transgression — and then the two grown women forgot the whole matter in five minutes, and the child crept out, and sat upon the door-stone, and felt her small pride crushed, and her character stained forever.

The strawberry party, at least it seemed so at this moment, was all spoiled now.

So, in our clumsy recklessness, we deal with souls !

Only, the dock always grows beside the nettle. It is God who takes care of that. Aunt Rebecca, in her white dress, with her pure, gentle young face, came out to the door-stone and stood behind Sarah.

The pleasant south wind was blowing through the great maples •hat stood in a row between the road and the chip-yard ; the scent

»f early roses came up from the low flower-garden, to which a white gate, and a few rough stone steps led in and down straight opposite the door. Further on, beside the drive that wound with sudden slope around the garden to the right, toward the great barns, stood the long trough, hewn from a tree-trunk, and holding clear, cool water that flowed incessantly into it, through a wooden duct of halved and hollowed saplings, leading fiom a spring in the hillside away up behind the house. Here a yoke of tired cattle were drinking, — the ploughboy standing patiently beside ; close by the great creatures' heads, upon the trough-rim, perched fearless chickens, dipping their yellow bills ; and underneath and around, in the merry, unfailing puddles, splashed and quackled the ducks. The bright June sun, genial, not scorching, hung in the afternoon sky. There were birds in the maple trees, and the very grass about the door-stone was full of happy life. Out upon all, through troubled eyes, looked a little, tender human soul that had felt a pain.

"What is it, Say?"

Say turned round at the gentle voice, and nestled her face against the folds of the white dress.

"I ate all sponge-cake for my supper at Mrs. Fairbrother's," she murmured, like a penitent at confessional, whispering into priestly ears the avowal of a deadly sin.

" And that was ? " said Aunt Eebecca.

"Greedy. Horrid." So far she spoke from sentence of others, out of her shame ; and then something in herself rebelled at her own words, and she added, with sudden defiance — " But I don't gee why. There was plenty of it. And they asked me."

" Plenty for you, dear. But if everybody else had wanted all sponge-cake? "

Sarah saw the selfishness then, and there was no answer for her to make. She dropped, wretchedly, back into her self-contempt again.

"I wish," said the child, impulsively, " that I was a chicken. Only a little, yellow, peeping chicken. Like those down there."

" Like that one, running away to hide under the fence, with a barleycorn in his mouth ? "

" Oh dear! " This soul that had been born into the world, and had had its tiny experience of the evil, might chafe in vain. She could see nowhere her escape, not even into chickenhood, had tat been possible.

" Not that way," said Rebecca, more to her own thought than umembering the child. "Only toward God."

" We must ask, Say, to have the selfishness taken from us.

A.nd we must try to give up. We can't turn into chickens, even if that would do. But we can grow — to be angels. This one little fault may make you better all your life. And," she added, with a delicate heart-instinct, " nobody will ever remember it ! "

Say's face changed. She had passed through, in these few moments — sensitive children do, in a strange undreamed-of way, in these their little experiences — an epitome of the grand, spiritual experience of human life, and of the world. All things great are in all things little. Law comes with its rebuke, — its fruitless shame for what is past ; Gospel with its word of mercy for what has been, its hope for better things to be. Aunt Prue was condemnation. Aunt Rebecca was redemption. The child loved the saintly young girl, at that moment, as men love their Redeemer.

She might overlive it, then ; even this terrible misdemeanor of the sponge-cake. "Nobody would remember it." The words were a balm like that which comes to us grown sinners with God's words — "I have blotted out thy transgressions; I will not remember thy sins."

Say slid her little hand into Aunt Rebecca's. " Let me stay by you at tea-time," she whispered. '• Why, Auntie ! " she cried, suddenly, with altered tone, as for the first time she lifted her eyes fully to the kind face that looked down upon her. " You had your hair in those pretty puffs. Where are they? "

"I brushed them back again," said Aunt Rebecca, quietly.

This young girl of nineteen had renounced her vanity s x She had seen in her glass that her face was very pretty, set in its glossy frame of smoothly banded locks; and, lest she should remember it to her spiritual hurt, — lest she should so, thinking of self, forget her Lord, — she had put them back, and chosen to wear only her usual and unnoted look to-day.

Moreover, the Eeverend Gordon King was to be of the strawberry party.

I do not say that puffs are sinful. I do not say that God forbids a simple joy in the beauty that He gives. I only tell you what this young creature, true to her own conception of duty, did.

Rebecca Gayworthy was growing into the character that primi. tive New England influei ces, and almost these alone, develop from certain natures. Out of these by-places where the Puritan air still lingers — out of these Bethlchems, slow of growth, perhaps, but the less tainted, come souls that rule. That walk sternly iver self, — that choose the thorns, — that take up their cross Jaily, giving up their own work to do that of the Lord Christ Taught from infancy that no Church or outside ark is to sav*

DOCTOR GAYWORTIIY'S WOMEN FOLKS. 15

them ; that no cabalism of words said over them is to bring them necessarily into the kingdom of heaven ; admonished of the spiritual birth, — warned of the spiritual death; set searching, each soul for itself, what this birth may mean, — how salvation from this death be won ; the thoughtful, earnest spirit wrestles and reaches till it lays hold of sainthood.

A fugue of voices from within called Rebecca at this moment Flour and cream and fruit had been carried away. The hour had come for laying the long table in the great front kitchen, the only room in the farm-house which might afford space for the expected guests at a real comfortable, sit-down, tea-drinking, whereat alone might strawberry short-cake be fittingly enjoyed. At other times, the Gayworthy ladies knew well how to order and preside over the stateliness of the formal " handing-round" in the best parlor. To-night was high festival, where mere gentility took second place.

The wide fireplace was garnished with greenery, and the flames that ordinarily poured upward through its capacious outlet were kindling unwontedly in the out-room, where Huldah Brown was already mixing and rolling, and would shortly be " scalding and mashing," — high priestess of the mighty mystery that she was. The dresser held now the wide tray laden with rare old china cups and saucers and plates; tea-pots of the same, tall, slender, quaint, long-spouted, high-handled; little pitchers with the "long ears,5' that shall forever be memorialized while little human receptacles with the like appendages continue to be ; all these, and many of them ; for in the days and regions of notable personal housewifery, and neat-handed Huldahs helping, grandmother's treasures of porcelain gathered and came down, with neither nick nor breakage, to second and third generations. Alas, for the days that have been, and shall be no more forever !

The monstrous linen-chest, that stood in the great " kitchen shamber " overhead, had delivered up its most voluminuus naperies to shroud the extended board whose construction for the occasion, since no guests shall have need to spy, we, neither, need Dry into nor explain. There was a sweet, nameless, delicate fragrance in the air, as the pure white folds were shaken out, such as is breathed only from old presses, and quaint bureaus, *nd great chests like this that had held these, wherein women of the olden time, who set store by their fair linens and delicate laces, and silken heirlooms of taffeta and brocade, kept daintily, with bits of musk, and sprigs of lavender, such wealth of house and wardrobe.

Rebecca was summoned to assist in the spreading and placing An hour hence, and the early country-party would have assembled.

16 THE GAYWORTIirS.

Sarah Gair stayed outside, waiting to see what Gershoni Vorse, coming up toward her from the orchard gate, with one of the farm men, might be going to do.

11 Eben is going to feed the pigs now, Say ! Come out into the shed-chamber, and we'll call 'em in! "

Say sprang down from the door-stone at that, eagerly ; and skipped, in a dainty way, turning out the toes of her new bronze boots, over the bit of grass-plot that lay between her and the wide open doors of the great woodshed.

Gerstom came up, with a certain contempt in the tread of his stout country shoes.

" I forgot you were all dressed up, and toes in position," said he.

Say had before this offered to teach him the small beginnings that she herself had made in the sublime art which includes " Deportment."

11 That isn't a bikof matter," returned the straightforward little lady, not accepting the sarcasm, and picking her way among the scattered chips and litter along the shed, with a continued, conscious pleasure, — the pleasure of using pretty things, — in each separate planting of the trim, golden-gleaming little feet. " It'~s as nice out in my play-parlor, as it is in Aunt Prue's best room. Besides, my dollies want to see me, by this time."

The shed-chamber was a clean, floored room, rough-beamed and small-windowed, at the further end of the building. One window opened on the yard, toward the house, and the other overlooked the pig-pen, and pleasanter things beyond. Through the middle of the floor came up two square, box-like constructions — open conduits to the troughs beneath.

And this " play-parlor," as Say called it, was a really pleasant ylace. To a child, a bit of Paradise, roughly boarded in. Here, in any weather, Say could come, and amuse herself with her grand china-closet of broken bits, — luckily for the children, common ware did get fractured now and then, — ranged along the ledges in ■>ne corner ; decorate the brown, unplaned walls with boughs of green and wild flowers or gay, coarse garden-blossoms that she had " leave to pick ;" admonish and discipline, dress and array, her indefinite family of corn-cob children, and. above all, when everything else sated, stand at the " pig-pen " window, and look out over the green meadow stretching towards the bit of oak woods that skirted the opposite boundary of the wet land with its j;recn mystery, which nobody but the pigs ever penetrated, and ♦diithcr these happy animals daily betook themselves through a 'ittlc wicket-gate left open from their board and lodging place

The call from this window, in a high, peculiar monotone, " pig-pig-pig-pig-pig, " would bring, first one, then another, and at last the whole drove, peeping out from the oak-grove, and scampering across the meadow to their roomy, and not unclean quarters within the wicket ; where, at suitable intervals, buckets-full, not of common refuse, but of what to swinish appreciation, must have seenied the most sumptuous white soup, — a boiling of vegetables added to the surplus of the dairy, — rich buttermilk, or sweet whey, or plentiful skimmed milk, better than humans in the cities pay for, — was poured, a luscious flood, down the square conduits above mentioned. I think pigs were never so happy, so well lodged, so bountifully and delicately fed, as these of Grandpapa Gayworthy ! What with the liberty abroad, and the dainties at home, it was the very poetry of pork.

At any rate,- Sarah Gair was hardly ever more happy than in luring them out from their green, shady covert where the sweet acorns grew, and watching their eagerness as they scrambled along the meadow-path, and into their dining-parlor, and tumbled up confusedly about the troughs ; lifting their small, keen eyes, like many a creature of higher organization, with a very assured expectancy of good gifts due, according to precedent, from above.

" Ebon — ezer ! " cried Say, from the window, as the man entered the chamber behind them, and set his pail beside the great wooden spouts. " The gate's blown to! The pigs can^ get in ! Make haste, — there's grandpa driving down the yard ! "

" An' I guess he'll want his horse took out, afore I come back again. So you an' the pigs can wait. It '11 be sometime, too, I should n't wonder. You can't expect a man that carries a name as long as that, to stir round quite so spry as a Jack-be-nimble ! "

Eben had so his sly revenge for Say's mischievous giving of the whole title, which, it was well known in the household, he very decidedly disliked. He left the pails as they were, beside the spouts, and went down to the yard below. As he set the wicket back, Dr. Gayworthy really did call to him. Meanwhile the children at the window called the pigs.

" How funny they look," said. Say, " with their great ears flapping, and their queer, flat noses going, so ! " and she turned her ■ips, very drolly, inside out and up and down against nose and ^hin, and tried to work them, pig-fashion.

" There they come, tumbling and grunting," as the creature?

crossed their outer court and disappeared beneath the building

'And now, I wish Eb would come/' 20