Summerwild

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American Women Writers

Professor of English

Chapter I. A Friend In Deed

OnE mild, lovely morning in autumn a man in the garb of the sect called Friends came off the . ferryboat from Hoboken to New York. He had a clean-shaved, pleasant face, was past middle age, and walked leisurely across town as if he was moved by no such a spirit of haste as urged the crowd about him. He carried a large basket on one arm and in the other hand an enormous bunch of asters, dahlias, chrysanthemums and other fall flowers. His gravity was undisturbed when street arabs, sniffing a vinous fragrance, held saucy noses to his big basket, but his blue eyes twinkled. On one boy, thin and lame, he bestowed a huge bunch of ripe grapes ; and when a clamor began over his flowers he picked blossom after blossom from his supply. Before he reached Broadway one could trace his

6 Summerwetd., way by a line of bright flowers and smiling children. There the basket began to prove heavy, for the day was warm, so the man stepped on a car going up town.

The first man by whom he was jostled proved to be an acquaintance, who exclaimed: ‘ Why, David Fenton! I have not seen you since you went out of the leather business down in the Swamp. You got rich and retired, I suppose ; you Quakers do prosper when other men go to the wall.”

“T retired, though I was far from being what thee would call rich. I was not well, and knew air and exercise were what I needed,” replied David, helping a woman with a baby to a seat.

“Where do you live now?”

“In New Jersey ; a pretty country settlement. I can reach town in half an hour; but good-day to thee. I get off at Twenty-sixth Street. It was scarcely worth while getting on; but at sixty-five one’s legs can tire.”

David slipped the basket off his lap again to his arm and started toward the river eastward until he could see the gleam of the water and the passing boats. He came next to the great hospital, turned in at the gateway, smiled at the civil policeman who knew him, and made his way to a ward where several patients claimed his attention. To the nurse in charge he delivered his fruit, but gave the flowers himself to any who cared for them. |

The nurse began telling him how thoughtful he was, but he gently silenced her, saying: “I have business in town, and ’tis but little out of my way and a pleasure.”

Evidently he came often, for he asked her of several patients and listened with interest to her reports. She asked suddenly: ‘“ You live in the country, do you not?”

‘We call it so, though 'tis really the raveledout edge of the city.”

“Your wife does not want a strong, good servant, I suppose? I wish I knew of some one who does. I would not recommend one out of a hundred of the women here for service in a good family, but this one is different. She came tothe city from Maine, with (so she says) excellent references. She was ill with pneumonia in a respectable boarding-house down town. There was no one to take proper care of her, and when she could be moved she was sent here. She had a relapse, and came near death. The day after she left the boarding-house took fire. The landlady was keeping her trunk for her, and it was burned with all her papers and clothes. She got well two months ago, but she isso sensible and hard-working we have kept her to help. She does not like the surroundings, and now wants a place to live in the country. She is peculiar, but honest asthe day islong. I have offered to write to Maine for her and get new credentials, but she says she is too proud to tell that she has been ina charity hospital. It is foolish, but she says she had such fine ideas of getting ahead in the city that old friends who did not like her to come will laugh.”

David had patiently waited for the loquacious little woman in blue seersucker to conclude, then he said, “I will ask Martha Cobb, with whom I board ; she may know of some one who needs a woman like this. I will send word to thee.”

‘‘ Here she comes now,” said the nurse; “her name is Dorothy Hakes.”

David looked and then carried the remainder of his flowers to an old man, one to whom Dorothy was taking a bowl of broth. She was as homely a creature, in a wholesome way, as could well be imagined, having prominent light blue eyes, high cheek bones, lank dark hair cut short in her neck, and a width of smile atoned for by fine white teeth. David noted the clean calico

AF veend in Deed. 9 dress she wore and the deft way she lifted the helpless man into a position where he could drink with comfort. Then she espied the flowers, and exclaimed: “Oh, Daddy Hooper! ain’t them chrysanthemums as gay as a streak of sunshine ? Now ye wont have the blues to-day looking at them. You will get out of here yet to pick posies for your little grandchildren. They must be mighty cute according to your story.”

The old man’s dull face brightened. He glanced from Dorothy to David, and mumbled through his toothless gums: “She knows how to coddle old folks, she do. She had a sick old father herself, and I'll wager she made him comfortable. I tell her she'd orter have on a pretty little cap herself and be a regular nurse.”

“Oh, wouldn't I like for to be just that,” she returned, answering David’s glance, “but to be a regular anything in this world takes edication, and I neverhad none. Our old minister down home, says he, ‘ All you've got, Dorothy Hakes, is muscle, common sense and considerable grit.’ He told me to ‘add tothem the fear of the Lord and the memory of a long line o’ prayin’ ancestors’ and I'd pull through somehow. At least he meant that, only he expressed it eleganter.”

“The fear of the Lord is truly the beginning

1O Summerwid.

of wisdom, and all things (that may mean troubles) work together for good to them that love God,” said David, in his singularly pleasant voice.

“T ain't half so good as I orter be—as them ancestors, for instance. How I did wish some of them had been posterity instead of ancestors when I was fetched here to be sick ; then they’d a been on hand, maybe; but I met with heaps of kindness from strangers ; nobody couldn't be kinder than these nurses. Yes, indeed, I’d like to be one, but they must know more than I to begin. I can cook, scrub, wash, and iron, and then my accomplishments are all told, except talking. Par used to say I wasa master hand for gab.”

David calmly studied her as she proceeded to make things tidy about old Daddy Hooper, then his eyes wandered up and down the ward. Four or five women from the other wards were cleaning the floors. They were someway different from Dorothy. He was believer enough in heredity to conclude ancestors had considerable to do with it. It being a difference in grit, common sense, and the chance of pulling through.

He asked Dorothy a few direct questions and then said, “TI will ask friends to find thee a place

A Friend tn Deed. II to work outside the city. It may be I can help thee,” then, to avoid thanks, he moved on to give his last flower to a boy in a cot near. His face wore a fatherly expression as he talked a while to the little fellow. He told him a story of the war, of a sick soldier, and the boy's face brightened wonderfully.

A few more errands of this sort and David was again in the street. He took a Broadway car, this time going to Wall Street ; there, for an hour or more, he attended to business, but this was ended at noon. Walking up the crowded thoroughfare, with his serene face in marked contrast to the eager, worried, tired visages of many ‘world’s people” whom he met, David was asking himself, ‘“‘ What next ?”

He had an impression there was more to be done in the city, and just then coming up by Trinity Church, he entered the yard. More than once he had received a “ leading” while musing quietly in that most beautiful old place. He never went within the sanctuary to pray, but seated on some stone, green with moss, or crumbling with age, he enjoyed intensely the peace of earth, trees, blue sky and twittering birds, the softened roar of Broadway outside. To-day he spent an hour in such employment, resting, thinking, or spelling out ancient epitaphs. Suddenly he exclaimed: ‘‘ Of a surety ‘tis John Welles I must see! The poor boy is ina strait, I hear.”

Once in the street he delayed by an old woman's fruit-stand to eat a peach and a pear ; then, his simple lunch ended, he crossed to an avenue car, and again made his way up-town.

As he went he tried to recall what the details were regarding the Welles family troubles, but could not do so clearly. At a point nearest St. Mark’s Place he got out of the car and walked toward Second Avenue, coming at last to a large, once elegant house, fashionably situated. It was now stranded far from the fashion and wealth that, sweeping up-town, had left it among shops, factories, and boarding-houses. David rang the bell, having first seen that the silver door-plate bearing the name “Joseph Welles” was still in place.

He stood several minutes until it seemed that no one was coming ; then the door was opened by a tiny old lady, whose wrinkled face was very careworn, until, recognizing her visitor, she exclaimed : |

“Oh, David Fenton! How glad I am to see your face again! My old friends are all dead, or so I was just thinking ten minutes ago.”

“Don’t think it, Hannah Welles. See how God’s sunshine is filling all space to-day. These friends of thine are somewhere in His light, just as we all are in His care.”

He was by this time following her into the parlor. She pulled up a shade; then, wiping quick-coming tears from her eyes, she sat down to entertain him. She was a pretty little driedup creature of seventy, with dainty hands and a nervous manner, but even without her silk gown and ruffle of old lace you would know she was an old-time lady.

‘“T heard rumors that thy brother Joseph had been troubled of late both in health and estate,”

“Yes, poor brother! I must take you up to see him, but you will find him greatly changed.”

“T would like thee to tell me as fully as is agreeable to thee what has come to him.”

Glad of a sympathetic friend, the old lady poured into his ears the whole story, which, condensed, amounted to this: David knew that Joseph Welles had in the slow, old-fashioned ’ way accumulated wealth. He was “close,” but a man of integrity, averse to anything newfangled, kind to the poor and beloved in his family. His wife was dead, but a sister of his own had for twenty years been at the head of his home. This same little woman talking to David he knew had been a mother to Joseph's sons, John and Clarence. As the old man grew older he took into his business a younger partner—one of the sort who must make haste to be rich. Then came the old story of treachery, fraud following speculation. A bank failed, the partner fled, and now Joseph Welles was as poor as when he started in life over fifty year before. The failure was in March; in April he fell senseless from his chair, was taken to his bed, and would probably only go from there to his grave.

« And John and Clarence? A man has not lost all with two such props,” suggested David.

‘‘Oh, no,” the boys were ‘everything now.” Clarence had a place as cashier with a friend of his father’s. John, who never took to business, and expected to devote himself to literature, John was—but here the old lady became rather vague, and could not say what John was doing. She added incidentally that he was the support of the family now, though, no doubt, |

Clarence would some day be richer than his father. He (Clarence) was exceedingly ambitious, and ‘‘so smart, you know.”

David smiled, remembering years back how the handsome little scapegrace managed the old lady. Fearing at last that he was to hear a repetition of facts just made plain, he asked to see his old friend. Consenting at once, Miss Welles led him from the parlor, furnished according to ideas of grandeur prevalent forty years ago, up to a large back room on the second floor, where lay the wreck of his former acute and active friend, now a querulous, forgetful old man, most rambling in his talk.

‘Keep up thy courage, brother,” said David. “What if thy money is gone, thou art soon going too, and thy better treasure, I trust, awaits thee in Heaven. If thy sons are the fine fellows I think, they can take care of themselves and be the better for it. Our fathers did not start us-in life with full houses, else we might have spent their contents like fools.”

The old man (who looked not unlike a mummy, with his brown, wrinkled face sunken in the pillow) nodded childishly, and then began to scold because John had not come in.

“If the fellow does nothing but scribble,” he mipht ‘as well do it at home and so be at hand” when he wanted him.

“He will be here soon, Joseph,” said his sister. “You know he comes before four every day.”

“How is your family—got any boys? Oh, I forgot,” mumbled Mr. Welles. ‘‘ You were going to marry pretty Nanny Miller, and she died a week before the day; so you never .

The little old sister interposed with a glass of ice-water, and having drank, Mr. Welles talked of something else until David rose to go. At the foot of the long staircase he was bidding Miss Welles good-day when the door opened, letting in a flood of afternoon light, and with it John Welles.

Greeting him, David Fenton went again to the parlor fora few words, and Aunt Hannah vanished.

David was not prepared for the change a few years had made in John, although wherein was the difference he could scarcely have told. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow, with a fine, clear complexion, dark hair, very good features, and a face smooth except for a dark moustache. But the charm of his personality was half in his large, brown eyes—clear, honest, speaking eyes —and for the rest in a hearty simpleness of manner not unlike David's own.

John had been a great favorite with David Fenton in the past, and he himself had been the boy’s father confessor in more than one case. Clarence, though younger, had been an adept in getting himself and John into “scrapes,” escaping himself and leaving John to bear the consequences—not because John was stupid, but because he would never betray his brother. To-day David's “ How is it with thee, John?” had the old sympathetic ring, and soon he was hearing more of the young man’s life than any one else knew. The property was all gone save the house that sheltered them. His father was helpless, his aunt totally dependent for means of support. Clarence—well, he had been used to spending money freely ; he had elegant tastes, and his friends were fashionable and wealthy. It had been a great blow to him when he was recalled from a long, leisurely European tour to learn that his father was no longer able to honor his large cheques. He had gone at once into the position provided, and had business ability. So much John said of his brother and no more, until David, suspecting the truth, bluntly asked, ‘‘ Does Clarence help thee carry on this household ?”

“Oh, yes, of course, in a measure,”

“In a just measure? Surely he has a good salary if cashier for the Wintertons. I know the firm. And what is thy occupation ?”

Leaving the first question unanswered, John replied: ‘I am doing journalistic work, for which I flatter myself I have an aptitude. It pays me tolerably well. You know I wasted five years in Europe after I came out of college —or, no, it was not wasted. My experiences and my note-books serve me now as material for use in my work. It occurred to me to-day that I would add to what I make by another trade and turn pedagogue. Father frets so that I must be home a few hours each day. He is contented if Iam under the roof. Now, I might fit boys for college or coach backward ones. I remember father paid an old professor a good round sum for getting Clarence up in Latin once.”

“Did he stay up?” asked David, and then shook with silent merriment at a series of pranks that ended in Clarence leaving college for the foreign tour. The Quaker often laughed thus; one never heard; but only saw this fun.

‘Do you know any boys wanting a tutor? If you do, I will take it very kindly if you will send them to me. You know I was something of a grind in college.”

David knew he took the prize for classics, and promised to keep his request in mind.

Just then a shrill, fretful voice was heard from above asking :

“Hannah! has not John come yet? I want to be lifted to the sofa.”

With a word or two more David departed, having learned much, but far from the whole of matters in the Welles family.

It was still sunshine everywhere, but if the city was pleasant, the country was still more so to our Friend. His errands done, he turned cheerfully homeward, Family, he had none, having, after the brief love story hinted at, never married, but he lived content with an odd old neighbor and his spinster daughter. His own house, a wormy old mansion, was rented to several widows and poor families. It was suspected that David's rents were collected once in ninety-nine years, and the pay-day would scarcely come in their lifetimes.

Chapter II. Miss Hogarth

Miss EvizaABETH HocartH stood by her library window watching something.

It will not take long to draw her picture: very tall and slight, fine brown hair a little waving at the forehead and neck, gray eyes, and features that singularly were not beautiful, the whole face white and pure. Her dress was rich; not studiedly free from ornament, but apparently lacking it through negligence. On the sofa from which she had arisen was a heap of silks, wool, and fancy-work, tumbled among open books; one great volume had fallen down and now formed the pedestal for a huge tortoise-shell cat who had made an animated statue of himself thereon.

“Mother!” said Miss Hogarth suddenly, “I am going over to Father Cobb’s to see David Fenton. He told father that he wanted to see me for something.”

A voice from the shadow responded: ‘ You 20)

had better stay in! You will get chills and fever; all the folks down by the creek are _ sick !”

Elizabeth knew better than to argue the question. She inquired if her mother’s headache was not better, and then donning her hat and shaw] went her way. It led her into a thick wood skirting the creek. The air was fragrant with the resinous odor of pine-trees, which meeting overhead made her walk as if under an arbor. The grass grew in the ruts of the unfrequented road. On one side were shadowy wood depths, silent save for the fall of acorns on the dry leaves, or the snap of a brittle twig under the scampering feet of a squirrel.

On the left, the woods sloped down to the creek. And now as Elizabeth saunters along under the pine-trees, let us tell you a little about her. She had been a child of unaccountable freaks and seemingly contradictory traits of character: wild, wilful, tender, fanciful, intensely curious, always conscientious, and never thinking or acting in the lines of thought preconceived for her by others. As a young girl she would apply herself to study for months; then again she would feed her imagination upon history and poetry. Turing of this she turned ascetic, ana-

22 Summerweilda.

lyzed her inner self; studied the motives of all about her; and was accused by her parents of ' inclination toward fasts, penances, and perusals of theological works. Indeed there was in Elizabeth a mysticism, which other elements being absent would make of her a sort of Madame Guyon, and there was too an ideal zeal in her, a lofty, unselfish earnestness, which belongs to the reformer—possibly the fanatic. About this time a young student fell in love with Elizabeth, and in his first, his one tender epistle, likened her to the “Pensive nun, devout and pure, - Sober, steadfast, and demure.”

She refused the youth kindly ; yet with somewhat the feeling she would have had in dislodging acaterpillar from her robe. Caterpillars had a place in creation, a right to be what they were ; but no right to place their soft, disgusting selves too close to her. This episode appeared to startle her out of her contemplative and somewhat morbid life. She surprised her methodical father by a request to travel and “see the world.” She saw as much of it as she chose, which after all was not much; then she returned to refit her apartments more tastefully and to fill her shelves _ with books whose contents were like Greek to the father, and whose title-pages were unknown to his wife. About this time five more suitors appeared ; a wild young man who courted Elizabeth after the latest style of young American dandyism ; but who was in some way surprised into sentiment and sense on the day she refused him. He even naively likened her to his good grandmother, who had named him after a Puri tan preacher. Next came an old man with a large family; a clerk, who misspelled his loveletters; an honest farmer-boy, and a gentleman ‘“unexceptionable in every particular ’’"—the neighbors said. With every one of these Elizabeth experienced, in a greater or less degree, the sensations before mentioned as awakened by the caterpillar on her robe. She came to the conclusion that she was not emotional. She said to herself : ‘‘ It is my conviction that I am incapable of any such passion as forms the subjectmatter of romantic literature. I shall with great serenity live a single life. The family is without doubt the woman’s kingdom—where, unmarried, shall I find mine? I donot quite know; yet sometimes I feel life in every finger-tip, and enthusiasm in every thought. I am sanguine, conscious of a reserve power. I see on every side those whom I can help, and that by which I

24 Summerwrtd.

can help myself. I have hope that I shall be able to do some work which shall be mine in the sense that no one else can do it.”

But it is time that we let Miss Hogarth reach her destination. Father Cobb’s house stood on the spot chosen by a Dutch ancestor. It had received with each generation repairs and additions until its gable ends stood toward all points of the compass. As Elizabeth approached, she found the old man leaning on the gate, his little red wig on the top of a post, and the sun shining down on his bald pate.

“Are you taking a sun bath?” she inquired gayly.

“Yes, Martha says I get out here to ripen. It sort o’ takes stiffness out o’ my bones and gives me a meller feelin’ all over. But come in! come in!”

Elizabeth followed the fat little old fellow up the walk bordered with flower beds into the homely little parlor, whose furniture was very old and quaint. In one corner stood an enormous clock, the wonder of Father Cobb’s childhood, the pride and admiration of all his days. Around and around it had spun the thread of his existence, until so interwoven was it with his life that it seemed a part of himself. When a baby he had lain hour after hour in his wooden cradle and watched the pendulum swing back and forth ; and in after years, when he was in any way excited, one eye would move from side to side with something of the same motion. His favorite position was astride a chair, with back to the fire watching the pendulum.

‘How its yer mar, Elizabeth? Her health is about as slimsy as mine. We old folks are a gittin’ along, a gittin’ along in years. I find the rheumatiz a regular grinder on human nater.”

Miss Hogarth threw back her shawl and entered into an account of her mother’s symptoms. Soon the other member of the family appeared, the spinster daughter, sharp of tongue and skilful of hand, and to her also was Elizabeth most amiable. Martha found her visitor so pleasing she forgot her kitchen duties, until a smell of burned potatoes sent her to seek out the cause ; then several of the old man’s stories were patiently listened to before Elizabeth inquired for David Fenton.

“He will be home soon,” said Martha, returning from the kitchen and sitting down to knit a blue-yarn sock. ‘‘He went to the city this morning, but it’s time the train was in. He took some of the nicest grapes you ever saw—took

‘em to a sick friend, I believe; somebody he spent last Sunday with. Here he comes now!” and she glanced out of the window at a drab figure coming up the walk.

The old dog Sancho sprang up from the fireplace, with a bark that changed to one long wag of his whole, ugly yellow body, as soon as he discovered the Quaker.

“Tam right glad to see thee, Elizabeth,” said David, when he had patted the dog’s head and ensconced himself in the big leather chair opposite Father Cobb’s; “I have a good work for thee to think of doing.”

“I presume you have,” said Martha, drawing out a knitting-needle and thrusting it into her peg of back hair. “ You do all the good you can, and set other folks at the same business.”

“Wall now, sis,” said Father Cobb (he always called the spinster sis), “ain't it Scriptur to stir one another up to good works? We're lots of us lively enough on the fust of the injunction. It jibes right in with our carnal naters to poke our neighbors up; but I will venture to bet ’tain’t half of the time to good works we do it; it’s oftener to make what Dr. Watts calls ‘children of one famzlee’ fall out and scratch and fight.”

‘‘T don’t know what you do to set the neighbors fighting, but if anybody pokes them up around here, I ain’t the poker,” said Martha coolly, and without a thought of disrespect.

Father Cobb polished off his head with his silk handkerchief and put on his wig, which he had picked off the gate-post and put in his pocket ; then he prepared to hear what David had to say to the young girl.

‘“T have a friend in town, Elizabeth, a most excellent man and a fine scholar. He supports himself by literary work; but times are hard now and he has been a little pressed to get along in comfort, or what he cares for most, to keep his family in comfort. He could have had last year a good position and salary as a professor in a college, but he refused it, not foreseeing trouble ‘that has come since. Now——’”

‘Take your old nose out of my work-box, Sancho! If you bite that beeswax, I'll cuff your ugly ears,” said Martha so energetically that David paused to await results and forgot what he was saying. Elizabeth tried to prompt him by suggesting, ‘‘ Yes, father said you had something you wished to tell me.”

‘Oh, that was about a young woman looking for a situation.”

“Don’t have anything to do with her, Elizabeth,” said Martha; ‘he found her in a charity hospital. You would have to fumigate her for weeks,”

David Fenton paused for these “asides,” his face solemnity itself; but his eyes sparkled as he watched Martha wind yarn with vicious velocity. “I was turning.it over in my own mind,” he continued, “how I could help him, when he suggested something himself. He said he wished he could find a few scholars to study with him, Greek, Latin, mathematics, or history. He could go to them, or they could come to him, according to choice. In this way he could add to his income. I immediately said to myself, perhaps Elizabeth Hogarth and I could find him one, two, or three pupils. Now, if thee knowest any young boys preparing for college, or any wanting a tutor, | am sure thee will remember my friend. Here is his address; have it with thee if by chance, or by a little effort, thee find a student or more for him.”