A picked company; a novel

Front matter

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Boston Public Library

Part I

I. The Northeast Chamber 3

II. Two Daughters of one Race 18

III. Colonization Sunday 31

TV. The First Volunteer 41

V. For the Young . . . • 55

VI. A Sale and an Engagement 60

VII. The Umbrella 68

VIII. Between Two Stools 75

IX. The Covenant 83

X. Opportunity 90

XI. Bradburn's Education 98

XII. Captain of the Road 105

XIII. The Wagons at Night 113

XIV. Silence 120

XV. The First Admonition 126

XVI. The Second Admonition 134

XVII. An Apostolic Judgment 146

XVIII. The Parson's Son 152

XIX. Mutiny 161

XX. A Sure Remedy 171

XXI. "A Thimbleful of Love" 174

XXII. Thinking it Over 187

XXIII. A Scoffer's Sermon 193

XXIV. The Divide 199 vi CONTENTS

XXV. The Better Man 207

XXVI. Enlightenment on Both Sides .... 213

XXVII. The Camp of Waiting 224

XXVIII. The Women's Part 232

XXIX. The Men's Part 241

XXX. The First Offering 251

Part II

I. Hail and Farewell! 257

II. The Truth as it is Told 264

III. Still with Us 270

IV. The Wasters 273

V. The Builders 282

VI. The Gamblers 294

VII. Corn and Cabbages 307

VIII. The Dead Fawn 311

IX. The Delegate 323

X. The Wife of His Bosom 327

XL Symptoms of a Change 332

XII. The Empty Bedroom 336

XIII. Running Water 343

XIV. Across the Border 355

XV. Having reached the Bay 360

XVI. A Mail from the South 371

XVII. The Greatest Gamble of All .... 380

XVIII. The Graves 393

XIX. A Wedding-gift Delayed 401

XX. The Same Day 408

PART I

Chapter I

The storm had increased steadily toward nightfall, though Mr. Hannington had found it far from pleasant driving that afternoon, over country roads to an out-of-town funeral. He might have made the weather or the distance an excuse for not going, or that he had seen so little in late years of the old neighbor just deceased, but these were reasons that with Alvin worked the other way. " I guess I am full as equal to it as Mr. Yardley," he answered his wife's concern on his behalf. It had ended in his taking the minister with him, and as they plodded home together under the same buggy-top through the rain, he opened the subject of a decision that he and Silence had come to, which would add new material for church membership and another girl to the young people's circle of Dugdale.

" It will be quite a different element in your household," Mr. Yardley observed, speaking of the young relative who was expected.

"Yes," said Alvin, "she won't be altogether our kind, more than likely, but that may be some advantage on both

sides."

It was a way of looking at it characteristic of Alvin ; the minister could have nothing to say in disapproval, though he would have preferred to keep the Hannington family as lie had always known it, and he had a stake of his own in the social life of Dugdale in the person of a handsome, headstrong son.

It was now rather late in the evening : Alvin had finished his paper, folded his spectacles and the curtains of his consciousness and settled himself for a doze. Mrs. Hannington looked at him and at the clock ; there were matters awaiting discussion that with difficulty she had postponed till he should have done with his reading, but she had not reckoned on a bedtime nap. Kepression at this moment had given a slight set to her features which did injustice to their general benignity and the pleasure she was taking in her work ; finishing the buttonholes in one of Barbie's new nightgowns which the girl had left in her mother's lap with a smile and a wheedling kiss when she went off to read "Philothea" alone by the dining-room fire. Barbie could make beautiful buttonholes herself, but preferred to charm them out of her mother ; she had the fullest confidence in the weak points in that woman's character. Most mothers are strong in theory, but we think that many were infirm in practice, even in Hampshire County, seventy years ago.

Suddenly, out of his specious slumbers, Mr. Hannington brought forth a live remark, with evident deliberation back of it.

" I should think this house was big enough for the girl to have a room to herself."

Silence, at no loss to grasp an allusion to the very subject her own thoughts were busy with, answered as one prepared at all points, " It would have to be a room as good as Barbie's."

" It would have to be comfortable," Mr. Hannington assented ; but this did not settle the matter to a housekeeper's mind entirely.

" I have thought," she considered, " of giving her the northwest chamber ; but then we should n't have any spare bedroom."

" How about that little room next the linen closet?"

" For a best bedroom ! " — withering pause to allow the sarcasm to sink into the male mind.

" For one of the girls."

Mrs. Hannington put off her spectacles at once: "For which one, father? Barbie has had that northeast chamber since she was ten years old, and chose it herself, though I thought she would freeze to death up there vinters. She always loved the room and I think she has well earned it."

" Who says she has n't ? I did n't mean you should turn Barbie out." Mr. Hannington rose from the small of his back and sat forward, neglecting to straighten his vest. In domestic argument this was counter to his wife's laying aside her spectacles.

" Would you want me to put Stella Mutrie into a room not half so good as our own child's ? The English live very handsomely in Jamaica," she subjoined, spoiling her point.

"It's nothing to us how they live! Any room in this house ought to be good enough for any one of my father's grandchildren. There was no such finicking and fussing when we were eleven to stow away, not counting company."

Silence accepted the rebuke ; she knew when she had done injustice to her side of an argument. She was merely visualizing that little room next the linen closet as it would appear to Stella Mutrie coming from those houses in the tropics, with mahogany floors like dark mirrors under foot, and courts full of flowers, and negro servants to fan you at your meals. Mary Hannington had written of these things glowingly, when she first went to the West Indies, exiled because of her cough. The doctors said she could not live North another winter.

"If I don't mistake," Alvin continued, warming into reminiscence, " the girl's own mother, my sister Mary, used to have that little room when she was about sixteen to twenty ; before she began to be delicate. The room was n't much to boast of, but she used to come out of it Sunday mornings dressed for church, looking like a queen lily."

" Poor lily," said Mrs. Hannington softly.

Her husband had a way of forgetting how long ago it was that she entered his family. The lily was at their wedding in her first bloom. She remembered the sad years of her decline ; she had been one of the intimate group gathered to say farewell, when her father took her by stage to Boston. To this day she could recall the girl's white face as she looked back at her home. It had seemed the end for her, but it turned out to be only another beginning ; whether worth what it cost or not, Mary's legacy to her family, the child of her sudden, tropical marriage, the orphan niece who was coming to live with them, would prove.

Husband and wife shared the same misgivings with regard to this event. They were ready to say " better she had died at home"; better that her asphodel lilies had not turned into orange flowers. They were afraid of the late Captain Mutrie ; of what he might have done with Mary's child in the years of his careless widowerhood, after her mother's death.

The Hanningtons were village gentry of a plain, old-fashioned type, but they knew enough about English society in Kingston to be aware that Mary could not have met her merchant captain in any of the houses her father's introductions had opened to her. Inquiries about him personally caused a great reserve whenever the marriage was mentioned. It was done, however; the doomed girl had made her last cast for life and happiness. She lived to see the curls on her baby's head — thick like its father's, golden like her own — grow long enough to brush a pair of sturdy shoulders that had not come from the New England side.

The Hanningtons were hardy stock, but Dr. Hannington in middle life had married beautiful Barbara Ilsey, of a more aristocratic, attenuated line. She bore him many babes in that northeast chamber, — which her grandchild and namesake throve in, loving its great summer mornings and thrilled by its winter gales. But Madam Ilsey declared that sunless bedroom, that chamber of the winds, had shortened her daughter's life and cost her the children she lost. It was amazing that a doctor should not have better protected his own — the old saying of shoemakers' children and blacksmiths' horses! Madam Ilsey was a spoiled, excitable woman who often spoke the truth, but seldom altogether truly.

Captain Mutrie had been away on one of his voyages when his wife died ; certain requests she left him in writing, referring to their child, were mislaid in a slack West Indian household and never met his eyes. Very likely it would have made no difference.

No more was heard for many years of the little West Iudian offshoot. Dr. Hannington died. He had provided against future complications, so he excused himself, by giving his daughter Mary, on her marriage, cash value for what he deemed her share in his estate. The money he raised on a mortgage. It was done in wrath : " Take it," his act said, " and run through with it as you have with your life." Neither of his girls had married to suit him, but the voung-est, who had done this thing; almost at the door of heaven, had shocked his heart. He had a doctor's opinion of those days as to her right to marry at all. The wild experiment would soon be over, for her ; let her use what he had to give her and use it up. He was not providing for the children of Captain Mutrie.

" That branch might as well be lopped off," said the hurt, despondent old man.

The Hanningtons were scattered now, like other big families in narrowing circumstances. Alvin was the last of his name in Dugdale : the least clever, least polished, but most dependable of the doctor's sons, — on his back were loaded the burdens which the old man could not carry beyond the grave.

Alvin had loved his youngest sister. The lopped branch never ceased to haunt him. Once, taking counsel of his wife, he wrote to Captain Mutrie, asking after his niece who must be now of an age to begin her schooling : could her relatives in Dugdale give him any information or help in regard to New England schools, in case he might be thinking of sending the little girl North for her education, and a more bracing climate?. (The respect of a New Englander for his climate is rather like a small boy's for the master's rod : he will run his risks and take his chances, but if caught he can't complain : he knew the rod was there ; and he courts the same risks and runs the same chances next time.)

Mr. Hannington's carefully considered letter obtained no answer. It may have miscarried, or Captain Mutrie, having nothing to say in response, had been too lazy to say it.

Great was Alvin's surprise, years later, when his niece herself addressed him, on paper perfumed and broadly edged with black. She informed him of her father's recent death in phrases a grown person would use. Reckoning back, he placed her age at eighteen. In almost the next sentence she entered upon a business matter, explained in a letter enclosed which had been found among her father's papers, in his handwriting, — either a copy or unsent. As it referred to a family matter, she had chosen to write to her uncle direct, she said, rather than consult a solicitor. Mr. Hannington smiled as he ran his eye over the enclosure.

"Is 'solicitor' English for lawyer?' Silence asked, taking alarm at the word, connected with family affairs.

" Probably her father did consult a lawyer and that 's why he never sent his own letter. He 'd heard of some wharf property sold in Boston after Edward's death, when his estate was settled up ; he thought if he had died single, there might be a share coming to Mary's daughter. It was supposing a good many things that did n't happen to be true, as I guess he found out."

" Well, that 's easily set right. The poor girl will be disappointed, though. Does she think the money would be withheld?"

" I guess she did n't think much about it. She says she 1 knows nothing of business ' " — Alvin consulted the letter — " but she does pretty well when it comes to asking for what she wants. ' If any money from any source should be found to be awaiting my mother's claim," he read on, "'may it not be sent to her daughter directly? My father's sudden death left his affairs in confusion. The law is very slow. I have no means to help myself with at present, — am living on my friends, in fact, — ■ and one hasn't so many after misfortunes come, I find.'

" That 's a poor sort of wisdom at her age, but she may be entitled to it," Alvin owned with charity. " Well, mother, — what do you think ? This is the branch father said had better be lopped off. Shall I send her a hundred dollars and let it go at that ? " He sat revolving his thumbs and waited with a quiet smile.

Silence looked at him absently. "Your father was a wise man in most things, but I expect he must have been considerably incensed when he said that. I 've seen a tree branch cut off so close to the house it belonged to, that it fell on the roof and broke a skylight."

They laughed together at the homely allegory. " You think that branch my father cut off has struck somewhere near us do you? Well ; won't a hundred be enough ?"

" In money, it 's enough, and more than you can spare."

" Well, come ! say what you think. I can't ask the girl to come and stay with us if you don't feel to want her."

" I guess the roof won't fall in if she should come," Silence answered dryly.

Each waited for the other to take the responsibility for a step which might well be supposed to have long consequences. They did not like the tone of their niece's letter, but neither did they wish to prejudge her in her unhappy situation. It hurt their pride that one of the family should be so placed.

"What's the use of asking me?" Mrs. Hannington

THE NORTHEAST CHAMBER n concluded. " You '11 do it anyway, and I don't see, myself, how you can get out of it."

As the invitation had been an act of duty, so the acceptance was plainly one of necessity. It came after Ion"- delay, after the money was spent, perhaps, and other expedients tried in vain. Mr. Hannington forwarded a second remittance, rather closely figured out (times were tight with him that year), for his niece's passage North, and in three days he expected to go to Boston to meet her.

They talked until after midnight, but were both awake and thinking long before the slow, November dawn showed the objects in their room. The choreman overhead in the attic chamber gat himself up and into his boots with large clumping sounds as of cattle rising in their stalls. They heard his accustomed knock on Jane's door (Jane-of-allwork) ; then he continued downstairs, still on hoofs apparently, like a domesticated faun. The noise did not disturb them.

It was Mr. Hannington who brought up the bedroom question again, his wife grimly amused at his puzzled efforts to improve upon a plan she had resigned herself to with such deep, inward dissatisfaction.

" Why can't you take the room back of the parlor for your spare bedroom ? "

" Because, in the first place," she answered tartly, "it is n't to spare ! "

" I mean, of course, next spring."

" That 's mother's room ! As long as she is in it, I 'd rather not discuss what we are going to do with it as soon as she is gone."

The doctor's old study, a charming room, with a fireplace and its own outside door opening on a sunny porch, had been given to Mrs. Trumbull, to save her the stairs. Grandmother was, as Barbie said, a rather " stoutsome" old lady. This was her second visit East, since she moved out to Buffalo, following the fortunes of her son William and his family; not only had she followed them, she had materially pushed them with money of her own to give William a start. Now, Buffalo was building out to meet his land ; he promised to become a rich man. In doing so much for William, Mrs. Trumbull had always felt guilty towards her daughter, her favorite child. She could not put it into words ; Silence would have been wounded if her mother had apologized : " It 's his only chance ; he '11 never do anything here ; I will make it up to you if he succeeds." She made it up, by loving best the child she was parted from. She boasted a good deal, however, before her son-in-law, of her business-like hardness with William : " Oh, I don't let him keep me waiting ! he pays me good interest right on the nail." She had means to dress well and to travel, as her Eastern visits showed ; but now the years began to count. She was seventy-six, a wonderful old lady of her age ; but there was no likelihood that she would ever make the trip again : hence her daughter's sensitiveness on the point of looking to its close, in a matter of house convenience. It was more than that, she knew, but the subject had nagged her enough already.

" We shall need a good spare room this winter," she explained less petulantly. " I want to ask one or two of mother's Valley friends to visit us while she is here. Old people can't be tucked around anywhere."

" I still say," — Mr. Hannington inserted a middle finger in either loop of his boot-leg, — "I still think you ought not to put those girls together in the same bedroom unless Barbie wants it so. What does she say ? "

" I don't know what Barbie wants. She does n't say anything."

" Much the best way ! Well, I don't seem to be helping much," he yielded.

His wife took up the word brightly, to comfort him.

" I '11 tell you how you can help ! Go down to Harvey's and pick out a good-sized air-tight stove to put up in the girls' room."

" The * girls' room ' ! " Barbie echoed.

She had been waiting in the dining-room for breakfast when her mother entered, speaking. The little smile on her face remained fixed, abashed by a flood of crimson. It was not the custom of this family to kiss all around when they met each morning, but Mrs. Hannington went over directly to her daughter and kissed her, without a word.

After worship, grace was said, and Barbie burst in fluently : " Are you going to put up a stove in — in our room — when Stella comes ? "

"I think we must," said Mrs. Hannington. "She'll feel the change very much this first winter ; her mother was delicate."

" The wind must be tempered to the shorn lamb," said the deacon ; he meant it — not piously, though the commonplace jarred upon his women.

" Why can't we use the old fireplace ? Is it bricked up, father?"

" No," he replied ; Mrs. Hannington adding that stoves heat up so much quicker and save firewood. Barbie let the subject drop.

Harvey's men came next day and left the stove and a sheet-iron fireboard and their tracks on the stair carpet ; it was snowing outside. After them Barbie rushed up to face disaster. What she saw first was her rejected fireboard leaned against the passage wall on its way up-garret. It was only a square pine back, faced with wallpaper of an old English design, a landscape supposed to be in China: till this moment she had not known how she cared for the old thing ; nor, till she regarded the new one in its place, did she realize how it had suited its frame, the white-painted mantelpiece and the soft, dull pinks of her faded ingrain carpet. It had been the dropcurtain, never lifted, of those unseen dramas on stormy nights performed by the wind in dialogue with that deep-chested old tragedian, the East Chimney. In pauses the chimney would make you think it was speaking alone, mouthing and whispering and ranting to itself. Often, the stage would be the house roof ; you knew it was a bough of the big elm that sounded like cordage dragged across a deck ; that no men's feet could be up there, nor large bodies moving softly down the slope of the kitchen shingles, but the creepy effect, as you snuggled under the bedclothes, was the same.

These were days when the northeast chamber had for its small occupant one face by day and another by night ; when she lived there in a state of fearsome joy — like a little Pysche in the Palace of the Unseen. She was enchanted by her solitary state, but at any moment there might be a nameless terror to reckon with.

In one pang, Barbie felt that a piece of her childhood was gone. " At least the rats shall not gnaw it ! ' And she searched the house for large wrapping-paper and lugged the hngh bumping bundle up-garret herself and spent a quarter-hour suspending it by strings from the rafters.

Her mother was now calling ; she ran down and they met in the passage outside of her closed door.

" Where is the fireboard ? "

Barbie explained sufficiently: Mrs. Hannington was not obtuse.

" Well, don't go in just yet. I 've opened all the windows."

" What for?" asked Barbie.

She went into her room to see, — Silence following, flushed and depressed. They were seized by a smothering, greasy, gaseous smell mingled with fresh wood smoke which the wind was expelling through the open windows. A little dry snow drifted in, lightly sprinkling the carpet. In front of the hand-carved mantelpiece, which seemed to flatten itself against the chimney repellently, stood a squat, iron monster on crocodile feet, panting, sucking its own flames. It stood on a square of new, chequered oilcloth, which went well enough with blackened sheet-iron, but not with old English ingrains dulled with use. These things were not matters of deep moment at that period, New England being moral and ethical rather than artistic, but certain persons had the instinct to feel them out. Mrs. Hannington saw the consternation in her daughter's eye.

" I thought of telling them to put it wrongside up ; the under side is plain brown."

" I wish you had," said Barbie.

" Next time we put it down we '11 do so."

" Will it always smell like this ? " Barbie seized upon the odor savagely, to cover her general despair ; years of that oilcloth and that stove stretched before her. They stood for years of other things.

" It 's only the fresh blacking burning off. And they wanted to see how it would draw," Mrs. Hannington gasped, breathing through her handkerchief, "so they built a fire — and forgot the damper in the pipe."

" Oh, there 's a damper in the pipe ! I must remember that." Barbie began to giggle hysterically. " Come out, mother, and let it go on and do its worst alone."

In the passage Silence pleaded anxiously : " You '11 find it very comfortable to dress by. I used to worry about you up here, those awful winter mornings. I don't know why we never did it for you."

" Well, JkDOw ! " said Barbie.

" Next summer it will come down. Then you '11 have your room just as it used to be."

" It is n't the room ! " said Barbie, choking. " But it 's right, mother. I 've had too many things just as I wanted." She was taller than her mother ; she had to bend to kiss her cheek, clasping her tensely to feel herself close to the best thing in life which now she must learn to share with a stranger.

"Of course, it's right," said Silence sternly. "You don't suppose father and I did it because we wanted to ! Parents can be selfish as well as children. I never felt a gift to mother any girl except my own, but I 've got to do it, and you must help me, daughter."

This was said with clear intention. Mrs. Hannington had made observations while wrestling with the stove in Barbie's room : she saw where the hitch lay. Of all her material comforts, the girl had been generous. She had washed her dainty toilet-covers with her own hands and given over the dressing-table to her room-mate, mounting a swing-glass on a chest of drawers for her own use ; and made the action simple by saying, " I am tall and I never do my hair sitting " ; she had been over-generous with closet-hooks and bureau-drawers, but every bit of herself she withheld. The room was stripped of personality. Mrs. Hannington looked around, missing one after • another of the objects Barbie had built into her nest, some whose significance the mother understood, others that she smiled at in silence. The copy of a Kempis which she had placed on Barbie's bedside table, the first night she slept in her own room, was gone out of sight; also a broken skate-strap tied with a ribbon, that had hung since winter before last against the girl's looking-glass. The ribbon was plainly one of Barbie's; the strap fitted a skate of male size which Mrs. Hannington suspected had once belonged to Jimmy Yardley.

So ; the decks were cleared. " She does n't know if it 's a friend or an enemy who is coming into her life, I suppose," the mother sighed ; " it is the instinct of self-defence." She was battling with the same instinct in herself, only, it included her offspring.

Chapter II Two Daughters Of One Eace

With Stella Mutrie's arrival the first fear was over. She looked healthy, to say the least ; — pale, from living in those darkened houses that narrow with their shuttered balconies the glaring streets of Kingston, but not meagre nor drooping : her complexion reminded one of Southern flowers, the velvet white of a magnolia blossom or the over-scented tuberose ; loops of golden curls fell against her temples, and a massive ten-strand braid crowned her with the support of a Spanish comb. Her black dresses had gigot sleeves and wide white shoulder capes ; they were very modish and looked expensive. There was no suggestion of the shorn lamb about her except her sensitiveness to cold.

Thus, the stove, which had been domiciled for her sake, became at once her idol and a grovelling necessity of her unacclimated being. The presumption had been that " the girls " would take turns laying their fire overnight, a task which delayed getting into bed when nights were coldest; but Stella's fires would never " go " : hence, no good husband for her ! — such was the popular fallacy. Barbie's fires went at the first spurt of the match; but Grandmother Trumbull hastened to moderate her hopes by setting forth that no young woman need build on the sort of intelligence required by these modern stoves, — nothing but iron boxes ! A fire on the hearth was the orthodox test, from the days when the saying began. Your wasteful virgin used too much splitwood and kindlings ; a foolish one went out of her way to lay them contrary to the laws of artificial air currents ; a hasty disposition piled on lo<>s and discouraged the struggling flames. There were ways enough of putting out a fire ; only the right way to mend or make one. Barbie would then speak up for those unpromising young firemakers — she could name them — who had hoodwinked destiny and got the good husband without qualifying for him. This was a girl's way of slighting prophecy too plainly put forth in the interests of thrift, marriage appealing to young minds on livelier grounds.