Craque-o'-Doom. A story

Contents

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CHAPTER PAGB

I. — Chenoworth’s Damsel 5

II

“Oh, you brought home that chair? Well, Thomas is in the other room, and when he comes out ril get the money to send to your father. My pocket-book is up-stairs.”

A male voice and the voices of girls sounded through the open archway of a parlor which branched from the side of this. Tamsin wanted to see the young-lady visitors, but in order to do so she would have to walk boldly up the room.

“ Take seats,” said Captain Mills’s aunt ; and Tamsin sat down on a haircloth cushion, but Tillie stood by the mantel, resting one foot upon the other.

Aunt Sally glanced through her glasses at the new page of her treatise. “ I am just reading a little in Andrew Jackson Davis’s great book while I knit,” she observed benignly, willing to share her favorite ism with anybody. “ It’s a wonderful book. Remarkable what a power of language he has. Has your mother finished reading that Banner of Light I sent her ?”

“ She pasted it up on the wall,” said Tillie. Her sister was listening to the other voices.

“ Well,” said Aunt Sally, pushing up her glasses, “ I didn’t intend that. But perhaps,” with energetic twists of her mouth, “that is as good a way as any to keep some of the remarkable seances in her mind. There was a beautiful account in that paper, given by Mrs. Cora L. V. Hatch, of com-

Q UE- a -DO OM.

muning with a spirit from New Jersey.” She went on rapidly, pouring Spiritualistic lore into her hearers.

Their eyes wandered up to the high ceiling and down the tinted walls, over velvet carpet and painted landscapes, bronze busts and a cabinetworld of bric-a-brac. Tillie started when the mantel-clock told the half-hour with a chime like music.

‘‘Now, aunt,” said Captain Mills, sauntering through the archway. — “Good-evening,” in short parenthesis to the girls. — “ I hear the Spiritualist drum beating a rally.”

“ Thomas,” replied his aunt, “ I never expect you to be a believer. The construction of your mind is such that you will not accept the most positive proofs. And I never thrust my opinions on anybody. The girls here are waiting. Have you got some change about you to pay for reseating a chair ?”

The captain went into his pockets, and, having ascertained what amount was wanted, paid it. While he did so, Tamsin watched him with speculative eyes. He was her single type of a gentleman.

He had come home from the army as hairy as a monkey, the townpeople said, but at this date he was a smooth-shaven, prematurely iron-gray man of perhaps forty, with a thick black moustache and smiling eyes. He bore a family resemblance to

CHENOWORTirs DAMSEL.

his aunt, having her smoothly-rounded temples and high-arched head. The benignity displayed in her face became graver in his.

*^Are you busy at anything now, Tamsin?” inquired Aunt Sally.

“ No, ma’am,” replied the girl, fingering the money in the corner of her shawl.

“Then you might come here and help about the house while we have company. There are a good many things up-stairs and around that need attention when the whole house is in use. I thought about sending down to see if your mother could let you come.”

“ She won’t care. Have you got a good many visitors ?”

“ Three young ladies, — the captain’s cousin and two of her friends. They came to spend the holidays with us. Very well. In the morning, then.”

“ I can come back to-night, after I take Tillie home.”

Captain Mills was sauntering off through the archway.

“ If you are not afraid of the dark — ” suggested Aunt Sally.

Chenoworth’s daughter smiled slowly. What difference did it make to anybody whether she was afraid of the dark or not ? “I can run right quick.”

“ Well, you might come back to-night, then.”

CRAQUE-a-DOOM.

Chapter II. The Chenoworths

Tamsin and her sister ran down the hill, crossed the pike, and walked along the middle of the road which led toward their back-street residence. Some dogs jumped out of the enclosures around large houses and barked at them. Though there was little traffic on the old canal at that time, Tillie was moved to point at a light far off floating serenely through the fog and say, “ There goes a boat.”

“ Tisn’t !” observed Tamsin, hugging her shawl ;

must be a lantern around the tavern.”

They came to their home, standing dejected, unpainted, and humble in a wilderness of dried cornstalks which rustled sadly in every breath of air, their dull bleached outlines suggesting ranks of diminutive ghosts.

Tamsin opened the door and looked in at a scene she had never loved. The interior was bare and coarse and smelled of onions. There was the open fire, but its light was dull. Her mother sat mending stockings by a tallow candle ; her father s^ooped over the hearth smoking. He was a de-

THE CHENOWORTHS.

cent old man who seemed to have given his family up as a hard problem. Sarah Jane sat there holding her baby. Arthur had come in, and John and George had for once forborne to go down town, and were growling at each other. All, excepting Sarah Jane, looked clay-colored and bleached, as if the weather had held them at its mercy for generations.

Tamsin disliked her family. She had no filial affection for her parents. Their apathy and general thriftlessness roused unexpressed indignation in her. She felt her existence as an indignity which they had cast upon her. She compared them with people whom she considered admirable, and silently hated them. She hated the two lazy boys who crowded her in the humble house. Her scorn was of the high-bred sort which shows no outward sign but indifference. When they ate their food she despised their loud chewing, their greedy dipping into dishes. When they lounged down town with their hands in their pockets she despised them for following the gypsy instincts of their blood, and avoiding, or accomplishing nothing by, labor. She was a magazine of silent rebellions and hatreds. No empress ever had a mightier pride or stronger will. The spirit which her people had lacked for generations was perhaps concentrated in her. She resented all her conditions of life. Under its pressure she was old. In a less i6 aggressive way, she was as cynical as Timon. A reticent and dignity-loving nature thus became secretive. But, while silently denying the stock from which she sprang, this girl had been known to scratch her school-fellows for disrespect toward the name of Chenoworth. It seemed to her secret consciousness the last humiliation of all that folks should ever know how she despised the Chenoworths herself. There was vast endurance in her. Natural girlish delicacy and sensitiveness, which in her were extreme, had long since protected themselves by a thick shell. At that time she had no room for more than one strong affection : she loved her youngest sister, and she loved nothing else.

Tillie pulled off her hood and approached the fire, but Tamsin merely stood and announced that she was going back.

“ I wouldn’t work for them proud things,” said Sarah Jane, who had an aquiline nose and lines which made a triangle of her chin.

Mrs. Chenoworth had nothing to say: her children always did as they pleased. She looked up, and observing that her nephew Arthur was about to leave the house also, suggested plaintively, “ Stay longer, Arter.”

I guess I’ll walk along a piece with Tamsin,” said Arthur.

“ I guess you won’t!” retorted Tamsin scornfully.

I don’t want you along of me.”

THE CHENOWORTHS.

** You’ll get over your spiteful ways, miss,” remarked Sarah Jane, “ when you’ve seen the trouble I’ve seen.”

Tillie clasped the black-eyed alien round the waist, and they looked most confidingly into each other’s eyes.

“ Come up to-morrow,” said Tamsin.

“ I will,” replied Tillie.

“ Don’t kick the kivverofif to-night. You might git a bad sore throat again.”

“ Then mammy’d make me poultice it,” laughed Tillie.

“ I s’pose,” remarked Arthur as he left the door behind Tamsin, “ you wouldn’t have anything against me walkin’ on the other side of the road from you if I’s goin’ the same way ?”

She did not reply or wait to see which side he chose. Her shawled head flitted away from him, though he could hear heavy shoes beating the snow till their rush died in the distance.

As Tamsin ran up the hill the oldest of the young-lady guests was holding a skein of yarn for Aunt Sally to wind, and saying, while Captain Mills and the girls were occupied with themselves, that she did wish Aunt Sally would tell her some of her recollections or experiences. The girls had said she knew charming Irish fairy-stories.

The wee folk,” said Aunt Sally, pulling off a long thread. b

2* i8

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Yes, but Miss Rhoda Jones preferred to hear about real folks, — the people in this little town, for instance. Mrs. Teagarden must know all about them, — their peculiarities and trials and unwritten histories.

Aunt Sally knew that Miss Jones was what is called a “ writer,” and that this was a hook thrown out for a good catch of “material;” but she inclined toward furnishing material. She was convinced that if she had not lived a busy practical life she would have been literary herself. Andrew Jackson Davis and Mrs. Cora L. V. Hatch were dearer to her because they “ wrote.” There had been one lovely school-girl niece in the family, Captain Tom’s sister, who died at her blossoming, but whose poems were turning yellow in Aunt Sally’s treasure-box. How could she look otherwise than affectionately on an author, when her namesake-girl had been prevented only by death from taking the lead in letters ?

“ Well,” said Aunt Sally, with an energetic preliminary twist of the mouth, “ most of the trials of the people about here are caused, as they usually are, I have observed, by their own thriftlessness or carelessness. The Chenoworth girls came in here awhile ago, and I was reading Andrew Jackson Davis’s book: someway, I got to thinking of the strength of hereditary tendencies.”

THE CHENOWORTHS.

Chenoworth ?” questioned Miss Jones as she turned her head for the passage of the yarn. “That’s rather a pretty name, — much highersounding than Jones.’’

“ The people who know them wouldn’t say so,” continued Aunt Sally, always with the beneficent twitching. “ It’s a name that means around here everything base and good-for-nothing. I have known the Chenoworths from my childhood, and I never saw one of them amount to anything, except one that died in Tom’s company during the war, and he was a notorious thief before he ’listed. But it’s a shame to bring up charges against the country’s dead,’’ Aunt Sally admonished herself solemnly. “ He was sent home in his box after Lookout Mountain : Tom saw that he was sent home.’’

“ There are girls in the family, you said ?’’

“ Oh, yes : there is a large connection of them, — all about alike, except that the younger ones seem to grow worse than the old ones. I heard it said there was a solid county of them in Tennessee before they moved to Ohio. Always living from hand to mouth, the men usually with no trades or business of any kind, and the women struggling to support prolific families.”

“ Poor things !”

“Yes, indeed! Such people are always multiplying their helpless offspring. I have thought sometimes Tamsin might turn out a little different from the rest, and I do what I can for her and encourage her; but,” the old lady paused in her winding to say impressively, “ hereditary tendencies are stronger than life itself. Her history was all written down before she was born.”

Tamsin?” murmured Miss Jones.

“ Yes. She was here with her little sister awhile ago. I feel sorry for that girl. Nobody knows any harm of her, but what good can she ever come to ?”

“Why not?”

“The name of the family will drag her down. Good’blood,” said Aunt Sally, who saw it coursing gently through the thin veins on her very round and handsome wrist, “ is the best inheritance a child can have. But where a stock has sunk below respectability as far back as you can trace it, what can you expect of it?”

“ How old is this Tamsin?”

“ About fifteen or sixteen, I should think.”

“ Pretty ?”

“ Not to my notion. She had a sister who was called rather pretty, — Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane went up to the capital to learn millinery, and she’s just home with a child in her arms, trying to give it away to somebody to raise, I hear. There was poor Mary. She was the oldest girl of the set, and she did real well for a while. One of our rich

THE CHENOWORTHS.

farmers’ wives took her and made a daughter of her ; and I have always thought it was fate against the poor child, and not her fault, that she didn’t do better. The family she lived with made everything of her. Mary was good-looking, — that is, as near good-looking as I ever saw a Chenoworth. She had a beau, and I think he disappointed her. It would have been a fine match for her, and she certainly loved him. But he went off, and she turned and married one of her trifling cousins: the Chenoworths intermarry to that degree it seems as if they can’t mate with anybody outside of their own stock. So there the poor thing is, tied down for life, with half a dozen miserable little ones to follow her around and no living provided for them. The farmer’s family were so indignant at her throwing herself away that they would have nothing to do with her.”

Poor thing !”

*‘Yes. And there was the oldest, — Sam. He married Mary Mann. He was a poOr half-witted thing, and she lived a jade’s life ; and finally she took poison one night, and he lay there drunk beside her, and she told him what she had done and begged him to help her. While she groaned and cried, * Well,’ said he, ' you oughtn’t to took it 1’ and went to sleep. When he waked in the morning she was cold.”

Miss Jones hid her face on her arm. She saw

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the dying and helpless woman, and felt the tragedy through every nerve.

“ The second boy is in the county jail for stealing, and the two young ones are common loafers. Old Mr. Chenoworth is a harmless creature, so far as I know, and his wife doesn’t seem to be a lazy woman, but probably in the generation before him are to be found the seeds which ripened in this.” The chronicler ended with a meditative twitch of her mouth.

That poor girl !” mused the other.

“Tamsin? Sometimes I think there is something in Tamsin.”

“ Why couldn’t she study ? Why couldn’t she make a woman of herself?”

Aunt Sally shook her wise head : “ It isn’t in - the stock to take to education : they are all ignorant. Once in a while I send a copy of the Banner of Light there, but I doubt if any of them read it.”

“ Or if she had some talent that would lift her up?”

“Tamsin hasn’t any gifts out of the common, that I ever heard of. She’s just a good ordinary girl.”

Rhoda Jones shook her head slowly, having this melancholy figure in her mind : “ It is like living under some crushing weight, or in swamps where the live-oak moss would make one want to com-

THE CHENOWORTHS.

mit suicide, — worse than being a homeless and kinless orphan. If she were an orphan without relatives, somebody would take pity on her, but, as she has too many relatives, they despise her.”

“ She’ll probably marry her cousin Arthur, a hulk of a fellow; but he hasn’t much harm in him — or anything else. Some one told me he was hanging after her. And she’ll go the way of the rest of them.”

The dining-room door, which had stood ajar, moved silently back, and Tamsin came in with her shawl around her shoulders.

CRAQUE-a-DOOM.

CHAPTER III. ‘'seeds of time.”

Both speakers looked at her with a start, but Tamsin’s face gave no sign of what she had heard. She did not meet their eyes, but went and sat down some distance from them in the unconscious dignity of loneliness. Rather than have them know that she had heard and was tormented by this formulated statement from other tongues of her own nebulous convictions, she would have hugged her blistering shame in secrecy if it killed her.

Aunt Sally felt disturbed, and the fountain of her kindness flowed : “ Come nearer to the fire, Tamsin. Ain’t you cold?”

“ No, ma’am.”

“Is it thawing out-doors?” inquired Miss Rhoda, wishing to open communication between this girl and herself.

“ Toler’ble soft.” She sat as immovable as an Indian, her eyelids lowered. ^

Rhoda scanned her with two or three keen looks, and, finding this scrutiny apparently unnoticed, studied her with a silent gaze, turning her skein-supporting hands now to this side, now to that. There is great force in her/’ thought Miss Jones, — “ an individuality which is going to assert itself. She looks good : the oval of her cheeks is splendid. How do people who rarely have enough to eat get up that curve and rich olive color ? Black eyebrows and eyelashes and light hair ! A reticent expression, but one, also, that seems to be absorbing everything around.”

Aunt Sally wound the last end of yarn upon her ball. “ Now, Tamsin,” said she, rising, “ you come with me up-stairs, and I’ll show you what to do jthere.”

Captain Mills and the girls were very merry in the other parlor, and after gazing at the fire awhile Miss Rhoda joined them. At eleven o’clock he bade them good-night.

Aunt Sally always retired at nine, after ordering breakfast and seeing to the fastening of all the doors. She left Tamsin the choice of going to bed at that time or sitting up until the young ladies had gone, to see that the fires were well down and read Andrew Jackson Davis. Tamsin took her place with no light but that of the grate, and without Andrew Jackson Davis, on a small sofa beside the arch connecting the parlors, where the group of young ladies could not see her. Her object was to look at them as much as she pleased. As to their talk, she did not think of overhearing it, yet when she began to notice it she listened B 3

CKAQUE- O' -DOOM.

keenly. Jennie Mills, who was really a beautiful brown girl, pleased her eye. Louise Latta, a very sweet-natured blonde, was pronounced by Tamsin the image of pride, because she had pretty airs and turns of the head and a fine clock-stockinged and slippered foot resting on the fender. The Chenoworth doubted not they all three considered her as the dirt under their soles. She put out her own foot and looked furtively at it. The leather was heavy around its shape, and that looked big compared to the one on the fender. Jennie Mills threw up her hands to exclaim, “ Oh, girls !” and Tamsin looked at her own hands, — not white and sparkling with ornaments, but chapped and red. More attractive to her than the others was Rhoda Jones, the wearer of the pearl-gray dress, who had played the piano. How wonderful it must be to play the piano ! She seemed to be a person who could do anything she wished.

Tamsin tried to detect how the other two “ did” their hair. There they all three sat toasting themselves by the deeply-red fire, saying they must go to bed, but lingering to tell a story or a joke. What good times rich folks’ girls had !

“ If we go up-stairs,” said Jennie, “ there are only the registers, and of course the furnace-fire must be low : so let’s bask as long as we can. Oh, how I should love to spend every winter in Florida ! Cold weather kills me.”

SEEDS OF TIMEF

** You ought to marry a Southerner, Jen,” suggested Louise.

^‘And have the yellow fever every summer?

You horrid thing!”

“ Oh, you could spend the summers with us.”

“ How silly you girls would be to think of marrying at your age I” exclaimed Rhoda.

“We don’t think of it: it’s the farthest possible thing from our thoughts. But look here, Rhoda Jones : we’re twenty-two, — that is, I am, and Lou is going to be soon. Gracious I we’re pretty near old maids I”

“ Old maids,” said Rhoda scornfully, “ are things of the past.”

“ I know they are,” said Louise : “ they feel it ^ themselves.”

“ No, they don’t. Come to that. Pm one.”

“You don’t look a day older than we do, Rhode.”

“ Why, certainly I do ! I’ve years of experience and thought that you don’t know anything about.

But I tell you the scarecrow old maid is a thing of the past : it was set up to frighten silly women away from the fields of independence. The woman of to-day, when she gets ready to marry, marries, and it doesn’t make any difference to her whether she’s twenty-five or a hundred. We don’t live in the hard conditions that our grandmothers lived in.

We aren’t old at forty any more; our bodies ripen y

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on instead of withering. We learn how to take care of them and how to bring ourselves in happy relations to society, and we get a few dabs of artknowledge ; and literature is a mighty preservative of the tissues. When I was fifteen I was a skinny little thing; but look here.” She held up one half-revealed plump arm, and her face seemed to sparkle. “I just learned how to live, and I’m going to live — all over, every faculty of me — as many days as are granted.”

“ Now, come, Rhode,” coaxed Jennie, catching the uplifted hand : “ do tell us if there’s anything in this splendid turquoise ring.”

“ My finger, as you see.”

If / were engaged,” remarked Louise in an injured tone, — “ and, mind, I don’t say I ain’t, but — I should tell my friends about it some time, especially my real old friends.”

Well, you two ancient goddesses — ”

** Ah, Rhoda, you are !”

“ Of course I am. Because I expect to be married before very long.”

The other girls uttered little squalls and crowded closer to her : “ Oh, tell us all about it. Is he light or dark? Is he real fascinating? Oh, what is his name ? Is it Smith ? Is it some gentleman where you are living now? Oh, Rhoda Jones, to think we have known you all our lives and don’t know who you are going to marry !”

“ I meant to tell you when I got around to it. Why, what’s the use of making such a fuss about it ? Marriage is only an incident in men’s lives, — an important one, of course, — and why should it be more in ours ?”

“ Mercy, Rhode ! you’re getting to be strongminded. But, oh, do tell us his name !”

His name is Mr. Burns.”

“ Burns ? That sounds nice.”

“ Of course it does : it is nice. I shan’t be Burne-Jones, but Jones-Burns. He is a most agreeable old gentleman.”

” Old !” Both girls emitted a low shriek.

“Why, certainly! You don’t think I would marry a boy, do you ? Don’t you know I’m thirty ? but I think I shall stay twenty-nine until after the wedding, — not that I am afraid of thirty, but twenty-nine seems a more interesting age to be married at. Yes, and the top of his head is bald.”

“ Oh, you needn’t make a fuss. He has a very nice fringe above his ears and around the back of his head.”

“ And is he rich ?”

“Yes, of course he is rich. Do you think I have been poor and deserving all my life to bestow myself on a poverty-stricken husband at last?”

3 *

Tamsin was listening intently to these revelations from a higher sphere. She leaned farther forward to ponder on the speaker. Was that proud, commanding, well-dressed girl poor ? Here she was, a guest in a rich man’s house and going to marry another rich man. The Chenoworth division of all society was simply into rich and poor. The rich were favored in every way; the poor were necessarily down-trodden. How, then, was that girl different from Tamsin Chenoworth, being poor, according to her own testimony ? In a dim way Tamsin comprehended that there was a strong individual spirit in that pearl-colored figure, and that education was a species of riches. Her mental receptiveness was roused to the fullest action. Rhoda loomed before her suddenly a vast example. What Rhoda said became seed, which she strewed plenteously without knowing it.

I used to think,” exclaimed Jennie, that you and Cousin Tom might make a match some time.”

” Captain Tom ? I don’t see how you could think that, when we’ve always been such excellent friends.”

Louise looked up from the grate with a pensive expression : Are you very much in love ?”

” With my future prospects ? Yes, I am. I’m going to have everything I ever wanted, and a comfortable husband who knows my untamed ways and won’t thwart me.” Rhoda took out a great many hair-pins and let her mass of hair come down to her waist while she declaimed to the two fair faces near her. “ If there is anything on earth I am sick and tired of, it is all this nonsense about sentiment. Now, there you sit, both of you, stuffed full of love-stories without a grain of practical sense in one of them, expecting a knight, if only in the shape of dear, simple Davy Crockett, to ride up and carry you off. When you see that very excellent backwoods play — it has literary merits — don’t your heart-strings ring to Davy’s rough rendering of * Young Lochinvar’ ? ‘ I want

my bride,’ says the knight. — ‘ Git out !’ says the dad. — ‘ Whoop !’ says the knight ; and he disappears from the scene with the willing young lady. That’s all very entertaining, but I like civilization. Not to put too fine a point on it, I like luxury.”

So did Tamsin, though she had never defined her delight in beautiful and sumptuous surroundings.

And I can’t do without it,” continued Rhoda. “ I like the things money will buy, and rve‘‘never had enough to buy them. In the Middle Ages, when everybody was fighting against everybody else, the strongest baron was the safest man to have for a husband. Money is the feudal power to-day; the strongest baron now is the man who can make the most money.”

CRAQUE-a-DOOM.

“ I should be afraid to marry for money,” sighed Jennie. Her thoughts flew to a very handsome youth in her father’s law-ofiice.

“You’d a great deal better be afraid to marry without it.”

“ But is it quite right ?” murmured Louise.

“You’ve been reading Miss Mulock’s novels,’* puffed Rhoda scornfully. “ I haven’t a bit of patience with that woman. She harps on the same old silly string year after year, and you girls listen and weep and long for an impecunious young man on the altar of whose fortunes you can make a sacrifice of your youth and comfort. Don’t you know that the key-note of the times is not sentiment, but practical sense? Just after the war, when the country was wrought to a high pitch of nerves, current literature overflowed with self-sacrifice. According to that showing, — and current literature ought to be a good reflection of the times, — everybody was running around trying to outdo his neighbor in the broken-heart and selfrenunciation business. One heroine gave up her lover to a friend who fancied him ; another sacrificed her future prospects to nurse somebody. All that sort of thing was ‘ nobte.’ I think it was mawkish. It isn’t natural and human. I am a healthy, selfish girl, — not mean or unjust, — but I have had some sharp, and even cruel, experiences. I know to my own satisfaction that poverty causes more evil than perhaps anything else in the world, and that easy circumstances are a great nourisher of the virtues. Why should I let my own observations go for nothing and take the dictum of sentimentalists who have no gauge for my individual life ? Ah ! dear Charles Lamb!” mused Rhoda, leaning forward and resting her elbow on her knee. ‘‘He told the truth, for he had felt the pinch: ‘ Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart’s ease, a man’s own time to himself, are not mucky however we may be pleased to scandalize with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.”