The Hollands

Front matter

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Chapter I

u Wait a moment, wait a moment, Ross, and I shall Btop crying and be brave again.”

The voice, a young one, and smitten through and choked and half-smothered by some sharp pain, but a voice that still gave you faith in it, — in a power behind that would assert itself and redeem its promise.

Then the answer came, — a man’s voice this time, yet with some subtle family likeness to the other, shaken a good deal, so that you felt rather than heard the inward struggle that it mastered.

“Well, Jessamine, I’ll give you another chance. It isn’t too late yet. Say the word, and I’ll throw up the whole thing and stay with you. But you know what an awful fact this poverty is, what it has been to us all our lives. It sickens me now to remember it, — one long, wearing struggle to make both ends meet, and keep up a show of decent appearance and of the old family respectability when the means had all melted away. Just think for a moment of our mother’s poor, worn, anxious face; it looked quieter and happier in

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the coffin than I ever saw it anywhere else, and I just thought to myself then, ‘ Poor heart ! you won’t be harrowed any more about the rent, nor have that dreadful hunted look in your eyes which I remember all my boyhood, as quarter day drew near. The little, low roof over your head now won’t cost anything !’ ”

He paused a moment here, and the other voice sobbed in between : —

“All that’s over now, Jessamine, for her, but for us it’s the old story again, for a number of years, at least. There’s no help for it. I’ve looked the thing fairly in the face, turned it round on every side. It will be only the old strain and scramble, wearing out youth and hope for each of us. It’s a long, hard pull for a fellow in the city without friends or influence of any sort, and there would be years of drudgery at some clerkship on a pittance of a salary, before I could provide you or myself with a comfortable home and beat the wolf from the door. But, Jessamine, you’re all I’ve got in the world now, and come to the point, it’s so tough to leave you, that, if you say the word, I’ll give it all up and stay here, and do the best I can.”

This time the pause was longer, and into it there came no sobs. There were struggling^ breaths though. You knew she was girding up her soul to speak.

“ I dare not tell you to stay, Ross. It is true all that you have said. It seems to me, though,’ now that the time of parting has come, that it would be easier to live in a garret and on a crust with you than in a palace without you ! ”

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“ I don’t think it would quite come to that, Jessamine/’ — with a smile, half-bitter, half-sorrowful, on the freshly-bearded lip.

That was his weakest moment. I think just then Ross half wished that Jessamine would bid him stay.

Perhaps the girl dimly discerned it ; but, young as she was, she had a conscience, and a will that obeyed it. Her inmost self had spokdn in those words, “ I do not dare tell you to stay.” It was right Ross should go. If he stayed, all the best possibilities of his future might be paralyzed. So, though this parting tugged at her heartstrings, held in it some of the bitterness of death, she would not bid him stay. Give the girl credit for it. Of such stuff are the real men and women made, whether they stand in high places or low, whether the world knows them or not.

“ To the garret and the crust ? ” — trying to return his smile playfully, but making a pitiful failure of it. “ But it would come to the long, slow toil and wasting of youth and life, which, in the end, would be harder to bear than to know you are so far away from me. I see there is no place for you near me, Ross, and, after all, it is God’s world there as much as here.”

The momentary weakness had slipped from the youth’s soul too.

“ So good-by, Jessamine. You and I know all that is locked up in those words.”

A sudden blenching, a scared look on her face, — u Is it quite time ? ”

“ Yes, the train will be along in half an hour. I

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thought it best to make this as short as possible for both of us, so I did not get in sooner. Will you walk over to the depot with me?”

She saw that he asked this for her sake, not his own. “ No, Ross, I could not have all that loud, coarse crowd staring at us when I spoke the last word, — had the last kiss like this. Good-by.” Her arms tight about his neck, — her warm, clinging kisses on his lips.

“ Good-by, little sister ; oh, good-by ! ” His face was working, his very breath coming in hot gasps now. He would break down if he stayed another minute. There was a small lounge in the room. He laid her right down on that, as if she had been a baby, her face away from him, and rushed out of the room, — out of the house, going to — life or death j all that would be as God willed.

Jessamine Holland lay there a while as her brother had left her. It seemed that she would never have life enough to get up again, except when she felt those dreadful stabs of pain that doubled her all up like swift blows. Once in a while she wrung her hands in a sudden spasm of ache, when she looked out to the future, and saw the long, slow, desolate years before he would come again ; he, Ross, the only one of her race, the only thing, too, she really loved on earth.

“How much better it would have been if they could only have died,” she thought in the hot, passionate anguish of her youth, “ than to be on different sides of the world ! ”

Suddenly she heard the car- whistle, — that long, sharp

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cry, that, familiar as it may be, never comes to you in certain moments, in soft twilights and dead wastes of midnight, without seeming like the cry of some wild, maddened thing in pain and terror. Jessamine Holland sprang up and rushed out. Betwixt the hills there was a bend just before they entered the ‘gorge, where one might get a glimpse of the cars. In a moment they came thundering along. She snatched off a little crimson scarf she wore and shook it in the air. Ross would know just where to look for the house. In a moment she caught sight of his figure on the platform. She could discern it plainly, though he was half a mile away. He took off his hat, swung it in the air ; and the long train glided out of her gaze into the hollow, and Jessamine Holland stood there all alone.

The house behind her was a kind of compromise between a cottage and a farm-house. It was old ; but there had been evident attempts to restore it, — at least, give it a certain appearance of homely comfort. The color was a reddish-brown, dingy with years. A low veranda across the front had evidently been an after-thought.

It was an afternoon late in October, the air warm, damp, and still, the sky smothered all up in gray, opaque-looking clouds. There had been terrible frosts that year, — you saw all that by the withered leaves and grasses ; they had lain in the grasp of death, and no warmth and light now could stir them out of the torpor ; still it seemed that the air had lapsed into a faint dream of her vanished summer, — a mild, moist, still autumn afternoon that had something pleasant and soothing in it,

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waiting between the frosts and the Indian summer. The landscape which stretched away from the veranda was a pleasant one, with no marked individuality. In the distance the hills * rose to the horizon, bearing great pastures half way up to their summits. Nearer there was a narrow river, with its dark tannery, and its mills and roads sloping here and there, after a picturesque, incoherent fashion, as country roads mostly do. The town lay on either side of the river, and the rusty cottage perched on the top of the hill took in most of it ; the stores, and the dwelling-houses, and the great town hall, and the little brown depot perched on one side, — a pleasant, wide, airy scene, but with no especial power nor grouping of anything to strike an artist. This girl, Jessamine Holland, standing on the veranda, is the central point in the picture for you and me. She is not handsome, noi beautiful, still less does the word pretty fit her, as in one way and another it does most girls of her age. She is very young, loitering somewhere late in her seventeenth year. Her hair is of a dark-brownish tint, fine and luxuriant; and her eyes — large, clear, truthful eyes — match it; eyes that you can trust, and that will never betray you, either with smiling or weeping.

There is a fresh, dewy youth of girlhood about the face, and the red, fine, yet full curve of the lips, all suggest feeling and force ; yet it seems to me this face of J essamine Holland never belonged to anybody who had led a careless, happy childhood. There is a certain thoughtfulness pervading it, which hardly belongs to its years, and makes it sometimes look older than she is;

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yet when the sadness slips off, as it does in bright and happy moods, the girl does not look her years, few as they are.

If the word were not so worn out with a certain kind of use, I should say this girl had an interesting face; it has a life, character, sweetness, of its own. There she stands, with her flushed face, and her wet eyes, and her lips apart, listening to the train as its rumble grows fainter and fainter among the hills.

The brother that swift train is carrying away is unlike her in looks as possible, and there is only a faint thread of family likeness in their characters. Ross Holland is now just twenty-one ; he had the reputation of a bright boy at school ; was big and awkward, though he has pretty much outgrown that, and has come up into a large, stalwart young manhood ; nothing particularly elegant or graceful about him however.

As for his face, the features are large and of an agreeable homeliness, with eyes blue, wide, and clear as a lake, that waits in the deep heart of some forest for the summer dawn ; and soft, bright yellowish hair, with that elusive golden tint which poets love.

The history of this brother and sister is common enough, but always a pitiful one. They come of a sort of broken-down race on both sides, though the old vitality of the stock seems to have quickened in them once more. The father, a dreamy, indolent, impractical man ; a wood chopper or a breaker of stones on the highway would have done more real service to the world, so he had been honest and diligent, than the father of Ross

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and Jessamine Holland. The man somehow seemed sent into the world to be of no mortal use in it, — was a mere absorbent ; jet he did not lack intelligence, and had the manner and conversational habits of a gentleman ; had, too, his little stock of pet theories, which he was ready to air with a rather tiresome loquacity whenever he could get a listener, but set him to any work which required promptness and practicality, and he was doomed to inevitable failure.

There was some lack of stamina, some want of balance, in the mental or moral structure of the man, or both, which made his fate; how much was his fault, no mortal could know.

Such a man, of course, run through with his property, though he had inherited what, with ordinary care, would have made him a large fortune ; but it slipped through his fingers like water through a sieve, while its owner mooned and dreamed among his books and pet theories.

Mrs. Holland was by no means the wife for this kind of man. She belonged to the delicate, nervous, clinging type, — one whom troubles and emergencies, requiring a prompt perception of the broad bearings of the case, and practical energy to meet them, would be likely to break down utterly. In those great test moments of life, which in one shape or another come to us all, Mrs. Holland was liable to go down into tears and hysteric spasms. Still, the burden was a heavy one, and the shoulders on which it fell were not fitted to carry it.

Long before their boy and girl were born, — for these were the last of a large household that dropped into

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small graves, — the family fortunes had begun to decline.

Ross and Jessamine Holland had been born into that old, miserable struggle of pride with poverty. The husband and father wasted his days in dreams and theories that did nobody any good, and his wife grew worn every year with tears and anxieties and shifts of every sort. So the children were defrauded of half the life and brightness of their years in the dreary, depressing atmosphere betwixt the irritability of one parent and the wearing anxieties of the other.

Of course, every year made it worse ; the misery, being the consequence of defects and feebleness of character, had no remedy. The wolf drew closer to the door. One piece of land after another was sold to furnish bread and shelter for the household, while all sorts of sordid economies chilled the young lives coming up in the midst of them.

If there had not entered into the making of the boy and girl, some of the stamina transmitted from the longdead generations, this cloud and darkness that hung so heavily on their blossoming years must have fatally dwarfed their natures; but there was a force in both, though of a different sort, that repelled much which was unwholesome in the influence gathered around the dawning of their lives, — not that they escaped unharmed. The boy was naturally obstinate, and the rainy day atmosphere of his home often made him sullen. The girl was sensitive, and she became more or less moody and passionate ; but with all this, each nature would often assert

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its birthright to happiness. And slipping off all their troubles, the two would flash up into hours of such high glee and wild sport, that the dark old home would shine out brightly from its prevailing hues of mist and vapor, settling back, of course, into its habitual tone after a while. For it was a dreadful struggle, — a sickening one, — with no steady hand at the helm, and that constant strain to make both ends meet and keep up some show of respectability on inadequate means. It came down at times to penury, actual suffering, hunger, and cold. And still Josiah Holland mooned about the house with his hands in his pocket and his face in a dream, with the poor worn wife, the hunted look in her eyes, and the pitiful faces of his children about him. Even their youth could not quite shake off the feeling of guilt and shame which clung to them.

Ross had just attained his fourteenth year when his father’s life suddenly went out. The family was no worse for that ; on the whole, a little bettered.

Some remote connection bestirred himself and found Ross a position as errand-boy in a lawyer’s office. The salary was a mere pittance, paid to the boy’s mother for his board, but trickled a steady rivulet into the small stream that nourished their lives.

So three or four more years went on. The father of Ross had been a scholar, and he had educated his son in a miscellaneous way, and the boy had plenty of opportunities to indulge his natural craving for study in his intervals of leisure at the lawyer’s office.

At last, however, Mrs. Holland broke down with anx-

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iety and overwork, and went out of life almost as suddenly as her husband.

By this time, the stream which, thus far, had kept soul and body of the Holland family together, was drained to its sources.

Ross taught district schools in the towns around for two or three winters that followed, and at last he found a place in the city as book-keeper, on a small salary. They gave up the old home which they had rented long before their father’s death, and the sale of the faded furniture boarded Jessamine at the home of a servant who had lived with her mother in better days, and who had married a small farmer in the town, and had always retained a loyal attachment to the household.

This family history has occupied more space than I intended. The last words of Ross to his sister tell the rest. The young man had clearly discerned the situation, and what his prospects were in the over-crowded city. A long drudgery at the desk, and a slender salary for years, was not inviting to a soul tired of the grip of poverty.

An opportunity suddenly opened of a clerkship in a commercial house in the East Indies. The salary trebled his present one, and there was every prospect of advancement for talent and energy. You have seen what it cost Ross Holland to make up his mind to go, and how at the very last his will well-nigh failed him. The feeling betwixt Jessamine and himself was something very unusual even betwixt brother and sister. Probably the lonely, darkened childhood of both had knit them closer to each other.

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Jessamine Holland had, as you must have discerned, no ordinary force of character when it was put to the test. She was resolved on some self-helpfulness, and through her brother’s influence she succeeded in obtaining some copying at the two law-offices in the town. The remuneration was a mere pittance, and of an uncertain kind; but it gave Jessamine a blessed feeling of independence.

She was to live still with the family where she had found a home for the last two years. The household atmosphere was not refined, and there was much that was coarse and repugnant to a nature that had inherited fine tastes and feelings ; but kindness of a certain sort, and a comfortable shelter, made up for much that was lacking. At any rate, this was Jessamine’s only refuge, and here her brother le^ her.

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Chapter II

“ Well, ma, you know Duke always was singular, and he would express his gratitude in a way peculiarly his own.”

“ Certainly, my dear ; and one can’t say a word when we remember what an immense obligation the whole family rests under to the young man. It’s really embarrassing. It makes me shiver yet when I think of the peril from which Duke so narrowly escaped. What an awful thing it might have been ! I’m ready to do anything that is proper and generous to the preserver of my boy’s life, but I really wish it was an obligation that a handsome sum of money would discharge.”

“ 0 mamma, it would never do to suggest that before Duke. You ought to have seen the way he flushed up when papa suggested it after they had gone over the whole thing together. ‘Sir,’ he said, — and you know how Duke can say a thing when his spirit is up, — ‘ if I were such a caitiff as to offer money to that fellow for so nobly risking his life in my behalf, I hope he’d tell me that he was sorry he had not left my miserable carcass to rot under the waves. I should certainly deserve no better answer.’ ”

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11 And what did jour father say ? ” asked the lady, with a little smile, evidently half enjoying the high spirit of the reply, — and only half.

11 Oh, he hemmed and hawed, and said he was ready and glad to do whatever was proper, and that Duke must find out the best mode of proving our gratitude ; hut I thought papa wished, like you, that it was something which dollars and cents could pay for.”

In one corner of the handsome room the mother and daughter talked in a low undertone together; in the other was a group of girls at the piano, utterly absorbed in their chatter over some German opera music, — pretty, blooming girls, with a year or two dividing their ages, and a family likeness more or less decided running through the whole group.

Mrs. Mason Walbridge, sitting in the corner, with the bright crimson meshes of the shawl she was knitting flowing over her lap, for she had nice little theories of industry, looks just what she is, - — the handsome mother of this blooming group of girls ; a lady who, under all circumstances, and in any position which she may occupy, will be certain to reflect credit on herself, — a woman of respectabilities and fitnesses always. But if your line and plummet went deeper than this, — into heart, feeling, sympathy, — into the things that are vital and eternal, — this woman, with her fair outside and her scrupulous life, somehow failed you. The great trouble with her was an excessive worldliness. It interpenetrated her whole being, shaped all her life-purposes, colored her thoughts and feelings even, though Mrs. Walbridge was

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quite unconscious of it, — people are apt to be of their besetting sins.

The world had always been kindly to this woman, her life flowing in broad, smooth currents ; no dreadful ploughshares of grief and loss going down deep into her nature, and turning up the good or evil to the light; if there were in her, too, hot, sulphurous passions of selfishness, envies, malice, their fires had never flashed up to her consciousness ; all seemed as smooth and polished as her life.

Mrs. Walbridge had married prosperously; indeed, you could hardly imagine her doing otherwise. Her husband was a rather dull, pompous man on the surface, with a good many obstinacies and angularities, but with plenty of business shrewdness and foresight, as a long and prosperous commercial career abundantly proved.

Mason Walbridge was fond and proud of his wife and family in his way. He indulged them, with a moderate allowance of grumbling, in all the elegance and luxury which his ample wealth afforded. He prided himself on what he regarded as the solid things of life, — money, respectability, social and business reputation. He even had some ambitions beyond that, — ambitions for civil and political distinction. He lived in one of the large inland cities of Massachusetts, and had been three times nominated for mayor, and once elected. “ His Honor, Mason Walbridge,” as it always gratified the gentleman to have his letters superscribed, lived in one of the quiet, but most expensive localities of the city. The house would have struck you at once, with its solid, substantial look, 2

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in the midst of pleasant grounds, an ample, rather pretentious stone house, with a couple of couchant lions on the steps, dark, and grim, — a kind of stern warder of the respectabilities and virtues within. Then there were terraces, arbors, walks with facings of shrubberies, and on every hand rare flowers that rejoiced the eyes and inspired the air; and a fountain shooting up its waters from an urn between two reclining marble naiads, — ■ everything very elegant and in good taste, you see ; and everybody conceded that Mason Walbridge had the finest residence in town.

The eldest daughter of the house, Edith Walbridge, had slipped off her school-days, and was now in society. Her family was very proud of her, and in many ways she certainly justified the feeling; a handsome face, after the mother’s type, fine bloom and delicate mould of feature, with a wonderful brilliancy and archness which made her very attractive in society. Her character, too, in its general structure, was like her mother’s, with something more of force and individuality; a haughtier temper when it was roused, a stronger will when it was opposed ; but these did not often indicate themselves, for Edith had the natural good nature of the family.

Mrs. Walbridge trained her children after what she believed to be the most exemplary pattern ; indeed, she relished pet theories and maxims, and interfused them largely into all those admonitions on which the young lives about her were mostly reared. She desired her daughters to become, after her own ideal, perfect women,

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wives, and mothers, and that ideal was one of exemplary respectability in all that the world values ; an ideal, too, that the woman believed she herself realized, although a modesty quite in keeping with the rest of Mrs. Walbridge’s character would have prevented her ever expressing any such conviction.

“ There, girls, there; one really can’t hear themselves think, you make such a chatter,” was Mrs. Walbridge’s mild admonition to the four girls about the piano, as the talk waxed louder and louder, after the manner of schoolgirls.

It was growing towards twilight ; the golden lights haunting the shrubberies outside, until they burned up suddenly with the last unearthly glory and beauty of the day, almost, a poet might have thought reverently, as though God walked in the cool of the evening among them.

Mrs. Walbridge and her daughter, looking out, however, over the pleasant grounds, certainly thought nothing of this sort.

It was not an atmosphere through which flashed the sudden inspirations of poetic fancies, or across which loomed sometimes vast horizons of lofty visions, which, though they fade swiftly, leaving us only the flats of our every-day life, still haunt our memories like the mighty mountain landscapes where our feet have stood, or the vast solemn seas to whose shores we have gone down.

In the Walbridge atmosphere you always felt somehow that wealth was the greatest thing, and the most to

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be desired in the world, — the one solid, substantial good, before which all other things dwindled in importance. What if it narrowed and crushed also all higher impulses, with all Teachings of the soul after that life that is more than meat or drink?

“There comes Duke,” said Edith, suddenly, closing the book she had been indolently attempting to read for the last hour.

Mrs. Walbridge folded up the soft, glowing meshes of her knitting. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “'It was very imprudent to go out so soon after that terrible exposure. I told him so ; but Duke is like his sex and his age; he never will listen to reason.”

You would not have been half an hour in the Walbridge family without feeling that this Duke was some strong force in the household ; not a pliant, 'nor perhaps altogether an approved one ; nevertheless, a force.

The others were always quoting his sayings and doings, often with a little touch of ridicule or sarcasm, frequently with perplexity and more or less admiration.

There was a hurrying of feet along the passage, and he burst into the room, — a young man, looking his years, and they were twenty-two ; nothing very remarkable in his appearance at first sight, as I know of, for Duke had managed to escape the general good looks of the family.

He was not particularly homely either ; a rather slender, though broad-chested youth ; a well-knit figure that gave a comfortable warrant of health and strength* but not a particle of Apollo grace in its movements ; indeed, it had been one of the trials of Mrs. Walbridge’s lifo

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that her only son should have barely escaped being actually awkward and clumsy during all his boyhood. He had outgrown that, — even the slouch in his shoulders and gait, though his mother in her secret soul hardly felt like insuring the latter now. A light complexion, a face that did not strike you as remarkable at first sight, but that somehow won you to turn and look at it over and over again, and each time you would like it better, — a strong, rather grave, manly face, with gray, clear, honest eyes ; and, over all, a mass of loose beautiful hair, — a rich brown hue, gleaming here and there into auburn, — is the best portrait I can paint for you of Duke Walbridge.

That of course was not his real name, which was Philip, though his family had so far naturalized the other, that they would never get back to his legitimate title. Duke was the household name. It had become fastened on the boy when he was hardly out of small clothes, because of a certain dignity and independence with which he used to carry himself when he was opposed or angry, and which sat in a wonderfully amusing way on the small head and shoulders. From his babyhood there had always been some marked character and individuality about the boy, to which no other of the Walbridges, big or little, could lay claim.