Читать книгу The Open Question: A Tale of Two Temperaments - Elizabeth Robins - Страница 6

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Naturally so clannish a woman as Mrs. Gano had not let the years go by without much solicitude on behalf of her orphan grandchild. After the death of her eldest son, Mrs. Gano wrote to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Tallmadge, asking her to send the little orphan to his father's people, or else appoint a time when Mrs. Gano might come to Boston and bring her grandson home. The reply came from Mr. Tallmadge, showing how deeply he and his wife had resented Mrs. Gano's behavior on the marriage of her son. Mr. Tallmadge wrote that his daughter on her death-bed had committed the infant to the care of her own mother, and that Ethan Gano himself had sent his son North under the protection of Mrs. Tallmadge. He had broken with his own family, and held no communication with them. It was plain what his wishes were with reference to his son. And the Tallmadges might be depended upon to make good their right to the custody of the child. Several spirited letters were exchanged, and then silence till the close of the war and the news of Mrs. Tallmadge's death. Mrs. Gano then made another attempt to get possession of the boy, but finding his grandfather as resolute as ever to keep him in Boston, she proposed a journey thither. This apparent prompting of natural affection could not decently be thwarted, although Mr. Tallmadge understood perfectly the suspicion and anxiety as to the way the orphan was being brought up, that secured the Tallmadges the honor of a visit from Mrs. Gano.

She declined to make the house in Ashburton Place her headquarters, "having already," she wrote, "engaged an apartment at the Tremont House." Mr. Tallmadge smiled, understanding perfectly.

But if he contemplated with serenity the descent of Mrs. Gano upon Ashburton Place, not so his unmarried daughter and house-keeper, Hannah Tallmadge. With nervous misgiving she looked forward to the coming of this hereditary foe, who, moreover, had the blackest designs upon her darling Ethan. Still, Hannah Tallmadge was a most Christian soul. Short of giving up Ethan, she would do all in her power to exhibit a hospitable and forgiving spirit in the approaching trial. She would do what she could to curb her father's uncompromising bluntness of speech, and would keep him off dangerous topics. It occurred to her that the mere sight of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the parlor table might rouse angry passions. She was in the act of putting that work into the bookcase, when her father, observing her suspiciously, asked:

"What are you doing?"

"Just putting this away."

"Leave it on the table. It is the only work of fiction I have ever been able to read. Leave it on the table."

Nevertheless, next day, in a moment of nervousness induced by the news that a strange lady was getting out of a carriage at their door, Miss Hannah dropped Uncle Tom behind the horse-hair sofa-cushion.

"Where is Ethan?" said her father, turning suddenly from the window.

"I'll go and bring him," replied Miss Hannah, and she left the room with haste.

A few moments, and the door opened again. Mrs. Gano came in with an air that seemed to Aaron Tallmadge suspiciously gracious. She paused for just that decisive but infinitesimal moment of first impression, as she took the measure of the spare figure standing on guard in the middle of his prim New England parlor.

"Mr. Tallmadge?" inquired Mrs. Gano, suavely.

"Mrs. Gano?"

He offered his hand, and then pushed a straight-backed horse-hair chair a little nearer the fire. In the mere speaking of her name his twang made instant attack upon the Southerner's nerves. It passed through the man's mind presently that Mrs. Gano's voice was disagreeably reminiscent of a runaway slave he had once befriended.

"I have just seen my grandson's face at an upper window." She looked round eagerly. "Ah!"

The door had opened very slowly. One eye and half a little dark head were put doubtfully in.

"Come here, Ethan!" said his grandfather.

The child disappeared altogether.

Mr. Tallmadge went out into the hall, and presently reappeared leading Ethan in. He hung back, dropping his curly head, and shooting an occasional look at the newcomer; but since she did not fly at him in the objectionable way of visitors, he allowed himself to be brought by degrees up to the strange lady's chair.

She did not even say "How do you do?" She stooped and kissed him silently. He stared at her with great melancholy eyes, backed away, and stood by his grandfather's side.

"I am afraid he is not strong," said Mrs. Gano, a little huskily.

"He has been singularly free from childish ailments—an occasional cold—"

"Of course, in this trying climate."

"Oh, we find our climate does very well."

"No doubt, in the case of those to the manner born. This child is singularly like his father."

"He reminds us constantly of his mother."

"Is it possible? I assure you I feel, as I look at him, that I have dreamed these twenty years, and that my son is standing there before me."

"You don't say!" remarked the child's grandfather, unmoved. "Everybody here considers him so like the Tallmadges."

Mrs. Gano, with unflattering eyes on the head of the house, gave an incredulous cough. She seemed on the point of expressing more indubitably some further thought, looked at the boy, softened suddenly, and smiled at the grave little face.

"You know who I am?"

He shook his brown curls. A shadow crossed the woman's face.

"Is he never told anything of his father or his father's people?"

"He is very young yet to take an interest in folks he hasn't seen."

"He is nearly six."

"What say?"

"I should have thought an intelligent child of six might have been told that his grandmother—"

"Not six yet, madam. Of course, when he is older—"

He made a gesture indicating a liberal policy.

"When he is older you will have no objection, I suppose, to his making a visit to his father's people?"

"No objection whatever to a visit, madam."

"How soon should you consider such a move expedient?"

"Ah, that depends," replied the wary gentleman—"depends so much on circumstances."

"What kind of circumstances?" she inquired, stiffly.

His look and tone said unmistakably, "Depends on your behavior, madam." "Depends on the child's health and—Run away and play, Ethan," he said.

As the little boy closed the door: "Then you do admit he is delicate?"

Mrs. Gano spoke more coldly than when Ethan had been there to hear.

"I admit the need to consider the health of all children, and secondary only to that, their education."

"What are your views as to Ethan's schooling?"

"I shall expect him to go through the regular mill, as I did: a good primary school, then the preparatory at Andover, then Harvard."

The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried programme presented in that dry manner by the dry old man. It was a "regular mill," and who could tell if the sensitive, fragile little Gano was the stuff to stand these machine-made processes?

"I don't believe, myself," said Mr. Tallmadge, with decision, "in haphazard, shilly-shally ways of raising children, and leaving it to them to see what they'll take to."

"I have little experience of shilly-shally methods," replied his visitor.

"If you leave it to boys to decide, what they take to is mischief nine times out of ten."

"I think you may make your mind easy about my grandson."

Mr. Tallmadge looked at her in silence for a moment; then suddenly: "Yes, yes; he'll turn out all right." He nodded, as if to say, "Trust me to see to that!" "My experience is, if you want a boy to do a particular thing, set that aim before him at the start. That's the way I was raised; that's the way I propose to raise my grandson."

There was a slight pause.

"And in what form of religious faith?"

"We are all members of the Presbyterian Church." It was said as though it had been in obedience to an edict of the Everlasting from the foundation of the world. "You will appreciate the necessity of having my grandson raised under my own eye when I tell you it is my intention that, after he gets through Harvard, he shall succeed to the editorship of my paper."

"My grandson edit an Abolitionist paper?"

Mr. Tallmadge blinked in a slightly nervous fashion, but answered, steadfastly:

"Abolition is abolished, madam; it has served its end. Ethan will naturally fall heir to my property and my profession."

"Ethan is his father's heir first of all—heir to a man who gave his life at Bull Run for our rights, not for the abolition of them."

"Abolition was right, and is law, by the sanction of the God of battles."

Mrs. Gano rose from her chair; the door opened, and in came Miss Hannah. Whether it was chance, or whether she had been waiting outside for the psychological moment, certainly her entrance was opportune. She went through her greeting with a flustered civility that, by its own extreme nervousness, made the situation she had broken in upon seem calm to the point of commonplace. Mrs. Gano found herself trying to put Miss Hannah at her ease.

The tall, thin spinster, with her smooth gray hair and anxious manner, must have been more than double the age of Ethan's mother.

Supper would be ready in twenty minutes.

"Of course," she said, "you will stay? Ethan has just been asking if he mayn't sit up a little later to-night."

"Ethan!" Potent conjuration! Mrs. Gano had not come all this way to look after her grandson's welfare and be turned back by a fanatical outbreak on the part of a bigoted Abolitionist. No, and if plain speaking was to be the order of the day, Mr. Tallmadge should not do it all. He had it his own way, however, in the long grace with which he prefaced supper, a performance that sounded in Mrs. Gano's ears aggressively Presbyterian. It appeared at that meal that Miss Hannah was disposed to be indulgent to her little nephew, and that he was devoted to her. He talked very little, and what he had to say he confided in a whisper to his aunt. But as he ate, he stared unceasingly with great gloomy eyes at his grandmother. She saw with deep misgiving that he was permitted to make the same meal as his elders. He declined to share his aunt's decoction of "shells," as she quaintly called cocoa, and joined his grandparents in a large cup of coffee. He bolted down quantities of that moist and leaden Boston brown bread which Mrs. Gano regarded with amazement and alarm, and he seemed to share the New England taste for beans and bacon, a fare which, in the visitor's mind, ranked with the "hog and hominy" of the hard-working plantation blacks; but to place such food before a little delicate child!

After supper his aunt took him on her lap, and, while Mr. Tallmadge and his guest skirted dangerous topics with stately politeness, Miss Tallmadge, in the corner by the fire, was softly repeating nursery rhymes to the little Ethan. Others might have been struck by the picture of the gaunt, childless woman and her ready assumption of the mother rôle; Mrs. Gano was vaguely conscious of a kind of remissness in herself in having omitted to tell her own children a word about little Nannie Etticott or Cock Robin. In all her life of maternal solicitude she had never once mentioned "Hey-diddle-diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," or even hinted at the existence of "the Little Man who had a little gun." Presently, in the midst of Mr. Tallmadge's remarks upon the beauties of Boston Common, Mrs. Gano caught the child's more and more insistent demand for some joy which Miss Tallmadge was minded to withhold. In spite of "Sh! sh!" more and more shrill came the iteration:

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

In his fervor Ethan had dragged the stern, unyielding horse-hair cushion off the end of the sofa, revealing two volumes hidden behind it.

Mrs. Gano seemed not to regret this diversion. Helping the child to restore the sofa-cushion, she took up the books. As she read the title her look darkened. She put the work down as if it burned her fingers.

"A great, bad book," she said.

"What is that?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.

Mrs. Gano jerked her head without answering.

"What say?" persisted the old man, with his hand to his ear.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," said Miss Tallmadge, trying to speak lightly.

"A very uncommon woman, Mrs. Stowe," said Mr. Tallmadge, firmly; "very uncommon, indeed."

"Let us hope so," ejaculated Mrs. Gano, half to herself.

"Eh?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with gruff suspicion. "What say?"

"I was granting her uncommonness, and hoping it wouldn't get commoner."

"H'm! It could hardly be expected, I suppose, that you should think well of—"

"No; I can't be expected to think well of a woman who is not content with getting a whole nation by the ears, but she must interfere between husband and wife, and—"

"What say?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with corrugated brows and hand to his deaf ear. "I'm talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe."

"So am I," said Mrs. Gano. "I only hope she'll be content with the mischief she's done already, and not rush into print with her espousal of Lady Byron's wrongs."

"I haven't heard that Mrs. Beecher Stowe had any such intention. As a friend of the family, from Lyman down—"

"As a friend of the family, you ought to warn them in time to curb her propensity for attending to other people's affairs. Uncommon! Yes, an uncommon busybody."

"I think, madam, you are misinformed," said Mr. Tallmadge, with dignity.

"I know more about Harriet Beecher Stowe than most people—though she never has set foot in the South—and I know she's a busybody. I also know she has less excuse than some women. The spring I spent with my sister, Mrs. Paget, in Covington, before I met the Stowes, I used to look out and see a man trudging about the hills in front of my windows with a basket on his arm. 'Who is that?' I asked. 'That's Professor Stowe,' they said; and we all wondered what he had in the basket. I said he was botanizing; Mrs. Paget said the basket was too big for that: he must be looking for kail, or dock, or dandelion greens for dinner. By-and-by we heard he had twins in the basket, and was taking them about for an airing. The Stowes were very poor, too, and what with that and twins, Harriet B. ought to have found enough to do at home."

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

"Sh!" said his aunt.

"Mus' sing it," answered Ethan, in the only distinct words his grandmother had heard from his lips.

"What is it?" she asked, more interested in Ethan's infant tastes than even in Mrs. Stowe's enormities.

"It's that foolish little rhyme, 'The New England Cat,'" replied Miss Hannah.

"I don't know it," said Mrs. Gano.

"Ethan likes it for some unknown reason. When he had scarlet-fever last year—"

She stopped, seeing the sudden change in Mrs. Gano's face.

"We had an epidemic of it," said Mr. Tallmadge, as though that fact lessened the danger. "Ethan came out of it famously—didn't you, my little man?"

"Nwingy Tat!" said Ethan.

"Oh yes, he came out all right," said Miss Hannah; "but before the crisis I sat up with him at night, and I sang 'The New England Cat' to him till I nearly died of it. Through sheer exhaustion my voice would get weaker and weaker, till it seemed to die too natural a death for him to notice. But the moment I stopped he would start up and say feverishly, 'Nwingy Tat!' It was the only thing that quieted him."

Mrs. Gano might have been supposed to regard this passion for New England cats as a depraved taste on the part of a Gano, but she said, graciously:

"Let me add my petition to Ethan's. I would like to hear his favorite song."

Perhaps in the dim recesses of her mind she had some formless idea of learning this lyric.

"It's not a song," said Miss Hannah, hurriedly. "Come, child, it's time you went to bed."

"Nwingy Tat, first," said Ethan, firmly.

"Oh, hum it for the child!" said Mr. Tallmadge, impatiently.

Miss Hannah's face took on a dull-red hue, but obediently she began in a thin, sweet little voice: