Читать книгу Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York - Frederic Harold - Страница 11

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MISS Sabrina sat by her accustomed window an hour after the return from the grave, waiting for Albert. The mourning dress, borrowed for the occasion from a neighbor, was cut in so modern a fashion, contrasted with the venerable maiden’s habitual garments, that it gave her spare figure almost a fantastic air. The bonnet, with its yard of dense, coarse ribbed crape, lay on the table at her elbow, beside her spectacles and the unnoticed Bible. Miss Sabrina was ostensibly looking out of the window, but she really saw nothing. She was thinking very steadily about the coming interview with her nephew, and what she would say to him, and wondering, desponding, hoping about his answers.

The door opened, and Albert entered. “You wanted to see me, Aunt, so Annie said,” he remarked! gravely, in a subdued tone.

She motioned him to a chair and answered, in a solemn voice curiously like his own: “Yes, there’s some things I want to say to you, all by yourself.”

They sat for some moments in silence, the lawyer watching his aunt with amiable forbearance, as if conscious that his time was being wasted, and she, poor woman, groping in a novel mental fog for some suitable phrases with which to present her views. Under Albert’s calm, uninspiring gaze those views seemed to lose form, and diminish in intelligence as much as in distinctness. It had all been so clear to her mind—and now she suddenly found it fading off into a misty jumble of speculations, mere castles in the air. She had expected to present an unanswerable case lucidly and forcibly to her lawyer nephew; instead, it seemed increasingly probable that he would scout the thing as ridiculous—and, what was worse, be justified in so doing. So it was that she finally made her beginning doubtingly, almost dolefully:

“Of course I dunno haow you feel abaout it, Albert, but I can’t help thinking something ought to be settled abaout th’ farm, while yer here.”

“Settled? How settled?’’ asked Albert. There was a dry, dispassionate fibre in his voice which further chilled her enthusiasm.

“Why—well—you knaow—what I mean, Albert,” she said, almost pathetically. It was so hard to know just how to say things to Albert.

“On the contrary, I don’t in the least know what you mean. What do you want settled about the farm? What is there to settle about it?”

“Oh, nothin’, ef yeh don’t choose to understand” said Miss Sabrina.

Another period of silence ensued. Albert made a movement as if to rise, and said:

“If there is’nt anything more, I think I’ll go down again.”

There was an artificial nicety of enunciation about this speech, which grated on the old lady’s nerves. She squared her shoulders and turned upon her nephew.

“Naow what’s the use of bein’ mean, Albert? Yeh dew knaow what I’m thinking of, jis’ ez well ez I dew! Yeh unly want to make it ez hard fer me to tell yeh as yeh possibly kin. I s’pose thet’s the lawyer of it!”

Albert smiled with all his face but the eyes, and slightly lifting his hands from his fat knees, turned them palms up, in mute deprecation of his aunt’s unreasonableness. The gesture was as near the shoulder-shrug as the self-contained lawyer ever permitted himself to go. It was a trifle, but it angered the old maid enough to remove the last vestige of hesitation from her tongue:

“Well, ef yeh don’t knaow what I mean, then I’ll tell yeh! I mean that ef th’ Fairchilds are goin’ to be a Dearborn caounty fam’ly, ’n’ hole their heads up amongst folks, ther’s got to be a change o’ some sort right away. Your father’s let everything slide year after year, till there’s pesky little lef’ naow to slide on. He’s behine hand agin in money matters, even with th’ Pratt mortgage on top of t’others. What’s wuss, it’s in everybody’s maouth. They’ve left him off th’ board at th’ cheese-factory this year, even; of course they say, it’s cuz he never ’tended th’ meetin’s—but I knaow better! It’s jis cuz Lemuel Fairchild’s goin’ deown hill, ’n’ the farm’s goin’ to rack ’n’ ruin, ’n’ ev’rybuddy knaows it. Jis’ think of it? Why, ’twas th’ Fairchilds made that cheese-factory, ’n’ it’s allus gone by aour name, ’n’ we used to sen’ th’ milk of a hundred ’n’ thirty caows there—almost as much as all th’ rest of ’em put togither—‘n’ ez I said to Leander Crump, when he was squirmin’ raound tryin’ to make me b’lieve they didn’t mean nothin’ by droppin’ Lemuel aout o’ th’ board, says I—‘nobuddy ever ’spected a table spoonful o’ water in aour milk!’—‘n’ he colored up, I tell yeh!”

“No doubt” said Albert, impassively.

Miss Sabrina paused to mentally retrace her argument, and see if this remark had any special bearing. She could discover none, and grew a little angrier.

“Well, then, th’ question’s right here. My father, your grand father, made a name fer hisself, and a place for his fam’ly, here in Dearborn caounty, second to nobuddy. Fer years ’n’ years I kin remember thet th’ one question people ast, when it was proposed to dew anything, was ‘what does Seth Fairchild think ’baout it?’ He went to th’ Senate twice; he could ’a gone to Congress from this dees-trick time ’n’ time agin, if he’d be’n a mine to. Ev’rybuddy looked up to him. When he died, all of a suddent, he lef’ Lemuel th’ bes’ farm, th’ bes’ stock, th’ bes’ farm haouse, fer miles raound. Well, thet’s forty year ago. I’ve lived here threw it all. I’ve swallered my pride every day in th’ week, all thet time. I’ve tried to learn myself a humble spirit—but I’ve hed to see this place, and the fam’ly, going daown, daown, daown!”

There were tears in the old maid’s eyes now, as she spoke, tears of mortification and revolt against her helplessness, for she seemed to read the failure of her appeal in the placid face of her nephew, with its only decent pretence of interest. She went on, with a rising voice:

“You knaow a little of haow things hev’ gone, though you’ve allus took precious good pains to knaow ez little ez yeh could. You knaow that when you were a boy you were a rich man’s son, with yer pony, ’n’ yer dancin’ lessons, ’n’ yer college eddica-tion; ’n’ yer mother dressed well, ’n’ had a kerridge, ’n’ visited with th’ bes’ people of Albany, people who were my friends tew when I used to go to Albany with yer grandfather. ’N’ what hev we come to? Yer mother slaved her life aout, lost all her ambition, lost all her pride, saw things goin’ to th’ dogs and didn’t knaow haow to stop ’em—sakes forbid thet I should say anything agin Sissly; she did all she could; p’raps ’twould ’ev gone different if she’d be’n a different kine o’ woman, p’raps not; there’s no use talkin’ ’baout thet. ’N’ ef I’d hed my say, tew, maybe things’d be’n different; but its ez it is, ’n’ it’s no use cryin’ over spilt milk.

“Father never meant to be hard with me. When he lef’ me nothin’ but a living aout o’ th’ farm, he expected, everybuddy expected, my Aunt Sabrina’d leave me a clean sixty thaousand dollars when she died. She was an ole woman, ’n’ a widow, ’n’ she hed no childern. She’d allus promised my father thet if I was named after her—confaound her name!—I shaould be her heir. ’N’ then, Iess’n a year after his death, what does the old huzzy up ’n’ do but marry some fortune hunter young enough to be her son, ’n’ give him every cent she hed in the world. He led her a fine dance of it, tew, ’n’ serve her right! But there I was, lef ’thaout a thing ’cep a roof over my head.

“ ’N’ then Lemuel, nothin’ ud do but he must go to Californy when the gold cry riz, ’n’ no sooner’d he git there than he was homesick ’n’ hed to come back; ’n’ when he got back, ’n’ begun to hear what fortunes them who’d gone aout with him were a making, than he must start aout again. But where it’d be’n wilderness a few months b’fore, he faound cities naow, ’n’ ev’ry chance took up; then he got robbed o’ all his money, ’n’ hed to borrer, ’n’ then he took chills ’n’ fever off th’ isthmus, n’ hed to lay in quarantine fer weeks, on ’caount o’ th’ yellah fever; it’d be’n a poor year on the farm, ’n’ when he got back, it took ev’ry cent of his ready-money to set himself right.

“From thet day to this, his Californy luck hez stuck to him like death to a nigger, tell here, to-day, the Fitches don’t think it wuth while to come to your poor mother’s fun’ral—I kin remember Lije Fitch when he was glad enough to beg beans o’ my father fer seed—‘n’ I’m wearing borrered mournin’ of Sarah Andrewses, a mile tew big for me!”

“It seems to me I’ve been told all this a good many times, Aunt Sabrina,” said Albert, as his aunt stopped and glared at him trembling with the excitement of her peroration. “There’s nothing very-pleasant in it, for either of us, to listen to or talk about; but I don’t see that there’s anything more than I’ve heard over and over again, except about your having on another woman’s dress, and I don’t assume that I am expected to interfere about that!”

Poor Miss Sabrina was too deeply moved, and too much in earnest, to note the sarcastic levity underlying the lawyer’s conclusion. She caught only the general sense of a negative response, and looked at her nephew steadily with a gaze half-indignant, half appealing.

“Then you won’t dew anything, ay?” she asked at last.

“Oh, I am very far from saying that. That’s another thing. You send for me, saying that you have an important communication to make to me—at least, I assume that it is important, from the circumstances surrounding the request. I come, and you first insist that I know as well as you do what you mean, and then, when I demur, you rehearse all the unfortunate details of my father’s failure in life. I suggest that these are already tolerably familiar to me, and this mild statement you construe as a definite refusal on my part to do something—what, I don’t know.”

“I declare, Albert, you better send in a bill fer givin’ me this consultation. I never knew a son who could take his father’s ruin ’n’ his fam’ly’s disgrace so cool, before. I s’pose that’s th’ lawyer of it, tew!”

“Perhaps it’s an advantage that some one of the family should keep cool, Aunt, and look at things one by one, in their true relation. Now, if you have any proposition to make to me, any plan to present for my consideration, I should like to hear it—because really this other style of conversation is profitless beyond description. In a word, what do you want me to do?”

“What do I want yeh to do?” The old maid leaned forward and put a thin, mitted hand on Albert’s knee, looking eagerly into his face, and speaking almost shrilly. “I want yeh to take this farm, to come here to live, to make it a rich gentleman’s home agin! to put the Fairchilds up once more where my father left ’em.”

“Yes?” was the provokingly unenthusiastic response.

Miss Sabrina felt that she had failed. She put her spectacles on, and took the Bible into her lap, as if to say that she washed her hands of all mundane matters. But it did not suit Albert to regard the interview as closed.

“There is one thing you don’t seem to see at all, Aunt,” he said. “That is, that Dearborn County is relatively not altogether the most important section of the Republic, and that it is quite possible for a man to win public recognition or attain professional distinction in other communities which might reconcile him to a loss of prestige here. It may sound like heresy to you, but I am free to admit that the good opinion of the business men of New York City, where I am regarded as a successful sort of man, seems to me to outweigh all possible questions as to how I am regarded by Elhanan Pratt and Le-ander Crump and—and that Baptist gentleman, for instance, whom you had here to-day. The world has grown so large, my dear aunt, since your day, that there are thousands upon thousands of Americans now who go all their lives without ever once thinking about Dearborn County’s opinion. Of course I can understand how deeply you must feel what you regard as a social decline in the eyes of your neighbours. But truly, it does not specially affect me. They are not my neighbours; if I seem to them to be of less importance than I was in my boyhood, when I had a pony, I can’t help it, and I am sure I don’t want to. Frankly, to use my mother’s old phrase, I don’t care a cotton hat for their opinion good, bad, or indifferent. It is this, I think, which you leave out of your calculation.”

Miss Sabrina had listened, with the Book opened only by a finger’s width. The elaborate irony of her nephew’s words had escaped her, but she saw a gleam of hope in his willingness to discuss the matter at all.

“But then this is the home o’ the Fairchilds; the fam’ly belongs to Dearborn Caounty; father was allus spoken of ez Seth Fairchild o’ Dearborn, jis’ as much ez—ez Silas Wright o’ Dutchess.”

“Of course that last is a powerful argument,” said Albert with a furtive smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “But, after all, the county family idea doesn’t seem to attract me much. Why, aunt, do you know that your grandfather Roger was a journeyman shoemaker, who walked all the way here from Providence. There was nothing incongruous in his son becoming a Senator. Very well; if you have a state of society where sudden elevations of this sort occur, there will inevitably be corresponding descents—just as lean streaks alternate with fat in the bacon of commerce. The Fairchilds went up—they, come down. They have exhausted the soil. Do you see?”

“Nao! I don’t see a bit! ’N’ I b’lieve at heart you’re jis’ ez praoud ez I be!”

“Proud? Yes! Proud of myself, proud of my practice, proud of my position. But proud because three or four hundred dull countrymen, seeing my cows sleek, my harness glossy, my farm well in order, and knowing that my grandfather had been a State Senator, would consider me a ‘likely ’ man—no, not at all.”

Albert rose at this to go, and added, as he turned the door-knob:

“As soon as he’s equal to it, Aunt Sabrina, I’ll get father to go over his affairs with me, and I’ll try and straighten them out a trifle. I dare say we can find some way out of the muddle.”

“But yeh won’t take up the thing yerself? Yeh won’t dew what I wanted yeh tew?”

The lawyer smiled, and said: “What really? Come here and be a farmer?”

Miss Sabrina had risen, too, and came toward her nephew. “No” she said, “not a farmer. Be a country gentleman, ’n’—‘n’—a Congressman!” Albert smiled again, and left the room. He smiled to himself going down the stairs, and narrowly escaped forgetting to change his expression of countenance when he entered the living room, where were sitting people who had not entirely forgotten the fact that it was a house of mourning.

For Albert had a highly interesting idea in his mind, both interesting and diverting. Curiously enough, he had begun developing it from the moment when his aunt first disclosed her ambition for him. At the last moment, in a blind way she had suggested the first political office that entered her mind as an added bribe. She could not know that her astute nephew had, from the first suggestion of her plan, been trying to remember whether it was Jay and Adams Counties, or Jay and Morgan, that were associated with Dearborn in the Congressional district; or that, when she finally in despair said “Be a country gentleman and a Congressman,” his brain had already turned over a dozen projects in as many seconds, every one Congressional.