Chapter VI: The Result (1)

There was another patient for the village doctor, besides Mildred, at the cottage next morning. Indeed, _her_ case sank into insignificance when compared with that of the moaning, tossing, delirious Anna, who shrank away from Adam, begging him not to touch her, for she was not worthy.

They had found her just after sunrise, and sent for her mother, whose first thought was to take her home; but Anna resisted at once; she must stay there she said, and expiate her sin, in Adam’s house. Then, looking, into her mother’s face, she added with a smile,

“You know it was to have been mine in a week!”

Adam did not see the smile. He only heard the words, and his heart beat quickly as he thought it natural that Anna should wish to stay in what was to be her home.

The hot August sun came pouring into the small, low room she occupied, making it so uncomfortable, that Adam said she must be moved, and taking her in his arms he carried her down the stairs, and laid her upon the bridal bed, whose snowy drapery was scarcely whiter than was her face, save where the fever burned upon her fair skin. On the carpet where it had fallen he found the crumpled note. He knew it was her writing, and he looked curiously at the name upon it, while there stole over him a shadowy suspicion, as to the cause of Anna’s recent coldness.

“Herbert Dunallen!” He read the name with a shudder, and then thrust the note into his pocket until the young man came.

Oh, how he longed to read the note and know what his affianced bride had written to Dunallen; but not for the world would he have opened it, and Anna’s secret was safe, unless she betrayed it in her delirium, as she seemed likely to do.

A messenger had been dispatched to Castlewild, informing its young heir of Mildred Atherton’s mishap. In the room he called his library, Herbert sat, arranging his papers, and writing some directions for his head man of business.

“Something from Adam Floyd,” he exclaimed, as he tore open the envelope, “Oh, bother,” was all the comment he made, as he read the hastily written lines, which gave no hint of Anna’s sudden illness.

He was not in the least prepared for that, and the sudden paling of his cheek when, on his arrival at the cottage, he heard of it, did not escape the watchful Adam, who quietly handed him the note, explaining where he had found it, and then went back to Anna, in whose great blue eyes there was a look of fear whenever they met his—a look which added to the dull, heavy pain gnawing at his heart. He did not see Herbert when he read Anna’s note—did not hear his muttered curse at woman’s fickleness, but he saw the tiny fragments into which it was torn, flutter past the window where he sat by Anna’s side. One, a longer strip than the others, fell upon the window sill, and Adam picked it up, reading involuntarily the words “Your unhappy Anna.”

Down in the depths of Adam’s heart there was a sob, a moan of anguish as his fears were thus corroborated, but his face gave no token of the fierce pain within. It was just as calm as ever, when it turned again to Anna who was talking in her sleep, first of Herbert and then of Adam, begging him to forget that he ever knew the little girl called Anna Burroughs, or carried her over the rifts of snow to the school-house under the hill. It seemed strange that she should grow sick so fast when yesterday she had been comparatively well, but the sudden cold she had taken the previous night, added to the strong excitement under which she had been laboring, combined to spend the energies of a constitution never strong, and the fever increased so rapidly that before the close of the second day more than one heart throbbed with fear as to what the end would be.

In spite of her lame ankle Mildred had managed to get into the sick-room, urging Herbert to accompany her, and feeling greatly shocked at his reply that “camphor and medicine were not to his taste.”

Herbert had not greeted his bride elect very lovingly, for to her untimely appearance he attributed Anna’s illness and decision. He could change the latter he knew, only give him the chance, but the former troubled him greatly. Anna might die, and then—Herbert Dunallen did not know what then, but bad as he was he would rather she should not die with all that sin against Adam unconfessed, and out in the beech woods where the night before he had planned with her their flight, and where after leaving Mildred he repaired, he laid his boyish head upon the summer grass and _cried_, partly as a child would cry for the bauble denied, partly as an honest man might mourn for the loved one whose life he had helped to shorten.

Regularly each morning the black pony from Castlewild was tied at the cottage gate, while its owner made inquiry for Anna. He had discernment enough to see that from the first his visits were unwelcome to Adam Floyd, who he believed knew the contents of the note written him by Anna. But in this last he was mistaken. All Adam knew certainly was gathered from Anna’s delirious ravings, which came at last to be understood by Mildred, who in spite of Mrs. Judge Harcourt’s entreaties or those of her tall, handsome son, George Harcourt, just home from Harvard, persisted in staying at the cottage and ministering to Anna. For a time the soft black eyes of sweet Mildred Atherton were heavy with unshed tears, while the sorrow of a wounded, deceived heart was visible upon her face; but at length her true womanly sense of right rose above it all, and waking as if from a dream she saw how utterly unworthy even of her childish love was the _boy man_, whose society she shunned, until, irritated by her manner, he one day demanded an explanation of her coolness.

“You know, Herbert,” and Milly’s clear, innocent eyes looked steadily into his. “You know far better than I, all that has passed between you and Anna Burroughs. To me and her lover, noble Adam Floyd, it is known only in part, but you understand the whole, and I am glad of this opportunity to tell you that you are free from an engagement which never should have been made, and of which you are weary. I did love you so much Herbert, even though I knew that you were wayward. I loved you, and prayed for you, too, every morning and every night. I shall do that yet, wherever you are, but henceforth we are friends, and nothing more. Seek forgiveness, first of God, and then of Adam Floyd, whom you thought to wrong by wresting from him the little ewe-lamb, which was his all.”

Herbert looked up quickly. Wholly unversed in Scripture, the _ewe-lamb_ was Greek to him, but Mildred was too much in earnest for him to jest. She had never seemed so desirable as now, that he had lost her, and grasping her hand from which she was taking the engagement ring, he begged of her to wait, to consider, before she cast him off.

“I was mean with Anna, I know, and I meant to run away with her, but that is over now. Speak to me, Milly; I do not know you in this new character.”

Milly hardly knew herself, but with regard to Herbert she was firm, giving him no hope of ever recovering the love he had wantonly thrown away.

After that interview, the black pony stayed quietly in its stable at Castlewild, while Herbert shut himself up in his room, sometimes crying when he thought of Anna, sometimes swearing when he thought of Mildred, and ending every reverie with his pet words, “oh botheration.”

Each morning, however, a servant was sent to the cottage where, for weeks, Anna hovered between life and death, carefully tended by her mother and Mildred Atherton, and tenderly watched by Adam, who deported himself toward her as a fond parent would toward its erring but suffering child. There was no bitterness in Adam’s heart, nothing save love and pity for the white-faced girl, whom he held firmly in his arms, soothing her gently, while Mildred cut away the long, golden tresses, at which, in her wild moods, she clutched so angrily.

“Poor shorn lamb,” he whispered, while his tears, large and warm, dropped upon the wasted face he had not kissed since the night he and Mildred watched with her and heard so much of the sad story.

But for the help which cometh only from on high, Adam’s heart would have broken, those long bright September days, when everything seemed to mock his woe. It was so different from what he had hoped when he built castles of the Autumn time, when Anna would be with him. She was there, it is true; there in the room he had called _ours_, but was as surely lost to him, he said, as if the bright-hued flowers were blossoming above her grave. She did not love him, else she had never purposed to deceive him, and he looked drearily forward to the time when he must again take up his solitary life, uncheered by one hope in the future.

She awoke to consciousness at last. It was in the grey dawn of the morning, when Adam was sitting by her, while her mother and Mildred rested in the adjoining room. Eagerly she seemed to be searching for something, and when Adam asked for what, she answered: “The note; I had it in my hand when I went to sleep.”

Bending over her, Adam said: “I found it; I gave it to him.”

There was a perceptible start, a flushing of Anna’s cheek and a frightened, half pleading look in her eyes; but she asked no questions, and thinking she would rather not have him there, Adam went quietly out to her mother with the good news of Anna’s consciousness.

Days went by after that, days of slow convalescence; but now that he was no longer needed in the sick-room, Adam stayed away. Tokens of his thoughtful care, however, were visible everywhere, in the tasteful bouquets arranged each morning, just as he knew Anna liked them—in the luscious fruit and tempting delicacies procured by him for the weak invalid who at last asked Mildred to call him and leave them alone together.

At first there was much constraint on either side, but at last Anna burst out impetuously, “Oh, Adam, I do not know what I said in my delirium, or how much you know, and so I must tell you everything.”

Then, as rapidly as possible and without excusing herself in the least, she told her story and what she had intended to do.

For a moment Adam did not speak, and when he did it was to ask if Mildred had told her about Herbert. But his name had not been mentioned between the two girls and thus it devolved upon Adam to explain. Herbert had left the neighborhood and gone abroad immediately after Anna’s convalescence was a settled thing.

“Perhaps he will soon come back,” Adam said, and Anna cried, “Oh, Adam, I never wish him to return, I know now that I never loved him as—I—oh, I wish I had died.”

“You were not prepared, and God spared you to us. We are very glad to have you back,” Adam said.

These were the first words he had spoken which had in them anything like his former manner, and Anna involuntarily stretched her hand toward him. He took it, and letting it rest on his broad, warm palm, smoothed it a little as he would have smoothed a little child’s, but what Anna longed to hear was not spoken, and in a tremor of pain she sobbed out,

“In mercy, speak to me once as you used to. Say that you forgive me, even though we never can be to each other again what we have been!”

“I do forgive you, Anna; and as for the rest I did not suppose you wished it.”

Raising herself up, Anna threw her arms impetuously around his neck, exclaiming,

“I do wish it, Adam. Don’t cast me off. Try me, and see if I am not worthy. I have sinned, but I have repented too. Never were you so dear to me! Oh, Adam, take me back!”

She was getting too much excited, and putting her arms from his neck, Adam laid her upon the pillow, and said to her gently,

“Anna, my faith in you has been shaken, but my love has never changed. You must not talk longer now. I’ll come again by and by, and meantime I’ll send Miss Atherton. She knows it all, both from Herbert and yourself. She is a noble girl. You can trust her.”

At Adam’s request Mildred went to Anna, and sitting down beside her, listened while Anna confessed the past, even to the particulars of her interview with Adam, and then added tearfully,

“Forgive me, and tell me what to do.”

“I should be an unworthy disciple of Him who said forgive, until seventy times seven, if I refused your request,” was Mildred’s reply, as she wound her arm around Anna’s neck, and imprinted upon Anna’s lips the kiss of pardon.

Then, as Anna could bear it, she unfolded her plan, which was that the invalid should return with her to her pleasant home at Rose Hill, staying there until she had fully tested the strength of her love for Adam, who, if she stood the test should come for her himself. As a change of air and scene seemed desirable, Anna’s mother raised no serious objection to this arrangement, and so one October morning Adam Floyd held for a moment a little wasted hand in his while he said good-bye to its owner, who so long as he was in sight leaned from the carriage window to look at him standing there so lone and solitary, yet knowing it was better to part with her awhile, if he would have their future as bright as he had once fancied it would be.

* * * * *

Eight years have passed away, and on the broad piazza of Castlewild a sweet-faced woman stands, waiting impatiently the arrival of the carriage winding slowly up the hill, and which stops at last, while Mildred Atherton alights from it and ascends the steps to where Anna stands waiting for her. And Mildred, who for years has been abroad, and has but recently returned to America, has come to be for a few weeks her guest, and to see how Anna deports herself as the wife of Adam Floyd, and mistress of beautiful Castlewild.

There is a sad story connected with Anna’s being there at Castlewild, a story which only Mildred can tell, and in the dusky twilight of that first evening when Adam was away and the baby Milly asleep in its crib, she takes Anna’s hand in hers and tells her what Anna indeed knew before, but which seems far more real as it comes from Mildred’s lips, making the tears fall fast as she listens to it. Tells her how Providence directed her to the room in a Paris hotel, where a fellow countryman lay dying, alone and unattended save by a hired nurse. The sick room was on the same hall with her own, and in passing the door which was ajar, she was startled to hear a voice once familiar to her and which seemed to call her name. Five minutes later and she was sitting by Herbert Dunallen’s bedside and holding his burning hands in hers, while he told her how long he had lain there with the fever contracted in the south of France, and how at the moment she passed his door he was crying out in his anguish and desolation for the friends so far away, and had spoken her name, not knowing she was so near.

After that Milly was his constant attendant, and once when she sat by him he talked to her of the past and of Anna, who had been three years the wife of Adam Floyd.

“I am glad of it,” he said. “She is happier with him than she could have been with me. I am sorry that I ever came between them, it was more my fault than hers, and I have told Adam so. I wrote him from Algiers and asked his forgiveness, and he answered my letter like the noble man he is. There is peace between us now, and I am glad. I have heard from him, or rather of him since, in a roundabout away. He lost his right arm in the war, and that will incapacitate him from his work. He can never use the hammer again. I do not suppose he has so very much money. Anna liked Castlewild. In fact I believe she cared more for that than for me, and I have given it to her;—have made my will to that effect. It is with my other papers, and Milly, when I am dead, you will see that Anna has her own. I did not think it would come quite so soon, for I am young to die. Not thirty yet, but it is better so, perhaps. You told me that you prayed for me every day, and the memory of that has stuck to me like a burr, till I have prayed for myself, more than once, when I was well, and often since shut up in this room which I shall never leave alive. Stay by me, Milly, to the last; it will not be long, and pray that if I am not right, God will make me so. Show me the way, Milly, I want to be good, I am sorry, oh, so sorry for it all.”

For a few days longer he lingered, and then one lovely autumnal morning, when Paris was looking her brightest, he died, with Milly’s hand in his, and Milly’s tears upon his brow.

And so Castlewild came to Anna, who had been three years its mistress when Milly came to visit her, and on whose married life no shadow however small had fallen, except, indeed, the shadows which are common to the lives of all. When her husband came home from the war a cripple, as he told her with quivering lips, her tears fell like rain for him, because he was sorry, but for herself she did not care; he was left to her, and kissing him lovingly she promised to be his right arm and to work for him if necessary, even to building houses, if he would teach her how. But poverty never came to Adam Floyd and Anna, and probably never would have come, even if there had been no will which left them Castlewild. That was a great surprise, and at first Adam hesitated about going there. But Anna persuaded him at last, and there we leave them, perfectly happy in each other’s love, and both the better, perhaps, for the grief and pain which came to them in their youth.

THE END
OF
ADAM FLOYD.

JOHN LOGAN’S THOUGHTS ABOUT REPAIRING OLD HOUSES.

My wife was Priscilla Lord, daughter of the Hon. Erastus Lord, but I always call her Cilly for short, and she rather likes that pet name, inasmuch as it is not spelled with an S. We had been married and kept house ten years, and it had never occurred to me that we were not as comfortable, and cozy, and happy as our neighbors, until one Saturday night in the month of May, when I was superintending the packing of my shirts, and socks, and neckties, preparatory to a business trip which I was to make for the firm which employed me, and which was to last four weeks positively, if not longer. Then, after sewing on the last button, and darning the last sock, and wondering why men always wore out their heels and toes so fast, Cilly suddenly informed me that we were neither cozy nor comfortable, nor respectable, in the present condition of things.

I was taking off my boots, and sat staring at her with one uplifted in the air, while she went on to say that the view from our bed-room was just horrid, looking out upon nothing but a lane, and a board fence, and Mrs. Patterson’s kitchen—that we had no china closet proper at all, which was a shame for people of our means—that we had to pass through the dining-room to go down cellar, which was a great inconvenience—that we had no conservatory, and the bay window was always crowded with plants in the winter, giving a littered appearance to the room—that the west piazza was altogether too short a walk for her mother, who had lived with us for the past year, and who needed a longer promenade, especially in bad weather. And she continued to inform me further that there was space for such a nice room in the attic, which we really needed in the summer when the house was full, and Lizzie was there with all her children and the nurse.

I liked Lizzie, and liked the children, and liked to have them with us, especially as there were no little Logans of my own playing in the yard; but I thought three spare rooms ought to be enough for them, until I reflected that my mother-in-law, Mrs. Erastus Lord, now occupied one of the spare rooms, leaving a surplus of only two, so I still kept silent until Cilly, thinking she had succeeded in convincing me that of all tucked-up, inconvenient, disreputable houses in town, ours was the worst, went on to say that she thought and her mother thought, and her grandma thought, (grandma was the old Mrs. Lord of all, Mrs. Erastus, senior,) that we ought to “go through a set of repairs;” I think that’s the way she worded it, and as brother John had left her two thousand dollars “_to do just exactly what she pleased with_” she had made up her mind to repair, and was going to do it while I was away, so as to save me all the trouble of the muss, and—and—Cilly got a little confused here and stammered a good deal, and finally went on rapidly: “You see, I have quite decided, and mother has seen the men, and they are coming Monday morning, and it will all be done beautifully before you get back, and you’ll never know the old hut at all.”

I felt a little hurt to hear her stigmatize, as the old hut, what we had thought so pretty and nice when we took possession of it ten years ago, but had no time to protest before she added:

“I didn’t mean to tell you, as I wished to see how surprised you would be when you returned; but I was afraid something might happen, the carpenters get sick, or you come home sooner than you intended, and so I had to tell you. See, here is the plan. I had an architect come and make it the day you were in New York. Isn’t it lovely, and such an improvement?”

I looked at the paper which she held toward me, and saw on it a drawing which reminded me of one of the boats of the White Star Line, it was so long and narrow, with chimneys and smoke-stacks and gables jutting out everywhere.

“Don’t you like it John?” Cilly asked, with a most rueful face, and I replied:

“Why, yes, I dare say it is nice, but you see I haven’t the least bit of building genius, and less imagination, so I’ve no idea what it’s to be.”

“Why, John, what a stupid; that’s the new piazza, and maybe the front door will have to be moved, and that’s the new gable, and that’s the conservatory, and here is our room right over the kitchen.”

“Over the kitchen!” and I involuntarily sniffed as I thought of onions, and codfish, and boiled cabbage, each one of which was a favorite dish of mine, though I did not like the smell in my sleeping room.

Cilly understood my meaning and hastened to say:

“Oh, we have fixed all that; there’s to be deafening, a double floor and a whole lot of mortar, and we shall never hear a sound nor smell a smell, Jane is so quiet; and it will be so pleasant with a broad balcony and a door to go out. I wish you would try to have a little interest in it, John.”

So I tried to be interested, but could not forbear asking her if she had the slightest conception of all it involved, this raising the roof and Cain generally; and then she cried, and the Lord part of her got the ascendant, and she said I was _mean_, and an _old fogy_, and a _conservative_, and a—well, she called me several names, and then we made it up, and I told her to fix away, and knock things endways if she wanted to, and that’s about the way matters stood Monday morning, when I said good-bye to her at half-past six and hurried to the train. She was up to see me off, the carpenters were coming at seven, and she must be ready to receive them.

“You won’t know the house when you get home,” she said, “it will be so changed and improved; and if you are at all puzzled to find it, look for the very biggest and handsomest place on the street. Good-by.”

She was so elated with her repairing that I do not think she was a bit sorry to have me go, and this did not console me much, or make me take any more kindly to the repairs. I did not hear from her for three or four days, and then she was in high spirits. Such nice men as the carpenters were, and such fun to superintend them: she began to think nature had intended her for a builder, or at least a designer of houses.

I groaned a little for fear my hitherto quiet, satisfied Cilly should develop a propensity for building, and ruin me entirely. It was in her family on both sides, for old Mrs. Erastus Lord had ruined her husband that way, while Mrs. Erastus, junior, had sunk over twenty thousand dollars on a place which originally cost five thousand, and which when completed looked as if it had been taken up and shaken by a high wind and thrown down promiscuously. But I hoped better things of my little Cilly, and resuming her letter, read that the piazza was going up so fast, and they had not yet done a single bit of damage, except to knock a hole through one of the front door lights, and kill the ivy, which was just growing so beautifully, and which had come all the way from Kenilworth.

The next letter was not quite so hilarious and assured, though Cilly was still hopeful and plucky, notwithstanding that four windows had been broken, and the arm of my Apollo Belvidere, which I had bought in Florence, and a whole lot of plaster, had fallen from the ceiling of the room where she was sitting, and a man’s leg came right through, lathing and all. I think the leg disturbed her more than all the other mishaps, though her mother told her it was nothing at all to what she must expect, but she didn’t think it was nice, and it was such a muss to have four carpenters, three masons, two tinners, three painters, besides a boy to lath, and a man to clean up, and the two thousand dollars would not begin to pay for it all, and I must make some arrangements, whereby she could get some more money, and if I could she’d like me to stay away as long as possible, not that she did not miss me awfully, and the days seemed a month each, but she did want the house done before I returned, and it went on so slowly, though mother said they were the best workmen she ever saw.

This was the substance of Cilly’s letter, and I did not hear from her again except a few hurried lines saying she was well, and the house progressing, and both drains stopped up, and a chimney blown down, and the hard finish in one of the rooms spoiled by the rain which beat in just as they got the eaves-trough off. This was about as I had expected it would be, but I was sorry for Cilly, and sorry that my business kept me away from her six weeks instead of four, as I had at first proposed. But the day came at last for me to go home, and I almost counted the minutes, until there came a whiz and a crash, and we were off the track, with baggage car smashed but nobody hurt. This made it very late, midnight in fact, when we reached Morrisville, and, valise in hand, I stepped out upon the platform. It was the darkest night I think, I ever knew, and the rain was falling in torrents. Fortunately, however, there was a solitary cab in waiting, and I took it and bade the negro drive me to No.— Guelph street. But he was a stranger in the place, and stared at me stupidly until I explained where Guelph street was, and then remembering what Cilly had said about looking for the handsomest and largest house, bade him drive to the best and most stylish house in the street, if he knew which that was.

“Yes, sar, I done knows now,” and with a grin he banged the door, mounted his box and drove me _somewhere_, and I alighted, paid my fare, and _heard_ him depart, for I could not see him, or the house either, except with the eye of faith, but of course it was mine, and I groped my way through the gate and up to the front door, to which I tried to fit my night-key, in vain, and after fumbling awhile at the key hole, and trying a shutter to see if it was unfastened, I was hunting for the bell knob, when suddenly a window from above was opened; there was a clicking sound, and then the sharp ring of a pistol broke the midnight stillness. I was not hit, but a good deal scared, and yelled out:

“For Heaven’s sake, Cilly, what do you mean by firing away at a chap like this?”

“John Logan, is that you? We thought it was a burglar. What are you here for?” some one called from the window, while at the same moment the gas flashed up in the hall and showed me where I was.

Not at my house at all, but at the large boarding house at the upper end of the street, kept by a dashing grass widow. Hastily explaining my mistake, I said good night to Bob Sawyer, one of the boarders, whose loud laugh discomfited me somewhat as I felt my way into the street and started toward home.

This time I was sure I was right by the trees near the gate, but the front door was gone—moved, and not wishing to venture into unknown regions, I concluded to try the bath-room door, for our rooms were adjoining it, and I could easily speak to Cilly without alarming her. So I tried it, and after floundering over piles of rubbish, and tearing my trousers on broads full of nails, and plunging up to my knees in what seemed to be a muddy ditch, and which smelled awfully, I suddenly found myself plump in the cistern, with the water up to my chin; at the same time I heard a succession of feminine shrieks, conspicuous among which was Cilly’s voice, crying out:

“Oh, we shall all be murdered. It is a burglar. Throw something at him.”

And they _did_ throw—first a soap dish, then the poker, then the broom, and lastly a pair of my old boots.

“Cilly, Cilly!” I screamed; “are you mad? It’s I, John, drowning in the cistern.”

Then such a Babel as ensued; such a scrambling down stairs, and opening of doors, and thrusting out of tallow candles into the darkness. But I was out of the cistern by this time, and, wet as a drowned rat, confronted Cilly in her night-gown and crimping-pins, and asked her “What the deuse was up?”

“Oh, John!” she sobbed; “everything is up; the drain,” (that explained the smell), “the floor, and the pump, and the walk, and I’ve had such a dreadful time, and mother’s down with the rheumatism, and Jane has sprained her ankle, and Mary has gone, and I have got such a cold, and the town is full of burglars, and I thought you were one, and I wish we hadn’t repaired, it’s all so nasty and awful.”

The next day, which was Sunday, I had ample time to survey the premises. There was a double piazza on three sides, which was an improvement; but the hall door was changed, which wasn’t. Then the little conservatory, hitched on to the double bay window, which looked like its father, was doubtful. But all this was nothing to the confusion which reigned at the back of the house; I only marveled that I had not broken my neck. The walk was up, the drain was up, the pump was up, the pipes were up, the cistern floor was up, and the kitchen roof was up, as well, looming into the sky, but the room was far from being finished.

Nothing had worked as she hoped it would, Cilly said, and everything went wrong, especially the eaves-troughs, and conductors, and pipes, and it always rained just at the wrong time, and the cellar filled with water, and everything floated like a boat, and the plastering came down on the stove when Jane was getting dinner, and the soot came down from the chimney on Mary’s clean clothes, and just as she got them all washed again and hung out, they came with a lot of lumber and she had to take them down, and things got so bad that she left in disgust, and Jane had fallen into the drain and sprained her ankle, and mother was sick in bed, and the carpets all up, and, worse than all, the Dunnings were coming next week from New York, and it was more than Cilly could bear.

Of course, I told her I’d help her bear it, and I put my shoulder to the wheel and wrote to the Dunnings to defer their visit, and began to investigate matters, which I found had become a little loose, to say the least of it. The men were good enough and faithful enough, and the troubles Cilly had encountered were only the troubles incident upon repairing any old house, a job which is quite as trying to one’s patience, and as exasperating as putting up a stove pipe when no one joint fits another, particularly the elbows, and the result is that new pipe is almost always bought to take the place of the old. So with our house; nothing was right, nothing would do again. No matter how good or how long the piece of conductor, or lead pipe, or bit of siding or floor, it would not fit, and it went to swell the pile of rubbish which, in our back yard was almost mountain high, and reminded me of the excavations in Rome, when I first looked out upon the debris that dreary Sunday morning. But Monday showed a better state of things. I saw that the open drain and cistern hurt Cilly the most, and so I had them closed up first and then plunged into the midst of the repairing, myself, and was astonished to find how rapidly I began to develop a talent for the business. I believe, after all, there is something exhilarating in the smell of fresh plaster, and something exciting in walking over piles of old lath, and bits of broken siding, and base boards, and moldings, and matched stuff, and so on through the whole list of terms in a carpenter’s vocabulary. I came to know them all, from _mitering_ to _nosing_, though I never rightly made out the orthography of that last word or its derivation either, but I knew just what it was, and was great on a squint to see if things were square or _plumb_, as Billy called it, and I think I made them change one window three times, and a certain door twice. What a propensity they did have for getting things wrong, that is, according to my ideas, and poor Cilly had been driven nearly crazy with windows just where she did not want them, and doors opening against her furniture. Then, too, she informed me, she began to suspect that the men thought she was strong-minded, and wanted to vote, because she superintended them, and was always in the thickest of it, and exactly in their way. Whether they liked masculine rule better, I never heard. I only know that they all worked well and faithfully, and they certainly did get on faster when they were not obliged to pull down one day what they had done the day before. This had been Cilly’s method of procedure, aided and abetted by her mother, whom the men stigmatized as “the old one,” and who spied upon them from every keyhole, and came unexpectedly upon them from every corner. She was disabled now, and could only issue daily bulletins to which I paid no heed, and so the repairs went on, and just three months after the first nail was driven the last man departed, and we went to work setting to rights, which would have been delightful business, if only we could have found our things, but everything was lost or mislaid. Curtain fixtures were gone; door keys were gone; stair rods were missing; screw drivers and tack-hammers could not be found; wood-saw broken; both trowels lost; water pails full of plaster, and all the brooms in the house spoiled, to say nothing of the dusters and dust pans broken, and dippers lost.

But then, we had a double piazza, and a place for flowers, and a china closet so big that I had to spend a hundred dollars to fill it, and our bed-room has two arches over the south windows, and a raised platform behind them, and we have each of us a bureau in a dressing-room which looks like a long hall, and I have four drawers all to myself for my shirts and neckties, and a quarter of a closet, and there are east windows and south windows, which make it so bright in the morning that the flies bite me awfully, and we had to buy a mosquito net to keep them off, and instead of being disturbed by Mrs. Patterson’s pump, and looking into nothing but her back yard and kitchen, we now look into Mrs. Alling’s barn-yard, with a most unsightly corn-crib in the center of it, and Mrs. Alling’s roosters have a bad habit of crowing every hour, while at about three or four o’clock in the morning, the noise is so terrible, that I believe her hens crow too.

But Cilly likes that—it sounds rural and like the country; and our room is lovely, with the two broad balconies where we sometimes have tea, when the west wind is not too strong, the sun too hot, or the mosquitoes too thick. Then it is such a nice place to smoke, but Cilly never lets me do that any more; she only smiles so sweetly on her gentlemen friends, and tells them it’s a nice place, that I am tempted to try it sometimes surreptitiously, when she and her mother are down town at some of the temperance meetings, but her mother would smell me a mile off, and so I forbear.

Honestly, though, I do enjoy the balconies, and I rather like the arches over the windows, which I call the _twins_, and which are very pretty. They ought to be, for they cost enough. I’ve never told Cilly just how much I paid, besides her brother’s windfall, but when the greedy assessors tucked an extra four thousand on our house because of the _improvements_, I wondered how they guessed so accurately.

We have five spare rooms now, but the new one in the attic, which was built for Lizzie’s children and the nurse, has never been occupied. The nurse is afraid to sleep there, you have to pass through such a menagerie of trunks, and broken chairs, and rag bags, and old hoop skirts, and cast off pants, and last year’s bonnets, to get to it, that it gives her the horrors, and as the children will not sleep without her, that room was made for nothing except to show.

Mrs. Erastus Lord, senior, is dead, and Cilly was very sorry, when she died, and I suppose I was sorry, too; and I _know_ I was glad when Mrs. Erastus, junior, recovered the use of her limbs, and sailed away to Europe, where she finds the manners and customs more congenial to her taste than here.

Cilly and I live very quietly together now, and I do not believe she has any thought of repairing again, though she has told me in confidence that the next time she does so, she means to stow the furniture in the barn, and knock the plaster off from all the old walls, which were so badly cracked when the house was fixed the last time; but when she actually gets to that point, as true as my name is John Logan, I’ll lock her up in a lunatic asylum and then commit suicide.

THE PASSION PLAY
AT OBERAMMERGAU, 1880.

We have seen the great Passion Play, and the day is nearly over which we have anticipated so long, and to which every plan has been made subservient, since we crossed the ocean. And now, while the streets are full of people and the twilight shadows are falling over Mt. Kofel, where the tall cross shows so conspicuously, I sit down to write my impressions of the wonderful drama, which, during the summer, has attracted nearly 100,000 visitors to this little, quiet, old-fashioned town, among the hills of Bavaria. The high and the low, the rich and the poor, the titled lord and the lowly peasant meet here together, jostling side by side, sharing the same fatigue and discomfort, and deeming neither too great a price to pay for the object they have in view.

Before speaking of the play in detail, it may not be out of place to say something of the way to reach Oberammergau, and of the town itself; and so, first, the journey there.

Nearly all the Americans and English who visit Oberammergau, make Munich their starting-point; consequently the city is at this season crowded to its utmost capacity, and reminds one of Philadelphia during the Centennial. Naturally a great deal of anxiety is felt by the tourist with regard to his pilgrimage to the valley of the Ammer, especially as he hears such exaggerated accounts of the difficulties to be encountered on the way, and he is at times half tempted to give it up as something unattainable. When we reached Munich, on Friday, August 20th, and made inquiries at our hotel as to the probability of our getting tickets for August 29th, we were looked upon as lunatics for entertaining such a thought.

It was impossible under any circumstances to procure a place for the 29th, we were told by the clerk. There would be at least 6,000 people there, with accommodations for 2,000, and our only way was to wait quietly at the hotel until Sunday, the 29th; then take Gaze’s tickets, which were to be had in the office for forty-five marks each, and go to see the play on Monday, as it was sure to be repeated.

Gaze, let me say, is an enterprising English tourist agent, who has opened a hotel at Oberammergau, and advertizes to board and lodge you for two days and carry you to and from the railway station at Murnau, where you leave the cars, for forty-five marks, which are equal to $11.25 of American money,—a pretty good price, it seemed to us, to pay for two days’ board and a drive of sixteen miles; but we accepted it as inevitable, and settled down quietly to wait, until Providence threw in our way an English clergyman, who changed our plans entirely.

“Don’t believe one word they tell you at the hotels,” he said. “They wish to keep you here as long as possible. Don’t listen to them. Don’t touch a Gaze ticket. Don’t touch a Cook ticket. Don’t touch anybody’s ticket, but just run your own canoe.”

On second considerations I am inclined to think he did not use that last expression, which I believe is purely American, but that was what he meant, and he went on to say: “Write to the burgomaster yourself and ask for the highest priced tickets. You’ll not get them, but you will get something. Neither will he answer your letter, but your name will be recorded and remembered when you prefer your claim. Go on Friday by the early train to Murnau, where you will find hundreds of carriages waiting to take you to Oberammergau, and once there, get a place for yourself at half the sum charged by Gaze or his agents.”

We followed the Englishman’s advice and wrote to the burgomaster, and on Friday took the train for Murnau, distant from Munich sixty miles, and from Oberammergau sixteen. Here we expected our troubles to commence, for we doubted a little our English friend’s story of the carriages waiting for us there; but he was right. There were hundreds of them,—vehicles of every kind,—some good enough for a princess, and some which looked as if Eve herself might have driven in them, had driving been one of her pastimes. I even noticed a cow and a horse harnessed together, but I hardly think they were there for the purpose of getting passengers. At all events we did not take that establishment, but chartering one, which had a pair of strong looking horses, we were soon started on what proved to be the pleasantest drive we ever experienced, and one we shall never forget.

There are two routes from Murnau to Oberammergau,—one through the little village of Oberau and up the famous Mt. Ettal, which is so steep and long that passengers are obliged to walk up it, or as a writer has expressed it, “Rich and poor have to struggle with the steepness of Mt. Ettal for over half an hour, while a pair of the best horses are struggling hard to draw up an empty carriage.” Marvelous stories are told of people who have had the apoplexy, and of horses which have died toiling up this hill, and as none of our party had a fancy to try it, we chose the other, and to my mind the pleasanter route of the two. It is a little longer than the one through Ettal, but the road winds alternately up and over hills neither too long or tiresome, and down through grassy valleys fresh from a recent shower and sweet with the perfume of new mown hay, and into which little brooks came tumbling from the mountains which shelter Oberammergau and which are always in view. Long before we reached the town I singled out one tall peak which from its peculiar shape attracted my curiosity and which I found to be the far-famed Kofel, on which the cross is erected and which bends over the little hamlet as if in benediction. For this peak the people have a kind of superstitious reverence, and when asked to repeat their play in America, they replied, “We would do so gladly, but we must bring our Kofel with us.”

As we came down into the valley and passed through Unterammergau our way lay through a long avenue, bordered on either side with trees of mountain ash, whose clusters of scarlet berries gave a bit of coloring to the picture, and thus enhanced its beauty. I wish I could convey to your minds a correct idea of the loveliness of that valley, and make you see it, as we saw it that summer afternoon, when the sunlight fell so softly upon the steep hillsides where the grass was green and smooth as velvet, and little feathery wreaths of mist were floating on the mountain tops, reminding one of the patches of snow seen in midsummer in the Alps of Switzerland. Through the valley the Ammer runs swiftly, making sundry turns and windings, as it goes singing on its way toward the deep ravines, which lie beyond Unterammergau. At the end of the ash-bordered avenue we crossed a little bridge and were at last in Oberammergau.

It is not a pretty town, or a clean one either, notwithstanding that a writer from whom I have before quoted, says, that “it is the cleanest town in the Bavarian Alps.” Not having seen all the towns in the Bavarian Alps, I am not prepared to dispute the assertion, but if Oberammergau is the cleanest, what must the others be? The streets are very narrow and crooked, and wind here and there in a crazy kind of manner very bewildering to the stranger, who constantly loses his way. But there is never any difficulty in finding it again, as the church, with its peculiar dome, not unlike a Turkish mosque, is a good landmark, as is also Gaze’s hotel, which stands very nearly in the center of the town. This last building looks as if it might have been an old barn before it was converted to its present use. It is very noisy around it, and dirty, too, in the extreme. The streets do not look as if they were ever picked up, and the open sewers are simply a nuisance to the eye and an offense to the nostrils, as are also the stables, of which there are quite as many as houses. Every dwelling has its barn, where the cows and horses are kept, and every barn has its manure heap, piled and boarded with great care, and standing close to the street, and oftentimes under the very windows of the houses. The fleas are everywhere, and attack you at all points, and travel over you until you feel like tearing your hair in utter desperation. And yet we have been told by some that they have not seen a flea. Truly their lot was cast in a more fortunate locality than ours.

The houses of Oberammergau are for the most part small, old-fashioned and peculiarly shaped, and very few have flowers or trees in front. They stand mostly in the street, as it were, and are neither homelike nor inviting in their outward appearance. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, and we noticed several places where it would be a delight to stay. But these had probably been engaged for weeks, and when we drove to one of them which had a pretty yard in front, we were received with a shake of the head. At last, however, we found rooms in a sort of _dependence_ to a restaurant near Gaze’s hotel, and though the stables were here, and more smells than poor, abused Cologne ever boasted, and though directly under our window there was a beer garden, where I knew the peasantry would probably spend most of the night, we concluded we were fortunate to get even such quarters, and tried to feel contented and cheerful, until in walking about the town we came upon a tiny little cottage standing in a patch of turnips, with the muck heap behind the house instead of in front of it. There were some boxes of flowers in the window, and the face of the old lady who sat on a bench by the door was so pleasant and attractive that we accosted her, and were told that “we could have the upper floor if we liked,—would we step in and look?”