Chapter I: Annie’s Story Continued

AFTER FIVE YEARS.

It is a question whether one can truly love more than once. I do not think a woman can. But men are different and seem capable of many loves. If anyone doubts this let him recall the number of widows and widowers among his acquaintance, and see if there are not fifty per cent. more of the former than of the latter. Three women had called my father husband and I believe he had loved them all devotedly, but whether it was the suddenness of the blow, or because he missed the force and energy which had kept him going, the death of the last Mrs. Hathern crushed him completely, and made him an old man at once.

“I don’t know what ails me, girls, but since your mother died I don’t seem to have any life or ambition left. I am like a clock which has run down and can’t be wound up again,” he would say to us when he came in from a walk into town or country where he still had a few patients of the old school.

He had never spoken to us of Mrs. Hathern as our mother while she lived; but now that she was dead he always mentioned her in that way, and we humored him, and sometimes called her so ourselves, and petted and made much of him, and felt that, like him, we were ships without rudders and didn’t know how to run ourselves. Especially was this the case with Phyllis, who needed whip and spur to keep her in the harness.

“I ’clars to goodness I don’t know nothin’ now the missus isn’t here to boss,” she said, as she sat on the bench outside the cabin door, her feet stretched out in front of her, her hands idly folded on her lap, her ironing neglected and her irons cooling on the hearth.

Only Norah kept her balance and went steadily on her way, her shoes creaking a good deal and her sharp tongue often lashing Phyllis when she got too far out of line. For three or four months Norah staid with us and then, as it was impossible for us to pay her the wages she had been receiving, she left us for Boston. But not until she had everything in what she called “apple pie order,” an expression which, I think, must belong exclusively to the east, as it was a favorite with Mrs. Hathern, and I have never heard it elsewhere. Owing to her delicate health Mrs. Hathern had deferred the spring cleaning, which she intended to take in hand as soon as her illness was over. But death snatched her away and it was left for Norah to carry out her plans, which she did with a vengeance. Everything was turned topsy-turvey, as it had been the year before when Mrs. Hathern was the presiding genius of brush and broom and soap suds. There was, however, this difference, there were no carpenters and masons and plumbers blocking the way, or hired negroes either. Knowing the low state of our finances Norah did everything herself with the little help she could extort from Phyllis. That functionary had taken to violent fits of short breath when there was more than usual to do. “Physicy,” she called it, and she had it badly now and wheezingly protested against so much useless cleaning. A little dirt was healthy, she said, and privately we sympathized with her, and were glad when Norah told us that we needn’t go through with quite so much in the fall. Boston folks didn’t as a rule.

“Wash the windows; wipe the fly-specks from the paint; air everything, and give the rest a lick and a promise and let it go till spring, when mabby I’ll visit you and see to the annual clean myself,” she said. Then, as a happy inspiration seized her, she added: “There are a few things you must see to every day, and as I know you won’t remember ’em all I’ll write ’em down.”

The result of this was a long document so full of what we were to do and not to do that I felt dizzy and bewildered as I read it, and then passed it on to Fan, who, with no fancy for housekeeping, threw it aside. This morning while looking over a trunk of old papers I came across that sheet of foolscap, written nearly thirty years ago, yellow with age, blurred and blotted and wonderful for composition and orthography. There were tear stains upon it, too, as I re-read it and thought of all which had happened since the autumnal day when Norah first brought it to me and asked me to nail it up in the pantry where it could be seen every day. I will give a few extracts: “Fust and fornenst, don’t let Phyllis make a pig-sty of my kitchen. I’ve kept it so clane that I can _need bred_ in it anywhere; don’t let her get pot black all over the table, and greese on the floor; don’t let her leave the kittles on the range till they bile dry, specially the Te kittle. Ittle leek, and hev to be mended, an’t costs money; an’ there an’t no Miss Hathern to pay the bills now; don’t let her put the wash biler away till she’s wiped it and the cover dry, or the close will be all iron rust; don’t let her open all the draffs and pile the cole on till the griddles is red hot, an’ the fire all going up the chimly. Ittle warp ’em an’ spile the range. Make her hang up the broom, or stand it on end. Ittle last longer. An’ ef I’se you, I wouldn’t use gilt ege chany every day as Miss Hathern did. You’se them tothers. An’ don’t let Phyllis jab her big black thum into that mended place on the vegetable dish. Ittle break sure. An’ don’t let her slat her things round everywhere in my nice kitchen. Tell her Miss Hathern will appear to her some nite if she does. That’ll fetch her. She’s afraid of spooks.”

All this, and much more, Norah wrote, and I promised to follow her instructions as well as I could. Then one morning in October the ‘bus which had brought her to us came to take her away. Lifting the baby from his cradle she cried over and kissed him and, assuring us that he was not long for this world, he looked so _pimpin_, she put him back and said good-bye and went away, while we watched her as far as we could see her with swelling hearts and tearful eyes, wondering how we should get on without her.

The next morning I read her instructions to Phyllis. She had moved her belongings from her cabin into the kitchen, which already began to show signs of a new administration. Seated upon an inverted wash tub she listened to my reading with sundry snorts and shakes of her head until her turban fell off and lay upon the floor.

“For de Lord’s sake, chile, is you that soft to think I can ‘member all dem things. No, sor; but nebber you mind, honey, I’se no fool, if I is a brack nigger. I’se kep’ my eyes open more’n you thinks an’ learned a heap of dem Boston ways. You’ll see; don’t you worry, nor come speerin’ ’round de kitchen. Jess stay in de parlor whar ladies belong, an’ I’ll run de ranch! I’se cap’n now.”

She adjusted her turban, picked up the mop and the broom, put them together behind the door, where Norah’s sunbonnet used to hang, and began to bustle about with the activity of a young girl. Norah’s instructions I pinned up, as I said I should, but they were all lost on Phyllis except the possibility of Mrs. Hathern’s return if things were too much mixed; that troubled her. For several nights when we were up with our baby we saw a light in the cabin where she slept. When questioned about it she owned to keeping a candle burning “So as to see de missus if she comes. I’se not gwine to be took unawares, nor be so unmanneredly as to let her stumble roun’ in de dark.”

“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “if it is dark she can’t see the litter.”

“Dat’s so, honey, I hain’t thought of dat,” was Phyllis’s rejoinder, and that night there was no candle burning in Phyllis’s room, but the door we knew was barricaded and the window nailed down to keep out Norah quite as much as Mrs. Hathern.

The superstitious old woman had been detected so often by the former in her little attempts to deceive that she had come to look upon her with a kind of awe as one gifted with second sight, who might pounce upon her in bodily shape quite as readily as Mrs. Hathern in ghostly form. With Norah’s departure the last link was severed which bound us to the new life, and I am ashamed to confess how quickly and unconsciously we took up the old one. It was so easy to do it, with Phyllis anticipating all our wants and encouraging us in our indolence. We breakfasted when we felt like it; had dinner and supper at all hours, while the kitchen gradually came to look like anything but a place where Norah could knead her bread on the floor. Phyllis’s handiwork was everywhere. There was pot black on the sink, and grease on the floor. Her big black thumb had _jabbed_ out the broken piece in the vegetable dish, and the hot tomatoes had been spilled, some on the carpet and some down Fan’s back. The wash boiler had been discarded for an iron kettle, and was filled with a variety of articles, conspicuous among which were father’s boot-jack and blacking brush. The griddles on the range were red most of the time and began to warp and crack; the kettles burned dry; the tea kettle leaked and was mended so often that father at last mildly protested, saying it was cheaper to get a new one, which he could ill afford as his bill at the hardware store was already a large one. Then I tried to take the helm. There were a good many battles with Phyllis, who, however, succumbed so far as to have one day in each week for _clarin up_, “and the Lord himself couldn’t ax more’n that ef she was workin’ for him,” she said.

In the midst of all our difficulties our baby was never for a moment forgotten or neglected. Norah had called him _pimpin_, by which she meant delicate, and so he was. But he was a beautiful child, with wavy hair, and eyes a cross between blue and gray, a complexion like wax and the prettiest ways, which made us all his slaves. It was Fan who devoted herself to him, while I wrestled with the house. When he began to talk, her name, or an attempt at it, was the first word he tried to speak. He had often heard us spoken of as “_Fan-and-Ann_,” and with a quickness and persistence for which he was remarkable, he caught it and applied it to her alone. “_Fan-er-nan_” he always called her, while, for some reason known only to himself, I was _Annie-mother_, although I didn’t take half the care of him that she did. As soon as we thought he could understand we told him of his mother, and when he asked us where she was Fan answered “In Paradise,” and tried to make him repeat the word after her.

“Oh, my lan!” came derisively from Phyllis, who was within hearing. She didn’t “b’lieve in ‘dat ar _pair-o’-dice_,’” she said, and when next she was alone with the little fellow she took him in her lap, gave him a lump of sugar and said to him, “Don’t you let ’em fool you about dat ar _pair-o’-dice_. Dar ain’t no sich place. Your mar’s sperrit is in heaven, and her body in Boston.”

After that he always insisted that his mother had gone to heaven in Boston. He knew that Carl was in Boston, and saw no reason why his mother should not be there too. We told him a great deal of Carl, who became to him a kind of imaginary hero, and whom he always remembered in his prayers, asking that God would bless “brother Tarl, make him a good boy, and keep him _straight_.” Mrs. Hathern’s dying injunction had been “Keep Carl straight,” and as we never saw him Fan hoped a baby’s prayers might accomplish what we had no means of doing, and taught the words to Paul. Carl was in Harvard, doing fairly well for a young man of his means and tastes. He had plenty of money, and was fond of luxury and “larks,” and sometimes wrote us letters which made our hair stand on end. It was usually Fan who took up the cudgels and berated him for what she called his “goings on.” He always answered good-humoredly, telling her she was too prudish and knew nothing of the world, living as she did in that out of the way place.

“Not that Lovering isn’t lovely,” he added, “and I’d like nothing better than to live with you in the charming old home I remember with so much pleasure.”

He always addressed us as “My dear sisters,” and signed himself, “Your loving brother.”

“Words,—nothing but words, which are so cheap,” Fan would say derisively. “If we are so dear, and the old house so charming, why does he never come near us. I tell you there is something wrong about Carl. He is fickle and fast.”

I feared so, too; but there was a very warm spot in my heart for Carl, whom I always defended, while Katy would never hear a word of censure against him. He was her hero as well as Paul’s, and she would rather he would be fast than stupid, she said. Just before he was graduated he sent a most cordial invitation for us all to come east and see him take his degree.

“I have been in a good many scrapes,” he wrote, “but have managed to slip out. I always have my lessons and shall come off with some honor, and I want you here to share it. So, pack up your best clothes. I shall want my sisters to look well, and some of the Boston girls are stunners. Bring Phyllis and the baby, and I will quarter you all in my house in Boston, with Norah to superintend. Did I tell you that I took the house when the last tenant’s lease expired, and had it refurnished from top to toe, and put Norah there to keep it for me? Quite a comfortable bachelor’s home you will find it.”

“Oh, how I’d like to go,” I exclaimed, remembering the pleasant house looking out upon the Common, and feeling a great desire to see Boston and Carl again.

But the thing was impossible. It was five years now since Mrs. Hathern died, and every year we had been growing poorer. Father’s practice was gone, or nearly so, and the few thousands left him by his wife had been drawn upon so many times that there was not much now to draw from. The trip to Boston was not to be thought of, and Fan answered the letter, declining the invitation.

He was sorry, he wrote in reply, adding that as we were not coming he should give a swell dinner in his house to his classmates and have a “high old time.”

As it chanced Jack was in Boston on business and meeting Carl accidentally was persuaded to be present at the dinner, which surpassed anything he had ever seen.

“The flowers alone and decorations must have cost hundreds of dollars,” he wrote to Fan; “and there were dishes whose name I never heard before and which I never care to taste again. Everyone was in evening dress but myself, who felt rather countryfied and out of place in my business clothes. But Carl was the same old kind-hearted boy, and made me feel perfectly at home and treated me as his honored guest. We sat down at nine and did not get up till two in the morning. Even then some of them did not get up at all for they were under the table, and lying round loose anywhere, and I shouldn’t like to tell Fan how many empty wine bottles were carried out by the waiters; but this I will say, I turned my glass down every time, although I know I was thought a milksop for doing it.”

This was at the time the great temperance crusade was beginning to sweep over the land, and Fan was head and front of the movement in Lovering. She had led a band of women into some of the lowest saloons and been threatened with eggs and brickbats, but had held her own bravely and won respect and attention where, at first, she met with coarse language and derisive jeers. Jack’s letter roused her to a pitch of white heat and she wrote to Carl, asking what his mother would say could she have looked upon the drunken revel, and if he didn’t think himself about as mean and low as he well could be for acting so entirely at variance with his mother’s wishes.

Carl’s reply was good-humored and apologetic. He was a cad, he said, to break his promise to his mother, but he positively had never been tipsy.

“I suppose, though, I can drink more than most fellows and not be affected by it,” he wrote. “But that is no excuse, and to prove that I am in earnest I have taken the pledge and shall keep it, too, as bravely as Jack Fullerton did that night. I never respected a man more in my life than I did him, even while chaffing him a little and calling him an old maid. He is the right kind of stuff, and I don’t see why you don’t marry him.”

“Carl’s advice is good,” I said. “Why don’t you marry Jack?”

There was an upward turn of Fan’s chin as she answered me—

“Poor, too poor. I can struggle with poverty at home but when I have one of my own I must have some luxuries. So I’ll wait awhile. I am only twenty-five, if old Granny Baker did say at the sewing society that ‘it was time them Hathern girls were married, as they are gettin’ to be old maids.’ Old maids, indeed! Do I look like one?”

She had never been more beautiful and attractive than she was then in the full bloom of her womanhood. Jack thought so, too, and often asked her to be his wife, while she as often answered him in a manner which, while it did not mean yes, certainly was not a decided no.