Chapter III: Going West

It was a very plain but pretty little cottage of which Mrs. Graham took possession with her children, Maude and John, who was two years younger than his sister. As most of the furniture had been sold it did not take them long to settle, and then the question arose as to how they were to live. A thousand dollars was all they had in the world, and these Mrs. Graham placed in the savings bank against a time of greater need, hoping that, as her friends assured her, something would turn up. “If there was anything I could do, I would do it so willingly,” Maude was constantly saying to herself, while busy with the household duties which now fell to her lot and to which she was unaccustomed. During her father’s life two strong German girls had been employed in the house and Maude had been as tenderly and delicately reared as are the daughters of millionaires. But now everything was changed, and those who had known her only as an idle dreamer and devourer of books, were astonished at the energy and capability which she developed. But these did not understand the girl or know that all the stronger part of her nature had been called into being by the exigencies of the case. Maude’s love for her mother was deep and unselfish, and for her sake she tried to make the most and the best of everything. Stifling with a smile born of a sob all her longings for the past, she turned her thoughts steadily to the one purpose of her life,—buying Spring Farm back! But how? The book she was going to write did not seem quite so certain now. Her brain children had turned traitors and flown away from the sweeping, dusting, dishwashing and bedmaking which fell to her lot and which she did with a song on her lips lest her mother should detect the heartache which was always with her, even when her face was the brightest and her song the sweetest. She had written to Archie’s uncle without a suspicion that she did not know his real name. As he was a brother of Mrs. More, whose maiden name was Marshall, his must be Marshall too, she reasoned, forgetting to have heard that Mrs. More was only a half-sister and that there had been two fathers. Of course, he was Max Marshall, and she addressed him as follows:

“MERRIVALE, July —, 18—.

“MR. MAX MARSHALL:

“DEAR SIR,—I am Maude Graham, and you bought my old home, Spring Farm,
and it nearly broke my own and mamma’s heart to have it sold. I don’t
blame you much now for buying it, but I did once, and I said some hard
things about you to Archie More, your nephew, which he may repeat to
you. But I was angry then at him and everybody, and I am sorry that I
said them. I am only eighteen and very poor, but I shall be rich some
day,—I am sure of it,—and able to buy Spring Farm, and I want you to
keep it for me and not sell it to any one else. It may be years, but
the day will come when I shall have the money of my own. Will you keep
the place till then? I think I shall be happier and have more courage
to work if you write and say you will.

“Yours truly, “MAUDE GRAHAM.”

After this letter was sent and before she had reason to expect an answer, Maude began to look for it, but none came, and the summer stretched on into August and the house at Spring Farm was shut up, for Mrs. Marshall-More was in Europe, and Maude’s great anxiety was to find something to do for her own and her mother’s support. Miss Nipe, the dressmaker, would give her a dollar a week while she was learning the trade, and this, with the three dollars per week which her brother John was earning in a grocery store, would be better than nothing, and she was seriously considering the matter, when a letter from her mother’s brother, who lived “out West,” as that portion of New York between the Cayuga Bridge and Buffalo was then called, changed the whole aspect of her affairs and forged the first link in the chain of her destiny. He could not take his sister and her children into his own large family, he wrote, but he had a plan to propose which, he thought, would prove advantageous to Maude, if her mother approved of it and would spare her from home. About six miles from his place was a school, which his daughter had taught for two years, but as she was about to be married, the position was open to Maude at four dollars a week and her board, provided she would take it.

“Maude is rather young, I know,” Mr. Ailing wrote in conclusion, “but no younger than Annie was when she began to teach, so her age need not stand in the way, if she chooses to come. The country will seem new and strange to her; there are still log-houses in the Bush district; indeed, the school-house is built of logs and the people ride in lumber wagons and are not like Bostonians or New Yorkers, but they are very kind, and Maude will get accustomed to them in time. My advice is that she accept.”

At first Mrs. Graham refused to let her young daughter go so far from home, but Maude was persistent and eager. Log-houses and lumber wagons had no terrors for her. Indeed, they were rather attractions than otherwise, and fired her imagination, which began at once to people those houses of the olden time with the Kimbricks and the Websters, who had forsaken her so long. Four dollars a week seemed a fortune to her, and she would save it all, she said, and send it to her mother, who unwillingly consented at last and fortunately found a gentleman in town who was going to Chicago and would take charge of Maude as far as Canandaigua, where she was to leave the train and finish her journey by stage. But on the evening of the day before the one when Maude was to start, the gentleman received word that his son was very ill in Portland and required his immediate presence.

“I can go alone,” Maude said courageously, though with a little sinking of the heart. “No one will harm me. Crossing the river at Albany is the worst, but I can do as the rest do, and after that I do not leave the car again until we reach Canandaigua.”

“Don’t feel so badly, mamma,” she continued, winding her arms around her mother’s neck and kissing away her tears. “I am not afraid, and don’t you know how often you have said that God cared for the fatherless, and I am that, and I shall ask Him all the time I am in the car to take care of me, and He will answer. He will hear. I’m not a child. I am eighteen in the Bible and a great deal older than that since father died. Don’t cry, darling mamma, and make it harder for me. I must go to-morrow, for school begins next Monday.”

So, for her daughter’s sake, Mrs. Graham tried to be calm, and Maude’s little hair trunk was packed with the garments, in each of which was folded a mother’s prayer for the safety of her child; and the morning came, and the ticket was bought, and the conductor, with whom Mrs. Graham had a slight acquaintance, promised to see to the little girl as far as Albany, where he would put her in charge of the man who took his place. Then the good-byes were said and the train moved on past the village on the hillside, past the dear old Spring Farm which she looked at through blinding tears as long as a tree-top was in sight, past the graveyard where her father was lying, past the meadows and woods and hills she loved so well, and on towards the new country and the new life of which she knew so little.