Chapter I: Mildred

The time was a hot morning in July, the place one of those little mountain towns between Albany and Pittsfield, and the scene opens in a farm house kitchen, where Mildred Leach was seated upon the doorstep shelling peas, with her feet braced against the doorjamb to keep her baby brother, who was creeping on the floor, from tumbling out, and her little sister Bessie, who was standing outside, from coming in. On the bed in a room off the kitchen Mildred’s mother was lying with a headache, and both the kitchen and the bedroom smelled of camphor and vinegar, and the vegetables which were cooking on the stove and filling the house with the odor which made the girl faint and sick, as she leaned against the door-post and longed, as she always was longing, for some change in her monotonous life. Of the world outside the mountain town where she was born she knew very little, and that little she had learned from Hugh McGregor, the village doctor’s son, who had been away to school, and seen the President and New York and a Cunarder as it came sailing up the harbor. On his return home Hugh had narrated his adventures to Mildred, who listened with kindling eyes and flushed cheeks, exclaiming, when he finished, “Oh! if I could see all that; and I will some day. I shall not stay forever in old Rocky Point. I hate it.”

Mildred was only thirteen, and not pretty, as girls usually are at that age. She was thin and sallow, and her great brown eyes were too large for her face, and her thick curly hair too heavy for her head. A mop her brother Tom called it, when trying to tease her; and Mildred hated her hair and hated herself whenever she looked in the ten by twelve glass in her room, and never dreamed of the wonderful beauty which later on she would develop, when her face and form were rounded out, her sallow complexion cleared, and her hair subdued and softened into a mass of waves and curls. Her father, John Leach, was a poor farmer, who, although he owned the house in which he lived, together with a few acres of stony land around it, was in one sense a tenant of Mr. Giles Thornton, the proprietor of Thornton Park, for he rented land enough of him to eke out his slender income. To Mildred, Thornton Park was a Paradise, and nothing she had ever read or heard of equaled it in her estimation, and many a night when she should have been asleep she stood at her window, looking off in the distance at the turrets and towers of the beautiful place which elicited admiration from people much older than herself. To live there would be perfect bliss, she thought, even though she were as great an invalid as its mistress, and as sickly and helpless as little Alice, the only daughter of the house. Against her own humble surroundings Mildred was in hot rebellion, and was always planning for improvement and change, not only for herself, but for her family, whom she loved devotedly, and to whom she was giving all the strength of her young life. Mrs. Leach was a martyr to headaches, which frequently kept her in bed for days, during which time the care and the work fell upon Mildred, whose shoulders were too slender for the burden they bore.

“But it will be different some time,” she was thinking on that hot July morning when she sat shelling peas, sometimes kissing Charlie, whose fat hands were either making havoc with the pods or pulling her hair, and sometimes scolding Bessie for chewing her bonnet strings and soiling her clean apron.

“You must look nice when Mrs. Thornton goes by,” she said, for Mrs. Thornton was expected from New York that day, and Mildred was watching for the return of the carriage, which half an hour before had passed on its way to the station.

And very soon it came in sight,—a handsome barouche, drawn by two shining black horses, with a long-coated driver on the box, and Mr. and Mrs. Thornton and the two children inside,—Gerard, a dark, handsome boy of eleven, and Alice, a sickly little girl, with some spinal trouble which kept her from walking or playing as other children did. Leaning back upon cushions was Mrs. Thornton,—her face very pale, and her eyes closed, while opposite her, with his gold-headed cane in his hand, was Mr. Thornton,—a tall, handsome man who carried himself as grandly as if the blood of a hundred kings was flowing in his veins. He did not see the children on the doorsteps, until Gerard, in response to a nod from Mildred, lifted his cap, while Alice leaned eagerly forward and said, “Look, mamma, there’s Milly and Bessie and the baby. Hello, Milly. I’ve comed back;” then he said quickly, “Allie, be quiet; and you Gerard, why do you lift your cap to such people? It’s not necessary;” and in these few words was embodied the character of the man.

Courteous to his equals, but proud and haughty to his inferiors, with an implicit belief in the Thorntons and no belief at all in such people as the Leaches, or indeed in many of the citizens of Rocky Point, where he owned, or held mortgages on, half the smaller premises. The world was made for him, and he was Giles Thornton, of English extraction on his father’s side and Southern blood on his mother’s, and in his pride and pomposity he went on past the old red farm house, while Mildred sat for a moment looking after the carriage and envying its occupants.

“Oh, if I were rich, like Mrs. Thornton, and could wear silks and jewels; and I will, some day,” she said, with a far-off look in her eyes, as if she were seeing the future and what it held for her. “Yes, I will be rich, no matter what it costs,” she continued, “and people shall envy me, and I’ll make father and mother so happy? and you, Charlie”——

Here she stopped, and parting the curls from her baby brother’s brow, looked earnestly into his blue eyes; then went on, “you shall have a golden crown, and you, Bessie darling, shall have,—shall have,—Gerard Thornton himself, if you want him.”

“And I lame Alice?” asked a cheery voice, as there bounded into the kitchen a ten year old lad, who, with his naked feet, sunny face and torn straw hat, might have stood for Whittier’s barefoot boy.

“Oh, Tom,” Mildred cried, “I’m glad you’ve come. Won’t you pick up the pods while I get the peas into the pot? It’s almost noon, and I’ve got the table to set.”

Before Tom could reply, another voice called out, “You have given Gerard to Bessie and Alice to Tom; now what am I to have, Miss Prophetess?”

The speaker was a fair-haired youth of seventeen, with a slight Scotch accent and a frank, open, genial face, such as strangers always trust. He had stopped a moment at the corner of the house to pick a rose for Mildred, and hearing her prophecies, sauntered leisurely to the doorstep, where he sat down, and fanning himself with his big hat, asked what she had for him.

“Nothing, Hugh McGregor,” Mildred replied, with a little flush on her cheek. “Nothing but that;” and she tossed him a pea-pod she had picked from the floor.

“Thanks,” Hugh said, catching the pod in his hand. “There are two peas in it yet, a big and a little one. I am the big, you are the little, and I’m going to keep them and see which hardens first, you or I.”

“What a fool you are,” Mildred said, with increased color on her cheek, while Hugh pocketed the pod and went on: “A crown for Charlie, Gerard for Bessie, Allie for Tom, a pea-pod for me, and what for you, my darling?”

“I am not your darling,” Mildred answered quickly; “and I’m going to be,—mistress of Thornton Park,” she added, after a little hesitancy, while Hugh rejoined: “As you have given Gerard to Bessie, I don’t see how you’ll bring it about, unless Mrs. Thornton dies, a thing not unlikely, and you marry that big-feeling man, whom you say you hate because he turned you from his premises. Have you forgotten that?”

Mildred had not forgotten it, and her face was scarlet as she recalled the time the past summer when, wishing to buy a dress for Charlie, then six months old, she had gone into one of Mr. Thornton’s pastures after huckleberries, which grew there so abundantly, and which found a ready market at the groceries in town. In Rocky Point, berries were considered public property, and she had no thought that she was trespassing until a voice close to her said, “What are you doing here? Begone, before I have you arrested.”

In great alarm Mildred had seized her ten quart pail, which was nearly full, and hurried away, never venturing again upon the forbidden ground.

“Yes, I remember it,” she said, “but that wouldn’t keep me from being mistress of the Park, if I had a chance and he wasn’t there. Wouldn’t I make a good one?”

“Ye-es,” Hugh answered slowly, as he looked her over from her head to her feet. “But you’ll have to grow taller and fill out some, and do something with that snarly pate of yours, which looks this morning like an oven broom,” and with this thrust at her bushy hair Hugh disappeared from the door just in time to escape the dipper of water which went splashing after him.

“Oven broom, indeed!” Mildred said indignantly, with a pull at the broom; “I wonder if I am to blame for my hair. I hate it!”

This was Mildred’s favorite expression, and there were but few things to which she had not applied it. But most of all she hated her humble home and the boiled dinner she put upon the table just as the clock struck twelve, wondering as she did so if they knew what such a dish was at Thornton Park, and what they were having there that day.