Chapter VI: The Morrises

The next day it rained and the next, and Mrs. Hart grew very restless and tired. But she had promised to stay a week, and she would do it, and then say good-by for ever to the humdrum life as it went on at the farmhouse. Connie, on the contrary, was very happy. She could not go out on her sled, it is true, but six of the barn cats had been allowed entrance to the house, and when she tired of these Kenneth took her to the ball-room, which filled her with ecstasy and set her in motion at once.

“I’ll show you I can do it,” she said, when Kenneth told her of the many dances given there when the house was a tavern and his father a boy, and that he was trying to learn. “I’ll show you,” and she went pirouetting up and down the long room, whirling like a little fairy and holding her short skirt as she had seen older ones do in the dancing class she attended. She knew a great deal which Kenneth did not know, and coached him for hours during the rainy days, proving so good a teacher that when the lessons were over he felt that he had learned nearly as much as during the whole term at Millville.

The third day the rain ceased, the air was fresher and the sun came out warm and bright. At the breakfast table Mr. Stannard remarked that one of the blinds of the Morris house had come open, and Kenneth must go and shut it.

“I, too,” Connie said, eager to go where Kenneth went.

She had looked with a great deal of interest at the silent house, which Kenneth told her belonged to Harry, and was eager to go over it. Kenneth carried her in his arms across the muddy road, and put her down inside the gate on the gravel walk, which was wet and full of weeds. The grounds were large and showed signs of former care and beauty, but were now mere sodden patches of decay. There had once been a fountain fed from a spring further up the hill, and the central figure was a little boy and girl under an umbrella. But the pipes were burst and the supply of water cut off. The basin was crumbling, and only the boy and girl stood bravely up, defying the elements and time.

“Now let’s go in,” Connie said, after admiring the boy and girl, and they went into the wide hall, with its broad stairs and wide railing of solid oak. “It seems as if the folks were all dead,” Connie said, as their footfalls made hollow sounds and their voices echoed through the great high rooms into which they had passed, the two parlors with folding doors between and a large bow window looking out upon a lawn terraced down the hill to the south.

There were handsome marble mantels and inlaid hearths and carved woodwork and signs of former grandeur everywhere, and Connie, who appreciated it all, held her breath as she went through the lower rooms and then ascended the stairs and followed Kenneth through one room after another, with here and there pieces of furniture standing in them. Young as she was, Connie’s perceptions were mature and quick, and she recognized the difference between this house and the one across the way.

“Grand folks used to live here. Where are they? Tell me about them,” she said, as they stood in what had been Mrs. Morris’ bed-chamber, where Harry was born and his mother had died, and where a mahogany bedstead and bureau, with a stationary wash-stand and silver faucet were still standing.

“All dead but Hal,” Kenneth answered, as they sat down in a deep seat of one of the windows.

“Yes, Hal. That’s Harry, who had everything on the tree and you nothing,” Connie replied. “Why don’t he live here, where there are bowls and things for the water to come in and go out, as we have in the city, and a hole in the floor for the heat to come through?”

She had spied a rusty register and was trying to open it, and her tone implied that this house was more to her taste than the farmhouse, and Kenneth felt a little hurt, but soon recovered himself and told her of the times, as he had heard of them from his mother, when his Uncle Morris lived there with his wife, a frail, lovely young girl who, knowing nothing of the world as her husband knew it, could not keep pace with his ideas and shrank from the gay company with which he filled the house.

“He had the best horses in the country for the men to ride,” Kenneth said, “and packs of dogs to hunt with in the fall, and my aunt had a maid and a nurse, who wore a cap, with great long strings, for Hal, until she died.”

“Oh-h!” Connie said, “that was splendid,” her natural love for luxury coming to the surface. “And your aunt died in that bed, and Harry was born in it?” she continued, walking round on three sides of the bedstead and stroking it with her hands, while there awoke in her heart a kind of pity for Harry, who, by the death of his mother, and something in his father, she couldn’t quite make out what, had been obliged to leave this handsome home for the farmhouse, where there was no mahogany furniture, no nurses with caps and streamers and no maids.

“I’d like to see Harry,” she said. “I wonder if I ever shall, and if I should like him as well as I do you. Give him my love, and say I’m sorry for him.”

“Sorry! Why?” Kenneth asked, and something in his tone made Connie look up quickly before she replied. “Sorry that his folks are dead,—his pretty mother and his father, who must have been a gentleman like those in New York,—and because he had to leave this handsome house.”

Kenneth was really hurt now. Here was flunkeyism he had not expected.

“Connie,” he said, in a voice not quite like the one which had called her to the tree, “would you rather live here with Harry than across the road with me?”

Connie thought a moment, and then replied: “You see, I’d like the nice things over here, but I don’t know Harry, and I am sure I like you the best and would rather be where you are. Do you think you can draw me on the sled this morning?”

She had made a rapid descent from the sentimental to the practical, but Kenneth was satisfied, and promised a sled ride in the afternoon, which was undertaken through the mud and over stones, until they ran into a rut and the sled was overturned, depositing Connie on the grass and soiling her blue cloak till, what with the mud stains and the sugar stains and grape juice, Mrs. Hart declared it spoiled and fit only for the old clothes man, who would get it as soon as she returned to New York.

That night there came a letter to Kenneth from Harry and, at Connie’s request, he began to read it aloud. Harry was much elated with his visit, and was having “a jam up good time,” he wrote, whereupon Connie, according to her habit, asked what “a jam up good time” was, and if it were like what she was having. She was promptly silenced by her aunt, and Kenneth read on, seeing far ahead, and skipping here and there when he came upon dangerous grounds for strangers’ ears. Connie was listening with rapt attention, and a growing interest in the boy who was in clover and his native element, among swells.

“What is _clover_? And what are _swells_?” Connie asked, but her auntie told her to hush, and that both terms were slang.

Then Kenneth continued reading in substance that Hal didn’t get up till nine or ten o’clock, unless he chose, and that “a fire was made in his room every morning by a nigger, which was O.K.”

Connie opened her lips to ask what “O.K.” meant, but her aunt shook her head, and she jotted it down in her mind to be hunted for in the dictionary later on, with “_jam up!_”

Harry went out to ride or drive every day, he said, with Tom, and when on horseback a “nigger” went with them to open the gates if their road was through the pastures. He had been to Versailles and Frankfort, and many times to Lexington, as Cedar Bank was near there. He had also been out into the country to Morrisford on the river, named for his ancestors, who used to live there, and where his father was born.

“It isn’t any great,” he wrote; “not half as fine as Morris Place at The 4 Corners must have been, and shall be again, if I live; but fine places here don’t count as they do with us. It is blood, and I’ve got a lot of it on father’s side. Why, when he was a boy, before the war, the Morrises had shot one or two people in a quarrel and had a hundred niggers! Think of it! and a few of the old ones are still living round there in log cabins, working some and stealing more, folks say. There’s an old auntie,—Aunt Polly,—who looks like a mummy. She was owned by my grandfather Morris. He was a colonel. I didn’t know that till I came here. In fact, I didn’t know what good stock I sprang from, and, I tell you, I feel proud that I am a Morris. Aunt Polly was my father’s nurse, and when they told her who I was she nearly strangled me with her black, skinny arms. Called me Mas’r Harry; said she was ‘Mas’r Charles’ ole mammy, and nussed him from a baby.’ I tell you, I felt big, with Tom Haynes standing by and hearing it all. There were more darkies in the Aunt Polly line, who came pressing up, with their ‘How dy’s,’ and ‘God bless you, mas’r,’ and ‘Has you a bit of backy?’ This was from a baboon, who might have been a hundred, and who claimed to be a Morris ‘bawn and raised on de ole plantation befo’ de wah,’ in which he said he took a part,—on which side I didn’t ask or care. As true as you live, I began to have a fellow feeling of relationship to these niggers, and feed every mother’s son of them. Tom said it was the right thing to do, and as I didn’t want to seem mean, I gave out right and left till I had only fifty cents left in my pocket, and, Ken, I must have some more by hook or by crook——”

Here Kenneth, who saw breakers ahead, broke down with a cough, while Connie chimed in, “What is ‘by hook or by crook’?”

“More slang,” her aunt whispered to her, and Connie put it down in her mind to be hunted up with “O.K.”

As Kenneth continued to cough, Mrs. Hart felt sure that the rest of the letter was not for strangers’ ears, and left the room, taking Connie with her.

“I don’t believe I ought to have read as much as I did,” Kenneth said, when Mrs. Hart was gone, “but Connie wanted to hear it, and I got at it and couldn’t very well stop. I did skip some, but hear what he says:

“You see a gentleman and a Morris can’t visit in a gentleman’s house
without money to spend, and ten dollars was a paltry sum any way, when
you consider that it is my own, or will be when I come of age. I tell
you what, Ken, Uncle Eph must shell out ten more at least and send me.
There must be that much due me; if not, tell him to loan it and keep
it back from my next allowance. I can skimp at home, but not here,
where they look upon me as a sort of millionaire. I’m awful glad Tom
did not go home with me as he proposed doing. When I’m of age I shall
fix up the Morris Place and invite him there with some more bloods,
and perhaps I’ll have some of Aunt Polly’s brood as servants, and, by
George, why not have Aunt Polly, too, if she is alive? An old family
servant like that, who has been a slave, would add _éclat_ to my
establishment; don’t you think so?

“I suppose Connie Elliott is with you now, as you wrote she was
coming. Just for a minute, after I got your letter with uncle’s
consent for me to come to Kentucky, I half wished I was going home to
see her, but am glad I came here. Tom has a sister, eleven years old,
pretty and shy, and will some day have quite a fortune from her father
and her aunt, who lives in Louisville, and has no children of her own.
Think of her sending fifty dollars to the Haynes family, to be spent
as they like for Christmas presents. That’s the kind of an aunt to
have when your pocket is empty, like mine. Give my regards to Connie
and write me if she is pretty. Get ten dollars for me somehow.

“Yours,
“HAL.”

Several times during the reading of the letter the deacon had moved uneasily in his chair, crossing and recrossing his legs, and twice going to the door to spit. He did not like the tone of the letter. Neither did his wife. It was the Morris blood cropping out, and they had seen too much of that when Charles Morris lived across the way and tried to lord it over his neighbors. They remembered his fast horses and hounds and carousals, and remembered the white-faced girl who died when she heard of his dissipations when he was away from The 4 Corners. They remembered, too, that with all his faults, there was a smooth exterior and a pleasant way which took with people, and Harry had the same and had made them love him almost as their own. His father was a spendthrift, but had left enough to supply every reasonable want of his son when it was looked after as carefully as the deacon looked after it. Ten dollars had been thought ample for his spending money at Cedar Grove, and here he was asking for ten more.

“I s’pose we must get it somehow,” he said. “The Morrises were high steppers, and I dare say the Hayneses are the same, and Hal wants to keep up his end; but I don’t like the way he wrote, as if he was lookin’ down upon us because he is a Morris. Great Scott! his father was a villain, with all his polish and blood, and if he had lived he’d spent every cent he was wuth. The dog! I knew him!”

The deacon was a good deal excited, and in the letter which he sent to Harry next day, with ten dollars, he told him not to make a fool of himself because he was a Morris.

“The Morrises are well enough,” he wrote, “but, Lord Harry, that isn’t all. It needs something besides being a Morris to make a man.”