Chapter VIII: Alice

The hot sun of a July afternoon was pouring in at the west windows of a little red schoolhouse among the mountains between Springfield and Albany. It was the last day of the term and as was the custom in district schools in New England the Committee men had been in to see what progress the scholars had made and to pronounce upon it at the close of the exercises. It was examination day and looked forward to with as much interest and anxiety by the teacher and pupils as are the commencements in larger institutions. To the red schoolhouse among the mountains had come this afternoon the minister, the doctor, the lawyer with several other visitors, parents and relatives of the children who had acquitted themselves so creditably that only words of commendation were spoken by the lawyer and doctor and minister when each in turn made remarks.

Rocky Point was to be congratulated upon having secured the services of so competent a teacher as Miss Tracy had proved herself to be, the lawyer said, and the doctor and clergyman acquiesced in his opinion, while the visitors bowed their approbation. Then a prayer was said, “Shall We Meet Beyond the River?” was sung, and school was dismissed. There was a scramble for books and dinner pails and sunbonnets and caps, and the children hurried away, glad that vacation had come, with no more study for many long weeks. The minister and doctor and lawyer and visitors went next after a few complimentary words to the young teacher, and the natural question as to where she intended to pass the summer. She might go to Cooperstown to visit a friend, she said, but more likely she should remain at home and help her Aunt Mary, as usual.

“I saw among the arrivals from abroad the names of your aunt, Mrs. Freeman Tracy, and her daughter, and thought you might possibly visit them,” one of the ladies said.

Alice replied, “I have no expectation of visiting them, and I hardly think they will stay in New York all summer.”

The ladies bowed and went out, and Alice was alone, tired and hot, and so glad her first term of teaching was over and that she had given satisfaction. Better than all was the fact that she would in a few days have thirty-six dollars of her own. It was the first money she had ever earned, and it seemed like a fortune to her. Sitting down upon one of the hard benches by an open window she began to plan what she should do with it. Give part of it to Aunt Mary to get her a new dress, and with another part buy herself some boots and gloves. Her old ones were so shabby, and she was very fastidious with regard to her hands and feet, if she were only a little country girl, living among the mountains of western Massachusetts, where city fashions did not prevail to a great extent, except as some ambitious factory girl aped them so far as she could. Alice’s father, George Tracy, had been half-brother to Helen’s father, Freeman Tracy, who had inherited his large fortune from his mother. George, who was ten years older than his brother, was a languid, easy-going, handsome man, with no more talent or inclination for work than a child. Twice Freeman, who was very fond of him, had set him up in business, with the result each time of a complete failure.

“No use, Free. It isn’t in me to see to anything. Better give me a small allowance, if you want to do anything for such a shiftless good-for-nothing as I am, and let me shirk for myself,” George said to his brother, who took him at his word and gave him not a small, but a liberal allowance, which kept him quite at his ease.

It had been Freeman’s intention to make his will and leave George the income of a certain sum, but death came suddenly, before the will was made, and there was no provision for George. The whole of Freeman’s large fortune went to his widow and infant daughter a few months old. Between George and his sister-in-law there did not exist the most amicable relations. She looked upon him as a dreaming neer-do-weel, through whom her husband had lost a great deal of money. Of the yearly allowance she knew nothing, and as George was too proud to enlighten her he found himself at his brother’s death without money and with no means of support, unless he went to work,—a new state of things for him, as he had never in his life been really fatigued from any physical exercise. But the strain had come, and he met it by hiring as a clerk in a cotton mill in Rocky Point, where he married a beautiful young girl, who died when her baby was four weeks old. Her home had always been with her aunt and uncle, Ephraim and Mary Wood, plain, old-fashioned people, with hearts larger than their means, and hands ready to give help to all who needed it. They were very fond of their niece and very proud of her alliance with George Tracy, whom they looked upon as a prince in disguise. A poor one, it is true, but still a prince, and they gave him a home as soon as he was married, and when his young wife died and left a little girl, whom they called for its mother, they still kept him with them and never lost their high opinion of him as one whom it was an honor to have in their family. Of her father, Alice had some remembrance, as she was nearly five years old when he died suddenly, as his brother had done. Tall, well-dressed, with long, white hands, of which he took a great deal of care; always looking for a seat and always reading when he found one, was the picture she carried of him. Of her mother’s personality she knew nothing, except what she heard from others, and what she gathered from an old-time photograph of a young girl with a lovely face and large, beautiful blue eyes, with a laugh in them which the bungling photographer had not been able to spoil, as he had the pose of the head and hands.

When George died Mr. Wood felt it incumbent upon him to notify Mrs. Freeman Tracy, who was at Richfield Springs, having an ideal time, she told Mrs. Wood, rather complainingly, when she came to the funeral with her daughter Helen, who was nearly three years older than Alice. It was Helen’s first experience in a country farmhouse like the Woods, and some of her remarks on what she saw were not very complimentary. But Alice was too young to resent them, or understand. She admired her cousin greatly, especially her bronze boots, with their high, French heels.

“I wish I had some like ’em. Do they cost more than a dollar?” she said, with a rueful glance at her own coarser shoes.

“A dollar! I guess they do. Forty or fifty dollars at least!” Helen replied, at random, and without the slightest idea of the real cost of them or anything else.

Stooping down, she unbuttoned her boots in a trice, and, removing Alice’s shoes, put her own upon a pair of feet much too short for them, for Alice was small for her years and Helen was large.

“Why, they are too big. Your feet wobble awfully in them,” Helen said, “but I’ll tell you what to do. Put some cotton in ’em. Our maid Susan does, and mamma did once for me when my boots were too long. Find some, and I’ll show you.”

The cotton was found and the boots stuffed and pronounced a splendid fit, as Helen proceeded to button them. Suddenly it occurred to her that she had nothing to wear herself, as she couldn’t begin to get her foot into Alice’s shoe. With a jerk the boots came off, and, to Alice’s wondering looks, she said, “I must not give ’em to you, for I can’t go in my stocking feet to New York, but I’ll have mamma send you some, if you can’t buy ’em. You are real poor, ain’t you?”

Alice didn’t know whether she were poor or not. She only knew she wanted boots like these being taken from her feet and transferred to Helen’s, and two great tears rolled down her cheeks as she resumed her own despised shoes.

“Don’t cry,” Helen said, brusquely. “I’ll send you some boots and a lot of things.”

She kept her word, and from time to time boots and other articles of dress,—some new and some secondhand, but quite as good as new, when Mrs. Wood’s skillful fingers had made them over,—found their way to the farmhouse, and little Alice Tracy was for years the best-dressed child in Rocky Point. As the children grew older and saw each other on the very rare intervals when Mrs. Tracy stopped for a day at Rocky Point, they became very fond of each other, and Helen, who inherited her father’s generous nature, was often troubled because Alice was not wealthy like herself. All that she could make her mother do for her she did, and it was owing to her influence that when Alice was fifteen she was placed in a boarding school in Albany with her cousin, who did not care for books and who managed to elude her teachers and give more spreads and have more larks and still retain her good standing than any pupil in school. At the end of the year she left, a fully fledged young lady, “with more beaux on her string,” her companions said, than they all had together.

Alice stayed two years longer, and, at eighteen, went back to Rocky Point, with somewhat different views of the world from what she had when she left it. In one point, however, she was unchanged, and that was her love for the old couple, Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Mary, who had been so kind to her. If the homely ways and duties of the farm grated upon her she kept it to herself, and was the same sweet, lovable, sunny-tempered girl she had always been, putting her young strength to the wheel when the strain of work was hardest, and making the labor easier by half by the way with which she planned and executed it.

“Where does that girl get her vim and go ahead?” the neighbors used to say, remembering her mother’s frail constitution and her indolent and easy-going father.

Alice knew all about him. She had overheard a farmhand telling another of his laziness, his selfishness and love of ease and pride, which sometimes rebelled against his plain surroundings and the people of the town, the mill-hands, the shoemakers and machinists who constituted a large proportion of the inhabitants of Rocky Point.

“I know now where I got that little mean thread in my nature. I am naturally lazy, and selfish, and proud, and sometimes grind my teeth hard at what seems common and vulgar. But I’ll kill it dead,” she said, with a stamp of her foot. “I’ll do what my hands find to do without shrinking, and not mind the rough men whom Uncle Ephraim has on his farm.”

On two or three occasions she had spent a month in New York in Mrs. Tracy’s elegant house, and although she did not go a great deal into society, she went enough to get a taste for something different from her life at home. But she resolutely set her face against any repinings which might show on the surface, and was as bright and cheerful and sunny as if the rambling old farmhouse, with its low ceilings, its square beams in the corners of the rooms, and its iron door latches were a palatial residence and she the queen; and, in a way, she was queen of the place, for the old couple loved her as if she had been their own child. Nothing was too good for her, and no sacrifice they could make too great if it made her happier. In return for this she lavished upon them all the love of her ardent nature, and gave to them a helpfulness and thoughtfulness beyond her years.

Just before going to Europe Helen spent a week at the farmhouse, declaring herself ennuied to death with the dulness.

“I like being with you, of course,” she said to Alice. “You rest me and bring out the best there is in me, and when I see you washing those dreadful dinner dishes and skimming the milk and pouring tea and coffee for those sweaty men who come to the table in their shirt sleeves, I hate myself for the useless piece of pottery I am, and feel tempted to try the dairy maid business like you. If I had a little _chalet_ and a _petit Trianon_ like Marie Antoinette I’d do it. Truly, Alice, I don’t see how you endure it as you do, with nothing livelier to go to than a church social, where they play kissing games, but won’t let you dance, because it is wicked, and not a single man to flirt with. I am positively getting rusty for some male to wink at!”

Alice laughed and replied, “I believe you’d flirt with the undertaker if you could get your eyes on him. Why, you have winked at every sweaty man on the farm, and there isn’t one of them who doesn’t brighten up the minute you appear in your stunning gowns, with your cheery good morning. There are men enough to flirt with, but not exactly your kind.”

“Nor yours, either,” Helen rejoined. “Honestly, how are you ever to be married, unless I send you some of my cast-offs?”

“Which one?” Alice asked, and Helen replied, “I really don’t know, there’s ——,” so and so, repeating their names; “but, I dare say, whichever one I made over to you I should want back again. I wrote you from Saratoga about Craig Mason, who didn’t care to call upon me. Do you know, I’m dying to see him. Something tells me _you_ would suit him to a dot, but it can’t be till I’ve met him in fair conflict and been defeated.”

This conversation took place the day before Helen left Rocky Point, and a week later she sailed for Europe, leaving Alice very lonely with the ocean between her and the cousin to whom she was greatly attached. The next April she was offered the spring term in the district school at three dollars a week and board herself. It was something to do,—something to earn,—and she took the school, and made believe she liked it, although Helen herself could scarcely have rebelled more against it than she did, mentally, or have been more relieved than she was when the last day came and she was released from the daily routine which had been so irksome to her. She was to take it up again in the autumn, it was true, but for ten weeks she was free to do what she liked. Skimming the milk and washing the dreadful dinner dishes and pouring coffee for sweaty men she preferred to school teaching, if it were not that the latter brought her money of her own. “Thirty-six dollars,” she repeated, as she fanned herself with the cover of a spelling book. “What shall I do with it all? Ten shall go to Aunt Mary; five to Uncle Ephraim, and I really think I need ten more for gloves and boots and things. Twenty-five dollars in all—oh my!” and she stopped, appalled at the thought that there were only eleven dollars left for the trip to Cooperstown, she was so anxious to take. It couldn’t be done. She must stay at home, as she had the previous summer, and she wanted so much to get in touch with the world as she had known it in Albany, and the glimpses she had had of it in New York, if it were only for a week. It seemed hard, and for a moment her bright spirits were clouded, and there were tears in her eyes, which she wiped away quickly as she heard a step and a whistle by the door. It was a young lad, one of her scholars, who came in without at first seeing her. Then, with a start, he said, “Oh, Miss Tracy, you here? I left my jography and come in to get it. I was goin’ out to your house. I’ve been to the office and they gin me a letter for you, ’cause it says on it ‘In Haste.’ Here ’tis.”

Alice knew before she took the letter that it must be from Helen, who was very apt to put “In Haste,” or, “Please forward,” on her letters, with a belief that it expedited their delivery, as it had in this instance. The boy found his geography and departed, leaving Alice again alone. Tearing open the letter she read it rapidly, and felt that the aspect of everything had changed. Even the weather was not so oppressive as it had been. She was going somewhere. It was the country, to be sure, but she liked the country and Ridgefield was different from Rocky Point. Then she would be with Helen, of whom she was very fond. She understood her, and knew all about her flirtations and the blue book, and what names were in it. She had written some of them herself at Helen’s request, because her handwriting was better than her cousin’s. She had heard of Craig Mason, and the fact that he did not care for her cousin’s acquaintance had awakened her own interest in him and she was nearly as pleased as Helen herself for a chance to meet him. That she could be preferred to Helen never entered her mind. She was simply glad to be with her and ready to do her any service in her power.

When Mr. and Mrs. Wood heard of Helen’s wish for Alice to accompany her to Ridgefield they at once urged her going, and refused to take the money offered them by the generous girl.

“Keep it for yourself,” Mrs. Wood said. “Ridgefield may not be a fashionable place, but you will see new people and want new things.”

“No one will know what I wear when Helen is with me,” Alice said, but she bought herself one or two inexpensive dresses, freshened up others with ribbons and ruches, retrimmed her hat, paid five dollars for a pair of boots, and two for a pair of gloves,—the greatest extravagance she had ever committed, and one which kept her awake for hours as she reflected that cheaper ones would have answered every purpose and left something for Aunt Mary.

The good woman, however, insisted that she did not need it, and, unknown to Alice, slipped a dollar of her egg money into the young girl’s purse on the morning when she started for Springfield where she was to meet her aunt and cousin. The New York train was late and when it came in Helen was on the platform motioning frantically to Alice to hurry and come on board.

“Mamma is in the parlor car. We were both there, but as there is no vacant chair, I’m coming with you where we can sit together and talk. I’ve so much to tell you,” she said, as she followed Alice into the common car, and as soon as the train started she was under full headway, telling where she had been, what and whom she had seen, and what she proposed to do and expected Alice to do. “You are looking lovely in that grey gown which I know is made over, but is quite up to date, and I would not be surprised if you eclipsed me,” she said; “but if Craig Mason is there, hands off till I have had my try with his royal highness. Oh, mercy!” and she gave a cry of alarm as a flash of sharp lightning lit up the darkening sky, followed by a terrific peal of thunder.

The storm had burst upon them in its fury, and between the roar of the thunder and the dashing of the rain against the windows, Alice could hear but little more that Helen said. She caught Craig Mason’s name two or three times and knew he was the theme of conversation as the train sped on, and finally drew up at Ridgefield station, where it only stopped when it had New York passengers.

“Oh, what shall we do?” Helen cried, drawing back in dismay from the rain which came driving in at the door.

“Open your umbrella and go on,” Alice said.

Helen obeyed, but her flimsy parasol was turned inside out as she sprang from the car, not to the ground, but into somebody’s arms, she did not know whose. They were very strong and held her fast while they held her, which was only an instant, for there was her mother uttering cries of dismay at the wetting she was getting. Dropping Helen, Mark took her mother and set her down upon the platform, while Alice helped herself. Her alpaca umbrella did not turn inside out, but protected her and her cousin, while Mark held another over her aunt as they ran to the carriage, into which Mrs. Tracy sank exhausted, blaming somebody, she did not know whom, for the storm and her discomfort generally.

“You are not going to leave us? The horses might start,” she cried as she saw Mark turn again toward the station.

“The horses are safe, madam, and there is still another of your party. Had you forgotten her?” he said, as he went after Celine, the maid, who was drenched to the skin and struggling with two or three satchels and wraps.

“Oh, must she come in here? Is there no other carriage?” Mrs. Tracy said, as Mark put the half-drowned girl in beside her and shut the door, saying, “There is no conveyance but this, except the van for the baggage. She surely cannot go in there.”

“I feel as if I were taking a bath,” the unhappy lady moaned, as they started up the hill, while Helen, true to her nature, said, “That man speaks like a gentleman. I wonder who he is.”