Chapter XVII: In Ridgefield

Fanny and Roy had been married amid flowers and music and crowds of people and the grand event chronicled in the Boston and New York papers. That the bride’s own father was living was not mentioned. The reporters had not gotten upon that item of gossip and Helen did not enlighten them. Fanny was the only daughter of Judge and Mrs. Prescott, and when she read one of the lengthy articles describing the wedding and her dress and her mother’s dress and dwelling at length upon the position and wealth of the Tracys and Prescotts and Masons she rebelled against it almost as hotly as years before Uncle Zach had rebelled against the advertisement her father had written of the Prospect House.

“I wish I had kept my own name, or taken it when I knew who I was. I am not Fanny Prescott,” she said, hotly, while Roy rejoined, “Of course not. You are Fanny Mason, my wife.”

They went to Florida where they spent the winter and Roy grew brown as a berry with being so much on the lakes and rivers and Fanny grew bilious eating too many oranges, and both were perfectly happy. Early in the spring they returned to Boston, where they staid with Roy’s father until June, when Fanny suggested that, instead of going to some fashionable watering place, they spend the summer in Ridgefield. Her father had sent her a deed of his Dalton property, and now that she owned it she began to have an affection for the old ruin and wanted to see it, she said to Roy, who answered, “All right. I’d rather go where I can have you to myself than to a hundred watering places where everybody will be admiring the beautiful and accomplished Mrs. Roy Mason; that’s what the reporters would call you.”

“Horrid!” Fanny said. “I’m not beautiful, and I haven’t a single accomplishment. I am just Fanny,—your wife,” and she nestled close to him, with a look in her blue eyes which told Roy how much he was to her.

They stopped at the Prospect House more for the sake of its association with their parents than for the real comfort there was there now. The ruling spirit, Dotty, had been stricken with paralysis, and was more helpless than Uncle Zach, who, a martyr to rheumatism, sat in his wheel chair all day, unable to walk more than a few steps at a time, with the help of two canes. He had received cards to their wedding, and had sent his regrets in a long letter in which he deplored the fact that he could not get some good out of his “swaller tail, which he wore to Craig’s weddin’ when he didn’t or’to wear it, and which was as good as new.” Mention, too, was made of Dot’s plum-colored satin, which was now too small for her, especially the sleeves. He was glad they remembered him. An _invite_ was good to stay home on, and he was their respectful and venerable friend to command. Zacheus Taylor, Esquire, and poor Dotty’s X mark, “for she can’t use her hands to write more than that.”

Uncle Zach had grown childishly weak with his trouble and his years, and received Roy and Fanny with floods of tears, lamenting Dotty’s inability to serve them.

“I never expected to see you both agin, and when you was here together I told Dot so,” he said; “but here you be, and I’m mighty glad. I’m havin’ hard sleddin’. Old age ain’t a pleasant thing, with rheumatiz’ and paralysis, and maybe soffnin’ of the brain, and the tarvern all run down,—and Dotty played out.”

The best the house afforded was theirs, he said, and he insisted upon their taking the saloon, as he still called the parlor Mrs. Tracy had occupied.

“You’ll be better off there by yourselves,” he said. “The boarders ain’t what they used to be. The Tremont has got the big bugs.”

Poor Dotty couldn’t talk much or move, and Fanny spent hours with her, anticipating her wishes by her looks and greatly smoothing her path to the grave. Roy staid a good deal with Uncle Zach, who asked numberless questions about Mark and Jeff.

“I wish they was here. I want to see ’em, and so does Dot, though she can’t say so. Strange how I miss her talk and blowin’ me when I deserved it. I’m like a ship without a captain, but my laigs trouble me the most. Feel like sticks when I try to walk, and Sam Baily don’t push me even, at all,—jolts awfully over the stones. Yes, I wish they was here. Mabby they’d come, if they knew how used up Dotty and I be. Jeff could lift her and wheel me. Write and tell ’em I want ’em.”

Roy was not very enthusiastic on the subject, but he made no objection when Fanny wrote what Uncle Zach had said and added her own entreaties for her father to come.

“I don’t suppose you will care to see mother often,” she said, “but you can see _me_. I shall have a home of my own in Boston and we are going to build a cottage near the old ruin,—Roy and I,—and shall spend a part of each summer here.”

It was two weeks before an answer came, not in Mark’s handwriting, but in Tom’s.

“Oh, Roy. Father is dead. Read what Tom has written. I can’t,” Fanny said, as she glanced at the letter and then passed it to Roy, who read: “Stockton, June — 18— Mrs. Mason, Dear Madam:

“It is my painful duty to inform you that your father is dead. He has been failing ever since Inez died, but did not wish you to know it, as it might mar the pleasure of your wedding trip. He was always thinking of you and Inez. He was very ill when your last letter came, but it pleased him to know that you wanted him, and Mr. Taylor, too. If he had lived and been able, I think he would have gone to Ridgefield and taken care of the poor old couple. His death occurred three days after the receipt of your letter, which he kept under his pillow with Inez’s watch, which you are to have.

“I know he died a good man. I wish I were half as good. He talked a great deal of you, and once or twice spoke of your mother. He said, ‘Tell Helen I am sorry for any pain I caused her, and that I always think of her as she was that summer at the Prospect House.’

“We buried him by the side of Inez and Anita, and crowds attended his funeral. Now, I am alone, with only Nero left of all which once made my life so happy.”

Uncle Zach shed floods of tears when Fanny read this letter to him.

“Mark dead and lyin’ away off there among the mountains and the robbers,” he said. “They or’to have brought him here and buried him with his kin. I’d of given him a big monument. Yes, marm, I would. I liked Mark, if he did alter his name, and I feel as if I had lost a son, don’t you?”

He was looking at Roy, who did not feel as if bereft of a son, and not much as if he had lost a father, but he was very sorry for Fanny. Her grief was genuine. She had built many castles in the future when her father would come to her and these were all swept away.

“Do you think I should wear black?” she asked, “and that father ought to be brought east and buried here? Inez and Anita must come if he does.”

Roy shivered, as he thought of the three coffins landed at the station and himself superintending their interment in the angle of the wall near ’Tina.

“No, darling,” he said, kissing Fanny’s tear stained face. “I do not want you to wear black, nor is it necessary, and it is much better for your father and Inez to be among the hills of the Yosemite where they lived than to be brought here. Sometime we will go and see the graves and I will have a suitable monument erected to their memory.

“By their loving daughter and sister,” Fanny rejoined, drying the tears which were like April showers, she was so sunny and sweet.

Tom’s letter was sent to Helen, who was about starting for Narragansett Pier with a party of friends. Just how it affected her it was hard to tell. She gave up the trip to Narragansett, saying she was not feeling well and preferred to remain at home. If she cried, no one saw her. If she were sorry, no one knew it. She was too proud to show her real feelings, or talk of a past which was buried, but her eyes were very heavy and her face very pale as she sat behind the closed blinds of her house, at home to no one, and supposed by most of her friends to be out of town, as she usually was at that season. Fanny urged her coming to Ridgefield, and she replied, “Not yet. It would bring back a past I wish to forget. Your father is dead, and I have no hard feeling towards him. We were both in fault. I was self willed, and thought because I had money I must not be crossed. He was a man who could not yield quietly to be governed in every particular by a woman. But let that pass. I am glad you knew him and glad you revere his memory.”

This was quite a concession for Helen, and showed that much of her proud spirit was broken. When she heard how fast Mrs. Taylor was failing as the summer wore on she sent her little notes of remembrance, with boxes of flowers and delicacies of various kinds. These pleased Uncle Zach, but it was difficult to know whether his wife realized the attention. She always seemed glad when Fanny was with her, but nothing brought so happy a look to her face as the appearance of Uncle Zach in his wheel chair, and her eyes rested constantly upon him when he was with her, but she couldn’t speak to him or return the pressure of his hand when he laid it on hers.

“She can’t do nothin’ she wants to,” Uncle Zach said pathetically. “I’d like to kiss her, but I can’t stand alone and should tumble on to her, if I tried.”

“I’ll help you,” Fanny said, and passing her arms around him she held him, while he bent down and kissed the old wife whose quivering lips returned the kiss and tried so hard to speak.

That night she died, and no young husband ever made a bitterer moan for his bride of a few months than did Zacheus over his Dotty. “The greatest woman in the world for runnin’ a tarvern and keepin’ a feller straight,” he said amidst his tears, which fell continually, sleeping or waking. He did not think of her as old and wrinkled and grey haired, but as she had been in their early married life, when she was slight and fair, with long curls in her neck and around her face. “The prettiest girl in town as she is now the most remarkable woman. I shall get along somehow, I s’pose,” he said to Fanny, “but it is very dark with Dotty gone, and Mark, too, and Jeff, and Johnny in the cemetry goin’ on sixty year. If he had lived he might have had boys to stay with me. As ’tis, I am all alone. It isn’t pleasant to be old and helpless and all alone and cold as I am most of the time with this pesky rheumatis’.”

To this Fanny could offer no consolation. She couldn’t stay with him always, nor could she take him with her when she left Ridgefield. He was indeed alone in his old age, dependent upon hired help, who might not always be kind to him. And this he seemed to feel nearly as much as Dotty’s death.