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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Mrs. Hallam's Companion; and The Spring Farm, and Other Tales," Mary Jane Holmes presents a rich tapestry of 19th-century American life, weaving themes of domesticity, social responsibility, and moral integrity into her narratives. The book combines elements of sentimental and regional literature, showcasing the lives of strong female characters who navigate societal expectations while forging their own identities. Holmes's prose is marked by an accessible yet engaging style, offering readers a vivid portrayal of the quaint yet complex landscapes of rural America, along with the intricate dynamics of family and friendship that define her characters' journeys. Mary Jane Holmes, an influential author of her time, was immersed in the cultural and social upheavals of the mid-1800s that shaped her writing. Born in 1825, she wielded her pen to address significant social issues, especially those pertinent to women in her era. Her own experiences as a teacher and a member of a literary circle cultivated her understanding of both the trials and triumphs faced by women, leading to her heartfelt and often autobiographical storytelling that resonates with authenticity and compassion. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in exploring the historical and literary nuances of American life during the 19th century. Holmes's insightful portrayals and richly developed characters offer not only entertainment but also provoke thought regarding the societal pressures still relevant today, making it a vital addition to the library of any literature enthusiast. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers four substantial works of prose fiction by Mary Jane Holmes: Mrs. Hallam’s Companion, The Spring Farm, The Hepburn Line, and Mildred’s Ambition. Bringing them together underscores the breadth of a nineteenth-century American author renowned for domestic narrative and social observation. The collection’s purpose is not archival completeness but coherence: to display, within a single book, Holmes’s handling of household dramas, rural and urban milieus, and the moral tests that animate her characters. Read side by side, these works illuminate recurring preoccupations—family, courtship, mobility, and work—while revealing the variety of structures and settings through which Holmes pursued them across extended, chaptered storytelling.
All four items here are long-form narratives—novels or novellas—organized into clearly marked chapters that guide the reader through scenes, settings, and shifts of emphasis. The Hepburn Line adopts a notably multi-voiced design, with chapters attributed to different narrators, while the other works proceed through continuous, scene-driven prose that follows central figures across households, journeys, and social encounters. The emphasis throughout is on sustained fictional narrative rather than shorter sketches or lyric forms. No plays, poems, or essays are included; the collection is entirely composed of prose fiction, ranging from intimate domestic chronicles to broader canvases that incorporate travel and public occasions.
Despite their differing frameworks, the works share a common concern with the home as both refuge and crucible. Companionship, teaching, and kin-keeping appear as forms of labor and loyalty through which women and men negotiate duty, desire, and status. Courtship and marriage touch questions of money, inheritance, and reputation; rural homesteads and farms sit in dialogue with parlors, schools, and great houses. Travel—by sea, across regions, and into cosmopolitan spaces such as resorts and theaters—introduces contrast and testing, placing private feeling under public scrutiny. Throughout, moral choice is dramatized in everyday acts, and character is revealed by steady conduct over sensational incident.
Holmes’s stylistic hallmarks are evident across the collection: direct, accessible prose; keen attention to domestic detail; and narrative momentum sustained by compact chapters and well-timed turns. Dialogue is used to register social nuance and to differentiate age, class, and temperament. Sentiment is present but disciplined by observation, producing pathos grounded in credible circumstance. Settings are vivid without ornament for its own sake, whether the scene is a farm kitchen, a ship’s deck, or a drawing room. The Hepburn Line’s polyphonic arrangement foregrounds perspective as a theme in itself, while the other tales balance interiority with outward action in a clear, companionable narrative voice.
As a whole, the collection remains significant for the way it documents and interprets everyday life in Holmes’s era. It offers readers a textured view of domestic management, education, and sociability; it also records the aspirations and vulnerabilities attendant on class mobility and changing fortunes. By centering women’s experiences—whether as companions, teachers, or daughters negotiating property and promise—these works contribute to the broader history of popular domestic fiction while offering material for discussions of gender, labor, and community. Their transregional and, at times, transatlantic horizons add cultural breadth, situating intimate plots within a larger social world recognizable to contemporary and modern readers alike.
Each narrative begins with an inviting premise. Mrs. Hallam’s Companion moves from a family portrait and a country homestead into settings shaped by travel and fashionable society, testing loyalty and self-knowledge. The Spring Farm opens in a farmhouse, follows departures and arrivals, and traces the making of new ties around work and education. The Hepburn Line unfolds as a family history told by multiple hands, its changing narrators illuminating memory, kinship, and the contingencies of lineage. Mildred’s Ambition centers on a young woman whose hopes must contend with family expectation, property arrangements, and the perennial contest between affection and advantage.
Taken together, these works offer a mosaic of Holmes’s craft: from single-arc romances to a compound family chronicle; from the quiet dignity of rural life to the bustle of public entertainments and journeys abroad. Readers may approach the volume sequentially or by theme, following motifs of home-making, vocation, and choice as they recur in new guises. The clear signposting of chapters, shifts of locale, and named perspectives makes the progression through each tale both lucid and engaging. This curated gathering invites fresh attention to an author’s sustained interests, revealing unity without uniformity and affirming the narrative vigor that continues to draw readers to Holmes’s fiction.
Historical Context
Mary Jane Holmes (1825–1907) wrote across six decades that spanned the antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age United States. Born Mary Jane Hawes in Brookfield, Massachusetts, she married Daniel Holmes in 1849, lived briefly in Versailles, Kentucky, and settled permanently in Brockport, New York in 1854. Her breakthrough with Tempest and Sunshine (1854), followed by Lena Rivers (1856), launched a career in domestic fiction whose settings range from New England homesteads to transatlantic resorts. By the 1890s her cumulative sales exceeded two million copies, making her, by contemporary accounts, second only to Harriet Beecher Stowe among American women novelists of the nineteenth century.
Holmes’s audience was built through serial publication and inexpensive reprint. Many later tales first appeared in New York story papers such as the New York Weekly before receiving cloth editions from G. W. Carleton and broad circulation via cheap libraries issued by firms like George Munro, A. L. Burt, and Hurst and Company. The American News Company, founded in 1864, pushed these books through railway stalls and subscription libraries, transforming reading into a national habit. The International Copyright Act of 1891 reshaped transatlantic reprinting just as Holmes’s mature work appeared, strengthening American authors’ control over editions and royalties at home and abroad.
Across her oeuvre Holmes dramatized middle-class women’s paid and unpaid labor—companions, governesses, and schoolmistresses—within a legal order transforming after New York’s Married Women’s Property Act of 1848 and its 1860 expansion. The professionalization of teaching, supported by state normal schools, including the Brockport State Normal School opened in 1867 near her home, made female wage-earning both respectable and narratively fertile. These plots unfolded in the long wake of Seneca Falls (1848) and later clubwomen’s activism, formalized nationally in 1890, which broadened discussions of women’s education, philanthropy, and autonomy that thread through inheritances, engagements, and domestic negotiations in the stories gathered here.
Holmes’s characters move through a rapidly shrinking world made possible by steam. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and dense eastern rail networks put country homesteads within reach of urban theaters and hotels. Transatlantic liners, exemplified by White Star vessels such as the RMS Teutonic launched in 1889, conveyed Americans to European spa circuits like Aix-les-Bains and to lakeside grand hotels, including Beau-Rivage establishments at Lausanne (1861) and Geneva (1865). Opera crystallized urban aspiration in New York’s Academy of Music (1854) and the Metropolitan Opera (1883). Such sites of travel and spectacle animate Holmes’s late Victorian tableaux of courtship, concealment, and social display.
Equally central is the American countryside in motion. The Homestead Act of 1862, postwar railroad expansion, and booster migrations drew families westward, while agricultural depression after 1873 and again in the 1890s strained farm incomes. Holmes’s rural chapters reflect the one-room school, the boardinghouse, wagon and rail journeys, and the ethical tests of settlement communities where kinship and credit were currency. The tension between the rooted farm and the beckoning town or Western opportunity—prominent in late nineteenth-century realism and domestic fiction—provides a historical frame for stories of teachers on the move, guardianship arrangements, and the recalibration of status far from ancestral homes.
The Gilded Age reordered class boundaries through speculation, rail and mining fortunes, and new country-house cultures. Estates and named parks on the suburban fringe or in upstate New York echoed English models and supplied stages for disputes over wills, trusts, and guardianship that domestic fiction scrutinized. Holmes’s plots turn on the era’s legal instruments—testamentary bequests, trusteeships, and settlements—and the social scripts attached to operas, hotels, and resorts. Economic shocks such as the Panics of 1873 and 1893 shadow these narratives, as fortunes teeter and marriage becomes a negotiation among affection, propriety, and solvency within a society fascinated, and unsettled, by display.
Holmes’s sojourn in Kentucky around 1849 to 1854 and lifelong residence in New York furnished a duplex regional lens, spanning border-state domesticity and northern small-town life. The Civil War and Reconstruction reconfigured households, labor systems, and migration routes, changes that echo in her depictions of servants, veterans, and newly mobile youths seeking prospects in cities or the West. Middle-class benevolence—channeled through church societies, temperance endeavors, and later settlement impulses—inflects her moral universe, where charity and reputation circulate as social capital. Though rarely polemical, the fiction registers postbellum anxieties about class mixing and mobility, answered with reconciliations grounded in work, kinship, and earned respectability.
By the 1890s, when publishers such as Hurst and Company packaged multi-work volumes for a mass market, Holmes’s name functioned as a brand linking domestic sentiment to modern travel and money. Her readership extended from parlors to railroad cars and Chautauqua tents—the movement began in 1874 in western New York—attesting to the portability of her plots and their adaptability to serial and book formats. This collection gathers late-career variations on themes she had refined since Tempest and Sunshine, situating companions, heirs, and farmers within the infrastructures, legal and cultural, of nineteenth-century America, and preserving the bridge her fiction forms between sentimental tradition and Gilded Age realism.
Synopsis (Selection)
Mrs. Hallam's Companion
A capable young woman becomes companion to the formidable Mrs. Hallam and is swept from a New England homestead to transatlantic steamers and European resorts, where she navigates the Hallam heir’s orbit and a web of family pride and concealed histories. Travel, social intrigue, and questions of loyalty draw her toward a choice between duty and the heart.
The Spring Farm
A farm family’s fortunes shift as loved ones head west in search of opportunity, testing bonds through hardship, travel, and separation. Guided by steadfast friends and a haven called The Cedars, the story traces youthful promise, quiet courage, and the long path back to belonging.
The Hepburn Line
Told in braided first-person voices, this family saga unravels the Hepburn-Montague lineage—its secrets, scandals, and claims—through clashing perspectives that gradually reveal the missing links of kinship and love. Inheritance, identity, and reconciliation drive a narrative that moves from drawing rooms to hidden spaces where the past refuses to stay buried.
Mildred's Ambition
Determined to rise, Mildred weighs filial duty against social aspiration as the powerful Thornton family, a contested will, and shifting fortunes complicate her path. Love and money come into sharp conflict, compelling a decision that defines her character and future.
Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales
MRS. HALLAM’S COMPANION.
CHAPTER I.THE HALLAMS.
Mrs. Carter Hallam was going to Europe,—going to Aix-les Bains,—partly for the baths, which she hoped “would lessen her fast-increasing avoirdupois, and partly to join her intimate friend, Mrs. Walker Haynes, who had urged her coming and had promised to introduce her to some of the best people, both English and American. This attracted Mrs. Hallam more than the baths. She was anxious to know the best people, and she did know a good many, although her name was not in the list of the four hundred. But she meant it should be there in the near future, nor did it seem unlikely that it might be. There was not so great a distance between the four hundred and herself, as she was now, as there had been between Mrs. Carter Hallam and little Lucy Brown, who used to live with her grandmother in an old yellow house in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and pick berries to buy herself a pair of morocco boots. Later on, when the grandmother was dead and the yellow house sold, Lucy had worked first in a shoe-shop and then in a dry-goods store in Worcester, where, attracted by her handsome face, Carter Hallam, a thriving grocer, had made her his wife and mistress of a pretty little house on the west side of the city. As a clerk she had often waited upon the West Side ladies, whom she admired greatly, fancying she could readily distinguish them from the ladies of the East Side. To marry a Hallam was a great honor, but to be a West-Sider was a greater, and when both came to her she nearly lost her balance, although her home was far removed from the aristocratic quarters where the old families, the real West-Siders, lived. In a way she was one of them, she thought, or at least she was no longer a clerk, and she began to cut her old acquaintances, while her husband laughed at and ridiculed her, wondering what difference it made whether one lived on the east or west side of a town. He did not care whether people took him for a nabob, or a fresh importation from the wild and woolly West; he was just Carter Hallam, a jolly, easy-going fellow whom everybody knew and everybody liked. He was born on a farm in Leicester, where the Hallams, although comparatively poor, were held in high esteem as one of the best and oldest families. At twenty-one he came into the possession of a few thousand dollars left him by an uncle for whom he was named, and then he went to the Far West, roughing it with cowboys and ranchmen, and investing his money in a gold-mine in Montana and in lands still farther west. Then he returned to Worcester, bought a small grocery, married Lucy Brown, and lived quietly for a few years, when suddenly one day there flashed across the wires the news that his mine had proved one of the richest in Montana, and his lands were worth many times what he gave for them. He was a millionaire, with property constantly rising in value, and Worcester could no longer hold his ambitious wife.
It was too small a place for her, she said, for everybody knew everybody else’s business and history, and, no matter how much she was worth, somebody was sure to taunt her with having worked in a shoe-shop, if, indeed, she did not hear that she had once picked berries to buy herself some shoes. They must go away from the old life, if they wanted to be anybody. They must travel and see the world, and get cultivated, and know what to talk about with their equals.
So they sold the house and the grocery and traveled east and west, north and south, and finally went to Europe, where they stayed two or three years, seeing nearly everything there was to be seen, and learning a great deal about ruins and statuary and pictures, in which Mrs. Hallam thought herself a connoisseur, although she occasionally got the Sistine Chapel and the Sistine Madonna badly mixed, and talked of the Paul Belvedere, a copy of which she bought at an enormous price. When they returned to America Mr. Hallam was a three times millionaire, for all his speculations had been successful and his mine was still yielding its annual harvest of gold. A handsome house on Fifth Avenue in New York was bought and furnished in the most approved style, and then Mrs. Hallam began to consider the best means of getting into society. She already knew a good many New York people whom she had met abroad, and whose acquaintance it was desirable to continue. But she soon found that acquaintances made in Paris or Rome or on the Nile were not as cordial when met at home, and she was beginning to feel discouraged, when chance threw in her way Mrs. Walker Haynes, who, with the bluest of blood and the smallest of purses, knew nearly every one worth knowing, and, it was hinted, would for a quid pro quo open many fashionable doors to aspiring applicants who, without her aid, would probably stay outside forever.
The daughter and grand-daughter and cousin of governors and senators and judges, with a quiet assumption of superiority which was seldom offensive to those whom she wished to conciliate, she was a power in society, and more quoted and courted than any woman in her set. To be noticed by Mrs. Walker Haynes was usually a guarantee of success, and Mrs. Hallam was greatly surprised when one morning a handsome coupé stopped before her door and a moment after her maid brought her Mrs. Walker Haynes’s card. She knew all about Mrs. Walker Haynes and what she was capable of doing, and in a flutter of excitement she went down to meet her. Mrs. Walker Haynes, who never took people up if there was anything doubtful in their antecedents, knew all about Mrs. Hallam, even to the shoe-shop and the clerkship. But she knew, too, that she was perfectly respectable, with no taint whatever upon her character, and that she was anxious to get into society. As it chanced, Mrs. Haynes’s funds were low, for business was dull, as there were fewer human moths than usual hovering around the social candle, and when the ladies of the church which both she and Mrs. Hallam attended met to devise ways and means for raising money for some new charity, she spoke of Mrs. Hallam and offered to call upon her for a subscription, if the ladies wished it. They did wish it, and the next day found Mrs. Haynes waiting in Mrs. Hallam’s drawing-room for the appearance of its mistress, her quick-seeing eyes taking in every detail in its furnishing, and deciding on the whole that it was very good.
“Some one has taste,—the upholsterer and decorator, probably,” she thought, as Mrs. Hallam came in, nervous and flurried, but at once put at ease by her visitor’s gracious and friendly manner.
After a few general topics and the mention of a mutual friend whom Mrs. Hallam had met in Cairo, Mrs. Haynes came directly to the object of her visit, apologizing first for the liberty she was taking, and adding:
“But now that you are one of us in the church, I thought you might like to help us, and we need it so much.”
Mrs. Hallam was not naturally generous where nothing was to be gained, but Mrs. Haynes’s manner, and her “now you are one of us,” made her so in this instance, and taking the paper she wrote her name for two hundred dollars, which was nearly one-fourth of the desired sum. There was a gleam of humor as well as of surprise in Mrs. Haynes’s eyes as she read the amount, but she was profuse in her thanks and expressions of gratitude, and, promising to call very soon socially, she took her leave with a feeling that it would pay to take up Mrs. Hallam, who was really more lady-like and better educated than many whom she had launched upon the sea of fashion. With Mrs. Walker Haynes and several millions behind her, progress was easy for Mrs. Hallam, and within a year she was “quite in the swim,” she said to her husband, who laughed at her as he had done in Worcester, and called Mrs. Haynes a fraud who knew what she was about. But he gave her all the money she wanted, and rather enjoyed seeing her “hob-a-nob with the big bugs,” as he expressed it. Nothing, however, could change him, and he remained the same unostentatious, popular man he had always been up to the day of his death, which occurred about three years before our story opens.
At that time there was living with him his nephew, the son of his only brother, Jack. Reginald,—or Rex as he was familiarly called,—was a young man of twenty-six, with exceptionally good habits, and a few days before his uncle died he said to him:
“I can trust you, Rex. You have lived with me since you were fourteen, and have never once failed me. The Hallams are all honest people, and you are half Hallam. I have made you independent by my will, and I want you to stay with your aunt and look after her affairs. She is as good a woman as ever lived, but a little off on fashion and fol-de-rol. Keep her as level as you can.”
This Rex had tried to do, rather successfully, too, except when Mrs. Walker Haynes’s influence was in the ascendant, when he usually succumbed to circumstances and allowed his aunt to do as she pleased. Mrs. Haynes, who had profited greatly in a pecuniary way from her acquaintance with Mrs. Hallam, was now in Europe, and had written her friend to join her at Aix-les-Bains, which she said was a charming place, full of titled people both English and French, and she had the entrée to the very best circles. She further added that it was desirable for a lady traveling without a male escort to have a companion besides a maid and courier. The companion was to be found in America, the courier in London, and the maid in Paris; “after which,” she wrote, “you will travel tout-à-fait en princesse. The en princesse appealed to Mrs. Hallam at once as something altogether applicable to Mrs. Carter Hallam of New York. She was a great lady now; Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the berries and the shoe-shop were more than thirty years in the past, and so covered over with gold that it seemed impossible to uncover them; nor had any one tried, so far as she knew. The Hallams as a family had been highly respected both in Worcester and in Leicester, and she often spoke of them, but never of the Browns, or of the old grandmother, and she was glad she had no near relatives to intrude themselves upon her and make her ashamed. She was very fond and very proud of Reginald, who was to her like a son, and who with the integrity and common sense of the Hallams had also inherited the innate refinement and kindly courtesy of his mother, a Bostonian and the daughter of a clergyman. As a rule she consulted him about everything, and after she received Mrs. Haynes’s letter she showed it to him and asked his advice in the matter of a companion.
“I think she would be a nuisance and frightfully in your way at times, but if Mrs. Haynes says you must have one, it’s all right, so go ahead,” Rex replied, and his aunt continued:
“But how am I to find what I want? I am so easily imposed upon, and I will not have one from the city. She would expect too much and make herself too familiar. I must have one from the country.”
“Advertise, then, and they’ll come round you like bees around honey,” Rex said, and to this suggestion his aunt at once acceded, asking him to write the advertisement, which she dictated, with so many conditions and requirements that Rex exclaimed, “Hold on there. You will insist next that they subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, besides believing in foreordination and everything in the Westminster Catechism. You are demanding impossibilities and giving too little in return. Three hundred dollars for perfection! I should say offer five hundred. ‘The higher-priced the better’ is Mrs. Walker Haynes’s motto, and I am sure she will think it far more tony to have an expensive appendage than a cheap one. The girl will earn her money, too, or I’m mistaken; for Mrs. Haynes is sure to share her services with you, as she does everything else.”
He spoke laughingly, but sarcastically, for he perfectly understood Mrs. Walker Haynes, whom his outspoken uncle had called “a sponge and a schemer, who knew how to feather her nest.” Privately Rex thought the same, but he did not often express these views to his aunt, who at last consented to the five hundred dollars, and Rex wrote the advertisement, which was as follows:
“A companion for a lady who is going abroad. One from the country, between twenty and twenty-five, preferred. She must be a good accountant, a good reader, and a good seamstress. She must also have a sufficient knowledge of French to understand the language and make herself understood. To such a young lady five hundred dollars a year will be given, and all expenses paid. Address,
When Rex read this to his aunt, she said:
“Yes, that will do; but don’t you think it just as well to say young person instead of young lady?”
“No, I don’t,” Rex answered, promptly. “You want a lady, and not a person, as you understand the word, and I wouldn’t begin by insulting her.”
So the “lady” was allowed to stand, and then, without his aunt’s knowledge, Rex added:
“Those applying will please send their photographs.”
“I should like to see the look of astonishment on aunt’s face when the pictures come pouring in. There will be scores of them, the offer is so good,” Rex thought, as he folded the advertisement and left the house.
That night, when dinner was over, he said to his aunt: “I have a project in mind which I wish to tell you about.”
Mrs. Hallam gave a little shrug of annoyance. Her husband had been full of projects, most of which she had disapproved, as she probably should this of Rex, who continued:
“I am thinking of buying a place in the country,—the real country, I mean,—where the houses are old-fashioned and far apart, and there are woods and ponds and brooks and things.”
“And pray what would you do with such a place?” Mrs. Hallam asked.
Rex replied, “I’d make it into a fancy farm and fill it with blooded stock, hunting-horses, and dogs. I’d keep the old house intact so far as architecture is concerned, and fit it up as a kind of bachelor’s hall, where I can have a lot of fellows in the summer and fall, and hunt and fish and have a glorious time. Ladies will not be excluded, of course, and when you are fagged out with Saratoga and Newport I shall invite you, and possibly Mrs. Haynes and Grace, down to see the fox-hunts I mean to have, just as they do in the Genesee Valley. Won’t it be fun?”
Rex was eloquent on the subject of his fancy farm. He was very fond of the country, although he really knew but little about it, as he was born in New York, and had lived there all his life with the exception of two years spent at the South with his mother’s brother and four years at Yale. His aunt, on the contrary, detested the country, with its woods, and ponds, and brooks, and old-fashioned houses, and she felt very little interest in Rex’s fancy farm and fox-hunts, which she looked upon as wholly visionary. She asked him, however, where the farm was, and he replied:
“You see, Marks, who is in the office with me, has a client who owns a mortgage on some old homestead among the hills in Massachusetts. This mortgage, which has changed hands two or three times and been renewed once or twice, comes due in October, and Marks says there is not much probability that the old man,—I believe he is quite old,—can pay it, and the place will be sold at auction. I can, of course, wait and bid it off cheap, as farms are not in great demand in that vicinity; but I don’t like to do that. I’d rather buy it outright, giving the old fellow more than it is worth rather than less. Marks says it is a rambling old house, with three or four gables, and stands on a hillside with a fine view of the surrounding country. The woods are full of pleasant drives, and ponds where the white lilies grow and where I can fish and have some small boats.”
“But where is it? In what town, I mean?” Mrs. Hallam asked, with a slight tremor in her voice, which, however, Rex did not notice as he answered:
“I don’t remember where Marks’s client said it was, but I have his letter. Let me see.” And, taking the letter from his pocket, he glanced at it a moment, and then said, “It is in Leicester, and not more than five or six miles from the city of Worcester and Lake Quinsigamond, where I mean to have a yacht and call it the Lucy Hallam for you. Why, auntie, it has just occurred to me that you once lived in Worcester, and Uncle Hallam, too, and that he and father were born in Leicester. Were you ever there,—at the house where father was born, I mean? But of course you have been.”
Rex had risen to his feet and stood leaning on the mantel and looking at his aunt with an eager, expectant expression on his face. She was pale to her lips as she replied:
“Yes, I was there just after I was married. Your uncle drove me out one afternoon to see the place. Strangers were living there then, for his father and mother were dead. He was as country mad as you are, and actually went down upon his knees before the old well-sweep and bucket.”
“I don’t blame him. I believe I’d do the same,” Rex replied, and then went on questioning her rapidly. “What was the house like? Had it a big chimney in the centre?”
Mrs. Hallam said it had.
“Wide fireplaces?”
“Rather wide,—yes.”
“Kitchen fireplace, with a crane?”
“I don’t know, but most likely.”
“Little window-panes, and deep window-seats?”
“I think so.”
“Big iron door-latches instead of knobs?”
“Yes, and a brass knocker.”
“Slanting roof, or high?”
“It was a high gabled roof,—three or four gables, and must have been rather pretentious when it was new.
“Rex,”—and Mrs. Hallam’s voice trembled perceptibly,—“the gables and the situation overlooking the valley make me think that the place you have in view is possibly your father’s old home.”
“By Jove,” Rex exclaimed, “wouldn’t that be jolly! I believe I’d give a thousand dollars extra for the sake of having the old homestead for my own. I wonder who the old chap is who lives there. I mean to go down and see for myself as soon as I return from Chicago and we get the lawsuit off our hands which is taking all Marks’s time and mine.”
Mrs. Hallam did not say what she thought, for she knew there was not much use in opposing Rex, but in her heart she did not approve of bringing the long-buried past up to the present, which was so different. The Homestead was well enough, and Leicester was well enough, for Hallam had been an honored name in the neighborhood, and Rex would be honored, too, as a scion of the family; but it was too near Worcester and the shoe-shop and the store and the people who had known her as a working-girl, and who would be sure to renew the acquaintance if she were to go there. She had no relatives to trouble her, unless it were a certain Phineas Jones, who was so far removed that she could scarcely call him a relative. But if he were living he would certainly find her if she ventured near him, and cousin her, as he used to do in Worcester, where he was continually calling upon her after her marriage and reminding her of spelling-schools and singing-schools and circuses which he said he had attended with her. How distasteful it all was, and how she shrank from everything pertaining to her early life, which seemed so far away that she sometimes half persuaded herself it had never been!
And yet her talk with Rex about the old Homestead on the hill had stirred her strangely, and that night, long after her usual hour for retiring, she sat by her window looking out upon the great city, whose many lights, shining like stars through the fog and rain, she scarcely saw at all. Her thoughts had gone back thirty years to an October day just after her return from her wedding trip to Niagara, when her husband had driven her into the country to visit his old home. How happy he had been, and how vividly she could recall the expression on his face when he caught sight of the red gables and the well-sweep where she told Reginald he had gone down upon his knees. There had been a similar expression on Rex’s face that evening when he talked of his fancy farm, and Rex was in appearance much like what her handsome young husband had been that lovely autumn day, when a purple haze was resting on the hills and the air was soft and warm as summer. He had taken her first to the woods and shown her where he and his brother Jack had set their traps for the woodchucks and snared the partridges in the fall and hunted for the trailing arbutus and the sassafras in the spring; then to the old cider-mill at the end of the lane, and to the hill where they had their slide in winter, and to the barn, where they had a swing, and to the brook in the orchard, where they had a water-wheel; then to the well, where he drew up the bucket, and, poising it upon the curb, stooped to drink from it, asking her to do the same and see if she ever quaffed a sweeter draught; but she was afraid of wetting her dress, and had drawn back, saying she was not thirsty. Strangers occupied the house, but permission was given them to go over it, and he had taken her through all the rooms, showing her where he and Jack and Annie were born, and where the latter had died when a little child of eight; then to the garret, where they used to spread the hickory-nuts and butternuts to dry, and down to the cellar, where the apples and cider were stored. He was like a school-boy in his eagerness to explain everything, while she was bored to death and heard with dismay his proposition to drive two or three miles farther to the Greenville cemetery, where the Hallams for many generations back had been buried. There was a host of them, and some of the headstones were sunken and mouldy with age and half fallen down, while the lettering upon them was almost illegible.
“I wonder whose this is?” he said, as he went down upon the ground to decipher the date of the oldest one. “I can’t make it out, except that it is seventeen hundred and something. He must have been an old settler,” he continued, as he arose and brushed a patch of dirt from his trousers with his silk handkerchief. Then, glancing at her as she stood listlessly leaning against a stone, he said, “Why, Lucy, you look tired. Are you?”
“No, not very,” she answered, a little pettishly; “but I don’t think it very exhilarating business for a bride to be visiting the graves of her husband’s ancestors.”
He did not hunt for any more dates after that, but, gathering a few wild flowers growing in the tall grass, he laid them upon his mother’s grave and Annie’s, and, going out to the carriage standing by the gate, drove back to Worcester through a long stretch of woods, where the road was lined on either side with sumachs and berry-bushes and clumps of bitter-sweet, and there was no sign of life except when a blackbird flew from one tree to another, or a squirrel showed its bushy tail upon the wall. He thought it delightful, and said that it was the pleasantest drive in the neighborhood and one which he had often taken with Jack when they were boys; but she thought it horribly lonesome and poky, and was glad when they struck the pavement of the town.
“Carter always liked the country,” she said to herself when her reverie came to an end, and she left her seat by the window; “and Rex is just like him, and will buy that place if he can, and I shall have to go there as hostess and be called upon by a lot of old women in sun-bonnets and blanket shawls, who will call me Lucy Ann and say, ‘You remember me, don’t you? I was Mary Jane Smith; I worked in the shoe-shop with you years ago.’ And Phineas Jones will turn up, with his cousining and dreadful reminiscences. Ah me, what a pity one could not be born without antecedents![1q]”
CHAPTER II.THE HOMESTEAD.
It stood at the end of a grassy avenue or lane a little distance from the electric road between Worcester and Spencer, its outside chimneys covered with woodbine and its sharp gables distinctly visible as the cars wound up the steep Leicester hill. Just what its age was no one knew exactly. Relic-hunters who revel in antiquities put it at one hundred and fifty. But the oldest inhabitant in the town, who was an authority for everything ancient, said that when he was a small boy it was comparatively new, and considered very fine on account of its gables and brass knocker, and, as he was ninety-five or six, the house was probably over a hundred. It was built by a retired sea-captain from Boston, and after his death it changed hands several times until it was bought by the Hallams, who lived there so long and were so highly esteemed that it came to bear their name, and was known as the Hallam Homestead. After the death of Carter Hallam’s father it was occupied by different parties, and finally became the property of a Mr. Leighton, who rather late in life had married a girl from Georgia, where he had been for a time a teacher. Naturally scholarly and fond of books, he would have preferred teaching, but his young wife, accustomed to plantation life, said she should be happier in the country, and so he bought the Homestead and commenced farming, with very little knowledge of what ought to be done and very little means with which to do it. Under such circumstances he naturally grew poorer every year, while his wife’s artistic tastes did not help the matter. Remembering her father’s plantation with its handsome grounds and gardens, she instituted numerous changes in and about the house, which made it more attractive, but did not add to its value. The big chimney was taken down and others built upon the outside, after the Southern style. A wide hall was put through the centre where the chimney had been; a broad double piazza was built in front, while the ground was terraced down to the orchard below, where a rustic bridge was thrown across the little brook where Carter and Jack Hallam had built their water-wheel. Other changes the ambitious little Georgian was contemplating, when she died suddenly and was carried back to sleep under her native pines, leaving her husband utterly crushed at his loss, with the care of two little girls, Dorcas and Bertha, and a mortgage of two thousand dollars upon his farm. For some years he scrambled on as best he could with hired help, giving all his leisure time to educating and training his daughters, who were as unlike each other as two sisters well could be. Dorcas, the elder, was fair and blue-eyed, and round and short and matter-of-fact, caring more for the farm and the house than for books, while Bertha was just the opposite, and, with her soft brown hair, bright eyes, brilliant complexion, and graceful, slender figure, was the exact counterpart of her beautiful Southern mother when she first came to the Homestead; but otherwise she was like her father, caring more for books than for the details of every-day life.
“Dorcas is to be housekeeper, and I the wage-earner, to help pay off the mortgage which troubles father so much,” she said, and when she was through school she became book-keeper for the firm of Swartz & Co., of Boston, with a salary of four hundred dollars a year. Dorcas, who was two years older, remained at home as housekeeper. And a very thrifty one she made, seeing to everything and doing everything, from making butter to making beds, for she kept no help. The money thus saved was put carefully by towards paying the mortgage coming due in October. By the closest economy it had been reduced from two thousand to one thousand, and both Dorcas and Bertha were straining every nerve to increase the fund which was to liquidate the debt.
It was not very often that Bertha indulged in the luxury of coming home, for even that expense was something, and every dollar helped. But on the Saturday following the appearance of Mrs. Hallam’s advertisement in the New York Herald she was coming to spend Sunday for the first time in several weeks. These visits were great events at the Homestead, and Dorcas was up as soon as the first robin chirped in his nest in the big apple-tree which shaded the rear of the house and was now odorous and beautiful with its clusters of pink-and-white blossoms. There was churning to do that morning, and butter to get off to market, besides the usual Saturday’s cleaning and baking, which included all Bertha’s favorite dishes. There was Bertha’s room to be gone over with broom and duster, and all the vases and handleless pitchers to be filled with daffies and tulips and great bunches of apple-blossoms and a clump or two of the trailing arbutus which had lingered late in the woods. But Dorcas’s work was one of love; if she were tired she scarcely thought of it at all, and kept steadily on until everything was done. In her afternoon gown and white apron she sat down to rest awhile on the piazza overlooking the valley, thinking as she did so what a lovely place it was, with its large, sunny rooms, wide hall, and fine view, and how dreadful it would be to lose it.
“Five hundred dollars more we must have, and where it is to come from I do not know. Bertha always says something will turn up, but I am not so hopeful,” she said, sadly. Then, glancing at the clock, she saw that it was nearly time for the car which would bring her sister from the Worcester station. “I’ll go out to the cross-road and meet her,” she thought, just as she heard the sharp clang of the bell and saw the trolley-pole as it came up the hill. A moment more, and Bertha alighted and came rapidly towards her.
“You dear old Dor, I’m so glad to see you and be home again,” Bertha said, giving up her satchel and umbrella and putting her arm caressingly around Dorcas’s neck as she walked, for she was much the taller of the two.
It was a lovely May afternoon, and the place was at its best in the warm sunlight, with the fresh green grass and the early flowers and the apple orchard full of blossoms which filled the air with perfume.
“Oh, this is delightful, and it is so good to get away from that close office and breathe this pure air,” Bertha said, as she went from room to room, and then out upon the piazza, where she stood taking in deep inhalations and seeming to Dorcas to grow brighter and fresher with each one. “Where is father?” she asked at last.
“Here, daughter,” was answered, as Mr. Leighton, who had been to the village, came through a rear door.
He was a tall, spare man, with snowy hair and a stoop in his shoulders, which told of many years of hard work. But the refinement in his manner and the gentleness in his face were indicative of good breeding, and a life somewhat different from that which he now led.
Bertha was at his side in a moment, and had him down in a rocking-chair, and was sitting on an arm of it, brushing the thin hair back from his forehead, while she looked anxiously into his face, which wore a more troubled expression than usual, although he evidently tried to hide it.
“What is it, father? Are you very tired?” she asked, at last, and he replied;
“No, daughter, not very; and if I were the sight of you would rest me.”
Catching sight of the corner of an envelope in his vest pocket, with a woman’s quick intuition, she guessed that it had something to do with his sadness.
“You have a letter. Is there anything in it about that hateful mortgage?” she said.
“It is all about the mortgage. There’s a way to get rid of it,” he answered, while his voice trembled, and something in his eyes, as he looked into Bertha’s, made her shiver a little; but she kissed him lovingly, and said very low:
“Yes, father. I know there is a way,” her lips quivering as she said it, and a lump rising in her throat as if she were smothering.
“Will you read the letter?” he asked, and she answered:
“Not now; let us have supper first. I am nearly famished, and long to get at Dor’s rolls and broiled chicken, which I smelled before I left the car at the cross-roads.”
She was very gay all through the supper, although a close observer might have seen a cloud cross her bright face occasionally, and a look of pain and preoccupation in her eyes; but she laughed and chatted merrily, asking about the neighbors and the farm, and when supper was over helped Dorcas with her dishes and the evening work, sang snatches of the last opera, and told her sister about the new bell skirt just coming into fashion, and how she could cut over her old ones like it. When everything was done she seemed to nerve herself to some great effort, and, going to her father said:
“Now for the letter. From whom is it?”
“Gorham, the man who holds the mortgage,” Mr. Leighton replied.
“Oh-h, Gorham!” and Bertha’s voice was full of intense relief. “I thought perhaps it was —— but no matter, that will come later. Let us hear what Mr. Gorham has to say. He cannot foreclose till October, anyhow.”
“And not then, if we do what he proposes. This is it,” Mr. Leighton said, as he began to read the letter, which was as follows:
“Dear Sir,—A gentleman in New York wishes to purchase a farm in the country, where he can spend a part of the summer and autumn, fishing and fox-hunting and so on. From what he has heard of your place and the woods around it, he thinks it will suit him exactly, and in the course of a few weeks proposes to go out and see it. As he has ample means, he will undoubtedly pay you a good price, cash down, and that will relieve you of all trouble with the mortgage. I still think I must have my money in October, as I have promised it elsewhere.
“Well?” Mr. Leighton said, as he finished reading the letter, and looked inquiringly at his daughters.
Bertha, who was very pale, was the first to speak. “Do you want to leave the old home?” she asked, and her father replied, in a choking voice, “No, oh, no. I have lived here twenty-seven years, and know every rock and tree and shrub, and love them all. I brought your mother here a bride and a slip of a girl like you, who are so much like her that sometimes when I see you flitting around and hear your voice I think for a moment she has come back to me again. You were both born here. Your mother died here, and here I want to die. But what is the use of prolonging the struggle? I have raked and scraped and saved in every possible way to pay the debt contracted so long ago, the interest of which has eaten up all my profits, and I have got within five hundred dollars of it, but do not see how I can get any further. I may sell a few apples and some hay, but I’ll never borrow another dollar, and if this New York chap offers a good price we’d better sell. Dorcas and I can rent a few rooms somewhere in Boston, maybe, and we shall all be together till I die, which, please God, will not be very long.”
His face was white, with a tired, discouraged look upon it pitiful to see, while Dorcas, who cried easily, was sobbing aloud. But Bertha’s eyes were round and bright and dry, and there was a ring in her voice as she said, “You will not die, and you will not sell the place. Horses and dogs and fox-hunts, indeed! I’d like to see that New Yorker plunging through the fields and farms with his horses and hounds, for that is what fox-hunting means. He would be mobbed in no time. Who is he, I wonder? I should like to meet him and give him a piece of my mind.”
She was getting excited, and her cheeks were scarlet as she kissed her father again and said, “Write and tell that New Yorker to stay where he is, and take his foxes to some other farm. He cannot have ours, nor any one else. Micawber-like, I believe something will turn up; I am sure of it; only give me time.”
Then, rising from her chair, she went swiftly out into the twilight, and, crossing the road, ran down the terrace to a bit of broken wall, where she sat down and watched the night gathering on the distant hills and over the woods, and fought the battle which more than one unselfish woman has fought,—a battle between inclination and what seemed to be duty. If she chose, she could save the farm with a word and make her father’s last days free from care. There was a handsome house in Boston of which she might be mistress any day, with plenty of money at her command to do with as she pleased. But the owner was old compared to herself, forty at least, and growing bald; he called her Berthy, and was not at all like the ideal she had in her mind of the man whom she could love,—who was really more like one who might hunt foxes and ride his horses through the fields, while she rode by his side, than like the commonplace Mr. Sinclair, who had asked her twice to be his wife. At her last refusal only a few days ago he had said he should not give her up yet, but should write her father for his co-operation, and it was from him she feared the New York letter had come when she saw it in her father’s pocket. She knew he was honorable and upright and would be kind and generous to her and her family, but she had dreamed of a different love, and she could not listen to his suit unless it were to save the old home for her father and Dorcas.
For a time she sat weighing in the balance her love for them and her love for herself, while darkness deepened around her and the air grew heavy with the scent of the apple-blossoms and the grove of pine-trees not far away; yet she was no nearer a decision than when she first sat down. It was strange that in the midst of her intense thinking, the baying of hounds, the tramp of horses’ feet, and the shout of many voices should ring in her ears so distinctly that once, as some bushes stirred near her, she turned, half expecting to see the hunted fox fleeing for his life, and, with an impulse to save him from his pursuers, put out both her hands.
“This is a queer sort of hallucination, and it comes from that New York letter,” she thought, just as from under a cloud where it had been hidden the new moon sailed out to the right of her. Bertha was not superstitious, but, like many others, she clung to some of the traditions of her childhood, and the new moon seen over the right shoulder was one of them. She always framed a wish when she saw it, and she did so now, involuntarily repeating the words she had so often used when a child:
and then, almost as seriously as if it were a prayer, she wished that something might occur to keep the home for her father and herself from Mr. Sinclair.
“I don’t believe much in the new moon, it has cheated me so often; but I do believe in presentiments, and I have one that something will turn up. I’ll wait awhile and see,” she said, as the silvery crescent was lost again under a cloud. Beginning to feel a little chilly, she went back to the house, where she found her father reading his evening paper.
This reminded her of a New York Herald she had bought on the car of a little newsboy, whose ragged coat and pleasant face had decided her to refuse the chocolates offered her by a larger boy and take the paper instead. It was lying on the table, where she had put it when she first came in. Taking it up, she sat down and opened it. Glancing from page to page, she finally reached the advertisements, and her eye fell upon that of Mrs. Hallam.
“Oh, father, Dorcas, I told you something would turn up, and there has! Listen!” and she read the advertisement aloud. “The very thing I most desired has come. I have always wanted to go to Europe, but never thought I could, on account of the expense, and here it is, all paid, and five hundred dollars besides. That will save the place. I did not wish the new moon for nothing. Something has turned up.”
“But, Bertha,” said the more practical Dorcas, “what reason have you to think you will get the situation? There are probably more than five hundred applicants for it,—one for each dollar.”
“I know I shall. I feel it as I have felt other things which have come to me. Theosophic presentiments I call them.”
Dorcas went on: “And if it does come, I don’t see how it will help the mortgage due in October. You will not get your pay in advance, and possibly not until the end of the year.”
“I shall borrow the money and give my note,” Bertha answered, promptly. “Anybody will trust me. Swartz & Co. will, anyway, knowing that I shall come back and work it out if Mrs. Hallam fails me. By the way, that is the name of the people who lived here years ago. Perhaps Mrs. Carter belongs to the family. Do you know where they are, father?”
Mr. Leighton said he did not. He thought, however, they were all dead, while Dorcas asked, “If you are willing to borrow money of Swartz & Co., why don’t you try Cousin Louie, and pay her in installments?”
“Cousin Louie!” Bertha repeated. “That would be borrowing of her proud husband, Fred Thurston, who, since I have been a bread-winner, never sees me in the street if he can help it. I’d take in washing before I’d ask a favor of him. My heart is set upon Europe, if Mrs. Hallam will have me, and you do not oppose me too strongly.”
“But I must oppose you,” her father said; and then followed a long and earnest discussion between Mr. Leighton, Dorcas, and Bertha, the result of which was that Bertha was to wait a few days and consider the matter before writing to Mrs. Hallam.
That night, however, after her father had retired, she dashed off a rough draught of what she meant to say and submitted it to Dorcas for approval. It was as follows:
“Madam,—I have seen your advertisement for a companion, and shall be glad of the situation. My name is Bertha Leighton. I am twenty-two years old, and was graduated at the Charlestown Seminary three years ago. I am called a good reader, and ought to be a good accountant, as for two years I have been book-keeper in the firm of Swartz & Co., Boston. I am not very handy with my needle, for want of practice, but can soon learn. While in school I took lessons in French of a native teacher, who complimented my pronunciation and quickness to comprehend. Consequently I think I shall find no difficulty in understanding the language after a little and making myself understood. I enclose my photograph, which flatters me somewhat. My address is
“I think it covers the whole business,” Bertha said to Dorcas, who objected to one point. “The photograph does not flatter you,” she said, while Bertha insisted that it did, as it represented a much more stylish-looking young woman than Mrs. Carter Hallam’s companion ought to be. “I wonder what sort of woman she is? I somehow fancy she is a snob,” she said; “but, snob me all she pleases, she cannot keep me from seeing Europe, and I don’t believe she will try to cheat me out of my wages.”
CHAPTER III.MRS. HALLAM’S APPLICANTS.
Several days after Mrs. Hallam’s advertisement appeared in the papers, Reginald, who had been away on business, returned, and found his aunt in her room struggling frantically with piles of letters and photographs and with a very worried and excited look on her face.
“Oh, Rex,” she cried, as he came in, “I am so glad you have come, for I am nearly wild. Only think! Seventy applicants, and as many photographs! What possessed them to send their pictures?”
Rex kept his own counsel, but gave a low whistle as he glanced at the pile which filled the table.
“Got enough for an album, haven’t you? How do they look as a whole?” he asked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. Such a time as I have had reading their letters, and such recommendations as most of them give of themselves, telling me what reverses of fortune they have suffered, what church they belong to, and how long they have taught in Sunday-school, and all that, as if I cared. But I have decided which to choose; her letter came this morning, with one other,—the last of the lot, I trust. I like her because she writes so plainly and sensibly and seems so truthful. She says she is not a good seamstress and that her picture flatters her, while most of the others say their pictures are not good. Then she is so respectful and simply addresses me as ‘Madam,’ while all the others dear me. If there is anything I like, it is respect in a servant.”
“Thunder, auntie! You don’t call your companion a servant, do you?” Rex exclaimed, but his aunt only replied by passing him Bertha’s letter. “She writes well. How does she look?” he asked.
“Here she is.” And his aunt gave him the photograph of a short, sleepy-looking girl, with little or no expression in her face or eyes, and an unmistakable second-class air generally.
“Oh, horrors!” Rex exclaimed. “This girl never wrote that letter. Why, she simpers and squints and is positively ugly. There must be some mistake, and you have mixed things dreadfully.”
“No, I haven’t,” Mrs. Hallam persisted. “I was very careful to keep the photographs and letters together as they came. This is Bertha Leighton’s, sure, and she says it flatters her.”
“What must the original be!” Rex groaned.
His aunt continued, “I’d rather she’d be plain than good-looking. I don’t want her attracting attention and looking in the glass half the time. Mrs. Haynes always said, ‘Get plain girls by all means, in preference to pretty ones with airs and hangers-on.’”
“All right, if Mrs. Haynes says so,” Rex answered, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he put down the photograph of the girl he called Squint-Eye, and began carelessly to look at the others.
