Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York. Frederic Harold
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“Father never meant to be hard with me. When he lef’ me nothin’ but a living aout o’ th’ farm, he expected, everybuddy expected, my Aunt Sabrina’d leave me a clean sixty thaousand dollars when she died. She was an ole woman, ’n’ a widow, ’n’ she hed no childern. She’d allus promised my father thet if I was named after her—confaound her name!—I shaould be her heir. ’N’ then, Iess’n a year after his death, what does the old huzzy up ’n’ do but marry some fortune hunter young enough to be her son, ’n’ give him every cent she hed in the world. He led her a fine dance of it, tew, ’n’ serve her right! But there I was, lef ’thaout a thing ’cep a roof over my head.
“ ’N’ then Lemuel, nothin’ ud do but he must go to Californy when the gold cry riz, ’n’ no sooner’d he git there than he was homesick ’n’ hed to come back; ’n’ when he got back, ’n’ begun to hear what fortunes them who’d gone aout with him were a making, than he must start aout again. But where it’d be’n wilderness a few months b’fore, he faound cities naow, ’n’ ev’ry chance took up; then he got robbed o’ all his money, ’n’ hed to borrer, ’n’ then he took chills ’n’ fever off th’ isthmus, n’ hed to lay in quarantine fer weeks, on ’caount o’ th’ yellah fever; it’d be’n a poor year on the farm, ’n’ when he got back, it took ev’ry cent of his ready-money to set himself right.
“From thet day to this, his Californy luck hez stuck to him like death to a nigger, tell here, to-day, the Fitches don’t think it wuth while to come to your poor mother’s fun’ral—I kin remember Lije Fitch when he was glad enough to beg beans o’ my father fer seed—‘n’ I’m wearing borrered mournin’ of Sarah Andrewses, a mile tew big for me!”
“It seems to me I’ve been told all this a good many times, Aunt Sabrina,” said Albert, as his aunt stopped and glared at him trembling with the excitement of her peroration. “There’s nothing very-pleasant in it, for either of us, to listen to or talk about; but I don’t see that there’s anything more than I’ve heard over and over again, except about your having on another woman’s dress, and I don’t assume that I am expected to interfere about that!”
Poor Miss Sabrina was too deeply moved, and too much in earnest, to note the sarcastic levity underlying the lawyer’s conclusion. She caught only the general sense of a negative response, and looked at her nephew steadily with a gaze half-indignant, half appealing.
“Then you won’t dew anything, ay?” she asked at last.
“Oh, I am very far from saying that. That’s another thing. You send for me, saying that you have an important communication to make to me—at least, I assume that it is important, from the circumstances surrounding the request. I come, and you first insist that I know as well as you do what you mean, and then, when I demur, you rehearse all the unfortunate details of my father’s failure in life. I suggest that these are already tolerably familiar to me, and this mild statement you construe as a definite refusal on my part to do something—what, I don’t know.”
“I declare, Albert, you better send in a bill fer givin’ me this consultation. I never knew a son who could take his father’s ruin ’n’ his fam’ly’s disgrace so cool, before. I s’pose that’s th’ lawyer of it, tew!”
“Perhaps it’s an advantage that some one of the family should keep cool, Aunt, and look at things one by one, in their true relation. Now, if you have any proposition to make to me, any plan to present for my consideration, I should like to hear it—because really this other style of conversation is profitless beyond description. In a word, what do you want me to do?”
“What do I want yeh to do?” The old maid leaned forward and put a thin, mitted hand on Albert’s knee, looking eagerly into his face, and speaking almost shrilly. “I want yeh to take this farm, to come here to live, to make it a rich gentleman’s home agin! to put the Fairchilds up once more where my father left ’em.”
“Yes?” was the provokingly unenthusiastic response.
Miss Sabrina felt that she had failed. She put her spectacles on, and took the Bible into her lap, as if to say that she washed her hands of all mundane matters. But it did not suit Albert to regard the interview as closed.
“There is one thing you don’t seem to see at all, Aunt,” he said. “That is, that Dearborn County is relatively not altogether the most important section of the Republic, and that it is quite possible for a man to win public recognition or attain professional distinction in other communities which might reconcile him to a loss of prestige here. It may sound like heresy to you, but I am free to admit that the good opinion of the business men of New York City, where I am regarded as a successful sort of man, seems to me to outweigh all possible questions as to how I am regarded by Elhanan Pratt and Le-ander Crump and—and that Baptist gentleman, for instance, whom you had here to-day. The world has grown so large, my dear aunt, since your day, that there are thousands upon thousands of Americans now who go all their lives without ever once thinking about Dearborn County’s opinion. Of course I can understand how deeply you must feel what you regard as a social decline in the eyes of your neighbours. But truly, it does not specially affect me. They are not my neighbours; if I seem to them to be of less importance than I was in my boyhood, when I had a pony, I can’t help it, and I am sure I don’t want to. Frankly, to use my mother’s old phrase, I don’t care a cotton hat for their opinion good, bad, or indifferent. It is this, I think, which you leave out of your calculation.”
Miss Sabrina had listened, with the Book opened only by a finger’s width. The elaborate irony of her nephew’s words had escaped her, but she saw a gleam of hope in his willingness to discuss the matter at all.
“But then this is the home o’ the Fairchilds; the fam’ly belongs to Dearborn Caounty; father was allus spoken of ez Seth Fairchild o’ Dearborn, jis’ as much ez—ez Silas Wright o’ Dutchess.”
“Of course that last is a powerful argument,” said Albert with a furtive smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “But, after all, the county family idea doesn’t seem to attract me much. Why, aunt, do you know that your grandfather Roger was a journeyman shoemaker, who walked all the way here from Providence. There was nothing incongruous in his son becoming a Senator. Very well; if you have a state of society where sudden elevations of this sort occur, there will inevitably be corresponding descents—just as lean streaks alternate with fat in the bacon of commerce. The Fairchilds went up—they, come down. They have exhausted the soil. Do you see?”
“Nao! I don’t see a bit! ’N’ I b’lieve at heart you’re jis’ ez praoud ez I be!”
“Proud? Yes! Proud of myself, proud of my practice, proud of my position. But proud because three or four hundred dull countrymen, seeing my cows sleek, my harness glossy, my farm well in order, and knowing that my grandfather had been a State Senator, would consider me a ‘likely ’ man—no, not at all.”
Albert rose at this to go, and added, as he turned the door-knob:
“As soon as he’s equal to it, Aunt Sabrina, I’ll get father to go over his affairs with me, and I’ll try and straighten them out a trifle. I dare say we can find some way out of the muddle.”
“But yeh won’t take up the thing yerself? Yeh won’t dew what I wanted yeh tew?”
The lawyer smiled, and said: “What really? Come here and be a farmer?”
Miss Sabrina had risen, too, and came toward her nephew. “No” she said, “not a farmer. Be a country gentleman, ’n’—‘n’—a Congressman!” Albert smiled again, and left the room. He smiled to himself going down the stairs, and narrowly escaped forgetting to change his expression of countenance when he entered the living room, where were sitting people who had not entirely forgotten the fact that it was a house of mourning.
For Albert had a highly interesting idea in his mind, both interesting and diverting. Curiously enough, he had begun developing it from