Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York. Frederic Harold
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to him had been of his future with Annie as his wife.
“You will have the farm before long, Seth,” she said, smiling faintly as he stroked her pale hair—somehow to the last it never grew grey—and looked at her through boyish tears, “and Annie will bring you the Warren farm. Her grandmother and I have talked it over many a time. Annie’s a good girl, there’s no better, and she’ll make my boy a good, true wife.”
For a year or two back Seth had understood in a nebulous way that his parents had an idea of his eventually marrying Annie, but his mother’s words still came to him in the form of a surprise. First, it had been far from his thoughts that old Mrs. Warren, Annie’s invalid grandmother, would listen to such a thing, much less plan it. There was a bitterness of long standing between the two families, he knew. His father’s younger brother—a halfbrother—named William Fairchild, had married Mrs. Warren’s only daughter under circumstances which he had never heard detailed, but which at least had enraged the mother. Both William and his wife had died, out West he believed, years and years ago, leaving only this girl, Annie Fairchild, who came an orphan to the grandmother she had never seen before, and was reared by her. In this Mrs. Warren and his aunt Sabrina had found sufficient occasion for a quarrel, lasting ever since he could remember, and as he had always understood from his aunt that her battle was in defense of the whole family, he had taken it for granted that he not less than the other Fairchilds was included in Mrs. Warren’s disfavor. He recalled, now, indeed, having heard Annie say once or twice that her grandmother liked him; but this he had taken in a negative way, as if the grandmother of the Capulets had remarked that of all the loathed Montagus perhaps young Romeo was personally the least offensive to her sight.
And second, he was far from being in a Romeo’s condition of heart and mind. He was not in love with Annie for herself—much less for the Warren farm. To state plainly what Seth had not yet mustered courage to say in entire frankness even to himself, he hated farming, and rebelled against the idea of following in his father’s footsteps. And the dreams of a career elsewhere which occupied the mutinous thoughts Seth concealed under so passive an exterior had carried him far away from the plan of an alliance with the nice sort of country cousin who would eventually own the adjoining farm. So in this sense, too, his mothers dying words were a surprise—converting into a definite and almost sacred desire what he had supposed to be merely a shapeless fancy.
Not all this crossed his mind, as he watched Annie till she disappeared, and then turned back to his work. But the sight of her had been pleasant to him, and her voice had sounded very gentle and yet full of the substance of womanliness—and perhaps his poor, dear mother’s plan for him, after all, was the best.
The gate swinging properly at last, there was an end to Seth’s out-door tasks, and he started toward the house. The thought that he would see Annie within was distinct enough in his mind, almost, to constitute a motive for his going. At the very door he encountered his brother Albert’s wife, coming out, and stopped.
Isabel Fairchild was far from deserving, at least as a woman, the epithets with which Aunt Sabrina mentally coupled her girlhood. There was nothing impertinent or ill-behaved about her appearance, certainly, as she stood before Seth, and with a faint smile bade him good-morning.
She was above the medium height, as woman’s stature goes, and almost plump; her hair, much of which was shown in front by the pretty Parisian form of straw hat she wore, was very light in color; her eyes were blue, a light, noticeable blue. She wore some loose kind of black and gray morning dress, with an extra fold falling in graceful lines from her shoulders to her train, like a toga, and she carried a dainty parasol, also of black and gray, like the ribbons on her dark hat. To Seth’s eyes she had seemed yesterday, when he saw her for the first time, a very embodiment of the luxury, beauty, refinement of city life—and how much more so now, when her dingy traveling raiment had given place to this most engaging garb, so subdued, yet so lovely. It seemed to him that his sister-in-law was quite the most attractive woman he had ever seen.
“I thought of going for a little stroll,” she said, again with the faint, half-smile. “It is so charming outside, and so blue and depressing in the house. Can I walk along there through the orchard now?—I used to when I was here as a girl, I know—and won’t you come with me? I’ve scarcely had a chance for a word with you since we came.”
The invitation was pleasant enough to Seth, but he looked down deprecatingly at his rough chore clothes, and wondered whether he ought to accept it or not.
“Why, Seth, the idea of standing on ceremony with me! As if we hadn’t played together here as children—to say nothing of my being your sister now!”
They had started now toward the orchard, and she continued:—
“Do you know, it seems as if I didn’t know anybody here but you—and even you almost make a stranger out of me. Poor Uncle Lemuel, he is so broken-down that he scarcely remembers me, and of course your Aunt and I couldn’t be expected to get very intimate—you remember our dispute? Then John, he’s very pleasant, and all that, but he isn’t at all like the John I used to look up to so, the summer I was here. But you—you have hardly changed a bit. Of course,” she made haste to add, for Seth’s face did not reflect unalloyed gratification at this, “you have grown manly and big, and all that, but you haven’t changed in your expression or manner. It’s almost ten years—and I should have known you anywhere. But John has changed—he’s more like a city man, or rather a villager, a compromise between city and country.”
“Yes, I’m a countryman through and through, I suppose,” said Seth, with something very like a sigh.
“John has seen a good deal of the world they tell me, and been on papers in large cities. I wonder how he can content himself with that little weekly in Thessaly after that.”
“I don’t think John has much ambition,” answered Seth, meditatively. “He doesn’t seem to care much how things go, if he only has the chance to say what he wants to say in print. It doesn’t make any difference to him, apparently, whether all New York State reads what he writes, or only thirty or forty fellows in Dearborn County—he’s just as well satisfied. And yet he’s a very bright man, too. He might have gone to the Assembly last fall, if he could have bid against Elhanan Pratt. He will go sometime, probably.”
“Why, do you have an auction here for the Assembly?”
“Oh, no, but the man who’s willing to pay a big assessment into the campaign fund can generally shut a poor candidate out John didn’t seem to mind much about being frozen out though—not half so much as I did, for him. Everybody in Thessaly knows him and likes him and calls him ‘John,’ and that seems to be the height of his ambition. I can’t imagine a man of his abilities being satisfied with so limited a horizon.”
“And, you, Seth, what is your horizon like?” asked Isabel.
They had entered the orchard path, now, and the apple blossoms close above them filled the May morning air with that sweet spring perfume which seems to tell of growth, harvest, the fruition of hope.
“Oh, I’m picked out to be a countryman all the days of my life I suppose.” There was the sigh again, and a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as well.
“Oh, I hope not—that is, if you don’t want to be. Oh, it must be such a dreary life! The very thought of it sets my teeth on edge. The dreadful people you have to know: men without an idea beyond crops and calves and the cheese-factory; women slaving their lives out doing bad cooking, mending for a houseful of men, devoting their scarce opportunities for intercourse with other women to the weakest and most wretched gossip; coarse servants who eat at the table with their employers and call them by their Christian names; boys whose only theory about education is thrashing the school teacher, if it is a man, or breaking her heart by their mean insolence if it is a woman; and girls brought up to be awkward gawks, without a chance in life, since the brighter and nicer they are the more they will suffer from marriage with men mentally beneath them—that is, if they don’t become sour old maids. I don’t wonder you hate it all, Seth.”
“You talk