The Lawton Girl. Frederic Harold
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career of her son, and the burden of responsibility for a great estate, had tended unduly to develop. She did not like many of the residents of Thessaly, yet it had never occurred to her to live elsewhere. If the idea had dawned in her mind, she would undoubtedly have picked out as an alternative her native village on the Hudson, where her Dutch ancestors had lived from early colonial times. The life of a big city had never become even intelligible to her, much less attractive. She went to the Episcopal church regularly, although she neither professed nor felt any particular devotion to religious ideals or tenets. She gave of her substance generously, though not profusely, to all properly organized and certified charities, but did not look about for, or often recognize when they came in her way, subjects for private benefaction. She applied the bulk of her leisure time to the writing of long and perfectly commonplace letters to female relatives in various sections of the Republic. She was profoundly fond of her daughters, but was rarely impelled to demonstrative proofs of this affection. Very often she grew tired of inaction, mental and physical; but she accepted this without murmuring as a natural and proper result of her condition in life, much as one accepts an uncomfortable sense of repletion after a dinner. When she did not know what else to do, she ordinarily took a nap.
It must have been by the law of oppositive attraction that her chosen intimate was Miss Tabitha Wilcox, the spare and angular little lady who sat across the table from her, the sole guest at the Thanksgiving dinner. The most vigorous imagination could not conceive her in the act of dozing for so much as an instant during hours when others kept awake. Vigilant observation and an unwearying interest in affairs were written in every line of her face: you could read them in her bright, sharp eyes; in the alert, almost anxious posture of her figure; in the very conformation of the little rows of iron-gray curls, which mounted like circular steps above each ear. She was a kindly soul, was Miss Tabitha, who could not listen unmoved to any tale of honest suffering, and who gave of her limited income to the poor with more warmth than prudence.
Her position in Thessaly was a unique one. She belonged, undoubtedly, to the first families, for her grandfather, Judge Abijah Wilcox, had been one of the original settlers, in those halcyon years following the close of the Revolution, when the good people of Massachusetts and Connecticut swarmed, uninvited, across the Hudson, and industriously divided up among themselves the territorial patrimony of the slow and lackadaisical Dutchmen. Miss Tabitha still lived in the roomy old house which the judge had built; she sat in one of the most prominent pews in the Episcopal church, and her prescriptive right to be president of the Dorcas Mite Society had not been questioned now these dozen years. Although she was far from being wealthy, her place in the very best and most exclusive society of Thessaly was taken for granted by everybody. But Miss Tabitha was herself not at all exclusive. She knew most of the people in the village: only the insuperable limitations of time and space prevented her knowing them all. And not even these stern barriers availed to bound her information concerning alike acquaintances and strangers. There were persons who mistook her eager desire to be of service in whatever was going forward for meddlesomeness. Some there were who even resented her activity, and thought of her as a malevolent old gossip. These latter were deeply in the wrong. Miss Tabitha loved everybody, and had never consciously done injury to any living soul. As for gossip, she could no more help talking than the robin up in the elm boughs of a sunny April morning can withhold the song that is in him.
It has been said that the presence of the butler threw a gloom over the dinner-party. It did not silence Miss Tabitha, but at least she felt constrained to discourse upon general and impersonal subjects while he was in hearing. The two daughters of the house, who faced each other at the ends of the table, asked her questions or offered comments at intervals, and once or twice their mother spoke. All ate from the plates that were set before them, in a perfunctory way, without evidence of appreciation. There was some red wine in a decanter on the table—I fancy none of them could have told precisely what it was—and of this Miss Tabitha drank a little, diluted with water. The two girls had allowed the butler to fill their glasses as well, and from time to time they made motions as of sipping from these, merely to keep their guest in company. Mrs. Minster had no wine-glasses at her plate, and drank ice-water. Every time that any one of the others lifted the wine to her lips, a common thought seemed to flash through the minds around the table—the memory of the son and heir who had died from drink.
When the butler, with an accession of impressiveness in his reserved demeanor, at last handed around plates containing each its thin layer of pale meat, Ethel Minster was moved to put into words what all had been feeling:
“Mamma, this isn’t like Thanksgiving at all!” she said, with the freedom of a favorite child; “it was ever so much nicer to have the turkey on the table where we could all see him, and pick out in our minds what part we would especially like. To have the carving done outside, and only slices of the breast brought in to us—it is as if we were away from home somewhere, in a hotel among strangers.”
Mrs. Minster, by way of answer, looked at the butler, the glance being not so much an inquiry as a reference of the matter to one who was a professor of this particular sort of thing. Her own inclination jumped with that of her daughter, but the possession of a butler entailed certain responsibilities, which must be neither ignored nor evaded. Happily Cozzens’s mind was not wholly inelastic. He uttered no word, but, with a slight obeisance which comprehended mistress and daughter and guest in careful yet gracious gradations of significance, went out, and presently returned with a huge dish, which he set in front of Mrs. Minster. He brought the carving instruments, and dignifiedly laid them in their place, as a chamberlain might invest a queen with her sceptre. Even when Miss Kate said, “If we need you any more, Cozzens, we will ring,” he betrayed neither surprise nor elation, but bowed again gravely, and left the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.
“I am sure he will turn out a perfect jewel,” said Miss Tabitha. “You were very fortunate to get him.”
“But there are times,” said Kate, “when one likes to take off one’s rings, even if the stones are perfection itself.”
This guarded reference to the fact that Mrs. Minster had secured an admirable servant who was a nuisance at small feminine dinner-parties sufficed to dismiss the subject. Miss Tabitha assumed on the moment a more confidential manner and tone:
“I wonder if you’ve heard,” she said, “that young Horace Boyce has come back. Why, now I think of it, he must have come up in your train.”
“He was in our car,” replied Mrs. Minster. “He sat by us, and talked all the way up. I never heard a man’s tongue run on so in all my born days.”
“He takes that from his grandmother Beekman,” explained Miss Tabitha, by way of parenthesis. “She was something dreadful: talking ‘thirteen to the dozen’ doesn’t begin to express it. You don’t remember her. She went down to New York when I was a mere slip of a girl, to have a set of false teeth fitted—they were a novelty in those days—and it was winter time, and she wouldn’t listen to the dentist’s advice to keep her mouth shut, and she caught cold, and it turned into lockjaw, and that was the last of her. It was just after her daughter Julia had been married to young Sylvanus Boyce. Dear me, how time flies! I can remember her old bombazine gown and her black Spanish mits, and her lace cap on one side of her head, as if it were only yesterday. And here Julia’s been dead twenty years and more, and her grown-up son’s come home from Europe, and the General—”
The old maid stopped short, because her sentence could not be charitably finished. “How did you like Horace?” she asked, to shift the subject, and looking at Kate Minster.
The tall, dark girl with the rich complexion and the beautiful, proud eyes glanced up at her questioner impatiently, as if disposed to resent the inquiry. Then she seemed to reflect that no offence could possibly have been intended, for she answered pleasantly enough:
“He seemed an amiable sort of person; and I should judge he was clever, too. He always was a smart boy—I think that is the phrase. He talked to mamma most of the time.”
“How can you say that, Kate? I’m sure it was because you scarcely answered him at all, and read your book—which was not very polite.”
“I