BY STORY-RAIL: TWENTY-SIX YEARS AN HOUR
Laura Shiere did not think much about
the “stump,” when, in her dark gray merino
travelling dress, and her black ribbons, nicely appointed,
as Mrs. Oferr’s niece should be, down to her
black kid gloves and broad-hemmed pocket-handkerchief,
and little black straw travelling-basket (for morocco
bags were not yet in those days), she stepped into
the train with her aunt at the Providence Station,
on her way to Stonington and New York.
The world seemed easily laid out before
her. She was like a cousin in a story-book, going
to arrive presently at a new home, and begin a new
life, in which she would be very interesting to herself
and to those about her. She felt rather important,
too, with her money independence there
being really “property” of hers to be spoken
of as she had heard it of late. She had her mother’s
diamond ring on her third finger, and was comfortably
conscious of it when she drew off her left-hand glove.
Laura Shiere’s nature had only been stirred,
as yet, a very little below the surface, and the surface
rippled pleasantly in the sunlight that was breaking
forth from the brief clouds.
Among the disreputable and vociferous
crowd of New York hack drivers, that swarmed upon
the pier as the Massachusetts glided into her
dock, it was good to see that subduedly respectable
and consciously private and superior man in the drab
overcoat and the nice gloves and boots, who came forward
and touched his hat to Mrs. Oferr, took her shawl
and basket, and led the way, among the aggravated
public menials, to a handsome private carriage waiting
on the street.
“All well at home, David?” asked Mrs.
Oferr.
“All well, ma’am, thank you,” replied
David.
And another man sat upon the box,
in another drab coat, and touched his hat;
and when they reached Waverley Place and alighted,
Mrs. Oferr had something to say to him of certain
directions, and addressed him as “Moses.”
It was very grand and wonderful to
order “David” and “Moses” about.
Laura felt as if her aunt were something only a little
less than “Michael with the sword.”
Laura had a susceptibility for dignities; she appreciated,
as we have seen out upon the wood-shed, “high
places, and all the people looking up.”
David and Moses were brothers, she
found out; she supposed that was the reason they dressed
alike, in drab coats; as she and Frank used to wear
their red mérinos, and their blue ginghams.
A little spasm did come up in her throat for a minute,
as she thought of the old frocks and the old times
already dropped so far behind; but Alice and Geraldine
Oferr met her the next instant on the broad staircase
at the back of the marble-paved hall, looking slight
and delicate, and princess-like, in the grand space
built about them for their lives to move in; and in
the distance and magnificence of it all, the faint
little momentary image of Frank faded away.
She went up with them out of the great
square hall, over the stately staircase, past the
open doors of drawing-rooms and library, stretching
back in a long suite, with the conservatory gleaming
green from the far end over the garden, up the second
stairway to the floor where their rooms were; bedrooms
and nursery, this last called so still,
though the great, airy front-room was the place used
now for their books and amusements as growing young
ladies, all leading one into another around
the skylighted upper hall, into which the sunshine
came streaked with amber and violet from the richly
colored glass. She had a little side apartment
given to her for her own, with a recessed window,
in which were blossoming plants just set there from
the conservatory; opposite stood a white, low bed
in a curtained alcove, and beyond was a dressing-closet.
Laura thought she should not be able to sleep there
at all for a night or two, for the beauty of it and
the good time she should be having.
At that same moment Frank and her
Aunt Oldways were getting down from the stage that
had brought them over from Ipsley, where they slept
after their day’s journey from Boston, at
the doorstone of the low, broad-roofed, wide-built,
roomy old farm-house in Homesworth.
Right in the edge of the town it stood,
its fields stretching over the south slope of green
hills in sunny uplands, and down in meadowy richness
to the wild, hidden, sequestered river-side, where
the brown water ran through a narrow, rocky valley, Swift
River they called it. There are a great many
Swift Rivers in New England. It was only a vehement
little tributary of a larger stream, beside which
lay larger towns; it was doing no work for the world,
apparently, at present; there were no mills, except
a little grist-mill to which the farmers brought their
corn, cuddled among the rocks and wild birches and
alders, at a turn where the road came down, and half
a dozen planks made a bit of a bridge.
“O, what beautiful places!”
cried Frank, as they crossed the little bridge, and
glanced either way into a green, gray, silvery vista
of shrubs and rocks, and rushing water, with the white
spires of meadow-sweet and the pink hardback, and
the first bright plumes of the golden rod nodding
and shining against the shade, as they
passed the head of a narrow, grassy lane, trod by cows’
feet, and smelling of their milky breaths, and the
sweetness of hay-barns, as they came up,
at length, over the long slope of turf that carpeted
the way, as for a bride’s feet, from the roadside
to the very threshold. She looked along the low,
treble-piled garden wall, too, and out to the open
sheds, deep with pine chips; and upon the broad brown
house-roof, with its long, gradual decline, till its
eaves were within reach of a child’s fingers
from the ground; and her quick eye took in facilities.
“O, if Laura could see this!
After the old shed-top in Brier Street, and the one
tree!”
But Laura had got what the shed-top
stood for with her; it was Frank who had hearkened
to whole forests in the stir of the one brick-rooted
fir. To that which each child had, it was already
given.
In a week or two Frank wrote Laura
a letter. It was an old-fashioned letter, you
know; a big sheet, written close, four pages, all
but the middle of the last page, which was left for
the “superscription.” Then it was
folded, the first leaf turned down twice, lengthwise;
then the two ends laid over, toward each other; then
the last doubling, or rather trebling, across; and
the open edge slipped over the folds. A wafer
sealed it, and a thimble pressed it, and there were twenty-five cents postage to
pay. That was a letter in the old times, when Laura and Frank Shiere were little
girls. And this was that letter:
DEAR LAURA, We got here
safe, Aunt Oldways and I, a week ago last Saturday,
and it is beautiful. There is a green
lane, almost everybody has a green
lane, and the cows go up and down,
and the swallows build in the barn-eaves. They
fly out at sundown, and fill all the sky up.
It is like the specks we used to watch in the
sunshine when it came in across the kitchen,
and they danced up and down and through and away, and
seemed to be live things; only we couldn’t
tell, you know, what they were, or if they really
did know how good it was. But these are
big and real, and you can see their wings, and you
know what they mean by it. I guess it is
all the same thing, only some things are little
and some are big. You can see the stars
here, too, such a sky full. And that
is all the same again.
There are beautiful roofs and walls
here. I guess you would think you were high
up! Harett and I go up from under the cheese-room
windows right over the whole house, and we sit on
the peak by the chimney. Harett is Mrs. Dillon’s
girl. Not the girl that lives with her, her
daughter. But the girls that live with people
are daughters here. Somebody’s else, I mean.
They are all alike. I suppose her name is
Harriet, but they all call her Harett. I
don’t like to ask her for fear she should think
I thought they didn’t know how to pronounce.
I go to school with Harett; up to the
West District. We carry brown bread and
butter, and doughnuts, and cheese, and apple-pie
in tin pails, for luncheon. Don’t you remember
the brown cupboard in Aunt Oldways’ kitchen,
how sagey, and doughnutty, and good it always
smelt? It smells just so now, and everything
tastes just the same.
There is a great rock under an oak
tree half way up to school, by the side of the
road. We always stop there to rest, coming home.
Three of the girls come the same way as far as that,
and we always save some of our dinner to eat
up there, and we tell stories. I tell them
about dancing-school, and the time we went to
the theatre to see “Cinderella,” and going
shopping with mother, and our little tea-parties,
and the Dutch dolls we made up in the long front
chamber. O, don’t you remember, Laura?
What different pieces we have got into our remembrances
already! I feel as if I was making patchwork.
Some-time, may-be, I shall tell somebody about
living here. Well, they will be beautiful
stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to live
in. You will see when you come next summer.
There is an apple tree down in the
south orchard that bends just like a horse’s
back. Then the branches come up over your head
and shade you. We ride there, and we sit and eat
summer apples there. Little rosy apples
with dark streaks in them all warm with the sun.
You can’t think what a smell they have, just
like pinks and spice boxes. Why don’t
they keep a little way off from each other in
cities, and so have room for apple trees?
I don’t see why they need to crowd so. I
hate to think of you all shut up tight when I
am let right out into green grass, and blue sky,
and apple orchards. That puts me in mind of
something! Zebiah Jane, Aunt Oldways’ girl,
always washes her face in the morning at the
pump-basin out in the back dooryard, just like
the ducks. She says she can’t spatter round
in a room; she wants all creation for a slop-bowl.
I feel as if we had all creation for everything
up here. But I can’t put all creation
in a letter if I try. That would spatter dreadfully.
I expect a long letter from you every
day now. But I don’t see what you
will make it out of. I think I have got all the
things and you won’t have anything
left but the words. I am sure you
don’t sit out on the wood-shed at Aunt Oferr’s,
and I don’t believe you pound stones and
bricks, and make colors. Do you know when
we rubbed our new shoes with pounded stone and made
them gray?
I never told you about Luclarion.
She came up as soon as the things were all sent
off, and she lives at the minister’s. Where
she used to live is only two miles from here, but other
people live there now, and it is built on to and
painted straw color, with a green door.
Your
affectionate sister,
FRANCES
SHIERE.
When Lauras letter came this was it:
DEAR FRANK, I received your
kind letter a week ago, but we have been very
busy having a dressmaker and doing all our fall shopping,
and I have not had time to answer it before. We
shall begin to go to school next week, for the
vacations are over, and then I shall have ever
so much studying to do. I am to take lessons
on the piano, too, and shall have to practice two hours
a day. In the winter we shall have dancing-school
and practicing parties. Aunt has had a new
bonnet made for me. She did not like the
plain black silk one. This is of gros d’Afrique,
with little bands and cordings round the crown and
front; and I have a dress of gros d’Afrique,
too, trimmed with double folds piped on.
For every-day I have a new black mousseline
with white clover leaves on it, and an all-black French
chally to wear to dinner. I don’t wear my
black and white calico at all. Next summer
aunt means to have me wear white almost all the
time, with lavender and violet ribbons. I shall
have a white muslin with three skirts and a black sash
to wear to parties and to Public Saturdays, next
winter. They have Public Saturdays at dancing-school
every three weeks. But only the parents
and relations can come. Alice and Geraldine dance
the shawl-dance with Helena Pomeroy, with crimson
and white Canton crape scarfs. They have
showed me some of it at home. Aunt Oferr
says I shall learn the gavotte.
Aunt Oferr’s house is splendid.
The drawing-room is full of sofas, and divans,
and ottomans, and a causeuse, a little S-shaped
seat for two people. Everything is covered with
blue velvet, and there are blue silk curtains
to the windows, and great looking-glasses between,
that you can see all down into through rooms
and rooms, as if there were a hundred of them.
Do you remember the story Luclarion used to tell
us of when she and her brother Mark were little
children and used to play that the looking-glass-things
were real, and that two children lived in them,
in the other room, and how we used to make believe
too in the slanting chimney glass? You could
make believe it here with forty children.
But I don’t make believe much now. There
is such a lot that is real, and it is all so grown
up. It would seem so silly to have such
plays, you know. I can’t help thinking
the things that come into my head though, and it seems
sometimes just like a piece of a story, when I
walk into the drawing-room all alone, just before
company comes, with my gros d’Afrique
on, and my puffed lace collar, and my hair tied
back with long new black ribbons. It all goes
through my head just how I look coming in, and
how grand it is, and what the words would be
in a book about it, and I seem to act a little
bit, just to myself as if I were a girl in a story,
and it seems to say, “And Laura walked
up the long drawing-room and took a book bound
in crimson morocco from the white marble pier table
and sat down upon the velvet ottoman in the balcony
window.” But what happened then it
never tells. I suppose it will by and by.
I am getting used to it all, though; it isn’t
so awfully splendid as it was at first.
I forgot to tell you that my new bonnet
flares a great deal, and that I have white lace
quilling round the face with little black dotty
things in it on stems. They don’t wear those
close cottage bonnets now. And aunt has
had my dresses made longer and my pantalettes
shorter, so that they hardly show at all. She
says I shall soon wear long dresses, I am getting so
tall. Alice wears them now, and her feet
look so pretty, and she has such pretty slippers:
little French purple ones, and sometimes dark
green, and sometimes beautiful light gray, to go with
different dresses. I don’t care for
anything but the slippers, but I should
like such ones as hers. Aunt says I can’t,
of course, as long as I wear black, but I can
have purple ones next summer to wear with my
white dresses. That will be when I come
to see you.
I am afraid you will think this
is a very wearing kind of a
letter, there are so many ‘wears’
in it. I have been reading it
over so far, but I can’t put in any other
word.
Your
affectionate sister,
LAURA
SHIERE.
P.S. Aunt Oferr says Laura
Shiere is such a good sounding name.
It doesn’t seem at all common. I am
glad of it. I should hate
to be common.
I do not think I shall give you any
more of it just here than these two letters tell.
We are not going through all Frank and Laura’s
story. That with which we have especially to do
lies on beyond. But it takes its roots in this,
as all stories take their roots far back and underneath.
Two years after, Laura was in Homesworth
for her second summer visit at the farm. It was
convenient, while the Oferrs were at Saratoga.
Mrs. Oferr was very much occupied now, of course, with
introducing her own daughters. A year or two
later, she meant to give Laura a season at the Springs.
“All in turn, my dear, and good time,”
she said.
The winter before, Frank had been
a few weeks in New York. But it tired her dreadfully,
she said. She liked the theatres and the concerts,
and walking out and seeing the shops. But there
was “no place to get out of it into.”
It didn’t seem as if she ever really got home
and took off her things. She told Laura it was
like that first old letter of hers; it was just “wearing,”
all the time.
Laura laughed. “But how
can you live without wearing?” said she.
Frank stood by, wondering, while Laura
unpacked her trunks that morning after her second
arrival at Aunt Oldways’. She had done now
even with the simplicity of white and violet, and her
wardrobe blossomed out like the flush of a summer
garden.
She unfolded a rose-colored muslin,
with little raised embroidered spots, and threw it
over the bed.
“Where will you wear
that, up here?” asked Frank, in pure bewilderment.
“Why, I wear it to church, with
my white Swiss mantle,” answered Laura.
“Or taking tea, or anything. I’ve
a black silk visite for cool days. That
looks nice with it. And see here, I’ve
a pink sunshade. They don’t have them much
yet, even in New York. Mr. Pemberton Oferr brought
these home from Paris, for Gerry and Alice, and me.
Gerry’s is blue. See! it tips back.”
And Laura set the dashy little thing with its head
on one side, and held it up coquettishly.
“They used them in carriages
in Paris, he said, and in St. Petersburg, driving
out on the Nevskoi Prospekt.”
“But where are your common things?”
“Down at the bottom; I haven’t
come to them. They were put in first, because
they would bear squeezing. I’ve two French
calicoes, with pattern trimmings; and a lilac jaconet,
with ruffles, open down the front.”
Laura wore long dresses now; and open
wrappers were the height of the style.
Laura astonished Homesworth the first
Sunday of this visit, with her rose-colored toilet.
Bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds and
a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted
over two starched petticoats; even her pink belt had
gay little borders of tiny buds and leaves, and her
fan had a pink tassel.
“They’re the things I
wear; why shouldn’t I?” she said to Frank’s
remonstrance.
“But up here!” said Frank.
“It would seem nicer to wear something stiller.”
So it would; a few years afterward
Laura herself would have seen that it was more elegant;
though Laura Shiere was always rather given to doing
the utmost in apparel that the
occasion tolerated. Fashions grew stiller in
years after. But this June Sunday, somewhere
in the last thirties or the first forties, she went
into the village church like an Aurora, and the village
long remembered the resplendence. Frank had on
a white cambric dress, with a real rose in the bosom,
cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her “cottage
straw” was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed
over the crown.
“Do you feel any better?”
asked Aunt Oldways of Laura, when they came home to
the country tea-dinner.
“Better how?” asked Laura,
in surprise.
“After all that ‘wear’ and stare,”
said Aunt Oldways, quietly.
Aunt Oldways might have been astonished,
but she was by no means awestruck, evidently; and
Aunt Oldways generally spoke her mind.
Somehow, with Laura Shiere, pink was
pinker, and ribbons were more rustling than with most
people. Upon some quiet unconscious folks, silk
makes no spread, and color little show; with Laura
every gleam told, every fibre asserted itself.
It was the live Aurora, bristling and tingling to
its farthest electric point. She did not toss
or flaunt, either; she had learned better of Signor
Pirotti how to carry herself; but she was in conscious
rapport with every thing and stitch she had
about her. Some persons only put clothes on to
their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put
them on to their souls.
Laura Shiere came up to Homesworth
three years later, with something more wonderful than
a pink embossed muslin: she had a lover.
Mrs. Oferr and her daughters were
on their way to the mountains; Laura was to be left
with the Oldways. Grant Ledwith accompanied them
all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to
Boston.
“I can’t think of anything
but that pink sunshade she used to carry round canted
all to one side over her shoulder,” said Aunt
Oldways, looking after them down the dusty road the
morning that he went away. Laura, in her white
dress and her straw hat and her silly little bronze-and-blue-silk
slippers printing the roadside gravel, leaning on
Grant Ledwith’s arm, seemed only to have gained
a fresh, graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty
goings and comings with, and to heighten the outside
interest of that little point of eternity that she
called her life. Mr. Ledwith was not so much a
man who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had
“got a beau.”
She had sixteen tucked and trimmed
white skirts, too, she told Frank; she should have
eight more before she was married; people wore ever
so many skirts now, at a time. She had been to
a party a little while ago where she wore seven.
There were deep French embroidery
bands around some of these white skirts; those were
beautiful for morning dresses. Geraldine Oferr
was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid;
Gerry had a white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace
veil. She had three dozen of everything, right
through. They had gone to housekeeping up town,
in West Sixteenth Street. Frank would have to
come to New York next winter, or in the spring, to
be her bridesmaid; then she would see; then who
knew!
Frank was only sixteen, and she lived
away up here in Homesworth among the hills; she had
not “seen,” but she had her own little
secret, for all that; something she neither told nor
thought, yet which was there; and it came across her
with a queer little thrill from the hidden, unlooked-at
place below thought, that “Who” didn’t
know.
Laura waited a year for Grant Ledwith’s
salary to be raised to marrying point; he was in a
wholesale woolen house in Boston; he was a handsome
fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address, capital,
this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up
to two thousand dollars within that twelvemonth.
Upon this, in the spring, they married; took a house
in Filbert Street, down by the river, and set up their
little gods. These were: a sprinkle of black
walnut and brocatelle in the drawing-room, a Sheffield-plate
tea-service, and a crimson-and-giltedged dinner set
that Mrs. Oferr gave them; twilled turkey-red curtains,
that looked like thibet, in the best chamber; and
the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses,
and whatever corresponded to them on the bride-groom’s
part, in their wardrobes. All that was left of
Laura’s money, and all that was given them by
Grant Ledwith’s father, and Mr. Titus Oldways’
astounding present of three hundred dollars, without
note or comment, the first reminder they
had had of him since Edward Shiere’s funeral,
“and goodness knew how he heard anything now,”
Aunt Oferr said, had gone to this outfit.
But they were well set up and started in the world;
so everybody said, and so they, taking the world into
their young, confident hands for a plaything, not
knowing it for the perilous loaded shell it is, thought,
merrily, themselves.
Up in Homesworth people did not have
to wait for two thousand dollar salaries. They
would not get them if they did.
Oliver Ripwinkley, the minister’s
son, finished his medical studies and city hospital
practice that year, and came back, as he had always
said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor.
Old Doctor Parrish, the parson’s friend of fifty
years, with no child of his own, kept the place for
Oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned saddle-bags
in the garret the very day the young man came home.
He was there to be “called in,” however,
and with this backing, and the perforce of there being
nobody else, young Doctor Ripwinkley had ten patients
within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing
himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man
who “appeared to know pretty well what he was
about.”
So that when he gave further proof
of the same, by asking, within the week that followed,
the prettiest girl in Homesworth, Frances Shiere,
to come and begin the world with him at Mile Hill village,
nobody, not even Frank herself, was astonished.
She bought three new gowns, a shawl,
a black silk mantle, and a straw bonnet. She
made six each of every pretty white garment that a
woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in September,
they took their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded
little corner room in the old “Rankin house;”
a bigger place than they really wanted yet, and not
all to be used at first; but rented “reasonable,”
central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they
hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad
sidegreen of the village street, and running back,
with its field and meadow belongings, away to the
foot of great, gray, sheltering Mile Hill.
And the vast, solemn globe, heedless
of what lit here or there upon its breadth, or took
up this or that life in its little freckling cities,
or between the imperceptible foldings of its hills, only
carrying way-passengers for the centuries, went
plunging on its track, around and around, and swept
them all, a score of times, through its summer and
its winter solstices.