AND
There is a piece of Z ,
just over the river, that they call “And.”
It began among the school-girls; Barbara
Holabird had christened it, with the shrewdness and
mischief of fourteen years old. She said the
“and-so-forths” lived there.
It was a little supplementary neighborhood;
an after-growth, coming up with the railroad improvements,
when they got a freight station established on that
side for the East Z mills.
“After Z , what should it
be but ‘And?’” Barbara Holabird wanted
to know. The people who lived there called it
East Square; but what difference did that make?
It was two miles Boston-ward from
Z centre, where the down trains
stopped first; that was five minutes gained in the
time between it and the city. Land was cheap
at first, and sure to come up in value; so there were
some streets laid out at right angles, and a lot of
houses put up after a pattern, as if they had all been
turned out of blanc-mange moulds, and there was “East
Square.” Then people began by-and-by to
build for themselves, and a little variety and a good
deal of ambition came in. They had got to French
roofs now; this was just before the day of the multitudinous
little paper collar-boxes with beveled covers, that
are set down everywhere now, and look as if they could
be lifted up by the chimneys, any time, and be carried
off with a thumb and finger. Two and a half story
houses, Mansarded, looked grand; and the East Square
people thought nothing slight of themselves, though
the “old places” and the real Z
families were all over on West Hill.
Mrs. Megilp boarded in And for the summer.
“Since Oswald had been in business
she couldn’t go far from the cars, you know;
and Oswald had a boat on the river, and he and Glossy
enjoyed that so much. Besides, she had friends
in Z , which made it pleasant;
and she was tired, for her part, of crowds and fashion.
All she wanted was a quiet country place. She
knew the Goldthwaites and the Haddens; she had met
them one year at Jefferson.”
Mrs. Megilp had found out that she
could get larger rooms in And than she could have
at the mountains or the sea-shore, and at half the
price; but this she did not mention. Yet there
was nothing shabby in it, except her carefully not
mentioning it.
Mrs. Megilp was Mrs. Grant Ledwith’s
chief intimate and counselor. She was a good
deal the elder; that was why it was mutually advantageous.
Grant Ledwith was one of the out-in-the-world, up-to-the-times
men of the day; the day in which everything is going,
and everybody that is in active life has, somehow or
other, all that is going. Grant Ledwith got a
good salary, an inflated currency salary; and he spent
it all. His daughters were growing up, and they
were stylish and pretty; Mrs. Megilp took a great interest
in Agatha and Florence Ledwith, and was always urging
their mother to “do them justice.”
“Agatha and Florence were girls who had a right
to every advantage.” Mrs. Megilp was almost
old enough to be Laura Ledwith’s mother; she
had great experience, and knowledge of the world;
and she sat behind Laura’s conscience and drove
it tandem with her inclination.
Per contra, it was nice
for Mrs. Megilp, who was a widow, and whose income
did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to
have friends who lived like the Ledwiths, and who
always made her welcome; it was a good thing for Glossy
to be so fond of Agatha and Florence, and to have
them so fond of her. “She needed young
society,” her mother said. One reason that
Glossy Megilp needed young society might be in the
fact that she herself was twenty-six.
Mrs. Megilp had advised the Ledwiths
to buy a house in Z-. “It
was just far enough not to be suburban, but to have
a society of its own; and there was excellent
society in Z , everybody knew.
Boston was hard work, nowadays; the distances were
getting to be so great.” Up to the West
and South Ends, the material distances, she
meant to be understood to say; but there was an inner
sense to Mrs. Megilp’s utterances, also.
“One might as well be quite
out of town; and then it was always something, even
in such city connection as one might care to keep
up, to hail from a well-recognized social independency;
to belong to Z was a standing,
always. It wasn’t like going to Forest Dell,
or Lakegrove, or Bellair; cheap little got-up places
with fancy names, that were strung out on the railroads
like French gilt beads on a chain.”
But for all that, Mrs. Ledwith had
only got into “And;” and Mrs. Megilp knew
it.
Laura did not realize it much; she
had bowing and speaking acquaintance with the Haddens
and the Hendees, and even with the Marchbankses, over
on West Hill; and the Goldthwaites and the Holabirds,
down in the town, she knew very well. She did
not care to come much nearer; she did not want to
be bound by any very stringent and exclusive social
limits; it was a bother to keep up to all the demands
of such a small, old-established set. Mrs. Hendee
would not notice, far less be impressed by the advent
of her new-style Brussels carpet with a border, or
her full, fresh, Nottingham lace curtains, or the
new covering of her drawing-room set with cuir-colored
terry. Mrs. Tom Friske and Mrs. Philgry, down
here at East Square, would run in, and appreciate,
and admire, and talk it all over, and go away perhaps
breaking the tenth commandment amiably in their hearts.
Mrs. Ledwith’s nerves had extended
since we saw her as a girl; they did not then go beyond
the floating ends of her blue or rose-colored ribbons,
or, at furthest, the tip of her jaunty laced sunshade;
now they ramified, for life still grows
in some direction, to her chairs, and her
china, and her curtains, and her ruffled pillow-shams.
Also, savingly, to her children’s “suits,”
and party dresses, and pic-nic hats, and double button
gloves. Savingly; for there is a leaven of grace
in mother-care, even though it be expended upon these.
Her friend, Mrs. Inchdeepe, in Helvellyn Park, with
whom she dined when she went shopping in Boston, had
nothing but her modern improvements and her
furniture. “My house is my life,”
she used to say, going round with a Canton crape duster,
touching tenderly carvings and inlayings and gildings.
Mrs. Megilp was spending the day with
Laura Ledwith; Glossy was gone to town, and thence
down to the sea-shore, with some friends.
Mrs. Megilp spent a good many days
with Laura. She had large, bright rooms at her
boarding-house, but then she had very gristly veal
pies and thin tapioca puddings for dinner; and Mrs.
Megilp’s constitution required something more
generous. She was apt to happen in at this season,
when Laura had potted pigeons. A little bird told
her; a dozen little birds, I mean, with their legs
tied together in a bunch; for she could see the market
wagon from her window, when it turned up Mr. Ledwith’s
avenue.
Laura had always the claret pitcher
on her dinner table, too; and claret and water, well-sugared,
went deliciously with the savory stew.
They were up-stairs now, in Laura’s
chamber; the bed and sofa were covered with silk and
millinery; Laura was looking over the girls’
“fall things;” there was a smell of sweet
marjoram and thyme and cloves, and general richness
coming up from the kitchen; there was a bland sense
of the goodness of Providence in Mrs. Megilp’s no,
not heart, for her heart was not very hungry; but
in her eyes and nostrils.
She was advising Mrs. Ledwith to take
Desire and Helena’s two green silks and make
them over into one for Helena.
“You can get two whole back
breadths then, by piecing it up under the sash; and
you can’t have all those gores again;
they are quite done with. Everybody puts in whole
breadths now. There’s just as much difference
in the way of goring a skirt, as there is between
gores and straight selvages.”
“They do hang well, though;
they have such a nice slope.”
“Yes, but the stripes
and the seams! Those tell the story six rods
off; and then there must be sashes, or postillions,
or something; they don’t make anything without
them; there isn’t any finish to a round waist
unless you have something behind.”
“They wore belts last year,
and I bought those expensive gilt buckles. I’m
sure they used to look sweetly. But there! a fashion
doesn’t last nowadays while you’re putting
a thing on and walking out of the house!”
“And don’t put in more
than three plaits,” pursued Mrs. Megilp, intent
on the fate of the green silks. “Everything
is gathered; you see that is what requires the sashes;
round waists and gathers have a queer look without.”
“If you once begin to alter,
you’ve got to make all over,” said Mrs.
Ledwith, a little fractiously, putting the scissors
in with unwilling fingers. She knew there was
a good four days’ work before her, and she was
quick with her needle, too.
“Never mind; the making over
doesn’t cost anything; you turn off work so
easily; and then you’ve got a really stylish
thing.”
“But with all the ripping and
remodelling, I don’t get time to turn round,
myself, and live! It is all fall work,
and spring work, and summer work and winter work.
One drive rushes pell-mell right over another.
There isn’t time enough to make things and have
them; the good of them, I mean.”
“The girls get it; we have to
live in our children,” said Mrs. Megilp, self-renouncingly.
“I can never rest until Glossy is provided with
everything; and you know, Laura, I am obliged
to contrive.”
Mrs. Megilp and her daughter Glaucia
spent about a thousand dollars a year, between them,
on their dress. In these days, this is a limited
allowance for the Megilps. But Mrs.
Megilp was a woman of strict pecuniary principle;
the other fifteen hundred must pay all the rest; she
submitted cheerfully to the Divine allotment, and
punctually made the two ends meet. She will have
this to show, when the Lord of these servants cometh
and reckoneth with them, and that man who has been
also in narrow circumstances, brings his nicely kept
talent out of his napkin.
Desire Ledwith, a girl of sixteen, spoke suddenly from a
corner where she sat with a book,
“I do wonder who ‘they’ are,
mamma!”
“Who?” said Mrs. Ledwith,
half rising from her chair, and letting some breadths
of silk slide down upon the floor from her lap, as
she glanced anxiously from the window down the avenue.
She did not want any company this morning.
“Not that, mamma; I don’t
mean anybody coming. The ‘theys’ that
wear, and don’t wear, things; the theys you have
to be just like, and keep ripping and piecing for.”
“You absurd child!” exclaimed
Mrs. Ledwith, pettishly. “To make me spill
a whole lapful of work for that! They? Why,
everybody, of course.”
“Everybody complains of them,
though. Jean Friske says her mother is all discouraged
and worn out. There isn’t a thing they had
last year that won’t have to be made over this,
because they put in a breadth more behind, and they
only gore side seams. And they don’t wear
black capes or cloth sacks any more with all kinds
of dresses; you must have suits, clear through.
It seems to me ‘they’ is a nuisance.
And if it’s everybody, we must be part, of it.
Why doesn’t somebody stop?”
“Desire, I wish you’d
put away your book, and help, instead of asking silly
questions. You can’t make the world over,
with ’why don’ts?’”
“I’ll rip,”
said Desire, with a slight emphasis; putting her book
down, and coming over for a skirt and a pair of scissors.
“But you know I’m no good at putting together
again. And about making the world over, I don’t
know but that might be as easy as making over all
its clothes, I’d as lief try, of the two.”
Desire was never cross or disagreeable;
she was only “impracticable,” her mother
said. “And besides that, she didn’t
know what she really did want. She was born hungry
and asking, with those sharp little eyes, and her
mouth always open while she was a baby. ‘It
was a sign,’ the nurse said, when she was three
weeks old. And then the other sign, that
she should have to be called ‘Desire!’”
Mrs. Megilp for Mrs. Megilp
had been in office as long ago as that had
suggested ways of getting over or around the difficulty,
when Aunt Desire had stipulated to have the baby named
for her, and had made certain persuasive conditions.
“There’s the pretty French
turn you might give it, ’Desiree.’
Only one more ‘e,’ and an accent.
That is so sweet, and graceful, and distinguished!”
“But Aunt Desire won’t
have the name twisted. It is to be real, plain
Desire, or not at all.”
Mrs. Megilp had shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, of course it can be that,
to christen by, and marry by, and be buried by.
But between whiles, people pick up names, you’ll
see!”
Mrs. Megilp began to call her Daisy when she was two years
old. Nobody could help what Mrs. Megilp took a fancy to call her by way of
endearment, of course; and Daisy she was growing to be in the family, when one
day, at seven years old, she heard Mrs. Megilp say to her mother,
“I don’t see but that
you’ve all got your Desire, after all.
The old lady is satisfied; and away up there in Hanover,
what can it signify to her? The child is ‘Daisy,’
practically, now, as long as she lives.”
The sharp, eager little gray eyes,
so close together in the high, delicate head, glanced
up quickly at speaker and hearer.
“What old lady, mamma, away up in Hanover?”
“Your Aunt Desire, Daisy, whom
you were named for. She lives in Hanover.
You are to go and see her there, this summer.”
“Will she call me Daisy?”
The little difficulty suggested in
this question had singularly never occurred to Mrs.
Ledwith before. Miss Desire Ledwith never came
down to Boston; there was no danger at home.
“No. She is old-fashioned,
and doesn’t like pet names. She will call
you Desire. That is your name, you know.”
“Would it signify if she thought
you called me Daisy?” asked the child frowning
half absently over her doll, whose arm she was struggling
to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own manufacture.
“Well, perhaps she might not
exactly understand. People always went by their
names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody
does. She was very particular about having you
called for her, and you are, you know.
I always write ‘Desire Ledwith’ in all
your books, and well, I always shall
write it so, and so will you. But you can be
Daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as
Florence is Flossie.”
“No, I can’t,” said
the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and dropping
her doll. “Aunt Desire, away up in Hanover,
is thinking all the time that there is a little Desire
Ledwith growing up down here. I don’t mean
to have her cheated. I’m going to went by
my name, as she did. Don’t call me Daisy
any more, all of you; for I shan’t come!”
The gray eyes sparkled; the whole
little face scintillated, as it were. Desire
Ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when
something quick and strong shone through it, it was
as if somewhere behind it there had been struck fire.
She was true to that through all the
years after; going to school with Mabels and Ethels
and Graces and Ediths, not a girl she knew
but had a pretty modern name, and they all
wondering at that stiff little “Desire”
of hers that she would go by. When she was twelve
years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and
left her a gold watch, large and old-fashioned, which
she could only keep on a stand in her room, a
good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and
twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.
Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with
gentle inadvertence, one day after that. Desire
lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other reply
in her face, or else.
“You might please your mother
now, I think,” said Mrs. Megilp. “There
is no old lady to be troubled by it.”
“A promise isn’t ever
dead, Mrs. Megilp,” said Desire, briefly.
“I shall keep our words.”
“After all,” Mrs. Megilp
said privately to the mother, “there is something
quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name.
I don’t know that it isn’t good taste
in the child. Everybody understands that it was
a condition, and an inheritance.”
Mrs. Megilp had taken care of that.
She was watchful for the small impressions she could
make in behalf of her particular friends. She
carried about with her a little social circumference
in which all was preeminently as it should be.
But, as I would say if
you could not see it for yourself this is
a digression. We will go back again.
“If it were any use!”
said Desire, shaking out the deep plaits as she unfastened
them from the band. “But you’re only
a piece of everybody after all. You haven’t
anything really new or particular to yourself, when
you’ve done. And it takes up so much time.
Last year, this was so pretty! Isn’t
anything actually pretty in itself, or can’t
they settle what it is? I should think they had
been at it long enough.”
“Fashions never were so graceful
as they are this minute,” said Mrs. Megilp.
“Of course it is art, like everything else, and
progress. The world is getting educated to a
higher refinement in it, every day. Why, it’s
duty, child!” she continued, exaltedly.
“Think what the world would be if nobody cared.
We ought to make life beautiful. It’s meant
to be. There’s not only no virtue in ugliness,
but almost no virtue with it, I think.
People are more polite and good-natured when they
are well dressed and comfortable.”
“That’s dress,
too, though,” said Desire, sententiously.
“You’ve got to stay at home four days,
and rip, and be tired, and cross, and tried-on-to,
and have no chance to do anything else, before you
can put it all on and go out and be good-natured and
bland, and help put the beautiful face on the world,
one day. I don’t believe it’s
political economy.”
“Everybody doesn’t have
to do it for themselves. Really, when I hear
people blamed for dress and elegance, why,
the very ones who have the most of it are those who
sacrifice the least time to it. They just go
and order what they want, and there’s the end
of it. When it comes home, they put it on, and
it might as well be a flounced silk as a plain calico.”
“But we do have to think,
Mrs. Megilp. And work and worry. And then
we can’t turn right round in the things
we know every stitch of and have bothered over from
beginning to end, and just be lilies of the field!”
“A great many people do have
to wash their own dishes, and sweep, and scour; but
that is no reason it ought not to be done. I always
thought it was rather a pity that was said, just
so,” Mrs. Megilp proceeded, with a mild
deprecation of the Scripture. “There is
toiling and spinning; and will be to the end of time,
for some of us.”
“There’s cauliflower brought
for dinner, Mrs. Ledwith,” said Christina, the
parlor girl, coming in. “And Hannah says
it won’t go with the pigeons. Will she
put it on the ice for to-morrow?”
“I suppose so,” said Mrs.
Ledwith, absently, considering a breadth that had
a little hitch in it. “Though what we shall
have to-morrow I’m sure I don’t know,”
she added, rousing up. “I wish Mr. Ledwith
wouldn’t send home the first thing he sees, without
any reference.”
“And here’s the milkman’s
bill, and a letter,” continued Christina, laying
them down on a chair beside her mistress, and then
departing.
Great things come into life so easily,
when they do come, right alongside of milk-bills and
cabbages! And yet one may wait so long sometimes
for anything to happen but cabbages!
The letter was in a very broad, thick
envelope, and sealed with wax.
Mrs. Ledwith looked at it curiously
before she opened it. She did not receive many
letters. She had very little time for correspondence.
It was addressed to “Mrs. Laura Ledwith.”
That was odd and unusual, too.
Mrs. Megilp glanced at her over the
tortoise-shell rims of her eye-glasses, but sat very
quiet, lest she should delay the opening. She
would like to know what could be in that very business-like
looking despatch, and Laura would be sure to tell her.
It must be something pretty positive, one way or another;
it was no common-place negative communication.
Laura might have had property left her. Mrs.
Megilp always thought of possibilities like that.
When Laura Ledwith had unfolded the
large commercial sheet, and glanced down the open
lines of square, upright characters, whose purport
could be taken in at sight, like print, she turned
very red with a sudden excitement. Then all the
color dropped away, and there was nothing in her face
but blank, pale, intense surprise.
“It is a most wonderful
thing!” said she, at last, slowly; and her breath
came like a gasp with her words. “My great-uncle,
Mr. Oldways.”
She spoke those four words as if from
them Mrs. Megilp could understand everything.
Mrs. Megilp thought she did.
“Ah! Gone?” she asked, pathetically.
“Gone! No, indeed!”
said Mrs. Ledwith. “He wrote the letter.
He wants me to come; me, and all of us, to
Boston, to live; and to get acquainted with him.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Megilp,
with the promptness and benignity of a Christian apostle,
“it’s your duty to go.”
“And he offers me a house, and
two thousand dollars a year.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Megilp,
“it is emphatically your duty to go.”
All at once something strange came
over Laura Ledwith. She crumpled the letter tight
in her hands with a clutch of quick excitement, and
began to choke with a little sob, and to laugh at the
same time.
“Don’t give way!”
cried Mrs. Megilp, coming to her and giving her a
little shake and a slap. “If you do once
you will again, and you’re not hystericky!”
“He’s sent for Frank,
too. Frank and I will be together again in dear
old Boston! But we can’t be children
and sit on the shed any more; and it isn’t
dear old Boston, either!”
And then Laura gave right up, and
had a good cry for five minutes. After that she
felt better, and asked Mrs. Megilp how she thought
a house in Spiller Street would do.
But she couldn’t rip any more
of those breadths that morning.
Agatha and Florence came in from some
calls at the Goldthwaites and the Haddens, and the
news was told, and they had their bonnets to take
off, and the dinner-bell rang, and the smell of the
spicy pigeon-stew came up the stairs, all together.
And they went down, talking fast; and one said “house,”
and another “carpets,” and another “music
and German;” and Desire, trailing a breadth of
green silk in her hand that she had never let go since
the letter was read, cried out, “oratorios!”
And nobody quite knew what they were going down stairs
for, or had presence of mind to realize the pigeons,
or help each other or themselves properly, when they
got there! Except Mrs. Megilp, who was polite
and hospitable to them all, and picked two birds in
the most composed and elegant manner.
When the dessert was put upon the table, and Christina,
confusedly enlightened as to the family excitement, and excessively curious, had
gone away into the kitchen, Mrs. Ledwith said to Mrs. Megilp,
“I’m not sure I should
fancy Spiller Street, after all; it’s a sort
of a corner. Westmoreland Street or Helvellyn
Park might be nice. I know people down that way, Mrs.
Inchdeepe.”
“Mrs. Inchdeepe isn’t
exactly ‘people,’” said Mrs. Megilp,
in a quiet way that implied more than grammar.
“Don’t get into ‘And’ in Boston,
Laura! With such an addition to your income,
and what your uncle gives you toward a house, I don’t
see why you might not think of Republic Avenue.”
“We shall have plenty of thinking
to do about everything,” said Laura.
“Mamma,” said Agatha,
insinuatingly, “I’m thinking, already;
about that rose-pink paper for my room. I’m
glad now I didn’t have it here.”
Agatha had been restless for white
lace, and rose-pink, and a Brussels carpet ever since
her friend Zarah Thoole had come home from Europe
and furnished a morning-room.
All this time Mr. Grant Ledwith, quite
unconscious of the impending changes with which his
family were so far advanced in imagination, was busy
among bales and samples in Devonshire Street.
It got to be an old story by the time the seven o’clock
train was in, and he reached home. It was almost
as if it had all happened a year ago, and they had
been waiting for him to come home from Australia.
There was so much to explain to him
that it was really hard to make him understand, and
to bring him up to the point from which they could
go on together.