The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs. Hastings—"Mrs. Fred," to distinguish her from "Mrs. Val"—happened to call. Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons—first, she had married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the "ruination" of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion and vulgarity. But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family, including herself. So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them alone together. With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence.
At sight of Henrietta, Hiram's face brightened; and well it might. In old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to "settle down" as soon as she returned from her honeymoon—to abandon all thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And conversation with any man, other than her husband—and even with him, if a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through—must be as clean shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about" thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere. And if Mrs. Fred had not been "one of the Fuller heirs," Saint X would have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and threatening.
"I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He fooled 'em again last night."
Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool 'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its favor. He lingered on, and so did they—watching each other, trying to outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire.
"How is he?" asked Hiram.
"They say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly—and that's pretty often—he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle—right in the dead of night."
"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the
Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"
"Everyone—except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man's money, that he ought to shy his castor into the ring."
"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.
"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it."