Household Papers and Stories

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

In time our Mary became quite a family institution for us, seeming to fill a thousand little places in the domestic arrangement where a hand or an eye was needed. She was deft at mending glass and china, and equally so at mending all sorts of household things. She darned the napkins and tablecloths in a way that excited my mother’s admiration, and was always so obliging and ready to offer her services that, in time, a resort to Mary’s work-basket and ever ready needle became the most natural thing in the world to all of us. She seemed to have no acquaintance in the city, never went out visiting, received no letters,—in short, seemed to live a completely isolated life, and to dwell in her own thoughts in her own solitary little room.

By that talent for systematic arrangement which she possessed, she secured for herself a good many hours to spend there. My mother, seeing her taste for reading, offered her the use of our books; and one volume after another spent its quiet week or fortnight in her room, and returned to our shelves in due time. They were mostly works of solid information,—history, travels,—and a geography and atlas which had formed part of the school outfit of one of 459 the younger children she seemed interested to retain for some time. “It is my opinion,” said my mother, “that she is studying,—perhaps with a view to getting some better situation.”

“Pray keep her with us,” said I, “if you can. Why don’t you raise her wages? You know that she does more than any other girl ever did before in her place, and is so trustworthy that she is invaluable to us. Persons of her class are worth higher wages than common uneducated servants.”

My mother accordingly did make a handsome addition to Mary’s wages, and by the time she had been with us a year the confidence which her quiet manner had inspired was such that, if my mother wished to be gone for a day or two, the house, with all that was in it, was left trustingly in Mary’s hands, as with a sort of housekeeper. She was charged with all the last directions, as well as the keys to the jellies, cakes, and preserves, with discretionary power as to their use; and yet, for some reason, such was the ascendency she contrived to keep over her Hibernian friends in the kitchen, all this confidence evidently seemed to them quite as proper as to us.

“She ain’t quite like us,” said Biddy one day, mysteriously, as she looked after her. “She’s seen better days, or I’m mistaken; but she don’t take airs on her. She knows how to take the bad luck quiet like, and do the best she can.”

“Has she ever told you anything of herself, Biddy?” said my mother.

“Me? No. It’s a quiet tongue she keeps in her head. She is ready enough to do good turns for us, and to smooth out our ways, and hear our stories, but it’s close in her own affairs she is. Maybe she don’t like to be talkin’, when talkin’ does no good,—poor soul!”

Matters thus went on, and I amused myself now and 460 then with speculating about Mary. I would sometimes go to her to ask some of those little charities of the needle which our sex are always needing from feminine hands; but never, in the course of any of these little transactions, could I establish the slightest degree of confidential communication. If she sewed on a shirt-button, she did it with as abstracted an air as if my arm were a post which she was required to handle, and not the arm of a good-looking youth of twenty-five,—as I fondly hoped I was. And certain remarks which I once addressed to her in regard to her studies and reading in her own apartment were met with that cool, wide-open gaze of her calm gray eyes, that seemed to say, “Pray, what is that to your purpose, sir?” and she merely answered, “Is there anything else that you would like me to do, sir?” with a marked deference that was really defiant.

But one day I fancied I had got hold of a clue. I was standing in our lower front hall, when I saw young McPherson, whom I used to know in New York, coming up the doorsteps.

At the moment that he rung the doorbell, our Mary, who had seen him from the chamber window, suddenly grew pale, and said to my mother, “Please, ma’am, will you be so good as to excuse my going to the door? I feel faint.”