Esther nodded gleefully. “Indeed they can’t, Uncle Foster!” she agreed. She was proud of the name. It was splendid to be a Townsend.
That evening, after she had gone up to bed, the chieftain of the Townsend clan spent several hours in the leather easy-chair thinking and planning. Here was a new and unforeseen complication, one which, he now realized, was certain to be followed by more of the same variety. He should have foreseen it, of course. It was as natural as life, it was what made life. Esther was a pretty, attractive girl. She was bound to attract masculine admiration. As she grew older there would be more of them and the consequent complications were serious. He could not prevent that, therefore he must see to it that her associates were of the right kind. She must have friends—yes; but if he undertook to select some and forbid others there would be trouble. In Harniss the social circle was limited and its boundaries not very clearly defined. If she could be taken away from there, put under careful supervision somewhere else, kept interested in other things, until she was old enough and sufficiently accustomed to the privileges of wealth and station, to judge more clearly—then—humph! But where—and how?
The clock struck twelve and he had reached no satisfactory solution. Whatever was done must be done with diplomacy. The light hand on the rein must continue light for a long time to come. The colt was still a colt—and skittish.
It was the singing teacher who, quite unconsciously, gave him a clue. Mr. Gott came next day, at Townsend’s command, to talk over the matter of Esther’s musical education. He was surprisingly self-abnegating and honestly outspoken.
“I can teach her about so much, Cap’n Townsend,” he said, “but she can go a whole lot farther than that if she has the chance. I’m about as good in my line as anybody in Harniss—yes, or Ostable County—if I do say so, but I don’t claim to be as good as the folks up to Boston. They are paid bigger rates than I am and they can afford to spend more time keeping abreast of their job. If I didn’t have to quit music teaching every little while to help run somebody’s funeral I might get ahead faster. If nobody died—but there! if they didn’t die I would. I’d starve to death if I had to live on what I make learning folks to play piano and sing in this town.”
This frank statement gave Foster Townsend the idea he had been seeking. He wrote to an acquaintance who lived in Boston. This acquaintance was the widow of a former clerk in the office of Cook and Townsend, occupied a small house in the Roxbury district and occasionally “let rooms” or even took a boarder, provided the latter’s credentials were of the best. And this widow was under heavy obligations for financial favors extended by her late husband’s employer. The reply he received was satisfactory. Yes, indeed, the lady would be only too delighted to provide food and shelter for her benefactor’s niece. “If she comes to me I shall look out for her as if she was my own daughter. You may be sure of that.” Townsend’s answer was brief. “I shall expect you to be sure of it,” he wrote.
Then he wrote to the head of the New England Conservatory of Music. When all these preliminaries were settled he took the matter up, not with Esther herself, but with her aunt.
Reliance listened to the plan with evident interest but in silence.
“So there it is,” concluded Townsend. “The girl has got a good voice, so everybody says. So good that it would be a shame not to give it every chance to be better. You can’t do that down here. She can study at the Conservatory and stay with this Carter woman from Monday till Friday. Jane Carter is a good woman, strict and church-going and all that; she comes of a first-class Boston family who stick by her even if she is a poor relation. Humph!” he added, with an amazed grunt, “you’d think Cap’n John Hancock and Commodore Winthrop and the rest of ’em were her brothers and sisters to hear her talk sometimes. She puts up with my fo’castle manners because she has to, but I always feel as if I was King Solomon’s bos’n calling on the Queen of Sheba when I go into that house. Funny, isn’t it?... Well, Esther will be kept in the straight and narrow path while she is there—and there will be nobody but bluebloods allowed in the path with her. And Saturdays and Sundays, of course—and vacations—she will be down here with me—with us. What do you think of the scheme, Reliance?”
Reliance said she thought well of it. “It will be a wonderful thing for Esther,” she declared. “But it will be a little hard for you, I should think. You got her up to your house because you were lonesome. Now you are goin’ to send her somewhere else. What is the matter? Isn’t your first notion workin’ out as well as you expected?”