Mrs. Hiller’s fresh-colored, matronly face might well be grave, as she recounted these things to herself, had the history of the Payne girls been an isolated case.
“But they are a type of so many!” she said, sadly. “Society is encrusted with such, like barnacles sticking to a ship. There is Lewis Carter, one of the ablest young lawyers at the bar, Philip says. He and Annie Morton have been in love with one another ever since he was twenty-one, and she nineteen, ten years ago. It is eight since his father died, and left him in charge of his mother and three sisters, only one of whom is younger than himself. They have not married, and, until they do, he cannot. Annie may wait for him until they are both fifty years old and upward—maybe all their lives—for the older the sisters grow, the more dependent they will become. They make a pleasant home for him, people say; manage his money judiciously, and fairly worship their benefactor. Yet he must compare them, mentally, to leeches, when he reflects how youth and hope are ebbing out of his heart and Annie’s. No doubt leeches are sincerely attached to what they feed upon. What right have they to expect a support from him, more than he from them? They are strong and well, and as much money was spent upon their education as upon his. Housekeepers, forsooth! Does it take four women to keep one man’s house?”
She was rowing very hard now, and the fog was denser than ever.
“There is Mr. Sibthorpe, with his four girls and three boys, and a salary, as bank-teller, of two thousand dollars a year. The daughters all ‘took’ French and music lessons at school. One of them is ‘passionately fond’ of worsted work; another does decalcomanie flower-pots and box-covers for fairs, and all crochet in various stitches, and one is great upon tatting. They ‘help about house,’ as our grandmothers used to say, all four of them; do contrive, with the aid of their mother and a strapping Irish girl, to keep the housework tolerably in hand, and ‘have in’ a dressmaker and seamstress, spring and fall, to give them a fresh start. They don’t read a book through once a year; they have no connected plans about anything, except to appear as well as girls whose fathers are worth ten times as much as is theirs—and to get married! They murder time by inches while waiting for the four coming men; mince it into worthlessness with their pitiful fal-lals of fancy work and the fine arts (save the mark!). Evelyn told me, the other day, that the sprig of wax hyacinths she showed me—a stiff, tasteless spike, that smelled of oil and turpentine—‘occupied’ her for ten hours! What will become of them when their pale, overworked father dies? It is frightful to think of a vessel thus freighted and cumbered being tied to safety by such a worn, frayed cord as that one man’s life.”
A dash of sleety rain against the window interrupted her.
“Philip said there would be a storm before morning. I wonder if he took his umbrella? He never thinks of himself. I am sorry he had to go out at all with such a cold.”
“One man’s life!” What flung the words back at her? What had she and her petted daughters between them and comparative—maybe absolute—poverty, save the life of this man, who, with a heavy cold on his lungs, had gone out into the fierce March night? Who would dare prophesy that his dream of amassing a competency for his children would be fulfilled? Why should she be vexing her soul with speculations about the Payne, and the Carter, and the Sibthorpe girls, when other women, as wise and far-sighted as she, were perhaps asking aloud, in friendly or impertinent gossip over their respective firesides, what would become of the “poor Hillers,” in the event of their father’s death.
She felt very much as if her barque had, like Robinson Crusoe’s ship,
“with a shock,
Struck plump on a rock!”