The Queen of the Swamp, and other plain Americans

by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

“Glad, of course. But why didn’t you tell me before?”

“How could I tell you what I didn’t know myself?”

“Oh, it’s his fault, evidently,” said Julian.

I began to wonder if Julian would not be a little jealous of T’férgore. As I had never seen T’férgore myself, I did not know what his aptitude might be at putting himself forward and eclipsing the master of the house. But I was glad it was Julian’s relation this time.

We had had several of my kin living upon our hearthstone at various times, and though Julian was always kind, I think he undervalued the stock from which I sprung. He said I must have been changed in the cradle, for refinement was my natural atmosphere. I did myself feel a creeping of the flesh at brother Jack’s ways; but the dear boy had been brought up away from me, and his manners were not his fault. He had an affectionate and honorable nature, and soon quit spitting upon our Brussels rugs and hard finished floors; his English, however, was beyond all help. I loved Jack so dearly that it was a grief to me to see him falling to pieces in his clothes, and slipping up and down in shoes that were never buttoned. He frequently put his trousers on wrong side foremost, and came to me to help him hunt the pockets. With my own pin-money I bought him hats that must adorn his rosy face, but after he slouched out in them once they looked disreputable. His coat-sleeves hung over his dirty fists like a hackman’s. Whenever he passed through his room he left it as if it had been struck by a tornado. The earth adhered to Jack. Stray burrs and dumpings of gravel appeared by the chair where he sat to put on his slippers. He had no cattish horror of mud, and left the print of his foot on his napkin under the table. When Jack was partially dressed, he shouted for me, to the remotest corners, to come and button his sleeves and hand him his tie.

The more fastidious our company, the louder would Jack bite his nails, while he sprawled like a spread eagle on the sofa, until every pause in conversation became vocal with that horrible cracking. He lost everything portable which was not tied or buttoned about his person, but he was always so good-natured about the losses it seemed stingy to regret the money it cost to replace things.

As he had no inclination toward Art, and walked flat-footed over canvases whenever he came into the studio, Julian got him employment. Jack’s apprenticeship to buying and selling was to me a long period of alternate hopes and despairs. He would begin well, and in fancy I saw him a merchant prince; but eventually he fell out with everybody and thought himself abused when his employer objected to his dribbling small change along the streets, and losing keys. I did not know what to do for Jack when the despair seasons came upon me. But in the end he did very well for himself. He got tired of the city, and no cajoling of mine could keep him from thrusting some shirts into a valise, grasping a pair of heavy boots in his hand, and starting for the country, sowing handkerchiefs and unmated socks in his wake. He went to work for a middle-aged widow with considerable property, and she got the dear boy’s consent to marry him: so there he is, a landed proprietor, with a thrifty wife to button his sleeves and join knives with him in the butter. Our bric-à-brac ways trouble him no more, and what he loses in the furrow at planting time he may find again during harvest. And when he comes to see us, his loving heart is as mellow as the apples he brings.

Then there was Aunt Lizy. I suppose she was christened Eliza, but her name was always pronounced Lizy with a plaintive lingering on the i. We had her with us two years. She was a stepsister of my stepmother’s. She looked like an Indian, and had seen more trouble than any other woman with whom she ever measured experiences. Her breathing was all done in sighs, and she tweaked her nose so much it was twisted at the end, and all of a dark red color. She and I never could understand why fortune hit her so hard, and we talked about it so much that I was kept quite bilious.

Aunt Lizy felt too low to sit in the parlor unless dragged there by entreaties, and spent a great deal of her time on the back stairs with a sunbonnet drawn over her eyes. She did not want to go anywhere, and the sound of the door-bell exorcised her as if she were a ghost. She compared her lot to mine until I was ashamed of myself, wondering if I had not stood in her sun.

I think Julian secretly regarded her as a trying disease that we had in the house, and that must be doctored and endured. She was so much in awe of him that I suffered anguish with her whenever he tried to show a man’s bluff kindness to her.