Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

Aside from her dread of the long journey and her terror of the sea was a growing feeling that she could not leave Jack. No word of love for her had ever passed his lips, but something told her that over the grave in his heart new hopes were springing, the tendrils of which were reaching towards herself. When he last started on his journey west, which was to last for a longer time than usual, he had thrown his arm across her shoulders as he stood talking to her in the hall before bidding her good-bye. Looking up in his face she had seen something in it she never saw before and which made her drop her eyes and hang her head.

“God bless you, Annie,” he said, putting his hand under her chin and turning her face up to his again, “God bless you for all you were to me in the dark days which are brightening now so fast that I see the past only through a mist, and that is rapidly lifting. Good-bye.”

He stooped and kissed her on her forehead and was gone, but his kiss still burned where he had imprinted it, and she saw the look in his eyes and heard his voice speaking to her as he had never spoken before. So when Carl came and asked her to go to Europe, she shrank from it with a feeling that she could not.

“I know I am selfish,” she said, “and it breaks my heart to have Paul go without me, but indeed I cannot go.”

After this Carl did not urge her, but began to look around for some reliable man with whom he could trust Paul at all times and in all places. This point Paul settled himself. At the time when Sam Slayton had been caring for Jack at The Elms a great friendship had sprung up between the little boy and the man, and this had increased as time wore on. Almost every day found Paul at the corner grocery, where he sometimes waited upon customers, but oftener sat upon the counter talking to Sam, who said of him to his friends that he was “the cutest little cuss he ever saw;” while Paul in turn worshiped him as the best man in the world, excepting Carl and Jack. When Miranda came, as she did in due time, the intimacy was not interrupted, but rather increased; for in her loneliness and longing for the five brothers she had left in Vermont, Miranda took at once to the little boy, whose prattle amused her so much. For a year the visits to Miranda continued, and then one morning there were streamers of crape on the doors of the house and grocery, and Miranda and her own little boy were coffined and ready for the journey back to her grave among her native hills. This happened while Paul was in New York with Carl, and on his return he found his friend alone, and crying like a child as he talked of his dead wife and baby.

“I’m broken all to smash,” he said, “and have got to go away from here, where every pound of sugar and every quart of vinegar reminds me of Miranda and the little shaver I was goin’ to call for you, if Miss Annie was willin’.”

This made Paul feel at once related to the baby which had looked only a few minutes upon the world before it died, and altogether akin to the bereaved man whose rough hand he held between his small white ones, patting and rubbing it in token of sympathy. When told that Paul was going to Europe Sam began to cry again.

“I wish to lan’ I could go, too, and look after you and the Square,” he said. “I’d be as faithful as a dog, an’ I can’t stay here with these things hauntin’ me and makin’ me think of her.”

As a result of this, Sam Slayton was hired by Carl to go with him to Europe and care for Paul.

“Not a high-toned valet,” Carl said to Annie; “but I like the fellow, and can trust him, and he has promised to be a little more choice in his language, and the slang phrases which Paul is apt to adopt.”