Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

That night on our way to bed we stopped for a moment at father’s room, the door of which stood open. In the winter, when there was no company in the house, it was really our living room, where most of our evenings were spent. Our father liked it warm when he came in at night, and there was always a bright fire on the hearth, with his arm-chair and slippers on one side, and next it the stand, with his book and paper and spectacles upon it, for he often read aloud to us, with Katy’s bright head resting on his knee, while Fan and I sewed, or embroidered, sitting on the settee rocker opposite him. This was all over now. A stranger had come between us, who would sit by father’s side while his children shifted for themselves. Some such thoughts as these were in our minds when we stepped into the room which we had taken so much pains to make attractive for his home coming.

“I wish we had let it alone,—must and all,” Fan said. “I am glad we couldn’t buy a new chamber set. Let her bring her own, as I dare say she will. I mean to take my pink pin cushion away. I didn’t put it here for her.”

But she left it. I knew she would, as she always subsided into quiet after a storm. We sat up late that night talking the matter over, and decided finally to make the best of it for father’s sake and never let him, nor any one but Jack, know that the new wife was not acceptable. We couldn’t deceive Phyllis, however, nor console her either, and for two days she went about the house with the tears dropping from her nose and running down her cheeks. “It was not so much the missus she ’jected to,” she said, “though it was bad enough to be sot on and bossed around by a stranger when she had been fust so long. It was the po’ white trash comin’ down with their a’rs that she couldn’t stan’, an’ wouldn’t. She’d run away fust! an’ if they sot the dogs on her she’d drown herself in the river; then see how ole mas’r’d feel when they brought her home drownded like a rat!”

Notwithstanding there was nothing to run from Phyllis was always threatening to run when disturbed or displeased, but had never contemplated suicide before, and now, in her pity for herself and for us when she should be fished from the river, limp and dead, she forgot the new mistress in a measure, and on the second day asked if she hadn’t better wash the windows again in master’s room. The marriage was generally known by this time, but no one congratulated us and few spoke of it at all. Evidently, it did not meet with approbation. Always perverse and contradictory, this silence on the part of our friends made Fan angry, and turned the tide in favor of the stranger. “Father had a right to marry if he chose, and the neighbors were very impudent to object,” she said, and, greatly to my surprise, she began to evince a good deal of interest in the coming of Mrs. Hathern. To Katy the new mother was to be mamma, but to us, Mrs. Hathern, and it seemed to me Fan took special pains to repeat the name as often as possible.

“I am trying to get used to it, but oh, how I hate it all. I’ll not let people know though,” she said to me, with quivering lips, and then she broke down and sobbed hysterically, declaring that she’d run away with Phyllis and drown herself, or marry Col. Errington. She hadn’t answered his letter yet, but she would that very day.

Possibly she might have done so if the post had not brought us a letter mailed in Andover and directed in a large boyish hand to “The Misses Hathern.” It was from Carl, who wrote:

“Dear Fanny and Annie and Katy:

“I am awfully glad that you are my sisters, and I am going to tell you about the wedding. I was there and saw your father endow my mother with all his worldly goods and heard her promise to obey him. She won’t do it, though, you bet. They mostly never do, I guess, and mother least of all. They seem happy as clams; so I suppose old people can be in love as well as young. I shouldn’t like mother to know I said that. She’d be mad as a hornet. She thinks she’s young, but she will be forty next birthday. She is a very handsome woman though. I never wanted mother to marry. She has had offers as thick as huckleberries, and I kicked at them all until I saw your father, and then I gave in and told her that she might. I like him immensely and I’m going to like you, especially little Katy, she’s so lovely. Your father showed me her photograph, and finally gave it to me, I begged so hard. I’ve shown it to the boys, and made them green with envy by telling them of the good times I am to have next summer in the Virginia woods and hills and in the old house with you. I hate the city, and like the country, and always wanted to go south. I was sorry I was not old enough to enlist in the army;—not to shoot anybody, but to see the country. I suppose you were rebels. Well, that’s right. I should have been, too, if I had been born south; but I’m a northerner, and yelled myself hoarse when I heard our men were in Richmond. I was in the country, and I and a lot more boys stole so many dry-goods boxes and barrels and wood for a bonfire that one old copperhead, whose chicken coop we took, had us arrested. Between you and I,—you and me, I mean,—I don’t believe your father is more than half a reb, or he wouldn’t sit so quiet and hear mother rake the south. She’s peppery. I said to her it wasn’t good form, and she told me to shut up, and I shut! I generally do when she tells me to.

“I wish you’d write to me. I like girls immensely, and they like me, but only one has ever written to me, and that didn’t count. It was Julina Smith,—mother’s maid,—two or three years older than I am. I’m fifteen. She is rather spoony, and made me a pair of slippers and sent them to me with a letter in which she called me ‘Dear Carl,’ and ended with ‘Your loving Julina.’ The slippers were well enough, if she wanted to give them to me, but the loving Julina was a little too much. I tore the letter up, and when I went home and she made eyes at me I told her to dry up, and she dried. I believe mother intends taking her to Virginia, and if she does you will have to set on her, I can tell you.

“It is nearly class-time and I must stop. I am studying Greek and Latin and a lot more stuff, and expect to enter Harvard when I know enough. And now, in the words of the divine Julina, or Julienne as she’d like to be called, seeing there’s French blood in her,