Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

Notwithstanding what he had said of his anxiety to reach the Elms, he did not seem to be in a great hurry to do so. He stopped some days in New York, and again in Washington, and it was two weeks from the time he left Boston before a telegram came to his mother saying he was in Richmond and would be with us the next evening. That same day Fan had a letter from Jack, who wrote: “I was the first to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Hathern, and am also the first to know her son Carl. He has been at the Spotswood four days, and I verily believe knows more of the city than I do. He has been everywhere and seen everything, from Libby Prison, Castle Thunder and Belle Isle to the fortifications in the country for miles around. He has the most expensive room in the hotel, and drives out with a span and a guide and coachman, and myself, whenever I can find time to go out with him. He has visited the State House and every store and shop and office in town, and talked politics and reconstruction with as much assurance as if he were a gray-haired veteran of fifty instead of a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Everybody knows him and everybody likes him, especially at the hotel, where he spends his money so freely. I usually go there every night and look over the register to see the new arrivals, and when I saw ‘Carlyle Haverleigh, Boston, Mass.,’ I soon had him by the hand, telling him who I was and asking what I could do for him. Do for him! Bless your soul, he does not need anyone to do for him; he is equal to anything; takes care of and patronizes me; owns the whole south generally, and Richmond and the Spotswood in particular. And yet he is not in the least offensive in his patronage. It is just his pleasant, genial, helpful way, which goes to your heart directly. We call him Boston, and laugh at his ‘I guesses’ and ‘carnts’ and ‘sharnts,’ and tell him he ought to be kept under a glass cover, with his fine clothes and white hands. But he takes it in perfect good humor and ridicules our ‘I reckons’ and ‘heaps’ and ‘right smarts,’ and says we wear baggy, ill-made clothes, and talk through our noses worse than any down-east Yankee he ever met, but admits that we are a pretty good sort, on the whole, for rebs, and much better, he presumes, for having been licked! Think of it! A Boston cub, right from the very heart of abolitionism and everything else, talking like that to old Virginia soldiers, who shake their sides over him. Truly the world moves, and we move with it, and I am glad we do. I like the boy, or, perhaps, I should say young man, for he is nearly as tall as I am, and straight as an Indian, with a proud bearing as if the world were made for him. He has a frank, ingenuous face, with clear-cut features, laughing eyes, and a mouth which, if it were a girl’s, would not be bad to kiss! I rather think it is a kissing mouth, he is so fond of the girls,—talks to everyone he meets in the hotel, and actually asked Mrs. Gen. Sands’ daughter Mabel, from South Carolina, to take a walk with him. She took it and a blowing up, too, from her mother, when she got home, while he took a worse one for his presumption,—I’m not sure she didn’t call it impudence,—in proposing such a thing to a southern girl and a stranger. You should have seen Carl then. I was really proud of him, he stood up so manly and dignified in the parlor half full of people and said, ‘I beg your pardon, madam; I meant no harm, I assure you. It was because she was a southern girl that I asked her. I wanted to see if she were like Boston girls; she is very much like them, except, perhaps, more charming, because not quite so stiff. I really did not intend to be impudent. I couldn’t, you know. Why, I’m a Bostonian, a Haverleigh, and a gentleman!’

“We all wanted to cheer, and Mrs. Sands most of all. She has been out driving with him since and taken Mabel with her. What strikes me as very remarkable about the boy is his freedom from all bad habits. I don’t believe he has one, unless it is a disposition to spend his money too freely. He says he owes everything to his mother. There was some bad blood in the family away back somewhere, and she was as afraid of it as of a mad dog and watched him as a rat would watch a mouse. When he was ten years old some college chaps got him to drink and smoke until he was so deathly sick that they feared he would die. When he got over it his mother thrashed him so soundly with a rawhide that he declares he has a mark of one of the welts on his back yet. Then she told him that for every year until he was twenty-one in which he neither drank, nor smoked, nor chewed, nor swore, nor lied, she would give him one hundred dollars over and above the allowance she usually made him. She wanted to tack on dancing and theatres, he said, but he kicked at that and promised the rest, and kept his promise, too, until last year, when he called a girl who lived with them a d—— fool because she would make eyes at him. Quite to his surprise his mother gave him fifty dollars, saying it was only half a swear and the girl deserved it.

“His father left a large fortune, the use of which is to be his mother’s during her lifetime, with the exception of twenty-five thousand dollars which are to be paid to Carl when he is twenty-one. At his mother’s death he gets the whole. So, you see, he will some day be a very rich man and a great catch. Pity he wasn’t older, or you and Annie younger. He has asked me a great many questions about you; says he always wanted some sisters, and knows he shall like you,—love, I think he said, but he is only a boy and I am not jealous. He leaves day after to-morrow and I shall miss him, for I find myself looking forward to the close of business hours when I am free to join him and hear his funny and original remarks about us and our ways which he says are a hundred years behind Boston.”

This letter did not in the least diminish our desire to see Carl Haverleigh, in whose coming the whole household was interested. We were running like clockwork now, with Phyllis as laundress, Norah as cook, Julina as housemaid, and Boston baked beans and brown bread on Sunday. We dressed for dinner and dined in courses at six, while father wore his swallow-tail and Julina waited upon us in her pretty white apron and cap. Mrs. Hathern’s carriage and horses had come from Boston. We had a colored coachman from Richmond, who wore a tall hat and brass buttons and went to sleep on the box while driving us around the neighborhood. Altogether, we were very high-toned and Bostony, and but for a few drawbacks might have enjoyed the new order of things immensely. Our house was handsomely furnished; father’s debts were paid, and had he chosen he might have dismissed his patients and lived a life of perfect ease. Mrs. Hathern was very free with her money, and more generous to Fan and me than we expected or deserved. But there was always a feeling of restraint in her presence and a hankering for the flesh-pots of Egypt, when it didn’t matter whether things were in order or not, or we on time to a minute; and then there was unfortunate Katy, who not only spent hours in the high chair and in bed for trivial things we had never dreamed of calling faults, but to whose other trials was added that of daily music lessons. Mrs. Hathern’s piano, a splendid Steinway, had come, and the old one which had been our mother’s was moved to make room for it. Then, following Miss Errington’s advice, she commenced teaching Katy, who was required to practice every day until her little arms and hands ached with fatigue. She hated the practice, but liked the singing, and every morning for half an hour or more the house was filled with melody as she went up and down the scales, clear and sweet as a bird, while I listened with pride and Fan with fear of what might be the result in the future.

There was to be a cessation of the lessons for a few days on account of Carl’s arrival and because of a grand picnic which was to be held in the woods near a little waterfall and a fine bit of scenery. Everybody in town who was anybody was going, and Mrs. Hathern was especially glad that it was fixed for the day after Carl’s expected arrival, as it would give her an early opportunity to show her handsome and accomplished son to her friends and neighbors. I think the New Englander revels in picnics. Mrs. Hathern was certainly in her element preparing for this one and for Carl, who was coming at last.

It was a lovely July day,—cool for the season, but with that deliciousness in the air and deep blue in the sky common to Virginia summers. Carl’s room was in readiness for him. Julina had swept and dusted and lingered over it longer than was at all necessary, and there was a light in the girl’s eyes and an airiness in her movements which irritated and disgusted us. Mrs. Hathern had hung upon the walls a few pictures we had not seen before, some of them exquisitely colored photographs of Venice and others, copies of Pompeiian dancing girls, who, it seemed to me, might have worn thicker garments and not have been uncomfortable even in the summer. But I was not up in high art and had not spent a year and a half abroad, like Mrs. Hathern, who could contemplate and discuss a Venus de Medicis or Apollo Belvidere as readily as a block of unhewn marble. There was a head of a Madonna, which Mrs. Hathern had found in Florence, in Carl’s room, and Norah hung around its neck a string of beads from Lourdes which had been blessed by the Pope; “not for keeps,” she said, “but just for a little while to show him I am glad he is coming.” Phyllis, too, had brought the only valuable article she possessed,—a handsome bowl of Royal Worcester, which a Federal soldier had given her in exchange for a peck of apples and some walnuts. It was stolen, of course, from some desecrated home, but as Phyllis didn’t know where that home was she had no compunctions in taking it, and since the war it had stood on a little table at the head of the bed with her pipes and tobacco and child’s first reader which she kept there, not because she could read,—we had tried to teach her and failed,—but because it looked as if she could. She had heard us talk so much of Carl that she was interested, too, and brought the bowl full of flowers and set it down by his photograph on the bureau.

The morning was long and the evening was longer, but five o’clock came at last and the carriage with Mrs. Hathern and father and Katy went to the station, while Fan and I waited at home upon the piazza, and Julina went once or twice to the gate and looked anxiously down the street. Suddenly there was the sound of rapid footsteps and of some one whistling Dixie at the rear of the hall, and in a moment Carl stood before us, flushed and expectant and eager. The train, which was usually late, had been ahead of time and pulled up at the station before the carriage reached it, for something had happened to the harness and detained it. Everybody knew Carl was coming, and everyone at the station knew it was he as he leaped upon the platform in his long linen duster and straw hat and northern air generally.

“Halloo! Is there anyone here from the Hatherns? I am Carl Haverleigh,” was his salutation to the station master, who replied that there was not yet, but undoubtedly would be soon.

“Well, is there a short cut to the house which I can take and surprise them?” he asked next.

There was one and Carl took it and brought up by Phyllis’s cabin, where she sat quietly smoking under the dogwood tree after her work was done. Jack had described us all so minutely that Carl knew in a moment who Phyllis was, and his cheery “Halloo, Aunt Phyllis. How d’ye,” nearly threw the old woman off her seat. She did drop her clay pipe, and Carl’s brown head and her red turban knocked together as both stooped to pick it up.