Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

He always addressed us as “My dear sisters,” and signed himself, “Your loving brother.”

“Words,—nothing but words, which are so cheap,” Fan would say derisively. “If we are so dear, and the old house so charming, why does he never come near us. I tell you there is something wrong about Carl. He is fickle and fast.”

I feared so, too; but there was a very warm spot in my heart for Carl, whom I always defended, while Katy would never hear a word of censure against him. He was her hero as well as Paul’s, and she would rather he would be fast than stupid, she said. Just before he was graduated he sent a most cordial invitation for us all to come east and see him take his degree.

“I have been in a good many scrapes,” he wrote, “but have managed to slip out. I always have my lessons and shall come off with some honor, and I want you here to share it. So, pack up your best clothes. I shall want my sisters to look well, and some of the Boston girls are stunners. Bring Phyllis and the baby, and I will quarter you all in my house in Boston, with Norah to superintend. Did I tell you that I took the house when the last tenant’s lease expired, and had it refurnished from top to toe, and put Norah there to keep it for me? Quite a comfortable bachelor’s home you will find it.”

“Oh, how I’d like to go,” I exclaimed, remembering the pleasant house looking out upon the Common, and feeling a great desire to see Boston and Carl again.

But the thing was impossible. It was five years now since Mrs. Hathern died, and every year we had been growing poorer. Father’s practice was gone, or nearly so, and the few thousands left him by his wife had been drawn upon so many times that there was not much now to draw from. The trip to Boston was not to be thought of, and Fan answered the letter, declining the invitation.

He was sorry, he wrote in reply, adding that as we were not coming he should give a swell dinner in his house to his classmates and have a “high old time.”

As it chanced Jack was in Boston on business and meeting Carl accidentally was persuaded to be present at the dinner, which surpassed anything he had ever seen.

“The flowers alone and decorations must have cost hundreds of dollars,” he wrote to Fan; “and there were dishes whose name I never heard before and which I never care to taste again. Everyone was in evening dress but myself, who felt rather countryfied and out of place in my business clothes. But Carl was the same old kind-hearted boy, and made me feel perfectly at home and treated me as his honored guest. We sat down at nine and did not get up till two in the morning. Even then some of them did not get up at all for they were under the table, and lying round loose anywhere, and I shouldn’t like to tell Fan how many empty wine bottles were carried out by the waiters; but this I will say, I turned my glass down every time, although I know I was thought a milksop for doing it.”

This was at the time the great temperance crusade was beginning to sweep over the land, and Fan was head and front of the movement in Lovering. She had led a band of women into some of the lowest saloons and been threatened with eggs and brickbats, but had held her own bravely and won respect and attention where, at first, she met with coarse language and derisive jeers. Jack’s letter roused her to a pitch of white heat and she wrote to Carl, asking what his mother would say could she have looked upon the drunken revel, and if he didn’t think himself about as mean and low as he well could be for acting so entirely at variance with his mother’s wishes.