Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

It was the last week in July when Fan and Katy left us for Washington. Jack, Paul and I went to the station with them, waving and kissing our hands to them as long as we could see them standing upon the rear platform and waving to us. How often now do I recall Fanny as she was then starting out to see the world. Although twenty-six she scarcely looked more than twenty, so lightly had the years touched her bright face and starry eyes, which tears made softer and lovelier as she said good-bye to us. With wonderful skill and some help from the fashion plates she had remodeled her wardrobe, adding a little to it as we could afford, but refusing the money Jack offered her, saying he knew she must need it and he wanted her to hold her own among the fashionables she was to meet.

“No, Jackey, dear,” she said, “I can’t take money from you now; but when I am your wife, it will not be safe to offer it to me. And don’t you worry, I shall hold my own.”

At first she wrote three times a week to Jack, and her letters were very satisfactory, judging from his manner after receiving them. To me she wrote once a week, but it was from Katy that I had the most reliable information. They had reached Washington safely, and been met by Colonel and Miss Errington in a superb turnout, with coachman and footman in livery. The house was more elegant than anything Katy had ever imagined, and all its appointments of service and servants were perfect, and Fan adapted herself to everything with the air of a duchess born to the purple. Both the Colonel and his sister were very kind and had taken them everywhere in and around Washington, which was a beautiful city, but so hot that after a week’s sojourn they were glad to leave it for Saratoga. At the very last moment the Colonel had decided to go with them. He had said he couldn’t be hired to spend a month in that frivolous place, but when in the morning they came down to breakfast there was his baggage with theirs in the hall waiting for the expressman, and he was in his light traveling suit giving directions. They were stopping at the United States, where they had a suite of rooms on the second floor, parlor, three bedrooms, dressing-rooms and bath-rooms, and were quite the distinguished guests of the house. After she had been in Saratoga two or three weeks Katy wrote again.

“We know everybody worth knowing and everybody knows us and are very polite and attentive, notwithstanding our plain black gowns, which contrast so strongly with the elegant dresses worn morning, noon and night, any one of which must have cost more than all our simple wardrobe. There is a story going the rounds that we were very wealthy before the war,—that being on the frontier we were overrun by both armies, our house burned, our negroes stolen, and that we lost all we had. Fan, they say, was a fierce rebel, and with a revolver once kept Col. Errington and his whole regiment at bay when he tried to quarter his men upon us. All this fiction seems to make the people think more of us. Funny, isn’t it? Fan is the belle of the season and more flattered and complimented and sought after than any young lady here. And you don’t know how beautiful she is even in her simple black lawn and linen collar, with her brilliant complexion, her eyes like diamonds and her smile which brings every man to her feet. You ought to see her sitting in one of the big chairs on the piazza, or in the hall, surrounded by half a dozen admirers of all ages from sixteen to sixty. She knows the right word to say to each one, and keeps them all on the qui vive, while the Colonel, who is always very near, looks on with an expression which says as plain as words can say, ‘Don’t go too far, gentlemen. It will do no good.’ His attentions are constant and so delicate and marked that people begin to associate their names together, and I have been asked if they were not engaged. I said no, decidedly, and told them about Jack, whom she is to marry at Christmas. In less than twenty-four hours, so fast does gossip travel here, I overheard one lady tell another that the eldest Miss Hathern was engaged to a wealthy Virginia planter who lived near Richmond.

“‘That splendid girl engaged to a farmer,’ the second lady exclaimed, and her friend replied, ‘No, a planter.’

“‘Oh, that will do,’ the other said, in a satisfied tone, ‘as if there were any difference between a planter and a farmer except the spelling.’ Do you see any?

“That night Fan and I quarrelled for the first time in our lives. She said that I had no business to tell that she was engaged and spoil her fun, and I said she had no business to flirt so outrageously with everybody, and that if she didn’t quit it I’d write to Jack. Then she began to cry and wish she was dead. She didn’t see why when a glimpse of the world was given her to enjoy she couldn’t be allowed to enjoy it in her own way, and if she chose to have a taste of the world, the flesh and the devil, meaning the Colonel, she didn’t know why I should interfere. She intended to marry Jack, but she meant to have a good time first before settling down in dull old Lovering, which she hated. Then her mood changed and she acknowledged that she was wrong, and that night she wrote Jack the longest letter she has written since we came here, and the most loving, I dare say. The next day she was as shy and demure as a nun, which sent the whole pack after her fiercer than ever, but she cut them dead and kept close to the Colonel as if for protection, and drove with him to the lake and didn’t get back until ten o’clock. She was gone with him again this afternoon, and the people crowded on to the piazza to see them off in his stylish turnout,—the finest here by far.”

This letter troubled me greatly, and I wondered what Jack would think of it. I remembered the long letter he had received and how happy he had looked after it. I had seen him reading it at least three different times, until I felt sure he must know it by heart. After that her letters were very short, both to him and to me. She had not time to write much, she said, she was kept in such a whirl, which grew dizzier as the season drew near its close. She never mentioned the Colonel, or any other gentleman in particular, but was loud in her praise of Katy, whose flowerlike beauty, she said, had turned the heads of half the men in Saratoga.

“And her voice,” she wrote; “people rave about it as if she were Patti herself. It seems the Diva sang here once years ago, when she was about Katy’s age, and a woman who heard her says she likes Katy’s voice better and that she is far prettier, she is so fair and sweet and unconscious of her great gift. I have let her sing twice in public for some charities; they are always getting up something of that sort and levying on any talent there may be here. Prejudiced as I am against the stage I was proud of Katy, she was so modest and unaffected, and received the applause of the people so shyly and sweetly. Miss Errington has a plan in her mind for keeping Katy in Washington and giving her lessons. She will probably write you about it. I shall oppose it if there is a career behind it. I have not yet reached a point where I want my sister a public character, with her photographs in the shop windows, and horrid wood-cuts of her in the papers. I intend to have her at The Plateau a good deal of the time to keep me from stagnating. Just think of it! Only Jack and me, sitting there alone, admiring each other! Well, nothing can blot out the remembrance of the good time I am having now seeing the world, and there is so much to see and enjoy, if one only had money.

“I hoped at one time Carl might join us. Katy has had a few lines from him; did she tell you? He has gone with a party to some outlandish place beyond the Rockies. There are some people here from Boston who know him well and speak highly of him. They say, however, that he is a little too much inclined to forget the friends of yesterday for those of to-day. We know that, don’t we? An uncle on his father’s side has recently died and left him what we should think a fortune. So he is richer now than ever. I wish we had an uncle to die and leave us some money. But, alas! if we ever had an uncle he was dry as dust long ago.