Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Oh, I must get up,” I said, trying to rise, when a sharp pain in the back of my head pulled me back.

“I told you so,” the doctor said. “You’ve got neuralgia in your neck. You never changed your wet clothes at all last night, Phyllis says, and if you don’t look out you’ll have pneumonia and the Lord knows what else. You must keep quiet.”

I had no choice but to obey, the pain in my neck was so severe, and were I to try I could not narrate what came with and followed that to-morrow of which Jack had talked so much and which was ushered in so sadly. This task devolves upon another.

PART III.

FAN-AND-ANN AND JACK.

Chapter I.—Author’s Story.
HOW LOVERING RECEIVED THE NEWS.

The news that Fanny Hathern had jilted Jack Fullerton and married Col. Errington flew like wild-fire and set the little town of Lovering ablaze with excitement and indignation. The doctor had told it to his wife the night after his return from The Elms, adding that she’d better keep dark until she heard it from some other source. But whether she kept dark or not everybody knew it by ten o’clock the next morning. Women who had not called upon their neighbors for weeks remembered suddenly that they had an errand, and were seen hurrying through the streets talking to everyone they met and then hastening on to other listeners, who in turn told it to all whom they saw. By twelve o’clock the story had received the addition that Jack Fullerton was at The Elms raving with brain fever and likely to die as the result of Col. Errington’s perfidy. Usually it is the woman who gets the most censure; in this case it was the man, whom all remembered as the haughty officer who had come into their midst with his troops and levied upon them for whatever he wished to have. And now he had put the crowning act to his other misdeeds by running off with Fanny Hathern and possibly causing Jack Fullerton’s death. There had hardly been more excitement in town when the news first came that Sumter had fallen than there was now. Even the men stopped each other to discuss it, and nowhere were there louder or more indignant voices heard than just outside a small corner grocery which bore the sign, “Sam Slayton, dealer in the finest groceries and freshest vegetables this side of the Potomac.”

Sam was a character. A long, lean, light-haired Yankee from Vermont, who, three or four years before had come to Lovering and opened a grocery, with the boast that he was “goin’ to show them Southerners a thing or two.” He had been in the Federal army and had passed through Lovering with some of his company, spending the night there and “painting the town red,” as he expressed it, in the confession he made when he came back a second time with the intention of settling. He was young then and out on a big lark and he had it, and stole a hen from “widder” Simmons’s roost, and some “aigs” from another, and threw a stone at a boy who called him a mud-sill. It missed the boy and broke a window light in a tin-shop.

“But lan sakes,” he added, “I was a boy then. I’m a man now, and different. I’m converted, and have brought money to pay for the hen and the aigs and the pane of glass. I liked the looks of your pretty little town among the Virginny hills and thought I’d like to live here, and when Mirandy,—that’s the girl I’m engaged to, she’s weakly, and coughs,—and when she said she’d live longer in a milder climate than Vermont, I thought of Lovering, and here I am, and as soon as I get a little forehanded, with a house to live in, I shall fetch Mirandy down, and a better woman you never seen.”

This was what Sam said to the people with whom he had come to live, never doubting in his simple heart that he should be received into favor at once. But war prejudices died hard, especially at the south where the feeling of having been conquered rankled the most and longest. No one who looked in Sam’s honest face doubted his integrity or good feeling, but he was from the north,—he had fought against them, and although they took his cash for the stolen property, and knew that his store was brighter and cleaner and his groceries better than any in Lovering, their patronage was slow in coming. For four years he had held his ground valiantly, with but little more hope of making Mirandy his wife than when he first started in business. Once when a knot of men were seated upon the comfortable seats he had himself built on two sides of his grocery so that “tired folks could rest themselves and see all that was going on around the four corners,” he held forth feelingly on the subject, asking why under the sun and moon they didn’t trade with him as well as to sit on his benches.