“Got up a little thunder-storm on his own account! Wonder what’s happened him now!” muttered Rachel, the colored housekeeper, as she placed a lamp upon the table, and then silently left the room.
Scarcely was she gone when, seating himself in his armchair, the Judge began to read again the letter which had so much disturbed him. It was post-marked at a little out-of-the-way place among the backwoods of Maine, and it purported to have come from a young mother, who asked him to adopt a little girl, nearly two months old.
“Her family is fully equal to your own,” the mother wrote; “and should you take my baby, you need never blush for her parentage. I have heard of you, Judge Howell. I know that you are rich, that you are comparatively alone, and there are reasons why I would rather my child should go to Beechwood than any other spot in the wide world. You need her, too,—need something to comfort your old age, for with all your money, you are far from being happy.”
“The deuce I am!” muttered the Judge. “How did the trollop know that, or how did she know of me, any way? I take a child to comfort my old age! Ridiculous! I’m not old,—I’m only fifty,—just in the prime of life; but I hate young ones, and I won’t have one in my house! I’m tormented enough with Rachel’s dozen, and if that madame brings hers here, I’ll——”
The remainder of the sentence was cut short by a peal of thunder, so long and loud that even the exasperated Judge was still until the roar had died away; then, resuming the subject of his remarks, he continued:
“Thanks to something, this letter has been two weeks on the road, and as she is tired of looking for an answer by this time, I sha’n’t trouble myself to write,—but what of Richard?—I have not yet seen why he is up there in New Hampshire, chasing after that Hetty, when he ought to have been home weeks ago;” and taking from his pocket another and an unopened letter, he read why his only son and heir of all his vast possessions was in New Hampshire “chasing after Hetty,” as he termed it.
Hetty Kirby was a poor relation, whom the Judge’s wife had taken into the family, and treated with the utmost kindness and consideration; on her death-bed she had committed the young girl to her husband’s care, bidding him be kind to Hetty for her sake. In Judge Howell’s crusty heart there was one soft, warm spot,—the memory of his wife and beautiful young daughter, the latter of whom died within a few months after her marriage. They had loved the orphan Hetty, and for their sakes, he had kept her until accident revealed to him the fact that to his son, then little more than a boy, there was no music so sweet as Hetty’s voice,—no light so bright as that which shone in Hetty’s eye.
Then the lion was roused, and he turned her from his door, while Richard was threatened with disinheritance if he dared to think again of the humble Hetty. There was no alternative but to submit, for Judge Howell’s word was law, and, with a sad farewell to what had been her home so long, Hetty went back to the low-roofed house among the granite hills, where her mother and half-imbecile grandmother were living.
Richard, too, returned to college, and from that time not a word had passed between the father and the son concerning the offending Hetty until now, when Richard wrote that she was dead, together with her grandmother,—that news of her illness had been forwarded to him, and immediately after leaving college, in July, he had hastened to New Hampshire, and staid by her until she died.
“You can curse me for it if you choose,” he said, “but it will not make the matter better. I loved Hetty Kirby: while living, I love her memory now that she is dead; and in that little grave beneath the hill I have buried my heart forever.”