About six months before I was graduated, Mr. Wilmot was told that I was to be sent to Madame De Moisiere’s School in Boston, and then, three months later, without any reason for the change, I learned that I was to go to Wellesley, provided I could pass the necessary examination. Of this I had no fears, but the change disappointed me greatly, as I had heard glowing accounts of Madame De Moisiere’s School from a girl friend who had been there, and at first I rebelled against Wellesley, which I fancied meant nothing but hard study, with little recreation. But there was no help for it. Aunt Keziah’s law was the law of the Medes and Persians, and one morning in September I said good-bye to Meadowbrook and started for Wellesley, which seemed to me then a kind of intellectual prison.
CHAPTER II.—Beriah’s story.
DORIS.
Morton Park, June —, 18—.
Ten o’clock at night, and I have brought out my old book for a little chat. I am sure I don’t know why I continue to write in my journal, when I am nearly forty years old, unless it is because I began it nineteen years ago, on the day after I said good-bye to Tom forever and felt that my heart was broken. It was just such a moonlight night as this when we walked under the elms in the Park and he told me I was a coward, because I would not brave Kizzy’s wrath and marry out of the “accursed Hepburn line,” as he called it. Well, I was afraid of Kizzy, and shrank from all the bitterness and trouble which has come to us through that Hepburn line. First, there was my brother Douglas, twenty-five years older than I am, who, because he married the girl he loved, instead of the one he didn’t, was sent adrift without a dollar. Why didn’t my father, I wonder, marry into the line himself, and so save all this trouble? Probably because he was so far removed from the crisis now so fast approaching, that he ventured to take my mother, to whom he was always tender and loving, showing that there was kindness in his nature, although he could be so hard on Douglas and the dear little wife who died when Gerold was born. Then came the terrible time when both my father and mother were swept away on the same day by the cholera, and six months after Douglas died, and his boy Gerold came to live with us, He was two years my senior, and more like my brother than my nephew, and I loved him dearly and spoke up for him when Kizzy turned him out, just as Douglas had been turned out before him. Had I dared I would have written to him and assured him of my love, but I could not, so great was my dread of Keziah, who exercises a kind of hypnotic power over us all. She tried to keep Desire from the man of her choice, and might have succeeded, if death had not forestalled her. She sent Tom away from me, and only yielded to Maria, who had a will as strong as her own and married whom she pleased. But she, too, died just after her husband, who was shot in the battle of Fredericksburgh, and we have no one left but her boy Grant, who is almost as dear to me as Gerold was.
Grant is a young man now, and I trust he will marry Dorothea, and so break the evil spell which that old man must have put upon us when to the long lease of ninety years given to my grandfather he tacked that strange condition that if before the expiration of the lease a direct heir of Joseph Morton, of Woodford County, Kentucky, married a direct heir of Amos Hepburn, of Keswick, England, only half the value of the property leased should revert to the Hepburn heir, while the other half should remain in the Morton family. If no such marriage has taken place, uniting the houses of Morton and Hepburn, then the entire property goes to the direct heir of the Hepburns. I believe I have stated it as it is worded in that old yellow document which Keziah keeps in the family Bible and reads every day with a growing dread of what will soon befall us unless Grant marries Dorothea, who, so far as we know, stands first in the Hepburn line, and to whom the Morton estate will go if it passes from our hands.
I have sometimes doubted if that clause would stand the test of law, and have said so to Keziah, suggesting to her to take advice on the subject. But she treated my suggestion with scorn, charging me with wishing to be dishonest, and saying that even if it were illegal it was the request of Amos Hepburn, and father had instilled it into her mind that a dead man’s wish was law, and she should abide by it. Neither would she allow me to ask any legal advice, or talk about the matter to any one.
“It is our own business,” she said, “and if we choose to give up our home it concerns no one but ourselves.”
But she does not expect to give it up, for our hopes are centred on Grant’s marrying Dorothea; and as one means of accomplishing this end he must be kept from Doris and all knowledge of her.
Poor little orphaned Doris! I wonder what she is like, and why Keziah is so hard upon her! She is not to blame because her father married the daughter of his landlady, whom Keziah calls a cook. How well I recall a morning two or three years ago when, at the tick of the clock announcing eight, Kizzy and Dizzy and I marched solemnly down to breakfast just as we have done for the last twenty years and shall for twenty more if we live so long, Keziah first in her black dress and lace cap, with her keys jingling at her side, Desire next, in her white gown and blue ribbons, which she will wear until she is seventy, and I, in my chintz wrapper of lavender and white, colors which Tom said were becoming to me and which I usually select. I can hear the swish of our skirts on the stairs, and see the round table with its china and glass and flowers, and old Abe, the butler, bringing in the coffee and toast, and a letter for Keziah, who read it twice, and then, folding it very deliberately, said, “Gerold’s widow is dead and has left a little girl, and a Rev. Mr. Wilmot has written to know what is to be done with her.”
“Oh, bring her here, by all means!” both Dizzy and I exclaimed in a breath, while Keziah’s face, which is always severe and stern, grew more so as she replied, in the tone from which there is no appeal, “She will stay where she is, if there is a decent school there. I shall educate her, of course; there is no alternative; but she cannot come here until she is sufficiently cultivated not to mortify us with her bad manners, as blood will tell. I have never forgiven her mother for marrying Gerold, and I cannot yet forgive this girl for being that woman’s daughter.”