Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Yes, and a brass knocker.”

“Slanting roof, or high?”

“It was a high gabled roof,—three or four gables, and must have been rather pretentious when it was new.

“Rex,”—and Mrs. Hallam’s voice trembled perceptibly,—“the gables and the situation overlooking the valley make me think that the place you have in view is possibly your father’s old home.”

“By Jove,” Rex exclaimed, “wouldn’t that be jolly! I believe I’d give a thousand dollars extra for the sake of having the old homestead for my own. I wonder who the old chap is who lives there. I mean to go down and see for myself as soon as I return from Chicago and we get the lawsuit off our hands which is taking all Marks’s time and mine.”

Mrs. Hallam did not say what she thought, for she knew there was not much use in opposing Rex, but in her heart she did not approve of bringing the long-buried past up to the present, which was so different. The Homestead was well enough, and Leicester was well enough, for Hallam had been an honored name in the neighborhood, and Rex would be honored, too, as a scion of the family; but it was too near Worcester and the shoe-shop and the store and the people who had known her as a working-girl, and who would be sure to renew the acquaintance if she were to go there. She had no relatives to trouble her, unless it were a certain Phineas Jones, who was so far removed that she could scarcely call him a relative. But if he were living he would certainly find her if she ventured near him, and cousin her, as he used to do in Worcester, where he was continually calling upon her after her marriage and reminding her of spelling-schools and singing-schools and circuses which he said he had attended with her. How distasteful it all was, and how she shrank from everything pertaining to her early life, which seemed so far away that she sometimes half persuaded herself it had never been!

And yet her talk with Rex about the old Homestead on the hill had stirred her strangely, and that night, long after her usual hour for retiring, she sat by her window looking out upon the great city, whose many lights, shining like stars through the fog and rain, she scarcely saw at all. Her thoughts had gone back thirty years to an October day just after her return from her wedding trip to Niagara, when her husband had driven her into the country to visit his old home. How happy he had been, and how vividly she could recall the expression on his face when he caught sight of the red gables and the well-sweep where she told Reginald he had gone down upon his knees. There had been a similar expression on Rex’s face that evening when he talked of his fancy farm, and Rex was in appearance much like what her handsome young husband had been that lovely autumn day, when a purple haze was resting on the hills and the air was soft and warm as summer. He had taken her first to the woods and shown her where he and his brother Jack had set their traps for the woodchucks and snared the partridges in the fall and hunted for the trailing arbutus and the sassafras in the spring; then to the old cider-mill at the end of the lane, and to the hill where they had their slide in winter, and to the barn, where they had a swing, and to the brook in the orchard, where they had a water-wheel; then to the well, where he drew up the bucket, and, poising it upon the curb, stooped to drink from it, asking her to do the same and see if she ever quaffed a sweeter draught; but she was afraid of wetting her dress, and had drawn back, saying she was not thirsty. Strangers occupied the house, but permission was given them to go over it, and he had taken her through all the rooms, showing her where he and Jack and Annie were born, and where the latter had died when a little child of eight; then to the garret, where they used to spread the hickory-nuts and butternuts to dry, and down to the cellar, where the apples and cider were stored. He was like a school-boy in his eagerness to explain everything, while she was bored to death and heard with dismay his proposition to drive two or three miles farther to the Greenville cemetery, where the Hallams for many generations back had been buried. There was a host of them, and some of the headstones were sunken and mouldy with age and half fallen down, while the lettering upon them was almost illegible.

“I wonder whose this is?” he said, as he went down upon the ground to decipher the date of the oldest one. “I can’t make it out, except that it is seventeen hundred and something. He must have been an old settler,” he continued, as he arose and brushed a patch of dirt from his trousers with his silk handkerchief. Then, glancing at her as she stood listlessly leaning against a stone, he said, “Why, Lucy, you look tired. Are you?”

“No, not very,” she answered, a little pettishly; “but I don’t think it very exhilarating business for a bride to be visiting the graves of her husband’s ancestors.”

He did not hunt for any more dates after that, but, gathering a few wild flowers growing in the tall grass, he laid them upon his mother’s grave and Annie’s, and, going out to the carriage standing by the gate, drove back to Worcester through a long stretch of woods, where the road was lined on either side with sumachs and berry-bushes and clumps of bitter-sweet, and there was no sign of life except when a blackbird flew from one tree to another, or a squirrel showed its bushy tail upon the wall. He thought it delightful, and said that it was the pleasantest drive in the neighborhood and one which he had often taken with Jack when they were boys; but she thought it horribly lonesome and poky, and was glad when they struck the pavement of the town.