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

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Two trunks?” she asked, in a tone which told me that I had brought altogether too much luggage.

“Yes,” I replied, stopping until the negroes came up the steps. “Perhaps I ought to have brought but one, but I have so many books and things, and, besides, one trunk was father’s and one mother’s, and I could not give either up. This was father’s, which he said you gave him when he went to college. See, here is his name.” And I pointed to “Gerald Morton, Versailles, Ky.,” on the end of the stout leather trunk, which had withstood the wear of years.

“Yes, I remember it,” she said, in a voice so changed and with so different an expression on her face that I scarcely knew her as she bent over the trunk, which she touched caressingly with her hand. “You have kept it well,” she continued; then, to the negroes, “Take it up-stairs, and mind you don’t mar the wall nor the banisters. Look sharp, now.”

“Mass’r Hinton’s man” had arrived with the wheelbarrow and the other trunk, a huge Saratoga, with mother’s name upon it, “Doris Morton, New Haven, Ct.,” but this Aunt Keziah did not touch. Indeed, it seemed to me that she recoiled from it, and there was an added severity in her tone as she told the man to be careful, and chided him for cutting up the gravel with the wheelbarrow.

“I’s couldn’t tote it, missis; it’s too heavy,” he said, as he waited for one of the other blacks to help him take it up the stairs.

I had reached the upper hall and was standing by the door of my room, while Aunt Beriah said, apologetically, “I am sorry it is so small: perhaps we can change it bye-and-bye.”

It was really a very pretty room, but quite too small for my trunks unless I moved out either the bedstead, or the bureau, or the washstand, and, as I could not well dispense with either of these, I looked rather ruefully at my aunt, who said, “There is a big closet in my room where you can hang your dresses and put both your trunks when they are unpacked.” And that was where I did put them, but not until after two days, for I awoke the next morning with the worst headache I ever had in my life, and which, I suppose, was induced by the long and rapid journey from Meadowbrook, added to homesickness and crying myself to sleep. I could not even sit up, and was compelled to keep my room, where Aunt Beriah nursed me so tenderly and lovingly, while Aunt Kizzy came three times a day to ask how I was, and where I first saw my aunt Desire, who had been suffering with neuralgia and was not present at dinner on the night of my arrival. She sent me her love, however, and the next day came into my room, languid and graceful, with a pretty air of invalidism about her, and a good deal of powder on her face, reminding me of a beautiful ball-dress which has done service through several seasons and been turned and made over and freshened up until it looks almost as well as new. Her dress, of some soft, cream-colored material was artistically draped around her fine figure and fastened on the left side with a ribbon bow of baby blue, and her fair hair, in which there was very little gray, was worn low on her neck in a large, flat knot, from which a few curls were escaping and adding to her youthful appearance. If I had not known that she was over fifty, I might, in my darkened room, easily have mistaken her for a young girl, and I told her so when after kissing me and telling me who she was, she sank into the rocking-chair and asked me if she looked at all as I thought she would.

With a merry laugh, which showed her white, even teeth, she said, “I like that. I like to look young, if I am fifty, which I will confess to you just because Kizzy will be sure to tell you; otherwise, torture could not wring it from me. A woman is as old as she feels, and I feel about twenty-five. Nor do I think it is necessary to blurt out my age all the time, as Kizzy does. It’s no crime to be old, but public opinion and women themselves have made it so. Let two of them get to saying nasty things about a third, and they are sure to add several years to her age, while even men call a girl right old before she is thirty, and doesn’t that prove that although age may be honorable it is not desirable, and should be fought against as long as possible? And I intend to fight it, too, and thus far have succeeded pretty well, or should, if it were not for Kizzy, who has the most aggravating way of saying to me, ‘You ought not to do so at your time of life,’ and ‘at your age,’ as if I were a hundred.”

I listened to her in amazement and admiration too. She was so pretty and graceful and earnest that although I thought her rather silly, and wished that in her fight against time she did not make up quite so much as I knew she did, I was greatly drawn towards her, and for a while forgot my headache as she told me of her ailments, which were legion, and with which Aunt Kizzy had little sympathy. “Kizzy thinks all one has to do is to exercise his will and make an effort, as Mrs. Chick insisted poor Fanny should do in ‘Dombey and Son,’” she said, and then went on to give me glimpses of their family life and bits of family history, all of which were, of course, very interesting to me. Aunt Brier, I heard, had been engaged, when young, to a very fine young man, but Aunt Kizzy broke up the match because she wished Beriah to marry some one in the Hepburn line, which was frightfully tangled up with the Morton line.

“It would take too long to explain the tangle,” she said, “and so I shall not try. It estranged your father from us, and his father before him, because each took the woman of his choice in spite of the line.”