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

by Mary Jane Holmes

I have solved the mystery of that room with the smell of cigars and the smoking-jacket. It does belong to a man, and that man is Grantley Montague, and Grantley Montague is my second cousin. Aunt Kizzy told me all about him this morning, and I am still so dazed and bewildered and glad and indignant that I can scarcely write connectedly about it. Why was the knowledge that Grant was my cousin kept from me so long, and from him, too, as he is still as ignorant as I was a few hours ago? Aunt Kizzy’s explanation was very lame. She said if he had known that he had a cousin at Wellesley when he was in Harvard, nothing could have kept him from seeing me so often that we should both have been interrupted in our studies,—that she did not approve of students visiting the girls while they were in school,—and that she hardly knew why she did not tell me as soon as I came here. This was not very satisfactory, and I believe there is something behind; but when I appealed to Aunts Dizzy and Beriah, and said I was hurt and angry, Aunt Brier did not answer at all, but Aunt Dizzy said, “I don’t blame you, and I’d have told you long ago if I had not been so afraid of Kizzy;” and that is all I could get from her.

But I know now that Grant is my cousin; and this is how it happened. This morning, as I was crossing the back piazza, I saw Tom opening a box which had come by express and which Aunt Kizzy was superintending. Taking a seat on the side piazza, I thought no more about it until I heard Aunt Kizzy say, very hurriedly and excitedly, “Go, boy, and call Miss Desire and Miss Beriah,—quick,” and a moment after I heard them both exclaim, and caught the sound of my father’s name, Gerold. Then I arose, and, going around the corner, saw them bending over a picture which I recognized at once, and in a moment I was kneeling by it and kissing it as I would have kissed my father’s hand had it suddenly been reached to me.

“Oh, the picture!” I cried. “It is my father’s; he painted it. I saw him do it. He said it was a picture of his aunties, and this is himself. Dear father!” And I touched the face of the young man who was standing behind the woman with the baby in her lap.

Aunt Kizzy was very white, and her voice shook as she asked me to explain, which I did rapidly and clearly, telling all I knew of the picture, which had been sold to some gentleman from Boston for fifty dollars.

“And,” I added, “that fifty dollars went to pay his funeral expenses, poor dear father. He was ill so long, and we were so poor.”

I was crying, and in fact we were all crying together, Aunt Kizzy the hardest of all, so that the hemstitched handkerchief she always carried so gingerly was quite moist and limp. I was the first to recover myself, and asked:

“How did it get here? Whose box is this?”

“Our nephew’s, Grantley Montague, who was graduated at Harvard last year and is now in Europe. He left this box in Cambridge by mistake, and it was not sent to us until yesterday. We are expecting him home in a short time. He must have bought the picture for its resemblance to us, although he could not have known that it was painted for us.”

It was Aunt Kizzy who told me this very rapidly, as if anxious to get it off her mind, and I noticed that she did not look at me as she spoke, and that she seemed embarrassed and anxious to avoid my gaze.

“Grantley Montague,—your nephew! Then he is my cousin!” I exclaimed, while every particular connected with the young man came back to me, and none more distinctly than the telegram, No, sent in response to my request that I might attend his tea-party.