CHAPTER XIV.—Doris’s Story.
TWO YEARS LATER.
It is just two years since that triple wedding, when six people were made as happy as it is possible to be in this world, Aunt Brier and Mr. Atkins, Aleck and Thea, and Grant and myself, on whom no shadow has fallen since I became Grant’s wife and basked in the fullness of his love, which grows stronger and more tender as the days go on. He is now studying hard in a law office in town, determined to fit himself for something useful, and if possible atone for the selfish, useless life he led before we were married. We spent a year abroad, going everywhere with Aleck and Thea, and staying a few weeks in Mr. Atkins’s elegant villa near Alexandria, where everything is done in the most luxurious and Oriental manner, and Aunt Brier was a very queen among her subjects. When the year of travel was ended we came back to Morton Park, where a royal welcome awaited us, and where Aunt Kizzy took me in her arms and cried over me a little and then led me to my room, or rather rooms, one of which was the Glory Hole, which had been fitted up as a boudoir, or dressing-room, while the large, airy chamber adjacent, where Thea used to sleep, had also been thoroughly repaired and refurnished, and was given to us in place of Grant’s old room.
And here this Christmas morning I am finishing my journal, in which I have recorded so much of my life,—more, in fact, than I care to read. I wish I had left out a good deal about Aunt Kizzy. She is greatly changed from the grim woman who held me at arm’s length when I first came from school, and of whom I stood in fear. We have talked that all over, and made it up, and every day she gives me some new proof of her affection. But the greatest transformation in her came some weeks ago, with the advent of a little boy, who is sleeping in his crib, with a yellow-turbaned negress keeping watch over him. Aunt Kizzy calls herself his grandmother, and tends him more, if possible, than the nurse. Grant laments that it is not a girl, so as to bear some one or two of the queer names of its ancestors. But I am glad it is a boy, and next Sunday it will be christened Gerold Douglas, for my father and grandfather, and Aleck and Thea will stand for it. They have bought a beautiful place a little out of town and have settled down into a regular Darby and Joan, wholly satisfied with each Other and lacking nothing to make them perfectly happy. Aunt Brier and Mr. Atkins are also here, staying in the house until spring, when they will build on a part of the Morton estate which Mr. Atkins has bought of Grant. Oriental life did not suit Aunt Brier, and, as her slightest wish is sacred to her husband, he has brought her to her old home, where, when Aleck and Thea are with us, we make a very merry party, talking of all we have seen in Europe, and sometimes of the Hepburn line, which Aleck says I straightened,—always insisting, however, that it did not need straightening, and that the obnoxious clause in the lease would never have stood the test of the law. Whether it would or not, I do not know, as we have never inquired.
MILDRED’S AMBITION.
CHAPTER I.
MILDRED.
The time was a hot morning in July, the place one of those little mountain towns between Albany and Pittsfield, and the scene opens in a farm house kitchen, where Mildred Leach was seated upon the doorstep shelling peas, with her feet braced against the doorjamb to keep her baby brother, who was creeping on the floor, from tumbling out, and her little sister Bessie, who was standing outside, from coming in. On the bed in a room off the kitchen Mildred’s mother was lying with a headache, and both the kitchen and the bedroom smelled of camphor and vinegar, and the vegetables which were cooking on the stove and filling the house with the odor which made the girl faint and sick, as she leaned against the door-post and longed, as she always was longing, for some change in her monotonous life. Of the world outside the mountain town where she was born she knew very little, and that little she had learned from Hugh McGregor, the village doctor’s son, who had been away to school, and seen the President and New York and a Cunarder as it came sailing up the harbor. On his return home Hugh had narrated his adventures to Mildred, who listened with kindling eyes and flushed cheeks, exclaiming, when he finished, “Oh! if I could see all that; and I will some day. I shall not stay forever in old Rocky Point. I hate it.”
Mildred was only thirteen, and not pretty, as girls usually are at that age. She was thin and sallow, and her great brown eyes were too large for her face, and her thick curly hair too heavy for her head. A mop her brother Tom called it, when trying to tease her; and Mildred hated her hair and hated herself whenever she looked in the ten by twelve glass in her room, and never dreamed of the wonderful beauty which later on she would develop, when her face and form were rounded out, her sallow complexion cleared, and her hair subdued and softened into a mass of waves and curls. Her father, John Leach, was a poor farmer, who, although he owned the house in which he lived, together with a few acres of stony land around it, was in one sense a tenant of Mr. Giles Thornton, the proprietor of Thornton Park, for he rented land enough of him to eke out his slender income. To Mildred, Thornton Park was a Paradise, and nothing she had ever read or heard of equaled it in her estimation, and many a night when she should have been asleep she stood at her window, looking off in the distance at the turrets and towers of the beautiful place which elicited admiration from people much older than herself. To live there would be perfect bliss, she thought, even though she were as great an invalid as its mistress, and as sickly and helpless as little Alice, the only daughter of the house. Against her own humble surroundings Mildred was in hot rebellion, and was always planning for improvement and change, not only for herself, but for her family, whom she loved devotedly, and to whom she was giving all the strength of her young life. Mrs. Leach was a martyr to headaches, which frequently kept her in bed for days, during which time the care and the work fell upon Mildred, whose shoulders were too slender for the burden they bore.
“But it will be different some time,” she was thinking on that hot July morning when she sat shelling peas, sometimes kissing Charlie, whose fat hands were either making havoc with the pods or pulling her hair, and sometimes scolding Bessie for chewing her bonnet strings and soiling her clean apron.
“You must look nice when Mrs. Thornton goes by,” she said, for Mrs. Thornton was expected from New York that day, and Mildred was watching for the return of the carriage, which half an hour before had passed on its way to the station.
And very soon it came in sight,—a handsome barouche, drawn by two shining black horses, with a long-coated driver on the box, and Mr. and Mrs. Thornton and the two children inside,—Gerard, a dark, handsome boy of eleven, and Alice, a sickly little girl, with some spinal trouble which kept her from walking or playing as other children did. Leaning back upon cushions was Mrs. Thornton,—her face very pale, and her eyes closed, while opposite her, with his gold-headed cane in his hand, was Mr. Thornton,—a tall, handsome man who carried himself as grandly as if the blood of a hundred kings was flowing in his veins. He did not see the children on the doorsteps, until Gerard, in response to a nod from Mildred, lifted his cap, while Alice leaned eagerly forward and said, “Look, mamma, there’s Milly and Bessie and the baby. Hello, Milly. I’ve comed back;” then he said quickly, “Allie, be quiet; and you Gerard, why do you lift your cap to such people? It’s not necessary;” and in these few words was embodied the character of the man.