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

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Well?” Mr. Leighton said, as he finished reading the letter, and looked inquiringly at his daughters.

Bertha, who was very pale, was the first to speak. “Do you want to leave the old home?” she asked, and her father replied, in a choking voice, “No, oh, no. I have lived here twenty-seven years, and know every rock and tree and shrub, and love them all. I brought your mother here a bride and a slip of a girl like you, who are so much like her that sometimes when I see you flitting around and hear your voice I think for a moment she has come back to me again. You were both born here. Your mother died here, and here I want to die. But what is the use of prolonging the struggle? I have raked and scraped and saved in every possible way to pay the debt contracted so long ago, the interest of which has eaten up all my profits, and I have got within five hundred dollars of it, but do not see how I can get any further. I may sell a few apples and some hay, but I’ll never borrow another dollar, and if this New York chap offers a good price we’d better sell. Dorcas and I can rent a few rooms somewhere in Boston, maybe, and we shall all be together till I die, which, please God, will not be very long.”

His face was white, with a tired, discouraged look upon it pitiful to see, while Dorcas, who cried easily, was sobbing aloud. But Bertha’s eyes were round and bright and dry, and there was a ring in her voice as she said, “You will not die, and you will not sell the place. Horses and dogs and fox-hunts, indeed! I’d like to see that New Yorker plunging through the fields and farms with his horses and hounds, for that is what fox-hunting means. He would be mobbed in no time. Who is he, I wonder? I should like to meet him and give him a piece of my mind.”

She was getting excited, and her cheeks were scarlet as she kissed her father again and said, “Write and tell that New Yorker to stay where he is, and take his foxes to some other farm. He cannot have ours, nor any one else. Micawber-like, I believe something will turn up; I am sure of it; only give me time.”

Then, rising from her chair, she went swiftly out into the twilight, and, crossing the road, ran down the terrace to a bit of broken wall, where she sat down and watched the night gathering on the distant hills and over the woods, and fought the battle which more than one unselfish woman has fought,—a battle between inclination and what seemed to be duty. If she chose, she could save the farm with a word and make her father’s last days free from care. There was a handsome house in Boston of which she might be mistress any day, with plenty of money at her command to do with as she pleased. But the owner was old compared to herself, forty at least, and growing bald; he called her Berthy, and was not at all like the ideal she had in her mind of the man whom she could love,—who was really more like one who might hunt foxes and ride his horses through the fields, while she rode by his side, than like the commonplace Mr. Sinclair, who had asked her twice to be his wife. At her last refusal only a few days ago he had said he should not give her up yet, but should write her father for his co-operation, and it was from him she feared the New York letter had come when she saw it in her father’s pocket. She knew he was honorable and upright and would be kind and generous to her and her family, but she had dreamed of a different love, and she could not listen to his suit unless it were to save the old home for her father and Dorcas.

For a time she sat weighing in the balance her love for them and her love for herself, while darkness deepened around her and the air grew heavy with the scent of the apple-blossoms and the grove of pine-trees not far away; yet she was no nearer a decision than when she first sat down. It was strange that in the midst of her intense thinking, the baying of hounds, the tramp of horses’ feet, and the shout of many voices should ring in her ears so distinctly that once, as some bushes stirred near her, she turned, half expecting to see the hunted fox fleeing for his life, and, with an impulse to save him from his pursuers, put out both her hands.

“This is a queer sort of hallucination, and it comes from that New York letter,” she thought, just as from under a cloud where it had been hidden the new moon sailed out to the right of her. Bertha was not superstitious, but, like many others, she clung to some of the traditions of her childhood, and the new moon seen over the right shoulder was one of them. She always framed a wish when she saw it, and she did so now, involuntarily repeating the words she had so often used when a child:

“New moon, new moon, listen to me,

And grant the boon I ask of thee,”

and then, almost as seriously as if it were a prayer, she wished that something might occur to keep the home for her father and herself from Mr. Sinclair.