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

by Mary Jane Holmes

Suddenly, as if she had been shot, Mrs. Leach started forward, and rubbing her eyes, in which there was an eager, expectant look, said:

“I must have been dozing, for I dreamed that Milly had come and I heard her voice in the kitchen. Mis’ Thornton here, did you say? I am very proud to meet her;” and the hands were outstretched, groping in the helpless way habitual with the blind. And Mildred took the hands in hers and drawing a chair to her mother’s side sat down so close to her that Mrs. Leach felt her hot breath stir her hair and knew she was being looked at very closely. But how closely she did not dream, for Mildred’s soul was in her eyes, which scanned the worn face where suffering and sorrow had left their impress. And what a sad, sweet face it was, so sweet and sad that Mildred involuntarily took it between her hands and kissed it passionately; then, unable to control herself, she laid her head on her mother’s bosom and sobbed like a little child.

“What is it? Oh, Mrs. Thornton, you scare me. What makes you cry so? Who are you?” Mrs. Leach said, excitedly, for she was frightened by the strange conduct of her visitor.

“You must excuse me,” Mildred said, lifting up her head. “The sight of you unnerved me, for my,—my mother is blind?”

She did not at all mean to say what she knew would involve more deception of a certain kind, but she had said it and could not take it back, and it was a sufficient explanation of her emotion to Mrs. Leach, who said:

“Your mother blind! Dear,—dear,—how did it happen, and has she been so long? Where does she live, and how could she bear to have you leave her? Dear, dear!”

“Don’t talk of her now, please. I can’t bear it,” Mildred replied, and thinking to herself, “Homesick, poor thing,” Mrs. Leach, whose ideas of the world were narrowed to her own immediate surroundings, began to talk of herself and her family in a desultory kind of way, while Mildred listened with a feeling of half wonder, half pain.

All her associations while with Mrs. Harwood had been with highly-cultivated people, and in one sense her mother was new to her and she realized as she had never done before how different she was from Mr. Thornton and herself. “But she is my mother, and nothing can change my love for her,” she thought, as she studied her and the room, which was cozy and bright, though very plainly furnished as compared with the elegant boudoir where she had made her own toilet. There was the tall clock in the corner which had ticked away the hours and days she once thought so dreary and lonely; the desk between the windows, where her father used to keep his papers, and his old, worn pocketbook, in which there was never much money, and on the bed in another corner was a patchwork quilt, a few blocks of which Mildred had pieced herself, recognizing them now with a start and a throb of pain as she saw in two of them bits of the frock she had bought for Charlie with the berries picked in her husband’s pasture. She had been turned out then as a trespasser where she was mistress now, and there were diamonds on her white hands, which had once washed potatoes for dinner, her special abomination, and her gown had cost more than all her mother’s wardrobe. And there she sat in a kind of dream, while the other Mildred of years ago sat close beside her, confusing and bewildering her, so that she hardly heard half her mother was saying about Tom and Bessie, the dearest children in the world. But when at last her own name was mentioned she started and was herself again, and listened as her mother went on:

“I’ve another girl, Mildred by name, but I call her Milly. She’s been in Europe for years, and has been everywhere and speaks French and German, and writes such beautiful letters.”

She was evidently very proud of her absent daughter, and the lady beside her, whose pallid face she could not see, clasped her hands and held her breath as she continued: