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

by Mary Jane Holmes

After a few general topics and the mention of a mutual friend whom Mrs. Hallam had met in Cairo, Mrs. Haynes came directly to the object of her visit, apologizing first for the liberty she was taking, and adding:

“But now that you are one of us in the church, I thought you might like to help us, and we need it so much.”

Mrs. Hallam was not naturally generous where nothing was to be gained, but Mrs. Haynes’s manner, and her “now you are one of us,” made her so in this instance, and taking the paper she wrote her name for two hundred dollars, which was nearly one-fourth of the desired sum. There was a gleam of humor as well as of surprise in Mrs. Haynes’s eyes as she read the amount, but she was profuse in her thanks and expressions of gratitude, and, promising to call very soon socially, she took her leave with a feeling that it would pay to take up Mrs. Hallam, who was really more lady-like and better educated than many whom she had launched upon the sea of fashion. With Mrs. Walker Haynes and several millions behind her, progress was easy for Mrs. Hallam, and within a year she was “quite in the swim,” she said to her husband, who laughed at her as he had done in Worcester, and called Mrs. Haynes a fraud who knew what she was about. But he gave her all the money she wanted, and rather enjoyed seeing her “hob-a-nob with the big bugs,” as he expressed it. Nothing, however, could change him, and he remained the same unostentatious, popular man he had always been up to the day of his death, which occurred about three years before our story opens.

At that time there was living with him his nephew, the son of his only brother, Jack. Reginald,—or Rex as he was familiarly called,—was a young man of twenty-six, with exceptionally good habits, and a few days before his uncle died he said to him:

“I can trust you, Rex. You have lived with me since you were fourteen, and have never once failed me. The Hallams are all honest people, and you are half Hallam. I have made you independent by my will, and I want you to stay with your aunt and look after her affairs. She is as good a woman as ever lived, but a little off on fashion and fol-de-rol. Keep her as level as you can.”

This Rex had tried to do, rather successfully, too, except when Mrs. Walker Haynes’s influence was in the ascendant, when he usually succumbed to circumstances and allowed his aunt to do as she pleased. Mrs. Haynes, who had profited greatly in a pecuniary way from her acquaintance with Mrs. Hallam, was now in Europe, and had written her friend to join her at Aix-les-Bains, which she said was a charming place, full of titled people both English and French, and she had the entrée to the very best circles. She further added that it was desirable for a lady traveling without a male escort to have a companion besides a maid and courier. The companion was to be found in America, the courier in London, and the maid in Paris; “after which,” she wrote, “you will travel tout-à-fait en princesse. The en princesse appealed to Mrs. Hallam at once as something altogether applicable to Mrs. Carter Hallam of New York. She was a great lady now; Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the berries and the shoe-shop were more than thirty years in the past, and so covered over with gold that it seemed impossible to uncover them; nor had any one tried, so far as she knew. The Hallams as a family had been highly respected both in Worcester and in Leicester, and she often spoke of them, but never of the Browns, or of the old grandmother, and she was glad she had no near relatives to intrude themselves upon her and make her ashamed. She was very fond and very proud of Reginald, who was to her like a son, and who with the integrity and common sense of the Hallams had also inherited the innate refinement and kindly courtesy of his mother, a Bostonian and the daughter of a clergyman. As a rule she consulted him about everything, and after she received Mrs. Haynes’s letter she showed it to him and asked his advice in the matter of a companion.

“I think she would be a nuisance and frightfully in your way at times, but if Mrs. Haynes says you must have one, it’s all right, so go ahead,” Rex replied, and his aunt continued:

“But how am I to find what I want? I am so easily imposed upon, and I will not have one from the city. She would expect too much and make herself too familiar. I must have one from the country.”

“Advertise, then, and they’ll come round you like bees around honey,” Rex said, and to this suggestion his aunt at once acceded, asking him to write the advertisement, which she dictated, with so many conditions and requirements that Rex exclaimed, “Hold on there. You will insist next that they subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, besides believing in foreordination and everything in the Westminster Catechism. You are demanding impossibilities and giving too little in return. Three hundred dollars for perfection! I should say offer five hundred. ‘The higher-priced the better’ is Mrs. Walker Haynes’s motto, and I am sure she will think it far more tony to have an expensive appendage than a cheap one. The girl will earn her money, too, or I’m mistaken; for Mrs. Haynes is sure to share her services with you, as she does everything else.”

He spoke laughingly, but sarcastically, for he perfectly understood Mrs. Walker Haynes, whom his outspoken uncle had called “a sponge and a schemer, who knew how to feather her nest.” Privately Rex thought the same, but he did not often express these views to his aunt, who at last consented to the five hundred dollars, and Rex wrote the advertisement, which was as follows: