CHAPTER I.
AT THE FARM HOUSE.
It was a very pleasant, homelike old farm house, standing among the New England hills, with the summer sunshine falling upon it, and the summer air, sweet with the perfume of roses and June pinks, filling the wide hall and great square rooms, where, on the morning when our story opens, the utmost confusion prevailed. Carpets were up; curtains were down; huge boxes were standing everywhere, while into them two men and a boy were packing the furniture scattered promiscuously around, for on the morrow the family, who had owned and occupied the house so long, were to leave the premises and seek another home in the little village about two miles away. In one of the lower rooms in the wing to the right, where the sunshine was the brightest and the rose-scented air the sweetest, a white-faced woman lay upon a couch looking at and listening to a lady who sat talking to her, with money and pride and selfishness stamped upon her as plainly as if the words had been placarded upon her back. The lady was Mrs. Marshall-More, of Boston, whose handsome country house was not far from the red farm house, which, with its rich, well-cultivated acres, had, by the foreclosure of a mortgage she held upon it, recently come into her possession, or rather into that of her half brother, who had bidden it off for her.
Mrs. Marshall-More had once been plain Mrs. John More, but since her husband’s death, she had prefixed her maiden name, with a hyphen to the More, making herself Mrs. Marshall-More, which, she thought, had a very aristocratic look and sound. She was a great lady in her own immediate circle of friends in the city, and a greater lady in Merrivale, where she passed her summers, and her manner toward the little woman on the couch was one of infinite superiority and patronage, mingled with a show of interest and pity. She had driven to the farm house that morning, ostensibly to say good-bye to the family, but really to go over the place which she had coveted so long as a most desirable adjunct to her possessions. What she was saying to the white-faced woman in the widow’s cap was this:
“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Graham, and I hope you do not blame me for foreclosing the mortgage. I had to have the money, for Archie’s college expenses will be very heavy, and then I am going to Europe this summer, and I did not care to draw from my other investments.”
“Oh, no, I blame no one, but it is very hard all the same to leave the old home where I have been so happy,” Mrs. Graham replied, and Mrs. Marshall-More went on: “I am glad to hear you say so, for the Merrivale people have been very ill-natured about it and I have heard more than once that I hastened the foreclosure and intend to tear down the old house and build a cottage, which is false.”
To this Mrs. Graham made no reply, and Mrs. Marshall-More continued:
“You will be much better off in the village than in this great rambling house, and your children will find employment there. Maude must be eighteen, and ought to be a great help to you. I hear she is a sentimental dreamer, living mostly in the clouds with people only known to herself, and perhaps she needed this change to rouse her to the realities of life.”
“Maude is the dearest girl in the world,” was the mother’s quick protest against what seemed like disapprobation of her daughter.
“Yes, of course,” was Mrs. Marshall-More’s response. “Maude is a nice girl and a pretty girl and will be a great comfort to you when she wakes up to the fact that life is earnest and not all a dream, and in time you will be quite as happy in your new home as you could be here, where it must be very dreary in the winter, when the snow-drifts are piled up to the very window ledges, and the wind screams at you through every crevice.”
“Oh-h,” Mrs. Graham said, with a shudder, her thoughts going back to the day when the blinding snow had come down in great billows upon the newly-made grave in which she left her husband, and went back alone to the desolate home where he would never come again.