Paul Ralston

by Mary Jane Holmes

For a little time the Ralstons returned to Boston, while the finishing touches were given to the house. Then they came back for the summer and there were signs of life everywhere around the handsome place. Occasionally Miss Hansford met the Ralston carriage with the Judge and his wife, a dainty little lady with a sweet, gentle face showing under her hat, which Miss Hansford decided was too youthful for a woman of her age to wear. As a rule, Miss Hansford did not take kindly to people who owned houses or cottages in Oak City, and only spent a few weeks in the summer there, bringing with them an assumption of superiority over their neighbors in the shape of horses and carriages and servants and city ways, which she did not like. They were pretty sure to be “stuck-ups” or nobodies.

Of the two she preferred the former. There had never been much money in the Hansford line, but there was plenty of blood of the bluest sort. Miss Hansford had the family tree at her fingers’ ends, and not a twig would she lop off, much less the branches reaching back to Oliver Cromwell and Miles Standish and a feudal lord in Scotland who held his castle days and weeks against a besieging party. At the Ralstons she first looked doubtfully. The old smuggler, whose bones were whitening off the Banks of Newfoundland, was not a desirable appendage, but to offset him was an ancestor who had heard the Indian war cry and helped to empty the chests of tea into the ocean on the night of the Boston Tea Party, while another had died at the battle of Bunker Hill, and these two atoned for shiploads of contraband goods and made the Ralstons somebody. Paul Miss Hansford had scarcely seen, except as he galloped down the avenue on his pony, until he came to ask forgiveness and make restitution. Then she was surprised to find how her heart went out to the boy, and after he was gone she began to consider the propriety of calling upon his mother.

“I don’t s’pose she cares whether I call or not,” she thought, “but I am about the oldest settler on the Island, and then if Miss Ralston returns it, it’ll be something to tell Mrs. Atwater, who has so much to say about her friends in Hartford.”

With all her war against the flesh, Miss Hansford had her weaknesses and ambitions, and one of the latter was to know and be known by Mrs. Ralston. This was an easy matter, for there was not a kinder-hearted or more genial woman in the world, and when she heard from her maid that Miss Phebe Hansford was in the drawing-room she went at once to meet her, and by her graciousness of manner put her at her ease and disarmed her of all prejudice there might have been against her. Miss Hansford was taken over the house to see the improvements and given a cup of tea and treated, as she told Mrs. Atwater when describing her call, “as if she and Miss Ralston were hand and glove.” The watermelon was not mentioned until just before Miss Hansford left, when Paul came in, accompanied by Jack Percy, who at sight of the woman sitting up so prim in a high-backed chair, with her far-seeing spectacles on, slunk out of sight. Paul, on the contrary, came forward, and, doffing his cap, offered her his hand.

“You have seen my son before?” Mrs. Ralston said, in some surprise, when Paul left the room.

“Why, yes. Didn’t he tell you about the melon he brought in place of the one——,” she was going to add “——he stole,” but something in Mrs. Ralston’s manner checked the harsh word before it was uttered.

Mrs. Ralston, however, understood, and her face flushed slightly as she replied: “I knew he took your melon, but not that he carried you another. I am very glad. Paul means to be a good boy. I hope you forgave him?”

“I did,” Miss Hansford exclaimed, “and I like him, too. I’m cross-grained, I know, but I’ve a soft spot somewhere, and your boy’s touched it and brought me here to see his mother. I hope we’ll be friends. I am a homely old woman with homely ways, and I hain’t anything like this,” glancing around the elegantly furnished drawing-room, “but I’ll be glad to see you any time.”

“I will surely come,” Mrs. Ralston said, offering her white hand covered with rings such as Miss Hansford considered it wicked to wear.

They did not look quite so sinful on Mrs. Ralston, who ever after was a queen among women as Paul was a king among boys. When Jack Percy’s mother came to the seashore and took him home Paul and Miss Hansford became fast friends. He called her “Aunt Phebe” and ate her ginger cookies and fried cakes and apple turnovers and huckleberry pies, and raced through her yard, and sometimes through her house, with his dog, Sherry, at his heels, upsetting things generally and seldom stopping to put in its place the stone tied in one corner of the netting which was tacked over the door to keep the flies out. This was a fashion followed by many of the cottagers whose doors were too wide to admit of screens. But Paul in his haste did not often think of it, and after a few attempts to make him remember the stone Miss Hansford gave it up and only held her breath when he came in like a whirlwind and out again as rapidly.