Rena's experiment

by Mary Jane Holmes

Colin was accustomed to hunt up things for his brother, and as a result of this investigation he found that Irene Burdick, the great-granddaughter of Mrs. Sandy McPherson the second, who was a relative of Nannie, was an orphan, with some means of her own, and was living with her aunt in New York, and also that she was spending a part of the summer in New London. Greatly to Colin’s surprise, the morning after he had imparted this information to his brother, he found him with his valise packed and himself dressed for a journey.

“I’m going to New London,” he said, “going, incog., for a look at Ireny. She has some of Nannie’s blood in her. Pretty thin by this time, running through so many channels, it is true, but if she suits me, all right; if not, all right, the same.”

He went to New London and registered as Mr. McPherson. He thought the Sandy might betray him, forgetting that his name was as strange to Irene Burdick as hers was to him. She was at the hotel with her aunt and he saw her in the dining-room and on the piazza and in the water, where she could swim like a duck, and he watched her with a strange stir in his heart as he thought, “She is some relation to Nannie. Poor little Nannie, dead more than sixty years ago.”

She was small, and thin, and brown-haired, and pale-faced, but her dark-gray eyes were wondrously beautiful, and once, when they flashed upon him as she ran past him on the beach in her dripping garments, he saw, or thought he saw, a look like Nannie, while the voice which said to him, “I beg your pardon,” as she whisked past him was certainly like the voice he had never forgotten.

“Nannie’s eyes and voice have come down through all these years, and Ireny will do,” he said.

He did not make himself known to her, as he stood a little in awe of her aunt, a typical New York woman, but he watched the girl for a week, and after his return home, made one of the strangest wills ever put upon record.

To his brother Colin he gave fifty thousand dollars, with the use of the house and farm until it was taken possession of by the young people, Reginald Travers and Irene Burdick, with whom he was to make his home as long as he lived, and to whom he willed the remainder of his fortune, in case they married each other, said marriage not to take place until both had had plenty of time in which to consider it and know their own minds. If either of them preferred some one else, he or she was to receive twenty thousand dollars, and the rest go to the other party. If the disaffection was mutual and neither cared for the other, each was to have ten thousand dollars, and the remainder of the property was to go half to Colin and half for the support of different missions named in the will. If both parties were agreeable to each other and the one died before the marriage took place, the survivor was to have the whole.

This will Sandy drew up himself after an immense amount of thought and many sleepless nights and consultations with Colin, who knew something of law and made some corrections and suggestions. When at last it was finished, duly executed and witnessed, Sandy put it with his private papers, telling no one except Colin, who had questioned the propriety of a will which might induce the young couple to marry whether they liked each other or not.

“That’s so,” Sandy said, recalling with a shudder his experience with Nannie. “They must not only be agreed, but they must love each other. There must be no one-sided affair. I’ll make that plain,” and he wrote a note which he put with his will, addressed to Reginald and Irene, charging them, as they hoped for happiness in this world and heaven in the next, not to enter into matrimony with each other unless their hearts were in it. “For be ye well assured that if any persons are joined together otherwise than as God’s word doth allow, their marriage is not lawful,” he wrote in conclusion. This sentence from the prayer-book Sandy knew by heart as he did the whole of the marriage ceremony. He had gone through with it twice and had repeated it to himself many and many a time when he thought it was to be Nannie standing by his side. This done he felt that he had performed his duty to his two wives by trying to bring their great-grandchildren together and giving them his money. It was due them, he thought, because Nannie had always stood between them and himself, and Irene was a distant relative and had her eyes and voice, and he ought to leave her something, as he must show respect to both his wives.

When he was first engaged to Nannie he had a very good likeness made of her by an artist sketching in the neighborhood, and after her death this was enlarged into a life-sized portrait, said by those who had known the girl to be very natural, especially the eyes. This picture hung in the drawing-room between the portraits of the first and second Mrs. McPherson, who looked rather stiff and prim and wholly unlike Nannie, with her soft brown hair and grayish-blue eyes, which followed one with a wistful, pathetic look, whose meaning Sandy understood as he had not when she was living. Many times a day Sandy stood before the portrait, studying the face and comparing it with that of the girl seen in New London. “They are alike,” he would say to himself, feeling more and more satisfied with his will. Several cautious inquiries he made at intervals with regard to Irene, hearing always the same report that she was sweet and pure and womanly; “not burdened with brains enough to make her strong-minded, but she is altogether lovely,” one of her teachers wrote to him of her; and he was satisfied in the belief that he had done well for the young couple, and he was planning to bring them together without their knowing his intentions, when death came suddenly, and on his ninetieth birthday he was found dead in his bed, with a lock of Nannie’s hair on the table beside him, and under his pillow a miniature of her, which had been made in Dresden from a photograph of the portrait in the drawing-room. They buried the miniature and the hair with the old man beside poor Nannie and between her and his first wife. They found the will and the whole town buzzed with its contents, wondering who Irene Burdick was and how she would take it and how Reginald Travers would take it. Colin wrote to him with regard to it and invited him to visit the McPherson place again, but decided to wait before sending a copy to Irene, who was travelling in Europe. Then public curiosity abated a little and waited for what would come next. Nothing came at once. Irene remained abroad and no one knew anything of her. Reginald attended to his business, if he had any, while Colin lived his lonely life at the McPherson place and the affairs in the town went on as usual.