Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

“How angry Jimmie was,” she continued, “when you brought him home, and how awfully he swore. It makes you shudder, don’t it?” and she turned to Annie, who had shivered either with cold or horror at Jimmie’s profanity. “He was a bad boy once, but I most know he’s better now. Maybe, mother, this was a real nice girl and if you’d let Jimmie alone he might have become attached to her, and she have been his wife by this time. Then he would not have joined the Rebel army. Don’t you think you and Tom were a little too severe on Jimmie sometimes?”

“Perhaps so,” was the faint response, as Mrs. Carleton looked out upon the wintry landscape, seeing there visions of a handsome, boyish, tearful face, flushed with anger and entreaty as its owner begged of her not to take him back to Boston, which he hated, but leave him where he was, saying that the little girl at the Pequot House had already done him more good than all the sermons preached from the pulpits of the Bay State Capital.

But she had disregarded Jimmie’s wishes, and from that time forward he had pursued a course of recklessness ending at last in prison. With a half-regretful sigh Mrs. Carleton thought of all this, and in her heart she blamed herself for some of her boy’s disobedience. But it could not now be helped, and with another sigh, she turned toward Rose, still speculating as to what the result might have been, had Jimmie been suffered to follow up his first, and so far as she knew, only fancy.

“What do you suppose would have happened if Jimmie had staid in New London, and this scheming aunt, whom mother feared far more than the Pequot, had staid there too?” she asked of Annie, forgetting that the particulars of the affair had not been repeated.

But it did not matter, for Annie answered all the same. She was sitting now with her back to Mrs. Carleton, while, so far as Rose was concerned, her face was in the shadow. Consequently Rose could not see its expression, as she replied:

“Nothing probably would have come of it. I imagine the Pequot, as you call her, was not more than fourteen, and you know how easily we forget the fancies of that age. She was undoubtedly pleased with the evident admiration of your handsome brother, and watched anxiously it may be, for the evenings when, with others of his comrades, he came to the hotel; but a closer acquaintance would have resulted in her knowing the deception about the name, and after that she would not have cared for him. If he really liked her he would not have imposed upon her thus. She’s forgotten him ere this, and is probably a married woman.”

“Perhaps so,” Rose replied; “I wish I knew. Jimmie didn’t mean to deceive her long. He took the name Dick Lee, partly in sport, and partly because he didn’t wish his teacher to know how often Jim Carleton was at the Pequot House, when he thought him somewhere else. After he began to like her, and saw how pure and good and truthful she was, he hated to tell her, but had made up his mind to do so when mother took him away.”

“He might have written,” Annie said, “and she may have been silly enough to cry over his abrupt and unexplained departure.”

“Mother wouldn’t let him write,” Rose rejoined, laughingly. “She watched him closely, and got Tom interested too. Poor Jimmie, I wonder if that girl ever thinks of him now?”

“She may, but I dare say she is glad your mother took him home. She has outlived all that fancy,” and Annie’s white fingers, on one of which the wedding ring was shining, worked nervously together.