The abandoned farm, and Connie's mistake

by Mary Jane Holmes

CONNIE’S MISTAKE

CHAPTER I
THE 4 CORNERS

Those who have lived on the mountain roads between Springfield and Albany, have heard of The 4 Corners, famous for the sign-post with its white lettering on a black background, the figure “4” large and conspicuous in the centre, instead of the word itself. Why it was painted thus no one knows. It has been there since the oldest inhabitant can remember, and when a high wind blew the post down and broke it another was put in its place and the old board retained. It is a reminder of past glories, and gives the Corners a kind of distinction, the people think, and they are very proud of their figure “4” and the sign-post, although few come there now inquiring the way to Albany, or other towns whose names are upon the board. Should you wish to visit “The 4 Corners” on a summer morning, take a Boston and Albany train for the way station, Millville, a town hemmed in by hills which look like mountains, and mountains which seem no higher than the hills. There is no daily public conveyance there now for The Corners two miles away, for the glory of the place was crushed beneath the wheels of the first locomotive which climbed the steep grade of the mountains and consigned stage coaches and the goodly cheer of the wayside inns to oblivion. Very few except those who live in the vicinity of The 4 Corners visit it, but sometimes you will find behind the station an old sorrel horse and a buggy, the latter with its square box seat telling of many years of service, and the former, the horse, sleek and fat and lazy, and untrammeled by check rein of any kind, seemingly asleep and paying no heed to the rush and roar and smoke of the train as it dashes by. But in his younger days, when he first saw and heard it, he started off at break-neck speed towards his home, which he reached with a broken thill and three wheels, the fourth having been left by the big gate as he entered the yard. Possibly Dr. Stannard may be there with one or the other of his horses, Pro and Con, named to suit a fancy of his. Failing old Sorrel and Pro and Con, there is a livery stable across the broad common where a conveyance can be had, and within fifteen minutes after you signify your wish to go to The 4 Corners, you will be driving along a road as smooth as an asphalt pavement, unless the wheels of your vehicle run into a rut full of stones washed down from the hills or up from the earth by some heavy fall of rain.

It is one of the pleasantest bits of road in all that section of country, winding up and up, with level stretches like plateaus between the ascents, and with delightful views of wooded hills, green in their summer dress, and mountains, purple with the haze which rests upon them when in the valley below the air is quivering with the heat of July and August. To your right you get glimpses of a pond where the white lilies grow in abundance, and whose waters help to turn the machinery of the manufacturing town at the foot of the hill. It is not a large place, but with its white houses and green blinds it makes a pretty picture, and you keep looking back at it as you bowl along the smooth road between hedges of blackberry bushes and low alders and red sumachs. Suddenly, at a turn in the road and a rise steeper than any before it, you reach a level plain, which seems to stretch away mile upon mile in every direction, and you look off upon farmhouses dotting the landscape, some red, some white and more brown and weather beaten. The doors and windows are flung open wide to admit the sunshine and the air, and the inmates are busy, some in the fields, some indoors, while others, in the early morning, when the whistle blew in the valley below, took their tin pails and hurried away to the great factory, whose chimney and roof and upper windows can be seen from the plateau.

“This is The 4 Corners. Where will you get out and shall I wait for you?” Jehu asks, and as your errand is not to any particular place, you tell him to put you down by the steps of the little church, the first building you come to. “Fifty cents,” he says, when you ask his price, and you pay it with alacrity and think it cheap when you remember the hills you have come up and look at the moist state of the horse, panting under the elm tree, with his head low down. “Allus in a chronic tucker,” Jehu says, when you call his attention to the animal, and suggest that he must at some time have been overworked or he would not tire so easily. “Mebby so. Bought him of a pedlar,” he says. “But now he’s in clover. It’s the marster’s religion to be good to hosses. I b’lieve he’ll go ridin’ into Heaven behind the finest span on the road. None of your yanked up heads, with straight checks and cut-off tails for him. No, marm. He says the Lord made a hosses’ tail like a woman’s hair, for ornament, and to brush off the flies, and if a hoss wants to see what is goin’ on behind him he’s goin’ to let him have a chance to see. Henriet ain’t abused. She’s had nervous prostration and is kep’ for short runs, that’s all,” and with his shirt sleeve he wipes the white drops from the neck of the horse, who rubs against him with a little whinny which no horse gives except he is well cared for and content.

You say you will walk back to the station, and when Jehu and Henriet disappear you seat yourself upon the steps of the church and begin to look about you, wondering if this is not the place in which to lay the first scene in the story you are going to write. The church seems very old, and looking over the door you see the date 1820, and begin to speculate upon the number of people who have gone in and out and worshipped inside its walls since its doors were thrown open to the public. There is a graveyard behind it, and you know that many of the worshippers are sleeping there, for the yard is full and the road leading into it is grass-grown like a lawn, showing that few wheels enter there now. There is a little red schoolhouse not far away, and near the schoolhouse is a small building, which serves the treble purpose of a dry-goods store, grocery and post-office, but there are no customers at this hour of the day, and there will not be many until afternoon, when Jehu and Henriet bring up the mail, then the proprietor will for a time be very busy, and sugar and tea and tobacco will be given out with the evening papers and the few letters which find their way to that office. From where you sit you can see the broad roads which cross each other at right angles and make The 4 Corners, one going north and south and the others continuing on towards Albany in one direction and towards Boston in another. This last was the great thoroughfare over which the stages came from the east and the west, before the limited express or fast mail or engine of any kind thundered through the peaceful country, bringing the mountaineers rather unwillingly into closer proximity with the outer world. When the surveyors first appeared in the vicinity of The 4 Corners, there was a council of war among the inhabitants. They didn’t want a railroad cutting up their farms and gardens and ruining Stannard’s Inn, which was famed as the best kept house in the State. But the railroad came two miles from Stannard’s Inn, which gradually became a thing of the past. The stage coaches came no more, for the cars carried the people where they wished to go and “The 4 Corners were nowhere,” the boy Ephraim Stannard said, as he saw the last stage that would ever stop at his father’s door roll down the hill, the driver blowing a farewell blast on the bugle with which he was wont to announce his approach.

A few changes were made, and then what had been Stannard’s Inn was transformed into the comfortable farmhouse which you see to your right in the southeast angle of The 4 Corners as you sit on the steps of the church. It is very large, with a wide hall in the centre and a big fireplace at the end, the glory and pride of the family, who would almost as soon part with an arm or foot as have the great chimney removed, with its fireplaces in so many rooms and its link with the olden time before stoves were in fashion or furnaces had been thought of. It was built by a Stannard some years before the church, and has been owned by the Stannards ever since. They are a thrifty race, and the Stannard farm is the finest in the neighborhood. Ephraim Stannard, the boy who watched with a swelling heart the last stage roll away is the owner, and a deacon in the church on whose steps you are sitting while you inspect The 4 Corners and the house which was once Stannard’s Inn.

Diagonally across the corner on the northwest angle is another and far more pretentious house, with gables and a bay window and a conservatory and a terraced garden down the hill behind it. This was once the Morris place, and Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Stannard were sisters, and both came, in their young womanhood, as brides to The 4 Corners, one as the wife of plain, honest-hearted Ephraim Stannard, a farmer, the other the wife of reckless, good-for-nothing Charles Morris, who broke her heart in two years and buried her in the yard behind the church and raised a tall monument to her memory, ran a wild career for a time and then died suddenly, leaving his only son, Charles Harold, to the care of his aunt, Mrs. Ephraim Stannard. For a while the Morris house was rented, but as time passed on and the village around the station grew in importance, few, who could afford to pay the rent, cared to live at The 4 Corners, and it was at last untenanted, while the decay of time crept over it until it would cost more to repair it than Ephraim Stannard, who had it in charge, felt warranted in putting upon it. The repairs, however, were made later on with a lavish hand, and you wonder that so much money should have been expended upon the place, and who the owners are. The windows and blinds are open, and a turbaned negress is sweeping the piazza. Otherwise you see no sign of life, and you hear later that the family are at the sea-shore. Around the farmhouse everything is quiet, except the motherly hen clucking to her brood of chickens and wandering unmolested through the yard. It seems a lonely place, but the view is so fine in every direction, the air so pure and the sky so blue, that you decide at last that no better spot can be found for the first scene of your story, which is to open years prior to the July morning when Henriet and Jehu took you up the old stage hill to The 4 Corners.

CHAPTER II
KENNETH AND HARRY

From the day when Mrs. Stannard took home her sister’s little boy, Charles Harold, or Harry, as he was usually called, she gave him a mother’s care equally with her own son, Kenneth, who was nearly the same age as his cousin, but as unlike him as one boy can be unlike another. “He is his father all over and can’t help it,” Mrs. Stannard would say, as an excuse for Harry’s faults, which, without his father, she would have condoned for the sake of his mother and because of his handsome face and affectionate, winning ways. At a very early age he began to assume an air of superiority over his associates, because of the money left him by his father, who, he said, was a gentleman and not a farmer, and came of a family which never had to work. And Harry wouldn’t work. Why should he? he said, when his board was paid and he was not beholden in any way to the uncle and aunt who cared for him. They could charge what they liked, he didn’t care. He should still have quite a fortune when he was twenty-one, after which he intended to travel and see the world and have a good time generally.