At first there were a few homesick letters from Hal, as he began to find his level and didn’t like it.
“Andover is not what it is cracked up to be,” he wrote to Kenneth. “Some of the fellows don’t know a gentleman when they see him. Think of their trying to make me a fag. Not much! I wish you were here to whale ’em.”
After a few weeks the letters were more cheerful in tone. The boys had found out that he was somebody, and he had made the acquaintance of a real nice chap,—rich, too. He laid great stress on rich, as if that were the main thing in favor of Tom Haynes, who lived in Kentucky near where Harry’s father was born.
“He has heard of the Morrises, and knows they are a tip-top family,” he wrote. “A little fast, maybe, as one of them once ran a bowie knife into somebody who called him a liar. But that’s nothing. That shows grit, Tom says, and he knows. We have a long vacation at Christmas and New Year’s, nearly two weeks, and Tom has hinted pretty broadly that he’d like to spend it with me at The 4 Corners. You see, I’ve done some tall bragging about my house, the Morris Place, and have spoken of Aunt Mary as the housekeeper, and so on. You know the blacks south are all uncles and aunts, and somehow Tom has got it into his head that Aunt Mary and Uncle Ephraim came from Kentucky with my father, and are like,—well, like his Aunt Dinah and Uncle Sam he talks so much about. I never meant him to think so, for I am not quite a cad; but when I saw that he had the idea, and that because of it he thought more of me and stood for me against the wretches who were going to toss me in a blanket I couldn’t tell him. How could I? He’d like to see the Morris Place, and says he’d have such fine times with sleigh rides and skating and eating Aunt Mary’s pones. I wonder what they are! I told him she made No. 1 fried cakes, but I never said a word about pones! He has a colored boy at home, who comes into his room every cold morning and makes a fire before he is up, and brushes his clothes and blacks his shoes. My eye! What would he think of that blizzardy north chamber, where we sleep and nearly shake the teeth out of our heads with the cold, as we dress and hurry downstairs to wash in a tin basin and wipe on a roller-towel! No, sir! I could not have him at the farmhouse, and so I had to make up some yarn about Aunt Mary’s having the rheumatism and Uncle Ephraim the gout, and nobody to do anything but a boy, Kenneth! And I honestly believe he thinks you black with the rest, although I never hinted such a thing. Why, you are as white as the driven snow compared to me, a liar and blackguard. But what was there left for me but to lie, and I can do that easy, you know,—that is, I can blarney a fellow till he don’t know whether he is himself or someone else. I blarneyed Tom till he wrote to his mother, who has invited me to spend the holidays at Cedar Bank, and I have accepted. Won’t it be jolly? And, by the way, I wish Uncle Ephraim would add a little to my allowance. Tom thinks me a kind of millionaire, and it won’t do to go empty-handed. I’d like to see you all, of course, but you will keep, and the invitation to Cedar Bank won’t. Give my love to Aunt Mary and kiss her for me, and Uncle Ephraim, too, if he will let you. Give old Chance a pat on the head. I think a good deal of him as a dog. Tom knows about him and the dozen cats,—I think I said two dozens,—who eat out of the trough. He wants to see them awfully. He is nearly as great on cats as you are.
“Very lovingly, your cousin,
“Hal.”
Kenneth read this letter twice, with a swelling in his heart as if it would burst. For himself he did not care, but he did not like to have his father and mother mistaken for darkies. It was humiliating, and it hurt him. He didn’t like the way Harry spoke of the house, as if he were ashamed of it, but more than all he was disappointed. He had anticipated Harry’s coming home, and wanted to show him his standing in the Millville Academy, and to compare notes as to which knew the most of Latin, and to show off his dancing steps and bows, and possibly get Hal to coach him a little, he was so well posted on such matters. Then there were so many things to make Harry’s home coming pleasant. Quantities of walnuts and butternuts and chestnuts, which he had gathered during the autumn, when he had a leisure hour, were ranged in rows on the ball-room floor. The finest clusters of grapes had been wrapped in paper bags, and put away where they would not freeze, for Harry was fond of grapes, and apples, too, and the largest and best of Baldwins and Kings were on the top of the barrels in the cellar ready for him, while over and above all was the present Kenneth had bought for him with money saved from his own rather scanty allowance, a pearl-handled pocket knife with three blades, for which he had given a dollar. There were the soft wool mittens his mother had knit and the skates his father had bought, all waiting for Hal, who was not coming to claim them, and whose friend, Tom Haynes, thought them all negroes and the Morris Place a palace! It was hard, and Kenneth swallowed and winked a good many times before he could force back the tears from his eyes and the lump from his throat.
“Hal does not care for us; he thinks we are dirt, and is ashamed to bring his fine friend here,” he said, as he handed the letter to his mother, who was scarcely less hurt and disappointed. “Yes, he’s ashamed of us,” Kenneth repeated to himself that night, as he went up to the blizzardy north room, which never seemed to him quite so cold as it did now in the light of Harry’s criticism. “’Tis cheerless, that’s a fact,” Kenneth thought, as the wind went screaming past the house, driving before it a cloud of snow, some of which sifted in upon the bare floor through the shaky window. “Yes, ’tis cheerless and cold, and after all I don’t much blame Hal for wanting to go where a nigger makes a fire in the morning before he is up, but, by golly! he needn’t let ’em think father and mother are nigger aunties and uncles, and if I live I’ll show him somebody he nor forty Tom Hayneses won’t be ashamed of! Yes, I will!”
The last words were said sleepily, for Kenneth’s head was on the pillow, and his last glimmer of consciousness was that he was to make something of himself of which his cousin would not be ashamed.