They went to Florida where they spent the winter and Roy grew brown as a berry with being so much on the lakes and rivers and Fanny grew bilious eating too many oranges, and both were perfectly happy. Early in the spring they returned to Boston, where they staid with Roy’s father until June, when Fanny suggested that, instead of going to some fashionable watering place, they spend the summer in Ridgefield. Her father had sent her a deed of his Dalton property, and now that she owned it she began to have an affection for the old ruin and wanted to see it, she said to Roy, who answered, “All right. I’d rather go where I can have you to myself than to a hundred watering places where everybody will be admiring the beautiful and accomplished Mrs. Roy Mason; that’s what the reporters would call you.”
“Horrid!” Fanny said. “I’m not beautiful, and I haven’t a single accomplishment. I am just Fanny,—your wife,” and she nestled close to him, with a look in her blue eyes which told Roy how much he was to her.
They stopped at the Prospect House more for the sake of its association with their parents than for the real comfort there was there now. The ruling spirit, Dotty, had been stricken with paralysis, and was more helpless than Uncle Zach, who, a martyr to rheumatism, sat in his wheel chair all day, unable to walk more than a few steps at a time, with the help of two canes. He had received cards to their wedding, and had sent his regrets in a long letter in which he deplored the fact that he could not get some good out of his “swaller tail, which he wore to Craig’s weddin’ when he didn’t or’to wear it, and which was as good as new.” Mention, too, was made of Dot’s plum-colored satin, which was now too small for her, especially the sleeves. He was glad they remembered him. An invite was good to stay home on, and he was their respectful and venerable friend to command. Zacheus Taylor, Esquire, and poor Dotty’s X mark, “for she can’t use her hands to write more than that.”
Uncle Zach had grown childishly weak with his trouble and his years, and received Roy and Fanny with floods of tears, lamenting Dotty’s inability to serve them.
“I never expected to see you both agin, and when you was here together I told Dot so,” he said; “but here you be, and I’m mighty glad. I’m havin’ hard sleddin’. Old age ain’t a pleasant thing, with rheumatiz’ and paralysis, and maybe soffnin’ of the brain, and the tarvern all run down,—and Dotty played out.”
The best the house afforded was theirs, he said, and he insisted upon their taking the saloon, as he still called the parlor Mrs. Tracy had occupied.
“You’ll be better off there by yourselves,” he said. “The boarders ain’t what they used to be. The Tremont has got the big bugs.”
Poor Dotty couldn’t talk much or move, and Fanny spent hours with her, anticipating her wishes by her looks and greatly smoothing her path to the grave. Roy staid a good deal with Uncle Zach, who asked numberless questions about Mark and Jeff.
“I wish they was here. I want to see ’em, and so does Dot, though she can’t say so. Strange how I miss her talk and blowin’ me when I deserved it. I’m like a ship without a captain, but my laigs trouble me the most. Feel like sticks when I try to walk, and Sam Baily don’t push me even, at all,—jolts awfully over the stones. Yes, I wish they was here. Mabby they’d come, if they knew how used up Dotty and I be. Jeff could lift her and wheel me. Write and tell ’em I want ’em.”
Roy was not very enthusiastic on the subject, but he made no objection when Fanny wrote what Uncle Zach had said and added her own entreaties for her father to come.