The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

The time was a hot July morning, with the thermometer at 85 in the shade, and rising. Not a leaf was stirring, and the air seemed to quiver with the heat of midsummer. The fog, which, early in the day, had hung over the meadows and the river, had lifted, and was floating upward in feathery wreaths towards a misty cloud in which it would soon be absorbed. Even the robins, of which there were many in the vicinity of the Prospect House, felt the effects of the weather and sat lazily upon the fence or the branches of the trees in which their nests were hidden. Only the English sparrows showed signs of life, twittering in and out of the thick ivy which covered the walls of what had once been a church, and was now used for public offices. It was a morning in which to keep quiet and cool if possible. “The hottest on record,” Uncle Zach Taylor, the proprietor of the Prospect House, said, as he examined the thermometer and wondered “What on earth Dot was thinking of to raise Cain generally in such weather.” The house was in a state of upheaval, and looked as if the annual cleaning was about to commence on a gigantic scale. In the back yard carpets were being beaten by two men, with the perspiration rolling down their faces, on the south and west piazzas furniture of every description was standing,—bureaus and washstands, tables, chairs and couches, with two or three old-time pictures in old-time frames. One was a representation of the famous Boston Tea Party. The Dartmouth, Elinor and Beaver were in close proximity to each other, their decks swarming with Indians breaking open chests and shovelling tea into the water. The others were family portraits, evidently husband and wife—she, small and straight and prim, in a high crowned cap with a wide frill shading her face—he, large and tall, with a black stock, which nearly touched his ears, and his forefingers joined together and pointing in a straight line at the right knee, which was elevated above the left. “A kind of abandoned position,” Uncle Zach was accustomed to say to his guests when calling their attention to this portrait of his wife’s great-grandfather, who assisted at the Tea Party, and gave, it was said, the most blood-curdling whoop which was heard on that memorable night. A blue cross on the figure of a man on the deck of the Dartmouth indicated which Zacheus had decided was his wife’s ancestor.

He was very proud of the pictures. “Wouldn’t take fifty dollars for em. No, sir,—and I don’t believe I’d take a hundred. Offer it, and see,” he frequently said. But no one had offered it, and they still hung in their respective places in the best room of the hotel except when, as was the case this morning, they were brought out and placed at a safe distance from the scene of confusion around them.

There were brooms and mops and scrubbing brushes and pails and the smell of soap suds in the vicinity of the wing at the west end of the hotel, where the fiercest battle was raging. Four women, with their sleeves rolled up and towels on their heads, were making a terrible onslaught on something, no one could tell what, for there was neither dust nor dirt to be seen.

“But, Lord land, it’s Dot’s way to scrub, and you can no more stop her than you can the wind. She’s great on cleaning house, Dot is, and you can’t control wimmen, so I let ’em slide,” Uncle Zach said to a young man whom, after his examination of the thermometer, he found on the north piazza, fanning himself with a newspaper and occasionally sipping lemonade through a straw and trying to get interested in Browning’s Sordello. After reading a page or two and failing to catch the meaning, he closed the book and welcomed Uncle Zach with a smile as he sank panting into a rocking chair much too large for him, for he was as small of stature as the Zacheus for whom he was named, and whose clothes he might have worn had they been handed down to so late a date as the 19th century. “This I call comfortable, and somethin’ like it. How be you feelin’ to-day? You don’t look quite as pimpin as you did two weeks ago, when you come here,” he said to the young man, who replied that he didn’t feel pimpin at all,—that the air was doing him good, and in a short time he hoped to be as well as ever.

Had you looked on the hotel register you would have seen the name, Craig Mason, Boston, and above it that of Mrs. Henry Mason, his mother. Craig had never been very strong, and during his college course at Yale, had applied himself so closely to study that his health had suffered from it, and soon after he was graduated he had come to Ridgefield, hoping much from the pure air and quiet he would find there. Nor could he have found a more favorable spot for nerves unstrung and a tired brain.

Just where Ridgefield is does not matter. There is such a place, and it lies on the Boston and Albany Railroad, which keeps it in touch with the world outside and saves it from stagnation. It is a typical New England town, full of rocks and hills and leafy woods, through which pleasant roads lead off and up to isolated farmhouses, some of them a hundred years old and more, and all with slanting roofs, big chimneys and low ceilings and little panes of glass.

These are the houses from which the young generation, tired of the barren soil and hard labor which yields so little in return, emigrates to broader fields of action and a more stirring life, but to which the father and the mother, to whom every tree and shrub is dear, because identified with their early married life, cling with a tenacity which only death can sever.

A river has its rise somewhere among the hills, and there are little ponds or lakes where in summer the white lilies grow in great profusion, and where in winter the girls and boys skate on moonlight nights, and men cut great blocks of ice for the Prospect House, which in July and August attracts many city people to its cool, roomy quarters. The house was built before the railroad was thought of, and in the days when stages plied between Boston and Albany and made it their stopping place for refreshments and change of horses. It was called a tavern when Zacheus Taylor brought his wife Dorothy there and became its owner. “Taylor’s Tavern” he christened it, and that name was on the creaking black sign in large white letters, and the little man always rubbed his hands together with pride when he looked at it and remembered that he was the Taylor whose name could be distinctly seen at a distance as you came up the street either from the east or the west. “A kind of beacon light,” he used to say, “tellin’ the played out traveler that there is rest for the weary at Taylor’s tavern.”

It was a pleasant sight to see him greet his guests with the cheery words, “Glad to see you. How are you? All fired tired, I know. Walk right in to the settin’ room. Dotty has got dinner most ready. Dotty is my wife, and I am Mr. Taylor,” with a nod towards the spot where Taylor’s Tavern swung. But if he were the Taylor, Dorothy was to all intents and purposes the Tavern,—the man of the house, who had managed everything from the time she took possession of her new home and began to understand that a clearer head was needed than the one on her husband’s shoulders if they were to succeed. Her head was clear, and her hands willing, and Taylor’s Tavern became famous for its good table, its clean beds and general air of homely hospitality. As years went by a few city people began to ask for board during the summer, and with their advent matters changed a little. There were finer linen and china and the extravagance of a dozen solid silver forks to be used only for the city boarders, and, when they were gone, to be wrapped in tissue paper and put carefully away in a piece of old shawl on a shelf in a closet opening from Mrs. Taylor’s sleeping room. Uncle Zacheus submitted to the silver forks and china and linen, but when, as his wife grew more ambitious, she told him that “Taylor’s Tavern” was quite too old fashioned a name for their establishment, and suggested changing it to “Prospect House,” he resisted quite stoutly for him. The change would necessitate a new sign, and “Taylor’s Tavern” would disappear from sight. It was in vain that he protested, saying it would be like putting away a part of himself. Dorothy was firm and carried her point, as she usually did. The sign was taken down and the sign post, too, for the new name was to be over the principal entrance to the house, as it was in cities.

The sign post Zacheus had carried to the barn and put up in a loft as a family relic and reminder of other days. The signboard with “Taylor’s Tavern” upon it was laid reverently away in the garret in a big hair trunk which had belonged to his mother and held a few things which no one but himself often saw, for Dolly did not interfere with the trunk. Carefully wrapped in a pocket handkerchief was a baby’s white blanket, and pinned on it was a piece of paper with “Johnny’s Blanket” written upon it. Johnny was a little boy who died when only three days old and his father had taken the blanket and put it away in the trunk with some articles sacred to boyhood, such as a pair of broken skates, a woolen cap, a cornstalk fiddle, withered and dried, but kept for the sake of the brother who made it and who had sailed away to Calcutta as cabin boy in a ship which was lost with all on board. Giving up the sign was harder than any one suspected, and when he felt more than usually snubbed he would go up to the hair trunk and look at it with affection and regret and as nearly as he was capable of it with a feeling that it embodied all the real manhood he had known since his marriage and with its disappearance his identification with the place had disappeared, leaving him a figure-head, known as, Uncle Zach, or Mrs. Taylor’s husband.