Tracy Park: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

Frau Hirch looked at him in some surprise, but promised compliance with his wishes; and when in the middle of December he left Wiesbaden for Italy he had the satisfaction of knowing that the inmates of the Gretchen home were enjoying a bill of fare not common in institutions of the kind.

Another odd fancy had entered his brain, upon which he acted with his usual promptness. Every child not known to have been baptized, was to be christened with a new name, either Gretchen, or Jerrie, or Maude or Arthur, or Harold, or Frank.

'Suppose you have Tom, and Ann Eliza, and Hilly,' Jerrie suggested, and after a little demur Arthur consented, and the names of Tom, and Ann Eliza, and Billy were added to the list, which, in the course of time, created some little confusion in the Gretchen home, where Jerries, and Maudes, and Harolds, and Arthurs abounded in great profusion, these being the favorites of the children, who in most instances were allowed to choose for themselves.

It was not difficult to find in Wiesbaden people who had remembered Gretchen and the grand marriage she had made with the rich American, who afterward abandoned her. That was the way they worded it, and they remembered too, the little girl, Jerrine, whom, after her mother's death, the nurse, Nannine, took to her father's friends, since which nothing had been heard from her. Thus, had there been in Arthur's mind any doubt as to Jerrie's identity, it would have been swept away; but there was none. He had accepted her from the first as his daughter, and he always looked up to her as a child to its mother whom it fears to lose sight of.

The winter was mostly spent in Rome, where Harold and Jerrie explored every part of the city, while Arthur staid in his room talking to an unseen Gretchen, who afforded him almost as much satisfaction as the real one might have done. In May they visited the lakes and in June drifted to Paris, where Jerrie was overjoyed to meet Nina and Dick, who were staying with the Raymonds at a charming chateau just outside the city. Here she and Harold passed a most enjoyable week, and before she left she was made happy by something which she saw and which told her that Dick was forgetting that night under the pines, and that some day not far in the future he would find in Marian all he had once hoped to find in her. In Paris, too, she came one day upon Ann Eliza at the Bon Marché, with silks and satins piled high around her, and two or three obsequious clerks in attendance, for La Petite Américaine, who bought so lavishly everything she saw and fancied, was well known to the tradespeople, who eagerly sought her patronage and that of my lord monsieur, who inspired them greatly with his air of importance and dignity. Tom was enjoying himself immensely, and was really a good deal improved and a good deal in love with his little wife, whom he always addressed as Petite or Madame, and who was quite a belle and a general favorite in the American colony. Following a fashion, which Tom was sure had been made for his benefit, she had cut off her obnoxious red hair and substituted in its place a wig of reddish brown, which for naturalness and beauty was a marvel of art and skill, and became her so well that Tom really thought her handsome, or at least very stylish and stunning, which was better than mere beauty. They had a suite of rooms at the Continental, and there Harold and Jerrie dined with them in their private parlor, for Tom was quite too fine a gentleman to go to table d'hôte with the common herd. Ann Eliza's grand maid, Doris, was with her still, and had come to look upon her young mistress as quite as great a personage as the Lady Augusta Hardy, whom she had ceased to quote, and who, with her mother, Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, was now in the city, attended, it was said, by a Polish count, who had an eye upon her money. Once, when they were alone, Jerrie asked Tom when he was going home, and, with a comical twinkle in his eye, he replied, 'When I hear that my respected father-in-law has gone off with apoplexy, and not before.' Jerrie thought this a shocking speech, but she was glad to see him so happy, and, as she told Harold, 'so much more of a man than she had ever supposed he could be.'

That summer Harold and Jerrie spent in Switzerland, with the Raymonds and St. Claires and Tracys, while Arthur went to Wiesbaden to see to the Gretchen Home, which he found so much to his taste that he remained there until Harold and Jerrie, after a trip through Austria and Germany, joined him in November, when they went again for the winter to Italy, coming back in the spring to Wiesbaden, and because Arthur would have it so, taking up their abode for a while in the Gretchen Home, which had been greatly enlarged and improved, and now held thirty deserted and homeless children. Here, in April, Jerrie's little boy was born, in the same room and corner where Gretchen had died, and where Arthur again went down upon his knees and said the Lord's Prayer, to which he added a fervent thanksgiving for Jerrie spared and a baby given to him.

'I hoped it would be a girl,' he said, 'for then we should have called it Gretchen; but as it is a boy, suppose we name it Heinrich?'

'No, father,' Jerrie said decidedly, 'Baby is not to be Heinrich, or Arthur, or Harold, although I think the last the dearest name in the world,' and she put up her hand caressingly to the brown beard of the tall young man bending over to kiss her pale face and look at his son. 'We will call the baby Frank Tracy.'

And so Frank Tracy was the name given to the child, who was more like its father than its mother, and whom Arthur called Tracy, which he liked better, he said, than he did Frank.

They remained in Wiesbaden until June, then went to Switzerland and Paris, and in October sailed for home, where the Park House was ready for them, with no mistress to dispute Jerrie's rights and no master except the lawful one. Just out of town on a grassy ridge overlooking the river, a gentleman from New York had built a pretty little cottage, which, as his wife died suddenly, he never occupied, but offered for sale, with all its furniture and appointments.