West Lawn, and The rector of St. Mark's

by Mary Jane Holmes

Rushing down the stairs and entering the library, he called loudly for his father, but he was not there. He had gone into the village, Jessie said, asking if it was anything in particular which he wanted. “Yes, of course. I want to tell him how it’s all day with him and Auntie. She don’t like him, and she does like Dr. West. Poor father! was there ever anything so mean?”

Here at last was one who in part expressed her own sentiments, and the impulsive Jessie replied:

“It is mean, I think, and I am so sorry for your father. Of course Dora intends to do right, and likes the doctor best, because he is not so old as your father; but young as I am, I should not think it so awful to marry a man of forty. Why, I think it would be rather jolly, for I could do just as I pleased with him. Yes, I blame Dora some—”

“I won’t have Aunt Dora blamed,” Johnnie roared, a reaction taking place the moment any one presumed to censure her. “No, I won’t have her blamed, so you just hush up. If she don’t want father she shan’t have him, and I’ll lick the first one who says she shall.”

Here Johnnie broke down entirely, and with a howling cry fled away into the garden, leaving Jessie perfectly amazed as she thought “how very unsatisfactory it was to meddle with a love-affair.”

Meanwhile Johnnie had seated himself beneath a tree in a sunny, quiet spot, where he was crying bitterly, and feeling almost as much grieved as when his mother died. Indeed, he fancied that he felt worse, for then there was hope in the future, and now there was none. Hearing the sound of the gate, and thinking his father had returned, he rose at last, and drying his eyes, repaired to the house, finding his conjecture true, for Squire Russell had come, and was reading his paper in the library. With his face all flushed with excitement, and his eyes red with weeping, Johnnie went to him at once, and bolting the door, began impetuously, “I would not mind it a bit, father. I’d keep a stiff upper lip, just as if I did not care.”

“What do you mean?” the Squire asked, in surprise, and Johnnie continued: “I mean that you and Aunt Dora have played out, and you may as well hang up your fiddle, for she don’t want you, and she does want Dr. West, and that’s why she has grown poor as a shark and white as chalk. I just found it out, standing by the door and hearing the greatest lot of stuff,—how he asked her to marry him once, and she got into a tantrum and wouldn’t say yes, though she wanted to all the time. What makes girls act so, I wonder?”

Squire Russell was too deeply interested to offer any explanation with regard to girls’ actions, and Johnnie went on:

“Then he went off to California, and didn’t write, as she hoped he would, and you and I asked her to have you, and she did not want to, but thought it was her duty, and wrote to ask the doctor, and he didn’t get the letter for weeks and weeks, and when he did he was most distracted, and cut stick for home; and Aunt Dora didn’t know it, and went off to the Lake, and sat with both feet in the water, and Mr. Robert West found her there and told her, and got her home, and she most had a fit, and, O thunder! what a muss they have kicked up!”

Here Johnnie stopped for breath, while his father grasped the table with both hands, as if he thus would steady himself, while he said slowly, with long breaths between the words, “How—was it—my son? Tell me—again. I—I do not—think—I understand.”