Betsey Pilrig, who was passing through the room, stopped in amazement. “Have you been inside the Clergy house?” she demanded.
Thurley told her experience.
Betsey sought refuge in the nearest rocking-chair. “Then, listen, Thurley, for as long as you’ve come to stay a spell, you ought to know—and I guess I can tell you as well as Hopeful Whittier or Ali Baba. A long time ago, most thirty-five years, that house was lived in by Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel Clergy, of New York City, and they were worth more money than they could count, but all they cared for was Abigail, their daughter, and they were going to leave her everything they owned just because they loved her so much. But they always planned she would marry some one and be as happy as a queen.”
Betsey paused for a properly doleful sigh. “As I was sayin’, my cousin, Hopeful Whittier, had married, and her husband, Jim Whittier, was drowned on the Great Lakes three months after their weddin’ day. Hopeful came back to Birge’s Corners, just like to die of grief. Mrs. Clergy heard of it and came to see her, and she says, ‘My dear, come and live with us—Abby needs a maid of her own these days, and I think she’d like you.’ Of course poor Hopeful didn’t know about bein’ a lady’s maid and fixin’ hair and lace and all that Miss Abby wanted done. But she was so heartbroken for Jim—they never found his body—that she was glad to go, and the Clergys were so good to her and Miss Abby so kind and willin’ to show her how she wanted everything fixed that Hopeful was as happy as she could be—without forgettin’ Jim.
“In them days the Clergy house—The Fincherie is its name—was never without guests. My stars, I’ve known as many as thirty extra people packed in there for a week at a time, and every other house on the shore the same with balls and basket picnics, charades and corn bakes and sailin’ trips every minute in the day! But out of every one there—and there was the grandest and the finest in the land—there was no one half so beautiful nor gay nor kindhearted as Abby Clergy—no one could deny but what it was so. Her father’s money and her fine clothes and jewels and her beauty didn’t turn her head a mite.
“Let me see—I guess she was around seventeen when Hopeful first went there—girls was more advanced at seventeen than they are now. That fall, when it came time to close the house and go to New York, Abby Clergy tells Hopeful she wants her to come and live in their New York house the same as if she was one of these high-flyer maids they bring from Paris. Of course Hopeful was mighty glad, for she had come to love Miss Abby and she knew Jim would have told her to go, if he could have done it. But before they closed the house, they give a harvest dance, so they called it—late in September it was—and I never did see such a time. The stables were packed with teams, and the steam cars ran a special train to South Wales for some of the people, and a fellow in New York sent the food, and champagne just flowed like the lake water. They had fiddlers from New York, and a florist with a load of flowers to fix up every room, and nobody else on the lake shore thought of going home until the Clergys’ harvest dance was over.
“Hopeful used to tell me everything that was goin’ on and she often says, ‘Betsey, that girl is too beautiful and good to live—I’m afraid she is goin’ to be taken.’ I laffed at her and said she’d marry a fine gentleman, and Hopeful would watch their children playin’ on the beach, but Hopeful always said no, she had a feeling things wouldn’t be right. Now Abby Clergy was beautiful—just five feet tall, she was, and slight as a reed. She had big, black, satiny eyes and an ivory skin. It was natural for her never to have color and her hair was blue black, combed up high and fastened with a carved comb, and, when she laffed, Ali Baba said her teeth was prettier than her strings of pearls—real pearls they was, too—but I must tell you something about Ali Baba.
“Nobody never thought of calling Joshua Maples anything but Josh, until Miss Abby named him Ali Baba after he started bein’ her father’s summer coachman and winter caretaker. One day he says to her, ‘Miss Abby, don’t you ever worry about anybody’s stealin’ this house. Just dismiss it from your mind the minute you leave here in the fall—and I ain’t goin’ to let any one steal you, neither.’ And she laffs and says, ‘Why, who wants to steal me?’ And that was a joke, because Abby Clergy had more beaux than she could remember their names, but she just smiled at them all and never cared any more for any particular one than she did for any particular rose that was bloomin’ outside her window. ‘A lot of thieves,’ says Josh—he was pretty smart in talking—‘and I guess you’ll have to ask me as well as your Pa before I give my consent.’ That sort of tickled her and she jumped up and down and says, ‘You be Ali Baba, and I’ll let you watch over the forty thieves,’ and from then on he was Ali Baba to her, and nobody else ever called him any other name.
“So the harvest party was a grand success. But there come down from New York a stranger, Count Sebastian Gomez, who was introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Clergy as an Eyetalian nobleman with a lot of castles and such truck over in Europe and more money than he wanted. He was a fine-lookin’ fellow, tall and straight as an arrow, and he had a curled-up mustache and big, bold eyes that looked you clean through. He was dressed way up in G, and could talk a lot of these here foreign languages, and he wanted to kiss all the ladies’ hands and everybody thought he was the finest sort of fellow they could ever wish to see....
“But Hopeful Whittier didn’t like him, and she says, when she saw how he was makin’ up to Miss Abby, flatterin’ her and kissin’ her hand and writin’ his name down for all the dances and starin’ angry-like at any other fellow who tried to look at her—she thought then that Miss Abby was makin’ a mistake. But if this count hadn’t eyes for any one but Miss Abby, Miss Abby didn’t have eyes for any one but the count. And Hopeful told me that, when she undressed Miss Abby that night, Miss Abby says to her, ‘Hopeful, I am a happy girl—I’m so happy I don’t know how to understand it—I’ve seen some one I could love better than my own dear father and mother.’ Hopeful tried to warn her, she didn’t know why, but Miss Abby wouldn’t listen, and she sat up half the night, Hopeful says, thinkin’ about him.