“The next day the guests went drivin’, and the count managed to set beside Miss Abby when they rode and at the basket picnic and never to let her out of his sight. Abby’s Pa and Ma seemed pleased about it, and they told their friends Count Gomez was of royal blood and he had letters provin’ he was all he said he was. Well, that didn’t win over Hopeful Whittier nor Ali Baba, but they didn’t matter, of course. So Hopeful went back to New York with the family, and Ali Baba closed up the place. In the middle of the winter I got a letter from Hopeful sayin’ that the count and Miss Abby were engaged, and all New York was talkin’ about the foreign alliance, and how grand it was to marry a nobleman and be a real Eyetalian countess. She said Miss Abby was so happy she just floated about and that she was having trunks and trunks of dresses made because he was goin’ to take her to his palace over in Italy and she wanted his family to think well of her. I didn’t like the sound of it, neither, but I didn’t think no more about it until in the spring, the last of Easter week, a coach and two bay hosses just came tearin’ into the Corners at dusk and put up at the Button livery.
“Late that night Hopeful come up here lookin’ as if she had seen a ghost. ‘Good heavens, Betsey,’ she says, ‘we’ve brought Abby Clergy home a ravin’ maniac!’ Well, I didn’t know what to answer, but she went on to tell me that just before the weddin’ was to take place—on Easter Monday night—and all New York was invited to come and see an American girl become an Eyetalian countess, didn’t that scoundrel clear out and they find he had a wife and five children hidin’ up in Michigan and that he wasn’t nothin’ but a common barber! It was a grand swindle—you know this idea of our girls marryin’ them noblemen was kind of new those days and nobody was smart enough to ask all the questions that they would have done if it was to happen now. It seems he had taken a lot of Miss Abby’s jewelry and she had loaned him money, him tellin’ her his ‘allowance’ was bein’ held up and such truck, and she, poor innocent lamb, believin’ him!
“They didn’t try to do nothin’ to him; the shame was enough to bear without goin’ any further. Hopeful said Mr. Clergy walked the floor all that night, and, finally, he told his lawyer, ‘Let the wretch go, thank God the girl was spared the farce of a marriage.’ So I guess the count and his wife and five children took the Clergy money and opened a shavin’ parlor somewheres in Michigan and I suppose God took care of him when He got around to it.
“But it took Abby Clergy’s reason for the time bein’, and it killed her Ma. When word came about him bein’ false and all, Abby was tryin’ on her weddin’ dress and she fainted dead away. When she come to and they undressed her, she fought ’em like a tiger and kept screamin’ out that it was not so. Finally, they got her calmed down and the doctor came and she told him she never wanted to see any one again; she wanted to go and live for a whole year at the old summer home at Birge’s Lake, where she thought she could forget her sorrow and bury her shame. But she didn’t want to see nor speak to any one—not even her father or mother; she just wanted Hopeful to stay with her.
“I guess if she had asked for the moon they’d have tried to have got it for her. So they packed up her things, and she and Hopeful came all the way to the Corners by team, and Ali Baba hurried up and made new fires in the house and Miss Abby was put to bed as helpless as a newborn child.
“For three months she had the real old-fashioned kind of brain fever. I guess they don’t have it any more. Some say it has left her queerer than others; I don’t know as to that; I only know that Hopeful never stirred from the Fincherie from the day Miss Abby came until she was out of danger, and then they had to tell her her ma had died six weeks before. Miss Abby had a relapse and never talked except when she was out of her head. She’d moan, ‘Sebastian—Sebastian—I love you—’ And she’d think Hopeful was that Eyetalian fraud and she’d hold out her little hands to her and beg him not to leave her and to prove he never had no wife!
“When she got through with that, it was fall and she had never set eyes on no one but Hopeful and the doctor. She sent for her father, and in Hopeful’s presence she said she wanted to live the rest of her life at the Fincherie with Hopeful and Ali Baba as her servants and she never wanted to take part in the world again, that she was not crazy, she knew her own mind. But she had a broken heart and she could not bear to let the world see all she had suffered.
“It ’most killed her pa—her hair had turned gray and she didn’t weigh more’n a handful—but she kept beggin’ him, and, finally, the doctor said time might change her, but it was no sense to argue with her now—so her father said she could stay there, and stay she has! It wasn’t long after that when her poor father died, but Miss Abby never went to the funeral nor shed a tear. Seems as if all the love and tears God gave her were spent on that rascal. She had the lawyer sell the town property and put the money in banks, and some of the furniture they sent on to the Fincherie, but she never let Ali Baba unpack it. And there she lived and there she lives—every day at four she drives in that old coupé with Ali Baba as the coachman. Outside of that, or maybe settin’ on the back balcony when it’s pretty hot weather, Miss Abby never shows herself. Nobody dares to go there neither. At first, the old friends tried to make her be herself, but she wouldn’t listen or even see ’em. She’s a sort of living death, like, wearin’ the same old clothes and stayin’ in her two front rooms year in and year out. Of course Hopeful has given up her life, you might say, to Miss Abby; she could have married many’s the time, but somehow she’s stayed faithful and so has Ali Baba. I guess it was meant to be so. Sometimes Miss Abby tries to thank Hopeful for all she’s done and she gives her presents of money—but she can’t never seem to take an interest in anything, and when it comes the anniversary of her weddin’, Hopeful says she unlocks her trunks and keeps tryin’ on all her weddin’ dresses and cryin’ soft and pitiful. The family lawyer has had doctors and doctors and mind-healers and faith-healers and all such people but nothing never done any good. She just lives in the house like a little old shadow, never hurtin’ no one and doin’ nothin’ wrong—sort of hauntin’ herself, that’s the best way to say it. She’s only fifty-five—but she seems seventy—sort of childish and sharp spoke, if things don’t go to suit, and she’s talkin’ of putting up a big wall around the house so’s nobody could even walk across the lawn.... Well, well, Thurley, so you got inside!”
Philena’s hands were clasped in excitement. “Isn’t it sad, Granny?” she said. “I want to cry.”
Thurley shook her head. “I don’t. I’d like to write a story about it and set it to music and rent a big hall. Then I’d have people pay to come in and hear me sing it to them and I’d rather make the people cry.”