MISS RACHEL WHITTAKER, as the years went by, found herself sole occupant of the old family homestead. Father and mother had lived their long honored lives, finished their work, and entered into rest. Brothers and sisters had one after another made for themselves new homes and gone their different ways. Miss Rachel had passed safely through the romances of youth and settled down to sober middle-aged life. She had also resisted all persuasions of friends to sell the old place and make her home with some one of the various families. "Because there is no man in the case," said Miss Whittaker, with a slightly contemptuous emphasis on the "man," "is no reason why I should not have a home of my own."
So life went on in the old Whittaker mansion with the same zest and order as if the household numbered a half-dozen, instead of a single lone female and her servant. There was the same punctilious regard to times and seasons. The house-cleaning paroxysm invariably came on a certain day of the month, the Monday's wash flapped in the wind, and the Saturday's baking sent forth spicy odors as regularly as they had done for the last forty years. The cellar continued to be stocked each autumn with "Mercers" and "Pink-eyes," with "Greenings" and "Spitzenbergs," with "Golden Pippins" and "Pound Sweets." The closet shelves contained their due amount of riches: rows of jars and glasses, filled with peaches, pears, quinces and jellies. In short, everything pertaining to good cheer was literally brimming over.
And Miss Rachel fed her chickens, counted her eggs, watered her plants and pattered upstairs and down, or sat in her large, sunny room and read her books and magazines, or clicked her knitting needles to the ticking of the tall old clock. Or she gathered a few friends about her for a social tea drinking, or, flung wide the doors of the old house to a troop of nieces and nephews. It was not alone that Miss Whittaker was fond of company, but it was pleasant to keep up the old customs. It was a pitiful attempt to bring back, as far as possible, the old times. It was easier when gay chatter and merry prattle filled the rooms, to see the white-haired father and mother as of old in their arm-chairs by the fireside. The most prosaic have a vein of sentiment somewhere. Rachel Whittaker's took this form; she guarded with a reverence that amounted to idolatry every object and principle belonging to those two. Her father's old hat occupied the identical peg on which he himself hung it the last time he went out; and mother's darning basket stood on the little stand, with balls and thimble and glasses; the needle stuck in the ball of blue yarn just where her own fingers placed it so long ago. And so, housekeeping was something more than ministering to her own wants or entertaining friends; it was having things go on as "they" would like to see them go on.
This devoted daughter was careful, as well, to direct the family benevolences into the well-worn channels in which they were accustomed to run. The church subscription and the contributions to home and foreign missions, and the various "Boards," were as faithfully attended to as if good Squire Whittaker still sat at the head of his pew.
She even loved and perpetuated her father's prejudices, and was too apt, like him, to have more sympathy for the unfortunate in Booroboolagha, than for those at her own door. She was prone to set all these down as "drunken" or "shiftless." However, she had not much opportunity to cultivate the grace of charity in home work, as nearly all the little community were well-to-do.
One of Miss Rachel's duties as a good housekeeper was to see that the large stock of bedding, packed away in trunks and closets, was aired at frequent intervals. It was more than abundant for the needs of a large family—and the Whittaker family was a large one when gathered in the old home at Thanksgiving and the holidays. One day in early winter—"just the right sort of a day for airing bedclothes, so warm and bright," Miss Rachel declared—the lines in the yard were filled with blankets, quilts, comfortables, etc., and the piazza roofs were adorned with feather beds and pillows.
Among the passers-by was Mrs. Barnes. She lived in the little gray, weather-beaten house just under the hill. She was neither shiftless nor drunken, yet she was pitifully poor, and was a widow as well, with three little children. She could "dig," though to "beg" she was ashamed, and managed by hard work and much pinching and stinting to piece out a living. What a tempting sight was this goodly array to the half-frozen woman!
Nobody knew but herself how hard she had tried to get enough bedding together for the winter; how she had saved every old scrap and pieced it up and eked out the cotton with newspapers that she had secured from Miss Rachel; and yet, with all that, the old house was so open it was going to be hard work to keep warm in the long, cold nights.
She stood and looked at those soft double blankets and thick comfortables, and said to herself, "What a thing it must be, eh, to have such lots of bedclothes; to pile on as many as you please and be warm as toast all night! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—I don't know how many blankets, double at that, and ever and ever so many comfortables, besides quilts and spreads. And there she is with all them warm things and nobody to keep warm but herself, and here I be, with three little children and no warm things. Oh dear! Why couldn't the two 'a' gone together, I should like to know." Then she brushed away a tear with the corner of her shawl and went on her way.
Miss Whittaker sat near the side window and noticed that the Widow Barnes stopped and looked over the fence. Somehow she didn't like to see her standing there, her thin dress blowing in the wind, her faded old shawl drawn close about her, and with such anxious-looking eyes fixed on those blankets. But now the obnoxious figure in the old shawl moved on, and Miss Rachel could once more give her undivided attention to a very difficult piece of embroidery she was engaged in making for a fair.