The Ferrier mansion had but one room, and the Ferrier plenishing was simple. The wardrobe also was simple. For state days, monsieur had a state costume, the salient points of which were an ample white waistcoat and an ancient and well-preserved silk hat which he wore very far back on his head, both these articles being part of his wedding gear. Madame had also her gala attire, with which she always assumed an expression of complacent solemnity. This toilet was composed of a dark-red merino gown, a dingy broché shawl, and a large straw bonnet, most unconsciously Pompadour, with its pink flowers and blue ribbons. For great occasions, the children had shoes, bought much too large that they might not be outgrown; and they had hats nearly as old as themselves. The girls had flannel gowns that hung decently to their heels; the boys, less careful of their finery, had to go very much patched.
On Sundays and holidays, they all walked two miles to hear Mass, and each one put a penny into the box. On Christmas Days, they each gave a silver quarter, the father distributing the coin just before the collector reached them, all blushing with pride and pleasure as they made their offering, and smiling for some time after, the children nudging and whispering to each other till they had to be set to rights by their elders. Contented souls, how simple and harmless they were!
Into the midst of this almost unconscious poverty, wealth dropped like a bombshell. If the sea of oil under their cabin and pasture had suddenly exploded and blown them sky-high, they could not have been more astounded; for oil there was, and floods of it. At almost any part of the little tract of land they had bought for next to nothing, it was but to dig a hole, and liquid gold bubbled up by the barrelful.
Mr. Ferrier, poor man! was like a great clumsy beetle that blunders out of the familiar darkness of night into a brilliantly lighted room. Perhaps something aspiring and only half dead in him cried out through his dulness with a voice he could not comprehend; perhaps the sudden brightness put out what little sight he had: who knows? He drank. He was in a dream; and he drank again. The dream became a nightmare; and still he drank—drank desperately—till at last nature gave way under the strain, and there came to him an hour of such utter silence as he had not known since he lay, an infant, in his mother’s lap. During that silence, light broke in at last, and the imprisoned light shone out with a strange and bewildered surprise. The priest, that visible angel of God, was by his side, instructing his ignorance, calming his fears, calling up in his awakening soul the saving contrition, leaving him only when the last breath had gone.
After the husband went child after child, till but two were left, Annette and Louis. These, the eldest, the mother saved alive.
We laugh at the preposterous extravagance and display of the newly enriched. But is there not something pitiful in it, after all? How it tells of wants long denied, of common pleasures that were so distant from those hopeless eyes as to look like shining stars! They flutter and run foolishly about, those suddenly prosperous ones, like birds released from the cage, like insects when the stone is lifted from them; but those who have always been free to practise their smooth flight through a sunny space, or to crawl at ease over the fruits of the world, would do well not to scorn them.
The house Mrs. Ferrier had built for herself in the newest and finest avenue of Crichton was, it must be confessed, too highly ornamented. Ultra-Corinthian columns; cornerstones piled to the very roof at each angle, and so laboriously vermiculated that they gave one an impression of wriggling; cornices laden with carving, festoons, fancy finials wherever they could perch; oriels, baywindows, arched windows with carven faces over them—all these fretted the sight. But the view from the place was superb.
When our three flower-bearers reached the gate, they turned to contemplate the scene.
All round, a circle of purple hills stood bathed in the sunset. From these hills the Crichtonians had borrowed the graceful Athenian title, and called their fair city the “city of the violet crown.” Forming their eastern boundary flowed the stately Saranac, that had but lately carried its last float of ice out to sea, almost carrying a bridge with it. Swollen with dissolving snows, it glided past, a moving mirror, nearly to the tops of the wharves. Northward was the Cocheco, an untamed little river born and brought up amid crags and rocks. It cleft the city in twain, to cast itself headlong into the Saranac, a line of bubbles showing its course for half a mile down the smoother tide.