Patty's Perversities

"Daughter Britann," grandmother would say, "thy mind is overmuch set on this world's goods. The Sanfords are never rich, unless thee shouldst reckon the wealth of brains; and thou hast already sufficient for all thy needs."

"So have you, mother," Mrs. Sanford one day retorted; "but I notice you are just as anxious about your pension, for all that."

"That I shall bestow in charity," the old lady answered. "I hope I am not unduly anxious. If my son Charles had not wished it, I should never have troubled the matter."

"Nonsense!" Mrs. Sanford said. "It would have been a sin to neglect such an opportunity. I am glad that for once Charles had sense enough to do the right thing about a money matter. He's usually so dreadfully squeamish!"

To a mind like Mrs. Sanford, the getting of money was the only end worth pursuing in this world. Her fancy dwelt upon the position Patience might occupy as the wife of a wealthy Toxteth, and upon her own importance as the mother-in-law of the best catch in Montfield. Knowing how much Patty might be influenced by her father, in case she proved blind to her own good in this important matter, Mrs. Sanford one night ventured to broach the subject to him.

"It is time Patty was getting settled," she began.

"Humph!" the doctor returned, "I do not see the need of any haste."

"But there is need. If she lets her chances slip by now, she'll live to repent of it. Girls who are over particular always have to put up with a crooked stick at last."

"What are you driving at?"

"Why," Mrs. Sanford said rather hesitatingly, "she might have Clarence Toxteth, if she only chose."

"How do you know?"

"I do know, and that's enough," his wife answered importantly. "He's half dead for her."

"He'll be whole dead before he gets her, unless she's a bigger fool than I ever thought her."

"Now, Charles, that's the way you always talk. What have you got against Clarence?"

"He hasn't any brains, for one thing."

"He must have," Mrs. Sanford returned, as if her logic admitted of no controversy. "Just see what a smart father he's got! What a sight of money Orrin Toxteth has made!"

"Nonsense! His brains stand in the same relation to his father's as froth does to beer. Good-night. I want to go to sleep."

"You always were prejudiced against Clarence Toxteth," the wife said. But Dr. Sanford allowed this to be the last word by answering nothing.

Mrs. Sanford felt that irritation which one feels who cannot understand how any point of view but one's own is possible. Not to be foiled, she abandoned the attempt to convince her husband, only to concentrate her energies upon her daughter. Very naturally she attempted to dazzle her eyes with the wealth which so bewitched her own fancy. Knowing by experience the difficulty of dealing abruptly with Patty, she began by throwing out hints which seemed to her the acme of strategical tactics, but which were in reality so transparent, that Flossy and Patty made merry over them without stint. Of course, this came to nothing; and Mrs. Sanford would have been the most obtuse of mortals, had she failed to perceive that she produced no impression in the suitor's favor. But the doughty woman had obstinacy, if not firmness; and, the more her plans did not succeed, the more firmly she clung to them. She prepared for the attack; and her daughter, foreseeing what was to come, steeled herself for the combat.

Patty suffered more from the weakness and prejudices of her mother than any one but Dr. Sanford himself. Will, both from his sex and from being much away from home, treated her oddities rather as witticisms. In his sister an inborn reverence for family, and a devotion to the name and relation of a mother, fought with her perception of the ludicrous, and an instinctive repugnance to narrowness and mental inferiority. Shut her eyes as she might, she could not be blind to her mother's faults; and Mrs. Sanford's affection, which should have compensated, had always appeared rather an accident of custom, and but skin-deep. The silly blunders which the doctor's wife constantly made, her absurd superstitions, continually jarred upon her daughter. Patty reproached herself sharply, her conscience flagellating her with vigorous arm for discerning these shortcomings of her mother; but no amount of self-reproach can dull the mental vision. She attempted to see only her mother's kindly deeds; but Patty was neither the first nor the last to discover that reverence and love are not to be constrained by an illogical balance-sheet; and that the taking account of stock in affection generally indicates a tendency to bankruptcy.

Mrs. Sanford had remained in suspense as long as she was able to endure it; and, upon the morning referred to earlier in this chapter, she at last spoke definitely. She was a little in awe of her daughter, having more than once been confused and worsted by that young lady's quickness of thought and expression; and the "Sanford will," she knew of old, had a strength against which it was useless to contend, if it were once determinedly fixed.

"Patty," she said, as they chanced to be alone together, "didn't I hear you tell Willie you were going to ride with Clarence Toxteth this afternoon?"

"Yes, mother. We are going to Samoset to look at those costumes."

"I am glad of it. You haven't treated him very well lately."

"You are losing a hairpin, mother."

"Dear me! Your father's thinking of me, I suppose."

"It ought to please you to have your husband think of you."

"He needn't think all the hairpins out of my head, though," responded Mrs. Sanford. "I'm always losing them."

"Where does the sewing-circle meet next week?" Patty asked, endeavoring to lead the conversation as far as possible from its original theme.

"At Mrs. Brown's; though I doubt she won't be ready for it until a week after it's all over. I declare, I thank the Lord I ain't so shiftless!"

"Well you may," Patty said lightly, feeling safe now.

"He'll be the richest man in Montfield," said Mrs. Sanford, returning to the charge with an abruptness which found the other off her guard.

"Well, what of that?" her daughter asked absently.

"What of that!" the mother cried impatiently. "A good deal of that. But I suppose you'd refuse him, if he offered himself to-day."

"Of course, mother. You know I'm never going to marry."

"Don't talk like a fool, Patience. If you know when you're well off, you'll be careful how you snub Clarence Toxteth."

"I treat him as I do everybody else."

"But you mustn't. You must treat him different. Oh, dear!" Mrs. Sanford continued, quivering with excitement and indignation. "The trouble that girls are from the day they are born! Always contrary, and never knowing what they want, nor what's best for them. Why girls can't be born boys is more than I know!"

"There, mother, that is Irish enough for old Paddy Shaunessey."

"Always flying in the face of luck too," her mother went on, not heeding the interruption, "and always taking up with some crooked stick at last. The way you run after that old Tom Putnam is shameful!"

It perhaps made little difference what Mrs. Sanford said in an argument of this kind, except that a reference to Mr. Putnam was the most infelicitous thing it were possible for her to utter. Patty had self-control enough not to speak the angry words which were on her tongue; but she hastened from the room, leaving her mother to reflect as she chose upon the results of the interview.

CHAPTER XXV

CLARENCE SPEAKS

Had Clarence Toxteth presented himself and his claims at the moment when the lady of his choice, panting and angry, had just escaped from the presence of her mother, his suit would have been disposed of in the most summary manner. It has been somewhere remarked, however, that women are creatures of changeable minds. By the time afternoon and the Toxteth equipage had arrived, the maiden's heart had so far relented, that she greeted her suitor as kindly as ever. As she rolled along in the luxurious carriage, her nimble fancy busied itself in picturing the future as it might be, if she chose to accept the man by her side. The very keenness of the senses, the fineness of perception which she possessed, made ready avenues by which temptations might enter. With tastes which demanded luxury, with at once the love and the knowledge of beauty, it was hard to deny herself the wealth which would put these things within her reach. To one who had been long the acknowledged leader among her associates, there was, too, a peculiar temptation to accept the hand of the wealthiest man in the village, making a brilliant match, and securing her position for the future. The weakness of Patty's nature that afternoon asserted itself; and all the way to Samoset she was rather silent, following in her mind a brilliant will-o'-the-wisp, which shone and glistened indeed, but led over dangerous morasses.

In the errand in relation to the costumes, the young people found themselves unexpectedly delayed; so that the short October twilight was already falling when they drove out of Samoset. By the time Wilk's Run was reached, it was so dark, that, in the shadow of the carriage-top, their faces were not visible to each other. As the gloom deepened, the courage of the young man increased; and when at length he could not see the eyes of his companion, he was able to speak the words which had all the afternoon been jostling each other in eagerness to obtain utterance. Unabashed with all others, Clarence found in Patty's clear glances a penetration against the embarrassment of which he strove in vain; but, that removed, he spoke.

"It may seem strange for me to say it," he began; "but I've quite made up my mind that we should get along nicely together."

"Have you?" she returned, laughing, but secretly uneasy. "We have never quarrelled, that I remember."

"Oh, no!" he answered, "of course not. I hope you don't think so meanly of me as to believe I'd quarrel with you."

"No," she said, smiling to herself; "but I might have quarrelled with you."

"I didn't mean that," said he. "But we get on so nicely together, that, I say, why shouldn't we be always together, you know?"

He could hardly have chosen a more unfortunate phrase in which to couch his proposal. There came over his companion a sickening sense of what it would be to live always with the man at her side. He attempted to embrace her with the arm not occupied with the reins; but she shrank back into the farthest corner of the carriage, filled with the bitterest self-contempt because she listened to him. This self-reproach was his salvation. The sense of her own weakness in letting him declare his passion, and of her dishonesty in keeping a silence which he might interpret favorably, so overwhelmed her with detestation for herself, that by contrast she for the moment almost regarded Clarence as an injured angel of honesty and devotion. From this odd mingling of feelings arose a sort of pity for her suitor; and, although she answered nothing, she suffered him to say on.

"I love you," he continued, "and I should be a fool if I didn't know that I have something to offer the girl who marries me."

"If I ever married," Patty answered in a constrained voice, "I shouldn't marry for what a man could give me."

"If that is true," she added to herself, "why am I listening to him at all? Oh, what a hypocrite I am!"

"Of course not," Toxteth said, answering the remark he heard. "But a man is no worse for having a few dollars, is he?"

"I suppose not."

"Then, why do you not say that you will marry me?" he demanded almost petulantly.

"I was not aware that you had asked me."

"I have, then. Will you?"

"I cannot tell," she said. "I cannot tell. Don't ask me to say more now."

"I must say," he retorted, rather offended, "that I can't be very much flattered by the way you talk."

"But you know how dreadfully sudden" —

The lie stuck in her throat, and refused to be uttered.

"Is it? How blind you must have been! Couldn't you see all summer that I was smashed?"

Patty was conscious of a wild desire to strangle her lover, and then fling herself under the wheels of the carriage. She longed to get possession of the whip, and lash the gray span into a gallop.

"I am fearfully cold and hungry," she said, feigning a shiver. "Do drive faster."

Clarence was ill pleased with the result of his wooing; yet the fact that he had not been absolutely refused made it needful for him to restrain his impatience. He whipped up his horses, and the carriage bowled along the road in a way that at another time would have filled Patty with delight. As it was, she was conscious of a passing thought that it lay in her power to become the mistress of this dashing equipage, and with the thought came fresh self-condemnation. At her gate she was only coldly civil to Clarence, who drove away, and relieved his feelings by swearing at his horses.

Patty ran up the path to the cottage like a hunted deer. She wanted to get away from Toxteth, to escape as far as possible from the sound of his voice, from the touch of his hand. On the piazza she encountered Tom Putnam, who had been calling at the house.

"How late you are!" he said, taking both her hands in his. "How you tremble! Do you think it prudent to ride in so thin wraps? We have all been worrying about you."

"Let me go!" she exclaimed, snatching her hands from his grasp, and half beside herself with shame and self-loathing. "Let me go! I hate you!"

And she darted into the house.

CHAPTER XXVI

MULLEN HOUSE

It is hardly to be wondered at that the sleep of Tom Putnam was not of the soundest that night. He recalled with painful minuteness the details of his relations with Patience, reviewing every word, every look, every gesture, from the evening of the thunder-storm until her passionate exclamation as she encountered him upon the piazza. It was not strange that he did not understand how that fierce declaration of hatred arose from love. When Patty suddenly found herself face to face with her lover, a sudden inner gleam, as with a lightning's flash, showed her clearly her own heart. With swift and terrible distinctness she saw how deep and strong was her love for him, and the miserable way in which she had been paltering with her own happiness and truth. With this came an equally rapid revulsion of feeling. She rebelled against this man for holding her heart in bondage, for constraining her love. Most of all she hated her own weakness; and upon him she wreaked her self-contempt. Knowing nothing of her mental combat, her lover could only wonder gloomily how he had deserved or provoked this bitterness, and in the watches of the night arraigned himself for a thousand fancied shortcomings which in love are crimes.

He fell into a troubled sleep towards morning, and awoke to find the sun staring in at his windows, astonished to find him so late in bed.

October this year was unusually warm and pleasant; and when, after breakfast, Mr. Putnam rode over to Mullen House, whither he had been summoned, he found the air soft and mild as in August. The place was a mile and a half from his home, standing a little out of the village, by itself. The leaves along the way were falling rapidly from the trees, and the sharp teeth of the frost had bitten the wild grapes and nightshade at the roadside. In some moist places the elms still remained full and green, while the brilliant sumach-clusters ran like a crimson line along the way.

The crickets chirped merrily like the little old men they are in the night-time, if the old fairy-tale be true. The asters and golden-rod flaunted their bright blooms over the stone walls. The distant hills looked blue and far.

The house to which the lawyer had been summoned was as singular as it was pretentious. In the lifetime of its builder it had been vulgarly dubbed "Mullen's Lunacy," – a name not quite forgotten yet. It was of stone, chiefly granite, although in a sort of tower which had been built later than the rest, the material used was a species of conglomerate. The building apparently had been modelled somewhat inexactly after some old English manor-house, and was a very noticeable object in a straggling modern village like Montfield. Mr. Mullen, its builder, had inherited, with a large property, a studious disposition, and a will as remarkable for its firmness as for its eccentricity. He had given his life to study, which came to nothing as far as the world was concerned, since it resulted in no productiveness. He had attained a high degree of scholarly culture, but manifested it chiefly in ways fairly enough regarded by his acquaintances and neighbors as affectations. He wore the dress of the Englishman of letters fifty years before his day, – an anachronism less striking then than now, it is true, but significantly symbolical of his habit of looking to the past rather than the present or future for mental nourishment. His mansion was furnished largely with antique furniture obtained in Europe, and was always associated, in the mind of Patty and Will Sanford, with the mediæval romances they had pored over in the old library in childhood. The Sanfords were among the very few Montfielders who were admitted at Mullen House, as the proprietor chose to style his dwelling, upon any thing like terms of equality. The doctor's family-tree struck its roots deeper into the past than did that upon which the eccentric scholar prided himself; and the two families had been friends for generations. The children had been made welcome to the childless mansion; and, when Ease Apthorpe came home to her grandfather's house, she found the brother and sister already almost as much domesticated there as at home. After the death of Mr. Mullen, the visits of the young people were less frequent; but the close friendship formed with Ease had never been loosened.

Mr. Mullen's youth had vanished early; but he had remained single until well towards middle life. Scandal had made free with his name in connection with Mrs. Smithers, both before and after he had married a timid wife, whom, after the fashion of Browning's Duke, he expected

"To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seenAt the proper place, in the proper minute,And die away the life between."

A sweet woman, who lived again in her grand-daughter Ease, was Mrs. Mullen, – a flower requiring sunshine and love, and who was as surely chilled to death by the frosty smiles of her husband as the four-o'clocks by the rime of autumn. Dying she left him two children, – Tabitha, the eldest, "a little faithful copy of her sire;" and Agnes, quite as true to the mother-type. Tabitha the father had kept at home, and educated himself. She grew up so like him, that she almost seemed an image into which had been breathed his spirit.

Tabitha Mullen was a woman of stately presence, with keen black eyes, and hair which had been like a raven's wing until time began to whiten it. She dressed always richly, wearing sumptuous apparel, rather because it was in keeping with her state as the only remaining representative of her name, than as if impelled thereto by any womanly vanity. She ruled her household with a rod of iron; and, from the boy who drove the cows afield, to the stately butler, the servants all stood in awe of her. This butler had once been a great scandal to the worthy people of Montfield; and even time had done little to change their feelings. He was one of Mr. Mullen's English innovations; and besides this objection, and the outrage of being a man-servant for indoor service, the butler was, in the minds of the village people, connected with the very questionable inversion of the natural order of things caused by five-o'clock dinners, and the still more outrageous habit of having wine at that meal. Miss Tabitha drank wine at dinner, and had it served by a butler in livery, because her father had done so before her. That Montfielders were shocked was a matter for which she cared no more than she did what missionary the King of Borrioboola-Gha ate for his breakfast. The absurdity of attempting to keep up the state of an old English mansion in a New-England village was a matter which the mistress of Mullen House did not choose to see; and that to which she chose to be blind she would not have perceived if illuminated by the concentrated light of a burning universe. So Mullen House and its mistress, its life and its state, existed in strange anachronism in the midst of the work-a-day world of Montfield.

Not an easy woman to live with was Tabitha Mullen, as her niece had found. Agnes Mullen, the younger daughter, had been reared by the sister of her mother; had married a young music-teacher with no fortune save the

"LandsHe held of his lute in fee."

Very happy had they been together, and perhaps, for that reason, had held but loosely to life, departing nearly together, as they believed to a better existence, soon after the birth of little Ease.

The orphan had grown up, snowdrop like, in the gloomy state of Mullen House, – a slender, graceful maiden, gentle and shy. Of yielding disposition, the Mullen strength of will had somehow been tempered in her to a firmness of principle. Hers was one of those natures which hold to what they believe true and pure with the same despairing clasp a drowning man fastens upon a floating spar, clinging with the strength of one who struggles for very existence. Desiring to yield every thing asked of her, she found the approval of conscience a necessity, – a character to make life in adverse circumstances hard but high, bitter but pure.

In some respects Ease's surroundings were fortunate for her peculiar disposition. The Episcopal form of worship which Miss Tabitha affected as most nearly like the Church of England was particularly suited to the needs of her niece, since it gave color and richness to a faith otherwise too sombre. The young girl's companionship with the Sanfords also had been of a nature calculated to brighten her life.

The relation between Ease and Will Sanford had never been quite the same as before since that Sunday afternoon at Wilk's Run. The young man felt no longer towards Ease as a dear friend simply. The presence of a rival had awakened in his heart the passion which had long lain there dormant. Love ceased to be a dream coldly ideal, and sprang up a living fire. He was conscious now of a keen delight in Ease's presence, very different from the negative pleasure her companionship had hitherto afforded him. The touch of her hand, the brushing of her dress against him, suddenly became events to be watched for and remembered.

This changed very little their outward demeanor, save that they might have seemed to an observer to have become somewhat reserved toward each other. The smallest chances had suddenly assumed too great an importance to be lightly indulged in. A virgin shyness enveloped Ease, which Will had not yet dared break through by the caresses he longed to bestow.

But all this has little to do, directly at least, with the visit of Tom Putnam to Mullen House. He had been not a little surprised by the summons, since no very cordial feeling existed between himself and Miss Mullen; and he had speculated, as he drove along, upon the possible nature of the business involved. His surprise was not lessened, when, after the slightest exchange of civilities compatible with very scant hospitality, Miss Tabitha suddenly came at once to the point by an abrupt question.

"Why," she asked, "have you brought that Smithers woman into the neighborhood?"

"Brought her into the neighborhood?" he echoed in astonishment.

"Yes, brought her into the neighborhood. She is living in your stone cottage at this moment. If you haven't any care for my feelings, you might have considered your own reputation."

"My reputation!" he repeated, puzzled. "What has that to do with it?"

"Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Shankland and Mrs. Sanford could tell you," she retorted with a scornful smile.

He was silent. Wrongly, it is true, but with the weight of a certainty, it flashed upon him that here was the key to Patty's sudden hatred. He turned sick at the thought of the gossip she must have heard; then, with a quick throb of pride, he raised his head in wonder that the woman he loved could believe this of him. He rose at once, and stepped towards the door.

"If you had hinted at your business," he said, "it would have saved my coming over. Whatever cause you may have to be sensitive in regard to Mrs. Smithers, I certainly have none; and you will allow, I think, that the stone cottage belongs to me."