The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hetty's Strange History, by Helen Jackson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Hetty's Strange History Author: Helen Jackson Release Date: August 15, 2009 [EBook #29699] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY *** Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY. BY HELEN JACKSON (H.H.) AUTHOR OF "RAMONA," "A CENTURY OF DISHONOR," "VERSES," "SONNETS AND LYRICS," "GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS," "BITS OF TRAVEL," "BITS OF TRAVEL AT HOME," "ZEPH," "MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE," "BETWEEN WHILES," "BITS OF TALK ABOUT HOME MATTERS," "BITS OF TALK FOR YOUNG FOLKS," "NELLY'S SILVER MINE," "CAT STORIES." BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1886. Copyright,1877, By Roberts Brothers. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. I. What lover best his love doth prove and show? The one whose words are swiftest, love to state? The one who measures out his love by weight In costly gifts which all men see and know? Nay! words are cheap and easy: they may go For what men think them worth: or soon or late, They are but air. And gifts? Still cheaper rate Are they at which men barter to and fro Where love is not! One thing remains. Oh, Love, Thou hast so seldom seen it on the earth, No name for it has ever sprung to birth; To give one's own life up one's love to prove. Not in the martyr's death, but in the dearth Of daily life's most wearing daily groove. II. And unto him who this great thing hath done, What does Great Love return? No speedy joy! That swift delight which beareth large alloy Is guerdon Love bestowed on him who won A lesser trust: the happiness begun In happiness, of happiness may cloy, And, its own subtle foe, itself destroy. But steadfast, tireless, quenchless as the sun Doth grow that gladness which hath root in pain. Earth's common griefs assail this soul in vain. Great Love himself, too poor to pay such debt, Doth borrow God's great peace which passeth yet All understanding. Full tenfold again Is found the life, laid down without regret! CONTENTS I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. I. When Squire Gunn and his wife died, within three months of each other, and Hetty their only child was left alone in the big farmhouse, everybody said, "Well, now Hetty Gunn'll have to make up her mind to marry somebody." And it certainly looked as if she must. What could be lonelier than the position of a woman thirty-five years of age sole possessor of a great stone house, half a dozen barns and out-buildings, herds of cattle, and a farm of five hundred acres? The place was known as "Gunn's," far and wide. It had been a rich and prosperous farm ever since the days of the first Squire Gunn, Hetty's grandfather. He was one of Massachusetts' earliest militia-men, and had a leg shot off at Lexington. To the old man's dying day he used to grow red in the face whenever he told the story, and bring his fist down hard on the table, with "Damn the leg, sir! 'Twasn't the leg I cared for: 'twas the not having another chance at those damned British rascals;" and the wooden leg itself would twitch and rap on the floor in his impatient indignation. One of Hetty's earliest recollections was of being led about the farm by this warm-hearted, irascible, old grandfather, whose wooden leg was a perpetual and unfathomable mystery to her. Where the flesh leg left off and the wooden leg began, and if, when the wooden leg stumped so loud and hard on the floor, it did not hurt the flesh leg at the other end, puzzled little Hetty's head for many a long hour. Her grandfather's frequent and comic references to the honest old wooden pin did not diminish her perplexities. He was something of a wag, the old Squire; and nothing came handier to him, in the way of a joke, than a joke at his own expense. When he was eighty years old, he had a stroke of paralysis: he lived six years after that; but he could not walk about the farm any longer. He used to sit in a big cane-bottomed chair close to the fireplace, in winter, and under a big lilac-bush, at the north-east corner of the house, in summer. He kept a stout iron-tipped cane by his side: in the winter, he used it to poke the fire with; in the summer, to rap the hens and chickens which he used to lure round his chair by handfuls of corn and oats. Sometimes he would tap the end of the wooden leg with this cane, and say, laughingly, "Ha! ha! think of a leg like that's being paralyzed, if you please. Isn't that a joke? It's just as paralyzed as the other: damn those British rascals." And only a few hours before he died, he said to his son: "Look here, Abe, you put on my grave-stone,—'Here lies Abraham Gunn, all but one leg.' What do you suppose one-legged men're going to do in the resurrection, hey, Abe? I'll ask the parson if he comes in this afternoon," he added. But, when the parson came, the brave, merry eyes were shut for ever, and the old hero had gone to a new world, on which he no doubt entered as resolutely and cheerily as he had gone through nearly a century of this. These glimpses of the old Squire's characteristics are not out of place here, although he himself has no place in our story, having been dead and buried for more than twenty years before the story begins. But he lived again in his granddaughter Hetty. How much of her offhand, comic, sturdy, resolute, disinterested nature came to her by direct inheritance from his blood, and how much was absorbed as she might have absorbed it from any one she loved and associated with, it is impossible to tell. But by one process or the other, or by both, Hetty Gunn was, as all the country people round about said, "Just the old Squire over again," and if they sometimes added, as it must be owned they did, "It's a thousand pities she wasn't a boy," there was, in this reflection on the Creator, no reflection on Hetty's womanliness: it was rather on the accepted theory and sphere of woman's activities and manifestations. Nobody in this world could have a tenderer heart than Hetty: this also she had inherited or learned from her grandfather. Many a day the two had spent together in nursing a sick or maimed chicken, or a half-frozen lamb, even a woodchuck that had got its leg broken in a trap was not an outcast to them; and as for beggars and tramps, not one passed "Gunn's," from June till October, that was not hailed by the old squire from under his lilac-bush, and fed by Hetty. Plenty of sarcastic and wholesome advice the old gentleman gave them, while they sat on the ground eating; and every word of it sank into Hetty's wide-open ears and sensible soul, developing in her a very rare sort of thing which, for want of a better name, we might call common-sense sympathy. To this sturdy common-sense barrier against the sentimental side of sympathy with other people's sufferings, Hetty added an equally sturdy, and she would have said common-sense, fortitude in bearing her own. This invaluable trait she owed largely to her grandfather's wooden leg. Before she could speak plain, she had already made his cheerful way of bearing the discomfort and annoyance of that queer leg her own standard of patience and equanimity. Nothing that ever happened to her, no pain, no deprivation, seemed half so dreadful as a wooden leg. She used to stretch out her own fat, chubby, little legs, and look from them to her grandfather's. Then she would timidly touch the wooden tip which rested on the floor, and look up in her grandfather's face, and say, "Poor Grandpa!" "Pshaw! pshaw! child," he would reply, "that's nothing. It does almost as well to walk on, and that's all legs are for. I'd have had forty legs shot off rather than not have helped drive out those damned British rascals." Not even for sake of Hetty's young ears could the old Squire mention the British rascals without his favorite expletive. Here, also, came in another lesson which sank deep into Hetty's heart. It was for his country that her grandfather had lost that leg, and would have gladly lost forty, if he had had so many to lose, not for himself; for something which he loved better than himself: this was distinct in Hetty Gunn's comprehension before she was twelve years old, and it was a most important force in the growth of her nature. No one can estimate the results on a character of these slow absorptions, these unconscious biases, from daily contact. All precepts, all religions, are insignificant agencies by their side. They are like sun and soil to a plant: they make a moral climate in which certain things are sure to grow, and certain other things are sure to die; as sure as it is that orchids and pineapples thrive in the tropics, and would die in New England. When old Squire Gunn was buried, all the villages within twenty miles turned out to his funeral. He was the last revolutionary hero of the county. An oration was delivered in the meeting-house; and the brass band of Welbury played "My country, 'tis of thee," all the way from the meeting-house to the graveyard gate. After the grave was filled up, guns were fired above it, and the Welbury village choir sang an anthem. The crowd, the music, the firing of guns, produced an ineffaceable impression upon Hetty's mind. While her grandfather's body lay in the house, she had wept inconsolably. But as soon as the funeral services began, her tears stopped; her eyes grew large and bright with excitement; she held her head erect; a noble exaltation and pride shone on her features; she gazed upon the faces of the people with a composure and dignity which were unchildlike. No emperor's daughter in Rome could have borne herself, at the burial of her most illustrious ancestor, more grandly and yet more modestly than did little Hetty Gunn, aged twelve, at the burial of this unfamed Massachusetts revolutionary soldier: and well she might; for a greater than royal inheritance had come to her from him. The echoes of the farewell shots which were fired over the old man's grave were never to die out of Hetty's ears. Child, girl, woman, she was to hear them always: signal guns of her life, they meant courage, cheerfulness, self-sacrifice. Of Hetty's father, the "young Squire," as to the day of his death he was called by the older people in Welbury, and of Hetty's mother, his wife, it is not needful to say much here. The young Squire was a lazy, affectionate man to whom the good things of life had come without his taking any trouble for them: even his wife had been more than half wooed for him by his doting father; and there were those who said that pretty Mrs. Gunn had been quite as much in love with the old Squire, old as he was, as with the young one; but that was only an idle village sneer. The young Squire and his wife loved each other devotedly, and their only child, Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this overweening affection, on their part, was to produce a slow reversal of some of the ordinary relations between parents and children. As Hetty grew into womanhood, she grew more and more to have a sense of responsibility for her father's and mother's happiness. She was the most filially docile of creatures, and obeyed like a baby, grown woman as she was. It was strange to hear and to see. "Hetty, bring me my overcoat," her father would say to her in her thirty-fifth year, exactly as he would have said it in her twelfth; and she would spring with the same alacrity and the same look of pleasure at being of use. But there was a filial service which she rendered to her parents much deeper than these surface obediences and attentions. They were but dimly conscious of it; and yet, had it been taken away from them, they had found their lives blighted indeed. She was the link between them and the outside world. She brought merriment, cheer, hearty friendliness into the house. She was the good comrade of every young woman and every young man in Welbury; and she compelled them all to bring a certain half-filial affection and attention to her father and mother. The best tribute to what she had accomplished in this direction was in the fact, that you always heard the young people mention Squire Gunn and his wife as "Hetty Gunn's father" or "Hetty Gunn's mother;" and the two old people were seen at many a gathering where there was not a single old face but theirs. "Hetty won't go without her father and mother," or "Hetty'll be so pleased if we ask her father and mother," was frequently heard. From this free and unembarrassed association of the old and the young, grew many excellent things. In this wholesome atmosphere honesty and good behavior thrived; but there was little chance for the development of those secret sentimental preferences and susceptibilities out of which spring love-making and thoughts of marriage. There probably was not a marriageable young man in Welbury who had not at one time or another thought to himself, what a good thing it would be to marry Hetty Gunn. Hetty was pretty, sensible, affectionate, and rich. Such girls as that were not to be found every day. A man might look far and long before he could find such a wife as Hetty would make. But nothing seemed to be farther from Hetty's thoughts than making a wife of herself for anybody. And the world may say what it pleases about its being the exclusive province of men to woo: very few men do woo a woman who does not show herself ready to be wooed. It is a rare beauty or a rare spell of some sort which can draw a man past the barrier of a woman's honest, unaffected, and persistent unconsciousness of any thoughts of love or matrimony. So between Hetty's unconsciousness and her perpetual comradeship with her father and mother, the years went on, and on, and no man asked Hetty to marry him. The odd thing about it was that every man felt sure that he was the only man who had not asked her; and a general impression had grown up in the town that Hetty Gunn had refused nearly everybody. She was so evidently a favorite; "Gunn's" was so much the headquarters for all the young people; it was so open to everybody's observation how much all men admired and liked Hetty,—she was never seen anywhere without one or two or three at her service: it was the most natural thing in the world for people to think as they did. Yet not a human being ever accused Hetty of flirting; her manner was always as open, friendly, and cordial as an honest boy's, and with no more trace of self-seeking or self-consciousness about it. She was as full of fun and mischief, too, as any boy could be. She had slid down hill with the wildest of them, till even her father said sternly,— "Hetty,—you're too big. It's a shameful sight to see a girl of your size, out on a sled with boys." And Hetty hung her head, and said pathetically,— "I wish I hadn't grown. I'd rather be a dwarf, than not slide down hill." But after the sliding was forbidden, there remained the chestnuttings in the autumn, and the trout fishings in the summer, and the Mayflower parties in the spring, and colts and horses and dogs. Until Hetty was twenty-two years old, you might have been quite sure that, whenever you found her in any out-door party, the masculine element was largely predominant in that party. After this time, however, life gradually sobered for Hetty: one by one her friends married; the maidens became matrons, the young men became heads of houses. In wedding after wedding, Hetty Gunn was the prettiest of the bridesmaids, and people whispered as they watched her merry, kindly face,— "Ain't it the queerest thing in life, Hetty Gunn won't marry. There isn't a fellow in town she mightn't have." If anybody had said this to Hetty herself, she would probably have laughed, and said with entire frankness,— "You're quite mistaken. They don't want me," which would only have strengthened her hearers' previous impressions that they did. In process of time, after the weddings came the christenings, and at these also Hetty Gunn was still the favorite friend, the desired guest. Presently, there came to be so many little Hetty Gunns in the village, that no young mother had courage to use the name more, however much she loved Hetty. Hetty used to say laughingly that it was well she was an only child, for she had now more nieces and nephews than she knew what to do with. Very dearly she loved them all; and the little things all loved her, the instant she put her arms round them: and more than one young husband, without meaning to be in the least disloyal to his wife, thought to himself, when he saw his baby's face nestling down to Hetty Gunn's brown curls,— "I wonder if she'd have had me, if I'd asked her. But I don't believe Hetty'll ever marry,—a girl that's had the offers she has." And so it had come to pass that, at the time our story begins, Hetty was thirty-five years old, and singularly alone in the world. The death of her mother, which had occurred first, was a great shock to her, for it had been a sudden and a painful death. But the loss of her mother was to Hetty a trivial one, in comparison with the loss of her father. On the day of her grandfather's death, she had seemed, child as she was, to have received her father into her hands, as a sacred legacy of trust; and he, on his part, seemed fully to reciprocate and accept without comprehending the new relation. He unconsciously leaned upon Hetty more and more from that hour until the hour when he died, bolstered up in bed with his head on her shoulder, and gasping out, between difficult breaths, his words of farewell,—strange farewell to be spoken to a middle-aged woman, whose hair was already streaked with gray,— "Poor little girl! I've got to leave you. You've been a good little girl, Hetty, a good little girl." Neighbors and friends crowded around Hetty, in the first moments of her grief. But they all, even those nearest and most intimate, found themselves bewildered and baffled, nay almost repelled, by Hetty's manner. Her noble face was so grief-stricken that she looked years older in a single day. But her voice and her smile were unaltered; and she would not listen to any words of sympathy. She wished to hear no allusions to her trouble, except such as were needfully made in the arranging of practical points. Her eyes filled with tears frequently, but no one saw a tear fall. At the funeral, her face wore much the same look it had worn, twenty-three years before, at her grandfather's funeral. There were some present who remembered that day well, and remembered the look, and they said musingly,— "There's something very queer about Hetty Gunn, after all. Don't you remember how she acted, when she was a little thing, the day old Squire Gunn was buried? Anybody'd have thought then a funeral was Fourth of July, and she looks much the same way now." Then they fell to discussing the probabilities of her future course. It was not easy to predict. "The Squire's left every thing to her, just as if she was a man. She can sell the property right off, if she wants to, and go and live where she likes," they said. "Well, you may set your minds to rest on that," said old Deacon Little, who had been the young squire's most intimate friend, and who knew Hetty as well as if she were his own child, and loved her better; for his own children, poor man, had nearly brought his gray hairs down to the grave with distress and shame. "Hetty Gunn'll never sell that farm, not a stick nor a stone on't, any more than the old Squire himself would. You'll see, she'll keep it a goin', jest the same's ever. It's a thousand pities, she warn't born a boy." II. The funeral took place late in the afternoon of a warm April day. The roads were very muddy, and the long procession wound back to the village about as slowly as it had gone out. One by one, wagon after wagon fell out of the line, and turned off to the right or left, until there were left only the Gunns' big carryall, in which sat Hetty, with her two house- servants,—an old black man and his wife, who had been in her father's house so long, that their original patronymic had fallen entirely out of use, and they were known as "Cæsar Gunn" and "Nan Gunn" the town over. Behind this followed their farm wagon, in which sat the farmer and his wife with their babies, and the two farm laborers,—all Irish, and all crying audibly after the fashion of their race. As they turned into the long avenue of pines which led up to the house, their grief broke out louder and louder; and, when the wagon stopped in front of the western piazza, their sobs and cries became howls and shrieks. Hetty, who was just entering the front-door, turned suddenly, and walking swiftly toward them, said, in a clear firm tone,— "Look here! Mike, Dan, Norah, I'm ashamed of you. Don't you see you're frightening the poor little children? Be quiet. The one who loved my father most will be the first one to go about his work as if nothing had happened. Mike, saddle the pony for me at six. I am going to ride over to Deacon Little's." The men were too astonished to reply, but gazed at her dumbly. Mike muttered sullenly, as he drove on,— "An' it's a quare way to be showin' our love, I'm thinkin'." "An' it's Miss Hetty's own way thin, by Jasus!" answered Dan; "an' I'd jist loike to see the man 'ud say, she didn't fairly worship the very futsteps of 'im." When Deacon Little heard Hetty Gunn's voice at his door that night, the old man sprang to his feet as he had not sprung for twenty years. "Bless my soul!" he exclaimed, "what can have brought Hetty Gunn here to-night?" and he met her in the hall with outstretched hands. "Hetty, my dear, what is it?" he exclaimed, in a tone of anxiety. "Oh!" said Hetty, earnestly. "I have frightened you, haven't I? was it wrong for me to come to-night? There are so many things I want to talk over with you. I want to get settled; and all the work on the farm is belated and I can't have the place run behindhand; that would worry father so." The tears stood in her eyes, but she spoke in as matter-of-course a tone as if she had simply come as her father's messenger to ask advice. The old deacon pushed his spectacles high upon his forehead, and, throwing his head back, looked at Hetty a moment, scrutinizingly, in silence. Then, he said, half to himself, half to her,— "You're your grandfather all over, Hetty. Now let me know what I can help you about. You can always come to me, as long as I'm alive, Hetty. You know that." "Yes," said Hetty, walking back and forth in the little room, rapidly. "You are the only person I shall ever ask any thing of in that way." "Sit down, Hetty, sit down," said the old man. "You must be all worn out." "Oh, no! I'm not tired: I was never tired in my life," replied Hetty. "Let me walk: it does me good to walk; I walked nearly all last night; it seems to be something to do. You see, Mr. Little," she said,—pausing suddenly, and folding her arms on her breast, as she looked at him,—"I don't quite see my way clear yet; and one must see one's way clear before one can be quiet. It's horrible to grope." "Yes, yes, child," said the deacon, hesitatingly. He did not understand metaphor. "You are not thinking of going away, are you, Hetty?" "Going away!" exclaimed Hetty. "Why, what do you mean? How could I go away? Besides, I wouldn't go for any thing in the world. What should I go away for?" "Well, I'm real glad to hear you say so, Hetty," replied the deacon warmly; "some folks have said, you'd most likely sell the farm, and go away." "What fools! I'd as soon sell myself," said Hetty, curtly. "But I can't live there all alone. And one thing I wanted to ask you about to-night was, whether you thought it would do for your James and his wife to come and live there with me: I would give him a good salary as a sort of overseer. Of course, I should expect to control every thing; and that's not much more than I have done for three or four years: but the men will do better with a man to give them their orders, than they will with me alone. I could do this better with Jim than I could with a stranger. I've always liked Jim." Deacon Little did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the ground, and his face flushed with agitation. At last he said huskily,— "Would you really take Jim and Sally home to your house, to live with you, Hetty?" "Why, certainly," replied Hetty, in an impatient tone, "that's what I said: didn't I make it plain?" and she walked faster and faster back and forth. "Hetty, you're an angel," exclaimed the old man, solemnly. "If there's any thing that could make him hold up his head again, it would be just that thing. But—" he hesitated, "you know Sally?" "Yes, yes, I know her. I know all about her. She's a poor, weak thing," said Hetty, with no shade of tenderness in her voice; "but Jim was the most to blame, and it's abominable the way people have treated her. I always wished I could do something for them both, and now I've got the chance: that is if you think they'd like to come." The deacon hesitated again, began to speak, broke off, hesitated, tried again, and at last stammered:— "Don't think I don't feel your kindness, Hetty; but, low's Jim's fallen, I don't quite feel like having them go into anybody's kitchen, especially with black help." "Kitchen!" interrupted Hetty. "What do you take me for, Deacon Little? If Jim comes to live with me as my overseer, he is just the same as my partner in the place, so far as his position goes. How do you suppose I thought that the men would respect him, and take orders from him, if I meant to put him in the kitchen with Cæsar and Nan? No indeed, they shall live with me as if they were my brother and sister. There are plenty of rooms in the house for them to have their own sitting-room, and be by themselves as much as they like. Kitchen indeed! I think you've forgotten that Jim and I were schoolmates from the time we were six till we were twenty. I always liked Jim, and he hasn't had half a chance yet: that miserable affair pulled him down when he was so young." "That's so, Hetty; that's so," said the deacon, with tears rolling down his wrinkled cheeks. "Jim wasn't a bad boy. He never meant to harm anybody, and he hasn't had any chance at all since that happened. It seems as if it took all the spirit right out of him; and Sally, she hasn't got any spirit either: she's been nothin' but a millstone round his neck. It's a mercy the baby died: that's one thing." "I don't think so at all, Mr. Little," said Hetty, vehemently. "I think if the baby had lived, it would have strengthened them both. It would have made Sally much happier, at any rate. She is a motherly little thing." "Yes," said the old man, reluctantly. "Sally's affectionate; I won't deny that: but"—and an expression of exceeding bitterness passed over his face—"I wish to the Lord I needn't ever lay my eyes on her face again! I can't feel right towards her, and I don't suppose I ever shall." "I wouldn't wonder if the time came when she was a real comfort to you, Mr. Little," said Hetty, cheerily. "You get them to come and live with me and see what that'll do. I can afford to give Jim more than he can make at surveying. I have a notion he's a better farmer than he is engineer, isn't he?" "Yes, there's nothing Jim don't know about a farm. I always did hope he'd settle down here at home with us. But we couldn't have Sally in the house: it would have killed Mrs. Little. It gives her a day's nervous headache now, long ago's 'tis, whenever she sees her on the street." "Well, well," said Hetty, impatiently, "she won't give anybody nervous headaches in my house, poor little soul, that's certain; and the sooner they can come the better I shall like it. So you will arrange it all for me at once, won't you?" Then Hetty went on to speak of some matters in regard to the farm about which she was in doubt,—as to certain fields, and crops, and what should be done with the young stock from last year. Presently the old clock in the hall struck nine, and the village bells began to ring. Hetty sprang to her feet. "Dear me!" she exclaimed, "I had no idea it was so late. I only meant to stay an hour. Nan will be frightened about me." And she was out of the house and on her pony's back almost before Deacon Little could say,— "But, Hetty, ain't you afraid to go home by yourself. I can go with you's well's not." "Bless me, no!" said Hetty. "I always ride alone. Polly knows the road as well as I do;" and she cantered off, saying cheerily, "Good-night, deacon, I can't tell you how much I'm obliged to you. Please see Jim's early's you can to- morrow: I want to get settled and begin work." When Hetty reached home, the house was silent and dark: only one feeble light glimmered in the hall. As she threw open the door, old Cæsar and Nan rushed forward together from the kitchen, exclaiming, half sobbing,— "Oh, Miss Hetty! Miss Hetty! we made sure you was killed." "Nonsense, Nan!" said Hetty, goodnaturedly: "what put such an idea into your head? Haven't I ridden Polly many a darker night than this?" "Yes'm," sobbed Nan; "but to-night's different. All our luck's gone: 'When the master's dead, the house is shook,' they say where I was raised. Oh, Miss Hetty! it's lonesome's death in the kitchen." Hetty threw open the door into the sitting-room. "Put on a stick of wood, Nan, and make the fire blaze up," she said. While Nan was doing this, Hetty lighted the lamps, drew down the curtains, and gave the room its ordinary evening look. Then she said,— "Now, Nan, sit down: I want to talk with you," and Hetty herself sat down in her father's chair on the right hand of the fireplace. "Oh, Miss Hetty!" cried Nan, "don't you go set in that chair: you'll die before the year's out if you do. Oh please, Miss Hetty! get right up;" and the poor old woman took forcible hold of her young mistress's arms, and tried to lift her from the chair. "To please you, I will sit in another chair now, Nan, because I want you to be quiet and listen to me. But that will be my chair to sit in always, just as it used to be my father's; and I shall not die before the year's out, Nan, nor I hope for a great many years to come yet," said Hetty. "Oh, no! please the Lord, Miss Hetty," sobbed Nan: "who'd take care of Cæsar an' me ef you was to die." "But I expect you and Cæsar to take care of me, Nan," replied Hetty, smiling, "and I want to have a good talk with you now, and make you understand about our life here. You want to please me, don't you, Nan?" "Oh, yes! Miss Hetty. You knows I do, and so does Cæsar. We wouldn't have no other missus, not in all these Norf States: we'd sooner go back down where we was raised." Hetty smiled involuntarily at this violent comparison, knowing well that both Cæsar and Nan would have died sooner than go back to the land where they were "raised." But she went on,— "Very well. You never need have any other mistress as long as I live: and when I die you and Cæsar will have money enough to make you comfortable, and a nice little house. Now the first thing I want you to understand is that we are going to live on here in this house, exactly as we did when my father was here. I shall carry on the farm exactly as he would if he were alive; that is, as nearly as I can. Now you will make it very hard for me, if you cry and are lonesome, and say such things as you said to-night. If you want to please me, you will go right on with your work cheerfully, and behave just as if your master were sitting there in his chair all the time. That is what will please him best, too, if he is looking on, as I don't doubt he very often will be." "But is you goin' to be here all alone, Miss Hetty? yer don't know what yer a layin' out for, yer don't," interrupted Nan. "No," replied Hetty: "Mr. James Little and his wife are coming here to stay. He will be overseer of the farm." "What! Her that was Sally Newhall?" exclaimed Nan, in a sharp tone. "Yes, that was Mrs. Little's name before she was married," replied Hetty, looking Nan full in the face with a steady expression, intended to restrain any farther remarks on the subject of Mrs. Little. But Nan was not to be restrained. "Before she was married! Yes'm! an' a good deal too late 'twas she was married too. 'Deed, Miss Hetty, yer ain't never going to take her in to live with you, be yer?" she muttered. "Yes, I am, Nan," Hetty said firmly; "and you must never let such a word as that pass your lips again. You will displease me very much if you do not treat Mrs. Little respectfully." "But, Miss Hetty," persisted Nan. "Yer don't know"— "Yes, I do, Nan: I know it all. But I pity them both very much. We have all done wrong in one way or another; and it is the Lord's business to punish people, not ours. You've often told me, Nan, about that pretty little girl of yours and Cæsar's that died when I was a baby. Supposing she had lived to be a woman, and some one had led her to do just as wrong as poor Sally Little did, wouldn't you have thought it very hard if the whole world had turned against her, and never given her a fair chance again to show that she was sorry and meant to live a good life?" Nan was softened. "'Deed would I, Miss Hetty. But that don't make me feel like seein' that gal a settin' down to table with you, Miss Hetty, now I tell yer! Cæsar nor me couldn't stand that nohow!" "Yes you can, Nan; and you will, when you know that it would make me very unhappy to have you be unkind to her," answered Hetty, firmly. "She and her husband both, have done all in their power to atone for their wrong; and nobody has ever said a word against Mrs. Little since her marriage; and one thing I want distinctly understood, Nan, by every one on this place,—any disrespectful word or look towards Mr. or Mrs. Little will be just the same as if it were towards me myself." Nan was silenced, but her face wore an obstinate expression which gave Hetty some misgivings as to the success of her experiment. However, she knew that Nan could be trusted to repeat to the other servants all that she had said, and that it would lose nothing in the recital; and, as for the future, one of Hetty's first principles of action was an old proverb which her grandfather had explained to her when she was a little girl,— "Don't cross bridges till you come to them." III. The gratitude with which James Little's wife received Hetty's proposition was so great that it softened even her father- in-law's heart. "I do believe, Hetty," he said, when he gave her their answer, "I do believe that poor girl has suffered more'n we've given her credit for. When I explained to her that you was goin' to take her right in to be like one o' your own family, she turned as white as a sheet, and says she,— "'You don't mean it, father: she won't ever dare to:' and when I said, says I,— "'Yes, she does: Hetty Gunn ain't a girl not to know what she means to do. And that's just what she says she's goin' to do with you and Jim,' she broke right out crying, out loud, just like a little baby, and says she,— "'If the Lord don't bless Hetty Gunn for bein' so good to us! she sha'n't ever be sorry for it's long's she lives.'" "Of course I sha'n't," said Hetty, bluntly. "I never was sorry yet for any thing I did which was right, and I am as sure this is right as I am that I am alive. When will they come?" "Sarah said she would come right over to-day, if you'd like to have her help you; and Jim he could fix up things at home, and shut the house up. Jim said they'd better not let the house till you had tried how it worked havin' 'em here. Jim don't seem very sanguine about it. Poor fellow, he's got the spirit all taken out of him." "Well, well, we'll put it back again, see if we don't, before the year is out," replied Hetty, with a beaming smile, which made her face beautiful. It happened fortunately that poor Sarah Little first came to her new home alone, rather than with her husband. The years of solitude and disgrace through which they had lived, had made him dogged and defiant of manner, but had made her humble and quiet. She still kept a good deal of the beauty of her youth; and there were few persons who could be unmoved by the upward glance of her saddened blue eyes. In less than five minutes, she conquered old Nan, and secured her as an ally for ever. As she entered the house, Hetty met her, and saying cordially,— "I'm glad to see you, Sally. It was so good of you to come right over at once; we have a great deal to do,"—she kissed her on her forehead. Sarah burst into tears. Nan stood by with a sullen face. Turning towards her involuntarily, perhaps because she hardly dared to speak to Hetty, Sarah said,— "Oh, Nan, I'm only crying because she is so kind to me. I can't help it;" and the poor thing sank into a chair and sobbed. No wonder! it was six years since she had returned to her native village, a shame-stricken woman, bearing in her arms the child whose birth had been her disgrace. That its father was now her husband did little or nothing to repair the loss which her weakness and wrong-doing had entailed on her. If there be a pitiless community in this world, it is a small New England village. Calvinism, in its sternest aspects, broods over it; narrowness and monotony make rigid the hearts which theology has chilled; and a grim Pharisaism, born of a certain sort of intellectual keen-wittedness, completes the cruel inhumanity. It was six years since poor Sarah Little, baby in arms, had come into such an air as this,—six years, and until this moment, when Hetty Gunn kissed her forehead and spoke to her with affection, no woman had ever said to her a kindly word. When the baby died, not a neighbor came to its funeral. The minister, the weeping father and mother, and the stern-looking grandfather, alone followed the little unwelcomed one to its grave. After that, Sarah rarely went out of her house except at night. The tradesmen with whom she had to deal came slowly to have a pitying respect for her. The minister went occasionally to see her, and in his clumsy way thought he perceived what he called "the right spirit" in her. Sarah dreaded his calls more than any thing else. What made her isolation much harder to bear was the fact that, only two years before, every young girl in the county had been her friend. There was no such milliner in all that region as Sarah Newhall. In autumn and in spring, her little shop at Lonway Four Corners was crowded with chattering and eager girls, choosing ribbons and hats, and all deferring to her taste. Now they all passed her by with only a cold and silent bow. Not one spoke. To Sarah's affectionate, mirth-loving temperament, this was misery greater than could be expressed. She said not a word about it, not even to her husband: she bore it as dumb animals bear pain, seeking only a shelter, a hiding-place; but she wished herself dead. Jim's share of the punishment had been in some ways lighter than hers, in others harder. He had less loneliness; but, on the other hand, by his constant intercourse with men, he was frequently reminded of the barrier which separated himself and his wife from all that went on in the village. He had the same mirthful, social temperament which she had: the thoughtless, childish, pleasure-loving quality, which they had in common, had been the root of their sin; and was now the instrument of their suffering. Stronger people could have borne up better; worse people might have found a certain evil solace in evil ways and with evil associates: but Jim and Sally were incapable of any such course; they were simply two utterly broken-spirited and hopeless children whose punishment had been greater than they could bear. In a dogged way, because they must live, Jim went on earning a little money as surveyor and draughtsman. He often talked of going away into some new far-away place where they could have, as he said, in the same words Hetty had used, "a fair chance;" but Sally would not go. "It would not make a bit of difference," she said: "it would be sure to be found out, and strange folks would despise us even more than our own folks do; perhaps things will come round right after a while, if we stay here." Jim did not insist, for he loved Sally tenderly; and he felt, to the core of his heart, that the least he could do for her now was to let her live where she chose to live: but he grew more sullen and dogged, day by day; and Sally grew sadder and quieter, and things were fast coming to a bad pass, when Hetty Gunn's generous offer came to them, like a great rift of sunlight in a black sky. When Sally sank into the chair sobbing, Hetty made a quick movement towards her, and was about to speak; but, seeing that old Nan was hastening to do the same thing, she wisely waited, thinking to herself,— "If Nan will only take her under her wing, all will go well." Old Nan's tenderness of heart was unlimited. If her worst enemy were in pain or sorrow, she would succor him: ready perhaps to take up the threads of her resentment again, as soon as his sufferings were alleviated; but a very Samaritan of good offices as long as he needed them. Cæsar, so well understood this trait in her, that in their matrimonial disputes, which, it must be confessed, were frequent and sharp, when all other weapons failed him, he fell back on the colic. He had only to interrupt the torrent of her reproaches, with a groan, and a twist of his fat abdomen, and "oh, honey, I'm so bad in my stomach!" and she was transformed, in an instant from a Xantippe into a Florence Nightingale: the whole current of her wrath deviated from him to the last meal he had eaten, whatever it might be. "Now, it's jist nothin' but that pesky bacon you ate this mornin', Cæsar: you sha'n't never touch a bit again's long's you live; do you hear?" and with hot water and flannels, she would proceed to comfort and coddle him as if no anger had ever stirred her heart. When she saw poor Sarah Little sink crying into a chair, and heard the humble gratefulness of her words; and, moreover, felt herself, as it were, distinctly taken into confidence by the implied reference to the unhappy past,—old Nan melted. "There, there, honey: don't ye take on so. We're jest powerful glad to get you here, we be. I was a tellin' Miss Hetty yesterday she couldn't live here alone, noways: we couldn't any of us stand it. Come along into the dinin'-room, an' Cæsar he'll give you a glass of his blackberry wine. Cæsar won't let anybody but hisself touch the blackberry wine, an' hain't this twenty year." "Here, Cæsar! you, Cæsar! where be yer? Come right in here, you loafin' niggah." This was Nan's most affectionate nickname for her husband; it was always accompanied with a glance of proud admiration, which was the key to the seemingly opprobrious epithet, and revealed that all it really meant was a complacent satisfaction in her breast that her husband was in a position to loaf if he liked to,—a gentleman of leisure and dignity, so to speak, subject to no orders but her own. Cæsar could hardly believe his ears when he heard himself called upon to bring a glass of his blackberry wine to Mrs. Sarah Little. This was not at all in keeping with the line of conduct which Nan had announced beforehand that she should pursue in regard to that lady. Bewildered by his perplexed meditations on this change of policy, he moved even more slowly than was his wont, and was presently still more bewildered by finding the glass snatched suddenly from his hand, with a sharp reprimand from Nan. "You're asleep, ain't you? p'raps you'd better go back to bed, seein' it's nigh noon." "There, honey, you jest drink this, an' it'll do you good," came in the next second from the same lips, in such dulcet tones, that Cæsar rubbed his head in sheer astonishment, and gazed with open mouth and eyes upon Nan, who was holding the glass to Sally's mouth, as caressingly as she would to a sick child's. The battle was won; won by a tone and a tear; won, as, ever since the days of Goliath, so many battles have been won by the feebleness of weapons, and not by their might. When two days later, James Little, more than half unwillingly, spite of his gratitude to Hetty, came to take his position as overseer at "Gunn's," he was met at the great gate by his wife, who had been watching there for him for an hour. He looked at her with undisguised wonder. There was a light in her eyes, a color in her cheeks, he had not seen there for many years. "Why, Sally!" he exclaimed, but gave no other expression to his amazement. She understood. "Oh, Jim!" she said, "it is like heaven here: they're all so kind. I told you things would come round all right if we waited." The new overseer found himself welcomed because he was Sally's husband, and the strangeness of this was a bewilderment indeed. He could hardly understand the atmosphere of cordial good feeling which seemed in so short time to have grown up between his wife and all the household. He had become so used to Sally's sweet sad face, that he did not know how great a charm it held for others; and he had never seen in her the manner which she now wore to every one. One day's kindly treatment had been to her like one day's sunlight to a drooping plant. Hetty was relieved and glad. All her misgivings had vanished; and she found growing up in her heart a great tenderness toward Sally. She recollected well the bright rosy face Sally had worn only a few years before, and the contrast between it and her pale sorrow-stricken countenance now smote Hetty whenever she looked at her. Her sympathy, however, took no shape in words or caresses. She was too wise for that. She simply made it plain that Sally's place in the family was to be a fixed and a busy one. "I shall look after the out-door things, Sally," she said. "I have done that ever since father was so poorly, and I like it best. I shall trust to you to keep the house going all straight. Old Nan isn't much of a housekeeper, though she's a good cook: she needs looking after." And so the new household entered on its first summer. The crops sprang up, abundant and green: all the cattle throve and increased: the big garden bloomed full of its old-fashioned flowers; its wide borders of balm and lavender made the whole road-side sweet: the doors stood open, and the cheery sounds of brisk farm life were to be heard all day long. To all passers-by "Gunn's" seemed unchanged, unless it were that it had grown even more prosperous and active. But in the hall, two knobbed old canes which used to stand in the corner were hung by purple ribbons from the great antlers on the wall, and would never be taken down again. Hetty had hung them there the day after the funeral, and had laid the squire's riding-whip across them, saying to herself as she did so,— "There! I'll keep those up there as long as I live, and I wonder what will become of them then or of the farm either," and she had a long and sad reverie, standing with the riding-whip in her hand in the doorway, and tying and untying the purple ribbons. But she shook the thought off at last, saying to herself,— "Well, well, I don't suppose the farm'll go begging. There are plenty of people that would be glad enough to have me give it to them. I expect it will have to go to Cousin Josiah after all; but father couldn't abide him. It's a great pity I wasn't a boy, then I could have married and had children to take it." A sudden flush covered Hetty's face as she said this, and with a shamefaced, impatient twist of her expressive features, she ran in hastily and laid the whip above the canes. The only thing which broke in on the even tenor of this summer at Gunn's was Cæsar's experiencing religion in a great revival at the Methodist church. Cæsar had been under conviction again and again; but, as old Nan said pathetically to her minister, there didn't seem to be "nothin' to ketch hold by in Cæsar." By the time his emotions had worked up to the proper climax for a successful result, he was "done tired out," and would "jest give right up" and "let go," and "there he was as bad's ever, if not wuss." Poor old Nan was a very ardent and sincere Christian, spite of her infirmities of temper, and she would wrestle in prayer with and for her husband till her black cheeks shone under streams of tears. She wrestled all the harder because the ungodly Cæsar would sometimes turn upon her, and in the most sarcastic and ungenerous way ask if he didn't keep his temper better "without religion than she did with it:" upon which Nan would groan and travail in spirit, and beseech the Lord not to "go an' let her be a stumbler-block in Cæsar's way." The Squire's death had produced a great impression on Cæsar: from that day he had been, Nan declared, "quite a changed pusson;" and the impression deepened until three months later, in the course of a great midnight meeting in the Methodist church, Cæsar Gunn suddenly announced that he had "got religion." The one habit which it was hardest for Cæsar to give up, in his new character, was the habit of swearing. Profanity had never been strongly discountenanced at "Gunn's." The old Squire and the young Squire had both been in the habit of swearing, on occasion, as roundly as troopers! and black Cæsar was not going to be behi...