Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York. Frederic Harold
brains by means of which he himself, in one way or another, had gathered together a substantial competency, won two elections to the State Senate, and established and held for himself the position of leading citizen in his town—that most valued and intangible of American local distinctions. But while Lemuel’s brown hair curled so prettily, and his eyes shone with the modest light of wealthy and well-behaved youth, nobody missed the brains. If there was any change in the management of the farm, it passed unnoticed, for all attention was centred on the great problem, interesting enough always when means seeks a help-meet, but indescribably absorbing in rural communities, where everybody knows everybody and casual gallants never come for those luckless damsels neglected by native swains—Whom will he marry?
It boots not now to recall the heart-burnings, the sad convictions that life would henceforth be a blank, the angry repinings at fate, which desolated the village of Thessaly and vicinity when Lemuel, returning from a mid-winter visit to Albany, brought a bride in the person of a bright eyed, handsome and clever young lady who had been Miss Cicely Richardson. He had known her, so they learned, for some years—not only during his school-days at the Academy there, but later, in what was mysteriously known in Thessaly as “society,” in whose giddy mazes he had mingled while on a visit to his legislative sire at the Capital City. No, it is not worth while to dwell upon the village hopes rudely destroyed by this shock—for they are dim memories of the far, far past.
But to one the blow was a disappointment not to be forgotten, or to grow dim in recollection. Miss Sabrina Fairchild was two years younger than her brother in age—a score of years his senior in firmness and will. She had only a small jointure in her father’s estate, because she had great expectations from an aunt in Ohio, in perpetual memory of whose anticipated bounty she bore her scriptural name, but she was a charge on her brother in that she was to have a home with him until she chose to leave it for one of her own. I doubt not that her sagacious father foresaw, from his knowledge of his daughter, the improbability that this second home would ever be offered her.
Miss Sabrina, even at this tender age, was clearly not of the marrying kind, and she grew less so with great steadiness. She was at this early date, when she was twenty-four, a woman of markedly strong character, of which perhaps the most distinct trait was family pride.
There has been a considerable army of State Senators since New York first took on the honors of a Commonwealth, and unto them a great troop of daughters have been born, but surely no other of all these girls ever exulted so fondly, nay, fiercely, in the paternal dignity as did Sabrina. She knew nothing of politics, and little of the outside world; her conceptions of social possibilities were of the most primitive sort; one winter, when she went to Albany with her father, and was passed in a bewildered way through sundry experiences said to be of a highly fashionable nature, it had been temporarily apparent to her own consciousness that she was an awkward, ignorant, red-armed country-girl—but this only for one wretched hour or so. Every mile-post passed on her homeward ride, as she looked through the stage window, brought restored self-confidence, and long before the tedious journey ended she was more the Senator’s daughter than ever.
Through this very rebound from mortification she queened it over the simpler souls of the village with renewed severity and pomp. The itinerant singing master who thought to get her for the asking into his class in the school-house Wednesday evenings, was frozen by the amazed disdain of her refusal. When young Smith Thurber, the kiln-keeper’s son, in the flippant spirit of fine buttons and a resplendent fob, asked her to dance a measure with him at the Wallaces’ party, the iciness of her stare fairly took away his breath.
Something can be guessed of her emotions when the brother brought home his bride. With a halfcowardly, half-kindly idea of postponing the trouble certain to ensue, he had given Sabrina no warning of his intention, and, through the slow mails of that date, only a day’s advance notice of his return with Mrs. Lemuel. The storm did not burst at once. Indeed it may be said never to have really burst. Sabrina was not a bad woman, according to her lights, and she did nothing consciously to make her sister-in-law unhappy. The young wife had a light heart, a sensible mind and the faculty of being cheerful about many things which might be expected to annoy. But she had some pride, too, and although at the outset it was the very simple and praiseworthy pride of a well-meaning individual, incessant vaunting of the Fairchilds quite naturally gave a family twist to it, and she soon was able to resent slights in the name of all the Richardsons.
After all, was she not in the right? for while the grass was scarcely green on the grave of the first Fairchild who had amounted to anything, there were six generations of Richardsons in Albany chronicles alone who had married into the best Dutch families of that ancient, aristocratic town, to say nothing of the New England record antedating that period. Thus the case appeared to her, and came gradually to have more prominence in her mind than, in her maiden days, she could have thought possible.
So this great Forty Years’ War began, in which there was to be no single grand, decisive engagement, but a thousand petty skirmishes and little raids, infinitely more vexatious and exhausting, and was waged until the weaker of the combatants, literally worn out in the fray, had laid down her arms and her life together, and was at peace at last, under the sheet in the darkened parlor.
The other veteran party to the feud, her thin, iron-gray hair half concealed under a black knit cap, her bold, sharp face red as with stains of tears, sat at the window of her own upper room, reading her Bible. If Milton and Alvira had known that she was reading in Judges, they might have been even more confident of a coming “flare-up.”
CHAPTER III.—AUNT SABRINA.
NEIGHBORING philosophers who cared, from curiosity or a loftier motive, to study the Fairchild domestic problem, in all its social and historic ramifications, generally emerged from the inquiry with some personal bias against Miss Sabrina, tempered by the conclusion that, after all, there was a good deal to be said on the old lady’s side.
Certainly, as the grim old maid in the rusty bombazine gown and cap, which gave a funereal air even to the red plaid shawl over her shoulders, sat at her upper window, and tried through a pained and resentful chaos of secular thoughts to follow the Scriptural lines, there was an extremely vivid conviction uppermost in her mind that justice had been meted out neither to her nor to the Fairchilds. She would have repelled indignantly, and honestly enough too, the charge that there was any bitterness in her heart toward the sister-in-law whose burial was appointed for the morrow. She had liked poor Cicely, in her iron-clad way, and had wept genuine tears more than once since her death. Indeed, her thoughts—and they were persistent, self-asserting thoughts which not even her favorite recital of Gideon’s sanguinary triumph could keep back—ran more upon the living than upon the dead.
And what gloomy, melancholy thoughts they were! They swept over two score of years, the whole gamut of emotion, from the pride and hope of youth to the anguish of disappointed, wrathful, hopeless old age, as her hand might cover all there was of sound in music by a run down her mother’s ancient spinet which stood, mute and forgotten, in the corner of the room. Her brother, this brother whom satirical fate had made a Lemuel instead of a Lucy or a Lucretia, a man instead of a woman as befitted his weakness of mind and spirit—had begun life with a noble heritage. Where was it now? He had been the heir to a leading position among the men of his county. What was he now? The Fairchilds had been as rich, as respected, as influential as any Dearborn family. Who did them honor now?
The mental answers to these questions blurred Miss Sabrina’s spectacles with tears, and Gideon’s performance with the lamps seemed a tiresome thing. She laid the Book aside, and went softly down stairs to her brother, who sat, still rocking in his late wife’s high, cushioned arm-chair, disconsolate by the stove.
There were also in the room his oldest son and this son’s wife, sitting dumbly, each at a window, making a seemly pretence of not being bored by the meagre prospect without. They looked at their aunt in that far-off impassive manner with which participants in a high pageant or solemn observance