Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York. Frederic Harold
glanced at the young wife for an instant—it was not a kindly glance. Then her eyes turned to the husband, and while surveying him seemed suddenly to light up with some new thought. She almost smiled, and her tight pressed lips parted. Had they followed the prompting of the brain and spoken, the words would have been:
“Thank God, there is still Albert!”
Albert Fairchild would have been known in any company, and in any guise, I think, for a lawyer. The profession had its badge in every line and aspect of his face, in every movement of his head, and, so it seemed, in the way he held his hands, in the very tone of his voice. His face was round, and would have been pleasant, so far as conformation and expression went, had it not been for the eyes, which were unsympathetic, almost cold. Often the rest of his countenance was wreathed in amiable smiles; but the eyes smiled never. He had looked a middle-aged man for a decade back, and casual acquaintances who met him from year to year complimented him on not growing old, because they saw no change. In fact he had been old from the beginning, and even now looked more than his age, which lacked some few months of forty. He was growing bald above the temples, and, like all the Fairchilds, was taking on flesh with increasing years. Nothing could have better shown the extremity of poor Sabrina’s woe than this clutching at the relief afforded by the sight of Albert, for she was not on good terms with him. Albert had been born and reared through boyhood at a time when the farm was still prosperous and money plenty. He had been educated far beyond the traditions of his sires, and was the first University man of his family, so far as was known. He had been given his own bent in all things, before he settled down to a choice of profession, and then, at considerable expense, had been secured a place with one of the greatest legal firms in New York City. For years the first fruits of the soil, the cream off all the milk—so the Aunt’s mingled scriptural and dairy metaphors ran—had been his. And what return had they had for it? He had become a sound, successful lawyer, with a handsome income, and he had married wealth as well. Yet year after year, as the fortunes of the Fairchild homestead declined, he had never interfered to prevent the fresh mortgage being placed—nay, had more than once explicitly declined to help save it.
“Agriculture is out of date in this State,” she had heard him say once, with her own ears, “Better let the old people live on their capital, as they go along. It’s no use throwing good money after bad. Farm land here in the East is bound to decrease in value, steadily.”
This about the homestead—about the cradle of his ancestors! Poor old lady, had the Fairchilds been sending baronial roots down through all this soil for a thousand years, she couldn’t have been more pained or mortified over Albert’s callous view of the farm which her grandfather, a revolted cobbler from Rhode Island, had cleared and paid for at ten cents an acre.
Then there was his marriage, too. In all the years of armed neutrality or tacit warfare which she and Cicely had passed together under one roof, they had never before or since come so near an open and palpable rupture as they did over a city-bred cousin of Cicely’s—a forward, impertinent, ill-behaved girl from New York, who had come to the farm on a visit some ten years before, and whose father was summoned at last to take her away because otherwise she, Sabrina, threatened to herself leave the house. There had been a desperate scene before this conclusion was reached. Sabrina had stormed and threatened to shake the dust of the homestead from off her outraged sandals. Cicely for the once had stood her ground, and said she fancied even worse things than that might happen without producing a universal cataclysm. Lemuel had almost wept with despair over the tumult. The two older boys, particularly John, had not concealed their exuberant hope that their maiden Aunt might be taken at her word, and allowed to leave. And the girl herself, this impudent huzzy of a Richardson, actually put her spoke in too, and said things about old cats and false teeth, which it made Sabrina’s blood still boil to recall.
And it was this girl, of all others in the world, whom Albert must go and marry!
Yet Sabrina, in her present despondent mood, felt herself able to rise above mere personal piques and dislikes, if there really was a hope for the family’s revival. She was not very sanguine about even Albert, but beyond him there was no chance at all.
John, the second brother, had talent enough, she supposed. People said he was smart, and he must be, else he could scarcely have come in his twenty-eighth year to be owner and editor of the Thessaly Banner of Liberty, and put in all those political pieces written in the first person plural, as if he had the power of attorney for all Dearborn county. But then he was mortally shiftless about money matters, and they did say that since his wife’s death—a mere school-teacher she had been—he had become quite dissipated and played billiards. Besides she was at open feud with him, and never, never would speak to him again, the longest day he lived! So that settled John.
As for Seth, the youngest of the brothers, it is to be doubted if she would have thought of him at all, had he not come in at the moment. He had been down to the village to get some black clothes which the tailor had constructed on short notice for him, and he, too, passed through the sitting room to the stairs with the serious look and the dead silence which the awful presence imposes.
Then she did think of him for a moment, as she stood warming her fingers over the bald, flat top of the stove—for though bright and warm enough outside, the air was still chilly in these great barns of rooms.
Seth was indisputably the handsomest of all the Fairchilds, even handsomer than she remembered his father to have been—a tall, straight, broadshouldered youth, who held his head well up and looked everybody in the face with honest hazel eyes. He had the Richardson complexion, a dusky tint gained doubtless from all those Dutch intermarriages of which poor Cicely used to make so much, but his brown hair curled much as Lemuel’s used to curl, only not so effeminately, and his temper was as even as his father’s had been, though not so submissive or weak. His hands were rough and coarse from the farm work, and his walk showed familiarity with ploughed ground, but still he had, in his way, a more distinguished air than either Albert or John had ever had.
Looking him over, a stranger would have been surprised that his aunt should have left him out of her thoughts of the family’s future—or that, once pausing to consider him, she should have dropped the idea so swiftly. But so it was. Miss Sabrina felt cold and aggrieved toward Albert, and she came as near hating John as a deeply devout woman safely could. She simply took no account of Seth at all, as she would have expressed it. To her he was a quiet, harmless sort of youngster, who worked prettily steadily on the farm, and got on civilly with people. She understood that he was very fond of reading, but that made no special impression on her.
If she had been asked, she would undoubtedly have said that Seth was her favorite nephew—but she had never dreamed of regarding him as a possible restorer of the family glories.
“Is yer oven hot enough?” she asked Alvira in the kitchen, a minute later. “If they’s anything I dew hate, it’s a soggy undercrust.”
“I guess I kin manage a batch o’ pies by this time,” returned the hired-girl with a sniff. Through some unexplained process of reasoning, Alvira was with the Fairchilds as against the Richardsons, but she was first of all for herself, against the whole human race.
“Milton gone aout with the caows?” asked the old lady, ignoring for the once the domestic’s challenge. “When he comes back, he ’n’ Leander better go over to Wilkinses, and get what chairs they kin spare. I s’pose there’ll be a big craowd, ef only to git in and see if there’s any holes in our body-Brussels yit, ’n’ haow that sofy-backed set in the parlor’s holdin’ out. Poor Cicely! I think they better bring over the chairs tonight, after dusk. What people don’t see they can’t talk abaout.”
“Heard Milton say he was goin’ to borrer some over at Warren’s,” remarked Alvira, in a casual way, but looking around to see how the idea affected Miss Sabrina.
“Well he jis’ won’t!” came the answer, very promptly and spiritedly. “If every mortal soul of ’em hes to stan’ up, he won’t! I guess Lemuel Fairchild’s wife can be buried ’thaout asking any help from Matildy Warren. I wouldn’t ask her if ’twas th’ las’ thing I ever did.”
“But