Real Folks, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [the reader ebook txt] 📗

intentions of mine that might concern you after my death; my wish is to do what is right by you, in return for your consenting to my pleasure in the matter, while I am alive. It will cost you more to live in Boston than where you do now, and I have no business to expect you to break up and come to a new home unless I can make it an object to you in some way. You can do some things for your children here that you could not do in Homesworth. I will give you two thousand dollars a year to live on, and secure the same to you if I die. I have a house here in Aspen Street, not far from where I live myself, which I will give to either of you that it may suit. That you can settle between you when you come. It is rather a large house, and Mrs. Ledwith's family is larger, I think, than yours. The estate is worth ten thousand dollars, and I will give the same sum to the one who prefers, to put into a house elsewhere. I wish you to reckon this as all you are ever to expect from me, except the regard I am willing to believe I may come to have for you. I shall look to hear from you by the end of the week.

"I remain, yours truly,

"TITUS OLDWAYS."

"Luclarion!" cried Mrs. Ripwinkley, with excitement, "come here and help me think!"

"Only four days to make my mind up in," she said again, when Luclarion had read the letter through.

Luclarion folded it and gave it back.

"It won't take God four days to think," she answered quietly; "and you can ask _Him_ in four minutes. You and I can talk afterwards." And Luclarion got up and went away a second time into the kitchen.

That night, after Diana and Hazel were gone to bed, their mother and Luclarion Grapp had some last words about it, sitting by the white-scoured kitchen table, where Luclarion had just done mixing bread and covered it away for rising. Mrs. Ripwinkley was apt to come out and talk things over at this time of the kneading. She could get more from Luclarion then than at any other opportunity. Perhaps that was because Miss Grapp could not walk off from the bread-trough; or it might be that there was some sympathy between the mixing of her flour and yeast into a sweet and lively perfection, and the bringing of her mental leaven wholesomely to bear.

"It looks as if it were meant, Luclarion," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, at last. "And just think what it will be for the children."

"I guess it's meant fast enough," replied Luclarion. "But as for what it will be for the children,--why, that's according to what you all make of it. And that's the stump."

Luclarion Grapp was fifty-four years old; but her views of life were precisely the same that they had been at twenty-eight.


VI.

AND.

There is a piece of Z----, just over the river, that they call "And."

It began among the school-girls; Barbara Holabird had christened it, with the shrewdness and mischief of fourteen years old. She said the "and-so-forths" lived there.

It was a little supplementary neighborhood; an after-growth, coming up with the railroad improvements, when they got a freight station established on that side for the East Z---- mills. "After Z----, what should it be but 'And?'" Barbara Holabird wanted to know. The people who lived there called it East Square; but what difference did that make?

It was two miles Boston-ward from Z---- centre, where the down trains stopped first; that was five minutes gained in the time between it and the city. Land was cheap at first, and sure to come up in value; so there were some streets laid out at right angles, and a lot of houses put up after a pattern, as if they had all been turned out of blanc-mange moulds, and there was "East Square." Then people began by-and-by to build for themselves, and a little variety and a good deal of ambition came in. They had got to French roofs now; this was just before the day of the multitudinous little paper collar-boxes with beveled covers, that are set down everywhere now, and look as if they could be lifted up by the chimneys, any time, and be carried off with a thumb and finger. Two and a half story houses, Mansarded, looked grand; and the East Square people thought nothing slight of themselves, though the "old places" and the real Z---- families were all over on West Hill.

Mrs. Megilp boarded in And for the summer.

"Since Oswald had been in business she couldn't go far from the cars, you know; and Oswald had a boat on the river, and he and Glossy enjoyed that so much. Besides, she had friends in Z----, which made it pleasant; and she was tired, for her part, of crowds and fashion. All she wanted was a quiet country place. She knew the Goldthwaites and the Haddens; she had met them one year at Jefferson."

Mrs. Megilp had found out that she could get larger rooms in And than she could have at the mountains or the sea-shore, and at half the price; but this she did not mention. Yet there was nothing shabby in it, except her carefully _not_ mentioning it.

Mrs. Megilp was Mrs. Grant Ledwith's chief intimate and counselor. She was a good deal the elder; that was why it was mutually advantageous. Grant Ledwith was one of the out-in-the-world, up-to-the-times men of the day; the day in which everything is going, and everybody that is in active life has, somehow or other, all that is going. Grant Ledwith got a good salary, an inflated currency salary; and he spent it all. His daughters were growing up, and they were stylish and pretty; Mrs. Megilp took a great interest in Agatha and Florence Ledwith, and was always urging their mother to "do them justice." "Agatha and Florence were girls who had a right to every advantage." Mrs. Megilp was almost old enough to be Laura Ledwith's mother; she had great experience, and knowledge of the world; and she sat behind Laura's conscience and drove it tandem with her inclination.

Per contra, it was nice for Mrs. Megilp, who was a widow, and whose income did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to have friends who lived like the Ledwiths, and who always made her welcome; it was a good thing for Glossy to be so fond of Agatha and Florence, and to have them so fond of her. "She needed young society," her mother said. One reason that Glossy Megilp needed young society might be in the fact that she herself was twenty-six.

Mrs. Megilp had advised the Ledwiths to buy a house in Z----. "It was just far enough not to be suburban, but to have a society of its own; and there _was_ excellent society in Z----, everybody knew. Boston was hard work, nowadays; the distances were getting to be so great." Up to the West and South Ends,--the material distances,--she meant to be understood to say; but there was an inner sense to Mrs. Megilp's utterances, also.

"One might as well be quite out of town; and then it was always something, even in such city connection as one might care to keep up, to hail from a well-recognized social independency; to belong to Z---- was a standing, always. It wasn't like going to Forest Dell, or Lakegrove, or Bellair; cheap little got-up places with fancy names, that were strung out on the railroads like French gilt beads on a chain."

But for all that, Mrs. Ledwith had only got into "And;" and Mrs. Megilp knew it.

Laura did not realize it much; she had bowing and speaking acquaintance with the Haddens and the Hendees, and even with the Marchbankses, over on West Hill; and the Goldthwaites and the Holabirds, down in the town, she knew very well. She did not care to come much nearer; she did not want to be bound by any very stringent and exclusive social limits; it was a bother to keep up to all the demands of such a small, old-established set. Mrs. Hendee would not notice, far less be impressed by the advent of her new-style Brussels carpet with a border, or her full, fresh, Nottingham lace curtains, or the new covering of her drawing-room set with cuir-colored terry. Mrs. Tom Friske and Mrs. Philgry, down here at East Square, would run in, and appreciate, and admire, and talk it all over, and go away perhaps breaking the tenth commandment amiably in their hearts.

Mrs. Ledwith's nerves had extended since we saw her as a girl; they did not then go beyond the floating ends of her blue or rose-colored ribbons, or, at furthest, the tip of her jaunty laced sunshade; now they ramified,--for life still grows in some direction,--to her chairs, and her china, and her curtains, and her ruffled pillow-shams. Also, savingly, to her children's "suits," and party dresses, and pic-nic hats, and double button gloves. Savingly; for there is a leaven of grace in mother-care, even though it be expended upon these. Her friend, Mrs. Inchdeepe, in Helvellyn Park, with whom she dined when she went shopping in Boston, had _nothing_ but her modern improvements and her furniture. "My house is my life," she used to say, going round with a Canton crape duster, touching tenderly carvings and inlayings and gildings.

Mrs. Megilp was spending the day with Laura Ledwith; Glossy was gone to town, and thence down to the sea-shore, with some friends.

Mrs. Megilp spent a good many days with Laura. She had large, bright rooms at her boarding-house, but then she had very gristly veal pies and thin tapioca puddings for dinner; and Mrs. Megilp's constitution required something more generous. She was apt to happen in at this season, when Laura had potted pigeons. A little bird told her; a dozen little birds, I mean, with their legs tied together in a bunch; for she could see the market wagon from her window, when it turned up Mr. Ledwith's avenue.

Laura had always the claret pitcher on her dinner table, too; and claret and water, well-sugared, went deliciously with the savory stew.

They were up-stairs now, in Laura's chamber; the bed and sofa were covered with silk and millinery; Laura was looking over the girls' "fall things;" there was a smell of sweet marjoram and thyme and cloves, and general richness coming up from the kitchen; there was a bland sense of the goodness of Providence in Mrs. Megilp's--no, not heart, for her heart was not very hungry; but in her eyes and nostrils.

She was advising Mrs. Ledwith to take Desire and Helena's two green silks and make them over into