A Little Girl in Old Boston, Amanda Minnie Douglas [black authors fiction .TXT] 📗

had just begun, and everybody was wondering about the author. Or you went to Faneuil Hall to see Trumbull's Declaration of Independence, which was considered a very remarkable work. There were the sleigh-rides, when you went out in style and had a supper and a dance; and the sledding parties, that were really the most fun of all, when you almost forgot you were grown-up.

Cary was always ready to attend his cousin, though she quite as often went out with Mr. and Mrs. Gray and Eudora. When he thought of it, it did seem a little curious that Doris had no special company.

But a girl was not allowed to keep special company until the family had consented and she was regularly engaged. Young men and girls came to sing, for a piano was a rarity; there were parties going here and there, but Doris never evinced any particular preference.

So spring came again and gardening engrossed Doris. She had been learning housekeeping in all its branches under the experienced tuition of Miss Recompense and Dinah. A girl who did not know everything from the roasting of a turkey to the making of sack-posset, and through all the gradations of pickling and preserving, was not considered "finished."

Doris was very fond of the wide out-of-doors. She often took her work, and Uncle Winthrop his book, and sat out on a rustic seat at the edge of the Common, which was beginning to be beautiful, though it was twenty years later that the Botanic Garden was started. But now that our ships were going everywhere, curious bulbs and plants were brought from Holland and from the East Indies by sea captains. And they found wonderful wild flowers that developed under cultivation. Brookline was a great resort on pleasant days, with its meadows and wooded hillsides and beautiful gardens. Colonel Perkins had all manner of foreign fruits and flowers that he had brought home from abroad, and had a greenhouse where you could often find the grandmother of the family, who was most generous in her gifts. There were people who thought you "flew in the face of Providence" when you made flowers bloom in winter, but Providence seemed to smile on them.

Over on the Foster estate at Cambridge there was a genuine hawthorn. People made pilgrimages to see it when it was white with bloom and diffusing its peculiar odor all about. There were the sweet blossoms of the mulberry and the honey locust, and the air everywhere was fragrant, for there were so few factories, and people had not learned to turn waste materials into every sort of product and make vile smells.

Cary sometimes left his books early in the afternoon and went driving with them. If he did not appreciate poetry so much, he was on the lookout for every fine tree and curious flower, and twenty years later he was deep in the Horticultural Society.

Uncle Winthrop bought a new low carriage this summer. For anyone else but a grave gentleman it would have looked rather pronounced, but it was so much easier to get in and out. And Doris in her sweet unconsciousness never made any bid for attention, but people would turn and look at them as one looks at a picture.

Thirty years or so afterward old ladies would sometimes say to the daughters of Doris:

"My dear, I knew your mother when she was a sweet, fresh young girl and used to go out driving with her uncle. Mr. Winthrop Adams was one of the high-bred, delicate-looking men that would have graced a court. There wasn't a prettier sight in Boston--and, dear me! that was way back in '16 or '17. How time flies!"

They heard from Betty occasionally. The letters were long and "writ fine," though happily not crossed. They should have been saved for a book, they were so chatty. In August one came to Doris that stirred up a mighty excitement. Betty had a way of being quite dramatic and leading up to a climax.

A month before they had met a delightful Frenchman, a M. Henri de la Maur, twenty-five or thereabouts, and found him an excellent cicerone to some remarkable things they had not seen. He was much interested in America and its chief cities, especially Boston, when he found that was Betty's native town.

And one day he told them of a search he had been making for a little girl. The De la Maurs had suffered considerably under the Napoleonic _regime_, and had now been restored to some of their rights. There was one estate that could not be settled until they found a missing member. They had traced the mother, who had died and left a husband and a little girl--Jacqueline. "That is such a common name in France," explained Betty. She had been placed in a convent, and that was such a common occurrence, too. Then she had been taken to the North of England. He had gone to the old town, but the child's father had died and some elderly relatives had passed away, and the child herself had been sent to the United States. Everybody who had known her was dead or had forgotten.

"And I never thought until one day he said Old Boston," confessed Betty, "when I remembered suddenly that your mother's name was Jacqueline Marie de la Maur in the old marriage certificate. We had been talking of it a week or more, but one hears so many family stories here in Paris, and lost and found inheritances. But I almost screamed with surprise, and added the sequel; and he was just overjoyed, and brought the family papers. He and your mother are second- and third-cousins. It is queer you should have so many far-off relations, and so few near-by ones, and be mixed up in so many romances.

"The fortune sounds quite grand in francs, but if we enumerated our money by quarters of dollars, we might all be rich. It is a snug little sum, however, and they are anxious to get it settled before the next turn in the dynasty, lest it might be confiscated again. So M. Henri is coming home with us, and we shall start the first day of September, as Mr. King has finished his business and Electa is wild to see her children. I think I shall give 'talks' all winter and invite you over to Sudbury Street, with your sewing, for I never shall be talked out."

It was wonderful. Doris had to read the letter over and over. It had listeners at the Royall house who said it was a perfect romance, and at the Leveretts' they rejoiced greatly.

"I declare!" exclaimed Aunt Priscilla, "if you should live to be fifty or sixty, and everybody go on leaving you fortunes, you won't know what to do with your money. They're filling up the Mill Pond and the big ma'sh and going to lay out streets. I wouldn't have believed it! Foster Leverett held on to his legacy because he couldn't sell it, and now Warren has been offered a good sum. Mary Manning will pinch herself blue to think she sold out when she did. I'm just glad for Warren. And Cary'll know so much law that he will look out for you."

It was a beautiful autumn, for a wonder. Summer seemed loath to depart or allow the flame-colored finger of Fall to place her seal on the glowing foliage. But it was the last of October when Betty reached Boston, convoyed by a very old-time New England woman going on to Newburyport.

"For you know," said Betty, "the French are very particular about a young woman traveling alone, but we did have a hunt to find someone coming to Boston. Otherwise M'sieur Henri--you see how apt I am in French--could not have accompanied me."

M. de la Maur was a very nice-looking young man, not as tall as Cary, but with a graceful and manly figure, soft dark eyes, and hair that just missed being black, a clear complexion and fine color, and a small line of mustache. As to manners he was really charming, and so well-read that Mr. Winthrop Adams took to him at once. He was conversant with Voltaire and Rousseau, the plays of Racine and Moliere, and the causes that had led to the French Revolution, and had been in Paris through the famous "Hundred Days." Of course he was bitter against Napoleon.

The inheritance part was soon settled. Doris would have about three thousand dollars. But De la Maur took a great fancy to Boston, and the Royall family approved of him. Mr. and Mrs. Sargent had returned this fall and the old house was a center of attractive gayeties.

"Do you know, I think Cousin Henri is in love with Betty," said Doris, with a feminine habit of guessing at love matters. "But she insists she will never live abroad, and Cousin Henri thinks Paris is the center of the world."

"How will they manage?"

Doris laughed. She did not just see herself.

But Betty's romance came to light presently. It had begun during her winter in New York, but it had not run smoothly. Betty had a rather quick wit and was fond of teasing, and there had been "differences" not easily settled. Mr. Harman Gaynor had risen to the distinction of a partnership in the King firm, and on meeting Betty again, with the young Frenchman at her elbow, had presented his claim in such a way that Betty yielded. When Mr. Gaynor came to Boston to have a conference with Mrs. Leverett--for fathers and mothers still had authority in such matters--Betty's engagement was announced and the marriage set for spring.

Somehow it was a delightful winter. But after a little one person began to feel strangely apprehensive, and this was Cary Adams.

"I suppose Doris and her third- or fourth-cousin will make a match?" Madam Royall said one evening when they had been playing morris and she had won the rubber. "How can you let her go away?"

"She will never leave father," exclaimed Cary confidently.

There was a sudden stricture all over his body. It seemed as if some cold hand had clutched both heart and brain.

He walked home in the bright, fresh air. It was barely ten. He passed De la Maur on the way and they greeted each other. The parlor windows were darkened, his father was alone in the study, and everyone else had gone to bed.

"I wish you had been home," said his father glancing up. "De la Maur has been reciting Racine, and I have never heard anything finer! I wish he could read Shakspere. He certainly is a delightful person, so cultured and appreciative. It makes me feel that we really are a new people."

Could no one see the danger? How happened it his father was so blind? Did Doris really care? She had not loved Captain Hawthorne, a man worthy of any woman's love. Cary had a confident feeling that in five years they would see him again. But he would be too old for Doris--thirteen years between them. Yet his father had been fifteen years older than his mother. Doris was so guileless, so simply honest, and if she loved--how curiously she had kept from friendships or intimacies with young men! Eudora had a train of admirers. So had Helen and Alice in their day.

When he had met Mrs. Sargent he knew it had only been a boyish fancy for Alice Royall, and it had merely shaped and strengthened the ardent desire of youth to go to his country's defense. He was a man now, and capable of loving with supreme