The farm seemed very little like home to Seth, now that he was back once more upon it. He could neither fit himself familiarly into such of the old ways as remained nor altogether appetize the changes which he felt rather than discerned about him.
Of all these alterations his father’s disappearance was among the least important. Everybody had grown out of the habit of considering Lemuel as a factor in any question. Nobody missed him now that he was gone, or felt that it was specially incumbent to pretend to do so—nobody save Aunt Sabrina. Those who cared to look closely could see that the old maid was shaken by her weak brother’s death, and that, though she said little or nothing about it, an augmented sense of loneliness preyed upon her mind. For the rest, the event imposed a day or two of solemnity, some alterations of dress and demeanor, a sombre journey with a few neighbors to the little burial plot beyond the orchard—and then things resumed their wonted aspect.
To the young journalist this aspect was strange and curious. The farm had put on a new guise to his eyes. It was as if some mighty hand and brush had painted it all over with bright colors. It was not only that the house had been restored and refurnished, that new spacious buildings replaced the ancient barns, that the fences had been rebuilt, the farm yard cleaned up and sodded, the old well-curb and reach removed—the very grass seemed greener, the bending of the boughs more graceful, the charm of sky and foliage and verdure far more apparent. The cattle were plumper and cleaner; there were carriage horses now, with bright harness and sweeping tails, and a costly black mare for the saddle, fleet as the wind: the food on the table was more uniformly toothsome, and there were now the broad silver-plated forks to which Seth had somewhat laboriously become accustomed in his Tecumseh boardinghouse. He admired all these changes, in a way, but somehow he could not feel at home among them. They were attractive, but they were alien to the memories which, in his crowded, bricked-up city solitude, had grown dear to him.
There were droll changes among the hired people. For one thing, they no longer all ate at the table with the family. An exception was made in favor of Milton Squires, who had burst through the overalls chrysalis of hired-manhood, and had become a sort of superintendent. He had not learned to eat with a fork, and he still talked loudly and with boisterous familiarity at the table, reaching for whatever he wanted, and calling the proprietor “Albert,” and his aunt “Sabriny.” He did not bear his social and industrial promotion meekly. He bullied the inferior hired men—Leander had a colleague now, a rough, tow-headed, burly young fellow named Dana Pills-bury—and snubbed loftily the menials of the kitchen. This former haunt scarcely knew him more, and his rare conversations with Alvira were all distinctly framed in condescension. This was only to be expected, for Milton wore a black suit of store-clothes every day, with a gold-plated watch chain and a necktie, and met the farmers round about on terms of practical equality. He was reputed to be a careful and capable manager; his wrath was feared at the cheese-factory; his judgment was respected at the corners’ store. Naturally, such a man would feel himself above kitchen associations.
Of course this defection evoked deep wrath in Alvira’s part of the house, some overflowings of which came to Seth’s notice before he had been a day at the farm. Alvira was not specially changed to the young man’s eyes—indeed her sallow, bilious visage, dark snapping eyes and furrowed forehead seemed the most familiar things about the homestead, and her acidulous tones struck a truer note in his chords of memory than did any other sound.
Aunt Sabrina, wrapped as of old in her red plaid shoulder shawl, but seemingly less erect and aggressive, spent most of her time in the kitchen, ostentatiously pretending to pay her board by culinary labor. Behind her back Alvira was wont to say to her assistant, a slatternly young slip from the ever-spreading Lawton family tree, that the old lady only hindered the work, and that her room would be better than her company. But when Aunt Sabrina was present, Alvira was customarily civil, sometimes quite friendly. The two were drawn together by community of grievance.
They both hated Isabel, with her citified notions, her forks and napkins, and stuck-up airs generally. It had pleased Aunt Sabrina’s mood to regard herself as included in the edict which ordained that servants should eat in the kitchen, and only the sharpest words she had ever heard Albert speak had prevented her acting upon this. She had come to the family table, then, but always with an air of protest; and she had a grim pleasure in leaving her napkin unfolded, month after month, and in keeping everybody waiting while she paraded her inability to eat rapidly or satisfactorily with the new fangled “split spoon.”
She and Alvira had a never-failing topic of hostile talk in the new mistress. To judge by their threats, their jibes and their angry complaints, they were always on the point of leaving the house on her account. So imminent did an outbreak seem to Seth, when he first heard their joint budget of woes and bitter resolves, that he was frightened, but the Lawton girl reassured him. They had talked just like that, she said, every day since she had been there, which would be “a year come August,” and she added scornfully: “They go away? You couldn’t chase ’em away with a clothes-pole!”
The two elderly females had another bond of sympathy, of course, in Milton’s affectation of superiority.
They debated this continually, though as Sabrina had the most to say about her niece-in-law, with Alvira as a sympathetic commentator, so the hateful apotheosis of the whilom hired-man was recognized to be Alvira’s special and personal grievance, in girding at which Sabrina bore only a helping part.
Seth accounted for this by calling up in recollection an old vague understanding of his youth that Milton was some time going to marry Alvira. He could remember having heard this union spoken of as taken for granted in the family. Doubtless Alvira’s present attitude of ugly criticism was due to the fear that Milton’s improved prospects would lead him elsewhere. The Lawton girl indeed hinted rather broadly to him that there were substantial grounds for Alvira’s rage. “I’d tear his eyes out if I was her, and he wouldn’t come up to the scratch,” she said, “after all that’s happened.” Seth understood her suggestion, but he didn’t believe it. The Lawtons were a low-down race, anyway. He had seen one of the girls at Tecumseh once, a girl who had gone utterly to the bad, and this sister of hers seemed a bold, rude huzzy, with a mind prone to mean suspicions.
It was a relief to go back again to the living-room, where Isabel was, and he both verbally and mentally justified her gentle hint that the kitchen was not a good place for young men to spend their time.
“You have no idea,” she said, letting her embroidery fall in her lap for the moment, “how ruinous to discipline and to household management generally this country plan of making companions of your servants is. I had to put a complete stop to it, very soon after I came. There would be no living with them otherwise. There’s not much comfort in living with them as it is, for your Aunt sits out in the kitchen all day long, pretending that she is abused and encouraging them to think that they are ill-used too. She makes it very hard for me—harping all the time on my being a Richardson, just as she did with your mother.
“Then there’s Milton. I did not want to make any difference between him and the other hired people, but your brother insisted on it—on having him at the table with us, and treating him like an equal. He is as coarse and rough and horrid as he can be, but it seems that he is very necessary on the farm, and your brother leaves so much to him and relies so much on him that I couldn’t help myself. He hasn’t got to calling me ‘Isabel’ yet, but I expect him to begin every day of my life. You can’t imagine what an infliction it is to see him eat—or rather, to hear him, for I try not to look.”
Isabel took up her work again, and Seth looked at her more closely than he had done before. She sat at the window, with the full summer light on her bright hair and fair, pretty face. Her tone had been melancholy, almost mournful; looking at her, Seth felt that she was not happy, and more—for he had never supposed her to be particularly happy—that she was bitterly disappointed with the result of the farm experiment. She had not said so, however, and he was in doubt whether it would be wise for him to assume it in his conversation.
“Albert seems to thrive on country fare,” he said, perhaps unconsciously suggesting in his remark what was turning in his mind—that she herself seemed not have thrived. The rounded outlines of her chin and throat were not so perfect as he remembered them. She looked thin and tired now, in the strong light, and there was no color to speak of in her face.
“Oh, yes!” she said, with that falling inflection which is sister to the sigh, and keeping her eyes bent upon her work, “he grows fat. I did not imagine that a man who had always been so active, who was so accustomed to regular office work and intellectual professional pursuits, could fall into idle ways so easily. But it is always a ............