that some one of the family should keep cool, Aunt, and look at things one by one, in their true relation. Now, if you have any proposition to make to me, any plan to present for my consideration, I should like to hear it—because really this other style of conversation is profitless beyond description. In a word, what do you want me to do?”
“What do I want yeh to do?” The old maid leaned forward and put a thin, mitted hand on Albert’s knee, looking eagerly into his face, and speaking almost shrilly. “I want yeh to take this farm, to come here to live, to make it a rich gentleman’s home agin! to put the Fairchilds up once more where my father left ’em.”
“Yes?” was the provokingly unenthusiastic response.
Miss Sabrina felt that she had failed. She put her spectacles on, and took the Bible into her lap, as if to say that she washed her hands of all mundane matters. But it did not suit Albert to regard the interview as closed.
“There is one thing you don’t seem to see at all, Aunt,” he said. “That is, that Dearborn County is relatively not altogether the most important section of the Republic, and that it is quite possible for a man to win public recognition or attain professional distinction in other communities which might reconcile him to a loss of prestige here. It may sound like heresy to you, but I am free to admit that the good opinion of the business men of New York City, where I am regarded as a successful sort of man, seems to me to outweigh all possible questions as to how I am regarded by Elhanan Pratt and Le-ander Crump and—and that Baptist gentleman, for instance, whom you had here to-day. The world has grown so large, my dear aunt, since your day, that there are thousands upon thousands of Americans now who go all their lives without ever once thinking about Dearborn County’s opinion. Of course I can understand how deeply you must feel what you regard as a social decline in the eyes of your neighbours. But truly, it does not specially affect me. They are not my neighbours; if I seem to them to be of less importance than I was in my boyhood, when I had a pony, I can’t help it, and I am sure I don’t want to. Frankly, to use my mother’s old phrase, I don’t care a cotton hat for their opinion good, bad, or indifferent. It is this, I think, which you leave out of your calculation.”
Miss Sabrina had listened, with the Book opened only by a finger’s width. The elaborate irony of her nephew’s words had escaped her, but she saw a gleam of hope in his willingness to discuss the matter at all.
“But then this is the home o’ the Fairchilds; the fam’ly belongs to Dearborn Caounty; father was allus spoken of ez Seth Fairchild o’ Dearborn, jis’ as much ez—ez Silas Wright o’ Dutchess.”
“Of course that last is a powerful argument,” said Albert with a furtive smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “But, after all, the county family idea doesn’t seem to attract me much. Why, aunt, do you know that your grandfather Roger was a journeyman shoemaker, who walked all the way here from Providence. There was nothing incongruous in his son becoming a Senator. Very well; if you have a state of society where sudden elevations of this sort occur, there will inevitably be corresponding descents—just as lean streaks alternate with fat in the bacon of commerce. The Fairchilds went up—they, come down. They have exhausted the soil. Do you see?”
“Nao! I don’t see a bit! ’N’ I b’lieve at heart you’re jis’ ez praoud ez I be!”
“Proud? Yes! Proud of myself, proud of my practice, proud of my position. But proud because three or four hundred dull countrymen, seeing my cows sleek, my harness glossy, my farm well in order, and knowing that my grandfather had been a State Senator, would consider me a ‘likely ’ man—no, not at all.”
Albert rose at this to go, and added, as he turned the door-knob:
“As soon as he’s equal to it, Aunt Sabrina, I’ll get father to go over his affairs with me, and I’ll try and straighten them out a trifle. I dare say we can find some way out of the muddle.”
“But yeh won’t take up the thing yerself? Yeh won’t dew what I wanted yeh tew?”
The lawyer smiled, and said: “What really? Come here and be a farmer?”
Miss Sabrina had risen, too, and came toward her nephew. “No” she said, “not a farmer. Be a country gentleman, ’n’—‘n’—a Congressman!” Albert smiled again, and left the room. He smiled to himself going down the stairs, and narrowly escaped forgetting to change his expression of countenance when he entered the living room, where were sitting people who had not entirely forgotten the fact that it was a house of mourning.
For Albert had a highly interesting idea in his mind, both interesting and diverting. Curiously enough, he had begun developing it from the moment when his aunt first disclosed her ambition for him. At the last moment, in a blind way she had suggested the first political office that entered her mind as an added bribe. She could not know that her astute nephew had, from the first suggestion of her plan, been trying to remember whether it was Jay and Adams Counties, or Jay and Morgan, that were associated with Dearborn in the Congressional district; or that, when she finally in despair said “Be a country gentleman and a Congressman,” his brain had already turned over a dozen projects in as many seconds, every one Congressional.
CHAPTER VII.—THE THREE BROTHERS.
After the early supper of stale bread, saltless butter, dark dried apple sauce, and chippy cake had been disposed of, Lemuel returned to his rocking chair by the stove, Aunt Sabrina and Isabel took seats, each at a window, and read by the fading light, and Albert put on his hat, lighted a cigar, and went out. His brother John stood smoking a pipe in the yard, leaning against the high well-curb, his hands deep in his pantaloons pocket, and his feet planted far to the front and wide apart. Seth was coming from the barns toward the well, with a bucket in his hand. Albert walked across to the curb, and the three brothers were alone together for the first time in years.
“It does one good to be out of doors such an evening as this,” said Albert. “It seems to me it would be better if father would get out in the open air more, instead of sitting cooped up over that stove all the while.”
“When a man’s been out in the open air, rain or shine, snow or blow, for fifty years, he ought to have earned the right to stay inside, if he wants to. | That’s about the only reward there is at the end of a farmer’s life,” answered Seth, turning the calfbucket upside down beside John, and sitting on it. Seth had his old clothes on once more, and perhaps there was some consciousness of the contrast between his apparel and that of his black-clad brethren in the truculent tone of his reply.
John had nodded at Albert on his approach, and thrust his feet a trifle further forward. He still stood silent, looking meditatively at the row of poplars on the other side of the road through rings of pipe smoke.
“So you don’t think much of farm work, eh?” said Albert.
“Who does?” replied Seth, sententiously.
A considerable period of silence ensued. Albert had never had a very high idea of his younger brothers’ conversational qualities, and had rarely known how to talk easily with them, but to-night it seemed a greater task than ever. He offered them cigars, in a propitiatory way. Seth accepted and lit one; John said “Thanks, I prefer a pipe,” and silence reigned again.
It was twilight now, and in the gathering dusk there was no sign of motion about, nor any
