He sat thus in solitude6 for some time, blankly studying the grotesque7 patterns in the old-fashioned wall-paper, and drawing mechanically at the pipe in his mouth, unconscious that no smoke came. Thus Miss Sabrina found him when, after a more than ordinarily sharp passage at arms with Alvira, she returned from the Kitchen.
“I swaow! thet girl gits wuss tempered ’n’ more presumin’ ev’ry day o’ her life,” she exclaimed.
“Who—Annie?” asked her brother, rousing himself as if from a nap.
“Annie! nao! who’s talkin’ abaout her?”
“Oh nothin’, unly I was thinkin’ ’baout Annie—‘baout her ’n’ Seth, yeh knaow,” answered Lemuel, apologetically.
“Well, what abaout ’em?” The query8 was distinctly aggressive in tone.
“Oh, nothin’ much. I was sort o’ thinkin’—well, you knaow S’briny, haow Sissly used to lot on their makin’ a match of it—’n’ I was kine o’ wond’rin’ ef this here notion o’ Seth’s goin’ away wouldn’t knock it all in th’ head.”
“Well?” Miss Sabrina’s monosyllabic comment had so little of sympathy or acquiescence9 in it, that Lemuel continued in an injured tone and with more animation10, not to say resolution:
“Well, I’ve hed kine of an idea o’ goin’ over ’n’ talkin’ it over with M’tildy. Mebbe that’ll be the best thing to dew.”
“Oh you think so, dew yeh? Thet’s all th’ pride you’ve got lef’, is it? I think I see myself goin’ hangin’ raound Matildy Warren, beggin’ her to let her granddaughter marry a Fairchild! I’m ashamed of yeh, Lemuel.”
“I don’ see, much, what ther’ is to be ashamed on.” He added, with the faintest shadow of a grin on his face. “’N’ b’twixt you ’n’ me, I don’t see ’s there’s so blamed much fur me to be praoud abaout, nuther. ‘Tain’t’s if I was goin’ to ask a favor o’ M’tildy, at all. She ’n’ Sissly used to talk ‘baout the thing’s if ’twas settled. ’N’ now’t she’s gone, ’n’ Seth’s talkin’ o’ quittin’ th’ farm, seems to me it’d be the sensible thing to kind o’ fine aout ef M’tildy wouldn’t offer th’ young folks her farm, ef they’d stay.”
“Very well, sir. Hev’ yer own way,” answered Miss Sabrina, with stern formality. “You allus would hev yer own way—and yeh kin1 go muddle11 things up to yer heart’s content, for all o’ me!”
Lemuel watched his sister march to the stairs door and close it decisively behind her. He was accustomed of old to this proof of her wrath12; as far back as he could remember it had been Sabrina’s habit to figuratively wash her hands of unpleasant complications on the ground-floor by slamming this self-same door, and going up to sulk in her own room. She did it as a young girl, in the first months of her disagreements with his young wife; it seemed to him a most natural proceeding13 now, when they were both old, gray-headed people.
Just now, it was a relief to him that she had gone, for if she had stayed he might not have had the courage to put his thoughts into actions. As it was he took his hat from its nail back of the kitchen door, and started across-lots for the Warren homestead.
There was no danger of not finding Mrs. Warren at home. For seven or eight years she had scarcely stirred beyond her own door, and for the past eighteen months she had been bed-ridden. The front door was opened to Mr. Fairchild by a young slip of a girl, one of the brood of daughters with which a neighboring poor family was weighted down, and all of whom had been driven to seek work at any price among the farmers of the vicinity. It seemed as if there was a Lawton girl in every other farmhouse14 the whole length of the Burfield road.
The girl ushered15 him into the gloomy hall, gloomier than ever now in the gathering16 twilight17, and unceremoniously left him there, while she went to announce his presence. He heard through a door ajar at the end of the hall a thin, querulous voice ask, “Which one of the Fairchilds is it?” and the girl’s reply “The old man.”
Then the servant returned to him and with a curt18 “Come ahead,” led him to the mistress of the house, who lay in her bed-home, in a recess19 off the living room.
Mrs. Matilda Warren had never been what might be called a popular woman in the neighborhood. She and her husband, the latter dead now for many years, had come from Massachusetts. They were educated people in a sense, and had not mingled20 easily with their rougher neighbors. The widow Warren had, after her daughter’s escapade, carried this exclusiveness to a point which the neighborhood found disagreeable. Gradually she had grown into the recluse21 habit, and younger generations on the hillside, eking22 out the gossip of their elders with fancies of their own, born of stray glimpses of her tall, gaunt figure and pale face, came to regard her with much that same awe23 which, two centuries before, reputed witches had for children, young and old.
Something of this feeling Lemuel himself was conscious of, as he stood before her. The coverlet came up close under her arms. She wore a wrapper-dress of red flannel24. As he entered she raised herself, with an evidently cruel effort, upon her elbow, dragging the pillow down to aid in supporting her shoulder. She panted with this exertion25 as she confronted him. Her scanty26 white hair was combed tightly back from her forehead, and bound in place with a black-velvet band; a natural parting on the side of the hair gave the withered27 face a suggestion of juvenile28 jauntiness29, in grotesque, jarring contrast with the pale blue eyes which glittered from caverns30 of dark wrinkles, and the sunken, distorted mouth. She had changed so vastly since their last meeting that Lemuel stood bewildered and silent, staring at her.
She spoke31 first. “I’m trying to think—it must be twenty year since we’ve met, Lemuel Fairchild.”
“Nigh onto that, M’tildy,” he replied, turning his hat in his hands.
“I didn’t expect ever to lay eyes on you again, I couldn’t come to you, and wouldn’t if I could, and I didn’t dream you would ever show your face here.” The aged32 woman said this in a high, sharp voice, speaking rapidly and with an ungracious tone.
Lemuel fidgetted with his hat and moved his feet uneasily on the dog-skin rug. “Yeh needn’t be afeered, M’tildy, I wouldn’t hev come naow ef it hadn’t been somethin’ partikler ’baout Annie.”
The invalid33 raised her shoulder from the pillow with a sudden movement, and bent34 her head forward. “What’s happened to her? Is she hurt? Tell me, quick!”
“Oh nao, they ain’t nothin’ th’ matter with her. It’s unly ’baout her ’n’ Seth. I kine o’ thought we ought to talk it over ’n’ see haow the land lay. That’s all.”
“Oh that’s it, is it? Samantha!”
Betrayed out of her shrewdness by the suddenness of the summons the servant girl made her immediate35 appearance through the hall door.
“Yes, I knew you were listening, you huzzy,” said Mrs. Warren grimly. “You get along up stairs, go into Annie’s room, an’ make a noise of some sort on the melodeon till I call you. Not too much noise, mind; jest enough so I can know you’re up there.” As the girl left the room, the invalid explained: “What she don’t hear, the rest of the Lawtons won’t know. That family’s as good as a detective force for the whole county.” Then, in a less amiable36 tone: “You might as well set down. What is it about my girl an’ Seth?”
As Lemuel awkwardly seated himself near the bedside and prepared to answer, a wailing37, discordant38 series of sounds came from the floor above. The knowledge that the girl was creating this melancholy39 noise to order, and on his account, confused his thought and he found himself stating the case much more baldly than he had intended. “The fact is,” he said, stroking his hat over his knee, “Seth’s thinkin’ o’ goin’ away to Tecumsy—Albert’s got him a place there—’n’ so I s’pose it’ll be all up b’twixt him ’n’ Annie.”
The grandmother never took those light, searching eyes off her visitor’s face. He felt himself turning uncomfortably red under their malevolent40 gaze, I and wished she would speak. But she said nothing. At last he explained, deferentially41:
“I thought it’d only be right to tell yeh. I know Sissly ’n’ you use to talk abaout th’ thing. Th’ way she use to talk, speshly jis’ ’fore she died, it ’peared ‘s if you tew hed it all settled. But Albert’s goin’ to take th’ farm, it seems, ’n’ Seth, he’s fig’rin’ on goin’ away to be a neditor, ’n’ it looks to me’s if th’ hull42 plan’d fell threw.”
Still no reply from the bed. He added, helplessly “Don’t it kind o’ seem so to you, M’tildy?”
The wretched discords43 from the chamber44 above mocked him. The witch-like eyes from the shadows of the recess began to burn him. It was growing into the dusk, but the eyes had a light of their own, a cold, steely, fierce light. Would she never speak? How he regretted having come!
“I’ll tell you what seems to me, Lemuel Fairchild,” she said at last, not speaking so rapidly now, and putting a sharp, finishing edge on each of her words. “It seems to me that there’s never been but one decent, honorable, likely human bein’ in your whole family an’ she came into it by the mistake of marrying you. I blame myself for not remembering the blood that was in you all, an’ for thinking that this youngest son of yours was different from the rest. I forgot that he was a Fairchild like the others, an’ I forgot what I owed that family of men, so mean and cowardly and selfish that they have to watch each other like so many hyenas45. An’ so you’ve come to tell me that Seth has turned out like his father, like his uncle, like all of his name, eh? The more fool I, to need to be told it!”
Lemuel’s impulse was to rise from his chair, and bear himself with offended dignity, but the glitter in the old woman’s eyes warned him that the attempt would be a failure. He scowled46, put his hat on the other knee, crossed his legs, pretended to be interested in the antics of a kitten which was working havoc47 with a ball of yarn48 at his feet. Finally he said:
“You ain’t fair to Seth. He’s a good boy. He ain’t said nothin’ nor done nothin’ fer yeh to git mad at. Fer that matter, you never was fair to any of us, ’cept Sissly.”
“Fair! Fair!” came the answer promptly49, and in a swifter measure. “Hear the man! Why, Lemuel Fairchild, you know that you cheated your own brother out of the share in that farm that was his by all rights as much as yours. You know that your father intended you both to share alike, that he died too suddenly to make a new will and that you grabbed everything under a will made when your brother William was thought to be too sickly to ever raise. You know that you let him grow up an idle, worthless coot of a fellow, an’ then encouraged him—yes, don’t deny it, encouraged him I say—to make a fool of my daughter, and run away with her.
“You knew I wouldn’t look at him as a suitor for Jenny; but you thought I would be soft enough, once they were married, to give him my farm, an’ you counted on getting it away from him afterwards, just as your father got the Kennard farm before you. You egged him on into the trouble, an’ you let him die in it, without help. Oh I know you, Lemuel Fairchild—I know your breed!
“Your wife was a good woman—a million times better than you deserved. She knew the wrongs that had been done me, an’ Annie, an’ her poor ne’er-do-well of a father before her; she was anxious to make them good, not I. It was she who talked, year after year, when she ran over here on the sly to visit me, of squaring everything by the young folk’s marriage. For a long time I didn’t like it. I distrusted the family, as, God knows, I had reason to. But all that I heard of Seth was in his favor. He was hardworking, patient, even-tempered, so everyone said. What little I saw of him I liked. An’ I felt sorry for him, too, knowing how dear he was to his mother, and yet how helpless she was to give him advantages, an’ make something besides a farm-drudge out of him. So little by little, I gave in to the idea, an’ finally it became mine almost as much as Cecily’s.
“As for Annie, I don’t know how much she has grown to care for him; I’m afraid she’s known about our talks, and lotted on ’em, though if anything has passed between them she would have told me. For she’s a good girl—a good girl—and she’ll stand by me, never fear, and say as I say now, that it’s good riddance! D’ye mind? Good riddance to bad rubbish—to your whole miserable50, conniving51, underhanded family! There ain’t an honest hair in your head, Lemuel Fairchild, and there never was. And you can go back to them that sent you, to your old catamaran of a sister and your young sneak52 of a son, and tell ’em what I think of them, and you, and the whole caboodle of you, that ruined and killed my Jane, and made me a broken old woman before my time, and now tries to break my grand-daughter’s heart! And the longest day you Jive, don’t ever let me lay eyes on you again. That’s all!”
Lemuel groped his way out again through the dark hall, to the front door. The groaning53 discords from upstairs rose to a triumphant54 babel of sound as he knocked against the hat-rack, and fumbled55 for the latch56, as if to emphasize and gloat over his discomfiture57. The cold evening air, after the sweltering heat of the sick-room, was a physical relief, but it brought no moral comfort.
Old Lemuel was much pained, and even more confused, by the hard words to which he had had to listen. They presented a portrait of himself which he felt to be in no way a likeness58, yet he could not say wherein a single line should be altered. He knew that he was not a bad man; he felt conscious of having done no special wrong, intentionally59, to anybody; he had always tried to be fair and square and easy-going with everybody: yet the mischief60 of it was that all these evil things which the witchlike M’tildy had piled at his door were of indubitable substance, and he could not prove, even to himself, much less to her, that they did not belong there. It was a part of the consistently vile61 luck of his life that all these malignant62 happenings should be charged up against him, and used to demonstrate his wickedness. He had not enough mental skill or alertness to sift63 the unfair from the true in the indictment64 she had drawn65, or to put himself logically in her place, and thus trace her mistakes. He only realized that all these events which she enumerated66 had served to convince Mrs. Warren that he was a villain67. The idea was a new one to him, and it both surprised and troubled him to find that, as he thought the matter over he could not see where she was particularly wrong. Yet a villain he had certainly never intended to be—never for a moment. Was this not cruelly hard luck?
And then there was this business about Seth. He had meant it all in the friendliest spirit, all with the best of motives68. And how she had snapped him up before he had a chance to explain, and called him a scoundrel and his boy a sneak, and driven him from the house! Here was a muddle for one—and Sabrina had said he would make a muddle of it, as he had of everything else, all through his life. The lonely, puzzled, discouraged old man felt wofully like shedding tears, as he approached his own gate—or no, it was Albert’s gate now—and passed the young people chatting there, and realized what a feeble old fool they all must think him.
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1
kin
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| n.家族，亲属，血缘关系；adj.亲属关系的，同类的 | |
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orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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animated
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| adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的 | |
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dozed
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| v.打盹儿，打瞌睡( doze的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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6
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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8
query
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| n.疑问，问号，质问；vt.询问，表示怀疑 | |
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acquiescence
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| n.默许；顺从 | |
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animation
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| n.活泼，兴奋，卡通片／动画片的制作 | |
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11
muddle
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| n.困惑，混浊状态；vt.使混乱，使糊涂，使惊呆；vi.胡乱应付，混乱 | |
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12
wrath
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| n.愤怒，愤慨，暴怒 | |
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13
proceeding
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| n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报 | |
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14
farmhouse
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| n.农场住宅（尤指主要住房） | |
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15
ushered
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| v.引，领，陪同( usher的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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16
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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curt
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| adj.简短的，草率的 | |
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recess
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| n.短期休息，壁凹（墙上装架子，柜子等凹处） | |
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20
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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21
recluse
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| n.隐居者 | |
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22
eking
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| v.（靠节省用量）使…的供应持久( eke的现在分词 )；节约使用；竭力维持生计；勉强度日 | |
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23
awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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24
flannel
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| n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服 | |
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exertion
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| n.尽力，努力 | |
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scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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27
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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28
juvenile
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| n.青少年，少年读物；adj.青少年的，幼稚的 | |
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29
jauntiness
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| n.心满意足；洋洋得意；高兴；活泼 | |
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caverns
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| 大山洞，大洞穴( cavern的名词复数 ) | |
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31
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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32
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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invalid
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| n.病人，伤残人；adj.有病的，伤残的；无效的 | |
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34
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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35
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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37
wailing
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱 | |
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38
discordant
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| adj.不调和的 | |
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39
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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40
malevolent
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| adj.有恶意的，恶毒的 | |
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41
deferentially
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| adv.表示敬意地，谦恭地 | |
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42
hull
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| n.船身；(果、实等的)外壳；vt.去(谷物等)壳 | |
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43
discords
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| 不和（discord的复数形式） | |
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44
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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45
hyenas
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| n.鬣狗( hyena的名词复数 ) | |
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46
scowled
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| 怒视，生气地皱眉( scowl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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47
havoc
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| n.大破坏，浩劫，大混乱，大杂乱 | |
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48
yarn
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| n.纱，纱线，纺线；奇闻漫谈，旅行轶事 | |
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49
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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50
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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51
conniving
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| v.密谋 ( connive的现在分词 )；搞阴谋；默许；纵容 | |
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52
sneak
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| vt.潜行(隐藏,填石缝)；偷偷摸摸做；n.潜行；adj.暗中进行 | |
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53
groaning
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| adj. 呜咽的, 呻吟的 动词groan的现在分词形式 | |
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54
triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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55
fumbled
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| （笨拙地）摸索或处理（某事物）( fumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 乱摸，笨拙地弄； 使落下 | |
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56
latch
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| n.门闩，窗闩；弹簧锁 | |
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57
discomfiture
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| n.崩溃；大败；挫败；困惑 | |
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58
likeness
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| n.相像，相似（之处） | |
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59
intentionally
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| ad.故意地，有意地 | |
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60
mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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61
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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62
malignant
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| adj.恶性的，致命的；恶意的，恶毒的 | |
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63
sift
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| v.筛撒，纷落，详察 | |
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64
indictment
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| n.起诉；诉状 | |
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65
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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66
enumerated
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| v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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67
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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68
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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