Chapter XIX: Odds and Ends

Six years later and it is summer again in Ridgefield. Uncle Zach has celebrated his ninetieth birthday, and except for his lameness is nearly as hale and hearty as he was when he first welcomed the Masons and the Tracys to his home. Jeff’s presence has worked wonders in him and in the house as well. In a quiet way he assumed the role of master while nominally acting under Mr. Taylor’s orders. The servants, who had become lax and worthless, have been dismissed, and others more competent hired in their place. The house has been thoroughly renovated and refurnished. Many of the former boarders, who had gone to the Tremont, have come back, and a few people from Boston spend the summers there.

“If Dot was only here, and I had my laigs it would seem like old times,” Uncle Zach often says to Jeff, who is his right hand and left hand and feet and brains.

If kindness to an old man can atone for the past Jeff is atoning for it. He puts his master to bed at night as if he were a child and dresses him in the morning. Every pleasant day he takes him for what he calls a drive through the town, stopping wherever the querulous old man wishes to stop and wheeling him so carefully that his rheumatic limbs seldom receive a jolt. Nero is always in attendance and is as much a part of the turnout as Jeff himself. Uncle Zach no longer _shoos_ him when he puts his head on his knees, but he sometimes has pricks of conscience as to what Dotty would say if she could see the big dog stretched on the floor of the piazza or wherever he chose to lie. Dotty’s habits are deferred to by both Uncle Zach and Jeff, except the quarterly house cleanings. At these Jeff has drawn the line. Twice a year was sufficient, he said, for any house, and Uncle Zach agreed with him. Every three months, however, a dress coat and vest and little yellow blanket are brought out to air, the blanket so tender with age that Jeff scarcely dares touch it. “Johnny’s blanket,” Uncle Zach always says, with a tone very different from that in which he speaks of his swallow tail.

“Fool and his money soon parted,” he said when telling Jeff what it had cost. “I never wore it but once and never shall again. The missionaries don’t want it, nor the heathen. If you had any use for it I’d give it to you. It seems a pity for it to lay there year in and year out smellin’ like fury with that moth stuff you put in it.”

Jeff laughed and thanked him as he folded up the garments and laid them away with Taylor’s Tavern in the hair trunk. Once he brought the sign down for Uncle Zach to see.

“I can’t git up them stairs and I’d like to look at it agin,” he said, and when Jeff brought it and stood it before him tears ran down his cheeks like rain. “It makes me think of the time when I was young, and Dotty, too. The lalocks in the garden was blowin’ and the apple trees was blossomin’ the day it was sot up. I can smell the lalocks yet, though the bush has been dead many a year just as Dotty is. Take it away, Jeff, and you needn’t bring it agin. I’m done with Taylor’s Tarvern, and with everything else but you!”

Jeff took it back and felt the moisture in his own eyes at his master’s reminiscences of a past which could never return. To the villagers Jeff was very reticent with regard to his western life. Of his change of name he made light. It was a fashion with some of the miners and he foolishly followed it, he said, but of what befel Tom Hardy he said very little. He was, however, paying so heavy a penalty for his misdeeds that he sometimes felt as if he must hide where no one had ever heard of him in connection with Long John and Little Dick. Fanny had told of the hold up of which he had been the hero, and of the other where he had been an actor, and it seemed to him people would never stop questioning him as to the most minute details. If he repeated the story once in the office he repeated it a hundred times to a breathless audience which never grew tired of listening and were always ready to hear it again.

“And they never got a clew to them, you say?”

“Never,” was the question and answer, with which the evening usually closed, the people dispersing to their rooms or homes, while Jeff rushed out into the night overwhelmed with remorse.

“I believe State’s Prison would be better than this,” he sometimes thought when Uncle Zacheus had him on the rack.

He was inexorable and made Jeff tell the story over and over again until he ought to have known it by heart. Once when he was out for his airing he asked, speaking of the robbers, “Be they gone, root and branch?”

“Yes, root and branch. Neither Long John nor Little Dick have been seen since Inez died,” Jeff replied.

It was not often that he spoke of Inez, and now at the mention of her name Uncle Zach rejoined, “Poor girl, and you was to have married her. I am sorry for you. And she was Miss Mason’s sister and Mark was her father. Mark was a likely chap. I’ve nothing agin him except that he run away and let ’em think he was dead and changed his name. I s’pose he put you up to change yours, too.”

“No, he didn’t,” Jeff answered quickly. “It was right the other way. I put him up to every bad thing he ever did.”

Jeff was a little heated in his defense of Mark and pushed the chair over a rough place with less care than usual.

“Soffly, soffly, Jeff. My bones is older than they was once,” Uncle Zach said.

This recalled Jeff to himself, and the rest of the journey was made with comparative comfort to the old man’s bones. They were on their way to the Queen Anne cottage which had been built near the site of the old ruin and between it and the road. It was a very pretty and artistic affair, with bay windows and projections and wide halls and piazza, where Roy said ’Tina could sit and rest if she wanted to, when she made her nocturnal visits. The cellar was filled up and made into a terrace, or plateau, which was ablaze with flowers from June to September. A part of the orchard had been cut down and with the lane converted into a small park of green sward, flowering shrubs and shade trees. Here Roy and Fanny spent a part of every summer and were often joined by Craig and Alice, and occasionally by Helen, whose beauty was not greatly marred by the lapse of years and who was sometimes told that she looked nearly as young as her daughter. She was a grandmother now and two children played on the grass and picked flowers from the spot where ’Tina once had lived and loved and sinned. They were a sturdy boy of five years old and a little girl of three. The only real disagreement Fanny and Roy ever had was on the subject of the boy’s name. Fanny wished to call him Mark Hilton, while Helen favored the idea. Roy could not tell Fanny that his son must not be named for one who he believed had been a highwayman, but he objected to the name and held his ground against Fanny’s entreaties and the advice of Craig and Alice.

“Perhaps as you won’t call him for my father you’d like to call him for yours,” Fanny said, with as much spirit as she ever opposed to Roy.

“No,” he answered, “not for my father either, but I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll call him for your adopted father, Walter Prescott. How will that suit you?”

“Not as well as Mark Hilton,” Fanny replied, but she gave up the point and the boy was christened Walter Prescott.

When two years later a girl was born there was no question as to her name from the moment Roy said to Fanny, “Would you like to see our little daughter _Inez_?”

They were bright, active children and Jeff was their slave. They were never happier than when with him, and always hailed with delight the sight of the wheel chair coming down the road, for that meant a ride after Uncle Zach was safely deposited upon the piazza with their father and mother.

On the morning when Jeff came near upsetting the chair in his defense of Mark they were on the lookout for him. They had come from Boston the night before and were watching eagerly for their _horse_, as they called him, while Nero was a _colt_. Craig and Alice were there and with Roy and Fanny were enjoying the freshness and fragrance of the June morning.

“There they come; there’s Jeff and Nero,” Walter cried, running to meet him, and “Dere’s Deff and Nero,” Inez repeated, toddling after her brother.

Both Fanny and Roy hurried to meet Uncle Zach, who was soon helped to a seat on the piazza, and his chair was at liberty and at once appropriated by the children.

“Where shall we go?” Jeff asked, and Walter answered, “To the woods.”

He always wanted to go there, hoping to find a bumble-bee’s nest, if not the hornet’s his grandmother had told him about. Inez was satisfied to go anywhere with Jeff, whose face always brightened at sight of her and then grew sad as he remembered another Inez in her mountain grave. They found the spot where a hornet’s nest had been, and saw a rabbit steal cautiously out from her hole and then in again as Nero started for her. They picked some wild flowers and ferns and then Inez grew tired of walking about and wanted Jeff to sit down and take her. When, as a baby of a year old, Inez had first held up her arms to him, he had shrunk from her with a feeling that he was unworthy to touch her. Roy, who was present, had something of the same feeling, for he never saw Jeff without a thought of the hold up. But the child’s persistence had conquered his prejudice and subjugated Jeff, who loved the little girl better than any living being. Indeed, there was no one else for him to love. He respected Uncle Zacheus and admired Fanny and reverenced Alice as one of the noblest of women, but his affection was given to the baby Inez.

“Taky me; I’se tired,” she kept saying in the woods until he sat down upon a log and took her in his lap.

“Now, tell us a story about Aunt Inez and the robbers,” Walter said, coming up with the dog, who stretched himself at Jeff’s feet while Walter lay down at his side.

The previous summer Jeff had told Walter of his home among the mountains and his life there with the other Inez, and his grandfather and Nero, and once Walter had heard his mother tell some one of the hold up and the robber, and boy-like this pleased him more than the cottage and the mountains. He had made Jeff tell him about it two or three times the year before and now insisted that he should tell it again, and begin where his Aunt Inez jumped over the wheel and Nero ran after the robber. Very unwillingly Jeff told the story, adapting it to Walter, who listened intently and did not allow him to omit any part of it which he knew.

“I wish I’d been there with mamma. Where was I?” he asked.

Jeff did not know, and with his respect for Jeff’s knowledge considerably lessened, he continued, “I’d have shot the robber.”

Inez, whose arms were about Jeff’s neck and who generally said what Walter did, replied, “I’d sot the yobber,” and her arms tightened their hold, giving Jeff a feeling of suffocation and helping to smother the groan he could not entirely repress.

“Now, tell about Aunt Inez and where she lived,” Walter said, and Jeff told him of the grand mountains and the waterfalls in the beautiful valley far away and the grave among the hills where his Aunt Inez was buried.

“Was she as pretty as mamma?” Walter asked, and Jeff replied, “_I_ think she was prettier.”

“I don’t believe it. Do you, Nero?” Walter said, with a kick of his foot against the side of the dog, who answered by springing up and hurrying after the rabbit which had ventured from its hole a second time.

Walter followed the dog, and Jeff was left alone with Inez, who whispered drowsily, “Tell more of the bufiful valley far away.”

Then she fell asleep, and bending over her Jeff whispered, “Oh, God, in this world my sin will always follow and torture me, but grant that in the next I may be pure and innocent as this child.”

Something roused the little girl and opening her eyes, so like the eyes Jeff remembered so well, she lisped, “Ess, he will.”

Then she fell asleep again, and with a feeling that he had received a benediction, Jeff, who had never kissed her before, kissed her now for the sake of the dead Inez, whose grave was in the beautiful valley far away.

THE END.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

POPULAR NOVELS

BY

MRS. MARY J. HOLMES.

TEMPEST AND SUNSHINE.
ENGLISH ORPHANS.
HOMESTEAD ON HILLSIDE.
’LENA RIVERS.
MEADOW BROOK.
DORA DEANE.
COUSIN MAUDE.
MARIAN GREY.
EDITH LYLE.
DAISY THORNTON.
CHATEAU D’OR.
QUEENIE HETHERTON.
BESSIE’S FORTUNE.
MARGUERITE.
MRS. HALLAM’S COMPANION.
DARKNESS AND DAYLIGHT.
HUGH WORTHINGTON.
CAMERON PRIDE.
ROSE MATHER.
ETHELYN’S MISTAKE.
MILBANK.
EDNA BROWNING.
WEST LAWN.
MILDRED.
FORREST HOUSE.
MADELINE.
CHRISTMAS STORIES.
GRETCHEN.
DR. HATHERN’S DAUGHTERS.
PAUL RALSTON.
THE TRACY DIAMONDS. (_New._)

“Mrs. Holmes is a peculiarly pleasant and fascinating writer. Her books
are always entertaining, and she has the rare faculty of enlisting the
sympathy and affections of her readers, and of holding their attention
to her pages with deep and absorbing interest.”

Handsomely bound in cloth. Price, $1.50 each, and sent _free_ by mail on
receipt of price,

G. W. Dillingham Co., Publishers
NEW YORK.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Moved ad to the end. 2. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 3. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.