Mrs. Roberto - Or the Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

Cordelia strode up to her cousin and gripped Priscilla’s hands, which were cold and damp.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Cord,” said Priscilla. It was one thing, she thought, to carry such a thing off in a dress shop, but quite another in the company of strangers, under the critical gaze of men and among women of much greater wealth and elegance.

  “No,” said Grace, simply and without being heard.

  “After seeing yourself in this,” insisted Cordelia, “how could you think of anything else?”

  “It’s very—” Priscilla considered herself in the mirror again, “mature.”

  “And why not?”

  “No,” said Grace again, and her tone, if not the word, sank through the young women’s consciousness.

  “What, Aunt Grace?”

  The older woman hurried across the room and took a pale yellow gown—to be favored, perhaps, by a young girl on a summer day—from its stand and held it before her. “Look at this!” she said a little too emphatically. “Isn’t it sweet?”

  It was just the thing Priscilla might have worn under any other circumstances, but she looked from her image in the mirror to the yellow gown and something like horror showed on her face. Even Grace flinched at what happened to the grown woman in the beautiful gown, and Cordelia stepped back and looked from her aunt to her cousin. Priscilla might have lost two inches of height and several yards of confidence.

  Mrs. Beallooked philosophic and unmoved.

  Grace Morningside herself drooped so that the hem of the gown in her hands touched the floor. “Is that the gown you want?” she said to her daughter after a long and terrible moment.

  Priscilla was not sure, of a sudden; certainly she hadn’t been sure before, but for different reasons. “I don’t know,” she said, but so softly that no one heard her.

  “Oh, but you must!” said Cordelia, almost as softly.

  Grace did not look at her niece. “Is that the gown you want?” she asked a gam.

  Priscilla looked like a child, fingering the velvet at her throat, but when she looked back at her mother, her expression changed, as if some recollection had unexpectedly determined her answer. Her jaw stiffened and there were tears in her eyes. She said nothing but nodded.

  Grace blinked and looked as if she found it difficult to breathe, or even move.

  Cordelia was startled, as well; from the moment they set eyes on it, she had believed the dress to be a lost cause. Now she hadn’t the slightest notion as to what had prompted Priscilla’s unexpected decision, but Cordelia studied her cousin’s face and thought there was, in Priscilla’s teary eyes, a brief and quiet anger.

  So the gown had been carefully gathered and boxed, and Grace even purchased the velvet ribbon and the cameo with her own money. Cordelia found a nice gown, relying as much as she dared upon her aunt’s advice. It was not a brilliant choice. (Priscilla suspected that her cousin had purposely insisted on something less grand.) Grace, too, found something suitable for a fancy ball that would yet do no harm to her insistent widowhood.

  Great-aunt Delia did not seem very happy with Cordelia’s selection till she saw Priscilla’s. She perhaps understood what Priscilla had suspected and returned to Cordelia’s finery with more praise. She was quite pleased with Priscilla’s gown, but did not go on about it. “Very practical,” she said at one point, and Cordelia almost laughed. Grace frowned at her aunt.

  Hanging behind the door in the bedroom upstairs, the gown looked a bit like traitor’s weeds to Priscilla. Grace had not said very much to her daughter, and only Cordelia’s careful chatter kept conversation alive till it was time for bed.

  When she was dressed for bed, Cordelia took another look at the gown behind the door and breathed a great sigh. “It is ... marvelous!” she said.

  “You should wear it,” said Priscilla.

  Cordelia made a noise. “I haven’t the figure.” It was true: she was a willow.

  “But you have the spirit,” added Priscilla.

  “Not as spirited as you looked when you came out of that fitting room. By Aunt Delia’s definition—or anyone’s, I dare say—you’ll knock over Mr. Moss, and any number of other men in the process.”

  “Please, don’t joke, Cord.”

  “Why do you think I’m joking? I told you, if you had only once looked up on the train, you might have seen how Mr. Moss was watching you.”

  “I think he’s very kind, is all.”

  “I think he’s very smitten.”

  “He did see us down from the train.”

  “He saw you down from the train. We just happened to be with you.”

  “Ah,” said Priscilla after the briefest hope had touched her eyes. “I might never see him again.”

  “He’s going to the ball.”

  “He said he would think about it.”

  Cordelia saw that Priscilla was not ready to be encouraged, so she came away from the gown, went to the edge of the bed where her cousin was sitting, and kissed Priscilla on the top of the head.

  For a moment, Priscilla let herself imagine Mr. Moss at the ball, herself in that magnificent gown, and she and Mr. Moss dancing a waltz about Mrs. Morrell’s grand ballroom. It was not long before a voice rose up and swept these visions aside—a voice and words she had heard only that morning. Cordelia had not heard them, or had made nothing of them if she had, but that voice—those words—only added to the impossibility of Priscilla’s sweet daydream.

  It was while they were taking the hired carriage to Aunt Delia’s. Priscilla was feeling a little giddy from having seen Mr. Moss. The entire day seemed dizzy when she looked back at it, but on the train, and for a while after, she had felt an unaccustomed pang of possibilities. She had even been brave enough to speak to her mother.

  “Mr. Moss was very nice to see us off the train,” she said with complete innocence.

  Grace was looking out the window of the carriage. She looked a little bored, a little weary, but Priscilla realized that her mother’s thoughts were racing. “After all, dear,” Grace had said, “he is a servant.”

  Priscilla’s giddiness had ended at that moment, and at that moment, as her anger rose above her fear, the gown in Mrs. Beal’s window was chosen before any of them had ever seen it.

  22. What They Promised Phileda

  Sundry thought it polite (and even circumspect, perhaps) to wait for Mister Walton and their host before stepping into the night after Madeline, but the young woman turned and smiled from the front yard—an expression he could not miss in the light that spilled from the hall—and he quickly forgot his brief discretion. The bright scythe of the moon’s first quarter was snared in a grove of trees on a hill to the west, and starlight blinked in and out from behind a fleet of clouds. Sundry could smell the lilacs in the yard.

  “Don’t you love a spring night, Mr. Moss,” she said airily, “when summer seems so close behind it?” A feathery breeze caught at certain stray locks of her auburn hair.

  “Well—" he began, hoping to think of something wise to say, or poetical, or even lucid, and settled for a simple “I do.”

  He didn’t regret his answer, for it made her smile again. “It’s very generous of Mister Walton to help with Hercules,” she said after a moment. “Daddy has been so troubled.”

  “That is an interesting subject,” said Sundry, and he was about to make further inroads under this heading when the two older gentlemen arrived on the front steps. The four of them stood in the yard and weighed the evening. “Do you have any thoughts about Hercules, Mister Walton?” asked the farmer as they went looking for the great pig.

  Mister Walton decided that now was the time to have it out. “I fear my experience, Mr. Fern, is not—”

  “You might want to keep Hercules in tonight,” interrupted Sundry.

  “Do you think?” said the farmer. Though he regarded Sundry with the smallest degree of caution, his honest and hospitable nature forbade anything but polite replies.

  Sundry referred the question to Mister Walton, and Mr. Fer
n, too, turned to the portly fellow and said again, “Do you think? I told you that we had him penned for three days.”

  “Not penned, I think,” said Sundry, “but in the barn.”

  A pig in a barn was not a usual thing, and Mr. Fern had to consider it for a moment.

  “I knew a fellow once,” said Sundry, his hands behind his back and his head up in the posture of one who does his best to recall with accuracy. “He had a cow he would tether before the barn when he milked her. Now, one day, when the cow was in her stall, lightning struck that tether, and afterward, whenever he milked the cow from that tether, she gave sour milk.”

  “I’ve read some articles about electrical dispersement and lightning storms,” said Mr. Fern thoughtfully, “but I’ve never understood that any effect can linger in an area after the initial charge has dissipated.”

  “There are other local influences that might have an effect,” suggested Sundry. “It’s just a notion. And there was the other thing—” Sundry tapped his head, as if he were having difficulty remembering. “What was it we spoke about, Mister Walton, that Hercules should be given.”

  “Spoke about?” Mister Walton could think of nothing.

  “In the house,” said Sundry.

  “The house?”

  “A dose of ... er—”

  “Birch-bark tea!” exclaimed Mister Walton, more from the pleasure of remembering what Sundry had been talking about than from any form of conviction. He had, in fact, no conviction at all regarding birch-bark tea, and had hardly heard of it before.

  “Birch-bark tea?” said Madeline. She had heard of the drink’s powers against headache and rheumatism but would never have thought it a remedy for a melancholy pig.

  “Is that what you think, Mister Walton?” asked Mr. Fern.

  “I have been meaning to explain,” said that gentle fellow, “that Sundry knows a good deal more about these matters than I do.”

  “Oh?” Mr. Fern spoke the word, but both he and Madeline wore the expression.

  “But,” added Mister Walton, “a change in venue has often been beneficial to my own state of mind in times of difficulty. Here he is,” he said, a little discomfited by the confusion on their faces. “He’s on his feet!”

  “Yes,” said the farmer, recovering slightly. “He often gets up at this time of day, but it doesn’t last very long. He seems a little more content in the evening, but tomorrow he’ll be sad as ever.”

  “Could he be eating something he shouldn’t, Mr. Fern?” wondered Sundry.

  “I won’t say he isn’t. It’s why I penned him up. I’m not a botanist by training, though I know something about plants. But I’ve had half a dozen taxonomies and the Farmer’s Guide to Destructive Weeds in hand, as I surveyed the place from corner to corner, and found nothing. There are some birches down in the hollow by the stream, if that’s what you think he needs.”

  Sundry scratched Hercules’s head.

  Mr. Fern exchanged looks with his daughter. “We could put him in for the night,” he said graciously. “What do you say, Hercules? Would you like to stay indoors?”

  Mister Walton noticed that Sundry was watching the house; there was a single lighted window on the second floor that spread a dim glow over the yard. Sundry turned away from the house and smiled when he caught his employer’s eye.

  “Madeline,” said the father, “get one of your sisters to go with you down to the birch grove by the stream. How much of the stuff will we need, Mister Walton ... er, Mr. Moss?”

  Sundry indicated some dimensions with his hands, saying, “A couple of lengths like this.”

  Mr. Fern turned to his daughter and Madeline hurried off. They led Hercules to the barn, his great weight creaking over the ramp, and saw the pig settled into a stall with a trough of slop and water. Mr. Fern’s lantern was an island of light in the darkness of the barn; their shadows shivered past timber and post, blotted the walls, and were lost in the rafters. Sundry saw the eyes of an owl shining in the loft, and he had a sense of the great bird swooping overhead as they walked back to the house. Something gave a tiny, frightened squeal in the field beyond.

  It was not long before Madeline and her sister were back in the kitchen steeping papery lengths of birch bark in a kettle. “What do we do with it?” asked Madeline.

  “Just pour it in with his slops,” said Sundry.

  After the bark had simmered for half an hour or so, and after the brew had cooled, Mr. Fern himself took it out to Hercules. “Let us hope,” he said simply when he came back.

  The Ferns and their guests retired, parting in the upper hall, and Mr. Fern thanked Mister Walton for perhaps the twentieth time. Mister Walton blushed and insisted that thanks were unnecessary. Once in his room, he sat on the edge of the one bed and blew a heartfelt sigh.

  Lingering at the door, Sundry had a brief glimpse of Madeline; she smiled and gave a hesitant wave, before disappearing through a doorway at the opposite end of the hall.

  “My, but it’s a lovely evening!” said Mister Walton when Sundry followed him into his room. “Would you crack a window?”

  “I was going to suggest it,” said Sundry, and he raised the sash opposite the bed. “I wish we were on the other side of the house,” he said as he leaned out the window.

  “I don’t know how you can tell which side of the house we’re on,” admitted Mister Walton. “I was quite befuddled coming up here and will starve for breakfast if someone doesn’t lead me back to the kitchen.”

  “I think I can get you there,” said Sundry without pulling his head in.

  “My nose might lead me,” said Mister Walton with a chuckle. He looked more curious than amused then. “You are filled with interesting questions.”

  “Am I?”

  Mister Walton chuckled again.

  “What is it you said last night about spring?” asked Sundry.

  “Good heavens! Was that only last night?”

  Sundry retrieved the quote, and sent it into the room. “‘A livelier iris changes on the burnished dove.’”

  “Has Hercules been eating irises, then?” said Mister Walton wryly. “And your acquaintance with the cow. Don’t I recall Mr. Pue telling us something like it at the Custom House last summer? That wasn’t the cow with the sense of humor, was it?”

  “Mr. Pue,” said Sundry. “Was that who told me? I guess it was.”

  “But that cow was actually struck by lightning.” Mister Walton sat upon his bed and began to pull off his shoes.

  “I think you’re right.”

  “I wonder if a change in sleeping arrangement will cure Hercules’s troubles. That and birch-bark tea.”

  “It used to do wonders for an uncle of mine,” said Sundry.

  “Was he sad much of the time?”

  “No, drunk.”

  “Do you really think—?”

  Sundry only shrugged. “What I really think is—” and here he pulled his head and shoulders back into the room. “What I really think is—what about this?” He pulled a white flower from his pocket.

  “What is it?” said Mister Walton.

  “A lilac, I think.”

  “Yes, but what does it mean?”

  “A lilac beneath the hydrangeas.”

  “And you picked it?”

  “I picked it up, I should say, among the hydrangeas.”

  “It wasn’t growing?”

  “They have lilacs in the front yard, but purple ones.”

  “This is white,” said Mister Walton quietly. Hardly conscious of what he was doing, he pressed the withered petals to his nose. “There’s little fragrance left to it.”

  “Perhaps it had been there a while.”

  “Sundry?” said Mister Walton. “What is this about?”

  Sundry cocked his head to one side, and said, “Listen.”

  Mister Walton froze in a posture of absolute attention, his eyes wide behind his round spectacles. Together they did listen, and Mister Walton thought he heard a distant rumble. “Is it thunde
r?”

  “Not yet, I think.”

  “Some wild creature?”

  “It would depend very much upon opinion,” said Sundry. He went to the door and, bearing its weight from the hinges, opened it with hardly a click or a groan.

  Mister Walton inched closer to the door, still keening an ear. The noise was louder and more distinct, but it took him a moment or two to place it. “Someone is snoring,” he said finally.

  Sundry nodded. One finger held in the air, he conducted another half a minute of silence while they listened to the racket. “I hope that’s not one of the young ladies,” said Sundry as he closed the door again.

  “Sundry, do you really believe that pig has been suffering from drink?”

  Sundry stood in the middle of the room with his arms folded and said, “It does seem unlikely. But if he has, one must wonder who has been feeding it to him—and why.”

  “It occurs to me,” said Mister Walton, his hands on his knees and his be spectacled gaze fixed upon the floor before his feet, “that anyone involved with hard drink would be an unwelcome guest here at Fern Farm.”

  “And an unwelcome suitor to any of Mr. Fern’s daughters.”

  “But why intoxicate the pig?”

  “He was a ‘watchpig,’ they tell us.”

  “Of course,” said Mister Walton, then: “The young man who drove us here was quite definite on the subject of Mr. Fern’s temperance. Did you notice a certain nervousness between him and Miss Fern?”

  “Madeline?” Sundry nodded. “Johnny’s smitten and no mistake. I hardly blame him, but I wonder what else he might do besides blacksmithing.”

  “I was ready to lay my head down and sleep, my friend,” said Mister Walton, “but I have revived.”

  “You did promise Miss McCannon we would stay out of adventures,” chuckled Sundry.

  Mister Walton considered this with all due gravity. “A melancholy pig seems tame enough.”

  “If that’s all it amounts to.” Sundry nodded philosophically. “Perhaps it will turn out in the morning.”

  “Ah, well,” said Mister Walton with another sigh. “I will just have to make it up to her.”