“But what made him do as you told him to?” asked Rachel.
“Why, bless you, didn’t you see the order of arrest?” asked Jim.
“But what has he done to Wendall?”
“Got a lot of his money. But the real thing that frightened him was, that I let him know I would expose him in the papers in full, in my most picturesque style, if he didn’t pay up. That would have broken up his whole arrangement with Wendall.”
“Why,” said Horace, “broke it up? Wendall has sued out this order of arrest now.”
“No, he hasn’t,” said Jim coolly. “When the ladies have got their money, I shall notify Huggins that the warrant is all a hum, and that he can proceed against me for false imprisonment or conspiracy or forgery or high treason, if he wants. He’ll be as still as a mouse, though, no fear of that.”
“Why,” said Horace again, his eyes wide open, “it’s a forgery!”
“No; the statute defines that,” calmly explained Master Jim. “I asked a lawyer. It’s a misdemeanor; but we’ll burn the corpus delicti in good season; and the recording angel will blot out the entry with a tear, as he did Uncle Toby’s oath because I’m a good little boy, after all.”
It was a fact; the reckless fellow had certainly perpetrated a legal offence, and a pretty serious one; yet it was so extremely fine a specimen of poetical justice, that one can hardly help being glad afterwards, though none of us could really have recommended it in advance.
Mrs. Worboise intended to transfer the whole of her money to the landlord. But Jim and Horace, acting a good deal like joint conservators for her benefit, forbade this, saying that half of it was quite enough.
“Fact is,” said Jim, “I know you can’t go on here, dame, just as well as you do, and a sight better too. You ought to put the money in your pocket and leave.”
Here a servant brought in a letter for Rachel, saying that it had fallen down behind the table on which the carrier’s letters were laid at the afternoon delivery, and that she had just found it on the floor. Rachel read it, and handed it to Mrs. Worboise. It was from Squire Holley, and was an urgent request to his half-sister to close up her New York business and come and keep house for him.
“He’s just as good as he can be,” said the landlady tearfully. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I do,” said Horace. “I’ll bet that sly thing told her father to do that!”
Rachel blushed. “Well,” said she, “if I did, it was in good season, wasn’t it? Mayn’t I help Aunt Delia as well as you?”
“Surely,” said Horace; “and very good of you to do it. And Mrs. Worboise must go too. Now, Mrs. Worboise, cash your check in the morning. Jim and I will go and see Mr. Warren this very minute.”
Warren was the landlord. The young men went instantly. He was a sufficiently well-disposed old fellow, but would not give them much of an answer that night, saying-very naturally-that he must see his tenant.
However, within a few days an arrangement was made by which Mrs. Worboise’s lease was surrendered; her furniture and carpets, which under her skilful and diligent management were in remarkably good order, were appraised; the landlord knew of a lady, he said, who would, he thought, take charge of the whole establishment at the end of September; and not only was Mrs. Worboise able to retain the whole of her money from Huggins, but there was a little surplus due her from the furniture, over and above the arrears of rent which it paid for.
Notice was given to the boarders accordingly; and on or before the 30th September, 1871, they either searched out other homes, or arranged to remain under the new administration.
As for Huggins, he departed on the morning after his exposure, with his frill much rumpled, his feathers generally in a very draggled state, and his bank-account horribly dilapidated. He talked big to the very last, assuring Crafts that he should hear from him.
CHAPTER X.
THE diligent reader has already learned that Nettie Sylva and Jeff Fleming found their way to the ancient and wealthy city of Hartford. It is such a trifle to travel nowadays, that I need only say that they went at such times as pleased them, by rail, from Greyford to New Haven, and thence to Hartford. Nettie’s Aunt Helen lived in a little cosey tenement of her own, in the southern part of the city; and Nettie went, of course, to her home. As for Jeff Fleming, he established himself at first in a hall bedroom, and “lived in his trunk;” but being at once independent and sociable in his tastes, he quickly devised a scheme which was on many accounts much more agreeable; and enlisting two or three decent young fellows, a clerk in the same store with him, and others, acquaintances of the same clerk, they found some empty rooms all in a row on the upper floor of a great building all full of offices, in the heart of the city, and, buying cheap new carpets and sets of furniture, they fitted up a very nice little colony in the air,-three little bedrooms, and a fourth room for a parlor. Here they lived in great mirth and harmony; for though no two of them were alike, yet that only made the quartet more entertaining to its members; and, as they were all manly and well-meaning young men, they were in no danger of jars or disagreements.
It is a pity not to acquaint you with the fun and jollity those four had in “the dove-cot,” as they christened it, and of the serious communion too; for thorough good fellows like these four will be sure to discuss as they go along together both the funny and the serious sides of every thing. As for Jeff, he was a sociable, organizing, and suggestive person, full of ideas, and greatly inclined to set them forth; in danger therefore, if in any danger in that direction, of becoming wordy and long-winded. Jerry Bigelow was full of puns and verbal jocularities; and he therefore tended to his own proper sort of tediousness. Punsters, however, have to be quick-witted; and thus they well know that the sole condition on which they are tolerated is, that they endure the pick-pocket similitude, and all manner of other snubbing and reprobation usually, of course, administered by persons not bright enough to do what they affect so greatly to despise; so that the pretty uniform course of ingenious discouragements which his three companions panions provided for him no more discouraged Master Jerry than the jeers and sarcasm of the heathen would a pious and enthusiastic missionary. Ralph Van Orden was neither a joker nor a talker. He was handsome, dark-faced, a little slow of speech, and a fine singer of many songs and ballads, which he accompanied, by ear, on the guitar. Last of the four was Abram Wilks, a tall flaxen-haired fellow, slender even to lankness, awkward and queer as possible, with a great taste for collections of all kinds,-shells, coins, old books, eggs, any thing that could be classified or even put in a row.
Jeff’s circle of friends began to enlarge before he had been many weeks in Hartford. In a town like that, crowded with an immense concentration of business, there is a gathering of both young men and old almost as busy and wide-awake as in enormous New York. At the same time, the very fact that the city is small prevents the sense of loneliness that springs up amid the New York multitude, and preserves a portion of the feeling of guardianship and watchfulness by the community over the individual. This is a wonderfully valuable guarantee of decency and uprightness in life. So Jeff flourished and made progress with great speed; became an active member of the Sons of Temperance, and of a debating society connected with the Young Men’s Institute; a diligent and inquisitive scholar in a Bible-class at the Centre Church Sunday-school, sometimes even somewhat to the bewilderment of the intelligent but rather conventional gentleman in charge; a useful member of the choir-for Jeff sung a very fair baritone, and could even serve as a tenor in case of great necessity, with a little strain or even a falsetto on a few of the higher notes, and constant care to sing in a head voice.
As for Nettie Sylva, her case was about equally fortunate. Her aunt was much older than Dr. Sylva; and having always had an especial fondness for Nettie, the relation between them was more like the loving tenderness of affectionate grandparent and grandchild, than a mere ordinary collateral kinship in the second degree. Aunt Helen was quite an old lady, wearing her
own gray hair under a neat cap, always dressing in black or gray, precise and rigid in all her views, feelings, and sentiments, and especially high and unbending in respect of goodness of family, belonging in this as well as in some other respects to a class of which but few specimens are nowadays left, like lofty peaks of a primitive formation, rising through the homogeneous “tertiary drift” and “recent alluvium” of our average communities. Her husband. Deacon Tarbox, was a dry and quaint old gentleman man, with the oddest prim air about him, and of a precision, conservatism, orthodoxy, and careful correctness generally, of such inexpressible rigidity, that in comparison with him, even poor strict Aunt Helen might appear quite randy. But he had a good deal of humor of a high and dry sort, which he dealt out sparingly, and with something like an air of regret, as a miser dislikes to see coin move away from his fingers, irrespective whether gain or loss is to follow.
Deacon Tarbox and Aunt Helen always had baked beans for supper Saturday night, and the same cold for dinner on Sunday, the latter meal being sometimes re-enforced by a dish of cold meat and invariably by pie and a cup of tea. Jeff had called to see Nettie very soon after they came to Hartford; and the young man, having had the tact to keep pretty much all of his ideas to himself, and to assent to whatever was suggested by the seniors in the way of doctrines, whether secular or theological, became highly acceptable in their eyes. His membership of the Bible-class and of the choir-as it happened it was at the Centre Church that Mr. Tarbox was deacon-confirmed this good opinion, as did also his co-operation in the temperance reform; and thus it fell out that not only was Jeff installed as Nettie’s usual escort to rehearsals-she sang alto, by the way, and a good alto too,-on Saturday evenings; but it came to be the recognized order of events, that he should take tea at Deacon Tarbox’s Saturday evenings, and should also, whenever he chose, be allowed to walk home with the family from church, and partake of the modest and cool but substantial regulation dinner of that day. It need not be said that at these sabbath occasions-Deacon Tarbox always said “the sabbath,” and never “Sunday”-the greatest seriousness of word and look was a matter of course. But Jeff Fleming, a New England boy, knew this well enough; no danger of his offending in this respect, so long as he should wish to preserve the good opinion of the deacon, or to be even tolerated within his gates. It is possible that this rigid law was slightly relaxed during the Saturday evening after sunset; but the difference, if there was any, was but a shade. It was the old school of observances as well as of theology to which Deacon Tarbox belonged, and had belonged from his youth up, and in which he would continue to his death, should that be a thousand years hence.
The first occasion, however, on which Jeff was admitted to the deacon’s hospitality, was a weekday one, only a few days after his arrival, and before he was quite settled in his new home; being a dinner, to which he was invited by Aunt Helen so very pressingly that he could not well refuse. He must stay, really, said the good old lady; she did not see Greyford faces every day, and his mother was her father’s second cousin.
In the matter of kinship, the Yankees are almost as tenacious as the Scotch; and those of the country towns especially. It belonged to the quiet and steadfast character of Aunt Helen to preserve this sentiment, even after her many years’ residence in the busy city; and Jeff responded to it with the vivacious pleasure of a youth who finds unexpected friends. However, the chief reason for recording this first dinner was not so much its being a demonstration of natural affection, as the fact that it gives an opportunity to chronicle one of Deacon Tarbox’s characteristic sayings. If the occasion had been Sunday, or Saturday evening either, he would have bitten his own head off before he would have said it; besides that the subject-matter would have been absent. They had a roast pig for dinner on the day in question, succulent and toothsome enough to have inspired the famous treatise of Charles Lamb on the subject, and which pleased well the healthy young appetites of Miss Nettie and Master Jeff. The young gentleman, indeed, expressed his approbation in warm terms, and asked Aunt Helen how she could possibly contrive to produce such a marvellous triumph of the culinary art. Before the old lady could say whatever she meant to say, her quaint old husband answered for her, with his very driest manner, in his most precise and slow utterance, with an extra portion of solemnity about his prim, thin lips, and with a funny, formal bow across the table to his spouse:-
“I will tell you, Mr. Fleming. She always gets into the oven along with the roast.”
Of course when the winter came down the broad Connecticut River Valley all the way from Canada, ice followed, and smoothed out all his footsteps upon lake and stream. Jeff and his three friends, being at that happy age when the puzzle of life is how to expend the surplus of it, hastened to overhaul their skating tackle, and to use whatever spare hours they could command, in staying out in the cold and scratching about on the ice. As the march of mind had not omitted Greyford, so Nettie had learned to skate; and Jeff and she had some very nice excursions on the broad and glassy surface of the Connecticut, during a “cold snap” of a week or two, before snow came. Sometimes the four young men went together; and once or twice a party of eight was organized, each escorting his steel-shod damsel. All this mirth and jollity, however, and other agreeable things too, were brought to a sudden close, by no less an event than the loss-or at least the irreparable injury-of a tall or stovepipe hat, and the consequences thereof, which befell as here followeth.
One blowing Saturday afternoon, when the early closing movement had enabled Jeff to take an extra number of hours’ skating, as if to get himself well stiffened up about the legs for Sunday, Nettie and he went down to the river as usual to skate. They got safely out upon the ice, fastened on their skates, and went careering about up and down before the docks and all along the city front. As the afternoon advanced, and it drew towards evening, the dull, gray clouds seemed to thicken; the north-wester, which had been raving along the river all the afternoon, whisking into small drifts and winrows a little dry snow that had fallen within a day or two, seemed to grow stronger and stronger, instead of lulling as sunset approached; and whistled and whewed along out from under the heavy, lumbering mass of the “Great Bridge,” with such a vengeance that it really required a good deal of pluck as well as muscle to make head against it.
Nettie and Jeff had more than once made their way defiantly up to the bridge, in the very teeth of old Boreas, (was he north-west?) and then, turning, had spread out their arms like sails, and glided victoriously forth, literally upon the wings of the wind, far away to the south; standing perfectly still, and borne over the smooth ice as swiftly and steadily as two great birds in the air.
What it was that made Jeff Fleming wear a tall hat out into that frozen hurricane, it is useless to conjecture. Why, indeed, he wore one at any time, or why any human being should do so, unless compelled by the sentence of a court of justice, as Chinese felons go about with a thick plank round their necks, I for my part cannot imagine. If the young man had known-but how fortunate for people who write about such circumstances that the persons in question do not know! At any rate, Jeff usually wore a tall hat, and with masculine obstinacy he wore it now. By means of the most energetic jerks he had seated it so firmly on his head that it might well have been believed capable of removal only “with it, or on it,” like a good Spartan and his shield. But there is, as some philosopher has profoundly observed, an “innate depravity of inanimate matter.” This, probably, imperceptibly loosened the hat. The really tremendous cold, in spite of Jeff’s young blood and vigorous exercise, had, moreover, begun to drive the feeling out of his forehead, and to substitute the cold numb band next the hat-rim, which the votaries of the abominable thing know all about, and which prevented him from knowing that it was becoming loose. Perhaps, too, for there are absolutely no exceptions, we are told, to the operations of the great natural laws, the cold was contracting his head a little-who knows? At any rate, just as they swept swiftly down to the end of one of their long, southwardly tri
ps, and whirled round to fight their way back again against the vengeful north-wester, off went Jeff’s hat, and bowled away down the river, skipping along and turning this way and that as if it were alive and looking round with one great empty eye to see if anybody were coming after it. Jeff flung up one hand as quick as lightning, but too late. Prompt in deciding, and not able to afford to lose a nice new hat, he merely cried out to Nettie, “Don’t wait-I’ll catch up!” and sprang forth after the fugitive.
Nettie stood laughing a moment, to see the fun, but it was too cold to stand. Turning about, she struck out with long, resolute strokes, for the bridge, and in a few seconds was out of sight round a low woody point.
Twice or thrice Jeff all but caught his fleeing head-gear; and once, as it lodged for a moment in a light snow-wreath, he even stooped to lay hands on it. But-as he afterwards said in describing the experience-it “laughed right in his face, and hopped off again.” It bounded and rolled, shooting across broad glassy spaces, vaulting with diabolic nimbleness over any little impediment, until the enraged proprietor almost thought he could see an imp riding inside of it, and making impertinent gestures backward at him over the rim. His ears quickly began to tingle, and then to lose their feeling, and he had to rub them furiously more than once. Even the very top of his head, through all his thick hair, began to feel the sharp bites of the relentless icy wind. Angrier than ever, he gathered his strength, filled his lungs full, set his teeth, and, though he was already flying along under the double impulse of legs and tempest at a rate that a locomotive could hardly have matched, he darted forward for one final spurt-
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 422