Read Ebook: Miss Theodora: A West End Story by Reed Helen Leah

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Ebook has 549 lines and 35830 words, and 11 pages

Back Bay streets are,--Berkeley and Clarendon and Dartmouth,--as though American names wouldn't have done better than those English imitations! Well, Miss Theodora, we have Pinckney and Revere named after good American men, and Spruce and Cedar for good American trees. I wouldn't live on one of those new-fangled streets, not if they'd give it to me."

Then Miss Theodora, almost driven to apologize for her misguided relatives, little as she sympathized with them herself, would reply in words that she must have seen in some of the newspapers: "Well, I suppose the growth of the city's population makes it necessary for--"

"Fudge!" Miss Chatterwits would interrupt, "the West End seems to have room enough for lodging and boarding house keepers; and I guess it's big enough for true Boston folks. It just makes me furious to see "Rooms to Let," "Table Board, .50 per week," stuck up in every window on some streets. Goodness knows, I hope the Somersets like their neighbors out there on the Back Bay. I hear anybody with money enough can buy a house there." And a tear seemed ready to fall from her eyes.

Ernest, himself, grew up without any social prejudices. His aunt often wondered at this, yet, like many sensible people, she did not try to impress him with her own views. As one by one the dwelling houses on Charles Street were changed into shops, he only rejoiced that Miss Theodora wouldn't have to send so far for her groceries and provisions. But Miss Theodora drew the line here. She had always been able to go to the market every day, and no thrifty housewife needs a provision shop under her very nose, she said.

Her one exception in favor of neighborhood shopping was made for the little thread and needle shop on the corner below her house. Even a person who doesn't have many new gowns occasionally needs tapes and needles, and may find it convenient to buy them near at hand.

This shop was a delight to Ernest, and in the days when his chin hardly reached the level of the counter, he loved to stand and gaze at the rows of jars filled with variegated sticks of candy, jaw-breakers and pickled limes; for the two maiden ladies who kept the shop sold many things besides needles and thread. In the little glass show-case, in addition to mittens and scissors and an occasional beautiful fan, and heaps of gay marbles, was a pile of highly-colored story books, "The Tale of Goody Two Shoes" and others of that ilk, and mysterious looking sheets of paper, which needed only the manipulation of skilful scissors to change them into life-like paper dolls with elaborate wardrobes. Ernest, of course, took little interest in the paper dolls,--he bought chiefly marbles; but his cousin, Kate Digby, whenever she was permitted to spend a day at the West End, was a devoted patron of the little shop, and saved all her pennies to increase her household of dolls. Indeed, she confided to Ernest that when she grew up she was going to have a shop just like the one kept by the Misses Bascom. If Mrs. Stuart Digby had heard her say this, she would have wondered where in the world her daughter had acquired a taste for anything so ordinary as trade.

A block or two away from the thread and needle shop was a shop that Miss Theodora abhorred. Within they sold every kind of thing calculated to draw the stray pennies from the pockets of the school children who passed it daily. Its windows, with their display of gaudy and vulgar illustrated papers, gave her positive pain. A generation ago ladies had not acquired the habit of rushing into print with every matter of reform; otherwise Miss Theodora might have sent a letter to the newspaper, signed "Prudentia," or something of that kind, deploring the fact that a shop like this should be allowed to exist near a school, drawing pennies from the pockets of the school children, at the same time that it vitiated their artistic sense.

Ernest, as I have said, grew up without marked local or social prejudices. Many of his spare pennies went into the money drawer of the corner shop, and much of his spare time he spent with the workmen at the cabinet-makers' near by. For little workshops were beginning to appear in the neighborhood of lower Charles Street, and some of their proprietors had cut away the front of an old house, in order to build a window to display their wares.

Ernest loved to gaze in at the shining faucets in the plumber's window, and horrified his aunt by announcing one day that when he was a man he meant to be either a plumber or a cabinet-maker. Among them all he preferred the cabinet-maker's. Everything going on there interested him, and the workmen, glad to answer his questions, showed him ways of doing things which he put into practice at home.

For Miss Theodora had given Ernest a basement room to work in, stipulating only that he should not bring more than three boys at a time into the house to share his labors. His joy was unbounded one Christmas when his cousin, Richard Somerset, sent him a turning lathe. Almost the first use to which he put it was to make a footstool, with delicately tapering legs, for his aunt's birthday. He tied it up in brown paper himself, and wound a great string about it with many knots.

"Law!" said Diantha, who stood by as Miss Theodora slowly untied the bulky package, "what's them boys been up to now? I believe it's some mischief."

"Now, old Di, you're mean," cried Ernest, dancing around in excitement in the narrow hall-way outside the bedroom door.

But Miss Theodora, as she bent over the package, tugging at the strings, caught sight of some sprawling letters that resolved themselves into "A birthday Present from your LOVEING nephew;" so, shaking her head at Diantha, she responded, loudly enough for Ernest to hear, and with no comment on the bad spelling, "Oh, no, it's a beautiful present from Ernest." And then Ernest ran in and undid the rest of the knots, and, setting the footstool triumphantly on its four legs on the floor, said: "Now, you'll always use it, won't you, Aunt Teddy?"

Of course Miss Theodora, as she kissed him, promised to use, and kept her promise, in spite of the fact that the little footstool--less comfortable than her well-worn carpet hassock--wasn't exactly steady on its feet. But although she so thoroughly appreciated Ernest's thoughtfulness, Miss Theodora did not regard the footstool with absolute pleasure. She was by no means sure that she approved of Ernest's skill in handicrafts. She wondered sometimes whether she ought to permit a probable lawyer to spend so much energy in work which could hardly go toward helping him in his profession. Yet, after all, she hadn't the heart to interfere with Ernest's mechanical tastes, when she saw that gratifying them gave him so much pleasure. She never forgot her fright one day on the Nahant boat, when Ernest, barely seven years old, was missing, and she found him only after a long search at the door of the engine room.

"You'd ought to be an engineer when you're grown up," she heard a gruff voice say, while Ernest meekly replied: "Well, I'd like to, but I've got to be a lawyer."

She did not scold Ernest as she took his hand to lead him up stairs, and she even lingered while he tried to put her in possession of all his own knowledge.

"This gentleman," he said apologetically, "has been explaining his engine to me," and the "gentleman," rubbing a light streak across his sooty face, turned to her with a sincere, "That there boy of yours has a big head, ma'am, for machinery, and, begging your pardon, if I was you I'd put him out to a machinist when he's a little bigger."

The plainness of Miss Theodora's dress may have placed her in this man's eye on the plane of those people who regularly sent their children to learn trades. Although in her mind she resented the suggestion, she listened attentively to Ernest as he tried, with glowing cheek and rapid tongue, to explain the various parts of the engine. If Miss Theodora never perhaps had more than a vague idea of the functions of piston and valve and the wonders of the governor, over which Ernest grew so eloquent, she was at least a sympathetic listener in this as in all other things that he cared for.

When it came to machinery, Ernest found his aunt much more sympathetic than his usual confidante, Kate Digby. As years went on, the childish companionship between the children deepened into friendship. They began to confide to each other their dreams for the future. Kate modelled herself somewhat on the accounts handed down of a certain ancestress of hers whose portrait hung in the stairway of her father's house.

The portrait was a copy of one thinly painted and flat looking, done by an obscure seventeenth century artist. It showed a very young girl dressed in gray, with a white kerchief folded around her slim neck, and with her thin little wrists meekly crossed in front. Whether her hair was abundant or not no one could tell, for an old-womanish cap with narrow ruffle so covered her head that only a faint blonde aureole could be seen beneath it. Colorless though this portrait seemed at first sight, longer study brought out a depth in the clear gray eye, a firmness in the small pink mouth, which consorted well with the stories told of this little Puritan's bravery.

One of the youngest of the children entering Massachusetts Bay on Winthrop's fleet, the little Mercy had been the pet of a Puritan household. Marrying early, she had gone from her father's comfortable house in Boston to live in the country forty miles away, a region remote and almost on the borders of civilization in those days. Not mere rumor but veritable records have told the story of the fierce attack of the savages on that secluded dwelling, of the murder of husband and man servant, of the flight of the wife and little children, and of their final rescue at the very moment when the Indians had overtaken them,--a rescue, however, not accomplished until one of the children had been killed by an arrow, while the mother pierced through the arm, was forced to drop the gun with which she held off her assailants.

"Just think of her being so brave and shooting like that!" Kate would say to Ernest. "I admire her more than any of my great-great-great-grandmothers--whichever of the 'greats' she was. And then she brought up all her children so beautifully, with almost nothing to live on, so that every one of them became somebody. I'm always delighted when people tell me I look like her."

"Well, you don't look like her," said Ernest, truthfully. "If you looked as flat and fady as that you wouldn't look like much. Besides, I don't like a woman's shooting and picking off the red-skins the way she did. Of course," in response to Kate's look of surprise, "it was all right; she had to save herself and the children; but some way it don't seem the kind of thing for a woman to do! Now, I like her because she wouldn't let her oldest son go back to England and have a title. You see, her husband's father had cast him off for being a Puritan."

"Oh, yes, I know," responded Kate. "But I wish she had let him take the title. I'd like to be related to a lord."

Kate and Ernest were no longer little children when this particular conversation took place; but its substance had come up between them many a time before. Yet Ernest always held to the more democratic position; and as years went by his acquaintance with Ben Bruce intensified his democratic feeling. No one recognized more clearly than Miss Theodora this tendency of Ernest's, and she questioned long whether she was doing what John would have approved in sending him to a school where he must mingle with his social inferiors. In John's day public schools had been different.

An unguarded expression of these feelings of hers one evening at the Digbys' led to an offer from Stuart Digby to share his son's tutor with Ernest, that the two boys might prepare for Harvard together. Now, the idea of a tutor was almost as unpleasant to Miss Theodora as the thought of the undesirable acquaintances that Ernest might make at a public school. In the choice between unrepublican aristocracy and simple democracy she almost inclined to the latter; but Stuart Digby, her second cousin, had been John's bosom friend, and she could not bring herself to refuse the well-meant offer. It was Ernest who rebelled.

"I don't want to go to college at all. I hate Latin; I won't waste time on Greek. I detest that namby-pamby Ralph. All he cares for is to walk down Beacon Street with the girls. He don't know a force pump from a steam engine!"

But Miss Theodora, though tearful--for she hated to oppose him--was firm; and for three years the boy went down the Hill and across the Garden to recite his lessons with Ralph. Out of school he saw as little as he could of Ralph. His time was spent chiefly with Ben Bruce. Ben's father kept a small retail shop somewhere down near Court Street, and his family lived in a little house at the top of the hill,--a little house that never had been meant for any but people of limited means.

Yet from the roof of the house there was a view such as no one at the Back Bay ever dreamed of; for past the sloping streets near by one could gaze on the river bounded like a lake by marshy low lands and the high sea walls, which, with the distant hills, the nearer factory chimneys, even the gray walls of the neighboring County Jail, on a dark day or bright day, formed a beautiful scene.

There in that little room of Ben's Ernest often opened his heart to his friend more freely than to his aunt. Ben, considerably Ernest's senior, had entered the Institute of Technology--in boys' language, "Tech"--soon after Ernest himself had begun to study with Ralph's tutor, and Ernest frankly envied his friend's opportunity for studying science.

In his boyish way Ernest enjoyed life. The Somersets, the Digbys and the rest made much of him, and at the Friday evening dancing class he was a favorite. Had he been a few years older the mothers might have objected to his popularity. A penniless boy attending the Friday evening dancing class is not old enough to be regarded as a dangerous detrimental, and he may receive the adoration, expressive though silent, of half a dozen little maids in white frocks and pink sashes, without encountering rebuffs from their mammas when he steps up to ask them to dance. In this respect fifteen has a great advantage over twenty, emphasized, too, by the fact that fifteen has not yet learned his own deficiency, while twenty is apt to be all too conscious of it.

Children's parties had been within Ernest's reach even before the doors of Papanti's opened to him. They were a friendly people on the Hill and no birthday party was counted a success without the presence of Ernest. Simple enough these affairs were, the entertainment, round games like "Hunt the Button," and "Going to Jerusalem," and "London's Burning," the refreshment, a light supper of bread and butter and home-made cakes, with raspberry vinegar and lemonade as an extra treat.

Miss Theodora herself did not take part in the social festivities of the neighborhood, although her silver spoons and even pieces of her best china were occasionally lent to add to the splendor of some one's tea table. Mrs. Fetchum was always anxious to make a good impression on the neighbors whom she sometimes asked to tea. Especially desirous was she to have her table glitter with silver and glass when Miss Chatterwits was one of her guests. Since Miss Chatterwits knew only too well Mrs. Fetchum's humble origin as the daughter of a petty West End shoe-seller, the latter could never, like the little seamstress, talk of bygone better days and loss of position. She could only aspire to get even with her by offering her occasionally a plethoric hospitality, in which a superabundance of food and a dazzling array of silver and china were the chief elements. Miss Chatterwits had long suspected that much of this silver was borrowed; but she had never dared hint her suspicions to Mrs. Fetchum, and the latter held up her head with a pride that could not have been surpassed had she been dowered with a modern bride's stock of wedding presents. A day or two after a tea party at which she had been unusually condescending to Miss Chatterwits, she ran across the street to return the borrowed spoons to Miss Theodora. It was dusk as she entered the little doorway, and she hastily thrust the package into the hands of some one standing in the narrow hall, Miss Theodora as she thought, whispering loudly as she did so: "Don't tell Miss Chatterwits I borrowed the spoons." For she knew that the seamstress had been sewing for Miss Theodora that day, and she wasn't quite sure that the latter realized that the borrowing must be kept secret.

"It gave me quite a turn," she said as she told Mr. Fetchum about it. "It gave me quite a turn when I found that it was Miss Chatterwits; but I never let on I knew it was her, and I turned about as quick as I could. Only the next time I set foot out of this house I'll be sure I have my glasses."

It was hard to tell which of the two had the best of this chance encounter. Mrs. Fetchum consoled herself for the carelessness by reflecting on the presence of mind that had kept her from acknowledging her humiliation; and Miss Chatterwits gloated over the fact that she had caught Mrs. Fetchum in a peccadillo she had long suspected--borrowing Miss Theodora's silver.

In his early years Ernest had been a neighborly little fellow, and, alone or with his aunt, would lift his hat to a woman, old or young, easily winning for himself the name of "little gentleman." He wore out his shoes in astonishingly quick time playing hopscotch on the hilly sidewalks with the boys and girls who lived near, while Kate, to whom this sport was forbidden, sitting on the doorsteps, looked enviously on. Willingly would she have exchanged her soft kid shoes for the coarse copper-toed boots of Tommy Fetchum, had it only been permitted her to hop across on one foot and kick the stone from one big square to another chalked out so invitingly on the uneven bricks.

But Mrs. Stuart Digby, although willing enough to let Kate visit Miss Theodora, made it a rule--and no one dared break a rule of hers--that Kate was never to play on the street with the children of the neighborhood. Yet as she sat sadly in her corner, Kate, often referred to for her opinion on disputed points, at last came to have a forlorn pride in her position as umpire.

At length there came a time when Ernest's interests in the street games waned. His former playmates saw little of him. He neglected the boys and girls with whom he had once played tag and hopscotch, and some of the neighbors, especially Mrs. Fetchum, said that he was growing "stuck up." Miss Theodora hardly knew her neighbors by sight; for it was one of the evidences of the decadence of the region that the houses changed tenants frequently, and furniture vans were often standing in front of some of the houses near Miss Theodora's.

Mrs. Fetchum was a permanent neighbor. She had lived in the street longer even than Miss Theodora. She always called on new comers, and never failed to impress on them a sense of the greatness of the jurist's daughter, with the result that Miss Theodora's comings and goings were always a matter of general neighborhood interest. Sometimes Miss Theodora invited the children hanging about her doorstep to come inside the house, where she regaled them with gingerbread, or let them look through the folio of engravings in the library.

In spite of the lady's kindness they all stood in awe of her, as the daughter of a Great Man, whose orations were printed in their school readers beside those of Webster and Clay. Miss Theodora, with her quiet manner and high forehead, in a day when all other women wore more elaborate coiffures, seemed to the children like a person in a book, and their answers to her questions were always the merest monosyllables.

It was not worldliness altogether which took Ernest away from his former playmates. After his mornings with Ralph and their tutor, he had to study pretty hard in the afternoon. His evenings were generally devoted to Miss Theodora; either he read aloud while she sewed, or they played chess with that curious set of carved chessmen given her father by a grateful Salem client years before.

In little ways, Miss Theodora, though not a sharp observer, sometimes thought that she detected a growing worldliness in Ernest.

"Why don't we get some new carpets?" he asked one day. It was the very spring before he entered college. "I never could tell, Aunt Teddy, what those flowers were meant to be. When I was a little chap, I used to wonder whether they were bunches of roses or dahlias; but now you'd hardly know they were meant to be flowers at all."

This was true enough, for the carpet, with its huge pattern, designed for the drawing room of their old house, had been trodden upon by so many feet that now hardly the faint outline of its former roses remained. The furniture, too, was growing shabby; the heavy green rep of the easy chairs had faded in spots, the gilded picture frames were tarnished, and the window draperies, with their imposing lambrequins, were sadly out of fashion. Yet from Miss Theodora's evasive reply the boy did not realize that poverty prevented her refurnishing the rooms in modern fashion. He had everything he needed; but the circle of relatives all continued to say, "It's wonderful that Theodora manages as well as she does."

"Come along! Hurry up!" called Ernest to Ben, one winter's day, kicking his heels into the little hillocks of frozen snow on the sidewalk; and even as he spoke Ben, with a "Here I am," rushed from the house with his skates slung over his shoulder. Ernest carried in a green bag, on which his aunt had worked his initials in shaded brown, a pair of the famous "Climax" club skates, a present from his cousin, Richard Somerset. Reaching the Common, after a brisk run, they began to put on their skates.

The cold day had apparently kept many of the younger boys and girls away, and although there was room enough for all the skaters, not a few of them were objectionably rough and boisterous. Near the spot where Ernest and Ben were, among a small group of well-dressed lads, swinging stick or playing hockey, Ernest was sorry to recognize Ralph Digby.

"I wouldn't have come if I'd known Ralph would be here," he said regretfully to Ben.

"No matter, we needn't have anything to do with him," said Ben cheerfully. It was no secret to Ben that Ralph and Ernest, out of school hours, had little to do with each other.

"Well, I hate to go near Ralph," responded Ernest. "He always tries to make me feel small," and for the moment Ernest became uncomfortably conscious that the sleeves of his overcoat were a trifle too short, and that it had, on the whole, an outgrown look, for this was the second winter he had worn it.

"Don't take any notice of him, except to speak to him as you pass," said Ben.

"I know that's all I need do, but Ralph always seems to me to be saying to himself, 'Oh, you're nothing but a poor relation.'"

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