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Tracy Park by Mary Jane Holmes

M >> Mary Jane Holmes >> Tracy Park




'Oh, Tom!' she said, while the tears shone in her eyes, which Tom
noticed for the first time were large and clear and very blue. 'It does
not seem possible for you to love me, but, if you really do, I will be
your wife and try to make you happy, and--and--'

She hesitated a moment and then went on:

'Save you as much as possible from father. We cannot live here; you and
he would not get on; he means well and is the kindest of fathers to me,
but he is not like you, and we must go away.'

She was really a very sensible girl, Tom thought, and in his joy at
finding her so sensible he stooped and kissed her forehead as the proper
thing for him to do, while she, the poor little mistaken girl, threw
herself into his arms and began to cry, she was so glad and happy.

Tom did not know exactly what he ought to do. It was a novel situation
for him to be in, with a girl sobbing on his bosom, and his first
impulse was to push her off; but when he remembered that she represented
a million of dollars, he did what half the men in the world would have
done in his place: he held her close and tried to quiet her, and told
her he was not half good enough for her, and knew in his heart he was
telling the truth, and felt within him that stirring of a resolve that
she should never know he did not love her, and that he would make her
happy, if he could.

And so they were betrothed without much billing and cooing, and Peterkin
came in with Mary Jane and made a speech half-an-hour long to his future
son-in-law, and settled just when they were to be married and what they
were to do.

Christmas week was the time, and he vowed he'd give 'em a wedding which
should take the starch entirely out of Gusty Browne, whose mother, Mrs.
Rossiter Browne, would think Gusty was never married at all when she saw
what he could do. Greatly he lamented that Harold and Jerry could not be
present. 'But they'll see it in the papers,' he said, 'for I'll have a
four column notice, if I write it myself, and pay for it too! And when
you meet 'em in Europe you can tell 'em what they missed.'

To all this Tom listened, with great drops of cold sweat running down
his back as he thought of the ridicule he should incur if Peterkin
should carry out his intentions to 'take the rag off the bush,' as he
expressed it. The trip to Europe pleased him, but the party filled him
with a horror from which he saw no escape, until he consulted his
mother, to whom he at once announced his engagement, but did not tell
her of the check on a Springfield bank for $2,000 which Peterkin had
slipped into his hand at parting with him, saying, when he protested
against taking it:

'Don't be a fool, Thomas. I'm to be your dad, so take it; you'll need
it. I know your circumstances; they ain't what they was, and I don't
s'pose you've got enough to buy the engagement ring, I want a big one. A
solitary--no cluster for me. I know what 'tis to be poor. Take it,
Thomas.'

So Tom took it with a sense of shame which prompted him several times to
tear it in shreds and throw them to the winds. But this he did not do,
for he knew he should need money, as he had none of his own; and when, a
few days before, he had asked Colvin for some, that worthy man, who had
never taken kindly to him, had bidden him go to a very warm place for
money, as he had no orders to give him any.

'Your uncle,' he said, 'settled one hundred thousand dollars on your
father--the more fool he--and expects him to live on it. So my advice to
you is that you go to work.'

Now, Tom couldn't work, and after a little Peterkin's gift did not seem
so very humiliating to him, although he could not bring himself to tell
his mother of it when he announced his engagement to her, which he did
bluntly and with nothing apologetic in his manner or speech.

'I am going to marry Ann Eliza Peterkin some time during the holidays,
and start at once for Europe,' he said, and then brought some water and
dashed it in her face, for she immediately went into hysterics and
declared herself dying.

When she grew calm, Tom swore a little, and talked a good deal, and told
her about the million, which he said was not to be sneezed at, and told
her what Colvin had said to him, and asked what the old Harry he was to
do if he didn't marry Ann Eliza, and told her of the proposed party,
asking her to save him from it if she could.

When she found she could not help herself, Dolly rose to the situation,
and said she would see her daughter-in-law elect, whom Tom was to bring
to her, as she could not think of calling at Le Bateau in her present
state of affliction. So Ann Eliza came over in the coat-of-arms
carriage, and her mother came with her. But her Dolly declined to see.
She could not endure everything, she said to Tom, and was only equal to
Ann Eliza, whom she met with a bow and the tips of her fingers, without
rising from her chair. Still, as the representative of a million, Ann
Eliza was entitled to some consideration, and Dolly motioned her to a
seat beside her, and, with her black-bordered handkerchief to her eyes,
said to her:

'Tom tells me you are going to marry him, and I trust you will try to
make him happy. He is a most estimable young man now, and if he should
develop any bad habits, I shall think it owing to some new and bad
influence brought to bear upon him.'

'Yes'm,' Ann Eliza answered, timidly; and the great lady went on to talk
of family, and blood, and position, as something for which money could
not make amends, and to impress upon her a sense of the great honor it
was to be a member of the Tracy family.

Then she spoke of the wedding party, which she trusted Ann Eliza would
prevent, as nothing could be in worse taste when they were in such
affliction, adding that neither herself nor Mr. Tracy could think of
being present.

'Be married quietly, without any display, if you wish to please me,' she
said; and with a wave of her cobweb handkerchief she signified that the
conference was ended.

'Well, Annie, how did you and my lady hit it?' Tom asked, meeting Ann
Eliza in the hall as she came out, flushed and hot from the interview.

'We didn't hit it at all,' Ann Eliza replied, with a sound of tears in
her voice, and a gleam in her eye which Tom had never seen before. 'She
just talked as if I were dirt, and that you were only marrying me for
money. She don't like me and I don't like her, there!' and the indignant
little girl began to cry.

Tom laughed immoderately, and, passing his arm around her as they went
down the stairs, he said:

'Of course you don't like her. Who ever did like her mother-in-law? But
you are marrying me, not my mother, so don't cry, _petite_.'

Tom was making an effort to be very kind, and even lover-like to his
_fiancee_, who was easily comforted, and who, on her return to Le Bateau
told her father plainly that the party must be given up, as it would be
sadly out of place and deeply offend the Tracys. Very unwillingly
Peterkin gave it up, and sent word to that effect to Mrs.
Rossiter-Browne, who had already been apprised of the coming event and
was having a wonderful gown made for the occasion.

'I find,' he wrote, 'that it wouldn't be at all _rachelshay_ to have a
blow out whilst the family is in deep black; but when they git into
lavender, and the young folks is home from their tower, I'll have a
tearer.'

Peterkin tried two or three times to see Mrs. Tracy, but she put him off
with one excuse after another, until Tom took the matter in hand and
told her she was acting like a fool and putting on quite too many airs.
Then she appointed an interview, and, bracing herself with a tonic, went
down to the darkened, cheerless room, and by her manner so managed to
impress him with her superiority over him and his that he forgot
entirely the speech he had prepared with infinite pains, and which had
in it a good deal about family _bonds_, and family _units_, and _Aaron's
beard_, and brotherly love. This he had rehearsed many times to May
Jane, with wonderful gestures and flourishes; 'but, I'll be bumped' he
said to her on his return from the Park House, 'if I didn't forget every
blessed word, she was so high and mighty. Lord! as if I didn't know what
she sprung from; but that's the way with them as was born to nothin'.
May Jane, if I ever catch you puttin' on airs 'cause you're a Peterkin,
I b'lieve I'll kill you!'

After this, anything like familiar intercourse ceased between the heads
of the two families until the morning after Christmas day, when Frank
and Dolly drove over to Le Bateau, where were assembled the same people
who had been present at Jerrie's wedding, and where Peterkin insisted
upon darkening the rooms and lighting the gas, as something a little out
of the usual order of things in Shannondale. Peterkin was very happy,
and very proud of this alliance with the Tracy, and his pride and
happiness shone in his face all through the ceremony; and when the
clergyman asked, 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?' his
manner was something grand to see as he stepped forward and responded,
'I do, sir,' in a voice so loud and full of importance that Dolly
involuntarily groaned, while Tom found it hard to refrain from laughing.

Tom behaved very well, and kissed his bride before any one else had a
chance to do so, and called May Jane mother and Peterkin father, after
he saw the papers which made Ann Eliza own in her own right a million
dollars; and when, an hour later, she handed over to him as his own, a
deed of property valued at one hundred thousand dollars, he took her in
his arms and kissed her again, telling her what was very true, that she
was worth her weight in gold. Tom had felt his poverty keenly, and all
the more so that Ann Eliza's engagement-ring, a superb solitaire, had
actually been bought with her father's gift, as had their passage
tickets to Europe. But now he was a rich man, made so by his wife's
thoughtful generosity, and he was conscious of a new set of feelings and
emotions with regard to her, and inwardly vowed that, so far as in him
lay, he would make her happy.

They took the train for New York that afternoon, accompanied by
Peterkin, who, when the ship sailed away next day, stood upon the wharf
waving his hands and calling out as long as they could hear him, 'God
bless you, my children! God bless you, my children!' Then he went back
to Shannondale and called at Tracy Park, and reported to Frank, the only
one he saw, that the youngsters had gone, and that Mrs. Thomas Tracy
looked as well as the best on 'em in the ship, and a darned sight better
than some!

After this the great houses of Le Bateau and Tracy Park settled down
into perfect quiet, especially that of Tracy Park, where Dolly shut
herself up in her mourning and crape, and Frank spent most of his time
in Maude's room, with her photograph in his hand, and his thoughts busy
with memories of the dear little girl lying in her grave of flowers
under the winter snow.




CHAPTER LIII.

AFTER TWO YEARS.


Two years since Harold and Jerrie went away, and it was October again,
and the doors and windows of the Park House were all open to the warm
sunshine which filled the rooms, where the servants were flitting in and
out with an air of importance and pleased expectancy, for that afternoon
the master was coming home, with Harold and Jerrie; and what was more
wonderful and exciting still, there was in the party a little boy, born
in Wiesbaden six months before, and christened Frank Tracy. They had
gone directly to Germany--Arthur, Harold, and Jerrie--for the former
would not stop a day until Wiesbaden was reached; and there, overcome
with fatigue and the recollections of the past which crowded upon him so
fast, Arthur fell sick and was confined to his room in the hotel for a
week, during which time Jerrie explored the city with Harold and a
guide, finding every spot connected with Gretchen and her life, even to
the shop were Frau Heinrich had sold her small wares.

As soon as her father was able, she took him to them one by one. Hand in
hand, for he seemed weak as a little child, they went to the bench under
the trees where he had first seen Gretchen knitting in the sunshine,
with the halo on her hair, and here Arthur took off his hat as if on
consecrated ground, and whispered, 'May God forgive me!' then to the
little shop once kept by Frau Heinrich, where Arthur astonished the
woman by buying out half her stock, which he ordered sent to his hotel,
and afterward gave away; then to the English church, where he knelt
before the altar and seemed to be praying, though the words he said were
spoken more to Gretchen than to God; then to the house where he had
lived with his bride, when heaven came down so close that she could
touch it, or rather, to the site of the house, for fire had done its
work there and they could only stand before the ruins, while Arthur said
again and again, 'May God forgive me!' then to the house where Jerrie
had lived and Gretchen had died, and where the picture still hung upon
the wall, a wonder and delight to all who had rented the place since
Marian's parents parents lived there. Jerrie recognized it in a moment,
and so did Arthur, but he could only wring his hands before it and sob,
'Oh, Gretchen, my darling, my darling!' Changed as the house was, Jerrie
found the room she remembered so well, where she had played and her
mother had died.

'The big stove stood here,' she said, indicating the spot, 'and mother
sat there writing to you, when Nannine opened the door and let the
firelight shine upon the paper. I can see it all so distinctly, and over
there in the corner was the bed where she died.'

Then Arthur knelt down upon the spot, and as if the oft-repeated
ejaculation, 'May God forgive me!' were wholly inadequate now, he said
the Lord's Prayer, with folded hands and streaming eyes, while Jerrie
stood over him, with her arm around his neck.

'Oh, Gretchen,' he cried; 'do you know I am here after so many
years?--Arthur, your husband, who loved you through all? Come back to
me, Gretchen, and I'll be so tender and true--tender and true! My heart
is breaking, Gretchen, and only for Cherry, our dear little girl baby, I
should wish I were dead, like you. Oh, Gretchen! Gretchen! sweetest wife
a man ever called his! and yet I forgot you, darling--forgot that you
had ever lived! May heaven forgive me for I could not help it; I forgot
everything. Where are you, Cherry? It's getting so dark and cold, and
Gretchen is not here--I think you must take me home.

Jerrie took him back to the hotel, where he kept his room for three
days, and then they went to Gretchen's grave beside her mother, which
Jerrie had found after some little search and enquiry. Here Arthur stood
like a statue, holding fast to Jerrie, and gazing down upon the
neglected grave, on which clumps of withered grass were growing and
blowing in the November wind.

'Gretchen is not here in this place,' he said mournfully, with a shake
of his head. 'She couldn't rest there a moment, for she liked everything
beautiful and bright, and this is like the Potter's field. But we'll put
up a monument for her, and make the place attractive; and by and by,
when she is tired of wandering about, she may come back and rest when
she sees what we have done, and knows that we have been here. We will
buy that house too, he said, as he walked away from the lonely grave;
and the next day Harold found the owner of the place and commenced
negotiations for the house, which soon changed hands and became the
property of Arthur.

Just what he meant to do with it he did not know, until Jerrie suggested
that he should make it an asylum for homeless children, who should
receive the kindest and tenderest care from competent and trustworthy
nurses, hired for the purpose.

'Yes, I'll do it,' Arthur said, 'and will call it "The Gretchen Home."
Maybe she will come there some time, and know what I have done.'

This idea once in his mind, Arthur never let go of it until the house
was fitted up with school-rooms and dormitories, with the little white
beds and chairs suggestive of the little ones rescued from want and
misery and placed in the Gretchen home until it would hold no more. The
general supervision of this home was placed in the hands of the English
rector, the Rev. James Dennis, whose many acts of kindness and humanity
among the poor had won for him the sobriquet of St. James, and with whom
the interests of the children were safe as with a loving father.

'There is money enough--money enough,' said Arthur, when giving his
instructions to the matron, a good-natured woman, who, he knew, would
never abuse a child. 'Money enough; to give them something besides bread
and water for breakfast, and mush and molasses for supper. Children like
cookies and custard pie, and if there comes a circus to town let them go
once in a while; it won't hurt them to see a little of the world.'

Frau Hirch looked at him in some surprise, but promised compliance with
his wishes; and when in the middle of December he left Wiesbaden for
Italy he had the satisfaction of knowing that the inmates of the
Gretchen home were enjoying a bill of fare not common in institutions of
the kind.

Another odd fancy had entered his brain, upon which he acted with his
usual promptness. Every child not known to have been baptized, was to be
christened with a new name, either Gretchen, or Jerrie, or Maude or
Arthur, or Harold, or Frank.

'Suppose you have Tom, and Ann Eliza, and Hilly,' Jerrie suggested, and
after a little demur Arthur consented, and the names of Tom, and Ann
Eliza, and Billy were added to the list, which, in the course of time,
created some little confusion in the Gretchen home, where Jerries, and
Maudes, and Harolds, and Arthurs abounded in great profusion, these
being the favorites of the children, who in most instances were allowed
to choose for themselves.

It was not difficult to find in Wiesbaden people who had remembered
Gretchen and the grand marriage she had made with the rich American, who
afterward abandoned her. That was the way they worded it, and they
remembered too, the little girl, Jerrine, whom, after her mother's
death, the nurse, Nannine, took to her father's friends, since which
nothing had been heard from her. Thus, had there been in Arthur's mind
any doubt as to Jerrie's identity, it would have been swept away; but
there was none. He had accepted her from the first as his daughter, and
he always looked up to her as a child to its mother whom it fears to
lose sight of.

The winter was mostly spent in Rome, where Harold and Jerrie explored
every part of the city, while Arthur staid in his room talking to an
unseen Gretchen, who afforded him almost as much satisfaction as the
real one might have done. In May they visited the lakes and in June
drifted to Paris, where Jerrie was overjoyed to meet Nina and Dick, who
were staying with the Raymonds at a charming chateau just outside the
city. Here she and Harold passed a most enjoyable week, and before she
left she was made happy by something which she saw and which told her
that Dick was forgetting that night under the pines, and that some day
not far in the future he would find in Marian all he had once hoped to
find in her. In Paris, too, she came one day upon Ann Eliza at the Bon
Marche, with silks and satins piled high around her, and two or three
obsequious clerks in attendance, for La Petite Americaine, who bought so
lavishly everything she saw and fancied, was well known to the
tradespeople, who eagerly sought her patronage and that of my lord
monsieur, who inspired them greatly with his air of importance and
dignity. Tom was enjoying himself immensely, and was really a good deal
improved and a good deal in love with his little wife, whom he always
addressed as Petite or Madame, and who was quite a belle and a general
favorite in the American colony. Following a fashion, which Tom was sure
had been made for his benefit, she had cut off her obnoxious red hair
and substituted in its place a wig of reddish brown, which for
naturalness and beauty was a marvel of art and skill, and became her so
well that Tom really thought her handsome, or at least very stylish and
stunning, which was better than mere beauty. They had a suite of rooms
at the Continental, and there Harold and Jerrie dined with them in their
private parlor, for Tom was quite too fine a gentleman to go to _table
d'hote_ with the common herd. Ann Eliza's grand maid, Doris, was with
her still, and had come to look upon her young mistress as quite as
great a personage as the Lady Augusta Hardy, whom she had ceased to
quote, and who, with her mother, Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, was now in the
city, attended, it was said, by a Polish count, who had an eye upon her
money. Once, when they were alone, Jerrie asked Tom when he was going
home, and, with a comical twinkle in his eye, he replied, 'When I hear
that my respected father-in-law has gone off with apoplexy, and not
before.' Jerrie thought this a shocking speech, but she was glad to see
him so happy, and, as she told Harold, 'so much more of a man than she
had ever supposed he could be.'

That summer Harold and Jerrie spent in Switzerland, with the Raymonds
and St. Claires and Tracys, while Arthur went to Wiesbaden to see to the
Gretchen Home, which he found so much to his taste that he remained
there until Harold and Jerrie, after a trip through Austria and Germany,
joined him in November, when they went again for the winter to Italy,
coming back in the spring to Wiesbaden, and because Arthur would have it
so, taking up their abode for a while in the Gretchen Home, which had
been greatly enlarged and improved, and now held thirty deserted and
homeless children. Here, in April, Jerrie's little boy was born, in the
same room and corner where Gretchen had died, and where Arthur again
went down upon his knees and said the Lord's Prayer, to which he added a
fervent thanksgiving for Jerrie spared and a baby given to him.

'I hoped it would be a girl,' he said, 'for then we should have called
it Gretchen; but as it is a boy, suppose we name it Heinrich?'

'No, father,' Jerrie said decidedly, 'Baby is not to be Heinrich, or
Arthur, or Harold, although I think the last the dearest name in the
world,' and she put up her hand caressingly to the brown beard of the
tall young man bending over to kiss her pale face and look at his son.
'We will call the baby Frank Tracy.'

And so Frank Tracy was the name given to the child, who was more like
its father than its mother, and whom Arthur called Tracy, which he liked
better, he said, than he did Frank.

They remained in Wiesbaden until June, then went to Switzerland and
Paris, and in October sailed for home, where the Park House was ready
for them, with no mistress to dispute Jerrie's rights and no master
except the lawful one. Just out of town on a grassy ridge overlooking
the river, a gentleman from New York had built a pretty little cottage,
which, as his wife died suddenly, he never occupied, but offered for
sale, with all its furniture and appointments.

'Let's buy it,' Dolly said to her husband. 'We must go somewhere before
Arthur comes home, and we can live there very respectably and
economically, too.'

She was beginning to count the cost of everything now, and was almost
penurious in her efforts to make their income go as far as possible. So
they bought the pretty place, which she called Ridge Cottage, but Frank
did not live to occupy it. After Tom went away and left him alone with
his wife, who was not the most agreeable of companions, he failed
rapidly, both in body and mind, and those who saw him walking about the
house, with his white hair and bent form, would have said he was seventy
rather than fifty years old. Every day, when the weather permitted, he
visited Maude's grave, where he sometime stayed for hours looking down
upon the mound talking to the insensible clay beneath.

'I am coming soon, Maude, very soon, to be here beside you,' he would
say. 'Everybody has gone, even to Tom, and your mother is sometimes hard
upon me because of what I did. And I am tired, and cold, and old, and
the world is dark and dreary, and I am coming very soon.'

Then he would walk slowly back, taking the post office on his way, to
inquire for letters from the folks, as he designated the absent ones.
These letters were a great comfort to him, especially those from Jerrie,
who wrote him very often and told him all they were doing and seeing,
and tried to make him understand how much she loved and sympathised with
him. Not a hint had been given him of the baby; and when, in June, he
received a letter from her containing a photograph of the little boy
named for him, he seemed childish in his joy, and started with the
picture at once for Maude's grave. Kneeling down, with his face in the
long grass, he whispered:

'Look, Maude!--Jerrie's baby boy, named for me--Frank Tracy! Do you hear
me, Maude? Frank Tracy, for me--who wronged her so. God bless Jerrie,
and give her many years of happiness when I am dead and gone, which will
not now be long. I am coming very soon, Maude; sooner than you think,
and shall never see Jerrie's little boy, God bless him!'

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