A Daughter of Witches – A Romance

Miss Temperance Tribbey stood at the back door of the old Lansing house, shading her eyes with one hand as she looked towards the gate to discover why Grip, the chained-up mastiff, was barking so viciously.

The great wooden spoon, which she held in her other hand, was dripping with red syrup, and showed that Temperance was preserving fruit. To the eyes of the initiated there were other signs of her occupation. Notably a dangerous expression in her eyes. The warmth of the stove was apt to extend to Miss Tribbey’s temper at such times.

Sidney Martin, coming up the avenue-like lane to the farm-house, did not observe Miss Tribbey standing at the back door, although she saw him; and, therefore, much to his own future detriment and present prejudice in Miss Tribbey’s eyes, he went
[2]
to the front door, under its heavy pillared porch, and knocked. After he had vanished round the corner of the house towards the ill-chosen door, Miss Tribbey waited impatiently for the knock, calculating whether she could safely leave her fruit on the fire whilst she answered it.

The knock did not come. Muffled by the heavy door, its feeble echo was absorbed by the big rooms between the front door and the kitchen.

“Well!” said Temperance, “has he gone to Heaven all alive, like fish goes to market, or is he got a stroke?”

The cat arched its back against Miss Tribbey’s skirts and so shirked the reply which clearly devolved upon it, there being no other living creature visible in the big kitchen.

“It’s as bad as consumpting to have a man hanging over a body’s head like this,” continued Temperance. “My palpitations is coming on! If I’m took with them and that fruit on the fire, along of a man not knowing enough to knock!”

The fruit in the big copper kettle began to rise insidiously towards the brim.

“I’ll just go and take a speck at him through the shutters,” said she.

She crossed the kitchen, but ere she left it, long housewifely habit made her “give a look to the stove.” The burnished copper kettle was domed by a great crimson bubble, raised sphere-like by the steam.

[3]

“My soul!” said Temperance, and took a flight across the kitchen, lifting the heavy pot with one sweep from the fire to the floor. The dome quivered, rose a fraction and collapsed in a mass of rosy foam.

The crisis was past, and just then the expected knock came.

Temperance drew a long breath.

“There!” she said, “that jell’s done for! I’ll have to stand palavering with some agent chap or book-canvasser with my jell a-setting there gettin’ all muddied up.”

This reflection bore her company to the front door, which she opened with an air of calm surprise. Miss Tribbey knew her manners.

“Well, I declare!” she said. “Have you been here long?”

“No—came this very minute,” said Sidney in his soft, penetrating voice.

“Oh, the liar!” said Miss Tribbey to herself, scandalized.

“It’s beautiful here,” he continued. “That field of yellow grain there is worth a journey to see.”

(“Poor crittur,” Miss Tribbey said in relating this afterwards. “Poor, ignorant crittur! Not knowing it’s a burning, heartsick shame to see grain that premature ripe with the hay standing in win’rows in the field, before his eyes.”)

“Ahem!” said Miss Tribbey, her visitor showing signs of relapsing again into that reverie which had
[4]
made the interval of waiting seem as nothing to him, unconscious as he was of the narrowly averted tragedy with Miss Tribbey’s fruit.

But face to face with her he was too sensitive not to recognize her impatience with his dallying mood. He roused himself and turned towards her with a frank and boyish smile.

“I’m bothering you,” he said, “and doubtless keeping you from something important.”

“I’m making jell,” said she briefly, her attitude growing tense.

“Have you heard Mr. Lansing speak of Sidney Martin?” he asked. “In reference to his coming to stay here this summer? I’m Sidney Martin, and I want to come, if it is convenient to receive me, the beginning of next week, and——”

“Come where?” demanded Temperance.

“Here,” said Sidney, a little embarrassed.

“To this house?”

“Yes,” said Sidney, looking at her with the confidence in his eyes of one who, loving his fellow-creatures more than life, expects and anticipates their love in return; one does not often see this expression, but one often sees the residuum left after the ignorance it bespeaks has been melled and mingled by experience.

“Mr. Lansing is over at the unction sale at Abiron Ranger’s,” said Temperance. “You’ll excuse me, my jell’s a-waitin’ for me, and whatever time other folks
[5]
has to waste I’ve none! You’ll excuse me! I know nothing about boarders and sich!”

“Boarders,” said Sidney in alarm, looking about for signs of the enemy. “Do you take boarders?”

“It would seem so now,” said Temperance, cuttingly. “It would sertingly seem so.”

“Oh, bless you!” said Sidney. “I’m not a boarder! I’m a visitor. There’s a great difference, isn’t there? I’m the son of old Sidney Martin, the county clerk who went away to Boston and married there. You have heard of him, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have,” said Temperance, throwing one end of her apron over her head to shield off the sun. “Yes, I have, though I was in short petticoats and my hair in a pig-tail when it happened. He went to Bosting and married rich, didn’t he?”

“He married in Boston,” said Sidney. “Where is Mr. Ranger’s?”

“Abiron Ranger lives two miles down the road, across to the right,” said Temperance. “He died a week ago Wednesday, and there’s an unction sale there to-day. There’s goin’ to be a divide up. The widow wants her thirds. A very pushin’ woman Mis’ Ranger is.”

“Two miles more,” said Sidney, with something like a sigh.

Miss Tribbey’s keen eyes noted that he was white as from recent illness.

“Won’t you set down a spell and hev’ a glass
[6]
of milk?” she asked; “set down in the shade there, and I’ll get it in a jiffy. What’s the sense of standing in a blazing sun like this?”

She whisked off and presently returned with the milk and a plate of New England cookies.

“I’ve got to go back to my jell,” she said. “When you get ready to go just put the things on the porch. My soul! I was took when you began talking about boarders. For I’ve said, and said often, ‘If boarders comes, I go.’ But visitors! We’ve always heaps of company, and I’ll go bail no house I do for’ll ever be took short of things to put on the table; the most unexpectedest company that ever drove up that avenue was always set down to a liberal table; when you go down the road about a mile, just look towards the right, and you’ll see a brown frame-house, with a lightning-rod on it. That’s Abiron Ranger’s. Cut across the fields. It’s shorter.”

“Thanks,” said Sidney; “what delicious milk.”

“Yes—Boss don’t give chalk and water, she don’t,” said Miss Tribbey, and went off to her kitchen.

“A poor, slim jack of a man,” she soliloquised, ladling out her jelly. “My soul! There’s a mighty difference between him and Lanty—but there—his kind don’t grow on every bush. Clear Lansing he is, through and through, and there never was no runts among the Lansings.”

For a few minutes Sidney rested in the porch, his
[7]
eyes dwelling upon the undulating grain before him. To one more experienced in these matters, its burnished gold would have told sad tales of the terrible drouth which had scorched the country side, but to him it appeared the very emblem of peace and plenty.

What field of the cloth of gold was ever equal in splendour to this?

He rose and passed down the dusty road. Upon one hand the panicles of an oat field whispered together, upon the other stretched the barren distances of a field known far and near as Mullein Meadow, these weeds and hard shiny goat grass being all that grew upon it.

Sidney did not grasp the significance of its picturesque grey boulders, nor think how dear a possession it was at the price of the taxes upon it. After Mullein Meadow came a little wood, thick with underbrush, in the shadow of which a few brackens were yet green; and fronting the wood a hayfield, with a patch of buckwheat in full bloom in one corner, showing against the dim greenness of the hay like a fragrant white handkerchief fallen from an angel’s hand.

Sidney cut across the hayfield to where a glistening point glimmered in the sunshine, above a sloping roof set on brown walls.

“‘How curious. How real!’” he said to himself. “‘Underfoot the divine soil—Overhead the sun.’”

[8]

He reached the enclosure in which the house stood, and paused at the gate to watch the groups of men discussing their purchases, for the sale was over.

Presently, his interest urging him, he entered, and mingled with the others, having the fanciful idea he would know his father’s old friend by intuition. His eyes softened as he looked at the weather-beaten faces and hard-wrought hands of these men. The memory of the golden grain was dimmed a little, and he saw bands of men bending above their toil beneath stern skies, “storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil.” But that vision was illy entertained in his sanguine, idealistic imagination. It was dismissed to give place once more to the “free farmer” of song and story, and as if to bear witness to this latter picture, a young man detached himself somewhat impatiently from a group of his fellows, and advancing towards where Sidney stood, flung himself across a mettlesome roan which was tugging viciously at its bridle as it stood tied beneath a tree.

The young man’s face was flushed, he was blue-eyed and debonair, his yellow hair tossed back carelessly above his brow; a wide, flapping felt hat rested on the back of his head. His features were large and strongly carved. His mouth, seen red through his tow-coloured moustache, had all the sweetness of a woman’s and much of the deviltry of a rake’s. But his face did not look vicious, only dangerous. His strong, lean hand curbed his horse
[9]
easily; he turned in his saddle to call to those whom he had just left.

“If anyone wants a last word he knows where to find me,” he cried.

“Yes,” someone said, giving a coarse laugh; “near some pair of apron strings.”

“What did you say?” demanded Lanty Lansing, urging his horse near the group.

“Nothing; O, nothing, Lanty,” said the speaker irritatingly, whilst Lanty’s horse circled the group crab-fashion.

“Don’t let me keep you,” went on the man, and Sidney saw he was heavy, black-browed and strongly built. “Don’t let me keep you. Is it the little yellow-haired one or the other? I like the little one best myself, Miss——”

“Keep my cousins’ names out of your mouth,” said Lanty, his quick temper in a flame, “or I’ll break your neck for you.”

“If all’s true that’s told for true, you’re better at breaking hearts than necks. There’s a little girl over Newton way—but there! I’ll tell no tales; but to say you’re going to have both your cousins! You’re a Mormon, Lanty, that’s what you are.”

“Be quiet! Be quiet!” some of the men said. “Good-bye, Lanty, better be off; he don’t mean nothing.”

But the big man, sure of the prestige of his size, thinking, evidently, that Lanty would not dismount,
[10]
was not to be silenced. Perhaps he was hardly quite sober. He was a machine agent in the neighbourhood, and had bidden unsuccessfully against Lanty for a horse. His next words took him too far.

“I ain’t sayin’ anything to put his back up! All I say is that them cousins of his can smile at other folks as well as at him, and why shouldn’t they? I don’t like a girl no less because she——” He never finished.

Lanty was off his horse like a flash. His fist caught the big man under the jaw, lifting him almost off his feet and sending him crashing down. Lanty waited with hands clenched for him to rise. The crowd swayed, those close at hand giving way, those upon the outskirts pressing forward. The horse, so suddenly released, reared and swung round on its hind legs, and just then Sidney saw a tall, finely-formed young woman appear almost under the plunging horse, twist a strong hand in the bridle, and wring both curb and snaffle so viciously that the beast gave his head to her guidance. She wheeled it towards Lanty.

“Lanty,” she said, laying her free hand upon his arm; “Lanty.”

“Go into the house, Vashti,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“You are not going to fight,” she said, “
with him
?”

Lansing was silent; she continued: “Go home, Lanty, please
[11]
——”

Some of the older men had closed around the man, who was just rising to his feet. The first mad impetus of battle was cooling in Lansing’s veins, and just then another girl pushed through the group of men to his side. A slight, graceful creature, with the Lansing blue eyes and fair skin, and sweet lips, she was trembling—white.

“Lanty,” she said, with terror in her eyes, “has he hurt you? You frighten me horribly.”

His eyes rested upon her, self-reproach making them eloquent.

He took the reins from the tall girl’s hand, looking always at the white, appealing face of the other.

“I’m a bit of a fool,” he said; “but he spoke of you two and——” he paused; “I’ll be over to-night,” he said, and rode away.

Vashti Lansing’s hand and wrist were wrenched, and already beginning to swell; the rearing horse had not been so easily subdued after all; but physical pain was a slight thing to her just then.

“Come,” she said to her cousin. “There’s father coming out. Don’t tell him; let some one else. There are always plenty ready to talk.”

So the two girls went into the house, and Sidney Martin stood gazing after them, rapt in the vision of a magnificently made woman curbing and subduing a rearing horse. Surely a type of the eternal divinity of womanhood, striving against the evil that men do.

Sidney Martin, dreamer of dreams, cherisher of
[12]
ideals, delicate and supra-sensitive, was subjugated for ever by love of that splendid piece of vitality—that woman whom even at this moment he likened to the
Venus de Milo
—whose magnificent energy and forceful grace recalled so vividly the
Winged Victory of Samothrace
. With a throb he remembered the beauty of that headless masterpiece, where it stands in the cool greyness of the Louvre, the inexplicable sense of triumphant effort expressed in its heroic pose. How many aspiring souls have gathered fresh courage from its mutilated majesty, where it stands at the head of the wide stairs! And here in the New England hills he had found a woman who might have been its original. The great sculptors had not dreamed then, when they created these Goddesses of stone; even unto this day, it seemed, they walked the earth, radiant in strength and beauty. How fitting that their statues should be given wings, to typify the splendid spirit prisoned in the imperial clay!

Sidney watched the girls enter the house and followed them involuntarily. As he passed the bully who had been knocked down, he saw there was a lump like an egg already adorning his jaw.

“Serves him right!” said gentle Sidney Martin to himself.

A little farther on half-a-dozen men stood talking together; one, whom Sidney took to be the auctioneer, was saying meaningly:—

[13]

“It’s a bad business bidding for what you don’t want.”

“Yes,” said one of the group, laboriously keeping up the joke. “Yes—for it’s apt to be knocked down to you, and then you’ve got it on your hands.”

“On your jaw, you mean,” said the auctioneer smartly; whereat a laugh went up. Clearly Lanty Lansing had partizans here.

As Sidney reached the doorway within which the girls had vanished, a grey-haired man stepped forth from it.

“Mr. Lansing?” said Sidney, confidently.

His intuitions had not played him false.

“I am Sidney Martin,” he continued, but got no further with his self-introduction.

“I’m right glad to see you,” said old Lansing heartily, “right glad to see you! So you’re old Sid’s son? Well, you don’t favour him no more than my girl favours me! I was struck all of a heap when Dr. Clement told me he knew old Sid’s son in Bosting; says I, ‘If that younker is like his father I should say he’d have a liking for the fields, even if he is Bosting born and bred.’ But there! How did you come? Is your things at the station? How long is it since old Sid died? A nice old boy was Sid! And he had a talent for finding wood-chucks that beat the dickens.”

“I lost my father four years ago,” said Sidney—“he often spoke of you.”

[14]

“I’ll warrant he did,” said old Lansing, “and my girls know old Sid as well as their next door neighbour. Sid weren’t one of the sort to go back on old times—girls”—raising his voice—“girls!”

The two girls reappeared side by side.

“This is Mr. Martin,” said the old man; “Old Sid Martin’s son.”

The girls gave him characteristic salutations. Vashti’s inclination was stately, with all the plastic grace of her beautiful form expressed in it. Mabella, to whose cheeks the soft rose had returned, bestowed upon him the tantalizing salutation of the born coquette, piquant, confident, but withal reserved.

“My daughter Vashti,” continued Mr. Lansing. “My niece Mabella”—and then—“Where’s Lanty?”

“He has gone home,” said Vashti; her voice was soft and full; a rarity in that region, and a heritage from the Lansings of old.

“That’s too bad! It’s my nephew—Lansing Lansing,” he went on to Sidney, “the last of the Lansings.”

“He’s coming over to-night,” said Mabella.

“You’ll see him then; there are only four Lansings left now. An old man, a young one, and two girls. Well, it’s a good old stock and that’s plenty for a fresh graft. Well, well! How’s Miss’ Ranger feeling, girls? Are you ready to go home?”

“Yes—quite. She’s more cheerful,” said Vashti. “Shall we get ready?”

[15]

“Yes.” Then turning to Sidney: “Where did you say your things were?”

Sidney had no time for explanations up to this moment.

“I’ve been staying at Brixton,” he said; “and this afternoon I thought I would come over and ask when I might come, as you had been so good as to invite me; so I came by train from Brixton, and walked to Lansing Farm, and there I saw a lady who directed me here.”

“Temperance,” said the two girls, and looked at each other.

“She gave me some delightful milk and her opinion of boarders,” said Sidney, smiling.

Mabella’s laugh rang out like the call of a bird.

“Go and get ready, girls,” said Mr. Lansing, “and I’ll fetch the horses around.”

The girls went indoors, first telling Sidney they would not be long. He went to the side of an old well and sat down upon the edge, looking into its cool depths; far, far down, he could see the distorted vision of his own face. A fat toad hopped lazily about the stones in the moist coolness of the well mouth. The wooden handle of the windlass was worn by many palms—as the creeds of the world are fretted and attenuated by the very eagerness of those who seek the Living Waters by their aid. Hop-vines grew over the house and Phœbe birds fluttered through their rustling leaves. The men stared
[16]
curiously at the stranger by the well, to whom presently came the two girls again, in flat, wide hats.

“How brave you are!” he said to Vashti, rising at their approach. He was more than ordinarily tall, but Vashti’s stately head was well above his shoulder.

“How brave you are! That beast of a horse looked frightful as it stood rearing above you! I thought you would be killed.”

“I am not afraid of many things,” said Vashti, soberly. Yet there was that leaping within her breast which sometimes frightened her sorely.

Sidney’s eyes dilated with eagerness as he drank in the suave beauty of her statuesque shape. It was a beauty which appealed to him keenly. Divorced from all minor attributes, it depended securely upon form and line alone; colour, environment, counted as nothing in its harmonious whole. But one of the flexile wrists was swollen and stiff.

“You are hurt,” he cried, forgetting that to keen eyes his anxiety might seem absurd. “You are hurt! That horse!”

She coloured a little—slowly—it was like the reflection of a rosy cloud on marble.

“Yes, it is twisted, I think.”

He looked at it and shuddered. It gave him a sense of absolute physical nausea to see suffering. He had had a strange bringing-up by a visionary mother, who, absorbed in a vision of the Pain of the world, had impressed her morbid ideas upon her
[17]
child, until now, in manhood, he was as sensitive to even the abstract idea of pain as the eye is to dust. Before real suffering his whole being shrank. At that moment Mr. Lansing drove up in the democrat waggon; but a change which was very apparent had come over his countenance.

Vashti and Mabella looked at each other and nodded apprehensively.

“Get in, girls,” said the old man in abrupt, authoritative tones. “Come up beside me here,” he said to Sidney.

They drove through the yard in silence, old Lansing nodding good-bye curtly to his neighbours. The moment they were on the road he turned to the two girls:

“What’s this I hear?” he demanded. “Lanty has been fighting again! Verily ‘he that slayeth with the sword shall perish by the sword.’ It’s a scandal.”

“It wasn’t a sword; ’twas his fist,” said Mabella
sotto voce
.

“He only knocked the man down,” said Vashti, “and he needed it.”

“You’re a judge of such things, evidently,” said her father irately. “I say it’s a disgrace to be a common brawler—to——”

Mabella spoke up eagerly. “Oh, but uncle,” she said. “The man said something about Vashti and me—I don’t know what, but not pleasant, and——”

“He did, did he?” demanded the old man, his
[18]
face growing strangely like Lanty’s in its anger. “He
did
. Wait till I see him! I’ll break every bone in his body if I catch him”; he cut the horses viciously with his whip. “Only wait.” Evidently he had forgotten his doctrine of peace. As a sky is lighted by an after-glow into the beauty of dawn, so old Lansing’s face illumined by his wrath was youthful once more.

“He spoke slightingly of you, did he! The——”

He choked down an unscriptural epithet.

Mabella nudged Vashti gleefully. Sidney managed to give the girls a look of sympathetic congratulation over his shoulder. But Vashti’s face was still sombre. She knew her father far too well to think he would be consistently inconsistent. Lanty would have his bad half-hour, irrespective of this raging. The Lansings were essentially illogical. It was a common saying in the neighbourhood, that calculating upon a Lansing was like catching a flea: when you thought you had him he wasn’t there!

“What did you think when Dr. Clement gave you my invitation?” asked old Lansing.

“I was simply delighted,” said Sidney; “you know I did not feel that I would be coming among strangers. My dear old dad spoke very often of the Lansings, and you in particular.”

“Yes—he wanted sister Mabella, her mother there; we quarrelled, sister and me, over that matter. She would have her cousin Reuben and nobody
[19]
else. Poor things! Neither the one nor the other of ’em lived long. We Lansings are great on marrying cousins,” he said half apologetically, suddenly remembering it was this young man’s father who had been slighted.

Both the girls blushed, but the blush died unseen upon the cheeks of each. For neither searched the countenance of the other. How blindly we stumble towards our own desires—unheeding the others who seek the same treasure till a hand plucks it away from before us, and then with empty hands we brush the mists from our eyes, and see how, led by fatuous delusion through perilous places, we have come to the ashes! But the ashes are never so dead that eager breath may not blow them into that Phoenix flame whence Hope is born.

“My father told me all the old stories of his boyhood,” said Sidney. “I have heard of all your adventures together.”

“So have we,” said Mabella. “Do you know the story of how a streamer of crape was tied upon the door of the old church the night the Independents opened theirs?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Sidney, laughing. “My father related that exploit of Mr. Lansing’s many a time.”

Both girls laughed aloud, at least Mabella did, and Vashti’s full, soft laughter echoed through it like the call of a wood dove.

[20]

“My uncle,” said Mabella, with emphasis, “has told us how your father did it.”

“Tut—tut,” said old Lansing, not ill pleased. “Not worth repeating—school-boy capers.”

Afterwards in comparing notes the girls and Sidney found that in every instance the teller of the story had given the other the hero’s rôle to play. A generous thing, surely. Yet, like all true generosity, not barren. For in the imaginations of all these young people, this Damon and Pythias of the New England hills shared a dual glory for deeds of “derring do” against scholastic authority and ghostly reverence; and their names went down to posterity as mighty hunters of the woodchuck.

“Must you really go back to Brixton to-night?” asked Vashti of Sidney, as they alighted from the democrat waggon. The man trembled as he looked upon her, so strongly had her individuality impressed him.

“Yes,” he said. “I must go back to-night, but,” he added, not concealing his eagerness, “I shall return.”

“Whenever you can, and the sooner the better,” said old Lansing, interrupting him.

“Monday, then,” said Sidney.

“Monday be it,” replied the old man, pleased with his eagerness. “You want to get browned up a bit,” he added. “Have you been ill?”

[21]

“Grippe—in the winter,” Sidney Martin said, suddenly feeling ashamed of acknowledging it—before that splendid creature whose presence seemed such a reproach to all less superbly well than herself. It was a bad sign, had Sidney been looking for such subtleties, that Vashti’s magnificence of physique impressed him as a reproach against imperfection, rather than as a triumph of the race. It was so with her always. She gave others a chilling sense of what the human “might have been” rather than an inspiring perception of what the human “might be.” Surely the spirit is subtly strong, giving each individual an
aura
of his own which may stimulate those who enter it like the piney ozone of the mountains, or stifle them as does the miasmic breath of a morass.

“Well—if you must really go——” said Mabella.

Supper was over—a supper presided over by Temperance Tribbey, and justifying thoroughly her remarks upon her capability as a purveyor. Sidney was taking leave at the front door preparatory to his departure for the station.

“Yes—don’t keep him any longer, girls. He’ll miss his train. It is sun-down now; another dry sun-down at that! It’s killing weather. Well, good bye—we’ll look for you Monday.”

“Yes, on Monday,” said Mabella’s treble.

“On Monday,” echoed Vashti’s contralto.

“On Monday,” repeated Sidney, raising his hat
[22]
and turning away, and the voices of the three blent even as their lives were to do.

At the gate Sidney turned; Mabella had vanished promptly to adorn herself against the arrival of Lanty. The old man had gone off to the stables.

Vashti stood alone, her figure erect beside the Corinthian pillar of the old colonial porch. The rigid line of the column accentuated the melting curves of shoulder and hip. Lighted by the yellow after-glow she seemed transfigured to his glamoured fancy. He bared his head, and the goddess raised her hand in farewell. He passed down the road in a dream, hardly noting Lanty, as he rode past him to where Vashti waited in the after-glow.

[23]