OLD LADY PRATT was failing, and being a shrewd old lady, even at the age of ninety-one, she was very well aware of the fact.
"My faculties ain't what they used to be," she would say, with all her old decision in statement. "I ain't what I used to be, nor what my mother was at my age, and I ain't goin' to be flattered into thinkin' I be."
Everybody liked Old Lady Pratt, though many people were a little afraid of her. Her bright, black eyes dimmed as old age crept upon her, but they rarely softened. The deep, clean-cut furrows in her dark face were the marks of alertness, good-sense, and humor, rather than of gentler qualities. A black "front" with a straight, uncompromising muslin "part," hid the grace and dignity of her white hairs. Her speech was always incisive, often piquant, but never tender. She sat so straight in her chair—thanking Heaven that she had a back of her own—that she never gave that impression of feebleness which makes old age so irresistible in its appeal to the kind-hearted. Dr. Baxter, the oracle of the neighborhood, used to say of her, that she was "keen as a brier," and that was the accepted estimate. The respect in which she was held among her acquaintances was negatively indicated by the fact that nobody ever thought of calling her little, though her height was, in reality, a trifle short of five feet.
She suffered no pain nor discomfort in her latter days, and she was willing enough to "bide her time," but after her ninetieth birthday she began to realize that life had lost something of its relish.
"Grandma," said her great-grandchild Susie one day, "when you are a hundred years old your name will be in all the papers."
The old lady turned her gleaming spectacles upon the rosy young person of sixteen, and a queer look came into her face. "I hope my name will be in the papers before that," she said, curtly.
"What do you mean, Grandma?"
"Mean, child? Why, among the 'deaths and marriages,' to be sure."
Miss Susie was rather a thoughtful child, and after gazing for a moment at the red flicker in the isinglass window of the stove, she said, "Grandma, would you like to live your life all over again just as it has been?"
"Yes, I should," said Old Lady Pratt. "For one reason," she added in a lower tone.
"I should think it would make you tired to think of all those years."
A wonderfully bright, youthful look came into the aged face. "Nothing could make me tired if your grandfather was alive again. But there! What do you know about that?"
"I wish I could remember Grandpa Pratt," said the little girl, sympathetically. "Tell me about him."
"There isn't much to tell. Only he was the best man that ever lived, I do believe. You've seen his picter?"
"Oh, yes, Grandma; and it looks so much like Sir Walter Scott's."
"He was a great reader of Scott, and had a very high opinion of his works. But I always said it was just as honorable a calling to be a builder of houses, like your great-grandfather, as to be putting up castles in the air that never kept the rain off anybody's head."
There was a silence, during which the isinglass gave an occasional crackle, and once the whole body of the stove seemed to stretch itself and sigh profoundly.
"Susie," said grandma, after a while, "I hope you ain't goin' to be like your old-maid sisters. There's Bella, twenty-five years old last 'lection, with no more idea of marryin' than she had ten years ago. Mark my words, child, a woman should be early married. Your grandfather was courtin' me when I was your age, and at seventeen I was a happy bride."
"But, Grandma," said Susie, deprecatingly, yet with a light-hearted laugh, "there isn't a single person courting me. What am I to do about it?"
To the old lady it was no laughing matter. She frowned a little and looked slightly contemptuous. The rising generation seemed to her very slow and unenterprising, in spite of their railroads and telegraphs. Was a man more a man for being whisked over the earth's surface at the rate of twenty miles an hour? Stuff! How many of them would walk from Framingham to Boston and back, as her grandfather had done, to fetch a betrothal ring for his sweetheart? She wore the ring to-day, a thin gold circlet with the outlines of a coffin just discernible inside. The words, "Till Death" had worn quite away since it came into her possession.
But Old Lady Pratt's mind did not often dwell upon the rising generation and its shortcomings. Even the great-great-grandson, in whose small person the family beheld its fifth generation among the living, had but a transient hold upon her attention. From him her thoughts wandered to her own grandchildren and their pranks, and there were certain reminiscences, especially of Uncle James, the eldest, which the children were never tired of hearing.
"Grandma," they would ask, "how did that spot come on the ceiling?"
Now there was in reality no spot whatever on the ceiling. It had had many a coat of whitewash in the last forty years, whose passage had left so little impression on the failing memory.
"That spot!" Grandma would answer. "I can't seem to see it very plain, but I guess that must be the spot your Uncle James made when he was a little boy."
"Why, how could he make a spot so high up?"
"He threw a spit-ball."
"Why, Grandma! And what did you do to him?"
"Do? I boxed him!"
This always came out with a snap, which delighted the souls of the children.
"You did, Grandma? Poor Uncle James!"
"Poor Uncle James, indeed! He was as impudent a young rascal as ever lived."
"Why, what did he do?"
"He looked up in my face and said, 'You Paddy!{{' "}}
Nothing could be better than grandma's relish of this story. She was not a great talker, however. In fact, her daily life was a peculiarly silent one, her only companion being her unmarried daughter, Betsy, whose deafness precluded all possibility of conversation. There had been a time when the old lady fretted a good deal about this.
"It does seem to me," she would say, "as though Betsy's deafness would drive me crazy." Or again, when very much vexed: "I do believe it ain't all deafness. The girl hasn't got any spunk, that's the trouble. If she had, she'd make out to understand something now and then by her wits."
But this had been when grandma was only seventy or eighty years old, and the impatience of youth was not yet wholly subdued.
Now it was different. She had got used to seeing the large, loosely built figure always at her side, with its slightly bobbing head, which had once been such an annoyance to her, and she had come to appreciate the unobtrusive virtues of a faithful slave.
Aunt Betsy had not much spunk, it is true. Her wits seldom came to the assistance of herimperfect faculties. But she knew all her mother's needs and wishes by heart; and the absolutely unswerving devotion, day by day, and hour by hour, of the sixty odd years of her life had come, by the mere process of accumulation, to have the weight and importance in the old lady's mind which they deserved. The black eyes of the elder woman often looked approvingly at the meek old face in its pretty frame of soft gray curls. It was a pity that Betsy never knew that the reason she had not been allowed the dignity of a "false front," to which she had so ardently aspired, was because her mother thought her curls "too pretty to be covered up."
Once in a great while when Betsy had rendered her some especially timely service, the old lady had called her to her side to say: "Betsy you're a good girl. I don't know what I should do without you." And Betsy had gone about with a warm feeling at her heart for weeks after.
Thanksgiving had always been a great day in the Pratt family, for then its scattered members came from far and near to keep the good old festival. Their numbers had years before outgrown the capacity of the little old house in Green Street, and the celebration had been transferred to "Harriet's."
Harriet was Mrs. Pratt's eldest daughter, the widow of a rich man, and she dwelt in a very grand house, with a terraced lawn in front anda cupola atop, a house where any family might be proud to meet together. Her long, wide parlors, with their thick Turkey carpets and their red velvet furniture; the large mirrors over the two black mantelpieces which were adorned with gilt candelabra hung with rainbow prisms; the pier glasses at either end, multiplying indefinitely every objectin the room; the numerous oil-paintings which had the air of having been bought by the dozen;—all this was very splendid indeed.
And the queen of this palace on Thanksgiving Day was Grandma Pratt. Every one paid his respects first to her as she sat bolt-upright in the stiff, high-backed "Governor Winthrop" arm-chair. Aunt Harriet took but a secondary place in her own house on that day.
It was as queen of the New England feast that the old lady's memory always lived in the minds of her descendants, perhaps because she was more "herself" on the last Thanksgiving of her life than at any time later.
The great dinner with its many courses may have seemed a little long to her, though she drank her annual glass of sherry with the old relish; but it was when they all gathered for a frolic in the brightly lighted parlors that she seemed most thoroughly in her element.
She joined in the quieter games, such as "Button, button," and "Neighbor, neighbor," and grew much excited over the traditional "Blindman's Buff," which she witnessed from a remote corner of the room, Aunt Betsy sitting by to ward off the impetuous "Blind Man" when he made too wild a dash in their direction.
When the young people were tired of romping—they were all young people to Old Lady Pratt—they gathered about in a far-reaching circle, and clamored for grandma's stories of their fathers and grandfathers, and of her own youth.
It was a pretty sight: the wide circle of faces,—old and young, dark and fair, all focusing upon one point—upon that small, upright figure which time had failed to bend; upon those clear-cut, animated features which ninety years had not subdued. It was a picture which the children, old and young, never forgot, and no Sibyl of ancient days was ever listened to with more rapt attention than Old Lady Pratt.
Last of all came the dance, which was the crowning pleasure of the gala-day. As the circle of her listeners dispersed, Uncle James came up to Grandma Pratt, and with old-time gallantry invited her to lead the Virginia reel with him. After coquetting a little, as she always did, and reminding him that she was an old woman, she suffered herself to be led to the end of the room, and, as the long lines were forming, her little old feet tapped the floor impatiently, and her eyes grew bright behind her gold-bowed spectacles. Mary Anne, who was generally conceded to be the "unselfish" member of the family, went to the Chickering grand piano, and struck up the jolly old jig, not too fast (as it is often played nowadays), but allowing time for the "steps."
Grandma moved lightly forward, and made the preliminary courtesy to her opposite grandson in a manner which should have been a lesson to a degenerate age. She had no more admiring spectator than Aunt Betsy, who could not dance herself, because it made her head swim, and who watched her mother with a sort of awe as she wound in and out in the mazes of the figure, her step brisk, her head erect, and cap-strings flying. Then came the march, grandma leading her half of the procession with great spirit, a light flush coming on her old face, her eyes shining brighter and blacker than ever, while the merry train of revellers clapped their palms together and gayly shouted. Then they all joined hands and formed a continuous arch the whole length of the long room, and Old Lady Pratt, with her favorite grandson at her side, passed down between her children and her children's children for the last time.
She panted a little when they reached the foot of the row, and James said, "I don't know how you feel, Grandma, but I'm kind o' tuckered out. Let's go and look on."
"That's a fib, James Spencer," she answered, sharply. "You think I'm tired and need to rest."
"You, Grandma? You never get tired. We all know that. But it's because you're so light on your feet. I guess you would be tired, though, if you'd gained fifteen pounds in a year, as I have."
And he escorted her resolutely to the straight-backed arm-chair, which she was glad enough to take, since she had not been obliged to "give in."
It was but a week after this Thanksgiving Day, on which she had seemed so young and gay, that Old Lady Pratt gave Aunt Betsy a great fright by not getting up to breakfast. It was an event without a precedent, and the fact that she only owned to feeling a little "rheumaticky" did not reassure her anxious daughter.
Immediately after the untasted breakfast, Eliza was despatched to summon Harriet, and Harriet was soon at her mother's bedside.
She found the old lady seeming very well and bright, and quite scoming the idea of calling in Dr. Baxter. Rheumatism, if rheumatism it was, was an entirely new guest in the sound old frame, and Harriet did not quite believe in it.
Just as she was about to leave her mother she said, abruptly: "Have you done anything to strain yourself, Mother? It don't seem quite natural for you to give out all at once so. Come, tell me."
The old lady looked up at her from among her feather pillows and said, rather petulantly: "You always was a sight smarter 'n Betsy. I sometimes think you're a leetle too smart."
Harriet sat down again, not ill pleased to be thus taxed with an excess of smartness.
"Tell me about it, Mother."
"That's jest as I choose," said the old lady, with some defiance in her tone. "Will you promise not to tell anybody?"
"Of course I will if you say so. Did you fall on the ice?"
"Not exactly."
Then, with a curious manner, half-reluctant, half-amused, she said: "I went out into the kitchen yesterday afternoon when Eliza was up attic changin' her gown, and there was that curtain over the sink all askew ag'in. I'vespoke to that girl about it forty times if I have once, and I was too mad to speak the forty-fust time. So I thought I'd fix it myself and it might be a lesson to her."
"But, Mother, you couldn't reach it! You're not tall enough."
"A pretty state of things it would be if we couldn't get hold of anything that was out of our reach!" the old lady retorted, with ready paradox. But she did not seem to want to go on.
"Well, what did you do?"
"Do? What would anybody do? I got a chair and climbed up on the edge of the sink."
"Dear me! And did you strain yourself?"
"No. I had a fall. But I fixed that curtain fust; straighter 'n it had been fer some time."
"And you fell onto the floor, all that distance? I don't wonder you feel lame."
"Well, no"—and here the reluctance became more evident,—"I fell into the sink!"
She looked defiantly at her daughter, as though daring her to laugh. This the daughter had no inclination to do.
"But, Mother, how did you ever get out?" she asked anxiously.
"Oh, I got out easy enough. But I felt kind o' stiff this mornin'," she admitted, after a pause, "and I thought I'd see how you'd all take it if I was to lay abed for once in my life. But mind you don't let on to anybody," she added, more sharply. "I ain't goin' to be the laughin'-stock of the neighborhood in my declinin' years."
The old lady was about again in a day or two, but she was pretty lame after this, and, indeed, she never seemed quite the same again. She would sometimes fall asleep in her chair—a thing which she had never been known to do before—and she was always mortified and vexed when she awoke.
One afternoon she started up suddenly from a nap, saying, "Betsy, what did you say?"
"What is it, Mother," said Betsy, turning her head to listen.
"What did you say?" asked the old lady.
"Nothin', Mother, nothin'."
The strained voice became a little querulous. "Betsy, I ask you what was you a-talkin' about?'"
"Nothin', Mother, nothin' at all."
Then a flash of anger, her last fit of "temper," lit up the old eyes, and she cried, "What was you a-thinkin' of?"
"Nothin', Mother, nothin'," declared the bewildered Betsy.
"Betsy, I heard ye!" screamed the baffled old lady; and she sank back exhausted, only to fall asleep again in a few minutes.
Yes, Old Lady Pratt was breaking up. She did not "take to her bed," as the saying is. She died one morning before "sun-up."
For a few days before her death she kept her own room, sitting, still upright, in the stuffed chair, in her sunny south window. It was January, and the snow lay glittering on the ground.
"I like it; it's so bright and cheerful," she declared, when they asked her if it was not too dazzling.
Betsy did not leave her side for several days and nights, till at last Harriet insisted upon taking her place for what proved to be the last night.
She arrived, escorted by one of her grandsons, early in the evening, and they went directly up the narrow stairs. As they reached the upper landing they heard a strange sound—an aged, quavering voice crooning a lullaby.
The door of the bedroom stood open, and a candle was burning dimly. The old lady sat in her stuffed chair, with her faithful daughter close beside her. She held one of Betsy's hands, which she stroked softly from time to time, as she sang, in a high, broken treble, to the old tune of "Greenville":
Holy angels guard thy sleep."
Betsy, alas! could not hear the familiar lullaby, but she felt the caressing touch. The gray head nodded gently, as was its wont; but the passive look upon the patient face, across which the light of the candle flickered, had given place to one of deep content.
Harriet and the boy turned and crept down the stairs again, the boy hushed and embarrassed, Harriet crying softly to herself.
"I'm glad I came," she said, with a sob—"I'm glad I came. I think mother'll die to-night."
Old Lady Pratt "passed away" very quietly. The going out of the light which had burned so bravely and steadily for more than ninety years was almost imperceptible to the watchers at her side.
The next two days were for Betsy a time of bewilderment. She sat, with a dazed look upon her face, receiving the visits of condolence. As one neighbor after another entered and pressed her hand in respectful sympathy, she would rouse herself to say, in a vague, wandering voice: "Mother's gone. Yes, mother's gone." And then she would sink back into silence, while the conversation went on about her in subdued tones.
"Poor Aunt Betsy!" they all said. "She's quite broken. It almost seems as though she were losing her mind."
Ah, it was not her mind she was losing, poor soul! She could have better spared that. It was the heart which had quite gone out of her.
Happily she was saved any acute feeling of sorrow in those first days by the merciful apathy that had fallen upon her. She was like a boat that has slipped its moorings, but floats upon a quiet sea. There were no wild tossings to and fro, no great waves to swallow up the fragile bark. It might drift far out on the darkening waters, or the incoming tide might rudely crush it on the rocks. For the moment it floated gently and aimlessly upon the bosom of the deep.
The stir and excitement of the funeral roused Betsy somewhat. She was pleased with the wreaths and crosses and other floral emblems which were sent in, making the air of the little house heavy with their fragrance. She was even interested in her own mourning when they brought it to her and helped her put it on. Hach token of respect, each ceremony of grief, gratified her, as a tribute to the imperious little woman who had ruled her every thought and action.
There was consolation, too, in the peaceful figure in the rosewood coffin. The face she loved looked so life-like and so serene, that she could not grasp the idea that it must be put away from her sight, that all this pageant, as it seemed to her simple mind, was to end in utter blackness and emptiness.
She was taken in the first carriage with Sister Harriet; and even when the mournful procession slowly moved on its solemn way she was upheld by a grateful consciousness of the long line of carriages, with their many inmates, paying honorable tribute to her mother's memory.
It was a bitterly cold day, and the services at the grave were short—short, but terribly real and final. As she stood there in the cruel wind, poor drifting soul, the inevitable tide was rising, and the rocks were very near.
Harriet was to stay with her that night; and when they had had their dinner and set the house in order, she proposed to Betsy that they should both go to their rooms and lie down.
Betsy had been looking on with a feeling of jealousy foreign to her gentle nature, as Harriet worked with her about the little rooms, straightening the furniture and replacing the ornaments upon the tables. She was thankful to be left, for a time, at least, in possession of her own, so she meekly went up stairs and lay down on the bed, while Harriet retired to the "best chamber."
The rocks were very, very near, and the poor soul was fast drifting upon them. She lay upon her bed for a few minutes in helpless misery. Then she got up, and sat awhile in her window. The mere inaction, to which she was unaccustomed, was distressing to her, but she did not know where to turn for escape.
"Oh, dear!" she moaned softly to herself; "oh, dear! I ain't got anybody to do for any more."
She got up and went into her mother's room, and moved about, taking up and putting down again the little personal belongings: the faded pin-cushion on the bureau, the old receipt-book, the worn spectacle-case with the steel-bowed glasses,—the gold spectacles had only been worn on "occasions," and were kept under lock-andkey. She went to the great double-bed with the calico flounce around it, and softly smoothed the pillows.
By and by she took a dust-cloth and went over every bit of the furniture. It comforted her, for the moment, when she found a speck of dust to be removed. But when the humble task was finished, the comfort was past.
"Oh, dear! I wish I could do something for her," she whispered, as she crept down the narrow stairs to the sitting-room.
Eliza was making a cheerful clatter in the kitchen, and some English sparrows were squabbling in the snow; but for Betsy's ears there was nothing to break the sense of utter emptiness and desolation.
"Oh, dear!" she kept saying to herself—"oh, dear!"
She moved toward the parlor, where her mother had lain in state. As she opened the door a fierce chill struck her, and she went and got her little gray knit shawl, which she pulled tightly about her shoulders. Everything in the parlor was in its accustomed place, yet nothing was the same. She moved to the table in the middle of the room, and laid her hand upon its hard, cold surface. In the shadow beneath a window she saw a small object lying. She picked it up. It was a little bunch of pansies which one of the great-grandchildren had brought "to Grandma Pratt."
"Oh, dear!" murmured Betsy. "It's the pansies. They've been forgotten. And they was always her favorite flower."
She lifted them to her face a moment, and then she laid them down on the table. By and by she went to the kitchen and fetched a tumbler of water, and set the pansies in it.
After that she wandered aimlessly about again.
"Mother'd say I was uneasy as a fish," she suddenly said to herself, and sat resolutely down. Her eyes lingered regretfully upon the pansies in the tumbler, and the words, "Mother'd ought to have them! Mother'd ought to have them!" dwelt like a refrain upon her lips. Suddenly an inspiration came to her that made her heart beat quicker. Why should not her mother have them? She looked out of the window. The sun was still bright upon the glittering snow, though the short winter's day was drawing to a close. "'T ain't so very far," she said to herself. "There'll be plenty o' time to git back before supper, and Harriet 'pears to be asleep. I do want to do somethin' for mother to-night, and she'd ought to have them flowers."
With trembling haste she went up stairs to her room, creeping stealthily past the door of the "best chamber." Harriet was sound asleep, as Betsy might have known if she could have heard the heavy breathing within the room. She put on her warmest cloak, which happened to be a black one, and her new black bonnet and gloves, and hurried softly down the stairs. In her haste she had forgotten the "Sontag," which she always wore in very cold weather, and it had not seemed quite decorous to wind her big white "cloud" around the mourning bonnet.
The air struck cold upon her as she closed the front door behind her, and she hid the pansies in the folds of her cloak to keep them warm. "It seems to me colder 'n it did this morning," she said, with a shiver, not noticing that the sunlight was all but gone from the chimneys and tree-tops; "but mother'd ought to have them pansies; her favorite flower, too!" Her teeth chattered as she hurried along, stumbling now and then, but there was the warmth of an eager purpose within her. "I wanted to do somethin' for mother; I did want to do some little thing for mother." The dusk was gathering fast about her, but she knew the way. "I hope they won't miss me before I git back," she whispered, with a guilty look at the darkening sky; "they might git worried." And she pushed on, faster and faster, through side streets and alleys, an increasing eagerness urging her on as she approached her goal.
Harriet's family and Anson's had lots in the new "Woodland Cemetery," but Old Lady Pratt and her husband were lying side by side in the quieter resting-place of their own generation, known as "the old burying-ground."
There was no wind stirring, and as Aunt Betsy hurried on and on, and saw the stars coming out in the clear sky, there was a growing gladness in her heart, and she scarcely noted the deadly chill that was creeping upon her.
The gates of the old burying-ground were never locked, and there was nought to hinder her as she pushed them aside with her benumbed hands and entered in.
The Pratt lot was in a sheltered corner not far from the entrance, and Betsy went to it, without hesitation. There it was, with its row of modest head-stones, and the black break in the snow, which marked the newly made grave. It looked very black indeed in the starlight, and Betsy shuddered with a feeling stronger than the outer cold.
She laid the pansies, wilted with frost, upon the dark mound, and then she sat down on a bench in the shelter of the high board fence to rest. The sky was sparkling with stars, and she looked up at them with a sudden glow of hope and joy.
"Mother's up there," she said within herself, for her cold lips refused their office. "Seems to me as though I could see her eyes a-shinin' down. I wonder if she's pleased to have them pansies?"
A feeling of warmth and well-being stole upon her as she sat on the old bench, gazing no longer at the dark grave, but at the starry heavens.
Yes, it did seem as though her mother's eyes were shining somewhere among those stars, and as she looked longingly toward them there sounded in her poor unhearing ears the sweetest words that had ever reached them: "Betsy, you're a good girl; I don't know what I should do without you."
Over and over, like a sweet refrain, those words sounded, while the sense of warmth and brightness deepened upon her. Then her eyes closed but did not seem to shut out the glory of the heavens. And hearing still those comforting words, her gray head dropped upon her breast, and she fell gently and happily asleep.
After a night of anxious search, they found her there in the early dawn.
"Poor Aunt Betsy!" some one said. "She must have gone crazy."
"That ain't the face of a crazy woman," said Brother Ben, with a choke in his voice. "It's the face of a transfigured saint. God bless her!" And he knew in his loving heart that already the benediction rested upon her.