Page:Scribner's Magazine Volume 1.djvu/36

24 hundred acres of dairy and hop land, free and clear, a residence much above the average farm-house of these parts, and a tidy sum of money in the bank.

The contrast now was sweeping. The Fairchild's house was still the largest residential structure on the Burfield road, which led from Thessaly across the hills to remote and baŕbarous latitudes, but respect had long since ceased to accrue to it upon the score of its size. To the local eye it was the badge and synonym of "rack and ruin;" while sometimes strangers of artistic tastes, chancing to travel by this unfrequented road, would voice regrets that such a prospect as opened to the vision just here, with the noble range of hills behind for the first time looming in their true proportions, should be spoiled by such a gaunt, unsightly edifice, with its tumble-down surroundings, its staring windows cheaply curtained with green paper, and its cheerless, shabby color—that indescribable gray with which rain and frost and Father Time supplant unrenewed white. The garden, comprising a quarter-acre to the east of the house, was a tangled confusion of flowers and weeds and berry-bushes run wild, yet the effect somehow was mean rather than picturesque. The very grass in the yard to the west did not grow healthfully, but revealed patches of sandy barrenness, created by feet too indifferent or unruly to keep the path to the barns.

Yet the neighbors said, and Lemuel had come himself to feel, that the blame of this sad falling off was not fairly his. There had been a fatal defect in the legacy.

The one needful thing which the Hon. Seth Fairchild did not leave his elder son was the brains by means of which he himself, in one way or another, had gathered together a substantial competency, won two elections to the State Senate, and established and held for himself the position of leading citizen in his town—that most valued and intangible of American local distinctions. But while Lemuel's brown hair curled so prettily, and his eyes shone with the modest light of wealthy and well-behaved youth, nobody missed the brains. If there was any change in the management of the farm, it passed unnoticed, for all attention was centred on the great problem, interesting enough always when means seeks a help-meet, but indescribably absorbing in rural communities, where everybody knows everybody and casual gallants never come for those luckless damsels neglected by native swains—Whom will he marry?

It boots not now to recall the heart-burnings, the sad convictions that life would henceforth be a blank, the angry repinings at fate, which desolated the village of Thessaly and vicinity when Lemuel, returning from a mid-winter visit to Albany, brought a bride in the person of a bright-eyed, handsome, and lever young lady who had been Miss Cicely Richardson. He had known her, so they learned, for some years—not only during his school-days at the academy there, but later, in what was mysteriously known at Thessaly as "society," in whose giddy mazes he had mingled while on a visit to his legislative sire at the Capital City. No, it is not worth while to dwell upon the village hopes rudely destroyed by this shock—for they are dim memories of the far, far past.

But to one the blow was a disappointment not to be forgotten, or to grow dim in recollection. Miss Sabrina Fairchild was two years younger than her brother in age—a score of years his senior in firmness and will. She had only a small jointure in her father's estate, because she had great expectations from an aunt in Ohio, in perpetual memory of whose anticipated bounty she bore her scriptural name, but she was a charge on her brother in that she was to have a home with him until she chose to leave it for one of her own. I doubt not that her sagacious father foresaw, from his knowledge of his daughter, the improbability that this second home would ever be offered her.

Miss Sabrina, even at this tender age, was clearly not of the marrying kind, and she grew less so with great steadiness. She was at this early date, when she was twenty-four, a woman of markedly strong character, of which perhaps the most distinct trait was family pride.