The Massey Money

I

‘I HAVE sent for Judge Fordham to talk to me about my will, Mayannah. He comes at three.’

‘Is that so, Mother Dreer?’

At this response, which seemed to her slipshod and perfunctory, Mrs. Dreer, lying high among her pillows, fairly glared at her son’s widow. She detected an almost professional quality in Mayannah’s irritating amiability.

In her point-lace cap and quilted silk bed-jacket, the high-nosed old woman looked masterful and important still, in spite of years and mortal illness. There was a red spot in the middle of either wasted cheek, and her deep-set black eyes were glowing with an excitement which even this fateful occasion hardly warranted. She sent for Judge Fordham frequently, but never before had she looked like this.

Mayannah Dreer, who was crocheting by the window, counted ten stitches apathetically. To live with Jane Dreer meant learning to restrain one’s tongue three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and Mayannah had lived with her ten years. Now, at thirty, she looked like a pink azalea that has lost its first freshness; her cheeks were somewhat pale, and the submission and steadiness in her clear gray eyes totally denied the rebellious exuberance of her waving, red-gold hair. Mayannah’s father was George Wetherbe, of old stock run to seed, but her mother was pretty Katy Curran from a farm far back in the hills. Thus Mayannah was burdened with the perplexing inheritance of a New England brain and an Irish heart.

‘I guess you’d like to know what I’m going to do with my money.’

‘Just as you please,’ said Mayannah, indifferently.

The gray head shook with vexation. ‘Mayannah Dreer, you make me tired, pretending it’s nothing to you how I make my will! I tell you, there is n’t anybody who don’t want money — and you just as much as the rest, even if butter won’t melt in your mealy mouth!’

‘If you go on that way, you’ll get all tired out before Judge Fordham comes,’said Mayannah, counting more stitches.

This was undeniable, so Jane Dreer relaxed her tension a little, for she had much to say before the lawyer came, and she knew it.

‘The Massey money!’ she said. ‘And all of it in my hands, for me to say where it goes! Time was I used to think the Massey money a little better than any other money on earth. But that was before it came to me. Grandsire Nahum Massey and Temperance, his wife, they got the first considerable amount of it together, by littles and by littles. But they got it. That’s the main thing.’

Mayannah glanced up, interested. Often as the Massey money had been used as a weapon of offense against her own insignificance during the patient years she had been her mother-in-law’s companion, this was the first time she had heard anything about the genesis of the snug little fortune that loomed large in Mrs. Dreer’s eyes.

‘Then I should think your father and your uncle Newton and your aunt Eliza would have had as much of it as your uncle Jabez,’ she observed. ‘But I thought your money came from Jabez Massey.’

‘It did. Father was n’t one to hold on to what he had; Jabez was one to make more. Families run like that — a streak o’ fat and a streak o’ lean. Uncle Newt held on to his fairly well. It’s the remains of Newton’s money the Varian girl is living on. She’s his only grandchild.’

Mayannah, considering for a minute the various branches of the family she had married into, remembered that Jane Dreer herself was one of three children.

‘How did all your uncle Jabez’s money happen to come to you, Mother Dreer?’ she asked idly, hardly expecting an answer. She was acquainted with the village legend which said that Jane Dreer came down like the Assyrian on the old home during Jabez Massey’s last illness; that she shut him off from kindred and acquaintance, nursed him, cursed him, bulldozed him, until, as a result of really excellent care, combined with really skillful browbeating, he had made her his heir; ‘in view of a private compact between us, and in acknowledgment of her faithful services in my behalf ’ ran his last testament, as anybody might read in the probate office, were they curious enough. Fordhampton people wondered vastly over that ‘private compact,’ but for twenty years Jane Dreer had gone her triumphant, silent, self-determined way. Thus her answer now quite petrified Mayannah.

‘It did n’t just happen,’ returned the elder woman grimly. ‘As for how I got it, that’s what I’m going to tell you right now. I promised Jabez Massey three things, and the first was, that before I died, I’d find somebody to tell it to. It might as well be you.’

There was contempt and impatience in her voice.

‘I don’t know as I wish to hear it,’ returned Mayannah quickly, ‘not if — if it’s anything against you.’

‘Against me! Against me! I’d like to know when it was ever against anybody to know the buttered side of bread! Jabez Massey did n’t hold it against me, I can tell you! Uncle Jabez was a smart man; he knew the world, and he knew folks. And he was sick almost unto death, up here in this old house in Vermont that his grandfather built, when I heard about it from ’Gusta Burden and came on from Illinois to take care of him. “Your uncle Jabez is n’t long for this world,” ’Gusta wrote me, “and if you don’t look after him, I expect Mary Varian will come up from New York with her little girl. She’s the same kin to Jabez that you are.”

‘At first I did n’t see how I could leave my husband and Harold. Harold was thirteen then, and into everything. Jim Dreer was working in Peoria, and I had all I could do to manage on his wages, let alone paying a housekeeper. Providentially, his sister’s husband died the week before, and she did n’t know what on earth to do, for there was n’t but four thousand life insurance, and the house was mortgaged. So I planned it all out for her — how she was to pay off the mortgage with a thousand of the insurance, put the rest out at eight per cent, rent the house, and come look after Jim and Harold. I offered her two dollars a week to do it. I’d have had to pay a girl three, but I considered my planning was worth something. You see it gave her an income she could save money on, put it all together.’

‘How did you know somebody else would n’t be taking care of Uncle Jabez by the time you got here?’ demanded Mayannah, drinking in these details.

‘I did n’t — but one has to leave something to the Lord. It will be twenty-one years the tenth of October since I came. There were no through trains up this way then. I came up from the junction on a mixed freight. It looked so lonely all the way that I was heart-sick — that old reservoir with the stumps sticking up out of the black water, and the mountains all dark with firs, and just a few yellow maples here and there to light them up. The old house looked desolate, too. Just scraggly chrysanthemums and rain-soaked asters up the front walk, and fallen leaves everywhere. I opened the front door and went in as if I belonged — but my heart was in my mouth. The downstairs rooms were all dirt and disorder. You could write your name on all that old mahogany. I put down my bag and walked upstairs. At the top I heard somebody calling from the south-east chamber, so I went along, as bold as brass, pushed open the door, and went in.

‘There sat Uncle Jabez in a black skull-cap and flowered dressing-gown, in a rocker by the fireplace, looking the image of distress. Yet there was always something about him, and even about the things he said and the way he said them — I don’t know what to call it but style, though that’s a ridiculous word to use about a twisted old man in a flowered bed-gown. He’d had rheumatic fever, and it had left him with a very bad heart, and so twisted he could hardly hobble. Hi Newton used to come, night and morning, to get him up and back to bed, and his wife looked in twice a day and cooked and fussed around a little. There was bread and milk for his dinner on a dusty table beside him, and a log smouldered in the corner of the fireplace.

‘“Well, Uncle Jabez,” said I, “how do you do? I’m afraid by the way things look, you don’t do very well.”

‘He looked at me hard, and finally his mouth screwed into a side-ways grin. You’d call it sardonic if he’d been a man in a book.

‘“Ah, it is my dear niece, Jane Dreer!” said he. “How do you do, Jane? — Now I wonder when Mary Varian will be up? About next week or the week after, I should say. Mary was always a little slow. But where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.”

“‘I’m glad you can still quote Scripture, Uncle Jabez,” said I. “It’s often a greater relief to the feelings than profanity.” With that I got down on my knees in front of the fire and fixed the charred stick for a back-log, with some chips and paper and small sticks in front. “As for Mary Varian,” I went on, “I doubt if you will need her now I am here. I have come on from Illinois on purpose to take care of you.”

‘Just then the sticks burst into a flame. Uncle Jabez looked at it. “If that Newton woman lived to be a thousand, she could n’t learn to make a fire,” he said.

“‘Some folks can’t,” said I, dusting the table by his elbow with my handkerchief. “Would n’t you rather have pop-robin and hot buttered toast for your lunch instead of that cold bread and milk?”

‘He shut his eyes and groaned. “Oh, the flesh-pots! The flesh-pots! At my age to be in bondage to the fleshpots!”

‘“Is n’t it premature,” said I, “to be worrying about flesh-pots when I offer you a little gruel? Uncle Jabez, you know this is no way for a man of your means and your state of health to live. It is n’t right and decent; now is it?”

‘He groaned again and looked into the fire, which had begun to snap quite lively. “Candidly, Jane, it is n’t,” he allowed at last.

‘“Very well. Then we’re perfectly agreed,” said I. “ If I stay here, there ’ll be some comfort in the place. Do you suppose the Newton woman would help me give this house one good cleaning? And can her husband be hired to rake up leaves?”

‘That was all the words we ever had about it. I just settled down and got the house to running, and made him as comfortable as he could be made. I did n’t spend more money than I had to, because it hurt him so to see it go, but I used what was needful. For all he was so close, Jabez knew what was fitting.

‘When I had been here a couple of weeks, along came a letter from Mary Varian in New York to her dear uncle Jabez. She said ’Gusta Burden had written her of his illness some weeks before (the same time she wrote me, I’ll warrant you! That was like ’Gusta to stir us both up and then sit back to see what would come of it), and she had been trying to plan it so as to get up to Fordhampton to see him, but she hated to interrupt Rowena’s term at school, and there was no one to leave her with. However, they could come at Christmas, and if dear uncle Jabez thought it best for his comfort, they might remain, for blood was thicker than water, and she felt for him in his illness and isolation.

‘I wrote straight back and told her she need n’t worry; Uncle Jabez’s hands were too swollen to write, but he was n’t suffering from isolation in the least. I was right, there, and meant to stay. And the doctor thought excitement was n’t good for him, so he would have to decline her kind offer of a visit.

‘When I took the letter in for Jabez to read before I sent it, he grinned that side-ways grin and said, “Come, Jane, what do you think you are going to do, keeping Mary Varian and her girl away from me? Why should n’t I see my affectionate relatives? I notice you don’t encourage the neighbors to come in very much, either. Going to get me under your thumb, eh? And then dictate my last will and testament. That’s a little too raw for a person of your intelligence, Jane.”

‘That made me angry. “Let’s have this thing out,” said I. “Then we’ll both feel better and know where we stand. — Uncle Jabez, in the Lord’s own time, you’ll have to leave the Massey money and the Massey house. You ’ ve got to leave them to somebody, and I suppose it will be to some of your kin. When you get done with them, I want them — and I am willing to earn them, which is more than any of the rest would do. Now — look at all of us. Take your own generation first: your brother Newton is dead; my father is dead; your sister Eliza is in the Old Ladies’ Home, and very comfortable she is. Her only living son has lost the use of his faculties and the state supports him as well as he needs to be supported. Mary Varian and her little girl have Newton’s money and manage to make it do. Mary is a worthy enough woman, but she is crazy about the city. She thinks her flat is better than the house of her fathers; you’ll never get her away for long from shopwindows and bargain-counters.

‘“Then, there’s my own family. Brother Joseph is a drunkard and wastrel, though he had ability to begin with. Sister Delia married a Canuck. He took her out to Winnipeg, where they are doing well, and have as much money as they ought to have. Neither they nor their children would care anything about the old Massey house in Fordhampton. If it was theirs, it would be sold to the first comer, and the money would buy more Manitoba land. If that’s what you want, I have nothing to say, for what I want is different. My idea is to live in the place where my people have lived — and live like a lady. I’m a Massey, and I guess if anybody could put life into this old place, I could.”

‘“Ah? And where does your family come into your plans?” he inquired, with that condescending air he knew how to put on.

‘“Jim Dreer could manage the quarry and the farm. My son should go to Cambridge and come back here to take up Judge Fordham’s law practice. The back-country needs young men more than the towns.”

“‘Kind of a sickly boy, is n’t he?” sneered Uncle Jabez. It was the only thing he ever said that showed he had heard about us, or thought of us. •

‘ My heart stood still, for I had never let on, even to myself, that Harold was n’t as strong as other boys.

‘ “No!” I said. “All he needs is to live up here in the hills to be as strong as they make them. He’s a good boy and his heart is set already on going to college. — Yes, I’m free to say I want your money, Uncle Jabez, and I want your house!”

‘“You are a shrewd woman, Jane Dreer,” he said, “a shrewd woman.” With that he sat looking in the fire for half an hour, not saying a word. And I went on with my sewing.

‘“So you want to live like a lady, Jane?” he brought out finally. “That’s the gist of the matter, is n’t it?”

‘“Yes,” I said; “it is.”

‘“It’s a fine old word,” said he. “Time was I thought it almost a sacred word. What is your notion of living like a lady, Jane? How would you go about it, now?”

“‘I want my carriage and pair,” said I, “not a piano-box buggy and a utility horse. I want linen and silver befitting this house. Servants enough to care for it properly. To go to Europe at my pleasure. And to entertain. 1 want to bring guests from hither and yon, to show this town the Masseys are n’t dead nor dying. I want Harold to fetch young people home, pretty girls and fine young men. I want lights and music and gayety, delicate food, and the open door. That’s how I want to live, ” said I. “I’m Temperance Massey’s granddaughter, and they say I’m her living image. I want to do these things in her house with her money, and do ’em right.”

‘ “The open door!” said he. “ Maybe it’s more your inheritance than you know. Do you happen to be aware, Jane Dreer, how Nahum and Temperance Massey got their money together at the first?”

‘“Why, no, I don’t know as I do.”

“Keeping tavern down in Connecticut and selling rum, tobacco, and molasses. Jonathan and I were quite big boys when the old place came to father, and we moved back here to fix it up and to ruffle it with the Fordhams and the Vyses. Rum, tobacco, and molasses,” he said, “and feeding the wayfarer. Plenty of other fortunes started just that way. Money is money, Jane. It is n’t an air-plant. Mostly its roots strike down into the dirt. And that’s all right — only don’t put on airs,” he said. “It behooves us all to remember the pit whence we were digged.”

‘I won’t deny I was taken aback. I’d always said a good deal about being a Massey. The Fordhams and the Vyses coined their money from their brains. “You’ve added to it,” I said finally.

“‘Oh, yes, I’ve added to it, but not in such very ladylike ways, either. I’ve screwed and pinched and ground my neighbors like other men.”

‘“If it’s clean enough for you, it’s clean enough for me,” I told him.

‘With that, something came upon him. He pulled himself up out of his chair and began to hobble up and down the room, hitching himself along. He was n’t thinking of me any longer, or talking to me. There was an agony in his face, and a kind of disgust, as if life had been one long affront to something far within him, not yet dead. I just don’t know how to express it. It was so different from anything I knew of him before.

'"O God, if I had had a child to be my heir!” he said. “Yet if I had, he might have been altogether such an one as I! Thank God I did not have a child!” he cried, and tottered back to where he had been sitting.

He was quiet a long time before he came back to me and my concerns.

‘“I knew a lady once. She was n’t much like you, Jane Dreer. Her children, now, — perhaps, — if one could find them — But I am old —it is too late. She was gentle and tender and simple — anyhow I thought so. Brave, too — Sometimes I’ve thought I’d like to have a lady like her have the spending of the Massey money. But they all have died, I guess. I will leave you the money if you will find me such an heir, Jane Dreer!”

‘“Jabez, I want the money, and I’ll do ’most anything to get it, but I tell you squarely, if you give it to me, it’s likely I shall give it to my son and to his children if he marries as he ought. I don’t want you to make any mistake about what I mean to do.”

‘He laughed, short and sharp. “I know the Dreers,” he said. “Fair to look at, but short-lived, feeble folk. Your child will leave no children for your heirs, Jane!”

‘How I hated him for that, but it was true!

‘“When you come to die, you must pick and choose as I am doing. I lay it on you that you find me a lady for your heir!”

‘“Your notion of a lady, now, — what is it, Jabez?”

He tottered to his feet again and lifted his hands to heaven. His face was terrible. I seemed to see something hard and avaricious tearing its way up from the bottom of his soul, as though it were an evil spirit going out of him.

‘ “ One whom the dollar does n’t dominate, by God!” he cried, and fell back in his chair.

‘When he spoke again, he was quite himself. “This is a very edifying conversation of ours, Jane Dreer,” says he. “It is a pity it should be entirely lost to a greedy world. Can you remember what we have been saying?”

‘ “Every word of it,” said I. And as you can see, I have.

‘“Then see you pass it on,” he told me. “As for the Massey money, you must pay a price for it. I don’t mean, merely, taking care of me in my dotage, and seeing I don’t, at the last, will it away to somebody else. Doubtless you will do that, and do it competently. There is an honest streak as well as a grasping one in you, Jane. But you must pay a higher price than that, and in a different coin. I lay it on you, Jane,” and he bent forward as he spoke, dragging his words as if they weighed a ton, his sharp old eyes boring into mine like gimlets all the while. “I lay it on you, Jane, that from this hour you watch yourself until you see what the Massey money does with you. When you come to your end of days, tell some one, whom you will, what it has been to you and done to you. Tell them the very truth! It is just common money, like that of other men, no better, not much worse — but I have seen it work. I watched my father and my mother. I watched my brothers and my sister. Most of all I watched — myself,” said he. “No use to tell you what I’ve seen — no use! But I lay it on you that you watch and see.”

‘“All right,” said I. “You can’t scare me that way, Uncle Jabez. For forty years I’ve watched what pinching poverty has done to me. I don’t know as riches can do worse!”

‘“You are a Massey fast enough,” he said, “and in the long run the Masseys are not fooled. As well you as another.”

‘ So he made his will next day, though he lived for a year afterward. And he gave the money all to me.’

Jane Dreer was white and tired as she finished. Mayannah dropped her work exclaiming distressfully, —

‘What am I thinking of! You have n’t had your milk or your nap, and it’s long past the time.’

‘I’ll have them now. I need all the strength I can get to finish this,’ the elder woman said wearily.

II

It was one thing for Jane Dreer to tell the story of her audacious contest with Jabez Massey, but quite another to relate the adventures of her spirit in contact with the Massey money. In her eyes, the former tale reflected small discredit upon herself. She had conquered Jabez by telling him the truth; while he lived, she had tended him with conscience; since his death she had spent his money handsomely. All this was as it should be. But to pluck out of the abyss of her own nature the hidden things she had learned from life, to spread them in the light of day, — how was she to bring herself to that? Yet she had promised, and to Jane Dreer a promise was a promise.

Bitterness surged up in her heart against the younger woman because Mayannah was her appointed auditor.

She had never loved the girl. Resenting her son’s marriage with an intensity that must be measured by her pride and her ambition, she yet clung to his widow as her only link on earth with Harold’s life.

Mayannah had dropped without audible protest into the position where Harold’s mother placed her. She was companion, helper, sometimes nurse; at other times the lay figure upon which Jane Dreer draped the ultrafashionable garments she herself might not wear. Mayannah looked well in her clothes; her voice was gentle; though sometimes abstracted, and, in Mrs. Dreer’s eyes, mopy, she had flashes of the Celtic gayety. People liked Mayannah.

The two traveled not a little; they had a winter shelter in North Carolina; they invited many traveling-acquaintances and winter friends to the old house in Fordhampton during the summer months. Mrs. Dreer had a clearcut notion of the kind of social importance that was easily within her reach; she lived for that and achieved it. Mayannah helped her by being pretty and well-dressed, and, when not in her apathetic mood, displaying that lively Irish interest in everything human which really goes further, and in more different directions, than any other social qualification on earth. But all that was over now.

Jane Dreer very simply attributed her daughter-in-law’s adherence and patience to familiar motives. Of course, Mayannah wanted the Massey money in her turn, and would put up with whatever was necessary to get it. True, she had a little income of her own which Jane had given to Harold and Harold to his wife, but what was eleven hundred dollars a year? Sometimes Jane’s conscience pricked her, for she knew perfectly well that she did not mean to give Mayannah much more.

If the Massey money were Mayannah’s price for these submissive years, she would be cheated of her wage.

Refreshed by food and sleep, the woman took up her recital. The flush in her cheeks and the glow in her eyes had died down; her mouth was set in a hard line; she pulled the bed-jacket away from her dark, bony throat, and ordered the window by her bedside raised.

‘Jabez told me to watch myself,’ she began harshly. ‘So I did. I hated to. But I felt it would n’t be honest if I did n’t. I had a fine time fixing up the house. It tasted every bit as good as I thought it would. I’m not going back on that for a minute. The money was a pleasure. But I began to see it made me more critical. With no real worries, I fussed about little things. My heart was set that my family should live up to the money and the house. I’d always been well enough satisfied with Jim Dreer before. He was a pleasant-tempered, well-meaning man, a good deal like Harold, but with not a particle of style. The way he looked in evening clothes was a distress to me, and when it came to a tall hat, I could have cried at the way it did n’t become him. Maybe you think these are little things, but I was bent on having everything according. I’ll not deny I came to snapping at Jim when he was dressed up; he got so he hated the sight of his good clothes and used to make excuses to get up to the farm for a week at a time to get away from them and me. I even went so far as to wish the Lord had provided me with a husband who would fit better into our new circumstances.

‘The second winter we lived here, he took pneumonia and died. I made him dress when he did n’t want to, one night when we went out to dine, and he forgot his muffler. It was a bitter night and he took a cold on his lungs.

Of course, he had no business to forget the muffler— still, after he was dead, I could n’t forget I’d insisted on his wearing those clothes. You don’t get rid of such things. They stick in your mind for all time. But I had Harold left.’

At the name, Mayannah stirred softly and sat a little straighter, looking across the room at Mrs. Dreer with level eyes that seemed to remember and to warn. But it never occurred to the elder woman that Harold belonged to Mayannah as much as to herself. In any case, she must say what she had to say.

‘Harold was a lot of comfort to me after his father died. It broke me up for a long while, and I did n’t try to do anything but get through the days. Harold was so thoughtful — you know how he was. For all it gave my heart a twist every time I thought of the way Jim died, those were my happiest years. It was all right until I began to plan again. But of course I had to get ambitious for Harold. It just seemed to me I’d die if he did n’t do this and be that. But his health broke down and it took him five years to go through college. Maybe that was n’t a bitter pill for me to swallow! No honors, no athletics, not many young people coming home with him. For, after he graduated, he was n’t well; he did n’t want young folks here; he did n’t want to travel; it tired him to dance. All he could do was to mope around and read, and go down and call on you.’

‘Yes!’ breathed Mayannah to herself, her big eyes swimming with memories.

Jane Dreer did not notice. She pushed on relentlessly, —

‘He was the heir. That was the way I looked at it. It was all to come into his hands, to rest on his shoulders. The scrimping and saving of three generations was all for him. So the money was just another reason for his being splendid and fine and competent

— the things he could n’t be, poor boy! Perhaps I loved him more for it

— but it cut deep, just the same. To have him feeble! To have other boys out-do him! Then, to have him hanging around you! I used to remember how your grandfather, old Pat Curran, looked driving down from Windy Hill to the cheese factory, with his cob-pipe in his mouth, and his raw-boned old white horse balking and starting and rattling the milk-cans. Christopher Wetherbe, your other grandfather, came of good stock if you went far enough back; but they used to say in his dotage that he went into other people’s cellars and took pork from their barrels. I don’t know if it was true.

— No, Harold never came up to my notions. I wanted him to do and be so much! I’d have given my heart’s blood, I guess, to see him marry Frances Fordham. But he chose to marry you!'

Mayannah, rigid in every muscle, yet lifted her head as if it held a coronet.

‘Yes,’ she echoed, in a voice Jane Dreer would have done well to note, ‘he chose to marry me!’

‘Yes! And he did it behind my back! Took the property I’d made over to him for spending-money and married you secretly on that! And then came those hemorrhages, and I had to forgive him. We all went to Asheville — and that was the end.

‘So — you see the things the money did to me those first ten years. It added bitterness to my married life, and to my motherhood, and to my mourning. I ’ll not deny it. And it has torn my heart to pieces to tell you about it. I hope Jabez Massey is satisfied!

‘And yet the money is a good, and I’m glad I’ve had it. I’ll not go back on that. Only it does n’t seem to me I’ve got the worth of it as I ought. Maybe everybody feels that way.’

She stopped abruptly. Candor seemed to demand more, but she did not know how to express her consciousness of that obscure, progressive change in her spirit, as fundamental as the physical hardening of the arteries, and as irretrievable. So, when she continued, it was to say, —

‘I don’t know as I’ve much to tell about the last ten years. You’ve been with me all the time. You’ve seen for yourself. Though he did n’t say so, I know Jabez Massey thought there was a miserly microbe in the Massey blood that was bound to develop in all of us. But so far as I can see, it has n’t. I like money, but no better than I did before.

‘Since Harold died, we’ve gone up and down, and to and fro, entertaining here, being entertained there. It’s what I wanted to do, and I’ve done it. One reason I kept at it so long, I was looking for the woman Jabez Massey wanted for his heir. I’m not very sentimental, but, I said, since everything has gone so ill with me, I’ll find Jabez his lady if I can. I’ve looked at ’em north and south, east and west, here and abroad. I have n’t found the right one yet. That’s flat.

‘These women we know are all like you and me, Mayannah, cumberers of the ground! It used to make me furious some nights in those Southern hotels, the way you could hear ’em spatting on the cold cream all down the corridor, from room to room. And yet there’s no harm in cold cream. It’s only that the women are all so fat and idle and pampered, and never thinking of a thing except to spend. I came to spending too late, I suppose. I can’t help thinking with Jabez that there must be other things to a lady, though I don’t claim there’s been much else for twenty years to me. I can look back and see how I had the money and I spent it, but it never made me really rich. I’ve been an idle, discontented, luxury-loving old woman, restless, and craving I don’t know what. If anybody’s been the better for my being alive since Harold died, I don’t know who it is.

‘I suppose you want, the Massey money as much as I did, and plan as I did what fine things you are going to do with it. You’re no worse than I am, but you’re younger. There’s some chance for you.—What do you care about now but clothes and gadding? To be sure I asked that from you and asked nothing else. I won’t say I have n’t been at fault, letting you sit around like a tame cat, waiting for my shoes. But they are n’t coming to you, Mayannah Dreer. I tell you, you are n’t Jabez Massey’s lady and the money will not go to you!’

Jane Dreer’s insistent, almost angry, utterance ceased at last. She had said it all, bluntly enough, but it was finished. She looked at the silent figure across the room for a response, and as she looked, Mayannah literally flashed to her feet. Jane Dreer had such a sense of sudden coruscation that she rubbed her eyes. Her daughter-in-law stood in the centre of the room, tall, pale, suddenly beautiful in the splendor of wrath. Mrs. Dreer was astounded. Mayannah was transformed before her into a woman whom Jane did not know and had never known. Jane Dreer’s Mayannah was a slim, docile, old-young girl. This was a woman in her flower. There was maturity, motherliness even, in her bearing, but there was judgment in her eyes.

‘MotherDreer,’ said this Mayannah, swiftly, ‘ there are a few things I simply have to tell you if I die for it. I am tired of turning the other cheek. It’s true I’ve lived with you for the last ten years, and you’ve grown more discontented every year. I can tell you what the money has done for you,—it has blinded you to the very thing you are trying to find! You will never find a lady while you look for her with Jane Dreer’s eyes! I know a dozen women like the one you have been hunting. So do you, but, don’t you see, they can’t show that side of themselves to you. You don’t call it out, and you can’t see it when it shows itself. It has got to be in you before you can know it is in them!—And that is Gospel truth, and it is the worst thing the Massey money has done for you. Why, you would n’t know heaven itself if you saw it with those eyes!

‘It’s true I do want the Massey money, and I’m going to tell you why. It was Harold’s plan. That year in Asheville, Harold said to me over and over, “Mayannah, stay with mother if you can. You’ll be unhappy, for her tongue is sharp, but she is just and honest — and she has no one left but you. Don’t leave her all alone. When she is done with the old place and the money, I hope she will leave them to you. I used to think,” he said, “how beautiful it would be to see you walking under those old elms with a child of ours on either side. Now, that can never be. But there’s a world full of other people’s children! If you could find two or three you liked, Mayannah, and give them an old-fashioned bringing-up in the old place, playing with dandelions in the grass, wading in the brook, coasting down the hill, romping in the attic! It’s just the house for that. It has never been alive since we lived there, but it would come alive again if it had children in it. And you are just the woman!” — He knew I would never marry again, for he knew too well what we were to each other. So that was his plan for me, and that is why I have stayed with you. A tame cat, indeed! — I guess I would have tried to live in hell if Harold had asked me to!’

Jane Dreer, white and trembling, leaned forward from her pillows and shook a shriveled finger in the air.

‘Mayannah Dreer, go to your room and stay there until I send for you. Do you think I ’ll take such words from you ? ’

The younger woman turned proudly to the door, but, as she opened it, she flung back one sentence more, hot from her Irish heart.

‘My grandfather is dead, Heaven rest his soul! If he did steal pork, I hope it was because he was hungry and not because he was a miser!’

Then, dazed and blind with the excess of her own feeling, she moved across the hall to her room. The wrath that had sustained her was passing as swiftly as it had come. Stumbling and sobbing, she fell before her writing-table and faced a picture there. It showed a hollow-cheeked, dark-eyed youth with a gentle, ineffective face. But, such as it was, it was the shrine of Mayannah’s heart.

‘O Harold—Harold, forgive me. I’ve spoiled it all. Your beautiful plan can never come true! She might have changed her mind before — but never, now! — Oh, my terrible temper! How could I let it spoil your plan!’

She dropped her head and sobbed her soul out hopelessly before the faded photograph of the commonplace young man.

III

‘I never thought Mayannah had it in her to stand up to me like that!’

Across the hall, Jane Dreer lay panting on her pillows, but her grim old face was glowing with a new and strange excitement. She looked exultant, almost joyous. She was seeing clearly; she was feeling keenly, and she knew these things for the ultimate good they are. It was not true that she could no longer see the finer realities of character. She was cleared of that accusation in the moment of its making. Had Mayannah’s flesh dissolved and left her white-hot spirit standing there, Jane could hardly have had a more startling revelation of her inner self.

The elder woman lay very still, taking in the wonder of it. This was Mayannah, wife of her son, the Mayannah Harold had chosen and adored. These were the thoughts that had nourished her during ten years of treading up and down another’s stairs. This passionate acceptance of the denials of her life, this passionate hope for the fulfillment of another’s dream, had been her meat and drink. She had kept these things hidden safely from sight; she had lived continually in the land of the heart, and only this once had its glow shone from her face. — Or, was it that only this once did Jane Dreer possess the seeing eyes? No matter which. Once was enough.

There was a tap at the door and a maid entered.

‘Judge Fordham is waiting, Mrs. Dreer.’

‘Show him up, Alice.’

While the old man slowly climbed the stair, Jane Dreer held short but sufficient counsel with herself. When the impressive, white-haired gentleman had greeted her, he spread out his papers on her bedside table with a patience born of long experience in composing wills for Mrs. Dreer.

‘And what is it to-day, Jane?’ he inquired. ‘Am I to draft a will in favor of the Old Ladies’ Home, or have you decided on the series of scholarships at the women’s colleges — or, have you, perhaps, found the individual heir you have been looking for?’

Jane Dreer smiled. The smile lit her face curiously, her lawyer noted, as if a light had fallen on it from afar.

He had never seen her look so chastened, yet so keen.

‘I am making my last will to-day, Judge,’ she said, with faint but sufficient emphasis upon the adjective. ‘I will dictate my words to you as I wish them to stand. If there are legal formalities that I omit, you can insert them afterward. Take your pen and write! ’

Astonished, he obeyed her.

Jane’s excitement and her sudden insight met and mingled; they precipitated themselves into words with the miraculous precision of some chemical reaction. Stirred to the core of her being, she dictated swiftly, and without faltering, that strange, almost lyric, testament which was to stand as her recognition of so much that her life had ignored; as her one possible amende to her son and her son’s wife. Truly, she was a Massey. And, in the long run, the Masseys were not fooled. Old Jabez knew.

I, Jane Dreer of the village of Fordhampton, being sound of mind and solvent of estate, but brought face to face with my end of days, do solemnly make and declare this my last will and testament : —

I give and bequeath all property, both real and personal, of which I maydie possessed, to Mayannah Dreer, once wife, now widow, of my son.

And this I do in fulfillment of a private compact between myself and Jabez Massey, whose heir I was, to the effect that his wealth should pass into a “lady’s” hands. I have searched this land and Europe for such an one as he described to me, but my eyes were holden, for I found not one among the people who fed me at their tables and broke bread at mine.

At last I saw the woman I was seeking, sitting at my hearth. I have despised her parentage, but her heart is higher than my heart. She is gentle, simple, and tender; she is fearless, patient, warm of heart. She knows neither guile nor greed. She was the wife of my son, and she worshiped him. To whom should I give this wealth if not to her ? It cannot curse her, for she is beyond the domination of the dollar. It may not bless her, for it has not blessed me. Yet if it is a burden to her spirit, what does it matter? She is one who can bear burdens. She has borne with me for ten long years. She shall stand in my shoes and sit in my seat and do with my goods as she wills. The place that has known me will know one more gentle than I. I, departing, bless her, and all that I leave in her hands. — Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly! In the name of Christ, Amen !