Miss Theodora Part 1

Miss Theodora.

by Helen Leah Reed.

I.

The tourist, with his day or two at a down town hotel, calls Boston a city of narrow streets and ancient graveyards; the dweller in one of the newer avenues is enthusiastic about the modern architecture and regular streets of the Back Bay region. Yet neither of these knows the real Boston, the old West End, with its quaint tree-lined streets sloping from the top of Beacon Hill toward the river.

Near the close of any bright afternoon, walk from the State House down the hill, pause half-way, and, glancing back, note the perfect Gothic arch formed by the trees that line both sides of Mount Vernon Street.

Admire those old houses which have taken on the rich, deep tones that age so kindly imparts to brick. Then look across the river to the sun just setting behind the Brookline hills,--and admit that even in a crowded city we may catch glimpses of the picturesque.

Half-way down one of the quiet, hilly West End streets is the house of Miss Theodora--no, I will not tell you her true name. If I should, you would recognize it at once as that of a great New England jurist. This jurist was descended from a long line of scholars, whose devotion to letters had not prevented their acc.u.mulating a fair amount of wealth.

Much of this wealth had fallen to the jurist, Miss Theodora's father, with whom at first everything went well, and then everything badly.

It was not entirely the great man's extravagance that wrought the mischief, although many stories were long told of his too liberal hospitality and lavish expenditure. He came, however, of a generous race; it was a cousin of his who divided a small fortune between Harvard College and the Provident a.s.sociation, and for more than a century back the family name might be found on every list of contributions to a good cause.

Yet it was not extravagance, but blind faith in the financial wisdom of others, as well as an undue readiness to lend money to every man who wished to borrow from him, which brought to Miss Theodora's father the trouble that probably hastened him to his grave. When he died, it was found that he had lost all but a fraction of a former fortune. His widow survived him only a few years, and before her death the family had to leave their roomy mansion on the hill, with its pleasant garden, for a smaller house farther down the street.

Here Miss Theodora tried to make a pleasant home for John, her brother.

He had just begun to practise law, and, with his talents, would undoubtedly do well, especially if he married as he should. Thus, with a woman's worldliness in things matrimonial, reasoned Miss Theodora, sometimes even going so far as to commend to John this girl or that among the family connections. But one day John put an end to all her innocent scheming by announcing his betrothal to the orphan daughter of a Plymouth minister, "a girl barely pretty, and certainly poor." It was only a half consolation to reflect that Dorothy had a pedigree going back to John Alden and Priscilla.

Ernest, John's boy, was just a month old when Sumter surrendered; yet John would go to the war, leaving Dorothy and the baby to the care of his sister. Eagerly the two women followed his regiment through each campaign, thankful for the bright and cheerful letters he sent them.

They bore bravely that awful silence after Antietam, until at length they knew that John would never come home again.

It was simply of a broken heart that Dorothy died, said every one, for little Ernest was scarcely three years old when he was left with no one to care for him but Miss Theodora. How she saved and scrimped to give him what he needed, I will not say; but gradually her attire took on a quaintness that would have been thought impossible for her even to favor in the days of her girlhood, when she had been a critic of dress. She never bought a new gown now; every cent beyond what was required for living expenses must be saved for Ernest.

Before the boy knew his letters, Miss Theodora was planning for his career at Harvard. He should be graduated at the head of his cla.s.s. With such a father, with such a grandfather, Ernest certainly must be a great man. The family glory would be renewed in him.

Little by little Miss Theodora withdrew from the world. She had not cared for gayety in her younger days; she hardly missed it now; yet she was not neglected by her relatives and old friends--even the most fashionable called on her once a year. These distant cousins and formal acquaintances had little personal interest in Miss Theodora. Their cards were left from respect to the memory of the distinguished jurist rather than from any desire to brighten the life of his daughter.

If Miss Theodora's invitations grew fewer and fewer, she herself was to blame, for she seldom accepted an invitation, even to luncheon, nor confided to any one that pride forbade her to accept hospitalities which circ.u.mstances prevented her returning.

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II.

Although Miss Theodora disliked visiting, every summer she and Ernest spent a month at Nahant with her cousin, Sarah Somerset. She herself would have preferred the quiet independence of a New Hampshire country farm, but she thought it her duty to give Ernest this yearly opportunity of seeing his relatives in the intimacy possible only at their summer homes. This was before the days of Beverly's popularity, when almost every one at Nahant was cousin to every one else. Even the people at the boarding houses belonged to the little group held to have an almost inherent right to the rocky peninsula.

Both the little boy, therefore, and Miss Theodora were made much of by their kinsfolk; and the child thought these summer days the happiest of the year.

In other ways Miss Theodora was occasionally remembered by her relatives. Once she was asked to spend a whole year in Europe as chaperone to two or three girls, her distant cousins. Even if she could have made up her mind to leave Ernest, I doubt whether she would have accepted the invitation. She had almost determined never to go abroad again, preferring to hold sacred the journey that she and her parents and John had made two or three years before their troubles began.

For the most part, then, Miss Theodora repelled all attempts at intimacy made by her relatives. Unreasonable though she knew herself to be, she believed that she could never care so much for her cousins since they had all in such curious fashion--like swallows in winter--begun to migrate southward to the Back Bay. At first she felt as bitter as was possible for a person of her amiable disposition, when she saw people whom no necessity impelled leaving their s.p.a.cious dwellings on the Hill for the more contracted houses on the flat land beyond the Public Garden.

Yet if Miss Theodora pitied her degenerate kin, how much more did they pity her! "Poor Theodora," some of them would say. "I don't see how she manages to get along at all. If she sold that house, with the interest of the money she and Ernest could board comfortably somewhere. Even as it is, she might let a room or two; but no--I suppose that would hardly do. Well, she must be dreadfully pinched."

Notwithstanding these well meant fears, Miss Theodora got along very well. The greatest sacrifice of pride that she had to make came when she found that she must send Ernest to a public school. Yet even this hardship might have been worse. "It isn't as if he were a girl, you know," she said half apologetically to Sarah Somerset. "Although he may make a few undesirable acquaintances, he will have nothing to do with them when he goes to Harvard." For Miss Theodora's plans for Ernest reached far into the future, even beyond his college days, and she must save all that was possible out of her meagre income.

Public or private school was all the same to Ernest; or perhaps his preference, if he had been asked to express it, would have been decidedly for the big brick schoolhouse, with its hosts of boys. What matter if many of these boys were rough and unkempt. Among them all he could always find some suitable companions. His refined nature chose the best; and if the best in this case did not mean rich boys or those of well-known names, it meant boys of a refinement not so very unlike that possessed by Ernest himself.

One day he came home from school later than usual, with his eye black and blue, and one of the pockets of his little jacket hanging ripped and torn.

"Why, what is the matter, Ernest?" cried his aunt; "have you been fighting?"

"Well, not exactly fighting, but kind of fighting," he replied, and "kind of fighting" became one of the joking phrases between aunt and nephew whenever the latter professed uncertainty as to his att.i.tude on any particular question.

"You see, it was this way," and he began to explain the black eye and the torn pocket.

"There were two big mickies--Irish you know--bothering two little n.i.g.g.e.rs--oh, excuse me! black boys--at the corner of our school; so I just pitched in and gave it to them right and left. But they were bigger than me, and maybe I'd have got whipped if it hadn't been for Ben Bruce.

He just ran down the school steps like a streak of lightning, and you should have seen those bullies slink away. They muttered something about doing Ben up some other day; but I guess they'll never dare touch him."

Now, Ben Bruce, two or three cla.s.ses ahead of Ernest in school, was a hero in the eyes of the younger boy. Ben was famous as an athlete, and Ernest, in schoolboy fashion, could never have hoped for an intimacy with one so greatly his superior in years and strength had not this chance encounter thrown them together. Ben appreciated the younger boy's manliness, and the two walked together down the hill, as a rearguard to the little negroes. The latter, too much amazed at the whole encounter even to speak, soon ran down a side street to their homes, and Ben and Ernest, if they did not say a great deal to each other at that time, felt that a real friendship had begun between them.

Miss Theodora heard Ernest's account of the affair with mixed feelings.

She was glad that her boy had shown himself true to the principles of an Abolition family; yet she wished that circ.u.mstances had made a contact with rough boys impossible for him. She was not altogether certain that she approved the intimacy with Ben, whose family belonged to an outside circle of West Enders with which she had hardly come into contact herself.

An expression of her misgivings drew forth a remonstrance from Miss Chatterwits: "Why, you know Ben Bruce's father's grandfather was on General Washington's staff; they've got his sword and a painting in their front parlor." As Miss Chatterwits was an authority as to the biography of the meanest as well as the most important resident on the Hill, her approbation of the Bruces may have inclined Miss Theodora toward Ben. Yet, had he had no other recommendation, the boy's own good manners would have gone far to impress Miss Theodora in his favor.

Ernest never knew just how meagre his aunt's income was. He thought it chiefly lack of taste that led her to wear those queer, scant gowns.

Year after year she drew upon an apparently inexhaustible store of changeable silks and queer plaided stuffs. Then she wore little tippets and small, flat hats, and in summer long black lace mitts, "like n.o.body else wears," sighed poor little Ernest one day, as he asked his aunt why she never bought anything new.

Yet even Miss Theodora's limited purse might occasionally have afforded her a new gown, had she not been well content with what she already had.

She could not wish more, she reasoned, than to have her old-fashioned garments remodeled from year to year by good Miss Chatterwits.

Miss Chatterwits, who had sewed in the family from the days of Miss Theodora's childhood, lived in one of those curious short lanes off Revere street. It was a great comfort to Miss Theodora to have her come for a day's sewing with her queer green workbag dangling from her arm, with her funny little corkscrew curls bobbing at every motion of her funny little head. While she sewed, Miss Chatterwits kept her nimble tongue at work, lamenting the changes that had come to the old West End.

She knew the region well, and understood the difference between the old residents and those newer people who were crowding in.

"It's shameful that the Somersets should think so little of themselves as to move from Chestnut to Beacon Street; and their new house isn't even opposite the Public Garden, but away up there beyond Berkeley Street. How aping the names of those Back Bay streets are,--Berkeley and Clarendon and Dartmouth,--as though American names wouldn't have done better than those English imitations! Well, Miss Theodora, we have Pinckney and Revere named after good American men, and Spruce and Cedar for good American trees. I wouldn't live on one of those new-fangled streets, not if they'd give it to me."

Then Miss Theodora, almost driven to apologize for her misguided relatives, little as she sympathized with them herself, would reply in words that she must have seen in some of the newspapers: "Well, I suppose the growth of the city's population makes it necessary for--"

"Fudge!" Miss Chatterwits would interrupt, "the West End seems to have room enough for lodging and boarding house keepers; and I guess it's big enough for true Boston folks. It just makes me furious to see "Rooms to Let," "Table Board, $3.50 per week," stuck up in every window on some streets. Goodness knows, I hope the Somersets like their neighbors out there on the Back Bay. I hear anybody with money enough can buy a house there." And a tear seemed ready to fall from her eyes.

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III.

Ernest, himself, grew up without any social prejudices. His aunt often wondered at this, yet, like many sensible people, she did not try to impress him with her own views. As one by one the dwelling houses on Charles Street were changed into shops, he only rejoiced that Miss Theodora wouldn't have to send so far for her groceries and provisions.

But Miss Theodora drew the line here. She had always been able to go to the market every day, and no thrifty housewife needs a provision shop under her very nose, she said.