CHAPTER I
NANNIE’S WELL
A tall, angular woman, wearing a sun-bonnet and a big work apron which nearly covered her short dress, stood on the fence calling, “Charlotte Ann! Charlotte Ann! Charlotte Ann Parks! Where be you? Don’t you know it’s ’most noon, and the table not set? and Miss Bennett’s very partic’lar about her digester; and there’s a letter from the two summer boarders who are coming!”
The woman’s voice, strong and clear, went echoing down a grassy lane which led to a small grove, or thicket, of pine-woods in which was a shallow well, now seldom used except during a summer drought, when the cattle, which fed in the pasture-land around the woods, were watered from it. The old bucket and curb had fallen apart, and pieces of them were lying on the ground; but around the well were large, flat stones, one of which projected beyond the others a foot or more, so that a person standing upon it could look directly down into the centre of the water below. And it was on this projection that Charlotte Ann Parks was standing when her mother’s voice came warning her that it was nearly noon, that the table was not set, that Miss Bennett was particular about her “digester,” and there was a letter from the summer boarders. Charlotte Ann, or Lottie, as she was usually called by all except her mother, heard the call, but paid no attention. Her ear was strained to catch the first sound of the town clock in the village two miles away which would tell her that it was noon, and her eyes were fixed intently upon the small square mirror she held in her hand as nearly over the centre of the well as possible. She was trying a charm, or a _trick_, as it was designated in the rural district of Oakfield, where the traditions of a century ago had been handed down from generation to generation, and believed in, or discarded, according to the susceptibility of the people for the marvellous. Lottie always scoffed at the stories told of her great-grandmother’s time before the Revolution, when armies were seen passing and repassing in the heavens and the snow was like blood in the light of the Auroras; when houses were haunted and wizened old witch women rode through the air on broomsticks, or held their weird vigils in the woods which studded the wild New England coast. All this superstition had mostly died with the old people, whose gravestones in the Oakfield cemetery were sunken deep in the ground and so covered with mold and moss that it was impossible to read the date of their birth or death. A few oldtime customs, however, still clung to the young people, because of the romance attaching to them, rather than from any real faith in their efficacy. One of these had to do with the well in the pine-grove and the tragedy connected with it, the story of which I heard on the summer afternoon when I alighted at the little country station of Oakfield, dusty and tired, and wondering how I was to get to the place of my destination.
I was a stenographer and bookkeeper in a large city firm, and was overworked in body and brain. Sleep and appetite had both forsaken me, and I was sinking into a state of semi-invalidism, with little strength and less ambition. Rest I must have and a change of air, and when I saw an advertisement saying that Mrs. Eli Parks, who lived near the sea-coast and two miles from town, wanted summer boarders, and that her rooms were large and cool and quiet, and her house a hundred years old, I said: “That is the place for me; the fashionable world has not invaded Mrs. Parks. I can rest there. I will write her at once.”
I did write her, with the result that on a day in early July I was standing by my trunk and asking the station master if there was no means of conveyance for strangers who visited Oakfield?
“Why, yes,” he said; “of course there is. We ain’t so far behind as that. There’s a ’bus from town, here mostly for the trains. I don’t know why ’tain’t here now, only there don’t many come at this hour, or if they are comin’ they telegraph. Want to go to Miss Parks’? Well, you are in luck. That young chap there lives next to her. He’ll take you in his rig and I’ll send your traps bimeby. Hallo, you Sam! Come here!”
At the agent’s call a young man, or boy, reined up suddenly, and I was soon driving with him along the pleasant country road toward Mrs. Parks’. The agent had introduced him as Sam Walker, and I found him inclined to be very sociable and ready to give me many items of interest concerning the neighborhood and its people.
“See that big stone house on the hill?” he asked, pointing to a large, gray-looking building in the distance with tall pillars in front and a square tower on the corner. “Well, that’s the McPherson place—the richest man in town—or his half-brother was, and Mr. Colin has it in trust for a young man—Reginald Travers—who is visiting there now; some relation to old Sandy, I believe, and a big swell. He has money of his own, they say; and he’ll get a pile more bimeby. That’s the luck of some folks.”
He was not very lucid in his remarks, but by questioning him I managed to learn that the house, of which he seemed very proud, had been the property of Sandy McPherson, a Scotchman and eccentric old man, who had lived to be ninety and had died a few months before, leaving quite a fortune to his half-brother, Colin, thirty years his junior. Colin was also to have the use of the house as long as he lived, and at his death it was to belong to the “swell young man,” provided he married somebody, Sam did not know whom. Some girl, he s’posed. Men mostly did marry girls and anybody would be a fool to give up the McPherson house and the money which went with it. “It was an awful funny will old Sandy made, and had something to do with a love affair when he was young. Seemed queer that he could ever have been in love, he looked so old and his hair was so white, and his head kept shaking, and hands, too. Awful nice man, though, and had the biggest funeral you ever seen,” Sam said.
I was not particularly interested in Sandy McPherson’s funeral, and was silent until Sam asked suddenly, “Do you believe in _tricks_?” as he came in sight of a pine-grove in the distance.
I said I didn’t know what he meant by “tricks,” as I had never heard of one, and in a way he explained what he meant.
“Lots of young people are always trying ’em at the well in the middle of the woods. There’s a queer love-story, and a true one—old Sandy’s love-story—connected with it. Want to hear it?”
I was forty, and presumably past the age of romance, but I did want to hear the story, which I afterward heard two or three times, and which I give in my own words rather than in those of Sam, who rambled a good deal and threw in various opinions of his own concerning the parties interested.
Sixty or seventy years before that July day Sandy McPherson had been a rich young farmer in the neighborhood and looked up to and respected by every one. He was not very handsome, with his light hair and eyes and freckled face, but his money and great kindness of heart made amends for what he lacked in his personal appearance, and there was scarcely a girl in the town who would not gladly have taken him with his freckled face, light hair and Scotch brogue. When his choice fell upon Nannie Wilkes much wonder was expressed at her indifference to his suit and her preference for Jack Bryan, a handsome, rollicking young man, who played fast and loose with all the girls, and with none more so than with pretty Nannie Wilkes, until he heard that in a fit of pique she had accepted Sandy and was to be married in a month. Then his real love for her showed itself, and many were the arguments used to dissuade her from her promise. But Nannie was firm. She had pledged her word to Sandy and would keep it. She did not care so very much for him, she said; he had too many freckles and talked with a brogue, but her mother was anxious for the match and he was rich, and could give her a piano and solid silver tea-set, and carryall with a top to it and two horses, to say nothing of his handsome house. Jack could give her nothing but a very humble home with his half-blind mother and a salary as grocer’s clerk at eighteen dollars a week. And so the wedding day drew on apace, and Nannie’s gowns were being made by a seamstress who went to Boston twice a year and was consequently posted on fashions.
Nearly every night Sandy went to Nannie’s home, where the girl’s eyes, full of unshed tears, seldom met his glance, and her little hands lay in his great warm ones, cold and passive, with no return of the loving pressure he gave them. On the nights when he was not with her Nannie sat in the pine-woods, with Jack’s arm around her and Jack’s face very near her own, while he pleaded with her to give up the marriage with Sandy and take him instead. He could not give her a piano nor silver tea-set, nor carryall with a top to it, but he could buy her a buggy. One had been offered him at a bargain. And he’d get her a melodeon, and his mother had lots of old china, and he would work like a beaver in the garden and yard to make them more like the McPherson grounds. But neither the second-hand buggy, nor the melodeon, nor the old china appealed to Nannie, who only shook her head.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said to her at last, when all his arguments had failed to elicit from her anything more than, “I’ve given my word and I can’t break it. You should have spoken this way sooner.”
“I’ll tell you what. Try a trick at the well. I know how they do it. My aunt did it once, and mother, too. I heard them talking about it, and mother declared she saw father’s face and nearly fell into the well. Hold a mirror over the well at exactly noon when the sun shines down into it, and wish that you may see the face of the one you are to marry. If my face looks in the glass by yours, I’m the chap. If Sandy’s, then Sandy it is, and I’ve no more to say. Try it to-morrow noon. Will you?”
Nannie had little faith in the experiment, of which she had heard before, but to please Jack she promised, and the next day as it drew near the hour of noon when the oracle was supposed to be propitious, she stood leaning over the curb, holding in her hands a small mirror, into which her white face was looking anxiously for the one which was to appear beside it just as the sun touched the meridian and shone down upon the water. She had said she had no faith in the charm, but in her room before she started on her errand she had knelt in an agony of tears and prayed that it might be Jack instead of Sandy. Somewhat comforted with a belief that God would hear her, and it would be Jack, she stole down to the woods and stood watching and waiting till the noonday sun shining through a clearing in the pines struck the waters below.
Jack had fully intended to be on the spot hiding behind a tree which grew near, and when Nannie was absorbed in her task he meant to steal cautiously behind her on the carpet of soft pine-needles, which would give no sound, and by looking over the curb let his face appear beside hers in the mirror; then, before she recovered from her surprise, he could retreat backward, and when discovered declare he had just come upon the scene. But an unforeseen accident kept him away, and only a blackbird and bobolink among the pines saw the trembling girl, whose nerves were strained to their utmost, and whose disordered imagination grew more and more disordered as floating clouds flitted across the sun, shutting out some of its brightness. Then she fancied that shadowy lineaments were forming upon the mirror, that a pair of eyes were looking at her, and they were not the brown laughing eyes of Jack, but the blue ones of Sandy, whose rugged features spread themselves beside her own, while she stood riveted to the spot, her pale lips whispering, “It is Sandy, God help me!”
After that there was no wavering, and Jack’s arguments and ridicule had no power to move her. She knew what she had seen. It was Sandy. She could not defy fate, and the wedding was appointed for Thursday night, when the McPherson house was to be thrown open and the marriage-feast held there after the ceremony.
Half the town was bidden and Sandy was the happiest of men, and on Wednesday evening, which he had spent with Nannie, he told her that the carryall had come and she was to have her first ride in it when she went to church as bride the next Sunday. The piano had also come, and a silver tea-set and a Brussels carpet for the great room, with lace curtains and a pier-glass in which she could see herself from her head to her feet; “and you will be the bonniest wife in the whole world and I the happiest man,” he said.
Nannie listened without a word, or smile, or sign that she heard. At parting, however, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him, and said:
“I think you the best man in the world, and I thank you for all you have done for me. Always remember that; but I am not good enough for you.”
Sandy laughed his broad, good-humored laugh, which always grated a little on Nannie, as he paid her one kiss with many, and held her close for a moment.
“Not good enough for me, my pearl, my lily! I wish I were half as good as you,” he said, and the thought kept him laughing during his walk home, which lay through the woods and past the well, at which he stopped to look, as his hired man had told him the curb was a little shaky. “I’ll have it fixed after the wedding. Just now I can think of nothing but that and Nannie,” he said, as he continued his way home, trying to whistle, an accomplishment in which he was not an expert.
Arrived at home and alone in his room, he said to himself, “To-morrow at this time she will be here, my very own,” and he stretched out his arms to embrace an imaginary form with brown hair and soft-gray eyes, and cheeks like the summer roses.
Alas for the morrow and the anguish it brought! and alas for the young girl who at midnight, when the moon was high in the heavens, stood again by the fatal well, looking down into its depths with despair in her eyes and determination in her face! She could not marry Sandy, and she could not brave the world’s censure if she did not, and so she chose the coward’s part, to die. There was a hurried look around her, a thought of Jack, and a prayer to be forgiven, and then the cold, dark waters closed over her with a splashing, gurgling sound, and Nannie Wilkes had gone out into the great unknown, away from Sandy and away from Jack—both dreaming of her and both waking on the morrow to a horror which filled them with dismay. A note was found in her room which read:
“I cannot marry Sandy because I love Jack. I have wanted to do right and cannot. I tried the charm at the well, hoping it would be Jack’s face I saw, but it was Sandy’s which came and stood by mine in the mirror. I saw it so plain, and I cannot marry him, and so I must die. I shall not jump into the well. I can push the curb aside, it is so loose, and shall slip down the stones into the water, so as not to be bruised. Tell Sandy I am sorry and hope he will forget me and take some girl for his wife better than I am. Tell Jack—but, no, don’t tell him anything, except that I loved him and died for him. Good-by.”
It was Sandy who took her from the well and laid her on the soft bed of needles under the pines, wringing the water from her dripping garments and her long hair which clung to her face and which he put back behind her ears, saying nothing except, “Poor little Nannie! If you had told me, you would not have been lying here dead. Poor Nannie! I wish I had known.”
He even tried to comfort Jack, whose grief at first was violent and noisy, but like such grief, was easily consoled when another pretty face caught his fancy. They buried Nannie in the McPherson lot, for Sandy would have it so, and he bought the headstone and put upon it simply, “Nannie, Aged 19.” Then he went about his usual business, with a pain in his heart which time never fully healed. Naturally domestic in his nature, he wanted a home, with wife and children in it, and after a few years he married a Mrs. Travers, a young widow with an only son. He seemed happy, but Nannie was never forgotten, and not an hour of his life that he did not see her in fancy as she was when he kissed her in the moonlight, and again when he laid her upon the pine-needles, cold and dead, but with a look of peace on her face as if at the very last there had been upon her lips a prayer for forgiveness which God had heard and answered. When his wife died, which she did within two years of his marriage, the great house was so silent and lonely that he soon married again, and this time a cousin of Nannie’s, who, like his first wife, was a widow, with an only child, a little daughter, so that he had two stepchildren to whom he gave a father’s care and love.
What came next after his second marriage is not essential to the story. His wife died. His stepchildren were married and had families of their own to the second generation, when they, too, died, and still old Sandy lived on, his only companion now his half-brother Colin, who had come from Scotland to join him. One by one the descendants of his wives died and were scattered until in his last years, when nearly ninety, he knew of only one, and that was Reginald Travers, great-grandson of his first wife, in whom he felt no particular interest, until Reginald, who had heard of the rather eccentric old man, came to call upon him and claim relationship through the great-grandmother, dead years and years ago. Something in the young man pleased the older one, who kept him for weeks and finally conceived the idea of making him heir to a part of his fortune, which had grown steadily and was greater than his brother would care for. Colin, to whom he broached the subject, and who, being so much younger, was his right hand and left hand and brain, made no objections, but said:
“Why leave everything to Reginald? There may be some member of the other branch of your family. You had two wives, you know, and one was Nannie’s cousin.”
“To be sure; to be sure, I did,” Sandy answered, rubbing his bald head as if to recall an incident of more than fifty years ago. “You see I lived with Susie so short a time, and that girl of hers was married so young that things slip my mind, and sometimes it seems as if I was never married at all. Nothing is real but Nannie, who is as fresh in my mind as she was that last night when I kissed her for the last time. Poor little Nannie! and Susie was her cousin and looked some like her. There must be somebody somewhere related to her. I wish you’d hunt it up.”
Colin was accustomed to hunt up things for his brother, and as a result of this investigation he found that Irene Burdick, the great-granddaughter of Mrs. Sandy McPherson the second, who was a relative of Nannie, was an orphan, with some means of her own, and was living with her aunt in New York, and also that she was spending a part of the summer in New London. Greatly to Colin’s surprise, the morning after he had imparted this information to his brother, he found him with his valise packed and himself dressed for a journey.
“I’m going to New London,” he said, “going, incog., for a look at Ireny. She has some of Nannie’s blood in her. Pretty thin by this time, running through so many channels, it is true, but if she suits me, all right; if not, all right, the same.”
He went to New London and registered as Mr. McPherson. He thought the Sandy might betray him, forgetting that his name was as strange to Irene Burdick as hers was to him. She was at the hotel with her aunt and he saw her in the dining-room and on the piazza and in the water, where she could swim like a duck, and he watched her with a strange stir in his heart as he thought, “She is some relation to Nannie. Poor little Nannie, dead more than sixty years ago.”
She was small, and thin, and brown-haired, and pale-faced, but her dark-gray eyes were wondrously beautiful, and once, when they flashed upon him as she ran past him on the beach in her dripping garments, he saw, or thought he saw, a look like Nannie, while the voice which said to him, “I beg your pardon,” as she whisked past him was certainly like the voice he had never forgotten.
“Nannie’s eyes and voice have come down through all these years, and Ireny will do,” he said.
He did not make himself known to her, as he stood a little in awe of her aunt, a typical New York woman, but he watched the girl for a week, and after his return home, made one of the strangest wills ever put upon record.
To his brother Colin he gave fifty thousand dollars, with the use of the house and farm until it was taken possession of by the young people, Reginald Travers and Irene Burdick, with whom he was to make his home as long as he lived, and to whom he willed the remainder of his fortune, in case they married each other, said marriage not to take place until both had had plenty of time in which to consider it and know their own minds. If either of them preferred some one else, he or she was to receive twenty thousand dollars, and the rest go to the other party. If the disaffection was mutual and neither cared for the other, each was to have ten thousand dollars, and the remainder of the property was to go half to Colin and half for the support of different missions named in the will. If both parties were agreeable to each other and the one died before the marriage took place, the survivor was to have the whole.
This will Sandy drew up himself after an immense amount of thought and many sleepless nights and consultations with Colin, who knew something of law and made some corrections and suggestions. When at last it was finished, duly executed and witnessed, Sandy put it with his private papers, telling no one except Colin, who had questioned the propriety of a will which might induce the young couple to marry whether they liked each other or not.
“That’s so,” Sandy said, recalling with a shudder his experience with Nannie. “They must not only be agreed, but they must love each other. There must be no one-sided affair. I’ll make that plain,” and he wrote a note which he put with his will, addressed to Reginald and Irene, charging them, as they hoped for happiness in this world and heaven in the next, not to enter into matrimony with each other unless their hearts were in it. “For be ye well assured that if any persons are joined together otherwise than as God’s word doth allow, their marriage is not lawful,” he wrote in conclusion. This sentence from the prayer-book Sandy knew by heart as he did the whole of the marriage ceremony. He had gone through with it twice and had repeated it to himself many and many a time when he thought it was to be Nannie standing by his side. This done he felt that he had performed his duty to his two wives by trying to bring their great-grandchildren together and giving them his money. It was due them, he thought, because Nannie had always stood between them and himself, and Irene was a distant relative and had her eyes and voice, and he ought to leave her something, as he must show respect to both his wives.
When he was first engaged to Nannie he had a very good likeness made of her by an artist sketching in the neighborhood, and after her death this was enlarged into a life-sized portrait, said by those who had known the girl to be very natural, especially the eyes. This picture hung in the drawing-room between the portraits of the first and second Mrs. McPherson, who looked rather stiff and prim and wholly unlike Nannie, with her soft brown hair and grayish-blue eyes, which followed one with a wistful, pathetic look, whose meaning Sandy understood as he had not when she was living. Many times a day Sandy stood before the portrait, studying the face and comparing it with that of the girl seen in New London. “They are alike,” he would say to himself, feeling more and more satisfied with his will. Several cautious inquiries he made at intervals with regard to Irene, hearing always the same report that she was sweet and pure and womanly; “not burdened with brains enough to make her strong-minded, but she is altogether lovely,” one of her teachers wrote to him of her; and he was satisfied in the belief that he had done well for the young couple, and he was planning to bring them together without their knowing his intentions, when death came suddenly, and on his ninetieth birthday he was found dead in his bed, with a lock of Nannie’s hair on the table beside him, and under his pillow a miniature of her, which had been made in Dresden from a photograph of the portrait in the drawing-room. They buried the miniature and the hair with the old man beside poor Nannie and between her and his first wife. They found the will and the whole town buzzed with its contents, wondering who Irene Burdick was and how she would take it and how Reginald Travers would take it. Colin wrote to him with regard to it and invited him to visit the McPherson place again, but decided to wait before sending a copy to Irene, who was travelling in Europe. Then public curiosity abated a little and waited for what would come next. Nothing came at once. Irene remained abroad and no one knew anything of her. Reginald attended to his business, if he had any, while Colin lived his lonely life at the McPherson place and the affairs in the town went on as usual.
With Sandy’s death, however, a fresh impetus had been given to the interest felt by the young people in the charmed well where Nannie had ended her life.
“Beats all what fools some of us are,” Sam said, as he finished his story, adding that the swell young man visiting at the McPherson place was Reginald Travers, and “didn’t speak to nobody often, though when he did he was nice as a pin.”
Then he stopped for a moment on the top of a hill for me to look down upon the pine-woods in which was the well which bore Nannie’s name.
“I don’t believe there’s more than one or two girls hereabouts, or boys either, who hasn’t tried a trick at that well,” he said. “Why, there’s a little box in a hollow pine tree and in it is a small square mirror to hold over the water when the sun is right overhead. I call it rot, and I don’t believe Lottie has ever done such a silly thing.”
“Who is Lottie?” I asked, and the crimson on his face and the look in his eyes told me what she was to him before he replied.
“Oh, don’t you know? She’s Charlotte Ann, Widow Parks’ girl. I call her Lottie for short. There she is now, in the yard, and that’s the house, with the li-locks in front, and that is our house beyond, with the high board fence. Father and Widow Parks don’t agree very well. Get up, Beauty.”
He chirruped to his horse, who took us quickly to the old-fashioned house, whose open doors, and windows with white curtains blowing in and out, and the odor of roses and pinks and lilacs in the garden and yard gave promise of the comfort and rest it was mine to enjoy for two long, happy months.