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1、【英文文学】Seths Brothers WifeCHAPTER I.THE HIRED FOLK.Ef ther aint a flare-up in this haouse fore long, I miss my guess,” said Alvira, as she kneaded the pie-crust, and pulled it out between her floury fingers to measure its consistency. “Ole Sabrinys got her back up this time to stay.”“Well, let em fla
2、re, says I. Taint none o aour business, Alviry.”“I knaow, Milton; but still it seems to me she might wait at least till th corpse was aout o th haouse.”“Whats thet got to dew with it?”The callousness of the question must have grated upon the hired-girl, for she made no reply, and slapped the dough o
3、ver on the board with an impatient gesture.It was near the close of a fair day, late in May, and the reddened sunlight from the West would have helped to glorify any human being less hopelessly commonplace than Milton Squires as he sat in its full radiance on the doorstep, peeling and quartering app
4、les over a pan which he held between his knees. This sunlight, to reach him, painted with warm tints many objects near at hand which it could not make picturesque. The three great barns, standing in the shadow to the south, were ricketty and ancient without being comely, and the glare only made thei
5、r awkward outlines and patched, paintless surfaces the meaner; the score of lean cows, standing idly fetlock-deep in the black mire of the barnyard, or nipping the scant tufts of rank grass near the trough, seemed all the dingier and scrawnier for the brilliancy of the light which covered them; the
6、broken gate, the bars eked out with a hop-pole, the wheelbarrow turned shiftlessly against a break in the wall, the mildewed wellcurb, with its antiquated reachall seemed in this glow of dying day to be conscious of exhibiting at its worse their squalid side. The sunset could not well have illumined
7、, during that hour at least, a less inspiring scene than this which Alvira, looking out as she talked, or the hired man, raising his head from over the apples, could see from the kitchen door of Lemuel Fairchilds farm-house. But any student of his species would have agreed that, in all the uninvitin
8、g view, Milton was the least attractive object.As he rose to empty his pan within, and start afresh, he could be seen more fully. He was clumsily cased from neck to ankles in brown over-alls, threadbare, discolored, patched, with mud about the knees and ragged edges lower down. He wore rubber boots,
9、 over the bulging legs of which the trousers came reluctantly, and the huge feet of these were slit down the instep. His hat had been soft and black once; now it seemed stiffened with dirt, to which the afternoon milking had lent a new contribution of short reddish hair, and was shapeless and colorl
10、ess from age. His back was narrow and bent, and his long arms terminated in hands which it seemed sinful to have touch anything thereafter to be eaten. Viewed from behind, Milton appeared to be at least fifty. But his face showed a somewhat younger man, despite its sun-baked lines and the frowzy bea
11、rd which might be either the yellow of unkempt youth or the gray of untidy age. In reality he was not yet thirty-six.He slouched out now with a fresh lot of apples, and, squatting on the door-stone, resumed the conversation.“I spose naow Sisslys gone, ther wont be no livin under th same roof with Sa
12、briny fer any of us. Ther aint nobuddy lef fer her to rassle with cep us. Ole Lemuels so broken-up, he wont dare say his souls his own; n Johnwell, Lize Wilkins says she heerd him say he didnt knows hed come to th funerl t all, after th way him n Sabriny hed it aout las time he was here.”“I wasnt ta
13、lkin o them!” said Alvira, slapping the flour from her hands and beginning with the roller; “itd be nothin new, her tryin to boss them. But shes got her dander up naow agin somebuddy that beats them all holler. They wont no Richardsons come puttin on airs raoun here, an takin th parlor bedroom thaou
14、t askin, not ef th ole lady knaows herselfn I guess she does.”“What Richardsons?” asked Milton. “Thought Sissly was th last of emthet they want no more Richardsons.”“Why, man alive, aint Alberts wife a Richardson, th daughter of Sisslys cousinyou remember, that pock-pitted man who kep th fast hoss h
15、ere one summer. Of course shes a Richardsonfull-blooded! When she come up from th train here this mornin, with Albert, I see by th ole ladys eye t she meant mischf. I didnt want to see no raow, here with a corpse in th haouse, n so I tried to smooth matters over, n kind o quiet Sabriny daown, tellin
16、 her thet they had to come to th fu-nerl, n theyd go way soons it was through with, n that Albert, bein the oldest son, hed a right to th compny bed-room.”“N whatd she say?”“She didnt say much, cep thet th Richardsons hed never brung nothin but bad luck to this haouse, n they never would, nuther. N
17、then she flaounced upstairs to her room, jiss she allus does when shes riled, n she give Alberts wife sech a look, I said to mself, Milady, I wouldnt be in your shoes fer all yer fine fixins.”“Well, shes a dum likely lookin woman, ef she is a Richardson,” said Milton, with something like enthusiasm.
18、 “Wonder ef she wears one o them low-necked gaowns when shes to hum, like th picters in th Ledger. They say they all dew, in New York.”“Haow shd I knaow!” Alvira sharply responded. “I got enough things to think of, thaout bothrin my head abaout city womens dresses. N you ought to hev, tew. Ef youn L
19、eanderd pay more heed to yer work, n dew yer chores up ship-shape, n spen less time porin over them good-fer-nothin story-papers, th farm wouldnt look so run-daown n slaouchy. Did yeh hear what Albert said this mornin, when he looked raoun? I swan! he said, I blieve this is th seediest lookin place
20、n all Northern New York. Nice thing fer him to hev to say, want it!”“What d I keer what he says? He aint th boss here, by a jug-full!”“N mores th pity, tew. Hed make yeh toe th mark!”“Yes, n Sabrinyd make it lively fer his wife, tew. Th ole fight baout th Fairchileses n th Richardsons wouldnt be a s
21、uccumstance to thet. Sisslyd thank her stars thet she was dead n buried aout o th way.”These two hired people, who discussed their employer and his family with that easy familiarity of Christian names to be found only in Russia and rural America, knew very well what portended to the house when the R
22、ichardson subject came up. Alvira Roberts had spent more than twenty years of her life in the thick of the gaseous strife between Fairchild and Richardson. She was a mere slip of a girl, barely thirteen, when she had first hired out at the homestead, and now, black-browed, sallow from much tea-drink
23、ing, and with a sharp, deep wrinkle vertically dividing her high forehead, she looked every year of her thirty-five. Compared with her, Milton Squires was a new comer on the farm, but still there were lean old cows over yonder in the barnyard, lazily waiting for the night-march to the pastures, that
24、 had been ravenous calves in their gruel-bucket stage when he came.What these two did not know about the Fairchild family was hardly worth the knowing. Something of what they knew, the reader ought here to be told.CHAPTER II.THE STORY OF LEMUEL.Lemuel Fairchild, the bowed, gray-haired, lumpish man w
25、ho at this time sat in the main living room within, feebly rocking himself by the huge wood-stove, and trying vaguely as he had been for thirty-six hours past, to realize that his wife lay in her final sleep in the adjoining chamber, had forty-odd years before been as likely a young farmer as Dearbo
26、rn County knew. He was fine-looking and popular in those days, and old Seth Fairchild, dying unexpectedly, had left to this elder son his whole possessionssix 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
27、 the bank.The contrast now was sweeping. The Fairchilds house was still the largest residential structure on the Burfield road, which led from Thessaly across the hills to remote and barbarous latitudes, but respect had long since ceased to accrue to it upon the score of its size. To the local eye,
28、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 propo
29、rtions, 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 colorthat indescribable gray with which rain and frost and Father Time supplant unrenewed white. The garden, comprising a
30、 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 indi
31、fferent 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
32、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 townthat most valued and intangible of American local distinctions. But while
33、 Lemuels 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
34、 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 swainsWhom will he marry?It boots not now to recall the heart-burnings, the sad convictions that life would hencef
35、orth 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 clever young lady who had been Miss Cicely Richardson. He had known her, so they l
36、earned, for some yearsnot only during his school-days at the Academy there, but later, in what was mysteriously known in 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
37、rudely destroyed by this shockfor 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 agea score of years his senior in firmness and will. She had onl
38、y a small jointure in her fathers 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.
39、 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, w
40、hen she was twenty-four, a woman of markedly strong character, of which perhaps the most distinct trait was family pride.There has been a considerable army of State Senators since New York first took on the honors of a Commonwealth, and unto them a great troop of daughters have been born, but surely
41、 no other of all these girls ever exulted so fondly, nay, fiercely, in the paternal dignity as did Sabrina. She knew nothing of politics, and little of the outside world; her conceptions of social possibilities were of the most primitive sort; one winter, when she went to Albany with her father, and
42、 was passed in a bewildered way through sundry experiences said to be of a highly fashionable nature, it had been temporarily apparent to her own consciousness that she was an awkward, ignorant, red-armed country-girlbut this only for one wretched hour or so. Every mile-post passed on her homeward r
43、ide, as she looked through the stage window, brought restored self-confidence, and long before the tedious journey ended she was more the Senators daughter than ever.Through this very rebound from mortification she queened it over the simpler souls of the village with renewed severity and pomp. The
44、itinerant singing master who thought to get her for the asking into his class in the school-house Wednesday evenings, was frozen by the amazed disdain of her refusal. When young Smith Thurber, the kiln-keepers son, in the flippant spirit of fine buttons and a resplendent fob, asked her to dance a me
45、asure with him at the Wallaces party, the iciness of her stare fairly took away his breath.Something can be guessed of her emotions when the brother brought home his bride. With a halfcowardly, half-kindly idea of postponing the trouble certain to ensue, he had given Sabrina no warning of his intent
46、ion, and, through the slow mails of that date, only a days advance notice of his return with Mrs. Lemuel. The storm did not burst at once. Indeed it may be said never to have really burst. Sabrina was not a bad woman, according to her lights, and she did nothing consciously to make her sister-in-law
47、 unhappy. The young wife had a light heart, a sensible mind and the faculty of being cheerful about many things which might be expected to annoy. But she had some pride, too, and although at the outset it was the very simple and praiseworthy pride of a well-meaning individual, incessant vaunting of
48、the Fairchilds quite naturally gave a family twist to it, and she soon was able to resent slights in the name of all the Richardsons.After all, was she not in the right? for while the grass was scarcely green on the grave of the first Fairchild who had amounted to anything, there were six generations of Richardsons in Albany chronicles alone who had married into the best Dutch families of that ancient, aristocratic town, to say nothing of the New England record antedating that period. Thus the case appeared to her, and came gradually to have more promi