Molly Brown's Post-Graduate Days Part 6

THE MURDER OF THE RATTAN FAMILY.

"One evening in September, in eighteen ninety-three, Jim Stone committed a murder, as cruel as it could be.

'Twas on the Rattan family, while they were preparing for their bed.

Jim Stone, he rapped upon the door, complaining of his head.

The first was young Mrs. Rattan. She come to let him in.

He slew her with his corn knife-that's where his crime begin.

The next was old Mrs. Rattan. Old soul was feeble and gray.

Truly she fought Jim Stone a battle till her strength it give way.

The next was the little baby. When he, Jim Stone did see, He raised up in his cradle. 'Oh! Jim Stone, don't murder me!'

Next morning when he was arrested-wasn't sure that he was the one.

Till only a few weeks later he confessed to the crime he done.

They took him to Southern Prison, which they thought was the safetes' place.

When they marched him out for trial, he had a smile upon his face.

And after he was sentenced, oh! how he did mourn and cry.

One day he received a letter, saying his daughter was bound to die.

Next morning he answered the letter and in it he did say, 'Tell her I'll meet her there in Heaven, on the sixteenth of Februway.'

They led him upon the scaffold with the black cap over his head.

And he hung there sixteen minutes 'fore the doctors p.r.o.nounced him dead.

Now wouldn't it have been much better if he'd stayed at home with his wife, Instead of keeping late hours, and taking that family's life?"

CHAPTER VII.-PICTURES ON MEMORY'S WALL.

The next week was a very quiet and peaceful one at Chatsworth. There had been so many excitements, with burglars and negro uprisings and what not, that Molly was afraid her visitors would think Kentucky deserved the meaning the Indians attached to it-"the dark and b.l.o.o.d.y battle-ground."

Ernest, home for a vacation from his labors in the West, endeavored to keep Judy from missing the attentions of Kent, who was back at his grind in Louisville in the architect's office, and did not get home each day until time for a late supper. Judy liked Ernest very well, as she did all of the Browns, but Kent and Molly were her favorites still, and the evenings were the best of all when Kent came home and, as he put it, "relieved Ernest."

Molly found herself on easier terms with Professor Green than she had ever imagined possible. If he did not consider her quite an old lady, she at least was beginning to look upon him as not such a very old gentleman. He played what Kent designated as a "cracker-jack" game of tennis, and turned out to be as good a horseman as the Brown boys themselves.

"If he only had a little more hair on his forehead," thought Molly, "he would look right young."

Aunt Mary was the unconscious means of consoling her for his lack of hair. "Honey, I likes yo' teacher mo'n any Yankee I ever seed. He'd oughter rub onions on his haid to stimilate the roots. Not but what he ain't han'some, baldish haid an' all, with them hones' eyes an' that upstandin' look. I done took notice that brains don' make the best sile to grow ha'r on an' lots er smart folks is baldish. Mindjer, I wouldn'

go so fer as to say bald haided folks is all smart. It looks like some er them is so hard-haided the ha'r can't break th'ough the scalp."

Of course, the first day at Chatsworth he had to be taken out to view his possessions, the two acres of orchard land. It was a possession for any man to be proud of. It lay on the side of a gently sloping hill covered with blue gra.s.s and n.o.ble, venerable, twisted apple trees, that Molly said reminded her of fine old hands that showed hard, useful work.

"And these trees always have done good work. You know my father called these his lucky acres. He was always certain of an income from these apples. The trees have been taken care of and trimmed and not allowed to rot away as some of the old orchards around here have, Aunt Clay's, for instance. She is so afraid of doing something modern that she refused to spray her trees when the country was full of San Jose scale, and in consequence lost her whole peach orchard and most of her apples. This is where our 'castle' used to be."

They were in a gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce near the middle of the orchard, where a stump of an old tree was still standing. The land, showing a beautiful soft contour, sloped to the worm fence at the foot of the hill, where the gra.s.s changed its green to a brighter hue and a beautiful little stream sparkled in the sun.

"All of us, even Sue, who is not given to such things, cried when in a big wind storm our beloved castle was twisted off of its roots. It was a tree made for children to play in, with low spreading branches and great crotches, the limbs all twisted and bent and one of them curving down so low you could sit in it and touch your feet to the ground. We had our regular apartments in that tree and kept our treasures in a hole too high up for thieves to have any suspicion of it. It was so shady and cool and breezy that on the hottest day we were comfortable and often had lunch here. We played every kind of game known to children and made up a lot more. 'Swiss Family Robinson' when they went to live up the tree was our best game. I remember once Kent gathered a lot of peach-tree gum and ruined my slippers trying to make rubber boots out of them as the father in Swiss Family Robinson did. Our castle had wonderful apples on it, too. They grew to an enormous size, and if any of them were ever allowed to get really ripe they turned pure gold and tasted-oh, how good they did taste."

Edwin Green listened, enchanted at Molly's description of her childhood and the beloved play-house. He half shut his eyes and tried to picture her as a little girl in a blue sun-bonnet-of course she must have had a blue bonnet-climbing nimbly up the old apple tree, entering as eagerly into the game of Swiss Family Robinson as she was now playing the game of life, even letting her best little slippers be gummed over to play the game true. He had a feeling of almost bitter regret that he hadn't known Molly as a little girl. "She must have been such a bully little girl," thought that highly educated teacher of English.

"Miss Molly, do you think that this would be the best place to build my bungalow? Place it right here where your castle stood? Maybe I could catch some of the breezes that you used to enjoy; and perhaps some of the happiness that you found here was spilled over and I might pick it up. It could not be so beautiful as your tree castle, but it is my 'Castle in the Air.' If I put it here I should not have to sacrifice any of the other trees; there is room enough where your old friend stood for my modest wants. Would it hurt your feelings to have me build a little house where your childish mansion stood?"

"Why, Professor Green, the idea of such a thing! It would give me the greatest happiness to have your bungalow right on this site. I would not be a dog in the manger about it, anyhow. Are you really and truly going to build?"

"I hope to. Of course, I shall have to ask your mother if she would mind having such a close neighbor."

"Well, I hardly think mother would expect to sell a lot and then not let the purchaser build. She may have to sell some more of the place. I wish it could be that old stony strip over by Aunt Clay's. You know our home, Chatsworth, is a Brown inheritance, and the Carmichael place adjoining belonged to mother's people. They call it the Clay place now, but until grandfather died it was known as the Carmichael place. Aunt Clay married and lived there and somehow got hold of grandfather and made him appoint her administratrix and executrix to his estate. She managed things so well for herself that she got the house with everything in it and the improved, cleared land, giving mother acres and acres of poor land where even blackberries don't flourish and the cows won't graze. The sheep won't drink the water, but they do condescend to keep down the weeds. I really believe that Aunt Clay is the only person in the world that I can't like even a little bit. I fancy it is because she has been so mean to mother. I believe I could get over her being cross and critical with me, but somehow I can't forgive the way she has always treated mother."

"I found her a very trying companion at your sister's wedding, and she looks as though she had brains, too. But how anyone with sense could be anything but kind to your mother I cannot see."

Molly beamed with pleasure. "Ah, you see how wonderful mother is. I thought you would appreciate her. She likes you, too, Professor Green.

Mother says she believes she understands boys better than girls and can enter into their feelings more."

"Oh, what am I saying?" thought Molly. "I wonder what the Wellington girls would say if they could know I forgot and as good as called their Professor of English a boy! Well, he does look quite boyish out of doors, with his hat on."

They strolled on down toward the brook, Molly patting each tree as they pa.s.sed and telling some little incident of her childhood.

"I truly believe you love every one of these trees. You touch them as lovingly as you do President or the dogs, and look at them as fondly as you do at old Aunt Mary."

"Indeed, I do; and, as for this little stream, it makes to me the sweetest music in the world."

"Miss Molly, when I build my little bungalow, will you come and have lunch with me as you used to with your brothers in the old castle? I'll promise you not to let you eat at the second table as you did when you took breakfast with me last Christmas."

They both laughed at the thought of that morning; and Molly remembered that it was then that she had overheard Professor Green tell his housekeeper of his apple orchard out in Kentucky, and had realized for the first time that it was he who had bought the orchard at Chatsworth.

"Indeed, I will take lunch with you, and would like to cook it, too, as I did your breakfast that cold morning. Do you know, when you came downstairs and I peeped at you through the crack in the pantry door, you looked and sounded almost as fierce as the mob of colored men who came hungry from Aunt Clay's last week? The nice breakfast I fixed for you seemed to soften your temper just as mother's b.u.t.termilk did the darkies'. Aunt Mary says, 'White men and black men is all the same on the inside, and all of them is Hungarians.'"

Edwin Green laughed, as he always did when Molly got on the subject of Aunt Mary. The old woman was a never failing source of wonder and amus.e.m.e.nt to him; and Molly mimicked her so well that you could almost see her short, fat figure with her head tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, vigorously nodding to punctuate each epigram.

"Next winter I hope to have my sister with me at Wellington, and she will see that this 'Hungarian' is fed better than my housekeeper has.

You will come to us a great deal, I hope. I am overjoyed that you are to take the postgraduate course. That was the one pleasant thing your aunt, Mrs. Clay, had to tell me when I conversed with her at the wedding, and she little dreamed how pleasant it was, or I doubt her giving me that joy."

"I am truly glad. I hated to give up right now. It seemed to me as though I could see the open door of culture but had not reached it, and had a lot of things to learn before I had any right to consider myself fit to pa.s.s through it. Mother and Kent together decided it must be managed for me. They are both bricks, anyhow."

The young people had come to the little purling brook during this conversation, and at Molly's instigation had turned down the stream and entered, through a break in the worm fence, a beautiful bit of woods.

The beech woods in Kentucky are, when all is told, about the most beautiful woods in the world. No shade is so dense, no trees more n.o.ble, not even oaks. With the grace of an aspen and the dignity of an oak, the beech to my mind is first among trees.

"Of all the beautiful pictures That hang on Memory's wall, Is one of a dim old forest That seemeth the best of all.

"Not for the gnarled oaks olden, Dark with the mistletoe, Not for the violets golden That sprinkle the vale below.

"Not for the milk-white lilies Leaning o'er the hedge, Coquetting all day with the sunbeams And stealing their golden edge."

Molly quoted the verses in her soft, clear voice, adding:

"I say 'gnarled oaks olden' for euphony, but I always think 'beech.' I don't know what Miss Alice or Phbe Gary, whichever one it was who wrote those lovely verses, would think of my taking such a liberty, even in my mind."

"No doubt if Miss Alice or Phbe Cary could have seen this wood, she would have searched about in her mind for a line to fit beeches and let oaks go hang. This is really a wonderful spot. Can't we sit down a while? I hope your mother will let me have right of way through these woods when I build my nest in the orchard. This makes my lot more valuable than I thought. I have never seen such beech trees; why, in the East a beech is not such a wonderful tree! We have an occasional big one, but here are acres and acres of genuine first growth. You must love it here even more than in the orchard, don't you?"

"Well, you see the orchard period is what might be known as my early manner; while the beech woods is my romantic era. I used to come here after I got old enough to roam around by myself, and a certain mystery and gloom I felt in the air would so fill my soul with rapture that (I know you think this is silly) I would sit right where we are sitting now and cry and cry just for the pure joy of having tears to shed, I suppose! I know of no other reason."

Professor Green smiled, but his eyes had a mist in them as he looked at the young girl, little more than a child now, with her sweet, wistful expression, already looking back on her childhood as a thing of the past and her "romantic era" as though she had finished with it.