Hettys Strange History | Page 5

on his part, seemed fully to reciprocate and accept without comprehending the new relation. He unconsciously leaned upon Hetty more and more from that hour until the hour when he died, bolstered up in bed with his head on her shoulder, and gasping out, between difficult breaths, his words of farewell,--strange farewell to be spoken to a middle-aged woman, whose hair was already streaked with gray,--
"Poor little girl! I've got to leave you. You've been a good little girl, Hetty, a good little girl."
Neighbors and friends crowded around Hetty, in the first moments of her grief. But they all, even those nearest and most intimate, found themselves bewildered and baffled, nay almost repelled, by Hetty's manner. Her noble face was so grief-stricken that she looked years older in a single day. But her voice and her smile were unaltered; and she would not listen to any words of sympathy. She wished to hear no allusions to her trouble, except such as were needfully made in the arranging of practical points. Her eyes filled with tears frequently, but no one saw a tear fall. At the funeral, her face wore much the same look it had worn, twenty-three years before, at her grandfather's funeral. There were some present who remembered that day well, and remembered the look, and they said musingly,--
"There 's something very queer about Hetty Gunn, after all. Don't you remember how she acted, when she was a little thing, the day old Squire Gunn was buried? Anybody'd have thought then a funeral was Fourth of July, and she looks much the same way now."
Then they fell to discussing the probabilities of her future course. It was not easy to predict.
"The Squire's left every thing to her, just as if she was a man. She can sell the property right off, if she wants to, and go and live where she likes," they said.
"Well, you may set your minds to rest on that," said old Deacon Little, who had been the young squire's most intimate friend, and who knew Hetty as well as if she were his own child, and loved her better; for his own children, poor man, had nearly brought his gray hairs down to the grave with distress and shame.
"Hetty Gunn'll never sell that farm, not a stick nor a stone on't, any more than the old Squire himself would. You'll see, she'll keep it a goin', jest the same's ever. It's a thousand pities, she warn't born a boy."

II.
The funeral took place late in the afternoon of a warm April day. The roads were very muddy, and the long procession wound back to the village about as slowly as it had gone out. One by one, wagon after wagon fell out of the line, and turned off to the right or left, until there were left only the Gunns' big carryall, in which sat Hetty, with her two house-servants,--an old black man and his wife, who had been in her father's house so long, that their original patronymic had fallen entirely out of use, and they were known as "C?sar Gunn" and "Nan Gunn" the town over. Behind this followed their farm wagon, in which sat the farmer and his wife with their babies, and the two farm laborers,--all Irish, and all crying audibly after the fashion of their race. As they turned into the long avenue of pines which led up to the house, their grief broke out louder and louder; and, when the wagon stopped in front of the western piazza, their sobs and cries became howls and shrieks. Hetty, who was just entering the front-door, turned suddenly, and walking swiftly toward them, said, in a clear firm tone,--
"Look here! Mike, Dan, Norah, I'm ashamed of you. Don't you see you're frightening the poor little children? Be quiet. The one who loved my father most will be the first one to go about his work as if nothing had happened. Mike, saddle the pony for me at six. I am going to ride over to Deacon Little's."
The men were too astonished to reply, but gazed at her dumbly. Mike muttered sullenly, as he drove on,--
"An' it's a quare way to be showin' our love, I'm thinkin'."
"An' it's Miss Hetty's own way thin, by Jasus!" answered Dan; "an' I'd jist loike to see the man 'ud say, she didn't fairly worship the very futsteps of 'im."
When Deacon Little heard Hetty Gunn's voice at his door that night, the old man sprang to his feet as he had not sprung for twenty years.
"Bless my soul!" he exclaimed, "what can have brought Hetty Gunn here to-night?" and he met her in the hall with outstretched hands.
"Hetty, my dear, what is it?" he exclaimed, in a tone of anxiety. "Oh!" said Hetty, earnestly. "I have frightened you,