That Fortune | Page 9

neat little cottage in the village,
distinguished only by its neatness and a plot of syringas, and pinks, and
marigolds, and roses, and bachelor's-buttons, and boxes of the tough
little exotics, called "hen-and-chickens," in the door-yard, and a
vigorous fragrant honeysuckle over the front porch. She only dimly
remembered her father, who had been a merchant in a small way in the
city, and dying left to his widow and only child a very moderate fortune.
The girl showed early an active and ingenious mind, and an equal love
for books and for having her own way; but she was delicate, and Mrs.
Howard wisely judged that a few years in a country village would
improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney
provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than
strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little
woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due
doubtless to the fact that she had been a New England girl, and, before
her marriage and emigration to the great city, had passed her life among
unexciting realities, and among people who had leisure to think out
things in a slow way. But the girl's energy and self-confidence had no
doubt been acquired from her father, who was cut off in mid-career of
his struggle for place in the metropolis, or from some remote ancestor.
Before she was eleven years old her mother had listened with some
wonder and more apprehension to the eager forecast of what this child
intended to do when she became a woman, and already shrank from a
vision of Celia on a public platform, or the leader of some
metempsychosis club. Through her affections only was the child

manageable, but in opposition to her spirit her mother was practically
powerless. Indeed, this little sprout of the New Age always spoke of
her to Philip and to the Maitlands as "little mother."
The epithet seemed peculiarly tender to Philip, who had lost his father
before he was six years old, and he was more attracted to the timid and
gentle little widow than to his equable but more robust Aunt Eusebia,
Mrs. Maitland, his father's elder sister, whom Philip fancied not a bit
like his father except in sincerity, a quality common to the Maitlands
and Burnetts. Yet there was a family likeness between his aunt and a
portrait of his father, painted by a Boston artist of some celebrity,
which his mother, who survived her husband only three years, had
saved for her boy. His father was a farmer, but a man of considerable
cultivation, though not college-bred--his last request on his death-bed
was that Phil should be sent to college--a man who made experiments
in improving agriculture and the breed of cattle and horses, read papers
now and then on topics of social and political reform, and was the only
farmer in all the hill towns who had what might be called a library.
It was all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate, and
the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated copy of
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a copy of
The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe Harold.
Probably these odd volumes had not been considered worth any
considerable bid at the auction. From his mother, who was fond of
books, and had on more than one occasion, of the failure of teachers,
taught in the village school in her native town before her marriage,
Philip inherited his love of poetry, and he well remembered how she
used to try to inspire him with patriotism by reading the orations of
Daniel Webster (she was very fond of orations), and telling him war
stories about Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Farragut and
Lincoln. He distinctly remembered also standing at her knees and
trying, at intervals, to commit to memory the Rime of the Ancient
Mariner. He had learned it all since, because he thought it would please
his mother, and because there was something in it that appealed to his
coming sense of the mystery of life. When he repeated it to Celia, who
had never heard of it, and remarked that it was all made up, and that she

never tried to learn a long thing like that that wasn't so, Philip could see
that her respect for him increased a little. He did not know that the
child got it out of the library the next day and never rested till she knew
it by heart. Philip could repeat also the books of the Bible in order, just
as glibly as the multiplication-table, and the little minx, who could not
brook that a country