Harriet Westbrook

“ She had flung her arms across the railing, and buried her hot face on them, and had wept desperate and angry tears into the silken and golden tangle that shone dully in the starlight.
The stars were paling, and the garden stirred with the first languid breath of the hot day to come, when she suddenly rose and bound up the loosened hair, and went in. Harriet was not yet twenty-seven, and every fibre of her being cried out for sleep. ”

“ If I could go to him, tell him what he means to me, if we were poor--if we could take a little place next to Linda--never see Nina or his mother or Ward or Roy again--Oh, what Heaven! How I should love it, planning for things together, as Linda and Fred did, having him come home to me every night!
"But it isn't that way," Harriet suddenly recalled herself sensibly, "and it is folly even to think about it! He is a rich man, and a married man, and that ends it. That ends it." ”

“ But when I add that I have the strongest testimonials to her character for integrity from William H. Seward, Gerritt Smith, Wendell Phillips, Fred. Douglass, and my brother, Prof. S.M. Hopkins, who has known her for many years, I do not fear to brave the incredulity of any reader.
Governor Seward wrote of her:
"I have known Harriet long, and a nobler, higher spirit, or a truer, seldom dwells in human form." ”

“ Harriet Wesden had been brought up with lady-like notions, and had never taken to the shop; it was pleasant to live in a private house, practice her piano, assist her mother in the gardening, and have a young man to come courting her "once or twice a-week!" Mr. Wesden, with habits more formed for shop life, had to struggle hard before he could accustom himself to the novelty of his position; in his heart he never felt thoroughly at home, and was always glad of an excuse to walk over to Great Suffolk Street. ”

“ She'll be only too glad to help. And she knows some people in New York who have influence in such matters."
During the short while she let elapse before she spoke, his confidence in the conviction-carrying power of this statement ebbed somewhat, though he hadn't seen yet what was wrong with it.
"Yes," she said at last, "I think I can see Harriet's view of it. As long as Rose had run away and joined a fifth-rate musical comedy in order to be on the stage, and as long as everybody knew it, the only thing to do was to get her into something respectable so that you could all pretend you liked it. ”

“ Rodney had given Harriet carte blanche to go ahead and fit it up before he and Rose came back from the seashore, and the layette was a monument to Harriet's thoroughgoing practicality. There had been a wild day of supplementing of course, when it was discovered that there were two babies instead of one.
The room, when they escorted Rose into it, was a terribly impressive place. The spirit of a barren sterile efficiency brooded everywhere. ”

“ They had two nurses all to themselves, quite apart from Miss Harris, who looked after Rose: one uncannily infallible person, omniscient in baby lore—thoroughgoing, logical, efficient, remorseless as a German staff officer; and a bright-eyed, snub-nosed, smart little maid, for an assistant, who boiled bottles, washed clothes, and, at certain stated hours, over a previously determined route, at a given number of miles per hour, wheeled the twins out, in a duplex perambulator, which Harriet had acquired as soon as the need for it had become evident. ”

“ Now, Miss Field, about your check book; I've arranged---"
"The world, my dear, is less blind than you imagine!" his mother reminded him pleasantly, gathering her draperies for departure.
"Well, about your checks," Richard said, with his indulgent smile, when she was gone. "Where were we?"
"I have never respected and admired and been so grateful to any human being as I am to you," thought Harriet. "I think you are the finest and the strongest man I ever saw in my life!" Aloud she said, "I can send Bottomley and his wife, and one or two of the girls down to-day, if you think best. ”

“ Better to doubt me than—others?"
She corrected herself in time; she remembered her promise to Harriet. She saw how easy it was for a few errors, a few mistakes to make this strange man forget all the good efforts of a life—deceived in Mr. Wesden as she had been, she could not gauge in those excited moments the depths of his affection for his daughter.
In the avowal there would be danger to Harriet; so, for Harriet's sake, let her take the blame and go away. Harriet could only have cleared up the last mystery—the rest affected herself. ”

“ Come now, my dear, you must face this like a woman. Think how your father and Ward will look to you--"
Acting, all of it, said Harriet in her soul. But despite the youthful appetite for heroics, there were real tears in Nina's eyes, as there had been in her grandmother's a few hours ago.
"Yes, that's true!" she said, wiping a swollen face on the handkerchief Harriet supplied. "But oh--I don't believe it, and my father will sue them for libel, you see if he doesn't! My mother's the purest and sweetest and best woman ALIVE--and I'll KILL any one who says any different!" ”

“ My mother--well, she has always taken life that way; she can't change now. I shall have Ida Tabor as a fixture here, I suppose, Nina running wild, Ward never home! You--you give me exactly what I want here! Good dinners, fires, hospitality, a good report from Nina and Ward; I can bring men home, I can--" He mused, with a smile touching his fine, tired face. "In short, I wish there was some fortunate young man somewhere to make you Mrs. Smith or Jones, Miss Field, and let you come back to the Carters immediately again!"
Harriet laughed, sighed sharply immediately upon the laugh. ”

“ Is it Harriet?" Harriet was his other sister—married, and not very happily, it was beginning to appear, to an Italian count.
A revulsion—a sort of sick misgiving took the color out of Rose's cheeks.
"It isn't any one," she said. "It's nothing like that. It's—it's that case." Her lips stumbled over the title of it. "It's been decided against you. ”

“ The irksomeness was added to by a horrible harness largely of whalebone. Rose got the notion, too, that the purpose of all this was not quite wholly hygienic. Harriet had said once: "You know the most distinguished thing about you, Rose, dear—about your looks, I mean—is that lovely boyish line of yours. It will be a perfect crime if you let yourself spread out."
This wasn't the sort of consideration to make the inactivity any easier to endure. She might have rebelled, had it not been for that germinant idea of hers. ”

“ Washington does no more fighting than he hath done for the past few years your Robert Dale will be in no danger,” observed Harriet, who was certainly in a bad mood for the day.
“Oh, as to that,” retorted Betty airily, “we manage to get in a victory often enough to keep up our spirits. Really, Harriet, I do wish thee could meet Robert.”
“And I wish that you both could meet my brother, Clifford,” cried Harriet. “Why, none of the youths in the rebel camp at Middlebrook could compare with him in looks. He is so handsome, and noble, and brave. ”

“ A charming letter is one of the fruits of loneliness and reading; Harriet was sure of her touch. His father, his mother, and Nina each had an epigrammatic line or two, and for his grandmother Harriet dared a little wit, and smiled to imagine his shout of appreciative laughter.
She dined as usual alone, that evening, and was surprised, at about eight o'clock, to receive the demure notification from Rosa that Mrs. Carter would like to see her. Harriet glanced at a mirror ”

“ While poor Isabelle was here, while Nina was a child, it was all well enough! But nothing could be more unfortunate for your daughter, for your young son, than to have any fresh gossip--the sort of thing people are only too ready to say, and are beginning to say now!"
"Why, how you do cook up things from whole cloth, Mother!" the man said with his indulgent smile. "You see the thing too closely, you are right in the middle of it!"
"I see that Harriet Field is an extremely pretty woman," his mother said, hotly. ”

“ In a thousand ways, many of them approaching actual mendacity, she undermined Harriet's usefulness, and annoyed and distracted the domestic force. If Harriet decided that the weather was too warm for an out-of-door luncheon, Madame Carter pleasantly overruled her, and there was much running to and fro for the change. Messages undelivered by the old lady were attributed to the secretary's carelessness, and there was more than one occasion when Harriet had no choice between silence toward Madame Carter or the flat accusation of untruthfulness. ”

“ Nina interposed an objection on the score of the tennis tournament at the club, was overruled, and departed in her turn to discover, as Harriet tactfully suggested, the condition of her bathing suit. Ward had already gone to do some necessary telephoning, so that Harriet and her employer were alone.
"Now, Miss Field," Richard said, when various details of management were delegated, "you understand that you are in charge from now on. My mother will--well, you know how to handle her! She is old--enjoys her little bit of mischief sometimes! ”

“ Once in her private sitting-room the matron began, low-voiced, with an occasional glance at the closed door, as if to make certain that no curious inmate lurked behind it:
"If Harriet Blake doesn't grow more sensible very soon I shall certainly go crazy; I invited you, Mr. Freeland, to dinner to-day because Harriet used to like your prayers in the afternoon, and it may help her to talk to you—but I don't know. She's a very obstinate old lady. The whole house talks about nothing else, and she's just morbid enough to like it. ”

“ At four o'clock she dressed herself again, half-mad with headache and fatigue, and went out into a world that was just beginning to brighten into faint shapes and colours. The fresh cold air of morning struck her jaded senses with a delicious chill; she went noiselessly across the terrace and down toward the water, her big soft coat brushing spider-webs from the dim rosebushes as she went. The world lay silent, fragrant, saturated with dew. Yet under its chill Harriet felt the pervading warmth of the day that had gone, and the day that was to come. ”

“ Harriet, her rage curdling into philosophy.
"Ah, but it is the best there is just yet," maintained Miss Anna, stoutly. "By and by we may all be able to do better—those of us who get the chance."
"What shall I care then?" said Harriet, scouting eternity as a palliative of contemporary woes.
"Wait! you are tired and you have lost your temper from thirst: children always do. I'll bring something to cure you, fresh from the country, fresh from Ambrose Webb's farm. ”

“ Oh, Miss Field!" he called, after Harriet's discreetly retreating back, "the car's downstairs. Wait for me there; I'll run you home in half the time the train takes. I'm playing in the tennis finals, Mother--"
Harriet, turning for just a nod and smile, heard no more. His voice dropped to a filial undertone, and he sank into a low chair, with his hands still clasping the old lady's hand. But as she entered the lift, the girl said to herself, with a passionate sort of gratitude: "Oh, I like you! You're the only genuine and unselfish and kind-hearted one in the whole crowd!" ”

“ Harriet was a very likely-looking woman, twenty-nine years of age, medium size, and of a brown color, and far from being a stupid person. Her daughter also was a smart, and interesting little girl of eight years of age, and seemed much pleased to be getting out of the reach of slave-holders. The mother and daughter, however, had not won their freedom thus far, without great suffering, from the long and fatiguing distance which they were obliged to walk. Sometimes the hardness of the road made them feel as though they would be compelled to give up the journey, whether or not ”

“ His face was keen and somewhat lined under a smooth crest of slightly graying hair; he smiled very rarely, but there was a certain kindliness in his gray eyes, when Nina or Ward or his wife turned to him, that Harriet liked. He came and went quietly, absorbed in his business, getting in and out of his cars with a murmur to his chauffeur, disappearing with his golf sticks, presiding almost silently over his own animated dinner table. He was always well groomed, well dressed without being in the least conspicuous; always more or less tired when she saw him. ”

“ And a romancer might have wondered what paths had led her, in the superb realization of her beautiful womanhood, at twenty-seven, to this subordinate position in the home of a self-made rich man, and this conventional tea table on a terrace over the Hudson. The smoky blue eyes to-day were full of an idle content; the rounded breast rose and fell quietly under the plain checked gown with its transparent frills at wrists and throat. Harriet may have had her moments of rebellion, but this was not one of them. ”

“ Wesden regard her proudly, as well they may, Harriet being a girl to be proud of—tall, graceful, and pretty, something that makes home bright to the parents, and has been long missed by them. No one is aware of all that they have sacrificed in their desire to make a lady of their only child—or of one-half of the hopes which they have built upon concerning her. ”

“ But I have known a hundred times why when I should have courage I had nothing but fear, when I should have self-confidence I failed myself. Something in my soul got broken!"
"You are the most beautiful woman in the world," Royal Blondin said, steadily, "you are established here, they all adore you! Why do you say that your life is a wreck?"
"I am the daughter of Professor Field," said Harriet, "and at twenty-seven I am the paid companion of Mrs. Richard Carter's daughter! ”