"Did you meet a grand lady in a carriage?" grandma asked, as Maddy sat
down beside her.
"Yes; and Dr. Holbrook said it was Mrs. Remington, from Aikenside, Mr.
Guy's stepmother, and that she was more than twenty years younger than
her husband--isn't it dreadful? I thought so; but the doctor didn't
seem to," and in a perfectly artless manner Maddy repeated much of the
conversation which had passed between the doctor and herself,
appealing to her grandma to know if she had not taken the right side
of the argument.
"Yes, child, you did," and grandma's hands lingered among the light
green peas in her pan, as if she were thinking of an entirely foreign
subject. "I knows nothing about this Mrs. Remington, only that she
stared a good deal at the house as she went by, even looking at us
through a glass, and lifting her spotted veil after she got by. She
may have been as happy as a queen with her man, but as a general thing
these unequal matches don't work, and had better not be thought on.
S'posin' you should think you was in love with somebody, and in a few
years, when you got older, be sick of him. It might do him a sight of
harm. That's what spoilt your poor Great-uncle Joseph, who's been in
the hospital at Worcester goin' on nine years."
"It was!" and Maddy's face was all aglow with the interest she always
evinced whenever mention was made of the one great living sorrow of
her grandmother's life--the shattered intellect and isolation from the
world of her youngest brother, who, as she said, had for nearly nine
long years been an inmate of a madhouse.
"Tell me about it," Maddy continued, bringing a pillow, and lying down
upon the faded lounge beneath the window.
"There is no great to tell, only he was many years younger than I.
He's only forty-one now, and was thirteen years older than the girl he
wanted. Joseph was smart and handsome, and a lawyer, and folks said a
sight too good for the girl, whose folks were just nothing, but she
had a pretty face, and her long curls bewitched him. She couldn't have
been older than you when he first saw her, and she was only sixteen
when they got engaged. Joseph's life was bound up in her; he worshiped
the very air she breathed, and when she mittened him, it almost took
his life. He was too old for her, she said, and then right on top of
that we heard after a little that she married some big bug, I never
knew who, plenty old enough to be her father. That settled it with
Joseph; he went into a kind of melancholy, grew worse and worse, till
we put him in the hospital, usin' his little property to pay the bill
until it was all gone, and now he's on charity, you know, exceptin'
what we do. That's what 'tis about your Uncle Joseph, and I warn all
young girls of thirteen or fourteen not to think too much of nobody.
They are bound to get sick of 'em, and it makes dreadful work."