Then followed a detailed account of her household matters, occupying
in all three pages of foolscap, to which was pinned a bit of paper,
containing the following: "Joel looked over my writing and said I'd left out the very thing I
wanted to tell the most. We are married, me and Joel, and I only
hope you are as happy with that doctor as I am with my man."
This announcement crushed at once the faint hope which Mrs. Kennedy
had secretly entertained, of eventually having Janet to supply the
place of Hannah, who was notoriously lazy, and never under any
circumstances did anything she possibly could avoid. Dr. Kennedy did
not tell his wife that he expected her to make it easy for Hannah,
so she would not leave them; but he told her how industrious the
late Mrs. Kennedy had been, and hinted that a true woman was not
above kitchen work.
The consequence of this was that Matty, who
really wished to please him, became in time a very drudge, doing
things which she once thought she could not do, and then without a
murmur ministering to her exacting husband when he came home from
visiting a patient, and declared himself "tired to death." Very
still he sat while her weary little feet ran for the cool drink--the
daily paper--or the morning mail; and very happy he looked when her
snowy fingers combed his hair or brushed his threadbare coat; and
if, perchance, she sighed amid her labor of love, his ear was deaf,
and he did not hear, neither did he see how white and thin she grew
as day by day went by.
Her piano was now seldom touched, for the doctor did not care for
music; still he was glad that she could play, for "Sister Kelsey,"
who was to him a kind of terror, would insist that Nellie should
take music lessons, and, as his wife was wholly competent to give
them, he would be spared a very great expense. "Save, save, save,"
seemed to be his motto, and when at church the plate was passed to
him he gave his dime a loving pinch ere parting company with it; and
yet none read the service louder or defended his favorite liturgy
more zealously than himself.
In some things he was a pattern man, and when once his servant John announced his intention of
withdrawing from the Episcopalians and joining himself to the
Methodists, who held their meetings in the schoolhouse, he was
greatly shocked, and labored long with the degenerate son of
Ethiopia, who would render to him no reason for his most
unaccountable taste, though he did to Matty, when she questioned him
of his choice.