Briefly, then, the housekeeper's story was this: She was almost forty years old, and had been the sister-mother of a
large family of children. One by one they had died, and been buried
beside their parents in a little town in the Middle West. There was
only one sister left, the baby, Lucy. On her the older girl had
lavished all the love of an impulsive and emotional nature. When Anne,
the elder, was thirty-two and Lucy was nineteen, a young man had come
to the town. He was going east, after spending the summer at a
celebrated ranch in Wyoming--one of those places where wealthy men send
worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air
and hunting. The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the
young man's ardor rather carried them away. In a word, seven years
before, Lucy Haswell had married a young man whose name was given as
Aubrey Wallace.
Anne Haswell had married a carpenter in her native town, and was a
widow. For three months everything went fairly well. Aubrey took his
bride to Chicago, where they lived at a hotel. Perhaps the very
unsophistication that had charmed him in Valley Mill jarred on him in
the city. He had been far from a model husband, even for the three
months, and when he disappeared Anne was almost thankful. It was
different with the young wife, however. She drooped and fretted, and on
the birth of her baby boy, she had died. Anne took the child, and
named him Lucien.
Anne had had no children of her own, and on Lucien she had lavished all
her aborted maternal instinct. On one thing she was determined,
however: that was that Aubrey Wallace should educate his boy. It was a
part of her devotion to the child that she should be ambitious for him:
he must have every opportunity. And so she came east. She drifted
around, doing plain sewing and keeping a home somewhere always for the
boy. Finally, however, she realized that her only training had been
domestic, and she put the boy in an Episcopalian home, and secured the
position of housekeeper to the Armstrongs. There she found Lucien's
father, this time under his own name. It was Arnold Armstrong.
I gathered that there was no particular enmity at that time in Anne's
mind. She told him of the boy, and threatened exposure if he did not
provide for him. Indeed, for a time, he did so. Then he realized that
Lucien was the ruling passion in this lonely woman's life. He found
out where the child was hidden, and threatened to take him away. Anne
was frantic. The positions became reversed. Where Arnold had given
money for Lucien's support, as the years went on he forced money from
Anne Watson instead until she was always penniless. The lower Arnold
sank in the scale, the heavier his demands became. With the rupture
between him and his family, things were worse. Anne took the child
from the home and hid him in a farmhouse near Casanova, on the
Claysburg road. There she went sometimes to see the boy, and there he
had taken fever. The people were Germans, and he called the farmer's
wife Grossmutter. He had grown into a beautiful boy, and he was all
Anne had to live for.