The Open Question Part 4

Mr. Tallmadge looked at her in silence for a moment; then suddenly: "Yes, yes; _he'll_ turn out all right." He nodded, as if to say, "Trust me to see to that!" "My experience is, if you want a boy to do a particular thing, set that aim before him at the start. That's the way I was raised; that's the way I propose to raise my grandson."

There was a slight pause.

"And in what form of religious faith?"

"We are all members of the Presbyterian Church." It was said as though it had been in obedience to an edict of the Everlasting from the foundation of the world. "You will appreciate the necessity of having my grandson raised under my own eye when I tell you it is my intention that, after he gets through Harvard, he shall succeed to the editors.h.i.+p of my paper."

"My grandson edit an Abolitionist paper?"

Mr. Tallmadge blinked in a slightly nervous fas.h.i.+on, but answered, steadfastly:

"Abolition is abolished, madam; it has served its end. Ethan will naturally fall heir to my property and my profession."

"Ethan is his father's heir first of all--heir to a man who gave his life at Bull Run for our rights, not for the abolition of them."

"Abolition _was_ right, and _is_ law, by the sanction of the G.o.d of battles."

Mrs. Gano rose from her chair; the door opened, and in came Miss Hannah. Whether it was chance, or whether she had been waiting outside for the psychological moment, certainly her entrance was opportune. She went through her greeting with a fl.u.s.tered civility that, by its own extreme nervousness, made the situation she had broken in upon seem calm to the point of commonplace. Mrs. Gano found herself trying to put Miss Hannah at her ease.

The tall, thin spinster, with her smooth gray hair and anxious manner, must have been more than double the age of Ethan's mother.

Supper would be ready in twenty minutes.

"Of course," she said, "you will stay? Ethan has just been asking if he mayn't sit up a little later to-night."

"Ethan!" Potent conjuration! Mrs. Gano had not come all this way to look after her grandson's welfare and be turned back by a fanatical outbreak on the part of a bigoted Abolitionist. No, and if plain speaking was to be the order of the day, Mr. Tallmadge should not do it all. He had it his own way, however, in the long grace with which he prefaced supper, a performance that sounded in Mrs. Gano's ears aggressively Presbyterian.

It appeared at that meal that Miss Hannah was disposed to be indulgent to her little nephew, and that he was devoted to her. He talked very little, and what he had to say he confided in a whisper to his aunt. But as he ate, he stared unceasingly with great gloomy eyes at his grandmother. She saw with deep misgiving that he was permitted to make the same meal as his elders. He declined to share his aunt's decoction of "sh.e.l.ls," as she quaintly called cocoa, and joined his grandparents in a large cup of coffee. He bolted down quant.i.ties of that moist and leaden Boston brown bread which Mrs. Gano regarded with amazement and alarm, and he seemed to share the New England taste for beans and bacon, a fare which, in the visitor's mind, ranked with the "hog and hominy" of the hard-working plantation blacks; but to place such food before a little delicate child!

After supper his aunt took him on her lap, and, while Mr. Tallmadge and his guest skirted dangerous topics with stately politeness, Miss Tallmadge, in the corner by the fire, was softly repeating nursery rhymes to the little Ethan. Others might have been struck by the picture of the gaunt, childless woman and her ready a.s.sumption of the mother role; Mrs. Gano was vaguely conscious of a kind of remissness in herself in having omitted to tell her own children a word about little Nannie Etticott or c.o.c.k Robin. In all her life of maternal solicitude she had never once mentioned "Hey-diddle-diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," or even hinted at the existence of "the Little Man who had a little gun."

Presently, in the midst of Mr. Tallmadge's remarks upon the beauties of Boston Common, Mrs. Gano caught the child's more and more insistent demand for some joy which Miss Tallmadge was minded to withhold. In spite of "s.h.!.+ s.h.!.+" more and more shrill came the iteration:

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

In his fervor Ethan had dragged the stern, unyielding horse-hair cus.h.i.+on off the end of the sofa, revealing two volumes hidden behind it.

Mrs. Gano seemed not to regret this diversion. Helping the child to restore the sofa-cus.h.i.+on, she took up the books. As she read the t.i.tle her look darkened. She put the work down as if it burned her fingers.

"A great, bad book," she said.

"What is that?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.

Mrs. Gano jerked her head without answering.

"What say?" persisted the old man, with his hand to his ear.

"_Uncle Tom's Cabin_," said Miss Tallmadge, trying to speak lightly.

"A very uncommon woman, Mrs. Stowe," said Mr. Tallmadge, firmly; "very uncommon, indeed."

"Let us hope so," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mrs. Gano, half to herself.

"Eh?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with gruff suspicion. "What say?"

"I was granting her uncommonness, and hoping it wouldn't get commoner."

"H'm! It could hardly be expected, I suppose, that you should think well of--"

"No; I can't be expected to think well of a woman who is not content with getting a whole nation by the ears, but she must interfere between husband and wife, and--"

"What say?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with corrugated brows and hand to his deaf ear. "I'm talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe."

"So am I," said Mrs. Gano. "I only hope she'll be content with the mischief she's done already, and not rush into print with her espousal of Lady Byron's wrongs."

"I haven't heard that Mrs. Beecher Stowe had any such intention. As a friend of the family, from Lyman down--"

"As a friend of the family, you ought to warn them in time to curb her propensity for attending to other people's affairs. Uncommon! Yes, an uncommon busybody."

"I think, madam, you are misinformed," said Mr. Tallmadge, with dignity.

"I know more about Harriet Beecher Stowe than most people--though she never _has_ set foot in the South--and I know she's a busybody. I also know she has less excuse than some women. The spring I spent with my sister, Mrs. Paget, in Covington, before I met the Stowes, I used to look out and see a man trudging about the hills in front of my windows with a basket on his arm. 'Who is that?' I asked. 'That's Professor Stowe,' they said; and we all wondered what he had in the basket. I said he was botanizing; Mrs. Paget said the basket was too big for that: he must be looking for kail, or dock, or dandelion greens for dinner.

By-and-by we heard he had twins in the basket, and was taking them about for an airing. The Stowes were very poor, too, and what with that and twins, Harriet B. ought to have found enough to do at home."

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

"s.h.!.+" said his aunt.

"_Mus'_ sing it," answered Ethan, in the only distinct words his grandmother had heard from his lips.

"What is it?" she asked, more interested in Ethan's infant tastes than even in Mrs. Stowe's enormities.

"It's that foolish little rhyme, 'The New England Cat,'" replied Miss Hannah.

"I don't know it," said Mrs. Gano.

"Ethan likes it for some unknown reason. When he had scarlet-fever last year--"

She stopped, seeing the sudden change in Mrs. Gano's face.

"We had an epidemic of it," said Mr. Tallmadge, as though that fact lessened the danger. "Ethan came out of it famously--didn't you, my little man?"

"Nwingy Tat!" said Ethan.

"Oh yes, he came out all right," said Miss Hannah; "but before the crisis I sat up with him at night, and I sang 'The New England Cat' to him till I nearly died of it. Through sheer exhaustion my voice would get weaker and weaker, till it seemed to die too natural a death for him to notice. But the moment I stopped he would start up and say feverishly, 'Nwingy Tat!' It was the only thing that quieted him."

Mrs. Gano might have been supposed to regard this pa.s.sion for New England cats as a depraved taste on the part of a Gano, but she said, graciously:

"Let me add my pet.i.tion to Ethan's. I would like to hear his favorite song."