The Turn of the Tide
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor H. Porter
Chapter 12
The great dining-room at Hilcrest, the old Spencer homestead, was perhaps the pleasantest room in the house. The house itself crowned the highest hill that overlooked the town, and its dining-room windows and the veranda without, commanded a view of the river for miles, just where the valley was the greenest and the most beautiful. On the other side of the veranda which ran around three sides of the house, one might see the town with its myriad roofs and tall chimneys; but although these same tall chimneys represented the wealth that made possible the great Spencer estate, yet it was the side of the veranda overlooking the green valley that was the most popular with the family. It was said, to be sure, that old Jacob Spencer, who built the house, and who laid the foundations for the Spencer millions, had preferred the side that overlooked the town; and that he spent long hours gloating over the visible results of his thrift and enterprise. But old Jacob was dead now, and his son’s sons reigned instead; and his son’s sons, no matter how much they might value the whiz and whir and smoke of the town, preferred, when at rest, to gaze upon green hills and far-reaching meadows. This was, indeed, typical of the Spencer code—the farther away they could get from the oil that made the machinery of life run easily and noiselessly, the better pleased they were.
The dining-room looked particularly pleasant this July evening. A gentle breeze stirred the curtains at the open windows, and the setting sun peeped through the vines outside and glistened on the old family plate. Three generations of Spencers looked down from the walls on the two men and the woman sitting at the great mahogany table. The two men and the woman, however, were not looking at the sunlight, the vines, or the swaying curtains; they were looking at each other, and their eyes were troubled and questioning.
“You say she is coming next week?” asked the younger man, glancing at the letter in the other’s hand.
“Yes. Tuesday afternoon.”
“But, Frank, this is so—sudden,” remonstrated the young fellow, laughing a little as he uttered the trite phrase. “How does it happen that I’ve heard so little of this young lady who is to be so unceremoniously dropped into our midst next Tuesday?”
Frank Spencer made an impatient gesture that showed how great was his perturbation.
“Come, come, Ned, don’t be foolish,” he protested. “You know very well that your brother’s stepdaughter has been my ward for a dozen years.”
“Yes, but that is all I know,” rejoined the young man, quietly. “I have never seen her, and scarcely ever heard of her, and yet you expect me to take as a matter of course this strange young woman who is none of our kith nor kin, and yet who is to be one of us from henceforth forevermore!”
“The boy is right,” interposed the low voice of the woman across the table. “Ned doesn’t know anything about her. He was a mere child himself when it all happened, and he’s been away from home most of the time since. For that matter, we don’t know much about her ourselves.”
“We certainly don’t,” sighed Frank Spencer; then he raised his head and squared his shoulders. “See here, good people, this will never do in the world,” he asserted with sudden authority. “I have offered the hospitality of this house to a homeless, orphan girl, and she has accepted it. There is nothing for us to do now but to try to make her happy. After all, we needn’t worry—it may turn out that she will make us happy.”
“But what is she? How does she look?” catechized Ned.
His brother shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he replied simply.
“You don’t know! But, surely you have seen her!”
“Yes, oh, yes, I have seen her, once or twice, but Margaret Kendall is not a girl whom to see is to know; besides, the circumstances were such that—well, I might as well tell the story from the beginning, particularly as you know so little of it yourself.”
Frank paused, and looked at the letter in his hand. After a minute he laid it gently down. When he spoke his voice was not quite steady.
“Our brother Harry was a physician, as you know, Ned. You were twelve years old when he married a widow by the name of Kendall who lived in Houghtonsville where he had been practising. As it chanced, none of us went to the wedding. You were taken suddenly ill, and neither Della nor myself would leave you, and father was in Bermuda that winter for his health. Mrs. Kendall had a daughter, Margaret, about ten years old, who was at school somewhere in the Berkshires. It was to that school that I went when the terrible news came that Harry and his new wife had lost their lives in that awful railroad accident. That was the first time that I saw Margaret.
“The poor child was, of course, heartbroken and inconsolable; but her grief took a peculiar turn. The mere sight of me drove her almost into hysterics. She would have nothing whatever to do with me, or with any of her stepfather’s people. She reasoned that if her mother had not married, there would have been no wedding journey; and if there had been no wedding journey there would have been no accident, and that her mother would then have been alive, and well.
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