Old Comrades
Copyright© 2026 by Agnes Giberne
Chapter 3: Using Opportunities
“AND you going out alone, Miss Tracy! And the Colonel that particular! As he wouldn’t hear of you crossing the road by yourself.”
Mrs. Stirring was manifestly uneasy, counting herself in some sort responsible. She looked upon this motherless young lady as a charge upon her conscience, —otherwise, as one of the many burdens in her life. Mrs. Stirring was a person who professed to carry a great many burdens. She always had been, and always would be, laden with cares; not so much because she had really more cares than other people, as because she had less pluck and endurance for the bearing of them. Where Dorothea would have looked up and smiled, Mrs. Stirring looked down and sighed. The difference was in the individuals themselves; not in the weight of the burdens laid upon them.
To be sure, Mrs. Stirring was a widow, which sounds sad. There are women, however, to whom widowhood comes as a merciful release from unhappy wifehood, and Mrs. Stirring was one of these. She had married in haste, and had repented at leisure. When her husband was taken from her, she had been conscious in her heart of relief from a bitter thraldom, though much too correct a little person to let any such feeling appear through her showers of weeping, —for Mrs. Stirring was a person who had always tears at command. Still—there the consciousness was.
Now for years, she had been a successful lodging-house keeper, and was not only paying her way, but was laying by a nice little sum for the future. She had one child, a pretty winning little girl, and one faithful though uncouth domestic. This was not altogether a bad state of things. Nevertheless, Mrs. Stirring talked on plaintively of her trials and burdens, making capital of the widowhood which had been a release.
“And you going out alone, Miss!” she reiterated, coming upon Dorothea dressed for walking. Mrs. Stirring was apt to be untidy at this hour, and her cap had dropped awry; while Dorothea was the very pink of dainty neatness, in a costume of dark brown, with brown hat to match, relieved by a suggestion of red, the glasses over her happy eyes balanced as usual over the little nose.
“To Church,” Dorothea said, smiling. “I wish you could go too.”
Mrs. Stirring shook her head dolorously.
“There’s the turkey and plum-pudden, Miss,” she said, in unconscious echo of the Colonel. “Dear me! Why if I was to leave them to Susanna, I don’t think your Pa ‘d stay a day longer under my roof; I don’t, really. He’s that particular about the roasting. I’m all of a quake now with the thought of it—if I shouldn’t do it right. And there’s the stuffing, and the gravy, and the sauce! And the pudden, as I’ve boiled six hours yesterday, and it’s been on again these two hours. Dear me! No; I couldn’t go to church! A poor widow like me ‘s got to stay at home and mind the dinner.”
“I wish my father could dine late,” said Dorothea.
A scared look came into Mrs. Stirring’s face.
“Now don’t you put him up to that—don’t you, Miss Tracy. Late dinner means a deal of work. If your papa dined late, he’d dine early too—that’s what gentlemen come to. No, I wouldn’t wish that. But if I was a lady—like yourself, Miss—and hadn’t to be at work all the morning, why I’d be glad enough to put on my best, and go off to Church with the rest of the folks. And take Minnie too.”
“Minnie! O I never thought of that! Why should not Minnie go with me?”
“It’s like you to think of it, Miss.” Mrs. Stirring was evidently gratified. “And I’m sure she’d have been glad enough, for she does fret, being kept in. But the bells ‘ll stop this minute, and she’s in her curl-papers.”
“Curl-papers. Can’t you pull them out, and smooth her hair, and put on her hat and jacket?”
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