The Countess at Pondsville Centre

“REAL pleasant, considerin’,” was the consensus of Pondsville Centre on the Countess Alma von Engelberg, and a somewhat similar verdict had, at the time of her presentation at court, been voiced by the highest circles of Berlin. In Pondsville the “considerin’ ” bore reference to the misfortune of her foreign birth; in Berlin a shrug of the shoulder, — but who dare affirm what a shrug of the shoulder may or may not imply? Enough, it was the New England village and not the capital of the German Empire that now harbored the lady, and as plain Mrs. Engelberg she had applied for the position of music teacher in the Pondsville Academy.

“You speak real well, considerin’,” said Mrs. Sinnet, the milliner, with whom the newcomer was to board.

“A thousand thanks,” replied the countess. Her flashing smile bespoke a due gratitude ; perhaps also the amused consciousness of using the purest English in the community.

“I guess you’ll pick up our ways pretty quick. You Congregational or Methodist? No? Freewill Baptist perhaps? ”

“ I shall like best to go to whichever church you attend.”

Mrs. Sinnet’s motherly heart began to warm toward her new boarder, and it was vaguely borne in upon her that, in spite of their ready smile, the dark eyes fastened on hers were the saddest and weariest she had ever seen.

“I presume you ’ll feel a mite homesick at first, but you ’ll soon be feelin’ to home. If there ain’t doctor now, comin’ up the steps to ask after my rheuinatiz. Dr. Smith ’s his name. Widower. Salt o’ the earth. Doctor, I want to make you acquainted with my new boarder, Mis’ Engelbug.”

“Pleased to meet you, ” said the doctor. He was a squarely built man, middle-aged, with kindly, keen eyes. He held out his hand, and before he had withdrawn it Mrs. Sinnet’s quick glance perceived that her boarder had already made a friend in Pondsville.

In the lap of the valley lies the village, the embodiment of white peace. Even the clear brown river, vexed a mile below by dam and mill and its own precipitous bed, steals noiselessly by the quiet town ; school, smithy, vane-tipped spire all quiveringly afloat upon its tide. Acre on acre, even halfway up to the knees of the great hills, toss, in midsummer, seas of oats and timothy. Here a line of willows marks the plumy covert of a stream; there a shadowy grove of broad-girthed maples whisper of noonday cud to ruminating kine.

Who would see the village at its best must take the grassy road that winds across the upland pastures. Looking down from here, late one afternoon, as she sat beside the doctor in his buggy, the countess pointed off to roof and gleaming spire among the elms.

“ Does she of a truth dwell yonder ? ” she asked in her clear speech, so good, “considerin’.”

“Who?”

“Peace.”

“The Centre’s got its share of happy homes, if that’s what you mean.”

“And for the homeless? ”

“You don’t need to be that a moment longer than you want to.”

She had expected this, but not so soon. Involuntarily her eyes sought out, in the village street, the white, rambling elmshaded cottage she might if she chose call home. Bathed in the luminous haze of a late afternoon the lowly roof had taken on an unfamiliar witchery. All about, hilltop and meadow seemed of the “ stuff that dreams are made on, ” and at the valley’s head the cone of Chillion soared cloudlike and amethystine ; a veritable mount of transfiguration.

“ I want you should be my wife, ” said the doctor.

“And live there? ” She spoke quietly, her eyes on the sleeping village.

“That ’s my home.”

“And never leave it — never? ”

“My practice ties me here.”

“Ties; yes, that is good, to have ties. If I were tied, then I too, perhaps — day after day, year after year, walled in by these green hills — no voices from the outer world ” —

Flinging out her arms with one of those free gestures, so disconcerting to the New England community, she paused abruptly, and turning looked full into the doctor’s face, probing, measuring. From the meagreness of his words she had not dreamed his eyes could say so much.

“No, no, my friend,” she answered gently.

Sitting massive and outwardly unshaken by her side, the doctor drove on.

“ I want you should be my wife, ” he repeated.

Despite its Doric façade, relic of a bygone prosperity, the Pondsville Academy now counted but a handful of pupils. Desertions to more progressive schools had thinned its ranks. Sons and daughters of sturdy yeoman stock, the boys and girls from outlying farms and hamlets helped pay their board by labor in barn and kitchen. Yet small as was the number of pupils the most important event in the Centre was the day of graduation. And this year an additional ceremony was to take place; the presentation of a picture, “tribute of love and esteem, ” to a favorite teacher about to leave the school, in order, as the valedictorian expressed it, “ to enter upon another sphere, even the bonds of matrimony with one who has for years fought undaunted the dread scourges of disease and death in this our peaceful vale.”

Beaming in the reflected glory of one who had for a whole year harbored the heroine of the hour, Mrs. Sinnet joined a knot of matrons on the green.

“ It beats all, ” one of the group was saying, “how much store the young folks set by her. But then, she is real pleasant.”

“Too pleasant, I say,” insinuated the baker’s wife. “Says I to my husband only last night, ' Mark my word, there’s something wrong there. ’ Pleasant! H’m. ’T ain’t natural to be so everlasting pleasant. ”

“No, ’t aint, for some,” retorted Mrs. Sinnet, up in arms for the honor of her house.

“And that time she swore so right out in class,” continued the baker’s wife, ignoring the maker of hats. “They tried to hush it up, but my Ila was there, and she said she heard Mis’ Engelbug, when Zilpha Field sung false, sputtering under her breath and saying— Well, I’m a church member, and I’m not going to peril my immortal soul repeating what she said.”

“ She said ' My God! ’ ” interrupted Mrs. Sinnet, flushed but stoutly loyal.

“Good land, Mis’ Sinnet, ain’t you ’shamed standing here so near the meeting-house and saying sech a dreadful word ? ”

“I don’t deny I was terrible shocked when I heard about it, and I went straight to the minister, and he said folks didn’t know no better over to Germany and France, and that very day I took sick with the grippe, and if she didn’t wait on me hand and foot for two weeks solid and keepin’ me laughin’ all the time,” —

“If there ain’t doctor’s buggy. Who’s sick? Ain’t he comin’ to the exercises ? ”

“I never see a man so taken up with any one as doctor is with Mis’ Engelbug. Seems kind of disrespectful to his first. I dunno what would happen to him if it would turn out she’d a husband round somewheres. These pleasant spoken furriners mostly do — or worse.”

The last person to ascend the academy steps was a well-groomed stranger. Before entering he turned and glanced between the fluted wooden columns down the dusty street, which, with its white clapboarded shop fronts, showed pitilessly aglare in the blinding midday.

“A year, a whole year! ” he exclaimed under his breath in German. “Mein Gott! how ever has she lived through it! ”

When flushed and weary, her arms laden with flowers, her mood mingled tears and laughter, the countess reached her own steps, she was told she had a visitor in the parlor.

Though in subsequent conversations Mrs. Sinnet frankly admitted having lingered near enough the closed door to catch the murmur of voices, the fact of the words falling dead on her ear redeemed the eavesdropping from any taint of vulgar curiosity. Rather was it an instinctive watchdog loyalty toward the absent doctor, who, abroad on errands of mercy for his ninety and nine, had left unguarded his own ewe lamb. And that an attack of some kind was being made on the fold was patent even to one as unversed as Mrs. Sinnet in the mysteries of foreign tongues.

What was it all about? And that a human being — let alone a man — could pour out such a torrent of words! Now, it was evident, he entreated, now upbraided, now broke into unmirthful laughter, now into bitter reproach; now — and this Mrs. Sinnet found herself dreading most — his voice melted into notes of flutelike tenderness.

“ Play actin’! sounds for all the world like play actin’ ! ” commented the anxious listener. “Real folks don’t never talk like that.” Still some instinct told her it was not play acting.

With an uneasy sense of impending disaster she listened and watched the hand of the tall clock toil twice around its face. At last a sturdy tread sounded on the piazza.

Doctor. It must be doctor !

No, only Elmer Tarbox, laden with the presentation picture, Faith clinging to the Cross. Then it was Mrs. Sinnet made a desperate resolve.

“Lean it up by the parlor door, Elmer, I ’ll take it in myself.”

However alarming had been the whirlwind of words, the pacings up and down, and the occasional heartrending sound as of a stifled sobbing, the deathlike silence that now reigned behind the closed door was even worse. What had he done to her in there alone ? Those foreigners ! You never could tell what they would do next. Cressit’s hired man, the one that murdered the old couple with an axe, he was a foreigner, a “Portugee, ” or something. Oh, if doctor would but come! Hoisting as a shield the gold-framed Faith clinging to the Cross, and with horrid visions of the bride-elect lying bathed in gore on the best rag mat, Mrs. Sinnet pushed in.

At this point in her tale the narrator was apt to make an impressive pause, and when she was fortunate enough to have among her auditors one unacquainted with the sequel, it was a moment of delicious horror.

“There ’s no denyin’ he was a fineappearin’ man, and there was somethin’ about the way he held his head, — well, ’s soon as I see Mis’ Engelbug was still alive, I own I was glad I ’d just put on fresh tidies, and that mother and husband and Aunt Hannah, all photographed life size and in elegant gilt frames, fitted out the parlor so handsome. You could see he ’d been used to things pretty nice to home. But when I come really to look at Mis’ Engelbug, the cold chills run down my back.

“Mis’ Engelbug, she was standin’ in the middle of the room, white ’s a sheet, and buttonin’ up her jacket. Sorter simple thing to give you a chill, you say? That’s how you look at it. Thinks I, ‘They was right, say in’ she ’d got a husband somewheres, ’ and I turned sick picturin’ doctor’s face when he ’d come and find her gone.

“ ‘ My good woman, ’ says the stranger in his queer soundin’ English, but cool ’s you please, ‘we ’re goin’ to drive to Wetherby and take the evenin’ express. Before we sail we shall let you know where to forward the trunks. ’

“I looked at Mis’ Engelbug, but she stood starin’ down at the carpet. You could have knocked me down with a feather, but I never lost my presence of mind. ‘ Here’s the pictur’, ’ says I. ‘I presume you ’ll want it boxed up real careful if you ’re goin’ to cross the ocean.’

“Well, that man, he looked hard at the pictur’ for a moment, and then says he, strokin’ his mustache, ‘By all means, madam, have it packed with the greatest care. We ’ll hang it in the reception room to the castle, ’ says he, ‘ or perhaps among the family portraits in the oak gallery. ’ It was only when Mis’ Engelbug lifted her eyes suddin and looked at him, it come over me, hot and prickly, he was makin’ fun of me and the pictur’.

“ Well, no one knows the pains the young folks had taken to get somethin’ they thought would please Mis’ Engelbug. At first they was all for one of them new-fashioned Madonnas, but says I, ‘ No, she’s marryin’ into a deacon’s family. I guess Faith dingin’ to the Cross is new fashion enough for doctor.’ Well, there I stood, kinder limpsy and foolish, and wishin’ I could sink through the floor, when Mis’ Engelbug giv a little cry and threw her arm round my shoulder.

“‘Never mind,’ says she. ‘It’s just that he ’s a furriner and don’t understand. ’

“‘But you ’re a furriner,’ says I.

Yes, but I’ve learnt your ways,’ says she; ‘ I’ve learnt ’em, and I like ’em, and that’s why I’m goin’ to stay. ’

“‘ Stay? ’ says I, and you ’d orter seen the look that man give her.

“‘ Yes,’ says she, strokin’ my hand sorter nervous. ‘ There was a moment I’d thought I’d got to go; seemed ’s if wild horses was draggin’ me. No one can’t tell what your own folks and your own language means to you, after all; and we was friends, this gentleman and I, since we was children.’ She looked at him kinder hungry, —she ’s dretful speakin’ eyes, — and held out her hand, but he sorter pushed it away, and just then who should we see fillin’ up the doorway but doctor.

“Them furrin languages, if they ain’t the scrimpiest! Have to eke ’em out so with dumb show. That Dutchman, he did n’t say a word, but all the same with his shoulders and his eyebrows and the palms of his hands he up and asked her if doctor was the man she was goin’ to marry, and she didn’t do nothin’ but narrer her eyelids and flutter her nostrils like a high-steppin’ horse, and you could read ’s plain ’s print she was answerin’ back, ‘ Yes I be, and he ’s wuth two of you.’

“Well, the Dutchman, he made a low bow — this way, ‘ Wish you joy,’ says he, and he laughed out in doctor’s face. When he done that I thought Mis’ Engelbug’d fly into fifty pieces.

“ ‘ I ’ll tell you everything, ’ says she. The Dutchman had slipped out quicker ’n a flash, and I presume I ’d orter left, but somehow I did n’t, and I never see doctor so exasperating. He jest looked at her stiddy and grave and says he, —

“' You ’re all wore out. Wait till after the weddin’, ’ says he.

“Mis’ Engelbug, she made a queer little sound, half-laughin’, half-cryin’, and caught doctor’s hand and kissed it. I presume he wished she would n’t do them queer furrin tricks, but he never let on.

No, now,’ says she.

“Well, seems she’d ben an opery singer and had lost her voice. Seems she was a countess. Seems her husband before he’d died had run through with her money and so she ’d gone on the stage. Seems her own folks weren’t no good neither for all they was a very high family, — and when she was a young girl in Berlin, folks would warn their sons against marryin’ into sech a family. Trouble, trouble, all her life, nothin’ but trouble; but most of all she seemed to mind losin’ her voice, and when that happened she just wanted to run away and die. It had come of a suddin, when she was singin’ in the opery. ‘ They hissed, ’ says she; she clapped her hands over her ears. ' Oh, that hiss! I was beginnin’ to forget, but when the baron come to-day and we got to talkin’ it all come back; all my miseries come back. I ’m so tired of sufferin’,’ says she; ' all I ask now is quiet and peace. He wanted to marry me, ’ says she, ' and take me back to my own country. ’

“' You want to go? ’ says doctor. It did n’t sound like doctor’s voice at all.

“ Well, Mis’ Engelbug, she jest kinder give a deep sigh like she was all tuckered out, and dropped her head down on doctor’s shoulder. Doctor he give me one look.

“Where did they hang the pictur’? Why in their own room. Mis’ Engelbug — Mis’ Smith I should say — says she sets more by it than any pictur’ in the house. The baby favors her.”

Esther B. Tiffany.