THE TRACY DIAMONDS

CHAPTER I. THE PROSPECT HOUSE.

The time was a hot July morning, with the thermometer at 85 in the shade, and rising. Not a leaf was stirring, and the air seemed to quiver with the heat of midsummer. The fog, which, early in the day, had hung over the meadows and the river, had lifted, and was floating upward in feathery wreaths towards a misty cloud in which it would soon be absorbed. Even the robins, of which there were many in the vicinity of the Prospect House, felt the effects of the weather and sat lazily upon the fence or the branches of the trees in which their nests were hidden. Only the English sparrows showed signs of life, twittering in and out of the thick ivy which covered the walls of what had once been a church, and was now used for public offices. It was a morning in which to keep quiet and cool if possible. “The hottest on record,” Uncle Zach Taylor, the proprietor of the Prospect House, said, as he examined the thermometer and wondered “What on earth Dot was 8thinking of to raise Cain generally in such weather.” The house was in a state of upheaval, and looked as if

the annual cleaning was about to commence on a gigantic scale. In the back yard carpets were being beaten by two men, with the perspiration rolling down their faces, on the south and west piazzas furniture of every description was standing,—bureaus and washstands, tables, chairs and couches, with two or three old-time pictures in old-time frames. One was a representation of the famous Boston Tea Party. The Dartmouth, Elinor and Beaver were in close proximity to each other, their decks swarming with Indians breaking open chests and shovelling tea into the water. The others were family portraits, evidently husband and wife—she, small and straight and prim, in a high crowned cap with a wide frill shading her face—he, large and tall, with a black stock, which nearly touched his ears, and his forefingers joined together and pointing in a straight line at the right knee, which was elevated above the left. “A kind of abandoned position,” Uncle Zach was accustomed to say to his guests when calling their attention to this portrait of his

wife’s great-grandfather, who assisted at the Tea Party, and gave, it was said, the most blood-curdling whoop which was heard on that memorable night. A blue cross on the figure of a man on the deck of the Dartmouth indicated which Zacheus had decided was his wife’s ancestor.

He was very proud of the pictures. “Wouldn’t take fifty dollars for em. No, sir,—and I don’t believe I’d take a hundred. Offer it, and see,” he frequently said. But no one had offered it, and they still hung in their respective places in the best room of the hotel except when, as was the case this morning, they were brought 9out and placed at a safe distance from the scene of confusion around them.

There were brooms and mops and scrubbing brushes and pails and the smell of soap suds in the vicinity of the wing at the west end of the hotel, where the fiercest battle was raging. Four women, with their sleeves rolled up and towels on their heads, were making a terrible onslaught on something, no one could tell what, for there was neither dust nor dirt to be seen.

“But, Lord land, it’s Dot’s way to scrub, and you can no more stop her than you can the wind. She’s great on cleaning house, Dot is, and you can’t control wimmen, so I let ’em slide,” Uncle Zach said to a young man whom, after his examination of the thermometer, he found on the north piazza, fanning himself with a newspaper and occasionally sipping lemonade through a straw and trying to get interested in Browning’s Sordello. After reading a page or two and failing to catch the meaning, he closed the book and welcomed Uncle Zach with a smile as he sank panting into a rocking chair much too large for him, for he was as small of stature as the Zacheus for whom he was named, and whose clothes he might have worn had they been handed down to so late a date as the 19th century. “This I call comfortable, and somethin’ like it. How be you feelin’ to-day? You don’t look quite as pimpin as you did two weeks ago, when you come here,” he said to the young man, who replied that he didn’t feel pimpin at all,—that the air was doing him good, and in a short

time he hoped to be as well as ever.

Had you looked on the hotel register you would have seen the name, Craig Mason, Boston, and above it that of Mrs. Henry Mason, his mother. Craig had never been very strong, and during his college course at Yale, had 10applied himself so closely to study that his health had suffered from it, and soon after he was graduated he had come to Ridgefield, hoping much from the pure air and quiet he would find there. Nor could he have found a more favorable spot for nerves unstrung and a tired brain.

Just where Ridgefield is does not matter. There is such a place, and it lies on the Boston and Albany Railroad, which keeps it in touch with the world outside and saves it from stagnation. It is a typical New England town, full of rocks and hills and leafy woods, through which pleasant roads lead off and up to isolated farmhouses, some of them a hundred years old and more, and all with slanting roofs, big chimneys and low ceilings and little panes of glass.

These are the houses from which the young generation, tired of the barren soil and hard labor which yields so little in return, emigrates to broader fields of action and a more stirring life, but to which the father and the mother, to whom every tree and shrub is dear, because identified with their early married life, cling with a tenacity which only death can sever.

A river has its rise somewhere among the hills, and there are little ponds or lakes where in summer the white lilies grow in great profusion, and where in winter the girls and boys skate on moonlight nights, and men cut great blocks of ice for the Prospect House, which in July and August attracts many city people to its cool, roomy quarters. The house was built before the railroad was thought of, and in the days when stages plied between Boston and Albany and made it their stopping place for refreshments and change of horses. It was called a tavern when Zacheus Taylor brought his wife Dorothy there and became its owner. 11“Taylor’s Tavern” he christened it, and that name was on the creaking black sign in large white letters, and the little man always rubbed his hands together with pride when he looked at it and remembered that he was the Taylor whose name could be distinctly seen at a distance as you came up the street either from the east or the west. “A kind of beacon light,” he used to say, “tellin’ the played out traveler that there is rest for the weary

at Taylor’s tavern.”

It was a pleasant sight to see him greet his guests with the cheery words, “Glad to see you. How are you? All fired tired, I know. Walk right in to the settin’ room. Dotty has got dinner most ready. Dotty is my wife, and I am Mr. Taylor,” with a nod towards the spot where Taylor’s Tavern swung. But if he were the Taylor, Dorothy was to all intents and purposes the Tavern,—the man of the house, who had managed everything from the time she took possession of her new home and began to understand that a clearer head was needed than the one on her husband’s shoulders if they were to succeed. Her head was clear, and her hands willing, and Taylor’s Tavern became famous for its good table, its clean beds and general air of homely hospitality. As years went by a few city people began to ask for board during the summer, and with their advent matters changed a little. There were finer linen and china and the extravagance of a dozen solid silver forks to be used only for the city boarders, and, when they were gone, to be wrapped in tissue paper and put carefully away in a

piece of old shawl on a shelf in a closet opening from Mrs. Taylor’s sleeping room. Uncle Zacheus submitted to the silver forks and china and linen, but when, as his wife grew more ambitious, she told him that “Taylor’s Tavern” was quite too old fashioned a name 12for their establishment, and suggested changing it to “Prospect House,” he resisted quite stoutly for him. The change would necessitate a new sign, and “Taylor’s Tavern” would disappear from sight. It was in vain that he protested, saying it would be like putting away a part of himself. Dorothy was firm and carried her point, as she usually did. The sign was taken down and the sign post, too, for the new name was to be over the principal entrance to the house, as it was in cities.

The sign post Zacheus had carried to the barn and put up in a loft as a family relic and reminder of other days. The signboard with “Taylor’s Tavern” upon it was laid reverently away in the garret in a big hair trunk which had belonged to his mother and held a few things which no one but himself often saw, for Dolly did not interfere with the trunk. Carefully wrapped in a pocket handkerchief was a baby’s white blanket, and pinned on it was a piece of paper with “Johnny’s Blanket” written upon it. Johnny was a little boy who died when only three days old and his father had taken the blanket and put it away in the trunk with some articles sacred to boyhood, such as a pair of broken skates, a woolen cap, a cornstalk fiddle, withered and dried, but kept for the sake of the brother who made it and who had sailed away to Calcutta as cabin boy in a ship which was lost with all on board. Giving up the sign was harder than any one suspected, and when he felt more than usually snubbed he would go up to the hair trunk and look at

it with affection and regret and as nearly as he was capable of it with a feeling that it embodied all the real manhood he had known since his marriage and with its disappearance his identification with the place had disappeared, leaving him a figure-head, known as, Uncle Zach, or Mrs. Taylor’s husband.

13She was never really unkind to him. She merely ignored his opinions, and brought him up rather sharp at times when he displeased her. Henpecked him, the neighbors said, while he called it “running her own canoe.”

“Not very hefty,” was the most she ever said of him to any one, and whether she meant mentally, or physically, or both, she did not explain. “Shiftless as the rot, with no more judgment or git up than a child,” was the worst she ever said to him, and he accepted her opinion as infallible and worshipped her as few women are worshipped by the man they hold in leading strings. She had been his Dot, or Dotty, when she was Dorothy Phelps and measured only half a yard round her waist, and he called her Dot still when she weighed two hundred and could throw him across the street. What she did was right, and after the burial of “Taylor’s Tavern” in the hair trunk he seldom objected to what she suggested, and when she told him she was going to improve and enlarge the house and make it into something worthy of its name, he told her to go ahead, and bore without any outward protest the discomfort of six weeks’ repairing, when carpenters and masons, plumbers and painters, transformed the old tavern into a comparatively modern structure of which Mrs. Taylor was very proud.

“I can advertise now with a good stomach,” she said, and every spring there appeared in the Boston papers and Worcester Spy and Springfield Republican, a notice setting forth the good qualities of the Prospect House and laying great stress upon its rooms and views. If the advertisement was to be believed, every woman could have a large corner room, with the finest view in all New England.

To some extent this was true; not all could have corner 14rooms, but all could have splendid views. If you faced the north you looked out upon what farmers call a mowing lot, where early in the summer the grass grew fresh and green, with here and there a sprinkling of cowslips, and later on lay on the ground in great swaths of newly mown hay, filling the air with a delicious perfume. Beyond were sunny pasture lands and wooded hills, and in the distance the church spires of North Ridgefield, with the smoke of its manufactories rising above the tree tops. If your room faced the east you looked up a long broad street, lined on either side with old-time houses, whose brass knockers and Corinthian pillars told of a past aristocracy before the steam engine thundered through the town and the whistle of a big shoe shop on a side street woke its employees at six o’clock and called them to work at seven. Here, nearly touching each other across the street, are gigantic elms, which tradition says were planted on the day when news of the Declaration of Independence reached the patriotic

town of Ridgefield. Liberty elms they are called, and they stretch along for nearly a mile from east to west, and, making a detour, spread their long branches protectingly across the Mall which leads into the Common. To the south is the railroad and the Chicopee winding its way through green meadows to a larger river which will take it to the Sound and thence to the sea whose waters bathe another continent. If your room was at the west you looked at your right on grassy hills, dotted with low roofed houses and on pastures where spoonwood and huckleberries grow. At your left the headstones of the cemetery gleam white among the evergreens and tell where Ridgefield’s dead are sleeping, the tall monuments keeping guard over the gentry of brass knocker and Corinthian pillar memory, and the less pretentious 15stones marking the last resting place of the middle class, the bourgeois,—for Ridgefield draws the line pretty close, and blue blood counts for more than money. Near the willows and close to a wall so wide that the children walk upon it as they go to and from school are the

old graves, whose dark, century stained stones have 17— upon them and are often visited by lovers of antiquity. Some of those who sleep there must have heard the guns of the Revolution and helped to plant the Liberty Elms which keep guard over them like watchful sentinels. The Ridgefield people are very proud of their old graves and their cemetery generally, especially the granite arch at the entrance with the words upon it:

This arch, with its background of marble and evergreens, is a prominent feature in the view from the west rooms of the Prospect House, and it was in these rooms that the battle of brooms and mops and soap suds was raging so fiercely on the hot July morning when our story opens.

CHAPTER II. THE CAUSE OF THE BATTLE.

Mrs. Taylor’s advertisements had paid her well, bringing every summer a few guests from Boston and its suburbs, but New York had not responded, and until it did Dorothy’s ambition would not be satisfied. Boston represented a great deal that was desirable, but New York represented more.

16“Why don’t you advertise in the New York papers?” Mark Hilton, the head clerk and real head of the house after herself, said to her, with the result that he was authorized to write an advertisement and have it inserted in as many New York papers as he thought best.

Three days later there appeared in several dailies a notice which would have startled Mrs. Taylor if she had seen it before it left Mark’s hands. It did throw Zacheus off his base when he at last read it in the New York Times.

“Wall, I’ll be dumbed,” he exclaimed, setting his spectacles more squarely on his nose and running his eyes rapidly over the article. “Yes, I’ll be dumbed if this don’t beat all for a whopper. I shouldn’t s’pose Dotty would have writ it, and she a church member! Mebby she didn’t. Here, Dot,—Dorothy, come here.”

She came and listened wide eyed while her husband read and commented as he read. The scenery of Ridgefield was described in glowing terms. “Hills and valleys for pleasant drives, two ponds and a river for sailing, rowing and fishing; many points of interest, such as haunted houses, and the like.”

“That’s all so,” Zacheus said, “except the ‘haunted houses.’ There ain’t but one, and that’s about played out. Queer thing to put in a paper; but listen to the rest of the lockrum,” and he proceeded to read a description of the house, which was nearly as fine as if a Vanderbilt had planned it. The cuisine was first mentioned as unsurpassed, and superintended by the lady of the house. “That’s you, Dot,” and Zacheus nodded toward her. “That’s you, but what the old Harry is that cu-i-sine you superintend?”

Dot didn’t know, and her husband went on to the rooms, which were palatial in size, handsomely furnished,—hot 17and cold water,—with intimations of suites of apartments, each connected with a private bathroom and balcony. It didn’t say so in so many words, but the idea was there and Uncle Zach saw it and disclaimed against it as false. “Hot and cold water,” he said. “That’s great; only two fassets, and them in the hall under the stairs near the dinin’ room where it’s handy for the teamsters to wash up before goin’ to dinner; and what’s them suits of rooms, I’d like to know, with baths and things? It’s a fraud; only one bathroom in the house and that always out of gear and wantin’ plummin’,—and I’ve a good mind to write to the Times and tell ’em so. You didn’t have nothin’ to do with this, Dotty, did you?”

“No,” she replied, glancing at Mark Hilton, who sat in the office listening to the tirade and shaking with laughter.

“I wrote it,” he said at last, “and it is quite as true as most of the ads you see, and those rooms in the upper hall which open together are suites, if you choose to call them so.”

“Sweets! Who said anything about sweets? The paper called ’em suits,” the excited man rejoined, while Mark explained the sweets and cu-i-sine which had puzzled Zacheus more than the suits.

“I wanted something to attract New Yorkers,” Mark said, “and perhaps I did romance a little, but once get them here they’ll be all right.”

Partially satisfied with this explanation, but wondering why he should have mentioned the haunted house, with which, in a way, he was connected, and glad Dotty had nothing to do with the fraud, as he persisted in calling the advertisement, Zach gave up his idea of writing to the Times, and with his wife began to look for any result 18the advertisement might have. It came sooner than they anticipated in a letter from Mrs. Freeman Tracy of New York, whose grandfather, Gen. Allen, had lived behind the largest brass knocker and Corinthian columns in town and was lying under the tallest monument in Ridgefield cemetery. She had seen the advertisement, she wrote, and as she had, when a child, spent a few weeks with her grandfather, she had a most delightful recollection of the town and wished to revisit it. She would like a suite of rooms with bath adjoining for herself and daughter,—a smaller room near for her maid, and her meals served in her private parlor. She had just returned from abroad, and called it a salon, which puzzled Mrs. Taylor a little, until enlightened by Mrs. Mason,

her Boston boarder, who, with her son Craig, was content with a table in the dining room. To be served in a salon was a new departure and if anything could have raised Mrs. Freeman Tracy in Mrs. Taylor’s estimation, the salon would have done it. This, however, was scarcely possible. The granddaughter of General Allen was a guest to be proud of without a salon, and Mrs. Taylor was thrown into a state of great excitement and Mark Hilton was told to write to the lady that she could be accommodated.