University of Virginia Library

32. CHAPTER XXXII.
CLIFTON.

THEY were very full at Clifton that summer, for
the new building was not completed, and every
available point was taken, from narrow, contracted
No. 94 in the upper hall down to more spacious No. 8
on the lower floor, where the dampness, and noise, and
mould, and smell of coal and cooking, and bath-rooms,
made it anything but agreeable. “A very quiet place,
with only a few invalids, too weak and languid, and too
much absorbed in themselves and their `complaints' to
note or care for their neighbors; a place where one lives
almost as much excluded from the world as if immured
within convent walls; a place where dress, and fashion, and
distinction, were unknown, save as something existing afar
off, where the turmoil and excitement of life were going
on.” This was Ethelyn's idea of Clifton; and when, at
four o'clock, on a bright June afternoon, the heavily-laden
train stopped before the little brown station, and “Clifton”
was shouted in her ears, she looked out with a bewildered
kind of feeling upon the crowd of gayly-dressed people
congregated upon the platform. Heads were uncovered,

and hair frizzled, and curled, and braided, and puffed, and
arranged in every conceivable shape, showing that even to
that “quiet town” the hairdresser's craft had penetrated.
Expanded crinoline, with light, fleecy robes, and ribbons,
and laces, and flowers, was there, with bright, eager, healthful
faces, and snowy hands wafting kisses to some departing
friend, and then stretched out to greet some new arrival.
There was no trace of sickness, no token of disease
among the smiling crowd; and Ethelyn feared she had
made a mistake and alighted at the wrong place, as she
gave her checks to John, and then taking her seat in the
omnibus, sat waiting and listening to the lively sallies and
playful remarks around her. Nobody spoke to her, nobody
stared at her, nobody seemed to think of her; and
for that she was thankful, as she sat with her veil drawn
closely over her face, looking out upon the not very pretentious
dwellings they were passing. The scenery around
Clifton is charming; and to the worn, weary invalid, escaping
from the noise, and heat, and bustle of the busy city, there
seems to come a rest and a quiet, from the sunlight which
falls upon the hills, to the cool, moist meadow-lands, where
the ferns and the mosses grow, and where the rippling
of the sulphur brook gives out constantly a soothing,
pleasant kind of music. But for the architecture of the
town not very much can be said; and Ethie, who had
longed to get away from Chicopee, where everybody knew
her story, and all looked so curiously at her, confessed to
a feeling of homesickness as her eyes fell upon the blacksmith
shop, the dressmaker's sign, the grocery on the corner,
where were sold various articles of food forbidden by
doctor and nurse; the school-house to the right, where a
group of noisy children played, and the little church further
on, where the Methodist people worshipped. She did not
see the “Cottage” then, with its flowers, and vines, and
nicely shaven lawn, for her back was to it; nor the handsome
grounds, where the shadows from the tall trees fall
so softly upon the velvet grass; and the winding gravelled
walks, which intersect each other, and give an impression
of greater space than a closer investigation will warrant.

“I can't stay here,” was Ethie's thought, as she stepped
into the hall and was conducted to her room, feeling utterly
lonely and wretched, and certain that she never could be
contented there.

She had not yet met the kindness and sympathy of those
whose business it is to care for the patients, or felt the influences
for good, the tendency to rouse all the better impulses
of our nature, which seems to pervade the very
atmosphere of Clifton. But she felt this influence very
soon, and her second letter to Aunt Barbara was filled with
praises of Clifton, where she had made so many friends, in
spite of her evident desire to avoid society and stay by her
self. She had passed through the usual ordeal attending
the advent of every new face, especially if that face be a
little out of the common order of faces. She had been
inspected in the dining-room, and bath-room, and chapel,
both when she went in and when she went out. She had
been talked up and criticised from the way she wore her
hair to the hang of her skirts, which had trailed the floor
with a sweep unmistakably aristocratic, and stamped her
as somebody. The sack and hat brought from Paris had
been copied by three or four, and pronounced distingué,
but ugly by as many more, while Mrs. Peter Pry set herself
industriously at work to find out just who and what Miss
Bigelow was. As the result of this research, it had been

ascertained that the young lady was remotely connected
with the Bigelows of Boston, and had something of her
own,—that she had spent several years abroad, and could
speak both French and German with perfect ease; that she
had been at the top of Mont Blanc, and passed part of a
winter at St. Petersburg, and seen a crocodile in the river
Nile, and a Moslem burying-ground in Constantinople, and
had the cholera at Milan, the varioloid at Rome, and was
marked between the eyes and on the chin, and was twenty-five
years old, and did not wear false hair, nor use Laird's
Liquid Pearl, as was at first suspected from the clearness
of her complexion, and did wear crimping-pins at night,
and pay Annie, the bath-girl, extra for bringing up the
morning-bath, and was more interested in the chapel exercises
when the great Head Centre was there, and bought
cream every morning of Mrs. King, and sat up at night long
after the gas was turned off, and was at Clifton for spine in
the back, and head difficulties generally. These few items,
together with the surmise that she had had some great
trouble,—a disappointment, most likely, which affected
her health,—were all Mrs. Pry could learn, and she detailed
them to any one who would listen, until Ethelyn's history,
from the Pry point of view, was pretty generally known,
and the most made of every good quality and virtue.

The Mrs. Pry of this summer was not ill-natured; she
was simply curious; and as she said more good than evil
of people, she was generally liked and tolerated by all. She
was not a fashionable woman, nor an educated woman,
though very popular with her neighbors at home, and she
was there for numbness and swollen knees; and having
knit socks for four years for the soldiers, she now knit
stockings for the soldiers' orphans, and took a dash every

morning, and screamed loud enough to be heard to the
depot when she took it, and had a pack every afternoon,
and corked her right ear with cotton, which she always
took out when in a pack, so as to hear whatever might be
said in the hall, her open ventilator being the medium of
sound. This was Mrs. Peter Pry, drawn from no one in
particular, but a fair exponent of characters found in other
places than Clifton Springs. Rooming on the same floor
with Ethelyn, whom she greatly admired, the good woman
persisted until she overcame the stranger's shyness, and
succeeded in establishing, first, a bowing, then a speaking,
and finally, a calling acquaintance between them,—the calls,
however, being mostly upon one side, and that the prying
one.

Ethie had been at Clifton for three or four weeks,
and the dimensions of No. 101 did not seem half so
circumscribed as at first. On the whole, she was contented,
especially after the man who snored, and the
woman who wore squeaky boots, and talked in her sleep,
vacated No. 102, the large, airy, pleasant room adjoining
her own. There was no one in it now, but Mary,
the chambermaid, said it was soon to be occupied by a
sick gentleman, adding that she believed he had the consumption,
and hoping his coughing would not fret Miss
Bigelow. Ethie hoped so, too. Nervousness, and, indeed,
diseases of all kinds, seem to develop rapidly at Clifton,
where one has nothing to do but to watch each new
symptom, and report to physician or nurse, and Ethie was
not an exception. She was very nervous, and she found
herself dreading the arrival of the sick man, wondering
if his coughing would keep her awake nights, and if
the light from her candle shining out into the darkened hall

would annoy and worry him, as it had worried the woman
opposite, who complained that she could not rest with that
glimmer on the wall, showing that somebody was up, who
might at any moment make a noise. That he was a person
of consequence she readily guessed, for an extra pair
of pillows was taken into his room, and a rocking-chair
possessed of two whole arms, and No. 109, also vacant
just then, was rifled of its round stand and footstool,
and Mrs. Pry reported that Dr. F— himself had been
up to see that all was comfortable, and Miss Clark had
ordered a better set of springs, with a new hair mattress,
and somebody had put a bouquet of flowers in the room,
and hung a muslin curtain at the window.

“A bigbug, most likely,” Mrs. Peter Pry said, when,
after her pack, she brought her knitting for a few moments
into Ethelyn's room, and wondered who the man
could be.

Ethelyn did not care particularly who he was, provided
he did not cough nights, and keep her awake, in which case
she should feel constrained to change her room, an alternative
she did not care to contemplate, as she had become
more attached to No. 101 than she had at first supposed it
possible. Ethelyn was very nervous that day, and, had she
believed in presentiments, she would have thought that
something was about to befall her, so heavy was the gloom
weighing upon her spirits, and so dark the future looked to
her. She was going to have a headache, she feared, and as
a means of throwing it off, she started for a walk to Rocky
Run, a distance of a mile or more. It was a cool, hazy
July afternoon, such as always carried Ethie back to Chicopee,
and the days of her happy girlhood, when her heart
was not so heavy and sad as it was now. With thoughts

of Chicopee came also thoughts of Richard, and Ethie's
eyes were moist with tears as she looked toward the setting
sun, and wondered if he ever thought of her now, or had
he forgotten her, and was the story true of his seeking for
a divorce? That rumor had troubled Ethie greatly, and
was the reason why she did not improve as the physician
hoped she would when she first came to Clifton. Sitting
down upon the bridge across the creek, she bowed her
head in her hands, and went over again with all the dreadful
past, blaming herself now more than she did Richard,
and wishing that much could be undone of all that had
transpired to make her what she was; and while she sat
there the Western train appeared in view, and mechanically
rising to her feet, Ethie turned her steps back toward the
Cure, standing aside to let the long train go by, and
feeling, when it passed her, a strange, sudden throb, as if it
were fraught with more than ordinary interest to her.
Usually, that Western train, the distant roll of whose
wheels, and the echo of whose scream, quickened so many
hearts waiting for news from home, had no special interest for
her. It never brought her a letter. Her name was never
called in the exciting distribution which took place in the
parlor, or on the long piazza, after the eight o'clock mail
arrived, and so she seldom heeded it; but to-night there
was a difference, and she watched the long line curiously
until it passed the corner by the old brown farm-house and
disappeared from view. It had left the station long ere
she reached the Cure, for she had walked slowly, and lights
were shining from the different rooms, and there was a
sound of singing in the parlor, and the party of croquet
players had come up from the lawn, and ladies were hurrying
toward the bath-room, when she came in and climbed
the three flights of stairs which led to the fourth floor.
There was a light in No. 102, the door was partly ajar, and
the doctor was there, asking some question of the tall
figure, whose outline Ethelyn dimly descried as she went
into her room. There was more talking after a little,—
more going in and out; while Mary Ann brought up some
supper on a tray, and John brought a travelling trunk much
larger than himself; and, without Mrs. Pry's assurance,
Ethie knew that the occupant of No. 102 had arrived.