Mam'selle JoComstock, Harriet T. (Harriet Theresa)
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Mam'selle Jo
Comstock, Harriet T. (Harriet Theresa)
Saint Lawrence River Valley -- Fiction; Self-sacrifice -- Fiction; Single women -- Fiction
I felt that everything worth while had been taken: Jack, my babies.
Only the money remained, and that I hated, because it could not keep
what I wanted. But you were splendid when you said, "make the thing you
despise a blessing!" I’ve tried, Man-Andy, to make it a blessing to
others, and it is becoming a blessing to me. I feel I am using it for
Jack and for the babies and that they are making it sacred. I feared
that in this big, empty house the ghosts would haunt me; not the strange
old history ghosts of great ladies and dashing men who used to forget
their homesickness for their mother-countries by revelling in this
shelter in the New World. I did not think of them, for do you not
remember Jack’s comical ghost hunts? How he joked about it, saying that
he’d yet lure some old English or French aristocrat to stay and sanctify
our presence by his sponsorship? But oh! I did fear the memories of my
man’s dear, jovial ways, the pretty babble of my little babies.
And then—I know I am rambling shamefully, but I cannot sleep, the
moonlight is flooding the garden—I hear Professor Revelle’s violin.
Andy, he has actually recovered to the extent of music when he thinks I
do not know. As I look at the dear old soul, so like a gentle wraith, I
remember how you and father and Jack adored his music and how Jack
grieved when illness and poverty stilled it. But you found him,
Man-Andy, and you lent him to me to save, and his music at least has
been given back to him. Not with its old fire and passion—I think if
any demand were made upon him he might be aroused. I may take lessons
myself some day. But he plays dreamily, softly when he is alone,
generally in the garden and at night. He forgets his blindness then.
But to-day I had a caller. I wonder if you remember the nice Mam’selle
Jo Morey that Jack and I used to talk about? You have some of her
linens in your studio. You may recall the incident of the summer when
we told you of her troubles; her desertion by a man of the place and the
death of her imbecile sister? I had almost forgotten it myself, so much
has happened since then, but it all came back to me to-day when she came
with her story.
Andy, her story is quite the most tragic a woman can have; such things
happen even here. She did not cringe or whine, I would have hated her
if she had; you know how I feel about such things. My Mam’selle Jo does
not whine!
There was a child, and now that Mam’selle can afford to do well by it,
she has taken it. She has done this so quietly and simply that it has
shocked the breath out of the very moral Point of Pines. Still, before
the breath left the body of the hamlet, it hissed! And when it recovers
its breath it is going to hound this poor Mam’selle, whose shoes it is
not worthy to touch. It’s going to hound and snarl and snap, two of its
inhabitants have done it already, and the Mam’selle Morey is not going
to have her child harried for what she is innocent of!
Isn’t this a situation?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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