The house faced the college campus and was the only one in the block. This, in Georgetown, implies a lawn of no small dimensions; the place had neither gardener’s house nor porter’s lodge—nothing but that old home half hidden by ancient elms. For many a year it had stood with closed doors in the very heart of that prosperous Kentucky town, presenting a gloomy aspect and exercising for many a singular attraction. Near the deep veranda a great tree, whose boughs were no longer held in check by trimming, had thrust one of its branches through the frontmost window. Dampness had attacked everything. The upper balcony was loosened, the roof warped, and lizards sunned themselves on the wall.
As for the garden, long ago it had lapsed into a chaotic state. The thistle and the pale poppy grew in fragrant tangle with the wild ivy and Virginia creeper, and wilful weeds thrust their way across the gravel walks.
Sadly old residents saw the place approaching the last stages of decay—saw this house, once the pride of the town, in its decrepitude and loneliness the plaything of the elements.
“A noble wreck! It must have a history of some kind,” strangers would remark.
“Ah, that it has, and a sombre one it is!” any man or woman living near would have answered, as they recalled the history of Richard Harding’s home. For the fate of Richard Harding was a sad memory to them. They remembered how he had been the representative of a fine old family and that much of his fortune had been spent in beautifying this place, to make it a fitting home for Catharine Field, his bride.
She too had been of gentle birth and held an important place in their memory as one who brought with her to this rural community the wider experience usual to a young woman educated in Boston, who, after a few seasons of social success in an ultra fashionable set, has crowned her many achievements by a brilliant marriage.
Her husband adored her and showed his devotion by humoring her extravagant tastes and prodigal fancies. He detested gayeties, yet complied with her slightest wish for social pleasures.
Although it was generally agreed that this young couple got on well together, at the end of two years the husband had to admit to himself that his efforts to render his wife happy had not been entirely successful. He saw that she fretted for her northern life, was bored by everything about her. She cherished a bitter resentment for the slaveholders, vowing that it was barbarous and inhuman to own human beings as her husband and neighbors did. Though expressing pity for the poor, simple, dependent creatures, she did little to make their tasks more healthful and reasonable ones, or to render them more capable and contented.
Her baby’s nurse was the one servant of her household who met with gracious treatment at her hands. This old slave came to her endowed with the womanly virtues of honor, self-respect and humility. But in marveling at her on these accounts, Mrs. Harding forgot that it was the former mistress—her husband’s mother—that had made her what she was.
At length the truth became clearly apparent that she was an obstinate, intensely prejudiced and very unreasonable woman, who, having lived for a time at a centre of fashionable intelligence in a city of culture, supposed herself to be quite beyond the reach of and entirely superior to ordinary country folk. Eventually, her morbid dissatisfaction became so extreme that her husband yielded to her importunities, closed the house, and with her and their baby boy, went to live in Boston.
This sacrifice he made quietly and uncomplainingly, his closest friends not then knowing how it wrenched his heart. A year passed, then another, and at the end of the third, the papers announced the death of Richard Harding.
Though never again seeing his southern home, where he had planned to live his life in peace and useful happiness, it had held to the end a most sacred place in his memory—a memory which he truly hoped would be transmittted to the heart and mind of his son. It was his last wish that the old homestead should remain as it was—closed to strangers—that no living being, unless of his own blood, should inhabit that abode of love and sorrow, that it be kept from the careless profanation of aliens.
The world prophesied that his widow would soon forget the wishes of the dead, but as witness that she had thus far kept faith, there stood the closed, abandoned home, upon which Nature alone laid a destroying hand.