Acushticook has changed her course from time to time through the centuries, and about five miles from town a stretch of flat land which must once have been either intervale along the river’s course or one of its many small lakes, lies pocketed among the hills. This stretch, which is very fertile, belongs, or belonged, to the Dunnacks, and they were surely a family which will be remembered. They never pretended to be anything more than plain farming people, but they were marked by a personal dignity and refinement, even fastidiousness, by their intelligence, and alas, by their many sorrows. Old Warren Dunnack was a farmer of substance. His son, the Warren Dunnack of our time, was nearly all his life in charge of the “Homestead” (one of the few country places in our neighborhood), during the long absence abroad of its owners. He married a beautiful woman, Sarah Brant. She was a magnificent creature, in a hard, almost animal sort of way, but was a shallow person, with a vain nature, coveting show, fine food and clothes, and she broke Warren’s heart. He took her back again and again after her many flights, for he had an unconquerable chivalry and gentleness for all women, and he let her have everything that he could earn.
[Illustration: INTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER’S COURSE]
Lucretia was the beauty of the family, a slip of a girl with eyes like black diamonds. She married a showy business man, who turned out badly. She came home, a handsome and embittered older woman, and made life uncomfortable for herself and everyone else on the farm. Afterwards she became companion to a widow of some means, a fantastic person, and they lived together (unharmoniously) all their days.
Delia, who was so pretty, though not striking like Lucretia, married silly Ephraim Simmons; but her affection for her brother Warren was the abiding thing of her life. When Warren’s wife left him, and Delia was offered the position of housekeeper at the Homestead, she took it, and there she and Warren kept house for fifteen years. Two good-natured slack daughters (they were all Simmons; not a trace of their mother’s fire in them) helped Ephraim with his farm, and he certainly needed the money that their mother earned. He was a poor enough farmer; but his foolish face used to look wistful when he drove the six miles, every other Saturday, to see Delia.