and said it smelt like a flower. And then he asked if he might offer it to me–just for a joke, you know. And I took it, and stuck it in my belt. And we had such a laugh! We got into a regular gale. And O Pen, what do you suppose he meant by it?” She suddenly caught herself to her sister’s breast, and hid her burning face on her shoulder.
“Well, there used to be a book about the language of flowers. But I never knew much about the language of shavings, and I can’t say exactly—-“
“Oh, don’t–DON’T, Pen!” and here Irene gave over laughing, and began to sob in her sister’s arms.
“Why, ‘Rene!” cried the elder girl.
“You KNOW he didn’t mean anything. He doesn’t care a bit about me. He hates me! He despises me! Oh, what shall I do?”
A trouble passed over the face of the sister as she silently comforted the child in her arms; then the drolling light came back into her eyes. “Well, ‘Rene, YOU haven’t got to do ANYthing. That’s one advantage girls have got–if it IS an advantage. I’m not always sure.”
Irene’s tears turned to laughing again. When she lifted her head it was to look into the mirror confronting them, where her beauty showed all the more brilliant for the shower that had passed over it. She seemed to gather courage from the sight.
“It must be awful to have to DO,” she said, smiling into her own face. “I don’t see how they ever can.”
“Some of ’em can’t–especially when there’s such a tearing beauty around.”
“Oh, pshaw, Pen! you know that isn’t so. You’ve got a real pretty mouth, Pen,” she added thoughtfully, surveying the feature in the glass, and then pouting her own lips for the sake of that effect on them.
“It’s a useful mouth,” Penelope admitted; “I don’t believe I could get along without it now, I’ve had it so long.”
“It’s got such a funny expression–just the mate of the look in your eyes; as if you were just going to say something ridiculous. He said, the very first time he saw you, that he knew you were humorous.”
“Is it possible?” must be so, if the Grand Mogul said it. Why didn’t you tell me so before, and not let me keep on going round just like a common person?”
Irene laughed as if she liked to have her sister take his praises in that way rather than another.
“I’ve got such a stiff, prim kind of mouth,” she said, drawing it down, and then looking anxiously at it.
“I hope you didn’t put on that expression when he offered you the shaving. If you did, I don’t believe he’ll ever give you another splinter.”
The severe mouth broke into a lovely laugh, and then pressed itself in a kiss against Penelope’s cheek.
“There! Be done, you silly thing! I’m not going to have you accepting ME before I’ve offered myself, ANYWAY.” She freed herself from her sister’s embrace, and ran from her round the room.
Irene pursued her, in the need of hiding her face against her shoulder again. “O Pen! O Pen!” she cried.
The next day, at the first moment of finding herself alone with her eldest daughter, Mrs. Lapham asked, as if knowing that Penelope must have already made it subject of inquiry: “What was Irene doing with that shaving in her belt yesterday?”
“Oh, just some nonsense of hers with Mr. Corey. He gave it to her at the new house.” Penelope did not choose to look up and meet her mother’s grave glance.
“What do you think he meant by it?”
Penelope repeated Irene’s account of the affair, and her mother listened without seeming to derive much encouragement from it.
“He doesn’t seem like one to flirt with her,” she said at last. Then, after a thoughtful pause: “Irene is as good a girl as ever breathed, and she’s a perfect beauty. But I should hate the day when a daughter of mine was married for her beauty.”
“You’re safe as far as I’m concerned, mother.”
Mrs. Lapham smiled ruefully. “She isn’t really equal to him, Pen. I misdoubted that from the first, and it’s been borne in upon me more and more ever since. She hasn’t mind enough.” “I didn’t know that a man fell in love with a girl’s intellect,” said Penelope quietly.
“Oh no. He hasn’t fallen in love with Irene at all. If he had, it wouldn’t matter about the intellect.”
Penelope let the self-contradiction pass.
“Perhaps he has, after all.”
“No,” said Mrs. Lapham. “She pleases him when he sees her. But he doesn’t try to see her.”
“He has no chance. You won’t let father bring him here.”
“He would find excuses to come without being brought, if he wished to come,” said the mother. “But she isn’t in his mind enough to make him. He goes away and doesn’t think anything more about her. She’s a child. She’s a good child, and I shall always say it; but she’s nothing but a child. No, she’s got to forget him.”
“Perhaps that won’t be so easy.”
“No, I presume not. And now your father has got the notion in his head, and he will move heaven and earth to bring it to pass. I can see that he’s always thinking about it.”
“The Colonel has a will of his own,” observed the girl, rocking to and fro where she sat looking at her mother.
“I wish we had never met them!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “I wish we had never thought of building! I wish he had kept away from your father’s business!”
“Well, it’s too late now, mother,” said the girl. “Perhaps it isn’t so bad as you think.”
“Well, we must stand it, anyway,” said Mrs. Lapham, with the grim antique Yankee submission.
“Oh yes, we’ve got to stand it,” said Penelope, with the quaint modern American fatalism.
X.
IT was late June, almost July, when Corey took up his life in Boston again, where the summer slips away so easily. If you go out of town early, it seems a very long summer when you come back in October; but if you stay, it passes swiftly, and, seen foreshortened in its flight, seems scarcely a month’s length. It has its days of heat, when it is very hot, but for the most part it is cool, with baths of the east wind that seem to saturate the soul with delicious freshness. Then there are stretches of grey westerly weather, when the air is full of the sentiment of early autumn, and the frying, of the grasshopper in the blossomed weed of the vacant lots on the Back Bay is intershot with the carol of crickets; and the yellowing leaf on the long slope of Mt. Vernon Street smites the sauntering observer with tender melancholy. The caterpillar, gorged with the spoil of the lindens on Chestnut, and weaving his own shroud about him in his lodgment on the brick-work, records the passing of summer by mid-July; and if after that comes August, its breath is thick and short, and September is upon the sojourner before he has fairly had time to philosophise the character of the town out of season.
But it must have appeared that its most characteristic feature was the absence of everybody he knew. This was one of the things that commended Boston to Bromfield Corey during the summer; and if his son had any qualms about the life he had entered upon with such vigour, it must have been a relief to him that there was scarcely a soul left to wonder or pity. By the time people got back to town the fact of his connection with the mineral paint man would be an old story, heard afar off with different degrees of surprise, and considered with different degrees of indifference. A man has not reached the age of twenty-six in any community where he was born and reared without having had his capacity pretty well ascertained; and in Boston the analysis is conducted with an unsparing thoroughness which may fitly impress the un-Bostonian mind, darkened by the popular superstition that the Bostonians blindly admire one another. A man’s qualities are sifted as closely in Boston as they doubtless were in Florence or Athens; and, if final mercy was shown in those cities because a man was, with all his limitations, an Athenian or Florentine, some abatement might as justly be made in Boston for like reason. Corey’s powers had been gauged in college, and he had not given his world reason to think very differently of him since he came out of college. He was rated as an energetic fellow, a little indefinite in aim, with the smallest amount of inspiration that can save a man from being commonplace. If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet–a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences. Some of the more nervous and excitable said that Tom Corey was as sweet as he could live; but this perhaps meant no more than the word alone. No man ever had a son less like him than Bromfield Corey. If Tom Corey had ever said a witty thing, no one could remember it; and yet the father had never said a witty thing to a more sympathetic listener than his own son. The clear mind which produced nothing but practical results reflected everything with charming lucidity; and it must have been this which endeared Tom Corey to every one who spoke ten words with him. In a city where people have good reason for liking to shine, a man who did not care to shine must be little short of universally acceptable without any other effort for popularity; and those who admired and enjoyed Bromfield Corey loved his son. Yet, when it came to accounting for Tom Corey, as it often did in a community where every one’s generation is known to the remotest degrees of cousinship, they could not trace his sweetness to his mother, for neither Anna Bellingham nor any of her family, though they were so many blocks of Wenham ice for purity and rectangularity, had ever had any such savour; and, in fact, it was to his father, whose habit of talk wronged it in himself, that they had to turn for this quality of the son’s. They traced to the mother the traits of practicality and common-sense in which he bordered upon the commonplace, and which, when they had dwelt upon them, made him seem hardly worth the close inquiry they had given him.
While the summer wore away he came and went methodically about his business, as if it had been the business of his life, sharing his father’s bachelor liberty and solitude, and expecting with equal patience the return of his mother and sisters in the autumn. Once or twice he found time to run down to Mt. Desert and see them; and then he heard how the Philadelphia and New York people were getting in everywhere, and was given reason to regret the house at Nahant which he had urged to be sold. He came back and applied himself to his desk with a devotion that was exemplary rather than necessary; for Lapham made no difficulty about the brief absences which he asked, and set no term to the apprenticeship that Corey was serving in the office before setting off upon that mission to South America in the early winter, for which no date had yet been fixed.
The summer was a dull season for the paint as well as for everything else. Till things should brisk up, as Lapham said, in the fall, he was letting the new house take a great deal of his time. AEsthetic ideas had never been intelligibly presented to him before, and he found a delight in apprehending them that was very grateful to his imaginative architect. At the beginning, the architect had foreboded a series of mortifying defeats and disastrous victories in his encounters with his client; but he had never had a client who could be more reasonably led on from one outlay to another. It appeared that Lapham required but to understand or feel the beautiful effect intended, and he was ready to pay for it. His bull-headed pride was concerned in a thing which the architect made him see, and then he believed that he had seen it himself, perhaps conceived it. In some measure the architect seemed to share his delusion, and freely said that Lapham was very suggestive. Together they blocked out windows here, and bricked them up there; they changed doors and passages; pulled down cornices and replaced them with others of different design; experimented with costly devices of decoration, and went to extravagant lengths in novelties of finish. Mrs. Lapham, beginning with a woman’s adventurousness in the unknown region, took fright at the reckless outlay at last, and refused to let her husband pass a certain limit. He tried to make her believe that a far-seeing economy dictated the expense; and that if he put the money into the house, he could get it out any time by selling it. She would not be persuaded.
“I don’t want you should sell it. And you’ve put more money into it now than you’ll ever get out again, unless you can find as big a goose to buy it, and that isn’t likely. No, sir! You just stop at a hundred thousand, and don’t you let him get you a cent beyond. Why, you’re perfectly bewitched with that fellow! You’ve lost your head, Silas Lapham, and if you don’t look out you’ll lose your money too.”
The Colonel laughed; he liked her to talk that way, and promised he would hold up a while.
“But there’s no call to feel anxious, Pert. It’s only a question what to do with the money. I can reinvest it; but I never had so much of it to spend before.”
“Spend it, then,” said his wife; “don’t throw it away! And how came you to have so much more money than you know what to do with, Silas Lapham?” she added.
“Oh, I’ve made a very good thing in stocks lately.”
“In stocks? When did you take up gambling for a living?”
“Gambling? Stuff! What gambling? Who said it was gambling?”
“You have; many a time.”
“Oh yes, buying and selling on a margin. But this was a bona fide transaction. I bought at forty-three for an investment, and I sold at a hundred and seven; and the money passed both times.”
“Well, you better let stocks alone,” said his wife, with the conservatism of her sex. “Next time you’ll buy at a hundred and seven and sell at forty three. Then where’ll you be?”
“Left,” admitted the Colonel.
“You better stick to paint a while yet.” The Colonel enjoyed this too, and laughed again with the ease of a man who knows what he is about. A few days after that he came down to Nantasket with the radiant air which he wore when he had done a good thing in business and wanted his wife’s sympathy. He did not say anything of what had happened till he was alone with her in their own room; but he was very gay the whole evening, and made several jokes which Penelope said nothing but very great prosperity could excuse: they all understood these moods of his.
“Well, what is it, Silas?” asked his wife when the time came. “Any more big-bugs wanting to go into the mineral paint business with you?”
“Something better than that.”
“I could think of a good many better things,” said his wife, with a sigh of latent bitterness. “What’s this one?”
“I’ve had a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“I don’t want to try. Who was it?”
“Rogers.”
Mrs. Lapham sat down with her hands in her lap, and stared at the smile on her husband’s face, where he sat facing her.
“I guess you wouldn’t want to joke on that subject, Si,” she said, a little hoarsely, “and you wouldn’t grin about it unless you had some good news. I don’t know what the miracle is, but if you could tell quick—-“
She stopped like one who can say no more.
“I will, Persis,” said her husband, and with that awed tone in which he rarely spoke of anything but the virtues of his paint. “He came to borrow money of me, and I lent him it. That’s the short of it. The long—-“
“Go on,” said his wife, with gentle patience.
“Well, Pert, I was never so much astonished in my life as I was to see that man come into my office. You might have knocked me down with–I don’t know what.”
“I don’t wonder. Go on!”
“And he was as much embarrassed as I was. There we stood, gaping at each other, and I hadn’t hardly sense enough to ask him to take a chair. I don’t know just how we got at it. And I don’t remember just how it was that he said he came to come to me. But he had got hold of a patent right that he wanted to go into on a large scale, and there he was wanting me to supply him the funds.”
“Go on!” said Mrs. Lapham, with her voice further in her throat.
“I never felt the way you did about Rogers, but I know how you always did feel, and I guess I surprised him with my answer. He had brought along a lot of stock as security—-“
“You didn’t take it, Silas!” his wife flashed out.
“Yes, I did, though,” said Lapham. “You wait. We settled our business, and then we went into the old thing, from the very start. And we talked it all over. And when we got through we shook hands. Well, I don’t know when it’s done me so much good to shake hands with anybody.”
“And you told him–you owned up to him that you were in the wrong, Silas?”
“No, I didn’t,” returned the Colonel promptly; “for I wasn’t. And before we got through, I guess he saw it the same as I did.”
“Oh, no matter! so you had the chance to show how you felt.”
“But I never felt that way,” persisted the Colonel. “I’ve lent him the money, and I’ve kept his stocks. And he got what he wanted out of me.”
“Give him back his stocks!”
“No, I shan’t. Rogers came to borrow. He didn’t come to beg. You needn’t be troubled about his stocks. They’re going to come up in time; but just now they’re so low down that no bank would take them as security, and I’ve got to hold them till they do rise. I hope you’re satisfied now, Persis,” said her husband; and he looked at her with the willingness to receive the reward of a good action which we all feel when we have performed one. “I lent him the money you kept me from spending on the house.”
“Truly, Si? Well, I’m satisfied,” said Mrs. Lapham, with a deep tremulous breath. “The Lord has been good to you, Silas,” she continued solemnly. “You may laugh if you choose, and I don’t know as I believe in his interfering a great deal; but I believe he’s interfered this time; and I tell you, Silas, it ain’t always he gives people a chance to make it up to others in this life. I’ve been afraid you’d die, Silas, before you got the chance; but he’s let you live to make it up to Rogers.”
“I’m glad to be let live,” said Lapham stubbornly, “but I hadn’t anything to make up to Milton K. Rogers. And if God has let me live for that—-“
“Oh, say what you please, Si! Say what you please, now you’ve done it! I shan’t stop you. You’ve taken the one spot–the one SPECK–off you that was ever there, and I’m satisfied.”
“There wa’n’t ever any speck there,” Lapham held out, lapsing more and more into his vernacular; “and what I done I done for you, Persis.”
“And I thank you for your own soul’s sake, Silas.”
“I guess my soul’s all right,” said Lapham.
“And I want you should promise me one thing more.”
“Thought you said you were satisfied?”
“I am. But I want you should promise me this: that you won’t let anything tempt you–anything!–to ever trouble Rogers for that money you lent him. No matter what happens–no matter if you lose it all. Do you promise?”
“Why, I don’t ever EXPECT to press him for it. That’s what I said to myself when I lent it. And of course I’m glad to have that old trouble healed up. I don’t THINK I ever did Rogers any wrong, and I never did think so; but if I DID do it–IF I did–I’m willing to call it square, if I never see a cent of my money back again.”
“Well, that’s all,” said his wife.
They did not celebrate his reconciliation with his old enemy–for such they had always felt him to be since he ceased to be an ally–by any show of joy or affection. It was not in their tradition, as stoical for the woman as for the man, that they should kiss or embrace each other at such a moment. She was content to have told him that he had done his duty, and he was content with her saying that. But before she slept she found words to add that she always feared the selfish part he had acted toward Rogers had weakened him, and left him less able to overcome any temptation that might beset him; and that was one reason why she could never be easy about it. Now she should never fear for him again.
This time he did not explicitly deny her forgiving impeachment. “Well, it’s all past and gone now, anyway; and I don’t want you should think anything more about it.”
He was man enough to take advantage of the high favour in which he stood when he went up to town, and to abuse it by bringing Corey down to supper. His wife could not help condoning the sin of disobedience in him at such a time. Penelope said that between the admiration she felt for the Colonel’s boldness and her mother’s forbearance, she was hardly in a state to entertain company that evening; but she did what she could.
Irene liked being talked to better than talking, and when her sister was by she was always, tacitly or explicitly, referring to her for confirmation of what she said. She was content to sit and look pretty as she looked at the young man and listened to her sister’s drolling. She laughed and kept glancing at Corey to make sure that he was understanding her. When they went out on the veranda to see the moon on the water, Penelope led the way and Irene followed.
They did not look at the moonlight long. The young man perched on the rail of the veranda, and Irene took one of the red-painted rocking-chairs where she could conveniently look at him and at her sister, who sat leaning forward lazily and running on, as the phrase is. That low, crooning note of hers was delicious; her face, glimpsed now and then in the moonlight as she turned it or lifted it a little, had a fascination which kept his eye. Her talk was very unliterary, and its effect seemed hardly conscious. She was far from epigram in her funning. She told of this trifle and that; she sketched the characters and looks of people who had interested her, and nothing seemed to have escaped her notice; she mimicked a little, but not much; she suggested, and then the affair represented itself as if without her agency. She did not laugh; when Corey stopped she made a soft cluck in her throat, as if she liked his being amused, and went on again.
The Colonel, left alone with his wife for the first time since he had come from town, made haste to take the word. “Well, Pert, I’ve arranged the whole thing with Rogers, and I hope you’ll be satisfied to know that he owes me twenty thousand dollars, and that I’ve got security from him to the amount of a fourth of that, if I was to force his stocks to a sale.”
“How came he to come down with you?” asked Mrs. Lapham.
“Who? Rogers?”
“Mr. Corey.”
“Corey? Oh!” said Lapham, affecting not to have thought she could mean Corey. “He proposed it.”
“Likely!” jeered his wife, but with perfect amiability.
“It’s so,” protested the Colonel. “We got talking about a matter just before I left, and he walked down to the boat with me; and then he said if I didn’t mind he guessed he’d come along down and go back on the return boat. Of course I couldn’t let him do that.”
“It’s well for you you couldn’t.”
“And I couldn’t do less than bring him here to tea.”
“Oh, certainly not.”
“But he ain’t going to stay the night–unless,” faltered Lapham, “you want him to.”
“Oh, of course, I want him to! I guess he’ll stay, probably.”
“Well, you know how crowded that last boat always is, and he can’t get any other now.”
Mrs. Lapham laughed at the simple wile. “I hope you’ll be just as well satisfied, Si, if it turns out he doesn’t want Irene after all.”
“Pshaw, Persis! What are you always bringing that up for?” pleaded the Colonel. Then he fell silent, and presently his rude, strong face was clouded with an unconscious frown.
“There!” cried his wife, startling him from his abstraction. “I see how you’d feel; and I hope that you’ll remember who you’ve got to blame.”
“I’ll risk it,” said Lapham, with the confidence of a man used to success.
From the veranda the sound of Penelope’s lazy tone came through the closed windows, with joyous laughter from Irene and peals from Corey.
“Listen to that!” said her father within, swelling up with inexpressible satisfaction. “That girl can talk for twenty, right straight along. She’s better than a circus any day. I wonder what she’s up to now.”
“Oh, she’s probably getting off some of those yarns of hers, or telling about some people. She can’t step out of the house without coming back with more things to talk about than most folks would bring back from Japan. There ain’t a ridiculous person she’s ever seen but what she’s got something from them to make you laugh at; and I don’t believe we’ve ever had anybody in the house since the girl could talk that she hain’t got some saying from, or some trick that’ll paint ’em out so’t you can see ’em and hear ’em. Sometimes I want to stop her; but when she gets into one of her gales there ain’t any standing up against her. I guess it ‘s lucky for Irene that she’s got Pen there to help entertain her company. I can’t ever feel down where Pen is.”
“That’s so,” said the Colonel. “And I guess she’s got about as much culture as any of them. Don’t you?”
“She reads a great deal,” admitted her mother. “She seems to be at it the whole while. I don’t want she should injure her health, and sometimes I feel like snatchin’ the books away from her. I don’t know as it’s good for a girl to read so much, anyway, especially novels. I don’t want she should get notions.”
“Oh, I guess Pen’ll know how to take care of herself,” said Lapham.
“She’s got sense enough. But she ain’t so practical as Irene. She’s more up in the clouds–more of what you may call a dreamer. Irene’s wide-awake every minute; and I declare, any one to see these two together when there’s anything to be done, or any lead to be taken, would say Irene was the oldest, nine times out of ten. It’s only when they get to talking that you can see Pen’s got twice as much brains.”
“Well,” said Lapham, tacitly granting this point, and leaning back in his chair in supreme content. “Did you ever see much nicer girls anywhere?”
His wife laughed at his pride. “I presume they’re as much swans as anybody’s geese.”
“No; but honestly, now!”
“Oh, they’ll do; but don’t you be silly, if you can help it, Si.”
The young people came in, and Corey said it was time for his boat. Mrs. Lapham pressed him to stay, but he persisted, and he would not let the Colonel send him to the boat; he said he would rather walk. Outside, he pushed along toward the boat, which presently he could see lying at her landing in the bay, across the sandy tract to the left of the hotels. From time to time he almost stopped in his rapid walk, as a man does whose mind is in a pleasant tumult; and then he went forward at a swifter pace. “She’s charming!” he said, and he thought he had spoken aloud. He found himself floundering about in the deep sand, wide of the path; he got back to it, and reached the boat just before she started. The clerk came to take his fare, and Corey looked radiantly up at him in his lantern-light, with a smile that he must have been wearing a long time; his cheek was stiff with it. Once some people who stood near him edged suddenly and fearfully away, and then he suspected himself of having laughed outright.
XI.
COREY put off his set smile with the help of a frown, of which he first became aware after reaching home, when his father asked–
“Anything gone wrong with your department of the fine arts to-day, Tom?”
“Oh no–no, sir,” said the son, instantly relieving his brows from the strain upon them, and beaming again. “But I was thinking whether you were not perhaps right in your impression that it might be well for you to make Colonel Lapham’s acquaintance before a great while.”
“Has he been suggesting it in any way?” asked Bromfield Corey, laying aside his book and taking his lean knee between his clasped hands.
“Oh, not at all!” the young man hastened to reply. “I was merely thinking whether it might not begin to seem intentional, your not doing it.”
“Well, Tom, you know I have been leaving it altogether to you—-“
“Oh, I understand, of course, and I didn’t mean to urge anything of the kind—-“
“You are so very much more of a Bostonian than I am, you know, that I’ve been waiting your motion in entire confidence that you would know just what to do, and when to do it. If I had been left quite to my own lawless impulses, I think I should have called upon your padrone at once. It seems to me that my father would have found some way of showing that he expected as much as that from people placed in the relation to him that we hold to Colonel Lapham.”
“Do you think so?” asked the young man.
“Yes. But you know I don’t pretend to be an authority in such matters. As far as they go, I am always in the hands of your mother and you children.”
“I’m very sorry, sir. I had no idea I was over-ruling your judgment. I only wanted to spare you a formality that didn’t seem quite a necessity yet. I’m very sorry,” he said again, and this time with more comprehensive regret. “I shouldn’t like to have seemed remiss with a man who has been so considerate of me. They are all very good-natured.”
“I dare say,” said Bromfield Corey, with the satisfaction which no elder can help feeling in disabling the judgment of a younger man, “that it won’t be too late if I go down to your office with you to-morrow.”
“No, no. I didn’t imagine your doing it at once, sir.”
“Ah, but nothing can prevent me from doing a thing when once I take the bit in my teeth,” said the father, with the pleasure which men of weak will sometimes take in recognising their weakness. “How does their new house get on?”
“I believe they expect to be in it before New Year.”
“Will they be a great addition to society?” asked Bromfield Corey, with unimpeachable seriousness.
“I don’t quite know what you mean,” returned the son, a little uneasily.
“Ah, I see that you do, Tom.”
“No one can help feeling that they are all people of good sense and–right ideas.”
“Oh, that won’t do. If society took in all the people of right ideas and good sense, it would expand beyond the calling capacity of its most active members. Even your mother’s social conscientiousness could not compass it. Society is a very different sort of thing from good sense and right ideas. It is based upon them, of course, but the airy, graceful, winning superstructure which we all know demands different qualities. Have your friends got these qualities,–which may be felt, but not defined?”
The son laughed. “To tell you the truth, sir, I don’t think they have the most elemental ideas of society, as we understand it. I don’t believe Mrs. Lapham ever gave a dinner.”
“And with all that money!” sighed the father.
“I don’t believe they have the habit of wine at table. I suspect that when they don’t drink tea and coffee with their dinner, they drink ice-water.”
“Horrible!” said Bromfield Corey.
“It appears to me that this defines them.”
“Oh yes. There are people who give dinners, and who are not cognoscible. But people who have never yet given a dinner, how is society to assimilate them?”
“It digests a great many people,” suggested the young man.
“Yes; but they have always brought some sort of sauce piquante with them. Now, as I understand you, these friends of yours have no such sauce.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that!” cried the son.
“Oh, rude, native flavours, I dare say. But that isn’t what I mean. Well, then, they must spend. There is no other way for them to win their way to general regard. We must have the Colonel elected to the Ten O’clock Club, and he must put himself down in the list of those willing to entertain. Any one can manage a large supper. Yes, I see a gleam of hope for him in that direction.”
In the morning Bromfield Corey asked his son whether he should find Lapham at his place as early as eleven.
“I think you might find him even earlier. I’ve never been there before him. I doubt if the porter is there much sooner.”
“Well, suppose I go with you, then?”
“Why, if you like, sir,” said the son, with some deprecation.
“Oh, the question is, will HE like?”
“I think he will, sir;” and the father could see that his son was very much pleased.
Lapham was rending an impatient course through the morning’s news when they appeared at the door of his inner room. He looked up from the newspaper spread on the desk before him, and then he stood up, making an indifferent feint of not knowing that he knew Bromfield Corey by sight.
“Good morning, Colonel Lapham,” said the son, and Lapham waited for him to say further, “I wish to introduce my father.” Then he answered, “Good morning,” and added rather sternly for the elder Corey, “How do you do, sir? Will you take a chair?” and he pushed him one.
They shook hands and sat down, and Lapham said to his subordinate, “Have a seat; “but young Corey remained standing, watching them in their observance of each other with an amusement which was a little uneasy. Lapham made his visitor speak first by waiting for him to do so.
“I’m glad to make your acquaintance, Colonel Lapham, and I ought to have come sooner to do so. My father in your place would have expected it of a man in my place at once, I believe. But I can’t feel myself altogether a stranger as it is. I hope Mrs. Lapham is well? And your daughter?”
“Thank you,” said Lapham, “they’re quite well.”
“They were very kind to my wife—-“
“Oh, that was nothing!” cried Lapham. “There’s nothing Mrs. Lapham likes better than a chance of that sort. Mrs. Corey and the young ladies well?”
“Very well, when I heard from them. They’re out of town.”
“Yes, so I understood,” said Lapham, with a nod toward the son. “I believe Mr. Corey, here, told Mrs. Lapham.” He leaned back in his chair, stiffly resolute to show that he was not incommoded by the exchange of these civilities.
“Yes,” said Bromfield Corey. “Tom has had the pleasure which I hope for of seeing you all. I hope you’re able to make him useful to you here?” Corey looked round Lapham’s room vaguely, and then out at the clerks in their railed enclosure, where his eye finally rested on an extremely pretty girl, who was operating a type-writer.
“Well, sir,” replied Lapham, softening for the first time with this approach to business, “I guess it will be our own fault if we don’t. By the way, Corey,” he added, to the younger man, as he gathered up some letters from his desk, “here’s something in your line. Spanish or French, I guess.”
“I’ll run them over,” said Corey, taking them to his desk.
His father made an offer to rise.
“Don’t go,” said Lapham, gesturing him down again. “I just wanted to get him away a minute. I don’t care to say it to his face,–I don’t like the principle,–but since you ask me about it, I’d just as lief say that I’ve never had any young man take hold here equal to your son. I don’t know as you care”
“You make me very happy,” said Bromfield Corey. “Very happy indeed. I’ve always had the idea that there was something in my son, if he could only find the way to work it out. And he seems to have gone into your business for the love of it.”
“He went to work in the right way, sir! He told me about it. He looked into it. And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into.”
“Oh yes. You might think he had invented it, if you heard him celebrating it.”
“Is that so?” demanded Lapham, pleased through and through. “Well, there ain’t any other way. You’ve got to believe in a thing before you can put any heart in it. Why, I had a partner in this thing once, along back just after the war, and he used to be always wanting to tinker with something else. ‘Why,’ says I, ‘you’ve got the best thing in God’s universe now. Why ain’t you satisfied?’ I had to get rid of him at last. I stuck to my paint, and that fellow’s drifted round pretty much all over the whole country, whittling his capital down all the while, till here the other day I had to lend him some money to start him new. No, sir, you’ve got to believe in a thing. And I believe in your son. And I don’t mind telling you that, so far as he’s gone, he’s a success.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“No kindness about it. As I was saying the other day to a friend of mine, I’ve had many a fellow right out of the street that had to work hard all his life, and didn’t begin to take hold like this son of yours.”
Lapham expanded with profound self-satisfaction. As he probably conceived it, he had succeeded in praising, in a perfectly casual way, the supreme excellence of his paint, and his own sagacity and benevolence; and here he was sitting face to face with Bromfield Corey, praising his son to him, and receiving his grateful acknowledgments as if he were the father of some office-boy whom Lapham had given a place half but of charity.
“Yes, sir, when your son proposed to take hold here, I didn’t have much faith in his ideas, that’s the truth. But I had faith in him, and I saw that he meant business from the start. I could see it was born in him. Any one could.”
“I’m afraid he didn’t inherit it directly from me,” said Bromfield Corey; “but it’s in the blood, on both sides.” “Well, sir, we can’t help those things,” said Lapham compassionately. “Some of us have got it, and some of us haven’t. The idea is to make the most of what we HAVE got.”
“Oh yes; that is the idea. By all means.”
“And you can’t ever tell what’s in you till you try. Why, when I started this thing, I didn’t more than half understand my own strength. I wouldn’t have said, looking back, that I could have stood the wear and tear of what I’ve been through. But I developed as I went along. It’s just like exercising your muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as much after you’ve been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it’s going to be just so with your son. His going through college won’t hurt him,–he’ll soon slough all that off,–and his bringing up won’t; don’t be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn’t ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will get along.”
“Thank you,” said Bromfield Corey, and smiled–whether because his spirit was safe in the humility he sometimes boasted, or because it was triply armed in pride against anything the Colonel’s kindness could do.
“He’ll get along. He’s a good business man, and he’s a fine fellow. MUST you go?” asked Lapham, as Bromfield Corey now rose more resolutely. “Well, glad to see you. It was natural you should want to come and see what he was about, and I’m glad you did. I should have felt just so about it. Here is some of our stuff,” he said, pointing out the various packages in his office, including the Persis Brand.
“Ah, that’s very nice, very nice indeed,” said his visitor. “That colour through the jar–very rich–delicious. Is Persis Brand a name?”
Lapham blushed.
“Well, Persis is. I don’t know as you saw an interview that fellow published in the Events a while back?”
“What is the Events?”
“Well, it’s that new paper Witherby’s started.”
“No,” said Bromfield Corey, “I haven’t seen it. I read The Daily,” he explained; by which he meant The Daily Advertiser, the only daily there is in the old- fashioned Bostonian sense.
“He put a lot of stuff in my mouth that I never said,” resumed Lapham; “but that’s neither here nor there, so long as you haven’t seen it. Here’s the department your son’s in,” and he showed him the foreign labels. Then he took him out into the warehouse to see the large packages. At the head of the stairs, where his guest stopped to nod to his son and say “Good-bye, Tom,” Lapham insisted upon going down to the lower door with him “Well, call again,” he said in hospitable dismissal. “I shall always be glad to see you. There ain’t a great deal doing at this season.” Bromfield Corey thanked him, and let his hand remain perforce in Lapham’s lingering grasp. “If you ever like to ride after a good horse—-” the Colonel began.
“Oh, no, no, no; thank you! The better the horse, the more I should be scared. Tom has told me of your driving!”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the Colonel. “Well! every one to his taste. Well, good morning, sir!” and he suffered him to go.
“Who is the old man blowing to this morning?” asked Walker, the book-keeper, making an errand to Corey’s desk.
“My father.”
“Oh! That your father? I thought he must be one of your Italian correspondents that you’d been showing round, or Spanish.”
In fact, as Bromfield Corey found his way at his leisurely pace up through the streets on which the prosperity of his native city was founded, hardly any figure could have looked more alien to its life. He glanced up and down the facades and through the crooked vistas like a stranger, and the swarthy fruiterer of whom he bought an apple, apparently for the pleasure of holding it in his hand, was not surprised that the purchase should be transacted in his own tongue.
Lapham walked back through the outer office to his own room without looking at Corey, and during the day he spoke to him only of business matters. That must have been his way of letting Corey see that he was not overcome by the honour of his father’s visit. But he presented himself at Nantasket with the event so perceptibly on his mind that his wife asked: “Well, Silas, has Rogers been borrowing any more money of you? I don’t want you should let that thing go too far. You’ve done enough.”
“You needn’t be afraid. I’ve seen the last of Rogers for one while.” He hesitated, to give the fact an effect of no importance. “Corey’s father called this morning.”
“Did he?” said Mrs. Lapham, willing to humour his feint of indifference. “Did HE want to borrow some money too?” “Not as I understood.” Lapham was smoking at great ease, and his wife had some crocheting on the other side of the lamp from him.
The girls were on the piazza looking at the moon on the water again. “There’s no man in it to-night,” Penelope said, and Irene laughed forlornly.
“What DID he want, then?” asked Mrs. Lapham.
“Oh, I don’t know. Seemed to be just a friendly call. Said he ought to have come before.”
Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. Then she said: “Well, I hope you’re satisfied now.”
Lapham rejected the sympathy too openly offered. “I don’t know about being satisfied. I wa’n’t in any hurry to see him.”
His wife permitted him this pretence also. “What sort of a person is he, anyway l”
“Well, not much like his son. There’s no sort of business about him. I don’t know just how you’d describe him. He’s tall; and he’s got white hair and a moustache; and his fingers are very long and limber. I couldn’t help noticing them as he sat there with his hands on the top of his cane. Didn’t seem to be dressed very much, and acted just like anybody. Didn’t talk much. Guess I did most of the talking. Said he was glad I seemed to be getting along so well with his son. He asked after you and Irene; and he said he couldn’t feel just like a stranger. Said you had been very kind to his wife. Of course I turned it off. Yes,” said Lapham thoughtfully, with his hands resting on his knees, and his cigar between the fingers of his left hand, “I guess he meant to do the right thing, every way. Don’t know as I ever saw a much pleasanter man. Dunno but what he’s about the pleasantest man I ever did see.” He was not letting his wife see in his averted face the struggle that revealed itself there–the struggle of stalwart achievement not to feel flattered at the notice of sterile elegance, not to be sneakingly glad of its amiability, but to stand up and look at it with eyes on the same level. God, who made us so much like himself, but out of the dust, alone knows when that struggle will end. The time had been when Lapham could not have imagined any worldly splendour which his dollars could not buy if he chose to spend them for it; but his wife’s half discoveries, taking form again in his ignorance of the world, filled him with helpless misgiving. A cloudy vision of something unpurchasable, where he had supposed there was nothing, had cowed him in spite of the burly resistance of his pride.
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t be pleasant,” said Mrs. Lapham. “He’s never done anything else.”
Lapham looked up consciously, with an uneasy laugh. “Pshaw, Persis! you never forget anything?”
“Oh, I’ve got more than that to remember. I suppose you asked him to ride after the mare?”
“Well,” said Lapham, reddening guiltily, “he said he was afraid of a good horse.”
“Then, of course, you hadn’t asked him.” Mrs. Lapham crocheted in silence, and her husband leaned back in his chair and smoked.
At last he said, “I’m going to push that house forward. They’re loafing on it. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be in it by Thanksgiving. I don’t believe in moving in the dead of winter.”
“We can wait till spring. We’re very comfortable in the old place,” answered his wife. Then she broke out on him: “What are you in such a hurry to get into that house for? Do you want to invite the Coreys to a house-warming?”
Lapham looked at her without speaking.
“Don’t you suppose I can see through you I declare, Silas Lapham, if I didn’t know different, I should say you were about the biggest fool! Don’t you know ANYthing? Don’t you know that it wouldn’t do to ask those people to our house before they’ve asked us to theirs? They’d laugh in our faces!”
“I don’t believe they’d laugh in our faces. What’s the difference between our asking them and their asking us?” demanded the Colonel sulkily.
“Oh, well! If you don t see!”
“Well, I DON’T see. But I don’t want to ask them to the house. I suppose, if I want to, I can invite him down to a fish dinner at Taft’s.”
Mrs. Lapham fell back in her chair, and let her work drop in her lap with that “Tckk!” in which her sex knows how to express utter contempt and despair.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, if you DO such a thing, Silas, I’ll never speak to you again! It’s no USE! It’s NO use! I did think, after you’d behaved so well about Rogers, I might trust you a little. But I see I can’t. I presume as long as you live you’ll have to be nosed about like a perfect–I don’t know what!”
“What are you making such a fuss about?” demanded Lapham, terribly crestfallen, but trying to pluck up a spirit. “I haven’t done anything yet. I can’t ask your advice about anything any more without having you fly out. Confound it! I shall do as I please after this.”
But as if he could not endure that contemptuous atmosphere, he got up, and his wife heard him in the dining-room pouring himself out a glass of ice-water, and then heard him mount the stairs to their room, and slam its door after him.
“Do you know what your father’s wanting to do now?” Mrs. Lapham asked her eldest daughter, who lounged into the parlour a moment with her wrap stringing from her arm, while the younger went straight to bed. “He wants to invite Mr. Corey’s father to a fish dinner at Taft’s!”
Penelope was yawning with her hand on her mouth; she stopped, and, with a laugh of amused expectance, sank into a chair, her shoulders shrugged forward.
“Why! what in the world has put the Colonel up to that?”
“Put him up to it! There’s that fellow, who ought have come to see him long ago, drops into his office this morning, and talks five minutes with him, and your father is flattered out of his five senses. He’s crazy to get in with those people, and I shall have a perfect battle to keep him within bounds.”
“Well, Persis, ma’am, you can’t say but what you began it,” said Penelope.
“Oh yes, I began it,” confessed Mrs. Lapham. “Pen,” she broke out, “what do you suppose he means by it?”
“Who? Mr. Corey’s father? What does the Colonel think?”
“Oh, the Colonel!” cried Mrs. Lapham. She added tremulously: “Perhaps he IS right. He DID seem to take a fancy to her last summer, and now if he’s called in that way “She left her daughter to distribute the pronouns aright, and resumed: “Of course, I should have said once that there wasn’t any question about it. I should have said so last year; and I don’t know what it is keeps me from saying so now. I suppose I know a little more about things than I did; and your father’s being so bent on it sets me all in a twitter. He thinks his money can do everything. Well, I don’t say but what it can, a good many. And ‘Rene is as good a child as ever there was; and I don’t see but what she’s pretty-appearing enough to suit any one. She’s pretty-behaved, too; and she IS the most capable girl. I presume young men don’t care very much for such things nowadays; but there ain’t a great many girls can go right into the kitchen, and make such a custard as she did yesterday. And look at the way she does, through the whole house! She can’t seem to go into a room without the things fly right into their places. And if she had to do it to-morrow, she could make all her own dresses a great deal better than them we pay to do it. I don’t say but what he’s about as nice a fellow as ever stepped. But there! I’m ashamed of going on so.”
“Well, mother,” said the girl after a pause, in which she looked as if a little weary of the subject, “why do you worry about it? If it’s to be it’ll be, and if it isn’t—-“
“Yes, that’s what I tell your father. But when it comes to myself, I see how hard it is for him to rest quiet. I’m afraid we shall all do something we’ll repent of afterwards.”
“Well, ma’am,” said Penelope, “I don’t intend to do anything wrong; but if I do, I promise not to be sorry for it. I’ll go that far. And I think I wouldn’t be sorry for it beforehand, if I were in your place, mother. Let the Colonel go on! He likes to manoeuvre, and he isn’t going to hurt any one. The Corey family can take care of themselves, I guess.”
She laughed in her throat, drawing down the corners of her mouth, and enjoying the resolution with which her mother tried to fling off the burden of her anxieties. “Pen! I believe you’re right. You always do see things in such a light! There! I don’t care if he brings him down every day.”
“Well, ma’am,” said Pen, “I don’t believe ‘Rene would, either. She’s just so indifferent!”
The Colonel slept badly that night, and in the morning Mrs. Lapham came to breakfast without him.
“Your father ain’t well,” she reported. “He’s had one of his turns.”
“I should have thought he had two or three of them,” said Penelope, “by the stamping round I heard. Isn’t he coming to breakfast?”
“Not just yet,” said her mother. “He’s asleep, and he’ll be all right if he gets his nap out. I don’t want you girls should make any great noise.” “Oh, we’ll be quiet enough,” returned Penelope. “Well, I’m glad the Colonel isn’t sojering. At first I thought he might be sojering.” She broke into a laugh, and, struggling indolently with it, looked at her sister. “You don’t think it’ll be necessary for anybody to come down from the office and take orders from him while he’s laid up, do you, mother?” she inquired
“Pen!” cried Irene.
“He’ll be well enough to go up on the ten o’clock boat,” said the mother sharply.
“I think papa works too hard all through the summer. Why don’t you make him take a rest, mamma?” asked Irene.
“Oh, take a rest! The man slaves harder every year. It used to be so that he’d take a little time off now and then; but I declare, he hardly ever seems to breathe now away from his office. And this year he says he doesn’t intend to go down to Lapham, except to see after the works for a few days. I don’t know what to do with the man any more! Seems as if the more money he got, the more he wanted to get. It scares me to think what would happen to him if he lost it. I know one thing,” concluded Mrs. Lapham. “He shall not go back to the office to-day.”
“Then he won’t go up on the ten o’clock boat,” Pen reminded her.
“No, he won’t. You can just drive over to the hotel as soon as you’re through, girls, and telegraph that he’s not well, and won’t be at the office till to-morrow. I’m not going to have them send anybody down here to bother him.”
“That’s a blow,” said Pen. “I didn’t know but they might send—-” she looked demurely at her sister–“Dennis!”
“Mamma!” cried Irene.
“Well, I declare, there’s no living with this family any more,” said Penelope.
“There, Pen, be done!” commanded her mother. But perhaps she did not intend to forbid her teasing. It gave a pleasant sort of reality to the affair that was in her mind, and made what she wished appear not only possible but probable.
Lapham got up and lounged about, fretting and rebelling as each boat departed without him, through the day; before night he became very cross, in spite of the efforts of the family to soothe him, and grumbled that he had been kept from going up to town. “I might as well have gone as not,” he repeated, till his wife lost her patience.
“Well, you shall go to-morrow, Silas, if you have to be carried to the boat.”
“I declare,” said Penelope, “the Colonel don’t pet worth a cent.”
The six o’clock boat brought Corey. The girls were sitting on the piazza, and Irene saw him first.
“O Pen!” she whispered, with her heart in her face; and Penelope had no time for mockery before he was at the steps.
“I hope Colonel Lapham isn’t ill,” he said, and they could hear their mother engaged in a moral contest with their father indoors.
“Go and put on your coat! I say you shall! It don’t matter HOW he sees you at the office, shirt-sleeves or not. You’re in a gentleman’s house now–or you ought to be–and you shan’t see company in your dressing-gown.”
Penelope hurried in to subdue her mother’s anger.
“Oh, he’s very much better, thank you!” said Irene, speaking up loudly to drown the noise of the controversy.
“I’m glad of that,” said Corey, and when she led him indoors the vanquished Colonel met his visitor in a double-breasted frock-coat, which he was still buttoning up. He could not persuade himself at once that Corey had not come upon some urgent business matter, and when he was clear that he had come out of civility, surprise mingled with his gratification that he should be the object of solicitude to the young man. In Lapham’s circle of acquaintance they complained when they were sick, but they made no womanish inquiries after one another’s health, and certainly paid no visits of sympathy till matters were serious. He would have enlarged upon the particulars of his indisposition if he had been allowed to do so; and after tea, which Corey took with them, he would have remained to entertain him if his wife had not sent him to bed. She followed him to see that he took some medicine she had prescribed for him, but she went first to Penelope’s room, where she found the girl with a book in her hand, which she was not reading.
“You better go down,” said the mother. “I’ve got to go to your father, and Irene is all alone with Mr. Corey; and I know she’ll be on pins and needles without you’re there to help make it go off.”
“She’d better try to get along without me, mother,” said Penelope soberly. “I can’t always be with them.”
“Well,” replied Mrs. Lapham, “then I must. There’ll be a perfect Quaker meeting down there.”
“Oh, I guess ‘Rene will find something to say if you leave her to herself. Or if she don’t, HE must. It’ll be all right for you to go down when you get ready; but I shan’t go till toward the last. If he’s coming here to see Irene–and I don’t believe he’s come on father’s account–he wants to see her and not me. If she can’t interest him alone, perhaps he’d as well find it out now as any time. At any rate, I guess you’d better make the experiment. You’ll know whether it’s a success if he comes again.”
“Well,” said the mother, “may be you’re right. I’ll go down directly. It does seem as if he did mean something, after all.”
Mrs. Lapham did not hasten to return to her guest. In her own girlhood it was supposed that if a young man seemed to be coming to see a girl, it was only common- sense to suppose that he wished to see her alone; and her life in town had left Mrs. Lapham’s simple traditions in this respect unchanged. She did with her daughter as her mother would have done with her.
Where Penelope sat with her book, she heard the continuous murmur of voices below, and after a long interval she heard her mother descend. She did not read the open book that lay in her lap, though she kept her eyes fast on the print. Once she rose and almost shut the door, so that she could scarcely hear; then she opened it wide again with a self-disdainful air, and resolutely went back to her book, which again she did not read. But she remained in her room till it was nearly time for Corey to return to his boat.
When they were alone again, Irene made a feint of scolding her for leaving her to entertain Mr. Corey.
“Why! didn’t you have a pleasant call?” asked Penelope.
Irene threw her arms round her. “Oh, it was a SPLENDID call! I didn’t suppose I could make it go off so well. We talked nearly the whole time about you!”
“I don’t think THAT was a very interesting subject.”
“He kept asking about you. He asked everything. You don’t know how much he thinks of you, Pen. O Pen! what do you think made him come? Do you think he really did come to see how papa was?” Irene buried her face in her sister’s neck.
Penelope stood with her arms at her side, submitting. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think he did, altogether.”
Irene, all glowing, released her. “Don’t you–don’t you REALLY? O Pen! don’t you think he IS nice? Don’t you think he’s handsome? Don’t you think I behaved horridly when we first met him this evening, not thanking him for coming? I know he thinks I’ve no manners. But it seemed as if it would be thanking him for coming to see me. Ought I to have asked him to come again, when he said good-night? I didn’t; I couldn’t. Do you believe he’ll think I don’t want him to? You don’t believe he would keep coming if he didn’t–want to—-“
“He hasn’t kept coming a great deal, yet,” suggested Penelope.
“No; I know he hasn’t. But if he–if he should?”
“Then I should think he wanted to.”
“Oh, would you–WOULD you? Oh, how good you always are, Pen! And you always say what you think. I wish there was some one coming to see you too. That’s all that I don’t like about it. Perhaps—-He was telling about his friend there in Texas—-“
“Well,” said Penelope, “his friend couldn’t call often from Texas. You needn’t ask Mr. Corey to trouble about me, ‘Rene. I think I can manage to worry along, if you’re satisfied.”
“Oh, I AM, Pen. When do you suppose he’ll come again?” Irene pushed some of Penelope’s things aside on the dressing-case, to rest her elbow and talk at ease. Penelope came up and put them back.
“Well, not to-night,” she said; “and if that’s what you’re sitting up for—-“
Irene caught her round the neck again, and ran out of the room.
The Colonel was packed off on the eight o’clock boat the next morning; but his recovery did not prevent Corey from repeating his visit in a week. This time Irene came radiantly up to Penelope’s room, where she had again withdrawn herself. “You must come down, Pen,” she said. “He’s asked if you’re not well, and mamma says you’ve got to come.”
After that Penelope helped Irene through with her calls, and talked them over with her far into the night after Corey was gone. But when the impatient curiosity of her mother pressed her for some opinion of the affair, she said, “You know as much as I do, mother.”
“Don’t he ever say anything to you about her–praise her up, any?”
“He’s never mentioned Irene to me.”
“He hasn’t to me, either,” said Mrs. Lapham, with a sigh of trouble. “Then what makes him keep coming?”
“I can’t tell you. One thing, he says there isn’t a house open in Boston where he’s acquainted. Wait till some of his friends get back, and then if he keeps coming, it’ll be time to inquire.”
“Well!” said the mother; but as the weeks passed she was less and less able to attribute Corey’s visits to his loneliness in town, and turned to her husband for comfort.
“Silas, I don’t know as we ought to let young Corey keep coming so. I don’t quite like it, with all his family away.”
“He’s of age,” said the Colonel. “He can go where he pleases. It don’t matter whether his family’s here or not.”
“Yes, but if they don’t want he should come? Should you feel just right about letting him?”
“How’re you going to stop him? I swear, Persis, I don’t know what’s got over you! What is it? You didn’t use to be so. But to hear you talk, you’d think those Coreys were too good for this world, and we wa’n’t fit for ’em to walk on.”
“I’m not going to have ’em say we took an advantage of their being away and tolled him on.”
“I should like to HEAR ’em say it!” cried Lapham. “Or anybody!”
“Well,” said his wife, relinquishing this point of anxiety, “I can’t make out whether he cares anything for her or not. And Pen can’t tell either; or else she won’t.”
“Oh, I guess he cares for her, fast enough,” said the Colonel.
“I can’t make out that he’s said or done the first thing to show it.”
“Well, I was better than a year getting my courage up.”
“Oh, that was different,” said Mrs. Lapham, in contemptuous dismissal of the comparison, and yet with a certain fondness. “I guess, if he cared for her, a fellow in his position wouldn’t be long getting up his courage to speak to Irene.”
Lapham brought his fist down on the table between them.
“Look here, Persis! Once for all, now, don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again! I’m worth nigh on to a million, and I’ve made it every cent myself; and my girls are the equals of anybody, I don’t care who it is. He ain’t the fellow to take on any airs; but if he ever tries it with me, I’ll send him to the right about mighty quick. I’ll have a talk with him, if—-“
“No, no; don’t do that!” implored his wife. “I didn’t mean anything. I don’t know as I meant ANYthing. He’s just as unassuming as he can be, and I think Irene’s a match for anybody. You just let things go on. It’ll be all right. You never can tell how it is with young people. Perhaps SHE’S offish. Now you ain’t–you ain’t going to say anything?”
Lapham suffered himself to be persuaded, the more easily, no doubt, because after his explosion he must have perceived that his pride itself stood in the way of what his pride had threatened. He contented himself with his wife’s promise that she would never again present that offensive view of the case, and she did not remain without a certain support in his sturdy self-assertion.
XII.
MRS. COREY returned with her daughters in the early days of October, having passed three or four weeks at Intervale after leaving Bar Harbour. They were somewhat browner than they were when they left town in June, but they were not otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and never show any one, knowing the slightness of their merit. Nanny, the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction. They were both nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to distract them.
In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid interest in their brother’s affairs, which they could see weighed upon their mother’s mind after the first hours of greeting.
“Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has never written a word about it,” she said, shaking her head.
“What good would it have done?” asked Nanny, who was little and fair, with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet-front very prettily; she looked best in a bonnet. “It would only have worried you. He could not have stopped Tom; you couldn’t, when you came home to do it.”
“I dare say papa didn’t know much about it,” suggested Lily. She was a tall, lean, dark girl, who looked as if she were not quite warm enough, and whom you always associated with wraps of different aesthetic effect after you had once seen her.
It is a serious matter always to the women of his family when a young man gives them cause to suspect that he is interested in some other woman. A son-in-law or brother-in-law does not enter the family; he need not be caressed or made anything of; but the son’s or brother’s wife has a claim upon his mother and sisters which they cannot deny. Some convention of their sex obliges them to show her affection, to like or to seem to like her, to take her to their intimacy, however odious she may be to them. With the Coreys it was something more than an affair of sentiment. They were by no means poor, and they were not dependent money-wise upon Tom Corey; but the mother had come, without knowing it, to rely upon his sense, his advice in everything, and the sisters, seeing him hitherto so indifferent to girls, had insensibly grown to regard him as altogether their own till he should be released, not by his marriage, but by theirs, an event which had not approached with the lapse of time. Some kinds of girls–they believed that they could readily have chosen a kind–might have taken him without taking him from them; but this generosity could not be hoped for in such a girl as Miss Lapham.
“Perhaps,” urged their mother, “it would not be so bad. She seemed an affectionate little thing with her mother, without a great deal of character though she was so capable about some things.”
“Oh, she’ll be an affectionate little thing with Tom too, you may be sure,” said Nanny. “And that characterless capability becomes the most in tense narrow-mindedness. She’ll think we were against her from the beginning.”
“She has no cause for that,” Lily interposed, “and we shall not give her any.”
“Yes, we shall,” retorted Nanny. “We can’t help it; and if we can’t, her own ignorance would be cause enough.”
“I can’t feel that she’s altogether ignorant,” said Mrs. Corey justly.
“Of course she can read and write,” admitted Nanny.
“I can’t imagine what he finds to talk about with her,” said Lily.
“Oh, THAT’S very simple,” returned her sister.
“They talk about themselves, with occasional references to each other. I have heard people ‘going on’ on the hotel piazzas. She’s embroidering, or knitting, or tatting, or something of that kind; and he says she seems quite devoted to needlework, and she says, yes, she has a perfect passion for it, and everybody laughs at her for it; but she can’t help it, she always was so from a child, and supposes she always shall be,–with remote and minute particulars. And she ends by saying that perhaps he does not like people to tat, or knit, or embroider, or whatever. And he says, oh, yes, he does; what could make her think such a thing? but for his part he likes boating rather better, or if you’re in the woods camping. Then she lets him take up one corner of her work, and perhaps touch her fingers; and that encourages him to say that he supposes nothing could induce her to drop her work long enough to go down on the rocks, or out among the huckleberry bushes; and she puts her head on one side, and says she doesn’t know really. And then they go, and he lies at her feet on the rocks, or picks huckleberries and drops them in her lap, and they go on talking about themselves, and comparing notes to see how they differ from each other. And—-“
“That will do, Nanny,” said her mother.
Lily smiled autumnally. “Oh, disgusting!”
“Disgusting? Not at all!” protested her sister. “It’s very amusing when you see it, and when you do it—-“
“It’s always a mystery what people see in each other,” observed Mrs. Corey severely.
“Yes,” Nanny admitted, “but I don’t know that there is much comfort for us in the application.” “No, there isn’t,” said her mother.
“The most that we can do is to hope for the best till we know the worst. Of course we shall make the best of the worst when it comes.”
“Yes, and perhaps it would not be so very bad. I was saying to your father when I was here in July that those things can always be managed. You must face them as if they were nothing out of the way, and try not to give any cause for bitterness among ourselves.”
“That’s true. But I don’t believe in too much resignation beforehand. It amounts to concession,” said Nanny.
“Of course we should oppose it in all proper ways,” returned her mother.
Lily had ceased to discuss the matter. In virtue of her artistic temperament, she was expected not to be very practical. It was her mother and her sister who managed, submitting to the advice and consent of Corey what they intended to do.
“Your father wrote me that he had called on Colonel Lapham at his place of business,” said Mrs. Corey, seizing her first chance of approaching the subject with her son.
“Yes,” said Corey. “A dinner was father’s idea, but he came down to a call, at my suggestion.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Corey, in a tone of relief, as if the statement threw a new light on the fact that Corey had suggested the visit. “He said so little about it in his letter that I didn’t know just how it came about.”
“I thought it was right they should meet,” explained the son, “and so did father. I was glad that I suggested it, afterward; it was extremely gratifying to Colonel Lapham.”
“Oh, it was quite right in every way. I suppose you have seen something of the family during the summer.”
“Yes, a good deal. I’ve been down at Nantasket rather often.”
Mrs. Corey let her eyes droop. Then she asked: “Are they well?”
“Yes, except Lapham himself, now and then. I went down once or twice to see him. He hasn’t given himself any vacation this summer; he has such a passion for his business that I fancy he finds it hard being away from it at any time, and he’s made his new house an excuse for staying” “Oh yes, his house! Is it to be something fine?”
“Yes; it’s a beautiful house. Seymour is doing it.”
“Then, of course, it will be very handsome. I suppose the young ladies are very much taken up with it; and Mrs. Lapham.”
“Mrs. Lapham, yes. I don’t think the young ladies care so much about it.”
“It must be for them. Aren’t they ambitious?” asked Mrs. Corey, delicately feeling her way.
Her son thought a while. Then he answered with a smile–
“No, I don’t really think they are. They are unambitious, I should say.” Mrs. Corey permitted herself a long breath. But her son added, “It’s the parents who are ambitious for them,” and her respiration became shorter again.
“Yes,” she said.
“They’re very simple, nice girls,” pursued Corey. “I think you’ll like the elder, when you come to know her.”
When you come to know her. The words implied an expectation that the two families were to be better acquainted.
“Then she is more intellectual than her sister?” Mrs. Corey ventured.
“Intellectual?” repeated her son. “No; that isn’t the word, quite. Though she certainly has more mind.”
“The younger seemed very sensible.”
“Oh, sensible, yes. And as practical as she’s pretty. She can do all sorts of things, and likes to be doing them. Don’t you think she’s an extraordinary beauty?”
“Yes–yes, she is,” said Mrs. Corey, at some cost.
“She’s good, too,” said Corey, “and perfectly innocent and transparent. I think you will like her the better the more you know her.”
“I thought her very nice from the beginning,” said the mother heroically; and then nature asserted itself in her. “But I should be afraid that she might perhaps be a little bit tiresome at last; her range of ideas seemed so extremely limited.”
“Yes, that’s what I was afraid of. But, as a matter of fact, she isn’t. She interests you by her very limitations. You can see the working of her mind, like that of a child. She isn’t at all conscious even of her beauty.”
“I don’t believe young men can tell whether girls are conscious or not,” said Mrs. Corey. “But I am not saying the Miss Laphams are not—-” Her son sat musing, with an inattentive smile on his face. “What is it?”
“Oh! nothing. I was thinking of Miss Lapham and something she was saying. She’s very droll, you know.”
“The elder sister? Yes, you told me that. Can you see the workings of her mind too?”
“No; she’s everything that’s unexpected.” Corey fell into another reverie, and smiled again; but he did not offer to explain what amused him, and his mother would not ask.
“I don’t know what to make of his admiring the girl so frankly,” she said afterward to her husband. “That couldn’t come naturally till after he had spoken to her, and I feel sure that he hasn’t yet.”
“You women haven’t risen yet–it’s an evidence of the backwardness of your sex–to a conception of the Bismarck idea in diplomacy. If a man praises one woman, you still think he’s in love with another. Do you mean that because Tom didn’t praise the elder sister so much, he HAS spoken to HER?”
Mrs. Corey refused the consequence, saying that it did not follow. “Besides, he did praise her.”
“You ought to be glad that matters are in such good shape, then. At any rate, you can do absolutely nothing.”
“Oh! I know it,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “I wish Tom would be a little opener with me.”
“He’s as open as it’s in the nature of an American-born son to be with his parents. I dare say if you’d asked him plumply what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told you–if he knew.”
“Why, don’t you think he does know, Bromfield?”
“I’m not at all sure he does. You women think that because a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he’s attached to them. It doesn’t at all follow. He dangles because he must, and doesn’t know what to do with his time, and because they seem to like it. I dare say that Tom has dangled a good deal in this instance because there was nobody else in town.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I throw out the suggestion. And it strikes me that a young lady couldn’t do better than stay in or near Boston during the summer. Most of the young men are here, kept by business through the week, with evenings available only on the spot, or a few miles off. What was the proportion of the sexes at the seashore and the mountains?”
“Oh, twenty girls at least for even an excuse of a man. It’s shameful.”
“You see, I am right in one part of my theory. Why shouldn’t I be right in the rest?”
“I wish you were. And yet I can’t say that I do. Those things are very serious with girls. I shouldn’t like Tom to have been going to see those people if he meant nothing by it.”
“And you wouldn’t like it if he did. You are difficult, my dear.” Her husband pulled an open newspaper toward him from the table.
“I feel that it wouldn’t be at all like him to do so,” said Mrs. Corey, going on to entangle herself in her words, as women often do when their ideas are perfectly clear. “Don’t go to reading, please, Bromfield! I am really worried about this matter I must know how much it means. I can’t let it go on so. I don’t see how you can rest easy without knowing.”
“I don’t in the least know what’s going to become of me when I die; and yet I sleep well,” replied Bromfield Corey, putting his newspaper aside.
“Ah! but this is a very different thing.”
“So much more serious? Well, what can you do? We had this out when you were here in the summer, and you agreed with me then that we could do nothing. The situation hasn’t changed at all.”
“Yes, it has; it has continued the same,” said Mrs. Corey, again expressing the fact by a contradiction in terms. “I think I must ask Tom outright.”
“You know you can’t do that, my dear.”
“Then why doesn’t he tell us?”
“Ah, that’s what HE can’t do, if he’s making love to Miss Irene–that’s her name, I believe–on the American plan. He will tell us after he has told HER. That was the way I did. Don’t ignore our own youth, Anna. It was a long while ago, I’ll admit.”
“It was very different,” said Mrs. Corey, a little shaken.
“I don’t see how. I dare say Mamma Lapham knows whether Tom is in love with her daughter or not; and no doubt Papa Lapham knows it at second hand. But we shall not know it until the girl herself does. Depend upon that. Your mother knew, and she told your father; but my poor father knew nothing about it till we were engaged; and I had been hanging about–dangling, as you call it—-“
“No, no; YOU called it that.”
“Was it I?–for a year or more.”
The wife could not refuse to be a little consoled by the image of her young love which the words conjured up, however little she liked its relation to her son’s interest in Irene Lapham. She smiled pensively. “Then you think it hasn’t come to an understanding with them yet?”
“An understanding? Oh, probably.”
“An explanation, then?”
“The only logical inference from what we’ve been saying is that it hasn’t. But I don’t ask you to accept it on that account. May I read now, my dear?”
“Yes, you may read now,” said Mrs. Corey, with one of those sighs which perhaps express a feminine sense of the unsatisfactoriness of husbands in general, rather than a personal discontent with her own.
“Thank you, my dear; then I think I’ll smoke too,” said Bromfield Corey, lighting a cigar.
She left him in peace, and she made no further attempt upon her son’s confidence. But she was not inactive for that reason. She did not, of course, admit to herself, and far less to others, the motive with which she went to pay an early visit to the Laphams, who had now come up from Nantasket to Nankeen Square. She said to her daughters that she had always been a little ashamed of using her acquaintance with them to get money for her charity, and then seeming to drop it. Besides, it seemed to her that she ought somehow to recognise the business relation that Tom had formed with the father; they must not think that his family disapproved of what he had done. “Yes, business is business,” said Nanny, with a laugh. “Do you wish us to go with you again?”
“No; I will go alone this time,” replied the mother with dignity.
Her coupe now found its way to Nankeen Square without difficulty, and she sent up a card, which Mrs. Lapham received in the presence of her daughter Penelope.
“I presume I’ve got to see her,” she gasped.
“Well, don’t look so guilty, mother,” joked the girl; “you haven’t been doing anything so VERY wrong.”
“It seems as if I HAD. I don’t know what’s come over me. I wasn’t afraid of the woman before, but now I don’t seem to feel as if I could look her in the face. He’s been coming here of his own accord, and I fought against his coming long enough, goodness knows. I didn’t want him to come. And as far forth as that goes, we’re as respectable as they are; and your father’s got twice their money, any day. We’ve no need to go begging for their favour. I guess they were glad enough to get him in with your father.”
“Yes, those are all good points, mother,” said the girl; “and if you keep saying them over, and count a hundred every time before you speak, I guess you’ll worry through.”
Mrs. Lapham had been fussing distractedly with her hair and ribbons, in preparation for her encounter with Mrs. Corey. She now drew in a long quivering breath, stared at her daughter without seeing her, and hurried downstairs. It was true that when she met Mrs. Corey before she had not been awed by her; but since then she had learned at least her own ignorance of the world, and she had talked over the things she had misconceived and the things she had shrewdly guessed so much that she could not meet her on the former footing of equality. In spite of as brave a spirit and as good a conscience as woman need have, Mrs. Lapham cringed inwardly, and tremulously wondered what her visitor had come for. She turned from pale to red, and was hardly coherent in her greetings; she did not know how they got to where Mrs. Corey was saying exactly the right things about her son’s interest and satisfaction in his new business, and keeping her eyes fixed on Mrs. Lapham’s, reading her uneasiness there, and making her feel, in spite of her indignant innocence, that she had taken a base advantage of her in her absence to get her son away from her and marry him to Irene. Then, presently, while this was painfully revolving itself in Mrs. Lapham’s mind, she was aware of Mrs. Corey’s asking if she was not to have the pleasure of seeing Miss Irene.
“No; she’s out, just now,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I don’t know just when she’ll be in. She went to get a book.” And here she turned red again, knowing that Irene had gone to get the book because it was one that Corey had spoken of.