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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
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.
“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.”
“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?”
“Well, Persis is. I don’t know as you saw an interview that fellow published in the Events a while back?”
“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.
“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?”
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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!”
“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.
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.
“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.”
“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—-“
“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.”
“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.
“Oh! I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Corey. “I had hoped to see her. And your other daughter, whom I never met?”
“Penelope?” asked Mrs. Lapham, eased a little. “She is at home. I will go and call her.” The Laphams had not yet thought of spending their superfluity on servants who could be rung for; they kept two girls and a man to look after the furnace, as they had for the last ten years. If Mrs. Lapham had rung in the parlour, her second girl would have gone to the street door to see who was there. She went upstairs for Penelope herself, and the girl, after some rebellious derision, returned with her.
Mrs. Corey took account of her, as Penelope withdrew to the other side of the room after their introduction, and sat down, indolently submissive on the surface to the tests to be applied, and following Mrs. Corey’s lead of the conversation in her odd drawl.
“You young ladies will be glad to be getting into your new house,” she said politely.
“I don’t know,” said Penelope. “We’re so used to this one.”
Mrs. Corey looked a little baffled, but she said sympathetically, “Of course, you will be sorry to leave your old home.”
Mrs. Lapham could not help putting in on behalf of her daughters: “I guess if it was left to the girls to say, we shouldn’t leave it at all.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Corey; “are they so much attached? But I can quite understand it. My children would be heart-broken too if we were to leave the old place.” She turned to Penelope. “But you must think of the lovely new house, and the beautiful position.”
“Yes, I suppose we shall get used to them too,” said Penelope, in response to this didactic consolation.
“Oh, I could even imagine your getting very fond of them,” pursued Mrs. Corey patronisingly. “My son has told me of the lovely outlook you’re to have over the water. He thinks you have such a beautiful house. I believe he had the pleasure of meeting you all there when he first came home.”
“Yes, I think he was our first visitor.”
“He is a great admirer of your house,” said Mrs. Corey, keeping her eyes very sharply, however politely, on Penelope’s face, as if to surprise there the secret of any other great admiration of her son’s that might helplessly show itself.
“Yes,” said the girl, “he’s been there several times with father; and he wouldn’t be allowed to overlook any of its good points.”
Her mother took a little more courage from her daughter’s tranquillity.
“The girls make such fun of their father’s excitement about his building, and the way he talks it into everybody.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Corey, with civil misunderstanding and inquiry.
Penelope flushed, and her mother went on: “I tell him he’s more of a child about it than any of them.”
“Young people are very philosophical nowadays,” remarked Mrs. Corey.
“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I tell them they’ve always had everything, so that nothing’s a surprise to them. It was different with us in our young days.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Corey, without assenting.
“I mean the Colonel and myself,” explained Mrs. Lapham.
“Oh yes–yes!” said Mrs. Corey.
“I’m sure,” the former went on, rather helplessly, “we had to work hard enough for everything we got. And so we appreciated it.”
“So many things were not done for young people then,” said Mrs. Corey, not recognising the early-hardships standpoint of Mrs. Lapham. “But I don’t know that they are always the better for it now,” she added vaguely, but with the satisfaction we all feel in uttering a just commonplace.
“It’s rather hard living up to blessings that you’ve always had,” said Penelope.
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Corey distractedly, and coming back to her slowly from the virtuous distance to which she had absented herself. She looked at the girl searchingly again, as if to determine whether this were a touch of the drolling her son had spoken of. But she only added: “You will enjoy the sunsets on the Back Bay so much.” “Well, not unless they’re new ones,” said Penelope. “I don’t believe I could promise to enjoy any sunsets that I was used to, a great deal.”
Mrs. Corey looked at her with misgiving, hardening into dislike. “No,” she breathed vaguely. “My son spoke of the fine effect of the lights about the hotel from your cottage at Nantasket,” she said to Mrs. Lapham.
“Yes, they’re splendid!” exclaimed that lady. “I guess the girls went down every night with him to see them from the rocks.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Corey, a little dryly; and she permitted herself to add: “He spoke of those rocks. I suppose both you young ladies spend a great deal of your time on them when you’re there. At Nahant my children were constantly on them.”
“Irene likes the rocks,” said Penelope. “I don’t care much about them,–especially at night.”
“Oh, indeed! I suppose you find it quite as well looking at the lights comfortably from the veranda.”
“No; you can’t see them from the house.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Corey. After a perceptible pause, she turned to Mrs. Lapham. “I don’t know what my son would have done for a breath of sea air this summer, if you had not allowed him to come to Nantasket. He wasn’t willing to leave his business long enough to go anywhere else.”
“Yes, he’s a born business man,” responded Mrs. Lapham enthusiastically. “If it’s born in you, it’s bound to come out. That’s what the Colonel is always saying about Mr. Corey. He says it’s born in him to be a business man, and he can’t help it.” She recurred to Corey gladly because she felt that she had not said enough of him when his mother first spoke of his connection with the business. “I don’t believe,” she went on excitedly, “that Colonel Lapham has ever had anybody with him that he thought more of.”
“You have all been very kind to my son,” said Mrs. Corey in acknowledgment, and stiffly bowing a little, “and we feel greatly indebted to you. Very much so.” At these grateful expressions Mrs. Lapham reddened once more, and murmured that it had been very pleasant to them, she was sure. She glanced at her daughter for support, but Penelope was looking at Mrs. Corey, who doubtless saw her from the corner of her eyes, though she went on speaking to her mother.
“I was sorry to hear from him that Mr.–Colonel?–Lapham had not been quite well this summer. I hope he’s better now?”
“Oh yes, indeed,” replied Mrs. Lapham; “he’s all right now. He’s hardly ever been sick, and he don’t know how to take care of himself. That’s all. We don’t any of us; we’re all so well.”
“Health is a great blessing,” sighed Mrs. Corey.
“Yes, so it is. How is your oldest daughter?” inquired Mrs. Lapham. “Is she as delicate as ever?”
“She seems to be rather better since we returned.” And now Mrs. Corey, as if forced to the point, said bunglingly that the young ladies had wished to come with her, but had been detained. She based her statement upon Nanny’s sarcastic demand; and, perhaps seeing it topple a little, she rose hastily, to get away from its fall. “But we shall hope for some–some other occasion,” she said vaguely, and she put on a parting smile, and shook hands with Mrs. Lapham and Penelope, and then, after some lingering commonplaces, got herself out of the house.
Penelope and her mother were still looking at each other, and trying to grapple with the effect or purport of the visit, when Irene burst in upon them from the outside.
“O mamma! wasn’t that Mrs. Corey’s carriage just drove away?”
Penelope answered with her laugh. “Yes! You’ve just missed the most delightful call, ‘Rene. So easy and pleasant every way. Not a bit stiff! Mrs. Corey was so friendly! She didn’t make one feel at all as if she’d bought me, and thought she’d given too much; and mother held up her head as if she were all wool and a yard wide, and she would just like to have anybody deny it.”
In a few touches of mimicry she dashed off a sketch of the scene: her mother’s trepidation, and Mrs. Corey’s well-bred repose and polite scrutiny of them both. She ended by showing how she herself had sat huddled up in a dark corner, mute with fear.
“If she came to make us say and do the wrong thing, she must have gone away happy; and it’s a pity you weren’t here to help, Irene. I don’t know that I aimed to make a bad impression, but I guess I succeeded–even beyond my deserts.” She laughed; then suddenly she flashed out in fierce earnest. “If I missed doing anything that could make me as hateful to her as she made herself to me—-” She checked herself, and began to laugh. Her laugh broke, and the tears started into her eyes; she ran out of the room, and up the stairs.
“What–what does it mean?” asked Irene in a daze.
Mrs. Lapham was still in the chilly torpor to which Mrs. Corey’s call had reduced her. Penelope’s vehemence did not rouse her. She only shook her head absently, and said, “I don’t know.”
“Why should Pen care what impression she made? I didn’t suppose it would make any difference to her whether Mrs. Corey liked her or not.”
“I didn’t, either. But I could see that she was just as nervous as she could be, every minute of the time. I guess she didn’t like Mrs. Corey any too well from the start, and she couldn’t seem to act like herself.”
“Tell me about it, mamma,” said Irene, dropping into a chair.
Mrs. Corey described the interview to her husband on her return home. “Well, and what are your inferences?” he asked.
“They were extremely embarrassed and excited–that is, the mother. I don’t wish to do her injustice, but she certainly behaved consciously.”
“You made her feel so, I dare say, Anna. I can imagine how terrible you must have been in the character of an accusing spirit, too lady-like to say anything. What did you hint?”
“I hinted nothing,” said Mrs. Corey, descending to the weakness of defending herself. “But I saw quite enough to convince me that the girl is in love with Tom, and the mother knows it.”
“That was very unsatisfactory. I supposed you went to find out whether Tom was in love with the girl. Was she as pretty as ever?”
“I didn’t see her; she was not at home; I saw her sister.”
“I don’t know that I follow you quite, Anna. But no matter. What was the sister like?”
“A thoroughly disagreeable young woman.”
“Nothing. She’s far too sly for that. But that was the impression.”
“Then you didn’t find her so amusing as Tom does?”
“I found her pert. There’s no other word for it. She says things to puzzle you and put you out.”
“Ah, that was worse than pert, Anna; that was criminal. Well, let us thank heaven the younger one is so pretty.”
Mrs. Corey did not reply directly. “Bromfield,” she said, after a moment of troubled silence, “I have been thinking over your plan, and I don’t see why it isn’t the right thing.”
“What is my plan?” inquired Bromfield Corey.
Her husband began to laugh. “Ah, you overdid the accusing-spirit business, and this is reparation.” But Mrs. Corey hurried on, with combined dignity and anxiety–
“We can’t ignore Tom’s intimacy with them–it amounts to that; it will probably continue even if it’s merely a fancy, and we must seem to know it; whatever comes of it, we can’t disown it. They are very simple, unfashionable people, and unworldly; but I can’t say that they are offensive, unless–unless,” she added, in propitiation of her husband’s smile, “unless the father–how did you find the father?” she implored.
“He will be very entertaining,” said Corey, “if you start him on his paint. What was the disagreeable daughter like? Shall you have her?”
“She’s little and dark. We must have them all,” Mrs. Corey sighed. “Then you don’t think a dinner would do?”
“Oh yes, I do. As you say, we can’t disown Tom’s relation to them, whatever it is. We had much better recognise it, and make the best of the inevitable. I think a Lapham dinner would be delightful.” He looked at her with delicate irony in his voice and smile, and she fetched another sigh, so deep and sore now that he laughed outright. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it would be the best way of curing Tom of his fancy, if he has one. He has been seeing her with the dangerous advantages which a mother knows how to give her daughter in the family circle, and with no means of comparing her with other girls. You must invite several other very pretty girls.”
“Do you really think so, Bromfield?” asked Mrs. Corey, taking courage a little. “That might do,” But her spirits visibly sank again. “I don’t know any other girl half so pretty.”
“She is very lady-like, very modest, and pleasing.”
“Tom doesn’t get on with such people.”
“Oh, you wish him to marry her, I see.”
“Then you’d better give the dinner to bring them together, to promote the affair.”
“You know I don’t want to do that, Bromfield. But I feel that we must do something. If we don’t, it has a clandestine appearance. It isn’t just to them. A dinner won’t leave us in any worse position, and may leave us in a better. Yes,” said Mrs. Corey, after another thoughtful interval, “we must have them–have them all. It could be very simple.”
“Ah, you can’t give a dinner under a bushel, if I take your meaning, my dear. If we do this at all, we mustn’t do it as if we were ashamed of it. We must ask people to meet them.”
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “There are not many people in town yet,” she added, with relief that caused her husband another smile. “There really seems a sort of fatality about it,” she concluded religiously.
“Then you had better not struggle against it. Go and reconcile Lily and Nanny to it as soon as possible.”
Mrs. Corey blanched a little. “But don’t you think it will be the best thing, Bromfield?”
“I do indeed, my dear. The only thing that shakes my faith in the scheme is the fact that I first suggested it. But if you have adopted it, it must be all right, Anna. I can’t say that I expected it.”
“No,” said his wife, “it wouldn’t do.”
HAVING distinctly given up the project of asking the Laphams to dinner, Mrs. Corey was able to carry it out with the courage of sinners who have sacrificed to virtue by frankly acknowledging its superiority to their intended transgression. She did not question but the Laphams would come; and she only doubted as to the people whom she should invite to meet them. She opened the matter with some trepidation to her daughters, but neither of them opposed her; they rather looked at the scheme from her own point of view, and agreed with her that nothing had really yet been done to wipe out the obligation to the Laphams helplessly contracted the summer before, and strengthened by that ill-advised application to Mrs. Lapham for charity. Not only the principal of their debt of gratitude remained, but the accruing interest. They said, What harm could giving the dinner possibly do them? They might ask any or all of their acquaintance without disadvantage to themselves; but it would be perfectly easy to give the dinner just the character they chose, and still flatter the ignorance of the Laphams. The trouble would be with Tom, if he were really interested in the girl; but he could not say anything if they made it a family dinner; he could not feel anything. They had each turned in her own mind, as it appeared from a comparison of ideas, to one of the most comprehensive of those cousinships which form the admiration and terror of the adventurer in Boston society. He finds himself hemmed in and left out at every turn by ramifications that forbid him all hope of safe personality in his comments on people; he is never less secure than when he hears some given Bostonian denouncing or ridiculing another. If he will be advised, he will guard himself from concurring in these criticisms, however just they appear, for the probability is that their object is a cousin of not more than one remove from the censor. When the alien hears a group of Boston ladies calling one another, and speaking of all their gentlemen friends, by the familiar abbreviations of their Christian names, he must feel keenly the exile to which he was born; but he is then, at least, in comparatively little danger; while these latent and tacit cousinships open pitfalls at every step around him, in a society where Middlesexes have married Essexes and produced Suffolks for two hundred and fifty years.
These conditions, however, so perilous to the foreigner, are a source of strength and security to those native to them. An uncertain acquaintance may be so effectually involved in the meshes of such a cousinship, as never to be heard of outside of it and tremendous stories are told of people who have spent a whole winter in Boston, in a whirl of gaiety, and who, the original guests of the Suffolks, discover upon reflection that they have met no one but Essexes and Middlesexes.
Mrs. Corey’s brother James came first into her mind, and she thought with uncommon toleration of the easy-going, uncritical, good-nature of his wife. James Bellingham had been the adviser of her son throughout, and might be said to have actively promoted his connection with Lapham. She thought next of the widow of her cousin, Henry Bellingham, who had let her daughter marry that Western steamboat man, and was fond of her son-in-law; she might be expected at least to endure the paint-king and his family. The daughters insisted so strongly upon Mrs. Bellingham’s son Charles, that Mrs. Corey put him down–if he were in town; he might be in Central America; he got on with all sorts of people. It seemed to her that she might stop at this: four Laphams, five Coreys, and four Bellinghams were enough.
“That makes thirteen,” said Nanny. “You can have Mr. and Mrs. Sewell.”
“Yes, that is a good idea,” assented Mrs. Corey. “He is our minister, and it is very proper.”
“I don’t see why you don’t have Robert Chase. It is a pity he shouldn’t see her–for the colour.”
“I don’t quite like the idea of that,” said Mrs. Corey; “but we can have him too, if it won’t make too many.” The painter had married into a poorer branch of the Coreys, and his wife was dead. “Is there any one else?”
“We have had her so much. She will begin to think we are using her.”
“She won’t mind; she’s so good-natured.”
“Well, then,” the mother summed up, “there are four Laphams, five Coreys, four Bellinghams, one Chase, and one Kingsbury–fifteen. Oh! and two Sewells. Seventeen. Ten ladies and seven gentlemen. It doesn’t balance very well, and it’s too large.”
“Perhaps some of the ladies won’t come,” suggested Lily.
“Oh, the ladies always come,” said Nanny.
Their mother reflected. “Well, I will ask them. The ladies will refuse in time to let us pick up some gentlemen somewhere; some more artists. Why! we must have Mr. Seymour, the architect; he’s a bachelor, and he’s building their house, Tom says.”
Her voice fell a little when she mentioned her son’s name, and she told him of her plan, when he came home in the evening, with evident misgiving.
“What are you doing it for, mother?” he asked, looking at her with his honest eyes.
She dropped her own in a little confusion. “I won’t do it at all, my dear,” she said, “if you don’t approve. But I thought–You know we have never made any proper acknowledgment of their kindness to us at Baie St. Paul. Then in the winter, I’m ashamed to say, I got money from her for a charity I was interested in; and I hate the idea of merely USING people in that way. And now your having been at their house this summer–we can’t seem to disapprove of that; and your business relations to him—-“
“Yes, I see,” said Corey. “Do you think it amounts to a dinner?”
“Why, I don’t know,” returned his mother. “We shall have hardly any one out of our family connection.”
“Well,” Corey assented, “it might do. I suppose what you wish is to give them a pleasure.”
“Why, certainly. Don’t you think they’d like to come?”
“Oh, they’d like to come; but whether it would be a pleasure after they were here is another thing. I should have said that if you wanted to have them, they would enjoy better being simply asked to meet our own immediate family.”
“That’s what I thought of in the first place, but your father seemed to think it implied a social distrust of them; and we couldn’t afford to have that appearance, even to ourselves.”