The loggers pulled off their boots and got into their bunks, where some of them lay and smoked, while others fell asleep directly.
Bartley made some indirect approaches to Kinney for sympathy in the snub which he had received, and which rankled in his mind with unabated keenness.
But Kinney did not respond. “Your bed's ready,” he said. “You can turn in whenever you like.”
“What's the matter?” asked Bartley.
“Nothing's the matter, if you say so,” answered Kinney, going about some preparations for the morning's breakfast.
Bartley looked at his resentful back. He saw that he was hurt, and he surmised that Kinney suspected him of making fun of his eccentricities to Mrs. Macallister. Hehadlaughed at Kinney, and tried to amuse her with him; but he could not have made this appear as harmless as it was. He rose from the bench on which he had been sitting, and shut with a click the penknife with which he had been cutting a pattern on its edge.
“I shall have to say good night to you, I believe,” he said, going to the peg on which Kinney had hung his hat and overcoat. He had them on, and was buttoning the coat in an angry tremor before Kinney looked up and realized what his guest was about.
“Why, what—why, where—you goin'?” he faltered in dismay.
“To Equity,” said Bartley, feeling in his coat pockets for his gloves, and drawing them on, without looking at Kinney, whose great hands were in a pan of dough.
“Why—why—no, you aint!” he protested, with a revulsion of feeling that swept away all his resentment, and left him nothing but remorse for his inhospitality.
“No?” said Bartley, putting up the collar of the first ulster worn by a native in that region.
“Why, look here!” cried Kinney, pulling his hands out of the dough, and making a fruitless effort to cleanse them upon each other. “I don't want you to go, this way.”
“Don't you? I'm sorry to disoblige you; but I'm going,” said Bartley.
Kinney tried to laugh. “Why, Hubbard,—why, Bartley,—why, Bart!” he exclaimed. “What's the matter with you? I aint mad!”
“You have an unfortunate manner, then. Good night.” He strode out between the bunks, full of snoring loggers.
Kinney hurried after him, imploring and protesting in a low voice, trying to get before him, and longing to lay his floury paws upon him and detain him by main force, but even in his distress respecting Bartley's overcoat too much to touch it. He followed him out into the freezing air in his shirt-sleeves, and besought him not to be such a fool. “It makes me feel like the devil!” he exclaimed, pitifully. “You come back, now, half a minute, and I'll make it all right with you. I know I can; you're a gentleman, and you'll understand.Docome back! I shall never get over it if you don't!”
“I'm sorry,” said Bartley, “but I'm not going back. Good night.”
“Oh, good Lordy!” lamented Kinney. “What am I goin' to do? Why, man! It's a good three mile and more to Equity, and the woods is full of catamounts. I tell ye 't aint safe for ye.” He kept following Bartley down the path to the road.
“I'll risk it,” said Bartley.
Kinney had left the door of the camp open, and the yells and curses of the awakened sleepers recalled him to himself. “Well, well! If you willgo” he groaned in despair, “here's that money.” He plunged his doughy hand into his pocket, and pulled out a roll of bills. “Here it is. I haint time to count it; but it'll be all right, anyhow.”
Bartley did not even turn his head to look round at him. “Keep your money!” he said, as he plunged forward through the snow. “I wouldn't touch a cent of it to save your life.”
“All right,” said Kinney, in hapless contrition, and he returned to shut himself in with the reproaches of the loggers and the upbraiding of his own heart.
Bartley dashed along the road in a fury that kept him unconscious of the intense cold; and he passed half the night, when he was once more in his own room, packing his effects against his departure next day. When all was done, he went to bed, half wishing that he might never rise from it again. It was not that he cared for Kinney; that fool's sulking was only the climax of a long series of injuries of which he was the victim at the hands of a hypercritical omnipotence.
Despite his conviction that it was useless to struggle longer against such injustice, he lived through the night, and came down late to breakfast, which he found stale, and without the compensating advantage of finding himself alone at the table. Some ladies had lingered there to clear up on the best authority the distracting rumors concerning him which they had heard the day before. Was it true that he had intended to spend the rest of the winter in logging? andwasit true that he was going to give up the Free Press? and was ittruethat Henry Bird was going to be the editor? Bartley gave a sarcastic confirmation to all these reports, and went out to the printing-office to gather up some things of his. He found Henry Bird there, looking pale and sick, but at work, and seemingly in authority. This was what Bartley had always intended when he should go out, but he did not like it, and he resented some small changes that had already been made in the editor's room, in tacit recognition of his purpose not to occupy it again.
Bird greeted him stiffly; the printer girls briefly nodded to him, suppressing some little hysterical titters, and tacitly let him feel that he was no longer master there. While he was in the composing-room Hannah Morrison came in, apparently from some errand outside, and, catching sight of him, stared, and pertly passed him in silence. On his inkstand he found a letter from Squire Gaylord, briefly auditing his last account, and enclosing the balance due him. From this the old lawyer, with the careful smallness of a village business man, had deducted various little sums for things which Bartley had never expected to pay for. With a like thriftiness the landlord, when Bartley asked for his bill, had charged certain items that had not appeared in the bills before. Bartley felt that the charges were trumped up; but he was powerless to dispute them; besides, he hoped to sell the landlord his colt and cutter, and he did not care to prejudice that matter. Some bills from storekeepers, which he thought he had paid, were handed to him by the landlord, and each of the churches had sent in a little account for pew-rent for the past eighteen months: he had always believed himself dead-headed at church. He outlawed the latter by tearing them to pieces in the landlord's presence, and dropping the fragments into a spittoon. It seemed to him that every soul in Equity was making a clutch at the rapidly diminishing sum of money which Squire Gaylord had enclosed to him, and which was all he had in the world. On the other hand, his popularity in the village seemed to have vanished over night. He had sometimes fancied a general and rebellious grief when it should become known that he was going away; but instead there was an acquiescence amounting to airiness.
He wondered if anything about his affairs with Henry Bird and Hannah Morrison had leaked out. But he did not care. He only wished to shake the snow of Equity off his feet as soon as possible.
After dinner, when the boarders had gone out, and the loafers had not yet gathered in, he offered the landlord his colt and cutter. Bartley knew that the landlord wanted the colt; but now the latter said, “I don't know as I care to buy any horses, right in the winter, this way.”
“All right,” answered Bartley. “Just have the colt put into the cutter.”
Andy Morrison brought it round. The boy looked at Bartley's set face with a sort of awe-stricken affection; his adoration for the young man survived all that he had heard said against him at home during the series of family quarrels that had ensued upon his father's interview with him; he longed to testify, somehow, his unabated loyalty, but he could not think of anything to do, much less to say.
Bartley pitched his valise into the cutter, and then, as Andy left the horse's head to give him a hand with his trunk, offered him a dollar. “I don't want anything,” said the boy, shyly refusing the money out of pure affection.
But Bartley mistook his motive, and thought it sulky resentment. “Oh, very well,” he said. “Take hold.”
The landlord came out. “Hold on a minute,” he said. “Where you goin' to take the cars?”
“At the Junction,” answered Bartley. “I know a man there that will buy the colt. What is it you want?”
The landlord stepped back a few paces, and surveyed the establishment. “I should like to ride after that hoss,” he said, “if you aint in any great of a hurry.”
“Get in,” said Bartley, and the landlord took the reins.
From time to time, as he drove, he rose up and looked over the dashboard to study the gait of the horse. “I've noticed he strikes some, when he first comes out in the spring.”
“Yes,” Bartley assented.
“Pulls consid'able.”
“He pulls.”
The landlord rose again and scrutinized the horse's legs. “I don't know as I ever noticed 't he'd capped his hock before.”
“Didn't you?”
“Done it kickin' nights, I guess.”
“I guess so.”
The landlord drew the whip lightly across the colt's rear; he shrank together, and made a little spring forward, but behaved perfectly well.
“I don't know as I should always be sure he wouldn't kick in the daytime.”
“No,” said Bartley, “you never can be sure of anything.”
They drove along in silence. At last the landlord said, “Well, he aint so fast as Isupposed.”
“He's not so fast a horse as some,” answered Bartley.
The landlord leaned over sidewise for an inspection of the colt's action forward. “Haint never thought he had a splint on that forward off leg?”
“A splint? Perhaps he has a splint.”
They returned to the hotel and both alighted.
“Skittish devil,” remarked the landlord, as the colt quivered under the hand he laid upon him.
“He's skittish,” said Bartley.
The landlord retired as far back as the door, and regarded the colt critically. “Well, I s'pose you've always used him too well ever to winded him, but dumn 'f he don'tblowlike it.”
“Look here, Simpson,” said Bartley, very quietly. “You know this horse as well as I do, and you know there isn't an out about him. You want to buy him because you always have. Now make me an offer.”
“Well,” groaned the landlord, “what'll you take for the whole rig, just as it stands,—colt, cutter, leathers, and robe?”
“Two hundred dollars,” promptly replied Bartley.
“I'll give ye seventy-five,” returned the landlord with equal promptness.
“Andy, take hold of the end of that trunk, will you?”
The landlord allowed them to put the trunk into the cutter. Bartley got in too, and, shifting the baggage to one side, folded the robe around him from his middle down and took his seat. “This colt can road you right along all day inside of five minutes, and he can trot inside of two-thirty every time; and you know it as well as I do.”
“Well,” said the landlord, “make it an even hundred.”
Bartley leaned forward and gathered up the reins, “Let go his head, Andy,” he quietly commanded.
“Make it one and a quarter,” cried the landlord, not seeing that his chance was past. “What do you say?”
What Bartley said, as he touched the colt with the whip, the landlord never knew. He stood watching the cutter's swift disappearance up the road, in a sort of stupid expectation of its return. When he realized that Bartley's departure was final, he said under his breath, “Sold, ye dumned old fool, and serve ye right,” and went in-doors with a feeling of admiration! for colt and man that bordered on reverence.
This last drop of the local meanness filled Bartley's bitter cup. As he passed the house at the end of the street he seemed to drain it all. He knew that the old lawyer was there sitting by the office stove, drawing his hand across his chin, and Bartley hoped that he was still as miserable as he had looked when he last saw him; but he did not know that by the window in the house, which he would not even look at, Marcia sat self-prisoned in her room, with her eyes upon the road, famishing for the thousandth part of a chance to see him pass. She saw him now for the instant of his coming and going. With eyes trained to take in every point, she saw the preparation which seemed like final departure, and with a gasp of “Bartley!” as if she were trying to call after him, she sank back into her chair and shut her eyes.
He drove on, plunging into the deep hollow beyond the house, and keeping for several miles the road they had taken on that Sunday together; but he did not make the turn that brought them back to the village again. The pale sunset was slanting over the snow when he reached the Junction, for he had slackened his colt's pace after he had put ten miles behind him, not choosing to reach a prospective purchaser with his horse all blown and bathed with sweat. He wished to be able to say, “Look at him! He's come fifteen miles since three o'clock, and he's as keen as when he started.”
This was true, when, having left his baggage at the Junction, he drove another mile into the country to see the farmer of the gentleman who had his summer-house here, and who had once bantered Bartley to sell him his colt. The farmer was away, and would not be at home till the up-train from Boston was in. Bartley looked at his watch, and saw that to wait would lose him the six o'clock down-train. There would be no other till eleven o'clock. But it was worth while: the gentleman had said, “When you want the money for that colt, bring him over any time; my farmer will have it ready for you.” He waited for the up-train; but when the farmer arrived, he was full of all sorts of scruples and reluctances. He said he should not like to buy it till he had heard from Mr. Farnham; he ended by offering Bartley eighty dollars for the colt on his own account; he did not want the cutter.
“You write to Mr. Farnham,” said Bartley, “that you tried that plan with me, and it wouldn't work, he's lost the colt.”
He made this brave show of indifference, but he was disheartened, and, having carried the farmer home from the Junction for the convenience of talking over the trade with him, he drove back again through the early night-fall in sullen desperation.
The weather had softened and was threatening rain or snow; the dark was closing in spiritlessly; the colt, shortening from a trot into a short, springy jolt, dropped into a walk at last as if he were tired, and gave Bartley time enough on his way back to the Junction for reflection upon the disaster into which his life had fallen. These passages of utter despair are commoner to the young than they are to those whom years have experienced in the impermanence of any fate, good, bad, or indifferent, unless, perhaps, the last may seem rather constant. Taken in reference to all that had been ten days ago, the present ruin was incredible, and had nothing reasonable in proof of its existence. Then he was prosperously placed, and in the way to better himself indefinitely. Now, he was here in the dark, with fifteen dollars in his pocket, and an unsalable horse on his hands; outcast, deserted, homeless, hopeless: and by whose fault? He owned even then that he had committed some follies; but in his sense of Marcia's all-giving love he had risen for once in his life to a conception of self-devotion, and in taking herself from him as she did, she had taken from him the highest incentive he had ever known, and had checked him in his first feeble impulse to do and be all in all for another. It was she who had ruined him.
As he jumped out of the cutter at the Junction the station-master stopped with a cluster of party-colored signal-lanterns in his hand and cast their light over the sorrel.
“Nice colt you got there.”
“Yes,” said Bartley, blanketing the horse, “do you know anybody who wants to buy?”
“Whose is he?” asked the man.
“He's mine!” shouted Bartley. “Do you think I stole him?”
“I don't know where you got him,” said the man, walking off, and making a soft play of red and green lights on the snow beyond the narrow platform.
Bartley went into the great ugly barn of a station, trembling, and sat down in one of the gouged and whittled arm-chairs near the stove. A pomp of timetables and luminous advertisements of Western railroads and their land-grants decorated the wooden walls of the gentlemen's waiting-room, which had been sanded to keep the gentlemen from writing and sketching upon them. This was the more judicious because the ladies' room, in the absence of tourist travel, was locked in winter, and they were obliged to share the gentlemen's. In summer, the Junction was a busy place, but after the snow fell, and until the snow thawed, it was a desolation relieved only by the arrival of the sparsely peopled through-trains from the north and east, and by such local travellers as wished to take trains not stopping at their own stations. These broke in upon the solitude of the joint station-master and baggage-man and switch-tender with just sufficient frequency to keep him in a state of uncharitable irritation and unrest. To-night Bartley was the sole intruder, and he sat by the stove wrapped in a cloud of rebellious memories, when one side of a colloquy without made itself heard.
“What?”
Some question was repeated.
“No; it went down half an hour ago.”
An inaudible question followed.
“Next down-train at eleven.”
There was now a faintly audible lament or appeal.
“Guess you'll have to come earlier next time. Most folks doos that wants to take it.”
Bartley now heard the despairing moan of a woman: he had already divined the sex of the futile questioner whom the station-master was bullying; but he had divined it without compassion, and if he had not himself been a sufferer from the man's insolence he might even have felt a ferocious satisfaction in it. In a word, he was at his lowest and worst when the door opened and the woman came in, with a movement at once bewildered and daring, which gave him the impression of a despair as complete and final as his own. He doggedly kept his place; she did not seem to care for him, but in the uncertain light of the lamp above them she drew near the stove, and, putting one hand to her pocket as if to find her handkerchief, she flung aside her veil with her other, and showed her tear stained face.
He was on his feet somehow. “Marcia!”
“Oh! Bartley—”
He had seized her by the arm to make sure that she was there in verity of flesh and blood, and not by some trick of his own senses, as a cold chill running over him had made him afraid. At the touch their passion ignored all that they had made each other suffer; her head was on his breast, his embrace was round her; it was a moment of delirious bliss that intervened between the sorrows that had been and the reasons that must come.
“What—what are you doing here, Marcia?” he asked at last.
They sank on the benching that ran round the wall; he held her hands fast in one of his, and kept his other arm about her as they sat side by side.
“I don't know—I—” She seemed to rouse herself by an effort from her rapture. “I was going to see Nettie Spaulding. And I saw you driving past our house; and I thought you were coming here; and I couldn't bear—I couldn't bear to let you go away without telling you that I was wrong; and asking—asking you to forgive me. I thought you would do it,—I thought you would know that I had behaved that way because I—I—cared so much for you. I thought—I was afraid you had gone on the other train—” She trembled and sank back in his embrace, from which she had lifted herself a little.
“How did you get here?” asked Bartley, as if willing to give himself all the proofs he could of the every-day reality of her presence.
“Andy Morrison brought me. Father sent him from the hotel. I didn't care what you would say to me, I wanted to tell you that I was wrong, and not let you go away feeling that—that—you were all to blame. I thought when I had done that you might drive me away,—or laugh at me, or anything you pleased, if only you would let me take back—”
“Yes,” he answered dreamily. All that wicked hardness was breaking up within him; he felt it melting drop by drop in his heart. This poor love-tossed soul, this frantic, unguided, reckless girl, was an angel of mercy to him, and in her folly and error a messenger of heavenly peace and hope. “I am a bad fellow, Marcia,” he faltered. “You ought to know that. You did right to give me up. I made love to Hannah Morrison; I never promised to marry her, but I made her think that I was fond of her.”
“I don't care for that,” replied the girl. “I told you when we were first engaged that I would never think of anything that had gone before that; and then when I would not listen to a word from you, that day, I broke my promise.”
“When I struck Henry Bird because he was jealous of me, I was as guilty as if I had killed him.”
“If you had killed him, I was bound to you by my word. Your striking him was part of the same thing,—part of what I had promised I never would care for.” A gush of tears came into his eyes, and she saw them. “Oh, poor Bartley! Poor Bartley!”
She took his head between her hands and pressed it hard against her heart, and then wrapped her arms tight about him, and softly bemoaned him.
They drew a little apart when the man came in with his lantern, and set it down to mend the fire. But as a railroad employee he was far too familiar with the love that vaunts itself on all railroad trains to feel that he was an intruder. He scarcely looked at them, and went out when he had mended the fire, and left it purring.
“Where is Andy Morrison?” asked Bartley. “Has he gone back?”
“No; he is at the hotel over there. I told him to wait till I found out when the train went north.”
“So you inquired when it went to Boston,” said Bartley, with a touch of his old raillery. “Come,” he added, taking her hand under his arm. He led her out of the room, to where his cutter stood outside. She was astonished to find the colt there.
“I wonder I didn't see it. But if I had, I should have thought that you had sold it and gone away; Andy told me you were coming here to sell the colt. When the man told me the express was gone, I knew you were on it.”
They found the boy stolidly waiting for Marcia on the veranda of the hotel, stamping first upon one foot and then the other, and hugging himself in his great-coat as the coming snow-fall blew its first flakes in his face.
“Is that you, Andy?” asked Bartley.
“Yes, sir,” answered the boy, without surprise at finding him with Marcia.
“Well, here! Just take hold of the colt's head a minute.”
As the boy obeyed, Bartley threw the reins on the dashboard, and leaped out of the cutter, and went within. He returned after a brief absence, followed by the landlord.
“Well, it ain't more 'n a mile 'n a half, if it's that. You just keep straight along this street, and take your first turn to the left, and you're right at the house; it's the first house on the left-hand side.”
“Thanks,” returned Bartley. “Andy, you tell the Squire that you left Marcia with me, and I said I would see about her getting back. You needn't hurry.”
“All right,” said the boy, and he disappeared round the corner of the house to get his horse from the barn.
“Well, I'll be all ready by the time you're here,” said the landlord, still holding the hall-door ajar, “Lucktoyou!” he shouted, shutting it.
Marcia locked both her hands through Bartley's arm, and leaned her head on his shoulder. Neither spoke for some minutes; then he asked, “Marcia, do you know where you are?”
“With you,” she answered, in a voice of utter peace.
“Do you know where we are going?” he asked, leaning over to kiss her cold, pure cheek.
“No,” she answered in as perfect content as before.
“We are going to get married.”
He felt her grow tense in her clasp upon his arm, and hold there rigidly for a moment, while the swift thoughts whirled through her mind. Then, as if the struggle had ended, she silently relaxed, and leaned more heavily against him.
“There's still time to go back, Marcia,” he said, “if you wish. That turn to the right, yonder, will take us to Equity, and you can be at home in two hours.” She quivered. “I'm a poor man,—I suppose you know that; I've only got fifteen dollars in the world, and the colt here. I know I can get on; I'm not afraid for myself; but if you would rather wait,—if you're not perfectly certain of yourself,—remember, it's going to be a struggle; we're going to have some hard times—”
“You forgive me?” she huskily asked, for all answer, without moving her head from where it lay.
“Yes, Marcia.”
“Then—hurry.”
The minister was an old man, and he seemed quite dazed at the suddenness of their demand for his services. But he gathered himself together, and contrived to make them man and wife, and to give them his marriage certificate.
“It seems as if there were something else,” he said, absently, as he handed the paper to Bartley.
“Perhaps it's this,” said Bartley, giving him a five-dollar note in return.
“Ah, perhaps,” he replied, in unabated perplexity. He bade them serve God, and let them out into the snowy night, through which they drove back to the hotel.
The landlord had kindled a fire on the hearth of the Franklin stove in his parlor, and the blazing hickory snapped in electrical sympathy with the storm when they shut themselves into the bright room, and Bartley took Marcia fondly into his arms.
“Wife!”
“Husband!”
They sat down before the fire, hand in hand, and talked of the light things that swim to the top, and eddy round and round on the surface of our deepest moods. They made merry over the old minister's perturbation, which Bartley found endlessly amusing. Then he noticed that the dress Marcia had on was the one she had worn to the sociable in Lower Equity, and she said, yes, she had put it on because he once said he liked it. He asked her when, and she said, oh, she knew; but if he could not remember, she was not going to tell him. Then she wanted to know if he recognized her by the dress before she lifted her veil in the station.
“No,” he said, with a teasing laugh. “I wasn't thinking of you.”
“Oh, Bartley!” she joyfully reproached him. “You must have been!”
“Yes, I was! I was so mad at you, that I was glad to have that brute of a station-master bullyingsomewoman!”
“Bartley!”
He sat holding her hand. “Marcia,” he said, gravely, “we must write to your father at once, and tell him. I want to begin life in the right way, and I think it's only fair to him.”
She was enraptured at his magnanimity. “Bartley! That'slikeyou! Poor father! I declare—Bartley, I'm afraid I had forgotten him! It's dreadful; but—youput everything else out of my head. I do believe I've died and come to life somewhere else!”
“Well,Ihaven't,” said Bartley, “and I guess you'd better write to your father.You'dbetter write; at present, he and I are not on speaking terms. Here!” He took out his note-book, and gave her his stylographic pen after striking the fist that held it upon his other fist, in the fashion of the amateurs of that reluctant instrument, in order to bring down the ink.
“Oh, what's that?” she asked.
“It's a new kind of pen. I got it for a notice in the Free Press.”
“Is Henry Bird going to edit the paper?”
“I don't know, and I don't care,” answered Bartley.
“I'll go out and get an envelope, and ask the landlord what's the quickest way to get the letter to your father.”
He took up his hat, but she laid her hand on his arm. “Oh, send for him!” she said.
“Are you afraid I sha'n't come back?” he demanded, with a laughing kiss. “I want to see him about something else, too.”
“Well, don't be gone long.”
They parted with an embrace that would have fortified older married people for a year's separation. When Bartley came back, she handed him the leaf she had torn out of his book, and sat down beside him while he read it, with her arm over his shoulder.
“Dear father,” the letter ran, “Bartley and I are married. We were married an hour ago, just across the New Hampshire line, by the Rev. Mr. Jessup. Bartley wants I should let you know the very first thing. I am going to Boston with Bartley to-night, and, as soon as we get settled there, I will write again. I want you should forgive us both; but if you wont forgive Bartley, you mustn't forgive me. You were mistaken about Bartley, and I was right. Bartley has told me everything, and I am perfectly satisfied. Love to mother.
“P.S.—Ididintend to visit Netty Spaulding. But I saw Bartley driving past on his way to the Junction, and I determined to see him if I could before he started for Boston, and tell him I was all wrong, no matter what he said or did afterwards. I ought to have told you I meant to see Bartley; but then you would not have let me come, and if I had not come, I should have died.”
“There's a good deal of Bartley in it,” said the young man with a laugh.
“You don't like it!”
“Yes, I do; it's all right. Did you use to take the prize for composition at boarding-school?”
“Why, I think it's a very good letter for when I'm in such an excited state.”
“It's beautiful!” cried Bartley, laughing more and more. The tears started to her eyes.
“Marcia,” said her husband fondly, “what a child you are! If ever I do anything to betray your trust in me—”
There came a shuffling of feet outside the door, a clinking of glass and crockery, and a jarring sort of blow, as if some one were trying to rap on the panel with the edge of a heavy-laden waiter. Bartley threw the door open and found the landlord there, red and smiling, with the waiter in his hand.
“I thought I'd bring your supper in here, you know,” he explained confidentially, “so 's't you could have it a little more snug. And my wife she kind o' got wind o' what was going on,—women will, you know,” he said with a wink,—“and she's sent ye in some hot biscuit and a little jell, and some of her cake.” He set the waiter down on the table, and stood admiring its mystery of napkined dishes. “She guessed you wouldn't object to some cold chicken, and she's put a little of that on. Sha'n't cost ye any more,” he hastened to assure them. “Now this is your room till the train comes, and there aint agoin' to anybody come in here. So you can make yourselves at home. AndIhope you'll enjoy your supper as much as we did ourn the nightwewas married. There! I guess I'll let the lady fix the table; she looks as if she knowed how.”
He got himself out of the room again, and then Marcia, who had made him some embarrassed thanks, burst out in praise of his pleasantness.
“Well, he ought to be pleasant,” said Bartley, “he's just beaten me on a horse-trade. I've sold him the colt.”
“Sold him the colt!” cried Marcia, tragically dropping the napkin she had lifted from the plate of cold chicken.
“Well, we couldn't very well have taken him to Boston with us. And we couldn't have got there without selling him. You know you haven't married a millionnaire, Marcia.”
“How much did you get for the colt?”
“Oh, I didn't do so badly. I got a hundred and fifty for him.”
“And you had fifteen besides.”
“That was before we were married. I gave the minister five for you,—I think you are worth it, I wanted to give fifteen.”
“Well, then, you have a hundred and sixty now. Isn't that a great deal?”
“An everlasting lot,” said Bartley, with an impatient laugh. “Don't let the supper cool, Marcia!”
She silently set out the feast, but regarded it ruefully. “You oughtn't to have ordered so much, Bartley,” she said. “You couldn't afford it.”
“I can afford anything when I'm hungry. Besides. I only ordered the oysters and coffee; all the rest is conscience money—or sentiment—from the landlord. Come, come! cheer up, now! We sha'n't starve to-night, anyhow.”
“Well, I know father will help us.”
“We sha'n't count on him,” said Bartley. “Nowdropit!” He put his arm round her shoulders and pressed her against him, till she raised her face for his kiss.
“Well, Iwill!”she said, and the shadow lifted itself from their wedding feast, and they sat down and made merry as if they had all the money in the world to spend. They laughed and joked; they praised the things they liked, and made fun of the others.
“How strange! How perfectly impossible it all seems! Why, last night I was taking supper at Kinney's logging-camp, and hating you at every mouthful with all my might. Everything seemed against me, and I was feeling ugly, and flirting like mad with a fool from Montreal: she had come out there from Portland for a frolic with the owners' party. You made me do it, Marcia!” he cried jestingly. “And remember that, if you want me to be good, you must be kind. The other thing seems to make me worse and worse.”
“I will,—I will, Bartley.” she said humbly. “I will try to be kind and patient with you. I will indeed.”
He threw back his head, and laughed and laughed. “Poor—poor old Kinney! He's the cook, you know, and he thought I'd been making fun of him to that woman, and he behaved so, after they were gone, that I started home in a rage; and he followed me out with his hands all covered with dough, and wanted to stop me, but he couldn't for fear of spoiling my clothes—” He lost himself in another paroxysm.
Marcia smiled a little. Then, “What sort of a looking person was she?” she tremulously asked.
Bartley stopped abruptly. “Not one ten-thousandth part as good-looking, nor one millionth part as bright, as Marcia Hubbard!” He caught her and smothered her against his breast.
“I don't care! I don't care!” she cried. “I was to blame more than you, if you flirted with her, and it serves me right. Yes, I will never say anything to you for anything that happened after I behaved so to you.”
“There wasn't anything else happened,” cried Bartley. “And the Montreal woman snubbed me soundly before she was done with me.”
“Snubbed you!” exclaimed Marcia, with illogical indignation. This delighted Bartley so much that it was long before he left off laughing over her.
Then they sat down, and were silent till she said, “And did you leave him in a temper?”
“Who? Kinney? In a perfect devil of a temper. I wouldn't even borrow some money he wanted to lend me.”
“Write to him, Bartley,” said his wife, seriously. “I love you so I can't bear to have anybody bad friends with you.”
The whole thing was so crazy, as Bartley said, that it made no difference if they kept up the expense a few days longer. He took a hack from the depot when they arrived in Boston, and drove to the Revere House, instead of going up in the horse-car. He entered his name on the register with a flourish, “Bartley J. Hubbard and Wife,Boston,” and asked for a room and fire, with laconic gruffness; but the clerk knew him at once for a country person, and when the call-boy followed him into the parlor where Marcia sat, in the tremor into which she fell whenever Bartley was out of her sight, the call-boy discerned her provinciality at a glance, and made free to say that he guessed they had better let him take their things up to their room, and come up themselves after the porter had got their fire going.
“All right,” said Bartley, with hauteur; and he added, for no reason, “Be quick about it.”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy.
“What time is supper—dinner, I mean?”
“It's ready now, sir.”
“Good. Take up the things. Come just as you are, Marcia. Let him take your cap,—no, keep it on; a good many of them come down in their bonnets.”
Marcia put off her sack and gloves, and hastily repaired the ravages of travel as best she could. She would have liked to go to her room just long enough to brush her hair a little, and the fur cap made her head hot; but she was suddenly afraid of doing something that would seem countrified in Bartley's eyes, and she promptly obeyed: they had come from Portland in a parlor car, and she had been able to make a traveller's toilet before they reached Boston.
She had been at Portland several times with her father; but he stopped at a second-class hotel where he had always “put up” when alone, and she was new to the vastness of hotel mirrors and chandeliers, the glossy paint, the frescoing, the fluted pillars, the tessellated marble pavements upon which she stepped when she left the Brussels carpeting of the parlors. She clung to Bartley's arm, silently praying that she might not do anything to mortify him, and admiring everything he did with all her soul. He made a halt as they entered the glittering dining-room, and stood frowning till the head-waiter ran respectfully up to them, and ushered them with sweeping bows to a table, which they had to themselves. Bartley ordered their dinner with nonchalant ease, beginning with soup and going to black coffee with dazzling intelligence. While their waiter was gone with their order, he beckoned with one finger to another, and sent him out for a paper, which he unfolded and spread on the table, taking a toothpick into his mouth, and running the sheet over with his eyes. “I just want to see what's going on to-night,” he said, without looking at Marcia.
She made a little murmur of acquiescence in her throat, but she could not speak for strangeness. She began to steal little timid glances about, and to notice the people at the other tables. In her heart she did not find the ladies so very well dressed as she had expected the Boston ladies to be; and there was no gentleman there to compare with Bartley, either in style or looks. She let her eyes finally dwell on him, wishing that he would put his paper away and say something, but afraid to ask, lest it should not be quite right: all the other gentlemen were reading papers. She was feeling lonesome and homesick, when he suddenly glanced at her and said, “How pretty you look, Marsh!”
“Do I?” she asked, with a little grateful throb, while her eyes joyfully suffused themselves.
“Pretty as a pink,” he returned. “Gay,—isn't it?” he continued, with a wink that took her into his confidence again, from which his study of the newspaper had seemed to exclude her. “I'll tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to take you to the Museum after dinner, and let you see Boucicault in the 'Colleen Bawn.'” He swept his paper off the table and unfolded his napkin in his lap, and, leaning back in his chair, began to tell her about the play. “We can walk: it's only just round the corner,” he said at the end.
Marcia crept into the shelter of his talk,—he sometimes spoke rather loud,—and was submissively silent. When they got into their own room,—which had gilt lambrequin frames, and a chandelier of three burners, and a marble mantel, and marble-topped table and washstand,—and Bartley turned up the flaring gas, she quite broke down, and cried on his breast, to make sure that she had got him all back again.
“Why, Marcia!” he said. “I know just how you feel. Don't you suppose I understand as well as you do that we're a country couple? But I'm not going to give myself away; and you mustn't, either. There wasn't a woman in that room that could compare with you,—dressor looks!”
“You were splendid,” she whispered, “and just like the rest! and that made me feel somehow as if I had lost you.”
“I know,—I saw just how you felt; but I wasn't going to say anything for fear you'd give way right there. Come, there's plenty of time before the play begins. I call thisnice! Old-fashioned, rather, in the decorations,” he said, “but pretty good for its time.” He had pulled up two arm-chairs in front of the glowing grate of anthracite; as he spoke, he cast his eyes about the room, and she followed his glance obediently. He had kept her hand in his, and now he held her slim finger-tips in the fist which he rested on his knee. “No; I'll tell you what, Marcia, if you want to get on in a city, there's no use being afraid of people. No use being afraid ofanything, so long as we're good to each other. And you've got to believe in me right along. Don't you let anything get you on the wrong track. I believe that as long as you have faith in me, I shall deserve it; and when you don't—”
“Oh, Bartley, you know I didn't doubt you! I just got to thinking, and I was a little worked up! I suppose I'm excited.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” cried her husband. “Don't you suppose I understandyou?”
They talked a long time together, and made each other loving promises of patience. They confessed their faults, and pledged each other that they would try hard to overcome them. They wished to be good; they both felt they had much to retrieve; but they had no concealments, and they knew that was the best way to begin the future, of which they did their best to conceive seriously. Bartley told her his plans about getting some newspaper work till he could complete his law studies. He meant to settle down to practice in Boston. “You have to wait longer for it than you would in a country place; but when you get it, it's worth while.” He asked Marcia whether she would look up his friend Halleck if she were in his place; but he did not give her time to decide. “I guess I won't do it. Not just yet, at any rate. He might suppose that I wanted something of him. I'll call on him when I don't need his help.”
Perhaps, if they had not planned to go to the theatre, they would have staid where they were, for they were tired, and it was very cosey. But when they were once in the street, they were glad they had come out. Bowdoin Square and Court Street and Tremont Row were a glitter of gas-lights, and those shops, with their placarded bargains, dazzled Marcia.
“Is it one of the principal streets?” she asked Bartley.
He gave the laugh of a veteranhabituéof Boston. “Tremont Row? No. Wait till I show you Washington Street to-morrow. There's the Museum,” he said, pointing to the long row of globed lights on the façade of the building. “Here we are in Scollay Square. There's Hanover Street; there's Cornhill; Court crooks down that way; there's Pemberton Square.”
His familiarity with these names estranged him to her again; she clung the closer to his arm, and caught her breath nervously as they turned in with the crowd that was climbing the stairs to the box-office of the theatre. Bartley left her a moment, while he pushed his way up to the little window and bought the tickets. “First-rate seats,” he said, coming back to her, and taking her hand under his arm again, “and a great piece of luck. They were just returned for sale by the man in front of me, or I should have had to take something 'way up in the gallery. There's a regular jam. These are right in the centre of the parquet.”
Marcia did not know what the parquet was; she heard its name with the certainty that but for Bartley she should not be equal to it. All her village pride was quelled; she had only enough self-control to act upon Bartley's instructions not to give herself away by any conviction of rusticity. They passed in through the long, colonnaded vestibule, with its paintings, and plaster casts, and rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side, and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects, endeared by association, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston play-goer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him; the painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass bell; the governors' portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full length, on canvas; and the pagan months and seasons in plaster,—if all these are, indeed, the subjects,—were dim phantasmagoria amid which she and Bartley moved scarcely more real. The usher, in his dress-coat, ran up the aisle to take their checks, and led them down to their seats; half a dozen elegant people stood to let them into their places; the theatre was filled with faces. At Portland, where she saw the “Lady of Lyons,” with her father, three-quarters of the house was empty.
Bartley only had time to lean over and whisper, “The place is packed with Beacon Street swells,—it's a regular field night,”—when the bell tinkled and the curtain rose.
As the play went on, the rich jacqueminot-red flamed into her cheeks, and burnt there a steady blaze to the end. The people about her laughed and clapped, and at times they seemed to be crying. But Marcia sat through every part as stoical as a savage, making no sign, except for the flaming color in her cheeks, of interest or intelligence. Bartley talked of the play all the way home, but she said nothing, and in their own room he asked: “Didn't you really like it? Were you disappointed? I haven't been able to get a word out of you about it. Didn't you like Boucicault?”
“I didn't know which he was,” she answered, with impassioned exaltation. “I didn't care for him. I only thought of that poor girl, and her husband who despised her—”
She stopped. Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end. “And you thought—you thought,” he cried, trying to get his breath,—“you thought you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan! Oh, I see, I see!” He went on making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she laughed with him at last. When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he began his joking afresh. “The real thing for Hardress to do,” he said, fumbling for the key, “is toblowit out. That's what Hardress usually does when he comes up from the rural districts with Eily on their bridal tour. That finishes off Eily, without troubling Danny Mann. The only drawback is that it finishes off Hardress, too: they're both found suffocated in the morning.”