With the other news that Halleck's mother gave him on his return, she told him of the chance that had brought his old college comrade to them again, and of how Bartley was now married, and was just settled in the little house she had helped his wife to find. “He has married a very pretty girl,” she said.
“Oh, I dare say!” answered her son. “He isn't the fellow to have married a plain girl.”
“Your father and I have been to call upon them in their new house, and they seem very happy together. Mr. Hubbard wants you should come to see them. He talks a great deal about you.”
“I'll look them up in good time,” said the young man. “Hubbard's ardor to see me will keep.”
That evening Mr. Atherton came to tea, and Halleck walked home with him to his lodgings, which were over the hill, and beyond the Public Garden. “Yes, it's very pleasant, getting back,” he said, as they sauntered down the Common side of Beacon Street, “and the old town is picturesque after the best they can do across the water.” He halted his friend, and brought himself to a rest on his cane, for a look over the hollow of the Common and the level of the Garden where the late September dark was keenly spangled with lamps. “'My heart leaps up,' and so forth, when I see that. Now that Athens and Florence and Edinburgh are past, I don't think there is any place quite so well worth being born in as Boston.” He moved forward again, gently surging with his limp, in a way that had its charm for those that loved him. “It's more authentic and individual, more municipal, after the old pattern, than any other modern city. It gives its stamp, it characterizes. The Boston Irishman, the Boston Jew, is a quite different Irishman or Jew from those of other places. Even Boston provinciality is a precious testimony to the authoritative personality of the city. Cosmopolitanism is a modern vice, and we're antique, we're classic, in the other thing. Yes, I'd rather be a Bostonian, at odds with Boston, than one of the curled darlings of any other community.”
A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only replies to the quality, separates your earnest from your whimsicality, and accounts for some whimsicality in your earnest. “I didn't know but you might have got that bee out of your bonnet, on the other side,” said Atherton.
“No, sir; we change our skies, but not our bees. What should I amount to without my grievance? You wouldn't have known me. This talk to-night about Hubbard has set my bee to buzzing with uncommon liveliness; and the thought of the Law School next week does nothing to allay him. The Law School isn't Harvard; I realize that more and more, though I have tried to fancy that it was. No, sir, my wrongs are irreparable. I had the making of a real Harvard man in me, and of a Unitarian, nicely balanced between radicalism and amateur episcopacy. Now, I am an orthodox ruin, and the undutiful stepson of a Down Eastalma mater. I belong nowhere; I'm at odds.—Is Hubbard's wife really handsome, or is she only country-pretty?”
“She's beautiful,—I assure you she's beautiful,” said Atherton with such earnestness that Halleck laughed.
“Well, that's right! as my father says. How's she beautiful?”
“That's difficult to tell. It's rather a superb sort of style; and—What did you really use to think of your friend?” Atherton broke off to ask.
“Who? Hubbard?”
“Yes.”
“He was a poor, cheap sort of a creature. Deplorably smart, and regrettably handsome. A fellow that assimilated everything to a certain extent, and nothing thoroughly. A fellow with no more moral nature than a base-ball The sort of chap you'd expect to find, the next time you met him, in Congress or the house of correction.”
“Yes, that accounts for it,” said Atherton, thoughtfully.
“Accounts for what?”
“The sort of look she had. A look as if she were naturally above him, and had somehow fascinated herself with him, and were worshipping him in some sort of illusion.”
“Doesn't that sound a little like refining upon the facts? Recollect: I've never seen her, and I don't say you're wrong.”
“I'm not sure I'm not, though. I talked with her, and found her nothing more than honest and sensible and good; simple in her traditions, of course, and countrified yet, in her ideas, with a tendency to the intensely practical. I don't see why she mightn't very well be his wife. I suppose every woman hoodwinks herself about her husband in some degree.”
“Yes; and we always like to fancy something pathetic in the fate of pretty girls that other fellows marry. I notice that we don't sorrow much over the plain ones. How's the divine Clara?”
“I believe she's well,” said Atherton. “I haven't seen her, all summer. She's been at Beverley.”
“Why, I should have supposed she would have come up and surf-bathed those indigent children with her own hand. She's equal to it. What made her falter in well-doing?”
“I don't know that we can properly call it faltering. There was a deficit in the appropriation necessary, and she made it up herself. After that, she consulted me seriously as to whether she ought not to stay in town and superintend the execution of the plan. But I told her she might fitly delegate that. She was all the more anxious to perform her whole duty, because she confessed that indigent children were personally unpleasant to her.”
Halleck burst out laughing. “That's like Clara! How charming women are! They're charming even in their goodness! I wonder the novelists don't take a hint from that fact, and stop giving us those scaly heroines they've been running lately. Why, a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant. I like them for that!”
“Do you?” asked Atherton, laughing in his turn at the single-minded confession. He was some years older than his friend.
They had got down to Charles Street, and Halleck took out his watch at the corner lamp. “It isn't at all late yet,—only half-past eight. The days are getting shorter.”
“Well?”
“Suppose we go and call on Hubbard now? He's right up here on Clover Street!”
“I don't know,” said Atherton. “It would do for you; you're an old friend. But for me,—wouldn't it be rather unceremonious?”
“Oh, come along! They'll not be punctilious. They'll like our dropping in, and I shall have Hubbard off my conscience. I must go to see him sooner or later, for decency's sake.”
Atherton suffered himself to be led away. “I suppose you won't stay long?”
“Oh, no; I shall cut it very short,” said Halleck; and they climbed the narrow little street where Marcia had at last found a house, after searching the South End quite to the Highlands, and ransacking Charlestown and Carnbridgeport. These points all seemed to her terribly remote from where Bartley must be at work during the day, and she must be alone without the sight of him from morning till night. The accessibility of Canary Place had spoiled her for distances; she wanted Bartley at home for their one-o'clock dinner; she wanted to have him within easy call at all times; and she was glad when none of those far-off places yielded quite what they desired in a house. They took the house on Clover Street, though it was a little dearer than they expected, for two years, and they furnished it, as far as they could, out of the three or four hundred dollars they had saved, including the remaining hundred from the colt and cutter, kept sacredly intact by Marcia. When you entered, the narrow staircase cramped you into the little parlor opening out of the hall; and back of the parlor was the dining-room. Overhead were two chambers, and overhead again were two chambers more; in the basement was the kitchen. The house seemed absurdly large to people who had been living for the last seven months in one room, and the view of the Back Bay from the little bow-window of the front chamber added all outdoors to their superfluous space.
Bartley came himself to answer Halleck's ring, and they met at once with such a “Why, Halleck!” and “How do you do, Hubbard?” as restored something of their old college comradery. Bartley welcomed Mr. Atherton under the gas-light he had turned up, and then they huddled into the little parlor, where Bartley introduced his old friend to his wife. Marcia wore a sort of dark robe, trimmed with bows of crimson ribbon, which she had made herself, and in which she looked a Roman patrician in an avatar of Boston domesticity; and Bartley was rather proud to see his friend so visibly dazzled by her beauty. It quite abashed Halleck, who limped helplessly about, after his cane had been taken from him, before he sat down, while Marcia, from the vantage of the sofa and the covert of her talk with Atherton, was content that Halleck should be plain and awkward, with close-cut drab hair and a dull complexion; she would not have liked even a man who knew Bartley before she did to be very handsome.
Halleck and Bartley had some talk about college days, from which their eyes wandered at times; and then Marcia excused herself to Atherton, and went out, reappearing after an interval at the sliding doors, which she rolled open between the parlor and dining-room. A table set for supper stood behind her, and as she leaned a little forward with her hands each on a leaf of the door, she said, with shy pride, “Bartley, I thought the gentlemen would like to join you,” and he answered, “Of course they would,” and led the way out, refusing to hear any demur. His heart swelled with satisfaction in Marcia; it was something like: having fellows drop in upon you, and be asked out to supper in this easy way; it made Bartley feel good, and he would have liked to give Marcia a hug on the spot. He could not help pressing her foot, under the table, and exchanging a quiver of the eyelashes with her, as he lifted the lid of the white tureen, and looked at her across the glitter of their new crockery and cutlery. They made the jokes of the season about the oyster being promptly on hand for the first of the R months, and Bartley explained that he was sometimes kept at the Events office rather late, and that then Marcia waited supper for him, and always gave him an oyster stew, which she made herself. She could not stop him, and the guests praised the oysters, and then they praised the dining-room and the parlor; and when they rose from the table Bartley said, “Now, we must show you the house,” and persisted against her deprecations in making her lead the way. She was in fact willing enough to show it; her taste had made their money go to the utmost in furnishing it; and though most people were then still in the period of green reps and tan terry, and of dull black-walnut movables, she had everywhere bestowed little touches that told. She had covered the marble parlor-mantel with cloth, and fringed it; and she had set on it two vases in the Pompeiian colors then liked; her carpet was of wood color and a moss pattern; she had done what could be done with folding carpet chairs to give the little room a specious air of luxury; the centre-table was heaped with her sewing and Bartley's newspapers.
“We've just moved in, and we haven't furnishedallthe rooms yet,” she said of two empty ones which Bartley perversely flung open.
“And I don't know that we shall. The house is much too big for us; but we thought we'd better take it,” he added, as if it were a castle for vastness.
Halleck and Atherton were silent for some moments after they came away, and then, “Idon't believe he whips her,” suggested the latter.
“No, I guess he's fond of her,” said Halleck, gravely.
“Did you see how careful he was of her, coming up and down stairs? That was very pretty; and it was pretty to see them both so ready to show off their young housekeeping to us.”
“Yes, it improves a man to get married,” said Halleck, with a long, stifled sigh. “It's improved the most selfish hound I ever knew.”
The two elder Miss Hallecks were so much older than Olive, the youngest, that they seemed to be of a sort of intermediary generation between her and her parents, though Olive herself was well out of her teens, and was the senior of her brother Ben by two or three years. The elder sisters were always together, and they adhered in common to the religion of their father and mother. The defection of their brother was passive, but Olive, having conscientiously adopted an alien faith, was not a person to let others imagine her ashamed of it, and her Unitarianism was outspoken. In her turn she formed a kind of party with Ben inside the family, and would have led him on in her own excesses of independence if his somewhat melancholy indifferentism had consented. It was only in his absence that she had been with her sisters during their summer sojourn in the White Mountains; when they returned home, she vigorously went her way, and left them to go theirs. She was fond of them in her defiant fashion; but in such a matter as calling on Mrs. Hubbard she chose not to be mixed up with her family, or in any way to countenance her family's prepossessions. Her sisters paid their visit together, and she waited for Clara Kingsbury to come up from the seaside. Then she went with her to call upon Marcia, sitting observant and non-committal while Clara swooped through the little house, up stairs and down, clamoring over its prettiness, and admiring the art with which so few dollars could be made to go so far. “Think of finding such a bower on Clover Street!” She made Marcia give her the cost of everything; and her heart swelled with pride in her sex—when she heard that Marcia had put down all the carpets herself. “I wanted to make them up,” Marcia explained, “but Mr. Hubbard wouldn't let me,—it cost so little at the store.”
“Wouldn't let you!” cried Miss Kingsbury. “I should hope as much, indeed! Why, my child, you're a Roman matron!”
She came away in agony lest Marcia might think she meant her nose. She drove early the next morning to tell Olive Halleck that she had spent a sleepless night from this cause, and to ask her what sheshoulddo. “Do you think she will be hurt, Olive? Tell me what led up to it. How did I behave before that? The context is everything in such cases.”
“Oh, you went about praising everything, and screaming and shouting, and my-dearing and my-childing her, and patronizing—”
“There, there! say no more! That's sufficient! I see,—I see it all! I've done the very most offensive thing I could, when I meant to be the most appreciative.”
“These country people don't like to be appreciated down to the quick, in that way,” said Olive. “I should think Mrs. Hubbard was rather a proud person.”
“I know! I know!” moaned Miss Kingsbury. “It was ghastly.”
“Idon't suppose she's ashamed of her nose—”
“Olive!” cried her friend, “be still! Why, I can'tbearit! Why, you wretched thing!”
“I dare say all the ladies in Equity make up their own carpets, and put them down, and she thought you were laughing at her.”
“Willyou be still, Olive Halleck?” Miss Kingsbury was now a large, blonde mass of suffering, “Oh, dear, dear! What shall I do? It was sacrilege—yes, it was nothing less than sacrilege—to go on as I did. And I meant so well! I did so admire, and respect, and revere her!” Olive burst out laughing. “You wicked girl!” whimpered Clara. “Should you—should you write to her?”
“And tell her you didn't mean her nose? Oh, by all means, Clara,—by all means! Quite an inspiration. Why not make her an evening party?”
“Olive,” said Clara, with guilty meekness, “I have been thinking of that.”
“No, Clara! Not seriously!” cried Olive, sobered at the idea.
“Yes, seriously. Would it be so very bad? Only just alittleparty,” she pleaded. “Half a dozen people or so; just to show them that I really feel—friendly. I know that he's told her all about meeting me here, and I'm not going to have her think I want to drop him because he's married, and lives in a little house on Clover Street.”
“Noble Clara! So you wish to bring them out in Boston society? What will you do with them after you've got them there?” Miss Kingsbury fidgeted in her chair a little. “Now, look me in the eye, Clara! Whom were you going to ask to meet them? Your unfashionable friends, the Hallecks?”
“My friends, the Hallecks, of course.”
“And Mr. Atherton, your legal adviser?”
“I had thought of asking Mr. Atherton. You needn't say what he is, if you please, Olive; you know that there's no one I prize so much.”
“Very good. And Mr. Cameron?”
“He has got back,—yes. He's very nice.”
“A Cambridge tutor; very young and of recent attachment to the College, with no local affiliations, yet. What ladies?”
“Miss Strong is a nice girl; she is studying at the Conservatory.”
“Yes. Poverty-stricken votary of Miss Kingsbury. Well?”
“Miss Clancy.”
“Unfashionable sister of fashionable artist. Yes?”
“The Brayhems.”
“Young radical clergyman, and his wife, without a congregation, and hoping for a pulpit in Billerica. Parlor lectures on German literature in the mean time. Well?”
“And Mrs. Savage, I thought.”
“Well-preserved young widow of uncertain antecedents tending to grassiness; out-doorprotégéeof the hostess. Yes, Clara, go on and give your party. It will beperfectly safe! But do you think it willdeceiveanybody?”
“Now, Olive Halleck!” cried Clara, “I am not going to have you talking to me in that way! You have no right to do it, and you have no business to do it,” she added, trying to pluck up a spirit. “Is there anybody that I value more than I do you and your sisters, and Ben?”
“No. But you don't value usjust in that way, and you know it. Don't you be a humbug, Clara. Now go on with your excuses.”
“I'm not making excuses! Isn't Mr. Atherton in the most fashionable society?”
“Yes. Why don't you ask some other fashionable people?”
“Olive, this is all nonsense,—perfect nonsense! I can invite any one I like to meet any one I like, and if I choose to show Mr. Hubbard's wife a little attention, I can do it, can't I?”
“Oh, of course!”
“And what would be the use of inviting fashionable people—as you call them—to meet them? It would just embarrass them, all round.”
“Perfectly correct, Miss Kingsbury. All that want you to do is to face the facts of the case. I want you to realize that, in showing Mr. Hubbard's wife this little attention, you're not doing it because you scorn to drop an old friend, and want to do him the highest honor; but because you think you can palm off your second-class acquaintance on them for first-class, and try to make up in that way for telling her she had a hooked nose!”
“Youknowthat I didn't tell her she had a hooked nose.”
“You told her that she was a Roman matron,—it's the same thing,” said Olive.
Miss Kingsbury bit her lip and tried to look a dignified resentment. She ended by saying, with feeble spite, “I shall have the little evening for all you say. I suppose you won't refuse to come because I don't ask the whole Blue Book to meet them.”
“Of course we shall come! I wouldn't miss it for anything. I always like to see how you manage your pieces of social duplicity, Clara. But you needn't expect that I will be a party to the swindle. No, Clara! I shall go to these poor young people and tell them plainly, 'This is not thebestsociety; Miss Kingsbury keeps that for—'”
“Olive! I think I never saw even you in such a teasing humor.” The tears came into Clara's large, tender blue eyes, and she continued with an appeal that had no effect, “I'm sure I don't see why you should make it a question of anything of the sort. It's simply a wish to—to have a little company of no particular kind, for no partic—Because I want to.”
“Oh, that's it, is it? Then I highly approve of it,” said Olive. “When is it to be?”
“I sha'n't tell you, now! You may wait till I'm ready,” pouted Clara, as she rose to go.
“Don't go away thinking I'm enough to provoke a saint becauseyou'vegot mad at me, Clara!”
“Mad? You know I'm not mad! But I think you might be alittlesympatheticsometimes, Olive!” said her friend, kissing her.
“Not in cases of social duplicity, Clara. My wrath is all that saves you. If you were not afraid of me, you would have been a lost worldling long ago.”
“I know you always really love me,” said Miss Kingsbury, tenderly.
“No, I don't,” retorted her friend, promptly. “Not when you're humbugging. Don't expect it, for you won't get it.” She followed Clara with a triumphant laugh as she went out of the door; and except for this parting taunt Clara might have given up her scheme. She first ordered hercoupédriven home, in fact, and then lowered the window to countermand the direction, and drove to Bartley's door on Clover Street.
It was a very handsome equipage, and was in keeping with all the outward belongings of Miss Kingsbury, who mingled a sense of duty and a love of luxury in her life in very exact proportions. When hercoupéwas not standing before some of the wretchedest doors in the city, it was waiting at the finest; and Clara's days were divided between the extremes of squalor and of fashion.
She was the only child of parents who had early left her an orphan. Her father, who was much her mother's senior, was an old friend of Olive's father, and had made him his executor and the guardian of his daughter. Mr. Halleck had taken her into his own family, and, in the conscientious pursuance of what he believed would have been her father's preference, he gave her worldly advantages which he would not have desired for one of his own children. But the friendship that grew up between Clara and Olive was too strong for him in some things, and the girls went to the same fashionable school together.
When his ward came of age he made over to her the fortune, increased by his careful management, which her father had left her, and advised her to put her affairs in the hands of Mr. Atherton. She had shown a quite ungirlish eagerness to manage them for herself; in the midst of her profusion she had odd accesses of stinginess, in which she fancied herself coming to poverty; and her guardian judged it best that she should have a lawyer who could tell her at any moment just where she stood. She hesitated, but she did as he advised; and having once intrusted her property to Atherton's care, she added her conscience and her reason in large degree, and obeyed him with embarrassing promptness in matters that did not interfere with her pleasures. Her pleasures were of various kinds. She chose to buy herself a fine house, and, having furnished it luxuriously and unearthed a cousin of her father's in Vermont and brought her to Boston to matronize her, she kept house on a magnificent scale, pinching, however, at certain points with unexpected meanness. When she was alone, her table was of a Spartan austerity; she exacted a great deal from her servants, and paid them as small wages as she could. After that she did not mind lavishing money upon them in kindness. A seamstress whom she had once employed fell sick, and Miss Kingsbury sent her to the Bahamas and kept her there till she was well, and then made her a guest in her house till the girl could get back her work. She watched her cook through the measles, caring for her like a mother; and, as Olive Halleck said, she was always portioning or burying the sisters of her second-girls. She was in all sorts of charities, but she was apt to cut her charities off with her pleasures at any moment, if she felt poor. She was fond of dress, and went a great deal into society: she suspected men generally of wishing to marry her for her money, but with those whom she did not think capable of aspiring to her hand, she was generously helpful with her riches. She liked to patronize; she had long supported an unpromising painter at Rome, and she gave orders to desperate artists at home.
The world had pretty well hardened one half of her heart, but the other half was still soft and loving, and into this side of her mixed nature she cowered when she believed she had committed some blunder or crime, and came whimpering to Olive Halleck for punishment. She made Olive her discipline partly in her lack of some fixed religion. She had not yet found a religion that exactly suited her, though she had many times believed herself about to be anchored in some faith forever.
She was almost sorry that she had put her resolution in effect when she rang at the door, and Marcia herself answered the bell, in place of the one servant who was at that moment hanging out the wash. It seemed wicked to pretend to be showing this pretty creature a social attention, when she meant to palm off a hollow imitation of society upon her. Why should she not ask the very superfinest of her friends to meet such a brilliant beauty? It would serve Olive Halleck right if she should do this, and leave the Hallecks out; and Marcia would certainly be a sensation. She half believed that she meant to do it when she quitted the house with Marcia's promise that she would bring her husband to tea on Wednesday evening, at eight; and she drove away so far penitent that she resolved at least to make her company distinguished, if not fashionable. She said to herself that she would make it fashionable yet, if she chose, and as a first move in this direction she easily secured Mr. Atherton: he had no engagements, so few people had got back to town. She called upon Mrs. Witherby, needlessly reminding her of the charity committees they had served on together; and then she went home and actually sent out notes to the plainest daughter and the maiden aunt of two of the most high-born families of her acquaintance. She added to her list an artist and his wife, (“Now I shallhaveto let him paint me!” she reflected,) a young author whose book had made talk, a teacher of Italian with whom she was pretending to read Dante, and a musical composer.
Olive came late, as if to get a whole effect of the affair at once; and her smile revealed Clara's failure to her, if she had not realized it before. She read there that the aristocratic and aesthetic additions which she had made to the guests Olive originally divined had not sufficed; the party remained a humbug. It had seemed absurd to invite anybody to meet two such little, unknown people as the Hubbards; and then, to avoid marking them as the subjects of the festivity by the precedence to be observed in going out to supper, she resolved to have tea served in the drawing-room, and to make it literally tea, with bread and butter, and some thin, ascetic cakes.
However sharp he was in business, Mr. Witherby was socially a dull man; and his wife and daughter seemed to partake of his qualities by affinition and heredity. They tried to make something of Marcia, but they failed through their want of art. Mrs. Witherby, finding the wife of her husband's assistant in Miss Kingsbury's house, conceived an awe of her, which Marcia would not have known how to abate if she had imagined it; and in a little while the Witherby family segregated themselves among the photograph albums and the bricabrac, from which Clara seemed to herself to be fruitlessly detaching them the whole evening. The plainest daughter and the maiden aunt of the patrician families talked to each other with unavailing intervals of the painter and the author, and the radical clergyman and his wife were in danger of a conjugal devotion which society does not favor; the unfashionable sister of the fashionable artist conversed with the young tutor and the Japanese law-student whom he had asked leave to bring with him, and whose small, mouse-like eyes continually twinkled away in pursuit of the blonde beauty of his hostess. The widow was winningly attentive, with a tendency to be confidential, to everybody. The Italian could not disabuse himself of the notion that he was expected to be light and cheerful, and when the pupil of the Conservatory sang, he abandoned himself to his error, and clapped and cried bravo with unseemly vivacity. But he was restored to reason when the composer sat down at the piano and played, amid the hush that falls on society at such times, something from Beethoven, and again something of his own, which was so like Beethoven that Beethoven himself would not have known the difference.
Mr. Atherton and Halleck moved about among the guests, and did their best to second Clara's efforts for their encouragement; but it was useless. In the desperation which owns defeat, she resolved to devote herself for the rest of the evening to trying to make at least the Hubbards have a good time; and then, upon the dangerous theory, of which young and pretty hostesses cannot be too wary, that a wife is necessarily flattered by attentions to her husband, she devoted herself exclusively to Bartley, to whom she talked long and with a reckless liveliness of the events of his former stay in Boston. Their laughter and scraps of their reminiscence reached Marcia where she sat in a feint of listening to Ben Halleck's perfunctory account of his college days with her husband, till she could bear it no longer. She rose abruptly, and, going to him, she said that it was time to say good-night. “Oh, so soon!” cried Clara, mystified and a little scared at the look she saw on Marcia's face. “Good night,” she added coldly.
The assembly hailed this first token of its disintegration with relief; it became a little livelier; there was a fleeting moment in which it seemed as if it might yet enjoy itself; but its chance passed; it crumbled rapidly away, and Clara was left looking humbly into Olive Halleck's pitiless eyes. “Thank you for adelightfulevening, Miss Kingsbury! Congratulate you!” she mocked, with an unsparing laugh. “Such a success! But why didn't you give them something to eat, Clara? Those poor Hubbards have a one-o'clock dinner, and I famished for them. I wasn't hungry myself,—wehave a two-o'clock dinner!”
Bartley came home elate from Miss Kingsbury's entertainment. It was something like the social success which he used to picture to himself. He had been flattered by the attention specially paid him, and he did not detect the imposition. He was half starved, but he meant to have up some cold meat and bottled beer, and talk it all over with Marcia.
She did not seem inclined to talk it over on their way home, and when they entered their own door, she pushed in and ran up-stairs. “Why, where are you going, Marcia?” he called after her.
“To bed!” she replied, closing the door after her with a crash of unmistakable significance.
Bartley stood a moment in the fury that tempted him to pursue her with a taunt, and then leave her to work herself out of the transport of senseless jealousy she had wrought herself into. But he set his teeth, and, full of inward cursing, he followed her up-stairs with a slow, dogged step. He took her in his arms without a word, and held her fast, while his anger changed to pity, and then to laughing. When it came to that, she put up her arms, which she had kept rigidly at her side, and laid them round his neck, and began softly to cry on his breast.
“Oh, I'm not myself at all, any more!” she moaned penitently.
“Then this is very improper—for me,” said Bartley.
The helpless laughter broke through her lamentation, but she cried a little more to keep herself in countenance.
“But I guess, from a previous acquaintance with the party's character, that it's really all you, Marcia. I don't blame you. Miss Kingsbury's hospitality has left me as hollow as if I'd had nothing to eat for a week; and I know you're perishing from inanition. Hence these tears.”
It delighted her to have him make fun of Miss Kingsbury's tea, and she lifted her head to let him see that she was laughing for pleasure now, before she turned away to dry her eyes.
“Oh, poor fellow!” she cried. “I did pity you so when I saw those mean little slices of bread and butter coming round!”
“Yes,” said Bartley, “I felt sorry myself. But don't speak of them any more, dearest.”
“And I suppose,” pursued Marcia, “that all the time she was talking to you there, you were simply ravening.”
“I was casting lots in my own mind to see which of the company I should devour first.”
His drollery appeared to Marcia the finest that ever was; she laughed and laughed again; when he made fun of the conjecturable toughness of the elderly aristocrat, she implored him to stop if he did not want to kill her. Marcia was not in the state in which woman best convinces her enemies of her fitness for empire, though she was charming in her silly happiness, and Bartley felt very glad that he had not yielded to his first impulse to deal savagely with her. “Come,” he said, “let us go out somewhere, and get some oysters.”
She began at once to take out her ear-rings and loosen her hair. “No, I'll get something here in the house; I'm not very hungry. Butyougo, Bartley, and have a good supper, or you'll be sick to-morrow, and not fit to work. Go,” she added to his hesitating image in the glass, “I insist upon it. I won'thaveyou stay.” His reflected face approached from behind; she turned hers a little, and their mirrored lips met over her shoulder. “Oh, howsweetyou are, Bartley!” she murmured.
“Yes, you will always find me obedient when commanded to go out and repair my wasted tissue.”
“I don't meanthat, dear,” she said softly. “I mean—your not quarrelling with me when I'm unreasonable. Why can't we always do so!”
“Well, you see,” said Bartley, “it throws the whole burden on the fellow in his senses. It doesn't require any great degree of self-sacrifice to fly off at a tangent, but it's rather a maddening spectacle to the party that holds on.”
“Now I will show you,” said Marcia, “that I can be reasonable too: I shall let you go alone to make our party call on Miss Kingsbury.” She looked at him heroically.
“Marcia,” said Bartley, “you're such a reasonable person when you're the most unreasonable, that I wonder Ieverquarrel with you. I rather think I'll letyoucall on Miss Kingsbury alone. I shall suffer agonies of suspicion, but it will prove that I have perfect confidence in you.” He threw her a kiss from the door, and ran down the stairs. When he returned, an hour later, he found her waiting up for him. “Why, Marcia!” he exclaimed.
“Oh! I just wanted to say that we will both go to call on hervery soon. If I sent you, she might think I was mad, and I won't give her that satisfaction.”
“Noble girl!” cried Bartley, with irony that pleased her better than praise. Women like to be understood, even when they try not to be understood.
When Marcia went with Bartley to call, Miss Kingsbury received her with careful, perhaps anxious politeness, but made no further effort to take her up. Some of the people whom Marcia met at Miss Kingsbury's called; and the Witherbys came, father, mother, and daughter together; but between the evident fact that the Hubbards were poor, and the other evident fact that they moved in the best society, the Witherbys did not quite know what to do about them. They asked them to dinner, and Bartley went alone; Marcia was not well enough to go.
He was very kind and tractable, now, and went whenever she bade him go without her, though tea at the Hallecks was getting to be an old story with him, and it was generally tea at the Hallecks to which she sent him. The Halleck ladies came faithfully to see her, and she got on very well with the two older sisters, who gave her all the kindness they could spare from their charities, and seemed pleased to have her so pretty and conjugal, though these things were far from them. But she was afraid of Olive at first, and disliked her as a friend of Miss Kingsbury. This rather attracted the odd girl. What she called Marcia's snubs enabled her to declare in her favor with a sense of disinterestedness, and to indulge her repugnance for Bartley with a good heart. She resented his odious good looks, and held it a shame that her mother should promote his visible tendency to stoutness by giving him such nice things for tea.
“Now, I like Mr. Hubbard,” said her mother placidly. “It's very kind of him to come to such plain folks as we are, whenever we ask him; now that his wife can't come, I know he does it because he likes us.”
“Oh, he comes for the eating,” said Olive, scornfully. Then another phase of her mother's remark struck her: “Why, mother!” she cried, “I do believe you think Bartley Hubbard's a distinguished man somehow!”
“Your father says it's very unusual for such a young man to be in a place like his. Mr. Witherby really leaves everything to him, he says.”
“Well, I think he'd better not, then! The Events has got to be perfectly horrid, of late. It's full of murders and all uncleanness.”
“That seems to be the way with the papers, nowadays. Your father hears that the Events is making money.”
“Why, mother! What a corrupt old thing you are! I believe you've been bought up by that disgusting interview with father. Nestor of the Leather Interest! Father ought to have turned him out of doors. Well, this family is getting a littletoogood, for me! And Ben's almost as bad as any of you, of late,—I haven't a bit of influence with him any more. He seems determined to be friendlier with thatpersonthan ever; he's always trying to do him good,—I can see it, and it makes me sick. One thing I know: I'm going to stop Mr. Hubbard's calling me Olive. Impudent!”
Mrs. Halleck shifted her ground with the pretence which women use, even amongst themselves, of having remained steadfast. “He is a very good husband.”
“Oh, because he likes to be!” retorted her daughter. “Nothing is easier than to be a good husband.”
“Ah, my dear,” said Mrs. Halleck, “wait till you have tried.”
This made Olive laugh; but she answered with an argument that always had weight with her mother, “Ben doesn't think he's a good husband.”
“What makes you think so, Olive?” asked her mother.
“I know he dislikes him intensely.”
“Why, you just said yourself, dear, that he was friendlier with him than ever.”
“Oh, that's nothing. The more he disliked him the kinder he would be to him.”
“That's true,” sighed her mother. “Did he ever say anything to you about him?”
“No,” cried Olive, shortly; “he never speaks of people he doesn't like.”
The mother returned, with logical severity, “All that doesn't prove that Ben thinks he isn't a good husband.”
“He dislikes him. Do you believe a bad man can be a good husband, then?”
“No,” Mrs. Halleck admitted, as if confronted with indisputable proof of Bartley's wickedness.
In the mean time the peace between Bartley and Marcia continued unbroken, and these days of waiting, of suffering, of hoping and dreading, were the happiest of their lives. He did his best to be patient with her caprices and fretfulness, and he was at least manfully comforting and helpful, and instant in atonement for every failure. She said a thousand times that she should die without him; and when her time came, he thought that she was going to die before he could tell her of his sorrow for all that he had ever done to grieve her. He did not tell her, though she lived to give him the chance; but he took her and her baby both into his arms, with tears of as much fondness as ever a man shed. He even began his confession; but she said, “Hush! you never did a wrong thing yet that I didn't drive you to.” Pale and faint, she smiled joyfully upon him, and put her hand on his head when he hid his face against hers on the pillow, and put her lips against his cheek. His heart was full; he was grateful for the mercy that had spared him; he was so strong in his silent repentance that he felt like a good man.
“Bartley,” she said, “I'm going to ask a great favor of you.”
“There's nothing that I can do thatIshall think a favor, darling!” he cried, lifting his face to look into hers.
“Write for mother to come. I want her!”
“Why, of course.” Marcia continued to look at him, and kept the quivering hold she had laid of his hand when he raised his head. “Was that all?”
She was silent, and he added, “I will ask your father to come with her.”
She hid her face for the space of one sob. “I wanted you to offer.”
“Why, of course! of course!” he replied.
She did not acknowledge his magnanimity directly, but she lifted the coverlet and showed him the little head on her arm, and the little creased and crumpled face.
“Pretty?” she asked. “Bring me the letter before you send it.—Yes, that is just right,—perfect!” she sighed, when he came back and read the letter to her; and she fell away to happy sleep.
Her father answered that he would come with her mother as soon as he got the better of a cold he had taken. It was now well into the winter, and the journey must have seemed more formidable in Equity than in Boston. But Bartley was not impatient of his father-in-law's delay, and he set himself cheerfully about consoling Marcia for it. She stole her white, thin hand into his, and now and then gave it a little pressure to accent the points she made in talking.
“Father was the first one I thought of—after you, Bartley. It seems to me as if baby came half to show me how unfeeling I had been to him. Of course, I'm not sorry I ran away and asked you to take me back, for I couldn't have had you if I hadn't done it; but I never realized before how cruel it was to father. He always made such a pet of me; and I know that he thought he was acting for the best.”
“I knew thatyouwere,” said Bartley, fervently.
“What sweet things you always say to me!” she murmured. “But don't you see, Bartley, that I didn't think enough of him? That's what baby seems to have come to teach me.” She pulled a little away on the pillow, so as to fix him more earnestly with her eyes. “If baby should behave so toyouwhen she grew up, I should hate her!”
He laughed, and said, “Well, perhaps your mother hates you.”
“No, they don't—either of them,” answered Marcia, with a sigh. “And I behaved very stiffly and coldly with him when he came up to see me,—more than I had any need to. I did it for your sake; but he didn't mean any harm to you, he just wanted to make sure that I was safe and well.”
“Oh, that's all right, Marsh.”
“Yes, I know. But what if he had died!”
“Well, he didn't die,” said Bartley, with a smile. “And you've corresponded with them regularly, ever since, and you know they've been getting along all right. And it's going to be altogether different from this out,” he added, leaning back a little weary with a matter in which he could not be expected to take a very cordial interest.
“Truly?” she asked, with one of the eagerest of those hand-pressures.
“It won't be my fault if it isn't,” he replied, with a yawn.
“How good you are, Bartley!” she said, with an admiring look, as if it were the goodness of God she was praising.
Bartley released himself, and went to the new crib, in which the baby lay, and with his hands in his pockets stood looking down at it with a curious smile.
“Is it pretty?” she asked, envious of his bird's-eye view of the baby.
“Not definitively so,” he answered. “I dare say she will smooth out in time; but she seems to be considerably puckered yet.”
“Well,” returned Marcia, with forced resignation, “I shouldn't let any one else say so.”
Her husband set up a soft, low, thoughtful whistle. “I'll tell you what, Marcia,” he said presently. “Suppose we name this baby after your father?”
She lifted herself on her elbow, and stared at him as if he must be making fun of her. “Why, how could we?” she demanded. Squire Gaylord's parents had called his name Flavius Josephus, in a superstition once cherished by old-fashioned people, that the Jewish historian was somehow a sacred writer.
“We can't name her Josephus, but we can call her Flavia,” said Bartley. “And if she makes up her mind to turn out a blonde, the name will just fit. Flavia,—it's a very pretty name.” He looked at his wife, who suddenly turned her face down on the pillow.
“Bartley Hubbard,” she cried, “you're the best man in the world!”
“Oh, no! Only the second-best,” suggested Bartley.
In these days they took their fill of the delight of young fatherhood and motherhood. After its morning bath Bartley was called in, and allowed to revere the baby's mottled and dimpled back as it lay face downward on the nurse's lap, feebly wiggling its arms and legs, and responding with ineffectual little sighs and gurgles to her acceptable rubbings with warm flannel. When it was fully dressed, and its long clothes pulled snugly down, and its limp person stiffened into something tenable, he was suffered to take it into his arms, and to walk the room with it. After all, there is not much that a man can actually do with a small baby, either for its pleasure or his own, and Barkley's usefulness had its strict limitations. He was perhaps most beneficial when he put the child in its mother's arms, and sat down beside the bed, and quietly talked, while Marcia occasionally put up a slender hand, and smoothed its golden brown hair, bending her neck over to look at it where it lay, with the action of a mother bird. They examined with minute interest the details of the curious little creature: its tiny finger-nails, fine and sharp, and its small queer fist doubled so tight, and closing on one's finger like a canary's claw on a perch; the absurdity of its foot, the absurdity of its toes, the ridiculous inadequacy of its legs and arms to the work ordinarily expected of legs and arms, made them laugh. They could not tell yet whether its eyes would be black like Marcia's, or blue like Bartley's; those long lashes had the sweep of hers, but its mop of hair, which made it look so odd and old, was more like his in color.
“She will be a dark-eyed blonde,” Bartley decided.
“Is that nice?” asked Marcia.
“With the telescope sight, they're warranted to kill at five hundred yards.”
“Oh, for shame, Bartley! To talk of baby's ever killing!”
“Why, that's what they all come to. It's what you came to yourself.”
“Yes, I know. But it's quite another thing with baby.” She began to mumble it with her lips, and to talk baby-talk to it. In their common interest in this puppet they already called each other papa and mamma.
Squire Gaylord came alone, and when Marcia greeted him with “Why, father! Where's mother?” he asked, “Did you expect her? Well, I guess your mother's feeling rather too old for such long winter journeys. You know she don't go out a great dealIguess she expects your family down there in the summer.”
The old man was considerably abashed by the baby when it was put into his arms, and being required to guess its name he naturally failed.
“Flavia!” cried Marcia, joyfully. “Bartley named it after you.”
This embarrassed the Squire still more. “Is that so?” he asked, rather sheepishly. “Well, it's quite a compliment.”
Marcia repeated this to her husband as evidence that her father was all right now. Bartley and the Squire were in fact very civil to each other; and Bartley paid the old man many marked attentions. He took him to the top of the State House, and walked him all about the city, to show him its points of interest, and introduced him to such of his friends as they met, though the Squire's dresscoat, whether fully revealed by the removal of his surtout, or betraying itself below the skirt of the latter, was a trial to a fellow of Bartley's style. He went with his father-in-law to see Mr. Warren in Jefferson Scattering Batkins, and the Squire grimly appreciated the burlesque of the member from Cranberry Centre; but he was otherwise not a very amusable person, and off his own ground he was not conversable, while he refused to betray his impressions of many things that Bartley expected to astonish him. The Events editorial rooms had no apparent effect upon him, though they were as different from most editorial dens as tapestry carpets, black-walnut desks, and swivel chairs could make them. Mr. Witherby covered him with urbanities and praises of Bartley that ought to have delighted him as a father-in-law; but apparently the great man of the Events was but a strange variety of the type with which he was familiar in the despised country editors. He got on better with Mr. Atherton, who was of a man's profession. The Squire wore his hat throughout their interview, and everywhere except at table and in bed; and as soon as he rose front either, he put it on.
Bartley tried to impress him with such novel traits of cosmopolitan life as atable d'hôtedinner at a French restaurant; but the Squire sat through the courses, as if his barbarous old appetite had satisfied itself in that manner all his life. After that, Bartley practically gave him up; he pleaded his newspaper work, and left the Squire to pass the time as he could in the little house on Clover Street, where he sat half a day at a stretch in the parlor, with his hat on, reading the newspapers, his legs sprawled out towards the grate. In this way he probably reconstructed for himself some image of his wonted life in his office at home, and was for the time at peace; but otherwise he was very restless, except when he was with Marcia. He was as fond of her in his way as he had ever been, and though he apparently cared nothing for the baby, he enjoyed Marcia's pride in it; and he bore to have it thrust upon him with the surly mildness of an old dog receiving children's caresses. He listened with the same patience to all her celebrations of Bartley, which were often tedious enough, for she bragged of him constantly, of his smartness and goodness, and of the great success that had crowned the merit of both in him.
Mr. Halleck had called upon the Squire the morning after his arrival, and brought Marcia a note from his wife, offering to have her father stay with them if she found herself too much crowded at this eventful time. “There! That is just the sort of people the Hallecks are!” she cried, showing the letter to her father. “And to think of our not going near them for months and mouths after we came to Boston, for fear they were stuck up! But Bartley is always just so proud. Now you must go right in, father, and not keep Mr. Halleck waiting. Give me your hat, or you'll be sure to wear it in the parlor.” She made him stoop down to let her brush his coat-collar a little. “There! Now you look something like.”
Squire Gaylord had never received a visit except on business in his life, and such a thing as one man calling socially upon another, as women did, was unknown to the civilization of Equity. But, as he reported to Marcia, he got along with Mr. Halleck; and he got along with the whole family when he went with Bartley to tea, upon the invitation Mr. Halleck made him that morning. Probably it appeared to him an objectless hospitality; but he spent as pleasant an evening as he could hope to spend with his hat off and in a frock-coat, which he wore as a more ceremonious garment than the dress-coat of his every-day life. He seemed to take a special liking to Olive Halleck, whose habit of speaking her mind with vigor and directness struck him as commendable. It was Olive who made the time pass for him; and as the occasion was not one for personal sarcasm or question of the Christian religion, her task in keeping the old pagan out of rather abysmal silences must have had its difficulties.
“What did you talk about?” asked Marcia, requiring an account of his enjoyment from him the next morning, after Bartley had gone down to his work.
“Mostly about you, I guess,” said the Squire, with a laugh. “There was a large sandy-haired young woman there—”
“Miss Kingsbury,” said Marcia, with vindictive promptness. Her eyes kindled, and she began to grow rigid under the coverlet. “Whom didshetalk with?”
“Well, she talked a little with me; but she talked most of the time to the young man. She engaged to him?”
“No,” said Marcia, relaxing. “She's a great friend of the whole family. I don't know what they meant by telling you it was to be just a family party, when they were going to have strangers in,” she pouted.
“Perhaps they didn't count her.”
“No.” But Marcia's pleasure in the affair was tainted, and she began to talk of other things.
Her father stayed nearly a week, and they all found it rather a long week. After showing him her baby, and satisfying herself that he and Bartley were on good terms again, there was not much left for Marcia. Bartley had been banished to the spare room by the presence of the nurse; and he gave up his bed there to the Squire, and slept on a cot in the unfurnished attic room; the cook and a small girl got in to help, had the other. The house that had once seemed so vast was full to bursting.
“I never knew how little it was till I saw your father coming down stairs,” said Bartley. “He's too tall for it. When he sits on the sofa, and stretches out his legs, his boots touch the mop-board on the other side of the room. Fact!”
“He won't stay over Sunday,” began Marcia, with a rueful smile.
“Why, Marcia, you don't think I want him to go!”
“No, you're as good as can be about it. But I hope he won't stay over Sunday.”
“Haven't you enjoyed his visit?” asked Bartley.
“Oh, yes, I've enjoyed it.” The tears came into her eyes. “I've made it all up with father; and he doesn't feel hard to me. But, Bartley—Sit down, dear, here on the bed!” She took his hand and gently pulled him down. “I see more and more that father and mother can never be what they used to be to me,—that you're all the world to me. Yes, my life is broken off from theirs forever. Could anything break it off from yours? You'll always be patient with me, won't you? and remember that I'd always rather be good when I'm behaving the worst?”
He rose, and went over to the crib, and kissed the head of their little girl. “Ask Flavia,” he said from the door.
“Bartley!” she cried, in utter fondness, as he vanished from her happy eyes.
The next morning they heard the Squire moving about in his room, and he was late in coming down to breakfast, at which he was ordinarily so prompt. “He's packing,” said Marcia, sadly. “It's dreadful to be willing to have him go!”
Bartley went out and met him at his door, bag in hand. “Hollo!” he cried, and made a decent show of surprise and regret.
“M-yes!” said the old man, as they went down stairs. “I've made out a visit. But I'm an old fellow, and I ain't easy away from home. I shall tell Mis' Gaylord how you're gettin' along, and she'll be pleased to hear it. Yes, she'll be pleased to hear it. I guess I shall get off on the ten-o'clock train.”
The conversation between Bartley and his father-in-law was perfunctory. Men who have dealt so plainly with each other do not assume the conventional urbanities in their intercourse without effort. They had both been growing more impatient of the restraint; they could not have kept it up much longer.
“Well, I suppose it's natural you should want to be home again, but I can't understand how any one can want to go back to Equity when he has the privilege of staying in Boston.”
“Boston will do for a young man,” said the Squire, “but I'm too old for it. The city cramps me; it's too tight a fit; and yet I can't seem to find myself in it.”
He suffered from the loss of identity which is a common affliction with country people coming to town. The feeling that they are of no special interest to any of the thousands they meet bewilders and harasses them; after the searching neighborhood of village life, the fact that nobody would meddle in their most intimate affairs if they could, is a vague distress. The Squire not only experienced this, but, after reigning so long as the censor of morals and religion in Equity, it was a deprivation for him to pass a whole week without saying a bitter thing to any one. He was tired of the civilities that smoothed him down on every side.
“Well, if you must go,” said Bartley, “I'll order a hack.”
“I guess I can walk to the depot,” returned the old man.
“Oh, no, you can't.” Bartley drove to the station with him, and they bade each other adieu with a hand-shake. They were no longer enemies, but they liked each other less than ever.
“See you in Equity next summer, I suppose?” suggested the Squire.
“So Marcia says,” replied Bartley. “Well, take care of yourself.—You confounded, tight-fisted old woodchuck!” he added under his breath, for the Squire had allowed him to pay the hack fare.
He walked home, composing variations on his parting malison, to find that the Squire had profited by his brief absence while ordering the hack, to leave with Marcia a silver cup, knife, fork, and spoon, which Olive Halleck had helped him choose, for the baby. In the cup was a check for five hundred dollars. The Squire was embarrassed in presenting the gifts, and when Marcia turned upon him with, “Now, look here, father, what do you mean?” he was at a loss how to explain.
“Well, it's what I always meant to do for you.”
“Baby's things are all right,” said Marcia. “But I'm not going to let Bartley take any money from you, unless you think as well of him as I do, and say so, right out.”
The Squire laughed. “You couldn't quite expect me to do that, could you?”
“No, of course not. But what I mean is, do you thinknowthat I did right to marry him?”
“Oh,you'reall right, Marcia. I'm glad you're getting along so well.”
“No, no! Is Bartley all right?”
The Squire laughed again, and rubbed his chin in enjoyment of her persistence. “You can't expect me to own up to everything all at once.”
“So you see, Bartley,” said Marcia, in repeating these words to him, “it was quite a concession.”
“Well, I don't know about the concession, but I guess there's no doubt about the check,” replied Bartley.
“Oh, don't say that, dear!” protested his wife. “I think father was pleased with his visit every way. I know he's been anxious about me, all the time; and yet it was a good deal for him to do, after what he had said, to come down here and as much as take it all back. Can't you look at it from his side?”
“Oh, I dare say it was a dose,” Bartley admitted. The money had set several things in a better light. “If all the people that have abused me would take it back as handsomely as your father has,”—he held the check up,—“why, I wish there were twice as many of them.”
She laughed for pleasure in his joke. “I think father was impressed by everything about us,—beginning with baby,” she said, proudly.
“Well, he kept his impressions to himself.”
“Oh, that's nothing but his way. He never was demonstrative,—like me.”
“No, he has his emotions under control,—not to say under lock and key,—not to add, in irons.”
Bartley went on to give some instances of the Squire's fortitude when apparently tempted to express pleasure or interest in his Boston experiences.
They both undeniably felt freer now that he was gone. Bartley stayed longer than he ought from his work, in tacit celebration of the Squire's departure, and they were very merry together; but when he left her, Marcia called for her baby, and, gathering it close to her heart, sighed over it, “Poor father! poor father!”