CHAPTER XVII
That morning, at breakfast in the public room, Mrs. Frampton was outraged at having a glass of ice-water and an orange given to her before the tea was served.
"What does the man give me an orange for, such a morning as this? As to this ice-water, I would not touch a drop of it, in any weather. I hope you have not, either of you, taken to that dangerous habit?"
Then, as the negro in attendance leaned reflectively on the back of Grace's chair, his round eyes fixed upon the animated face of the speaker, "May I ask," she continued, "if that gentleman of color always listens to your conversation? Perhaps he would join in if you asked him."
"It's a way they have here," murmured her nephew. "They don't mean to be cheeky, but servants here are the only class whonever, by any accident, address you as 'sir.' As to these waiter-fellows, their manners, I admit, are peculiar. One darky pulled my hat off my head the other day. He thought he was doing the civil thing."
She threw up her hands. "And, pray, did you do the civil thing in return?" Themenufor the morning meal being handed to her, she exclaimed, "Good heavens! What is this? 'Clam chowder,' 'Squab pie.' What on earth is 'Squab pie'? 'Cold-slaw and shredded beef!'—it sounds like cannibalism! 'Flapjacks and maple syrup!'—a combination of fish and trees, I suppose! 'Waffles!' 'Buckwheat cakes!' 'Grits!' 'Dip toast!'—is that another word for 'pap'?"—and so on, with a running commentary, down the bill-of-fare.
Some of these unknown dishes, however, she tried, and candidly owned were excellent, and when the breakfast was despatched, and they had returned to their own "parlor," Mrs. Frampton was visibly better disposed towards the outer world. She moved one of the ponderous chairs to the window, and produced a long roll of embroidery.
"That is what I have not seen a woman do since I arrived in the States," said Mordaunt. "I dare say they work a great deal in strict private, but never in public. They don't consider it 'the thing,' I believe. They are very angry when I say so, but it is the truth."
"Well, there is no great virtue that I can see in doing this sort of rubbish," said his aunt, in her most amiable manner. "If I could do anything more useful, I should. But I can talk much better when I am pulling something about; and Grace and I are going to have a long gossip, while you go and smoke your cigar, and bring us back the news out of one of those dreadful, wicked papers."
"You're a regular Eve, Aunt Su," laughed her nephew, as he sauntered to the door. "The woman tempted me, and I did eat."
"Ah! Adam was a poor creature," returned Mrs. Frampton, as she put on her spectacles; then, when he had left the room, "I am not at all satisfied about Mordy," she continued, as she stabbed the canvas with her needle, and a stream of sanguinaryfilosellefollowed it.
"Why, aunty?"
"Don't you see how much more silent he is, with only an occasional burst of his old fun? I am afraid he cares—reallycares—for this girl."
"And if he does, what then? There is really nothing to object to in her. Putting her beauty aside, she is clever—in her way—wonderfully adaptable, and has a great deal of character. I don't say that she is exactly the sister-in-law I should have selected, but then, almost certainly, the girl I should prefer Mordy would not look at. If Miss Planter makes up her mind to marry him, which I am not at all sure that she will—"
"The idea! Not accept Mordy, who might marry almost any one in England?"
"Nonsense, aunty. You know very well that, judged by your own standard—the worldly standard—a poor baronet, without any transcendent abilities to advance his career, is not a match for ambitious mammas or daughters to jump at. If dear Mordy really and truly falls in love at last with this American girl, and if she returns his love—she won't marry him unless she does—I see no reason why they should not be very happy."
"I wish it had been the Hurlstone girl," said Mrs. Frampton, without taking her eyes from her work. "Besides the money being certain in her case, there are the relations. The Planters, I am told, are people of yesterday."
"Yesterday, or the day before—does it make much difference?"
"The father, I am told, is impossible. The mother—"
"You heard all this from the Hurlstones; it is a tainted source. People are even more jealous of each other over here, it seems to me, than in London. And in this case, you see, there are peculiar reasons for jealousy. If you meet the Planters in the course of our travels"—she cautiously avoided any hint of the Californian rendezvous—"you must not be prejudiced. You must judge the girl upon her own merits. Promise me you will do this, aunty."
"Oh! No one can say I am prejudiced. That is the last charge that can be brought against me." Grace bit her lip, and bent her head over a dropped stitch in her knitting. There was a little pause. Mrs. Frampton heaved a sigh, then stretching out her hand to her work-basket, drew from the depths of it a society paper, not yet a fortnight old. "Look here, Gracey," she continued, as she opened and flattened out the paper with her hand; "there is a subject upon which I have long since given up speaking to you. I shouldn't do so now but for something Mordy said to me yesterday. I had hoped your eyes were gradually opened to Mr. Ivor Lawrence's true character. I told Mordy to tell you the common topic of conversation—the new light that has been thrown upon the case. And now, as it seems you still believe in the man, I think you should see this paragraph," and she handed the paper to her niece. It ran thus:
"With regard to the disputed will of the late Mr. Tracy, which promises to be acause célèbre, we understand that the attorney who drew up several wills for the deceased, between the years 1875 and 1887, has been traced to Victoria, where he emigrated on account of his health. He is subpoenaed to appear, and will be an important witness, as it is said he brings with him duplicates of these wills, which appear to have been destroyed. The evidence of this witness, as testifying to the affection which subsisted formerly between Mr. Giles Tracy and his uncle, will, it is said, be of paramount importance on the trial."
"With regard to the disputed will of the late Mr. Tracy, which promises to be acause célèbre, we understand that the attorney who drew up several wills for the deceased, between the years 1875 and 1887, has been traced to Victoria, where he emigrated on account of his health. He is subpoenaed to appear, and will be an important witness, as it is said he brings with him duplicates of these wills, which appear to have been destroyed. The evidence of this witness, as testifying to the affection which subsisted formerly between Mr. Giles Tracy and his uncle, will, it is said, be of paramount importance on the trial."
Mrs. Frampton's eye was fixed upon her niece as Grace read this, but she did not wince. She folded the paper carefully, and returned it to her aunt.
"Thank you; it makes no difference—I am sure you did not expect that it would?—in my opinion. It would be the same if Mr. Lawrence lost his case. Iknowhe is incapable of having used his influence with his uncle to induce him to alter his will."
"Humph! There are grave doubts whether it is notforged." Grace gave a little contemptuous smile. "I am told he has been given the cold shoulder at his club—one man cut him dead—and he goes nowhere."
"No; if he did, he would have come to us."
Mrs. Frampton pulled her needle so irritably through the canvas that the silk nearly snapped.
"Thank goodness he has not. If he had behaved like a gentleman, and come forward immediately his uncle died, it might be difficult to shake him off now. As it is, he cut the Gordian knot himself."
"We will not go over the old ground again, aunt. The trial is public property; I can't help hearing it discussed. But that question of his 'coming forward,' please, must never be spoken of. Just think how inconsistent you are, dear. You suggest that he forged; and then say he would have behaved like a gentleman if, having forged, he had 'come forward.' The fact is, Ivor Lawrence is a very proud, sensitive man. I believe the tenor of his uncle's will was a surprise to him, and when he was told it was to be disputed, and the charge that was to be made against him, he resolved to subject none of his friends to the ordeal of receiving a suspected man until the trial was over. And now, dear aunt, please let the subject be closed, as far as I am personally concerned. You are the only person who knows something of what I have suffered. But I have been lighter-hearted and braver since I left England. And why? Simply because time, instead of shaking my belief in the man whom all the world suspects, has made it stronger. At first his silence crushed me. If I thought my friend unworthy, I should still be crushed, far more than at first. But you see I am crushed no longer. Be content with that."
She had risen, and was standing before her aunt, who looked up, over her spectacles, literally dumfounded, until she felt two strong young arms flung round her neck and a shower of kisses upon her cheek. That was an argument she never could resist. She patted the girl's back with one fat, dimpled hand, while she wiped away a furtive tear with the other.
"God bless you, child! You are too good and noble—yes, too noble—for this wretched, miserable world of ours."
And so peace was restored between the two women, who, being very unlike, were yet warmly attached to each other.
Later, they went forth with Mordaunt, and walked across the park, on planks laid upon the pathway, up to Beacon Street, and were reminded of Bath, as one looks down from its century-old crescent; and then they crunched the frozen snow under their spiked shoes, back to the Museum of Fine Arts, where they found a collection of Blake's strange and poetic conceptions, and some memorable sketches by W. M. Hunt, an artist of rare genius, lately deceased, and but little known in England. Copley's portraits—Lord Lyndhurst's father—of which there are so few examples in England, also interested them; and, of course, there were the usual inevitable French pictures, which are the staple commodity of all collections in the States. They passed a pleasant hour here, after which Mrs. Frampton was deposited at the Brunswick, as she declared nothing would induce her to enter the electric car, which was to convey her nephew and niece into the heart of the city.
"I have looked inside one," she said; "that is enough! I saw a double row of people standing up in the middle, clinging on by straps, and jammed against the knees of those who were seated! Never saw anything so shocking in my life. No, thank you. I will go in a carriage, or on my ten toes, or I will remain at home. None of those dreadful tramways forme!"
So they left her, and went their ways. And in their course they ran up against Mordaunt's wiry friend, Reid. He said he had come to Boston for a few days' visit to his mother, "who will be very happy to call on you, Miss Ballinger, if you will allow her." And when Grace had expressed her willingness to be called upon, he continued, "She is a real good woman, my mother; but you must be prepared for some tall talk. It don't amount to much, but it takes a little time to get accustomed to it."
That evening the party assembled by Mrs. Courtly to meet her English friends was peculiarly agreeable. Besides Mr. Laffan and other distinguished men, there were three ladies: one, a poetess whose stirring verse had moved a whole nation's heart, and two sisters whose well-earned reputation for brilliancy had won for them the name of "The Duplex Burners."
Mrs. Frampton was at her best. She was always appreciative of talent, more especially of conversational talent, and would toss into the caldron, now and again, a pungent remark which stimulated alike the powers of the artists and the appetites of those who sat at meat.
The talk turning upon American modes of spelling, she said, in her trenchant way,
"I should have been whipped when I was a child, if I had spelled theatret-e-rinstead oftre. Why, it is neither Latin nor any other tongue!"
"We let 'the dead past bury its dead,'" was the reply. "We follow the living tongues, the tongues in your head and mine, and those distinctly say 'thea-ter.' We don't approve of whipping little girls for spelling as they pronounce, even if the result be to produce such brilliant women as yourself," with a bow.
Mrs. Frampton was reduced to silence for a moment by this un-English compliment, and so her ear caught another that was being proffered to Grace. Her niece was deploring the loss of the letteruin so many words as now printed in America.
"Do you really like theudropped in such a word as 'parlor'?" she asked of her neighbor.
"I prefer a parlor withyouin it," he replied.
Grace laughed.
"You are trying to silence me, I see. But do tell me why youwillchange our c's into s's, in such words as 'offence' and 'defence'?"
"I suppose we think that in 'offence' and 'defence' you English are alwaysat sea!" returned her incorrigible neighbor.
And so the chaff went on.
One man present sustained theories which, as coming from an American, were curious. He declared there was over-education in his country, and used all the arguments in support of this view which would have been employed by an old English Tory.
Mordaunt Ballinger stared when he heard a citizen of the United States declare that muscle and sinew were not yet driven out of the field by machinery, that scientific absorption was an evil, and that the world's work cannot be done by the brain alone. It was a little too much, even for the young conservative member, when this clever supporter of paradoxes maintained that people would be happier if they knew less, and that genius was more sure to rise from a poor educational plane than from a highly cultivated one.
"Certainly," assented another, "our most successful men in the country havenotbeen the best educated."
"Theirs was a rich soil," continued the first speaker, "that needed no top-dressing. It was just suited to the grain it had to grow. Its strength was concentrated on that. Manured with learning, all manner of rank, useless stuff would have sprung up and flourished there."
"For shame!" said Mrs. Courtly's silvery voice. "I wonder you dare to talk such blasphemy almost within the shadow of Harvard! To think that I should live to hear a Bostonian throw such an aspersion on 'belles-lettres.'"
"Ah! dear lady, but 'belles-lettres,' like other feminine things, are so apt to distract our minds from the only serious object of life—which, of course, is money-getting!"
This elicited hisses and laughter, in which the speaker himself joined.Il n'y a que la verité qui blesse.Boston could never take such an accusation to itself.
"One would fancy you were from Chicago!" said Mrs. Courtly.
Now Chicago is to the Bostonians as the full moon is to a dog—they are never tired of baying at it.
"Well, then, Iamfrom Chicago. I was there two weeks ago on business. And what do you suppose I saw in a shop-window? I can tell you it was something worth going to Chicago to see. Why, a statue of the Venus de Medici in a Jaeger's combination suit!"
"Great Scot!" cried a man from the farther end of the table, "Jaeger must be like the poet,nasciturbutnon fit. Poor goddess! 'To what base uses we may return, Horatio!' But we are a practical people. Beauty and utility with us go hand in hand. Indeed, you see that in this case they don't stopthere."
"No," said one of the ladies, gravely. "Life has never been the same to me since I saw Lord Byron's head, with a chestnut wig upon it, in a 'tonsorial saloon,' and a bust of the young Augustus at an optician's, with a pair of blue spectacles on his nose!"
Mrs. Frampton, meantime, was being questioned by her neighbor as to the route the travellers meant to take in going westward.
"I suppose you go through Chicago?" he said.
"Ask my nephew. I am as dough in his hands, and the dough is unleavened. It doesn'trisein the oven of your railway carriages. I dread the journey. By the bye, whywillyou call them 'cars'? My idea of a 'car' is the thing I remember as a child in my Roman history—Tullia trampling her father to death, you know—and so on."
"We don't trample our fathers, even when they are very much in the way; but we like short cuts for all that. Now 'car' is a short cut for a long carriage-drive."
"Oh! but I beg to say you don'talwaysgo in for shortness. You call a 'lift' an 'elevator,' and you always 'conclude' a thing, instead of 'ending' it. I must tell you frankly that we think those long words horrid."
"I am sorry for it," he replied, amused, "but we, on our side, think fashionable English slang, and a good deal of fashionable English pronunciation horrid. There is a lady here, lately returned from London, who speaks so beautifully that we can't understand more than half she says!"
Mrs. Frampton laughed. She was quite pleased with her neighbor. If he carried the war into the enemy's country, she felt justified in saying a tart thing.
"You mean that she no longer pronounces 'clerk' as if it rhymed with 'shirk' and 'work.' You get that, and the tendency to nasal intonation from your Puritan fathers. We retain a Cavalier broadness and boldness of utterance."
"Ah! I see the broadness and boldness," returned the American, with a humorous twitch of the lips. "Still, all evidence shows that Englishmen of Chaucer's day pronounced 'clerk' as it is written."
"Chaucer? Good heavens! you don't expect us to go on talking as they did in Edward III.'s reign?"
"Why are you to start from Charles II. rather than Edward III.? 'Clark' is an affectation that crept into the language in the seventeenth century, when it became the fashion to talk ofJarseyandBarkley. The latter I believe you still retain in fashionable parlance."
"Of course! The man or woman would be lost who spoke ofBerkleySquare."
"But worse than all is your fashionable pronunciation of Pall Mall. Why! you lose all the pleasant old association and courtly flavor of the 'Palace Mall' by calling it 'Pell Mell.' You might as well call it 'Helter-Skelter'!"
"Don't talk to me of association, or accuracy, or grammar, or anything else. Custom overrides all with us."
"The trouble is, that you will not allow it to do so with us," he returned, smiling.
"Really, I think we might be allowed to know how to speak our own language!"
"Not if you go on changing it all the time, according to the vagaries of fashion. Whenwehave gotten hold of a word, we stick to it. Look at that poor word 'genteel,' which was such a useful servant to you all through the last century, and now you have kicked it into the gutter!"
"It deserved kicking into the gutter. It had become so frayed and tarnished that it wasn't fit to wear. We have incorporated a number of new words into the language, so no one can complain because we discard one or two."
"If the new ones supplied the vacuum, but they do not. You have no word to replace 'genteel.' Your argument reminds me of a man who, having lost his boots, put on two hats and an overcoat!"
Thus they sparred amicably through that pleasant dinner, the least animated participator in which, beyond a doubt, was Mordaunt Ballinger. And yet he sat beside Mrs. Courtly, whom he sincerely liked, and who, though she tried to make the conversation general, found an opportunity to say to him,
"I have heard of our friends' arrival at Pittsburgh."
"Do they speak of going to California?" he asked, quickly.
"Mrs. Planter's cough was worse as soon as she got home," replied Mrs. Courtly, with a smile. "That promises well."