But the youthful Baxter Spaulding had not reached the age of twenty when he cast down his mother’s hopes in utter ruin by coming home from a business trip to Augusta and announcing that he was going to marry, and that the bride of his choice was a young lady of the variety stage who danced for a living, her specialty being known as “hitch-and-kick.”
Now, this may not seem, to you who read this, quite a complete, perfect and unimprovable thing in the way of the abomination of desolation; but then you must remember that you were not born and raised in a far corner of the Maine hills, and that you probably have so frequently seen play-actoress-women of all sorts that the mere idea of them has ceased to giveyou cold creeps down your back. And to Samantha Spaulding the whole theatrical system, from the Tragic Muse to the “hitch-and-kick artiste,” was conceived in sin and born in iniquity; and what her son proposed to do was to her no whit better than forgery, arson, or any other ungodliness. To you of a less distinctively Aroostook code of morals, I may say that the enchainer of young Spaulding’s heart was quite as good a little girl in her morals and her manners as you need want to find on the stage or off it; and “hitch-and-kick” dancing was to her only a matter of business, as serio-comic singing had been to her mother, as playing Harlequin had been to her father, and as grinning through a horse-collar had been to her grandfather and great-grandfather, famous old English clowns in their day, one of whom had been a partner of Grimaldi. She made her living, it is true, by traveling around the country singing a song called “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,” which required a great deal of high-kicking for its just and full artistic expression; but then, it should be remembered, it was the way she had always made her living, and her mother’s living, too, since the old lady lost her serio-comic voice. And as her mother had taught her all she knew about dancing, and as she and her mother had hardly been separated for an hour since she was out of her cradle, Little Betty Billington looked on her profession, as you well may imagine, with eyes quite different from those with which Mrs. Samantha Spaulding regarded it. It was a lop-sided contest that ensued, and that lasted for months. On one side were Baxter and his Betty and Betty’smama—after that good lady got over her natural objections to having her daughter marry “out of the profession.” On the other side was Samantha, determined enough to be a match for all three of them. Mr. Reuben Pett hovered on the outskirts, asking only peace.
At last he was dragged into the fight. Baxter Spaulding went to Bangor, where his lady’s company happened to be playing, with the avowed intention of wedding Betty out of hand. When his mother found it out, she took Reuben Pett and her boy’s apprenticeship-indenture to Bangor with her, caught the youngster ere the deed was done, and, having the majesty of the law behind her, she was taking her helpless captive home on this particular August afternoon. He was on the front seat of the wagon, Samantha was on the splint-bottomed chair, and Reuben Pett was driving.
***
It was a two-days’ drive from the railroad station at Byram’s Pond around the spur of the mountain to their home. The bi-weekly stage did it in a day; but it was unwonted traveling for Mr. Pett’s easy-going team. Therefore, the three travelers put up at Canada Jake’s camp; so called, though it was only on the edge of the wilderness, because it was what Maine people generally mean when they talk of a “camp”—a large shanty of rough, unpainted planks, with a kitchen and eating-room below, and rudely partitioned sleeping-rooms in the upper story. It stood by the roadside, and served the purpose of an inn.
Canada Jake was lounging in the doorway as they came up, squat, bullet-headed and bead-eyed; a very ordinary specimen of mean French Canadian. He welcomed them in as if he were conferring a favor upon them, fed them upon black, fried meat and soggy, boiled potatos, and later on bestowed them in three wretched enclosures overhead.
He himself staid awake until the sound of two bass and one treble snore penetrated the thin partition planks; and then he stole softly up the ladder that served for stairway, and slipped into the moonlit little room where Baxter Spaulding was lying on a cot-bed six inches too short for him. Putting his finger upon his lips, he whispered to the wakeful youth:
“Sh-h-h-h-h-h! You got you’ boots on?”
“No,” said Baxter softly.
“Come wiz me and don’ make no noise!”
And the next thing that Baxter Spaulding knew, he was outside of the house, behind the wood-pile, holding a slight but charming figure in his arms, and saying:
“Why, Betty! why, Betty!” in a dazed sort of way, while a fat and motherly lady near by stood shaking with silent sobs, like a jelly-fish convulsed with sympathy and affection.
“We ’eaded you off in the stage-coach!” was all she said.
***
The next morning Mr. Reuben Pett was called out of the land of dreams by a familiar feminine voice from the next room.
“Reuben Pett!” it said; “where is Baxter?”
“Baxter!” yelled Mr. Pett; “your ma wants yer!”
But Baxter came not. His room was empty. Mr. Pett descended and found his host out by the wood-pile, splitting kindling. Canada Jake had seen nothing whatever of the young man. He opined that the youth most ’ave got up airlee, go feeshin’.
Reuben Pett went back and reported to Samantha Spaulding through the door. Samantha’s voice came back to him as a voice from the bottom sub-cellar of abysmal gloom.
“Reuben,” she said; “them women have been here!”
“Why, Samantha!” he said; “it ain’t possible!”
“I heard them last night,” returned Samantha, in tones of conviction. “I know, now. I did. I thought then I was dreamin’.”
“Most likely you was, too!” said Mr. Pett, encouragingly.
“Well, I wa’n’t!” rejoined Mrs. Spaulding, with a suddenness and an acerbity that made her listener jump. “They’ve stole my clothes!”
“Whatever do you mean, Samantha?” roared Reuben Pett.
“I mean,” said Mrs. Spaulding, in a tone that left no doubt whatever that what she did mean she meant very hard; “I mean that that hussy has been here in the night, and has took every stitch and string of my clothing, and ain’t left me so much as a button-hole, except—except—except—”
“Except what?” demanded Reuben, in stark amazement.
“Except that there idolatrous flounced frock the shameless critter doos her stage-dancing in!”
Mr. Pett might, perhaps, have offered appropriate condolences on this bereavement had not a thought struck him which made him scramble down the ladder again and hasten to the woodshed, where he had put up his team the night before. The team was gone—the fat horses and fresh painted wagon, and the tracks led back down the road up which they had ridden the day before.
Once more Mr. Pett climbed the ladder; but when he announced his loss he was met, to his astonishment, with severity instead of with sympathy.
“I don’t care, Reuben Pett,” Samantha spoke through the door; “if you’ve lost ten horses and nineteen wagons. You got to hitch some kind of a critter tosuthin’, for we’re goin’to ketch them people to-day or my name’s not Samantha Spaulding.”
“But Law Sakes Alive, Samantha!” expostulated Mr. Pett; “you ain’t goin’ to wear no circus clothes, be ye?”
“You go hunt a team, Mr. Pett,” returned his companion, tartly; “I know my own business.”
Mr. Pett remonstrated. He pointed out that there was neither horse nor vehicle to be had in the neighborhood, and that pursuit was practically hopeless in view of the start which the runaways had. But Mrs. Spaulding was obdurate with an obduracy that made the heart of Reuben Pett creep into his boots. After ten minutes of vain combating, he saw, beyond a doubt, that the chase would have to continue even if it were to be carried on astraddle a pair of confiscated cows. Having learned that much, he went drearily down again to discuss the situation with Canada Pete. Canada Pete was indisposed to be of the slightest assistance, until Mr. Pett reminded him of the danger of the law in which he stands who aids a runaway apprentice in his flight. After that, the sulkyCanadian awoke to a new and anxious interest; and, before long, he remembered that a lumberer who lived “a piece” up the road had a bit of meadow-land reclaimed from the forest, and sometimes kept an old horse in it. It was a horse, however, that had always positively refused to go under saddle, so that a new complication barred the way, until suddenly the swarthy face of thehabitantlit up with a joyful, white-toothed grin.
“My old calèche zat I bring from Canada! I let you have her, hey? You come wiz me!”
And Canada Pete led the way through the underbrush to a bit of a clearing near his house, where were accumulated many years’ deposits of household rubbish; and here, in a desert of tin-cans and broken bottles and crockery, stood the oldest of all old calashes.
There are calashes and calashes, but the calash or calèche of Canada is practically of one type. It is a high-hung, tilting chaise, with a commodious back seat and a capacious hood, and with an absurd, narrow, cushioned bar in front for the driver to sit on. It is a startling-looking vehicle in its mildest form, and when you gaze upon a calash for the first time you will probably wonder whether, if a stray boy should catch on behind, the shafts would not fly up into the air, bearing the horse between them. Canada Pete’s calash had evidently stood long a monument of decay, yet being of sturdy and simple construction, it showed distinct signs of life when Pete seized its curved shafts and ran it backward and forward to prove that the wheels could still revolve and the great hood still nodand sway like a real calash in commission. It was ragged, it was rusty, it was water-soaked and weather-beaten, blistered and stained; but it hung together, and bobbed along behind Canada Pete, lurching and rickety, but still a vehicle, and entitled to rank as such.
The calash was taken into Pete’s back-yard; and then, after a brief and energetic campaign, Pete secured the horse, which was a very good match for the calash. He was an old horse, and he had the spring-halt. He held his long ewe-neck to one side, being blind in one eye; and this gave him the coquettish appearance of a mincing old maid. A little polka step, which he affected with his fore-feet, served to carry out this idea.
Also, he had been feeding on grass for a whole Summer, and his spirits were those of the young lambkin that gambols in the mead. He was happy, and he wanted to make others happy, although he did not seem always to know theright way to go about it. When Mr. Pett and Canada Pete had got this animal harnessed up with odds and ends of rope and leather, they sat down and wiped their brows. Then Mr. Pett started off to notify Mrs. Samantha Spaulding.
Mr. Pett was a man unused to feminine society, except such as he had grown up with from early childhood, and he was of a naturally modest, even bashful disposition. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was startled when, on re-entering the living-room of Canada Pete’s camp, he found himself face to face with a strange lady, and a lady, at that, of a strangeness that he had never conceived of before. She wore upon her head a preposterously tall bonnet, or at least a towering structure that seemed to be intended to serve the purpose of a bonnet. It reminded him—except for its shininess and newness—of the hood of the calash; indeed, it may have suggested itself vaguely to his memory that his grandmother had worn a piece of head-gear something similar, though not so shapely, which in very truth was nicknamed a “calash” from this obvious resemblance. The lady’s shapely and generously feminine figure was closely drawn into a waist of shining black satin, cut down in a V on the neck, before and behind, and ornamented with very large sleeves of a strange pattern. But her skirts—for they were voluminous beyond numeration—were the wonder of her attire. Within fold after fold they swathed a foamy mystery of innumerable gauzy white underpinnings. As Mr. Pett’s abashed eye traveled down this marvel of costume it landed upon a pair of black stockings, the feet of whichappeared to be balanced somewhat uncertainly in black satin slippers with queer high heels.
“Reuben Pett,” said the lady suddenly and with decision, “don’t you say nothing! If you knew how them shoes was pinching me, you’d know what I was goin’ through.”
Mr. Pett had to lean up against the door-post before recovering himself.
“Why, Samantha!” he said at last; “seems to me like youhadgone through more or less.”
Here Mrs. Spaulding reached out in an irritation that carried her beyond all speech, and boxed Mr. Pett’s ears. Then she drew back, startled at her own act, but even more surprised at Mr. Pett’s reception of it. He was neither surprised nor disconcerted. He leaned back against the door-post and gazed on unperturbed.
“My!” he said; “Samantha, be them that play-actresses’ clo’es?”
Mrs. Spaulding nodded grimly.
“Well, all I’ve got to say, Samantha,” remarked Reuben Pett, as he straightened himself up and started out to bring their chariot to the door; “all I’ve got to say, and all I want to say, is that she must be a mighty fine figure of a woman, and that you’re busting her seams.”
Down the old dusty road the old calash jiggled and juggled, “weaving” most of the way in easy tacks down the sharp declivities. On the front seat—or, rather, on the upholstered bar—sat Reuben Pett, squirming uncomfortably, and every now and then trying to sit side-saddle fashion for the sake of easier converse with his fair passenger. Mrs. Spaulding occupied the back seat, lifted high above her driver by the tilt
of the curious vehicle, which also served to make the white foundation of her costume particularly visible, so that there were certain jolting moments when she suggested a black-robed Venus rising from a snowy foam-crest. At such moments Mr. Pett lost control of his horse to such an extent that the animal actually danced and fairly turned his long neck around as though it were set on a pivot. When such a crisis was reached, Mrs. Spaulding would utter a shrill and startling “hi!” which would cause the horse tostop suddenly, hurling Mr. Pett forward with such force that he would have to grab his narrow perch to save his neck, and for the next hundred yards or so of descent his attention would be wholly concentrated upon his duties as driver—for the horse insisted upon waltzing at the slightest shock to his nerves.
Mr. Pett’s tendency to turn around and stare should not be laid up against him. For twenty years he had seen his neighbor, Mrs. Samantha Spaulding, once, at least; perhaps twice or thrice; mayhap even six or seven times a week; and yet, on this occasion, he had fair excuse for looking over his shoulder now and then to assure himself that the fair passenger at whose feet he—literally—sat, was indeed that very Samantha of his twenty years’ knowledge. How was he, who was only a man, and no ladies’ man at that, to understand that the local dressmaker and the local habit of wearing wrinkly black alpaca and bombazine were to blame for his never having known that his next door neighbor had a superb bust and a gracious waist? How was he to know that the blindness of his own eyes was alone accountable for his ignorance of the whiteness of her teeth, and the shapeliness of the arms that peeped from the big, old-fashioned sleeves? Samantha’s especial care upon her farm was her well-appointed dairy, and it is well known that to some women work in the spring-house imparts a delicate creaminess of complexion; but he was no close observer, and how was he to know that that was the reason why the little V in the front of Samantha’s black satin bodice melted so softly into the freshbright tint of her neck and chin? How, indeed, was a man who had no better opportunities than Reuben Pett had enjoyed, to understand that the pretty skirt-dancer dress, a dainty, fanciful travesty of an old-time fashion, had only revealed and not created an attractive and charming woman in his life-long friend and neighbor?
Samantha was not thinking in the least of herself. She had accepted her costume as something which she had no choice but to assume in the exercise of an imperative duty. She wore it for conscience sake only, just as any other New England martyr to her New England convictions of right might have worn a mealsack or a suit of armor had circumstances imposed such a necessity.
But when Reuben Pett had looked around three or four times, she grasped her skirts in both hands and pushed them angrily down totheir utmost length. Then, with a true woman’s dislike of outraging pretty dress material, she made a furtive experiment or two to see if her skirts would not answer all the purposes of modesty without hanging wrong. Perhaps she had a natural talent that way; at any rate, she found that they would.
“Samantha,” said Reuben Pett, over his shoulder, “what under the sun sense be there in chasin’ them two young fools up? If they want to marry, why not let ’em marry? It’s natural for ’em to want to, and it’s agin nature to stop ’em. May be it wouldn’t be sech a bad marriage, after all. Now you look at it in the light of conscience—”
“You’re a nice hand to be advocating marriage, Reuben Pett,” said Mrs. Spaulding; “you jest hurry up that horse and I’ll look out for the light of conscience.”
Mr. Pett chirruped to the capering ewe-neck, and they jolted downward in silence for a half a mile. Then he said suddenly, as if emerging from a cloud of reflection:
“I ain’t never said nothing agin marriage!”
***
Noon-time came, and the hot August sun poured down upon them, until the old calash felt, as Mr. Pett remarked, like a chariot of fire. This observation was evolved in a humorous way to slacken the tension of a situation which was becoming distinctly unpleasant. Moved by a spirit of genial and broadly human benevolence which was somewhat unnatural tohim, Mr. Pett had insisted upon pleading the cause of the youthful runaways with an insistence that was at once indiscreet and futile. In the end his companion had ordered him to hold his tongue, an injunction he was quite incapable of obeying. After a series of failures in the way of conversational starters, he finally scored a success by suggesting that they should pause and partake of the meagre refection which Canada Pete had furnished them—a modest repast of doughnuts, apples and store-pie. This they ate at the first creek where they found a convenient place to water the horse.
When they resumed their journey, they found that they were all refreshed and in brighter mood. Even the horse was intoxicated by the water and that form of verdure which may pass for grass on the margin of a mountain highway in Maine.
This change of feeling was also perceptible in the manner and bearing of the human beings who made up the cavalcade. Samantha adjusted her furbelows with unconscious deftness and daintiness, while she gazed before her into the bright blue heaven; and, I am sorry to say, sucked her teeth. Reuben frankly flung one leg over the end of his seat, and conversed easily as he drove along, poised like a boy who rides a bare-back horse to water. After awhile he even felt emboldened to resume the forbidden theme of conversation.
“Nature is nature, Samantha,” he said.
“’Tis in some folks,” responded Samantha, dryly; “there’s others seems to be able togit along without it.” And Reuben turned this speech over in his mind for a good ten minutes.
Then, just as he was evidently about to say something, he glanced up and saw a sight which changed the current of his reflections. It was only a cloud in the heavens, but it evidently awakened a new idea in his mind.
“Samantha,” he said, in a tone of voice that seemed inappropriately cheerful; “they’s goin’ to be a thunder storm.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Spaulding.
“Certain,” asseverated Mr. Pett; “there she is a-comin up, right agin the wind.”
A thunder storm on the edge of a Maine forest is not wholly a joke. It sometimes has a way of playing with the forest trees much as a table d’hôte diner plays with the wooden tooth-picks. Samantha’s protests, when Mr. Pettstated that he was going to get under the cover of an abandoned saw-mill which stood by the roadside a little way ahead of them, were more a matter of form than anything else. But still, when they reached the rough shed of unpainted and weather-beaten boards, and Mr. Pett, in turning in gave the vehicle a sudden twist that broke the shaft, her anger at the delay thus rendered necessary was beyond her control.
“I declare to goodness, Reuben Pett,” she cried; “if you ain’t the awkwardest! Anybody’d a’most think you’d done that a purpose.”
“Oh, no, Samantha!” said Reuben Pett, pleasantly; “it ain’t right to talk like that. This here machine’s dreadful old. Why, Samantha, we’d ought to sympathize with it—you and me!”
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Pett,” said Samantha. “I ain’t so dreadful old, whatever you may be.”
At the moment Mr. Pett made no rejoinder to this. He unshipped the merry horse, and tied him to a post under the old saw-mill, and then he pulled the calash up the runway into the first story, and patiently set about the difficult task of mending the broken shaft, while Samantha, looking out through the broad, open doorway, watched the fierce Summer storm descend upon the land; and she tapped her impatient foot until it almost burst its too narrow satin covering.
“No, Samantha,” Mr. Pett said, at last, intently at work upon his splicing; “you ain’t so dreadful old, for a fact; but I’ve knowed youwhen you was a dreadful sight younger. I’ve knowed you,” he continued, reflectively, “when you was the spryest girl in ten miles round—when you could dance as lively as that young lady whose clo’es you’re a-wearin’.”
“Don’t you dare to talk to me about that jade!” said Mrs. Spaulding, snappishly.
“Why, no! certainly not!” said Mr. Pett; “I didn’t mean no comparison. Only, as I was a-sayin’, there was a time, Samantha, when you could dance.”
“And who says I can’t dance now?” demanded Mrs. Spaulding, with anger in her voice.
“My! I remember wunst,” said Mr. Pett; and then the sense of Samantha’s angry question seemed to penetrate his wandering mind.
“‘Dance now?’”he repeated. “Sho! Samantha,you couldn’t dance nowadays if you was to try.”
“Who says I couldn’t?” asked Samantha, again, with a set look developing around the corners of her mouth.
“Isay you couldn’t,” replied Mr. Pett, obtusely. “’Tain’t in nature. But there was a time, Samantha, when you was great on fancy steps.”
“Think I’m too old for fancy steps now, do you?” She looked at her tormentor savagely, out of the corners of her eyes.
“Well, not too old, may be, Samantha,” went on Mr. Pett; “but may be you ain’t that limber you was. I know how it is. I ain’t smart as I used to be, myself. Why, do you remember that night down at the Corners, when we two was the only ones that could jump over Squire Tate’s high andirons and cut a pigeon-wing before we come down?”
Mr. Pett appeared to be entirely unconscious that Mrs. Spaulding’s bosom was heaving, that her eyes were snapping angrily, and that her foot was beating on the floor in that tattoo with which a woman announces that she is near an end of her patience.
“How high was them andirons?” she asked, breathlessly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Reuben, indifferently. He kept his eyes fixed on his work; but while he worked his splice closer with his right hand, with his left he took off his hat and held it out rather more than two feet above the floor.
“’Bout as high as that, may be,” he said.“Remember the tune we done that to? Went some sort of way like this, didn’t it?” And with that remarkable force of talent which is only developed in country solitudes, Mr. Pett began to whistle an old-time air, a jiggetty, wiggetty whirl-around strain born of some dead darkey’s sea-sawing fiddle-bow, with a volume of sustained sound that would have put to shame anything the saw-mill could have done for itself in its buzzingest days.
“Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, eeee!” whistled Mr. Pett; and then, softly, and as if only the dim stirring of memory moved him, he began to call the old figures of the old dance.
“Forward all!” he crooned. “Turn partners! Sashay! Alleman’ all! Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee, ee, eeee!”
And suddenly, like the tiger leaping from her lair, the soft pattering and shuffling of feet behind him resolved itself into a quick, furious rhythmic beat, and Samantha Spaulding shot high into the air, holding up her skirts with both hands, while her neat ankles crossed each other in a marvelous complication of agility a good twelve inches above his outstretched hat.
“There!” she cried, as she landed with a flourish that combined skill and grace; “there’s what I done with you, and much I think of it! If you want to see dancin’ that is dancin’ look here. Here’s what I did with Ben Griggs at the shuckin’ that same year; and you wa’n’t there, and good reason why!”
And then and there, while Reuben Pett’s great rasping whistle rang through the old saw-mill,shrilling above the roar of the storm outside, Mrs. Samantha Spaulding executed with lightning rapidity and with the precision of perfect and confident knowledge, a dancing-step which for scientific complexity and daring originality had been twenty years before the surprise, the delight, the tingling, shocking, tempting nine-days’-wonder of the country-side.
“Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee ee, eeee!” Reuben Pett’s whistle died away from sheer lack of breath as Samantha came to the end of her dance.
***
There is nothing that hath a more heavy and leaden cold than a chilled enthusiasm. When the storm was over, although a laughing light
played over the landscape; although diamond sparkles lit up the grateful white mist that rose from the refreshed earth; although the sun shone as though he had been expecting that thunder storm all day, and was inexpressibly glad that it was over and done with, Samantha leaned back in her seat in the calash, and nursed a cheerless bitterness of spirit—such a bitterness as is known only to the New England woman to whom has come a realization of the fact that she has made a fool of herself. Samantha Spaulding. Made a fool of herself. At her age. After twenty years of respectable widowhood. Her, of all folks. And with that old fool. Who’d be’n a-settin’and a-settin’ and a-settin’ all these years. And never said Boo! And now for him to twist her round his finger like that. She felt like—well, she didn’t know how shedidfeel.
She was so long wrapped up in her own thoughts that it was with a start that she awoke to the fact that they were making very slow progress, and that this was due to the very peculiar conduct of Mr. Pett. He was making little or no effort to urge the horse along, and the horse, consequently, having got tired of wasting his bright spirits on the empty air, was maundering. So was Mr. Pett, in another way. He mumbled to himself; from time to time he whistled scraps of old-fashioned tunes, and occasionally he sang to himself a brief catch—the catch coming in about the third or fourth bar.
“Look here, Reuben Pett!” demanded Samantha, shrilly; “be you going to get to Byram’s Pond to-night?”
“Ikin,” replied Reuben.
“Well,beyou?” Samantha Spaulding inquired.
“I d’no. Fact is, I wa’n’t figurin’ on that just now.”
“Well, whatwasyou figurin’ on?” snapped Mrs. Spaulding.
“When you’s goin’ to marry me,” Mr. Pett answered with perfect composure. “Look here, Samantha! it’s this way: here’s twenty years you’ve kept me waitin’.”
“Mekept you waitin’! Well, Reuben Pett, if I ever!”
“Don’t arguefy, Samantha; don’t arguefy,” remonstrated Mr. Pett; “I ain’t rakin up nodetails. What we’ve got to deal with is this question as it stands to-day. Be you a-goin’ to marry me or be you not? And if you be, when be you?”
“Reuben Pett,” exclaimed Samantha, with a showing of severity which was very creditable under the circumstances; “ain’t youashamedof talk like that between folks of our age?”
“Weain’t no age—no age in particular, Samantha,” said Mr. Pett. “A woman who can cut a pigeon-wing over a hat held up higher than any two pair of andirons that I ever see is young enough for me, anyway.” And he chuckled over his successful duplicity.
Samantha blushed a red that was none the less becoming for a tinge of russet. Then she took a leaf out of Mr. Pett’s book.
“Young enough for you?” she repeated. “Well, I guess so! I wa’n’t thinkin’ of myself when I said old, Mr. Pett. I was thinkin’ of folks who was gettin’ most too old to drive down hill in a hurry.”
“Who’s that?” asked Reuben.
“I ain’t namin’ any names,” said Samantha; “but I’ve knowed the time when you wasn’t so awful afraid of gettin’ a spill off the front seat of a calash. Lord! how time does take the tuck out of some folks!” she concluded, addressing vacancy.
“Do you mean to say that I da’sn’t drive you down to Byram’s Pond to-night?” Mr. Pett inquired defiantly.
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Mr. Pett stuck a crooked forefinger into hislady-love’s face, and gazed at her with such an intensity that she was obliged at last to return his penetrating gaze.
“If I get you to Byram’s Pond before the train goes, will you marry me the first meetin’ house we come to?”
“I will,” said Mrs. Spaulding, after a moment’s hesitation, well remembering what the other party to the bargain had forgotten, that there was no church in Byram Pond, nor nearer than forty miles down the railroad.
***
In the warm dusk of a Summer’s evening, a limping, shackle-gaited, bewildered horse, dragging a calash in the last stages of ruin, brought two travelers into the village of Byram’s Pond. Far up on the hills there lingered yet the clouds of dust that marked where that calash had come down those hills at a pace whereat no calash ever came down hill before. Dust covered the two travelers so thickly, that, although the woman’s costume was of peculiar and striking construction, its eccentricities were lost in a dull and uniform grayness. Her bonnet, however, would have excited comment. It had apparently been ofremarkable height; but pounding against the hood of the calash had so knocked it out of all semblance to its original shape, that with its great wire hoops sticking out “four ways for Sunday,” it looked more like a discarded crinoline perched upon her head than any known form of feminine bonnet.
The calash slowed up as it drew near the town. Suddenly it stopped short, and both the travelers gazed with startled interest at a capacious white tent reared by the roadside. From within this tent came the strains of a straining melodeon. Over the portal was stretched a canvas sign:
GOSPEL TENT OF REV. J. HANKEY.
As the travelers stared with all their eyes, they saw the flap of the tent thrown back,and four figures came out. There were two ladies, a stout, middle-aged lady, a shapely, buxom young lady, a tall, broad-shouldered young man, and the fourth figure was unmistakably a Minister of one of the Congregational denominations. The young man and the two ladies walked down the road a little way, and, entering a solid-looking farm wagon, drove off behind a pair of plump horses, in the direction of the railroad station, while the minister waved them a farewell that was also a benediction.
“Git down, Samantha!” said Reuben Pett, “and straighten out that bonnet of yours. Parson’s got another job before prayer-meetin’ begins.”
MISS CARMELITA BILLINGTON sat in a bent-wood rocking-chair in an upper room of a great hotel by the sea, and cried for a little space, and then for a little space dabbed at her hot cheeks and red eyes with a handkerchief wet with cologne; and dabbed and cried, and dabbed and cried, without seeming to get any “forwarder.” The sun and the fresh breeze and the smell of the sea came in through her open windows, but she heeded them not. She mopped herself with cologne till she felt as if she could never again bear to have that honest scent near her dainty nose; but between the mops the tears trickled and trickled and trickled; and she was dreadfully afraid that inwardly, into the surprising great big cavity that had suddenly found room for itself in her poor little heart, the tears would trickle, trickle, trickle forever. It was no use telling herself she had done right. When you have done right and wish you hadn’t had to you can’t help having a profound contempt for the right. The right is respectable, of course, and proper and commendable and—in short, it’s the right;—but, oh! what a nuisance it is! You can’t help wondering in yourprivate mind why the right is so disagreeable and unpleasant and unsatisfactory, and the wrong so extremely nice. Of course, it was right to refuse Jack Hatterly; but why, why on earth couldn’t it just as easily have been right to accept him? And the more she thought about it the more she doubted whether it was always quite right to do right, and whether it was not sometimes entirely wrong not to do wrong.
No; it was no use telling herself to be a brave girl. She was a brave girl and she knew it. In the face of the heartless world she could bear herself as jauntily as if she were heartless, too; but in the privacy of her own room, with Mama fast asleep on the verandah below, she could not see the slightest use in humbugging herself. She was perfectly miserable, and the rest of her reflections might have been summed up in the simple phrase of early girlhood, “So there!”
It was no consolation to poor Carmelita’s feelings that her little private tragedy was of a most business-like, commonplace, unromantic complexion. It only made her more disgusted with herself for having made up her mind to do the right thing. She was not torn from her chosen love by the hands of cruel parents. Her parents had never denied her anything in her life, and if she had really wanted to wed a bankrupt bashaw with three tails and an elephant’s head, she could have had her will. Nor did picturesque poverty have anything to do with the situation. She was rich and so was Jack. Nor could she rail against a parental code of morality too stern for tender hearts. There was not the least atom of objection to Jack in any respect. He was absolutely as nice as could be—and, unless I am greatly misinformed, a good-looking young man, deeply in love, can be very nice indeed.
And yet there was no doubt in Carmelita’s mind that it was her plain duty to refuse Jack. To marry him would mean to utterly give up and throw aside a plan of life, which, from her earliest childhood, she had never imagined to be capable of the smallest essential alteration. If a man who had devoted his whole mind and soul to the business of manufacturing overshoes were suddenly invited to become a salaried poet on a popular magazine, he could not regard the proposed change of profession as more preposterously impossible than the idea of marriage with Jack Hatterly seemed to Miss Carmelita Billington.
For Miss Billington occupied a peculiar position. She was the Diana of a small but highly prosperous city in the South-West; a city which her father had built up in years of enterprising toil. To mention the town of Los Brazos to any capitalist in the land was to call up the name of Billington, the brilliant speculator who, ruined on the Boston stock-market, went to Texas and absolutely created a town which for wealth, beauty and social distinction had not its equal in the great South-West. It was colonized with college graduates from New York, Boston and Philadelphia; and, in Los Brazos, boys who had left cane-rushes and campus choruses scarce ten years behind them had fortunes in the hundred thousands, and stood high in public places. As the daughter of the founder of Los Brazos, Miss Billington’s fortunes were allied, she could not but feel, to the place of her birth. There must she marry, there must she continue the social leadership which her mother was only too ready to lay down. The Mayor of the town, the District Attorney, the Supreme Court Judge and the Bishop were all among her many suitors; and six months before she had wished, being a natural-born sport, if shewasa girl, that they would only get together and shake dice to see which of them should have her. But then she hadn’t come East and met Jack Hatterly.
She thought of the first day she had seen the Atlantic Ocean and Jack, and she wished now that she had never been seized with the fancy to gaze on the great water. And yet, what a glorious day that was! How grand
she had thought the ocean! And how grand she had thought Jack! And now she had given him up forever, that model of manly beauty and audacity; Jack with his jokes and his deviltries and his exhaustless capacity for ever new and original larks. Was it absolutely needful? Her poor little soul had to answer itself that it was. To leave Los Brazos and the great house with the cool quiet court-yard and the broad verandahs, and to live in crowded, noisy New York, where she knew not a soul except Jack—to be separated from those two good fairies who lived only to gratify her slightest wish—to “go back” on Los Brazos, the pride of the Billingtons—no; it was impossible, impossible! She must stick to her post and make her choice between the Mayor and the Judge and the District Attorney and the Bishop. But how dull and serious and business-like they all seemed to her now that she had known Jack Hatterly, the first man she had ever met with a well-developed sense of humor!
What made it hardest for poor Carmelita was, perhaps, that fate had played her cruel pranks ever since the terrible moment of her act of renunciation. Thirty-six hours before, at the end of the dance in the great hotel parlors, Jack had proposed to her. For many days she had known what was coming, and what her answer must be, and she had given him no chance to see her alone. But Jack was Jack, and he had made his opportunity for himself, and had said his say under cover of the confusion at the end of the dance; and she had promised to give him his answer later, and she had given it, after a sleepless and tearful night; just a line to say that it could never, never be, and that he must not ask her again. And it had been done in such a commonplace, unromantic way that she hated to think of it—the meagre, insufficient little note handed to her maid to drop in the common letter-box of the hotel, and to lie there among bills and circulars and all sorts of silly every-day correspondence, until the hotel-clerk should take it out and put it in Jack’s box. She had passed through the office a little later, and her heart had sunk within her as she saw his morning’s mail waiting for him in its pigeon-hole, and thought what the opening of it would bring to him.
But this was the least of her woe. Later came the fishing trip on the crowded cat-boat. She had fondly hoped that he would have the delicacy to excuse himself from that party of pleasure; but no, he was there, and doing just as she had asked him to, treating her as if nothing had happened, which was certainly the