Ephraim B. Price, Attorney at Law.
Ephraim B. Price, Attorney at Law.
Ephraim B. Price, Attorney at Law.
“Oh,” said Archibald, “this is Elvira’s house, and the driver is delivering my box of flowers.”
He leaned forward, hoping to catch sight of the fair young girl when the front-door opened to take in the box. But he was disappointed. The impatient driver had merely left it on the steps of the high, white-pillared portico, after giving the door-bell a vigorous pull.
Then followed a further few minutes of pitching and tossing, and the stage drew up before the tavern-door. A row of a dozen men, whose hats were drawn down over their eyes, and whose feet fell instantaneously from the rail to the floor as the coach drew up, came forward, and one of them betrayed a desire to grasp Archibald’sin his own horny hand. “Guess ye’ll stop overnight? Th’ain’t no other place. ’Sprised to see a stranger to-night, tew. Will you go in an’ sign—will you, sir?”
“So this uncouth ruffian,” thought Archibald, “is Elvira’s ideal landlord! No wonder she distrusts me!”
“We’re local temp’rance,” said the landlord. “An’ no licker’s being seen to East Village for nigh six years. Not a drop, sir, an’ it’s bustin’ my ho-tel higher’n a kite. Yes, it is!”
Archibald expressed commiseration.
“As I tell’d Squar’ Price, ‘yeou high-toned, ’ristocratic temp’rance folk’ll hurt East Village when ye close the hotel!’ Why, when a gent comes up here fr’ the city, he wants to be able to call fer a glass o’ gin or a glass o’ whiskey ’s often ’s he likes.”
Archibald thought he detected the faint smell of liquor upon the landlord’s breathas he talked, and it occurred to him that his obtrusively free-and-easy-manner was the result of a secret violation of the prohibitory local license law. “Bein’ fr’ the city, as you be,” said the landlord, lowering his voice to a whisper, and placing his heavy hand on Archibald’s shoulder familiarly, “I calc’late you’re cold an’ ready for a tidy drink. I calc’late I’m talkin’ to a gent as is used ter lickerin’ up, even ef ’tis agin the law?” To humor him, Archibald admitted that he had no stringent prohibitory sentiments.
“Well then, good! Jest you foller me!”
Archibald followed the landlord out into the hotel yard, where the latter pulled up the flaps of a cellar-door. Hearing the creaking sound, and taking it for an admonitory signal, the row of men on the hotel piazza, who had resumed their seats, again dropped their feet on the floor, rose, and came out into the yard in Indian file,in perfect silence. Archibald followed his landlord down into the darkness of the cellar, where, beneath the dim light of a solitary candle he perceived a cask with a wooden spigot, and near it half a dozen tin cups. The men filed down the steps behind him. “You’ve heerd o’ apple jack?” asked the landlord, in a whisper.
Archibald nodded.
“Drink that, then!” and the landlord handed him a cupful of the beverage. It was enough to intoxicate him. He drank but a very little; as he saw the other men were waiting, he passed the cup on to them.
“Welcome to East Village, stranger,” said one of the men, drinking. “Be you up ’ere a-sellin’ marchandize?”
“Oh, no!”
“Be you come to see the Squar’?”
“Well—perhaps—yes.”
“Wa’l, this is a dead give away!” and the men laughed noisily, as rustics will.“Don’t mention this ’ere cider to Squar’ Price!”
The next morning was delicious, the air clear and smelling of the mountains. The mist hung above the distant river, and a line of hills showed their green wooded outline above it. As Archibald breathed the sweet country air, he stepped more briskly, felt less of his city malaria, drew into his lungs a long breath of the fresh, invigorating summer wind, which seemed to come to him across the high upland, from such a vast distance.
He came to the old colonial gate and entered. The Hon. Ephraim B. Price was just at the moment sauntering down the gravel path from his house to his law office. As he saw Archibald enter, he came forward somewhat more rapidly. He was a man of large frame, gaunt rather than spare, of prominent cheekbones, of lengthy chin-beard. His eyeswere very keen, and his entire expression was one of patient alertness—as if there was very little to be alert over, but a deep necessity of keeping up a reputation. Archibald learned afterward how indefatigable a partisan, and how strenuous a believer in the Republican party the Hon. Ephraim was.
“Sir,” he said, after greeting Archibald, and looking with a grin of pity upon his engraved card—a grin directed chiefly to the “Mr.” before Archibald’s name—“you are Elvira’s landlord down to New York—tell me, how is your city and State going, do you think?”
Archibald felt taken aback. Politics were something of which he knew nothing. He was but barely aware that it was a presidential year. In the city he kept severely out of politics, as hardly the employment of gentlemen.
“I—I—think it will go Democratic.”
A more violent frown than before. “IfI thought so, sir; if I imagined so; if for one instant I believed that what we fought for during the war—Eh, Elvira? Here is Mr. Archibald!”
Then the Hon. Ephraim turned abruptly and entered his office, where, it may be added, he sat for the next hour, his feet on the cold stove before him, meditating where his next fee was to come from, and breaking out with an occasional invective against the wicked democracy.
Before the old gentleman was a square window which looked out over the town. All day long he sat before this, as upon a watch-tower—a censor of village morals and deportment.
“Father is so interested in the election,” apologized Elvira. “But how strange to see you here; and I told you not to!”
She held a small gray kitten in her arms, which she stroked slowly. She was still in his favorite white muslin, and shehad a gentle, sweet flush of pleasure in her face.
“I came, Miss Price—because—don’t you know—I—aw—missed you,” and he smiled.
“You are very good. How is Aunt Perkins? Did she bring her mission boys to your house? She has written that a friend of yours has given fifty dollars for the boys. Do tell me about it. Is she well? Have any more boarders come?”
She plied him with questions as they strolled toward the white-pillared portico. The house was old and shabby, but he did not notice it. The place was run down and impoverished, but it seemed very beautiful to him, for he noticed that she wore one of his roses in her lustrous hair.
Entering the hallway he met some of the younger brothers and sisters, and felt a sudden strange affection spring up in his heart for them. Elvira took himthrough into a gloomy parlor, lined with plain hair-cloth furniture. On the walls were several portraits. “This was my mother,” said the girl, affectionately, pointing to what Archibald felt to be a hideous daub, a red-faced woman in black, against a green background. It was the portrait by Mr. Raymond, whose abode was now the poor-house. “She died only two years ago——”
“I fancy if she had lived,” said Archibald, “you would not have tried—the stage?”
She looked at him calmly a moment.
“That Boston man has told you?”
“Yes, I learned the fact from his friends.”
“I shall never—again.” There was a despairing pathos in her voice.
“Elvira,” he said, slowly, “as I see it—I think it was very noble of you to try.”
Then, unaccountably to him, she burst into tears.
“It is what I love—what I long for—to be an actress—a great actress,” she sobbed. “But I can’t—I can’t! I can’t exist with those creatures—those horrible men who hang about you! No one knows what I endured! No one knows what, too, I gave up when I left the stage and came home; but Ihadto.”
He leaned forward in sympathy.
“You may say what you will, but there is no Art like acting, and nothing so fine as applause. Oh, that I could bring myself to do it—to be strong enough to do it—to save our fortunes—to help father. You little know how I have suffered, Mr. Archibald.”
“By Jove—I—I quite like you for it!”
He was on his feet at her side. Impulsively he bent down and whispered close to her ear. “Let me be your audience the rest of my life! Act forme—let me applaud everything—anything you do, my darling! always! always!”
She put him away.
“I don’t feel I have acted just rightwithyou,” she said. “I should have told you that I was—or might be again—an actress.” She spoke coldly. “I don’t believe you want them in your boarding-house. They are not always desirable, I believe!” Elvira’s eyes were fastened on the floor.
Archibald paced to and fro in the parlor. “Confound her odd New England conscience!” he muttered to himself. Seizing her hands, he cried, passionately, “I, too, must confess. Elvira, I loved you that first day you came.I loved you!Therefore I let you think—itwasa boarding house.”
“And it isn’t—it’s your own private—Oh, Mr. Archibald!”
She sat and looked at him with a horrified stare. The full truth of his imposition began to steal upon her gradually. Then her face fell and she averted it, asshe felt that a fatal untruth had come between them. She rose quietly and left him standing near her. She went upstairs to her room and threw herself upon her bed in an agony of tears.
Through it all Archibald had merely smiled!
But when she left him he felt rather weak for a moment, as if his city malaria had returned upon him with a double force. As Elvira showed no signs of returning, he amused himself by turning over the leaves of the family photograph album. Face by face revealed the stern, set, arid, Puritan features, the hard, determined chins, and the “firmness,” which, in the person of the Hon. Ephraim, he felt still dominated and controlled the public affairs of East Village. He threw down the album with a feeling of impotent rage against the survival of this colonial“narrowness,” as he liked to call it. He walked out of the house and wandered, much crestfallen and full of malaria, along the village street toward the hotel. A great many farm wagons were tied along the sidewalk, and there were numbers of fresh-cheeked country girls walking in threes and fours, and sweeping the sidewalk as they went. Upon a slight elevation stood a white wooden meetinghouse, with a white steeple, and it gave him a chill even on that warm morning to look at it—itlookedso cold. Small groups of hard-featured farmers in fur caps stood on the corners of the streets discussing, presumably, the crops. He wondered if the fur caps were needed in that arid, bleak region to keep warm the natives’ sense of Right and Wrong? He made his way out, beneath some beautiful elms, into a small, old-fashioned burying-ground, where he discovered that “erring sinners” apparently comprised the onlyelement of those who were requested to “Pause and Read.” Feeling himself to be now, for some reason, a distinctly immoral person, he read some of the quaint epitaphs, to which he was invited, in a spirit of humility, which presently changed to amusement. In death as in life, the hard, stern old village characters preserved on their headstones a fund of grim humor for the “sinner,” which in Archibald’s instance made him smile. “Oh,” he sighed to himself, “I long to take her away from all this sort of thing—forever!”
He took a long walk in the afternoon, and returned to the hotel to find a coldly worded note from Elvira inviting him around to tea. He removed the stains of his walk, and dressed himself with his usual care. He found Elvira waiting for him beneath the high white pillars, in an unbecoming, and as it seemed to him, forbidding dress of black. Her face seemedunusually stern and relentless. There were traces of tears in her red eyelids, but the tears were dried away now, and her eyes were very bright and hard.
“Don’t say anythingnow. Father feels very deeply about it. We have had a long talk. When he heard of the—of the unfortunate house affair—he wassoangry I could hardly pacify him.”
Archibald’s heart sank within him. He fairly shivered.
“He said that he did not want me to lower my standard,” continued Elvira, in her clear, musical, passionless voice. “And I told him that he need have no fears. I wanted to see you first, and tell you. Let us not have anyfeelingabout it.”
“Anyfeeling!” exclaimed Archibald. “Why—how can we help it!”
“Let us act as if we had never understood one another. I will go back to the city with you, and Aunt Perkins and I will find some other place at once.”
“Go back with me—and expect me to show no feeling! Elvira, this is preposterous!”
“Then I will go back alone.” She compressed her lips, just as he had observed her father do.
“I beg pardon, Elvira, do you mean—can you mean that I can never—I can never hope!”
She nodded her pretty flower-like head gravely. “Come in to tea, won’t you?” she said, coolly. “I want father to hear you talk about Art.”
He turned on his heel. At last he, too, was angry.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “But if I go back to the hotel now, I shall just have time to pack my valise and catch the evening train.”
He walked rapidly away, leaving her standing upon the white-pillared portico, looking with pure, sweet, upturned face, like a saint who has for all time renouncedthe world, the flesh, and the devil. Had he looked back, Mr. Jerome Archibald’s tender heart would have been touched by her attitude; he would have returned, and, against her will, clasped her in his arms and covered her pale lips with warm kisses. It might have melted her high “standard” a little. But he let a night intervene without seeing her, and the entering wedge of her high sense of duty did its work before morning. He determined to remain another day and make a further trial. When he called the next day she was obdurate. “Love cannot be built upon deceit and untruth,” she said, sententiously. “I was not frank, you were not. It is better that we should part. I could never hold up my head—I could never face the world. I know what they would call me. They would call me anadventuress!and they would hate me for being successful. Yes—your mother, your sisters—everyone.”
“But you were perfectly innocent about it, Elvira.”
There was a little pause.
“I, too, was innocent. I meant no more than to have you near me, where I could learn to know you—love you—and now, really, it seems as if you had built up a mountain of ice between us, don’t you know.”
She merely shook her head.
When Archibald returned to the city his malaria compelled him to go away again almost immediately to Newport. There, a few weeks later, his agent wrote him that he had succeeded in renting the house “at an exorbitant figure to a very rich tenant without children”—thus fulfilling his mother’s conditions to the letter. He went back to the city, recovered in health, to pack up a few personal effects, and found to his surprise that Miss Perkins and her niece were, at the moment he arrived, in the house. They had takenboard on Ninth Street, and had gone up to take a last look of the charming interior where, Elvira guiltily acknowledged, life had been “so wrongly pleasant.” He found Elvira holding a fan in her hand and seated pensively in an old Venetian chair in what was formerly her studio. As he entered the room she rose, blushing a most vivid red, and as rapidly turning pale again.
“Mr. Archibald!” she exclaimed. “I did not know you were in the city!”
“I have been here only an hour,” he said, stiffly.
“It is time for us to go;” and she turned to the door.
“Elvira!” His face looked sick and ghastly.
“Well?” She drew herself up very coldly.
“Are you made of stone?”
“Mr. Archibald, what can you mean?”
“My child, you are capable of grindingone who loves you into powder—like—er—a millstone!”
“Aunt Perkins!” she called out, “let us go!”
“No,” he cried, “I will not let you go. You shall hear me! I love you! Do you hear? And you shall not leave this house until you say you will be my wife! I know you care for me—everything tells me so—but you will wear your own and my heart out with your hard, cruel conscience! What brought you here?You loved me!Why have you been sitting in this room? You love me, Elvira—I know it—I feel it!”
Gently he drew her to him and kissed her. She laid her head on his shoulder and breathed a little contented sigh. “I don’t think this—is right!” she said.