What a Charming Girl Your Niece is 054
“What a charming girl your niece is, Port!” said Mr. Brown, as the fluttering train of Dorothy’s dress disappeared through the door-way.
Mr. Port evidently considered that this possibly debatable statement was sufficiently answered by a grunt, for that was all the answer he gave it.
Not permitting his enthusiasm to be checked by this chillingly dubious response, Mr. Brown continued:
“She certainly is one of the most charming girls I have met in a long time, Port. She is not a bit like the average of young girls nowadays. I rarely have known a young person of either sex to be so genuinely interested in genealogy, especially in Philadelphia genealogy; and I must say that her liking for antiquarian matters generally is very remarkable. I envy you, I really envy you, old boy, the blessing of that sweet young creature’s constant companionship.”
“Umph—do you?” was Mr. Port’s concise and rather discouraging reply.
“Indeed I do”—Mr. Brown was too warm to notice the cynical tone of his friend’s rejoinder—“and I have been thinking, Port, that we are a pair of selfish old wretches to monopolize every evening in the way that we have been doing this bright young flower. It is a shame for us to keep her in our stupid company—though she tells me that she finds our talk about old people and old times exceedingly interesting—instead of letting her have a little of the young society and a little of the excitement and pleasure of watering-place life. Now, how would it do for us to take her down to the Casino to-night? There is to be a hop to-night, she says; at least, that is to say”—Mr. Brown became somewhat confused—“I heard somewhere that there is to be a hop tonight, and while that sort of thing is pretty stupid for you and me, it isn’t a bit stupid for a young and pretty girl like her. So suppose we take her, old man?”
As this amazing proposition was advanced by his elderly friend, Mr. Port’s anger and astonishment were aroused together; and his rude rejoinder to it was: “Have you gone crazy, Brown, or has Dorothy been making a fool of you? Has she asked you to ask me to take her to the Casino hop? She knows there is no use in talking to me about it any longer.”
“No, certainly not—at least—that is to say—well, no, not exactly,” replied Mr. Brown, beginning his sentence with an asperity and positiveness that somehow did not hold out to its end. “She did say to me, I confess, how fond she was of dancing, and how she had refrained from saying much about it to you”—Mr. Port here interpolated a sceptical snort—“because she knew that taking her to the Casino would only bore you. And I do think, Port, that keeping her here with us all the time is grossly selfish; and if you don’t want to take her to the hop I hope you’ll let her go with me. But what we’d better do, old man, is to take her together—then we can talk to each other just as well, at least nearly as well, as we can here, and we can have the comfort of knowing that she is enjoying herself too. Come, Hutch; we’re getting old and rusty, you and I, but let us try at least to keep from degenerating into a pair of selfish old brutes with no care for anybody’s comfort but our own.”
Mr. Hutchinson Port might have replied with a fair amount of truth that so far as he himself was concerned the degeneration that his friend referred to as desirable to avoid already had taken place. But all of us like most to be credited with the virtues of which we have least, and he therefore accepted as his due Mr. Brown’s tribute of implied praise. And the upshot of the matter was that Dorothy, when she returned to the veranda again, was unaffectedly surprised (and considering how carefully she had planned her small campaign she did it very creditably) by discovering that her uncle’s edict against the Casino hops had been withdrawn.
Even Dorothy was disposed to believe that unless some peculiarly favorable combination of circumstances presented itself as a basis for her intelligent manipulation her strong desire for a yacht voyage must remain ungratified; for, now that his liver was decidedly the larger part of him, Mr. Port had a fairly catlike dread of the sea. To be sure, Dorothy’s character was a resolute one, and her staying powers were quite remarkable; but in the matter of venturing his bilious body upon the ocean she discovered that her uncle—although now reduced to a fairly satisfactory state of submission in other respects—had a large and powerful will of his own.
Fortune, however, favors the resolute even more decidedly than she favors the brave. This fact Dorothy comprehended thoroughly, and uniformly acted upon. Each time that even a remote possibility of a yacht cruise presented itself she instantly brought her batteries to bear; and, with a nice understanding of her uncle’s intellectual peculiarities, she each time treated the matter as though it never before had been discussed.
Therefore it was that when Miss Lee’s eyes were gladdened one day—just as she and her uncle were about to begin their lunch on the shady veranda of the Casino—by the sight of a trim schooner yacht sliding down the wind from the direction of Newport, the subject of the cruise was revived with a suddenness and point that Mr. Port found highly disconcerting. The yacht rounded to off the Casino, and the sound of a plunge and a clanking chain floated across the water as her anchor went overboard.
The Yacht Rounded to off the Casino 060
“Oh, isn’t she a beauty!” exclaimed Dorothy, with enthusiasm. “Now, Uncle Hutchinson, her owner is coming ashore—they have just brought the gig round to the gangway—and if you don’t know him you must get somebody to introduce you to him; and then you must introduce him to me; and then he will ask us to go on a cruise; and of course we will go, and have just the loveliest time in the world. I haven’t been on board a yacht for nearly five years (just look at the gig: don’t the men pull splendidly?)—not since that nice little Lord Alderhone took poor dear mamma and me up to Norway. We did have such a good time! Poor dear mamma, of course, was desperately sick—she always was horribly sea-sick, you know; but I’m never sea-sick the least bit, and it was perfectly delightful. Look, Uncle Hutchinson, they’ve made the dock, and now he’s coming right up here. What a handsome man he is, and how well he looks in his club uniform! It seems to me I’ve seen him somewhere. Do you know him, Uncle Hutchinson?”
A serious difficulty under which Mr. Port labored in his dealings with his niece was his inability—due to his Philadelphia habit of mind—to keep up with the exceptionally rapid flow of her ideas. On the present occasion, while he still was engaged in consideration of the irrational proposition that he should court the desperate misery that attends a bilious man at sea by as good as asking to be taken on a yacht voyage, he suddenly found his ideas twisted off into another direction by the reference to his sister’s sufferings on a similar occasion in the past; and before he could frame in words the reproof that he was disposed to administer to Dorothy for what he probably would have styled her heartlessness, he found his thoughts shunted to yet another track by a direct question. It is within the bounds of possibility that Miss Lee had arrived at a just estimate of her relative’s intellectual peculiarities, and that she even sometimes framed her discourses with a view to taking advantage of them.
The direct question being the simplest section of Dorothy’s complex utterance, Mr. Port abandoned his intended remonstrance and reproof and proceeded to answer it. “Yes,” he said, “I know him. It’s Van Rensselaer Livingstone. His cousin, Van Ruy-ter Livingstone, married your cousin Grace—Grace Winthrop, you know. He’s a great scamp—this one, I mean; gambles, and that sort of thing, I’m told, and drinks, and—and various things. I shall have to speak to him if he sees me, I suppose; but of course I shall not introduce him to you.”
“Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone! Why so it is! How perfectly delightful! I know him very well, Uncle Hutchinson. He was in Nice the last winter we were there; and he broke the bank at Monaco; and he played that perfectly absurd trick on little Prince Sporetti: cut off his little black mustache when Prince Sporetti was—was not exactly sober, you know, and gummed on a great red mustache instead of it; and then, before the prince was quite himself again, took him to Lady Orrasby’s ball. All Nice was in a perfect roar over it. And they had a duel afterwards, and Mr. Livingstone—he is a wonderful shot—instead of hurting the little prince, just shot away the tip of his left ear as nicely as possible. Oh, he is a delightful man—and here he comes.” And Dorothy, half rising from her chair, and paying no more attention to Mr. Port’s kicks under the table than she did to his smothered verbal remonstrances, extended her well-shaped white hand in the most cordial manner, and in the most cordial tone exclaimed:
“Won’t you speak to me in English, Mr. Livingstone? We talked French, I think it was, the last time we met. And how is your friend Prince Sporetti? Has his ear grown out again? You know my uncle, I think? Mr. Hutchinson Port.”
Livingstone took the proffered hand with even more cordiality than it was given, and then extended his own to Mr. Port—who seemed much less inclined to shake it than to bite it.
“I think that we are justified in regarding ourselves as relations now, Miss Lee, since our cousins have married each other, you know. Quite a romance, wasn’t it? And how very jolly it is to meet you here—when I thought that you certainly were in Switzerland or Norway, or even over in that new place that people are going to in Roumania! I flatter myself that I always have rather a knack of falling on my feet, but, by Jove, I’m doing it more than usual this morning!”
Miss Lee seemed to be entirely unaware of the fact that her uncle was looking like an animated thunder-cloud. “It is just like a bit out of a delightful novel,” was her encouraging response. “A long, low, black schooner suddenly coming in from the seaward and anchoring close off shore, and the hero landing in a little boat just in time to slay the villain and rescue the beautiful bride. Of course I’m the beautiful bride, but my uncle is not a villain, but the very best of guardians—by-the-way, I don’t think that you know that poor dear mamma is dead, Mr. Livingstone? Yes, she died only a week or two after you left us. So you see you must be very nice to the villain—and you can begin your kind treatment of him by having lunch with him and with me too. Uncle Hutchinson wassopleased when he saw you come ashore. He said that we certainly must capture you, and he sent a man to bring some hot soup for you at once—here it is now.” And so it was, for Dorothy herself very thoughtfully had given the order that she now modestly attributed to her uncle.
And so in less than ten minutes from the moment when Mr. Port had informed Dorothy that Van Rensselaer Livingstone was a very objectionable person whom he desired to avoid, and whose introduction to her was not even to be thought of, they all three were lunching together in what to the casual observer seemed to be the most amicable manner possible.
“I’ve run over to look up Mrs. Rattleton,” said Livingstone, as he discussed with evident relish thefiletthat Mr. Port charitably hoped would choke him. “Very likely you haven’t met her, for she’s only just got here. But you’ll like her, I know, for she’s ever so jolly. She’s promised to play propriety for me in a party that we want to make up aboard the yacht. The squadron won’t get down from New York for a week yet, and I’ve come up ahead of it so that we can have a cruise to the Shoals and back before the races. Of course, Miss Lee, you won’t fly in the face of Fate, after this providential meeting, by refusing to join our party; at least if you do you will make me wretched to the end of my days. And we will try to make you comfortable on board, sir,” he added, politely, turning to Mr. Port. “I have a tolerably fair cook, and ice isn’t the only thing in the ice-chest, I assure you.”
“How very kind you are, Mr. Livingstone,” Dorothy hastened to say, in order to head off her uncle’s inevitable refusal. “Of course we will go, with the greatest possible pleasure. It is very odd how things fall out sometimes. Now only this morning I was begging Uncle Hutchinson to take me off yachting, and he was saying how much he enjoyed being at sea, and how he really thought that if it wasn’t for his age—wasn’t it absurd of him to talk about his age? He is not old at all, the dear!—he would have a yacht of his own. And almost before the words are fairly out of our mouths here you drop from the clouds, or are cast up by the sea, it’s all the same thing, and give us both just what we have been longing for. At least, Uncle Hutchinson pretended to be longing for it only in case he could be young enough to enjoy it; but if he doesn’t think he’s young now, I’d like to know what he’ll call himself when he’s fifty!” And then, facing around sharply upon her uncle, Dorothy concluded: “The idea of pretending thatyouare too old to go yachting! Really, Uncle Hutchinson, I am ashamed of you!”
As has been intimated, if there was any one subject upon which Mr. Port was especially sensitive, it was the subject of his age. As the parish register of St. Peter’s all too plainly proved, he never would see sixty again; but this awkward record was in an out-of-the-way place, and the agreeable fiction that he advanced in various indirect ways to the effect that he was a trifle turned of forty-seven was not likely to be officially contradicted. And it is not impossible, so tenacious was he upon this point, that had the official proof been produced, he would have denied its authenticity. For it was Mr. Port’s firm determination still to figure before the world as a youngish, middle-aged man.
To say that Miss Lee deliberately set herself to playing upon this weakness of her guardian’s, possibly, remotely possibly, would be doing her injustice. But the fact is obvious that she succeeded by her cleverly turned discourse in landing her esteemed relative fairly between the horns of an exceedingly awkward dilemma: either Mr. Port must accept the invitation and be horribly ill, or he must reject it, and so throw over his pretensions to elderly youth.
For a moment the unhappy gentleman hung in the wind, and Dorothy regretted that she had not made her statement of the case still stronger. Indeed, she was about to supplement it by a remark to the effect that people never thought of giving up yachting until they were turned of sixty, when, to her relief, her uncle slowly filled away on the right tack. His acceptance was expressed in highly ungracious terms; but, as has been said, Dorothy never troubled herself about forms, provided she compassed results. The moment that he had uttered the fatal words, Mr. Port fell to cursing himself in his own mind for being such a fool; but the same reason that had impelled him to give his consent withheld him from retracting it. He knew that he was going to be desperately miserable; but, at least, nobody could say that he was old.
“I’m ever so much obliged to you, Miss Lee, and to you too, Mr. Port,” said Livingstone. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and hunt up Mrs. Rattle-ton, and tell her what a splendid raise I’ve made, and help her organize the rest of the party. We shall have only two more. It’s a bore to have more than six people on board a yacht. I don’t know why it is, I’m sure, but if you have more than six they always get to fighting. Queer, isn’t it?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Port. “Mrs. Rattleton? May I ask if this is the Mrs. Rattleton from New York who was here last season, the one whose bathing costume was so—so very eccentric, and about whom there was so much very disagreeable talk?”
“Mrs. Rattletonisfrom New York, and shewashere last season,” Livingstone answered. “But I can’t say that I remember anything eccentric in her bathing costume, except that it was exceedingly becoming; and I certainly never heard any disagreeable talk about her. There may have been such talk about her, but perhaps it was thought just as well not to have it in my presence. Mrs. Rattleton is my cousin, Mr. Port—she was a Van Twiller, you know. Do you happen to remember any of the things that were said about her, and who said them?” Livingstone spoke with extreme courtesy; but there was something in his tone that caused Mr. Port suddenly to think of the tip of Prince Sporetti’s left ear, and that led him to reply hurriedly, and by no means lucidly:
“Certainly—no—yes—that is to say, I can’t exactly remember anything in particular. I’m sure I was led to believe from what was said that she was a very charming woman. No, I don’t remember at all.”
“Ah, perhaps it is just as well,” Livingstone replied, gravely. “But how lucky!” he added; “there she is now. Everybody is at the Casino about this time of day, I fancy. May I bring her over and present her to you, Miss Lee?”
“Of course you may, Mr. Livingstone. I shall be delighted to meet her. And if she is to matronize me, the sooner that I begin to get accustomed to her severities the better.”
And then Mr. Hutchinson Port suffered a fresh pang of misery when the presentation was accomplished and he was forced to say approximately pleasant things to a lady whose decidedly ballet-like attire in the surf—or, to be precise, on the beach above high-water-mark, where, for some occult reason, she usually saw fit to do the most of her bathing—joined to the exceeding celerity of her conduct generally, had marked her during the preceding season as the conspicuous centre of one phase of life at the Pier. Nor was Mr. Port’s lot made happier as he listened to the brisk discussion that ensued in regard to the organization of the yachting party, and found that its two remaining members were to be drawn, as was only natural, from the eminently meteoric set to which Mrs. Rattleton belonged.
Had time been given Mr. Port for consideration it is probable that he would have collected his mental forces sufficiently to have enabled him to lodge a remonstrance; he might even—though this is doubtful, for Dorothy’s voting power was vigorous—have accomplished a veto. But projects in which Mrs. Rattleton was concerned never went slowly; and in the present case the necessity for getting back in time for the races really compelled haste. And so it came to pass that not until theFleetwingswas off the Brenton’s Reef light-ship, with her nose pointed well up into the north-east, was there framed in Mr. Port’s slow-moving mind a suitable line of argument upon which to base a peremptory refusal to go upon the expedition—and by that time he was so excruciatingly ill in his own cabin that coherent utterance and converse with his kind were alike impossible.
So far as Mr. Port was concerned the ensuing six days made up an epoch in his life that can only be described as an agonized blank. And when—as it seemed to him many ages later—theFleetwingsonce more cast anchor off Narragansett Pier, and he stepped shakily from the schooner’s gig to the Casino dock, the usual plumpness and ruddiness of his face had given place to a yellow leanness, and his weight had been reduced by very nearly twenty pounds. The cruise had been a flying one, or he never would have finished it. After the first six hours he would have landed on a desert island cheerfully—and it is not impossible that a hint from Dorothy as to her uncle’s probable movements should a harbor be made had induced Livingstone to give the land a wide berth.
Dorothy came ashore blooming. “You don’t know, Uncle Hutchinson,” she said, “what a perfectly lovely time I’ve had”—and this cheerful assertion was the literal truth, for Mr. Port had entered his cabin before the yacht had crossed the line between Beaver Tail and Point Judith, and had not emerged from it until the anchor went overboard. “And you don’t know,” Miss Lee went on with effusion, “how grateful your angel is to you for helping her to have such a delightful cruise. I’m sorry that you haven’t been very well, Uncle Hutchinson; but I know that you will be all the better for it. Poor dear mamma, you know, was bilious too, and going to sea always made her wretched; but she used to be wonderfully well always when she got on shore again. And you’ll be wonderfully well too, you dear; and that will be your reward for helping your angel to have such a perfectly delightful time.”
Mr. Port made no reply to this address, for his condition of collapse was too complete to permit him to give form in words to the thoughts of rage and resentment which were burning in the depths of his injured soul. Without a word to one single member of the party, he climbed heavily into a carriage and was driven directly to his hotel—while Dorothy, still under the chaperonage of Mrs. Rattleton, gayly joined the pleasant little lunch-party at the Casino with which the yacht voyage came to an end.
During the ensuing week, a considerable portion of which Mr. Port passed in the privacy of his own room, the relations between Miss Lee and her guardian were characterized by a chill formality that was ominous of a coming storm. In point of fact, Mr. Port was waiting only until he should fully regain his strength in order to try conclusions with Dorothy once and for all—and he was most highly resolved that in the impending battle royal he should not suffer defeat. So far, he had gone down in each encounter with his spirited antagonist because the tactics employed against him were of an unfamiliar sort. But he was beginning to get the hang of these tactics now; and he also had got what in fighting parlance would have been styled his second wind. As he thought of the wrongs which had been heaped upon him, rage filled his breast; and the strong determination slowly shaped itself within him that to the finesse of the enemy he would oppose a solid front of brute force.
Astuteness was not the least marked of Miss Lee’s many charming characteristics, and although her guardian gave no outward sign of his belligerent intentions, she felt an inward conviction that a decisive trial of strength between them was at hand. Five or six years earlier she had engaged in a trial of this nature with her mother, and had emerged from it victorious. In that case, feminine weakness had yielded to feminine strength. But now the gloomy thought assailed her that her uncle, while closely resembling her mother in the matter of his liver, had in the depths of his torpid nature a substratum of brutal masculine resolution against which, should it fairly be set in array, she might battle in vain. And the upshot of her meditations was the conviction that her only chance of success lay in avoiding a battle by a radical change of base.
An easy way, as she perceived, to effect such a change of base was to marry Van Rensselaer Livingstone. Indeed, his proposal, a couple of days after the yacht voyage ended, came so opportunely that she almost was surprised into accepting it out of hand. But Dorothy was too well balanced a young person to do anything hastily, even to get herself out of a tight place; and while she held Livingstone’s proposal under advisement—as a line of retreat kept open for use in case of urgent necessity—she welcomed it less for the possibilities of a safer position that it offered than for those which it suggested to her fertile mind.
Marriage, she decided, was the only way by which she could score a final victory over her uncle, and at the same time spike his guns; but it did not necessarily follow that her marriage must be with Livingstone. Indeed, as her coolly intelligent mind perceived, marrying an unmanageable young man in order to be free of an unmanageable old one would be simply walking out of the frying-pan into the fire—and that was not at all the resolution of her difficulties that Dorothy sought. The plan that now began to shape itself in her mind was one by which both fire and frying-pan would be successfully avoided; and as the more that she examined into it the more desirable it appeared to her, she lost no time in carrying it into effect—whereby, in less than three days’ time, she sent Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone away in such a rage that he put to sea in the very face of a threatening north-easter, and in a much shorter period she caused her uncle seriously to doubt the evidence of his own senses.
At the end of his week of retirement, Mr. Port found himself in the hale condition of a bilious giant refreshed with blue-pills. He looked a little thinner than when he had started upon his ill-starred cruise, and his usual ruddiness was not as yet fully restored; but he was in capital condition, and a good deal more than ready for Miss Lee to come on. He could not very well, in the nature of the case, start an offensive campaign; but at the very first suggestion on Dorothy’s part of the slightest desire to engage again in any of the various forms of frivolous amusement by which she had made his life a burden to him, he was all loaded and primed to go off with a bang that he believed would settle her.
And, such is the perversity of human nature, Mr. Port presently became not a little annoyed by Dorothy’s failure to supply the spark that was to touch him off. In fact, her conduct was bewilderingly strange. She drew away from the lively circle of which Mrs. Rattleton was the animated centre and voluntarily associated herself with the elderly and very respectable Philadelphians whoso acquaintance she previously had so emphatically declined. Still further to Mr. Port’s astonishment, the lady and gentleman especially singled out by Miss Lee as most in accord with her newly-acquired tastes were the severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse and that lady’s staid brother, Mr. Pennington Brown.
The Severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse 074
At the feet of the former, quite literally, she sat as a disciple in crochet; and listened the while with every outward sign of interest to the dull record of South Fourth Street scandals of the past and West Walnut Street scandals of the present which this estimable matron poured into her ears by the hour at a time. And in a quiet corner of the veranda (Mr. Brown’s eyesight having failed a little, so that he found reading rather difficult) she read aloud to the latter fromWatson’s Annals; and listened with a pleased satisfaction to his comments upon her selections from this, the Philadelphia Bible, and to the numerous anecdotes of a genealogical and antiquarian cast which thus were recalled to his mind. Possibly the readings fromWatsonwere continued in the afternoons—when Miss Lee and Mr. Brown regularly went down to the Rocks. So extraordinary was all this that Mr. Port admitted frankly to himself that he could make neither head nor tail of it; but he had an inborn conviction that such an unnatural state of affairs was not likely to last There was good Scriptural authority, he called to mind grimly, for the assertion that the leopard did not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin.
In accordance with the substantial customs of his fellow-citizens, Mr. Port always returned to Philadelphia sharp on the 1st of September—calmly ignoring the heat and the mosquitoes, which are the dominant characteristics of Philadelphia during that month, and resting secure in the knowledge that the course which he pursued was that which his father and his grandfather had pursued before him. It was on the eve of his departure from Narragansett that his doubts and perplexities occasioned by Dorothy’s surprising conduct were resolved.
Being seated in a snug corner of the veranda in company with Mr. Pennington Brown, Mr. Port was smoking a comforting cigar. Mr. Brown, who also was smoking, did not seem to find his cigar comforting. He smoked it in so fitful a fashion that it repeatedly went out; and his nervousness seemed to be increased each time that he lighted it. Further, his comment upon Mr. Port’s discourse—which was a more than ordinarily thoughtful and accurate weighing of the relative merits of thin and thick soups—obviously were delivered quite at random. At first Mr. Port was disposed to resent this inattention to his soulful utterances; but as the subject was one in which, as he well knew, his friend was profoundly interested, he presently became uneasy.
“What’s the matter, Brown?” he asked, in a tone of kindly concern. “Is your rheumatism bothering you? I’ve been afraid that your absurd sitting around on rocks with my niece would bring it on again. You’re not as young as you once were, Pen, and you’ve got to take care of yourself.”
“I am not aware, Port,” Mr. Brown answered rather stiffly, “that I am as yet conspicuously superannuated. Indeed, I never felt younger in my life than I have felt during the past fortnight. Ihavea little touch of rheumatism to-night,” he added, frankly, and at the same time gave unintentional emphasis to his admission by catching his breath and almost groaning as he slightly moved his legs, “but it has nothing to do with sitting on the rocks with Dor—with your charming niece. You forget that my rheumatism is hereditary, Port. Why, I had an attack of it when I was only five-and-twenty.”
“All the same, you wouldn’t have it now if you had spent your afternoons sensibly with me here on a dry veranda, or properly wrapped up in a dry carriage, instead of on damp rocks, with that baggage. What on earth has got into you I can’t imagine. If you were twenty years younger, Brown, I should think, yes, positively, I should think that you were in love with her.”
“Port,” said Mr. Brown, with a tone of resentment in his voice, “I shall be very much obliged if you will not use such language when you are speaking of Miss Lee. She is the best and kindest and noblest woman I ever have met. You have most cruelly misunderstood her. Had you given her half a chance she would have been to you only a source of constant joy.”
Mr. Port replied to this emphatic assertion by a low, but most pointedly incredulous, whistle.
“You have not the slightest conception, as such a comment shows,” Mr. Brown continued, with increasing asperity, “of the depths of sweetness and tenderness which are in her nature; of her perfect unselfishness; of the gentleness and trustfulness of her heart. She is all that a woman can be, and more. She is—she is an angel!” Mr. Brown’s elderly voice trembled as he made this avowal.
As for Mr. Port, his astonishment was almost too deep for words. But he managed to say: “Yes, I suppose she is—at least she has said so often enough herself.”
For some seconds there was silence; and then, with a deprecating manner and in a voice from which all trace of resentment had disappeared, Mr. Brown resumed: “Hutch, old man, you and I have been friends these many years together, and you won’t fail me in your friendship now, will you? You are right, Iamin love with this sweet young creature, and she—think of it, Hutch!—she has admitted that she is in love with me; not romantically in love, for that would be, not absurd, of course, but a little unreasonable—for while I’m not at all old, yet I know, of course, that I am not exactly what can be called young—but in love sensibly and rationally. She wants to take care of me, she says, the dear child!” (Mr. Port grunted.) “And she has such clever notions in regard to my health. When we are married—how strange and how delightful it sounds, Hutch!—she says that we will go immediately to Carlsbad, where the waters will do my rheumatism a world of good; and from there, when I am better, we will go on to Vienna, where the dry climate and the white wines, she thinks, still further will benefit me; and from Vienna, in order to set me on my feet completely, we are to go on to the North and spend a winter in Russia—for there is nothing that cures rheumatism so quickly and so thoroughly, she says (though I never should have imagined it) as steady and long-continued cold. Just think of her planning it all out for me so well!
“Yes, Hutch, I love her with all my heart; and what has made me so nervous to-night is the great happiness that has come to me—it only came positively this afternoon—and the dread that perhaps, as her guardian, you know, you might not approve of what we have decided to do. But you do approve, don’t you, Hutch? Of course, in a few months she will be her own mistress, and your consent to our marriage, as she very truly says, then will be unnecessary. But even a month seems a desperately long while to wait; and that is the very shortest time, she thinks, in which she could get ready—though the dear child has consented to wait for most of the little things which she wants until we get on the other side.” Mr. Port smiled cynically at the announcement of this concession. It struck him that when Dorothy was turned loose among the Paris shops, backed by the capacious purse of a doting elderly husband, she would mow a rather startlingly broad swath. “So you won’t oppose our marriage, will you, old man? You will consent to my having this dear young creature for my wife?”
Various emotions found place in Mr. Port’s breast as he listened to this extraordinary declaration and appeal. At first he felt a lively anger at Dorothy for having, as he coarsely phrased it in his own mind, so successfully gammoned Mr. Pennington Brown; to this succeeded an involuntary admiration of the clever way in which she had managed it; and then a feeling of profound satisfaction possessed him as there came into his slow-moving mind a realizing sense of his own deliverance. But Mr. Port was not so utterly selfish but that, in the midst of the sunrise of happiness which dawned upon him with the opening of a way by which he decently could get rid of Dorothy, he was assailed by certain qualms of conscience as to the unfairness of thus casting upon his old friend the burden that he had found so hard to bear. For the heaviness of Mr. Port’s mental processes prevented him from perceiving, as a shrewder person would have perceived, that Dorothy was not the sort of young woman to engage in an enterprise of this nature without first fully counting the cost. Had he been keener of penetration he would have known that she could be trusted, when safely landed in the high estate of matrimony, to play on skilfully the game that she had so skilfully begun; that in her own interest she would manage matters in such a way as never to arouse in the mind of her elderly husband the awkward suspicion that the scheme of life arranged by his angel apparently with a view solely to his own comfort really was arranged only for the comfort of her angelic self.
It was while Mr. Port wavered among his qualms of conscience, hesitating between his great longing to chuck Dorothy overboard, and so have done with her, and his sense of duty to Mr. Pennington Brown, that the subject of his perplexities herself appeared upon the scene; and her arrival at so critical a juncture seemed to suggest as a remote possibility that she had been all the while snuffing this particular battle from not very far off.
“Dear Uncle Hutchinson,” said Miss Lee, with affectionate fervor, “do you think that your angel is most cruel and horrid because she is willing to go off in this way after her own selfish happiness and leave you all alone? But she won’t do it, dear, if you would rather have her stay. Her only wish, you know, has been to make you comfortable and happy; and you have been so good and so kind to her that she is ready to sacrifice even her love for your sake. Yes, if you would rather keep her to yourself she will stay. Only if she does stay,” and there was a warning tone of deep meaning in Miss Lee’s well-modulated voice, “her heart, of course, will be broken, and she will have to ask you to travel” with her for two or three years into out-of-the-way parts of the world (Mr. Port shuddered) “until her poor broken heart gets well. Not that it ever will get quite well again, you know; but she will be brave, and try to pretend for your sake that it has. So it shall be just as you say, dear; only for Pennington’s sake, who loves me so much, Uncle Hutchinson, I hope that perhaps you may be willing to let me go.”
And having concluded this moving address, Miss Lee extended one of her well-shaped hands to Mr. Pennington Brown—who grasped it warmly, for he was deeply moved by so edifying an exhibition of affectionate and dutiful unselfishness—and with the other applied her handkerchief delicately to her eyes.
Mr. Port was not in the least moved by Dorothy’s professions of self-sacrifice; but he was most seriously alarmed by her threat—that opened before him a dismal vista of bilious misery—to cart him for several years about the world on the pretext of a broken heart that required travel for its mending.
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He believed, to be sure, that in a stand-up fight he could conquer Dorothy; but he had his doubts as to how long she would stay conquered—and between constant fighting and constant travel there is not much choice; for Mr. Port knew from experience how acute is that form of biliousness which results from rage. After all, self-preservation is the first law of nature; and under the stress thus put upon him, therefore, it is not surprising that Mr. Port’s qualms of conscience incident to his failure to do his duty to his neighbor vanished to the winds.
Mr. Pennington Brown still held Dorothy’s hand in his own. “Will you make this great sacrifice, Hutch, for your old friend?” he asked.
Mr. Port hesitated a little, for he felt a good deal like a criminal who is shifting his crime upon an innocent man; and then he answered, rather weakly both in tones and terms: “Why, of course.”
“Dear Uncle Hutchinson, how good you are!” exclaimed Miss Lee. “And you really think that you can spare your angel, then?”
And both promptly and firmly Mr. Port answered: “Yes, I really think that I can.”