{0081}
The artist had seated himself on a rock a little distance from the house, and was trying to catch some of the figures as they appeared up the path, and a young girl was looking over his shoulder with an amused face, just as he was getting an elderly man in a long flowing duster, straggling gray hair, hat on the back of his head, large iron-rimmed spectacles, with a baggy umbrella, who stopped breathless at the summit, with a wild glare of astonishment at the view. This young girl, whom the careless observer might pass without a second glance, was discovered on better acquaintance to express in her face and the lines of her figure some subtle intellectual quality not easily interpreted. Marion Lamont, let us say at once, was of Southern origin, born in London during the temporary residence of her parents there, and while very young deprived by death of her natural protectors. She had a small, low voice, fine hair of a light color, which contrasted with dark eyes, waved back from her forehead, delicate, sensitive features—indeed, her face, especially in conversation with any one, almost always had a wistful, appealing look; in figure short and very slight, lithe and graceful, full of unconscious artistic poses, fearless and sure-footed as a gazelle in climbing about the rocks, leaping from stone to stone, and even making her way up a tree that had convenient branches, if the whim took her, using her hands and arms like a gymnast, and performing whatever feat of. daring or dexterity as if the exquisitely molded form was all instinct with her indomitable will, and obeyed it, and always with an air of refinement and spirited breeding. A child of nature in seeming, but yet a woman who was not to be fathomed by a chance acquaintance.
The old man with the spectacles was presently overtaken by a stout, elderly woman, who landed in the exhausted condition of a porpoise that has come ashore, and stood regardless of everything but her own weight, while member after member of the party straggled up. No sooner did this group espy the artist than they moved in his direction. “There's a painter.” “I wonder what he's painting.” “Maybe he'll paint us.” “Let's see what he's doing.” “I should like to see a man paint.” And the crowd flowed on, getting in front of the sketcher, and creeping round behind him for a peep over his shoulder. The artist closed his sketch-book and retreated, and the stout woman, balked of that prey, turned round a moment to the view, exclaimed, “Ain't that elegant!” and then waddled off to the hotel.
“I wonder,” Mr. King was saying, “if these excursionists are representative of general American life?”
“If they are,” said the artist, “there's little here for my purpose. A good many of them seem to be foreigners, or of foreign origin. Just as soon as these people get naturalized, they lose the picturesqueness they had abroad.”
“Did it never occur to your highness that they may prefer to be comfortable rather than picturesque, and that they may be ignorant that they were born for artistic purposes?” It was the low voice of Miss Lamont, and that demure person looked up as if she really wanted information.
“I doubt about the comfort,” the artist began to reply.
“And so do I,” said Miss Sumner. “What on earth do you suppose made those girls come up here in white dresses, blowing about in the wind, and already drabbled? Did you ever see such a lot of cheap millinery? I haven't seen a woman yet with the least bit of style.”
“Poor things, they look as if they'd never had a holiday before in their lives, and didn't exactly know what to do with it,” apologized Miss Lamont.
“Don't you believe it. They've been to more church and Sunday-school picnics than you ever attended. Look over there!”
It was a group seated about their lunch-baskets. A young gentleman, the comedian of the patty, the life of the church sociable, had put on the hat of one of the girls, and was making himself so irresistibly funny in it that all the girls tittered, and their mothers looked a little shamefaced and pleased.
“Well,” said Mr. King, “that's the only festive sign I've seen. It's more like a funeral procession than a pleasure excursion. What impresses me is the extreme gravity of these people—no fun, no hilarity, no letting themselves loose for a good time, as they say. Probably they like it, but they seem to have no capacity for enjoying themselves; they have no vivacity, no gayety—what a contrast to a party in France or Germany off for a day's pleasure—no devices, no resources.”
“Yes, it's all sad, respectable, confoundedly uninteresting. What does the doctor say?” asked the artist.
“I know what the doctor will say,” put in Miss Summer, “but I tell you that what this crowd needs is missionary dressmakers and tailors. If I were dressed that way I should feel and act just as they do. Well, Selina?”
“It's pretty melancholy. The trouble is constant grinding work and bad food. I've been studying these people. The women are all—”
“Ugly,” suggested the artist.
“Well, ill-favored, scrimped; that means ill-nurtured simply. Out of the three hundred there are not half a dozen well-conditioned, filled out physically in comfortable proportions. Most of the women look as if they had been dragged out with indoor work and little intellectual life, but the real cause of physical degeneration is bad cooking. If they lived more out-of-doors, as women do in Italy, the food might not make so much difference, but in our climate it is the prime thing. This poor physical state accounts for the want of gayety and the lack of beauty. The men, on the whole, are better than the women, that is, the young men. I don't know as these people are overworked, as the world goes. I dare say, Nettie, there's not a girl in this crowd who could dance with you through a season. They need to be better fed, and to have more elevating recreations-something to educate their taste.”
“I've been educating the taste of one excursionist this morning, a good-faced workman, who was prying about everywhere with a curious air, and said he never'd been on an excursion before. He came up to me in the office, deferentially asked me if I would go into the parlor with him, and, pointing to something hanging on the wall, asked, 'What is that?' 'That,' I said, 'is a view from Sunset Rock, and a very good one.' 'Yes,' he continued, walking close up to it, 'but what is it?' 'Why, it's a painting.' 'Oh, it isn't the place?' 'No, no; it's a painting in oil, done with a brush on a piece of canvas—don't you see—, made to look like the view over there from the rock, colors and all.' 'Yes, I thought, perhaps—you can see a good ways in it. It's pooty.' 'There's another one,' I said—'falls, water coming down, and trees.' 'Well, I declare, so it is! And that's jest a make-believe? I s'pose I can go round and look?' 'Certainly.' And the old fellow tiptoed round the parlor, peering at all the pictures in a confused state of mind, and with a guilty look of enjoyment. It seems incredible that a person should attain his age with such freshness of mind. But I think he is the only one of the party who even looked at the paintings.”
“I think it's just pathetic,” said Miss Lamont. “Don't you, Mr. Forbes?”
“No; I think it's encouraging. It's a sign of an art appreciation in this country. That man will know a painting next time he sees one, and then he won't rest till he has bought a chromo, and so he will go on.”
“And if he lives long enough, he will buy one of Mr. Forbes's paintings.”
“But not the one that Miss Lamont is going to sit for.”
When Mr. King met the party at the dinner-table, the places of Miss Lamont and Mr. Forbes were still vacant. The other ladies looked significantly at them, and one of them said, “Don't you think there's something in it? don't you think they are interested in each other?” Mr. King put down his soup-spoon, too much amazed to reply. Do women never think of anything but mating people who happen to be thrown together? Here were this young lady and his friend, who had known each other for three days, perhaps, in the most casual way, and her friends had her already as good as married to him and off on a wedding journey. All that Mr. King said, after apparent deep cogitation, was, “I suppose if it were here it would have to be in a traveling-dress,” which the women thought frivolous.
{0088}
Yet it was undeniable that the artist and Marion had a common taste for hunting out picturesque places in the wood-paths, among the rocks, and on the edges of precipices, and they dragged the rest of the party many a mile through wildernesses of beauty. Sketching was the object of all these expeditions, but it always happened—there seemed a fatality in it that whenever they halted anywhere for a rest or a view, the Lamont girl was sure to take an artistic pose, which the artist couldn't resist, and his whole occupation seemed to be drawing her, with the Catskills for a background. “There,” he would say, “stay just as you are; yes, leaning a little so”—it was wonderful how the lithe figure adapted itself to any background—“and turn your head this way, looking at me.” The artist began to draw, and every time he gave a quick glance upwards from his book, there were the wistful face and those eyes. “Confound it! I beg your pardon-the light. Will you please turn your eyes a little off, that way-so.” There was no reason why the artist should be nervous, the face was perfectly demure; but the fact is that art will have only one mistress. So the drawing limped on from day to day, and the excursions became a matter of course. Sometimes the party drove, extending their explorations miles among the hills, exhilarated by the sparkling air, excited by the succession of lovely changing prospects, bestowing their compassion upon the summer boarders in the smartly painted boarding-houses, and comparing the other big hotels with their own. They couldn't help looking down on the summer boarders, any more than cottagers at other places can help a feeling of superiority to people in hotels. It is a natural desire to make an aristocratic line somewhere. Of course they saw the Kaaterskill Falls, and bought twenty-five cents' worth of water to pour over them, and they came very near seeing the Haines Falls, but were a little too late.
“Have the falls been taken in today?” asked Marion, seriously.
“I'm real sorry, miss,” said the proprietor, “but there's just been a party here and taken the water. But you can go down and look if you want to, and it won't cost you a cent.”
{8090}
They went down, and saw where the falls ought to be. The artist said it was a sort of dry-plate process, to be developed in the mind afterwards; Mr. King likened it to a dry smoke without lighting the cigar; and the doctor said it certainly had the sanitary advantage of not being damp. The party even penetrated the Platerskill Cove, and were well rewarded by its exceeding beauty, as is every one who goes there. There are sketches of all these lovely places in a certain artist's book, all looking, however, very much alike, and consisting principally of a graceful figure in a great variety of unstudied attitudes.
“Isn't this a nervous sort of a place?” the artist asked his friend, as they sat in his chamber overlooking the world.
“Perhaps it is. I have a fancy that some people are born to enjoy the valley, and some the mountains.”
“I think it makes a person nervous to live on a high place. This feeling of constant elevation tires one; it gives a fellow no such sense of bodily repose as he has in a valley. And the wind, it's constantly nagging, rattling the windows and banging the doors. I can't escape the unrest of it.” The artist was turning the leaves and contemplating the poverty of his sketch-book. “The fact is, I get better subjects on the seashore.”
“Probably the sea would suit us better. By the way, did I tell you that Miss Lamont's uncle came last night from Richmond? Mr. De Long, uncle on the mother's side. I thought there was French blood in her.”
“What is he like?”
“Oh, a comfortable bachelor, past middle age; business man; Southern; just a little touch of the 'cyar' for 'car.' Said he was going to take his niece to Newport next week. Has Miss Lamont said anything about going there?”
“Well, she did mention it the other day.”
The house was filling up, and, King thought, losing its family aspect. He had taken quite a liking for the society of the pretty invalid girl, and was fond of sitting by her, seeing the delicate color come back to her cheeks, and listening to her shrewd little society comments. He thought she took pleasure in having him push her wheel-chair up and down the piazza at least she rewarded him by grateful looks, and complimented him by asking his advice about reading and about being useful to others. Like most young girls whose career of gayety is arrested as hers was, she felt an inclination to coquet a little with the serious side of life. All this had been pleasant to Mr. King, but now that so many more guests had come, he found himself most of the time out of business. The girl's chariot was always surrounded by admirers and sympathizers. All the young men were anxious to wheel her up and down by the hour; there was always a strife for this sweet office; and at night, when the vehicle had been lifted up the first flight, it was beautiful to see the eagerness of sacrifice exhibited by these young fellows to wheel her down the long corridor to her chamber. After all, it is a kindly, unselfish world, full of tenderness for women, and especially for invalid women who are pretty. There was all day long a competition of dudes and elderly widowers and bachelors to wait on her. One thought she needed a little more wheeling; another volunteered to bring her a glass of water; there was always some one to pick up her fan, to recover her handkerchief (why is it that the fans and handkerchiefs of ugly women seldom go astray?), to fetch her shawl—was there anything they could do? The charming little heiress accepted all the attentions with most engaging sweetness. Say what you will, men have good hearts.
{0092}
Yes, they were going to Newport. King and Forbes, who had not had a Fourth of July for some time, wanted to see what it was like at Newport. Mr. De Long would like their company. But before they went the artist must make one more trial at a sketch-must get the local color. It was a large party that went one morning to see it done under the famous ledge of rocks on the Red Path. It is a fascinating spot, with its coolness, sense of seclusion, mosses, wild flowers, and ferns. In a small grotto under the frowning wall of the precipice is said to be a spring, but it is difficult to find, and lovers need to go a great many times in search of it. People not in love can sometimes find a damp place in the sand. The question was where Miss Lamont should pose. Should she nestle under the great ledge, or sit on a projecting rock with her figure against the sky? The artist could not satisfy himself, and the girl, always adventurous, kept shifting her position, climbing about on the jutting ledge, until she stood at last on the top of the precipice, which was some thirty or forty feet high. Against the top leaned a dead balsam, just as some tempest had cast it, its dead branches bleached and scraggy. Down this impossible ladder the girl announced her intention of coming. “No, no,” shouted a chorus of voices; “go round; it's unsafe; the limbs will break; you can't get through them; you'll break your neck.” The girl stood calculating the possibility. The more difficult the feat seemed, the more she longed to try it.
{0094}
“For Heaven's sake don't try it, Miss Lamont,” cried the artist.
“But I want to. I think I must. You can sketch me in the act. It will be something new.”
And before any one could interpose, the resolute girl caught hold of the balsam and swung off. A boy or a squirrel would have made nothing of the feat. But for a young lady in long skirts to make her way down that balsam, squirming about and through the stubs and dead limbs, testing each one before she trusted her weight to it, was another affair. It needed a very cool head and the skill of a gymnast. To transfer her hold from one limb to another, and work downward, keeping her skirts neatly gathered about her feet, was an achievement that the spectators could appreciate; the presence of spectators made it much more difficult. And the lookers-on were a good deal more excited than the girl. The artist had his book ready, and when the little figure was half-way down, clinging in a position at once artistic and painful, he began. “Work fast,” said the girl. “It's hard hanging on.” But the pencil wouldn't work. The artist made a lot of wild marks. He would have given the world to sketch in that exquisite figure, but every time he cast his eye upward the peril was so evident that his hand shook. It was no use. The danger increased as she descended, and with it the excitement of the spectators. All the young gentlemen declared they would catch her if she fell, and some of them seemed to hope she might drop into their arms. Swing off she certainly must when the lowest limb was reached. But that was ten feet above the ground and the alighting-place was sharp rock and broken bowlders. The artist kept up a pretense of drawing. He felt every movement of her supple figure and the strain upon the slender arms, but this could not be transferred to the book. It was nervous work. The girl was evidently getting weary, but not losing her pluck. The young fellows were very anxious that the artist should keep at his work; they would catch her. There was a pause; the girl had come to the last limb; she was warily meditating a slide or a leap; the young men were quite ready to sacrifice themselves; but somehow, no one could tell exactly how, the girl swung low, held herself suspended by her hands for an instant, and then dropped into the right place—trust a woman for that; and the artist, his face flushed, set her down upon the nearest flat rock. Chorus from the party, “She is saved!”
{0096}
“And my sketch is gone up again.”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Forbes.” The girl looked full of innocent regret. “But when I was up there I had to come down that tree. I couldn't help it, really.”
{9098}
n the Fourth of July, at five o'clock in the morning, the porters called the sleepers out of their berths at Wickford Junction. Modern civilization offers no such test to the temper and to personal appearance as this early preparation to meet the inspection of society after a night in the stuffy and luxuriously upholstered tombs of a sleeping-car. To get into them at night one must sacrifice dignity; to get out of them in the morning, clad for the day, gives the proprietors a hard rub. It is wonderful, however, considering the twisting and scrambling in the berth and the miscellaneous and ludicrous presentation of humanity in the washroom at the end of the car, how presentable people make themselves in a short space of time. One realizes the debt of the ordinary man to clothes, and how fortunate it is for society that commonly people do not see each other in the morning until art has done its best for them. To meet the public eye, cross and tousled and disarranged, requires either indifference or courage. It is disenchanting to some of our cherished ideals. Even the trig, irreproachable commercial drummer actually looks banged-up, and nothing of a man; but after a few moments, boot-blacked and paper-collared, he comes out as fresh as a daisy, and all ready to drum.
Our travelers came out quite as well as could be expected, the artist sleepy and a trifle disorganized, Mr. King in a sort of facetious humor that is more dangerous than grumbling, Mr. De Long yawning and stretching and declaring that he had not slept a wink, while Marion alighted upon the platform unruffled in plumage, greeting the morning like a bird. There were the usual early loafers at the station, hands deep in pockets, ruminant, listlessly observant. No matter at what hour of day or night a train may arrive or depart at a country station in America, the loafers are so invariably there in waiting that they seem to be a part of our railway system. There is something in the life and movement that seems to satisfy all the desire for activity they have.
Even the most sleepy tourist could not fail to be impressed with the exquisite beauty of the scene at Wickford Harbor, where the boat was taken for Newport. The slow awaking of morning life scarcely disturbed its tranquillity. Sky and sea and land blended in a tone of refined gray. The shores were silvery, a silvery light came out of the east, streamed through the entrance of the harbor, and lay molten and glowing on the water. The steamer's deck and chairs and benches were wet with dew, the noises in transferring the baggage and getting the boat under way were all muffled and echoed in the surrounding silence. The sail-boats that lay at anchor on the still silver surface sent down long shadows, and the slim masts seemed driven down into the water to hold the boats in place. The little village was still asleep. It was such a contrast; the artist was saying to Marion, as they leaned over the taffrail, to the new raw villages in the Catskills. The houses were large, and looked solid and respectable, many of them were shingled on the sides, a spire peeped out over the green trees, and the hamlet was at once homelike and picturesque. Refinement is the note of the landscape. Even the old warehouses dropping into the water, and the decaying piles of the wharves, have a certain grace. How graciously the water makes into the land, following the indentations, and flowing in little streams, going in and withdrawing gently and regretfully, and how the shore puts itself out in low points, wooing the embrace of the sea—a lovely union. There is no haze, but all outlines are softened in the silver light. It is like a dream, and there is no disturbance of the repose when a family party, a woman, a child, and a man come down to the shore, slip into a boat, and scull away out by the lighthouse and the rocky entrance of the harbor, off, perhaps, for a day's pleasure. The artist has whipped out his sketch-book to take some outlines of the view, and his comrade, looking that way, thinks this group a pleasing part of the scene, and notes how the salt, dewy morning air has brought the color into the sensitive face of the girl. There are not many such hours in a lifetime, he is also thinking, when nature can be seen in such a charming mood, and for the moment it compensates for the night ride.
The party indulged this feeling when they landed, still early, at the Newport wharf, and decided to walk through the old town up to the hotel, perfectly well aware that after this no money would hire them to leave their beds and enjoy this novel sensation at such an hour. They had the street to themselves, and the promenade was one of discovery, and had much the interest of a landing in a foreign city.
“It is so English,” said the artist.
“It is so colonial,” said Mr. King, “though I've no doubt that any one of the sleeping occupants of these houses would be wide-awake instantly, and come out and ask you to breakfast, if they heard you say it is so English.”
“If they were not restrained,” Marion suggested, “by the feeling that that would not be English. How fine the shade trees, and what brilliant banks of flowers!”
“And such lawns! We cannot make this turf in Virginia,” was the reflection of Mr. De Long.
“Well, colonial if you like,” the artist replied to Mr. King. “What is best is in the colonial style; but you notice that all the new houses are built to look old, and that they have had Queen Anne pretty bad, though the colors are good.”
“That's the way with some towns. Queen Anne seems to strike them all of a sudden, and become epidemic. The only way to prevent it is to vaccinate, so to speak, with two or three houses, and wait; then it is not so likely to spread.”
{0102}
Laughing and criticising and admiring, the party strolled along the shaded avenue to the Ocean House. There were as yet no signs of life at the Club, or the Library, or the Casino; but the shops were getting open, and the richness and elegance of the goods displayed in the windows were the best evidence of the wealth and refinement of the expected customers—culture and taste always show themselves in the shops of a town. The long gray-brown front of the Casino, with its shingled sides and hooded balconies and galleries, added to the already strong foreign impression of the place. But the artist was dissatisfied. It was not at all his idea of Independence Day; it was like Sunday, and Sunday without any foreign gayety. He had expected firing of cannon and ringing of bells—there was not even a flag out anywhere; the celebration of the Fourth seemed to have shrunk into a dull and decorous avoidance of all excitement. “Perhaps,” suggested Miss Lamont, “if the New-Englanders keep the Fourth of July like Sunday, they will by and by keep Sunday like the Fourth of July. I hear it is the day for excursions on this coast.”
Mr. King was perfectly well aware that in going to a hotel in Newport he was putting himself out of the pale of the best society; but he had a fancy for viewing this society from the outside, having often enough seen it from the inside. And perhaps he had other reasons for this eccentric conduct. He had, at any rate, declined the invitation of his cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow, to her cottage on the Point of Rocks. It was not without regret that he did this, for his cousin was a very charming woman, and devoted exclusively to the most exclusive social life. Her husband had been something in the oil line in New York, and King had watched with interest his evolution from the business man into the full-blown existence of a man of fashion. The process is perfectly charted. Success in business, membership in a good club, tandem in the Park, introduction to a good house, marriage to a pretty girl of family and not much money, a yacht, a four-in-hand, a Newport villa. His name had undergone a like evolution. It used to be written on his business card, Jacob B. Glow. It was entered at the club as J. Bartlett Glow. On the wedding invitations it was Mr. Bartlett Glow, and the dashing pair were always spoken of at Newport as the Bartlett-Glows.
When Mr. King descended from his room at the Ocean House, although it was not yet eight o'clock, he was not surprised to see Mr. Benson tilted back in one of the chairs on the long piazza, out of the way of the scrubbers, with his air of patient waiting and observation. Irene used to say that her father ought to write a book—“Life as Seen from Hotel Piazzas.” His only idea of recreation when away from business seemed to be sitting about on them.
“The women-folks,” he explained to Mr. King, who took a chair beside him, “won't be down for an hour yet. I like, myself, to see the show open.”
“Are there many people here?”
“I guess the house is full enough. But I can't find out that anybody is actually stopping here, except ourselves and a lot of schoolmarms come to attend a convention. They seem to enjoy it. The rest, those I've talked with, just happen to be here for a day or so, never have been to a hotel in Newport before, always stayed in a cottage, merely put up here now to visit friends in cottages. You'll see that none of them act like they belonged to the hotel. Folks are queer.”
At a place we were last summer all the summer boarders, in boarding-houses round, tried to act like they were staying at the big hotel, and the hotel people swelled about on the fact of being at a hotel. Here you're nobody. I hired a carriage by the week, driver in buttons, and all that. It don't make any difference. I'll bet a gold dollar every cottager knows it's hired, and probably they think by the drive.”
“It's rather stupid, then, for you and the ladies.”
“Not a bit of it. It's the nicest place in America: such grass, such horses, such women, and the drive round the island—there's nothing like it in the country. We take it every day. Yes, it would be a little lonesome but for the ocean. It's a good deal like a funeral procession, nobody ever recognizes you, not even the hotel people who are in hired hacks. If I were to come again, Mr. King, I'd come in a yacht, drive up from it in a box on two wheels, with a man clinging on behind with his back to me, and have a cottage with an English gardener. That would fetch 'em. Money won't do it, not at a hotel. But I'm not sure but I like this way best. It's an occupation for a man to keep up a cottage.”
“And so you do not find it dull?”
“No. When we aren't out riding, she and Irene go on to the cliffs, and I sit here and talk real estate. It's about all there is to talk of.”
There was an awkward moment or two when the two parties met in the lobby and were introduced before going in to breakfast. There was a little putting up of guards on the part of the ladies. Between Irene and Marion passed that rapid glance of inspection, that one glance which includes a study and the passing of judgment upon family, manners, and dress, down to the least detail. It seemed to be satisfactory, for after a few words of civility the two girls walked in together, Irene a little dignified, to be sure, and Marion with her wistful, half-inquisitive expression. Mr. King could not be mistaken in thinking Irene's manner a little constrained and distant to him, and less cordial than it was to Mr. Forbes, but the mother righted the family balance.
“I'm right glad you've come, Mr. King. It's like seeing somebody from home. I told Irene that when you came I guess we should know somebody. It's an awful fashionable place.”
“And you have no acquaintances here?”
“No, not really. There's Mrs. Peabody has a cottage here, what they call a cottage, but there no such house in Cyrusville. We drove past it. Her daughter was to school with Irene. We've met 'em out riding several times, and Sally (Miss Peabody) bowed to Irene, and pa and I bowed to everybody, but they haven't called. Pa says it's because we are at a hotel, but I guess it's been company or something. They were real good friends at school.”
Mr. King laughed. “Oh, Mrs. Benson, the Peabodys were nobodys only a few years ago. I remember when they used to stay at one of the smaller hotels.”
“Well, they seem nice, stylish people, and I'm sorry on Irene's account.”
At breakfast the party had topics enough in common to make conversation lively. The artist was sure he should be delighted with the beauty and finish of Newport. Miss Lamont doubted if she should enjoy it as much as the freedom and freshness of the Catskills. Mr. King amused himself with drawing out Miss Benson on the contrast with Atlantic City. The dining-room was full of members of the Institute, in attendance upon the annual meeting, graybearded, long-faced educators, devotees of theories and systems, known at a glance by a certain earnestness of manner and intensity of expression, middle-aged women of a resolute, intellectual countenance, and a great crowd of youthful schoolmistresses, just on the dividing line between domestic life and self-sacrifice, still full of sentiment, and still leaning perhaps more to Tennyson and Lowell than to mathematics and Old English.
{0107}
“They have a curious, mingled air of primness and gayety, as if gayety were not quite proper,” the artist began. “Some of them look downright interesting, and I've no doubt they are all excellent women.”
“I've no doubt they are all good as gold,” put in Mr. King. “These women are the salt of New England.” (Irene looked up quickly and appreciatively at the speaker.) “No fashionable nonsense about them. What's in you, Forbes, to shy so at a good woman?”
“I don't shy at a good woman—but three hundred of them! I don't want all my salt in one place. And see here—I appeal to you, Miss Lamont—why didn't these girls dress simply, as they do at home, and not attempt a sort of ill-fitting finery that is in greater contrast to Newport than simplicity would be?”
“If you were a woman,” said Marion, looking demurely, not at Mr. Forbes, but at Irene, “I could explain it to you. You don't allow anything for sentiment and the natural desire to please, and it ought to be just pathetic to you that these girls, obeying a natural instinct, missed the expression of it a little.”
“Men are such critics,” and Irene addressed the remark to Marion, “they pretend to like intellectual women, but they can pardon anything better than an ill-fitting gown. Better be frivolous than badly dressed.”
“Well,” stoutly insisted Forbes, “I'll take my chance with the well-dressed ones always; I don't believe the frumpy are the most sensible.”
“No; but you make out a prima facie case against a woman for want of taste in dress, just as you jump at the conclusion that because a woman dresses in such a way as to show she gives her mind to it she is of the right sort. I think it's a relief to see a convention of women devoted to other things who are not thinking of their clothes.”
“Pardon me; the point I made was that they are thinking of their clothes, and thinking erroneously.”
“Why don't you ask leave to read a paper, Forbes, on the relation of dress to education?” asked Mr. King.
They rose from the table just as Mrs. Benson was saying that for her part she liked these girls, they were so homelike; she loved to hear them sing college songs and hymns in the parlor. To sing the songs of the students is a wild, reckless dissipation for girls in the country.
When Mr. King and Irene walked up and down the corridor after breakfast the girl's constraint seemed to have vanished, and she let it be seen that she had sincere pleasure in renewing the acquaintance. King himself began to realize how large a place the girl's image had occupied in his mind. He was not in love—that would be absurd on such short acquaintance—but a thought dropped into the mind ripens without consciousness, and he found that he had anticipated seeing Irene again with decided interest. He remembered exactly how she looked at Fortress Monroe, especially one day when she entered the parlor, bowing right and left to persons she knew, stopping to chat with one and another, tall, slender waist swelling upwards in symmetrical lines, brown hair, dark-gray eyes—he recalled every detail, the high-bred air (which was certainly not inherited), the unconscious perfect carriage, and his thinking in a vague way that such ease and grace meant good living and leisure and a sound body. This, at any rate, was the image in his mind—a sufficiently distracting thing for a young man to carry about with him; and now as he walked beside her he was conscious that there was something much finer in her than the image he had carried with him, that there was a charm of speech and voice and expression that made her different from any other woman he had ever seen. Who can define this charm, this difference? Some women have it for the universal man—they are desired of every man who sees them; their way to marriage (which is commonly unfortunate) is over a causeway of prostrate forms, if not of cracked hearts; a few such women light up and make the romance of history. The majority of women fortunately have it for one man only, and sometimes he never appears on the scene at all! Yet every man thinks his choice belongs to the first class; even King began to wonder that all Newport was not raving over Irene's beauty. The present writer saw her one day as she alighted from a carriage at the Ocean House, her face flushed with the sea air, and he remembers that he thought her a fine girl. “By George, that's a fine woman!” exclaimed a New York bachelor, who prided himself on knowing horses and women and all that; but the country is full of fine women—this to him was only one of a thousand.
What were this couple talking about as they promenaded, basking in each other's presence? It does not matter. They were getting to know each other, quite as much by what they did not say as by what they did say, by the thousand little exchanges of feeling and sentiment which are all-important, and never appear even in a stenographer's report of a conversation. Only one thing is certain about it, that the girl could recall every word that Mr. King said, even his accent and look, long after he had forgotten even the theme of the talk. One thing, however, he did carry away with him, which set him thinking. The girl had been reading the “Life of Carlyle,” and she took up the cudgels for the old curmudgeon, as King called him, and declared that, when all was said, Mrs. Carlyle was happier with him than she would have been with any other man in England. “What woman of spirit wouldn't rather mate with an eagle, and quarrel half the time, than with a humdrum barn-yard fowl?” And Mr. Stanhope King, when he went away, reflected that he who had fitted himself for the bar, and traveled extensively, and had a moderate competence, hadn't settled down to any sort of career. He had always an intention of doing something in a vague way; but now the thought that he was idle made him for the first time decidedly uneasy, for he had an indistinct notion that Irene couldn't approve of such a life.
This feeling haunted him as he was making a round of calls that day. He did not return to lunch or dinner—if he had done so he would have found that lunch was dinner and that dinner was supper—another vital distinction between the hotel and the cottage. The rest of the party had gone to the cliffs with the artist, the girls on a pretense of learning to sketch from nature. Mr. King dined with his cousin.
“You are a bad boy, Stanhope,” was the greeting of Mrs. Bartlett Glow, “not to come to me. Why did you go to the hotel?”
“Oh, I thought I'd see life; I had an unaccountable feeling of independence. Besides, I've a friend with me, a very clever artist, who is re-seeing his country after an absence of some years. And there are some other people.”
“Oh, yes. What is her name?”
“Why, there is quite a party. We met them at different places. There's a very bright New York girl, Miss Lamont, and her uncle from Richmond.” (“Never heard of her,” interpolated Mrs. Glow.) “And a Mr. and Mrs. Benson and their daughter, from Ohio. Mr. Benson has made money; Mrs. Benson, good-hearted old lady, rather plain and—”
“Yes, I know the sort; had a falling-out with Lindley Murray in her youth and never made it up. But what I want to know is about the girl. What makes you beat about the bush so? What's her name?”
“Irene. She is an uncommonly clever girl; educated; been abroad a good deal, studying in Germany; had all advantages; and she has cultivated tastes; and the fact is that out in Cyrusville—that is where they live—You know how it is here in America when the girl is educated and the old people are not—”
“The long and short of it is, you want me to invite them here. I suppose the girl is plain, too—takes after her mother?”
“Not exactly. Mr. Forbes—that's my friend—says she's a beauty. But if you don't mind, Penelope, I was going to ask you to be a little civil to them.”
“Well, I'll admit she is handsome—a very striking-looking girl. I've seen them driving on the Avenue day after day. Now, Stanhope, I don't mind asking them here to a five o'clock; I suppose the mother will have to come. If she was staying with somebody here it would be easier. Yes, I'll do it to oblige you, if you will make yourself useful while you are here. There are some girls I want you to know, and mind, my young friend, that you don't go and fall in love with a country girl whom nobody knows, out of the set. It won't be comfortable.”
“You are always giving me good advice, Penelope, and I should be a different man if I had profited by it.”
“Don't be satirical, because you've coaxed me to do you a favor.”
Late in the evening the gentlemen of the hotel party looked in at the skating-rink, a great American institution that has for a large class taken the place of the ball, the social circle, the evening meeting. It seemed a little incongruous to find a great rink at Newport, but an epidemic is stronger than fashion, and even the most exclusive summer resort must have its rink. Roller-skating is said to be fine exercise, but the benefit of it as exercise would cease to be apparent if there were a separate rink for each sex. There is a certain exhilaration in the lights and music and the lively crowd, and always an attraction in the freedom of intercourse offered. The rink has its world as the opera has, its romances and its heroes. The frequenters of the rink know the young women and the young men who have a national reputation as adepts, and their exhibitions are advertised and talked about as are the appearances of celebrated 'prime donne' and 'tenori' at the opera. The visitors had an opportunity to see one of these exhibitions. After a weary watching of the monotonous and clattering round and round of the swinging couples or the stumbling single skaters, the floor was cleared, and the darling of the rink glided upon the scene. He was a slender, handsome fellow, graceful and expert to the nicest perfection in his profession. He seemed not so much to skate as to float about the floor, with no effort except volition. His rhythmic movements were followed with pleasure, but it was his feats of dexterity, which were more wonderful than graceful, that brought down the house. It was evident that he was a hero to the female part of the spectators, and no doubt his charming image continued to float round and round in the brain of many a girl when she put her, head on the pillow that night. It is said that a good many matches which are not projected or registered in heaven are made at the rink.
At the breakfast-table it appeared that the sketching-party had been a great success—for everybody except the artist, who had only some rough memoranda, like notes for a speech, to show. The amateurs had made finished pictures.
Miss Benson had done some rocks, and had got their hardness very well. Miss Lamont's effort was more ambitious; her picture took in no less than miles of coast, as much sea as there was room for on the paper, a navy of sail-boats, and all the rocks and figures that were in the foreground, and it was done with a great deal of naivete and conscientiousness. When it was passed round the table, the comments were very flattering.
“It looks just like it,” said Mr. Benson.
“It's very comprehensive,” remarked Mr. Forbes.
“What I like, Marion,” said Mr. De Long, holding it out at arm's-length, “is the perspective; it isn't an easy thing to put ships up in the sky.”
“Of course,” explained Irene, “it was a kind of hazy day.”
“But I think Miss Lamont deserves credit for keeping the haze out of it.” King was critically examining it, turning his head from side to side. “I like it; but I tell you what I think it lacks: it lacks atmosphere. Why don't you cut a hole in it, Miss Lamont, and let the air in?”
“Mr. King,” replied Miss Lamont, quite seriously, “you are a real friend, I can only repay you by taking you to church this morning.”
“You didn't make much that time, King,” said Forbes, as he lounged out of the room.
After church King accepted a seat in the Benson carriage for a drive on the Ocean Road. He who takes this drive for the first time is enchanted with the scene, and it has so much variety, deliciousness in curve and winding, such graciousness in the union of sea and shore, such charm of color, that increased acquaintance only makes one more in love with it. A good part of its attraction lies in the fickleness of its aspect. Its serene and soft appearance might pall if it were not now and then, and often suddenly, and with little warning, transformed into a wild coast, swept by a tearing wind, enveloped in a thick fog, roaring with the noise of the angry sea slapping the rocks and breaking in foam on the fragments its rage has cast down. This elementary mystery and terror is always present, with one familiar with the coast, to qualify the gentleness of its lovelier aspects. It has all moods. Perhaps the most exhilarating is that on a brilliant day, when shore and sea sparkle in the sun, and the waves leap high above the cliffs, and fall in diamond showers.
This Sunday the shore was in its most gracious mood, the landscape as if newly created. There was a light, luminous fog, which revealed just enough to excite the imagination, and refined every outline and softened every color. Mr. King and Irene left the carriage to follow the road, and wandered along the sea path. What softness and tenderness of color in the gray rocks, with the browns and reds of the vines and lichens! They went out on the iron fishing-stands, and looked down at the shallow water. The rocks under water took on the most exquisite shades—purple and malachite and brown; the barnacles clung to them; the long sea-weeds, in half a dozen varieties, some in vivid colors, swept over them, flowing with the restless tide, like the long locks of a drowned woman's hair. King, who had dabbled a little in natural history, took great delight in pointing out to Irene this varied and beautiful life of the sea; and the girl felt a new interest in science, for it was all pure science, and she opened her heart to it, not knowing that love can go in by the door of science as well as by any other opening. Was Irene really enraptured by the dear little barnacles and the exquisite sea-weeds? I have seen a girl all of a flutter with pleasure in a laboratory when a young chemist was showing her the retorts and the crooked tubes and the glass wool and the freaks of color which the alkalies played with the acids. God has made them so, these women, and let us be thankful for it.
What a charm there was about everything! Occasionally the mist became so thin that a long line of coast and a great breadth of sea were visible, with the white sails drifting.
“There's nothing like it,” said King—“there's nothing like this island. It seems as if the Creator had determined to show man, once for all, a landscape perfectly refined, you might almost say with the beauty of high-breeding, refined in outline, color, everything softened into loveliness, and yet touched with the wild quality of picturesqueness.”
“It's just a dream at this moment,” murmured Irene. They were standing on a promontory of rock. “See those figures of people there through the mist—silhouettes only. And look at that vessel—there—no—it has gone.”
As she was speaking, a sail-vessel began to loom up large in the mysterious haze. But was it not the ghost of a ship? For an instant it was coming, coming; it was distinct; and when it was plainly in sight it faded away, like a dissolving view, and was gone. The appearance was unreal. What made it more spectral was the bell on the reefs, swinging in its triangle, always sounding, and the momentary scream of the fog-whistle. It was like an enchanted coast. Regaining the carriage, they drove out to the end, Agassiz's Point, where, when the mist lifted, they saw the sea all round dotted with sails, the irregular coasts and islands with headlands and lighthouses, all the picture still, land and water in a summer swoon.
Late that afternoon all the party were out upon the cliff path in front of the cottages. There is no more lovely sea stroll in the world, the way winding over the cliff edge by the turquoise sea, where the turf, close cut and green as Erin, set with flower beds and dotted with noble trees, slopes down, a broad pleasure park, from the stately and picturesque villas. But it was a social mistake to go there on Sunday. Perhaps it is not the height of good form to walk there any day, but Mr. King did not know that the fashion had changed, and that on Sunday this lovely promenade belongs to the butlers and the upper maids, especially to the butlers, who make it resplendent on Sunday afternoons when the weather is good. As the weather had thickened in the late afternoon, our party walked in a dumb-show, listening to the soft swish of the waves on the rocks below, and watching the figures of other promenaders, who were good enough ladies and gentlemen in this friendly mist.
The next day Mr. King made a worse mistake. He remembered that at high noon everybody went down to the first beach, a charming sheltered place at the bottom of the bay, where the rollers tumble in finely from the south, to bathe or see others bathe. The beach used to be lined with carriages at that hour, and the surf, for a quarter of a mile, presented the appearance of a line of picturesquely clad skirmishers going out to battle with the surf. Today there were not half a dozen carriages and omnibuses altogether, and the bathers were few-nursery maids, fragments of a day-excursion, and some of the fair conventionists. Newport was not there. Mr. King had led his party into another social blunder. It has ceased to be fashionable to bathe at Newport.
Strangers and servants may do so, but the cottagers have withdrawn their support from the ocean. Saltwater may be carried to the house and used without loss of caste, but bathing in the surf is vulgar. A gentleman may go down and take a dip alone—it had better be at an early hour—and the ladies of the house may be heard to apologize for his eccentricity, as if his fondness for the water were abnormal and quite out of experience. And the observer is obliged to admit that promiscuous bathing is vulgar, as it is plain enough to be seen when it becomes unfashionable. It is charitable to think also that the cottagers have made it unfashionable because it is vulgar, and not because it is a cheap and refreshing pleasure accessible to everybody.
Nevertheless, Mr. King's ideas of Newport were upset. “It's a little off color to walk much on the cliffs; you lose caste if you bathe in the surf. What can you do?”
“Oh,” explained Miss Lamont, “you can make calls; go to teas and receptions and dinners; belong to the Casino, but not appear there much; and you must drive on the Ocean Road, and look as English as you can. Didn't you notice that Redfern has an establishment on the Avenue? Well, the London girls wear what Redfern tells them to wear-much to the improvement of their appearance—and so it has become possible for a New-Yorker to become partially English without sacrificing her native taste.”
Before lunch Mrs. Bartlett Glow called on the Bensons, and invited them to a five-o'clock tea, and Miss Lamont, who happened to be in the parlor, was included in the invitation. Mrs. Glow was as gracious as possible, and especially attentive to the old lady, who purred with pleasure, and beamed and expanded into familiarity under the encouragement of the woman of the world. In less than ten minutes Mrs. Glow had learned the chief points in the family history, the state of health and habits of pa (Mr. Benson), and all about Cyrusville and its wonderful growth. In all this Mrs. Glow manifested a deep interest, and learned, by observing out of the corner of her eye, that Irene was in an agony of apprehension, which she tried to conceal under an increasing coolness of civility. “A nice lady,” was Mrs. Benson's comment when Mrs. Glow had taken herself away with her charmingly-scented air of frank cordiality—“a real nice lady. She seemed just like our folks.”
Irene heaved a deep sigh. “I suppose we shall have to go.”
“Have to go, child? I should think you'd like to go. I never saw such a girl—never. Pa and me are just studying all the time to please you, and it seems as if—” And the old lady's voice broke down.
“Why, mother dear”—and the girl, with tears in her eyes, leaned over her and kissed her fondly, and stroked her hair—“you are just as good and sweet as you can be; and don't mind me; you know I get in moods sometimes.”
The old lady pulled her down and kissed her, and looked in her face with beseeching eyes.
“What an old frump the mother is!” was Mrs. Glow's comment to Stanhope, when she next met him; “but she is immensely amusing.”