I
The Archibald house, on West Forty-— Street, was of the character described as a “modernized front.” A handsome arch in rough stone surmounted the front-door, which was done in polished oak and plate-glass. The stoop was on a level with the sidewalk; a richly carved bow-window jutted out from the second story. “No. 41,” in old iron open work, formed a pretty grating above the door. There was, in fact, nothing which would lead an ordinary person to conceive of the house as given over to boarders, except, possibly, the sign,
TO LET, FURNISHED.
which was posted conspicuously below the first-story window, and at an angle which enabled him that ran to read.
Old Mr. Archibald’s death, the autumn before, had left his widow rather poorer than she anticipated. He was a great collector of pretty things. His taste was exquisite, and he had gratified it by filling his house with a variety of bric-à-brac, pictures, statuary, and old furniture, which made it a centre of attraction to many of the old gentleman’s artistic friends. Mrs. Archibald, loath to dispose of her husband’s art collections, determined to let the house, as it stood, “at an exorbitant figure, to a very rich tenant without children.” Under these terms, on her departure for Europe, her agent was entrusted with the house, and her son Jerome, when he saw her off on the steamer, received a parting injunction, “Be sure and see that they have no children.” Jerome Archibald saw his mother and sisters depart—in no very enviable frame of mind; but he was a good son, and he resolved to forego Newport, if it would tend to dispose of the house as his mother wished, and add to her diminished income.
His mother and sisters sailed in May. It was now July, and very warm and disagreeable. As the “heated term” set in, he began to think it too bad, you know, of mamma and the girls to remain abroad for three whole years. It was positively absurd. What was he to do? After the house was let—where was he to go? By Jove, he felt deuced lonely, don’t you know! It was especially trying for a sensitive man to go in and out of a house with a great placard on it, “To Let, Furnished,” but it was a deal more trying to have people come and want board. Yes, actually, two ladies came one morning and wanted to know if they could see the landlord. It was positively ridiculous! His agent was a clevah fellow, but even he gave up hope of letting the house until fall. Hadn’t he better run down to Newport? He got a letter from Dick Trellis that morning, and they really didn’t see how they were going to get on without him in the polo matches. It put him in a fuming fury. He had never stayed late in the city in summer before. How infernally hot it was—and nahsty—don’t you know! His collars were in a perpetual state of wilt—they never wilted at Newport. Then everybody was not only out of town, having a good time somewhere, but they had a provoking way now of ostentatiously boarding up their front-doors—yes—and their windows, too—which made it doubly disagreeable for those who had to remain. It was bad enough to see the blinds drawn down, but boxing up their stonework and planking up their front-doors caused Mr. Jerome Archibald unutterable pangs. Then they thought it was a boarding-house!
They were coming again in the afternoon, at four. There were two of them—ladies. In his rather depressing and solitary occupation of living alone in his house, with one solemn apoplectic cook and one chalk-faced maid, in order to exhibit it to that endless raft of females with “permits,” who universally condemned or “damned with faint praise” his father’s exquisite taste in rugs and furniture, Mr. Jerome Archibald had to-day admitted to himself a distinct pleasure in showing “Miss Perkins” and her niece (whose name did not happen at the time to be mentioned) over the house, and pointing out in his quiet way its excellences.
They saw the sign, they said, and so made bold to enter. Evidently Miss Perkins was a prim, thin, tall, spectacled, New England old maid. She had the delicate air and manner of a lady. A lady faded, perhaps, and unused to a larger social area than that surrounding her native village green. She had also the timid manner of hesitancy of New England spinsters—hesitancy concerning everything except questions of casuistry and religion—and seemed, in what she did, to be spurred on from behind by the niece, who was, on the whole, as Mr. Jerome Archibald told a friend at the club later, “quite extraordinary.”
In the first place, as he said, the niece was undeniably beautiful.
“She wore rawther an odd street dress,” he said, “made up in the country somewhere, by a seamstress who gathered her crude notions of the prevailing fashions from some prevaricating ladies’ journal, and her hat was something positively ridiculous—but her face!” The fastidious Mr. Jerome Archibald at once conceded to it a certain patrician quality of elegance. It denoted pure blood and pure breeding, somewhere up among Vermont hills or Maine forests. A long line of “intelligent ancestors,” perhaps. It was fine, and—beautiful. The forehead high, nose straight, the large eyes gray, the mouth and chin sweet, and yet quite determined. When he showed them a large room at the rear, on the second story, facing the north, the niece had observed, with a lofty air—mind, the room was literally crammed with the most costly bric-à-brac—“I think this will suit me very well, aunt dear, on account of the light.”
He noticed in her unfashionable dress a certain artistic sense of freedom, a soupçon of colored ribbon here and there, and he concluded that she was all the more interesting, as an artist, in that she so quietly accepted the elegancies around her. She gave an unconscious sigh over a small glass-covered “Woodland Scene,” by Duprez. Mr. Jerome Archibald noticed it, and inwardly smiled, delighted.
Perhaps the niece captivated him the more by her silent appreciation of some things he himself admired exceedingly. It was odd that she seemed always to choose his favorites. There was nothing said as to the rent, the size of the house, the lot, the plumbing. He spent an hour showing his etchings alone, and in the afternoon, at four, they were coming again, “to decide.”