VII.
He preferred not to see Elvira again before she took her departure for Vermont the next day. Her aunt remained in the city to look after her “mission work.” Archibald presented her, as the gift of a rich, unknown friend, fifty dollars—their board-money—to send some of her boys into the country. After Elvira’s departure he became very despondent. Elvira’s image was broken to him, and while she had not become in his mind quite an adventuress, yet she had concealed her former life from him. She had deceived him.
But as the days went by and he missed her, he found that he must speak to Miss Perkins about Elvira’s acting, or go through a serious case of nervous prostration. He said very bluntly to her, one day, at dinner:
“So I hear your niece is a great actress.”
Miss Perkins gave him a quick, sharp glance.
“She has acted,” she replied. “But Elvira Price had too much conscience to act long.”
He gave a sigh of relief.
“She acted in Boston, because she was bound to try it. She wanted to try everything—everything that would keep her father out of the poor-house and educate the family. But acting, Mr. Archibald, is a dreadful business! As soon as Elvira saw into it a little she quit. The air wasn’t pure enough, somehow, for her. Elvira, she needs awful pure air!”
Again Archibald felt a certain glow of satisfaction steal over him.
“Do you know,” he said, after a suitable pause, “I am more than half-inclined to make her angry by running up to East Village.”
Miss Perkins gave a little quinzied laugh of satisfaction. She was beginning to like Archibald very much.
“It would startle Elvira; but she’d be pleased,” ventured the thin old maid. “She’d be pleased—in spite of everything!”
A few days later Archibald, after half a day’s journey, found himself in Vermont. As the train drew near East Village the mountains grew higher and the scenery wilder. He could see the great August moon roll itself above the high crest of the mountains to the west. Though Archibald was far from superstitious, he was pained to observe that he saw the moon over his left shoulder.
It was late when he stumbled from the steps of the car upon the wooden platform of the station at East Village. It was dark, also, and to him, extraordinarily cold. He groped his way, shivering, past a blinding reflector, where half a dozen men in cow-hide boots were examing a list of invoices, to what he could dimly outline as the village stage. No one spoke to him, and he found that no one seemed to care whether he, the sole passenger, was carried. He had visions of an unpleasant nature of being deposited inside the coach in a shed or stable to await the morning. He felt the stage pitch and toss for twenty minutes like a bark upon an angry sea. When all was still again he found that the driver had drawn up before a white-pillared old-fashioned house, which stood a little back from the street. At the side of the gate a small wooden building bore the sign, which was illuminated by the stage lamp,
Ephraim B. Price, Attorney at Law.
“Oh,” said Archibald, “this is Elvira’s house, and the driver is delivering my box of flowers.”
He leaned forward, hoping to catch sight of the fair young girl when the front-door opened to take in the box. But he was disappointed. The impatient driver had merely left it on the steps of the high, white-pillared portico, after giving the door-bell a vigorous pull.
Then followed a further few minutes of pitching and tossing, and the stage drew up before the tavern-door. A row of a dozen men, whose hats were drawn down over their eyes, and whose feet fell instantaneously from the rail to the floor as the coach drew up, came forward, and one of them betrayed a desire to grasp Archibald’s in his own horny hand. “Guess ye’ll stop overnight? Th’ain’t no other place. ’Sprised to see a stranger to-night, tew. Will you go in an’ sign—will you, sir?”
“So this uncouth ruffian,” thought Archibald, “is Elvira’s ideal landlord! No wonder she distrusts me!”
“We’re local temp’rance,” said the landlord. “An’ no licker’s being seen to East Village for nigh six years. Not a drop, sir, an’ it’s bustin’ my ho-tel higher’n a kite. Yes, it is!”
Archibald expressed commiseration.
“As I tell’d Squar’ Price, ‘yeou high-toned, ’ristocratic temp’rance folk’ll hurt East Village when ye close the hotel!’ Why, when a gent comes up here fr’ the city, he wants to be able to call fer a glass o’ gin or a glass o’ whiskey ’s often ’s he likes.”
Archibald thought he detected the faint smell of liquor upon the landlord’s breath as he talked, and it occurred to him that his obtrusively free-and-easy-manner was the result of a secret violation of the prohibitory local license law. “Bein’ fr’ the city, as you be,” said the landlord, lowering his voice to a whisper, and placing his heavy hand on Archibald’s shoulder familiarly, “I calc’late you’re cold an’ ready for a tidy drink. I calc’late I’m talkin’ to a gent as is used ter lickerin’ up, even ef ’tis agin the law?” To humor him, Archibald admitted that he had no stringent prohibitory sentiments.
“Well then, good! Jest you foller me!”
Archibald followed the landlord out into the hotel yard, where the latter pulled up the flaps of a cellar-door. Hearing the creaking sound, and taking it for an admonitory signal, the row of men on the hotel piazza, who had resumed their seats, again dropped their feet on the floor, rose, and came out into the yard in Indian file, in perfect silence. Archibald followed his landlord down into the darkness of the cellar, where, beneath the dim light of a solitary candle he perceived a cask with a wooden spigot, and near it half a dozen tin cups. The men filed down the steps behind him. “You’ve heerd o’ apple jack?” asked the landlord, in a whisper.
Archibald nodded.
“Drink that, then!” and the landlord handed him a cupful of the beverage. It was enough to intoxicate him. He drank but a very little; as he saw the other men were waiting, he passed the cup on to them.
“Welcome to East Village, stranger,” said one of the men, drinking. “Be you up ’ere a-sellin’ marchandize?”
“Oh, no!”
“Be you come to see the Squar’?”
“Well—perhaps—yes.”
“Wa’l, this is a dead give away!” and the men laughed noisily, as rustics will. “Don’t mention this ’ere cider to Squar’ Price!”
The next morning was delicious, the air clear and smelling of the mountains. The mist hung above the distant river, and a line of hills showed their green wooded outline above it. As Archibald breathed the sweet country air, he stepped more briskly, felt less of his city malaria, drew into his lungs a long breath of the fresh, invigorating summer wind, which seemed to come to him across the high upland, from such a vast distance.
He came to the old colonial gate and entered. The Hon. Ephraim B. Price was just at the moment sauntering down the gravel path from his house to his law office. As he saw Archibald enter, he came forward somewhat more rapidly. He was a man of large frame, gaunt rather than spare, of prominent cheekbones, of lengthy chin-beard. His eyes were very keen, and his entire expression was one of patient alertness—as if there was very little to be alert over, but a deep necessity of keeping up a reputation. Archibald learned afterward how indefatigable a partisan, and how strenuous a believer in the Republican party the Hon. Ephraim was.
“Sir,” he said, after greeting Archibald, and looking with a grin of pity upon his engraved card—a grin directed chiefly to the “Mr.” before Archibald’s name—“you are Elvira’s landlord down to New York—tell me, how is your city and State going, do you think?”
Archibald felt taken aback. Politics were something of which he knew nothing. He was but barely aware that it was a presidential year. In the city he kept severely out of politics, as hardly the employment of gentlemen.
“I—I—think it will go Democratic.”
A more violent frown than before. “If I thought so, sir; if I imagined so; if for one instant I believed that what we fought for during the war—Eh, Elvira? Here is Mr. Archibald!”
Then the Hon. Ephraim turned abruptly and entered his office, where, it may be added, he sat for the next hour, his feet on the cold stove before him, meditating where his next fee was to come from, and breaking out with an occasional invective against the wicked democracy.
Before the old gentleman was a square window which looked out over the town. All day long he sat before this, as upon a watch-tower—a censor of village morals and deportment.
“Father is so interested in the election,” apologized Elvira. “But how strange to see you here; and I told you not to!”
She held a small gray kitten in her arms, which she stroked slowly. She was still in his favorite white muslin, and she had a gentle, sweet flush of pleasure in her face.
“I came, Miss Price—because—don’t you know—I—aw—missed you,” and he smiled.
“You are very good. How is Aunt Perkins? Did she bring her mission boys to your house? She has written that a friend of yours has given fifty dollars for the boys. Do tell me about it. Is she well? Have any more boarders come?”
She plied him with questions as they strolled toward the white-pillared portico. The house was old and shabby, but he did not notice it. The place was run down and impoverished, but it seemed very beautiful to him, for he noticed that she wore one of his roses in her lustrous hair.
Entering the hallway he met some of the younger brothers and sisters, and felt a sudden strange affection spring up in his heart for them. Elvira took him through into a gloomy parlor, lined with plain hair-cloth furniture. On the walls were several portraits. “This was my mother,” said the girl, affectionately, pointing to what Archibald felt to be a hideous daub, a red-faced woman in black, against a green background. It was the portrait by Mr. Raymond, whose abode was now the poor-house. “She died only two years ago——”
“I fancy if she had lived,” said Archibald, “you would not have tried—the stage?”
She looked at him calmly a moment.
“That Boston man has told you?”
“Yes, I learned the fact from his friends.”
“I shall never—again.” There was a despairing pathos in her voice.
“Elvira,” he said, slowly, “as I see it—I think it was very noble of you to try.”
Then, unaccountably to him, she burst into tears.
“It is what I love—what I long for—to be an actress—a great actress,” she sobbed. “But I can’t—I can’t! I can’t exist with those creatures—those horrible men who hang about you! No one knows what I endured! No one knows what, too, I gave up when I left the stage and came home; but I had to.”
He leaned forward in sympathy.
“You may say what you will, but there is no Art like acting, and nothing so fine as applause. Oh, that I could bring myself to do it—to be strong enough to do it—to save our fortunes—to help father. You little know how I have suffered, Mr. Archibald.”
“By Jove—I—I quite like you for it!”
He was on his feet at her side. Impulsively he bent down and whispered close to her ear. “Let me be your audience the rest of my life! Act for me—let me applaud everything—anything you do, my darling! always! always!”
She put him away.
“I don’t feel I have acted just right with you,” she said. “I should have told you that I was—or might be again—an actress.” She spoke coldly. “I don’t believe you want them in your boarding-house. They are not always desirable, I believe!” Elvira’s eyes were fastened on the floor.
Archibald paced to and fro in the parlor. “Confound her odd New England conscience!” he muttered to himself. Seizing her hands, he cried, passionately, “I, too, must confess. Elvira, I loved you that first day you came. I loved you! Therefore I let you think—it was a boarding house.”
“And it isn’t—it’s your own private—Oh, Mr. Archibald!”
She sat and looked at him with a horrified stare. The full truth of his imposition began to steal upon her gradually. Then her face fell and she averted it, as she felt that a fatal untruth had come between them. She rose quietly and left him standing near her. She went upstairs to her room and threw herself upon her bed in an agony of tears.
Through it all Archibald had merely smiled!