CHAPTER X.
The long storm in August set in next day. A fine, close drizzle veiled the world by 7 o’clock. At 8.30, the twins and Fanny needed their waterproof cloaks for the walk to school. By noon the patter on the piazza roof and falling floods upon lawn and garden and streets were slow, but abundant. It was scrubbing day and closet day, and, as Hester fretted sometimes to methodical Mary Ann on Friday, “all the rest of the week,” below stairs. Hetty had to prepare a dessert and to set the lunch table. Before going down she made up a little fire in the sewing room, and put out Hester’s color-box, glass of water, stretching board, paper, and easel within easy reach, should she decide to use them. Silently, and not too suggestively, she set upon the table near by a vase containing some fine specimens of the moccasin flower sent in by May Gilchrist, with a note addressed to “Queen Mab.” Hester hated hints, but if she lacked a study she would not have to look far for it.
It was “a bad day” with her. Her mother attributed it partly to her disappointment at not seeing her crony teacher.
Hetty, who had put the excited child to bed as soon as she got into the house the night before, held her peace. Mrs. Wayt, hovering from the nursery and her husband’s chamber to the sewing room, saw that in her taciturn daughter’s countenance that warned and kept her aloof. Another of Hester’s biting sayings was that her mother, on the day succeeding one of her spouse’s “seizures” was “betwixt the devil and the deep sea.” She never admitted, even to her sister, that “dear Percy” was more than “unfortunate,” yet read Hetty’s disapprobation in averted looks and studiously commonplace talk.
Wan and limp the cripple reclined among the cushions Hetty packed about her in her wheeled chair. Blue shadows ringed mouth and eyes, and stretched themselves in the hollowed temples; the deft fingers were nerveless. Most of the time she seemed to watch the rain under drooping eyelids, so transparent as to show the dark irides beneath.
At half past eleven her mother stole in like a bit of drifted down.
“Dear, I have promised papa to go up to your room and lie down for half an hour. Annie is with him. She amuses him, and will be very good, she says. I told her to let you know if she wanted anything. May I leave the door open? She cannot turn this stiff bolt.”
Annie was one of Hester’s weak points. “Baby” never made her nervous or impatient, and much of the little one’s precocity was due to intimate companionship with the disabled sister, whose plaything she was.
“Yes. All right!” murmured Hester, closing her eyes entirely.
She was deathly pallid in the uncolored gloom of a rainy noon.
“Or—if you feel like taking a nap, yourself?” hesitated Mrs. Wayt.
Tactful with her husband, and tender with all her household, she yet had the misfortune often to rub Hester’s fur the wrong way. The delicately pencilled brows met over frowning eyes.
“No! no! you know I never sleep in the day! If you would never bother yourself with my peace and comfort, mamma, we should be on better terms. I am not a baby, or a—husband!”
She was not sorry for her ill humor or for the long gap between the last article and noun, when left to herself.
She lay upon a bed of thorns, each of which was endued with intelligent vitality. Earth was a waste. Heaven had never been. Hate herself for it as she might she had never, in all her rueful existence, known suffering comparable to that condensed into the three little minutes she had lived twelve hours ago.
When Hetty had come up to bed her face was beautiful with a strange white peace, at sight of which Hester held her breath. Coming swiftly, but without bustle, across the room, she kneeled by the bed and gathered the frail form in the dear, strong arms that had cradled it a thousand times. Her eyes sparkled, her lips were parted by quick breaths, but she tried to speak quietly.
“Precious child! you should be asleep. But I am glad you are not, for I have a message for you. We—you and I—are to take no anxious thought for to-morrow, or for any more of the to-morrows we are to spend together. March told me to say that and to give you this!” laying a kiss upon her lips. “For he loves me, Hester, darling, and you are to live with us! Just as we planned, ever and ever so long ago! But what day dream was ever so beautiful as this?”
For one of the three awful minutes Hester thought and hoped she was dying. The frightened blood ebbed back with turbulence that threw her into a spasm of trembling and weeping. She recollected pushing Hetty away, then clutching her frantically to pull her down for a storm of passionate kisses given between tearless sobs. Then she gave way to wheezing shrieks of laughter, which Hetty tried to check. She would not let her move or speak after that.
“How thoughtless in me not to know that you were too much unnerved to bear another shock—even of happiness!” said the loving nurse. “No! don’t try to offer so much as a word of congratulation. It will keep! All we have to do to-night is to obey the order of our superior officer, and not think—only trust!”
In the morning there was no opportunity for speech-making. A night of suffering had beaten Hester dumb.
“Nobody could be surprised at that!” cooed Hetty, as she rubbed and bathed the throbbing spine. “If I could but pour down this aching column some of my redundant vitality!”
Hester detested herself in acknowledging the fervent sincerity of the wish. Hetty would willingly divide her life with her, as she had said yesterday that she meant to divide her fortune.
“Half for you while I live! All for you when I am gone!”
The sad sweetness of the smile accompanying the words was as little like the wonderful white shining of last night as the lot cast for Hetty was like that of the deformed dwarf whose height of grotesque folly was attained when she loved—first, in dreams and in “drifting”—then, all unconsciously, in actual scenes and waking moments—one whose whole heart belonged to the woman who had “made her over,” to whom she owed life, brain, and soul!
She was to live with them! Hetty must make her partaker of her every good. By force of long habit, Hester fell to planning the house the three would inhabit. She was herself—always helpless, never less a burden than now—a piece of rubbish in the pretty rooms, a clog upon domestic machinery—a barrier to social pleasure—the inadmissible third in the married tête-à-tête.
She writhed impotently. More useless than a toy; more troublesome than a baby—uglier than the meanest insect that crawls—she must yet submit to the fate that fastened her upon the young lives of her custodians.
“I doubt if I could even take my own life!” she meditated darkly. “In my fits of rage and despair, I used to threaten to roll my chair down the stairs and break my neck to ‘finish the job.’ I said it once to mamma. I wonder sometimes if that is the reason Tony puts up gates across the top of the stairs wherever we go? He says it is to keep baby Annie from tumbling down. I haven’t cared to die lately, but to-day I wish my soul had floated clean out of my body in that five minute make-believe under the pink tent of the apple tree, three months ago.
“I suppose he will be coming here constantly, now. Hetty won’t belong to me anymore. I am very wicked! I am jealous of her with him, and of him with her! I am a spiteful, malicious, broken-backed toad! Oh, how I despise Hester Wayt! And I owe it all to him!”
She glowered revengefully at the door her mother had left unclosed.
Baby Annie was having a lovely hour with “dee papa.” He had not left his bed, but the nausea and sense of goneness with which he had awakened, were yielding to the administration of minute potions of opium by his wife, at stated intervals. A fit of delirium tremens, induced by the failure to “cool him off” secundum artem, had brought about Homer’s introduction to his nominal employer. Routed from his secret lodgings under the roof-tree at one o’clock of a winter morning, Hetty’s waif had first run for a doctor, and, pending his arrival, pinioned the raving patient with his sinewy arms until the man of intelligent measures took charge of the case. Mrs. Wayt had run no such risks since.
Her lord never confessed that he took opium or ardent spirits. Indeed, he made capital of his total abstinence even from tobacco. There was always a cause, natural or violent, for his attacks. The Chicago seizure followed upon his rashness in swallowing, “mistaking it for mineral water,” a pint of spirits of wine, bought for cleaning his Sunday suit. Other turns he attributed, severally, to dyspepsia, to vertigo, to over-study, and to extreme heat. A sunstroke, suffered when he was in college, rendered him peculiarly sensitive to hot weather. His wife never gainsaid his elaborate explanations. He was her Percy, her conscience, her king. She not only went backward with the cloak of love to conceal his shame, but she affected to forget the degradation when he became sober.
Many women in a thousand, and about one man in twenty millions, are “built so.” The policy—or principle—may be humane. It is not Godlike. The All-Merciful calls sinners to repentance before offering pardon. The Church insists upon conviction as a preliminary to conversion. Mrs. Wayt was a Christian and a churchwoman, but she clung pathetically to belief in the efficacy of her plan for the reclamation of her husband. In life, or in death, she would not have upon her soul the weight of a reproach addressed to him whom she had sworn to “honor.” Love was omnipotent. In time he would learn the depth of hers and be lured back to the right way.
He was plaintive this forenoon, but not peevish. His eyes were bloodshot; his tongue was furry; there was a gnawing in the pit of his stomach and an unaccountable ache at the base of the brain.
“I have missed another sunstroke by a hair’s breadth,” he informed his wife. “I almost regret that we did not go to the seashore. My summer labors are exhausting the reserves of vital energy.”
“Why not run down to the beach for a day or two next week?” suggested Mrs. Wayt. “Now that your wife is an heiress, you can afford a change of air, now and then.”
A dull red arose in the sallow cheek. He pulled her down to kiss her.
“The best, sweetest wife ever given to man!” he said.
After that he bade her get a little rest. She must have slept little the night before. Annie would keep him company. While his head was so light and his tongue so thick Annie’s was the best society for him. She made no demand upon intellectual forces. He sent the best wife ever given to man off lightened in spirit, and grateful for the effort he made to appease her anxiety and to affect the gayety he could not be supposed to feel. She looked back at the door to exchange affectionate smiles with the dear, unselfish fellow.
He watched the baby’s pretty, quaint pretense of “being mamma,” and hearkened to the drip and plash of the rain until the gnawing in his stomach re-asserted itself importunately. He knew what it meant. It was the demand of the devil-appetite he had created long ago—his Frankenstein, his Old Man of the Sea, his body of death, lashed fast to him, lying down when he lay down, rising up at his awakening, keeping step with him, however he might try to flee. The lust he had courted rashly—now become flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone.
His wife had carried off the phial of opium. But he had secreted a supply of the drug for such emergencies since she had found out the phosphate device and privately confiscated the stout blue bottle. He always carried a small Greek Testament in his hip pocket. Mrs. Wayt’s furtive search of his clothes every night, after making sure that he was asleep, had not extended to the removal of the sacred volume.
He arose stealthily, steadied his reeling head by holding hard to the back of his neck with one hand, while the other caught at the chairs and bed-foot; tiptoed to the closet, found his black cloth pantaloons, drew out the Testament, and extracted from the depths beneath a wad of silken, rustleless paper. Within was a lump of dark brown paste.
“Tan’y! tan’y!” twittered Annie’s sweet, small pipe. “Give baby a piece! p’ease, dee papa!”
He hurried back into bed. If the child were overheard Hetty might look in. And Hester’s sharp ears were across the hall.
“No, baby; papa has no candy.” He was so startled and unmanned that he had to wet his lips with a tongue almost as parched before he could articulate. “Papa’s head aches badly. Will Annie sing him to sleep?”
Hester heard, through her stupor of misery, the weak little voice and the thump of the low rocking chair as baby crooned to the dolly cuddled in her arms and to “dee papa,” the song learned from Hester’s self:
“S’eep, baby, s’eep.
The angels watch ’y s’eep.
The fairies s’ake ’e d’eamland t’ee,
An’ all’e d’eams ’ey fall ow’ee.
S’eep, baby, s’eep!”
The rain fell straight and strong. The heavy pour had beaten all motion out of the air, but the gurgling of water pipes and the resonance of the tinned roof gave the impression of a tumultuous storm. Through the register and chimney arose a far-off humming from the cellar, where Homer was “redding up.” Hester’s acute ears divided the sound into notes and words:
“An’ we buried her deep, yes! deep among the rocks.
On the banks of the Oma-ha!”
Annie stopped singing. “Dolly mus’ lie down in her twadle, an’ mamma mate her some tea!” Hester heard her say. At another time she would have speculated, perhaps anxiously, as to the processes going on when the clatter of metal and the tinkle of china arose, accompanied by the fitful bursts of song and a monologue of exclamations.
“Oh! oh! tate tare, dee papa!” came presently in a frightened tone. Then louder: “Papa! dee papa! wate up! you’ll det afire!”
Wee feet raced across the hall, a round face, red and scared, appeared in the doorway.
“Hetter! Hetter! tum, wate up dee papa! ’E bed is on fire!”
Through the doors left open behind her Hester saw a lurid glare, a column of smoke.
Shrieking for help at the top of her feeble lungs she plied the levers of her chair and rolled rapidly into the burning room. Upon the table at the foot of the bed had stood the spirit lamp and copper teakettle used by Mrs. Wayt in heating her husband’s phosphate draughts at night. Annie had lighted the lamp and contrived to knock it over upon the bed. The alcohol had ignited and poured over the counterpane.
Mr. Wayt lay, unstirring, amid the running flames. Hester made straight for him, leaned far out of her chair, to pull off the blazing covers, “Papa! papa! papa!”
He had not heard the word from her in ten years. He was not to hear it now.
Mrs. Wayt, Hetty, March Gilchrist, and the servants, rushing to the spot, found father and child enwrapped in the same scorching pall.
“Mr. Wayt died at midnight,” reported the Fairhill papers. “He never regained consciousness. The heroic daughter who lost her life in attempting to rescue a beloved parent lived until daybreak.
“‘They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided.’”
“I must be going, dear heart!” whispered Hetty’s namechild, as the August dawn, made faint by showers, glimmered through the windows. “I cannot see you. Would Mr. March mind kissing me ‘good-by’?”
“Mind?” He could not restrain the great sob. A tear fell with the kiss.
“Dear little friend! my sweet sister!”
The glorious eyes, darkened by death and almost sightless, widened in turning toward him. She smiled radiantly.
“Thank you for calling me that. Now, Miss May! And poor mamma! I wish I had been a better child to you! Hetty, dearest! hold me fast and kiss me last of all! You will be very happy, darling! But you won’t forget me—will you? I heard the doctors say”—a gleam of the old fantastic humor playing about her mouth—“that I had swallowed the flame. I think they were right—for the—bitterness is all—burned—out—of my heart!”
A SOCIAL SUCCESS.
PART I.
“I know it is horrid to swoop down upon you at this barbarously early hour, but I couldn’t help coming the minute I received your card. We get our mail at the breakfast table, and I fairly screamed with joy when I opened the envelope. ‘Jack!’ I said, ‘who do you think has come to New York to live?’
“‘The Picanninnies and the Joblillies and the Garyulies, and probably the grand Panjandrum himself,’ said my gentleman.
“You know what a tease he is. Oh, no, you don’t! for you never met him. But you will before long! ‘Better than all of them put together, with the little round button on top,’ said I. (You see I am used to his chaff!) ‘My very dearest school friend, of whom you have heard me talk ten thousand times—Susie Barnes, now Mrs. Cornell. She has been living five years in Brooklyn (and I’ve always declared I’d rather go to Canada than to Brooklyn) and here’s her card telling me that she has returned to civilization. Mrs. Arthur Hayward Cornell, No. — West Sixty-seventh St.’ At that he pricked up his ears.
“‘That’s the new cashier in the Pin and Needle Bank,’ says he. ‘Somebody was talking of him at the Club last night.’ And nothing would do but I must tell him all about you. In going over the story and thinking of the dear old times, my heart got so warm and full that I rushed off by the time he was out of the house.”
Mrs. John Hitt, a well-dressed, prettyish woman, whom the cold morning light showed to be also a trifle society-worn, embraced her hostess anew, and then held her off at arm’s length for inspection.
“You sweet old girl! what sort of life have you led that you have kept your roses, your dimples, and the sparkle in your eyes all these years? Do you know that you are absolutely bewitching?”
The lately recovered friend smiled, coloring as a woman of Mrs. Hitt’s world could not have done.
“You are the same impulsive Kitty!” she said affectionately. “I have had a quiet, busy, happy life with Arthur and the children. Three babies in five years do not give a housekeeper much time for anything but domestic duties.”
“I should think not, indeed!” The shiver of shoulders was well-executed, the heavenward cast of eyes and hands dramatic. “I wonder you live to tell it! One child in six years has been enough to unsettle my wits. Now that you are once more within my reach (Oh, you darling!) we must make up for lost time and see a great deal of each other! Do you ever sing nowadays? Or have you let your music go to the dogs? I suppose so, if Providence has interfered to save your wild-rose complexion. I was raving to Jack this morning over the voice you used to have, and your genius for theatricals and all that. ‘Indeed,’ said I, ‘there was nothing that girl couldn’t do.’ To think of wasting such an organ, or wearing it thin in crooning nursery ditties.”
Mrs. Cornell laughed a soft, merry burst of amusement, at which the other eyed her curiously.
“You behave less like an exhumed corpse than anybody could imagine who knew of your five years in Brooklyn, and the three younglings. What amuses you?”
“Nothing, except your determination to regard me as dead, buried, and resurrected. So far from giving up my music, I have practiced more steadily than if I had spent more evenings abroad. You know I studied vocal and instrumental music with the intention of making it my profession. Arthur agrees with me that what is once learned should never be lost. Then, when my little girls are ready to be taught, I can instruct them myself. We had a number of musical friends in Brooklyn, and a pleasant circle of acquaintances. We have not lived in—Hoboken,” cried the hostess in whimsical vexation. “I don’t see why New Yorkers always talk of Brooklyn as if it were as far off and as much a terra incognita as the moon. We are inhabitants of the same planet as yourselves.”
The visitor patted the back of her companion’s hand, soothingly. “You are a New Yorker now—one of us!” she purred. “In six months you would as soon cross the Styx as the East River, even on that overgrown, preposterous Bridge the Brooklynites give themselves such airs over. How prettily settled you are!” staring, rather than glancing about the apartment. “These are nice drawing rooms and furnished in excellent taste.”
Mrs. Cornell had regarded them as “parlors,” but her first concession to Mrs. Hitt’s better knowledge was to look accustomed to the new term. She fought down with equal success the impulse to classify Kitty’s open admiration with the amiable patronage of which Brooklyn people are inclined to suspect New Yorkers. She plumed herself modestly upon her taste in house-furnishing and upon the ability to make cheap things look as if they had cost a good deal. She had withheld the fact of the change of residence from metropolitan acquaintances until her house was in order that might defy unfavorable criticism. It was kind in Kitty to run in so unceremoniously and to be glad of the chance to renew their early intimacy. In spite of Arthur and the children, she had begun to be somewhat homesick in the great whirling world about her.
“Like a chip in the Atlantic Ocean!” Thus she had described her sensations to her husband that very morning. “I suppose I shall get used to it after a while, especially as Brooklyn and New York are, to all intents and purposes, one and the same city.”
She asserted it stoutly, knowing all the while that Moscow and New Orleans were as nearly homogeneous.
Yes! Kitty was heartily welcome to the stranger in an unknown territory. Mrs. Hitt was not intellectual, and judged by standards Arthur Cornell’s wife had come to revere sincerely, she was not especially refined in speech and bearing. Or were Susie’s tastes too quiet and her ideas old-fashioned, that her interlocutor’s crisp sayings sounded pert, and the bright brown eyes and fixed flush upon the cheekbones were artificially aggressive? Her former chum had always been warm-hearted, if inconveniently outspoken. And she was a New Yorker, and fashionable. Susie’s cherished ambition, unavowed even to Arthur while it was expedient for them to live simply, was to be fashionable, brilliant, and courted—a member in good and regular standing in the Society of which Mrs. Sherwood lectured, and Ellen Olney Kirk wrote, and to which Jenkyns Knickerbocker was au fait. A certain something that was not air or tone, deportment or attire, and yet partook of all these as pot-pourri of rose-breath, spices, and perfumed oils—marked Kitty Hitt as an habituée of the charmed Reserve. She was not, perhaps, one of the Four Hundred selected from the Upper Ten Thousand by processes as arbitrary, to human judgment, as those by which Gideon’s three hundred were picked out from the hosts of Israel. Susie was no simpleton, albeit ambitious. Mr. Hitt was a stockbroker; hence manifestly in the line of promotion, but there were degrees of elevation upon even Olympus. Her imagination durst not lift eyes to the cloud-wreathed summit where chief gods held revel, guarded from vulgar intrusion by Gabriel Macallister. The climate and manner of life a few leagues lower down would, as she felt, suit her better than the rarified atmosphere of the extremest heights. She had always meant to climb, and successfully, when time and opportunity should serve. From the moment the passage of the river was determined upon as a business necessity, she felt intuitively that both of these were near.
“We think them cozy!” she assented quietly to the visitor’s praise of her rooms.
“Cozy! they are lovely!”
While she talked she raised her eye-glasses to make note of some fine etchings upon the walls and a choice water-color upon an easel, and took in, in passing, the circumstance that the rugs laid upon the polished floor were of prime quality, although neither large nor numerous.
“I do hope you don’t mean to shut yourself up in your pretty cage as so many pattern wives and mothers—particularly Brooklyn women” (roguishly) “do? That’s the reason American society is so crude and colorless. With your face and figure and accomplishments (I haven’t forgotten how divinely you recite) you ought to become a Social Success—a star in the world of Society. You ought indeed!” drowning the feeble murmur of dissent. “There’s many a so-named leader of the gay world who doesn’t hold, and who never did hold such a card. Just trust yourself to me, and I will prove all I promise.”
“But, my dear Kitty, I lack the Open Sesame to the Gotham Innermost—Money! Only the repeatedly-millionaired can pass the outer courts.”
“There it is! Epigrams and bon-mots drop from your lips as pearls and diamonds used to tumble out whenever the good little girl in the Fairy-tale opened her mouth. As to millions of money—bah!” with a gesture of royal disdain. “Our best people are not the richest. The true New Yorker knows that. Of course one must live and dress well, but your husband’s means amply warrant that. Jack says cashiers get from ten to fifteen thousand dollars a year. Your face, your manner, and your talents are all the passport you require when once you are introduced. I claim the privilege of doing it. And, as an initial step, I want you and Mr. Cornell to dine with us to-morrow evening. I’ll ask six or eight of the nicest people I know to meet you. They’ll excuse the shortness of the notice when they see what a reason I have for calling them together. Put on a pretty gown and look your loveliest and bring along some music. I mean that you shall capture all hearts. I shall be grieved to the quick if you don’t. The hour will be seven—sharp. Punctuality is the soul of good humor in a dinner company. I must run away. I have an appointment with a tyrannical dressmaker at half-past ten; Mr. Lincoln’s Literature Class at eleven; a luncheon at half-past one; and afternoon tea, anywhere from four to six; a dinner party, and after that the opera. Such a whirl! Yet, as I say to Jack when he grumbles that we never have a quiet home evening—it is the only life worth living, as you’ll own when you’ve had a taste of it! (You dear thing! it rests my tired eyes just to look at you!) Here’s Jack’s card for Mr. Cornell. I’m just dying to see him and if he is good enough for you.”
“A great deal too good!” ejaculated Susie, earnestly, through this accidental gap in the monologue. “The dearest, most generous fellow!”
“Cela va sans dire—with the Brooklyn model! I’m so happy that you are one of us, and no longer a pattern article. Good-by!”
“There! I let her go without showing her the children,” reflected Mrs. Cornell, when she got back her breath. “But we had so much to talk of it is no wonder we forgot them. There are no friends like the old friends. How unjust we are sometimes! I came near not sending her my card because she had never been over to Brooklyn to see me all the while I was there. And Arthur advised me against doing it. He would have it that it is no further from New York to Brooklyn than from Brooklyn to New York. He predicted, too, that she would never come to see me here. He says there’s no other memory so short as that of a woman who has risen fast upon the social ladder. This ought to be a lesson in Christian charity to us both. Kitty’s heart is always in the right place.”
With a becoming mantling of rose-pink in her cheeks, she went singing about her “drawing” rooms, altering the angle of chairs and sofas, and the arrangement of bric-a-brac, already viewing her appointments through Kitty’s eye-glasses. Her thoughts were running upon the projected dinner party. She was the proud owner of a black velvet gown with a trained skirt, and a V-shaped front, and of dainty laces wherewith to fill the triangle. She had a diamond pin and earrings—wedding gifts from the wealthy aunt for whom she was named. The same generous relative had bestowed upon her, at different holiday seasons, the rugs and pictures that adorned her house. Aunt Susan might always be depended upon to do the handsome thing, and she was fond of this niece and her “steady” husband. The home of Susie’s girlhood had been more plainly furnished, as Kitty had known and must recollect. It was natural that the elegant grace characterizing Mrs. Cornell’s abode should mislead the shrewd observer in the estimate of the cashier’s income. Without surmising what had suggested the remark, or that it was a “feeler,” Mrs. Cornell smiled, yet a little uneasily, in recalling it.
“Kitty is so used to hearing of big sums that her ideas are vague on the subject of salaries,” meditated the better informed wife. “She doesn’t dream how handsomely people can live on six thousand dollars. Or that we got along on one-half that much in Brooklyn and laid aside something yearly. It is none of my business to set her right. Arthur doesn’t care to have his money affairs discussed.”
It did not occur to her as a possibility that from the pardonable disingenuousness any serious trouble could ever arise, yet she knew what Arthur would say. She heard, in imagination, his warning:
“Never sail under false colors, Susie!”
Therefore, in her animated description of call and conversation, she omitted all mention of Kitty’s tentative allusion to their income. Not knowing his wife’s old comrade, he might think her prying and impertinent in touching upon such a subject at all. Poor, dear Kitty! there were disadvantages in being so impetuously frank. A clear-headed cool reasoner like Arthur, for instance, was almost sure to misread her.
As our heroine had told Kitty, her married life had been quiet. Her vivacious friend would have called it “stupid.” The circle of congenial friends had been circumscribed and most of them were people of moderate means and desires. Brooklyn might be called a segregation of neighborhoods, each district having manners, customs, and social code peculiar to the village that was its germ. As one settlement ran into another, a city grew that claims the respect of the mightier sister across the river. The Cornells had lived in a pleasant house in a pleasant street, and Susie had spoken truly in saying that they lived well. With no pretense of entertaining, they were cordially hospitable, “having” friends to supper, or to pass the evening, whenever fair occasion offered. For the children’s sake the mother took her principal meal with them at one o’clock, but the hearty tea prepared for the father who had lunched frugally in town was invariably appetizing, being well cooked and daintily served. He had the privilege not always accorded to richer men who sit down daily to late “course dinners”—that of bringing a crony home with him whenever he pleased. It was like Arthur Cornell to choose as chance guests men who had not such homes as his—bank clerks from the country, Bohemian artists of good character and light purses, and the like. Such were the honored recipients of the hostess’ smile and warm handshake. She had won the admiring reverence of more than one homeless bachelor by her skill in delicate and savory cookery and the gracious friendliness of her welcome, and these, oftener than any other class, composed the delighted audience of the music Arthur called for every evening.
Once or twice a month husband and wife went to the theater or a concert, and twice or at the most three times a year to the opera. They were pretty sure to have complimentary tickets to the water-color exhibition and other displays of paintings in Brooklyn or New York. Of receptions, they knew comparatively little except such as followed weddings among their acquaintances. Neither had ever attended a regular dinner party gotten up by a professional caterer, and the ladies’ luncheon of eight, ten, or a dozen courses was unknown by the seeing of the eyes and the tasting of the palate to the bright woman whose social successes in a new arena were foretold by the sanguine admirer who craved the pleasure of bringing her out. There are still in fast growing American cities tens of thousands of such people who live honestly, comfortably, and beneficently, and whose homes are refined centers of happiness and goodness.
There was, then, cause for the wife’s pleasurable flutter of spirits and the doubtful satisfaction expressed, against his intention, in the husband’s visage at the close prospect of a state banquet given in honor of their undistinguished selves, at which anonymous edibles would be washed down with foreign wines, and spicy entrées be punctuated by spicy hors d’œuvres. Arthur’s predominant quality was sound sense, and as his spouse had anticipated, his first emotion after hearing her tale was wonder at the sudden and violent increase of friendship consequent upon their change of residence, in one who had apparently forgotten the unimportant fact of her favorite schoolfellow’s existence for more than five years.
“I can’t imagine why she should care to take us up now,” he demurred.
Susie’s ready flush testified to the hurt he had dealt her pride or affections. She thought to the latter.
“If you would only not let your prejudice master your reason!” she sighed. “All New York women hate and dread ferries.”
“There is the Bridge!” put in the Brooklyn-born literalist.
“Which would have taken visitors miles away from us. I was afraid you would wet-blanket the whole affair. I really dreaded to tell you of what I was silly enough to look forward to with pleasure. You see you don’t know what a fine, genuine creature Kitty is. But we won’t dispute over her or her dinner party. I can write to her and say that we regret our inability to accept the invitation.”
Arthur closed his teeth upon another struggling sentence. Although even less of a society man than she was of a society woman, he had a definite impression that invitations to dinner were usually sent out some days in advance of the “occasion.” Less distinct, because intuitive, was the idea that gay young women, already laden with social obligations, did not press attentions upon everyday folk from Brooklyn, E. D., unless they hoped to gain something by it, or were addicted to patronage. The former hypothesis being, as he conceived, untenable, it followed that Mrs. Hitt, a good-natured rattle, must have said more than she meant of her intentions toward the strangers, or that she had a native fondness for playing the lady patroness.
Loving and admiring his wife from the full depths of a quiet heart, he held all this back. Susie was vivacious, ready of wit and speech, and he was not. She dearly enjoyed excitement and new acquaintances. Give him dressing jacket, slippers, and an interesting book, or his wife’s music and his own fireside, and he would not have exchanged places with Ward Macallister at his complacent best. Susie would shine anywhere; she was born to it! He was not even a first-class reflector of her rays. Yet this noblest of women had stood by him with cheerful gallantry in their less prosperous days. He had told her over and over that she had hidden her light under a bushel in becoming the mistress of such a home as he had to give her, but she had loyally denied this, and borne her part bravely in the struggle to lap the non-elastic ends of their common income. To her capital management he owed much of their present comfort.
Arthur Cornell reasoned slowly, but always in a straight line.
“I am a selfish, brutal fellow, darling,” he said at this point of his cogitations. “I am afraid I am a little tired to-night. We have had a busy day at the Bank. You mustn’t mind my growls. When we have had sup—dinner, I would say!—you’ll find me more than willing to listen and sympathize.”
Her satisfactory answer was to come over and kiss him silently, taking his head between her hands and laying her cheek upon it. The hair was getting thin on the top, and the gaslight brought into gleaming conspicuousness a few gray hairs. He was older than she by nine years. It would not be surprising if, for a long time yet, he continued to say “supper” instead of “dinner.” She was certain he would never learn to talk of the “drawing room.” But he was her very own, and dearly beloved, and the kindest, noblest fellow in the world. Whatever he might do or say, she could never be angry with or ashamed of him.