Chapter I
"No; no house-parties till the middle of July. Dear knows, what with a string of big dinners, my two little dances, and those tiresome Thursdays in January and February when everybody came, I have done all that could be expected by society from paupers like ourselves," said Mrs. Henry Gervase, settling herself in a wicker chair, on the veranda of her country home, and looking approvingly at her water-view.
"Paupers!" said a lady from a neighboring cottage, who had dropped in to call. Mrs. Gervase's friends rarely liked to commit themselves to positive comment upon her statements until certain which way the cat was meant to jump. Mrs. Luther Prettyman, the wife of the dry-goods magnate, whose good fortune it was to own the land adjoining the Gervase property at Sheepshead Point,—a recently famous resort for summer visitors on our far eastern coast,—now contented herself with a little deprecatory giggle that might mean anything, and waited for Mrs. Gervase to go on.
"Oh, well! everything is comparative; and on the scale by which people measure things in New York, to-day, we are simply grovelling in poverty. John,"—to her gardener,—"you have got that row of myosotis entirely out of line; and, remember, nothing but salvia behind the heliotropes. I like a blaze of scarlet and purple against a blue sea-line like this. Heavens! what a perfect afternoon! The atmosphere has been clarified, and those birches in the ravine 'twinkle with a million lights.' My dear woman, I make no apologies. Any one who wants me at this season of the year must take me as I am. After eight months of bricks and mortar, dirty streets, and stupid drives in the Park, I am fairly maudlin over Nature when I get her back in June.
"I went to a concert where Paderewski played a night or two before he left America; and I give you my word that while the music was going on I put up my fan and plainly heard the babble of this little brook of mine, and the lap of the waves over the rocks at high tide, with, now and then, the notes of the song-sparrow that comes back every year and perches on my Norway pine. Somebody said of me afterwards, at supper, that I had been having a little nap. They may say anything of me, I believe, and some idiot will be found to credit it. But please don't accept the newspaper report that I am to have Mr. and Mrs. This, or Mr. That and Mrs. T'other, stopping with me at Stoneacres during June. I am much too busy with my granger-work, and my husband too industrious doing nothing, to play host and hostess now."
"I did not know; I only thought—" ventured Mrs. Prettyman. "You see, everything is so dull here, socially, till August. And when one has a guest coming who is accustomed to a great deal of fashionable gaiety,—a young lady, a distinguished belle,—one naturally grasps at the idea of such pleasant house-parties as yours are known to be, dear Mrs. Gervase."
"We shall be dull as ditch-water," answered relentless Mrs. Gervase, turning around to survey the struggle of a fat-breasted robin to extract from the turf a worm that continued to emerge in apparently unending length. "And if you will have a girl out of season, why, put her on bread and milk and beauty-sleep, give her plenty of trashy novels and a horse to ride, and she'll do well enough."
"But—perhaps I am wrong—surely Mr. Gervase told Mr. Prettyman, when they were smoking on our veranda last Sunday, that you are expecting your nephew, Mr. Alan Grove."
"That's just like Mr. Gervase,—a perfect sieve for secrets," quoth Mrs. Gervase, contemptuously; "when I particularly requested him to mention Alan's visit to nobody. The poor boy is completely used up with work, and has engaged to get a paper ready to read before some scientific congress next month, and finds himself unable to write a line of it in town. Here, I have promised him, he may have absolute quiet—not be called on to play civility or squire-of-dames for any one; and, I may as well warn you now, he's not to be expected to do a hand's turn of entertainment for your girl. Besides, I happen to know that he can't abide 'society' young women. He is plunged up to the neck in electricity, is poor, ambitious, clever, on the way to sure success; and I'm going to back him all I can, not put stumbling-blocks in his path."
"How plunged up to his neck in electricity?" asked puzzled Mrs. Prettyman.
"Electric law, my good soul; did you think it a new kind of capital punishment? The lucrative law of the future, I've heard wise men say. Simpkins!" hailing, with irresistible command, a butcher's cart that seemed possessed of a strong desire to drive away in a hurry from a side entrance to the house. "Simpkins! Oh! there you are; I meant to leave orders with the cook not to let you get away again to-day without a word from me. I noticed, on the book, that you had the effrontery to charge sixty cents a pound for spring chickens here in June. Now, don't tell me! The way all you natives do; you have a short season, and must make the most of it. This is not your season, or my season, either. Wait till August before you put on the screws. And your sweetbreads, eighty cents a pair, when you know that when Mr. Gervase and I first came here to live, you were throwing sweetbreads away, till we taught you the use of them! Now, mind, I shall get tired of sending friends to you to be fleeced in August, if this is what you do to me in June."
"I must be running off," said Mrs. Prettyman, arising from her spot of shade and luxurious comfort in the deep veranda filled, though not encumbered, with picturesque belongings, with stands and pots of blooming plants in every nook. "I'll declare, nobody's flowers do as well as yours. And the wages we pay our head gardener! It makes me really envious."
This, be it known, was a clever stroke on the part of neighbor Prettyman. Secretly resentful of the tepid interest in the personality of her expected guest,—who, in the eyes of the house of Prettyman, was an event,—she yet did not dare attempt to bring the greater lady to yield sympathy upon the spot. Mrs. Gervase's weakest side was for her flowers. She possessed the magic touch that alone nurtures them to perfection, and with it the proud love of a parent for children that grow inclined according to her will.
"Hum! We do pretty well, considering this house is built on the ragged edge of nothing over the sea, and is swept by all the winds of heaven, in turn, and sometimes all together. And, in a climate where one goes to bed in the Tropics and wakes up at the North Pole, what would you have? John, there, though I'll not set him up by telling him so, has learned all I know about flowers, and picks up new ideas every day. By August, now, these beds and stands will be worth looking at. What did you say is the name of the young person who's coming to stop with you? If you've nothing better, suppose you and she and Mr. Prettyman come over to dinner Saturday. Alan has promised me not to work at night, and by that time my plants will all be in the ground and my mind at rest."
"Thank you so much," said the lesser luminary. "It is always a treat to dine with you en famille; and it is—didn't I mention her?—Gladys Eliot who is coming to us to-morrow."
"Gladys Eliot! Why, she's gone with her people to London for two months. I saw her name in the Teutonic's list last Thursday. Those Eliots would never in the world let slip another chance for her to make the great match they've set out to get."
"Nevertheless," said Mrs. Prettyman, with some show of spirit, "Mrs. Eliot, who is my old school-friend, wrote me, the day before they sailed, that Gladys had taken it into her head to stay behind, and begged me to keep her till her aunt can come up from Baltimore in July and take the girl in charge."
"Three weeks of Gladys Eliot!" remarked Mrs. Gervase. "My poor woman, I pity you. By the end of the month there will be no health in you. A professional beauty, who has run the gauntlet of four or five years of incessant praises, has been advertised like 'Pear's Soap,' in England and America, and has failed to make her coup! I remember what Alan Grove said about her no longer ago than Christmas of last year: 'I haven't the advantage of Miss Eliot's acquaintance, but her and her kind I hold in abhorrence,—denationalized Americans; hangers-on of older civilizations that make a puppet-show of them; spoiled for home, with no rightful place abroad; restless, craving what no healthy-minded husband of their own kind can give them.' Bless me—and those two are going to meet here!"
"I think Mr. Alan Grove need not concern himself," said Mrs. Prettyman, driven to bay. "Mrs. Eliot mentioned in her letter that Gladys—it is no secret, evidently—is nearly, if not quite, engaged to marry some one the family feels is in all respects all they could have hoped for her."
"Then it must be either that Colonel Larkyns, the very rude man with large feet, who walked all over my velvet gown at the Egertons', last winter,—came over with Lord Glenmore, whom the Eliots tried for and couldn't get,—or else McLaughlin, the Irishman who made such a lot of money in Montana. The two men were running evenly, 'twas said. Let me think—didn't I see her at Claremont on McLaughlin's coach, last month? Pray, my dear, are we to congratulate you on having Mr. McLaughlin, also, as a member of your household, before long?"
"Oh dear, dear!" continued the plain-spoken lady to herself, when poor Mrs. Prettyman, fairly routed, had retired without honors from the field. "Why is nature so heavenly kind to us in American places of resort, and 'only man is vile'? Why does this struggle for place, this pride of vogue, these types of our worst social element—I hate that word 'social,' it sounds vulgar; but what else expresses this for me?—follow one into this earthly Paradise? Here I have got myself into a pretty kettle of fish with Alan Grove. He will be bored to death and his visit broken up, for we can't rid ourselves of people who sit in our pocket, like the Prettymans in summer; and he will be running upon this Eliot creature perpetually. If Henry would help me, we might—but he is so abominably friendly and cordial with country neighbors, there's no hope from him. Besides, if a girl is pretty, it makes no earthly difference to my good man whether she is a fiend of calculation and cold-heartedness. I declare, I've no patience with Henry, anyhow."
So saying, Mrs. Gervase went out to drive with the offender in question, behind a pair of sleek cobs, in a little buckboard of tawny wood with russet leather cushions and harness,—his latest present,—and soon, in cheerful companionship, forgot all sorrows amid such views of land and water as Sheepshead Point people think only Sheepshead Point can offer.