“Stay with me, Bessie,” I said, “I want to speak to you. Your mother is at liberty to go in whenever she pleases.” It was then she gave me a disdainful look and swept in, and I muttered the wish regarding her transportation to a distant clime, which brought out the gentle rebuke with which this story opens.
I saw no prospect of enjoying a longer stay at the Fairview, unless some burglary or terrible accident should occur to give me chance for a new display of my heroic qualities, and even then, I thought, it would be of no use, for I should spoil it all next day. So we determined to go home a week earlier than we had intended. The Marstons were going to Canada and Lake George, and wouldn’t reach home till October. Mr. Desmond and his niece stayed a month longer where they were, and that would bring them home about the same time. Bessie and I went home with a lack of that buoyant bliss with which we had travelled to the mountains and spent those first two weeks. There was no change in us, but it was all due to my mother-in-law.
CHAPTER VI.
WHAT IS HOME WITHOUT A MOTHER-IN-LAW?
Home! We were back from the mountains, and our brief wedding-journey had become a thing of the past. Mrs. Pinkerton’s iron-bound trunk had been reluctantly deposited in her bed-chamber by a puffing and surly hack-driver; and here was I, installed in the little cottage as head of the household, for weal or for woe. It was Mrs. Pinkerton’s cottage, to be sure, but I entered it with the determination not to live there as a boarder or as a guest subject to the proprietor’s condescending hospitality. I was able and not unwilling to establish a home of my own, and inasmuch as I refrained from doing so because of Mrs. Pinkerton’s desire to keep her daughter with her, I had the right to consider myself under no obligation to my mother-in-law.
The cottage was far from being a disagreeable place in itself. It was small, but extremely neat and pleasant. The rooms were furnished with a degree of quiet taste that defied criticism. The hand of an accomplished housekeeper was everywhere made manifest, and everything had an air of refinement and comfort. There was no ostentatious furniture; the chairs were made to sit in, but not to put one’s boots on. The cleanliness of the house was terrible. One could see that no man had lived there since the death of the late Pinkerton.
Our room was the same that had been occupied by Bessie since she was a school-girl in short frocks. It was full of Bessie’s “things,” and it was lucky that my effects occupied but very little space.
“This is jolly,” I said, as I sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled a cigar from my pocket. “How soon will supper be ready, I wonder?”
There was no response. Bessie was unpacking,—and such an unpacking!
I lighted my cigar and threw myself back on the bed, wondering how they had got on without me at the bank. Presently in came mother-in-law to lend a hand at the unpacking. She did not see me at first, but the fragrance of my Manila soon reached her nostrils, and she turned.
Such a look as she cast upon me! It almost took my breath away. But she did not say a word. “The subject is beyond her powers of speech,” I said to myself. “Let us hope it will be so as a general thing.”