“If there’s anything you want ironed, Mr. Walpole, bring it down here, and I’ll be more’n glad to iron it for you.”
Horace grew red, and found his voice going entirely out of his control, as he tried to explain that it wasn’t for that—it wasn’t for ironing clothes—he was sure nobody could do it but himself.
“Do you want it hot or cold?” asked Mrs. Wilkins, puzzled.
“Cold!” said Horace desperately. And he got it cold, and had to heat it at his own fire to perform his labor of love.
That was of a piece with many things he did. Of a piece, for instance, with his looking in at the milliners’ windows and trying to think which bonnet would best become her—and then taking himself severely to task for dreaming that she would wear a ready-made bonnet. Of a piece with his buying two seats for the theatre, and going alone and fancying her next him, and glancing furtively at the empty place at the points where he thought she would be amused, or pleased, or moved.
What a fool he was! Yes, my friend, and so are you and I. And remember that this boy’s foolishness did not keep him tossing, stark awake, through ghastly nights; did not start him up in the morning with a hot throat and an unrested brain; did not send him down to his day’s work with the haunting, clutching, lurking fear that springs forward at every stroke of the clock, at every opening of the door. Perhaps you and I have known folly worse than his.
Through all the winter—the red handkerchief cheered the hideous first Monday in October, and the Christmas holidays, when business kept him from going home to Montevista—he heard little or nothing of her. His friends in the city, or rather his father’s friends, were all ingrained New Yorkers, dating from the provincial period, who knew not Philadelphia; and it was only from an occasional newspaper paragraph that he learned that Judge Rittenhouse and his daughter were travelling through the South, for the Judge’s health. Of course, he had a standing invitation to call on them whenever he should find himself in Philadelphia; but they never came nearer Philadelphia than Washington, and so he never found himself in Philadelphia. He was not so sorry for this as you might think a lover should be. He knew that, with a little patience, he might present himself to Judge Rittenhouse as something more than a lawyer’s managing clerk.
For, meanwhile, good news had come from home, and things were going well with him. Mineral springs had been discovered at Aristotle—mineral springs may be discovered anywhere in north New York, if you only try; though it is sometimes difficult to fit them with the proper Indian legends. The name of the town had been changed to Avoca, and there was already an Avoca Improvement Company, building a big hotel, advertising right and left, and prophesying that the day of Saratoga and Sharon and Richfield was ended. So the barrens between Montevista and Aristotle, skirting the railroad, suddenly took on a value. Hitherto they had been unsalable, except for taxes. For the most part they were an adjunct of the estate of Montevista; and in February Horace went up to St. Lawrence County and began the series of sales that was to realize his father’s most hopeless dream, and clear Montevista of all incumbrances.
How pat it all came, he thought, as, on his return trip, the train carried him past the little old station, with its glaring new sign, AVOCA, just beyond the broad stretch of “Squire Walpole’s bad land,” now sprouting with the surveyors’ stakes. After all was paid off on the old home, there would be enough left to enable him to buy out Haskins, who had openly expressed his desire to get into a “live firm,” and who was willing to part with his interest for a reasonable sum down, backed up by a succession of easy installments. And Judge Weeden had intimated, as clearly as dignity would permit, his anxiety that Horace should seize the opportunity.