The Storm Centre: A Novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

As the moving panorama turned and wheeled and shifted, the surgeon commented in a spirit of forecast:—

"If that fellow doesn't pay some attention to his bronchial tubes, they will pay some attention to him, and that promptly."

So promptly indeed was this prophecy verified that within the next few days old Ephraim, who purveyed all the news of the period to the remote secluded country house, informed Judge Roscoe that Captain Baynell was seriously ill with bronchitis and threatened with pneumonia. In order to have indoor protection and treatment he was to be removed as soon as possible to the hospital near the town. Judge Roscoe verified this rumor upon hastening to camp, and with hospitable warmth he invited the son of his old schoolmate to sojourn instead in his house; for in the college days to which he was fond of recurring he had been taken into the home of the elder Fluellen Baynell, and nursed by his friend's mother through a typhoid attack. To repay the obligation thus was peculiarly acceptable to a man of his type. But Baynell hardly heeded the detail of the hospitable precedent. He needed no persuasion, and thereafter he seemed more than ever lapsed in the serenities of the storm centre, ensconced in one of the great square upper bedrooms, with the spare furnishing of heavy mahogany that gave an idea of so much space, the order of the day when the plethora of decoration, the "cosy corner," the wall pocket, the "art drapery," the crowded knickknackery, did not obtain. For more than a week Baynell could not rise; the surgeon visited him at regular intervals, and Judge Roscoe appeared unfailingly each morning in the sick room; but the rest of the family remained invisible, and held unsympathetically aloof.

This was a shrewd loss to Ashley, for although he had called at first with genuine anxiety as to his friend's state, the humors of the situation appealed to him as time wore on, and he recollected with the enhanced interest of enforced idleness his boast that he would compass an introduction to Mrs. Gwynn, despite Baynell's stiff refusal. Seymour still resented the circumstance so seriously that he had withheld all manifestations of sympathy or concern, and this, the kind Ashley considered, carried the matter much too far. He thought it might effect a general reconciliation if he should meet Mrs. Gwynn by accident, when he fancied he would not fear to introduce any one whom he considered fit for good society. Thus, after he had ceased to be apprehensive concerning Baynell's condition, he called on him again and again, but hearing never a light footfall on the stair or the flutter of flounces that might promise a realization of his quest. He was all unconscious that his project had an unwitting ally in Judge Roscoe himself. For more than once Judge Roscoe was uncomfortably visited by hospitable monitions.

"I should have liked to ask Colonel Ashley to dine with us," he said tentatively to Mrs. Gwynn. "He was leaving the house just as the meal was being served. Old Ephraim—confound the old fellow—has no sort of tact. He brought in the soup to Captain Baynell with Colonel Ashley sitting by the bedside! It was indeed a hint to beat a retreat. I was—I was mortified. I was really mortified not to ask him to stay."

"Heavens, Uncle Gerald!—what are you dreaming about? Ask people to dine, and no trained servant to wait on the table—and this china—and the ladies in their pinafores!" And Mrs. Gwynn glanced scoffingly around the domestic board, for the place had once been famous for the elegance of its entertainments; but the balls, the "wine suppers," the formal late dinners of many courses, had come to an end with the conclusion of the period of prosperity, and the perfectly trained service had vanished with the vanishing butler and his corps of assistants whom he himself had rigorously drilled in the school of the pantry, in strict accordance with old traditions.

"Well, we have better china," said the judge, inexorably. "And the pinafores don't grow on the ladies; we have excellent precedent for believing they can be dispensed with."

Mrs. Gwynn fixed him with a resolute eye. "I don't intend to have the ladies taken from their studies in the forenoon to dress for company and distract their minds with fascinating gentlemen. Besides it is too great a compliment to receive an absolute stranger informally, as one of ourselves,—as we treat Captain Baynell,—and it is almost impossible to entertain Colonel Ashley otherwise. You forget that we have no trained servants. And I am not going to trust the handling of my aunt's beautiful old Sèvres dinner set to our inexperienced factotum—oh, the idea! It makes me shudder to think of the nicks and smashings. It ought to be kept intact for Julius's wife when he takes one, or for Clarence's if he should ever marry again. A stray Yankee officer isn't sufficient justification for risking it."

"He has called so often, and has been so kind to Captain Baynell."

"Well, so have I been kind to Captain Baynell, and here am I eating on the everyday china—no Sèvres for me! And I am going to be kinder still, for he is allowed to have some dessert to-day, and I have spread this tray with mine own hands."