“It was a perfectly fiendish day; you’ve never been here in February, have you? Well, that’s the time to see dear old Cambridge. It snows and rains most of the day, and then stops to rest and melt a little. There aren’t any sidewalks to speak of—just dirt paths with curbstones that keep the mud and stuff from running off into the street, so you have to walk in it up to your neck, if you want to get anywhere. That’s what did Wellington up, I guess.
“The front door of his house was latched, and I was fumbling round under the crape trying to get hold of the bell, when the landlady appeared; you know—it makes me shudder now sometimes, when I think of that gruesome old buzzard of a woman. She was a typical Cambridge landlady,—one of those uncorsetted, iron grey slatterns who lives in a rancid atmosphere of hot soap-suds and never goes to bed; a room-renting old spider who manages to break everything you own, in a listless sort of way, and then writes home to your father that you haven’t paid your bill. This one belonged to the class that looks on death as a social opportunity. She was dressed for the occasion, and greeted each of us with a kind of a soiled smile that made her old face look like a piece of dish-rag.”
“Philip dear.”
“Well, it did. And then she said in a loud, important whisper,—
“‘He isn’t upstairs; he’s in my parlor,’ and took us in where poor Wellington was. It was all so dreadful, that part of it, that it didn’t seem sad. There were three other bleary old funeral coaches,—more landladies, I suppose,—on a sofa on one side, and a girl with fuzzy, yellow hair, in a rocking-chair, on the other; she was Mrs. Finley’s daughter, I think. I’ve seen her round the Square since. There didn’t seem to be much of anything for us to do; and Nate was awfully embarrassed and uncomfortable, and seemed to fill up most of the space in the horrid plushy little room. But I didn’t like to go away exactly, because it made our coming there at all seem so useless; so I said to Mrs. Finley,—I couldn’t think of anything else,—
“‘Have many of the fellows been in?’
“‘No,’ she whispered; ‘nobody’s been in but Mis’ Taylor and Mis’ Buckson and Mis’ Myles. They come at two,’—it was then after five,—‘and the Regent. Mr. Wellington was a real quiet young man. He didn’t have much company. He stayed in his room nights—mostly.’ She stuck on ‘mostly’ as a sort of afterthought, and repeated it; the old fool had a passion for accuracy of a vague, unimportant kind that almost drove me crazy. I asked her if any one else roomed in the house. I knew he must have known them if there did; no matter how objectionable people are at college, if they room near you, you can’t help borrowing matches from them—I’ve made lots of acquaintances borrowing matches. But no one lived there except two law students, ‘real nice gentlemen, real nice,’ they were, and they weren’t there very much. Nate asked her when the funeral was to be, which was the most sensible thing he could have done; for she took a telegram from her pocket, and said,—
“‘His mother’s coming to-night. She was in New York State when he passed away. They wa’n’t able to get her till this afternoon.’ Then Nate and I left her, and I don’t know why,—it wasn’t idle curiosity,—but we went up to Wellington’s rooms.
“They were bully rooms. You can tell a lot about a man from his room here. Wellington had no end of really good things: rugs and books,—the Edinburgh Stevenson, and that edition of Balzac we have at home,—and ever so many Braun photographs—not the every day ones, but portraits and things that you felt he’d picked up abroad, because he happened to like them. And on the table—he had a corking big oak table that filled up one end of the room—his note-books and scratch block were lying open, just the way he’d left them when he stopped grinding for the exams. And there was a letter without a stamp, addressed to his mother, and a little picture of his mother, with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back. Then I got to thinking of his mother, and got her mixed up with you somehow or other. I don’t know just how it was, but you seemed to change places; I couldn’t see you apart for any length of time, and I thought of you arriving at the Park Square station all alone, and trying to get a cab in the wet, and having to pay the man anything he asked you, until I was almost crying, and told Nate that some one ought to be there to meet you—Mrs. Wellington, I mean. Nate agreed with me, and began to look panicky, because he knew I meant him. He really ought to have gone—it was his place. But I knew how he felt. He kept insisting that I could do the thing much better than he could; and it ended by my getting a carriage at about eight or nine o’clock, and splashing into town.
“There was a possibility, of course, that she wouldn’t come alone, although she had been away from home, in New York, when she heard. But it never occurred to me that I could miss her if she did come alone, although I’d never seen her, and felt sure she wouldn’t have on black veils and things. You can’t imagine all the different things I thought of to say to her while I was walking up and down the platform waiting for the train to come in. They all sounded so formal and sort of undertakery, that I knew I shouldn’t say any of them when the time came. But I couldn’t think of anything else—the one right one, I mean.