We talked about it together for a long time after that—talked on till Horace came back from his men’s dinner, after midnight. Grace insisted on going in and out of the whole subject, over and over again. As she kept repeating, it was certainly the only time that poor Mary had ever been in the papers. But though I sat and listened patiently I couldn’t get up any real interest in what she said. I felt I should never again be interested in Mary Pask, or in anything concerning her.
THE YOUNG GENTLEMEN
I
The uniform newness of a new country gives peculiar relief to its few relics of antiquity—a term which, in America, may fairly enough be applied to any building already above ground when the colony became a republic.
Groups of such buildings, little settlements almost unmarred by later accretions, are still to be found here and there in the Eastern states; and they are always productive of inordinate pride in those who discover and live in them. A place of the sort, twenty years ago, was Harpledon, on the New England coast, somewhere between Salem and Newburyport. How intolerantly proud we all were of inhabiting it! How we resisted modern improvements, ridiculed fashionable “summer resorts,” fought trolley-lines, overhead wires and telephones, wrote to the papers denouncing municipal vandalism, and bought up (those of us who could afford it) one little heavy-roofed house after another, as the land-speculator threatened them! All this, of course, was on a very small scale: Harpledon was, and is still, the smallest of towns, hardly more than a village, happily unmenaced by industry, and almost too remote for the week-end “flivver.” And now that civic pride has taught Americans to preserve and adorn their modest monuments, setting them in smooth stretches of turf and nursing the elms of the village green, the place has become far more attractive, and far worthier of its romantic reputation, than when we artists and writers first knew it. Nevertheless, I hope I shall never see it again; certainly I shall not if I can help it....
II
The elders of the tribe of summer visitors nearly all professed to have “discovered” Harpledon. The only one of the number who never, to my knowledge, put forth this claim was Waldo Cranch; and he had lived there longer than any of us.
The one person in the village who could remember his coming to Harpledon, and opening and repairing the old Cranch house (for his family had been India merchants when Harpledon was a thriving sea-port)—the only person who went back far enough to antedate Waldo Cranch was an aunt of mine, old Miss Lucilla Selwick, who lived in the Selwick house, itself a stout relic of India merchant days, and who had been sitting at the same window, watching the main street of Harpledon, for seventy years and more to my knowledge. But unfortunately the long range of Aunt Lucilla’s memory often made it hit rather wide of the mark. She remembered heaps and heaps of far-off things; but she almost always remembered them wrongly. For instance, she used to say: “Poor Polly Everitt! How well I remember her, coming up from the beach one day screaming, and saying she’d seen her husband drowning before her eyes”—whereas every one knew that Mrs. Everitt was on a picnic when her husband was drowned at the other end of the world, and that no ghostly premonition of her loss had reached her. And whenever Aunt Lucilla mentioned Mr. Cranch’s coming to live at Harpledon she used to say: “Dear me, I can see him now, driving by on that rainy afternoon in Denny Brine’s old carry-all, with a great pile of bags and bundles, and on top of them a black and white hobby-horse with a real mane—the very handsomest hobby-horse I ever saw.” No persuasion could induce her to dissociate the image of this prodigious toy from her first sight of Waldo Cranch, most incurable of bachelors, and least concerned with the amusing of other people’s children, even those of his best friends. In this case, to be sure, her power of evocation had a certain success. Some one told Cranch—Mrs. Durant I think it must have been—and I can still hear his hearty laugh.
“What could it have been that she saw?” Mrs. Durant questioned; and he responded gaily: “Why not simply the symbol of my numerous tastes?” Which—as Cranch painted and gardened and made music (even composed it)—seemed so happy an explanation that for long afterward the Cranch house was known to us as Hobby-Horse Hall.