Mrs. Cliff's Yacht

by Frank R. Stockton

"These people ought to come down and see Mrs. Cliff's house," thought Burke, "and I'll make them do it if I can!"

When Mrs. Buskirk, a lady who had always found it necessary to place strong guards around her social position, made her appearance, she received her visitor with an attentive civility. She had been impressed by his appearance when she had seen him grandly careering in his barouche or his sleigh, and she was still more impressed as she saw him in her parlor with additional furs. She had heard he had been a sailor, but now as she talked to him, the belief grew upon her that he might yet make a very good sailor. He was courteous, entirely at his ease, and perhaps a little too bland, and Mrs. Buskirk thought that although her husband might like to sit and smoke with this well-dressed, sun-burned man, he was not a person very desirable for the society of herself and daughters.

But she was willing to sit and talk to Mr. Burke, for she wanted to ask him some questions about Mrs. Cliff. She had heard about that lady's new house, or rather the improvement to her old one, and she had driven past it, and she did not altogether understand the state of affairs.

She had known that Mrs. Cliff was a widow of a storekeeper of the town, and that she had come into possession of a portion of a treasure which had been discovered somewhere in the West Indies or South America, but those portions of treasures which might be allotted to the widow of a storekeeper in a little country town were not likely to be very much, and Mrs. Buskirk was anxious to know something definite about Mrs. Cliff's present circumstances.

Burke felt a little embarrassed in regard to his answers. He knew that Mrs. Cliff was very anxious not to appear as a millionnaire in the midst of the friends and associations of her native town,—at least, that she did not desire to do so until her real financial position had been gradually understood and accepted. Nothing she would dislike so much as to be regarded as the people in her social circle regarded the Buskirks on the hill.

So Burke did not blaze out as he would have liked to do with a true and faithful statement of Mrs. Cliff's great wealth,—far in excess, he was very sure, of that of the fine lady with whom he was talking,—but he said everything he could in a modest way, or what seemed so to him, in regard to his friend's house and belongings.

"But it seems to me," said Mrs. Buskirk, "that it's a very strange thing for any one to build a house, such as the one you describe, in such a neighborhood, when there are so many desirable locations on the outskirts of the town. The houses on the opposite side of the street are very small, some of them even mean; if I am not mistaken there is a little shop somewhere along there! I should consider that that sort of thing would spoil any house, no matter how good it might be in itself!"

"Oh, that makes no difference whatever!" said Burke, with a wave of his hand, and delighted to remember a proposition he had made to Mrs. Cliff and which she had viewed with favor. "Mrs. Cliff will soon settle all that! She's going to buy that whole block opposite to her and make a park of it. She'll clear away all the houses and everything belonging to them, and she'll plant trees, and lay out lawns and driveways, and have a regular landscape gardener who'll superintend everything. And she's going to have the water brought in pipes which will end in some great rocks, which we'll have hauled from the woods, and from under these rocks a brook will flow and meander through the park. And there'll be flowers, and reeds, and rushes, and, very likely, a fountain with the spare water.

"And that'll be a public park for the use of the whole town, and you can see for yourself, madam, that it'll be a grand thing to look out from Mrs. Cliff's windows on such a beautiful place! It will be fitted up and railed off very much after the style of her own grounds, so that the whole thing will be like a great estate right in the middle of the town. She's thinkin' of callin' the park 'The Grove of the Incas.' That sounds nice; don't you think so, madam?"

"It sounds very well indeed," said Mrs. Buskirk. She had heard before of plans made by people who had suddenly come into possession of money.