MRS. BERKELEY HAMMOND ENTERTAINS
The heritage of the world comes at last to the pachyderms. Fate is never so unkind as to those who blindly resist her and into the lap of stoic and unimpressionable she pours the horn of plenty.
Trevelyan Morehouse had gone through life on the low gear. In fact he had no change of gears and needed none. He never "hit it up" on the smooth places or burned out his tires on the rough ones, and was therefore always to be found in perfect repair. He was a good hill climber and had a way of arriving at his destination no matter how difficult the going. When others passed him he let them go, and plodded on after them with solemn assurance, his gait so leisurely that rapid travelers had the habit of regarding his conservatism with undisguised contempt. And yet his perseverance, though inconspicuous, was singularly effective. He had won his way into the sanctorum of a big corporation and his advice, though never brilliant, was always sane and peculiarly reliable. He did not mind rebuffs and was so indifferent to indignities that people had ceased to offer them. Socially he could always be trusted to do the usual thing in the usual way and was therefore always much in demand by hostesses who required conventional limitations. In a word he was "the excellent Trevelyan." and the adjective fitted him as snugly as it did the well-known comestible with which it had come to be so comfortably and freely associated. His excellence lay largely in the fact that he did not excel. He was content with his subordinate capacity, wise in his confidence that all things would come to him in the end, if he only waited long enough.
The same rules which he found so successful in business he now applied to his affair of the heart, and plodded off in the wake of the fast flying Hermia, imperturbable and undismayed. His flowers had been sent to her with the regularity of the clock, his visits carefully timed, and his proposals renewed with a well-bred ardor. He had waited patiently through Hermia's short and sportive attachment for "Reggie" Armistead, and when their "trial" engagement reached its tempestuous conclusion, had stepped softly into the breach, rosy with hope and a definite sense that his time had come. Hermia liked him—had liked him for years. She had gotten used to him as one does to a familiar chair or an article of diet. He was a habit with her like her bedroom slippers or her afternoon tea. He was comfortable, always safe and quite sane, which she was not, and she accepted him in the guise of counselor and friend with the same cheerful tolerance that she gave to her Aunt Harriet Westfield or to Mr. Winthrop of the Pilgrim Trust Company.
When Hermia departed suddenly for Europe, her sportive idyl so suddenly shattered, Mr. Morehouse followed her in the next steamer. She had given him no definite encouragement, it was true, and yet he found reasons to hope that the time was at hand when she must make some definite decision. In Europe her brief disappearance from the scene of her usual activities had mystified him and her return to her hotel, shabby and uncommunicative, had aroused a chagrin and an anxiety quite unusual to him; but he had sat and waited her pleasure, survived her turbulent moods and had found his patience at last rewarded by her silent acquiescence in his presence, and by an invitation to accompany her to Switzerland, where she was to join her Aunt Julia and the children.
From the vantage point of his office window down town, where he now sat and viewed the bleak perspective of the city, his memories of the summer with Hermia seemed a strange compound of brief blisses and more enduring pangs. They had been much seen together and the announcement of their engagement which had appeared in the newspapers had not been surprising. Aunt Julia had favored his suit and Mrs. Westfield had given him to understand that it was time Hermia married. But the fact remained that Hermia had not accepted him. His insistence had always provoked and still provoked one of two moods—either resentment or mockery. She either dismissed him in a dudgeon or cajoled him with elusive banter. Why was he so impatient? There was plenty of time? Was he sure that he wanted to marry her? What did her really know about her heart of hearts? Perhaps, if he knew her better he might not want to marry her. He pleaded in patient calm. The world, it seemed, thought them engaged. Why shouldn't he be permitted to think so. She only laughed at him and her heart of hearts had come to be the most profound enigma that it had ever been his fortune to study. So the prize, which he had thought most surely his own, still hung reluctantly upon the lip of the horn of plenty. It would not fall, and all the traditions of his experience forbade that he should jostle it. And so he only watched with patient eyes and a physical restraint which could only be described as "excellent."
What did she mean by saying that if he knew her better he might not want to marry her? Vague doubts assailed him. Did he, after all, know her? What was this chapter of her life of which he knew nothing and to which she had so frequently alluded? Was it something which had happened to her in America? Or had it something to do with her disappearance last summer from Paris, after which she had returned sober and intolerant? He gave it up. He was always giving her up and then putting his doubts of her in his pocket with his neat handkerchief, plodding sedulously as before. He must wait. Everything that he had got in life had come from waiting and Hermia, his philosophy told him, must be no exception to the rule.
The winter drew on toward spring. Lent arrived, and society, quite bored and thoroughly exhausted, halted in the mad round of the "one-step" and turned to calmer delights. Country places in adjacent counties were opened and guests flitted from one house to the other in a continuous round of visits.
Mrs. Berkeley Hammond's invitations, whether to the big house near the Park or to Rood's Knoll, her place in the country, were much in demand. The Hammonds had unlimited means, the social instinct, worthy family traditions, and a talent for entertainment, a combination of qualities and circumstances which explained the importance of this family in the social life of the city. The mantle of an older leader who had passed had fallen comfortably on Mrs. Hammond's capacious shoulders and she wore it with a familiar grace which gave the impression that it had always been there. Conservative, the more radical called her, and radical, the conservative; but her taste and her chef were both above reproach, and her dinners, whether large or small, had the distinction which only comes of a rare order of tact and discrimination. Nor were her hospitalities confined to the entertainment of the indigenous. Visitors to New York, foreign celebrities, literary, artistic or political, found within her doors a welcome and a company exactly suited to their social requirements. She liked young people, too, and contrived to let them know it, to the end that her dances, while formal, were gay rather than "stodgy," juvenescent rather than patriarchal.
The house at Rood's Knoll was a huge affair, of brick and timbered plaster, set in the midst of its thousand acres of woodland in the heart of the hills. Lent found it full of people and its gayety was reflected in other houses of the neighborhood whose owners, like the Hammonds, kept open house. There was much to do. March went out like a lion and the snow which kept the more timid indoors at the cards made wonderful coasting and sledding, of which latter these wearied children of fortune were not slow to take advantage. The ponds were frozen, too, and skating was added to the sum of their rural delights.