PART FIFTH
I
AN Indian summer day, idle and tender, lay over hills and woods, meadows, river. The quaint little Old Town of Oldbridge, set among apple orchards and gardens and avenues of elms, received this last Benediction of Nature with an agreeable ouf! of respite from imminent grim winter approaches.
It is difficult to account, by any utilitarian motive on the part of our “brown and green old Mother Earth,” for her November caprice of a New England Indian summer, though I make no doubt the scientists will have some prosaic reason to give which we are asked to take upon faith. But since fruit, in New England, is garnered in September, and the toughest plants are burned to a crimson glory by October frosts, no ripened fruit or renewal of leaves defend the vagary. And so—will-he nill-he, we praise Heaven which made our “bounteous mother” feminine forsooth; we gratefully credit the enchanted fortnight to her bountiful illogical womanhood.
The Old Town of Oldbridge, then, basking under the Indian summer's morning blandishment while it sipped its mocha and partook of grape-fruit towards eight of the clock, pushed an agreeable ouf!—awake to agreeable titillations of excitement. General Adgate's niece, lovely and rich, admirable combination—Miss Adgate (Ruth Adgate, they already called her, didn't she belong to them?) had arrived. The event, discreetly mentioned in the Oldbridge Morning Herald, stared them in the face. Some boasted a glimpse of her, the day before, seated in the brougham beside her uncle; a pretty girl with reddish brown hair. Others had seen of her nothing but her outward manifestations on the luggage cart—two big brass-bound cork trunks, a cabin trunk, precisely similar, a square hat-box, a dressing case and a dark-eyed Italian maid.
The man of all work, Jo, brought this luggage into the house, with the gardener's assistance, and up to Ruth's rooms. Now he wiped the perspiration from his face. Arms akimbo, brows warped in puzzled frown, he glared at the encumbrances.
“Well, I be durned!” he burst forth. “Glad I ain't got any of them things to carry round when I go a travelling. One carpet bag's big enough for me, when I visit my folks, to Falls Junction.”
“Lucky you're glad,” Martha, the efficient, the tart, the very tart housemaiden snapped, and put him instantly in his place. “Not likely soon, we'll catch you towering it with a valet and trunks.”