"Yes, I know, the colonel introduced us right off, and handed over the flask and cup just as if it were the most natural thing in the world. 'Here's how, bub!' the old woman said, winked at me, turned the whiskey off like an expert, handed the things back, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Mrs. Pallinder's mother! It's inconceivable! Doctor, I swear you could have knocked me down with a straw. The Pallinders don't seem to make anything of it—but that pretty, delicate-featured woman, and that slender spirited-looking girl, both of them so beautifully dressed, and their manners really charming, Doctor—a little different from what one sees ordinarily, maybe, but charming for all that! Why, the old woman might be their cook—I can't understand it! They take it just as a matter of course."
"Well, I don't know how else you'd have them take it," said the doctor. "She's Mrs. Pallinder's mother, and that's all there is to it. But Mrs. Pallinder did say something to me about the old lady being 'queer'—eccentric, as she put it. That's like charity—it covers a multitude of strange doings."
"Yes, 'queer' accounts for a good deal," said Gwynne, his face sobering. Doctor Vardaman looked at him with regretful tenderness. He walked with us as far as the street, and patted Gwynne's shoulder gently as we parted—an unusual display of feeling from the doctor, who was anything but a demonstrative man.
CHAPTER FIVE
Doctor Vardaman's house was called, in the day when it was built, a Swiss cottage. It was a story and a half high, with a steep-pitched roof, garnished with a kind of scalloped wooden lambrequin pendant from the eaves all around. There were casement-windows with arched tops, and the whole edifice was painted a dark chocolate-brown in accordance, no doubt, with the best Swiss models—at least we never questioned the taste of it. It is possible that the charming and faithful Swiss cottage of to-day may be as much of an offence to the landscape in twenty-five years—so does the old order change, giving place to new. Yet it will always be true that a house derives some curious character from its tenant; the doctor redeemed his cottage; he was the soul of that misbegotten body. It was shabby and down-at-heel, if you like, but it was not bourgeois. There was a charm in his unkempt garden, in the slouching ease of his worn old furniture and carpets, his multitudinous loose-backed books, his dim family portraits in chipped gilt frames. He met all hints at alteration or renewal with an indulgent ridicule. "Fresh paint?" he said. "It would make the house look like a servant-girl dressed for Sunday!" Or: "Better is a horse-hair sofa with brass nails than a plush platform-rocker and veneering therewith!" When the Pallinders moved in, trailing a procession rich as Sheba's past his little iron gate, the doctor viewed it with an indecipherable smile. It was in April, a day of light gusty winds, flashes of sunshine and flashes of rain; and Doctor Vardaman, in his shirt-sleeves, was trowelling amongst his young plants with what he frequently denounced as a frantic and futile energy. "I don't know why I do it," he would say soberly. "Nothing ever grows the better for it; very often nothing grows at all. The Irishman, the negro, the very Chinaman whom for my sins I am constrained to employ about the house, have achieved triumphs in the way of lilies of the valley and young onions that leave me gasping in defeat. They are ignorant, unwashed, dissolute pagans. Ling Chee was a spectre soaked in opium; Erastus absconded with all my clothes, my most cherished razors, and whatever money he could get at—yet they had but to scratch the ground and lo, the desert blossomed like the rose! You may see therein the constant allegory of Vice ascendant and unrewarded Virtue."
He leaned on his spade in an ironically rustic attitude to watch the Pallinder household goods go by—goods, not gods, for everything, as he observed, was of a transcendant and sparkling newness. Most of us live in unacknowledged bondage to certain kind, familiar, sooty, and begrimed, utterly useless hearthstone deities. We cling shamefaced to our rickety old relics. The pair of vases that used to stand on mother's mantelpiece—hideous things they are, too,—the little high chair that was Johnny's—he died in '87, you remember—who has not seen this pathetic lumber voyaging helplessly about from house to apartment, from town to country and back again, hobnobbing peaceably on the rear of the wagon with flower-stands and the gas-range, retiring at last to the garret, but somehow never getting as far as the junk-shop? Sunt lacrimæ rerum—as Doctor Vardaman would have said, being somewhat given to Latin tags after the taste of an older generation. His own house was crowded with these touching reminders; the Pallinders went to the other extreme; either they sternly repressed the mushy sentimentalism that would cherish outworn sticks and stoneware for the sake of auld lang syne, or they never had had any to cherish. "They brought nothing into the town with them, and it is certain they took nothing away," said the doctor afterwards in an awful and irreverent parody. An aroma of fresh packing-stuff and varnish hung about the caravan; bright new mirrors swayed and glanced; and, since the fashions of eighty-one were more or less flamboyant, you might see from afar the roses, poppies, and what-not that bloomed upon the Pallinder rolls of new carpet, the gilt and veneered scrolls, knobs, and channellings of the Pallinder furniture, the Pallinder Tennessee-marble table-tops, carefully boxed, yet—as one may say in a figure—hallooing aloud for admiration of their size and costliness. There was one van filled with hogsheads packed with china; it was whispered that many of the things had been ordered from New York, but most of them were got in town at prices that kept the shop-keepers smiling until their bills were sent in—I am anticipating. The doctor espied the ladies in a carriage at the end, and bowed with the rather exuberant courtesy taught in his youth.
Miss Pallinder returned the salutation; Mrs. Botlisch shouted a jovial "Howdy, Doc.!" Mrs. Pallinder drew back impulsively in a momentary embarrassment; she emerged almost instantly and recognised him, triumphantly gracious. But the doctor resumed his digging, inscrutably grinning at the next shovelful. The fact is, this casual passage vividly recalled his first encounter with these ladies a few weeks earlier, upon one of the occasions when they had driven out to inspect the Gwynne house, before the bargain was closed. Doctor Vardaman, in a sleeve-waistcoat, for the day was cold, was busily spading up his beds, when a carriage drew in beside the iron palings.