"All right, Cousin Steven, never mind," he said soothingly. "I—I just wanted you to be comfortable, you know. You'd just as lief go and see Doctor Vardaman, wouldn't you?"
Steven was readily mollified—or perhaps, diverted would be the better word. Jack? Yes, he wanted to see old Jack—he wanted to talk to him about something. Jack Vardaman was a man of sound sense, if he could be brought to the right views. "He's been cramped by—by his career, and his profession," said the old man, gesticulating with one hand as they walked. "I tried it, studying medicine, you know—but it's not broad enough, Gwynne, not broad enough. Jack finds it hard to grasp any new ideas. I said to him the last time I was in: 'John, this money trouble we're labouring under all proceeds from—from—from the circulating medium. Why have any? Why have any circulating medium? Poverty is a lacking in the essentials of life because of waste on the superfluities through the use of money—circulating medium; you want to rid yourself of the—the—the economic compulsion to wrong-doing—I've been studying a pamphlet by William P. Drinkwater that goes to the heart of the financial situation in this country.' I say, get rid of the circulating medium. Gwynne, do away with it utterly, fall back on exchange of the—the products of labour, and an era of prosperity will set in such as this country has never seen!"
Gwynne reflected with a wry smile that it would be interesting to hear an expression of opinion from Jake Bennett on the subject; times were hard in eighty-one, as some of us remember, and in these disjointed arguments, Gwynne recognised some echo of the political agitations of the day. To be fair, Steven Gwynne was no more astray in speech or manner than many of the William P. Drinkwaters; the exasperating thing about him was that constant appearance of being able to control himself, if he only would, which seems to be one of the specific symptoms of unsoundness.
"You will find that the lack—I mean the absence of a medium of coinage," said Steven, as they climbed on the car—"By George! It is cold, isn't it?" he interrupted himself, "I guess I'll put my mitts on." And, to Gwynne's surprise, he produced those symbols of ostentation and effeminacy from the pocket of his overcoat, and began to adjust them with every display of comfort. They were a bright "Maria-Louise" purple. "Knit worsted, you know," said Steven. "I got 'em at Billy Sharpe's at the corners, for seventy-five cents——"
"You're getting effeminated, Cousin Steven," said Gwynne, soberly. "Mittens! The idea! Do you suppose Adam wore mittens?"
"Well, I understand Adam didn't wear breeches either," said Steven, with an unexpected flash of humour. "I'm not luxurious, anyhow, like you with your kids. But you're young—you'll learn." He laid his hand on Gwynne's arm affectionately. "You're a good boy, Gwynne, if you do get kind of stuck-up notions, you're a good boy," he said with earnestness—and the young man's heart smote him.
He found his cousin so tractable on the journey out that he began to have hopes of persuading Steven to the collar and wash-basin, with Doctor Vardaman's help. "I'd rather Mrs. Pallinder saw him looking clean, anyhow—she's so dainty herself," thought Gwynne, with a burning change of colour. Alas! No such good luck! As they neared the Swiss cottage, they beheld the lady tripping out from the door, exquisitely trim and gracious, smiling and showing all her pretty white teeth, with Doctor Vardaman escorting her to his gate, in his pleasantly formal old way. Mrs. Pallinder dimpled, and flashed her clear grey eyes under their amazingly black lashes and brows at Gwynne; she was en-haloed in rich furs and soft scrolls of ostrich-plumes; she rustled and fluttered with an enticing suggestion of dainty womanliness, and there was something even in the frail absurdity of her little, thin, high-heeled and pointed-toed boots that appealed to the masculine sense almost touchingly. Old Steven Gwynne himself felt this jewelry-box charm; he looked at her with open, child-like, rather frightened admiration. Wealth and luxury for which in the abstract he had—or believed himself in all sincerity to have—so vigorous a disdain, exhibited thus concretely, stunned the old man; Mrs. Pallinder, to the ordinary view merely an unusually handsome and well-dressed woman, somehow represented to Steven that material power, confident, lucky, successful, to which he had long ago bowed down in the person of Governor Gwynne; and, if it had not been for the uplifting consciousness of being that great man's cousin, Steven would have shuffled and stammered before her like any school-boy.
"Mr. Peters," said Mrs. Pallinder, delightedly. She withdrew a hand from her coquettishly fashionable little muff—we wore them very small in those days, a mere cuff of fur—and gave it to Gwynne, who was oddly nervous, with soothing self-possession. The readiness with which she set herself to the business of putting Steven at his ease was a grateful thing to see; she accepted his purple mitt, and shed on him a smile as winning as if he had been the most desirable acquaintance in the world. These courtesies, we have been assured, are, in reality, nothing but small evidences of a kind heart; yet I never thought Mrs. Pallinder a kind-hearted woman. Her elegant cordialities were not spontaneous; she spread the conversation with a thin glittering varnish of smiles, agreeable speeches, pretty conventionalities; one sometimes felt uneasily that her tact was almost aggressively brilliant, her good manners too flawless. But Gwynne, having in mind, maybe, this very incident, was quite enthusiastic about her to his intimates; Mrs. Pallinder was so kind, so considerate, a—a—a really sweet woman—sweet-tempered, he meant, of course, wasn't she? As for Steven, he proclaimed her without exception the most polished lady he had ever met. Doctor Vardaman—but one could not always be sure of what Doctor Vardaman thought. "Mrs. Pallinder was an uncommon sort of woman," he used to say with an unreadable expression. "I admired her very much—almost as much as I wondered at her. When we met at my gate she contrived to look at us three men, as if every one severally were the man in the world in whom she was most interested. Are ladies taught these things from their cradles? I am told so; but I never saw one of them do it so well as Mrs. Pallinder. It's a tolerably stiff job to listen to poor Steven discourse on the circulating medium. Experto credite! I've done it myself for hours at a stretch that I piously hope will count for me when I get to the Place of Punishment. But I'm sure I never could have done it with so perfect a grace as Mrs. Pallinder. We went up to the house, she walking the whole way with Steven, Gwynne and I following in the rear, humbly grateful and admiring. 'You're not a married man, Mr. Gwynne?' says Mrs. Pallinder, snatching at a change of topic in one of the pauses of Steven's eloquence. 'I've met so many charming Mrs. Gwynnes——' 'Madame, I am not,' said Steven. 'Do you know why the eagle is called the bird of freedom, Mrs. Pallinder?' Here," said the doctor, with a malicious grin, "I thought I detected a sort of crooked sequence in Steven's thoughts, but Mrs. Pallinder was as nearly gravelled as I ever saw her; and you must admit the subject was somewhat abruptly introduced. 'A—er—why, I must give it up, I am afraid,' she said. 'It's a riddle, isn't it? I'm not very good at riddles.' 'Because it never mates in captivity, ma'am,' says Steven profoundly. 'That's the way I am; the chains of gold, the circulating——' and I suppose he was going to intimate by a delicate allegory that he couldn't afford a wife and family, but we reached the house at that moment, and the changes in its appearance switched him off, as it were."
The old man was, in fact, rather pathetically overawed by all the Pallinder sumptuousness; he looked down at his boots doubtfully, and trod with caution on the velvet moss-roses and lilies of the south parlour. It required the telling of the cut-glass chandelier story to revive his spirit; and Mrs. Pallinder further smoothed matters by asking his opinion of the new wall-paper with a caressing deference. Afterwards, it is true, Steven went away in a mood of gracious approval, and bragged freely with no little satisfaction about his tenants in his house; but at the first moment, he was both startled and unhappy. There were gilt mirrors all about that gave back a pitiless reflection of the party, and of them all, I believe that Doctor Vardaman was the only one who was not faintly ill at ease. The situation was actually relieved by the entrance of old Mrs. Botlisch, as incongruous a figure in the scene as Steven himself. "And somehow or other," said the doctor, "I am sure the look of her for once was a kind of comfort to Gwynne; it seemed as if she and poor Steven were a—well, a stand-off, with the balance in favour of Steven. You know Mrs. Pallinder was always saying in a gentle regretful way that her mother was 'eccentric.' She was, in fact—ahem!—I am informed by the ladies of my acquaintance," Doctor Vardaman would say, with another grin, "that she was a dreadfully 'common' old person who drank and swore like a trooper, but was as sane as anybody. Whereas, we all know that whatever Steven's faults, he was not—was not entirely responsible."