"What did you think of it?"
"Nothin'," said this renegade, with astounding callousness, bending himself to the top; it was warranted to spin five minutes at a stretch, and when he had got it started, and was timing it by my watch, he felt his mind released from cares enough to volunteer indulgently: "Father's got a big photograph of it in his office. It's all yellow and fly-specky, because it's so old, you know. I guess it's 'most as old as father—or maybe you."
"Doesn't your father ever tell you about him—what a great man he was, and all?"
"Nope."
"What!" said I, then, unable to believe my ears. "Doesn't he ever talk to you about Governor Gwynne? Doesn't anybody ever tell you to remember that you're a Gwynne?" The top was reeling to its fall, and he was very busy, and, as I could see, justifiably annoyed at my persistence, but this question caused him to look up sharply with the quick suspicion of his twelve years.
"Aw, you're in fun!" he said, eying me shrewdly. "Father wouldn't talk guff like that! And anyway my name's Peters—Gwynne's just my given name—so it wouldn't be true, see?" Guff like that! These were his sacrilegious words. Nothing could have more stingingly brought home to me the lapse of years, or better illustrated the changes in men's minds. And I might here insert some valuable reflections on the vanity of human achievement, and the hollow and transitory character of fame, if I were not uneasily conscious that Governor Gwynne's renown, even in his heyday, was not of a kind to fill the four corners of the universe; it was only in the opinion of his family that it reached those magnificent proportions. Now he and his deeds are forgotten, even by them; the fires are all dead on that fantastic altar which the Gwynnes tended for so many years with so much misplaced zeal. It is not likely, I think, that little Gwynne will ever be troubled by the problems confronting his father in March of the year of Grace, 1883.
In fact, during this time, Gwynne might have been seen any day pondering gloomily before his empty desk, under his grandfather's grimly searching scrutiny, by the hour. The Pallinder business had reached a stage when he could no longer ignore it; yet he could not bring himself to any active measures. Gwynne knew as much as anybody about the colonel's affairs; he had heard certain subdued but very disagreeable rumours. Templeton himself had brought them to him months earlier with a countenance of fright and perplexity. It had not cleared much when he left the office; the little agent could not understand what ailed his patron. He had never known Gwynne to be so indifferent, so careless of the rights and feelings of the other heirs; it was clean out of his character, and Templeton felt with dismay that his surest prop had been removed. If Mr. Peters was becoming as queer as the rest of them, Templeton was almost ready to resign from the management of the Gwynne estate; single-handed, he could not "hold up his end," as he phrased it. In the years of their association he had conceived something like a real affection for the young man, and this change obscurely alarmed and distressed him. Gwynne, about everything else so open, so resourceful, so patient in the control of his difficult kindred, so genially shrewd, would not allow any discussion of the Pallinder delinquency; he shifted the subject, or turned upon Templeton with a manner of such forbidding reticence that the agent shrank discomfited. "Oh, well, Mr. Peters, I—I guess I'd better leave you alone to run your tenants and the family," he would say humbly, reaching for his hat in an apologetic confusion. "I—I ain't ever made such a success of it that I've any call to argue, or advise you how to do," and so would shuffle meekly from the room, leaving the young man, had he known it, in a miserable humiliation. Time and again, Gwynne had made the resolve to have it out with the colonel; and time and again had turned aside from the act, like a hunter refusing the leap. He bargained with himself, loathing his own weakness; he would go and see Colonel Pallinder on such a day at such an hour; he would say to him thus and so. The day came and the hour—why was it that something invariably prevented him? Once he even got so far as the door of Colonel Pallinder's office—and it was locked. The office was closed for the day: it was late Saturday afternoon, and in his heart Gwynne knew the office would be closed—knew it before he left his own. He turned away in a flash of angry contempt of himself—of Pallinder—of the whole shabby business. Yet the colonel was safe for that day; you cannot scour the town for a man, like a bailiff; and Gwynne certainly was not going to follow him to the house, and dun him under the very roof where he himself had received so many hospitalities, such unfailing courtesy and kindness, within hearing of the fellow's innocent wife and daughter! What had Mrs.—ahem!—what had those two poor women done? Very likely they knew nothing whatever about Pallinder's indebtedness; they were both of them touchingly ignorant of money matters. This was strictly an affair for men—he would see Pallinder Monday. And so Gwynne strode away home, to dinner and a change of dress, and thence, by the most natural sequence in the world, to the Lexington and Amherst cars, and out to the Pallinders'! In one of his spasms of conscience he had refused their urgent invitation to the house party—the irony of his position was apparent, even to him; but he balanced the scales by going out night after night to the rehearsals of "William Tell," wherein he bore his part with a feverish enthusiasm that surprised his friends.
It might have been noticed, but, as a matter of fact, I am sure hardly anybody did notice, that Gwynne was the only one of the family who figured in the theatricals, or, in the pungent everyday phrase, had anything to do with the Pallinders. Marian Lawrence had been asked to the house party, and had eagerly promised to come, but in a day or so Mrs. Pallinder received a charming, apologetic, and graceful little note from Mrs. Lawrence, declining on Marian's behalf, for some vague reason. The truth is, Mrs. Horace Gwynne, on hearing of the plan, had once again ordered out her barouche and driven over to the Lawrences', upright and stern, with the stark face of Doom. And after a heated conference with the mother, the note had been despatched; Mrs. Lawrence sat down and cried heartily with the disappointed girl when that dire act had been performed—but neither of them thought of disobeying Cousin Jennie. When they met Mrs. Pallinder face to face coming out of church next Sunday morning they were both a good deal flustered; they flinched before Mrs. Pallinder's steadily radiant smile, and were devoutly glad, I think, to escape from her neighbourhood into the crowd. Archie Lewis walked home with Marian, and raised his hat as a carriage spun by—"That was the Pallinders with Miss Baxter," said Archie, observing with a passing surprise that his companion made no sign of recognition. "Was it? I didn't see them," said Marian stoutly, looking straight in front of her with very red cheeks. Not so long before, Mazie had been one of her most intimate friends. Look on that picture, and now on this! What was the matter with all the Gwynnes? Little old Eleanor and little old Mollie, on seeing the colonel less than half a square off, advancing upon them, already uncovered, courtly, bland, with outstretched hand—the two old sisters, I say, fairly took to their heels up a side street, with scared and shrinking faces. They gathered up their virgin skirts and fled shudderingly as from contamination. Mrs. Horace Gwynne, alone of them all, possessed the courage of her convictions. Erect in her barouche, she encountered and returned Mrs. Pallinder's smile with a salute so casual, so perfunctory that it suggested the recognition she would have bestowed upon her cook in event of a public meeting with that functionary. Mrs. Pallinder bit her lips; she reddened through her rouge—and the next moment was gaily bowing to another acquaintance as if life meant nothing to her but this pleasant exchange of civilities. "Of course I never would deliberately cut anybody," Mrs. Horace explained later; "that sort of behaviour is childish and ill-tempered. But I flatter myself I know as well as anyone how to put people in their proper place, and intimate my opinion of them, without talking or acting like a washerwoman. I wanted Mrs. Pallinder to understand that while I was absolutely indifferent to such a matter as the back-rent she owed me and every one of us, I did not approve of the principle of the thing. She knew perfectly well what I meant. And at receptions or wherever she happened to be in the same company with me afterwards, I simply didn't see her at all! I was always talking to someone else, or had my back turned. She understood—a person like that!" I dare say Mrs. Pallinder did understand; she was not without some previous experience, and it is likely deserved every snub and stab which Mrs. Horace, with the just severity of a good and upright woman, inflicted on her. So must we all lie upon the beds we make.
This was the secret of the Gwynnes' altered demeanour; it was, of course, not the failure to pay them their rent to which they objected, but the appalling principle, or lack of principle, it indicated. At least, that is what they all and severally declared afterwards. At the time, with characteristic Gwynne reticence, they kept their troubles to themselves; no set of conspiring revolutionists could have been more close-mouthed. Their behaviour in this instance was of a piece with the futile pride that prompted their efforts to distract the public mind from Caroline—from Steven—from Sam Peters. What! Drag their noble name through the mud and riot of a Common Pleas suit? Associate their house and the memory of Governor Gwynne with a debasing scandal about Money! I should not care to reveal the arts by which Gwynne put off the hour of retribution for the Pallinders, playing upon these familiar strings with a skill he himself despised. Even he, in the end, sounded the note once too often, as we have seen in the case of old Steven, to whom the sum, small as it was, meant more than to the other members of the family. For Steven, once away from the blandishments of Mrs. Pallinder, naturally reverted in the shortest possible space of time to his previous mood of brooding indignation. He had parted from Doctor Vardaman with a confused notion that everything was going smoothly—that Gwynne would settle with the Pallinders in a few days—a week, perhaps, at furthest. It had not been stated in so many words; none the less Steven carried away these ideas planted within him either by Mrs. Pallinder's soothing flatteries, or by the doctor's well-meant efforts at comforting and diverting him. He waited a day or two, eagerly inspecting every mail; he spoke grandly of his expected remittances to his tolerant country neighbours, and alluded to Gwynne with a large air as his man of business. But as the days passed and his man of business made no sign, Steven's slender allowance of patience gave out once more. He wrote to Gwynne, and waited a fevered while for an answer. Wrote again, and with the letter, addressed and stamped, in his pocket, abandoned his design, and took the first train for town. It was with a fierce and resolute face that he stalked into the office that afternoon—and Gwynne had gone out! This delay, to speak in high metaphorical terms which would have delighted Steven's own taste, did not arrest the falling of the levin-brand; it only increased its momentum. In proportion as the moments lapsed, his wrath gathered head. As it happened, he found himself in appropriate company, with his grievance; when he entered the room there sat his cousins, the two Misses Gwynne, with their pale, furtive, startled faces framed in curls and satin rosettes, in their rigid bombazine skirts, Miss Gwynne tremblingly clasping an umbrella, Miss Mollie fingering a foolscap document whereon, if Steven had cared to look, he might have seen some arithmetical calculations similar to his own. They started up, fluttering and ejaculating at his appearance; then sank down disappointed, yet, probably, a little relieved. The two not only dressed, but thought and acted in couples; either one was helpless without the other; and both now wore an air of terrified resolution such as a pair of mice, a pair of pullets might have presented in some desperate crisis of the trap or butcher's knife. Even in their day, a day which recognised but one career for respectable women, which knew not women's colleges or bachelor-maids, or what we call the professional equality of the sexes, Eleanor and Mollie were caricatures of spinsterhood; we looked upon them with as much pity as amusement, I believe. This was a tremendous step for them to take; and horror laid a throttling hold on both at the idea (occurring to them simultaneously) that Cousin Steven might think them indiscreet or unladylike. But Steven was much too preoccupied to spare a thought to their confusion. "Huh, girls!" said he, sat down in Gwynne's revolving-chair, and glowered absently out of the window, beating a tattoo on the desk, and framing the sentences in which he would open his arraignment. "Waiting to see Gwynne?" he inquired, rousing himself with a momentary curiosity after a while.
The twins murmured inarticulately, looking at each other.