There may be little enough humor in this story, given thus barely, but Mr. Perkins's droll tone of voice and the mirthful twinkle in his eye kept us in peals of laughter while he related the adventure. The history gained an added zest from the frankness of the narrator, for it proved once again how little the gold of his nature was cheapened by the dross of an assumed ultra-holiness, which more than anything else is repulsive to young people when coming from a religious Mentor. "Was you ever a little girl?" asks the pranksome Miss Lotta in one of her nursery-rhyme plays of a particularly cross and crabbed old grenadier of an aunt. A similar question was never propounded to Mr. Perkins. No boy in Hurville—even the copper-toed ruffians of the editor's wife—entertains any doubts of the unadulterated boyishness, at some remote period, of Mr. Perkins. His pious monitions and enthusiastic essays to lead the boys in the path of a noble manhood lose nothing from the knowledge.
It was now the turn of Mrs. Marcellus to speak. We peremptorily bade her unfold herself, as did Hamlet the Ghost. She smiled and craved a minute's grace in which to serve us all anew fresh jorums of the fragrant Kyshow Congou—a tea unparalleled which she imports herself direct from Oxford Circus in famed London Town—and when the incense of the fragrant brew rose on the ambient air of the yellow satin drawing-room our hostess desired us to rattle our teaspoons and clatter our cups and saucers with a will, as she thought, she said, that a little confusion would enable her to get through the recital with more courage. In spite of this request, the most unobtrusive mice could scarcely have been more noiseless than we as we listened to her narrative, not a word of which escaped our attentive ears.
"You know," began Mrs. Marcellus, "that it is now five years since the double wedding of my two darling daughters, parting from whom was such a dreadful cross for me to bear. Every mother knows how sharp a pang it gives to transfer to another, almost a stranger—a man whose very existence six months or a year before was unknown to us—the treasured being whose smiles and tears have been since babyhood her mother's rain and sunshine. Ah me! if mothers suffer in this way at the marriage of one daughter, think how doubly great must the trial have been to me when I was called upon to relinquish both my girls at once—to see them both go away on the train, joyous and happy with the men of their choice, while nothing was left for me but to come back here into the empty house and begin a new plan of existence with the vivifying and soul-sustaining element of constant and ever-present love left out! I don't think any one in Hurville had the slightest glimmering of an idea of what I suffered."
Mr. Perkins, who sat next her, shook her hand in testimony of the appreciation of all Hurville of her kindness in never once remitting (in spite of her private feelings) the pleasant social gatherings which were so prized by the community; and all present gave audible assent to the unanimity of opinion on this head.
"You know that some two months before the double wedding I took my daughters to New York for the purpose of completing the purchases I considered necessary to furnish each with a suitable trousseau. Much had been bought here at Mr. Perkins's nice store, almost all the underclothing which was so much admired by their Boston friends when the girls arrived at their husbands' homes was made here by the neat fingers of our Hurville seamstresses, but there were a few things for which the New York style was necessary, or at least so the girls thought, and that was the same thing. We were in New York about ten days, and though every moment, except when we were asleep, was absorbed by the intricate duties of our shopping, my sense of approaching loneliness grew deeper and sadder, until it became so overwhelming that in spite of my efforts to conceal it from them I feared my daughters would observe my melancholy, and that it would cast a gloom over the last joyous days of their maidenhood. But they were too full of spirits and excitement to notice it, and attributed whatever was unusual in my manner to the exceptional fatigue of the occasion. Finally, our task seemed finished, and we started for home laden with purchases, leaving a number of unfinished orders, which were to be sent us by express when completed. We got to the dépôt rather late, and I found a long line of people standing before me at the ticket-office window. I was almost at the tail of an elongated serpent of humanity which wriggled forward with despairing slowness, and after standing a while I impatiently left the ranks and went to where my daughters were sitting. 'We shall never get all that baggage checked in time,' I said: 'I'm afraid we can't get off by this train.' At that moment a young gentleman who was awaiting his turn, and was only the second or third person from the window, leaned toward us and said to me, 'I'll get your tickets for you if you'll allow me. How many? Three?'—'Yes,' I answered: 'three for Hurville, please,' offering him the money. 'Never mind that now: wait till I bring you the tickets;' and I saw him pay for them out of his well-stuffed wallet. Of course I refunded, with many thanks, as soon as he brought the tickets, which he did in a minute or two, and I then hurried away to check the baggage, while the girls went on the train to secure seats together and get the conductor to let us face each other.
"We had a pleasant day for our journey, but the train was uncomfortably crowded. A succession of way-passengers, one after another, absorbed our vacant seat, and prevented the girls from indulging in that exchange of secret, and in general highly-laughable, confidences with which young people of their age are always bubbling over. Some of these local passengers were not very pleasant company, being frequently encumbered with market-baskets which were not only in everybody's way, but proclaimed by unmistakable odors the nature of their contents. Seeing that it was impossible for us to retain the fourth seat, and having learned from the conductor that there was no room in the parlor-car, it was really a great relief, as a certainty of escape from unpleasant companionship, when the same young gentleman who had kindly helped me at the ticket-office came up and asked if we had any objection to his sitting there, as he had given up two seats in succession to ladies, and had been standing the most of the time since we left New York. Of course we assented, and for the first time I examined our fellow-traveller minutely. He was very good-looking—a blond, a style of coloring that I have always particularly admired in a man when it does not degenerate into effeminacy, as it certainly did not in this instance. In figure he was tall and slender, with the erect and graceful carriage of the accomplished soldier, not the awkward stiffness of the recruit. His eyes were a deep, rich blue, almost violet—eyes that in themselves would have been sufficient to make a woman's reputation for beauty: his long silken moustache shaded from blond to golden red, and was parted fanlike over his vermilion lips, fragrant and glowing with youth and health. His manners were essentially those of distinguished society, and his well-cut gray travelling-suit, his superlatively fine linen, his tiny gold watch-chain with a valuable pearl set in the slide, his fresh gloves, his dark-blue necktie carelessly twisted in a sailor's knot, his fine shoes fitting every curve of his aristocratic foot and covered by neat cloth gaiters buttoned at the side, his elegant travelling-rug rolled in a pair of Russia-leather straps, his stylish umbrella, his fine handkerchief embroidered evidently in Paris in quite a new way—a fac-simile of a seal in red wax, with a monogram and crest standing out upon it—above all, his silver-fitted travelling-bag, even finer than those we had priced at Tiffany's for one hundred and fifty dollars each,—all gave evidence of a position of something more than ease in regard to money; while his beautifully-white teeth, his exactly-parted hair, his scrupulously-tended hands, all spoke of that extreme care of the person which unmistakably indicates the habit of contact with people of dignity and good-breeding. Remember, friends, I did not judge my new friend from the point of view, naturally restricted, of Hurville. I looked at him from the summits of the forty centuries of civilization of the European capitals, and I at once adjudged him to be a man of the world and a gentleman.
"Of course we fell into conversation, and his tone of thought and mode of expression fully coincided with the elevated character of his appearance. He was English by descent, he told us, but American by birth. His reading had evidently been extensive, and his comments on every subject that arose showed that an original as well as a scholarly mind had been brought to bear upon it. Yet never was he so absorbed in the discussion as to neglect any of those attentions which are so agreeable, even so necessary, to ladies while travelling. His politeness was constantly on the alert, and his quick eye detected wants even before they were fully felt, much less spoken of.
"His journey might or might not be so long as ours. He had taken his ticket for a place he named, a small station in Pennsylvania, where his father's horses and carriage would be waiting to drive him to the town where their home was, a bustling lumber-centre back among the Alleghanies some twenty miles off the railway. His father was the owner of an immense tract of timber-land there, a property which had come into his hands many years ago in England as an offset to a very bad debt incurred by some scamp who had inherited it, but had never seen it and knew not whether it was valueless or the reverse. For thirty years his father had paid taxes on these unpromising forest-lands, and then suddenly there was a rush of enterprise in that direction and the property became a fortune. The timber was of the finest and the demand for it unlimited. He was his father's business-representative in the cities, and had been to Europe also, where he had visited their English relations, who were very high-toned and all that, but not quite so well off now as those of the family who were in the plebeian bustle of successful trade-enterprise in America—to wit, his father and himself. If the coachman and team were at the station when we arrived (we were to take supper there), he should go home with him: if the man and horses were not there, he should find a telegram from his father, in which case he was to go on to Pittsburg, and would see us at breakfast in the morning at the place where we changed cars for Hurville.
"In the course of conversation I mentioned to him the peculiar and interesting circumstance which had called us to New York, the girls both blushing and ejaculating in a duet, 'Oh don't, mamma!' But I know so well the heart of youth, both male and female, that I did not think it right to expose this young man to a misconception in regard to the position of my girls, more especially as ever since he had joined us he had sat and gazed at the seat which I occupied with my younger daughter with a look in his eyes which betrayed the secret of an inward and sudden yearning which was almost pain. To my surprise, the announcement of the approaching wedding of both my girls produced no especial effect upon him. He seemed interested, and indulged in a little graceful badinage; but this was what struck me as so strange: every time he spoke to the girls he was smiling and gay and joking, but every time he turned his eyes on me his expression of face, his whole manner, changed. His gaze became riveted on my features, and his soulful eyes lingered there with a fixity that abashed and disconcerted me. I could not understand it. Why did he look at me so? Years had passed since last that sort of gaze had been fastened upon my face, for it was a gaze which unmistakably says, 'You have made an impression upon me which I cannot resist: everything about you is pleasing to me.' Try as I would to avoid this look, turn my head as I might to escape the gaze of those bewitching eyes—even when I closed my own and feigned sleep—still I felt their tender rays upon me, and never once did I find it otherwise.
"It is this point of the story, friends, where I feel confession so difficult. You who have known me for fifteen years, pursuing unswervingly the prosaic path of duty, will find it difficult to understand the power of the impression this stranger made upon my poor heart, widowed in its prime and at that moment about to be further robbed of all it had to love and cherish. All the years during which I had employed the most rigid rules of subjection over myself seemed to vanish like a mist. Every moment I felt more and more strongly a belief that this new-born passion was sincere, and knew that if it should really prove so the time when it would meet with full and grateful return on my part would not be far distant.