The Carstyles belonged to the all-the-year-round Millbrook of
paper-mills, cable-cars, brick pavements and church sociables, while
Mrs. Vance, the aunt with whom Vibart lived, was an ornament of the
summer colony whose big country-houses dotted the surrounding hills.
Mrs. Vance had, however, no difficulty in appeasing the curiosity which
Mrs. Carstyle’s enigmatic utterances had aroused in the young man.
Mrs. Carstyle’s relentless veracity vented itself mainly on the “summer
people,” as they were called: she did not propose that any one within
ten miles of Millbrook should keep a carriage without knowing that she
was entitled to keep one too. Mrs. Vance remarked with a sigh that Mrs.
Carstyle’s annual demand to have her position understood came in as
punctually as the taxes and the water-rates.
“My dear, it’s simply this: when Andrew Carstyle married her years
ago--Heaven knows why he did; he’s one of the Albany Carstyles, you
know, and she was a daughter of old Deacon Ash of South Millbrook--well,
when he married her he had a tidy little income, and I suppose the bride
expected to set up an establishment in New York and be hand-in-glove
with the whole Carstyle clan. But whether he was ashamed of her from the
first, or for some other unexplained reason, he bought a country-place
and settled down here for life. For a few years they lived comfortably
enough, and she had plenty of smart clothes, and drove about in a
victoria calling on the summer people. Then, when the beautiful Irene
was about ten years old, Mr. Carstyle’s only brother died, and it turned
out that he had made away with a lot of trust-property. It was a horrid
business: over three hundred thousand dollars were gone, and of course
most of it had belonged to widows and orphans. As soon as the facts were
made known, Andrew Carstyle announced that he would pay back what his
brother had stolen. He sold his country-place and his wife’s carriage,
and they moved to the little house they live in now. Mr. Carstyle’s
income is probably not as large as his wife would like to have it
thought, and though I’m told he puts aside, a good part of it every
year to pay off his brother’s obligations, I fancy the debt won’t be
discharged for some time to come. To help things along he opened a law
office--he had studied law in his youth--but though he is said to be
clever I hear that he has very little to do. People are afraid of him:
he’s too dry and quiet. Nobody believes in a man who doesn’t believe in
himself, and Mr. Carstyle always seems to be winking at you through a
slit in his professional manner. People don’t like it--his wife
doesn’t like it. I believe she would have accepted the sacrifice of the
country-place and the carriage if he had struck an attitude and talked
about doing his duty. It was his regarding the whole thing as a matter
of course that exasperated her. What is the use of doing something
difficult in a way that makes it look perfectly easy? I feel sorry for
Mrs. Carstyle. She’s lost her house and her carriage, and she hasn’t
been allowed to be heroic.”
Vibart had listened attentively.
“I wonder what Miss Carstyle thinks of it?” he mused.
Mrs. Vance looked at him with a tentative smile. “I wonder what _you_
think of Miss Carstyle?” she returned,
His answer reassured her.
“I think she takes after her mother,” he said.
“Ah,” cried his aunt cheerfully, “then I needn’t write to _your_ mother,
and I can have Irene at all my parties!”
Miss Carstyle was an important factor in the restricted social
combinations of a Millbrook hostess. A local beauty is always a useful
addition to a Saturday-to-Monday house-party, and the beautiful Irene
was served up as a perennial novelty to the jaded guests of the summer
colony. As Vibart’s aunt remarked, she was perfect till she became
playful, and she never became playful till the third day.
Under these conditions, it was natural that Vibart should see a good
deal of the young lady, and before he was aware of it he had drifted
into the anomalous position of paying court to the daughter in order to
ingratiate himself with the father. Miss Carstyle was beautiful,
Vibart was young, and the days were long in his aunt’s spacious and
distinguished house; but it was really the desire to know something
more of Mr. Carstyle that led the young man to partake so often of that
gentleman’s overdone mutton. Vibart’s imagination had been touched by
the discovery that this little huddled-up man, instead of travelling
with the wind, was persistently facing a domestic gale of considerable
velocity. That he should have paid off his brother’s debt at one stroke
was to the young man a conceivable feat; but that he should go on
methodically and uninterruptedly accumulating the needed amount,
under the perpetual accusation of Irene’s inadequate frocks and
Mrs. Carstyle’s apologies for the mutton, seemed to Vibart proof of
unexampled heroism. Mr. Carstyle was as inaccessible as the average
American parent, and led a life so detached from the preoccupations of
his womankind that Vibart had some difficulty in fixing his attention.
To Mr. Carstyle, Vibart was simply the inevitable young man who had been
hanging about the house ever since Irene had left school; and Vibart’s
efforts to differentiate himself from this enamored abstraction were
hampered by Mrs. Carstyle’s cheerful assumption that he _was_ the young
man, and by Irene’s frank appropriation of his visits.
In this extremity he suddenly observed a slight but significant change
in the manner of the two ladies. Irene, instead of charging him with
being sarcastic and horrid, and declaring herself unable to believe a
word he said, began to receive his remarks with the impersonal
smile which he had seen her accord to the married men of his aunt’s
house-parties; while Mrs. Carstyle, talking over his head to an
invisible but evidently sympathetic and intelligent listener, debated
the propriety of Irene’s accepting an invitation to spend the month of
August at Narragansett. When Vibart, rashly trespassing on the rights of
this unseen oracle, remarked that a few weeks at the seashore would make
a delightful change for Miss Carstyle, the ladies looked at him and then
laughed.
It was at this point that Vibart, for the first time, found himself
observed by Mr. Carstyle. They were grouped about the debris of a
luncheon which had ended precipitously with veal stew (Mrs. Carstyle
explaining that poor cooks _always_ failed with their sweet dish when
there was company) and Mr. Carstyle, his hands thrust in his pockets,
his lean baggy-coated shoulders pressed against his chair-back, sat
contemplating his guest with a smile of unmistakable approval. When
Vibart caught his eye the smile vanished, and Mr. Carstyle, dropping his
glasses from the bridge of his thin nose, looked out of the window with
the expression of a man determined to prove an alibi. But Vibart was
sure of the smile: it had established, between his host and himself,
a complicity which Mr. Carstyle’s attempted evasion served only to
confirm.
On the strength of this incident Vibart, a few days later, called at
Mr. Carstyle’s office. Ostensibly, the young man had come to ask, on his
aunt’s behalf, some question on a point at issue between herself and the
Millbrook telephone company; but his purpose in offering to perform the
errand had been the hope of taking up his intercourse with Mr. Carstyle
where that gentleman’s smile had left it. Vibart was not disappointed.
In a dingy office, with a single window looking out on a blank wall, he
found Mr. Carstyle, in an alpaca coat, reading Montaigne.
It evidently did not occur to him that Vibart had come on business, and
the warmth of his welcome gave the young man a sense of furnishing the
last word in a conjugal argument in which, for once, Mr. Carstyle had
come off triumphant.
The legal question disposed of, Vibart reverted to Montaigne: had Mr.
Carstyle seen young So-and-so’s volume of essays? There was one on
Montaigne that had a decided flavor: the point of view was curious.
Vibart was surprised to find that Mr. Carstyle had heard of young
So-and-so. Clever young men are given to thinking that their elders have
never got beyond Macaulay; but Mr. Carstyle seemed sufficiently familiar
with recent literature not to take it too seriously. He accepted
Vibart’s offer of young So-and-so’s volume, admitting that his own
library was not exactly up-to-date.
Vibart went away musing. The next day he came back with the volume of
essays. It seemed to be tacitly understood that he was to call at the
office when he wished to see Mr. Carstyle, whose legal engagements did
not seriously interfere with the pursuit of literature.
For a week or ten days Mrs. Carstyle, in Vibart’s presence, continued
to take counsel with her unseen adviser on the subject of her daughter’s
visit to Narragansett. Once or twice Irene dropped her impersonal smile
to tax Vibart with not caring whether she went or not; and Mrs. Carstyle
seized a moment of _tête-à-tête_ to confide in him that the dear child
hated the idea of leaving, and was going only because her friend Mrs.
Higby would not let her off. Of course, if it had not been for Mr.
Carstyle’s peculiarities they would have had their own seaside home--at
Newport, probably: Mrs. Carstyle preferred the tone of Newport--and
Irene would not have been dependent on the _charity_ of her friends; but
as it was, they must be thankful for small mercies, and Mrs. Higby was
certainly very kind in her way, and had a charming social position--for
Narragansett.
These confidences, however, were soon superseded by an exchange, between
mother and daughter, of increasingly frequent allusions to the delights
of Narragansett, the popularity of Mrs. Higby, and the jolliness of
her house; with an occasional reference on Mrs. Carstyle’s part to the
probability of Hewlett Bain’s being there as usual--hadn’t Irene heard
from Mrs. Higby that he was to be there? Upon this note Miss Carstyle
at length departed, leaving Vibart to the undisputed enjoyment of her
father’s company.
Vibart had at no time a keen taste for the summer joys of Millbrook, and
the family obligation which, for several months of the year, kept him
at his aunt’s side (Mrs. Vance was a childless widow and he filled the
onerous post of favorite nephew) gave a sense of compulsion to the light
occupations that chequered his leisure. Mrs. Vance, who fancied herself
lonely when he was away, was too much engaged with notes, telegrams and
arriving and departing guests, to do more than breathlessly smile upon
his presence, or implore him to take the dullest girl of the party for a
drive (and would he go by way of Millbrook, like a dear, and stop at the
market to ask why the lobsters hadn’t come?); and the house itself,
and the guests who came and went in it like people rushing through
a railway-station, offered no points of repose to his thoughts. Some
houses are companions in themselves: the walls, the book-shelves, the
very chairs and tables, have the qualities of a sympathetic mind; but
Mrs. Vance’s interior was as impersonal as the setting of a classic
drama.
These conditions made Vibart cultivate an assiduous exchange of books
between himself and Mr. Carstyle. The young man went down almost daily
to the little house in the town, where Mrs. Carstyle, who had now an
air of receiving him in curl-papers, and of not always immediately
distinguishing him from the piano-tuner, made no effort to detain him on
his way to her husband’s study.