family, and after the first glance it was not observed whether they
came into the kitchen or went strolling down the vegetable garden
together. But some time after the house should have been closed and
Roxy should have been reposing by Kitty’s side, it was found that she
had not come in, and the hat and feather with which she exaggerated her
stature were seen conspicuously touched by the ray of the late-rising
moon outside the high street fence. Needless to say that Binns was not
seen at all.
But Binns was present all the same, as in the active conversation going
on out there, in answer to Roxy’s shrill expostulations, a gruff
little growl seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth--the voice of
Binns.
“But I’m all ready, Binns. I’ve got everything except the carpet and
the cooking-stove, and I haven’t asked you to get a thing, and I’ve
spent all the money, except enough for them, that I’ve laid up since
I’ve been having my wages myself.”
“You needn’t,” said the unseen owner of the growl. “Nobody asked you
to.”
“I didn’t wait for anybody to ask me. It isn’t my way. I like to be
generous. I meant to surprise you and please you, and show you that I
came to you pretty forehanded.” And here Roxy’s voice was apparently
drowned in tears.
“I can’t help it,” muttered Binns, in the pause. “Mother says it’s
ridic’lous; she says side by side we look like a clothes-pin and a
clothes-pole, and we’ll have everybody laughing at us.”
“I’ll have everybody laughing at _me_,” sobbed Roxy, her voice rising
to the surface again. “They’ll say--I don’t know what they won’t say!
And that spiteful Kitty! And oh, Binns, when I’d counted on such a
happy home!”
“Mother says there never was such a tall woman in the family,” growled
the bass tones again.
“As if tallth made any difference in hearts!” cried Roxy, very
reasonably.
“And I ain’t old enough to go and be married. And I don’t want to be,
either. I never said yes, hi, or no about it. And when I don’t want to
be, I don’t see--”
“Binns,” said Roxy, solemnly, “I could sue you for breach of promise
to-morrow”--as she paused an inarticulate rumble spoke for Binns’s
shudder--“if I was so mean as some folks,” she added.
“Then you ain’t going to,” he said. “And besides, what good ’d it do
you? I ’ain’t got nothing.”
“Your mother has,” answered Roxy, with repeated solemnity, as became
the implied and dreadful threat, which again gave Binns pause. “But I’d
scorn it,” said Roxy, after letting the idea work a moment. “I don’t
hold my affections so slight that any money--Oh, Binns! If you feel too
young to settle yet, and want to have your fling out, I’ll wait--”
“There’s no use in waiting,” ejaculated Binns.
“That’s just what I say,” cried Roxy, in a sudden flush of hope and
misinterpretation. But the dead silence told her mistake. “Do you mean
to say it’s all off?” she cried, in despair.
“It’s all off,” growled Binns, in the boldness of desperation. “My
mother says--”
“Oh, bother your mother!” exclaimed Roxy.
Perhaps Binns looked aghast at such a proposition, for she added at
once, “I mean--I don’t mean--any disrespect to her. But I never knew
that mothers could--”
“Mine can,” said Binns, comprehending the hiatus, and still under the
impulse of his last access of courage. “My mother stood by me when I
couldn’t stand alone. And now I’m going to stand by her.”
“I never asked you not to!” cried out Roxy. “I’d be as good a daughter
to her as any she’s got. I know she’d like my short-cake. And oh,
Binns, it would have been so nice and cosey for you when you came home,
and I had onions all smothering in the spider, and there’s nobody can
fry the rind any crisper than I can.” And at this juncture a rush, a
stumble, a quick patter of footsteps, might have been heard, and Binns
had resorted to his last refuge, as usual, and was running away up the
street and out of sight as fast as his little legs could carry him.
And Roxy came into the house, and sat down by the kitchen window in
the moonlight, and cried as if she were doing the weeping for all the
disconsolate damsels in the world, and got up and found herself some
tarts, and ate them with a relish, feeling in every mouthful that Binns
would never have those tarts to-morrow, and went to bed and to sleep.
The next day an air of expectation kept Roxy all alert, and her
hope that possibly Binns had run home to ask his mother, after all,
alternated with her despairing certainty that she should never see him
again. Occasionally she burst forth in a song that showed the drift of
her thoughts:
“Go ask your mother for fifty cents
To see Bill Barnum jump the fence,”
the quickly following tears obscuring the rest of the words that had
once come home with her from a circus. But the despairing certainty
became a fixed one when a week passed, and the long, thin young
man still came to take the orders. She made no attempt at pride or
concealment. She tried to do her work, and she failed. And she went
away at last, saying her heart was broken, and she could live no longer
in a place full of cruel associations.
A year afterwards, Roxy having been heard of as established in another
home, and paying her attentions to another object, it was presumed that
the old wound was healed; and her former mistress, happening to meet
her one day in the street-car, was pleased with the smiling face that
towered over her under its tall hat and scarlet feather. This lady had
what she called a warm interest in humanity, but what her husband was
daring enough to call an intense curiosity, and the unexpected meeting
with Roxy inspired her with a keen desire to know something further
of the tragic story of Binns. But she could not bring herself to the
fateful point, and was spared the trouble by Roxy herself asking her
if Binns came for the dinner orders nowadays, and closing the brief
conversation that ensued by turning a melancholy eye upon her former
mistress, and sighing, as she left the car,
“Oh, it hurts there still!”
And so one year passed and another, and the world rolled over on its
sunny side, and rolled over again on its dark one, and the clouds
of sorrow broke in their sad deluge, and the sun burst forth again,
filling the horizon with transformation, and new points in every
landscape rose in brilliancy or sank into shadow, and Roxy was one of
the points that sank into shadow--the shadow of forgetfulness.
It is a singular liability we have, after losing sight of any in whom
we have had interest, to feel as if they remained exactly where we
left them, heedless of the way in which the forces of the universe are
building up and tearing down, and of the fact that fate and fortune
never let us remain at rest. If any of the old household thought of
Roxy, it was still as some one’s kitchen-girl laying her sieges and
approaches to an unwilling heart. Is not Gladys, in our memory, still
at her lattice gazing after the cavalry officer? But fate and fortune,
despite our indifference, were conscious of Roxy as an integral atom
of the great cosmos, and in the interval of forgetfulness were as busy
with her as with any other of the lovers whose loves give the _raison
d’être_ to the universe.
It was late one summer afternoon, a few years after that eventful night
when Binns’s footsteps had been heard pattering up the street, that
Roxy’s former mistress, having been taken by her liege lord on a little
tour of their native county, passed slowly along a rural lane, some
dozen miles away from home, and held the reins while her husband paused
to throw back the top of the phaeton, looking about the soft afternoon
landscape meanwhile. On one side, a thick woodland shut off the view
and the easterly winds, but on the other was a rolling hill-country
broken by farms and orchards, and just at hand was a tiny cottage, with
open windows and blowing curtains that allowed sight of the interior
and its various mottoes framed upon the walls. A cow grazed in the
grass-plot beyond; there were symptoms of a pig-sty, and a decided
hennery in the rear; and there were lines of cabbages like great green
roses, and potatoes and onions and beans and blushing beet-tops, and
a honeysuckle and a rose-bush, and a bed of sweet-peas and a beehive,
and a gigantic elm-tree overtopping everything. What a picture of
content and comfort it was! “What a country this is,” said the lady in
the phaeton, “where the poorest can have such a peaceful home as this,
where some happy young farmer has brought home his timid little wife,
and their cares are few, and they have nothing to regret, and little
left to wish for!”
Somebody was bustling about inside the pretty nest, a white cloth was
spread upon the table, there was a clatter of dishes, and then there
stole forth an odor--an odor of nectar and ambrosia to the hungry
travellers a dozen miles from home--an odor of onions smothering in the
spider. Suddenly a figure appeared at the side window beckoning some
one, a tall, an immensely tall and gaunt young woman, and on her face,
her reddish face, with its snapping, unpaired brown eyes, surmounted
by a wilderness of slate-pencil crimps, a smile that could only be the
habitual smile of perfect satisfaction. “Stop a moment,” said the lady
in the phaeton--“one moment. Surely--that must be--it is--” Just then
the young woman sat down by the window, and began to beguile the tedium
of her waiting with music--nasal, to be sure, but still a familiar
tune. “Hark!” said the gentleman. “Did I hear a bagpipe?”
“A comb and paper,” said the lady. “I wonder if she keeps it still in
the drawer with the nutmegs?”
I don’t know why neither of that guilty couple cared at that crisis to
leave the phaeton. It would seem natural to have delayed a little, to
have asked some questions, to have tasted, perchance, the contents of
that redolent dish, to have learned if there are any in the world to
whom their very wishes give them not their wish, to have learned if
cruel fate were as cruel to any in the fact as in the fear. But the
lady shrank into her corner, and the gentleman laid an urgent hand upon
the reins, and they went on and up the winding road. Who is it cares
to see the struggle of the fly in the web? For at the moment that they
started up, as if for the capping race at Coulterlee, there appeared,
coming slowly round the row of pole-beans, the person who had been
beckoned--a little scrap of a fellow, stout and stocky in his long blue
blouse, pale-eyed, red-headed, freckled, holding in his arms a teething
baby, which he soothed with a monotonous melody as he sang, half under
his breath,
“If I had minded mother
I’d not been here to-day;
But I was young and foolish,
And easy led astray.”
Unmistakably it was Binns.
A COMPOSITE WIFE
A COMPOSITE WIFE
When Mr. Chipperley lost his wife he was for a time very unhappy. He
felt a little angry when he saw other women walking in the sunlight.
He missed the flattery, the affection, the object of love. And he
seemed to think all that furnished him with sufficient reason for
marrying again, which he did speedily. He lived very happily with the
next venture, although now and then the pale and pretty young face of
her predecessor slipped in across his mental vision of the other, and
it was a little difficult to separate them. And when a third young
woman ruled his affections, it was an effort for him to say if it
were May’s lower lip that looked as if a bee had stung it, or if it
were Mary’s upper lip that had the Cupid’s-bow curves, or if it were
Maria that smiled with the deep Greek corner in the mouth; and in his
memory gleams of Mary’s eyes shot through May’s glance, veiled with
Maria’s long lashes. May’s pale cheek wore the rose bloom of Mary’s;
the outline of Mary’s broad brow melted into the oval of Maria’s
Madonna-like forehead; and in this composite memory of a wife May’s
frown and Maria’s smile were fast becoming indistinguishable when he
first laid eyes on Honor Humphreys, who overshot the whole picture
with her great shining hazel eyes and black brows, her full red lips,
and the faultless teeth that flashed with white light in the dark
countenance where the rare red only now and then blossomed--a tall and
superb young creature, whose health and vitality and lustre completely
wiped out the whole mental photography of poor May and Mary and Maria.
“Gracious!” said Honor to her gentle cousin, Marian Marcy. “Don’t
talk of him! He’s married all to pieces. Do you suppose I will take a
fragment of a husband? Am I going to make one of a harem? What does
papa mean? The idea of my marrying an old man like that!”
Poor Mr. Chipperley was only forty-five, but such is the point of view
of youth that forty-five was all the same to her as one hundred and
forty-five.
“I don’t care if he is made of money!” cried Honor. “He looks as if he
were--of old bank-bills.”
“Old bank-bills,” said Marian, “make a slag, you know, almost as
splendid as precious stones.”
“He hasn’t reached the slag stage. The fancy of his daring to send me
roses!” as her cousin opened for her a box that had just come in. “Put
them all back in the box, Maddy, right away; I won’t touch one of them!”
“But, Honor, look at these great beauties--an armful--the stems more
than half a yard long. Why, they cost a dollar and a half apiece,”
laying one with its soft reflection on the pale oval of her cheek.
“I don’t care if they cost a fortune apiece. Wear his roses, indeed!
I’d rather have a green leaf of Ted’s picking. Here, Pinky, take them
away; throw them out, every one!”
“What a gorgeous twenty-five-dollar breast-knot Pinky will wear with
her best young man to-night.”
“I hope Mr. Chipperley will see her then. Make haste back, Pinky; you
must have the rose-red chiffon out presently--there! I declare, what
can papa be thinking of not only to be willing I should accept that old
Mormon, but to want me to! Why, I might as well go out to Utah, where
they drive their wives forty abreast, and be done with it!”
“But, at any rate, Mr. Chipperley has the decency to drive his wives
tandem.”
“No, he hasn’t. The law compels him. Oh, you make me shiver!” she
exclaimed, with a mock shudder, as she turned over the laces and
ribbons in the drawer before her. “The idea of going tandem with three
ghosts! Poor ghosts--poor dead women! They must have lost all identity
by this time. Mrs. Chipperley--Mrs. Theodore Chipperley--which of
them--all of them--none of them! And to be a fourth, and put on their
name! I should feel that I was putting on their shroud! Oh, oh, oh, I
hate the ground he walks on!”
“And love the ground Ted dances on.”
“Poor Ted! Poor Ted! Oh, Maddy, what does make all the inequality?
That horrid Chipperley man with millions, and Ted, the delightful, the
original, the good, the brilliant Ted, without a penny to his name!”
“Mr. Chipperley has been brilliant enough to make a fortune.”
“Well, he may keep it,” smoothing out a Honiton flounce. “I don’t want
it.”
“As if you could do without a fortune, Honor, you who have always had
so many luxuries that you don’t know what the necessities are. Look at
that flounce--”
“I know it. I should never have another inch of real lace if I
married Ted. And--well--will you tell me, Maddy, why Ted doesn’t say
anything?”--her face the color of a damask rose--“I can’t ask a man to
marry me--”
“I could, if need were.”
“You! Well, for a demure little cat that dares to look at a king you
would take a prize in a tabby show,” said Honor, folding away the
flounce, and leaning both round elbows among the rings and pins of
the toilet cushions, while she looked at a dark and handsome siren
in the glass. “I shall never forget, Maddy, how you went and took
your mother’s necklace off my mother’s neck. I think that did papa
good to the core of his heart. And when mamma got over being startled
she always rather admired you for it. Only she will be even with you
some day.” And then she fell to tying bows and snipping ribbons with
twinkling fingers. “I should make a capital milliner if--oh, if! Well,
Ted does everything except say the word.” And again the flood of color.
“How can he say the word? What would he do with a wife? Just think,
Honor! Why, he’d be a wretch if he did speak! A man with no more
possibilities than Ted and with so many attractions, ought not to come
where you and Helen and Teresa and the rest are--you butterflies who
have only fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life.”
“Marian, you are just an old maid--a puritanic, conscientious,
cantankerous old maid! There--don’t you think these little lavender
and mignonette bows add to the butterfly appearance of this particular
butterfly?”
“You are perfectly hopeless, Honor. You forget there is a future. You
just dance in the beam to-day. Your father’s interest in the Humphreys
estate dies with him. It’s a big interest to-day; but it reverts to
the co-residuaries, and all his children inherit is the nice little
family quarrel--that has given the General occupation ever since
lawyers and surrogates and the rest ate up the whole of your mother’s
fortune--and a parcel of most expensive tastes and habits. And here is
Mr. Chipperley, a nice young man--”
“Old Chipperley!” dropping the scarf over her hair, while Marian
colored and coughed.
“Young--ah--comparatively,” stammered Marian.
“Twice my age, at all events,” tying the scarf with a bewitching knot.
“A worthy gentleman!” exclaimed Marian, the blush still enlivening her
fair cheek, “against whom there is nothing to be said, and who offers
an ante-nuptial settlement of a million dollars. And you have been out
three years, and have let Ted keep every eligible man away. And your
father feels his life insecure--and you’ve all lived so at the top of
the wave that there won’t be a dollar left the day after his funeral--”
“Marian Marcy!” turning on her with a diamond stick-pin in each
hand. “How can you talk so? My dear old father! How can you be so
indelicate--so, so cruel?”
“I hope you are not going to stab me. I am not cruel. I am speaking for
your good--”
“Great good!” with half a sob and half a laugh. “I shall have a
hysteric if you don’t take care!” and the eyes were flaming and the
teeth flashing.
“Have twenty if you want to.” And Marian stood up beside her and looked
her in the face with steady gray eyes that had a steely point behind
their dewy softness. “When it comes to the point,” she said, “and you
are married to a poor man, and your mother and Helen and Teresa and the
boys are homeless and penniless, do you believe you won’t regret Mr.
Chipperley?”
“What a mercy it would be, Maddy, if you were struck dumb.”
Marian laughed. “I’m not angry,” she said, “because your temper shows
that you are beginning to listen to reason. You marry Ted to-day, and
have a happy year or two. And presently you are shabby. And presently
care and anxiety about making bricks without straw have taken off
your bloom, and given your face lines. You go nowhere--no balls and
dinners and operas for you with nothing to wear. You grow irritable. He
finds other places pleasanter than home. He reproaches, you cry. You
reproach, he goes off. And you are more lucky than I think you’ll be if
you settle into anything like tolerable content with him at last, if
you don’t leave him and go off and earn your living as a milliner or a
lady’s maid.”
“Marian!”
“But you marry Mr. Chipperley--you have, possibly, a bad quarter of an
hour, regretting a handsome face and a dashing manner. But you meet
with absolute devotion. You tread on rose-leaves and eat and drink
nectar and ambrosia, and wear purple and fine linen. You have your
palaces, your horses, your servants, and your path through life is a
perfect milky-way of diamonds.”
“I never knew you could be so eloquent, Marian,” with sarcastic
seriousness.
“And the long and the short of it is that you become accustomed to the
way in which your husband surrounds you with sweet observances, and you
are grateful to him, and have a friendly feeling for the rest of your
life. And that is about all you would come out on in the end if you had
married your ideal.”
“And you leave out all the companionship, the oneness, the--the--”
“Three uncommonly nice women have found companionship with Mr.
Chipperley very satisfying.”
“Yes; they had all they wished of it early, and left for parts unknown.
Oh, how bored they must have been!”
“Bored! With Mr. Chipperley!”
“I believe that you are in love with that man yourself, Maddy!”
“Well, now, Honor, I’ve said all I had to say. If you think it over
quietly, and remember that all this time Ted hasn’t whispered a word--”
“Oh yes, he has--whispered--a plenty.”
“He hasn’t spoken out.”
“And not to do that?”
“Is very unmanly.”
“And if he had?”
“It would be very scoundrelly.”
“Marian Marcy, I’ll never speak to you again!”
“Till next time,” said Marian, as she left the room. “There!” she
murmured, her face taking on more than its usual pallor, as the door
closed, “I believe I’ve said every word my uncle asked me to say.”
And Honor burst into tears, tore off her lace scarf, and hid her face
in it, and snatched it away, conscious in the midst of her trouble that
every tear was a spot upon the ribbons, and sobbed out to the image of
herself in the mirror: “Oh! oh! I am so afraid I shall be tempted into
marrying Mr. Chipperley!” And she rummaged out a photograph of Ted from
a chaos of sachets and beads and ribbons and laces, and looked at it,
magnified and haloed through the mist of her tears; and then she had
to bathe her eyes in hot water, and then in cold, and to powder the
lids, and to pale them, by comparison, with a little rouge upon her
cheeks, before Pinky returned and clothed her in the gown the color
of the heart of a damask rose, in which she went off to dinner, where
she was to meet Mr. Chipperley, who hated the color of the heart of a
damask rose.
Mr. Chipperley’s wives had all been pallid women, dressing in pallid
colors. One or two of them would have liked to wear a grass-green gown,
or one even of sea-blue; one more daring than the rest had appeared in
a primrose-colored silk, but it aroused such uncomfortable remarks that
she only wore it once. No; soft grays and mauves were the only wear for
them; and now when their likeness rose on his memory, the fawns and
drabs of their garments were the only distinct thing about it. Those,
too, as delicate eyebrows had merged into dark, positive lines, as blue
eyes had become gray, and now darted forth hazel gleams, were swiftly
suffusing themselves with deep reds and dazzling pinks and glowing
purples. And he felt as though he had forbidden it, and May and Mary
and Maria were wearing these colors in spite of his expressed will. It
had the effect of unmarrying him more than anything else--more than
death itself; and he was decidedly displeased with himself to find
that he was more wildly and passionately in love with this brilliant
creature in her burning reds and yellows than he had been with all his
tender little pearl-gray and indistinct wives put together. It seemed
to Mr. Chipperley that he had been an indistinct man himself till now;
he found himself growing to the measure of his love; he had had to
stoop before; now he must climb; this gorgeous, glowing young woman
was like a light in the sky; one must aspire to her, not stoop; that
was a new sensation. She spoke of politics, and the kingdoms of the
earth made new combinations, and the destinies of nations rearranged
themselves. She talked a little theosophy; he felt this world enlarged
to all the borders of the vast unknown. She spoke of a symphony; he
entered into the secrets of music that he had not dreamed existed. She
sang, and he heard the trumpets on heaven’s ramparts sound. Yet she
knew next to nothing of politics, or theosophy, or music; he rose only
to the demands of his imagination concerning her. If sometimes the
exercises were a trifle wearisome, there was Marian’s gentle denseness
to fall back on and find restful.