In their attempts to talk he was aware that she was seconding all his
endeavors with intelligence, and with a humorous subtlety to which he
could not pretend. She was suffering from their anomalous position as
much as he, but she had the means of enjoying it while he had not. After
half an hour of these defeats Mrs. Simpson operated a diversion by
coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of
sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then
to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of
cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn,
"Won't you take some lemonade? Won't you have a piece of cake?" and then
went out with her empty tray, and the air of having fulfilled the duties
of hospitality to her niece's company.
"I don't know," said Miss Simpson, "but it's rather early in the season
for _cold_ lemonade," and Langbourne, instead of laughing, as her tone
invited him to do, said:
"It's very good, I'm sure." But this seemed too stiffly ungracious, and
he added: "What delicious sponge-cake! You never get this out of New
England."
"We have to do something to make up for our doughnuts," Miss Simpson
suggested.
"Oh, I like doughnuts too," said Langbourne. "But you can't get the
right kind of doughnuts, either, in New York."
They began to talk about cooking. He told her of the tamales which he
had first tasted in San Francisco, and afterward found superabundantly
in New York; they both made a great deal of the topic; Miss Simpson had
never heard of tamales. He became solemnly animated in their exegesis,
and she showed a resolute interest in them.
They were in the midst of the forced discussion, when they heard a quick
foot on the brick walk, but they had both fallen silent when Miss
Bingham flounced elastically in upon them. She seemed to take in with a
keen glance which swept them from her lively eyes that they had not been
getting on, and she had the air of taking them at once in hand.
"Well, it's all right about Jenny," she said to Miss Simpson. "She'd a
good deal rather go day after to-morrow, anyway. What have you been
talking about? I don't want to make you go over the same ground. Have
you got through with the weather? The moon's out, and it feels more like
the beginning of June than the last of April. I shut the front door
against dor-bugs; I couldn't help it, though they won't be here for six
weeks yet. Do you have dor-bugs in New York, Mr. Langbourne?"
"I don't know. There may be some in the Park," he answered.
"We think a great deal of our dor-bugs in Upper Ashton," said Miss
Simpson demurely, looking down. "We don't know what we should do without
them."
"Lemonade!" exclaimed Miss Bingham, catching sight of the glasses and
saucers on the corner of the piano, where Miss Simpson had allowed
Langbourne to put them. "Has Aunt Elmira been giving you lemonade while
I was gone? I will just see about that!" She whipped out of the room,
and was back in a minute with a glass in one hand and a bit of
sponge-cake between the fingers of the other. "She had kept some for me!
Have you sung _Paloma_ for Mr. Langbourne, Barbara?"
"No," said Barbara, "we hadn't got round to it, quite."
"Oh, do!" Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked
her before; it would have saved them from each ether.
"Wait a moment," cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught
of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the
piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the
refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then
tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with
some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song. "Do you sing?"
"Oh, no. But I like--"
"Are you ready, Bab?" she asked, ignoring him; and she dashed into the
accompaniment.
He sat down in his chair behind the two girls, where they could not see
his face.
Barbara began rather weakly, but her voice gathered strength, and then
poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she
was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he
escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head
drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back
what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which
had grown so precious to him.
Juliet Bingham sounded the last note almost as she rose from the piano;
Barbara passed her handkerchief over her forehead, as if to wipe the
heat from it, but he believed that this was a ruse to dry her eyes in
it: they shone with a moist brightness in the glimpse he caught of them.
He had risen, and they all stood talking; or they all stood, and Juliet
talked. She did not offer to sit down again, and after stiffly thanking
them both, he said he must be going, and took leave of them. Juliet gave
his hand a nervous grip; Barbara's touch was lax and cold; the parting
with her was painful; he believed that she felt it so as much as he.
The girls' voices followed him down the walk,--Juliet's treble, and
Barbara's contralto,--and he believed that they were making talk
purposely against a pressure of silence, and did not know what they were
saying. It occurred to him that they had not asked how long he was
staying, or invited him to come again: he had not thought to ask if he
might; and in the intolerable inconclusiveness of this ending he
faltered at the gate till the lights in the windows of the parlor
disappeared, as if carried into the hall, and then they twinkled into
darkness. From an upper entry window, which reddened with a momentary
flush and was then darkened, a burst of mingled laughter came. The girls
must have thought him beyond hearing, and he fancied the laugh a burst
of hysterical feeling in them both.