MISS VAN’S PARTY AND ANOTHER UNPLEASANTNESS.
One day in the early fall, Mrs. Pinkerton received a letter postmarked
at Paris, which seemed to throw her into a state of extraordinary
excitement. I knew her well enough to be certain that she would not tell
me the news, but that I should hear it later through Bessie. Such was
the case. When I came home towards evening and went up stairs to prepare
for supper, Bessie, who was seated in our room, said in a joyful tone,—
“George is coming home next month!”
“That’s good,” I said; and the more I thought of it the better it
seemed. A new element would be infused into our home life with his
advent, and I confidently believed that the widow’s society would be
vastly more tolerable when he was among us. George had been so long in
Paris that he had become a veritable Parisian. That he would bring
along with him a large amount of Paris sunshine and vivacity to enliven
the atmosphere of our little circle, I felt certain.
“Is he coming to stay?” I asked.
“He don’t know. He says he never makes any plans for six months ahead.
It will depend upon circumstances.”
“Well, that’s Parisian. I’m very glad he’s coming, and I hope
circumstances will keep him here. Isn’t old Dr. Jones pretty nearly
dead? Seems to me George could take his practice.”
“Now, Charlie!”
“It’s all right, puss; doctors must die as well as their patients.”
I broached the subject to mother-in-law at the supper-table,
and—_mirabile dictu!_—she agreed with me that we must keep George with
us when we got him.
In November George arrived. He didn’t telegraph from New York, but came
right on by a night train, and, walking into the house while we were at
breakfast, took us by surprise.
Mrs. Pinkerton taken by surprise was a funny phenomenon, and I’m afraid
propriety received a pretty smart blow when she threw her napkin into a
plate of buckwheat cakes, dropped her eye-glasses, and rushed to meet
the long-lost prodigal.
As for George, he brought such a gale into the house with him—there are
plenty of them on the Atlantic in November—that everything seemed
metamorphosed. He laughed and shouted, and hugged first one of us and
then another, and finally sat down and ate breakfast enough for six
Frenchmen, every minute ripping out some wicked little French oath and
winking at his mother with the utmost complacency. Never since I had
become an inmate of the cottage had we enjoyed a meal so much as that
one. There was an _abandon_, an _insouciance_, an _esprit_, a
_je-ne-sais-quoi_ about this young frog-eater that thoroughly carried
away the whole party, including even Mrs. Pinkerton.
When George had eaten everything he could find on the table, he lighted
a cigarette,—right there in the dining-room, too, and under his
mother’s eyes,—and we had a good, long, jolly talk together, Bessie
sitting between us and feasting her eyes on her brother’s comeliness.
He certainly was handsome.
“I have no plans,” he said, “except to loaf here awhile and wait for an
opening.”
“A French Micawber,” said I. “And I suppose you know all about medicine
and surgery?”
“I have learned when not to give medicine, I believe, and so, I think, I
can save lots of lives.”
A few days after George’s arrival we received a call from the Watsons. I
had never had the pleasure of meeting the Watsons, but I had had the
Watsons held up before me as examples of the right sort of style so many
times, that I felt already well acquainted with them.
Mr. Watson was a very retiring, quiet little man, awed into obscurity by
his wife. After a long and persistent effort to interest him in
conversation, I was compelled to give it up, and to leave him smiling
blankly, with his gaze directed toward the Argand burner.
Mrs. Watson was immense in every sense of the word. Her moral and mental
dimensions were awe-inspiring; and she delivered what I afterwards
found, on reflection, to be very commonplace utterances in a style in
which unction, dogmatism, self-satisfaction, and finality were
predominant. Once, when she had brought forth an unusually imposing
sentence, her husband fairly smacked his lips.
The Watsons had no children. They were among the most prominent
attendants of St. Thomas’s, and the old gentleman was reputed to be
worth about a million.
George came in while the call was in progress, and after greeting the
Watsons, he turned to Mrs. W., and uttered one of the most polished,
delicate, pleasing little compliments it has ever been my fortune to
hear uttered. Then he quietly withdrew into the background.
Just then some more callers were announced, and what was my surprise to
see Mr. Desmond and Miss Van Duzen enter. The former was as resplendent
as to his watch-chain as ever, and his niece looked charming.
Introductions all round followed, and the company broke up into groups.
George took a seat near Miss Van, and a brisk fire of conversation was
soon under way between them, varied by frequent bursts of friendly
laughter.
Mr. Desmond soon drew out Mr. Watson, and their talk was on stocks,
bonds, and the like.
After Mrs. Watson had proved her theory of the laws of the universe, and
had almost intoxicated my worthy mother-in-law with her glittering
rhetoric, the Watsons took their departure. Before the others followed
their example, Miss Van extended an informal invitation to us to attend
a “social gathering” at her uncle’s residence the following Wednesday
evening.
We went, of course, Mrs. Pinkerton, George, Bessie, and I. It was a
pleasant party, and it could not have been otherwise with Miss Van as
the hostess. There was a little dancing,—not enough to entitle it to be
called a dancing-party; a little card-playing,—not enough to make it a
card-party; and there was a vast amount of bright and pleasant
conversation, but still one could not name it a _converzatione_. The
company was remarkably good, and Miss Van’s management, although
imperceptible, was so skilful that her guests found themselves at their
ease, and enjoying themselves, without knowing that their pleasure was
more than half due to her _finesse_.
George was quite a lion, and I envied his easy tact, his unconscious
grace of manner, and his faculty of saying bright things without effort.
He and Miss Van got on famously together, and she found him an efficient
and trustworthy aid in her capacity as hostess.
Mrs. Pinkerton made a lovely wall-flower, and I could not refrain from a
wicked chuckle when I saw her sitting on a sofa, exchanging commonplaces
with a puffing dowager. Presently, however, I noticed that she had gone,
and I found that Mr. Desmond had been kind enough to relieve me from the
onerous duty of taking her down to supper.
I wish I had a printed bill of fare of that supper, for even George,
fresh from Véfour’s and the Trois Frères Provençaux, acknowledged that
it was sublime, magnificent, perfect. We men folks, in fact, talked so
much about it afterwards, that Bessie rebuked us by remarking that “men
didn’t care about anything so much as eating.”
As Fred Marston remarked to me, while helping himself a third time to
the salad, “It’s a stunning old lay-out, isn’t it!” His wife was there,
dressed “to kill,” as he himself said, and dancing with every gentleman
she could decoy into asking her.
After we had come up from the supper-room, Fred Marston pulled me into a
corner, and inflicted on me a volley of stinging observations about the
people in the room. George, Bessie, Mrs. Pinkerton, and Miss Van were, I
supposed, in one of the other rooms; I had lost sight of them.
“Old Jenks lost a cool hundred thousand fighting the tiger at Saratoga,
this last summer,” said Fred. “I had it from a man who backed him. Do
you know that young widow talking with him near the end of the piano?
No? Why, that’s Mrs. Delascelles, and a devil of a little piece she
is,—twice divorced and once widowed, and she isn’t a day over
twenty-five. You ought to know her. By the way, that brother of yours is
a whole team, with a bull-pup under the wagon. Does he let old Pink boss
him around as she does you?”
“It’s a fine night,” I said.
“Delightful! I say, Charlie, it must be a terrible bore to lug the old
woman around to all these shindigs with you, hey?”
“What do you think about the State election?” I demanded.
“The Republicans have got a dead sure thing, I’ll lay you a V. She has
bulldozed you till you don’t dare open your head, my boy. Yours is one
of the saddest and most malignant cases of mother-in-law I ever struck.”
“Fred,” I said, in hopes of bringing his tirade to an end, “your
friendship is slightly oppressive. Confine your attentions to your own
grievances. I will take care of mine.”
“Ah! at last you acknowledge that you have one. Confess, now, that old
Pink is a confounded nuisance!”
“Well, then, yes, she is! Does that satisfy you, scandal-monger? Now,
for Heaven’s sake, shut up!”
I heard a brisk rustling of silk just at my left and a little back of
where I sat, and some one passed toward the front parlor.
“By Jove!” ejaculated Fred, looking intently. “It’s old Pink herself,
and I hope she got the benefit of what we said about her. I had no idea
she was sitting near us.”
“What _we_ said about her!” I repeated. “I didn’t say anything about
her.”
“Yes, you did. Ha, ha! You said she was a confounded nuisance!”
I shuddered.
“Oh, well, brace up! Perhaps she didn’t hear that impious remark,” said
Fred, chuckling maliciously. “Or if she did, perhaps she’ll let you off
easy: only a few hours in the dark closet, or bread and water for a day
or two.”
“Confound your mischief-making tongue!” I growled. “Here comes Miss Van
Duzen to bid you quit spreading scandal about her guests.”
Miss Van Duzen, on the contrary, only wished Mr. Marston to secure a
partner for the Lanciers, which he promptly did.
I sat brooding while the dancing went on, and was somewhat astonished,
when it was over, to see George making for my corner.
“How’s this?” he said. “Didn’t you go home with them?”
“With them? What! You don’t mean to say—”
“But I do, though! Bessie and mother made their adieux half an hour
ago, and I thought of course you had gone home with them, as nothing was
said to me. This is a pretty go! Bessie must have been ill.”
“Nonsense!” I exclaimed. “I should have known if that was the case.
Where’s Miss Van?”
“I saw her. She thought it was odd, but supposed you had gone with them.
What could have started them off in that fashion?”
“Well, well, don’t let’s stand here talking. Come on.”
We did not stop for ceremony. Rushing up stairs, we donned our hats and
coats, and made our way out to the sidewalk without losing any time. I
hailed a carriage, and we drove rapidly out of town. It was about half
past one o’clock when we arrived home. There were lights in our room and
in Mrs. Pinkerton’s chamber. George followed me up stairs, and I tapped
at the door of our room.
“Is it you, Charlie?” said Bessie’s voice.
“Yes,—and George.”
She opened the door. It was evidently not long since their arrival
home, for she had not begun to undress.
“Explain, for our benefit, the new method of leaving a party,” said
George, “and why it was deemed necessary to give us a scare in
inaugurating the same.” He threw himself into an easy-chair.
“Perhaps Mr. Travers is better able to tell you why mother should have
left in the way she did,” said Bessie, trying to make her speech sound
sarcastic and cutting, but finding it a difficult job, with her breath
coming and going so quickly.
“The deuce he is!” roared George. “Come, Charlie, what have you been up
to? I must get it out of some of you.”
“I am utterly unable to tell you why your mother should have left in the
way she did,” was all I could find to say.
“Sapristi! This is getting mysterious and blood-curdling. The latest
_feuilleton_ is nothing to it. Must I go to bed without knowing the
cause of this escapade? Well, so be it. But let me tell you, young
woman, that it wasn’t the thing to do. If you find your husband flirting
with some siren, you must lead him off by the ear next time, but don’t
sulk. Good night.”
George walked out and shut the door after him.
“See here, Bessie,” I said kindly, “don’t cry, because I want to talk
sensibly with you.”
She was sobbing now in good earnest.
“I want you to tell me what your mother said to you about me.”
She couldn’t talk just then, poor little woman! But when she had had her
cry partly out, she told me.
Her mother had not told her a word of what had passed between Fred
Marston and me! The outraged dignity of the widow would not admit of an
explicit account of the unspeakable insult she had received. She had
simply given Bessie to understand that I had uttered some unpardonable,
infamous slander, and had hustled the poor girl breathlessly into a cab
and away, before she fairly realized what had happened.
I then told Bessie what our conversation had been, and left her to judge
for herself. I had not the heart to scold her for her part in the French
leave-taking, though it made me feel miserable to think how few
episodes of such a sort might bring about endless misunderstandings and
heart-aches.
Of course more or less talk was caused by the mysterious manner of our
several departures from Miss Van’s party; and, thanks to Fred Marston
and his wife and similar rattle-pates, it became generally known that
there was a skeleton in the Pinkerton closet.
Miss Van soon heard how it came about, and nothing could have afforded a
more complete proof of her refinement of character than the delicacy and
tact with which she ignored the whole affair.