"But, mother--"
There was an intonation in the protest that hinted at some irritation.
Champney Googe emptied his pipe on the grass and knocked it clean
against the porch rail before he continued.
"Won't it make a lot of talk? Of course, I can see your side of it; it's
hospitable and neighborly and all that, to give the priest his meals for
a while, but,--" he hesitated, and his mother answered his thought.
"A little talk more or less after all there has been about the quarry
won't do any harm, and I'm used to it." She spoke with some bitterness.
"It _has_ stirred up a hornet's nest about your ears, that's a fact. How
does Aunt Meda take this latest move? Meat-axey as usual? I didn't see
her when I went there yesterday; she's in Hallsport for two days on
business, so Tave says."
His mother smiled. "I haven't seen her since the sale was concluded, but
I hear she has strengthened the opposition in consequence. I get my
information from Mrs. Caukins."
At the mention of that name Champney laughed out. "Good authority,
mother. I must run over and see her to-night. Well, we don't care, do
we? I mean about the feeling. Mother, I just wish you were a man for one
minute."
"Why?"
"Because I'd like to go up to you, man fashion, grip your hand, slap you
on the back, and shout 'By Jove, old man, you've made a deal that would
turn the sunny side of Wall Street green with envy!' How did you do it,
mother? And without a lawyer! I'll bet Emlie is mad because he didn't
get a chance to put his finger in your pie."
"I was thinking of you, of your future, and how you have been used by
Almeda Champney; and that gave me the confidence, almost the push of a
man--and I dealt with them as a man with men; but I felt unsexed in
doing it. I've wondered what they think of me."
"Think of you! I can tell you what one man thinks of you, and that's Mr.
Van Ostend. I had a note from him at the time of the sale asking me to
come to his office, an affidavit was necessary, and I found he had had
eyes in his head for the most beautiful woman in the world--"
"Champney!"
"Fact; and, what's more, I got an invitation to his house on the
strength of his recognition of that fact. I dined with him there; his
sister is a stunning girl."
"I'm glad such homes are open to you; it is your right and--it
compensates."
"For what, mother?"
"Oh, a good many things. How do they live?"
"The Van Ostends?"
"Yes."
Champney Googe hugged his knees and rocked back and forth on the step
before he answered. His merry face seemed to lengthen in feature, to
harden in line. His mother left her chair and sewing to sit down on the
step beside him. She looked up inquiringly.
"Just as _I_ mean to live sometime, mother,"--his fresh young voice rang
determined and almost hard; his mother's eyes kindled;--"in a way that
expresses Life--as you and I understand it, and don't live it, mother;
as you and I have conceived of it while up here among these sheep
pastures." He glanced inimically for a moment at the barren slopes above
them. "I have you to thank for making me comprehend the difference." He
continued the rocking movement for a while, his hands still clasping his
knees. Then he went on:
"As for his home on the Avenue, there isn't its like in the city, and as
a storehouse of the best in art it hasn't its equal in the country; it's
just perfect from picture gallery to billiard room. As for adjuncts,
there's a shooting box and a _bona fide_ castle in the Scottish
Highlands, a cottage at Bar Harbor with the accessory of a steam yacht,
and a racing stud on a Long Island farm. As a financier he's great!"
He sat up straight, and freely used his fists, first on one knee then on
the other, to emphasize his words; "His right hand is on one great lever
of interstate traffic, his left on the other of foreign trade, and two
continents obey his manipulations. His eye exacts trained efficiency
from thousands; his word is a world event; Wall Street is his automaton.
Oh, the power of it all! I can't wait to get out into the stream,
mother! I'm only hugging the shore at present; that's what has made me
kick against this last year in college; it has been lost time, for I
want to get rich quick."
His mother laid her hand on his knee. "No, Champney, it's not lost time;
it's one of your assets as a gentleman."
He looked up at her, his blue eyes smiling into her dark ones.
"I can be a gentleman all right without that asset; you said father
didn't go."
"No, but the man for whom you are named went, and he told me once a
college education was a 'gentleman's asset.' That expression was his."
"Well, I don't see that the asset did him much good. It didn't seem to
discount his liabilities in other ways. Queer, how Uncle Louis went to
seed--I mean, didn't amount to anything along any business or
professional line. Only last spring I met the father of a second-year
man who remembers Uncle Louis well, said he was a classmate of his. He
told me he was banner man every time and no end popular; the others
didn't have a show with him."
His mother was silent. Champney, apparently unheeding her
unresponsiveness, rose quickly, shook himself together, and suddenly
burst into a mighty laughter that is best comparable to the
inextinguishable species of the blessed gods. He laughed in arpeggios,
peal on peal, crescendo and diminuendo, until, finally, he flung himself
down on the short turf and in his merriment rolled over and over. He
brought himself right side up at last, tears in his eyes and a sigh of
satisfying exhaustion on his lips. To his mother's laughing query:
"What is it now, Champney?" He shook his head as if words failed him;
then he said huskily:
"It's Aunt Meda's _protegee_. Oh, Great Scott! She'll be the death by
shock of some of the Champo people if she stays another three months. I
hear Aunt Meda has had her Waterloo. Tavy buttonholed me out in the
carriage house yesterday, and told me the whole thing--oh, but it's
rich!" He chuckled again. "He got me to feel his vest; says he can lap
it three inches already and she has only been here two weeks; and as
for Romanzo, he's neither to have nor to hold when the girl's in
sight--wits topsy-turvy, actually, oh, Lord!"--he rolled over again on
the grass--"what do you think, mother! She got Roman to scour down
Jim--you know, the white cart-horse, the Percheron--with Hannah's
cleaning powder, and the girl helped him, and together they got one side
done and then waited for it to dry to see how it worked. Result: Tave
dead ashamed to drive him in the cart for fear some one will see the
yellow-white calico-circus horse, that the two rapscallions have left on
his hands, and doesn't want Aunt Meda to know it for fear she'll turn
down Roman. He says he's going to put Jim out to grass in the Colonel's
back sheep pasture, and when Aunt Meda comes home lie about sudden
spavin or something. And the joke of it is Roman takes it all as a part
of the play, and has owned up to Tave that, by mistake, he blacked Aunt
Meda's walking boots, before she went to Hallsport, with axle grease,
while the girl was 'telling novels' to him! Tave said Roman told him she
knew a lot of the nobility, marchionesses and 'sich'; and now Roman
struts around cocksure, high and mighty as if he'd just been made
K.C.B., and there's no getting any steady work out of him. You should
have seen Tave's face when he was telling me!"
His mother laughed. "I can imagine it; he's worried over this new move
of Almeda's. I confess it puzzles me."
"Well, I'm off to see some of the fun--and the girl. Tave said he didn't
expect Aunt Meda before to-morrow night, and it's a good time for me to
rubber round the old place a little on my own hook;--and, mother,"--he
stooped to her; Aurora Googe raised her still beautiful eyes to the
frank if somewhat hard blue ones that looked down into hers; a fine
color mounted into her cheeks,--"take the priest for his meals, for all
me. It's an invasion, but, of course, I recognize that we're responsible
for it on account of the quarry business. I suppose we shall have to
make some concessions to all classes till we get away from here for good
and all--then we'll have our fling, won't we, mother?"
He was off without waiting for a reply. Aurora Googe watched him out of
sight, then turned to her work, the flush still upon her cheeks.
V
Champney leaned on the gate of the paddock at Champ-au-Haut and looked
about him. The estate at The Bow had been familiar to him throughout his
childhood and boyhood. He had been over every foot of it, and at all
seasons, with his Uncle Louis. He was realizing that it had never seemed
more beautiful to him than now, seen in the warm light of a July sunset.
In the garden pleasance, that sloped to the lake, the roses and lilies
planted there a generation ago still bloomed and flourished, and in the
elm-shaded paddock, on the gate of which he was leaning, filly and foal
could trace their pedigree to the sixth and seventh generation of
deep-chested, clean-flanked ancestors.
The young man comprehended in part only, the reason of his mother's
extreme bitterness towards Almeda Champney. His uncle had loved him; had
kept him with him much of the time, encouraging him in his boyish aims
and ambitions which his mother fostered--and Louis Champney was
childless, the last in direct descent of a long line of fine
ancestors--.
Here his thought was checked; those ancestors were his, only in a
generation far removed; the Champney blood was in his mother's veins.
But his father was Almeda Champney's only brother--why then, should not
his mother count on the estate being his in the end? He knew this to
have been her hope, although she had never expressed it. He had gained
an indefinite knowledge of it through old Joel Quimber and Elmer Wiggins
and Mrs. Milton Caukins, a distant relative of his father's. To be sure,
Louis Champney might have left him his hunting-piece, which as a boy he
had coveted, just for the sake of his name--
He stopped short in his speculations for he heard voices in the lane.
The cows were entering it and coming up to the milking shed. The lane
led up from the low-lying lake meadows, knee deep with timothy and
clover, and was fenced on both sides from the apple orchards which
arched and overshadowed its entire length. The sturdy over-reaching
boughs hung heavy with myriads of green balls. Now and then one dropped
noiselessly on the thick turf in the lane, and a noble Holstein mother,
ebony banded with ivory white, her swollen cream-colored bag and
dark-blotched teats flushed through and through by the delicate rose of
a perfectly healthy skin, lowered her meek head and, snuffing largely,
caught sideways as she passed at the enticing green round.
At the end of this lane there swung into view a tall loose-jointed
figure which the low strong July sunshine threw into bold relief. It was
Romanzo Caukins, one of the Colonel's numerous family, a boy of sixteen
who had been bound out recently to the mistress of Champ-au-Haut upon
agreement of bed, board, clothes, three terms of "schooling" yearly, and
the addition of thirty dollars to be paid annually to the Colonel.
The payment of this amount, by express stipulation, was to be made at
the end of each year until Romanzo should come into his majority. By
this arrangement, Mrs. Champney assured to herself the interest on the
aforesaid thirty dollars, and congratulated herself on the fact that
such increment might be credited to Milton Caukins as a minus quantity.
Champney leaped the bars and went down the lane to meet him.
"Hello, Roman, how are you?"
The boy's honest blue eyes, that seemed always to be looking forward in
a chronic state of expectancy for the unexpected, beamed with goodness
and goodwill. He wiped his hands on his overalls and clasped Champney's.
"Hullo, Champ, when'd you come?"
"Only yesterday. I didn't see you about when I was here in the
afternoon. How do you like your job?"
The youth made an uncouth but expressive sign towards the milk shed.
"Sh--Tave'll hear you. He and I ain't been just on good terms lately;
but 'tain't my fault," he added doggedly.
At that moment a clear childish voice called from somewhere below the
lane:
"Romanzo--Romanzo!"