Mrs. Gilbert kept her word, and presented the young men to each of the
boarders; but for all that, the talk did not become general. After
dinner she went off for a nap, and the young men both followed Mrs.
Farrell to the piazza, where they seemed to forget that there was anyone
else. She was very amiable to both, but a little meek and subdued in her
manner; if she encouraged one more than the other, it was Gilbert. She
was disposed to talk of serious things, and said that one could not
realize the New England Sabbath in town as one could in the country;
that here in these hills the stillness, the repose, seemed to have
something almost holy about it. Two young girls in gay flannel walking
skirts and branching shade hats passed Mrs. Farrell where she sat with
her court, and she who passed nearest dropped a demure glance out of the
corner of her eye, and a demurely arch “good-by” from the corner of her
mouth.
“What for?” asked Mrs. Farrell, breaking abruptly from her pensive mood.
“Those brakes,” said the girl over her shoulder, having now got by.
“Oh, come! Won’t you go, too?” cried Mrs. Farrell. “It’s an old
engagement. Wait, please!” she called to the girls, and ran in to get
her hat, while they loitered down the path.
Gilbert walked forward to join them, and Easton stayed for Mrs. Farrell,
who delayed a little, and then came out in walking-gear which had the
advantage over the dresses of the young girls that foliage or plumage
has over dress always--it seemed part of her.
“If you’ll be so kind--yes,” she said, giving Easton her light shawl,
while she fitted her hat cord under the knot of her hair. “It’s a little
coolish sometimes in the deep woods, and it’s best to bring one. Don’t
you think,” she asked, dazzling him with the radiant, immortal youth of
her glance and smile, “that the worst thing about growing older is that
you have to be so careful about your miserable, perishable body? I hope
I’ve not made you do anything against your principles, Mr. Easton, in
getting you to go with me after brakes on Sunday? We don’t often do such
things, ourselves.”
“No,” said Easton; “unfortunately, I have no principles on that point. I
suppose it’s a thing to be regretted.”
“Oh yes, indeed!” said Mrs. Farrell, earnestly. “I think one ought
always to be one thing or the other. I find nothing so wretched as this
sort of betwixt-and-betweenity that most people live in nowadays; and I
envy Rachel Woodward her fixed habits of religious observance. I wish
she could have gone with us this afternoon; but the Woodwards never do.
You must get acquainted with her, Mr. Easton. She’s a splendid girl;
she has a great deal of talent and a great deal of character; more than
all of us lady boarders put together--except Mrs. Gilbert, of course.”
It vaguely troubled Easton, he did not know why, to have her talk of
Rachel Woodward; at that moment it vexed him that there should be any
other woman in the world than herself. But he contrived to say that Mrs.
Gilbert had mentioned Miss Woodward’s talent for drawing.
“Isn’t she nice--Mrs. Gilbert?” asked Mrs. Farrell, looking into
Easton’s face, and no doubt seeing there a consciousness of his having
heard from Mrs. Gilbert something not to her advantage. “She’s the only
one of our boarders that one cares to talk with; she’s such a humorous
old thing that I like to hear her even when I know she’s looking me
through and through. She’s a very keen observer, and such a wonderful
judge of character! Don’t you think so?”
“I hardly know; I’m scarcely acquainted with her or the people she talks
about.”
“To be sure. But then, I think you can often see whether a person
understands people, even if you don’t know any of them.”
“Oh yes--yes,” answered Easton.
They had crossed the road from the farmhouse and, traversing some
sloping meadows, were at the border of the wood in which the tall brakes
grew, with delicate shapes of fern slowly waving and swaying in the
breeze. He was offering her his hand to help her over the wall into the
wood, and she was throwing half her elastic weight upon his happy arm.
Gilbert and the young girls were far ahead among the brakes, which their
movement tossed about them with a continual, gracious rise and fall of
the stately plumes, the bright colors of the girls’ dresses deepening
their tint as they glimmered through the undulant greenery.
“How lovely!” cried Mrs. Farrell. She chose to sit still a moment on the
wall. “And isn’t your friend superb in his white flannel and his
planterish-looking hat? When I was a little girl I was traveling with my
father on the Mississippi, and one night a New Orleans boat landed
alongside of us. The most that I can remember is those iron baskets of
burning pine-knots they stick into the shore, and the slim, dark young
Southerners, in white linen from head to foot, as they came on and off
the boat in the red light. I felt then that I never could marry anybody
but a young Southerner in white linen. Your friend reminds me of them.
But he isn’t Southern?”
“No; he was South before the war, awhile, and he tried a cotton
plantation after the war; but he’s a New-Yorker.”
“How picturesque he is!” sighed Mrs. Farrell. “Was he a soldier?”
“Yes. He’s Major Gilbert, if you like.”
“Was that where you met him, in the army?”
“Yes.”
“And were you a major, too?”
“I went in as a private,” said Easton.
“But you didn’t come out a private?”
“Our regiment suffered a great deal, and the promotions were pretty
rapid.”
“And so you came out a captain?”
“Not exactly.”
“A major--a colonel?”
“I couldn’t very well help it.”
“Oh, I dare say you’re not to blame!” cried Mrs. Farrell. “You and
Mr.--Major Gilbert, were you in the same regiment?”
“Yes. I owed my first commission to his interest. He was my captain
before I got my company.”
“Well, how was it, then, that you came out a colonel and he only came
out a major?” asked Mrs. Farrell, innocently.
Easton turned about and looked after the others, whose voices, in talk
and laughter, came over the bracken with a light, hollow sound that
voices have in the woods.
“Oh, don’t snub me!” implored Mrs. Farrell; “I didn’t mean to ask
anything wrong. You soldiers are always so queer about the war; one
would think you were ashamed of it.”
“It was full of unjust chances,” answered Easton, almost fiercely. “All
that I did Gilbert would have done better, and if he had done it he
would have got the promotion that I got. I ought to have refused it;
it’s my lasting shame and sorrow that I didn’t.” A look of strange
dismay and of selfcontempt came into Easton’s face with the last words,
which sounded like the expression of an old remorse.
“Oh, excuse me!” said Mrs. Farrell with a quick sympathy of tone. “I’ve
made you talk of something-- I didn’t think--your men’s friendships are
so much more tenderly brought up than women’s, that a woman can scarcely
understand,” she added, a little mockingly; but she made obvious haste
to get away from the subject that annoyed him.
“Here are tall enough brakes,” she said, “if it’s tallness we’re after;
but I think we’d better get ferns. I want to show you a place down here
in the hollow where I found some maidenhair the other day. Don’t you
think that’s the prettiest of the ferns? Did you ever find it in any
part of the South where you were stationed? I should fancy it might be
in the Everglades--or some other damp place.”
“I don’t know what it is,” said Easton, absently.
“Not know maidenhair? Then I’ve the chance to show you something novel,
as well as very pretty. Come!” She sprang lightly from the wall and
swept through the bowing brakes and down the slope of the hollow to a
spot where clustering maples, flinging their shadows one upon another,
made a cool gloom beneath their boughs, and the delicate maidenhair
balanced its crest upon its slender purple stems and trembled in the
silent air. “Here, here!” called Mrs. Farrell. “Did you ever see
anything lovelier? But doesn’t it seem a pity to pull it? Well, it must
die for women, as humming-birds and pheasants do; we can’t look pretty
without them, poor things! I’m going to sit down here, Mr. Easton, and
you’re going to gather maidenhair for me and show your taste; you
haven’t experience in it, but you are to have instinct.”
She sat down on the broad flat top of a rock, and though her seat was in
a spot where the slighter texture of the shade let the sunlight flicker
through upon her, she gave a slight tremor and shrugged her shoulders.
“You must let me have my shawl, Mr. Easton--my poor health, you know;
there’s rheumatism and typhoid fever in every breath of this delicious
air.”
He went to lay the shawl upon her shoulders reverently, but she dragged
it down and adjusted it about her waist in a very much prettier effect.
“There, now, give me your hat. One of the penalties that a gentleman
pays for the pleasure of going braking with a lady is to have his hat
trimmed with ferns and to be made to look silly. You may have your
revenge in trimming my hat.” She began to undo the elastic from her
hair; but there were hairpins upon which it was entangled, and she
dropped her arms from the attempt, and with a quick, “Ah!” she tried to
unloose her glove. It was fastened by one of those little clasps which
are so hard to undo, and after many attempts she was obliged to look up
at Easton in despair.
“May I try to help you?” he dared to ask.
“Why, if you will be so very kind,” she answered, and she held out her
beautiful wrist, from which her hand drooped like a flower from its
stem. It was a task of some moments, and the young man wrought at it in
silence; when it was done, she did not instantly withdraw her hand, but
“Oh, is it really finished?” she asked, and then took it from him and
pulled off the glove. She put it up to her hair again, and began to feel
about with those women fingers that seem to have all the five senses in
their tips; but now they were wise in vain. “I’m afraid, Mr. Easton,”
she appealed with a well-embarrassed little laugh, “that I must tax your
kindness once more. Would you be so _very_ good as to look what can be
the matter?” and she turned the wonder of her neck toward him and bent
down her head. “Is it caught, anywhere?”
“It’s caught,” he answered, gravely, “on a hairpin.”
“Oh dear!” sighed Mrs. Farrell.
“May I?” asked Easton, after a pause.
“Why--yes--please,” she answered, faintly.
He knelt down on the rock beside her and with trembling hands touched
the warm, fragrant, silken mass, and lightly disengaged the string. When
he handed her the hat she thanked him for it very sweetly, and with an
air of simple gratitude laid it in her lap, and drew out its long,
hanging ribbons through her fingers. She did this looking with a
downcast, absent gaze at her hat. When she lifted her eyes again they
were full of a gentle sadness. “I hope you won’t think I spoke too
lightly of the war and of soldiers, just now.”
“I can’t think you spoke amiss,” he answered, fervently.
“I am sure I _meant_ nothing amiss,” said Mrs. Farrell, humbly. “But
everything one does or says in this world,” she continued, “is so
liable to misconstruction, that if one values--if one cares for the
opinion of others, one feels like doing almost _anything_ to prevent
it.”
Her eyes fell again, and she twisted the ribbons of her hat into long
curls. “I’m glad that at least _you_ understood me, and I _do_ thank
you--yes, more than you can know. How still and beautiful it is here! Do
you know, I sometimes think that the boundary, the invisible wall
between the two worlds, is nowhere so thin as in the deep woods like
this?” Mrs. Farrell looked up at Easton with the eyes of a nun. “It
seems as if one could draw nearer to better influences here than
anywhere else. Not, of course, but what one can be good anywhere if one
wants to be, but it isn’t everywhere that one does want to be good.
Don’t laugh at my moralizing, please,” she besought him. “There, take
your hat. I won’t make a victim of you. I know you’d hate to wear
ferns.”
Easton protested that though he had never worn ferns, he did not believe
he should hate to wear them.
“No matter,” said Mrs. Farrell, “the mood is past, now; but you’d better
pull a few of them, because one mustn’t come for ferns without getting
them.”
She put together in pretty clusters the ferns with which he heaped her
lap, holding them up from time to time and viewing them critically to
get the effect, and talked as she worked, while he reclined on a sloping
rock near by. “Isn’t that rather nice?” she asked, displaying the
finest group, and letting the tips of the ferns drip through her fingers
as she softly caressed their spray. “I suppose you’ll laugh if I tell
you what my great passion in life would be, if I could indulge a great
passion--millinery! Bonnets, caps, hats, ribbons, feathers!” Nothing so
enraptures a man as to hear the woman of his untold love belittle
herself; it intoxicates him that this adorable preciousness can hold
itself cheap--as Mrs. Farrell possibly knew. “You know,” she went on, “I
think I have some little artistic talent--not really enough for
painting, but quite enough for clothes. I might set up a studio, and
everybody would smile on my efforts, but if I set up a shop, nobody
would associate with me. You wouldn’t, yourself! Don’t pretend to be so
much better than other people,” cried Mrs. Farrell, with nothing of the
convent left in her look.
“I don’t know about being better,” said Easton. “But I’ve lived too
little in the world to be quite of it, I suppose. I’m afraid I am not
shocked at the notion of anybody’s being a milliner that likes.”
“Oh yes, I know. Cheap ideas of equality. But you wouldn’t marry a
milliner, if she was ever such a genius in her art.”
“If I were in love with her, and she were in love with me and would have
me, I would marry her. But why do you make marrying the test of a man’s
respect for a woman?”
“Isn’t it?”
Easton pondered awhile. “Well, yes, it does seem to be,” he said, a
little sadly. “But it narrows the destiny of half the world.”
“Are you woman’s rights?” asked Mrs. Farrell, trailing a plume of fern
through the air.
“Oh, I’m woman’s anything,” said Easton; “anything that women really
want; but rights are a subject that they don’t seem very certain of,
themselves.”
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Farrell, “that’s the trouble with women; from day to
day, and from dress to dress, they don’t really know what they want.
There’s Rachel Woodward; she has this decided talent, but she don’t seem
to want decidedly to use it, as a man would. I’m not even sure that if
all the world were propitious I should open a milliner shop. But I
_think_ I should. If I ever do, Mr. Easton, and you marry one of my
’prentices, I want you to promise that you’ll let her buy her bonnets of
me. That isn’t asking a great deal, is it?” She was scrutinizing a crest
of maidenhair and making it tilt on its stem, as if in doubt just where
to put it in the cluster, and she began softly and as if unconsciously,
to whistle in a low, delicious note. Then she suddenly stopped, made a
little prim mouth, threw up her eyebrows, and said: “Why, excuse me,
excuse me! What awful behavior in company!”
Easton gave himself to the joy of being played upon by her charming
insolence, with a glad laugh, full of a sort of happy wonder; but she
seemed not to notice, while she went on gravely adding spray to spray.
“What are you making all those for?” he asked, when he was willing to
change the delight of her silence for the delight of her speech.
“I don’t know--for Mrs. Gilbert, I think. She’s so much of an invalid
that she can’t come after things that she doesn’t want, as the rest of
us can, and so we’re always carrying them to her. I often wonder how she
gets rid of them. You never see them next day. Isn’t it strange?” asked
Mrs. Farrell, with a serious face; and abruptly, “What makes you come to
the country if you don’t know anything about it?”
“Well, I take an ignorant pleasure in it. On this occasion I came
because I thought Gilbert would like it.”
“Ah, Damon and Pythias! Do New York gentlemen commonly desert their
business at the beck of their men friends in that way? We have six
Boston husbands belonging to the wives of Woodward farm, and _they_
can’t leave their business one workday in the week.”
“But I’m not a business man. I’m no more useless here than in New York.”
Mrs. Farrell looked interested, and Easton went on. “I went into the
army too young to have a profession, and came out of it too old--or
something--to study one. So I live upon a little money left me by a
better man.”
“And you don’t actually do anything?”
“I can’t quite say that. I try not to keep other people from working;
that’s something; and I have my little pursuits.”
“But you have no business occupation?”
“No.”
“Really! And your friend, Pythias--is _he_ a gentleman of elegant
leisure, too?”
“He’s a lawyer, if you mean Gilbert.”
“Yes, I mean Gilbert,” said Mrs. Farrell, abstractedly. “He didn’t go in
too young, then?”
“He’s a little older than I.”
“‘I said an older soldier, not a better,’” quoted Mrs. Farrell. “Is
he--why, excuse me! I seem to be actually _pumping_ you.”
“I hope you’ll believe that I’m not in the habit of exploiting myself
and my affairs,” said Easton.
But Mrs. Farrell did not seem to heed what he said. She looked him
steadily in the face with her bewildering eyes, and asked, “Why doesn’t
_he_ live on some better man’s money, too?” and laughed to see his shame
painted in his face.
“I have been so silly as to talk of my own business, and you’ve punished
me as I deserved; but I don’t think I’ll enter into my friend’s
concerns, even for the honor of making you laugh,” he answered, hotly.
“Then you don’t like being laughed at?” she gravely questioned. Easton
rose to his feet. “What! Are you actually going away from me? I beg you
to forgive me-- I do indeed! I really meant nothing. You haven’t said a
word that I don’t respect you for. I thought you wouldn’t mind it. Tell
me how I shall treat you. It’s only for a week; I should be so sorry to
be enemies with you while you stay. What shall I do to make peace? What
shall I say?”
She rose quickly, and stretched her hand appealingly toward him. A
mastering impulse of tenderness filled his heart at her words of regret.
Before he knew, he had pressed her hand in a quick kiss against his
lips, and then stood holding it fast, awestruck at what he had done.
“Oh! What are you doing?” cried Mrs. Farrell, starting away from him in
a panic. “Don’t; you mustn’t! Mr. Easton! Oh dear, there’ll be somebody
coming in a moment!” She wrung her hand loose and, casting one look of
fear, wonder, and reproach upon him, turned and walked sadly away. He
followed her as silently, and without a word they mounted the slope of
the hollow, and passed through the brakes and over the walls, which she
mounted now without his help. When they came to the last, which divided
the wood from the open meadow, she turned her aggrieved face upon him
again and said, meekly: “I shall have to beg you to go back and get me
those ferns we left there in the hollow. It won’t do to go home without
anything. I’ll wait here;” and she sat down upon the low broken wall,
and averted her face from him again. He went back as he was bidden, and
with a little search found the place, the sight of which somehow sent a
shiver through him as if it were haunted, and, gathering up the clusters
of ferns, returned with them to her. He tried to say something, but
could not. She took some of them, and began to talk in a curiously
animated way, looking at them and comparing them; and then, not far
off, he saw Gilbert and the young girls approaching. Mrs. Farrell sprang
down from the wall and hurried to meet them. They were covered with
brakes and ferns and a gay laughing and talking broke forth among the
women. Mrs. Farrell attached Gilbert to her for the walk home; and it
fell to Easton to accompany the two young girls. When he left them they
said he was very nice-looking, and he was very hard to get along with,
much harder than Mr. Gilbert, who always kept saying something to make
you laugh. They did not know whether Mr. Easton was really stupid or
not; he did not look stupid, and it was quite delightful to have a man
so bashful.
In the meantime he had parted in a blank, opaque sort of way from Mrs.
Farrell, with whom he left Gilbert, and was walking moodily homeward
over that road where he had met her in the morning. He found the hotel
intolerable, and after a cup of its Japan tea, and a glance at its hot
biscuit, its cold slices of corned beef, its little blocks and wedges of
cheese, its small satellite dishes of prunes and preserves, and its
twenty-five Sunday evening toilettes, he went out again, and walked far
and long in a direction that he knew nothing of except that it was away
from where he had spent the day. His heart was still thickly beating in
his ears when he got back and found Gilbert alone on the piazza.
“Hello!” said Gilbert. “Developing into a pedestrian? Why did you go
away so soon? I think the lovely Farrell missed you. She was quite
pensive and _distraite_ at first; though I must own she cheered up and
collected herself after a while. She looked extremely attractive in her
melancholy.”
Easton sat down in the next chair without answering, and, drawing a
match along the bottom of the seat, lighted his cigar. After a few
whiffs he took it from his lips and held it till it went out.
Gilbert went on with a quick laugh, “She’s a most amusing creature!”
“I don’t understand what you mean by that,” said Easton, turning his
face halfway toward his friend, in a fashion he had.
“Well, it’s hard to say. I suppose because she’s so deep and so
transparent. She does everything for an effect, and she isn’t at peace
with herself for a moment.”
“I suppose we all do that,” commented Easton.
“Yes, but not with her motive.”
“What is her motive?”
“That’s not so easy to explain. It’s a pity you haven’t the data for
comprehending her, Easton, and enjoying her character; you don’t know
other women, and you can’t see how sublimely perfect Mrs. Farrell is in
her way. She’s one of the most beautiful women I ever saw; one of the
brightest, the most amiable. But I should be sorry to marry her; I
shouldn’t want my wife so amiable--to everybody. She isn’t meant for the
domesticities. There’s no harm in her; she simply wants excitement,
luxury, applause, all in one, all the time. By Jove! the man that gets
her will wish she was _his_ widow, and so will she, as soon as she has
him. She’s an inspired flirt; and I don’t mean that she’s like young
girls who can’t help their innocent coquetries with a man or two; but
her flirtatiousness is vast enough for the whole world, and enduring
enough for all time. As long as she lives she’ll be wanting to try her
power upon some one; and there can’t be any game so high or so low that
she won’t fly at it. What a life that would be for her husband!”
Easton sat still while Gilbert spoke, and he remained silent when he
ceased. But the words had given him a supreme satisfaction; they had
lifted a load from his heart; they had made the way clear and straight.
He was infinitely far from resenting what left her, as concerned Gilbert
at least, so solely to his love and worship. With his passion their
reason or unreason had not a feather’s weight.
“Shall you stay any longer than the end of the fortnight?” he asked at
last.
“No,” said Gilbert, who was used to Easton’s way of suddenly turning
from the matter of their talk, and coming as suddenly back to it some
other time; “I don’t think I could stand it longer.”
Easton made a motion to replace his cigar in his lips, then looked at it
with sudden disgust and flung it over the rail. His mind ran off in wild
reverie upon the kiss, which he now feigned again and again upon her
hand. His eccentric life and his peculiar temperament had kept him so
unlike other young men that he had no trouble for the violated
conventionality; it could only be a question of right or wrong with him;
he believed that he had taken an unfair advantage of her attempt at
reparation, but the fire that burned in his heart seemed to purge it of
whatever wrong there was in his violence. He was reclining there near
her on the rock under the hovering shade, with the bracken in light
undulation all around above their heads, and the summer at its sweetest
in the air and earth; then he despaired to think that the night must
pass before he could see her again, that life itself might pass and no
such moment come again. His reverie broke in a long, deep sigh.
Gilbert gave a sudden laugh. “Why, I believe, Easton, you are _hit_! You
had forgotten I was here,” he continued, as Easton looked round in a
stupefied way. “Well, I’ll leave you to your raptures.”
“I’m going to bed, too,” said Easton. “I’m tired to death;” and he rose
from his chair with a leaden sense of fatigue in every fiber.
Their rooms opened into each other, and Easton was abed when Gilbert
rapped on the dividing door. “Come in,” he called.
Gilbert came into the room, which the bright moon would have made
uncomfortable for any but a lover. “Look here, old fellow,” he said,
bending over his friend, with one arm stretched along the headboard,
“you didn’t think to-day, from anything my sister-in-law said, that I’d
been making light of you, did you?”
“What did she say?”
“Oh, about Rogers, you know.”
“Certainly not.”
“Then it isn’t necessary to say I hadn’t?”
“Oh no,” said Easton, turning his head impatiently. “I never thought of
it again.” Gilbert’s anxious loyalty annoyed him, for since they had
bidden each other good night the consciousness that he had, however
against his will, suffered something to be extorted from him that might
be construed as derogation of his friend had troubled him, but he had
rather arrogantly dismissed the thought as unworthy of their friendship.
Besides, without placing himself in a false light he could not speak of
it, and it was vexatious to be reminded of it by Gilbert’s scruples.
“Then it’s all right?” asked Gilbert.
“Why, certainly!” said Easton, impatiently.
Gilbert slowly withdrew his arm from where it lay, and stood a moment in
hesitation; then he said, “Good night,” and went into his own room.
Easton felt the vague disappointment in his manner, but was helpless to
make the reparation to which his heart urged him. He could not expose
Mrs. Farrell’s part in what had been said to his friend’s
interpretation; the wrong done was one of those things which must be
lived down.