THE OLD CAT!
"WOULD he like to have one or two young people asked to meet them? Alice
Warder, for instance, and her cousin. How would they do?" Did his face
cloud a little?
"I don't know," he said slowly, and his voice suggested a cloud, or at
least a diminution of his pleasure.
"Is that necessary, do you think, mother? It is not as though we were at
home, of course. Several guests at one time would hardly be expected at
a boarding-house."
His mother reminded him of their hostess's cordial offer of a separate
table for themselves and three or four guests whenever they cared to
give her a half-day's notice; and added that Alice was so used to being
called upon to help entertain their guests, that to count her out would
seem almost strange to her. Besides, wouldn't this be a convenient time
to show her cousin some attention? He was not to be with her long.
Apparently Erskine had no more arguments to offer.
"Oh, very well," he said. Those were matters for her to settle, and it
must all be just as she thought, of course. Then he kissed her,
lavishly, and went away; but she felt that she had destroyed much of his
pleasure in the proposed visit. And he used to be so fond of Alice!
During the next two days she spent much time and thought over her little
boarding-house dinner-party. She had adhered to her resolve to include
Alice and her cousin among the guests, although she had given herself
time to look steadily in the face the reason why she was so insistent
about this when Erskine evidently desired it otherwise.
Alice Warder was Flossy Shipley's dear friend, and being introduced by
her to the Burnhams was at once established on the footing of an old
friend. It had taken but a very short time to learn to love her for
herself. Even the careful mother of one son of marriageable age would
have found it hard to find flaws in Alice Warder. She was beautiful to
look upon, with regular, well-modelled features and a complexion that
was faultless. Perhaps her great brown eyes were what a stranger noticed
first; they were certainly very expressive. But she was much more than
beautiful. There was about her a charm of manner and movement that are
difficult to define and impossible to describe, but that made their
invariable impression even on those who met her casually. Ruth Burnham,
who in her womanhood was, as she had been in her girlhood, fastidious to
a fault with regard to young women, had yielded to the subtle charm of
this one at their very first meeting; and as the intimacy between them
deepened into friendship she had found graces of heart and mind that
fully harmonized with the lovely exterior.
The Warders bought a home very near to the Burnham place, and so far as
social life was concerned the two families speedily became as one.
Mrs. Burnham, singularly enough, as she reflected afterward, had not
once, during the early days of their friendship, coupled the names of
Alice and Erskine in her thoughts, congenial as they were. Although they
were almost to a day of the same age, Alice, who had been for several
years the nominal head of her father's house, appeared much the older,
and more like a mature young woman than a girl still in the charge of a
governess. It might have been this apparent disparity in their ages that
helped Mrs. Burnham to take the girl to her heart and think of her as
the daughter she had often wished for; not by any means as Erskine's
wife, but as his sister.
Erskine had been from the first of their acquaintance drawn to the young
woman in the frank and brotherly way that his mother desired. When the
plans for college were matured, one of the loudly spoken regrets on the
part of both mother and son was that they must be separated from the
Warders.
It came to pass, however, in the course of their second year of absence
that Mr. Warder had occasion to make the college town his headquarters
for several months; so Alice and her former governess were installed in
one of the hotels for the winter, that her father might have as much of
her company as possible; and the Burnhams rejoiced greatly thereat.
Yet here was Erskine, barely six weeks afterwards, considering it not
necessary to invite Alice to dinner! The poor mother sighed over the
perversity and the blindness of young manhood, and knew for the first
time that if Erskine had developed the peculiar interest which Miss
Parker seemed to have awakened, for Alice Warder, instead, she could
have rejoiced with her whole heart.
They came to dinner, Alice and her Boston cousin, a Harvard student of
marked ability, and Miss Parker and her brother. And Alice was fully as
marked a contrast to the other young woman as Ruth had believed that she
would be. First, in the matter of dress. Alice Warder was an artist in
dress. She wore at this quiet little dinner party a cloth gown of
olive-green, so severely plain in its make-up that its richness of
texture and faultless workmanship were apparent. And Miss Parker
appeared in an elbow-sleeved white dress badly laundered and profusely
trimmed with a quantity of lace that was startling rather than fine.
Moreover, she was adorned with a mass of hothouse blooms to which she
referred so significantly that the little company were at once made
aware that Erskine was the giver.
But the dress was perfection compared with the poor girl's manner. She
gayly and unblushingly appropriated Erskine to herself and rallied her
brother on the situation.
"Poor Jim! you haven't any girl at all, have you? Since Miss
Warder--must I call you 'Miss Warder'? it sounds ever so much more
friendly and cosey to say 'Alice.' You must look after your cousin, I
suppose. Are you sure he is your cousin? You know that is a dodge girls
have when--Oh, well, never mind; I won't bother you. This is good for
Jim; he always has half a dozen strings to his bow and can never decide
which one of them he wants the most; so this will be excellent
discipline for him, leaving him out in the cold. Dear me! What am I
talking about? Here is Mrs. Burnham looking young enough this minute to
be one of us."
All this, while they were making their way through the boarding-house
halls and large dining-room to a cosey little alcove, where a table had
been set for the Burnhams and their guests. Erskine's face had flushed
deeply during the outburst, and he had darted an annoyed look at his
mother to see if she was hearing it. He led the way across the
dining-room much to the irrepressible Mamie's disappointment, though she
chose to seem to ridicule it.
"Dear me!" she said in a stage whisper to Alice, "do look at that
ridiculous boy walking off alone. Where I come from, the fellows take
the girls out to supper. Can't I borrow your cousin for this evening,
and get even with him?"
Mrs. Burnham felt the color rising in her face, but Alice was gracious
and lovely. She laughed pleasantly as though used to such jokes, linked
her arm in the girl's, and said merrily:--
"We will give them all the slip, my dear, and go in together."
[Illustration: "WE WILL GIVE THEM ALL THE SLIP, MY DEAR."--_Page 61._]
Throughout that embarrassing and long-drawn-out dinner Alice was a help
and comfort at least to her hostess, and did steadily and patiently what
she could to cover the blunders of the girl beside her. Utterly
unaccustomed to even the formalities of a fashionable boarding-house
table, Mamie made constant blunders with forks and spoons and other
instruments of torture for the uninitiated; but these were trifles
compared with the blunders of her tongue. She made evident attempts to
cover her ignorance with regard to table formalities by much gay talk.
She laughed incessantly, and told many jokes at her brother's expense.
She said: "him and me," and "her and I," and "you folks," and a dozen
other provincialisms. When they returned to Mrs. Burnham's parlor, it
was almost worse--for then Mamie sang; and it was hard for her hostess
to determine of which she was most ashamed, the bad taste of the girl's
selections or the less than mediocre execution.
Still, the music was by no means the worst feature of that memorable
hour. Mamie's next startling venture was a pretence of being offended by
what she called Erskine's desertion of her at dinner-time.
"Oh, you needn't come around," she said rudely, as he rose to arrange
her music. "I can fix things myself, thank you, and Mr. Colchester will
turn the music for me, I know; won't you, Mr. Colchester?" with a jaunty
little smile for the stately Boston cousin. "You can't make up for
rudeness to me, sir, as easy as you think. I make fellows who want my
company mind their p's and q's, don't I, Jim?"
The stalwart brother thus appealed to replied only by a slight
embarrassed laugh, and the hostess had time out of her own embarrassment
to bestow a swift glance of pity upon him. He had already seen enough of
another sort of world to realize that his pretty, pert little sister,
the idol of his country home, was not making as good an impression on
these new friends of his as he wished she were. If the ladies had but
known it, the poor young fellow was at that moment saying to himself:--
"Why can't Mamie act more like that Miss Warder, I wonder? There's an
awful difference between them, and she doesn't catch on, somehow."
Throughout the interminable evening, Alice Warder proved not only the
excellent foil that Mrs. Burnham had foreseen, but a faithful and
efficient coadjutor. Not a lift of her eyebrows or a stray glance of any
kind betrayed a second's surprise at the character of the guests invited
to meet her dignified cousin and herself. She was gracious and friendly
to such an extent that before the evening was over, Mamie, who was
frankness itself, said admiringly:--
"How long you going to stay in this place? Dear me! I wish you was going
to be here all winter; I can see that you and me would be real cronies."
In the privacy of Mrs. Burnham's bedroom, whither Alice was taken to put
on her wraps, the girl bestowed her closing touch of sweetness and balm
upon her hostess.
"I had quite a little visit with Mr. Parker while you were entertaining
the others with those pictures; I was much interested in him; he is a
young man of good principle, isn't he? One on whom education will tell.
It is lovely in you and Erskine to open your home to him in this way; it
will be sure to mean much to him; and it ought to help the little
sister, too. It is pleasant to see how fond he is of her."
"You helped," said Mrs. Burnham, significantly. "I am more grateful for
your help to-night than the mere words will express."
She kissed her as she spoke, and felt in her heart that she was willing
that Erskine should marry this girl to-morrow, if he would.
"I was glad of the opportunity," the girl said simply. "And so, I am
sure, was Ranford. He is very much interested in young men of this
type."
For a full half hour after "Jim" had carried off his pouting
sister,--whose parting shot had been that she considered it "awfully
pokey" for a girl to go home from a dinner-party with "nothing but her
brother"--spoken in a pretended confidence to him, but loud enough for
all to hear,--silence reigned in the Burnham parlor.
Erskine had a desk in one of its corners, where he kept certain of his
books, and studied, whenever he chose to remain with his mother. He
flung himself down before it the moment the door closed after their
guests, as though work pressed hard.
His mother took a book and sat silent and apparently absorbed, although
as a matter of fact, instead of reading, she was studying the
half-averted face that was drawn in almost stern lines, and the eyes
that stared at the open page as though they did not see its words. She
did not believe that Erskine was studying Latin.
What had this terrible evening done for him, and for her? Had that
pretty-faced, ill-dressed, ill-bred girl secured in some unaccountable
way a permanent hold on her son's heart? Might it not be possible that
in giving him this awful view of her in sharp contrast with Alice Warder
she had but alienated him from herself? Perhaps she had blundered, and
perhaps the consequences of her blunder would be fatal to them both. Why
had she done it? Why had she not waited, and watched, and understood
better before she attempted anything? What should she do now? How was
she to bear this silence? And yet, what might not Erskine say when at
last he broke it?
A half-hour passed and neither mother nor son had turned a page.
Suddenly he wheeled his chair around so that she could get a full view
of his face, and smiled a half-sad, half-whimsical smile, and spoke his
word:--
"I don't believe we can do it, Mommie. It was good in you to try, and
you did it royally, as you do things, but--she can't be assimilated. She
doesn't belong. We shall have to wait until she goes home before we can
do much for Parker. All the same, mother, you understand that I thank
you for the effort. Alice was superb to-night, wasn't she?"
Then Ruth Burnham understood that it was her business to understand that
her son's interest lay solely in the young man Parker, and that in the
desire to help the brother the sister must be thought of as simply
tolerated. Already Erskine had put away his first illusion so utterly
that he did not propose to own it to himself, much less to his mother.
Poor Mamie Parker spent her fruitless winter in the college town, and
tried by many innocent and a few questionable ways to win back to
interest and special attention her brother's handsome friend, whose
sudden defection she could not understand. She tortured herself in a
vain effort to discover what could have happened on that evening which
she had expected to be memorable to her for other reasons than now
appeared. Why had it so utterly changed the attitude toward her of the
young man who, she had confidently assured Jim, was "caught, all right,"
she "knew the signs"?
By degrees, without any clearly defined reason for doing so, she came to
associate the defection with the young man's mother, and called her
"that old cat!" with a bitterness that had more than mere anger behind
it; there was a lump in her throat and a curious stricture about the
little organ that she called her heart, which was new to the frivolous
girl.
Jim's handsome college friend had afforded his sister Mamie a glimpse
into a new, strange world, one that she felt she could have loved, and
in which she believed that she could have shone; and in some way, she
did not understand how, his mother had closed the door.
"The old cat!" she said. "I should like to get even with her!" And then
she cried.