malaria had returned upon him with a double force. As Elvira showed no
signs of returning, he amused himself by turning over the leaves of the
family photograph album. Face by face revealed the stern, set, arid,
Puritan features, the hard, determined chins, and the “firmness,” which,
in the person of the Hon. Ephraim, he felt still dominated and
controlled the public affairs of East Village. He threw down the album
with a feeling of impotent rage against the survival of this colonial
“narrowness,” as he liked to call it. He walked out of the house and
wandered, much crestfallen and full of malaria, along the village street
toward the hotel. A great many farm wagons were tied along the sidewalk,
and there were numbers of fresh-cheeked country girls walking in threes
and fours, and sweeping the sidewalk as they went. Upon a slight
elevation stood a white wooden meetinghouse, with a white steeple, and
it gave him a chill even on that warm morning to look at it—it _looked_
so cold. Small groups of hard-featured farmers in fur caps stood on the
corners of the streets discussing, presumably, the crops. He wondered if
the fur caps were needed in that arid, bleak region to keep warm the
natives’ sense of Right and Wrong? He made his way out, beneath some
beautiful elms, into a small, old-fashioned burying-ground, where he
discovered that “erring sinners” apparently comprised the only element
of those who were requested to “_Pause and Read_.” Feeling himself to be
now, for some reason, a distinctly immoral person, he read some of the
quaint epitaphs, to which he was invited, in a spirit of humility, which
presently changed to amusement. In death as in life, the hard, stern old
village characters preserved on their headstones a fund of grim humor
for the “sinner,” which in Archibald’s instance made him smile. “Oh,” he
sighed to himself, “I long to take her away from all this sort of
thing—forever!”
He took a long walk in the afternoon, and returned to the hotel to find
a coldly worded note from Elvira inviting him around to tea. He removed
the stains of his walk, and dressed himself with his usual care. He
found Elvira waiting for him beneath the high white pillars, in an
unbecoming, and as it seemed to him, forbidding dress of black. Her face
seemed unusually stern and relentless. There were traces of tears in her
red eyelids, but the tears were dried away now, and her eyes were very
bright and hard.
“Don’t say anything _now_. Father feels very deeply about it. We have
had a long talk. When he heard of the—of the unfortunate house affair—he
was _so_ angry I could hardly pacify him.”
Archibald’s heart sank within him. He fairly shivered.
“He said that he did not want me to lower my standard,” continued
Elvira, in her clear, musical, passionless voice. “And I told him that
he need have no fears. I wanted to see you first, and tell you. Let us
not have any _feeling_ about it.”
“Any _feeling_!” exclaimed Archibald. “Why—how can we help it!”
“Let us act as if we had never understood one another. I will go back to
the city with you, and Aunt Perkins and I will find some other place at
once.”
“Go back with me—and expect me to show no feeling! Elvira, this is
preposterous!”
“Then I will go back alone.” She compressed her lips, just as he had
observed her father do.
“I beg pardon, Elvira, do you mean—can you mean that I can never—I can
never hope!”
She nodded her pretty flower-like head gravely. “Come in to tea, won’t
you?” she said, coolly. “I want father to hear you talk about Art.”
He turned on his heel. At last he, too, was angry.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “But if I go back to the hotel now, I shall
just have time to pack my valise and catch the evening train.”
He walked rapidly away, leaving her standing upon the white-pillared
portico, looking with pure, sweet, upturned face, like a saint who has
for all time renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. Had he
looked back, Mr. Jerome Archibald’s tender heart would have been touched
by her attitude; he would have returned, and, against her will, clasped
her in his arms and covered her pale lips with warm kisses. It might
have melted her high “standard” a little. But he let a night intervene
without seeing her, and the entering wedge of her high sense of duty did
its work before morning. He determined to remain another day and make a
further trial. When he called the next day she was obdurate. “Love
cannot be built upon deceit and untruth,” she said, sententiously. “I
was not frank, you were not. It is better that we should part. I could
never hold up my head—I could never face the world. I know what they
would call me. They would call me an _adventuress!_ and they would hate
me for being successful. Yes—your mother, your sisters—everyone.”
“But you were perfectly innocent about it, Elvira.”
There was a little pause.
“I, too, was innocent. I meant no more than to have you near me, where I
could learn to know you—love you—and now, really, it seems as if you had
built up a mountain of ice between us, don’t you know.”
She merely shook her head.
When Archibald returned to the city his malaria compelled him to go away
again almost immediately to Newport. There, a few weeks later, his agent
wrote him that he had succeeded in renting the house “at an exorbitant
figure to a very rich tenant without children”—thus fulfilling his
mother’s conditions to the letter. He went back to the city, recovered
in health, to pack up a few personal effects, and found to his surprise
that Miss Perkins and her niece were, at the moment he arrived, in the
house. They had taken board on Ninth Street, and had gone up to take a
last look of the charming interior where, Elvira guiltily acknowledged,
life had been “so wrongly pleasant.” He found Elvira holding a fan in
her hand and seated pensively in an old Venetian chair in what was
formerly her studio. As he entered the room she rose, blushing a most
vivid red, and as rapidly turning pale again.
“Mr. Archibald!” she exclaimed. “I did not know you were in the city!”
“I have been here only an hour,” he said, stiffly.
“It is time for us to go;” and she turned to the door.
“Elvira!” His face looked sick and ghastly.
“Well?” She drew herself up very coldly.
“Are you made of stone?”
“Mr. Archibald, what can you mean?”
“My child, you are capable of grinding one who loves you into
powder—like—er—a millstone!”
“Aunt Perkins!” she called out, “let us go!”
“No,” he cried, “I will not let you go. You shall hear me! I love you!
Do you hear? And you shall not leave this house until you say you will
be my wife! I know you care for me—everything tells me so—but you will
wear your own and my heart out with your hard, cruel conscience! What
brought you here? _You loved me!_ Why have you been sitting in this
room? You love me, Elvira—I know it—I feel it!”
Gently he drew her to him and kissed her. She laid her head on his
shoulder and breathed a little contented sigh. “_I don’t think this—is
right!_” she said.
MRS. MANSTEY’S VIEW
BY EDITH WHARTON
The view from Mrs. Manstey’s window was not a striking one, but to her
at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the
back room on the third floor of a New York boarding-house, in a street
where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the
pavement would have staggered a Quintus Curtius. She was the widow of a
clerk in a large wholesale house, and his death had left her alone, for
her only daughter had married in California, and could not afford the
long journey to New York to see her mother. Mrs. Manstey, perhaps, might
have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been so many
years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each other’s
society, and their intercourse had long been limited to the exchange of
a few perfunctory letters, written with indifference by the daughter,
and with difficulty by Mrs. Manstey, whose right hand was growing stiff
with gout. Even had she felt a stronger desire for her daughter’s
companionship, Mrs. Manstey’s increasing infirmity, which caused her to
dread the three flights of stairs between her room and the street, would
have given her pause on the eve of undertaking so long a journey; and
without, perhaps, formulating these reasons she had long since accepted
as a matter of course her solitary life in New York.
She was, indeed, not quite lonely, for a few friends still toiled up now
and then to her room; but their visits grew rare as the years went by.
Mrs. Manstey had never been a sociable woman, and during her husband’s
lifetime his companionship had been all-sufficient to her. For many
years she had cherished a desire to live in the country, to have a
hen-house and a garden; but this longing had faded with age, leaving
only in the breast of the uncommunicative old woman a vague tenderness
for plants and animals. It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her
cling so fervently to the view from her window, a view in which the most
optimistic eye would at first have failed to discover anything
admirable.
Mrs. Manstey, from her coign of vantage (a slightly projecting
bow-window where she nursed an ivy and a succession of
unwholesome-looking bulbs), looked out first upon the yard of her own
dwelling, of which, however, she could get but a restricted glimpse.
Still, her gaze took in the topmost boughs of the ailanthus below her
window, and she knew how early each year the clump of dicentra strung
its bending stalk with hearts of pink.
But of greater interest were the yards beyond. Being for the most part
attached to boarding-houses they were in a state of chronic untidiness
and fluttering, on certain days of the week, with miscellaneous garments
and frayed table-cloths. In spite of this Mrs. Manstey found much to
admire in the long vista which she commanded. Some of the yards were,
indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and
no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the
clothes-lines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others,
the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder; the
broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer annoyed
her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of
the prospect before her.
[Illustration: [Magnolia]]
In the very next enclosure did not a magnolia open its hard white
flowers against the watery blue of April? And was there not, a little
way down the line, a fence foamed over every May by lilac waves of
wistaria? Farther still, a horse-chestnut lifted its candelabra of buff
and pink blossoms above broad fans of foliage; while in the opposite
yard June was sweet with the breath of a neglected syringa, which
persisted in growing in spite of the countless obstacles opposed to its
welfare.
But if nature occupied the front rank in Mrs. Manstey’s view, there was
much of a more personal character to interest her in the aspect of the
houses and their inmates. She deeply disapproved of the mustard-colored
curtains which had lately been hung in the doctor’s window opposite; but
she glowed with pleasure when the house farther down had its old bricks
washed with a coat of paint. The occupants of the houses did not often
show themselves at the back windows, but the servants were always in
sight. Noisy slatterns, Mrs. Manstey pronounced the greater number; she
knew their ways and hated them. But to the quiet cook in the newly
painted house, whose mistress bullied her, and who secretly fed the
stray cats at nightfall, Mrs. Manstey’s warmest sympathies were given.
On one occasion her feelings were racked by the neglect of a housemaid,
who for two days forgot to feed the parrot committed to her care. On the
third day, Mrs. Manstey, in spite of her gouty hand, had just penned a
letter, beginning: “Madam, it is now three days since your parrot has
been fed,” when the forgetful maid appeared at the window with a cup of
seed in her hand.
But in Mrs. Manstey’s more meditative moods it was the narrowing
perspective of far-off yards which pleased her best. She loved, at
twilight, when the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in the fluid
yellow of the west, to lose herself in vague memories of a trip to
Europe, made years ago, and now reduced in her mind’s eye to a pale
phantasmagoria of indistinct steeples and dreamy skies. Perhaps at heart
Mrs. Manstey was an artist; at all events she was sensible of many
changes of color unnoticed by the average eye, and dear to her as the
green of early spring was the black lattice of branches against a cold
sulphur sky at the close of a snowy day. She enjoyed, also, the sunny
thaws of March, when patches of earth showed through the snow, like
ink-spots spreading on a sheet of white blotting-paper; and, better
still, the haze of boughs, leafless but swollen, which replaced the
clear-cut tracery of winter. She even watched with a certain interest
the trail of smoke from a far-off factory chimney, and missed a detail
in the landscape when the factory was closed and the smoke disappeared.
Mrs. Manstey, in the long hours which she spent at her window, was not
idle. She read a little, and knitted numberless stockings; but the view
surrounded and shaped her life as the sea does a lonely island. When her
rare callers came it was difficult for her to detach herself from the
contemplation of the opposite window-washing, or the scrutiny of certain
green points in a neighboring flowerbed which might, or might not, turn
into hyacinths, while she feigned an interest in her visitor’s anecdotes
about some unknown grandchild. Mrs. Manstey’s real friends were the
denizens of the yards, the hyacinths, the magnolia, the green parrot,
the maid who fed the cats, the doctor who studied late behind his
mustard-colored curtains; and the confidant of her tenderer musings was
the church-spire floating in the sunset.
One April day, as she sat in her usual place, with knitting cast aside
and eyes fixed on the blue sky mottled with round clouds, a knock at the
door announced the entrance of her landlady. Mrs. Manstey did not care
for her landlady, but she submitted to her visits with ladylike
resignation. To-day, however, it seemed harder than usual to turn from
the blue sky and the blossoming magnolia to Mrs. Sampson’s unsuggestive
face, and Mrs. Manstey was conscious of a distinct effort as she did so.
“The magnolia is out earlier than usual this year, Mrs. Sampson,” she
remarked, yielding to a rare impulse, for she seldom alluded to the
absorbing interest of her life. In the first place it was a topic not
likely to appeal to her visitors and, besides, she lacked the power of
expression and could not have given utterance to her feelings had she
wished to.
“The what, Mrs. Manstey?” inquired the landlady, glancing about the room
as if to find there the explanation of Mrs. Manstey’s statement.
“The magnolia in the next yard—in Mrs. Black’s yard,” Mrs. Manstey
repeated.
“Is it, indeed? I didn’t know there was a magnolia there,” said Mrs.
Sampson, carelessly. Mrs. Manstey looked at her; she did not know that
there was a magnolia in the next yard!
“By the way,” Mrs. Sampson continued, “speaking of Mrs. Black reminds me
that the work on the extension is to begin next week.”
“The what?” it was Mrs. Manstey’s turn to ask.
“The extension,” said Mrs. Sampson, nodding her head in the direction of
the ignored magnolia. “You knew, of course, that Mrs. Black was going to
build an extension to her house? Yes, ma’am, I hear it is to run right
back to the end of the yard. How she can afford to build an extension in
these hard times I don’t see; but she always was crazy about building.
She used to keep a boarding-house in Seventeenth Street, and she nearly
ruined herself then by sticking out bow-windows and what not; I should
have thought that would have cured her of building, but I guess it’s a
disease, like drink. Anyhow, the work is to begin on Monday.”
Mrs. Manstey had grown pale. She always spoke slowly, so the landlady
did not heed the long pause which followed. At last Mrs. Manstey said:
“Do you know how high the extension will be?”
“That’s the most absurd part of it. The extension is to be built right
up to the roof of the main building; now, did you ever?”
Mrs. Manstey paused again. “Won’t it be a great annoyance to you, Mrs.
Sampson?” she asked.
“I should say it would. But there’s no help for it; if people have got a
mind to build extensions there’s no law to prevent ’em, that I’m aware
of.” Mrs. Manstey, knowing this, was silent. “There is no help for it,”
Mrs. Sampson repeated, “but if I _am_ a church member, I wouldn’t be so
sorry if it ruined Eliza Black. Well, good-day, Mrs. Manstey; I’m glad
to find you so comfortable.”
So comfortable—so comfortable! Left to herself the old woman turned once
more to the window. How lovely the view was that day! The blue sky with
its round clouds shed a brightness over everything; the ailanthus had
put on a tinge of yellow-green, the hyacinths were budding, the magnolia
flowers looked more than ever like rosettes carved in alabaster. Soon
the wistaria would bloom, then the horse-chestnut; but not for her.
Between her eyes and them a barrier of brick and mortar would swiftly
rise; presently even the spire would disappear, and all her radiant
world be blotted out. Mrs. Manstey sent away untouched the dinner-tray
brought to her that evening. She lingered in the window until the windy
sunset died in bat-colored dusk; then, going to bed, she lay sleepless
all night.
Early the next day she was up and at the window. It was raining, but
even through the slanting gray gauze the scene had its charm—and then
the rain was so good for the trees. She had noticed the day before that
the ailanthus was growing dusty.
“Of course I might move,” said Mrs. Manstey aloud, and turning from the
window she looked about her room. She might move, of course; so might
she be flayed alive; but she was not likely to survive either operation.
The room, though far less important to her happiness than the view, was
as much a part of her existence. She had lived in it seventeen years.
She knew every stain on the wallpaper, every rent in the carpet; the
light fell in a certain way on her engravings, her books had grown
shabby on their shelves, her bulbs and ivy were used to their window and
knew which way to lean to the sun. “We are all too old to move,” she
said.
That afternoon it cleared. Wet and radiant the blue reappeared through
torn rags of cloud; the ailanthus sparkled; the earth in the
flower-borders looked rich and warm. It was Thursday, and on Monday the
building of the extension was to begin.
On Sunday afternoon a card was brought to Mrs. Black, as she was engaged
in gathering up the fragments of the boarders’ dinner in the basement.
The card, black-edged, bore Mrs. Manstey’s name.
“One of Mrs. Sampson’s boarders; wants to move, I suppose. Well, I can
give her a room next year in the extension. Dinah,” said Mrs. Black,
“tell the lady I’ll be upstairs in a minute.”
Mrs. Black found Mrs. Manstey standing in the long parlor garnished with
statuettes and antimacassars; in that house she could not sit down.
Stooping hurriedly to open the register, which let out a cloud of dust,
Mrs. Black advanced to her visitor.
“I’m happy to meet you, Mrs. Manstey; take a seat, please,” the landlady
remarked in her prosperous voice, the voice of a woman who can afford to
build extensions. There was no help for it; Mrs. Manstey sat down.
“Is there anything I can do for you, ma’am?” Mrs. Black continued. “My
house is full at present, but I am going to build an extension, and——”
“It is about the extension that I wish to speak,” said Mrs. Manstey,
suddenly. “I am a poor woman, Mrs. Black, and I have never been a happy
one. I shall have to talk about myself first to—to make you understand.”
Mrs. Black, astonished but imperturbable, bowed at this parenthesis.
“I never had what I wanted,” Mrs. Manstey continued. “It was always one
disappointment after another. For years I wanted to live in the country.
I dreamed and dreamed about it; but we never could manage it. There was
no sunny window in our house, and so all my plants died. My daughter
married years ago and went away—besides, she never cared for the same
things. Then my husband died and I was left alone. That was seventeen
years ago. I went to live at Mrs. Sampson’s, and I have been there ever
since. I have grown a little infirm, as you see, and I don’t get out
often; only on fine days, if I am feeling very well. So you can
understand my sitting a great deal in my window—the back window on the
third floor——”
“Well, Mrs. Manstey,” said Mrs. Black, liberally, “I could give you a
back room, I dare say; one of the new rooms in the ex——”
“But I don’t want to move; I can’t move,” said Mrs. Manstey, almost with
a scream. “And I came to tell you that if you build that extension I
shall have no view from my window—no view! Do you understand?”
Mrs. Black thought herself face to face with a lunatic, and she had
always heard that lunatics must be humored.
“Dear me, dear me,” she remarked, pushing her chair back a little way,
“that is too bad, isn’t it? Why, I never thought of that. To be sure,
the extension _will_ interfere with your view, Mrs. Manstey.”
“You do understand?” Mrs. Manstey gasped.
“Of course I do. And I’m real sorry about it, too. But there, don’t you
worry, Mrs. Manstey. I guess we can fix that all right.”
Mrs. Manstey rose from her seat, and Mrs. Black slipped toward the door.
“What do you mean by fixing it? Do you mean that I can induce you to
change your mind about the extension? Oh, Mrs. Black, listen to me. I
have two thousand dollars in the bank and I could manage, I know I could
manage, to give you a thousand if——” Mrs. Manstey paused; the tears were
rolling down her cheeks.
“There, there, Mrs. Manstey, don’t you worry,” repeated Mrs. Black,
soothingly. “I am sure we can settle it. I am sorry that I can’t stay
and talk about it any longer, but this is such a busy time of day, with
supper to get——”
Her hand was on the door-knob, but with sudden vigor Mrs. Manstey seized
her wrist.
“You are not giving me a definite answer. Do you mean to say that you
accept my proposition?”
“Why, I’ll think it over, Mrs. Manstey, certainly I will. I wouldn’t
annoy you for the world——”
“But the work is to begin to-morrow, I am told,” Mrs. Manstey persisted.
Mrs. Black hesitated. “It shan’t begin, I promise you that; I’ll send
word to the builder this very night.” Mrs. Manstey tightened her hold.
“You are not deceiving me, are you?” she said.
“No—no,” stammered Mrs. Black. “How can you think such a thing of me,
Mrs. Manstey?”
Slowly Mrs. Manstey’s clutch relaxed, and she passed through the open
door. “One thousand dollars,” she repeated, pausing in the hall; then
she let herself out of the house and hobbled down the steps, supporting
herself on the cast-iron railing.
“My goodness,” exclaimed Mrs. Black, shutting and bolting the hall-door,
“I never knew the old woman was crazy! And she looks so quiet and
ladylike, too.”
Mrs. Manstey slept well that night, but early the next morning she was
awakened by a sound of hammering. She got to her window with what haste
she might and, looking out, saw that Mrs. Black’s yard was full of
workmen. Some were carrying loads of brick from the kitchen to the yard,
others beginning to demolish the old-fashioned wooden balcony which
adorned each story of Mrs. Black’s house. Mrs. Manstey saw that she had
been deceived. At first she thought of confiding her trouble to Mrs.
Sampson, but a settled discouragement soon took possession of her and
she went back to bed, not caring to see what was going on.
Toward afternoon, however, feeling that she must know the worst, she
rose and dressed herself. It was a laborious task, for her hands were
stiffer than usual, and the hooks and buttons seemed to evade her.
When she seated herself in the window, she saw that the workmen had
removed the upper part of the balcony, and that the bricks had
multiplied since morning. One of the men, a coarse fellow with a bloated
face, picked a magnolia blossom and, after smelling it, threw it to the
ground; the next man, carrying a load of bricks, trod on the flower in
passing.
“Look out, Jim,” called one of the men to another who was smoking a
pipe, “if you throw matches around near those barrels of paper you’ll
have the old tinder-box burning down before you know it.” And Mrs.
Manstey, leaning forward, perceived that there were several barrels of
paper and rubbish under the wooden balcony.