In accordance with the substantial customs of his fellow-citizens,
Mr. Port always returned to Philadelphia sharp on the 1st of
September--calmly ignoring the heat and the mosquitoes, which are the
dominant characteristics of Philadelphia during that month, and resting
secure in the knowledge that the course which he pursued was that which
his father and his grandfather had pursued before him. It was on the
eve of his departure from Narragansett that his doubts and perplexities
occasioned by Dorothy’s surprising conduct were resolved.
Being seated in a snug corner of the veranda in company with Mr.
Pennington Brown, Mr. Port was smoking a comforting cigar. Mr. Brown,
who also was smoking, did not seem to find his cigar comforting. He
smoked it in so fitful a fashion that it repeatedly went out; and
his nervousness seemed to be increased each time that he lighted it.
Further, his comment upon Mr. Port’s discourse--which was a more than
ordinarily thoughtful and accurate weighing of the relative merits of
thin and thick soups--obviously were delivered quite at random. At
first Mr. Port was disposed to resent this inattention to his soulful
utterances; but as the subject was one in which, as he well knew, his
friend was profoundly interested, he presently became uneasy.
“What’s the matter, Brown?” he asked, in a tone of kindly concern. “Is
your rheumatism bothering you? I’ve been afraid that your absurd sitting
around on rocks with my niece would bring it on again. You’re not as
young as you once were, Pen, and you’ve got to take care of yourself.”
“I am not aware, Port,” Mr. Brown answered rather stiffly, “that I am as
yet conspicuously superannuated. Indeed, I never felt younger in my life
than I have felt during the past fortnight. I _have_ a little touch
of rheumatism to-night,” he added, frankly, and at the same time gave
unintentional emphasis to his admission by catching his breath and
almost groaning as he slightly moved his legs, “but it has nothing to do
with sitting on the rocks with Dor--with your charming niece. You forget
that my rheumatism is hereditary, Port. Why, I had an attack of it when
I was only five-and-twenty.”
“All the same, you wouldn’t have it now if you had spent your afternoons
sensibly with me here on a dry veranda, or properly wrapped up in a dry
carriage, instead of on damp rocks, with that baggage. What on earth has
got into you I can’t imagine. If you were twenty years younger, Brown, I
should think, yes, positively, I should think that you were in love with
her.”
“Port,” said Mr. Brown, with a tone of resentment in his voice, “I shall
be very much obliged if you will not use such language when you are
speaking of Miss Lee. She is the best and kindest and noblest woman I
ever have met. You have most cruelly misunderstood her. Had you given
her half a chance she would have been to you only a source of constant
joy.”
Mr. Port replied to this emphatic assertion by a low, but most pointedly
incredulous, whistle.
“You have not the slightest conception, as such a comment shows,” Mr.
Brown continued, with increasing asperity, “of the depths of sweetness
and tenderness which are in her nature; of her perfect unselfishness;
of the gentleness and trustfulness of her heart. She is all that a woman
can be, and more. She is--she is an angel!” Mr. Brown’s elderly voice
trembled as he made this avowal.
As for Mr. Port, his astonishment was almost too deep for words. But he
managed to say: “Yes, I suppose she is--at least she has said so often
enough herself.”
For some seconds there was silence; and then, with a deprecating manner
and in a voice from which all trace of resentment had disappeared, Mr.
Brown resumed: “Hutch, old man, you and I have been friends these many
years together, and you won’t fail me in your friendship now, will
you? You are right, I _am_ in love with this sweet young creature, and
she--think of it, Hutch!--she has admitted that she is in love with me;
not romantically in love, for that would be, not absurd, of course,
but a little unreasonable--for while I’m not at all old, yet I know,
of course, that I am not exactly what can be called young--but in love
sensibly and rationally. She wants to take care of me, she says, the
dear child!” (Mr. Port grunted.) “And she has such clever notions in
regard to my health. When we are married--how strange and how delightful
it sounds, Hutch!--she says that we will go immediately to Carlsbad,
where the waters will do my rheumatism a world of good; and from there,
when I am better, we will go on to Vienna, where the dry climate and the
white wines, she thinks, still further will benefit me; and from Vienna,
in order to set me on my feet completely, we are to go on to the North
and spend a winter in Russia--for there is nothing that cures rheumatism
so quickly and so thoroughly, she says (though I never should have
imagined it) as steady and long-continued cold. Just think of her
planning it all out for me so well!
“Yes, Hutch, I love her with all my heart; and what has made me so
nervous to-night is the great happiness that has come to me--it only
came positively this afternoon--and the dread that perhaps, as her
guardian, you know, you might not approve of what we have decided to
do. But you do approve, don’t you, Hutch? Of course, in a few months she
will be her own mistress, and your consent to our marriage, as she
very truly says, then will be unnecessary. But even a month seems a
desperately long while to wait; and that is the very shortest time,
she thinks, in which she could get ready--though the dear child has
consented to wait for most of the little things which she wants until we
get on the other side.” Mr. Port smiled cynically at the announcement of
this concession. It struck him that when Dorothy was turned loose among
the Paris shops, backed by the capacious purse of a doting elderly
husband, she would mow a rather startlingly broad swath. “So you won’t
oppose our marriage, will you, old man? You will consent to my having
this dear young creature for my wife?”
Various emotions found place in Mr. Port’s breast as he listened to this
extraordinary declaration and appeal. At first he felt a lively anger
at Dorothy for having, as he coarsely phrased it in his own mind,
so successfully gammoned Mr. Pennington Brown; to this succeeded an
involuntary admiration of the clever way in which she had managed it;
and then a feeling of profound satisfaction possessed him as there came
into his slow-moving mind a realizing sense of his own deliverance.
But Mr. Port was not so utterly selfish but that, in the midst of the
sunrise of happiness which dawned upon him with the opening of a way by
which he decently could get rid of Dorothy, he was assailed by certain
qualms of conscience as to the unfairness of thus casting upon his old
friend the burden that he had found so hard to bear. For the heaviness
of Mr. Port’s mental processes prevented him from perceiving, as a
shrewder person would have perceived, that Dorothy was not the sort
of young woman to engage in an enterprise of this nature without first
fully counting the cost. Had he been keener of penetration he would have
known that she could be trusted, when safely landed in the high estate
of matrimony, to play on skilfully the game that she had so skilfully
begun; that in her own interest she would manage matters in such a
way as never to arouse in the mind of her elderly husband the awkward
suspicion that the scheme of life arranged by his angel apparently
with a view solely to his own comfort really was arranged only for the
comfort of her angelic self.
It was while Mr. Port wavered among his qualms of conscience, hesitating
between his great longing to chuck Dorothy overboard, and so have
done with her, and his sense of duty to Mr. Pennington Brown, that the
subject of his perplexities herself appeared upon the scene; and
her arrival at so critical a juncture seemed to suggest as a remote
possibility that she had been all the while snuffing this particular
battle from not very far off.
“Dear Uncle Hutchinson,” said Miss Lee, with affectionate fervor,
“do you think that your angel is most cruel and horrid because she is
willing to go off in this way after her own selfish happiness and leave
you all alone? But she won’t do it, dear, if you would rather have her
stay. Her only wish, you know, has been to make you comfortable and
happy; and you have been so good and so kind to her that she is ready to
sacrifice even her love for your sake. Yes, if you would rather keep
her to yourself she will stay. Only if she does stay,” and there was a
warning tone of deep meaning in Miss Lee’s well-modulated voice, “her
heart, of course, will be broken, and she will have to ask you to travel”
with her for two or three years into out-of-the-way parts of the world
(Mr. Port shuddered) “until her poor broken heart gets well. Not that
it ever will get quite well again, you know; but she will be brave, and
try to pretend for your sake that it has. So it shall be just as you
say, dear; only for Pennington’s sake, who loves me so much, Uncle
Hutchinson, I hope that perhaps you may be willing to let me go.”
And having concluded this moving address, Miss Lee extended one of her
well-shaped hands to Mr. Pennington Brown--who grasped it warmly, for
he was deeply moved by so edifying an exhibition of affectionate and
dutiful unselfishness--and with the other applied her handkerchief
delicately to her eyes.
Mr. Port was not in the least moved by Dorothy’s professions of
self-sacrifice; but he was most seriously alarmed by her threat--that
opened before him a dismal vista of bilious misery--to cart him for
several years about the world on the pretext of a broken heart that
required travel for its mending.
[Illustration: Page 67 084]
He believed, to be sure, that in a stand-up fight he could conquer
Dorothy; but he had his doubts as to how long she would stay
conquered--and between constant fighting and constant travel there is
not much choice; for Mr. Port knew from experience how acute is
that form of biliousness which results from rage. After all,
self-preservation is the first law of nature; and under the stress thus
put upon him, therefore, it is not surprising that Mr. Port’s qualms
of conscience incident to his failure to do his duty to his neighbor
vanished to the winds.
Mr. Pennington Brown still held Dorothy’s hand in his own. “Will you
make this great sacrifice, Hutch, for your old friend?” he asked.
Mr. Port hesitated a little, for he felt a good deal like a criminal who
is shifting his crime upon an innocent man; and then he answered, rather
weakly both in tones and terms: “Why, of course.”
“Dear Uncle Hutchinson, how good you are!” exclaimed Miss Lee. “And you
really think that you can spare your angel, then?”
And both promptly and firmly Mr. Port answered: “Yes, I really think
that I can.”