The whole thing was so crazy, as Bartley said, that it made no difference
if they kept up the expense a few days longer. He took a hack from the
depot when they arrived in Boston, and drove to the Revere House, instead
of going up in the horse-car. He entered his name on the register with a
flourish, “Bartley J. Hubbard and Wife, _Boston_,” and asked for a room and
fire, with laconic gruffness; but the clerk knew him at once for a country
person, and when the call-boy followed him into the parlor where Marcia
sat, in the tremor into which she fell whenever Bartley was out of her
sight, the call-boy discerned her provinciality at a glance, and made free
to say that he guessed they had better let him take their things up to
their room, and come up themselves after the porter had got their fire
going.
“All right,” said Bartley, with hauteur; and he added, for no reason, “Be
quick about it.”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy.
“What time is supper--dinner, I mean?”
“It's ready now, sir.”
“Good. Take up the things. Come just as you are, Marcia. Let him take your
cap,--no, keep it on; a good many of them come down in their bonnets.”
Marcia put off her sack and gloves, and hastily repaired the ravages of
travel as best she could. She would have liked to go to her room just long
enough to brush her hair a little, and the fur cap made her head hot; but
she was suddenly afraid of doing something that would seem countrified in
Bartley's eyes, and she promptly obeyed: they had come from Portland in a
parlor car, and she had been able to make a traveller's toilet before they
reached Boston.
She had been at Portland several times with her father; but he stopped at a
second-class hotel where he had always “put up” when alone, and she was new
to the vastness of hotel mirrors and chandeliers, the glossy paint, the
frescoing, the fluted pillars, the tessellated marble pavements upon which
she stepped when she left the Brussels carpeting of the parlors. She clung
to Bartley's arm, silently praying that she might not do anything to
mortify him, and admiring everything he did with all her soul. He made a
halt as they entered the glittering dining-room, and stood frowning till
the head-waiter ran respectfully up to them, and ushered them with sweeping
bows to a table, which they had to themselves. Bartley ordered their dinner
with nonchalant ease, beginning with soup and going to black coffee with
dazzling intelligence. While their waiter was gone with their order, he
beckoned with one finger to another, and sent him out for a paper, which he
unfolded and spread on the table, taking a toothpick into his mouth, and
running the sheet over with his eyes. “I just want to see what's going on
to-night,” he said, without looking at Marcia.
She made a little murmur of acquiescence in her throat, but she could not
speak for strangeness. She began to steal little timid glances about, and
to notice the people at the other tables. In her heart she did not find the
ladies so very well dressed as she had expected the Boston ladies to be;
and there was no gentleman there to compare with Bartley, either in style
or looks. She let her eyes finally dwell on him, wishing that he would put
his paper away and say something, but afraid to ask, lest it should not be
quite right: all the other gentlemen were reading papers. She was feeling
lonesome and homesick, when he suddenly glanced at her and said, “How
pretty you look, Marsh!”
“Do I?” she asked, with a little grateful throb, while her eyes joyfully
suffused themselves.
“Pretty as a pink,” he returned. “Gay,--isn't it?” he continued, with a
wink that took her into his confidence again, from which his study of the
newspaper had seemed to exclude her. “I'll tell you what I'm going to
do: I'm going to take you to the Museum after dinner, and let you see
Boucicault in the 'Colleen Bawn.'” He swept his paper off the table and
unfolded his napkin in his lap, and, leaning back in his chair, began to
tell her about the play. “We can walk: it's only just round the corner,” he
said at the end.
Marcia crept into the shelter of his talk,--he sometimes spoke rather
loud,--and was submissively silent. When they got into their own
room,--which had gilt lambrequin frames, and a chandelier of three burners,
and a marble mantel, and marble-topped table and washstand,--and Bartley
turned up the flaring gas, she quite broke down, and cried on his breast,
to make sure that she had got him all back again.
“Why, Marcia!” he said. “I know just how you feel. Don't you suppose I
understand as well as you do that we're a country couple? But I'm not going
to give myself away; and you mustn't, either. There wasn't a woman in that
room that could compare with you,--_dress_ or looks!”
“You were splendid,” she whispered, “and just like the rest! and that made
me feel somehow as if I had lost you.”
“I know,--I saw just how you felt; but I wasn't going to say anything for
fear you'd give way right there. Come, there's plenty of time before
the play begins. I call this _nice_! Old-fashioned, rather, in the
decorations,” he said, “but pretty good for its time.” He had pulled up two
arm-chairs in front of the glowing grate of anthracite; as he spoke, he
cast his eyes about the room, and she followed his glance obediently. He
had kept her hand in his, and now he held her slim finger-tips in the fist
which he rested on his knee. “No; I'll tell you what, Marcia, if you want
to get on in a city, there's no use being afraid of people. No use being
afraid of _anything_, so long as we're good to each other. And you've got
to believe in me right along. Don't you let anything get you on the wrong
track. I believe that as long as you have faith in me, I shall deserve it;
and when you don't--”
“Oh, Bartley, you know I didn't doubt you! I just got to thinking, and I
was a little worked up! I suppose I'm excited.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” cried her husband. “Don't you suppose I understand
_you?”_
They talked a long time together, and made each other loving promises of
patience. They confessed their faults, and pledged each other that they
would try hard to overcome them. They wished to be good; they both felt
they had much to retrieve; but they had no concealments, and they knew
that was the best way to begin the future, of which they did their best to
conceive seriously. Bartley told her his plans about getting some newspaper
work till he could complete his law studies. He meant to settle down to
practice in Boston. “You have to wait longer for it than you would in a
country place; but when you get it, it's worth while.” He asked Marcia
whether she would look up his friend Halleck if she were in his place; but
he did not give her time to decide. “I guess I won't do it. Not just yet,
at any rate. He might suppose that I wanted something of him. I'll call on
him when I don't need his help.”
Perhaps, if they had not planned to go to the theatre, they would have
staid where they were, for they were tired, and it was very cosey. But when
they were once in the street, they were glad they had come out. Bowdoin
Square and Court Street and Tremont Row were a glitter of gas-lights, and
those shops, with their placarded bargains, dazzled Marcia.
“Is it one of the principal streets?” she asked Bartley.
He gave the laugh of a veteran _habitué_ of Boston. “Tremont Row? No. Wait
till I show you Washington Street to-morrow. There's the Museum,” he said,
pointing to the long row of globed lights on the façade of the building.
“Here we are in Scollay Square. There's Hanover Street; there's Cornhill;
Court crooks down that way; there's Pemberton Square.”
His familiarity with these names estranged him to her again; she clung the
closer to his arm, and caught her breath nervously as they turned in with
the crowd that was climbing the stairs to the box-office of the theatre.
Bartley left her a moment, while he pushed his way up to the little window
and bought the tickets. “First-rate seats,” he said, coming back to her,
and taking her hand under his arm again, “and a great piece of luck. They
were just returned for sale by the man in front of me, or I should have had
to take something 'way up in the gallery. There's a regular jam. These are
right in the centre of the parquet.”
Marcia did not know what the parquet was; she heard its name with the
certainty that but for Bartley she should not be equal to it. All her
village pride was quelled; she had only enough self-control to act upon
Bartley's instructions not to give herself away by any conviction of
rusticity. They passed in through the long, colonnaded vestibule, with its
paintings, and plaster casts, and rows of birds and animals in glass cases
on either side, and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects,
endeared by association, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston
play-goer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him; the
painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass
bell; the governors' portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing
the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full
length, on canvas; and the pagan months and seasons in plaster,--if all
these are, indeed, the subjects,--were dim phantasmagoria amid which she
and Bartley moved scarcely more real. The usher, in his dress-coat, ran up
the aisle to take their checks, and led them down to their seats; half a
dozen elegant people stood to let them into their places; the theatre was
filled with faces. At Portland, where she saw the “Lady of Lyons,” with her
father, three-quarters of the house was empty.
Bartley only had time to lean over and whisper, “The place is packed with
Beacon Street swells,--it's a regular field night,”--when the bell tinkled
and the curtain rose.
As the play went on, the rich jacqueminot-red flamed into her cheeks, and
burnt there a steady blaze to the end. The people about her laughed and
clapped, and at times they seemed to be crying. But Marcia sat through
every part as stoical as a savage, making no sign, except for the flaming
color in her cheeks, of interest or intelligence. Bartley talked of the
play all the way home, but she said nothing, and in their own room he
asked: “Didn't you really like it? Were you disappointed? I haven't been
able to get a word out of you about it. Didn't you like Boucicault?”
“I didn't know which he was,” she answered, with impassioned exaltation. “I
didn't care for him. I only thought of that poor girl, and her husband who
despised her--”
She stopped. Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and
fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end. “And you
thought--you thought,” he cried, trying to get his breath,--“you thought
you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan! Oh, I see, I see!” He went on
making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she
laughed with him at last. When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he
began his joking afresh. “The real thing for Hardress to do,” he said,
fumbling for the key, “is to _blow_ it out. That's what Hardress usually
does when he comes up from the rural districts with Eily on their bridal
tour. That finishes off Eily, without troubling Danny Mann. The only
drawback is that it finishes off Hardress, too: they're both found
suffocated in the morning.”