Now that Bartley had got his basis and had no favors to ask of any one, he
was curious to see his friend Halleck again; but when, in the course of the
Solid Men Series, he went to interview A Nestor of the Leather Interest,
as he meant to call the elder Halleck, he resolved to let him make all
the advances. On a legitimate business errand it should not matter to him
whether Mr. Halleck welcomed him or not. The old man did not wait for
Bartley to explain why he came; he was so simply glad to see him that
Bartley felt a little ashamed to confess that he had been eight months in
Boston without making himself known. He answered all the personal questions
with which Mr. Halleck plied him; and in his turn he inquired after his
college friend.
“Ben is in Europe,” said his father. “He has been there all summer; but
we expect him home about the middle of September. He's been a good while
settling down,” continued the old man, with an unconscious sigh. “He talked
of the law at first, and then he went into business with me; but he didn't
seem to find his calling in it; and now he's taken up the law again. He's
been in the Law School at Cambridge, and he's going back there for a year
or two longer. I thought you used to talk of the law yourself when you were
with us, Mr. Hubbard.”
“Yes, I did,” Bartley assented. “And I haven't given up the notion yet.
I've read a good deal of law already; but when I came up to Boston, I had
to go into newspaper work till I could see my way out of the woods.”
“Well,” said Mr. Halleck, “that's right. And you say you like the
arrangement you've made with Mr. Witherby?”
“It's ideal--for me,” answered Bartley.
“Well, that's good,” said the old man. “And you've come to interview me.
Well, that's all right. I'm not much used to being in print, but I shall be
glad to tell you all I know about leather.”
“You may depend upon my not saying anything that will be disagreeable
to you, Mr. Halleck,” said Bartley, touched by the old man's trusting
friendliness. When his inquisition ended, he slipped his notebook back into
his pocket, and said with a smile, “We usually say something about the
victim's private residence, but I guess I'll spare you that, Mr. Halleck.”
“Why, we live in the old place, and I don't suppose there is much to say.
We are plain people, and we don't like to change. When I built there thirty
years ago, Rumford Street was one of the most desirable streets in Boston.
There was no Back Bay, then, you know, and we thought we were doing
something very fashionable. But fashion has drifted away, and left us high
and dry enough on Rumford Street; though we don't mind it. We keep the old
house and the old garden pretty much as you saw them. You can say whatever
you think best. There's a good deal of talk about the intrusiveness of the
newspapers; all I know is that they've never intruded upon me. We shall not
be afraid that you will abuse our house, Mr. Hubbard, because we expect you
to come there again. When shall it be? Mrs. Halleck and I have been at home
all summer; we find it the most comfortable place; and we shall be very
glad if you'll drop in any evening and take tea with us. We keep the old
hours; we've never taken kindly to the late dinners. The girls are off at
the mountains, and you'd see nobody but Mrs. Halleck. Come this evening!”
cried the old man, with mounting cordiality.
His warmth as he put his hand on Bartley's shoulder made the young man
blush again for the reserve with which he had been treating his own
affairs. He stammered out, hoping that the other would see the relevancy of
the statement, “Why, the fact is, Mr. Halleck, I--I'm married.”
“Married?” said Mr. Halleck. “Why didn't you tell me before? Of course we
want Mrs. Hubbard, too. Where are you living? We won't stand upon ceremony
among old friends. Mrs. Halleck will come with the carriage and fetch Mrs.
Hubbard, and your wife must take that for a call. Why, you don't know how
glad we shall be to have you both! I wish Ben was married. You'll come?”
“Of course we will,” said Bartley. “But you mustn't let Mrs. Halleck send
for us; we can walk perfectly well.”
“_You_ can walk if you want, but Mrs. Hubbard shall ride,” said the old
man.
When Bartley reported this to Marcia, “Bartley!” she cried. “In her
carriage? I'm afraid!”
“Nonsense! She'll be a great deal more afraid than you are. She's the
bashfulest old lady you ever saw. All that I hope is that you won't
overpower her.”
“Bartley, hush! Shall I wear my silk, or--”
“Oh, wear the silk, by all means. Crush them at a blow!”
Rumford Street is one of those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the West End
of Boston, which are now almost wholly abandoned to boarding-houses of the
poorer class. Yet they are charming streets, quiet, clean, and respectable,
and worthy still to be the homes, as they once were, of solid citizens. The
red brick houses, with their swell fronts, looking in perspective like a
succession of round towers, are reached by broad granite steps, and their
doors are deeply sunken within the wagon-roofs of white-painted Roman
arches. Over the door there is sometimes the bow of a fine transom, and the
parlor windows on the first floor of the swell front have the same azure
gleam as those of the beautiful old houses which front the Common on Beacon
Street.
When her husband bought his lot there, Mrs. Halleck could hardly believe
that a house on Rumford Street was not too fine for her. They had come to
the city simple and good young village people, and simple and good they
had remained, through the advancing years which had so wonderfully--Mrs.
Halleck hoped, with a trembling heart, not wickedly--prospered them. They
were of faithful stock, and they had been true to their traditions in every
way. One of these was constancy to the orthodox religious belief in which
their young hearts had united, and which had blessed all their life; though
their charity now abounded perhaps more than their faith. They still
believed that for themselves there was no spiritual safety except in their
church; but since their younger children had left it they were forced
tacitly to own that this might not be so in all cases. Their last endeavor
for the church in Ben's case was to send him to the college where he and
Bartley met; and this was such a failure on the main point, that it left
them remorsefully indulgent. He had submitted, and had foregone his boyish
dreams of Harvard, where all his mates were going; but the sacrifice seemed
to have put him at odds with life. The years which had proved the old
people mistaken would not come back upon their recognition of their error.
He returned to the associations from which they had exiled him too much
estranged to resume them, and they saw, with the unavailing regrets which
visit fathers and mothers in such cases, that the young know their own
world better than their elders can know it, and have a right to be in it
and of it, superior to any theory of their advantage which their elders can
form. Ben was not the fellow to complain; in fact, after he came home from
college, he was allowed to shape his life according to his own rather
fitful liking. His father was glad now to content him in anything he could,
it was so very little that Ben asked. If he had suffered it, perhaps his
family would have spoiled him.
The Halleck girls went early in July to the Profile House, where they had
spent their summers for many years; but the old people preferred to stay
at home, and only left their large, comfortable house for short absences.
Their ways of life had been fixed in other times, and Mrs. Halleck liked
better than mountain or sea the high-walled garden that stretched back of
their house to the next street. They had bought through to this street when
they built, but they had never sold the lot that fronted on it. They
laid it out in box-bordered beds, and there were clumps of hollyhocks,
sunflowers, lilies, and phlox, in different corners; grapes covered the
trellised walls; there were some pear-trees that bore blossoms, and
sometimes ripened their fruit beside the walk. Mrs. Halleck used to work in
the garden; her husband seldom descended into it, but he liked to sit on
the iron-railed balcony overlooking it from the back parlor.
As for the interior of the house, it had been furnished, once for all,
in the worst style of that most tasteless period of household art, which
prevailed from 1840 to 1870; and it would be impossible to say which were
most hideous, the carpets or the chandeliers, the curtains or the chairs
and sofas; crude colors, lumpish and meaningless forms, abounded in a rich
and horrible discord. The old people thought it all beautiful, and those
daughters who had come into the new house as little girls revered it; but
Ben and his youngest sister, who had been born in the house, used the right
of children of their parents' declining years to laugh at it. Yet they
laughed with a sort of filial tenderness.
“I suppose you know how frightful you have everything about you, Olive,”
said Clara Kingsbury, one day after the Eastlake movement began, as she
took a comprehensive survey of the Halleck drawing-room through her
_pince-nez_.
“Certainly,” answered the youngest Miss Halleck. “It's a perfect chamber of
horrors. But I like it, because everything's so exquisitely in keeping.”
“Really, I feel as if I had seen it all for the first time,” said Miss
Kingsbury. “I don't believe I ever realized it before.”
She and Olive Halleck were great friends, though Clara was fashionable and
Olive was not.
“It would all have been different,” Ben used to say, in whimsical sarcasm
of what he had once believed, “if I had gone to Harvard. Then the fellows
in my class would have come to the house with me, and we should have got
into the right set naturally. Now, we're outside of everything, and it
makes me mad, because we've got money enough to be inside, and there's
nothing to prevent it. Of course, I'm not going to say that leather is
quite as blameless as cotton socially, but taken in the wholesale form it
isn't so very malodorous, and it's quite as good as other things that are
accepted.”
“It's not the leather, Ben,” answered Olive, “and it's not your not going
to Harvard altogether, though that has something to do with it. The
trouble's in me. I was at school with all those girls Clara goes with, and
I could have been in that set if I'd wanted; but I didn't really want to. I
saw, at a very tender age, that it was going to be more trouble than it was
worth, and I just quietly kept out of it. Of course, I couldn't have gone
to Papanti's without a fuss, but mother would have let me go if I had made
the fuss; and I could be hand and glove with those girls now, if I tried.
They come here whenever I ask them; and when I meet them on charities, I'm
awfully popular. No, if I'm not fashionable, it's my own fault. But what
difference does it make to you, Ben? You don't want to marry any of those
girls as long as your heart's set on that unknown charmer of yours.” Ben
had once seen his charmer in the street of a little Down East town, where
he met her walking with some other boarding-school girls; in a freak with
his fellow-students, he had bribed the village photographer to let him have
the picture of the young lady, which he had sent home to Olive, marked, “My
Lost Love.”
“No, I don't want to marry anybody,” said Ben. “But I hate to live in a
town where I'm not first chop in everything.”
“Pshaw!” cried his sister, “I guess it doesn't trouble you much.”
“Well, I don't know that it does,” he admitted.
Mrs. Halleck's black coachman drove her to Mrs. Nash's door on Canary
Place, where she alighted and rang with as great perturbation as if it had
been a palace, and these poor young people to whom she was going to be kind
were princes. It was sufficient that they were strangers; but Marcia's
anxiety, evident even to meekness like Mrs. Halleck's, restored her
somewhat to her self-possession; and the thought that Bartley, in spite of
his personal splendor, was a friend of Ben's, was a help, and she got home
with her guests without any great chasms in the conversation, though she
never ceased to twist the window-tassel in her embarrassment.
Mr. Halleck came to her rescue at her own door, and let them in. He shook
hands with Bartley again, and viewed Marcia with a fatherly friendliness
that took away half her awe of the ugly magnificence of the interior. But
still she admired that Bartley could be so much at his ease. He pointed to
a stick at the foot of the hat-rack, and said, “How much that looks like
Halleck!” which made the old man laugh, and clap him on the shoulder, and
cry: “So it does! so it does! Recognized it, did you? Well, we shall soon
have him with us again, now. Seems a long time to us since he went.”
“Still limps a little?” asked Bartley.
“Yes, I guess he'll never quite get over that.”
“I don't believe I should like him to,” said Bartley. “He wouldn't seem
natural without a cane in his hand, or hanging by the crook over his left
elbow, while he stood and talked.”
The old man clapped Bartley on the shoulder again, and laughed again at the
image suggested. “That's so! that's so! You're right, I _guess!”_
As soon as Marcia could lay off her things in the gorgeous chamber to
which Mrs. Halleck had shown her, they went out to tea in the dining-room
overlooking the garden.
“Seems natural, don't it?” asked the old man, as Bartley turned to one of
the windows.
“Not changed a bit, except that I was here in winter, and I hadn't a chance
to see how pretty your garden was.”
“It is pretty, isn't it?” said the old man. “Mother--Mrs. Halleck, I
mean--looks after it. She keeps it about right. Here's Cyrus!” he said, as
the serving-man came into the room with something from the kitchen in his
hands. “You remember Cyrus, I guess, Mr. Hubbard?”
“Oh, yes!” said Bartley, and when Cyrus had set down his dish, Bartley
shook hands with the New Hampshire exemplar of freedom and equality; he was
no longer so young as to wish to mark a social difference between himself
and the inside-man who had served Mr. Halleck with unimpaired self-respect
for twenty-five years.
There was a vacant place at table, and Mr. Halleck said he hoped it would
be taken by a friend of theirs. He explained that the possible guest was
his lawyer, whose office Ben was going into after he left the Law School;
and presently Mr. Atherton came. Bartley was prepared to be introduced
anew, but he was flattered and the Hallecks were pleased to find that he
and Mr. Atherton were already acquainted; the latter was so friendly, that
Bartley was confirmed in his belief that you could not make an interview
too strong, for he had celebrated Mr. Atherton among the other people
present at the Indigent Surf-Bathing entertainment.
He was put next to Marcia, and after a while he began to talk with her,
feeling with a tacit skill for her highest note, and striking that with
kindly perseverance. It was not a very high note, and it was not always a
certain sound. She could not be sure that he was really interested in the
simple matters he had set her to talking about, and from time to time she
was afraid that Bartley did not like it: she would not have liked him to
talk so long or so freely with a lady. But she found herself talking on,
about boarding, and her own preference for keeping house; about Equity, and
what sort of place it was, and how far from Crawford's; about Boston, and
what she had seen and done there since she had come in the winter. Most
of her remarks began or ended with Mr. Hubbard; many of her opinions,
especially in matters of taste, were frank repetitions of what Mr. Hubbard
thought; her conversation had the charm and pathos of that of the young
wife who devotedly loves her husband, who lives in and for him, tests
everything by him, refers everything to him. She had a good mind, though it
was as bare as it could well be of most of the things that the ladies of
Mr. Atherton's world put into their minds.
Mrs. Halleck made from time to time a little murmur of satisfaction in
Marcia's loyalty, and then sank back into the meek silence that she only
emerged from to propose more tea to some one, or to direct Cyrus about
offering this dish or that.
After they rose she took Marcia about, to show her the house, ending with
the room which Bartley had when he visited there. They sat down in this
room and had a long chat, and when they came back to the parlor they
found Mr. Atherton already gone. Marcia inferred the early habits of the
household from the departure of this older friend, but Bartley was in no
hurry; he was enjoying himself, and he could not see that Mr. Halleck
seemed at all sleepy.
Mrs. Halleck wished to send them home in her carriage, but they would not
hear of this; they would far rather walk, and when they had been followed
to the door, and bidden mind the steps as they went down, the wide open
night did not seem too large for their content in themselves and each
other.
“Did you have a nice time?” asked Bartley, though he knew he need not.
“The best time I ever had in the world!” cried Marcia.
They discussed the whole affair; the two old people; Mr. Atherton, and how
pleasant he was; the house and its splendors, which they did not know were
hideous. “Bartley,” said Marcia at last, “I _told_ Mrs. Halleck.”
“Did you?” he returned, in trepidation; but after a while he laughed.
“Well, all right, if you wanted to.”
“Yes, I did; and you can't think how kind she was. She says we must have a
house of our own somewhere, and she's going round with me in her carriage
to help me to find one.”
“Well,” said Bartley, and he fetched a sigh, half of pride, half of dismay.
“Yes, I long to go to housekeeping. We can afford it now. She says we can
get a cheap little house, or half a house, up at the South End, and it
won't cost us any more than to board, hardly; and that's what I think,
too.”
“Go ahead, if you can find the house. I don't object to my own fireside.
And I suppose we must.”
“Yes, we must. Ain't you glad of it?”
They were in the shadow of a tall house, and he dropped his face toward the
face she lifted to his, and gave her a silent kiss that made her heart leap
toward him.