silence for a half a mile. Then he said suddenly, as if emerging from a
cloud of reflection:
“I ain’t never said nothing agin marriage!”
* * * * *
Noon-time came, and the hot August sun poured down upon them, until the
old calash felt, as Mr. Pett remarked, like a chariot of fire. This
observation was evolved in a humorous way to slacken the tension of a
situation which was becoming distinctly unpleasant. Moved by a spirit of
genial and broadly human benevolence which was somewhat unnatural to
him, Mr. Pett had insisted upon pleading the cause of the youthful
runaways with an insistence that was at once indiscreet and futile. In
the end his companion had ordered him to hold his tongue, an injunction
he was quite incapable of obeying. After a series of failures in the way
of conversational starters, he finally scored a success by suggesting
that they should pause and partake of the meagre refection which Canada
Pete had furnished them--a modest repast of doughnuts, apples and
store-pie. This they ate at the first creek where they found a
convenient place to water the horse.
When they resumed their journey, they found that they were all refreshed
and in brighter mood. Even the horse was intoxicated by the water and
that form of verdure which may pass for grass on the margin of a
mountain highway in Maine.
This change of feeling was also perceptible in the manner and bearing of
the human beings who made up the cavalcade. Samantha adjusted her
furbelows with unconscious deftness and daintiness, while she gazed
before her into the bright blue heaven; and, I am sorry to say, sucked
her teeth. Reuben frankly flung one leg over the end of his seat, and
conversed easily as he drove along, poised like a boy who rides a
bare-back horse to water. After awhile he even felt emboldened to resume
the forbidden theme of conversation.
“Nature is nature, Samantha,” he said.
“’Tis in some folks,” responded Samantha, dryly; “there’s others seems
to be able to git along without it.” And Reuben turned this speech over
in his mind for a good ten minutes.
Then, just as he was evidently about to say something, he glanced up and
saw a sight which changed the current of his reflections. It was only a
cloud in the heavens, but it evidently awakened a new idea in his mind.
“Samantha,” he said, in a tone of voice that seemed inappropriately
cheerful; “they’s goin’ to be a thunder storm.”
[Illustration]
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Spaulding.
“Certain,” asseverated Mr. Pett; “there she is a-comin up, right agin
the wind.”
A thunder storm on the edge of a Maine forest is not wholly a joke. It
sometimes has a way of playing with the forest trees much as a table
d’hôte diner plays with the wooden tooth-picks. Samantha’s protests,
when Mr. Pett stated that he was going to get under the cover of an
abandoned saw-mill which stood by the roadside a little way ahead of
them, were more a matter of form than anything else. But still, when
they reached the rough shed of unpainted and weather-beaten boards, and
Mr. Pett, in turning in gave the vehicle a sudden twist that broke the
shaft, her anger at the delay thus rendered necessary was beyond her
control.
“I declare to goodness, Reuben Pett,” she cried; “if you ain’t the
awkwardest! Anybody’d a’most think you’d done that a purpose.”
“Oh, no, Samantha!” said Reuben Pett, pleasantly; “it ain’t right to
talk like that. This here machine’s dreadful old. Why, Samantha, we’d
ought to sympathize with it--you and me!”
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Pett,” said Samantha. “I ain’t so dreadful old,
whatever you may be.”
At the moment Mr. Pett made no rejoinder to this. He unshipped the merry
horse, and tied him to a post under the old saw-mill, and then he pulled
the calash up the runway into the first story, and patiently set about
the difficult task of mending the broken shaft, while Samantha, looking
out through the broad, open doorway, watched the fierce Summer storm
descend upon the land; and she tapped her impatient foot until it almost
burst its too narrow satin covering.
“No, Samantha,” Mr. Pett said, at last, intently at work upon his
splicing; “you ain’t so dreadful old, for a fact; but I’ve knowed you
when you was a dreadful sight younger. I’ve knowed you,” he continued,
reflectively, “when you was the spryest girl in ten miles round--when
you could dance as lively as that young lady whose clo’es you’re
a-wearin’.”
“Don’t you dare to talk to me about that jade!” said Mrs. Spaulding,
snappishly.
“Why, no! certainly not!” said Mr. Pett; “I didn’t mean no comparison.
Only, as I was a-sayin’, there was a time, Samantha, when you could
dance.”
[Illustration]
“And who says I can’t dance now?” demanded Mrs. Spaulding, with anger in
her voice.
“My! I remember wunst,” said Mr. Pett; and then the sense of Samantha’s
angry question seemed to penetrate his wandering mind.
“‘Dance now?’” he repeated. “Sho! Samantha, you couldn’t dance nowadays
if you was to try.”
“Who says I couldn’t?” asked Samantha, again, with a set look developing
around the corners of her mouth.
“_I_ say you couldn’t,” replied Mr. Pett, obtusely. “’Tain’t in nature.
But there was a time, Samantha, when you was great on fancy steps.”
“Think I’m too old for fancy steps now, do you?” She looked at her
tormentor savagely, out of the corners of her eyes.
“Well, not too old, may be, Samantha,” went on Mr. Pett; “but may be you
ain’t that limber you was. I know how it is. I ain’t smart as I used to
be, myself. Why, do you remember that night down at the Corners, when we
two was the only ones that could jump over Squire Tate’s high andirons
and cut a pigeon-wing before we come down?”
Mr. Pett appeared to be entirely unconscious that Mrs. Spaulding’s bosom
was heaving, that her eyes were snapping angrily, and that her foot was
beating on the floor in that tattoo with which a woman announces that
she is near an end of her patience.
“How high was them andirons?” she asked, breathlessly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Reuben, indifferently. He kept his eyes
fixed on his work; but while he worked his splice closer with his right
hand, with his left he took off his hat and held it out rather more than
two feet above the floor.
“’Bout as high as that, may be,” he said. “Remember the tune we done
that to? Went some sort of way like this, didn’t it?” And with that
remarkable force of talent which is only developed in country solitudes,
Mr. Pett began to whistle an old-time air, a jiggetty, wiggetty
whirl-around strain born of some dead darkey’s sea-sawing fiddle-bow,
with a volume of sustained sound that would have put to shame anything
the saw-mill could have done for itself in its buzzingest days.
“Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee _ee_!” whistled Mr. Pett;
and then, softly, and as if only the dim stirring of memory moved him,
he began to call the old figures of the old dance.
“Forward all!” he crooned. “Turn partners! Sashay! Alleman’ all!
Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee _ee_!”
And suddenly, like the tiger leaping from her lair, the soft pattering
and shuffling of feet behind him resolved itself into a quick, furious
rhythmic beat, and Samantha Spaulding shot high into the air, holding up
her skirts with both hands, while her neat ankles crossed each other in
a marvelous complication of agility a good twelve inches above his
outstretched hat.
“There!” she cried, as she landed with a flourish that combined skill
and grace; “there’s what I done with you, and much I think of it! If you
want to see dancin’ that is dancin’ look here. Here’s what I did with
Ben Griggs at the shuckin’ that same year; and you wa’n’t there, and
good reason why!”
And then and there, while Reuben Pett’s great rasping whistle rang
through the old saw-mill, shrilling above the roar of the storm
outside, Mrs. Samantha Spaulding executed with lightning rapidity and
with the precision of perfect and confident knowledge, a dancing-step
which for scientific complexity and daring originality had been twenty
years before the surprise, the delight, the tingling, shocking, tempting
nine-days’-wonder of the country-side.
[Illustration]
“Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee ee, ee _ee_!” Reuben
Pett’s whistle died away from sheer lack of breath as Samantha came to
the end of her dance.
* * * * *
There is nothing that hath a more heavy and leaden cold than a chilled
enthusiasm. When the storm was over, although a laughing light
[Illustration]
played over the landscape; although diamond sparkles lit up the grateful
white mist that rose from the refreshed earth; although the sun shone as
though he had been expecting that thunder storm all day, and was
inexpressibly glad that it was over and done with, Samantha leaned back
in her seat in the calash, and nursed a cheerless bitterness of
spirit--such a bitterness as is known only to the New England woman to
whom has come a realization of the fact that she has made a fool of
herself. Samantha Spaulding. Made a fool of herself. At her age. After
twenty years of respectable widowhood. Her, of all folks. And with that
old fool. Who’d be’n a-settin’ and a-settin’ and a-settin’ all these
years. And never said Boo! And now for him to twist her round his finger
like that. She felt like--well, she didn’t know how she _did_ feel.
She was so long wrapped up in her own thoughts that it was with a start
that she awoke to the fact that they were making very slow progress, and
that this was due to the very peculiar conduct of Mr. Pett. He was
making little or no effort to urge the horse along, and the horse,
consequently, having got tired of wasting his bright spirits on the
empty air, was maundering. So was Mr. Pett, in another way. He mumbled
to himself; from time to time he whistled scraps of old-fashioned tunes,
and occasionally he sang to himself a brief catch--the catch coming in
about the third or fourth bar.
“Look here, Reuben Pett!” demanded Samantha, shrilly; “be you going to
get to Byram’s Pond to-night?”
“I _kin_,” replied Reuben.
“Well, _be_ you?” Samantha Spaulding inquired.
“I d’no. Fact is, I wa’n’t figurin’ on that just now.”
“Well, what _was_ you figurin’ on?” snapped Mrs. Spaulding.
“When you’s goin’ to marry me,” Mr. Pett answered with perfect
composure. “Look here, Samantha! it’s this way: here’s twenty years
you’ve kept me waitin’.”
“_Me_ kept you waitin’! Well, Reuben Pett, if I ever!”
“Don’t arguefy, Samantha; don’t arguefy,” remonstrated Mr. Pett; “I
ain’t rakin up no details. What we’ve got to deal with is this question
as it stands to-day. Be you a-goin’ to marry me or be you not? And if
you be, when be you?”
“Reuben Pett,” exclaimed Samantha, with a showing of severity which was
very creditable under the circumstances; “ain’t you _ashamed_ of talk
like that between folks of our age?”
“_We_ ain’t no age--no age in particular, Samantha,” said Mr. Pett. “A
woman who can cut a pigeon-wing over a hat held up higher than any two
pair of andirons that I ever see is young enough for me, anyway.” And he
chuckled over his successful duplicity.
Samantha blushed a red that was none the less becoming for a tinge of
russet. Then she took a leaf out of Mr. Pett’s book.
“Young enough for you?” she repeated. “Well, I guess so! I wa’n’t
thinkin’ of myself when I said old, Mr. Pett. I was thinkin’ of folks
who was gettin’ most too old to drive down hill in a hurry.”
“Who’s that?” asked Reuben.
“I ain’t namin’ any names,” said Samantha; “but I’ve knowed the time
when you wasn’t so awful afraid of gettin’ a spill off the front seat of
a calash. Lord! how time does take the tuck out of some folks!” she
concluded, addressing vacancy.
“Do you mean to say that I da’sn’t drive you down to Byram’s Pond
to-night?” Mr. Pett inquired defiantly.
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Mr. Pett stuck a crooked forefinger into his lady-love’s face, and
gazed at her with such an intensity that she was obliged at last to
return his penetrating gaze.
“If I get you to Byram’s Pond before the train goes, will you marry me
the first meetin’ house we come to?”
[Illustration]
“I will,” said Mrs. Spaulding, after a moment’s hesitation, well
remembering what the other party to the bargain had forgotten, that
there was no church in Byram Pond, nor nearer than forty miles down the
railroad.
* * * * *
In the warm dusk of a Summer’s evening, a limping, shackle-gaited,
bewildered horse, dragging a calash in the last stages of ruin, brought
two travelers into the village of Byram’s Pond. Far up on the hills
there lingered yet the clouds of dust that marked where that calash had
come down those hills at a pace whereat no calash ever came down hill
before. Dust covered the two travelers so thickly, that, although the
woman’s costume was of peculiar and striking construction, its
eccentricities were lost in a dull and uniform grayness. Her bonnet,
however, would have excited comment. It had apparently been of
remarkable height; but pounding against the hood of the calash had so
knocked it out of all semblance to its original shape, that with its
great wire hoops sticking out “four ways for Sunday,” it looked more
like a discarded crinoline perched upon her head than any known form of
feminine bonnet.
[Illustration]
The calash slowed up as it drew near the town. Suddenly it stopped
short, and both the travelers gazed with startled interest at a
capacious white tent reared by the roadside. From within this tent came
the strains of a straining melodeon. Over the portal was stretched a
canvas sign:
GOSPEL TENT OF REV. J. HANKEY.
As the travelers stared with all their eyes, they saw the flap of the
tent thrown back, and four figures came out. There were two ladies, a
stout, middle-aged lady, a shapely, buxom young lady, a tall,
broad-shouldered young man, and the fourth figure was unmistakably a
Minister of one of the Congregational denominations. The young man and
the two ladies walked down the road a little way, and, entering a
solid-looking farm wagon, drove off behind a pair of plump horses, in
the direction of the railroad station, while the minister waved them a
farewell that was also a benediction.
“Git down, Samantha!” said Reuben Pett, “and straighten out that bonnet
of yours. Parson’s got another job before prayer-meetin’ begins.”
MY DEAR MRS. BILLINGTON.
Miss Carmelita Billington sat in a bent-wood rocking-chair in an upper
room of a great hotel by the sea, and cried for a little space, and then
for a little space dabbed at her hot cheeks and red eyes with a
handkerchief wet with cologne; and dabbed and cried, and dabbed and
cried, without seeming to get any “forwarder.” The sun and the fresh
breeze and the smell of the sea came in through her open windows, but
she heeded them not. She mopped herself with cologne till she felt as if
she could never again bear to have that honest scent near her dainty
nose; but between the mops the tears trickled and trickled and trickled;
and she was dreadfully afraid that inwardly, into the surprising great
big cavity that had suddenly found room for itself in her poor little
heart, the tears would trickle, trickle, trickle forever. It was no use
telling herself she had done right. When you have done right and wish
you hadn’t had to you can’t help having a profound contempt for the
right. The right is respectable, of course, and proper and commendable
and--in short, it’s the right;--but, oh! what a nuisance it is! You
can’t help wondering in your private mind why the right is so
disagreeable and unpleasant and unsatisfactory, and the wrong so
extremely nice. Of course, it was right to refuse Jack Hatterly; but
why, why on earth couldn’t it just as easily have been right to accept
him? And the more she thought about it the more she doubted whether it
was always quite right to do right, and whether it was not sometimes
entirely wrong not to do wrong.
[Illustration]
No; it was no use telling herself to be a brave girl. She was a brave
girl and she knew it. In the face of the heartless world she could bear
herself as jauntily as if she were heartless, too; but in the privacy of
her own room, with Mama fast asleep on the verandah below, she could not
see the slightest use in humbugging herself. She was perfectly
miserable, and the rest of her reflections might have been summed up in
the simple phrase of early girlhood, “So there!”
It was no consolation to poor Carmelita’s feelings that her little
private tragedy was of a most business-like, commonplace, unromantic
complexion. It only made her more disgusted with herself for having made
up her mind to do the right thing. She was not torn from her chosen love
by the hands of cruel parents. Her parents had never denied her anything
in her life, and if she had really wanted to wed a bankrupt bashaw with
three tails and an elephant’s head, she could have had her will. Nor did
picturesque poverty have anything to do with the situation. She was rich
and so was Jack. Nor could she rail against a parental code of morality
too stern for tender hearts. There was not the least atom of objection
to Jack in any respect. He was absolutely as nice as could be--and,
unless I am greatly misinformed, a good-looking young man, deeply in
love, can be very nice indeed.
And yet there was no doubt in Carmelita’s mind that it was her plain
duty to refuse Jack. To marry him would mean to utterly give up and
throw aside a plan of life, which, from her earliest childhood, she had
never imagined to be capable of the smallest essential alteration. If a
man who had devoted his whole mind and soul to the business of
manufacturing overshoes were suddenly invited to become a salaried poet
on a popular magazine, he could not regard the proposed change of
profession as more preposterously impossible than the idea of marriage
with Jack Hatterly seemed to Miss Carmelita Billington.
For Miss Billington occupied a peculiar position. She was the Diana of a
small but highly prosperous city in the South-West; a city which her
father had built up in years of enterprising toil. To mention the town
of Los Brazos to any capitalist in the land was to call up the name of
Billington, the brilliant speculator who, ruined on the Boston
stock-market, went to Texas and absolutely created a town which for
wealth, beauty and social distinction had not its equal in the great
South-West. It was colonized with college graduates from New York,
Boston and Philadelphia; and, in Los Brazos, boys who had left
cane-rushes and campus choruses scarce ten years behind them had
fortunes in the hundred thousands, and stood high in public places. As
the daughter of the founder of Los Brazos, Miss Billington’s fortunes
were allied, she could not but feel, to the place of her birth. There
must she marry, there must she continue the social leadership which her
mother was only too ready to lay down. The Mayor of the town, the
District Attorney, the Supreme Court Judge and the Bishop were all among
her many suitors; and six months before she had wished, being a
natural-born sport, if she _was_ a girl, that they would only get
together and shake dice to see which of them should have her. But then
she hadn’t come East and met Jack Hatterly.
She thought of the first day she had seen the Atlantic Ocean and Jack,
and she wished now that she had never been seized with the fancy to gaze
on the great water. And yet, what a glorious day that was! How grand
[Illustration]
she had thought the ocean! And how grand she had thought Jack! And now
she had given him up forever, that model of manly beauty and audacity;
Jack with his jokes and his deviltries and his exhaustless capacity for
ever new and original larks. Was it absolutely needful? Her poor little
soul had to answer itself that it was. To leave Los Brazos and the great
house with the cool quiet court-yard and the broad verandahs, and to
live in crowded, noisy New York, where she knew not a soul except
Jack--to be separated from those two good fairies who lived only to
gratify her slightest wish--to “go back” on Los Brazos, the pride of the
Billingtons--no; it was impossible, impossible! She must stick to her
post and make her choice between the Mayor and the Judge and the
District Attorney and the Bishop. But how dull and serious and
business-like they all seemed to her now that she had known Jack
Hatterly, the first man she had ever met with a well-developed sense of
humor!
What made it hardest for poor Carmelita was, perhaps, that fate had
played her cruel pranks ever since the terrible moment of her act of
renunciation. Thirty-six hours before, at the end of the dance in the
great hotel parlors, Jack had proposed to her. For many days she had
known what was coming, and what her answer must be, and she had given
him no chance to see her alone. But Jack was Jack, and he had made his
opportunity for himself, and had said his say under cover of the
confusion at the end of the dance; and she had promised to give him his
answer later, and she had given it, after a sleepless and tearful night;
just a line to say that it could never, never be, and that he must not
ask her again. And it had been done in such a commonplace, unromantic
way that she hated to think of it--the meagre, insufficient little note
handed to her maid to drop in the common letter-box of the hotel, and to
lie there among bills and circulars and all sorts of silly every-day
correspondence, until the hotel-clerk should take it out and put it in
Jack’s box. She had passed through the office a little later, and her
heart had sunk within her as she saw his morning’s mail waiting for him
in its pigeon-hole, and thought what the opening of it would bring to
him.
But this was the least of her woe. Later came the fishing trip on the
crowded cat-boat. She had fondly hoped that he would have the delicacy
to excuse himself from that party of pleasure; but no, he was there, and
doing just as she had asked him to, treating her as if nothing had
happened, which was certainly the
[Illustration]
most exasperating thing he could have done. And then, to crown it all,
they had been caught in a storm; and had not only been put in serious
danger, which Carmelita did not mind at all, but had been tossed about
until they were sore, and drenched with water, and driven into the
stuffy little hole that was called a cabin, to choke and swelter and
bump about in nauseated misery for two mortal hours, with the spray
driving in through the gaping hatches; a dozen of them in all, packed
together in there in the ill-smelling darkness. And so it was no wonder
that, after a second night of utter misery, Miss Carmelita Billington
felt so low in her nerves that she was quite unable to withhold her
tears as she sat alone and thought of what lay behind her and before
her.
She had been sitting alone a long time when she heard her mother come up
the stairs and enter her own room. Mrs. Billington was as stout as she
was good-natured, and her step was not that of a light-weight. An
irresistible desire came, to the girl to go to her and pour out her
grief, with her head pillowed on that broad and kindly bosom. She
started up and hurried into the little parlor that separated her room
from her mother’s. As she entered the room at one door, Mr. Jack
Hatterly entered through the door opening into the corridor. Then
Carmelita lost her breath in wonderment, anger and dismay, for Mr. Jack
Hatterly put his arm around her waist, kissed her in a somewhat casual
manner, and then the door of her mother’s room opened and her mother
appeared; and instead of rebuking such extraordinary conduct, assisted
Mr. Hatterly in gently thrusting her into the chamber of the elder lady
with the kind of caressing but steering push with which a child is
dismissed when grown-ups wish to talk privately.
“Stay in there, my dear, for the present; Mr. Hatterly and I have
something to say to each other. I will call you later.”
And before Carmelita fairly knew what had happened to her she found
herself on the other side of the door, wondering exactly where insanity
had broken out in the Billington family.