VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE.
Comedy of Errors; ii.--I.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson had in the course of a varied, if not always
dignified career, learned many things. There are people who seem
compelled by circumstances to waste much of their mental energy in
attending to the trivial and sordid details of life, and the widow
often repined that she was one of these unfortunates. She secretly
fretted not a little, for instance, over the fact that she was
compelled to be gracious to servants, to butcher and baker and
candlestick maker, from unmixed reasons of policy. To be gracious in
the _role_ of a _grande dame_ would have pleased her, but she resented
the necessity; and she avenged herself upon fate by gloating upon the
stupidity of that power in wasting her energies in these petty things,
when results so brilliant might have been attained by a more wise
utilization of her cleverness.
This morning, for instance, when Mrs. Sampson chatted affably with the
carpenter who had come to do an odd job in the china closet of her tiny
dining-room, she really enjoyed the talk. She was one of those women
who cannot help liking to chat with a man, and John Stanton was both
good looking enough and intelligent enough to make her willing to exert
herself for his entertainment. This did not, however, prevent her being
inwardly indignant that she felt herself compelled to converse with
Stanton because experience had taught her that a little amiability
properly exhibited was sure to increase the work and lessen the bill at
the same time. She did not forego the pleasure of pitying herself
because she chanced to find the task imposed upon her an agreeable one.
There are few people in this world who are sufficiently just and
sufficiently sane to deny themselves the luxury of self pity merely
because the occasion does not justify that feeling.
Stanton, with his coat off and his strong arms bare to the elbow, was
planing down a shelf to make it fit into its place, and as he paused to
shake the long creamy shavings out of his plane, he looked up to say
apologetically,--
"I'm making an awful litter, ma'am, but I don't see how I can help it."
Mrs. Sampson laughed.
"Oh, it isn't of the least consequence," she answered. "If I was
inclined to complain it would be because after keeping me waiting for
six weeks for this work, you come just when I have company staying with
me, and gentlemen coming to dine."
She had walked into the room with a not illy simulated air of having
come with the intention of going out again immediately, and stood well
posed, so that her fine figure came out in relief against a crimson
Japanese screen.
"I haven't anything to do with that, ma'am," Stanton replied. "The boss
makes out the orders, and we go where we are sent."
"Well," the widow said, smiling brilliantly, and moving across the room
to the table where the dishes taken from the closet were piled, "it
can't be helped, I suppose; but I hope you will let me get things
cleared up in time for dinner."
"Oh, I'll surely get through by eleven or half past."
"And I don't have dinner till half past six."
The carpenter looked up questioningly. Then he went on with his work.
"I never can get used to city ways," he observed. "I don't see how
folks can get along without having dinner in the middle of the day when
it's dinner time."
Mrs. Sampson busied herself with the plates, arranging things on the
sideboard ready for evening. Her guest, Miss Merrivale, was out driving
with Fred Rangely, and the widow's resources in the way of servants
were so limited that it was necessary that the hands of the mistress
should attend to many of the details of the housekeeping. She enjoyed
talking to this stalwart, vigorous fellow. She was alive to the last
fibre of her being to the influence of masculine perfections, and
Stanton was a splendidly built type of manhood. She utilized the
moments and secured an excuse for lingering by going on with her work
while the carpenter continued his, carrying out her theory of getting
the most out of a laborer by personal supervision, and withal
gratifying her intense and instinctive fondness for the presence of a
magnificent man.
"You are not city bred, perhaps," she answered his last remark, for the
sake of saying something.
"Oh, no, ma'am," John answered. "I was raised at Feltonville."
The widow became alert at once.
"Feltonville?" she repeated. "Why, I have a cousin living there, the
Hon. Thomas Greenfield."
"Oh, Tom Greenfield. Everybody knows Tom Greenfield," John said, his
face lighting up. "We call him 'Honest Tom' up our way. He's here in
the Legislature now."
"Yes, I know he is. He's coming here to dinner to-night."
"Is he? He's an awful smart man, and he's a good one, too, as ever
walked. He's awful interested in Orin's getting the job to make the new
statue of _America_. Orin," he added in explanation, "Orin Stanton,
he's the sculptor and he's my brother; my half-brother, that is. You've
heard of him?"
"Oh, of course," she answered, warmly.
Mrs. Sampson knew little of Orin Stanton, but she did know that Alfred
Irons was on the committee having in charge the commission for the new
statue, and the fact that Mr. Greenfield had an interest, however
indirect, in the same matter, was a hint too valuable not to be acted
upon.
Despite the confidence with which he had spoken to Fenton, the railroad
business was by no means settled. The Staggchase syndicate had rallied
to raise objections to prevent the Railroad Commissioners from
authorizing the other route. A hearing had been granted, and for it
elaborate preparations were being made. The Irons syndicate were
extremely anxious that Greenfield should speak at this hearing, but
there had been so much feeling aroused at Feltonville by his action in
the Senate that he was not inclined to do so; and Mrs. Sampson, who had
already proved so successful in influencing her relative, had been
requested to continue her efforts.
The widow had pondered deeply upon the tactics she should use, and it
is to be noted that she set down the amount of the obligation incurred
by Irons as the greater because she had really become in a way fond of
Greenfield, and she was too clever not to understand the fact, to which
the senator with singular perversity remained obstinately blind, that
he could not but injure his political prestige by the course he was
taking. She had aroused his combativeness by telling him that if his
convictions forced him to vote against the Feltonville interest, people
would say he was bought. She knew that now this was said, and that
openly;--indeed, despite all her shrewdness and knowledge of human
nature, she had moments when she wondered whether the charge might not
be true, so incomprehensible did it seem that a man should throw away
his own advantage. She had no sentiment strong enough to make her
hesitate about going on to sacrifice Greenfield to her own interests,
but she distinctly disliked the fact that Irons should also profit by
the senator's loss.
All day the widow pondered deeply on the situation, and the result of
the chance disclosure of John Stanton was that when her guests arrived
she made an opportunity to take Irons aside for a moment's confidential
talk.
The widow's dinner-party was a somewhat singular one to give in
compliment to a young girl, there being no one of the guests near Miss
Merrivale's own age except Fred Rangely. The widow's acquaintance among
women whom she could ask to meet the New Yorker was limited, and having
decided upon inviting Greenfield, Irons, and Rangely to dinner, the
hostess sat gnawing her stylographic pen in despair a good half hour
before she could decide upon a fourth guest. A woman she must have, and
few women whom she wished to ask would come to her house even to call.
When she now and then gathered at an afternoon tea a handful of people
whose names she was proud to have reported in the society papers, she
did it by securing a lion of literary or of theatrical fame, whose
unwary feet she entangled in her cunningly laid snares before he knew
anything about social conditions in Boston. There were many people,
moreover, who would go to see a celebrity at a house like that of Mrs.
Sampson much as they would have gone to the theatre, when they would
have received neither the guest of honor nor the hostess, the latter of
whom, to their thinking, stood for the time being much in the position
of stage manager.
Mrs. Sampson never set herself to a problem like this without a feeling
of bitterness. To consider what woman of any standing could be induced
to eat her salt brought her true social position before her with
painful vividness. She could not, in face of the facts which then
forced themselves upon her, shut her eyes to the truth that her painful
struggles for position had been pretty nearly fruitless. She did now
and then get an invitation to a crush in a desirable house, some
over-sensitive woman who had been to stare at one of Mrs. Sampson's
captures thus discharging her debt, and at the same time virtually
wiping her hands of all intercourse with the dashing widow. As for
asking her to their tables or going to hers, everybody understood that
that was not to be thought of.
With the cleverness born of desperation, Mrs. Sampson solved her
difficulty by asking Miss Catherine Penwick to fill the vacant place.
Miss Catherine Penwick was the last forlorn and fluttering leaf on the
bare branches of a lofty but expiring family tree. The Penwicks had
come over in the Mayflower, or at a period yet more remote, and the
acme of the prosperity and social distinction of the name was
coincident with the second administration of President Washington.
Since that time its decadence had been steady; at first slow, but later
with the accelerating motion common to falling bodies, until nothing
remained of the family revenues, little but a tradition of the family
greatness, and none of the race but this frostbitten old lady, poor and
forsaken in her desolate old age.
Miss Penwick was one of the learned ladies of her generation, a fact
which counted for less in the erudite day into which it was her
misfortune to linger than in those of her far-away youth. She struggled
against the tide with pathetic bravery, endeavoring to eke out some
sort of a livelihood by giving feeble lectures on Greek art, which no
living being wished to hear, or could possibly be supposed to be any
better for hearing, but to which the charitably disposed subscribed
with spasmodic benevolence. The poor creature, with her antique curls
quivering about her face, yellow and wrinkled now, its high-bred
expression sadly marred by the look of anxious eagerness which comes of
watching, like the prophet, for the ravens to bring one's dinner, was
but too glad to be invited to sit at any table where she could get a
comfortable meal and be allowed to play for the moment at being the
grand lady her ancestresses had been in reality.
"I hope you don't mind my asking Miss Penwick as the only lady," Mrs.
Sampson said to her guest; "but she is such a dear old creature, and
our family and hers have been intimate for centuries. She is getting
old, poor dear, and she hasn't any money any more, just as I haven't.
But you know she is wiser than Minerva's owl, and quite the fashion in
Boston. One really is nobody who doesn't know Miss Penwick; and she is
_so_ well bred."
Miss Penwick, dear old soul, had a feeling that Mrs. Amanda Welsh
Sampson was somehow too hopelessly modern for one of her generation
ever to be really in sympathy with the widow; but Mrs. Sampson had been
born a Welsh, and Miss Catherine was too unworldly to be aware of all
the gossip and even scandal which had made the name of the dashing
adventuress of so evil savor in the nostrils of people like Mrs.
Frederick Staggchase.
And it must be confessed also, that to such petty economies was the
last of the Penwicks reduced by poverty that a dinner was an object to
her. She could not afford to lose an opportunity of dining at the price
of two horse-car tickets, and so promptly at the moment she presented
herself in the dainty elegance of bits of real old lace, with family
miniatures and locks of hair from the illustrious heads of
great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers decorously framed in split
pearls, the lustre of the jewels, like that of their wearer, tarnished
by time.
Miss Merrivale did feel that the company assembled was an odd one,
although she lived too far away to appreciate the fact that none of the
guests, with the possible exception of Rangely, were exactly what she
would have been asked to dine with at home. A country member, a
self-made vulgarian, an antiquated spinster, and a literateur who,
after all, was received rather upon sufferance into such exclusive
houses as he entered at all, made up a group of which Miss Merrivale,
with feminine instinct, felt the inferiority, despite the fact that she
had no means of placing the guests. Miss Penwick appreciated the social
standing of her fellow-diners, but she had by a long course of social
humiliations come to accept unpleasant conditions where getting a
dinner was concerned; and she was, moreover, somewhat relieved that at
Mrs. Sampson's she was not obliged to meet anybody worse. Her instincts
were keen enough, after all her melancholy experiences, to enable her
to recognize the fact that Tom Greenfield was the most truly a
gentleman of the three men, and she was pleased that he should take her
in to dinner.
Mrs. Sampson, as she went in on the arm of Irons, contrived to let him
know what she had heard that morning from young Stanton of Greenfield's
interest in the young sculptor; adding a hint or two of the use to be
made of this information. Rangely, just behind her, was chatting with
Miss Frances in that half amorous badinage which some girls always
provoke, perhaps because they expect and keenly relish it.
"Oh, no," he observed, just as Mrs. Sampson was able to give an ear to
what was being said by the young people. "I am not fickle. I am
constancy itself, but when you are in New York and I am in Boston, you
really can't expect me to sigh loud enough to be heard all that
distance."
"I know you too well to suppose you will sigh at all," she returned,
with a coquettish air. "Especially with the consolations I am given to
understand that you have near at hand."
"What consolations?" he asked, visibly disconcerted.
"What has that confounded widow been telling her?" he wondered
inwardly. "Is it Mrs. Staggchase or Ethel Mott she's aiming at?"
Miss Merrivale tossed her head, as they paused in the doorway of the
tiny dining-room a moment to give Mr. Irons opportunity to convey his
ungainly length into its proper niche. Her shot had been purely a
random one and, unless one believes in telepathy, so was the question
by which she abruptly changed the subject.
"Do you know my cousin, Mrs. Frederick Staggchase?"
He held himself in hand wonderfully.
"Oh, yes," was his reply. "I know Mrs. Staggchase very well, but I
didn't know she was your cousin. All the good gifts of life seem to
fall to her lot."
"Thanks for nothing. She has not been to see me. She invited me to dine
and I declined, and then she wrote and asked me to visit there when I
finished my stay here."
"Shall you do it?"
The thought with which Rangely asked this question was one oddly
mingled of regret and of hope. He had flirted too seriously with Miss
Merrivale to wish to meet her at Mrs. Staggchase's, although he had
never seriously cared for her; and he reflected with a humorous sense
of relief that if the pretty New Yorker should really visit her cousin,
he was likely to be put in a position to give his undivided attention
to wooing Miss Mott, a consummation for which he wished without having
the strength of mind to bring it about. As she let his question pass in
silence, he smiled to himself at the ignominious manner in which he
must retreat from his attitude as the devoted admirer of Mrs.
Staggchase and of Miss Merrivale, feeling that to set about the earnest
attempt to win Ethel would be quite consolation enough to enable him to
reconcile himself to even this. The comfort of having circumstances
make for him a decision which he should make for himself, is often to a
self-indulgent man of far more importance than the decision itself.
As the dinner progressed, Miss Penwick, warming with the good
cheer--for Mrs. Sampson was too thoroughly a man's woman not to
appreciate the value of palatable viands--become decidedly loquacious;
and at last, by a happy coincidence for which her hostess could have
hugged her on the spot, she introduced the name of Orin Stanton.
"I hear you are on the _America_ committee, Mr. Irons," she said. "We
ladies are so much interested in that just now. I called on Mrs.
Bodewin Ranger yesterday, and she is really enthusiastic over this
young Stanton that's going to make it. He is going to make it, isn't
he?"
Irons laughed his vulgar laugh, which Fenton once said was the laugh of
a swineherd counting his pigs.
"It has not been decided," he answered. "Stanton seems to have a good
many friends."
"Oh, he has, indeed," responded Miss Penwick eagerly. "He is a young
man of extraordinary genius. I saw a beautiful notice of him in the
_Daily Observer_ the other morning, Mr. Rangely," she continued,
turning to Fred, "and Mrs. Frostwinch said she thought you wrote it. It
was very appreciative."
"Yes, I wrote it," he responded, not very warmly. "Mr. Stanton is
endorsed by Mr. Calvin, you know, Mr. Irons; and Mr. Calvin is our
highest authority, I suppose."
Of those present no one except the hostess was surprised at this
admission, which marked the great change in Rangely's position since
the days when, like Arthur Fenton, he was a pronounced Pagan and
denounced Peter Calvin as the incarnation of Philistinism in art. On
one occasion Rangely had boldly reproached his friend with having gone
over to the camp of the Philistines; and he had been met with the
retort,--
"We have found it pleasant in the camp of Philistia, have we not?"
"We?" Rangely had echoed, with an accent of indignation.
"Yes," Arthur had replied, with cool scorn. "You Pagans pitched into me
because I made my way over; but I am not so stupid as not to see that
there has been considerable sneaking after me."
"But at least," Fred had urged, "we fellows preserved the decency of a
respect for the principles we had professed."
"Ah, bah! The principles we had professed Were the impossible dreams of
extreme youth. Honesty is a weakness that is outgrown by any man who
has brains enough to do his own thinking. You still profess the
principles, and betray them, while I boldly disavow them at the start."
"At least," Rangely had said, driven to his last defences, "if we have
fallen off, we have done it unconsciously, and you"--
"I," Fenton had flamed out in interruption, "have, at least, made it a
point to be honest with myself, whether I was with anybody else or not.
I find it easier to be mistaken than to be vague, and I had far rather
be."
The thought of Fenton floated through Fred's mind as he endorsed Peter
Calvin, and with no especial thought of what he was saying, he
observed--
"Arthur Fenton wants Grant Herman to have the commission, and I must
say Herman would be sure to do it well."
"If Fenton wants Herman," Irons returned, with an attempt at lightness
which only served to emphasize the genuine bitterness which underlaid
his words, "that settles my voting for him."
"Don't you and Mr. Fenton agree?" the hostess asked. "I supposed you
were one of his admirers or you wouldn't have had him paint your
portrait."
"I admire his works more than I do him," Irons answered, adding with
clumsy jocularity "I am waiting for offers from the friends of
candidates."
"I am interested in young Stanton," Mr. Greenfield said; "I might make
you an offer."
"Oh, to oblige you," the other responded, "I will consent to support
him without money and without price."
The talk meant little to any one save the hostess and Irons, but they
both felt that this move in their game, slight as it seemed, was both
well made and important. Later in the evening Irons took occasion to
assure Greenfield that he would really support Stanton in the
committee, adding that with the vote of Calvin this would settle the
matter. When a few days later Irons asked the decision of Greenfield in
regard to the railroad matter, he found that the attitude of the
chairman of the committee was satisfactory. And honest Tom Greenfield
had the satisfaction of believing that he had been instrumental in
furthering the interests of Orin Stanton, in whose success he felt the
pride common to people in a country district when a genius has appeared
among them and secured recognition from the outside world sufficient to
assure them that they are not mistaken in their admiration. Nor was the
mind of the country member disturbed by any suspicion that he had been
managed and deceived, and that he had really played into the hands of
that most unscrupulous corporation, the Wachusett Syndicate.