Produced by Hillie Plantinga and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Transcriber's notes:
Four typographical errors have been corrected:
Page 88, "seemes" changed to "seems" (it seems such a wasteful way
to live somehow,)
Page 162, "Ellen" changed to "Ellen," ("I'm very glad you feel that way
about it, Ellen,")
Page 199, "accomodating" changed to "accommodating" (He felt his mind
accommodating to)
Page 252, "Weatherall" changed to "Weatheral" (Mr. Weatheral had some
papers)
THE LOVELY LADY
_By the same author_
A WOMAN OF GENIUS
THE ARROW MAKER
THE GREEN BOUGH
CHRIST IN ITALY
[Illustration: _"It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of
burnished light...."_]
THE LOVELY LADY
BY MARY AUSTIN
[Illustration: ]
_Frontispiece by Gordon Grant_
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1913
_Copyright, 1913, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into Foreign Languages,
including the Scandinavian._
To
J. AND E.
THE COMPANIONS OF THE GONDOLA
CONTENTS
PAGE
PART ONE
In which Peter meets a Dragon, and the Lovely
Lady makes her appearance. 3
PART TWO
In which Peter becomes invisible on the way to
growing rich. 37
PART THREE
In which Peter becomes a bachelor. 59
PART FOUR
In which the Lovely Lady makes a final appearance. 107
ILLUSTRATIONS
"It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of
burnished light...."
PART ONE
IN WHICH PETER
MEETS A DRAGON, AND
THE LOVELY LADY
MAKES HER APPEARANCE
PART ONE
IN WHICH PETER MEETS A DRAGON, AND THE
LOVELY LADY MAKES HER APPEARANCE
I
The walls of the Wonderful House rose up straight and shining, pale
greenish gold as the slant sunlight on the orchard grass under the apple
trees; the windows that sprang arching to the summer blueness let in the
scent of the cluster rose at the turn of the fence, beginning to rise
above the dusty smell of the country roads, and the evening clamour of
the birds in Bloombury wood. As it dimmed and withdrew, the shining of
the walls came out more clearly. Peter saw then that they were all of
coloured pictures wrought flat upon the gold, and as the glow of it
increased they began to swell and stir like a wood waking. They leaned
out from the walls, looking all one way toward the increasing light and
tap-tap of the Princess' feet along the halls.
"Peter, oh, Peter!"
The tap-tapping grew sharp and nearer like the sound of a crutch on a
wooden veranda, and the voice was Ellen's.
"Oh, Peter, you are always a-reading and a-reading!"
Peter rolled off the long settle where he had been stretched and put the
book in his pocket apologetically.
"I was just going to quit," he said; "did you want anything, Ellen?"
"The picnic is coming back; I thought we could go down to the turn to
meet them. Mrs. Sibley said she would save me some things from the
luncheon."
If there was a little sting to Peter in Ellen's eagerness, it was
evidence at least, how completely he and his mother had kept her from
realizing that it was chiefly because of their not being able to afford
the well-filled basket demanded by a Bloombury picnic that they had not
accepted the invitation. Ellen had thought it was because Bet, the mare,
could not be spared all day from the ploughing nor Peter from hoeing
the garden, and her mother was too busy with the plaid gingham dress she
was making for the minister's wife, to do any baking. It meant to Ellen,
the broken fragments of the luncheon, just so much of what a picnic
should mean: the ride in the dusty morning, swings under the trees, easy
games that she could play, lemonade, pails and pails of it, pink ham
sandwiches and frosted cake; and if Ellen could have any of these, she
was having a little piece of the picnic. What it would have meant
particularly to Peter over and above a day let loose, the arching elms,
the deep fern of Bloombury wood, might have been some passages, perhaps,
which could be taken home and made over into the groundwork of new and
interesting adventures in the House from which Ellen had recalled him.
There was a girl with June apple cheeks and bright brown eyes at that
picnic, who could have given points to princesses.
He followed the tapping of his sister's crutch along the thick, bitter
smelling dust of the road, rising more and more heavily as the dew
gathered, until they came to the turn by the cluster rose and heard
below them on the bridge, the din of the wheels and the gay laughter of
the picnickers.
"Hi, Peter!"
"Hello, Ellen!"
"Awful sorry you couldn't come ... had a bully time.... Killed a
copperhead and two water snakes."
"Here, Ellen, catch ahold of this!"
And while she was about it the June apple girl leaned over the end-board
of the wagon, and spoke softly to Peter.
"We're going over to Harvey's pasture next Wednesday afternoon,
berrying, in the Democrat wagon with our team; Jim Harvey's going to
drive. We made it up to-day. Surely you can get away for an afternoon?"
That was what the voice said. "To be with me," the eyes added.
"I don't know.... I'd like it...."
It was not altogether the calculation as to how much earlier he would
have to get up that morning to be able to take an hour off in the
afternoon, that made Peter hesitate, but the sudden swimming of his
senses about the point of meeting eyes. "I'll tell you what," he said,
"you come by for Ellen, and I'll walk over about four and ride home with
you."
"Oh," said the girl; she did not know quite whether to triumph at having
gained so much or to be disappointed at so little. "I'll be expecting
you."
The horses creaked forward in the harness, the dust puffed up from under
the wheels and drowned the smell of the wilding rose, it fell thick on
the petals and a little on Peter's spirit, too, as he followed Ellen
back to the house, though it never occurred to him to think any more of
it than that he had been working too long in the hot sun and was very
tired. It did not, however, prevent his eating his share of the picnic
dainties as he sat with his mother and Ellen on the veranda. Then as the
soft flitter of the bats' wings began in the dusk, he kissed them both
and went early up to bed.
Peter's room was close under the roof and that was close under the elm
boughs; all hours he could hear them finger it with soft rustling
touches. The bed was pulled to the window that gave upon the downslope
of the hill; at the foot of it one saw the white bloom-faces of the
alders lift and bow above the folded leaves, and the rising of the river
damp across the pastures. All the light reflected from the sky above
Bloombury wood was no more than enough to make a glimmer on the glass of
a picture that hung at the foot of Peter's bed. It served to show the
gilt of the narrow frame and the soft black of the print upon which
Peter had looked so many times that he thought now he was still seeing
it as he lay staring in the dusk--a picture of a young man in bright
armour with loosened hair, riding down a particularly lumpy and swollen
dragon. Flames came out of the creature's mouth in the immemorial
fashion of dragons, but the young man was not hurt by them. He sat there
lightly, his horse curvetting, his lance thrust down the dragon's throat
and coming out of the back of his head, doing a great deed easily, the
way people like to think of great things being done. It was a very
narrow picture, so narrow that you might think that it had something to
do with the dragon's doubling on himself and the charger's forefeet
being up in the air to keep within the limits of the frame, and the
exclusion from it of the Princess whom, as his father had told him the
story, the young knight George had rescued from those devouring jaws. It
came out now, quite clearly, that she must have had cheeks as red as
June apples and eyes like the pools of spring rain in Bloombury wood,
and her not being there in the picture was only a greater security for
her awaiting him at this moment in the House with the Shining Walls.
There was, for the boy still staring at it through the dusk, something
particularly personal in the picture, for ever since his father had
died, three years ago, Peter had had a dragon of his own to fight. Its
name was Mortgage. It had its lair in Lawyer Keplinger's office, from
which it threatened twice yearly to come out and eat up his mother and
Ellen and the little house and farm, and required to have its mouth
stopped with great wads of interest which took all Peter's laborious
days to scrape together. This year, however, he had hopes, if the garden
turned out well, of lopping off a limb or a claw of the dragon by way
of a payment on the principal, which somehow seemed to bring the
Princess so much nearer, that as Peter lay quite comfortably staring up
at the glimmer on the wall, the four gold lines of the frame began to
stretch up and out and the dark block of the picture to recede until it
became the great hall of a palace again, and there was the Princess
coming toward him in a golden shimmer.
There was just such another glow on the afternoon when Peter walked over
to the berrying and came up with the apple-cheeked girl whose name was
Ada, a good half mile from the others. As they climbed together over
uneven ground she gave him her hand to hold, and there was very little
to say and no need of saying it until they came to the hill overlooking
the pasture, yellowing toward the end of summer, full of late bloom and
misty colour passing insensibly into light. Threads of gossamer caught
on the ends of the scrub or floated free, glinting as they turned and
bellied in the windless air, to trick the imagination with the hint of
robed, invisible presences.
"Oh, Peter, don't you wish it would stay like this always?"
"Like this," Peter gave her hand the tiniest squeeze to show what there
was about this that he would like to keep. "It's just as good to look at
any season though," he insisted. "I was here hunting rabbits last
winter, in February, and you could find all sorts of things in the
runways where the brambles bent over and kept off the snow; bunches of
berries and coloured leaves, and little green fern, and birds hopping in
and out."
Ada spread her skirts as she sat on a flat boulder and began sticking
leaves into Peter's hat.
"Peter, what are you going to do this winter?"
"I don't know, I should like to go over to the high school at Harmony,
but I suppose I'll try to get a place to work near home."
"We've been getting up a dancing and singing school, to begin in
October. The teacher is coming from Dassonville. It will be once a week;
we sing for an hour and then have dancing. It will be cheap as
cheap--only two dollars a month. I hope you can come."
"I don't know; I'll think about it." He was thinking then that two
dollars did not sound much, but when you come to subtract it from the
interest it was a great deal, and then there would be Ellen to pay for,
and perhaps a dress for her, and dancing shoes for himself and singing
books. And no doubt at the dances there would be basket suppers.
"I should think you could come if you wanted to. Jim Harvey's getting it
up.... He wants to keep company with me this winter." Ada was a little
nervous about this, but as she stole a glance at Peter's face as he lay
biting at a stem of grass, she grew quite comfortable again. "But I
don't know as I will," she said. "I don't care very much for Jim
Harvey."
Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.
"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly. "I'll come to
that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know
it isn't because I don't wish to."
"You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true. You
can wish it on my amethyst ring."
"You won't take it off until October, Ada?"
"I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on
and held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was
practically no time at all until the others found them on the way home
as they came laughing up the hill.
As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once
that winter. The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice,
to the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done
to it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so it
happened that the mortgage dragon did not get his payment and Peter gave
up the high school to get a place in Greenslet's grocery at Bloombury.
And since there were the books to be made up after supper, and as Bet,
the mare, after being driven in the delivery wagon all day, could not be
let stand half the night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned
out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning
he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing,
thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the
Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found
occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could
afford;--bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before
the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that
Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him. They had moved
Ellen's bed downstairs as a way of getting on better with the
possibility of her being bedridden all that winter, and the tiny
whispered moan recalled him to the dread that as the half yearly term
came around, what with doctor's bills and delicacies, the mortgage
dragon would have not even his sop of interest, and remain whole and
threatening as before.
When Ellen was able to sit up in bed the mother moved her sewing in
beside it. Then Peter would sit on the other side of the lamp with a
book, and the walls of the House rose up from its pages gilded finely,
and the lights would come out and the dancing begin, but before he could
get more than a word with the Princess, he would hear Ellen:
"Peter, oh, Peter! I wish you wouldn't be always with your nose in a
book. I wish you would talk sometimes."
"What about, Ellen?"
"Oh, Peter, you are the _worst_. I should think you would take some
interest in things."
"What sort of things?" Peter wished to know.
"Why, who comes in the store, and what they say, and everything."
"Mrs. Sleason wanted us to open a kit of mackerel to see if she'd like
it," began Peter literally, "and we persuaded her to take two cans of
sardines instead. Does that interest you?"
"Have you sold any of the blue tartan yet?"
"Ada Brown bought seven yards of it."
"Oh, Peter! And trimmings?"
"Six yards of black velvet ribbon--yes, I forgot--Mrs. Blackman is to
make it up for her. I heard Mrs. Brown say she would call for the
linings."
"She's having it made up for Jim Harvey's birthday," Ellen guessed
shrewdly. "He's twenty-one, you know.... People say she's engaged to
him."
Peter felt the walls of the House which had stood out waiting for him
during this interlude, fall inward into the gulf of blackness. Nobody
said anything for two or three ticks of the large kitchen clock, and
then Ellen burst out:
"I think she's a nasty, flirty, stuck-up _thing_; that's what I think!"
"Shs--hss! Ellen," said her mother.
"Peter," demanded Ellen, "are you reading again?"
"I beg your pardon, Ellen." Peter did not know that he had turned a
page.
"Don't you ever wish for anything for yourself, Peter? Don't you wish
you were rich?"
"No, Ellen, I don't know that I ever do."
But as the winter got on and the news of Ada Brown's engagement was
confirmed, he must have wished it a great many times.
One evening late in January he was sitting with his mother very quietly
by the kitchen stove, the front of which was opened to throw out the
heat; there was the good smell of the supper in the room, for though he
had a meal with the Greenslets at six, his mother always made a point of
having something hot for him when he came in from bedding down the
mare, and the steam of it on the window-panes made dull smears of the
reflected light. The shade of the lamp was drawn down until the ceiling
of the room was all in shadow save for the bright escape from the
chimney which shone directly overhead, round and yellow as twenty
dollars, and as Peter leaned back in his chair, looking up, it might
have been that resemblance which gave a turn to his thoughts and led him
to say to his mother:
"Why did my father never get rich?"
"I hardly know, Peter. He used to say that he couldn't afford it. There
were so many other things he wished to do; and I wished them, too. When
we were young we did them together. Then your father was the sort of man
who always gave too much and took too little. I remember his saying once
that no one who loved his fellowman very much, _could_ get rich."
"Do you wish he had?"
"I don't know that either. No, not if he was happier the way he was. And
we _were_ happy. Things would have come out all right if it hadn't been
for the accident when the thresher broke, and his being ill so long
afterward. And my people weren't so kind as they might have been. You
see, they always thought him a little queer. Before we were married,
before we were even engaged, he had had a little money. It had been left
him, and instead of investing it as anybody in Bloombury would, he spent
it in travel. I remember his saying that his memories of Italy were the
best investment he could have made. But afterward, when he was in
trouble, they threw it up to him. We had never got in debt before ...
and then just as he was getting round, he took bronchitis and died."
She wiped her eyes quietly for a while, and the kettle on the stove
began to sing soothingly, and presently Peter ventured:
"Do you wish I would get rich?"
"Yes, Peter, I do. We are all like that, I suppose, we grown-ups. Things
we manage to get along without ourselves, we want for our children. I
hope you will be a rich man some day; but, Peter, I don't want you to
think it a reflection on your father that he wasn't. He had what he
thought was best. He might have left me with more money and fewer happy
memories--and that is what women value most, Peter;--the right sort of
women. There are some who can't get along without _things_: clothes, and
furniture, and carriages. Ada Brown is that kind; sometimes I'm afraid
Ellen is a little. She takes after my family."
"It is partly on account of Ellen that I want to get rich."
"You mustn't take it too hard, Peter; we've always got along somehow,
and nobody in Bloombury is very rich."
Peter turned that over in his mind the whole of a raw and sleety
February. And one day when nobody came into the store from ten till
four, and loose winds went in a pack about the village streets, casting
up dry, icy dust where now and then some sharp muzzle reared out of the
press as they turned the corners, he spoke to Mr. Greenslet about it. It
was so cold that day that neither the red apples in the barrels nor the
crimson cranberries nor the yellowing hams on the rafters could
contribute any appearance of warmth to the interior of the grocery. A
kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned
goods; the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked
coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the
glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted
panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of
chilblains, roughed by the wind.
A kind of arctic stillness pervaded the place, out of which the two men
hailed each other at intervals as from immeasurable deeps of space.
"Mr. Greenslet," ventured Peter at last, "are you a rich man?"
"Not by a long sight."
"Why?" questioned Peter.
"Not built that way."
The grocer lapsed back into the silence and seemed to lean against it
meditatively. The wolf wind howled about the corners and cast snow like
powdered glass upon the windows contemptuously, and time went by with a
large deliberate movement like a fat man turning over, before Peter
hailed again.
"Did you ever want to be?"
Mr. Greenslet reached out for the damper of the stove ostensibly to
shake down the ashes, but really to pull himself up out of the soundless
spaces of thought.
"When I was your age, yes. Thought I was going to be." The shaking of
the damper seemed to loosen the springs of speech in him. "I was up in
the city working for Siegel Brothers; began as a bundle boy and meant to
be one of the partners. But by the time I worked up to fancy goods I
realized that I would have to be as old as Methuselah to make it at that
rate. And Mrs. Greenslet didn't like the city; she was a Bloombury girl.
It wasn't any place for the children."
"So you came back?"
"We had saved a little. I bought out this place and put in a few notions
I'd got from Siegel's. I'm comfortably off, but I'm not rich."
"Would you like to be?"
"I don' know, I don' know. I'd like to give the boys a better start than
I had, but I'm my own boss here and one of the leading men. That's
always something."
Peter went and looked out of the smudged windows while he considered
this. The long scrapes of the wind in the loose snow were like the
scratches of great claws. It was now about mail time and a few people
began to stir in the street; the clear light and the cold gave them a
poverty-bitten look.
"Does anybody ever get rich in Bloombury?"
"Not that I know of. There's Mr. Dassonville in Harmony--Dave
Dassonville, the richest man in these parts."
"I suppose he could tell me how to go about it?"
"I suppose he would if he knows. Mostly these things just happen."
Peter did not say anything more just then; he was watching a man and a
girl of about his own age who had come out of a frame house farther down
the street. The young man was walking so as to shield her from the wind,
her rosy cheek was at his shoulder, and she smiled up at him over her
muff, from dark, bright eyes.
"What's set you on to talk about riches? Thinking of doing something in
that line yourself?"
"Yes," said Peter, kicking at the baseboard with his toes. "I don't know
how it is to be done, but I've got to be rich. I've just simply got to."
II
It was along in the beginning of spring on a day full of wet cloud and
clearing wind, that Peter walked over to Harmony to inquire of Mr. David
Dassonville the way to grow rich. It was Sunday afternoon and the air
sweet with the sap adrip from the orchards lately pruned and the smell
of the country road dried to elasticity by the winds of March.
Between timidity and the conviction that a week day would have been
better suited to his business, he drew on to the place of his errand
very slowly, for he was sore with the raking of the dragon's claws, and
unrested. It had been a terrible scrape to get together the last
instalment of interest, and since Ellen had shattered it with the gossip
about Ada Brown's engagement, there had been no House with Shining Walls
for Peter to withdraw into out of the dragon's breath of poverty; above
all, no Princess.
He did not know where the House had come from any more than he knew now
where it had gone. It was a gift out of his childhood to his shy,
unfriended youth, but he understood that if ever its walls should waver
and rise again to enclose his dreams, there would be no Princess. Never
any more. Princesses were for fairy tales; girls wanted Things. There
was his mother too--he had wished so to get her a new dress this winter.
It was an ache to him to cut off yards and yards of handsome stuffs at
Mr. Greenslet's, and all the longing in the world had not availed to get
one of them for his mother. Plainly the mastery of Things was
accomplished by being rich; he was on his way to Mr. Dassonville to find
out how it was done.
It was quite four of the clock when he paused at the bottom of the
Dassonville lawn to look up at the lace curtains at the tall French
windows. Nobody in Bloombury was rich enough to have lace curtains at
all the windows, and the boy's spirit rose at the substantial evidence
of being at last fairly in the track of his desire.
He found Mr. Dassonville willing to receive him in quite a friendly way,
sitting in his library, keeping the place with his finger in the book he
had been reading to his wife. Peter also found himself a little at a
loss to know how to begin in the presence of this lady, for he
considered it a matter quite between men, but suddenly she looked up and
smiled. It came out on her face fresh and delicately as an apple orchard
breaking to bloom, and besides making it quite spring in the room,
discovered in herself a new evidence of the competency of Mr. David
Dassonville to advise the way of riches. She looked fragile and
expensive as she sat in her silken shawl, her dark hair lifted up in a
half moon from her brow, her hands lying in her lap half-covered with
the lace of her sleeves, white and perfect like twin flowers. He saw
rings flashing on the one she lifted to motion to the maid to bring a
chair.
"If you have walked over from Bloombury you must be tired," she said,
"and chilled, perhaps. Come nearer the fire."
"No, thank you," Peter had managed, "I am quite warm," as in fact he
was, and a little flushed. He sat down provisionally on the edge of the
chair and looked at Mr. Dassonville.
"I came on business. I don't know if you will mind its being Sunday, but
I couldn't get away from the store on other days."
"Quite right, quite right." Mr. Dassonville had lost his place in the
book and laid it on his knee. "Private business? My dear, perhaps----"
"Oh, no--no," protested Peter handsomely. "I'd rather she stayed. It
isn't. At least ... I don't know if you will consider it private or
not."
"Go on," urged Mr. Dassonville.
"I just came to ask you," Peter explained, "if you don't mind telling
me, how you got rich?"
"But bless you, young man," exclaimed Mr. Dassonville, "I'm not rich."
This for a beginning, was, on the face of it, disconcerting. Peter
looked about at the rows of books, at the thick, soft carpet and the
leather-covered furniture, and at the rings on Mrs. Dassonville's hand.
If Mr. Dassonville were not rich, how then--unless----
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I thought--that is, everybody says you are
the richest man in these parts."
"As to that, well, perhaps, I have a little more money than my
neighbours."
Peter breathed relief. The beautiful Mrs. Dassonville's rings were paid
for, then.
"But as to being _rich_, why, when you come to a really rich man all
I've got wouldn't be a pinch to him." Mr. Dassonville illustrated with
his own thumb and fingers how little that would be. "We don't have
really rich men in a place like Harmony," he concluded. "You have to go
to the city for that."
"You've got everything you want, haven't you?"
Mr. Dassonville looked over at his wife, and the smile bloomed again; he
smiled quietly to himself as he admitted it. "Yes, I've got everything I
want."
They were quiet, all of them, for a little while, with Peter turning his
hat over in his hands and Mr. Dassonville laying the tips of his fingers
together before him, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.
"I wish," said Peter at last, "you would tell me how you did it."
"How I got more money than my neighbours? Well, I wasn't born with it."
This was distinctly encouraging. Neither was Peter.
"No two men, I suppose, make money in the same way," went on the man who
had, "but there are three or four things to be observed by all of them.
In the first place one must be very hard-working."
"Yes," said Peter.
"And one must never lose sight of the object worked for. Not"--as if he
had followed the boy's inward drop of dismay--"that a man should think
of nothing but getting money. On the contrary, I consider it very
essential for a man to have some escape from his business, some change
of pasture to run his mind in. He comes fresher to his work so. What I
mean is that _when_ he works he must make every stroke count toward the
end he has in view. Do you understand?"
"I think so." The House and the Shining Walls were safe, at any rate.
"And then," Mr. Dassonville checked off the points on his fingers, "he
must always save something from his income, no matter how small it is."
"I try to do that," confessed Peter, "but what with Ellen's back being
bad, and the interest on the mortgage, it's not so easy."
"Is there a mortgage? I am sorry for that, for the next thing I was
going to say is that he must never go into debt, never on any account."
"My father was sick; it was an accident," Peter protested loyally.
"So! I think I remember. Well, it is unfortunate, but where there is a
debt the only thing is to reduce it as steadily as possible, and if this
mortgage teaches you the trick of saving it may not be such a bad thing
for you. But when a man works and saves for a long time without getting
any sensible benefit, he sometimes thinks that saving and working are
not worth while. You must never make that mistake."
"Oh, no," said Peter. It seemed to him that they were getting on very
well indeed.
"There is another thing I should like to say," Mr. Dassonville went on,
"but I am not sure I can put it plainly. It is that you must not try to
be too wise." He smiled a little to Peter's blankness. "I believe in
Harmony it is called looking on all sides of a thing, but there is
always one side of everything like the moon which is turned from us. You
must just start from where you are and keep moving."
"I see," said Peter, looking thoughtfully into the fire, in imitation of
Mr. Dassonville. And there being no more advice forthcoming he began to
wonder if he ought to sit a while from politeness, as people did in
Bloombury, or go at once. Mrs. Dassonville got up and came behind her
husband's chair.
"Don't you think you ought to tell him, David, that there are other
things worth having besides money; better worth?"
"You, perhaps." Mr. Dassonville took the hand of his wife laid on his
shoulder and held it against his cheek; it brought out for Peter
suddenly, how many years younger she was, and what he had heard of Mr.
Dassonville having married her from among the summer folk who came to
Harmony for the pine woods and the sea air. "Ah, but I'm not sure I'd
have you without a great deal of it. It takes money to raise rare plants
like you. But I ought to say," still holding his wife's hand to his
cheek and watching Peter across it, "that I think it is a very good sign
that you are willing to ask. The most of poor men will sit about and
rail and envy the rich, but hardly one would think to ask how it is
done, or believe if he were told. They've a notion it's all gouging and
luck, and you couldn't beat that out of them if you tried. Very few of
them understand how simple success is; it isn't easy often, but it is
always simple."
Peter supposed that he really ought to go after that, though he did not
know how to manage it until Mrs. Dassonville smiled at him over her
husband's shoulder and asked him what sort of work he did. "Oh, if you
know about gardens," she interrupted him, "you can help a little. There
are such a lot of things coming up in mine that I don't know the names
of."
It flashed out to Peter long afterward that she had simply provided an
easy way for him to get out of the house now that his visit was
terminated. She held the white fold of her shawl over her head with one
hand and gathered the trailing skirts with the other. They rustled as
she moved like the leaves of the elms at night above the roof, as she
led him along the walk where little straight spears of green and blunt
flower crowns faintly tinged with colour came up thickly in the borders.
So by degrees she got him down past the hyacinth beds and the nodding
buds of the daffodils to the gate and on the road again, walking home in
the chill early twilight with the pricking of a pleasant excitement in
his veins.
It was that, perhaps, and the sense of having got so much more out of it
than any account of his visit would justify, that kept Peter from saying
much to his mother that night about his talk with the rich man; he asked
her instead if she had ever seen Mrs. Dassonville.
"Yes," she assured him. "Mr. Dassonville drove her over to Mrs.
Tillinghurst's funeral in October. They had only been married a little
while then; she is the second Mrs. Dassonville, you know; the first died
years ago. I thought her a very lovely lady."
"A lovely lady," Peter said the phrase under his breath. The sound of it
was like the soft drawing of silken skirts.
His mother looked at him across the supper table and was pleased to see
the renewal of cheerfulness, and then, motherlike, sighed to think that
Peter was getting so old now that if he didn't choose to tell her things
she had no right to ask him. "Your walk has done you good," was all she
said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his
head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since
Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately
against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden
before it was all full of spring bulbs and the scent of daffodils. The
Princess came walking in it as before, but she was no Princess now,
merely a woman with her dark hair brushed up in a half moon from her
brow and her skirts drawing after her with a silken rustle; her face was
dim and sweet, with only a faint, a very faint, reminder of Ada, and her
name was the Lovely Lady.
PART TWO
IN WHICH PETER
BECOMES INVISIBLE ON THE
WAY TO GROWING RICH
PART TWO
IN WHICH PETER BECOMES INVISIBLE ON
THE WAY TO GROWING RICH
In the late summer of that year Peter went up to the city with Mr.
Greenslet to lay in his winter stock and remained in canned goods with
Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium. That his mother had rented the
farming land for cash was the immediate occasion of his setting out, but
there were several other reasons and a great many opinions. Mr.
Greenslet had a boy of his own coming on for Peter's place; Bet, the
mare, had died, and the farm implements wanted renewing; in spite of
which Mrs. Weatheral could hardly have made up her mind to spare him
except for the opportune appearance of the cash renter. With that and
the chickens and the sewing, she and Ellen could take care of themselves
and the interest, which would leave all that Peter could make to count
against the mortgage.
They put it hopefully to one another so, as they sat about the kitchen
stove, all three of them holding hands, on the evening before his
departure. But the opinions, which were rather thicker at Bloombury than
opportunities, were by no means so confident as Peter could have wished
if he had known them. Mr. Greenslet thought it couldn't be much worse
than Peter's present situation, and the neighbours were sure it wasn't
much better. The minister had a great deal to say of the temptations of
a young man in the city, which was afterward invalidated by the city's
turning out quite another place than he described it.
It was left for Ellen and Mrs. Jim Harvey to make the happy
prognostication. "You can trust Peter," Ada was confident.
"But you got to be mighty cute to get in with those city fellows," her
husband warned her, "and Peter's so dashed simple; never sees anything
except what's right in front of him. Now a man"--Jim assumed this estate
for himself in the right of being three months married--"has got to look
on all sides of a thing."
As for Ellen, she hadn't the slightest doubt that Peter was shortly to
become immensely wealthy and she was to go up and keep house for him.
"There'll be gold chairs in the parlour and real Brussels," she
anticipated. Peter affected to think it unlikely that she could be
spared by the highly mythical person who was to carry her off to keep
house for himself. Somehow Peter could never fall into the normal
Bloombury attitude of thinking that if you had hip disease, your life
was bound to be different from everybody's and you might as well say so
right out, flat-footed, and be done with it.
With all this, finally he was got off to the city in the wake of Mr.
Greenslet, and the first discovery he made there was that outside of
Siegel Brothers, and a collarless man with a discouraged moustache who
appeared in the hall of his lodging-house when the rent was due, he was
practically invisible. As he went up and down the stairs sodden with
scrub water which never by any possible chance left them scrubbed,
nobody spoke to him. Nobody in the street saw him walking to and fro in
his young loneliness. There were men passing there with faces like Mr.
Dassonville's, keen and competent, and lovely ladies in soft becoming
wraps and bright winged hats--such hats! Peter would like to have hailed
some of these as one immeasurably behind but still in the way, seized of
that precious inward quality which manifests itself in competency and
brightness. He would have liked to feel them looking on friendlily at
his business of becoming rich; but he remained, as far as any word from
them was concerned, completely invisible. He came after a while to the
conclusion that most of those who went up and down with him were in the
same unregarded condition.
The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of
them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth and
loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into the
dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally under
the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles. Sometimes
in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls from whom
the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that country
of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him a native,
but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to Peter.
The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could want and
nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he knew at
Siegel Brothers. And at the lodging house they seemed never to have
heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled behind plate
glass and polished counters. It was extraordinary, incredible, that he
wasn't to have the least of them.
As the winter closed in on him, the restrictions of daily living rose so
thick upon him that they began to prevent him from his dreams. He could
no longer get through them to the House with the Shining Walls. Often as
he lay in his bed trying to believe he was warm enough, he would set off
for it down the lanes of blinding city light through which the scream of
the trolley pursued him, only to see it glimmer palely on him through
impenetrable plate glass, or defended from him by huge trespass signs
that appeared to have some relation to the fact that he was not yet so
rich as he expected to be. Times when he would wake out of his sleep,
it would be to a strange sense of severances and loss, and though he did
not know exactly what ailed him, it was the loss of all his dreams.
After a while the whole city seemed to ache with that loss. He would lie
in his narrow bed and think that if he did not see his mother and
Bloombury again he would probably die of it.
Then along in the beginning of April somebody saw him. It was in the
dusk between supper and bed time, walking on the viaduct where he had
the park below him. There was a wash of blue still in the sky and a thin
blade of a moon tinging it with citron; here and there the light
glittered on the trickle of sap on the chafed boughs. It was just here
that he met her. She was about his own age, and she was walking oddly,
as though unconscious of the city all about her, with short picked
steps, and her hat with the tilt to it of a girl who knows herself
admired. She had a rose at her breast which she straightened now and
then, or smoothed a fold of her dress and hummed as she walked. Her
cheeks were bright even in the dusk, and some strange, quick fear kept
pace with her glancing. Peter was walking heavily himself, as the young
do when the dreams have gone out of them, and as they passed in the
light of the arc that danced delicately to the wandering air, the girl's
look skimmed him like a swallow. She must have turned just behind him,
for in a moment she drifted past his shoulder.
"Hello!" she said.
"Hello!" said Peter, but, in the moment it had taken to drag that up
from under his astonishment, she had passed him; her laugh as she went
brushed the tip of his youth like a swallow's wing. It remained with him
as a little, far spark; it seemed as if a dream was about to spin itself
out from it. He went around that way several times on his evening walks
in hopes that he might meet her again.
As though the spark had lightened a little of the blank unrecognition
with which the city met him, he was seen that day and in no unfriendly
aspect by "our Mr. Croker" of Siegel Brothers. The running gear of a
great concern like the Household Emporium pressed, in the days of
Peter's apprenticeship, unequally at times on its employees, and the
galled spot of the canned goods department was Blinders the bundle boy.
His other name was Horace and he was chiefly remarkable for pimples
which he seemed to think interesting, and for a state of active
resentment against anybody who gave him anything to do. The world for
Horace was a dark jungle full of grouches and pulls and privilege and
devious guile.
That the propensity which Peter had developed for inquiring every half
hour or so if he hadn't got that done yet, could be nothing else but a
cabal directed against Blinders' four dollars and a half a week, he was
convinced. In all the time that he could spare from his pimples, Horace
rehearsed a martyr's air designed to convey to Mr. Croker that though he
would suffer in silence he was none the less suffering. It being
precisely Mr. Croker's business to rap out grouches as an expert
mechanician taps defective cogs, it happened the day after Peter's
meeting with the girl that the worst hopes of Horace were realized.
"Aw, they're always a pickin' on me, Mr. Croker, that's what they are,
Mr. Croker," Horace defended himself, preparing to snivel if the
occasion seemed to demand it, by taking out his gum and sticking it on
the inside of his sleeve. "I can't handle 'em no faster, Mr. Croker."
"Not the way you go at it," Peter assured him. Anybody could have told
by the way he included Mr. Croker in his cheerfulness that there was
something between them. "You turn 'em over too many times and you use
too much paper and too much string." Suddenly Peter reddened with
embarrassment. "Not that that makes any difference to a big firm like
this," he apologized, "but in a small place every little counts." He
turned the package deftly and began to illustrate his method. "When
you're tying up calico with one hand and taking in eggs and butter with
the other and telling three people the price of things at the same
time," he explained, "you have to notice things like this."
"I see," said Mr. Croker. "You try it, Blinders."
"Aw, what's the matter with the way I was doin' it?" wailed Horace.
"If you don't feel quite up to it----" Mr. Croker hinted. Horace did, he
wrapped with alacrity and Peter showed him how to hold the string.
"You come along with me, Weatheral," Mr. Croker commanded. Horace took
his gum out of his cuff and made dark prognostication as to what was
probably to be done to Peter.
What Peter thought was that he should probably become very unpopular
with his fellow clerks. Croker took him across to dry goods, where girls
were tying bundles in little cages over the sales ladies' heads, and had
him repeat the method of handling string. Except that he thought he
should get to like Mr. Croker, the incident made no particular
impression on Peter--so dulled were all his senses for want of
dreams,--and passed wholly out of mind.
It was two or three days after that he saw the girl again, nearer the
end of the viaduct, where four or five streets poured light and
confusion into Venable Square. She was going on ahead, hurrying and
pretending not to hurry to overtake a man to whom she wished to speak.
She was quite close to him, she was speaking, and suddenly he gave a
little outward jerk with his elbow which caught hers unexpectedly and
whirled her back against the parapet. The little purse she was carrying
fell from her hand. The man gave a quick laugh over his shoulder and
ploughed his way across the street.
"The skunk!" Peter's list of expletives was not extensive. He picked up
the flat little purse and handed it back to her. "Shall I go after him?
Did you know him?"
The girl was holding on to the parapet with a little choky laugh. "Oh,
yes, I know that kind. No, I don't want him!"
"He ought to have a good thrashing," Peter was convinced. The girl
looked up at him with a sudden curiosity.
"You're from the country, ain't you? I thought so the other night. I can
always tell."
"I guess you're from the country yourself," Peter hazarded. She was
prettier even than he had thought. Her glance had left his, however, and
was roving up and down the hurrying crowd as though testing it for some
plunge she was about to make.
"If you wanted me to see you home----" Peter hinted; he did not know
quite what was expected of him. She answered with a little sharp noise
which ended in a cough.
"I guess you're real kind," she admitted, "but I ain't goin' home just
yet. I got a date." She moved off then, and since it was in the
direction he was going, there was nothing for Peter to do but move with
her, on the other side of the wide pavement. At the turn she drifted
back to his side again; it seemed to Peter there was amusement in her
tone.
"You got anything to do Saturday about this time?" Peter hadn't. "Well,
I'll be here--savvy?" But before he could make her any assurance she
laughed again and slipped into the crowd.
Peter knew a great many facts about life. There were human failings even
in Bloombury, and what Peter didn't know about the city had been largely
made up to him by the choice conversation of J. Wilkinson Cohn, in
staples, at the next counter to him. Anybody who listened long enough
to J. Wilkinson's personal reminiscences would have found himself fully
instructed for every possible contingency likely to arise between a
gentleman of undoubted attractions and the ladies, but there are forces
in youth that are stronger than experience. It is a very old, old way of
the world for young things to walk abroad in the spring and meet one
another.
Peter strolled along the viaduct Saturday and felt his youth beat in him
pleasantly when he saw her come. She had on a different hat, and the
earlier hour showed him the shining of her eyes above the raddled
cheeks.
"We could go down in the park a piece," he suggested as they turned in
together along the parapet. There was a delicate damp smell coming up
from it on the night, like the Bloombury lanes.
"You're regular country, aren't you?" There was an accent of impatience
in her tone, "I haven't had my supper yet."
"Well, what do you say to a piece of roast beef and a cup of coffee?"
Peter had planned this magnificence as he came along fingering his pay
envelope. He knew just the place, he told her. The feeling of his proper
male ascendency as he drew her through the crowd was a tonic to him; the
man tossing pancakes in the window where he hesitated looking for the
ladies' entrance seemed quite to enjoy doing it, as though he had known
all along there was to be company.
"Oh, I don't care for any of these places." Peter felt her pull at his
elbow. "I'll show you." They went along then, brushing lightly shoulder
to shoulder until they came to one of those revolving doors from which
gusts of music issued. There was a girl standing up to sing as they sat
down and the whole air of the place was beyond even the retailed
splendour of J. Wilkinson. The girl threw back her wraps and began to
order freely. Peter, who had a glimpse of the card, stiffened.
"I--I guess I'm not so very hungry," he cautioned. She looked up from
the menu sharply and her face softened; she made one or two deft changes
in it.
"This is Dutch, you know," she threw out. "Oh, I know you invited me,
but you didn't think I was one of the kind that let a strange gentleman
pay for my dinner, did you?" Peter denied it, stricken with
embarrassment. She seemed in the light, to take him in more completely.
"Say, would you have licked that fellow the other night, honest?"
"Well, if he was disrespectful to a lady----" Peter began.
"Oh, _excuse_ me!" She turned her head aside for a moment in her long
gloves. "You _are_ country!" she said again, but it seemed not to
displease her. "I don't care so much for her voice, do you?" She turned
on the singer. They discussed the entertainment and the dinner. They
were a long time about it. The orchestra played a waltz at last, and
Ethel--she had told him to call her that--put her arms on the table and
leaned across to him, and though Peter knew by this time that her cheeks
were painted, he didn't somehow mind it.
"What's it like up in the country where you lived?" she wished to know.