young Mr. Weatheral walking with his mother in the back pasture with his
arm about her, and was slightly shocked by it, for though it was thought
highly commendable in him to have paid off the mortgage and managed a
silk dress for her and Ellen besides, Bloombury was not habituated to a
lively expression of family affection. Peter had consented to gather the
huckleberries which Ellen insisted were of a superior flavour in the
back pasture, on the sole condition that his mother should come with
him, and the minister's wife had just stepped aside on her way to the
Tillinghurst's to gather the southerwood which grew there, for the
minister's winter cough, when she caught sight of them.
"She couldn't have stared more if she'd caught me with a girl." Peter
protested.
"It's only that she'd have thought it more likely," his mother
extenuated. "I hope you aren't going to be a girl-hater, Peter. I want
you should marry some time, and if I haven't seemed anxious about it
before now, you mustn't think it's because I want to keep you for Ellen
and me. What I don't want is that you should take to it just _because_
there's a girl. Not but what that's natural, but there's more to it than
that, Peter. For you," she supplemented. She sat down on a gray, round
stone while Peter stripped the bushes at her feet, and watched to see if
his colour rose while she talked, or his gaze failed to meet hers at any
point.
"I'd have liked to have Ellen marry," said Ellen's mother, "she's that
kind. Having a man of her own, most any kind of a man so as he would be
good to her, would mean such a lot. If Ellen can have a little of what
everybody's having, she's satisfied. But there are some who can get a
great deal more out of it than that ... and if they don't the rest of it
is a drag and a weariness." He left off stripping the bushes and turned
contentedly against her knees.
"You're my home, Mumsey."
"And not even," she gently insisted, "when I'm not here to make it for
you. There's a kind of life goes with loving; it's like--like the
lovely inside colour of a shell, and somehow, this winter I've wondered
if you'd got to the place where you knew what that would be like if you
should find it." She turned his face up to her with a tender anxiety and
yet with a little timidity; they did not talk much of such things in
Bloombury.
"I know, mother."
"Yes...." after a long look, "you would; you're so like your father. But
if you know, you mustn't ever be led by dullness or loneliness into
anything less, Peter. Not that I'm afraid you'll be led into anything
wrong ... but there are things that are almost more wrong than downright
wickedness....
"I've been thinking a great deal lately about when I was your age, and
there didn't seem anything for me but to marry one of the neighbour's
boys that I'd known always, or a long plain piece of school teaching. It
wasn't easy with everybody egging me on--but I stuck it out, and at the
last along came your father ... I'd like you to have something like
that, Peter,--and your son coming to you the way you came to me, like
it was through a cloud of glory...." He looked up presently on her
silence, silver tipped now with the hope of renewal, and he saw her as a
man sometimes when he is young and clean, sees his mother, the Sacred
Door ... and he did not observe at all that her hands were berry stained
and the nails broken, nor that her cheek had fallen in and her hair gray
and wispy. But being a young man and never good at talking, it made no
difference with him except that as they walked home across the pastures
he was more than ever careful of her and teased her more whimsically.
He forgot, after he had settled in his room again at Blodgett's, that
Miss Minnie Havens had ever walked with him in the purlieus of the
House, for he was quite taken up with a new set of rooms he had thrown
out from it for his mother. She was always there with him now until the
day of her death and long after, made a part of all his dreaming by the
touch with which she had limned in herself for him, the feature of all
Lovely Ladies.
He would write her long letters into which crept much that had been
uttered only in the House, which that winter became an estate in
Florida, moved there because of Mrs. Weatheral's need of mild climate.
They went abroad after the Christmas Holidays in which she had coughed
more than usual and consented to have her breakfast brought up to bed,
setting out every evening from Peter's reading-lamp and arriving very
shortly at Italian Cathedrals and old Roman seaport towns that smelled
of history.
Dreaming of lovely ladies who have no face or form other than they
borrow from the passing incident is a very pleasant way of passing the
time, and does not necessarily lead to anything; but when a man goes
about afraid lest his mother should die for lack of something he might
have got for her, he dreams closer at home. More than ever since the
revelation of his mother's frailness, Peter dreamed of being rich, and
since there was nothing nearer to him than the way Siegel Brothers had
managed it, he devoted so much time to the scrutiny of their methods
that he passed in a very short time from being head of the delivery
department to the right hand of Mr. Croker. Even Blinders could not
recall, in the three years he had been bundle boy, so marked an example
of favouritism.
"They don't make partners any more out of underlings," Croker let him
know confidentially. "What do you think you're headed for?" Peter
explained himself.
"I wanted to find out how they did it."
"And when you find out," Croker wagged at him, "you won't be able to do
anything with it. You have to have capital. Look at the time I've been
with them!"
"How long is that?" Peter was interested.
"Twenty years." Croker told him.
"In twenty years," Peter was confident, "a man ought to be able to find
some capital." After that he began to observe Mr. Croker.
It is probable at this time that if he had not been concerned for his
mother's health, he might have grown as dry and uninteresting as at
Blodgett's they began to think him.
He was a thin young man with hair of no particular colour, and eyes
that were good and rather shy about women. He went out very little and
had not, Miss Thatcher who sat opposite him was sure, a mind above his
business. Aggie had married her Outfitter, and J. Wilkinson Cohn, who
had become a full partner in his brother's cigar stand, had moved out to
Fifty-fourth Street, so that there was nobody who could have
contradicted her. But lying awake planning how he might piece out life
for his mother with comforts, and hearing in every knock the precursor
of what might have happened to her, his heart was exercised as it is
good for the heart to be even with pain and anxiety. And beyond the
heart stretching there was always the House. He could seldom get away to
it in his waking hours, but he knew it was there for him, and visiting
it in dreams he kept in spite of the anxiety and Mr. Croker, his young
resiliency. Along in December, about two weeks before his midwinter
holiday, Ellen sent for him.
"It's not as if there hadn't been time for everything. You must think of
that, Peter. And your being able to come down every Saturday since the
first stroke. There's plenty that are hurried away without a good-bye or
anything."
"I know, Ellen."
"And it isn't as if there hadn't been plenty to say, either. Six weeks
would have been too long for anybody less loving than mother. They
wouldn't have known how to go through your life and say just the things
you'll be glad to remember when the time comes for them. You've got to
keep your mind on those things, Peter."
"Yes, Ellen."
The front room had been well rid up after the funeral and everybody at
Ellen's earnest entreaty had left them quite alone. Although there was
fire in the base burner, they were sitting together by the kitchen
stove, the front of which was thrown open for the sake of the warm glow
of the coals. By and by the kettle began to sing and the bare tips of
the lilac scratched on the pane like a live thing waiting to be let in.
The little familiar sounds refilled for them the empty room.
Outside it was every way such a day as a well-spent life might slip
away in; the tracks in the deep-rutted February snow might have been
worn there by the habit of sixty years. There was no hint of the spring
yet, but here and there in the bare patches on the hills and the frayed
icy edges of the drifts, the sign that the weight of the winter was
behind them. There would be a little quiet time yet and then the
resurrection. The brother and sister had taken it all very quietly.
Nobody had ever taken anything in any other way in the presence of Mrs.
Weatheral, and that she was there still for them, that she would always
be present in their lives, a warm determining influence, was witnessed
by that absence of violence which empties too soon the cup of grief. The
loss of their mother had at least brought them no sense of leaving her
behind. They were going on with their life so soon because she was going
with them.
"That was why I wanted them all to go away," Ellen took up the thought
again. "I've been thinking all day about mother being with father and
how glad he'll be to see her, and yet it seems as if I can feel her
here. I thought if we kept still a while she'd make us understand what
she wanted us to do."
"About what, Ellen?"
"About my going up to the city with you to board--it seems such a
wasteful way to live somehow, just sitting around!"
"It isn't as expensive as keeping house," Peter told her, "and I want
you to sit around, Ellen; women in Bloombury don't get enough of that
I'm afraid."
"They don't. Did you see Ada Harvey to-day? Four children and two teeth
out, and her not thirty. I guess you'd take better care of me than that,
Peter,--only----"
"You think _she_ wouldn't like it for you?"
"She thought such a lot of keeping up a home, Peter. It was like--like
those Catholics burning candles. It seemed as if she thought you'd get
something out of it if it was just going on, even if you didn't visit it
more than two or three times a year. Lots of women feel that way, Peter,
and I guess there must be something in it."
"There _is_ something in it," Peter assured her.
"And if I go and board with you we'd have to break up everything----"
She looked about on all the familiar mould of daily habit that was her
world, and tears started afresh. "And we've got all this furniture." She
moved her head toward the door of the front room and the parlour set
that had been Peter's Christmas gift to them two years ago. "For all it
was such a comfort to her to have it, it's as good as new. It seemed as
if she thought you were the only one good enough to sit in it."
"Don't, Ellen."
"I know, Peter." They were silent a while until the deep wells of grief
had stilled in the sense of that sustaining presence. "I only wanted to
be sure I wouldn't be going against her, breaking up the home. It seems
like anything she set such store by oughtn't to stop just because she
isn't here to take care of it." They had to come back to that the next
day and the next.
"I only want to do what is best for you, Ellen."
"I'd be best off if I was making you happy, Peter--and I'd feel such a
burden somehow, just boarding."
"The rents _are_ cheaper in the suburbs," Peter went so far as to admit.
It was all so inarticulate in him; how could he explain to Ellen the
feeling that he had, that settling down to a home with her would somehow
put an end to any dreams he had had of a home of his own, persistent but
unshaped visions that vanished before the sudden brightening of Ellen's
face at his least concession.
"We could have somebody in to clean," she reminded him, "and I hardly
ever have to be in bed now."
The fact was that Peter had the very place in mind; he had often walked
out there on Sundays from Blodgett's; he thought the neighbourhood had a
clean and healthy look. He went up on Tuesday to see what could be done
about it.
Lessing, who rented him the apartment, made the natural mistake about it
that Peter's age and his inexperience as a householder invited. He said
the neighbours were all a most desirable class of people, and Peter
could see for himself that the city was bound to build out that way in a
few years. As for what Pleasanton could do in the way of climate, well,
Lessing told him, with the air of being only a little less interested
than he credited Peter with being, look at the perambulators.
They were as fine a lot of wellfilled vehicles as could be produced by
any suburb anywhere, and Ellen for one was never tired of looking at
them. But Peter couldn't understand why Ellen insisted on walking home
from church Sunday morning the wrong way of the pavement.
"I suppose we do get in the way," she admitted after he had explained to
her that they wouldn't be crowded off so frequently if they moved with
the nurse-maid's parade and not against it, "but if we go this way we
can see all the little faces."
"I didn't know you cared so much for babies."
"Well, you see it isn't as if I was to have any of my own----" Something
in the tone with which she admitted the restraining fact of her
affliction brought out for Peter how she had fitted her life to it, like
a plant growing hardily out of a rock, climbing over and around it
without rancour or rebellion. As he turned now to look at her long,
plain face in the light of what had been going on in himself lately, he
recalled that the determining influence which had drawn her thick hair
into that unbecoming knot at the back of her neck had been the pain it
had given her when she first began to put up her hair, to do it higher.
She was watching the bright little bonneted heads go by with the same
detachment that he had learned to look at the shop windows, without
thinking of appropriating any of their splendour for himself, and when
she spoke again it was without any sensible connection with the present
occasion.
"Peter, do you remember Willy Shakeley?"
"Shakey Willy, we used to call him. I remember his freckles; they were
the biggest thing about him." He waited for the communicating thread,
but nothing came except what presently reached him out of his own young
recollections. "He wasn't good enough for you, Ellen," he said at last
for all comment.
"He was kind, and he wouldn't have minded about my being lame, but a man
has to have a healthy wife if he's a farmer." How completely she had
accepted the deprivation for herself, he saw by her not wasting a sigh
over it; she had schooled herself so long to go no further in her
thought than she went on the crutch which tapped now on the pavement
beside him. As if to stop his going any further on her account she
smiled up at him. "Peter, if you were to meet any of the things you
thought you'd grow up to be, do you suppose you'd know them?"
At least he could have told her that he didn't meet any of them on his
way between Siegel Brothers and the flat in Pleasanton.
There are many things which if a young man goes without until he is
twenty-five he can very well do without, but the one thing he cannot
leave off without hurting him is the expectation of some time doing
them. The obligation of the mortgage and Ellen's lameness had been a
sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best
of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting
him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its
commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible,
that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for
beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his
entry with it. Now by the shock of his mother's death he found himself
precipitated in a frame of living where a parlour set out of Siegel
Brothers' Household Emporium was the limit of taste and understanding.
The worst thing about Siegel Brothers' parlour sets was that he sold
them. He knew it was his particular value to Siegel Brothers that he had
always known what sort of things were acceptable to the out-of-town
trade. He had selected this one distinctly with an eye to the pleasure
his mother and Ellen would get out of what Bloombury would think of it.
He hadn't expected it would turn and rend him. That it was distinctly
better than anything he had had at Blodgett's was inconsiderable beside
the fact that Blodgett's hadn't owned him. That he was owned now by his
sister and the furniture, was plain to him the first time he sat down to
figure out the difference between his salary and what it would cost him
to let Ellen be a burden to him in the way that made her happiest. Not
that he thought of Ellen in that way; he was glad when he thought of it
at all articulately, to be able to make life so little of a burden to
her. But though he saw quite clearly how, without some fortunate
accident, the rest of his life would be taken up with making a home for
Ellen and making it secure for her in case anything happened to him, he
saw too, that there was no room in it for the Lovely Lady. The worst of
all this was that he did not see how he was to go on without her.
He had fled to her from the inadequacy of all substitutes for her that
his life afforded, and she had ended by making him over into the sort of
man who could never be satisfied with anything less. Something he owed,
no doubt, to that trait of his father's which made his memories of Italy
more to him than his inheritance, but there it was, a world Peter had
built up out of books and pictures and music, more real and habitable
than that in which he went about in a gray business suit and a pleasant
ready manner; a world from which, every time he fitted his key in the
latch of the little flat in Pleasanton, he felt himself suddenly
dispossessed.
It was not that he failed to get a proper pleasure out of being a
householder, in being able to take a certain tone with the butcher and
discuss water rates and rents with other householders going to and fro
on his train. Ellen's cooking tasted good to him and it was very
pleasant to see the pleasure it gave her to have Burnell of the
hardware, out to supper occasionally. He made friends with Lessing,
whose natty and determinedly architectural office with its air of being
somehow akin to Wally Whitaker, occupied the corner where Peter waited
every morning for his car. Lessing began it by coming out on the very
first occasion to ask him how his sister did, in an effort to correct
any impression of a want of perspicuity in his first estimate of Peter's
situation. He kept it up for the reason perhaps that men friends are
meant for each other from the beginning of time quite as much as we are
accustomed to thinking of them as being meant for the lovely ladies whom
they so frequently miss. Lessing was about Peter's own age and had large
and cheerful notions of the probable increase of real-estate values in
Pleasanton, combined with a just appreciation of the simple shrewdness
which had so recommended Peter to his employers.
"You'd be a crackerjack to talk to the old ladies," Lessing generously
praised him. "I scare 'em; they think I'm too hopeful." That he didn't,
however, have the same effect on young ladies was apparent from the very
pretty one whom Peter used to see about, especially on early closing
Saturday afternoons, helping him to shut up the office and get off to
the ball game. He couldn't have told why, but those were the days when
Peter allowed the car to carry him on to the next block, before
alighting, after which he would make a point of being particularly kind
to Ellen. It would never do for her to get a notion that the tapping of
her crutch beside him had scared anything out of Peter's life which he
might think worth having in it.
Along toward Thanksgiving time, on an occasion when Peter had just
missed his car and had to wait for another one, Lessing--J. B. on the
door sign, though he was the sort that everybody who knew him called
Julian--came quite out to the pavement and stood there with his hands
in his pockets and his hair beginning to curl boyishly in the dampness,
quite brimming over with good fortune. Singularly he didn't mention it
at once, but began to complain about the low state of the market in real
estate.
"Not but that the values are all right," he was careful to explain;
"it's just that they _are_ all right makes it so trying. If a fellow had
a little capital now, he could do wonders. The deuce of a chap like me
is that he hasn't any capital unless there's some buying."
"You think it's a good time then to lay out a little money?"
"Good! _Good!_ Oh, Lord, it's so good that if a fellow had a few
thousands just put around judiciously, he wouldn't be able to sleep
nights for hearing it turn over." He kicked the gravel in sheer
impatience. "How's your sister?"
It was a formula that he had kept on with because to have dropped it
immediately might have betrayed the extenuating nature of its inception,
and besides there were so many directions in which one might start
conversationally off from it. He made use of it now without waiting for
Peter's habitual "Very well, thank you," by a burst into confidence.
"You see I'm engaged to be married--yes, I guess you've seen me with
her. Fact is, I haven't cared how much people have seen so long as she's
seen it, too; and now we've got it all fixed up, naturally I'm on the
make. I'm dashed if I don't think I'll have to take a partner."
"I've been wanting to speak to you about some property of mine," Peter
ventured. "It's a farm up country."
"What's it worth?"
"Well, I've added to it some the last ten years and made considerable
improvement. I ought to get three thousand."
"That's for farming? For summer residence it ought to bring more than
that. Any scenery?"
"Plenty," Peter satisfied him on that score. "I've been thinking," he
let out shyly, "that if I could put the price of it in some place where
I could watch it, the money would do me more good...."
Lessing turned on him a suddenly brightening eye.
"That's the talk--say, you know I think I could get you forty-five
hundred for that farm of yours anyway." They looked at one another on
the verge of things hopeful and considerable. As Peter's car swung
around the curve, suddenly they blushed, both of them, and reached out
and shook hands.
That evening as Peter came home he saw Lessing buying chrysanthemums at
the florist's with a happy countenance, and to master the queer pang it
gave him, Peter got off the car and walked a long way out on the dim wet
pavement. He was looking at the bright picture of Lessing and the
girl--she was really very pretty--and seeing instead, himself, quite the
bachelor, and his lame sister taking their blameless dull way in the
world. He couldn't any more for the life of him, get a picture of
himself without Ellen in it; the tapping of her crutch sounded even in
the House when he visited it in his dreams. It was well on this occasion
that he had Ellen beside him, for she showed him the way presently to
take it, as he knew she would take it as soon as he went home and told
her--as another door by which they could enter sympathetically in the
joyousness they were denied. She would be so pleased for Julian's sake,
in whom, by Peter's account of him, she took the greatest interest, and
so pleased for the girl to have such a handsome, capable lover. It made,
for Ellen, a better thing of life if somebody could have him.
Peter went back after a while with that thought to the florist's and
bought chrysanthemums, taking care to ask for the same kind Mr. Lessing
had just ordered. He was feeling quite cheerful even, as he ran up the
steps with them a few minutes later, and saw the square of light under
the half-drawn curtain, and heard the tap of Ellen's crutch coming to
meet him.
That night after he had gone to bed a very singular thing happened. The
Princess out of the picture visited him. It was there at the foot of his
bed in a new frame where Ellen had hung it--the young knight riding down
the old, lumpy dragon, but with an air that Peter hadn't for a long time
been able to manage for himself, doing a great thing easily the way one
knew perfectly great things couldn't. The assistant sales manager of
Siegel Brothers had been lying staring up at it for some time when the
Princess spoke to him. He knew it was she, though there was no face nor
form that he could remember in his waking hours, except that it was
familiar.
"Ellen is right," she told him; "it doesn't really matter so long as
somebody finds me."
"But what have _I_ done?" Peter was sore with a sense of personal
slight. "It wasn't in the story that there should be a whole crop of
dragons."
"All dragons are made so that where one head comes off there are seven
in its place; and you must remember if somebody didn't go about slaying
them, I couldn't be at all." This as she said it had a deep meaning for
Peter that afterward escaped him. "And you can hold the dream. It takes
a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass."
"I'm sick of dreams," said Peter. "A man dies after a little who is fed
on nothing else."