NINETY-NINE FAHRENHEIT.
Rodney Sherrett got up from the breakfast table, where he had eaten
half an hour later than the rest of the family, threw aside the
newspaper that had served to accompany his meal as it had previously
done his father's, and walked out through the conservatory upon the
slope of lawn scattered over with bright little flower-beds, among
which his sister, with a large shade hat on, and a pair of garden
scissors and a basket in her hands, was moving about, cutting
carnations and tea-roses and bouvardia and geranium leaves and bits
of vines, for her baskets and shells and vases.
"I say, Amy, why haven't you been over to the Argenters' this long
while? Why don't you get Sylvie here?"
"Why, I did go, Rod! Just when you asked me to. And she has been
here; she called three weeks ago."
"O, poh! After the spill! Of course you did. Just called; and she
called. Why need that be the end of it? Why don't you make much of
her? I can tell you she's a girl you _might_ make much of. She
behaved like a lady, that day; and a _woman_,--that's more. She was
neither scared nor mad; didn't scream, nor pout; nor even stand
round to keep up the excitement. She was just cool and quiet, and
took herself off properly. I don't know another girl that would have
done so. She saved me out of the scrape as far as she was concerned;
she might have made it ten times the muss it was. I'd rather run
down a whole flock of sheep than graze the varnish off a woman's
wheel, as a general principle. There's real backbone to Sylvie
Argenter, besides her prettiness. My father would like her, I know.
Why don't you bring her here; get intimate with her? I can't do
it,--too fierce, you know."
Amy Sherrett laughed.
"What a nice little cat's-paw a sister makes! Doesn't she, Rod?"
"I wonder if cats don't like chestnuts too, sometimes," said Rod;
and then he whistled.
"What a worry you are, Rod!" said Amy, with a little frown that some
pretty girls have a way of making; half real and half got up for the
occasion; a very becoming little pucker of a frown that seems to put
a lovely sort of perplexed trouble into the beautiful eyes, only to
show how much too sweet and tender they really are ever to be
permitted a perplexity, and what a touching and appealing thing it
would be if a trouble should get into them in any earnest. "In term
time I'm always wishing it well over, for fear of what dreadful
thing you may do next; and when it is vacation, it gets to be so
much worse, here and there and everywhere, that I'm longing for you
to be safe back in Cambridge."
"Coming home Saturday nights? Well, you do get about the best of me
so. And we fellows get just the right little sprinkle of family
influence, too. It loses its affect when you have it all the time.
That's what I tell Truesdaile, when he goes on about home, and what
a thing it is to have a sister,--he doesn't exactly say _my_ sister;
I suppose he believes in the tenth commandment. By the way, he's
knocking round at the seashore some where using up the time. I've
half a mind to hunt him up and get him back here for the last week
or so. I think he'd like it."
"Nonsense, Rod! You can't. When Aunt Euphrasia's away."
"She would come back, if you asked her; wouldn't she? I think it
would be a charity. Put it to her as an opportunity. She'd drop
anything she might be about for an opportunity. I wonder if she ever
goes back upon her tracks and finishes up? She's something like a
mowing machine: a grand good thing, but needs a scythe to follow
round and pick out the stumps and corners."
Amy shook her head.
"I don't believe I'll ask her, Rod. She's perfectly happy up there
in New Ipswich, painting wild flowers and pressing ferns, and
swinging those five children in her hammock, and carrying them all
to drive in her pony-wagon, and getting up hampers of fish and
baskets of fruit, and beef sirloins by express, and feeding them all
up, and paying poor dear cousin Nan ten dollars a week for letting
her do it. I guess it's my opportunity to get along here without
her, and let her stay."
"Incorruptible! Well--you're a good girl, Amy. I must come down to
plain soft-sawder. Put some of those things together prettily, as
you know how, and drive over and take them to Sylvie Argenter this
afternoon, will you?"
"Fish and fruit and sirloins!"
"Amy, you're an aggravator!"
"No. I'm only grammatical. I'm sure those were the antecedents."
"If you don't, I will."
"If you will, I will too, Rod! Drive me over, that's a good boy, and
I'll go."
Amy seized with delicate craft her opportunity for getting her
brother off from one of his solitary, roaming expeditions with Red
Squirrel that ended too often in not being solitary, but in bringing
him into company with people who knew about horses, or had them to
show, and were planning for races, and who were likely to lead
Rodney, in spite of his innate gentlemanhood, into more of mere
jockeyism than either she or her father liked.
"But the flowers, I fancy, Rod, would be coals to Newcastle. They
have a greenhouse."
"And have never had a decent man to manage it. It came to nothing
this year. She told me so. You see it just is a literal _new_
castle. Mr. Argenter is too busy in town to look after it; and
they've been cheated and disappointed right and left. They're not to
blame for being new," he continued, seeing the least possible little
_lifted_ look about Amy's delicate lips and eyebrows. "I hate _that_
kind of shoddiness."
"'Don't fire--I'll come down,'" said Amy, laughing. "And I don't
think I ever get _very_ far up, beyond what's safe and reasonable
for a"--
"Nice, well-bred little coon," said Rodney, patting her on the
shoulder, in an exuberance of gracious approval and beamingly serene
content. "I'll take you in my gig with Red Squirrel," he added, by
way of reward of merit.
Now Amy in her secret heart was mortally afraid of Red Squirrel, but
she would have been upset ten times over--by Rodney--sooner than say
so.
When Sylvie Argenter, that afternoon, from her window with its cool,
deep awning, saw Rodney Sherrett and his sister coming up the drive,
there flashed across her, by a curious association, the thought of
the young carpenter who had gone up the village street and bowed to
Ray Ingraham, the baker's daughter.
After all, the gentleman's "place," apart and retired, and the long
"approach," were not so very much worse, when the "people in the
carriages,"--the right people,--really came: and "on purpose" was
not such a bad qualification of the coming, either.
And when Mrs. Argenter, hearing the bell, and the movement of an
arrival, and not being herself summoned in consequence, rung
in her own room for the maid, and received for answer to her
inquiry,--"Miss Sherrett and young Mr. Sherrett, ma'am, to see Miss
Sylvie,"--she turned back to her volume of "London Society," much
and mixedly reconciled in her thoughts to two things that occurred
to her at once,--one of them adding itself to the other as
manifestly in the same remarkable order of providence; "that
tip-out" from the basket-phæton, and the new white frill-trimmed
polonaise that Miss Sylvie would put on, so needlessly, this
afternoon, in spite of her remonstrance that the laundress had just
left without warning, and there was no knowing when they should ever
find another.
"There is certainly a fate in these matters," she said to herself,
complacently. "_One_ thing always follows another."
Mrs. Argenter was apt to make to herself a "House that Jack built"
out of her providences. She had always a little string of them to
rehearse in every history; from the malt that lay in the house, and
the rat that ate the malt, up to the priest all shaven and shorn,
that married the man that kissed the maid--and so on, all the way
back again. She counted them up as they went along. "There was the
overturn," she would say, by and by "and there was Rodney
Sherrett's call because of that, and then his sister's because no
doubt he asked her, and then their both coming together; and there
was your pretty white polonaise, you know, the day they did come;
and there was"--Mrs. Argenter has not counted up to that yet.
Perhaps it may be a long while before she will so readily count it
in.
It had turned out a hot day; one of those days in the nineties, when
if you once hear from the thermometer, or in any way have the fact
forcibly brought home to you, you relinquish all idea of exertion
yourself, and look upon the world outside as one great pause, out of
which no movement can possibly come, unless there first come the
beneficence of an east wind, which the dwellers on Massachusetts Bay
have always for a reserve of hope. Yet it may quite well occur to
here and there an individual with a resolute purpose in the day, to
actually live through it and pursue the intended plan, without
realizing the extra degrees of Fahrenheit at all, and to learn with
surprise at set of sun when the deeds are done, of the excelsior
performances of the mercury. With what secret amazement and dismay
is one's valor recognized, however, when it has led one to render
one's self at four in the afternoon on such a day, near one's friend
who _has_ been vividly conscious of the torrid atmosphere! Did you
ever make or receive such an afternoon call?
Mrs. Argenter, comfortable in her thin wrapper, reading her thin
romance, did not trouble herself to be astonished. "They were young
people; young people could do anything," she dimly thought; and
putting the white polonaise into the structure of the House that
Jack built, she interrupted herself no farther than presently to
ring her bell again, and tell the maid on no account to admit any
one to see herself, and to be sure that there were plenty of
raspberries brought in for tea.
Meanwhile, away in the cities, the thermometer had climbed and
climbed. Pavements were blistering hot; watering carts went
lumbering round only to send up a reek of noisome mist and to leave
the streets whitening again a few yards behind them. Blinds were
closed up and down the avenues, where people had either long left
their houses vacant or were sheltering themselves in depths of gloom
in the tomb-like coolness of their double walls. Builders' trowels
and hammers had a sound that made you think of sparks struck out, as
if the world were a great forge and all its matter at a white heat.
Down in the poor, crowded places, where the gutters fumed with
filth, and doors stood open upon horrible passages and staircases,
little children, barefooted, with one miserable garment on, sat on
grimy stone steps, or played wretchedly about the sidewalks,
impeding the passers of a better class who hastened with bated
breath, amidst the fever-breeding nuisances, along to railway
stations whence they would escape to country and sea-side homes.
On the wharves was the smell of tarred seams and
cordage,--sweltering in the sun; in the counting-rooms the clerks
could barely keep the drops of moisture from their faces from
falling down to blot their toilsome lines of figures on the
faultless pages of the ledgers; on the Common, common men
surreptitiously stretched themselves in shady corners on the grass,
regardless of the police, until they should be found and ordered
off; little babies in second-rate boarding-houses, where their
fathers and mothers had to stay for cheapness the summer through
wailed the helpless, pitiful cry of a slowly murdered infancy; and
out on the blazing thoroughfares where business had to be busy,
strong men were dropping down, and reporters were hovering about
upon the skirts of little crowds, gathering their items; making
_their_ hay while this terrible sun was shining.
What did Mrs. Argenter care?
The sun would be going down now, in a little while; then the cool
piazzas, and the raspberries and cream, and the iced milk,--yellow
Alderney milk,--would be delightful. Once or twice she did think of
"Argie" in New York,--gone thither on some perplexing, hurried
errand, which he had only half told her, and the half telling of
which she had only half heard,--and remembered that the heat must be
"awful" there. But to-night he would be on board the splendid Sound
steamer, coming home; and to-morrow, if this lasted, she would
surely speak to him about getting off for a while to Rye, or Mount
Desert.
She came by and by to the end of her volume, and found that the
serial she was following ran on into the next.
"Provoking," she said, tossing it down to the end of the sofa, "and
neither Sylvie nor I can get into town in this heat, and Argie
thinks it such a bother to be asked to go to Loring's."
Just then Sylvie's step came lightly up the stairs. She looked into
the large cool dressing-room where her mother lay.
"I'm only up for my 'Confession Album'," she said. "But O Mater
Amata! if you'd just come down and help me through! I know they'd
stay to tea and go home in the cool, if I only knew how to ask them;
but if I said a word I should be sure to drive them away. _You_ can
do it; and they would if you came. Please do!"
"You silly child! Won't you ever be able to do anything yourself?
When you were a little girl, you wouldn't carry a message, because
you could get into a house, but didn't know how to get out! And now
you are grown up, you can get people into the house to see you, but
you don't know how to ask them to stay to tea! What _shall_ I ever
do with you?"
"I don't know. I'm awfully afraid of--_nice_ girls!"
"Sylvie, I'm ashamed of you! As if you had any other kind of
acquaintance, or weren't as nice as any of them! I wouldn't suggest
it, even to myself, if I were you."
"And I don't," said Sylvie boldly--"when I'm _by_ myself. But
there's a kind of a little misgiving somehow, when they come, or
when I go, as if--well, as if there _might_ be something to it that
I didn't know of, or behind it that I hadn't got; or else, that
there were things that they had nothing to do with that I know too
much of. A kind of a--Poggowantimoc feeling, mother! Amy Sherrett is
so _fearfully_ refined,--all the way through! It doesn't seem as if
she ever had any common things to say or do. Don't you think it
_takes_ common things to get people really near to each other? It
doesn't seem to me I could ever be intimate--or very easy--with Amy
Sherrett."
"You seemed to get on well enough with her brother, the other day."
"Boys aren't half so bad. There isn't any such wax-work about boys.
Besides,"--and Sylvie laughed a low, gay little laugh,--we got spilt
out together, you know."
"Well, don't stand talking. You mustn't keep them waiting. It isn't
time to speak about tea, yet. Look over the album, and get at some
music. _Keep_ them without saying anything about it. When people
think every minute they are just going, is just when they are having
the very pleasantest time."
"I know it. But you'll come, won't you, and make it all right? Put
on something loose and cool; that lovely black lace jacket with the
violet lining, and your gray silk skirt. It won't take you a minute.
Your hair's perfectly sweet now." And Sylvie hurried away.
Mrs. Argenter came down, twenty minutes afterwards, into the great
summer drawing-room, where the finest Indian matting, and dark, rich
Persian rugs, and inner window blinds folded behind lace curtains
that fell like the foam of waterfalls from ceiling to floor, made a
pleasantness out of the very heat against which such furnishings
might be provided.
In her silken skirt of silver gray, and the llama sack, violet
lined, to need no tight corsage beneath, her fair wrists and arms
showing white and cool in the wide drapery sleeves, she looked a
very lovely lady. Sylvie was proud of her handsome, elegant mother.
She grew a great deal braver always when Mrs. Argenter came in. She
borrowed a second consciousness from her in which she took courage,
assured that all was right. Chairs and rugs gave her no such
confidence, though she knew that the Sherretts themselves had no
more faultless surroundings. Anybody could have rugs and chairs. It
was the presence among them that was wanted; and poor Sylvie seemed
to herself to melt quite away, as it were, before such a girl as Amy
Sherrett, and not to be able to be a presence at all.
It was all right now, as Sylvie had said. They could not leave
immediately upon Mrs. Argenter joining them and her joining them was
of itself a welcome and an invitation. So Sylvie called upon her
mother to admire the lovely basket, wherein on damp, tender, bright
green moss, clustered the most exquisite blossoms, and the most
delicate trails of stem and leafage wandered and started up lightly,
and at last fell like a veil over rim and handle, and dropped below
the edge of the tiny round table with Siena marble top, on which
Sylvie had placed it between the curtains of the recess that led
through to their conservatory, which had been "a failure this year."
"I would not tell you of it, Amata. I wanted you just to see it,"
she said. And Mrs. Argenter admired and thanked, and then lamented
their own ill-success in greenhouse and garden culture.
"I am not strong enough to look after it much myself, and Mr.
Argenter never has time," she said; "and our first man was a
tipsifier, and the last was a rogue. He sold off quantities of the
best young plants, we found, just before they came to show for
anything."
"Our man has been with us for eight years," said Rodney Sherrett. "I
dare say he could recommend some one to you, if you liked; and he
wouldn't send anybody that wasn't right. Shall I ask him?"
Mrs. Argenter would be delighted if he would; and then Mr. Sherrett
must come into the conservatory, where a few ragged palm ferns,
their great leaves browning and crumbling at the edges,--some
daphnes struggling into green tips, having lost their last growth of
leaf and dropped all their flower buds, and several calmly enduring
orange and lemon trees, gave all the suggestion of foliage that the
place afforded, and served, much like the painter's inscription at
the bottom of his canvas merely to signify by the scant glimpse
through the drawing-room draperies,--"This is a conservatory."
Mrs. Argenter asked Rodney something about the best arrangement for
the open beds, and wanted to know what would be surest to do well
for the rockery, and whether it was in a good part of the
house,--sufficiently shaded? Meanwhile, Amy and Sylvie were turning
over music, and when they all gathered together again the call had
extended to a two hours' visit.
"It is really unpardonable," Amy Sherrett was saying, and picking up
the pretty little hat which she had thrown down upon a chair,--"it
had been so warm to wear anything a minute that one need not." And
then Mrs. Argenter said so easily and of course, that they
"certainly would not think of going now, when it would soon be
really pleasant for a twilight drive; tea would be ready early, for
she and Sylvie were alone, and all they had cared for to-day had
been a cold lunch at one. They would have it on the north veranda;"
and she touched a bell to give the order.
Perhaps Amy Sherrett would hardly have consented, but that Rodney
gave her a look, comical in its appeal, over Sylvie's shoulder, as
she stood showing him a great scarlet Euphorbia in a portfolio of
water-colors, and said with a beseeching significance,--
"Consider Red Squirrel, Amy. He really did have a pretty hard pull;
and what with the heat and the flies, I dare say he would take it
with more equanimity after sundown,--since Mrs. Argenter is so very
kind."
And so they stayed; and Mrs. Argenter laid another little brick in
her "House that Jack built."
* * * * *
At this same time,--how should she know it?--something very
different was going on in one of the rooms of a great hotel in New
York. Somebody else who had meant before now to have left for home,
had been delayed till after sundown. Somebody else would go over the
road by dark instead of by daylight. By dark,--though there should
be broad, beating sunshine over the world again when the journey
should be made.
While Mrs. Argenter's maid was bringing out the tray with delicate
black-etched china cups, and costly fruit plates illuminated
with color, and dainty biscuits, and large, rare, red berries,
and cream that would hardly pour for richness in a gleaming
crystal flagon,--and ranging them all on the rustic veranda
table,--something very different,--very grim,--at which the
occupants of rooms near by shuddered as it passed their open
doors,--was borne down the long, wide corridor to Number Five, in
the Metropolitan; and at the same moment, again, a gentleman, very
grave, was standing at the counter of the Merchants' Union Telegraph
Company's Office, writing with rapid hand, a brief dispatch,
addressed to "Mrs. I.M. Argenter, Dorbury, Mass.," and signed
"Philip Burkmayer, M.D."
Nobody knew of any one else to send to; at that hour, especially,
when the office in State Street would be closed. Closed, with that
name outside the door that stood for nobody now.
The news must go bare and unbroken to her.
Something occurred to Doctor Burkmayer, however, as he was just
handing the slip to the attendant.
"Stop; give me that again, a minute," he said; and tearing it in
two, he wrote another, and then another.
"Send this on at once, and the second in an hour," he said; as if
they might have been prescriptions to be administered. "They may
both be delivered together after all," he continued to himself, as
he turned away. "But it is all I can do. When a weight is let drop,
it has got to fall. You can't ease it up much with a string measured
out for all the way down!"
The young woman operator at the little telegraph station at Dorbury
Upper Village heard the call-click as she unlocked the room and came
in after her half-hour supper time. She set the wires and responded,
and laid the paper slip under the wonderful pins.
"Tick-tick-tick; tick-tick; tick-tick-tick-tick," and so on. The
girl's face looked startled, as she spelled the signs along. She
answered back when it was ended; then wrote out the message rapidly
upon a blank, folded, directed it, and went to the open street door.
"Sim! Here--quick!" she called to a youth opposite, in a
stable-yard.
"This has got to go down to the Argenter Place. And mind how you
give it. It's bad news."
"How can _I_ mind?" said Sim, gruffly. "I spose I must give it to
who comes."
"You might see somebody on the way, and speak a word; a neighbor, or
the minister, or somebody. 'Tain't fit for it to go right to her,
_I_ know. Telegraphs might as well be something else when they can,
besides lightning!"
"Donno's I can go travellin' round after 'em, if that's what you
mean," said Sim, putting the envelope in his rough breast pocket,
and turning off.
Sylvie was standing on the stone steps, bidding the Sherretts
good-by; Amy was just seated in the gig, and Rodney about to spring
in beside her, when Sim Atwill drove up the avenue in the rusty
covered wagon that did telegraph errands. Red Squirrel did not quite
like the sudden coming face to face, as Sim reined up in a hurry
just below the door, and Rodney had to pause and hold him in.
"A tellagrim for Mrs. Argenter," said Sim, seizing his opportunity,
and speaking to whom it might concern. "Eighty cents to pay, and I
'blieve it's bad news."
"O, Mr. Sherrett, stop, please!" cried Sylvie, turning white in the
dim light. "What shall I do? Won't you wait a minute, Miss Sherrett,
until I see? Won't you come in again? Mother will be frightened to
death, and I'm all alone."
"Jump out, Amy; I'll take Squirrel round," was Rodney's answer. "Go
right up; I'll come."
And as Sylvie took the thin envelope that held so much, and the two
girls silently passed up into the piazza again, he paid Sim the
eighty cents which nobody thought of at that moment or ever again,
and sent him off.
Sylvie and Amy stopped under the softly bright hall lantern. Mrs.
Argenter was up-stairs in her dressing room, quite at the end of the
long upper hall, changing her lace sack for a cashmere, before
coming out into the evening air again.
"I think I shall open it myself," whispered Sylvie, tremulously; "it
would seem worse to mother, whatever it is, coming this way. She has
such a horror of a telegram." She looked at it on both sides, drew a
little shivering breath, and paused again.
"Is it wicked, do you think, to wish it may be--only grandma,
perhaps? Do you suppose it could _possibly_ be--my _father_?"
And by this time there was a hysterical sound in poor little
Sylvie's voice.
"Wait a minute," said Amy, kindly. "Here's Rod."
"OFFICE OF WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH CO.,
NEW YORK, _July_ 24_th_, 187-.
"To MRS. I. M. ARGENTER, Dorbury, Mass.
"Mr. Argenter has had a sunstroke. Insensible. Very serious.
Will telegraph again.
"PHILIP BURKMAYER, M.D."
Sylvie's eyes, so roundly innocent, so star-like in their usual
bright uplifting, were raised now with a wide terror in them, first
to Rodney, then to Amy; and "O--O!" broke in short, subdued gasps
from her lips.
Then they heard Mrs. Argenter's step up-stairs.
"What is the matter, Sylvie? What are you doing? Who is with you
down there?" she said, over the baluster, from the hall above.
"O, mother!" cried Sylvie, "they aren't gone! Something has _come_!
Go up and tell her, Amy, please!" And forgetting all about Amy as
"Miss Sherrett," and all her fear of "nice girls," she dropped down
on the lower step of the staircase after Amy had passed her upon her
errand, put her face between her hands and caught her breath with
frightened sobs.
Rodney, leaning against the newel post, looked down at her, and
said, after the manner of men,--"Don't cry. It mayn't be very bad,
after all. You'll hear again in an hour or two. Can't I do
something? I'll go to the telegraph office. I'll get somebody for
your mother. Whom shall I go for?"
"O, you are very kind. I don't know. Wait a minute. They didn't say
any place! We ought to go right to New York, and we don't know
where! O, dear!" She had lifted her head a little, just to say these
broken sentences, and then it went down again.
Rodney did not answer instantly. It occurred to him all at once
what this "not saying any place" might mean.
Just as he began,--"You couldn't go until to-morrow,"--came Mrs.
Argenter's sharp cry from her room above. Amy had walked right on
into the open, lighted apartment, Mrs. Argenter following, not
daring to ask what she came and did this strange thing for, till Amy
made her sit down in her own easy chair, and taking her hands, said
gently,--
"It is a telegram from New York. Mr. Argenter--is very ill." Then
Mrs. Argenter cried out, "That's not all! I know how people bring
news! Tell me the whole." And Sylvie sprang to her feet, hearing the
quick, excited words, and leaving Rodney Sherrett standing there,
rushed up into the dressing-room.
This was the way the same sort of news came to Sylvie Argenter as
had come to the baker's daughter. Did it really make any
difference--the different surrounding of the two? The great
house--the lights--the servants--the friends; and the open bake-shop
door, the village street, the blunt, common-spoken neighbor-woman,
and the boy with the brick loaf?
These two were to be fatherless: their mothers were both to be
widows: that was all.
Did it happen strangely with the two--in this same story? Who know,
always, when they are in the same story? These things are happening
every day, and one great story holds us all. If one could see wide
enough, one could tell the whole.
These things happen: and then the question comes,--alike in high and
low places,--alike with money and without it,--what the women and
the girls are to do?
Rodney Sherrett took his sister home; drove three miles round and
brought Mrs. Argenter's sister to her from River Point, and then
turned toward Dorbury Upper Village and the telegraph office. But he
met Sim Atwill on the way, received the telegram from him, and
hurried back.
It was the dispatch of the hour later, and this was it:--
"Mr. Argenter died at five o'clock. His remains will be sent
home to-morrow, carefully attended.
"PHILIP BURKMAYER."