A BIT OF ADVICE
The next morning I awoke about seven o'clock. My clothes, neatly
brushed and folded, were on a chair near the bed, with my
brightly-blackened shoes near by. I rose, quickly dressed myself, and
went forth into the morning air. I met no one in the house, and the
hall door was open. For an hour or more I walked about the beautiful
grounds. Sometimes I wandered near the house, among the flower-beds
and shrubs; sometimes I followed the winding path to a considerable
distance; occasionally I sat down in a covered arbor; and then I
sought the shade of a little grove, in which there were hammocks and
rustic chairs. But I met no one, and I saw no one except some men
working near the stables. I would have been glad to go down to the
lodge and say "Good-morning" to my kind entertainers there, but for
some reason or other it struck me that that neat little house was too
much out of the way.
When I had had enough walking I retired to the piazza and sat there,
until Brownster, with a bow, came and informed me that breakfast was
served.
The young lady, in the freshest of summer costumes, met me at the door
and bade me "Good-morning," but the greeting of her father was not by
any means cordial, although his manner had lost some of the stiff
condescension which had sat so badly upon him the evening before. The
mother was a very pleasant little lady of few words and a general air
which indicated an intimate acquaintance with back seats.
The breakfast was a remarkably good one. When the meal was over, Mr.
Putney walked with me into the hall. "I must now ask you to excuse me,
sir," said he, "as this is the hour when I receive my manager and
arrange with him for the varied business of the day. Good-morning,
sir. I wish you a very pleasant journey." And, barely giving me a
chance to thank him for his entertainment, he disappeared into the
back part of the house.
The young lady was standing at the front of the hall. "Won't you
please come in," she said, "and see mother? She wants to talk to you
about Walford."
I found the little lady in a small room opening from the parlor, and
also, to my great surprise, I found her extremely talkative and
chatty. She asked me so many questions that I had little chance to
answer them, and she told me a great deal more about Walford and its
people and citizens than I had learned during my nine months'
residence in the village. I was very glad to give her an opportunity
of talking, which was a pleasure, I imagined, she did not often enjoy;
but as I saw no signs of her stopping, I was obliged to rise and take
leave of her.
The young lady accompanied me into the hall. "I must get my valise," I
said, "and then I must be off. And I assure you--"
"No, do not trouble yourself about your valise," she interrupted.
"Brownster will attend to that--he will take it down to the lodge.
And as to your gorgeous raiment, he will see that that is all properly
returned to its owners."
I picked up my cap, and she walked with me out upon the piazza. "I
suppose you saw everything on our place," she asked, "when you were
walking about this morning?"
A little surprised, I answered that I had seen a good deal, but I did
not add that I had not found what I was looking for.
"We have all sorts of hot-houses and green-houses," she said, "but
they are not very interesting at this time of the year, otherwise I
would ask you to walk through them before you go." She then went on to
tell me that a little building which she pointed out was a
mushroom-house. "And you will think it strange that it should be there
when I tell you that not one of our family likes mushrooms or ever
tastes one. But the manager thinks that we ought to grow mushrooms,
and so we do it."
As she was talking, the thought came to me that there were some people
who might consider this young lady a little forward in her method of
entertaining a comparative stranger, but I dismissed this idea. With
such a peculiarly constituted family it was perhaps necessary for her
to put herself forward, in regard, at least, to the expression of
hospitality.
"One thing I must show you," she said, suddenly, "and that is the
orchid-house! Are you fond of orchids?"
"Under certain circumstances," I said, unguardedly, "I could be fond
of apple-cores." As soon as I had spoken these words I would have
been glad to recall them, but they seemed to make no impression
whatever on her.
We walked to the orchid-house, we went through it, and she explained
all its beauties, its singularities, and its rarities. When we came
out again, I asked myself: "Is she in the habit of doing all this to
chance visitors? Would she treat a Brown or a Robinson in the way she
is treating me?" I could not answer my question, but if Brown and
Robinson had appeared at that moment I should have been glad to knock
their heads together.
I did not want to go; I would have been glad to examine every building
on the place, but I knew I must depart; and as I was beginning to
express my sense of the kindness with which I had been treated, she
interrupted by asking me if I expected to come back this way.
"No," said I, "that is not my plan. I expect to ride on to Waterton,
and there I shall stop for a day or two and decide what section of the
country I shall explore next."
"And to-day?" she said. "Where have you planned to spend the night?"
"I have been recommended to stop at a little inn called the 'Holly
Sprig,'" I replied. "It is a leisurely day's journey from Walford, and
I have been told that it is a pleasant place and a pretty country. I
do not care to travel all the time, and I want to stop a little when I
find interesting scenery."
[Illustration: "As soon as I had spoken these words"]
"Oh, I know the Holly Sprig Inn," said she, speaking very quickly,
"and I would advise you not to stop there. We have lunched there two
or three times when we were out on long drives. There is a much better
house about five miles the other side of the Holly Sprig. It is really
a large, handsome hotel, with good service and everything you
want--where people go to spend the summer."
I thanked her for her information and bade her good-bye. She shook my
hand very cordially and I walked away. I had gone but a very few steps
when I wanted to turn around and look back, but I did not.
Before I had reached the lodge, where I had left my bicycle, I met
Brownster, and when I saw him I put my hand into my pocket. He had
certainly been very attentive.
"I carried your valise, sir," he said, "to the lodge, and I took the
liberty of strapping it to your handle-bar. You will find everything
all right, sir, and the--other clothes will be properly attended to."
I thanked him, and then handed him some money. To my surprise, he did
not offer to take it. He smiled a little and bowed.
"Would you mind, sir," he said, "if you did not give me anything? I
assure you, sir, that I'd very much rather that you wouldn't give me
anything." And with this he bowed and rapidly disappeared.
"Well," said I, to myself, as I put my money back into my pocket, "it
is a queer country, this Cathay."
As I approached the lodge, I felt that perhaps I had received a
lesson, but I was not sure. I would wait and let circumstances decide.
The gardener was away attending to his duties; but his wife was there,
and when she came forward, with a frank, cheery greeting, I instantly
decided that I had had a lesson. I thanked her, as earnestly as I knew
how, for what she had done for me, and then I added:
"You and your husband have treated me with such kind hospitality that
I am not going to offer you anything in return for what you have
done."
"You would have hurt us, sir, if you had," said she.
Then, in order to change the subject, I spoke of the honor which had
been bestowed upon me by being allowed to wear the Duke's
dressing-gown. She smiled, and replied:
"Honors would always be easy for you, sir, if you only chose to take
them."
As I rode away I thought that the last remark of the gardener's wife
seemed to show a mental brightness above her station, although I did
not know exactly what she meant. "Can it be," I asked myself, "that
she fancies that good family, six feet of athletic muscle, and no
money would be considered sufficient to make matrimonial honors easy
on that estate?" If such an idea had come into her head, it certainly
was a very foolish one, and I determined to drive it from my mind by
thinking of something else.
Suddenly I slackened my speed. I stopped and put one foot to the
ground. What a hard-hearted wretch I thought myself to be! Here I was
thinking of all sorts of nonsense and speeding away without a thought
of the young girl who had hurt herself the day before and who had been
helped by me to her home! She lived but a few miles back, and I had
determined, the evening before, to run down and see how she was
getting on before starting on my day's journey.
I turned and went bowling back over the road on which I had been so
terribly drenched the previous afternoon. In a very little while my
bicycle was leaning against the fence of the pretty house by the
road-side, and I had entered the front yard. The slender girl was
sitting on the piazza behind some vines. When she saw me she quickly
closed the book she was reading, drew one foot from a little stool,
and rose to meet me. There was more color on her face than I had
supposed would be likely to find its way there, and her bright eyes
showed that she was not only surprised but glad to see me.
"I thought you were ever so far on your journey!" she said. "And how
did you get through that awful storm?"
"I want to know first about your foot," I said--"how is that?"
"My own opinion is," she answered, "that it is nearly well. Mother
knew exactly what to do for it; she wrapped it in wet cloths and dry
cloths, and this morning I scarcely think of it. But there is one
thing I want to tell you before you meet father and mother--for they
want to see you, I know. We talked a great deal about you last night.
You may have thought it strange I told you about the peas, but I had
to do it to explain why I could not ask you to stop. Now I want to
tell you that this accident made everything all right. As soon as
father and mother knew that I was hurt they forgot everything else,
and neither of them remembered that there was such a thing as a
pea-vine in the world. It really seems as if my tumble was a most
lucky thing. And now you must come in. They will never forgive me if I
let you go away without seeing them."
The mother, a pleasant little woman, full of cheerful gratitude to me
for having done so much for her daughter, and the father, tall and
slender, hurrying in from the garden, his face beaming with a friendly
enthusiasm, apologizing for the mud on his clothes, and almost in the
same breath telling me of the obligations under which I had placed
him, both seemed to me at the first glance to be such kind,
simple-hearted, simple-mannered people that I could not help
contrasting this family with the one under whose roof I had passed the
night.
I spent half an hour with these good people, patiently listening to
their gratitude and to their deep regrets that I had been allowed to
go on in the storm; but I succeeded in allaying their friendly regrets
by assuring them that it would have been impossible to keep me from
going on, so certain had I been that I could reach the little town of
Vernon before the storm grew violent. Then I was obliged to tell them
that I did not reach Vernon, and how I had spent the night.
"With the Putneys!" exclaimed the mother. "I am sure you could not
have been entertained in a finer house!"
They asked me many questions and I told them many things, and I soon
discovered that they took a generous interest in the lives of other
people. They spoke of the good this rich family had done in the
neighborhood during the building of their great house and the
improvement of their estate, and not a word did I hear of ridicule or
scandalous comment, although in good truth there was opportunity
enough for it.
The young lady asked me if I had seen Miss Putney, and when I replied
that I had, she inquired if I did not think that she was a very pretty
girl. "I do not know her," she said, "but I have often seen her when
she was out driving. I do not believe there is any one in this part of
the country who dresses better than she does."
I laughed, and told her that I thought I knew somebody who dressed
much finer even than Miss Putney, and then I described the incident
of the Duke's dressing-gown. This delighted them all, and before I
left I was obliged to give every detail of my gorgeous attire.
It was about eleven o'clock when at last I tore myself away from this
most attractive little family. To live as they lived, to be interested
in the things that interested them--for the house seemed filled with
books and pictures--to love nature, to love each other, and to think
well of their fellow-beings, even of the super-rich--seemed to me to
be an object for which a man of my temperament should be willing to
strive and thankful to win. After meeting her parents I did not wonder
that I had thought the slender girl so honest-hearted and so lovable.
It was true that I had thought that.