"I suppose we ought to do the best we can for the children, in every
way."
"I supposed we always had," replied her husband.
"Yes, we have, according to our light."
"Have you got some new light?"
"I don't know as it's light. But if the girls are going to keep on
living in Boston and marry here, I presume we ought to try to get them
into society, some way; or ought to do something."
"Well, who's ever done more for their children than we have?" demanded
Lapham, with a pang at the thought that he could possibly have been
out-done. "Don't they have everything they want? Don't they dress just
as you say? Don't you go everywhere with 'em? Is there ever anything
going on that's worth while that they don't see it or hear it? I don't
know what you mean. Why don't you get them into society? There's money
enough!"
"There's got to be something besides money, I guess," said Mrs. Lapham,
with a hopeless sigh. "I presume we didn't go to work just the right
way about their schooling. We ought to have got them into some school
where they'd have got acquainted with city girls--girls who could help
them along."
"Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie's was from some where else."
"Well, it's pretty late to think about that now," grumbled Lapham.
"And we've always gone our own way, and not looked out for the future.
We ought to have gone out more, and had people come to the house.
Nobody comes."
"Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever makes people welcomer."
"We ought to have invited company more."
"Why don't you do it now? If it's for the girls, I don't care if you
have the house full all the while."
Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of humiliation. "I don't
know who to ask."
"Well, you can't expect me to tell you."
"No; we're both country people, and we've kept our country ways, and we
don't, either of us, know what to do. You've had to work so hard, and
your luck was so long coming, and then it came with such a rush, that
we haven't had any chance to learn what to do with it. It's just the
same with Irene's looks; I didn't expect she was ever going to have
any, she WAS such a plain child, and, all at once, she's blazed out
this way. As long as it was Pen that didn't seem to care for society,
I didn't give much mind to it. But I can see it's going to be
different with Irene. I don't believe but what we're in the wrong
neighbourhood."
"Well," said the Colonel, "there ain't a prettier lot on the Back Bay
than mine. It's on the water side of Beacon, and it's twenty-eight
feet wide and a hundred and fifty deep. Let's build on it."
Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. "No," she said finally; "we've always
got along well enough here, and I guess we better stay."
At breakfast she said casually: "Girls, how would you like to have your
father build on the New Land?"
The girls said they did not know. It was more convenient to the
horse-cars where they were.
Mrs. Lapham stole a look of relief at her husband, and nothing more was
said of the matter.
The mother of the family who had called upon Mrs. Lapham brought her
husband's cards, and when Mrs. Lapham returned the visit she was in
some trouble about the proper form of acknowledging the civility. The
Colonel had no card but a business card, which advertised the principal
depot and the several agencies of the mineral paint; and Mrs. Lapham
doubted, till she wished to goodness that she had never seen nor heard
of those people, whether to ignore her husband in the transaction
altogether, or to write his name on her own card. She decided finally
upon this measure, and she had the relief of not finding the family at
home. As far as she could judge, Irene seemed to suffer a little
disappointment from the fact.
For several months there was no communication between the families.
Then there came to Nankeen Square a lithographed circular from the
people on the Hill, signed in ink by the mother, and affording Mrs.
Lapham an opportunity to subscribe for a charity of undeniable merit
and acceptability. She submitted it to her husband, who promptly drew
a cheque for five hundred dollars.
She tore it in two. "I will take a cheque for a hundred, Silas," she
said.
"Why?" he asked, looking up guiltily at her.
"Because a hundred is enough; and I don't want to show off before them."
"Oh, I thought may be you did. Well, Pert," he added, having satisfied
human nature by the preliminary thrust, "I guess you're about right.
When do you want I should begin to build on Beacon Street?" He handed
her the new cheque, where she stood over him, and then leaned back in
his chair and looked up at her.
"I don't want you should begin at all. What do you mean, Silas?" She
rested against the side of his desk.
"Well, I don't know as I mean anything. But shouldn't you like to
build? Everybody builds, at least once in a lifetime."
"Where is your lot? They say it's unhealthy, over there."
Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs. Lapham had kept strict
account of all her husband's affairs; but as they expanded, and ceased
to be of the retail nature with which women successfully grapple, the
intimate knowledge of them made her nervous. There was a period in
which she felt that they were being ruined, but the crash had not come;
and, since his great success, she had abandoned herself to a blind
confidence in her husband's judgment, which she had hitherto felt
needed her revision. He came and went, day by day, unquestioned. He
bought and sold and got gain. She knew that he would tell her if ever
things went wrong, and he knew that she would ask him whenever she was
anxious.
"It ain't unhealthy where I've bought," said Lapham, rather enjoying
her insinuation. "I looked after that when I was trading; and I guess
it's about as healthy on the Back Bay as it is here, anyway. I got
that lot for you, Pert; I thought you'd want to build on the Back Bay
some day."
"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly, but not going to
show it, as she would have said. "I guess you want to build there
yourself." She insensibly got a little nearer to her husband. They
liked to talk to each other in that blunt way; it is the New England
way of expressing perfect confidence and tenderness.
"Well, I guess I do," said Lapham, not insisting upon the unselfish
view of the matter. "I always did like the water side of Beacon.
There ain't a sightlier place in the world for a house. And some day
there's bound to be a drive-way all along behind them houses, between
them and the water, and then a lot there is going to be worth the gold
that will cover it--COIN. I've had offers for that lot, Pert, twice
over what I give for it. Yes, I have. Don't you want to ride over
there some afternoon with me and see it?" "I'm satisfied where we be,
Si," said Mrs. Lapham, recurring to the parlance of her youth in her
pathos at her husband's kindness. She sighed anxiously, for she felt
the trouble a woman knows in view of any great change. They had often
talked of altering over the house in which they lived, but they had
never come to it; and they had often talked of building, but it had
always been a house in the country that they had thought of. "I wish
you had sold that lot."
"I hain't," said the colonel briefly.
"I don't know as I feel much like changing our way of living."
"Guess we could live there pretty much as we live here. There's all
kinds of people on Beacon Street; you mustn't think they're all
big-bugs. I know one party that lives in a house he built to sell, and
his wife don't keep any girl. You can have just as much style there as
you want, or just as little. I guess we live as well as most of 'em
now, and set as good a table. And if you come to style, I don't know
as anybody has got more of a right to put it on than what we have."
"Well, I don't want to build on Beacon Street, Si," said Mrs. Lapham
gently.
"Just as you please, Persis. I ain't in any hurry to leave."
Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the cheque which she held in her right hand
against the edge of her left.
The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and watching the effect
of the poison of ambition which he had artfully instilled into her mind.
She sighed again--a yielding sigh. "What are you going to do this
afternoon?"
"I'm going to take a turn on the Brighton road," said the Colonel.
"I don't believe but what I should like to go along," said his wife.
"All right. You hain't ever rode behind that mare yet, Pert, and I
want you should see me let her out once. They say the snow's all
packed down already, and the going is A 1."
At four o'clock in the afternoon, with a cold, red winter sunset before
them, the Colonel and his wife were driving slowly down Beacon Street
in the light, high-seated cutter, where, as he said, they were a pretty
tight fit. He was holding the mare in till the time came to speed her,
and the mare was springily jolting over the snow, looking intelligently
from side to side, and cocking this ear and that, while from her
nostrils, her head tossing easily, she blew quick, irregular whiffs of
steam.
"Gay, ain't she?" proudly suggested the Colonel.
"She IS gay," assented his wife.
They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them pass on either hand,
down the beautiful avenue narrowing with an admirably even sky-line in
the perspective. They were not in a hurry. The mare jounced easily
along, and they talked of the different houses on either side of the
way. They had a crude taste in architecture, and they admired the
worst. There were women's faces at many of the handsome windows, and
once in a while a young man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly
from his head, and bowed in response to some salutation from within.
"I don't think our girls would look very bad behind one of those big
panes," said the Colonel.
"No," said his wife dreamily.
"Where's the YOUNG man? Did he come with them?"
"No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that has a ranch
in Texas. I guess he's got to do something."
"Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a generation
or two."
Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew perfectly well
what his wife had come with him for, and she was aware that he knew it.
The time came when he brought the mare down to a walk, and then slowed
up almost to a stop, while they both turned their heads to the right
and looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen stretch
of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge, and the roofs and
smoke-stacks of Charlestown.
"Yes, it's sightly," said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand from the reins,
on which she had unconsciously laid it.
Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.
The sleighs and cutters were thickening round them. On the Milldam it
became difficult to restrict the mare to the long, slow trot into which
he let her break. The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of
them, with the sunset redder and redder, over the low, irregular hills
before them. They crossed the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from
the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which
thousands of cutters went and came. Some of the drivers were already
speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines,
between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road. Here
and there a burly mounted policeman, bulging over the pommel of his
M'Clellan saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing and directing the
course, and keeping it all under the eye of the law. It was what
Bartley Hubbard called "a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the
Brighton road," in his account of it. But most of the people in those
elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of the great world
that one knowing it at all must have wondered where they and their
money came from; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed,
like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim almost fierce, alertness; the
women wore an air of courageous apprehension. At a certain point the
Colonel said, "I'm going to let her out, Pert," and he lifted and then
dropped the reins lightly on the mare's back.
She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said, "she laid down to
her work." Nothing in the immutable iron of Lapham's face betrayed his
sense of triumph as the mare left everything behind her on the road.
Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps
about her, and shielding her face from the scud of ice flung from the
mare's heels, to betray it; except for the rush of her feet, the mare
was as silent as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to
an alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a
hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by
the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what
they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to
interfere with trotting like that. At the end of the heat Lapham drew
her in, and turned off on a side street into Brookline.
"Tell you what, Pert," he said, as if they had been quietly jogging
along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he last spoke, "I've
about made up my mind to build on that lot."
"All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose you know what you're
about. Don't build on it for me, that's all."
When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things, she said to
the girls, who were helping her, "Some day your father will get killed
with that mare."
"Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder.
She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited from
another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits
won her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and
Prudences. Penelope was the girl whose odd serious face had struck
Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed him
on the day of the interview. Her large eyes, like her hair, were
brown; they had the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes which is called
mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.
Her mother did not reply to a question which might be considered
already answered. "He says he's going to build on that lot of his,"
she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had tied round her
neck to hold her bonnet on. She put her hat and cloak on the hall
table, to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea:
creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and dishes of
stewed and canned fruit and honey. The women dined alone at one, and
the Colonel at the same hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal
when he got home in the evening. The house flared with gas; and the
Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers, through
which a welding heat came voluming up from the furnace.
"I'll be the death of that darkey YET," he said, "if he don't stop
making on such a fire. The only way to get any comfort out of your
furnace is to take care of it yourself."
"Well," answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat down at
table with this threat, "there's nothing to prevent you, Si. And you
can shovel the snow too, if you want to--till you get over to Beacon
Street, anyway."
"I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean, if I take
the notion."
"I should like to see you at it," retorted his wife.
"Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be you will."
Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in each
other. They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as they would
have said, right along.
"A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess."
"Well, I'll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville," said Mrs.
Lapham. "I presume you'll let me have set tubs, Si. You know I ain't
so young any more." She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea,--none of them
had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Sou-chong,--and the girl
handed it to her father. "Papa," she asked, "you don't really mean
that you're going to build over there?"
"Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his tea.
"I don't believe you do," pursued the girl.
"Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me. Your mother does." He
said DOOS, of course.
Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don't see any use in not
enjoying money, if you've got it to enjoy. That's what it's for, I
suppose; though you mightn't always think so." She had a slow, quaint
way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some
ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from
being nasal that it was a little hoarse.
"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father. "How would it do to
let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and us go into
the new house?" At times the Colonel's grammar failed him.
The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking
recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon. The Colonel
seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way,
his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing.