"In the music-room, of course," consented the architect.
"And in the drawing-room?"
"Carpet. Some sort of moquette, I should say. But I should prefer to
consult Mrs. Lapham's taste in that matter."
"And in the other rooms?"
"Oh, carpets, of course."
"And what about the stairs?"
"Carpet. And I should have the rail and banisters white--banisters
turned or twisted."
The Colonel said under his breath, "Well, I'm dumned!" but he gave no
utterance to his astonishment in the architect's presence. When he
went at last,--the session did not end till eleven o'clock,--Lapham
said, "Well, Pert, I guess that fellow's fifty years behind, or ten
years ahead. I wonder what the Ongpeer style is?"
"I don't know. I hated to ask. But he seemed to understand what he
was talking about. I declare, he knows what a woman wants in a house
better than she does herself."
"And a man's simply nowhere in comparison," said Lapham. But he
respected a fellow who could beat him at every point, and have a reason
ready, as this architect had; and when he recovered from the daze into
which the complete upheaval of all his preconceived notions had left
him, he was in a fit state to swear by the architect. It seemed to him
that he had discovered the fellow (as he always called him) and owned
him now, and the fellow did nothing to disturb this impression. He
entered into that brief but intense intimacy with the Laphams which the
sympathetic architect holds with his clients. He was privy to all
their differences of opinion and all their disputes about the house.
He knew just where to insist upon his own ideas, and where to yield.
He was really building several other houses, but he gave the Laphams
the impression that he was doing none but theirs.
The work was not begun till the frost was thoroughly out of the ground,
which that year was not before the end of April. Even then it did not
proceed very rapidly. Lapham said they might as well take their time
to it; if they got the walls up and the thing closed in before the snow
flew, they could be working at it all winter. It was found necessary
to dig for the kitchen; at that point the original salt-marsh lay near
the surface, and before they began to put in the piles for the
foundation they had to pump. The neighbourhood smelt like the hold of
a ship after a three years' voyage. People who had cast their fortunes
with the New Land went by professing not to notice it; people who still
"hung on to the Hill" put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told
each other the old terrible stories of the material used in filling up
the Back Bay.
Nothing gave Lapham so much satisfaction in the whole construction of
his house as the pile-driving. When this began, early in the summer, he
took Mrs. Lapham every day in his buggy and drove round to look at it;
stopping the mare in front of the lot, and watching the operation with
even keener interest than the little loafing Irish boys who
superintended it in force. It pleased him to hear the portable engine
chuckle out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big iron
weight to the top of the framework above the pile, then seem to
hesitate, and cough once or twice in pressing the weight against the
detaching apparatus. There was a moment in which the weight had the
effect of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty whack
on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it a foot into the earth.
"By gracious!" he would say, "there ain't anything like that in THIS
world for BUSINESS, Persis!"
Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty times
before she said, "Well, now drive on, Si."
By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go
up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood that she might
indulge with impunity her husband's passion for having her clamber over
the floor-timbers and the skeleton stair-cases with him. Many of the
householders had boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun
to swell and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed
soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had been in the
depth of the country. Ordinarily she and her girls left town early in
July, going to one of the hotels at Nantasket, where it was convenient
for the Colonel to get to and from his business by the boat. But this
summer they were all lingering a few weeks later, under the novel
fascination of the new house, as they called it, as if there were no
other in the world.
Lapham drove there with his wife after he had set Bartley Hubbard down
at the Events office, but on this day something happened that
interfered with the solid pleasure they usually took in going over the
house. As the Colonel turned from casting anchor at the mare's head
with the hitching-weight, after helping his wife to alight, he
encountered a man to whom he could not help speaking, though the man
seemed to share his hesitation if not his reluctance at the necessity.
He was a tallish, thin man, with a dust-coloured face, and a dead,
clerical air, which somehow suggested at once feebleness and tenacity.
Mrs. Lapham held out her hand to him.
"Why, Mr. Rogers!" she exclaimed; and then, turning toward her husband,
seemed to refer the two men to each other. They shook hands, but
Lapham did not speak. "I didn't know you were in Boston," pursued Mrs.
Lapham. "Is Mrs. Rogers with you?"
"No," said Mr. Rogers, with a voice which had the flat, succinct sound
of two pieces of wood clapped together. "Mrs. Rogers is still in
Chicago."