THE silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong
and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without
lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits society together might
appear to the eye of faltering faith the curse of those immediately
bound by it. Two people by no means reckless of each other's rights
and feelings, but even tender of them for the most part, may tear at
each other's heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity;
though if they were any other two they would not speak or look at each
other again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a
curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of
the divinity of the institution. If the husband and wife are blunt,
outspoken people like the Laphams, they do not weigh their words; if
they are more refined, they weigh them very carefully, and know
accurately just how far they will carry, and in what most sensitive
spot they may be planted with most effect.
Lapham was proud of his wife, and when he married her it had been a
rise in life for him. For a while he stood in awe of his good fortune,
but this could not last, and he simply remained supremely satisfied
with it. The girl who had taught school with a clear head and a strong
hand was not afraid of work; she encouraged and helped him from the
first, and bore her full share of the common burden. She had health,
and she did not worry his life out with peevish complaints and
vagaries; she had sense and principle, and in their simple lot she did
what was wise and right. Their marriage was hallowed by an early
sorrow: they lost their boy, and it was years before they could look
each other in the face and speak of him. No one gave up more than they
when they gave up each other and Lapham went to the war. When he came
back and began to work, her zeal and courage formed the spring of his
enterprise. In that affair of the partnership she had tried to be his
conscience, but perhaps she would have defended him if he had accused
himself; it was one of those things in this life which seem destined to
await justice, or at least judgment, in the next. As he said, Lapham
had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more
money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said,
simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in
advantages which he had created. But Lapham had not created them all.
He had been dependent at one time on his partner's capital. It was a
moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man for ever after who can
choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could
not rise to it. He did what he could maintain to be perfectly fair.
The wrong, if any, seemed to be condoned to him, except when from time
to time his wife brought it up. Then all the question stung and burned
anew, and had to be reasoned out and put away once more. It seemed to
have an inextinguishable vitality. It slept, but it did not die.
His course did not shake Mrs. Lapham's faith in him. It astonished her
at first, and it always grieved her that he could not see that he was
acting solely in his own interest. But she found excuses for him,
which at times she made reproaches. She vaguely perceived that his
paint was something more than business to him; it was a sentiment,
almost a passion. He could not share its management and its profit
with another without a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which
he must make with something less personal to him. It was the poetry of
that nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic; and she understood this,
and for the most part forbore. She knew him good and true and
blameless in all his life, except for this wrong, if it were a wrong;
and it was only when her nerves tingled intolerably with some chance
renewal of the pain she had suffered, that she shared her anguish with
him in true wifely fashion.
With those two there was never anything like an explicit
reconciliation. They simply ignored a quarrel; and Mrs. Lapham had
only to say a few days after at breakfast, "I guess the girls would
like to go round with you this afternoon, and look at the new house,"
in order to make her husband grumble out as he looked down into his
coffee-cup. "I guess we better all go, hadn't we?"
"Well, I'll see," she said.
There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham arrived on the
ground in his four-seated beach-wagon. But the walls were up, and the
studding had already given skeleton shape to the interior. The floors
were roughly boarded over, and the stairways were in place, with
provisional treads rudely laid. They had not begun to lath and plaster
yet, but the clean, fresh smell of the mortar in the walls mingling
with the pungent fragrance of the pine shavings neutralised the
Venetian odour that drew in over the water. It was pleasantly shady
there, though for the matter of that the heat of the morning had all
been washed out of the atmosphere by a tide of east wind setting in at
noon, and the thrilling, delicious cool of a Boston summer afternoon
bathed every nerve.
The foreman went about with Mrs. Lapham, showing her where the doors
were to be; but Lapham soon tired of this, and having found a pine
stick of perfect grain, he abandoned himself to the pleasure of
whittling it in what was to be the reception-room, where he sat looking
out on the street from what was to be the bay-window. Here he was
presently joined by his girls, who, after locating their own room on
the water side above the music-room, had no more wish to enter into
details than their father.
"Come and take a seat in the bay-window, ladies," he called out to
them, as they looked in at him through the ribs of the wall. He
jocosely made room for them on the trestle on which he sat.
They came gingerly and vaguely forward, as young ladies do when they
wish not to seem to be going to do a thing they have made up their
minds to do. When they had taken their places on their trestle, they
could not help laughing with scorn, open and acceptable to their
father; and Irene curled her chin up, in a little way she had, and
said, "How ridiculous!" to her sister.
"Well, I can tell you what," said the Colonel, in fond enjoyment of
their young ladyishness, "your mother wa'n't ashamed to sit with me on
a trestle when I called her out to look at the first coat of my paint
that I ever tried on a house."
"Yes; we've heard that story," said Penelope, with easy security of her
father's liking what she said. "We were brought up on that story."
"Well, it's a good story," said her father.
At that moment a young man came suddenly in range, who began to look up
at the signs of building as he approached. He dropped his eyes in
coming abreast of the bay-window, where Lapham sat with his girls, and
then his face lightened, and he took off his hat and bowed to Irene.
She rose mechanically from the trestle, and her face lightened too.
She was a very pretty figure of a girl, after our fashion of girls,
round and slim and flexible, and her face was admirably regular. But
her great beauty--and it was very great--was in her colouring. This
was of an effect for which there is no word but delicious, as we use it
of fruit or flowers. She had red hair, like her father in his earlier
days, and the tints of her cheeks and temples were such as suggested
May-flowers and apple-blossoms and peaches. Instead of the grey that
often dulls this complexion, her eyes were of a blue at once intense
and tender, and they seemed to burn on what they looked at with a soft,
lambent flame. It was well understood by her sister and mother that
her eyes always expressed a great deal more than Irene ever thought or
felt; but this is not saying that she was not a very sensible girl and
very honest.
The young man faltered perceptibly, and Irene came a little forward,
and then there gushed from them both a smiling exchange of greeting, of
which the sum was that he supposed she was out of town, and that she
had not known that he had got back. A pause ensued, and flushing again
in her uncertainty as to whether she ought or ought not to do it, she
said, "My father, Mr. Corey; and my sister."
The young man took off his hat again, showing his shapely head, with a
line of wholesome sunburn ceasing where the recently and closely
clipped hair began. He was dressed in a fine summer check, with a blue
white-dotted neckerchief, and he had a white hat, in which he looked
very well when he put it back on his head. His whole dress seemed very
fresh and new, and in fact he had cast aside his Texan habiliments only
the day before.
"How do you do, sir?" said the Colonel, stepping to the window, and
reaching out of it the hand which the young man advanced to take.
"Won't you come in? We're at home here. House I'm building."
"Oh, indeed?" returned the young man; and he came promptly up the
steps, and through its ribs into the reception-room.
"Have a trestle?" asked the Colonel, while the girls exchanged little
shocks of terror and amusement at the eyes.
"Thank you," said the young man simply, and sat down.
"Mrs. Lapham is upstairs interviewing the carpenter, but she'll be down
in a minute."
"I hope she's quite well," said Corey. "I supposed--I was afraid she
might be out of town."
"Well, we are off to Nantasket next week. The house kept us in town
pretty late."
"It must be very exciting, building a house," said Corey to the elder
sister.
"Yes, it is," she assented, loyally refusing in Irene's interest the
opportunity of saying anything more.