"Gay people?" Hughson elevated his brow. The phrase, with him, was
synonymous with impropriety. "No; but there's my training-company
ball, now; it's given in Union Street hall; gentlemen a dollar, ladies
fifty cents. Each gentleman can bring two ladies. Why not let me take
her there?"
"I'm sure it's very kind of you, John," said Jamie. He felt a pang
that he, too, could not take Mercedes to balls.
"It's not like one o' them Tremont Street balls, you know," said
Hughson proudly. Secretly he thought it a very fine affair. The
governor was to be there, and his aides-de-camp, in gold lace.
Mercedes went to the ball when the night came, but only stayed an
hour. She knew very few of the other girls. Her dress was a yellow
muslin, modestly open at the throat, and she could see them eying it.
None of the other women wore low-necked gowns, but they wore more
pretentious dresses, with more of ornament, and Mercedes felt they did
not even know in how much better taste was she. But John Hughson was
in a most impossible blue swallow-tail with brass buttons,--the sort
of thing, indeed, that Webster had worn a few years before, only
Hughson was not fitted for it. She suspected he had hired it for the
evening, in the hope of pleasing her, for she saw that he had to bear
some chaff about it from his friends. One of the colonels of the
staff, with plumed hat and a sword, came and was introduced to her. In
a sense she made a conquest of him, for he tried clumsily to pay his
court to her, but not seriously. Nothing that yet had happened in her
little life had enraged Miss Mercedes as did this. She inly vowed that
some day she would remember the man, to cut him. And so she had
Hughson take her home.
Poor Hughson felt that his evening had been a failure, and rashly
ventured on some chances of rebuff from her as the two walked
home,--chances of which Miss Mercedes was cruel enough to avail
herself to the full. The honest fellow was puzzled by it, for even he
knew that Mercedes' only desire in going to the ball was to be
admired, and admiration she had had. John was too simple to make fine
discriminations in male deference, but he judged more rightly the
feminine opinion of her looks and manners than did Miss Mercedes
herself. They had thought her too fine for them--as she had wished.
After all her democratic education, social consideration was the one
ambition that had formed in pretty Mercedes' mind. Her desire for this
was as real in the form it took with men as in the form it took with
other women; as clear the outcome of the books and reading given her
as of the training given any upper servant in a London suburb,
patterned on a lady mistress. Mercedes had no affections; she was as
careless of religion as a Yankee boy; this desire alone she had of
self-esteem above her fellow-creatures, especially those of her own
sex and age. Her education had not gone to the point of giving her
higher enjoyment,--poetry, art, happiness of thought. Even her
piano-playing was but an adornment. She never played for her own
pleasure; and what was the use of practicing now?
This New World life has got reduced to about three motives, like the
three primary colors; one is rather surprised that so few can blend in
so many shades of people. Money-getting, love of self, love,--is not
that quite all? Yet poor Jamie and Mercedes, who was nearest to him,
did not happen in the same division. Hughson, perhaps, made even the
third. Yet a woman who holds herself too fine for her world will get
recognition, commonly, from it. To honest Hughson, lying unwontedly
awake and thinking of the evening's chances and mischances, now in a
hot fit, now in a cold fit, of something like to love, such a creature
as Mercedes, as she lightly hung upon his arm that evening, had never
yet appeared. She was an angel, a being apart, a fairy,--any crude
simile that occurs to honest plodding men of such young girls. John
took the _distrait_ look for dreamy thought; her irresponsiveness for
ethereal purity; her moodiness for superiority of soul. She imposed
herself on him now, as she had done before on Jamie, as deserving a
higher life than he could give her. This is what a man terms being in
love, and then would wish, _quand même_, to drag his own life into
hers!
One day, some weeks after this, Mr. James Bowdoin, on coming down to
the little office on the wharf rather later than usual, went up the
stairs, more than ever choky with that spicy dust that was the
mummy-like odor of departed trade, and divined that the cause thereof
was in the counting-room itself, whence issued sounds of much bumping
and falling, as if a dozen children were playing leap-frog on the
floor. Jamie McMurtagh was seated on the stool in the outer den that
was called the bookkeeper's, biting his pen, with even a sourer face
than usual.
"Good-morning, Jamie," said he cheerily.
"Good-morning, Mr. James." Jamie always greeted glumly, but there was
a touch of tragedy in him this morning that was more than manner.
James Bowdoin looked at him sharply.
"Can I--has anything"--He was interrupted by a series of tremendous
poundings that issued from the counting-room within. The entrance door
was closed. Young Mr. Bowdoin cocked his thumb at it. "How many
children has the governor got in there to-day?"
"One, sir," grunted Jamie.
"One child? Great heavens! who makes all that noise?"
"Mr. Bowdoin do the most of it, sir," said Jamie solemnly. "I have
been waiting, sir, to see him mysel' since"--Jamie looked gravely at
his watch--"since the half after twal'. But he does not suffer being
interrupted."