glance swept non-committally the green burlap walls. Both of them were
seeing pictures of the wedding preparations. Hortense saw delivery-boys
at the front door, with things that must be held to the light or draped
over chairs. She saw George haling Amy to the furniture-shops and to
the dealers in wall-paper. She saw them in cosy shaded confab evening
after evening, in her aunt's library. It was a period of joy, of
self-absorption, of unsettlement, of longing, of irritation, of
exasperation--oh, would it never end! Cope saw a long string of gifts
and entertainments, a diamond engagement-ring, a lavishly-furnished
apartment ... How in the world could he himself have compassed all
this? And how blessed was he among men that he had not been obliged to
try!
Hortense went through some motions with her brush, yet seemed to be
looking beyond him rather than at him.
"There will be a bridal-trip of a week or so," she concluded; "and they
will be in their new home on the first of May."
"Very good," said Cope. He thought he was thinking to himself, but he
spoke aloud. "And that ends it." This last he really did say to himself.
He sank more comfortably into his chair, kept his face properly
immobile, and spoke no further word. Hortense brought back her gaze to
focus and worked on for a little time in silence. The light was good,
her palette was full, her brushes were well-chosen, her eyes were
intent on his face. It was a handsome face, displayed to the best
advantage. She might look as long as she liked, and a long look
preceded every stroke.
Presently she paused, opening her eyes wider and holding aloft her
brush. "There will be a bride's-maid," she said.
"The deuce!" he thought. "That didn't end it!" But he said nothing
aloud.
"Guess who!"
"Why, how should _I_----?"
"Guess!" she cried peremptorily, in a tone of bitter derision. "You
won't? Well, it's Carolyn--our poor, silly Carolyn! And what do you
suppose she has started in to do? She is writing an epitha--an
epithal----"
"----amium," contributed Cope. "An epithala-mium."
"Yes, an epithala-mium!" repeated Hortense, with an outburst of jarring
laughter. "Isn't she absurd! Isn't she ridiculous!"
"Is she? Why, it seems to me a delicate attention, a very sweet
thought." If Carolyn could make anything out of Amy--and of
George--why, let her do it.
"You _like_ her poetry!" cried Hortense in a high, strained voice. "You
enjoy her epithalamiums, and her--sonnets...."
Cope flushed and began to grow impatient. "She is a sweet girl," he
said; "and if she wishes to write verse she is quite within her rights."
"'Sweet'! There you go again! 'Sweet'--twice. She ought to know!"
"Perhaps she does know. Everybody else knows."
"And perhaps she doesn't!" cried Hortense. "Tell her! Tell her!"
Cope stared. "She is a sweet girl," he repeated; "and she has been
filling very discreetly a somewhat difficult position----"
He knew something of the suppressed bitterness which, in subordinate
places, was often the lot of the pen. He found himself preferring, just
here, "pen" to "typewriter": he would give Carolyn a touch of
idealization--though she had afflicted him with a heavy stroke of
embarrassment.
"'Difficult position'?" shrilled Hortense. "With Aunt Medora the very
soul of kindness? I like that! Well, if you want to rescue her from her
difficult position, do it. If you admire her--and love her--tell her
so! _She'll_ be grateful--just read those sonnets over again!"
Hortense dropped her palette and brushes and burst into outrageous
tears.
Cope sat bolt upright in that spacious chair. "Tell her? I have nothing
to tell her. I have nothing to tell anyone!"
His resonant words cut the air. They uttered decision. He did not mean
to make the same mistake twice.
Hortense drew across her eyes an apron redolent of turpentine and
stepped toward the throne.
"Nothing? Why this sudden refuge in silence?" she asked, almost
truculently, even if tremulously. "You usually find enough words--even
though they mean little."
"I'm afraid I do," he admitted cautiously.
"You have nothing to tell anyone? Nothing to tell--me?"
Cope rose. "Nothing to tell anyone," he repeated. "Nothing."
"Then let me tell you something." There was an angry thrill in her
voice. "For I am not so selfish and cold-hearted as you are. I have
seen nobody but you all these months. I have never tried harder to
please anybody. You have scarcely noticed me--you have never given me a
glance or a thought. You could interest yourself in that silly Amy and
in our foolish Carolyn; but for me--me--Nothing!"
Cope came down from the throne. If she had lavished her maiden thoughts
on him, by day or evening or at night, he had not known and could
hardly be supposed to know. Indeed, she had begun by treating him with
a cursory roughness; nor had he noticed any great softening later on.
"Listen," he said. Under the stress of embarrassment and alarm his cold
blue eyes grew colder and his delicate nostrils quivered with an effect
a little too like disdain. "I like you as well as another; no more, no
less. I am in no position to think of love and marriage, and I have no
inclination that way. I am willing to be friends with everybody, and
nothing more with anybody." The sentences came with the cruel
detachment of bullets; but, "Not again, not twice," was his uppermost
thought. Any bluntness, any ruggedness, rather than another month like
that of the past holiday season.
He took a step away and looked to one side, toward the couch where his
hat and coat were lying.
"Go, if you will," she said. "And go as soon as you like. You are a
contemptible, cold-hearted ingrate. You have grudged me every minute of
your company, everywhere--and every second you have given me here. If I
have been foolish it is over now, and there shall be nothing to record
my folly." She stepped to the easel and hurled the canvas to the floor,
where it lay with palette and brushes.
Cope stood with his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm. He
seemed to see the open volume of some "printed play." After all, there
was a type which, even under emotional stress, gave a measure of
instinctive heed to structure and cadence. Well, if there was relief
for her in words, he could stand to hear her speak for a moment or two
more, not longer.
"One word yet," she said in a panting voice. "Your Arthur Lemoyne. That
preposterous friendship cannot go on for long. You will tire of him; or
more likely he will tire of you. Something different, something better
will be needed,--and you will live to learn so. I should be glad if I
never saw either one of you again!"
She turned her stormy face away, and Cope slipped out with a blended
sense of mortification, pain and relief.
28
_COPE ABSENT FROM A WEDDING_
Cope went out on the square with his being a-tingle. If Hortense, on
another occasion, had thrown a dash of brine, on this occasion she had
rubbed in the salt itself. And he had struck a harsh blow in turn; the
flat of his mind was still stinging, as if half the shock of the blow
had remained behind. "But it was no time for half-measures," he
muttered to himself. "Not again; not twice!" he repeated.
Hortense remained for several days in a condition of sullen anger--she
was a cloud lit up by occasional unaccountable flashes of temper.
"Whatever in the world is the matter with her?" asked her aunt in more
directions than one. And Amy Leffingwell, blissfully busy over her
little trousseau and her selection of china-patterns, protested and
opened wide, inquiring blue eyes against the intrusion of such a spirit
at such a joyous time.
But Hortense, though better days intervened now and then, did not
improve essentially; and she contrived at the climacteric moment of
Amy's career to make herself felt--unduly felt--after all.
The wedding took place during the latter half of April, as demanded by
the enterprising wooer. Then there would be a rapid ten-day
wedding-journey, followed by a prompt, business-like occupancy of the
new apartment on the first of May exactly.
Pearson's parents prepared to welcome Amy handsomely; and her own
people--some of them--came on from Iowa to attend the ceremony. There
was her mother, who had been rather disconcerted by the sudden shift,
but who was satisfied with George Pearson the moment she saw him, and
who found him even more vivid and agreeable than Amy's photograph of
him had led her to expect. There was the aunt, who had lived a bare,
starved life, and who luxuriated, along with her sister, in the
splendor of the Louis Quinze chamber. And there was a friendly,
wide-awake brother of fourteen who was tucked away in the chintz room
up stairs, whence he issued to fraternize in the ball-room with Joe
Foster, whose exacerbated spirit he did much to soothe.
This young brother was alert, cheery, chatty. He was not at all put out
by Foster's wheeled chair and eyeshade, nor by the strange contortions
which Foster went through when, on occasion, he left the chair for a
couch or for some chair of ordinary type. He got behind the wheels, and
together they made the tour of the landscapes, marines, and
genre-pieces which covered the walls. The boy was sympathetic, without
being obtrusively so, and his comments on the paintings were confident
and unconventional. "So different from _ce cher_ Pelouse," said Foster,
with a grimace. He enjoyed immensely the fragmental half-hours given
him through those two days. His young companion was lavish in his
reports on life's vast vicissitudes at Fort Lodge, and was always ready
with comparisons between things as observed in his home town and in
Churchton itself. He came as a tonic breeze; and the evening after he
departed, Foster, left moping alone in the let-down which followed the
festivities, said to himself more than once, "If I had had a boy, I
should have wanted him just like Dick."
Dick's mother and aunt stood up as well as they could against the
bustling, emphatic geniality of Medora Phillips; and they were able,
after a little, to adjust themselves to the prosperity of the Pearsons.
These, they came to feel, were essentially of the same origin and
traditions as themselves: just plain people who, however, had settled
on the edge of the Big Town to make money and had made it. Pearson the
elder was hardly more prepotent than Mr. Lusk, the banker at home.
George himself was a dashing go-ahead: if he turned into a tired
business-man his wife would know how to divert him.
Medora Phillips provided rice. Also she satisfied herself as to where,
if the newer taste were not too delicate, she could put her hand on an
old shoe. She was happy to have married off Amy; she would be still
happier once Amy got away. More room would be left for other young
people. By "other young people" she meant, of course, certain young
men. By "certain young men" she thought she meant Cope and Lemoyne. Of
course she meant Cope only.
"If Carolyn keeps amiable and if Hortense contrives to regain her
good-nature, we may have some pleasant days yet," she mused.
But Hortense did not regain her good-nature; she did not even maintain
her self-control. In the end, the ceremony was too much for her. George
and Amy had plighted their troth in a floral bower, which ordinarily
was a bay window, before a minister of a denomination which did not
countenance robes nor a ritual lifted beyond the chances of wayward
improvisation; and after a brief reception the new couple prepared for
the motor-car dash which was to take them to a late train. In the big
wide hallway, after Amy had kissed Carolyn and thanked her for her poem
and was preparing for the shower of rice which she had every reason to
think she must face, there was a burst of hysterical laughter from
somewhere behind, and Hortense Dunton, to the sufficing words, "O
Bertram, Bertram!" emitted with sufficing clearness, fainted away.
Her words, if not heard by all the company, were heard by a few to whom
they mattered; and while Hortense, immediately after the departure of
the happy pair, was being revived and led away, they left occasion for
thought. Carolyn Thorpe cast a startled glance. The aunt from Iowa, who
knew that Bertrams did not grow on every bush, and whose senses the
function had preternaturally sharpened for any address from Romance,
seized and shook her sister's arm; and, later on, in a Louis Quinze
_causeuse_, up stairs, they agreed that if young Cope really had had
another claimant on his attention, it was all the better that their Amy
had ended by taking George. And Medora Phillips, in the front hall
itself----
Well, to Medora Phillips, in the front hall, much was revealed as in a
lightning-flash, and the revelation was far from agreeable. What
advantage in Amy's departure if Hortense continued to cumber the
ground? Hortense must go off somewhere, for a sojourn of a month or
more, to recover her health and spirits and to let the house recover
its accustomed tone of cheer.
Medora forced these considerations to the back of her mind and saw most
of her guests out of the house. Toward the end of it all she found
herself relaxing in the library, with Basil Randolph in the opposite
chair. Randolph himself had figured in the ceremony. This had been a
crude imitation of a time-hallowed form and had allowed for an
extemporaneous prayer and for a brief address to the young couple; but
it had retained the familiar inquiry, "Who giveth--?" "Who _can_ give?"
asked Medora of Amy. Poor Joe was rather out of the question, and
Brother Dick was four or five years too young. Was there, then, anyone
really available except that kind Mr. Randolph? So Basil Randolph,
after remembering Amy with a rich and handsome present, had taken on a
paternal air, had stepped forward at the right moment, and was now
recovering from his novel experience.
The two, as they sat there, said little, though they looked at each
other with half-veiled, questioning glances. Medora, indeed, improvised
a little stretch of silent dialogue, and it made him take his share.
She felt dislocated, almost defeated. Hortense's performance had set
her to thinking of Bertram Cope, and she figured the same topic as
uppermost in the mind of Basil Randolph.
"Well, you have about beaten me," she said.
"How so?" she made him ask, with an affectation of simplicity.
"You know well enough," she returned. "You have played off the whole
University against my poor house, and you have won. Your influence with
the president, your brother on the board of trustees ... If Bertram
Cope has any gratitude in his composition...."
"Oh, well," she let him say, "I don't feel that I did much; and I'm not
sure I'm glad for what I did do."
"You may regret it, of course. That other man is an uncertain quantity."
"Oh, come," he said; "you've had the inside track from the very start:
this house and everything in it...."
"You have a house of your own, now."
"Your dinners and entertainments...."
"You have your own dinner-table."
"Your limousine, your chauffeur,--running to the opera and heaven knows
where else...."
"Taxis can always be had. Yes," she went on, "you have held the
advantage over a poor woman cooped up in her own house. While I have
had to stick here, attending to my housekeeping, you have been
careering about everywhere,--you with a lot of partners and clerks in
your office, and no compulsion to look in more than two or three times
a week. Of _course_ you can run to theatres and clubs. I wonder they
don't dispense with you altogether!"
"There's the advantage of a business arranged to run itself--so far as
_I_ am concerned."
"Yes, you have had the world to range through: shows and restaurants;
the whole big city; strolls and excursions, and who knows what
beside...."
Thus Medora Phillips continued silently, and with no exact sense of
justice, to work up her grievance. Presently she surprised Randolph
with a positive frown. She had made a quick, darting return to Hortense.
"I shall send her away," she said aloud. The girl might join her studio
friend, who had stopped at Asheville on her way North, and stay with
her for a few weeks. Yes, Hortense might go and meet the spring--or
even the summer, if that must be. The spring here in town she herself
would take as it came. "I shall welcome a few free, easy breaths after
this past fortnight," she finished audibly.
Randolph squared himself with her mood as best he could. "You are tired
and nervous," he said with banality. "Get the last of us out and go to
bed. I'll lead the way, and will give these loiterers as marked an
example as possible."
Medora Phillips hushed down her house finally and went thoughtfully up
stairs to her room. Amy had gone off, and Hortense was sentenced to go.
There remained only Carolyn. Was there any threat in her and her
sonnets?
29
_COPE AGAIN IN THE COUNTRY_
Medora treated Hortense to a few cautious soundings, decided that
another locale was the thing to do her good, and sent her South
forthwith.
"It's a low latitude," she said to herself; "but it's a high altitude.
The season is late, but she won't suffer."
Hortense, who had been sullen and fractious, met her aunt half-way, and
agreed passively when Medora said:
"It will benefit you to see the spring come on in a new scene and in a
new fashion. You will find the mountains more interesting than the
dunes." So Hortense packed her things and joined her friend for a brief
sojourn in sight of the Great Smokies.
Thus, when Medora herself went forth to meet the spring among the
sand-hills, she had only Carolyn and the other members of her domestic
staff. Yet no simplest week-end without a guest or so, and she asked
Cope to accompany them.
"You need it," she told him bluntly; "--you need a change, however
slight and brief. You are positively thin. You make me wish that
thesises----"
"Theses," Cope corrected her, rather spiritlessly.
"----that theses, then, had never been invented. To speak familiarly,
you are almost 'peakèd.'"
Cope, with the first warm days, had gone back to the blue serge suit of
the past autumn, and he filled it even less well than before. And his
face was thin to correspond.
"Besides," she went on, "we need you. It will be a kind of camping-out
for a day or two--merely that. We must have your help to pitch the
tent, so to speak, and to pick up firewood, and to fry the bacon....
And this time," she added, "you shall not have that long tiresome trip
by train. There will be room in the car."
She did not attempt to make room for Lemoyne. She was glad to have no
need to do so; Lemoyne was deeply engrossed otherwise--"Annabella" and
her "antics" were almost ready for the public eye. The first of May
would see the performance, and the numerous rehearsals were exacting,
whether as regarded the effort demanded or the time. Every spare hour
was going into them, as well as many an hour that could hardly be
spared. Lemoyne, who had been cast originally for a minor female part,
now found himself transferred, through the failure of a principal, to a
more important one. For him, then, rehearsals were more exigent than
ever. He cut his Psychology once or twice, nor could he succeed, during
office hours, in keeping his mind on office-routine. His superiors
became impatient and then protestant. The annual spring dislocation of
ordered student life was indeed a regular feature of the year's last
term; yet to push indulgence as far as Arthur Lemoyne was pushing
it----!
Cope was concerned; then worried. "Arthur," he said, "be reasonable
about this. You've got real work to do, remember."
But Lemoyne's real work was in the musical comedy. "This is the biggest
chance I've ever had in my life," he declared, "and I don't want to
lose out on it."
So Cope rolled away to the dunes and left Lemoyne behind for one
Saturday night rehearsal the more.
Duneland gave him a tonic welcome. Under a breezy sky the far edge of
the lake stood out clear. Along its nearer edge the vivacious waves
tumbled noisily. The steady pines were welcoming the fresh early
foliage of such companions as dressed and undressed in accord with the
calendar; the wrecked trunks which had given up life and its leafy
pomps seemed somehow less sombre and stark; and in the threatened
woodlands behind the hills a multiplicity of small new greeneries
stirred the autumn's dead leaves and brightened up the thickets of
shrubbery. The arbutus had companioned the hepatica, and the squads of
the lupines were busily preparing their panoply of lavender-blue
racemes. Nature was breaking bounds. On the inland horizon rose the
vast bulk of the prison. As on other excursions, nobody tried too hard
to see it.
"It's all too lovely," exclaimed Medora Phillips. "And what is quite as
good," she was able to declare, "the house itself is all right." Winter
had not weakened its roof nor wrenched away its storm-windows; no
irresponsible wayfarer had used it for a lodging, nor had any casual
marauder entered to despoil. Medora directed the disposition of the
hamper of food with a relieved air and sent Cope down with Peter for an
armful or two of driftwood from the assertive shore.
"And you, Carolyn," she said, "see if the oil-stove will really go."
Down on the beach itself, where the past winter's waste was still
profusely spread, Cope rose to the greening hills, to the fresh sweep
of the wind, and to the sun-shot green and purple streakings over the
water. The wind, in particular, took its own way: dry light sand, blown
from higher shelvings, striped the dark wet edges of the shore; and
every bending blade of sandgrass drew a circle about itself with its
own revolving tip.
Cope let the robust and willing Peter pick up most of the firewood and
himself luxuriated in the spacious world round about him. Yes, a winter
had flown--or, at any rate, had passed--and here he was again. There
had been annoyances, but now he felt a wide and liberal relief. Here,
for example, was the special stretch of shore on which Amy Leffingwell
had praised his singing and had hinted her desire to accompany
him,--but never mind that. Farther on was the particular tract where
Hortense Dunton had pottered with her water-colors and had harried him
with the heroines of eighteenth century fiction,--but never mind that,
either. All those things were past, and he was free. Nobody remained
save Carolyn Thorpe, an unaggressive girl with whom one could really
trust oneself and with whom one could walk, if required, in comfort and
content. Cope threw up his head to the hills and threw out his chest to
the winds, and laid quick hands on a short length of weather-beaten
hemlock plank. "Afraid I'm not holding up my end," he said to Peter.
At the house again, he found that Carolyn had brought the oil-stove
back into service, and, with Helga, had cast the cloth over the table
and had set some necessary dishes on it. He fetched a pail or two of
water from the pump, and each time placed a fresh young half-grown
sassafras leaf on the surface. "The trade-mark of our bottling-works,"
he said facetiously; "to show that our products are pure." And Carolyn,
despite his facetiousness, felt more than ever that he might easily
become a poet. Medora viewed the floating leaves with indulgent
appreciation. "But don't let's cumber ourselves with many cares," she
suggested; "we are here to make the best of the afternoon. Let's out
and away,--the sooner the better."
The three soon set forth for a stroll through spring's reviving domain.
Cope walked between Medora and Carolyn, or ahead of them, impartially
sweeping away twigs and flowering branches from before their faces. The
young junipers were putting forth tender new tips; the bright leaves of
the sassafras shone forth against the pines. Above the newly-rounded
tops of the oaks and maples in the valley below them the Three Witches
rose gauntly; and off on their far hill the two companion pines--(how
had he named them? Romeo and Juliet? Pelleas and Melisande?)--still lay
their dark heads together in mysterious confidences under the
heightening glow of the late afternoon sun. Carolyn looked from them
back to Cope and gave him a shy smile.
He did not quite smile back. Carolyn was well enough, however. She was
suitably dressed for a walk. Her shoes were sensible, and so was her
hair. Amy had run to fluffiness. Hortense had often favored heavy waves
and emphatic bandeaux. But Carolyn's hair was drawn back plainly from
her forehead, and was gathered in a small, low-set knot. "Still, it's
no concern of mine," he reminded himself, and walked on ahead.