Mrs. Vertrees “sat up” for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired
after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his
Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come for
her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor did
the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees had a
long vigil of it.
She was not the woman to make herself easy--no servant had ever seen her
in a wrapper--and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what they
had been when she returned from the afternoon's call, she sat through
the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the gaslight in her
own room, which was directly over the “front hall.” There, book in hand,
she employed the time in her own reminiscences, though it was her belief
that she was reading Madame de Remusat's.
Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband's; and the
deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they brought
her--and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought backward
because she did not dare think forward definitely. What thinking forward
this troubled couple ventured took the form of a slender hope which
neither of them could have borne to hear put in words, and yet they
had talked it over, day after day, from the very hour when they heard
Sheridan was to build his New House next door. For--so quickly does
any ideal of human behavior become an antique--their youth was of the
innocent old days, so dead! of “breeding” and “gentility,” and no craft
had been more straitly trained upon them than that of talking about
things without mentioning them. Herein was marked the most vital
difference between Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees and their big new neighbor.
Sheridan, though his youth was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such
matters. He had been chopping wood for the morning fire in the country
grocery while they were still dancing.
It was after one o'clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the delicate
clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening of the door,
Mary's laugh, and “Yes--if you aren't afraid--to-morrow!”
The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath
of cold and bracing air into her mother's room. “Yes,” she said, before
Mrs. Vertrees could speak, “he brought me home!”
She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet
rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light
pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.
“Mamma!” Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that
she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. “Why don't you ask
me?”
This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. “I don't--” she
faltered. “Ask you what, Mary?”
“How I got along and what he's like.”
“Mary!”
“Oh, it isn't distressing!” said Mary. “And I got along so fast--” She
broke off to laugh; continuing then, “But that's the way I went at it,
of course. We ARE in a hurry, aren't we?”
“I don't know what you mean,” Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head
plaintively.
“Yes,” said Mary, “I'm going out in his car with him to-morrow
afternoon, and to the theater the next night--but I stopped it there.
You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them while
YOU pretend to run away!”
“My dear, I don't know what to--”
“What to make of anything!” Mary finished for her. “So that's all
right! Now I'll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening and
tee-total. We could have lived a year on it. I'm not good at figures,
but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned
and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could manage at least twice
as long on the cost of the 'house-warming.' I think the orchids alone
would have lasted us a couple of months. There they were, before me, but
I couldn't steal 'em and sell 'em, and so--well, so I did what I could!”
She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother. “It
seemed to be a success--what I could,” she said, clasping her hands
behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic
accompaniment to her narrative. “The girl Edith and her sister-in-law,
Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things on me.
The father's worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it. He's
what he is. I like him.” She paused reflectively, continuing, “Edith's
'interested' in that Lamhorn boy; he's good-looking and not stupid, but
I think he's--” She interrupted herself with a cheery outcry: “Oh! I
mustn't be calling him names! If he's trying to make Edith like him, I
ought to respect him as a colleague.”
“I don't understand a thing you're talking about,” Mrs. Vertrees
complained.
“All the better! Well, he's a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody's
always known that, but the Sheridans don't know the everybodies that
know. He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan. SHE'S like those
people you wondered about at the theater, the last time we went--dressed
in ball-gowns; bound to show their clothes and jewels SOMEwhere! She
flatters the father, and so did I, for that matter--but not that way. I
treated him outrageously!”
“Mary!”
“That's what flattered him. After dinner he made the whole regiment of
us follow him all over the house, while he lectured like a guide on the
Palatine. He gave dimensions and costs, and the whole b'ilin' of 'em
listened as if they thought he intended to make them a present of the
house. What he was proudest of was the plumbing and that Bay of Naples
panorama in the hall. He made us look at all the plumbing--bath-rooms
and everywhere else--and then he made us look at the Bay of Naples. He
said it was a hundred and eleven feet long, but I think it's more. And
he led us all into the ready-made library to see a poem Edith had taken
a prize with at school. They'd had it printed in gold letters and framed
in mother-of-pearl. But the poem itself was rather simple and wistful
and nice--he read it to us, though Edith tried to stop him. She was
modest about it, and said she'd never written anything else. And then,
after a while, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan asked me to come across the street
to her house with them--her husband and Edith and Mr. Lamhorn and Jim
Sheridan--”
Mrs. Vertrees was shocked. “'Jim'!” she exclaimed. “Mary, PLEASE--”
“Of course,” said Mary. “I'll make it as easy for you as I can,
mamma. Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. We went over there, and Mrs. Roscoe
explained that 'the men were all dying for a drink,' though I noticed
that Mr. Lamhorn was the only one near death's door on that account.
Edith and Mrs. Roscoe said they knew I'd been bored at the dinner. They
were objectionably apologetic about it, and they seemed to think NOW we
were going to have a 'good time' to make up for it. But I hadn't been
bored at the dinner, I'd been amused; and the 'good time' at Mrs.
Roscoe's was horribly, horribly stupid.”
“But, Mary,” her mother began, “is--is--” And she seemed unable to
complete the question.
“Never mind, mamma. I'll say it. Is Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, stupid?
I'm sure he's not at all stupid about business. Otherwise--Oh, what
right have I to be calling people 'stupid' because they're not exactly
my kind? On the big dinner-table they had enormous icing models of the
Sheridan Building--”
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Vertrees cried. “Surely not!”
“Yes, and two other things of that kind--I don't know what. But, after
all, I wondered if they were so bad. If I'd been at a dinner at a palace
in Italy, and a relief or inscription on one of the old silver pieces
had referred to some great deed or achievement of the family, I
shouldn't have felt superior; I'd have thought it picturesque and
stately--I'd have been impressed. And what's the real difference? The
icing is temporary, and that's much more modest, isn't it? And why is
it vulgar to feel important more on account of something you've done
yourself than because of something one of your ancestors did? Besides,
if we go back a few generations, we've all got such hundreds of
ancestors it seems idiotic to go picking out one or two to be proud of
ourselves about. Well, then, mamma, I managed not to feel superior to
Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, because he didn't see anything out of place
in the Sheridan Building in sugar.”
Mrs. Vertrees's expression had lost none of its anxiety pending the
conclusion of this lively bit of analysis, and she shook her head
gravely. “My dear, dear child,” she said, “it seems to me--It looks--I'm
afraid--”
“Say as much of it as you can, mamma,” said Mary, encouragingly. “I can
get it, if you'll just give me one key-word.”
“Everything you say,” Mrs. Vertrees began, timidly, “seems to have the
air of--it is as if you were seeking to--to make yourself--”
“Oh, I see! You mean I sound as if I were trying to force myself to like
him.”
“Not exactly, Mary. That wasn't quite what I meant,” said Mrs. Vertrees,
speaking direct untruth with perfect unconsciousness. “But you said
that--that you found the latter part of the evening at young Mrs.
Sheridan's unentertaining--”
“And as Mr. James Sheridan was there, and I saw more of him than at
dinner, and had a horribly stupid time in spite of that, you think I--”
And then it was Mary who left the deduction unfinished.
Mrs. Vertrees nodded; and though both the mother and the daughter
understood, Mary felt it better to make the understanding definite.
“Well,” she asked, gravely, “is there anything else I can do? You and
papa don't want me to do anything that distresses me, and so, as this is
the only thing to be done, it seems it's up to me not to let it distress
me. That's all there is about it, isn't it?”
“But nothing MUST distress you!” the mother cried.
“That's what I say!” said Mary, cheerfully. “And so it doesn't. It's all
right.” She rose and took her cloak over her arm, as if to go to her own
room. But on the way to the door she stopped, and stood leaning against
the foot of the bed, contemplating a threadbare rug at her feet.
“Mother, you've told me a thousand times that it doesn't really matter
whom a girl marries.”
“No, no!” Mrs. Vertrees protested. “I never said such a--”
“No, not in words; I mean what you MEANT. It's true, isn't it, that
marriage really is 'not a bed of roses, but a field of battle'? To get
right down to it, a girl could fight it out with anybody, couldn't she?
One man as well as another?”
“Oh, my dear! I'm sure your father and I--”
“Yes, yes,” said Mary, indulgently. “I don't mean you and papa. But
isn't it propinquity that makes marriages? So many people say so, there
must be something in it.”
“Mary, I can't bear for you to talk like that.” And Mrs. Vertrees
lifted pleading eyes to her daughter--eyes that begged to be spared. “It
sounds--almost reckless!”
Mary caught the appeal, came to her, and kissed her gaily. “Never fret,
dear! I'm not likely to do anything I don't want to do--I've always been
too thorough-going a little pig! And if it IS propinquity that does our
choosing for us, well, at least no girl in the world could ask for more
than THAT! How could there be any more propinquity than the very house
next door?”
She gave her mother a final kiss and went gaily all the way to the door
this time, pausing for her postscript with her hand on the knob. “Oh,
the one that caught me looking in the window, mamma, the youngest one--”
“Did he speak of it?” Mrs. Vertrees asked, apprehensively.
“No. He didn't speak at all, that I saw, to any one. I didn't meet him.
But he isn't insane, I'm sure; or if he is, he has long intervals when
he's not. Mr. James Sheridan mentioned that he lived at home when he was
'well enough'; and it may be he's only an invalid. He looks dreadfully
ill, but he has pleasant eyes, and it struck me that if--if one were
in the Sheridan family”--she laughed a little ruefully--“he might be
interesting to talk to sometimes, when there was too much stocks and
bonds. I didn't see him after dinner.”
“There must be something wrong with him,” said Mrs. Vertrees. “They'd
have introduced him if there wasn't.”
“I don't know. He's been ill so much and away so much--sometimes people
like that just don't seem to 'count' in a family. His father spoke of
sending him back to a machine-shop of some sort; I suppose he meant
when the poor thing gets better. I glanced at him just then, when Mr.
Sheridan mentioned him, and he happened to be looking straight at me;
and he was pathetic-looking enough before that, but the most tragic
change came over him. He seemed just to die, right there at the table!”
“You mean when his father spoke of sending him to the shop place?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Sheridan must be very unfeeling.”
“No,” said Mary, thoughtfully, “I don't think he is; but he might be
uncomprehending, and certainly he's the kind of man to do anything he
once sets out to do. But I wish I hadn't been looking at that poor boy
just then! I'm afraid I'll keep remembering--”
“I wouldn't.” Mrs. Vertrees smiled faintly, and in her smile there
was the remotest ghost of a genteel roguishness. “I'd keep my mind on
pleasanter things, Mary.”
Mary laughed and nodded. “Yes, indeed! Plenty pleasant enough, and
probably, if all were known, too good--even for me!”
And when she had gone Mrs. Vertrees drew a long breath, as if a burden
were off her mind, and, smiling, began to undress in a gentle reverie.