SAIL--HO!
WINTER’S swoop upon Stoughton that year was early and savage. In her
desperate loneliness and boredom Emily began occasionally to indulge in
the main distraction of Stoughton--church. On a Sunday late in March
she went for the first time since Christmas. Her mother had succumbed
to the drugs and had been really ill, so ill that Emily did not dare
let herself admit the dread of desolation which menaced. But, the
crisis past, Mrs. Bromfield had rapidly returned to her normal state.
The peril of death cowed or dignified her into silence. When she again
took up her complainings, her daughter was reassured.
As she walked the half mile to the little church, Emily was in better
spirits than at any time since she had come to Stoughton. The reaction
from her fears had given her natural spirits of youth their first
chance to assert themselves. She found herself hopeful for no reason,
cheerful not because of benefits received or expected, but because of
calamities averted. “I might be so much worse off,” she was thinking.
“There is mother, and there is the income. I feel almost rich--and a
little ungrateful. I’m in quite a church-going mood.”
The walk through the cold air did her good, and as she went up the
aisle her usually pale face was delicately flushed and she was carrying
her slender but very womanly figure with that erectness and elasticity
which made its charm in the days when people were in the habit of
discussing her prospects as based upon her title to beauty. Her black
dress and small black hat brought out the finest effects of her
red-brown hair and violet eyes and rosy white skin. She was, above all,
most distinguished looking--in strong contrast to the stupid faces and
ill-carried forms in “Sunday best.”
Her coming caused a stir--that rustling and creaking of garments
feminine and starched, which in the small town church always arouses
the dozers for something uncommon. She faintly smiled a greeting to
Mrs. Cockburn as she entered the pew where that old lady was sitting.
She had just raised her head from the appearance of prayer, when Mrs.
Cockburn whispered:
“Have you seen young Mr. Wayland?”
Emily could not remember that she had heard of him. But Mrs. Cockburn’s
agitation demanded a show of interest, so she whispered:
“No--where is he?”
She would have said, “Who is he?” but that would have called for a long
explanation. And, as Mrs. Cockburn had a wide space between her upper
front teeth, every time she whispered the letter =s= the congregation
rustled and the minister was disconcerted.
“There,” whispered Mrs. Cockburn. “Straight across--don’t look now, for
he’s looking at us--straight across to the other side two pews forward.”
When they rose for the hymn, Emily glanced and straightway saw the
cause of Mrs. Cockburn’s excitement. He was a commonplace-looking young
man with a heavy moustache. His hair was parted in the middle and
brushed back carefully and smoothly. He was dressed like a city man, as
distinguished from the Stoughton man who, little as he owed to nature,
owed even less to art as exploited by the Stoughton tailors.
Young Mr. Wayland would not have attracted Emily’s attention in a city
because he was in no way remarkable. But in Stoughton he seemed to her
somewhat as an angel might seem to a Peri wandering in outer darkness.
When she discovered him looking at her a few moments later, and looking
with polite but interested directness, she felt herself colouring.
She also felt pleased--and hopeful in that fantastic way in which the
desperate dream of desperate chances.
After the service she stood talking to Mrs. Cockburn, affecting an
unprecedented interest in a woman whom she liked as little--if as
much--as any in Stoughton. Her back was toward the aisle but she felt
her “sail-ho,” coming.
“He’s on his way to us,” said Mrs. Cockburn hoarsely--she had been
paying no attention to what Emily had been saying to her, or to her
own answers. She now pushed eagerly past Emily to greet the young man
at the door of the pew.
“Why, I’m so glad to see you again, Mr. Wayland,” she said with a
cordiality that verged on hysteria. “It has been a long time. I’m
afraid you’ve forgotten an old woman like me.”
“No, indeed, Mrs. Cockburn,” replied Wayland, who had just provided
himself with her name. “It’s been only four years, and you’ve not
changed.”
Mrs. Cockburn saw his eyes turn toward Emily and introduced him. Emily
was not blushing now, or apparently interested. She seemed to be simply
waiting for her path to be cleared.
“I felt certain it was you,” began young Wayland, a little embarrassed.
He made a gesture as if to unbutton his long coat and take something
from his inside pocket, then seemed to change his mind. “I’ve a note of
introduction to you, that is to your mother--Mrs. Ainslie, you know.
But I heard that your mother was ill. And I hesitated about coming.”
“Mother is much better.” Emily was friendly, but not effusive. “I am
sure she--both of us--will be glad to see a friend of Mrs. Ainslie.”
She smiled, shook hands with him, gave him a fascinating little
nod, submitted to a kiss on the cheek from Mrs. Cockburn and went
swiftly and gracefully down the aisle. Wayland looked after her with
admiration. He had been in Stoughton three weeks and was profoundly
bored.
Mrs. Cockburn was also looking after her, but disapprovingly. “A nice
young woman in some ways,” she said. “But she carries her head too high
for the plain people here.”
“She’s had a good deal of trouble, I’ve heard,” Wayland answered, not
committing himself.
The next morning Mrs. Bromfield got a letter from Mrs. Ainslie. It was
of unusual length for Mrs. Ainslie, who was a bird-of-passage that
rarely paused long enough for extended communication.
“I never could get used to that big, angular handwriting,” said Mrs.
Bromfield to her daughter. “Won’t you read it to me, please?”
Emily began at “My Dear Frances” and read steadily through, finding in
the postscript four sentences which should have begun the letter of so
worldly-wise a woman: “Don’t on any account let Emily see this. You
know how she acted about Bob Fulton. She ought to have learned better
by this time, but I don’t trust her. Be careful what you say to her.”
Mrs. Ainslie was urging the opportunity offered by the sojourn of young
Wayland in Stoughton. “Emily will have a clear field,” she wrote.
“He’s got money in his own right--millions when his father dies--and
he’s a good deal of a fool--dissipated, I hear, but in a prudent,
business-like way. It’s Emily’s chance for a resurrection.”
Mrs. Bromfield was made speechless by the postscript. Emily sat silent,
looking at the letter on the table before her.
“Don’t be prejudiced against him, dear,” pleaded her mother.
“I imagine it doesn’t matter in the least what I think of him,” Emily
replied. She rose and left the room, sending back from the doorway a
short, queer laugh that made her mother feel how shut out she was from
what was going on in her daughter’s mind.
If she could have seen into that small, ethereal-looking head she
would have been astounded at the thoughts boiling there. Emily had
been bred in an atmosphere of mercenary or, rather, “practical”
ideas. But she was also a woman of sound and independent mind, in the
habit of thinking for herself, and with strong mental and physical
self-respect. She would have hesitated to marry unwisely for love.
But she had been far from that state of self-degradation in which a
young woman deliberately and consciously closes her heart, locks the
door and flings the key away. Now however, the deepest instinct of
the human animal--the instinct of self-preservation--was aroused in
her. It seemed to her that an imperative command had issued from that
instinct--a command at any cost to flee the living death of Stoughton.
* * * * *
That same afternoon Mrs. Bromfield learned--without having to ask a
question--all that Stoughton knew about the Waylands: They were the
pride of the town and also its chief irritation. It gloried in them
because it believed that the report of their millions was as clamourous
throughout the nation as in its own ears. It was exasperated against
them, because it believed that they ought to live in Stoughton and be
content with a life which it thought, or thought it thought, desirable
above life in any other place whatsoever.
So as long as Mrs. Wayland lived, the family had spent at least half of
each year there; and Stoughton, satisfied on that point, disliked them
for other reasons, first of all for being richer than any one else.
When Mrs. Wayland died, leaving an almost grown daughter and a son just
going into trousers, General Wayland had put the girl in school at
Dobbs Ferry-on-the-Hudson, the boy in Groton, had closed the house and
made New York his residence. The girl died two years after the death of
her mother. The boy went from Groton to Harvard, from Harvard to his
father’s business--the Cotton Cloth Trust. The Wayland homestead, the
most considerable in Stoughton with its two wings built to the original
square house, with its conservatories and its stables, was opened for
but a few weeks each winter. And then it was opened only in part--to
receive the General on his annual business visit to the factories of
the Stoughton Cotton Mills Company, the largest group in the “combine.”
Sometimes he brought Edgar. But Edgar gave the young women of Stoughton
no opportunities to ensnare him. He kept to his work and departed at
the earliest possible moment. This year he had come alone, as his
father had now put him in charge of their Stoughton interests.