> ^ T7OTVERSITY OF CALIFOBN* DAVIS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. LOVE IN OLD CLOATHES AND OTHER STORIES. With 12 full-page Illustrations by A. Castaigne, W. T. Smedley, and Orson Lowell $1.50 POEMS. With an Introduction by Brander Mat- tnews, and a Portrait. 12mo 1.75 JERSEY STREET AND JERSEY LANE. Urban and Suburban Sketches. Illustrated by A. B. Frost, Irving R. Wiles, and others. 12mo. . 1.25 ZADOC PINE, and Other Stories. 12mo, paper, 50c.; cloth 1.00 THE STORY OF A NEW YORK HOUSE. Illus trated by A. B. Frost 1.25 THE MIDGE. Paper, 50c.; cloth 1.00 AIRS FROM ARCADY AND ELSEWHERE. 12mo 1.25 ROWEN. " Second- Crop" Songs. 12mo . . 1.25 Love in Old Cloathes And Other Stories I'M TOMMY BIGGS, MISS LUCRETIA " Love in Old Cloathes and Other Stories. By H. C. Bunner Illustrated by W. T. Smedley, Orson Lowell, and Andre Castaigne Charles Scribner's Sons New York ccccccx 1896 LIBRARY n'Y OF CALIFOKJSttB Copyright, 1896, by Charles Scrtbner's Sons TROW DIRECTORY PRINTINQ AND BOOKBINDING COMPAN> NEW YORK TO A. L B. CONTENTS Page Love in Old Cloathes, .... / A Letter and a Paragraph, . . 25 "As One Having Authority," . 49 Cra^y Wife's Ship, .... 79 French for a Fortnight, . . . 99 The Red Silk Handkerchief, . . 127 Our Aromatic Uncle, .... 187 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS " I'm Tommy Biggs, Miss Lucretia," . Frontispiece Facing page "'All right now, Bishop/ I heard him " The Bishop, his eyes still far away, his hands stretched out over the people, went on," 78 Why might not the Reverend Mr. Pentagon take lodgings at the inn of Monsieur Perot? 106 Mr. Pentagon opened his eyes wide to take in the unaccustomed scene, . . . . 116 He saw for the first time two huge signs, . 122 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page It was on a summer morning, .... 790 Then he began, Told him all the things that I should not have known how to say, 200 " Dear Aunt Lucretia," 206 " You're my own dear Uncle David, any way!" 2/0 The duplicity of which he had been guilty weighed on his spirit, 214 Exit our Aromatic Uncle, 2/7 LOVE IN OLD CLOATHES LOVE IN OLD CLOATHES NEWE YORK, y 1st Aprile, 1883. Y B worste of my ailment is this, y* it grow- eth not Less with much nursinge, but is like to those fevres w ch y e leeches Starve, 'tis saicle, for that y 6 more Bloode there be in y e Sicke man's Bodie, y e more foode is there for y e Distemper to feede upon. And it is moste fittinge y* I come backe to y s my Journall (wherein I have not writt a Lyne these manye months) on y e 1 st of Aprile, beinge in some Sort rnyne owne foole and y e foole of Love, and a poore Butt on whome his hearte hath play'd a Sorry tricke. For it is surelie a strange happenninge, that I, who am ofte accompted a man of y e Worlde, (as y e Phrase goes,) sholde be soe Overtaken and caste downe lyke a Schoole- boy or a countrie Bumpkin, by a meere Mayde, & sholde set to Groaninge and Sighinge, looked doubtfully at Jack, then at the Bishop, then at me ; and it was to me that he addressed himself. " Well, sir," he said, " there's something what they call a revival meeting going on out in the woods. There do be some people "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" 67 takes an interest in such things. They're too sickly like for me, sir, with the women screaming, and having fits, like it might be, on the ground ; but if ye'd like to see it I'd be proud to hitch up the old mare, and it's an easy ride for this part of the country, where the roads is the devil, if I may speak without disrespect for his riverence." " Niggers ? " inquired Jack. "No, sir," replied Magonigle. "White folks, such as they are. I don't rightly re member what religion they call themselves ; for it's no church they have here, only meet ings like this three or four times in the twelvemonth, maybe." Jack and I looked at each other. There were limits to even Jack's audacity. We both started as the Bishop's full, deep voice joined in the conversation. " Gentlemen," said he, " I do not in the least wish to obtrude my society upon you. I feel that I have already given you much trouble ; but, if it does not conflict with your arrangements for this evening, I should very much like to be one of your party. It has never been my fortune to be present at one of these gatherings, and it would deeply 68 "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" interest me to look on as a spectator. I do not feel that there can be any impropriety and it is a form of worship of which I have heard much, and which I should like to see with my own eyes. But, of course, if your plans " And he stopped. "Why, Bishop," said Jack, "we'd sooner stay here than leave you out. Magonigle, hitch up that mare ! " It was eight o'clock when we climbed into what Magonigle called the carriage a vehicle that was neither an express wagon nor a rock- away, but partook of the nature of both. On a road so rough that to our Northern under standing it was no road at all, we plunged into the shadowy, dreary depths of the pine- wood. The night was clearing, and 'through the ragged evergreens we could catch glimpses of a pale, wind-swept sky. The hot, moist, sickly smell of the pines and firs half choked us, the rough bumping of the wagon tired us and set our nerves on edge, and even Jack McMarsters had no stomach for talk. "We were all but dazed with weariness of mind and body, and with the smell of the resin-laden air, when suddenly a weird flicker of flaring torches played before our eyes, "A3 ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" 69 dancing slashes of yellow-orange slitting the deep gloom ahead of us, and dazzling our sleepy eyes. Faintly there came to us across the wind, that whistled and wailed through the trees, the long-drawn-out notes of a mournful, old- fashioned hymn, a dismal tune that I knew in my boyhood. It was one of those sad, stern, denunciatory old hymns that to my memory still hold the very spirit of the dead New England Sabbath in the cheerless, hopeless melody. The singing ceased for an instant only ; then there uprose a far greater volume of voices, tumbling over each other in a mad, rattling, jingling strain, a popular dance-hall air, shamelessly and grotesquely twisted into the form of a hymn. It was a harmless jig ging tune enough, but linked to the words which we could now hear in the lulls of the wind, it sounded like a profane travesty. u He's the Lily of the Valley, the bright and morning star, He's the fairest often thousand to my soul ." The Bishop turned to me with a look of troubled surprise. " Did I catch the meaning of those words ? " 70 "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY 1 ' he asked ; " or did my ears deceive me ? I certainly thought " I tried to explain to the Bishop that camp- meeting folk allowed themselves a certain freedom and familiarity in dealing with sa cred subjects, which might be in bad taste, but certainly was not ill meant. But he checked me with a touch on my arm. " Nay, nay," he said, in his old-fashioned manner, " do not misapprehend me. I had not meant to be uncharitable." " Any tune goes with these people see ? " said Jack, " so long as it is snappy. That's 'The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.' " " Is it, indeed ? " said the Bishop. Magonigle led the way, and we followed him into the circle of wavering, smoking ker osene torches. At first the light dazzled our eyes, but after a few moments we could take note of the picture of gaunt, uncouth poverty around us. We were in a little clearing of the woods where the stumps had been roughly levelled to serve as supports for heavy, rough-hewn planks, which were the seats. The straggly pines made a black belt around this rude am phitheatre. At the further end was a low "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" 71 platform of rough timber, where the leaders of the meeting sat. Here the smoky lamps were thickest, and they cast a yellow glare on a little patch of smooth ground that we could see had been trodden bare by many feet. Here stood one bench, separate from all the rest, which might have held a dozen people, but nobody sat there as we first saw it. Be tween two and three hundred people were scattered round among the other benches. They were all " poor whites," children of the wilderness, a class apart by themselves ; and poverty, ignorance, and loneliness stared out of every sallow face. They all turned to look at us as we entered, but it was with a vacant, self-absorbed look, and then their eyes went back to the platform and the man who stood on it, or rather walked and leaped and stag gered on it. He was a man between forty and fifty years of age, with a straggling beard and long hair ; tall, haggard, and hungry-looking, like the rest ; but with a light of intelligence in his face and a consciousness of power in his bearing that set him above his auditors. He was accustomed to public speaking ; his voice was harsh and unpleasant, but strong and 72 "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" clear, and in spite of its disagreeable quality it had certain curiously caressing and per suasive tones in it. "We did not need to study the dumb, brute-like interest of the faces of his hearers to know that this man had laid a spell upon their dull spirits, and that he spoke to each one as if they stood hand-in-hand. " Oh, my brethren," he cried, raising his long arms high in air, and throwing his lank frame forward in convulsive excitement; " oh, my sisters, the hour is nigh at hand the hour of grace the hour of deliverance ! For three days have we labored here, for three days have we sought and struggled and prayed for the blessing to come, and no an swer has come. But now it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, sinners; I know it's coming ! I feel it right here in my heart ! Oh, glory, hallelujah ! Call with me, all of you, for it's nigh at hand ! Salvation's right over you, right by your side ! It's touching you right now ! Call with me ! Oh, Glory ! Glory! Glory!" A few weak cries came up from the outer edges of the throng. "That won't do," shouted the revivalist, "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" 73 waving his arms in the air and beating the platform with his feet, "that won't do! I want you all to shout with me ! I want you to shout so that the Lord hears you ! Now once more ! Glory ! Glory ! " " Glory ! " thundered Jack McMarsters, next to me. " Be quiet, you devil," I whispered, grasp ing him by the arm. " Got to help them out," said Jack. "Glory! Glory!" And as his big voice rang out upon the air the whole crowd followed him as if a sudden madness had seized them, and the torches flickered as one wild, deafening shout of "Glory! Glory! Glory!" rose up to the bleak sky. The sweat poured down the preacher's face as he joined in the shout, quivering from head to foot. " That's it ! " he fairly yelled. I knew it was coming ! I knew it had to come ! Now, who is the first to come forward ? "Who is the first to come to this bench ? Who is the first to come to this throne of glory and be born again? Oh, don't wait, don't linger an instant, or the moment may be forever lost ! 74: "A3 ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" Hell eternal or eternal life ! "Who is the first ? Who is the first to save a soul from eternal hell?" He stretched his arms out as if he were feeling for something in space. Suddenly the long fore-finger of his right hand pointed directly at a sickly looking woman on a near-by bench. " Oh, my sister ! " he cried out, " do you feel it ? has it come to you ? Are you the first on whom the Lord has descended? Come forward, come forward ! Come to the seat of those who wait for the Lord come ! " The woman arose, and slowly and feebly, her eyes fixed on the face of the preacher, she came forward as one who had no power to resist. "I knew it, I knew it!" the revivalist shouted. "Come forward, my sister, and when you have touched that blessed bench grace will come to you as your soul wrestles in agony. I can see it working. I can see the hand of the Lord upon you ! " The woman reached the bench as he spoke, and touched it with her thin, quivering hand, and a hysterical shriek, horrible to hear, burst from her. Every figure in the crowd "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" 75 behind her bent forward, and cries of " Glory ! Glory ! " rent the air. But none came from Jack this time, for the woman was lying on her back across the bench, her poor, thin form writhing and twisting, clasping and unclasping her hands until her nails tore the worn flesh. I looked on with a shuddering sickness. My brain whirled. I could not make myself believe that it was real, that it was true, that I saw this thing going on before my eyes. Then I became conscious of a sensation of acute physical pain, and, looking down, I saw that the Bishop had grasped my wrist, and that his strong fingers had closed on it in a grip that seemed to drive the flesh into the bone. I understood what that grasp meant when I looked at his face. He was pale as death, and the features were fixed in a stern ness that struck cold to my heart. And all this time the revivalist shouted to the sobbing, swaying crowd. " Come," he cried, " come, all who would be saved from hell ! Here is one who has the grace. Who will join her? Who will save his soul to-night ? This is the only way, and this may be the only moment! Who comes forward for salvation ? " 76 "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" The Bishop was breathing heavily, with long, trembling breaths, but I noticed that his expression had changed. It was no longer stern. It was strange and sad, and his look was fixed on something far away far beyond the blackness of the black woods behind the madman who shrieked upon the platform. I felt a sudden fear, and turned toward Jack. He was not by my side. I looked round and saw him at the rail that enclosed the clearing. He was placing a white-faced child in a woman's arms, and I saw by his gestures that he was forcing her to leave that place of horror. In a moment he was back, and, with one glance at me, he sat down on the other side of the Bishop and laid his steady hand on the old man's arm. " Come ! " screamed the man on the plat form. " Come and choose between the Lord and hell ! Every soul here is hanging over the fires of hell eternal. Come and be saved ! " But already, on the bench, under it, and on all sides of it lay a score of struggling, agon ized human beings, beating the ground, tear ing their very flesh in the exaltation of fear "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" 77 and frenzy, choking, gasping ; and through it all, shrieking mad and awful appeals to the Most High; while the crowd around them, all on their feet, shouted and yelled in inco herent delirium. " Come ! come ! " the voice on the platform rose above the din. " Be saved while there is yet time." "ALMIGHTY GOD " My heart stood still. The Bishop had risen to his feet, and his 'gigantic figure tow ered up as he spread out his hands above the crowd ; and, as his deep tones rang out clear and dominant in that hideous Babel, a sud den silence fell upon them all. " THE FATHER OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, WHO DESIRETH NOT THE DEATH OF A SINNER, BUT RATHER THAT HE MAY TURN FROM HIS WICKEDNESS AND LIVE, HATH GIVEN POWER, AND COMMANDMENT, TO HIS MINISTERS, TO DE CLARE AND PRONOUNCE TO HIS PEOPLE, BEING PENITENT, THE ABSOLUTION AND REMISSION OF THEIR SINS. HE PARDONETH AND ABSOLVETH ALL THOSE WHO TRULY REPENT, AND UNFEIGN- EDLY BELIEVE HIS HOLY GOSPEL." The madness had gone utterly gone out of that stricken throng. The struggling fig- 78 "AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY" ures around the bench ceased to struggle. They raised their heads as they lay upon the ground, and every face in the clearing was turned toward the Bishop, wearing a look of eager wonderment which I shall never forget. The Bishop, his eyes still far away, his hands stretched out over the people, went on : " WHEREFORE LET us BESEECH HIM TO GBANT US TRUE REPENTANCE, AND HIS HOLY SPIRIT, THAT THOSE THINGS MAY PLEASE HIM WHICH WE DO AT THIS PRESENT J AND THAT THE REST OF OUR LIFE HEREAFTER MAY BE PURE AND HOLY J SO THAT AT THE LAST WE MAY COME TO HIS ETERNAL JOY J THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD." And the people answered, " Amen." When he had finished he steadied himself by my shoulder, at first with a nervous press ure ; but in a moment I felt the tension of his muscles relax. Then, in a voice that was almost feeble, so tender had it grown, he turned toward the East, and, in that abiding silence, he pronounced the Benediction. For a moment, until they began to disperse softly and silently, the Bishop stood erect, then he sank back into his seat, with one arm around my neck and one around Jack's. "THE BISHOP, HIS EYES STILL FAR AWAY, HIS HANDS STRETCHED OUT OVER THE PEOPLE, WENT ON" CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP "I CAN'T see for the rain. Who that there 1 going up the hill? Why, I thought you knew most everybody on the island by this time ! I'd have thought you'd known her, anyway. Why, that's old Mis' Bint the aunt of all that tribe of Bints that live just near Calais. No, Mr. Woglom, that isn't the least bit what I was looking for. That isn't pa'm leaf anyway, not what we used to call pa'm leaf. Why, now, it's strange you don't know Mis' Bint and you so well ac quainted around here too. Why, you had ought to write her up in some of your papers hadn't he, Mr. Woglom ? It's quite some of a story, if only anybody knew how to fix it up the right way, sost it would go in the newspapers. Why, I should have thought you'd have remarked her mourning ! " I could not help remarking her mourning now, at all events. I watched her struggling 6 82 CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP up the bleak island hillside, passing in and out of sight among the scraggly pines; and such a grimly fantastic figure, so swathed and swaddled and hung about and decked on with crape and stiff old-fashioned black stuffs, I had never before seen. Her veil projected on each side of her head as though her big old-fashioned bonnet were rigged out with stun-sail booms. The wind buffeted her; the rain drenched her in angry little spats, first to starboard and then to port, but she tacked steadily on up the hill, with all her voluminous garments flapping bravely, as stiff and black as sheet-iron. I was watch ing her through the one clear pane in the window of Mr. Woglom's general store. Tar paulins, rubber boots, sou'westers, fishing- tackle, scap-nets, school-books, suspenders, overalls, garden tools, horse medicine, mos quito-netting, lanterns, and other general- store stock, including the accursed lottery ticket, which is for sale in Maine everywhere where anything is sold, filled up the rest of the window. I was waiting for the squall to blow over. Miss Cynthiana Lovejoy, who accommodated me with board and lodging during my stay on the island, had happened CRAZT WIFE'S SHIP S3 in and was casually examining the new in voice of calicoes from New York, in search, Mr. "Woglom confidentially told me, of a pat tern which she had wanted for at least a generation, and which had been two genera tions out of the market. "Now what year was it, do you remember, Mr. Woglom, when Obed Bint's ship was lost in that gale when the big whale come ashore ? No, I don't mean Isaac Bint ; I mean Obed Bint, Isaac's son the young man that is, he wouldn't be so dreadful young to-day if he'd lived most fifty now, I should think. Mr. Woglom, that ain't any more pa'm leaf than I'm pa'm leaf. " Sixty-seven ? Well, now, I wouldn't have thought it was so far back as sixty-seven. Land's sake, how time does go ! Yes, that's something like the pattern, but 'tisn't just it. Only I can't draw at all, I could draw that pattern for you just as clear as day. Well, now, it doesn't seem so long. But I guess you're right, Mr. Woglom. That was just the year that I bought the first piece of magenta poplin I ever saw, off your father. My, I thought I was made ! Father, he used to call it my whale dress, because he paid for 84 CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP it out of the money lie made off that whale. It came ashore right on his beach. " That was a real bad storm, Mr. Wog- lom, if you recollect. Let me see there was Obed Bint's boat, and Plum Davis's boat, and the two Daw brothers, their boat, and that man who lived on Three Acre Island, what was his name, now? oh, yes, "Wilkinson well, there was his boat, too; not a one of them came back. Every one of those boats was lost in that gale. At least, not a one of them ever came in. Aw ful, wa'n't it? " "Well, now, what I was going to tell you about Mis' Bint that was so queer was just this, and I thought you might make sort of a story of it, if you could only fix it up some way sost it would read well. It was this way. Obed, he married just before he made his first trip on his own boat married a girl he met at Eastport the year he went over there to go to a dancing-school they had there 'twa'n't much of a concern, I guess, but it was the best they was. She was a real nice little thing, and pretty too, and clever to everybody. She made friends with lots of people. I remember it was real gay on the CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP 85 island that year; there was two or three other young married couples too. " Well, as I was telling you, that big whale my ! he was a monstrous big thing ! that whale came up on our beach the same gale Obed Bint's boat was lost in. And of course we had to attend to the whale right off, and cut him up before he'd spoil, and I don't know but it took quite some time, and in consequence we didn't get over to see Mis' Bint as much as we had ought to; 'twa'n't that we didn't want to; but there was the whale, don't you see? "Dear me, Mr, Woglom, I can remember that magenta dress just the same as if it was yesterday ! I remember how I bought it off your father on this very counter. I remem ber just what he says when he sold it to me. Says he, 'You'll look just like that piny bed up to Widow Pierson's when you get that on,' says he. Why, it wa'n't no more like the color of pinies than nothing at all. Your father hadn't what folks call an eye for color, Mr. Woglom. "Now, what was I saying? Oh yes! I know ! I had that magenta dress on the first day that I ever looked across the cove from 86 CRAZT WIFE'S SHIP my father's house to the meadow lot under the light-house, and saw Mis' Bint and Obed's wife setting there looking out to sea as if they's expecting something. My great- grandmother, my father's grandmother, that is, she was alive then, and she was a real queer old lady. She'd sit in an old splint-bot tomed chair by the chimney all day long and never say a word only set bolt-upright and smoke an old corn-cob pipe just like a man. I don't know what made me speak to her when I saw Mis' Bint and Obed's wife settin' there under the light-house, but I did, some how. Says I, 'Granny, there's Mis' Bint and Obed's wife under the light-house look ing out to sea. "What do you think they're looking for ? ' says I. " ' Crazy wife's ship/ says she, short, just like that, and she didn't say another thing that day. That was a way she had; she didn't often say anything, but when she did say something she was real curious. "I don't know whether it was an old- fashioned saying or something she made up herself, but it gave me a real sort of a turn. And that afternoon I went over to Mis' Bint's, that is, my mother and I did. They lived CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP 87 quite a piece away on the other side of the cove, but our two families had always been first-rate friends, and my father had taught Obed Bint all he knew about navigation. "Well, you may imagine it took us all aback when old Mis' Bint met us at the gate, and we saw right away that she wa'n't going to let us in. That was the first time I ever saw or heard of neighbors quarrelling on the island I've seen enough since, but I was only a young slip of a girl then, and it did seem perfectly dreadful to me. Mis' Bint she talked oh, she talked quite violently, and reproached us for not coming sooner, and as much as said she wanted to have done with us for good and all. My mother she was a very proud woman she never answered her back at all, but she just took me by the hand and told me to come along, and we started for home. I didn't dare say anything ; I was most too frightened to speak. And mother she didn't say a word, but just walked right on leading me by the hand as if I was a baby. " Going back we met old Mr. Starbuck, the one who used to live in the red house down by the Point. He was about the only near 88 CRAZT WIFE'S SHIP neighbor the Bints had between 'em I guess they owned pretty much all that end of the island. " ' Hello ! ' says he, when he saw my mother. * Been to call on me ? ' " ' What do you mean, Mr. Starbuck? ' says my mother, for she didn't know what to make of his asking such a question. " ' Why,' he says, ' I supposed you'd been to my house. I understand folks ain't ad mitted anywheres else in this neighborhood.' " We didn't understand him just then, but we did when we got down to the village and heard the talk that was going on. You never heard anything so queer in all your life. It was a real nine-days' wonder, as the saying is. It seemed that old Mis' Bint had picked a quarrel with everybody on the island, on one pretext or another, so that there wa'n't one that she hadn't, so to speak, shut her doors on. Dreadful queer behavior ! With one it was one thing and with another it was some thing different, but it all came to pretty much the same in the end she wa'n't on speaking terms with hardly a soul in the place, and there she was, living up on the Point with not a neighbor to go near her, mewed up CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP 89 all alone there with Melindy that was Obed's wife's name. Everybody was sorry for the poor little clever creature, for Mis' Bint wa'n't a cheerful woman the best of times, and when she was vexed, my ! she was vexed. " But then, of course, we couldn't do any thing, she kept Melindy so close wouldn't let her stir anywheres without her, and it got so at last that she wouldn't hardly let her go out at all. " Of course we all made out that the loss of her son had turned her mind, and people was all the more sorry for Melindy on that account. She pined away dreadfully too ; lost all her good looks, and got real peaked. " For one thing, her mother-in-law would never let her wear mourning, nor Mis' Bint wouldn't wear a stitch of black herself. That's what made folks say she was crazy first off; for though there's lots of people here who won't wear mourning clothes on principle, old Mis' Bint come from Calais, and she was a Bint by birth, too, before she married Isaac Bint ; and all those Bints, the whole stock of them, were just sot on dressing all out in black, every cousin that died. She was real par- 90 CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP ticular about her dress, Mis' Bint was. I think folks was generally more particular in those days. I know there ain't any patterns nowadays like that old pa'm-leaf pattern ; not so nice, that is, to my taste. " Of course Mis' Bint didn't drop out like that without being considerable missed. Me- lindy was kind of new to the town, but her mother-in-law was a good deal looked up to. She was a great housekeeper for one thing, and when there was anything going on I mean sociably weddings and funerals, for instance, people always use to a sort of de pend on Mis' Bint. And then she was a master-hand at nursing sick folks and tak ing care of young children, and altogether people missed her quite some. Mr. Wog- lom, if you can't show me those dress goods yourself, don't bother to put that boy of yours at it, for you just might as well not. I don't believe he knows gingham from goose- grease. " Let me see, I guess it must have been two-three years, maybe four, that I found out the rights of the matter, and just acci- dently, as you might say. The light-house I was telling you about was away at the far CRAZT WIFE'S SHIP 91 end of the Point, and nobody hardly ever went there, except, of course, the man who kept the light, and he was a Portugee or something some kind of a foreigner any way, and didn't talk much English. But ever since she began to act so queer, old Mis' Bint had made a regular practice of going down there and setting with her daughter-in- law oh, my ! for hours at a time, and every day, too, in all sorts of weather. I don't be lieve anybody knew about it, though, except our folks, for you could see them where they sat from our kitchen window, but not from much of any place else. And as for my mother, from the day old Mis' Bint spoke sharp to her to the day of her death, she never mentioned the name of Bint, and you may believe I wouldn't have dared to men tion it to her. The way it happened was this, and it was kind of funny. I had a lit tle green parrot about that long. A sailor uncle of mine brought it to me from Java, somewheres in the tropics my Uncle Hiram, one of my mother's folks; he died young, and I guess there ain't anybody remembers him now, without it's me, and I don't believe I'd ever think of him if it wa'n't for that par- 92 CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP rot. It was a cute little tiling, and I set a heap by it, though it couldn't talk, and it was dreadful misc/wevous. It died, in the end, of swallowing a needle-book. Well, as I was saying, that bird got loose one awful bleak day in November, and ran right along the shore of the cove, and made straight to Bint's place, and me after it, you'd better believe, running just as hard as I could tear. And you wouldn't have thought a little thing could get over such a lot of ground so amazing fast. It was clean over in Mis' Bint's cow-pasture before I caught it, and then I started for home real frightened, for I didn't know what my mother would say to me if she ever knew I'd been anywheres on land belonging to the Bints. She was dreadful strict sometimes, my mother was. " Well, just by good luck, nobody saw me, and I come back by the short-cut across the Point under the light-house. And would you believe it, just as I got under that sand bank there with the swallows' nests in it you can see 'em from here that dratted parrot got away from me again ; and I was so tuckered out what with the running and the fright and the disappointment and all that it sounds CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP 93 kinder foolish now, don't it? I just laid right clown there on the sand and cried as if I was going to cry my eyes out. " And while I was lying there and crying fit to break my heart, the first thing I knew I heard people's voices talking on the bank above me. I couldn't see them, and at first I thought it was some of our folks come after me, and I was worse scared than ever, and just laid quiet, not knowing what to do. Then I recognized Mis' Bint's voice and Melindy's, though, as I say, I hadn't spoken a word to either of them in three-four years, but you may fancy it sent a real cold chill down my back when I heard old Mis' Bint say, in a perfectly peaceful, ca'm, natural way, just as I am talking to you now : '"No, dearie; Obed can't get in on that wind. He'll most likely lay to on t'other side of South Island, and come up with the tide in the morning.' " * But he'll come in the morning sure, won't he, ma ? ' says Melindy ; and it gave me an awful funny creepy feeling to hear her, for she talked a sort of innocent, something- like a little child. ' " Oh yes,' says old Mis' Bint. ' Obed will 94 CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP come in the morning sure. You'd better be thinking of getting a good breakfast for him.' " ' Yes,' says Melindy ; ' picked-up codfish. Obed always was great for picked-up cod fish.' " Well, if I was scared before, I was scared worse than ever now. Why, it was just the unnaturalist thing that you ever could form a notion of, setting there and hearing those two women talking about getting breakfast for a man who had been lying four years at the bottom of the sea. It 'most made my blood run cold ; but of course I didn't dare to stir, and I just had to set there and listen while they laid out the breakfast they was go ing to get ready for him picked-up codfish and mock mince-pie and I don't know what all. And then they talked about how soon he'd be rested enough to feel like taking a journey up the river to Bucksport to pay a visit to his Uncle John. My ! his Uncle John 'd been dead two years. " I don't know what it was I did at last that attracted their attention. I guess I must have coughed or something, because Mis' Bint she called out suddenly, ' What's that ? ' and looked over the sand bank and saw me. CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP 95 I wasn't so scared then but what I got straight up and started to run. But Mis' Bint she just came down and caught me by the arm, and walked me quite a ways down the beach be fore she said a word. Then she talked right close to my ear sost I could hear her, but Melindy couldn't. " ' You think I'm a lunatic,' she says. " * Yes, ma'am,' I says. I didn't know what to say, but I was a real truthful child. " ' Well, I ain't,' says Mis' Bint. ' I'm as sane as you are. But she's an idiot, and she's been so ever since the night of the big gale ; and I've kep' up the delusion in her mind that Obed's coming home,' says she. ' I've en couraged her in it, because if I didn't she wouldn't live a week.' " Then she looked at me real hard for a minute, and then she said : " ' That's why I don't want folks around. You're John Lovejoy's daughter, ain't you ? ' says she. " ' Yes, ma'am,' says I. " * Well,' says she, ' you've seen the afflic tion the Lord's visited upon me. Now what you going to do ? Tell folks ? ' " Then I spunked up. I guess she knew I 96 CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP would. ' Mis' Bint,' says I, ' I guess our folks 'ain't meddled with your affairs very lately, and I don't think,' says I, ' that we're going to begin now,' I told her. And with that I walked away. I was real mad. " And do you know, it was the funniest thing. I hadn't gone more than a hundred yards when what should I see but that parrot a-hopping along in front of me, head ing for home across the sand. He was dreadful little, but I could see him a long ways off ; he was such a bright green against the beach, and the day was kinder gray too, sost he showed up quite some. It was a green something like that pattern, Mr. "Wog- lom, but with more yellow into it. " And I never did say one word about it for the longest time. But maybe three-four years after that Melindy fell kind of sick, and they had to send for a doctor, and then some how it all came out. But it didn't do any harm, I guess, for Melindy wa'n't sick long. She died that January, and the first boat that got through the ice to the mainland that spring old Mis' Bint went over on it to Eastport, and when she come back she had the greatest lot of mourning clothes that CRAZY WIFE'S SHIP 97 I guess most any woman ever had. She's taken some of it off since then, and they don't wear skirts so full now, so you don't notice it so much, but still she wears considerable enough to notice, I should think. But they do say she's a great deal more sociable now though, my ! I don't know. I 'ain't spoken to her since. "No, Mr. Woglom," concluded Miss Cyn- thiana, as she felt the edge of the last piece of calico between her thumb and her fore finger, " you needn't trouble yourself to show me anything more. I don't believe you've got the real pa'm leaf anyway. Though I was in hopes you might have had it, you've talked so much of getting it for me so many times. Does Mis' Bint buy her mourning of you now, or does she still go to Eastport for it? But wa'n't it curious, my finding that parrot again that way ? " Between the legs of a pendent pair of wad- ing-boots I peered out of the dripping window, looking at the crest of the storm- swept hill, and caught a last glimpse of the gaunt black figure tacking against the wind, funereal and lonely. 7 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT , dear!" said the Keverend Mr. Pentagon. " Oh, dear ! Oh, dear ! Oh, dear!" Then he tossed uneasily upon his neat white bed, and ground his broad shoulders into its snowy depths. He looked out of the window, and saw, through the pale green panes of flint glass a bough of darker green bob up and down, shaking off great drops of rain as the last gust of the summer rain storm agitated it and gently subsided. Be yond, the gray sky, that had but now been weeping, was slowly growing blue ; not smil ing yet, but tearfully clearing up to tranquil brightness. To people not in an unpleasant frame of mind it might have suggested the face of a child coming out of a crying spell. To the Reverend Mr. Pentagon, who was in a 102 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT very unpleasant frame of mind, it suggested nothing beyond the fact that he had to wait before he could walk out under the blue sky. He stared and tossed, and stared and tossed again, and once more he said, explosively : "Oh, dear!" If the Kecording Angel sets down our words according to what they mean to our hearts rather than by their dictionary mean ing, he credited the Keverend Mr. Penta gon's account with a right, good, healthy bit of profanity on the score of that last " Oh, dear ! " And, indeed, if he had said some awful thing with " Damn " in it, he could not have meant anything worse. For the Reverend Mr. Pentagon was lying in bed and thinking of the days that had dropped out of his life during a long period of unconsciousness and delirium. " Fifteen days," he said to himself. " Fif teen days ! Oh, dear ! Oh, dear ! Oh, dear!" ' The Eeverend Mr. Pentagon was a clergy man of culture and understanding, who, writ ing and preaching from a small provincial city in Massachusetts, had made a name for FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 103 himself all over the country, and indeed wher ever the old Church of England points its spires toward the sky, or drops earthward the clangor of its square belfries. So great had grown his fame that when he gave up the charge he had held for fifteen years, be ing forced thereto by ill health, and, go ing into the Canada woods, was, in the course of one summer, recovered of fifteen years of dyspepsia, why, it so happened that this modest provincial parson found himself given to understand that if a certain series of sermons which he was invited to deliver in New York should please the congregation to whom they were addressed, he would in all probability be called to fill the pulpit of one of the great city's fashionable churches. It was a very old, a very rich, a very exclusive church. The old Hector was about to resign by reason of his age : not wholly to the re gret of certain members of his congregation, who found that in the years of his steward ship the dear old gentleman had " slowly broadened down from precedent to prece dent " until he was almost as broad and char itable as the New Testament itself. So, nat urally, they wanted a man who, if he had to 104 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT broaden down, would start from a higher plane of orthodoxy, and such a man they were sure they had found in theEeverend Mr. Pen tagon. So, too, Mr. Pentagon thought, and he came down from the Canada woods, and in a pretty little town among the rocks of the Maine coast set himself to write his series of sermons. There were to be six in the series, but I know the heads of only three of them. The first was " On the Reciprocal Duties of the Church and the Pastor." The second was " On the Duty of Church-going." The third was entitled, " On the Duty of a Strict Ob servance of the Sabbath." It was while he was writing this sermon that the Reverend Mr. Pentagon chanced to ask himself whether it would not be well for the rector of a NewYork church to know some thing about New York. He had had enough acquaintance with Boston, which he consid ered a large city, to grasp the idea that large cities have ways of their own which they are not at all inclined to change at the pleasure of the casual stranger. Moreover, Mr. Pentagon was a man whose native habit of mind was liberal enough, and he happened to be free FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 105 from the usual intolerant provincial hatred of big cities. And he made up his mind that he would go at once, all by himself, to see what New York was like. He had been in New York, of course, but only to stay for a few days at a boarding-house with a delegation of his own townspeople at the time of a great convention of the Church. He knew that New York was almost intol erably hot in summer-time, and so he con ceived for himself the notion of a resting- place in the suburbs, from whence he could make brief incursions into the body of the town, coming back at night to the green fields and fresh air. He consulted with his brother of the local church, a Portland man who had been in New York in 1874, who gave him just the address he wanted a nice, quiet little place in Westchester County, on the Bronx Biver, where he could board most comforta bly at next to nothing. Clergymen are wonderfully like sheep in many things. The Reverend Mr. Pentagon packed a large old-fashioned travelling bag of course and set out for the nice place on the Bronx River. Ha found it readily enough, for there was only one other house within five 106 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT miles. It had been an excellent house, but it was now getting along without doors or win dows, in a sad and paintless old age. The fam ily that had entertained his clerical friend so hospitably in the year 1874, had moved out in the year 1875, and the house had had no tenant since. This much he learned of the man of the other house, who was a fat and kindly French tavern-keeper, with the reddest of faces and the whitest of aprons, and an amount of politeness that made the Eeverend Mr. Pentagon feel more awkward than he had felt since he was a little boy at school and got up on the platform to speak his little piece just as the four awful school inspectors dropped in on a sudden visit of inspection. On that occasion, he remembered, his little bare legs felt as if they had ten joints in each one of them, and he certainly had four teen fingers on each hand. As awkward as a child and as lonely as a lost child, the Keverend Mr. Pentagon stood in front of the house of Monsieur Perot and stared blankly at the inn and at the landlord until an idea slowly crept into his mind. The inn looked very clean and neat. It was an odd little old-fashioned structure with green WHY MIGHT NOT THE REVEREND MR, PENTAGON TAKE LODGINGS AT THE INN OF MONSIEUR PEROT? FRENOH FOR A FORTNIGHT 107 palings and trellises stuck about it in various places, and it overhung the margin of the placid Bronx and mirrored its whitewashed front in the calm stream. The landlord's face inspired confidence so, too, did a smell of crisp, clean cooking that came from the kitchen of Madame Perot. "Why might not the Keverend Mr. Pentagon take lodgings at the inn of Monsieur Perot ? There was no rea son why he might not, and in the end he did. Yery comfortable he found himself, and very friendly were the famille Perot ; and a multitudinous family they were. Mr. Penta gon never succeeded in taking the census of them all, which need not be wondered at when it is said that the eleventh infant of Monsieur and Madame Perot was exactly of the same age as the third child of their first married daughter. And all of them, of every age and size, were polite by birth and inheritance, and took a cheerful view of life. The first day of his arrival, which was a Saturday, Mr. Pentagon took out his unfin ished sermon, meaning to set to work. Then he read it over, and it struck him that really it was so very strong, especially the passage 108 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT in denunciation of the Continental Sabbath, that he really ought to wait until he found himself in just the proper spirit to go on with it. He had a feeling of chastened pride in the thought that he had denounced that sinful Continental Sabbath very aptly indeed for a man who had never seen it. So that day he went for a walk and saw some of the pretty places which are too near to New York for most New Yorkers to visit. The next day was Sunday, and he went into the City and wor shipped at Trinity, and on his way home went out of his course to view the great church to which he expected to be called, and stood and looked at its closed doors ; and his heart beat hard. On Monday he went to New York again, and again on Tuesday, and again on Wednes day, and again on Thursday. Hither and thither he wandered, bewildered at first, then fascinated. The cosmopolitan variety of the life amazed and interested him. He had a slight book-knowledge of several languages, and in his ramblings he heard them all and many that he could not recognize. On Fri day he stumbled on the Polish quarter in Attorney Street and thereabouts, and then, FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 109 strolling aimlessly on, got into Mulberry Bend and was suddenly seized with a nervous fright at the swarming vastness of that mighty ant-hill. He gazed about him at the count less foreign faces that streamed this way and that through the narrow pass ; he blinked at the marvellous street-stands with their wild confusion of reds and greens and whites ; he looked up at the thin strip of blue sky be tween the tops of the towering tenements ; and then his eye fell upon the huge form of the Irish policeman who sauntered grandly through all this bustle and turmoil of agile Italians, and he said to him : " Do you think that any of these people would offer me violence if I were to proceed farther along this street ? " The policeman looked down at him kindly, but from an infinite height of scorn. " An' ME here ? " he said. Mr. Pentagon went on unmolested, and before he had reached the end of the street he had some glimmering realization of the fact that it was not only the big policeman who was keeping order for him, but the spirit of good-natured, happy, all-expectant indus try that is the salvation of the poor whose 110 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT feet are on the road that may lead to prosper ity if they will but keep to it. But not then, not till long, long afterward, did Mr. Penta gon learn the awful difference between the hopeful and the hopeless poor. Friday found the Keverend Mr. Pentagon tired and footsore, with not one word added to the sermon " On the Duty of a Strict Observ ance of the Sabbath." Then, having lain on his lounge all day Friday, of course he needed a little exercise on Saturday. He thought he would take a row. He had rowed at college, and once or twice on the broad river that ran by the town that had been his home for fif teen years. But he had never rowed on the Bronx, and the Bronx is a river that requires a special education for its navigation. It winds, it twists, it turns, it doubles upon it self, it spreads out into a pond, it contracts to a mere thread of water ; in fact it is the most capricious and absurd little water-course on the face of the civilized globe. And so it happened that Mr. Pentagon, coming around a turn with an unnecessarily powerful stroke, and with his body thrown FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 111 back, ran into a stone bridge, struck his head full on the spring of the arch, and went backward into his boat, unconscious of every thing in this world, save a dim sense of grind ing pain, and of alternate heat and chill. After this came a long period when he had a certain fitful knowledge of things and peo ple about him. He saw faces the faces of the elder members of the Perot family, the red good-natured face of Monsieur Perot, the kindly withered face of his old wife, the sweet and pretty face of the married daughter ; now and then wondering faces of children looking in at the doorway, and at certain regular in tervals a man's face, grave and gentle, with searching eyes that were somehow connected in his mind with the word " Doctor." Then came the time when he awoke to know that he had been sick nigh unto death, and out of his head, and out of this world more or less, for a period of days. "When he asked how many, the Doctor answered him evasively, and he fretted over the evasion with all the futile insistence of a convales cent. He could learn nothing from Madame Perot, who could have made a professional cross-examiner change any given subject for 112 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT any other one he did not want. But at last he caught Monsieur Perot and bullied him into an admission. Perot would not abso lutely defy the Doctor's orders, but in the end, being in an agony of perspiration and trepidation, he told Mr. Pentagon that he might calculate the rest for himself ; it was now fifteen days since the reverend gentle man had honored the house with his pres ence. "Quinze jours," said the Reverend Mr. Pentagon to himself, " Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday " and he went on count ing on his fingers. " Why, to-day must be Sunday!" Even as he spoke a church bell tinkled faintly in the distance. It tinkled long enough to remind the Eeverend Mr. Pentagon that instead of scolding at the week that lay be fore him, it behooved him to thank the Lord for his deliverance, and he accordingly did so, without the aid of his Book of Common Prayer; for his injury had somewhat en dangered his eyesight, and he was absolutely forbidden to read. Mr. Pentagon was a strong, healthy, tern- FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 113 perate man ; and he made a most rapid re covery. To be more exact it was soon to be seen that his case would have no sequelce, as the good, grave Doctor loved to call the sec ondary consequences of an ailment. Instead of a week, he was kept but a day longer in bed, and two days in his room, and after that he was allowed to wander the whole day long under Monsieur Perot's cherry-trees, or to sun himself on the little veranda overlooking the stream. He could not read, which tried him a little, but his young friends of the in numerable tribe of Perot made life bearable, in fact, delightful for him. His French, what there was of it, was of what might be called the passive sort ; and he understood perhaps one word in three of what the elder Perots said to him. But the children, as is often the case with Franco-American youngsters, spoke two languages with equal fluency and incorrectness, and moreover combined the two as they saw fit. Thus Mr. Pentagon conversed with them in a sort of Pigeon-Eng lish, or lingua franca, after this fashion : MB. PENTAGON. Kee ay ploorong, Mah- ree? 114: FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT MARIE ANGELIQUE EULALIE EOSE ETIENNE PEROT (aged seven). Mais, m'sieu, c'est Toto qui pleure, parce qu'il a tveeste la tail a la chatte, et puis papa lui a fetchee des gifles." That's what the beautiful language of France comes to on the banks of the winding Bronx. Mr. Pentagon had never married, he had no near kin, and he was not in the habit of keeping up close correspondence with even the best of his many friends. But when he awoke on the third morning of his convales cence as an externe, he reflected that he must very soon find some way of notifying those who cared for him of his present condition and whereabouts. He thought he would ask the Doctor, who still came to see him once a day, if he would not write the requisite let ters for him. The Doctor was a serious man, his face was almost sad in its thoughtfulness, and he was chary of speech to the verge of taciturnity ; but there was an earnest kindli ness in his thoughtful eyes which made Mr. Pentagon feel sure that he would write the letters, and would write them well. Much cheered by this conclusion he fin- FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 115 ished his dressing and was about to start downstairs, when the door opened and he be held Monsieur Perot, in gorgeous attire, with a large tri-colored bouquet in his buttonhole ; Madame Perot in her very best dress witk a marvellous and complicated white cap on her gray head, and the married daughter, with her husband, both costumed in the most advanced art of the Bowery. Behind them, like the incidental cherubs with which tho Old Masters used to fill up the odd corners of their canvases, surged a selected group of small Perots, the girls all in white dresses with big sashes, and the boys all in white shirts with tri-colored neckties. There was a flood, a deluge, an explosion of French, and after Mr. Pentagon had strug gled with it for some time, and had been helped out by the younger members of the delegation, he got it through his head that he was invited to join the Perot family at the Summer Festival of the French Society to which they belonged, this festival being a combined fete and pique-nique at Tompkin- son's Summer-Garden Park, a paradise of un speakable delights situated in the immediate neighborhood. 116 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT It would have been impossible for Mr. Pen tagon to refuse, if lie had wished to refuse, which he did not in the least. " I ought to see about the letters," he re flected ; " but then, this being Saturday, they could not go until Monday, and I need miss only a single mail. And really I must not lose this opportunity of seeing what a French Festival is like." Three country stages of vast age and of unlimited capacity transported the Perot family through clouds of dust to Mr. Tomp- kinson's Garden, which was shut off from the rest of the world by a high yellow fence. Through a gateway decked with the fluttering flags of all nations and of several defunct yacht- clubs, the party was whirled, in such a tumult of joyous shouting and shrieking as Mr. Pen tagon had never in his life heard before. His head whirled with it, and it was with the sense of being in a dream that he found him self seated at a table under a tree, drinking a milky sweet stuff called orgeat, and by the aid of a spoon sharing his beverage with a warm and sticky little Perot, who had perched on his left knee. In front of them a com pany of eleven amateur soldiers, attired in i MR. PENTAGON OPENED HIS EYES WIDE TO TAKE IN THE UNACCUSTOMED SCENE FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 117 uniforms that would have made Solomon in all his glory look like a Quaker, performed evolutions of a mysterious and rapid nature, looking extremely fierce all the while, and thumping the butts of their guns on the ground every now and then, with a snort of defiance. This done, they mopped their hot faces, accepted the congratulations of the Pe rot family with smiling satisfaction, took off their hats and bowed in the politest way, and went off somewhere else to do it again. In every direction somebody was doing something. The " Park " was a poor bare place, with dusty trees, and dry and faded grass, and the little booths that lined its yel low walls were old and weatherbeaten, and their sparse decorations of red, white, and blue bunting were pitifully faded with sun and rain. But the people made it gay the swarms of happy holidaying folk, some of them in quaint, old-world costumes, some of them in brilliant uniforms of designs that would have looked equally strange on either side of the water all of them wearing hot and smiling faces. Mr. Pentagon opened his eyes wide to take in the unaccustomed scene. The women's caps were wonderful to him ; so 118 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT were the waistcoats of the men. As to the various sports and games, he had never dreamed that there were so many ways of amusing one's self in the world. There were shooting-galleries, and merry-go-rounds, and "Aunt Sallies," and the tiniest little switch-back railway, which was labelled in letters as big as itself, " Aux Montagues Eus- ses." And in every little open space of the extensive grounds there was a club or a soci ety, or a league, or a group, or some other aggregation of from six to a dozen young men, practising some athletic sports with infinite perspiration and ardor. The fencers fenced, the strong men lifted their heavy weights, the military companies drilled, the athletes tum bled and twisted, and climbed, and ran, and turned hand-springs ; and the sportsmen and sharp-shooters shot, and shot, and shot, till their popping fairly peppered the general 1mm and buzz as if the place were undergo ing a miniature bombardment. And when nature needed refreshment or stimulus, one bottle of thin blue wine sufficed for the needs of any six of the participants ; some of them, more ascetic, indeed, preferred lemonade, and shunned the wine-cup. FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 119 Before long Mr. Pentagon found himself in the very thick of it. He was introduced to everybody, and everybody made him wel come. As an American, he was regarded as a prime authority upon " le sport" and he was called upon to act as umpire and referee in all manner of contests, most of them wholly strange to him. His umpiring must have been fearful and wonderful ; but as the wild est of his decisions gave perfect satisfaction to everybody concerned, he was none the wiser. Then he got so interested that he be gan to take a hand in some of the milder sports, and with his hat on the back of his head, and his clerical necktie twisted around under one ear, he showed what an able-bod ied American clergyman can do when he puts his whole mind on the noble game of ring- toss. And when Madame Perot came to tell him it was time to go home, she found him hand in hand with a string of little Perots and their playmates, capering clumsily but cheerfully to the tune of " Sur le pont d' Avignon, Tout le monde y danse, danse, Sur le pont d' Avignon, Tout le monde y danse en rond." 120 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT As he approached the gate, weary but happy, he met the Doctor, who bore in his face a look more bright and more kindly (if that could be) than Mr. Pentagon had ever seen there before. The Doctor shook Mr. Pentagon warmly by the hand. " My dear sir," he said, " I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you here. I am afraid I should have expected to find you literally and figuratively on the other side of the fence. I have never yet been able to convince any one of your cloth of the neces sity of allowing to the working people con fined in great cities a chance for innocent and wholesome recreation on the one day that they can call their own. The workman in this country, and especially in New York, works harder and has fewer holidays than any workman in civilization. What with the climate and his three meals of meat a day, he has a tremendous head of steam on, and the standard of work which he makes for him self is such as no European employer would dare set up for his operatives. To con demn such a man to absolute idleness and inactivity one day in seven ; to take his beer from him on that one day ; to shut him out of FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 121 every place of innocent enjoyment in a city that is tropically hot in summer, and cold as Russia in winter, and that has only one nar row outlet to country walks, is cruel, my dear sir positively cruel. And when you lend the sanction of your presence to Sunday amusements, so innocent and helpful as these, you are helping hundreds and thousands of stunted lives, and doing more good than your own eyes can see. Look around you ! Is there drunkenness here ? Is there dissolute conduct or disorder? "Why, my dear sir, these people are not only good citizens, but devout members of their own church it is not yours or mine, but it is theirs. They have been to early mass, and finished their de votions before you and I were out of bed, and " The Doctor was growing eloquent, and seemed to be but just started in his discourse. Somehow the Reverend Mr. Pentagon, limp, terrified, white of face, and weak as to his knees, slipped away and out, through the big gate on whose portals he saw for the first time two huge signs on which he read but two words "FfiTE" and "DIMANCHE." 122 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT The next day Mr. Pentagon went to New York, although he had neither supped nor slept the night before. He wanted to evade the Doctor's daily call, or at least to think things over with himself before he should meet that grave and thoughtful face. He was slowly and painfully walking down Fifth Avenue, his thoughts turned in upon himself, when he felt his hand grasped and warmly shaken. Lifting his eyes, he saw before him a face that gradually revealed itself to his memory as the face of the little vestryman, of the great church of his hopes, who had called upon him some months before to suggest the possibility of his coming to New York. The little man was beaming, and he flourished a newspaper. " Good ! good ! " he said, shaking the clergy man's hand up and down, "you have done nobly, Mr. Pentagon ! It was a daring thing, sir, very daring; but the very audacity of it has settled the business. The conservative element in our vestry is fairly frightened out of the field. Why, sir, Mr. McGlaisher, the leader of the Sabbatarian wing in our church, actually said that while he could not vote for you, he would not vote against you ; and that FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 123 lie could not help respecting a man who had the courage of his convictions. You will be called, sir, you will be called; as sure as my name ain't McGlaisher." And he bustled away, leaving the daily paper in Mr. Pentagon's hands ; and Mr. Pentagon's weak and blinking eyes read : NO BLUE LAWS FOE HIM! THE REVEREND MR. PENTAGON ATTENDS A SUNDAY PICNIC. AND DANCES WITH THE BABIES. WILL ST. PHYLACTERY'S CALL HIM NOW? That evening the Keverend Mr. Pentagon made a confession to the Doctor or rather two confessions : one of error, and one of conversion. " But," said he, " will you tell me how it was possible for me to make such an error? The man certainly said fifteen days" The Doctor's amused smile broadened. 124 FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT " My dear sir," he said, " we Anglo- Saxons think we belong to the most logical race on the face of the earth, and yet the accurate little Frenchman can give us points three times out of four. With him a week is a iveek seven days with us it sometimes is, and sometimes is not. When you speak of something that happened * a week ago this Monday/ you really speak of a period of eight days, or a week and the present Mon day. The logical Frenchman does not even think of that space of time as a week; he calls it huit jours, in the same way. On the third Wednesday of your stay here, which happened, by the way, to be a saint's day in the Catholic Church, Monsieur Perot very rightly told you that you had been here fifteen days. But with your habit of count ing ( exclusively* as we call our stupid fashion, you counted the days done and not the day you were in. You would not have done it if you had been calculating the date of pay ment of a note ; it was simply illogical habit that counted for you. But you see," he con cluded, with a little laugh, as he took up his hat, "you had been French for a fort night." FRENCH FOR A FORTNIGHT 125 " Ah, yes, I see," said the Reverend Mr. Pentagon. And as he heard the Doctor close the front door behind him, he picked up his half- finished sermon "On the Duty of a Strict Observance of the Sabbath" and tore it into small pieces. THE RED SILK HANDKER CHIEF THE RED SILK HANDKER CHIEF THE yellow afternoon sun came in through the long blank windows of the room wherein the Superior Court of the State of New York, Part II., Gillespie, Judge, was in session. The hour of adjournment was near at hand, a dozen court-loungers slouched on the hard benches in the attitudes of cramped carelessness which mark the familiar of the halls of justice. Beyond the rail sat a dozen lawyers and lawyers' clerks, and a dozen weary jurymen. Above the drowsy silence rose the nasal voice of the junior counsel for the defence, who in a high monotone, with his faint eyes fixed on the paper in his hand, was making something like a half-a-score of " requests to charge." Nobody paid attention to him. Two law yers' clerks whispered like mischievous 9 130 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF schoolboys, hiding behind a pile of books that towered upon a table. Junior counsel for the plaintiff chewed his pencil and took advantage of his opportunity to familiarize himself with certain neglected passages of the New Code. The crier, like a half-dormant old spider, sat in his place and watched a boy who was fidgeting at the far end of the room, and who looked as though he wanted to whistle. The jurymen might have been dream-men, vague creations of an autumn afternoon's doze. It was hard to connect them with a world of life and business. Yet, gazing closer, you might have seen that one looked as if he were thinking of his dinner, and another as if he were thinking of the lost love of his youth ; and that the expression on the faces of the others ranged from the vacant to the inscrutable. The oldest juror, at the end of the second row, was sound asleep. Every one in the court-room, except himself, knew it. No one cared. Gillespie, J., was writing his acceptance of an invitation to a dinner set for that evening at Dehnonico's. He was doing this in such a way that he appeared to be taking copious THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 131 and conscientious notes. Long years on the bench had whitened Judge Gillespie's hair, and taught him how to do this. His seem ing attentiveness much encouraged the coun sel for the defence, whose high-pitched tone rasped the air like the buzzing of a bee that has found its way through the slats of the blind into some darkened room, of a summer noon, and that, as it seeks angrily for egress, raises its shrill scandalized protest against the idleness and the pleasant gloom. " We r'quest y'r Honor t' charge : First, 't forcible entry does not const'oot tresp'ss, 'nless intent's proved. Thus, 'f a man rolls down a bank " But the judge's thoughts were in the private supper -room at Delmonico's. He had no interest in the sad fate of the hero of the supposititious case, who had been obliged, by a strange and ingenious combina tion of accidents, to make violent entrance, incidentally damaging the persons and prop erty of others, into the lands and tenements of his neighbor. And further away yet the droning lawyer had set a-travelling the thoughts of Horace Walpole, clerk for Messrs. Weeden, Snowden 132 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF & Gilfeather ; for the young man sat with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, a sad half-smile on his lips, and his brown eyes looking through vacancy to St. Lawrence County, New York. He saw a great, shabby old house, shabby with the awful shabbiness of a sham grandeur laid bare by time and mocked by the pitiless weather. There was a great sham Grecian portico at one end ; the white paint was well- nigh washed away, and the rain-streaked wooden pillars seemed to be weeping tears of penitence for having lied about them selves and pretended to be marble. The battened walls were cracked and blistered. The Grecian temple on the hillock near looked much like a tomb, and not at all like a summer-house. The flower-garden was so rank and ragged, so overgrown with weed and vine, that it was spared the morti fication of revealing its neglected maze, the wonder of the county in 1820. All was sham, save the decay. That was real ; and by virtue of its decrepitude the old house seemed to protest against modern contempt, as though it said : " I have had my day. I was built when people thought this sort of THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 133 thing was the right sort of thing ; when we had our own little pseudo-classic renaissance in America. I lie between the towns of Aristotle and Sabine Farms. I am a gentle man's residence, and my name is Montevista. I was built by a prominent citizen. You need not laugh through your lattices, you smug new Queen Anne cottage, down there in the valley ! What will become of you when the falsehood is found out of your imitation bricks and your tiled roof of shingles, and your stained glass that is only a sheet of transparent paper pasted on a pane ? You are a young sham ; I am an old one. Have some respect for age ! " Its age was the crowning glory of the estate of Montevista. There was nothing new on the place except a third mortgage. Yet had Montevista villa put forth a juster claim to respect, it would have said : " I have had my day. Where all is desolate and silent now, there was once light and life. Along these halls and corridors, the arteries of my being, pulsed a hot blood of joyous humanity, fed with delicate fare, kindled with generous wine. Every corner under my roof was alive with love and hope and 134 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF ambition. Great men and dear women were here ; and the host was great and the hostess was gracious among them all. The laughter of children thrilled my gaudily decked stucco. To-day an old man walks up and down my lonely drawing-rooms, with bent head, mur muring to himself odds and ends of tawdry old eloquence, wandering in a dead land of memory, waiting till Death shall take him by the hand and lead him out of his ruinous house, out of his ruinous life." Death had indeed come between Horace and the creation of his spiritual vision. Never again should the old man walk, as to the boy's eyes he walked now, over the creaking floors, from where the Nine Muses simpered on the walls of the south parlor to where Homer and Plutarch, equally simpering, yet simpering with a difference severely simp ering faced each other across the north room. Horace saw his father stalking on his accustomed round, a sad, familiar figure, tall and bent. The hands were clasped behind the back, the chin was bowed on the black stock ; but every now and then the thin form drew itself straight, the fine, clean-shaven, aquiline face was raised, beaming with the THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 135 ghost of an old enthusiasm, and the long right arm was lifted high in the air as he be gan, his sonorous tones a little tremulous in spite of the restraint of old-time pomposity and deliberation, " Mr. Speaker, I rise ; " or, " If your Honor please " The forlorn, helpless earnestness of this mockery of life touched Horace's heart ; and yet he smiled to think how different were the methods and manners of his father from those of brother Hooper, whose requests still droned up to the reverberating hollows of the roof, and there were lost in a subdued boom and snarl of echoes such as a court room only can beget. Two generations ago, when the Honorable Horace Kortlandt Walpole was the rising young lawyer of the State; when he was known as " the Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Lawrence County," he was in the habit of assuming that he owned whatever court he practised in ; and, as a rule, he was right. The most bullock -brained of country judges deferred to the brilliant young master of law and eloquence, and his " requests " were gen erally accepted as commands and obeyed 136 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF as such. Of course the great lawyer, for form's sake, threw a veil of humility over his deliverances ; but even that he rent to shreds when the fire of his eloquence once got fairly aglow. " May it please your Honor ! Before your Honor exercises the sacred prerogative of your office before your Honor performs the sacred duty which the State has given into your hands before, with that lucid genius to which I bow my head, you direct the minds of these twelve good men and true in the path of strict judicial investigation, I ask your Honor to instruct them that they must bring to their deliberations that im partial justice which the laws of our beloved country of which no abler exponent than your Honor has ever graced the bench which the laws of our beloved country guar antee to the lowest as well as to the loftiest of her citizens from the President in the Exec utive Mansion to the humble artisan at the forge throughout this broad land, from the lagoons of Louisiana to where the snow-clad forests of Maine hurl defiance at the descend ants of Tory refugees in the barren wastes of Nova Scotia " THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 137 Horace remembered every word and every gesture of that speech. He recalled even the quick upward glance from under the shaggy eyebrows with which his father seemed to see again the smirking judge catching at the gross bait of flattery ; he knew the little pause which the speaker's memory had filled with the applause of an audience long since dispersed to various silent country grave yards ; and he wondered, pityingly, if it were possible that even in his father's prime that wretched allusion to old political hatreds had power to stir the fire of patriotism in the citizen's bosom. " Poor old father ! " said the boy to him self. The' voice which had for so many years been but an echo was stilled wholly now. Brief victory and long defeat were nothing now to the golden-mouthed orator. "Shall I fail as he failed?" thought Horace : " No ! I can't. Haven't I got her to work for?" And then he drew out of his breast-pocket a red silk handkerchief and turned it over in his hand with a movement that concealed and caressed at the same time. It was a very red handkerchief. It was 138 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF not vermilion, nor " cardinal," nor carmine, a strange Oriental idealization of blood- red which lay well on the soft, fine, luxurious fabric. But it was an unmistakable, a shame less, a barbaric red. And as he looked at it, young Hitchcock, of Hitchcock & Van Rensselaer, came up behind him and leaned over his shoulder. "Where did you get the handkerchief, Walpole ? " he whispered ; " you ought to hang that out for an auction flag, and sell out your cases." Horace stuffed it back in his pocket. " You'd be glad enough to buy some of them, if you got the show," he returned ; but the opportunity for a prolonged contest of wit was cut short. The judge was folding his letter, and the nasal counsel, having finished his reading, stood gazing in doubt and trepi dation at the bench, and asking himself why his Honor had not passed on each point as presented. He found out. " Are you prepared to submit those requests in writing ? " demanded Gillespie, J., sharply and suddenly. He knew well enough that that poor little nasal, nervous junior counsel would never have trusted himself to speak THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 139 ten consecutive sentences in court without having every word on paper before him. "Ye-yes," the counsel stammered, and handed up his careful manuscript. "I will examine these to-night," said his Honor, and, apparently, he made an endorse ment on the papers. He was really writing the address on the envelope of his letter. Then there was a stir, and a conversation between the judge and two or three lawyers, all at once, which was stopped when his Honor gave an Olympian nod to the clerk. The crier arose. " He' ye ! he' ye ! he' ye ! " he shouted with perfunctory vigor. " Wah wah wah ! " the high ceiling slapped back at him ; and he declaimed, on one note, a brief ad dress to " Awperns han bins " in that court, of which nothing was comprehensible save the words " Monday next at eleven o'clock." And then the court collectively rose, and in dividually put on hats for the most part of the sort called queer. All the people were chattering in low voices ; chairs were moved noisily, and the slumbering juror opened his weary eyes and troubled himself with an uncalled-for effort 140 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF to look as though he had been awake all the time and didn't like the way things were going, at all. Horace got from the clerk the papers for which he had been waiting, and was passing out, when his Honor saw him and hailed him with an expressive grunt. Gillespie, J., looked over his spectacles at Horace. " Shall you see Judge Weeden at the of fice ? Yes ? Will you have the kindness to give him this yes? If it's no trouble to you, of course." Gillespie, J., was not over-careful of the feelings of lawyers' clerks, as a rule ; but he had that decent disinclination to act ultra prcescriptum which marks the attitude of the well-bred man toward his inferiors in office. He knew that he had no business to use Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather's clerk as a messenger in his private correspondence. Horace understood him, took the letter, and allowed himself a quiet smile when he reached the crowded corridor. What mattered, he thought, as his brisk feet clattered down the wide stairs of the rotunda, the petty insolence of office now? He was Gillespie's messenger to-day; but THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 141 had not his young powers already received recognition from a greater than Gillespie? If Judge Gillespie lived long enough he should put his gouty old legs under Judge "Walpole's mahogany, and prose over his port yes, he should have port, like the relic of mellow old days that he was of the times "when your father-in-law and I, Walpole, were boys together." Ah, there you have the spell of the Red Silk Handkerchief ! It was a wonderful tale to Horace ; for he saw it in that wonderful light which shall shine on no man of us more than once in his life on some of us not at all, Heaven help us ! but, in the telling, it is a simple tale : " The Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Law rence " was at the height of his fame in that period of storm and stress which had the civil war for its climax. His misfortune was to be drawn into a contest for which he was not equipped, and in which he had little interest. His sphere of action was far from the battle-ground of the day. The intense localism that bounded his knowledge and his sympathies had but one break he had tasted in his youth the extravagant hospitality of 142 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF the South, and he held it in grateful remem brance. So it happened that he was a trim mer a moderationist he called himself a man who dealt in optimistic generalities, and who thought that if everybody the slaves included would only act temperately and reasonably, and view the matter from the stand-point of pure policy, the differences of South and North could be settled as easily as, through his own wise intervention, the old turnip-field feud of Farmer Oliver and Farm er Bunker had been wiped out of existence. His admirers agreed with him, and they sent him to Congress to fill the unexpired short term of their representative, who had just died in Washington of what we now know as a malarial fever. It was not to be expected, perhaps, that the Honorable Mr. Walpole would succeed in putting a new face on the great political question in the course of his first term ; but they all felt sure that his first speech would startle men who had never heard better than what Daniel Webster had had to offer them. But the gods were against the Honorable Mr. Walpole. On the day set for his great effort there was what the theatrical people THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 143 call a counter-attraction. Majah Pike had come up from Mizourah, sah, to cane that demn'd Yankee hound, Chahles Sumnah, sah, yes, sah, to thrash him like a dawg, begad ! And all "Washington had turned out to see the performance, which was set down for a certain hour, in front of Mr. Sumner's door. There was just a quorum when the golden- mouthed member began his great speech, an inattentive, chattering crowd, that paid no attention to his rolling rhetoric and rococo grandiloquence. He told the empty seats what a great country this was, and how beau tiful was a middle policy, and he illustrated this with a quotation from Homer, in the original Greek (a neat novelty : Latin was fashionable for parliamentary use in Web ster's time), with, for the benefit of the un educated, the well-known translation by the great Alexander Pope, commencing : " To calm their passions with the words of Age, Slow from his seat arose the Pylian sage, Experienced Nestor, in Persuasion skilled, Words sweet as honey from his lips distilled." When Nestor and Mr. Walpole closed, there was no quorum. The member from 144 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF New Jersey, who had engaged him in debate, was sleeping the sleep of honorable intoxica tion in his seat. Outside, all Washington was laughing and cursing. Majah Pike had not appeared. It was the end of the golden-mouthed orator. His voice was never heard again in the House. His one speech was noticed only to be laughed at, and the news went home to his constituents. They showed that mag nanimity which the poets tell us is an at tribute of the bucolic character. They, so to speak, turned over the pieces of their broken idol with their cow-hide boots, and remarked that they had known it was clay, all along, and dern poor clay at that. So the golden-mouthed went home, to try to make a ruined practice repair his ruined fortune; to give mortgages on his home to pay the debts his hospitality had incurred ; to discuss with a few feeble old friends ways and means by which the war might have been averted ; to beget a son of his old age, and to see the boy grow up in a new generation, with new ideas, new hopes, new ambitions, and a lifetime before him to make memories in. THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 145 They had little enough in common, but they came to be great friends as the boy grew older, for Horace inherited all his traits from the old man, except a certain stern energy which came from his silent, strong-hearted mother, and which his father saw with a sad joy- Mr. Walpole sent his son to New York to study law in the office of Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather, who were a pushing young firm in 1850. Horace found it a very quiet and conservative old concern. Snowden and Gilfeather were dead ; Weeden had been on the bench and had gone off the bench at the call of a " lucrative practice ; " there were two new partners, whose names appeared only on the glass of the office door and in a corner of the letter-heads. Horace read his law to some purpose. He became the managing clerk of Messrs. Weed- en, Snowden & Gilfeather. This particular managing clerkship was one of unusual dig nity and prospective profit. It meant, as it always does, great responsibility, little honor, and less pay. But the firm was so peculiarly constituted that the place was a fine stepping- stone for a bright and ambitious boy. One 10 146 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF of the new partners was a business man, who had put his money into the concern in 1860, and who knew and cared nothing about law. He kept the books and managed the money, and was beyond that only a name on the door and a terror to the office-boys. The other new partner was a young man who made a specialty of collecting debts. He could wring gold out of the stoniest and barrenest debtor; and there his usefulness ended. The general practice of the firm rested on the shoulders of Judge Weeclen, who was old, lazy, and luxury-loving, and who, to tell the honest truth, shirked his duties. Such a state of affairs would have wrecked a younger house; but Weeden ? Siiowden & Gilfeather had a great name, and the consequences of his negligent feebleness had not yet descended upon Judge "Weeden's head. That they would, in a few years, that the Judge knew it, and that he was quite ready to lean on a strong young arm, Horace saw clearly. That his own arm was growing in strength he also saw ; and the Judge knew that, too. He was Judge Weeden's pet. All in the of- THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 147 fice recognized the fact. All, after reflection, concluded that it was a good thing that he was. New blood had to come into the firm sooner or later, and although it was not pos sible to watch the successful rise of this boy without a little natural envy and heart-burn ing, yet it was to be considered that Horace was one who would be honorable, just, and generous wherever fortune put him. Horace was a gentleman. They all knew it. Barnes and Haskins, the business man and the champion collector, knew it down in the shallows of their vulgar little souls. Judge "Weeden, who had some of that mysterious ichor of gentlehood in his wine-fed veins, knew it and rejoiced in it. And Horace I can say for Horace that he never forgot it. He was such a young prince of managing clerks that no one was surprised when he was sent down to Sand Hills, Long Island, to make preparations for the reorganization of the Great Breeze Hotel Company, and the trans fer of the property known as the Breeze Hotel and Park to its new owners. The Breeze Hotel was a huge " Queen Anne " vagary which had, after the fashion of hotels, bank rupted its first owners, and was now going 148 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF into the hands of new people, who were likely to make their fortunes out of it. The prop erty had been in litigation for a year or so ; the mechanics' liens were numerous, and the mechanics clamorous; and although the business was not particularly complicated, it needed careful and patient adjustment. Hor ace knew the case in every detail. He had drudged over it all the winter, with no espe cial hope of personal advantage, but simply because that was his way of working. He went down in June to the mighty barracks, and lived for a week in what would have been an atmosphere of paint and carpet-dye had it not been for the broad sea-wind that blew through the five hundred open windows, and swept rooms and corridors with salty fresh ness. The summering folk had not arrived yet ; there were only the new manager and his six score of raw recruits of clerks and ser vants. But Horace felt the warm blood com ing back to his cheeks, that the town had somewhat paled, and he was quite content ; and every day he went down to the long, lonely beach, and had a solitary swim, al though the sharp water whipped his white skin to a biting red. The sea takes a long THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 149 I while to warm up to the summer, and is sul len about it. He was to have returned to New York at the end of the week, and Haskins was to have taken his place ; but it soon became evident to Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather that the young man would attend to all that was to be done at Sand Hills quite as well as Mr. Has kins, or quite as well as Judge Weeden himself for that matter. He had to shoulder no great responsibility ; the work was mostly of a purely clerical nature, vexatious enough, but simple. It had to be done on the spot, however ; the original Breeze Hotel and Park Company was composed of Sand Hillers, and the builders were Sand Hillers, too, the bet ter part of them. And there were titles to be searched; for the whole scheme was an ambitious splurge of Sand Hills pride and it had been undertaken and carried out in a reckless and foolish way. Horace knew all the wretched little details of the case, and so Horace was entrusted with duties such as do not often devolve upon a man of his years ; and he took up his burden proudly, and with a glowing consciousness of his own strength. Judge Weeden missed his active and intel- 150 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF ligent obedience in the daily routine of office business ; but the Judge thought that it was just as well that Horace should not know the fact. The young man's time would come soon enough, and he would be none the worse for serving his apprenticeship in modesty and humility. The work entrusted to him was an honor in itself. And then, there was no reason why poor Walpole's boy shouldn't have a sort of half-holiday out in the country and enjoy his youth. He was not recalled. The week stretched out. He worked hard, found time to play, hugged his quickened ambitions to his breast, wrote hopeful letters to the mother at Mon- tevesta, made a luxury of his loneliness, and felt a bashful resentment when the " guests " of the hotel began to pour in from the out side world. For a day or two he fought shy of them. But these first-comers were lonely, too, and not so much in love with loneliness as he thought he was, and very soon he became one of them. He had found out all the walks and drives ; he knew the times of the tides ; he had made friends with the fishermen for a league up and down the coast, and he had THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 151 amassed a store of valuable hints as to where the first blue-fish might be expected to run. Altogether he was a very desirable com panion. Besides, that bright, fresh face of his, and a certain look in it, made you friends with him at once, especially if you happened to be a little older, and to remember a look of the sort, lost, lost forever, in a boy's look ing-glass. So he was sought out, and he let himself be found, and the gregarious instinct in him waxed delightfully. And then It came. Perhaps I should say She came, but it is not the woman we love ; it is our dream of her. Sweet and tender, fair and good, she may be ; but let it be honor enough for her that she has that glory about her face which our love kindles to the halo that lights many a man's life to the grave, though the face beneath it be dead or false. I will not admit that it was only a pretty girl from Philadelphia who came to Sand Hills that first week in July. It was the rosy goddess herself, dove-drawn across the sea, in the warm path of the morning sun although the tremulous, old-fashioned hand- 152 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF writing on the hotel register only showed that the early train had brought " Samuel Rittenhouse, Philadelphia. " Miss Bittenhouse, do." It was the Honorable Samuel Rittenhouse, ex-Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, the hon ored head of the Pennsylvania bar, and the legal representative of the Philadelphia con tingent of the New Breeze Hotel and Park Company. In the evening Horace called upon him in his rooms with a cumbersome stack of papers, and patiently waded through explanations and repetitions until Mr. Rittenhouse's testy courtesy he had the nervous manner of age apprehensive of youthful irreverence melted into a complacent and fatherly geniality. Then, when the long task was done and his young guest arose, he picked up the card that lay on the table and trained his glasses on it. " ' H. K. Walpole ? '" he said. " Are you a New Yorker, sir ? " " From the north of the State," Horace told him. "Indeed, indeed. Why, let me see you THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 153 must be the son of my old friend Walpole of Otsego wasn't it ? " said the old gentle man, still tentatively. "St. Lawrence, sir." " Yes, St. Lawrence of course, of course. Why, I knew your father well, years ago, sir. We were at college together." "At Columbia?" " Yes yes. Why, bless me," Judge Eit- tenhouse went on, getting up to look at Hor ace, " you're the image of your poor father at your age. A very brilliant man, sir, a very able man. I did not see much of him after we left college I was a Pennsylvanian, and he was from this State but I have always remembered your father with respect and re gard, sir a very able man. I think I heard of his death some years ago." "Three years ago," said Horace. His voice fell somewhat. How little to this old man of success was the poor, unnoticed death of failure ! " Three years only ! " repeated the Judge, half apologetically. "Ah, people slip away from each other in this world slip away. But I am glad to have met you, sir very much pleased indeed. Rosamond ! " 154: THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF For an hour the subdued creaking of a rocking-chair by the window had been play ing a monotonously pleasant melody in Hor ace's ears. Now and then a coy wisp of bright hair, or the reflected ghost of it, had flashed into view in the extreme lower left- hand corner of a mirror opposite him. Once he had seen a bit of white brow under it, and from time to time the low flutter of turning magazine leaves had put in a brief second to the rocking-chair. All this time Horace's brains had been among the papers on the table; but some thing else within him had been swaying to and fro with the rocking-chair, and giving a leap when the wisp of hair bobbed into sight. Now the rocking-chair accompaniment ceased, and the curtained corner by the win dow yielded up its treasure, and Miss Eitten- house came forward, with one hand brushing the wisp of hair back into place, as if she were on easy and familiar terms with it. Horace envied it. "Rosamond," said the Judge, "this is Mr. "Walpole, the son of my old friend "VValpole. You have heard me speak of Mr. "Walpole's father." THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 155 " Yes, papa," said the young lady, all but the corners of her mouth. And, oddly enough, Horace did not think of being sad dened because this young woman had never heard of his father. Life was going on a new key, all of a sudden, with a hint of a melody to be unfolded that ran in very different cadences from the poor old tune of memory. My heroine, over whose head some twenty summers had passed, was now in the luxuri ant prime of her youthful beauty. Over a brow whiter than the driven snow fell cluster ing ringlets, whose hue That is the way the good old novelists and story tellers of the Neville and Beverley days would have set out to describe Miss Kittenhouse, had they known her. Fools and blind ! As if anyone could describe as if a poet, even, could more than hint at what a man sees in a woman's face when, seeing, he loves. For a few moments the talkers were con strained, and the talk was meagre and desul tory. Then the Judge, who had been rum maging around among the dust-heaps of his memory, suddenly recalled the fact that he had once, in stage-coach days, passed a night 156 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF at Montevista, and had been most hospitably treated. He dragged this fact forth, pro fessed a lively remembrance of Mrs. Wai- pole "a fine woman, sir, your mother ; a woman of many charms," asked after her present health ; and then, satisfied that he had acquitted himself of his whole duty, withdrew into the distant depths of his own soul and fumbled over the papers Horace had brought him, trying to familiarize himself with them, as a commander might try to learn the faces of his soldiers. Then the two young people proceeded to find the key together, and began a most har monious duet. Sand Hills was the theme. Thus it was that they had to go out on the balcony, where Miss Rittenhouse might gaze into the brooding darkness over the sea, and watch it wink a slow yellow eye with a humor ous alternation of sudden and brief red. Thus, also, Horace had to explain how the light-house was constructed. This moved Miss Bittenhouse to scientific research. She must see how it was done. Mr. Walpole would be delighted to show her. Papa was so much interested in those mechanical mat ters. Mr. Walpole had a team and light THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 157 wagon at his disposal, and would very much liko to drive Miss Eittenhouse and her father over to the light-house. Miss Eittenhouse communicated this kind offer to her father. Her father saw what was expected of him, and dutifully acquiesced, like an obedient American father. Miss Eittenhouse had managed the Eittenhouse household and the head of the house of Eittenhouse ever since her mother's death. Mr. Walpole really had a team at his dis posal. He came from a country where people do not chase foxes, nor substitutes for foxes ; but where they know and revere a good trotter. He had speeded many a friend's horse in training for the county fair. When he came to Sand Hills his soundness in the equine branch of a gentleman's education had attracted the attention of a horsey Sand- Hiller, who owned a showy team with a record of 2.37. This team was not to be trusted to the ordinary summer boarder on any terms ; but the Sand-Hiller was thrifty and appreciative, and he lured Horace into hiring the turnout at a trifling rate, and thus captured every cent the boy had to spare, and got his horses judiciously exercised. 158 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF There was a showy light wagon to match the team, and the next day the light wagon, with Horace and the Rittenhouses in it, passed every carriage on the road to the light-house, where Miss Kittenhouse satisfied her scientific spirit with one glance at the lantern, after giving which glance she went outside and sat in the shade of the white tower with Horace, while the keeper showed the machinery to the Judge. Perhaps she went to the Judge afterward, and got him to explain it all to her. Thus it began, and for two golden weeks thus it went on. The reorganized Breeze Hotel and Park Company met in business session on its own property, and Horace acted as a sort of honorary clerk to Judge Rittenhouse. The company, as a company, talked over work for a couple of hours each day. As a congregation of individuals, it ate and drank and smoked and played billiards and fished and slept the rest of the two dozen. Horace had his time pretty much to himself, or rather to Miss Kittenhouse, who monopo lized it. He drove her to the village to match embroidery stuffs. He danced with her in the evenings, when two stolidly soulful Ger- THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 159 mans, one with a fiddle and the other with a piano, made the vast dining-room ring and hum with Suppe and Waldteufel, and this was to the great and permanent improvement of his waltzing. She taught him how to play lawn-tennis he was an old-fashioned boy from the backwoods, and he thought that croquet was still in existence, so she had to teach him to play lawn -tennis until he learned to play much better than she could. On the other hand, he was a fresh-water swimmer of rare wind and wiriness, and a young sea-god in the salt, as soon as he got used to its pungent strength. So he taught her to strike out beyond the surf-line, with broad, breath-long sweeps, and there to float and dive and make friends with the ocean. Even he taught her to fold her white arms behind her back, and swim with her feet. As he glanced over his shoulder to watch her following him, and to note the timorous, ad miring crowd on the shore, she seemed a sea- bred Venus of Milo in blue serge. I have known men to be bored by such matters. They made Horace happy. He was happiest, perhaps, when he found out that she was studying Latin. All the girls 160 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF in Philadelphia were studying Latin that summer. They had had a little school Latin, of course ; but now their aims were loftier. Miss Eittenhouse had brought with her a Harkness's Virgil, an Anthon's diction ary, an old Bullion & Morris, and yes, when Horace asked her, she had brought an Inter linear ; but she didn't mean to use it. They rowed out to the buoy, and put the Inter linear in the sea. They sat on the sands after the daily swim, and enthusiastically labored, with many an unclassic excursus, over P. Y.Maronis Opera. Horace borrowed some books of a small boy in the hotel, and got up at five o'clock in the morning to run a couple of hundred lines or so ahead of his pupil, " getting out " a stint that would have made him lead a revolt had any teacher im posed it upon his class a few years before for he was fresh enough from school to have a little left of the little Latin that col leges give. He wondered how it was that he had never seen the poetry of the lines before. Forsan et hcec olim meminisse juvabit for perchance it will joy us hereafter to remember these things ! He saw the wet and weary sailors THE EED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 161 on the shore, hungrily eating, breathing hard after their exertions ; he heard the deep cheerfulness of their leader's voice . The wind blew toward him over the pine barrens, as fresh as ever it blew past Dido's towers. A whiff of briny joviality and adventurous recklessness seemed to come from the page on his knee. And to him, also, had not She appeared who saw, hard by the sea, that pious old buccaneer-Lothario, so much tossed about on land and upon the deep ? This is what the moderns call a flirtation, and I do not doubt that it was called a flirta tion by the moderns around these two young people. Somehow, though, they never got themselves " talked about," not even .by the stranded nomads on the hotel verandas. Perhaps this was because there was such a joyous freshness and purity about both of them that it touched the hearts of even the slander-steeped old dragons who rocked all day in the shade, and embroidered tidies and talked ill of their neighbors. Perhaps it was because they also had that about them which the mean and vulgar mind always sneers at, jeers at, affects to disbelieve in, always recog nizes and fears the courage and power of 11 162 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF the finer strain. Envy in spit-curls and jeal ousy in a false front held their tongues, may be, because, though they knew that they, and even their male representatives, were safe from any violent retort, yet they recognized the superior force, and shrunk from it as the cur edges away from the quiescent whip. There is a great difference, too, between the flirtations of the grandfatherless and the flir tations of the grandfathered. I wish you to understand that Mr. Walpole and Miss Rit- tenhouse did not sprawl through their flirta tion, nor fall into that slipshod familiarity which takes all the delicate beauty of dignity and mutual respect out of such a friendship. Horace did not bow to the horizontal, and Miss Rittenhouse did not make a cheese cake with her skirts when he held open the door for her to pass through ; but the bond of courtesy between them was no less sweetly gracious on her side, no less finely reverential on his, than the taste of their grandparents' day would have exacted no less earnest, I think, that it was a little easier than puff and periwig might have made it. Yet I also think, whatever was the reason that made the dragons let them alone, that a THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 163 simple mother of the plain, old-fashioned style is better for a girl of Miss Eosamond Eittenhouse's age than any such precarious immunity from annoyance. Ah, the holiday was short ! The summons soon came for Horace. They went to the old church together for the second and last time, and he stood beside her, and they held the hymn-book between them. Horace could not rid himself of the idea that they had stood thus through every Sun day of a glorious summer. The week before he had sung with her. He had a boyish bari tone in him, one of those which may be some what extravagantly characterized as consist ing wholly of middle register. It was a good voice for the campus, and, combined with that startling clearness of utterance which young collegians acquire, had been very effective in the little church. But to-day he had no heart to sing "Byefield" and " Pleyel ; " he would rather stand beside her and feel his heart vibrate to the deep lower notes of her tender contralto, and his soul rise with the higher tones that soared upward from her pure young breast. And all the while he was making that act of devotion 164: THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF which " uttered or unexpressed " is, in deed, all the worship earth has ever known. Once she looked up at him as if she asked, " Why don't you sing? " But her yes fell quickly, he thought with a shade of displeas ure in them at something they had seen in his. Yet as he watched her bent head, the cheek near him warmed with a slow, soft blush. He may only have fancied that her clear voice quivered a little with a tremulo not written in the notes at the top of the page. And now the last day came. "When the work-a-day world thrust its rough shoulder into Arcadia, and the hours of the idyl were numbered, they set to talking of it as though the two weeks that they had known each other were some sort of epitomized summer. Of course they were to meet again, in New York or in Philadelphia ; and of course there were many days of summer in store for Miss Kittenhouse at Sand Hills, at Newport, and at Mount Desert ; but Horace's brief season was closed, and somehow she seemed to fall readily into his way of looking upon it as a golden period of special and important value, their joint and exclusive property something set apart from all the rest of her holiday, THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 165 where there would be other men and other good times and no Horace. It was done with much banter and merri ment; but through it all Horace listened for delicate undertones that should echo to his ear the earnestness which sometimes rang irrepressibly in his own speech. In that marvellous instrument, a woman's voice, there are strange and fine possibilities of sound that may be the messengers of the subtlest intelligence or the sweet falterings of imper fect control. So Horace, with love to con strue for him, did not suffer too cruelly from disappointment. On the afternoon of that last day they sat upon the beach and saw the smoke of Dido's funeral pile go up, and they closed the dog's- eared Yirgil, and, looking seaward, watched the black clouds from a coaling steamer mar the blinding blue where sea and sky blent at the horizon, watched it grow dull and faint, and fade away, and the illumined tur quoise reassert itself. Then he was for a farewell walk, and she, with that bright acquiescence with which a young girl can make companionship almost perfect, if she will, accepted it as an inspira- 166 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF tion, and they set out. They visited to gether the fishermen's houses, where Horace bade good-by to mighty fisted friends, who stuck their thumbs inside their waistbands and hitched their trousers half way up to their blue-shirted arms, and said to him, " You come up here in Orgust, Mr. Walpole say 'bout the fus't' the third week 'n Or gust, 'n' we'll give yer some bloo-fishin' 't y' won't need t' lie about, neither." They all liked him, and heartily. Old Eufe, the gruff hermit of the fishers, who lived a half-mile beyond the settlement, flicked his shuttle through the net he was mending, and did not look up as Horace spoke to him. " Goin' ? " he said ; " waal, we've all gotter go some time or uther. The' ain't no real perma-nen-cy on this uth. Goin' ? Waal, I'm " he paused, and weighed the shuttle in his hand as though to aid him in balancing some important mental process. " Sho ! I'm derned 'f I ain't sorry. Squall comin' up, an' don't y' make no mistake," he hurried on, not to be further committed to unguarded ex pression ; "better look sharp, or y'll git a wettin'." THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 167 A little puff of gray cloud, scurrying along in the southeast, had spread over half the sky, and now came a strong, eddying wind. A big raindrop made a dark spot on the sand before them; another fell on Miss Ritten- house's cheek, and then, with a vicious, un certain patter, the rain began to come down. " We'll have to run for Poinsett's," said Horace, and stretched out his hand. She took it, and they ran. Poinsett's was just ahead a white house on a lift of land, close back of the shore line, with a long garden stretching down in front, and two or three poplar trees. The wind was turning up the pale undersides of grass- blade and flower leaf, and whipping the shivering poplars silver white. Cap'n Poin- sett, late of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was tacking down the path in his pea-jacket, with his brass telescope tucked under his arm. He was'making for the little white summer-house that overhung the shore ; but he stopped to admire the two young people dashing up the slope toward him, for the girl ran with a splendid free stride that kept her well abreast of Horace's athletic lope. " Come in," he said, opening the gate. 168 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF and smiling on the two young faces, flushed and wet; "come right in out o' the rain. Be'n runnin', ain't ye? Go right int' the house. Mother ! " he called, " here's Mr. "Walpole 'n' his young lady. You'll hev to ex-cuse me ; I'm a-goin' down t' my observa tory. I carn't foller the sea no longer myself, but I can look at them that dooz. There's my old woman go right in." He waddled off, leaving both of them red der than their run accounted for, and Mrs. Poinsett met them at the door, her arms folded in her apron. " "Walk right in," she greeted them ; " the cap'n he mus' always go down t' his observa tory, 's he calls it, 'n' gape through thet old telescope of hisn, fust thing the 's a squall jus' 's if he thought he was skipper of all Long Island. But you come right int' the settin'-room 'n' make yourselves to home. Dear me suz ! 'f I'd 'a' thought I'd 'a' had company I'd 'a' tidied things up. I'm jus' 's busy, as busy, gettin' supper ready ; but don't you mind me jus' you make yourselves to home," and she drifted chattering away, and they heard her in the distant kitchen amiably nagging the hired girl. THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 169 It was an old-time, low-ceiled room, neat with New England neatness. The windows had many pains of green flint glass, through which they saw the darkening storm swirl over the ocean and ravage the flower-beds near by. And when they had made an end of watch ing Cap'n Poinsett in his little summer-house, shifting his long glass to follow each scud ding sail far out in the darkness ; and when they had looked at the relics of Cap'n Poin sett' s voyages to the Orient and the Arctic, and at the cigar-boxes plastered with little shells, and at the wax fruit, and at the family trousers and bonnets in the album, there was nothing left but that Miss Eittenhouse should sit down at the old piano, bought for Amanda Jane in the last year of the war, and bring forth rusty melody from the yel lowed keys. " What a lovely voice she has ! ""thought Horace as she sang. No doubt he was right. I would take his word against that of a pro fessor of music, who would have told you that it was a nice voice for a girl, and that the young woman had more natural dramatic expression than technical training. 170 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF They fished out Amanda Jane's music- books, and went through " Juanita," and the " Evergreen Waltz," and " Beautiful Isle of the Sea ; " and, finding a lot of war-songs, severally and jointly announced their deter mination to invade Dixie Land, and to anni hilate Rebel Hordes ; and adjured each other to remember Sumter and Baltimore, and many other matters that could have made but slight impression on their young minds twenty odd years before. Mrs. Poinsett, in the kitchen, stopped nagging her aid, and thought of young John Tarbox Poinsett's name on a great sheet of paper in the Glou cester post-office, one morning at the end of April, 1862, when the news came that Farra- gut had passed the forts. The squall was going over, much as it had come, only no one paid attention to its move ments now, for the sun was out, trying to straighten up the crushed grass and flowers, and to brighten the hurrying waves, and to soothe the rustling agitation of the pop lars. They must have one more song. Miss Eittenhouse chose " Jeannette and Jeannot," and when she looked back at him with THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 171 a delicious coy mischief in her eyes, and sang, " There is no one left to love me now, And you too may forget " Horace felt something flaming in his cheeks and choking in his breast, and it was hard for him to keep from snatching those hands from the keys and telling her she knew bet ter. But he was man enough not to. He con trolled himself, and made himself very pleas ant to Mrs. Poinsett about not staying to supper, and they set out for the hotel. The air was cool and damp after the rain. " You've been singing," said Horace, " and you will catch cold in this air, and lose your voice. You must tie this handkerchief around your throat." She took his blue silk handkerchief and tied it around her throat, and wore it until just as they were turning away from the shore, when she took it off to return to him ; and the last gust of wind that blew that after noon whisked it out of her hand, and sent it whirling a hundred yards out to sea. 172 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF " Now, don't say a word," said Horace ; " it isn't of the slightest consequence." But he looked very gloomy over it. He had made up his mind that that silk hand kerchief should be the silk handkerchief of all the world to him, from that time on. It was one month later that Mr. H. K. Walpole received, in care of Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather, an envelope post marked Newport, containing a red silk hand kerchief. His initials were neatly nay, beautifully, exquisitely stitched in one cor ner. But there was absolutely nothing about the package to show who sent it, and Horace sorrowed over this. Not that he was in any doubt ; but he felt that it meant to say that he must not acknowledge it ; and, loyally, he did not. And he soon got over that grief. The lost handkerchief, whose origin was base and com mon, like other handkerchiefs, and whose sanctity was purely accidental what was it to this handkerchief, worked by her for him ? This became the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that had changed the boy's whole life. Before this he THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 173 had had purposes and ambitions. He had meant to take care of his mother, to do well in the world, and to restore, if he could, the honor and glory of the home his father had left him. Here were duty, selfishness, and an innocent vanity. But now he had an end in life, so high that the very seeking of it was a religion. Every thought of self was flooded out of him, and what he sought he sought in a purer and nobler spirit than ever before. Is it not strange ? A couple of weeks at the sea-side, a few evenings under the brood ing darkness of hotel verandas, the going to and fro of a girl with a sweet face, and this ineradicable change is made in the mind of a man who has forty or fifty years before him wherein to fight the world, to find his place, to become a factor for good or evil. And here we have Horace, with his heart full of love and his head full of dreams, mooning over a silk handkerchief, in open court. Not that he often took such chances. The daws of humor peck at the heart worn on tho sleeve ; and quite rightly, for that is no place for a heart. But in the privacy of his modest 174 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF lodging-house room lie took the handkerchief out, and spread it before him, and looked at it, and kissed it sometimes, I suppose it seems ungentle to pry thus into the sacred- ness of a boy's love and, certainly, kept it in sight, working, studying, or thinking. With all this, the handkerchief became somewhat rumpled, and at last Horace felt that it must be brought back to the condition of neatness in which he first knew it. So, on a Tuesday, he descended to the kitchen of his lodging-house, and asked for a flat-iron. His good landlady, at the head of an indus trious, plump - armed Irish brigade, all vigorously smoothing out towels, stared at him in surprise. " If there's anything you want ironed, Mr. Walpole, bring it down here, and I'll be more'n glad to iron it for you." Horace grew red, and found his voice going entirely out of his control, as he tried to explain that it wasn't for that it wasn't for ironing clothes he was sure nobody could do it but himself. " Do you want it hot or cold ? " asked Mrs. Wilkins, puzzled. "Cold!" said Horace desperately. And THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 175 he got it cold, and had to heat it at his own fire to perform his labor of love. That was of a piece with many things he did. Of a piece, for instance, with his look ing in at the milliners' windows and trying to think which bonnet would best become her and then taking himself severely to task for dreaming that she would wear a ready-made bonnet. Of a piece with his buying two seats for the theatre, and going alone and fancying her next him, and glan cing furtively at the empty place at the points where he thought she would be amused, or pleased, or moved. What a fool he was ! Yes, my friend, and so are you and I. And remember that this boy's foolishness did not keep him tossing, stark awake, through ghastly nights ; did not start him up in the morning with a hot throat and an unrested brain; did not send him down to his day's work with the haunting, clutching, lurking fear that springs forward at every stroke of the clock, at every opening of the door. Perhaps you and I have known folly worse than his. Through all the winter the red handker chief cheered the hideous first Monday in 176 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF October, and the Christmas holidays, when business kept him from going home to Montevista he heard little or nothing of her. His friends in the city, or rather his father's friends, were all ingrained New Yorkers, dating from the provincial period, who knew not Philadelphia ; and it was only from an occasional newspaper paragraph that he learned that Judge Rittenhouse and his daughter were travelling through the South, for the Judge's health. Of course, he had a standing invitation to call on them whenever he should find himself in Philadelphia ; but they never came nearer Philadelphia than Washington, and so he never found himself in Philadelphia. He was not so sorry for this as you might think a lover should be. He knew that, with a little patience, he might present himself to Judge Eittenhouse as something more than a lawyer's managing clerk. For, meanwhile, good news had come from home, and things were going well with him. Mineral springs had been discovered at Aristotle mineral springs may be discovered anywhere in north New York, if you only try; though it is sometimes difficult to fit TEE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 177 them with the proper Indian legends. The name of the town had been changed to Avoca, and there was already an Avoca Improvement Company, building a big hotel, advertising right and left, and prophesying that the day of Saratoga and Sharon and Bichfield was ended. So the barrens between Montevista and Aristotle, skirting the railroad, suddenly took on a value. Hitherto they had been unsalable, except for taxes. For the most part they were an adjunct of the estate of Montevista ; and in February Horace went up to St. Lawrence County and began the series of sales that was to realize his father's most hopeless dream, and clear Montevista of all incumbrances. How pat it all came, he thought, as, on his return trip, the train carried him past the little old station, with its glaring new sign, AYOCA, just beyond the broad stretch of " Squire Walpole's bad land," now sprouting with the surveyors' stakes. After all was paid off on the old home, there would be enough left to enable him to buy out Haskins, who had openly expressed his desire to get into a " live firm," and who was willing to part with his interest for a reason- 12 178 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF able sum down, backed up by a succession of easy instalments. And Judge Weeden had intimated, as clearly as dignity would permit, his anxiety that Horace should seize the opportunity. Winter was still on the Jersey flats on the last day of March ; but Horace, waiting at a little " flag station," found the air full of crude prophecies of spring. He had been searching titles all day, in a close and gloomy little town -hall, and he was glad to be out-of- doors again, and to think that he should be back in New York by dinner time, for it was past five o'clock. But a talk with the station-master made the prospect less bright. No train would stop there until seven. Was there no other way of getting home ? The lonely guardian of the Gothic shanty thought it over, and found that there was a way. He talked of the trains as though they were whimsical creatures under his charge. " The 's a freight coming down right now," he said, meditatively, " but I can't do nothin' with her. She gotter get along mighty lively to keep ahead of the Express from Philadel- THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 179 pliia till she gets to the junction and goes on a siding till the Express goes past. And as to the Express why, I couldn't no more flag her than if she was a cyclone. But I tell you what you do. You walk right down to the junction 'bout a mile 'n' a half down and see if you can't do something with number ninety-seven on the other road. You see, she goes on to New York on our tracks, and she mostly 's in the habit of waiting at the junction 'bout say five to seven minutes, to give that Express from Philadelphia a fair start. That Express has it pretty much her own way on this road, for a fact. You go down to the junction walk right down the line and you '11 get ninety-seven there ain't no kind of doubt about it. You can't see the junc tion; but it's just half a mile beyont that curve down there." So there was nothing to be done but to walk to the junction. The railroad ran a straight, steadily descending mile on the top of a high embankment, and then suddenly turned out of sight around a ragged elevation. Horace buttoned his light overcoat, and tramped down the cinder-path between the tracks. 180 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF Yes, spring was coming. The setting sun beamed a soft, hopeful red over the shoulder of the ragged elevation ; light, drifting mists rose from the marsh land below him, and the last low rays struck a vapory opal through them. There was a warm, almost prismatic purple hanging over the outlines of the hills and woods far to the east. The damp air, even, had a certain languid warmth in it ; and though there was snow in the little hollows at the foot of the embankment, and bits of thin whitish ice were in the swampy pools, it was clear enough to Horace that spring was at hand. Spring and then summer; and, by the sea or in the mountains, the junior part ner of the house of Weeden, Snowden & Gil- feather might hope to meet once more with Judge Rittenhouse's daughter. The noise of the freight train, far up the track behind him, disturbed Horace's spring time revery. A forethought of rocking gravel- cars scattering the overplus of their load by the way, and of reeking oil-tanks, filling the air with petroleum, sent him down the em bankment to wait until the way was once more clear. The freight train went by and above him THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 181 with a long-drawn roar and clatter, and with a sudden fierce crash, and the shriek of iron upon iron, at the end, and the last truck of the last car came down the embankment, tearing a gully behind it, and ploughed a grave for itself in the marsh ten yards ahead of him. And, looking up, he saw a twisted rail rais ing its head like a shining serpent above the dim line of the embankment. A furious rush took Horace up the slope. A quarter of a mile below him the freight train was slipping around the curve. The fallen end of the last car was beating and tearing the ties. He heard the shrill shriek of the brakes and the fright ened whistle of the locomotive. But the grade was steep, and it was hard to stop. And if they did stop they were half a mile from the junction half a mile from their only chance of warning the Express. Horace heard in his ears the station- master's words : " She's gotter get along mighty lively to keep ahead of the Express from Philadelphia." " Mighty lively mighty lively " the words rang through his brain to the time of thundering car- wheels. He knew where he stood. He had made 182 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF three-quarters of the straight mile. He was three-quarters of a mile, then, from the little station. His overcoat was off in half a second. Many a time had he stripped, with that familiar movement, to trunks and sleeve less shirt, to run his mile or his half-mile; but never had such a thirteen hundred yards lain before him, up such a track, to be run for such an end. The sweat was on his forehead before his right foot passed his left. His young muscles strove and stretched. His feet struck the soft, unstable path of cinders with strong, regular blows. His tense forearms strained upward from his sides. Under his chest, thrown outward from his shoulders, was a constricting line of pain. His wet face burnt. There was a fire in his temples, and at every breath of his swelling nostrils something throbbed behind his eyes. The eyes saw nothing but a dan cing dazzle of tracks and ties, through a burn ing blindness. And his feet beat, beat, beat, till the shifting cinders seemed afire under him. That is what this human machine was do ing, going at this extreme pressure; every THE EED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 183 muscle, every breath, every drop of blood alive with the pain of this intense stress. Looking at it you would have said, " A fleet, light-limbed young man, with a stride like a deer, throwing the yards under him in fine style." All we know about the running other folks are making in this world! Half-way up the track Horace stopped short, panting hard, his heart beating like a crazy drum, a nervous shiver on him. Up the track there was a dull whirr, and he saw the engine of the express-train slipping down on him past the station already. The white mists from the marshes had risen up over the embankment. The last rays of the sunset shot through them, brill iant and blinding. Horace could see the engine ; but would the engineer see him, waving his hands in futile gestures, in time to stop on that slippery, sharp grade ? And of what use would be his choking voice when the dull whirr should turn into a roar ? For a moment, in his hopeless disappointment, Horace felt like throwing himself in the path of the train, like a wasted thing that had no right to live, after so great a failure. As will happen to those who are stunned 184: TEE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF by a great blow, his mind ran back mechan ically to the things nearest his heart, and in a flash he went through the two weeks of his life. And then, before the thought had time to form itself, he had brought a red silk handkerchief from his breast, and was wav ing it with both hands, a fiery crimson in the opal mist. Seen. The whistle shrieked ; there was a groan and a creak of brakes, the thunder of the train resolved itself into various rattling noises, the engine slipped slowly by him, and slowed down, and he stood by the platform of the last car as the express stopped. There was a crowd around Horace in an instant. His head was whirling, but in a dull way he said what he had to say. An officious passenger, who would have explained it all to the conductor if the conductor had waited, took the deliverer in his arms for the boy was near fainting and enlightened the pas sengers who flocked around. Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of one of the dozen flasks that were thrust at him. Noth ing was very clear in his mind ; as far as he could make out, his most distinct impression THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF 185 was of a broad, flat beach, a blue sea and a blue sky, a black steamer making a black trail of smoke across them, and a voice soft as an angel's reading Latin close by him. Then he opened his eyes and saw the woman of the voice standing in front of him. " Oh, Kichard," he heard her say, " it's Mr. Walpole ! " Horace struggled to his feet. She took his hand in both of hers and drew closer to him ; the crowd falling back a little, seeing that they were friends. " What can I ever say to thank you ? " she said. " You have saved our lives. It's not so much for myself, but" she blushed faintly, and Horace felt her hands tremble on his " Richard my husband we were married to-day, you know and " Something heavy and black came between Horace and life for a few minutes. When it passed away he straightened himself up out of the arms of the officious passenger and stared about him, mind and memory coming back to him. The people around looked at him oddly. A brakeman brought him his overcoat, and he stood unresistingly while it 186 THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF was slipped on him. Then he turned away and started down the embankment. "Hold on ! " cried the officious passenger ex citedly ; " we're getting up a testimonial " Horace never heard it. How he found his way he never cared to recall; but the gas was dim in the city streets, and the fire was out in his little lodging-house room when he came home ; and his narrow white bed knows all that I cannot tell of his tears and his broken dreams. "Walpole," said Judge Weeden, as he stood between the yawning doors of the of fice safe, one morning in June, "I observe that you have a private package here. Why do you not use the drawer of our our late associate, Mr. Haskins? It is yours now, you know. I'll put your package in it." He poised the heavily sealed envelope in his hand. "Very odd feeling package, "Walpole. Kemarkably soft ! " he said. " Well, bless me, it's none of my business, of course. Horace, how much you look like your father!" OUR AROMATIC UNCLE OUR AROMATIC UNCLE IT is always with a feeling of personal tenderness and regret that I recall his story, although it began long before I was born, and must have ended shortly after that important date, and although I myself never laid eyes on the personage of whom my wife and I always speak as " The Aromatic Uncle." The story begins so long ago, indeed, that I can tell it only as a tradition of my wife's family. It goes back to the days when Bos ton was so frankly provincial a town that one of its leading citizens, a man of eminent position and ancient family, remarked to a young kinsman whom he was entertaining at his hospitable board, by way of pleasing and profitable discourse : " Nephew, it may interest you to know that it is Mr. Everett who has the other hindquarter of this lamb." This simple tale I will vouch for, for I got it 190 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE from the lips of the nephew, who has been rny uncle for so many years that I know him to be a trustworthy authority. In those days which seem so far away and yet the space between them and us is spanned by a lifetime of three-score years and ten life was simpler in all its details ; yet such towns as Boston, already old, had well- established local customs which varied not at all from year to year ; many of which lingered in later phases of urban growth. In Boston, or at least in that part of Boston where my wife's family dwelt, it was the invariable cus tom for the head of the family to go to mar ket in the early morning with his wife's list of the day's needs. When the list was filled, the articles were placed in a basket ; and the baskets thus filled were systematically depos ited by the market-boys at the back-door of the house to which they were consigned. Then the house-keeper came to the back-door at her convenience, and took the basket in. Exposed as this position must have been, such a thing as a theft of the day's edibles was un known, and the first authentic account of any illegitimate handling of the baskets brings me to the introduction of my wife's uncle. /,',.; --a?- IT WAS ON A SUMMER MORNING OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 191 It was on a summer morning, as far as I can find out, that a little butcher-boy a very little butcher-boy to be driving so big a cart stopped in the rear of two houses that stood close together in a suburban street. One of these houses belonged to my wife's father, who was, from all I can gather, a very pompous, severe, and generally objectionable old gentleman ; a Judge, and a very consider able dignitary, who apparently devoted all his leisure to making life miserable for his family. The other was owned by a comparatively poor and unimportant man, who did a shipping business in a small way. He had bought it during a period of temporary affluence, and it hung on his hands like a white elephant. He could not sell it, and it was turning his hair gray to pay the taxes on it. On this particu lar morning he had got up at four o'clock to go down to the wharves to see if a certain ship in which he was interested had arrived. It was due and overdue, and its arrival would settle the question of his domestic comfort for the whole year ; for if it failed to appear, or came home with an empty bottom, his fate would be hard indeed ; but if it brought him money or marketable goods from its long 192 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE Oriental trip, he might take heart of grace and look forward to better times. When the butcher's boy stopped at the house of my wife's father, he set down at the back-door a basket containing fish, a big joint of roast beef, and a generous load of fruit and vegetables, including some fine, fat oranges. At the other door he left a rather unpromis ing-looking lump of steak and a half-peck of potatoes, not of the first quality. When he had deposited these two burdens he ran back and started his cart up the road. But he looked back as he did so, and he saw a sight familiar to him, and saw the com mission of a deed entirely unfamiliar. A handsome young boy of about his own age stepped out of the back-door of my wife's father's house and looked carelessly around him. He was one of the boys who compel the admiration of all other boys strong, sturdy, and a trifle arrogant. He had long ago compelled the admiration of the little butcher-boy. They had been playmates together at the public school, and although the Judge's son looked down from an infinite height upon his poor little com rade, the butcher-boy worshipped him with OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 193 the deepest and most fervent adoration. He had for him the admiring reverence which the boy who can't lick anybody has for the boy who can lick everybody. He was a superior being, a pattern, a model ; an ideal never to be achieved, but perhaps in a crude, humble way to be imitated. And there is no hero- worship in the world like a boy's worship of a boy-hero. The sight of this fortunate and adorable youth was familiar enough to the butcher- boy, but the thing he did startled and shocked that poor little workingman almost as much as if his idol had committed a capital crime right before his very eyes. For the Judge's son suddenly let a look into his face that meant mischief, glanced around him to see whether anybody was observing him or not, and, failing to notice the butcher-boy, quickly and dexterously changed the two baskets. Then he went back into the house and shut the door on himself. The butcher-boy reined up his horse and jumped from his cart. His first impulse, of course, was to undo the shocking iniquity which the object of his admiration had com mitted. But before he had walked back a 13 194 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE dozen yards, it struck him that he was taking a great liberty in spoiling the other boy's joke. It was wrong, of course, he knew it ; but was it for him to rebuke the wrong-doing of such an exalted personage ? If the Judge's son came out again, he would see that his joke had miscarried, and then he would be displeased. And to the butcher-boy it did not seem right in the nature of things that anything should displease the Judge's son. Three times he went hesitatingly backward and forward, trying to make up his mind, and then he made it up. The king could do no wrong. Of course he himself was doing wrong in not putting the baskets back where they belonged ; but then he reflected, he took that sin on his own humble conscience, and in some measure took it off the conscience of the Judge's son if, indeed, it troubled that lightsome conscience at all. And, of course, too, he knew that, being an apprentice, he would be whipped for it when the substitu tion was discovered. But he didn't mind being whipped for the boy he worshipped. So he drove out along the road ; and the wife of the poor shipping-merchant, coming to the back-door, and finding the basket full of OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 195 good things, and noticing especially the beautiful China oranges, naturally concluded that her husband's ship had come in, and that he had provided his family with a rare treat. And the Judge, when he came home to dinner, and Mrs. Judge introduced him to the rump-steak and potatoes but I do not wish to make this story any more pathetic than is necessary. A few months after this episode, perhaps indirectly in consequence of it I have never been able to find out exactly the Judge's son, my wife's uncle, ran away to sea, and for many years his recklessness, his strength, and his good looks were only traditions in the family, but traditions which he himself kept alive by remembrances than which none could have been more effective. At first he wrote but seldom, later on more regularly, but his letters I have seen many of them were the most uncommunicative documents that I ever saw in my life. His wanderings took him to many strange places on the other side of the globe, but he never wrote of what he saw or did. His family 196 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE gleaned from them that his health was good, that the weather was such-and-such, and that he wished to have his love, duty, and respects conveyed to his various relatives. In fact, the first positive bit of personal intelligence that they received from him was five years after his departure, when he wrote them from a Chinese port on letter-paper whose heading showed that he was a member of a com mercial firm. The letter itself made no mention of the fact. As the years passed on, however, the letters came more regularly and they told less about the weather, and were slightly very slightly more expressive of a kind regard for his relatives. But at the best they were cramped by the formality of his day and generation, and we of to-day would have called them cold and perfunctory. But the practical assurances that he gave of his undiminished naj r , his steadily in creasing affection for the people at home, were of a most satisfying character, for they were convincing proof not only of his love but of his material prosperity. Almost from his first time of writing he began to send gifts to all the members of the family. At first these were mere trifles, little curios of OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 197 travel sucli as he was able to purchase out of a seaman's scanty wages; but as the years went on they grew richer and richer, till the munificence of the runaway son became the pride of the whole family. The old house that had been in the sub urbs of Boston was fairly in the heart of the city when I first made its acquaintance, and one of the famous houses of the town. And it was no wonder it was famous, for such a collection of Oriental furniture, bric-a-brac, and objects of art never was seen outside of a museum. There were ebony cabinets, book cases, tables, and couches wonderfully carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were beautiful things in bronze and jade and ivory. There were all sorts of strange rugs and curtains and portieres. As to the china-ware and the vases, no house was ever so stocked; and as for such trifles as shawls and fans and silk handkerchiefs, why such things were sent not singly but by dozens. No one could forget his first entrance into that house. The great drawing-room was darkened by heavy curtains, and at first you had only a dim vision of the strange and graceful shapes of its curious furnishing. 198 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE But you could not but be instantly conscious of the delicate perfume that pervaded the apartment, and, for the matter of that, the whole house. It was a combination of all the delightful Eastern smells not sandal-wood only, nor teak, nor couscous, but all these odors and a hundred others blent in one. Yet it was not heavy nor overpowering, but delightfully faint and sweet, diffused through those ample rooms. There was good reason, indeed, for the children of the generation to which my wife belonged to speak of the generous relative whom they had never seen as " Our Aromatic Uncle." There were other uncles, and I have no doubt they gave presents freely, for it was a wealthy and free handed family ; but there was no other uncle who sent such a delicate and delightful re minder with every gift, to breathe a soft memory of him by day and by night. I did my courting in the sweet atmosphere of that house, and, although I had no earthly desire to live in Boston, I could not help missing that strangely blended odor when my wife and I moved into an old house in an old OUR AROMATIG UNCLE 199 part of New York, whose former owners had no connections in the Eastern trade. It was a charming and home-like old house ; but at first, although my wife had brought some be longings from her father's house, we missed the pleasant flavor of our aromatic uncle, for he was now my uncle, as well as my wife's. I say at first, for we did not miss it long. Uncle David that was his name not only continued to send his fragrant gifts to my wife at Christmas and upon her birthday, but he actually adopted me, too, and sent me Chinese cabinets and Chinese gods in various minerals and metals, and many articles de signed for a smoker's use, which no smoker would ever want to touch with a ten-foot pole. But I cared very little about the utility of these presents, for it was not many years before, among them all, they set up that exquisite perfume in the house, which we had learned to associate with our aro matic uncle. " FOO-CHOO-LI, CHINA, January, 18. " DEAR NEPHEW AND NIECE : The Present is to inform you that I have this day shipped 200 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE to your address, per Steamer Ocean Queen, one marble and ebony Table, six assorted gods, and a blue Dinner set ; also that I pur pose leaving this Country for a visit to the Land of my Nativity on the 6th of March next, and will, if same is satisfactory to you, take up my Abode temporarily in your household. Should same not be satisfac tory, please cable at my charge. Messrs. Smithson & Smithson, my Customs Brokers, will attend to all charges on the goods, and will deliver them at your readiness. The health of this place is better than customary by reason of the cool weather, which Health I am as usual enjoying. Trusting that you both are at present in the possession of the same Blessing, and will so continue, I re main, dear nephew and niece, " Your affectionate " UNCLE." This was, I believe, by four dozen words those which he used to inform us of his in tention of visiting America the longest letter that Uncle David had ever written to any member of his family. It also conveyed more TOLD HIM ALL THE THINGS THAT I SHOULD NOT HAVE KNOWN HOW TO SAY OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 201 information about himself than he had ever given since the day he ran away to sea. Of course we cabled the old gentleman that we should be delighted to see him. And, late that Spring, at some date at which he could not possibly have been ex pected to arrive, he turned up at our house. Of course we had talked a great deal about him, and wondered what manner of a man we should find him. Between us, my wife and I had got an idea of his personal appearance which I despair of conveying in words- Vaguely, I should say that we had pictured him as something mid-way between an ab normally tall Chinese mandarin and a bene volent Quaker. What we found when we got home and were told that our uncle from India was awaiting us, was a shrunken and bent old gentleman, dressed very cleanly and neatly in black broadcloth, with a limp, many pleated shirt-front of old-fashioned style, and a plain black cravat. If he had worn an old-time stock we could have for given him the rest of the disappointment he cost us ; but we had to admit to ourselves that he had the most absolutely commonplace appearance of all our acquaintance. In fact, 202 OUR AROMATIC UNOLE we soon discovered that, except for a taciturn ity the like of which we had never encoun tered, our aromatic uncle had positively not one picturesque characteristic about him. Even his aroma was a disappointment. He had it, but it was patchouly or some other cheap perfume of the sort, wherewith he scented his handkerchief, which was not even a bandanna, but a plain decent white one of the unnecessarily large sort which clergymen and old gentlemen affect. But, even if we could not get one singlo romantic association to cluster about him, we very soon got to like the old gentleman. It is true that at our first meeting, after saying " How d'ye do " to me and receiving in im passive placidity the kiss which my wife gave him, he relapsed into dead silence, and continued to smoke a clay pipe with a long stem and a short bowl. This instrument he filled and re-filled every few minutes, and it seemed to be his only employment. We plied him with questions, of course, but to these he responded with a wonderful brevity. In the course of an hour's conversation we got from him that he had had a pleasant voyage, that it was not a long voyage, that OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 203 it was not a short voyage, that it was about the usual voyage, that he had not been sea sick, that he was glad to be back, and that he was not surprised to find the country very much changed. This last piece of in formation was repeated in the form of a simple "No," given in reply to the direct question ; and although it was given politely, and evidently without the least unamiable intent, it made us both feel very cheap. After all, it ivas absurd to ask a man if he were surprised to find the country changed after fifty or sixty years of absence. Unless he was an idiot, and unable to read at that, he must have expected something of the sort. But we grew to like him. He was thoroughly kind and inoffensive in every way. He was entirely willing to be talked to, but he did not care to talk. If it was absolutely necessary, he could talk, and when he did talk he always made me think of the " French-English Dictionary for the Pocket," compiled by the ingenious Mr. John Bellows ; for nobody except that extraordinary Eng lishman could condense a greater amount of information into a smaller number of words. 204 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE During the time of his stay with ns I think I learned more about China than any other man in the United States knew, and I do not believe that the aggregate of his utterances in the course of that six months could have amounted to one hour's continuous talk. Don't ask me for the information. I had no sort of use for it, and I forgot it as soon as I could. I like Chinese bric-a-brac, but my interest in China ends there. Yet it was not long before Uncle David slid into his own place in the family circle. We soon found that he did not expect us to entertain him. He wanted only to sit quiet and smoke his pipe, to take his two daily walks by himself, and to read the daily paper one afternoon and Macaulay's "History of England " the next. He was never tired of sitting and gazing amiably but silently at my wife ; and, to head the list of his good points, he would hold the baby by the hour, and for some mysterious reason that baby, who re quired the exhibition of seventeen toys in a minute to be reasonably quiet in the arms of anybody else, would sit placidly in Uncle David's lap, teething away steadily on the old gentleman's watch-chain, as quiet and as sol- OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 205 emn and as aged in appearance as any one of the assorted gods of porcelain and jade and ivory which our aromatic uncle had sent us. The old house in Boston was a thing of the past. My wife's parents had been dead for some years, and no one remained of her im mediate family except a certain Aunt Lucre- tia, who had lived with them until shortly before our marriage, when the breaking up of the family sent her West to find a home with a distant relative in California. We asked Uncle Davy if he had stopped to see Aunt Lucretia as he came through California. He said he had not. We asked him if he wanted to have Aunt Lucretia invited on to pass a visit during his stay with us. He answered that he did not. This did not surprise us at all. You might think that a brother might long to soe a sister from whom he had been separated nearly all of a long lifetime, but then you might never have met Aunt Lucre tia. My wife made the offer only from a sense of duty ; and only after a contest with me which lasted three days and nights. Nothing but loss of sleep during an ex- 206 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE ceptionally busy time at my office induced me to consent to her project of inviting Aunt Lucretia. When Uncle David put his veto upon the proposition I felt that he might have taken back all his rare and costly gifts, and I could still have loved him. But Aunt Lucretia came, all the same. My wife is afflicted with a New England con= science, originally of a most uncomfortable character. It has been much modified and ameliorated, until it is now considerably less like a case of moral hives ; but some wretched lingering remnant of the original article in duced her to write to Aunt Lucretia that Uncle David was staying with us, and of course Aunt Lucretia came without invitation and without warning, dropping in on us with ruthless unexpectedness. You may not think, from what I have said, that Aunt Lucretia's visit was a pleasant event. But it was, in some respects ; for it was not only the shortest visit she ever paid us, but it was the last with which she ever honored us. OUR AROMATIC UNOLE 207 She arrived one morning shortly after breakfast, just as we were preparing to go out for a drive. She would not have been Aunt Lucretia if she had not upset somebody's cal culations at every turn of her existence. We welcomed her with as much hypocrisy as we could summon to our aid on short notice, and she was not more than usually offensive, al though she certainly did herself full justice in telling us what she thought of us for not in viting her as soon as we even heard of Uncle David's intention to return to his native land. She said she ought to Have been the first to embrace her beloved brother to whom I don't believe she had given one thought in more years than I have yet seen. Uncle David was dressing for his drive. His long residence in tropical countries had rendered him sensitive to the cold, and al though it was a fine, clear September day, with the thermometer at about sixty, he was industriously building himself up with a ser ies of overcoats. On a really snappy day I have known him to get into six of these garments ; and when he entered the room on this occasion I think he had on five, at 208 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE My wife had heard his familiar foot on the stairs, and Aunt Lucretia had risen up and braced herself for an outburst of emotional affection. I could see that it was going to be such a greeting as is given only once in two or three centuries, and then on the stage. I felt sure it would end in a swoon, and I was looking around for a sofa-pillow for the old lady to fall upon, for from what I knew of Aunt Lucretia I did not believe she had ever swooned enough to be able to go through the performance without danger to her aged person. But I need not have troubled myself. Uncle David toddled into the room, gazed at Aunt Lucretia without a sign of recognition in his features, and toddled out into the hall, where he got his hat and gloves, and went out to the front lawn, where he always paced up and down for a few minutes before taking a drive, in order to stimulate his circula tion. This was a surprise, but Aunt Lu- cretia's behavior was a greater surprise. The moment she set eyes on Uncle David the theatrical fervor went out of her entire system, literally in one instant ; and an absolutely natural, unaffected astonishment OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 209 displayed itself in her expressive and strong ly marked features. For almost a minute, until the sound of Uncle David's footsteps had died away, she stood absolutely rigid ; while my wife and I gazed at her spell bound. Then Aunt Lucretia pointed one long bony finger at me, and hissed out with a true femi nine disregard of grammar : " That aint him ! " "David," said Aunt Lucretia, impressively, " had only one arm. He lost the other in Madagascar." I was too dumbfounded to take in the situ ation. I remember thinking, in a vague sort of way, that Madagascar was a curious sort of place to go for the purpose of losing an arm ; but I did not apprehend the full significance of this disclosure until I heard my wife's dis tressed protestations that Aunt Lucretia must be mistaken; there must be some horrible mistake somewhere. But Aunt Lucretia was not mistaken, and there was no mistake anywhere. The arm had been lost, and lost in Madagascar, and 14 210 007? AROMATIC UNCLE she could give the date of the occurrence, and the circumstances attendant. Moreover, she produced her evidence on the spot. It was an old daguerreotype, taken in Calcutta a year or two after the Madagascar episode. She had it in her hand-bag, and she opened it with fingers trembling with rage and ex citement. It showed two men standing side by side near one of those three-foot Ionic pillars that were an indispensable adjunct of photography in its early stages. One of the men was large, broad-shouldered, and hand some unmistakably a handsome edition of Aunt Lucrctia. His empty left sleeve was pinned across his breast. The other man was making allowance for the difference in years, no less unmistakably the Uncle David who was at that moment walking to and fro under our windows. For one instant my wife's face lighted up. " Why, Aunt Lucretia," she cried, " there he is! That's Uncle David, dear Uncle David." " There he is not" replied Aunt Lucretia. " That's his business partner some common person that he picked up on the ship he first sailed in and, upon my word, I do believe " YOU'RE MY OWN DEAR UNCLE DAVID, ANYWAY!" OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 211 it's that wretched creature outside. And I'll Uncle David him." She marched out like a grenadier going to battle, and we followed her meekly. There was, unfortunately, no room for doubt in the case. It only needed a glance to see that the man with one arm was a member of my wife's family, and that the man by his side, our Uncle David, bore no resemblance to him in stature or features. Out on the lawn Aunt Lucre tia sailed into the dear old gentleman in the five overcoats with a volley of vituperation. He did not interrupt her, but stood patiently to the end, listening, with his hands behind his back ; and when, with her last gasp of available breath, Aunt Lucretia demanded : " Who who who are you, you wretch ? '' he responded, calmly and respectfully : " I'm Tommy Biggs, Miss Lucretia." But just here my wife threw herself on his neck and hugged him, and cried : "You're my own dear Uncle David, any- ivay ! " It was a fortunate, a gloriously fortunate, inspiration. Aunt Lucretia drew herself up in speechless scorn, stretched forth her bony 212 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE finger, tried to say something and failed, and then she and her hand-bag went out of my gates, never to come in again. When she had gone, our aromatic uncle for we shall always continue to think of him in that light, or rather in that odor looked thoughtfully after her till she disappeared, and then made one of the few remarks I ever knew him to volunteer. "Ain't changed a mite in forty-seven years." Up to this time I had been in a dazed con dition of mind. As I have said, my wife's family was extinct save for herself and Aunt Lucretia, and she remembered so little of her parents, and she looked herself so little like Aunt Lucretia, that it was small wonder that neither of us remarked Uncle David's unlikeness to the family type. We knew that he did not resemble the ideal we had formed of him ; and that had been the only considera tion we had given to his looks. Now, it took only a moment of reflection to recall the fact that all the members of the family had been tall and shapely, and that even between the OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 213 ugly ones, like Aunt Lucretia, and the pretty ones, like niy wife, there was a certain re semblance. Perhaps it was only the nose the nose is the brand in most families, I be lieve but whatever it was, I had only to see my wife and Aunt Lucretia together to real ize that the man who had passed himself off as our Uncle David had not one feature in common with either of them nor with the one-armed man in the daguerreotype. I was thinking of this, and looking at my wife's troubled face, when our aromatic uncle touched ine on the arm. "I'll explain," he said, "to you. You tell Jier." We dismissed the carriage, went into the house, and sat down. The old gentleman was perfectly cool and collected, but he lit his clay pipe, and reflected for a good five min utes before he opened his mouth. Then ho began : " Finest man in the world, sir. Finest boy in the world. Never anything like him. But, peculiarities. Had 'em. Peculiarities. Wouldn't write home. Wouldn't " here he hesitated " send things home. I had to do it. Did it for him. Didn't want his folks to 214 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE know. Other peculiarities. Never had any money. Other peculiarities. Drank. Other peculiarities. Ladies. Finest man in the world, all the same. Nobody like him. Kept him right with his folks for thirty-one years. Then died. Fever. Canton. Never been myself since. Kept right on writing, all the same. Also " here he hesitated again " sending things. Why? Don't know. Been a fool all my life. Never could do anything but make money. No family, no friends. Only him. Ban away to sea to look after him. Did look after him. Thought maybe your wife would be some like him. Barring peculiarities, she is. Getting old. Came here for company. Meant no harm. Didn't calcu late on Miss Lucretia." Here he paused and smoked reflectively for a minute or two. " Hot in the collar Miss Lucretia. Haughty. Like him, some. Just like she was forty-seven years ago. Slapped my face one day when I was delivering meat, because my jumper wasn't clean. Ain't changed a mite." This was the first condensed statement of the case of our aromatic uncle. It was THE DUPLICITY OF WHICH HE HAD BEEN GUILTY WEIGHED ON HIS SPIRIT OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 215 only in reply to patient, and, I hope, lov ing, gentle, and considerate questioning that the whole story came out at once pitiful and noble of the poor little butcher-boy who ran away to sea to be body-guard, servant, and friend to the splendid, showy, selfish youth whom he worshipped; whose heartlessness he cloaked for many a long year, who lived upon his bounty, and who died in his arms, nursed with a tenderness surpassing that of a brother. And as far as I could find out, ingratitude and contempt had been his only reward. I need not tell you that when I repeated all this to my wife she ran to the old gentle man's room and told him all the things that I should not have known how to say that we cared for him ; that we wanted him to stay with us ; that he was far, far more our uncle than the brilliant, unprincipled scape grace who had died years before, dead for almost a lifetime to the family who idolized him ; and that we wanted him to stay with us as long as kind heaven would let him. But it was of no use. A change had coine over our 216 OUR AROMATIC UNCLE aromatic uncle which we could both of us see, but could not understand. The duplicity of which he had been guilty weighed on his spirit. The next day he went out for his usual walk, and he never came back. "We used every means of search and inquiry, but we never heard from him until we got this letter from Foo-clioo-li : " DEAE NEPHEW AND NIECE : The present is to inform you that I am enjoying the Health that might be expected at my Age, and in my condition of Body, which is to say bad. I ship you by to-day's steamer, Pacific Monarch, four dozen jars of ginger, and two dozen ditto preserved oranges, to which I would have added some other Comfits, which I purposed offering for your acceptance, if it were not that my Physician has forbidden me to leave my Bed. In case of Fatal Eesults from this trying Condition, my Will, duly attested, and made in your favor, will be placed in your hands by Messrs. Smithson & Smithson, my Customs Brokers, who will also pay all charges on goods sent. The Health of this place being unfavorably af- OUR AROMATIC UNCLE 217 fected by the Weather, you are unlikely to hear more from, " Dear Nephew and Niece, " Your affectionate " UNCLE." And we never did hear more except for his will from Our Aromatic Uncle ; but our whole house still smells of his love. THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DA STAMPED BELOW TE RENEWED BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE RECALL JAN 2 6 1966 LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVI Book Slip-50m-12,'64(F772s4)458 352250 PS 1202 Bunner, B.C. L6 Love in old c loathes and other stories. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS