Part 25 (1/2)
Cousin John thinks the world revolves round the Oldbury bank; and I suppose it is natural he should, seeing how long he has been president, and what a fine reputation it has the country round.
Of course Philip does not see it in the same light, and it seems he made some ill-advised speech,--said he would rather turn s.e.xton and bury other people than be buried alive himself in a hole like that, which was not a nice thing for him to say to his father,--but that was no reason why Cousin John should swear at him, and tell him he was sick of his capitalist airs, and he for one should not be surprised if he came some day to beg for aid from the bank he thought too insignificant to be worthy of his attention.
Philip was furious. ”Bankrupt I may be some day,” he answered, ”but I promise you I will go to the poorhouse before ever I ask help of you and your infernal bank.”
This was the state of mind in which they parted, when Philip had come home for his first visit in years. I could have shaken them both for their obstinacy and lack of common sense; but it is always so when men live alone. They need a woman about the house to accustom them to being contradicted. Now if Philip married a girl like Winifred, she would soon straighten things out. I can see now how Cousin John would dote on her and pretend not to care very much, and scold sometimes when he had the gout; but all the while be her slave and spend his life trying to give her pleasure. That is what ought to happen, so of course it won't. Instead, Philip will go and marry some uncomfortable sort of person with a mission. Oh, dear! what if it should be--?
There, I will not allow my mind to turn in _that_ direction. I have a sort of superst.i.tion that thinking too much about any unfortunate thing helps to bring it about. I think it must be this city life which makes me feel so blue and discouraged. The fact is, I do not like New York. In the first place, because it is not Boston; and in the second place, because it _is_ New York. There is too much of everything here--too much money, too much show, too many lamps, and sofa-pillows, and courses at dinner. Then everybody seems to be everlastingly at work getting ready to live. Here is Winifred, for instance, tearing up and down for hours after upholsterers and paper-hangers, toiling about from shop to shop, and from Broadway to Sixth Avenue, matching samples and trying aesthetic effects which no one but herself cares anything for when they are accomplished. And by the end of the day she is so tired that she falls asleep when I read aloud to her in the evening.
”Why do you fuss so about everything?” I asked her the other day. ”We don't fuss in Boston.”
”That accounts,” she answered,--which was not very civil, I thought. She has certainly grown very queer this fall. She told me this morning that she thought the Unitarians were as bigoted as anybody. Now she never would have said a thing like that this summer when she was living in the open air. It's my opinion that two things are telling upon her,--furnace heat and the influence of that Mr.
Flint--especially the last. Why, it just seems to me as if she were trying to make herself over into the kind of woman he would be likely to like. She has dropped her old hoidenish ways and goes about as prim as a Puritan. She says she is always like that in the city, and that her Nepaug ways are only a reaction; but I don't believe it. He comes here a great deal, that is certain; and I don't think it is very gentlemanly, after her begging him, as I heard her with my own ears, to go away. But he is too selfish to care what any one wants but himself. For some reason or other it suits his plans just now to try to please Winifred.
The first night I was here Winifred was telling him about Maria Polonati, the little Italian girl who sells flowers at the corner of the Square, and how she had made friends with her, and learned all about her ”padre” and her ”madre” and the playmates she had left behind her in the ”bella Napoli.” Winifred knows how to tell a thing so it seems to stand right out like the old Dutch women in the pictures, and I could see that Mr. Flint was taking it all in, for all he said so little; and so he was, for the next time he came he walked right up to Winifred's chair and dropped a great bunch of violets into her lap.
”The little girl at the corner sent you these,” he said; and Winifred smiled as if it were the most natural thing in the world for that cross-grained egotist to do a thing like that. He did it rather gracefully, I admit; but a Boston man would have done it just as well, if he had only thought of it.
Of late Mr. Flint has taken to dropping in once or twice a week of an evening to play whist,--he and Winifred against her father and me. Now I like to beat as well as any one; but I do like some show of organized resistance, and this young man's playing is what I call impertinently poor, as if he did not think it worth while to try.
Winifred seems just as well satisfied to be beaten as to beat, and the Professor takes a guileless and childlike satisfaction in his triumph which is quite pitiable. I take pains to let Mr. Flint see that I at least am not taken in; but he only smiles in that exasperatingly non-committal way of his, as if it mattered little enough to him what I thought one way or the other. After the game is over he gets a chance for a few minutes' talk with Winifred while I am hunting up my knitting and her father his pipe, and it is my belief that it's just those few minutes that he looks forward to all the evening, while he is ignoring his partner's trump-signal and leading from his weak suit.
Winifred has caught a very annoying trick of turning to him on all occasions, as if waiting to know what he thought before making up her mind. Altogether I don't like the look of things at all.
Of course there was no getting out of inviting Mr. Flint to the little birthday party which we were planning for Nora Costello. To tell the truth, n.o.body but me seemed to want to get out of it. Professor Anstice says he is the most agreeable man that comes to the house, and when I confided to him that I was afraid Winifred would fall in love with him, he answered: ”She might do worse. She might do much worse.”
That was all the consolation I got in that quarter, and with Winifred herself it was as bad. I thought it might do good to recall some of her early impressions, which seem to have changed so mightily of late.
”Don't you remember,” I said, ”how you called him a refrigerator?”
”Did I?” she said with a little laugh. ”Well, he was rather frigid in those days.”
”Yes, and you said how disagreeable his manners were, and how thoughtless he was of every one but himself.”
At this Winifred colored up as if they hadn't been her own very words.
”If I said it,” she answered with a little toss of her head, ”or if anybody else said it, it was a stupid slander, which grows stupider every time it is repeated.”
I was a little nettled myself at her answering me like that. ”You didn't think so,” I said, ”when you begged him to go away from Nepaug.”
At this Winifred jumped straight up from her chair, running her hand through her hair in a way she has when she is excited--”Did you hear that? Then you must have been listening,” she cried out, as if she were accusing me of chicken-stealing.
”If you think that of me, Winifred, the sooner my trunk is packed the better,” I answered, as stiff as the Captain's monument on Duxbury Hill.
In an instant Winifred was on her knees by my side, and had thrown her arms around my neck.
”No, no, dear Miss Standish, I do not think it, and I ought not to have said it. It only made me feel so badly to think of any one's having overheard my secret, which after all was not my own.”
Now here was my chance to find out the very thing which had been bothering my old head all these weeks. I had only to pretend to know and I should hear it all, for Winifred was in one of her rare confidential moods. But that inconvenient New England conscience of mine not only would not let me pretend, but it p.r.i.c.ked me a little with Winifred's accusation of having listened. Perhaps if my ears had not been strained just a trifle, I should not have caught as much as I did of the conversation at Flying Point. Anyway, I felt bound to confess now.
”I did not hear anything but just your asking him to go away, and his answering rather reluctantly that he did not want to, but he would.”
”Then,” said Winifred, ”you are bound to take my word for the meaning of the s.n.a.t.c.h of talk you heard, and I tell you that he acted like a gentleman and a very honorable gentleman; moreover, that from that good hour I began to be ashamed of my rash estimate of him (I always do jump in overhead in my judgments) and am only waiting for a chance to tell him so frankly, and to ask him to forget all my rude speeches.”