“I am not going to have ’em say we took an advantage of their being away and tolled him on.”
“I should like to hear ’em say it!” cried Lapham. “Or anybody!”
“Well,” said his wife, relinquishing this point of anxiety, “I can’t make out whether he cares anything for her or not. And Pen can’t tell either; or else she won’t.”
“Oh, I guess he cares for her, fast enough,” said the Colonel.
“I can’t make out that he’s said or done the first thing to show it.”
“Well, I was better than a year getting my courage up.”
“Oh, that was different,” said Mrs. Lapham, in contemptuous dismissal of the comparison, and yet with a certain fondness. “I guess, if he cared for her, a fellow in his position wouldn’t be long getting up his courage to speak to Irene.”
Lapham brought his fist down on the table between them.
“Look here, Persis! Once for all, now, don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again! I’m worth nigh on to a million, and I’ve made it every cent myself; and my girls are the equals of anybody, I don’t care who it is. He ain’t the fellow to take on any airs; but if he ever tries it with me, I’ll send him to the right about mighty quick. I’ll have a talk with him, if—”
“No, no; don’t do that!” implored his wife. “I didn’t mean anything. I don’t know as I meant anything. He’s just as unassuming as he can be, and I think Irene’s a match for anybody. You just let things go on. It’ll be all right. You never can tell how it is with young people. Perhaps she’s offish. Now you ain’t—you ain’t going to say anything?”
Lapham suffered himself to be persuaded, the more easily, no doubt, because after his explosion he must have perceived that his pride itself stood in the way of what his pride had threatened. He contented himself with his wife’s promise that she would never again present that offensive view of the case, and she did not remain without a certain support in his sturdy self-assertion.
XII
MRS. COREY returned with her daughters in the early days of October, having passed three or four weeks at Intervale after leaving Bar Harbor. They were somewhat browner than they were when they left town in June, but they were not otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and never show anyone, knowing the slightness of their merit. Nanny, the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction. They were both nice girls, accomplished, well dressed, of course, and well enough looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to distract them.
In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid interest in their brother’s affairs, which they could see weighed upon their mother’s mind after the first hours of greeting.
“Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has never written a word about it,” she said, shaking her head.
“What good would it have done?” asked Nanny, who was little and fair, with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet front very prettily; she looked best in a bonnet. “It would only have worried you. He could not have stopped Tom; you couldn’t, when you came home to do it.”
“I daresay Papa didn’t know much about it,” suggested Lily. She was a tall, lean, dark girl, who looked as if she were not quite warm enough, and whom you always associated with wraps of different aesthetic effect after you had once seen her.
It is a serious matter always to the women of his family when a young man gives them cause to suspect that he is interested in some other woman. A son-in-law or brother-in-law does not enter the family; he need not be caressed or made anything of; but the son’s or brother’s wife has a claim upon his mother and sisters which they cannot deny. Some convention of their sex obliges them to show her affection, to like or to seem to like her, to take her to their intimacy, however odious she may be to them. With the Coreys it was something more than an affair of sentiment. They were by no means poor, and they were not dependent money-wise upon Tom Corey; but the mother had come, without knowing it, to rely upon his sense, his advice, in everything; and the sisters, seeing him hitherto so indifferent to girls, had insensibly grown to regard him as altogether their own till he should be released, not by his marriage, but by theirs, an event which had not approached with the lapse of time. Some kinds of girls—they believed that they could readily have chosen a kind—might have taken him without taking him from them; but this generosity could not be hoped for in such a girl as Miss Lapham.
“Perhaps,” urged their mother, “it would not be so bad. She seemed an affectionate little thing with her mother, without a great deal of character, though she was so capable about some things.”
“Oh, she’ll be an affectionate little thing with Tom too, you may be sure,” said Nanny. “And that characterless capability becomes the most intense narrow-mindedness. She’ll think we were against her from the beginning.”
“She has no cause for that,” Lily interposed, “and we shall not give her any.”
“Yes, we shall,” retorted Nanny. “We can’t help it; and if we can’t, her own ignorance would be cause enough.”
“I can’t feel that she’s altogether ignorant,” said Mrs. Corey justly.
“Of course she can read and write,” admitted Nanny.
“I can’t imagine what he finds to talk about with her,” said Lily.
“Oh, that’s very simple,” returned her sister. “They talk about themselves, with occasional references to each other. I have heard people ‘going on’ on the hotel piazzas. She’s embroidering, or knitting, or tatting, or something of that kind; and he says she seems quite devoted to needlework, and she says, yes, she has a perfect passion for it, and everybody laughs at her for it; but she can’t help it, she always was so from a child, and supposes she always shall be—with remote and minute particulars. And she ends by saying that perhaps he does not like people to tat, or knit, or embroider, or whatever. And he says, oh, yes, he does; what could make her think such a thing? But for his part he likes boating rather better or, if you’re in the woods, camping. Then she lets him take up one corner of her work, and perhaps touch her fingers; and that encourages him to say that he supposes nothing could induce her to drop her work long enough to go down on the rocks, or out among the huckleberry bushes; and she puts her head on one side, and says she doesn’t know really. And then they go, and he lies at her feet on the rocks, or picks huckleberries and drops them in her lap, and they go on talking about themselves, and comparing notes to see how they differ from each other. And—”
“That will do, Nanny,” said her mother.
Lily smiled autumnally. “Oh, disgusting!”
“Disgusting? Not at all!” protested her sister. “It’s very amusing when you see it, and when you do it—”
“It’s always a mystery what people see in each other,” observed Mrs. Corey severely.
“Yes,” Nanny admitted, “but I don’t know that there is much comfort for us in the application.”
“No, there isn’t,” said her mother.
“The most that we can do is to hope for the best till we know the worst. Of course, we shall make the best of the worst when it comes.”
“Yes, and perhaps it would not be so very bad. I was saying to your father when I was here in July that those things can always be managed. You must face them as if they were nothing out of the way, and try not to give any cause for bitterness among ourselves.”
“That’s true. But I don’t believe in too much resignation beforehand. It amounts to concession,” said Nanny.
“Of
course, we should oppose it in all proper ways,” returned her mother.
Lily had ceased to discuss the matter. In virtue of her artistic temperament, she was expected not to be very practical. It was her mother and her sister who managed, submitting to the advice and consent of Corey what they intended to do.
“Your father wrote me that he had called on Colonel Lapham at his place of business,” said Mrs. Corey, seizing her first chance of approaching the subject with her son.
“Yes,” said Corey. “A dinner was Father’s idea, but he came down to a call, at my suggestion.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Corey, in a tone of relief, as if the statement threw a new light on the fact that Corey had suggested the visit. “He said so little about it in his letter that I didn’t know just how it came about.”
“I thought it was right they should meet,” explained the son, “and so did Father. I was glad that I suggested it, afterward; it was extremely gratifying to Colonel Lapham.”
“Oh, it was quite right in every way. I suppose you have seen something of the family during the summer.”
“Yes, a good deal. I’ve been down at Nantasket rather often.”
Mrs. Corey let her eyes droop. Then she asked: “Are they well?”
“Yes, except Lapham himself, now and then. I went down once or twice to see him. He hasn’t given himself any vacation this summer; he has such a passion for his business that I fancy he finds it hard being away from it at any time, and he’s made his new house an excuse for staying—”
“Oh yes, his house! Is it to be something fine?”
“Yes; it’s a beautiful house. Seymour is doing it.”
“Then, of course, it will be very handsome. I suppose the young ladies are very much taken up with it; and Mrs. Lapham.”
“Mrs. Lapham, yes. I don’t think the young ladies care so much about it.”
“It must be for them. Aren’t they ambitious?” asked Mrs. Corey, delicately feeling her way.
Her son thought awhile. Then he answered with a smile: “No, I don’t really think they are. They are unambitious, I should say.” Mrs. Corey permitted herself a long breath. But her son added, “It’s the parents who are ambitious for them,” and her respiration became shorter again.
“Yes,” she said.
“They’re very simple, nice girls,” pursued Corey. “I think you’ll like the elder, when you come to know her.”
When you come to know her. The words implied an expectation that the two families were to be better acquainted.
“Then she is more intellectual than her sister?” Mrs. Corey ventured.
“Intellectual?” repeated her son. “No; that isn’t the word, quite. Though she certainly has more mind.”
“The younger seemed very sensible.”
“Oh, sensible, yes. And as practical as she’s pretty. She can do all sorts of things, and likes to be doing them. Don’t you think she’s an extraordinary beauty?”
“Yes—yes, she is,” said Mrs. Corey, at some cost.
“She’s good too,” said Corey, “and perfectly innocent and transparent. I think you will like her the better the more you know her.”
“I thought her very nice from the beginning,” said the mother heroically; and then nature asserted itself in her. “But I should be afraid that she might perhaps be a little bit tiresome at last; her range of ideas seemed so extremely limited.”
“Yes, that’s what I was afraid of. But, as a matter of fact, she isn’t. She interests you by her very limitations. You can see the working of her mind, like that of a child. She isn’t at all conscious even of her beauty.”
“I don’t believe young men can tell whether girls are conscious or not,” said Mrs. Corey. “But I am not saying the Miss Laphams are not—” Her son sat musing, with an inattentive smile on his face. “What is it?”
“Oh! nothing. I was thinking of Miss Lapham and something she was saying. She’s very droll, you know.”
“The elder sister? Yes, you told me that. Can you see the workings of her mind too?”
“No; she’s everything that’s unexpected.” Corey fell into another reverie, and smiled again; but he did not offer to explain what amused him, and his mother would not ask.
“I don’t know what to make of his admiring the girl so frankly,” she said afterward to her husband. “That couldn’t come naturally till after he had spoken to her, and I feel sure that he hasn’t yet.”
“You women haven’t risen yet—it’s an evidence of the backwardness of your sex—to a conception of the Bismarck idea in diplomacy. If a man praises one woman, you still think he’s in love with another. Do you mean that because Tom didn’t praise the elder sister so much, he has spoken to her?”
Mrs. Corey refused the consequence, saying that it did not follow. “Besides, he did praise her.”
“You ought to be glad that matters are in such good shape, then. At any rate, you can do absolutely nothing.”
“Oh! I know it,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “I wish Tom would be a little opener with me.”
“He’s as open as it’s in the nature of an American-born son to be with his parents. I daresay if you’d asked him plumply what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told you—if he knew.”
“Why, don’t you think he does know, Bromfield?”
“I’m not at all sure he does. You women think that because a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he’s attached to them. It doesn’t at all follow. He dangles because he must, and doesn’t know what to do with his time, and because they seem to like it. I daresay that Tom has dangled a good deal in this instance because there was nobody else in town.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I throw out the suggestion. And it strikes me that a young lady couldn’t do better than stay in or near Boston during the summer. Most of the young men are here, kept by business through the week, with evenings available only on the spot, or a few miles off. What was the proportion of the sexes at the seashore and the mountains?”
“Oh, twenty girls at least for even an excuse of a man. It’s shameful.”
“You see, I am right in one part of my theory. Why shouldn’t I be right in the rest?”
“I wish you were. And yet I can’t say that I do. Those things are very serious with girls. I shouldn’t like Tom to have been going to see those people if he meant nothing by it.”
“And you wouldn’t like it if he did. You are difficult, my dear.” Her husband pulled an open newspaper toward him from the table.
“I feel that it wouldn’t be at all like him to do so,” said Mrs. Corey, going on to entangle herself in her words, as women often do when their ideas are perfectly clear. “Don’t go to reading, please, Bromfield! I am really worried about this matter. I must know how much it means. I can’t let it go on so. I don’t see how you can rest easy without knowing.”
“I don’t in the least know what’s going to become of me when I die; and yet I sleep well,” replied Bromfield Corey, putting his newspaper aside.
“Ah! but this is a very different thing.”
“So much more serious? Well, what can you do? We had this out when you were here in the summer, and you agreed with me then that we could do nothing. The situation hasn’t changed at all.”
“Yes, it has; it has continued the same,” said Mrs. Corey, again expressing the fact by a contradiction in terms. “I think I must ask Tom outright.”
“You know you can’t do that, my dear.”
“Then why doesn’t he tell us?”
“Ah, that’s what he can’t do, if he’s making love to Miss Irene—that’s her name, I believe—on the American plan. He will tell us after he has told her. That was the way I did. Don’t ignore our own youth, Anna. It was a long while ago, I’ll admit.”
“It was very different,” said Mrs. Corey, a l
ittle shaken.
“I don’t see how. I daresay Mama Lapham knows whether Tom is in love with her daughter or not; and no doubt Papa Lapham knows it at second hand. But we shall not know it until the girl herself does. Depend upon that. Your mother knew, and she told your father; but my poor father knew nothing about it till we were engaged; and I had been hanging about—dangling, as you call it—”
“No, no; you called it that.”
“Was it I?—for a year or more.”
The wife could not refuse to be a little consoled by the image of her young love which the words conjured up, however little she liked its relation to her son’s interest in Irene Lapham. She smiled pensively. “Then you think it hasn’t come to an understanding with them yet?”
“An understanding? Oh, probably.”
“An explanation, then?”
“The only logical inference from what we’ve been saying is that it hasn’t. But I don’t ask you to accept it on that account. May I read now, my dear?”
“Yes, you may read now,” said Mrs. Corey, with one of those sighs which perhaps express a feminine sense of the unsatisfactoriness of husbands in general, rather than a personal discontent with her own.
“Thank you, my dear; then I think I’ll smoke too,” said Bromfield Corey, lighting a cigar.
She left him in peace, and she made no further attempt upon her son’s confidence. But she was not inactive for that reason. She did not, of course, admit to herself, and far less to others, the motive with which she went to pay an early visit to the Laphams, who had now come up from Nantasket to Nankeen Square. She said to her daughters that she had always been a little ashamed of using her acquaintance with them to get money for her charity, and then seeming to drop it. Besides, it seemed to her that she ought somehow to recognize the business relation that Tom had formed with the father; they must not think that his family disapproved of what he had done.
“Yes, business is business,” said Nanny, with a laugh. “Do you wish us to go with you again?”
The Rise of Silas Lapham Page 18
