“I should wish to pay you whatever the work was worth,” said Witherby, not to be outdone in nobleness.
“All right; we sha’n’t quarrel about that, at any rate.”
Bartley was getting toward the door, for he was eager to be gone now to Marcia, but Witherby followed him up as if willing to detain him. “My wife,” he said, “knows Miss Kingsbury. They have been on the same charities together.”
“I met her a good while ago, when I was visiting a chum of mine at his father’s house here. I didn’t suppose she’d know me; but she did at once, and began to ask me if I was at the Hallecks’ — as if I had never gone away.”
“Mr. Ezra B. Halleck?” inquired Witherby reverently. “Leather trade?”
“Yes,” said Bartley. “I believe his first name was Ezra. Ben Halleck was my friend. Do you know the family?” asked Bartley.
“Yes, we have met them — in society. I hope you’re pleasantly situated where you are, Mr. Hubbard? Should be glad to have you call at the house.”
“Thank you,” said Bartley, “my wife will be glad to have Mrs. Witherby call.”
“Oh!” cried Witherby. “I didn’t know you were married! That’s good! There’s nothing like marriage, Mr. Hubbard, to keep a man going in the right direction. But you’ve begun pretty young.”
“Nothing like taking a thing in time,” answered Bartley. “But I haven’t been married a great while; and I’m not so young as I look. Well, good afternoon, Mr. Witherby.”
“What did you say was your address?” asked Witherby, taking out his note-book. “My wife will certainly call. She’s down at Nantasket now, but she’ll be up the first part of September, and then she’ll call. Good afternoon.”
They shook hands at last, and Bartley ran home to Marcia. He burst into the room with a glowing face. “Well, Marcia,” he shouted, “I’ve got my basis!”
“Hush! No! Don’t be so loud! You haven’t!” she answered, springing to her feet. “I don’t believe it! How hot you are!”
“I’ve been running — almost all the way from the Events office. I’ve got a place on the Events, — assistant managing-editor, — thirty dollars a week,” he panted.
“I knew you would succeed yet, — I knew you would, if I could only have a little patience. I’ve been scolding myself ever since you went. I thought you were going to do something desperate, and I had driven you to it. But Bartley, Bartley! It can’t be true, is it? Here, here! Do take this fan. Or no, I’ll fan you, if you’ll let me sit on your knee! O poor thing, how hot you are! But I thought you wouldn’t white for the Events; I thought you hated that old Witherby, who acted so ugly to you when you first came.”
“Oh, Witherby is a pretty good old fellow,” said Bartley, who had begun to get his breath again. He gave her a full history of the affair, and they rejoiced together over it, and were as happy as if Bartley had been celebrating a high and honorable good fortune. She was too ignorant to feel the disgrace, if there were any, in the compact which Bartley had closed, and he had no principles, no traditions, by which to perceive it. To them it meant unlimited prosperity; it meant provision for the future, which was to bring a new responsibility and a new care.
“We will take the parlor with the alcove, now,” said Bartley. “Don’t excite yourself,” he added, with tender warning.
“No, no,” she said, pillowing her head on his shoulder, and shedding peaceful tears.
“It doesn’t seem as if we should ever quarrel again, does it?”
“No, no! We never shall,” she murmured. “It has always come from my worrying you about the law, and I shall never do that any more. If you like journalism better, I shall not urge you any more to leave it, now you’ve got your basis.”
“But I’m going on with the law, now, for that very reason. I shall read law all my leisure time. I feel independent, and I shall not be anxious about the time I give, because I shall know that I can afford it.”
“Well, only you mustn’t overdo.” She put her lips against his cheek. “You’re more to me than anything you can do for me.”
“Oh, Marcia!”
XIX.
Now that Bartley had got his basis and had no favors to ask of any one, he was curious to see his friend Halleck again; but when, in the course of the Solid Men Series, he went to interview A Nestor of the Leather Interest, as he meant to call the elder Halleck, he resolved to let him make all the advances. On a legitimate business errand it should not matter to him whether Mr. Halleck welcomed him or not. The old man did not wait for Bartley to explain why he came; he was so simply glad to see him that Bartley felt a little ashamed to confess that he had been eight months in Boston without making himself known. He answered all the personal questions with which Mr. Halleck plied him; and in his turn he inquired after his college friend.
“Ben is in Europe,” said his father. “He has been there all summer; but we expect him home about the middle of September. He’s been a good while settling down,” continued the old man, with an unconscious sigh. “He talked of the law at first, and then he went into business with me; but he didn’t seem to find his calling in it; and now he’s taken up the law again. He’s been in the Law School at Cambridge, and he’s going back there for a year or two longer. I thought you used to talk of the law yourself when you were with us, Mr. Hubbard.”
“Yes, I did,” Bartley assented. “And I haven’t given up the notion yet. I’ve read a good deal of law already; but when I came up to Boston, I had to go into newspaper work till I could see my way out of the woods.”
“Well,” said Mr. Halleck, “that’s right. And you say you like the arrangement you’ve made with Mr. Witherby?”
“It’s ideal — for me,” answered Bartley.
“Well, that’s good,” said the old man. “And you’ve come to interview me. Well, that’s all right. I’m not much used to being in print, but I shall be glad to tell you all I know about leather.”
“You may depend upon my not saying anything that will be disagreeable to you, Mr. Halleck,” said Bartley, touched by the old man’s trusting friendliness. When his inquisition ended, he slipped his notebook back into his pocket, and said with a smile, “We usually say something about the victim’s private residence, but I guess I’ll spare you that, Mr. Halleck.”
“Why, we live in the old place, and I don’t suppose there is much to say. We are plain people, and we don’t like to change. When I built there thirty years ago, Rumford Street was one of the most desirable streets in Boston. There was no Back Bay, then, you know, and we thought we were doing something very fashionable. But fashion has drifted away, and left us high and dry enough on Rumford Street; though we don’t mind it. We keep the old house and the old garden pretty much as you saw them. You can say whatever you think best. There’s a good deal of talk about the intrusiveness of the newspapers; all I know is that they’ve never intruded upon me. We shall not be afraid that you will abuse our house, Mr. Hubbard, because we expect you to come there again. When shall it be? Mrs. Halleck and I have been at home all summer; we find it the most comfortable place; and we shall be very glad if you’ll drop in any evening and take tea with us. We keep the old hours; we’ve never taken kindly to the late dinners. The girls are off at the mountains, and you’d see nobody but Mrs. Halleck. Come this evening!” cried the old man, with mounting cordiality.
His warmth as he put his hand on Bartley’s shoulder made the young man blush again for the reserve with which he had been treating his own affairs. He stammered out, hoping that the other would see the relevancy of the statement, “Why, the fact is, Mr. Halleck, I — I’m married.”
“Married?” said Mr. Halleck. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Of course we want Mrs. Hubbard, too. Where are you living? We won’t stand upon ceremony among old friends. Mrs. Halleck will come with the carriage and fetch Mrs. Hubbard, and your wife must take that for a call. Why, you don’t know how glad we shall be to have you both! I wish Ben was married. You’ll come?”
“Of course we will,” said Bartley. “But you mustn’t let Mrs. Halleck send for us; we can walk perfectly well.”
“You can walk if you want, but Mrs. Hubbard shall ride,” said the old man.
When Bartley reported this to Marcia, “Bartley!” she cried. “In her carriage? I’m afraid!”
“Nonsense! She’ll be a great deal more afraid than you are. She’s the bashfulest old lady you ever saw. All that I hope is that you won’t overpower her.”
“Bartley, hush! Shall I wear my silk, or—”
“Oh, wear the silk, by all means. Crush them at a blow!”
Rumford Street is one of those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the West End of Boston, which are now almost wholly abandoned to boarding-houses of the poorer class. Yet they are charming streets, quiet, clean, and respectable, and worthy still to be the homes, as they once were, of solid citizens. The red brick houses, with their swell fronts, looking in perspective like a succession of round towers, are reached by broad granite steps, and their doors are deeply sunken within the wagon-roofs of white-painted Roman arches. Over the door there is sometimes the bow of a fine transom, and the parlor windows on the first floor of the swell front have the same azure gleam as those of the beautiful old houses which front the Common on Beacon Street.
When her husband bought his lot there, Mrs. Halleck could hardly believe that a house on Rumford Street was not too fine for her. They had come to the city simple and good young village people, and simple and good they had remained, through the advancing years which had so wonderfully — Mrs. Halleck hoped, with a trembling heart, not wickedly — prospered them. They were of faithful stock, and they had been true to their traditions in every way. One of these was constancy to the orthodox religious belief in which their young hearts had united, and which had blessed all their life; though their charity now abounded perhaps more than their faith. They still believed that for themselves there was no spiritual safety except in their church; but since their younger children had left it they were forced tacitly to own that this might not be so in all cases. Their last endeavor for the church in Ben’s case was to send him to the college where he and Bartley met; and this was such a failure on the main point, that it left them remorsefully indulgent. He had submitted, and had foregone his boyish dreams of Harvard, where all his mates were going; but the sacrifice seemed to have put him at odds with life. The years which had proved the old people mistaken would not come back upon their recognition of their error. He returned to the associations from which they had exiled him too much estranged to resume them, and they saw, with the unavailing regrets which visit fathers and mothers in such cases, that the young know their own world better than their elders can know it, and have a right to be in it and of it, superior to any theory of their advantage which their elders can form. Ben was not the fellow to complain; in fact, after he came home from college, he was allowed to shape his life according to his own rather fitful liking. His father was glad now to content him in anything he could, it was so very little that Ben asked. If he had suffered it, perhaps his family would have spoiled him.
The Halleck girls went early in July to the Profile House, where they had spent their summers for many years; but the old people preferred to stay at home, and only left their large, comfortable house for short absences. Their ways of life had been fixed in other times, and Mrs. Halleck liked better than mountain or sea the high-walled garden that stretched back of their house to the next street. They had bought through to this street when they built, but they had never sold the lot that fronted on it. They laid it out in box-bordered beds, and there were clumps of hollyhocks, sunflowers, lilies, and phlox, in different corners; grapes covered the trellised walls; there were some pear-trees that bore blossoms, and sometimes ripened their fruit beside the walk. Mrs. Halleck used to work in the garden; her husband seldom descended into it, but he liked to sit on the iron-railed balcony overlooking it from the back parlor.
As for the interior of the house, it had been furnished, once for all, in the worst style of that most tasteless period of household art, which prevailed from 1840 to 1870; and it would be impossible to say which were most hideous, the carpets or the chandeliers, the curtains or the chairs and sofas; crude colors, lumpish and meaningless forms, abounded in a rich and horrible discord. The old people thought it all beautiful, and those daughters who had come into the new house as little girls revered it; but Ben and his youngest sister, who had been born in the house, used the right of children of their parents’ declining years to laugh at it. Yet they laughed with a sort of filial tenderness.
“I suppose you know how frightful you have everything about you, Olive,” said Clara Kingsbury, one day after the Eastlake movement began, as she took a comprehensive survey of the Halleck drawing-room through her pince-nez.
“Certainly,” answered the youngest Miss Halleck. “It’s a perfect chamber of horrors. But I like it, because everything’s so exquisitely in keeping.”
“Really, I feel as if I had seen it all for the first time,” said Miss Kingsbury. “I don’t believe I ever realized it before.”
She and Olive Halleck were great friends, though Clara was fashionable and Olive was not.
“It would all have been different,” Ben used to say, in whimsical sarcasm of what he had once believed, “if I had gone to Harvard. Then the fellows in my class would have come to the house with me, and we should have got into the right set naturally. Now, we’re outside of everything, and it makes me mad, because we’ve got money enough to be inside, and there’s nothing to prevent it. Of course, I’m not going to say that leather is quite as blameless as cotton socially, but taken in the wholesale form it isn’t so very malodorous, and it’s quite as good as other things that are accepted.”
“It’s not the leather, Ben,” answered Olive, “and it’s not your not going to Harvard altogether, though that has something to do with it. The trouble’s in me. I was at school with all those girls Clara goes with, and I could have been in that set if I’d wanted; but I didn’t really want to. I saw, at a very tender age, that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and I just quietly kept out of it. Of course, I couldn’t have gone to Papanti’s without a fuss, but mother would have let me go if I had made the fuss; and I could be hand and glove with those girls now, if I tried. They come here whenever I ask them; and when I meet them on charities, I’m awfully popular. No, if I’m not fashionable, it’s my own fault. But what difference does it make to you, Ben? You don’t want to marry any of those girls as long as your heart’s set on that unknown charmer of yours.” Ben had once seen his charmer in the street of a little Down East town, where he met her walking with some other boarding-school girls; in a freak with his fellow-students, he had bribed the village photographer to let him have the picture of the young lady, which he had sent home to Olive, marked, “My Lost Love.”
“No, I don’t want to marry anybody,” said Ben. “But I hate to live in a town where I’m not first chop in everything.”
“Pshaw!” cried his sister, “I guess it doesn’t trouble you much.”
“Well, I don’t know that it does,” he admitted.
Mrs. Halleck’s black coachman drove her to Mrs. Nash’s door on Canary Place, where she alighted and rang with as great perturbation as if it had been a palace, and these poor young people to whom she was going to be kind were princes. It was sufficient that they were strangers; but Marcia’s anxiety, evident even to meekness like Mrs. Halleck’s, restored her somewhat to her self-possession; and the thought that Bartley, in spite of his personal splendor, was a friend of Ben’s, was a help, and she got home with her guests without any great chasms in the conversation, though she never ceased to twist the window-tassel in her embarrassment.
Mr. Halleck came to her rescue at her own door, and let them in. He shook hands with Bartley again, and viewed Marcia with a fatherly friendliness that took away half her awe of the ugly magnificence of the interior. But still she admired that Ba
rtley could be so much at his ease. He pointed to a stick at the foot of the hat-rack, and said, “How much that looks like Halleck!” which made the old man laugh, and clap him on the shoulder, and cry: “So it does! so it does! Recognized it, did you? Well, we shall soon have him with us again, now. Seems a long time to us since he went.”
“Still limps a little?” asked Bartley.
“Yes, I guess he’ll never quite get over that.”
“I don’t believe I should like him to,” said Bartley. “He wouldn’t seem natural without a cane in his hand, or hanging by the crook over his left elbow, while he stood and talked.”
The old man clapped Bartley on the shoulder again, and laughed again at the image suggested. “That’s so! that’s so! You’re right, I guess!”
As soon as Marcia could lay off her things in the gorgeous chamber to which Mrs. Halleck had shown her, they went out to tea in the dining-room overlooking the garden.
“Seems natural, don’t it?” asked the old man, as Bartley turned to one of the windows.
“Not changed a bit, except that I was here in winter, and I hadn’t a chance to see how pretty your garden was.”
“It is pretty, isn’t it?” said the old man. “Mother — Mrs. Halleck, I mean — looks after it. She keeps it about right. Here’s Cyrus!” he said, as the serving-man came into the room with something from the kitchen in his hands. “You remember Cyrus, I guess, Mr. Hubbard?”
“Oh, yes!” said Bartley, and when Cyrus had set down his dish, Bartley shook hands with the New Hampshire exemplar of freedom and equality; he was no longer so young as to wish to mark a social difference between himself and the inside-man who had served Mr. Halleck with unimpaired self-respect for twenty-five years.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 161
