Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I don’t know but I am,” said Cornelia. “I haven’t got quite turned round yet.”

  “Well, you must do it. I’m going to have the class here, some day, as soon as I get the place in perfect order. I must have a suit of Japanese armor for that corner, over there; and then two or three of those queer-looking, old, long, faded trunks, you know, with eastern stuffs gaping out of them, to set along the wall. I should be ashamed to have anybody see it now; but you have an eye, you can supply every thing with a glance. I’m going to have a bed made up in the alcove, over there, and sleep here, sometimes: just that broad lounge, you know, with some rugs on it — I’ve got the cushions, you see, already — and mice running over you, for the crumbs you’ve left when you’ve got hungry sitting up late. Are you afraid of mice?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t care to have them run over me, much,” said Cornelia.

  “Well, I shouldn’t either,” said Charmian, “but if you sleep in your studio, sometime you have to. They all do. Just put your hat in here,” and she glided before Cornelia through the studio door into one that opened beside it. The room was a dim and silent bedchamber, appointed with the faultless luxury that characterized the rest of the apartment. Cornelia had never dreamt of anything like it, but “Don’t look at it!” Charmian pleaded. “I hate it, and I’m going to get into the studio to sleep as soon as I’ve thought out the kind of hangings. Well, we shall have to hurry back now,” but she kept Cornelia while she critically rearranged a ribbon on her, and studied the effect of it over her shoulder in the glass. “Yes,” she said, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, “perfectly Roman! Gladys wouldn’t have done for you. Cornelia was a step in the right direction; but it ought to have been Fulvia.

  “‘I should have clung to Fulvia’s waist and thrust

  The dagger through her side,’”

  she chanted tragically; and she flung her arms about Cornelia for illustration. “Dream of Fair Women, you know. What part are you going to play, today?”

  “What part?” Cornelia demanded, freeing herself, with her darkest frown of perplexity. “You’re not going to have theatricals, I hope.” She thought it was going pretty far to receive company Sunday afternoon, and if there was to be anything more she was ready to take her stand now.

  Charmian gave a shout of laughter. “I wish we were. Then I could be natural. But I mean, what are you going to be: very gentle and mild and sweet and shrinking; or very philosophical and thoughtful; or very stately and cold and remote? You know you have to be something. Don’t you always plan out the character you want them to think you?”

  “No,” said Cornelia, driven to her bluntest by the discomfort she felt at such a question, and the doubt it cast her into.

  Charmian looked at her gloomily. “You strange creature!” she murmured. “But I love you,” she added aloud. “I simply idolize you!”

  Cornelia said, half-laughing, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and pulled herself out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.

  XVIII.

  They still had some time with Mrs. Maybough, when they went back to her before any one else came; Cornelia could see that her features were rather small and regular, and that her hair was that sort of elderly blond in color which makes people look younger than they are after they have passed a certain age. She was really well on in the thirties when she went out to Leadville to take charge of Charmian Maybough’s education from the New England town where she had always lived, and ended by marrying Charmian’s father. At that time Andrew Maybough had already made and lost several fortunes without great depravation from the immoralities of the process; he remained, as he had always been, a large, loosely good-natured, casual kind of creature, of whom it was a question whether he would not be buried by public subscription, in the end; but he died so opportunely that he left the widow of his second marriage with the income from a million dollars, which she was to share during her lifetime with the child of his first. Mrs. Maybough went abroad with her step-daughter, and most of the girl’s life had been spent in Europe.

  There was a good deal of Dresden in their sojourn, something of Florence, necessarily a little of Paris; it was not altogether wanting in London, where Mrs. Maybough was presented at court. But so far as definitively materialized society was concerned, Europe could not be said to have availed. When she came back to her own country, it was without more than the hope that some society people, whom she had met abroad, might remember her.

  “You’ll see the greatest lot of frumps, if they ever do come,” Charmian said to Cornelia, after her stepmother had made her excuses to Cornelia for her friends being rather late, “and I don’t think they’re half as uncertain to come as mamma does. Anyway, they’re certain to stay, after they get here, till you want to rise up and howl.”

  “My dear!” said Mrs. Maybough.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose I ever shall howl. I’m too thoroughly subdued; and with Cornelia here to-day I shall be able to hold in. You’re the first Synthesis girl,” she frankly explained to Cornelia, “that mamma’s ever let me have. She thinks they spend all their time drawing the nude.”

  Mrs. Maybough looked at Cornelia for the effect of this boldness upon her, and the girl frowned to keep herself from laughing, and then gave way. Mrs. Maybough smiled with a ladylike decorum which redeemed the excess from impropriety. Charmian seemed to know the bounds of her license, and as if Mrs. Maybough’s smile had marked them, she went no farther, and her mother began softly to question Cornelia about herself. The girl perceived that Charmian had not told her anything quite right concerning her, but had got everything dramatically and picturesquely awry. She tried to keep Cornelia from setting the facts straight, because it took all the romance out of them, and she said she should always believe them as she had reported them. Cornelia knew from novels that they were very humble facts, but she was prepared to abide by them whatever a great society woman like Mrs. Maybough should think of them. Mrs. Maybough seemed to think none the worse of them in the simple angularity which Cornelia gave them.

  Her friends began to come in at last, and Cornelia found herself, for the first time, in a company of those modern nomads whom prosperity and the various forms of indigestion have multiplied among us. They were mostly people whom Mrs. Maybough had met in Europe, drinking different waters and sampling divers climates, and they had lately arrived home, or were just going abroad, or to Florida, or Colorado, or California. The men were not so sick as the women, but they were prosperous, and that was as good or as bad a reason for their homelessness. They gradually withdrew from the ladies, and stirred their tea in groups of their own sex, and talked investments; sometimes they spoke of their diseases, or their hotels and steamers; and they took advice of each other about places to go to if they went in this direction or that, but said that, when it came to it they supposed they should go where their wives decided. The ladies spoke of where they had met last, and of some who had died since, or had got their daughters married; they professed a generous envy of Mrs. Maybough for being so nicely settled, and said that now they supposed she would always live in New York, unless, one of them archly suggested, her daughter should be carried off somewhere; if one had such a lovely daughter it was what one might expect to happen, any day.

  XIX.

  The part that Charmian had chosen to represent must have been that of an Egyptian slave. She served her mother’s guests with the tea that Cornelia poured, in attitudes of the eldest sculptures and mural paintings, and received their thanks and compliments with the passive impersonality of one whose hope in life had been taken away some time in the reign of Thotmes II. She did not at once relent from her self-sacrificial conception of herself, even under the flatteries of the nice little fellow who had decorated the apartment for Mrs. Maybough, and had come to drink a cup of tea in the environment of his own taste. Perhaps this was because he had been one of the first to note the peculiar type of Charmian�
��s style and beauty, and she wished to keep him in mind of it. He did duty as youth and gayety beside the young ladies at their tea-urn, and when he learned that Cornelia was studying at the Synthesis, he professed a vivid interest and a great pleasure.

  “I want Huntley to paint Miss Maybough,” he said. “Don’t you think he would do it tremendously well, Miss Saunders?”

  “Miss Saunders is going to paint me,” said Charmian, mystically.

  “As soon as I get to the round,” said Cornelia to Charmian; she was rather afraid to speak to the decorator. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to be painted with block hands.”

  The decorator laughed, and Charmian asked, “Isn’t she nice not to say anything about a block head? Very few Synthesis girls could have helped it; it’s one of the oldest Synthesis jokes.”

  The young man smiled sympathetically, and said he was sure they would not keep Miss Saunders long at the block. “There’s a friend of mine I should like to bring here, some day.”

  “Mamma would be glad to see him,” said Charmian. “Who is it?”

  Somebody began to sing: a full-bodiced lady, in a bonnet, and with an over-arching bust distended with chest-notes, which swelled and sank tumultuously to her music; her little tightly-gloved hands seemed of an earlier period. Cornelia lost the name which Mr. Plaisdell gave, in the first outburst, and caught nothing more of the talk which Charmian dropped, and then caught up again when the hand-clapping began.

  Some of the people went, and others came, with brief devoirs to Mrs. Maybough in the crepuscular corner where she sat. The tea circulated more and more; the babble rose and fell; it was all very curious to Cornelia, who had never seen anything like it before, and quite lost the sense of the day being Sunday. The stout lady’s song had been serious, if not precisely devotional in character; but Cornelia could not have profited by the fact, for she did not know German. Mr. Plaisdell kept up his talk with Charmian, and she caught some words now and then that showed he was still speaking of his friend, or had recurred to him. “I’m rather dangerous when I get started on him. He’s working out of his mannerisms into himself. He’s a great fellow. I’m going to ask Mrs. Maybough.” But he did not go at once. He drew nearer Cornelia, and tried to include her in the talk, but she was ashamed to find that she was difficult to get on common ground. She would not keep on talking Synthesis, as if that were the only thing she knew, but in fact she did not know much else in New York, even about art.

  “Ah!” he broke off to Charmian, with a lift of his head. “That’s too bad! There he comes now, with Wetmore!”

  Cornelia looked toward Mrs. Maybough with him. One gentleman was presenting another to Mrs. Maybough. They got through with her as quickly as most people did, and then they made their way toward Cornelia’s table. She had just time to govern her head and hand into stony rigidity, when Wetmore came up with Ludlow, whom he introduced to Charmian. She was going to extend the acquaintance to Cornelia, but had no chance before Ludlow took Cornelia’s petrified fingers and bowed over them. The men suppressed their surprise, if they had any, at this meeting as of old friends, but Charmian felt no obligation to silence.

  “Where in the world have you met before? Why, Cornelia Saunders, why didn’t you say you knew Mr. Ludlow?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t give her time,” Ludlow answered.

  “Yes, but we were just speaking of you — Mr. Plaisdell was!” said Charmian, with the injury still in her voice.

  “I didn’t hear you speak of him,” Cornelia said, with a vague flutter of her hands toward the teacups.

  The action seemed to justify Wetmore to himself in saying, “Yes, thank you, I will have some tea, Miss Saunders, and then I’ll get some one to introduce me to you. You haven’t seen me before, and I can’t stand these airs of Ludlow’s.” He made them laugh, and Charmian introduced them, and Cornelia gave him his tea; then Charmian returned to her grievance and complained to Cornelia: “I thought you didn’t know anybody in New York.”

  “Well, it seems you were not far wrong,” Wetmore interposed. “I don’t call Ludlow much of anybody.”

  “You don’t often come down to anything as crude as that, Wetmore,” Ludlow said.

  “Not if I can help it. But I was driven to it, this time; the provocation was great.”

  “I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Saunders at home, several years ago,” Ludlow said in obedience to Charmian. “We had some very delightful friends in common, there — old friends of mine — at Pymantoning.”

  “What a pretty name,” said Mr. Plaisdell. “What a pity that none of our great cities happen to have those musical Indian names.”

  “Chicago,” Wetmore suggested.

  “Yes, Chicago is big, and the name is Indian; but is it pretty?”

  “You can’t have everything. I don’t suppose it is very decorative.”

  “Pymantoning is as pretty as its name,” said Ludlow. “It has the loveliness of a level, to begin with; we’re so besotted with mountains in the East that we don’t know how lovely a level is.”

  “The sea,” Wetmore suggested again.

  “Well, yes, that’s occasionally level,” Ludlow admitted. “But it hasn’t got white houses with green blinds behind black ranks of maples in the moonlight.”

  “If ‘good taste’ could have had its way, the white house with green blinds would have been a thing of the past.” said the decorator. “And they were a genuine instinct, an inspiration, with our people. The white paint is always beautiful, — as marble is. People tried to replace it with mud-color — the color of the ground the house was built on! I congratulate Miss Saunders on the conservatism of Py — ?”

  “Pymantoning,” said Cornelia, eager to contribute something to the talk, and then vexed to have it made much of by Mr. Plaisdell.

  Wetmore was looking away. He floated lightly off, with the buoyancy which is sometimes the property of people of his bulk, and Ludlow remained talking with Charmian. Then, with what was like the insensible transition of dreams to her, he was talking with Cornelia. He said he had been meaning to come and see her all the week past, but he had been out of town, and very busy, and he supposed she was occupied with looking about and getting settled. He did not make out a very clear case, she chose to think, and she was not sure but he was treating her still as a child, and she tried to think how she could make him realize that she was not. He seemed quite surprised to hear that she had been at work in the Synthesis ever since Tuesday. He complimented her energy, and asked, not how she was getting on there, but how she liked it; she answered stiffly, and she knew that he was ignoring her blunt behavior as something she could not help, and that vexed her the more; she wished to resist his friendliness because she did not deserve it. She kept seeing how handsome he was, with his brilliant brown beard, and his hazel eyes. There were points of sunny light in his eyes, when he smiled, and then his teeth shone very white. He did not smile very much; she liked his being serious and not making speeches; she wished she could do something to make him think her less of an auk, but when she tried, it was only worse. He did not say anything to let her think he had changed his mind as to the wisdom of her coming to study art in New York; and she liked that; she should have hated him if he had.

  “Have you got that little Manet, yet?” Mr. Plaisdell broke in upon them. “I was telling Miss Maybough about it.”

  “Yes,” said Ludlow. “It’s at my place. Why won’t Miss Maybough and Miss Saunders come and see it? You’ll come, won’t you, Miss Maybough?”

  “If mamma will let me,” said Charmian, meekly.

  “Of course! Suppose we go ask her?”

  The friends of Mrs. Maybough had now reduced themselves to Wetmore, who sat beside her, looking over at the little tea-table group. Ludlow led the rest toward her.

  “What an imprudence,” he called out, “when I’d just been booming you! Now you come up in person to spoil everything.”

  Ludlow presented his petition, and Mrs. Maybough received it with her
provisional anxiety till he named the day for the visit. She said she had an engagement for Saturday afternoon, and Ludlow ventured, “Then perhaps you’d let the young ladies come with a friend of mine: Mrs. Westley. She’ll be glad to call for them, I’m sure.”

  “Mrs. General Westley?”

  “Yes.”

  “We met them in Rome,” said Mrs. Maybough. “I shall be very happy, indeed, for my daughter. But you know Miss Saunders — is not staying with us?”

  “Miss Saunders will be very happy for herself,” said Charmian.

  The men took their leave, and Charmian seized the first moment to breathe in Cornelia’s ear: “Oh, what luck! I didn’t suppose he would do it, when I got Mr. Plaisdell to hint about that Manet. And it’s all for you. Now come into my room and tell me everything about it. You have got to stay for dinner.”

  “No, no; I can’t,” Cornelia gasped. “And I’m not going to his studio. He asked me because he had to.”

  “I should think he did have to. He talked to you as if there was no one else here. How did you meet him before? When did you?” She could not wait for Cornelia to say, but broke out with fresh astonishment. “Why, Walter Ludlow! Do you know who Walter Ludlow is? He’s one of the greatest painters in New York. He’s the greatest!”

  “Who is Mr. Wetmore?” Cornelia asked evasively.

  “Don’t name him in the same century! He’s grand, too! Does those little Meissonier things. He’s going to paint mamma. She’s one of his types. He must have brought Mr. Ludlow to see me. But he didn’t. He saw nobody but you! Oh Cornelia!” She caught Cornelia in her arms.

  “Don’t be a goose!” said Cornelia, struggling to get away.