Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She would have protested further, but he had already left her, and she vainly appealed to him with her entreating eyes when he looked back at her over his shoulder.

  While he was gone she unwrapped the hat that she had borrowed from Friend Ella Shewall, and put it on at the little mirror by the water-cooler. Then she dropped her Shaker shawl over her arm, and sat down again to wait.

  When Lorenzo came back he started at sight of her. “Well, well!” he said.

  “Do you like it?” she cooed back at him.

  “Well, I should think so!”

  He began to pick up her bundles, and she stood outside of the seat to give him a chance. “I thought I wouldn’t like to have them see me in my Family shawl and my short hair,” she explained.

  “I guess they wouldn’t noticed much,” said Lorenzo. “There a’n’t anybody up but the porter. Well, it’s all ready.” He stopped, and let some of the parcels fall back into the seat, and stood staring at her.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he answered; and then he said, thickly, “ I was just thinking how you would look in a dress that I saw a girl have on at Fitchburg to-day.” She felt his eyes on her waist, but she did not mind; she laughed for pleasure; she liked to know he thought she had a pretty waist; he might just as well. He affected to turn it off with a practical remark:

  “That dress looks a little Shaker yet. Perhaps it won’t when you’ve got the sack on over it. Anyway, we can get something ready-made at Saratoga. I don’t believe you’ll ever get anything that’ll fit you much better,” he gasped, in helpless adoration.

  The girl’s face fell a little. “Yee. Sister Miranda made it. She said she was afraid she took almost too much pride in it. I did hate to leave without saying good-bye to her!”

  “Yee,” said the young fellow, gravely.

  The black porter from the sleeping-car came in briskly, and after a glance up and down their car to make sure of his passenger he came and took Althea’s bags and parcels from Lorenzo’s passive hands. “This way, lady,” he said.

  She looked at Lorenzo, and he nodded. “I guess he can show you.”

  “Good-night,” she said, following the porter out.

  “Well, good-night,” answered Lorenzo. He sat down in the seat now empty of her form, and pulled his hat over his eyes.

  III

  IT was bright day when she came back to him from the sleeping-car, but he had not yet awakened. She stood looking down at him and smiling, and presently he started awake and stared distractedly up at her before he could pull himself together and say, “Well, well! Did you sleep pretty well?”

  “I rested pretty well,” she answered. “how did you?”

  Lorenzo laughed. “I guess I slept pretty Well, but I don’t believe I rested very much. But I’ve got the whole day to rest in now.” Althea had Friend Ella Shewall’s hat and sack both on, and she waited for him to realize the fact before she sat down. “Well, well,” he said, in recognition, “that sack is nice.”

  “Well?” she urged, as if she felt a disappointment in his tone.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “It don’t seem to go exactly with the dress.”

  “Nay,” said Lorenzo, with his laugh. “It makes you look like the world-outside one-half, and the other half Shaker.”

  “Yee, it does,” said Althea, forlornly; her chin trembled a little, and her eyes threatened tears. “I guess it’s all we’re ever going to be, too, Lorenzo: half Shaker and half world-outside,” she added, bitterly. “I guess I better go back into the sleeping-car and put on my old shawl and bonnet again.”

  “No such a thing!” cried Lorenzo. “I guess we’ll see about that when we get to Saratoga — we must be pretty near there now. Set right down here, and I’ll go back for your things.”

  “Nay, the colored man said he would bring them.” Althea sank into the seat and got out the handkerchief, broad as a napkin, which she had brought from the Family with her, and wiped the tears from her eyes. Then she bowed her face into it, and her little frame shook with the sobs she smothered.

  “Well! well!” groaned Lorenzo, in an anguish of tenderness.

  Althea suddenly took her handkerchief away and controlled her face. “There! I am ashamed, Lorenzo.”

  “Nay, don’t you say that, Althea. You’ve got just as much right to cry as anybody, and I want you should cry.”

  “Nay, I’ve got through now,” said Altlica; and to prove it she smiled up into his face so radiantly that he laughed, and she laughed with him.

  The porter with her bag and parcels perhaps thought he had arrived at a fortunate moment. He set the bag respectfully at her feet, and kept a smiling face on Lorenzo while he arranged the parcels almost decoratively on her lap. Then he lingered a moment; the smile died on his face, and he went mournfully away. They both felt the gloom in his manner, aud were sensible of a vague reproach in it.

  “What was it, Lorenzo?” she asked.

  “Well, that was just what I was going to ask you, Althea,” said Lorenzo. They wondered over the incident so sadly closed, and their minds were not wholly taken from it until they drew in sight of Saratoga and the train began to slow. They ran along the backs of some simple houses whose yards and gardens were shorn off by the track, and then the vast bulks of the hotels began to show among the foliage that everywhere masses itself over the town. “This must be it,” said Lorenzo, and they looked at each other in a sudden fright. “No use being scared about it now,” he added, as he resolutely gathered up Althea’s belongings and stood aside to let her get out of the car. The conductor who took her elbow to help her down from it let Lorenzo shift for himself, and the embarrassment they felt was relieved for them both by his dropping some of the parcels, and their having to pick them up from under the feet of the crowd thronging into the station. She made him let her keep some of them now, and they passed through the station to the street beyond, where there was a clamor of carriage drivers, and a rank of stately hacks and barouches, and light, wood-colored surreys and phaetons. The drivers swarmed upon them, but as they stood silent and motionless under their burdens the drivers dropped off one by one, like dogs that have rushed out at a passer and have failed to make the expected impression upon him. At last they were free, and they walked from the station under the flank of a mighty hotel into a wide street, where they found it one hotel of many, with sweeping piazzas and narrow pillars springing into the air like the stems of tall young trees. The street was freshly watered, and smelled of the dampened dust; it was set with elms, and under their arches stood vehicles of the same sort and variety as those at the station. Some drove slowly up and down through the sun and shadow; but their drivers, after a glance at Lorenzo and Althea struggling along under their parcels, intelligently forbore to invite them to a morning drive.

  “I guess we sha’n’t want to go to any hotel just yet,” said Lorenzo. “We can get breakfast at an eating-house, if we can find one.”

  “Yee,” Althea timidly assented.

  They had to walk up and down a long while before they found an eating-house. Lorenzo began to be afraid there was nothing but hotels in Saratoga. They trudged along, staring at all the signs, and the shopkeepers, sweeping the dust of their floors across the pavement to the gutters, had to stop for them to get slowly by or else sweep it against them. Althea knew that Lorenzo looked well, but she was smitten with a sense of her own inadequate appearance, and she tried to shrink as much out of sight as possible.

  “Here’s one at last,” said Lorenzo, stopping at a doorway. “Go right in, Althea,” he added to her at a certain faltering she showed. “It’s all right. It’s just like the one Friend Nason took me to in Fitchburg.”

  It seemed very splendid with its mirrors and marble-topped tables and bent-wood chairs, and it overcame Althea with the surprise and then the indifference it showed in the shining black waiter who came forward after a moment, as if their custom were not expected or much wanted at that hour in the
morning. But Lorenzo was not afraid. He asked if they could have something to eat; and then the waiter said he guessed so, and be took their parcels and set them against the wall by the table he chose for them. Little groups of flies had knotted themselves into rosettes on the marble where it seemed to have been imperfectly cleansed; others paraded across it in black files. There were a great many flies in the long, narrow saloon, and the air within was faint and dull, as if it were the air of the evening before, and had been up all night there. A man was wiping a marble counter with a soda fountain at one end of it. At the rear of the room a boy was taking down the chairs which stood on the tables with their legs up.

  Lorenzo asked Althea what she wanted for breakfast, and when she could not think he told the colored man he guessed they would have beefsteak and coffee and hot biscuit. The colored man said they had no hot biscuit yet, and he suggested hot cakes.

  “Well, hot cakes, then,” said Lorenzo; and he said to Althea that he guessed hot cakes would be full as well anyway.

  Before he brought their breakfast the waiter spread a large napkin over the marble before them, and that forced the flies into a momentary exile. They rose into the air, but they did not go far; they remained circling round overhead and humming angrily till Lorenzo’s order came, and then they settled down upon the table again, and brought with them apparently all the other flies they knew.

  The steak was very juicy and tender, and when the cakes came from the place where all old negro stood frying them on a slab of soapstone with gas-jets underneath they were very good too. But the coffee was green in color when they had poured their small jugs of milk into it, and thick with grounds.

  “Not much like our cocoa at the Family,” said Lorenzo, for a joke.

  Althea let fall a small “Nay” like a tear, and pushed her cup a little from her without seeming to know it.

  But Lorenzo had seen the act of repulsion, and he called over his shoulder to the waiter, who stood behind him watching Althea, “haven’t you got any cocoa?”

  “Chocolate,” said the waiter, impassively. “That do?”

  Lorenzo saw Althea’s face brighten, and he said, “Yee — yes, I should say,” and then Althea and be laughed together at the joke that puzzled the waiter. They were very gay over their breakfast when he came back with the chocolate, though they were dashed a little at going when the same gloom that they had noticed in the sleeping-car porter fell upon their waiter, after Lorenzo had gathered up all the change he had brought them.

  “What is it, Lorenzo, seems to come over them so at the last? He was so polite when we sat down, and took our bundles and everything, and he didn’t even offer to hand them back when we left.”

  IV

  THEY were out on the sidewalk again, and were pushing aimlessly ahead under their burdens. The air felt fresher outside, and a breeze had begun to stir. “I don’t know,” said Lorenzo. “I guess they’re rather changeable, that’s all. Now, Althea, I can see that you’re troubled about that dress of yours, and I want you should go into some of these stores with me and see if we can’t match your sack better.”

  “Do you truly, Lorenzo?” she returned, in a flutter of pleasure. “Well!”

  “Yee, I want to see you in something a little more seasonable. It’s summer, and I’d like you to have — well, a white dress, I believe.”

  “But that wouldn’t go any better with the sack than this one.”

  “Well, I guess we can find a sack that it will go with, then,” said Lorenzo. “I always heard that they got married in white, anyway. I want you should look like other folks.”

  “Yee,” Althea assented, a little faint with her consciousness.

  They passed a good many stores where there were dresses hanging at the doors or in the windows, but Lorenzo showed himself very fastidious; and though Althea thought some of them would do, he would only say that they could come back if they did not see anything that suited them better.

  “I saw some dresses in a store under that big hotel down yonder a piece, and I want to ask about them first. Didn’t you notice them?”

  “Yee, I did. But isn’t it rather of a fashionable place?”

  “That’s just what I’m looking for,” said Lorenzo, and Althea laughed tremulously.

  When they came down opposite the hotel he boldly led the way across the street, and would not let her falter at the shop door. “Now you come right in, Althea. I know more about the wor1d-outside than you do,” he said, in an imperative whisper.

  He was blushing, too, though, when he set their things down on the floor, and a tall, handsome woman came flowingly forward to meet them, between counters gay with hats and bonnets, and clothes-trees with sacks and jackets, and figure-frames with gowns that swept the floor with silken trains. The shop-woman looked at them with a blush as bright as their own or brighter, but subdued to a softer effect by the film of powder that had got a little into her eyebrows.

  She glanced inquiringly from one to the other, and at Althea’s vain gasp she said to Lorenzo, as if he were an old man of the world, and they could understand each other perhaps better, “Is there something I could show madam?”

  “Yee, there is,” said Lorenzo. “We wanted to get some kind of a dress, if they a’n’t all too dear.”

  “We have all prices,” said the woman, and she touched different gowns as she spoke. “Seventy-five dollars, one fifty, sixty-two and a half, forty-five.”

  “You wanted something in cotton goods, didn’t you, Althea?” asked Lorenzo, artfully, so as both to escape from the offer of these garments, which he did not wish to discredit by refusing them, and to bring Althea into the transaction.

  “Yee, I did.” And when Lorenzo whispered, “Yes — don’t say yee,” she promptly retorted, in undertone, “You keep saying it too.” And as if she had plucked up courage from inculpating him, she added to the shopwoman, “I should like something that would go with this sack and hat.”

  “Oh, well, then,” said the shopwoman, as if she now understood exactly, and in a tone that transferred her allegiance instantly from Lorenzo to Althea, “I have something here very pretty and very cheap,” and she took up from a heap of dainty dresses thrown across a table a frock of white muslin, trimmed with ends and knots of cherry ribbon, and fluttered over with lace and ruching and ruffling. “This is very cheap,” she said, looking at the tag on it, and then drawing it over her arm with her right hand and holding it out to survey it with a glance of her sidelong head, in which there was an eye that studied both the young lovers. “It is quite a dream — and imported. It would fit you perfectly, madam. We’re about at the end of our season for summer things now, and you could have this — it’s marked thirty-five — for twenty-five.”

  Lorenzo stood agape, but Althea did not seem to know that he was even there. She was rapt in the ecstasy of the pretty dress. “Could — would you let me try it on first?”

  “Why, certainly, madam. Just come with me.”

  Althea followed like one led by a spell. Lorenzo sat down on one of the revolving stools before a show-case filled with ribbons, with Althea’s bags and parcels at his feet. It seemed to him that he sat there a long time. While he waited the shopwoman drifted in twice — once to fetch away a coquettish cape from one of the clothes-trees, and once to take a gauze hat from a peg. Then nothing happened for a time; and he had begun to wonder what was keeping Althea when he lifted his downcast eyes and beheld a vision.

  It was Althea and it was not Althea. It was Althea as she would look, he suddenly thought, in the spirit-life, if spirits could be as beautiful as people on the earth, and have some of the danger in them. He could only deeply murmur, “Well, well!” and stare and stare.

  “Will it do?” she entreated, with a smile that had a heavenly splendor in it.

  He shut his mouth and swallowed, and then opened it again, but he could not speak.

  “I think,” said the shopwoman, “that madam looks superb in that dress, and she must have the cape with it.
Her black sack is very nice, but it’s a little out of style, and it’s rather more of a spring and fall garment. Don’t you think the hat is very becoming, too? The ribbon is the same as that on the dress.” She touched a knot of it on the hat, and another knot of it on Althea’s breast, and Lorenzo felt as if his own heart were under the place. “As the season is passing I can let you have them at the same reduction as the dress. I should have wanted twenty-five for the cape at the beginning of the month, and fifteen for the hat. You can have them both now for twenty-five — just fifty in all. And there isn’t a stitch needed in any of them.”

  “They do seem to fit,” said Lorenzo.

  “She could wear them into the street this moment,” said the woman.

  Althea said nothing. She let her eyes fall.

  “I guess we shall have to take them,” said Lorenzo, and he got his pocket-book out.

  Althea turned suddenly upon him. “Don’t you do it unless you feel you’d ought to, Lorenzo. If it isn’t right, I don’t want you should do it.”

  “Oh, I guess it’s all right,” said Lorepzo, and the shopwoman confirmed him in the opinion.

  “It would be simply wicked for madam not to have them.”

  “Yee, it would” said Lorenzo more heartily, and he paid the bills over on the counter.

  The woman took them with an absent air, as if she too were bewitched with the beauty she had adorned. “The hat would look ever so much better, of course,” she said, “if madam’s hair was the natural length. You must come back when it’s grown out, and let me show you another.”

  It seemed a joke, and they laughed. Lorenzo said, boldly, “Yee, we will.” And then he said, to help get away, “Well, Althea, I guess we must be going.”

  “Oh, then, madam will wear the things at once? Well, that is right. Where did you say I should send the old ones?”

  The shopwoman addressed Lorenzo, and he blushed — he did not know why. “Well, we haven’t gone to any hotel yet. Could — could we leave them here a little while?”