“It’s taffy of the most barefaced description. Now, my dear, you look out for that girl. Don’t trust her beyond your sight. Does she expect us to take any active part in regard to this Englishman of hers?”
“Oh no. And I quite agree with you about her slyness. There can’t be so much smoke without some fire, and I shall certainly watch her. She wants to commit us to some scheme in her mother’s absence, and I am not going to be used. She will find that out.”
The talk of the Crombies ended for the night in a very exhaustive analysis of the relations of Lillias to her more immediate family, then as remote in space as close in blood, and in a just recognition of how very little the girl, left to shift for herself, owed her mother in obedience or deference. Mrs. Crombie led the conclusion in censure of her sister, with those reserves in behalf of her peculiarities which a woman sometimes likes to make in judging her next of kin, as if their eccentricities somehow reflected picturesqueness if not praise upon herself. Lillias, she said, had come honestly by anything that was original in her; and she did not know but that if the girl was now hesitating in a way that was ridiculous about accepting Mr. Craybourne, she was certainly improving upon her mother, who used to be always hesitating about people after she had accepted them, and sometimes after she had married them. In the case of Lillias’s father, she reminded Crombie, Aggie’s misgiving had gone so far as to have the character of a provisional separation for a whole year before his death. She asked Crombie if he did not think that this showed a real honesty in the child; and he said that he did. By this time he was so sleepy that he would have said anything.
He was quite as compliant when he woke, but he found his wife of another mind, after a night passed beyond the influence of her niece. She came into his room before he was up, or fairly awake, fully dressed and with a defensive armor invisibly on, which she betrayed in saying, “Well, she is a case.”
“Why, what has she been doing now?” Crombie asked, instantly roused to consciousness.
“Oh, nothing. I have just been thinking her over, and I have gone back to my first impressions. I think what she has done is enough without anything more. The question is, what ought we to do? Shall we quietly ignore Mr. Craybourne until she chooses to make a move, or shall we ignore her, and you go over to the Saco Shore and call upon him, and take the bull by the horns? Do you know, my dear, I believe that’s just what she wants you to do. How can we tell but it’s a plot between them to force our hands? There’s every probability, to my mind, that she planned for him to get here before her, so that he would come and be looked over before she arrived, and we be driven at the point of the bayonet to say what we think of him. I’ll bet anything you dare that she was enraged beyond description when she found that she had missed fire, and that we hadn’t seen him, after all!”
“I don’t think it’s fair,” Crombie said, “to use such various and vigorous imagery with a man that’s still on his back.”
“Well, you must get up, then.” She had been going about, pulling up window-shades and throwing open shutters, as she talked, and she now confronted him in the full light of day. “It’s nearly breakfast-time, anyway; and I want to talk it thoroughly over with you after you’re shaved.”
“I shall be clearer, then; but I shall be a great deal hungrier, and I don’t believe I can talk it over till I’ve had my coffee.”
“You’ve got to,” she said, going out of the room.
But before he had half finished shaving, and while he was still grieving inwardly at having to help his wife make up her mind about her niece all over again, he heard her voice gayly lifted and the clash of enthusiastic kisses in a pause of the rustling skirts that he knew to be meeting in the upper hallway on which all the bedroom doors opened. He noticed that his wife’s and her niece’s voices were very much alike in the one asking, “Why, child, you poor thing, are you up already? Why didn’t you let me send your breakfast to your room?” and the other answering, “Oh, I’m always up to breakfast, aunt, and I’m so be-youthfully rested, I couldn’t think of it.”
“Well, then, come right down. It’ll be on the table instantly,” he heard his wife continue. “Your uncle will come any old time, as he says, and we needn’t wait for him.”
“Well, I am rather nippish,” he heard Lillias owning in the same note.
The girl was very amusing, he thought, when he found them at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie said she had been telling about her university life, out there, and bade her go on.
“Oh, I don’t believe Uncle Archibald will care for it,” Lillias said, but she corrected herself so far as to add, “It is rather funny, I suppose, to you, off here.” He liked her standing up so for her adoptive West, and he showed an immediate interest which inspired her. She was looking still prettier than the night before, and the flower-like freshness of her morning-dress was quite as becoming as the twilight tones which had clothed her as with a pensive music the night before. He tried to put out of his mind a saying to the effect that in the dark all cats are gray, while he found a singular pleasure in the pseudo-deference with which she addressed herself to him. “You see,” she continued, “that my lectures are rather outside of the regular courses, and that was the reason why the general public was always more or less at them. I believe they were popular, but I knew all the time that they would have been more popular if they had been more — well, humbuggy. And you know I couldn’t stand that, uncle,” she appealed to him with a sidelong glance.
“No,” he assented, in a way that made her laugh.
She went on: “People like that, both old and young, and I should have had all the unoccupied human material that goes into women’s clubs raving about me, if I had done some sort of Delsarte business; they would have much preferred a song and dance to the modesty of nature which I was trying to brag up by precept and practice. I was tolerably adored by my classes, as it was, but I should have had them in ecstasies if I had descended to the cheap kind of things we were taught to avoid in the dramatic school.”
“Yes,” Crombie said, and now Lillias did not immediately continue.
When she did, it was to say, with a silently accumulated frankness, “The only one, really, that thoroughly understood, from the first instant, what I was driving at, was Mr. Craybourne. I suppose,” she said, with another cast of her eyes, though this time it was rather defiant than appealing, towards Crombie, “Aunt Hester has told you about him?”
“Not at all! What about him?”
His effrontery made her laugh again.
“Oh, that’s another story, as Kipling says — or used to say; I believe he doesn’t say it now, any more. This story only relates to his telling me, as soon as he could manage to get introduced — which he did by very properly waiting and asking the president to perform the ceremony, when he could have got any soul in the place to do it at once — that I was the first person to give him the least notion of what nature was at.”
“Indeed!” Crombie said. “Did you believe him?”
“Not immediately. There’s nothing,” she deferred, “that we suspect so much as downright openness, is there?”
“It’s often very misleading.”
“Well, I found out afterwards that he really meant it. That,” she added, after a distinct interval, “was what gave me pause,” and Crombie felt that she had come to the other story. “There is no use beating about the bush, and I’m not going to. Aunt Hester,” she now turned to Mrs. Crombie, “I may as well say first as last that if the Mellays hadn’t providentially written to put me off a week I should have invented some providential excuse for coming to you and letting me meet Mr. Craybourne as nearly on the parental premises as I could get them.” Crombie stole a look at his wife, but he could detect nothing of resentment in her face; nothing but a generous and protecting welcome. She laid her left hand along the table towards the girl, and Lillias put hers gratefully into it. “You have done exactly right, my dear,” she said, and Lillias went on, piecing a little break in her v
oice:
“Even if mother were on the ground, and not off in the wilds of Europe somewhere, I should wish Uncle Archie’s approval, as I’ve no father of my own; for in the kind of scrambling life I’ve led I like to have a thing of this kind perfectly regular. I’m not the least bit bohemian, Aunt Hester, though I know you always thought me so—”
“No, my dear!” Mrs. Crombie protested, but Lillias tenderly insisted:
“Oh yes, you did, aunt, and I don’t blame you; I should have, myself. But at heart I’m deadly respectable, and Mr. Craybourne’s being an Englishman makes me all the more anxious to be more so; though he thinks the other kind of thing is charming, and was quite ready to be fetched by it — at least in my case. You see, I’m not having any concealments from you!”
“You needn’t have, poor child!” Mrs.
Crombie said, so tenderly that Crombie kept himself with difficulty from a derisory snort.
“And now you have the whole thing before you. I have come to you simply for a social basis, a domestic hearth, a family fireside, and when Mr. Craybourne comes I want him to find me in a chimney-corner belonging to my own kith and kin.”
The terms of this declaration, and the mixed tones in which it was delivered, were such as to make Crombie feel that it need not be taken too seriously, though it could not be taken too earnestly; so, when his wife, with an adjuratory frown, indicated that it was for him, as head of the house, to make their joint response, he said, with a certain hardy gayety:
“And when is he coming?”
“Oh, any moment!” Lillias said, with a rueful little smile full of gladness at his light daring. “That is, if one can judge from his already being here before me. I suppose I may say that it wasn’t his fault that we are not here on our wedding journey.”
She turned from her uncle to her aunt in making this observation, and Mrs. Crombie met it in the same spirit. “Well, Lillias, I must say that you have done very wisely in the whole matter. I should never have forgiven myself if any fancied inconvenience to us had kept you from coming to us in such an emergency; and no matter how it turns out, I shall write to Aggie that you have done everything that a girl could do.”
“Thank you, Aunt Hester,” and the two women had a moment of mothering and daughtering in which Crombie could not join them.
“Well, I am prepared to do anything you want,” he said, with an ironical ease, and a genuine interest in the affair which he thought it more manly to conceal. “Do I understand that Mr. Craybourne will ask for me again?”
“Yes, indeed!” the girl said. “We are not out there now, and he knows it.”
“And what am I to say, when he asks to see you — if he does?”
Lillias looked at her aunt, who visibly failed to formulate a line of conduct for Crombie, and then she looked back at him, and said, caressingly, “Oh, just trust to the inspiration of the moment, uncle.”
“Then you leave it all to me?”
“Quite.”
“Well, I’ve never had the chance of forbidding a young man my house before, and perhaps I sha’n’t do it in just the way that this Mr. Craybourne is used to, but I think I can do it effectually.”
Crombie wore the mustache of his period branching into the side whiskers of the early eighteen-sixties, and it was with a fine flare of both that he now tilted his head on one side and waited for his wife and niece to precede him out of the breakfast-room. His beard and the gossamer traces of his hair were faded from their earlier red to an agreeable yellowish white, and his bulging blue eyes matched very well with them and with a complexion of ancestral Scotch floridity, so that as he stood leaning forward with his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets he was such a fine elderly Du Maurier military type that Lillias could hardly forbear throwing him a kiss. She did forbear, but she forbore with a backward roll of her own eyes which had all the effect of a thrown kiss. “You’ll be splendid, Uncle Archie, whatever you do,” she encouraged him, though it made him tremble, almost, to see her put her arm round her aunt’s waist. He felt that she might carry it too far in constituting herself Mrs. Crombie’s protégée, and in fact he fancied Mrs. Crombie’s waist tacitly stiffening under the caress.
To make sure, he asked her, when Lillias had gone up to her room for a moment, “Then you’ve changed your mind about her?”
“Not at all!” his wife returned, in the scorn often used by women to give dignity to a misstatement. “I feel exactly as I did, though in an entirely different way. She is not underhanded, but overhanded, and she thinks that if she is perfectly transparent I shall not see through her. All is, I shall have to fight her in the open.”
“Where did you get that expression?” Crombie parleyed.
“I don’t know: in some of those English South African accounts. You know what I mean. She is determined to be married from this house.”
Crombie caught his breath, and then whistled.
“I can see it,” she went on, “as plain as the nose on my face. But I can tell her she won’t do it, without my knowing it.”
“I wish I knew what you meant by that,” Crombie sighed.
“Well, you will see.”
Just then Lillias’s trailing skirts were heard on the stairs like the drift of fallen leaves down a forest path.
IV
MR. CRAYBOURNE, whatever were his impulses to an earlier call, had quelled them so far as not to come before eleven o’clock in the morning, though why he should have come before the afternoon can be explained only on the ground that the country informality and the summer heat had relaxed him to a social freedom which he might not otherwise have permitted himself. When he did come, however, he was not relaxed to the extreme of asking for Miss Bellard. He asked for Mr. Crombie, and he was shown to him in the library, a room that few men could have had so little need of as the master of the house. It had some books, mostly dishevelled paper copies of novels, tumbling about on its shelves; and it was stuck round with Crombie’s sketches on pasteboard and canvas, memories of The Surges and its scenery, and forecasts of the White Mountain landscape, and bits of the Saco valley. Crombie was so old-fashioned in his methods that these attempts were like rejected studies by poorer masters of the extinct White Mountain school. He was ranging among them, trying, with his mouth puckered to an inaudible whistle, to make choice of some one or other that might be carried farther, when Mr. Craybourne rang. Crombie had almost forgotten about him, but he now started into a sense of him that took all nature out of his careless ease. He came forward, however, with outstretched hand, and welcomed him. He said, “Ah, how do you do, Mr. Craybourne?” in a tone of expectation that struck upon his own ear as not quite the thing; and he did not know whether he mended matters much or not by adding, “Sorry not to have been at home when you called yesterday. Sit down.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Craybourne said, and after faltering a moment on foot he folded himself down and down, by what appeared to Crombie successive plications, into the rather low chair appointed him. The result of the process brought his face somewhat more on a level with Crombie’s, who was himself of such a good height that he was at least not used to being towered over, and who saw that Mr. Craybourne’s face was a decidedly handsome, tanned face, regular in feature, with rather deep-set blue eyes, and a skin burnished on the cheeks, chin, and upper lip by the very close shave which the barber at the Saco Shore House had just given him. He diffused, involuntarily, as Crombie decided, a faint and fainter odor of the bay-rum which he had not been quick enough to keep the barber from dabbling him with after the close shave; and he also seemed to have a good deal of wrist, from which, on the right and left, he nervously clasped his hat with slender, gentlemanly hands. His hands had been liberated from the labor of the fields by the failure of his ranching experiment so long as to have lost the brown of the sun and wind, but they had the tone of his complexion. The clasp he had given Crombie was soft, yet firm, and not at all damp, in spite of the nervousness that brought some perspiration to the youn
g man’s straight, comely forehead.
The embarrassing variety of topics which Crombie had to choose from, in view of the intimate relations he found himself in with this perfect stranger through the frankness of Lillias Bellard, kept him silent for a breath or two. Then he said, “Fine day.”
“Yes,” Mr. Craybourne admitted, with an indrawn sigh, as if from the sense of reprieve. “But I suppose you expect fine weather at this time of year.”
Crombie saw his opening and said, “Yes, rather oftener than we get it,” and this made way for a mutual smile of such good-fellowship that it was easy for him to add, “I suppose I needn’t conceal that I know you wish to ask for Miss Bellard.” Mr. Craybourne could apparently do no more than laugh gratefully, and Crombie said, “She came last night, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I — I had the pleasure of seeing her at the station,” the young man innocently said, and Crombie concealed any surprise he felt at having ascertained a limit to Lillias Bellard’s frankness, which had seemed so unbounded. In fact, for a few seconds he felt no surprise, or anything at all, the effect of Mr. Craybourne’s simple statement was so benumbing. Then abysms of astonishment began to open within him, to which there was no bottom. Had the girl meant to tell her aunt of this meeting, and had the moment slipped by her in her first grapple with the fact of Craybourne’s presence, and got so far by that she could not overtake it? If she had meant to keep their meeting a secret, why had not she charged Craybourne not to speak of it? There was mystery here which Crombie’s plummet could not fathom, and before which he shuddered in conjecture, while he smiled to think how completely his wife had been taken in by her niece. He first abhorred the girl’s duplicity, and then his abhorrence yielded to pity for the unknown necessity which had forced her to it, and at the same time his bare scalp felt the ghost of its vanished hair rise on it at the thought of what Mrs. Crombie might do and say when she found out the fact.
“Oh, I didn’t know you met her,” he said, hollowly, and not very wisely.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 820
