One morning, when Lillias and Norah had played this comedy, the young man said, with a worshipping look at the face which Lillias had given the effect of a very pretty girl’s, “I suppose it will be something like this when we are really—”
He hesitated with a fine modesty, and she suggested, “It?”
“Yes! And what a nice, comprehensive little word!”
“You can say a good deal,” she returned, thoughtfully, “with almost any sort of word when you mean it. But I was thinking,” she added, “that perhaps it mightn’t be always so.”
“Why not?”
“Well — is your coffee just right?”
“Sweetness and strength have kissed each other in it. But why mightn’t it be always so?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes we might be cross. I think I am rather apt to be cross in the morning.”
“I have never seen you so, Lillias!”
“You never have seen me in the morning more than half a dozen times, yet. But I suppose we shall have our little outs.”
“Quarrels?”
“Yes, regular rows.”
Craybourne no longer protested against the notion. He asked, “I wonder what made you think of that?”
“Why?”
“Because it was in my mind too, and I was trembling to think it mightn’t be always like this.”
“Probably, then, I got it out of your mind. It was a case of thought-transference.” She smiled in radiant burlesque, but immediately asked, with a dangerous little inflation of the nostrils, which escaped him, “Or perhaps there was something in my behavior that suggested it to you?”
“No,” he answered, so simply that the most impassioned suspicion must have been allayed in her, who saw that her suspicion was not suspected. “You are never otherwise than angelically peaceful. But — how very slight the partition walls in your summer hotels seem to be!”
“Was that what you were going to say?”
“Not at all. But it is on the way to it. I was kept awake last night by the sound of a ‘regular row’ in the room next mine.”
“It served you right — if you were eavesdropping.”
“Oh, but I wasn’t. That was the odd part. I was a perfectly helpless ear-witness, as one might call it. But I am afraid I recognized their voices as those of a couple who sat at table with me at supper. The husband seemed to be interested in the view of Mr. Crombie’s cottage, which he had had from the hotel veranda, and asked me if I knew who lived there. The wife manifested — what shall I say? — such an ostentatious indifference that I saw she was curious too. They had nothing to say to each other, and the question may have been merely to make conversation with a third person.”
“And did you tell them?”
“I don’t know why I didn’t. But I evaded the question.”
“You poor thing! It must have been a great strain on you — any sort of uncandor. Do you know, Edmund, I think your candor is the nicest thing about you?”
“Really? I must cultivate it.”
“No, if you did I should feel that I had made you conscious, and I could never forgive myself for that. What did they say to each other?”
“Nothing.”
“But when they kept you awake?”
The young man had a certain hesitation. “Well, I don’t know! Wasn’t it rather in the nature of a confidence? An involuntary confidence?”
“Yes, it was,” Lillias admitted, with all her frankness. But she added, with a courage which fetched, “Still, if we are one — or going to be — it wouldn’t be the same as if you spoke of it to another.”
“You darling!” Craybourne started up, all his length, and asked, “May I?”
“Well,” she said, “if you will be very quick.”
He ran round the table, and after he had been very quick, or very much quicker than he wished, he sat down, all his length, and asked, “Where was I?”
“On the point of telling me what they said.”
“It appeared to be principally names. But as far as the tenor of their discourse was coherent, it related to a separation. It was mixed up with a good deal of crying from her.”
“Edmund!”
“Yes, it was rather touching, in that.”
“Doesn’t it seem incredible,” Lillias mused, “that people who have once cared for each other should come to that? I can understand death, but I can’t understand divorce — between husband and wife, I mean.”
“And yet, that’s where it’s commonest,” he suggested, without apparent sense of the joke.
“It seems to be,” she agreed. “What else did they say?”
“The rest was mainly an exchange of insults.”
The lovers were silent for a little space, and then she asked, “Doesn’t it seem strange, that just in this supreme moment, when we are promising our lives to each other, and trying to join them in the sweetest hopes, those poor people should be so near us — in the next house, in the next room — tearing themselves apart in the darkest despair and the bitterest hate! Do you think there is anything ominous in it?”
“I don’t see why there should be. While I heard them talking, last night, of course I couldn’t help thinking of ourselves. But our love is very different, Lillias. It isn’t founded on any mere personal fancy. It is reasoned and reasonable. It has been thought out seriously and soberly from the very beginning. I was in love with the idea of you before I saw you — with the girl who was doing the sort of thing that you were doing, and must be the sort of girl you were. When I saw you, I saw that I had been merely fulfilling my destiny.”
“You said that.” Lillias paused from this beginning, and then continued. “I suppose there was some other — attraction. I’m free to say there was with me, Edmund,” she tenderly entreated him.
“Oh, there was with me, too — afterwards. So much so that at times, now, I’m afraid I forget the original motive, altogether.”
“Oh, how sweetly you say it,” she beamed upon him. She started up with him, and he was quicker than before because now they met half-way of the table. She said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I suppose, if we’re going for a walk, I had better get my hat.”
“Oh, certainly, dearest. And I will get mine, too.”
They laughed together at their reciprocal imbecility, and once more he was very quick; or rather they were both very quick.
VI
MRS. CROMBIE went into Crombie’s library to receive the stranger, whose card was coming up for her husband, an hour or so after Craybourne and Lillias had left the house. She intercepted the card, for she was just going in to see why Crombie was not getting up, even for the belated breakfast which he ordinarily made. He said, as if he needed any excuse for being lazy, that he was not feeling just like himself that morning, and he thought he would take it out in bed till luncheon. Then he should be fresher, and more equal to things. He did not say what the things were that he needed being equal to, and she did not press him for an explanation. He glanced drowsily at the card she gave him, and she descended to the library, prepared with a good conscience to say to the stranger that Mr. Crombie had begged her to see him, and was very sorry not to be well enough to come himself. She added, to a visible preoccupation of the stranger’s, that she hoped she could be Mr. Crombie’s substitute.
“Oh, by all means,” the stranger returned, standing up during these preliminaries, and supporting what seemed an habitual lameness on the stick he held in his hand. Mrs. Crombie asked him to sit down, and she was the more civil to him in her tone because of a certain distinction in his presence. He was very well set up, and his voice was well managed, and he had the air of the world which we all prize in ourselves and others.
“I don’t know why I should expect Mr. Crombie to remember me, after such a time,” he said, looking down as with an habitual glance and tapping his boot with his stick, “but when I made out that it was actually he who was living here, I couldn’t resist dropping over. I’m at the Saco Shore House.” He lifte
d his head. “My name is Mevison; Mr. Crombie and I knew each other in Paris.”
Mrs. Crombie started dramatically. “Not Arthur Mevison! Of Réné’s atelier?”
“Yes.”
“Why, Mr. Crombie did nothing but talk of you, after we were married, for years and years! I used to perfectly die of wonder that we never saw you; I saw all the rest of his bachelor friends, and he always said that you would be sure to turn up. But you never did. I’m so glad! I’ll rush up and tell him who it is; I don’t believe he really looked at your card. Why, he’ll be wild!” She bolted towards the door with an agility impredicable of her bulk, but something in his look indefinitely detained her.
“No, don’t disturb Crombie! I couldn’t wait till he’s dressed — if he’s still in bed. I just dropped over. We shall be at the hotel some days. Perhaps he’ll look in on me. It’s quite enough for the present to know that we’re so near each other. Don’t!” There was such a note of pathos in his entreaty that she provisionally forbore, but as much in curiosity as in compassion, and he added, “I’m rather glad not to see him this morning; he’ll know how to account for that, if he remembers me as well as I remember him. Do let me go, and come back again!”
“Will you come back soon? To luncheon?” she parleyed.
“Well — ah — perhaps not to luncheon—”
“I beg your pardon! Of course Mrs. Mevison is with you. I will go over and bring her back with me, and you will both stay to luncheon.”
“I don’t believe Mrs. Mevison—”
“Well, we will see!” Mrs. Crombie cried, in prepotent hospitality. “I know the table at the Saco Shore, and how glad hotel-bound people are of a little home food, if you put it on the lowest ground. Have they made you comfortable as to rooms?”
“Oh, I think so. They’ve done their best, I dare say. Mrs. Mevison is a nervous sufferer, and sometimes the best isn’t the most she could ask; but it’s very well; the rooms are rather high up—”
“Now, I’ll tell you what, Mr. Mevison,” Mrs. Crombie broke in upon him. “We’re not going to let you stay there. We are going to have you here. We have plenty of rooms that are mere aching voids at present, and it will be not only a pleasure but a mercy. This place is my doing, and Mr. Crombie misses the society we used to have at the sea-shore, and is always more or less pining for people. To have you, of all people — and Mrs. Mevison! Can’t you understand?”
“Dimly,” Mr. Mevison returned. “But the thing is simply impossible—”
“Not till Mrs. Mevison says so,” Mrs. Crombie gayly retorted. “It will be such a surprise for Mr. Crombie. Now, I won’t really take no for an answer, or at least any no but your wife’s. It won’t be the least disturbance to us, if that’s what you mean. It will be an unmitigated blessing. Don’t say another word. The thing is simply settled.”
“No, my dear Mrs. Crombie, it isn’t settled,” he protested, with a solemnity which in another mood must have impressed her. “It can’t be—”
But she took this for a polite pretence, and laughed him down, in saying, “Well, it shall be just as you wish, Mr. Mevison. Only, I suppose I may go and call upon Mrs. Mevison?”
“Mrs. Mevison will be very glad to see you,” he said, gravely, and after a little more hilarious fatuity of hers and embarrassed helplessness of his, he took his leave with her promise, or her threat, that she would bring Crombie with her to call upon Mrs. Mevison.
She meant to keep the matter a secret from Crombie, and to have an agreeable mystery for him in making him go to the inn, to call with her upon some old friends of his whom she should not name; but she did not find in herself the strength for this. As soon as Mr. Mevison was out of the house, she pounded breathlessly up-stairs to Crombie, who was still drowsing, in a vain security from what was about to happen, and called out to him as soon as she opened the door, “Well, now, Archibald, who do you think has been here?”
He said, of course, that he did not know, and then she came out with “Arthur Mevison!”
He returned sleepily, sceptically, conditionally, “What Arthur Mevison?”
“Why, your Arthur Mevison that you’ve always told me about — Paris Réné’s favorite pupil. Surely you’re not going to—” Crombie sat up in bed. “You don’t mean to tell me that Arthur Mevison — I thought he was dead!”
“He isn’t dead in the least. He’s staying at the Saco Shore with his wife—”
“With his wife?”
“Yes; what is there so strange about that? Did you know her?”
“Oh no.”
“What do you know about her? What have you ever heard of her?”
“Nothing definite. Only that she was a thundering fool of some sort.”
“Then that accounts for it. Tell me all about her, before you go one inch further, Archibald.”
“I’ve always told you all about her. How she broke him up as soon as she could, and made him leave off painting, and tag her round the world everywhere, and wouldn’t let him live six months in any one place, and quarrelled with all his friends and enemies, and led him a dog’s life, and played the devil generally.”
“You never told me one word of the kind.”
“Didn’t I?” he returned, easily. “I thought I did.”
“Not one word! And you have got me into an awful scrape.”
Crombie lay down again, and pulled the coverlet to his chin, as if he could take the consequences better in that posture. “What have you done?”
“Done? I have asked them to come and stay with us. I thought it would be such a pleasant surprise for you.”
“Why, you don’t mean to say that she’s been here in the house with him?”
“Not at all! But I’ve asked him, and I’ve said I was going over to ask her. And I shall have to do it.”
“Oh, well! Very likely there’s no harm done. But I thought you had your hands rather full with Lillias and her young man, and you wouldn’t want any more guests just now. Besides, if he wants to come, very likely she won’t. I’ve understood that it usually works that way with them.” He meant not only the Mevisons, but all people in the like case.
“But he doesn’t want to come! And I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I insisted upon going and asking her.”.
Crombie puckered his mouth to a long, low whistle.
“And that is the sort of scrape you have got me into, my dear. How often have I told you that your habit of supposing you had spoken of things would be the ruin of us some day!”
“Oh, well,” Crombie said after a moment’s reflection, “perhaps it isn’t so bad as I’ve heard. It was some talk of Minver’s at the club when I was down at New York last winter. He said she had spoiled the most promising career in the world. Minver seemed to want to kill her. But he’s an awful tongue, Minver is. Well, it can’t be helped now.”
“No, it can’t be helped now,” Mrs. Crombie echoed. “And the sooner I make the plunge the better,” she added, strenuously as to her words, but, as to her actions, with the effect of shivering on the verge. In order to gird herself up, she argued, “I said luncheon, and I suppose I ought to go at once.”
“Yes,” Crombie assented in great personal comfort, “I suppose you had. I can’t.”
His wife tacitly examined his moral armor for some crevice at which to pierce him with inculpation, but finding it proof against her she could only say, as she turned to sweep out of the room, “Well, for goodness’ sake, Archy, do be up to receive them if I bring them back with me!”
“Oh, that will be all right,” he answered cosily from the depths of his selfish security; but by-and-by, when she called through his closed door that she was going, he stretched himself in bed with decision, and really began to push off the blanket.
Mrs. Crombie, as she issued into the irregular avenue of elms that formed the approach to her cottage from the river, saw a couple advancing towards her. In the distance they seemed united by the simple device of the man’s having his arm round the woman’s waist;
as they came nearer, this appearance yielded to the effect of her having her hand through his arm; and by the time they were unmistakably Lillias and Craybourne, they were walking less and less closely together. “Upon my word,” Mrs. Crombie said to herself, “Lillias is going it!” But to Lillias, then within hail, she called, “I’m just running over to the hotel, to see some old friends of your uncle’s. I shall have to leave the house in your charge while I’m gone.”
“Well, I dare say I can get Mr. Craybourne to help keep the robbers away.”
“I guess you’ll have to. Your uncle isn’t up yet. It’s a Mr. Mevison and his wife,” she explained at random. “He used to be in Réné’s atelier with your uncle, but he gave it up after he was married. She wouldn’t let him. I wonder if Mr. Craybourne has met them at the hotel.”
“One meets a great many people at the Saco Shore House,” the young man replied, not wholly able to keep his eyes away from Lillias’s waist.
“Do you suppose it could have been the people,” the girl asked him, “who were inquiring about aunty’s cottage?”
A look of alarm came into the dark face of the young man. “It’s possible. I’m sure I can’t say.”
“Well, you’d better, if they’re the ones you heard conversing so violently at night.”
Craybourne stood looking at her and wondering what she was giving him away for in that fashion. She explained indirectly. “Forewarned is forearmed, Aunt Hester. I hope it isn’t the couple that Mr. Craybourne says are carrying on a running fight, over there.”
“Horrors!” Mrs. Crombie said. “What does she mean?” she asked the young man.
“Really, it can’t be the same. I was telling Miss Bel — Lillias — of a family jar that I had been rather obliged to overhear part of last night; but there’s no reason to suppose—”
“He means there’s every reason to suppose,” the girl put in mischievously.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 822
