Miss Shirley said, with a distress which was genuine, though he perceived a trace of amusement in it, too, “I see that I will have to go on.”
“Oh, do!” he made out to utter.
“I am going to Mrs. Westangle’s as a sort of mistress of the revels. The business is so new that it hasn’t got its name yet, but if I fail it won’t need any. I invented it on a hint I got from a girl who undertakes the floral decorations for parties. I didn’t see why some one shouldn’t furnish suggestions for amusements, as well as flowers. I was always rather lucky at that in my own fam — at my father’s—” She pulled herself sharply up, as if danger lay that way. “I got an introduction to Mrs. Westangle, and she’s to let me try. I am going to her simply as part of the catering, and I’m not to have any recognition in the hospitalities. So it wasn’t necessary for her to send for me at the station, except as a means of having me on the ground in good season. I have to thank you for that, and — I thank you.” She ended in a sigh.
“It’s very interesting,” Verrian said, and he hoped he was not saying it in any ignoble way.
He was very presently to learn. Round a turn of the road there came a lively clacking of horses’ shoes on the hard track, with the muted rumble of rubber-tired wheels, and Mrs. Westangle’s victoria dashed into view. The coachman had made a signal to Verrian’s driver, and the vehicles stopped side by side. The footman instantly came to the door of the carryall, touching his hat to Verrian.
“Going to Mrs. Westangle’s, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Westangle’s carriage. Going to the station for you, sir.”
“Miss Shirley,” Verrian said, “will you change?”
“Oh no,” she answered, quickly, “it’s better for me to go on as I am. But the carriage was sent for you. You must—”
Verrian interrupted to ask the footman, “How far is it yet to Mrs. Westangle’s?”
“About a mile, sir.”
“I think I won’t change for such a short distance. I’ll keep on as I am,” Verrian said, and he let the goatskin, which he had half lifted to free Miss Shirley for dismounting, fall back again. “Go ahead, driver.”
She had been making several gasping efforts at speech, accompanied with entreating and protesting glances at Verrian in the course of his brief colloquy with the footman. Now, as the carryall lurched forward again, and the victoria wheeled and passed them on its way back, she caught her handkerchief to her face, and to Verrian’s dismay sobbed into it. He let her cry, as he must, in the distressful silence which he could not be the first to break. Besides, he did not know how she was taking it all till she suddenly with threw her handkerchief and pulled down her veil. Then she spoke three heart-broken words, “How could you!” and he divined that he must have done wrong.
“What ought I to have done?” he asked, with sullen humility.
“You ought to have taken the victoria.”
“How could I?”
“You ought to have done it.”
“I think you ought to have done it yourself, Miss Shirley,” Verrian said, feeling like the worm that turns. He added, less resentfully, “We ought both to have taken it.”
“No, Mrs. Westangle might have felt, very properly, that it was presumptuous in me, whether I came alone in it or with you. Now we shall arrive together in this thing, and she will be mortified for you and vexed with me. She will blame me for it, and she will be right, for it would have been very well for me to drive up in a shabby station carryall; but an invited guest—”
“No, indeed, she shall not blame you, Miss Shirley. I will make a point of taking the whole responsibility. I will tell her—”
“Mr. Merriam!” she cried, in anguish. “Will you please do nothing of the kind? Do you want to make bad worse? Leave the explaining altogether to me, please. Will you promise that?”
“I will promise that — or anything — if you insist,” Verrian sulked.
She instantly relented a little. “You mustn’t think me unreasonable. But I was determined to carry my undertaking through on business principles, and you have spoiled my chance — I know you meant it kindly or, if not spoiled, made it more difficult. Don’t think me ungrateful. Mr. Merriam—”
“My name isn’t Merriam,” he resented, at last, a misnomer which had annoyed him from the first.
“Oh, I am so glad! Don’t tell me what it is!” she said, giving a laugh which had to go on a little before he recognized the hysterical quality in it. When she could check it she explained: “Now we are not even acquainted, and I can thank a stranger for the kindness you have shown me. I am truly grateful. Will you do me another favor?”
“Yes,” Verrian assented; but he thought he had a right to ask, as though he had not promised, “What is it?”
“Not to speak of me to Mrs. Westangle unless she speaks of me first.”
“That’s simple. I don’t know that I should have any right to speak of you.”
“Oh yes, you would. She will expect you, perhaps, to laugh about the little adventure, and I would rather she began the laughing you have been so good.”
“All right. But wouldn’t my silence make it rather more awkward?”
“I will take care of the awkwardness, thank you. And you promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“That is very good of you.” She put her hand impulsively across the goat-skin, and gave his, with which he took it in some surprise, a quick clasp. Then they were both silent, and they got out of the carryall under Mrs. Westangle’s porte-cochere without having exchanged another word. Miss Shirley did not bow to him or look at him in parting.
X.
Verrian kept seeing before his inner eyes the thin face of the girl, dimmed rather than lighted with her sick yes. When she should be stronger, there might be a pale flush in it, like sunset on snow, but Verrian had to imagine that. He did not find it difficult to imagine many things about the girl, whom, in another mood, a more judicial mood, he might have accused of provoking him to imagine them. As it was, he could not help noting to that second self which we all have about us, that her confidences, such as they were, had perhaps been too voluntary; certainly they had not been quite obligatory, and they could not be quite accounted for, except upon the theory of nerves not yet perfectly under her control. To be sure, girls said all sorts of things to one, ignorantly and innocently; but she did not seem the kind of girl who, in different circumstances, would have said anything that she did not choose or that she did not mean to say. She had been surprisingly frank, and yet, at heart, Verrian would have thought she was a very reticent person or a secret person — that is, mentally frank and sentimentally secret; possibly she was like most women in that. What he was sure of was that the visual impression of her which he had received must have been very vivid to last so long in his consciousness; all through his preparations for going down to afternoon tea her face remained subjectively before him, and when he went down and found himself part of a laughing and chattering company in the library he still found it, in his inner sense, here, there, and yonder.
He was aware of suffering a little disappointment in Mrs. Westangle’s entire failure to mention Miss Shirley, though he was aware that his disappointment was altogether unreasonable, and he more reasonably decided that if she knew anything of his arrival, or the form of it, she had too much of the making of a grande dame to be recognizant of it. He did not know from her whether she had meant to send for him at the station or not, or whether she had sent her carriage back for him when he did not arrive in it at first. Nothing was left in her manner of such slight specialization as she had thrown into it when, at the Macroyds’, she asked him down to her house party; she seemed, if there were any difference, to have acquired an additional ignorance of who and what he was, though she twittered and flittered up close to his elbow, after his impersonal welcome, and asked him if she might introduce him to the young lady who was pouring tea for her, and who, after the brief drama necessary for possessing him
of a cup of it, appeared to have no more use for him than Mrs. Westangle herself had. There were more young men than young women in the room, but he imagined the usual superabundance of girlhood temporarily absent for repair of the fatigues of the journey. Every girl in the room had at least one man talking to her, and the girl who was pouring tea had one on each side of her and was trying to fix them both with an eye lifted towards each, while she struggled to keep her united gaze watchfully upon the tea-urn and those who came up with cups to be filled or refilled.
Verrian thought his fellow-guests were all amiable enough looking, though he made his reflection that they did not look, any of them, as if they would set the Sound on fire; and again he missed the companion of his arrival.
After he had got his cup of tea, he stood sipping it with a homeless air which he tried to conceal, and cast a furtive eye round the room till it rested upon the laughing face of Miss Macroyd. A young man was taking away her teacup, and Verrian at once went up and seized his place.
“How did you get here?” she asked, rather shamelessly, since she had kept him from coming in the victoria, but amusingly, since she seemed to see it as a joke, if she saw it at all.
“I walked,” he answered.
“Truly?”
“No, not truly.”
“But, truly, how did you? Because I sent the carriage back for you.”
“That was very thoughtful of you. But I found a delightful public vehicle behind the station, and I came in that. I’m so glad to know that it wasn’t Mrs. Westangle who had the trouble of sending the carriage back for me.”
Miss Macroyd laughed and laughed at his resentment. “But surely you met it on the way? I gave the man a description of you. Didn’t he stop for you?”
“Oh yes, but I was too proud to change by that time. Or perhaps I hated the trouble.”
Miss Macroyd laughed the more; then she purposely darkened her countenance so as to suit it to her lugubrious whisper, “How did she get here?”
“What she?”
“The mysterious fugitive. Wasn’t she coming here, after all?”
“After all your trouble in supposing so?” Verrian reflected a moment, and then he said, deliberately, “I don’t know.”
Miss Macroyd was not going to let him off like that. “You don’t know how she came, or you don’t know whether she was coming?”
“I didn’t say.”
Her laugh resounded again. “Now you are trying to be wicked, and that is very wrong for a novelist.”
“But what object could I have in concealing the fact from you, Miss Macroyd?” he entreated, with mock earnestness.
“That is what I want to find out.”
“What are you two laughing so about?” the voice of Mrs. Westangle twittered at Verrian’s elbow, and, looking down, he found her almost touching it. She had a very long, narrow neck, and, since it was long and narrow, she had the good sense not to palliate the fact or try to dress the effect of it out of sight. She took her neck in both hands, as it were, and put it more on show, so that you had really to like it. Now it lifted her face, though she was not a tall person, well towards the level of his; to be sure, he was himself only of the middle height of men, though an aquiline profile helped him up.
He stirred the tea which he had ceased to drink, and said, “I wasn’t ‘laughing so about,’ Mrs. Westangle. It was Miss Macroyd.”
“And I was laughing so about a mysterious stranger that came up on the train with us and got out at your station.”
“And I was trying to make out what was so funny in a mysterious stranger, or even in her getting out at your station.”
Mrs. Westangle was not interested in the case, or else she failed to seize the joke. At any rate, she turned from them without further question and went away to another part of the room, where she semi-attached herself in like manner to another couple, and again left it for still another. This was possibly her idea of looking after her guests; but when she had looked after them a little longer in that way she left the room and let them look after themselves till dinner.
“Come, Mr. Verrian,” Miss Macroyd resumed, “what is the secret? I’ll never tell if you tell me.”
“You won’t if I don’t.”
“Now you are becoming merely trivial. You are ceasing even to be provoking.” Miss Macroyd, in token of her displeasure, laughed no longer.
“Am I?” he questioned; thoughtfully. “Well, then, I am tempted to act upon impulse.”
“Oh, do act upon impulse for once,” she urged. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”
“Do you mean that I’m never impulsive?”
“I don’t think you look it.”
“If you had seen me an hour ago you would have said I was very impulsive. I think I may have exhausted myself in that direction, however. I feel the impulse failing me now.”
XI.
His impulse really had failed him. It had been to tell Miss Macroyd about his adventure and frankly trust her with it. He had liked her at several former meetings rather increasingly, because she had seemed open and honest beyond the most of women, but her piggish behavior at the station had been rather too open and honest, and the sense of this now opportunely intervened between him and the folly he was about to commit. Besides, he had no right to give Miss Shirley’s part in his adventure away, and, since the affair was more vitally hers than his, to take it at all out of her hands. The early-falling dusk had favored an unnoticed advent for them, and there were other chances that had helped keep unknown their arrival together at Mrs. Westangle’s in that squalid carryall, such as Miss Shirley’s having managed instantly to slip indoors before the man came out for Verrian’s suit-case, and of her having got to her own appointed place long before there was any descent of the company to the afternoon tea.
It was not for him now to undo all that and begin the laughing at the affair, which she had pathetically intimated that she would rather some one else should begin. He recoiled from his imprudence with a shock, but he had the pleasure of having mystified Miss Macroyd. He felt dismissal in the roving eye which she cast from him round the room, and he willingly let another young man replace him at her side.
Yet he was not altogether satisfied. A certain meaner self that there was in him was not pleased with his relegation even merely in his own consciousness to the championship of a girl who was going to make her living in a sort of menial way. It had better be owned for him that, in his visions of literary glory, he had figured in social triumphs which, though vague, were resplendent with the glitter of smart circles. He had been so ignorant of such circles as to suppose they would have some use for him as a brilliant young author; and though he was outwearing this illusion, he still would not have liked a girl like Julia Macroyd, whose family, if not smart, was at least chic, to know that he had come to the house with a professional mistress of the revels, until Miss Shirley should have approved herself chic, too. The notion of such an employment as hers was in itself chic, but the girl was merely a paid part of the entertainment, as yet, and had not risen above the hireling status. If she had sunk to that level from a higher rank it would be all right, but there was no evidence that she had ever been smart. Verrian would, therefore, rather not be mixed up with her — at any rate, in the imagination of a girl like Julia Macroyd; and as he left her side he drew a long breath of relief and went and put down his teacup where he had got it.
By this time the girl who was “pouring” had exhausted one of the two original guards on whom she had been dividing her vision, and Verrian made a pretence, which she favored, that he had come up to push the man away. The man gracefully submitted to be dislodged, and Verrian remained in the enjoyment of one of the girl’s distorted eyes till, yet another man coming up, she abruptly got rid of Verrian by presenting him to yet another girl. In such manoeuvres the hour of afternoon tea will pass; and the time really wore on till it was time to dress for dinner.
By the time that the guests came down to dinner they were all able
to participate in the exchange of the discovery which each had made, that it was snowing outdoors, and they kept this going till one girl had the good-luck to say, “I don’t see anything so astonishing in that at this time of year. Now, if it was snowing indoors, it would be different.”
This relieved the tension in a general laugh, and a young man tried to contribute further to the gayety by declaring that it would not be surprising to have it snow in-doors. He had once seen the thing done in a crowded hall, one night, when somebody put up a window, and the freezing current of air congealed the respiration of the crowd, which came down in a light fall of snow-flakes. He owned that it was in Boston.
“Oh, that excuses it, then,” Miss Macroyd said. But she lost the laugh which was her due in the rush which some of the others made to open a window and see whether it could be made to snow in-doors there.
“Oh, it isn’t crowded enough here,” the young man explained who had alleged the scientific marvel.
“And it isn’t Boston,” Miss Macroyd tried again on the same string, and this time she got her laugh.
The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk of pneumonia, with her arm prettily lifted against the open sash, for a moment peering out, and then reported, in dashing it down with a shiver, “It seems to be a very soft snow.”
“Then it will be rain by morning,” another predicted, and the girl tried hard to think of something to say in support of the hit she had made already. But she could not, and was silent almost through the whole first course at dinner.
In spite of its being a soft snow, it continued to fall as snow and not as rain. It lent the charm of stormy cold without to the brightness and warmth within. Much later, when between waltzes some of the dancers went out on the verandas for a breath of air, they came back reporting that the wind was rising and the snow was drifting.
Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her guests congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having thought to have it. The felicitations included recognition of the originality of her whole scheme. She had downed the hoary superstition that people had too much of a good time on Christmas to want any good time at all in the week following; and in acting upon the well-known fact that you never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one, she had made a movement of the highest social importance. These were the ideas which Verrian and the young man of the in-doors snow-storm urged upon her; his name was Bushwick, and he and Verrian found that they were very good-fellows after they had rather supposed the contrary.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 888
