Part 1.

I.

It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know

the roads. When they came to a place where they had a choice of two,

she said that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house

standing a little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they

ought to take for South Middlemount. She alleged many cases in which

they had met trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where

they were before he pushed rashly forward in their drives. Whilst she

urged the facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat,

and held her hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse,

which was impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then

the blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track. She

declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it

herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of

her, and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and

seemed about to overset it.

“Oh, what are you doing, Albe't?” Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless

against the back of her seat. “Haven't I always told you to speak to the

hoss fust?”

“He wouldn't have minded my speakin',” said her husband. “I'm goin' to

take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin'

out.”

This was so well, in view of Mrs. Lander's age and bulk, and the

hardship she must have undergone, if she had tried to carry out her

threat, that she was obliged to take it in some sort as a favor; and

while the vehicle rose and sank over the surface left rough, after

building, in front of the house, like a vessel on a chopping sea, she

was silent for several seconds.

The house was still in a raw state of unfinish, though it seemed to have

been lived in for a year at least. The earth had been banked up at the

foundations for warmth in winter, and the sheathing of the walls had

been splotched with irregular spaces of weather boarding; there was a

good roof over all, but the window-casings had been merely set in their

places and the trim left for a future impulse of the builder. A block

of wood suggested the intention of steps at the front door, which stood

hospitably open, but remained unresponsive for some time after the

Landers made their appeal to the house at large by anxious noises in

their throats, and by talking loud with each other, and then talking

low. They wondered whether there were anybody in the house; and decided

that there must be, for there was smoke coming out of the stove pipe

piercing the roof of the wing at the rear.

Mr. Lander brought himself under censure by venturing, without his

wife's authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the

butt of his whip. At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from

the region of the stove pipe, “Clem! Clementina? Go to the front dooa!

The'e's somebody knockin'.” The sound of feet, soft and quick, made

itself heard within, and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a

little girl, too childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway,

looking down on the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as

a flower's. She had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and

a pretty chin whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips.

She had hair of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass

light prongs, or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately

touched it. Her tanned face was not very different in color from her

hair, and neither were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles

in the calico skirt she wore. At sight of the elders in the buggy she

involuntarily stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at

the same time she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it,

but she lost in her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of

the strangers seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them

while she waited for them to speak.

“Oh!” Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, “we just

wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount. We've

come from the hotel, and we wa'n't quite ce'tain.”

The girl laughed as she said, “Both roads go to South Middlemount'm;

they join together again just a little piece farther on.”

The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by

vowel sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it

came last in a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it

was annexed to the vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom

universal in rural New England.

“Oh, do they?” said Mrs. Lander.

“Yes'm,” answered the girl. “It's a kind of tu'nout in the wintatime; or

I guess that's what made it in the beginning; sometimes folks take one

hand side and sometimes the other, and that keeps them separate; but

they're really the same road, 'm.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Lander, and she pushed her husband to make him

say something, too, but he remained silently intent upon the child's

prettiness, which her blue eyes seemed to illumine with a light of their

own. She had got hold of the door, now, and was using it as if it was

a piece of drapery, to hide not only the tear in her gown, but somehow

both her bare feet. She leaned out beyond the edge of it; and then, at

moments she vanished altogether behind it.

Since Mr. Lander would not speak, and made no sign of starting up his

horse, Mrs. Lander added, “I presume you must be used to havin' people

ask about the road, if it's so puzzlin'.”

“O, yes'm,” returned the girl, gladly. “Almost every day, in the

summatime.”

“You have got a pretty place for a home, he'e,” said Mrs. Lander.

“Well, it will be when it's finished up.” Without leaning forward

inconveniently Mrs. Lander could see that the partitions of the house

within were lathed, but not plastered, and the girl looked round as if

to realize its condition and added, “It isn't quite finished inside.”

“We wouldn't, have troubled you,” said Mrs. Lander, “if we had seen

anybody to inquire of.”

“Yes'm,” said the girl. “It a'n't any trouble.”

“There are not many otha houses about, very nea', but I don't suppose

you get lonesome; young folks are plenty of company for themselves, and

if you've got any brothas and sistas--”

“Oh,” said the girl, with a tender laugh, “I've got eva so many of

them!”

There was a stir in the bushes about the carriage, and Mrs. Lander was

aware for an instant of children's faces looking through the leaves at

her and then flashing out of sight, with gay cries at being seen. A boy,

older than the rest, came round in front of the horse and passed out of

sight at the corner of the house.

Lander now leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his wife as if

he might hopefully suppose she had come to the end of her questions, but

she gave no sign of encouraging him to start on their way again.

“That your brotha, too?” she asked the girl.

“Yes'm. He's the oldest of the boys; he's next to me.”

“I don't know,” said Mrs. Lander thoughtfully, “as I noticed how many

boys there were, or how many girls.”

“I've got two sistas, and three brothas, 'm,” said the girl, always

smiling sweetly. She now emerged from the shelter of the door, and Mrs.

Lander perceived that the slight movements of such parts of her person

as had been evident beyond its edge were the effects of some endeavor at

greater presentableness. She had contrived to get about her an overskirt

which covered the rent in her frock, and she had got a pair of shoes on

her feet. Stockings were still wanting, but by a mutual concession of

her shoe-tops and the border of her skirt, they were almost eliminated

from the problem. This happened altogether when the girl sat down on the

threshold, and got herself into such foreshortening that the eye of

Mrs. Lander in looking down upon her could not detect their absence. Her

little head then showed in the dark of the doorway like a painted head

against its background.

“You haven't been livin' here a great while, by the looks,” said Mrs.

Lander. “It don't seem to be clea'ed off very much.”

“We've got quite a ga'den-patch back of the house,” replied the girl,

“and we should have had moa, but fatha wasn't very well, this spring;

he's eva so much better than when we fust came he'e.”

“It has the name of being a very healthy locality,” said Mrs. Lander,

somewhat discontentedly, “though I can't see as it's done me so very

much good, yit. Both your payrints livin'?”

“Yes'm. Oh, yes, indeed!”

“And your mother, is she real rugged? She need to be, with such a flock

of little ones!”

“Yes, motha's always well. Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and

ought to keep more in the open air. That's what he's done since he came

he'e. He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out

himself.”

“Is he a ca'penta?” asked Mrs. Lander.

“No'm; but he's--I don't know how to express it--he likes to do every

kind of thing.”

“But he's got some business, ha'n't he?” A shadow of severity crept

over Mrs. Lander's tone, in provisional reprehension of possible

shiftlessness.

“Yes'm. He was a machinist at the Mills; that's what the doctas thought

didn't agree with him. He bought a piece of land he'e, so as to be in

the pine woods, and then we built this house.”

“When did you say you came?”

“Two yea's ago, this summa.”

“Well! What did you do befoa you built this house?”

“We camped the first summa.”

“You camped? In a tent?”

“Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank.”

“I should have thought you would have died.”

The girl laughed. “Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate. We slept in the

tents--we had two--and we cooked in the shanty.” She smiled at the notion in

adding, “At fast the neighbas thought we we'e Gipsies; and the summa

folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us.”

Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, “But didn't it

almost perish you, stayin' through the winter in an unfinished house?”

“Well, it was pretty cold. But it was so dry, the air was, and the woods

kept the wind off nicely.”

The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent

the girl to the Landers now called her from them. “Clem! Come here a

minute!”

The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, “You'll have to excuse me,

now'm. I've got to go to motha.”

“So do!” said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and

grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the

hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was

not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him.

They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, “What you doin',

Albe't? Whe'e you goin'?”

“I'm goin' to South Middlemount. Didn't you want to?”

“Well, of all the men! Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye

to the child, or take leave, or anything!”

“Seemed to me as if SHE took leave.”

“But she was comin' back! And I wanted to ask--”

“I guess you asked enough for one while. Ask the rest to-morra.”

Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an

immediate purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had

already, perhaps, intimated itself to her. She said, “That's true,”

but by the time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond

the woods into open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity.

“Well, all I've got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about

'em.”

“Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess,” said her husband.

“No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel. I want to know now.

I want you should stop at the very fust house we come to. Dea'! The'e

don't seem to be any houses, any moa.” She peered out around the side

of the carry-all and scrutinized the landscape. “Hold on! No, yes it is,

too! Whoa! Whoa! The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!”

She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand. Mr. Lander

looked round over his shoulder at her. “Hadn't you betta wait till you

get within half a mile of the man?”

“Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him. Will you? I want

to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks.”

“I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance,” said her husband.

When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up

beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry

vines that overran it.

Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay

and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork. At the signs and sounds

she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with

him. When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the

tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the

long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.

“Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the

edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?”

The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy

that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his

teeth, where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he

talked, before he answered, “You mean the Claxons?”

“I don't know what thei' name is.” Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she

had said.

The farmer said, “Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin'?”

“We didn't see the man--”

“Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?”

“We didn't see her, eitha; but I guess we hea'd her at the back of the

house.”

“Lot o' children, about as big as pa'tridges, runnin' round in the

bushes?”

“Yes! And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi'teen or fou'teen, I

should think.”

The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his

person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright

than before. “Yes; it's them,” he said. “Ha'n't been in the neighbahood

a great while, eitha. Up from down Po'tland way, some'res, I guess.

Built that house last summer, as far as it's got, but I don't believe

it's goin' to git much fa'tha.”

“Why, what's the matta?” demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.

The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include

Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,

“Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?”

“Seen 'em, too,” answered Lander, comprehensively.

“Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly. He a'n't a do-nothin';

he's a do-everything. I guess it's about as bad.” Lander glimmered back

at the man, but did not speak.

“Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from,” the farmer

began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for

a moment, interrupted:

“Yes, Yes! That's what the gul said.”

“But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's

goin' in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin'

lathe, and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for

fence-posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but

the place bunt down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for

wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks.

Seems to think that the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's

dry, is goin' to cure him, and he can't git too much of it.”

“Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!” cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband

had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of

controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.

“I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's

got, and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up. But he don't

seem to be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow.

Wife takes in sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last

season. Whole fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do

everything.”

The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but

the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which

began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and

the man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited

the father's smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures,

and one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They

were all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they

almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved

little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very

much to her, compared with some of the boys. Any rate, she had not the

name of being so smart at school. Good little thing, too, and kind of

mothered the young ones.

Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him,

let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband

drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was

scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel. That night she

talked a long time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed

him to go to sleep. She said she must certainly see the child again;

that they must drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about

herself.

“Albe't,” she concluded; “I wish we had her to live with us. Yes, I do!

I wonder if we could get her to. You know I always did want to adopt a

baby.”

“You neva said so,” Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first

time, since the talk began.

“I didn't suppose you'd like it,” said his wife.

“Well, she a'n't a baby. I guess you'd find you had your hands full,

takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up.”

“I shouldn't be afraid any,” the wife declared. “She has just twined

herself round my heat. I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes. I

know she's good.”

“We'll see how you feel about it in the morning.”

The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this

for a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He

seldom talked, but there came times when he would not even listen. One

of these was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later he

had undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in

bed, as effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were

already asleep.

II.

When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the

Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of

business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most

serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid

fancies. He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he

preferred one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something

to do, she inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that

what they both needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and

trouble of every kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and

stored their furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple

old house in which they had always lived, on an unfashionable

up-and-down-hill street of the West End, if he had not taken one of his

stubborn stands, and let it for a term of years without consulting her.

But she had her way about their own movements, and they began that life

of hotels, which they had now lived so long that she believed any other

impossible. Its luxury and idleness had told upon each of them with

diverse effect.

They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she

had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was

not much more than half the weight of his prime. Their digestion was

alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines

Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result. She was sure

that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one

who ought to have wasted away. But she had before her the spectacle of

a husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did

not audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such

measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of

storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the

side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear

when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own

dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one

of the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman

could to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they

could neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over

with herself before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of

sending them back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring

when the Landers came away for the summer.

They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of

Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New

York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and St.

Augustine. They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early in

the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where Mrs.

Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to a

Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to

Florida in January. She would not on any account have gone directly to

the city from the mountains, for people who did that were sure to lose

the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they

did not actually come down with a fever.

She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person. She

made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which

she still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else

since they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for

all the charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed. Few

if any guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys,

waiters, chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave

richly in fees for every conceivable service which could be rendered

them; they went out of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials

who had done nothing for them. He would make the boy who sold papers at

the dining-room door keep the change, when he had been charged a profit

of a hundred per cent. already; and she would let no driver who had

plundered them according to the carriage tariff escape without something

for himself.

A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with

a just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and

questioned no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these

expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her

husband pay whatever was asked. Yet when they lived under their own roof

they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned

business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a

man reckless of money afterwards. He had been first of all a tailor,

and then he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small way, and

finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his

hands full. He invested his money so prosperously that the income

for two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying

relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.

She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with

which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel

dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down

the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband

the commonness of their origin. She could not help talking, and her

accent and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England

person of village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston. He, on

the contrary, lurked about the hotels where they passed their days in a

silence so dignified that when his verbs and nominatives seemed not to

agree, you accused your own hearing. He was correctly dressed, as an

elderly man should be, in the yesterday of the fashions, and he wore

with impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could be worn. A pair

of drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an old school of

gentlemen, not very definite in time or place. He had a full gray beard

cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a great deal.

But he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by her frowning.

They had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to pass for persons of

social distinction. They really did not know what society was, and they

were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they caught sight of it in

their journeys and sojourns. They led a life of public seclusion, and

dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in all to each other,

and nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had been when they

resided (as they would have said) on Pinckney street. In their own house

they had never entertained, though they sometimes had company, in the

style of the country town where Mrs. Lander grew up. As soon as she was

released to the grandeur of hotel life, she expanded to the full measure

of its responsibilities and privileges, but still without seeking

to make it the basis of approach to society. Among the people who

surrounded her, she had not so much acquaintance as her husband even,

who talked so little that he needed none. She sometimes envied his ease

in getting on with people when he chose; and his boldness in speaking to

fellow guests and fellow travellers, if he really wanted anything. She

wanted something of them all the time, she wanted their conversation

and their companionship; but in her ignorance of the social arts she was

thrown mainly upon the compassion of the chambermaids. She kept these

talking as long as she could detain them in her rooms; and often fed

them candy (which she ate herself with childish greed) to bribe them to

further delays. If she was staying some days in a hotel, she sent for

the house-keeper, and made all she could of her as a listener, and

as soon as she settled herself for a week, she asked who was the best

doctor in the place. With doctors she had no reserves, and she

poured out upon them the history of her diseases and symptoms in an

inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and misgiving, which was

by no means affected by her profound and inexpugnable ignorance of the

principles of health. From time to time she forgot which side her liver

was on, but she had been doctored (as she called it) for all her organs,

and she was willing to be doctored for any one of them that happened

to be in the place where she fancied a present discomfort. She was not

insensible to the claims which her husband's disorders had upon science,

and she liked to end the tale of her own sufferings with some such

appeal as: “I wish you could do something for Mr. Landa, too, docta.”

She made him take a little of each medicine that was left for her; but

in her presence he always denied that there was anything the matter with

him, though he was apt to follow the doctor out of the room, and get a

prescription from him for some ailment which he professed not to believe

in himself, but wanted to quiet Mrs. Lander's mind about.

He rose early, both from long habit, and from the scant sleep of an

elderly man; he could not lie in bed; but his wife always had her

breakfast there and remained so long that the chambermaid had done up

most of the other rooms and had leisure for talk with her. As soon as he

was awake, he stole softly out and was the first in the dining-room for

breakfast. He owned to casual acquaintance in moments of expansion that

breakfast was his best meal, but he did what he could to make it his

worst by beginning with oranges and oatmeal, going forward to beefsteak

and fried potatoes, and closing with griddle cakes and syrup, washed

down with a cup of cocoa, which his wife decided to be wholesomer than

coffee. By the time he had finished such a repast, he crept out of the

dining-room in a state of tension little short of anguish, which he

confided to the sympathy of the bootblack in the washroom.

He always went from having his shoes polished to get a toothpick at the

clerk's desk; and at the Middlemount House, the morning after he had

been that drive with Mrs. Lander, he lingered a moment with his elbows

beside the register. “How about a buckboa'd?” he asked.

“Something you can drive yourself”--the clerk professionally dropped his

eye to the register--“Mr. Lander?”

“Well, no, I guess not, this time,” the little man returned, after a

moment's reflection. “Know anything of a family named Claxon, down the

road, here, a piece?” He twisted his head in the direction he meant.

“This is my first season at Middlemount; but I guess Mr. Atwell will

know.” The clerk called to the landlord, who was smoking in his private

room behind the office, and the landlord came out. The clerk repeated

Mr. Lander's questions.

“Pootty good kind of folks, I guess,” said the landlord provisionally,

through his cigar-smoke. “Man's a kind of univussal genius, but he's got

a nice family of children; smaht as traps, all of 'em.”

“How about that oldest gul?” asked Mr. Lander.

“Well, the'a,” said the landlord, taking the cigar out of his mouth. “I

think she's about the nicest little thing goin'. We've had her up he'e,

to help out in a busy time, last summer, and she's got moo sense than

guls twice as old. Takes hold like--lightnin'.”

“About how old did you say she was?”

“Well, you've got me the'a, Mr. Landa; I guess I'll ask Mis' Atwell.”

“The'e's no hurry,” said Lander. “That buckboa'd be round pretty soon?”

he asked of the clerk.

“Be right along now, Mr. Lander,” said the clerk, soothingly. He stepped

out to the platform that the teams drove up to from the stable, and came

back to say that it was coming. “I believe you said you wanted something

you could drive yourself?”

“No, I didn't, young man,” answered the elder sharply. But the next

moment he added, “Come to think of it, I guess it's just as well. You

needn't get me no driver. I guess I know the way well enough. You put me

in a hitchin' strap.”

“All right, Mr. Lander,” said the clerk, meekly.

The landlord had caught the peremptory note in Lander's voice, and he

came out of his room again to see that there was nothing going wrong.

“It's all right,” said Lander, and went out and got into his buckboard.

“Same horse you had yesterday,” said the young clerk. “You don't need to

spare the whip.”

“I guess I can look out for myself,” said Lander, and he shook the reins

and gave the horse a smart cut, as a hint of what he might expect.

The landlord joined the clerk in looking after the brisk start the horse

made. “Not the way he set off with the old lady, yesterday,” suggested

the clerk.

The landlord rolled his cigar round in his tubed lips. “I guess he's

used to ridin' after a good hoss.” He added gravely to the clerk, “You

don't want to make very free with that man, Mr. Pane. He won't stan'

it, and he's a class of custom that you want to cata to when it comes

in your way. I suspicioned what he was when they came here and took the

highest cost rooms without tu'nin' a haia. They're a class of custom

that you won't get outside the big hotels in the big reso'ts. Yes, sir,”

said the landlord taking a fresh start, “they're them kind of folks that

live the whole yea' round in hotels; no'th in summa, south in winta, and

city hotels between times. They want the best their money can buy, and

they got plenty of it. She”--he meant Mrs. Lander--“has been tellin' my

wife how they do; she likes to talk a little betta than he doos; and I

guess when it comes to society, they're away up, and they won't stun'

any nonsense.”

III.

Lander came into his wife's room between ten and eleven o'clock, and

found her still in bed, but with her half-finished breakfast on a tray

before her. As soon as he opened the door she said, “I do wish you would

take some of that heat-tonic of mine, Albe't, that the docta left for

me in Boston. You'll find it in the upper right bureau box, the'a; and

I know it'll be the very thing for you. It'll relieve you of that

suffocatin' feeling that I always have, comin' up stars. Dea'! I don't

see why they don't have an elevata; they make you pay enough; and I wish

you'd get me a little more silva, so's't I can give to the chambamaid

and the bell-boy; I do hate to be out of it. I guess you been up and

out long ago. They did make that polonaise of mine too tight after all

I said, and I've been thinkin' how I could get it alt'ed; but I presume

there ain't a seamstress to be had around he'e for love or money. Well,

now, that's right, Albe't; I'm glad to see you doin' it.”

Lander had opened the lid of the bureau box, and uncorked a bottle from

it, and tilted this to his lips.

“Don't take too much,” she cautioned him, “or you'll lose the effects.

When I take too much of a medicine, it's wo'se than nothing, as fah's I

can make out. When I had that spell in Thomasville spring before last,

I believe I should have been over it twice as quick if I had taken just

half the medicine I did. You don't really feel anyways bad about the

heat, do you, Albe't?”

“I'm all right,” said Lander. He put back the bottle in its place and

sat down.

Mrs. Lander lifted herself on her elbow and looked over at him. “Show me

on the bottle how much you took.”

He got the bottle out again and showed her with his thumb nail a point

which he chose at random.

“Well, that was just about the dose for you,” she said; and she sank

down in bed again with the air of having used a final precaution. “You

don't want to slow your heat up too quick.”

Lander did not put the bottle back this time. He kept it in his hand,

with his thumb on the cork, and rocked it back and forth on his knees as

he spoke. “Why don't you get that woman to alter it for you?”

“What woman alta what?”

“Your polonaise. The one whe'e we stopped yestaday.”

“Oh! Well, I've been thinkin' about that child, Albe't; I did before I

went to sleep; and I don't believe I want to risk anything with her.

It would be a ca'e,” said Mrs. Lander with a sigh, “and I guess I don't

want to take any moa ca'e than what I've got now. What makes you think

she could alta my polonaise?”

“Said she done dress-makin',” said Lander, doggedly.

“You ha'n't been the'a?”

He nodded.

“You didn't say anything to her about her daughta?”

“Yes, I did,” said Lander.

“Well, you ce'tainly do equal anything,” said his wife. She lay still

awhile, and then she roused herself with indignant energy. “Well, then,

I can tell you what, Albe't Landa: you can go right straight and take

back everything you said. I don't want the child, and I won't have her.

I've got care enough to worry me now, I should think; and we should have

her whole family on our hands, with that shiftless father of hers, and

the whole pack of her brothas and sistas. What made you think I wanted

you to do such a thing?”

“You wanted me to do it last night. Wouldn't ha'dly let me go to bed.”

“Yes! And how many times have I told you nova to go off and do a thing

that I wanted you to, unless you asked me if I did? Must I die befo'e

you can find out that there is such a thing as talkin', and such anotha

thing as doin'? You wouldn't get yourself into half as many scrapes if

you talked more and done less, in this wo'ld.” Lander rose.

“Wait! Hold on! What are you going to say to the pooa thing? She'll be

so disappointed!”

“I don't know as I shall need to say anything myself,” answered the

little man, at his dryest. “Leave that to you.”

“Well, I can tell you,” returned his wife, “I'm not goin' nea' them

again; and if you think--What did you ask the woman, anyway?”

“I asked her,” he said, “if she wanted to let the gul come and see you

about some sewing you had to have done, and she said she did.”

“And you didn't speak about havin' her come to live with us?”

“No.”

“Well, why in the land didn't you say so before, Albe't?”

“You didn't ask me. What do you want I should say to her now?”

“Say to who?”

“The gul. She's down in the pahlor, waitin'.”

“Well, of all the men!” cried Mrs. Lander. But she seemed to find

herself, upon reflection, less able to cope with Lander personally than

with the situation generally. “Will you send her up, Albe't?” she asked,

very patiently, as if he might be driven to further excesses, if not

delicately handled. As soon as he had gone out of the room she wished

that she had told him to give her time to dress and have her room put in

order, before he sent the child up; but she could only make the best of

herself in bed with a cap and a breakfast jacket, arranged with the help

of a handglass. She had to get out of bed to put her other clothes away

in the closet and she seized the chance to push the breakfast tray out

of the door, and smooth up the bed, while she composed her features and

her ideas to receive her visitor. Both, from long habit rather than from

any cause or reason, were of a querulous cast, and her ordinary tone

was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction. She was at once

plaintive and voluable, and in moments of excitement her need of freeing

her mind was so great that she took herself into her own confidence, and

found a more sympathetic listener than when she talked to her husband.

As she now whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not

predicable of her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering

and drew it up to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out

decorously over her person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of

lamentation and conjecture. “I do suppose he'll be right back with her

before I'm half ready; and what the man was thinkin' of to do such a

thing anyway, I don't know. I don't know as she'll notice much, comin'

out of such a lookin' place as that, and I don't know as I need to care

if she did. But if the'e's care anywhe's around, I presume I'm the one

to have it. I presume I did take a fancy to her, and I guess I shall be

glad to see how I like her now; and if he's only told her I want some

sewin' done, I can scrape up something to let her carry home with her.

It's well I keep my things where I can put my hand on 'em at a time like

this, and I don't believe I shall sca'e the child, as it is. I do hope

Albe't won't hang round half the day before he brings her; I like to

have a thing ova.”

Lander wandered about looking for the girl through the parlors and the

piazzas, and then went to the office to ask what had become of her.

The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk. “Oh, I

guess she's round in my wife's room, Mr. Landa. She always likes to see

Clementina, and I guess they all do. She's a so't o' pet amongst 'em.”

“No hurry,” said Lander, “I guess my wife ain't quite ready for her

yet.”

“Well, she'll be right out, in a minute or so,” said the landlord.

The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on

the veranda and look at the landscape while he waited. It was one of the

loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of

an abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of

the valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped

with folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops. But Lander was

tired of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put' up

with them, in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same

resignation that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars

and sleepers, and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables. He was chained to

the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for

its impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife's disappointments

from it. He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an

order of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though

there were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of

its justice. He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was

master in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he

was in some sort of authority. He perceived that now he was a slave to

the wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he

was never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she

asked. He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from

him, and he had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by

her whims, who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object.

He felt no rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender

regard for him, and that she believed she was considering him first in

her most selfish arrangements. He always hoped that sometime she would

get tired of her restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in

some stated place; and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind

of business again. Till this should happen he waited with an apathetic

patience of which his present abeyance was a detail. He would hardly

have thought it anything unfit, and certainly nothing surprising, that

the landlady should have taken the young girl away from where he had

left her, and then in the pleasure of talking with her, and finding her

a centre of interest for the whole domestic force of the hotel, should

have forgotten to bring her back.

The Middlemount House had just been organized on the scale of a first

class hotel, with prices that had risen a little in anticipation of

the other improvements. The landlord had hitherto united in himself the

functions of clerk and head waiter, but he had now got a senior, who was

working his way through college, to take charge of the dining-room, and

had put in the office a youth of a year's experience as under clerk at

a city hotel. But he meant to relinquish no more authority than his wife

who frankly kept the name as well as duty of house-keeper. It was in

making her morning inspection of the dusting that she found Clementina

in the parlor where Lander had told her to sit down till he should come

for her.

“Why, Clem!” she said, “I didn't know you! You have grown so! Youa folks

all well? I decla'e you ah' quite a woman now,” she added, as the girl

stood up in her slender, graceful height. “You look as pretty as a pink

in that hat. Make that dress youaself? Well, you do beat the witch! I

want you should come to my room with me.”

Mrs. Atwell showered other questions and exclamations on the girl, who

explained how she happened to be there, and said that she supposed she

must stay where she was for fear Mr. Lander should come back and find

her gone; but Mrs. Atwell overruled her with the fact that Mrs. Lander's

breakfast had just gone up to her; and she made her come out and see

the new features of the enlarged house-keeping. In the dining-room there

were some of the waitresses who had been there the summer before, and

recognitions of more or less dignity passed between them and Clementina.

The place was now shut against guests, and the head-waiter was having

it put in order for the one o'clock dinner. As they came near him, Mrs.

Atwell introduced him to Clementina, and he behaved deferentially, as

if she were some young lady visitor whom Mrs. Atwell was showing the

improvements, but he seemed harassed and impatient, as if he were

anxious about his duties, and eager to get at them again. He was a

handsome little fellow, with hair lighter than Clementina's and a

sanguine complexion, and the color coming and going.

“He's smaht,” said Mrs. Atwell, when they had left him--he held the

dining-room door open for them, and bowed them out. “I don't know but he

worries almost too much. That'll wear off when he gets things runnin' to

suit him. He's pretty p'tic'la'. Now I'll show you how they've made the

office over, and built in a room for Mr. Atwell behind it.”

The landlord welcomed Clementina as if she had been some acceptable

class of custom, and when the tall young clerk came in to ask him

something, and Mrs. Atwell said, “I want to introduce you to Miss

Claxon, Mr. Fane,” the clerk smiled down upon her from the height of his

smooth, acquiline young face, which he held bent encouragingly upon one

side.

“Now, I want you should come in and see where I live, a minute,” said

Mrs. Atwell. She took the girl from the clerk, and led her to the

official housekeeper's room which she said had been prepared for her so

that folks need not keep running to her in her private room where she

wanted to be alone with her children, when she was there. “Why, you

a'n't much moa than a child youaself, Clem, and here I be talkin' to you

as if you was a mother in Israel. How old ah' you, this summa? Time does

go so!”

“I'm sixteen now,” said Clementina, smiling.

“You be? Well, I don't see why I say that, eitha! You're full lahge

enough for your age, but not seein' you in long dresses before, I didn't

realize your age so much. My, but you do all of you know how to do

things!”

“I'm about the only one that don't, Mrs. Atwell,” said the girl. “If it

hadn't been for mother, I don't believe I could have eva finished this

dress.” She began to laugh at something passing in her mind, and Mrs.

Atwell laughed too, in sympathy, though she did not know what at till

Clementina said, “Why, Mrs. Atwell, nea'ly the whole family wo'ked on

this dress. Jim drew the patte'n of it from the dress of one of the

summa boa'das that he took a fancy to at the Centa, and fatha cut it

out, and I helped motha make it. I guess every one of the children

helped a little.”

“Well, it's just as I said, you can all of you do things,” said Mrs.

Atwell. “But I guess you ah' the one that keeps 'em straight. What did

you say Mr. Landa said his wife wanted of you?”

“He said some kind of sewing that motha could do.”

“Well, I'll tell you what! Now, if she ha'n't really got anything that

your motha'll want you to help with, I wish you'd come here again and

help me. I tuned my foot, here, two-three weeks back, and I feel it,

times, and I should like some one to do about half my steppin' for me.

I don't want to take you away from her, but IF. You sha'n't go int' the

dinin'room, or be under anybody's oddas but mine. Now, will you?”

“I'll see, Mrs. Atwell. I don't like to say anything till I know what

Mrs. Landa wants.”

“Well, that's right. I decla'e, you've got moa judgment! That's what

I used to say about you last summa to my husband: she's got judgment.

Well, what's wanted?” Mrs. Atwell spoke to her husband, who had opened

her door and looked in, and she stopped rocking, while she waited his

answer.

“I guess you don't want to keep Clementina from Mr. Landa much longa.

He's settin' out there on the front piazza waitin' for her.”

“Well, the'a!” cried Mrs. Atwell. “Ain't that just like me? Why didn't

you tell me sooner, Alonzo? Don't you forgit what I said, Clem!”

IV.

Mrs. Lander had taken twice of a specific for what she called her

nerve-fag before her husband came with Clementina, and had rehearsed

aloud many of the things she meant to say to the girl. In spite of

her preparation, they were all driven out of her head when Clementina

actually appeared, and gave her a bow like a young birch's obeisance in

the wind.

“Take a chaia,” said Lander, pushing her one, and the girl tilted over

toward him, before she sank into it. He went out of the room, and left

Mrs. Lander to deal with the problem alone. She apologized for being

in bed, but Clementina said so sweetly, “Mr. Landa told me you were not

feeling very well, 'm,” that she began to be proud of her ailments, and

bragged of them at length, and of the different doctors who had treated

her for them. While she talked she missed one thing or another, and

Clementina seemed to divine what it was she wanted, and got it for her,

with a gentle deference which made the elder feel her age cushioned by

the girl's youth. When she grew a little heated from the interest she

took in her personal annals, and cast off one of the folds of her bed

clothing, Clementina got her a fan, and asked her if she should put up

one of the windows a little.

“How you do think of things!” said Mrs. Lander. “I guess I will let

you. I presume you get used to thinkin' of othas in a lahge family like

youas. I don't suppose they could get along without you very well,” she

suggested.

“I've neva been away except last summa, for a little while.”

“And where was you then?”

“I was helping Mrs. Atwell.”

“Did you like it?”

“I don't know,” said Clementina. “It's pleasant to be whe'e things ah'

going on.”

“Yes--for young folks,” said Mrs. Lander, whom the going on of things

had long ceased to bring pleasure.

“It's real nice at home, too,” said Clementina. “We have very good

times--evenings in the winta; in the summer it's very nice in the woods,

around there. It's safe for the children, and they enjoy it, and fatha

likes to have them. Motha don't ca'e so much about it. I guess she'd

ratha have the house fixed up more, and the place. Fatha's going to do

it pretty soon. He thinks the'e's time enough.”

“That's the way with men,” said Mrs. Lander. “They always think the's

time enough; but I like to have things over and done with. What chuhch

do you 'tend?”

“Well, there isn't any but the Episcopal,” Clementina answered. “I go to

that, and some of the children go to the Sunday School. I don't believe

fatha ca'es very much for going to chuhch, but he likes Mr. Richling;

he's the recta. They take walks in the woods; and they go up the

mountains togetha.”

“They want,” said Mrs. Lander, severely, “to be ca'eful how they drink

of them cold brooks when they're heated. Mr. Richling a married man?”

“Oh, yes'm! But they haven't got any family.”

“If I could see his wife, I sh'd caution her about lettin' him climb

mountains too much. A'n't your father afraid he'll ovado?”

“I don't know. He thinks he can't be too much in the open air on the

mountains.”

“Well, he may not have the same complaint as Mr. Landa; but I know if I

was to climb a mountain,' it would lay me up for a yea'.”

The girl did not urge anything against this conviction. She smiled

politely and waited patiently for the next turn Mrs. Lander's talk

should take, which was oddly enough toward the business Clementina had

come upon.

“I declare I most forgot about my polonaise. Mr. Landa said your motha

thought she could do something to it for me.”

“Yes'm.”

“Well, I may as well let you see it. If you'll reach into that fuhthest

closet, you'll find it on the last uppa hook on the right hand, and if

you'll give it to me, I'll show you what I want done. Don't mind the

looks of that closet; I've just tossed my things in, till I could get a

little time and stren'th to put 'em in odda.”

Clementina brought the polonaise to Mrs. Lander, who sat up and spread

it before her on the bed, and had a happy half hour in telling the girl

where she had bought the material and where she had it made up, and how

it came home just as she was going away, and she did not find out that

it was all wrong till a week afterwards when she tried it on. By the

end of this time the girl had commended herself so much by judicious

and sympathetic assent, that Mrs. Lander learned with a shock of

disappointment that her mother expected her to bring the garment home

with her, where Mrs. Lander was to come and have it fitted over for the

alterations she wanted made.

“But I supposed, from what Mr. Landa said, that your motha would come

here and fit me!” she lamented.

“I guess he didn't undastand, 'm. Motha doesn't eva go out to do wo'k,”

said Clementina gently but firmly.

“Well, I might have known Mr. Landa would mix it up, if it could be

mixed;” Mrs. Lander's sense of injury was aggravated by her suspicion

that he had brought the girl in the hope of pleasing her, and confirming

her in the wish to have her with them; she was not a woman who liked to

have her way in spite of herself; she wished at every step to realize

that she was taking it, and that no one else was taking it for her.

“Well,” she said dryly, “I shall have to see about it. I'm a good deal

of an invalid, and I don't know as I could go back and fo'th to try on.

I'm moa used to havin' the things brought to me.”

“Yes'm,” said Clementina. She moved a little from the bed, on her way to

the door, to be ready for Mrs. Lander in leave-taking.

“I'm real sorry,” said Mrs. Lander. “I presume it's a disappointment for

you, too.”

“Oh, not at all,” answered Clementina. “I'm sorry we can't do the wo'k

he'a; but I know mocha wouldn't like to. Good-mo'ning, 'm!”

“No, no! Don't go yet a minute! Won't you just give me my hand bag off

the bureau the'a?” Mrs. Lander entreated, and when the girl gave her the

bag she felt about among the bank-notes which she seemed to have loose

in it, and drew out a handful of them without regard to their value.

“He'a!” she said, and she tried to put the notes into Clementina's hand,

“I want you should get yourself something.”

The girl shrank back. “Oh, no'm,” she said, with an effect of seeming

to know that her refusal would hurt, and with the wish to soften it.

“I--couldn't; indeed I couldn't.”

“Why couldn't you? Now you must! If I can't let you have the wo'k the

way you want, I don't think it's fair, and you ought to have the money

for it just the same.”

Clementina shook her head smiling. “I don't believe motha would like to

have me take it.”

“Oh, now, pshaw!” said Mrs. Lander, inadequately. “I want you should

take this for youaself; and if you don't want to buy anything to wea',

you can get something to fix your room up with. Don't you be afraid of

robbin' us. Land! We got moa money! Now you take this.”

Mrs. Lander reached the money as far toward Clementina as she could and

shook it in the vehemence of her desire.

“Thank you, I couldn't take it,” Clementina persisted. “I'm afraid I

must be going; I guess I must bid you good-mo'ning.”

“Why, I believe the child's sca'ed of me! But you needn't be. Don't you

suppose I know how you feel? You set down in that chai'a there, and

I'll tell you how you feel. I guess we've been pooa, too--I don't

mean anything that a'n't exactly right--and I guess I've had the same

feelin's. You think it's demeanin' to you to take it. A'n't that it?”

Clementina sank provisionally upon the edge of the chair. “Well, it did

use to be so consid'ed. But it's all changed, nowadays. We travel pretty

nee' the whole while, Mr. Lander and me, and we see folks everywhere,

and it a'n't the custom to refuse any moa. Now, a'n't there any little

thing for your own room, there in your nice new house? Or something your

motha's got her heat set on? Or one of your brothas? My, if you don't

have it, some one else will! Do take it!”

The girl kept slipping toward the door. “I shouldn't know what to tell

them, when I got home. They would think I must be--out of my senses.”

“I guess you mean they'd think I was. Now, listen to me a minute!” Mrs.

Lander persisted.

“You just take this money, and when you get home, you tell your mother

every word about it, and if she says, you bring it right straight back

to me. Now, can't you do that?”

“I don't know but I can,” Clementina faltered. “Well, then take it!”

Mrs. Lander put the bills into her hand but she did not release her at

once. She pulled Clementina down and herself up till she could lay her

other arm on her neck. “I want you should let me kiss you. Will you?”

“Why, certainly,” said Clementina, and she kissed the old woman.

“You tell your mother I'm comin' to see her before I go; and I guess,”

said Mrs. Lander in instant expression of the idea that came into her

mind, “we shall be goin' pretty soon, now.”

“Yes'm,” said Clementina.

She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful

apathy in his face.

Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him.

“Albe't, what made you want me to see that child?”

Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came

to it at once. “I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to

come and live with us.”

“Yes?”

“We're both of us gettin' pretty well on, and you'd ought to have

somebody to look after you if--I'm not around. You want somebody that

can do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to

you--well, moa like a daughta than a suvvant--somebody that you'd get

attached to, maybe--”

“And don't you see,” Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, “what a

ca'e that would be? Why, it's got so already that I can't help thinkin'

about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I'd have her on

my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be

tewin' around to do for her. I shouldn't have any peace of my life any

moa. Can't you see that?”

“I guess if you see it, I don't need to,” said Lander.

“Well, then, I want you shouldn't eva mention her to me again. I've had

the greatest escape! But I've got her off home, and I've give her money

enough! had a time with her about it--so that they won't feel as if we'd

made 'em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again.

I don't want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be

frettin' if I'm in reach of her, and I shan't get any good of the ai'a.

Will you promise?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then!” Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the

dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she

was insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door

suggested. She once more twisted her head in that direction and called,

“Come in!”

The door opened and Clementina came in. She advanced to the bedside

smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon

the counterpane.

“Why, you haven't been home, child?”

“No'm,” said Clementina, breathlessly. “But I couldn't take it. I knew

they wouldn't want me to, and I thought you'd like it better if I just

brought it back myself. Good-mo'ning.” She slipped out of the door. Mrs.

Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her

head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail. “Now we got to go! And

it's all youa fault, Albe't.”

Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and

then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau. He sighed

profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.

V.

The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that

she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that

she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she

was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to

carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps,

when she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an

excuse or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr.

Atwell about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms

taken or left.

She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the

discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with

grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself

who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it

was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in

her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that

it was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef

have his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called

her Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel

that he had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man

who much preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any

sort, and after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he

said, “Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?”

She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her

for him, and went away.

It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the

young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to

look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by

a girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth,

and he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of

trying to bully her.

He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a

college student, though for the time being he ranked the student

socially. He had him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed

a sort of little private room for him, and talked with him at such hours

of the forenoon and the late evening as the student was off duty. He

found comfort in the student's fretful strength, which expressed itself

in the pugnacious frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright

sorrel mustache was beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.

Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure

with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he

wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in

his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he

acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he

wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning

of the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several

coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a

number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been

so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.

One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the

desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who

sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing

in the distant parlor, Fane said. “Now, what'll you bet that they won't

every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes

to bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel

to study 'em.”

“I don't want to study them,” said Gregory, harshly.

“Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?”

Fane suggested.

“No, I don't know them at all,” said the student.

“I don't believe,” urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, “that

there's a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your

mind to it.”

Gregory twitched irascibly. “I don't want to marry them.”

“Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don't know.”

“I don't mean that,” retorted the student. “But I've got other things to

think of.”

“Don't you believe,” the clerk modestly urged, “that it is natural for a

man--well, a young man--to think about girls?”

“I suppose it is.”

“And you don't consider it wrong?”

“How, wrong?”

“Well, a waste of time. I don't know as I always think about wanting to

marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em. There's

something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.

Take almost any of 'em,” said the clerk, with an air of inductive

reasoning. “Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don't know what

it is about her. She's good-looking, I don't deny that; and she's got

pretty manners, and she's as graceful as a bird. But it a'n't any one of

'em, and it don't seem to be all of 'em put together that makes you

want to keep your eyes on her the whole while. Ever noticed what a nice

little foot she's got? Or her hands?”

“No,” said the student.

“I don't mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some

girls that would. But she's not that kind. She ain't much more than a

child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman. Noticed the kind

of way she's got?”

“No,” said the student, with impatience.

The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke.

“Well, it's something as if she'd been trained to it, so that she knew

just the right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it's nature. You

know how the chef always calls her the Boss? That explains it about as

well as anything, and I presume that's what my mind was running on, the

other day, when I called her Boss. But, my! I can't get anywhere near

her since!”

“It serves you right,” said Gregory. “You had no business to tease her.”

“Now, do you think it was teasing? I did, at first, and then again it

seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right

one. I presume I couldn't explain that to her.”

“It wouldn't be easy.”

“I look upon her,” said Fane, with an effect of argument in the

sweetness of his smile, “just as I would upon any other young lady in

the house. Do you spell apology with one p or two?”

“One,” said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of

paper.

“I feel badly for the girl. I don't want her to think I was teasing her

or taking any sort of liberty with her. Now, would you apologize to her,

if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your

chance and speak to her?”

Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of

the place. “You make me sick, Fane,” he said.

The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with

one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like

summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down

the piazzas, and storm into the office. Several of them fluttered up to

the desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes

bearing their initials. They called him out, and asked if he had not

forgotten something for them. He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and

then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other

material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently

said, Well, they guessed they must go; and went. Fane turned to

encounter Gregory, who had come in by a side door.

“Fane, I want to beg your pardon. I was rude to you just now.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” the clerk protested. “That's all right. Sit down a

while, can't you, and talk with a fellow. It's early, yet.”

“No, I can't. I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way.

Good-night. Is there anything in particular?”

“No; good-night. I was just wondering about--that girl.”

“Oh!”

VI.

Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not

stop there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his

days went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to

do with. He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose

susceptibilities were such that they kept about their work bathed

in tears or suffused with anger much of the time. He was not only

good-looking but he was a college student, and their feelings were ready

to bud toward him in tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and

blighted by his curt words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him

for the hurts he did them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly

or furiously that he was too cross for anything. They were mostly young

school-mistresses, and whether they were of a soft and amorous make,

or of a forbidding temper, they knew enough in spite of their hurts to

value a young fellow whose thoughts were not running upon girls all the

time. Women, even in their spring-time, like men to treat them as if

they had souls as well as hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory

that he treated them all, the silliest of them, as if they had souls.

Very likely they responded more with their hearts than with their souls,

but they were aware that this was not his fault.

The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner

between them and the girls whom they served. The knot between his brows

did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he

preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than

in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.

They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he

saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,

but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her

grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of

them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned

occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies

among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,

and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in

the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with

his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with

grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.

He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and

function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who

celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of

these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered

his work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from

discredit through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to

do so.

The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in

for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl

herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but

would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business

to forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs,

and butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant.

“Very well, I'll wait here for him a little while,” Gregory answered.

“So do,” said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she

saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and

she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could

have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, “I

have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back,”

and then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her

tender voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept

listening for Clementina to say, “No'm, there a'n't. Perhaps, the'e'll

be something the next mail,” and “Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this

paper is for some of youa folks, too.”

Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,

to go away.

The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. “Oh! I thought

something had happened.”

“No, nothing has happened,” said Gregory, with a sort of violence;

which was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair

springing from the mass that defined her pretty head. “Don't you know

that you oughtn't to say 'No'm' and 'Yes'm?”' he demanded, bitterly, and

then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into

her cheeks.

Clementina merely looked interested. “Did I say that? I meant to say

Yes, ma'am and No, ma'am; but I keep forgetting.”

“You oughtn't to say anything!” Gregory answered savagely, “Just say

Yes, and No, and let your voice do the rest.”

“Oh!” said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the

novelty of the idea. “I should be afraid it wasn't polite.”

Gregory took an even brutal tone. It seemed to him as if he were forced

to hurt her feelings. But his words, in spite of his tone, were not

brutal; they might have even been thought flattering. “The politeness is

in the manner, and you don't need anything but your manner.”

“Do you think so, truly?” asked the girl joyously. “I should like to try

it once!”

He frowned again. “I've no business to criticise your way of speaking.”

“Oh yes'm--yes, ma'am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed! The'a! It

does sound just as well, don't it?” Clementina laughed in triumph at

the outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon

Gregory's face, too. “I'm very mach obliged to you, Mr. Gregory--I shall

always want to do it, if it's the right way.”

“It's the right way,” said Gregory coldly.

“And don't they,” she urged, “don't they really say Sir and Ma'am,

whe'e--whe'e you came from?”

He said gloomily, “Not ladies and gentlemen. Servants do. Waiters--like

me.” He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he

bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.

“But I thought--I thought you was a college student.”

“Were,” Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, “Were, I

mean.”

“I'm a student at college, and here I'm a servant! It's all right!” he

said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, “My Master

was the servant of the meanest, and I must--I beg your pardon for

meddling with your manner of speaking--”

“Oh, I'm very much obliged to you; indeed I am. And I shall not care

if you tell me of anything that's out of the way in my talking,” said

Clementina, generously.

“Thank you; I think I won't wait any longer for Mr. Fane.”

“Why, I'm su'a he'll be back very soon, now. I'll try not to disturb you

any moa.”

Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, “I

wish you would tell Mr. Fane something.”

“For you? Why, suttainly!”

“No. For you. Tell him that it's all right about his calling you Boss.”

The indignant color came into Clementina's face. “He had no business to

call me that.”

“No; and he doesn't think he had, now. He's truly sorry for it.”

“I'll see,” said Clementina.

She had not seen by the time Fane got back. She received his apologies

for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she

told what had passed between Gregory and herself.

“Is he truly so proud?” she asked.

“He's a very good young man,” said Mrs. Atwell, “but I guess he's proud.

He can't help it, but you can see he fights against it. If I was you,

Clem, I wouldn't say anything to the guls about it.”

“Oh, no'm--I mean, no, indeed. I shouldn't think of it. But don't you

think that was funny, his bringing in Christ, that way?”

“Well, he's going to be a minister, you know.”

“Is he really?” Clementina was a while silent. At last she said, “Don't

you think Mr. Gregory has a good many freckles?”

“Well, them red-complected kind is liable to freckle,” said Mrs. Atwell,

judicially.

After rather a long pause for both of them, Clementina asked, “Do you

think it would be nice for me to ask Mr. Gregory about things, when I

wasn't suttain?”

“Like what?”

“Oh-wo'ds, and pronunciation; and books to read.”

“Why, I presume he'd love to have you. He's always correctin' the guls;

I see him take up a book one day, that one of 'em was readin', and when

she as't him about it, he said it was rubbage. I guess you couldn't have

a betta guide.”

“Well, that was what I was thinking. I guess I sha'n't do it, though.

I sh'd neva have the courage.” Clementina laughed and then fell rather

seriously silent again.

VII.

One day the shoeman stopped his wagon at the door of the helps' house,

and called up at its windows, “Well, guls, any of you want to git a

numba foua foot into a numba two shoe, to-day? Now's youa chance, but

you got to be quick abort it. The'e ha'r't but just so many numba two

shoes made, and the wohld's full o' numba foua feet.”

The windows filled with laughing faces at the first sound of the

shoeman's ironical voice; and at sight of his neat wagon, with its

drawers at the rear and sides, and its buggy-hood over the seat where

the shoeman lounged lazily holding the reins, the girls flocked down the

stairs, and out upon the piazza where the shoe man had handily ranged

his vehicle.

They began to ask him if he had not this thing and that, but he said

with firmness, “Nothin' but shoes, guls. I did carry a gen'l line, one

while, of what you may call ankle-wea', such as spats, and stockin's,

and gaitas, but I nova did like to speak of such things befoa ladies,

and now I stick ex-elusively to shoes. You know that well enough, guls;

what's the use?”

He kept a sober face amidst the giggling that his words aroused,--and

let his voice sink into a final note of injury.

“Well, if you don't want any shoes, to-day, I guess I must be goin'.”

He made a feint of jerking his horse's reins, but forebore at the

entreaties that went up from the group of girls.

“Yes, we do!” “Let's see them!” “Oh, don't go!” they chorused in an

equally histrionic alarm, and the shoeman got down from his perch to

show his wares.

“Now, the'a, ladies,” he said, pulling out one of the drawers, and

dangling a pair of shoes from it by the string that joined their heels,

“the'e's a shoe that looks as good as any Sat'd'y-night shoe you eva

see. Looks as han'some as if it had a pasteboa'd sole and was split

stock all through, like the kind you buy for a dollar at the store, and

kick out in the fust walk you take with your fella--'r some other gul's

fella, I don't ca'e which. And yet that's an honest shoe, made of the

best of material all the way through, and in the best manna. Just look

at that shoe, ladies; ex-amine it; sha'n't cost you a cent, and I'll pay

for youa lost time myself, if any complaint is made.” He began to toss

pairs of the shoes into the crowd of girls, who caught them from each

other before they fell, with hysterical laughter, and ran away with

them in-doors to try them on. “This is a shoe that I'm intaducin',”

the shoeman went on, “and every pair is warranted--warranted numba two;

don't make any otha size, because we want to cata to a strictly numba

two custom. If any lady doos feel 'em a little mite too snug, I'm sorry

for her, but I can't do anything to help her in this shoe.”

“Too snug!” came a gay voice from in-doors. “Why my foot feels puffectly

lost in this one.”

“All right,” the shoeman shouted back. “Call it a numba one shoe and

then see if you can't find that lost foot in it, some'eres. Or try a

little flour, and see if it won't feel more at home. I've hea'd of a

shoe that give that sensation of looseness by not goin' on at all.”

The girls exulted joyfully together at the defeat of their companion,

but the shoeman kept a grave face, while he searched out other sorts

of shoes and slippers, and offered them, or responded to some definite

demand with something as near like as he could hope to make serve. The

tumult of talk and laughter grew till the chef put his head out of the

kitchen door, and then came sauntering across the grass to the helps'

piazza. At the same time the clerk suffered himself to be lured from his

post by the excitement. He came and stood beside the chef, who listened

to the shoeman's flow of banter with a longing to take his chances with

him.

“That's a nice hawss,” he said. “What'll you take for him?”

“Why, hello!” said the shoeman, with an eye that dwelt upon the chef's

official white cap and apron, “You talk English, don't you? Fust off, I

didn't know but it was one of them foreign dukes come ova he'a to marry

some oua poor millionai'es daughtas.” The girls cried out for joy, and

the chef bore their mirth stoically, but not without a personal relish

of the shoeman's up-and-comingness. “Want a hawss?” asked the shoeman

with an air of business. “What'll you give?”

“I'll give you thutty-seven dollas and a half,” said the chef.

“Sorry I can't take it. That hawss is sellin' at present for just one

hundred and fifty dollas.”

“Well,” said the chef, “I'll raise you a dolla and a quahta. Say

thutty-eight and seventy-five.”

“W-ell now, you're gittin' up among the figgas where you're liable to

own a hawss. You just keep right on a raisin' me, while I sell these

ladies some shoes, and maybe you'll hit it yit, 'fo'e night.”

The girls were trying on shoes on every side now, and they had dispensed

with the formality of going in-doors for the purpose. More than one put

out her foot to the clerk for his opinion of the fit, and the shoeman

was mingling with the crowd, testing with his hand, advising from his

professional knowledge, suggesting, urging, and in some cases artfully

agreeing with the reluctance shown.

“This man,” said the chef, indicating Fane, “says you can tell moa lies

to the square inch than any man out o' Boston.”

“Doos he?” asked the shoeman, turning with a pair of high-heeled bronze

slippers in his hand from the wagon. “Well, now, if I stood as nea' to

him as you do, I believe I sh'd hit him.”

“Why, man, I can't dispute him!” said the chef, and as if he had now at

last scored a point, he threw back his head and laughed. When he brought

down his head again, it was to perceive the approach of Clementina.

“Hello,” he said for her to hear, “he'e comes the Boss. Well, I guess

I must be goin',” he added, in mock anxiety. “I'm a goin', Boss, I'm a

goin'.”

Clementina ignored him. “Mr. Atwell wants to see you a moment, Mr.

Fane,” she said to the clerk.

“All right, Miss Claxon,” Fane answered, with the sorrowful respect

which he always showed Clementina, now, “I'll be right there.” But he

waited a moment, either in expression of his personal independence, or

from curiosity to know what the shoeman was going to say of the bronze

slippers.

Clementina felt the fascination, too; she thought the slippers were

beautiful, and her foot thrilled with a mysterious prescience of its

fitness for them.

“Now, the'e, ladies, or as I may say guls, if you'll excuse it in one

that's moa like a fatha to you than anything else, in his feelings”--the

girls tittered, and some one shouted derisively--“It's true!”--“now

there is a shoe, or call it a slippa, that I've rutha hesitated about

showin' to you, because I know that you're all rutha serious-minded,

I don't ca'e how young ye be, or how good-lookin' ye be; and I don't

presume the'e's one among you that's eve' head o' dancin'.” In the

mirthful hooting and mocking that followed, the shoeman hedged gravely

from the extreme position he had taken. “What? Well, maybe you have

among some the summa folks, but we all know what summa folks ah', and I

don't expect you to patte'n by them. But what I will say is that if

any young lady within the sound of my voice,”--he looked round for

the applause which did not fail him in his parody of the pulpit

style--“should get an invitation to a dance next winta, and should feel

it a wo'k of a charity to the young man to go, she'll be sorry--on his

account, rememba--that she ha'n't got this pair o' slippas.

“The'a! They're a numba two, and they'll fit any lady here, I don't ca'e

how small a foot she's got. Don't all speak at once, sistas! Ample time

allowed for meals. That's a custom-made shoe, and if it hadn't b'en too

small for the lady they was oddid foh, you couldn't-'a' got 'em for less

than seven dollas; but now I'm throwin' on 'em away for three.”

A groan of dismay went up from the whole circle, and some who had

pressed forward for a sight of the slippers, shrank back again.

“Did I hea' just now,” asked the shoeman, with a soft insinuation in his

voice, and in the glance he suddenly turned upon Clementina, “a party

addressed as Boss?” Clementina flushed, but she did not cower; the chef

walked away with a laugh, and the shoeman pursued him with his voice.

“Not that I am goin' to folla the wicked example of a man who tries to

make spot of young ladies; but if the young lady addressed as Boss--”

“Miss Claxon,” said the clerk with ingratiating reverence.

“Miss Claxon--I Stan' corrected,” pursued the shoeman. “If Miss Claxon

will do me the fava just to try on this slippa, I sh'd be able to tell

at the next place I stopped just how it looked on a lady's foot. I see

you a'n't any of you disposed to buy 'em this aftanoon, 'and I a'n't

complainin'; you done pootty well by me, already, and I don't want

to uhge you; but I do want to carry away the picture, in my mind's

eye--what you may call a mental photograph--of this slipper on the kind

of a foot it was made for, so't I can praise it truthfully to my next

customer. What do you say, ma'am?” he addressed himself with profound

respect to Clementina.

“Oh, do let him, Clem!” said one of the girls, and another pleaded,

“Just so he needn't tell a story to his next customa,” and that made the

rest laugh.

Clementina's heart was throbbing, and joyous lights were dancing in her

eyes. “I don't care if I do,” she said, and she stooped to unlace her

shoe, but one of the big girls threw herself on her knees at her feet to

prevent her. Clementina remembered too late that there was a hole in her

stocking and that her little toe came through it, but she now folded the

toe artfully down, and the big girl discovered the hole in time to abet

her attempt at concealment. She caught the slipper from the shoeman and

harried it on; she tied the ribbons across the instep, and then put on

the other. “Now put out youa foot, Clem! Fast dancin' position!” She

leaned back upon her own heels, and Clementina daintily lifted the edge

of her skirt a little, and peered over at her feet. The slippers might

or might not have been of an imperfect taste, in their imitation of the

prevalent fashion, but on Clementina's feet they had distinction.

“Them feet was made for them slippas,” said the shoeman devoutly.

The clerk was silent; he put his hand helplessly to his mouth, and then

dropped it at his side again.

Gregory came round the corner of the building from the dining-room, and

the big girl who was crouching before Clementina, and who boasted that

she was not afraid of the student, called saucily to him, “Come here, a

minute, Mr. Gregory,” and as he approached, she tilted aside, to let him

see Clementina's slippers.

Clementina beamed up at him with all her happiness in her eyes, but

after a faltering instant, his face reddened through its freckles, and

he gave her a rebuking frown and passed on.

“Well, I decla'e!” said the big girl. Fane turned uneasily, and said

with a sigh, he guessed he must be going, now.

A blight fell upon the gay spirits of the group, and the shoeman asked

with an ironical glance after Gregory's retreating figure, “Owna of this

propaty?”

“No, just the ea'th,” said the big girl, angrily.

The voice of Clementina made itself heard with a cheerfulness which had

apparently suffered no chill, but was really a rising rebellion. “How

much ah' the slippas?”

“Three dollas,” said the shoeman in a surprise which he could not

conceal at Clementina's courage.

She laughed, and stooped to untie the slippers. “That's too much for

me.”

“Let me untie 'em, Clem,” said the big girl. “It's a shame for you eva

to take 'em off.”

“That's right, lady,” said the shoeman. “And you don't eva need to,” he

added, to Clementina, “unless you object to sleepin' in 'em. You pay me

what you want to now, and the rest when I come around the latta paht of

August.”

“Oh keep 'em, Clem!” the big girl urged, passionately, and the rest

joined her with their entreaties.

“I guess I betta not,” said Clementina, and she completed the work of

taking off the slippers in which the big girl could lend her no further

aid, such was her affliction of spirit.

“All right, lady,” said the shoeman. “Them's youa slippas, and I'll just

keep 'em for you till the latta paht of August.”

He drove away, and in the woods which he had to pass through on the

road to another hotel he overtook the figure of a man pacing rapidly. He

easily recognized Gregory, but he bore him no malice. “Like a lift?” he

asked, slowing up beside him.

“No, thank you,” said Gregory. “I'm out for the walk.” He looked round

furtively, and then put his hand on the side of the wagon, mechanically,

as if to detain it, while he walked on.

“Did you sell the slippers to the young lady?”

“Well, not as you may say sell, exactly,” returned the shoeman,

cautiously.

“Have you--got them yet?” asked the student.

“Guess so,” said the man. “Like to see 'em?”

He pulled up his horse.

Gregory faltered a moment. Then he said, “I'd like to buy them. Quick!”

He looked guiltily about, while the shoeman alertly obeyed, with some

delay for a box to put them in. “How much are they?”

“Well, that's a custom made slipper, and the price to the lady that

oddid'em was seven dollas. But I'll let you have 'em for three--if you

want 'em for a present.”--The shoeman was far too discreet to permit

himself anything so overt as a smile; he merely let a light of

intelligence come into his face.

Gregory paid the money. “Please consider this as confidential,” he said,

and he made swiftly away. Before the shoeman could lock the drawer that

had held the slippers, and clamber to his perch under the buggy-hood,

Gregory was running back to him again.

“Stop!” he called, and as he came up panting in an excitement which the

shoeman might well have mistaken for indignation attending the discovery

of some blemish in his purchase. “Do you regard this as in any manner a

deception?” he palpitated.

“Why,” the shoeman began cautiously, “it wa'n't what you may call a

promise, exactly. More of a joke than anything else, I looked on it. I

just said I'd keep 'em for her; but--”

“You don't understand. If I seemed to disapprove--if I led any one to

suppose, by my manner, or by--anything--that I thought it unwise or

unbecoming to buy the shoes, and then bought them myself, do you think

it is in the nature of an acted falsehood?”

“Lo'd no!” said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to

drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous.

Gregory stopped him with another question. “And shall--will you--think

it necessary to speak of--of this transaction? I leave you free!”

“Well,” said the shoeman. “I don't know what you're after, exactly, but

if you think I'm so shot on for subjects that I've got to tell the folks

at the next stop that I sold a fellar a pair of slippas for his gul--Go

'long!” he called to his horse, and left Gregory standing in the middle

of the road.

VIII.

The people who came to the Middlemount in July were ordinarily the

nicest, but that year the August folks were nicer than usual and there

were some students among them, and several graduates just going into

business, who chose to take their outing there instead of going to the

sea-side or the North Woods. This was a chance that might not happen in

years again, and it made the house very gay for the young ladies; they

ceased to pay court to the clerk, and asked him for letters only at

mail-time. Five or six couples were often on the floor together, at the

hops, and the young people sat so thick upon the stairs that one could

scarcely get up or down.

So many young men made it gay not only for the young ladies, but also

for a certain young married lady, when she managed to shirk her

rather filial duties to her husband, who was much about the verandas,

purblindly feeling his way with a stick, as he walked up and down, or

sitting opaque behind the glasses that preserved what was left of his

sight, while his wife read to him. She was soon acquainted with a good

many more people than he knew, and was in constant request for such

occasions as needed a chaperon not averse to mountain climbing, or

drives to other hotels for dancing and supper and return by moonlight,

or the more boisterous sorts of charades; no sheet and pillow case party

was complete without her; for welsh-rarebits her presence was essential.

The event of the conflict between these social claims and her duties to

her husband was her appeal to Mrs. Atwell on a point which the landlady

referred to Clementina.

“She wants somebody to read to her husband, and I don't believe but what

you could do it, Clem. You're a good reader, as good as I want to hear,

and while you may say that you don't put in a great deal of elocution,

I guess you can read full well enough. All he wants is just something to

keep him occupied, and all she wants is a chance to occupy herself with

otha folks. Well, she is moa their own age. I d'know as the's any hahm

in her. And my foot's so much betta, now, that I don't need you the

whole while, any moa.”

“Did you speak to her about me?” asked the girl.

“Well, I told her I'd tell you. I couldn't say how you'd like.”

“Oh, I guess I should like,” said Clementina, with her eyes shining.

“But--I should have to ask motha.”

“I don't believe but what your motha'd be willin',” said Mrs. Atwell.

“You just go down and see her about it.”

The next day Mrs. Milray was able to take leave of her husband, in

setting off to matronize a coaching party, with an exuberance of good

conscience that she shared with the spectators. She kissed him with

lively affection, and charged him not to let the child read herself to

death for him. She captioned Clementina that Mr. Milray never knew when

he was tired, and she had better go by the clock in her reading, and not

trust to any sign from him.

Clementina promised, and when the public had followed Mrs. Milray away,

to watch her ascent to the topmost seat of the towering coach, by

means of the ladder held in place by two porters, and by help of the

down-stretched hands of all the young men on the coach, Clementina

opened the book at the mark she found in it, and began to read to Mr.

Milray.

The book was a metaphysical essay, which he professed to find a lighter

sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously

employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain

point, to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for

entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians

were. He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which

had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any

consciousness of being read to. He kept the smile on his delicate face

which had come there when his wife said at parting, “I don't believe I

should leave her with you if you could see how prettty she was,” and he

held his head almost motionlessly at the same poise he had given it in

listening to her final charges. It was a fine head, still well covered

with soft hair, which lay upon it in little sculpturesque masses, like

chiseled silver, and the acquiline profile had a purity of line in the

arch of the high nose and the jut of the thin lips and delicate chin,

which had not been lost in the change from youth to age. One could never

have taken it for the profile of a New York lawyer who had early found

New York politics more profitable than law, and after a long time passed

in city affairs, had emerged with a name shadowed by certain doubtful

transactions. But this was Milray's history, which in the rapid progress

of American events, was so far forgotten that you had first to remind

people of what he had helped do before you could enjoy their surprise

in realizing that this gentle person, with the cast of intellectual

refinement which distinguished his face, was the notorious Milray,

who was once in all the papers. When he made his game and retired from

politics, his family would have sacrificed itself a good deal to reclaim

him socially, though they were of a severer social than spiritual

conscience, in the decay of some ancestral ideals. But he had rendered

their willingness hopeless by marrying, rather late in life, a young

girl from the farther West who had come East with a general purpose

to get on. She got on very well with Milray, and it was perhaps not

altogether her own fault that she did not get on so well with his

family, when she began to substitute a society aim for the artistic

ambition that had brought her to New York. They might have forgiven him

for marrying her, but they could not forgive her for marrying him. They

were of New England origin and they were perhaps a little more critical

with her than if they had been New Yorkers of Dutch strain. They said

that she was a little Western hoyden, but that the stage would have been

a good place for her if she could have got over her Pike county accent;

in the hush of family councils they confided to one another the belief

that there were phases of the variety business in which her accent would

have been no barrier to her success, since it could not have been heard

in the dance, and might have been disguised in the song.

“Will you kindly read that passage over again?” Milray asked as

Clementina paused at the end of a certain paragraph. She read it, while

he listened attentively. “Could you tell me just what you understand by

that?” he pursued, as if he really expected Clementina to instruct him.

She hesitated a moment before she answered, “I don't believe I undastand

anything at all.”

“Do you know,” said Milray, “that's exactly my own case? And I've an

idea that the author is in the same box,” and Clementina perceived she

might laugh, and laughed discreetly.

Milray seemed to feel the note of discreetness in her laugh, and he

asked, smiling, “How old did you tell me you were?”

“I'm sixteen,” said Clementina.

“It's a great age,” said Milray. “I remember being sixteen myself; I

have never been so old since. But I was very old for my age, then. Do

you think you are?”

“I don't believe I am,” said Clementina, laughing again, but still very

discreetly.

“Then I should like to tell you that you have a very agreeable voice. Do

you sing?”

“No'm--no, sir--no,” said Clementina, “I can't sing at all.”

“Ah, that's very interesting,” said Milray, “but it's not surprising.

I wish I could see your face distinctly; I've a great curiosity about

matching voices and faces; I must get Mrs. Milray to tell me how you

look. Where did you pick up your pretty knack at reading? In school,

here?”

“I don't know,” answered Clementina. “Do I read-the way you want?”

“Oh, perfectly. You let the meaning come through--when there is any.”

“Sometimes,” said Clementina ingenuously, “I read too fast; the children

ah' so impatient when I'm reading to them at home, and they hurry me.

But I can read a great deal slower if you want me to.”

“No, I'm impatient, too,” said Milray. “Are there many of them,--the

children?”

“There ah' six in all.”

“And are you the oldest?”

“Yes,” said Clementina. She still felt it very blunt not to say sir,

too, but she tried to make her tone imply the sir, as Mr. Gregory had

bidden her.

“You've got a very pretty name.”

Clementina brightened. “Do you like it? Motha gave it to me; she took it

out of a book that fatha was reading to her.”

“I like it very much,” said Milray. “Are you tall for your age?”

“I guess I am pretty tall.”

“You're fair, of course. I can tell that by your voice; you've got a

light-haired voice. And what are your eyes?”

“Blue!” Clementina laughed at his pursuit.

“Ah, of course! It isn't a gray-eyed blonde voice. Do you think--has

anybody ever told you-that you were graceful?”

“I don't know as they have,” said Clementina, after thinking.

“And what is your own opinion?” Clementina began to feel her dignity

infringed; she did not answer, and now Milray laughed. “I felt the

little tilt in your step as you came up. It's all right. Shall we try

for our friend's meaning, now?”

Clementina began again, and again Milray stopped her. “You mustn't bear

malice. I can hear the grudge in your voice; but I didn't mean to laugh

at you. You don't like being made fun of, do you?”

“I don't believe anybody does,” said Clementina.

“No, indeed,” said Milray. “If I had tried such a thing I should be

afraid you would make it uncomfortable for me. But I haven't, have I?”

“I don't know,” said Clementina, reluctantly.

Milray laughed gleefully. “Well, you'll forgive me, because I'm an old

fellow. If I were young, you wouldn't, would you?”

Clementina thought of the clerk; she had certainly never forgiven him.

“Shall I read on?” she asked.

“Yes, yes. Read on,” he said, respectfully. Once he interrupted her to

say that she pronounced admirable, but he would like now and then to

differ with her about a word if she did not mind. She answered, Oh no,

indeed; she should like it ever so much, if he would tell her when

she was wrong. After that he corrected her, and he amused himself by

studying forms of respect so delicate that they should not alarm her

pride; Clementina reassured him in terms as fine as his own. She did not

accept his instructions implicitly; she meant to bring them to the bar

of Gregory's knowledge. If he approved of them, then she would submit.

Milray easily possessed himself of the history of her life and of all

its circumstances, and he said he would like to meet her father and make

the acquaintance of a man whose mind, as Clementina interpreted it to

him, he found so original.

He authorized his wife to arrange with Mrs. Atwell for a monopoly of

Clementina's time while he stayed at Middlemount, and neither he nor

Mrs. Milray seemed surprised at the good round sum, as the landlady

thought it, which she asked in the girl's behalf.

IX.

The Milrays stayed through August, and Mrs. Milray was the ruling spirit

of the great holiday of the summer, at Middlemount. It was this year

that the landlords of the central mountain region had decided to compete

in a coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor

of the East Side and the West Side parades. The boarding-houses were

to take part, as well as the hotels; the farms where only three or four

summer folks were received, were to send their mountain-wagons, and all

were to be decorated with bunting. An arch draped with flags and covered

with flowers spanned the entrance to the main street at Middlemount

Centre, and every shop in the village was adorned for the event.

Mrs. Milray made the landlord tell her all about coaching parades, and

the champions of former years on the East Side and the West Side, and

then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from

them all this year, or she should never come near his house again. He

answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray's

class of custom, “I'm goin' to drive our hossis myself.”

She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display

on the coach. She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of

dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and

when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and

pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her

decoration for the coach.

She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves

early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking

the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.

She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents

of despair all over the place. When their dresses were finished she made

the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret

of the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the

effects she aimed at. But on the eve of realizing these in public she

was overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was

to be a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the

character of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers,

and invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally

divided as to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes

assigned to the gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter

months. It had been all worked out and the actors drilled in their

parts, when the Spirit of Summer, who had been chosen for the

inoffensiveness of her extreme youth, was taken with mumps, and

withdrawn by the doctor's orders. Mrs. Milray had now not only to

improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose her from a group

of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and embittering those who

were not chosen. In her calamity she asked her husband what she should

do, with but the least hope that he could tell her. But he answered

promptly, “Take Clementina; I'll let you have her for the day,” and then

waited for the storm of her renunciations and denunciations to spend

itself.

“To be sure,” she said, when this had happened, “it isn't as if she were

a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of

public function, anyhow. I can't say that I've hired her to take the

part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same

thing.”

The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost

as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation.

“She has got to be dressed new from head to foot,” she said, “every

stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?”

By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons,

it was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took

the girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to

a perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached. The

victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to

look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume. No shoes

at all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down

at one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing.

Mrs. Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the

statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was

richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to

the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture

in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself

mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside

the landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal

flowers in his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of

his six horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the

parade set out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it.

They were all to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and

festooned in flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of

the young swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade.

The coach itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined

itself as a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other

wagons and coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of

having been mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had

the unwieldiness which seems inseparable from spectacularity. They

represented motives in color and design sometimes tasteless enough, and

sometimes so nearly very good that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great

deal in her mouth, as they arrived, each with its hotel-cry roared and

shrilled from a score of masculine and feminine throats, and finally

spelled for distinctness sake, with an ultimate yell or growl. But she

had not finished giving the lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper

the points of her own tableau, before she regained the courage and the

faith in which she remained serenely steadfast throughout the parade.

It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she

climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to

his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed

slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests

crowding the verandas.

The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize

was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to

escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass

as many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of

the carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in

the lives of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain

coaching parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or

advertising it came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of

phantasmagoric strangeness.

Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed

slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls,

interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the

young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless

August morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in

holiday processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew

poetry burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the

condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time

and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face

to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful

or ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,

with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him

and out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.

When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the

landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray,

and Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, “Wave it, wave

it!”

The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung

their hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand

and drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it.

Then Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace

with which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left

the village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort

before him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of

the victors, and followed them with applause as far beyond the village

borders as wind and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped

off breathless before they reached a half-finished house in the edge

of some woods. A line of little children was drawn up by the road-side

before it, who watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the

Middlemount coach came in full sight. Then they sprang into the air, and

beating their hands together, screamed, “Clem! Clem! Oh it's Clem!” and

jumped up and down, and a shabby looking work worn woman came round the

corner of the house and stared up at Clementina waving her banner wildly

to the children, and shouting unintelligible words to them. The young

people on the coach joined in response to the children, some simply,

some ironically, and one of the men caught up a great wreath of flowers

which lay at Clementina's feet, and flung it down to them; the shabby

woman quickly vanished round the corner of the house again. Mrs. Milray

leaned over to ask the landlord, “Who in the world are Clementina's

friends?”

“Why don't you know?” he retorted in abated voice. “Them's her brothas

and sistas.”

“And that woman?”

“The lady at the conna? That's her motha.”

When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said

again, and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months

from going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months

from trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone

with Clementina.

The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted

to go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, “What is it,

Clementina?”

“Oh, nothing. Only I was afraid maybe you didn't like my waving to

the children, when you saw how queea they looked.” Clementina's lips

quivered.

“Did any of the rest say anything?”

“I know what they thought. But I don't care! I should do it right over

again!”

Mrs. Milray's happiness in the day's triumph was so great that she could

indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in her arms. “I want to

kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!”

X.

The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the

success of the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray over a

welsh-rarebit which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was

in the charge of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an

austerity that might have conspired with the viand itself against their

dreams, if they had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations.

He would not allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening

leisure, or kept from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when

he had provided the materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left

their combination to Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.

She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to

one of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed

Clementina's absence with a “Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit

of Summer?” Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these

months before the parade was over, and now they clamored together, and

said they must have her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly

seconded by the spring and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, “Well,

then, you'll have to all subscribe and get her a pair of dancing

slippers.” They pressed her for her meaning, and she had to explain

the fact of Clementina's destitution, which that additional fold of

cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the coaching tableau that it had

never been suspected. The young men entreated her to let them each buy a

pair of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn

for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray

declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and

that she was not going to have her spoiled. But, before the party broke

up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it

very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as

she knew she must, that she could not go, and why. They agreed that the

cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for

the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of

slippers untouched. It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried

on all of Mrs. Milray's festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints

and high heels would avail. She went away disappointed, but not yet

disheartened; youth does not so easily renounce a pleasure pressed to

the lips; and Clementina had it in her head to ask some of the table

girls to help her out. She meant to try first with that big girl who had

helped her put on the shoeman's bronze slippers; and she hurried through

the office, pushing purblindly past Fane without looking his way, when

he called to her in the deference which he now always used with her,

“Here's a package here for you, Clementina--Miss Claxon,” and he gave

her an oblong parcel, addressed in a hand strange to her. “Who is

it from?” she asked, innocently, and Fane replied with the same

ingenuousness: “I'm sure I don't know.” Afterwards he thought of having

retorted, “I haven't opened it,” but still without being certain that he

would have had the courage to say it.

Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone

in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt

it over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four

inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the

address again, “Miss Clementina Claxon,” and at the narrow notched

ribbon which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was

very white and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the

paper slipped off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and

the shoe man's bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.

Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both

real and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of

fortune could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she

was so giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran

down to Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow

staircase.

“What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?” she panted, with the

slippers in her hand. “Whe'e did they come from?” She poured out the

history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them

and of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost

ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly

short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair

still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in

their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with

her in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes.

Mrs. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had

clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given

them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the

parade. Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had

secretly dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at

Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the

shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that

she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then

in that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each

conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free

to any opposite theory.

Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long

before his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a

piece of the Boss's luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen

door after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands

that took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to

her: “Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin'

out the sky int' youa lap?”

Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,

and she said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?” she

entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the

heart of a tease.

“I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts.”

Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a

well-affected sympathy.

“Say Fane fust told you about 'em?”

“Yes. 'He'e's a package for you,' he said. Just that way; and he

couldn't tell me who left it, or anything.”

“Anybody asked him about it since?”

“Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody.”

“Everybody.” The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. “And he

didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?”

“No. The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!” Clementina stood

expectant, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say,

and seemed to have forgotten her. “Who do you think put them thea, Mr.

Mahtin?”

The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. “Oh! Oh,

yes! Who d' I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don't believe I'd betta

tell you.”

“Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it--”

“No, no! I guess I betta not. 'Twouldn't do you any good. I guess I

won't say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted

to know whe'e them slippas come from--”

“I do--I do indeed--”

The chef paused before he added, “I should go at Fane. I guess what he

don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.

Thea! I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now.”

What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in

Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not

be true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped;

she turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was

touched; he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he

knew that she disliked the clerk.

“Mind,” he called after her, too late, “I ain't got no proof 't he done

it.”

She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat

down in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.

Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the

chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving

about over her own room.

“Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin',” she began, and then

at sight of the dim figure she broke off: “Why, Clem! What's the matte?

Ah' you asleep? Ah' you sick? It's half an hour of the time and--”

“I'm not going,” Clementina answered, and she did not move.

“Not goin'! Why the land o'--”

“Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell. Don't ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!”

“I will, when I got something to tell,” said Mrs. Atwell. “Now, you just

say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!” Clementina suffered the woful

truth to be drawn from her. “But you don't know whether it's so or not,”

the landlady protested.

“Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef

wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it.”

“That's just what he would done,” cried Mrs. Atwell. “And I'll give him

such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while. He just

said it to tease. What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?”

“Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache,

truly.”

“Why, listen,” said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. “If you believe he done

it--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em,

and then give 'em back to him after it's ova? It would suv him right.”

Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.

“It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't,” she said, and Mrs.

Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She

went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task

was greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun

to find, since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the

management of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither

servant nor lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it,

without sorrow to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the

relief she felt, Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but

when the simpler Mrs. Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with

Clementina, she said, No, no; better let her alone, if she felt as she

did; and perhaps after all she was right.

XI.

Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was

played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as

they issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls

and verandas, and presently to call good night to one another. Then she

lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped

it up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched

ribbon. She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after

the dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she

was doing it all now. She wrote the clerk's name on the parcel, and then

she took the box, and descended to the office with it. There seemed to

be nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case

of letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.

“What's wanted, Miss Claxon?” he asked, with his hopeless

respectfulness. “Anything I can do for you?”

She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the

parcel down on the open register, and then went out.

He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box

fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina.

He ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before

Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily

nursing his knee.

“What do you suppose this means, Frank?”

Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly. “They're the slippers she got

to-day. She thinks you sent them to her.”

“And she wouldn't have them because she thought I sent them! As sure as

I'm standing here, I never did it,” said the clerk, solemnly.

“I know it,” said Gregory. “I sent them.”

“You!”

“What's so wonderful?” Gregory retorted. “I saw that she wanted them

that day when the shoe peddler was here. I could see it, and you could.”

“Yes.”

“I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon. I

was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him. I wanted to give them

to her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them.

To-day, when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to

her anonymously. That's all there is about it.”

The clerk had a moment of bitterness. “If she'd known it was you, she

wouldn't have given them back.”

“That's to be seen. I shall tell her, now. I never meant her to know,

but she must, because she's doing you wrong in her ignorance.”

Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own

suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind. In

the end his attempt was a failure. He asked Gregory, “And do you think

you've done just right by me?”

“I've done right by nobody,” said Gregory, “not even by myself; and I

can see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind. I must tell her the

truth, and then I must leave this place.”

“I suppose you want I should keep it quiet,” said Fane.

“I don't ask anything of you.”

“And she wouldn't,” said Fane, after reflection. “But I know she'd be

glad of it, and I sha'n't say anything. Of course, she never can care

for me; and--there's my hand with my word, if you want it.” Gregory

silently took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: “All I'll

ask is that you'll tell her I wouldn't have presumed to send her the

shoes. She wouldn't be mad at you for it.”

Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away.

It was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to

impulse at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another

or against himself. What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane;

what pain he had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished

the simple soul! With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the

worst was perhaps to come yet. He could not hope to see the girl before

morning, and then, what should he say to her? At sight of a lamp burning

in Mrs. Atwell's room, which was on a level with the veranda where he

was walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her,

and confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to

confess before him; they were there in the place of the child's father

and mother, and it was due to them. As he pressed rapidly toward the

light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did

not notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs.

Atwell's apartment, a figure at the door. It shrank back from his

contact, and he recognized Clementina. His purpose instantly changed,

and he said, “Is that you, Miss Claxon? I want to speak with you. Will

you come a moment where I can?”

“I--I don't know as I'd betta,” she faltered. But she saw the box under

his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and

she wanted to hear what he would say. She had been waiting at the door

there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having

something more happen.

“You needn't be afraid. I shall not keep you. Come with me a moment.

There is something I must tell you at once. You have made a mistake. And

it is my fault. Come!”

Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked

across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river. There

were still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the

piazzas, and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air,

under the pure sky.

Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: “I

have to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane. I was there

behind the letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these

shoes because you thought he sent them to you. He didn't send them.”

Clementina did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: “Do you

wish to know who sent them? I won't tell you unless you do wish it.”

“I think I ought to know,” she said, and she asked, “Don't you?”

“Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane

did. I sent them to you.”

Clementina's heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say

anything. He went on.

“I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to

overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted

on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you. I meant to send them

to you anonymously, then. I had committed one error in acting upon

impulse-my rashness is my besetting sin--and I wished to add a species

of deceit to that. But I was kept from it until-to-day. I hoped you

would like to wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the

post-office for you myself. Mr. Fane didn't know anything about it. That

is all. I am to blame, and no one else.”

He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, “I don't know

what to say.”

“You can't say anything that would be punishment enough for me. I have

acted foolishly, cruelly.”

Clementina did not think so. She was not indignant, as she was when she

thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought

it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had

imagined. She said, “I don't see why you wanted to do it,” hoping that

he would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem

less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.

“There is only one thing that could justify it, and that is something

that I cannot justify.” It was very mysterious, but youth loves mystery,

and Clementina was very young. “I did it,” said Gregory solemnly, and

he felt that now he was acting from no impulse, but from a wisely

considered decision which he might not fail in without culpability,

“because I love you.”

“Oh!” said Clementina, and she started away from him.

“I knew that it would make me detestable!” he cried, bitterly. “I had

to tell you, to explain what I did. I couldn't help doing it. But now if

you can forget it, and never think of me again, I can go away, and try

to atone for it somehow. I shall be guided.”

Clementina did not know why she ought to feel affronted or injured by

what he had said to her; but if Mr. Gregory thought it was wrong for him

to have spoken so, it must be wrong. She did not wish him to feel badly,

even if he had done wrong, but she had to take his view of what he had

done. “Why, suttainly, Mr. Gregory,” she answered. “You mustn't mind

it.”

“But I do mind it. I have been very, very selfish, very thoughtless. We

are both too young. I can't ask you to wait for me till I could marry--”

The word really frightened Clementina. She said, “I don't believe I

betta promise.”

“Oh, I know it!” said Gregory. “I am going away from here. I am

going to-morrow as soon as I can arrange--as soon as I can get away.

Good-night--I”--Clementina in her agitation put her hands up to her

face. “Oh, don't cry--I can't bear to have you cry.”

She took down her hands. “I'm not crying! But I wish I had neva seen

those slippas.”

They had come to the bank of the river, whose current quivered at that

point in a scaly ripple in the moonlight. At her words Gregory suddenly

pulled the box from under his arm, and flung it into the stream as

far as he could. It caught upon a shallow of the ripple, hung there a

moment, then loosed itself, and swam swiftly down the stream.

“Oh!” Clementina moaned.

“Do you want them back?” he demanded. “I will go in for them!”

“No, no! No. But it seemed such a--waste!”

“Yes, that is a sin, too.” They climbed silently to the hotel. At Mrs.

Atwell's door, he spoke. “Try to forget what I said, and forgive me, if

you can.”

“Yes--yes, I will, Mr. Gregory. You mustn't think of it any moa.”

XII.

Clementina did not sleep till well toward morning, and she was still

sleeping when Mrs. Atwell knocked and called in to her that her brother

Jim wanted to see her. She hurried down, and in the confusion of mind

left over from the night before she cooed sweetly at Jim as if he had

been Mr. Gregory, “What is it, Jim? What do you want me for?”

The boy answered with the disgust a sister's company manners always

rouse in a brother. “Motha wants you. Says she's wo'ked down, and she

wants you to come and help.” Then he went his way.

Mrs. Atwell was used to having help snatched from her by their families

at a moment's notice. “I presume you've got to go, Clem,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I've got to go,” Clementina assented, with a note of relief

which mystified Mrs. Atwell.

“You tied readin' to Mr. Milray?”

“Oh, no'm--no, I mean. But I guess I betta go home. I guess I've been

away long enough.”

“Well, you're a good gul, Clem. I presume your motha's got a right to

have you home if she wants you.” Clementina said nothing to this, but

turned briskly, and started upstairs toward her room again. The landlady

called after her, “Shall you speak to Mis' Milray, or do you want I

should?”

Clementina looked back at her over her shoulder to warble, “Why, if you

would, Mrs. Atwell,” and kept on to her room.

Mrs. Milray was not wholly sorry to have her go; she was going herself

very soon, and Clementina's earlier departure simplified the question

of getting rid of her; but she overwhelmed her with reproaches which

Clementina received with such sweet sincerity that another than Mrs.

Milray might have blamed herself for having abused her ingenuousness.

The Atwells could very well have let the girl walk home, but they sent

her in a buckboard, with one of the stablemen to drive her. The landlord

put her neat bundle under the seat of the buckboard with his own

hand. There was something in the child's bearing, her dignity and

her amiability, which made people offer her, half in fun, and half in

earnest, the deference paid to age and state.

She did not know whether Gregory would try to see her before she went.

She thought he must have known she was going, but since he neither came

to take leave of her, nor sent her any message, she decided that she had

not expected him to do so. About the third week of September she heard

that he had left Middlemount and gone back to college.

She kept at her work in the house and helped her mother, and looked

after the little ones; she followed her father in the woods, in his

quest of stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the

taste of summer folks in dress and in canes. The winter came, and she

read many books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector's

library. He had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss

Austen and Miss Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best

thing for her mind as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be

better for any one than these old English novels, which he had nearly

forgotten in their details. She colored the faded English life of the

stories afresh from her Yankee circumstance; and it seemed the consensus

of their testimony that she had really been made love to, and not so

very much too soon, at her age of sixteen, for most of their heroines

were not much older. The terms of Gregory's declaration and of its

withdrawal were mystifying, but not more mystifying than many such

things, and from what happened in the novels she read, the affair might

be trusted to come out all right of itself in time. She was rather

thoughtfuller for it, and once her mother asked her what was the matter

with her. “Oh, I guess I'm getting old, motha,” she said, and turned

the question off. She would not have minded telling her mother about

Gregory, but it would not have been the custom; and her mother would

have worried, and would have blamed him. Clementina could have more

easily trusted her father with the case, but so far as she knew fathers

never were trusted with anything of the kind. She would have been

willing that accident should bring it to the knowledge of Mrs. Richling;

but the moment never came when she could voluntarily confide in

her, though she was a great deal with her that winter. She was Mrs.

Richling's lieutenant in the social affairs of the parish, which the

rector's wife took under her care. She helped her get up entertainments

of the kind that could be given in the church parlor, and they managed

together some dances which had to be exiled to the town hall. They

contrived to make the young people of the village feel that they were

having a gay time, and Clementina did not herself feel that it was a

dull one. She taught them some of the new steps and figures which the

help used to pick up from the summer folks at the Middlemount, and

practise together; she liked doing that; her mother said the child would

rather dance than eat, any time. She was never sad, but so much dignity

got into her sweetness that the rector now and then complained of

feeling put down by her.

She did not know whether she expected Gregory to write to her or not;

but when no letters came she decided that she had not expected them. She

wondered if he would come back to the Middlemount the next summer; but

when the summer came, she heard that they had another student in his

place. She heard that they had a new clerk, and that the boarders were

not so pleasant. Another year passed, and towards the end of the season

Mrs. Atwell wished her to come and help her again, and Clementina went

over to the hotel to soften her refusal. She explained that her mother

had so much sewing now that she could not spare her; and Mrs. Atwell

said: Well, that was right, and that she must be the greatest kind of

dependence for her mother. “You ah' going on seventeen this year, ain't

you?”

“I was nineteen the last day of August,” said Clementina, and Mrs.

Atwell sighed, and said, How the time did fly.

It was the second week of September, but Mrs. Atwell said they were

going to keep the house open till the middle of October, if they could,

for the autumnal foliage, which there was getting to be quite a class of

custom for.

“I presume you knew Mr. Landa was dead,” she added, and at Clementina's

look of astonishment, she said with a natural satisfaction, “Mm! died

the thutteenth day of August. I presumed somehow you'd know it, though

you didn't see a great deal of 'em, come to think of it. I guess he

was a good man; too good for her, I guess,” she concluded, in the New

England necessity of blaming some one. “She sent us the papah.”

There was an early frost; and people said there was going to be a hard

winter, but it was not this that made Clementina's father set to work

finishing his house. His turning business was well started, now, and

he had got together money enough to pay for the work. He had lately

enlarged the scope of his industry by turning gate-posts and urns for

the tops of them, which had become very popular, for the front yards of

the farm and village houses in a wide stretch of country. They sold more

steadily than the smaller wares, the cups, and tops, and little vases

and platters which had once been the output of his lathe; after the

first season the interest of the summer folks in these fell off; but the

gate posts and the urns appealed to a lasting taste in the natives.

Claxon wished to put the finishing touches on the house himself, and

he was willing to suspend more profitable labors to do so. After some

attempts at plastering he was forced to leave that to the plasterers,

but he managed the clap-boarding, with Clementina to hand him boards and

nails, and to keep him supplied with the hammer he was apt to drop at

critical moments. They talked pretty constantly at their labors, and in

their leisure, which they spent on the brown needles under the pines at

the side of the house. Sometimes the hammering or the talking would be

interrupted by a voice calling, from a passing vehicle in the hidden

roadway, something about urns. Claxon would answer, without troubling

himself to verify the inquirer; or moving from his place, that he would

get round to them, and then would hammer on, or talk on with Clementina.

One day in October a carriage drove up to the door, after the work on

the house had been carried as far as Claxon's mood and money allowed,

and he and Clementina were picking up the litter of his carpentering.

He had replaced the block of wood which once served at the front door

by some steps under an arbor of rustic work; but this was still so novel

that the younger children had not outgrown their pride in it and were

playing at house-keeping there. Clementina ran around to the back door

and out through the front entry in time to save the visitor and the

children from the misunderstanding they began to fall into, and met

her with a smile of hospitable brilliancy, and a recognition full of

compassionate welcome.

Mrs. Lander gave way to her tears as she broke out, “Oh, it ain't

the way it was the last time I was he'a! You hea'd that he--that Mr.

Landa--”

“Mrs. Atwell told me,” said Clementina. “Won't you come in, and sit

down?”

“Why, yes.” Mrs. Lander pushed in through the narrow door of what was to

be the parlor. Her crapes swept about her and exhaled a strong scent

of their dyes. Her veil softened her heavy face; but she had not grown

thinner in her bereavement.

“I just got to the Middlemount last night,” she said, “and I wanted to

see you and your payrents, both, Miss Claxon. It doos bring him back so!

You won't neva know how much he thought of you, and you'll all think I'm

crazy. I wouldn't come as long as he was with me, and now I have to come

without him; I held out ag'inst him as long as I had him to hold out

ag'inst. Not that he was eva one to push, and I don't know as he so much

as spoke of it, afta we left the hotel two yea's ago; but I presume it

wa'n't out of his mind a single minute. Time and time again I'd say to

him, 'Now, Albe't, do you feel about it just the way you done?' and he'd

say, 'I ha'r't had any call to charge my mind about it,' and then I'd

begin tryin' to ahgue him out of it, and keep a hectorin', till he'd

say, 'Well, I'm not askin' you to do it,' and that's all I could get

out of him. But I see all the while 't he wanted me to do it, whateva he

asked, and now I've got to do it when it can't give him any pleasure.”

Mrs. Lander put up her black-bordered handkerchief and sobbed into it,

and Clementina waited till her grief had spent itself; then she gave her

a fan, and Mrs. Lander gratefully cooled her hot wet face. The children

had found the noises of her affliction and the turbid tones of her

monologue annoying, and had gone off to play in the woods; Claxon kept

incuriously about the work that Clementina had left him to; his wife

maintained the confidence which she always felt in Clementina's ability

to treat with the world when it presented itself, and though she was

curious enough, she did not offer to interrupt the girl's interview with

Mrs. Lander; Clementina would know how to behave.

Mrs. Lander, when she had refreshed herself with the fan, seemed to

get a fresh grip of her theme, and she told Clementina all abort Mr.

Lander's last sickness. It had been so short that it gave her no time to

try the climate of Colorado upon him, which she now felt sure would have

brought him right up; and she had remembered, when too late, to give him

a liver-medicine of her own, though it did not appear that it was his

liver which was affected; that was the strange part of it. But, brief

as his sickness was, he had felt that it was to be his last, and had

solemnly talked over her future with her, which he seemed to think would

be lonely. He had not named Clementina, but Mrs. Lander had known well

enough what he meant; and now she wished to ask her, and her father and

mother, how they would all like Clementina to come and spend the winter

with her at Boston first, and then further South, and wherever she

should happen to go. She apologized for not having come sooner upon this

errand; she had resolved upon it as soon as Mr. Lander was gone, but she

had been sick herself, and had only just now got out of bed.

Clementina was too young to feel the pathos of the case fully, or

perhaps even to follow the tortuous course of Mrs. Lander's motives, but

she was moved by her grief; and she could not help a thrill of pleasure

in the vague splendor of the future outlined by Mrs. Lander's proposal.

For a time she had thought that Mrs. Milray was going to ask her to

visit her in New York; Mrs. Milray had thrown out a hint of something

of the kind at parting, but that was the last of it; and now she at

once made up her mind that she would like to go with Mrs. Lander, while

discreetly saying that she would ask her father and mother to come and

talk with her.

XIII.

Her parents objected to leaving their work; each suggested that the

other had better go; but they both came at Clementina's urgence. Her

father laughed and her mother frowned when she told them what Mrs.

Lander wanted, from the same misgiving of her sanity. They partly

abandoned this theory for a conviction of Mrs. Lander's mere folly when

she began to talk, and this slowly yielded to the perception that she

had some streaks of sense. It was sense in the first place to want to

have Clementina with her, and though it might not be sense to suppose

that they would be anxious to let her go, they did not find so much want

of it as Mrs. Lander talked on. It was one of her necessities to talk

away her emotions before arriving at her ideas, which were often found

in a tangle, but were not without a certain propriety. She was now,

after her interview with Clementina, in the immediate presence of these,

and it was her ideas that she began to produce for the girl's father and

mother. She said, frankly, that she had more money than she knew what to

do with, and they must not think she supposed she was doing a favor, for

she was really asking one.

She was alone in the world, without near connections of her own, or

relatives of her husband's, and it would be a mercy if they could let

their daughter come and visit her; she would not call it more than a

visit; that would be the best thing on both sides; she told of her great

fancy for Clementina the first time she saw her, and of her husband's

wish that she would come and visit with them then for the winter. As for

that money she had tried to make the child take, she presumed that they

knew about it, and she wished to say that she did it because she was

afraid Mr. Lander had said so much about the sewing, that they would

be disappointed. She gave way to her tears at the recollection, and

confessed that she wanted the child to have the money anyway. She ended

by asking Mrs. Claxon if she would please to let her have a drink of

water; and she looked about the room, and said that they had got it

finished up a great deal, now, had not they? She made other remarks upon

it, so apt that Mrs. Claxon gave her a sort of permissive invitation to

look about the whole lower floor, ending with the kitchen.

Mrs. Lander sat down there while Mrs. Claxon drew from the pipes a glass

of water, which she proudly explained was pumped all over the house by

the wind mill that supplied the power for her husband's turning lathes.

“Well, I wish mah husband could have tasted that wata,” said Mrs.

Lander, as if reminded of husbands by the word, and by the action of

putting down the glass. “He was always such a great hand for good, cold

wata. My! He'd 'a liked youa kitchen, Mrs. Claxon. He always was such

a home-body, and he did get so ti'ed of hotels. For all he had such an

appearance, when you see him, of bein'--well!--stiff and proud, he was

fah moa common in his tastes--I don't mean common, exactly, eitha--than

what I was; and many a time when we'd be drivin' through the country,

and we'd pass some o' them long-strung-out houses, don't you know, with

the kitchen next to the wood shed, and then an ahchway befoa you get

to the stable, Mr. Landa he'd get out, and make an urrand, just so's

to look in at the kitchen dooa; he said it made him think of his own

motha's kitchen. We was both brought up in the country, that's a fact,

and I guess if the truth was known we both expected to settle down and

die thea, some time; but now he's gone, and I don't know what'll become

o' me, and sometimes I don't much care. I guess if Mr. Landa'd 'a seen

youa kitchen, it wouldn't 'a' been so easy to git him out of it; and

I do believe if he's livin' anywhe' now he takes as much comfo't in

my settin' here as what I do. I presume I shall settle down somewhe's

before a great while, and if you could make up youa mind to let your

daughta come to me for a little visit till spring, you couldn't do a

thing that 'd please Mr. Landa moa.”

Mrs. Claxon said that she would talk it over with the child's father;

and then Mrs. Lander pressed her to let her take Clementina back to

the Middlemount with her for supper, if they wouldn't let her stay the

night. After Clementina had driven away, Mrs. Claxon accused herself to

her husband of being the greatest fool in the State, but he said that

the carriage was one of the Middlemount rigs, and he guessed it was all

right. He could see that Clem was wild to go, and he didn't see why she

shouldn't.

“Well, I do, then,” his wife retorted. “We don't know anything about the

woman, or who she is.”

“I guess no harm'll come to Clem for one night,” said Claxon, and Mrs.

Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of

her anxiety. She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the

whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not

got round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be

thought of first. He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the

light of his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and

her motives than he had been before.

When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought

of something in the nature of credentials. It was the letter from her

church in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she

wished she might unite with the church in any place where she happened

to be stopping. It did not make a great impression upon the Claxons,

who were of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the

Episcopal church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves.

They said they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if

Mrs. Lander did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him,

and the rector was brought at once.

He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old

Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism,

advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New

England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and

exactions of the native temperament. On the ecclesiastical side he was

conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered

as he was simple-hearted. He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a

clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a

belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer's

tan on his face and hands. He pronounced the church-letter, though quite

outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability,

and he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs.

Lander poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference

to this or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second

hand. He had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality;

it was enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she

professed to be.

“You must think,” he said, laughing, “that we are over-particular; but

the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be

sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good.”

“Of cou'se,” said Mrs. Lander. “I should be just so myself abort her.”

“I don't know,” he continued, “that I've ever said how much we think of

her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is

not present.

“She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl

as she can without knowing it. She has a great deal of common-sense, and

we all want her to have the best chance.”

“Well, that's just the way I feel about her, and that's just what I mean

to give her,” said Mrs. Lander.

“I am not sure that I make myself quite clear,” said the rector. “I

mean, a chance to prove how useful and helpful she can be. Do you think

you can make life hard for her occasionally? Can you be peevish and

exacting, and unreasonable? Can you do something to make her value

superfluity and luxury at their true worth?”

Mrs. Lander looked a little alarmed and a little offended. “I don't know

as I undastand what you mean, exactly,” she said, frowning rather with

perplexity than resentment. “But the child sha'n't have a care, and her

own motha couldn't be betta to her than me. There a'n't anything money

can buy that she sha'n't have, if she wants it, and all I'll ask of her

is 't she'll enjoy herself as much as she knows how. I want her with me

because I should love to have her round; and we did from the very fust

minute she spoke, Mr. Lander and me, both. She shall have her own money,

and spend it for anything she pleases, and she needn't do a stitch o'

work from mohnin' till night. But if you're afraid I shall put upon

her.”

“No, no,” said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.

When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of

certain of Mrs. Lander's references by letters to Boston, he said to

Clementina's father and mother, “There's only one danger, now, and that

is that she will spoil Clementina; but there's a reasonable hope that

she won't know how.” He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh

misgiving, which Claxon expressed. “The way I look at it is like this. I

don't want that woman should eva think Clem was after her money. On the

face of it there a'n't very much to her that would make anybody think

but what we was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood

that we wa'n't that kind. But I don't seem to see any way of tellin'

her.”

“No,” said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, “that would be

difficult.”

“It's plain to be seen,” Mrs. Claxon interposed, “that she thinks a good

deal of her money; and I d' know but what she'd think she was doin' Clem

most too much of a favor anyway. If it can't be a puffectly even thing,

all round, I d' know as I should want it to be at all.”

“You're quite right, Mrs. Claxon, quite right. But I believe Mrs. Lander

may be safely left to look out for her own interests. After all, she has

merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her. It will be a good

opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it may

bring her the chance of placing herself in life. We have got to consider

these things with reference to a young girl.”

Mrs. Claxon said, “Of cou'se,” but Claxon did not assent so readily.

“I don't feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light. If

the chance don't come to her, I don't want she should go huntin' round

for it.”

“I thoroughly agree with you,” said the rector. “But I was thinking that

there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is

no chance at all.”

“I guess that's so,” Claxon owned with a laugh. “Well, I guess we can

leave it to Clem to do what's right and proper everyway. As you say,

she's got lots of sense.”

From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but

husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of

common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties

which he had abandoned. She fretted under the load, and expressed an

exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of

any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her

clothes ready for leaving home. She said finally that she presumed they

were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the

more she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn't like, she could

come home. By this time her husband was in something of that insensate

eagerness to have the affair over that people feel in a house where

there is a funeral.

At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her

father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off.

Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her

talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up.

Her father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the

Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander's hand baggage and took the final

fee she thrust upon him. When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory

about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been

inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background,

where she could not see into it from the outside. He said that he had

felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like. But

he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in

it, and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them. He

owned that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.

“I guess,” said his wife, grimly, “we're a passel o' fools to let her

go. Even if she don't like, the'a, with that crazy-head, she won't be

the same Clem when she comes back.”

They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as

they drove home behind Claxon's self-broken colt: a creature that had

taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example

to its kind in sobriety and industry.

The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having

seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up

before a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her. She had

seen them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform,

and waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them,

but they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.

At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house. Not to

have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same

again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could

bear.

The rector's wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting

hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of

this world's kingdoms than a clergyman's wife ought ever to see, even

for another. She decided that Clementina's chances of making a splendid

match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she

contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with

her native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe,

where Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her. If she did not take her

to Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and

this would serve the same end, though more indirectly.

Mr. Richling scoffed at this ideal of Clementina's future with a

contempt which was as little becoming to his cloth. He made his wife

reflect that, with all her inherent grace and charm, Clementina was an

ignorant little country girl, who had neither the hardness of heart nor

the greediness of soul, which gets people on in the world, and repair

for them the disadvantages of birth and education. He represented that

even if favorable chances for success in society showed themselves to

the girl, the intense and inexpugnable vulgarity of Mrs. Lander would

spoil them; and he was glad of this, he said, for he believed that the

best thing which could happen to the child would be to come home as

sweet and good as she had gone away; he added this was what they ought

both to pray for.

His wife admitted this, but she retorted by asking if he thought such a

thing was possible, and he was obliged to own that it was not possible.

He marred the effect of his concession by subjoining that it was no more

possible than her making a brilliant and triumphant social figure in

society, either at home or in Europe.

XIV.

So far from embarking at once for Europe, Mrs. Lander went to that

hotel in a suburb of Boston, where she had the habit of passing the late

autumn months, in order to fortify herself for the climate of the early

winter months in the city. She was a little puzzled how to provide for

Clementina, with respect to herself, but she decided that the best thing

would be to have her sleep in a room opening out of her own, with a

folding bed in it, so that it could be used as a sort of parlor for both

of them during the day, and be within easy reach, for conversation, at

all times.

On her part, Clementina began by looking after Mrs. Lander's comforts,

large and little, like a daughter, to her own conception and to that of

Mrs. Lander, but to other eyes, like a servant. Mrs. Lander shyly shrank

from acquaintance among the other ladies, and in the absence of this,

she could not introduce Clementina, who went down to an early breakfast

alone, and sat apart with her at lunch and dinner, ministering to her in

public as she did in private. She ran back to their rooms to fetch her

shawl, or her handkerchief, or whichever drops or powders she happened

to be taking with her meals, and adjusted with closer care the hassock

which the head waiter had officially placed at her feet. They seldom sat

in the parlor where the ladies met, after dinner; they talked only to

each other; and there, as elsewhere, the girl kept her filial care of

the old woman. The question of her relation to Mrs. Lander became so

pressing among several of the guests that, after Clementina had watched

over the banisters, with throbbing heart and feet, a little dance one

night which the other girls had got up among themselves, and had fled

back to her room at the approach of one of the kindlier and bolder of

them, the landlord felt forced to learn from Mrs. Lander how Miss Claxon

was to be regarded. He managed delicately, by saying he would give the

Sunday paper she had ordered to her nurse, “Or, I beg your pardon,”

he added, as if he had made a mistake. “Why, she a'n't my nuhse,” Mrs.

Lander explained, simply, neither annoyed nor amused; “she's just a

young lady that's visiting me, as you may say,” and this put an end

to the misgiving among the ladies. But it suggested something to Mrs.

Lander, and a few days afterwards, when they came out from Boston where

they had been shopping, and she had been lavishing a bewildering waste

of gloves, hats, shoes, capes and gowns upon Clementina, she said, “I'll

tell you what. We've got to have a maid.”

“A maid?” cried the girl.

“It isn't me, or my things I want her for,” said Mrs. Lander. “It's you

and these dresses of youas. I presume you could look afta them, come to

give youa mind to it; but I don't want to have you tied up to a lot of

clothes; and I presume we should find her a comfo't in moa ways than

one, both of us. I don't know what we shall want her to do, exactly; but

I guess she will, if she undastands her business, and I want you should

go in with me, to-morror, and find one. I'll speak to some of the

ladies, and find out whe's the best place to go, and we'll get the best

there is.”

A lady whom Mrs. Lander spoke to entered into the affair with zeal born

of a lurking sense of the wrong she had helped do Clementina in the

common doubt whether she was not herself Mrs. Lander's maid. She offered

to go into Boston with them to an intelligence office, where you could

get nice girls of all kinds; but she ended by giving Mrs. Lander the

address, and instructions as to what she was to require in a maid.

She was chiefly to get an English maid, if at all possible, for the

qualifications would more or less naturally follow from her nationality.

There proved to be no English maid, but there was a Swedish one who had

received a rigid training in an English family living on the Continent,

and had come immediately from that service to seek her first place in

America. The manager of the office pronounced her character, as set down

in writing, faultless, and Mrs. Lander engaged her. “You want to look

afta this young lady,” she said, indicating Clementina. “I can look

afta myself,” but Ellida took charge of them both on the train out from

Boston with prompt intelligence.

“We got to get used to it, I guess,” Mrs. Lander confided at the first

chance of whispering to Clementina.

Within a month after washing the faces and combing the hair of all her

brothers and sisters who would suffer it at her hands, Clementina's

own head was under the brush of a lady's maid, who was of as great a

discreetness in her own way as Clementina herself. She supplied the

defects of Mrs. Lander's elementary habits by simply asking if she

should get this thing and that thing for the toilet, without criticising

its absence,--and then asking whether she should get the same things for

her young lady. She appeared to let Mrs. Lander decide between having

her brushes in ivory or silver, but there was really no choice for her,

and they came in silver. She knew not only her own place, but the places

of her two ladies, and she presently had them in such training that they

were as proficient in what they might and might not do for themselves

and for each other, as if making these distinctions were the custom of

their lives.

Their hearts would both have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at

a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the

glove of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the

impassable gulf between mistress and maid.

At the end of her month she gave them, out of a clear sky, a week's

warning. She professed no grievance, and was not moved by Mrs. Lander's

appeal to say what wages she wanted. She would only say that she was

going to take a place an Commonwealth Avenue, where a friend of hers was

living, and when the week was up, she went, and left her late mistresses

feeling rather blank. “I presume we shall have to get anotha,” said Mrs.

Lander.

“Oh, not right away!” Clementina pleaded.

“Well, not right away,” Mrs. Lander assented; and provisionally they

each took the other into her keeping, and were much freer and happier

together.

Soon after Clementina was startled one morning, as she was going in to

breakfast, by seeing Mr. Fane at the clerk's desk. He did not see her;

he was looking down at the hotel register, to compute the bill of a

departing guest; but when she passed out she found him watching for her,

with some letters.

“I didn't know you were with us,” he said, with his pensive smile, “till

I found your letters here, addressed to Mrs. Lander's care; and then I

put two and two together. It only shows how small the world is, don't

you think so? I've just got back from my vacation; I prefer to take

it in the fall of the year, because it's so much pleasanter to travel,

then. I suppose you didn't know I was here?”

“No, I didn't,” said Clementina. “I never dreamed of such a thing.”

“To be sure; why should you?” Fane reflected. “I've been here ever since

last spring. But I'll say this, Miss Claxon, that if it's the least

unpleasant to you, or the least disagreeable, or awakens any kind of

associations--”

“Oh, no!” Clementina protested, and Fane was spared the pain of saying

what he would do if it were.

He bowed, and she said sweetly, “It's pleasant to meet any one I've seen

before. I suppose you don't know how much it's changed at Middlemount

since you we' e thea.” Fane answered blankly, while he felt in his

breast pocket, Oh, he presumed so; and she added: “Ha'dly any of the

same guests came back this summer, and they had more in July than they

had in August, Mrs. Atwell said. Mr. Mahtin, the chef, is gone, and

newly all the help is different.”

Fane kept feeling in one pocket and then slapped himself over the other

pockets. “No,” he said, “I haven't got it with me. I must have left it

in my room. I just received a letter from Frank--Mr. Gregory, you know,

I always call him Frank--and I thought I had it with me. He was asking

about Middlemount; and I wanted to read you what he said. But I'll find

it upstairs. He's out of college, now, and he's begun his studies in the

divinity school. He's at Andover. I don't know what to make of Frank,

oftentimes,” the clerk continued, confidentially. “I tell him he's a

kind of a survival, in religion; he's so aesthetic.” It seemed to

Fane that he had not meant aesthetic, exactly, but he could not ask

Clementina what the word was. He went on to say, “He's a grand good

fellow, Frank is, but he don't make enough allowance for human nature.

He's more like one of those old fashioned orthodox. I go in for having a

good time, so long as you don't do anybody else any hurt.”

He left her, and went to receive the commands of a lady who was leaning

over the desk, and saying severely, “My mail, if you please,” and

Clementina could not wait for him to come back; she had to go to Mrs.

Lander, and get her ready for breakfast; Ellida had taught Mrs. Lander a

luxury of helplessness in which she persisted after the maid's help was

withdrawn.

Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had

said about Middlemount filling her mind. It must have had something to

do with her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to

forget. She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in

it, to know why he really took them back. She had never blamed him, and

she had outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him. But she

had never lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation,

and now she found that she was eager for his message; she decided that

it must be something like a message, although it could not be anything

direct. No one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was

willing to try what they would think of each other now, to measure her

own obligation to the past by a knowledge of his. There was scarcely

more than this in her heart when she allowed herself to drift near

Fane's place that night, that he might speak to her, and tell her what

Gregory had said. But he had apparently forgotten about his letter, and

only wished to talk about himself. He wished to analyze himself, to tell

her what sort of person he was. He dealt impartially with the subject;

he did not spare some faults of his; and after a week, he proposed a

correspondence with her, in a letter of carefully studied spelling, as a

means of mutual improvement as well as further acquaintance.

It cost Clementina a good deal of trouble to answer him as she wished

and not hurt his feelings. She declined in terms she thought so cold

that they must offend him beyond the point of speaking to her again; but

he sought her out, as soon after as he could, and thanked her for her

kindness, and begged her pardon. He said he knew that she was a very

busy person, with all the lessons she was taking, and that she had no

time for carrying on a correspondence. He regretted that he could not

write French, because then the correspondence would have been good

practice for her. Clementina had begun taking French lessons, of a

teacher who came out from Boston. She lunched three times a week with

her and Mrs. Lander, and spoke the language with Clementina, whose

accent she praised for its purity; purity of accent was characteristic

of all this lady's pupils; but what was really extraordinary in

Mademoiselle Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote

the language even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but

wonderfully; her exercises were something marvellous.

Mrs. Lander would have liked Clementina to take all the lessons that

she heard any of the other young ladies in the hotel were taking. One of

them went in town every day, and studied drawing at an art-school, and

she wanted Clementina to do that, too. But Clementina would not do that;

she had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing,

and her father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that

she never could do it, and the time would be wasted. She decided against

piano lessons and singing lessons, too; she did not care for either, and

she pleaded that it would be a waste to study them; but she suggested

dancing lessons, and her gift for dancing won greater praise, and

perhaps sincerer, than her accent won from Mademoiselle Blanc, though

Mrs. Lander said that she would not have believed any one could be

more complimentary. She learned the new steps and figures in all the

fashionable dances; she mastered some fancy dances, which society was

then beginning to borrow from the stage; and she gave these before Mrs.

Lander with a success which she felt herself.

“I believe I could teach dancing,” she said.

“Well, you won't eve' haf to, child,” returned Mrs. Lander, with an eye

on the side of the case that seldom escaped her.

In spite of his wish to respect these preoccupations, Fane could

not keep from offering Clementina attentions, which took the form of

persecution when they changed from flowers for Mrs. Lander's table to

letters for herself. He apologized for his letters whenever he met her;

but at last one of them came to her before breakfast with a special

delivery stamp from Boston. He had withdrawn to the city to write it,

and he said that if she could not make him a favorable answer, he should

not come back to Woodlake.

She had to show this letter to Mrs. Lander, who asked: “You want he

should come back?”

“No, indeed! I don't want eva to see him again.”

“Well, then, I guess you'll know how to tell him so.”

The girl went into her own room to write, and when she brought her

answer to show it to Mrs. Lander she found her in frowning thought.

“I don't know but you'll have to go back and write it all over again,

Clementina,” she said, “if you've told him not to come. I've been

thinkin', if you don't want to have anything to do with him, we betta go

ouaselves.”

“Yes,” answered Clementina, “that's what I've said.”

“You have? Well, the witch is in it! How came you to--”

“I just wanted to talk with you about it. But I thought maybe you'd like

to go. Or at least I should. I should like to go home, Mrs. Landa.”

“Home!” retorted Mrs. Lander. “The'e's plenty of places where you can be

safe from the fella besides home, though I'll take you back the'a this

minute if you say so. But you needn't to feel wo'ked up about it.”

“Oh, I'm not,” said Clementina, but with a gulp which betrayed her

nervousness.

“I did think,” Mrs. Lander went on, “that I should go into the Vonndome,

for December and January, but just as likely as not he'd come pesterin'

the'a, too, and I wouldn't go, now, if you was to give me the whole city

of Boston. Why shouldn't we go to Florida?”

When Mrs. Lander had once imagined the move, the nomadic impulse mounted

irresistably in her. She spoke of hotels in the South, where they could

renew the summer, and she mapped out a campaign which she put into

instant action so far as to advance upon New York.