Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

“Well, I’m blamed glad he’s gone away, anyhow.” And then, to French’s relief, Marble came and announced in his unctuous voice:

“The tray is in the library, sir,” and all thought of Simeon was abandoned.

That feast at Stephen’s lived in Dicky’s memory for years. It supported him through the disappointments of many a dessertless dinner – in the hopeless fancy engendered by seeing sweets pressed to the lips of others; it won for him an easy victory in times of gustatory boasting when at school. He could affirm, with truth, that for once he had had his fill of the very best.

With Stephen also the experience was a revelation. The capacity of his guest caused him amazement mingled with fear.

And still he gazed
And still the wonder grew
That one small boy
Could hold all he could chew.

The chiming of the clock reminded French that it was already dark and high time Dicky was dispatched home.

“Do you want to take these grapes home with you,” asked Stephen, “or shall I send you a basket of them tomorrow?”

Dicky looked coy.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I guess I’ll take the chocolates, and you can send the grapes to-morrow.”

He pulled a very dirty handkerchief from his pocket, in order to provide a wrapping for the chocolates, and, as he spread it on the table, a letter dropped out. He turned his eyes upon French with an expression of sincere regret.

“I say!” he began. “Now, isn’t that too bad! And Deena so particular that you should get the note before tea time. I’m awfully sorry, Mr. French – it’s all Bridget’s fault. Deena said if I got that note to you before five o’clock I should have a piece of cake, and when Bridget wouldn’t give it to me it made me so mad I forgot everything. I wanted to kill her.”

“I know just how you felt,” said Stephen, with irony.

Dicky was tying his chocolates into a hard ball, but with the finishing grimy knot he tossed responsibility to the winds.

“Oh, well,” he said, soothingly, “you’ve got it now, at any rate, so there’s no occasion for saying just when I gave it to you, unless you want to get a fellow into trouble.”

Stephen looked grave; he did want Mrs. Ponsonby to know why he had failed to follow her suggestion of taking tea with her at her mother’s house – and also he hated evasion.

“As it happens, that is the exact point I wish your sister to know. I shall not tell her, but I expect you, as a gentleman, to tell of yourself.”

“All right,” said Dicky, mournfully. “Good-night, Mr. French.”

CHAPTER V

Deena had ample time to get accustomed to the old home life before her parents returned, for she had already been in charge for two weeks and still they tarried.

It was evident that young Mr. Beck wished to carry out his aunt’s bequests in the spirit as well as the letter of her instructions, for trunks of linen and silver began to arrive from Chicago which gave some idea of the loot obtained from the dismantling of Mrs. Beck’s fine house. The young Sheltons took the keenest interest in unpacking these treasures. Children are naturally communistic. They enjoy possessions held in common almost as much as their individual acquisitions – only in a different way. There is more glorification in the general good luck, but not such far-reaching privilege.

In the midst of these excitements Deena received a letter the possession of which no one seemed inclined to dispute with her. It was from Simeon, posted at Montevideo, and containing the first news of his voyage. His wife read it in the retirement of her own room, but she might have proclaimed it from the rostrum, so impersonal was its nature. He had made an attempt, however, to meet what he conceived to be feminine requirements in a correspondent, for the handwriting was neat, and the facts he recorded of an unscientific nature. He described his cabin in the vessel, also his fellow passengers; not humorously, but with an appreciation of their peculiarities Deena had not anticipated; he introduced her to flying fish, and then to the renowned albatross, and he conducted her up the river Platte to Montevideo, which he described with the ponderous minuteness of a guide book. At the end he made a confidence – namely, that even his summer flannels had proved oppressive in that climate – but the intimacy of his letter went no further, and he omitted to mention any personal feelings in regard to their separation.

It was an admirable family letter, instructive and kind, and rather pleasanter and lighter in tone than his conversation. Deena was glad that no exhortations to economy made it too private to show to French when he called that afternoon. She but anticipated his object in coming. He also had a letter which he had brought for her to read, and they sat on opposite sides of the fire, enjoying their exchanged correspondence.

But what a difference there was in the letters; Deena’s had three pages of pretty handwriting; Stephen’s six of closely written scrawl. In Deena’s the ideas barely flowed to the ink; in Stephen’s they flowed so fast they couldn’t get themselves written down – he used contractions, he left out whole words; he showed the interest he felt in the work he left behind in endless questions in regard to his department; he thanked Stephen more heartily than he had ever done by word of mouth for suggesting him for the appointment, and finally he gave such an account of his voyage as one intelligent man gives another.

Deena recognized her place in her husband’s estimation when she finished his letter to Stephen, and said, with pardonable sarcasm:

“Simeon saves the strong meat of observation for masculine digestion, and I get only the hors-d’œuvres; perhaps he has discriminated wisely.”

The mere fact of being able to exchange letters with Deena was a revelation to French, and as he walked home from their interview his fancy was busy putting himself in Simeon’s place. The paths that lead through another man’s kingdom are never very safe for the wandering feet of imagination. It is an old refrain, “If I were king,” the song of a usurper, if only in thought.

If he were king of Deena Ponsonby’s life, Stephen thought, would he write letters that another chap might read? Would he dwell upon the shape of an albatross, when there must be memories – beautiful, glowing memories – between them to recall? Pen and ink was a wretched medium for love, but the heart of the world has throbbed to its inspiration before now. Why, if a woman like Mrs. Ponsonby shared his hearth, he would let Tierra del Fuego, with its flora and its fauna, sink into the sea and be damned to it, before he’d put the hall door between himself and her. His own front door had suggested the idea, and he shut it with a bang.

He picked up the letters he found waiting on the hall table, and went directly to his library, passing through a room that would have been a drawing-room had a lady presided there, but to the master served only as a defense against intrusion into the privacy of his sanctum.

The postman had left a pile of bills and advertisements, but there was one letter in Ben Minthrop’s familiar writing, and Stephen turned up his light and settled himself to read it. Ben wrote:

Dear French: When I asked you to spend Christmas with us in Boston I had no idea that, like the Prophet Habbacuc, I, with my dinner pail, was to be lifted by the hair of my head, and transported to Babylon – in other words, New York. But so it is! If you know your Apocrypha, this figurative language will seem apt, but in case you should like my end of it explained I will leave the mystifications of Bel and the Dragon and come down to plain speech.

My father has conceived the idea that I am one of the dawning lights in the financial world, and he has decided to open a branch office of our business in New York and to put me at its head. I must confess that the whole thing is very pleasant and flattering, and it has stirred all the decent ambitions I have – that I have any I owe to you, old fellow – and I am rather keen to be off.

We have taken a house not far from the park in East Sixty-fifth Street, where a welcome will always be yours, and where Polly and I hope you will eat your Christmas dinner.

Perhaps you may reflect that it is a serious thing to befriend straying men and dogs; they are apt to regard past kindness as a guarantee of future interest in their welfare. I do not believe, however, that I am making too large a demand upon your friendship in asking for your good wishes in this pleasant turn to my future affairs.

Of course I want one more favor. If you have any influence with Deena Ponsonby, will you urge her to spend the winter with us? Polly is writing to her by this same mail, but I know the New England conscience will suggest to Deena that anything amusing is wrong, and so you might explain that I am nervous about Polly’s health, and that I look to her to help me get settled without overstrain to my wife – in short, administer a dose of duty, and she may see her way to coming.

Ever, my dear French,

    Sincerely yours,
    Benjamin Minthrop.

Anger gives to the natural man a pedal impulse – in plain language, he wants to kick something. Rage flows from the toes as freely as gunpowder ran out of the great Panjandrum’s boots when he played “Catch who catch can” on the immortal occasion of the gardener’s wife marrying the barber. Now, Stephen French was a man of habitual self-restraint, and yet upon reading Ben Minthrop’s letter he got up and – ignoring the poker and tongs – kicked the fire with a savagery that showed how little the best of us has softened by civilization. And yet the letter was distinctly friendly, even modest and grateful – without one kick-inspiring sentence. Stephen began pacing his library floor, hurling his thoughts broadcast, since there was no one to listen to his words.

Why were people never content to let well enough alone? he demanded. There was old Minthrop, with enough money to spoil his son, laying plans for Ben to muddle away a few millions in New York in the hope of making more; or even if, by some wild chance, the boy were successful and doubled it – still one would think the place for an only son was in the same town with his parents. Of course it was their business, but when it came to dragging Mrs. Ponsonby into their schemes it was a different matter. Simeon would disapprove, he knew, and as her adviser in Simeon’s absence, he felt it his duty to tell her to stay at home with her parents till her husband returned.

And then common sense asserted itself, and he asked himself what Deena owed to her parents; and why Harmouth was a better place for her than New York; and what possible difference it could make to Simeon? The answer came in plain, bold, horrid words, and he shrank from them. The curse of Nathan was upon him; like David, he had condemned his friend to absence and danger, and had then promptly fallen in love with his wife. But not willingly, he pleaded, in extenuation; it had crept upon him unawares. It was his own secret, he had never betrayed himself, and so help his God, he would trample it down till he gained the mastery. Not for one moment would he tolerate disloyalty to his friend, even in his thoughts. Ben’s suggestion was a happy solution of the situation as far as he was concerned; he would urge Deena to go before his folly could be suspected. To have any sentiments for a woman like Mrs. Ponsonby except a chivalrous reverence was an offense against his manhood.

French was a man who had been brought up to respect ceremonial in daily living, and he dressed as scrupulously for his lonely dinner as if a wife presided and expected the courtesy to her toilet. Somebody has wisely said that unconsciously we lay aside our smaller worries with our morning clothes, and come down to dinner refreshed in mind as well as body by the interval of dressing. If Stephen did not exactly hang up his anxiety with his coat, he at least took a more reasonable view of his attachment to his neighbor’s wife. He began to think he had exaggerated an extreme admiration into love – that he was an honorable man and a gentleman, and could keep his secret as many another had done before him; and that if Deena went away for the winter it removed the only danger, which was in daily meeting under terms of established intimacy.

There was to be a lecture at the Athenæum that evening on the engineering difficulties incident to building the Panama Canal, and Stephen, who was interested in the subject, made up his mind to start early and stop for a moment at the Sheltons’ to carry out Ben’s request. He took glory to himself for choosing an hour when Mrs. Ponsonby was likely to be surrounded by a bevy of brothers and sisters; he would never again try to see her alone.

His very footfall sounded heroic when he ran up the steps and rang the bell. As he stood within the shelter of the storm door waiting to be let in, the voices of the young Sheltons reached him, all talking at once in voluble excitement, and then a hand was laid on the inside knob and advice offered in a shrill treble.

“You had better run, Deena, if you don’t want to be caught,” and then more giggling, and a quick rush across the hall.

Dicky threw open the hall door, and French, glancing up the stairs, caught sight of a velvet train disappearing round the turn of the first landing. He took the chances of making a blunder and called:

“Come down, Mrs. Ponsonby. It is I – Stephen French – and I have something to say to you.”

This was first received in silence, and then in piercing whispers, the little sisters tried to inspire courage:

“Go down, Deena; you don’t look a bit funny– really.”

“‘Funny’ – ye gods!” thought French, as Deena turned and came slowly down the stairs. He only wished she did look funny, or anything, except the intoxicating, maddening contrast to her usual sober self that was descending to him.