Boston Neighbours In Town and Out Part 8

The second figure was over, and she looked across the great hall, wondering if she could not truthfully plead a headache, and go to the cloak-room. But how was she to get there? and what could she do there alone? She would have died on the spot rather than make any appeal to Mrs. Underwood. No, she must go through with it; and then as she looked again, a great, sudden sense of relief came over her, for she saw in the doorway the slouching figure of her friend of Monday. He did not look at her, and she doubted if he saw her; but it was something to have him in the room. In a moment more, however, she saw him speak to Ralph Underwood; and then the latter came up to her and asked if he might present a friend of his, and at her acquiescence, moved away and came up again with "Miss Parke, let me introduce Mr. Smith."

"I am very sorry to say I don't dance," Mr. Smith began, "but I hear that there are more ladies than men to-night; so perhaps if you have not a partner already, you won't mind doing me the favour of sitting it out with me."

Margaret hardly knew what he meant, but she would have accepted, had he asked her to dance a _pas de deux_ with him in the middle of the hall.

She took his arm and they walked far down to a place at the very end of the line of chairs; but it did not matter; it was in the crowd.

Mr. Smith did not say much at first; he hung her opera cloak over the back of her chair carefully, so that she could draw it up if she needed it, and somehow the way he did so made her feel quite at home with him, and as if she had known him for a long time; even though she perceived, now that she had the opportunity to look more closely at him, that he was by no means so old as she had at first taken him to be. His hair was thin, and there were one or two deeply-marked lines on his face, but there was something about his figure and motions that gave an impression of youthfulness. Without knowing his age, you would have said that he looked old for it. He was rather undersized than small, having none of the trim compactness that we a.s.sociate with the latter word, and his face had the dull, thick, sodden skin that indicates unhealthy influences in childhood.

"That was a pleasant party at Mrs. Underwood's the other evening," he began at last.

"Was it?" said Margaret, "I never was at a party before--I mean a party like that."

"And I have been to very few; parties are not much in my line, and when I do go I am generally satisfied with looking on; but I like that very well, sometimes."

"Perhaps," said Margaret ingenuously, "if I had gone only to look on, I should have thought it pleasant too; but I did not suppose one went to a party for that."

"You do not know many people in Boston?"

"Oh, no! I live in the country--at Royalston. I don't know anyone here but Mrs. Underwood; but I thought--mamma said, that she would probably introduce me to some of her friends; but she didn't--not to one. Don't people do so now?"

"Well, it depends on circ.u.mstances. I certainly think she might have; but then she has so much to think about, you know."

"I suppose I was foolish to expect anything different, but I had read about parties, and I thought--I was very silly--but I thought I didn't look so very badly. I thought I should dance a little--that everybody did. Perhaps my gown doesn't look right. Mamma made it, and took a great deal of pains with it. Of course, it isn't so new or nice as the others here, but I can't see that it looks so very different; do you?"

"It looks very nice to me," said Mr. Smith, smiling. He had a pleasant, rather melancholy smile, which gave his face the sole physical attraction it possessed, and would have given it more, if he had had better teeth. "It looks very nice to me, and as you are my partner, I am the one you should wish most to please."

"Oh, thank you! it was so kind in you to ask me. I can tell them when I write home that I had a partner at any rate; and you can tell me who some of the others are."

"I am afraid not many," said Mr. Smith, "I go out but very little. I only went to the Underwoods because Ralph is an old friend of mine, and I came here because--" He checked himself suddenly.

"I am sorry, since he is your friend, but I must say that I do think him very disagreeable. I did not know a man could be so unpleasant. I had rather he had not danced with me at all than to do it in that terribly dreary way, as if he were doing it because he had to."

"You mustn't be hard on poor Ralph. He's a very good fellow, really, but he's almost beside himself just now. The very day of their dance, Kitty Chester's engagement came out. She had been keeping him hanging on for more than a year, and at one time he really thought she was going to have him; and not only that, but she and Frank Thomas actually came to his party, and they are here to-night. Ralph acts as if he had lost his senses, and his mother is almost wild about him. Why, after their dance, I was up all the rest of the night with him. He can't make any fight about it, and I think it would be better if he were to go away; but he won't--he just hangs about wherever she is to be seen. We all do all we can to get him to pluck up some spirit, but it's no go--yet."

"I am very sorry for him," said Margaret, with all a girl's interest in a love story; and she cast an awe-struck glance toward the spot where Miss Chester was keeping half a dozen young men in conversation; "but he need not make everyone else so uncomfortable on account of it--need he?"

"He needn't make himself so uncomfortable, you might say, for a girl who could treat him in that way; but it doesn't do to tell a man that. It doesn't seem to me that I should give up everything in the way he is doing; but then I was never in his place; of course, things are different for Ralph and me."

"Yes, I am sure, you are different. I don't believe you would ever have behaved so ill to one girl in your own mother's house, because another hadn't treated you well."

"I have had such a different experience of life; that was what I meant.

It made me sympathise with you when you felt a little strange; though of course, it was only a mere accident that things happened so with you.

Now, I was never brought up in society, and always feel a little out of place in it."

"I don't know much about society either; we live very quietly at home, and when we do go out, why it is at home, you know, and that makes it different."

"I suppose you live in a pretty place when you are at home?"

"Oh, Royalston is lovely!" said Margaret, eagerly; "there are beautiful walks and drives all round it, and the streets have wide gra.s.s borders, and great elms arching over them, and every house has a garden, and our garden is one of the prettiest there. The place was an old one when father bought it, and the flower-beds have great thick box edges and they are so full of flowers; and there is a long walk up to the front door, between lilac bushes as big as trees, some purple and some white; and inside it is so pleasant, with rooms built on here and there, all in and out, and stairs up and down between them. Of course we are not rich at all, and things are very plain, but mamma has so much taste; and then there are all the old doors and windows, and the big fireplaces with carved mantel-pieces, and so much old panelling and queer little cupboards in the rooms--mamma says it is the kind of house that furnishes itself."

"I see--it is a good thing to have such a home to care about. Now I was born in the ugliest village you can conceive of in the southern part of Illinois; dust all summer, and mud all winter, and in one of the ugliest houses in it; and yet, do you know, I am fond of the place; it was home.

We were very poor then--poorer than you can possibly conceive of--and I was very sickly when I was a boy, and had to stay in most of the time. I was fond of reading, though I hadn't many books, but I never saw any society--what you would call society. When I was old enough to go to college, father had got along a little, and sent me to Harvard. I liked it there, and some of the fellows were very kind to me, especially Ralph Underwood, though you might not think it. I tried to learn what I could of their ways and customs, but it was rather late for me, and I never cared to go out much; and then--there were other reasons." A faint flush rose on his sallow face and he paused. Margaret fancied he alluded to his poverty, and felt sorry for him. She hoped he was getting on in the world, though he did not look very well fitted for it. By this time they were on a footing of easy comradeship, such as two people of the same s.e.x and on the same plane of thought sometimes fall into at their first meeting. It is not often that a young man and a girl of such different antecedents slide so easily into it; but as Margaret said to herself, this was a peculiar case. He had told his little story with an apparent effort to be strictly truthful and put things in their proper position at the outset. There could be no intentions on his part, or foolish consciousness or any reason for it on hers, and she asked him with undisguised interest:

"Where do you live now,--in Illinois?"

"Not that part of it. Father and mother live in Chicago when they are at home. I am in Cambridge, just now, myself; it is a convenient place for my work"; and then as her eyes still looked inquiry, he went on, "I am writing a book."

"Oh! and what is it about?"

"The Albigenses--it is a historical monograph upon the Albigenses."

"That must be a very interesting subject."

"It is interesting. It would be too long a story to tell you how I came to think of writing it, but I do enjoy it very much indeed. It's the great pleasure of my life. It isn't that I have any ambition, you know,"

he said in a disclaiming manner. "It's not the kind of book that will sell well, or be very generally read, for I know I haven't the power to make it as readable as it ought to be; but I hope it may be useful to other writers. I am making it as complete as I can. I have been out twice to Europe to look up authorities, and spent a long time in the south of France studying localities."

"Oh, have you? how delightful it must be! Father writes too," with a little pride in her tone, "but it's all on medical subjects; we don't understand them, and he doesn't care to have us. He hates women to dabble in medicine, and he says amateur physicians, anyhow, are no better than quacks."

Mr. Smith made no answer, and they sat silent, till Margaret, fancying that perhaps he did not like the conversation turned from his book, asked another question on the subject. She was a well-taught girl, fond of books, and accustomed to hear them talked over at home, and made an intelligent auditor. The evening flew by rapidly for both of them, though their tete-a-tete was seldom disturbed. The man who sat on Margaret's other side, after staring at her for a long time, asked to be introduced to her, and took her out once; but it was not very satisfactory, for he had nothing to talk of but the season, and other parties of which she knew nothing. However, the figure brought a group of the ladies together for a moment in the middle of the hall; and a smiling girl who had been pretty before her face had taken on the tint of a beetroot, made some pleasant remark to Margaret on the excessive heat of the room, but was off and away before the answer. Margaret thought the room comfortably cool--but then she had been sitting still, while the other had hardly touched her chair since she came. Almost at the end of the evening too, it dawned upon good-natured, short-sighted, absent-minded Mrs. w.i.l.l.y Lowe, always put into every list of patronesses to keep the peace among them, that the pretty girl in pink did not seem to be dancing much; and she seized and dragged across the room, much as if by the hair of the head, the only man she could lay hold of--a shy, awkward undergraduate, of whose little wits she quickly deprived him, by introducing him as Warner, his real name being Warren. She addressed Margaret as Miss Parker; but she meant well, and Margaret was grateful, though they interrupted Mr. Smith in his account of the Roman Amphitheatre at Arles, and the "Lilies of Arles." But it was well that she should have something to put into her letter home besides Mr.

Smith--it would never do to have it entirely taken up with him. By the by, what was his other name? Mr. Smith sounded so unmeaning. She had heard Ralph Underwood call his friend "Al," which it would not do for her to use. It might be either Alfred or Albert, and with that p.r.o.neness to imagine we have heard what we wish, it really seemed to her as if she had heard that his name was Albert; she would venture on it, and if she were mistaken it would be very easy to correct it afterwards; and she wrote him down as "Mr. Albert Smith." His story she considered as told in confidence and n.o.body's affair but his own.

Cousin Susan had never heard the name, but thought of course he must be one of the right Smiths, or he wouldn't have been there; there were plenty of them, and this one, it seemed, had lived much abroad. She would ask Mrs. Underwood when they next met; but this did not happen soon, and Cousin Susan never took any pains to expedite events--she was not able. The world did not make allowance for this habit of hers, but went on its determined course, and the very next day but one, as Margaret was lightly skimming with her quick country walk across the Public Garden on her way to the Art School, Mr. Smith, overtaking her with some difficulty, asked if he might not carry her portfolio? he was going that way. She did not know how she could, nor why she should, refuse and they walked happily on together. People turned to look after them rather curiously, and Margaret thought it must be because she was so much taller than Mr. Smith and wondered if he minded it. She should be very sorry if he did--she was sure she did not if he did not; and she longed to tell him so, but of course that would never do; and then the little worry faded from her mind, her companion had so much to say that was pleasant to hear.

After that he joined her on her way more and more frequently. She did not think it could be improper. The Public Garden was free to everybody, and after all he didn't come every day, and somehow the meetings always had an accidental air, which seemed to put them out of her control. He could hardly call on her in the little sitting-room, where Cousin Susan was almost always lying on her sofa by the fire in a wrapper, secure from the intrusion of any man but the reigning physician. Sometimes Mrs.

Swain, below, asked Margaret to sit with her, but the Swain sitting-room was full of their own affairs, the children and servants running in and out by day, and Dr. Swain, when at home, resting there in the evening.

Margaret felt herself in the way in both places, and preferred her own chilly little bedroom. A man calling would be a sad infliction, and have a most tiresome time of it himself. The winter was a warm and bright one, and it was far pleasanter to stroll along the walks when it was too early for the school.

Their acquaintance during this time progressed rapidly in some respects, more slowly in others. They knew each others' opinions and views on a vast variety of subjects. On many of these they were in accordance, and when they differed, Mr. Smith usually brought her round to his point of view in a way which she enjoyed more than if she had seen it at first.

Sometimes she brought him round to hers, and then she was proud and pleased indeed. He told her all about his book, what he had done on it, what he did day by day, and what he projected. On her side, Margaret told him a world about her own family,--their names, ages, characters, and occupations,--but on this head he was by no means so communicative.

She supposed the subject might be a painful one, after she had found out that he was the only survivor of a large family. He spoke of his parents, when he did speak, respectfully and affectionately, casually mentioning that his father had been very kind to let him take up literature instead of going into business. Margaret conjectured that they were not very well-to-do, and probably uneducated, and that without any false shame, of which, indeed, she judged him incapable, he might not enjoy being questioned about them; and she was rapidly learning an insight into his feelings, and a tender care for them. But one day a sudden impulse put it into her head to ask his Christian name, as yet unknown to her, and he quietly answered that it was Alcibiades.

Margaret did not quite appreciate the ghastly irony of the appellation, but it hit upon her ear unpleasantly, and yet not as entirely unfamiliar. She was silent while her mind made one of those plunges among old memories, which, as when one reaches one's arm into a still pool after something glimmering at the bottom, only ruffles the water until the wished-for treasure is entirely lost to view; then she frankly said. "I was trying to think where I had heard your name before, but I can't."

Mr. Smith actually colored, a rare thing for him, and Margaret longed to start some fresh topic, but could think of none. He did it for her in a moment, by asking her whether she meant to go to the German next Thursday.

"I don't think I shall. I don't know anyone there, and it doesn't seem worth while."

"I was going to ask you," said Mr. Smith, still with a slight confusion which she had never noticed in him before, "if you would mind going, and sitting it out with me as we did the other night?"

"No, but--oh, yes, I should enjoy that ever so much, but--would you like it? You wouldn't go if it were not for me, would you?"

"I certainly should not go if it were not for you; and I shall like it better than I ever liked anything in my life."

It was now Margaret's turn to blush, and far more deeply. They had reached the corner of West Cedar Street, and parted with but few words more, for he never went further with her, and she went home in a happy dream, only broken by a few slight perplexities. What should she wear?

She could not be marked out by that old pink silk again; she must wear the white, and make the best of it. And how was she to get there? She knew that it would not have been the thing for Mr. Smith to ask her to go with him. She was so urgent about the matter that she brought herself to do what she fairly hated, and wrote a timid little note to Mrs.

Underwood, asking if she might not go with her. Mrs. Underwood wrote back that she was sorry, but her carriage was full; she would meet Miss Parke in the cloak-room. Even Cousin Susan was a little moved at this, and said it was too bad of Mrs. Underwood, though she had no suggestion to make herself but her former one of a cab. Margaret was apprehensive; but she knew that when she once got there, Mr. Smith would make it all right and easy for her, and her little troubles faded away in the light of a great pleasure beyond. The old white muslin looked better than might have been expected, and Cousin Susan gave her a lovely pair of long gloves; and she came down into the sitting-room to show off their effect, well pleased. On the table stood a big blue box with a card bearing her name attached to it. Mrs. Swain, who had come in to see her dress, was regarding it curiously, and Jenny, who had brought it up, was lingering and peering through the half-open door.

"Your partner has sent you some flowers, Margaret," said Cousin Susan with unusual animation. "Do open that immense box, and let us see them!"