Peter Part 11

"The only Miss Grayson I ever met in Washington, my dear, was an old maid, the niece of the Secretary of State. She kept house for him after his wife died. She held herself very high, let me tell you. A very grand lady, indeed. But she must be an old woman now, if she is still living.

What did you say her first name was?"

Corinne took the open letter from Jack's hand. "Felicia... Yes, Felicia."

"And what does she want?--money for some charity?" Almost everybody she knew, and some she didn't, wanted money for some charity. She was loosening her cloak as she spoke, Frederick standing by to relieve my lady of her wraps.

"No; she's going to give a tea and wants us all to come. She's the sister of that old man who came to see Jack the other night, and--"

"Going to give a tea!--and the sister of--Well, then, she certainly isn't the Miss Grayson I know. Don't you answer her, Corinne, until I find out who she is."

"I'll tell you who she is," burst out Jack. His face was aflame now.

Never had he listened to such discourtesy. He could hardly believe his ears.

"It wouldn't help me in the least, my dear Jack; so don't you begin. I am the best judge of who shall come to my house. She may be all right, and she may not, you can never tell in a city like New York, and you can't be too particular. People really do such curious pushing things now-a-days." This to Garry. "Now serve tea, Parkins. Come in all of you."

Jack was on the point of blazing out in indignation over the false position in which his friend had been placed when Peter's warning voice rang in his ears. The vulgarity of the whole proceeding appalled him, yet he kept control of himself.

"None for me, please, aunty," he said quietly. "I will join you later, Garry," and he mounted the stairs to his room.

CHAPTER VIII

Peter was up and dressed when Miss Felicia arrived, despite the early hour. Indeed that gay cavalier was the first to help the dear lady off with her travelling cloak and bonnet, Mrs. McGuffey folding her veil, smoothing out her gloves and laying them all upon the bed in the adjoining room--the one she kept in prime order for Miss Grayson's use.

The old fellow was facing the coffee-urn when he told her Jack's story and what he himself had said in reply, and how fine the boy was in his beliefs, and how well-nigh impossible it was for him to help him, considering his environment.

The dear lady had listened with her eyes fixed on Peter. It was but another of his benevolent finds; it had been the son of an old music teacher the winter before, and a boy struggling through college last spring;--always somebody who wanted to get ahead in one direction or another, no matter how impracticable his ambitions might be. This young man, however, seemed different; certain remarks had a true ring.

Perhaps, after all, her foolish old brother--foolish when his heart misled him--might have found somebody at last who would pay for the time he spent upon him. The name, too, had a familiar sound. She was quite sure the aunt must be the same rather over-dressed persistent young widow who had flitted in and out of Washington society the last year of her own stay in the capital. She had finally married a rich New York man of the same name. So she had heard.

The tea to which Jack and Corinne were invited was the result of this conversation. Trust Miss Felicia for doing the right thing and in the right way, whatever her underlying purpose might be; and then again she must look this new protege over.

Peter at once joined in the project. Nothing pleased him so much as a function of any kind in which his dear sister was the centre of attraction, and this was always the case. Was not Mrs. McGuffey put to it, at these same teas, to know what to do with the hats and coats, and the long and short cloaks and overshoes, and lots of other things beside--umbrellas and the like--whenever Miss Felicia came to town? And did not the good woman have many of the cards of the former function hidden in her bureau drawer to show her curious friends just how grand a lady Miss Felicia was? General Waterbury, U.S.A., commanding the Department of the East, with headquarters at Governors Island, was one of them. And so were Colonel Edgerton, Judge Lambert and Mrs. Lambert; and His Excellency the French Amba.s.sador, whom she had known as an attache and who was pa.s.sing through the city and had been overjoyed to leave a card; as well as Sir Anthony Broadstairs, who expected to spend a week with her in her quaint home in Geneseo, but who had made it convenient to pay his respects in Fifteenth Street instead: to say nothing of the Coleridges, Thomases, Bordeauxs and Worthing tons, besides any number of people from Washington Square, with plenty more from Murray Hill and be yond.

Peter in his enthusiasm had made a mental picture of a repet.i.tion of all this and had already voiced it in the suggestion of these and various other prominent names, "when Miss Felicia stopped him with:

"No, Peter--No. It's not to be a museum of fossils, but a garden full of rosebuds; n.o.body with a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"--I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman--"is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, and who doesn't know a soul, and n.o.body over twenty-five is to be admitted. So if you and the Major want to come to Ruth's tea--Ruth's, remember; not yours or the Major's, or mine--you will either have to pa.s.s the cake or take the gentlemen's hats. Do you hear?"

We heard, and we heard her laugh as she spoke, raising her gold lorgnon to her eyes and gazing at us with that half-quizzical look which so often comes over her face.

She was older than Peter--must have been: I never knew exactly. It would not have been wise to ask her, and n.o.body else knew but Peter, and he never told. And yet there was no mark of real old age upon her. She and Peter were alike in this. Her hair, worn Pompadour, was gray--an honest black-and-white gray; her eyes were bright as needle points; the skin slightly wrinkled, but fresh and rosy--a spare, straight, well-groomed old lady of--perhaps sixty--perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress, or undress, for her shoulders were still full and well rounded. "The most beautiful neck and throat, sir, in all Washington in her day," old General Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority. "You should have seen her in her prime, sir. What the devil the men were thinking of I don't know, but they let her go back to Geneseo, and there she has lived ever since. Why, sir, at a ball at the German Emba.s.sy she made such a sensation that--" but then the General always tells such stories of most of the women he knows.

There was but little left of that kind of beauty. She had kept her figure, it is true--a graceful, easy moving figure, with the waist of a girl; well-proportioned arms and small, dainty hands. She had kept, too, her charm of manner and keen sense of humor--she wouldn't have been Peter's sister otherwise--as well as her interest in her friend's affairs, especially the love affairs of all the young people about her.

Her knowledge of men and women had broadened. She read them more easily now than when she was a girl--had suffered, perhaps, by trusting them too much. This had sharpened the tip end of her tongue to so fine a point that when it became active--and once in a while it did--it could rip a sham reputation up the back as easily as a keen blade loosens the seams of a bodice.

Peter fell in at once with her plan for a "Rosebud Tea," in spite of her raillery and the threatened possibility of our exclusion, promising not only to a.s.sist her with the invitations, but to be more than careful at the Bank in avoiding serious mistakes in his balances--so as to be on hand promptly at four. Moreover, if Jack had a sweetheart--and there was no question of it, or ought not to be--and Corinne had another, what would be better than bringing them all down together, so that Miss Felicia could look them over, and Miss Ruth and the Major could get better acquainted, especially Jack and Miss Felicia; and more especially Jack and himself.

Miss Felicia's proposal having therefore been duly carried out, with a number of others not thought of when the tea was first discussed--including some pots of geraniums in the window, red, of course, to match the color of Peter's room--and the freshening up of certain swiss curtains which so offended Miss Felicia's ever-watchful eyes that she burst out with: "It is positively disgraceful, Peter, to see how careless you are getting--" At which Mrs. McGuffey blushed to the roots of her hair, and washed them herself that very night before she closed her eyes. The great day having arrived, I say the tea-table was set with Peter's best, including "the dearest of silver teapots"

that Miss Felicia had given him for special occasions; the table covered with a damask cloth and all made ready for the arrival of her guests.

This done, the lady returned to her own room, from which she emerged an hour later in a soft gray silk relieved by a film of old lace at her throat, blending into the tones of her gray hair brushed straight up from her forehead and worn high over a cushion, the whole topped by a tiny jewel which caught the light like a drop of dew.

And a veritable grand dame she looked, and was, as she took her seat and awaited the arrival of her guests--in bearing, in the way she moved her head; in the way she opened her fan--in the selection of the fan itself, for that matter. You felt it in the color and length of her gloves; the size of her pearl ear rings (not too large, and yet not too small), in the choice of the few rings that encircled her slender and now somewhat shrunken fingers (one hoop of gold had a history that the old French Amba.s.sador could have told if he wanted to, so Peter once hinted to me)--everything she did in fact betrayed a wide acquaintance with the great world and its requirements and exactions.

Other women of her age might of their choice drop into charities, or cats, or nephews and nieces, railing against the present and living only in the past; holding on like grim death to everything that made it respect able, so that they looked for all the world like so many old daguerreotypes pulled from the frames. Not so Miss Felicia Grayson of Geneseo, New York. Her past was a flexible, india-rubber kind of a past that she stretched out after her. She might still wear her hair as she did when the old General raved over her, although the frost of many winters had touched it; but she would never hold on to the sleeves of those days or the skirts or the mantles: Out or in they must go, be puffed, cut bias, or made plain, just as the fashion of the day insisted. Oh! a most level-headed, common-sense, old aristocrat was Dame Felicia!

With the arrival of the first carriage old Isaac Cohen moved his seat from the back to the front of his shop, so he could see everybody who got out and went in, as well as everybody who walked past and gazed up at the shabby old house and its shabbier steps and railings. Not that the shabby surroundings ever made any difference whether the guests were "carriage company" or not, to quote good Mrs. McGuffey. Peter would not be Peter if he lived anywhere else, and Miss Felicia wouldn't be half so quaint and charming if she had received her guests behind a marble or brownstone front with an awning stretched to the curbstone and a red velvet carpet laid across the sidewalk, the whole patrolled by a bluecoat and two hired men.

The little tailor had watched many such functions before. So had the neighbors, who were craning their heads from the windows. They all knew by the carriages when Miss Felicia came to town and when she left, and by the same token for that matter. The only difference between this reception and former receptions, or teas, or whatever the great people upstairs called them, was in the ages of the guests; not any gray whiskers and white heads under high silk hats, this time; nor any demure or pompous, or gentle, or, perhaps, faded old ladies puffing up Peter's stairs--and they did puff before they reached his door, where they handed their wraps to Mrs. McGuffey in her brave white cap and braver white ap.r.o.n. Only bright eyes and rosy faces today framed in tiny bon nets, and well-groomed young fellows in white scarfs and black coats.

But if anybody had thought of the shabby surroundings they forgot all about it when they mounted the third flight of stairs and looked in the door. Not only was Peter's bedroom full of outer garments, and Miss Felicia's, too, for that matter--but the banisters looked like a clothes-shop undergoing a spring cleaning, so thickly were the coats slung over its hand rail. So, too, were the hall, and the hall chairs, and the gas bracket, and even the hooks where Peter hung his clothes to be brushed in the morning--every conceivable place, in fact, wherever an outer wrap of any kind could be suspended, poked, or laid flat. That Mrs. McGuffey was at her wits' end--only a short walk--was evident from the way she grabbed my hat and coat and disappeared through a door which led to her own apartments, returning a moment later out of breath and, I fancied, a little out of temper.

And that was nothing to the way in which the owners of all these several habiliments were wedged inside. First came the dome of Peter's bald head surmounting his merry face, then the top of Miss Felicia's pompadour, with its tiny diamond spark bobbing about as she laughed and moved her head in saluting her guests and then mobs and mobs of young people packed tight, looking for all the world like a matinee crowd leaving a theatre (that is when you crane your neck to see over their heads), except that the guests were without their wraps and were talking sixteen to the dozen, and as merry as they could be.

"They are all here, Major," Peter cried, dragging me inside. It was wonderful how young and happy he looked. "Miss Corinne, and that loud Hullaballoo, Garry Minott, we saw prancing around at the supper--you remember--Holker gave him the ring."

"And Miss MacFarlane?" I asked.

"Ruth! Turn your head, my boy, and take a look at her. Isn't she a picture? Did you ever see a prettier girl in all your life, and one more charmingly dressed? Ruth, this is the Major... nothing else... just the Major. He is perfectly docile, kind and safe, and--"

"--And drives equally well in single or double harness, I suppose,"

laughed the girl, extending her hand and giving me the slightest dip of her head and bend of her back in recognition, no doubt, of my advancing years and dignified bearing--in apology, too, perhaps, for her metaphor.

"In SINGLE--not double," rejoined Peter. "He's the sourest, crabbedest old bachelor in the world--except myself."

Again her laugh bubbled out--a catching, spontaneous kind of laugh, as if there were plenty more packed away behind her lips ready to break loose whenever they found an opening.

"Then, Major, you shall have two lumps to sweeten you up," and down went the sugar-tongs into the silver bowl.

Here young Breen leaned forward and lifted the bowl nearer to her hand, while I waited for my cup. He had not left her side since Miss Felicia had presented him, so Peter told me afterward. I had evidently interrupted a conversation, for his eyes were still fastened upon hers, drinking in her every word and movement.

"And is sugar your cure for disagreeable people, Miss MacFarlane?" I heard him ask under his breath as I stood sipping my tea.

"That depends on how disagreeable they are," she answered. This came with a look from beneath her eyelids.

"I must be all right, then, for you only gave me one lump--" still under his breath.

"Only one! I made a mistake--" Eyes looking straight into Jack's, with a merry twinkle gathering around their corners.

"Perhaps I don't need any at all."

"Yes, I'm sure you do. Here--hold your cup, sir; I'll fill it full."

"No, I'm going to wait and see what effect one lump has. I'm beginning to get pleasant already--and I was cross as two sticks when I--"

And then she insisted he should have at least three more to make him at all bearable, and he said there would be no living with him he would be so charming and agreeable, and so the talk ran on, the battledoor and shuttlec.o.c.k kind of talk--the same prattle that we have all listened to dozens of times, or should have listened to, to have kept our hearts young. And yet not a talk at all; a play, rather, in which words count for little and the action is everything: Listening to the toss of a curl or the lowering of an eyelid; answering with a lift of the hand--such a strong brown hand, that could pull an oar, perhaps, or help her over dangerous places! Then her white teeth, and the way the head bent; and then his ears and how close they lay to his head; and the short, glossy hair with the faintest bit of a curl in it. And then the sudden awakening: Oh, yes--it was the sugar Mr. Breen wanted, of course. What was I thinking of?