Senator North Part 16

"Mrs. North is here, and the Senator brought her, but he had to go back; for that disgraceful Tariff bill still hangs on. I believe we are to pay for the very air we breathe: a Trust company has bought it up.

Oh, by the way, you have a new housekeeper;" and both she and Emory laughed. "Do you mean that old Mrs. Sawyer has left? She was invaluable."

"Her son wanted her to keep house for him, and she secured the services of a female from a neighboring village. Miss Trumbull is forty-odd and unmarried. She has a large bony face, the nondescript colouring of the average American, and a colossal vanity. We amuse ourselves watching her smirk as she pa.s.ses a looking-gla.s.s. But she is an excellent housekeeper, and her vanity would be of no consequence if she would keep her place. The day we arrived she hinted broadly that she wanted to sit at table with us, and one night when John was ill and she had to help wait, she joined in the conversation. She's a good-natured fool, but an objectionable specimen of that 'I'm-as-good-as-you-are'

American. I've been waiting for you to come and extinguish her."

"I certainly shall extinguish her."

"She victimizes poor Harriet, whom she seems to think more on her level," said Miss Carter, not without unction.

Betty could feel her face flush. "The sooner she puts that idea out of her head the better," she said coldly. "I am surprised that Harriet permits a liberty of that sort."

"Harriet lacks pride, my dear, in spite of her ambition and what Nature has done for her outside. She is curiously contradictory. But that lack is one which persons of Miss Trumbull's sort are quick to detect and turn to their own account. Your housekeeper's variety of pride is common and blatant, and demands to be fed, one way or another."

Mrs. Madison had not retired and was awaiting her daughter in the living-room. Betty found the household an apparently happy one. The Major was a courtly gentleman who told stories of the war. Harriet in her soft black mull with a deep colour in her cheeks looked superb, and Betty kissed and congratulated her warmly; as Senator North had predicted, the physical repulsion had worn away long since. The big room with its matting and cane divans and chairs, heaped with bright cushions, and the pungent fire in the deep chimney--for the evenings were still cold--looked cosey and inviting; no wonder everybody was content. Even Jack looked less careworn than usual; doubtless the pines, as ever, had routed his malaria. Only Sally's gayety seemed a little forced, and there was an occasional snap in her eye and dilation of her nostril.

When Betty had put her mother to bed and talked her to sleep, she went to her own room and opened the window. She could hear the lake murmuring at the foot of the terrace, the everlasting sighing of the pines; but it was very dark: she could hardly see the grim mountains across the water. Just below them was a triple row of lights. He should have been behind those lights and he was not. For the moment she hated politics.

She closed the window and wrote the following letter:--

DEAR MR. NORTH,--I am home, you see. Don't reply and tell me that the Tariff Bill surrounds you like a fortress wall. I am going for a walk at five o'clock on Sat.u.r.day morning, and I expect to meet you somewhere in the forest above the north end of the lake. You can reach it by the path on your side. I shall row there. Do not labour over an excuse, my friend. I know how you hate to write letters, and you know that I am a tyrant whose orders are always obeyed.

BETTY MADISON.

"That should not worry him," she thought, "and it should bring him."

III

As soon as she awoke next morning, she dressed and went downstairs. A woman stood in the lower hall, and from Sally's description Betty recognized Miss Trumbull. The woman's large mouth expanded in a smile, which, though correct enough, betrayed the self-satisfaction which pervaded her being. She was youngish-looking, and not as ugly as Miss Carter's bald description had implied.

"Good-mornin'," She drawled. "I had a mind to set up for you last night, but I was tired. You like to get up early, don't you? It's just six. Miss Walker and Miss Carter don't git up till eight, Mr. Emory till nine fifteen, and your ma till eleven. The Major's uncertain. But I'm real glad you like gittin' up early--"

"Will you kindly send me a boy?" interrupted Betty. "I wish a letter taken to the post-office."

The woman came forward and extended her hand. "I'll give it to him,"

she said.

"Send the boy to me. I have other orders to give him."

As the woman turned away, Betty thought she detected a shade of disappointment on her face. "Has she that most detestable vulgarity of her cla.s.s, curiosity?" she thought. "She seems to have observed the family very closely."

The boy came, accompanied by Miss Trumbull, who made a slight but perceptible effort to see the address of the letter as Betty handed it to him.

"Take this at once and bring me back a dollar's worth of stamps; and go also to the village store and bring me some samples of worsted."

She thought of several other things she did not want, reflecting that she must in the future herself take to the post-office such letters as she did not wish Miss Trumbull to inspect and possibly read. The boy went his way, and Betty turned to the housekeeper and regarded her sharply.

"I'm afraid you will find this a lonely situation," she said. "We are only here for a few months in the summer."

"Well, of course I like the society of nice people, but I guess I can stand it. Poor folks can't pick and choose, and I suppose you wouldn't mind my havin' a friend with me in the winter, would you?"

"Certainly not," said Betty, softening a little. But she did not like the woman, who was not frankly plebeian, but had b.u.t.tered herself over with a coat of third-rate pretentiousness. And her voice and method of speech were irritating. She had a fat inflection and the longest drawl Betty had ever heard. Upon every fourth or fifth word she prolonged the drawl, and accomplished the effect of smoothing down her voice with her tongue. Capable as she might be, Betty wondered if she could stand Miss Trumbull through the summer. But the position was a very difficult one to fill. Even an old couple found it lonely, and a woman with a daughter never had been permitted to remain for two consecutive years.

If the woman could be kept in the background, it might be worth while to give her a trial.

Betty went out of doors and down to the lake. It lay in the cup of a peak, and about it towered higher peaks, black with pine forests, only a path here and there cutting their primeval gloom. Betty stepped into a boat and rowed beyond sight of her house and the hotel. Then she lay down, pushed a cushion under her head, and drifted. It had been a favourite pastime of hers since childhood, but this morning her mind for the first time opened to the danger of a wild and brooding solitude, still palpitating with the pa.s.sions which had given it birth, for those whose own were awake.

"Civilization does wonders for us," she said aloud; she could have raised her voice and been unheard, and she revelled in her solitude.

"It makes us really believe that conventions are the only comfortable conditions in the world, certainly indispensable. Up here--"

"If he and I were here alone for one week," she continued uncompromisingly and aloud to the mountains, "the world would cease to exist as far as we both were concerned. And I wish he were here and the Adirondacks adrift in s.p.a.ce!"

She sat up suddenly after this wish; but although it had flushed her face, she had said the words deliberately and made no haste to unsay them. She looked ahead to the north end of the lake and the dark quiet aisles above. And when she met him there on Sat.u.r.day morning, she must hold down her pa.s.sion as she would hold down a mad dog. She must look with bright friendly eyes at the man to whose arms her imagination had given her unnumbered times. It seemed to her that she was an independent intellect caught and tangled in a fish-net of traditions.

To violate the greatest of social laws was abhorrent to every inherited instinct. Her intellect argued that man was born for happiness and was a fool to put it from him. The social laws were arbitrary and had their roots in expediency alone; man and his needs were made before the community. But the laws had been made long before her time, and they were bone of her bone.

She knew that he would not be the one to break down the barrier, that he would leave her if she manifested uncontrollable weakness,--not from the highest motives only, but because he had long since ceased to court ruin by folly; his self-control was many years older than herself.

Doubtless he would never betray himself to her, no matter how much he might love her, unless she so tempted him that pa.s.sion leaped above reason. And she knew that this was possible. There was no mistaking the temperament of the man. He was virile and sensual, but he had ordered that his pa.s.sions should be the subjects of his brain; and so no doubt they were.

Betty had no intention of forcing any such crisis, often as she might toy with the idea in her mind. But for the first time she compelled herself to look beyond the present, beyond the time when she could no longer sit in her boudoir and play to him, and shake him lightly by the hand as he left her. Perhaps she could not even get through this summer without betraying the flood that shook her nerves. If the barriers went down she must look into what? She gave her insight its liberty, and turned white. It seemed to her that the lake and the forest disappeared and a blank wall surrounded her. She lay down in the boat and pressed the corner of the cushion against her eyes. A thousand voices in her soul, for generations dumb and forgotten, seemed to awake and describe the agony of women, an agony which survived the mortal part that gave it expression, to live again and again in unwary hearts.

She sat up suddenly and took hold of the oars. "That will do for this morning," she said. "It is so true that none of us can stand more than just so much intensity that I suppose if this dear dream of mine went to pieces I should have intervals when life would seem brilliant by contrast with my misery. I might even find mental rest in pouring tea again for attaches. And there is always the pleasure of a.s.suaging hunger. I am ravenous."

IV

After breakfast--an almost hilarious meal, for Emory and Sally Carter were in the highest spirits and sparred with much vigour--Betty and Harriet went for a walk. There was a long level path about the lake for a mile or more before they turned into the forest, and Betty noted that Harriet, although her gait still betrayed indolence, held herself with an air of unmistakable pride. She had improved in other respects; her arrangement of dress and hair no longer looked rural, she not only had ceased to bite her nails, but had put them in vivid order, and the p.r.o.nunciation of her words was wholly white.

"She will be a social success one of these days," thought Betty, "or with that voice and beauty she could doubtless win fame and wealth, and have a brilliant and enjoyable life. The tug will come when she wants to marry; but perhaps she won't want to for a long while--or will fall in love with a foreigner who won't mind."

She longed to ask Harriet if she were happy, if she had forgotten; but she dreaded reviving a distasteful subject. She would be glad never to hear it alluded to again.

Harriet did not allude to it. She talked of her studies, of the many pleasures she had found in Washington, of the kindness of Mr. Emory and Sally Carter, and of her delight to see Betty again. As she talked, Betty decided that the change in her went below the surface. She had regained all the self-control that her sudden change of circ.u.mstances had threatened, and something more. It was not hardness, nor was it exactly coldness. It was rather a studied aloofness. "Has she decided to shut herself up within herself?" thought Betty. "Does she think that will make life easier for her?"

Aloud she said,--"Would not you like to go to Europe for a year or so?

I could easily find a chaperon, and you would enjoy it."

"Oh, yes, I shall enjoy it. I feel as if I held the world in the hollow of my hand, now that I have got used to gratifying every wish;" and she threw back her head and dilated her nostril.

"What _have_ I launched upon the world?" thought Betty. "She certainly will even with Fate in some way." But she said, "I am glad you and Sally get on well. She has her peculiarities."

"I reckon I could get on with any one; but she doesn't like me, all the same."