The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Part 224

There is no haze, but all outlines are softened in the silver light. It is like a dream, and there is no disturbance of the repose when a family party, a woman, a child, and a man come down to the sh.o.r.e, slip into a boat, and scull away out by the lighthouse and the rocky entrance of the harbor, off, perhaps, for a day's pleasure. The artist has whipped out his sketch-book to take some outlines of the view, and his comrade, looking that way, thinks this group a pleasing part of the scene, and notes how the salt, dewy morning air has brought the color into the sensitive face of the girl. There are not many such hours in a lifetime, he is also thinking, when nature can be seen in such a charming mood, and for the moment it compensates for the night ride.

The party indulged this feeling when they landed, still early, at the Newport wharf, and decided to walk through the old town up to the hotel, perfectly well aware that after this no money would hire them to leave their beds and enjoy this novel sensation at such an hour. They had the street to themselves, and the promenade was one of discovery, and had much the interest of a landing in a foreign city.

"It is so English," said the artist.

"It is so colonial," said Mr. King, "though I've no doubt that any one of the sleeping occupants of these houses would be wide-awake instantly, and come out and ask you to breakfast, if they heard you say it is so English."

"If they were not restrained," Marion suggested, "by the feeling that that would not be English. How fine the shade trees, and what brilliant banks of flowers!"

"And such lawns! We cannot make this turf in Virginia," was the reflection of Mr. De Long.

"Well, colonial if you like," the artist replied to Mr. King. "What is best is in the colonial style; but you notice that all the new houses are built to look old, and that they have had Queen Anne pretty bad, though the colors are good."

"That's the way with some towns. Queen Anne seems to strike them all of a sudden, and become epidemic. The only way to prevent it is to vaccinate, so to speak, with two or three houses, and wait; then it is not so likely to spread."

Laughing and criticising and admiring, the party strolled along the shaded avenue to the Ocean House. There were as yet no signs of life at the Club, or the Library, or the Casino; but the shops were getting open, and the richness and elegance of the goods displayed in the windows were the best evidence of the wealth and refinement of the expected customers --culture and taste always show themselves in the shops of a town. The long gray-brown front of the Casino, with its shingled sides and hooded balconies and galleries, added to the already strong foreign impression of the place. But the artist was dissatisfied. It was not at all his idea of Independence Day; it was like Sunday, and Sunday without any foreign gayety. He had expected firing of cannon and ringing of bells--there was not even a flag out anywhere; the celebration of the Fourth seemed to have shrunk into a dull and decorous avoidance of all excitement. "Perhaps," suggested Miss Lamont, "if the New-Englanders keep the Fourth of July like Sunday, they will by and by keep Sunday like the Fourth of July. I hear it is the day for excursions on this coast."

Mr. King was perfectly well aware that in going to a hotel in Newport he was putting himself out of the pale of the best society; but he had a fancy for viewing this society from the outside, having often enough seen it from the inside. And perhaps he had other reasons for this eccentric conduct. He had, at any rate, declined the invitation of his cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow, to her cottage on the Point of Rocks. It was not without regret that he did this, for his cousin was a very charming woman, and devoted exclusively to the most exclusive social life. Her husband had been something in the oil line in New York, and King had watched with interest his evolution from the business man into the full-blown existence of a man of fashion. The process is perfectly charted. Success in business, membership in a good club, tandem in the Park, introduction to a good house, marriage to a pretty girl of family and not much money, a yacht, a four-in-hand, a Newport villa. His name had undergone a like evolution. It used to be written on his business card, Jacob B. Glow. It was entered at the club as J. Bartlett Glow. On the wedding invitations it was Mr. Bartlett Glow, and the dashing pair were always spoken of at Newport as the Bartlett-Glows.

When Mr. King descended from his room at the Ocean House, although it was not yet eight o'clock, he was not surprised to see Mr. Benson tilted back in one of the chairs on the long piazza, out of the way of the scrubbers, with his air of patient waiting and observation. Irene used to say that her father ought to write a book--"Life as Seen from Hotel Piazzas." His only idea of recreation when away from business seemed to be sitting about on them.

"The women-folks," he explained to Mr. King, who took a chair beside him, "won't be down for an hour yet. I like, myself, to see the show open."

"Are there many people here?"

"I guess the house is full enough. But I can't find out that anybody is actually stopping here, except ourselves and a lot of schoolmarms come to attend a convention. They seem to enjoy it. The rest, those I've talked with, just happen to be here for a day or so, never have been to a hotel in Newport before, always stayed in a cottage, merely put up here now to visit friends in cottages. You'll see that none of them act like they belonged to the hotel. Folks are queer."

At a place we were last summer all the summer boarders, in boarding-houses round, tried to act like they were staying at the big hotel, and the hotel people swelled about on the fact of being at a hotel. Here you're n.o.body. I hired a carriage by the week, driver in b.u.t.tons, and all that. It don't make any difference. I'll bet a gold dollar every cottager knows it's hired, and probably they think by the drive."

"It's rather stupid, then, for you and the ladies."

"Not a bit of it. It's the nicest place in America: such gra.s.s, such horses, such women, and the drive round the island--there's nothing like it in the country. We take it every day. Yes, it would be a little lonesome but for the ocean. It's a good deal like a funeral procession, n.o.body ever recognizes you, not even the hotel people who are in hired hacks. If I were to come again, Mr. King, I'd come in a yacht, drive up from it in a box on two wheels, with a man clinging on behind with his back to me, and have a cottage with an English gardener. That would fetch 'em. Money won't do it, not at a hotel. But I'm not sure but I like this way best. It's an occupation for a man to keep up a cottage."

"And so you do not find it dull?"

"No. When we aren't out riding, she and Irene go on to the cliffs, and I sit here and talk real estate. It's about all there is to talk of."

There was an awkward moment or two when the two parties met in the lobby and were introduced before going in to breakfast. There was a little putting up of guards on the part of the ladies. Between Irene and Marion pa.s.sed that rapid glance of inspection, that one glance which includes a study and the pa.s.sing of judgment upon family, manners, and dress, down to the least detail. It seemed to be satisfactory, for after a few words of civility the two girls walked in together, Irene a little dignified, to be sure, and Marion with her wistful, half-inquisitive expression. Mr.

King could not be mistaken in thinking Irene's manner a little constrained and distant to him, and less cordial than it was to Mr.

Forbes, but the mother righted the family balance.

"I'm right glad you've come, Mr. King. It's like seeing somebody from home. I told Irene that when you came I guess we should know somebody.

It's an awful fashionable place."

"And you have no acquaintances here?"

"No, not really. There's Mrs. Peabody has a cottage here, what they call a cottage, but there no such house in Cyrusville. We drove past it. Her daughter was to school with Irene. We've met 'em out riding several times, and Sally (Miss Peabody) bowed to Irene, and pa and I bowed to everybody, but they haven't called. Pa says it's because we are at a hotel, but I guess it's been company or something. They were real good friends at school."

Mr. King laughed. "Oh, Mrs. Benson, the Peabodys were n.o.bodys only a few years ago. I remember when they used to stay at one of the smaller hotels."

"Well, they seem nice, stylish people, and I'm sorry on Irene's account."

At breakfast the party had topics enough in common to make conversation lively. The artist was sure he should be delighted with the beauty and finish of Newport. Miss Lamont doubted if she should enjoy it as much as the freedom and freshness of the Catskills. Mr. King amused himself with drawing out Miss Benson on the contrast with Atlantic City. The dining-room was full of members of the Inst.i.tute, in attendance upon the annual meeting, graybearded, long-faced educators, devotees of theories and systems, known at a glance by a certain earnestness of manner and intensity of expression, middle-aged women of a resolute, intellectual countenance, and a great crowd of youthful schoolmistresses, just on the dividing line between domestic life and self-sacrifice, still full of sentiment, and still leaning perhaps more to Tennyson and Lowell than to mathematics and Old English.

"They have a curious, mingled air of primness and gayety, as if gayety were not quite proper," the artist began. "Some of them look downright interesting, and I've no doubt they are all excellent women."

"I've no doubt they are all good as gold," put in Mr. King. "These women are the salt of New England." (Irene looked up quickly and appreciatively at the speaker.) "No fashionable nonsense about them.

What's in you, Forbes, to shy so at a good woman?"

"I don't shy at a good woman--but three hundred of them! I don't want all my salt in one place. And see here--I appeal to you, Miss Lamont --why didn't these girls dress simply, as they do at home, and not attempt a sort of ill-fitting finery that is in greater contrast to Newport than simplicity would be?"

"If you were a woman," said Marion, looking demurely, not at Mr. Forbes, but at Irene, "I could explain it to you. You don't allow anything for sentiment and the natural desire to please, and it ought to be just pathetic to you that these girls, obeying a natural instinct, missed the expression of it a little."

"Men are such critics," and Irene addressed the remark to Marion, "they pretend to like intellectual women, but they can pardon anything better than an ill-fitting gown. Better be frivolous than badly dressed."

"Well," stoutly insisted Forbes, "I'll take my chance with the well-dressed ones always; I don't believe the frumpy are the most sensible."

"No; but you make out a prima facie case against a woman for want of taste in dress, just as you jump at the conclusion that because a woman dresses in such a way as to show she gives her mind to it she is of the right sort. I think it's a relief to see a convention of women devoted to other things who are not thinking of their clothes."

"Pardon me; the point I made was that they are thinking of their clothes, and thinking erroneously."

"Why don't you ask leave to read a paper, Forbes, on the relation of dress to education?" asked Mr. King.

They rose from the table just as Mrs. Benson was saying that for her part she liked these girls, they were so homelike; she loved to hear them sing college songs and hymns in the parlor. To sing the songs of the students is a wild, reckless dissipation for girls in the country.

When Mr. King and Irene walked up and down the corridor after breakfast the girl's constraint seemed to have vanished, and she let it be seen that she had sincere pleasure in renewing the acquaintance. King himself began to realize how large a place the girl's image had occupied in his mind. He was not in love--that would be absurd on such short acquaintance--but a thought dropped into the mind ripens without consciousness, and he found that he had antic.i.p.ated seeing Irene again with decided interest. He remembered exactly how she looked at Fortress Monroe, especially one day when she entered the parlor, bowing right and left to persons she knew, stopping to chat with one and another, tall, slender waist swelling upwards in symmetrical lines, brown hair, dark-gray eyes--he recalled every detail, the high-bred air (which was certainly not inherited), the unconscious perfect carriage, and his thinking in a vague way that such ease and grace meant good living and leisure and a sound body. This, at any rate, was the image in his mind --a sufficiently distracting thing for a young man to carry about with him; and now as he walked beside her he was conscious that there was something much finer in her than the image he had carried with him, that there was a charm of speech and voice and expression that made her different from any other woman he had ever seen. Who can define this charm, this difference? Some women have it for the universal man--they are desired of every man who sees them; their way to marriage (which is commonly unfortunate) is over a causeway of prostrate forms, if not of cracked hearts; a few such women light up and make the romance of history. The majority of women fortunately have it for one man only, and sometimes he never appears on the scene at all! Yet every man thinks his choice belongs to the first cla.s.s; even King began to wonder that all Newport was not raving over Irene's beauty. The present writer saw her one day as she alighted from a carriage at the Ocean House, her face flushed with the sea air, and he remembers that he thought her a fine girl. "By George, that's a fine woman!" exclaimed a New York bachelor, who prided himself on knowing horses and women and all that; but the country is full of fine women--this to him was only one of a thousand.

What were this couple talking about as they promenaded, basking in each other's presence? It does not matter. They were getting to know each other, quite as much by what they did not say as by what they did say, by the thousand little exchanges of feeling and sentiment which are all-important, and never appear even in a stenographer's report of a conversation. Only one thing is certain about it, that the girl could recall every word that Mr. King said, even his accent and look, long after he had forgotten even the theme of the talk. One thing, however, he did carry away with him, which set him thinking. The girl had been reading the "Life of Carlyle," and she took up the cudgels for the old curmudgeon, as King called him, and declared that, when all was said, Mrs. Carlyle was happier with him than she would have been with any other man in England. "What woman of spirit wouldn't rather mate with an eagle, and quarrel half the time, than with a humdrum barn-yard fowl?"

And Mr. Stanhope King, when he went away, reflected that he who had fitted himself for the bar, and traveled extensively, and had a moderate competence, hadn't settled down to any sort of career. He had always an intention of doing something in a vague way; but now the thought that he was idle made him for the first time decidedly uneasy, for he had an indistinct notion that Irene couldn't approve of such a life.

This feeling haunted him as he was making a round of calls that day. He did not return to lunch or dinner--if he had done so he would have found that lunch was dinner and that dinner was supper--another vital distinction between the hotel and the cottage. The rest of the party had gone to the cliffs with the artist, the girls on a pretense of learning to sketch from nature. Mr. King dined with his cousin.

"You are a bad boy, Stanhope," was the greeting of Mrs. Bartlett Glow, "not to come to me. Why did you go to the hotel?"

"Oh, I thought I'd see life; I had an unaccountable feeling of independence. Besides, I've a friend with me, a very clever artist, who is re-seeing his country after an absence of some years. And there are some other people."

"Oh, yes. What is her name?"

"Why, there is quite a party. We met them at different places. There's a very bright New York girl, Miss Lamont, and her uncle from Richmond."

("Never heard of her," interpolated Mrs. Glow.) "And a Mr. and Mrs.

Benson and their daughter, from Ohio. Mr. Benson has made money; Mrs.

Benson, good-hearted old lady, rather plain and--"

"Yes, I know the sort; had a falling-out with Lindley Murray in her youth and never made it up. But what I want to know is about the girl. What makes you beat about the bush so? What's her name?"

"Irene. She is an uncommonly clever girl; educated; been abroad a good deal, studying in Germany; had all advantages; and she has cultivated tastes; and the fact is that out in Cyrusville--that is where they live --You know how it is here in America when the girl is educated and the old people are not--"

"The long and short of it is, you want me to invite them here. I suppose the girl is plain, too--takes after her mother?"