The Lovely Lady Part 7

Outside it was every way such a day as a well-spent life might slip away in; the tracks in the deep-rutted February snow might have been worn there by the habit of sixty years. There was no hint of the spring yet, but here and there in the bare patches on the hills and the frayed icy edges of the drifts, the sign that the weight of the winter was behind them. There would be a little quiet time yet and then the resurrection. The brother and sister had taken it all very quietly.

n.o.body had ever taken anything in any other way in the presence of Mrs.

Weatheral, and that she was there still for them, that she would always be present in their lives, a warm determining influence, was witnessed by that absence of violence which empties too soon the cup of grief. The loss of their mother had at least brought them no sense of leaving her behind. They were going on with their life so soon because she was going with them.

"That was why I wanted them all to go away," Ellen took up the thought again. "I've been thinking all day about mother being with father and how glad he'll be to see her, and yet it seems as if I can feel her here. I thought if we kept still a while she'd make us understand what she wanted us to do."

"About what, Ellen?"

"About my going up to the city with you to board--it seems such a wasteful way to live somehow, just sitting around!"

"It isn't as expensive as keeping house," Peter told her, "and I want you to sit around, Ellen; women in Bloombury don't get enough of that I'm afraid."

"They don't. Did you see Ada Harvey to-day? Four children and two teeth out, and her not thirty. I guess you'd take better care of me than that, Peter,--only----"

"You think _she_ wouldn't like it for you?"

"She thought such a lot of keeping up a home, Peter. It was like--like those Catholics burning candles. It seemed as if she thought you'd get something out of it if it was just going on, even if you didn't visit it more than two or three times a year. Lots of women feel that way, Peter, and I guess there must be something in it."

"There _is_ something in it," Peter a.s.sured her.

"And if I go and board with you we'd have to break up everything----"

She looked about on all the familiar mould of daily habit that was her world, and tears started afresh. "And we've got all this furniture." She moved her head toward the door of the front room and the parlour set that had been Peter's Christmas gift to them two years ago. "For all it was such a comfort to her to have it, it's as good as new. It seemed as if she thought you were the only one good enough to sit in it."

"Don't, Ellen."

"I know, Peter." They were silent a while until the deep wells of grief had stilled in the sense of that sustaining presence. "I only wanted to be sure I wouldn't be going against her, breaking up the home. It seems like anything she set such store by oughtn't to stop just because she isn't here to take care of it." They had to come back to that the next day and the next.

"I only want to do what is best for you, Ellen."

"I'd be best off if I was making you happy, Peter--and I'd feel such a burden somehow, just boarding."

"The rents _are_ cheaper in the suburbs," Peter went so far as to admit.

It was all so inarticulate in him; how could he explain to Ellen the feeling that he had, that settling down to a home with her would somehow put an end to any dreams he had had of a home of his own, persistent but unshaped visions that vanished before the sudden brightening of Ellen's face at his least concession.

"We could have somebody in to clean," she reminded him, "and I hardly ever have to be in bed now."

The fact was that Peter had the very place in mind; he had often walked out there on Sundays from Blodgett's; he thought the neighbourhood had a clean and healthy look. He went up on Tuesday to see what could be done about it.

Lessing, who rented him the apartment, made the natural mistake about it that Peter's age and his inexperience as a householder invited. He said the neighbours were all a most desirable cla.s.s of people, and Peter could see for himself that the city was bound to build out that way in a few years. As for what Pleasanton could do in the way of climate, well, Lessing told him, with the air of being only a little less interested than he credited Peter with being, look at the perambulators.

They were as fine a lot of wellfilled vehicles as could be produced by any suburb anywhere, and Ellen for one was never tired of looking at them. But Peter couldn't understand why Ellen insisted on walking home from church Sunday morning the wrong way of the pavement.

"I suppose we do get in the way," she admitted after he had explained to her that they wouldn't be crowded off so frequently if they moved with the nurse-maid's parade and not against it, "but if we go this way we can see all the little faces."

"I didn't know you cared so much for babies."

"Well, you see it isn't as if I was to have any of my own----" Something in the tone with which she admitted the restraining fact of her affliction brought out for Peter how she had fitted her life to it, like a plant growing hardily out of a rock, climbing over and around it without rancour or rebellion. As he turned now to look at her long, plain face in the light of what had been going on in himself lately, he recalled that the determining influence which had drawn her thick hair into that unbecoming knot at the back of her neck had been the pain it had given her when she first began to put up her hair, to do it higher.

She was watching the bright little bonneted heads go by with the same detachment that he had learned to look at the shop windows, without thinking of appropriating any of their splendour for himself, and when she spoke again it was without any sensible connection with the present occasion.

"Peter, do you remember w.i.l.l.y Shakeley?"

"Shakey w.i.l.l.y, we used to call him. I remember his freckles; they were the biggest thing about him." He waited for the communicating thread, but nothing came except what presently reached him out of his own young recollections. "He wasn't good enough for you, Ellen," he said at last for all comment.

"He was kind, and he wouldn't have minded about my being lame, but a man has to have a healthy wife if he's a farmer." How completely she had accepted the deprivation for herself, he saw by her not wasting a sigh over it; she had schooled herself so long to go no further in her thought than she went on the crutch which tapped now on the pavement beside him. As if to stop his going any further on her account she smiled up at him. "Peter, if you were to meet any of the things you thought you'd grow up to be, do you suppose you'd know them?"

At least he could have told her that he didn't meet any of them on his way between Siegel Brothers and the flat in Pleasanton.

There are many things which if a young man goes without until he is twenty-five he can very well do without, but the one thing he cannot leave off without hurting him is the expectation of some time doing them. The obligation of the mortgage and Ellen's lameness had been a sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible, that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his entry with it. Now by the shock of his mother's death he found himself precipitated in a frame of living where a parlour set out of Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium was the limit of taste and understanding.

The worst thing about Siegel Brothers' parlour sets was that he sold them. He knew it was his particular value to Siegel Brothers that he had always known what sort of things were acceptable to the out-of-town trade. He had selected this one distinctly with an eye to the pleasure his mother and Ellen would get out of what Bloombury would think of it.

He hadn't expected it would turn and rend him. That it was distinctly better than anything he had had at Blodgett's was inconsiderable beside the fact that Blodgett's hadn't owned him. That he was owned now by his sister and the furniture, was plain to him the first time he sat down to figure out the difference between his salary and what it would cost him to let Ellen be a burden to him in the way that made her happiest. Not that he thought of Ellen in that way; he was glad when he thought of it at all articulately, to be able to make life so little of a burden to her. But though he saw quite clearly how, without some fortunate accident, the rest of his life would be taken up with making a home for Ellen and making it secure for her in case anything happened to him, he saw too, that there was no room in it for the Lovely Lady. The worst of all this was that he did not see how he was to go on without her.

He had fled to her from the inadequacy of all subst.i.tutes for her that his life afforded, and she had ended by making him over into the sort of man who could never be satisfied with anything less. Something he owed, no doubt, to that trait of his father's which made his memories of Italy more to him than his inheritance, but there it was, a world Peter had built up out of books and pictures and music, more real and habitable than that in which he went about in a gray business suit and a pleasant ready manner; a world from which, every time he fitted his key in the latch of the little flat in Pleasanton, he felt himself suddenly dispossessed.

It was not that he failed to get a proper pleasure out of being a householder, in being able to take a certain tone with the butcher and discuss water rates and rents with other householders going to and fro on his train. Ellen's cooking tasted good to him and it was very pleasant to see the pleasure it gave her to have Burnell of the hardware, out to supper occasionally. He made friends with Lessing, whose natty and determinedly architectural office with its air of being somehow akin to Wally Whitaker, occupied the corner where Peter waited every morning for his car. Lessing began it by coming out on the very first occasion to ask him how his sister did, in an effort to correct any impression of a want of perspicuity in his first estimate of Peter's situation. He kept it up for the reason perhaps that men friends are meant for each other from the beginning of time quite as much as we are accustomed to thinking of them as being meant for the lovely ladies whom they so frequently miss. Lessing was about Peter's own age and had large and cheerful notions of the probable increase of real-estate values in Pleasanton, combined with a just appreciation of the simple shrewdness which had so recommended Peter to his employers.

"You'd be a crackerjack to talk to the old ladies," Lessing generously praised him. "I scare 'em; they think I'm too hopeful." That he didn't, however, have the same effect on young ladies was apparent from the very pretty one whom Peter used to see about, especially on early closing Sat.u.r.day afternoons, helping him to shut up the office and get off to the ball game. He couldn't have told why, but those were the days when Peter allowed the car to carry him on to the next block, before alighting, after which he would make a point of being particularly kind to Ellen. It would never do for her to get a notion that the tapping of her crutch beside him had scared anything out of Peter's life which he might think worth having in it.

Along toward Thanksgiving time, on an occasion when Peter had just missed his car and had to wait for another one, Lessing--J. B. on the door sign, though he was the sort that everybody who knew him called Julian--came quite out to the pavement and stood there with his hands in his pockets and his hair beginning to curl boyishly in the dampness, quite br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with good fortune. Singularly he didn't mention it at once, but began to complain about the low state of the market in real estate.

"Not but that the values are all right," he was careful to explain; "it's just that they _are_ all right makes it so trying. If a fellow had a little capital now, he could do wonders. The deuce of a chap like me is that he hasn't any capital unless there's some buying."

"You think it's a good time then to lay out a little money?"

"Good! _Good!_ Oh, Lord, it's so good that if a fellow had a few thousands just put around judiciously, he wouldn't be able to sleep nights for hearing it turn over." He kicked the gravel in sheer impatience. "How's your sister?"

It was a formula that he had kept on with because to have dropped it immediately might have betrayed the extenuating nature of its inception, and besides there were so many directions in which one might start conversationally off from it. He made use of it now without waiting for Peter's habitual "Very well, thank you," by a burst into confidence.

"You see I'm engaged to be married--yes, I guess you've seen me with her. Fact is, I haven't cared how much people have seen so long as she's seen it, too; and now we've got it all fixed up, naturally I'm on the make. I'm dashed if I don't think I'll have to take a partner."

"I've been wanting to speak to you about some property of mine," Peter ventured. "It's a farm up country."

"What's it worth?"

"Well, I've added to it some the last ten years and made considerable improvement. I ought to get three thousand."

"That's for farming? For summer residence it ought to bring more than that. Any scenery?"

"Plenty," Peter satisfied him on that score. "I've been thinking," he let out shyly, "that if I could put the price of it in some place where I could watch it, the money would do me more good...."

Lessing turned on him a suddenly brightening eye.

"That's the talk--say, you know I think I could get you forty-five hundred for that farm of yours anyway." They looked at one another on the verge of things hopeful and considerable. As Peter's car swung around the curve, suddenly they blushed, both of them, and reached out and shook hands.

That evening as Peter came home he saw Lessing buying chrysanthemums at the florist's with a happy countenance, and to master the queer pang it gave him, Peter got off the car and walked a long way out on the dim wet pavement. He was looking at the bright picture of Lessing and the girl--she was really very pretty--and seeing instead, himself, quite the bachelor, and his lame sister taking their blameless dull way in the world. He couldn't any more for the life of him, get a picture of himself without Ellen in it; the tapping of her crutch sounded even in the House when he visited it in his dreams. It was well on this occasion that he had Ellen beside him, for she showed him the way presently to take it, as he knew she would take it as soon as he went home and told her--as another door by which they could enter sympathetically in the joyousness they were denied. She would be so pleased for Julian's sake, in whom, by Peter's account of him, she took the greatest interest, and so pleased for the girl to have such a handsome, capable lover. It made, for Ellen, a better thing of life if somebody could have him.

Peter went back after a while with that thought to the florist's and bought chrysanthemums, taking care to ask for the same kind Mr. Lessing had just ordered. He was feeling quite cheerful even, as he ran up the steps with them a few minutes later, and saw the square of light under the half-drawn curtain, and heard the tap of Ellen's crutch coming to meet him.

That night after he had gone to bed a very singular thing happened. The Princess out of the picture visited him. It was there at the foot of his bed in a new frame where Ellen had hung it--the young knight riding down the old, lumpy dragon, but with an air that Peter hadn't for a long time been able to manage for himself, doing a great thing easily the way one knew perfectly great things couldn't. The a.s.sistant sales manager of Siegel Brothers had been lying staring up at it for some time when the Princess spoke to him. He knew it was she, though there was no face nor form that he could remember in his waking hours, except that it was familiar.