White Ashes Part 40

"I really breathe a huge sigh of relief. And with positive cheerfulness I can now proceed to divulge the secrets I have learned about one Richard Smith, Esquire, in the months which have elapsed since a certain traveler from the Far East--relatively--returned home from New York. As my somewhat cryptic rhetoric may not be clear, and appreciating your fondness for words of one syllable, permit me to state that this means you.

"Self-satisfaction, self-absorption, self-sufficiency, have had a sobering shock. For I find that for the full and perfect enjoyment of my city I myself am no longer enough. I need company--curiously, one specific and particular individual whom, having once named, I need not name again.

"Do you suppose all this can be a sort of vanity? Do you think it was my delight in the sound of my own voice, booming through the crowded streets I love like the bittern across his lonely marshes, that makes me wish you would abandon even such thrilling traffic as trousseau planning, and come back and let me boom some more? For I have found it truth absolute that New York with Miss Maitland in it is a better place than the same city peopled only by Richard Smith--and some millions of others. Do you object to my telling you this? If your mood is unusually Bostonian when you receive this letter, you will very likely hurl the fragments of it into an ashcan omitted from the map of the brown building on Deerfield Street. However, I am counting heavily on the mood and influence of the approaching wedding to help me out.

"For n.o.body--that is, no real girl--is inflexible when there is a wedding in the air, and your letter only proves you are a real girl--which I always thought you to be. And I'm awfully glad you are!

Only think how icily unhuman you would seem if you could hold yourself superior even to a wedding, and especially to one so romantic as this of Miss Hurd's promises to be, with all the melodramatic settings of a possible elopement, a distracted mother, and the thunderously raging paternal parent of the disinherited heiress to add zest to the occasion! If you remained unmelted by all this, my next visit to Boston--which I am sorry to say cannot occur as soon as I would like to have it--would almost certainly see my calls confined to insurance agents and lawyers--or perhaps to the mythical other person referred to in your letter.

"For the other person is purely mythical, as you must some day know.

Only in Deerfield Street is there the type of brown building that irresistibly attracts me. So beware of stray rings at the doorbell, for any moment it may be I. Do you believe in telepathy? And if so, do you believe in it sufficiently to think it can ring a doorbell all the way from New York to Boston? If you do, listen--and you can hear it now!

"You asked me about the onslaught upon the octopus, and I am happy to say that things are going as well as the most ardent muck-raker on the most active fifteen-cent reform magazine could wish. The suit has been put on the calendar for trial in Ma.s.sachusetts, and in New York State the Superintendent of Insurance is causing more trouble than we ourselves could possibly have created. There haven't been any actual results yet, but the moral effect for us has been immense. The Eastern Conference people are no fools, and they can read the Mene-tekel on the wall even if they don't know a.s.syrian.

"If you have talked with Mr. Osgood, you doubtless know that we are agreed on our Boston plans. At the proper time he is to go back into his office, taking the Guardian back with him--and probably the first thing he will do after taking charge again will be to resign the Salamander. Meanwhile we sit as tight as a couple of dynamite conspirators--and at present the Guardian appoints no Boston representative and accepts no Boston business except from a few suburban agents.

"Elsewhere things are looking very much more cheerful than when I saw you; and when the rush begins to let up a bit, I shall have no difficulty at all in persuading myself that a conference with Mr.

Osgood and our Boston attorneys is necessary. Until then I must do my best to forget that New York is less delightful under some conditions than--others.

"I hope you will be good enough to write me all about the wedding of Miss Hurd and Wilkinson. Somehow I cannot help regarding it as a fundamentally humorous happening--I think the picture of Wilkinson as a man of responsibilities in any actual sense is probably the cause of my amus.e.m.e.nt. But I wish them both the very best of luck, and if you think it a suitable match, I am quite willing to accept your judgment.

Wilkinson always seemed to me to look quite happy and contented, and it is the popular belief that any young bachelor of such an appearance needs a woman to take care of him.

"Do you remember the old print of the Madison Cottage that we discovered in the print room of the Library one afternoon? I found a copy of it in a second-hand book shop down town a few days ago. In case you don't object to having it I am "inclosing it herewith," as we say in our office correspondence a hundred times a week. Except that the people to whom we send the inclosures usually don't want them, and I am hoping that you will care something about this.

"Very sincerely yours,

"RICHARD SMITH."

It was at the close of a pleasant afternoon in the good town of Boston, only a few days after the arrival of this letter, that two girls and a young man rather hastily descended the front steps of a certain substantial and dignified dwelling in the Back Bay district. That something a little out of the ordinary had occurred might have been guessed from the expression of guilt on the faces of certainly two and perhaps all three of them, and possibly by the half-embarra.s.sed alacrity with which the young man escorted his companions down the steps. No one of them apparently cared even to glance back at the building they had just left, although its occupancy was as respectable as its appearance indicated; and each one seemed oddly reluctant to look at either of the others. It was not until their feet stood soundly on the flagged sidewalk and the house was well behind them that the tension snapped and the young man spoke.

"Well, Isabel," said he, "I'm awfully glad I've done it, but that ceremony was certainly terrific. I believe that to go through such a thing twice in a span of life would unhinge a mind like mine, whose hinges creak slightly at times, anyway."

"Very well, Charlie," responded the young lady addressed, smiling. "I think I can arrange that you shan't have to, for the Hurds are a notoriously long-lived family."

"But what was so terrific about it, Charlie?" inquired the other young lady. "It didn't seem to me to differ much from any other marriage ceremony--and you must have heard dozens at one time or another."

"Oh, I suppose I have," was the reply; "but somehow that man made me feel like a worm--and a worm that's only by the most extraordinary luck managed to keep out of jail. I felt like a cheap political hack accepting the nomination for an important office that I was perfectly certain I couldn't fill acceptably."

"Well, he did look a trifle severe--not very cheerful," conceded Miss Maitland.

"Cheerful! He looked about as cheerful as a firm believer in infant d.a.m.nation during a bad attack of dyspepsia. But never mind." He turned to the other girl. "Now that it's all over, how does it feel, Isabel, to be Mrs. Charles Sylvester Wilkinson?"

"I really don't know," said his wife, considering a moment. "It's the Sylvester part that seems most unfamiliar. I had honestly almost forgotten that you had such a decorative middle name. And when I was told that some one called Charles Sylvester had endowed me with all his worldly goods, I admit I felt somewhat surprised."

"You would have been even more so if, at the same time, you had been given a list of them," replied the bridegroom. "I think--to go back to the Archbishop--" he said reflectively, "that the trouble with that man was that he was too high-church. Now my leanings have never been toward high-churchness. Ordinarily my inclinations toward church at all are discernible with difficulty. My enthusiasm regarding it is continually, under normal conditions, at low ebb. And this, I take it, makes me a low-churchman."

"It's a most encouraging sign, to see you embracing any kind of ritual," said Miss Maitland. "Isabel, I have hopes of him yet."

"That is very good of you," replied the bride, smiling amiably at her lord and master--to speak academically.

"Very strange feeling it gives one to be so suddenly married in this way--without any of the conventional preliminaries," Wilkinson continued. "I always imagined that when my time was come, while the grape scissors and sets of Jane Austen and cut gla.s.s berry bowls were pouring in on my happy fiancee, I should have one last, lonely, sentimental hour set apart for maiden meditations and twilight reflections over my dead life and half-forgotten past. Also to recover from the effects of my ushers' dinner. An ushers'--girls, have either of you ever given or even attended an ushers' dinner?"

His companions' reply was a laughing negative.

"Well," said the young man, gravely, "to have escaped giving an ushers'

dinner is a.s.suredly worth an almost innumerable number of pairs of grape scissors and several entire editions of Jane Austen. Yes, I am certainly to be congratulated, for an ushers' dinner should be shunned like the Bubonic plague. To begin with, the cost is simply colossal.

The food, of course, counts for practically nothing, and the drink is only an incidental, though a large one. But repairing the broken furniture, and repapering and redecorating the room in which the function has been held, and purchasing another piano in place of the one which your guests have playfully torn to pieces--those are a few of the things that count."

"They sound as though they did," agreed Miss Maitland.

"Moreover," Wilkinson continued, "if the dinner is given at the club to which you belong, you always put the board of governors in an awkward position, for at their next meeting after your entertainment they can never agree on whether to expel you outright or merely suspend you for three years, and quite often there is bad feeling created by these dissensions; while if you hold the affair at a public restaurant, you risk the friendly ultimate intervention of the police. And then the favors! Why should I present several gentlemen with pearl stick pins, when I have none myself? To be sure I might give my best man the ticket for mine, and he could redeem it whenever he had four dollars, but generally speaking, the answer is in the interrogative."

"On the whole, then," said his bride, "you ought to be reconciled for the loss of your twilight reflections."

"When I look into your eyes I am repaid for everything! There!" he turned to Helen, "could any one have said a perfect thing more perfectly?" And Miss Maitland agreed that, although his grammar might have been criticized, his sentiment and delivery were flawless.

"Well, it's over now, so I'm glad you accept it gracefully," she said.

"You're committed, temporarily at least--unless you wish to start for Nevada at once."

"Really, Helen, I think it's most indelicate of you to refer to such a possibility," the other girl remarked. "I've only been married fifteen minutes, and to be deserted by one's husband even within a week or two is not considered flattering."

"No, I think I'll stay," Wilkinson replied. "But if I were to start West at all, I should say the sooner the better to avert the wrath of your esteemed but irascible parent."

"I think father has said all he has to say; he expressed himself most thoroughly," Isabel rejoined thoughtfully.

"I should say he did!" her husband agreed. "With elaborate precision, if I may so express it. He told me enough about my family and antecedents to make me wholly ashamed to belong to them. His presentation of myself was simply masterful; it would have moved one of his own trolley cars; I didn't wonder a bit that he objected to me as a son-in-law. In fact, I told him that had I known all these things I should have sought a fitting helpmate from the State Reformatory, but that I could not withdraw--my word was pledged."

"What did he say to that?" Helen asked, with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"He intimated that, as I seemed susceptible to reason, perhaps his daughter also might be. But I a.s.sured him that he failed to calculate correctly my undeniable personal charm--that I was an acquired taste, but one for which there was no cure."

"An odd one, but mine own?" suggested Isabel.

"That was not quite the idea I intended to convey, but I am bound to admit it was just about the way it seemed to strike your respected parent. That is, he said, 'I suppose if she's been idiotic enough to decide to marry you, it would be impossible to bring her to her senses now.' I cordially a.s.sented."

"Do you know, I believe I really _am_ married," Isabel said reflectively; "for I certainly object most decidedly to my father's way of talking to you. Heavens! If I have to go through life resenting the things people say of my husband, I shall certainly lead a checkered career."

"It is the common lot of wives," remarked her husband philosophically.

"But here we are, hard by the gilded food bazaar wherein a head waiter with drawn b.u.t.terknife guards a table for three, reserved in my name.

We are about fifteen minutes early, but personally I could look with resignation on the idea of nourishment."

"The voice of returning nature," said Helen, with a laugh. "Charlie married is the same man, in one respect at least, that we have always known. Isabel, you may be disturbed over what people say about your husband, but you will never need to be disturbed at his lack of appet.i.te."

"The main disturbance will be in providing for it," Wilkinson responded. "The securities I own bring me in a revenue of thirty dollars a year. That is two dollars and a half a month, or about eight cents a day. I read only yesterday an article about some ingenious person who contrived to support life on something like that sum, but my recollection is that his menu consisted almost entirely of peanut b.u.t.ter--of which I am not particularly fond--and besides that, there was only one of him, while there are two of us."

"Yes, that's true," Miss Maitland conceded.

"I had begun to think I had gotten financially on my feet, when my father-in-law turned over that trolley insurance to me, but he says he'll see me considerably below the equator before he gives me the renewal of it. Deeply do I regret that I did not succeed in getting him to take out three-year policies."