With the Procession Part 10

For a third new acquaintance Truesdale was indebted to his aunt Lydia; he had felt certain, all along, that some such indebtedness would befall.

His aunt lived two or three miles due south from his father's, near the last brace of big hotels. Her house had a rather imposing but impa.s.sive front of gray-stone, with many neighbors, more or less varying the same type, to the right and to the left and over the way. The house had never the absolute effect of extending hospitality; but he understood the possibilities of the interior, and knew that a cup of tea late on a November afternoon was among them.

As he drew near he found this house and the other houses combined in a conspiracy of silence against the musical addresses of a swarthy foreigner who had a foothold a yard beyond the curbstone, and who was turning the crank of his instrument with all the rapid regularity of the thorough mechanician. The whole street rang. "'Ah, perche non posso odiarti!'" hummed Truesdale in unison with the organ, as the performer, after an intricate cadenza, returned to the original theme. "That's the only recognizable thing I've heard these fellows play since I came over.

I wonder who puts together all the shocking stuff they are loaded up with nowadays."

The melody, so plaintive and cloying as a vocal performance, leaped forward briskly enough under the rapid lashings to and fro of the crank; the elbow of the organist moved with a swift rhythm as his searching eye tried vainly to wring a penny or two from some one of all these opulent facades. "Good Heaven!" cried Truesdale; "how little feeling, how little expression! Here," he said to the man in Italian; "take this half lira and let _me_ have a chance. Bellini was never meant to go like that."

The man, with a cheerful grin, yielded up his instrument to this engaging youth who was able to address him so pointedly in his own language, and Truesdale, with his eye on his aunt's upper windows, proceeded to indulge himself in a realization of his ideal. His aunt was vastly susceptible to music, and he would heap upon her (in the absence of any other) all those pa.s.sionate reproaches for cruelty and faithlessness proper to the role--welling crescendos and plaintive diminuendos and long, slow rallentandos, followed quickly by panting and impa.s.sioned accelerandos.

In other words, he would show this music-cobbler the possibilities of his instrument and the emotional capacity of the human soul. Incidentally, he should earn his cup of tea.

"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to h-a-te thee, Cruel creature, as deeply as I would?"

began Truesdale, blithely, with his eye on the one window whose shade was not completely lowered. But at the third or fourth measure he paused disconcerted. He had adopted a varying rhythm to express each last fine shade of the text, and the air was already littered with abrupt and disjointed phrases which began with a quick snarl or with a prolonged nasal wail, leaving a sudden hiatus here, and giving there a long, lingering scream on some mere pa.s.sing note.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Truesdale, "this won't do at all. Here, signor organista, just set that thing back, will you, and we'll start again."

"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to hate thee?"

More notes shattered themselves on the stone walls about him--singly, in bunches, in long, detached wails. The organ yelped and snarled as Truesdale, time routed and accent annihilated, abandoned himself to the expression and the phrasing of the true Italian school. Two or three pa.s.sing children paused on the pavement; a park policeman, stationed on the next corner, walked his sedate iron-gray slowly along to the point of disturbance.

Presently the object of all this attention showed herself. Mrs. Rhodes appeared at the window with that expression of indignant protest which forecasts an appeal to the authorities. When she saw the offending cause her indignation did not greatly diminish; she refused to smile even when Truesdale extended his hat for the usual tribute. He saw her lips move, however, with a quick exclamation which brought a second person to the window. Then both immediately withdrew.

"Another niece, I swear!" said Truesdale; "and I've walked right into it." He gave the man a second dime. "I guess you understand it better than I do, after all," he said, magnanimously.

"What was your idea in making me ridiculous that way?" his aunt asked in severe reproach, as she advanced to meet him in the reception-hall. "Do you want to set me up as a laughingstock for all my friends and neighbors? After all I've told Bertie about your music, too! I don't know whether I shall let you know her or not."

"It was pretty rocky, wasn't it?" Truesdale admitted, with a cheery impartiality. "I'm afraid it takes more practice than I've ever had a chance to give it. And perhaps I don't understand the genius of the instrument. Where do you suppose they learn to do it? How long a course is necessary, do you fancy, to get a complete grip on the technique?"

His aunt's protest had been purely personal. With a broader outlook and a better understanding she might have protested on behalf of a slighted neighborhood, or, indeed, of a misprized town. A finer vision might have seen in Truesdale's prank a good-natured, half-contemptuous indifference alike to place and people. "I don't know _what_ the Warners over the way will think," she emitted, as if that were all.

She presently relented as to the new inmate of her household. "Come, Bertie!" she called; "step up, like a good girl. This is my nephew Truesdale--you've heard all about him; Miss Bertie Patterson, of Madison."

Miss Patterson of Madison was a shy, brown-eyed little girl who, at a guess, had been in long dresses but a year or two; as she faced Truesdale she seemed to be wondering if she might venture to smile. She had never before been south of the Wisconsin State line; but Mrs. Rhodes, having exhausted the ranks of her own nieces, was now giving a tardy recognition to the nieces of her late husband. Bertie Patterson had come for the winter, and she was finding a great deal of pleasure and interest (slightly tinctured with awe) in a town which for some years she had favored with a highly idealistic antic.i.p.ation.

"Nice little thing," admitted Truesdale, inwardly; "but Aunt Lydia has got to leave _me_ alone."

Mrs. Rhodes took him into the drawing-room, and had Bertie Patterson make him his tea. She did this very nicely; she helped rather than hindered the effect by her hesitancy and lack of complete confidence. She had never poured tea many times before for a young man--never at all for just such a young man as this.

"Now," said his aunt, presently. She emitted this monosyllable with a falling inflection, and followed it by a full stop. She took his teacup from him. "You know what little Tommy Tucker did." She placed her thumb on one of the upper black notes of the piano and waved her fingers over the remainder of the keyboard. "'Just a song at twilight,'" She quoted, with a coaxing smile.

"All right," said Truesdale, promptly. "Thanks for this chance to redeem myself. I'll show you now how it really ought to go."

And he did. At Milan he had seen reflected in his looking-gla.s.s not only Fernando, but Elvino, too, besides Edgardo and Manrico, and that whole romantic brotherhood. He resuscitated them all, with as much sentiment, romance, pa.s.sion, drama, as each individual case required, while Bertie Patterson sat in the fading light behind the great three-cornered screen of the up-tilted cover and clasped her hands and brought her generous idealizing faculty into its fullest play.

Then he sang a few German lieder of a more contemporaneous cast. Then his aunt asked him for that last sweet little thing of his own. "I don't believe Bertie has ever heard a composer sing one of his own songs."

As he concluded, his aunt gave a long and appreciative sigh. "There!" she breathed. Then: "Why do you act like a crazy, when you can be so nice if you only will?"

VII

"Drive on a little farther, Martin," Mrs. Bates directed her coachman; "I can never work my way through all that mess."

Beds of mortar and piles of brick half filled the roadway, and the posts of a kind of rough plank canopy, which formed a shelter for pedestrians, rose flush with the curbstone. Far above this improvised shelter bricklayers were adding the courses of a new story or two to the walls of a shabby and smoke-stained old structure, and immediately below it the march of traffic and the hubbub of trade proceeded upon the broad flag sidewalk as fully as contractors and their underlings would permit.

"Right over there," Mrs. Bates indicated; "between that sand-pile and the row of flour-barrels."

Porters in blue overalls hurried boxes and tubs across the wide walk to the waiting carts of suburban grocers. Through the dingy windows there showed rows of shelves set with bottles of olives or cluttered with gla.s.s jars containing various grades of mola.s.ses. From the narrow window of a small, close pen, a few feet within the door, a shipping-clerk, wearing a battered straw hat of the past summer, thrust out bills of lading to draymen and issued directions to a gang of German and Swedish roustabouts.

"I have taken a great time to come," Mrs. Bates observed to herself. She rubbed a streak of lime from her fur coat, and stooped to pick a splinter from the hem of her skirt. "Who's the one to ask, I wonder?"

She secured the interest of a plump, round-shouldered young German, whose viscous hands had just left a syrup-cask, and whose wide blue eyes stared at this unaccustomed visitor with an honest wonder. He ventured to lead her as far as a door in a grimy gla.s.s part.i.tion which closed off a large room filled with desks, gas-shades, clerks, and account-books. Circles of teacups stood on the round tops of oak tables; little pasteboard trays of coffee were disposed on the wide window-ledges, and were also ranged on the top of a substantial bal.u.s.trade that shut off two or three gentlemen in high silk hats from the other occupants of the place.

Mrs. Bates threw herself upon the guidance of a young office-hand--the sole person present who seemed sufficiently disengaged to notice her. He asked her, with a mixture of surprise and deference, what name he should give.

"Sue Lathrop, say," she responded, in an access of large and liberal recklessness.

She was led through another door, in another dingy gla.s.s part.i.tion, to a smaller room at one corner, and as she pa.s.sed along she threw a general glance over her surroundings. "So _he's_ here, then!" she said, under her breath, as one of the gentlemen took off his hat and set it carefully on top of a desk. "I'd forgotten all about his being in business with David.

It's just as well if he didn't see me. No love lost," she added, grimly.

She paused on the threshold of this last doorway; apparently she had fallen upon the final moments of some small conference. A tall, spare old man was delaying the resumption of his correspondence to call a last word after a younger one, who had just set his hat upon the back of his head and was now moving towards the exit.

"Try a summons--yes," said the elder; "that would have been the best thing to start with, wouldn't it?"

"I don't quite see it that way,' replied the other, in the tone of heated defence. "he took the goods, and must have had them on the premises."

"You didn't find them, though. I don't quite see the use of your having gone with a writ of replevin after goods that I were bought to be sold again as soon as might be."

"Such old stuff isn't worked off in any such haste as that. It's as I tell you--word was got around to her that the writ had been issued. The place was all turned upside down; the things had been hidden away."

"Who could have told her?"

"Who?" cried the other, with a scornful impatience. "Somebody connected with the court. Who else could? Who else knew? Well, I'll try the other thing; there is plenty yet to be learned about justice-court justice, no doubt." He pa.s.sed out with snapping eyes and a curl on his lips, and the older man again bent himself over his desk.

It was a cramped little room with a breadth or two of worn oilcloth on the floor. Two or three shelves, set across the dingy window, supported a range of gla.s.s jars filled with nutmegs and orris-root. On the tilted flagging, outside, the tops of a row of blue gasoline barrels held each a half-pint of the past night's shower, and across the muddy street bunches of battered bananas hung from the rusty framework of several shabby old awnings.

"Poor David! twenty years and more of _this_!" Mrs. Bates stood within the doorway. It was easy enough to figure her as already forgotten--easier still when the old man's half-guilty start at length acknowledged her presence.

She stepped forward with an undaunted cordiality. "Well, David, here I am at last, you see. The mountain wouldn't come to Mohammed, so"--She tapped her foot smartly on the oilcloth. "Here stands Sue Lathrop, with a long memory and a disposition to meet the mountain half-way, or three-quarters, or seven-eighths, or to trudge the whole distance--even to the last yard. One, two, three!" she counted, as she stepped up to his desk and flung out her hand.

The old man rose with something like alacrity. He banished his slight frown of preoccupation and hastened to replace it by an expression of--so to speak--apologetic cordiality.

"Mrs. Bates," he murmured. "It's very kind of you to come here--very. My daughter--" he hesitated. He finished the sentence by drawing up a chair and clearing its seat of the ruck of morning papers.