Flint Part 25

Cousin John thinks the world revolves round the Oldbury bank; and I suppose it is natural he should, seeing how long he has been president, and what a fine reputation it has the country round.

Of course Philip does not see it in the same light, and it seems he made some ill-advised speech,--said he would rather turn s.e.xton and bury other people than be buried alive himself in a hole like that, which was not a nice thing for him to say to his father,--but that was no reason why Cousin John should swear at him, and tell him he was sick of his capitalist airs, and he for one should not be surprised if he came some day to beg for aid from the bank he thought too insignificant to be worthy of his attention.

Philip was furious. "Bankrupt I may be some day," he answered, "but I promise you I will go to the poorhouse before ever I ask help of you and your infernal bank."

This was the state of mind in which they parted, when Philip had come home for his first visit in years. I could have shaken them both for their obstinacy and lack of common sense; but it is always so when men live alone. They need a woman about the house to accustom them to being contradicted. Now if Philip married a girl like Winifred, she would soon straighten things out. I can see now how Cousin John would dote on her and pretend not to care very much, and scold sometimes when he had the gout; but all the while be her slave and spend his life trying to give her pleasure. That is what ought to happen, so of course it won't. Instead, Philip will go and marry some uncomfortable sort of person with a mission. Oh, dear! what if it should be--?

There, I will not allow my mind to turn in _that_ direction. I have a sort of superst.i.tion that thinking too much about any unfortunate thing helps to bring it about. I think it must be this city life which makes me feel so blue and discouraged. The fact is, I do not like New York. In the first place, because it is not Boston; and in the second place, because it _is_ New York. There is too much of everything here--too much money, too much show, too many lamps, and sofa-pillows, and courses at dinner. Then everybody seems to be everlastingly at work getting ready to live. Here is Winifred, for instance, tearing up and down for hours after upholsterers and paper-hangers, toiling about from shop to shop, and from Broadway to Sixth Avenue, matching samples and trying aesthetic effects which no one but herself cares anything for when they are accomplished. And by the end of the day she is so tired that she falls asleep when I read aloud to her in the evening.

"Why do you fuss so about everything?" I asked her the other day. "We don't fuss in Boston."

"That accounts," she answered,--which was not very civil, I thought. She has certainly grown very queer this fall. She told me this morning that she thought the Unitarians were as bigoted as anybody. Now she never would have said a thing like that this summer when she was living in the open air. It's my opinion that two things are telling upon her,--furnace heat and the influence of that Mr.

Flint--especially the last. Why, it just seems to me as if she were trying to make herself over into the kind of woman he would be likely to like. She has dropped her old hoidenish ways and goes about as prim as a Puritan. She says she is always like that in the city, and that her Nepaug ways are only a reaction; but I don't believe it. He comes here a great deal, that is certain; and I don't think it is very gentlemanly, after her begging him, as I heard her with my own ears, to go away. But he is too selfish to care what any one wants but himself. For some reason or other it suits his plans just now to try to please Winifred.

The first night I was here Winifred was telling him about Maria Polonati, the little Italian girl who sells flowers at the corner of the Square, and how she had made friends with her, and learned all about her "padre" and her "madre" and the playmates she had left behind her in the "bella Napoli." Winifred knows how to tell a thing so it seems to stand right out like the old Dutch women in the pictures, and I could see that Mr. Flint was taking it all in, for all he said so little; and so he was, for the next time he came he walked right up to Winifred's chair and dropped a great bunch of violets into her lap.

"The little girl at the corner sent you these," he said; and Winifred smiled as if it were the most natural thing in the world for that cross-grained egotist to do a thing like that. He did it rather gracefully, I admit; but a Boston man would have done it just as well, if he had only thought of it.

Of late Mr. Flint has taken to dropping in once or twice a week of an evening to play whist,--he and Winifred against her father and me. Now I like to beat as well as any one; but I do like some show of organized resistance, and this young man's playing is what I call impertinently poor, as if he did not think it worth while to try.

Winifred seems just as well satisfied to be beaten as to beat, and the Professor takes a guileless and childlike satisfaction in his triumph which is quite pitiable. I take pains to let Mr. Flint see that I at least am not taken in; but he only smiles in that exasperatingly non-committal way of his, as if it mattered little enough to him what I thought one way or the other. After the game is over he gets a chance for a few minutes' talk with Winifred while I am hunting up my knitting and her father his pipe, and it is my belief that it's just those few minutes that he looks forward to all the evening, while he is ignoring his partner's trump-signal and leading from his weak suit.

Winifred has caught a very annoying trick of turning to him on all occasions, as if waiting to know what he thought before making up her mind. Altogether I don't like the look of things at all.

Of course there was no getting out of inviting Mr. Flint to the little birthday party which we were planning for Nora Costello. To tell the truth, n.o.body but me seemed to want to get out of it. Professor Anstice says he is the most agreeable man that comes to the house, and when I confided to him that I was afraid Winifred would fall in love with him, he answered: "She might do worse. She might do much worse."

That was all the consolation I got in that quarter, and with Winifred herself it was as bad. I thought it might do good to recall some of her early impressions, which seem to have changed so mightily of late.

"Don't you remember," I said, "how you called him a refrigerator?"

"Did I?" she said with a little laugh. "Well, he was rather frigid in those days."

"Yes, and you said how disagreeable his manners were, and how thoughtless he was of every one but himself."

At this Winifred colored up as if they hadn't been her own very words.

"If I said it," she answered with a little toss of her head, "or if anybody else said it, it was a stupid slander, which grows stupider every time it is repeated."

I was a little nettled myself at her answering me like that. "You didn't think so," I said, "when you begged him to go away from Nepaug."

At this Winifred jumped straight up from her chair, running her hand through her hair in a way she has when she is excited--"Did you hear that? Then you must have been listening," she cried out, as if she were accusing me of chicken-stealing.

"If you think that of me, Winifred, the sooner my trunk is packed the better," I answered, as stiff as the Captain's monument on Duxbury Hill.

In an instant Winifred was on her knees by my side, and had thrown her arms around my neck.

"No, no, dear Miss Standish, I do not think it, and I ought not to have said it. It only made me feel so badly to think of any one's having overheard my secret, which after all was not my own."

Now here was my chance to find out the very thing which had been bothering my old head all these weeks. I had only to pretend to know and I should hear it all, for Winifred was in one of her rare confidential moods. But that inconvenient New England conscience of mine not only would not let me pretend, but it p.r.i.c.ked me a little with Winifred's accusation of having listened. Perhaps if my ears had not been strained just a trifle, I should not have caught as much as I did of the conversation at Flying Point. Anyway, I felt bound to confess now.

"I did not hear anything but just your asking him to go away, and his answering rather reluctantly that he did not want to, but he would."

"Then," said Winifred, "you are bound to take my word for the meaning of the s.n.a.t.c.h of talk you heard, and I tell you that he acted like a gentleman and a very honorable gentleman; moreover, that from that good hour I began to be ashamed of my rash estimate of him (I always do jump in overhead in my judgments) and am only waiting for a chance to tell him so frankly, and to ask him to forget all my rude speeches."

After this there was no more to be said. I only pray to be kept from arguing. The habit of making comments has brought me into more trouble than all my other vices put together. Well, this time grace was given me to hold my tongue. When I saw a note addressed in Winifred's hand to "J. Edwards Flint, Esq.," I did not even observe that it would have been as well to let her father write it, nor did I say what I think,--that I hate to see a man chop off his first name with a capital and write his middle name in full. It always looks like an alias. The man who does it is either trying to attract attention or trying to get rid of it.

Everything else about the birthday scheme ran as smooth as a ribbon from Jordan & Marsh's. I begged leave to make the cake, and it came out of the oven done to a turn, white as snow inside and a golden brown on the crust. Nora Costello and her brother came at eight o'clock just as they had promised, with unfas.h.i.+onable promptness. They looked somewhat surprised to see the house so lighted up, and Nora gave a timid little glance at Winifred's rose-colored waist (a woman doesn't forget how clothes look just because she joins the Salvation Army); but she herself was a picture in spite of her dress--perhaps because of it, for the close-fitting blue gown, with its plain band at the neck and sleeves, set off her fine features and the n.o.ble carriage of her head. The chief decoration of her dress was a scarlet ribbon coming diagonally from the shoulder to the belt, marked "Jesus is My Helper." I did wish she had not felt called to make a guy of herself with that thing; but she seemed so unconscious of it herself that I should have forgotten it too if Mr. Flint had not been coming; but I hate to see a scoffer like him get hold of anything ridiculous in religion. Now we Unitarians stand midway between scepticism and superst.i.tion. I wonder everybody can't see it as we do.

I am bound to say, however, that Mr. Flint behaved exceedingly well. A thorough acquaintance with the world seems to give pleasanter manners sometimes than a religious nature. Anyway, he came forward and greeted her very handsomely. He handed her a little volume of Thomas a Kempis, "For those leisure hours which you never have," he said. The girl looked mightily pleased but a little bewildered, and still more so when Philip Brady followed with a great bunch of the reddest of red roses (trust men for always picking out red flowers--I don't believe they know there is any other color). Tied by a satin ribbon to the flowers was the little blue bag which I made at Nepaug, and inside it lay the lost brooch. I never saw any such delight as shone on Nora Costello's face when she drew out the pin. She looked from one to another of us, then at the pin in her hand, which she turned about and about, crying over it softly. At length she brushed away her tears and smiled a real child's smile of pure pleasure. "Look, Angus!" she exclaimed, holding out her treasure to her brother, "the lost is found. Do you mind the day Mither gave it me, and how she bade me have a care, for that I was a heedless la.s.s and like to lose it?"

"Ay, I mind it," answered her brother, a flush of gratified pride and affection mounting to his high cheekbones. "How can we thank these kind folks?"

"How indeed!" echoed Nora. "Oh, how good it is to have it back!" she exclaimed, fondling the brooch as though it had life and could feel.

"But where did you find it, and why--Ah! I see," she added, as she turned it in her hand--"you dear, good folks--and here it was only this morning I thought the Lord had clean forgot 't was my birthday."

I wish I could recall on paper the little foreign accent of the Scotch girl which seemed to add so much to the charm of her simple speech.

Her big drooping eyes were wet with tears, and the little homesick note in her voice made an irresistible appeal to the hearts of those who heard it,--at least it did to mine, and I sneaked away behind the lid of the grand piano, which was open, to get out my pocket handkerchief, for I did not choose to make a spectacle of myself, and I don't know how to cry prettily, like Nora Costello. My nose gets red, and my eyes look as if I were addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors.

When I emerged from behind the screen of the piano, I saw Philip Brady standing over Nora Costello, and looking down at her in a way that made my heart jump. She is a sweet girl, and a good girl, and a beautiful girl; but really this wouldn't do at all. Fancy Cousin John's son going round with a drum, keeping company with a tambourine. Shades of Dr. Charming forbid! Now why couldn't it have been Mr. Flint? That would have been poetic justice. Conversion of an atheist--marriage on the platform in presence of the Army. She is too good for him; but still I would have given my blessing--but here everything is snarled up and getting worse all the time.

The surprises of the evening were not over yet, for the most remarkable remains to tell. While we were all sitting at table (Winifred did look startlingly handsome under the pink candle-shades) the bell rang, and a messenger boy appeared.

Could he not leave the package? Professor Anstice asked, when he had signed the ticket the boy took out of his hat, where for some inscrutable reason New York messengers carry everything.

No, he was ordered to give it to Miss Anstice herself.

"Very well," said Winifred, "bring it in by all means. Perhaps some one has mixed things a little, and fancies that it is _my_ birthday that we are celebrating."

So in came the package, and with it a great bunch of violets, and a card which said, "The little girl at the corner sends you these."

I saw Winifred's hands tremble as she untied the ends of the package.

The wrappings fell off and she saw a picture.

"What--who is it?" Winifred asked, turning from one to another of us with bewilderment in her eyes.

"A relative of yours, I believe," Mr. Flint answered quietly. "Her name is Ruth. She formed the habit of eloping in her youth, and had not the heart to refuse my entreaties to run away with me when I left Nepaug."

Then in an instant it flashed across Winifred and all of us that this was the portrait for which she had been searching all summer (any one might have recognized it, for the resemblance to Winifred about the eyes and mouth is unmistakable), and she knew of course that Mr. Flint had been the one to find it. Her way of taking the affair was very characteristic. There was no tearful tremulous grat.i.tude like Nora Costello's, but a great overflow of pride and gladness. Rising, with her just filled wine gla.s.s in her hand, and her head thrown back a little as if in a pride which had a shade of defiance in it, she called out, "A health!--a health! Here's to my great-great-grandmother, the runaway bride, and to the generous man who restored her to the bosom of her family!"

Every one looked bewildered, but all laughed and drank the toast (I noticed that the Costellos drank theirs in water), and then began to ask questions as fast as they could talk. The health broke up the feast, and every one crowded about the portrait. As Winifred and Mr.

Flint stood close behind me, I overheard, this time without intention, upon my honor, an exchange of remarks between them.

"You have shown yourself very generous, Mr. Flint," Winifred remarked.

"You will not surely be so _un_generous as not to let us make some little return for your gift. I am not ignorant that such a portrait has a value besides that of sentiment."

"You touch me there on a sore point, Miss Anstice," Mr. Flint answered. "I am afraid the person to whom you are really indebted is old Marsden, for I knew if I offered him anything like the real value of the picture, he would hold it for the price of a Raphael. So I made him set his own price, which the sly old dog thought a staggering one, and which I found so absurdly low that I shall feel bound to remember him handsomely at Christmas."

"You are jesting," Winifred answered, speaking lower; "but I am in earnest. Can we not persuade you to let us pay for this picture? For the pleasure you have given us we never could repay you."

"If it is a question of payment," said Mr. Flint, sinking his voice still lower, "I am so deep in your debt that it would bankrupt me to straighten our accounts. If it is a question of generosity, and I should come to you some day and ask--"

"Did you say it was a Copley?"