White Ashes Part 18

"I hope it will not," returned Smith, politely.

She was about to turn to the door. The underwriter made no move.

"Shall I say good-by now?" she asked.

"Here better than elsewhere. Good-by."

And then, to her subsequent surprise, Helen found herself saying:--

"I am stopping with my aunt, Miss Wardrop, at thirteen Was.h.i.+ngton Square, North. If you and I are to go into the harness business together, I hope you will come--and bring your price lists and things, won't you?"

"Thank you. I will surely come," the underwriter answered simply.

It was not until she found herself once more mounting the steps of her aunt's house that Miss Maitland recollected the lamp shade.

CHAPTER X

There have been in half a century many and significant changes in Was.h.i.+ngton Square. Of the buildings that defied time fifty years ago, not many remain. On the East especially, where Waverley Place--once more picturesquely called Rag Carpet Lane--links the Square to Broadway, the traditional brick structures have all been replaced by modern loft-buildings, almost as sober but far less austere. Elsewhere around the Square the old-time residences only here and there survive, encroached upon more and more by the inroads of modernity. Only along Was.h.i.+ngton Square North, east and west of Fifth Avenue, has there been consistent and effective resistance to the tidal march of progress; and it was east of the Avenue and in the immediate shadow of the New that Miss Mary Wardrop had lived for more than three generations.

Now there remained only three of what must not long ago have been a considerable community--those that dwelt on Was.h.i.+ngton Square at the time when Central Park was being made or when Lincoln called for a quarter of a million volunteers and in prompt and patriotic answer the Northern regiments pa.s.sed through cheering crowds down Broadway.

Miss Wardrop herself, being by far the most dominant of the three, shall be mentioned first. The second was her ancient butler, whose surname--and apparently his only name--was Jenks, which was always p.r.o.nounced with ever so slight a tendency toward him of the Horse Marines. And the third, who, like Miss Wardrop, still retained possession of the family mansion, was Mr. Augustus Lispenard, bachelor, aged--in the morning--nearly eighty, although later in the day, when the ichor in his veins began to course more briskly, his appearance was that of an uncommonly well-preserved man of sixty or thereabouts. His residence adjoined that of Miss Wardrop, but there had never been any intimacy between the two households. For this there were a number of reasons, but the paramount one was the fact that Mr. Lispenard was descended from one of the oldest houses among the Knickerbockers, and as such it was extremely difficult for him to become aware of any one not sprung with equal selectness. The Wardrops had arrived on the Square at the comparatively recent period of Miss Mary's babyhood--and even now Miss Mary was only sixty or so.

Miss Helen Maitland remembered very well the occasion of her first meeting with the distinguished personage who lived next door. It had occurred on the first visit she had made her aunt, when she was but a small girl, yet Helen had found few things in after years to etch themselves more sharply upon her recollection. It had been in the holiday season, and, Helen's mother having been sent South by the inclemencies of the Boston weather, the child had been left with Miss Wardrop over the Christmas time. On New Year's Day, wide-eyed, she had beheld the elaborate, old-world, decorous preparations made by Jenks under the eye of his mistress, and with delight she had learned that, while she could not--nor indeed did she wish to--attend the New Year's reception herself, she was to be allowed a seat of vantage above stairs where part, and the most interesting part, of the reception hall lay open to her view.

Miss Wardrop rigidly preserved the old custom as to New Year's calls--preserved even the old blue punch-bowl, which Jenks filled with a decoction of haunting and peculiar excellence; and the dress wherein the hostess received had done duty on more New Years' Days than its owner liked always to recall.

Peering down through the mahogany railings that fenced her eyrie from the world, the youthful Miss Maitland had watched, starry-eyed, a function which in essentials had not altered in very many years. Its hostess had grown more gray, but no less alert, had changed in years more than in age. And it was with a courtly bow, which also had not varied in angle or courtliness, that little Miss Maitland saw Mr.

Augustus Lispenard bend low over Miss Wardrop's hand.

A small, slight man was Mr. Lispenard, very erect, very straight of eyebrow, keen of glance, precise of speech. His extraordinary black eyes peered out from beneath his level brows in a disquietingly observant manner. One felt immediately that one's hands and feet were peculiarly large and awkward, or one's last remark hopelessly ba.n.a.l, or one's birthplace in some cheap and innominate region outside of Manhattan. So long as Miss Wardrop remained under forty, Mr. Lispenard had held aloof. Perhaps he feared that by calling on a maiden lady under forty he might arouse hopes which, however chaste, could not, in the nature of things, be fulfilled, he being what he was, a Knickerbocker. But after this danger mark was past, and perhaps stimulated by the removal of almost the last of the other patriarchal residents of the Square, he called one New Year's afternoon, and gravely presented the compliments of the season to the woman to whom he now spoke for the first time in his life.

There was nothing vindictive about Miss Wardrop. She appreciated his viewpoint, and bade him welcome as naturally as though they had been friends for years. And thereafter Mr. Lispenard was an irregular but always gladly received caller in the parlor separated from his own by little more than twelve inches of brick and mortar.

In the days when Miss Mary was growing up to childhood, Mr. Lispenard had been one of those who had marched down Broadway in 1861, not to return for four long years. South of the Potomac he had acquired many vivid and remarkable experiences of which no one had ever heard him speak, and also a pension, incredibly small, which he received in silent dignity each month and equally without comment turned over to a rascally body servant who had run away from more battles than one would have conceived to be possible. This st.u.r.dy retainer, having served a short time in Mr. Lispenard's troop and performed him some trifling services, had ten years after the war turned up with a calm and most surprising a.s.sumption of his old commander's responsibility for his entire existence, and since that time had lived on his ex-lieutenant's bounty.

One of the chief attractions, in Helen's eyes, of her aunt's old house in Was.h.i.+ngton Square was the chance of a call or two from Mr.

Lispenard. After her third or fourth visit he grew friendly with her, in fact vastly more friendly than he ever became with her aunt. And she, for her part, found this elderly aristocrat all the more fascinating for finding him in New York, through the rus.h.i.+ng progressiveness of which he seemed to move in a kind of stately, romantic twilight.

"My dear child," were her aunt's first words after Helen's latest arrival, "you have missed by a single day a call from our next-door neighbor."

"Well, if he doesn't come again," replied the girl, with a smile, "I'll scandalize the dear old man nearly to death by going and calling on him myself."

And this, a few days later, she actually did, to the carefully concealed elation of Mr. Lispenard's elderly housekeeper, who, after ushering Miss Maitland into the high-ceiled parlor, betook herself to the region below stairs, where she definitely expressed herself to the cook.

"Sure it's a divil the masther is wid the ladies till this very day--and him only about four minutes inside of eighty!"

"A lady calling, is it?" inquired the cook, with interest.

"Sure--a young wan. It's the ould bhoys have the way wid them, after all's said and done."

Meanwhile in the old-fas.h.i.+oned reception room with its tinkly crystal chandelier aquiver, as it were, in sympathetic excitement, the old gentleman was greeting his young guest.

"Old age!" he said, with a smile of half-mock ruefulness. "Old age!

When ladies come to call on us, we understand, we old beaux, that it is because we are no longer considered dangerous. Yet the bitterness of that knowledge, were it twice as bitter as it is, would be more than offset by my honor and pleasure in receiving you."

Helen beamed on him for reply, and his swift, penetrating eyes observed her.

"You have grown up to be beautiful, my child," observed old Mr.

Lispenard. "There is nothing about you of this new generation, which I hate. Indeed, if you would wear crinolines and a curl of that dark hair on your shoulder, you would be quite perfect."

His young caller blushed a little, but she laughingly retorted:--

"Did you say you had ceased to be dangerous? No one of my generation could have said that. You will turn my head, sir--and isn't that being dangerous? For the heads of my generation, the new generation, as you call it, are not easy to turn."

"No. True enough," said Mr. Lispenard, nodding with cynical approval.

"Their heads are on so tight there is no turning them; no flexibility about the young people to-day. The maids are sad enough, but the young men are worse. Gallants is what we used to call young men, but they make none to-day that could answer to that term. Gallants! There is no more courtesy in the land than among the fishes below sea!"

Helen felt inclined to defend her contemporaries, but as she looked at the old aristocrat before her and contrasted his manner with that of some of the men in her own set, she did not know quite what to say.

Pelgram's poses seemed cheap and shallow, and Charlie Wilkinson's free-and-easy carriage might have its virtues, but it certainly was not marked by dignity, nor did it make particularly for respect.

"They have no reverence for age, none for the great things, the great days that some of us remember. I confess that I do not like them. I am quite an old man, and for some years past I have met scarcely a young man whom my mother would have permitted in her drawing room."

"I know what you mean," Helen said thoughtfully; "and in one way, at least, I'm afraid you're right. But don't you think that most of the difference is on the surface, and the young people of to-day are not really so irreverent as they appear to be? The fas.h.i.+on now is toward plain, blunt unaffectedness; reverence is a polish of manners which implies insincerity, and the young men who are really reverent are most of them ashamed of it and work all the harder to conceal it."

"They are not obliged to overexert themselves," replied Mr. Lispenard.

"But perhaps you are right, my dear. I admit that I am out of sympathy with the younger generation. They might possess a thousand virtues, and I could see none of them."

"I'm of the younger generation," said his visitor, with humorous apologeticalness. "I hope you won't be too hard on it."

"One of its few virtues--that it numbers you among its members," her host gallantly rejoined. "But they are not all like you--or there would be fewer bachelors in your town of Boston."

Helen laughed outright.

"No bachelor yet have I unmade," she replied, somewhat enigmatically.

"Indeed?" said Mr. Lispenard. "I may not think very highly of the young men of to-day, but my opinion of them is not so low as that.

Come, now--I am an old gentleman and the model of reticence--I will never tell. I'll wager you a box of roses against anything you like that you had a proposal no later than last week. Perhaps you even came to New York to escape him."

Considering that Pelgram's studio tea was barely a week in the past, Helen's face betrayed her confusion.

"_Touche_!" said her host, with a laugh. "Really, I may have to revise in part my idea of modern young men. After all, they're not blind."

Helen found that time pa.s.sed quickly during her first few days in New York. Miss Wardrop was a self-sufficient personage, with a decided opinion upon everything in heaven and on earth, and a preference no less decided for that opinion over those held by others. She had, however, a great fondness for her niece, whom she honored, as she expressed it, by making not one iota of change in her menage or habits on account of the presence of her visitor.

"It would be a poor arrangement for both of us if I were to put myself out for you," she had once explained to the girl. "I would be certain to regret having done so; and if I did, so would you. So I will pay you the compliment of going on precisely as though you weren't here."