Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow: "Won"t you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for you, with the door opening and shutting."
The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a flush in her thin cheek, but no embarra.s.sment in her tone, "No, I thank you. This will do quite well," and then she turned her face away as before.
He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.
II.
"Ah, I see what you mean," said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact, ever since he had arrived from the station at Birkwall"s door, where Mrs. Birkwall met them and welcomed him. He had been sufficiently impressed with the aristocratic quiet of the vast square white old wooden house, standing behind a high white board fence, in two acres of gardened ground; but the fine hallway with its broad low stairway, the stately drawing-room with its carving, the library with its panelling and portraits, and the dining-room with its tall wainscoting, united to give him a sense of the pride of life in old Burymouth such as the raw splendors of the millionaire houses in New York had never imparted to him.
"They knew how to do it, they knew how to do it!" he exclaimed, meaning the people who had such houses built; and he said the same thing of the other Burymouth houses which Birkwall showed him, by grace of their owners, after the mid-day dinner, which Gaites kept calling luncheon.
"Be sure you get back in good time for _tea_," said Mrs. Birkwall for a parting charge to her husband; and she bade Gaites, "Remember that it _is_ tea, please; _not_ dinner;" and he was tempted to kiss his hand to her with as much courtly gallantry as he could; for, standing under the transom of the slender-pillared portal to watch them away, she looked most distinctly descended from ancestors, and not merely the daughter of a father and mother, as most women do. Gaites said as much to Birkwall, and when they got home Birkwall repeated it to his wife, without injuring Gaites with her. If he saw what Birkwall had meant in marrying her, and settling down to his literary life with her in the atmosphere of such a quiet place as Burymouth, when he might have chosen money and unrest in New York, she on her side saw what her husband meant in liking the shrewd, able fellow who had such a vein of gay romance in his practicality, and such an intelligent and respectful sympathy with her tradition and environment.
She sent and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in that New England disproportion of the s.e.xes which at Burymouth is intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that of these sequestered ladies, who were so well bred and so well read, so humorous and so dignified, who loved to laugh and who loved to think. It was all like something in a pleasant book, and Gaites was not altogether to blame if it went to his head, and after the talk had been of Burymouth, in which he professed so acceptable an interest, and then of novels, of which he had read about as many as they, he confided to the whole table his experience with Miss Phyllis Desmond"s piano. He managed the psychology of the little incident so well that he imparted the very quality he meant them to feel in it.
"How perfectly charming!" said one of the ladies. "I don"t wonder you fell in love with the name. It"s fit for a shepherdess of high degree."
"If _I_ were a man," said the girl across the table who was not less sweetly a girl because she would never see thirty-nine again, "I should simply drop everything and follow that piano to Phyllis Desmond"s door."
"It"s quite what I should like to do," Gaites responded, with a well-affected air of pa.s.sionate regret. "But I"m promised at Kent Harbor--"
She did not wait for him to say more, but submitted, "Oh, well, if you"re going to Kent _Harbor_, of course!" as if that would excuse and explain any sort of dereliction; and then the talk went on about Kent Harbor till Mrs. Birkwall asked, generally, as if it were part of the Kent Harbor inquiry, "Didn"t I hear that the Ashwoods were going to their place at Upper Merritt, this year?"
Then there arose a dispute, which divided the company into nearly equal parties; as to whether the Ashwoods had got home from Europe yet. But it all ended in bringing the talk back to Phyllis Desmond"s piano again, and in urging its pursuit upon Gaites, as something he owed to romance; at least he ought to do it for their sake, for now they should all be upon pins and needles till they knew who she was, and what she _could_ be doing at Lower Merritt, N. H.
At one time he had it on his tongue to say that there seemed to be something like infection in his interest in that piano, and he was going to speak of the young girl who seemed to share it, simply because she saw him staring at it, and who faltered so long with him before the freight-depot that she came near getting no seat in the train for Burymouth. But just at that moment the dispute about the Ashwoods renewed itself upon some fresh evidence which one of the ladies recollected and offered; and Gaites"s chance pa.s.sed. When it came again he had no longer the wish to seize it. A lingering soreness from his experience with that young girl made itself felt in his nether consciousness. He forbore the more easily because, mixed with this pain, was a certain insecurity as to her quality which he was afraid might impart itself to those patrician presences at the table. They would be nice, and they would be appreciative,--but would they feel that she was a lady, exactly, when he owned to the somewhat poverty-stricken simplicity of her dress in some details, more especially her thread gloves, which he could not consistently make kid? He was all the more bound to keep her from slight because he felt a little, a very little ashamed of her.
He woke next morning in a wide, low, square chamber to the singing of robins in the garden, from which at breakfast he had luscious strawberries, and heaped bowls of June roses. When he started for his train, he parted with Mrs. Birkwall as old friends as he was with her husband; and he completed her conquest by running back to her from the gate, and asking, with a great air of secrecy, but loud enough for Birkwall to hear, whether she thought she could find him another girl in Burymouth, with just such a house and garden, and exactly like herself in every way.
"Hundreds!" she shouted, and stood a graceful figure between the fluted pillars of the portal, waving her hand to them till they were out of sight behind the corner of the high board fence, over which the garden trees hung caressingly, and brushed Gaites"s shoulder in a shy, fond farewell.
It had all been as nice as it could be, and he said so again and again to Birkwall, who _would_ go to the train with him, and who would _not_ let him carry his own hand-bag. The good fellow clung hospitably to it, after Gaites had rechecked his trunk for Kent Harbor, and insisted upon carrying it as they walked up and down the platform together at the station. It seemed that the train from Boston which the Kent Harbor train was to connect with was ten minutes late, and after some turns they prolonged their promenade northward as far as the freight-depot, Birkwall in the abstraction of a plot for a novel which he was seizing these last moments to outline to his friend, and Gaites with a secret shame for the hope which was springing in his breast.
On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, "All out?"
and a voice from far within responded, "Case here, yet; _I_ can"t handle it alone."
The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy b.u.mping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it, while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to Birkwall"s plot that the most besotted young author could not have failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an "Oh, h.e.l.lo!" and slapped him on the back.
Gaites nodded in proud a.s.sent, and Birkwall went on: "I thought you were faking the name last night; but I didn"t want to give you away. It was the real thing, wasn"t it, after all."
"The real thing," said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he laughed for pleasure in his friend"s astonishment.
"Well," Birkwall resumed, "she seems to be following _you_ up, old fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted you to follow _her_ up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why, Gaites, you"ll be the tea-table talk for a week; you"ll be married to that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of Providence? Come! There"s time enough to get a ticket, and have your check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country express will be along here at nine o"clock. You can"t let that poor thing start off on her travels alone again!"
Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer--flung over the man"s shoulder--which seemed willing enough, but was wholly unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a pa.s.senger-train which came pulling in from the southward.
"Here"s the Hill Country express now!" said Birkwall. "You won"t change your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out.
Don"t worry about the piano. I"ll find out what"s happened to the car it was in, and I"ll see that it"s put into a good strong one, next time."
"Do! That"s a good fellow!" said Gaites, and in repeated promises, demanded and given, to come again, they pa.s.sed the time till the Hill Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.
III.
Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed; at half past one o"clock he dined at somebody"s cottage, and afterwards sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time to go to afternoon tea at somebody else"s cottage, where he chatted about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for seven or eight o"clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.
There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type than Gaites himself had on.
The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well that he told people he was never going away.
He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs.
Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-b.u.t.ter letter the excuse of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond"s piano; and she had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably delayed there for the three days that had now pa.s.sed. Only that morning, however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case into a car, and had waited till the train had b.u.mped and jolted off with it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared already with them.
He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of anxiety at its r.e.t.a.r.ded progress.
"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her s.e.x, "I"m just going to the station to see what"s become of a trunk myself that I ordered expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you"re not doing anything this morning--the tide isn"t in till noon, and there"ll be little or no bathing to look at before that--you"d better drive down with me. Or perhaps you"re canoeing up the river with somebody?"
Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.
"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too, and you can take her canoeing afterwards."
But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as combining all the searching effects of a Rontgen-ray examination and the earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.
He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis Desmond"s piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He pa.s.sed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.
"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its cover, "what"s that piano doing _here_?"
The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that"s just what I was thinking myself."
"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it"s been lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent Harbor Sat.u.r.day morning!"
The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites"s figure warily, as if it might be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."
Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the pa.s.senger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.
"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked at Gaites"s face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and then she looked back at the piano-case.
"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.
Gaites nodded confirmation.
"Then it won"t be there in time for the poor thing"s birthday?"
He nodded again.
Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.