"Amy, you"re an aggravator!"
"No. I"m only grammatical. I"m sure those were the antecedents."
"If you don"t, I will."
"If you will, I will too, Rod! Drive me over, that"s a good boy, and I"ll go."
Amy seized with delicate craft her opportunity for getting her brother off from one of his solitary, roaming expeditions with Red Squirrel that ended too often in not being solitary, but in bringing him into company with people who knew about horses, or had them to show, and were planning for races, and who were likely to lead Rodney, in spite of his innate gentlemanhood, into more of mere jockeyism than either she or her father liked.
"But the flowers, I fancy, Rod, would be coals to Newcastle. They have a greenhouse."
"And have never had a decent man to manage it. It came to nothing this year. She told me so. You see it just is a literal _new_ castle. Mr. Argenter is too busy in town to look after it; and they"ve been cheated and disappointed right and left. They"re not to blame for being new," he continued, seeing the least possible little _lifted_ look about Amy"s delicate lips and eyebrows. "I hate _that_ kind of shoddiness."
""Don"t fire--I"ll come down,"" said Amy, laughing. "And I don"t think I ever get _very_ far up, beyond what"s safe and reasonable for a"--
"Nice, well-bred little c.o.o.n," said Rodney, patting her on the shoulder, in an exuberance of gracious approval and beamingly serene content. "I"ll take you in my gig with Red Squirrel," he added, by way of reward of merit.
Now Amy in her secret heart was mortally afraid of Red Squirrel, but she would have been upset ten times over--by Rodney--sooner than say so.
When Sylvie Argenter, that afternoon, from her window with its cool, deep awning, saw Rodney Sherrett and his sister coming up the drive, there flashed across her, by a curious a.s.sociation, the thought of the young carpenter who had gone up the village street and bowed to Ray Ingraham, the baker"s daughter.
After all, the gentleman"s "place," apart and retired, and the long "approach," were not so very much worse, when the "people in the carriages,"--the right people,--really came: and "on purpose" was not such a bad qualification of the coming, either.
And when Mrs. Argenter, hearing the bell, and the movement of an arrival, and not being herself summoned in consequence, rung in her own room for the maid, and received for answer to her inquiry,--"Miss Sherrett and young Mr. Sherrett, ma"am, to see Miss Sylvie,"--she turned back to her volume of "London Society," much and mixedly reconciled in her thoughts to two things that occurred to her at once,--one of them adding itself to the other as manifestly in the same remarkable order of providence; "that tip-out" from the basket-phaeton, and the new white frill-trimmed polonaise that Miss Sylvie would put on, so needlessly, this afternoon, in spite of her remonstrance that the laundress had just left without warning, and there was no knowing when they should ever find another.
"There is certainly a fate in these matters," she said to herself, complacently. "_One_ thing always follows another."
Mrs. Argenter was apt to make to herself a "House that Jack built"
out of her providences. She had always a little string of them to rehea.r.s.e in every history; from the malt that lay in the house, and the rat that ate the malt, up to the priest all shaven and shorn, that married the man that kissed the maid--and so on, all the way back again. She counted them up as they went along. "There was the overturn," she would say, by and by "and there was Rodney Sherrett"s call because of that, and then his sister"s because no doubt he asked her, and then their both coming together; and there was your pretty white polonaise, you know, the day they did come; and there was"--Mrs. Argenter has not counted up to that yet.
Perhaps it may be a long while before she will so readily count it in.
It had turned out a hot day; one of those days in the nineties, when if you once hear from the thermometer, or in any way have the fact forcibly brought home to you, you relinquish all idea of exertion yourself, and look upon the world outside as one great pause, out of which no movement can possibly come, unless there first come the beneficence of an east wind, which the dwellers on Ma.s.sachusetts Bay have always for a reserve of hope. Yet it may quite well occur to here and there an individual with a resolute purpose in the day, to actually live through it and pursue the intended plan, without realizing the extra degrees of Fahrenheit at all, and to learn with surprise at set of sun when the deeds are done, of the excelsior performances of the mercury. With what secret amazement and dismay is one"s valor recognized, however, when it has led one to render one"s self at four in the afternoon on such a day, near one"s friend who _has_ been vividly conscious of the torrid atmosphere! Did you ever make or receive such an afternoon call?
Mrs. Argenter, comfortable in her thin wrapper, reading her thin romance, did not trouble herself to be astonished. "They were young people; young people could do anything," she dimly thought; and putting the white polonaise into the structure of the House that Jack built, she interrupted herself no farther than presently to ring her bell again, and tell the maid on no account to admit any one to see herself, and to be sure that there were plenty of raspberries brought in for tea.
Meanwhile, away in the cities, the thermometer had climbed and climbed. Pavements were blistering hot; watering carts went lumbering round only to send up a reek of noisome mist and to leave the streets whitening again a few yards behind them. Blinds were closed up and down the avenues, where people had either long left their houses vacant or were sheltering themselves in depths of gloom in the tomb-like coolness of their double walls. Builders" trowels and hammers had a sound that made you think of sparks struck out, as if the world were a great forge and all its matter at a white heat.
Down in the poor, crowded places, where the gutters fumed with filth, and doors stood open upon horrible pa.s.sages and staircases, little children, barefooted, with one miserable garment on, sat on grimy stone steps, or played wretchedly about the sidewalks, impeding the pa.s.sers of a better cla.s.s who hastened with bated breath, amidst the fever-breeding nuisances, along to railway stations whence they would escape to country and sea-side homes.
On the wharves was the smell of tarred seams and cordage,--sweltering in the sun; in the counting-rooms the clerks could barely keep the drops of moisture from their faces from falling down to blot their toilsome lines of figures on the faultless pages of the ledgers; on the Common, common men surrept.i.tiously stretched themselves in shady corners on the gra.s.s, regardless of the police, until they should be found and ordered off; little babies in second-rate boarding-houses, where their fathers and mothers had to stay for cheapness the summer through wailed the helpless, pitiful cry of a slowly murdered infancy; and out on the blazing thoroughfares where business had to be busy, strong men were dropping down, and reporters were hovering about upon the skirts of little crowds, gathering their items; making _their_ hay while this terrible sun was shining.
What did Mrs. Argenter care?
The sun would be going down now, in a little while; then the cool piazzas, and the raspberries and cream, and the iced milk,--yellow Alderney milk,--would be delightful. Once or twice she did think of "Argie" in New York,--gone thither on some perplexing, hurried errand, which he had only half told her, and the half telling of which she had only half heard,--and remembered that the heat must be "awful" there. But to-night he would be on board the splendid Sound steamer, coming home; and to-morrow, if this lasted, she would surely speak to him about getting off for a while to Rye, or Mount Desert.
She came by and by to the end of her volume, and found that the serial she was following ran on into the next.
"Provoking," she said, tossing it down to the end of the sofa, "and neither Sylvie nor I can get into town in this heat, and Argie thinks it such a bother to be asked to go to Loring"s."
Just then Sylvie"s step came lightly up the stairs. She looked into the large cool dressing-room where her mother lay.
"I"m only up for my "Confession Alb.u.m"," she said. "But O Mater Amata! if you"d just come down and help me through! I know they"d stay to tea and go home in the cool, if I only knew how to ask them; but if I said a word I should be sure to drive them away. _You_ can do it; and they would if you came. Please do!"
"You silly child! Won"t you ever be able to do anything yourself?
When you were a little girl, you wouldn"t carry a message, because you could get into a house, but didn"t know how to get out! And now you are grown up, you can get people into the house to see you, but you don"t know how to ask them to stay to tea! What _shall_ I ever do with you?"
"I don"t know. I"m awfully afraid of--_nice_ girls!"
"Sylvie, I"m ashamed of you! As if you had any other kind of acquaintance, or weren"t as nice as any of them! I wouldn"t suggest it, even to myself, if I were you."
"And I don"t," said Sylvie boldly--"when I"m _by_ myself. But there"s a kind of a little misgiving somehow, when they come, or when I go, as if--well, as if there _might_ be something to it that I didn"t know of, or behind it that I hadn"t got; or else, that there were things that they had nothing to do with that I know too much of. A kind of a--Poggowantimoc feeling, mother! Amy Sherrett is so _fearfully_ refined,--all the way through! It doesn"t seem as if she ever had any common things to say or do. Don"t you think it _takes_ common things to get people really near to each other? It doesn"t seem to me I could ever be intimate--or very easy--with Amy Sherrett."
"You seemed to get on well enough with her brother, the other day."
"Boys aren"t half so bad. There isn"t any such wax-work about boys.
Besides,"--and Sylvie laughed a low, gay little laugh,--we got spilt out together, you know."
"Well, don"t stand talking. You mustn"t keep them waiting. It isn"t time to speak about tea, yet. Look over the alb.u.m, and get at some music. _Keep_ them without saying anything about it. When people think every minute they are just going, is just when they are having the very pleasantest time."
"I know it. But you"ll come, won"t you, and make it all right? Put on something loose and cool; that lovely black lace jacket with the violet lining, and your gray silk skirt. It won"t take you a minute.
Your hair"s perfectly sweet now." And Sylvie hurried away.
Mrs. Argenter came down, twenty minutes afterwards, into the great summer drawing-room, where the finest Indian matting, and dark, rich Persian rugs, and inner window blinds folded behind lace curtains that fell like the foam of waterfalls from ceiling to floor, made a pleasantness out of the very heat against which such furnishings might be provided.
In her silken skirt of silver gray, and the llama sack, violet lined, to need no tight corsage beneath, her fair wrists and arms showing white and cool in the wide drapery sleeves, she looked a very lovely lady. Sylvie was proud of her handsome, elegant mother.
She grew a great deal braver always when Mrs. Argenter came in. She borrowed a second consciousness from her in which she took courage, a.s.sured that all was right. Chairs and rugs gave her no such confidence, though she knew that the Sherretts themselves had no more faultless surroundings. Anybody could have rugs and chairs. It was the presence among them that was wanted; and poor Sylvie seemed to herself to melt quite away, as it were, before such a girl as Amy Sherrett, and not to be able to be a presence at all.
It was all right now, as Sylvie had said. They could not leave immediately upon Mrs. Argenter joining them and her joining them was of itself a welcome and an invitation. So Sylvie called upon her mother to admire the lovely basket, wherein on damp, tender, bright green moss, cl.u.s.tered the most exquisite blossoms, and the most delicate trails of stem and leaf.a.ge wandered and started up lightly, and at last fell like a veil over rim and handle, and dropped below the edge of the tiny round table with Siena marble top, on which Sylvie had placed it between the curtains of the recess that led through to their conservatory, which had been "a failure this year."
"I would not tell you of it, Amata. I wanted you just to see it,"
she said. And Mrs. Argenter admired and thanked, and then lamented their own ill-success in greenhouse and garden culture.
"I am not strong enough to look after it much myself, and Mr.
Argenter never has time," she said; "and our first man was a tipsifier, and the last was a rogue. He sold off quant.i.ties of the best young plants, we found, just before they came to show for anything."
"Our man has been with us for eight years," said Rodney Sherrett. "I dare say he could recommend some one to you, if you liked; and he wouldn"t send anybody that wasn"t right. Shall I ask him?"
Mrs. Argenter would be delighted if he would; and then Mr. Sherrett must come into the conservatory, where a few ragged palm ferns, their great leaves browning and crumbling at the edges,--some daphnes struggling into green tips, having lost their last growth of leaf and dropped all their flower buds, and several calmly enduring orange and lemon trees, gave all the suggestion of foliage that the place afforded, and served, much like the painter"s inscription at the bottom of his canvas merely to signify by the scant glimpse through the drawing-room draperies,--"This is a conservatory."
Mrs. Argenter asked Rodney something about the best arrangement for the open beds, and wanted to know what would be surest to do well for the rockery, and whether it was in a good part of the house,--sufficiently shaded? Meanwhile, Amy and Sylvie were turning over music, and when they all gathered together again the call had extended to a two hours" visit.
"It is really unpardonable," Amy Sherrett was saying, and picking up the pretty little hat which she had thrown down upon a chair,--"it had been so warm to wear anything a minute that one need not." And then Mrs. Argenter said so easily and of course, that they "certainly would not think of going now, when it would soon be really pleasant for a twilight drive; tea would be ready early, for she and Sylvie were alone, and all they had cared for to-day had been a cold lunch at one. They would have it on the north veranda;"
and she touched a bell to give the order.
Perhaps Amy Sherrett would hardly have consented, but that Rodney gave her a look, comical in its appeal, over Sylvie"s shoulder, as she stood showing him a great scarlet Euphorbia in a portfolio of water-colors, and said with a beseeching significance,--
"Consider Red Squirrel, Amy. He really did have a pretty hard pull; and what with the heat and the flies, I dare say he would take it with more equanimity after sundown,--since Mrs. Argenter is so very kind."
And so they stayed; and Mrs. Argenter laid another little brick in her "House that Jack built."