She had walked into the room with a not illy simulated air of having come with the intention of going out again immediately, and stood well posed, so that her fine figure came out in relief against a crimson j.a.panese screen.
"I haven"t anything to do with that, ma"am," Stanton replied. "The boss makes out the orders, and we go where we are sent."
"Well," the widow said, smiling brilliantly, and moving across the room to the table where the dishes taken from the closet were piled, "it can"t be helped, I suppose; but I hope you will let me get things cleared up in time for dinner."
"Oh, I"ll surely get through by eleven or half past."
"And I don"t have dinner till half past six."
The carpenter looked up questioningly. Then he went on with his work.
"I never can get used to city ways," he observed. "I don"t see how folks can get along without having dinner in the middle of the day when it"s dinner time."
Mrs. Sampson busied herself with the plates, arranging things on the sideboard ready for evening. Her guest, Miss Merrivale, was out driving with Fred Rangely, and the widow"s resources in the way of servants were so limited that it was necessary that the hands of the mistress should attend to many of the details of the housekeeping. She enjoyed talking to this stalwart, vigorous fellow. She was alive to the last fibre of her being to the influence of masculine perfections, and Stanton was a splendidly built type of manhood. She utilized the moments and secured an excuse for lingering by going on with her work while the carpenter continued his, carrying out her theory of getting the most out of a laborer by personal supervision, and withal gratifying her intense and instinctive fondness for the presence of a magnificent man.
"You are not city bred, perhaps," she answered his last remark, for the sake of saying something.
"Oh, no, ma"am," John answered. "I was raised at Feltonville."
The widow became alert at once.
"Feltonville?" she repeated. "Why, I have a cousin living there, the Hon. Thomas Greenfield."
"Oh, Tom Greenfield. Everybody knows Tom Greenfield," John said, his face lighting up. "We call him "Honest Tom" up our way. He"s here in the Legislature now."
"Yes, I know he is. He"s coming here to dinner to-night."
"Is he? He"s an awful smart man, and he"s a good one, too, as ever walked. He"s awful interested in Orin"s getting the job to make the new statue of _America_. Orin," he added in explanation, "Orin Stanton, he"s the sculptor and he"s my brother; my half-brother, that is. You"ve heard of him?"
"Oh, of course," she answered, warmly.
Mrs. Sampson knew little of Orin Stanton, but she did know that Alfred Irons was on the committee having in charge the commission for the new statue, and the fact that Mr. Greenfield had an interest, however indirect, in the same matter, was a hint too valuable not to be acted upon.
Despite the confidence with which he had spoken to Fenton, the railroad business was by no means settled. The Staggchase syndicate had rallied to raise objections to prevent the Railroad Commissioners from authorizing the other route. A hearing had been granted, and for it elaborate preparations were being made. The Irons syndicate were extremely anxious that Greenfield should speak at this hearing, but there had been so much feeling aroused at Feltonville by his action in the Senate that he was not inclined to do so; and Mrs. Sampson, who had already proved so successful in influencing her relative, had been requested to continue her efforts.
The widow had pondered deeply upon the tactics she should use, and it is to be noted that she set down the amount of the obligation incurred by Irons as the greater because she had really become in a way fond of Greenfield, and she was too clever not to understand the fact, to which the senator with singular perversity remained obstinately blind, that he could not but injure his political prestige by the course he was taking. She had aroused his combativeness by telling him that if his convictions forced him to vote against the Feltonville interest, people would say he was bought. She knew that now this was said, and that openly;--indeed, despite all her shrewdness and knowledge of human nature, she had moments when she wondered whether the charge might not be true, so incomprehensible did it seem that a man should throw away his own advantage. She had no sentiment strong enough to make her hesitate about going on to sacrifice Greenfield to her own interests, but she distinctly disliked the fact that Irons should also profit by the senator"s loss.
All day the widow pondered deeply on the situation, and the result of the chance disclosure of John Stanton was that when her guests arrived she made an opportunity to take Irons aside for a moment"s confidential talk.
The widow"s dinner-party was a somewhat singular one to give in compliment to a young girl, there being no one of the guests near Miss Merrivale"s own age except Fred Rangely. The widow"s acquaintance among women whom she could ask to meet the New Yorker was limited, and having decided upon inviting Greenfield, Irons, and Rangely to dinner, the hostess sat gnawing her stylographic pen in despair a good half hour before she could decide upon a fourth guest. A woman she must have, and few women whom she wished to ask would come to her house even to call.
When she now and then gathered at an afternoon tea a handful of people whose names she was proud to have reported in the society papers, she did it by securing a lion of literary or of theatrical fame, whose unwary feet she entangled in her cunningly laid snares before he knew anything about social conditions in Boston. There were many people, moreover, who would go to see a celebrity at a house like that of Mrs.
Sampson much as they would have gone to the theatre, when they would have received neither the guest of honor nor the hostess, the latter of whom, to their thinking, stood for the time being much in the position of stage manager.
Mrs. Sampson never set herself to a problem like this without a feeling of bitterness. To consider what woman of any standing could be induced to eat her salt brought her true social position before her with painful vividness. She could not, in face of the facts which then forced themselves upon her, shut her eyes to the truth that her painful struggles for position had been pretty nearly fruitless. She did now and then get an invitation to a crush in a desirable house, some over-sensitive woman who had been to stare at one of Mrs. Sampson"s captures thus discharging her debt, and at the same time virtually wiping her hands of all intercourse with the dashing widow. As for asking her to their tables or going to hers, everybody understood that that was not to be thought of.
With the cleverness born of desperation, Mrs. Sampson solved her difficulty by asking Miss Catherine Penwick to fill the vacant place.
Miss Catherine Penwick was the last forlorn and fluttering leaf on the bare branches of a lofty but expiring family tree. The Penwicks had come over in the Mayflower, or at a period yet more remote, and the acme of the prosperity and social distinction of the name was coincident with the second administration of President Washington.
Since that time its decadence had been steady; at first slow, but later with the accelerating motion common to falling bodies, until nothing remained of the family revenues, little but a tradition of the family greatness, and none of the race but this frostbitten old lady, poor and forsaken in her desolate old age.
Miss Penwick was one of the learned ladies of her generation, a fact which counted for less in the erudite day into which it was her misfortune to linger than in those of her far-away youth. She struggled against the tide with pathetic bravery, endeavoring to eke out some sort of a livelihood by giving feeble lectures on Greek art, which no living being wished to hear, or could possibly be supposed to be any better for hearing, but to which the charitably disposed subscribed with spasmodic benevolence. The poor creature, with her antique curls quivering about her face, yellow and wrinkled now, its high-bred expression sadly marred by the look of anxious eagerness which comes of watching, like the prophet, for the ravens to bring one"s dinner, was but too glad to be invited to sit at any table where she could get a comfortable meal and be allowed to play for the moment at being the grand lady her ancestresses had been in reality.
"I hope you don"t mind my asking Miss Penwick as the only lady," Mrs.
Sampson said to her guest; "but she is such a dear old creature, and our family and hers have been intimate for centuries. She is getting old, poor dear, and she hasn"t any money any more, just as I haven"t.
But you know she is wiser than Minerva"s owl, and quite the fashion in Boston. One really is n.o.body who doesn"t know Miss Penwick; and she is _so_ well bred."
Miss Penwick, dear old soul, had a feeling that Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was somehow too hopelessly modern for one of her generation ever to be really in sympathy with the widow; but Mrs. Sampson had been born a Welsh, and Miss Catherine was too unworldly to be aware of all the gossip and even scandal which had made the name of the dashing adventuress of so evil savor in the nostrils of people like Mrs.
Frederick Staggchase.
And it must be confessed also, that to such petty economies was the last of the Penwicks reduced by poverty that a dinner was an object to her. She could not afford to lose an opportunity of dining at the price of two horse-car tickets, and so promptly at the moment she presented herself in the dainty elegance of bits of real old lace, with family miniatures and locks of hair from the ill.u.s.trious heads of great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers decorously framed in split pearls, the l.u.s.tre of the jewels, like that of their wearer, tarnished by time.
Miss Merrivale did feel that the company a.s.sembled was an odd one, although she lived too far away to appreciate the fact that none of the guests, with the possible exception of Rangely, were exactly what she would have been asked to dine with at home. A country member, a self-made vulgarian, an antiquated spinster, and a literateur who, after all, was received rather upon sufferance into such exclusive houses as he entered at all, made up a group of which Miss Merrivale, with feminine instinct, felt the inferiority, despite the fact that she had no means of placing the guests. Miss Penwick appreciated the social standing of her fellow-diners, but she had by a long course of social humiliations come to accept unpleasant conditions where getting a dinner was concerned; and she was, moreover, somewhat relieved that at Mrs. Sampson"s she was not obliged to meet anybody worse. Her instincts were keen enough, after all her melancholy experiences, to enable her to recognize the fact that Tom Greenfield was the most truly a gentleman of the three men, and she was pleased that he should take her in to dinner.
Mrs. Sampson, as she went in on the arm of Irons, contrived to let him know what she had heard that morning from young Stanton of Greenfield"s interest in the young sculptor; adding a hint or two of the use to be made of this information. Rangely, just behind her, was chatting with Miss Frances in that half amorous badinage which some girls always provoke, perhaps because they expect and keenly relish it.
"Oh, no," he observed, just as Mrs. Sampson was able to give an ear to what was being said by the young people. "I am not fickle. I am constancy itself, but when you are in New York and I am in Boston, you really can"t expect me to sigh loud enough to be heard all that distance."
"I know you too well to suppose you will sigh at all," she returned, with a coquettish air. "Especially with the consolations I am given to understand that you have near at hand."
"What consolations?" he asked, visibly disconcerted.
"What has that confounded widow been telling her?" he wondered inwardly. "Is it Mrs. Staggchase or Ethel Mott she"s aiming at?"
Miss Merrivale tossed her head, as they paused in the doorway of the tiny dining-room a moment to give Mr. Irons opportunity to convey his ungainly length into its proper niche. Her shot had been purely a random one and, unless one believes in telepathy, so was the question by which she abruptly changed the subject.
"Do you know my cousin, Mrs. Frederick Staggchase?"
He held himself in hand wonderfully.
"Oh, yes," was his reply. "I know Mrs. Staggchase very well, but I didn"t know she was your cousin. All the good gifts of life seem to fall to her lot."
"Thanks for nothing. She has not been to see me. She invited me to dine and I declined, and then she wrote and asked me to visit there when I finished my stay here."
"Shall you do it?"
The thought with which Rangely asked this question was one oddly mingled of regret and of hope. He had flirted too seriously with Miss Merrivale to wish to meet her at Mrs. Staggchase"s, although he had never seriously cared for her; and he reflected with a humorous sense of relief that if the pretty New Yorker should really visit her cousin, he was likely to be put in a position to give his undivided attention to wooing Miss Mott, a consummation for which he wished without having the strength of mind to bring it about. As she let his question pa.s.s in silence, he smiled to himself at the ignominious manner in which he must retreat from his att.i.tude as the devoted admirer of Mrs.
Staggchase and of Miss Merrivale, feeling that to set about the earnest attempt to win Ethel would be quite consolation enough to enable him to reconcile himself to even this. The comfort of having circ.u.mstances make for him a decision which he should make for himself, is often to a self-indulgent man of far more importance than the decision itself.
As the dinner progressed, Miss Penwick, warming with the good cheer--for Mrs. Sampson was too thoroughly a man"s woman not to appreciate the value of palatable viands--become decidedly loquacious; and at last, by a happy coincidence for which her hostess could have hugged her on the spot, she introduced the name of Orin Stanton.
"I hear you are on the _America_ committee, Mr. Irons," she said. "We ladies are so much interested in that just now. I called on Mrs.
Bodewin Ranger yesterday, and she is really enthusiastic over this young Stanton that"s going to make it. He is going to make it, isn"t he?"
Irons laughed his vulgar laugh, which Fenton once said was the laugh of a swineherd counting his pigs.
"It has not been decided," he answered. "Stanton seems to have a good many friends."
"Oh, he has, indeed," responded Miss Penwick eagerly. "He is a young man of extraordinary genius. I saw a beautiful notice of him in the _Daily Observer_ the other morning, Mr. Rangely," she continued, turning to Fred, "and Mrs. Frostwinch said she thought you wrote it. It was very appreciative."