"Well, I"ll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville," said Mrs.
Lapham. "I presume you"ll let me have set tubs, Si. You know I ain"t so young any more." She pa.s.sed Irene a cup of Oolong tea,--none of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Sou-chong,--and the girl handed it to her father. "Papa," she asked, "you don"t really mean that you"re going to build over there?"
"Don"t I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his tea.
"I don"t believe you do," pursued the girl.
"Is that so? I presume you"d hate to have me. Your mother does." He said DOOS, of course.
Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don"t see any use in not enjoying money, if you"ve got it to enjoy. That"s what it"s for, I suppose; though you mightn"t always think so." She had a slow, quaint way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from being nasal that it was a little hoa.r.s.e.
"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father. "How would it do to let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and us go into the new house?" At times the Colonel"s grammar failed him.
The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon. The Colonel seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way, his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing.
III.
TOWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, addressed to Miss Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas newspaper, with a complimentary account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton, which the representative of the journal had visited.
"It must be his friend," said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her daughter brought the paper; "the one he"s staying with."
The girl did not say anything, but she carried the paper to her room, where she scanned every line of it for another name. She did not find it, but she cut the notice out and stuck it into the side of her mirror, where she could read it every morning when she brushed her hair, and the last thing at night when she looked at herself in the gla.s.s just before turning off the gas. Her sister often read it aloud, standing behind her and rendering it with elocutionary effects.
"The first time I ever heard of a love-letter in the form of a puff to a cattle-ranch. But perhaps that"s the style on the Hill."
Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the arrival of the paper, treating the fact with an importance that he refused to see in it.
"How do you know the fellow sent it, anyway?" he demanded.
"Oh, I know he did."
"I don"t see why he couldn"t write to "Rene, if he really meant anything."
"Well, I guess that wouldn"t be their way," said Mrs. Lapham; she did not at all know what their way would be.
When the spring opened Colonel Lapham showed that he had been in earnest about building on the New Land. His idea of a house was a brown-stone front, four stories high, and a French roof with an air-chamber above. Inside, there was to be a reception-room on the street and a dining-room back. The parlours were to be on the second floor, and finished in black walnut or party-coloured paint. The chambers were to be on the three floors above, front and rear, with side-rooms over the front door. Black walnut was to be used everywhere except in the attic, which was to be painted and grained to look like black walnut. The whole was to be very high-studded, and there were to be handsome cornices and elaborate centre-pieces throughout, except, again, in the attic.
These ideas he had formed from the inspection of many new buildings which he had seen going up, and which he had a pa.s.sion for looking into. He was confirmed in his ideas by a master builder who had put up a great many houses on the Back Bay as a speculation, and who told him that if he wanted to have a house in the style, that was the way to have it.
The beginnings of the process by which Lapham escaped from the master builder and ended in the hands of an architect are so obscure that it would be almost impossible to trace them. But it all happened, and Lapham promptly developed his ideas of black walnut finish, high studding, and cornices. The architect was able to conceal the shudder which they must have sent through him. He was skilful, as nearly all architects are, in playing upon that simple instrument Man. He began to touch Colonel Lapham"s stops.
"Oh, certainly, have the parlours high-studded. But you"ve seen some of those pretty old-fashioned country-houses, haven"t you, where the entrance-story is very low-studded?" "Yes," Lapham a.s.sented.
"Well, don"t you think something of that kind would have a very nice effect? Have the entrance-story low-studded, and your parlours on the next floor as high as you please. Put your little reception-room here beside the door, and get the whole width of your house frontage for a square hall, and an easy low-tread staircase running up three sides of it. I"m sure Mrs. Lapham would find it much pleasanter." The architect caught toward him a sc.r.a.p of paper lying on the table at which they were sitting and sketched his idea. "Then have your dining-room behind the hall, looking on the water."
He glanced at Mrs. Lapham, who said, "Of course," and the architect went on--
"That gets you rid of one of those long, straight, ugly staircases,"--until that moment Lapham had thought a long, straight staircase the chief ornament of a house,--"and gives you an effect of amplitude and s.p.a.ce."
"That"s so!" said Mrs. Lapham. Her husband merely made a noise in his throat.
"Then, were you thinking of having your parlours together, connected by folding doors?" asked the architect deferentially.
"Yes, of course," said Lapham. "They"re always so, ain"t they?"
"Well, nearly," said the architect. "I was wondering how would it do to make one large square room at the front, taking the whole breadth of the house, and, with this hall-s.p.a.ce between, have a music-room back for the young ladies?"
Lapham looked helplessly at his wife, whose quicker apprehension had followed the architect"s pencil with instant sympathy. "First-rate!"
she cried.
The Colonel gave way. "I guess that would do. It"ll be kind of odd, won"t it?"
"Well, I don"t know," said the architect. "Not so odd, I hope, as the other thing will be a few years from now." He went on to plan the rest of the house, and he showed himself such a master in regard to all the practical details that Mrs. Lapham began to feel a motherly affection for the young man, and her husband could not deny in his heart that the fellow seemed to understand his business. He stopped walking about the room, as he had begun to do when the architect and Mrs. Lapham entered into the particulars of closets, drainage, kitchen arrangements, and all that, and came back to the table. "I presume," he said, "you"ll have the drawing-room finished in black walnut?"
"Well, yes," replied the architect, "if you like. But some less expensive wood can be made just as effective with paint. Of course you can paint black walnut too."
"Paint it?" gasped the Colonel.
"Yes," said the architect quietly. "White, or a little off white."
Lapham dropped the plan he had picked up from the table. His wife made a little move toward him of consolation or support.
"Of course," resumed the architect, "I know there has been a great craze for black walnut. But it"s an ugly wood; and for a drawing-room there is really nothing like white paint. We should want to introduce a little gold here and there. Perhaps we might run a painted frieze round under the cornice--garlands of roses on a gold ground; it would tell wonderfully in a white room."
The Colonel returned less courageously to the charge. "I presume you"ll want Eastlake mantel-shelves and tiles?" He meant this for a sarcastic thrust at a prevailing foible of the profession.
"Well, no," gently answered the architect. "I was thinking perhaps a white marble chimney-piece, treated in the refined Empire style, would be the thing for that room."
"White marble!" exclaimed the Colonel. "I thought that had gone out long ago."
"Really beautiful things can"t go out. They may disappear for a little while, but they must come back. It"s only the ugly things that stay out after they"ve had their day."
Lapham could only venture very modestly, "Hard-wood floors?"
"In the music-room, of course," consented the architect.
"And in the drawing-room?"
"Carpet. Some sort of moquette, I should say. But I should prefer to consult Mrs. Lapham"s taste in that matter."
"And in the other rooms?"
"Oh, carpets, of course."
"And what about the stairs?"