Chapter 12

They sat down before the fire, hand in hand, and talked of the light things that swim to the top, and eddy round and round on the surface of our deepest moods. They made merry over the old minister's perturbation, which Bartley found endlessly amusing. Then he noticed that the dress Marcia had on was the one she had worn to the sociable in Lower Equity, and she said, yes, she had put it on because he once said he liked it. He asked her when, and she said, oh, she knew; but if he could not remember, she was not going to tell him. Then she wanted to know if he recognized her by the dress before she lifted her veil in the station.

“No,” he said, with a teasing laugh. “I wasn't thinking of you.”

“Oh, Bartley!” she joyfully reproached him. “You must have been!”

“Yes, I was! I was so mad at you, that I was glad to have that brute of a station-master bullying _some_ woman!”

“Bartley!”

He sat holding her hand. “Marcia,” he said, gravely, “we must write to your father at once, and tell him. I want to begin life in the right way, and I think it's only fair to him.”

She was enraptured at his magnanimity. “Bartley! That's _like_ you! Poor father! I declare--Bartley, I'm afraid I had forgotten him! It's dreadful; but--_you_ put everything else out of my head. I do believe I've died and come to life somewhere else!”

“Well, _I_ haven't,” said Bartley, “and I guess you'd better write to your father. _You'd_ better write; at present, he and I are not on speaking terms. Here!” He took out his note-book, and gave her his stylographic pen after striking the fist that held it upon his other fist, in the fashion of the amateurs of that reluctant instrument, in order to bring down the ink.

“Oh, what's that?” she asked.

“It's a new kind of pen. I got it for a notice in the Free Press.”

“Is Henry Bird going to edit the paper?”

“I don't know, and I don't care,” answered Bartley.

“I'll go out and get an envelope, and ask the landlord what's the quickest way to get the letter to your father.”

He took up his hat, but she laid her hand on his arm. “Oh, send for him!” she said.

“Are you afraid I sha'n't come back?” he demanded, with a laughing kiss. “I want to see him about something else, too.”

“Well, don't be gone long.”

They parted with an embrace that would have fortified older married people for a year's separation. When Bartley came back, she handed him the leaf she had torn out of his book, and sat down beside him while he read it, with her arm over his shoulder.

“Dear father,” the letter ran, “Bartley and I are married. We were married an hour ago, just across the New Hampshire line, by the Rev. Mr. Jessup. Bartley wants I should let you know the very first thing. I am going to Boston with Bartley to-night, and, as soon as we get settled there, I will write again. I want you should forgive us both; but if you wont forgive Bartley, you mustn't forgive me. You were mistaken about Bartley, and I was right. Bartley has told me everything, and I am perfectly satisfied. Love to mother.

“MARCIA.”

“P.S.--I _did_ intend to visit Netty Spaulding. But I saw Bartley driving past on his way to the Junction, and I determined to see him if I could before he started for Boston, and tell him I was all wrong, no matter what he said or did afterwards. I ought to have told you I meant to see Bartley; but then you would not have let me come, and if I had not come, I should have died.”

“There's a good deal of Bartley in it,” said the young man with a laugh.

“You don't like it!”

“Yes, I do; it's all right. Did you use to take the prize for composition at boarding-school?”

“Why, I think it's a very good letter for when I'm in such an excited state.”

“It's beautiful!” cried Bartley, laughing more and more. The tears started to her eyes.

“Marcia,” said her husband fondly, “what a child you are! If ever I do anything to betray your trust in me--”

There came a shuffling of feet outside the door, a clinking of glass and crockery, and a jarring sort of blow, as if some one were trying to rap on the panel with the edge of a heavy-laden waiter. Bartley threw the door open and found the landlord there, red and smiling, with the waiter in his hand.

“I thought I'd bring your supper in here, you know,” he explained confidentially, “so 's't you could have it a little more snug. And my wife she kind o' got wind o' what was going on,--women will, you know,” he said with a wink,--“and she's sent ye in some hot biscuit and a little jell, and some of her cake.” He set the waiter down on the table, and stood admiring its mystery of napkined dishes. “She guessed you wouldn't object to some cold chicken, and she's put a little of that on. Sha'n't cost ye any more,” he hastened to assure them. “Now this is your room till the train comes, and there aint agoin' to anybody come in here. So you can make yourselves at home. And _I_ hope you'll enjoy your supper as much as we did ourn the night _we_ was married. There! I guess I'll let the lady fix the table; she looks as if she knowed how.”

He got himself out of the room again, and then Marcia, who had made him some embarrassed thanks, burst out in praise of his pleasantness.

“Well, he ought to be pleasant,” said Bartley, “he's just beaten me on a horse-trade. I've sold him the colt.”

“Sold him the colt!” cried Marcia, tragically dropping the napkin she had lifted from the plate of cold chicken.

“Well, we couldn't very well have taken him to Boston with us. And we couldn't have got there without selling him. You know you haven't married a millionnaire, Marcia.”

“How much did you get for the colt?”

“Oh, I didn't do so badly. I got a hundred and fifty for him.”

“And you had fifteen besides.”

“That was before we were married. I gave the minister five for you,--I think you are worth it, I wanted to give fifteen.”

“Well, then, you have a hundred and sixty now. Isn't that a great deal?”

“An everlasting lot,” said Bartley, with an impatient laugh. “Don't let the supper cool, Marcia!”

She silently set out the feast, but regarded it ruefully. “You oughtn't to have ordered so much, Bartley,” she said. “You couldn't afford it.”

“I can afford anything when I'm hungry. Besides. I only ordered the oysters and coffee; all the rest is conscience money--or sentiment--from the landlord. Come, come! cheer up, now! We sha'n't starve to-night, anyhow.”

“Well, I know father will help us.”

“We sha'n't count on him,” said Bartley. “Now _drop_ it!” He put his arm round her shoulders and pressed her against him, till she raised her face for his kiss.

“Well, I _will!”_ she said, and the shadow lifted itself from their wedding feast, and they sat down and made merry as if they had all the money in the world to spend. They laughed and joked; they praised the things they liked, and made fun of the others.

“How strange! How perfectly impossible it all seems! Why, last night I was taking supper at Kinney's logging-camp, and hating you at every mouthful with all my might. Everything seemed against me, and I was feeling ugly, and flirting like mad with a fool from Montreal: she had come out there from Portland for a frolic with the owners' party. You made me do it, Marcia!” he cried jestingly. “And remember that, if you want me to be good, you must be kind. The other thing seems to make me worse and worse.”

“I will,--I will, Bartley.” she said humbly. “I will try to be kind and patient with you. I will indeed.”

He threw back his head, and laughed and laughed. “Poor--poor old Kinney! He's the cook, you know, and he thought I'd been making fun of him to that woman, and he behaved so, after they were gone, that I started home in a rage; and he followed me out with his hands all covered with dough, and wanted to stop me, but he couldn't for fear of spoiling my clothes--” He lost himself in another paroxysm.

Marcia smiled a little. Then, “What sort of a looking person was she?” she tremulously asked.

Bartley stopped abruptly. “Not one ten-thousandth part as good-looking, nor one millionth part as bright, as Marcia Hubbard!” He caught her and smothered her against his breast.

“I don't care! I don't care!” she cried. “I was to blame more than you, if you flirted with her, and it serves me right. Yes, I will never say anything to you for anything that happened after I behaved so to you.”

“There wasn't anything else happened,” cried Bartley. “And the Montreal woman snubbed me soundly before she was done with me.”

“Snubbed you!” exclaimed Marcia, with illogical indignation. This delighted Bartley so much that it was long before he left off laughing over her.

Then they sat down, and were silent till she said, “And did you leave him in a temper?”

“Who? Kinney? In a perfect devil of a temper. I wouldn't even borrow some money he wanted to lend me.”

“Write to him, Bartley,” said his wife, seriously. “I love you so I can't bear to have anybody bad friends with you.”

XIII.

The whole thing was so crazy, as Bartley said, that it made no difference if they kept up the expense a few days longer. He took a hack from the depot when they arrived in Boston, and drove to the Revere House, instead of going up in the horse-car. He entered his name on the register with a flourish, “Bartley J. Hubbard and Wife, _Boston_,” and asked for a room and fire, with laconic gruffness; but the clerk knew him at once for a country person, and when the call-boy followed him into the parlor where Marcia sat, in the tremor into which she fell whenever Bartley was out of her sight, the call-boy discerned her provinciality at a glance, and made free to say that he guessed they had better let him take their things up to their room, and come up themselves after the porter had got their fire going.

“All right,” said Bartley, with hauteur; and he added, for no reason, “Be quick about it.”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy.

“What time is supper--dinner, I mean?”

“It's ready now, sir.”

“Good. Take up the things. Come just as you are, Marcia. Let him take your cap,--no, keep it on; a good many of them come down in their bonnets.”

Marcia put off her sack and gloves, and hastily repaired the ravages of travel as best she could. She would have liked to go to her room just long enough to brush her hair a little, and the fur cap made her head hot; but she was suddenly afraid of doing something that would seem countrified in Bartley's eyes, and she promptly obeyed: they had come from Portland in a parlor car, and she had been able to make a traveller's toilet before they reached Boston.

She had been at Portland several times with her father; but he stopped at a second-class hotel where he had always “put up” when alone, and she was new to the vastness of hotel mirrors and chandeliers, the glossy paint, the frescoing, the fluted pillars, the tessellated marble pavements upon which she stepped when she left the Brussels carpeting of the parlors. She clung to Bartley's arm, silently praying that she might not do anything to mortify him, and admiring everything he did with all her soul. He made a halt as they entered the glittering dining-room, and stood frowning till the head-waiter ran respectfully up to them, and ushered them with sweeping bows to a table, which they had to themselves. Bartley ordered their dinner with nonchalant ease, beginning with soup and going to black coffee with dazzling intelligence. While their waiter was gone with their order, he beckoned with one finger to another, and sent him out for a paper, which he unfolded and spread on the table, taking a toothpick into his mouth, and running the sheet over with his eyes. “I just want to see what's going on to-night,” he said, without looking at Marcia.

She made a little murmur of acquiescence in her throat, but she could not speak for strangeness. She began to steal little timid glances about, and to notice the people at the other tables. In her heart she did not find the ladies so very well dressed as she had expected the Boston ladies to be; and there was no gentleman there to compare with Bartley, either in style or looks. She let her eyes finally dwell on him, wishing that he would put his paper away and say something, but afraid to ask, lest it should not be quite right: all the other gentlemen were reading papers. She was feeling lonesome and homesick, when he suddenly glanced at her and said, “How pretty you look, Marsh!”

“Do I?” she asked, with a little grateful throb, while her eyes joyfully suffused themselves.

“Pretty as a pink,” he returned. “Gay,--isn't it?” he continued, with a wink that took her into his confidence again, from which his study of the newspaper had seemed to exclude her. “I'll tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to take you to the Museum after dinner, and let you see Boucicault in the 'Colleen Bawn.'” He swept his paper off the table and unfolded his napkin in his lap, and, leaning back in his chair, began to tell her about the play. “We can walk: it's only just round the corner,” he said at the end.

Marcia crept into the shelter of his talk,--he sometimes spoke rather loud,--and was submissively silent. When they got into their own room,--which had gilt lambrequin frames, and a chandelier of three burners, and a marble mantel, and marble-topped table and washstand,--and Bartley turned up the flaring gas, she quite broke down, and cried on his breast, to make sure that she had got him all back again.

“Why, Marcia!” he said. “I know just how you feel. Don't you suppose I understand as well as you do that we're a country couple? But I'm not going to give myself away; and you mustn't, either. There wasn't a woman in that room that could compare with you,--_dress_ or looks!”

“You were splendid,” she whispered, “and just like the rest! and that made me feel somehow as if I had lost you.”

“I know,--I saw just how you felt; but I wasn't going to say anything for fear you'd give way right there. Come, there's plenty of time before the play begins. I call this _nice_! Old-fashioned, rather, in the decorations,” he said, “but pretty good for its time.” He had pulled up two arm-chairs in front of the glowing grate of anthracite; as he spoke, he cast his eyes about the room, and she followed his glance obediently. He had kept her hand in his, and now he held her slim finger-tips in the fist which he rested on his knee. “No; I'll tell you what, Marcia, if you want to get on in a city, there's no use being afraid of people. No use being afraid of _anything_, so long as we're good to each other. And you've got to believe in me right along. Don't you let anything get you on the wrong track. I believe that as long as you have faith in me, I shall deserve it; and when you don't--”

“Oh, Bartley, you know I didn't doubt you! I just got to thinking, and I was a little worked up! I suppose I'm excited.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” cried her husband. “Don't you suppose I understand _you?”_

They talked a long time together, and made each other loving promises of patience. They confessed their faults, and pledged each other that they would try hard to overcome them. They wished to be good; they both felt they had much to retrieve; but they had no concealments, and they knew that was the best way to begin the future, of which they did their best to conceive seriously. Bartley told her his plans about getting some newspaper work till he could complete his law studies. He meant to settle down to practice in Boston. “You have to wait longer for it than you would in a country place; but when you get it, it's worth while.” He asked Marcia whether she would look up his friend Halleck if she were in his place; but he did not give her time to decide. “I guess I won't do it. Not just yet, at any rate. He might suppose that I wanted something of him. I'll call on him when I don't need his help.”

Perhaps, if they had not planned to go to the theatre, they would have staid where they were, for they were tired, and it was very cosey. But when they were once in the street, they were glad they had come out. Bowdoin Square and Court Street and Tremont Row were a glitter of gas-lights, and those shops, with their placarded bargains, dazzled Marcia.

“Is it one of the principal streets?” she asked Bartley.

He gave the laugh of a veteran _habitué_ of Boston. “Tremont Row? No. Wait till I show you Washington Street to-morrow. There's the Museum,” he said, pointing to the long row of globed lights on the façade of the building. “Here we are in Scollay Square. There's Hanover Street; there's Cornhill; Court crooks down that way; there's Pemberton Square.”

His familiarity with these names estranged him to her again; she clung the closer to his arm, and caught her breath nervously as they turned in with the crowd that was climbing the stairs to the box-office of the theatre. Bartley left her a moment, while he pushed his way up to the little window and bought the tickets. “First-rate seats,” he said, coming back to her, and taking her hand under his arm again, “and a great piece of luck. They were just returned for sale by the man in front of me, or I should have had to take something 'way up in the gallery. There's a regular jam. These are right in the centre of the parquet.”

Marcia did not know what the parquet was; she heard its name with the certainty that but for Bartley she should not be equal to it. All her village pride was quelled; she had only enough self-control to act upon Bartley's instructions not to give herself away by any conviction of rusticity. They passed in through the long, colonnaded vestibule, with its paintings, and plaster casts, and rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side, and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects, endeared by association, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston play-goer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him; the painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass bell; the governors' portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full length, on canvas; and the pagan months and seasons in plaster,--if all these are, indeed, the subjects,--were dim phantasmagoria amid which she and Bartley moved scarcely more real. The usher, in his dress-coat, ran up the aisle to take their checks, and led them down to their seats; half a dozen elegant people stood to let them into their places; the theatre was filled with faces. At Portland, where she saw the “Lady of Lyons,” with her father, three-quarters of the house was empty.

Bartley only had time to lean over and whisper, “The place is packed with Beacon Street swells,--it's a regular field night,”--when the bell tinkled and the curtain rose.

As the play went on, the rich jacqueminot-red flamed into her cheeks, and burnt there a steady blaze to the end. The people about her laughed and clapped, and at times they seemed to be crying. But Marcia sat through every part as stoical as a savage, making no sign, except for the flaming color in her cheeks, of interest or intelligence. Bartley talked of the play all the way home, but she said nothing, and in their own room he asked: “Didn't you really like it? Were you disappointed? I haven't been able to get a word out of you about it. Didn't you like Boucicault?”

“I didn't know which he was,” she answered, with impassioned exaltation. “I didn't care for him. I only thought of that poor girl, and her husband who despised her--”

She stopped. Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end. “And you thought--you thought,” he cried, trying to get his breath,--“you thought you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan! Oh, I see, I see!” He went on making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she laughed with him at last. When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he began his joking afresh. “The real thing for Hardress to do,” he said, fumbling for the key, “is to _blow_ it out. That's what Hardress usually does when he comes up from the rural districts with Eily on their bridal tour. That finishes off Eily, without troubling Danny Mann. The only drawback is that it finishes off Hardress, too: they're both found suffocated in the morning.”

XIV.

The next day, after breakfast, while they stood together before the parlor fire, Bartley proposed one plan after another for spending the day. Marcia rejected them all, with perfectly recovered self-composure.

“Then what _shall_ we do?” he asked, at last.

“Oh, I don't know,” she answered, rather absently. She added, after an interval, smoothing the warm front of her dress, and putting her foot on the fender, “What did those theatre-tickets cost?”

“Two dollars,” he replied carelessly. “Why?”

Marcia gasped. “Two dollars! Oh, Bartley, we couldn't afford it!”

“It seems we did.”

“And here,--how much are we paying here?”

“That room, with fire,” said Bartley, stretching himself, “is seven dollars a day--”

“We mustn't stay another instant!” said Marcia, all a woman's terror of spending money on anything but dress, all a wife's conservative instinct, rising within her. “How much have you got left?”

Bartley took out his pocket-book and counted over the bills in it. “A hundred and twenty dollars.”

“Why, what has become of it all? We had a hundred and sixty!”

“Well, our railroad tickets were nineteen, the sleeping-car was three, the parlor-car was three, the theatre was two, the hack was fifty cents, and we'll have to put down the other two and a half to refreshments.”

Marcia listened in dismay. At the end she drew a long breath. “Well, we must go away from here as soon as possible,--that I know. We'll go out and find some boarding-place. That's the first thing.”

“Oh, now, Marcia, you're not going to be so severe as that, are you?” pleaded Bartley. “A few dollars, more or less, are not going to keep us out of the poorhouse. I just want to stay here three days: that will leave us a clean hundred, and we can start fair.” He was half joking, but she was wholly serious.

“No, Bartley! Not another hour,--not another minute! Come!” She took his arm and bent it up into a crook, where she put her hand, and pulled him toward the door.

“Well, after all,” he said, “it will be some fun looking up a room.”

There was no one else in the parlor; in going to the door they took some waltzing steps together.

While she dressed to go out, he looked up places where rooms were let with or without board, in the newspaper. “There don't seem to be a great many,” he said meditatively, bending over the open sheet. But he cut out half a dozen advertisements with his editorial scissors, and they started upon their search.

They climbed those pleasant old up-hill streets that converge to the State House, and looked into the houses on the quiet Places that stretch from one thoroughfare to another. They had decided that they would be content with two small rooms, one for a chamber, and the other for a parlor, where they could have a fire. They found exactly what they wanted in the first house where they applied, one flight up, with sunny windows, looking down the street; but it made Marcia's blood run cold when the landlady said that the price was thirty dollars a week. At another place the rooms were only twenty; the position was as good, and the carpet and furniture prettier. This was still too dear, but it seemed comparatively reasonable till it appeared that this was the price without board.

“I think we should prefer rooms with board, shouldn't we?” asked Bartley, with a sly look at Marcia.