Chapter 9

A week after Henry Wilding had called on Austin Buckingham, that gentleman tried to return his call. It must be confessed that his motive was not so much a commendable desire to get even socially with his new acquaintance, nor to give him good advice, as it was to get a nearer view of the heroine of his story. Candor compels me to say that every evening for the week past Buckingham had taken an airing, and always in the same direction. He had always found the shade drawn at No. 17, and often he had caught a glimpse, as he sauntered past, of the figure which he now knew so well. It is true that he had never again seen Miss Vila in so dramatic a character as upon the first evening when he had discovered her _en famille;_ but he had seen her, not as one sees a portrait, which always looks in the same direction. In the horse-car she had been such a portrait to him,--the "Portrait of a Lady Reading." Behind the window of Mr. Martindale's house she had been a figure in a _tableau vivant_, often animated, always disclosing some new grace of attitude, some new charm of manner. He faintly told himself that these views enabled him to form a more distinct impression of the character of his heroine: whenever he should have his plot ready, his heroine would in the various situations instantly appear to him with the vividness and richness of reality.

He bethought himself that it was high time to see a little more of his hero; and so he persuaded himself that in going to call upon him he was engaged in a strictly professional occupation. If by any chance he should hear the rustle of the heroine's dress, why, that could not possibly injure any impressions which he might receive of his hero's individuality. These two people had become important factors in his story. He had not yet succeeded in sketching his plot. He felt it all the more necessary that they should sketch it for him. He was sure that he should readily catch at any hint which they might drop. He would therefore go into the society of his hero--and heroine.

For, somehow or other, whenever he essayed to call up the image of his hero and make it yield some distinct personality, the heroine would gently come to the fore. It was like going to a party and finding the eye glancing off from every black-coated figure to the richly-draped presence which made the party different from a town-meeting.

He was so much under the influence of all this reflex sentiment that he dressed himself with care before he went out, and so presented himself at the door of Mr. Martindale's house. It did not occur to him that Wilding lived anywhere else. He had taken it for granted that the young man was still at his cousin's. So when the door was opened for him he asked if Mr. Wilding were in, at the same time presenting his card. It chanced that the maid-servant had that day entered Mr. Martindale's service,--not a very rare chance in any household,--and, never having heard Mr. Wilding's name, indeed, not now hearing it, but hearing instead the name Miss Vila, cordially welcomed the distinguished-looking visitor, and marched before him into the little parlor, where she presented the card, on a salver which she had snatched on the way, to Miss Vila, who was sitting with Mrs. Martindale. The two ladies were playing backgammon.

VIII.

THE INTERRUPTED GAME.

"For me!" exclaimed Miss Vila, in a dismayed undertone. "Julia!"

Mrs. Martindale glanced at the card. She rose at once, just as Mr. Buckingham entered the room with a little hesitation in his step. As the two ladies held the backgammon-board in their laps, one effect of the sudden movement was to send the men rolling in every direction about the room. It was weeks before one of the men--a black one--was found.

Mr. Buckingham saw his card in Miss Vila's hands. He addressed himself to her:

"Possibly your servant misunderstood me. I asked for Mr. Wilding."

"She is a new servant," said Mrs. Martindale, and then added, with alacrity, as she seized the accident by its nearest horn, "her mistake was probably one of the ear. She thought you asked for Miss Vila." Mrs. Martindale had it in her to wave her hand toward the young lady, as if showing off wax-works, and to explain, "This is Miss Vila," but Mr. Buckingham was quick enough not to need the line upon line.

"I must beg Miss Vila's pardon. There certainly is a likeness in the names, if you spell it with a _we_."

"I will speak to Mr. Wilding," said Mrs. Martindale, jerking an eyeful of mysterious intelligence at Miss Vila and whisking out of the room.

"I hope you were just about to be beaten, Miss Vila," said Buckingham, "for I see I have spoiled the game."

"It is nothing," said she.

She had said nothing, but she had said it with a singularly musical voice, and, after all, it is not the significant words but the significant tones which touch one.

"No. It is nothing," he repeated. "A game may always be interrupted, because it is not the conclusion but the playing which gives it any value. I suspect it is like the stories we read,--somebody comes in, and we lay the book down before we come to the end. It is no great matter if we never take it up again. We got our pleasure, not from knowing how things turned out, but from knowing things." He blushed a little as he said this. In fact, his own inchoate story came to his mind. Besides, Miss Vila had his card. Since she read so constantly, it was odds but she knew of him. He blushed a little more as this thought crossed his mind.

"Do you think so?" she asked, and her downcast eyes were suddenly up-turned in full, the look which he had often patiently watched for as he had seen her in the horse-car. "I find the end necessary. If I stop half-way I think I have done the story-teller an injustice. I have not given him the chance to tell me all he intended to tell me. He lets out the secret of his characters by degrees. He could justly say to me, 'You do not know the heroine; you have not seen her in that scene which is going to test her.'"

"You are quite right," said Buckingham, "if you really think you are under any obligation to the story-teller."

"Why, of course I am," she exclaimed, with wide-open surprise. Then she blushed in turn,--first a little color of half-indignant rebuke, then a warm hue as she thought of her unnecessary earnestness, then a deep crimson as there rushed over her the sudden recollection of the hours she had spent in Buckingham's company, and the silent admiration which she had bestowed from the shelter of ignorance upon this gentleman who now sat composedly before her. It was by an effort of self-control that she did not spring from her seat and leave the room. The effort blanched her face. It was as she sat thus, her eyes cast down, her lips set, her countenance pale, that Mrs. Martindale returned.

IX.

THE UNNECESSARY HERO.

"My cousin will be here presently," she said, as she entered the room. And then her eye fell on Miss Vila and glanced quickly at Mr. Buckingham, who was nervously fingering his stick. "Meanwhile," she added, with a mischievous look, "I will ask you to remain with us, as Mr. Wilding will be obliged to see you here. Lillie, you have the gentleman's card. It seems awkward to wait for the formality of Henry's introduction. Will you have the kindness to make us acquainted?"

Miss Vila gravely performed the ceremony.

"Your cousin is fortunate in finding friends in town, Mrs. Martindale," said Buckingham; "for a collegian coming here freshly, especially one in a special course, is apt to be slow in breaking through the hedge which divides the college from the town."

"Yes, he is quite fortunate," said his cousin. "I exercise an influence over him. You know we exercise an influence over students, don't you?"

Buckingham laughed.

"I supposed that was what the town was for."

"When they are away from home and parents and all those refining influences, we serve as substitutes. Henry is away, not so much from his parents, who are dead, as from the lady to whom he is engaged. That is why I feel bound to exercise an influence over him." Mrs. Martindale made this explanation with a serious air, but Buckingham, whose eye never stayed far from Miss Vila, detected that young lady casting a reproachful, not to say indignant, glance at the speaker. Miss Vila, indeed, made a motion as if to leave, but, with another quick blush, as if she had betrayed a secret thought, settled again into her chair. To tell the secret, she had a sudden misgiving that her reckless friend might take it into her head to make ingenuous revelations concerning her.

"I hope he finds his work agreeable," said Buckingham; not that he cared a straw, but by way of keeping up his end of the conversation.

"Oh, I have no doubt he does, or he would come to see us oftener. I mean," she explained hurriedly, "he would stay in his room less."

"He certainly takes his time now in coming down," thought the visitor. There was, however, a movement in the passage, and Mrs. Martindale darted out. She came back immediately, looking somewhat embarrassed.

"I am sorry," she faltered, "but I find I am mistaken. He is not in."

"I am afraid you are not exerting enough influence, Mrs. Martindale," said Buckingham pleasantly, but somewhat perplexed in his mind at the length of time it had taken to make this discovery, and at the hallucination which had seemed to possess his cousin's mind when she announced him as about to appear. As for Miss Vila, she persistently refused to look up. She scarcely looked up, indeed, when Mr. Buckingham bowed himself out, though he looked eagerly at her, in hopes once more of catching the full light of her eyes.

She did look up, however, when the door closed behind the visitor, and she looked straight at Mrs. Martindale. That lady answered her look with one tear and a good many words:

"Well, Lillie, if you knew how I felt at getting into such a scrape, you wouldn't look at me as if you were an Avenging Conscience, or a Nemesis, or any of those horrid furies. No; and you wouldn't look speechlessly sorrowful, either. Of course I ought to have told him at once that Henry did not live here, and I ought to have sent him next door instead of sending Kate, and I ought not to have pretended that he was coming the next moment; but of course I thought he was at home, and then when he came I could have laughed it off; but he didn't come, and I was too frightened to laugh it off. Oh, yes, I am a criminal of the deepest dye; but he's introduced, Lillie, and you've introduced him to me, and we're all--we're all introduced."

X.

THE REAL HERO.

When a pile of wood has been laid upon smouldering embers, a thin curl of smoke crawls lazily up the chimney, another follows with like indolence, and it looks after a while as if the wood would not burn at all. Suddenly a little whiff of air enters the pile, when, presto! up blazes the fire, and soon there is a famous glow.

It was somewhat thus with Mr. Austin Buckingham. He had been toying with the fancy of his story, and especially of this maiden to whom his eyes had become so wonted, and had allowed himself to look at her in so many lights, that she had gradually come to be always before him. The figure of the hero had as gradually disappeared: it was only by an effort that he could revive it. Suddenly he had sat a long quarter of an hour with the girl, he had heard her voice, he had seen her smile, he had felt the graciousness of her near presence when he was not merely at hand, but the direct object of her thought. What a world of difference there was between sitting by her side in a crowded horse-car and sitting even half a room-breadth's away, when they two were the only ones in the room!

By all this experience, as much perhaps by what had gone before as by what had followed suddenly after, Buckingham now stood revealed to himself. He was ablaze with this new, tingling, searching ardor. When he had entered the room and shut the door, he saw lying upon his table his note-book, open as he had left it. He had been amusing himself, just before he went out, with further suggestions for his story. He dipped his pen into the ink and drew a bold, straight line across the page. He stood looking at the leaf,--idle fancy above the line, a blank below it.

A knock at the door, and Henry Wilding entered. Buckingham greeted him with a sudden excess of fervor which puzzled the young man.

"I was sorry to miss finding you," he began, and then checked himself. "Not so very sorry either, since fortune made me acquainted with--your cousin--and with Miss Vila," he added, after an embarrassed pause.

"I don't understand," said Wilding. "Have I missed a call from you?"

"Yes. I just came from your house. Your cousin at first thought you were at home. Now I think of it, she--"

"But I don't live at my cousin's," said Wilding.

"Where do you live, then?"

"Next door to her house."

"Oh! then she sent out for you. That explains it." And so Mr. Buckingham, intent on his own affairs, brushed away the duplicity of the fair hostess. "But I was very glad to hear a piece of news about you from her. Let me congratulate you. I did not know you were engaged." And he shook Wilding's hand warmly. He was not so generous at the moment as he appeared. In reality, he was shaking his own hand in anticipation. Wilding responded with a good-natured laugh.

"I have sometimes wondered, Mr. Buckingham," he said, "how you, who write stories of love and marriage, should remain unmarried."

"Let us put it the other way. How can I who am unmarried write such stories? In truth, I have a dim sense that persons like you, who know the matter by experience, must laugh inwardly at my innocent attempts at realistic treatment."

"Why not, then, have the experience first?" said Wilding lightly.

"God forbid!" said Buckingham, with a somewhat unintelligible seriousness. "If I were ever in love, it seems to me I should stop writing love-stories."

Now, this was just what happened, for a time at least. To any one so dead in love as Buckingham was at this time, all circumstances are favorable. It needs but a given moment, and the hero is on hand ready to seize it. The next night he could not ride out from the city; he must walk. When he got beyond the bridge, he wondered that he saw no horse-cars coming toward him. He remembered that he had seen none for some time, but now he noticed a long line of them standing before him, pointed outward. He heard the puff of a steam fire-engine, and saw that travel by rail was stopped by a fire. The hose crossed the track, and the incoming horse-cars were in a long line beyond it. He looked at the cars which he had over-taken. Midway in the line stood the one he had been accustomed to take. He caught sight of a familiar head bent over a book. He stepped into the car and stood before Miss Vila. He bent forward, and she looked up as he spoke:

"The cars are stopped by a fire. We may be delayed a long while. Why not walk home from here? It is a fine night."

He spoke somewhat hurriedly. He did not know how appealingly he looked. She did, however, and she closed her book and followed him.

The story, then, never was written, even though the heroine had been found. Everything else had disappeared,--the hero, the mystery, the plot. Nothing was left but the heroine and--love.

HORACE E. SCUDDER.

SHADOWS ALL.

Shadows all! From the birth-robe to the pall, In this travesty of life, Hollow calm and fruitless strife, Whatsoe'er the actors seem, They are posturing in a dream; Fates may rise, and fates may fall, Shadows are we, shadows all!

From what sphere Float these phantoms flickering here? From what mystic circle cast In the dim æonian Past? Many voices make reply, But they only rise to die Down the midnight mystery, While earth's mocking echoes call, Shadows, shadows, shadows all!

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE.

ROSES OF YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY.

It always seemed to me, as a child, that the birds put their hearts more wholly into their songs in that special little corner of Paradise on the Hudson River than they did anywhere else. Not that it was really so very little a corner, being small only in comparison with an entire Paradise, composed of many such bits, that lines the shore of the beautiful Hudson.

It was so great a delight to the child who knew little of country pleasures to be called away from some task or commonplace "every-day" pastime and to be told that there was an invitation to spend an afternoon, or perhaps several days, at Professor Morse's place, "Locust Grove."

There would be the drive, leaning back in the barouche (with a feeling of easy importance lent by the consciousness of wondrous delights to come) and looking up with a species of admiring awe at the herculean form of the French coachman, who seemed to be concealing romantically brigandish recollections behind his fiery black eyes and wide-spreading, ferocious moustache. Along the dusty "South Road" we would go, under the green lights and shadows of the maple-trees, over the two miles which stretch between Poughkeepsie town and "Locust Grove,"--past "Eastman's Park," with its smart decorations, past the small, unambitious houses, draped with many-hued, old-fashioned roses, that straggled along the dividing-line between the narrow restrictions of town and the fragrant wideness of the country, where the air was cool with the breath of the river, and the breezes brought suggestions of freshly-cut grass, just blown locust-blossoms, and the thousand sweet, indefinable scents of the woods.

On approaching the boundaries of "the Grove," the perfume of the locust-flowers assumed due prominence, as the name of the place implies they should, while their white clusters drooped from the heavily-loaded branches till they fairly touched the high posts of the gate. And then would come the drive up the dim avenue, flecked with patches of sunshine that lay like fallen gold pieces in the dusk shadow, while if one glanced upward or on either side one saw nothing save the arching trees,--pines and locusts, and maples no less stately,--until a space was reached where the grove was less dense and the view widened to a stretch of velvet grass whitened with daisies lying soft on the tops of the blades in a way to make one fancy a summer fall of snow. At the turn of the avenue one caught a glimpse of the house, with its vine-wreathed tower, generous piazzas, and hospitable _porte-cochère_, and in the background, beyond the lawn, the river, with the blue hills on the opposite shore veiled by a light, lace like haze, just enough of a haze to lend mystery to the distance.

The loud clattering of the horses' shoes on the stone pavement under the _porte-cochère_, which informed the occupants of the house that visitors had come, seemed always to tell the youngest, most insignificant, yet happiest of those visitors that the anticipated hour of many delights had actually arrived. And of these delights there were to the heart of the child a thousand and one such as could scarcely be realized or even dreamed of at the home in town. There were the broad, shady piazzas to be walked over with dainty footfalls, lest the grown people should be disturbed. There was the mystic retreat within the circle of a group of low-branching pines, the secret of which one penetrated by stepping down from the front piazza at a certain place and there insinuating one's self into a small opening, which only the initiated could discover, among the trees. Here one had a little fragrant sanctum all one's own, carpeted with pine needles, green and brown, and arched over by ceiling and walls of thick branches, from out of which peeped startled robins, who soon, finding that no harm was meant them, went on with their song. Then there was the garden, fragrant and brilliant, which one might explore when one had promised Thomas, the presiding genius, that one would not touch his cherished sweets, for it "went to his heart" to see a single blossom torn from its parent stem. And there were the grape-houses, for which the place was famous far and near,--hot, and odorous of moist soil and growing vines, among which white and purple clusters hung temptingly heavy and low.

One especial pleasure was to walk along the gravelled path that skirted the smooth, level stretch of lawn at the back of the house, and thus to reach the brow of the hill overlooking the "farm" and the river. There were seats on the edge of this bluff, and a large spring-board on which one might ride and jump to one's heart's content. By following this path still farther, and to the left, one soon deserted the well-kept lawn and found one's self on a narrow, winding walk overhanging a deep, wooded ravine, in the depths of which a little brook ran curving about among the ferns and daisies; and presently, far out of sight of the house, in shade so dense as to lend a certain pleasing enchantment, one came upon a rustic summer-house, with odd, three-cornered-seats, and a table surrounding the tree-trunk that supported the centre of the roof.

There were manifold other out-of-door enjoyments, such as visiting the pigeon-house, and, as a rare favor, rioting in the scented hay in the loft over the barn, visiting the gardener's wife (whose home was in that part of the old Livingston mansion which its master and time had allowed to stand), and being permitted to draw water from the ancient well, about which hung so many stories of generations past. How exciting it was, and with what delicious awe one listened, when the little lady who was a fairy grandmamma instead of a fairy godmother in the household told a certain story regarding this well! It was a story before the time of her own birth, when two of her older sisters were very tiny girls. One day, when the mother was busy in superintending some homely task (such as the manufacturing of the "cream cheese," perhaps, for which she was noted), the baby of two years toddled in and began to lisp over and over the same broken words, "Tatie in 'ell, Tatie in 'ell." She had repeated them many times, with increasing insistence, before the busy mother realized that they possessed a meaning. "Tatie in 'ell, Tatie in 'ell," the little one said, pulling at her mother's gown, half crying as she spoke; and then it dawned upon the latter that her baby had something serious to tell. She yielded to the little importunate hands upon her dress, and followed the child out of doors to the well and there looked down. "Katie" was indeed in the well, as the lisping tongue had tried to say, and, gazing into the darkness below, the mother could see the frightened, pitiful little face turned up to her, while two small hands convulsively grasped the edge of the great bucket. The husband and father was away from home, all the men employed about the place were working at a distance, and there was no time to lose: those frail hands must soon relax their hold, and the child was sorely terrified and begging to be saved. As the mother hesitated, in an agony of doubt, out from the house came a stout, elderly serving-woman, who had lived in the family for many years, and who was especially devoted to little Kate. She had heard her mistress's cry, and, running to look into the well, without even waiting to explain, she set about the execution of a hazardous and original plan of rescue. Climbing over the curb, she began to descend by striding the well and planting her feet upon the rough, protruding stones of which the sides were formed. Not one woman in a thousand could or would have done such a thing; but this one was tall and strong, and brave as a lion with the might of her love for little Kate. She saved the child, who had suffered no graver injury than a thorough drenching and a fright which served as a warning for herself and the children of her own and several generations to come.