Chapter 7

She could play tennis, too, with the best, as she demonstrated on the courts of The Beaches Club. Her proficiency and spirit speedily made friends for her among the young people of the colony, who visited her and invited her to take part in their amusements. She was prepared to ride on her bicycle wherever the interest of the moment called her, and deplored the solemnity of the family carryall. When her aunts declared that a wheel was too undignified a vehicle on which to go out to luncheon, she compromised on a pony cart as a substitute, for she could drive almost as well as she could sail. She took comparatively little interest in the garden, and was not always at home at five-o’clock tea to read aloud the latest books; but her amiability and natural gayety were like sunshine in the house. She talked freely of what she did, and she had an excellent appetite.

“She’s as unlike the girls of my day as one could imagine, and I do wish she wouldn’t drive about the country bareheaded, looking like a colt or a young Indian,” said Miss Rebecca pensively one morning, just after Mabel’s departure for the tennis-court. “But I must confess that she’s the life of the place, and we couldn’t get on without her now. I don’t think, though, that she has done three hours of solid reading since she entered the house. I call that deplorable.”

“She’s a dear,” said Aunt Carry. “We haven’t been much in the way of seeing young girls of late, and Mabel doesn’t seem to me different from most of those who visit her. Twenty years ago, you remember, girls pecked at their food and had to lie down most of the time. Now they eat it. What I can’t get quite used to is the habit of letting young men call them by their first names on short acquaintance. In my time,” she added with a little sigh, “it would have been regarded as inconsistent with maidenly reserve. I’m sure I heard the young man who was here last night say, ‘I’ve known you a week now; may I call you Mabel?’”

As to young men, be it stated, the subject of this conversation showed herself impartially indifferent. Her attitude seemed to be that boys were good fellows as well as girls, and should be encouraged accordingly. If they chose to make embarrassing speeches regarding one’s personal appearance and to try to be alone with one as much as possible, while such favoritism was rather a fillip to existence, it was to be considered at bottom as an excellent joke. Young men came and young men went. Mabel attracted her due share. Yet evidently she seemed to be as glad to see the last comer as any of his predecessors.

Then occurred the second happening in the tranquil existence of the maiden ladies. One day at the end of the first summer, an easterly day, when the sky was beginning to be obscured by scud and the sea was swelling with the approach of a storm, Dan Anderson, the only son of his father, was knocked overboard by the boom while showing the heels of his thirty-foot knockabout to the hired boat of his neighbor, Miss Mabel Ripley. They were not racing, for his craft was unusually fast, as became a multi-millionaire’s plaything. Besides, he and the girl had merely a bowing acquaintance. The _Firefly_ was simply bobbing along on the same tack as the _Enchantress_, while the fair skipper, who had another girl as a companion, tried vainly, at a respectful distance, to hold her own by skill.

The headway on Dan’s yacht was so great that before the two dazed salts on board realized what had happened their master was far astern. They bustled to bring the _Enchantress_ about and to come to his rescue in the dingy. Stunned by the blow of the--spar, he had gone down like a stone; so, in all probability, they would have been too late. When he came up the second time it was on the port bow of the _Firefly_, but completely out of reach. Giving the tiller to her friend, and stripping off superfluous apparel, Mabel jumped overboard in time to grasp and hold the drowning youth. There she kept him until aid reached them. But the unconscious victim did not open his eyes until after he had been laid on the Misses Ripley’s lawn, where, by virtue of brandy from the medicine-closet and hot-water bottles, the flickering spark of life was coaxed into a flame.

It was an agitating experience for the aunts. But Mabel was none the worse for the wetting; and though she naturally made light of her performance, congratulations on her pluck and presence of mind came pouring in. David Walker suggested that the Humane Society would be sure to take the matter up and confer a medal upon the heroine. The members of the Anderson family came severally to express with emotion their gratitude and admiration. The father had not been there since his previous eventful visit, though once or twice he had met his neighbors on the road and stopped to speak to them, as if to show he harbored no malice in spite of his disappointment.

Now with a tremulous voice he bore testimony to the greatness of the mercy which had been vouchsafed him.

The third and last happening might be regarded as a logical sequel to the second by those who believe that marriages are made in heaven. It was to ponder it again after having pondered it for twenty-four hours that the Ripley sisters found themselves in their pleached garden at the close of the day. That the event was not unforeseen by one of them was borne out by the words of Miss Carry:

“I remember saying to myself that day on the lawn, Rebecca, that it would be just like the modern girl if she were to marry him; because she saved his life, I mean. If he had saved hers, as used to happen, she would never have looked at him twice. I didn’t mention it because it was only an idea, which might have worried you.”

“We have seen it coming, of course,” answered Miss Rebecca, who was clasping the points of her elbows. “And there was nothing to do about it--even if we desired to. I can’t help, though, feeling sorry that she isn’t going to marry some one we know all about--the family, I mean.

“Well,” she added with a sigh, “the Andersons will get our place in the end, after all, and we shall be obliged to associate more or less with multi-millionaires for the rest of our days. It’s depressing ethically; but there’s no use in quarrelling with one’s own flesh and blood, if it is a modern girl, for one would be quarrelling most of the time. We must make the best of it, Carry, and--and try to like it.”

“He really seems very nice,” murmured Miss Carry. “He gives her some new jewel almost every day.”

Miss Rebecca sniffed disdainfully, as though to inquire if love was to be attested by eighteen-carat gold rather than by summer blooms.

The sound of steps on the gravel path interrupted their confabulation.

“It is Mr. Anderson, _père_” said Miss Carry laconically.

“He is coming to take possession,” responded her sister.

The crunch of the gravel under his solid, firm tread jarred on their already wearied sensibilities. Nevertheless they knew that it behooved them to be cordial and to accept the situation with good grace. Their niece was over head and ears in love with a young man whose personal character, so far as they knew, was not open to reproach, and who would be heir to millions. What more was to be said? Indeed, Miss Rebecca was the first to broach the subject after the greetings were over.

“Our young people seem to have made up their minds that they cannot live apart,” she said.

“So my son has informed me.”

Mr. Anderson spoke gravely and then paused. His habitually confident manner betrayed signs of nervousness.

“I told him this morning that there could be no engagement until after I had talked with you,” he added.

One could have heard a pin drop. Each of the sisters was tremulous to know what was coming next. Could he possibly be meditating purse-proud opposition? The Ripley blue blood simmered at the thought, and Miss Rebecca, nervous in her turn, tapped the ground lightly with her foot.

“The day I was first here,” he resumed, “you ladies taught me a lesson. I believed then that money could command anything. I discovered that I was mistaken. It provoked me, but it set me thinking. I’ve learned since that the almighty dollar cannot buy gentle birth and--and the standards which go with it.”

Unexpectedly edifying as this admission was, his listeners sought in vain to connect it with the immediate issue, and consequently forebore to speak.

“The only return I can make for opening my eyes to the real truth is by doing what I guess you would do if you or one of your folk were in my shoes. I’m a very rich man, as you know. If your niece marries my son her children will never come to want in their time. He’s a good boy, if I do say it; and I should be mighty proud of her.”

Miss Carry breathed a gentle sigh of relief at this last avowal.

“I don’t want her to marry him, though, without knowing the truth, and perhaps when you hear it you’ll decide that she must give him up.”

Thereupon Mr. Anderson blew his nose by way of gathering his faculties for the crucial words as a carter rests his horse before mounting the final hill when the sledding is hard.

“I’m going to tell you how I made my first start. I was a clerk in a bank and sharp as a needle in forecasting what was going to happen downtown. I used to say to myself that if I had capital it would be easy to make money breed money. Well, one day I borrowed from the bank, without the bank’s leave, $3,000 in order to speculate. I won on that deal and the next and the next. Then I was able to return what I’d borrowed and to set up in a small way for myself in the furniture business. That was my start, ladies--the nest-egg of all I’ve got.”

He sat back in his chair and passed his handkerchief across his forehead like one who has performed with credit an agonizing duty.

There was silence for a moment. Unequivocal as the confession was, Miss Rebecca, reluctant to believe her ears, asked with characteristic bluntness:

“You mean that you--er--misappropriated the money?”

“I was an embezzler, strictly speaking.”

“I see.”

“Perhaps you wonder why I told you this,” he said, bending forward.

“No, we understand,” said Miss Rebecca.

“We understand perfectly,” exclaimed Miss Carry with gentle warmth.

“It’s very honest of you, Mr. Anderson,” said Miss Rebecca after a musing pause.

“I’ve never been dishonest since then,” he remarked naïvely. “But a year ago I wouldn’t have told you this, though it’s been in the back of my mind as a rankling sore, growing as I grew in wealth and respectability. I made a bluff at believing that it didn’t matter, and that a thing done has an end. Well, now I’ve made a clean breast of it to the ones who have a right to know. I should like you to tell Mabel.”

As he spoke the lovers appeared in the near distance at the edge of the lawn, coming up from the beach. “But I don’t think it will be necessary to tell my son,” he added yearningly.

“Certainly _not_” said Miss Rebecca with emphasis.

The sisters exchanged glances, trying to read each other’s thoughts.

“It’s a blot in the ‘scutcheon, of course,” said Miss Rebecca. “It’s for our niece to say.” But there was no sternness in her tone.

This gave Miss Carry courage. Her hand shook a little as she put down her teacup, for she was shy of taking the initiative. “I think I know what she would say. In our time it would probably have been different, on account of the family--and heredity; but Mabel is a modern girl. And a modern girl would say that she isn’t to marry the father but the son. She loves him, so I’m certain she would never give him up. Therefore is it best to tell her?”

Daniel Anderson’s face was illumined with the light of hope, and he turned to the elder sister, whom he recognized as the final judge.

Miss Rebecca sniffed. Her ideas of everlasting justice were a little disconcerted. Nevertheless she said firmly after brief hesitation:

“I was taught to believe that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children; but I believe, Carry, you’re right.”

“Bless you for that,” exclaimed the furniture king. Then, groping in the excess of his emotion for some fit expression of gratitude, he bent forward and, taking Miss Rebecca’s hand, pressed his lips upon her fingers as an act of homage.

Miss Carry would have been justified in reflecting that it would have been more fitting had he kissed her fingers instead. But she was used to taking the second place in the household, and the happy expression of her countenance suggested that her thoughts were otherwise engaged.

ACROSS THE WAY

The news that the late Mr. Cherrington’s house on Saville Street had been let for a school, within a few months after his death, could not have been a surprise to any one in the neighborhood. Ten years before, when Mr. Cherrington and those prominent in his generation were in their heyday, Saville Street had been sacred to private residences from one end to the other, but the tide of fashion had been drifting latterly. There was already another school in the same block, and there were scattered all along on either side of the street a sprinkling of throat, eye, and ear doctors, a very fashionable dressmaker or two, an up-town bank, and numerous apartments for bachelors.

The news could not have been a surprise even to Mr. Homer Ramsay, but that crusty old bachelor in the seventies brought down his walking-stick with a vicious thump when he heard it, and remarked that he would live to be ninety “if only to spite ‘em.” This threat, however, had reference, not to Mr. Cherrington’s residence, but his own, which was exactly opposite, and which he had occupied for more than forty years. It was a conviction of Mr. Ramsay’s that there was a conspiracy on foot to purchase his house, and accordingly he took every opportunity to declare that he would never part with an inch of his land while he was in the flesh. A wag in the neighborhood had expressed the opinion that the old gentleman waxed hale and hearty on his own bile. He was certainly a churlish individual in his general bearing toward his fellow-beings, and violent in his prejudices. For the last ten years his favorite prophecy had been that the country was going to the devil.

Besides the house on Saville Street, Mr. Ramsay had some bonds and stock--fifty or sixty thousand dollars in all--which tidy little property would, in the natural course of events, descend to his next of kin; in this case, however, only a first cousin once removed. In the eye of the law a living person has no heir; but blood is thicker than water, and it was generally taken for granted that Mr. Horace Barker, whose grandmother had been the sister of Mr. Ramsay’s father, would some day be the owner of the house on Saville Street. At least, confident expectation that this would come to pass had long restrained Mr. Barker from letting any one but his better half know that he regarded his Cousin Homer as an irascible old curmudgeon; and perhaps, on the other hand, had justified Mr. Ramsay in his own mind for referring in common parlance to his first cousin once removed as a stiff nincompoop who had married a sickly doll. Not that Mr. Horace Barker needed the money, by any means. He was well-to-do already, and lived in a more fashionable street than Saville Street, where he occupied a dignified-looking brown-stone house, from the windows of which his three little people--all girls--peeped and nodded at the organ-grinder and the street-band.

The name of the person to whom Mr. Cherrington’s house had been leased was Miss Elizabeth Whyte. She was twenty-five, and she was starting a school because it was necessary for her to earn her own living. She considered that life, from the point of view of happiness, was over for her; and yet, though she had made up her mind that she could never be really happy again, she was resolved neither to mope nor to be a burden on any one. Mr. Mills, the executor of Mr. Cherrington’s estate, who believed himself to be a judge of human nature withal, had observed that she seemed a little overwrought, as though she had lived on her nerves; but, on the other hand, he had been impressed by her direct, business-like manner, which argued that she was very much in earnest. Besides, she was vouched for by the best people, and Mrs. Cyrus Bangs was moving heaven and earth to procure pupils for her. It was clearly his duty as a business man to let her have the house.

Until within a few months Elizabeth Whyte had lived in a neighboring town--the seat of a college, where the minds of young men for successive generations have been cultivated, but sometimes at the expense of a long-suffering local community. Her father, who at the time of her birth was a clergyman with a parish, had subsequently evolved into an agnostic and an invalid without one, and she had been used to plain living and high thinking from her girlhood. Even parents who find it difficult to keep the wolf at a respectful distance by untiring economy will devise some means to make an only daughter look presentable on her first appearance in society. Fine feathers do not make fine birds, and yet the consciousness of a becoming gown will irradiate the cheek of beauty. Elizabeth at eighteen would have been fetching in any dress, but in each of her three new evening frocks she looked bewitching. She was a gay, trig little person, with snapping, dark eyes and an arch expression; a tireless dancer, quick and audacious at repartee; the very ideal of a college belle. The student world had fallen prostrate at her feet, and Tom Whittemore most conspicuously and devotedly of all.

Tom was, perhaps, the most popular man of his day; a Philadelphian of reputedly superfine stock, fresh-faced and athletic, with a jaunty walk. There was no one at the college assemblies who whispered so entrancingly in her ear when she was all alone with him in a corner, and no one who placed her new fleecy wrap about her shoulders with such an air of devotion when it was time to go home. She liked him from the very first; and all her girl friends babbled, “Wouldn’t it be a lovely match?” But Tom’s classmates from Philadelphia, when they became confidential in the small hours of the morning, asked each other what Tom’s mother would say. Tom was a senior, and it was generally assumed that matters would culminate on Class-day evening, that evening of all evenings in the collegiate world sacred to explanation and vows. Elizabeth lay awake all that night, remembering that she had let Tom have his impetuous say, and that at the end he had folded her in his arms and kissed her. Not until the next morning, and then merely as an unimportant fact, did it occur to her that, though Tom had told her she was dearer to him than all the world besides, there was no definite engagement between them. It was only when whispers reached her that Tom, who had gone to Philadelphia to attend the wedding of a relation, was not coming back to his Commencement, that she began to think a little. But she never really doubted until the news came that Tom had been packed off by his mother on a two years’ journey round the world.

What mother in a distant city would be particularly pleased to have her only son, on whom rested the hopes of an illustrious stock, lose his heart to a college belle? But Elizabeth can scarcely be blamed for not having taken the illustrious stock into consideration. She kept saying to herself, that, if he had only written, she could have forgiven him; and it was not surprising that the partners with whom she danced at the college assemblies during the next five years described her to each other as steely. Indeed, she danced and prattled with such vivacious energy, and her black eyes shone so like beads, that college tradition twisted her story until it ran that she had thrown over Tom Whittemore, the most popular man of his day, and that she had no more heart than a nether millstone. And all the time, just to prove to herself that she had not cared for him, she kept the roses that he had given her on that Class-day evening in the secret drawer of her work-box. It had been all sheer nonsense, a boy and girl flirtation. So she had taught herself to argue, knowing that it was untrue, and knowing that she knew it to be so.

Then had come the deaths of her father and mother within three months of each other, and she had awakened one morning to the consciousness that she was alone in the world, and face to face with the necessity of earning her daily bread. The gentleman who had charge of the few thousand dollars belonging to her father’s estate, in announcing that her bonds had ceased to pay interest, had added that she was in the same boat with many of the best people; which ought to have been a consolation, had she needed any. But this loss of the means of living had seemed a mere trifle beside her other griefs; indeed, it acted as a spur rather than a bludgeon. The same pride which had prompted her to continue to dance bade her bestir herself to make a living. Upon reflection, the plan of starting a school struck her as the most practicable. But it should be a school for girls; she had done with the world of men. She had loved with all her heart, and her heart was broken; it was withered, like the handful of dried roses in the secret drawer of her work-box.

* * * * *

Elizabeth was fortunate enough to obtain at the outset the patronage of some of those same “best people” in the adjacent city, who happened to know her story. Fashionable favor grows apace. It was only after hearing that Mrs. Cyrus Bangs had intrusted her little girl to the tender mercies of Miss Whyte that Mrs. Horace Barker subdued the visions of scarlet-fever, bad air, and evil communications which haunted her, sufficiently to be willing to send her own darlings to the new kindergarten. People intimate with Mrs. Barker were apt to say that worry over her three little girls, who were exceptionally healthy children, kept her a nervous invalid.

“I consider Mrs. Cyrus Bangs a very particular woman,” she said, with plaintive impressiveness to her husband. “If she is willing to send her Gwendolen to Miss Whyte, I am disposed to let Margery, Gladys, and Dorothy go. Only you must have a very clear understanding with Miss Whyte, at the outset, as to hours and ventilation and Gladys’s hot milk. We cannot move from the seaside until a fortnight after her term begins, and it will be utterly impossible for me to get the children to school in the mornings before half-past nine.”

It never occurred to Horace Barker, when one morning about ten o’clock, some six weeks later, he called at the kindergarten with his precious trio, that there was any impropriety in breaking in upon Miss Whyte’s occupations an hour after school had begun. What school-mistress could fail to be proud of the distinction of obtaining his three daughters as pupils at any hour of the twenty-four when he saw fit to proffer them? He expected to find a cringing, deferential young person, who would, in the interest of her own bread and butter, accede without a murmur to any stipulations which so important a patroness as Mrs. Horace Barker might see fit to impose. He became conscious, in the first place, that the school-mistress was a much more attractive-looking young person than he had anticipated, and secondly, that she seemed rather amused than otherwise at his conditions. No man, and least of all a man so consummate as Mr. Barker--for he was a dapper little person with a closely cropped beard and irreproachable kid gloves--likes to be laughed at by a woman, especially by one who is young and moderately good-looking; and he instinctively drew himself up by way of protest before Elizabeth spoke.