Chapter V: Part 5

Binns and Roxy, however, did not occupy the whole attention of the family, and after the first glance it was not observed whether they came into the kitchen or went strolling down the vegetable garden together. But some time after the house should have been closed and Roxy should have been reposing by Kitty’s side, it was found that she had not come in, and the hat and feather with which she exaggerated her stature were seen conspicuously touched by the ray of the late-rising moon outside the high street fence. Needless to say that Binns was not seen at all.

But Binns was present all the same, as in the active conversation going on out there, in answer to Roxy’s shrill expostulations, a gruff little growl seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth--the voice of Binns.

“But I’m all ready, Binns. I’ve got everything except the carpet and the cooking-stove, and I haven’t asked you to get a thing, and I’ve spent all the money, except enough for them, that I’ve laid up since I’ve been having my wages myself.”

“You needn’t,” said the unseen owner of the growl. “Nobody asked you to.”

“I didn’t wait for anybody to ask me. It isn’t my way. I like to be generous. I meant to surprise you and please you, and show you that I came to you pretty forehanded.” And here Roxy’s voice was apparently drowned in tears.

“I can’t help it,” muttered Binns, in the pause. “Mother says it’s ridic’lous; she says side by side we look like a clothes-pin and a clothes-pole, and we’ll have everybody laughing at us.”

“I’ll have everybody laughing at _me_,” sobbed Roxy, her voice rising to the surface again. “They’ll say--I don’t know what they won’t say! And that spiteful Kitty! And oh, Binns, when I’d counted on such a happy home!”

“Mother says there never was such a tall woman in the family,” growled the bass tones again.

“As if tallth made any difference in hearts!” cried Roxy, very reasonably.

“And I ain’t old enough to go and be married. And I don’t want to be, either. I never said yes, hi, or no about it. And when I don’t want to be, I don’t see--”

“Binns,” said Roxy, solemnly, “I could sue you for breach of promise to-morrow”--as she paused an inarticulate rumble spoke for Binns’s shudder--“if I was so mean as some folks,” she added.

“Then you ain’t going to,” he said. “And besides, what good ’d it do you? I ’ain’t got nothing.”

“Your mother has,” answered Roxy, with repeated solemnity, as became the implied and dreadful threat, which again gave Binns pause. “But I’d scorn it,” said Roxy, after letting the idea work a moment. “I don’t hold my affections so slight that any money--Oh, Binns! If you feel too young to settle yet, and want to have your fling out, I’ll wait--”

“There’s no use in waiting,” ejaculated Binns.

“That’s just what I say,” cried Roxy, in a sudden flush of hope and misinterpretation. But the dead silence told her mistake. “Do you mean to say it’s all off?” she cried, in despair.

“It’s all off,” growled Binns, in the boldness of desperation. “My mother says--”

“Oh, bother your mother!” exclaimed Roxy.

Perhaps Binns looked aghast at such a proposition, for she added at once, “I mean--I don’t mean--any disrespect to her. But I never knew that mothers could--”

“Mine can,” said Binns, comprehending the hiatus, and still under the impulse of his last access of courage. “My mother stood by me when I couldn’t stand alone. And now I’m going to stand by her.”

“I never asked you not to!” cried out Roxy. “I’d be as good a daughter to her as any she’s got. I know she’d like my short-cake. And oh, Binns, it would have been so nice and cosey for you when you came home, and I had onions all smothering in the spider, and there’s nobody can fry the rind any crisper than I can.” And at this juncture a rush, a stumble, a quick patter of footsteps, might have been heard, and Binns had resorted to his last refuge, as usual, and was running away up the street and out of sight as fast as his little legs could carry him. And Roxy came into the house, and sat down by the kitchen window in the moonlight, and cried as if she were doing the weeping for all the disconsolate damsels in the world, and got up and found herself some tarts, and ate them with a relish, feeling in every mouthful that Binns would never have those tarts to-morrow, and went to bed and to sleep.

The next day an air of expectation kept Roxy all alert, and her hope that possibly Binns had run home to ask his mother, after all, alternated with her despairing certainty that she should never see him again. Occasionally she burst forth in a song that showed the drift of her thoughts:

“Go ask your mother for fifty cents
To see Bill Barnum jump the fence,”

the quickly following tears obscuring the rest of the words that had once come home with her from a circus. But the despairing certainty became a fixed one when a week passed, and the long, thin young man still came to take the orders. She made no attempt at pride or concealment. She tried to do her work, and she failed. And she went away at last, saying her heart was broken, and she could live no longer in a place full of cruel associations.

A year afterwards, Roxy having been heard of as established in another home, and paying her attentions to another object, it was presumed that the old wound was healed; and her former mistress, happening to meet her one day in the street-car, was pleased with the smiling face that towered over her under its tall hat and scarlet feather. This lady had what she called a warm interest in humanity, but what her husband was daring enough to call an intense curiosity, and the unexpected meeting with Roxy inspired her with a keen desire to know something further of the tragic story of Binns. But she could not bring herself to the fateful point, and was spared the trouble by Roxy herself asking her if Binns came for the dinner orders nowadays, and closing the brief conversation that ensued by turning a melancholy eye upon her former mistress, and sighing, as she left the car,

“Oh, it hurts there still!”

And so one year passed and another, and the world rolled over on its sunny side, and rolled over again on its dark one, and the clouds of sorrow broke in their sad deluge, and the sun burst forth again, filling the horizon with transformation, and new points in every landscape rose in brilliancy or sank into shadow, and Roxy was one of the points that sank into shadow--the shadow of forgetfulness.

It is a singular liability we have, after losing sight of any in whom we have had interest, to feel as if they remained exactly where we left them, heedless of the way in which the forces of the universe are building up and tearing down, and of the fact that fate and fortune never let us remain at rest. If any of the old household thought of Roxy, it was still as some one’s kitchen-girl laying her sieges and approaches to an unwilling heart. Is not Gladys, in our memory, still at her lattice gazing after the cavalry officer? But fate and fortune, despite our indifference, were conscious of Roxy as an integral atom of the great cosmos, and in the interval of forgetfulness were as busy with her as with any other of the lovers whose loves give the _raison d’être_ to the universe.

It was late one summer afternoon, a few years after that eventful night when Binns’s footsteps had been heard pattering up the street, that Roxy’s former mistress, having been taken by her liege lord on a little tour of their native county, passed slowly along a rural lane, some dozen miles away from home, and held the reins while her husband paused to throw back the top of the phaeton, looking about the soft afternoon landscape meanwhile. On one side, a thick woodland shut off the view and the easterly winds, but on the other was a rolling hill-country broken by farms and orchards, and just at hand was a tiny cottage, with open windows and blowing curtains that allowed sight of the interior and its various mottoes framed upon the walls. A cow grazed in the grass-plot beyond; there were symptoms of a pig-sty, and a decided hennery in the rear; and there were lines of cabbages like great green roses, and potatoes and onions and beans and blushing beet-tops, and a honeysuckle and a rose-bush, and a bed of sweet-peas and a beehive, and a gigantic elm-tree overtopping everything. What a picture of content and comfort it was! “What a country this is,” said the lady in the phaeton, “where the poorest can have such a peaceful home as this, where some happy young farmer has brought home his timid little wife, and their cares are few, and they have nothing to regret, and little left to wish for!”

Somebody was bustling about inside the pretty nest, a white cloth was spread upon the table, there was a clatter of dishes, and then there stole forth an odor--an odor of nectar and ambrosia to the hungry travellers a dozen miles from home--an odor of onions smothering in the spider. Suddenly a figure appeared at the side window beckoning some one, a tall, an immensely tall and gaunt young woman, and on her face, her reddish face, with its snapping, unpaired brown eyes, surmounted by a wilderness of slate-pencil crimps, a smile that could only be the habitual smile of perfect satisfaction. “Stop a moment,” said the lady in the phaeton--“one moment. Surely--that must be--it is--” Just then the young woman sat down by the window, and began to beguile the tedium of her waiting with music--nasal, to be sure, but still a familiar tune. “Hark!” said the gentleman. “Did I hear a bagpipe?”

“A comb and paper,” said the lady. “I wonder if she keeps it still in the drawer with the nutmegs?”

I don’t know why neither of that guilty couple cared at that crisis to leave the phaeton. It would seem natural to have delayed a little, to have asked some questions, to have tasted, perchance, the contents of that redolent dish, to have learned if there are any in the world to whom their very wishes give them not their wish, to have learned if cruel fate were as cruel to any in the fact as in the fear. But the lady shrank into her corner, and the gentleman laid an urgent hand upon the reins, and they went on and up the winding road. Who is it cares to see the struggle of the fly in the web? For at the moment that they started up, as if for the capping race at Coulterlee, there appeared, coming slowly round the row of pole-beans, the person who had been beckoned--a little scrap of a fellow, stout and stocky in his long blue blouse, pale-eyed, red-headed, freckled, holding in his arms a teething baby, which he soothed with a monotonous melody as he sang, half under his breath,

“If I had minded mother
I’d not been here to-day;
But I was young and foolish,
And easy led astray.”

Unmistakably it was Binns.

A COMPOSITE WIFE

A COMPOSITE WIFE

When Mr. Chipperley lost his wife he was for a time very unhappy. He felt a little angry when he saw other women walking in the sunlight. He missed the flattery, the affection, the object of love. And he seemed to think all that furnished him with sufficient reason for marrying again, which he did speedily. He lived very happily with the next venture, although now and then the pale and pretty young face of her predecessor slipped in across his mental vision of the other, and it was a little difficult to separate them. And when a third young woman ruled his affections, it was an effort for him to say if it were May’s lower lip that looked as if a bee had stung it, or if it were Mary’s upper lip that had the Cupid’s-bow curves, or if it were Maria that smiled with the deep Greek corner in the mouth; and in his memory gleams of Mary’s eyes shot through May’s glance, veiled with Maria’s long lashes. May’s pale cheek wore the rose bloom of Mary’s; the outline of Mary’s broad brow melted into the oval of Maria’s Madonna-like forehead; and in this composite memory of a wife May’s frown and Maria’s smile were fast becoming indistinguishable when he first laid eyes on Honor Humphreys, who overshot the whole picture with her great shining hazel eyes and black brows, her full red lips, and the faultless teeth that flashed with white light in the dark countenance where the rare red only now and then blossomed--a tall and superb young creature, whose health and vitality and lustre completely wiped out the whole mental photography of poor May and Mary and Maria.

“Gracious!” said Honor to her gentle cousin, Marian Marcy. “Don’t talk of him! He’s married all to pieces. Do you suppose I will take a fragment of a husband? Am I going to make one of a harem? What does papa mean? The idea of my marrying an old man like that!”

Poor Mr. Chipperley was only forty-five, but such is the point of view of youth that forty-five was all the same to her as one hundred and forty-five.

“I don’t care if he is made of money!” cried Honor. “He looks as if he were--of old bank-bills.”

“Old bank-bills,” said Marian, “make a slag, you know, almost as splendid as precious stones.”

“He hasn’t reached the slag stage. The fancy of his daring to send me roses!” as her cousin opened for her a box that had just come in. “Put them all back in the box, Maddy, right away; I won’t touch one of them!”

“But, Honor, look at these great beauties--an armful--the stems more than half a yard long. Why, they cost a dollar and a half apiece,” laying one with its soft reflection on the pale oval of her cheek.

“I don’t care if they cost a fortune apiece. Wear his roses, indeed! I’d rather have a green leaf of Ted’s picking. Here, Pinky, take them away; throw them out, every one!”

“What a gorgeous twenty-five-dollar breast-knot Pinky will wear with her best young man to-night.”

“I hope Mr. Chipperley will see her then. Make haste back, Pinky; you must have the rose-red chiffon out presently--there! I declare, what can papa be thinking of not only to be willing I should accept that old Mormon, but to want me to! Why, I might as well go out to Utah, where they drive their wives forty abreast, and be done with it!”

“But, at any rate, Mr. Chipperley has the decency to drive his wives tandem.”

“No, he hasn’t. The law compels him. Oh, you make me shiver!” she exclaimed, with a mock shudder, as she turned over the laces and ribbons in the drawer before her. “The idea of going tandem with three ghosts! Poor ghosts--poor dead women! They must have lost all identity by this time. Mrs. Chipperley--Mrs. Theodore Chipperley--which of them--all of them--none of them! And to be a fourth, and put on their name! I should feel that I was putting on their shroud! Oh, oh, oh, I hate the ground he walks on!”

“And love the ground Ted dances on.”

“Poor Ted! Poor Ted! Oh, Maddy, what does make all the inequality? That horrid Chipperley man with millions, and Ted, the delightful, the original, the good, the brilliant Ted, without a penny to his name!”

“Mr. Chipperley has been brilliant enough to make a fortune.”

“Well, he may keep it,” smoothing out a Honiton flounce. “I don’t want it.”

“As if you could do without a fortune, Honor, you who have always had so many luxuries that you don’t know what the necessities are. Look at that flounce--”

“I know it. I should never have another inch of real lace if I married Ted. And--well--will you tell me, Maddy, why Ted doesn’t say anything?”--her face the color of a damask rose--“I can’t ask a man to marry me--”

“I could, if need were.”

“You! Well, for a demure little cat that dares to look at a king you would take a prize in a tabby show,” said Honor, folding away the flounce, and leaning both round elbows among the rings and pins of the toilet cushions, while she looked at a dark and handsome siren in the glass. “I shall never forget, Maddy, how you went and took your mother’s necklace off my mother’s neck. I think that did papa good to the core of his heart. And when mamma got over being startled she always rather admired you for it. Only she will be even with you some day.” And then she fell to tying bows and snipping ribbons with twinkling fingers. “I should make a capital milliner if--oh, if! Well, Ted does everything except say the word.” And again the flood of color.

“How can he say the word? What would he do with a wife? Just think, Honor! Why, he’d be a wretch if he did speak! A man with no more possibilities than Ted and with so many attractions, ought not to come where you and Helen and Teresa and the rest are--you butterflies who have only fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life.”

“Marian, you are just an old maid--a puritanic, conscientious, cantankerous old maid! There--don’t you think these little lavender and mignonette bows add to the butterfly appearance of this particular butterfly?”

“You are perfectly hopeless, Honor. You forget there is a future. You just dance in the beam to-day. Your father’s interest in the Humphreys estate dies with him. It’s a big interest to-day; but it reverts to the co-residuaries, and all his children inherit is the nice little family quarrel--that has given the General occupation ever since lawyers and surrogates and the rest ate up the whole of your mother’s fortune--and a parcel of most expensive tastes and habits. And here is Mr. Chipperley, a nice young man--”

“Old Chipperley!” dropping the scarf over her hair, while Marian colored and coughed.

“Young--ah--comparatively,” stammered Marian.

“Twice my age, at all events,” tying the scarf with a bewitching knot.

“A worthy gentleman!” exclaimed Marian, the blush still enlivening her fair cheek, “against whom there is nothing to be said, and who offers an ante-nuptial settlement of a million dollars. And you have been out three years, and have let Ted keep every eligible man away. And your father feels his life insecure--and you’ve all lived so at the top of the wave that there won’t be a dollar left the day after his funeral--”

“Marian Marcy!” turning on her with a diamond stick-pin in each hand. “How can you talk so? My dear old father! How can you be so indelicate--so, so cruel?”

“I hope you are not going to stab me. I am not cruel. I am speaking for your good--”

“Great good!” with half a sob and half a laugh. “I shall have a hysteric if you don’t take care!” and the eyes were flaming and the teeth flashing.

“Have twenty if you want to.” And Marian stood up beside her and looked her in the face with steady gray eyes that had a steely point behind their dewy softness. “When it comes to the point,” she said, “and you are married to a poor man, and your mother and Helen and Teresa and the boys are homeless and penniless, do you believe you won’t regret Mr. Chipperley?”

“What a mercy it would be, Maddy, if you were struck dumb.”

Marian laughed. “I’m not angry,” she said, “because your temper shows that you are beginning to listen to reason. You marry Ted to-day, and have a happy year or two. And presently you are shabby. And presently care and anxiety about making bricks without straw have taken off your bloom, and given your face lines. You go nowhere--no balls and dinners and operas for you with nothing to wear. You grow irritable. He finds other places pleasanter than home. He reproaches, you cry. You reproach, he goes off. And you are more lucky than I think you’ll be if you settle into anything like tolerable content with him at last, if you don’t leave him and go off and earn your living as a milliner or a lady’s maid.”

“Marian!”

“But you marry Mr. Chipperley--you have, possibly, a bad quarter of an hour, regretting a handsome face and a dashing manner. But you meet with absolute devotion. You tread on rose-leaves and eat and drink nectar and ambrosia, and wear purple and fine linen. You have your palaces, your horses, your servants, and your path through life is a perfect milky-way of diamonds.”

“I never knew you could be so eloquent, Marian,” with sarcastic seriousness.

“And the long and the short of it is that you become accustomed to the way in which your husband surrounds you with sweet observances, and you are grateful to him, and have a friendly feeling for the rest of your life. And that is about all you would come out on in the end if you had married your ideal.”

“And you leave out all the companionship, the oneness, the--the--”

“Three uncommonly nice women have found companionship with Mr. Chipperley very satisfying.”

“Yes; they had all they wished of it early, and left for parts unknown. Oh, how bored they must have been!”

“Bored! With Mr. Chipperley!”

“I believe that you are in love with that man yourself, Maddy!”

“Well, now, Honor, I’ve said all I had to say. If you think it over quietly, and remember that all this time Ted hasn’t whispered a word--”

“Oh yes, he has--whispered--a plenty.”

“He hasn’t spoken out.”

“And not to do that?”

“Is very unmanly.”

“And if he had?”

“It would be very scoundrelly.”

“Marian Marcy, I’ll never speak to you again!”

“Till next time,” said Marian, as she left the room. “There!” she murmured, her face taking on more than its usual pallor, as the door closed, “I believe I’ve said every word my uncle asked me to say.”

And Honor burst into tears, tore off her lace scarf, and hid her face in it, and snatched it away, conscious in the midst of her trouble that every tear was a spot upon the ribbons, and sobbed out to the image of herself in the mirror: “Oh! oh! I am so afraid I shall be tempted into marrying Mr. Chipperley!” And she rummaged out a photograph of Ted from a chaos of sachets and beads and ribbons and laces, and looked at it, magnified and haloed through the mist of her tears; and then she had to bathe her eyes in hot water, and then in cold, and to powder the lids, and to pale them, by comparison, with a little rouge upon her cheeks, before Pinky returned and clothed her in the gown the color of the heart of a damask rose, in which she went off to dinner, where she was to meet Mr. Chipperley, who hated the color of the heart of a damask rose.

Mr. Chipperley’s wives had all been pallid women, dressing in pallid colors. One or two of them would have liked to wear a grass-green gown, or one even of sea-blue; one more daring than the rest had appeared in a primrose-colored silk, but it aroused such uncomfortable remarks that she only wore it once. No; soft grays and mauves were the only wear for them; and now when their likeness rose on his memory, the fawns and drabs of their garments were the only distinct thing about it. Those, too, as delicate eyebrows had merged into dark, positive lines, as blue eyes had become gray, and now darted forth hazel gleams, were swiftly suffusing themselves with deep reds and dazzling pinks and glowing purples. And he felt as though he had forbidden it, and May and Mary and Maria were wearing these colors in spite of his expressed will. It had the effect of unmarrying him more than anything else--more than death itself; and he was decidedly displeased with himself to find that he was more wildly and passionately in love with this brilliant creature in her burning reds and yellows than he had been with all his tender little pearl-gray and indistinct wives put together. It seemed to Mr. Chipperley that he had been an indistinct man himself till now; he found himself growing to the measure of his love; he had had to stoop before; now he must climb; this gorgeous, glowing young woman was like a light in the sky; one must aspire to her, not stoop; that was a new sensation. She spoke of politics, and the kingdoms of the earth made new combinations, and the destinies of nations rearranged themselves. She talked a little theosophy; he felt this world enlarged to all the borders of the vast unknown. She spoke of a symphony; he entered into the secrets of music that he had not dreamed existed. She sang, and he heard the trumpets on heaven’s ramparts sound. Yet she knew next to nothing of politics, or theosophy, or music; he rose only to the demands of his imagination concerning her. If sometimes the exercises were a trifle wearisome, there was Marian’s gentle denseness to fall back on and find restful.

One thing, however, concerning Honor, he had not yet learned to explain, and hardly to endure. How could she love animals in the way she did? Four great Persian cats haunted her every footstep in the house; there they lay on their cushions in the drawing-rooms, in the music-room, in the library; a sleepy, snowy creature, like some half-animated ostrich plume; a satanic black thing with fiery eyes that to Mr. Chipperley’s perception were informed with the very bottomless flames; another like a golden fleece, caressing, half human; and a little mouse-colored imp, whose bounds and springs and feathery tail-lashings not only did infinite damage among the Venetian and Dresden knick-knackerie, but among Mr. Chipperley’s nerves. And Mr. Chipperley hated cats. They gave him nausea; they made him sneeze; he had an indescribable antipathy to them; he was, as Honor said to Marian, afraid of them. He schooled himself to lay a very gingerly hand on the white one, feeling a chill up and down his spine as he did so; to suffer the yellow one to rub against his shoe, although that also made his flesh creep; he said nothing about certain scratches given him by the little gray Astarte devil, as he called it, for Honor’s eye was on him; but when the black Asmodeus looked him in the face, Mr. Chipperley quailed. Then, too, there was a great buff-bodied and black-muzzled mastiff, and a spitz, and a poodle, and goodness knows what else; a parrot, an owl no bigger than your fist, a little silken marmoset. Sometimes, when Mr. Chipperley saw her, in a gown the hue of a pomegranate, with her cats in her arms or on her chair, and her dogs fawning around her, he had a moment of such feeling as he might have had were she Circe and he another lover just undergoing the enchantment, and about to become one of them himself.

“Well, it’s of no use,” Circe had said. “He admires the colors he hates; he caresses the cats he fears; he loves the dogs he detests. It does look as if he were hypnotized. Can’t I undo the spell?”

“You talk like a silly girl,” said her father. “Mr. Chipperley does you the honor to make you a proposal of marriage--”

“A proposal? Twenty proposals!”

“And I wish you, I advise you, I command you to accept it.” And General Humphreys looked at her with eyes accustomed to authority, gleaming from the shadow of a pair of brows like epaulets that gave a military force to his glance. But his daughter had seen that glance before, and knew just how much it meant.

“The Humphreys, papa,” said the young rebel, “have not been in the habit of being commanded. I should hardly like to break the family traditions.”

“You are a disobedient and insolent girl!”

“Nor have the Humphreys been bought and sold in the past--do you think I will be the first one placed upon the market? I wouldn’t marry Mr. Chipperley if he were made of diamonds and set in the sky!”

“I don’t know how you could in that case,” said her father. “But you know, without any more words about it, what the circumstances are, what is likely to become of your mother and the rest of the children at my death, and that it is in your power, with the settlements I call for, to make their condition all that it has been.”

“That is to say, you sell me and my happiness for their ease and comfort. It is pleasant to know which you care for the most. It leaves me quite free. No, Mr. Papa Humphreys, you needn’t promise to deliver what you can’t get hold of! You will have to go very long indeed on this particular block! I heard De Puy say once it was a good plan to go short on a rising market!” And just then the name of Mr. Theodore Dane was announced, and the father’s eyes flashed fire at the daughter, and the daughter’s eyes flashed fire in return, and cousin Marian was not the only one who knew how much Mr. Theodore Dane had to do with the fortunes of Honor.

“Oh,” said Honor to Marian, when this conversation and struggle with her father had been reported and summed up with her mother’s dark hints that her supplies should be cut off, that she should be sent into the country, or shut up in her room till she promised different fashions, and balanced against her own declaration that mediæval customs were impossible in this _fin de siècle_ period--“oh,” said Honor, “if I could only dress you in my clothes and make you pass for me, and marry you off to Mr. Chipperley, how I should like it!”

“And I, too,” said the poor Marian.

“Marian! Could you really endure the thought of marrying that man, for one instant?”

“What an idiot I should be if I couldn’t!”

Honor looked at her a moment, large-eyed and silent. “Marian Marcy!” she cried, then, “you shall! You shall marry Mr. Chipperley, you shameless dear!”

“How strangely fate moves,” said Honor to her mother a little later. “Here is Marian Marcy, pale and drab, just like all the women he naturally prefers, wearing pale and drab gowns, thinking pale and drab thoughts, doing pale and drab things--exactly the one Mr. Chipperley ought to marry; she would melt into that composite wife of his without a wrinkle. And here he is possessed to marry one who sets all his ideals at defiance, whose whims and ways would eventually drive him mad, whose colors would startle him blind, who would be as much a blight on his life as strong sun on tender grass.”

“I never heard such indelicate and improper remarks from a young girl’s mouth before. Marian think of marrying Mr. Chipperley when he has not asked her!”

“My goodness! Oh, my goodness!” cried Honor, teeth and eyes flashing out of that brown face in one dazzle of light along with her ringing laugh. “Oh!” she cried, running from the room, “if I die the next minute I shall have had my share of satisfaction! I mean to make Marian do the one thing in her life that shall be neither pale nor drab!”

But if Marian was a timid and conventional person in the main, she had more than once proved herself capable of rising to the occasion, and certainly she was doing something unusual and daring when uninvited she took Ted Dane’s arm one night as he stood, rather dark and dour in the face, leaning against a window, and walked with him into Mrs. Roberts’s orchid-house. “Oh, there is Honor!” she said, as they paused where a swarm of rosy flower-butterflies fluttered in their faces. “Is it not wicked that such a girl should be sacrificed--”

“Should be sold!” said Ted, suddenly beaming on her, with his blue eyes shining and his manner for the first time showing, as he bent from his lofty height, that here was an unexpectedly delightful person in that Humphreys family. “It is infamous!”

“I dare say he would make a very good husband.”

“He ought. He has had enough experience in that line.”

“Then I should think he’d see how very unfit she is.”

“Unfit? For that beggar? No, no; Chipperley’s a good fellow--but there’s no one good enough for her.”

“At any rate, she doesn’t love him,” hiding her face in the butterfly flowers.

“She doesn’t? Look at her, then!” gazing at Honor down a vista, where she stood graciously extending her hand like some young queen, with Mr. Chipperley bending over it like some seigneur swearing fealty.

“Very well. They are obliging her. It isn’t worth while for her to quarrel with a man on whom she may be forced to rely for all the happiness she can have.”

“Forced! Who can force her?”

“Father, mother, a whole household. And break her heart.”

“Has she any heart?” biting his mustache as if he meant it an injury.

“Heart? Honor Humphreys! She--well, _you_ are the last person to deny it!”

“I? What have I to do with it?”

“Oh, certainly--if you have been meaning nothing”--frightened into the propriety she had forsaken in her desire to help both Honor and herself.

“Meaning nothing? I? What do you mean?” exclaimed Ted, suddenly facing her. “You know I am meaning something! You know I love Honor with all my heart and soul! You know I would spend my life for her! You know I haven’t a dollar in the world--”

“I know she loves you, whether you have a dollar in the world or not!” And the next instant Ted Dane, in a thoughtless, breathless ecstasy, had clasped Marian to his heart for one swift second. On such an avowal it was impossible not to embrace some one.

“Oh, Marian,” he said, “you are the best friend a man ever had.”

“No, no, no!” she gasped, pink with her blushes. “What do you do such things for? Oh, I am sure Mr. Chipperley saw you.”

“What if he did? What do I care for Chipperley? Oh, Marian, you have made me the happiest man in the world!” And Mr. Chipperley, whom some dancing fellow had robbed of Honor, saw the act and heard the words, as he came down the orchid-house, and noticed for the first time that Marian Marcy, in her misty toilet of lavender satin and tulle, was really a most attractive person and most becomingly dressed. He knew that Marian had little or nothing of her own except her mother’s jewels, and that it was owing to Honor’s determined insistence that she had everything as if she were a daughter of the house, and it only made Honor seem more charming still. How well that young woman would spend a big income, with what generosity, what nobility!

As for Ted, when Honor had finished that dance he was awaiting her. And what took place out in the grand hall where two people sat on the pedestal of the Psyche and Eros group, in the broad glare of the candles, one opening and shutting her fan, the other leaning towards her eagerly and taking the fan into his own hands at last, all the world might see, but only two of all the world might know.

“It is time,” said old General Humphreys to his daughter, a week, perhaps, after that night, “that Mr. Chipperley had a definite answer. He is very impatient. Your mother thinks your conduct is fast becoming scandalous.” And he cleared his throat and straightened his collar in preparation for the fray. “Yes, fast becoming scandalous.”

“She will think it is quite scandalous before I am through, I fear.”

“I can’t imagine your objection to a man of Mr. Chipperley’s worth--”

“Oh, he is worth too much.”

“This is not an occasion for trifling, Honor.”

“Well, then, the chief objection is that I prefer some one else,” said Honor, carelessly swinging her lorgnon.

“Some one else!” and the eyebrows, like epaulets, lifted themselves and fell again ominously.

“Yes. I presume that at least my preferences are my own.”

“May I ask who this some one is?”

“How can I hinder your asking, papa?”

“Let me know the name at once!”

“It is Theodore Dane.”

“Great heavens!” cried the general. “A fellow with nothing but a pedigree! A man of family without a penny, a lawyer without a brief, an idle, dancing, driving, shiftless--”

“I wouldn’t talk so, papa, about a man to whom you may by-and-by stand in the relation of a father,” said Honor, calmly.

“Never! The day you married that fellow you would cease to be my daughter!”

“Nonsense, papa; you are just like my mastiff! Old Proudfoot’s bark is very much worse than his bite. How can I ever cease being your daughter?” And then she had her arm about the old hero’s neck. “You know very well, papsy, you would never wish to make your dear unhappy.”

“No, certainly, no; of course not, no,” disengaging himself. “And this is the very reason I wish you to marry a man quite suitable in himself, and who can indulge all your extravagant tastes, and hinder you by-and-by from the unhappiness of seeing your mother and your sisters deprived of all their gratifications on my death.”

“How absurd, papa! As if you were going to die! It’s perfectly ridiculous!”

“I’m glad you find it so amusing.”

“Hale and hearty and strong and good, with a father and mother that lived to be ninety, and their father and mother before them. I won’t listen to such talk! Besides, if worse came to worse, mamma and the others could live with us. We shall have a home of some sort--”

“Shall?”

“Yes, we shall live in an old house of Ted’s in the country--an old place on a river--quite a place once--and had such lovely gardens. He will come into town to his office every day, and I shall raise asparagus.”

“You, Honor!” he groaned. “Do you know what you are saying? Is it all cut and dried?”

“Yes, papa,” she said, “the plan, not the asparagus.” And again she made the movement to imprison him. But General Humphreys caught her in time, and held her off at arm’s-length, looking straight into her eyes.

“Do you mean to say you can talk this way without a blush--”

“You know I can’t blush, papa. I’m too dark. I can turn purple, if you want me to.”

“I’ve as good a mind as ever I had to eat to call in a justice of the peace and marry you out of hand.”

“I wish you would,” she exclaimed, “to Theodore.”

But as he released her she flung herself upon his breast. “Papa, papa!” she cried. “You must help me! I love Ted--I hate that old Mormon! And oh--I should think you would find it such fun to get the better of mamma--and you remember the traverse she worked on you when you wanted De Puy to marry Kate Appleton, and she arranged it all for Henrietta von Frump--”

“I don’t know what that has to do with this case. Your mother has much the best sense of all of us. De Puy’s has turned out a very comfortable marriage, if he is a little hen-pecked. Yours--”

“Oh, papa, I shall simply throw myself in front of the train if you make me marry Mr. Chipperley! I should like to have some identity of my own. Just think of my being a band of sisters with those three poor ghosts hovering round old Chipperley!” And as the ghosts did not seem to move her father, she had resort to the last argument--tears.

“There, there, there!” said her father. “You know very well that I abhor tears,” taking her in his arms. “I--I will confess that I had just as lief let your mother see that I had a will of my own as not. But the fact is, you will be a pauper. And I can’t think of that.”

“I told you, papa, that we--that Ted has a house. It will be the greatest pleasure in the world to make it habitable. And you’ve no idea how profitable my asparagus beds are going to be.”

“Honor!”

“Oh, we have figured it all out. It’s a delightful old place. Maddy and I went out to see it.”

“Maddy--there’s another thing. What is to become of Marian, as well as all the rest, if you persist in this course?”

“Why shouldn’t Marian marry Mr. Chipperley, papa, and keep the money in the family?”

“Simply because he doesn’t want her.”

“He does. She is just and exactly the very thing he wants. Only he doesn’t know it yet. He would find it out. For Marian is precisely the sweet, pale, quiet nun that would make him feel as if it were all a bad dream that he had ever had any other wife--as if they were all nothing but different phases of one woman. He is bejuggled with me just now, but oh, he would so regret it in a little; my canary and ruby colors would drive him wild, and he wouldn’t live a year with all the exactions and exasperations that I should bring to him. Can’t you reason with him, papsy?”

“I could reason with him a great deal better than I could with your mother.”

“Well, we won’t try to reason with mamma. I’ve heard you say many a time that she never would hear reason. Of course you know, darling, I’m not doing anything imprudent. Ted is only waiting for Mr. Lorton to come home to have his appointment as attorney to the Creamery Trust, with a salary of I don’t know how many thousand a year; and a family that can’t live on that ought to starve. And, besides, that is only a beginning. When people see what Ted is the big cases will come in, and we shall have an income to astonish you. That ought to content mamma. And it isn’t as if Helen and Teresa wouldn’t marry. Now, Papa Humphreys, you are an old soldier, you named me Honor because Honor was the dearest thing on earth to you. And I’m not going to ask you to do a living thing contrary to your principles, only to take mamma on a little journey, to Washington or to New Orleans--anywhere. You press that button, and I’ll do the rest.” And it was at the end of a delightful half-hour that Mrs. Humphreys found Honor sitting on her father’s knees, all smiles and tears and tangles.

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Humphreys, “from the appearance of things, that your good sense has come to the rescue, my child. Of course, Mr. Chipperley’s fortune is our last consideration. It is himself, his intelligence, his breeding, his goodness that we think calculated to make you happy. But it is outside of the possibilities that a young girl should refuse the settlements he offers--”

“Well, mamma,” said Honor, moving from her pleasant seat and twisting up her hair, “I give you fair warning that when I marry Mr. Chipperley I will not accept a settlement of any sort.”

“My child!”

“No. No man shall think I marry him for his money.”

“But, Honor, what an absurd, high-flown notion!”

“No matter, mamma. I give you my ultimatum. If you want me to marry Mr. Chipperley, no settlement, no gifts, not a ring, not a flower. And you may tell him so.”

“Humph! I suppose he can give it to you afterwards, just the same. But I must say it is the most quixotic nonsense--”

“Never mind about that. You are willing to sell me--but I have some rights, some feelings--I will arrange the terms myself!” And she swept out of the room.

“Well,” said her mother to the old general, who stared confused, not quite accommodating his ideas to Honor’s words, but keeping a wise silence in the presence of his superior officer, “I am so glad, so relieved that she consents at all, that I will say no more at present. You had best see Mr. Chipperley at once, and give him to understand that she must be approached most delicately.”

“My love, you would do all that much better yourself--a man’s blundering bludgeon--your dainty rapier--”

“Very well, then; leave it all to me,” said Mrs. Humphreys, with great good-nature. And, satisfied that events were shaping to her mind, she wrote a note summoning Mr. Chipperley, and when he came she gave him to understand that at last his suit was accepted, but that, in fact, as some one in _Shirley_ said of all women, Miss Honor was very kittle-kattle, and there must be no mention of gifts or settlements, or, in fact, of the understanding itself. “My daughter is exceedingly sensitive, and the idea that it might be thought your wealth was a factor in this happy conjunction--”

“Oh, precisely, exactly,” said the delighted Mr. Chipperley. “I understand, I understand,” and did not understand in the least.

Poor Mr. Chipperley! It was not really a blissful period to him that followed this rather peculiar betrothal in which the bride had given no promise, signified no assent, and expressed no feeling. He would have liked to press that hand of hers, but it was snatched away before he had more than icily touched it. He would have liked to drop the opera-cloak on those lovely shoulders, but that officious Ted Dane was allowed to be before him. He longed to fold his arms about her and press one kiss upon those luscious lips--he would as soon have offered such a familiarity to the Tinted Venus. When he saw her at a charity concert, playing on the violin, looking like one of Fra Angelico’s angels, in a long red gown, spangled with golden stars, with the loose sleeves falling open over an arm fit for a tawny young Cleopatra, he wanted to cry out to all the world, “She is mine! She is mine!” But you would have thought she had never seen him before. All the same, he was quite positive that when she was his wife, fast and sure, she should never wear a red gown again. In this red gown she was so unlike his dreams, so brilliant, so overpowering, so effacing, that she gave Mr. Chipperley the singular sensation of being unfaithful to a wife; he felt as if there really was something unlawful in his passion, and it was far from being agreeable to him. “If it were anything but herself,” he thought, “I should declare that gown could be worn only by the Scarlet Lady. It puts out a man’s sight. It almost puts out his love. How much more womanly, how much fairer and softer that silvery thing her cousin wore--a very sweet woman, that Marian Marcy. I must really speak to Honor about her vivid toilets. As for the gentle cousin, she’s altogether too nice to waste on Ted Dane! ‘A creature, not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food.’” And then vaguely and obscurely Mr. Chipperley thought what a pity it was that a man might not marry two women at once.

Somehow or other Marian Marcy was always in the room now when Mr. Chipperley was admitted to the presence. It was not so much of an effort to follow Marian as he had found it to keep up with Honor’s flights and vagaries; she soothed him after the attempt; she always agreed with him; and he felt with half an uncertain sigh that Ted Dane was going to have a very restful person for a wife.

“Mr. Lorton has returned, and we are talking of their domino party,” said Honor. “A wilderness of flowers and Seidl’s orchestra. Maud Van Wieck is going as Catherine de’ Medici, and Rose as Catherine of Russia, and Belle Devers as Catherine of Aragon--”

“And you?” said Mr. Chipperley.

“We thought first of Petrucio’s Katherine and Camoens’s Catharina--”

“‘Sweetest eyes were ever seen,’” quoted he.

“And then of Iris and Charmien, pearls and asps, and all that, you know. But it’s too much trouble. We will go just in our brown dominos.”

“‘I’ll wear my brown gown, and never dress too fine,’” quoted Marian.

“Yes, we will just go in our brown dominos. That is exactly the way I should like to be married,” Honor said, suddenly, looking up with a flash of eyes and teeth. “No fuss, no feathers, no company, no cards. Just Ted and you and Marian and I, all at one time, all our own witnesses--stealing out from the ball, going to the minister’s, and going our own way afterwards!”

“It would be admirable!” cried Mr. Chipperley. “It is one of your brilliant thoughts. No need of waiting for paraphernalia; that can be had in Paris. A hand-bag in the carriage, and over to the _Utopia’s_ dock directly afterwards; she sails at sunrise that night--I mean morning.”

“What do you say to it, Ted?” asked Marian, as that young man joined them.

“What do you say to it?”

“Oh, whatever Mr. Chipperley thinks best.”

And to Mr. Chipperley it seemed that he was about to enter a charming family, where even the remote cousins were so engaging.

“A capital notion,” said Ted. “For of all things to be dreaded the marriage ceremony is chief. If one could take ether now, or nitrous oxide, and wake up and find it all over--”

“Pshaw!” said Mr. Chipperley, before he thought, “it’s nothing at all, nothing at all.”

Still, Mr. Chipperley was not displeased with the anticipated privacy and quietness. For, feel as you may, the world will have a little fun over a man’s fourth nuptial. And then the elopement-like process gave a color of poetry to the affair which it otherwise lacked. When they parted, Mr. Chipperley made haste to send his berth-trunk and steamer-chairs and rugs on board the _Utopia_, and to secure the best state-room to be had for money, and Ted to see about the licenses and the minister. It gave Mr. Chipperley a jolly feeling of being young and rash and reckless and romantic.

“I shall wear my glory gown,” said Honor, when she and Marian were alone. “It will stun him out of his wits when I open my domino. You have the hardest part, Marian. Oh, how I pity you!”

“You needn’t,” said Marian, quietly. “I am equal to it.”

“But you dread it--just a little.”

“Just a little. I would rather not, if it could be arranged in any other way. But I sacrifice myself,” she said, with a quiet laugh, “to my aunts and cousins.”

“Marian, to say you are a trump is to say nothing at all. You are a whole straight flush!”

The day before the Lortons’ domino party Mrs. Humphreys saw two of Honor’s trunks taken down on an expressman’s back before her very eyes, under the supposition that they were either Pinky’s or her own packed for the Washington trip with the General, which her cold had deferred. Another trunk was sent later from the house of the Humphreys to the steamer. And it wanted hardly a couple of hours to sunrise when Ted and Mr. Chipperley, with two dominos masked _au marveil_, left the Lortons’ lights and flowers and music, entered the coach in waiting, and drove across to the Church of St. Peter-cum-Paul.

There was but a dim and solitary light burning at the altar. The rector, who had been napping in his study, was hardly more than half awake now. He examined the licenses perfunctorily, and hurried through the service, as he had been begged to do, as if he were expecting a policeman to interrupt him. For the first time Mr. Chipperley took with permitted tenderness the hand, he thought, that he had so often longed to take. Joyful moment when it returned the pressure, when he heard a whispering voice in the responses, when those swift and sleepy tones pronounced them husband and wife. He hastened down the dusky aisle with a trembling, clinging shadow beside him. Ted delayed a moment or two for the certificates, following with the other domino, and then, the curtains of the carriage closely drawn, they drove through the gray morning twilight of the empty streets that seemed to belong to some other life, breathless, wordless, over the ferry and to the pier.