People of the Whirlpool, Mabel Osgood Wright [sneezy the snowman read aloud .txt] 📗

servants was let with it, and then he added, as if conferring a favour, "and Mrs. Latham has gone on the coach to the station to meet some guests, the last 'ouse party before she sails."

"Before she sails," thought Bradford, numbly. Sylvia was going? Could he believe the man? Should he go through the formality of leaving a card that she might not get? No, he would go home and write a letter.

Sylvia kept the house until late in the afternoon, these days. Then she slipped out by the servants' stairway, and through the garden, to walk in the wood lane that ran northward, joining the two parallel highroads; for her healthy body needed air, and she knew that if she did not have it, she could not control herself to keep peaceful silence for even the few days that remained. So it chanced this afternoon that she was walking to and fro in the quiet lane where the ferns crept down quite to the grassy wheel tracks, when Perkins said those repellent words, "Not at home."

As Bradford turned out the gate and noticed that the sun was already setting, he thought to save time by cutting through the almost unused lane to the turnpike that led directly to Pine Ridge. He had driven but halfway across, when a flutter of light garments a little way ahead attracted him. Could it be? Yes, it was Sylvia, in truth, and at the moment that he recognized her and sprang to the ground she heard the approaching hoofs and turned. For a full minute neither spoke nor moved, then going quickly to her and stretching out both hands, he said, his heart breaking through his voice, "I have been to see you. I did not know until to-day."

She gave her hands, and in another moment his strong arms held her fast and unresisting--the purifying friendship of those unconscious years crystallized and perfected at love's first touch.

They said but very little as they walked up and down the lane together, for half an hour; but as the shadows lengthened, the thought came equally to both--"What should they do next? How could they part, and yet how stay together?" Horace, with man's barbarian directness, would have liked to bear her home to safety and his mother; but the shadow of usage and her mother stood between, for in spite of the hollow mockery of it all, Sylvia was still of her household.

"I must take you home," he said at last, "and to-morrow I will come--all shall be arranged."

"To-night," she whispered, clasping his arm in nervous terror. "Come back with me and tell her to-night; then I shall feel sure, and not as if it was not real. And when you have told her,--before whoever may be there, remember,--go home; do not stop to listen to anything she may say."

They drove slowly back, and went up the steps to the house, from which voices and laughter came, hand in hand, like two children; but they were children no longer when they crossed the threshold and saw Monty Bell in the group that loitered with Mrs. Latham in the reception hall, waiting for dinner to be announced.

Sylvia's thin gown was wet with dew, her hair was tossed about, her eyes big with excitement, and a red spot burned in each cheek in startling contrast to her pallor--all of which gave her a wild and unusual beauty that absolutely startled as well as shocked her mother, letting her think for a second that Sylvia was going to make a scene, had gone mad, perhaps, and run away, and that the tall man holding her by the hand had found her and brought her home.

Taking a few hasty steps forward, and dreading anything disagreeably tragic, she said: "Mr. Bradford, I believe. What is it? What has happened?"

"Only this, that Miss Sylvia has promised to be my wife, and that, as her mother, we have come to tell you of it before I go home to tell my own." Horace Bradford drew himself up to every inch of his full height as he spoke, bowed to Mrs. Latham, then led Sylvia to the foot of the stairs, saying, "Until to-morrow," and walked quietly out of the house.

No one spoke. Then Mrs. Latham, choking with rage, feeling herself helplessly at bay (Sylvia was of age, and she could not even assume authority under the circumstances), collapsed on a divan in modified hysterics, and Monty Bell, completely thunderstruck, finally broke the silence by his characteristic exclamation, "I'll be damned!"

* * * * *

After their belated supper, when Esther Nichols had gone over to a neighbour's, Horace, sitting by his mother's side, out in the honeysuckled porch, where the sphinx moths whirred like humming-birds of night, holding her hands in his, told her all. And she, stifling the mother pain that, like a birth pang, expected yet dreaded, must come at first when the other woman, no matter how welcome, steps between, folded his hands close, as if she held him again a baby in her arms, and said, smiling through vague tears, "To-morrow we will go together to her, my blessed son."

"I cannot ask you to do that; there are reasons--I will bring Sylvia to you later, when her mother has gone," he answered hastily, resolving that he would do anything to shield her self-respect from the possible shock of meeting that other mother.

"Horace, you forget yourself, and your father too," she said almost sternly. "I am country bred, but still I know the world's ways. Your father's wife will go first to greet her who will be yours; you need not fear for me," and he sat silent.

That next afternoon, when Horace's first and last love met, they looked into each other's hearts and saw the same image there, while Mrs. Latham lay on the lounge in her room, raging within, that again her tongue had failed her in her own house, and realizing that, woman of the world as she aimed to be, the "egg woman" had rendered her helpless by mere force of homely courtesy. Presently she rose, and railing and scolding the bewildered maid, sent a message to New York to transfer her passage, if possible, to an earlier steamer.


XIII

GOSSIP AND THE BUG HUNTERS

_July_ 18. It is such a deadly sin to marry outside of the limited set that is socially registered, that I now understand why many of the Whirlpoolers are mentally inbred, almost to the vanishing point, so that they have lost the capacity of thinking for themselves, and must necessarily follow a leader.

Sylvia Latham's engagement to Horace Bradford has caused a much greater sensation than her mother's divorce. To be sure, every one who has met Horace, not only fails to find anything objectionable about him, but accords him great powers of attraction; yet they declare in the same breath that the affair will not do for a precedent, and deplore its radical influence.

To-day we have settled down to midsummer quiet and to a period of silence after much talking. The Bluffs are quite deserted except by a bevy of children left with governesses while their parents are yachting or in Europe, and the servants in charge of the various houses. But a trail of discontent is left behind, for these servants, by their conspicuous idleness, are having a very demoralizing effect upon the help in the plain houses hereabout, who are necessarily expected to do more work for lower wages.

I am fully realizing, also, that the excitement of living other people's lives, which we cannot control, through sympathetic imagination, is even more wearing than meeting one's own responsibilities. A certain amount of separateness--I use the word in an entirely opposite meaning to that of aloofness--is, I find, necessary to every member of our household, and this chance for intimacy with oneself is a luxury denied to those who live all their lives taking joy and sorrow equally in a crowd.

Even the boys, young as they are, recognize it unconsciously, and have separate tree lairs, and neither may enter the other's, without going through some mysterious and wonderful ceremony and sign language, by which permission is asked and granted.

There are often days when father sits in his study with closed door or drives over the hills without desire for even the boys as companions. This need not signify that he is either ill or worried,--it is simply the need of separateness. The same thing applies to Evan when he sometimes slips out through the garden at night, without word or sign, and is only traceable by the beacon his cigar point makes, as he moves among the trees, until this also vanishes, while my attic corner and the seat at the end of the wild walk offer me similar relief.

At least the attic did until Martin Cortright, at my own invitation, established a rival lair at the opposite end. I did not think that it would matter, the presence of this quiet man barricaded by his books and papers, but it does, because the charm of isolation is destroyed. I would not have done otherwise, however; I have all outdoors, and he will have returned to New York to find winter quarters, and arrange for the publication of the first volume of his history when autumn and shut-in time draws near.

Mrs. Latham sailed last week, and Sylvia is now in New York visiting her father at his hotel and arranging her future plans. To-morrow she returns, and together with Lavinia Dorman goes to the Alton cottage until late August or early September, when her wedding is expected to take place.

At the last moment Mrs. Latham changed her plan of leaving the Bluff cottage in the charge of servants, had all her personal belongings moved away, and offered the place for sale.

"Yes, my dear," said Mrs. Jenks-Smith, who, being a sort of honorary stewardess of the Colony, usually remains a full week after the breaking-up time, and frequently runs in to report progress, "she's not coming back; being divorced she doesn't need to claim residence here. The place is so convenient to town, too, but I can't really blame her,--though of course I'm glad poor Sylvia's to be happy in her own way, and all that, for it's plain to be seen with one eye she's too slow to go her mother's pace--you couldn't expect Vivvy Latham, over all the hurdles but one, and almost at the end of the race, to relish her daughter's mother-in-law being in the egg trade in the very neighbourhood.

"At first everybody thought that the Bradfords, mother and son, would probably give up work and float on Sylvester J. Latham's money, for they say (to spite Vivvy, most likely) he took to Horace Bradford at the first, for what did the young fellow do but go straight to town and look Sylvester up, and make a clean breast of it before the gossips could even twist their tongues around the affair.

"Sylvester thought he could handle Bradford to suit himself, move him to New York, jam him into business, cut up the farm in house lots, reorganize his affairs, and declare a dividend out of him for his own benefit, as he does with lame railroads,--but not a bit of it!

"'With what you may choose to do for Sylvia personally, it would be selfish for me to interfere; but our way of