The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.), Marshall P. Wilder [e book reader for pc txt] 📗

The confirmed bachelor sat apart, fairly submerged by a sea of Sunday papers; yet a peripheral consciousness of the ladies' presence was revealed in his embryonic smile.

He folded over a voluminous sheet containing an account of the latest murder, and glanced at a half-page picture, labeled, "The Scene of the Crime."

"Was there ever yet a woman that could keep a secret," he demanded, apparently of the newspaper. "Now, if this poor fellow had only kept his little plans to himself—but, of course, he had to go and tell some woman."

"Looks like the man didn't know how to keep his secret that time," returned Mrs. Pendleton with a smile calculated to soften harsh judgments against her sex.

"There are some secrets woman can keep," observed Elsie Howard. Her gaze happened to rest upon Mrs. Pendleton's golden hair.

"For instance," demanded the confirmed bachelor. (His name was Barlow.)

"Oh—her age for one thing." Elsie withdrew her observant short-sighted eyes from Mrs. Pendleton's crowning glory, and a smile barely touched the corners of her expressively inexpressive mouth. Mrs. Pendleton glanced up, faintly suspicious of that last remark.

Mr. Barlow laughed uproariously. In the two years that he had been a "guest" in Mrs. Howard's boarding-house he had come to regard Miss Elsie as a wit, and it[Pg 1339] was his habit—like the Italians at the opera—to give his applause before the closing phrases were delivered.

"I guess that's right. You hit it that time. That's one secret a woman can keep." He chuckled appreciatively.

Mrs. Pendleton laughed less spontaneously than usual and said, "It certainly was a dangerous subject," that "she had been looking for silver hairs amongst the gold herself lately." And again Elsie's eyes were attracted to the hairs under discussion. For three months now she had questioned that hair. At night it seemed above reproach in its infantile fairness, but in the crude unkind daylight there was a garish insistence about it that troubled the eye.

At that moment the door opened and Mrs. Hilary came in with her bonnet on. She glanced around with frigid greeting.

"So I'm not late to dinner after all. I had thought you would be at table. The tram was so slow I was sorry I had not walked and saved the fare." She spoke with an irrational rising and falling of syllables that at once proclaimed her nationality. She was a short, compact little woman with rosy cheeks, abundant hair and a small tight mouth. Mrs. Hilary was a miniature painter by choice and a wife and mother by accident. She was subject to lapses in which she unquestionably forgot the twins' existence. She recalled them suddenly now.

"Has any one seen Gladys and Gwendolen? Dear, dear, I wonder where they are. They wouldn't go to church with me. Those children are such a responsibility."

"But they are such happy children," said gentle little Mrs. Howard, who had come in at the beginning of this speech. In her heart Mrs. Howard dreaded the long-legged, all-pervasive twins, but she pitied the widowed[Pg 1340] and impoverished little artist. "So sad," she was wont to say to her intimates in describing her lodger, "a young widow left all alone in a foreign country."

"But one would hardly call America a foreign country to an Englishwoman," one friend had interpolated at this point.

"Yes, I know," Mrs. Howard had acknowledged, "but she seems foreign. Her husband was an American, I believe, and he evidently left her with almost nothing. He must have been very unkind to her, she has such a dislike of Americans. She wasn't able to give the regular price for the rooms, but I couldn't refuse her—I felt so sorry for her."

Mrs. Howard liked to "feel sorry for" people. Yet she was apt to find herself at sea in attempting to sympathize with Mrs. Hilary. She was a sweet-faced, tired-looking little woman with a vague smile and dreamy eyes. About five years ago Mrs. Howard had had "reverses" and had been forced by necessity to live to violate the sanctity of her hearth and home; grossly speaking, she had been obliged to take boarders, no feasible alternative seeming to suggest itself. The old house in Eleventh Street, in which she had embarked upon this cheerless career, had never been a home for her or her daughter. Yet an irrepressible sociability of nature enabled her to find a certain pleasure in the life impossible to her more reserved daughter.

As they all sat around now in the parlor, into which the smell of the Sunday turkey had somehow penetrated, a few more guests wandered in and sat about provisionally on the impracticable parlor furniture, waiting for the dinner signal. Mrs. Howard bravely tried to keep up the simulation of social interchange with which she ever[Pg 1341] pathetically strove to elevate the boarding-house intercourse into the decency of a chosen association.

Suddenly there came a thump and a crash against the door and the twins burst in, their jackets unbuttoned, their dusty picture hats awry.

"Oh! mater, mater!" they cried tumultuously, dancing about her.

"Such sport, mater. We fed the elephant."

"And the rabbits—"

"And a monkey carried off Gwendolen's gloves—"

"Children," exclaimed Mrs. Hilary impotently, looking from one to the other, "where have you been?" (She pronounced it bean.)

"To the park, mater—"

"To see the animals—"

"Oh, mater, you should see the ducky little baby lion!"

"What is it that they call you?" inquired a perpetually smiling young kindergartner who had just taken possession of a top-floor hall-room.

Mrs. Hilary glanced at her slightingly.

"What is it that they call me? Why, mater, of course."

"Ah, yes," the girl acquiesced pleasantly. "I remember now; it's English, of course."

"Oh, no," returned Mrs. Hilary instructively, "it's not English; it's Latin."

The kindergartner was silent. Mrs. Pendleton suppressed a chuckle that strongly suggested her "mammy." Mr. Barlow grinned and Elsie Howard's mouth twitched.

"They are such picturesque children," Mrs. Howard put in hastily. "I wonder you don't paint them oftener."

"I declare I just wish I could paint," Mrs. Pendleton contributed sweetly, "I think it's such pretty work."

Mrs. Hilary was engrossed in the task of putting the twins to rights.[Pg 1342]

"I don't know what to do with them, they are quite unmanageable," she sighed. "It's so bad for them—bringing them up in a lodging-house."

Mrs. Howard flushed and Mrs. Pendleton's eyes flashed. The dinner bell rang and Elsie Howard rose with a little laugh.

"An English mother with American children! What do you expect, Mrs. Hilary?"

Mrs. Hilary was busy retying a withered blue ribbon upon the left side of Gladys' brow. She looked up to explain:

"They are only half-American, you know. But their manners are getting quite ruined with these terrible American children."

Then they filed down into the basement dining-room for the noon dinner.

"Horrid, rude little Cockney," Mrs. Pendleton whispered in Elsie Howard's ear.

The girl smiled faintly. "Oh, she doesn't know she is rude. She is just—English."

Mrs. Howard, over the characterless soup, wondered what it was about the little English artist that seemed so "different." Conversation with Mrs. Hilary developed such curious and unexpected