Miss Bellard's Inspiration. William Dean Howells
inevitable. But the wildest stroke of her imagination could not inculpate him in the present affair; and though she felt it somewhat guilty of him to attempt any palliation of Lillias Bellard's behavior, she also felt it kind, and was very good to him the whole day on account of it; so that he was able honestly to pity her for the base of real tragedy he knew in her comedy. They had not only sold The Surges, where they had spent twenty summers, because of the heavy drain of hospitality upon her energies there, but because they had been offered a very good price for it, and they believed that the air of the mountains would be better for their rheumatisms. It formed at any rate a more decided change from the air of Boston; and the sale of The Surges was not altogether that sacrifice to solitude which her passionate resentment of the first menace of it had made it seem to her. Still there were associations with the things brought from the seaside cottage which supported her in the change, and which now burdened her with unavailing suggestions of how easy it would have been to make Lillias have a nice time in the more familiar environment. She sighed to herself in owning that she did not know what she should do with the girl where they were; for already, as she went through the house, she forgot her own hardship in realizing how difficult, with only the Saco Shore House to draw upon, it would be to amuse the child.
It was an essential part of her comedy to keep this transmutation of moods from Crombie; her self-respect required it, and experience had taught her that the most generous of men would take a mean advantage if he could, and would turn from pitying to mocking her for the change. There was no outward change from the effect of plaintive submission into which she had sunk by their one-o'clock dinnertime, when, in the later afternoon she asked him to take her adrive: the last, she predicted, they should have alone together that summer. Some part of the way she dedicated to a decent pathos in the presence of scenery endeared by their unmolested meanderings, and the thought of the sweet intimacy in which they had all but got back their young married selves. But the time and the place came when she could stand it no longer, and he was hardly surprised to have her break out with the unrelated conjecture, " I wonder what she has got up her sleeve."
"A young man, probably," he suggested.
" Don't be coarse! What makes you think that?"
" I don't know that I think that, or anything. What's the use of worrying about it? She'll be here so soon."
"Well, I really believe she has. And I shall watch her, I can tell you. If Aggie Bellard" — Mrs. Crombie branched away in the direction of the girl's mother — "thinks she can go off to Europe for the summer, and leave Lillias scattered broadcast over the continent, with no one to look after her, she is very much mistaken." This was the expression of such very complex feeling that Crombie could reply with nothing so well as a spluttering laugh. His wife knew perfectly what his laugh meant, and she went on: "I never approved of her second marriage, anyway, and I am not going to have Lillias shouldered off on me to make room for a second family in her mother's house. Archibald!" she cried, and she had to use him very sternly in the tone she was really taking with her sister and niece, "do you suppose it's a plot between them to get Lillias here with us, so that she can ingratiate herself with me, and just keep staying on indefinitely? Because if you do," she continued to threaten him, while she cast about in her mind for a penalty severe enough to fit the offence, " I won't have it!"
This was so ineffective that he had to laugh again, but he reconciled her to his derision by the real compassion with which he said, "You know you don't suppose anything of the kind yourself. It's a perfectly simple case, and the only reasonable conjecture is that Lillias has told you the exact truth in her letter. She is coming here because she has nowhere else to put in the time till the Mellays are ready for her, and in a week she will be gone. I don't think that will make any serious break in the quiet of our summer. At any rate, you can't help yourself."
"No, I can't," Mrs. Crombie recognized. "But if she imagines that she is going to hoodwink me!"
She did not attempt to say what she would do in such an event, and her husband felt no anxiety as to the sort of time Lillias would have under his roof.
II
THE maid met them on their return with word that a gentleman had called while they were
I away. On rigid question from Mrs. Crombie she confessed that he seemed rather short and fair, but this proved to be partially an effect from Mrs. Crombie's displeasure with his being first long and dark. The girl was quite sure that he had a mustache, though she afterwards corrected herself so far as to say that his hair was cut close. He had asked for no one but Mr. Crombie, who evinced so little interest in his visitor that after a casual glance at his card he left it to the scrutiny by which his wife sought to divine him from it. From evidences not apparent to Crombie, she had decided that it was an English card, and that Mr. Edmund Craybourne was English himself, because he had no middle name, not even a middle initial.
"Did he leave any message?" She now turned upon the maid again.
"No, ma'am."
" Did he say he would come back?"
"He didn't say, m'm."
" Did he tell you whether he was stopping at the Saco Shore House?"
" He didn't tell anything, m'm."
With these facts in hand, Mrs. Crombie followed her husband to his room, where he was washing the odor of his driving-gloves from his hands, and asked him what he had to say now about Lillias Bellard.
"Well, when I said there was a young man in question, you told me not to be indecent."
"'Coarse," I said; and it was coarse. Do you suppose this is the young man?"
"Not if there is none."
" Well, I know it is. Now what are you going to do? He didn't say where he was staying, and you will have to wait till he comes back. But what will you do, then?"
" I will settle that when I see him," Crombie said, applying himself vigorously to the towel. "If he is short and fair and fat, I may fall upon him and rend him; but if he is long and lank and dark, I may consider about it; though I don't know why I should do anything at all, come to think of it."
"No," Mrs. Crombie allowed, "I don't know why you should. In fact, I should prefer to see him myself. I could get it out of him better."
She did not say what it was, and the whole situation was simplified, as to action, by the young man's not coming back, though it was intensified as a mystery by his failure to reappear. In this aspect it supplied Mrs. Crombie with conversation quite to the end of supper, when the barge of the Saco Shore House drove up, and left Lillias Bellard and her baggage at the cottage door. Her aunt welcomed her with a warmth which she could not have imagined of herself, and affectionately ignored the girl's excuses for coming so much sooner than she had said, and so much later; for the train that brought her twenty-four hours ahead of time was a whole hour behind. For that reason she sat down to her retarded supper nearly a day before she should have had any supper at all. Her justification was that she had found people she knew coming on, and she had thought it best to come with them, hoping it would not make too much difference to her aunt Hester. She was a pretty girl of what Crombie in his quality of incomplete artist decided was a silvery type, singularly paintable in the relation of her gray-green eyes to the argent tones of her travelling-costume, her hat and ribbons and her gloves. You must take her, of course, with the same intention and intelligence that she had taken herself with, or as much of it as you could get; for it was clear that she was dressed in the frankest sympathy with her own coloring, and in conscious rejection of all mistaken notions of contrast. If some girls made you think of May and others of July or August, the month that she made you think of was September: not the moods in which it mirrored the coming October, but those in which it suggested the youngest months of summer, or even spring. She was fairly mature, as he knew from his acquaintance with her history; she would not see twenty-seven again; but she gave you the same sort of contradictory impressions of youth and age that she gave you of knowingness and innocence, of self-reliance and helplessness, of ignorance and experience, and of energy that ended in indecision.