Miss Bellard's Inspiration. William Dean Howells
revolved these things in his mind, while he looked at her where she sat at table, talking with her aunt in a serenity like that of a September afternoon: her silvery veil misting her gray hat above her hair, sprinkled even at her age with gray, and her gray gloves lying beside her plate, physically but not spiritually detached from her gray costume. Her intelligent eyes, glancing from her aunt to him and back again to her, had lovely skyey lights in them, of the sort that haunt the horizons of the passing summer, when the deep turquoise of the upper heavens changes into the delicate emerald that seems a reflection of the green earth below. It struck him that if it were really a question of his wife's knowing what her niece had up her sleeve, she would know no more than her niece chose to show; and if there were possibilities of her being quite willing to bare both her pretty arms to the elbows it might be in the confident skill with which the prestidigitator chooses to convince the witness that there is really nothing of preparation for the feat he is about to perform, in order to heighten the effect of it.
A sense of her contradictions persisted when she rose from the table and stood not so high as he had expected, and again when she followed her aunt upstairs with a deceptive show of height from the skirt that trailed behind her. He was shut from the revelation of the slight and rather small figure which Lillias made to Mrs. Crombie, in her room, when she had reduced herself to the fact by putting off her jacket and hat, and stood waiting in her shirt-waist for her aunt to finish explaining why she gave her that room and not another. Mrs. Crombie ended by saying that she supposed Lillias must be very tired, and would want to be going to bed; but Lillias answered, not at all, and would not her aunt sit down? She said that one got so used to distances in the West that trains rather rested one than not. Besides, she had enjoyed a season of such entire vegetation, since Commencement, out on the Pacific coast, that a little fatigue would be an agreeable variety which she would be glad to be aware of. At the same time she hid a yawn with such skill that it made her aunt respect her, and resolve to spare her as soon as she got what she wished out of her.
She sat down provisionally and asked Lillias whether she was going back there in the fall, and when the girl said she did not know but she was, Mrs. Crombie said it must be very queer, co-education. "Aren't they apt to get married?" she asked, with a frown of polite disgust.
"Well, yes, they are," Lillias admitted. " But that isn't considered such a very bad thing, out there. You might say that there was a good deal of courting, but there is very little flirting; and there is nothing that is so instantly sat upon by the girls themselves as the least fastness. But I don't come in on the question anywhere. I'm 'one of the faculty,' but my professorship, if it's that, is teaching the advanced pupils of the upper-grade schools that form part of the university. My undergraduate classes average about fourteen for girls, and fifteen or sixteen for boys, and there hasn't been a marriage among them for the whole year past. My postgraduate lecture audiences are mostly made up of townspeople who are married already."
She smiled very amusingly upon her aunt at the end of a speech which she made with pretty turns of her head and a final droop of her shoulders and a forward thrust of her chin above her hands fallen into each other in her lap. It was very young-ladyish, and as little academical as could be, so that her aunt, who had feared among other things that the child was going to be priggish, was entirely consoled. Lillias was in the department of oratory, and she might have been expected to have a public manner, or an elocutionary manner, but anything more private or colloquial than her manner Mrs. Crombie had not seen. It was with the determination not to be overcome by the peculiar charm which she felt in her, and yet not to use unnecessary violence in avoiding the dust which Lillias might attempt to throw into her eyes, that Mrs. Crombie now no longer delayed coming down to business.
"Lillias," she said, with a skirmishing laugh, and trying not to say it with any change of note, " we have had a very strange call this afternoon. Some gentleman whom we don't at all know asked for Mr. Crombie, while we were driving, and left his card. We thought perhaps he was an acquaintance of yours, or it may be some mistake of his; though the maid was very sure that he asked for Mr. Crombie by name."
Mrs. Crombie gave Lillias Mr. Craybourne's card, and that girl looked at it with a carelessness which only partially faded from her manner as she read. She said, "Really!" and she might apparently have contented herself with that brief comment if her aunt had not prompted her.
"You know him?"
"Yes," Lillias said, promptly enough.
Mrs. Crombie, as lightly and brightly as she could, suggested, "And you expected him?"
Lillias laughed after a little absence and silence, "Well, not quite so soon. Aunt Hester. I didn't expect him for a day or two yet. I won't let him bother you."
"Oh," Mrs. Crombie said, with a flight of generous insincerity, "any friend of yours!" and she prepared, with an effect of going away, which did not even lift her out of her chair, to make her next approach still more delicately. "We thought, somehow, that he was an Englishman."
The candor of Lillias in replying could not have been greater if she was actually trying to conceal something. "Well, he is, Aunt Hester. He's one of those younger sons who rather abound out there."
"Oh, indeed! And the eldest son — " It was a little too leading, even with the abrupt stop that Mrs. Crombie made.
"Isn't a title, in this case. But there's property, and Mr. Craybourne's brother got it all, I guess, except the money that Mr. Craybourne has spent in amateur ranching. He's very nice, I may as well tell you at once. Aunt Hester. He's cultivated and well-read and well mannered. Our men have no manners, though some of them will have when my boys grow up through the department of applied conduct, which is really my job, though I pretend to teach the niceties of speech and pronunciation only. Yes, I like Mr. Craybourne very, very much," Lillias concluded, and she remained looking at the card in her left palm, as if it were the sort of photograph that used to be called a carte-de-visite.
Mrs. Crombie made several attempts to speak, which ended, as they began, in gasps, and left Lillias to go on, as she did, thoughtfully.
" He is very nice, and very bidable, though what he might be afterwards! — "
Now, indeed, Mrs. Crombie broke from her inarticulate struggles. "Why, Lillias Bellard, are you engaged to Mr. Craybourne?"
"Well, no. But we're seeing."
III
CROMBIE, when his wife had rejoined him, sat dripping, as it were, from the deluge of conjectures, facts, and reflections which she had hastened to pour out on him after coming away from Lillias.
"Anything more outspoken, more boldfaced, more unblushing! If those are the manners that she is teaching the youth out there under the guise of elocution!"
"There does seem to be a sort of brazen ingenuousness in it," Crombie allowed. " But you can't say there's anything deceitful. And that's what you dreaded."
" I don't know whether I dreaded it. But I did hope that if Lillias had anything to conceal she would manage it with a little finesse, a little delicacy. I hoped that if she was going to bring the burden of a love-affair into the house with her, she would have the grace to carry it off so that it shouldn't seem to be a burden. But the brutal frankness with which she dumps it all on me!"
" I don't call it brutal," Crombie said, with an air of reasoning, "though it is certainly frank. I think it has its charm. It's deliciously honest, and it ought to be a relief to you, after the duplicity you've been dreading — the finesse, as you call it."
" I call it duplicity, pretending to come here for a week, so as to bridge over between visits, and meaning all the time to make us a base of operations, with him at the Saco Shore House, so that they can see each other constantly under my very wing. If that isn't finesse, I don't know what it is!"
" Then, I don't see what you have to complain of, with frankness and finesse both on hand in one and the same Mephistophelian innocent."
"Oh, Archie!" Mrs. Crombie whimpered. "It's the