The Lovely Lady. Mary Hunter Austin
mustn't take it too hard, Peter; we've always got along somehow, and nobody in Bloombury is very rich."
Peter turned that over in his mind the whole of a raw and sleety February. And one day when nobody came into the store from ten till four, and loose winds went in a pack about the village streets, casting up dry, icy dust where now and then some sharp muzzle reared out of the press as they turned the corners, he spoke to Mr. Greenslet about it. It was so cold that day that neither the red apples in the barrels nor the crimson cranberries nor the yellowing hams on the rafters could contribute any appearance of warmth to the interior of the grocery. A kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned goods; the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of chilblains, roughed by the wind.
A kind of arctic stillness pervaded the place, out of which the two men hailed each other at intervals as from immeasurable deeps of space.
"Mr. Greenslet," ventured Peter at last, "are you a rich man?"
"Not by a long sight."
"Why?" questioned Peter.
"Not built that way."
The grocer lapsed back into the silence and seemed to lean against it meditatively. The wolf wind howled about the corners and cast snow like powdered glass upon the windows contemptuously, and time went by with a large deliberate movement like a fat man turning over, before Peter hailed again.
"Did you ever want to be?"
Mr. Greenslet reached out for the damper of the stove ostensibly to shake down the ashes, but really to pull himself up out of the soundless spaces of thought.
"When I was your age, yes. Thought I was going to be." The shaking of the damper seemed to loosen the springs of speech in him. "I was up in the city working for Siegel Brothers; began as a bundle boy and meant to be one of the partners. But by the time I worked up to fancy goods I realized that I would have to be as old as Methuselah to make it at that rate. And Mrs. Greenslet didn't like the city; she was a Bloombury girl. It wasn't any place for the children."
"So you came back?"
"We had saved a little. I bought out this place and put in a few notions I'd got from Siegel's. I'm comfortably off, but I'm not rich."
"Would you like to be?"
"I don' know, I don' know. I'd like to give the boys a better start than I had, but I'm my own boss here and one of the leading men. That's always something."
Peter went and looked out of the smudged windows while he considered this. The long scrapes of the wind in the loose snow were like the scratches of great claws. It was now about mail time and a few people began to stir in the street; the clear light and the cold gave them a poverty-bitten look.
"Does anybody ever get rich in Bloombury?"
"Not that I know of. There's Mr. Dassonville in Harmony—Dave Dassonville, the richest man in these parts."
"I suppose he could tell me how to go about it?"
"I suppose he would if he knows. Mostly these things just happen."
Peter did not say anything more just then; he was watching a man and a girl of about his own age who had come out of a frame house farther down the street. The young man was walking so as to shield her from the wind, her rosy cheek was at his shoulder, and she smiled up at him over her muff, from dark, bright eyes.
"What's set you on to talk about riches? Thinking of doing something in that line yourself?"
"Yes," said Peter, kicking at the baseboard with his toes. "I don't know how it is to be done, but I've got to be rich. I've just simply got to."
II
It was along in the beginning of spring on a day full of wet cloud and clearing wind, that Peter walked over to Harmony to inquire of Mr. David Dassonville the way to grow rich. It was Sunday afternoon and the air sweet with the sap adrip from the orchards lately pruned and the smell of the country road dried to elasticity by the winds of March.
Between timidity and the conviction that a week day would have been better suited to his business, he drew on to the place of his errand very slowly, for he was sore with the raking of the dragon's claws, and unrested. It had been a terrible scrape to get together the last instalment of interest, and since Ellen had shattered it with the gossip about Ada Brown's engagement, there had been no House with Shining Walls for Peter to withdraw into out of the dragon's breath of poverty; above all, no Princess.
He did not know where the House had come from any more than he knew now where it had gone. It was a gift out of his childhood to his shy, unfriended youth, but he understood that if ever its walls should waver and rise again to enclose his dreams, there would be no Princess. Never any more. Princesses were for fairy tales; girls wanted Things. There was his mother too—he had wished so to get her a new dress this winter. It was an ache to him to cut off yards and yards of handsome stuffs at Mr. Greenslet's, and all the longing in the world had not availed to get one of them for his mother. Plainly the mastery of Things was accomplished by being rich; he was on his way to Mr. Dassonville to find out how it was done.
It was quite four of the clock when he paused at the bottom of the Dassonville lawn to look up at the lace curtains at the tall French windows. Nobody in Bloombury was rich enough to have lace curtains at all the windows, and the boy's spirit rose at the substantial evidence of being at last fairly in the track of his desire.
He found Mr. Dassonville willing to receive him in quite a friendly way, sitting in his library, keeping the place with his finger in the book he had been reading to his wife. Peter also found himself a little at a loss to know how to begin in the presence of this lady, for he considered it a matter quite between men, but suddenly she looked up and smiled. It came out on her face fresh and delicately as an apple orchard breaking to bloom, and besides making it quite spring in the room, discovered in herself a new evidence of the competency of Mr. David Dassonville to advise the way of riches. She looked fragile and expensive as she sat in her silken shawl, her dark hair lifted up in a half moon from her brow, her hands lying in her lap half-covered with the lace of her sleeves, white and perfect like twin flowers. He saw rings flashing on the one she lifted to motion to the maid to bring a chair.
"If you have walked over from Bloombury you must be tired," she said, "and chilled, perhaps. Come nearer the fire."
"No, thank you," Peter had managed, "I am quite warm," as in fact he was, and a little flushed. He sat down provisionally on the edge of the chair and looked at Mr. Dassonville.
"I came on business. I don't know if you will mind its being Sunday, but I couldn't get away from the store on other days."
"Quite right, quite right." Mr. Dassonville had lost his place in the book and laid it on his knee. "Private business? My dear, perhaps–"
"Oh, no—no," protested Peter handsomely. "I'd rather she stayed. It isn't. At least … I don't know if you will consider it private or not."
"Go on," urged Mr. Dassonville.
"I just came to ask you," Peter explained, "if you don't mind telling me, how you got rich?"
"But bless you, young man," exclaimed Mr. Dassonville, "I'm not rich."
This for a beginning, was, on the face of it, disconcerting. Peter looked about at the rows of books, at the thick, soft carpet and the leather-covered furniture, and at the rings on Mrs. Dassonville's hand. If Mr. Dassonville were not rich, how then—unless–
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I thought—that is, everybody says you are the richest man in these parts."
"As to that, well, perhaps, I have a little more money than my neighbours."
Peter breathed relief. The beautiful Mrs. Dassonville's rings were paid for, then.
"But as to being rich, why, when you come to a really rich man all I've got wouldn't be a pinch to him." Mr. Dassonville illustrated with his own thumb and fingers how little that would be. "We don't have really