III
THE BOSTONIANS
It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting thatthe postman, making his morning round, delivered David Kent's asking atthe house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for themigration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem ofcompressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she wasreading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.
"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."
"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me."Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of herbrow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the earlymorning caller.
Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritorof the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful offire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.
"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protestedreproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"
Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, butjust now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.
"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the_Transcript_."
"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have tokeep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper.Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke apropeller blade on the _Amphitrite_ trying to get here in time."
"I am so sorry--for the _Amphitrite_," she said. "But you are here, and ingood season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"
"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you--take yourtickets, and so on."
"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things.And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head ofthis household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all overEurope?"
"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for thecapable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the Germanfrontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim tohelp her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"
"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."
He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which theclean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outwardpresentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.
"You are hard with me, Elinor--always flinty and adamantine, and thatsort. Have you no soft side at all?"
She laughed.
"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can'tbe an anachronism."
"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other thingsabout you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"
"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man ofthe house since father died."
"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you putthe woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; totake the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. Whenare you going to give me the right to come between you and all the littleworries, Elinor?"
She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.
"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "Wewere to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at BarHarbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strongenough to make it possible."
He looked at her with narrowing eyes.
"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart itis that I haven't been able to open."
She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.
"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also--toAbigail and the trunk-packing."
He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterfulsoul asserting itself boldly.
"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."
"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"
"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West--wherever it is you are goingto hibernate."
"No," she said decisively; "you must not."
"Why?"
"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."
"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall Itell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."
"I am not," she denied.
"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why youshould continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I mightover-persuade you."
Her eyes--they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-bluetints in stressful moments--met his defiantly.
"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother andPenelope will be delighted, I am sure."
"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'llbe decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."
Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.
"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave meout of it entirely?"
It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when topress the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shutthe door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.
"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to takeall three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person awell-earned holiday--a little journey in which she won't have to chafferwith the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the westernsomewhere?"
Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and theblue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden inthe folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirredlike a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking pasther to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing thetime with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.
"There is nothing embarrassing about the choosing of a route, is there?"he queried.
"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in ourown country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to goover the Western Pacific."
Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much fortime-killing purposes.
"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Lineis a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lotbetter."
But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and shewould not withdraw it.
"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We do;and we mean to be loyal to our salt."
Ormsby laughed.
"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election ofGovernor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."
"We are not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch ofthe austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite soconscienceless as you men."
"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such anout-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you oughtto get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question ofconscience involved."
"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we wereto sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a badinvestment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, wehave no right to sell."
He smiled leniently.
"All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian. ButI mustn't keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks. What time shallI send the expediters after your luggage?"
She told him, and went with him to the door.
"Please don't think me ungrateful," she said, when she had thrown the
night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."
"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am asconscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'llmeet you all at the station."
As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself underfire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.
Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had sheforgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She wasa thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness;a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had becomepanic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction,it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also thepassivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.
Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but ofher tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring'ssumming-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and thehumanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her nativehills takes polish--reluctantly, and without prejudice to its innergranular structure.
"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the wayyou do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father'sdaughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in eitherof you, I do believe."
Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under hermother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in herveins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she saidnothing.
"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copperbusiness in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you knowit," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care somuch for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go backto nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'dboth starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that youcan't tolerate him."
"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily."Please let's not go over it all again, mother."
Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.
"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himselfthis winter?"
The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong uponElinor, and she yielded to it.
"How should I know? He has the _Amphitrite_ and the Florida coast, hasn'the?"
Mrs. Brentwood groaned.
"To think of the way he squanders his money in sheer dissipation!" sheexclaimed. "Of course, he will take an entire house-party with him, asusual, and the cost of that one cruise would set you up in housekeeping."
Penelope laughed with a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesqueyoung woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyeswith an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose thatwas neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie,which was pure Puritan renaissance.
"Which is to intimate that he won't have money enough left to do it whenhe comes back," she commented. "I wish there were some way of making himbelieve he had to give me what remains of his income after he has spentall he can on the Florida cruise. I'd wear Worth gowns and be lapped inluxury for the next ten years at the very least."
"He isn't going to Florida this winter," said Elinor, repenting her of thesmall quibble. "He is going West."
Mrs. Brentwood looked up sharply.
"With us?" she queried.
"Yes."
Penelope clasped her hands and tried to look soulful.
"Oh, Ellie!" she said; "have you----"
"No," Elinor retorted; "I have not."
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