“I guess I shouldn’t amounted to much without you, Persis,” interposed Lapham, moved to this justice by her praise.
“Oh, don’t talk about ME!” protested the wife. “Now that you’ve made it all right about Rogers, there ain’t a thing in this world against you. But still, for all that, I can see — and I can feel it when I can’t see it — that we’re different from those people. They’re well-meaning enough, and they’d excuse it, I presume, but we’re too old to learn to be like them.”
“The children ain’t,” said Lapham shrewdly.
“No, the children ain’t,” admitted his wife, “and that’s the only thing that reconciles me to it.”
“You see how pleased Irene looked when I read it?”
“Yes, she was pleased.”
“And I guess Penelope’ll think better of it before the time comes.”
“Oh yes, we do it for them. But whether we’re doing the best thing for ‘em, goodness knows. I’m not saying anything against HIM. Irene’ll be a lucky girl to get him, if she wants him. But there! I’d ten times rather she was going to marry such a fellow as you were, Si, that had to make every inch of his own way, and she had to help him. It’s in her!”
Lapham laughed aloud for pleasure in his wife’s fondness; but neither of them wished that he should respond directly to it. “I guess, if it wa’n’t for me, he wouldn’t have a much easier time. But don’t you fret! It’s all coming out right. That dinner ain’t a thing for you to be uneasy about. It’ll pass off perfectly easy and natural.”
Lapham did not keep his courageous mind quite to the end of the week that followed. It was his theory not to let Corey see that he was set up about the invitation, and when the young man said politely that his mother was glad they were able to come, Lapham was very short with him. He said yes, he believed that Mrs. Lapham and the girls were going. Afterward he was afraid Corey might not understand that he was coming too; but he did not know how to approach the subject again, and Corey did not, so he let it pass. It worried him to see all the preparation that his wife and Irene were making, and he tried to laugh at them for it; and it worried him to find that Penelope was making no preparation at all for herself, but only helping the others. He asked her what should she do if she changed her mind at the last moment and concluded to go, and she said she guessed she should not change her mind, but if she did, she would go to White’s with him and get him to choose her an imported dress, he seemed to like them so much. He was too proud to mention the subject again to her.
Finally, all that dress-making in the house began to scare him with vague apprehensions in regard to his own dress. As soon as he had determined to go, an ideal of the figure in which he should go presented itself to his mind. He should not wear any dress-coat, because, for one thing, he considered that a man looked like a fool in a dress-coat, and, for another thing, he had none — had none on principle. He would go in a frock-coat and black pantaloons, and perhaps a white waistcoat, but a black cravat anyway. But as soon as he developed this ideal to his family, which he did in pompous disdain of their anxieties about their own dress, they said he should not go so. Irene reminded him that he was the only person without a dress-coat at a corps reunion dinner which he had taken her to some years before, and she remembered feeling awfully about it at the time. Mrs. Lapham, who would perhaps have agreed of herself, shook her head with misgiving. “I don’t see but what you’ll have to get you one, Si,” she said. “I don’t believe they ever go without ’em to a private house.”
He held out openly, but on his way home the next day, in a sudden panic, he cast anchor before his tailor’s door and got measured for a dress-coat. After that he began to be afflicted about his waist-coat, concerning which he had hitherto been airily indifferent. He tried to get opinion out of his family, but they were not so clear about it as they were about the frock. It ended in their buying a book of etiquette, which settled the question adversely to a white waistcoat. The author, however, after being very explicit in telling them not to eat with their knives, and above all not to pick their teeth with their forks, — a thing which he said no lady or gentleman ever did, — was still far from decided as to the kind of cravat Colonel Lapham ought to wear: shaken on other points, Lapham had begun to waver also concerning the black cravat. As to the question of gloves for the Colonel, which suddenly flashed upon him one evening, it appeared never to have entered the thoughts of the etiquette man, as Lapham called him. Other authors on the same subject were equally silent, and Irene could only remember having heard, in some vague sort of way, that gentlemen did not wear gloves so much any more.
Drops of perspiration gathered on Lapham’s forehead in the anxiety of the debate; he groaned, and he swore a little in the compromise profanity which he used.
“I declare,” said Penelope, where she sat purblindly sewing on a bit of dress for Irene, “the Colonel’s clothes are as much trouble as anybody’s. Why don’t you go to Jordan & Marsh’s and order one of the imported dresses for yourself, father?” That gave them all the relief of a laugh over it, the Colonel joining in piteously.
He had an awful longing to find out from Corey how he ought to go. He formulated and repeated over to himself an apparently careless question, such as, “Oh, by the way, Corey, where do you get your gloves?” This would naturally lead to some talk on the subject, which would, if properly managed, clear up the whole trouble. But Lapham found that he would rather die than ask this question, or any question that would bring up the dinner again. Corey did not recur to it, and Lapham avoided the matter with positive fierceness. He shunned talking with Corey at all, and suffered in grim silence.
One night, before they fell asleep, his wife said to him, “I was reading in one of those books to-day, and I don’t believe but what we’ve made a mistake if Pen holds out that she won’t go.”
“Why?” demanded Lapham, in the dismay which beset him at every fresh recurrence to the subject.
“The book says that it’s very impolite not to answer a dinner invitation promptly. Well, we’ve done that all right, — at first I didn’t know but what we had been a little too quick, may be, — but then it says if you’re not going, that it’s the height of rudeness not to let them know at once, so that they can fill your place at the table.”
The Colonel was silent for a while. “Well, I’m dumned,” he said finally, “if there seems to be any end to this thing. If it was to do over again, I’d say no for all of us.”
“I’ve wished a hundred times they hadn’t asked us; but it’s too late to think about that now. The question is, what are we going to do about Penelope?”
“Oh, I guess she’ll go, at the last moment.”
“She says she won’t. She took a prejudice against Mrs. Corey that day, and she can’t seem to get over it.”
“Well, then, hadn’t you better write in the morning, as soon as you’re up, that she ain’t coming?”
Mrs. Lapham sighed helplessly. “I shouldn’t know how to get it in. It’s so late now; I don’t see how I could have the face.”
“Well, then, she’s got to go, that’s all.”
“She’s set she won’t.”
“And I’m set she shall,” said Lapham with the loud obstinacy of a man whose women always have their way.
Mrs. Lapham was not supported by the sturdiness of his proclamation.
But she did not know how to do what she knew she ought to do about Penelope, and she let matters drift. After all, the child had a right to stay at home if she did not wish to go. That was what Mrs. Lapham felt, and what she said to her husband next morning, bidding him let Penelope alone, unless she chose herself to go. She said it was too late now to do anything, and she must make the best excuse she could when she saw Mrs. Corey. She began to wish that Irene and her father would go and excuse her too. She could not help saying this, and then she and Lapham had some unpleasant words.
“Look here!” he cried. “Who wanted to go in for these people in the first place?
Didn’t you come home full of ’em last year, and want me to sell out here and move somewheres else because it didn’t seem to suit ‘em? And now you want to put it all on me! I ain’t going to stand it.”
“Hush!” said his wife. “Do you want to raise the house? I didn’t put it on you, as you say. You took it on yourself. Ever since that fellow happened to come into the new house that day, you’ve been perfectly crazy to get in with them. And now you’re so afraid you shall do something wrong before ‘em, you don’t hardly dare to say your life’s your own. I declare, if you pester me any more about those gloves, Silas Lapham, I won’t go.”
“Do you suppose I want to go on my own account?” he demanded furiously.
“No,” she admitted. “Of course I don’t. I know very well that you’re doing it for Irene; but, for goodness gracious’ sake, don’t worry our lives out, and make yourself a perfect laughing-stock before the children.”
With this modified concession from her, the quarrel closed in sullen silence on Lapham’s part. The night before the dinner came, and the question of his gloves was still unsettled, and in a fair way to remain so. He had bought a pair, so as to be on the safe side, perspiring in company with the young lady who sold them, and who helped him try them on at the shop; his nails were still full of the powder which she had plentifully peppered into them in order to overcome the resistance of his blunt fingers. But he was uncertain whether he should wear them. They had found a book at last that said the ladies removed their gloves on sitting down at table, but it said nothing about gentlemen’s gloves. He left his wife where she stood half hook-and-eyed at her glass in her new dress, and went down to his own den beyond the parlour. Before he shut his door he caught a glimpse of Irene trailing up and down before the long mirror in HER new dress, followed by the seamstress on her knees; the woman had her mouth full of pins, and from time to time she made Irene stop till she could put one of the pins into her train; Penelope sat in a corner criticising and counselling. It made Lapham sick, and he despised himself and all his brood for the trouble they were taking. But another glance gave him a sight of the young girl’s face in the mirror, beautiful and radiant with happiness, and his heart melted again with paternal tenderness and pride. It was going to be a great pleasure to Irene, and Lapham felt that she was bound to cut out anything there. He was vexed with Penelope that she was not going too; he would have liked to have those people hear her talk. He held his door a little open, and listened to the things she was “getting off” there to Irene. He showed that he felt really hurt and disappointed about Penelope, and the girl’s mother made her console him the next evening before they all drove away without her. “You try to look on the bright side of it, father. I guess you’ll see that it’s best I didn’t go when you get there. Irene needn’t open her lips, and they can all see how pretty she is; but they wouldn’t know how smart I was unless I talked, and maybe then they wouldn’t.”
This thrust at her father’s simple vanity in her made him laugh; and then they drove away, and Penelope shut the door, and went upstairs with her lips firmly shutting in a sob.
XIV.
THE Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered in Bellingham Place, the handsome, quiet old street which the sympathetic observer must grieve to see abandoned to boarding-houses. The dwellings are stately and tall, and the whole place wears an air of aristocratic seclusion, which Mrs. Corey’s father might well have thought assured when he left her his house there at his death. It is one of two evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been painted white, and which, with the delicate mouldings of the cornice, form the sole and sufficient decoration of the street front; nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be better. Within, the architect has again indulged his preference for the classic; the roof of the vestibule, wide and low, rests on marble columns, slim and fluted like the wooden columns without, and an ample staircase climbs in a graceful, easy curve from the tesselated pavement. Some carved Venetian scrigni stretched along the wall; a rug lay at the foot of the stairs; but otherwise the simple adequacy of the architectural intention had been respected, and the place looked bare to the eyes of the Laphams when they entered. The Coreys had once kept a man, but when young Corey began his retrenchments the man had yielded to the neat maid who showed the Colonel into the reception-room and asked the ladies to walk up two flights.
He had his charges from Irene not to enter the drawing-room without her mother, and he spent five minutes in getting on his gloves, for he had desperately resolved to wear them at last. When he had them on, and let his large fists hang down on either side, they looked, in the saffron tint which the shop-girl said his gloves should be of, like canvased hams. He perspired with doubt as he climbed the stairs, and while he waited on the landing for Mrs. Lapham and Irene to come down from above before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at his hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard. He heard quiet talking beyond the portiere within, and presently Tom Corey came out.
“Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you.”
Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, “Waiting for Mis’ Lapham,” to account for his presence. He had not been able to button his right glove, and he now began, with as much indifference as he could assume, to pull them both off, for he saw that Corey wore none. By the time he had stuffed them into the pocket of his coat-skirt his wife and daughter descended.
Corey welcomed them very cordially too, but looked a little mystified. Mrs. Lapham knew that he was silently inquiring for Penelope, and she did not know whether she ought to excuse her to him first or not. She said nothing, and after a glance toward the regions where Penelope might conjecturably be lingering, he held aside the portiere for the Laphams to pass, and entered the room with them.
Mrs. Lapham had decided against low-necks on her own responsibility, and had entrenched herself in the safety of a black silk, in which she looked very handsome. Irene wore a dress of one of those shades which only a woman or an artist can decide to be green or blue, and which to other eyes looks both or neither, according to their degrees of ignorance. If it was more like a ball dress than a dinner dress, that might be excused to the exquisite effect. She trailed, a delicate splendour, across the carpet in her mother’s sombre wake, and the consciousness of success brought a vivid smile to her face. Lapham, pallid with anxiety lest he should somehow disgrace himself, giving thanks to God that he should have been spared the shame of wearing gloves where no one else did, but at the same time despairing that Corey should have seen him in them, had an unwonted aspect of almost pathetic refinement.
Mrs. Corey exchanged a quick glance of surprise and relief with her husband as she started across the room to meet her guests, and in her gratitude to them for being so irreproachable, she threw into her manner a warmth that people did not always find there. “General Lapham?” she said, shaking hands in quick succession with Mrs. Lapham and Irene, and now addressing herself to him.
“No, ma’am, only Colonel,” said the honest man, but the lady did not hear him. She was introducing her husband to Lapham’s wife and daughter, and Bromfield Corey was already shaking his hand and saying he was very glad to see him again, while he kept his artistic eye on Irene, and apparently could not take it off. Lily Corey gave the Lapham ladies a greeting which was physically rather than socially cold, and Nanny stood holding Irene’s hand in both of hers a moment, and taking in her beauty and her style with a generous admiration which she could afford, for she was herself faultlessly dressed in the quiet taste of her city, and looking very pretty. The interval was long enough to let every man present confide his sense of Irene’s beauty to every other; and then, as the party was small, Mrs. Corey made everybody acquainted. When Lapham had not quite understood, he held the person’s hand, and, leaning urbanely forward, inquired, “What name?” He did that because a great man to w
hom he had been presented on the platform at a public meeting had done so to him, and he knew it must be right.
A little lull ensued upon the introductions, and Mrs. Corey said quietly to Mrs. Lapham, “Can I send any one to be of use to Miss Lapham?” as if Penelope must be in the dressing-room.
Mrs. Lapham turned fire-red, and the graceful forms in which she had been intending to excuse her daughter’s absence went out of her head. “She isn’t upstairs,” she said, at her bluntest, as country people are when embarrassed. “She didn’t feel just like coming to-night. I don’t know as she’s feeling very well.”
Mrs. Corey emitted a very small “O!” — very small, very cold, — which began to grow larger and hotter and to burn into Mrs. Lapham’s soul before Mrs. Corey could add, “I’m very sorry. It’s nothing serious, I hope?”
Robert Chase, the painter, had not come, and Mrs. James Bellingham was not there, so that the table really balanced better without Penelope; but Mrs. Lapham could not know this, and did not deserve to know it. Mrs. Corey glanced round the room, as if to take account of her guests, and said to her husband, “I think we are all here, then,” and he came forward and gave his arm to Mrs. Lapham. She perceived then that in their determination not to be the first to come they had been the last, and must have kept the others waiting for them.
Lapham had never seen people go down to dinner arm-in-arm before, but he knew that his wife was distinguished in being taken out by the host, and he waited in jealous impatience to see if Tom Corey would offer his arm to Irene. He gave it to that big girl they called Miss Kingsbury, and the handsome old fellow whom Mrs. Corey had introduced as her cousin took Irene out. Lapham was startled from the misgiving in which this left him by Mrs. Corey’s passing her hand through his arm, and he made a sudden movement forward, but felt himself gently restrained. They went out the last of all; he did not know why, but he submitted, and when they sat down he saw that Irene, although she had come in with that Mr. Bellingham, was seated beside young Corey, after all.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 241