“Certainly, by all means,” said the woman.
“What name?”
“Well,” said Lorenzo, and he thought a moment, “I guess you better just put Lorenzo Weaver on.”
“Very well,” said the shopwoman, and she wrote it down on a piece of paper which she pinned to the sack Friend Ella Shewall had lent Althea. In the midst of all that finery it now looked very common and shabby. Lorenzo said he would come round for the things a little later, and she said, politely, “Oh, any time!” and she followed them to the door. “I wish,” she said,” I could have seen madam with her hair long. It’s such a pretty shade. Cut off in sickness, I suppose.”
“Yee,” said Lorenzo; and as they issued upon the sidewalk he was aware that Althea shrank from him, perhaps rather spiritually than corporeally, and yet really. “I know,” he pleaded, “that I oughtn’t to have said that, Althea, and I hated to do it as much as you would. But what could I do?”
“Nay, we seem to have to tell lies whenever folks speak to us,” said Althea, sadly.
“Well, it a’n’t lying exactly, or it a’n’t so considered in the world-outside. It’s considered just the same as putting folks off. I suppose we’ve got to conform in such things.”
“Oh, yee,” she sighed.
They walked along in an unhappy silence till Lorenzo said, “Those shoes, Althea, don’t seem to go exactly with the rest.” he looked down at the little feet which flatly patted the ground in the roomy gear of the Family.
She looked down at them too, and she assented in a rueful “Nay.”
“I want to see if we can’t find you something a little more like,” he said ; and he laughed to see a slight lift come at once into Althea’s gait.
The young man in the shoe-store made Althea sit down for him to unlace her shoe, and then when he had put on the russet ties, which he said were the thing she wanted, felt her foot all over, to see that the fit was perfect, Lorenzo thought that they ought to have a woman for that, and he could see Althea blushing and shrinking, as if she thought so too; but he noticed another young woman trying on pair after pair of shoes under the same conditions, and he decided to say nothing about what was so plainly the custom of the world-outside. The shoes were certainly very pretty, and when Althea suffered him to see the points, the very sharp points of them, beyond her skirt, it seemed to him that her feet had gone to nothing in them. “A’n’t they a little tight, Althea? No use getting shoes that will hurt you.”
“They don’t feel so,” said Althea, conscientiously.
“You’ll find more room in a sharp-pointed shoe, lady,” said the shopman, ignoring Lorenzo in the matter, “than you will in a broad-pointed. Keep them on? All right. Where shall I send the old ones?”
Lorenzo explained, as he had to the modiste, that they had not got a hotel yet, and he asked if he might not call for the shoes later, and he had them marked with his name. “Seems to me you’re a good deal taller than you were before, Althea,” he said, when they were out on the sidewalk again.
“Yee; these shoes have got heels, and they seem to be pretty high.” She no longer swung forward with the free gait he had always thought so beautiful, but walked mincingly, like the fashionably dressed ladies of the world-outside, whom they now began to meet more and more. He thought Althea was as well dressed as any of them, and he made her come into a gay little shop with him and choose a parasol. “Got to have something to keep the sun off, now your old bonnet’s gone.” And Althea laughed with him at the thought of it. She chose a white parasol with white silk fringe, and when the shopwoman suggested gloves she chose a pair of white ones, which the woman put on for her. Lorenzo bought her a lace handkerchief, and the woman showed her how to tuck it in at the waist of her dress, where she said handkerchiefs were worn now.
“Lorenzo,” Althea said, with coquettish severity, when they were in the street again, “I’m not going another step with you unless you get something for yourself now.”
“What do you want I should get?” he asked, fondly, with his heart in his throat.
“You ought to know,” she returned, almost pertly.
“Well,” said Lorenzo, “I been thinking I’d look full better in this hot weather with a straw hat.”
“Yee, you would,” said Althea; and they went into a men’s furnishing store, where the shopman advised a straw hat with a very low crown and a very wide brim, and a deep ribbon with vertical stripes of red and blue. Lorenzo took it, and he took a necktie of white silk, which he was advised was the latest style, and he put it on at a little mirror in the back of the store. When he came forward with his new hat on a little slanted, he could see the glow of pride in his looks which came into Althea’s face.
“Like it?” he asked. But it seemed as if she were too full to speak, and he resumed, carelessly, after he had given the shopman his name, and promised to call for his old hat and tie, “I don’t know but we’d full as well go to some hotel now, Althea, and get our things sent there.”
“Well, if you say so, Lorenzo,” she answered, demurely.
“I declare, I don’t know which one to go to, though,” said Lorenzo. “ We sha’n’t be here often, I presume, and I should like to go to the very best; but if we asked anybody we shouldn’t know whether they were right or not about it.”
They stopped and stood looking up and down the street at the different hotels as they showed themselves in the perspective, but they could not make a choice.
“I wish we had asked that woman at the dress-store,” said Lorenzo, dreamily; and Althea assented with an anxious, “Yee, she could have told.”
“We might go and ask her now,” said Lorenzo, “and yet I kind of hate to.”
The driver of a gay, wood-colored surrey, who was slowly walking his horses up and down with an eye abroad for custom, placed his own interpretation on the wistful air of the young couple standing at the edge of the sidewalk and looking into the street. He pulled up beside them before they were aware. “Carriage? Take you to the Lake for a dollar! Drive?”
Lorenzo hastily whispered Althea, “We could ask him which is the best, on the way. And — and, Althea, we have got to ask somebody about a minister!” She questioned his meaning with her eyes, and he added, “To marry us.”
She flushed and looked down, and admitted, faintly, “Yee.”
“The driver could take us to a good one.”
The driver waited patiently for the end of their conference, though they had not yet answered a word. He suggested, “Take you through the principal streets first, and not charge you anything more.”
“I guess we better, Althea,” said Lorenzo; and she let him help her into the surrey with a soft “Well.”
V
THE driver looked sharply round at them, and then turned about to his horses again. As he drove by the United States, and the Grand Union, and Congress Hall, and out past the Windsor, he named the different great hotels to them, and Lorenzo caught at the chance to ask him which was the best. “Well, I don’t know as I could hardly make a choice between the four biggest. It depends on what you want for your money.” He leaned half round, so as to converse with his passengers at his ease, and lightly controlled his slim sorrels with his left hand, while he stretched his right arm along the back of the seat. “If you want old-family business, I sh’d go to the States; and if you want all the earth can give in the way of solid comfort, I sh’d go to Congress Hall; and if you want something very tony, I sh’d go to the Windsor; but if you’re in for all the life you can get, and all the distinguished visitors, and the big politicians, and style, and jewelry, and full band all the while, you want to go to the Grand Union. That’s where I’d go if I was in Saratoga for a good time; but tastes differ, and there a’n’t a word to say against the other big hotels, or any house in the place, as far as I’ve heard from ‘em. Lady object to smokin’?” The driver suddenly addressed himself to Lorenzo. “Because if she don’t, I’ll finish my cigar.” He spoke with the unlighted remnant of a ciga
r between his teeth.
Lorenzo looked at Althea, and she said, “Nay, I don’t mind.”
A smile ran up into the hard, averted cheek of the driver. He was a slim young fellow, who wore his straw hat at an impudent angle, and had a handsome face full of wicked wisdom; at the same time there was something like a struggle of conscience in the restraint from impertinence which he put upon himself. “If you’ll just take these lines a second,” he said, giving them into Lorenzo’s hand; and then he lighted a match and exhaled his thanks with the first whiff of his cigar. “I can always talk so much better when I’m smokin’, but I don’t never like to smoke when my passengers object.” He started up his horses briskly, and pointed out the objects of interest as he passed them. “That’s Congress Park. You want to come here in the afternoon for the music — Troy band — and there’s a balloon ascension there to-day; that’s something you don’t want to miss.” He said, more especially for Althea’s behoof, “Lady goes up.” He let them look a moment at the pretty park with its stretch of level lawn, and its pavilion and kiosk, its fountain, and its amphitheatrical upland, with a roofage of darker and lighter green propped on tall pine and oak tree stems, and then he jerked his head towards a building on the left. “That’s the Saratoga Club. Gamblin’ place,” he explained to their innocence. “Lots of money exchanges hands every night. German prince dropped ten thousand there one night, and he didn’t take the whole night for it either. It’s a gay place, if it don’t look it.” In fact, with its discreetlv drawn curtains, its careful keeping of grass and flowers, the club-house looked in the bright morning sun like the demure dwelling of some rich man who did not care to flaunt his riches. “Indian encampment,” said the driver, with another nod to the left, a little farther up the hill. “Get your fortune told there; shooting-gallery, Punch and Judy, and a little of everything.” He nodded at a splendid villa on the right, with an auctioneer’s sign upon it. “One of our leadin’ gamblers’ house. Cost him eighty thousand dollars, and won’t bring twenty under the hammer. Got caught in the panic. Took to speculatin’. Been all right if he’d stuck to the cards,” he concluded, as if this were the moral.
Lorenzo’s mind worked with rustic slowness through a cloud of worldly ignorance, and the driver had time to point out several other notable residences on the handsome avenue which they were passing through, and told them that it was the way to the horse-races, and that they ought to be in Saratoga for the races, before Lorenzo could get round to ask, “But a’n’t it against the law to gamble?”
“It’s against the gospel too, I guess,” said the driver, “but you wouldn’t know it in Saratoga. It’s the gamblin’ and the racin’ that makes the place.” He spoke with that pride which people feel in their local evils if they are very great. He swept his passengers with his hardy eye, as if for full enjoyment of any horror he had raised in them, and ended:
“And there a’n’t but one single minister here that I ever heard of that’s had the gall to say a word against hoss-racin’. That’s what Saratoga is.”
His point was lost to them in the thought that came into both their minds at once. Lorenzo whispered it : “Wouldn’t that be the one?”
“I don’t know,” Althea began. Then she said, boldly, “Yee, it would. Ask who it is.”
It took courage; but Lorenzo was leaning forward to put the question, when the driver turned round upon them and said, “But if it a’n’t one thing it’s another, and I don’t suppose Saratoga’s any worse than any other place in the world-outside.”
He pronounced the last words slowly, hut with no apparent consciousness that they must have a peculiar effect with Lorenzo and Althea, who mutely shrank together at them. “You ought to let me fetch you here in the afternoon if you want to see life,” the driver went on, carelessly. “It’s a string of carriages going out one side, and a string coming in on the other. Or it is,” he added, more candidly, “in the season. It’s full early yet.”
It was Althea who commanded herself first. When the danger of discovery seemed past Lorenzo was still silent, but she began to talk and to ask the driver questions, which he answered, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” with a crowing stress on the opening word that seemed personal to her at first, and then only personal to himself. But it was as if he had to he held in cheek continually from taking liberties, and it tasked all the severity Althea had learned in teaching the girls’ school at the Family to manage him. Lorenzo was no help to her; but she held her own, even upon ground so strange to her.
When they reached the wayside restaurant at the end of the lake, he said, Well, here they were, if they wanted to get a lemonade or anything; and he added to Lorenzo, “Be a dollar; I sha’n’t charge you anything extra for showin’ you round first, as I said.”
“I thought,” said Lorenzo to Althea, as they followed, passively, the lead of the waiter who was showing them to a table on the veranda of the house, “that it meant taking us back, too. Didn’t you, Althea?”
“Yee,” Althea whispered, in return. “But I’m glad it didn’t. I don’t believe I like him very much. We can take another carriage back.”
“Oh yee.”
They could see far up the lovely lake, from their table, and beyond a stretch of level the noble range of nearer uplands and farther mountains that frames the Saratoga landscape on the northward.
“It’s sightly, Althea,” Lorenzo murmured: and she answered in the same undertone, “Yee, it is.”
She spoke vaguely, for she was noticing the people who were sitting about at the other tables, and trying to make out what kind of people they were. There was one group of rather noisy girls, who had very yellow hair and bright cheeks, and who seemed to her like a bevy of harsh, brilliant birds; their eyes shone glassily when they turned to look at her. A family party of father and mother, and children who had to be constantly checked and controlled were at another table. At another still a pair in later-middle life, who sat at their half-eaten ices, seemed to be studying the rest, and Althea could feel that Lorenzo and she were peculiarly interesting to this pair.
“They are talking about us,” she said to Lorenzo.
“Well,” he returned, after a long draught of his lemonade — he had ordered that because the driver had mentioned lemonade— “they can’t say anything against you, Althea.”
“I wonder if they live in Saratoga,” she said.
“What makes you ask that?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, faintly, and she looked down. “Don’t you think they are very nice appearing?”
“Yee, I do,” said Lorenzo, after a moment. “We’ve got to ask somebody about a minister, I presume,” he mused aloud, “sooner or later.”
A quick red and white dyed and then blanched Althea’s face. “There’s no — hurry. I like keeping so, don’t you, Lorenzo?”
“Oh yee. But we can’t keep so always.”
“I do declare, when that fellow spoke up so about the world-outside I didn’t know which way to look. Althea, if you think those friends reside here, and it would do to ask tkem about a minister—”
“Nay,” she whispered back in a sudden panic, “you mustn’t!”
“Well, I won’t then.”
They had to pass the elderly couple in going out, and Althea heard the gentleman say to the lady: “It’s quite the nun look.”
“Yes. I don’t understand,” the lady answered. “Beautiful — lovely — pure! It’s like a child’s — an angel’s.”
They were both looking up the lake, where the little excursion steamer was coming in sight.
VI
Lorenzo and Althea found a number of carriages standing outside, but the drivers all said they were engaged. The driver wbo had brought them was sitting under a tree smoking. He waited for them to ask the others, and then he called out briskly to them, as if he had never seen them before, “Carriage?”
They looked at each other. “It would be too far to walk back,” Lorenzo suggested.
“It would dust this dress,” said Althea, “and I can’t seem to walk so well in these shoes.”
Lorenzo turned to the driver, who had now come up to them. “What will you charge to take us back to town?”
The driver reflected. “Well, I’ve got to go back pretty soon anyway. I’ll leave it to you.”
“If it was worth a dollar to bring us here,” said Lorenzo, firmly, “it’s worth a dollar to take us back; and it a’n’t worth any more.”
“All right,” said the man, and he jumped to his seat. “Where do you want I should leave you?” he asked, turning round to them when they were seated, while his sorrels started gayly off of themselves. “Leave you at Congress Park, if you say so. It’s central, and you could set down in there, and think what you wanted to do next.”
They felt an impertinence in his suggestion, but it expressed their minds, and Lorenzo assented with a stiff “All right.” He received some remarks of the driver’s so forbiddingly that he left them quite to themselves until they reached the park.
When they dismounted at the upper gate he took Lorenzo’s dollar with a certain hesitation. “I don’t know as I’d ought to charge you so much for just bringin’ you back.” He looked at them, and then suddenly turned upon Lorenzo: “Say, a’n’t you up from Lebanon? You’re Shakers, anyway!”
“Nay,” returned Lorenzo, angrily, “we are not.”
“Nays have it,” said the young fellow. Without looking round at them, he hollowed out his hands about the match he struck, and lighted a cigar at it while he drove up the street at a slow walk, with the lines held between his knees.
“Oh, Lorenzo,” cried Althea, “we are! You know we are! How could you say it?”
“Well, Althea, we a’n’t from Lebanon!”
“Oh, you know it wasn’t that you denied. We are Shakers. Run after him — run after him, and tell him so, no matter what happens!”
“Well, well! But just as you say, Althea. I don’t want to tell a lie any more than you do.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 579