IX
AFTER what Mrs. Kelwyn had now told her, and still more after what she had said she could not begin to tell her, Parthenope could not have been surprised that Mrs. Kite was not at the door to receive them. But with spirits uplifted by the glory of the June day, and with senses filled with the odor of the clover-heads and the blackberry blossoms of the roadsides, and the song of the bobolinks and orioles in the fields and dooryards on the way from the station, all the pathos of Mrs. Kelwyn’s squalid tragedy could not blight her. Prom the provisions which Kelwyn had laid in at the village store she capably helped prepare a meal at which she could not have imagined herself an unwelcome guest; she laid the table with a fresh cloth, and with cutlery and china rubbed for double assurance of cleanliness after Mrs. Kite’s washing and wiping; so that when Kelwyn had opened the can of tongue which he had got unbidden, and Mrs. Kelwyn had sliced it and cut the loaf of baker’s bread, they had what she hoped she was not swearing in calling a picnic for the gods. In order that the nectar to wash down the ambrosia should not be steeped to the strength of lye, which was still Mrs. Kite’s notion of tea, Mrs. Kelywn had asked her with careful politeness to let her have the canister on the table, and to bring a pitcher of hot water from the stove; she had to praise, almost with tears, the thoughtfulness of her husband in having provided a can of condensed milk which could not he cowy or speckled.
Parthenope had foraged for wild flowers among those which grew in the pasture just over the stone wall, and had filled a tall jug with columbines, clover-heads, and pink and white laurel; and she dropped, from the final task of arranging them, into her chair, and announced herself as hungry as a bear. Her coarse, yellowish-brown hair was, in fact, not unlike the pelt of a cinnamon bear in color, but in the classic knot at the nape of her rounded neck, and the dull rose of her cheeks, and her regular human features, there was nothing to remind one of a wild animal; even her eyes, which were gray and rather large, did not carry the idea of anything savage to the beholder. She was rather tall, in the fashion which quite so long ago as the early seventies was beginning to prevail among girls, but she was of no such towering height as now puts to shame the dwarfish stature of most men. One of the more noticeable features of her make-up, if hands are features, were her beautiful, long, rather large, and most capable-looking hands. Though she had used them mostly in drawing from the round, the flat, and the nude of late, and in chicquing her more original studies in composition, she had earlier employed them in putting and keeping her aunt’s house in order, both directly and indirectly. She could, almost congenitally, cook and sweep and sew, and the time had been when it had seemed as if her gift lay in the direction of being mistress of a house of her own. But this was distinctly before her genius for painting had so strongly manifested itself, though now she recurred to those earlier inspirations with a pleasure which she felt in all the fingers of her beautiful hands. But she had hardly begun to serve herself with them in the satisfaction of the sylvan famine she had boasted when she dropped her knife and fork and demanded, “Where are the boys?”
Mrs. Kelwyn started back, too. “Why, Elmer, where are the children?”
“The children?” he echoed. “I’m sure I don’t know. We left them playing about here with that Kite boy when we went to the Shakers’. Perhaps they haven’t heard the bell.”
“There hasn’t been any bell for them to hear,” the girl said, and she caught up the bell from the table, as she jumped from her chair, and rang it at the open window. “That will fetch them, I hope.”
It fetched Mrs. Kite, who appeared from the kitchen door. “Did anybody ring?” she asked, in her sweet treble.
“Oh!” the girl said, in dignified apology. “I was ringing for the boys. I suppose they don’t know luncheon is ready.”
In the anxieties of her hospitality, Mrs. Kelwyn had forgotten her children, but the fact seemed to her at first so much out of character that she made a feint of ignoring it. She had known mothers do very strange things with their families in moments of social preoccupation, and she would have excused this aberration of her own if she had been of a lower ideal concerning her duty to her children; but, as it was, some one must suffer for it, and now she said to Mrs. Kite, with severity, “If they’re with your little boy, will you please send them to luncheon immediately?”
Mrs. Kite relaxed in a laugh. “Well, I guess they’re with Arthur fast enough, wherever he is. They all went off together, the last I see of them, with that old hoss.”
Mrs. Kelwyn referred the strange fact to her husband, who asked, “What old horse?”
“Well,” Mrs. Kite responded, tolerantly, “I don’t know as you did notice him before you left this mornin’. He come up the road from down Ellison way, and all three boys piled after him. I guess he’s a hoss that somebody’s turned out to die; he’s a perfect stranger to me, though; large white hoss, blind on the off side, and awful frail-lookin’. Mr. Kite had gone off to his ploughin’ by that time, and one of the boys catched him by the foretop and they all three got onto him.”
Kelwyn followed her through the pronouns to the fact that the boys had mounted the horse and not Kite. “And where did they go?”
“Well, I guess you got me there,” she submitted, and she joined the Kelwyns at the window in looking up and down the road.
“They couldn’t got far,” she said. “That hoss couldn’t get anywhere with ’em if he done his best.” She bent this way and that, looking over one shoulder and then the other of Parthenope. “Why, there they are now, just risin’ the hill, and there’s somebody leadin’ him! Well, they didn’t have no bridle.”
The Kelwyns and their cousin ran down-stairs and out-of-doors to meet the wanderers. When they came near, the two Kelwyn boys burst into a loud crying; the Kite boy, from no personal motive, joined them, where they sat on the horse’s back with their little legs spread far apart, and clinging, the foremost to his mane, and the others keeping on their perch by clasping each other round the waist.
“We got lost, papa!” Francy called to his father. Carl, apparently, could not do better than repeat, “We got lost, papa,” and he repeated his brother’s further explanation inculpating the Kite boy. “He wanted us to get on, and then we couldn’t stop him because we hadn’t any bridle, and we couldn’t get off because it was so hi-i-gh!” They rose an octave in the close and sobbed loudly.
Their father called, “Well, well! Never mind; it’s all right now. Don’t cry.” Whatever obscure notion he had of teaching them a hardy spirit was not shared by his wife and her cousin, who ran forward, the first with a cry of, “Hush, hush!” and the other with a laugh of, “Oh, you poor darlings!” and embraced each a leg of the Kelwyn boys, abandoning the Kite boy to a moral isolation on the horse’s neck, where he vainly continued to lift up his lament. The effect of his grief was to extract from his mother a promise which she kept her head out of the window above to deliver, “I’ll give it to you, Mr. Arthur, when I get round to you.” This at least was something, and it so far consoled the boy that he looked down at the face of the young man who was holding the old horse by his foretop, and smiled through his tears as if recognizing a kindred spirit who could enter into a joke. As yet, neither of the women who were clinging to the legs of the Kelwyn boys had made any sign of seeing their rescuer, but Kelwyn himself now came forward and said, politely: “You’re very good to have taken so much trouble with these scamps. Where did you find them?”
“Not very far off,” the young man answered. “Just beyond the Office at the Shakers’.”
The sound of his voice seemed to recall Mrs. Kelwyn to herself, and she said, “Oh!” As the young man released the foretop of the horse, which immediately fell to mumbling feebly at the wayside grass, and dusted his hands together, she began: “I beg your pardon. Isn’t this the gentleman I met at the Office?”
“Yes,” he said, and then there was a pause which she decided to terminate in the only possible way under the circumstances.
May
I introduce my husband, Mr.—”
“My name is Emerance.”
“Oh, thank you! And my cousin, Miss Brook.” Parthenope and the young man bowed, Kelwyn shook his hand, and Mrs. Kelwyn said toward her husband, “Mr. Emerance is staying with the Shakers for a few days,” and she looked one of those comprehensive looks at Kelwyn which wives explain too late as meaning that their husbands shall be nice but cautious, and kind without committing themselves. Perhaps Kelwyn might have understood her look; but just then she loosed her grasp of her son’s leg, and Parthenope dropped the leg of the other boy. The old horse made a witless movement forward, and as if they were the crew of a ship dragging her anchor, the boys wailed over their shoulders, “We haven’t had anything to e-e-eat, mamma,” and, “We’re awfully hungry, mamma,” the younger echoing the elder, as before, and prolonging his cadences in a shriller key.
Then the mother in Mrs. Kelwyn betrayed the woman of the world, and she said, “Well, don’t cry; dinner is on the table now, and — Elmer! Will you lift them down?”
“Let me lift them down!” Parthenope demanded. She swung Carl earthward through the air, and the stranger did the like with Francy. Both boys stumbled, their legs having fallen asleep, and saved themselves from falling by a clutch on their cousin’s and mother’s skirts. The Kite boy, restored to cheerfulness, dug his heels into the horse’s ribs, and the horse, moved by an instinct of food and shelter, jolted crookedly off toward the barn.
X
MRS. KELWYN turned from watching him and bent a still absent-minded eye upon the young man whom his retreat had left upon her hands, but Kelwyn, realizing that the stranger, who had been so kind, had probably come out of his way and left his dinner at the Shakers’ to bring their lost boys to them, said: “Won’t you come and dine with us, Mr. Emerance? We were just sitting down.”
His words recalled Mrs. Kelwyn to herself; she said, in afterward reproving him, that she was just going to make the invitation; and whether this was so or not she now did it. “Why, yes, Mr. Emerance, you must stay, of course. I was so distracted by that wretched animal,” she apologized.
The young man demurred that the Shakers would be waiting his dinner for him, but he did not demur much. At the end Mrs. Kelwyn said, “Elmer, will you show Mr. Emerance to a room? And we will be ready as soon as you are.” As the two men moved away submissively she mused aloud, horror-strickenly, “I don’t suppose she’s put either water or towels!”
“Let me go and see, Cousin Carry,” Parthenope demanded, and she ran round the men and so quickly ahead that by the time Mrs. Kelywn had followed from the outside with her hungry and whimpering boys Parthenope was coming from her own room with a heavy water-pitcher between her hands and towels hanging from one of her tense arms.
“You were quite right, Cousin Carry,” she said, over her shoulder, “and I can get some for myself just as well afterward.” Then Mrs. Kelwyn heard her husband’s dry-voiced recognition of Parthenope’s service within the room where he had taken the guest, with the young man’s grave protest and the girl’s gay insistence.
After leaving the men to follow her to the diningroom, she had a moment there with Mrs. Kelwyn for one of those formulations of motive which women sometimes find essential with each other and sometimes not. “I thought I would do it, for if we kept him waiting till Mrs. Kite could get them it would embarrass him still more.”
“Yes, of course. Though I don’t know that he seems very embarrassed.”
“That’s what I meant. That stiffness of theirs is always so amusing. One wouldn’t do anything in the world to let them see that one noticed it.” She glanced at the table. “I’ll get a plate for him. If we made Mrs. Kite — Shall I put him with the boys or let him have your whole right-hand side to himself? Or would that be too ceremonious? He shall have Francy next him, and I will take Carl under my wing.”
“I think that will be best,” Mrs. Kelwyn assented, still from the daze that the whole incident had wrapt her in. Her distraction gave her an effect of hauteur toward their guest when her husband returned with him, and she assigned him, with more majesty than she meant, the place Parthenope had chosen for him. During the meal her condescension wore away so far that by the time Parthenope was making coffee with the new machine which the Kelwyns had brought with them, and stored in the pantry against some occasion of experimenting with it, the hostess had reached the level with her guest on which she had met him at the Office.
“As I told you, Mr. Emerance, we are here on the most provisional terms; and I feel like explaining that this is a—” She cast about for a descriptive phrase, and Parthenope, from peering anxiously into the performance of the coffee-machine, supplied it without looking up.
“Boughten lunch.” She spoke lightly, but with authority, as one who dignifies a phrase by using it.
“Yes, and certainly I can say, without boasting, Mrs. Kite had no hand in it. I don’t wish you to think I did her injustice in what I said this morning at the—”
She stopped and stared hard at the coffee-making, which had already fixed the gaze of Kelwyn, and now also held the eyes of the guest.
“Oh, don’t all look so!” the girl protested, turning a flushed face toward them.
“I think you turn it over,” Kelwyn suggested.
“Blow it out, my dear,” his wife commanded.
“Not till it begins to pour from the spout,” the guest interposed. “Now!” he bade her, and the fragrant stream fell smoking into the cup which Parthenope, with a shriek, had interposed in time.
If she obscurely resented his peremptory tone, she hospitably decided to say: “And you shall have the first sprightly runnings, Mr. Emerance, for truly instructing me. And, Cousin Carry, the next time you have a coffee-machine that you haven’t tried yourself, don’t let me try it. In another moment I should have been blown through the roof.”
“Not quite so bad as that,” the young man said. “They always look as if they would explode, but I believe they never do.”
The incident relieved the tension in which the meal had passed. The Kelwyn boys had, first the older and then the younger, asked to be excused, and tottered away in a repletion which would be proof for a while against the lures of the Kite boy; and the talk began to ease itself more and more under the spell of the little cups.
“You spoke as if from a wide experience of coffee-machines,” Kelwyn said, smiling over his drink.
“I’ve tried most of them,” the guest explained. “You can make good coffee or bad coffee with any of them, but neither so good nor so bad as you can make with the simple old-fashioned coffee-pot, if you have the art of it.”
“I should say Mrs. Kite hadn’t the art, though she has the pot. Better recommend the machine to her, my dear,” Kelwyn added to his wife. “You needn’t tell her just when to put it out, unless you mind it blowing her through the roof. I shouldn’t.”
Mrs. Kelwyn usually thought this sort of joking from, her husband rather coarse, but she herself was excited by the coffee and the escape to it from imminent danger, and now his joke did not seem so very coarse to her.
Kelwyn turned again to his guest. “You appear to have looked into the metaphysics of coffee-making.”
“Not so much as the physics, perhaps,” the young man answered. “I attended a cooking - school last winter.”
The two women leaned forward, and Kelwyn tempered the common curiosity to a polite “Ah?”
“I didn’t know,” Emerance continued, “but I might take it up.”
“I don’t quite understand,” Kelwyn ventured, with continued politeness.
“My digestion had given way in teaching, and I suppose that was what directed my attention to the matter. I had a notion at one time of starting a summer school of cooking.”
Mrs. Kelwyn shrank back in her chair, but Parthenope leaned farther forward. Kelwyn joined them in their silence, and the young man addressed him more especially. “And I still don’t see why it shouldn’t fall in with some of the mod
ern humors of our civilization. People are going more and more into the country and for longer seasons, and the general tendency is a sort of reversion to nature in the way of camping in the Adirondacks and the Maine woods, away from the hotels and boarding-houses. I imagined a somewhat larger group of families than ordinarily camp together, who would be willing to form a school of cooking, if they could get teachers. If it became a fad first it might later become a serious study; and we all know how much knowledge in that direction is needed.”
“We certainly know how much it is needed in this house,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, and in her sense of injury through the ignorance which the young man’s notion might have helped ultimately to abate, even in such as Mrs. Kite, she relented to him still more.
“And did you ever make an experimental test of the matter?” Kelwyn asked, with a superior smile, at which Parthenope again inclined herself a little.
“Nο,” the young man hesitated, “I became interested in something else. My notion was not to let the school end with the summer people, but to work finally on the curiosity of the farmers and their wives. They suffer far more than townsfolk from wholesome food, badly cooked. The science of cooking interested me; it’s a kind of chemistry, you know.” He concluded toward Kelwyn, who nodded tolerantly, “No, I never brought the teaching to a practical test myself. But, after learning how to cook, I couldn’t help cooking for myself.”
Chafing-dish?” Kelwyn suggested.
“I went beyond the chafing-dish. I set up a little gas-stove in a room that I got next my study in the house where I lodged, and instead of going out to the meals which I used to get at the boarding-house across the street, I cooked my own meals, much more economically, and, I believed, aesthetically.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 929