Bless the man! cried his hostess. I dont mean you. I mean Kitty. But that girl never could keep her face straight. She always favored me more than her father.
This statement was not difficult to believe, for Hiram at that moment looked as if he had never smiled in his life. He sat silent throughout the meal, but Mrs. Bartlett talked quite enough for two.
Well, for my part, she said, I dont know what farmings coming to! Henry Howard and Margaret drove past here this afternoon as proud as Punch in their new covered buggy. Things is very different from what they was when I was a girl. Then a farmers daughter had to work. Now Margarets took her diploma at the ladies college, and Arthur hes begun at the university, and Henrys sporting round in a new buggy. They have a piano there, with the organ moved out into the back room.
The whole Howard lots a stuck-up set, muttered the farmer.
But Mrs. Bartlett wouldnt have that. Any detraction that was necessary she felt competent to supply, without help from the nominal head of the house.
No, I dont go so far as to say that. Neither would you, Hiram, if you hadnt lost your lawsuit about the line fence; and served you right, too, for it wouldnt have been begun if I had been at home at the time. Not but what Margarets a good housekeeper, for she wouldnt be her mothers daughter if she wasnt that; but it does seem to me a queer way to raise farmers children, and I only hope they can keep it up. There were no pianos nor French and German in my young days.
You ought to hear her play! My lands! cried young Bartlett, who spoke for the first time. His admiration for her accomplishment evidently went beyond his powers of expression.
Bartlett himself did not relish the turn the conversation had taken, and he looked somewhat uneasily at the two strangers. The professors countenance was open and frank, and he was listening with respectful interest to Mrs. Bartletts talk. Yates bent over his plate with flushed face, and confined himself strictly to the business in hand.
I am glad, said the professor innocently to Yates, that you made the young ladys acquaintance. I must ask you for an introduction.
For once in his life Yates had nothing to say, but he looked at his friend with an expression that was not kindly. The latter, in answer to Mrs. Bartletts inquiries, told how they had passed Miss Howard on the road, and how Yates, with his usual kindness of heart, had offered the young woman the hospitalities of the hay rack. Two persons at the table were much relieved when the talk turned to the tent. It was young Hiram who brought about this boon. He was interested in the tent, and he wanted to know. Two things seemed to bother the boy: First, he was anxious to learn what diabolical cause had been at work to induce two apparently sane men to give up the comforts of home and live in this exposed manner, if they were not compelled to do so. Second, he desired to find out why people who had the privilege of living in large cities came of their own accord into the uninteresting country, anyhow. Even when explanations were offered, the problem seemed still beyond him.
After the meal they all adjourned to the veranda, where the air was cool and the view extensive. Mrs. Bartlett would not hear of the young men pitching the tent that night. Goodness knows, you will have enough of it, with the rain and the mosquitoes. We have plenty of room here, and you will have one comfortable night on the Ridge, at any rate. Then in the morning you can find a place in the woods to suit you, and my boy will take an ax and cut stakes for you, and help to put up your precious tent. Only remember that when it rains you are to come to the house, or you will catch your deaths with cold and rheumatism. It will be very nice till the novelty wears off; then you are quite welcome to the front rooms upstairs, and Hiram can take the tent back to Erie the first time he goes to town.
Mrs. Bartlett had a way of taking things for granted. It never seemed to occur to her that any of her rulings might be questioned. Hiram sat gazing silently at the road, as if all this was no affair of his.
Yates had refused a chair, and sat on the edge of the veranda, with his back against one of the pillars, in such a position that he might, without turning his head, look through the open doorway into the room. where Miss Bartlett was busily but silently clearing away the tea things. The young man caught fleeting glimpses of her as she moved airily about her work. He drew a cigar from his case, cut off the end with his knife, and lit a match on the sole of his boot, doing this with an easy automatic familiarity that required no attention on his part; all of which aroused the respectful envy of young Hiram, who sat on a wooden chair, leaning forward, eagerly watching the man from New York.
Have a cigar? said Yates, offering the case to young Hiram.
No, no; thank you, gasped the boy, aghast at the reckless audacity of the proposal.
Whats that? cried Mrs. Bartlett. Although she was talking volubly to the professor, her maternal vigilance never even nodded, much less slept. A cigar? Not likely! Ill say this for my husband and my boy: that, whatever else they may have done, they have never smoked nor touched a drop of liquor since Ive known them, and, please God, they never will.
Oh, I guess it wouldnt hurt them, said Yates, with a lack of tact that was not habitual. He fell several degrees in the estimation of his hostess.
Hurt em? cried Mrs. Bartlett indignantly. I guess it wont get a chance to. She turned to the professor, who was a good listenerrespectful and deferential, with little to say for himself. She rocked gently to and fro as she talked.
Her husband sat unbendingly silent, in a sphinxlike attitude that gave no outward indication of his mental uneasiness. He was thinking gloomily that it would be just his luck to meet Mrs. Bartlett unexpectedly in the streets of Fort Erie on one of those rare occasions when he was enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season. He had the most pessimistic forebodings of what the future might have in store for him. Sometimes, when neighbors or customers treated him in the village, and he felt he had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent cigar instead of a drink. He did not particularly like the smoking of it, but there was a certain devil-may-care recklessness in going down the street with a lighted cigar in his teeth, which had all the more fascination for him because of its manifest danger. He felt at these times that he was going the pace, and that it is well our women do not know of all the wickedness there is in this world. He did not fear that any neighbor might tell his wife, for there were depths to which no person could convince Mrs. Bartlett he would descend. But he thought with horror of some combination of circumstances that might bring his wife to town unknown to him on a day when he indulged. He pictured, with a shudder, meeting her unexpectedly on the uncertain plank sidewalk of Fort Erie, he smoking a cigar. When this nightmare presented itself to him, he resolved never to touch a cigar again; but he well knew that the best resolutions fade away if a man is excited with two or three glasses of liquor.
When Mrs. Bartlett resumed conversation with the professor, Yates looked up at young Hiram and winked. The boy flushed with pleasure under the comprehensiveness of that wink. It included him in the attractive halo of crime that enveloped the fascinating personality of the man from New York. It seemed to say:
Thats all right, but we are men of the world. We know.