Peter was up and dressed when Miss Felicia arrived, despite the early hour. Indeed that gay cavalier was the first to help the dear lady off with her travelling cloak and bonnet, Mrs. McGuffey folding her veil, smoothing out her gloves and laying them all upon the bed in the adjoining room—the one she kept in prime order for Miss Grayson's use.
The old fellow was facing the coffee-urn when he told her Jack's story and what he himself had said in reply, and how fine the boy was in his beliefs, and how well-nigh impossible it was for him to help him, considering his environment.
The dear lady had listened with her eyes fixed on Peter. It was but another of his benevolent finds; it had been the son of an old music teacher the winter before, and a boy struggling through college last spring;—always somebody who wanted to get ahead in one direction or another, no matter how impracticable his ambitions might be. This young man, however, seemed different; certain remarks had a true ring. Perhaps, after all, her foolish old brother—foolish when his heart misled him—might have found somebody at last who would pay for the time he spent upon him. The name, too, had a familiar sound. She was quite sure the aunt must be the same rather over-dressed persistent young widow who had flitted in and out of Washington society the last year of her own stay in the capital. She had finally married a rich New York man of the same name. So she had heard.
The tea to which Jack and Corinne were invited was the result of this conversation. Trust Miss Felicia for doing the right thing and in the right way, whatever her underlying purpose might be; and then again she must look this new protege over.
Peter at once joined in the project. Nothing pleased him so much as a function of any kind in which his dear sister was the centre of attraction, and this was always the case. Was not Mrs. McGuffey put to it, at these same teas, to know what to do with the hats and coats, and the long and short cloaks and overshoes, and lots of other things beside—umbrellas and the like—whenever Miss Felicia came to town? And did not the good woman have many of the cards of the former function hidden in her bureau drawer to show her curious friends just how grand a lady Miss Felicia was? General Waterbury, U.S.A., commanding the Department of the East, with headquarters at Governors Island, was one of them. And so were Colonel Edgerton, Judge Lambert and Mrs. Lambert; and His Excellency the French Ambassador, whom she had known as an attache and who was passing through the city and had been overjoyed to leave a card; as well as Sir Anthony Broadstairs, who expected to spend a week with her in her quaint home in Geneseo, but who had made it convenient to pay his respects in Fifteenth Street instead: to say nothing of the Coleridges, Thomases, Bordeauxs and Worthingtons, besides any number of people from Washington Square, with plenty more from Murray Hill and beyond.
Peter in his enthusiasm had made a mental picture of a repetition of all this and had already voiced it in the suggestion of these and various other prominent names, when Miss Felicia stopped him with:
“No, Peter—No. It's not to be a museum of fossils, but a garden full of rosebuds; nobody with a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age”—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—“is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, and who doesn't know a soul, and nobody over twenty-five is to be admitted. So if you and the Major want to come to Ruth's tea—Ruth's, remember; not yours or the Major's, or mine—you will either have to pass the cake or take the gentlemen's hats. Do you hear?”
We heard, and we heard her laugh as she spoke, raising her gold lorgnon to her eyes and gazing at us with that half-quizzical look which so often comes over her face.
She was older than Peter—must have been: I never knew exactly. It would not have been wise to ask her, and nobody else knew but Peter, and he never told. And yet there was no mark of real old age upon her. She and Peter were alike in this. Her hair, worn Pompadour, was gray—an honest black-and-white gray; her eyes were bright as needle points; the skin slightly wrinkled, but fresh and rosy—a spare, straight, well-groomed old lady of—perhaps sixty—perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress, or undress, for her shoulders were still full and well rounded. “The most beautiful neck and throat, sir, in all Washington in her day,” old General Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority. “You should have seen her in her prime, sir. What the devil the men were thinking of I don't know, but they let her go back to Geneseo, and there she has lived ever since. Why, sir, at a ball at the German Embassy she made such a sensation that—” but then the General always tells such stories of most of the women he knows.
There was but little left of that kind of beauty. She had kept her figure, it is true—a graceful, easy moving figure, with the waist of a girl; well-proportioned arms and small, dainty hands. She had kept, too, her charm of manner and keen sense of humor—she wouldn't have been Peter's sister otherwise—as well as her interest in her friend's affairs, especially the love affairs of all the young people about her.
Her knowledge of men and women had broadened. She read them more easily now than when she was a girl—had suffered, perhaps, by trusting them too much. This had sharpened the tip end of her tongue to so fine a point that when it became active—and once in a while it did—it could rip a sham reputation up the back as easily as a keen blade loosens the seams of a bodice.
Peter fell in at once with her plan for a “Rosebud Tea,” in spite of her raillery and the threatened possibility of our exclusion, promising not only to assist her with the invitations, but to be more than careful at the Bank in avoiding serious mistakes in his balances—so as to be on hand promptly at four. Moreover, if Jack had a sweetheart—and there was no question of it, or ought not to be—and Corinne had another, what would be better than bringing them all down together, so that Miss Felicia could look them over, and Miss Ruth and the Major could get better acquainted, especially Jack and Miss Felicia; and more especially Jack and himself.
Miss Felicia's proposal having therefore been duly carried out, with a number of others not thought of when the tea was first discussed—including some pots of geraniums in the window, red, of course, to match the color of Peter's room—and the freshening up of certain swiss curtains which so offended Miss Felicia's ever-watchful eyes that she burst out with: “It is positively disgraceful, Peter, to see how careless you are getting—” At which Mrs. McGuffey blushed to the roots of her hair, and washed them herself that very night before she closed her eyes. The great day having arrived, I say the tea-table was set with Peter's best, including “the dearest of silver teapots” that Miss Felicia had given him for special occasions; the table covered with a damask cloth and all made ready for the arrival of her guests. This done, the lady returned to her own room, from which she emerged an hour later in a soft gray silk relieved by a film of old lace at her throat, blending into the tones of her gray hair brushed straight up from her forehead and worn high over a cushion, the whole topped by a tiny jewel which caught the light like a drop of dew.
And a veritable grand dame she looked, and was, as she took her seat and awaited the arrival of her guests—in bearing, in the way she moved her head; in the way she opened her fan—in the selection of the fan itself, for that matter. You felt it in the color and length of her gloves; the size of her pearl ear rings (not too large, and yet not too small), in the choice of the few rings that encircled her slender and now somewhat shrunken fingers (one hoop of gold had a history that the old French Ambassador could have told if he wanted to, so Peter once hinted to me)—everything she did in fact betrayed a wide acquaintance with the great world and its requirements and exactions.
Other women of her age might of their choice drop into charities, or cats, or nephews and nieces, railing against the present and living only in the past; holding on like grim death to everything that made it respectable, so that they looked for all the world like so many old daguerreotypes pulled from the frames. Not so Miss Felicia Grayson of Geneseo, New York. Her past was a flexible, india-rubber kind of a past that she stretched out after her. She might still wear her hair as she did when the old General raved over her, although the frost of many winters had touched it; but she would never hold on to the sleeves of those days or the skirts or the mantles: Out or in they must go, be puffed, cut bias, or made plain, just as the fashion of the day insisted. Oh! a most level-headed, common-sense, old aristocrat was Dame Felicia!
With the arrival of the first carriage old Isaac Cohen moved his seat from the back to the front of his shop, so he could see everybody who got out and went in, as well as everybody who walked past and gazed up at the shabby old house and its shabbier steps and railings. Not that the shabby surroundings ever made any difference whether the guests were “carriage company” or not, to quote good Mrs. McGuffey. Peter would not be Peter if he lived anywhere else, and Miss Felicia wouldn't be half so quaint and charming if she had received her guests behind a marble or brownstone front with an awning stretched to the curbstone and a red velvet carpet laid across the sidewalk, the whole patrolled by a bluecoat and two hired men.
The little tailor had watched many such functions before. So had the neighbors, who were craning their heads from the windows. They all knew by the carriages when Miss Felicia came to town and when she left, and by the same token for that matter. The only difference between this reception and former receptions, or teas, or whatever the great people upstairs called them, was in the ages of the guests; not any gray whiskers and white heads under high silk hats, this time; nor any demure or pompous, or gentle, or, perhaps, faded old ladies puffing up Peter's stairs—and they did puff before they reached his door, where they handed their wraps to Mrs. McGuffey in her brave white cap and braver white apron. Only bright eyes and rosy faces today framed in tiny bon nets, and well-groomed young fellows in white scarfs and black coats.
But if anybody had thought of the shabby surroundings they forgot all about it when they mounted the third flight of stairs and looked in the door. Not only was Peter's bedroom full of outer garments, and Miss Felicia's, too, for that matter—but the banisters looked like a clothes-shop undergoing a spring cleaning, so thickly were the coats slung over its hand rail. So, too, were the hall, and the hall chairs, and the gas bracket, and even the hooks where Peter hung his clothes to be brushed in the morning—every conceivable place, in fact, wherever an outer wrap of any kind could be suspended, poked, or laid flat. That Mrs. McGuffey was at her wits' end—only a short walk—was evident from the way she grabbed my hat and coat and disappeared through a door which led to her own apartments, returning a moment later out of breath and, I fancied, a little out of temper.
And that was nothing to the way in which the owners of all these several habiliments were wedged inside. First came the dome of Peter's bald head surmounting his merry face, then the top of Miss Felicia's pompadour, with its tiny diamond spark bobbing about as she laughed and moved her head in saluting her guests and then mobs and mobs of young people packed tight, looking for all the world like a matinee crowd leaving a theatre (that is when you crane your neck to see over their heads), except that the guests were without their wraps and were talking sixteen to the dozen, and as merry as they could be.
“They are all here, Major,” Peter cried, dragging me inside. It was wonderful how young and happy he looked. “Miss Corinne, and that loud Hullaballoo, Garry Minott, we saw prancing around at the supper—you remember—Holker gave him the ring.”
“And Miss MacFarlane?” I asked.
“Ruth! Turn your head, my boy, and take a look at her. Isn't she a picture? Did you ever see a prettier girl in all your life, and one more charmingly dressed? Ruth, this is the Major... nothing else... just the Major. He is perfectly docile, kind and safe, and—”
“—And drives equally well in single or double harness, I suppose,” laughed the girl, extending her hand and giving me the slightest dip of her head and bend of her back in recognition, no doubt, of my advancing years and dignified bearing—in apology, too, perhaps, for her metaphor.
“In SINGLE—not double,” rejoined Peter. “He's the sourest, crabbedest old bachelor in the world—except myself.”
Again her laugh bubbled out—a catching, spontaneous kind of laugh, as if there were plenty more packed away behind her lips ready to break loose whenever they found an opening.
“Then, Major, you shall have two lumps to sweeten you up,” and down went the sugar-tongs into the silver bowl.
Here young Breen leaned forward and lifted the bowl nearer to her hand, while I waited for my cup. He had not left her side since Miss Felicia had presented him, so Peter told me afterward. I had evidently interrupted a conversation, for his eyes were still fastened upon hers, drinking in her every word and movement.
“And is sugar your cure for disagreeable people, Miss MacFarlane?” I heard him ask under his breath as I stood sipping my tea.
“That depends on how disagreeable they are,” she answered. This came with a look from beneath her eyelids.
“I must be all right, then, for you only gave me one lump—” still under his breath.
“Only one! I made a mistake—” Eyes looking straight into Jack's, with a merry twinkle gathering around their corners.
“Perhaps I don't need any at all.”
“Yes, I'm sure you do. Here—hold your cup, sir; I'll fill it full.”
“No, I'm going to wait and see what effect one lump has. I'm beginning to get pleasant already—and I was cross as two sticks when I—”
And then she insisted he should have at least three more to make him at all bearable, and he said there would be no living with him he would be so charming and agreeable, and so the talk ran on, the battledoor and shuttlecock kind of talk—the same prattle that we have all listened to dozens of times, or should have listened to, to have kept our hearts young. And yet not a talk at all; a play, rather, in which words count for little and the action is everything: Listening to the toss of a curl or the lowering of an eyelid; answering with a lift of the hand—such a strong brown hand, that could pull an oar, perhaps, or help her over dangerous places! Then her white teeth, and the way the head bent; and then his ears and how close they lay to his head; and the short, glossy hair with the faintest bit of a curl in it. And then the sudden awakening: Oh, yes—it was the sugar Mr. Breen wanted, of course. What was I thinking of?
And so the game went on, neither of them caring where the ball went so that it could be hit again when it came their way.
When it was about to stay its flight I ventured in with the remark that she must not forget to give my kindest and best to her good father. I think she had forgotten I was standing so near.
“And you know daddy!” she cried—the real girl was shining in her eyes now—all the coquetry had vanished from her face.
“Yes—we worked together on the piers of the big bridge over the Delaware; oh, long ago.”
“Isn't he the very dearest? He promised to come here today, but I know he won't. Poor daddy, he gets home so tired sometimes. He has just started on the big tunnel and there is so much to do. I have been helping him with his papers every night. But when Aunt Felicia's note came—she isn't my real aunt, you know, but I have called her so ever since I was a little girl—daddy insisted on my coming, and so I have left him for just a few days. He will be so glad when I tell him I have met one of his old friends.” There was no question of her beauty, or poise, or her naturalness.
“Been a lady all her life, my dear Major, and her mother before her,” Miss Felicia said when I joined her afterward, and Miss Felicia knew. “She is not like any of the young girls about, as you can see for yourself. Look at her now,” she whispered, with an approving nod of her head.
Again my eyes sought the girl. The figure was willowy and graceful; the shoulders sloping, the arms tapering to the wrists. The hair was jet black—“Some Spanish blood somewhere,” I suggested, but the dear lady answered sharply, “Not a drop; French Huguenot, my dear Major, and I am surprised you should have made such a mistake.” This black hair parted in the middle, lay close to her head—such a wealth and torrent of it; even with tucking it behind her ears and gathering it in a coil in her neck it seemed just ready to fall. The face was oval, the nose perfect, the mouth never still for an instant, so full was it of curves and twinkles and little quivers; the eyes big, absorbing, restful, with lazy lids that lifted slowly and lay motionless as the wings of a resting butterfly, the eyebrows full and exquisitely arched. Had you met her in mantilla and high-heeled shoes, her fan half shading her face, you would have declared, despite Miss Felicia's protest, that only the click of the castanets was needed to send her whirling to their rhythm. Had she tied that same mantilla close under her lovely chin, and passed you with upturned eyes and trembling lips, you would have sworn that the Madonna from the neighboring church had strayed from its frame in search of the helpless and the unhappy; and had none of these disguises been hers, and she had flashed by you in the open some bright morning mounted on her own black mare, face aglow, eyes like stars, her wonderful hair waving in the wind, you would have stood stock-still in admiration, fear gripping your throat, a prayer in your heart for the safe home-coming of one so fearless and so beautiful.
There was, too, about her a certain gentleness, a certain disposition to be kind, even when her inherent coquetry—natural in the Southern girl—led her into deep waters; a certain tenderness that made friends of even unhappy suitors (and I heard that she could not count them on her fingers) who had asked for more than she could give—a tenderness which healed the wound and made lovers of them all for life.
And then her Southern speech, indescribable and impossible in cold type. The softening of the consonants, the slipping away of the terminals, the slurring of vowels, and all in that low, musical voice born out side of the roar and crash of city streets and crowded drawing-rooms with each tongue fighting for mastery.
All this Jack had taken in, besides a thousand other charms visible only to the young enthusiast, before he had been two minutes in her presence. As to her voice, he knew she was one of his own people when she had finished pronouncing his name. Somebody worthwhile had crossed his path at last!
And with this there had followed, even as he talked to her, the usual comparisons made by all young fellows when the girl they don't like is placed side by side with the girl they do. Miss MacFarlane was tall and Corinne was short; Miss MacFarlane was dark, and he adored dark, handsome people—and Corinne was light; Miss MacFarlane's voice was low and soft, her movements slow and graceful, her speech gentle—as if she were afraid she might hurt someone inadvertently; her hair and dress were simple to severity. While Corinne—well, in every one of these details Corinne represented the exact opposite. It was the blood! Yes, that was it—it was her blood! Who was she, and where did she come from? Would Corinne like her? What impression would this high bred Southern beauty make upon the pert Miss Wren, whose little nose had gone down a point or two when her mother had discovered, much to her joy, the week before, that it was the REAL Miss Grayson and not an imitation Miss Grayson who had been good enough to invite her daughter and any of her daughter's friends to tea; and it had fallen another point when she learned that Miss Felicia had left her card the next day, expressing to the potato-bug how sorry she was to hear that the ladies were out, but that she hoped it would only be a matter of a few days before “she would welcome them” to her own apartments, or words to that effect, Frederick's memory being slightly defective.
It was in answer to this request that Mrs. Breen, after consulting her husband, had written three acceptances before she was willing that Frederick should leave it with his own hands in Fifteenth Street—one beginning, “It certainly is a pleasure after all these years”—which was discarded as being too familiar; another, “So good of you, dear Miss Grayson,” which had a similar fate; and the third, which ran, “My daughter will be most happy, dear Miss Grayson, to be with you,” etc., which was finally sealed with the Breen crest—a four-legged beastie of some kind on its hind legs, with a motto explanatory of the promptness of his ancestors in times of danger. Even then Corinne had hesitated about accepting until Garry said: “Well, let's take it in, anyhow—we can skip out if they bore us stiff.”
Knowing these things, therefore, and fearing that after all something would happen to mar the pleasant relations he had established with Peter, and with the honor of his uncle's family in his keeping, so to speak, Jack had awaited the arrival of Corinne and Garry with considerable trepidation. What if, after all, they should stay away, ignoring the great courtesy which this most charming of old ladies—never had he seen one so lovable or distinguished—had extended to them; and she a stranger, too, and all because her brother Peter had asked her to be kind to a boy like himself.
The entrance of Corinne and Garry, therefore, into the crowded room half an hour after his own had brought a relief to Jack's mind (he had been watching the door, so as to be ready to present them), which Miss Felicia's gracious salutation only intensified.
“I remember your dear mother perfectly,” he heard the old lady say as she advanced to Corinne and took both her hands. “And she was quite lovely. And this I am very sure is Mr. Breen's friend, Mr. Minott, who has carried off all the honors. I am delighted to see you both. Peter, do you take these dear young people and present them to Ruth.”
The two had thereupon squeezed through to Ruth's side; Peter in his formal introduction awarding to Garry all the honors to which he was entitled, and then Ruth, remembering her duties, said how glad she was to know them; and would they have lemon or sugar?—and Corinne, with a comprehensive glance of her rival, declined both, her excuse being that she was nearly dead now with the heat and that a cup of tea would finish her. Jack had winced when his ears caught the flippant answer, but it was nothing to the way in which he shrivelled up when Garry, after shaking Miss MacFarlane's hand as if it had been a pump-handle instead of a thing so dainty that no boy had a right to touch it except with reverence in his heart, had burst out with: “Glad to see you. From the South, I hear—” as if she was a kangaroo or a Fiji Islander. He had seen Miss MacFarlane give a little start at Garry's familiar way of speaking, and had noticed how Ruth shrank behind the urn as if she were afraid he would touch her again, although she had laughed quite good-naturedly as she answered:
“Not very far South; only from Maryland,” and had then turned to Jack and continued her talk with the air of one not wishing to be further interrupted.
The Scribe does not dare to relate what would have become of one so sensitive as our hero could he have heard the discussion going on later between the two young people when they were backed into one of Peter's bookcases and stood surveying the room. “Miss MacFarlane isn't at all my kind of a girl,” Corinne had declared to Garry. “Really, I can't see why the men rave over her. Pretty?—yes, sort of so-so; but no style, and SUCH clothes! Fancy wearing a pink lawn and a sash tied around her waist like a girl at a college commencement—and as to her hair—why no one has ever THOUGHT of dressing her hair that way for AGES and AGES.”
Her mind thus relieved, my Lady Wren had made a survey of the rooms, wondering what they wanted with so many funny old portraits, and whether the old gentleman or his sister read the dusty books, Garry remarking that there were a lot of “swells” among the young fellows, many of whom he had heard of but had never met before. This done, the two wedged their way out, without ever troubling Peter or Miss Felicia with their good-bys, Garry telling Corinne that the old lady wouldn't know they were gone, and Corinne adding under her breath that it didn't make any difference to her if she did.
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