“Not much, because I am not of importance. They think women the equals of men; but they are a great deal more pleased when a man joins than when a woman does.”
Ransom complimented Doctor Prance on the lucidity of her mind, and then he said: “Is Miss Birdseye really sick? Is her condition very precarious?”
“Well, she is very old, and very—very gentle,” Doctor Prance answered, hesitating a moment for her adjective. “Under those circumstances a person may flicker out.”
“We must trim the lamp,” said Ransom; “I will take my turn, with pleasure, in watching the sacred flame.”
“It will be a pity if she doesn’t live to hear Miss Tarrant’s great effort,” his companion went on.
“Miss Tarrant’s? What’s that?”
“Well, it’s the principal interest, in there.” And Doctor Prance now vaguely indicated, with a movement of her head, a small white house, much detached from its neighbours, which stood on their left, with its back to the water, at a little distance from the road. It exhibited more signs of animation than any of its fellows; several windows, notably those of the ground floor, were open to the warm evening, and a large shaft of light was projected upon the grassy wayside in front of it. Ransom, in his determination to be discreet, checked the advance of his companion, who added presently, with a short, suppressed laugh—“You can see it is, from that!” He listened, to ascertain what she meant, and after an instant a sound came to his ear—a sound he knew already well, which carried the accents of Verena Tarrant, in ample periods and cadences, out into the stillness of the August night.
“Murder, what a lovely voice!” he exclaimed, involuntarily.
Doctor Prance’s eye gleamed towards him a moment, and she observed, humourously (she was relaxing immensely), “Perhaps Miss Birdseye is right!” Then, as he made no rejoinder, only listening to the vocal inflections that floated out of the house, she went on—“She’s practising her speech.”
“Her speech? Is she going to deliver one here?”
“No, as soon as they go back to town—at the Music Hall.”
Ransom’s attention was now transferred to his companion. “Is that why you call it her great effort?”
“Well, so they think it, I believe. She practises that way every night; she reads portions of it aloud to Miss Chancellor and Miss Birdseye.”
“And that’s the time you choose for your walk?” Ransom said, smiling.
“Well, it’s the time my old lady has least need of me; she’s too absorbed.”
Doctor Prance dealt in facts; Ransom had already discovered that; and some of her facts were very interesting.
“The Music Hall—isn’t that your great building?” he asked.
“Well, it’s the biggest we’ve got; it’s pretty big, but it isn’t so big as Miss Chancellor’s ideas,” added Doctor Prance. “She has taken it to bring out Miss Tarrant before the general public—she has never appeared that way in Boston—on a great scale. She expects her to make a big sensation. It will be a great night, and they are preparing for it. They consider it her real beginning.”
“And this is the preparation?” Basil Ransom said.
“Yes; as I say, it’s their principal interest.”
Ransom listened, and while he listened he meditated. He had thought it possible Verena’s principles might have been shaken by the profession of faith to which he treated her in New York; but this hardly looked like it. For some moments Doctor Prance and he stood together in silence.
“You don’t hear the words,” the doctor remarked, with a smile which, in the dark, looked Mephistophelean.
“Oh, I know the words!” the young man exclaimed, with rather a groan, as he offered her his hand for goodnight.
XXXVI
A certain prudence had determined him to put off his visit till the morning; he thought it more probable that at that time he should be able to see Verena alone, whereas in the evening the two young women would be sure to be sitting together. When the morrow dawned, however, Basil Ransom felt none of the trepidation of the procrastinator; he knew nothing of the reception that awaited him, but he took his way to the cottage designated to him overnight by Doctor Prance, with the step of a man much more conscious of his own purpose than of possible obstacles. He made the reflection, as he went, that to see a place for the first time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation. At the present hour—it was getting towards eleven o’clock-he felt that he was dealing with the original. The little straggling, loosely-clustered town lay along the edge of a blue inlet, on the other side of which was a low, wooded shore, with a gleam of white sand where it touched the water. The narrow bay carried the vision outward to a picture that seemed at once bright and dim—a shining, slumbering summer-sea, and a far-off, circling line of coast, which, under the August sun, was hazy and delicate. Ransom regarded the place as a town because Doctor Prance had called it one; but it was a town where you smelt the breath of the hay in the streets and you might gather blackberries in the principal square. The houses looked at each other across the grass—low, rusty, crooked, distended houses, with dry, cracked faces and the dim eyes of small-paned, stiffly-sliding windows. Their little door-yards bristled with rank, old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow; and on the quarter that stood back from the sea the fields sloped upward, and the woods in which they presently lost themselves looked down over the roofs. Bolts and bars were not a part of the domestic machinery of Marmion, and the responsive menial, receiving the visitor on the threshold, was a creature rather desired than definitely possessed; so that Basil Ransom found Miss Chancellor’s house-door gaping wide (as he had seen it the night before), and destitute even of a knocker or a bell-handle. From where he stood in the porch he could see the whole of the little sitting-room on the left of the hall—see that it stretched straight through to the back windows ; that it was garnished with photographs of foreign works of art, pinned upon the walls, and enriched with a piano and other little extemporised embellishments, such as ingenious women lavish upon the houses they hire for a few weeks. Verena told him afterwards that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand they had all George Eliot’s writings,1 and two photographs of the Sistine Madonna.bs Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he observed that his cousin Olive had as many German books as ever lying about. He dipped into this literature, momentarily, according to his wont, and then remembered that this was not what he had come for and that as he waited at the door he had seen, through another door, opening at the opposite end of the hall, signs of a small verandah attached to the other face of the house. Thinking the ladies might be assembled there in the shade, he pushed aside the muslin curtain of the back window, and saw that the advantages of Miss Chancellor’s summer-residence were in this quarter. There was a verandah, in fact, to which a wide, horizontal trellis, covered with an ancient vine, formed a kind of extension. Beyond the trellis was a small, lonely garden; beyond the garden was a large, vague, woody space, where a few piles of old timber were disposed, and which he afterwards learned to be a relic of the shipbuilding era described to him by Doctor Prance; and still beyond this again was the charming lake-like estuary he had already admired. His eyes did not rest upon the distance; they were attracted by a figure seated under the trellis, where the chequers of sun, in the interstices of the vine-leaves, fell upon a bright-coloured rug spread out on the ground. The floor of the roughly-constructed verandah was so low that there was virtually no difference in the level. It took Ransom only a moment to recognise Miss Birdseye, though her back was turned to the house. She was alone; she sat there motionless (she had a newspaper in her lap, but her attitude was not that of a reader), looking at the shimmering bay. She might be asleep; that was why Ransom moderated the process of his long legs as he came round t
hrough the house to join her. This precaution represented his only scruple. He stepped across the verandah and stood close to her, but she did not appear to notice him. Visibly, she was dozing, or presumably, rather for her head was enveloped in an old faded straw-hat, which concealed the upper part of her face. There were two or three other chairs near her, and a table on which were half a dozen books and periodicals, together with a glass containing a colourless liquid, on the top of which a spoon was laid. Ransom desired only to respect her repose, so he sat down in one of the chairs and waited till she should become aware of his presence. He thought Miss Chancellor’s back-garden a delightful spot, and his jaded senses tasted the breeze—the idle, wandering summer-wind—that stirred the vine-leaves over his head. The hazy shores on the other side of the water which had tints more delicate than the street-vistas of New York (they seemed powdered with silver, a sort of midsummer light), suggested to him a land of dreams, a country in a picture. Basil Ransom had seen very few pictures, there were none in Mississippi; but he had a vision at times of something that would be more refined than the real world, and the situation in which he now found himself pleased him almost as much as if it had been a striking work of art. He was unable to see, as I have said, whether Miss Birdseye were taking in the prospect through open or only, imagination aiding (she had plenty of that), through closed, tired, dazzled eyes. She appeared to him, as the minutes elapsed and he sat beside her, the incarnation of well-earned rest, of patient, submissive superannuation. At the end of her long day’s work she might have been placed there to enjoy this dim prevision of the peaceful river, the gleaming shores, of the paradise her unselfish life had certainly qualified her to enter, and which, apparently, would so soon be opened to her. After a while she said, placidly, without turning:
“I suppose it’s about time I should take my remedy again. It does seem as if she had found the right thing; don’t you think so?”
“Do you mean the contents of that tumbler? I shall be delighted to give it to you, and you must tell me how much you take.” And Basil Ransom, getting up, possessed himself of the glass on the table.
At the sound of his voice Miss Birdseye pushed back her straw-hat by a movement that was familiar to her, and twisting about her muffled figure a little (even in August she felt the cold, and had to be much covered up to sit out), directed at him a speculative, unastonished gaze.
“One spoonful—two?” Ransom asked, stirring the dose and smiling.
“Well, I guess I’ll take two this time.”
“Certainly, Doctor Prance couldn’t help finding the right thing,” Ransom said, as he administered the medicine; while the movement with which she extended her face to take it made her seem doubly childlike.
He put down the glass, and she relapsed into her position; she seemed to be considering. “It’s homœopathic,” she remarked, in a moment.
“Oh, I have no doubt of that; I presume you wouldn’t take anything else.”
“Well, it’s generally admitted now to be the true system.”
Ransom moved closer to her, placed himself where she could see him better. “It’s a great thing to have the true system,” he said, bending towards her in a friendly way; “I’m sure you have it in everything.” He was not often hypocritical; but when he was he went all lengths.
“Well, I don’t know that any one has a right to say that. I thought you were Verena,” she added in a moment, taking him in again with her mild, deliberate vision.
“I have been waiting for you to recognise me; of course you didn’t know I was here—I only arrived last night.”
“Well, I’m glad you have come to see Olive now.”
“You remember that I wouldn’t do that when I met you last?”
“You asked me not to mention to her that I had met you; that’s what I principally recall.”
“And don’t you remember what I told you I wanted to do? I wanted to go out to Cambridge and see Miss Tarrant. Thanks to the information that you were so good as to give me, I was able to do so.”
“Yes, she gave me quite a little description of your visit,” said Miss Birdseye, with a smile and a vague sound in her throat—a sort of pensive, private reference to the idea of laughter—of which Ransom never learned the exact significance, though he retained for a long time afterwards a kindly memory of the old lady’s manner at the moment.
“I don’t know how much she enjoyed it, but it was an immense pleasure to me; so great a one that, as you see, I have come to call upon her again.”
“Then, I presume, she has shaken you?”
“She has shaken me tremendously!” said Ransom, laughing.
“Well, you’ll be a great addition,” Miss Birdseye returned. “And this time your visit is also for Miss Chancellor?”
“That depends on whether she will receive me.”
“Well, if she knows you are shaken, that will go a great way,” said Miss Birdseye, a little musingly, as if even to her unsophisticated mind it had been manifested that one’s relations with Miss Chancellor might be ticklish. “But she can’t receive you now—can she?—because she’s out. She has gone to the post-office for the Boston letters, and they get so many every day that she had to take Verena with her to help her carry them home. One of them wanted to stay with me, because Doctor Prance has gone fishing, but I said I presumed I could be left alone for about seven minutes. I know how they love to be together; it seems as if one couldn’t go out without the other. That’s what they came down here for, because it’s quiet, and it didn’t look as if there was any one else they would be much drawn to. So it would be a pity for me to come down after them just to spoil it!”
“I am afraid I shall spoil it, Miss Birdseye.”
“Oh, well, a gentleman,” murmured the ancient woman.
“Yes, what can you expect of a gentleman? I certainly shall spoil it if I can.”
“You had better go fishing with Doctor Prance,” said Miss Birdseye, with a serenity which showed that she was far from measuring the sinister quality of the announcement he had just made.
“I shan’t object to that at all. The days here must be very long— very full of hours. Have you got the doctor with you?” Ransom inquired, as if he knew nothing at all about her.
“Yes, Miss Chancellor invited us both; she is very thoughtful. She is not merely a theoretic philanthropist—she goes into details,” said Miss Birdseye, presenting her large person, in her chair, as if she herself were only an item. “It seems as if we were not so much wanted in Boston, just in August.”
“And here you sit and enjoy the breeze, and admire the view,” the young man remarked, wondering when the two messengers, whose seven minutes must long since have expired, would return from the post-office.
“Yes, I enjoy everything in this little old-world place; I didn’t suppose I should be satisfied to be so passive. It’s a great contrast to my former exertions. But somehow it doesn’t seem as if there were any trouble or any wrong round here; and if there should be, there are Miss Chancellor and Miss Tarrant to look after it. They seem to think I had better fold my hands. Besides, when helpful, generous minds begin to flock in from your part of the country,” Miss Birdseye continued, looking at him from under the distorted and discoloured canopy of her hat with a benignity which completed the idea in any cheerful sense he chose.
He felt by this time that he was committed to rather a dishonest part; he was pledged not to give a shock to her optimism. This might cost him, in the coming days, a good deal of dissimulation, but he was now saved from any further expenditure of ingenuity by certain warning sounds which admonished him that he must keep his wits about him for a purpose more urgent. There were voices in the hall of the house, voices he knew, which came nearer, quickly; so that before he had time to rise one of the speakers had come out with the exclamation—“Dear Miss Birdseye, here are seven letters for you!” The words fell to the ground, indeed, before they were fairly spoken, and when Ransom got up, turning, he saw Olive Chance
llor standing there, with the parcel from the post-office in her hand. She stared at him in sudden horror ; for the moment her self-possession completely deserted her. There was so little of any greeting in her face save the greeting of dismay, that he felt there was nothing for him to say to her, nothing that could mitigate the odious fact of his being there. He could only let her take it in, let her divine that, this time, he was not to be got rid of. In an instant—to ease off the situation—he held out his hand for Miss Birdseye’s letters, and it was a proof of Olive’s having turned rather faint and weak that she gave them up to him. He delivered the packet to the old lady, and now Verena had appeared in the doorway of the house. As soon as she saw him, she blushed crimson; but she did not, like Olive, stand voiceless.
“Why, Mr. Ransom,” she cried out, “where in the world were you washed ashore?” Miss Birdseye, meanwhile, taking her letters, had no appearance of observing that the encounter between Olive and her visitor was a kind of concussion.
It was Verena who eased off the situation; her gay challenge rose to her lips as promptly as if she had had no cause for embarrassment. She was not confused even when she blushed, and her alertness may perhaps be explained by the habit of public speaking. Ransom smiled at her while she came forward, but he spoke first to Olive, who had already turned her eyes away from him and gazed at the blue sea-view as if she were wondering what was going to happen to her at last.
“Of course you are very much surprised to see me; but I hope to be able to induce you to regard me not absolutely in the light of an intruder. I found your door open, and I walked in, and Miss Birdseye seemed to think I might stay. Miss Birdseye, I put myself under your protection; I invoke you; I appeal to you,” the young man went on. “Adopt me, answer for me, cover me with the mantle of your charity!”
Miss Birdseye looked up from her letters, as if at first she had only faintly heard his appeal. She turned her eyes from Olive to Verena; then she said, “Doesn’t it seem as if we had room for all? When I remember what I have seen in the South, Mr. Ransom’s being here strikes me as a great triumph.”