Natural Selection (Bunner)/Part 3
PART III.
DORINDA threw herself upon the task of preparing Celia for the fray with a zeal and ardor that brought only dismay to her younger sister's breast. It having been decided that the victim of society must have some new gowns, Dorinda at once planned a wardrobe of variegated brilliancy. Celia strove with all her tact for a more modest working, but she had to stand up and do battle-royal for her own standards when Dorinda wanted her to purchase a certain "Dame Trot" garment, of a pattern which was at the time exciting the irreverent attention of the press. They came to an open rupture. Celia finally appealed to the head of the house, who decided, with masculine justice, that she was entitled to choose her clothes for herself. Dorinda writhed; but came back to the fascinating employment more in sorrow than in anger.
When the little trunk was at last packed, Dorinda's verdict on the contents was that they were good enough, but had no sort of style about them. Celia, doubtful of their possessing any merits at all, took a negative comfort from this. Ah! if she could only gather an idea of Mrs. Wykoff's likes from Dorinda's dislikes!
The day came when Mrs. Wykoff's maid was to convey her charge to the further shore of Long Island. This relegation of Celia to a menial's care had somewhat troubled the family conclave; but it had been decided that, in view of the differences in social ethics revealed by past dealings with the Wykoff family, it would be fair to assume that the lady's intent was respectful, however much her course was open to the criticism of the right minded. The sun was shining on the mid-day dinner when the carriage was announced; Celia had finished a nervous attempt at a meal, and was ready for the ordeal. Five napkins fell to the ground, and amid a storm of caresses and tears, Celia was hustled to the door. Even Alonzo shook her hand with a stern cordiality which hinted that, under favorable circumstances, all might yet be forgiven. Her father kissed her brow and in a minute she was in the carriage—the Wykoff carriage—with Parker.
Parker was a Briton, and she stood by her colors. Long years before, when her firm but kindly rule over Mrs. Wykoff was just beginning, her employer made one single effort to treat her as an American.
"Your name is Jane, I believe?" she said: "I will call you Jane, I think, hereafter, instead of Parker."
Jane Parker dropped an old-world curtsey, and set her thin lips.
"Indeed, mum, I would not be that disrespectful to my betters; and I 'ope, mum, you will not insist." Mrs. Wykoff did not insist, and Parker remained Parker.
The carriage rolled away, and Celia leaned back in her corner and felt a delicious glow of yearning fright and mysterious hope. Opposite her sat Parker, bolt upright, an eminently respectable guide to the gates of Elysium. Beyond her, through the windows, Celia saw the silver W tossing on the rounded flanks of the Wykoff horses. At the railroad Station—or the corral called by that name—Stephen met them, Mrs. Wykoff's aged but efficient butler and general manager—the masculine equivalent of Parker. Here they were taken under the wing of that vigilance of which an accomplished servitor like Stephen makes a pride. Celia did nothing for herself, she was not even sure that she had used her own means of locomotion when she found herself seated in the best seat in the car, Parker close behind her, her light wrap and little satchel on the seat by her side, and a monthly magazine on her lap.
She had not thought of taking a book with her, and she did not even know that for this delicate attention she was indebted to Stephen's own inspiration. Later she learned of the conscientious care he had given to the selection. He felt it his duty to report his exercise of discretion to Mrs. Wykoff:
"Seeing her unprovided, ma'am," he explained, "I felt that I might go so far. I would not take the responsibility of choosing what a young lady should read, but I had see that particular paper here on your own table, ma'am, and I run through it on the news-stand to see that there was no nudity pictures nor anything that you could object to, ma'am."
Celia hardly glanced at her magazine. She was too full of a new and sweet content to care to read any other woman's love-story. She looked out of the window, and was interested in the landscape. Perhaps no one else ever cared to look at that dull, flat country, divided between swampiness and aridity; but Celia gazed at it with an indulgence that had in it a touch of proprietorship. Most of the time, however. it pleased her to lean back in her seat and sense the guardianship of her lover's emissaries. It was as though the ægis of her Prince of the Golden World was stretched out over her. She had discovered Stephen sitting unobtrusively at the furthest end of the car, watching her with a steady eye that took in all her surroundings, her every movement. She half lifted her hand toward the window—he was at her side in an instant., and had raised the sash. She drew back a little from the draft—Parker silently slipped her wrap over her shoulders. At one of the stations a tall, handsome young man entered and wandered down the aisle, looking for a seat. His eye fell on the empty place next to hers—then, as if lured by some strange magnetism, that youthful masculine eye was attracted to Stephen's, sitting weazened and bent in the far corner of the car; and the young man passed on his way. Celia felt sure that if he had hesitated in the least, he would have been snatched up and wafted into the most distant car on the train. Surely such service was sweet.
It was dusk when they arrived at the station nearest to the Wykoffs' place—a summery dusk, yet chill and damp. Randolph was waiting, with his mother's victoria. He did not kiss her; he only pressed her hand and murmured "Dearest!" in stately confidence. There were people all about them; it could not be otherwise, and Celia knew it: yet somehow she felt a little disappointed—a trifle chilled.
The carriage went swiftly over the sandy roads, while Randolph talked to his betrothed in low, deep tones—talked of such things only as Parker, sitting on the box, might hear. They passed under dim trees, and through pigmy forests of underbrush, the cool gloom growing deeper and deeper. Celia listened almost in silence. An indefinable loneliness and a joyous, fluttering expectancy struggled within her. She was trying to adjust her consciousness to a sudden change in her surroundings. She felt she was more than the length of the longest railroad from Chelsea Village and Popper Leete's mid-day dinner.
"We didn't expect to have anyone at the house except my cousins," she heard Randolph saying, as her mind tried to picture the life that already seemed to have slipped far behind her; "but I've got an old college chum of mine down here for a month or two—Jack Claggett. He's an artist, and he is doing some of the decorative work on the Co-operative Buildings. That is only one end of his cleverness. Claggett is going to be a great man some day. And then, just for to-night, we have old Jedby at dinner. He invited himself—he lives with his brother six or seven miles down the road—near Sag Harbor. He's a jolly old gossip, and used to be a friend of my father's. He's a sort of tame cat with us. But you'll see nobody else except my mother and the girls."
"The girls?" queried Celia.
"Yes, my cousins. And you've got to fall in love with them, you know. They're dear good girls. I've known them ever since they were little mites. We used to play together. Laura is uncommonly clever, and no end of fun. She's the eldest. Annette is the pretty one; but she isn't as bright as Laura. But mind, you must admire them both."
"I will if they will let me," said Celia, meekly.
"Let you!" exclaimed her lover; "they will worship you—see if they don't!" And then, catching sight of Parker's back, he became silent.
They swung through a gateway in a long stone wall, and the wheels crashed up a graveled drive. Red windows flashed out through the trees, a flood of warm light came from a broad open door, and presently Celia was standing on the veranda, receiving a motherly kiss from Mrs. Wykoff, and furtively examining two tall, pretty and very talkative girls who had a number of unimportant things to say with bird-like volubility.
"Parker will take you to your room, my dear," said Mrs. Wykoff; "and she will help you to change your dress, or you shall come to dinner just as you are, whichever pleases you. Are you tired? You are a little pale."
"I—I have a headache, I think," faltered Celia, truly enough, for the strong, sharp sea-air had struck hard on her nerves.
"You shall have your dinner in your own room," declared Mrs. Wykoff; but Celia would not consent. It was only the ghost of a headache, and it would go away of itself.
She found it very awkward to be helped by Parker, and when Parker opened her trunk and took out the contents she watched Parker's eye with uneasiness in her soul. She might as well have tried to read the eye of the sphinx.
"Which dress, mum?" inquired her assistant.
"The gray one, I think," said Celia, naming the garment on which she placed her main reliance, as being what women call "always nice." It was a dark gray silk, so made as to fall, to Celia's apprehension, just about at the vanishing point or horizon-line between the heaven of full dress and the lowly simplicity of work-a-day attire—a compromise gown, in fact. And truly, the modest square-cut corsage with pretty lace (the first real lace Celia had ever bought) at the neck was a proper garb as you shall see a pretty maid in.
But when Celia saw that gray dress come out of the trunk, the kindly current of her blood flew back to her heart's chill core. Down the front in an arabesque pattern, over the back in simulation of impossible festoons, nay, down the skirt in a mad cascade of color ran a ribbon of two shades of arsenical green, occasionally exhibiting a reverse side of pale yellow. Dorinda had done good by stealth, and had violated the sanctity of the trunk after it had been packed. Dorinda had always said that that dress lacked style.
"No, not that one," Celia said to the immovable Parker: "that is a—a mistake. There's a black silk dress there—I'll get it."
Celia blessed her mother's peculiar fancy, that was responsible for the existence of the black silk dress. "Mrs. Wykoff bein' in mournin'," Mrs. Leete had speculated, "she might like to see you in black of a Sunday. It looks more considerate."
Ten minutes after the appearance of the black silk, Celia had begun to live her dream: she sat at her lover's table; whatever this life might be for which she had yearned, she was in the midst of it. She had wished a wish, and the wish had come true, as in a fairy tale.
A dream she thought it, at first. She sank into her great leather chair with a pleasant sense of physical fatigue. She saw everything in the rosy dazzle of the crimson-shaded candles. She had a vague, diffused perception of luxurious comfort. The table spread before her, a glittering, snowy plain. She heard murmur of gentle voices all about her; even the soft laughter was musical to her cars.
It was only a moment of dreamy ecstasy. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips, and awoke herself to observe, to study, to learn. Eve ate of the fruit of knowledge, and the glories of uncomprehended Paradise began the slow process of resolving themselves in so much land and so much water, so many trees, so many shrubs, and so many spotted, speckled and striped birds and beasts and creeping things.
She sat at her hostess's right hand, and at the distant end of the table she saw Randolph, and saw him for the first time in all the grandeur of what he would have called his "war paint." She accepted him as a revelation, and wondered whether she had ever sufficiently revered him. When Alonzo got into evening dress, he always looked as though he might break in the middle if he were carelessly handled. Nothing of this painful effect was observable in Randolph. To her right was Mr. Jedby, an ancient beau, who had begun to wax his moustache in the Presidency of the late Louis Napoleon, but whose juvenility was otherwise carefully conserved, save in the matter of his collar, which was as high as the prevailing style required, yet, in pattern, warped somewhat by memories of an older fashion. Mr. Jedby was pouring into the ear of Miss Laura Curtis a monotonous stream of gossip, confined between walls of elegant diction. Mr. Jedby rounded his sentences as though each one was to be taken down for publication in the "Autobiography of a Diner-Out," or the "Literary and Anecdotic Remains of Mr. Richard Jedbv, edited, with a Preface, by ."
The Lisles, Celia learnt, were at Vevey; the Oakleys at Bonn. Where the De la Hunts were he should know by the next European mail. (Mr. Jedby kept up a correspondence—a sort of gossip exchange—with all the idle widows and busy old maids of his acquaintance.) Yes, the Carroll party was in the Riviera, and they were talking, at last accounts, of a trip through the South of Italy and the Mediterranean Isles; but Mr. Jedby did not believe the plan would be carried out. Mortimer Faxon was with them, and Jack Ludlow's widow, and Mr. Jedby did not believe she would let him get too far from a legation.
"Opportunity, my dear young lady," said Mr. Jedby, "opportunity is elusive, and should be seized with promptitude and alacrity."
It was all a foreign language to Celia. Do you remember your first day at school, when you sat waiting for your assignment of lessons, and listened to the elder classes reciting Greek verbs? Some day, you knew, you would do the same thing; but what a world of unintelligibility lay before you!
Mr. Jedby had done no more than acknowledge his introduction to Miss Leete in the drawing room, and he could not even pay attention to his dinner until he had made an end of his recital to Laura Curtis. Thus Celia was left to the ministrations of Mrs. Wykoff, who asked after each member of the Leete family in turn. Celia answered her almost mechanically, and quietly studied Mr. Claggett, opposite her.
She did not, perhaps, formulate the idea; but she felt that Mr. Claggett did not altogether harmonize with his surroundings. It was not only that he was tall, gaunt, and breezily Western in all his ways and manners; it was not only that he was a carelessly picturesque figure in a trim and decorous picture: in some way that she did not attempt to define he differed from the types about him. She was destined to receive more light upon the subject.
Claggett was, as Randolph Wykoff frequently had occasion to assert, a good fellow. He was also a promising young artist—in his friend's eye the most promising young artist of the day. Randolph had—like most young men of his serious and earnest temperament, a circle of youthful friends who were setting out to revolutionize everything in Art, Science, Literature, and Religion, and Claggett was the coming apostle of Art. But what Harvard College had done for Mr. Claggett and what Nature had done for him were two widely different things, and out of the conflict between Nature and Education came a side-issue unpleasant for Celia.
It happened that five or six wine-glasses by her plate and a number of courses presented to her in various styles and shapes somewhat puzzled this poor novice in the ways of the Golden World. She had been trying hard to recollect what she had learned at boarding-school of the technicalities of the social board; but unfamiliar problems arrived; and some exhibition of hesitation or indecision attracted Mr. Claggett's attention. Now it was not many years since Mr. Claggett had wondered what terrapin might be, and had boggled at croquettes and bouchées. This fact ought to have made him charitable, and given him a kindly sympathy for others in such sad condition; but the experience had, in truth, embittered the young man. Why is the "tenderfoot" ill-treated in the far West? Because the "old settler" was a new settler but yesterday. The lust of torturing awoke in Claggett's breast.
The little confabs of two or three that began a dinner had broken up. Conversation crossed and criss-crossed the table. Mr. Claggett addressed himself to Miss Leete, and began to ply her with questions in gastronomy, designed for her confusion. What were her views on the cooking of terrapin? Did she agree with a Baltimore friend of his who thought that canvas-back duck should be cooked fifty seconds to the pound?
Mrs. Wykoff, talking across the board to Mr. Jedby, noticed nothing. The Curtis girls did notice, and made one or two ineffectual diversions in Celia's behalf. Randolph had some notion that his friend was conversing in a strain foreign to the normal Claggett taste, and good-naturedly told him not to be absurd. But the baiting continued until Annette Curtis said under her breath—her face flushing hotly—"Mr, Claggett!"
Claggett, like most people who have gone too far, went a little farther.
"I was only trying to take a rise out of our young friend," he explained, aside.
He lowered his voice, as he spoke; but Celia heard him, and the Curtis girls knew that she had heard. Probably no one else at the table would have known the significance of that piece of slang. But slang is a part of the modern girl's education, and Randolph's cousins were none the worse for recognizing the phrase and catching the rude allusion. They became Celia Leete's champions on the instant.
Celia's eye flashed; but she said nothing. Mr. Claggett looked at Miss Annette Curtis's face, and was silent. The dinner was ended in peace and calm.
The good old fashion prevailed in the Wykoff household, and the gentlemen had their hour of tobacco and chartreuse. In the drawing-room Annette sang a song or two, and when the men appeared, she and Randolph set themselves to sorting out piles of sheet-music. Claggett, anxious to reëstablish himself, began a little monologue on farm-life in Wisconsin. He was a sharp observer of externals; and he told his tale with some cleverness, and he was really getting on very well when it occurred to him to inquire of Celia, with the best intentions in the world, but with an unfortunate inflection:
"Were you ever in the West, Miss Leete?"
"No," said Celia, "we have too much of the West here, as it is."
There was silence in that place for the space of a minute after this speech was uttered. An expression of puzzled surprise on Mr. Claggett's features slowly lost itself in a broad smile; but there was no smile on any other face. Annette Curtis, at the piano, let her hands wander over the keys, struck a chord or two, and said:
"Ah! that's it. Don't you want to try that anthem over with me, Laura?—la la la la—la la!"
Late that night Mrs. Wykoff tapped at Celia's door. Celia was sitting up, ripping the party-colored ribbon from her gray dress, and removing other superfluities, in conformity with suggestions gathered from her observation during the evening. She went guiltily to the door, and opened it half way.
"I saw the light in your room," said Mrs. Wvkoff, "and I was afraid you might be ill?"
"Oh, no! " said Celia, very red and nervous, "I'm feeling much better—I think I'll go to bed now."
"I hope," Mrs. Wykoff continued, her brows contracted in an anxious way, "I hope you didn't mind—that Mr. Claggett did not say anything—anything that might"
"Oh, no," Celia interrupted.
"He is peculiar. He is not exactly—Randolph is very fond of him, and he is a young man of many excellent qualities; but his sense of humor sometimes runs away with him, I'm afraid."
"I didn't mind him the least little bit," said Celia.
•••••
The next day there was tennis in the morning, at which Celia looked on; then a drive to the beach in the afternoon, and again Celia sat with Mrs. Wykoff and saw a quartette of athletes making merry. Randolph and Claggett and the two girls all swam until Celia shivered in wasted sympathy.
At twilight, she took a little walk with Annette Curtis, and their walk brought them through a neighboring country-place, a spacious old house, almost the mate of the Wykoff homestead.
"That is our place," said Annette: "or, at hast, it used to be, before Papa—had troubles. We used to live here when Randolph was a little boy. I don't remember much about it, because I was the baby, you know; but Laura and Randolph played together all the time. The neighbors used to call them 'the twins.' They're almost of an age—Randolph's just one week older. One day they went out in a boat together, and the boat struck a rock and sunk, and Randolph couldn't swim then, and Laura swam ashore with him. That's reversing the usual story, isn't it? And do you know? he was so angry with her for being able to swim, when he couldn't, that he wouldn't speak to her for ever so long?"
Thus began a summer of country life. One day was like another. Randolph was as affectionate in private, as delicately attentive in the presence of others as his sense of the proprieties of the situation permitted him to be. Celia's status was anomalous, yet she was not uncomfortable. Although her engagement to Randolph was never hinted at, she knew that all in the house were in the secret, and that their discretion was to be trusted. There were few visitors; Mr. Jedby made rare appearances, and if Mr. Jedby knew why she was under the Wykoff roof, he gave no sign.
Claggett alone enlivened the calm monotony of Celia's days. He followed up his declaration of war with a series of attacks, in which he generally got fully the equivalent of what he gave. This warfare was carried on without the knowledge of Mrs. Wykoff. Both the combatants feared her disapprobation. Randolph, from his infinite height, saw something of it, and it annoyed him: But, in so far as it touched his own interests, he dismissed it with the reflection in which young men who are betrothed sometimes indulge themselves, that he would have to make some alterations in the character of his affianced, after the wedding. The Curtis girls saw and heard, and talked much between themselves.
And Randolph himself could not long remain in his position of uninterested superiority. There came an occasion when he was forced to see and act.
The young people were off for a day's sail, with an incidental crabbing expedition, in Randolph's cat-boat; and toward the end of the homeward trip, Celia was out of temper.
She had come down to the boat in the morning attired in what she had purchased for a "sailor costume." There was much white braid about it, and a stiff little white collar, that later was limp. Then she had found the Curtis girls in old blue flannel gowns, with water-stained silk handkerchiefs knotted loosely at their throats. Randolph had looked at her dress—put on for the first time—with as near an approach to frank surprise as he was capable of. Then she had been sea-sick, in a feeble, doubtful way, through all the outward sail. Then the crabbing came, to crush her with astonishment and disappointment. How could anyone like such a disgusting employment? She sat in the dirty flat-bottomed boat they had hired of the neighboring fisherman; she was rowed about the glaring waters of a little cove; she gazed with abhorrence upon the squirming, uncanny crabs, the grinning fish-heads, the livid strings of soaked raw meat, and she marveled how they could laugh and chatter and enjoy it all. She was glad Dorinda could not see her at the moment. "They" she thought—her "They" was the Wykoffs, this time; not her own family—"may be awfully swell, and we mayn't be—but I know none of us would think this was nice."
It was on the sail home that Celia exhibited the cumulative effect of these annoyances. A bushel-basket full of crabs had been spilt in the cockpit, and Claggett was restoring the scuttling wretches to their prison. Celia lay on the seat, trying not to be sea-sick. A fold of the white-braided dress hung down to the deck.
"Do keep those nasty things away from my skirt, Mr. Claggett!" she said, with asperity.
"Do not be too harsh with the crabs, Miss Leete," responded Claggett, unperturbed; "they are simple, humble, semi-marine creatures, and they have never seen a dress like that before. They merely wish to admire its gorgeousness. Give them a chance to make some approach to taste and fashion."
"Well," Celia returned, "they do seem to be getting away from you as hard as they can."
Randolph, who was at the tiller, heard this. A moment later he was called forward to the halliards, and he did not know that Celia, cheered up by her own triumph of witticism, forgot her qualms, and engaged merrily in a prolonged contest of wit with the young man from the West.
Randolph waited until he and Claggett were left to put the boat to rights for the night; and then he unburdened his mind.
"Look here, Jack," he said, kindly but firmly; "I wish you wouldn't talk to Miss Leete in the way you were talking down in the cockpit. It's all very well, you know, between fellows, and at college, and all that sort of thing—but I think it's out of place with ladies."
"Has Miss Leete said anything to you about it?" Claggett inquired, looking up quickly from his work.
"She has not."
"I thought not. You take things too seriously, old man. She likes it, and so would you, if you had any sense of humor. It's all pure fun and nonsense, and she's quite well able to take care of herself."
"I do not wish," said Randolph, coldly, "that Miss Leete should be obliged to take care of herself. I am the best judge in such matters; and I suppose that you understand the situation."
"No," said Claggett, standing up straight, and looking his friend in the eye: "I do not understand the situation."
"I am—" Randolph hesitated—"Miss Leete and I are engaged."
Unfortunately for Randolph, he could never rid himself of the idea that there was a special sanctity attaching to his private and personal affairs. When he was obliged to make even the most indirect mention of them, he assumed the tone which the boy at college tries to assume when you speak to him of his "secret society." It is the tone of stern, self-conscious dignity which some people take on in speaking of the unspeakable things of life. I knew one man, once upon a time, who used this tone whenever he had occasion to talk of a cold in the head. The members of his family seemed to be peculiarly afflicted with this ailment; and, somehow. I got the idea that they were not "proper" people. Perhaps Mr. Claggett had similar associations with that peculiar tone, for he smiled in a way that greatly irritated Mr. Wykoff. And then he dealt a blow which left his friend paralyzed and dumb with inexpressible indignation.
"Well," Mr. Claggett said, "I don't know of any man more peculiarly fitted to make her unhappy."
He shouldered the sweeps, and walked off to the boathouse. Wykoff stood still for a minute, nearly, and his soul boiled within him. He wanted to do to Claggett many things which he could not do, under the social conditions of our age. Perhaps he came near to attempting some of them. But he checked himself. Instead, he walked for half an hour on the sands, and thought it all over. It may be that he communed with the spirit of his father, for a glimmering of John Wykoff's good sense visited his excited brain. He resolved to wreak no vengeance on the irreverent Claggett, but to establish for him a suitable "place" in the social scale; to put him there, and to keep him there. He carried out his programme to the letter. He put Claggett in his "place" at once, and he kept him there. There was only one limitation to his satisfaction. Claggett never seemed to know what had happened to him.
•••••
Celia had accommodated herself to her surroundings—how thoroughly she did not know until a little thing set her to thinking.
Old habit led her to rise early, when only the servants were stirring. The mail of the previous night was brought in from the distant post-office early in the morning, and was spread out on a table in the hall. It was a week after her arrival that Celia came down and found a letter from Dorinda awaiting her—a letter in an envelope of pink, bordered with pale blue, stamped with a huge initial L, and scented. She snatched it up with an involuntary movement of concealment; checked herself, and then walked out into the clear sunshine with a guilty and troubled heart. Was she ashamed of her own people? Or was it only that she was rightly ashamed of her people's ways? Where was she drifting—where had she drifted? Had she turned her back on the little frame house in Chelsea Village? What lay before her here in the house of strangers?
•••••
Poor little Eve! she had to look around Paradise, and ask herself how she liked it. And she had to confess to herself that only as a mystery was it wholly delightful.
Personalities were not the staple of conversation in the Wykoff household; yet personalities there must be, and these were still Greek to Celia. And even in the employments of every day she found herself set apart from all the others. She tried to play tennis, and gave it up, after a little while. Her muscles were flaccid; her heart rebelled at the least strain; flushing and palpitating, she went to sit with Mrs. Wykoff, an uninterested spectator. It was the same at the afternoon swim—she could not overcome her dread of the pounding surf. She tried to walk with the Curtis girls, and three miles in an hour sent her to bed sore and tired. Indeed, she reflected, she had not come there to bat tennis-balls, to swim, to tramp over sandy roads. These things had no charm for her. Perhaps the pleasantest time of all the day was when she leaned back in Mrs. Wykoff's victoria and rolled gently through the streets of the village, when the summer boarders sat on the verandas and stared hard at the plump horses and the carriage.
In August the Curtis girls went to join their mother in the Catskills. Laura went to Celia's room to bid her good-bye. She put her arms around Celia's neck. "Be good to him, my dear," she said.
•••••
It was dull after they went. Mrs. Wykoff seemed to be anxious and apprehensive. Randolph was grave. Claggett was moody and cynical. Celia showed depression of spirits in her dull silence.
"I wonder if Claggett annoys her in any way," Randolph said to his mother, who only shook her head.
He saw her grow more listless day by day; but he loyally waited for the appointed hour. When it came, he sought her out, and found her in a far corner of the old-fashioned garden.
"Celia," he said, "it is time to announce our engagement."
An hour later he walked into his mother's room, very pale; but collected, as became a Harvard man.
"It is all over, mother," he said; "and I am going away on Saturday. I think I shall go to California. I think I can do something there. I have an idea of providing proper homes for the farm-laborers."
He was John Wykoffs son, and there was no arguing with him. Mrs. Wykoff listened to all he would tell her, and then went to find Celia. Celia was in her room, packing up her clothes in hysterical haste. Mrs. Wykoff took her in her arms.
"I can't help it!" Celia sobbed; "I feel mean and wicked, but I can't do anything else. I did love him, and I do think he's the best man in the world—he's just as good and noble as he can be—but I couldn't be happy this way, Mrs. Wykoff! I don't like it—I couldn't get along at all. I've made a mistake—I've made a mistake right from the first; but I won't make any more mistakes, and I won't make his life miserable because I've spoiled my own. Oh, don't be so good to me, Mrs. Wykoff—I don't deserve it—I'm a wretched girl! Just let me go home—that's where I belong!"
Mrs. Wykoff was as gentle as only a wise, kindly, worldly woman can be. She soothed poor Celia, and made her understand that, for the sake of appearances, at least, she must outstay the broken-hearted philanthropist bound for California. Celia stayed. Randolph made his preparations and went, hopelessly gloomy, but punctiliously courteous and considerate to the last.
After a quick fortnight, Celia knocked at Mrs. Wykoff's room to say good-bye. She tried, with a full heart, to give some measure of thanks for the kindness that was the one real thing to her in the world she was quitting. When she had made her timorous attempt, she blushed and trembled, and grew more timorous yet.
"There's something—something you ought to know," she said, huskily; "I—I—I know it seems queer—but—but I couldn't help it. While Randolph—while Mr. Wykoff—while he was here, you know, I wouldn't listen to it; I wouldn't let him—I mean—I wouldn't have let anybody say anything to me, although we both—" Celia's voice was all but inaudible—"understood—how we felt. But now, it's different, you know; and—and—Mrs. Wykoff, I'm not a wicked girl, but—I'm going to marry Mr. Claggett!"