The Mystery of Metropolisville. Eggleston Edward

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СКАЧАТЬ with as much vigor as a religionist holds to his creed.

      Miss Minorkey was just a little irritating to one so enthusiastic. She neither believed nor disbelieved anything in particular. She liked to talk about everything in a cool and objective fashion; and Charlton was provoked to find that, with all her intellectual interest in things, she had no sort of personal interest in anything. If she had been a disinterested spectator, dropped down from another sphere, she could not have discussed the affairs of this planet with more complete impartiality, not to say indifference. Theories, doctrines, faiths, and even moral duties, she treated as Charlton did beetles; ran pins through them and held them up where she could get a good view of them—put them away as curiosities. She listened with an attention that was surely flattering enough, but Charlton felt that he had not made much impression on her. There was a sort of attraction in this repulsion. There was an excitement in his ambition to impress this impartial and judicial mind with the truth and importance of the glorious and regenerating views he had embraced. His self-esteem was pleased at the thought that he should yet conquer this cool and open-minded girl by the force of his own intelligence. He admired her intellectual self-possession all the more that it was a quality which he lacked. Before that afternoon ride was over, he was convinced that he sat by the supreme woman of all he had ever known. And who was so fit to marry the supreme woman as he, Albert Charlton, who was to do so much by advocating all sorts of reforms to help the world forward to its goal?

      He liked that word goal. A man's pet words are the key to his character. A man who talks of "vocation," of "goal," and all that, may be laughed at while he is in the period of intellectual fermentation. The time is sure to come, however, when such a man can excite other emotions than mirth.

      And so Charlton, full of thoughts of his "vocation" and the world's "goal," was slipping into an attachment for a woman to whom both words were Choctaw. Do you wonder at it? If she had had a vocation also, and had talked about goals, they would mutually have repelled each other, like two bodies charged with the same kind of electricity. People with vocations can hardly fall in love with other people with vocations.

      But now Metropolisville was coming in sight, and Albert's attention was attracted by the conversation of Mr. Minorkey and the fat gentleman.

      "Mr. Plausaby has selected an admirable site," Charlton heard the fat gentleman remark, and as Mr. Plausaby was his own step-father, he began to listen. "Pretty sharp! pretty sharp!" continued the fat gentleman. "I tell you what, Mr. Minorkey, that man Plausaby sees through a millstone with a hole in it. I mean to buy some lots in this place. It'll be the county-seat and a railroad junction, as sure as you're alive. And Plausaby has saved some of his best lots for me."

      "Yes, it's a nice town, or will be. I hold a mortgage on the best eighty—the one this way—at three per cent and five after maturity, with a waiver. I liked to have died here one night last summer. I was taken just after supper with a violent—"

      "What a beauty of a girl that is," broke in the fat gentleman, "little

       Katy Charlton, Plausaby's step-daughter!" And instantly Mr. Albert

       Charlton thrust his head out of the coach and shouted "Hello, Katy!" to a

       girl of fifteen, who ran to intercept the coach at the hotel steps.

      "Hurrah, Katy!" said the young man, as she kissed him impulsively as soon as he had alighted.

      "P'int out your baggage, mister," said Jim, interrupting Katy's raptures with a tone that befitted a Superior Being.

      In a few moments the coach, having deposited Charlton and the fat gentleman, was starting away for its destination at Perritaut, eight miles farther on, when Charlton, remembering again his companion on the front seat, lifted his hat and bowed, and Miss Minorkey was kind enough to return the bow. Albert tried to analyze her bow as he lay awake in bed that night. Miss Minorkey doubtless slept soundly. She always did.

CHAPTER IV.

       Table of Contents

      ALBERT AND KATY.

      All that day in which Albert Charlton had been riding from Red Owl Landing to Metropolisville, sweet Little Katy Charlton had been expecting him. Everybody called her sweet, and I suppose there was no word in the dictionary that so perfectly described her. She was not well-read, like Miss Minorkey; she was not even very smart at her lessons: but she was sweet. Sweetness is a quality that covers a multitude of defects. Katy's heart had love in it for everybody. She loved her mother; she loved Squire Plausaby, her step-father; she loved cousin Isa, as she called her step-father's niece; she loved—well, no matter, she would have told you that she loved nobody more than Brother Albert.

      And now that Brother Albert was coming to the new home in the new land he had never seen before, Katy's heart was in her eyes. She would show him so many things he had never seen, explain how the pocket-gophers built their mounds, show him the nestful of flying-squirrels—had he ever seen flying-squirrels? And she would show him Diamond Lake, and the speckled pickerel among the water-plants. And she would point out the people, and entertain Albert with telling him their names and the curious gossip about them. It was so fine to know something that even Albert, with all his learning, did not know. And she would introduce Albert to him. Would Albert like him? Of course he would. They were both such dear men.

      And as the hours wore on, Katy grew more and more excited and nervous. She talked about Albert to her mother till she wearied that worthy woman, to whom the arrival of any one was an excuse for dressing if possible in worse taste than usual, or at least for tying an extra ribbon in her hair, and the extra ribbon was sure to be of a hue entirely discordant with the mutually discordant ones that preceded it. Tired of talking to her mother, she readily found an excuse to buy something—ribbons, or candles, or hair-pins, or dried apples—something kept in the very miscellaneous stock of the "Emporium," and she knew who would wait upon her, and who would kindly prolong the small transaction by every artifice in his power, and thus give her time to tell him about her Brother Albert. He would be so glad to hear about Albert. He was always glad to hear her tell about anybody or anything.

      And when the talk over the counter at the Emporium could not be farther prolonged, she had even stopped on her way home at Mrs. Ferret's, and told her about Albert, though she did not much like to talk to her—she looked so penetratingly at her out of her round, near-sighted eyes, which seemed always keeping a watch on the tip of her nose. And Mrs. Ferret, with her jerky voice, and a smile that was meant to be an expression of mingled cheerfulness and intelligence, but which expressed neither, said: "Is your brother a Christian?"

      And Katy said he was a dear, dear fellow, but she didn't know as he was a church-member.

      "Does he hold scriptural views? You know so many people in colleges are not evangelical."

      Mrs. Ferret had a provoking way of pronouncing certain words unctuously—she said "Chrishchen" "shcripcherral," and even in the word evangelical she made the first e very hard and long.

      And when little Katy could not tell whether Albert held "shcripcherral" views or not, and was thoroughly tired of being quizzed as to whether she "really thought Albert had a personal interest in religion," she made an excuse to run away into the chamber of Mrs. Morrow, Mrs. Ferret's mother, who was an invalid—Mrs. Ferret said "inva_leed_," for the sake of emphasis. The old lady never asked impertinent questions, never talked about "shcripcherral" or "ee-vangelical" views, but nevertheless breathed an atmosphere of scriptural patience and evangelical fortitude and Christian victory over the world's tribulations. СКАЧАТЬ