The Rising Tide. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

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СКАЧАТЬ what with pasteurized milk, and all the other improvements upon Nature, her children would be supermen; "they'll say they were evolved from us," he reflected, sipping his tea, and listening to his hostess's outpourings about her daughter, "as we say we were evolved from monkeys."

      Not that Mrs. Payton—telling him, with endless illustrations, just how "impossible" her Freddy was—looked in the least like a monkey; she was a large, fair, dull lady, of fifty-seven or thereabouts, who never took any exercise, and credited the condition of her liver to Providence; but she was nearly as far removed from Miss Frederica Payton as she was from those arboreal ancestors, the very mention of whom would have shocked her religious principles, for Mrs. Payton was very truly and humbly religious.

      "And church—Freddy never goes to church," she complained. "She plays tennis all Sunday morning. Rather different from our day, isn't it, Bessie? We children were never allowed even to read secular books on Sunday. Well, I think it was better than the laxity of the present. We always wore our best dresses to church, and—"

      "May I have some more tea, Mrs. Payton?" her auditor murmured, and, the tide of reminiscence thus skilfully dammed, Freddy's offense was finally revealed to him. "Well," he said—"yes, cream please; a great deal! I hope it's pasteurized?—they were stupid to lose the car. Fred told me all about it yesterday; it appears she was talking to some poor woman about the size of her family"—the two ladies exchanged horrified glances;—"of course, Maitland ought to have broken in on eugenics and hustled her off. But an accident isn't one of the seven deadly sins, and—"

      "Oh," Fred's mother interrupted, "of course there was nothing wrong."

      Mr. Weston looked at her admiringly; she really conceived it necessary to say such a thing! Those denied ancestors of hers could hardly have been more direct. It occurred to him, reaching for another lump of sugar, that Frederica came by her talent for free speech honestly. "With her mother, it is free thought. Fred goes one better, that's all," he reflected, dreamily. Once or twice, while the complaints flowed steadily on, he roused himself from his amused abstraction to murmur sympathetic disapproval: "Of course she ought not to say things like that—"

      "She is impossible!" Mrs. Payton sighed. "Why, she said 'Damn,' right out, before the Rev. Mr. Tait!"

      "Did she damn Tait? I know him, and really—"

      "Well, no; I think it was the weather. But that is nothing to the way she talks about old people."

      "About me, perhaps?"

      "Oh no; really, no! About you?" Mrs. Payton stammered; "why—how could she say anything about you?"

      Arthur Weston's eyes twinkled. ("I'll make her tell me what it was," he promised himself.)

      "As for age," Mrs. Childs corroborated, "she seems to have no respect for it. She spoke quite rudely to her uncle William about Shakespeare and Bacon. She said the subject 'bored' her."

      Mr. Weston shook his head, speechless.

      "And she said," Mrs. Childs went on, her usual detachment sharpening for a moment into personal displeasure, "she said the antis had no brains; and she knows I'm an anti!"

      "Oh, my dear," Fred's mother condoled, "I'm an anti, and she says shocking things to me; once she said the antis were—I really can't say just what she said before Mr. Weston; but she implied they were—merely mothers. And as for her language! I was saying how perfectly shocked my dear old friend, Miss Maria Spencer, was over this Inn escapade; Miss Maria said that if it were known that Freddy had spent the night at the Inn with Mr. Maitland her reputation would be gone."

      Mr. Weston's lips drew up for a whistle, but he frowned.

      "I told Freddy, and what do you suppose she said? Really, I hesitate to repeat it."

      "But dear Ellen," Mrs. Childs broke in, "it was horrid in Miss Spencer to say such a thing! I don't wonder Freddy was provoked."

      "She brought it on herself," Mrs. Payton retorted. "Have another sandwich, Bessie? What she said is almost too shocking to quote. She said of my dear old friend—Miss Spencer used to be my school-teacher, Mr. Weston—'What difference does it make what she said about me? Everybody knows Miss Spencer is a silly old ass.' 'A silly old ass.' What do you think of that?" Mrs. Payton's voice trembled so with indignation that she did not hear Mr. Weston's gasp of laughter. But as she paused, wounded and ashamed, he was quick to console her:

      "It was abominably disrespectful!"

      "There is no such thing as reverence left in the world," said Mrs. Childs; "my William says he doesn't know what we are coming to."

      "Youth is very cruel," Mr. Weston said.

      Mrs. Payton's eyes filled. "Freddy is cruel," she said, simply. The wounded look in her worn face was pitiful. They both tried to comfort her; they denounced Freddy, and wondered at her, and agreed with Mr. Childs that "nobody knew what we were coming to." In fact, they said every possible thing except the one thing which, with entire accuracy, they might have said, namely, that Miss Spencer was a silly old ass.

      "When I was a young lady," Mrs. Payton said, "respect for my elders would have made such words impossible."

      "Even if you didn't respect them, you would have been respectful?" Mr. Weston suggested.

      "We reverenced age because it was age," she agreed.

      "Yes; in those happy days respect was not dependent upon desert," he said, ruefully. (Mrs. Childs looked at him uneasily; just what did he mean by that?) "It must have been very comfortable," he ruminated, "to be respected when you didn't deserve to be! This new state of things I don't like at all; I find that they size me up as I am, these youngsters, not as what they ought to think I am. One of my nephews told me the other day that I didn't know what I was talking about."

      "Oh, my dear Mr. Weston, how shocking!" Mrs. Payton sympathized.

      "Well, as it happened, I didn't," he said, mildly; "but how outrageous for the cub to recognize the fact."

      "Perfectly outrageous!" said his hostess. "But it's just as Bessie says, they don't know the meaning of the word 'respect.' You should hear Freddy talk about her grandmother. The other day when I told her that my dear mother said that if women had the ballot, chivalry would die out and men wouldn't take off their hats in elevators when ladies were present—she said, 'Grandmother belongs to the generation of women who were satisfied to have men retain their vices, if they removed their hats.' What do you think of that! I'm sure I don't know what Freddy's father would have said if he had heard his daughter say such a thing about his mother-in-law."

      Mr. Weston, having known the late Andy Payton, thought it unwise to quote the probable comment of the deceased. Instead, he tried to change the subject: "Howard Maitland is a nice chap; I wonder if—" he paused; there was a scuffle on the other side of the closed door, a bellowing laugh, then a whine. Mrs. Childs bit her lip and shivered. Mr. Weston's face was inscrutable. "I wonder," he continued, raising his voice—"if Fred will smile on Maitland? By the way, I hear he is going in for conchology seriously."

      "Mortimore is nervous this afternoon," Mrs. Payton said, hurriedly; "that horrid puppy worried him. Conchology means shells, doesn't it? Freddy says he has a great collection of shells. I was thinking of sending him that old conch-shell I used to use to keep the parlor door open. Do you remember, Bessie? Yes, Mr. Maitland is attentive, but I don't know how serious it is. Of course, I'm the last person to know! Rather different from СКАЧАТЬ