Mrs. Farrell. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ looked after the two women with eyes that clung charmed to the figure of Mrs. Farrell, as she drifted down the sloping meadow-path.

      “Magnificent!” said the dark man, carelessly. “‘A daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair!’”

      A flush came over the cheek of the other, but he said nothing, while he absently advanced to the rock beside which the women had been sitting, as if that superb shape had drawn him thus far after her. A little book lay there, which he touched with his foot before he saw it. As he stooped to pick it up, Mrs. Farrell stopped fleetly, as a deer stops, and, wheeling round, went rapidly back toward the two men. When Mrs. Farrell advanced upon you, you had a sense of lustrous brown eyes growing and brightening out of space, and then you knew of the airy looseness of the overhanging hair and of the perfection of the face, and last of the sweeping, undulant grace of the divine figure. So she came onward now, fixing her unfrightened, steadfast eyes upon the young man, out of whose face went everything but worship. He took off his hat, and bent forward with a bow, offering the pretty volume, at which he had hardly glanced.

      “Thanks,” she breathed, and for an instant she relaxed the severe impersonality of her regard, and flooded him with a look. He stood helpless, while she turned and swiftly rejoined her companion, and so he remained standing till she and Rachel had passed through the meadow bars and out of sight.

      Then the dark man moved and said, solemnly, “Don’t laugh, Easton; you wouldn’t like to be seen through, yourself.”

      “Laugh, Gilbert?” retorted Easton, with a start. “What do you mean? What is there to laugh at?” he demanded.

      “Nothing. It was superbly done. It was a stroke of genius in its way.”

      “I don’t understand you,” cried Easton.

      “Why, you don’t suppose she left it here on purpose, and meant one of us to pick it up, so that she could come back and get it from him, and see just what manner of men we were; and—”

      “No! I don’t suppose that.”

      “Neither do I,” said Gilbert, nonchalantly. “I never saw anything more unconscious. Come, let’s be going; there’s nothing to call her back, now.”

      He put his hand under the fish basket, and weighed it mechanically, while he used the mass of his uncoupled rod staffwise, and moved away. Easton followed with a bewildered air, at which Gilbert, when he happened to glance round at him, broke into a laugh.

Chapter III

       Table of Contents

      IN the evening Gilbert walked over to Woodward farm from the hotel where he and Easton had stopped that morning, and called on his sister-in-law. He had brought word from her husband in Boston, whom he had gone out of his course to see on his journey up from New York. When she found out that he had been in West Pekin all day, he owned that he had spent the time fishing. “I didn’t suppose you’d be in any hurry to hear of Bob’s detention; and really, you know, I came for the fishing.”

      “You needn’t be so explicit, William,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “I’m not vain.”

      “I was merely apologizing.”

      “Were you? What luck did you have?”

      “The brooks are fished to death. I’ve had bad enough luck to satisfy even Easton, who had a conscience against fishing, among other things.”

      “Easton! Your Easton? Is Wayne Easton with you?” demanded Mrs. Gilbert, with impetuous interest. “You don’t mean it!”

      “No, but I say it,” answered Gilbert, unperturbed.

      “What in the world brought him?” pursued his sister-in-law more guardedly, as if made aware by some lurking pain that an impetuous interest was not for invalids.

      “The ideal of friendship. I happened to say that I was feeling a little out of sorts and was coming up here, and he jumped at the chance to disarrange himself by coming with me. He was illustrating his great principle that New York is the best place to spend the summer, and it cost him something of a struggle to give it up, but he conquered.”

      “Is he really so queer?”

      “He or we. I won’t make so bold as to say which.”

      “Has he still got that remarkable protégé of his on his hands?”

      “No; Rogers has given Easton his freedom. He’s gone on to a farm, with all Easton’s board and lodging, Latin and French, in him. His modest aspiration is finally to manage a market garden.”

      “What a wicked waste of beneficence!”

      “Easton looks at it differently. He says that no one else would ever have given Rogers an education, and that the learning wasn’t more thrown away on him than on many, perhaps most, people who are sent to college; learning has to be thrown away somehow. Besides, he economized by sharing his room with Rogers, you know.”

      “No, I didn’t know that. Don’t you think that was rather more than Providence required of Mr. Easton?”

      “I can’t say, Mrs. Gilbert.”

      “But to take such a hopeless case—so hopelessly common!”

      “There are some odd instances of the kind on record. The Christian religion was originally sent to rather a common lot.”

      “Yes, but Latin wasn’t, and French wasn’t, and first-class board wasn’t. You needn’t try to gammon me with that sort of thing, William. I won’t stand it.”

      “Well, I wouldn’t, myself. But I thought perhaps a lady might. Why did you put me on the defensive? I didn’t try to form Rogers, or reform him.”

      “No, but you countenanced your Mr. Easton in it. He ought to have married and supported a wife, instead of risking his money on such a wild venture; it’s no better than gambling.”

      “That’s your old hobby, Susan. A man can’t always be marrying and supporting a wife. And as for countenancing Easton, if he thought a thing was right, it’s very little of my cheek he would want to uphold him.”

      “Oh, I dare say. That’s his insufferable conceit; conscientious people are always so conceited! They’re always so sure that they know just what is right and wrong. Ugh! I can’t endure ’em.”

      “I don’t think Easton’s conscientiousness is of that aggravating type, exactly,” said Gilbert, with a lazy laugh.

      “He has got a good many principles, ready cut and dried, but I should say life in general was something of a puzzler to him. He’s one of the wrecks of the war. Easton was peculiarly fitted to go on fighting forever in a sacred cause; he’s a born crusader; and this piping time of peace takes him at a disadvantage. He hates rest, and ease, and all the other nice things; what he wants is some good, disagreeable, lasting form of self-sacrifice: I believe it’s a real grief to him that he didn’t lose a leg; a couple of amputations СКАЧАТЬ