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A Modern Instance

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"No?" Bartley looked at her in a certain way. "She shall come to mine,
then. There will be two picnics. The more the merrier."

Marcia gasped, as if she felt the clutch in which her husband had her
tightening on her heart. She said that she could only carry her point
against him at the cost of disgraceful division before the Hallecks, for
which he would not care in the least. She moved her head a little from side
to side, like one that breathes a stifling air. "Oh, let her come," she
said quietly, at last.

"Now you're talking business," said Bartley. "I haven't forgotten the
little snub Mrs. Macallister gave me, and you'll see me pay her off."

Marcia made no answer, but went downstairs to put what face she could upon
the matter to Olive, whom she had left alone in the parlor, while she ran
up with Bartley immediately upon his arrival to demand an explanation of
him. In her wrathful haste she had forgotten to kiss him, and she now
remembered that he had not looked at the baby, which she had all the time
had in her arms.

The picnic was to be in a pretty glen three or four miles north of the
village, where there was shade on a bit of level green, and a spring
bubbling out of a fern-hung bluff: from which you looked down the glen over
a stretch of the river. Marcia had planned that they were to drive thither
in a four-seated carryall, but the addition of Bartley's guests disarranged
this.

"There's only one way," said Mrs. Macallister, who had driven up with her
husband from the hotel to the Squire's house in a buggy. "Mr. Halleck tells
me he doesn't know how to drive, and my husband doesn't know the way. Mr.
Hubbard must get in here with me, and you must take Mr. Macallister in your
party." She looked authoritatively at the others.

"First rate!" cried Bartley, climbing to the seat which Mr. Macallister
left vacant. "We'll lead the way."

Those who followed had difficulty in keeping their buggy in sight.
Sometimes Bartley stopped long enough for them to come up, and then, after
a word or two of gay banter, was off again.

They had taken possession of the picnic grounds, and Mrs. Macallister was
disposing shawls for rugs and drapery, while Bartley, who had got the horse
out, and tethered where he could graze, was pushing the buggy out of the
way by the shafts, when the carryall came up.

"Don't we look quite domestic?" she asked of the arriving company, in her
neat English tone, and her rising English inflection. "You know I like
this," she added, singling Halleck out for her remark, and making it as if
it were brilliant. "I like being out of doors, don't you know. But there's
one thing I don't like: we weren't able to get a drop of champagne at that
ridiculous hotel. They told us they were not allowed to keep 'intoxicating
liquors.' Now I call that jolly stupid, you know. I don't know whatever we
shall do if you haven't brought something."

"I believe this is a famous spring," said Halleck.

"How droll you are! Spring, indeed!" cried Mrs. Macallister. "Is _that_ the
way you let your brother make game of people, Miss Halleck?" She directed a
good deal of her rattle at Olive; she scarcely spoke to Marcia, but she was
nevertheless furtively observant of her. Mr. Macallister had his rattle
too, which, after trying it unsatisfactorily upon Marcia, he plied almost
exclusively for Olive. He made puns; he asked conundrums; he had all the
accomplishments which keep people going in a lively, mirthful, colonial
society; and he had the idea that he must pay attentions and promote
repartee. His wife and he played into each other's hands in their _jeux
d'esprit_; and kept Olive's inquiring Boston mind at work in the vain
endeavor to account for and to place them socially. Bartley hung about Mrs.
Macallister, and was nearly as obedient as her husband. He felt that the
Hallecks disapproved his behavior, and that made him enjoy it; he was
almost rudely negligent of Olive.

The composition of the party left Marcia and Halleck necessarily to each
other, and she accepted this arrangement in a sort of passive seriousness;
but Halleck saw that her thoughts wandered from her talk with him, and that
her eyes were always turning with painful anxiety to Bartley. After their
lunch, which left them with the whole afternoon before them, Marcia said,
in a timid effort to resume her best leadership of the affair, "Bartley,
don't you think they would like to see the view from the Devil's Backbone?"

"Would you like to see the view from the Devil's Backbone?" he asked in
turn of Mrs. Macallister.

"And _what_ is the Devil's Backbone?" she inquired.

"It's a ridge of rocks on the bluff above here," said Bartley, nodding his
head vaguely towards the bank.

"And _how_ do you get to it?" asked Mrs. Macallister, pointing her pretty
chin at him in lifting her head to look.

"Walk."

"Thanks, then; I shall try to be satisfied with me own backbone," said Mrs.
Macallister, who had that freedom in alluding to her anatomy which marks
the superior civilization of Great Britain and its colonial dependencies.

"Carry you," suggested Bartley.

"I dare say you'd be very sure-footed; but I'd quite enough of donkeys in
the hills at home."

Bartley roared with the resolution of a man who will enjoy a joke at his
own expense.

Marcia turned away, and referred her invitation, with a glance, to Olive.

"I don't believe Miss Halleck wants to go," said Mr. Macallister.

"I couldn't," said Olive, regretfully. "I've neither the feet nor the head
for climbing over high rocky places."

Marcia was about to sink down on the grass again, from which she had risen,
in the hopes that her proposition would succeed, when Bartley called out:
"Why don't you show Ben the Devil's Backbone? The view is worth seeing,
Halleck."

"Would you like to go?" asked Marcia, listlessly.

"Yes, I should, very much," said Halleck, scrambling to his feet, "if it
won't tire you too much?"

"Oh, no," said Marcia, gently, and led the way. She kept ahead of him in
the climb, as she easily could, and she answered briefly to all he said.
When they arrived at the top, "There is the view," she said coldly. She
waved her hand toward the valley; she made a sound in her throat as if she
would speak again, but her voice died in one broken sob.

Halleck stood with downcast eyes, and trembled. He durst not look at her,
not for what he should see in her face, but for what she should see in his:
the anguish of intelligence, the helpless pity. He beat the rock at his
feet with the ferule of his stick, and could not lift his head again. When
he did, she stood turned from him and drying her eyes on her handkerchief.
Their looks met, and she trusted her self-betrayal to him without any
attempt at excuse or explanation.

"I will send Hubbard up to help you down," said Halleck.

"Well," she answered, sadly.

He clambered down the side of the bluff, and Bartley started to his feet in
guilty alarm when he saw him approach. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. But I think you had better help Mrs. Hubbard down the bluff."

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Macallister. "A panic! how interesting!"

Halleck did not respond. He threw himself on the grass, and left her
to change or pursue the subject as she liked. Bartley showed more
_savoir-faire_ when he came back with Marcia, after an absence long enough
to let her remove the traces of her tears.

"Pretty rough on your game foot, Halleck. But Marcia had got it into her
head that it wasn't safe to trust you to help her down, even after you had
helped her up."

"Ben," said Olive, when they were seated in the train the next day, "why
_did_ you send Marcia's husband up there to her?" She had the effect of not
having rested till she could ask him.

"She was crying," he answered.

"What do you suppose could have been the matter?"

"What you do: she was miserable about his coquetting with that woman."

"Yes. I could see that she hated terribly to have her come; and that
she felt put down by her all the time. What kind of person _is_ Mrs.
Macallister?"

"Oh, a fool," replied Halleck. "All flirts are fools."

"I think she's more wicked than foolish."

"Oh, no, flirts are better than they seem,--perhaps because men are better
than flirts think. But they make misery just the same."

"Yes," sighed Olive. "Poor Marcia, poor Marcia! But I suppose that, if it
were not Mrs. Macallister, it would be some one else."

"Given Bartley Hubbard,--yes."

"And given Marcia. Well,--I don't like being mixed up with other people's
unhappiness, Ben. It's dangerous."

"I don't like it either. But you can't very well keep out of people's
unhappiness in this world."

"No," assented Olive, ruefully.

The talk fell, and Halleck attempted to read a newspaper, while Olive
looked out of the window. She presently turned to him. "Did you ever fancy
any resemblance between Mrs. Hubbard and the photograph of that girl we
used to joke about,--your lost love?"

"Yes," said Halleck.

"What's become of it,--the photograph? I can't find it any more; I wanted
to show it to her one day."

"I destroyed it. I burnt it the first evening after I had met Mrs. Hubbard.
It seemed to me that it wasn't right to keep it."

"Why, you don't think it was _her_ photograph!"

"I think it was," said Halleck. He took up his paper again, and read on
till they left the cars.

That evening, when Halleck came to his sister's room to bid her good night,
she threw her arms round his neck, and kissed his plain, common face, in
which she saw a heavenly beauty.

"Ben, dear," she said, "if you don't turn out the happiest man in the
world, I shall say there's no use in being good!"

"Perhaps you'd better say that after all I wasn't good," he suggested, with
a melancholy smile.

"I shall know better," she retorted.

"Why, what's the matter, now?"

"Nothing. I was only thinking. Good night!"

"Good night," said Halleck. "You seem to think my room is better than my
company, good as I am."

"Yes," she said, laughing in that breathless way which means weeping next,
with women. Her eyes glistened.

"Well," said Halleck, limping out of the room, "you're quite good-looking
with your hair down, Olive."

"All girls are," she answered. She leaned out of her doorway to watch
him as he limped down the corridor to his own room. There was something
pathetic, something disappointed and weary in the movement of his figure,
and when she shut her door, and ran back to her mirror, she could not see
the good-looking girl there for her tears.




XXVIII.


"Hello!" said Bartley, one day after the autumn had brought back all the
summer wanderers to the city, "I haven't seen you for a month of Sundays."
He had Ricker by the hand, and he pulled him into a doorway to be a little
out of the rush on the crowded pavement, while they chatted.

"That's because I can't afford to go to the White Mountains, and swell
round at the aristocratic summer resorts like some people," returned
Ricker. "I'm a horny-handed son of toil, myself."

"Pshaw!" said Bartley. "Who isn't? I've been here hard at it, except for
three days at one time and live at another."

"Well, all I can say is that I saw in the Record personals, that
Mr. Hubbard, of the Events, was spending the summer months with his
father-in-law, Judge Gaylord, among the spurs of the White Mountains. I
supposed you wrote it yourself. You're full of ideas about journalism."

"Oh, come! I wouldn't work that joke any more. Look here, Ricker, I'll tell
you what I want. I want you to dine with me."

"Dines people!" said Ricker, in an awestricken aside.

"No,--I mean business! You Ve never seen my kid yet: and you've never seen
my house. I want you to come. We've all got back, and we're in nice running
order. What day are you disengaged?"

"Let me see," said Ricker, thoughtfully. "So many engagements! Wait! I
could squeeze your dinner in some time next month, Hubbard."

"All right. But suppose we say next Sunday. Six is the hour."

"Six? Oh, I can't dine in the middle of the forenoon that way! Make it
later!"

"Well, we'll say one P.M., then. I know your dinner hour. We shall expect
you."

"Better not, till I come." Bartley knew that this was Ricker's way of
accepting, and he said nothing, but he answered his next question with easy
joviality. "How are you making it with old Witherby?"

"Oh, hand over hand! Witherby and I were formed for each other. By, by!"

"No, hold on! Why don't you come to the club any more?"

"We-e-ll! The club isn't what it used to be," said Bartley, confidentially.

"Why, of course! It isn't just the thing for a gentleman moving in the
select circles of Clover Street, as you do; but why not come, sometimes, in
the character of distinguished guest, and encourage your humble friends? I
was talking with a lot of the fellows about you the other night."

"Were they abusing me?"

"They were speaking the truth about you, and I stopped them. I told them
that sort of thing wouldn't do. Why, you're getting fat!"

"You're behind the times, Kicker," said Bartley. "I began to get fat six
months ago. I don't wonder the Chronicle Abstract is running down on your
hands. Come round and try my tivoli on Sunday. That's what gives a man
girth, my boy." He tapped Ricker lightly on his hollow waistcoat, and left
him with a wave of his hand.

Ricker leaned out of the doorway and followed him down the street with a
troubled eye. He had taken stock in Bartley, as the saying is, and his
heart misgave him that he should lose on the investment; he could not have
sold out to any of their friends for twenty cents on the dollar. Nothing
that any one could lay his finger on had happened, and yet there had been
a general loss of confidence in that particular stock. Ricker himself had
lost confidence in it, and when he lightly mentioned that talk at the club,
with a lot of the fellows, he had a serious wish to get at Bartley some
time, and see what it was that was beginning to make people mistrust him.
The fellows who liked him at first and wished him well, and believed in
his talent, had mostly dropped him. Bartley's associates were now the most
raffish set on the press, or the green hands; and something had brought
this to pass in less than two years. Ricker had believed that it was
Witherby; at the club he had contended that it was Bartley's association
with Witherby that made people doubtful of him. As for those ideas that
Bartley had advanced in their discussion of journalism, he had considered
it all mere young man's nonsense that Bartley would outgrow. But now, as he
looked at Bartley's back, he had his misgivings; it struck him as the back
of a degenerate man, and that increasing bulk seemed not to represent an
increase of wholesome substance, but a corky, buoyant tissue, materially
responsive to some sort of moral dry-rot.

Bartley pushed on to the Events office in a blithe humor. Witherby had
recently advanced his salary; he was giving him fifty dollars a week now;
and Bartley had made himself necessary in more ways than one. He was not
only readily serviceable, but since he had volunteered to write those
advertising articles for an advance of pay, he was in possession of
business facts that could be made very uncomfortable to Witherby in the
event of a disagreement. Witherby not only paid him well, but treated him
well; he even suffered Bartley to bully him a little, and let him foresee
the day when he must be recognized as the real editor of the Events.

At home everything went on smoothly. The baby was well and growing fast;
she was beginning to explode airy bubbles on her pretty lips that a fond
superstition might interpret as papa and mamma. She had passed that stage
in which a man regards his child with despair; she had passed out of
slippery and evasive doughiness into a firm tangibility that made it some
pleasure to hold her.

Bartley liked to take her on his lap, to feel the spring of her little
legs, as she tried to rise on her feet; he liked to have her stretch out
her arms to him from her mother's embrace. The innocent tenderness which he
experienced at these moments was satisfactory proof to him that he was a
very good fellow, if not a good man. When he spent an evening at home, with
Flavia in his lap for half an hour after dinner, he felt so domestic that
he seemed to himself to be spending all his evenings at home now. Once or
twice it had happened, when the housemaid was out, that he went to the door
with the baby on his arm, and answered the ring of Olive and Ben Halleck,
or of Olive and one or both of the intermediary sisters.

The Hallecks were the only people at all apt to call in the evening, and
Bartley ran so little chance of meeting any one else, when he opened the
door with Flavia on his arm, that probably he would not have thought it
worth while to put her down, even if he had not rather enjoyed meeting
them in that domestic phase. He had not only long felt how intensely Olive
disliked him, but he had observed that somehow it embarrassed Ben Halleck
to see him in his character of devoted young father. At those times he used
to rally his old friend upon getting married, and laughed at the confusion
to which the joke put him. He said more than once afterwards, that he did
not see what fun Ben Halleck got out of coming there; it must bore even
such a dull fellow as he was to sit a whole evening like that and not
say twenty words. "Perhaps he's livelier when I'm not here, though," he
suggested. "I always did seem to throw a wet blanket on Ben Halleck." He
did not at all begrudge Halleck's having a better time in his absence if he
could.

One night when the bell rung Bartley rose, and saying, "I wonder which
of the tribe it is this time," went to the door. But when he opened it,
instead of hearing the well-known voices, Marcia listened through a
hesitating silence, which ended in a loud laugh from without, and a cry
from her husband of "Well, I swear! Why, you infamous old scoundrel, come
in out of the wet!" There ensued, amidst Bartley's voluble greetings, a
noise of shy shuffling about in the hall, as of a man not perfectly master
of his footing under social pressure, a sound of husky, embarrassed
whispering, a dispute about doffing an overcoat, and question as to the
disposition of a hat, and then Bartley reappeared, driving before him the
lank, long figure of a man who blinked in the flash of gaslight, as Bartley
turned it all up in the chandelier overhead, and rubbed his immense hands
in cruel embarrassment at the beauty of Marcia, set like a jewel in the
pretty comfort of the little parlor.

"Mr. Kinney, Mrs. Hubbard," said Bartley; and having accomplished the
introduction, he hit Kinney a thwack between the shoulders with the flat of
his hand that drove him stumbling across Marcia's footstool into the seat
on the sofa to which she had pointed him. "You old fool, where did you come
from?"

The refined warmth of Bartley's welcome seemed to make Kinney feel at home,
in spite of his trepidations at Marcia's presence. He bobbed his head
forward, and stretched his mouth wide, in one of his vast, silent laughs.
"Better ask where I'm goin' to."

"Well, I'll ask that, if it'll be any accommodation. Where you going?"

"Illinois."

"For a divorce?"

"Try again."

"To get married?"

"Maybe, after I've made my pile." Kinney's eyes wandered about the room,
and took in its evidences of prosperity, with simple, unenvious admiration;
he ended with a furtive glimpse of Marcia, who seemed to be a climax of
good luck, too dazzling for contemplation; he withdrew his glance from her
as if hurt by her splendor, and became serious.

"Well, you're the _last_ man I ever expected to see again," said Bartley,
sitting down with the baby in his lap, and contemplating Kinney with
deliberation. Kinney was dressed in a long frock-coat of cheap diagonals,
black cassimere pantaloons, a blue necktie, and a celluloid collar. He had
evidently had one of his encounters with a cheap clothier, in which the Jew
had triumphed; but he had not yet visited a barber, and his hair and beard
were as shaggy as they were in the logging-camp; his hands and face were
as brown as leather. "But I'm as glad," Bartley added, "as if you had
telegraphed you were coming. Of course, you're going to put up with us." He
had observed Kinney's awe of Marcia, and he added this touch to let
Kinney see that he was master in his house, and lord even of that radiant
presence.

Kinney started in real distress. 'Oh, no! I couldn't do it! I've got all my
things round at the Quincy House."

"Trunk or bag?" asked Bartley.

"Well, it's a bag; but--"

"All right. We'll step round and get it together. I generally take a little
stroll out, after dinner," said Bartley, tranquilly.

Kinney was beginning again, when Marcia, who had been stealing some covert
looks at him under her eye lashes, while she put together the sewing she
was at work on, preparatory to going upstairs with the baby, joined Bartley
in his invitation.

"You wont make us the least trouble, Mr. Kinney," she said. "The
guest-chamber is all ready, and we shall be glad to have you stay."

Kinney must have felt the note of sincerity in her words. He hesitated, and
Bartley clinched his tacit assent with a quotation: "'The chief ornament of
a house is the guests who frequent it.' Who says that?"

Kinney's little blue eyes twinkled. "Old Emerson."

"Well, I agree with him. We don't care anything about your company, Kinney;
but we want you for decorative purposes."

Kinney opened his mouth for another noiseless laugh, and said, "Well, fix
it to suit yourselves."

"I'll carry her up for you," said Bartley to Marcia, who was stooping
forward to take the baby from him, "if Mr. Kinney will excuse us a moment."

"All right," said Kinney.

Bartley ventured upon this bold move, because he had found that it was
always best to have things out with Marcia at once, and, if she was going
to take his hospitality to Kinney in bad part, he wanted to get through the
trouble. "That was very nice of you, Marcia," he said, when they were in
their own room. "My invitation rather slipped out, and I didn't know how
you would like it."

"Oh, I'm very glad to have him stay. I never forget about his wanting to
lend you money that time," said Marcia, opening the baby's crib.

"You're a mighty good fellow, Marcia!" cried Bartley, kissing her over the
top of the baby's head as she took it from him. "And I'm not half good
enough for you. You never forget a benefit. Nor an injury either," he
added, with a laugh. "And I'm afraid that I forget one about as easily as
the other."

Marcia's eyes suffused themselves at this touch of self-analysis which,
coming from Bartley, had its sadness; but she said nothing, and he was
eager to escape and get back to their guest. He told her he should go out
with Kinney, and that she was not to sit up, for they might be out late.

In his pride, he took Kinney down to the Events office, and unlocked it,
and lit the gas, so as to show him the editorial rooms; and then he passed
him into one of the theatres, where they saw part of an Offenbach opera;
after that they went to the Parker House, and had a New York stew. Kinney
said he must be off by the Sunday-night train, and Bartley thought it well
to concentrate as many dazzling effects upon him as he could in the single
evening at his disposal. He only regretted that it was not the club night,
for he would have liked to take Kinney round, and show him some of the
fellows.

"But never mind," he said. "I'm going to have one of them dine with us
to-morrow, and you'll see about the best of the lot."

"Well, sir," observed Kinney, when they had got back into Bartley's parlor,
and he was again drinking in its prettiness in the subdued light of the
shaded argand burner, "I hain't seen anything yet that suits me much better
than this."

"It isn't bad," said Bartley. He had got up a plate of crackers and two
bottles of tivoli, and was opening the first. He offered the beaded goblet
to Kinney.

"Thank you," said Kinney. "Not any. I never do."

Bartley quaffed half of it in tolerant content. "I _always_ do. Find it
takes my nerves down at the end of a hard week's work. Well, now, tell me
some thing about yourself. What are you going to do in Illinois?"

"Well, sir, I've got a friend out there that's got a coal mine, and he
thinks he can work me in somehow. I guess he can: I've tried pretty much
everything. Why don't you come out there and start a newspaper? We've got a
town that's bound to grow."

It amused Bartley to hear Kinney bragging already of a town that he had
never seen. He winked a good-natured disdain over the rim of the goblet
which he tilted on his lips. "And give up my chances here?" he said, as he
set the goblet down.

"Well, that's so!" said Kinney, responding to the sense of the wink. "I'll
tell you what, Bartley, I didn't know as you'd speak to me when I rung your
bell to-night. But thinks I to myself, 'Dumn it! look here! He can't more'n
slam the door in your face, anyway. And you've hankered after him so
long,--go and take your chances, you old buzzard!' And so I got your
address at the Events office pretty early this morning; and I went round
all day screwing my courage up, as old Macbeth says,--or Ritchloo, _I_
don't know which it was,--and at last I _did_ get myself so that I toed the
mark like a little man."

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