Part 1 (1/2)
The Desert and The Sown.
by Mary Hallock Foote.
I
A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS
It was an evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale.
The colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log--only one, he declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed with flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the stored-up energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the consumption of that four-foot stick.
The young persons of the house had escaped, laughing, into the fresh night air, but the colonel was hemmed in on every side; deserted by his daughter, mocked by the work of his own hands, and torn between the duties of a host and the host's helpless craving for his after-dinner cigar.
Across the hearth, filling with her silks all the visible room in his own favorite settle corner, sat the one woman on earth it most behooved him to be civil to,--the future mother-in-law of his only child. That Moya was a willing, nay, a reckless hostage, did not lessen her father's awe of the situation.
Mrs. Bogardus, according to her wont at this hour, was composedly doing nothing. The colonel could not make his retreat under cover of her real or feigned absorption in any of the small scattering pursuits which distract the female mind. When she read she read--she never ”looked at books.” When she sewed she sewed--presumably, but no one ever saw her do it. Her mind was economic and practical, and she saved it whole, like many men of force, for whatever she deemed her best paying sphere of action.
It was a silence that crackled with heat! The colonel, wrathfully perspiring in the glow of that impenitent stick, frowned at it like an inquisitor. Presently Mrs. Bogardus looked up, and her expression softened as she saw the energetic despair upon his face.
”Colonel, don't you always smoke after dinner?”
”That is my bad habit, madam. I belong to the generation that smokes--after dinner and most other times--more than is good for us.”
Colonel Middleton belonged also to the generation that can carry a sentence through to the finish in handsome style, and he did it with a suave Virginian accent as easy as his seat in the saddle. Mrs. Bogardus always gave him her respectful attention during his best performances, though she was a woman of short sentences herself.
”Don't you smoke in this room sometimes?” she asked, with a barely perceptible sniff the merest contraction of her housewifely nostrils.
”Ah--h! Those rascally curtains and cus.h.i.+ons! You ladies--women, I should say--Moya won't let me say ladies--you bolster us up with comforts on purpose to betray us!”
”You can say 'ladies' to me,” smiled the very handsome one before him.
”That's the generation _I_ belong to.”
The colonel bowed playfully. ”Well, you know, I don't detect myself, but there's no doubt I have infected the premises.”
”Open fires are good ventilators. I wish you would smoke now. If you don't, I shall have to go away, and I'm exceedingly comfortable.”
”You are exceedingly charming to say so--on top of that last stick, too!” The colonel had Irish as well as Virginian progenitors. ”Well,” he sighed, proceeding to make himself conditionally happy, ”Moya will never forgive me! We spoil each other shamefully when we're alone, but of course we try to jack each other up when company comes. It's a great comfort to have some one to spoil, isn't it, now? I needn't ask which it is in your family!”
”The spoiled one?” Mrs. Bogardus smiled rather coldly. ”A woman we had for governess, when Christine was a little thing, used to say: 'That child is the stuff that tyrants are made of!' Tyrants are made by the will of their subjects, don't you think, generally speaking?”
”Well, you couldn't have made a tyrant of your son, Mrs. Bogardus. He's the Universal Spoiler! He'll ruin my striker, Jephson. I shall have to send the fellow back to the ranks. I don't know how you keep a servant good for anything with Paul around.”
”Paul thinks he doesn't like to be waited on,” Paul's mother observed shrewdly. ”He says that only invalids, old people, and children have any claim on the personal service of others.”
”By George! I found him blacking his own boots!”
Mrs. Bogardus laughed.
”But I'm paying a man to do it for him. It upsets my contract with that other fellow for Paul to do his work. We have a claim on what we pay for in this world.”
”I suppose we have. But Paul thinks that nothing can pay the price of those artificial relations between man and man. I think that's the way he puts it.”