Part 39 (2/2)
In reply to which summons Estelle came hurrying down the stairs with an innocent, expectant air.
”If it isn't Doctor Bewick!” she exclaimed, without giving herself away by one false inflection. ”Why, Doctor Bewick, this is simply too awfully nice! What _are_ you doing over here? Who _would_ have expected to see _you_?”
”Tom,” said Aurora, ”I was never in my life so glad to see any one. I didn't know how much I'd missed you till I saw you. You good old thing!
You nice old boy! Aren't you a brick to have come! My soul, my soul! I didn't know till this minute how tired I am of foreigners and half-foreigners and quarter-foreigners and all their ways. I was hungry for home-folks and didn't know it. Now, please G.o.d, we'll have some talk where we know that when we use the same words we mean the same thing, and aren't wondering all the time what's really in the other's mind!”
The man to whom this was said absorbed it with a face fixed in smiles of pleasure. He was a big blond man, disposed to corpulence, and looking somewhat like a fresh-faced, gigantic boy until his eye met yours and gave the note of a fine, mature intelligence, open on every side, and un.o.btrusively gathering in what it had no strong impulse afterward to give out again in any open form of self-expression.
Tolerant, not from any vagueness of judgment; easy to get on with, but not to drive or to deceive, he looked strikingly the good fellow, yet kept you in respect. An air of capability, a consciousness of definite achievements, went coupled in him with the humor that would prevent b.u.mptiousness however great the matter for pride. A quiet carelessness of other people's opinions formed part of his effect of poise; the opinions of dukes would have affected him as little as those of rag-pickers, unless they recommended themselves to that judicial spot in his brain at which he tried them. He was level-headed, unsentimental, but kind, of a kindness that like good-humor seemed almost physical, and made him stop to stroke the kitchen cat as well as see to it that the negress's baby had the right milk for its orphaned stomach.
He looked at Aurora with smiling scrutiny, and facially expressed a vast appreciation. She looked back at him with eyes of laughing tenderness.
Avoiding to speak directly to her the compliments rising in his mind, he turned to Estelle.
”Hasn't she blossomed out!”
”Isn't she wonderful?” chimed in that friend, enthusiastically.
Aurora, with a comedy of pride, threw up her chin, lifted her arms, and turned as if on a pivot, to show herself off in her elegance. She had on the wine-colored street-dress bordered with black fox; over its white satin waistcoat embroidered with gold hung in a splendid loop her pink corals. The restraining Paris corset gave to her luxuriant form a charming modish correctness of line.
”Oh, Tom,”--she sank happily on the sofa beside him,--”we're having the time of our lives! Just wait till you see me in company, and hear me put on my good English, when, instead of calling things lovely or horrid, I call them amusing or beastly or impossible. But your turn first. Give us the Denver news.”
After dinner that evening, in the midst of Italo's brilliant performance, a caller came,--a thin, oldish, English-speaking lady whose black dress made no pretense of following the fas.h.i.+on.
Aurora had met her at Mrs. Satterlee's during a meeting appointed to raise funds for the Protestant orphanage. When this philanthropist, after a little talk of other things, mentioned the relict of a mason, left with five young children, Estelle and Dr. Bewick took it as a hint to withdraw beyond earshot. The two ladies were left talking in undertones; after a minute they found themselves alone in the room.
Estelle preceded Dr. Bewick across the hall to the dining-room, deserted and orderly, where the drop-light rained its direct brightness only on the rich and variegated tapestry cover of the table beneath it. From the sideboard--whence the marble fruit had for some time been missing--she brought a bottle of aerated water and a gla.s.s to set before him; she found him an ash-tray, and seated herself beside the table near him in such a way as to get, through the parted half-doors, a glimpse of the visitor when she should leave.
Before speaking, she exchanged with the doctor a look of intelligence.
”You see what I mean?” she asked little above a whisper.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Aurora, with a comedy of pride, threw up her chin, lifted her arms, and turned as if on a pivot, to show herself off in her elegance]
Dr. Bewick looked all around the room with leisurely appraising eyes, then nodded understanding. There was no intimation that he was not ready to listen, but he did not seem quite ready to talk. His white s.h.i.+rt-bosom was remarkably broad as he leaned back in his chair in the slightly lolling fas.h.i.+on of large, good-humored men. For all the nonchalance of his att.i.tude, he looked, from evening tie to thin-soled dress-boots, beautifully spruce, as Aurora had remarked, and made an appropriate pendant to her in her Parisian finery.
Approval of him was written large on Estelle's pleasant, alert countenance; a quiet, comprehensive liking for her sat as plainly in the eyes reflecting her slim person and evening-frock of beaded net. Being Nell's friends made them friends, a thing not so common as one wishes.
Through her they felt almost on the familiar terms of old friends.h.i.+p, although Estelle had never met Dr. Tom Bewick before he came to New York to see them off on their great four-stacked ocean-steamer.
”You see what I mean?” she asked, and, not expecting a regular answer, did not wait for it. ”Now that woman won't leave until she has secured support for the mason's five children, and she'll do this without the smallest difficulty. In a day or two some one else will come, with the sad case of a poor father out of work who is going to have to sell his blind daughter's canary unless Nell steps in to relieve their wants. And Nell will step in. Word has been pa.s.sed, just as they say a tramp at home marks a house where he's been given a meal, and every case of want in this town, it seems to me, is hopefully brought to Nell. And she listens every time; she doesn't get sick of it. And you know, Doctor, that her circ.u.mstances don't warrant it.”
Bewick, as Estelle stopped for some comment on his side, made a slight motion of chin and eyelids that partly or deprecatingly agreed with her.
He took the cigar out of his mouth, but having knocked the ash off, replaced it, to listen further and not for the moment speak.
”It's positively funny, the things Nell has been doing with her money,”
<script>