Part 6 (1/2)
She was just established in her comfortable _causeuse_, when the door-bell heralded a visitor.
”My dear Mr. Wyllys!” she cried, fluttering forward to meet him.
”You are doubly welcome when you come alone. One sees you so seldom except in a crowd, that it is a genuine pleasure to have a few moments' quiet conversation with you.”
”It is like yourself to excuse my unfas.h.i.+onably early call with such gracious tact,” responded the gentleman, bowing low over her hand.
He shook hands with the doctor with less _empress.e.m.e.nt_, but most respectfully, and sank upon a divan near the hostess.
”I have another engagement this evening, but I could not deny myself the pleasure of paying my _devoirs_ to you in pa.s.sing. I will not ask if you have recovered from the fatigue of Thursday night”--with an expressive look at her blooming face. ”I believe, however, it is never a weariness to you to be agreeable, as it is to us duller and less benevolent mortals. I am horribly cross, always, on the morning succeeding a party. It is as if I had overdrawn my account, in the matter of social entertainment; borrowed too heavily from the reserve fund intended by Nature for daily expenses. But this rule applies only to people whose resources of spirits, wit, and general powers of pleasing, are limited. You are above the need of such pitiful economy as we find necessary.”
”_Shall_ I undeceive you?” beamed the lady. ”If the doctor--dear, patient martyr!--were put into the witness-box, he might tell sad tales, make divulgations that would demolish your pretty and flattering theory. Doctor, my love! Mr. Wyllys is anxious to know what was the status of my spiritual and mental thermometer, on the morning after our little _re-union_, last week?”
”Eh, what did you say, my dear?”
He lowered his folio. His eyebrows were perked discontentedly, and his forefinger was in the doomed bow she had tied not fifteen minutes before.
Mrs. Baxter tried, unsuccessfully, to frown down the offending digit before she made reply.
”Mr. Wyllys has heard that I am like champagne, 'stale, flat, and unprofitable'--with a dash of vinegar--when the effervescence wrought by social excitement is off,” vivified, by her mirthful misrepresentation of her visitor's words, into radiance that revealed every molar, and forced her eyelids into utter retirement.
”Ah!” The doctor smiled absently, and re-bent his brows over the page, protruding his lips in a vicious pout as he read.
”He disdains to notice the slander,” resumed Mrs. Baxter, unabashed at her failure to elicit a conjugal compliment. ”Seriously, Mr.
Wyllys, I am thankful for the guidance of reason and will that counterbalance my mercurial temperament. My spirit resembles nothing else so much as a mettled steed, whose curvettings are restrained by an inexorable rein. But for my sober judgment, Impulse would have led me into an erratic course, I fear.”
Relaxing the tension of the fingers and wrist that had pulled hard at an imaginary curb, and unclenching the teeth from their bite upon the word ”inexorable,” she sighed, reflectively.
”The combination is rare--” commenced the gentleman.
”It is preposterous!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the doctor, closing the Russian-leather alb.u.m with a concussion like the report of a pocket-pistol.
”I think not, dear,” said the wife, gently corrective. ”It is, as Mr. Wyllys says, a rare combination, but certainly not an impossible one.”
”It is preposterous,” reiterated the doctor, with a ruinous tug at his cravat, ”that a rational creature, who can read and write, should waste time in disfiguring good, honest paper with such incongruous, not to say blasphemous, nonsense as I find here. It was bad enough for mediaeval monks to deck the Word of Life in the motley wear of a harlequin. Greek, German, black-letter text, are, all of them, stumbling-blocks to the unlearned, diversions to the thoughtless. But when the sacred Scriptures are bedizened into further illegibility by paint and gilding, and _ill.u.s.trated_ by birds, beasts, and even fishes, daubed upon fields, azure, argent, and verde, the offence becomes an abomination. Such profanation is offered that divinest of pastorals, the twenty-third psalm, in this volume,” elevating it in strong disgust.
Mrs. Baxter arose and took it from his hand in time to save it from being tossed to the table or floor.
”Tastes differ, my dear husband,” was all she said, but her forbearance and real sweetness of temper called forth a look of unfeigned respect from the amused spectator.
”I wouldn't keep it in the parlor, if I were in your place, Jane,”
the doctor expostulated, seeing her deposit the folio upon a stand beyond his reach.
”I will not ask you to look at it again, love,”--still amiably.
She returned to the subject when the critic had helped himself to a volume which was more to his taste.
”I saw few things when I was abroad, before my marriage, that interested me more than the illuminated missals and breviaries preserved in convents, museums, and private collections of _vertu_,”
she said to Mr. Wyllys. ”I am the possessor of a remarkably fine specimen of the illuminator's art--the gift of a dear friend and relative, now no more. I had not looked into it for years until after I commenced my humble alb.u.m, which, allow me to observe, my excellent husband does not guess is my handiwork. To return”--the hands describing an inward curve, and subsiding into an embrace upon her knee--”the best touches in my work were after my precious reliquary. I must show it to you. I am chary of displaying it to non-appreciative or irreverent eyes. Consequently it seldom sees the light.”
Orrin followed her to an escritoire at the back of the room, peeping covertly at his watch as he went. Mrs. Baxter laid her hand upon her bust, and choked down some rebellious uprising of memory or regret, as she unlocked a drawer.