Chapter 17

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_ Chapter XVII

There was a good deal of talk in Banbridge when Ina Carroll's wedding-invitations were out. There were not many issued. When it came to making out the list, the number of persons who, from what the family considered as a reasonable point of view, were possible, was exceedingly small.

"Of course we cannot ask such and such a one," Mrs. Carroll would say, and the others would acquiesce simply, with no thought of the possibility of anything else.

"There's that young man who goes on the train every morning with papa," said Charlotte. "His name is Veazie--Francis Veazie. He has called here. They live on Elm Street. His father is that nice-looking old gentleman who walks past here every day, on his way to the mail, a little lame."

"Charlotte, dear," said Ina, "don't you remember that somebody told us that that young man was a floor-walker in one of the department stores?"

"Oh, sure enough," said Charlotte, "I do remember, dear."

"There are really very few indeed in a place like Banbridge whom it is possible to invite to a wedding," said Mrs. Carroll.

Banbridge itself shared her opinion. Those who were bidden to the wedding acquiesced in their selectedness and worthiness; those who were not bidden, with a very few exceptions of unduly aspiring souls, acquiesced calmly in their own ineligibility. Banbridge, for a village in the heart of a republic, had a curious rigidity of establishment and content as to its social conditions. For the most part those who were not invited would have been embarrassed and even suspicious at receiving invitations. But they talked. In that they showed their inalienable republican freedom. They moved along as unquestioningly as European peasants, in their grooves, but their tongues soared. In speech, as is the way with an American, they held nothing sacred, not even the institutions which they propped, not even themselves. They might remain unquestioningly, even preferredly, outside the doors of superiority, but out there they raised a clamor of self-assertion. Their tongues wagged with prodigious activity utterly unleashed. In the days before Ina Carroll's wedding all Banbridge seethed and boiled like a pot with gossip, and gossip full of malice and sneer, and a good deal of righteous indignation. Anderson heard much of it. Neither he nor his mother was asked to the wedding. The Carrolls had not even considered the possibility of such a thing. Mrs. Anderson spoke of it one evening at tea.

"I hear they are going to have quite a wedding at those new people's," said she; "a wedding in the church, and reception afterwards at the house. Miss Josie Eggleston and Agnes and Mrs. Monroe were in here this afternoon, and they were speaking about it. They said the young lady was having her trousseau made at Mrs. Griggs's, and everybody thought it rather singular. They are going to the wedding and reception. They inquired if we were going, and I said that we had not been invited, that we had not called. I have been intending to call ever since they came, but now, of course, it is out of the question until after the wedding." Mrs. Anderson spoke with a slight regret. A mild curiosity was a marked trait of hers. "I suppose we could go to the church even if we had no invitation; I suppose many will do that," she said, a little wistfully, after a pause.

"Do you think it wise, without an invitation?" asked Anderson, rather amusedly.

"Why, I don't know, really, dear, that it could do any harm--that is, lower one's dignity at all. Of course it is not as if we had called. If we had called and then received no invitation, the slight would have been marked. But of course we were not invited simply because we had not called--"

"Still, I think I should rather not go, under the circumstances, mother," Anderson said, quietly.

"Well, perhaps you are right, dear," said his mother. "It seems to me that you may be a trifle too punctilious; still, it is best to err on the safe side, and, after all, these are new people; we know very little about them, after all." Nothing was further from Mrs. Anderson than the surmise that, even had she called, no invitation would have come from these unknown new people to the village grocer and his mother. Mrs. Anderson, even with her secret and persistent dissent to her son's giving up his profession and adopting trade, never dreamed of any possible loss of social prestige. She considered herself and her son established in their family traditions beyond possibility of shaking by such minor matters. Anderson did not enlighten her.

"Mrs. Monroe said that she had heard that the Carrolls were owing a good deal," said she, presently. "She said she heard that Blumenfeldt said he must have cash for the flowers for the decorations. They have ordered a great many palms and things. She said she heard that Captain Carroll told him that the money would be forthcoming, and scared him out of his wits, he was so high and mighty, and the florist just gave right in and said he should have all he wanted. She said Mr. Monroe was in there and heard it. I hope Mrs. Griggs will get her pay. They don't owe you, I hope, dear?"

"Don't worry about me, mother?" Randolph replied, smiling. However, she had placed a finger upon a daily perplexity of his. The Carrolls indeed owed him, and every day the debt was increasing. He felt that his old clerk regarded him with wonder at every fresh entry on the books. That very day he had come into the office to inform him, in a hushed voice, that the Carrolls had sent for a pail of lard and a box of butter, besides a bag of flour, and to inquire what he should do about supplying them.

"The girl hasn't brought any money," said he, further, in an ominous whisper.

Anderson, glancing out, saw the small, sturdy, and smiling face of the Hungarian girl employed by the Carrolls. She was gazing straight through at him in the office with a shrewd expression in her untutored black eyes. "Send the order," Anderson replied, in a low voice.

"But," began the clerk.

"It's all right," said Anderson. He dipped his pen in the ink and went on with the letter he was writing. The clerk retreated with a long, anxious, wondering look, which the other man felt.

The Hungarian girl plodded smiling forth with the promise to have the groceries sent at once. Stepping flat-footedly and heavily through the door, she caught her cotton skirt on a nail, and, lo! a rent. The boy, who was a gallant soul for all femininity in need, hurried to her aid with some pins gathered from the lapel of his gingham coat. Little Marie, with a coquettish shake of her head and a blush and smile began repairing the damage.

"It is the cloth that is easy broke," explained she, when she lifted her suffused but still smiling face, "and I a new one will have when I haf my money, my vage." With that Marie was gone, her poor gown scalloping around her heavy, backward heels, her smiling glance of artless coquetry over her shoulder to the last, and the boy and the old clerk looked at each other. The boy whistled.

Just then the delivery-wagon drove up in front of the store. The driver, who was a young fellow in the first stages of pulmonary consumption, got down with weakly alacrity from the seat and came in to get the new orders. He coughed as he entered, but he looked radiant. He was driving the delivery-wagon in the hope of recovering his health by out-of-door life, and he was, or flattered himself that he was, perceptibly gaining.

"Where's the next delivery?" he inquired, hoarsely.

"Wait a minute," said the old clerk, and again invaded the office.

"They 'ain't paid their hired girl," he said, in a whisper. "Had we better--"

"Better what?" said Anderson, impatiently, though he looked confused.

"Better send them things to the Carrolls'?"

"Didn't I tell you? What--"

"Oh, all right, sir," said the clerk, and retreated hastily. At times he had an awe of his employer.

"Goin' to take all that truck to the Carrolls'?" inquired the consumptive deliverer.

"Yep," replied the boy, lugging out the flour-bag.

"Credit," whispered the man.

The boy nodded.

The man essayed a whistle, but he coughed. "Well, it's none of my funeral," he declared, when he got his breath, "but I hear he's a dead-beat. I s'pose he knows what he is about."

"If he don't, nobody is goin' to tell him, you bet," said the boy, succinctly.

"Well, it's none of my funeral," said the man, and he coughed again, and gathered up the reins, and drove away in a cloud of dust down the street. It had not rained for two weeks and the roads gave evidence of it.

Anderson, back in his office, heard the sound of the retreating wheels with a feeling of annoyance, even scorn of himself for his gullibility, and his stress upon the financial part of the affair.

He was losing a good deal of money, and he did not wish to do so. "I am a fool," he told himself, with that voice of mentality which sounds the loudest, to the consciousness, of any voice on earth. He frowned, then he laughed a little, and began mounting a fine new butterfly specimen. "Other men marry and spend their hard earnings in that way, on love," said he. "Why should I not spend mine after this fashion if I choose?"

That noon, as he passed out of the store on his way home to dinner, Ina and Charlotte came out of the dressmaker's opposite. They looked flushed and happily excited. Charlotte carried a large parcel. They rushed past without seeing him at all, as he gained the opposite sidewalk. He walked along, grave and self-possessed. Nobody seeing him would have dreamed of his inward perturbation, that spiritual alienation as secret as the processes of the body.

Nobody could have suspected how his fond thought and yearning followed one of those small, hurrying, girlish figures. In a way the man, even with his frustrated aims in the progress of life, was so superior to the little, unconscious feminine thing whose chief assets of life were her youth and innocence, and even those of slight weight against the man's age and innocence, that it seemed a pity.

It was not a case of pearls before swine, but seemingly rather of pearls before canary-birds or butterflies, which would not defile them, but flutter over them unheedingly.

However, it may be better to cast away one's pearls of love before anything, rather than keep them. Anderson, walking along home to his dinner in the summer noon, loving foolishly and unreasonably this young girl who would never, probably, place the slightest value on his love, was not actively unhappy. After he had turned the corner of the street on which his house stood he heard the whistle of the noon-train, and soon the carriages from the station came whirling in sight.

Samson Rawdy came first, driving a victoria in which sat the gentleman who had been pointed out to him as Ina Carroll's _fiance_. He glanced at him approvingly, and the thought even was in his mind that had this stranger been going to marry Charlotte, instead of her sister, he could have had nothing to say against his appearance. Suddenly, Major Arms in the victoria looked full at him and bowed, raising his hat in his soldierly fashion. Anderson was surprised, but returned the salutation promptly.

"Who was that gentleman bowing to you?" his mother asked, as he went up the front steps. She was standing on the porch in her muslin morning panoply.

"He is the gentleman who is to marry the eldest daughter of Captain Carroll," replied Anderson.

"Do you know him?"

"No."

"He bowed."

"I suppose he thought he recognized me."

"He looks old enough to be her grandfather, but he looks like a fine man. I hope she will make him a good wife. It is a risk for a man of his age, marrying a little young thing. I wonder why Samson Rawdy was bringing him from the station. Strange the Carroll carriage didn't meet him, wasn't it?"

"Perhaps they were not expecting him," replied Randolph, which was true.

The carriage occupied by Major Arms and Samson Rawdy overtook Ina and Charlotte before they had walked far, in front of Drake's drug-store. They had stopped in there for soda, in fact, and were just coming out.

"Why, there's Major Arms!" cried Charlotte, so loudly that some lounging men in the drug-store heard her. Drake, Amidon, and the postmaster, who had just stopped, stood in the doorway, with no attempt to disguise their interest, and watched Major Arms spring out of the carriage like a boy, kiss his sweetheart, utterly unmindful of their observance, then assist the sisters to the back seat, and spring to the front himself.

"Pretty spry for an old boy," remarked the postmaster as the carriage rolled away.

"Oh, he's Southern," returned Amidon, easily. "That is why. Catch a Yankee his age with joints as limber. The cold winters here stiffen folk up quick after they get middle-aged."

"You don't seem very stiff in the joints," said Drake, jocularly. "Guess you are near as old as that man."

"I'm a right smart stiffer than I'd been ef I'd stayed South," replied Amidon.

Then the postmaster wondered, as Mrs. Anderson had done, why Major Arms was driving up with Samson Rawdy rather than in the Carroll carriage, and the others opined, as Randolph had done, that they had not expected him.

"I don't see, for my part, what they get to feed him on when he comes," said Amidon, wisely.

The postmaster and Drake looked at him with expressions like hunting-dogs, although a certain wisdom as to his meaning was evident in both faces.

"I suppose it's getting harder and harder for them to get credit," said Drake.

"Harder," returned Amidon. "I guess it is. I had it from Strauss this morning, that he wouldn't let them have a pound of beef without cash, and I know that Abbot stopped giving them anything some time ago."

"How do they manage, then?" asked the postmaster.

"Strauss says sometimes they send a little money and get a little, the rest of the time he guesses they go without; live on garden-sauce--they've got a little garden, you know, or grocery stuff."

"Can they get trusted at the grocer's?"

"Ingram won't trust 'em, but Anderson lets 'em have all they want, they say."

"S'pose he knows what he's about."

"Lawyers generally do," said Drake.

"He wasn't much of a lawyer, anyhow," said Amidon.

"That's so. He didn't set the river afire," remarked the postmaster.

"I don't believe, if Anderson trusts him, but he knows what he is about," said the druggist. "I guess he knows he's goin' to get his pay."

"Mebbe some of those fine securities of his will come up sometime," Amidon said. "I heard they'd been slumpin' lately. Guess there's some Banbridge folks got hit pretty bad, too."

"Who?" asked Drake, eagerly.

"I heard Lee was in it, for one, and I guess there's others. I must light out of this. It's dinner-time. Where's that arrow-root? My wife's got to make arrow-root gruel for old Mrs. Joy. She's dreadful poorly. Oh, there it is!"

Amidon started, and the postmaster also. In the doorway Amidon paused. "Suppose you knew Carroll was away?" he said.

"No," said Drake.

"Yes, he's been gone a week; ain't coming home till the day before the wedding. Their girl told ours. We've got a Hungarian, too, you know. Carroll's girl can't get any pay. It's a dam'ed shame."

"Why don't she leave?"

"Afraid she'll lose it all, if she does. Same way with the coachman."

"Where's Carroll gone?" asked the postmaster.

"Don't know. The girl said he'd gone to Chicago on business."

"Guess he'll want to go farther than Chicago on business if he don't look out, before long. I don't see how he's goin' to have the weddin', anyway. I don't believe anybody 'll trust him here, and, unless I miss my guess, he won't find it very easy anywhere else."

"They say the man the girl's goin' to marry is rich. Maybe he'll foot the bills," said Drake.

"Mebbe he is," assented Amidon. Then he went out in earnest, and the postmaster with him.

"Look at here," said Amidon, mysteriously, as the two men separated on the next corner. "I'll tell you something, if you want to know."

"What?"

"I believe Drake trusts those Carrolls a little." _

Read next: Chapter 18

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