LITMIR.BIZ

      VII

      The compromise between a Boston dinner and a Saxmills tea, which the mother and son had agreed upon, prospered beyond the wont of compromises. It was a very good meal of the older-fashioned sort, and it was better served by Norah, from her habit of such meals, than could have been expected, with the help of the niece she had got in for the evening. The turkey was set before Langbrith and the chicken pie before his mother. Norah asked the guests which they would have, in taking their plates, and brought the plates back with the chosen portion, and the vegetables added by the host or hostess from the deep dishes on their right and left. There were small plates of subsidiary viands, such as brandied peaches and sweet pickles, which the guests passed to one another. Tea and coffee and cocoa were served through the supper by Norah’s niece from the pantry, where she had them hot from the kitchen stove. There was no wine till the ladies left the table, when Langbrith had Norah put down, with the cigars, some decanters of madeira from, as he said, his father’s stock. He had a little pomp in saying that; it seemed to him there was something ancestral in it.

      Instead of letting all follow the hostess out to supper pell-mell, as the Saxmills custom had always been, he went about asking the men, sotto voce, if they would take out such and such ladies. “Will you take out my mother, Dr. Anther?” he said, with special graciousness. He told Falk to give his arm to Hope Hawberk, and he gave his own to the rector’s wife. But when they came to look up their places, and found their names, by Falk’s example, on cards beside their plates, Hope found hers on Langbrith’s left. That way of appointing people their chairs was an innovation at Saxmills, and the girls put their dinner cards where they should remember to take them away. But the effect of this innovation was lost in the great innovation of having old and young people together at tea. The like had not happened in Saxmills before; except at a church sociable or a Sunday-school picnic, it had scarcely happened that the different ages met at all. When they did, it was understood that the old people were to go away early, and leave the young people to take their pleasure in their own fashion.

      At first, the affair went hitchily. The girls had confided to one another, in the library, their astonishment at finding themselves in the mixed company, and their wonder whether their elders were going to stay for the dance. But, partly through their fear of Langbrith, which they could overcome only when they had him on their own ground, and partly through their embarrassment at being obliged to talk with the rector and the doctor and the judge, they remained in a petrified decorum which lasted well into the supper. Even when Jessamy Colebridge caught the eye of Hope Hawberk from her place diagonally across the table, and saw its lid droop in a slow, deliberate wink, instead of bursting into a whoop of sympathetic intelligence, she blushed painfully and turned her face away, with a tendency to tears. She was not having, as she would have said, a bit good time, between the judge on one hand, who did not speak much to anyone, and Mr. Matthewson on the other, who was talking to Susie Johns. And she felt the joyous mockery of Hope’s triumph, where she sat between Falk and Langbrith, without the ability to respond in kind. Besides, she could not see why her father and mother had not been invited, if there were going to be old people. She could not catch the words which were kindly cast her across the table, from time to time, by the judge’s wife. But good cheer is a solvent which few spiritual discomforts can resist. Before she left the table, Jessamy was beginning to have the good time which mounted as the evening went on, and culminated in Mr. Matthewson’s going home with her. Judge Garley had scarcely talked to a young girl since his wife had ceased to be one. But he was so little versed in the nature of girls that he did not know how much he had failed to enjoy Jessamy’s conversation till his wife asked him at home how he could manage to find things to say to that little simpleton. In fact, he had set her and young Matthewson talking across him, while Susie sat placidly silent, or funnily smiled to her indirect vis-h-vis, who happened to be Falk, released to her by Hope’s preoccupation with Langbrith. As he noted to Susie, those two seemed to be having rather a stormy time, springing from a radical difference of opinion upon a point of sociology advanced by Langbrith, who held that the unions ought to be broken up, and alleged their criminal incivism even in their strikes in such a small place as Saxmills, where labor and capital were personally acquainted.

      Mrs. Enderby was heard saying affably, across the table to Hope: “I didn’t know young people took such an interest in those things. You ought to talk with Mr. Enderby. I’m afraid he finds me very lukewarm.”

      “Oh, well, then, I’ll talk with you, Mrs. Enderby,” Langbrith promised. “There’s nothing I like so much as lukewarmness on these subjects. I’d no idea I should get into such hot water with Miss Hawberk. I believe she’s a walking delegate in disguise!”

      “Well,” the girl said, “I shouldn’t like anything better than to lead your hands out on a strike. I think it would be fun.”

      Mrs. Enderby said “Oh!” in compliance with the convention that one ought to be shocked by such audacity, but really amused with it.

      “You’ll find me in the ranks of labor, if you ever do lead a strike,” Langbrith said, gallantly deserting his colors.

      Hope went on: “I should like to be a great labor leader and start a revolution.”

      “ What salary would you want?” Langbrith asked.

       “About half the profits of the employers!” the girl came back.

      “Well, we must talk to Uncle John about that. He manages the mills. But if your strike cut the profits down to nothing?”

      “There, there!” Mrs. Enderby interposed. “You mustn’t let your joke go too far.”

      “Oh, I haven’t been joking,” Hope said.

      “I was never more in earnest,” Langbrith followed, laughing.

      His laughing provoked her. She wanted, somehow, to turn their banter into earnest—to say something saucy to him, something violent; something that would show Mrs. Enderby that she was not afraid of him. At the same time, she believed she did not care for Mrs. Enderby or what she might think, and in the midst of her insurrection it seemed to her that he was handsomer than she had ever supposed—that he had beautiful eyes. She noticed, for

Скачать книгу