“Dear George,” said Totty, one evening near the end of May, “I hate the idea of going away and leaving you here in the heat!”
“So do I,” answered George, thoughtfully, as he turned in his chair and looked at his cousin’s face.
“I am sure you will fall ill. There will be nobody to take care of you, no place where you can drop in to dinner when you feel inclined, and where you can do just as you like. And yet—you see how Mamie is looking! I cannot conscientiously keep her here any longer.”
“Good heavens, Totty, you must not think of it! You do not mean to say you have been waiting here only on my account?”
Totty Trimm hesitated, withdrew one tiny foot, of which the point had projected beyond the skirt of her tea-gown, and then put out the other and looked at it curiously. They were both so small and pointed that George could not have told which was the right and which the left. She hesitated because she had not anticipated the question. George was not like other men. He would not be flattered by merely being informed that the whole Sherrington Trimm establishment had been kept up a month beyond the usual time, on a war footing, as it were, for his sole and express benefit. Most men would be pleased at being considered of enough importance to be told such a thing, though they might not believe the statement altogether. It was necessary that George should know that Totty was speaking the truth, if she answered his question directly. She hesitated and looked at the point of her little slipper.
“What does it matter?” she asked, suddenly, looking up and smiling at him affectionately.
It was very well done. The strongest asseverations could not have expressed more clearly her readiness to 221sacrifice everything she could to his comfort. George was touched.
“You have been very good to me, Totty. I cannot thank you enough.” He took her hand and pressed it warmly.
“What is the use of having friends unless they will stand by you?” she asked, returning the pressure, while her face grew grave and sad.
Since she had written her first note after his disappointment, she had never referred to his troubles. He had answered her on that occasion as he answered every one, by saying that there had never been any engagement, and he had marvelled at her exceeding tact in avoiding the subject ever since. Her reference to it now, however, seemed natural, and did not hurt him.
“You have been more than a friend to me,” he answered. “I feel as though you were my sister—only, if you were, I suppose I should be less grateful.”
“No, you would not,” said Totty with a smile of genuine pleasure produced of course by the success of her operations. “Do you want to do something to please me? Something to show your gratitude?”
“Whatever I can——”
“Come and spend the summer with us—no, I do not mean you to make a visit of a month or six weeks. Pack up all your belongings, come down with us and be one of the family, till we are ready to come back to town. Make your headquarters with us, write your book, go away and make visits for a week when you like, but consider that our house is your home. Will you?”
“But, Totty, you would be sick of the sight of me——” Visions of an enchanted existence by the river rose before George’s eyes. He was to some extent intellectually demoralised, and every agreeable prospect in the future resolved itself into the thought of mental rest superinduced by boundless luxury and material comfort.
“What an idea!” exclaimed Totty indignantly. “Besides, if you knew how interested I am in making the 222proposal, you would see that you would be conferring a favour instead of accepting one.”
She laughed softly when she had finished the sentence, thinking how very true her words were.
“I cannot understand how,” George answered. “Please explain. I really cannot see how I shall be conferring a favour by eating your wonderful dinners and drinking that champagne of Sherry’s.”
Totty laughed again.
“I wish you would finish it! It would be ever so much better for his liver, if you would.”
She wondered what George would think if he knew that a fresh supply of that particular brand of brut was already on its way from France, ordered in the hope that he might accept the invitation she was now pressing upon him.
“And as for the cook,” she continued, “he will do nothing unless there is a man in the party. That is it, George. I have told you now. Dear Sherry is not coming back until the autumn, and Mamie and I feel dreadfully unprotected down there all by ourselves. Please, please come and take care of us. I knew you would come—oh, I am so glad! It is such a relief to feel that you will be with us!”
As indeed it was, since if George was under Totty’s personal supervision there would be no chance of his returning to his former allegiance to Constance. George himself saw that her reasons were not serious, and considering the previous conversation and its earnest tone, he thought that he saw through Totty’s playfulness and kindly wish to do a very friendly action.
“I will tell you what I will do,” he said. “I will come for a month——”
“No—I will not have you for a month, nor for two months—the whole summer or nothing.”
So George at last consented, and left town two or three days later with Mrs. Sherrington Trimm and her daughter. He had felt that in some way he was acting weakly, 223and that he had yielded too easily to his cousin’s invitation, but if he had been in any doubt about her sincere desire to keep him during the whole season, his anxiety was removed when as soon as he was established in his new quarters Totty immediately began to talk of plans for the months before them, in all of which George played a principal part, and Mamie took it for granted that there was to be no separation until they should all go back to New York together. During the first few days George allowed himself to be utterly idle and let the hours pass with an indifference to all thought which he had never known before.
He had been transported into a sort of fairyland, of which he had enjoyed occasional glimpses at other times, but which he had never had an opportunity of knowing intimately. It was unlike anything in his experience. Even the journey had not reminded him of other journeys, for it had been performed in that luxurious privacy which is dear to the refined American. Mr. Craik’s yacht was permanently at his sister’s disposal, and on the morning appointed for the departure she and Mamie and George had driven down to the pier at their leisure and had gone on board. It had been but a step from the perfectly appointed house in the city to the equally perfect dwelling on the water, and only one step more from the snowy deck of the yacht to the flower garden before the country mansion on the banks of the great river. Everything had been ready for them, on board and on shore, and George could not realise when the journey was over that he had been carried over a distance which he formerly only traversed in the heat and dust of a noisy train, or on the crowded deck of a river steamboat. He had passed the hot hours sitting under the cool shade of a double awning, in the most comfortable of chairs beside Mamie Trimm and opposite to her mother. There had been no noise, no tramping of sailors, no blowing of whistles, no shouting of orders. From time to time, indeed, he caught a glimpse of the captain’s feet as he 224paced the bridge, but that was all. At mid-day a servant had appeared and Totty had glanced at him, glanced at the table beside her and nodded. Immediately luncheon had been served and George had recognised the touch of the master in the two or three delicacies he had tasted, and had found in his glass wine of the famous brand which was said to have caused Sherry Trimm’s sufferings. He had divided with Mamie a priceless peach, which had no natural right to be ripe on the last day of May, and Totty had selected for him a little bunch of muscat grapes such as he might not have eaten in the south before September. George tasted the ambrosia and swallowed the nectar, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery, the two pretty faces and the pleasant voices in his ear, thinking, perhaps, of the old times when after a desperate morning’s work at reviewing trash, he had sat down to a luncheon of cold meat, pickles and tea. The thought of the contrast made the present more delightful.
The spell was not broken, and Totty’s country-house prolonged without interruption the series of exquisite sensations which had been intermittent during the last month in New York. If Totty had intended to play the part of the tempter instead of being the chief comforter, she could not have done it with a more diabolical skill. She believed that a man could always be more easily attacked by the senses than by his intelligence, and she put every principle of her belief into her acts. She partly knew, and partly guessed, the manner of George’s former life, the absence of luxury, the monotony of an existence in which common necessities were always provided for in the same way, without stint but without variety. Her art consisted in creating contrasts of unlike perfections, so that the senses, unable to decide between the amount of pleasure experienced yesterday, enjoyed to-day and anticipated to-morrow, should be kept in a constant state of suspended judgment. She had practised this system with her husband and it had often 225succeeded in persuading him to let her have her own way, and she practised it continually for her own personal satisfaction, as being the only means of extracting all possible enjoyment from her existence.
George fell under the charm without even making an effort to resist it. Why, he asked himself dreamily, should he resist anything that was good in itself and harmless in its consequences? His life had all at once fallen in pleasant places. Should he disappoint Totty and give Mamie pain by a sudden determination to break up all their plans and return to the heat of the city? He could work here as well as anywhere else, better if there was any truth in the theory that the mind should be more active when the body is subject to no pain or inconvenience. A deal of asceticism had been forced upon him since he had been seventeen years old, and he believed that a surfeit of luxuries would do him no harm now. He would get tired of it all, no doubt, and would be very glad to go back to his more simple existence.
Totty, however, was far too accomplished an Epicurean to allow her patient a surfeit of anything. She watched him more narrowly than he supposed and was ready with a change, not when she saw signs of fatigue in his manner, his face or his appetite, but before that, as soon as she had seen that he was pleased. She was playing a great game and her attention never relaxed. There was a fortune at stake of which he himself did not dream, and of which even she did not know the extent. She had everything in her favour. The coast was clear, for Sherrington was in Europe. The final scene was prepared, since Mamie was already in love with George. She herself was a past master of scene-shifting and her theatre was well provided with properties of every description. All that was necessary was that the hero should take a fancy to the heroine. But the very fact that it all looked so easy aroused Totty’s anxiety. She said to herself that what appeared to be most simple was 226often, in reality, most difficult, and she warned herself to be careful and diffident of success.
Fortunately Mamie was all she could desire her to be. She did not believe in beauty as a means of attracting a disappointed man. Beauty could only draw his mind into making comparisons, and comparisons must revive recollection and reawaken regret. She had more faith in Mamie’s subtle charm of manner, voice and motion than she would have had in all the faultless perfections of classic features, queenly stature and royal carriage. That charm of hers, gave her an individuality of her own, such as Constance Fearing had never possessed, unlike anything that George had ever noticed in other girls or women. Doubtless he might have too much of that, too, as well as of other things, but Totty was even more cautious of the effects she produced with Mamie than of those she brought about by her minute attention to the management of her house. And here her greatest skill appeared, for she had to play a game of three-sided duplicity. She had to please George, without wearying him, to regulate the intercourse between the two so as to suit her own ends, and to invent reasons for making Mamie behave as she desired that she should without communicating to the girl a word of her intentions. If George appeared to have been enjoying especially a quiet conversation with Mamie, he must be prevented from talking to her again alone for at least twenty-four hours, and even then he must be allowed to please himself in the matter. This was not easy, for Mamie was by this time blindly in love with him, and if she were not watched would be foolish enough to bore him by her frequent presence at his side. To keep her away from him long enough to make him want her company needed much diplomacy. If George went out for a turn in the garden, and if Mamie joined him without an invitation, Totty could not pursue the pair in order to protect George from being bored. Hitherto also, Mamie had made no confidences to her mother and did not seem inclined to 227make any. Manifestly, if an accident could happen by which Mamie could be brought to betray herself to her careful parent, great advantages would ensue. The careful parent would then appear as the firm and skilful ally of the love-lorn daughter, the two would act in concert and great results might be effected. Totty was not only really fond of George, in her own way, but it would not have suited her that a hair of his head should be injured. Nevertheless, she nourished all sorts of malicious hope............