The Rise of Silas Lapham Read online

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” said Corey, not perfectly reconciled to philosophy in the place of business, but accepting it as he must.

  “Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands. As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out—even if he hasn’t been found out to be very bad—it’s pretty much all up with him. No, sir. I don’t want to know people through and through.”

  The greater part of the crowd on board—and, of course, the boat was crowded—looked as if they might not only be easily but safely known. There was little style and no distinction among them; they were people who were going down to the beach for the fun or the relief of it, and were able to afford it. In face they were commonplace, with nothing but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they did not wholly lack fire. But they were nearly all shrewd and friendly looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous intimacy native to us all. The women were dandified in dress, according to their means and taste, and the men differed from each other in degrees of indifference to it. To a straw-hatted population, such as ours is in summer, no sort of personal dignity is possible. We have not even the power over observers which comes from the fantasticality of an Englishman when he discards the conventional dress. In our straw hats and our serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd of boys.

  “Someday,” said Lapham, rising as the boat drew near the wharf of the final landing, “there’s going to be an awful accident on these boats. Just look at them jam.”

  He meant the people thickly packed on the pier, and under strong restraint of locks and gates to prevent them from rushing on board the boat and possessing her for the return trip before she had landed her Nantasket passengers.

  “Overload ’em every time,” he continued, with a sort of dry, impersonal concern at the impending calamity, as if it could not possibly include him. “They take about twice as many as they ought to carry, and about ten times as many as they could save if anything happened. Yes, sir, it’s bound to come. Hello! There’s my girl!” He took out his folded newspaper and waved it toward a group of phaetons and barouches drawn up on the pier a little apart from the pack of people, and a lady in one of them answered with a flourish of her parasol.

  When he had made his way with his guest through the crowd, she began to speak to her father before she noticed Corey. “Well, Colonel, you’ve improved your last chance. We’ve been coming to every boat since four o’clock—or Jerry has—and I told Mother that I would come myself once, and see if I couldn’t fetch you; and if I failed, you could walk next time. You’re getting perfectly spoiled.”

  The Colonel enjoyed letting her scold him to the end before he said, with a twinkle of pride in his guest and satisfaction in her probably being able to hold her own against any discomfiture, “I’ve brought Mr. Corey down for the night with me, and I was showing him things all the way, and it took time.”

  The young fellow was at the side of the open beach wagon, making a quick bow, and Penelope Lapham was cozily drawling, “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Corey?” before the Colonel had finished his explanation.

  “Get right in there, alongside of Miss Lapham, Mr. Corey,” he said, pulling himself up into the place beside the driver. “No, no,” he had added quickly at some signs of polite protest in the young man, “I don’t give up the best place to anybody. Jerry, suppose you let me have hold of the leathers a minute.”

  This was his way of taking the reins from the driver; and in half the time he specified, he had skillfully turned the vehicle on the pier, among the crooked lines and groups of foot passengers, and was spinning up the road toward the stretch of verandaed hotels and restaurants in the sand along the shore. “Pretty gay down here,” he said, indicating all this with a turn of his whip as he left it behind him. “But I’ve got about sick of hotels; and this summer I made up my mind that I’d take a cottage. Well, Pen, how are the folks?” He looked halfway ’round for her answer, and with the eye thus brought to bear upon her he was able to give her a wink of supreme content. The Colonel, with no sort of ulterior design, and nothing but his triumph over Mrs. Lapham definitely in his mind, was feeling, as he would have said, about right.

  The girl smiled a daughter’s amusement at her father’s boyishness. “I don’t think there’s much change since morning. Did Irene have a headache when you left?”

  “No,” said the Colonel.

  “Well, then, there’s that to report.”

  “Pshaw!” said the Colonel, with vexation in his tone.

  “I’m sorry Miss Irene isn’t well,” said Corey politely.

  “I think she must have got it from walking too long on the beach. The air is so cool here that you forget how hot the sun is.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” assented Corey.

  “A good night’s rest will make it all right,” suggested the Colonel, without looking ’round. “But you girls have got to look out.”

  “If you’re fond of walking,” said Corey, “I suppose you find the beach a temptation.”

  “Oh, it isn’t so much that,” returned the girl. “You keep on walking on and on because it’s so smooth and straight before you. We’ve been here so often that we know it all by heart—just how it looks at high tide, and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after a storm. We’re as well acquainted with the crabs and stranded jellyfish as we are with the children digging in the sand and the people sitting under umbrellas. I think they’re always the same, all of them.”

  The Colonel left the talk to the young people. When he spoke next it was to say, “Well, here we are!” and he turned from the highway and drove up in front of a brown cottage with a vermilion roof and a group of geraniums clutching the rock that cropped up in the loop formed by the road. It was treeless and bare all ’round, and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little more than a stone’s cast from the cottage. A hospitable smell of supper filled the air, and Mrs. Lapham was on the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her belated husband’s excuses, which she was obliged to check on her tongue at sight of Corey.

  VII

  THE exultant Colonel swung himself lightly down from his seat. “I’ve brought Mr. Corey with me,” he nonchalantly explained.

  Mrs. Lapham made their guest welcome, and the Colonel showed him to his room, briefly assuring himself that there was nothing wanting there. Then he went to wash his own hands, carelessly ignoring the eagerness with which his wife pursued him to their chamber.

  “What gave Irene a headache?” he asked, making himself a fine lather from his hairy paws.

  “Never you mind Irene,” promptly retorted his wife. “How came he to come? Did you press him? If you did, I’ll never forgive you, Silas!”

  The Colonel laughed, and his wife shook him by the shoulder to make him laugh lower. “Sh!” she whispered. “Do you want him to hear everything? Did you urge him?”

  The Colonel laughed the more. He was going to get all the good out of this. “No, I didn’t urge him. Seemed to want to come.”

  “I don’t believe it. Where did you meet him?”

  “At the office.”

  “What office?”

  “Mine.”

  “Nonsense! What was he doing there?”

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  “What did he come for?”

  “Come for? Oh! he said he wanted to go into the mineral-paint business.”

  Mrs. Lapham dropped into a chair, and watched his bulk shaken with smothered laughter. “Silas Lapham,” she gasped, “if you try to get off any more of those things on me—”

  The Colonel applied himself to the towel. “Had a notion he could work it in South America. I don’t know what he’s up to.”

  “Nev
er mind!” cried his wife. “I’ll get even with you yet.”

  “So I told him he had better come down and talk it over,” continued the Colonel, in well-affected simplicity. “I knew he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Go on!” threatened Mrs. Lapham.

  “Right thing to do, wasn’t it?”

  A tap was heard at the door, and Mrs. Lapham answered it. A maid announced supper. “Very well,” she said, “come to tea now. But I’ll make you pay for this, Silas.”

  Penelope had gone to her sister’s room as soon as she entered the house.

  “Is your head a little better, ’Rene?” she asked.

  “Yes, a little,” came a voice from the pillows. “But I shall not come to tea. I don’t want anything. If I keep still, I shall be all right by morning.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said the elder sister. “He’s come down with Father.”

  “He hasn’t! Who?” cried Irene, starting up in simultaneous denial and demand.

  “Oh, well, if you say he hasn’t, what’s the use of my telling you who?”

  “Oh, how can you treat me so!” moaned the sufferer. “What do you mean, Pen?”

  “I guess I’d better not tell you,” said Penelope, watching her like a cat playing with a mouse. “If you’re not coming to tea, it would just excite you for nothing.”

  The mouse moaned and writhed upon the bed.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t treat you so!”

  The cat seated herself across the room, and asked quietly: “Well, what could you do if it was Mr. Corey? You couldn’t come to tea, you say. But he’ll excuse you. I’ve told him you had a headache. Why, of course you can’t come! It would be too barefaced. But you needn’t be troubled, Irene; I’ll do my best to make the time pass pleasantly for him.” Here the cat gave a low titter, and the mouse girded itself up with a momentary courage and self-respect.

  “I should think you would be ashamed to come here and tease me so.”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe me,” argued Penelope. “Why shouldn’t he come down with Father, if Father asked him? And he’d be sure to if he thought of it. I don’t see any p’ints about that frog that’s any better than any other frog.”

  The sense of her sister’s helplessness was too much for the tease; she broke down in a fit of smothered laughter, which convinced her victim that it was nothing but an ill-timed joke.

  “Well, Pen, I wouldn’t use you so,” she whimpered.

  Penelope threw herself on the bed beside her.

  “Oh, poor Irene! He is here. It’s a solemn fact.” And she caressed and soothed her sister, while she choked with laughter. “You must get up and come out. I don’t know what brought him here, but here he is.”

  “It’s too late now,” said Irene desolately. Then she added, with a wilder despair: “What a fool I was to take that walk!”

  “Well,” coaxed her sister, “come out and get some tea. The tea will do you good.”

  “No, no; I can’t come. But send me a cup here.”

  “Yes, and then perhaps you can see him later in the evening.”

  “I shall not see him at all.”

  An hour after, Penelope came back to her sister’s room and found her before her glass. “You might as well have kept still, and been well by morning, ’Rene,” she said. “As soon as we were done Father said, ‘Well, Mr. Corey and I have got to talk over a little matter of business, and we’ll excuse you, ladies.’ He looked at Mother in a way that I guess was pretty hard to bear. ’Rene, you ought to have heard the Colonel swelling at supper. It would have made you feel that all he said the other day was nothing.”

  Mrs. Lapham suddenly opened the door.

  “Now, see here, Pen,” she said, as she closed it behind her, “I’ve had just as much as I can stand from your father, and if you don’t tell me this instant what it all means—”

  She left the consequences to imagination, and Penelope replied with her mock soberness: “Well, the Colonel does seem to be on his high horse, ma’am. But you mustn’t ask me what his business with Mr. Corey is, for I don’t know. All that I know is that I met them at the landing, and that they conversed all the way down—on literary topics.”

  “Nonsense! What do you think it is?”

  “Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think this talk about business is nothing but a blind. It seems a pity Irene shouldn’t have been up to receive him,” she added.

  Irene cast a mute look of imploring at her mother, who was too much preoccupied to afford her the protection it asked.

  “Your father said he wanted to go into the business with him.”

  Irene’s look changed to a stare of astonishment and mystification, but Penelope preserved her imperturbability.

  “Well, it’s a lucrative business, I believe.”

  “Well, I don’t believe a word of it!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “And so I told your father.”

  “Did it seem to convince him?” inquired Penelope.

  Her mother did not reply. “I know one thing,” she said. “He’s got to tell me every word, or there’ll be no sleep for him this night.”

  “Well, ma’am,” said Penelope, breaking down in one of her queer laughs, “I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if you were right.”

  “Go on and dress, Irene,” ordered her mother, “and then you and Pen come out into the parlor. They can have just two hours for business, and then we must all be there to receive him. You haven’t got headache enough to hurt you.”

  “Oh, it’s all gone now,” said the girl.

  At the end of the limit she had given the Colonel, Mrs. Lapham looked into the dining room, which she found blue with his smoke.

  “I think you gentlemen will find the parlor pleasanter now, and we can give it up to you.”

  “Oh no, you needn’t,” said her husband. “We’ve got about through.” Corey was already standing, and Lapham rose too. “I guess we can join the ladies now. We can leave that little point till tomorrow.”

  Both of the young ladies were in the parlor when Corey entered with their father, and both were frankly indifferent to the few books and the many newspapers scattered about on the table where the large lamp was placed. But after Corey had greeted Irene he glanced at the novel under his eye, and said, in the dearth that sometimes befalls people at such times: “I see you’re reading Middlemarch. Do you like George Eliot?”

  “Who?” asked the girl.

  Penelope interposed. “I don’t believe Irene’s read it yet. I’ve just got it out of the library; I heard so much talk about it. I wish she would let you find out a little about the people for yourself,” she added.

  But here her father struck in: “I can’t get the time for books. It’s as much as I can do to keep up with the newspapers; and when night comes, I’m tired, and I’d rather go out to the theater, or a lecture, if they’ve got a good stereopticon to give you views of the places. But I guess we all like a play better then ’most anything else. I want something that’ll make me laugh. I don’t believe in tragedy. I think there’s enough of that in real life without putting it on the stage. Seen Joshua Whitcomb?”

  The whole family joined in the discussion, and it appeared that they all had their opinions of the plays and actors. Mrs. Lapham brought the talk back to literature. “I guess Penelope does most of our reading.”

  “Now, Mother, you’re not going to put it all on me!” said the girl, in comic protest.

  Her mother laughed, and then added, with a sigh: “I used to like to get hold of a good book when I was a girl; but we weren’t allowed to read many novels in those days. My mother called them all lies. And I guess she wasn’t so very far wrong about some of them.”

  “They’re certainly fictions,” said Corey, smiling.

  “Well, we do buy a good many books, first and last,” said the Colonel,
who probably had in mind the costly volumes which they presented to one another on birthdays and holidays. “But I get about all the reading I want in the newspapers. And when the girls want a novel, I tell ’em to get it out of the library. That’s what the library’s for. Phew!” he panted, blowing away the whole unprofitable subject. “How close you womenfolks like to keep a room! You go down to the seaside or up to the mountains for a change of air, and then you cork yourselves into a room so tight you don’t have any air at all. Here! You girls get on your bonnets, and go and show Mr. Corey the view of the hotels from the rocks.”