Chapter V: Company Manners

Agatha took leave of Forbes about two hours before Warren's train was due. She had worked valiantly most of the morning to render the room he was to occupy approximately presentable. She had patched the worst places in the carpet, provided two chairs with seats of cretonne, and brought all the pictures from her own quarters to help disguise the defaced condition of the guest-room walls. Her feeling of dissatisfaction with the result, rather than her labors, had tired her, and she had no heart for making the most of the dramatic possibilities of the farewell. In her faded print dress, with a dusting cap drooping limply over one ear, she presented herself on the porch, hastily drawing on a kid glove, her sole make-up for her rôle.

"Well, good-by, Mr. Forbes. I'm going now."

Forbes took her gloved hand in both his. "I hope you'll have a delightful week-end," he said cordially. "Nobody deserves it more."

"I'm not anxious to get my deserts," Agatha assured him with truth, and then to head off inconvenient questionings, "Give my apologies to Mr. Warren, and say that if it had been possible I would have been here to receive him myself. But I am sure that Miss Finch and Hephzibah between them will make you perfectly comfortable."

She released her hand and pulling off her glove as she went, betook herself to the kitchen, where Phemie was still washing the dishes from the mid-day meal. Left to herself, Phemie could be trusted to stretch that uninspiring task over the better part of the afternoon. Thanks to Agatha's presence, the splashing at once became animated.

Deprived of the stimulating companionship of his elderly hostess, Forbes decided to accompany Howard to the station. From the kitchen window Agatha watched the carryall pass and recalled the sensations with which she had first seen Forbes approaching in the same shabby vehicle. Perhaps her present apprehensions would prove as groundless as those. Agatha whistled a martial tune, as she beat up her cake, and sought diversion in addressing Phemie with that disregard of grammatical precedent to be expected from a girl named Hephzibah Diggs.

* * * * *

The usual number of loungers was in evidence at the Bridgewater station, and the approach of Howard and his passenger was the signal for animated comment. The rumors Agatha had been at such pains to disseminate had taken on new and startling details as the village gossips rolled them under their tongues. It was stated on indisputable authority that Forbes had been the victim of sunstroke during his South American sojourn, and that this had left him blind and with his mind permanently affected. Another equally authoritative version pictured him the slave of an appetite for liquor and accounted for his presence at Oak Knoll by the fact that the village was "bone dry." All the rumors agreed, however, in emphasizing Forbes' aversion to society, and though Howard was surrounded and questioned as soon as he stepped on the platform, it was not till the train was in sight that any one ventured to approach the vehicle where Forbes sat alone.

Howard, absorbed in the responsibilities connected with the recognition of Mr. Warren, failed to notice the intrusion on Forbes' privacy, but a number of other people were more observant. For once the arrival of the four o'clock express had a rival in the public interest. The unconscious Forbes was the target for a dozen pair of curious eyes, as Jim Doolittle slouched toward him.

Jim paused by the carryall and looked Forbes over with the agreeable certainty that he could make his scrutiny as prolonged and insolent as he pleased, without being called to account. Then as the noise of the approaching train warned him to make the most of his conversational opportunities, he ventured a remark: "How do you find yourself to-day?"

Forbes' face showed no change of expression. Though Jim's nasal tones reached him distinctly, it did not occur to him that he was the object of solicitude. Jim waited vainly for a reply, and then, spurred to persistence by his grinning audience, he tried again, this time lifting his voice to a bellow, as if Forbes were deaf as well as blind. "Air they treatin' you right out to Kent's?"

Forbes turned with a start. "Beg pardon! I didn't know you were speaking to me."

"You're stayin' out to Kent's ain't you, for the summer? Folks say you came for your health."

"Yes." Forbes spoke stiffly, sharing the impression of most men who have always been robust, that illness is a disgrace. "The doctors advised a change of air."

"And does Aggie Kent take good care of you?"

The formality of Mr. Forbes' manner became more pronounced. "Miss Kent," he replied, with marked emphasis on the prefix, "has made me most comfortable."

"Glad to hear it, glad to hear it," Mr. Doolittle assured him affably. "Seems as if takin' boarders was pretty risky for anybody of her age."

Forbes' irritation deepened. "Miss Kent is perfectly capable and extremely vigorous. I believe she could tire me out."

"Yes, I shouldn't wonder," Jim agreed, rather to Forbes' annoyance. "And I guess Zaida Finch steadies her down when there's a chance of her doin' something flighty."

As this suggested to Forbes the weakening of his hostess' intellect through age, necessitating the guardianship of Miss Finch, he contented himself by a disdainful silence. The approach of Howard with a stranger in tow checked further conversational angling on Jim's part He tore himself away with a genial, "See you later," to which Forbes responded by a non-committal grunt. But he forgot his annoyance as Warren shouted his name, coupled with those abusive epithets with which his sex are wont to disguise sentiment toward one another.

Mr. Ridgeley Warren took an unaffected pleasure in his own society, which as a rule proved contagious. He was an inveterate talker, noisy, slangy, in every way Forbes' antithesis. Warren admired Forbes' dignity, and Forbes found diversion in Warren's flow of spirits. And beneath this mutual admiration was one of those steadfast affections which springing up between two men is more lasting, in nine cases out of ten, than the love between men and women.

It was fortunate that the staid bays knew the way home, for though Howard sat with the lines in his hands, he left to the horses all responsibility for keeping to the road, and turning at the right crossing. Warren told stories steadily all the way, and roared his appreciation of each. Howard laughed too, and Forbes shared their amusement, though less boisterously. Though the horses moved with deliberation, the five-mile drive seemed short.

As they turned up the driveway at Oak Knoll, Forbes said with the pride of a proprietor, "Fine old place, isn't it?"

"You bet," agreed Warren, his eyes upon one of the splendid oaks which had given the place its name. Then beyond, he caught sight of the house, and he leaned forward for a better look. "House been standing for some time, from appearances."

"Built by Miss Kent's grandfather," Forbes replied boastfully, "and she's well on to seventy. I imagine the house is a hundred years old."

Warren, staring at the sagging roof of the old building, looked as if he could easily believe it, but unaware of his lack of enthusiasm, Forbes continued: "I'm sorry you're not going to see Miss Kent, as she's away for over Sunday. You'd fall in love with her on sight."

Warren shrugged his shoulders. "Seventeen is nearer my style than seventy. Can't you trot out some pretty girls for me to fall in love with?"

"I'm afraid Miss Finch is all we can offer you in the way of feminine society, old man, and I've found her 'uncertain, coy and hard to please.' But you always had a way with the ladies. You might do better."

The carriage stopped at the door. Howard alighted and possessed himself of the visitor's suit-case. Miss Finch, who from the window of the living-room had watched their leisurely progress along the driveway, appeared on the porch, prepared to do her duty as hostess if it killed her. Miss Finch's nose was red and her lips were blue. Despite the warmth of the mild summer day, her teeth chattered.

Warren's hilarious air had disappeared with his first view of the dilapidated country house where his friend was spending the summer. His introduction to Miss Finch completed his undoing. He stared at the tremulous little figure in silent stupefaction. What on earth was Forbes doing in this tumbledown building with two old women for company? And the extraordinary part was that Forbes seemed contented with his quarters. Warren ascended the stairs to his room, trying to make up his mind how to handle the situation. He had an uneasy feeling that his friend was being imposed on.

The appearance of his quarters confirmed his worst apprehensions. Warren looked around him, shook his head, and rejoined Forbes on the porch, feeling the necessity of immediate action. But Forbes' air of tranquillity made him hesitate. After all, if Forbes himself were satisfied, that was the main thing.

He broached the topic cautiously. "I judge your friend, Miss Kent, isn't what you'd call opulent."

"Hardly, or I shouldn't be here. She advertised for boarders. Some one was reading me a few of the promising ads from the _Onlooker_, and I recognized her name. You see I visited her once when I was a boy, and I've always remembered the beauty of the place."

"Trees are fine," agreed Warren with reserve. "But the buildings all seem rather seedy. Need paint badly."

"Do they?" Forbes spoke indifferently. "Paint is the least of my troubles."

"I suppose so. But say, Forbes, are you sure it's a good thing for you to be cooped up here all summer with two old hens?"

He had fancied he was being tactful, but to his surprise Forbes seemed irritated.

"You haven't seen Miss Kent. If you had, you'd know that she's a regular beef, iron and wine combination."

"If she's like Miss Finch," Warren was beginning, when Forbes interrupted him with such spontaneous laughter that he dropped his sentence unfinished.

"She's about as much like Miss Finch as a collie pup is like those Teddy bears the kids lug around. She's an old lady in years, but otherwise she's as young as you or I. She's so full of vitality that you can't be near her ten minutes without feeling braced up. She's like a mountain breeze."

"Pity a woman of that sort didn't marry," commented Warren dryly.

"That's what my old dad thought. Miss Kent was his first love, and he stayed single on her account till he was well on to forty."

"Maybe that's why you're ace high with the old lady. She's trying to make up to the son for turning down the father."

"Can't say, I'm sure. I imagine it's her disposition to be kind to the crippled and disabled and generally good-for-nothing."

His tone was suddenly bitter, and Warren's look sharpened. "How's Julia?" he asked with seeming irrelevance.

"Julia's well and enjoying herself." Forbes' manner seemed to defy his friend to criticize, and Warren, who would have enjoyed nothing better than expressing his opinion of Julia, changed the subject abruptly. If Forbes liked this gone-to-seed place and the society of old women it was no concern of his. Queer how differently men were affected when their love-affairs went wrong. Some took to drink and some were women-haters. With Forbes it had developed a craving for the atmosphere of an Old Ladies' Home. Every man to his taste.

Supper partly dissipated Warren's concern. The dining-room was as rusty as the rest of the house. Miss Finch at the head of the table looked tinier and more frightened than ever. The girl who waited on the table was, without exception, Warren decided, the most unattractive specimen of youthful femininity he had ever come across. But the supper was unique. As Warren ate, his high spirits returned. Old Forbes knew what he was about, after all. A homely waitress need not trouble a blind man. Warren was almost inclined to believe that he himself could put up with the sight of Phemie's vacant face for the rest of his life, if he could be sure of three such meals every day.

In the relief from his anxiety regarding Forbes, Warren turned his attention to Miss Finch. She looked so helpless over all his jokes, that he realized the necessity of strict literalness in dealing with her. "I suppose you've known Miss Kent for a long time," he said by way of beginning.

Miss Finch paled over the shock of being addressed, but answered with unusual promptness, "Yes, ever since she was a teething baby."

In an instant she knew what she had done even before Forbes, turning a perplexed face in her direction, asked, "But you're the younger of the two, are you not?"

Miss Finch opened her mouth like a newly-landed fish, and closed it again without speaking. The device Agatha had suggested and which she had mentally dismissed as "acting a lie," thrust itself upon her recollection, and she clutched it with the avidity of the desperate. Putting her hand to her ear with the immemorial gesture of the deaf, she quavered, "What did you say?"

"I asked if you weren't the younger of the two. Miss Kent said to me the other day that she thought of you as a mere girl."

"I didn't quite catch what you said," faltered Miss Finch, but before Forbes could again repeat his inquiry, Phemie created a diversion. She had taken the water pitcher to refill it, and as she advanced to the kitchen door, her tray extended before her, she looked back. It was characteristic of Phemie to walk in one direction and look in another. Agatha was beginning to congratulate herself on having at last eradicated this tendency, but she had not reckoned on the effect of a handsome and lively young man on Phemie's susceptible temperament. As she turned for another look at Warren, Phemie's tray came into collision with the door and the pitcher, overturning, broke in fragments.

As was inevitable, every one turned to look. Warren, who was in range of the door, saw it open, apparently of its own accord. A figure stood in the passageway, fairly dazzling in its effect after the gray tints of Miss Finch, the subdued tan and tow of Phemie. His eyes drank in the colorful apparition for some ten seconds and then a rounded arm closed the door. Phemie picked up the fragments of the broken pitcher, and tearfully withdrew.

Miss Finch sat through the remainder of the meal without tasting a morsel, waiting in an agony of apprehension for Forbes to ask her again whether she was older or younger than Miss Kent. She might have spared her anxiety, for Warren's flow of conversation gave no chance for settling such minor perplexities. Warren was one of the men to whom the propinquity of a pretty woman is as stimulating as champagne. He did not think it probable that the apparition in the kitchen could hear his witticisms, but he assumed that she must realize who was responsible for the hilarity at the supper table. And even without this confidence, he would probably have talked and jested in the same breezy fashion, this form of responsiveness to beauty being instinctive with him rather than deliberate.

The moment he was alone with Forbes, Warren broached the subject engrossing his thoughts. "Burton, you have my sympathy. You don't know what you're missing. Under this roof there's as pretty a bit of flesh and blood as ever wore petticoats. Take it from me, she's a peach."

"Phemie?" exclaimed Forbes. "The waitress?"

Warren's derisive yell effectually settled Phemie's claims. "Gosh, no! That girl would stop a clock. This one was out in the kitchen, but I could see her peeking through after the smash-up."

"Oh, yes," exclaimed Forbes, recollecting. "I know. That's Hephzibah."

Warren positively staggered. "Lord, forbid," he ejaculated piously, "she can't be."

"She is, though, Hephzibah Diggs."

Again Warren's stentorian tones shattered the peace of the night. He used his first spare breath in announcing his intention to get a nearer view and see if a girl named Hephzibah Diggs could possibly be the beauty she had seemed. The announcement of this intention rendered Forbes uneasy.

"You let Hephzibah alone," he warned his friend. "These self-respecting country girls think themselves as good as anybody--they _are_ as good as anybody. And I'm responsible to Miss Kent for your behavior."

"I don't want anything of the girl except to see her by daylight. She's not too self-respecting for that, is she?" And then seeing that Forbes was really annoyed, Warren dropped the subject of Hephzibah, though without the least alteration in his intentions.

It did not prove so easy as he had anticipated to get a satisfactory view of the girl whose face, glimpsed in the half-light of the previous evening, had seemed so alluring. At breakfast time Phemie met with no accident, and though Warren watched the swinging door that led to the kitchen with the alertness of a cat at a rat hole, it swung open and shut without revealing anything more seductive than a corner of the kitchen table. The day was warm, but the outside kitchen door remained obstinately closed, and on the rare occasions when it opened, it was Phemie who emerged.

Warren was not a man who readily surrendered. Indeed, difficulties were likely to stiffen a careless desire into adamantine resolution. When his watch showed noon and Hephzibah Diggs continued invisible, he decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. He rose from his chair on the porch stretching his sinewy length lazily. "I believe I'll walk about a bit," he said, "and work up an appetite for dinner. With meals like these, a man wants to be able to do himself full justice every time he sits down to the table."

"You ought to try Miss Kent's cooking," boasted Forbes. "She trained this girl, and she does well, but she's not a patch on her teacher."

Warren's stroll took him no farther than the kitchen door. He ascended the steps jauntily and knocked. After waiting vainly for an invitation to enter, he decided to assume that it had been spoken, and pushing the door ajar, he walked in.

Over in the corner Phemie was chopping something in a wooden bowl, but in spite of the insistent tapping of the knife upon the wood, he was hardly conscious of her existence. A girl stood at the table rolling out biscuit, and her sleeve turned back almost to the shoulders, revealed a faultless arm, white and rounded and tapering to the finger-tips. She turned her head at his step and he thrilled with amazed pleasure. His glimpse of the previous evening had not been misleading. Indeed his impression had fallen short of the actuality. He was looking at the handsomest young woman he had ever seen.

Mr. Ridgeley Warren did not lack self-confidence. His momentary silence was due to wondering admiration, not to any doubt of his power to please. With smiling self-possession he advanced into the room. In her corner Phemie chopped on steadily, without removing her fascinated eyes from his face. Hephzibah--it was preposterous that this radiant creature should be encumbered with such a name--continued to roll biscuit.

"You seem busy here," remarked Warren in his most ingratiating manner. "Don't you want an assistant?"

He was sorry to discover that the voice of Hephzibah Diggs was not in accord with her bodily perfection. She talked through her nose and that fact impressed him so painfully he almost lost the force of her reply, "Guess me and Phemie kin manage."

"I'm quite a little cook myself," continued Warren, saddened but not discouraged. "In my last place they said my parboiled cauliflower beat anything they had ever tasted. And my string-bean _parfait_ has become popular in the best New York restaurants."

Phemie's delighted gasp was his sole applause. Hephzibah Diggs gave her attention to her biscuits.

Warren seated himself on one corner of the immaculate table and began to talk with his customary volubility. His remarks took the form he imagined would please a country farmer's daughter, lacking the rudiments of education. He soon realized, and with some irritation, that he was making an impression on the wrong girl. Phemie chortled joyfully over her chopping. Hephzibah Diggs listened as if it were against her principles to smile.

She brought three eggs from the pantry presently and broke them in a workmanlike manner, whites in one bowl, and yolks in another. "Got to have three more," she said to Phemie in that unpleasant nasal voice which helped to reconcile Warren to her continued silence.

A little flicker of triumph crossed Warren's face. Her sending Phemie for eggs was obviously a ruse to be alone with him. When Phemie had departed on her errand, with obvious reluctance, he leaned toward Hephzibah, his smile so confident that it was almost a smirk. She looked up with a directness rather disconcerting and he reflected that her eyes even in a face like Phemie's, would have given her a certain claim to beauty.

"I don't like men folks hangin' 'round when I'm busy." Her speech, it appeared, was as direct as the gaze of those adorable, reddish brown eyes.

"Then what do you say to a little walk when you've finished your work?"

"I ain't got the time."

"You mean you've got another fellow up your sleeve, don't you? Say, let's give him the slip. You ought to be nice to me after I've come so far to see you."

She turned her attention again to the cooking, drawing her arched brows into a frown. He noticed with approval that her beauty lost nothing of its distinction by her look of ill temper. But perhaps that was because the ill temper was a make-believe.

He leaned toward her persuasively, losing his head a little in her proximity. His pulses quickened. He thought he had never seen anything prettier than the way her hair crinkled away from her creamy neck. It occurred to him that he would like to kiss the cheek whose vivid freshness seemed an invitation to such temerity. Country people were primitive and direct. With a girl of the type of Hephzibah Diggs, a kiss was simply a natural expression of admiration.

As his lips brushed that blooming cheek, she reached for the bowl containing the egg yolks. She did not look in his direction as she flung the contents in his face, but her aim was true. He sprang to his feet with a gasp and a sputter. There was an incredible quantity of that sticky yellow stuff, matting his hair, dripping from his eyebrows, trickling in sickening streams down his neck.

"You little vixen. Does this stuff spot?"

Hephzibah ignored his inquiry. Warren backed away, laughing nervously, his mood divided between anger with her and shame for himself. Then panic seized him at the thought of encountering Phemie and he took a hasty departure, mopping himself with his handkerchief as he ran.

Howard had driven Miss Finch to church and Forbes was alone on the porch. "You didn't walk far," he said, recognizing his friend's step.

"No--o. Had an encounter with a wasp. I'll be down in a minute when I repair damages."

He hoped Hephzibah would not tell Miss Kent of the episode, but he decided to take the chance, and suggested to Forbes his coming up again in two or three weeks. To his surprise Forbes was not enthusiastic.

"It was awfully good of Miss Kent to take me in," he explained, apparently forgetful of the advertisement which was responsible for his presence at Oak Knoll. "And I don't want to bother her with too much company. I think she finds it upsetting to have strangers around, and it's not singular when you come to think of it. For all she's so wonderful, she's really getting to be an old lady."