The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
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My mother is afraid she would have a bad conscience. If she took all the work and worry on herself, she would feel that she was paying the penalty of her pleasure beforehand; if she didn’t, she would know that she must pay for it afterwards. Isn’t that so, mother? But now you leave it to me, you dear old thing.” Langbrith ran round the table and kissed her on top of the head, and made her blush like a girl, as he patted her shoulder. “Just imagine I was master, and you couldn’t help yourself.” He went back to his place. “ What was the largest dinner you ever had in the old time?”
She hesitated, as if for his meaning. “ Mr. Langbrith once entertained a company of six gentlemen, who came up here and talked of locating some cotton-mills. We called it “ supper.’ ”
“I can imagine them. Can’t you, Falk? The moneyed man to supply the funds, the lawyer to draw up the papers, the civil engineer to survey the property. Very solemn, and a little pompous, but secretly ready for a burst if the opportunity offered under the right auspices; something like an outing of city officials.”
“They were very pleasant gentlemen,” Mrs. Langbrith interposed, as from her conscience.
“Oh, I dare say they were when they had tasted my father’s madeira. But about our dinner now? I don’t think we’d better have more than twelve, and I should want them equally divided between youth and age.”
Mrs. Langbrith looked at him as if she did not quite understand him, and he said:
“Have Jessamy Colebridge and Hope Hawberk and Susie Johns and Bob Matthewson—he’s a good fellow—and make out the half-dozen with Falk and me; we’re both good fellows. Then, on your side of the line, yourself first of all, mother, and the rector and his wife, and Judge and Mrs. Garley, and—who else? Oh, Dr. Anther, of course! I want Falk to meet the doctor—the dearest and quaintest old type in the world. I don’t know why he hasn’t been in to see us, mother. Has he been here lately?”
“He was here a day or two before you came,” Mrs. Langbrith answered, with her eyes down.
“Perhaps he has been waiting for me to call. Well, what do you think of my dinner-party?’’
“It seems very nice,’’ Mrs. Langbrith sighed.
“And haven’t you any preferences? Nobody you want to turn down?”
“ It will be a good deal of a surprise for Saxmills,” she suffered herself to say.
“I flatter myself it will. I have been telling Falk that the mixed assembly of old and young is unknown in Saxmills.”
Falk had not troubled himself to take part in the discussion, if it was that, but had given himself to the turkey and the cranberry sauce, with the mashed potatoes and the stewed squash, which Mrs. Langbrith had very good. Her son had obliged her to provide claret, which Falk now drank out of an abnormal glass with a stout stem and pimpled cup, hitherto dedicated to currant wine, before saying: “ It astonished me less than if I had been used to something different all my life. You ought to have tried the other thing on me.”
“Well, I only supposed from the smartness of the people in your Caricature pictures that you had always lived in a whirl of fashion.”
“That shows how little you know of fashion,” said Falk, and Langbrith laughed with the difficult joy of a man who owns a hit.
Mrs. Langbrith glanced from one to the other; from her son, with his long, distinguished face (he had decided that it was colonial), to the dark, aquiline type of Falk, with his black hair, his upward-pointed mustache, his pouted lips, and his prominent, floating, brown eyes. In her abeyance, she was scared at the bold person who was not afraid of her son.
“Well,” said Langbrith, “I shall have to find someone to illustrate my vers de society who knows enough of the world for both.”
“You couldn’t!” Falk insinuated.
Mrs. Langbrith did not quite catch the point, but her son laughed again. “No one ever distances you, Falk!”
He discussed the arrangement of the affair with his mother. At the end, as she rose, obedient to his sign, and he came round to give her his arm, he said: “After all, perhaps, it wouldn’t be well to strike too hard a blow. If you think you can get it up by Saturday night, mother, we’ll drop the notion of having White. Make it tea, with turkey at one end of the table and chicken pie at the other, and all the sweet pickles and preserves and kinds of cake you can get together; coffee straight through, and a glass of the old Langbrith madeira to top off with.”
V
Mrs. Langbrith went into the library with her son and his friend by the folding doors from the dining-room, but only to go out of the door which opened into the hall, and escape by that route to the kitchen for an immediate conference with the cook.
The young men dropped into deep leather chairs at opposite corners of the fireplace, after lighting their cigars. Probably, the comfort of his seat suggested Langbrith’s reflection: “ It is a shame I never knew my father. We should have had so much in common. I couldn’t imagine anything more adapted to the human back than these chairs.”
“His taste?” Falk asked, between whiffs.
“Everything in the house is his taste. I don’t believe my mother has changed a thing. He must have been a strong personality.” Langbrith followed his friend’s eye in its lift towards his father’s portrait over the mantel.
“I should think so,” Falk assented.
“Those old New England faces,” Langbrith continued, meditatively, “have a great charm. From a child, that face of my father’s fascinated me. As I got on, and began to be interested in my environment, I read into it all I had read out of Hawthorne about the Puritan type. I put the grim old chaps out of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and the Twice-Told Tales into it, and interpreted my father by them. But, really, I knew very little about him. My mother’s bereavement seemed to have sealed her lips, and I preferred dreaming to asking. A kid is queer! Once or twice when I did ask, she evaded answering; that was after I was old enough to understand, and I didn’t press my questions. He was much older than she; twenty years, I believe. He couldn’t have been a Puritan in his creed; he was a Unitarian, as far as churchgoing went, and I believe my mother is a Unitarian yet; but she goes to the Episcopal Church, which makes itself a home for everybody, and she likes the rector. You’ll like him, too, Falk.”
“He won’t talk theology to me, I suppose,” Falk grumbled.
“He’ll talk athletics with you. The good thing about a man of his church is that he’s usually a man of the world, too. He’s an Enderby, you know.”
“I shouldn’t be much the wiser, if I did,” Falk said.
“I wouldn’t work that pose so hard, Falk. You can’t get even with the Enderbys by ignoring them; and you can’t pretend it’s meekness that makes you profess ignorance. The only thing I don’t like about you is your peasant pride.”
“I still have hopes of winning your whole heart then. I’ll study your peasant humility.”
Langbrith made as if he had not noticed the point. He rose and moved restively about the room, and then came back to his chair again, and said, as if he had really been thinking of something else: “If I should decide to take up dramatic literature, I believe I’ll go to Paris to continue my studies, and perhaps we’ll keep on there together. I wish we could! Can’t you manage it, somehow? Those things of yours in Caricature have attracted attention; and if Life has asked you to send something, why couldn’t you get a lot of orders, and go out with me?”
“Gentle dreamer!” Falk murmured.
“No, but why not, really?”
“ Because a lot of orders are not to be got for the asking, and