The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
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amiability which she could not account for. “It looks very pretty from here.” She glanced down the table, with a quick turn of her little head, towards the glass extension of the room, where the plants bedded in the ground showed their green and bloom in masses under the paper lanterns, and the fine spray of an inaudible fountain glimmered.
“Yes, doesn’t it? Everything that my mother touches flourishes.”
“Oh, I know that!” the girl said, with an intonation of wonder and reverence.
“There are very few things,” he said, from his proud satisfaction, “that my mother can’t do better than anybody else.”
“ Did you have to go to Harvard to find that out? Everybody in Saxmills knew it!”
“But you haven’t,” he reverted, “said what you thought of the arrangement.” He indicated the flowers on the table with a turn of his head.
Another mood seized her. “You can’t spoil flowers!”
“Well, I did my worst.” He wished her to know that he had suggested their arrangement.
Mrs. Enderby was talking with her left-hand neighbor. Langbrith lowered his voice slightly in asking: “Are you going to give me the first dance, Hope?”
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely; and then indifferently, “I suppose I must begin by dancing with somebody.”
He laughed and they were silent, while she kept herself from panting by drawing each breath very slowly and smoothly. Her breast heaved and her nostrils dilated.
There came a quick clash on the glass roof of the conservatory. “Rain?” she said. “Goodness! How are we going to get home?”
“ Oh, don’t even talk of going home,” he implored, and she laughed.
He looked down the table to catch his mother’s eye, and give her the sign for rising with the ladies and leaving the room. That was a main part of his innovation and a thing unprecedented. But he had agreed with Falk that the stroke could be broken by each giving his arm, in the new fashion, to his partner, and taking her back to the library. The other men did not understand, and waited, on foot, for the cue from him. He lost his head, which seemed to whirl on his shoulders, and he was stooping to offer his arm to Hope when he remembered Mrs. Enderby.
He was stupefied into the awkwardness of saying, “Oh, I beg your pardon!’’
The rector’s wife laughed, from a woman’s perennial joy in the sight of such feeling as his. “Oh, I shouldn’t have minded.”
Hope gave an imitation of not having noticed, which none but a connoisseur could have distinguished from the genuine.
VIII
“ Dr. Anther, I want to introduce Mr. Falk a little more particularly to my oldest and best friend.”
“Will he know what to do with such a treasure?”
Dr. Anther returned Falk’s tentative bow with smiling irony, while he reached with his left hand for the cigars which Langbrith offered him.
Everyone was still on foot, after leaving the ladies in the library, and Langbrith said to the group: “Sit down, gentlemen,” and placed himself before answering the doctor. “ Yes, I think he will. You smoke, don’t you, Dr. Enderby? And you, Judge? Matthewson, I know, doesn’t. Start the madeira after the sun, Harry.” He pushed the cigars towards the elders and the decanter towards the young man, whom he bade give the smokers the candle. “Yes,” he went on, to put Falk and Dr. Anther at ease with each other, “Falk’s father is a physician, and my physician is the only father I have known.”
“Oh, you’re very good, James!” the doctor said, forgiving to the genuine feeling in the young fellow’s voice the patronage of his words: “I can’t say less than that no son of mine has given me less trouble.” The two laughed together, and Falk smiled conditionally, as if he suspected that this country practitioner had his knife out. “Are you going in for medicine, too?” the doctor asked.
“ Worse yet,’’ Langbrith answered for him. “ He’s going in for art. I don’t know whether my mother has shown you any copies of Caricature which I send her. But, if she has, you know Falk’s work. It’s the best part of Falk. Falk is Caricature himself— with my poor help in joking a picture now and then.”
“This puts me on my good behavior at once,” Anther said. “ Mr. Falk may be looking for types.”
“No, no; Falk’s types always look for him,” said Langbrith. “ Won’t you sit down?”
“I’ve been sitting,” Anther said, and he walked, Falk with him, towards the conservatory.
“Well, it’s a change, and your smoke will help the plants,” Langbrith called, and he turned to take part in the talk of the judge and the rector, to which Matthewson was listening with the two sorts of deference respectively due to the law and to the church.
“Well, Mr. Falk,” Anther said, “I suppose we must make the best of being two such remarkable people. I hope you’re enjoying your visit to Saxmills.”
“Oh, very much,” Falk answered, smiling less conditionally.
“ I don’t know that it’s much adapted to pictorial satire.”
“You must make allowance for the stately layout Langbrith gives his friends,” said Falk, and the gleam of intelligence in the doctor’s shaggily pent-roofed eyes satisfied him of his ground.
“The place has always struck me as very picturesque,” the doctor continued. “ Of course, I don’t know; but a good head of water seems to imply broken ground, and if there’s a fall, such as we have here, it means up and down hill and the broken banks and the rapids and other things that you artists are supposed to care for.”
“I don’t know whether we really do—or I do,” the young man said, modestly. “I’m rather more for the figure, I reckon.”
“Western?” the doctor asked, with a lift of the pent-roofs.
“Northern Kentucky; Catletsburg.”
“Curious! I thought of settling in that place, myself, before I came to Saxmills. Not New England people?”
“No, my people were German. My grandfather came out after the 1848 revolutions.”
“Oh, indeed! Rather odd I should meet someone from Catletsburg at this late day. I’ve hardly thought of it since I gave up going there. Except for a run to New York, at times, I have been twenty-two years in Saxmills, and I don’t suppose I shall ever go anywhere else to live. In that time, a man’s life shapes itself to the environment, and new surroundings hurt. Don’t you find it so?”
“Well, I’m just trying my first twenty-two years.”
“To be sure,” the doctor laughed. “I suppose you and James are thrown a good deal together at Harvard.”
“This last year, yes. Since he took the editorship of Caricature .”
“Oh, indeed! He must be very popular, then, to have that?”
“ Not very,” Falk answered, tranquilly. He looked steadily at the doctor, in breaking off his cigar ash, as if asking his eyes how far he might go. Then he said, in a low tone, but with a certain indifference as to being overheard in his manner: “A good many of the fellows think he’s an ass. They can’t stand him. But they make a mistake. He’s got a lot of ability. He doesn’t do himself justice.”
“ How?” the doctor asked, blowing his smoke out.
“Too patronizing. But he doesn’t mean anything by it, as I know. All you have got to do is to call him down. He stands