Part 23

"'Oh, I like this,' said Rounders, quite cheerfully. 'I do not know when I have gone anywhere without some of my people. But I assure you I like it. At the bottom of our hearts we all like this sort of thing.'

"Anita showed him everything, and probably bored him dreadfully; but our guest was determined to be pleased, and never ceased to say how much he liked everything. There was no foolish pride about him, he said; he believed in coming close to nature; and although a great many of the peaceful joys of humanity were denied the man of affairs, still, when the opportunity came, how gladly our inward natures rose up to welcome it! 'Your wife tells me,' said he, 'that she is cook, housekeeper, everything. This is charming! It must be a joy to you to know she is capable of it. But, my dear friend,' he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, 'you must not let her overwork herself. She will be very apt to do it; the temptation is great. I am sure if I were she the temptation to overwork in these new spheres would be very great.'

"Rounders certainly did overwork himself, and this was in the line of trying to make us believe that he thoroughly liked this plan of ours of living in a cot by a rill, and that he was quite capable of forgetting his ordinary life of affluence and luxury in the simple joys of our rural household. He would have produced an impression on both Anita and me if he had not said so much about it; but I knew what he was trying to do, and made all the necessary allowances for him.

"But, say what he might, I knew he was not satisfied. I could see that he missed his 'people,' by whom he was accustomed to be surrounded and served; and I soon found out that his meals did not suit him. Anita visited the kitchen much more frequently than she had done just before Rounders arrived, and she talked a great deal about the dishes which were served to us; but, so far as I could judge, she had no more to do with their preparation than she had previously had. I was thoroughly well satisfied with everything; and, although Rounders was not, it was impossible for him to say so when he sat opposite the lady who told him two or three times at every meal that she presided in the kitchen. Of course I would have done everything in my power to give Rounders things to eat that he liked, but I did not know what to do. Our table was just as good, though not as varied, as it was when we were in town; and that Rounders was accustomed to living better than we did I could not for one moment believe. I came to the conclusion that, in spite of his efforts to subdue his dominating habit, he could not resist the temptation to let us know that he was not used to humble life, or even the appearance of it.

"So I enjoyed our three good meals a day,--Anita would not allow us any more,--which were prepared by one of the best cooks on the continent from the choicest materials furnished regularly under Baxter's orders; and if Rounders chose to think that what was good enough for me was not good enough for him, he must go his own way and suffer accordingly. In fortune and in station I was so immeasurably superior to him that it nettled me a little to see him put on airs at the table to which I had invited him. But Rounders was Rounders, and I did not allow my irritation to continue.

"In two or three days our visitor's overwork began to show on him: his naturally plump cheeks hung down, his eyes drooped, and, although he drank a great deal of wine, he was seldom in good spirits. On the fourth day of his visit, after the morning mail had been brought to us by Isaac, Rounders came to me and told me he had just received a letter which would make it necessary for him to go home that afternoon. I expressed my regret, but did not urge him to stay, for it was obvious that he wanted to go. 'I have had a most delightful time,' he said, as he took leave of Anita; 'but business is business, and I cannot put it aside.'

"I believed both these statements to be incorrect: I knew that at that season he was not likely to be called away on business, and he had given me no reason to suppose he was enjoying himself; and as I walked with him to the gate I am afraid I was only stiffly polite. Our spirits rose after his departure. Anita said she had found him an incongruity, and I was tired of the spectacle of a purse-proud man trying to appear like other people. But if I were harsh in my judgment of him I was speedily punished. On the third day after he left I received a message from Baxter, who wanted to see me at Baldwin's tent. He was not allowed to come into the grounds, for Anita said that would look too much like business.

"I found that Baxter's errand was indeed urgent, and that he was fully warranted in disturbing our privacy. The members of an English syndicate were coming down from Canada to make final arrangements with me for the purchase of a great tract of mining land, and as my presence and signature were absolutely necessary in the concluding stages of the transaction, I would be obliged to be in New York on the next day but one.

"I was greatly annoyed by this intelligence. The weather was particularly fine, Anita was reading me a most interesting novel, and I was settling myself down to a thorough enjoyment of our cottage life, which I did not wish interfered with by anybody or anything, and I growlingly asked why the syndicate had chosen such an unsuitable time of the year to come down from Canada. But Baxter did not know. I continued to growl, but there was no way out of it. I must go to New York. For the sake of perhaps half a million dollars, which would not alter our ordinary manner of living, which would not give us any pleasures, privileges, or advantages of any kind which we did not now possess, we must break up our delightful life at the cot and rill, and go back to the humdrum of ordinary society.

"Baxter tried to console me. He said we could easily return when this business had been settled. But I knew that going away would break the charm; I thoroughly understood Anita's nature, and I was sure if she left the cot for a time she would not want to go back to it. But when I told her Baxter's business, and that she would have to have some one come and pack up for her, she flatly declared that no one should do anything of the kind. She would stay where she was.

"'You can't stay here by yourself!' I cried.

"'Of course not,' she said. 'Who could imagine such an absurdity? But I shall not be alone. I was thinking this very morning of Fanny Ransmore and her mother. I want some women guests this time, and they would be delightful after Mr. Rounders. Fanny is as lively as a cricket, and Mrs. Ransmore could take care of anybody. You can tell Baxter to have some one to patrol the grounds at night, and we shall get along beautifully. I am sure you will not be away long.'

"'But can you get the Ransmores?' I asked.

"'Certainly,' said she. 'They are at Newport now; but I will telegraph immediately, and they can start to-night and get here to-morrow afternoon. You need not be afraid they cannot come. They would give up any engagement on earth to be our only guests.'

"The matter was settled according to Anita's plan, and I was more willing to go to New York when I reflected that after the Ransmores came Anita would not be able to read aloud to me."

"At this point," said the Master of the House, "your hero makes me angry. Why should he think he could not go away and leave his wife for three days, when I leave my wife, and daughter too, for three years? His Anita is not worth one twentieth as much as either my wife or daughter. Then again, if I were in his place, I would not allow a disadvantageous half-million to take me away from you two. It is only the absolutely necessary thousands that make me leave you as I do."

"Your sentiments are just as nice as they can be, papa," said the Daughter of the House; "but don't you see if the gentleman did what you would do it would spoil the story?"

John Gayther smiled with pleasure. Here was a young lady who never forgot the principle of the thing, whatever the thing might be.

"That is true!" exclaimed the captain, stretching himself at full length in his chair. "I did not think of that. Madam, please proceed; let the King of Siam recommence his performances."

"I will merely remark," said the Mistress of the House, "that if the King of Siam undertook to emulate my hero in all his performances, it would be a pretty hard thing for his already overtaxed subjects.

"The Ransmores arrived on time, and were as delighted with the invitation as Anita had said they would be. According to her orders, neither of them brought a maid, which must have been pretty hard on the old lady; but they declared that the fun of waiting on themselves would be greater than anything Newport could possibly offer them.

"I went to New York, attended to my business, which occupied me for three days, and then I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a trip to Philadelphia to look at a large steam-yacht which was in course of construction at the shipyards there. I did not feel in such a hurry to go back to the cot now that the Ransmores were there, and I was sure also that Anita would like to hear about the new yacht, in which we hoped to make a Mediterranean voyage during the winter. But early in the forenoon of my second day in Philadelphia, while I was engaged in a consultation concerning some of the interior fittings of the yacht, I received a telegram from Baxter informing me that my wife had returned from the cot on the previous evening, and was now at our town house. At this surprising intelligence I dropped the business in hand and went to New York by the first train.

"'Of course,' said Anita, when we were alone, 'I will tell you why I left that precious cot. We had a very good time after you left, and I showed the Ransmores everything. The next day Fanny and I determined to go fishing, leaving Mrs. Ransmore to read novels in a hammock, an occupation she adores. Isaac was just as good as he could be all the time; he got rods for us, and made us some beautiful bait out of raw beef, for of course we did not want to handle worms; and we started for the river. We had just reached a place where we could see the water, when Fanny called out that somebody had a chicken-yard there, and that we would have to go around it. We walked ever and ever so far, over all sorts of stones and bushes, until we made up our minds we were inside a chicken-yard and not outside, and so we could not get around it. I was very much put out, and did not like it a bit because we could not reach the river; but Fanny saw through it all, and said she was sure the fence had been put there to keep all sorts of things from disturbing us; and then she proposed fishing in the rill.

"'We tried this a long time, but not a bite could we get; and then Fanny went wandering up the stream to see if she could find a spring, because she said she had heard that trout were often found in cold streams. After a while she came running back, and said she had found the spring, and what on earth did I think it was? She had soon come to what seemed to be the upper end of the rill, and went down on her hands and knees and looked under the edge of a great flat rock, and there she saw the end of an iron pipe through which the water was running. When I heard this I threw down my fishing-rod and would have nothing to do with an artificial rill. I remembered then that I had thought, two or three times, it had improved very much since I had first seen it; and when I asked Mr. Baxter about it last night, he said the original rill had not water enough in it for the little cataracts and ponds, and all that, and so he had brought down water from some other stream about half a mile away.

"'When we went back to the cot Fanny seemed to have her suspicions excited, and she pried into everything, and soon told me that the furniture and all the things in the cot were only imitation of the things plain country people use, and were, in reality, of the best materials and wonderfully well made, and that it must have cost a lot of money to buy all these imitations of old-fashioned, poor-folksy things. Then she went into the garden and peered about, and told Isaac, who was working there, that she had never seen so many different kinds of vegetables all ripe at the same time. He touched his cap, and said that was a compliment to his gardening. But pretty soon she saw the edge of a flower-pot sticking above the ground, and showed it to me. I made him dig up whole beds of things, and there was nothing but pots and pots, in which everything was growing.

"'I went back to the house and looked about a good deal more, with Fanny at my elbow to tell me how poor people would never have this or that or the other thing. Then I was very angry with myself for not being able to see things without having them pointed out to me by that Fanny Ransmore, who was not invited to pry about and make herself disagreeable in that way.'

"'And were you angry with me?' I asked.

"'Yes,' she answered; 'for a little while. But when I remembered the plans I had made I thought we were about square, and that I had concealed as much from you as you had from me. I was not angry, but I was determined I would not stay in that mock-cot any longer. I could not bear the sight of anything I looked at. I thought the quickest way of settling the matter was to get rid of the whole business at once, and I told Isaac to put a crowbar under the kitchen stove, which was full of burning wood, and turn it over. But he was horrified, and said he might be arrested and put in prison for doing that; and, besides, it would be such a shame to waste so many beautiful things. Fanny and her mother thought so, too. And I asked Isaac where the family lived who used to own the cot, and he said they were still at the hotel, not being able to find any suitable quarters. So I sent for the widow and her daughter and son, and I told them to take the cot just as it was, and to keep it forever, and I would have Mr. Maxwell make out the law papers. They went about shouting with delight at everything they saw, very different from that Fanny! So it was really a very nice thing to do, and I feel a great deal better. And here I am, and you will find Fanny and her mother somewhere in the house whenever you want to see them. After this I think it will be better for us both not to try any affectionate frauds on each other.'