Books: The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
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Kathleen Norris >> The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
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10 Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE RICH MRS. BURGOYNE
KATHLEEN NORRIS
TO KATHLEEN MARY THOMPSON
Lover of books, who never fails to find
Some good in every book, your namesake sends
This book to you, knowing you always kind
To small things, timid and in need of friends.
O friend! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,
To think that now our life is only drest
For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,
Or groom!--We must run glittering like a brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest;
The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence.
And pure religion breathing household laws.
--WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
CHAPTER I
"Annie, what are you doing? Polishing the ramekins? Oh, that's
right. Did the extra ramekins come from Mrs. Brown? Didn't! Then as
soon as the children come back I'll send for them; I wish you'd
remind me. Did Mrs. Binney come? and Lizzie? Oh, that's good. Where
are they? Down in the cellar! Oh, did the extra ice come? Will you
find out, Annie? Those can wait. If it didn't, the mousse is ruined,
that's all! No, wait, Annie, I'll go out and see Celia myself."
Little Mrs. George Carew, flushed and excited, crossed the pantry as
she spoke, and pushed open the swinging door that connected it with
the kitchen. She was a pretty woman, even now when her hair, already
dressed, was hidden under snugly pinned veils and her trim little
figure lost under a flying kimono. Mrs. Carew was expecting the
twenty-eight members of the Santa Paloma Bridge Club on this
particular evening, and now, at three o'clock on a beautiful April
afternoon, she was almost frantic with fatigue and nervousness. The
house had been cleaned thoroughly the day before, rugs shaken,
mirrors polished, floors oiled; the grand piano had been closed, and
pushed against the wall; the reading-table had been cleared, and
wheeled out under the turn of the stairway; the pretty drawing-room
and square big entrance hall had been emptied to make room for the
seven little card-tables that were already set up, and for the
twenty-eight straight-back chairs that Mrs. Carew had collected from
the dining-room, the bedrooms, the halls, and even the nursery, for
the occasion. All this had been done the day before, and Mrs. Carew,
awakening early in the morning to uneasy anticipations of a full
day, had yet felt that the main work of preparation was out of the
way.
But now, in mid-afternoon, nothing seemed done. There were flowers
still to arrange; there was the mild punch that Santa Paloma
affected at card parties to be finished; there was candy to be put
about on the tables, in little silver dishes; and new packs of
cards, and pencils and score-cards to be scattered about. And in the
kitchen--But Mrs. Carew's heart failed at the thought. True, her own
two maids were being helped out to-day by Mrs. Binney from the
village, a tower of strength in an emergency, and by Lizzie Binney,
a worthy daughter of her mother; but there had been so many stupid
delays. And plates, and glasses, and punch-cups, and silver, and
napkins for twenty-eight meant such a lot of counting and sorting
and polishing! And somehow George and the children must have dinner,
and the Binneys and Celia and Annie must eat, too.
"Well," thought Mrs. Carew, with a desperate glance at the kitchen
clock, "it will all be over pretty soon, thank goodness!"
A pleasant stir of preparation pervaded the kitchen. Mrs. Binney,
enormous, good-natured, capable, was opening crabs at one end of the
table, her sleeves rolled up, and her gingham dress, in the last
stage of age and thinness, protected by a new stiff white apron;
Celia, Mrs. Carew's cook, was sitting opposite her, dismembering two
cold roasted fowls; Lizzie Binney, as trim and pretty as her mother
was shapeless and plain, was filling silver bonbon-dishes with
salted nuts.
"How is everything going, Celia?" said Mrs. Carew, sampling a nut.
"Fine," said Celia placidly. "He didn't bring but two bunches of
sullery, so I don't know will I have enough for the salad. They sent
the cherries. And Mrs. Binney wants you should taste the punch."
"It's sweet now," said Mrs. Binney, as Mrs. Carew picked up the big
mixing-spoon, "but there's the ice to go in."
"Delicious! not one bit too sweet," Mrs. Carew pronounced. "You know
that's to be passed around in the little glasses, Lizzie, while
we're playing; and a cherry and a piece of pineapple in every glass.
Did Annie find the doilies for the big trays? Yes. I got the bowl
down; Annie's going to wash it. Oh, the cakes came, didn't they?
That's good. And the cream for coffee; that ought to go right on
ice. I'll telephone for more celery."
"There's some of these napkins so mussed, laying in the drawer,"
said Lizzie, "I thought I'd put a couple of irons on and press them
out."
"If you have time, I wish you would," Mrs. Carew said, touching the
frosted top of an angel-cake with a tentative finger. "I may have to
play to-night, Celia," she went on, to her own cook, "but you girls
can manage everything, can't you? Dinner really doesn't matter--
scrambled eggs and baked potatoes, something like that, and you'll
have to serve it on the side porch."
"Oh, yes'm, we'll manage!" Celia assured her confidently. "We'll
clear up here pretty soon, and then there's nothing but the
sandwiches to do."
Mrs. Carew went on her way comforted. Celia was not a fancy cook,
she reflected, passing through the darkened dining-room, where the
long table had been already set with a shining cloth, and where
silver and glass gleamed in the darkness, but Celia was reliable.
And for a woman with three children, a large house, and but one
other maid, Celia was a treasure.
She telephoned the grocer, her eyes roving critically over the hall
as she did so. The buttercups, in a great bowl on the table, were
already dropping their varnished yellow leaves; Annie must brush
those up the very last thing.
"So far, so good!" said Mrs. Carew, straightening the rug at the
door with a small heel and dropping wearily into a porch rocker.
"There must be one thousand things I ought to be doing," she said,
resting her head and shutting her eyes.
It was a warm, delicious afternoon. The little California town lay
asleep under a haze of golden sunshine. The Carews' pretty house,
with its lawn and garden, was almost the last on River Street, and
stood on the slope of a hill that commanded all Santa Paloma Valley.
Below it, the wide tree-shaded street descended between other
unfenced lawns and other handsome homes.
This was the aristocratic part of the town. The Willard Whites'
immense colonial mansion was here; and the Whites, rich, handsome,
childless, clever, and nearing the forties, were quite the most
prominent people of Santa Paloma. The Wayne Adamses, charming,
extravagant young people, lived near; and the Parker Lloyds, who
were suspected of hiding rather serious money troubles under their
reckless hospitality and unfailing gaiety, were just across the
street. On River Street, too, lived dignified, aristocratic old Mrs.
Apostleman and nervous, timid Anne Pratt and her brother Walter,
whose gloomy, stately old mansion was one of the finest in town. Up
at the end of the street were the Carews, and the shabby comfortable
home of Dr. and Mrs. Brown, and the neglected white cottage where
Barry Valentine and his little son Billy and a studious young
Japanese servant led a rather shiftless existence. And although
there were other pretty streets in town, and other pleasant well-to-
do women who were members of church and club, River Street was
unquestionably THE street, and its residents unquestionably THE
people of Santa Paloma.
Beyond these homes lay the business part of the town, the railway
station, and post-office, the library, and the women's clubhouse,
with its red geraniums, red-tiled roof, and plaster arches.
And beyond again were blocks of business buildings, handsome and
modern, with metal-sheathed elevators, and tiled vestibules, and
heavy, plate-glass windows on the street. There was a drug store
quite modern enough to be facing upon Forty-second Street and
Broadway, instead of the tree-shaded peace of Santa Paloma's main
street. At its cool and glittering fountain indeed, a hundred drinks
could be mixed of which Broadway never even heard. And on Broadway,
three thousand miles away, the women who shopped were buying the
same boxed powders, the same bottled toilet waters, the same
patented soaps and brushes and candies that were to be found here.
And in the immense grocery store nearby there were beautifully
spacious departments worthy of any great city, devoted to rare
fruits, and coffees and teas, and every pickle that ever came in a
glass bottle, and every little spiced fish that ever came in a gay
tin. A white-clad young man "demonstrated" a cake-mixer, a blue-clad
young woman "demonstrated" jelly-powders.
Nearby were the one or two big dry-goods stores, with lovely gowns
in their windows, and milliners' shops, with French hats in their
smart Paris boxes--there was even a very tiny, very elegant little
shop where pastes and powders and shampooing were the attraction; a
shop that had a French name "et Cie" over the door.
In short, there were modern women, and rich women, in Santa Paloma,
as these things unmistakably indicated. Where sixty years ago there
had been but a lonely outpost on a Spanish sheep-ranch, and where
thirty years after that there was only a "general store" at a
crossroads, now every luxury in the world might be had for the
asking.
All this part of the town lay northeast of the sleepy little Lobos
River, which cut Santa Paloma in two. It was a pretty river, a
boiling yellow torrent in winter, but low enough in the summer-time
for the children to wade across the shallows, and shaded all along
its course by overhanging maples, and willows, and oaktrees, and an
undergrowth of wild currant and hazel bushes and blackberry vines.
Across the river was Old Paloma, where dust from the cannery
chimneys and soot from the railway sheds powdered an ugly shabby
settlement of shanties and cheap lodging-houses. Old Paloma was
peppered thick with saloons, and flavored by them, and by the odor
of frying grease, and by an ashy waste known as the "dump." Over all
other odors lay the sweet, cloying smell of crushed grapes from the
winery and the pungent odor from the tannery of White & Company. The
men, and boys, and girls of the settlement all worked in one or
another of these places, and the women gossiped in their untidy
doorways. Above the Carew house and Doctor Brown's, opposite, River
Street came perforce to an end, for it was crossed at this point by
an old-fashioned wooden fence of slender, rounded pickets. In the
middle of the fence was a wide carriage gate, with a smaller gate
for foot passengers at each side, and beyond it the shabby,
neglected garden and the tangle of pepper, and eucalyptus, and
weeping willow trees that half hid the old Holly mansion. Once this
had been the great house of the village, but now it was empty and
forlorn. Captain Holly had been dead for five or six years, and the
last of the sons and daughters had gone away into the world. The
house, furnished just as they had left it, was for sale, but the
years went by, and no buyer appeared; and meantime the garden
flowers ran wild, the lawns were dry and brown, and the fence was
smothered in coarse rose vines and rampant wild blackberry vines.
Dry grass and yarrow and hollow milkweed grew high in the gateways,
and when the village children went through them to prowl, as
children love to prowl, about the neglected house and orchard, they
left long, dusty wakes in the crushed weeds. Further up than the
children usually ventured, there was an old bridge across the Lobos,
Captain Holly's private road to the mill town; but it was boarded
across now, and hundreds of chipmunks nested in it, and whisked
about it undisturbed. The great stables and barns stood empty; the
fountains were long gone dry. Only the orchard continued to bear
heavily.
The Holly estate ran up into the hill behind it, one of the wooded
foothills that encircled all Santa Paloma, as they encircle so many
California towns. Already turning brown, and crowned with dense, low
groves of oak, and bay, and madrona trees, they shut off the world
outside; although sometimes on a still day the solemn booming of the
ocean could be heard beyond them, and a hundred times a year the
Pacific fogs came creeping over them long before dawn, and Santa
Paloma awakened in an enveloping cloud of soft mist. Here and there
the slopes of these hills were checkered with the sharp oblongs and
angles of young vineyards, and hidden by the thickening green of
peach and apple orchards. A few low, brown dairy ranch-houses were
perched high on the ridges; the red-brown moving stream of the
cattle home-coming in mid-afternoon could be seen from the village
on a clear day. And over hill and valley, on this wonderful
afternoon in late spring, the most generous sunlight in the world
lay warm and golden, and across them the shadows of high clouds--for
there had been rain in the night--traveled slowly.
"I declare," said little Mrs. Carew lazily, "I could go to sleep!"
CHAPTER II
A moment later when a tall man came up the path and dropped on the
top porch step with an air of being entirely at home, Mrs. Carew was
still dreaming, half-awake and half-asleep.
"Hello, Jeanette!" said the newcomer. "What's new with thee, coz?"
"Don't smoke there, Barry, and get things mussy!" said Mrs. Carew in
return, smiling to soften the command, and to show Barry Valentine
that he was welcome.
Barry was usually welcome everywhere, although not at all approved
in many cases, and criticised even by the people who liked him best.
He was a sort of fourth cousin of Mrs. Carew, who sometimes felt
herself called to the difficult task of defending him because of the
distant kinship. He was very handsome, lean, and dark, with a sleepy
smile and with eyes that all children loved; and he was clever, or,
at least, everyone believed him to be so; and he had charm--a charm
of sheer sweetness, for he never seemed to be particularly anxious
to please. Barry was very gallant, in an impersonal sort of way: he
took a keen, elder-brotherly sort of interest in every pretty girl
in the village, and liked to discuss their own love affairs with
them, with a seriousness quite paternal. He never singled any girl
out for particular attention, or escorted one unless asked, but he
was flatteringly attentive to all the middle-aged people of his
acquaintance and his big helpful hand was always ready for stumbling
old women on the church steps, or tearful waifs in the street--he
always had time to listen to other people's troubles. Barry--
everyone admitted--had his points. But after all--
After all, he was lazy, and shiftless, and unambitious: he was
content to be assistant editor of the Mail; content to be bullied
and belittled by old Rogers; content to go on his own idle, sunny
way, playing with his small, chubby son, foraging the woods with a
dozen small boys at his heels, working patiently over a broken
gopher-trap or a rusty shotgun, for some small admirer. Worst of
all, Barry had been intemperate, years ago, and there were people
who believed that his occasional visits to San Francisco, now, were
merely excuses for revels with his old newspaper friends there.
And yet, he had been such a brilliant, such a fiery and ambitious
boy! All Santa Paloma had taken pride in the fact that Barry
Valentine, only twenty, had been offered the editorship of the one
newspaper of Plumas, a little town some twelve miles away, and had
prophesied a triumphant progress for him, to the newspapers of San
Francisco, of Chicago, of New York! But Barry had not been long in
Plumas when he suddenly married Miss Hetty Scott of that town, and
in the twelve years that had passed since then the golden dreams for
his future had vanished one by one, until to-day found him with no
one to believe in him--not even himself.
Hetty Scott was but seventeen when Barry met her, and already the
winner in two village contests for beauty and popularity. After
their marriage she and Barry went to San Francisco, and shrewd,
little, beautiful Hetty found herself more admired than ever, and
began to talk of the stage. After that, Santa Paloma heard only
occasional rumors: Barry had a position on a New York paper, and
Hetty was studying in a dramatic school; there was a baby; there
were financial troubles, and Barry was drinking again; then Hetty
was dead, and Barry, fearing the severe eastern winters for the
delicate baby, was coming back to Santa Paloma. So back they came,
and there had been no indication since, that the restless, ambitious
Barry of years ago was not dead forever.
"No smoking?" said Barry now, good-naturedly. "That's so; you've got
some sort of 'High Jinks' on for to-night, haven't you? I brought up
those hinges for your mixing table, Jen," he went on, "but any time
will do. I suppose the kitchen is right on the fault, as it were."
"The kitchen DOES look earthquakey," admitted Mrs. Carew with a
laugh, "but the girls would be glad to have the extra table; so go
right ahead. I'll take you out in a second. I have been on the GO,"
she added wearily, "since seven this morning: my feet are like balls
of fire. You don't know what the details are. Why, just tying up the
prizes takes a good HOUR!"
"Anything go wrong?" asked the man sympathetically.
"Oh, no; nothing particular. But you know how a house has to LOOK!
Even the bathrooms, and our room, and the spare room--the children
do get things so mussed. It all sounds so simple; but it takes such
a time."
"Well, Annie--doesn't she do these things?"
"Oh, ordinarily she does! But she was sweeping all morning, we moved
things about so last night, and there was china, and glasses to get
down, and the porches--"
"But, Jeanette," said Barry Valentine patiently, "don't you keep
this house clean enough ordinarily without these orgies of cleaning
the minute anybody comes in? I never knew such a house for women to
open windows, and tie up curtains, and put towels over their hair,
and run around with buckets of cold suds. Why this extra fuss?"
"Well, it's not all cleaning," said Mrs. Carew, a little annoyed.
"It's largely supper; and I'm not giving anything LIKE the suppers
Mrs. White and Mrs. Adams give."
"Why don't they eat at home?" said Mr. Valentine hospitably. "What
do they come for anyway? To see the house or each other's clothes,
or to eat? Women are funny at a card party," he went on, always
ready to expand an argument comfortably. "It takes them an hour to
settle down and see how everyone else looks, and whether there
happens to be a streak of dust under the piano; and then when the
game is just well started, a maid is nudging you in the elbow to
take a plate of hot chicken, and another, on the other side, is
holding out sandwiches, and all the women are running to look at the
prizes. Now when men play cards--
"Oh, Barry, don't get started!" his cousin impatiently implored.
"I'm too tired to listen. Come out and fix the table."
"Wish I could really help you," said Barry, as they crossed the
hall; and as a further attempt to soothe her ruffled feelings, he
added amiably, "The place looks fine. The buttercups came up, didn't
they?"
"Beautifully! You were a dear to get them," said Mrs. Carew, quite
mollified.
Welcomed openly by all four maids, Barry was soon contentedly busy
with screws and molding-board, in a corner of the sunny kitchen. He
and Mrs. Binney immediately entered upon a spirited discussion of
equal suffrage, to the intense amusement of the others, who kept him
supplied with sandwiches, cake and various other dainties. The
little piece of work was presently finished to the entire
satisfaction of everyone, and Barry had pocketed his tools, and was
ready to go, when Mrs. Carew returned to the kitchen wide-eyed with
news.
"Barry," said she, closing the door behind her, "George is here!"
"Well, George has a right here," said Barry, as the lady cast a
cautious glance over her shoulder.
"But listen," his cousin said excitedly; "he thinks he has sold the
Holly house!"
"Gee whiz!" said Barry simply.
"To a Mrs. Burgoyne," rushed on Mrs. Carew. "She's out there with
George on the porch now; a widow, with two children, and she looks
so sweet. She knows the Hollys. Oh, Barry, if she only takes it;
such a dandy commission for George! He's terribly excited himself. I
can tell by the calm, bored way she's talking about it."
"Who is she? Where'd she come from?" demanded Barry.
"From New York. Her father died last year, in Washington, I think
she said, and she wants to live quietly somewhere with the children.
Barry, will you be an angel?"
"Eventually, I hope to," said Mr. Valentine, grinning, but she did
not hear him.
"Could you, WOULD you, take her over the place this afternoon,
Barry? She seems sure she wants it, and George feels he must get
back to the office to see Tilden. You know he's going to sign for a
whole floor of the Pratt Building to-day. George can't keep Tilden
waiting, and it won't be a bit hard for you, Barry. George says to
promise her anything. She just wants to see about bathrooms, and so
on. Will you, Barry?"
"Sure I will," said the obliging Barry. And when Mrs. Carew asked
him if he would like to go upstairs and brush up a little, he
accepted the delicate reflection upon the state of his hair and
hands, and said "sure" again.
CHAPTER III
Mrs. Burgoyne was a sweet-faced, fresh-looking woman about thirty-
two or-three years old, with a quick smile, like a child's, and blue
eyes, set far apart, with a little lift at the corners, that, under
level heavy brows, gave a suggestion of something almost Oriental to
her face. She was dressed simply in black, and a transparent black
veil, falling from her wide hat and flung back, framed her face most
becomingly in square crisp folds.
She and Barry presently walked up River Street in the mellow
afternoon sunlight, and through the old wooden gates of the Holly
grounds. On every side were great high-flung sprays of overgrown
roses, dusty and choked with weeds, ragged pepper tassels dragged in
the grass, and where the path lay under the eucalyptus trees it was
slippery with the dry, crescent-shaped leaves. Bees hummed over rank
poppies and tangled honeysuckle; once or twice a hummingbird came
through the garden on some swift, whizzing journey, and there were
other birds in the trees, little shy brown birds, silent but busy in
the late afternoon. Close to the house an old garden faucet dripped
and dripped, and a noisy, changing group of the brown birds were
bathing and flashing about it. The old Hall stood on a rise of
ground, clear of the trees, and bathed in sunshine. It was an ugly
house, following as it did the fashion of the late seventies; but it
was not undignified, with its big door flanked by bay-windows and
its narrow porch bounded by a fat wooden balustrade and heavy
columns. The porch and steps were weather-stained and faded, and
littered now with fallen leaves and twigs.
Barry opened the front door with some difficulty, and they stepped
into the musty emptiness of the big main hall. There was a stairway
at the back of the house with a colored glass window on the landing,
and through it the sunlight streamed, showing the old velvet carpet
in the hall below, and the carved heavy walnut chairs and tables,
and the old engravings in their frames of oak and walnut mosaic. The
visitors peeped into the old library, odorous of unopened books, and
with great curtains of green rep shutting out the light, and into
the music room behind it, cold even on this warm day, with a muffled
grand piano drawn free of the walls, and near it two piano-stools,
upholstered in blue-fringed rep, to match the curtains and chairs.
They went across the hall to the long, dim drawing room, where there
was another velvet carpet, dulled to a red pink by time, and muffled
pompous sofas and chairs, and great mirrors, and "sets" of
candlesticks and vases on the mantels and what-nots. The windows
were shuttered here, the air lifeless. Barry, in George Carew's
interest, felt bound to say that "they would clear all this up, you
know; a lot of this stuff could be stored."
"Oh, why store it? It's perfectly good," the lady answered absently.
Presently they went out to the more cheerful dining-room, which ran
straight across the house, and was low-ceiled, with pleasant square-
paned windows on two sides.
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