Books: The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
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Kathleen Norris >> The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
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As a matter of fact, his club and his office, and above all, his
motor-cars, absorbed him. His natural paternal instinct had been
diverted toward these latter, and, quite without his knowing it, his
cars were his nursery. Willard White had owned the first electric
car ever seen in Santa Paloma. Later, there had been half-a-dozen
machines, and he loved them all, and spoke of them as separate
entities. He spoke of the runs they had made, of the strains they
had triumphantly sustained, and he and his chauffeur held low-toned
conferences over any small breakage, with the same seriousness that
he might have used had Willard Junior--supposing there to have been
such a little person--developed croup, and made the presence of a
physician necessary. He liked to glance across his lawn at night to
the commodious garage, visible in the moonlight, and think of his
treasures, locked up, guarded, perfect in every detail, and safe.
He and Mrs. White always spoke of Santa Paloma as a "jay" town, and
compared it, to its unutterable disadvantage, to other and larger
cities, but still, business reasons would always keep them there for
the greater part of the year, and they were both glad to hear that a
fabulously wealthy widow, and a woman prominent in every other
respect as well, had come to live in Santa Paloma. Mrs. White
determined to play her game very carefully with Mrs. Burgoyne; there
should be no indecent hurry, there should be no sudden overtures at
friendship. "But, poor thing! She will certainly find our house an
oasis in the desert!" Mrs. White comfortably decided, putting on the
very handsomest of her afternoon gowns to go and call formally at
the Hall.
Mrs. Burgoyne and the little girls were always most cordial to
visitors. They spent these first days deep in gardening, great heaps
of fragrant dying weeds about them, and raw vistas through the
pruned trees already beginning to show the gracious slopes of the
land, and the sleepy Lobos down beneath the willows. The Carew
children and the little Browns were often there, fascinated by the
outdoor work, as children always are, and little Billy Valentine
squirmed daily through his own particular gap in the hedge, and took
his share of the fun with a deep and silent happiness. Billy gave
Mrs. Burgoyne many a heartache, with his shock of bright, unbrushed
hair, his neglected grimed little hands, his boyish little face that
was washed daily according to his own small lights, with surrounding
areas of neck and ears wholly overlooked, and his deep eyes, sad
when he was sad, and somehow infinitely more pathetic when he was
happy. Sometimes she stealthily supplied Billy with new garters, or
fastened the buttons on his blue overalls, or even gave him a
spoonful of "meddy" out of a big bottle, at the mere sight of which
Ellen shuddered sympathetically; a dose which was always followed by
two marshmallows, out of a tin box, by way of consolation. But
further than this she dared not go, except in the matter of mugs of
milk, gingerbread, saucer-pies, and motherly kisses for any bump or
bruise.
The village women, coming up to the Hall, in the pleasant summer
afternoons, were puzzled to find the old place almost unchanged. Why
any woman in her senses wanted to live among those early-Victorian
horrors, the women of Santa Paloma could not imagine. But Mrs.
Burgoyne never apologized for the old walnut chairs and tables, and
the old velvet carpets, and the hopelessly old-fashioned white lace
curtains and gilt-framed mirrors. Even Captain Holly's big clock--
"an impossibly hideous thing," Mrs. White called the frantic bronze
horses and the clinging tiger, on their onyx hillside--was serenely
ticking, and the pink china vases were filled with flowers. And
there was an air of such homely comfort, after all, about the big
rooms, such a fragrance of flowers, and flood of sunny fresh air,
that the whole effect was not half as bad as it might be imagined;
indeed, when Mammy Curry, the magnificent old negress who was
supreme in the kitchen and respected in the nursery as well, came in
with her stiff white apron and silver tea-tray, she seemed to fit
into the picture, and add a completing touch to the whole.
Very simply, very unpretentiously, the new mistress of Holly Hall
entered upon her new life. She was a woman of very quiet tastes,
devoted to her little girls, her music, her garden and her books.
With the negress, she had one other servant, a quiet little New
England girl, with terrified, childish eyes, and a passionate
devotion to her mistress and all that concerned her mistress. Fanny
had in charge a splendid, tawny-headed little boy of three, who
played happily by himself, about the kitchen door, and chased
chickens and kittens with shrieks of delight. Mrs. Burgoyne spoke of
him as "Fanny's little brother," and if the two had a history of any
sort, it was one at which she never hinted. She met an embarrassing
question with a readiness which rather amused Mrs. Brown, on a day
when the two younger ladies were having tea with Mrs. Apostleman,
and the conversation turned to the subject of maids.
"--but if your little girl Fanny has had her lesson, you'll have no
trouble keepin' her," said Mrs. Apostleman.
"Oh, I hope I shall keep Fanny," said Mrs. Burgoyne, "she comes of
such nice people, and she's such a sweet, good girl."
"Why, Lord save us!" said the old lady, repentantly, "and I was
almost ready to believe the child was hers!"
"If Peter was hers, she couldn't be fonder of him!" Mrs. Burgoyne
said mildly, and Mrs. Brown choked on her tea, and had to wipe her
eyes.
In the matter of Fanny, and in a dozen other small matters, the
independence of the great lady was not slow in showing itself in
Mrs. Burgoyne. Santa Paloma might be annoyed at her, and puzzled by
her, but it had perforce to accept her as she stood, or ignore her,
and she was obviously not a person to ignore. She declined all
invitations for daytime festivities; she was "always busy in the
daytime," she said. No cards, no luncheons, no tea-parties could
lure her away from the Hall, although, if she and the small girls
walked in for mail or were down in the village for any other reason,
they were very apt to stop somewhere for a chat on their way home.
But the children were allowed to go nowhere alone, and not the
smartest of children's parties could boast of the presence of Joanna
and Ellen Burgoyne.
Santa Paloma children were much given to parties, or rather their
parents were; and every separate party was a separate great event.
The little girls wore exquisite hand-made garments, silken hose and
white shoes. Professional entertainers, in fashionably darkened
rooms, kept the little people amused, and professional caterers
supplied the supper they ate, or perhaps the affair took the shape
of a box-party for a matinee, and a supper at the town's one really
pretty tea-room followed. These affairs were duly chronicled in the
daily and weekly papers, and perhaps more than one matron would have
liked the distinction of having Mrs. Burgoyne's little daughters
listed among her own child's guests. Joanna and Ellen were pretty
children, in a well-groomed, bright-eyed sort of way, and would have
been popular even without the added distinction of their ready
French and German and Italian, their charming manners, their naive
references to other countries and peoples, and their beautiful and
distinguished mother.
But in answer to all invitations, there came only polite, stilted
little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother
would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young
ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the
subject, leaving it to the more tactful Joanna to add, "But Mother
thanks you JUST as much." They were always close to their mother
when it was possible, and she only banished them from her side when
the conversation grew undeniably too old in tone for Joanna and
Ellen, and then liked to keep them in sight, have them come in with
the tea-tray, or wave to her occasionally from the river bank.
"We've been wondering what you would do with this magnificent
drawing-room," said Mrs. White, on her first visit. "The house ought
to take a colonial treatment wonderfully--there's a remarkable man
in San Francisco who simply made our house over for us last year!"
"It must have been a fearful upheaval," said Mrs. Burgoyne,
sympathetically.
"Oh, we went away! Mr. White and I went east, and when we came back
it was all done."
"Well, fortunately," said the mistress of Holly Hall cheerfully, as
she sugared Mrs. Apostleman's cup of tea, "fortunately all these
things of Mrs. Holly's were in splendid condition, except for a
little cleaning and polishing. They used to make things so much more
solid, don't you think so? Why, there are years of wear left in
these carpets, and the chairs and tables are like rocks! Captain
Holly apparently got the very best of everything when he furnished
this place, and I reap the benefit. It's so nice to feel that one
needn't buy a chair or a bed for ten years or more, if one doesn't
want to!"
"Dear, sweet people, the Hollys," said Mrs. White, pleasantly,
utterly at a loss. Did people of the nicer class speak of furniture
as if it were made merely to be useful? "But what a distinct period
these things belong to, don't they?" she asked, feeling her way.
"So--so solid!"
"Yes, in a way it was an ugly period," said Mrs. Burgoyne, placidly.
"But very comfortable, fortunately. Fancy if he had selected Louis
Quinze chairs, for example!"
Mrs. White gave her a puzzled look, and smiled.
"Come now, Mrs. Burgoyne," said she, good-naturedly, "Confess that
you are going to give us all a surprise some day, and change all
this. One sees," said Mrs. White, elegantly, "such lovely effects in
New York"
"In those upper Fifth Avenue shops--ah, but don't you see lovely
things!" the other woman assented warmly. "Of course, one could be
always changing," she went on. "But I like associations with things-
-and changing takes so much time! Some day we may think all this
quite pretty," she finished, with a contented glance at the
comfortable ugliness of the drawing-room.
"Oh, do you suppose we shall REALLY!" Mrs. White gave a little
incredulous laugh. She was going pretty far, and she knew it, but as
a matter of fact, she was entirely unable to believe that there was
a woman in the world who could afford to have what was fashionable
and expensive in household furnishings or apparel, and who
deliberately preferred not to have it. That her own pretty things
were no sooner established than they began to lose their charm for
her, never occurred to Mrs. White: she was a woman of conventional
type, perfectly satisfied to spend her whole life in acquiring
things essentially invaluable, and to use a naturally shrewd and
quick intelligence in copying fashions of all sorts, small and
large, as fast as advanced merchants and magazines presented them to
her. She was one of the great army of women who help to send the
sale of an immoral book well up into the hundreds of thousands; she
liked to spend long afternoons with a box of chocolates and a book
unfit for the touch of any woman; a book that she would review for
the benefit of her friends later, with a shocked wonder that "they
dare print such things!" She liked to tell a man's story, and the
other women could not but laugh at her, for she was undeniably good
company, and nobody ever questioned the taste of anything she ever
said or did. She was a famous gossip, for like all women, she found
the private affairs of other people full of fascination, and, having
no legitimate occupation, she was always at liberty to discuss them.
Yet Mrs. White was not at all an unusual woman, and, like her
associates, she tacitly assumed herself to be the very flower of
American womanhood. She quoted her distinguished relatives on all
occasions, the White family, in all its ramifications, supplied the
correct precedent for all the world; there was no social emergency
to which some cousin or aunt of Mrs. White's had not been more than
equal. Having no children of her own, she still could silence and
shame many a good mother with references to Cousin Ethel
Langstroth's "kiddies", or to Aunt Grace Thurston's wonderful
governess.
Personally, Mrs. White vaguely felt that there was something
innately indecent about children anyway, the smaller they were the
less mentionable she found them. The little emergencies, of nose-
bleeds and torn garments and spilled porridge, that were constantly
arising in the neighborhood of children, made her genuinely sick and
faint. And she had so humorous and so assured an air of saying
"Disgusting!" or "Disgraceful!" when the family of some other woman
began to present itself with reasonable promptness, that other women
found themselves laughing and saying "Disgusting!" too.
Mrs. Burgoyne, like Mrs. White, was a born leader. Whether she made
any particular effort to influence her neighbors or not, they could
not but feel the difference in her attitude toward all the various
tangible things that make a woman's life. She was essentially
maternal, wanted to mother all the little living and growing things
in the world, wanted to be with children, and talk of them and study
them. And she was simple and honest in her tastes, and entirely
without affectation in her manner, and she was too great a lady to
be either laughed at or ignored. So Santa Paloma began to ask itself
why she did this or that, and finding her ways all made for economy
and comfort and simplicity, almost unconsciously copied them.
CHAPTER VI
When Mrs. Apostleman invited several of her friends to a formal
dinner given especially for Mrs. Burgoyne everyone realized that the
newcomer was accepted, and the event was one of several in which the
women of Santa Paloma tried with more than ordinary eagerness to
outshine each other. Mrs. Apostleman herself never entered into
competition with the younger matrons, nor did they expect it of her.
She gave heavy, rich, old-fashioned dinners in her own way, in which
her servants were perfectly trained. It was a standing joke among
her friends that they always ate too much at Mrs. Apostleman's
house, there were always seven or eight substantial courses, and she
liked to have the plates come back for more lobster salad or roast
turkey. In this, as in all things, she was a law unto herself.
But for the other women, Mrs. White set the pace, and difficult to
keep they often found it. But they never questioned it. They admired
the richer woman's perfect house-furnishing, and struggled blindly
to accumulate the same number and variety of napkins and
fingerbowls, ramekins and glasses and candlesticks and special forks
and special knives. The first of the month with its bills, became a
horror to them, and they were continually promising their husbands,
in all good faith, that expenses should positively be cut down.
But what use were good resolves; when one might find, the very next
day, that there were no more cherries for the grapefruit, that one
had not a pair of presentable white gloves for the club, or that the
motor-picnic that the children were planning was to cost them five
dollars apiece? To serve grapefruit without cherries, to wear
colored gloves, or no gloves at all to the club, and to substitute
some inexpensive pleasure for the ride was a course that never
occurred to Mrs. Carew, that never occurred to any of her friends.
Mrs. Carew might have a very vague idea of her daughter's spiritual
needs, she might be an entire stranger to the delicately adjusted
and exquisitely susceptible entity that was the real Jeanette, but
she would have gone hungry rather than have Jeanette unable to wear
white shoes to Sunday School, rather than tie Jeanette's braids with
ribbons that were not stiff and new. She was so entirely absorbed in
pursuit of the "correct thing," so anxious to read what was "being
read," to own what was "right", that she never stopped to seriously
consider her own or her daughter's place in the universe. She was
glad, of course when the children "liked their teacher," just as she
had been glad years before when they "liked their nurse." The
reasons for such likings or dislikings she never investigated; she
had taken care of the children herself during the nurse's regular
days "off", but she always regarded these occasions as so much lost
time. Mrs. Carew kept her children, as she kept her house, well-
groomed, and she gave about as much thought to the spiritual needs
of the one as the other. She had been brought up to believe that the
best things in life are to be had for money, and that earthly
happiness or unhappiness falls in exact ratio with the possession or
non-possession of money. She met the growing demands of her family
as well as she could, and practised all sorts of harassing private
economies so that, in the eyes of the world, the family might seem
to be spending a great deal more money than was actually the case.
Mrs. Carew's was not an analytical mind, but sometimes she found
herself genuinely puzzled by the financial state of affairs.
"I don't know where the money GOES to!" she said, in a confidential
moment, to Mrs. Lloyd. They had met in the market, where Mrs. Carew
was consulting a long list of necessary groceries.
"Oh, don't speak of it!" said Mrs. Lloyd, feelingly. "That's so,
your dinner is tomorrow night, isn't it?" she added with interest.
"Are you going to have Lizzie?"
"Oh, dear me, yes! For eight, you know. Shan't you have her?" For
Mrs. Lloyd's turn to entertain Mrs. Burgoyne followed Mrs. Carew's
by only a few days.
"Lizzie and her mother, too," said the other woman. "I don't know
what's the matter with maids in these days," she went on, "they
simply can't do things, as my mother's maids used to, for example.
Now the four of them will be working all day over Thursday's dinner,
and, dear me! it's a simple enough dinner."
"Well, you have to serve so much with a dinner, nowadays," Mrs.
Carew said, in a mildly martyred tone. "Crackers and everything else
with oysters--I'm going to have cucumber sandwiches with the soup--"
"Delicious!" said Mrs. Lloyd.
"'Cucumbers, olives, salted nuts, currant jelly'", Mrs. Carew was
reading her list, "'ginger chutney, saltines, bar-le-duc, cream
cheese', those are for the salad, you know, 'dinner rolls, sandwich
bread, fancy cakes, Maraschino cherries, maple sugar,' that's to go
hot on the ice, I'm going to serve it in melons, and 'candy'--just
pink and green wafers, I think. All that before it comes to the
actual dinner at all, and it's all so fussy!"
"Don't say one word!" said Mrs. Lloyd, sympathetically. "But it
sounds dee-licious!" she added consolingly, and little Mrs. Carew
went contentedly home to a hot and furious session in her kitchen;
hours of baking, boiling and frying, chopping and whipping and
frosting, creaming and seasoning, freezing and straining.
"I don't mind the work, if only everything goes right!" Mrs. Carew
would say gallantly to herself, and it must be said to her credit
that usually everything did "go right" at her house, although even
the maids in the kitchen, heroically attacking pyramids of sticky
plates, were not so tired as she was, when the dinner was well over.
But there was a certain stimulus in the mere thought of entertaining
Mrs. Burgoyne, and there was the exhilarating consciousness that one
of these days she would entertain in turn; so the Santa Paloma
housewives exerted themselves to the utmost of their endurance, and
one delightful dinner party followed another.
But a dispassionate onlooker from another planet might have found it
curious to notice, in contrast to this uniformity, that no two women
dressed alike on these occasions, and no woman who could help it
wore the same gown twice. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Carew, to be sure,
wore their "little old silks" more than once, but each was secretly
consoled by the thought that a really "smart" new gown awaited Mrs.
White's dinner; which was naturally the climax of all the affairs.
Only the wearers and their dress-makers knew what hours had been
spent upon these costumes, what discouraged debates attended their
making, what muscular agonies their fitting. Only they could have
estimated, and they never did estimate--the time lost over pattern
books, the nervous strain of placing this bit of spangled net or
that square inch of lace, the hurried trips downtown for samples and
linings, for fringes and embroideries and braids and ribbons. The
gown that she wore to her own dinner, Mrs. White had had fitted in
the Maison Dernier Mot, in Paris;--it was an enchanting frock of
embroidered white illusion, over pink illusion, over black illusion,
under a short heavy tunic of silver spangles and threads. The yoke
was of wonderful old lace, and there was a girdle of heavy pink
cords, and silver clasps, to match the aigrette that was held by
pink and silver cords in Mrs. White's beautifully arranged hair.
Mrs. Burgoyne's gowns, or rather gown, for she wore exactly the same
costume to every dinner, could hardly have been more startling than
Santa Paloma found it, had it gone to any unbecoming extreme. Yet it
was the simplest of black summer silks, soft and full in the skirt,
short-sleeved, and with a touch of lace at the square-cut neck. She
arranged her hair in a becoming loose knot, and somehow managed to
look noticeably lovely and distinguished, in the gay assemblies. To
brighten the black gown she wore a rope of pearls, looped twice
about her white throat, and hanging far below her waist; pearls, as
Mrs. Adams remarked in discouragement later, that "just made you
feel what's the use! She could wear a kitchen apron with those
pearls if she wanted to, everyone would know she could afford cloth
of gold and ermine!"
With this erratic and inexplicable simplicity of dress she combined
the finish of manner, the poise, the ready sympathies of a truly
cultivated and intelligent woman. She could talk, not only of her
own personal experiences, but of the political, and literary, and
scientific movements of the day. Certain proposed state legislation
happened to be interesting the men of Santa Paloma at this time, and
she seemed to understand it, and spoke readily of it.
"But, George," said Mrs. Carew, walking home in the summer night,
after the Adams dinner, "you have often said you hated women to talk
about things they didn't understand."
"But she does understand, dearie. That's just the point."
"Yes; but you differed with her, George!"
"Well, but that's different, Jen. She knew what she was talking
about."
"I suppose she has friends in Washington who keep her informed,"
said Mrs. Carew, a little discontentedly, after a silence. And there
was another pause before she said, "Where do men get their
information, George?"
"Papers, dear. And talking, I suppose. They're interested, you
know."
"Yes, but--" little Mrs. Carew burst out resentfully, "I never can
make head or tail of the papers! They say 'Aldrich Resigns,' or
'Heavy Blow to Interests,' or 'Tammany Scores Triumph,' and _I_
don't know what it's about!"
George Carew's big laugh rang out in the night, and he put his arm
about her, and said, "You're great, Jen!"
Shortly after Mrs. White's dinner a certain distinguished old artist
from New York, and his son, came to stay a night or two at Holly
Hall, on their way home from the Orient, and Mrs. Burgoyne took this
occasion to invite a score of her new friends to two small dinners,
planned for the two nights of the great Karl von Praag's stay in
Santa Paloma.
"I don't see how she's going to handle two dinners for ten people
each, with just that colored cook of hers and one waitress," said
Mrs. Willard White, late one evening, when Mr. White was finishing a
book and a cigar in their handsome bedroom, and she was at her
dressing-table.
"Caterers," submitted Mr. White, turning a page.
"I suppose so," his wife agreed. After a thoughtful silence she
added, "Sue Adams says that she supposes that when a woman has as
much money as that she loses all interest in spending it!
Personally, I don't see how she can entertain a great big man like
Von Praag in that old-fashioned house. She never seems to think of
it at all, she never apologizes for it, and she talks as if nobody
ever bought new things until the old were worn out!"
Her eyes went about her own big bedroom as she spoke. Nothing old-
fashioned here! Even eighteen years ago, when the Whites were
married, their home had been furnished in a manner to make the Holly
Hall of to-day look out of date. Mrs. White shuddered now at the
mere memory of what she as a bride had thought so beautiful: the
pale green carpet, the green satin curtains, the white-and-gold
chairs and tables and bed, the easels, the gilded frames! Seven or
eight years later she had changed all this for a heavy brass
bedstead, and dark rugs on a polished floor, and bird's-eye maple
chests and chairs, and all feminine Santa Paloma talked of the
Whites' new things. Six or seven years after that again, two
mahogany beds replaced the brass one, and heavy mahogany bureaus
with glass knobs had their day, with plain net curtains and old-
fashioned woven rugs. But all these were in the guest-rooms now, and
in her own bedroom Mrs. White had a complete set of Circassian
walnut, heavily carved, and ornamented with cunningly inset panels
of rattan. On the beds were covers of Oriental cottons, and the
window-curtains showed the same elementary designs in pinks and
blues.
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