The Whirligig of Time Part 3

"And that while it was harder on me, it put a greater responsibility on me, because, you see--oh, I can't explain it all! But she was about right, I guess."

"She told me something of the same kind ... not exactly like that, I mean, but--well, the same sort of thing. It helped, too. It's funny, to think of her understanding better than any one else--Aunt Selina!"

"Yes, isn't it? Well, you really never can tell about people." With which mature reflection Harry turned over and went to sleep. But his brother lay awake for some time thinking over what he had just heard, and as he thought, his respect for his aunt grew. Not only could she sound the depths of his own woe and give him comfort for it, but she could light on the one thing that would be likely to help Harry in his own peculiar need, and show it to him with ready and fearless tact. And what she had told Harry was practically the very opposite of what she had told him.

"I wish I could be like Aunt Selina," he thought.

CHAPTER III

NOT COLONIAL; GEORGIAN

Harry and James lived in the city of New Haven in a big house surrounded by s.p.a.cious grounds. The house itself was an old and stately one; the local papers, when they had occasion to mention it, usually referred to it as the Wimbourne "mansion." The boys' dislike of this word dated from an early age, when their father informed them that it was a loathsome expression, which people who "really knew" never used under any circ.u.mstances. He himself, if he had had occasion to describe it, would have spoken of it as a "place."

The house was built in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was put up by Hilary Wimbourne's great-grandfather James, first of the name, the founder of the family fortunes. He came to New Haven as a penniless apprentice to a carriage-maker after the conclusion of the Revolutionary wars left him without other occupation, and within ten years after his arrival he became one of the two or three most prominent lawyers in the place. His understanding of his early trade he turned to good account by investing a large portion of his earnings as a lawyer in the carriage factory in which he originally served, and which with the benefit of his money and business ac.u.men, became the most profitable of its kind in the town. He bought a farm in what were then the extreme outskirts of the city and built the s.p.a.cious, foursquare, comfortable-looking house in which the Wimbournes with whom we have to deal still lived, nearly one hundred years later.

The house stood in a commanding position above an up-town avenue. It was painted white with green tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and had a front portico of tall Doric columns reaching up to the top of the house. People habitually referred to its style of architecture as "Colonial." "Post-Colonial," or "late American Georgian" would have come much nearer the mark, but these distinctions are as naught to the great and glorious body of New England's inhabitants, to whom everything with pillars is and always will be "Colonial." The house was in truth a fine example of its style, and had been surprisingly little spoiled by the generations of Wimbournes that had lived and died in it, but the unity of its general effect was marred by the addition of two wings reaching out from its sides, erected by Hilary Wimbourne's father in the fifties and showing all the peculiarities of that glorious but architecturally weak period.

Friends of the family often expressed sympathy and sorrow at the anachronism the house was thus made to offer, but Hilary soon became somewhat impatient of these. In fact, he never listened to an expression of regret on the subject without breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving that the wings had been built when they were, and not ten or twenty or thirty years later, when architectural indiscretion ran to extremes only vaguely hinted at in the forties and fifties.

"Besides," he would explain to those who showed interest in the matter, "those wings are not always going to look as badly as they do now. Our eyes will always look on them as unpleasantly different from the old house, but the eyes of a hundred years hence will see in them nothing more than a quaint and agreeable variety. After all, the two styles are but two different aspects of neo-cla.s.sicism, one a little more remote from its original model than the other. History has proved what I say; think how the sensitive must have shuddered in the fifteenth century when they saw a lot of Perpendicular Gothic slammed down by the side of pure Early Englis.h.!.+ It must have looked like the very devil to them."

Only very few people heard this theory carried back to its logical conclusion, however. Hilary would see and recognize the drowning expression that came over their faces, and as soon as he knew that he was beyond their depth he stopped, for he made it a rule never to talk above people's heads. Consequently he seldom got beyond the "neo-cla.s.sicism" point.

As far as the interior was concerned, the atmosphere of the old days had been almost perfectly preserved. Every wall-paper, every decoration had, by some lucky succession of chances, been as nearly as possible duplicated when it became necessary to replace or restore, and the hand of the seventies and eighties left almost no trace of its equally ruthless destructive and constructive powers. So that at the time of which we write the house was furnished almost completely in the style of the late Georgian period, for what his ancestors omitted to leave him the faultless taste of Hilary supplied.

The house faced westward and toward the princ.i.p.al street of the neighborhood; the ground fell gently away from it on all sides, but most steeply toward the west. Carriage drives led up to the house from the two corners formed by the main thoroughfare and the two intersecting streets which bounded the property. A tar footpath followed the curve of each driveway, so that between the street and the front door of the house there stretched an unbroken expanse of green lawn. In their early youth Harry and James both wondered why no footpath ran directly up the middle of the front lawn, as was the case with most of the other front lawns of their acquaintance, and they considered it monstrously inconvenient that they were obliged to "go way round by the corners"

when they wished to reach the house from without. At length, however, the brilliant thought occurred to them that as they always approached the house either from the north or the south, and never from the unbroken block to the west, they could not well have used a central walk if they had had it.

Such was the setting in which the early lives of these two boys took place, and, taking one thing with another, their lot could probably not have been bettered. The first ten years of their lives had the divine monotony of perfect happiness and harmony, in which no more momentous events than the measles, a change of school, or summer trips to the coast of Maine or, more rarely, to Europe, ever occurred. They were brought up, from their earliest years, under the direct but never too obtrusive eye of their mother, and as we have already heard Aunt Selina describe her as "one of the best women that ever lived," we should be guilty of something akin to painting the rose if we ventured on any further encomiums of her character on our own account. Their relation with their father was hardly less ideal, though they saw much less of him and were, at bottom, less deeply attached to him than to their mother. Hilary was fond of his boys, and was capable of entering into their youthful moods with a sort of intimate aloofness that the boys found very winning. Not infrequently he would suddenly swoop down on them in their happy but humdrum occupations and carry them off to a baseball game or perhaps to New York for the day to spend a few hours of bliss in the Aquarium or the Zoo, in less time than it frequently took their mother to decide what overcoats they should wear to school. This das.h.i.+ng _insouciance_ secretly captivated their mother as much as it did them, and though by this time she had given up showing the delight it caused her, she was never more pleased than when Hilary would so take them off.

Hilary also read to them occasionally, and his reading was another source of secret admiration to their mother. He never read them anything but what his wife would have described, and rightly, too, as "far beyond them"; such things as Spenser, Shakespeare, Sheridan, or Milton, even; and he always read with such a mock-serious air as Sir Henry Irving used in the scene where Charles I recites poetry to his children. His wife on such occasions, though perfectly content with her role of Henrietta Maria, would reflect that if _she_ tried to read such things to them they would be fidgeting and walking about the room and longing for her to stop, instead of sitting spellbound, as they did when he read, on the arms of his chair and breathlessly following each word of the text.

With another parent and with other children such reading would have proved utterly sterile, but from it the boys managed to absorb a good deal of pleasure and the germs of literary appreciation as well, and the words of many a great pa.s.sage in many a great author became dear to them long before they were able to grasp their full meaning. Results of their literary sessions would crop out in the family intercourse in sundry curious ways. One instance may serve to ill.u.s.trate this. The family were sitting about together one day after lunch; Edith Wimbourne had a pile of household mending before her.

"I declare," she said, "these tablecloths have simply rotted away from lying in that dark closet; they would have lasted much better if they had been used a little."

"She let concealment," said Hilary from behind a magazine, "like a worm i' the bud, feed--what did concealment feed on, James?"

"Feed on her damask--"

"Tablecloth!" shouts Harry, brilliantly but indiscreetly.

"Oh, shut up," retorts his brother, peevishly, as who would not, at having the words s.n.a.t.c.hed from his mouth? "You needn't be so smart, I was going to say that anyway."

"The heck you were!"

"Yes, I was."

"You were not! You were going to say 'cheek'; I saw you start to say it."

"Oh, shut up! Can't any one be bright but you?"

"That's all right; you were going to say it. Wasn't he, Father?" asks Harry, with the air of one appealing to the supreme authority.

"What?" Hilary had long since returned to his magazine.

"Say 'cheek.' Wasn't he going to?"

"Who?"

"James, of course."

"I trust not. It seems to me that it is one of the slang words your mother has requested you not to use."

"Wha--what is?"

"Cheek." Not much of a joke, certainly, but Hilary, looking with impenetrable gravity over his gla.s.ses at his son, when he really knows perfectly well what Harry is talking about, is funny. At any rate Harry stops to laugh, and the quarrel is a failure. Edith could have stopped the quarrel by simply enjoining peace, but she could not have done it without resort to parental authority.

One day James, ordinarily phlegmatic and self-controlled, ran through the house in a great state of dishevelment and distress in search of his mother, holding aloft a b.l.o.o.d.y finger and weeping hot tears of woe.

"Where's Mama?" he inquired breathlessly, ending up in the library and finding his father alone there.

"Out, I think. What's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing.... A kid licked me.... I wanted something for this finger."

"Well, go upstairs and get that large brown bottle on my wash-stand, and we'll see what we can do about it." Hilary, taking a page out of his own boyhood, guessed that no mere cut finger could have reduced James to such an abject pa.s.s. He suspected that his son, who, unlike Harry, was almost morbidly sensitive to appearances and almost never gave way to demonstrations of grief, had augmented the disgrace of being thrashed by allowing himself to be reduced to a state of tears in the presence of his fellows. Some such occurrence only could account for this precipitate rout. One or two further inquiries confirmed this conjecture, and he then prepared to apply, if possible, a balm to his son's mental wound as well as the physical one.

"There," said he, giving a final pull to an unprofessional-looking bandage, composed of an entirely un-antiseptic handkerchief, "that will stay till your mother comes in. Now go and get me that green book on the third shelf and I'll read to you for a while, if you want."

The green book happened to be no less notable a work than "Paradise Lost," and Hilary, turning to the last pages of the twelfth book, read of the expulsion of our sinning forbears from Eden. He read Milton rather well, almost as well, in fact, as he secretly thought he did, and James, though incapable at first of listening attentively or understanding much of anything, was gradually soothed by the solemn music of the lines; by the time his father reached the closing pa.s.sage he was listening with wide open ears.

They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.

Hilary kept the book open on his knee for a moment after he had finished, and he noticed with interest that James leaned forward with aroused attention to read over the pa.s.sage again. "Some natural tears--wiped them soon--the world was all before them--" the words sank in on James' mind as his father knew they would, and suggested the thought that the world need not be irrevocably lost through one indiscretion.

Let no one gain from these somewhat extended accounts of Hilary's dealings with his sons an impression to the effect that the boys found a more sympathetic friend in their father than in their mother. As a matter of fact, the exact contrary was true. Like all perfect art, Hilary's successful pa.s.sages with them bore no trace of the means by which they were brought about, and consequently they did not feel that their father's att.i.tude toward them was inspired by anything like the warm and undisguised affection which pervaded their mother's. Nor, indeed, was it.

James, even in these early days, showed signs of having inherited a fair share of his father's inborn tact in his dealings with his brother. The fraternal relation is always an interesting one to observe, because of its extreme elasticity, combining, as it does, apparently unlimited possibilities for love, hate and indifference. Who ever saw two pairs of brothers that seemed to regard each other with exactly the same feelings? Harry and James certainly did not hate each other, but on the other hand they did not love each other with that pa.s.sionate devotion that is supposed to characterize the ideal brothers of fancy. Nor could they truthfully be called wholly indifferent to each other; their mutual att.i.tude lay somewhere between indifference and the Castor-and-Pollux-like devotion that the older and less attractive of their relatives constantly tried to instil in their youthful bosoms.

They were never bored by each other. James always felt for Harry's superior quickness in all intellectual matters an admiration which he would have died sooner than give full expression to, and Harry, though he frequently scouted his brother's opinions in all matters, had a profound respect for James' clearness and maturity of judgment. But what, more than anything else, kept them on good terms with each other and always, at the last moment, prevented serious ructions, was a way that James had at times of viewing their relation in a detached and impersonal light, and acting accordingly. On such occasions he appeared to be two people; first, the James that was Harry's brother and contemporary, less than two years older than he and subject to the same desires and weakness, and, secondly, the James who stood as judge over their differences and distributed justice to them both with a fair and impartial hand.

For instance, there was the episode of the neckties. A distant relative, a cousin of their mother's, who does not really come into the story at all, took occasion of expressing her approval of their existence by sending them two neckties, one purple and one green, with the direction that they should decide between them which was to have which. James, by the right of primogeniture that prevails among most families of children, was given the first choice, and picked out the purple one.

Harry quietly took the other, but though there was no open dissatisfaction expressed, it soon became evident to James that his brother was tremendously disappointed. During the rest of the day, as he went about his business and pleasure, vague but disturbing recollections flitted through James' mind of Harry's being particularly anxious to possess a purple tie, of having been half promised one, indeed, by the very relative from whom these blessings came; circ.u.mstances which, from the wording of the letter which accompanied the gift, obviously const.i.tuted no legal claim on the tie, but were nevertheless enough to appeal to James' sense of moral, or "ultimate" justice.

The next morning James, according to custom, approaching the completion of his dressing some time before Harry, remarked in a casual tone: