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A Bicycle of Cathay: A Novel, a novel by Frank R Stockton |
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Chapter 4. A Bit Of Advice |
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_ CHAPTER IV. A BIT OF ADVICE The next morning I awoke about seven o'clock. My clothes, neatly brushed and folded, were on a chair near the bed, with my brightly-blackened shoes near by. I rose, quickly dressed myself, and went forth into the morning air. I met no one in the house, and the hall door was open. For an hour or more I walked about the beautiful grounds. Sometimes I wandered near the house, among the flower-beds and shrubs; sometimes I followed the winding path to a considerable distance; occasionally I sat down in a covered arbor; and then I sought the shade of a little grove, in which there were hammocks and rustic chairs. But I met no one, and I saw no one except some men working near the stables. I would have been glad to go down to the lodge and say "Good-morning" to my kind entertainers there, but for some reason or other it struck me that that neat little house was too much out of the way. When I had had enough walking I retired to the piazza and sat there, until Brownster, with a bow, came and informed me that breakfast was served. The young lady, in the freshest of summer costumes, met me at the door and bade me "Good-morning," but the greeting of her father was not by any means cordial, although his manner had lost some of the stiff condescension which had sat so badly upon him the evening before. The mother was a very pleasant little lady of few words and a general air which indicated an intimate acquaintance with back seats. The breakfast was a remarkably good one. When the meal was over, Mr. Putney walked with me into the hall. "I must now ask you to excuse me, sir," said he, "as this is the hour when I receive my manager and arrange with him for the varied business of the day. Good-morning, sir. I wish you a very pleasant journey." And, barely giving me a chance to thank him for his entertainment, he disappeared into the back part of the house. The young lady was standing at the front of the hall. "Won't you please come in," she said, "and see mother? She wants to talk to you about Walford." I found the little lady in a small room opening from the parlor, and also, to my great surprise, I found her extremely talkative and chatty. She asked me so many questions that I had little chance to answer them, and she told me a great deal more about Walford and its people and citizens than I had learned during my nine months' residence in the village. I was very glad to give her an opportunity of talking, which was a pleasure, I imagined, she did not often enjoy; but as I saw no signs of her stopping, I was obliged to rise and take leave of her. The young lady accompanied me into the hall. "I must get my valise," I said, "and then I must be off. And I assure you--" "No, do not trouble yourself about your valise," she interrupted. "Brownster will attend to that--he will take it down to the lodge. And as to your gorgeous raiment, he will see that that is all properly returned to its owners." I picked up my cap, and she walked with me out upon the piazza. "I suppose you saw everything on our place," she asked, "when you were walking about this morning?" A little surprised, I answered that I had seen a good deal, but I did not add that I had not found what I was looking for. "We have all sorts of hot-houses and green-houses," she said, "but they are not very interesting at this time of the year, otherwise I would ask you to walk through them before you go." She then went on to tell me that a little building which she pointed out was a mushroom-house. "And you will think it strange that it should be there when I tell you that not one of our family likes mushrooms or ever tastes one. But the manager thinks that we ought to grow mushrooms, and so we do it." As she was talking, the thought came to me that there were some people who might consider this young lady a little forward in her method of entertaining a comparative stranger, but I dismissed this idea. With such a peculiarly constituted family it was perhaps necessary for her to put herself forward, in regard, at least, to the expression of hospitality. "One thing I must show you," she said, suddenly, "and that is the orchid-house! Are you fond of orchids?" "Under certain circumstances," I said, unguardedly, "I could be fond of apple-cores." As soon as I had spoken these words I would have been glad to recall them, but they seemed to make no impression whatever on her. We walked to the orchid-house, we went through it, and she explained all its beauties, its singularities, and its rarities. When we came out again, I asked myself: "Is she in the habit of doing all this to chance visitors? Would she treat a Brown or a Robinson in the way she is treating me?" I could not answer my question, but if Brown and Robinson had appeared at that moment I should have been glad to knock their heads together. I did not want to go; I would have been glad to examine every building on the place, but I knew I must depart; and as I was beginning to express my sense of the kindness with which I had been treated, she interrupted by asking me if I expected to come back this way. "No," said I, "that is not my plan. I expect to ride on to Waterton, and there I shall stop for a day or two and decide what section of the country I shall explore next." "And to-day?" she said. "Where have you planned to spend the night?" "I have been recommended to stop at a little inn called the 'Holly Sprig,'" I replied. "It is a leisurely day's journey from Walford, and I have been told that it is a pleasant place and a pretty country. I do not care to travel all the time, and I want to stop a little when I find interesting scenery." [Illustration: "As soon as I had spoken these words"] "Oh, I know the Holly Sprig Inn," said she, speaking very quickly, "and I would advise you not to stop there. We have lunched there two or three times when we were out on long drives. There is a much better house about five miles the other side of the Holly Sprig. It is really a large, handsome hotel, with good service and everything you want--where people go to spend the summer." I thanked her for her information and bade her good-bye. She shook my hand very cordially and I walked away. I had gone but a very few steps when I wanted to turn around and look back, but I did not. Before I had reached the lodge, where I had left my bicycle, I met Brownster, and when I saw him I put my hand into my pocket. He had certainly been very attentive. "I carried your valise, sir," he said, "to the lodge, and I took the liberty of strapping it to your handle-bar. You will find everything all right, sir, and the--other clothes will be properly attended to." I thanked him, and then handed him some money. To my surprise, he did not offer to take it. He smiled a little and bowed. "Would you mind, sir," he said, "if you did not give me anything? I assure you, sir, that I'd very much rather that you wouldn't give me anything." And with this he bowed and rapidly disappeared. "Well," said I, to myself, as I put my money back into my pocket, "it is a queer country, this Cathay." As I approached the lodge, I felt that perhaps I had received a lesson, but I was not sure. I would wait and let circumstances decide. The gardener was away attending to his duties; but his wife was there, and when she came forward, with a frank, cheery greeting, I instantly decided that I had had a lesson. I thanked her, as earnestly as I knew how, for what she had done for me, and then I added: "You and your husband have treated me with such kind hospitality that I am not going to offer you anything in return for what you have done." "You would have hurt us, sir, if you had," said she. Then, in order to change the subject, I spoke of the honor which had been bestowed upon me by being allowed to wear the Duke's dressing-gown. She smiled, and replied: "Honors would always be easy for you, sir, if you only chose to take them." As I rode away I thought that the last remark of the gardener's wife seemed to show a mental brightness above her station, although I did not know exactly what she meant. "Can it be," I asked myself, "that she fancies that good family, six feet of athletic muscle, and no money would be considered sufficient to make matrimonial honors easy on that estate?" If such an idea had come into her head, it certainly was a very foolish one, and I determined to drive it from my mind by thinking of something else. Suddenly I slackened my speed. I stopped and put one foot to the ground. What a hard-hearted wretch I thought myself to be! Here I was thinking of all sorts of nonsense and speeding away without a thought of the young girl who had hurt herself the day before and who had been helped by me to her home! She lived but a few miles back, and I had determined, the evening before, to run down and see how she was getting on before starting on my day's journey. I turned and went bowling back over the road on which I had been so terribly drenched the previous afternoon. In a very little while my bicycle was leaning against the fence of the pretty house by the road-side, and I had entered the front yard. The slender girl was sitting on the piazza behind some vines. When she saw me she quickly closed the book she was reading, drew one foot from a little stool, and rose to meet me. There was more color on her face than I had supposed would be likely to find its way there, and her bright eyes showed that she was not only surprised but glad to see me. "I thought you were ever so far on your journey!" she said. "And how did you get through that awful storm?" "I want to know first about your foot," I said--"how is that?" "My own opinion is," she answered, "that it is nearly well. Mother knew exactly what to do for it; she wrapped it in wet cloths and dry cloths, and this morning I scarcely think of it. But there is one thing I want to tell you before you meet father and mother--for they want to see you, I know. We talked a great deal about you last night. You may have thought it strange I told you about the peas, but I had to do it to explain why I could not ask you to stop. Now I want to tell you that this accident made everything all right. As soon as father and mother knew that I was hurt they forgot everything else, and neither of them remembered that there was such a thing as a pea-vine in the world. It really seems as if my tumble was a most lucky thing. And now you must come in. They will never forgive me if I let you go away without seeing them." The mother, a pleasant little woman, full of cheerful gratitude to me for having done so much for her daughter, and the father, tall and slender, hurrying in from the garden, his face beaming with a friendly enthusiasm, apologizing for the mud on his clothes, and almost in the same breath telling me of the obligations under which I had placed him, both seemed to me at the first glance to be such kind, simple-hearted, simple-mannered people that I could not help contrasting this family with the one under whose roof I had passed the night. I spent half an hour with these good people, patiently listening to their gratitude and to their deep regrets that I had been allowed to go on in the storm; but I succeeded in allaying their friendly regrets by assuring them that it would have been impossible to keep me from going on, so certain had I been that I could reach the little town of Vernon before the storm grew violent. Then I was obliged to tell them that I did not reach Vernon, and how I had spent the night. "With the Putneys!" exclaimed the mother. "I am sure you could not have been entertained in a finer house!" They asked me many questions and I told them many things, and I soon discovered that they took a generous interest in the lives of other people. They spoke of the good this rich family had done in the neighborhood during the building of their great house and the improvement of their estate, and not a word did I hear of ridicule or scandalous comment, although in good truth there was opportunity enough for it. The young lady asked me if I had seen Miss Putney, and when I replied that I had, she inquired if I did not think that she was a very pretty girl. "I do not know her," she said, "but I have often seen her when she was out driving. I do not believe there is any one in this part of the country who dresses better than she does." I laughed, and told her that I thought I knew somebody who dressed much finer even than Miss Putney, and then I described the incident of the Duke's dressing-gown. This delighted them all, and before I left I was obliged to give every detail of my gorgeous attire. It was about eleven o'clock when at last I tore myself away from this most attractive little family. To live as they lived, to be interested in the things that interested them--for the house seemed filled with books and pictures--to love nature, to love each other, and to think well of their fellow-beings, even of the super-rich--seemed to me to be an object for which a man of my temperament should be willing to strive and thankful to win. After meeting her parents I did not wonder that I had thought the slender girl so honest-hearted and so lovable. It was true that I had thought that. _ |
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