Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

Simeon Ponsonby – the professor of botany at Harmouth – had married when over forty the eldest daughter of a distinguished though impecunious family in his own college town. His mother, on her deathbed, foresaw that he would need a housekeeper and suggested the match.

“Simeon,” she said, “it isn’t for us to question the Lord’s ways, but I am mortally sorry to leave you, my son; it is hard for a man to shift for himself. I was thinking now if you were to marry Deena Shelton you might go right along in the old house. The Sheltons would be glad to have her off their hands, and she is used to plain living. She would know enough to keep her soup pot always simmering on the back of the range and make her preserves with half the regular quantity of sugar. I like her because she brushes her hair and parts it in the middle, and she has worn the same best dress for three years.”

Soon after Mrs. Ponsonby died and Simeon married Deena.

She didn’t particularly want to marry him, but then, on the other hand, she was not violently set against it. She saw romance through her mother’s eyes, and Mrs. Shelton said Professor Ponsonby was a man any girl might be proud to win. If his sympathies were as narrow as his shoulders, his scientific reputation extended over the civilized world, and Harmouth was proud of the fact. Deena’s attention was not called to his sympathies, and it was called to his reputation.

He proposed to Miss Shelton in a few well-chosen words, placed his mother’s old-fashioned diamond ring on her finger, and urged forward the preparations for the wedding with an impatience that bespoke an ardent disposition. Later Deena learned that his one servant had grown reckless in joints after Mrs. Ponsonby’s death, and the house bills had shocked Simeon into seeking immediate aid.

At twenty Deena was able to accommodate herself to her new life with something more than resignation; a wider experience would have made it intolerable. She was flattered by his selection, proud to have a house of her own, and not sorry to be freed from the burdens of her own home. There were no little Ponsonbys, and there had been five younger Sheltons, all clamoring for Deena’s love and care, whereas Simeon made no claims except that she should stay at home and care for the house and not exceed her allowance. If she expected to see a great deal of her own family she was mistaken, for, while no words passed on the subject, she felt that visiting was to be discouraged and the power to invite was vested in Simeon alone. Respect was the keynote of her attitude in regard to him, and he made little effort to bridge the chasm of years between them.

He was a tall, spare man, slightly stooped, with a prominent forehead, insignificant nose, and eyes red and strained through too ardent a use of the microscope. He habitually wore gold-rimmed spectacles; indeed, he put them on in the morning before he tied his cravat, and took them off at the corresponding moment of undressing at night. His mouth was his best feature, for, while the lips were pinched, they had a kind of cold refinement.

He was a just man but close, and the stipend he gave his wife for their monthly expenses barely kept them in comfort, but Deena had been brought up in the school of adversity, and had few personal needs. Her house absorbed all her interest, as well as stray pennies. The old mahogany furniture was polished till it shone; the Ponsonby silver tea set looked as bright as if no battering years lay between it and its maker’s hand a century ago; the curtains were always clean; the flowers seemed to grow by magic – and Deena still parted her wonderful bronze hair and kept it sleek.

At the end of two years, when she was twenty-two, a ripple of excitement came into her life; another Shelton girl married, and caused even greater relief to her family than had Deena, for she married a Boston man with money. He had been a student at Harmouth and had fallen in love with Polly Shelton’s violet eyes and strange red-gold hair, that seemed the only gold fate had bestowed upon the Sheltons. He took Polly to Boston, where, as young Mrs. Benjamin Minthrop, she became the belle of the season, and almost a professional beauty, though she couldn’t hold a candle to Deena – Deena whose adornment was “a meek and quiet spirit,” who obeyed Simeon with the subjection St. Peter recommended – whose conversation was “chaste coupled with fear.”

But one day all this admirable monotony came to an end quite adventitiously, and events came treading on each other’s heels. It was a crisp October day, and an automobile ran tooting and snorting, and trailing its vile smells, through Harmouth till it stopped at Professor Ponsonby’s gate and a lady got out and ran up the courtyard path. Deena had been trying in vain to make quince jelly stiffen —jell was the word used in the receipt book of the late Mrs. Ponsonby – with the modicum of sugar prescribed, till in despair she had resorted to a pinch of gelatine, and felt that the shade of her mother-in-law was ticking the word incompetent from the clock in the hall – when suddenly the watchword was drowned in the stertorous breathing of the machine at the gate, and Polly whisked in without ringing and met Deena face to face.

“We have come to take you for a spin in our new automobile,” Polly cried, gayly. “Where is Simeon? You think he would not care to go? Well, leave him for once, and come as far as Wolfshead, and we will lunch there and bring you back before sunset.”

Deena’s delicate complexion was reddened by the heat of the preserve kettle, her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, and a checked apron with a bib acted as overalls. Polly twitched her to the stairs.

“What a fright you make of yourself,” she exclaimed; “and yet, I declare, you are pretty, in spite of it! Ben has to go down in the town to get some more gasoline, and then he means to persuade Stephen French to go with us, so rush upstairs and change your dress while I report to him that you will go, and he will come back for us in half an hour.”

Stephen French, who was to make the fourth in the automobile, was Harmouth’s young professor of zoölogy, a favorite alike with the students and the dons, with the social element in the town as well as the academic. To Ben Minthrop he had been a saving grace during a rather dissipated career at college, and now that that young gentleman was married, and his feet set in the path of commercial respectability, the friendship was even more cemented. On Ben’s part there was admiration and gratitude, on Stephen’s the genuine liking an older man has for a youngster who has had the pluck to pull himself together. It was a bond between the Shelton sisters that their husbands shared one sentiment in common – namely, a romantic affection for Stephen French.

Deena was standing in her petticoat when her sister joined her in her bed-room – not in a petticoat of lace and needlework, such as peeped from under the edge of Polly’s smart frock as she threw herself into a chair, but a skimpy black silk skirt with a prim ruffle, made from an old gown of Mrs. Ponsonby’s. It was neat and fresh, however, and her neck and arms, exposed by her little tucked underwaist, were of a beauty to ravish a painter or a sculptor. Polly herself, boyish and angular in build, groaned to think of such perfection “born to blush unseen”; her one season in Boston had demonstrated to her the value of beauty as an asset in that strange, modern exchange we call society. She was evidently trying to say something that would not get itself said, and her elder sister was too busy with her toilet to notice the signs of perturbation. Finally the words came with a rush.

“Deena,” she said, “when we were children in the nursery you once said I was a ‘coward at you’ – I remember your very words. Well, I believe I am still! You are so dignified and repressing that I am always considering what you will think a liberty. I have taken a liberty now, but please don’t be angry. It does seem so absurd to be afraid to make a present to one’s own sister.”

She opened the bedroom door, and dragged in a huge box, which she proceeded to uncord, talking all the while.

“I have brought you a dress,” she said; “a coat and skirt made for me by R – , but Ben cannot bear me in it because it’s so womanish – pockets where no man would have them, and the sleeves all trimmed – and so, as I think it charming myself, I hoped, perhaps, you would accept it.”

Both sisters blushed, Polly with shyness, Deena with genuine delight. She loved pretty things, although she rarely yielded to their temptations, and she kissed her sister in loving acknowledgment of the gift. It never occurred to her that Simeon could object.

Polly, in high spirits at her success, next declared that she must arrange Deena’s hair, and she pushed her into a low chair in front of the dressing table, and fluffed the golden mane high above the temples, and coiled and pinned it into waves and curls that caught the sunlight on their silken sheen and gave it back. A very beautiful young woman was reflected in old Mother Ponsonby’s small looking-glass, a face of character and spirit, in spite of its regularity.

“There, admire yourself!” exclaimed Polly, thrusting a hand mirror into her sister’s grasp. “I don’t believe you ever look at your profile or the back of your head! You are so busy enacting the part of your own mother-in-law that I only wonder you don’t insist upon wearing widow’s caps. Oh! I beg your pardon – I forgot that could only be done by forfeiting Simeon! Where do you keep your shirt-waists? This one isn’t half bad; let me help you into it.”

She chose the least antiquated blouse in Deena’s wardrobe, and pinned it into place with the precision of experience; next she hooked the new skirt round the waist and held the little coat for her sister to put on.

“Where is your hat?” she demanded.

Deena fetched a plain black straw, rusty from the sun and dust of two summers, and shook her head as she tried to pinch the bows into shape.

“I shall be like a peacock turned topsy-turvy,” she laughed – “ashamed of my head instead of my feet!”

Polly took it out of her hand.

“Of course, you cannot wear that with your hair done in the new way – besides, it spoils your whole costume. I saw quite a decent hat in a shop window in the next street. I’ll get it for you!” and she was out of the room like a flash of lightning.

Deena ran to the window and caught her mercurial sister issuing from the door below.

“Stop, Polly!” she called. “I cannot afford a new hat, and I cannot accept anything more – please come back.”

Polly made a little grimace and walked steadily down the path; at the gate she condescended to remark:

“Have all your last words said to your cook by the time I get back, for Ben will not want to wait.”

In ten minutes she returned with a smart little hat, and in answer to Deena’s remonstrances, she tossed the condemned one into the wood fire that was burning on the dining-room hearth; at the same instant the automobile arrived at the gate. Deena, nearly in tears, pinned the unwelcome purchase on her head, and followed her sister to the street. The hat set lightly enough on her curls, but it weighed heavily on her conscience.

After the manner of the amateur chauffeur, Ben was doubled up under the front wheels of his motor, offering a stirrup-cup of machine oil to the god of the car, but Stephen French stood at the gate, his grave face lighted up with the fun of a stolen holiday.

“You see a truant professor!” he exclaimed. “Simeon doesn’t approve; we couldn’t induce him to come. He said a day off meant a night on for him – he is so wise, is Simeon – but I positively had to do something in the way of sport; I am in a reckless mood to-day.”

“I’ll do the wrecking for you, if that’s all you want,” came from under the auto’s wheels.

Stephen conveyed his thanks.

“I dare say you will, with no effort on your part,” he said, opening the back door of the great, puffing monster. “Get in here, Mrs. Ponsonby. Ben likes his wife beside him in front, he says, because she understands how to run the machine when he blows his nose, but I think it is a clear case of belated honeymoon.”

Here Ben scrambled to his feet, his broad, good-humored face crimson from groveling.

“Deena, good-day to you,” he cried. “How perfectly stunning you look! I declare I thought Polly was the pick of the Sheltons, but, by Jove! you are running her hard. What have you been doing to yourself?”

Stephen French was delighted – he laughed his slow, reluctant laugh, and then he called to Ben:

“Turn round and see whether you dropped them in the road.”

“Dropped what?” asked Ben, his hand on the lever, making a black semicircle.

“Your manners,” said Stephen, and chuckled again.

“You go to thunder,” roared Ben, shooting ahead. “A poor, wretched bachelor like you instructing a married man how to treat his sister-in-law, and just because once upon a time I sat in your lecture room and let you bore me by the hour about protoplasms! Do you suppose I should dare admit to Polly that Deena is as handsome as she is? Why, man alive, a Russian warship off Port Arthur would be a place of safety compared to this automobile.”

Deena, laughing though embarrassed, was trying to cover the countenance that provoked the discussion with a veil, for her hat strained at its pins and threatened to blow back to Harmouth before the knotty point was settled as to who should pay for it.

They were flying between fields strewn with Michaelmas daisies and wooded banks gay with the first kiss of frost, and gradually Deena forgot everything but the exhilaration of rushing through the air, and their attitude of holiday-making. She was thoroughly at her ease with French; he was Simeon’s one intimate in the corps of professors, the only creature who was ever welcome at the Ponsonby table, the one discerning soul who found something to admire in Simeon’s harsh dealings with himself and the world. Their line of study naturally drew them together, but Stephen admired the man as well as the scholar; the purity of his scientific ambition, the patience with which he bore his poverty – for poverty seemed a serious thing to French, who was a man of independent fortune, and whose connection with the university was a matter of predilection only. With Ponsonby it was bread and butter, and yet he had ventured to marry with nothing but his splendid brain between his wife and absolute want. French stole a glance at Deena, who was looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and wondered whether she found her lot satisfactory; whether there were not times when Simeon’s absence was precious to her. Without disloyalty to his friend, he hoped so, for he had something to tell her before the day was over that might lead to a temporary separation, and he hated to think of those lovely eyes swimming in tears – all women were not Penelopes.

“She can’t care in that way,” he reflected. “Ponsonby is tremendous in his own line, of course, but no woman could love him.”

Perhaps he was mistaken – perhaps Mrs. Ponsonby loved her husband with all the fervor of passion, but she conveyed an impression of emancipation to-day, and of powers of enjoyment hitherto suppressed, that made Stephen doubt. She was like a child bubbling over with happiness, gay as a lark, as unlike her usual self in behavior as her modish appearance was unlike that of Simeon Ponsonby’s self-denying wife.

“Of course she won’t mind; why should she?” he decided, and yet determined to put off making his announcement till after lunch.

At Wolfshead they stopped at the little inn, found the one o’clock dinner smoking on the table, and sat down with the rest of the hungry company – employees of a branch railroad that had its terminus there; drummers in flashy shop-made clothes, and temporary residents in the little town. This jaunt had given them an appetite, and roast beef and apple tart disappeared at a rate that should have doubled their bill.

After lunch they strolled down to the beach, Deena starting ahead with French, while Polly went with Ben to get cushions from the automobile. The present generation seems to consider comfort the first aim of existence, though the trouble they take to insure it more than counterbalances the results in old-fashioned judgment.

Stephen stopped to light his cigar behind the shelter of a tree, and then came running after Deena, who was walking slowly toward the vast plain of blue water stretching to the east. She turned at the sound of his footsteps and waited for him, wondering what his classes would think if they could see their professor bounding along with his hat under his arm. There was something peculiarly charming in the lighter side of Stephen’s nature; a simplicity and boyishness, which was the secret of his popularity far more than his weightier qualities. The women of Harmouth called him handsome, but he had small claims to beauty. A well set-up figure rather above the medium height, dark hair grizzled at the temples, eyes that seemed to laugh because of a slight contraction of the muscles at the outer corners, and a nose decidedly too high and bony. The expression of the mouth was shrewd, almost sarcastic, and possibly a little coarse, but his smile redeemed it and illumined his face like sunshine. What dazzled the ladies of Harmouth was really a certain easy luxury in dress and habits not common in the little town. It is always the exotic we prize in our conservatories.

This summing up of French’s outer man was not Deena’s estimate, as she watched his approach – she was too familiar with his appearance to receive any especial impression. She accepted his apologies for his cigar and for keeping her waiting with an indifferent air, and turned once more toward the sea.

CHAPTER II

The beach at Wolfshead was pebbly, with rocks thrown untidily about and ridges of blackened seaweed marking the various encroachments of the tide. Stephen brushed the top of a low bowlder with his handkerchief and invited Deena to sit down.

“You would be more comfortable,” he said, “if Ben would come with the cushions.”

“I am quite comfortable without them,” she answered, “though I cannot but resent the Paul and Virginia attitude of the young Minthrops. One would think a year of married life would have satisfied their greed for tête-à-têtes. I wonder whether they would continue sufficient to each other if they really were stranded on a desert island.”

“Could you be happy on such an island with the man of your heart, Mrs. Ponsonby?” asked Stephen.

And Deena, feeling that Simeon was perforce the man of her heart, and that he was quite unfitted to live on sea air and love, answered, smiling:

“Not unless there were a perfectly new flora to keep him contented.”

Stephen saw his opportunity to make his communication, and said, quickly:

“I suspect you have been reading those articles of Simeon’s in the Scientist on the vegetation of Tierra del Fuego. They are very able. He ought to go there and verify all he has gleaned by his reading. We fully appreciate we have a remarkable man at Harmouth in our professor of botany.”

Deena colored with pleasure.

“Poor Simeon,” she said; “his limited means have stood in the way of such personal research, and then, also, the college holidays are too short for extended trips.”

“Let him throw over his classes in the cause of science,” said Stephen, with excitement. “Why, such a book as Simeon would write after an exploration of – Fuegia, let us say – would place him among the scientists of the world.”

The thought that raced across Deena’s mind was what dull reading it would be, but she recognized the impropriety of the reflection and said, simply:

“It is too bad we haven’t a little more money.”

Stephen put his hand in his breast pocket and half drew out a letter, and then let it drop back, and then he walked a little apart from Deena and looked at her thoughtfully, as if trying to readjust his previous ideas of her to the present coquetry of her appearance. The way her thoughts had flown to Simeon when a desert island existence was mooted seemed as if she did care, and Stephen hated to give pain, and yet the letter had to be answered, and the opportunity was not likely to occur again. The thing he had always admired most in his friend’s wife was her common sense – to that he trusted.

“Mrs. Ponsonby,” he said, boldly, “if Simeon had a chance to do this very thing – free of expense – would you be unhappy at his desertion? Would you feel that the man who sent him to Patagonia was doing you an unkindness you could not forgive?”

“I should rejoice at his good fortune,” she answered, calmly. “The fact that I should miss him would not weigh with me for a moment.”

French gave a sigh of relief, while his imagination pictured to him a dissolving view of Polly under similar circumstances.

“The Argentine Government is fitting up an expedition,” he went on, “to go through the Straits of Magellan and down the east coast of Fuegia with a view of finding out something more exact in regard to the mineral and agricultural resources than has been known hitherto. I happen to have been in active correspondence for some time with the man who virtually set the thing going, and he has asked me to send him a botanist from here. Shall I offer the chance to your husband? He must go at once. It is already spring in that part of the world, and the summer at Cape Horn is short.”

Deena’s face grew crimson and then paled. She felt an emotion she could not believe – pure, unalloyed joy! But in a second she understood better; it was joy, of course, but joy at Simeon’s good luck.

“Could he get leave of absence right in the beginning of the term?” she asked, breathlessly.

And Stephen answered that he had never taken his Sabbatical year, and that some one could be found to do his work, though it might mean forfeiting half his salary.

Here they were joined by Polly and Ben, and as Deena made no reference to the subject they had been discussing, the talk wandered to general topics.

The sun was making long shadows and the hour to start was come. The gayety of the morning deserted Deena as they sped back to Harmouth. Her brain was busy fitting her ideas to this possible change that French had just foreshadowed, and though she was silent, her eyes shone with excitement and her color came and went in response to her unspoken thoughts.

In her mind she saw Tierra del Fuego as it looked on the map at the end of the narrowing continent, and then she remembered a picture of Cape Horn that had been in her geography when she was a child – a bold, rocky promontory jutting into a restless sea, in which three whales were blowing fountains from the tops of their heads. She reflected that it was very far away, and that in going there Simeon might encounter possible dangers and certain discomfort, and she tried to feel sorry, and all the time a wild excitement blazed in her breast. She felt as if her youth had been atrophied, and that if Simeon went it might revive, and then a great shame shook her to have allowed such thoughts, and a tender pity for the lonely man she had married obliterated self.

Stephen’s voice broke in upon her reverie.

“Have I depressed you, Mrs. Ponsonby?”

“No, no,” she answered. “I am only considering ways and means. I want him to go. We might rent our house for the winter, and I could go home to live. Count upon my doing everything in my power to make Simeon’s going easy, Mr. French.”

“You are admirable,” said Stephen, with genuine satisfaction. He even half put out his hand to give hers a grasp of approbation, but thought better of it. If she had had her hair parted in the middle, and had been mending Ponsonby’s stockings under the drop-light in her parlor, he might have done so, braving the needle’s point; but, looking as she did to-day, it seemed safer to refrain.

It was six o’clock when the auto stopped at Deena’s door.

“I wish she had shown a little more emotion at his going,” was Stephen’s reflection as he helped her out, forgetting how he had dreaded any evidence of distress; but he only said: