 | CHAPTER III.
A FRIENDLY WELCOME. The Wetherel affair |  |
3. CHAPTER III.
A FRIENDLY WELCOME.
The Elm City, although freighted with a possible hero and heroine, reached
New Haven without misadventure.
As it zigzagged up the shallow harbor Wetherel pointed out to Nestoria the
country-seat of his uncle, a low, wide-spreading wooden house, with pillared
veranda and pointed gables, nested on a little rocky bluff which rose some
thirty feet above the yellow beach. The girl looked at it in silence and with a
slight sense of aversion, for which she conscientiously reproved herself. The
dwelling did not seem to her heartily hospitable, because this very kind and
sweet-mannered young gentleman might not enter it. Notwithstanding her
keen sense of loneliness in America, and the pleasure with which she had but
lately looked forward to meeting her friends, the dear, good Dinnefords, she
would have been not unwilling to pass the night at a hotel.
“It is a long way from the city,” she said, with a suppressed sigh which
meant, “Perhaps we shall not meet again.”
“Yes, four miles,” he replied. “If you will allow me, I will drive out there
with you; that is, if my uncle has not sent a carriage for you.”
“I expect one,” she sighed again, half hoping that it might not arrive.
“Alice telegraphed me that she would be on the dock. She would have come
to New York for me, only I wouldn't let her. I hate to have people take
trouble about me.”
“You shouldn't,” he declared. “You are worth taking trouble for.”
He looked down in admiration at the sweet innocent face which was turned
up towards his in wonder at his flattering speech. It was a constant marvel
to him that she should not be aware of her own fascinations and use them to
command service. A dandy, a mere worldling, a spoiled child of flattery, he
had not a suspicion of the education of humility and self-abnegation which she
had received. He had serious-minded relations, it is true, but he had avoided
them as far as possible, and in his aversion given their characters no intelligent
study, so that he had grown up in a sort of heathenish ignorance of the
workings and ways of devout souls. He could not have guessed that any one,
not even a piously faithful father, not even a clergyman and missionary, would
say daily to such an endearing little beauty as this, “We are dust and ashes;
we are worthless worms of the earth; we have no manner of merit of our own;
we live from day to day by sufferance; our sole honor is humility, our sole
hope is mercy.” Even had he divined the fact of such lessons, he could not
have believed that she would take them seriously to heart and learn from them
to hold herself in little esteem. That she was not vain or self-conscious he had
discovered; but he attributed it to natural modesty, and gave her all the glory.
The touch of the steamer against the wooden sides of the Belle Dock brought
Alice Dinneford upon the scene, as the rubbing of a lamp or other talisman in
the “Arabian Nights” calls in a friendly genii. The moment the gangway
through the throng of disembarking passengers, and gathered her guest
into her cordial arms. A tall brunette, with flashing eyes and an assured manner,
she was a striking contrast to the blonde and childlike Nestoria, the two
forming some such a bouquet as a pink and a lily of the valley.
In a few minutes the waif from the Kurdish mountains found herself in
Jabez Wetherel's ancient rockaway, driving soberly among the rectangles
of New Haven. She had not bidden good-by to Edward Wetherel; he had
disappeared during the confusion of the landing. It seemed to Nestoria that
he must have avoided Alice intentionally, and the suspieion was sad enough to
throw a chill over even her meeting with a dear friend. It was so strange
and dreadful that cousins should not speak, especially when they were both
such good and charming people! During the whole drive Nestoria thought
of this ugly avoidance; and it was because of it she did not mention Edward
Wetherel's name.
“So here you are at last!” prattled the lively Alice. “I am so glad to get
hold of you. Why didn't you let me come down to New York after you?
You are such a little speck of a thing that you mustn't go wandering alone in
this way. You might get lost out of a sail-boat, out of a basket, out of a
thimble, and nobody notice it.”
“I came across the ocean with only an old lady,” said Nestoria. “I know
how to cling fast to somebody or other.”
She had hold of Alice's dress at that very moment. It was a charming little
trick of hers, indicative of her clinging, confiding nature, thus to lay an infantile,
tendril-like clasp upon the garments of her friends. On the Elm City there
had been a minute when she could hardly refrain from slyly taking the skirt
of Edward Wetherel's coat between her thumb and finger in order to enjoy
that precious luxury of hers, the sense of attaching herself closely to a protector.
“Besides,” she added, “my father doesn't like to have me be a charge to
people.”
“A charge to people! You!” laughed Alice. “Wait till people find fault
about it. What Turkish ideas your father has. He has forgotten what a
young lady passes for in America. Don't you know that we are the salt of the
earth here?”
“Oh, no!” protested Nestoria, who was accustomed to hear that phrase
used in a very solemn sense.
“The cream of the cream, then,” varied Alice, with a glimpse of her friend's
sensitiveness as to the perversion of Scriptural language.
“It depends upon how we behave,” seriously replied Nestoria. She remembered
at the moment a sermon of her father's to his oriental flock, in
which he had said, “Men and women are precisely equal in the sight of their
Creator; they are both of value merely because the cross was uplifted for both;
merely because both may equally lay hold of divine merey.”
“It depends upon how we look,” insisted Alice. “But never mind about
that now. I must tell you what sort of a life you are to have at Sea Lodge.
Sea Lodge is the name of Uncle Wetherel's villa. He wanted to call it Mount
Horeb, or Mount Pisgah, or something of that sort. Oh, he is such a queer old
gentleman, with such old-fashioned antediluvian notions. One would think
that he had just come out of the wanderings of the children of Israel, and had
got into the world of our time by mistake. I beat him on the name of the
villa. I dated all my letters from Sea Lodge, and I had a signboard put up
himself. He has given in, however; he found the word lodge just a little bit
Biblical—a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, you know. And that is just about
it, for he does garden it away in a most extravagant manner, and we do have
an abundance of cucumber vines, and the place isn't an enchanted palace, nor
a castle of chivalry, nor anything very scrumptions. Now don't bother your
head about the word scrumptions; it just means sumptuous, I suppose. You
will like Uncle Wetherel; he will exactly suit your tastes. That is, you will
like him if you are not afraid of him. Don't be afraid of him. I am not. And
yet some people are, he is such an old Plymouth Rock of a man, with eyes
which are as set and glassy as a ghost's. He is almost eighty years old and as
thin and bony as an umbrella. There is nothing of him but a frame and a
black cloth covering. I sometimes feel as if I should like to pick him up and
open him with a slap, and shut him up again and put him in the umbrella
stand.”
“Don't!” begged Nestoria, irresistibly tempted to laugh, but feeling that
it was wrong, for Mr. Wetherel was old and good. How could Alice make
such fun of her uncle?
“Well, I won't,” answered the irrepressible Alice. “He shan't be put in
the umbrella stand if you don't want it. But he is so queer that one can't help
having queer plans and projects for him. Can you imagine what he does when
he drives out in his phaeton with mamma or me? Every time he finds little
boys swearing he pulls up this old poke of a horse and reproves the little rascals;
and if they keep on at it, he gets out and chases them with his horsewhip.
Of course he can't run, and of course they scud away from him, and then
swear worse than ever. All the small wretches around here know him now,
and blaspheme him out of his phaeton as often as they can. I do believe he
has increased the profanity of the township enormonsly.”
“Perhaps it is not a judicious way of dealing with bad boys,” admitted
Nestoria.
“Dealing!” repeated Alice, laughingly catching hold of her friend and
shaking her. “You dear little primness! did you learn to talk out of the catechism?
Oh, you will get along famously with Uncle Wetherel. He will say
that you talk the language of Zion. Besides, he is all primed to like you; he
is fairly addled about missionary people: the forlorn-hope of godliness, he calls
them. Your father is a particular admiration of his. I really believe he puts
your father alongside of John Bunyan or Jonathan Edwards.”
“Does he?” murmured Nestoria, with a thrill of filial pride which sent the
tears into her eyes. “I wish my father could come home and see the kind
people who care for him.”
“I wish he could,” replied Alice, divining the girl's emotion with that sympathy
which is so quick in woman, and passing an arm around her waist.
“We should spoil him. Well, so much for Uncle Wetherel. He will like you,
and you will like him. As for my mother, you know what she is.”
“Oh, yes,” said Nestoria, with a sigh of satisfaction—the sigh of a contented
infant. Now that she had a little lost out of mind the mysterious troubles of
Edward Wetherel, it was a pure pleasure to her to think that she would shortly
meet the good, cordial Mrs. Dinneford.
“And that is all,” continued Alice. “Uncle Wetherel is a widower, and
has lost all his children. No young people except myself; no beaux and no
chance of flirtations; no adventures except driving and sea-bathing. We two
women take care of Uncle Wetherel; that is our life. I wish we could have a
Uncle has a million or so, and he spends less than four thousand a year. It
seems to me precious mean; I could spend fifty thousand. But then he gives
away fifty thousand.”
“He must be a very noble man,” judged Nestoria. “The Turks would respect
such a man.”
“A lesson for me, I suppose,” laughed Alice. “I won't take it; I won't
be advised by the Turks; they don't know as much as I do. But of course
you must like him. I want you to, for your own sake. I want you to be contented
with us. One thing more I must tell you. Don't be scared and get
faint at his way of carving and helping. He carves, and gets tired and sits
down and rests himself, and then tries it again. Then he shies things at you;
he takes a piece of beefsteak on the fork and hits it with his knife, and away
it goes; you would think a frog was jumping across the table at you. But he
has done it so often that he always hits his mark. It will land on your plate,
and not in your lap. You won't have to wear a baby-apron.”
After nearly an hour of this prattle, and of such leisurely journeying that
Nestoria once looked at the horse to see if it were not a cow, the rockaway
pulled up in front of a red glimmer showing through shrubbery, and the girl
perceived that she was at the gate of her new home.
The thought which came into her mind at the instant was a wondering
query as to what might be the real, fundamental character of an old gentleman
who could quarrel with his own nephew, and such a gentle, charming,
and seemingly altogether admirable nephew as Edward Wetherel.
| CHAPTER III.
A FRIENDLY WELCOME. The Wetherel affair | |