“Whatever happens—whatever happens!” cried Mrs. Nimick, melting on his bosom.
“The only thing likely to happen at present is that you will miss your train if I let you go on saying nice things to me much longer.”
Mrs. Nimick at this dried her eyes, renewed her clutch on her draperies, and stood glancing sentimentally about the room while her brother rang for the carriage.
“I take away a lovely picture of you,” she murmured. “It’s wonderful what you’ve made of this hideous house.”
“Ah, not I, but Ella—there she
“Oh, she’s wonderful, quite wonderful. I see she has got those imported damask curtains she was looking at the other day at Fielding’s. When I am asked how she does it all, I always say it’s beyond me!” Mrs. Nimick murmured.
“It’s an art like another,” smiled the Governor. “Ella has been used to living in tents and she has the knack of giving them a wonderful look of permanence.”
“She certainly makes the most extraordinary bargains—all the knack in the world won’t take the place of such curtains and carpets.”
“Are they good? I’m glad to hear it. But all the good curtains and carpets won’t make a house comfortable to live in. There’s where the knack comes in, you see.”
He recalled with a shudder the lean Congressional years—the years before his marriage—when Mrs. Nimick had lived with him in Washington, and the daily struggle in the House had been combined with domestic conflicts almost equally recurrent. The offer of a foreign mission, though disconnecting him from active politics, had the advantage of freeing him from his sister’s tutelage, and in Europe, where he remained for two years, he had met the lady who was to become his wife. Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretaryship at our various embassies. Her life had given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She regarded a public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and studying debates. So sincere was the latter taste that she passed without regret from the amenities of a European life well stocked with picturesque intimacies to the rawness of the Midsylvanian capital. She helped Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to be helped by a woman—by her tact, her good looks, her memory for faces, her knack of saying the right thing to the right person, and her capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public activity. But, above all, she helped him by making his private life smooth and harmonious. For a man careless of personal ease, Mornway was singularly alive to the domestic amenities. Attentive service, well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers in the house—these material details, which had come to seem the extension of his wife’s personality, the inevitable result of her nearness, were as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as in the first surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had kept house jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task silently and imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the latter method. Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway’s guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing scale of expense.
Such an eye was now projected on the Governor’s surroundings, and its explorations were summed up in the tone in which Mrs. Nimick repeated from the threshold: “I always say I don’t see how she does it!”
The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more than the buzz of a baffled insect. Poor Grace! It was not his fault if her husband was given to chimerical investments, if her sons were “unsatisfactory,” and her cooks would not stay with her; but it was natural that these facts should throw into irritating contrast the ease and harmony of his own domestic life. It made him all the sorrier for his sister to know that her envy did not penetrate to the essence of his happiness, but lingered on those external signs of well-being which counted for so little in the sum total of his advantages. Poor Mrs. Nimick’s life seemed doubly thin and mean when one remembered that, beneath its shabby surface, there were no compensating riches of the spirit.
II
IT was the custodian of his own hidden treasure who at this moment broke in upon his musings. Mrs. Mornway, fresh from her afternoon walk, entered the room with that air of ease and lightness which seemed to diffuse a social warmth about her; fine, slender, pliant, so polished and modeled by an intelligent experience of life that youth seemed clumsy in her presence. She looked down at her husband and shook her head.
“You promised to keep the afternoon to yourself, and I hear Grace has been here.”
“Poor Grace—she didn’t stay long, and I should have been a brute not to see her.”
He leaned back, filling his gaze to the brim with her charming image, which obliterated at a stroke the fretful ghost of Mrs. Nimick.
“She came to congratulate you, I suppose?”
“Yes, and to ask me to do something for Ashford.”
“Ah—on account of Jack. What does she want for him?”
The Governor laughed. “She said you were in her confidence—that you were backing her up. She seemed to think your support would ensure her success.”
Mrs. Mornway smiled; her smile, always full of delicate implications, seemed to caress her husband while it gently mocked his sister.
“Poor Grace! I suppose you undeceived her.”
“As to your influence? I told her it was paramount where it ought to be.”
“And where is that?”
“In the choice of carpets and curtains. It seems ours are almost too good.”
“Thanks for the compliment! Too good for what?”
