A CHANCE MEETING

The young ship builder by Sophie Swett is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. CHAPTER VIII

A CHANCE MEETING

“Could it have been Loveday?” said Octavia, who never trusted her near-sighted eyes.

I said that I was very strongly under the impression that I knew Loveday by sight. Also that if I had not seen her face, or recognized her clothes, I should have known that she savored too strongly of Palmyra soil to have come from anywhere else.

“But Loveday in the city! My mind fails to grasp the idea. It’s as if one of the old barn owls had preened his rusty feathers and taken a daytime flight into the world,” said Octavia. “What could have induced her to do it?”

“The owl or Loveday? Care for its young—devotion to some one of us.” I said, drawing upon my somewhat limited knowledge of owl and human nature for motives. And then my mind was suddenly illumined as by a flash of lightning.

The photograph of the horse! There had been a method in Loveday’s midnight madness. I wondered that I had not suspected before that her interest in it was in some way connected with Dave’s difficulty. Alf Reeder’s racer! What interest could Loveday have had in a race-horse except for some special reason?

I had fancied, in my sleepy stupidity, that she had cherished the photograph, and was having fancies about it, because Hiram had taken it. I thought she had tardily developed a pride in Hiram’s photography, and that that was the reason for her visit to Uncle Horace’s old carriage-house, where Hiram’s wagon was stored. But it must have been a more striking idea than that which had “ketched a holt” of Loveday “between midnight and sun-up”—“ketched a holt” so powerfully as to have driven her from her peaceful couch.

How dull I had been not to see it! And yet, now, as I walked along the crowded sidewalk, I racked my brains in vain to find out what the photograph could possibly mean, and what had brought Loveday to the city.

“I’m afraid that Evelyn isn’t altogether like a city girl,” meditated Octavia aloud. Her mind had already reverted to her book, and Loveday was forgotten. “I see, now, how I might have made her different.” She talked as if she had now had the benefit of several society seasons! “I’m afraid there is a good deal of Palmyra in her.”

“Well, Palmyra is what you know best,” I said, in my matter-of-fact way.

“A novel is a work of the imagination,” Octavia declared with dignity—and a suspicion of redness in her cheeks.

It was natural, perhaps, that she should not like to have hints given her by a maker of sage cheese!

But I had not meant to hint. I didn’t really understand, then, that people can better write what they know. I only didn’t see how they could possibly write anything else. But of course I knew that I hadn’t an imagination like Octavia’s.

The day that we felt to be big with fate for us dawned with an unsmiling April sky, and the nipping New England east wind, that is not elevating to the spirits.

As for me, I had no misgivings about my sage cheese—its reputation was already made—or my preserves, or my butter. Only sausages weighed upon my mind. They were as yet unproven. I could only boast of what Groundnut Hill Farm could do in that line, and bespeak a trial of its new commodities. And I meant to be very shrewd and business-like, and get the very best prices for all my wares. But it was “Evelyn Marchmont” that made the day seem momentous, and gave me the sickening, apprehensive feeling that made breakfast an impossibility.

Octavia wore the gentle dignity that made her quite impressive on the days of her kindergarten exhibition, as she walked toward the inner sanctum pointed out to us as the editorial office of the great publishing house. She approached an elderly man, who sat at a desk, and looked up with shrewd but kindly eyes from under a pair of very ferocious gray eyebrows. She began to explain her errand with gentle deliberation, extending toward him at the same time her precious package. He waved her, courteously but insistently, toward another desk, from which a younger man arose, thrusting his pen behind his ear with a preoccupied air and a patient expression which was not encouraging.

He broke in upon Octavia’s slow and carefully modulated speech—Octavia is very slow, things are done so deliberately in Palmyra.

“I am sorry to say that our list is full, quite full for this year, and we are not now considering anything,” he said, with perfect politeness, but with an air of absolute finality that made it impossible to say another word.

Octavia’s lips were set firmly together, as we walked out. There was really nothing to complain of; a publisher is under no obligation to “consider” a story if he knows that he doesn’t wish to publish it. But in Palmyra we were treated as if we were of some consequence; here we were only units in the crowd; more than that, countrified young women stealing busy men’s time to offer a probably worthless manuscript!

“How does a new writer get a hearing?” Octavia questioned drearily, when, at length, she opened her lips.

She repeated the question at the next publisher’s, where we were invited to sit down, and a little more time was spent upon us, but with the same decision that it would be useless to have “Evelyn Marchmont” read.

“By means of short stories in the magazines often,” said the publisher’s editor, who did not look the stern destroyer of hope that he was.

“Couldn’t—wouldn’t it be possible that one who could not write short stories might be successful with a long one?” stammered Octavia, breathlessly and with blazing cheeks.

“Oh, quite possible, I should think,” returned the editor, blandly, but with a trace of indifference in his tone; for we had stayed a good while.

“I should think you might perhaps find a publisher if you were willing to pay the expenses yourself,” he suggested, as we arose.

“Pay! why I expected to be paid at once,” gasped Octavia, losing her dignified deliberation in dismay.

The polite editor smiled in superior wisdom as he bowed us out.

There was much more of the same thing; I should not have the heart to write in detail the rebuffs which gradually caused a white line to appear around Octavia’s firmly-set lips—even if there were no risk of wearying my readers.

We found, at last, a minor publisher, who was willing to allow “Evelyn Marchmont” to be left with him on the chance that his readers would “get round to it” in the course of a month or two. He further encouraged us by the assurance that about one in five hundred of the manuscripts read in his establishment was worth publishing, and that, provided the book trade was brisk. It did not promise to be brisk at this time of the year.

Octavia came away and left her manuscript, with a long, lingering look behind, as one might confide one’s child to the tender mercies of a surgeon.

I dragged her into a restaurant, for it was now late in the afternoon, and made her have some tea.

“Of course I knew it would not be easy,” she said, looking at me across the little table, with tired eyes, that made my heart ache. “I have had enough disappointments with my short stories to teach me that. I’ve read enough about these things, too. But I didn’t dream that it could be so bad! Why, they look at you as if you were a disturber of the peace, to have written a book! And to suggest that I should pay for it! What are publishers for?”

“Well, you see, they have to pay and take the chances,” I said, with the dispassionate candor of a business woman. “I suppose sometimes a book may not sell at all, and they may lose money. He said one in five hundred were not acceptable. And they don’t know how fine a story ‘Evelyn Marchmont’ is.”

“That’s it! Why don’t they read it and find out?” cried Octavia. “Two or three said, you know, that it was the wrong time of year for them. Bathsheba, I almost think they didn’t like our appearance!”—this slowly, as if it were not a new thought.

“Do you think that we may possibly look Palmyran? Nowadays the fashions travel everywhere, and I am sure Miss Jobyns has the latest styles.”

“Perhaps it would have been better if you had sent the manuscript,” I said dubiously. “We took their time, anyway, and that may have made them unfavorably disposed toward the book. But it is going to be read, and when they’ve read it, I’m sure they’ll want to publish it!”

Octavia took a swallow of tea that seemed to choke her, and set down the cup.

“I don’t think that any one will ever publish it. I have put a whole year of time and all of myself into it, and it is a dreary, miserable failure!” she said.

She drank her tea chokingly, but she would not eat. I had never seen Octavia’s self-control so overthrown.

As we passed into the street I caught sight of a familiar head with sleek black braids. It turned toward me suddenly, and there was Alice Yorke’s piquant, fascinating face. I glanced eagerly at her companion. It was not Estelle; but a very striking girl, whose costume was either eccentric or artistic, I could not, from my Palmyran point of view, be quite sure which. My impression was only a momentary one, for Alice Yorke immediately seized upon us.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you! It seems like a special providence!” she cried. “Estelle is with me, you know. She is at my friend’s studio. My friend, Miss Carruthers,” she interpolated, introducing the striking young lady, whose laughing gray eyes and slightly turned-up nose were winning, but vaguely incongruous with her carriage and her toilet.

“And Estelle is—oh, in such a state! You must come to her at once. She has fainted and has had hysterics. And she has always been so strong and self-restrained!”

“Those self-restrained people, when they do give way!” her friend remarked, sagely.

“You see, she expected to sell her pictures at once, and no one would buy them,” continued Alice Yorke, who had drawn us into a doorway, out of the way of the crowd. “Of course, she will not mind having you know.”

“Oh, the poor child! the poor child!” cried Octavia. And I know I had never heard her speak of Estelle in just that tone before in my life.

“No one ought to expect to sell pictures at once,” continued Alice, judicially. “My friend, Miss Carruthers, who is an artist, says so. You have to try and try, until you have made a name for yourself.”

“Then how do you begin to make a name?” demanded Octavia, almost fiercely, sympathetic from the depths of her own experience.

“Well, you must have originality, or strike the popular taste in some way,” replied Miss Carruthers. “I can’t exactly say, because I haven’t done it yet,” she added, with a frank laugh.

“The poor child!” repeated Octavia, from her full heart. That Estelle should have to face these baffling problems that had overcome her filled Octavia with a new sympathy for her. And that one touch of sympathy had made her closer kin than she ever had been before. “Let us go to her at once! How could you leave her alone?” she added, reproachfully.

And then the superiority of the elder sister, of the practical New England stock suddenly asserted itself. “How could the child be so foolish as to think she could sell her pictures! I could have told her,” she said.

Our eyes met then, and I never did think that Octavia had much sense of humor, but she laughed drearily.

“You’re quite right, Bathsheba,” she said—although I had not made a remark. “I am not the one to say anything.”

We followed the girls up over the hill where the State House stood, an imposing building, with a gilded dome, that looked curiously frivolous to me, like a child’s toy, and into a stately, old-fashioned mansion, on a back street. It was only a stone’s throw from the busy centre, but as peaceful as Palmyra on a Sunday morning.

Up-stairs we went, in this stately mansion—up and up, until suddenly we were ushered into the most charming room that my eyes had ever beheld, with a quaintly-shaped bow-window hung out, so that one could see between the long, long rows of roofs—it made me think of looking through our old spy-glass—a beautiful blue glimpse of river—which actually brought the tears to my eyes, as if I had been away from our river for a twelvemonth. But it was not at the first moment that I saw the beauty of the room or the lovely river vista.

Estelle was lying on a couch covered with a leopard skin, over which her pretty yellow hair hung disheveled. Her eyelids were red, and her face blotched from weeping. Not even in her childhood, not even in the period when she did undeniably “make faces,” had I ever seen our delicately-reticent and self-contained Estelle in such a condition of frank overthrow as this.

She sprang up, and then, as if the sight of us were an additional humiliation, she sank back again and covered her face with her hands.

“Where—where in the world did you come from?” she gasped. “Oh, there are such perfectly dreadful people in Boston! I want to get home to Palmyra—and yet I can’t go, I can’t until I’ve shown my drawings to another dreadful editor; it’s a woman, too—that will be even worse!”

“Estelle, dearie, I know all about it!” Octavia knelt beside the couch and clasped the slender figure in her arms.

Estelle withdrew her hands from her face, and stared at her, round-eyed, like a child.

“You? You couldn’t possibly know anything about it!” she said, with a thrill of astonishment in her tone.

I had wondered sometimes if she had never guessed at Octavia’s literary ventures, since she had so often brought the dreadful packages home in the mail. It was evident, now, that she never had. Perhaps that was not strange, since she was a child when Octavia began to write, and her bump of curiosity had never been large.

“I—I rather think you would believe that I know about it, if I should tell you what I’ve been through this very day!” said Octavia, and sat down flat upon the floor.

Estelle sat up. And she looked at Octavia as if she were seeing her for the first time in her life, as, indeed, in a certain sense I think she was. I will admit that I was not altogether acquainted with Octavia in this mood myself.

“You!” repeated Estelle, in a bewildered way.

“I have written a book. I thought it was a beautiful story. I put my whole self into it, and a year—more than a year—of work, and no publisher will look at it! Or, at least none would until we had gone the rounds, and then received no encouragement at all. And I have to wait and wait to hear from it. And the worst is that I know no one will ever have it—I know it is bad!”

“I don’t believe you ever wrote anything bad,” said Estelle, loyally. “And I don’t believe that my pictures are bad, although they all said so. One dealer said I might leave them with him, although he feared it would be of no use, because his patrons were of the class that understood art! Think of that! Another thought that I didn’t understand composition or color. Some of them were quite civil about the drawings. I found the publishers better than the picture-dealers, but they all had their regular corps of artists—all but one firm. I am to go there to-morrow to show my drawings to the editor of a children’s magazine. But if people won’t buy my paintings, I know they won’t have my drawings.”

Octavia checked the encouraging words that rose to her lips. Her conscience would not allow her to say that she thought any one would buy Estelle’s drawings.

“But I must sell them. I want the money!” Estelle added, with a quivering lip.

“That’s always the way; things won’t sell when you want the money,” said Miss Carruthers, easily. She had sunk down upon a hassock, and allowed her skirts to drift around her in a way that reminded me of the “cheeses” of our childhood, while she still held her picturesque head in a way that suggested posing.

“I know!” she continued, answering my surprised glance, for in so luxurious an atmosphere one did not expect to hear of the need of money. “When Ned and I lived in New York, before Uncle Thaddeus left us this house and his money, we were as poor as church mice. I had to sell my pictures to help Ned pay his college expenses. It was a country college, too, and he lived very cheaply. He has gone to Harvard now; I wanted him to be near me, but I’m afraid it isn’t very good for him there. However, there are temptations everywhere for a boy, especially if he has money.”

Her pose had vanished; there was a pucker of anxiety between her brows. Were all brothers a trouble? I wondered, thinking of Dave, certainly Cyrus never had been.

It was for Dave that Estelle wanted the money. I was sure that the loan had not yet been paid, and probably the dishonorable fellow who had betrayed him to the college authorities was pressing him for the money. He was as yet only an apprentice in the shipyard, and received little or no wages. Cyrus and Uncle Horace treated him exactly like any other apprentice, somewhat to my disgust, as well as Estelle’s.

“You never saw me behave like this before—not in all my life, did you?” asked Estelle, suddenly sitting upright, and turning up her disheveled locks. “It was the unexpected that overcame me. Perhaps it would have been better if I had listened to you, for you never believed in me, either of you.”

“I believe in you, now!” cried Octavia. “Oh, I don’t know about the pictures! What does it matter what people can do? Talent is only an accident. It’s what people are that counts!”

Now it had occurred to me several times to try to comfort Octavia in that sort of way; but we are not given to preaching in our family, and I feared that the author of “Evelyn Marchmont” would find me trite, and somewhat of a Job’s comforter as well. “You are true and strong,” continued Octavia, while Estelle stared at her round-eyed, and I actually found my mouth hanging helplessly open with amazement—like Jonas Hickey’s, at the poorhouse, who isn’t even half-witted.

It was a little queer to regard Estelle as strong, just when she was giving way to tears like a child!

“You’re not thinking of yourself, like me,” continued Octavia. “You’re doing it all for Dave. You’ve been true to Dave, and I—I haven’t. I’ve been too hard and careless, to him and you always! This—this has shown it to me. I don’t quite know why! I suppose it’s the sympathy.”

God’s providence! “God’s providence is mine inheritance,” rang in my ears as if some one had said it. It seems sometimes—often, often, as we grow older, that we can see God’s great web in its weaving. Tiny threads, unconsidered trifles, and all woven into the wonderful pattern of life!

But the situation was becoming a little strained for Palmyra girls in a stranger’s studio. Octavia felt it, and arose suddenly to her feet with a murmured apology. Miss Carruthers showed a ready tact. She took the matter lightly, although there were sympathetic tears in her frank gray eyes, and insisted that we should all stay to tea.

It was served in the studio, and was a delightfully merry affair, considering that our visit had begun so tearfully. Miss Bocock, an elderly Englishwoman, who lived with Miss Carruthers, as companion and chaperon, declined tea, and devoted herself to embroidery and a vinaigrette, which she offered to Octavia and Estelle, evidently on account of their tearful appearance, and somewhat to their embarrassment.

Octavia seemed to wholly recover her spirits, or else she felt that she had shown quite enough of her wounded feelings to strangers. Estelle was very quiet and occasionally stole a pleased and puzzled glance at Octavia, as if she had formed an agreeable new acquaintance, but didn’t quite know what to make of her.

I was making a furtive study of the beautiful room, hoping that Estelle might some day have one just like it, when the door opened and a young man came in, who did not need to be introduced as the brother of our winsome hostess.

He was almost but not quite her masculine counterpart; not quite, for he lacked both her fineness and her picturesqueness, and his nose was more decidedly snub. But when one met his eyes, gray like hers, one found the same frankness. On the whole, he seemed like a rough and unsuccessful masculine copy of his sister; or, rather, as Burns’ song has it, as if nature had “tried her prentice hand” on him, and then had “made the lassie-o.”

His sister made him useful at once, in pouring the tea.

“He’s used to it, and does it better than any girl,” she explained, and I discovered in her an almost feverish eagerness to keep him and make things agreeable for him. He had not just come from Cambridge, it appeared, although he evaded, for some time, his sister’s questions concerning his whereabouts for the day, finally revealing that he had been spending the afternoon with some college chums.

His sister started slightly at this admission, and I saw the sugar-tongs shake in her firm, shapely fingers.

“Oh, you haven’t been to one of those dreadful races again, Ned?” she asked, reproachfully. And I thought that the family revelations were not going to be all on our side.

“I do like to see a fine horse,” said the young man, as if in extenuation. “And I suppose when God made them he intended them to use their speed, didn’t he?” he added, with a little uneasy laugh.

“I’m sure he didn’t intend them to be raced! It’s wicked, besides being coarse and horrid!” his sister returned, with vehemence. “And I would rather be poor, ten times poorer than we were, than that you should come to such things as that!” Her cheeks blazed and there were tears in her eyes, and my heart was so full of sympathy that I could almost have told him, then and there, for a warning, the dreadful things that had happened to our Dave.

“Ten times as poor, Peggy? that would be pretty stiff,” he said, meditatively. “Then I should never have gone to college at all, for there was a race-course pretty near us up there at the country college. But it wasn’t there, it was in Kentucky, where we were brought up, that I learned to love horses.

“However, I haven’t been betting, and you needn’t worry. I’ve always known that it was a sneaking thing to get your gain out of another fellow’s loss. Even up there in the country, where there was such a fuss made, it was the horses that I cared for—not the money.

“I saw about the queerest figure to-day that I ever saw at a race. It was a country old maid. I’m sure she was an old maid—of forty odd, with skimpy black ringlets and clothes that might have come out of the ark. And she was asking every one to point out the different horses to her. She begged me to tell her which was Alf Reeder’s racer. She said she was so ashamed of herself that it seemed as if she should sink right through the ground, but she did want to know which was Alf Reeder’s racer.

“But she seemed to forget all about the horses, after a while, and went to preaching on the evils of horse-racing. I wish you could have heard her preach! Her homely, rough-featured face was all alight. When she got thoroughly under way you wouldn’t have believed that she was the same person.

“She gathered a crowd around her. I don’t suppose many of those fellows had ever been inside a church, and they evidently meant, at first, to have some fun out of her; but the laughter and jeering died out. She was in such deadly earnest! That sort of thing is pretty sure to win respect when there is no self-interest about it. There was no cant about her, either; and she seemed to have so much plain common sense that one could hardly call her a crank.

“Some of those who had hooted at first looked really ashamed of themselves before she got through. As for me, I thought of Savonarola and those fellows. I caught myself wishing I could get a chance to explain to her that I hadn’t come to bet, but only to see the horses. I laughed at myself a little for having that feeling, but before she got through I began to think she was right, and it was a disgraceful thing to be there, anyway! She talked about touching pitch and being defiled, and causing one’s brother to offend, and all that; things that I’ve heard all my life, of course, but she had such a forcible, original way of putting them. Her quaint dialect added to the effect of her originality. But, after all, I think it was the heart of the woman, showing in every word she said, that made her exhortation so impressive. She reminded me of the preacher in one of Jean Ingelow’s poem’s, ‘so anxious not to go to heaven alone.’”

Octavia leaned toward me and whispered, breathlessly:

“Loveday? Could it have been Loveday?”

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