in accordance with the substantial customs of his fellow-citizens, mr. port always returned to philadelphia sharp on the 1st of september—calmly ignoring the heat and the mosquitoes, which are the dominant characteristics of philadelphia during that month, and resting secure in the knowledge that the course which he pursued was that which his father and his grandfather had pursued before him. it was on the eve of his departure from narragansett that his doubts and perplexities occasioned by dorothy’s surprising conduct were resolved.
being seated in a snug corner of the veranda in company with mr. pennington brown, mr. port was smoking a comforting cigar. mr. brown, who also was smoking, did not seem to find his cigar comforting. he smoked it in so fitful a fashion that it repeatedly went out; and his nervousness seemed to be increased each time that he lighted it. further, his comment upon mr. port’s discourse—which was a more than ordinarily thoughtful and accurate weighing of the relative merits of thin and thick soups—obviously were delivered quite at random. at first mr. port was disposed to resent this inattention to his soulful utterances; but as the subject was one in which, as he well knew, his friend was profoundly interested, he presently became uneasy.
“what’s the matter, brown?” he asked, in a tone of kindly concern. “is your rheumatism bothering you? i’ve been afraid that your absurd sitting around on rocks with my niece would bring it on again. you’re not as young as you once were, pen, and you’ve got to take care of yourself.”
“i am not aware, port,” mr. brown answered rather stiffly, “that i am as yet conspicuously superannuated. indeed, i never felt younger in my life than i have felt during the past fortnight. i have a little touch of rheumatism to-night,” he added, frankly, and at the same time gave unintentional emphasis to his admission by catching his breath and almost groaning as he slightly moved his legs, “but it has nothing to do with sitting on the rocks with dor—with your charming niece. you forget that my rheumatism is hereditary, port. why, i had an attack of it when i was only five-and-twenty.”
“all the same, you wouldn’t have it now if you had spent your afternoons sensibly with me here on a dry veranda, or properly wrapped up in a dry carriage, instead of on damp rocks, with that baggage. what on earth has got into you i can’t imagine. if you were twenty years younger, brown, i should think, yes, positively, i should think that you were in love with her.”
“port,” said mr. brown, with a tone of resentment in his voice, “i shall be very much obliged if you will not use such language when you are speaking of miss lee. she is the best and kindest and noblest woman i ever have met. you have most cruelly misunderstood her. had you given her half a chance she would have been to you only a source of constant joy.”
mr. port replied to this emphatic assertion by a low, but most pointedly incredulous, whistle.
“you have not the slightest conception, as such a comment shows,” mr. brown continued, with increasing asperity, “of the depths of sweetness and tenderness which are in her nature; of her perfect unselfishness; of the gentleness and trustfulness of her heart. she is all that a woman can be, and more. she is—she is an angel!” mr. brown’s elderly voice trembled as he made this avowal.
as for mr. port, his astonishment was almost too deep for words. but he managed to say: “yes, i suppose she is—at least she has said so often enough herself.”
for some seconds there was silence; and then, with a deprecating manner and in a voice from which all trace of resentment had disappeared, mr. brown resumed: “hutch, old man, you and i have been friends these many years together, and you won’t fail me in your friendship now, will you? you are right, i am in love with this sweet young creature, and she—think of it, hutch!—she has admitted that she is in love with me; not romantically in love, for that would be, not absurd, of course, but a little unreasonable—for while i’m not at all old, yet i know, of course, that i am not exactly what can be called young—but in love sensibly and rationally. she wants to take care of me, she says, the dear child!” (mr. port grunted.) “and she has such clever notions in regard to my health. when we are married—how strange and how delightful it sounds, hutch!—she says that we will go immediately to carlsbad, where the waters will do my rheumatism a world of good; and from there, when i am better, we will go on to vienna, where the dry climate and the white wines, she thinks, still further will benefit me; and from vienna, in order to set me on my feet completely, we are to go on to the north and spend a winter in russia—for there is nothing that cures rheumatism so quickly and so thoroughly, she says (though i never should have imagined it) as steady and long-continued cold. just think of her planning it all out for me so well!
“yes, hutch, i love her with all my heart; and what has made me so nervous to-night is the great happiness that has come to me—it only came positively this afternoon—and the dread that perhaps, as her guardian, you know, you might not approve of what we have decided to do. but you do approve, don’t you, hutch? of course, in a few months she will be her own mistress, and your consent to our marriage, as she very truly says, then will be unnecessary. but even a month seems a desperately long while to wait; and that is the very shortest time, she thinks, in which she could get ready—though the dear child has consented to wait for most of the little things which she wants until we get on the other side.” mr. port smiled cynically at the announcement of this concession. it struck him that when dorothy was turned loose among the paris shops, backed by the capacious purse of a doting elderly husband, she would mow a rather startlingly broad swath. “so you won’t oppose our marriage, will you, old man? you will consent to my having this dear young creature for my wife?”
various emotions found place in mr. port’s breast as he listened to this extraordinary declaration and appeal. at first he felt a lively anger at dorothy for having, as he coarsely phrased it in his own mind, so successfully gammoned mr. pennington brown; to this succeeded an involuntary admiration of the clever way in which she had managed it; and then a feeling of profound satisfaction possessed him as there came into his slow-moving mind a realizing sense of his own deliverance. but mr. port was not so utterly selfish but that, in the midst of the sunrise of happiness which dawned upon him with the opening of a way by which he decently could get rid of dorothy, he was assailed by certain qualms of conscience as to the unfairness of thus casting upon his old friend the burden that he had found so hard to bear. for the heaviness of mr. port’s mental processes prevented him from perceiving, as a shrewder person would have perceived, that dorothy was not the sort of young woman to engage in an enterprise of this nature without first fully counting the cost. had he been keener of penetration he would have known that she could be trusted, when safely landed in the high estate of matrimony, to play on skilfully the game that she had so skilfully begun; that in her own interest she would manage matters in such a way as never to arouse in the mind of her elderly husband the awkward suspicion that the scheme of life arranged by his angel apparently with a view solely to his own comfort really was arranged only for the comfort of her angelic self.
it was while mr. port wavered among his qualms of conscience, hesitating between his great longing to chuck dorothy overboard, and so have done with her, and his sense of duty to mr. pennington brown, that the subject of his perplexities herself appeared upon the scene; and her arrival at so critical a juncture seemed to suggest as a remote possibility that she had been all the while snuffing this particular battle from not very far off.
“dear uncle hutchinson,” said miss lee, with affectionate fervor, “do you think that your angel is most cruel and horrid because she is willing to go off in this way after her own selfish happiness and leave you all alone? but she won’t do it, dear, if you would rather have her stay. her only wish, you know, has been to make you comfortable and happy; and you have been so good and so kind to her that she is ready to sacrifice even her love for your sake. yes, if you would rather keep her to yourself she will stay. only if she does stay,” and there was a warning tone of deep meaning in miss lee’s well-modulated voice, “her heart, of course, will be broken, and she will have to ask you to travel” with her for two or three years into out-of-the-way parts of the world (mr. port shuddered) “until her poor broken heart gets well. not that it ever will get quite well again, you know; but she will be brave, and try to pretend for your sake that it has. so it shall be just as you say, dear; only for pennington’s sake, who loves me so much, uncle hutchinson, i hope that perhaps you may be willing to let me go.”
and having concluded this moving address, miss lee extended one of her well-shaped hands to mr. pennington brown—who grasped it warmly, for he was deeply moved by so edifying an exhibition of affectionate and dutiful unselfishness—and with the other applied her handkerchief delicately to her eyes.
mr. port was not in the least moved by dorothy’s professions of self-sacrifice; but he was most seriously alarmed by her threat—that opened before him a dismal vista of bilious misery—to cart him for several years about the world on the pretext of a broken heart that required travel for its mending.
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he believed, to be sure, that in a stand-up fight he could conquer dorothy; but he had his doubts as to how long she would stay conquered—and between constant fighting and constant travel there is not much choice; for mr. port knew from experience how acute is that form of biliousness which results from rage. after all, self-preservation is the first law of nature; and under the stress thus put upon him, therefore, it is not surprising that mr. port’s qualms of conscience incident to his failure to do his duty to his neighbor vanished to the winds.
mr. pennington brown still held dorothy’s hand in his own. “will you make this great sacrifice, hutch, for your old friend?” he asked.
mr. port hesitated a little, for he felt a good deal like a criminal who is shifting his crime upon an innocent man; and then he answered, rather weakly both in tones and terms: “why, of course.”
“dear uncle hutchinson, how good you are!” exclaimed miss lee. “and you really think that you can spare your angel, then?”
and both promptly and firmly mr. port answered: “yes, i really think that i can.”