Early on Monday morning,Mr.Mayhew hastened from the breakfast-table to the stage.His wife and daughter were not down to see him off,and he seemed desirous of shunning all recognition.With the exception that that his eyes were heavy and bloodshot from his debauch,his face had the same dreary,apathetic expression which Van Berg had noted on his arrival.And so he went back to his city office,where,fortunately for him,mechanical routine brought golden rewards,since he was in no state for business enterprise.
From his appearance,Van Berg could not help surmising what had been his condition the previous day.Indeed Stanton,with a contemptuous shrug,had the same as said on Sabbath evening,that his uncle had "dropped into the old slough."Although neither of the young men knew how great an impetus Ida had given her father towards such degradation,they both felt that if his wife and daughter had had the tact to detect and appreciate his better mood,produced by the morning ramble,they might have sustained him,and given him at least one day that he could remember without shame and discouragement.
Van Berg found something pathetic in Mr.Mayhew's weary and disheartened manner.It was like that of a soldier who has suffered defeat,but who goes on with his routine in a mechanical,spiritless manner,because there is nothing else to do.He seemed to have no hope,nor even a thought of retrieving the past and of reasserting his own manhood.Accustomed as the young artist had ever been to a household in which affection,allied to high-bred courtesy and mutual respect,made even homely daily life noble and beautiful,he could not look on the discordant Mayhew family with the charity,or the indifference,of those who have seen more of the wrong side of life.Had there been only poor,besmirched Mr.Mayhew,and stout,dressy,voluble Mrs.Mayhew,he would never have glanced towards them the second time;but his artist's eyes had fallen on the contradictory being that linked them together.Morally and mentally she seemed one with her parent stock;but her beauty,in some of its aspects,was so marvellous,that the desire to redeem it from its hateful and grotesque associations grew stronger every hour.
Instead,therefore,of going off upon solitary rambles,as he had done hitherto,he mingled more frequently in the amusements of the guests of the house,with the hope he would thus be brought so often in contact with the subject of his experiment,that her pique would wear away sufficiently to permit them to meet on something like friendly terms.
As far as the other guests were concerned,he had not trouble.
They welcomed him to croquet,to walking and boating excursions,and to their evening games and promenades.Such of the ladies as danced were pleased to secure him as a partner.Indeed,from the dearth of gentlemen during the week,he soon found himself more in demand than he cared to be,and saw that even the landlord was beginning to rely upon him to keep up a state of pleasurable effervescence among his patrons.His languid friend,Stanton,was not a little surprised,and at last remarked:
"Why,Van,what has come over you?I never saw you in the role of a society fellow before!"But his unwonted courtesies seemed wholly in vain.He propitiated and won all save one,and that one was the sole object of his effort.
While all others smiled,her face remained cold and averted.Indeed she took such pains to ignore and avoid him,that it was generally recognized that there was a difference between them,and of course there was an endless amount of gossiping surmise.As the hostility seemed wholly on the lady's side,Van Berg appeared to the better advantage,and Ida was all the more provoked as she recognized the fact.
She now began to wish that she had taken a different course.As Van Berg pursued his present tactics,her feminine intuition was not so dull but that she was led to believe he wished to make her acquaintance.Of course there was,to her mind,but one explanation of this fact--he was becoming fascinated,like so many others.
"If I were only on speaking and flirting terms,"she thought (the two relations were about synonymous in her estimation),"I might draw him on to a point which would give me a chance of punishing him far more than is now possible by sullenly keeping aloof.As it is,it looks to these people here as if he had jilted me instead of I him,and that I am sulking over it."But she had entangled herself in the snarl of her own previous words and manner.She had charged her mother and cousin to permit no overtures of peace;and once or twice,when mine host,in his good-natured,off-hand manner,had sought to introduce them,she had been so blind and deaf to his purpose as to appear positively rude.Her repugnance to the artist had become a generally recognized fact;and she had built up such a barrier that she could not break it down without asking for more help than was agreeable to her pride.But she chafed inwardly at her false position,and at the increasing popularity of the object of her spite.
Even her mother at last formed his acquaintance;and,as the artist listened to the garrulous lady for half an hour with scarcely an interruption,she pronounced him one of the most entertaining of men.
As Mrs.Mayhew was chanting his praises that evening,Ida broke out petulantly:
