_ CHAPTER LIX. MRS. ALFRED DINKS
It was but a few days after the dinner that the junior partner was taking the old path that led under the tower of the fairy princess, when lo! he met her in the way. In her eyes there was that sweet light of expectation and happiness which illuminated all Gabriel's thoughts of her, and persuaded him that he was the happiest and unworthiest of men.
"Where are you going, May?"
"I am going to Fanny's."
"May I go too?"
May Newt looked at him and said, gravely, "No, I am going to ask Little Malacca to go with me."
"Oh, very well," replied Mr. Gabriel Bennet, with equal gravity.
"What splendid, melancholy eyes he has!" said May, with unusual ardor.
"Ah! you think so?"
"Of course I do, and such hair! Why, Mr. Bennet, did you ever see such magnificent hair--"
"Oh, you like black hair?"
"And his voice--"
"Now, May--"
"Well, Sir."
"Please--"
What merry light in the fairy eyes! What dazzling splendor of love and happiness in the face that turned to his as he laid her arm in his own! One would have thought she, too, had been admitted a junior partner in some most prosperous firm.
They passed along the street, which was full of people, and Gabriel and May unconsciously looked at the crowd with new eyes and thoughts. Can it be possible that all these people are so secretly happy as two that we know? thought they. "All my life," said Gabriel to himself, without knowing it, "have I been going up and down, and never imagined how much honey there was hived away in all the hearts of which I saw only the rough outside?" "All my life," mused May, with sweet girl-eyes, "have I passed lovers as if they were mere men and women?" And under her veil, where no eye could see, her cheek was flushed, and her eyes were sweeter.
They passed up Broadway and turned across to the Bowery. Crossing the broad pavement of the busy thoroughfare, they went into a narrow street beyond, and so toward the East River. At length they stopped before a low, modest house near a quiet corner. A sloppy kitchen-maid stood upon the area steps abreast of the street. A few miserable trees, pining to death in the stone desert of the town, were boxed up along the edge of the sidewalk. A scavenger's cart was joggling along, and a little behind, a ragman's wagon with a string of jangling bells. The smell of the sewer was the chief odor, and the long lines of low, red brick houses, with wooden steps and balustrades, and the blinds closed, completed a permanent camp of dreariness.
"Does Fanny Newt live there?" asked Gabriel, in a tone which indicated that there might be hearts in which honey was not abundantly hived.
"Yes," said May, gravely. "You know they have very little to live upon, and--and--oh dear, I don't like to speak of it, Gabriel, but they are very miserable."
Gabriel said nothing, but rang the bell.
The sloppy servant having stared wildly for a moment at the apparition of blooming love that had so incomprehensibly alighted upon the steps, ducked under them, and in a moment reappeared at the door. She seemed to recognize May, and said "Yes'm" before any question had been asked.
Gabriel and May walked into the little parlor. It was dark and formal. There was a black haircloth sofa with wooden edges all over it, so that nobody could lean or lounge, or do any thing but sit uncomfortably upright. There were black haircloth chairs, a table with two or three books; two lamps with glass drops upon the mantle; a thin cheap carpet; gloom, silence, and a complicated smell of grease--as if the ghosts of all the wretched dinners that had ever been cooked in the house haunted it spitefully.
While May went up stairs to find Fanny, Gabriel Bennet looked and smelled around him. He had not believed that a human home could be so dismal, and he could not understand how haircloth furniture and dimness could make it so. His father's house was certainly not very large; and it was scantily and plainly furnished, but no Arabian palace had ever seemed so splendid to his imagination as that home was dear to his heart. No, it isn't the furniture nor the smell, thought he. I am quite sure it is something that I neither see nor smell that makes the difference.
As he sat on the uncomfortable sofa and heard the jangling bells of the ragman die away into the distance, and the loud, long, mournful whoop of the chimney-sweep, his fancy was busy with the figures of a thousand things that might be--of a certain nameless somebody, mistress of that poor, sombre house, but so lighting it up with grace and gay sweetness that the hard sofa became the most luxurious lounge, and the cheap table more gorgeous than ormolu; and of a certain other nameless somebody coming home at evening--an opening door--a rustle in the hall as of women's robes--a singular sound as of meeting lips--then a coming together arm in arm into the dingy furnished little parlor, but with such a bright fire blazing under the wooden mantle--and then--and then--a pattering of little feet down the stairs--Hem! hem! said Gabriel Bennet, clearing his throat, as if to arouse himself by making a noise. For there was a sound of feet upon the stairs, and the next moment May and her sister Fanny entered the room. Gabriel rose and bowed, and held out his hand. Mrs. Alfred Dinks said, "How do you do?" and seated herself without taking the hand.
Time had not softened her face, but sharpened it, and her eyes were of a fierce blackness. She looked forty years old; and there was a permanent frown of her dark brows.
"So this silly May is going to marry you?" said she, addressing Gabriel.
Surprised by this kind of congratulation, but also much amused by it, as if there could be nothing so ludicrous as the idea of May not marrying a man who loved her as he loved, Gabriel gravely responded,
"Yes, ma'am, she is set upon it."
Fanny Newt, who had seated herself with an air of utter and chronic contempt and indifference, and who looked away from Gabriel the moment she had spoken to him, now turned toward him again suddenly with an expression like that of an animal which pricks up his ears. The keen fire of the old days shot for a moment into her eyes, for it was the first word of badinage or humor that Fanny Newt had heard for a long, long time.
"A woman who is such a fool as to marry ought to be unhappy," she replied, with her eyes fixed upon Gabriel.
"A man who persuades her to do it ought to be taken out and hung," answered he, with aphoristic gravity.
Fanny was perplexed.
"Better to be the slave of a parent than a husband," she continued.
"I'd lock him out," retorted Gabriel, with pure irrelevancy; "I'd scotch his sheets; I'd pour water in his boots; I'd sift sand in his hair-brush; I'd spatter vitriol on his shirts. A man who marries a woman deserves nothing better."
He wagged his foot carelessly, took up one of the books upon the table, and looked into it indifferently. Fanny Newt turned to her sister, who sat smiling by her side.
"What is the matter with this man?" asked Mrs. Alfred Dinks, audibly, of May.
"There is a pregnant text, my dear Mrs. Dinks,
nee Newt, a name which I delight to pronounce," said Gabriel, striking in before May could reply, with the lightest tone and the soberest face in the world, "which instructs us to answer a fool according to his folly."
Fanny was really confounded. She had heard Abel in old days speak of Gabriel Bennet as a spooney--a saint in the milk--a goodsey, boodsey, booby--a sort of youth who would turn pale and be snuffed out by one of her glances. She found him incomprehensible. She owed him the first positive emotion of human interest she had known for years.
May Newt looked and listened without speaking. The soft light glimmered in her eyes, for she knew what it all meant. It meant precisely what her praises of Little Malacca meant. It meant that she and Gabriel loved each other.
The junior partner was still holding the book when a heavy step was heard in the entry. Fanny's eyes grew darker and the frown deeper. There was a blundering movement outside--a hat fell--a cane struck something--and Gabriel knew as perfectly as if he could look through the wall what kind of man was coming. The door opened with a burst, and Mr. Alfred Dinks stopped as his eye fell upon the company. A heavy, coarse, red-faced, dull-eyed man, with an air of brutish obstinacy in every lineament and movement, he stared for a moment without a word or sign of welcome, and then looking at his wife, said, in a grunting, surly tone,
"Look here; don't be fooling round. The old man's bust up!"
He banged the door violently to, and they heard his clumsy footsteps creaking up the stairs. _