Read Ebook: Letters from England Volume 1 (of 3) by Southey Robert

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Ebook has 359 lines and 15812 words, and 8 pages

"I'm aware that you haven't been brought up on the most economical basis," Anthony acknowledged frankly. "But I'll take care of my funds, no matter how extravagant you are inclined to be. If I should hand you five dollars and say, 'Buy a dining-table,' you could do it, couldn't you? You couldn't satisfy your ideals, of course, but you could give me the benefit of your discriminating choice within the five-dollar limit."

Juliet laughed, but in her eyes there grew nevertheless a look of doubt. "Tony," she demanded, "how much have you to spend on the furnishing of that house?"

"Just five hundred dollars," said Anthony concisely. "And that must cover the repairing and painting of the outside. Really, Juliet, haven't I done fairly well to save up that and the cost of the house and lot--for a fellow who till five years ago never did a thing for himself and never expected to need to? Yes, I know--the piano in your music-room cost twice that, and so did the horses you drive, and a very few of your pretty gowns would swallow another five. But Mrs. Anthony Robeson will have to chasten her ideas a trifle. Do you know, Juliet--I think she will--for love of me?"

He was smiling at his own audacious confidence. Juliet attempted no reply to this very unanswerable statement. She studied the photograph in silence, and he lay watching her. In her blue-and-white boating suit she was a pleasant object to look at.

"Will you help me?" he asked again at length. "I'm more anxious than I can tell you to have everything ready."

"I shouldn't like to fail you, Tony, since you really wish it, though I'm very sure you'll find me a poor adviser. But you haven't been a brother to me since the mud-pie days for nothing, and if I can help you with suggestions as to colour and style I'll be glad to. Though I shall all the while be trying to live up to this photograph, and that will be a little hard on the five-dollar-dining-table scale."

"You've only to look out that everything is in good taste," said Anthony quietly, "and that you can't help doing. My wife will thank you, and the new home will be sweet to her because of you. It surely will to me."

It was on the first day of Robeson's two-weeks' July vacation that he came to take Juliet Marcy and her aunt, Mrs. Dingley, who had long stood to her in the place of the mother she had early lost, to see the home he had bought in a remote suburb of a great city. It was a three-hours' journey from the Marcy country place, but he had insisted that Juliet could not furnish the house intelligently until she had studied it in detail.

So at eleven o'clock of a hot July morning Miss Marcy found herself surveying from the roadway a small, old-fashioned white house, with green blinds shading its odd, small-paned windows; a very "box of a house," as Anthony had said, set well back from the quiet street and surrounded by untrimmed trees and overgrown shrubbery. The whole place had a neglected appearance. Even the luxuriant climbing-rose, which did its best to hide the worn white paint of the house-front, served to intensify the look of decay.

"Charming, isn't it?" asked Robeson with the air of the delighted proprietor. "Of course everything looks gone to seed, but paint and a lawn-mower and a few other things will make another place of it. It's good old colonial, that's sure, and only needs a bit of fixing up to be quite correct, architecturally, small as it is."

He led the way up the weedy path, Mrs. Dingley and Juliet exchanging amused glances behind his back. He opened the doors with a flourish and waved the ladies in. They entered with close-held skirts and noses involuntarily sniffing at the musty air. Anthony ran around opening windows and explaining the "points" of the house. When they had been over it Mrs. Dingley, warm and weary, subsided upon the door-step, while Juliet and Anthony fell to discussing the possibilities of the place.

"You see," said Anthony, mopping his heated brow, "it isn't like having big, high rooms to decorate. These little rooms,"--he put up his hand and succeeded, from his fine height, in touching the ceiling of the lower front room in which they stood--"won't stand anything but the most simple treatment, and expensive papers and upholsteries would be out of place. It will take only very small rugs to suit the floors. The main thing for you to think of will be colours and effects. You'll find five hundred dollars will go a long way, even after the repairs and outside painting are disposed of."

Anthony laughed and put his hand into his breast-pocket. But he drew it out empty.

"Why--I've left it behind," he admitted in some embarrassment. "I really thought I had it."

"Oh, Tony! And on this very trip when we needed it most! How could you leave it behind? Don't you always carry it next your heart?"

"Is that the prescribed place?"

"Certainly. I should doubt a man's love if he did not constantly wear my likeness right where it could feel his heart beating for me."

"Now I never supposed," remarked Anthony, considering her attentively, "that you had so much romance about you. Do you realise that for an extremely practical young person such as you have--mostly--appeared to be, that is a particularly sentimental suggestion? Er--should you wear his in the same way, may I inquire?"

"Of course," returned Juliet with defiance in her eyes, whose lashes, when they fell at length before his steadily interested gaze, swept a daintily colouring cheek.

"Have you ever worn one?" inquired this hardy young man, nothing daunted by these signs of righteous indignation. But all he got for answer was a vigorous:

She vanished around the corner only to put her head in again with the air of one who fires a parting shot at a discomfited enemy: "But, Tony--do you honestly think the house is large enough for such a queen of a woman? Won't her throne take up the whole of the first floor?"

Then she was gone up the diminutive staircase, and her light footsteps could be heard on the bare floors overhead. Left alone, Anthony Robeson stood still for a moment looking fixedly at the door by which she had gone. The smile with which he had answered her gay fling had faded; his eyes had grown dark with a singular fire; his hands were clenched. Suddenly he strode across the floor and stopped by the door. He was looking down at the quaint old latch which served instead of a knob. Then, with a glance at the unconscious back of Mrs. Dingley, sitting sleepily on the little porch outside, he stooped and pressed his lips upon the iron where Juliet's hand had lain.

"You forget," warned Anthony Robeson from the seat where he faced Juliet and Mrs. Dingley. "That must cover the outside painting and repairs. You can't figure on having more than three hundred dollars left for the inside."

"Dear me, yes," frowned Juliet. She held Anthony's plan in her hand, and her tablets and pencil lay in her lap. "Well, I can spend fifty dollars on each room--only some will need more than others. The living-room will take the most--no, the dining-room."

"The kitchen will take the most," suggested Mrs. Dingley. "Your range will use up the most of your fifty. And kitchen utensils count up very rapidly."

"It will be a very small range," Anthony said. "A little toy stove would be more practical for our--the kitchen. How big is it, Juliet?"

"'Ten by fourteen,'" read Juliet. "From the centre of the room you can hit all the side walls with the broom. Speaking of walls, Tony--those must be our first consideration. If we get our colour scheme right everything else will follow. I have it all in my head."

So it proved. But it also proved, when they had been hard at work for an hour at a well-known decorator's, that the tints and designs for which Miss Marcy asked were not readily to be found in the low-priced wall-papers to which Anthony rigidly held her.

"But that is a dollar a roll," whispered Anthony.

"Eighty-five cents."

"Twenty-five cents a roll is all we can allow," insisted Anthony firmly. "And less than that everywhere else."

The salesman was very obliging, and showed the best things possible for the money. It was impossible to resist the appeal in the eyes of this critical but restricted young buyer.

"There, that will do, I think," said Juliet at length, with a long breath. "The green for the living-room and for the bit of a hall--No, no, Tony; I've just thought! You must take away that little partition and let the stairs go up out of the living-room. That will improve the apparent size of things wonderfully."

"All right," agreed Anthony obediently.

"Then we'll put that rich red in the dining-room. For upstairs there is the tiny rose pattern, and the Delft blue, and that little pale yellow and white stripe. In the kitchen we'll have the tile pattern. We won't have a border anywhere--the rooms are too low; just those simplest mouldings, and the ivory white on the ceilings. The woodwork must all be white. There now, that's settled. Next come the floors."

There could be no doubt that Juliet was becoming interested in her task. Though the July heat was intense she led the way with rapid steps to the place where she meant to select her rugs. Here the three spent a trying two hours. It was hard to please Miss Marcy with Japanese jute rugs, satisfactory in colouring though many of them were, when she longed to buy Persian pieces of distinction. If Juliet had a special weakness it was for choice antique rugs.

She cornered Anthony at last, while Mrs. Dingley and the salesman were politely but unequivocally disputing over the quality of a certain piece of Chinese weaving.

"Tony," she begged, "please let me get that one dear Turkish square for the living-room. It will give character to the whole room, and the colours are perfectly exquisite. I simply can't get one of those cheap things to go in front of that beautiful old fireplace. Imagine the firelight on that square; it would make you want to spend your evenings at home. Please!"

"Do you imagine that I shall ever want to spend them anywhere else?" asked Tony softly, looking down into her appealing face. "Why, chum, I'd like to get that Tabriz you admire so much, if it would please you, in spite of the fact that we should have to pull the whole house up forty notches to match it. But even the Turkish square is out of the question."

"But, Tony"--Juliet was whispering now with her head a little bent and her eyes on the lapel of his coat--"won't you let me do it as my--my contribution? I'd like to put something of my own into your house."

"You dear little girl," Anthony answered--and possibly for her own peace of mind it was fortunate that Miss Langham, of California, could not see the look with which he regarded Miss Marcy, of Massachusetts--"I'm sure you would. And you are putting into it just what is priceless to me--your individuality and your perfect taste. But I can't let even you help furnish that house. She--must take what I--and only I--can give her."

"You're perfectly ridiculous," murmured Juliet, turning away with an expression of deep displeasure. "As if she wouldn't bring all sorts of elegant stuff with her, and make your cheap things look insignificant."

"I don't think she will," returned Anthony with conviction. "She'll bring nothing out of keeping with the house."

"I thought you told me she was of a wealthy family."

"She is. But if she marries me she leaves all that behind. I'll have no wife on any other basis."

"Well--for a son of the Robesons of Kentucky you are absolutely the most absurd boy anybody ever heard of," declared the girl hotly under her breath. Then she walked over and ordered a certain inexpensive rug for the living-room with the air of a princess and the cheeks of a poppy.

It may have been that Miss Marcy was piqued into trying to see how little she could spend, but certain it was that from the time she left the carpet shop she begged for no exceptions to Mr. Robeson's rule of strict economy. She selected simple, delicate muslins for the windows, one and all, without a glance at finer draperies; bought denims and printed stuffs as if she had never heard of costlier upholsteries; and turned away from seductive pieces of Turkish and Indian embroideries offered for her inspection with a demure, "No, I don't care to look at those now," which more than once brought a covert smile to Anthony's lips and a twinkle to the eyes of the salesman. It was so very evident that the fair buyer did not pass them by for lack of interest.

Altogether, it was an interesting week these three people spent--for a week it took. Anthony began to protest after the first two days, and said he could not ask so much of his friends. But Juliet would not be hindered from taking infinite pains, and Mrs. Dingley good humouredly lent the two her chaperonage and her occasional counsel, such as only the gray-haired matron of long housewifely experience can furnish.

The selection of the furniture took perhaps the most time, and was the hardest, because of the difficulty of finding good styles in keeping with the limited purse. Anthony possessed a number of good pieces of antique character, but beyond these everything was to be purchased. Juliet turned in despair from one shop after another, and when it came to the fitting of the dining-room she grew distinctly indignant.

She broke off suddenly, rushed away down the long room to a group of chastely elegant dining-room furniture and came back after a little with a face of great eagerness to drag her companions away with her. She took them to survey a set of the costliest of all.

"Have you gone crazy?" Anthony inquired.

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