Hollyhock House/Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
“AND ADD TO THESE RETIRED LEISURE,
THAT IN TRIM GARDENS TAKES HIS PLEASURE”
Mary and Win were walking slowly over to Mr. and Mrs. Moulton’s, discussing the coming party with immense seriousness, at least on Mary’s part. Win could not be induced to regard it as of as much importance as she did.
“Mary,” he said, “it’s precisely here: you give a party; you do your best to make it a pleasant party, to both sides, hosts and invited; you either succeed, or you don’t—most likely you neither quite succeed nor quite fail. And when the next full moon comes around it won’t make tuppence worth of difference how it came out. That’s the way I look at it, and it’s the right way to look at it, not because it’s my way, but because it is! This won’t be different from all other Vineclad parties.”
“Mercy, yes, it will!” cried Mary. “Mother hasn’t been at the others.”
“Not since you remember parties, nor I, for that matter, but she has been here,” said Win. “She knows what to expect, and if Vineclad doesn’t remember her, all the better for Vineclad. It ought to be an interesting party to the town, because it has her to wonder over beforehand, and to see at the time. Your guests are sure to enjoy it. Whether Lynette does, what she’ll think of it, I don’t know.”
“But I can guess,” sighed Mary. Then they both laughed.
“Mary’s come to be braced up, Mrs. Moulton,” announced Win, when they had been greeted by both Mr. and Mrs. Moulton, and after Mark Walpole, with a shining, joyous face, had brought for Mary the low chair she liked, and placed it beside her guardian.
“It’s pleasanter within to-night, my dear,” Mrs. Moulton said. “I think there’s a heavy dew. What is wrong, child, that you need bracing?”
“Nothing wrong, Mrs. Moulton, and I need encouraging, not really bracing; that’s Win’s exaggeration. I—we’ve got to give a party.”
“Dear me, why?” asked Mr. Moulton. “Are you coming out, Mary?”
“No, sir; never, I imagine,” said Mary. “I’m out, or I never shall be out; I don’t know which it is. We children were born knowing everybody in old Vineclad, so there’s no society for us to be introduced to; we’ve been asked to places with you ever since we could walk. But mother is getting restless; she needs amusing. We have to give a party, a tea—no, a garden party; to get her introduced to her neighbours.”
“I see! Why should that afflict you, Mistress Mary?” asked Mr. Moulton.
“Everything is so turned about!” cried Mary. “We’ve got to invite people to meet our mother. Who ever heard of girls doing that? And—do you suppose we can make it a nice party? And isn’t it ridiculous for us to ask people? Yet mother doesn’t want to, because no one has yet called on her—except you, and you are our own! Wouldn’t it be better if you sent out the invitations, Mrs. Moulton?”
“I invite people to your house to meet your mother, my dear? Hardly! Send your invitations and don’t worry. I see you are afraid that Vineclad society may bore your mother. There is a consolation in Vineclad, as there is almost always a good side to a drawback! If Vineclad is dull it is because it is so small and old-fashioned, and, for that very reason, it will not misunderstand you, nor be critical of the peculiarities of your party. I think you may safely count upon a pleasant afternoon, my dear,” Mrs. Moulton reassured her.
“Mother has a beautiful gown for a garden party, which she wants to wear. She has worn it but once, to Lord Balindale’s coming-of-age celebration, in England. He’s an earl, Mrs. Moulton! And for the second time she is to wear it here. Doesn’t it sound rather awful?” Mary asked.
“I haven’t heard a description of it, Mary,” said Mrs. Moulton dryly. “I doubt that your mother would have an awful gown. Of course you can’t mean that you are overpowered by its having been worn on a superior occasion? No good American admits superior occasions—at least not titled superiors. And, if it came to that, my child, the original Garden bore a title and renounced it, when he came here, for conscientious reasons. Doesn’t that offset the incense of past glories which that gown may waft?”
“Yes, it does. I knew that about the first Garden, but I haven’t thought of it for a long time,” laughed Mary. “To tell the truth, it isn’t the earl’s party in itself that worries me: it’s only that I do so want mother to be happy here!”
“Surely, dear,” said Mr. Moulton gently. “Your mother is easily won by kindness. After she has fluttered a while, restlessly, she will settle down in our blest Garden spot. She is more of a child than any one of her children, I think.”
“So do I!” cried Mary. “I would never think of going to her with bothers, as I do to you. We all feel that we must protect her, even that witch of a Florimel feels it. Then you think our party will be all right, and I may go on and make out the list of invitations? Will you help me with that, Mrs. Moulton? I think we ought not to ask a few, as I thought at first. I think it would be right to ask everybody we know, not just our own set; then mother will really be introduced to Vineclad.”
“Please hand me my fountain pen and a pad, Mark,” Mrs. Moulton answered Mary indirectly. “We’ll make out our list this instant.”
For an hour they worked on this task, Mr. Moulton and Win throwing in suggestions which Mark saw were absurd, although he did not know any of the people discussed, because the elder and the younger man twinkled at each other in making them, Mary laughed at them, and Mrs. Moulton passed them over with dignified contempt.
“That is seventy-five names, Mrs. Moulton,” Mary announced, adding up the three pages of the pad. “Some of these people won’t come, but most of them will. Isn’t that a large party? Jane and I counted up a third of those in the first place.”
“Either you must make it small, keep it within the circle which the Garden family has always moved among, or else you must include every one set down here,” said Mrs. Moulton. “Since you are to do this, Mary, I advise making it what the Old Campaigner, in the Newcomes, called ‘an omnium gatherum.’”
“With a caterer?” asked Mary.
“No. With cakes ordered from Mrs. Mills and ice cream and thin homemade sandwiches and your own coffee, tea, and chocolate. Abbie and Anne can manage it. I’ll lend you Violet; she is unsurpassed in cooking; her coffee is indescribable. But you know that. And you know she is like all of her race, ready to do anything for any one she likes, though quite unreconcilable to those whom she does not fancy. And you know she calls you: ‘Dem Gyarden blossums!’ Vineclad would be inclined to resent a caterer. What are you three to wear?” Mrs. Moulton ended with a look of suspicion at Mary.
Mary proved that the suspicion was just by the dismay that overspread her face. Then she laughed.
“Never thought of it; not once!” she cried. “But we have something that will do. A white dress is best, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know as to that, but you have not ‘something that will do!’” said Mrs. Moulton firmly. “You are to send for something perfectly new, and perfectly suitable. You must live up to the gown that appeared at the earl’s majority celebration. White for you, demure Mary, but I think pale sea green for Jane, and rose colour for Florimel. I shall write to New York in the morning to have gowns sent up on approval; I have an account at Oldfellow’s. I intend to see that you are properly apparelled for this introductory festivity.”
“Althea, I am not sure that I shall approve your teaching Mary to be vain,” interposed Mr. Moulton.
“Austin,” his wife retorted, “if nature is not strong enough to make a girl of seventeen vain, I shall be quite harmless. I suppose I should dislike vanity in our girl, but I sometimes feel that I should like to make her know that she was worth considering.”
“Oh, dear Mrs. Moulton!” Mary protested, rosy red from her throat to her soft brown hair. “No fear of my forgetting Mary Garden.”
“I see her alluded to in the papers rather often,” said Mr. Moulton. “I saw to-day that she was singing in London.”
“Poor real Mary Garden!” sighed Mary, pityingly, as she arose to go. “She has to be used so much to tease me!”
“The party’s all arranged, is it?” asked Win, also rising.
“No, indeed; it’s only arranged to be arranged!” cried Mary, looking around the grave room with the affection she always gave it.
It was a high-ceiled room, with arched door-ways, white wainscoting, an ample unadorned fireplace; soft green, patternless paper on the walls making an effective background for excellent pictures, and its furniture was plain and solid, square in outlines, upholstered in dark brocade.
“This room always looks to me as if it had never let anything that was not good come into it, at least not to stay in it,” she said.
“That is true,” Mrs. Moulton confirmed her, adding with a look of profound admiration at her husband: “Mr. Moulton’s father built this house and they say Austin is his father over again.”
“I’ll walk with them, if you are not going to close the house for a while, Mrs. Moulton,” said Mark, offering Mary the little scarf which had slipped from her arm to the floor. There was a look in his eyes, as his hand lightly brushed Mary’s shoulder, laying the scarf over it, that sent the colour flushing to Mrs. Moulton’s brow, it so surprised her.
“I’m sure I don’t know what I should say to that!” she exclaimed. Then, as Mark looked at her in blank amazement, she recalled herself. “Of course, walk over with them, Mark; we are not going to bed for an hour or so,” she added.
“They’re awfully good to me, Mary and Win,” said Mark, as they went along the street made silent by Vineclad’s early bedtime habits. “Mr. Moulton is trusting me more and more with important bits of his work, and they both are treating me as if they considered me something besides a snip of a boy whom they were paying. I’m having a fine time with them and the botanical work I wanted to do but never expected to be able to touch.”
“Gets better every day, doesn’t it?” cried Mary, raising her face to his, glowing with pure joy over this fortunate state of things.
“Every day lovelier than the last!” declared Mark, looking into Mary’s unclouded, unsuspicious eyes. And Win silently received the impression which, a little earlier, had startled Mrs. Moulton, but of which Mary was as unconscious as a crystal is of the rainbow colours playing through it.
In the succeeding days after this call the hours sped rapidly, filled with the absorbing topic of the garden party and its business. The invitations were sent out and all but six of them were accepted. The gowns sent up from New York by the famous house of Oldfellow proved to be deliriously attractive. Mary did not hesitate a moment, but seized upon a soft white gown, so simple in its lines, so exquisite in material, design, and workmanship, with its only trimming real lace upon its clinging round neck and sleeves, that it seemed to have been designed expressly for this girl, whose sweetness was of a type that forbade ornate decoration. Jane could not decide between a pale green gown and a pale golden one, either of which made of her brilliant, delicate beauty a jewel perfectly set. The golden gown won the day at last and in it Jane’s red-gold tints of hair and eyes became the attributes of a sun-maiden. Florimel was offered no choice of colour, only of design in various rose pinks. Above each one she glowed like a living rose. The frock they all voted for her to wear was the palest of them all, a shell-like rose colour, floating over its own shade.
Mrs. Garden was in ecstasy; she gained in strength on each of these happy days. “I don’t care what the party is like, I’m having such fun now!” she truthfully declared.
Mrs. Mills, whose cakes were the correct supplement to one’s own kitchen limitations in Vineclad, sparing the housekeeper the mortification of having recourse to a professional caterer, made the best examples of her skill for the Garden garden party. Ice cream might be ordered from the nearest large town; Vineclad did not disapprove of buying ice cream, so for this party it was ordered from abroad. But this did not release the Garden kitchen from weighty obligations and achievements. It was supplemented by Violet, Mrs. Moulton’s most competent and blackest of cooks, to whom the preparation of the coffee was securely entrusted. Twelve young girls, from the nearby industrial school orphanage, were engaged to serve the guests. They were to be dressed alike, in white waists and skirts, and Mrs. Garden pronounced their effect “refreshing among the garden foliage and blossoms.”
Jane dressed her mother’s hair, relieved to know that her picturesque hat would more than conceal any deficiency in her maid’s skill. The gown which had but once before appeared in public, and then in an august and distant place, was revealed for the first time to the girls; Mrs. Garden had refused them a glimpse of it before the day. It was of white lace, skirt, waist, and coat, lined with white silk, yet touched, with a French artist’s skill, with exactly the correct effective amount of a wonderful red, like the heart of a rare rose. Roses of the same shade lay, as if they had fallen, on one side of the lace on the hat, and the same marvellous colour lined the lace parasol, that added the last touch of perfection to the costume.
“Didn’t that young earl, Lord Balindale, die on his twenty-first birthday? I’d expect that dress and all to be the end of him,” said Florimel, regarding her mother literally with open mouth and eyes.
“Nice, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Garden, much gratified by the effect of her magnificence. “No, he survived, Florimel. There were other gowns there that day which might easily have been as fatal as this one. Do you suppose all Vineclad will perish off the earth? We’ve asked most of it here.”
“Well, there’s one thing sure, it never in all it’s vineclad life saw anything like you, Mrs. Lynette Garden, who-can’t-possibly-be-our-mother!” declared Jane.
“Some of our guests will adore you, and some of them will detest you; your gown is too magnificent for a small place like Vineclad to stop halfway,” said Mary, displaying her understanding of small places. “Of course our own friends will be in raptures over you,” she added, seeing her mother’s face cloud.
A carpet rug had been spread at one end of the lawn side of the garden; on this Mrs. Garden, her daughters, and Mrs. Moulton were to stand to receive the guests. The invitations had run “from five to nine.” This allowed the heat of the day to be over when the first guests came, and it gave three hours of sunset light to show the beauty of the scene at its best, and one hour in which the Japanese lanterns, hung from tree to tree throughout the great garden, might burn to transform it into fairyland for the close of the garden festival. It was funny to see the arrival of the guests. Vineclad held certain families, like the Moultons and the Gardens themselves, which for generations had been accustomed to the best society, at home and abroad; but the majority of its citizens were the average small-town type, upright, good people, refined in taste and principles, ambitious to grasp opportunity as it was offered to them, but wholly inexperienced in the ways and standards of a larger, better-equipped world.
When these women, in their “best dresses,” eloquent of the home use of paper patterns, secure, most of them, in being silk, decorated with a fichu of machine-made lace, came up to greet the Garden girls and be presented to the princess who looked scarcely older than they, and yet was introduced to them as “my mother,” their faces were a study. The struggle between diffidence, pride, and amazement was so easily read that Mrs. Garden grew younger every instant, finding herself once more taking part in a play, and the rôle assigned to her far from easy.
But Florimel, with her overflowing fun, Mary, with her sweetness and tact, beloved as she was by the entire community, high and low, threw themselves into the task of entertaining, and were seconded by some of their girl friends and some older ones, and most of all by Win, who knew precisely how to set everybody at ease and to make them forget themselves in a laugh. Jane never could be at her best in a crowd, so she stayed at her post beside her mother, leaving the entertaining to the others.
The people whom Mrs. Garden had known when she had lived her brief married life in Vineclad came later than the others and instantly Mrs. Garden renewed her slight acquaintance with them, chatting and laughing so prettily that they were enchanted with her. Jane, close at her elbow, made mental notes of how to be a social success.
The refreshments were delicious, the young waitresses served them deftly, Anne and Abbie directing them, and to their boundless relief, the Garden girls saw that all their guests were, at last, having a thoroughly good time. Win and Mark commanded a selected force of young men, or big boys, as one liked better to regard them, and lighted the lanterns when the last radiance of the beautiful June afterglow faded away. Ray by ray the myriad little lights began to gleam over the garden, made more vast, and transformed into mystery, by the deep shadows waving between these stationary fireflies, swinging with their particoloured shapes in all directions. The guests knew that they were expected to go, but still lingered, entranced by the beauty of the scene which the sunset had made lovely beyond words, but which the lanterns now, beneath the stars, revealed in a new and more fascinating beauty.
“If only I could sing! Can’t you start them singing, Jane?” whispered Mrs. Garden.
Always ready to sing, Jane raised her voice, and from all over the great garden the chorus joined her, till at last, realizing that they were exceeding the time limit of their invitations by almost an hour, the guests sang the good-night song: “Good-night, Ladies,” and melted away.
With one of her characteristic changes of mood the tears ran down Mrs. Garden’s cheeks in the shadow of the tree against which she leaned, and fell on her glorious gown. She could no longer sing; she was so tired; she had had a happy time; the garden was full of sweet odours, brought out by the night; it was all wonderful, mysterious, lovely—and she could no longer sing! Mary, quick to see every movement of her new, absorbing charge, noted the droop of her body and went to her, slipping both arms around her mother’s slender waist.
“Had a nice time, little madrina? Tired?” she asked.
“I’ve enjoyed it a great deal better than I thought I should, I’ve had a nice time, really, Mary. And I’m launched in Vineclad society!” said Mrs. Garden, with a nervous laugh that to Mary’s true ear held in it the suggestion of a sob.
“You’re tired, dearest,” said this mother-daughter. “Say good-night to Mr. and Mrs. Moulton—they’re still here—and come to bed.”