later they came back to Boston.
In this world of inextricable human complications, of tangled enigmas whereof only fate can give the answer, was ever a stranger anomaly than this, or a less congruous little group than the five who, that sunny and snowy afternoon of early March, drove up Beacon Hill in the soft-cushioned limousine?
Let us glimpse them. First, an aged man, brain-touched and nerve-shaken, smiling fatuously through all the exhaustions of his long journey, with the supreme beatitude of a lifelong search ended and of longed-for ones once more gathered to his arms.
Then a careworn woman of some fifty years, the opulent beauty of her new fur coat contrasting sharply with the harassed look of faded blue eyes that mirrored only fear.
Beside her, likewise in miraculous furs, and with a fetching new hat close-drawn over luxuriant black hair, a slender girl of nineteen—a girl eager-eyed at all this unaccustomed luxury, thrilled by this city of dreams and by anticipations of the wondrous home soon to be hers.
Next, seated with the chauffeur, Professor Maximilian Veazie, his thin lips hard and smiling under his red mustache; and last, a frightened negro at the wheel, held to his task only by a liberal supply of “coke” and by the professor's largesse.
“Well, children, here we are at last!” the old man quaveringly exulted, as the car swung to the curb and stopped. “A weary trip we've had of it, but now it's all over. We're home at last!”
They helped him out of the limousine, his numbed legs hardly able to support him, and got him into the house. Followed a vast confusion of baggage, of getting their things off, of meeting Miss Lavinia Grush, more glum and dour than ever. Amid all this pother Professor Veazie discreetly vanished, like one of his own wraiths.
“Oh, oh, oh!” Disney exclaimed, with the delight of a youthful and perfectly unspoiled ingenuousness.
The transition from the almost conventual austerity of a boarding house to the luxury of a mansion on Beacon Hill left her nearly breathless. The violet blackness of her eyes fairly sparkled with delight as she looked about the truly impressive drawing-room, ran a deft hand over the keyboard of the grand piano so long silent, glanced through the purple-paned windows at the unknown allurements of the motor-thronged street and the—to her—fascinating snow still patching the Common.
“Isn't this just wonderful, mother?” she frankly exulted. “Isn't it all like a dream? What a beautiful place! How I love the snow! It's all just like a dream! Is it true?”
“Come here, child, and kiss me again,” bade the trembling old aristocrat, from the wing chair into which, before the fire, he had sunk exhausted. “It's all true. There, if you're happy, what do you think of me?”
“I think you're the most wonderful grandfather in all this world, and I know I love you!”
Lockwood smiled with a happiness too deep for words, as Disney, perched on the arm of his big chair, smoothed back the scant white hair from his forehead; but her mother closed eyes of pain and turned away, and Miss Grush, watching, smiled with a grimness destined to bear bitter fruits!
That afternoon, an hour after lunch, in the huge, high-wainscoted dining room with the steel engravings and the massive brass-handled sideboard, Miss Grush had her first passage at arms with the interloping Mrs. Forrester.
Old Lockwood, completely done up, had been persuaded to go to bed. Disney, not to be denied, had gone out for some preliminary explorations of Boston, especially the Common and its scant, though to her almost miraculous, film of snow. Only once in her life, twelve years before, had the girl ever seen snow, and now she simply had to walk upon it. Though—
“Mind, now,” her mother had warned, “you're to be back before five. Things in Boston aren't like Charleston. This is a great big city, and there's no telling what might happen to a girl here.”
“As if I were a child!” Disney had laughingly retorted, already at the door. “I reckon I can look out for myself!”
Blowing her mother a kiss, she had gone out—fur-clad and glowing with young enthusiasms—into the allure of this strange, fascinating new life.
As Mrs. Forrester turned back into the hallway, Lavinia Grush spoke to her:
“If you don't mind, I'd like a few words with you!”
The housekeeper beckoned the woman from Charleston into the drawing-room. She left the door open. Open doors are safer, when servants may listen at key-holes; and as for Lockwood, he lay dead to the world, two stories above.
“Well,” asked Mrs. Forrester, with sinking heart, “what do you want of me?”
Miss Grush's eyes glowed almost like the coals in the grate.