She drives out to the park with Eliza and me, and walks and runs races, and does gymnastics. She has lost ten pounds."Armorer wagged his head with a grin: "I dare say. I thought so when you began. Meg is always moaning and groaning because she isn't a sylph!
She will make her cook's life a burden for about two months and lose ten pounds, and then she will revel in ice-cream! Last time, she was raving about Dr. Salisbury and living on beefsteak sausages, spending a fortune starving herself.""She had Dr. Salisbury's pamphlet; but Cardigan told her it was a long way out; so she said she hated to have it do no one any good, and she gave it to Maria, one of the maids, who is always fretting because she is so thin.""But the thing was to cure fat people!"
"Precisely." Esther laughed a little low laugh, at which her father's eyes shone; "but you see she told Maria to exactly reverse the advice and eat everything that was injurious to stout people, and it would be just right for her.""I perceive," said Armorer, dryly; "very ingenious and feminine scheme.
But who is Cardigan?"
"Shuey Cardigan? He is the trainer. He is a fireman in a furniture shop, now; but he used to be the boxing teacher for some Harvard men; and he was a distinguished pugilist, once.
He said to me, modestly, 'I don't suppose you will have seen my name in the _Police Gazette_, miss?' But he really is a very sober, decent man, notwithstanding.""Your Aunt Meg always was picking up queer birds! Pray, who introduced this decent pugilist?"Esther was getting into the carriage; her face was turned from him, but he could see the pink deepen in her ear and the oval of her cheek.
She answered that it was a friend of theirs, Mr. Lossing. As if the name had struck them both dumb, neither spoke for a few moments.
Armorer bit a sigh in two. "Essie," said he, "I guess it is no use to side-track the subject. You know why I came here, don't you?""Aunt Meg told me what she wrote to you."
"I knew she would. She had compunctions of conscience letting him hang round you, until she told me; and then she had awful gripes because she had told, and had to confess to YOU!"He continued in a different tone: "Essie, I have missed your mother a long while, and nobody knows how that kind of missing hurts;but it seems to me I never missed her as I do to-day. I need her to advise me about you, Essie. It is like this: I don't want to be a stern parent any more than you want to elope on a rope ladder.
We have got to look at this thing together, my dear little girl, and try to--to trust each other.""Don't you think, papa," said Esther, smiling rather tremulously, "that we would better wait, before we have all these solemn preparations, until we know surely whether Mr. Lossing wants me?""Don't you know surely?"
"He has never said anything of--of that--kind.""Oh, he is in love with you fast enough," growled Armorer; but a smile of intense relief brightened his face. "Now, you see, my dear, all I know about this young man, except that he wants my daughter--which you will admit is not likely to prejudice me in his favor--is that he is mayor of this town and has a furniture store ----""A manufactory; it is a very large business!""All right, manufactory, then; all the same he is not a brilliant match for my daughter, not such a husband as your sisters have."Esther's lip quivered and her color rose again; but she did not speak.
"Still I will say that I think a fellow who can make his own fortune is better than a man with twice that fortune made for him.
My dear, if Lossing has the right stuff in him and he is a real good fellow, I shan't make you go into a decline by objecting;but you see it is a big shock to me, and you must let me get used to it, and let me size the young man up in my own way.
There is another thing, Esther; I am going to Europe Thursday, that will give me just a day in Chicago if I go to-morrow, and I wish you would come with me. Will you mind?"Either she changed her seat or she started at the proposal.
But how could she say that she wanted to stay in America with a man who had not said a formal word of love to her?
"I can get ready, I think, papa," said Esther.
They drove on. He felt a crawling pain in his heart, for he loved his daughter Esther as he had loved no other child of his; and he knew that he had hurt her. Naturally, he grew the more angry at the impertinent young man who was the cause of the flitting; for the whole European plan had been cooked up since the receipt of Mrs. Ellis's letter.
They were on the very street down which he used to walk (for it takes the line of the hills) when he was a poor boy, a struggling, ferociously ambitious young man. He looked at the changed rows of buildings, and other thoughts came uppermost for a moment.
"It was here father's church used to stand; it's gone, now," he said.
"It was a wood church, painted a kind of gray; mother had a bonnet the same color, and she used to say she matched the church.
I bought it with the very first money I earned. Part of it came from weeding, and the weather was warm, and I can feel the way my back would sting and creak, now! I would want to stop, often, but Ithought of mother in church with that bonnet, and I kept on!
There's the place where Seeds, the grocer that used to trust us, had his store; it was his children had the scarlet fever, and mother went to nurse them. My! but how dismal it was at home!
We always got more whippings when mother was away. Your grandfather was a good man, too honest for this world, and he loved every one of his seven children; but he brought us up to fear him and the Lord.
We feared him the most, because the Lord couldn't whip us!
He never whipped us when we did anything, but waited until next day, that he might not punish in anger; so we had all the night to anticipate it. Did I ever tell you of the time he caught me in a lie?
