A Woman's Reason. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.

      V.

      Captain Butler believed that his old friend had died a bankrupt; he represented the estate as insolvent, and the sale of the property took place at the earliest possible day. A red flannel flag, on which the auctioneer's name was lettered, was hung out from the transom above the front door, and at ten o'clock on a dull morning when the sea-turn was beginning to break in a thin, chilly rain, a long procession of umbrellas began to ascend the front steps, where Helen had paused to cast that look of haughty wonder after the retreating policeman. The umbrellas were of all qualities, from the silk that shuts into the slimness of a walking-stick, to the whity-brown, whale-bone ribbed family umbrella, under which the habitual auction-goer of a certain size and age repairs to her favorite amusement. Many of the people had a suburban look, and some even the appearance of having arrived by the Fitchburg railroad; but there was a large proportion of citizens, and a surprising number of fashionably dressed ladies, who, nevertheless, did not seem to be of that neighborhood; they stared curiously about them, as if they had now for the first time entered a house there. They sat down in the sad old parlor, and looked up at the pictures and the general equipment of the room with the satisfied air of not finding it after all any better than their own. One large and handsome woman, whose person trembled and twinkled all over with black bugles, stood in the middle of the floor, and had the effect of stamping upon the supposed pride of the place. People were prowling all over the house, from cellar to garret, peering into closets and feeling of walls and doors; several elderly women in feeble health were to be met at the turns of the stairways, pressing their hands against their chests, and catching their breath with difficulty. Few, apparently, of the concourse had come to buy; but when the sale began, they densely thronged the rooms in which the bidding successively went on, and made it hard for one another to get out of the packed doorways. The whole morning long the auctioneer intoned his chant of "A half, and a half and half, do-I-hear-the-threequarters?" varied with a quick "Sold!" as from time to tune he knocked off this lot or that. The cheaper carpets, chairs, beds, and tables were bought for the most part by certain fading women who bid with a kind of reluctant greed, and got together each her store of those mismated movables which characterize furnished lodgings. They wore cheap camel's hair wraps and thread gloves; others, who seemed poor mothers of families, showed their black stubbed fingertips, pressed anxiously together outside the edges of imitation India shawls, and bid upon the kitchen crockery. The Copleys were bought, as Captain Butler had expected, by the Museum of Fine Arts; the other paintings were bought by men who got them low to sell again, and in whose ruinous bazaars they were destined to consort with secondhand refrigerators and strips of dusty carpeting.

      Captain Butler would gladly have stayed away from the auction, but his duty in the matter was not to be avoided. Helen had given him a list of things to be reserved from the sale, which she had made out under two heads. The first was marked "For self," and this was very short, and easily managed by setting the things aside before the sale began. But the list of articles " To be given away," was on a scale which troubled the Captain's conscience, while it forlornly amused him, by its lavish generosity; the girl had done charity to an extent that wronged the creditors of the estate, and that put it quite beyond Captain Butler's power to humor her unwitting munificence by purchasing the things to give away. He used a discretion with which he invested himself, to put all the valuable articles up at the sale, and bestowed in charity only the cheaper matters on Helen's list. Even then, the auction was an expensive affair to him. He was unable to let certain things, with which he intimately associated his old friend, pass into the hands of strangers, especially things connected with the India trade. He bought the Chinese vases and bronze monsters, the terra cotta statues and ivory carvings, the outlandish weapons, and Oriental bric-à-brac, which in the age of Eastlake mantelshelves, then setting in with, great severity, he discovered to be in great request.

      His dismay increased as these costly and worthless treasures accumulated upon his hands, for his house was already full of them, to the utmost capacity of its closets and out-of-the-way corners. Besides, he laid himself open to the suspicion of bidding in, and remained under that doubt with many. He had a haughty way of outbidding that stood him in no good stead, and went far to convince the crowd that all the sales to him were sham.

      The auction, which began in the basement, ascended through the several stories, wandering from room to room till it reached the remotest attic chamber. Then, all the personal property had been sold, and it descended again to the first floor, where the crowd was already much thinner than at first, and was composed mainly of respectable-looking citizens who had come to bid on the house, or to see how much it would bring. The fashionably dressed women were gone; it was not long before the last auction-goer's whity-brown umbrella, expanded after the usual struggle, went down the front steps, and round the next corner. The auctioneer took his stand in the parlor before the pier-glass,— into which Helen looked that day to see whether her trouble with Robert had changed her,—with the long windows of the swell-front on either side of him. He was a young man, eager to win his reputation. He had been praised to Captain Butler as a frightfully vulgar wretch, who could get him more for the property than any other auctioneer in the city, and the Captain had taken him with certain misgivings. As he now confronted his respectable audience, he kept his hat a little aslant; he had an unlighted cigar in his left hand, which he put into his mouth from time to time, and chewed upon nervously; his eyes shone with a gross, humorous twinkle, and his whole face expressed a reckless audacity, and a willingness to take other people into the joke of life's being a swindle, anyway.

      "Gentlemen," he said, "I feel honored in being the instrument, however humble, of offering this property to your consideration; this old family mansion, rich in tradition and association, in the very heart of the most select quarter of Boston. You have already examined the house, gentlemen, from attic to cellar, you have seen that it is in perfect repair, and that it has no concealments to make— 'nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice,' as our colored brother says in the play. I will not insult your intelligence, gentlemen, by dwelling upon its entire soundness. Built forty years ago, it is this day a better house than the day its foundations were laid—better than nine-tenths of the gaudy and meretricious conceptions of modern architecture. Plain, substantial, soberly elegant,—these, gentlemen, are its virtues, which, like

      'A bold peasantry, their country's pride,

      When once destroyed, can