Within a week I encountered Susie and her two tall girls in the waiting room of Union Station. They were off to the Alders for the summer and Susie invited me up over any Sunday I chose.
As with Rex, so also the time I had with Susie was too short for me to ask a tenth of the questions I wanted to ask or for her to tell me a tenth of what she had to tell.
The first Saturday I could get off early I ran up to the Alders. Buck met me at Jonesville station, a little more bronzed than I had last seen him, otherwise the same youthful-looking giant.
The house, of course, was the same tile-roofed brick house, big and plain, neat under a new coat of bright lemon-yellow paint. The barns were the same weathered gray, unpainted, ramshackle barns I remembered, not a bit more decayed nor less dilapidated than a dozen years before. The grove behind the barn was unaltered, not a tree gone as far as I could judge, and all its big oaks, tulip-poplars and hickories rustling delightfully. The outbuildings near the house were as of old and the brook, just as of yore, not fifty feet from the front porch, rippled across the lawn between its rows of alders. The ailanthus trees west of the house and the locust tree by the well seemed exactly as formerly. They were so big they did not show their growth. But the catalpa by the bridge over the brook had taken on a new lease of life and was flourishing, whereas the lombardy poplars across the brook were gone. The chief change was in the maples. In my time they had been young trees, with trunks too slender to support a hammock rope without bending when anyone sat in the hammock. Now they were large trees, shading the entire front yard from the brook to the porch with an almost continuous canopy of green.
The place was full of boarders and their children, though the family themselves took up a larger part of the house than of old. Susie was there with her two girls, Anna with her two manly boys and Rex and his wife and his two step-children. Leslie had grown into an entirely adequate housekeeper and hostess and presided admirably. As of yore, the homestead tinkled with banjo music and rang with laughter.
Mattie, of course, was not at the house, as she and her husband lived a quarter of a mile down the road on the farm that had been Aunt Cynthia's. Everything and everybody was as I expected except that I missed Pake.
“Where's Pake?” I queried.
“Pake!” Susie exclaimed. “Didn't you know Pake was in Rio de Janeiro?”
“No!” I answered; “why, I saw Pake on Washington's birthday and he said nothing about going abroad.”
“He went in March,” Susie rejoined; “late in March, I think. He likes it down there.” Somebody interrupted and we did not mention Pake again until after supper. Then we were all out on the long front porch, grouped about Susie. Buck and Tom Brundige and I, scattered among the ladies, had our cigars drawing well. Rex, as always, was smoking one cigarette after another. A V.M.I. cadet, a crony of one of Anna's boys, was seated on one rail of the rustic bridge over the brook, twanging a banjo at three girls who sat on the other rail facing him. In the lulls of our talk and of the banjo, the chuckle of the brook over its pebbles emphasized the silence, into which broke the undertones of a pair of lovers, swinging in a hammock off to the right. The stars twinkled through the tree-tops, the cigar ends glowed red in the darkness, which was cloven by shafts of lamplight from the windows and mitigated afar to the left where, over the long black outline of the Blue Ridge a paling sky prophesied moonrise.
Somebody had been expecting a letter and had been disappointed and was mourning over it.
“I don't understand about letters from Pake,” Susie remarked. “Sometimes we don't get any letters for weeks, and then we get two or three, all at once. When we compare dates and postmarks we find that he writes every Wednesday and Saturday and mails the letters the very day they are written. How do you explain that, Billy?”
“I suppose,” I said, “that the letters come different ways, perhaps some by Lisbon, some by London, others perhaps other ways. That might explain it. What do you think, Tom?”
“I fancy,” said Brundige, “that you are probably right.”
“I had a letter from Pake to-day,” Susie went on. “I had not heard from him for a month. He says he don't like his business quarters. He has an expensive office and he says it is dark and hot and stuffy and he is going to change just as soon as he can find something to suit him. He says he is looking round. But he says he is most comfortably located otherwise. He is boarding, as he expresses it, 'up on Santa Teresa'; what does that mean, Billy?”
“Big, long hill,” I replied. “Four hundred feet high. Splendid view over the city and harbor. Fine air all night. Lots of places to board up there, and all good. How's that now, Tom?”
“All correct,” Brundige corroborated me.
“I should think,” Rex put in, “that Pake would get into trouble down there.”
“What sort of trouble?” Anna demanded. “Pake never gets into trouble anywhere. What sort of trouble do you mean?”
Rex lit another cigarette.
“Oh,” he said, “I meant that down there those Dago Portuguese won't stand any nonsense. They're a revengeful lot, by what I hear. Pake might cut somebody out with a girl and get a knife stuck in him.”
“You're teasing!” cried Anna, indignantly. “You're always up to some teasing! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And Susie rebuked him:
“You oughtn't to suggest such awful things, Rex.”
“But I wasn't suggesting anything awful,” Rex persisted, “and I wasn't teasing. I only meant Pake would be likely to cause some heartburnings down there. Pake's bound to be the same old Pake. He can't change all of a sudden. He's certain to have half a dozen girls thinking they have him on a string before he was there a week. Before he was there a month he had more than one girl on a string. Somebody's bound to be jealous. Those Dagoes are a hot-blooded lot.”
“Pooh!” Buck cut in, “Pake don't know enough Portuguese to flirt with any natives and all the Americans and English down there will understand flirting.”
“What's the matter with some Dago being in love with an English girl or an American girl?” Rex persevered; “Pake might cut one out with a girl that speaks English.”
I saw that both Susie, who was naturally nervous, and Anna, who had been inseparable from Pake all through their childhood, were wrought up. I tried to intervene.
“Nonsense,” I said, “Pake might cut out any number of gallants and never get into any trouble. Rio is as peaceable as Baltimore. To begin with, he can't flirt with any Brazilian girls, for no Brazilian girl is ever permitted to talk to a young man. Anybody going along the streets can see the fashionable Brazilians making love according to their custom. Toward sunset, when the heat is less fierce, the girls, all dressed up, lean out of the windows of the second floor drawing rooms. Their lovers stand on the other side of the street and look at them. A young man will stand that way two hours or more every afternoon for a year before he asks her father for a girl. That's the fashion. How is it now, Tom?”
“Same way now.” Brundige corroborated me. “Lots of flirtation among the foreign set, though. But no danger of daggers or revenge. Rio is as peaceable as Washington. I never heard of any case of revenge or of jealousy leading to bloodshed. Never heard of a supposed case, except once.”
His tone told us all there was a story coming. He was sitting next to Susie and we all hitched our chairs nearer.
“What was that, Tom?” Buck asked.
The women all looked towards Brundige. Rex lit another cigarette. The rest of us lit fresh cigars.
“It was a fellow named Orodoff Guimaraes,” Brundige began. “Guimaraes, in Portuguese, is like Smith in English, only more so. It seems as if half the Fluminenses, as they call the people of Rio, are named Guimaraes. This Orodoff Guimaraes was a cousin and namesake of a wealthy and respected wine-merchant and rather traded on the relationship and identity of the name. He was one of those dandies who swarm in all South American cities, young men with little or no income, a great sense of their own importance, a taste for expensive pleasures, a love of ease and comfort, ungovernable passions, and an insane devotion to the latest fashion in clothes.