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Page 10
The good people of Wellsville regarded this uncle with quite all the
respect so flashing a figure deserved. Not so the two other Uncle
Bunkers from over Walnut Shade way. Their first known agreement, voiced
of this financier, was in saying something wise about a fool and his
money.
Later, and perhaps for the last time on earth, they agreed once more.
That was when the news of his marriage came to them--for what was she?
Nothing but his landlady's daughter! Snip of a girl that helped her
mother run a cheap Chicago boarding-house! Him that could have taken his
pick, if he was going to be a fool and tie himself up! You could bet
that the pair had "worked" him, that mother and the girl; landed him for
his money, that was plain! Well, he'd made his bed!
Bean was not slow to liken this uncle to his mother, who had also
"made her bed." He had at first a misty notion that the bride might
a little resemble his father, a notion happily dispelled when he saw
her. For the pair came to Wellsville. It was a sort of honeymoon
combined vaguely with business. The bride was wonderfully pretty,
Bean thought; dark and dainty and laughing, forever talking the most
irresistible "baby-talk" to her adoring mate. Her name for him was
"Boo'ful."
Bean at once fell deeply in love with this bride, a passion that was to
endure beyond the life of most such affairs. She professed an
infatuation equal to his own, and regretted that an immediate marriage,
which he timidly advocated in the course of their first interview, was
not practicable. That she was frivolous, light-minded, and would never
settle down to be a good worker, was a village verdict he scorned. Who
would have her otherwise? Not he, nor the adoring Boo'ful, it is
certain. He determined to go to live at her house, and, strangely
enough--for these sudden plans of his were most often discouraged--the
thing seemed feasible. For one thing, his father was going to bring home
a new mother; a lady, he gathered, who had not only settled down to be a
good worker, but who, in espousing his father, would curiously not marry
beneath her. Without being told so, he had absorbed from his first
mother a conviction that this was possible to but few women. He felt a
little glow of pride for his father in this affair.
Another matter that seemed to bear on his going away was that this
brilliant and human Uncle Bunker was a "trustee." Not only a trustee,
but _his_ trustee; his very own, like his shell, or anything. This led
to his discovery that he had money. His mother, it seemed, had left it
to him; Bunker money that the two older uncles had sought and failed to
divert from her on the occasion of her wedding one below her station.
Money! and the capable Uncle Bunker as trustee of that money! Money one
could buy things with! He was pleasantly conscious of being rather
important under the glance of familiars. Even his father spoke formal
words of counsel to him, as if a gulf was between them--his father now
bereft of all Bunker prestige, legal or social.
And the new uncle was to "educate" him, though this was to be paid for
out of that money of his very own. He was rudely shocked to learn that
you had to pay money to go to school. Loathing school as he did, to pay
money for your own torture--money that would buy things--seemed
unutterably silly. But despite this inbecility the prospect retained its
glamour.
He would have suffered punishments even worse than school for the
privilege of existing near that beautiful bride, whom he was now
calling, at her especial request, "Aunt Clara." She readily understood
any affair that he chose to explain to her; understood about his shell
and said it was the most beautiful thing in all the world. She
understood, too, and was deeply sympathetic about Skipper, the dog.
Skipper was one of a series of puppies that Bean had appropriated from
the public highway. Some had shamefully deserted him after a little time
of pampering. Others, and these were the several that had howled
untimely in the far night, had mysteriously disappeared. Bean had
sometimes a hurt suspicion that his father knew more than he cared to
tell about these vanishings. But Skipper had stayed and had not howled.
Buffeted wastrel of a thousand casual amours, soft-haired, confiding,
ungainly, he was rich in understanding if not in beauty. And yet he must
be left. Even the discriminating and ever-just Aunt Clara felt that
Skipper would not do well in a great city. Of course she was not clumsy
enough to suggest that there were other dogs in the world, as did her
less discerning husband. But she said that it would come out all right,
and Bean trusted her. She knew, too, what would happen on his first
night away, and came softly to his bed and solaced him as he lay crying
for Skipper.
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