PETER
A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero
By F. Hopkinson Smith
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Peter was still poring over his ledger one dark afternoon in December, his bald head glistening like a huge ostrich egg under the flare of the overhead gas jets, when Patrick, the night watchman, catching sight of my face peering through the outer grating, opened the door of the Bank.
The sight so late in the day was an unusual one, for in all the years that I have called at the Bank—ten, now—no, eleven since we first knew each other—Peter had seldom failed to be ready for our walk uptown when the old moon-faced clock high up on the wall above the stove pointed at four.
“I thought there was something up!” I cried. “What is it, Peter—balance wrong?”
He did not answer, only waved his hand in reply, his bushy gray eyebrows moving slowly, like two shutters that opened and closed, as he scanned the lines of figures up and down, his long pen gripped tight between his thin, straight lips, as a dog carries a bone.
I never interrupt him when his brain is nosing about like this; it is better to keep still and let him ferret it out. So I sat down outside the curved rail with its wooden slats backed by faded green curtains, close to the big stove screened off at the end of the long room, fixed one eye on the moon-face and the other on the ostrich egg, and waited.
There are no such banks at the present time—were no others then, and this story begins not so very many years ago—A queer, out-of-date, mouldy old barn of a bank, you would say, this Exeter—for an institution wielding its influence. Not a coat of paint for half a century; not a brushful of whitewash for goodness knows how much longer. As for the floor, it still showed the gullies and grooves, with here and there a sturdy knot sticking up like a nut on a boiler, marking the track of countless impatient depositors and countless anxious borrowers, it may be, who had lock-stepped one behind the other for fifty years or more, in their journey from the outer door to the windows where the Peters of the old days, and the Peter of the present, presided over the funds entrusted to their care.
Well enough in its day, you might have said, with a shrug, as you looked over its forlorn interior. Well enough in its day! Why, man, old John Astor, James Beekman, Rhinelander Stewart, Moses Grinnell, and a lot of just such worthies—men whose word was as good as their notes—and whose notes were often better than the Government's, presided over its destinies, and helped to stuff the old-fashioned vault with wads of gilt-edged securities—millions in value if you did but know it—and making it what it is to-day. If you don't believe the first part of my statement, you've only to fumble among the heap of dusty ledgers piled on top of the dusty shelves; and if you doubt the latter part, then try to buy some of the stock and see what you have to pay for it. Although the gas was turned off in the directors' room, I could still see from where I sat the very mahogany table under which these same ruffle-shirted, watch-fobbed, snuff-taking old fellows tucked their legs when they decided on who should and who should not share the bank's confidence.
And the side walls and surroundings were none the less shabby and quite as dilapidated. Even the windows had long since given up the fight to maintain a decent amount of light, and as for the grated opening protected by iron shutters which would have had barely room to swing themselves clear of the building next door, no Patrick past or present had ever dared loosen their bolts for a peep even an inch wide into the canyon below, so gruesome was the collection of old shoes, tin cans, broken bottles and battered hats which successive generations had hurried into the narrow un-get-at-able space that lay between the two structures.
Indeed the only thing inside or out of this time-worn building which the most fertile of imaginations could consider as being at all up to date was the clock. Not its face—that was old-timey enough with its sun, moon and stars in blue and gold, and the name of the Liverpool maker engraved on its enamel; nor its hands, fiddle-shaped and stiff, nor its case, which always reminded me of a coffin set up on end awaiting burial—but its strike. Whatever divergences the Exeter allowed itself in its youth, or whatever latitude or longitude it had given its depositors, and that, we may be sure, was precious little so long as that Board of Directors was alive, there was no wabbling or wavering, no being behind time, when the hour hand of the old clock reached three and its note of warning rang out.
Peter obeyed the ominous sound and closed his Teller's window with a gentle bang. Patrick took notice and swung to the iron grating of the outer door. You might peer in and beg ever so hard—unless, of course, you were a visitor like myself, and even then Peter would have to give his consent—you might peer through, I say, or tap on the glass, or you might plead that you were late and very sorry, but the ostrich egg never turned in its nest nor did the eyebrows vibrate. Three o'clock was three o'clock at the Exeter, and everybody might go to the devil—financially, of course—before the rule would be broken. Other banks in panicky times might keep a side door open until four, five or six—that is, the bronze-rail, marble-top, glass-front, certify-your-checks-as-early-as- ten-in-the-morning-without-a-penny-on-deposit kind of banks—but not the Exeter—that is, not with Peter's consent—and Peter was the Exeter so far as his department was concerned—and had been for nearly thirty years—twenty as bookkeeper, five as paying teller and five as receiving teller.
And the regularity and persistency of this clock! Not only did it announce the hours, but it sounded the halves and quarters, clearing its throat with a whirr like an admonitory cough before each utterance. I had samples of its entire repertoire as I sat there:
One...two...three...four...five—then half an hour later a whir-r and a single note. “Half-past five,” I said to myself. “Will Peter never find that mistake?” Once during the long wait the night watchman shifted his leg—he was on the other side of the stove—and once Peter reached up above his head for a pile of papers, spreading them out before him under the white glare of the overhead light, then silence again, broken only by the slow, dogged tock-tick, tock-tick, or the sagging of a hot coal adjusting itself for the night.
Suddenly a cheery voice rang out and Peter's hands shot up above his head.
“Ah, Breen & Co.! One of those plaguey sevens for a nine. Here we are! Oh, Peter Grayson, how often have I told you to be careful! Ah, what a sorry block of wood you carry on your shoulders. I won't be a minute now, Major.” A gratuitous compliment on the part of my friend, I being a poor devil of a contractor without military aspirations of any kind. “Well, well, how could I have been so stupid. Get ready to close up, Patrick. No, thank you, Patrick, my coat's inside; I'll fetch it.”
He was quite another man now, closing the great ledger with a bang; shouldering it as Moses did the Tables of the Law, and carrying it into the big vault behind him—big enough to back a buggy into had the great door been wider—shooting the bolts, whirring the combination into so hopeless and confused a state that should even the most daring and expert of burglars have tried his hand or his jimmy on its steel plating he would have given up in despair (that is unless big Patrick fell asleep—an unheard-of occurrence) and all with such spring and joyousness of movement that had I not seen him like this many times before I would have been deluded into the belief that the real Peter had been locked up in the dismal vault with the musty books and that an entirely different kind of Peter was skipping about outside.
But that was nothing to the air with which he swept his papers into the drawer of his desk, brushed away the crumpled sheets upon which he had figured his balance, and darted to the washstand behind the narrow partition. Nor could it be compared to the way in which he stripped off his black bombazine office-coat with its baggy pockets—quite a disreputable-looking coat I must say—taking it by the nape of the neck, as if it were some loathsome object to be got rid of, and hanging it upon a hook behind him; nor to the way in which he pulled up his shirt sleeves and plunged his white, long-fingered, delicately modeled hands into the basin, as if cleanliness were a thing to be welcomed as a part of his life. These carefully dried, each finger by itself—not forgetting the small seal ring on the little one—he gave an extra polish to his glistening pate with the towel, patted his fresh, smooth-shaven cheeks with an unrumpled handkerchief which he had taken from his inside pocket, carefully adjusted his white neck-cloth, refastening the diamond pin—a tiny one but clear as a baby's tear—put on his frock-coat with its high collar and flaring tails, took down his silk hat, gave it a flourish with his handkerchief, unhooked his overcoat from a peg behind the door (a gray surtout cut something like the first Napoleon's) and stepped out to where I sat.
You would never have put him down as being sixty years of age had you known him as well as I did—and it is a great pity you didn't. Really, now that I come to think of it, I never did put him down as being of any age at all. Peter Grayson and age never seemed to have anything to do with each other. Sometimes when I have looked in through the Receiving Teller's window and have passed in my book—I kept my account at the Exeter—and he has lifted his bushy shutters and gazed at me suddenly with his merry Scotch-terrier eyes, I have caught, I must admit, a line of anxiety, or rather of concentrated cautiousness on his face, which for the moment made me think that perhaps he was looking a trifle older than when I last saw him; but all this was scattered to the winds when I met him an hour afterward swinging up Wall Street with that cheery lift of the heels so peculiarly his own, a lift that the occupants of every office window on both sides of the street knew to be Peter's even when they failed to recognize the surtout and straight-brimmed high hat. Had any doubting Thomas, however, walked beside him on his way up Broadway to his rooms on Fifteenth Street, and had the quick, almost boyish lift of Peter's heels not entirely convinced the unbeliever of Peter's youth, all questions would have been at once disposed of had the cheery bank teller invited him into his apartment up three flights of stairs over the tailor's shop—and he would have invited him had he been his friend—and then and there forced him into an easy chair near the open wood fire, with some such remark as: “Down, you rascal, and sit close up where I can get my hands on you!” No—there was no trace of old age about Peter.
He was ready now—hatted, coated and gloved—not a hint of the ostrich egg or shaggy shutters visible, but a well-preserved bachelor of forty or forty-five; strictly in the mode and of the mode, looking more like some stray diplomat caught in the wiles of the Street, or some retired magnate, than a modest bank clerk on three thousand a year. The next instant he was tripping down the granite steps between the rusty iron railings—on his toes most of the way; the same cheery spring in his heels, slapping his thin, shapely legs with his tightly rolled umbrella, adjusting his hat at the proper angle so that the well-trimmed side whiskers—the veriest little dabs of whiskers hardly an inch long—would show as well as the fringes of his grey hair.
Not that he was anxious to conceal these slight indications of advancing years, nor did he have a spark of cheap personal vanity about him, but because it was his nature always to put his best foot foremost and keep it there; because, too, it behooved him in manner, dress and morals, to maintain the standards he had set for himself, he being a Grayson, with the best blood of the State in his veins, and with every table worth dining at open to him from Fourteenth Street to Murray Hill, and beyond.
“Now, it's all behind me, my dear boy,” he cried, as we reached the sidewalk and turned our faces up Wall Street toward Broadway. “Fifteen hours to live my own life! No care until ten o'clock to-morrow. Lovely life, my dear Major, when you think of it. Ah, old Micawber was right—income one pound, expense one pound ten shillings; result, misery: income one pound ten, expense one pound, outcome, happiness! What a curse this Street is to those who abuse its power for good; half of them trying to keep out of jail and the other half fighting to keep out of the poor-house! And most of them get so little out of it. Just as I can detect a counterfeit bill at sight, my boy, so can I put my finger on these money-getters when the poison of money-getting for money's sake begins to work in their veins. I don't mean the laying up of money for a rainy day, or the providing for one's family. Every man should lay up a six-months' doctor's bill, just as every man should lay up money enough to keep his body out of Potter's Field. It's laying up the SURPLUS that hurts.”
Peter had his arm firmly locked in mine now.
“Now that concern of Breen & Company, where I found my error, are no better than the others. They are new to this whirlpool, but they will soon get in over their heads. I think it is only the third or fourth year since they started business, but they are already floating all sorts of schemes, and some of them—if you will permit me in confidence, strictly in confidence, my dear boy—are rather shady, I think: at least I judge so from their deposits.”
“What are they, bankers?” I ventured. I had never heard of the firm; not an extraordinary thing in my case when bankers were concerned.
Peter laughed:
“Yes, BANKERS—all in capital letters—the imitation kind. Breen came from some place out of town and made a lucky hit in his first year—mines or something—I forget what. Oh, but you must know that it takes very little now-a-days to make a full-fledged banker. All you have to do is to hoist in a safe—through the window, generally, with the crowd looking on; rail off half the office; scatter some big ledgers over two or three newly varnished desks; move in a dozen arm-chairs, get a ticker, a black-board and a boy with a piece of chalk; be pleasant to every fellow you meet with his own or somebody else's money in his pocket, and there you are. But we won't talk of these things—it isn't kind, and, really, I hardly know Breen, and I'm quite sure he wouldn't know me if he saw me, and he's a very decent gentleman in many ways, I hear. He never overdraws his account, any way—never tries—and that's more than I can say for some of his neighbors.”
The fog, which earlier in the afternoon had been but a blue haze, softening the hard outlines of the street, had now settled down in earnest, choking up the doorways, wiping out the tops of the buildings, their facades starred here and there with gas-jets, and making a smudged drawing of the columns of the Custom House opposite.
“Superb, are they not?” said Peter, as he wheeled and stood looking at the row of monoliths supporting the roof of the huge granite pile, each column in relief against the dark shadows of the portico. “And they are never so beautiful to me, my boy, as when the ugly parts of the old building are lost in the fog. Follow the lines of these watchmen of the temple! These grave, dignified, majestic columns standing out in the gloom keeping guard! But it is only a question of time—down they'll come! See if they don't!”
“They will never dare move them,” I protested. “It would be too great a sacrilege.” The best way to get Peter properly started is never to agree with him.
“Not move them! They will break them up for dock-filling before ten years are out. They're in the way, my boy; they shut out the light; can't hang signs on them; can't plaster them over with theatre bills; no earthly use. 'Wall Street isn't Rome or any other excavated ruin; it's the centre of the universe'—that's the way the fellows behind these glass windows talk.” Here Peter pointed to the offices of some prominent bankers, where other belated clerks were still at work under shaded gas-jets. “These fellows don't want anything classic; they want something that'll earn four per cent.”
We were now opposite the Sub-Treasury, its roof lost in the settling fogs, the bronze figure of the Father of His Country dominating the flight of marble steps and the adjacent streets.
Again Peter wheeled; this time he lifted his hat to the statue.
“Good evening, your Excellency,” he said in a voice mellowed to the same respectful tone with which he would have addressed the original in the flesh.
Suddenly he loosened his arm from mine and squared himself so he could look into my face.
“I notice that you seldom salute him, Major, and it grieves me,” he said with a grim smile.
I broke into a laugh. “Do you think he would feel hurt if I didn't.”
“Of course he would, and so should you. He wasn't put there for ornament, my boy, but to be kept in mind, and I want to tell you that there's no place in the world where his example is so much needed as right here in Wall Street. Want of reverence, my dear boy”—here he adjusted his umbrella to the hollow of his arm—“is our national sin. Nobody reveres anything now-a-days. Much as you can do to keep people from running railroads through your family vaults, and, as to one's character, all a man needs to get himself battered black and blue, is to try to be of some service to his country. Even our presidents have to be murdered before we stop abusing them. By Jove! Major, you've GOT to salute him! You're too fine a man to run to seed and lose your respect for things worth while. I won't have it, I tell you! Off with your hat!”
I at once uncovered my head (the fog helped to conceal my own identity, if it didn't Peter's) and stood for a brief instant in a respectful attitude.
There was nothing new in the discussion. Sometimes I would laugh at him; sometimes I would only touch my hat in unison; sometimes I let him do the bowing alone, an act on his part which never attracted attention—looking more as if he had accosted some passing friend.
We had reached Broadway by this time and were crossing the street opposite Trinity Churchyard.
“Come over here with me,” he cried, “and let us look in through the iron railings. The study of the dead is often more profitable than knowledge of the living. Ah, the gate is open! It is not often I am here at this time, and on a foggy afternoon. What a noble charity, my boy, is a fog—it hides such a multitude of sins—bad architecture for one,” and he laughed softly.
I always let Peter run on—in fact I always encourage him to run on. No one I know talks quite in the same way; many with a larger experience of life are more profound, but none have the personal note which characterizes the old fellow's discussions.
“And how do you suppose these by-gones feel about what is going on around them?” he rattled on, tapping the wet slab of a tomb with the end of his umbrella. “And not only these sturdy patriots who lie here, but the queer old ghosts who live in the steeple?” he added, waving his hand upward to the slender spire, its cross lost in the fog. “Yes, ghosts and goblins, my boy. You don't believe it?—I do—or I persuade myself I do, which is better. Sometimes I can see them straddling the chimes when they ring out the hours, or I catch them peeping out between the slats of the windows away up near the cross. Very often in the hot afternoons when you are stretching your lazy body under the tents of the mighty—” (Peter referred to some friends of mine who owned a villa down on Long Island, and were good enough to ask me down for a week in August) “I come up here out of the rush and sit on these old tombstones and talk to these old fellows—both kinds—the steeple boys and the old cronies under the sod. You never come, I know. You will when you're my age.”
I had it in my mind to tell him that the inside of a dry tent had some advantages over the outside of a damp tomb, so far as entertaining one's friends, even in hot weather, was concerned, but I was afraid it might stop the flow of his thoughts, and checked myself.
“It is not so much the rest and quiet that delights me, as the feeling that I am walled about for the moment and protected; jerked out of the whirlpool, as it were, and given a breathing spell. On these afternoons the old church becomes a church once more—not a gate to bar out the rush of commercialism. See where she stands—quite out to the very curb, her warning finger pointing upward. 'Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther,' she cries out to the Four Per Cents. 'Hug up close to me, you old fellows asleep in your graves; get under my lea. Let us fight it out together, the living and the dead!' And now hear these abominable Four Per Cents behind their glass windows: 'No place for a church,' they say. 'No place for the dead! Property too valuable. Move it up town. Move it out in the country—move it any where so you get it out of our way. We are the Great Amalgamated Crunch Company. Into our maw goes respect for tradition, reverence for the dead, decency, love of religion, sentiment, and beauty. These are back numbers. In their place, we give you something real and up-to-date from basement to flagstaff, with fifty applicants on the waiting list. If you don't believe it read our prospectus!'”
Peter had straightened and was standing with his hand lifted above his head, as if he were about to pronounce a benediction. Then he said slowly, and with a note of sadness in his voice:
“Do you wonder, now, my boy, why I touch my hat to His Excellency?”
CHAPTER II
All the way up Broadway he kept up his good-natured tirade, railing at the extravagance of the age, at the costly dinners, equipages, dress of the women, until we reached the foot of the dilapidated flight of brown-stone steps leading to the front door of his home on Fifteenth Street. Here a flood of gas light from inside a shop in the basement brought into view the figure of a short, squat, spectacled little man bending over a cutting-table, a pair of shears in his hand.
“Isaac is still at work,” he cried. “If we were not so late we'd go in and have a word with him. Now there's a man who has solved the problem, my boy. Nobody will ever coax Isaac Cohen up to Fifth Avenue and into a 'By appointment to His Majesty' kind of a tailor shop. Just pegs away year after year—he was here long before I came—supporting his family, storing his mind with all sorts of rare knowledge. Do you know he's one of the most delightful men you will meet in a day's journey?”
“No—never knew anything of the kind. Thought he was just plain tailor.”
“And an intimate friend of many of the English actors who come over here?” continued Peter.
“I never heard a word about it” I answered meekly; Peter's acquaintances being too varied and too numerous for me to keep track of. That he should have a tailor among them as learned and wise as Solomon, and with friends all over the globe, was quite to be expected.
“Well, he is,” answered Peter. “They always hunt him up the first thing they do. He lived in London for years and made their costumes. There's no one, I assure you, I am more glad to see when he makes an excuse to rap at my door. You'll come up, of course, until I read my letters.”
“No, I'll keep on to my rooms and meet you later at the club.”
“You'll do nothing of the kind, you restless mortal. You'll come upstairs with me until I open my mail. It's really like touching the spring of a Jack-in-the-box, this mail of mine—all sorts of things pop out, generally the unexpected. Mighty interesting, I tell you,” and with a cheery wave of the hand to his friend Isaac, whose eyes had been looking streetward at the precise moment, Peter pushed me ahead of him up the worn marble steps flanked by the rust-eaten iron railing which led to the hallway and stairs, and so on up to his apartment.
It was just the sort of house Peter, of all men in the world, would have picked out to live in—and he had been here for twenty years or more. Not only did the estimable Isaac occupy the basement, but Madame Montini, the dress-maker, had the first floor back; a real-estate agent made free with the first floor front, and a very worthy teacher of music, whose piano could be heard at all hours of the day, and far into the night, was paying rent for the second, both front and back. Peter's own apartments ran the whole length of the third floor, immediately under the slanting, low-ceiled garret, which was inhabited by the good Mrs. McGuffey, the janitress, who, in addition to her regular duties, took especial care of Peter's rooms. Adjoining these was a small apartment consisting of two rooms, connecting with Peter's suite by a door cut through for some former lodger. These were also under Mrs. McGuffey's special care and very good care did she take of them, especially when Peter's sister, Miss Felicia Grayson, occupied them for certain weeks in the year.
These changes had all taken place in the time the old fellow had mounted the quaint stairs with the thin mahogany banisters, and yet Peter stayed on. “The gnarled pear tree in the back yard is so charming,” he would urge in excuse, “especially in the spring, when the perfume of its blossoms fills the air,” or, “the view overlooking Union Square is so delightful,” or, “the fireplace has such a good draught.” What mattered it who lived next door, or below, or overhead, for that matter, so that he was not disturbed—and he never was. The property, of course, had gone from bad to worse since the owner had died; the neighborhood had run down, and the better class of tenants down, up, and even across the street—had moved away, but none of these things had troubled Peter.
And no wonder, when once you got inside the two rooms and looked about!
There was a four-post bedstead with chintz curtains draped about the posts, that Martha Washington might have slept in, and a chintz petticoat which reached the floor and hid its toes of rollers, which the dear lady could have made with her own hands; there was a most ancient mahogany bureau to match, all brass fittings. There were easy chairs with restful arms within reach of tables holding lamps, ash receivers and the like; and rows and rows of books on open shelves edged with leather; not to mention engravings of distinguished men and old portraits in heavy gilt frames: one of his grandfather who fought in the Revolution, and another of his mother—this last by Rembrandt Peale—a dear old lady with the face of a saint framed in a head of gray hair, the whole surmounted by a cluster of silvery curls. There were quaint brass candelabra with square marble bases on each end of the mantel, holding candles showing burnt wicks in the day time and cheery lights at night; and a red carpet covering both rooms and red table covers and red damask curtains, and a lounge with a red afghan thrown over it; and last, but by no means least—in fact it was the most important thing in the sitting-room, so far as comfort was concerned—there was a big open-hearth Franklin, full of blazing red logs, with brass andirons and fender, and a draught of such marvellous suction that stray scraps of paper, to say nothing of uncommonly large sparks, had been known more than once to have been picked up in a jiffy and whirled into its capacious throat.
Just the very background for dear old Peter, I always said, whenever I watched him moving about the cheery interior, pushing up a chair, lighting a fresh candle, or replacing a book on the shelf. What a half-length the great Sully would have made of him, with his high collar, white shirt-front and wonderful neck-cloth with its pleats and counterpleats, to say nothing of his rosy cheeks and bald head, the high light glistening on one of his big bumps of benevolence. And what a background of deep reds and warm mahoganys with a glint of yellow brass for contrast!
Indeed, I have often thought that not only Peter's love of red, but much of Peter's quaintness of dress, had been suggested by some of the old portraits which lined the walls of his sitting-room—his grandfather, by Sully, among them; and I firmly believe, although I assure you I have never mentioned it to any human being before, that had custom permitted (the directors of his bank, perhaps), Peter would not only have indulged in the high coat-collar and quaint neck-cloths of his fathers, but would also have worn a dainty cue tied with a flowing black ribbon, always supposing, of course, that his hair had held out, and, what is more important, always supposing, that the wisp was long enough to hold on.
The one article, however, which, more than any other one thing in his apartment, revealed his tastes and habits, was a long, wide, ample mahogany desk, once the property of an ancestor, which stood under the window in the front room. In this, ready to his hand, were drawers little and big, full of miscellaneous papers and envelopes; pigeon-holes crammed full of answered and unanswered notes, some with crests on them, some with plain wax clinging to the flap of the broken envelopes; many held together with the gum of the common world. Here, too, were bundles of old letters tied with tape; piles of pamphlets, quaint trays holding pens and pencils, and here too was always to be found, in summer or in winter, a big vase full of roses or blossoms, or whatever was in season—a luxury he never denied himself.
To this desk, then, Peter betook himself the moment he had hung his gray surtout on its hook in the closet and disposed of his hat and umbrella. This was his up-town office, really, and here his letters awaited him.
First came a notice of the next meeting of the Numismatic Society of which he was an honored member; then a bill for his semi-annual dues at the Century Club; next a delicately scented sheet inviting him to dine with the Van Wormleys of Washington Square, to meet an English lord and his lady, followed by a pressing letter to spend Sunday with friends in the country. Then came a long letter from his sister, Miss Felicia Grayson, who lived in the Genesee Valley and who came to New York every winter for what she was pleased to call “The Season” (a very remarkable old lady, this Miss Felicia Grayson, with a mind of her own, sections of which she did not hesitate to ventilate when anybody crossed her or her path, and of whom we shall hear more in these pages), together with the usual assortment of bills and receipts, the whole an enlivening record not only of Peter's daily life and range of taste, but of the limitations of his purse as well.
One letter was reserved for the last. This he held in his hand until he again ran his eye over the pile before him. It was from Holker Morris the architect, a man who stood at the head of his profession.
“Yes, Holker's handwriting,” he said as he inserted the end of the paper cutter. “I wonder what the dear fellow wants now?” Here he ran his eye over the first page. “Listen, Major. What an extraordinary man... He's going to give a dinner, he says, to his draughtsmen... in his offices at the top of his new building, six stories up. Does the rascal think I have nothing to do but crawl up his stairs? Here, I'll read it to you.”
“'You, dear Peter:' That's just like Holker! He begins that way when he wants me to do something for him. 'No use saying you won't come, for I shall be around for you at seven o'clock with a club—'No, that's not it—he writes so badly—'with a cab.' Yes, that's it—'with a cab.' I wonder if he can drive me up those six flights of stairs? 'There'll be something to eat, and drink, and there will be fifty or more of my draughtsmen and former employees. I'm going to give them a dinner and a house-warming. Bring the Major if you see him. I have sent a note to his room, but it may not reach him. No dress suit, remember. Some of my men wouldn't know one if they saw it.”
As the letter dropped from Peter's hand a scraping of feet was heard at the hall door, followed by a cheery word from Mrs. McGuffey—she had her favorites among Peter's friends—and Holker Morris burst into the room.
“Ah, caught you both!” he cried, all out of breath with his run upstairs, his hat still on his head. No one blew in and blew out of Peter's room (literally so) with the breeze and dash of the distinguished architect. “Into your coats, you two—we haven't a moment to spare. You got my letter, of course,” he added, throwing back the cape of his raincoat.
“Yes, Holker, just opened it!” cried Peter, holding out both hands to his guest. “But I'm not going. I am too old for your young fellows—take the Major and leave me behind.”
The architect grabbed Peter by the arm. “When did that mighty idea crack its way through that shell of yours, you tottering Methusaleh! Old! You're spryer than a frolicking lamb in March. You are coming, too, Major. Get into your coats and things!”
“But Isaac is pressing my swallow-tail.”
“I don't mean your dress-coat, man—your OVERCOAT! Now I am sure you didn't read my letter? Some of my young fellows haven't got such a thing—too poor.”
“But look at YOURS!”
“Yes, I had to slip into mine out of respect to the occasion; my boys wouldn't like it if I didn't. Sort of uniform to them, but they'd be mighty uncomfortable if you wore yours. Hurry up, we haven't a minute to lose.”
Peter had forced the architect into one of the big chairs by the fire by this time, and stood bending over him, his hands resting on Morris's broad shoulders.
“Take the Major with you, that's a good fellow, and let me drop in about eleven o'clock,” he pleaded, an expression on his face seen only when two men understand and love each other. “There's a letter from Felicia to attend to; she writes she is coming down for a couple of weeks, and then I've really had a devil of a day at the bank.”
“No, you old fraud, you can't wheedle me that way. I want you before everybody sits down, so my young chaps can look you over. Why, Peter, you're better than a whole course of lectures, and you mean something, you beggar! I tell you” (here he lifted himself from the depths of the chair and scrambled to his feet) “you've got to go if I have to tie your hands and feet and carry you downstairs on my back! And you, too, Major—both of you. Here's your overcoat—into it, you humbug!... the other arm. Is this your hat? Out you go!” and before I had stopped laughing—I had refused to crowd the cab—Morris had buttoned the surtout over Peter's breast, crammed the straight-brimmed hat over his eyes, and the two were clattering downstairs.
CHAPTER III
Long before the two had reached the top floor of the building in which the dinner was to be given, they had caught the hum of the merrymakers, the sound bringing a smile of satisfaction to Peter's face, but it was when he entered the richly colored room itself, hazy with cigarette smoke, and began to look into the faces of the guests grouped about him and down the long table illumined by myriads of wax candles that all his doubts and misgivings faded into thin air. Never since his school days, he told me afterwards, had he seen so many boisterously happy young fellows grouped together. And not only young fellows, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes, but older men with thoughtful faces, who had relinquished for a day the charge of some one of the important buildings designed in the distinguished architect's office, and had spent the night on the train that they might do honor to their Chief.
But it was when Morris, with his arm fast locked in his, began introducing him right and left as the “Guest of Honor of the Evening,” the two shaking hands first with one and then another, Morris breaking out into joyous salvos of welcome over some arrival from a distant city, or greeting with marked kindness and courtesy one of the younger men from his own office, that the old fellow's enthusiasm became uncontrollable.
“Isn't it glorious, Holker!” he cried joyously, with uplifted hands. “Oh, I'm so glad I came! I wouldn't have missed this for anything in the world. Did you ever see anything like it? This is classic, my boy—it has the tang and the spice of the ancients.”
Morris's greeting to me was none the less hearty, although he had left me but half an hour before.
“Late, as I expected, Major,” he cried with out-stretched hand, “and serves you right for not sitting in Peter's lap in the cab. Somebody ought to sit on him once in a while. He's twenty years younger already. Here, take this seat alongside of me where you can keep him in order—they were at table when I entered. Waiter, bring back that bottle—Just a light claret, Major—all we allow ourselves.”
As the evening wore away the charm of the room grew upon me. Vistas hazy with tobacco smoke opened up; the ceiling lost in the fog gave one the impression of out-of-doors—like a roof-garden at night; a delusion made all the more real by the happy uproar. And then the touches here and there by men whose life had been the study of color and effects; the appointments of the table, the massing of flowers relieving the white cloth; the placing of shaded candles, so that only a rosy glow filtered through the room, softening the light on the happy faces—each scalp crowned with chaplets of laurel tied with red ribbons: an enchantment of color, form and light where but an hour before only the practical and the commonplace had held sway.
No vestige of the business side of the offices remained. Peter pointed out to me a big plaster model of the State House, which filled one end of the room, and two great figures, original plaster casts, heroic in size, that Harding, the sculptor, had modelled for either side of the entrance of the building; but everything that smacked of T-square or scale was hidden from sight. In their place, lining the walls, stood a row of standards of red and orange silk, stretched on rods and supported by poles; the same patterns of banners which were carried before Imperial Caesars when they took an airing; and now emblazoned with the titles of the several structures conceived in the brain of Holker Morris and executed by his staff: the Imperial Library in Tokio; the great Corn Exchange covering a city block; the superb Art Museum crowning the highest hill in the Park; the beautiful chateau of the millionaire surrounded by thousands of acres of virgin forest; the spacious warehouses on the water front, and many others.
With the passing of the flagons an electric current of good fellowship flashed around the circle. Stories that would have been received with but a bare smile at the club were here greeted with shouts of laughter. Bon-mots, skits, puns and squibs mouldy with age or threadbare with use, were told with a new gusto and welcomed with delight.
Suddenly, and without any apparent reason, these burst forth a roar like that of a great orchestra with every instrument played at its loudest—rounds of applause from kettle-drums, trombones and big horns; screams of laughter from piccolos, clarionettes and flutes, buzzings of subdued talk by groups of bass viols and the lesser strings, the whole broken by the ringing notes of a song that soared for an instant clear of the din, only to be overtaken and drowned in the mighty shout of approval. This was followed by a stampede from the table; the banners were caught up with a mighty shout and carried around the room; Morris, boy for the moment, springing to his feet and joining in the uproar.
The only guest who kept his chair, except Peter and myself, was a young fellow two seats away, whose eyes, brilliant with excitement, followed the merrymaking, but who seemed too much abashed, or too ill at ease, to join in the fun. I had noticed how quiet he was and wondered at the cause. Peter had also been watching the boy and had said to me that he had a good face and was evidently from out of town.
“Why don't you get up?” Peter called to him at last. “Up with you, my lad. This is one of the times when every one of you young fellows should be on your feet.” He would have grabbed a banner himself had any one given him the slightest encouragement.
“I would, sir, but I'm out of it,” said the young man with a deferential bow, moving to the empty seat next to Peter. He too had been glancing at Peter from time to time.
“Aren't you with Mr. Morris?”
“No, I wish I were. I came with my friend, Garry Minott, that young fellow carrying the banner with 'Corn Exchange' marked on it.”
“And may I ask, then, what you do?” continued Peter.
The young fellow looked into the older man's kindly eyes—something in their expression implied a wish to draw him the closer—and said quite simply: “I don't do anything that is of any use, sir. Garry says that I might as well work in a faro bank.”
Peter leaned forward. For the moment the hubbub was forgotten as he scrutinized the young man, who seemed scarcely twenty-one, his well-knit, well-dressed body, his soft brown hair curled about his scalp, cleanly modelled ears, steady brown eyes, white teeth—especially the mobile lips which seemed quivering from some suppressed emotion—all telling of a boy delicately nurtured.
“And do you really work in a faro bank?” Peter's knowledge of human nature had failed him for once.
“Oh, no sir, that is only one of Garry's jokes. I'm clerk in a stock broker's office on Wall Street. Arthur Breen & Company. My uncle is head of the firm.”
“Oh, that's it, is it?” answered Peter in a relieved tone.
“And now will you tell me what your business is, sir?” asked the young man. “You seem so different from the others.”
“Me! Oh, I take care of the money your gamblers win,” replied Peter, at which they both laughed, a spark of sympathy being kindled between them.
Then, seeing the puzzled expression on the boy's face, he added with a smile: “I'm Receiving Teller in a bank, one of the oldest in Wall Street.”
A look of relief passed over the young fellow's face.
“I'm very glad, sir,” he said, with a smile. “Do you know, sir, you look something like my own father—what I can remember of him—that is, he was—” The lad checked himself, fearing he might be discourteous. “That is, he had lost his hair, sir, and he wore his cravats like you, too. I have his portrait in my room.”
Peter leaned still closer to the speaker. This time he laid his hand on his arm. The tumult around him made conversation almost impossible. “And now tell me your name?”
“My name is Breen, sir. John Breen. I live with my uncle.”
The roar of the dinner now became so fast and furious that further confidences were impossible. The banners had been replaced and every one was reseated, talking or laughing. On one side raged a discussion as to how far the decoration of a plain surface should go—“Roughing it,” some of them called it. At the end of the table two men were wrangling as to whether the upper or the lower half of a tall structure should have its vertical lines broken; and, if so, by what. Further down high-keyed voices were crying out against the abomination of the flat roof on the more costly buildings; wondering whether some of their clients would wake up to the necessity of breaking the sky-line with something less ugly—even if it did cost a little more. Still a third group were in shouts of laughter over a story told by one of the staff who had just returned from an inspection trip west.
Young Breen looked down the length of the table, watched for a moment a couple of draughtsmen who stood bowing and drinking to each other in mock ceremony out of the quaint glasses filled from the borrowed flagons, then glanced toward his friend Minott, just then the centre of a cyclone that was stirring the group midway the table.
“Come over here, Garry,” he called, half rising to his feet to attract his friend's attention.
Minott waved his hand in answer, waited until the point of the story had been reached, and made his way toward Peter's end of the table.
“Garry,” he whispered, “I want to introduce you to Mr. Grayson—the very dearest old gentleman you ever met in your whole life. Sits right next to me.”
“What, that old fellow that looks like a billiard ball in a high collar?” muttered Minott with a twinkle in his eye. “We've been wondering where Mr. Morris dug him up.”
“Hush,” said Breen—“he'll hear you.”
“All right, but hurry up. I must say he doesn't look near so bad when you get close to him.”
“Mr. Grayson, I want you to know my friend Garry Minott.”
Peter rose to his feet. “I DO know him,” he said, holding out his hand cordially. “I've been knowing him all the evening. He's made most of the fun at his end of the table. You seem to have flaunted your Corn Exchange banner on the smallest provocation, Mr. Minott,” and Peter's fingers gripped those of the young man.
“That's because I've been in charge of the inside work. Great dinner, isn't it, Mr. Grayson. But it's Britton who has made the dinner. He's more fun than a Harlem goat with a hoopskirt. See him—that's Brit with a red head and blue neck-tie. He's been all winter in Wisconsin looking after some iron work and has come back jam full of stories.” The dignity of Peter's personality had evidently not impressed the young man, judging from the careless tone with which he addressed him. “And how are you getting on, Jack—glad you came, ar'n't you?” As he spoke he laid his hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder. “Didn't I tell you it would be a corker? Out of sight, isn't it? Everything is out of sight around our office.” This last remark was directed to Peter in the same casual way.
“I should say that every stopper was certainly out,” answered Peter in graver tones. He detested slang and would never understand it. Then again the bearing and air of Jack's friend jarred on him. “You know, of course, the old couplet—'When the wine flows the—'”
“No, I don't know it,” interrupted Minott with an impatient glance. “I'm not much on poetry—but you can bet your bottom dollar it's flowing all right.” Then seeing the shade of disappointment on Breen's face at the flippant way in which he had returned Peter's courtesies, but without understanding the cause, he added, tightening his arm around his friend's neck, “Brace up, Jack, old man, and let yourself go. That's what I'm always telling Jack, Mr. Grayson. He's got to cut loose from a lot of old-fashioned notions that he brought from home if he wants to get anywhere around here. I had to.”
“What do you want him to give up, Mr. Minott?” Peter had put on his glasses now, and was inspecting Garry at closer range.
“Oh, I don't know—just get into the swing of things and let her go.”
“That is no trouble for you to do,” rejoined Jack, looking into his friend's face. “You're doing something that's worth while.”
“Well, aren't you doing something that's worth while? Why you'll be a millionaire if you keep on. First thing you know the lightning will strike you just as it did your uncle.”
Morris leaned forward at the moment and called Minott by name. Instantly the young man's manner changed to one of respectful attention as he stepped to his Chief's side.
“Yes, Mr. Morris.”
“You tell the men up your way to get ready to come to order, or we won't get through in time—it's getting late.”
“All right, sir, I'll take care of 'em. Just as soon as you begin to speak you won't hear a sound.”
As Minott moved from Morris's seat another and louder shout arose from the other end of the table:
“Garry, Garry, hurry up!” came the cry. It was evident the young man was very popular.
Peter dropped his glasses from his nose, and turning toward Morris said in a low voice:
“That's a very breezy young man, Holker, the one who has just left us. Got something in him, has he, besides noise?”
“Yes, considerable. Wants toning down once in a while, but there's no question of his ability or of his loyalty. He never shirks a duty and never forgets a kindness. Queer combination when you think of it, Peter. What he will make of himself is another matter.”
Peter drew his body back and sent his thoughts out on an investigating tour. He was wondering what effect the influence of a young man like Minott would have on a young man like Breen.
The waiters at this point brought in huge trays holding bowls of tobacco and long white clay pipes, followed by even larger trays bearing coffee in little cups. Morris waited a moment and then rapped for order. Instantly a hush fell upon the noisy room; plates and glasses were pushed back so as to give the men elbow room; pipes were hurriedly lighted, and each guest turned his chair so as to face the Chief, who was now on his feet.
As he stood erect, one hand behind his back, the other stretched toward the table in his appeal for silence, I thought for the hundredth time how kind his fifty years had been to him; how tightly knit his figure; how well his clothes became him. A handsome, well-groomed man at all times and in any costume—but never so handsome or so well groomed as in evening dress. Everything in his make-up helped: the broad, square shoulders, arms held close to his side; flat waist; incurving back and narrow hips. His well-modelled, aristocratic head, too, seemed to gain increased distinction when it rose clear from a white shirt-front which served as a kind of marble pedestal for his sculptured head. There was, moreover, in his every move and look, that quality of transparent sincerity which always won him friends at sight. “If men's faces are clocks,” Peter always said, “Holker's is fitted with a glass dial. You can not only see what time it is, but you can see the wheels that move his heart.”
He was about to speak now, his eyes roaming the room waiting for the last man to be still. No fumbling of glasses or rearranging of napkin, but erect, with a certain fearless air that was as much a part of his nature as was his genius. Beginning in a clear, distinct voice which reached every ear in the room, he told them first how welcome they were. How great an honor it was for him to have them so close to him—so close that he could look into all their faces with one glance; not only those who came from a distance but those of his personal staff, to whom really the success of the year's work had been due. As for himself, he was, as they knew, only the lead horse in the team, going ahead to show them the way, while they did the effective pulling that brought the load to market! Here he slipped his hand in his pocket, took from it a small box which he laid beside his plate, and continued:
“At these festivals, as you know, and if my memory serves me this is our third, it has always been our custom to give some slight token of our appreciation to the man who has done most during the year to further the work of the office. This has always been a difficult thing to decide, because every one of you, without a single exception, has given the best that is in you in the general result. Three years ago, you remember, it was awarded to the man who by common consent had carried to completion, and without a single error, the detailed drawings of the Museum which was finished last year. I am looking at you, Mr. Downey, and again congratulate you. Last year it was awarded to Mr. Buttrick for the masterly way with which he put together the big arches of the Government warehouses—a man whom it would have been my pleasure to congratulate again to-night had it been possible for him to reach us. To-night I think you will all agree with me that this small token, not only of my own, but of your 'personal regard and appreciation'” (here he opened the box and took from it a man's ring set with three jewels), “should be given to the man who has carried out in so thorough a way the part allotted to him in the Corn Exchange, and who is none other than Mr. Garrison Minott, who for—”
The rest of the sentence was lost in the uproar.
“Garry! Garry! Garry Minott!” came from all parts of the room. “Bully for Garry! You deserve it, old man! Three cheers for Garry Minott! Hip... Hip...!”
Morris's voice now dominated the room.
“Come this way, Mr. Minott.”
The face of the young superintendent, which had been in a broad laugh all the evening, grew white and red by turns. Out of pure astonishment he could neither move nor speak.
“All right—stay where you are!” cried Morris laughing. “Pass it up to him, please.”
John Breen sprang from his chair with the alertness of a man who had been accustomed to follow his impulse. In his joy over his friend's good fortune he forgot his embarrassment, forgot that he was a stranger; forgot that he alone, perhaps, was the only young man in the room whose life and training had not fitted him for the fullest enjoyment of what was passing around him; forgot everything, in fact, but that his comrade, his friend, his chum, had won the highest honors his Chief could bestow.
With cheeks aflame he darted to Morris's chair.
“Let me hand it to him, sir,” he cried, all the love for his friend in his eyes, seizing the ring and plunging toward Garry, the shouts increasing as he neared his side and placed the prize in his hand. Only then did Minott find his breath and his feet.
“Why, Mr. Morris!—Why, fellows!—Why, there's plenty of men in the office who have done more than I have to—”
Then he sat down, the ring fast in his hand.
When the applause had subside—the young fellow's modesty had caused a fresh outburst—Morris again rose in his chair and once more the room grew still.
“Twelve o'clock, gentlemen,” he said. “Mr. Downey, you are always our stand-by in starting the old hymn.”
The diners—host and guests alike—rose to their feet as one man. Then to Peter's and my own intense surprise that most impressive of all chants, the Doxology in long metre, surged out, gaining in volume and strength as its strains were caught up by the different voices.
With the ending of the grand old hymn—it had been sung with every mark of respect by every man in the room—John Breen walked back to his chair, leaned toward Peter, and with an apologetic tone in his voice—he had evidently noticed the unfavorable impression that Garry had made on his neighbor—said:
“Don't misjudge Garry, Mr. Grayson; he's the kindest hearted fellow in the world when you know him. He's a little rough sometimes, as you can see, but he doesn't mean it. He thinks his way of talking and acting is what he calls 'up-to-date.'” Then he added with a sigh: “I wish I had a ring like that—one that I had earned. I tell you, Mr. Grayson, THAT'S something worth while.”
Peter laid his hand on the young man's shoulder and looked him straight in the face, the same look in his eyes that a proud father would have given a son who had pleased him. He had heard with delight the boy's defence of his friend and he had read the boy's mind as he sang the words of the hymn, his face grave, his whole attitude one of devotion. “You'd think he was in his father's pew at home,” Peter had whispered to me with a smile. It was the latter outburst though—the one that came with a sigh—that stirred him most.
“And you would really have liked a ring yourself, my lad?”
“Would I like it! Why, Mr. Grayson, I'd rather have had Mr. Morris give me a thing like that and DESERVED IT, than have all the money you could pile on this table.”
One of those sudden smiles which his friends loved so well irradiated Peter's face.
“Keep on the way you're going, my son,” he said, seizing the boy's hand, a slight tremble in his voice, “and you'll get a dozen of them.”
“How?” The boy's eyes were wide in wonderment.
“By being yourself. Don't let go of your ideals no matter what Minott or anybody else says. Let him go his way and do you keep on in yours. Don't... but I can't talk here. Come and see me. I mean it.”
Breen's eyes glistened. “When?”
“To-morrow night, at my rooms. Here's my card. And you, too, Mr. Minott—glad to see both of you.” Garry has just joined them.
“Thanks awfully,” answered Minott. “I'm very sorry, Mr. Grayson, but I'm booked for a supper at the Magnolia. Lot of the fellows want to whoop up this—” and he held the finger bearing the ring within an inch of Peter's nose. “And they want you, too, Jack.”
“No, please let me have him,” Peter urged. Minott, I could see, he did not want; Breen he was determined to have.
“I would love to come, sir, and it's very kind of you to ask me. There's to be a dance at my uncle's tomorrow night, though I reckon I can be excused. Would you—would you come to see me instead? I want you to see my father's portrait. It's not you, and yet it's like you when you turn your head; and there are some other things. I'd like—” Here the boy stopped.
Peter considered for a moment. Calling at the house of a man he did not know, even to continue the acquaintance of so charming a young fellow as his nephew, was not one of the things punctilious Mr. Grayson—punctilious as to forms of etiquette—was accustomed to do. The young man read his thoughts and added quickly:
“Of course I'll do just as you say, but if you only would come we will be entirely alone and won't see anybody else in the house.”
“But couldn't you possibly come to me?” Peter urged. The fact that young Breen had a suite of rooms so sequestered as to be beyond the reach even of a dance, altered the situation to some extent, but he was still undecided. “I live all alone when my sister is not with me, and I, too, have many things I am sure would interest you. Say you'll come now—I shall expect you, shall I not?”
The boy hesitated. “You may not know exactly what I mean,” he said slowly. “Maybe you can't understand, for everybody about here seems to love you, and you must have lots of friends. The fact is, I feel out of everything. I get pretty lonely sometimes. Garry, here, never stays five minutes when he comes to see me, so many people are after him all the time. Please say you'll come!”
There was a note in the boy's voice that swept away all the older man's scruples.
“Come, my son! Of course I'll come,” burst out Peter. “I'll be there at nine o'clock.”
As Morris and the others passed between the table and the wall on their way to the cloak-room, Minott, who had listened to the whole conversation, waited until he thought Peter had gone ahead, and then, with an impatient gesture, said:
“What the devil, Jack, do you want to waste your time over an old fellow like that for?”
“Oh, Garry, don't—”
“Don't! A bald-headed old pill who ought to have—”
Then the two passed out of hearing.
CHAPTER IV
Breakfast—any meal for that matter—in the high-wainscoted, dark-as-a-pocket dining-room of the successful Wall Street broker—the senior member of the firm of A. Breen & Co., uncle, guardian and employer of the fresh, rosy-cheeked lad who sat next to Peter on the night of Morris's dinner, was never a joyous function.
The room itself, its light shut out by the adjoining extensions, prevented it; so did the glimpse of hard asphalt covering the scrap of a yard, its four melancholy posts hung about with wire clothes-lines; and so did the clean-shaven, smug-faced butler, who invariably conducted his master's guests to their chairs with the movement of an undertaker, and who had never been known to crack a smile of any kind, long or short, during his five years' sojourn with the family of Breen.
Not that anybody wanted Parkins to crack one, that is, not his master, and certainly not his mistress, and most assuredly not his other mistress, Miss Corinne, the daughter of the lady whom the successful Wall Street broker had made his first and only wife.
All this gloomy atmosphere might have been changed for the better had there been a big, cheery open wood fire snapping and blazing away, sputtering out its good morning as you entered—and there would have been if any one of the real inmates had insisted upon it—fought for it, if necessary; or if in summer one could have seen through the curtained windows a stretch of green grass with here and there a tree, or one or two twisted vines craning their necks to find out what was going on inside; or if in any or all seasons, a wholesome, happy-hearted, sunny wife looking like a bunch of roses just out of a bath, had sat behind the smoking coffee-urn, inquiring whether one or two lumps of sugar would be enough; or a gladsome daughter who, in a sudden burst of affection, had thrown her arms around her father's neck and kissed him because she loved him, and because she wanted his day and her day to begin that way:—if, I say, there had been all, or one-half, or one-quarter of these things, the atmosphere of this sepulchral interior might have been improved—but there wasn't.
There was a wife, of course, a woman two years older than Arthur Breen—the relict of a Captain Barker, an army officer—who had spent her early life in moving from one army post to another until she had settled down in Washington, where Breen had married her, and where the Scribe first met her. But this sharer of the fortunes of Breen preferred her breakfast in bed, New York life having proved even more wearing than military upheavals. And there was also a daughter, Miss Corinne Barker, Captain and Mrs. Barker's only offspring, who had known nothing of army posts, except as a child, but who had known everything of Washington life from the time she was twelve until she was fifteen, and she was now twenty; but that young woman, I regret to say, also breakfasted in bed, where her maid had special instructions not to disturb her until my lady's jewelled fingers touched a button within reach of her dainty hand; whereupon another instalment of buttered rolls and coffee would be served with such accessories of linen, porcelain and silver as befitted the appetite and station of one so beautiful and so accomplished.
These conditions never ceased to depress Jack. Fresh from a life out of doors, accustomed to an old-fashioned dining-room—the living room, really, of the family who had cared for him since his father's death, where not only the sun made free with the open doors and windows, but the dogs and neighbors as well—the sober formality of this early meal—all of his uncle's meals, for that matter—sent shivers down his back that chilled him to the bone.
He had looked about him the first morning of his arrival, had noted the heavy carved sideboard laden with the garish silver; had examined the pictures lining the walls, separated from the dark background of leather by heavy gold frames; had touched with his fingers the dial of the solemn bronze clock, flanked by its equally solemn candelabra; had peered between the steel andirons, bright as carving knives, and into the freshly varnished, spacious chimney up which no dancing blaze had ever whirled in madcap glee since the mason's trowel had left it and never would to the end of time,—not as long as the steam heat held out; had watched the crane-like step of Parkins as he moved about the room—cold, immaculate, impassive; had listened to his “Yes, sir—thank you, sir, very good, sir,” until he wanted to take him by the throat and shake something spontaneous and human out of him, and as each cheerless feature passed in review his spirits had sunk lower and lower.
This, then, was what he could expect as long as he lived under his uncle's roof—a period of time which seemed to him must stretch out into dim futurity. No laughing halloos from passing neighbors through wide-open windows; no Aunt Hannahs running in with a plate of cakes fresh from the griddle which would cool too quickly if she waited for that slow-coach of a Tom to bring them to her young master. No sweep of leaf-covered hills seen through bending branches laden with blossoms; no stretch of sky or slant of sunshine; only a grim, funereal, artificial formality, as ungenial and flattening to a boy of his tastes, education and earlier environment as a State asylum's would have been to a red Indian fresh from the prairie.
On the morning after Morris's dinner (within eight hours really of the time when he had been so thrilled by the singing of the Doxology), Jack was in his accustomed seat at the small, adjustable accordion-built table—it could be stretched out to accommodate twenty-four covers—when his uncle entered this room. Parkins was genuflecting at the time with his—“Cream, sir,—yes, sir. Devilled kidney, sir? Thank you, sir.” (Parkins had been second man with Lord Colchester, so he told Breen when he hired him.) Jack had about made up his mind to order him out when a peculiar tone in his uncle's “Good morning” made the boy scan that gentleman's face and figure the closer.
His uncle was as well dressed as usual, looking as neat and as smart in his dark cut-away coat with the invariable red carnation in his buttonhole, but the boy's quick eye caught the marks of a certain wear and tear in the face which neither his bath nor his valet had been able to obliterate. The thin lips—thin for a man so fat, and which showed, more than any other feature, something of the desultory firmness of his character—drooped at the corners. The eyes were half their size, the snap all out of them, the whites lost under the swollen lids. His greeting, moreover, had lost its customary heartiness.
“You were out late, I hear,” he grumbled, dropping into his chair. “I didn't get in myself until two o'clock and feel like a boiled owl. May have caught a little cold, but I think it was that champagne of Duckworth's; always gives me a headache. Don't put any sugar and cream in that coffee, Parkins—want it straight.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the flunky, moving toward the sideboard.
“And now, Jack, what did you do?” he continued, picking up his napkin. “You and Garry made a night of it, didn't you? Some kind of an artist's bat, wasn't it?”
“No, sir; Mr. Morris gave a dinner to his clerks, and—”
“Who's Morris?”
“Why, the great architect.”
“Oh, that fellow! Yes, I know him, that is, I know who he is. Say the rest. Parkins! didn't I tell you I didn't want any sugar or cream.”
Parkins hadn't offered any. He had only forgotten to remove them from the tray.
Jack kept straight on; these differences between the master and Parkins were of daily occurrence.
“And, Uncle Arthur, I met the most wonderful gentleman I ever saw; he looked just as if he had stepped out of an old frame, and yet he is down in the Street every day and—”
“What firm?”
“No firm, he is—”
“Curbstone man, then?” Here Breen lifted the cup to his lips and as quickly put it down. “Parkins!”
“Yes, sir,” came the monotone.
“Why the devil can't I get my coffee hot?”
“Is it cold, sir?”—slight modulation, but still lifeless.
“IS IT COLD? Of course it's cold! Might have been standing in a morgue. Take that down and have some fresh coffee sent up. Servants running o'er each other and yet I can't get a—Go on, Jack! I didn't mean to interrupt, but I'll clean the whole lot of 'em out of here if I don't get better service.”
“No, Uncle Arthur, he isn't a banker—isn't even a broker; he's only a paying teller in a bank,” continued Jack.
The older man turned his head and a look of surprise swept over his round, fat face.
“Teller in a BANK?” he asked in an altered tone.
“Yes, the most charming, the most courteous old gentleman I have ever met; I haven't seen anybody like him since I left home, and, just think, he has promised to come and see me to-night.”
The drooping lips straightened and a shrewd, searching glance shot from Arthur Breen's eyes. There was a brain behind this sleepy face—as many of his competitors knew. It was not always in working order, but when it was the man became another personality.
“Jack—” The voice was now as thin as the drawn lips permitted, with caution in every tone, “you stop short off. You mustn't cotton to everybody you pick up in New York—it won't do. Get you into trouble. Don't bring him here; your aunt won't like it. When you get into a hole with a fellow and can't help yourself, take him to the club. That's one of the things I got you into the Magnolia for; but don't ever bring 'em here.”
“But he's a personal friend of Mr. Morris, and a friend of another friend of Mr. Morris's they called 'Major.'” It was not the first time he had heard such inhospitable suggestions from his uncle.
“Oh, yes, I know; they've all got some old retainers hanging on that they give a square meal to once a year, but don't you get mixed up with 'em.”
Parkins had returned by this time and was pouring a fresh cup of coffee.
“Now, Parkins, that's something like—No, I don't want any kidneys—I don't want any toast—I don't want anything, Parkins—haven't I told you so?”
“Yes, sir; thank you sir.”
“Black coffee is the only thing that'll settle this head. What you want to do, Jack, is to send that old fossil word that you've got another engagement, and... Parkins, is there anything going on here to-night?”
“Yes, sir; Miss Corinne is giving a small dance.”
“There, Jack—that's it. That'll let you out with a whole skin.”
“No, I can't, and I won't, Uncle Arthur,” he answered in an indignant tone. “If you knew him as I do, and had seen him last night, you would—”
“No, I don't want to know him and I don't want to see him. You are all balled up, I see, and can't work loose, but take him upstairs; don't let your aunt come across him or she'll have a fit.” Here he glanced at the bronze clock. “What!—ten minutes past nine! Parkins, see if my cab is at the door.... Jack, you ride down with me. I walked when I was your age, and got up at daylight. Some difference, Jack, isn't there, whether you've got a rich uncle to look after you or not.” This last came with a wink.
It was only one of his pleasantries. He knew he was not rich; not in the accepted sense. He might be a small star in the myriads forming the Milky-Way of Finance, but there were planets millions of miles beyond him, whose brilliancy he was sure he could never equal. The fact was that the money which he had accumulated had been so much greater sum than he had ever hoped for when he was a boy in a Western State—his father went to Iowa in '49—and the changes in his finances had come with such lightning rapidity (half a million made on a tip given him by a friend, followed by other tips more or less profitable) that he loved to pat his pride, so to speak, in speeches like this.
That he had been swept off his feet by the social and financial rush about him was quite natural. His wife, whose early life had been one long economy, had ambitions to which there was no limit and her escape from her former thraldom had been as sudden and as swift as the upward spring of a loosened balloon. Then again all the money needed to make the ascension successful was at her disposal. Hence jewels, laces, and clothes; hence elaborate dinners, the talk of the town: hence teas, receptions, opera parties, week-end parties at their hired country seat on Long Island; dances for Corinne; dinners for Corinne; birthday parties for Corinne; everything, in fact, for Corinne, from manicures to pug dogs and hunters.
His two redeeming qualities were his affection for his wife and his respect for his word. He had no child of his own, and Corinne, though respectful never showed him any affection. He had sent Jack to a Southern school and college, managing meanwhile the little property his father had left him, which, with some wild lands in the Cumberland Mountains, practically worthless, was the boy's whole inheritance, and of late had treated him as if he had been his own son.
As to his own affairs, close as he sailed to the wind in his money transactions—so close sometimes that the Exchange had more than once overhauled his dealings—it was generally admitted that when Arthur Breen gave his WORD—a difficult thing often to get—he never broke it. This was offset by another peculiarity with less beneficial results: When he had once done a man a service only to find him ungrateful, no amount of apologies or atonement thereafter ever moved him to forgiveness. Narrow-gauge men are sometimes built that way.
It was to be expected, therefore, considering the quality of Duckworth's champagne and the impression made on Jack by his uncle's outburst, that the ride down town in the cab was marked by anything but cheerful conversation between Breen and his nephew, each of whom sat absorbed in his own reflections. “I didn't mean to be hard on the boy,” ruminated Breen, “but if I had picked up everybody who wanted to know me, as Jack has done, where would I be now?” Then, his mind still clouded by the night at the club (he had not confined himself entirely to champagne), he began, as was his custom, to concentrate his attention upon the work of the day—on the way the market would open; on the remittance a belated customer had promised and about which he had some doubt; the meeting of the board of directors in the new mining company—“The Great Mukton Lode,” in which he had an interest, and a large one—etc.
Jack looked out of the windows, his eyes taking in the remnants of the autumnal tints in the Park, now nearly gone, the crowd filling the sidewalks; the lumbering stages and the swifter-moving horse-cars crammed with eager men anxious to begin the struggle of the day—not with their hands—that mob had swept past hours before—but with their brains—wits against wits and the devil take the man who slips and falls.
Nothing of it all interested him. His mind was on the talk at the breakfast table, especially his uncle's ideas of hospitality, all of which had appalled and disgusted him. With his father there had always been a welcome for every one, no matter what the position in life, the only standard being one of breeding and character—and certainly Peter had both. His uncle had helped him, of course—put him under obligations he could never repay. Yet after all, it was proved now to him that he was but a guest in the house enjoying only such rights as any other guest might possess, and with no voice in the welcome—a condition which would never be altered, until he became independent himself—a possibility which at the moment was too remote to be considered. Then his mind reverted to his conversation the night before with Mr. Grayson and with this change of thought his father's portrait—the one that hung in his room—loomed up. He had the night before turned on the lights—to their fullest—and had scanned the picture closely, eager to find some trace of Peter in the counterfeit presentment of the man he loved best, and whose memory was still almost a religion, but except that both Peter and his father were bald, and that both wore high, old-fashioned collars and neck-cloths, he had been compelled to admit with a sigh that there was nothing about the portrait on which to base the slightest claim to resemblance.
“Yet he's like my father, he is, he is,” he kept repeating to himself as the cab sped on. “I'll find out what it is when I know him better. To-night when Mr. Grayson comes I'll study it out,” and a joyous smile flashed across his features as he thought of the treat in store for him.
When at last the boy reached his office, where, behind the mahogany partition with its pigeon-hole cut through the glass front he sat every day, he swung back the doors of the safe, took out his books and papers and made ready for work. He had charge of the check book, and he alone signed the firm's name outside of the partners. “Rather young,” one of them protested, until he looked into the boy's face, then he gave his consent; something better than years of experience and discretion are wanted where a scratch of a pen might mean financial ruin.
Breen had preceded him with but a nod to his clerks, and had disappeared into his private office—another erection of ground glass and mahogany. Here the senior member of the firm shut the door carefully, and turning his back fished up a tiny key attached to a chain leading to the rear pocket of his trousers. With this he opened a small closet near his desk—a mere box of a closet—took from it a squatty-shaped decanter labelled “Rye, 1840,” poured out half a glass, emptied it into his person with one gulp, and with the remark in a low voice to himself that he was now “copper fastened inside and out”—removed all traces of the incident and took up his morning's mail.
By this time the circle of chairs facing the huge blackboard in the spacious outer office had begun to fill up. Some of the customers, before taking their seats, hurried anxiously to the ticker, chattering away in its glass case; others turned abruptly and left the room without a word. Now and then a customer would dive into Breen's private room, remain a moment and burst out again, his face an index of the condition of his bank account.
When the chatter of the ticker had shifted from the London quotations to the opening sales on the Exchange, a sallow-faced clerk mounted a low step-ladder and swept a scurry of chalk marks over the huge blackboard, its margin lettered with the initials of the principal stocks. The appearance of this nimble-fingered young man with his piece of chalk always impressed Jack as a sort of vaudeville performance. On ordinary days, with the market lifeless, but half of the orchestra seats would be occupied. In whirl-times, with the ticker spelling ruin, not only were the chairs full, but standing room only was available in the offices.
Their occupants came from all classes; clerks from up-town dry-goods houses, who had run down during lunch time to see whether U.P. or Erie, or St. Paul had moved up an eighth, or down a quarter, since they had devoured the morning papers on their way to town; old speculators who had spent their lives waiting buzzard-like for some calamity, enabling them to swoop down and make off with what fragments they could pick up; well-dressed, well-fed club men, who had had a run of luck and who never carried less than a thousand shares to keep their hands in; gray-haired novices nervously rolling little wads of paper between their fingers and thumbs—up every few minutes to listen to the talk of the ticker, too anxious to wait until the sallow-faced young man with the piece of chalk could make his record on the board. Some of them had gathered together their last dollar. Two per cent. or one percent, or even one-half of one per cent. rise or fall was all that stood between them and ruin.
“Very sorry, sir, but you know we told you when you opened the account that you must keep your margins up,” Breen had said to an old man. The old man knew; had known it all night as he lay awake, afraid to tell his wife of the sword hanging above their heads. Knew it, too, when without her knowledge he had taken the last dollar of the little nest-egg to make good the deficit owed Breen & Co. over and above his margins, together with some other things “not negotiable”—not our kind of collateral but “stuff” that could “lie in the safe until he could make some other arrangement,” the cashier had said with the firm's consent.
Queer safe, that of Breen & Co., and queer things went into it. Most of them were still there. Jack thought some jeweller had sent part of his stock down for safe-keeping when he first came across a tiny drawer of which Breen alone kept the key. Each object could tell a story: a pair of diamond ear-rings surely could, and so could four pearls on a gold chain, and perhaps, too, a certain small watch, the case set with jewels. One of these days they may be redeemed, or they may not, depending upon whether the owners can scrape money enough together to pay the balances owed in cash. But the four pearls on the gold chain are likely to remain there—that poor fellow went overboard one morning off Nantucket Light, and his secret went with him.
During the six months Jack had stood at his desk new faces had filled the chairs—the talk had varied; though he felt only the weary monotony of it all. Sometimes there had been hours of tense excitement, when even his uncle had stood by the ticker, and when every bankable security in the box had been overhauled and sent post-haste to the bank or trust company. Jack, followed by the porter with a self-cocking revolver in his outside pocket, had more than once carried the securities himself, returning to the office on the run with a small scrap of paper good for half a million or so tucked away in his inside pocket. Then the old monotony had returned with its dull routine and so had the chatter and talk. “Buy me a hundred.” “Yes, let 'em go.” “No, I don't want to risk it.” “What's my balance?” “Thought you'd get another eighth for that stock.” “Sold at that figure, anyhow,” etc.
Under these conditions life to a boy of Jack's provincial training and temperament seemed narrowed down to an arm-chair, a black-board, a piece of chalk and a restless little devil sputtering away in a glass case, whose fiat meant happiness or misery. Only the tongue of the demon was in evidence. The brain behind it, with its thousand slender nerves quivering with the energy of the globe, Jack never saw, nor, for that matter, did nine-tenths of the occupants of the chairs. To them its spoken word was the dictum of fate. Success meant debts paid, a balance in the bank, houses, horses, even yachts and estates—failure meant obscurity and suffering. The turn of the roulette wheel or the roll of a cube of ivory they well knew brought the same results, but these turnings they also knew were attended with a certain loss of prestige. Taking a flier in the Street was altogether different—great financiers were behind the fluctuations of values told by the tongue of the ticker, and behind them was the wealth of the Republic and still in the far distance the power of the American people. Few of them ever looked below the grease paint, nor did the most discerning ever detect the laugh on the clown's face.
The boy half hidden by the glass screen, through which millions were passed and repassed every month, caught now and then a glimpse.
Once a faded, white-haired old man had handed Jack a check after banking hours to make good an account—a man whose face had haunted him for hours. His uncle told him the poor fellow had “run up solid” against a short interest in a stock that some Croesus was manipulating to get even with another Croesus who had manipulated HIM, and that the two Croesuses had “buried the old man alive.” The name of the stock Jack had forgotten, but the suffering in the victim's face had made an indelible impression. In reply to Jack's further inquiry, his uncle had spoken as if the poor fellow had been wandering about on some unknown highway when the accident happened, failing to add that he himself had led him through the gate and started him on the road; forgetting, too, to say that he had collected the toll in margins, a sum which still formed a considerable portion of Breen & Co.'s bank account. One bit of information which Breen had vouchsafed, while it did not relieve the gloom of the incident, added a note of courage to the affair:
“He was game, however, all the same, Jack. Had to go down into his wife's stocking, I hear. Hard hit, but he took it like a man.”
CHAPTER V.
While all this was going on downtown under the direction of the business end of the house of Breen, equally interesting events were taking place uptown under the guidance of its social head. Strict orders had been given by Mrs. Breen the night before that certain dustings and arrangings of furniture should take place, the spacious stairs swept, and the hectic hired palms in their great china pots watered. I say “the night before,” because especial stress was laid upon the fact that on no account whatever were either Mrs. Breen or her daughter Corinne to be disturbed until noon—neither of them having retired until a late hour the night before.
So strictly were these orders carried out that all that did reach the younger woman's ear—and this was not until long after mid-day—was a scrap of news which crept upstairs from the breakfast table via Parkins wireless, was caught by Corinne's maid and delivered in manifold with that young lady's coffee and buttered rolls. This when deciphered meant that Jack was not to be at the dance that evening—he having determined instead to spend his time up stairs with a disreputable old fellow whom he had picked up somewhere at a supper the preceding night.
Corinne thought over the announcement for a moment, gazed into the egg-shell cup that Hortense was filling from the tiny silver coffee-pot, and a troubled expression crossed her face. “What has come over Jack?” she asked herself. “I never knew him to do anything like this before. Is he angry, I wonder, because I danced with Garry the other night? It WAS his dance, but I didn't think he would care. He has always done everything to please me—until now.” Perhaps the boy was about to slip the slight collar he had worn in her service—one buckled on by him willingly because—though she had not known it—he was a guest in the house. Heretofore she said to herself Jack had been her willing slave, a feather in her cap—going everywhere with her; half the girls were convinced he was in love with her—a theory which she had encouraged. What would they say now? This prospect so disturbed the young woman that she again touched the button, and again Hortense glided in.
“Hortense, tell Parkins to let me know the moment Mr. John comes in—and get me my blue tea-gown; I sha'n't go out to-day.” This done she sank back on her pillows.
She was a slight little body, this Corinne—blue-eyed, fair-haired, with a saucy face and upturned nose. Jack thought when he first saw her that she looked like a wren with its tiny bill in the air—and Jack was not far out of the way. And yet she was a very methodical, level-headed little wren, with several positive convictions which dominated her life—one of them being that everybody about her ought to do, not as they, but as she, pleased. She had begun, and with pronounced success, on her mother as far back as she could remember, and had then tried her hand on her stepfather until it became evident that as her mother controlled that gentleman it was a waste of time to experiment further. All of which was a saving of stones without the loss of any birds.
Where she failed—and she certainly had failed, was with Jack, who though punctiliously polite was elusive and—never quite subdued. Yet the discovery made, she neither pouted nor lost her temper, but merely bided her time. Sooner or later, she knew, of course, this boy, who had seen nothing of city life and who was evidently dazed with all the magnificence of the stately home overlooking the Park, would find his happiest resting-place beneath the soft plumage of her little wing. And if by any chance he should fall in love with her—and what more natural; did not everybody fall in love with her?—would it not be wiser to let him think she returned it, especially if she saw any disposition on the young man's part to thwart her undisputed sway of the household?
For months she had played her little game, yet to her amazement none of the things she had anticipated had happened. Jack had treated her as he would any other young woman of his acquaintance—always with courtesy—always doing everything to oblige her, but never yielding to her sway. He would laugh sometimes at her pretensions, just as he would have laughed at similar self-assertiveness on the part of any one else with whom he must necessarily be thrown, but never by thought, word or deed had he ever given my Lady Wren the faintest suspicion that he considered her more beautiful, better dressed, or more entertaining, either in song, chirp, flight or plumage, than the flock of other birds about her. Indeed, the Scribe knows it to be a fact that if Jack's innate politeness had not forbidden, he would many times have told her truths, some of them mighty unpleasant ones, to which her ears had been strangers since her school-girl days.
This unstudied treatment, strange to say—the result really, of the boy's indifference—had of late absorbed her. What she could not have she generally longed for, and there was not the slightest question up to the present moment that Jack was still afield.
Again the girl pressed the button of the cord within reach of her hand, and for the third time Hortense entered.
“Have you told Parkins I want to know the very instant Mr. John comes in?”
“Yes, miss.”
“And, Hortense, did you understand that Mr. John was to go out to meet the gentleman, or was the gentleman to come to his rooms?”
“To his rooms, I think, miss.”
She was wearing her blue tea-gown, stretched out on the cushions of one of the big divans in the silent drawing-room, when she heard Jack's night-key touch the lock. Springing to her feet she ran toward him.
“Why, Jack, what's this I hear about your not coming to my dance? It isn't true, is it?” She was close to him now, her little head cocked on one side, her thin, silken draperies dripping about her slender figure.
“Who told you?”
“Parkins told Hortense.”
“Leaky Parkins?” laughed Jack, tossing his hat on the hall table.
“But you are coming, aren't you, Jack? Please do!”
“Not to-night; you don't need me, Corinne.” His voice told her at once that not only was the leash gone but that the collar was off as well.
“Yes, but I do.”
“Then please excuse me, for I have an old gentleman coming to pay me a visit. The finest old gentleman, by the way, you ever saw! A regular thoroughbred, Corinne—who looks like a magnificent portrait!” he added in his effort to interest her.
“But let him come some other time,” she coaxed, holding the lapel of his coat, her eyes searching his.
“What, turn to the wall a magnificent old portrait!” This came with a mock grimace, his body bent forward, his eyes brimming with laughter.
“Be serious, Jack, and tell me if you think it very nice in you to stay upstairs in your den when I am giving a dance? Everybody will know you are at home, and we haven't enough men as it is. Garry can't come, he writes me. He has to dine with some men at the club.”
“I really AM sorry, Corinne, but I can't this time.” Jack had hold of her hand now; for a brief moment he was sorry he had not postponed Peter's visit until the next day; he hated to cause any woman a disappointment. “If it was anybody else I might send him word to call another night, but you don't know Mr. Grayson; he isn't the kind of a man you can treat like that. He does me a great honor to come, anyhow. Just think of his coming to see a boy like me—and he so—”
“Well, bring him downstairs, then.” Her eyes began to flash; she had tried all the arts she knew—they were not many—but they had won heretofore. “Mother will take care of him. A good many of the girls' fathers come for them.”
“Bring him downstairs to a dance!” Jack answered with a merry laugh. “He isn't that kind of an old gentleman, either. Why, Corinne, you ought to see him! You might as well ask old Bishop Gooley to lead the german.”
Jack's foot was now ready to mount the lower step of the stairs. Corinne bit her lip.
“You never do anything to please me!” she snapped back. She knew she was fibbing, but something must be done to check this new form of independence—and then, now that Garry couldn't come, she really needed him. “You don't want to come, that's it—” She facing him now, her little nose high in the air, her cheeks flaming with anger.
“You must not say that, Corinne,” he answered in a slightly indignant tone.
Corinne drew herself up to her full height—toes included; not very high, but all she could do—and said in a voice pitched to a high key, her finger within a few inches of his nose:
“It's true, and I will say it!”
The rustle of silk was heard overhead, and a plump, tightly laced woman in voluminous furs, her head crowned by a picture hat piled high with plumes, was making her way down the stairs. Jack looked up and waved his hand to his aunt, and then stood at mock attention, like a corporal on guard, one hand raised to salute her as she passed. The boy, with the thought of Peter coming, was very happy this afternoon.
“What are you two quarrelling about?” came the voice. Rather a soft voice with a thread of laziness running through it.
“Jack's too mean for anything, mother. He knows we haven't men enough without him for a cotillion, now that Garry has dropped out, and he's been just stupid enough to invite some old man to come and see him this evening.”
The furs and picture hat swept down and on, Jack standing at attention, hands clasping an imaginary musket his face drawn down to its severest lines, his cheeks puffed out to make him look the more solemn. When the wren got “real mad” he would often say she was the funniest thing alive.
“I'm a pig, I know, aunty” (here Jack completed his salute with a great flourish), “but Corinne does not really want me, and she knows it. She only wants to have her own way. They don't dance cotillions when they come here—at least they didn't last time, and I don't believe they will to-night. They sit around with each other in the corners and waltz with the fellows they've picked out—and it's all arranged between them, and has been for a week—ever since they heard Corinne was going to give a dance.” The boy spoke with earnestness and a certain tone of conviction in his voice, although his face was still radiant.
“Well, can't you sit around, too, Jack?” remarked his aunt, pausing in her onward movement for an instant. “I'm sure there will be some lovely girls.”
“Yes, but they don't want me. I've tried it too often, aunty—they've all got their own set.”
“It's because you don't want to be polite to any of them,” snapped Corinne with a twist of her body, so as to face him again.
“Now, Corinne, that isn't fair; I am never impolite to anybody in this house, but I'm tired of—”
“Well, Garry isn't tired.” This last shot was fired at random.
Again the aunt poured oil: “Come, children, come! Don't let's talk any more about it. If Jack has made an engagement it can't be helped, I suppose, but don't spoil your party, my dear. Find Parkins, Jack, and send him to me.... Ah, Parkins—if any one calls say I'll be out until six o'clock.”
“Yes, my Lady.” Parkins knew on which side his bread was buttered. She had reproved him at first, but his excuse was that she was so like his former mistress, Lady Colchester, that he sometimes forgot himself.
And again “my Lady” swept on, this time out of the door and into her waiting carriage.
CHAPTER VI
Jack's impatience increased as the hour for Peter's visit approached. Quarter of nine found him leaning over the banisters outside his small suite of rooms, peering down between the hand-rails watching the top of every head that crossed the spacious hall three flights below—he dare not go down to welcome his guest, fearing some of the girls, many of whom had already arrived, would know he was in the house. Fifteen minutes later the flash of a bald head, glistening in the glare of the lower hall lantern, told him that the finest old gentleman in the world had arrived, and on the very minute. Parkins's special instructions, repeated for the third time, were to bring Mr. Peter Grayson—it was wonderful what an impressive note was in the boy's voice when he rolled out the syllables—up at once, surtout, straight-brimmed hat, overshoes (if he wore any), umbrella and all, and the four foot-falls—two cat-like and wabbly, as befitted the obsequious flunky, and two firm and decided, as befitted a grenadier crossing a bridge—could now be heard mounting the stairs.
“So here you are!” cried Peter, holding out both hands to the overjoyed boy—“'way up near the sky. One flight less than my own. Let me get my breath, my boy, before I say another word. No, don't worry, only Anno Domini—you'll come to it some day. How delightfully you are settled!”
They had entered the cosey sitting-room and Jack was helping with his coat; Parkins, with his nose in the air (he had heard his master's criticism), having already placed his hat on a side table and the umbrella in the corner.
“Where will you sit—in the big chair by the fire or in this long straw one?” cried the boy, Peter's coat still in his hand.
“Nowhere yet; let me look around a little.” One of Peter's tests of a man was the things he lived with. “Ah! books?” and he peered at a row on the mantel. “Macaulay, I see, and here's Poe: Good, very good—why, certainly it is—Where did you get this Morland?” and again Peter's glasses went up. “Through that door is your bedroom—yes, and the bath. Very charming, I must say. You ought to live very happily here; few young fellows I know have half your comforts.”
Jack had interrupted him to say that the Morland print was one that he had brought from his father's home, and that the books had come from the same source, but Peter kept on in his tour around the room. Suddenly he stopped and looked steadily at a portrait over the mantel.
“Yes—your father—”
“You knew!” cried Jack.
“Knew! How could any one make a mistake? Fine head. About fifty I should say. No question about his firmness or his kindness. Yes—fine head—and a gentleman, that is best of all. When you come to marry always hunt up the grandfather—saves such a lot of trouble in after life,” and one of Peter's infectious laughs filled the room.
“Do you think he looks anything like Uncle Arthur? You have seen him, I think you said.”
Peter scanned the portrait. “Not a trace. That may also be a question of grandfathers—” and another laugh rippled out. “But just be thankful you bear his name. It isn't always necessary to have a long line of gentlemen behind you, and if you haven't any, or can't trace them, a man, if he has pluck and grit, can get along without them; but it's very comforting to know they once existed. Now let me sit down and listen to you,” added Peter, whose random talk had been inspired by the look of boyish embarrassment on Jack's face. He had purposely struck many notes in order to see which one would echo in the lad's heart, so that his host might find himself, just as he had done when Jack with generous impulse had sprang from his chair to carry Minott the ring.
The two seated themselves—Peter in the easy chair and Jack opposite. The boy's eyes roamed from the portrait, with its round, grave face, to Peter's head resting on the cushioned back, illumined by the light of the lamp, throwing into relief the clear-cut lips, little gray side-whiskers and the tightly drawn skin covering his scalp, smooth as polished ivory.
“Am I like him?” asked Peter. He had caught the boy's glances and had read his thoughts.
“No—and yes. I can't see it in the portrait, but I do in the way you move your hands and in the way you bow. I keep thinking of him when I am with you. It may, as you say, be a good thing to have a gentleman for a father, sir, but it is a dreadful thing, all the same, to lose him just as you need him most. I wouldn't hate so many of the things about me if I had him to go to now and then.”
“Tell me about him and your early life,” cried Peter, crossing one leg over the other. He knew the key had been struck; the boy might now play on as he chose.
“There is very little to tell. I lived in the old home with an aunt after my father's death. And went to school and then to college at Hagerstown—quite a small college—where uncle looked after me—he paid the expenses really—and then I was clerk in a law office for a while, and at my aunt's death about a year ago the old place was sold and I had no home, and Uncle Arthur sent for me to come here.”
“Very decent in him, and you should never forget him for it,” and again Peter's eyes roamed around the perfectly appointed room.
“I know it, sir, and at first the very newness and strangeness of everything delighted me. Then I began to meet the people. They were so different from those in my part of the country, especially the young fellows—Garry is not so bad, because he really loves his work and is bound to succeed—everybody says he has a genius for architecture—but the others—and the way they treat the young girls, and what is more unaccountable to me is the way the young girls put up with it.”
Peter had settled himself deeper in his chair, his eyes shaded with one hand and looked intently at the boy.
“Uncle Arthur is kind to me, but the life smothers me. I can't breathe sometimes. Nothing my father taught me is considered worth while here. People care for other things.”
“What, for instance?” Peter's hand never moved, nor did his body.
“Why stocks and bonds and money, for instance,” laughed Jack, beginning to be annoyed at his own tirade—half ashamed of it in fact. “Stocks are good enough in their way, but you don't want to live with them from ten o'clock in the morning till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then hear nothing else talked about until you go to bed. That's why that dinner last night made such an impression on me. Nobody said money once.”
“But every one of those men had his own hobby—”
“Yes, but in my uncle's world they all ride one and the same horse. I don't want to be a pessimist, Mr. Grayson, and I want you to set me straight if I am wrong, but Mr. Morris and every one of those men about him were the first men I've seen in New York who appear to me to be doing the things that will live after them. What are we doing down-town? Gambling the most of us.”
“But your life here isn't confined to your uncle and his stock-gambling friends. Surely these lovely young girls—two of them came in with me—” and Peter smiled, “must make your life delightful.”
Jack's eyes sought the floor, then he answered slowly:
“I hope you won't think me a cad, but—No, I'm not going to say a word about them, only I can't get accustomed to them and there's no use of my saying that I can. I couldn't treat any girl the way they are treated here. And I tell you another thing—none of the young girls whom I know at home would treat me as these girls treat the men they know. I'm queer, I guess, but I might as well make a clean breast of it all. I am an ingrate, perhaps, but I can't help thinking that the old life at home was the best. We loved our friends, and they were welcome at our table any hour, day or night. We had plenty of time for everything; we lived out of doors or in doors, just as we pleased, and we dressed to suit ourselves, and nobody criticised. Why, if I drop into the Magnolia on my way up-town and forget to wear a derby hat with a sack coat, or a black tie with a dinner-jacket, everybody winks and nudges his neighbor. Did you ever hear of such nonsense in your life?”
The boy paused as if the memory of some incident in which he was ridiculed was alive in his mind. Peter's eyes were still fixed on his face.
“Go on—I'm listening; and what else hurts you? Pour it all out. That's what I came for. You said last night nobody would listen—I will.”
“Well, then, I hate the sham of it all; the silly social distinctions; the fits and starts of hospitality; the dinners given for show. Nothing else going on between times; even the music is hired. I want to hear music that bubbles out—old Hannah singing in the kitchen, and Tom, my father's old butler, whistling to himself—and the dogs barking, and the birds singing outside. I'm ashamed of myself making comparisons, but that was the kind of life I loved, because there was sincerity in it.”
“No work?” There was a note of sly merriment in the inquiry, but Jack never caught it.
“Not much. My father was Judge and spent part of the time holding court, and his work never lasted but a few hours a day, and when I wanted to go fishing or shooting, or riding with the girls, Mr. Larkin always let me off. And I had plenty of time to read—and for that matter I do here, if I lock myself up in this room. That low library over there is full of my father's books.”
Again Peter's voice had a tinge of merriment in it.
“And who supported the family?” he asked in a lower voice.
“My father.”
“And who supported him?”
The question brought Jack to a full stop. He had been running on, pouring out his heart for the first time since his sojourn in New York, and to a listener whom he knew he could trust.
“Why—his salary, of course,” answered Jack in astonishment, after a pause.
“Anything else?”
“Yes—the farm.”
“And who worked that?”
“My father's negroes—some of them his former slaves.”
“And have you any money of your own—anything your father left you?”
“Only enough to pay taxes on some wild lands up in Cumberland County, and which I'm going to hold on to for his sake.”
Peter dropped his shading fingers, lifted his body from the depths of the easy chair and leaned forward so that the light fell full on his face. He had all the information he wanted now.
“And now let me tell you my story, my lad. It is a very short one. I had the same sort of a home, but no father—none that I remember—and no mother, they both died before my sister Felicia and I were grown up. At twelve I left school; at fifteen I worked in a country store—up at daylight and to bed at midnight, often. From twenty to twenty-five I was entry clerk in a hardware store; then book-keeper; then cashier in a wagon factory; then clerk in a village bank—then book-keeper again in my present bank, and there I have been ever since. My only advantages were a good constitution and the fact that I came of gentle people. Here we are both alike—you at twenty—how old?—twenty two?... Well, make it twenty-two.... You at twenty-two and I at twenty-two seem to have started out in life with the same natural advantages, so far as years and money go, but with this difference—Shall I tell you what it is?”
“Yes.”
“That I worked and loved it, and love it still, and that you are lazy and love your ease. Don't be offended—” Here Peter laid his hand on the boy's knee. He waited an instant, and not getting any reply, kept on: “What you want to do is to go to work. It wouldn't have been honorable in you to let your father support you after you were old enough to earn your own living, and it isn't honorable in you, with your present opinions, to live on your uncle's bounty, and to be discontented and rebellious at that, for that's about what it all amounts to. You certainly couldn't pay for these comforts outside of this house on what Breen & Co. can afford to pay you. Half of your mental unrest, my lad, is due to the fact that you do not know the joy and comfort to be got out of plain, common, unadulterated work.”
“I'll do anything that is not menial.”
“What do you mean by 'menial'?”
“Well, working like a day-laborer.”
“Most men who have succeeded have first worked with their hands.”
“Not my uncle.”
“No, not your uncle—he's an exception—one among a million, and then again he isn't through.”
“But he's worth two million, they say.”
“Yes, but he never earned it, and he never worked for it, and he doesn't now. Do you want to follow in his footsteps?”
“No—not with all his money.” This came in a decided tone. “But surely you wouldn't want me to work with my hands, would you?”
“I certainly should, if necessary.”
Jack looked at him, and a shade of disappointment crossed his face.
“But I COULDN'T do anything menial.”
“There isn't anything menial in any kind of work from cleaning a stable up! The menial things are the evasions of work—tricks by which men are cheated out of their just dues.”
“Stock gambling?”
“Yes—sometimes, when the truth is withheld.”
“That's what I think; that's what I meant last night when I told you about the faro-bank. I laughed over it, and yet I can't see much difference, although I have never seen one.”
“So I understood, but you were wrong about it. Your uncle bears a very good name in the Street. He is not as much to blame as the system. Perhaps some day the firm will become real bankers, than which there is no more honorable calling.”
“But is it wrong to want to fish and shoot and have time to read.”
“No, it is wrong not to do it when you have the time and the money. I like that side of your nature. My own theory is that every man should in the twenty-four hours of the day devote eight to work, eight to sleep and eight to play. But this can only be done when the money to support the whole twenty-four hours is in sight, either in wages, or salary, or invested securities. More money than this—that is the surplusage that men lock up in their tin boxes, is a curse. But with that you have nothing to do—not yet, anyhow. Now, if I catch your meaning, your idea is to go back to your life at home. In other words you want to live the last end of your life first—and without earning the right to it. And because you cannot do this you give yourself up to criticising everything about you. Getting only at the faults and missing all the finer things in life. If you would permit me to advise you—” he still had his hand on the lad's knee, searching the soft brown eyes—“I would give up finding fault and first try to better things, and I would begin right here where you are. Some of the great banking houses which keep the pendulum of the world swinging true have grown to importance through just such young men as yourself, who were honest and had high ideals and who so impressed their own personalities upon everybody about them—customers and employers—that the tone of the concern was raised at once and with it came a world-wide success. I have been thirty years on the Street and have watched the rise of half the firms about me, and in every single instance some one of the younger men—boys, many of them—has pulled the concern up and out of a quagmire and stood it on its feet. And the reverse is true: half the downfalls have come from those same juniors, who thought they knew some short road to success, which half the time was across disreputable back lots. Why not give up complaining and see what better things you can do? I'm not quite satisfied about your having stayed upstairs even to receive me. Your aunt loves society and the daughter—what did you say her name was—Corinne? Yes, Miss Corinne being young, loves to have a good time. Listen! do you hear?—there goes another waltz. Now, as long as you do live here, why not join in it too and help out the best you can?—and if you have anything of your own to offer in the way of good cheer, or thoughtfulness, or kindness, or whatever you do have which they lack—or rather what you think they lack—wouldn't it be wiser—wouldn't it—if you will permit me, my lad—be a little BETTER BRED to contribute something of your own excellence to the festivity?”
It was now Jack's turn to lean back in his chair and cover his face, but with two ashamed hands. Not since his father's death had any one talked to him like this—never with so much tenderness and truth and with every word meant for his good. All his selfrighteousness, his silly conceit and vainglory stood out before him. What an ass he had been. What a coxcomb. What a boor, really.
“What would you have me do?” he asked, a tone of complete surrender in his voice. The portrait and Peter were one and the same! His father had come to life.
“I don't know yet. We'll think about that another time, but we won't do it now. I ought to be ashamed of myself for having spoiled your evening by such serious talk (he wasn't ashamed—he had come for that very purpose). Now show me some of your books and tell me what you read, and what you love best.”
He was out of the chair before he ceased speaking, his heels striking the floor, bustling about in his prompt, exact manner, examining the few curios and keepsakes on the mantel and tables, running his eyes over the rows of bindings lining the small bookcase; his hand on Jack's shoulder whenever the boy opened some favorite author to hunt for a passage to read aloud to Peter, listening with delight, whether the quotation was old or new to him.
Jack, suddenly remembering that his guest was standing, tried to lead him back to his seat by the fire, but Peter would have none of it.
“No—too late. Why, bless me, it's after eleven o'clock! Hear the music—they are still at it. Now I'm going to insist that you go down and have a turn around the room yourself; there were such a lot of pretty girls when I came in.”
“Too late for that, too,” laughed Jack, merry once more. “Corinne wouldn't speak to me if I showed my face now, and then there will be plenty more dances which I can go to, and so make it all up with her. I'm not yet as sorry as I ought to be about this dance. Your being here has been such a delight. May I—may—I come and see you some time?”
“That's just what you will do, and right away. Just as soon as my dear sister Felicia comes down, and she'll be here very soon. I'll send for you, never fear. Yes, the right sleeve first, and now my hat and umbrella. Ah, here they are. Now, good night, my boy, and thank you for letting me come.”
“You know I dare not go down with you,” explained Jack with a smile.
“Oh, yes—I know—I know. Good night—” and the sharp, quick tread of the old man grew fainter and fainter as he descended the stairs.
Jack waited, craning his head, until he caught a glimpse of the glistening head as it passed once more under the lantern, then he went into his room and shut the door.
Had he followed behind his guest he would have witnessed a little comedy which would have gone far in wiping clean all trace of his uncle's disparaging remarks of the morning. He would have enjoyed, too, Parkins's amazement. As the Receiving Teller of the Exeter Bank reached the hall floor the President of the Clearing House—the most distinguished man in the Street and one to whom Breen kotowed with genuflections equalling those of Parkins—accompanied by his daughter and followed by the senior partner of Breen & Co., were making their way to the front door. The second man in the chocolate livery with the potato-bug waistcoat had brought the Magnate's coat and hat, and Parkins stood with his hand on the door-knob. Then, to the consternation of both master and servant, the great man darted forward and seized Peter's hand.
“Why, my dear Mr. Grayson! This is indeed a pleasure. I didn't see you—were you inside?”
“No—I've been upstairs with young Mr. Breen,” replied Peter, with a comprehensive bow to Host, Magnate and Magnate's daughter. Then, with the grace and dignity of an ambassador quitting a salon, he passed out into the night.
Breen found his breath first: “And you know him?”
“Know him!” cried the Magnate—“of course I know him! One of the most delightful men in New York; and I'm glad that you do—you're luckier than I—try as I may I can hardly ever get him inside my house.”
I was sitting up for the old fellow when he entered his cosey red room and dropped into a chair before the fire. I had seen the impression the young man had made upon him at the dinner and was anxious to learn the result of his visit. I had studied the boy somewhat myself, noting his bright smile, clear, open face without a trace of guile, and the enthusiasm that took possession of him when his friend won the prize. That he was outside the class of young men about him I could see from a certain timidity of glance and gesture—as if he wanted to be kept in the background. Would the old fellow, I wondered, burden his soul with still another charge?
Peter was laughing when he entered; he had laughed all the way down-town, he told me. What particularly delighted him—and here he related the Portman incident—was the change in Breen's face when old Portman grasped his hand so cordially.
“Made of pinchbeck, my dear Major, both of them, and yet how genuine it looks on the surface, and what a lot of it is in circulation. Quite as good as the real thing if you don't know the difference,” and again he laughed heartily.
“And the boy,” I asked, “was he disappointing?”
“Young Breen?—not a bit of it. He's like all the young fellows who come up here from the South—especially the country districts—and he's from western Maryland, he says. Got queer ideas about work and what a gentleman should do to earn his living—same old talk. Hot-house plants most of them—never amount to anything, really, until they are pruned and set out in the cold.”
“Got any sense?” I ventured.
“No, not much—not yet—but he's got temperament and refinement and a ten commandments' code of morals.”
“Rather rare, isn't it?” I asked.
“Yes—perhaps so.”
“And I suppose you are going to take him up and do for him, like the others.”
Peter picked up the poker and made a jab at the fire; then he answered slowly:
“Well, Major, I can't tell yet—not positively. But he's certainly worth saving.”
CHAPTER VII
With the closing of the front door upon the finest Old Gentleman in the World, a marked change took place in the mental mechanism of several of our most important characters. The head of the firm of Breen & Co. was so taken aback that for the moment that shrewdest of financiers was undecided as to whether he or Parkins should rush out into the night after the departing visitor and bring him back, and open the best in the cellar. “Send a man out of my house,” he said to himself, “whom Portman couldn't get to his table except at rare intervals! Well, that's one on me!”
The lid that covered the upper half of Parkins's intelligence also received a jolt; it was a coal-hole lid that covered emptiness, but now and then admitted the light.
“Might 'ave known from the clothes 'e wore 'e was no common PUR-son,” he said to himself. “To tell you the truth—” this to the second man in the potato-bug waistcoat, when they were dividing between them the bottle of “Extra Dry” three-quarters full, that Parkins had smuggled into the pantry with the empty bottles (“Dead Men,” Breen called them)—“to tell you the truth, Frederick, when I took 'is 'at and coat hupstairs 'e give me a real start 'e looked that respectable”
As to Jack, not only his mind but his heart were in a whirl.
Half the night he lay awake wondering what he could do to follow Peter's advice while preserving his own ideals. He had quite forgotten that part of the older man's counsel which referred to the dignity of work, even of that work which might be considered as menial. If the truth must be told, it was his vanity alone which had been touched by the suggestion that in him might lay the possibility of reforming certain conditions around him. He was willing, even anxious, to begin on Breen & Co., subjecting his uncle, if need be, to a vigorous overhauling. Nothing he felt could daunt him in his present militant state, upheld, as he felt that he was, by the approval of Peter. Not a very rational state of mind, the Scribe must confess, and only to be accounted for by the fact that Peter's talk, instead of clearing Jack's mind of old doubts, had really clouded it the more—quite as a bottle of mixture when shaken sends its insoluble particles whirling throughout the whole.
It was not until the following morning, indeed, that the sediment began to settle, and some of the sanity of Peter's wholesome prescription to produce a clarifying effect. As long as he, Jack, lived upon his uncle's bounty—and that was really what it amounted it—he must at least try to contribute his own quota of good cheer and courtesy. This was what Peter had done him the honor to advise, and he must begin at once if he wanted to show his appreciation of the courtesy.
His uncle opened the way:
“Why, I didn't know until I saw him go out that he was a friend of Mr. Portman's,” he said as he sipped his coffee.
“Neither did I. But does it make any difference?” answered Jack, flipping off the top of his egg.
“Well I should think so—about ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent,” replied the older man emphatically. “Let's invite him to dinner, Jack. Maybe he'll come to one I'm giving next week and—”
“I'll ask him—that is... perhaps, though, you might write him a note, uncle, and—”
“Of course,” interrupted Breen, ignoring the suggestion, “when I wanted you to take him to the club I didn't know who he was.”
“Of course you did not,” echoed Jack, suppressing a smile.
“The club! No, not by a damned sight!” exclaimed the head of the house of Breen. As this latter observation was addressed to the circumambient air, and not immediately to Jack, it elicited no response. Although slightly profane, Jack was clever enough to read in its tones not only ample apology for previous criticisms but a sort of prospective reparation, whereupon our generous young gentleman forgave his uncle at once, and thought that from this on he might like him the better.
Even Parkins came in for a share of Jack's most gracious intentions, and though he was as silent as an automaton playing a game of chess, a slight crack was visible in the veneer of his face when Jack thanked him for having brought Mr. Grayson—same reverential pronunciation—upstairs himself instead of allowing Frederick or one of the maid-servants to perform that service.
As for his apologies to Corinne and his aunt for having remained in his room after Mr. Grayson's departure, instead of taking part in the last hours of the dance—one o'clock was the exact hour—these were reserved until those ladies should appear at dinner, when they were made with so penitential a ring in his voice that his aunt at once jumped to the conclusion that he must have been bored to death by the old fellow, while Corinne hugged herself in the belief that perhaps after all Jack was renewing his interest in her; a delusion which took such possession of her small head that she finally determined to send Garry a note begging him to come to her at once, on business of the UTMOST IMPORTANCE; two strings being better than one, especially when they were to be played each against the other.
As to the uplifting of the house of Breen & Co., and the possibility of so small a tail as himself being able to wag so large a dog as his uncle and his partners, that seemed now to be so chimerical an undertaking that he laughed when he thought of it.
This urbanity of mood was still with him when some days later he dropped into the Magnolia Club on his way home, his purpose being to find Garry and to hear about the supper which his club friends had given him to celebrate his winning of the Morris ring.
Little Biffton was keeping watch when Jack swung in with that free stride of his that showed more than anything else his muscular body and the way he had taken care of and improved it. No dumb-bells or clubs for fifteen minutes in the morning—but astride a horse, his thighs gripping a bare-back, roaming the hills day after day—the kind of outdoor experience that hardens a man all over without specializing his biceps or his running gear. Little Biff never had any swing to his gait—none that his fellows ever noticed. Biff went in for repose—sometimes hours at a time. Given a club chair, a package of cigarettes and some one to talk to him and Biff could be happy a whole afternoon.
“Ah, Breen, old man! Come to anchor.” Here he moved back a chair an inch or two with his foot, and pushed his silver cigarette-case toward the newcomer.
“Thank you,” replied Jack. “I've just dropped in to look for Garry Minott. Has he been in?”
Biff was the bulletin-board of the Magnolia club. As he roomed upstairs, he could be found here at any hour of the day or night.
Biff did not reply at once; there was no use in hurrying—not about anything. Besides, the connection between Biff's ears and his brain was never very good. One had to ring him up several times before he answered.
Jack waited for an instant, and finding that the message was delayed in transmission, helped himself to one of Biff's “Specials”—bearing in gold letters his name “Brent Biffton” in full on the rice paper—dropped into the proffered chair and repeated the question:
“Have you seen Garry?”
“Yes—upstairs. Got a deck in the little room. Been there all afternoon. Might go up and butt in. Touch that bell before you go and say what.”
“No—I won't drink anything, if you don't mind. You heard about Garry's winning the prize?”
“No.” Biffton hadn't moved since he had elongated his foot in search of Jack's chair.
“Why Garry got first prize in his office. I went with him to the supper; he's with Holker Morris, you know.”
“Yes. Rather nice. Yes, I did hear. The fellows blew him off upstairs. Kept it up till the steward shut 'em out. Awfully clever fellow, Minott. My Governor wanted me to do something in architecture, but it takes such a lot of time... Funny how a fellow will dress himself.” Biffton's sleepy eyes were sweeping the Avenue. “Pendergast just passed wearing white spats—A month too late for spats—ought to know better. Touch the bell, Breen, and say what.”
Again Jack thanked him, and again Biffton relapsed into silence. Rather a damper on a man of his calibre, when a fellow wouldn't touch a bell and say what.
Jack having a certain timidity about “butting in”—outsiders didn't do such things where he came from—settled himself into the depths of the comfortable leather-covered arm-chair and waited for Garry to finish his game. From where he sat he could not only overlook the small tables holding a choice collection of little tear-bottles, bowls of crushed ice and high-pressure siphons, but his eye also took in the stretch beyond, the club windows commanding the view up and down and quite across the Avenue, as well as the vista to the left.
This outlook was the most valuable asset the Magnolia possessed. If the parasol was held flat, with its back to the club-house, and no glimpse of the pretty face possible, it was, of course, unquestionable evidence to the member looking over the top of his cocktail that neither the hour or the place was propitious. If, however, it swayed to the right or left, or better still, was folded tight, then it was equally conclusive that not only was the coast clear, but that any number of things might happen, either at Tiffany's, or the Academy, or wherever else one of those altogether accidental—“Why-who-would-have-thought-of-seeing-you- here” kind of meetings take place—meetings so delightful in themselves because so unexpected.
These outlooks, too, were useful in solving many of the social problems that afflicted the young men about town; the identity, for instance, of the occupant of the hansom who had just driven past, heavily veiled, together with her destination and her reason for being out at all; why the four-in-hand went up empty and came back with a pretty woman beside the “Tooler,” and then turned up a side street toward the Park, instead of taking the Avenue into its confidence; what the young wife of the old doctor meant when she waved her hand to the occupant of a third-story window, and who lived there, and why—None of their business, of course—never could be—but each and every escapade, incident and adventure being so much thrice-blessed manna to souls stranded in the desert waste of club conversation.
None of these things interested our hero, and he soon found himself listening to the talk at an adjoining table. Topping, a young lawyer, Whitman Bunce, a man of leisure—unlimited leisure—and one or two others, were rewarming some of the day's gossip.
“Had the gall to tell Bob's man he couldn't sleep in linen sheets; had his own violet silk ones in his trunk, to match his pajamas. The goat had 'em out and half on the bed when Bob came in and stopped him. Awful row, I heard, when Mrs. Bob got on to it. He'll never go there again.”
“And I heard,” broke in Bunce, “that she ordered the trap and sent him back to the station.”
Other bits drifted Jack's way:
“Why he was waiting at the stage-door and she slipped out somewhere in front. Billy was with her, so I heard.... When they got to Delmonico's there came near being a scrap.... No.... Never had a dollar on Daisy Belle, or any other horse....”
Loud laughter was now heard at the end of the hall. A party of young men had reached the foot of the stairs and were approaching Biffton and Jack. Garry's merry voice led the others.
“Still hard at work, are you, Biffy? Why, hello, Jack!—how long have you been here? Morlon, you know Mr. Breen, don't you?—Yes, of course you do—new member—just elected. Get a move on that carcass of yours, Biffy, and let somebody else get up to that table. Charles, take the orders.”
Jack had shaken everybody's hand by this time, Biffton having moved back a foot or two, and the circle had widened so that the poker party could reach their cocktails. Garry extended his arm till his hand rested on Jack's shoulder.
“Nothing sets me up like a game of poker, old man. Been on the building all day. You ought to come up with me some time—I'll show you the greatest piece of steel construction you ever saw. Mr. Morris was all over it to-day. Oh, by the way! Did that old chunk of sandstone come up to see you last night? What did you say his name was?”
Jack repeated Peter's cognomen—this time without rolling the syllables under his tongue—said that Mr. Grayson had kept his promise; that the evening had been delightful, and immediately changed the subject. There was no use trying to convert Garry.
“And now tell me about the supper,” asked Jack.
“Oh, that was all right. We whooped it up till they closed the bar and then went home with the milk. Had an awful head on me next morning; nearly fell off the scaffold, I was so sleepy. How's Miss Corinne? I'm going to stop in on my way uptown this afternoon and apologize to her. I have her note, but I haven't had a minute to let her know why I didn't come. I'll show her the ring; then she'll know why. Saw it, didn't you?”
Jack hadn't seen it. He had been too excited to look. Now he examined it. With the flash of the gems Biffy sat up straight, and the others craned their heads. Garry slipped it off his finger for the hundredth time for similar inspections, and Jack utilized the pause in the conversation to say that Corinne had received the note and that in reply she had vented most of her disappointment on himself, a disclosure which sent a cloud across Garry's face.
The cocktail hour had now arrived—one hour before dinner, an hour which was fixed by that distinguished compounder of herbs and spirits, Mr. Biffton—and the room began filling up. Most of the members were young fellows but a few years out of college, men who renewed their Society and club life within its walls; some were from out of town—students in the various professions. Here and there was a man of forty—one even of fifty-five—who preferred the gayer and fresher life of the younger generation to the more solemn conclaves of the more exclusive clubs further up and further down town. As is usual in such combinations, the units forming the whole sought out their own congenial units and were thereafter amalgamated into groups, a classification to be found in all clubs the world over. While Biffy and his chums could always be found together, there were other less-fortunate young fellows, not only without coupon shears, but sometimes without the means of paying their dues—who formed a little coterie of their own, and who valued and used the club for what it brought them, their election carrying with it a certain social recognition: it also widened one's circle of acquaintances and, perhaps, of clients.
The sound of loud talking now struck upon Jack's ear. Something more important than the angle of a parasol or the wearing of out-of-date spats was engrossing the attention of a group of young men who had just entered. Jack caught such expressions as—“Might as well have picked his pocket....” “He's flat broke, anyhow....” “Got to sell his house, I hear....”
Then came a voice louder than the others.
“There's Breen talking to Minott and Biffy. He's in the Street; he'll know.... Say, Breen!”
Jack rose to his feet and met the speaker half way.
“What do you know, Breen, about that scoop in gold stock? Heard anything about it? Who engineered it? Charley Gilbert's cleaned out, I hear.”
“I don't know anything,” said Jack. “I left the office at noon and came up town. Who did you say was cleaned out?”
“Why, Charley Gilbert. You must know him.”
“Yes, I know him. What's happened to him?”
“Flat broke—that's what happened to him. Got caught in that gold swindle. The stock dropped out of sight this afternoon, I hear—went down forty points.”
Garry crowded his way into the group: “Which Mr. Gilbert?—not Charley M., the—”
“Yes; Sam's just left him. What did he tell you, Sam?”
“Just what you've said—I hear, too, that he has got to stop on his house out in Jersey. Can't finish it and can't pay for what's been done.”
Garry gave a low whistle and looked at Jack.
“That's rough. Mr. Morris drew the plan of Gilbert's house himself. I worked on the details.”
“Rough!” burst out the first speaker. “I should say it was—might as well have burglared his safe. They have been working up this game for months, so Charley told me. Then they gave out that the lode had petered out and they threw it overboard and everybody with it. They said they tried to find Charley to post him, but he was out of town.”
“Who tried?” asked Jack, with renewed interest, edging his way close to the group. It was just as well to know the sheep from the goats, if he was to spend the remainder of his life in the Street.
“That's what we want to know. Thought you might have heard.”
Jack shook his head and resumed his seat beside Biffy, who had not moved or shown the slightest interest in the affair. Nobody could sell Biff any gold stock—nor any other kind of stock. His came on the first of every month in a check from the Trust Company.
For some moments Jack did not speak. He knew young Gilbert, and he knew his young and very charming wife. He had once sat next to her at dinner, when her whole conversation had been about this new home and the keen interest that Morris, a friend of her father's, had taken in it. “Mr. Breen, you and Miss Corinne must be among our earliest guests,” she had said, at which Corinne, who was next to Garry, had ducked her little head in acceptance. This was the young fellow, then, who had been caught in one of the eddies whirling over the sunken rocks of the Street. Not very creditable to his intelligence, perhaps, thought Jack; but, then, again, who had placed them there, a menace to navigation?—and why? Certainly Peter could not have known everything that was going on around him, if he thought the effort of so insignificant an individual as himself could be of use in clearing out obstructions like these.
Garry noticed the thoughtful expression settling over Jack's face, and mistaking the cause called Charles to take the additional orders.
“Cheer up—try a high-ball, Jack. It's none of your funeral. You didn't scoop Gilbert; we are the worst sufferers. Can't finish his house now, and Mr. Morris is just wild over the design. It's on a ledge of rock overlooking the lake, and the whole thing goes together. We've got the roof on, and from across the lake it looks as if it had grown there. Mr. Morris repeated the rock forms everywhere. Stunning, I tell you!”
Jack didn't want any high-ball, and said so. (Biffy didn't care if he did.) The boy's mind was still on the scoop, particularly on the way in which every one of his fellow-members had spoken of the incident.
“Horrid business, all of it. Don't you think so, Garry?” Jack said after a pause.
“No, not if you keep your eyes peeled,” answered Garry, emptying his glass. “Never saw Gilbert but once, and then he looked to me like a softy from Pillowville. Couldn't fool me, I tell you, on a deal like that. I'd have had a 'stop order' somewhere. Served Gilbert right; no business to be monkeying with a buzz-saw unless he knew how to throw off the belt.”
Jack straightened his shoulders and his brows knit. The lines of the portrait were in the lad's face now.
“Well, maybe it's all right, Garry. My own opinion is that it's no better than swindling. Anyway, I'm mighty glad Uncle Arthur isn't mixed up in it. You heard what Sam and the other fellows thought, didn't you? How would you like to have that said of you?”
Garry tossed back his head and laughed.
“Biffy, are you listening to his Reverence, the Bishop of Cumberland? Here endeth the first lesson.”
Biff nodded over his high-ball. He wasn't listening—discussions of any kind bored him.
“But what do you care, Jack, what they say—what anybody says?” continued Garry. “Keep right on. You are in the Street to make money, aren't you? Everybody else is there for the same purpose. What goes up must come down. If you don't want to get your head smashed, stand from under. The game is to jump in, grab what you can, and jump out, dodging the bricks as they come. Let's go up-town, old man.”
Neither of the young men was expressing his own views. Both were too young and too inexperienced to have any fixed ideas on so vital a subject.
It was the old fellow in the snuff-colored coat, black stock and dog-eared collar that was behind Jack. If he were alive to-day Jack's view would have been his view, and that was the reason why it was Jack's view. The boy could no more explain it than he could prove why his eyes were brown and his hair a dark chestnut, or why he always walked with his toes very much turned out, or made gestures with his hands when he talked. Had any of the jury been alive—and some of them were—or the prosecuting-attorney, or even any one of the old settlers who attended court, they could have told in a minute which one of the two young men was Judge Breen's son. Not that Jack looked like his father. No young man of twenty-two looks like an old fellow of sixty, but he certainly moved and talked like him—and had the same way of looking at things. “The written law may uphold you, sir, and the jury may so consider, but I shall instruct them to disregard your plea. There is a higher law, sir, than justice—a law of mercy—That I myself shall exercise.” The old Judge had sat straight up on his bench when he said it, his face cast-iron, his eyes burning. The jury brought in an acquittal without leaving their seats. There was an outbreak, of course, but the man went free. This young offshoot was from the same old stock, that was all; same sap in his veins, same twist to his branch; same bud, same blossom and—same fruit.
And Garry!
Not many years have elapsed since I watched him running in and out of his father's spacious drawing-rooms on Fourteenth Street—the court end of town in those days. In the days, I mean, when his father was Collector of the Port, and his father's house with its high ceilings, mahogany doors and wide hall, and the great dining-room overlooking a garden with a stable in the rear. It had not been many years, I say, since the Hon. Creighton Minott had thrown wide its doors to whoever came—that is, whoever came properly accredited. It didn't last long, of course. Politics changed; the “ins” became the “outs.” And with the change came the bridging-over period—the kind of cantilever which hope thrusts out from one side of the bank of the swift-flowing stream of adversity in the belief that somebody on the other side of the chasm will build the other half, and the two form a highway leading to a change of scene and renewed prosperity.
The hospitable Collector continued to be hospitable. He had always taken chances—he would again. The catch-terms of Garry's day, such as “couldn't fool him,” “keep your eye peeled,” “a buzz-saw,” etc., etc., were not current in the father's day, but their synonyms were. He knew what he was about. As soon as a particular member of the Board got back from the other side the Honorable Collector would have the position of Treasurer, and then it was only a question of time when he would be President of the new corporation. I can see now the smile that lighted up his rather handsome face when he told me. He was “monkeying with a buzz-saw” all the same if he did but know it, and yet he always professed to follow the metaphor that he could “throw off the belt” that drove the pulley at his own good pleasure and so stop the connecting machinery before the teeth of the whirling blade could reach his fingers. Should it get beyond his control—of which there was not the remotest possibility—he would, of course, rent his house, sell his books and curtail. “In the meantime, my dear fellow, there is some of the old Madeira left and a game of whist will only help to drive dull care away.”
Garry never whimpered when the crash came. The dear mother died—how patient and uncomplaining she was in all their ups and downs—and Garry was all that was left. What he had gained since in life he had worked for; first as office boy, then as draughtsman and then in charge of special work, earning his Chief's approval, as the Scribe has duly set forth. He got his inheritance, of course. Don't we all get ours? Sometimes it skips a generation—some times two—but generally we are wearing the old gentleman's suit of clothes cut down to fit our small bodies, making believe all the time that they are our very own, unconscious of the discerning eyes who recognize their cut and origin.
Nothing tangible, it is safe to say, came with Garry's share of the estate—and he got it all. That is, nothing he could exchange for value received—no houses or lots, or stocks or bonds. It was the INTANGIBLE that proved his richest possession, viz.:—a certain buoyancy of spirits; a cheery, optimistic view of life; a winning personality and the power of both making and holding friends. With this came another asset—the willingness to take chances, and still a third—an absolute belief in his luck. Down at the bottom of the box littered with old papers, unpaid tax bills and protested notes—all valueless—was a fourth which his father used to fish out when every other asset failed—a certain confidence in the turn of a card.
But the virtues and the peccadilloes of their ancestors, we may be sure, were not interesting our two young men as they swung up the Avenue arm in arm, this particular afternoon, the sidewalks crowded with the fashion of the day, the roadway blocked with carriages. Nor did any passing objects occupy their attention.
Garry's mind was on Corinne, and what he would tell her, and how she would look as she listened, the pretty head tucked on one side, her sparkling eyes drinking in every word of his story, although he knew she wouldn't believe one-half of it. Elusive and irritating as she sometimes was, there was really nobody exactly like Miss Corinne.
Jack's mind had resumed its normal tone. Garry's merry laugh and good-natured ridicule had helped, so had the discovery that none of his friends had had anything to do with Gilbert's fall. After all, he said to himself, as he strode up the street beside his friend, it was “none of his funeral,” none of his business, really. Such things went on every day and in every part of the world. Neither was it his Uncle Arthur's. That was the most comforting part of all.
Corinne's voice calling over the banisters: “Is that you, Jack?” met the two young men as they handed their hats to the noiseless Frederick. Both craned their necks and caught sight of the Wren's head framed by the hand-rail and in silhouette against the oval sky-light in the roof above.
“Yes, and Garry's here, too. Come down.”
The patter of little feet grew louder, then the swish of silken skirts, and with a spring she was beside them.
“No, don't you say a word, Garry. I'm not going to listen and I won't forgive you no matter what you say.” She had both of his hands now.
“Ah, but you don't know, Miss Corinne. Has Jack told you?”
“Yes, told me everything; that you had a big supper and everybody stamped around the room; that Mr. Morris gave you a ring, or something” (Garry held up his finger, but she wasn't ready to examine it yet), “and that some of the men wanted to celebrate it, and that you went to the club and stayed there goodness knows how long—all night, so Mollie Crane told me. Paul, her brother, was there—and you never thought a word about your promise to me” (this came with a little pout, her chin uplifted, her lips quite near his face), “and we didn't have half men enough and our cotillion was all spoiled. I don't care—we had a lovely time, even if you two men did behave disgracefully. No—I don't want to listen to a thing. I didn't come down to see either of you.” (She had watched them both from her window as they crossed the street.) “What I want to know, Jack, is, who is Miss Felicia Grayson?”
“Why, Mr. Grayson's sister,” burst out Jack—“the old gentleman who came to see me.”
“That old fellow!”
“Yes, that old fellow—the most charming—”
“Not that remnant!” interrupted Garry.
“No, Garry—not that kind of a man at all, but a most delightful old gentleman by the name of Mr. Grayson,” and Jack's eyes flashed. “He told me his sister was coming to town. What do you know about her, Corinne?” He was all excitement: Peter was to send for him when his sister arrived.
“Nothing—that's why I ask you. I've just got a note from her. She says she knew mamma when she lived in Washington, and that her brother has fallen in love with you, and that she won't have another happy moment—or something like that—if you and I don't come to a tea she is giving to a Miss Ruth MacFarlane; and that I am to give her love to mamma, and bring anybody I please with me.”
“When?” asked Jack. He could hardly restrain his joy.
“I think next Saturday—yes, next Saturday,” consulting the letter in her hand.
“Where? At Mr. Grayson's rooms?” cried Jack.
“Yes, at her brother's, she says. Here, Jack—you read it. Some number in East Fifteenth Street—queer place for people to live, isn't it, Garry?—people who want anybody to come to their teas. I've got a dressmaker lives over there somewhere; she's in Fifteenth Street, anyhow, for I always drive there.”
Jack devoured the letter. This was what he had been hoping for. He knew the old gentleman would keep his word!
“Well, of course you'll go, Corinne?” he cried eagerly.
“Of course I'll do nothing of the kind. I think it's a great piece of impudence. I've never heard of her. Because you had her brother upstairs, that's no reason why—But that's just like these people. You give them an inch and—”
Jack's cheeks flushed: “But, Corinne! She's offered you a courtesy—asked you to her house, and—”
“I don't care; I'm not going! Would you, Garry?”
The son of the Collector hesitated for a moment. He had his own ideas of getting on in the world. They were not Jack's—his, he knew, would never succeed. And they were not exactly Corinne's—she was too particular. The fence was evidently the best place for him.
“Would be rather a bore, wouldn't it?” he replied evasively, with a laugh. “Lives up under the roof, I guess, wears a dyed wig, got Cousin Mary Ann's daguerreotype on the mantle, and tells you how Uncle Ephraim—”
The door opened and Jack's aunt swept in. She never walked, or ambled, or stepped jauntily, or firmly, or as if she wanted to get anywhere in particular; she SWEPT in, her skirts following meekly behind—half a yard behind, sometimes.
Corinne launched the inquiry at her mother, even before she could return Garry's handshake. “Who's Miss Grayson, mamma?”
“I don't know. Why, my child?”
“Well, she says she knows you. Met you in Washington.”
“The only Miss Grayson I ever met in Washington, my dear, was an old maid, the niece of the Secretary of State. She kept house for him after his wife died. She held herself very high, let me tell you. A very grand lady, indeed. But she must be an old woman now, if she is still living. What did you say her first name was?”
Corinne took the open letter from Jack's hand. “Felicia... Yes, Felicia.”
“And what does she want?—money for some charity?” Almost everybody she knew, and some she didn't, wanted money for some charity. She was loosening her cloak as she spoke, Frederick standing by to relieve my lady of her wraps.
“No; she's going to give a tea and wants us all to come. She's the sister of that old man who came to see Jack the other night, and—”
“Going to give a tea!—and the sister of—Well, then, she certainly isn't the Miss Grayson I know. Don't you answer her, Corinne, until I find out who she is.”
“I'll tell you who she is,” burst out Jack. His face was aflame now. Never had he listened to such discourtesy. He could hardly believe his ears.
“It wouldn't help me in the least, my dear Jack; so don't you begin. I am the best judge of who shall come to my house. She may be all right, and she may not, you can never tell in a city like New York, and you can't be too particular. People really do such curious pushing things now-a-days.” This to Garry. “Now serve tea, Parkins. Come in all of you.”
Jack was on the point of blazing out in indignation over the false position in which his friend had been placed when Peter's warning voice rang in his ears. The vulgarity of the whole proceeding appalled him, yet he kept control of himself.
“None for me, please, aunty,” he said quietly. “I will join you later, Garry,” and he mounted the stairs to his room.
CHAPTER VIII
Peter was up and dressed when Miss Felicia arrived, despite the early hour. Indeed that gay cavalier was the first to help the dear lady off with her travelling cloak and bonnet, Mrs. McGuffey folding her veil, smoothing out her gloves and laying them all upon the bed in the adjoining room—the one she kept in prime order for Miss Grayson's use.
The old fellow was facing the coffee-urn when he told her Jack's story and what he himself had said in reply, and how fine the boy was in his beliefs, and how well-nigh impossible it was for him to help him, considering his environment.
The dear lady had listened with her eyes fixed on Peter. It was but another of his benevolent finds; it had been the son of an old music teacher the winter before, and a boy struggling through college last spring;—always somebody who wanted to get ahead in one direction or another, no matter how impracticable his ambitions might be. This young man, however, seemed different; certain remarks had a true ring. Perhaps, after all, her foolish old brother—foolish when his heart misled him—might have found somebody at last who would pay for the time he spent upon him. The name, too, had a familiar sound. She was quite sure the aunt must be the same rather over-dressed persistent young widow who had flitted in and out of Washington society the last year of her own stay in the capital. She had finally married a rich New York man of the same name. So she had heard.
The tea to which Jack and Corinne were invited was the result of this conversation. Trust Miss Felicia for doing the right thing and in the right way, whatever her underlying purpose might be; and then again she must look this new protege over.
Peter at once joined in the project. Nothing pleased him so much as a function of any kind in which his dear sister was the centre of attraction, and this was always the case. Was not Mrs. McGuffey put to it, at these same teas, to know what to do with the hats and coats, and the long and short cloaks and overshoes, and lots of other things beside—umbrellas and the like—whenever Miss Felicia came to town? And did not the good woman have many of the cards of the former function hidden in her bureau drawer to show her curious friends just how grand a lady Miss Felicia was? General Waterbury, U.S.A., commanding the Department of the East, with headquarters at Governors Island, was one of them. And so were Colonel Edgerton, Judge Lambert and Mrs. Lambert; and His Excellency the French Ambassador, whom she had known as an attache and who was passing through the city and had been overjoyed to leave a card; as well as Sir Anthony Broadstairs, who expected to spend a week with her in her quaint home in Geneseo, but who had made it convenient to pay his respects in Fifteenth Street instead: to say nothing of the Coleridges, Thomases, Bordeauxs and Worthingtons, besides any number of people from Washington Square, with plenty more from Murray Hill and beyond.
Peter in his enthusiasm had made a mental picture of a repetition of all this and had already voiced it in the suggestion of these and various other prominent names, when Miss Felicia stopped him with:
“No, Peter—No. It's not to be a museum of fossils, but a garden full of rosebuds; nobody with a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age”—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—“is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, and who doesn't know a soul, and nobody over twenty-five is to be admitted. So if you and the Major want to come to Ruth's tea—Ruth's, remember; not yours or the Major's, or mine—you will either have to pass the cake or take the gentlemen's hats. Do you hear?”
We heard, and we heard her laugh as she spoke, raising her gold lorgnon to her eyes and gazing at us with that half-quizzical look which so often comes over her face.
She was older than Peter—must have been: I never knew exactly. It would not have been wise to ask her, and nobody else knew but Peter, and he never told. And yet there was no mark of real old age upon her. She and Peter were alike in this. Her hair, worn Pompadour, was gray—an honest black-and-white gray; her eyes were bright as needle points; the skin slightly wrinkled, but fresh and rosy—a spare, straight, well-groomed old lady of—perhaps sixty—perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress, or undress, for her shoulders were still full and well rounded. “The most beautiful neck and throat, sir, in all Washington in her day,” old General Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority. “You should have seen her in her prime, sir. What the devil the men were thinking of I don't know, but they let her go back to Geneseo, and there she has lived ever since. Why, sir, at a ball at the German Embassy she made such a sensation that—” but then the General always tells such stories of most of the women he knows.
There was but little left of that kind of beauty. She had kept her figure, it is true—a graceful, easy moving figure, with the waist of a girl; well-proportioned arms and small, dainty hands. She had kept, too, her charm of manner and keen sense of humor—she wouldn't have been Peter's sister otherwise—as well as her interest in her friend's affairs, especially the love affairs of all the young people about her.
Her knowledge of men and women had broadened. She read them more easily now than when she was a girl—had suffered, perhaps, by trusting them too much. This had sharpened the tip end of her tongue to so fine a point that when it became active—and once in a while it did—it could rip a sham reputation up the back as easily as a keen blade loosens the seams of a bodice.
Peter fell in at once with her plan for a “Rosebud Tea,” in spite of her raillery and the threatened possibility of our exclusion, promising not only to assist her with the invitations, but to be more than careful at the Bank in avoiding serious mistakes in his balances—so as to be on hand promptly at four. Moreover, if Jack had a sweetheart—and there was no question of it, or ought not to be—and Corinne had another, what would be better than bringing them all down together, so that Miss Felicia could look them over, and Miss Ruth and the Major could get better acquainted, especially Jack and Miss Felicia; and more especially Jack and himself.
Miss Felicia's proposal having therefore been duly carried out, with a number of others not thought of when the tea was first discussed—including some pots of geraniums in the window, red, of course, to match the color of Peter's room—and the freshening up of certain swiss curtains which so offended Miss Felicia's ever-watchful eyes that she burst out with: “It is positively disgraceful, Peter, to see how careless you are getting—” At which Mrs. McGuffey blushed to the roots of her hair, and washed them herself that very night before she closed her eyes. The great day having arrived, I say the tea-table was set with Peter's best, including “the dearest of silver teapots” that Miss Felicia had given him for special occasions; the table covered with a damask cloth and all made ready for the arrival of her guests. This done, the lady returned to her own room, from which she emerged an hour later in a soft gray silk relieved by a film of old lace at her throat, blending into the tones of her gray hair brushed straight up from her forehead and worn high over a cushion, the whole topped by a tiny jewel which caught the light like a drop of dew.
And a veritable grand dame she looked, and was, as she took her seat and awaited the arrival of her guests—in bearing, in the way she moved her head; in the way she opened her fan—in the selection of the fan itself, for that matter. You felt it in the color and length of her gloves; the size of her pearl ear rings (not too large, and yet not too small), in the choice of the few rings that encircled her slender and now somewhat shrunken fingers (one hoop of gold had a history that the old French Ambassador could have told if he wanted to, so Peter once hinted to me)—everything she did in fact betrayed a wide acquaintance with the great world and its requirements and exactions.
Other women of her age might of their choice drop into charities, or cats, or nephews and nieces, railing against the present and living only in the past; holding on like grim death to everything that made it respectable, so that they looked for all the world like so many old daguerreotypes pulled from the frames. Not so Miss Felicia Grayson of Geneseo, New York. Her past was a flexible, india-rubber kind of a past that she stretched out after her. She might still wear her hair as she did when the old General raved over her, although the frost of many winters had touched it; but she would never hold on to the sleeves of those days or the skirts or the mantles: Out or in they must go, be puffed, cut bias, or made plain, just as the fashion of the day insisted. Oh! a most level-headed, common-sense, old aristocrat was Dame Felicia!
With the arrival of the first carriage old Isaac Cohen moved his seat from the back to the front of his shop, so he could see everybody who got out and went in, as well as everybody who walked past and gazed up at the shabby old house and its shabbier steps and railings. Not that the shabby surroundings ever made any difference whether the guests were “carriage company” or not, to quote good Mrs. McGuffey. Peter would not be Peter if he lived anywhere else, and Miss Felicia wouldn't be half so quaint and charming if she had received her guests behind a marble or brownstone front with an awning stretched to the curbstone and a red velvet carpet laid across the sidewalk, the whole patrolled by a bluecoat and two hired men.
The little tailor had watched many such functions before. So had the neighbors, who were craning their heads from the windows. They all knew by the carriages when Miss Felicia came to town and when she left, and by the same token for that matter. The only difference between this reception and former receptions, or teas, or whatever the great people upstairs called them, was in the ages of the guests; not any gray whiskers and white heads under high silk hats, this time; nor any demure or pompous, or gentle, or, perhaps, faded old ladies puffing up Peter's stairs—and they did puff before they reached his door, where they handed their wraps to Mrs. McGuffey in her brave white cap and braver white apron. Only bright eyes and rosy faces today framed in tiny bon nets, and well-groomed young fellows in white scarfs and black coats.
But if anybody had thought of the shabby surroundings they forgot all about it when they mounted the third flight of stairs and looked in the door. Not only was Peter's bedroom full of outer garments, and Miss Felicia's, too, for that matter—but the banisters looked like a clothes-shop undergoing a spring cleaning, so thickly were the coats slung over its hand rail. So, too, were the hall, and the hall chairs, and the gas bracket, and even the hooks where Peter hung his clothes to be brushed in the morning—every conceivable place, in fact, wherever an outer wrap of any kind could be suspended, poked, or laid flat. That Mrs. McGuffey was at her wits' end—only a short walk—was evident from the way she grabbed my hat and coat and disappeared through a door which led to her own apartments, returning a moment later out of breath and, I fancied, a little out of temper.
And that was nothing to the way in which the owners of all these several habiliments were wedged inside. First came the dome of Peter's bald head surmounting his merry face, then the top of Miss Felicia's pompadour, with its tiny diamond spark bobbing about as she laughed and moved her head in saluting her guests and then mobs and mobs of young people packed tight, looking for all the world like a matinee crowd leaving a theatre (that is when you crane your neck to see over their heads), except that the guests were without their wraps and were talking sixteen to the dozen, and as merry as they could be.
“They are all here, Major,” Peter cried, dragging me inside. It was wonderful how young and happy he looked. “Miss Corinne, and that loud Hullaballoo, Garry Minott, we saw prancing around at the supper—you remember—Holker gave him the ring.”
“And Miss MacFarlane?” I asked.
“Ruth! Turn your head, my boy, and take a look at her. Isn't she a picture? Did you ever see a prettier girl in all your life, and one more charmingly dressed? Ruth, this is the Major... nothing else... just the Major. He is perfectly docile, kind and safe, and—”
“—And drives equally well in single or double harness, I suppose,” laughed the girl, extending her hand and giving me the slightest dip of her head and bend of her back in recognition, no doubt, of my advancing years and dignified bearing—in apology, too, perhaps, for her metaphor.
“In SINGLE—not double,” rejoined Peter. “He's the sourest, crabbedest old bachelor in the world—except myself.”
Again her laugh bubbled out—a catching, spontaneous kind of laugh, as if there were plenty more packed away behind her lips ready to break loose whenever they found an opening.
“Then, Major, you shall have two lumps to sweeten you up,” and down went the sugar-tongs into the silver bowl.
Here young Breen leaned forward and lifted the bowl nearer to her hand, while I waited for my cup. He had not left her side since Miss Felicia had presented him, so Peter told me afterward. I had evidently interrupted a conversation, for his eyes were still fastened upon hers, drinking in her every word and movement.
“And is sugar your cure for disagreeable people, Miss MacFarlane?” I heard him ask under his breath as I stood sipping my tea.
“That depends on how disagreeable they are,” she answered. This came with a look from beneath her eyelids.
“I must be all right, then, for you only gave me one lump—” still under his breath.
“Only one! I made a mistake—” Eyes looking straight into Jack's, with a merry twinkle gathering around their corners.
“Perhaps I don't need any at all.”
“Yes, I'm sure you do. Here—hold your cup, sir; I'll fill it full.”
“No, I'm going to wait and see what effect one lump has. I'm beginning to get pleasant already—and I was cross as two sticks when I—”
And then she insisted he should have at least three more to make him at all bearable, and he said there would be no living with him he would be so charming and agreeable, and so the talk ran on, the battledoor and shuttlecock kind of talk—the same prattle that we have all listened to dozens of times, or should have listened to, to have kept our hearts young. And yet not a talk at all; a play, rather, in which words count for little and the action is everything: Listening to the toss of a curl or the lowering of an eyelid; answering with a lift of the hand—such a strong brown hand, that could pull an oar, perhaps, or help her over dangerous places! Then her white teeth, and the way the head bent; and then his ears and how close they lay to his head; and the short, glossy hair with the faintest bit of a curl in it. And then the sudden awakening: Oh, yes—it was the sugar Mr. Breen wanted, of course. What was I thinking of?
And so the game went on, neither of them caring where the ball went so that it could be hit again when it came their way.
When it was about to stay its flight I ventured in with the remark that she must not forget to give my kindest and best to her good father. I think she had forgotten I was standing so near.
“And you know daddy!” she cried—the real girl was shining in her eyes now—all the coquetry had vanished from her face.
“Yes—we worked together on the piers of the big bridge over the Delaware; oh, long ago.”
“Isn't he the very dearest? He promised to come here today, but I know he won't. Poor daddy, he gets home so tired sometimes. He has just started on the big tunnel and there is so much to do. I have been helping him with his papers every night. But when Aunt Felicia's note came—she isn't my real aunt, you know, but I have called her so ever since I was a little girl—daddy insisted on my coming, and so I have left him for just a few days. He will be so glad when I tell him I have met one of his old friends.” There was no question of her beauty, or poise, or her naturalness.
“Been a lady all her life, my dear Major, and her mother before her,” Miss Felicia said when I joined her afterward, and Miss Felicia knew. “She is not like any of the young girls about, as you can see for yourself. Look at her now,” she whispered, with an approving nod of her head.
Again my eyes sought the girl. The figure was willowy and graceful; the shoulders sloping, the arms tapering to the wrists. The hair was jet black—“Some Spanish blood somewhere,” I suggested, but the dear lady answered sharply, “Not a drop; French Huguenot, my dear Major, and I am surprised you should have made such a mistake.” This black hair parted in the middle, lay close to her head—such a wealth and torrent of it; even with tucking it behind her ears and gathering it in a coil in her neck it seemed just ready to fall. The face was oval, the nose perfect, the mouth never still for an instant, so full was it of curves and twinkles and little quivers; the eyes big, absorbing, restful, with lazy lids that lifted slowly and lay motionless as the wings of a resting butterfly, the eyebrows full and exquisitely arched. Had you met her in mantilla and high-heeled shoes, her fan half shading her face, you would have declared, despite Miss Felicia's protest, that only the click of the castanets was needed to send her whirling to their rhythm. Had she tied that same mantilla close under her lovely chin, and passed you with upturned eyes and trembling lips, you would have sworn that the Madonna from the neighboring church had strayed from its frame in search of the helpless and the unhappy; and had none of these disguises been hers, and she had flashed by you in the open some bright morning mounted on her own black mare, face aglow, eyes like stars, her wonderful hair waving in the wind, you would have stood stock-still in admiration, fear gripping your throat, a prayer in your heart for the safe home-coming of one so fearless and so beautiful.
There was, too, about her a certain gentleness, a certain disposition to be kind, even when her inherent coquetry—natural in the Southern girl—led her into deep waters; a certain tenderness that made friends of even unhappy suitors (and I heard that she could not count them on her fingers) who had asked for more than she could give—a tenderness which healed the wound and made lovers of them all for life.
And then her Southern speech, indescribable and impossible in cold type. The softening of the consonants, the slipping away of the terminals, the slurring of vowels, and all in that low, musical voice born out side of the roar and crash of city streets and crowded drawing-rooms with each tongue fighting for mastery.
All this Jack had taken in, besides a thousand other charms visible only to the young enthusiast, before he had been two minutes in her presence. As to her voice, he knew she was one of his own people when she had finished pronouncing his name. Somebody worthwhile had crossed his path at last!
And with this there had followed, even as he talked to her, the usual comparisons made by all young fellows when the girl they don't like is placed side by side with the girl they do. Miss MacFarlane was tall and Corinne was short; Miss MacFarlane was dark, and he adored dark, handsome people—and Corinne was light; Miss MacFarlane's voice was low and soft, her movements slow and graceful, her speech gentle—as if she were afraid she might hurt someone inadvertently; her hair and dress were simple to severity. While Corinne—well, in every one of these details Corinne represented the exact opposite. It was the blood! Yes, that was it—it was her blood! Who was she, and where did she come from? Would Corinne like her? What impression would this high bred Southern beauty make upon the pert Miss Wren, whose little nose had gone down a point or two when her mother had discovered, much to her joy, the week before, that it was the REAL Miss Grayson and not an imitation Miss Grayson who had been good enough to invite her daughter and any of her daughter's friends to tea; and it had fallen another point when she learned that Miss Felicia had left her card the next day, expressing to the potato-bug how sorry she was to hear that the ladies were out, but that she hoped it would only be a matter of a few days before “she would welcome them” to her own apartments, or words to that effect, Frederick's memory being slightly defective.
It was in answer to this request that Mrs. Breen, after consulting her husband, had written three acceptances before she was willing that Frederick should leave it with his own hands in Fifteenth Street—one beginning, “It certainly is a pleasure after all these years”—which was discarded as being too familiar; another, “So good of you, dear Miss Grayson,” which had a similar fate; and the third, which ran, “My daughter will be most happy, dear Miss Grayson, to be with you,” etc., which was finally sealed with the Breen crest—a four-legged beastie of some kind on its hind legs, with a motto explanatory of the promptness of his ancestors in times of danger. Even then Corinne had hesitated about accepting until Garry said: “Well, let's take it in, anyhow—we can skip out if they bore us stiff.”
Knowing these things, therefore, and fearing that after all something would happen to mar the pleasant relations he had established with Peter, and with the honor of his uncle's family in his keeping, so to speak, Jack had awaited the arrival of Corinne and Garry with considerable trepidation. What if, after all, they should stay away, ignoring the great courtesy which this most charming of old ladies—never had he seen one so lovable or distinguished—had extended to them; and she a stranger, too, and all because her brother Peter had asked her to be kind to a boy like himself.
The entrance of Corinne and Garry, therefore, into the crowded room half an hour after his own had brought a relief to Jack's mind (he had been watching the door, so as to be ready to present them), which Miss Felicia's gracious salutation only intensified.
“I remember your dear mother perfectly,” he heard the old lady say as she advanced to Corinne and took both her hands. “And she was quite lovely. And this I am very sure is Mr. Breen's friend, Mr. Minott, who has carried off all the honors. I am delighted to see you both. Peter, do you take these dear young people and present them to Ruth.”
The two had thereupon squeezed through to Ruth's side; Peter in his formal introduction awarding to Garry all the honors to which he was entitled, and then Ruth, remembering her duties, said how glad she was to know them; and would they have lemon or sugar?—and Corinne, with a comprehensive glance of her rival, declined both, her excuse being that she was nearly dead now with the heat and that a cup of tea would finish her. Jack had winced when his ears caught the flippant answer, but it was nothing to the way in which he shrivelled up when Garry, after shaking Miss MacFarlane's hand as if it had been a pump-handle instead of a thing so dainty that no boy had a right to touch it except with reverence in his heart, had burst out with: “Glad to see you. From the South, I hear—” as if she was a kangaroo or a Fiji Islander. He had seen Miss MacFarlane give a little start at Garry's familiar way of speaking, and had noticed how Ruth shrank behind the urn as if she were afraid he would touch her again, although she had laughed quite good-naturedly as she answered:
“Not very far South; only from Maryland,” and had then turned to Jack and continued her talk with the air of one not wishing to be further interrupted.
The Scribe does not dare to relate what would have become of one so sensitive as our hero could he have heard the discussion going on later between the two young people when they were backed into one of Peter's bookcases and stood surveying the room. “Miss MacFarlane isn't at all my kind of a girl,” Corinne had declared to Garry. “Really, I can't see why the men rave over her. Pretty?—yes, sort of so-so; but no style, and SUCH clothes! Fancy wearing a pink lawn and a sash tied around her waist like a girl at a college commencement—and as to her hair—why no one has ever THOUGHT of dressing her hair that way for AGES and AGES.”
Her mind thus relieved, my Lady Wren had made a survey of the rooms, wondering what they wanted with so many funny old portraits, and whether the old gentleman or his sister read the dusty books, Garry remarking that there were a lot of “swells” among the young fellows, many of whom he had heard of but had never met before. This done, the two wedged their way out, without ever troubling Peter or Miss Felicia with their good-bys, Garry telling Corinne that the old lady wouldn't know they were gone, and Corinne adding under her breath that it didn't make any difference to her if she did.
CHAPTER IX
But Jack stayed on.
This was the atmosphere he had longed for. This, too, was where Peter lived. Here were the chairs he sat in, the books he read, the pictures he enjoyed. And the well-dressed, well-bred people, the hum of low voices, the clusters of roses, the shaded candles, their soft rosy light falling on the egg-shell cups and saucers and silver service, and the lovely girl dispensing all this hospitality and cheer! Yes, here he could live, breathe, enjoy life. Everything was worth while and just as he had expected to find it.
When the throng grew thick about her table he left Ruth's side, taking the opportunity to speak to Peter or Miss Felicia (he knew few others), but he was back again whenever the chance offered.
“Don't send me away again,” he pleaded when he came back for the twentieth time, and with so much meaning in his voice that she looked at him with wide-open eyes. It was not what he said—she had been brought up on that kind of talk—it was the way he said it, and the inflection in his voice.
“I have been literally starving for somebody like you to talk to,” he continued, drawing up a stool and settling himself determinedly beside her.
“For me! Why, Mr. Breen, I'm not a piece of bread—” she laughed. “I'm just girl.” He had begun to interest her—this brown-eyed young fellow who wore his heart on his sleeve, spoke her dialect and treated her as if she were a duchess.
“You are life-giving bread to me, Miss MacFarlane,” answered Jack with a smile. “I have only been here six months; I am from the South, too.” And then the boy poured out his heart, telling her, as he had told Peter, how lonely he got sometimes for some of his own kind; and how the young girl in the lace hat and feathers, who had come in with Garry, was his aunt's daughter; and how he himself was in the Street, signing checks all day—at which she laughed, saying in reply that nothing would give her greater pleasure than a big book with plenty of blank checks—she had never had enough, and her dear father had never had enough, either. But he omitted all mention of the faro bank and of the gamblers—such things not being proper for her ears, especially such little pink shells of ears, nestling and half hidden in her beautiful hair.
There was no knowing how long this absorbing conversation might have continued (it had already attracted the attention of Miss Felicia) had not a great stir taken place at the door of the outside hall. Somebody was coming upstairs; or had come upstairs; somebody that Peter was laughing with—great, hearty laughs, which showed his delight; somebody that made Miss Felicia raise her head and listen, a light breaking over her face. Then Peter's head was thrust in the door:
“Here he is, Felicia. Come along, Holker—I have been wondering—”
“Been wondering what, Peter? That I'd stay away a minute longer than I could help after this dear lady had arrived?... Ah, Miss Felicia! Just as magnificent and as young as ever. Still got that Marie Antoinette look about you—you ought really—”
“Stop that nonsense, Holker, right away,” she cried, advancing a step to greet him.
“But it's all true, and—”
“Stop, I tell you; none of your sugar-coated lies. I am seventy if I am a day, and look it, and if it were not for these furbelows I would look eighty. Now tell me about yourself and Kitty and the boys, and whether the Queen has sent you the Gold Medal yet, and if the big Library is finished and—”
“Whew! what a cross examination. Wait—I'll draw up a set of specifications and hand them in with a new plan of my life.”
“You will do nothing of the kind! You will draw up a chair—here, right alongside of me, and tell me about Kitty and—No, Peter, he is not going to be taken over and introduced to Ruth for at least five minutes. Peter has fallen in love with her, Holker, and I do not blame him. One of these young fellows—there he is still talking to her—hasn't left her side since he put his eyes on her. Now begin—The Medal?—
“Expected by next steamer.”
“The Corn Exchange?”
“All finished but the inside work.”
“Kitty?”
“All finished but the outside work.”
Miss Felicia looked up. “Your wife, I mean, you stupid fellow.”
“Yes, I know. She would have come with me but her dress didn't arrive in time.”
Miss Felicia laughed: “And the boys?”
“Still in Paris—buying bric-a-brac and making believe they're studying architecture and—But I'm not going to answer another question. Attention! Miss Felicia Grayson at the bar!”
The dear lady straightened her back, her face crinkling with merriment.
“Present!” she replied, drawing down the corners of her mouth.
“When did you leave home? How long will you stay? Can you come to dinner—you and Methusaleh—on Wednesday night?”
“I refuse to answer by advice of counsel. As to coming to dinner, I am not going anywhere for a week—then I am coming to you and Kitty, whether it is Wednesday or any other night. Now, Peter, take him away. He's so puffed up with his Gold Medal he's positively unbearable.”
All this time Jack had been standing beside Ruth. He had heard the stir at the door and had seen Holker join Miss Felicia, and while the talk between the two lasted he had interspersed his talk to Ruth with accounts of the supper, and Garry's getting the ring, to which was added the boy's enthusiastic tribute to the architect himself. “The greatest man I have met yet,” he said in his quick, impulsive way. “We don't have any of them down our way. I never saw one—nobody ever did. Here he comes with Mr. Grayson. I hope you will like him.”
Ruth made a movement as if to start to her feet. To sit still and look her best and attend to her cups and hot water and tiny wafers was all right for men like Jack, but not with distinguished men like Mr. Morris.
Morris had his hand on her chair before she could move it back.
“No, my dear young lady—you'll please keep your seat. I've been watching you from across the room and you make too pretty a picture as you are. Tea?—Not a drop.”
“Oh, but it is so delicious—and I will give you the very biggest piece of lemon that is left.”
“No—not a drop; and as to lemon—that's rank poison to me. You should have seen me hobbling around with gout only last week, and all because somebody at a reception, or tea, or some such plaguey affair, made me drink a glass of lemonade. Give it to this aged old gentleman—it will keep him awake. Here, Peter!”
Up to this moment no word had been addressed to Jack, who stood outside the half circle waiting for some sign of recognition from the great man; and a little disappointed when none came. He did not know that one of the great man's failings was his forgetting the names even of those of his intimate friends—such breaks as “Glad to see you—I remember you very well, and very pleasantly, and now please tell me your name,” being a common occurrence with the great architect—a failing that everybody pardoned.
Peter noticed the boy's embarrassment and touched Morris' arm.
“You remember Mr. Breen, don't you, Holker? He was at your supper that night—and sat next to me.”
Morris whirled quickly and held out his hand, all his graciousness in his manner.
“Yes, certainly. You took the ring to Minott, of course. Very glad to meet you again—and what did you say his name was, Peter?” This in the same tone of voice—quite as if Jack were miles away.
“Breen—John Breen,” answered Peter, putting his arm on Jack's shoulder, to accentuate more clearly his friendship for the boy.
“All the better, Mr. John Breen—doubly glad to see you, now that I know your name. I'll try not to forget it next time. Breen! Breen! Peter, where have I heard that name before? Breen—where the devil have I—Oh, yes—I've got it now. Quite a common name, isn't it?”
Jack assured him with a laugh that it was; there were more than a hundred in the city directory. He wasn't offended at Morris forgetting his name, and wanted him to see it.
“Glad to know it; wouldn't like to think you were mixed up in the swindle. You ought to thank your stars, my dear fellow, that you got into architecture instead of into Wall—”
“But I am in—”
“Yes, I know—you're with Hunt—” (another instance of a defective memory) “and you couldn't be with a better man—the best in the profession, really. I'm talking of some scoundrels of your name—Breen & Co., the firm is—who, I hear, have cheated one of my clients—young Gilbert—fine fellow—just married—persuaded him to buy some gold stock—Mukton Lode, I think they called it—and robbed him of all he has. He must stop on his house I hear. And now, my dear Miss—” here he turned to the young girl—“I really forget—”
“Ruth,” she answered with a smile. She had taken Morris's measure and had already begun to like him as much as Jack did.
“Yes—Miss Ruth—Now, please, my dear girl, keep on being young and very beautiful and very wholesome, for you are every one of these things, and I know you'll forgive me for saying so when I tell you that I have two strapping young fellows for sons who are almost old enough to make love to you. Come, Peter, show me that copy of Tacitus you wrote me about. Is it in good condition?” They were out of Jack's hearing now, Morris adding, “Fine type of Southern beauty, Peter. Big design, with broad lines everywhere. Good, too—good as gold. Something about her forehead that reminds me of the Italian school. Looks as if Bellini might have loved her. Hello, Major! What are you doing here all by yourself?”
Jack stood transfixed!
Horror, anger, humiliation over the exposure (it was unheard, if he had but known it, by anyone in the room except Peter and himself) rushed over him in hot concurrent waves. It was his uncle, then, who had robbed young Gilbert! The Mukton Lode! He had handled dozens of the certificates, just as he had handled dozens of others, hardly glancing at the names. He remembered overhearing some talk one day in which his uncle had taken part. Only a few days before he had sent a bundle of Mukton certificates to the transfer office of the company.
Then a chill struck him full in the chest and he shivered to his finger-tips. Had Ruth heard?—and if she had heard, would she understand? In his talk he had given her his true self—his standards of honor—his beliefs in what was true and worth having. When she knew all—and she must know—would she look upon him as a fraud? That his uncle had been accused of a shrewd scoop in the Street did not make his clerk a thief, but would she see the difference?
All these thoughts surged through his mind as he stood looking into her eyes, her hand in his while he made his adieux. He had determined, before Morris fired the bomb which shattered his hopes, to ask if he might see her again, and where, and if there could be found no place fitting and proper, she being motherless and Miss Felicia but a chaperon, to write her a note inviting her to walk up through the Park with him, and so on into the open where she really belonged. All this was given up now. The best thing for him was to take his leave as quietly as possible, without committing her to anything—anything which he felt sure she would repudiate as soon as she learned—if she did not know already—how undesirable an acquaintance John Breen, of Breen & Co., was, etc.
As to his uncle's share in the miserable transaction, there was but one thing to do—to find out, and from his own lips, if possible, if the story were true, and if so to tell him exactly what he thought of Breen & Co. and the business in which they were engaged. Peter's advice was good, and he wished he could follow it, but here was a matter in which his honor was concerned. When this side of the matter was presented to Mr. Grayson he would commend him for his course of action. To think that his own uncle should be accused of a transaction of this kind—his own uncle and a Breen! Could anything be more horrible!
So sudden was his departure from the room—just “I must go now; I'm so grateful to you all for asking me, and I've had such a good—Good-by—” that Miss Felicia looked after him in astonishment, turning to Peter with:
“Why, what's the matter with the boy? I wanted him to dine with us. Did you say anything to him, Peter, to hurt his feelings?”
Peter shook his head. Morris, he knew, was the unconscious culprit, but this was not for his sister's or Ruth's ears—not, at least, until he could get at the exact facts for himself.
“He is as sensitive as a plant,” continued Peter; “he closes all up at times. But he is genuine, and he is sincere—that's better than poise, sometimes.”
“Well, then, maybe Ruth has offended him,” suggested Miss Felicia. “No—she couldn't. Ruth, what have you done to young Mr. Breen?”
The girl threw back her head and laughed.
“Nothing.”
“Well, he went off as if he had been shot from a gun. That is not like him at all, I should say, from what I have seen of him. Perhaps I should have looked after him a little more. I tried once, but I could not get him away from you. His manner is really charming when he talks, and he is so natural and so well bred; not at all like his friend, of whom he seems to think so much. How did you like him, dear Ruth?”
“Oh, I don't know.” She knew, but she didn't intend to tell anybody. “He's very shy and—”
“—And very young.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“And very much of a gentleman,” broke in Peter in a decided tone. None should misunderstand the boy if he could help it.
Again Ruth laughed. Neither of them had touched the button which had rung up her sympathy and admiration.
“Of course he is a gentleman. He couldn't be anything else. He is from Maryland, you know.”
CHAPTER X
Reference has been made in these pages to a dinner to be given in the house of Breen to various important people, and to which Mr. Peter Grayson, the honored friend of the distinguished President of the Clearing House, was to be invited. The Scribe is unable to say whether the distinguished Mr. Grayson received an invitation or not. Breen may have thought better of it, or Jack may have discouraged it after closer acquaintance with the man who had delighted his soul as no other man except his father had ever done—but certain it is that he was not present, and equally certain is it that the distinguished Mr. Portman was, and so were many of the directors of the Mukton Lode, not to mention various others—capitalists whose presence would lend dignity to the occasion and whose names and influence would be of inestimable value to the future of the corporation.
As fate would have it the day for assuaging the appetites of these financial magnates was the same that Miss Felicia had selected for her tea to Ruth, and the time at which they were to draw up their chairs but two hours subsequent to that in which Jack, crushed and humiliated by his uncle's knavery, had crept downstairs and into the street.
In this frame of mind the poor boy had stopped at the Magnolia in the hope of finding Garry, who must, he thought, have left Corinne at home, and then retraced his steps to the club. He must explode somewhere and with someone, and the young architect was the very man he wanted. Garry had ridiculed his old-fashioned ideas and had advised him to let himself go. Was the wiping out of Gilbert's fortune part of the System? he asked himself.
As he hunted through the rooms, almost deserted at this hour, his eyes searching for his friend, a new thought popped into his head, and with such force that it bowled him over into a chair, where he sat staring straight in front of him. Tonight, he suddenly remembered, was the night of the dinner his uncle was to give to some business friends—“A Gold-Mine Dinner,” his aunt had called it. His cheeks flamed again when he thought that these very men had helped in the Mukton swindle. To interrupt them, though, at their feast—or even to mention the subject to his uncle while the dinner was in progress—was, of course, out of the question. He would stay where he was; dine alone, unless Garry came in, and then when the last man had left his uncle's house he would have it out with him.
Biffton was the only man who disturbed his solitude. Biffy was in full evening dress—an enormous white carnation in his button-hole and a crush hat under his arm. He was booked for a “Stag,” he said with a yawn, or he would stay and keep him company. Jack didn't want any company—certainly not Biffy—most assuredly not any of the young fellows who had asked him about Gilbert's failure. What he wanted was to be left alone until eleven o'clock, during which time he would get something to eat.
Dinner over, he buried himself in a chair in the library and let his mind roam. Angry as he was, Ruth's image still haunted him. How pretty she was—how gracefully she moved her arm as she lifted the cups; and the way the hair waved about her temples; and the tones of her voice—and dear Peter, so kind and thoughtful of him, so careful that he should be introduced to this and that person; and Miss Felicia! What a great lady she was; and yet he was not a bit afraid of her. What would they all think of him when the facts of his uncle's crime came to their ears, and they MUST come sooner or later. What, too, would Peter think of him for breaking out on his uncle, which he firmly intended to do as soon as the hour hand reached eleven? Nor would he mince his words. That an outrage of this kind could be committed on an unsuspecting man was bad enough, but that it should have taken place in his own uncle's office, bringing into disrepute his father's and his own good name, was something he could not tolerate for a moment. This he intended saying to his uncle in so many plain words; and so leaving our hero with his soul on fire, his mind bent on inflammables, explosives, high-pressures—anything in fact that once inserted under the solid body of the senior Breen would blow that gentleman into space—we will betake ourselves to his palatial home. The dinner being an important one, no expense had been spared.
All day long boys in white aprons had sprung from canvas-covered wagons, dived in Arthur Breen's kitchen and dived out again after depositing various eatables, drinkables and cookables—among them six pair of redheads, two saddles of mutton, besides such uncanny things as mushrooms, truffles and the like, all of which had been turned over to the chef, who was expressly engaged for the occasion, and whose white cap—to quote Parkins—“Gives a hair to the scullery which reminded him more of 'ome than anything 'e 'ad seen since 'e left 'is lordship's service.”
Upstairs more wonderful things had been done. The table of the sepulchral dining-room was transformed into a bed of tulips, the mantel a parterre of flowers, while the sideboard, its rear packed with the family silver, was guarded by a row of bottles of various sizes, shapes and colors; various degrees of cob webbed shabbiness, too—containing the priceless vintages which the senior member of the firm of Breen & Co. intended to set before his friends.
Finally, as the dinner hour approached, all the gas jets were ablaze; not only the side lights in the main hall, and the overhead lantern which had shed its rays on Peter's bald head, but the huge glass chandelier hung in the middle of the satin-upholstered drawing room, as well as the candelabra on the mantel with their imitation wax candles and brass wicks—everything, in fact, that could add to the brilliancy of the occasion.
All this, despite the orderly way in which the millionaire's house was run, had developed a certain nervous anxiety in the host himself, the effect of which had not yet worn off, although but a few minutes would elapse before the arrival of the guests. This was apparent in the rise and fall of Breen's heels, as he seesawed back and forth on the hearth-rug in the satin-lined drawing-room, with his coattails spread to the lifeless grate, and from the way he glanced nervously at the mirror to see that his cravat was properly tied and that his collar did not ride up in the back.
The only calm person in the house was the ex-widow. With the eyes of a major-general sweeping the field on the eve of an important battle, she had taken in the disposition of the furniture, the hang of the curtains and the placing of the cushions and lesser comforts. She had also arranged with her own hands the masses of narcissus and jonquils on the mantels, and had selected the exact shade of yellow tulips which centred the dining-room table. It was to be a “Gold-Mine Dinner,” so Arthur had told her, “and everything must be in harmony.”
Then seeing Parkins, who had entered unexpectedly and caught her in the act (it is bad form for a hostess to arrange flowers in some houses—the butler does that), she asked in an indifferent tone: “And how many are we to have for dinner, Parkins?” She knew, of course, having spent an hour over a diagram placing the guests.
“Fourteen, my lady.”
“Fourteen!—really, quite a small affair.” And with the air of one accustomed all her life to banquets in palaces of state, she swept out of the room.
The only time she betrayed herself was just before the arrival of the guests, when her mind reverted to her daughter.
“The Portmans are giving a ball next week, Arthur, and I want Corinne to go. Are you sure he is coming?”
“Don't worry, Kitty, Portman's coming; and so are the Colonel, and Crossbin, and Hodges, and the two Chicago directors, and Mason, and a lot more. Everybody's coming, I tell you. If Mukton Lode doesn't sit up and take notice with a new lease of life after tonight, I'm a Dutchman. Run, there's the bell.”
The merciful Scribe will spare the reader the details incident upon the arrival of the several guests. These dinners are all alike: the announcements by the butler; the passing of the cocktails on a wine tray; the standing around until the last man has entered the drawing-room; the perfunctory talk—the men who have met before hobnobbing instantly with each other, the host bearing the brunt of the strangers; the saunter into the dining-room, the reading of cards, and the “Here you are, Mr. Portman, right alongside Mr. Hodges. And Crossbin, you are down there somewhere”; the spreading of napkins and squaring of everybody's elbow as each man drops into his seat.
Neither will the reader be told of the various dishes or their garnishings. These pages have so far been filled with little else beside eating and drinking, and with reason, too, for have not all the great things in life been begun over some tea-table, carried on at a luncheon, and completed between the soup and the cordials? Kings, diplomats and statesmen have long since agreed that for baiting a trap there is nothing like a soup, an entree and a roast, the whole moistened by a flagon of honest wine. The bait varies when the financier or promoter sets out to catch a capitalist, just as it does when one sets out to catch a mouse, and yet the two mammals are much alike—timid, one foot at a time, nosing about to find out if any of his friends have had a nibble; scared at the least disturbing echo—then the fat, toothsome cheese looms up (Breen's Madeira this time), and in they go.
But if fuller description of this special bait be omitted, there is no reason why that of the baiters and the baited should be left out of the narrative.
Old Colonel Purviance, of the Chesapeake Club, for one—a big-paunched man who always wore, summer and winter, a reasonably white waistcoat and a sleazy necktie; swore in a loud voice and dropped his g's when he talked. “Bit 'em off,” his friends said, as he did the end of his cigars. He had, in honor of the occasion so contrived that his black coat and trousers matched this time, while his shoestring tie had been replaced by a white cravat. But the waistcoat was of the old pattern and the top button loose, as usual. The Colonel earned his living—and a very comfortable one it was—by promoting various enterprises—some of them rather shady. He had also a gift for both starting and maintaining a boom. Most of the Mukton stock owned by the Southern contingent had been floated by him. Another of his accomplishments was his ability to label correctly, with his eyes shut, any bottle of Madeira from anybody's cellar, and to his credit, be it said, he never lied about the quality, be it good, bad or abominable.
Next to him sat Mason, from Chicago—a Westerner who had made his money in a sudden rise in real estate, and who had moved to New York to spend it: an out-spoken, common-sense, plain man, with yellow eyebrows, yellow head partly bald, and his red face blue specked with powder marks due to a premature blast in his mining days. Mason couldn't tell the best Tiernan Madeira from corner-grocery sherry, and preferred whiskey at any and all hours—and what was more, never assumed for one instant that he could.
Then came Hodges, the immaculately dressed epicure—a pale, clean-shaven, eye-glassed, sterilized kind of a man with a long neck and skinny fingers, who boasted of having twenty-one different clarets stored away under his sidewalk which were served to ordinary guests, and five special vintages which he kept under lock and key, and which were only uncorked for the elect, and who invariably munched an olive before sampling the next wine. Then followed such lesser lights, as Nixon, Leslie and the other guests.
A most exacting group of bons vivants, these. The host had realized it and had brought out his best. Most of it, to be sure, had come from Beaver Street, something “rather dry, with an excellent bouquet,” the crafty salesman with gimlet eyes had said; but, then, most of the old Madeira does come from Beaver Street, except Portman's, who has a fellow with a nose and a palate hunting the auction rooms for that particular Sunset of 1834 which had lain in old Mr. Grinnells cellar for twenty-two years; and that other of 1839, once possessed by Colonel Purviance, a wine which had so sharpened the Colonel's taste that he was always uncomfortable when dining outside of his club or away from the tables of one or two experts like himself.
These, then, were the palates to which Breen catered. Back of them lay their good-will and good feeling; still back of them, again, their bank accounts and—another scoop in Mukton! Most of the guests had had a hand in the last deal and they were ready to share in the next. Although this particular dinner was supposed to be a celebration of the late victory, two others, equally elaborate, had preceded it; both Crossbin and Hodges having entertained nearly this same group of men at their own tables. That Breen, with his reputation for old Madeira and his supposed acquaintance with the intricacies of a Maryland kitchen, would outclass them both, had been whispered a dozen times since the receipt of his invitation, and he knew it. Hence the alert boy, the chef in the white cap, and hence the seesawing on the hearth-rug.
“Like it, Crossbin?” asked Breen.
Parkins had just passed down the table with a dust covered bottle which he handled with the care of a collector fingering a peachblow vase. The precious fluid had been poured into that gentleman's glass and its contents were now within an inch of his nose.
The moment was too grave for instant reply; Mr. Crossbin was allowing the aroma to mount to the innermost recesses of his nostrils. It had only been a few years since he had performed this same trick with a gourd suspended from a nail in his father's back kitchen, overlooking a field of growing corn; but that fact was not public property—not here in New York.
“Yes—smooth, and with something of the hills in it. Chateau Lamont, is it not, of '61?” It was Chateau of something-or-other, and of some year, but Breen was too wise to correct him. He supposed it was Chateau Lafitte—that is, he had instructed Parkins to serve that particular wine and vintage.
“Either '61 or '63,” replied Breen with the air of positive certainty. (How that boy in the white apron, who had watched the boss paste on the labels, would have laughed had he been under the table.)
Further down the cloth Hodges, the epicure, was giving his views as to the proper way of serving truffles. A dish had just passed, with an underpinning of crust. Hodges's early life had qualified him as an expert in cooking, as well as in wines: Ten years in a country store swapping sugar for sausages and tea for butter and eggs; five more clerk in a Broadway cloth house, with varied boarding-house experiences (boiled mutton twice a week, with pudding on Sundays); three years junior partner, with a room over Delmonico's; then a rich wife and a directorship in a bank (his father-in-law was the heaviest depositor); next, one year in Europe and home, as vice-president, and at the present writing president of one of the certify-as-early-as-ten-o'clock-in-the-morning kind of banks, at which Peter would so often laugh. With these experiences there came the usual blooming and expanding—all the earlier life forgotten, really ignored. Soon the food of the country became unbearable. Even the canvasbacks must feed on a certain kind of wild celery; the oysters be dredged from a particular cove, and the terrapin drawn from their beds with the Hodges' coat of arms cut in their backs before they would be allowed a place on the ex-clerk's table.
It is no wonder, then, that everybody listened when the distinguished epicure launched out on the proper way to both acquire and serve so rare and toothsome a morsel as a truffle.
“Mine come by every steamer,” Hodges asserted in a positive tone—not to anybody in particular, but with a sweep of the table to attract enough listeners to make it worthwhile for him to proceed. “My man is aboard before the gang-plank is secure—gets my package from the chief steward and is at my house with the truffles within an hour. Then I at once take proper care of them. That is why my truffles have that peculiar flavor you spoke of, Mr. Portman, when you last dined at my house. You remember, don't you?”
Portman nodded. He did not remember—not the truffles. He recalled some white port—but that was because he had bought the balance of the lot himself.
“Where do they come from?” inquired Mason, the man from Chicago. He wanted to know and wasn't afraid to ask.
“All through France. Mine are rooted near a little village in the Province of Perigord.”
“What roots 'em?”
“Hogs—trained hogs. You are familiar, of course, with the way they are secured?”
Mason—plain man as he was—wasn't familiar with anything remotely connected with the coralling of truffles, and said so. Hodges talked on, his eye resting first on one and then another of the guests, his voice increasing in volume whenever a fresh listener craned his neck, as if the information was directed to him alone—a trick of Hodges' when he wanted an audience.
“And now a word of caution,” he continued; “some thing that most of you may not know—always root on a rainy day—sunshine spoils their flavor—makes them tough and leathery.”
“Kind of hog got anything to do with the taste?” asked Mason in all sincerity. He was learning New York ways—a new lesson each day, and intended to keep on, but not by keeping his mouth shut.
“Nothing whatever,” replied Hodges. “They must never be allowed to bite them, of course. You can wound a truffle as you can everything else.”
Mason looked off into space and the Colonel bent his ear. Purviance's diet had been largely drawn from his beloved Chesapeake, and “dug-up dead things”—as he called the subject under discussion—didn't interest him. He wanted to laugh—came near it—then he suddenly remembered how important a man Hodges might be and how necessary it was to give him air space in which to float his pet balloons and so keep him well satisfied with himself.
Mason, the Chicago man, had no such scruples. He had twice as much money as Hodges, four times his digestion and ten times his commonsense.
“Send that dish back here, Breen,” Mason cried out in a clear voice—so loud that Parkins, winged by the shot, retraced his steps. “I want to see what Mr. Hodges is talking about. Never saw a truffle that I know of.” Here he turned the bits of raw rubber over with his fork. “No. Take it away. Guess I'll pass. Hog saw it first; he can have it.”
Hodges's face flushed, then he joined in the laugh. The Chicago man was too valuable a would-be subscriber to quarrel with. And, then, how impossible to expect a person brought up as Mason had been to understand the ordinary refinements of civilization.
“Rough diamond, Mason—Good fellow. Backbone of our country,” Hodges whispered to the Colonel, who was sore from the strain of repressed hilarity. “A little coarse now and then—but that comes of his early life, no doubt.”
Hodges waited his chance and again launched out; this time it was upon the various kinds of wines his cellar contained—their cost—who had approved of them—how impossible it was to duplicate some of them, especially some Johannesburg of '74.
“Forty-two dollars a bottle—not pressed in the ordinary way—just the weight of the grapes in the basket in which they are gathered in the vineyard, and what naturally drips through is caught and put aside,” etc.
Breen winced. First his truffles were criticised, and now his pet Johannesburg that Parkins was pouring into special glasses—cooled to an exact temperature—part of a case, he explained to Nixon, who sat on his right, that Count Mosenheim had sent to a friend here. Something must be done to head Hodges off or there was no telling what might happen. The Madeira was the thing. He knew that was all right, for Purviance had found it in Baltimore—part of a private cellar belonging some time in the past to either the Swan or Thomas families—he could not remember which.
The redheads were now in order, with squares of fried hominy, and for the moment Hodges held his peace. This was Nixon's opportunity, and he made the most of it. He had been born on the eastern shore of Maryland and was brought up on canvasbacks, soft-shell crabs and terrapin—not to mention clams and sheepshead. Nixon therefore launched out on the habits of the sacred bird—the crimes committed by the swivel-gun in the hands of the marketmen, the consequent scarcity of the game and the near approach of the time when the only rare specimens would be found in the glass cases of the museums, ending his talk with a graphic description of the great wooden platters of boiling-hot terrapin which were served to passengers crossing to Norfolk in the old days. The servants would split off the hot shell—this was turned top side down, used as a dish and filled with butter, pepper and salt, into which toothsome bits of the reptile, torn out by the guests' forks, were dipped before being eaten.
The talk now caromed from birds, reptiles and fish to guns and tackles, and then to the sportsmen who used them, and then to the millionaires who owned the largest shares in the ducking clubs, and so on to the stock of the same, and finally to the one subject of the evening—the one uppermost in everybody's thoughts which so far had not been touched upon—the Mukton Lode. There was no question about the proper mechanism of the traps—the directors were attending to that; the quality of the bait, too, seemed all that could be desired—that was Breen's part. How many mice were nosing about was the question, and of the number how many would be inside when the spring snapped?
The Colonel, after a nod of his head and a reassuring glance from his host, took full charge of the field, soaring away with minute accounts of the last inspection of the mine. He told how the “tailings” at Mukton City had panned out 30 per cent, to the ton—with two hundred thousand tons in the dump thrown away until the new smelter was started and they could get rid of the sulphides; of what Aetna Cobb's Crest had done and Beals Hollow and Morgan Creek—all on the same ridge, and was about launching out on the future value of Mukton Lode when Mason broke the silence by asking if any one present had heard of a mine somewhere in Nevada which an Englishman had bought and which had panned out $1,200 to the ton the first week and not a cent to the square mile ever afterward? The Chicago man was the most important mouse of the lot, and the tone of his voice and his way of speaking seemed fraught with a purpose.
Breen leaned forward in rapt attention, and even Hodges and Portman (both of them were loaded to the scuppers with Mukton) stopped talking.
“Slickest game I ever heard of,” continued Mason. “Two men came into town—two poor prospectors, remember—ran across the Englishman at the hotel—told the story of their claim: 'Take it or leave it after you look it over,' they said. Didn't want but sixty thousand for it; that would give them thirty thousand apiece, after which they'd quit and live on a ranch. No, they wouldn't go with him to inspect the mine; there was the map. He couldn't miss it; man at the hotel would drive him out there. There was, of course, a foot of snow on the ground, which was frozen hard, but they had provided for that and had cut a lot of cord-wood, intending to stay till spring. The Englishman could have the wood to thaw out the ground.”
“The Englishman went and found everything as the two prospectors had said; thawed out the soil in half a dozen places; scooped up the dirt and every shovelful panned out about twelve hundred to the ton. Then he came back and paid the money; that was the last of it. Began to dig again in the spring—and not a trace of anything.”
“What was the matter?” asked Breen. So far his interest in mines had been centred on the stock.
“Oh, the same old swindle,” said Mason, looking around the table, a grim smile on his face—“only in a different way.”
“Was it salted?” called out a man from the lower end of the table.
“Yes,” replied Mason; “not the mine, but the cord-wood. The two poor prospectors had bored auger holes in each stick, stuffed 'em full of gold dust and plugged the openings. It was the ashes that panned out $1,200 to the ton.”
Mason was roaring, as were one or two about him. Portman looked grave, and so did Breen. Nothing of that kind had ever soiled their hands; everything with them was open and above-board. They might start a rumor that the Lode had petered out, throw an avalanche of stock on the market, knock it down ten points, freezing out the helpless (poor Gilbert had been one of them), buy in what was offered and then declare an extra dividend, sending the stock skyward, but anything so low as—“Oh, very reprehensible—scandalous in fact.”
Hodges was so moved by the incident that he asked Breen if he would not bring back that Madeira (it had been served now in the pipe-stem glasses which had been crossed in finger-bowls). This he sipped slowly and thoughtfully, as if the enormity of the crime had quite appalled him. Mason was no longer a “rough diamond,” but an example of what a “Western training will sometimes do for a man,” he whispered under his breath to Crossbin.
With the departure of the last guest—one or two of them were a little unsteady; not Mason, we may be sure—Jack, who had come home and was waiting upstairs in his room for the feast to be over, squared his shoulders, threw up his chin and, like many another crusader bent on straightening the affairs of the world, started out to confront his uncle. His visor was down, his lance in rest, his banner unfurled, the scarf of the blessed damosel tied in double bow-knot around his trusty right arm. Both knight and maid were unconscious of the scarf, and yet if the truth be told it was Ruth's eyes that had swung him into battle. Now he was ready to fight; to renounce the comforts of life and live on a crust rather than be party to the crimes that were being daily committed under his very eyes!
His uncle was in the library, having just bowed out his last guest, when the boy strode in. About him were squatty little tables holding the remnants of the aftermath of the feast—siphons and decanters and the sample boxes of cigars—full to the lid when Parkins first passed them (why fresh cigars out of a full box should have a better flavor than the same cigars from a half-empty one has always been a mystery to the Scribe).
That the dinner had been a success gastronomically, socially and financially, was apparent from the beatific boozy smile that pervaded Breen's face as he lay back in his easy-chair. To disturb a reverie of this kind was as bad as riding rough-shod over some good father digesting his first meal after Lent, but the boy's purpose was too lofty to be blunted by any such considerations. Into the arena went his glove and out rang his challenge.
“What I have got to say to you, Uncle Arthur, breaks my heart, but you have got to listen to me! I have waited until they were all gone to tell you.”
Breen laid his glass on the table and straightened himself in his chair. His brain was reeling from the wine he had taken and his hand unsteady, but he still had control of his arms and legs.
“Well, out with it! What's it all about, Jack?”
“I heard this afternoon that my friend Gilbert was ruined in our office. The presence of these men to-night makes me believe it to be true. If it is true, I want to tell you that I'll never enter the office again as long as I live!”
Breen's eyes flashed:
“You'll never enter!... What the devil is the matter with you, Jack!—are you drunk or crazy?”
“Neither! And I want to tell you, sir, too, that I won't be pointed out as having anything to do with such a swindling concern as the Mukton Lode Company. You've stopped the work on Gilbert's house—Mr. Morris told me so—you've—”
The older man sprang from his seat and lunged toward the boy.
“Stop it!” he cried. “Now—quick!”
“Yes—and you've just given a dinner to the very men who helped steal his money, and they sat here and laughed about it! I heard them as I came in!” The boy's tears were choking him now.
“Didn't I tell you to stop, you idiot!” His fist was within an inch of Jack's nose: “Do you want me to knock your head off? What the hell is it your business who I invite to dinner—and what do you know about Mukton Lode? Now you go to bed, and damn quick, too! Parkins, put out the lights!”
And so ended the great crusade with our knight unhorsed and floundering in the dust. Routed by the powers of darkness, like many another gallant youth in the old chivalric days, his ideals laughed at, his reforms flouted, his protests ignored—and this, too, before he could fairly draw his sword or couch his lance.
CHAPTER XI
That Jack hardly closed his eyes that night, and that the first thing he did after opening them the next morning was to fly to Peter for comfort and advice, goes without saying. Even a sensible, well-balanced young man—and our Jack, to the Scribe's great regret, is none of these—would have done this with his skin still smarting from an older man's verbal scorching—especially a man like his uncle, provided, of course, he had a friend like Peter within reach. How much more reasonable, therefore, to conclude that a man so quixotic as our young hero would seek similar relief.
As to the correctness of the details of this verbal scorching, so minutely described in the preceding chapter, should the reader ask how it is possible for the Scribe to set down in exact order the goings-on around a dinner-table to which he was not invited, as well as the particulars of a family row where only two persons participated—neither of whom was himself—and this, too, in the dead of night, with the outside doors locked and the shades and curtains drawn—he must plead guilty without leaving the prisoner's dock.
And yet he asks in all humility—is the play not enough?—or must he lift the back-drop and bring into view the net-work of pulleys and lines, the tanks of moonlight gas and fake properties of papier-mache that produce the illusion? As a compromise would it not be the better way after this for him to play the Harlequin, popping in and out at the unexpected moment, helping the plot here and there by a gesture, a whack, or a pirouette; hobnobbing with Peter or Miss Felicia, and their friends; listening to Jack's and Ruth's talk, or following them at a distance, whenever his presence might embarrass either them or the comedy?
This being agreed upon, we will leave our hero this bright morning—the one succeeding the row with his uncle—at the door of Peter's bank, confident that Jack can take care of himself.
And the confidence is not misplaced. Only once did the boy's glance waver, and that was when his eyes sought the window facing Peter's desk. Some egg other than Peter's was nesting on the open ledger spread out on the Receiving Teller's desk—not an ostrich egg of a head at all, but an evenly parted, well-combed, well-slicked brown wig, covering the careful pate of one of the other clerks who, in the goodness of his heart, was filling Peter's place for the day.
Everybody being busy—too busy to answer questions outside of payments and deposits—Patrick, the porter, must necessarily conduct the negotiations.
“No, sur; he's not down to-day—” was the ever-watchful Patrick's answer to Jack's anxious inquiry. “His sister's come from the country and he takes a day off now and thin when she's here. You'll find him up at his place in Fifteenth Street, I'm thinkin'.”
Jack bit his lip. Here was another complication. Not to find Peter at the Bank meant a visit to his rooms—on his holiday, too—and when he doubtless wished to be alone with Miss Felicia. And yet how could he wait a moment longer? He himself had sent word to the office of Breen & Co. that he would not be there that day—a thing he had never done before—nor did he intend to go on the morrow—not until he knew where he stood. While his uncle had grossly misunderstood him, and, for that matter, grossly insulted him, he had neither admitted nor denied the outrage on Gilbert.
When he did—this question had only now begun to loom up—where would he go and what would he do? There was but little money due him at the office—and none would come—until the next month's pay—hardly enough, in any event, to take him back to his Maryland home, even if that refuge were still open to him. What then would become of him? Peter was, in fact, his main and only reliance. Peter he must see, and at once.
Not that he wavered or grew faint at heart when he thought of his defeat the night before. He was only thinking of his exit and the way to make it. “Always take your leave like a gentleman,” was one of his father's maxims. This he would try his best to accomplish.
Mrs. McGuffey, in white cap and snow-white apron, now that Miss Felicia had arrived, was the medium of communication this time:
“Indeed, they are both in—this way, sir, and let me have your hat and coat.”
It was a delightful party that greeted the boy. Peter was standing on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, his coat-tails hooked over his wrists. Miss Felicia sat by a small table pretending to sew. Holker Morris was swallowed up in one of Peter's big easy-chairs, only the top of his distinguished head visible, while a little chub of a man, gray-haired, spectacled and plainly dressed, was seated behind him, the two talking in an undertone.
“Why, Breen!—why, my dear boy!—And you have a holiday, too? How did you know I was home?” cried Peter, extending both hands in the joy of his greeting.
“I stopped at the Bank, sir.”
“Did you?—and who told you?”
“The janitor, I suppose.”
“Oh, the good Patrick! Well, well! Holker, you remember young Breen.”
Holker did remember, for a wonder, and extended one hand to prove it, and Felicia—but the boy was already bending over her, all his respect and admiration in his eyes. The little chub of a man was now on his feet, standing in an attentive attitude, ready to take his cue from Peter.
“And now, my boy, turn this way, and let me introduce you to my very dear friend, Mr. Isaac Cohen.”
A pudgy hand was thrust out and the spectacled little man, his eyes on the boy, said he was glad to know any friend of Mr. Grayson, and resuming his seat continued his conversation in still lower tones with the great architect.
Jack stood irresolute for an instant, not knowing whether to make some excuse for his evidently inopportune visit and return later, or to keep his seat until the others had gone. Miss Felicia, who had not taken her gaze from the lad since he entered the room, called him to her side.
“Now, tell me what you are all doing at home, and how your dear aunt is, and—Miss Corinne, isn't it? And that very bright young fellow who came with you at Ruth's tea?”
It was the last subject that Jack wanted to discuss, but he stumbled through it as best he could, and ended in hoping, in a halting tone, that Miss MacFarlane was well.
“Ruth! Oh, she is a darling! Didn't you think so?”
Jack blushed to the roots of his hair, but Miss Felicia's all-comprehensive glance never wavered. This was the young man whom Ruth had been mysterious about. She intended to know how far the affair had gone, and it would have been useless, she knew, for Jack to try to deceive her.
“All our Southern girls are lovely,” he answered in all sincerity.
“And you like them better than the New York belles?”
“I don't know any.”
“Then that means that you do.”
“Do what?”
“Do like them better.”
The boy thought for a moment.
“Yes, and Miss MacFarlane best of all; she is so—so—” the boy faltered—“so sincere, and just the kind of girl you would trust with anything. Why, I told her all about myself before I'd known her half an hour.”
“Yes, she was greatly pleased.” The match-making instinct was always uppermost in Miss Felicia's moves, and then, again, this young man had possibilities, his uncle being rich and he being his only nephew.
“Oh, then she told you!” The boy's heart gave a great leap. Perhaps, after all, Ruth had not heard—at all events she did not despise him.
“No, I told her myself. The only thing that seemed to worry Ruth was that you had not told her enough. If I remember right, she said you were very shy.”
“And she did not say anything about—” Jack stopped. He had not intended to put the question quite in this way, although he was still in doubt. Give this keen-eyed, white-haired old lady but an inkling of what was uppermost in his mind and he knew she would have its every detail.
“About what?” Here Miss Felicia's eyes were suddenly diverted, and became fastened on the short figure of Mr. Isaac Cohen, who had risen to his feet and stood talking in the most confidential way with Morris—Peter listening intently. Such phrases as “Better make the columns of marble,” from Morris, and, “Well, I will talk it over with the Rabbi,” from the tailor, reached his ears. Further relief came when Miss Felicia rose from her chair with her hand extended to Morris, who was already taking leave of Peter and all danger was passed when host and hostess conducted the tailor and the architect to the door; Morris bending over Miss Felicia's hand and kissing it with the air of a courtier suddenly aroused by the appearance of royalty (he had been completely immersed in Cohen's talk), and the tailor bowing to her on his way out without even so much as touching the tips of her fingers.
“There, my dear Breen,” said Peter, when he had adjusted his cravat before the glass and brushed a few stray hairs over his temples, “that's a man it would do you an immense amount of good to know; the kind of a man you call worthwhile. Not only does he speak three languages, Hebrew being one of them, but he can talk on any subject from Greek temples to the raising of violets. Morris thinks the world of him—So do I.”
“Yes, I heard him say something about columns.”
“Oh!—then you overheard! Yes, they are for the new synagogue that Morris is building. Cohen is chairman of the committee.”
“And he is the banker, too, I suppose?” rejoined Jack, in a tone which showed his lack of interest in both man and subject. It was Peter's ear he wanted, and at once.
The old man's eyes twinkled: “Banker!—not a bit of it. He's a tailor, my dear boy—a most delightful gentleman tailor, who works in the basement below us and who only yesterday pressed the coat I have on.” Here Peter surveyed himself with a comprehensive glance. “All the respectable people in New York are not money mad.” Then, seeing Jack's look of astonishment over the announcement, he laid his hand on the boy's shoulder and said with a twinkle of his eye and a little laugh: “Only one tailor—not nine—my boy, was required to make Mr. Cohen a man. And now about yourself. Why are you not at work? Old fellows like me once in a while have a holiday—but young fellows! Come!—What is it brings you here during business hours? Anything I can help you in?—anything at home?” and Peter's eyes bored holes in the boy's brain.
Jack glanced at Miss Felicia, who was arranging the roses Morris had brought her, and then said in a half whisper: “I have had a row with my uncle, sir. Maybe I had better come some other day, when—”
“No—out with it! Row with your uncle, eh? Rows with one's uncles are too commonplace to get mysterious over, and, then, we have no secrets. Ten chances to one I shall tell Felicia every word you say after you've gone, so she might as well hear it at first-hand. Felicia, this young fellow is so thin-skinned he is afraid you will laugh at him.”
“Oh, he knows better. I have just been telling him how charming he must be to have won Miss MacFarlane's good opinion,” rejoined his sister as she moved her work-basket nearer her elbow.
And then, with mind at rest, now that he was sure Ruth had not heard, and with eyes again blazing as his thoughts dwelt upon the outrage, he poured out his story, Miss Felicia listening intently, a curious expression on her face, Peter grave and silent, his gaze now on the boy, now on the hearth-rug on which he stood. Only once did a flash illumine his countenance; that was when Jack reached that part of his narrative which told of the denunciation he had flung in his uncle's face concerning the methods by which poor Gilbert had been ruined.
“And you dared tell your uncle that, you young firebrand?”
“Yes, Mr. Grayson, I had to; what else could I say? Don't you think it cruel to cheat like that?”
“And what did he say?” asked Peter.
“He would not listen—he swore at me—told me—well, he ordered me out of the room and had the lights put out.”
“And it served you right, you young dog! Well, upon my word! Here you are without a dollar in the world except what your uncle pays you, and you fly off at a tangent and insult him in his own house—and you his guest, remember. Well! Well! What are we coming to? Felicia, did you ever hear of such a performance?”
Miss Felicia made no answer. She knew from her brother's tone that there was not a drop of bitterness in any one of the words that fell from his lips; she had heard him talk that way dozens of times before, when he was casting about for some means of letting the culprit down the easier. She even detected a slight wrinkling of the corners of his mouth as the denunciation rolled out.
Not so Jack: To him the end of the world had come. Peter was his last resort—that one so good and so clear-headed had not flared up at once over the villainy was the severest blow of all. Perhaps he WAS a firebrand; perhaps, after all, it was none of his business; perhaps—perhaps—now that Ruth would not blame him, knew nothing, in fact, of the disgraceful episode, it would have been better for him to have ignored the whole matter and taken Garry's advice.
“Then I have done wrong again, Mr. Grayson?” he said at last, in so pleading a tone that even Miss Felicia's reserve was on the point of giving away.
“Yes, in the manner in which you acted. Your father wouldn't have lost his temper and called people names. Gentlemen, my dear boy, don't do that sort of thing. They make up their minds about what they want to do and then do it quietly, and, let me say, with a certain amount of courtesy.”
“Then, what must I do?” All the fight was out of the lad now.
“Why, go back to your desk in the office and your very delightful suite of rooms at your uncle's. Tell him you are sorry you let your feelings get the best of you; then, when you have entirely quieted down, you and I will put our heads together and see what can be done to improve matters. And that, let me tell you, my dear boy, is going to be rather a difficult thing, for you see you are rather particular as to what you should and should not do to earn your living.” Peter's wrinkles had now crept up his cheeks and were playing hide and seek with the twinkles in his eyes. “Of course any kind of healthy work—such, for instance, as hauling a chain through a swamp, carrying a level, prospecting for oil, or copper, or gold—all very respectable occupations for some men—are quite impossible in your case. But we will think it out and find something easier—something that won't soil your hands, and—”
“Please don't, Mr. Grayson,” interrupted Jack. The boy had begun to see through the raillery now. “I will do anything you want me to do.”
Peter burst into a laugh and grabbed him by both shoulders: “Of course, my dear boy, you will do anything except what you believe to be wrong. That's right—right as can be; nobody wants you to do any different, and—”
The opening of a door leading into the hall caused Peter to stop in his harangue and turn his head. Mrs. McGuffey was ushering in a young woman whose radiant face was like a burst of sunshine. Peter strained his eyes and then sprang forward:
“Why, Ruth!”
There was no doubt about it! That young woman, her cheeks like two June peonies, her eyes dancing, the daintiest and prettiest hat in the world on her head, was already half across the room and close to Peter's rug before Jack could even realize that he and she were breathing the same air.
“Oh! I just could not wait a minute longer!” she cried in a joyous tone. “I had such a good time yesterday, dear aunt Felicia, and—Why!—it is you, Mr. Breen, and have you come to tell aunty the same thing? Wasn't it lovely?”
Then Jack said that it was lovely, and that he hadn't come for any such purpose—then that he had—and then Peter patted her hand and told her she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen in all his life, and that he was going to throw overboard all his other sweethearts at once and cleave to her alone; and Miss Felicia vowed that she was the life of the party; and Jack devoured her with his eyes, his heart thumping away at high pressure; and so the moments fled until the blithesome young girl, saying she had not a minute to spare, as she had to meet her father, who would not wait, readjusted her wraps, kissed Miss Felicia on both cheeks, sent another flying through the air toward Peter from the tips of her fingers, and with Jack as escort—he also had to see a friend who would not wait a minute—danced out of the room and so on down to the street.
The Scribe will not follow them very far in their walk uptown. Both were very happy, Jack because the scandal he had been dreading, since he had last looked into her eyes, had escaped her ears, and Ruth because of all the young men she had met in her brief sojourn in New York this young Mr. Breen treated her with most consideration.
While the two were making their way through the crowded streets, Jack helping her over the crossings, picking out the drier spots for her dainty feet to step upon, shielding her from the polluting touch of the passing throng, Miss Felicia had resumed her sewing—it was a bit of lace that needed a stitch here and there—and Peter, dragging a chair before the fire, had thrown himself into its depths, his long, thin white fingers open fan-like to its blaze.
“You are just wasting your time, Peter, over that young man,” Miss Felicia said at last, snipping the end of a thread with her scissors. “Better buy him a guitar with a broad blue ribbon and start him off troubadouring, or, better still, put him into a suit of tin armor and give him a lance. He doesn't belong to this world. It's just as well Ruth did not hear that rigmarole. Charming manners, I admit—lovely, sitting on a cushion looking up into some young girl's eyes, but he will never make his way here with those notions. Why he should want to anger his uncle, who is certainly most kind to him, is past finding out. He's stupid, that's what he is—just stupid!”—to break with your bread and butter and to defy those who could be of service to you being an unpardonable sin with Miss Felicia. No, he would not do at all for Ruth.
Peter settled himself deeper in his chair and studied the cheery blaze between his outspread fingers.
“That's the very thing will save him, Felicia.”
“What—his manners?”
“No—his adorable stupidity. I grant you he's fighting windmills, but, then, my dear, don't forget that he's FIGHTING—that's something.”
“But they are only windmills, and, more extraordinary still, this one is grinding corn to keep him from starving,” and she folded up her sewing preparatory to leaving the room.
Peter's fingers closed tight: “I'm not so sure of that,” he answered gravely.
Miss Felicia had risen from her seat and was now bending over the back of his chair, her spare sharp elbows resting on its edge, her two hands clasping his cheeks.
“And are you really going to add this stupid boy to your string, you goose of a Peter?” she asked in a bantering tone, as her fingers caressed his temples. “Don't forget Mosenthal and little Perkins, and the waiter you brought home and fed for a week, and sent away in your best overcoat, which he pawned the next day; or the two boys at college. Aren't you ever going to learn?” and she leaned forward and kissed the top of his bald head.
Peter's only reply was to reach up and smooth her jewelled fingers with his own. He remembered them all; there was an excuse, of course, he reminded her, for his action in each and every case. But for him Mosenthal—really a great violinist—would have starved, little Perkins would have been sent to the reformatory, and the waiter to the dogs. That none of them, except the two college boys, had ever thanked him for his assistance—a fact well known to Miss Felicia—never once crossed his mind—wouldn't have made any difference if it had.
“But this young Breen is worth saving, Felicia,” he answered at last.
“From what—the penitentiary?” she laughed—this time with a slight note of anger in her voice.
“No, you foolish thing—much worse.”
“From what, then?”
“From himself.”
Long after his sister had left the room Peter kept his seat by the fire, his eyes gazing into the slumbering coals. His holiday had been a happy one until Jack's entrance: Morris had come to an early breakfast and had then run down and dragged up Cohen so that he could talk with him in comfort and away from the smell of the tailor's goose and the noise of the opening and shutting of the shop door; Miss Felicia had summoned all her good humor and patience (she did not always approve of Peter's acquaintances—the little tailor being one), and had received Cohen as she would have done a savant from another country—one whose personal appearance belied his intellect but who on no account must be made aware of that fact, and Peter himself had spent the hour before and after breakfast—especially the hour after, when the Bank always claimed him—in pulling out and putting back one book after another from the shelves of his small library, reading a page here and a line there, the lights and shadows that crossed his eager, absorbed face, an index of his enjoyment.
All this had been spoiled by a wild, untamed colt of a boy whom he could not help liking in spite of his peculiarities.
And yet, was his sister not right? Why bother himself any more about a man so explosive and so tactless—and he WAS a man, so far as years and stature went, who, no matter what he might attempt for his advancement, would as surely topple it over as he would a house of cards. That the boy's ideals were high, and his sincerity beyond question, was true, but what use would these qualities be to him if he lacked the common-sense to put them into practice?
All this he told to the fire—first to one little heap of coals—then another—snuggling together—and then to the big back-log scarred all over in its fight to keep everybody warm and happy.
Suddenly his round, glistening head ceased bobbing back and forth; his lips, which had talked incessantly without a sound falling from them, straightened; his gesticulating fingers tightened into a hard knot and the old fellow rose from his easy-chair. He had made up his mind.
Then began a search through his desk in and out of the pigeon-holes, under a heap of letters—most of them unanswered; beneath a package tied with tape, until his eyes fell upon an envelope sealed with wax, in which was embedded the crest of the ancestors of the young gentleman whose future had so absorbed his thoughts. It was Mrs. Breen's acceptance of Miss Felicia's invitation to Miss MacFarlane's tea.
“Ah, here it is! Now I'll find the number—yes, 864—I thought it was a “4”—but I didn't want to make any mistake.”
This done, and the note with the number and street of Jack's uncle's house spread out before him, Peter squared his elbows, took a sheet of paper from a drawer, covered it with half a dozen lines beginning “My dear Breen—” enclosed it in an envelope and addressed it to “Mr. John Breen, care of Arthur Breen, Esq.,” etc. This complete, he affixed the stamp in the upper left-hand corner, and with the letter fast in his hand disappeared in his bedroom, from which he emerged ten minutes later in full walking costume, even to his buckskin gloves and shiny high hat, not to mention a brand-new silk scarf held in place by his diamond tear-drop, the two in high relief above the lapels of his tightly buttoned surtout.
“No, Mrs. McGuffey,” he said with a cheery smile as he passed out of the door (she had caught sight of the letter and had stretched out her hand)—“No—I am going for a walk, and I'll mail it myself.”
CHAPTER XII
Whatever the function—whether it was a cosey dinner for the congenial few, a crowded reception for the uncongenial many, or a coming-out party for some one of the eager-expectant buds just bursting into bloom—most of whom he had known from babyhood—Peter was always ready with his “Of course I'll come—” or “Nothing would delight me more—” or the formal “Mr. Grayson accepts with great pleasure,” etc., unless the event should fall upon a Saturday night; then there was certain to be a prompt refusal.
Even Miss Felicia recognized this unbreakable engagement and made her plans accordingly. So did good Mrs. McGuffey, who selected this night for her own social outings; and so did most of his intimate friends who were familiar with his habits.
On any other night you might, or you might not, find Peter at home, dependent upon his various engagements, but if you really wanted to get hold of his hand, or his ear, or the whole or any other part of his delightful body, and if by any mischance you happened to select a Saturday night for your purpose, you must search for him at the Century. To spend this one evening at his favorite club had been his custom for years—ever since he had been elected to full membership—a date so far back in the dim past that the oldest habitue had to search the records to make sure of the year, and this custom he still regularly kept up.
That the quaint old club-house was but a stone's throw from his own quarters in Fifteenth Street made no difference; he would willingly have tramped to Murray Hill and beyond—even as far as the big reservoir, had the younger and more progressive element among the members picked the institution up bodily and moved it that far—as later on they did.
Not that he favored any such innovation: “Move up-town! Why, my dear sir!” he protested, when the subject was first mentioned, “is there nothing in the polish of these old tables and chairs, rubbed bright by the elbows of countless good fellows, that appeals to you? Do you think any modern varnish can replace it? Here I have sat for thirty years or more, and—please God!—here I want to continue to sit.”
He was at his own small table in the front room overlooking the street when he spoke—his by right of long use, as it was also of Morris, MacFarlane, Wright, old Partridge the painter, and Knight the sculptor. For years this group of Centurions, after circling the rooms on meeting nights, criticising the pictures and helping themselves to the punch, had dropped into these same seats by the side of Peter.
And these were not the only chairs tacitly recognized as carrying special privileges by reason of long usage. Over in the corner between the two rooms could be found Bayard Taylor's chair—his for years, from which he dispensed wisdom, adventure and raillery to a listening coterie—King, MacDonough and Collins among them, while near the stairs, his great shaggy head glistening in the overhead light, Parke Godwin held court, with Sterling, Martin and Porter, to say nothing of still older habitues who in the years of their membership were as much a part of the fittings of the club as the smoke-begrimed portraits which lined its walls.
On this Saturday night he had stepped into the clubhouse with more than his usual briskness. Sweeping a comprehensive glance around as he entered, as if looking for some one in the hall, he slipped off his overcoat and hat and handed both to the negro servant in charge of the cloak-room.
“George.”
“Yes, Mr. Grayson.”
“If anybody inquires for me you will find me either on this floor or in the library above. Don't forget, and don't make any mistake.
“No, suh—ain't goin' to be no mistake.”
This done, the old gentleman moved to the mirror, and gave a sidelong glance at his perfectly appointed person—he had been dining at the Portmans', had left the table early, and was in full evening dress.
The inspection proved that the points of his collar wanted straightening the thousandth part of an inch, and that his sparse gray locks needed combing a wee bit further toward his cheek bones. These, with a certain rebellious fold in his necktie, having been brought into place, the guardian of the Exeter entered the crowded room, picked a magazine from the shelves and dropped into his accustomed seat.
Holker Morris and Lagarge now strolled in and drawing up to a small table adjoining Peter's touched a tiny bell. This answered, and the order given, the two renewed a conversation which had evidently been begun outside, and which was of so absorbing a character that for a moment Peter's face, half hidden by his book, was unnoticed.
“Oh!—that's you, Methusaleh, is it!” cried Morris at last. “Move over—have something?”
Peter looked up smiling: “Not now, Holker. I will later.”
Morris kept on talking. Lagarge, his companion—a thin, cadaverous-looking man with a big head and the general air of having been carved out of an old root—a great expert in ceramics—listening intently, bobbing his head in toy-mandarin fashion whenever one of Holker's iconoclasms cleared the air.
“Suppose they did pay thirty thousand dollars for it,” Holker insisted, slapping his knee with his outspread palm. “That makes the picture no better and no worse. If it was mine, and I could afford it, I would sell it to anybody who loved it for thirty cents rather than sell it to a man who didn't, for thirty millions. When Troyon painted it he put his soul into it, and you can no more tack a price to that than you can stick an auction card on a summer cloud, or appraise the perfume from a rose garden. It has no money value, Legarge, and never will have. You might as well list sunsets on the Stock Exchange.”
“But Troyon had to live, Holker,” chimed in Harrington, who, with the freedom accorded every member of the club—one of its greatest charms—had just joined the group and sat listening.
“Yes,” rejoined Morris, a quizzical expression crossing his face—“that was the curse of it. He was born a man and had a stomach instead of being born a god without one. As to living—he didn't really live—no great painter really lives until he is dead. And that's the way it should be—they would never have become immortal with a box full of bonds among their assets. They would have stopped work. Now they can rest in their graves with the consciousness that they have done their level best.”
“There is one thing would lift him out of it, or ought to,” remarked Harrington, with a glance around the circle. “I am, of course, speaking of Troyon.”
“What?” asked Morris.
“The news that Roberts paid thirty thousand dollars for a picture for which the painter was glad to get three thousand francs,” a reply which brought a roar from the group, Morris joining in heartily.
The circle had now widened to the filling of a dozen chairs, Morris's way of putting things being one of the features of club nights, he, as usual, dominating the talk, calling out “Period”—his way of notifying some speaker to come to a full stop, whenever he broke away from the facts and began soaring into hyperbolics—Morgan, Harrington and the others laughing in unison at his sallies.
The clouds of tobacco smoke grew thicker. The hum of conversation louder; especially at an adjoining table where one lean old Academician in a velvet skull cap was discussing the new impressionistic craze which had just begun to show itself in the work of the younger men. This had gone on for some minutes when the old man turned upon them savagely and began ridiculing the new departure as a cloak to hide poor drawing, an outspoken young painter asserting in their defence, that any technique was helpful if it would kill off the snuff-box school in which the man under the skull cap held first place.
Morris had lent an ear to the discussion and again took up the cudgels.
“You young fellows are right,” he cried, twisting his body toward their table. The realists have had their day; they work a picture to death; all of them. If you did but know it, it really takes two men to paint a great picture—one to do the work and the other to kill him when he has done enough.”
“Pity some of your murderers, Holker, didn't start before they stretched their canvases,” laughed Harrington.
And so the hours sped on.
All this time Peter had been listening with one ear wide open—the one nearest the door—for any sound in that direction. French masterpieces, Impressionism and the rest of it did not interest him to-night. Something else was stirring him—something he had been hugging to his heart all day.
Only the big and little coals in his own fireplace in Fifteenth Street, and perhaps the great back-log, beside himself, knew the cause. He had not taken Miss Felicia into his confidence—that would never have done—might, indeed, have spoilt everything. Even when he had risen from Morris's coterie to greet Henry MacFarlane—Ruth's father—his intimate friend for years, and who answered his hand-shake with—“Well, you old rascal—what makes you look so happy?—anybody left you a million?”—even then he gave no inkling of the amount of bottled sunshine he was at the precise moment carrying inside his well-groomed body, except to remark with all his twinkles and wrinkles scampering loose:
“Seeing you, Henry—” an answer which, while it only excited derision and a sly thrust of his thumb into Peter's ribs, was nevertheless literally true if the distinguished engineer did but know it.
It was only when the hours dragged on and his oft-consulted watch marked ten o'clock that the merry wrinkles began to straighten and the eyes to wander.
When an additional ten minutes had ticked themselves out, and then a five and then a ten more, the old fellow became so nervous that he began to make a tour of the club-house, even ascending the stairs, searching the library and dining-room, scanning each group and solitary individual he passed, until, thoroughly discouraged, he regained his seat only to press a bell lying among some half-empty glasses. The summoned waiter listened attentively, his head bent low to catch the whispered order, and then disappeared noiselessly in the direction of the front door, Peter's fingers meanwhile beating an impatient staccato on the arm of his chair.
Nothing resulting from this experiment he at last gave up all hope and again sought MacFarlane who was trying to pound into the head of a brother engineer some new theory of spontaneous explosions.
Hardly had he drawn up a chair to listen—he was a better listener to-night, somehow, than a talker, when a hand was laid on his shoulder, and looking up, he saw Jack bending over him.
With a little cry of joy Peter sprang to his feet, both palms outstretched: “Oh!—you're here at last! Didn't I say nine o'clock, my dear boy, or am I wrong? Well, so you are here it's all right.” Then with face aglow he turned to MacFarlane: “Henry, here's a young fellow you ought to know; his name's John Breen, and he's from your State.”
The engineer stopped short in his talk and absorbed Jack from his neatly brushed hair, worn long at the back of his neck, to his well-shod feet, and held out his hand.
“From Maryland? So am I; I was raised down in Prince George County. Glad to know you. Are you any connection of the Breens of Ann Arundle?”
“Yes, sir—all my people came from Ann Arundle. My father was Judge Breen,” answered Jack with embarrassment. He had not yet become accustomed to the novelty of the scene around him.
“Now I know just where you belong. My father and yours were friends. I have often heard him speak of Judge Breen. And did you not meet my daughter at Miss Grayson's the other day? She told me she had met a Mr. Breen from our part of the country.”
Jack's eyes danced. Was this what Peter had invited him to the club for? Now it was all clear. And then again he had not said a word about his being in the Street, or connected with it in any way. Was there ever such a good Peter?
“Oh, yes, sir!—and I hope she is very well.”
The engineer said she was extremely well, never better in her life, and that he was delighted to meet a son of his old friend—then, turning to the others, immediately forgot Jack's existence, and for the time being his daughter, in the discussion still going on around him.
The young fellow settled himself in his seat and looked about him—at the smoke-stained ceiling, the old portraits and quaint fittings and furniture—more particularly at the men. He would have liked to talk to Ruth's father a little longer, but he felt dazed and ill at ease—out of his element, somehow—although he remembered the same kind of people at his father's house, except that they wore different clothes.
But Peter did not leave him long in meditation. There were other surprises for him upstairs, in the small dining-room opening out of the library, where a long table was spread with eatables and drinkables—salads, baby sausages, escaloped oysters, devilled crabs and other dishes dear to old and new members. Here men were met standing in groups, their plates in their hands, or seated at the smaller tables, when a siphon and a beer bottle, or a mug of Bass would be added to their comfort.
It was there the Scribe met him for the second time, my first being the Morris dinner, when he sat within speaking distance. I had heard of him, of course, as Peter's new protege—indeed, the old fellow had talked of nothing else, and so I was glad to renew the acquaintance. I found him to be like all other young fellows of his class—I had lived among his people, and knew—rather shy, with a certain deferential air toward older people—but with the composure belonging to unconscious youth—no fidgeting or fussing—modest, unassertive—his big brown eyes under their heavy lashes studying everything about him, his face brightening when you addressed him. I discovered, too, a certain indefinable charm which won me to him at once. Perhaps it was his youth; perhaps it was a certain honest directness, together with a total lack of all affectation that appealed to me, but certain it is that not many minutes had passed before I saw why Peter liked him, and I saw, too, why he liked Peter.
When I asked him—we had found three empty seats at a table—what impressed him most in the club, it being his first visit, he answered in his simple, direct way, that he thought it was the note of good-fellowship everywhere apparent, the men greeting each other as if they really meant it. Another feature was the dress and faces of the members—especially the authors, to whom Peter had introduced him, whose books he had read, and whose personalities he had heard discussed, and who, to his astonishment, had turned out to be shabby-looking old fellows who smoked and drank, or played chess, like other ordinary mortals, and without pretence of any kind so far as he could detect.
“Just like one big family, isn't it, Mr. Grayson?” the boy said. “Don't you two gentlemen love to come here?”
“Yes.”
“They don't look like very rich men.”
“They're not. Now and then a camel crawls through but it is a tight squeeze,” remarked Peter arching his gray, bushy eyebrows, a smile hovering about his lips.
The boy laughed: “Well, then, how did they get here?”
“Principally because they lead decent lives, are not puffed up with conceit, have creative brains and put them to some honest use,” answered Peter.
The boy looked away for a moment and remarked quietly that about everybody he knew would fail in one or more of these qualifications. Then he added:
“And now tell me, Mr. Grayson, what most of them do—that gentleman, for instance, who is talking to the old man in the velvet cap.”
“That is General Norton, one of our most distinguished engineers. He is Consulting Engineer in the Croton Aqueduct Department, and his opinion is sought all over the country. He started life as a tow-boy on the Erie Canal, and when he was your age he was keeping tally of dump-cars from a cut on the Pennsylvania Railroad.”
Jack looked at the General in wonderment, but he was too much interested in the other persons about him to pursue the inquiry any further.
“And the man next to him—the one with his hand to his head?”
“I don't recall him, but the Major may.”
“That is Professor Hastings of Yale,” I replied—“perhaps the most eminent chemist in this or any other country.”
“And what did he do when he was a boy?” asked young Breen.
“Made pills, I expect, and washed out test tubes and retorts,” interrupted Peter, with a look on his face as if the poor professor were more to be pitied than commended.
“Did any of them dig?” asked the boy.
“What kind of digging?” inquired Peter.
“Well, the kind you spoke of the night you came to see me.”
“Oh, with their hands?” cried Peter with a laugh. “Well, now, let me see—” and his glance roved about the room. “There is Mr. Schlessinger, the Egyptologist, but of course he was after mummies, not dirt; and then there is—yes—that sun-burned young fellow of forty, talking to Mr. Eastman Johnson; he has been at work in Yucatan looking for Toltec ruins, because he told me his experience only a few nights ago; but then, of course, that can hardly be said to be—Oh!—now I have it. You see that tall man with side-whiskers, looking like a young bank president—my kind—my boy—well, he started life with a pick and shovel. The steel point of the pick if I remember rightly, turned up a nugget of gold that made him rich, but he DUG all the same, and he may again some day—you can't tell.”
It had all been a delightful experience for Jack and his face showed it, but it was not until after I left that the story of why he had come late was told. He had started several times to explain but the constant interruption of members anxious to shake Peter's hand, had always prevented.
“I haven't apologized for being late, sir,” Jack had said at last. “It was long after ten, I am afraid, but I could not help it.”
“No; what was the matter?”
“I didn't get the letter until half an hour before I reached here.”
“Why, I sent it to your uncle's house, and mailed it myself, just after you had gone out with Miss MacFarlane.”
“Yes, sir; but I am not at my uncle's house any more. I am staying with Garry Minott in his rooms; I have the sofa.”
Peter gave a low whistle.
“And you have given up your desk at the office as well?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bless my soul, my boy! And what are you going to do now?”
“I don't know; but I will not go on as I have been doing. I can't, Mr. Grayson, and you must not ask it. I would rather sweep the streets. I have just seen poor Charley Gilbert and Mrs. Gilbert. He has not a dollar in the world, and is going West, he tells me.”
Peter reflected for a moment. It was all he could do to hide his delight.
“And what do your people say?”
“My aunt says I am an idiot, and Corinne won't speak to me.”
“And your uncle?”
“Nothing, to me. He told Garry that if I didn't come back in three days I should never enter his house or his office again.”
“But you are going back? Are you not?”
“No,—never. Not if I starve!”
Peter's eyes were twinkling when he related the conversation to me the next day.
“I could have hugged him, Major,” he said, when he finished, “and I would if we had not been at the club.”
CHAPTER XIII
The Scribe is quite positive that had you only heard about it as he had, even with the details elaborated, not only by Peter, who was conservatism itself in his every statement, but by Miss Felicia as well—who certainly ought to have known—you would not have believed it possible until you had seen it. Even then you would have had to drop into one of Miss Felicia's cretonne-upholstered chairs—big easy-chairs that fitted into every hollow and bone in your back—looked the length of the uneven porch, run your astonished eye down the damp, water-soaked wooden steps to the moist brick pavement below, and so on to the beds of crocuses blooming beneath the clustering palms and orange trees, before you could realize (in spite of the drifting snow heaped up on the door-steps of her house outside—some of it still on your shoes) that you were in Miss Felicia's tropical garden, attached to Miss Felicia's Geneseo house, and not in the back yard of some old home in the far-off sunny South.
It was an old story, of course, to Peter, who had the easy-chair beside me, and so it was to Morris, who had helped Miss Felicia carry out so Utopian a scheme, but it had come to me as a complete surprise, and I was still wide-eyed and incredulous.
“And what keeps out the cold?” I asked Morris, who was lying back blowing rings into the summer night, the glow of an overhead lantern lighting up his handsome face.
“Glass,” he laughed.
“Where?”
“There, just above the vines, my dear Major,” interrupted Miss Felicia, pointing upward. “Come and let me show you my frog pond—” and away we went along the brick paths, bordered with pots of flowers, to a tiny lake covered with lily-pads and circled by water-plants.
“I did not want a greenhouse—I wanted a back yard,” she continued, “and I just would have it. Holker sent his men up, and on three sides we built a wall that looked a hundred years old—but it is not five—and roofed it over with glass, and just where you see the little flight of stairs is the heat. That old arbor in the corner has been here ever since I was a child, and so have the syringa bushes and the green box next the wall. I wanted them all the year round—not just for three or four months in the year—and that witch Holker said he could do it, and he has. Half the weddings in town have been begun right on that bench, and when the lanterns are lighted and the fountain turned on outside, no gentleman ever escapes. You and Peter are immune, so I sha'n't waste any of my precious ammunition on you. And now what will you wear in your button-hole—a gardenia, or some violets? Ruth will be down in a minute, and you must look your prettiest.”
But if the frog pond, damp porch and old-fashioned garden had come as a surprise, what shall I say of the rest of Miss Felicia's house which I am now about to inspect under Peter's guidance.
“Here, come along,” he cried, slipping his arm through mine. “You have had enough of the garden, for between you and me, my dear Major”—here he looked askance at Miss Felicia—“I think it an admirable place in which to take cold, and that's why—” and he passed his hand over his scalp—“I always insist on wearing my hat when I walk here. Mere question of imagination, perhaps, but old fellows like you and me should take no chances—” and he laughed heartily.
“This room was my father's,” continued Peter. “The bookcases have still some of the volumes he loved; he liked the low ceiling and the big fireplace, and always wrote here—it was his library, really. There opens the old drawing-room and next to it is Felicia's den, where she concocts most of her deviltry, and the dining-room beyond—and that's all there is on this floor, except the kitchen, which you'll hear from later.”
And as Peter rattled on, telling me the history of this and that piece of old furniture, or portrait, or queer clock, my eyes were absorbing the air of cosey comfort that permeated every corner of the several rooms. Everything had the air of being used. In the library the chairs were of leather, stretched into saggy folds by many tired backs; the wide, high fender fronting the hearth, though polished so that you could see your face in it, showed the marks of many a drying shoe, while on the bricks framing the fireplace could still be seen the scratchings of countless matches.
The drawing-room, too—although, as in all houses of its class and period, a thing of gilt frames, high mirrors and stiff furniture—was softened by heaps of cushions, low stools and soothing arm-chairs, while Miss Felicia's own particular room was so veritable a symphony in chintz, white paint and old mahogany, with cubby-holes crammed with knickknacks, its walls hung with rare etchings; pots of flowers everywhere and the shelves and mantels crowded with photographs of princes, ambassadors, grand dukes, grand ladies, flossy-headed children, chubby-cheeked babies (all souvenirs of her varied and busy life), that it was some minutes before I could throw myself into one of her heavenly arm-chairs, there to be rested as I had never been before, and never expect to be again.
It being Peter's winter holiday, he and Morris had stopped over on their way down from Buffalo, where Holker had spoken at a public dinner. The other present and expected guests were Ruth MacFarlane, who was already upstairs; her father, Henry MacFarlane, who was to arrive by the next train, and last and by no means lest, his confidential clerk, Mr. John Breen, now two years older and, it is to be hoped, with considerable more common-sense than when he chucked himself neck and heels out into the cold world. Whether the expected arrival of this young gentleman had anything to do with the length of time it took Ruth to dress, the Scribe knoweth not. There is no counting upon the whims and vagaries of even the average young woman of the day, and as Ruth was a long way above that medium grade, and with positive ideas of her own as to whom she liked and whom she did not like, and was, besides, a most discreet and close-mouthed young person, it will be just as well for us to watch the game of battledoor and shuttlecock still being played between Jack and herself, before we arrive at any fixed conclusions.
Any known and admitted facts connected with either one of the contestants are, however, in order, and so while we are waiting for old Moggins, who drives the village 'bus, and who has been charged by Miss Felicia on no account to omit bringing in his next load a certain straight, bronzed-cheeked, well-set-up young man with a springy step, accompanied by a middle-aged gentleman who looked like a soldier, and deliver them both with their attendant baggage at her snow-banked door, any data regarding this same young man's movements since the night Peter wanted to hug him for leaving his uncle's service, cannot fail to be of interest.
To begin then with the day on which Jack, with Frederick, the second man's assistance, packed his belongings and accepted Garry's invitation to make a bed of his lounge.
The kind-hearted Frederick knew what it was to lose a place, and so his sympathies had been all the more keen. Parkins's nose, on the contrary, had risen a full degree and stood at an angle of 45 degrees, for he had not only heard the ultimatum of his employer, but was rather pleased with the result. As for the others, no one ever believed the boy really meant it, and everybody—even the maids and the high-priced chef—fully expected Jack would turn prodigal as soon as his diet of husks had whetted his appetite for dishes more nourishing and more toothsome. But no one of them took account of the quality of the blood that ran in the young man's veins.
It was scheming Peter who saved the day.
“Put that young fellow to work, Henry,” he had said to MacFarlane the morning after the three had met at the Century Club.
“What does he know, Peter?”
“Nothing, except to speak the truth.”
And thus it had come to pass that within twenty-four hours thereafter the boy had shaken the dust of New York from his feet—even to resigning from the Magnolia, and a day later was found bending over a pine desk knocked together by a hammer and some ten-penny nails in a six-by-nine shanty, the whole situated at the mouth of a tunnel half a mile from Corklesville, where he was at work on the pay-roll of the preceding week.
Many things had helped in deciding him to take the proffered place. First, Peter had wanted it; second, his uncle did not want it, Corinne and his aunt being furious that he should go to work like a common laborer, or—as Garry had put it—“a shovel-spanked dago.” Third, Ruth was within calling distance, and that in itself meant Heaven. Once installed, however, he had risen steadily, both in MacFarlane's estimation and in the estimation of his fellow-workers; especially the young engineers who were helping his Chief in the difficult task before him. Other important changes had also taken place in the two years: his body had strengthened, his face had grown graver, his views of life had broadened and, best of all, his mind was at rest. Of one thing he was sure—no confiding young Gilberts would be fleeced in his present occupation—not if he knew anything about it.
Moreover, the outdoor life which he had so longed for was his again. On Saturday afternoons and Sundays he tramped the hills, or spent hours rowing on the river. His employer's villa was also always open to him—a privilege not granted to the others in the working force. The old tie of family was the sesame. Judge Breen's son was, both by blood and training, the social equal of any man, and although the distinguished engineer, being well born himself, seldom set store on such things, he recognized his obligation in Jack's case and sought the first opportunity to tell him so.
“You will find a great change in your surroundings, Mr. Breen,” he had said. “The little hotel where you will have to put up is rather rough and uncomfortable, but you are always welcome at my home, and this I mean, and I hope you will understand it that way without my mentioning it again.”
The boy's heart leaped to his throat as he listened, and a dozen additional times that day his eyes had rested on the clump of trees which shaded the roof sheltering Ruth.
That the exclusive Miss Grayson should now have invited him to pass some days at her home had brought with it a thrill of greater delight. Her opinion of the boy had changed somewhat. His willingness to put up with the discomforts of the village inn—“a truly dreadful place,” to quote one of Miss Felicia's own letters—and to continue to put up with them for more than two years, while losing nothing of his good-humor and good manners, had shaken her belief in the troubadour and tin-armor theory, although nothing in Jack's surroundings or in his prospects for the future fitted him, so far as she could see, to life companionship with so dear a girl as her beloved Ruth—a view which, of course, she kept strictly to herself.
But she still continued to criticise him, at which Peter would rub his hands and break out with:
“Fine fellow!—square peg in a square hole this time. Fine fellow, I tell you, Felicia!”
He receiving in reply some such answer as:
“Yes, quite lovely in fairy tales, Peter, and when you have taught him—for you did it, remember—how to shovel and clean up underbrush and split rocks—and that just's what Ruth told me he was doing when she took a telegram to her father which had come to the house—and he in a pair of overalls, like any common workman—what, may I ask, will you have him doing next? Is he to be an engineer or a clerk all his life? He might have had a share in his uncle's business by this time if he had had any common-sense;” Peter retorting often with but a broad smile and that little gulp of satisfaction—something between a chuckle and a sigh—which always escaped him when some one of his proteges were living up to his pet theories.
And yet it was Miss Felicia herself who was the first to welcome the reprobate, even going to the front door and standing in the icy draught, with the snowflakes whirling about her pompadoured head, until Jack had alighted from the tail-end of Moggins's 'bus and, with his satchel in his hand, had cleared the sidewalk with a bound and stood beside her.
“Oh, I'm so glad to be here,” Jack had begun, “and it was so good of you to want me,” when a voice rang clear from the top of the stairs:
“And where's daddy—isn't he coming?”
“Oh!—how do you do, Miss Ruth? No; I am sorry to say he could not leave—that is, we could not persuade him to leave. He sent you all manner of messages, and you, too, Miss—”
“He isn't coming? Oh, I am so disappointed! What is the matter, is he ill?” She was half-way down the staircase now, her face showing how keen was her disappointment.
“No—nothing's the matter—only we are arranging for an important blast in a day or two, and he felt he couldn't be away. I can only stay the night.” Jack had his overcoat stripped from his broad shoulders now and the two had reached each other's hands.
Miss Felicia watched them narrowly out of her sharp, kindly eyes. This love-affair—if it were a love-affair—had been going on for years now and she was still in the dark as to the outcome. There was no question that the boy was head over heels in love with the girl—she could see that from the way the color mounted to his cheeks when Ruth's voice rang out, and the joy in his eyes when they looked into hers. How Ruth felt toward her new guest was what she wanted to know. This was, perhaps, the only reason why she had invited him—another thing she kept strictly to herself.
But the two understood it—if Miss Felicia did not. There may be shrewd old ladies who can read minds at a glance, and fussy old men who can see through blind millstones, and who know it all, but give me two lovers to fool them both to the top of their bent, be they so minded.
“And now, dear, let Mr. Breen go to his room, for we dine in an hour, and Holker will be cross as two sticks if we keep it waiting a minute.”
But Holker was not cross—not when dinner was served; nobody was cross—certainly not Peter, who was in his gayest mood; and certainly not Ruth or Jack, who babbled away next to each other. Peter's heart swelled with pride and satisfaction as he saw the change which two years of hard work had made in Jack—not only in his bearing and in a certain fearless independence which had become a part of his personality, but in the unmistakable note of joyousness which flowed out of him, so marked in contrast to the depression which used to haunt him like a spectre. Stories of his life at his boarding-house—vaguely christened a hotel by its landlady, Mrs. Hicks—bubbled out of the boy as well as accounts of various escapades among the men he worked with—especially the younger engineers and one of the foremen who had rooms next his own—all told with a gusto and ring that kept the table in shouts of merriment—Morris laughing loudest and longest, Peter whispering behind his hand to Miss Felicia:
“Charming, isn't he?—and please note, my dear, that none of the dirt from his shovel seems to have clogged his wit—” at which there was another merry laugh—Peter's, this time, his being the only voice in evidence.
“And she is such fun, Miss Felicia” (Mrs. Hicks was under discussion), called out Jack, realizing that he had, perhaps—although unconsciously—failed to include his hostess in his coterie of listeners. “You should see her caps, and the magnificent airs she puts on when we come down late to breakfast on Sunday mornings.”
“And tell them about the potatoes,” interrupted Ruth.
“Oh, that was disgraceful, but it really could not be helped—we had greasy fried potatoes until we could not stand them another day, and Bolton found them in the kitchen late one night ready for the skillet the next morning, and filled them with tooth powder, and that ended it.”
“I'd have set you fellows out on the sidewalk if I'd been Mrs. Hicks,” laughed Morris. “I know that old lady—I used to stop with her myself when I was building the town hall—and she's good as gold. And now tell me how MacFarlane is getting on—building a railroad, isn't he? He told me about it, but I forget.”
“No,” replied Jack, his face growing suddenly serious as he turned toward the speaker; “the company is building the road. We have only got a fill of half a mile and then a tunnel of a mile more.”
Miss Felicia beamed sententiously when Jack said “we,” but she did not interrupt the speaker.
“And what sort of cutting?” continued the architect in a tone that showed his entire familiarity with work of the kind.
“Gneiss rock for eleven hundred feet and then some mica schist that we have had to shore up every time we move our drills,” answered Jack quietly.
“Any cave-ins?” Morris was leaning forward now, his eyes riveted on the boy's. What information he wanted he felt sure he now could get.
“Not yet, but plenty of water. We struck a spring last week” (this time the “we” didn't seem so preposterous) “that came near drowning us out, but we managed to keep it under with a six-inch centrifugal; but it meant pumping night and day.”
“And when is he going to get through?”
“That depends on what is ahead of us. Our borings show up all right—most of it is tough gneiss—but if we strike gravel or shale again it means more timbering, of course. Perhaps another year—perhaps a few months. I am not giving you my own opinion, for I've had very little experience, but that is what Bolton thinks—he's second in command next to Mr. MacFarlane—and so do the other fellows at our boarding house.”
And then followed a discussion on “struts,” roof timbers and tie-rods, Jack describing in a modest, impersonal way the various methods used by the members of the staff with which he was connected, Morris, as usual, becoming so absorbed in the warding off of “cave-ins” that for the moment he forgot the table, his hostess and everybody about him, a situation which, while it delighted Peter, who was bursting with pride over Jack, was beginning to wear upon Miss Felicia, who was entirely indifferent as to whether the top covering of MacFarlane's underground hole fell in or not.
“There, now, Holker,” she said with a smile as she laid her hand on his coat sleeve—“not another word. Tunnels are things everybody wants to get through with as quick as possible—and I'm not going to spend all night in yours—awful damp places full of smoke—No—not another word. Ruth, ask that young Roebling next you to tell us another story—No, wait until we have our coffee and you gentlemen have lighted your cigars. Perhaps, Ruth, you had better take Mr. Breen into the smoking-room. Now, give me your arm, Holker, and you come, too, Major, and bring Peter with you to my boudoir. I want to show you the most delicious copy of Shelley you ever saw. No, Mr. Breen, Ruth wants you; we will be with you in a few minutes—” Then after the two had passed on ahead—“Look at them, Major—aren't they a joy, just to watch?—and aren't you ashamed of yourself that you have wasted your life? No arbor for you! What would you give if a lovely girl like that wanted you all to herself by the side of my frog pond?”
A shout ahead from Jack, and a rippling laugh from Ruth now floated our way.
“Oh!—OH!—” and “Yes—isn't it wonderful—come and see the arbor—” and then a clatter of feet down the soggy steps and fainter footfalls on the moist bricks, ending in silence.
“There!” laughed Miss Felicia, turning toward us and clapping her hands—“they have reached the arbor and it's all over, and now we will all go out on the porch for our coffee. I haven't any Shelley that you have not seen a dozen times—I just intended that surprise to come to the boy and in the way Ruth wanted it—she has talked of nothing else since she knew he was coming. Mighty dangerous, I can tell you, that old bench. Ruth can take care of herself, but that poor fellow will be in a dreadful state if we leave them alone too long. Sit here, Holker, and tell me about the dinner and what you said. All that Peter could remember was that you never did better, and that everybody cheered, and that the squabs were so dry he couldn't eat them.”
But the Scribe refuses to be interested in Holker's talk, however brilliant, or in Miss Felicia's crisp repartee. His thoughts are down among the palms, where the two figures are entering the arbor, the soft glow of half a dozen lanterns falling upon the joyous face of the beautiful girl, as, with hand in Jack's, she leads him to a seat beside her on the bench.
“But it's like home,” Jack gasped. “Why, you must remember your own garden, and the porch that ran alongside of the kitchen, and the brick walls—and just see how big it is and you never told me a word about it! Why?”
“Oh, because it would have spoiled all the fun; I was so afraid daddy would tell you that I made him promise not to say a word; and nobody else had seen it except Mr. Morris, and he said torture couldn't drag it out of him. That old Major that Uncle Peter thinks so much of came near spoiling the surprise, but Aunt Felicia said she would take care of him in the back of the house—and she did; and I mounted guard at the top of the stairs before anybody could get hold of you. Isn't it too lovely?—and, do you know, there are real live frogs in that pond and you can hear them croak? And now tell me about daddy, and how he gets on without me.”
But Jack was not ready yet to talk about daddy, or the work, or anything that concerned Corklesville and its tunnel—the transition had been too sudden and too startling. To be fired from a gun loaded with care, hard work and anxiety—hurled through hours of winter travel and landed at a dinner-table next some charming young woman, was an experience which had occurred to him more than once in the past two years. But to be thrust still further into space until he reached an Elysium replete with whispering fountains, flowering vines and the perfume of countless blossoms—the whole tucked away in a cosey arbor containing a seat for two—AND NO MORE—and this millions of miles away, so far as he could see, from the listening ear or watchful eye of mortal man or woman—and with Ruth, too—the tips of whose fingers were so many little shrines for devout kisses—that was like having been transported into Paradise.
“Oh, please let me look around a little,” he begged at last. “And this is why you love to come here?”
“Yes—wouldn't you?”
“I would not live anywhere else if I could—and it has just the air of summer—and it feels like a summer's night, too—as if the moon was coming up somewhere.”
Ruth's delight equalled his own; she must show him the new tulips just sprouting, taking down a lantern so that he could see the better; and he must see how the jessamine was twisted in and out the criss-cross slats of the trellis, so that the flowers bloomed both outside and in; and the little gully in the flagging of the pavement through which ran the overflow of the tiny pond—till the circuit of the garden was made and they were again seated on the dangerous bench, with a cushion tucked behind her beautiful shoulders.
They talked of the tunnel and when it would be finished; and of the village people and whom they liked and whom they didn't—and why—and of Corinne, whose upturned little nose and superior, dominating airs Ruth thought were too funny for words; and of her recently announced engagement to Garry Minott, who had started for himself in business and already had a commission to build a church at Elm Crest—known to all New Jersey as Corklesville until the real-estate agencies took possession of its uplands—Jack being instrumental, with Mr. MacFarlane's help, in securing him the order; and of the dinner to be given next week at Mrs. Brent Foster's on Washington Square, to which they were both invited, thanks to Miss Felicia for Ruth's invitation, and thanks to Peter for that of Jack, who, at Peter's request, had accompanied him one afternoon to one of Mrs. Foster's receptions, where he had made so favorable an impression that he was at once added to Mrs. Foster's list of eligible young men—the same being a scarce article. They had discussed, I say, all these things and many more, in sentences, the Scribe devoutly hopes, much shorter than the one he has just written—when in a casual—oh, so casual a way—merely as a matter of form—Ruth asked him if he really must go back to Corklesville in the morning.
“Yes,” answered Jack—“there is no one to take charge of the new battery but myself, and we have ten holes already filled for blasting.”
“But isn't it only to put the two wires together? Daddy explained it to me.”
“Yes—but at just the right moment. Half a minute too early might ruin weeks of work. We have some supports to blow out. Three charges are at their bases—everything must go off together.”
“But it is such a short visit.”
Some note in her voice rang through Jack's ears and down into his heart. In all their intercourse—and it had been a free and untrammelled one so far as their meetings and being together were concerned—there was invariably a barrier which he could never pass, and one that he was always afraid to scale. This time her face was toward him, the rosy light bathing her glorious hair and the round of her dimpled cheek. For an instant a half-regretful smile quivered on her lips, and then faded as if some indrawn sigh had strangled it.
Jack's heart gave a bound.
“Are you really sorry to have me go, Miss Ruth?” he asked, searching her eyes.
“Why should I not be? Is not this better than Mrs. Hicks's, and Aunt Felicia would love to have you stay—she told me so at dinner.”
“But you, Miss Ruth?” He had moved a trifle closer—so close that his eager fingers almost touched her own: “Do you want me to stay?”
“Why, of course, we all want you to stay. Uncle Peter has talked of nothing else for days.”
“But do you want me to stay, Miss Ruth?”
She lifted her head and looked him fearlessly in the eyes:
“Yes, I do—now that you will have it that way. We are going to have a sleigh-ride to-morrow, and I know you would love the open country, it is so beautiful, and so is—”
“Ruth! Ruth! you dear child,” came a voice—“are you two never coming in?—the coffee is stone cold.”
“Yes, Aunt Felicia, right away. Run, Mr. Breen—” and she flew up the brick path.
For the second time Miss Felicia's keen, kindly eyes scanned the young girl's face, but only a laugh, the best and surest of masks, greeted her.
“He thinks it all lovely,” Ruth rippled out. “Don't you, Mr. Breen?”
“Lovely? Why, it is the most wonderful place I ever saw; I could hardly believe my senses. I am quite sure old Aunt Hannah is cooking behind that door—” here he pointed to the kitchen—“and that poor old Tom will come hobbling along in a minute with 'dat mis'ry' in his back. How in the world you ever did it, and what—”
“And did you hear my frogs?” interrupted his hostess.