ZELDA DAMERON

Zelda

ZELDA
DAMERON

By
MEREDITH NICHOLSON
Author of The Main Chance
With Drawings by
JOHN CECIL CLAY

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1904
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
October
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

To the Memory of
My Father,
A Captain of Volunteers
In the Great War

CONTENTS

ZELDA DAMERON

ZELDA DAMERON

CHAPTER I
THE RETURN OF ZELDA DAMERON

“She’s like Margaret; she’s really one of us,” remarked Mrs. Forrest to her brother. “She carries herself as Margaret did in her girlhood, and she’s dark, as we all are.”

“I hope she’s escaped the Dameron traits; they’re unattractive,” said Rodney Merriam. “She’s taller than Margaret; but Margaret was bent at the last,—bent but not quite broken.”

Mrs. Forrest and Zelda Dameron, her niece, who were just home from a five years’ absence abroad, had, so to speak, stepped directly from the train into Mrs. Carr’s drawing-room. The place was full of women, old and young, and their animated talk blended in a great murmur, against which the notes of a few stringed instruments in the hall above struggled bravely.

Mrs. Carr was forcing the season a trifle—it was near the end of September—but the dean of a famous college for women had come to town unexpectedly, and it was not Mrs. Carr’s way to let heat or cold interfere with her social inclinations. Mrs. Forrest and her brother had ceased talking to watch their niece. The girl’s profile was turned to them, and the old gentleman noted the good points of her face and figure. She was talking to several other girls, and it seemed to him that they showed her a deference. Mrs. Forrest was eager for her brother’s approval, and Rodney Merriam was anxious to be pleased; for the girl was of his own blood, and there were reasons why her home-coming was of particular interest to him.

Rodney Merriam was annoyed to find that he must raise his voice to make his sister hear him, and he frowned; but there was a quaver about his lips and a gentle look in his black eyes. He was a handsome old gentleman, still erect and alert at sixty. His air of finish and repose seemed alien, and he was, indeed, a departure from the common types of the Ohio Valley. Yet Rodney Merriam was born within five minutes’ walk of where he stood.

Zelda turned from her companions suddenly, followed by their laughter at something she had been describing. She crossed swiftly to her uncle with a happy exclamation:

“This is indeed an occasion! Behold my long-lost uncle!” She seized his hands eagerly. “We mustn’t be introduced; but you’d never know me!”

She looked at him admiringly. Their eyes met almost at a level and the eyes were very like.

“I’m afraid that is so! And you are Zelda—our little Zee!”

“Quite that! We must be acquainted! Perhaps we shall be friends, who knows? Aunt Julia promised to arrange it,—and I’m not used to being disappointed.”

Zelda was a name that had been adopted in the Merriam family long ago, though no one knew exactly how. Now and then some one sought in the Bible for light on the significance of the name and sought in vain; but there always remained for such the consoling reflection that Zelda sounded like the Old Testament anyhow. Zelda Dameron’s grandmother Merriam, for whom she was named, had always been called Zee. There had been something abrupt and inadvertent about Mrs. Merriam that the single syllable seemed to express. A great many people had never known that old Roger Merriam’s wife’s name was Zelda, so generally was Zee applied to her even in her old age. And in like manner the same abbreviation was well adapted to the definition and description of her granddaughter. Margaret Dameron’s child had been called Little Zee while her grandmother lived, and until her aunt had taken her away; and now, on her reappearance in Mariona, she was quite naturally spoken of as Zee Dameron, which seemed appropriate and adequate.

Her voice was unusually deep, but it was clear and sweet. She was very dark, like themselves, as Mrs. Forrest had said. There was a wistfulness in the girl’s eyes that touched Rodney Merriam by the suggestion of her dead mother, the sister that had been the pride of the Merriams. Mrs. Forrest watched her brother curiously. She had speculated much about this meeting, and had planned it for her own house. But her brother had been away from town on her arrival a week before. Rodney Merriam was away from home a great deal; his comings and goings were always unexpected. He had reached Mariona at noon from a trip into Canada, and had gone to Mrs. Carr’s in pursuit of his sister. Mrs. Forrest understood perfectly that her brother had come to Mrs. Carr’s tea chiefly that he might casually, and without apparent interest, inspect his niece. He was a Merriam, and the Merriams did things differently, as every one in Mariona knew. Rodney Merriam was wary of entanglements with his relatives; he had broken with most of them, and he did not intend to be bored by any new ones if he could help it. He and Mrs. Forrest were, it was said in Mariona, the only Merriams who could safely be asked to the same table, or who were not likely to cause embarrassment if they met anywhere. He had not spoken to Ezra Dameron, Zelda’s father, for ten years, and the name Dameron was an offense in his nostrils; but the girl was clearly a Merriam; she was the child of his favorite sister, and he hoped it would be possible to like her.

“Yes, we shall be friends—much more than friends,” he said kindly.

“You must come and see me; Aunt Julia has graduated me, and I’m back on my native heath to stay. I shall come to see you. I used to like your house very much, Uncle Rodney. It’s a trifle austere, as I remember, but we can change all that.”

There was a subdued mirth in her that pleased him; it had been a conclusion of his later years that young girls lacked spirit and humor; they were dull and formal, and talked inanely to old people. Zelda promised better things, and he was relieved.

“Come and tell me what you have learned in distant lands,—and I’ll tell you what to forget! I’m not sure that your Aunt Julia has been a safe preceptress. And as you’re going to live in Mariona I must, as the saying is, ‘put you on’.”

“That isn’t right. You should say, ‘put you next,’—a young American told me so in Paris.”

“Maybe my slang isn’t up to date. I’ll accept the Paris amendment. Was the young man handsome?”

“Not very. He was introducing threshing machines into France. Can you imagine Millet doing an American thresher with cowed peasants grouped about it? How perfectly impossible it would be, mon oncle!”

Teas in Mariona were essentially feminine, but a few young men had appeared, and one of them now came toward the trio.

“Here’s Morris Leighton; I want you to know him, Zee,” said Rodney Merriam.

Merriam greeted the young man cordially, and said as he introduced him:

“Mr. Leighton’s getting to be an old citizen, Julia. It isn’t his fault if you don’t know him.”

“I don’t know any one any more,” said Mrs. Forrest, plaintively. “I’ve been away so much. But I’m going to stay at home now. They say the malaria isn’t troublesome in Indiana any more.”

“Not half as bad as in your chosen Italy,” her brother answered.

“And it doesn’t seem new here at all,—the buildings down-town really look old,” said Zelda.

“The town’s old enough; it’s ancient; it’s older even than I am!”

“He’s very young to be an uncle,” declared Leighton. “He’s really the youngest man we have. If you’re the long-exiled niece, I must confess my amazement, Miss Dameron. I had the impression that you weren’t grown up.”

“That wasn’t fair, Uncle Rodney. You ought to have prepared the way for me better than that.”

“You’ll do very well for yourself. I’ll walk down with you when you go, Morris.”

Merriam moved away through the crowd, followed by his sister, who wished to get him aside to question him. She had planned that her brother should now share her responsibility; she saw that he liked the girl; but this would not serve unless she caught him with his guard still down and compelled him to admit it.

“You know Uncle Rodney very well, don’t you?” said Zelda to Leighton. “It must be very well, because I’ve already heard that; so I may grow jealous. I’d forgotten he was so splendid. He was always my hero, though. When I was a little girl I used to sit on a trunk in his garret and watch him fence with a German fencing master. It was great fun. Uncle Rodney was much better than the master, and I applauded all his good points.”

“The applause was certainly worth working for. I sometimes fence with Mr. Merriam myself. I assure you that his hand and eye have not lost their cunning. But we lack spectators!”

“I’m too big for the trunk now, so you’ll have to get along. Is that all you do,—play at fighting?”

“No; when my adversary gets tired, he talks to me.”

“Oh! he’s tired, then, before the conversation begins. Perhaps it’s safer—that way!”

She hesitated before speaking the last words of her sentences with an effect that was amusing.

“I’m a pretty bad fencer; I wasn’t prepared for that.”

“It’s wise always to be on guard. They teach that, I think, in the schools.”

“I wish you’d tell me something to say to the guest of honor. Is she a Protestant deaconess, a temperance reformer, an educator, or what? I have to say something to her before I go.”

“Quite between ourselves, I don’t know what she is,” said Zelda, “and I don’t care; but if my judgment is worth anything, her things—clothes—the tout ensemble—are charming. You might tell her we like her raiment and ask for a card to her tailor. There are some old ladies over there that I remember dimly,—I must go and speak to them. Please say a good word to Uncle Rodney about me, if you can—conscientiously.”

She left him with a quick little nod and slipped away into the crowd.

Morris Leighton’s social adventures had not lacked variety, as a young western American’s experiences may go. He knew a good deal about girls, or thought he did; and while a young man is still under thirty the delusion serves all the purposes of actual knowledge. Rodney Merriam had often spoken to Leighton of Zelda Dameron’s home-coming, but with his habitual reserve in referring to family matters. There was, of course, no reason why he should have made any point of discussing his niece with a young man who had never seen her. The Merriams were not like the usual run of simple, wholesome, bread-and-butter folk who gave the social and intellectual note to Mariona; and Morris, in his slight knowledge of all of them except Rodney, doubtless thought them much more unusual than they were.

His eyes followed Zelda, and in a moment he caught a glimpse of her profile. He had been wondering of whom she reminded him; and as he joined a group of young women who were stranded in a corner, he suddenly remembered. There flashed before him, vividly, a portrait that hung in Rodney Merriam’s house in Seminary Square. It was natural to attribute all manner of romance to Rodney Merriam; and Leighton had accepted the local tradition of an unfortunate early love affair which had, as many people held, affected the whole current of Merriam’s life. But the mystery that Morris had constructed from the quaint old portrait of the dark lady with gentle eyes was now dispelled. The dark lady was clearly Rodney Merriam’s sister, and the mother of Zelda Dameron. The talk of the young women did not interest Morris, and he kept glancing about in search of Zelda. He could not find her, and this vexed him so that he gave the wrong reply to a question one of the young women put to him; and they laughed at him disconcertingly.

Zelda Dameron’s return to Mariona was more of an event than she herself understood. The Merriams were an interesting family; they were, indeed, one of the first families. There were Merriams about whom people laughed cynically; but Mrs. Forrest did not belong to this faction, nor did Rodney Merriam, of whom most people stood in awe. There had been much speculation, in advance of Zelda’s coming, as to her probable course when she should return to Mariona with her aunt. Many had predicted that she would not go to live with her father—that Mrs. Forrest and Rodney Merriam would save her from that; but Zelda was already domiciled in her father’s house. The word had gone forth that she was very foreign. Many who spoke to her this afternoon merely to test for themselves the truth of this report decided that her clothes, at least, had the accent of Paris.

Mrs. Forrest led her brother to an alcove of Mrs. Carr’s library, and sent him to bring a cup of tea to her there. She was afraid to wait for a better opportunity; she must take advantage of his first impression at once. He brought what was offered at the buffet in the dining-room, and gave her his serious attention.

“This isn’t quite the place I should have chosen for a reunion after three years,” he began. “Where was it I saw you last? Geneva? I believe it was. The girl is very handsome. I suppose you found your house in good order. And Zee went with you without any trouble? That’s as it should be.”

“But, Rodney, she isn’t with me! I couldn’t persuade her—”

“You mean to say that—”

“She has gone to her father; she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Rodney Merriam’s face darkened.

“Gone to her father, has she? It’s a mistake. I’m disappointed; but it’s my fault. I didn’t know you were coming so soon, or I should have met you in New York. I wanted to make sure she had shaken him off,—that she had forgotten him, if possible.”

“Well, she hadn’t, and you couldn’t have done anything if you had met us. She had written to him all the time we were away, and he had always acknowledged her letters. I suppose there may be something in the filial instinct one reads of in books.”

“It’s possible,”—and Merriam smiled a trifle grimly. “Of course, she hasn’t decided yet. She’ll change her mind about him. A few days with Ezra Dameron will be enough.”

He was greatly annoyed. He had looked forward for a year to Zelda’s home-coming. He had planned to save her from the ignominy of contact with her father; and now he had failed completely through an absence which he could not justify in his own conscience. There had been no very good reason why he should go to the Muskoka Lakes just at the time he had chosen, except that there was nothing else to do; and his sister had sent him no preliminary hint of her immediate return. He felt that, between them, he and Mrs. Forrest had made a sorry mess of it.

“She’s gone home. That fact is settled,” said Mrs. Forrest, glad that the worst had now been made known to him.

The music ceased, and Rodney Merriam could talk without shouting.

“Oh! I’ll fix that,” he said. “I’ll get her away from him.”

“I should be very glad to have you try,”—and Mrs. Forrest smiled slightly. Though she feared her brother’s displeasure, she nevertheless found a secret joy in his fallibility. He was not tolerant of other people’s errors, and it was gratifying to know that matters did not always run smoothly for him any more than for other human beings.

“If I were you,” she said presently, “I shouldn’t try to do anything about it. Zelda is not a child. We have no right to assume that Ezra won’t treat her well. And her father’s house is the proper place for her. We know that he’s an unpleasant person, but many of his fellow townsmen think him a paragon of virtue. Between us, we ought to manage to keep her a good deal to ourselves.”

“I don’t like it! I don’t like it at all!”

“But you’d better make the best of it. It wasn’t so easy to arrange as you think, and the situation has embarrassments either way. We don’t know her father. It’s been many a day since I set eyes on him.”

“Well, you may be right,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “Now that you’ve given her to him, I suppose I’ll have to take a hand,” said Merriam, with frank displeasure. “I’ll have to renew my acquaintance with that blackguard. I really suppose I’ll have to call on him, or I might meet him accidentally, in the street, or at the bank. I might make a study of his habits and then lie in wait. I should like to give an accidental air to the meeting, to save my self-respect as far as possible.”

There was in Merriam’s voice an even, hard tone that was not wholly pleasant; but his sister laughed.

“I suppose I might give a reconciliation dinner,” she said. “We might as well go into it deep while we are about it.”

Merriam shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t push matters too fast. I don’t remember Ezra as a good dinner man.”

He rested his arm upon a low book-case, looking down at his sister as she talked and drank her tea. It was quiet in their corner; the murmur of talk in the other rooms reached them faintly. Several times other guests came to the door and looked in on them and went away wondering, or perhaps saying to their friends that Mrs. Forrest and her brother, old Rodney Merriam, were holding a family council in the library, and that very likely it was about Zee Dameron.

“I’ve never asked you about her money,” said Mrs. Forrest. “There ought to be a good deal of it. I hope our stay abroad didn’t cut into it too much—”

“It didn’t cut into it at all. I think I told you when you went away with Zee that I should care for the expenses. I really intended telling Ezra that he must pay the bills; but I waited until after you had gone, and then it seemed much easier to pay them myself than to see him. She has just so much more money coming to her, and I only hope she’ll get it.”

“That’s like you, Rodney. I’ve never talked to her about her money. She thinks her father paid the bills. Her money’s safe enough. Ezra isn’t exactly a spend-thrift!”

“No, the brute! I hope he’ll give her enough to eat now.”

“Her going there is only an experiment; I shan’t be surprised if she gives it up. We must stand by her, Rodney. We haven’t any of our own. And she’s worth it,—worth it even for her own sake if it weren’t for—”

“Yes, certainly. She needs no apology. You’ve done very well. She does you credit. You may count on me for anything I can do for her,—or for you,” he added cordially. “I’m glad you’re at home again, and I’d hoped to get some cheer out of Zee. I’m tired of wandering; and I even get tired of myself and my own house. I wish I had your eternal youth, Julia!”

She was short and stout, and there was infinite good-nature in her dark face. She was an indolent woman, who had always taken life easily. Her hair, once very black, was now whitening fast. She had been abroad in the world a good deal, and knew where the best shops were in Vienna and Paris, Munich and Dresden; and she cared more about Italian politics than the politics of her own country. It was reported periodically that Julia Forrest, who had long been a widow, was about to marry some titled foreigner, but while these rumors always proved untrue, they served to keep alive the traditional interesting qualities of the Merriams.

“I’ll take you home if you’re ready,” said Mrs. Forrest, when, after some further talk, they returned to the drawing-room. “Zelda’s father is coming for her.”

“Thanks; but I’m going to walk down with Leighton, if I can find him.”

“Who is he?—should I remember him?—the name—”

“You never saw him before; but—he’s the son of his father. It’s the same name. He’s a youngster I’ve picked up. The boy came here from the country to go into the law. He’s a graduate of Tippecanoe College—my college and his father’s.”

“He’s very good-looking; is he anything else?”

“I hope so; I think so. I’ll send him around to pay his respects. He must know you.”

It was nearly six o’clock, and a procession of women was coming down the stairs to Mrs. Carr’s front door, as Rodney Merriam and Morris Leighton left the house with Mrs. Forrest and Zelda. The waiting carriages made a long line in the street.

“How gay it looks! The old town really has a metropolitan air at last. A tea—with men present—it’s almost beyond belief!”

“The town’s not so bad, Julia; and it’s a nice comfortable place for one’s old age. You’d better get reconciled.”

Mrs. Forrest’s carriage had drawn up to the curb and Leighton shut her into it.

“Be sure to come to my house to-morrow, Zee,” she called to the girl.

“Miss Dameron’s carriage!”

A shabby vehicle emerged from the line and came forward. Zelda and Leighton were talking animatedly together; and Merriam watched the approaching carriage with interest, standing back from the curb. It was a box-like, closed carriage of an old pattern, drawn by one horse, with the driver mounted on a low seat in front. Leighton opened the door.

“Shall I say home?” Morris asked, as the girl gathered up her skirts and stepped in.

“You needn’t trouble yourself,” said the driver, sharply. He was muffled in a heavy coat, though the air was warm, and as the carriage door closed, he struck his horse with the reins and drove rapidly away.

“Sorry I made a mistake,” said Leighton to Merriam, as they turned toward the city.

“It was her father,” said Merriam.

“Yes; I hadn’t noticed him.”

They walked slowly toward the city, the man of sixty and the man of twenty-five. Mariona was proud of High Street, which was, so to speak, the equator from which the local social latitude was reckoned. The maples that overhung it were not the product of haste, but stood for the foresight of remote yesterdays in which the early comers had planted hopefully for the to-morrows that had now arrived. New-fallen leaves were crisp under foot, and the sound of sweepers at work on walks and lawns and the keen tang of leaf-smoke proclaimed the reign of autumn to urban senses. There were not, in the whole length of the street, a dozen houses that were worth considering architecturally, but while there was nowhere luxury, there was everywhere comfort; and the main thing in life is not, after all, to make a show.

Mariona is, to be frank about it, the capital of an Ohio Valley state whose vote in national elections—never “reliably” the asset of any party—has long been essential to the winner in the electoral college. Its early settlers were drawn from two distinct types at the sea-board,—from Virginia and North Carolina on the one hand, from the Middle States and New England on the other. The new type thus formed had sent a king’s host to die in the Civil War; but in civic matters it was, in the usual American fashion, long-suffering and slow to wrath, and continued so to the yesterday of which this tale is written.

The Merriams had come out of New England, and they had come early, when Mariona was still a village in the wilderness and long before the first railroad had connected it with the Ohio. The original Merriam had left a large family when he died. He was a man of ability, and if his children had not all prospered, it was through no fault of his own; for it was clear from an examination of the county records that he had in early days owned, or held liens upon, much of the soil of Mariona. Old Roger Merriam had been dead many years, but of his children four remained. Of these Rodney Merriam had never married; Mrs. Forrest was a widow and childless; and they were the only Merriams whose names ever appeared among the society items of the Mariona papers. Another son of Roger Merriam was a merchant, and still another had been a lawyer. They had spent the money left them by their father, and owing to difficulties whose origin Mariona had forgotten, these brothers had broken with each other. Rodney Merriam had dropped both of them in disgust at their quarrel, and Mrs. Forrest, as usual, followed Rodney’s lead; so it had come to pass that the house of Merriam was divided against itself, and as far as the appraisement of Mariona went, the better half stood.

Rodney Merriam had never done any of the things which the men and women of his generation had expected him to do; he had, on the other hand, done many things that seemed utterly inexplicable. He had, like most men of his generation in Mariona, served in the Civil War; but the easiest known way of irritating Rodney Merriam was to give him a military title. He had a particularly stony stare for the person who called him colonel; the individual who dared to call him general was in danger of his life. At the close of the war Merriam disappeared for two years, and no one knew where he spent that period, though there were stories afloat that he had continued his soldiering in one part of the world or another. When he reappeared, he gave no account of himself; and after a year, in which he renewed old acquaintances and friendships, he again left Mariona, to return after Sedan, followed by a generally credited story that he had fought on the losing side in the Franco-Prussian War.

The fact that elderly men in Mariona usually dressed in black did not deter Rodney Merriam from wearing, when he pleased, the extreme thing in English tweeds; he had a weakness for bright scarfs and tied them well. He owned a great variety of walking-sticks, and used them in a certain order known only to himself. He never in any circumstances carried an umbrella; he never rode in a street car, and he never talked business. Before the lean years of the seventies, when most of his family connections lost their money, he reduced all his property, except the High Street house, to cash, which he invested in England.

Rodney Merriam had driven his father’s cows to pasture through upper High Street, and he felt a proprietary interest in the whole of the exclusive mile that lay between Mrs. Carr’s residence and the business district. It was his influence that kept the street free from asphalt; the new-comers who had extended the thoroughfare and carried its sacred name far countryward might have anything they liked; but he had drawn a dead line within which wooden blocks should forever prevail. He walked or rode every day the full length of the block-paved part of the street, for he loved the town—the old town, as he called it, though the state itself had not reached its centenary—with a love that is possible only in those who have been linked to the beginnings of a community. No matter how many of his townsmen held otherwise, there was, after all, a good deal of sentiment in Rodney Merriam.

Merriam’s plain brick house faced south on Seminary Square, a pretty park in which there had once been an academy in the boyhood days of Rodney Merriam. There was a plot of grass at the front and side of his house, which was inclosed by an iron fence.

“You’d better come in and stay to dinner,” said the old gentleman to Morris Leighton, as they reached the gate. “The jump from a live tea to a solitary dinner is almost too abrupt for me.”

He drew out his latch-key and opened the door, and Leighton followed him into the hall.

“I mustn’t stop; I must bolt my bite down-town and go to work.”

Merriam put aside his coat and hat and went into the library. The ceilings of the house were high and the hall was wide. The woodwork was black walnut. The library was clearly a man’s abiding-place; its deep leather chairs and broad heavy table suggested the furniture of a club. Here again was black walnut—table, chairs and book-cases, as though the great trees of the mixed forests that had once stood on the site of the town had turned into furniture so that they might, even with a loss of dignity, prolong the tenure of their native soil.

Leighton turned over the periodicals that lay on the table.

“You saw my niece up there, didn’t you?” asked Merriam, peering into his tobacco jar.

“Yes; oh, yes!” The question was superfluous, as Rodney Merriam had himself introduced Leighton to Zelda Dameron; and Merriam was not forgetful. Leighton threw down the magazine whose table of contents he had been scanning.

“She’s stunning, isn’t she? I wasn’t quite prepared for it.”

“Of course she’s stunning. I’d like to know what you expected. She’s the finest girl in the world!”

“I can’t deny it. I suppose she’ll be about a good deal from now on. I hope you’ll allow me to break a lance in her behalf.”

“It can probably be arranged, if you’re good. You’d better cultivate Mrs. Forrest. She’s a friend worth having. You know Zee’s father when you see him?”

“Yes; Mr. Carr’s his lawyer. He comes to the office once a month, at least. He’s an odd sort, isn’t he? He has a standing appointment with Mr. Carr for the first of every month, and he’s always there when the curtain rises.”

“I believe Ezra always was an early bird. You’d better stay to dinner, Morris.”

A Japanese boy in a white jacket appeared at the door and bowed jerkily from the hips.

“No, thanks; the poor barrister must work when he gets a chance. I’ll be around soon, though, to get the story of your adventures in Canada.”

“I suppose I must harden my heart against you. There’ll be a lobster as usual, Sunday evening. Good night.”

Merriam heard the click of the iron gate as he stood meditating. Then he took up a bit of paper from his table and wrote:

“October 1; see Ezra.”

The Japanese boy bowed again in the door, and Rodney Merriam went out to his lonely dinner.

CHAPTER II
OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS

“The cost of living is high, very high.”

“Yes, father; I know that things cost, of course.”

“I have lived on very little while you were away, Zee. With one servant it’s possible to keep down expenses. Servants are ruinous. And I’m not rich, Zee, like your Aunt Julia and Uncle Rodney.”

“I want to do just what you would have me do, in everything. It was kind and generous of you to let me stay away so long. I know my expenses abroad must have been a great tax on you.”

Ezra Dameron looked quickly at his daughter.

“Yes, to be sure, Zee, to be sure. Mariona is a simple place and your sojourn abroad has hardly fitted you for our homely ways. You’ll find that things are done very differently here. But of course you will accommodate yourself to the conditions. And you’ll find the house quite comfortable. It’s a little old-fashioned, but it was your grandfather’s, and it rarely happens nowadays that a girl lives in the same house her mother was born in. Of course any little changes that you want to make will be all right; but you must practise economy.”

They were studying each other with a shrewd sophistication on the father’s side; with anxious wonder on the part of the girl. She knew little of her father. Even the memory of her mother had grown indistinct. The thing that had always impressed her about her father was his seeming age; she remembered him from her childhood as an old man, who came and went on errands which had seemed unrelated to her own life. The house had stood in a large tract when Zelda went away, but this had shrunk gradually as Ezra Dameron divided the original Merriam acres and sold off the lots. The front door of the homestead was now only a few feet from the new cement walk on what was called Merriam Street, in honor of Zelda’s grandfather. Sun and wind had peeled the paint from the brick walls and the green of the blinds had faded to a dull nondescript.

The house, without its original setting of trees and grass, was somber and ugly. A few cedars remained, but they only intensified the gloom of the place. The house had been built like a fortress and was old before the Civil War. It was a large house, or had been considered so, with several levels of floors marking the additions that had been made from time to time by the elder Merriam. There was a small iron balcony in front, opening from the upper windows; but it seemed ridiculous now that it hung over the public walk. At the rear there was a broad wooden gallery with pillars rising to the second story. A high board fence surrounded the back of the lot, as though to guard from further encroachment the few feet of earth that remained of the ampler acres of a bygone day. The house had fallen to Mrs. Dameron in the division of Roger Merriam’s estate, and she had willed it to her daughter, making it part of the property held in trust for Zelda by her father.

Mrs. Forrest liked the good things of life and spent her money generously to get them. She avoided discomfort at any cost, and Zelda’s ideas of living had naturally been derived in a considerable degree from her aunt. The transition from their pleasant quarters in Dresden, Florence and Paris to the grim living-room in Merriam Street was too abrupt. A wave of loneliness swept over the girl as she sat with her father in the stiff sitting-room, before the cramped little grate where a heap of burning anthracite gleamed like a single hot coal. Back of them was a table, covered with a faded felt cloth, and on it lay a few newspapers, a magazine, a religious weekly, and an old copy of the Bible, in which Ezra Dameron read a chapter twice a day. He was ill at ease now as he talked to his daughter. He felt that she was a stranger who had come to break in upon the orderly course of his life. He had believed sometimes during her absence that he needed her, that he was lonely and wished to have her back; but the photographs that she had sent home had not prepared him for the change in her. He had expected a child to return, but here was a woman, with a composure, a poise, that were disconcerting. Even her voice, her way of speaking, troubled him. She had tried to tell him fully of her life while away, to create the atmosphere of it for him; but she had only widened the margin between what he could know and what he could not be made to understand.

Mrs. Forrest

The girl felt for a moment that she could not stay, that it was more than she could bear. Her fingers were clasped upon her knees. She sat very straight in a hard unyielding chair that seemed to share the austerity of the whole house. She wished at that moment to escape—there was no other word for it—and run away to her aunt or uncle. Why were they alone here, these two, she and this difficult old man? Why had she not gone to Mrs. Forrest’s to live? It had grown suddenly colder at sundown and the wind swept dolorously through the cedars that brushed the side of the house. Why did not some one come? Why did not her uncle come for her? Carriages passed now and then with the smart beat of hoofs on the asphalt, so near that the sounds might have come from a remote room of the dreary house.

“Your aunt probably told you something of your business affairs,—of the trusteeship.”

Her thoughts had been far away; he watched her with a shrewd smile as she turned quickly toward him.

“Oh, no! Aunt Julia never discussed it; but I remember that she told me once I had some property. I know nothing more—except that there is a trusteeship—whatever that is!” And she laughed.

“Yes; it was a very wise idea of your mother’s in providing for you. She always maintained her separate estate. She inherited some property from her father,—you may have known.”

“No, I didn’t know, but I always supposed grandfather Merriam was rich.”

“I never touched your mother’s property at all; never a cent,” the old man went on. He did not know what Mrs. Forrest might have told Zelda. He was dropping down his plummet to measure her ignorance. Zelda knew nothing; and she cared very little. Her wants had always been provided for without any trouble on her part. Mrs. Forrest indulged herself, and she had indulged Zelda. Ezra Dameron was wondering just what Rodney Merriam and Mrs. Forrest would expect him to do for the girl. His position as her father had been anomalous ever since his wife died, ten years ago. The Merriams had taken his daughter away from him at once and then they had sent her out of the country, and now that they had brought her back he was not without curiosity as to what their attitude toward him would be.

“The trusteeship will not be terminated for a year—on your twenty-first birthday, unless you should marry before the end of that time. This is always an emergency to look forward to; but I trust you will be in no hurry to leave me.”

He looked at her again in his quick, nervous way. His voice showed the first hint of the whine of senility.

Zelda laughed abruptly.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?—the getting married. I honestly hadn’t thought of it before. I don’t know any young men. We didn’t meet any men abroad except very old ones. Aunt Julia was afraid the young men weren’t respectable!”

“There’s nothing like being careful where young men are concerned. There are many bad ones about these days. The temptations of modern life are increasing fast. A young girl can have no idea of them.”

“Who’s afraid?” she said, and laughed again.

He tried to laugh; he was making an effort to be friendly, to accommodate himself to his daughter’s ways, to understand her if he could.

The girl rose and walked restlessly about the room, picking up and throwing down the papers on the table; and then she examined several steel engravings on the walls. She had been at home a week, but the place was still unfamiliar.

A plate of apples had been placed on the table, and presently the old man took a knife and began paring one carefully. The girl paused in her restless wandering about the room, and turned to watch him. He had ceased trying to talk to her. There was something of pathos in his bent figure as he sat peeling the apple. She watched him silently, touched by his weight of years, and the feeling of loneliness left her suddenly. It had seemed hard and difficult at first, but it was only a kind of homesickness; this was home, and this was her father. There were things about him that moved her pity. His clothes were scrupulously neat; his linen was clean and his collar was carefully turned down over a high cravat, suggesting the stock of another time. His gray hair was long, and fell down on his coat, but it was carefully brushed.

Zelda went over and stood by him, and he looked up at her and smiled,—an impersonal, martyr-like smile.

“They look good, father. If you don’t mind I’ll get a knife and try one. It’s been a long time since I ate an apple.”

She brought herself a plate and knife from the pantry, and sat down near him. A gentler impulse had taken hold of her. She owed her father honor and respect; he was an old man, and at his age men were entitled to their whims. She won him to a more companionable mood than she had known in him before.

“I remember, father, a queer old table service that used to be here,—very heavy pieces, with a curious, big flower pattern. I haven’t seen it about anywhere; but I haven’t done much looking. Probably Polly knows where it is.”

“To be sure. I seem to remember it. It’s probably in the attic. The attic’s full of things.”

“I should like to explore it. I remember attics very pleasantly from my youth. There was Uncle Rodney’s. He always had the most curious things in his garret.”

“Yes, yes. Rodney is a very strange man.”

He looked at her sharply; evidently the girl did not understand the idiosyncrasies of the family relationship. Julia Forrest, his sister-in-law, was a more discreet woman than he had imagined.

“But about the attic,—I’ll give you the basket of keys, Zee, just as your mother left it. There is probably much rubbish that ought to be thrown away. No doubt there are things that might be given to the poor.” He bowed his head almost imperceptibly, as though in humble acknowledgment of all the beatitudes. Zelda took his plate and he rose and left the room. He walked lightly, and with an elastic step that was out of keeping with his appearance of age.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he called, and he went up stairs, returning presently, carrying a small basket filled with keys.

“These are yours, my daughter,” he said, and waved his hand with a little touch of manner.

“Oh, so many!” She poured the keys upon the table. There were half a hundred of them, of many kinds and sizes; and they were all tagged with little bits of ivory, on which their several uses were written clearly in ink.

“Your mother was very methodical,—very painstaking—”

He shook his head and turned to the fire, as though to hide any show of feeling.

Zelda was turning the keys over in her hand, and she did not look at him. A mist had come into her eyes. She remembered the dark woman who had been so gentle and patient with her childhood. They used to walk together in the old pasture; and they carried their books to a seat that had been built under a great beech where her mother read the quaint tales and old ballads that were her delight. These were the only happy memories she had kept of her mother—the times under the beech, with which her father was not associated.

“I’m sure it’s your time to go to bed, father. You mustn’t let me break in on your ways.” Zelda walked over to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “I want to be very good to you, father; and I know we’ll live here very happily. You won’t mind me much—when you get used to me!”

She touched his forehead with her lips.

“Thank you, thank you,”—and there was a helpless note in his voice.

She turned away from him quickly, restored the keys to the basket and ran with it to her room.

The next morning she was down to his seven o’clock breakfast in the cold, forbidding dining-room. She was very gay and made him talk a great deal to her. He had been up for an hour at work in the barn, where he cared for his own horse. He carried the morning newspaper to the table, as he had done for years.

“This will never do, father! You must talk to me and help me to learn the American breakfast habit. I’ll be lonesome if you read at the table.”

His thoughts seemed far away; he had long been out of practice in the amenities and graces, and the morning had brought him once more face to face with this change in his life. The place across the table had been empty for so many years that he resented the appearance there of this slender dark girl, pouring his coffee with an ease that puzzled and even touched him. There had been another girl like her, in the long ago, and this was her child. The resemblance between mother and daughter was so marked that he grew uneasy as he pondered it; he made a pretense of holding up his newspaper to shut out the girl, and when he dropped it Zelda was waiting for him, her elbows on the table, her hands clasped under her chin.

“Oh, pardon me!” he exclaimed, rising hastily.

As she helped him into his overcoat her hand touched a hammer he carried in his pocket with a miscellaneous assortment of nails, for use in repairing the small properties he owned in many parts of town, and she drew the implement forth and inspected it at arm’s length.

“Why, father! What on earth is this?”

The nails jingled, and she made a dive into the pocket and drew forth a handful.

“Why, you’ve forgotten to empty your pockets! You mustn’t go about with this hardware in your clothes.”

He reached for the things, a little shamefacedly.

“You don’t understand. I need them to make trifling repairs, you know.” He smiled, and she put the things back into his pockets, still laughing at him.

“I must go about with you. I can carry the hammer. Maybe you will let me drive a nail once in a while, if I’m good.”

He drew out a faded silk handkerchief and began twisting it about his throat, but Zelda took it from him and adjusted it carefully under his coat collar; and she brushed his old brown derby hat with a whisk broom that lay on the hall table.

He suffered her ministrations with his patient smile, into which he tried to throw something of a look of pride; and when she had set the hat squarely on his head, she drew back and regarded him critically and then kissed him on the cheek.

“Now be sure to come home to luncheon always. You didn’t come yesterday and it was lonely. I must get Polly to show me the way to the grocery. I don’t intend to let her be the boss. I’m sure she’s been abusing you all these years.”

“Oh, in time you will come to it. Polly will do very well, and you oughtn’t to be bothered with such things. I—I usually buy the groceries myself. One of my tenants is a grocer and—and—he does a little better for me!”

“Oh, to be sure. You must do it in your own way, father.” There was a note of disappointment in her voice, and he would have liked to concede something to her, but he did not know how.

He turned to the door and went out, and she watched him hurry down the street.

She roamed idly about the house, going finally to the kitchen, where the colored woman told her that orders for the remaining meals of the day had been given by her father. Polly viewed Zelda with admiration, but she did not ask advice, and Zelda continued her wanderings, going finally to the attic with the key-basket.

The place was pitch dark when she threw open the door, and as there was no way of lighting it, she went down and brought several old glass candlesticks from the parlor. The attic was a great low room extending over the whole of the house. It was unplastered and the cobwebs of many years hung from the rafters. Boxes and barrels abounded. Bunches of herbs, long dried, and garden tools hung here and there; in a corner an old saddle was suspended by one stirrup. Pieces of furniture covered with cloths were distributed under the eaves, their draperies heavy with dust, and the light of the candles gave them a spectral appearance. Zelda went about peering at the labels that had been tacked carefully to every article. Here, then, was something to do—something that had even a touch of adventure; and she went for water and a broom and sprinkled and swept the floor.

There were several trunks of her mother’s clothing and Zelda peered into these bravely. Her mother had arranged them thus shortly before her death. The girl was touched by their nice order; they were folded many times in tissue paper and were sweet with lavender. There stole again into her heart a sense of loneliness, of separation from the past to which these plaintive things belonged; and there lay beneath everything a wonder and awe, as of one who entered with another’s key some strange, dark chamber of life. A sob clutched her throat as she ran her fingers caressingly over the parcels at the top of a small brass-bound trunk that contained little trinkets for the toilet-table. Unlike the other boxes she had opened, this had evidently been packed in haste. One flat packet had been crowded into the top, and the lid had crushed it, so that the paper wrapping had fallen aside. It held a small address book, bound in red leather; and Zelda ran the leaves through her fingers, noting the names of persons who were her mother’s friends. “Margaret Dameron” was written on one of the fly leaves. The book had been intended as a register of visits, begun at the threshold of her married life; but, from appearances, it had been abandoned soon as an address book. At the back, where the ink was fresher and of a different kind, some of the pages were filled. The girl carried the book close to the shrouded table where her candles stood and opened it.

“This is to you, Julia or Rodney. They have told me to-day that I am going to die; but I have known it for a long time. The end is nearer than they think it is; and I am going to set down here an appeal that I can not bring myself to make to either of you directly. It is about Zelda. I think she will be like us. God grant it may be so. I know what I hope her future may be; but I dare not plan it. My own—you know that I planned my own. * * * Save her, as you tried to save me from myself, if it should be necessary. She is very dear and gentle; but she has our pride. I can see it growing day by day. They say that we Merriams are hard and proud; but she will never be hard. Do for her what you would have done for me. Do not let him kill the sweetness and gentleness in her. Keep her away from him if you can; but do not let her know what I have suffered from him. I have arranged for him to care for the property I have to leave her, so that she may never feel that I did not trust him. He will surely guard what belongs to her safely. * * * Perhaps I was unjust to him; it may have been my fault; but if she can respect or love him I wish it to be so.”

Zelda read on. There were only a few pages of this appeal, but the words sank into her consciousness with the weight of lead. She was to be saved from her father, if need be, by her aunt and uncle; but she must not know what this dead woman, her mother, had suffered at his hands. There was the heartache of years in the lines; they had not been written to her, but fate had brought them under her eyes. She closed the book, clasping it in her hands, and stared into the dark area beyond the candlelight. Her mind was busily reconstructing the life of her mother, of whom she knew so little. The book that she held, with its pitiful plea for her own security and happiness, opened a new world to her; her mother’s words brought the past before her vividly and sent her thoughts into the future with a fierce haste of transition.

This was her home-coming and this was home! She forgot for the moment that she had friends anywhere; she felt herself a stranger in her native city, in the house where she was born. Her heart went out to her mother, across a distance that was vaster than any gulf of time, for there was added the greater void that sympathy and love would have filled if mother and child might have touched hands to-day.

Her fingers came upon the broken wrapper that had fallen from the little book. She lifted it to the light and read:

“Private. For brother Rodney or sister Julia.”

CHAPTER III
ZELDA RECEIVES A VISITOR

The front door-bell rang—it was an old-fashioned contrivance, on a wire, and pealed censoriously—and Zelda thrust the book back into the trunk and ran to the second-floor landing to listen. Polly, the colored maid-of-all-work, admitted Mrs. Forrest warily, though Mrs. Forrest was a woman for whom doors were usually flung wide.

“Good morning, Aunt Julia! Welcome to your ancestral home! Come on up!” Zelda called from the top of the stairs. “Leave the door open, Polly, so Mrs. Forrest can see the way.”

There was something reluctant and difficult about the Dameron front door. It swung open so close to the newel post that ingress was difficult, and when you were once in, the hall was a narrow, dark and inhospitable place.

“What on earth are you doing, Zee?” demanded Mrs. Forrest, gathering up her skirts and beginning the ascent.

“I’m cleaning house a little. The steps are rather steep, but it’s nothing when you get used to it.” Zelda bent over the railing and contemplated her aunt critically.

“I’m not sure that your clothes will do for these upper regions.” Zelda looked down commandingly. She had twisted a handkerchief round her head; a big gingham apron and a dusting cloth in her hand bore further testimony to her serious intentions.

“I suppose you won’t kiss me in these togs, beloved; it would be unseemly.”

“My dear Zee, this will never do!” And Mrs. Forrest, having reached the second floor, surveyed her niece with disapproval.

“Do you mean the clothes?” asked Zelda, putting her hand to her turban. “I flattered myself that I looked rather well. I’m exploring the garret. I’m not really doing anything but poke about; and it’s great fun, raking in the dust of the past—a very remote past, too!”

Mrs. Forrest sniffed contemptuously.

“I’m sure there are stunning antiques up here that beat anything you ever saw. I’ve only touched the crust. Better come up and look it over. Oh, Polly,”—the old colored woman lingered below—“you needn’t wait. It’s around this way, auntie, if you’re rested enough. Those lodgings we had in Florence last winter were three flights up, and we didn’t mind a bit. You see, father gave me a basket of old keys and told me to rummage anywhere I liked. I never expected to find anything so much fun as this. Take your hand off the rail there, and save your gloves,—I’m going to dust it soon. And here we are! Don’t the candles give a fine touch? Lamps up here would be sacrilegious. It’s been swept, and there’s a place over there on that box where you can sit down without spoiling your clothes. If you’re very good, I might let you read some of your old love-letters. There’s a lot of them—”

“Don’t be silly; of course they’re not mine.”

“Some of the gentlemen would probably like to have them back—to read to their children,” persisted Zelda, who liked to plague her aunt.

“This is a horrible hole, Zee. You must go right down.” Mrs. Forrest was staring about frowningly.

“I might read a few extracts to help you remember,—”

A trunk stood within the arc of the candle’s flame. It was filled with old papers and letters, and Zelda flung up the lid to pique her aunt’s curiosity.

“Don’t trouble! You must burn all these old things. Your grandfather never destroyed anything, and your mother kept all he left. Old letters ought never to be kept; they’re dangerous. I’m about settled myself. I came in to see how you’re getting on, Zee. What kind of a cook have you?”

Zelda hesitated. “Oh, she’s very good; very good indeed,” she declared with sudden ardor.

“Black?”

“Yes, black. There isn’t any other kind here, is there? I don’t remember any other kind,” Zelda added vaguely, as though making an effort to recall the complexion of domestic service in Mariona.

“The blacks are not inevitable. I have Swedes. You remember, I had our consul at Stockholm get them for me. Your Uncle Rodney has two Japanese who do everything. How many of these blacks does your father keep?”

“Well, there’s Aunt Polly,” Zelda answered slowly.

“Is she the slattern that let me in?”

“Yes, but don’t call names; she’s a dear old soul. You mustn’t talk that way about her. She’s devoted to me.”

“I should think she would be.”

“Thank you, very kindly.” And then, as if recalling the list of servants with difficulty: “There’s the cook! Did I mention her?”

“What’s she like?”

“A good deal like Polly. Yes, very much like her.”

“Can she cook?”

“Oh yes; well enough. Father’s tastes are very simple; and you know I never did eat much.”

“I don’t remember anything of the kind. Most of our family are hard to please.”

“I’ve heard that Uncle Rodney is an epicure. I hope he’ll invite me down to dinner very soon.”

“It’s possible that he may. His home is perfectly managed; he runs it like a club; a club is a man’s idea of Heaven, they say: anything, when you ring; no apologies and no questions asked.”

“It sounds attractive. Just think of being able to command chocolates by pushing a button!”

“Well, you have a housemaid?”

“Yes; there’s a housemaid.”

“Black?”

“Yes,—a good deal like Polly,” answered Zee, cheerfully.

“What else do you keep?”

“There’s the laundress. She’s like Polly, too,—the same dusky race. They all look alike to me.”

“They use chemicals,” observed Mrs. Forrest. “All American laundresses use chemicals. What else?”

“There’s a man. He’s Polly’s grandfather or uncle—something like that. He’s a general utility, and only comes on call.”

“Better get rid of the whole lot.”

“In time, of course. I’m going to see what I can do with this old furniture first.”

“You’d better buy what you need new. I never had any patience with this idea of gathering up old rubbish just because it’s old. And then there’s the microbe theory; it sounds reasonable and there’s probably a good deal in it.”

“Horrors! The garret’s probably full. Perhaps there are some in those love-letters.” Zelda laughed; her mirth was seemingly spontaneous, and bubbled up irrelevantly.

“If there’s anything of mine up here, for heaven’s sake burn it right away. And now clean yourself up and come out with me. You must show yourself or people won’t know you’re in town. And come home to luncheon with me afterward.”

“I’d like to, Aunt Julia, but I really mustn’t. Father comes home to luncheon.”

“Oh, he does, does he? Well, he has had a good many meals alone and the shock wouldn’t kill him.”

“He’s perfectly splendid! He’s just as kind and thoughtful as can be. I didn’t know that anybody’s father could be so nice.”

Mrs. Forrest rose and swept the garret disapprovingly with her lorgnette; and there may have been an excess of disapproval that was meant for something else. Julia Forrest was a woman without sentiment, for there are such in the world. The lumber-room did not interest her, and she was anxious to get out into the sunlight. She was too indolent by nature to have much curiosity: she was not a woman who spent all her rainy days poring over lavender-scented trifles and weeping over old letters. She was born in this old house, and she had played as a girl in the wooded pasture that once lay east of it. Her father’s fields were now forty-foot lots, through which streets had been cut, and the houses that had been built up thickly all about were of a formal urban type. The Merriam homestead was to Julia Forrest merely an old, shabby and uncomfortable house, whose plumbing was doubtless highly unsanitary. She had been married there; her father and mother had died there; but the place meant nothing to her beyond the fact that it was now her niece’s home. It occurred to her that she ought to see Zelda’s room, to be sure the girl was comfortable; but Zelda did not invite her in when they reached the second floor.

“The letters were beautiful; they wrote lovely letters in those days,” Zelda persisted ironically. “I wish I could have some half as nice.”

“Do get your things, Zee; it’s fine outdoors and the outing will do you good.”

“I’m very sorry, but I can’t go this morning, ma tante. I have a lot to do. I’ll be freer after a little.”

“You’re foolish, very foolish. When shall I see you, then?”

“I’ll be along late in the afternoon sometime.”

“And then stop to dinner—”

“Very sorry; but father will expect me. It doesn’t seem quite kind to forsake him—when he’s so nice to me.”

“I suppose not; but bring him along. We’re all an unsociable lot. They say the Merriams and their connections are queer—I don’t like the word. Your uncle and I want you to raise the fallen reputation of the family. Do be conventional, whatever you do.”

“Oh, I shall be that,—commonplace even.”

“Don’t come down in those clothes!” Mrs. Forrest was descending the stairs.

“All right, Aunt Julia. Good-by!”

When the front door had closed, Zelda sat down on the stairs and laughed softly to herself.

“Oh, Polly,” she called.

The black woman shuffled slowly into the hall and looked up gravely at the girl.

“Polly, I wish to see the footman the moment he returns to the house. And the butler’s work is very unsatisfactory; I shall have to let him go. And please say to the cook that there will be pie for dinner until further notice,—apple-pie with cheese. And the peasants,—they will be received by My Majesty on the lawn at five as usual, and largess will be distributed. Will you execute these commissions at once, Polly? Stand not on the order of your going—” She laughed down at the amazed colored woman and then ran swiftly up stairs.

She did not pause until she reached the candle-lighted table in the garret and knelt before it, with her face against her mother’s little book, and sobbed as though her heart would break.

CHAPTER IV
MR. MERRIAM MAKES SUGGESTIONS

The law offices of Knight, Kittredge and Carr were tucked away in the rear of an old building that stood at the apex of a triangle formed by Jefferson Street and Commonwealth Avenue. The firm had been tenants of the same rooms for so many years that any outward sign of their occupancy had ceased to be necessary. There was, to be sure, a battered tin sign at the entrance, but its inscription could be read only by persons who remembered it from bygone days. The woodwork in the series of low rooms occupied by the firm had once been white, but it was now yellow, as though from years of intimacy with dusty file-boxes and law sheep. The library, the quaintest and quietest place in town, was marked by a pleasing twilight of antiquity. Across the hall the private rooms of the several partners were distinguished by their domestic atmosphere, to which the locust-trees that brushed the windows and the grained wooden mantels contributed.

Knight and Kittredge had been prominent in state politics during and immediately following the Civil War. They were dead now, but Carr, who had left politics to his partners, survived, and he had changed nothing in the offices. The private rooms of the dead members of the firm were still as they had been, though Morris Leighton, the chief clerk, and the students who always overran the place now made use of them. Knight, Kittredge and Carr had been considered invincible in the old days; and Carr was still the best lawyer in the state, and the one whose name was most frequently subscribed to the appearance docket of the Federal Court. There were other lawyers who said that he was not what he had been; but they were not the sort whose opinion creates public sentiment or affects the ruling of courts. For though Michael Carr was a mild little man, with a soft voice and brown eyes that might have been the pride of any girl, he was a formidable antagonist. The students in the office affectionately referred to him among themselves as “A. D.,” which, being interpreted, meant Annotated Digest—a delicate reference to the fact that Michael Carr was able to cite cases from memory, by title and page, in nearly every series of decisions that was worth anything.

In the old days it had been the custom of the members of the firm of Knight, Kittredge and Carr to assemble every morning at eight o’clock in the library for a brief discussion of the news of the day, or for a review of the work that lay before them. The young men who were fortunate enough to be tolerated in the offices had always enjoyed these discussions immensely, for Governor Kittredge and Senator Knight had known men and manners as well as the law; and Michael Carr knew Plato and the Greek and Latin poets as he knew the way home.

These morning conferences were still continued in Morris Leighton’s day, though Knight and Kittredge had long been gone. It might be a topic from the day’s news that received attention, or some new book—Michael Carr was a persistent novel reader—or it might be even a bit of social gossip that was discussed. Mr. Carr was a man of deliberate habits, and when he set apart this half-hour for a talk with his young men, as he called them, it made no difference that the president of a great railway cooled his heels in the outer office while the Latin poets were discussed in the library, or that other dignified Caucasians waited while negro suffrage was debated. Mr. Carr did not like being crowded. He knew how to crowd other people when there was need; but it pleased him sometimes to make other people wait.

Ezra Dameron was waiting for him this morning, for it was the first of October; and on the first of every month Ezra Dameron went to the offices of Knight, Kittredge and Carr to discuss his personal affairs. He was of an economical turn, and he made it a point to combine as many questions as possible in a single consultation. His relations with the offices were of long standing and dated back to a day when Knight, Kittredge and Carr were a new firm and Ezra Dameron was a young merchant whom people respected, and whose prospects in life were bright. There had been a time when he was pointed to as a handsome man; but that was very long ago, and he was not an attractive object now, as he moved restlessly about Michael Carr’s private room. He carried a packet of papers in one hand and he walked now and then to a window, whose panes were small and old-fashioned, and looked out upon the locust-trees in the little court. He was clean-shaven, as always. His beak-like nose had given him in his youth an air of imperiousness that was now lacking; it combined with his thin lips and restless gray eyes to give an impression of cruelty. From one pocket of his overcoat the handle of the hammer protruded; and the other bulged with the accompanying nails. There were people who held that his inoffensive carpentry was an affectation, and that he practised it merely to enhance his reputation for penuriousness, a reputation which, the same people said, he greatly enjoyed.

While Ezra Dameron waited for Michael Carr, Rodney Merriam was walking slowly from his house in Seminary Square down High Street to Jefferson, swinging his stick, and gravely returning the salutations of friends and acquaintances. In Mariona, where men of leisure are suspicious characters, it was easy to take Rodney Merriam’s peculiarities far too seriously. When he was at home he lived quietly, as became a gentleman, and those who tried to find something theatrical in his course of life were doomed to disappointment. He was, perhaps, amused to know that his fellow townsmen puzzled over him a good deal and convinced themselves that he was a strange and difficult man,—but that, after all, he was a Merriam, and what could one expect! He usually knew what he was about, however, and when he started for a place he reached it without trouble. Thus he came presently to the offices of Knight, Kittredge and Carr. He stepped into the reception-room and found it empty. The door into the library was closed but he could hear Carr’s voice; and he knew that the lawyer was holding one of those morning talks with his clerks and students that Morris Leighton had often described. He looked about with interest and then crossed the hall. The doors of the three private offices were closed, but he turned the knob of the one marked in small black letters “Mr. Carr,” and went in.

Ezra Dameron was still looking out of the window when the door was flung open. He supposed Carr had come, and having been gazing out into the sunny court, his sight did not accommodate itself at once to the dim light of the little room.

“Ah, Mr. Carr—” he began.

“Good morning, Ezra,” said Rodney Merriam, blandly. Dameron knew the voice before he recognized his brother-in-law, and after a second’s hesitation he advanced with a great air of cordiality.

“Why, Rodney, what brings you into the haunts of the law? I thought you were a man who never got into trouble. I’m waiting for Mr. Carr. I have a standing appointment with him this same day every month—excepting Sundays, of course.”

“So I have understood. I don’t want to see Mr. Carr, however; I want to see you.”

Dameron glanced at his brother-in-law anxiously. He had believed Merriam’s appearance to be purely accidental, and he was not agreeably disappointed to find that he had been mistaken. He looked at the little clock on Carr’s desk, and was relieved to find that the lawyer would undoubtedly appear in a few minutes.

“I should be glad, at any other time, Rodney, but Mr. Carr is very particular about his appointments.”

“I have heard so, Ezra. What I have to say to you will not interfere with your engagement with Mr. Carr.”

Merriam stood with his back to the little grate-fire, holding his hat and stick in his hand.

“As near as I can remember, Ezra, it has been ten years since I enjoyed a conversation with you.”

“Better let the old times go,—I—I—am willing to let them go, Rodney.”

“And on that last occasion, if my memory serves me, I believe I told you that you were an infernal scoundrel.”

“You were very violent, very unjust; but let it all go, Rodney. I treasure no unkind feelings.”

“I think, to be more exact, that I called you a damned cur,” Merriam went on, “and it would be a source of real annoyance to me to have you think for a moment that I have changed my mind. I want to have a word with you about Zelda. She has chosen to go to live with you—”

“Very loyal, very noble of her. I’m sure I appreciate it.”

“I hope you do. She doesn’t understand what a contemptible hound you are, and I don’t intend to tell her. And you may be quite sure that her Aunt Julia will never tell her how you treated her mother,—how you made her life a curse to her. I don’t want you to think that because I have let you alone these ten years I have forgotten or forgiven you. I wouldn’t trust you to do anything that demanded the lowest sense of honor or manhood.”

There was no sign of anger or even resentment in Ezra’s face. His inevitable smile died away in a sickly grin, but he said nothing.

“With this little preface I think you will understand that what I have sought you out for is not to ask favors but to give orders, in view of Zee’s return.”

“But Rodney, Rodney,—that matter needs no discussion. I shall hope to make my daughter happy in her father’s house—I am her natural protector—”

“You are, indeed; but a few instructions from me will be of great assistance, Ezra.”

Dameron sat down, changing his position restlessly several times, so that the loose nails in his pockets jingled.

“To begin with,” Merriam continued, “I want you to understand that the first time I hear you have mistreated that girl or in any way made her uncomfortable I shall horsewhip you in front of the post-office. The second time I shall cowhide you in your own house, and the third offense I shall punish either by shooting you or taking you out and dropping you into the river, I haven’t fully decided which. I expect you to provide generously for her out of the money her mother left her. If you haven’t squandered it there ought to be a goodly sum by this time.”