I dined with the Blights. It had been a month since the afternoon when
I talked with Penelope, and this evening in December I went to the
house with hope high that in seeing her again I might have an
opportunity of regaining a little of our lost friendship. The
invitation had come from her, over the telephone, to dine with them
most informally, and though she cleared herself of any charge of
interest in the matter by adding that Mr. Blight wished to see me, I
flattered myself with the hope that she might be speaking more
personally than she cared to admit. How soon was that illusion
wrecked! I entered the great library. Mrs. Bannister was standing by
the fireplace, her eyes fixed on the opposite wall, her mind occupied
with a struggle to suppress a yawn of boredom. Rufus Blight was
reading a newspaper, but when I was announced he came forward and
greeted me cordially. With his arm in mine he led me to Mrs.
Bannister, and she allowed me to raise her hand and drop it. She said
something, made some conventional remark on the great pleasure it gave
her to see me; the yawn almost forced itself into view, but she set her
lips firmly and drove it back. As I made my response to these friendly
expressions of welcome my eyes swept the room and rested at last on the
door through which I had come. There they held expectantly.
Mrs. Bannister read my thoughts. "Penelope is so distressed that she
cannot see you to-night," she said, drawing her scarf across her bared
and massive shoulders, so that I wondered if my entrance had suddenly
chilled the air. "She had expected to be here, but this afternoon the
Ruyters called up and insisted that she dine with them and go to the
opera. It's 'Tristan.' She is mad about 'Tristan.'"
So faded the last vain hope! Had Penelope spent hours in devising a
way of making it plain to me that the link between the past and the
present was broken, she could not have been more adroit. Had David
Malcolm, the boy, been coming to dine that night I know that she would
have been standing there at Mrs. Bannister's side, her own eyes fixed
expectantly on the door. But between the company of such excellent
folk as these Ruyters, with the glorious music of "Tristan," and this
awkward man whose people were not her people, who found content in the
lodges of the Todds and Bundys, there could be but one choice. I was
humiliated. The good-natured grace with which I expressed my
disappointment to Mrs. Bannister belied my angry mind, and as we moved
toward the dining-room, she chattering incessantly, she must have
believed that I was entirely satisfied with just her company.
Fortunately I had only to smile my responses, while my thoughts were
busy with the cavalier way in which I had been treated. I was incensed
at Penelope, but had it been any balm to my wounds to make her feel the
weight of my anger, I knew well enough that she was far beyond the
reach of my reproaches. But hopelessly I repeated over and over to
myself that I never could forgive her. Then, by a sudden weak
reversal, I did forgive her and let my anger evaporate into a silent
protest against the unkind fate which had decreed that her people
should no longer be my people.
It was when I saw her that I forgave her. As we three sat at dinner,
Mrs. Bannister chattering on, Rufus Blight meditative but offering a
mono-syllable now and then as evidence that he listened, I smiling
responsively, Penelope came in. How could I not forgive her when I saw
her thus, gowned in the daintiest art of the Rue de la Paix, cloaked in
soft white fur, capped with a scarf of filmy lace, and one small hand
held out to mine.
The fault, I said, was my own, mine and the Fates which had ordered
that the orbits in which we moved should meet but rarely. The fault,
too, lay with my forebears, who, had they considered me, would have
settled on the shores of the Hudson instead of pushing westward so
recklessly. Then I might now be going to the Ruyters', to sit at
dinner at her side, to sit behind her in the shadow of an opera-box and
whisper in her ear the ten thousand things which I had to say. I
forgave Penelope. I called down maledictions on the robust Malcolms
and McLaurins who had carried me out of her world and abandoned me to
the garrulous Mrs. Bannister and the taciturn Rufus Blight.
Penelope was exceedingly sorry to be going out, but she knew that David
would understand and would come some other night. David understood
thoroughly; there was no reason for her to apologize, and, of course,
he would come again. Penelope was immensely relieved to find him so
complacent; she even wished he were to be of the company to which she
was going. She had just come in to have a glimpse of him, and now she
must be hurrying. And so she went away to take her bright place in
that social firmament of which the abandoned Mr. Malcolm thought with
so much envy and longing while he dallied again with sweetbreads and
peas.
"It was very late when I got home," said Mrs. Bannister, taking up the
thread of her narrative, "and who should I find here, as usual, but
Herbert Talcott!"
The emphasis which she put on the words "as usual" aroused Mr. Blight
from his placid interest in his glass of claret. "And who," said he,
"is Talcott, anyway? What does he do?"
"Herbert Talcott is a remarkable man," replied Mrs. Bannister. "He
does nothing."
It should have mattered little to me that Herbert Talcott refused tea
from Penelope's hands every day of the week because he had just come
from the club. Had Mrs. Bannister announced that he was calling daily
on Gladys Todd, then I should very properly have been startled. Yet I
sat up straight now as though she had named an archenemy of my
happiness and my ears were keen to hear every word.
"He does absolutely nothing," she continued. "He has absolutely
nothing, in spite of the reports that he is quite well off. I know
positively that his father left him only ten thousand a year, and yet
he knows everybody and goes everywhere. He is undeniably clever and
was a great favorite at Harvard."
"Doesn't he work at all?" said Mr. Blight with a rising inflection of
astonishment.
"Why, no," replied Mrs. Bannister. She saw the disapproval in my
host's face and was quick to bring herself into sympathy. "That is
what I can't understand. Now, there is Bob Grant, who is very rich in
his own right, and yet goes religiously down to the Stock Exchange
every day because he feels an obligation to be of some use in the
world. But of the two men, Herbert Talcott is the more sought after."
"Sought after?" said my host inquiringly.
"Yes, sought after," repeated Mrs. Bannister. "He is asked everywhere.
I suppose his name has something to do with it, but in these days, when
name counts for so little and money for so much, it is remarkable."
"It is remarkable," said Rufus Blight, with a return to the spirit of
the day when I had known him as a bustling, pompous man. "It is
remarkable that he can be happy doing nothing. Look how restless I am
with nothing to do but to play golf and read magazines. I can't
understand him. And yet he seems a decent young man."
"But, you must remember, he is going out all the time," said Mrs.
Bannister. "A man simply couldn't go out as he does and do anything.
He is always in demand. Why, I know a dozen families into which he
would be heartily welcomed. Last year it was reported that he was
engaged to marry Jane Carmody, the mine man's daughter; but she was
rather plain--to be truthful, very plain--and I will say for Herbert
Talcott that he is not the kind who would marry solely for money."
Mrs. Bannister went on chattering her praise of Herbert Talcott, with a
subtle purpose, I suspected, of impressing on me the utter absurdity of
my entering the lists with him and of bringing Rufus Blight to a keener
appreciation of the man whom he might be called on any day to welcome
into his own family. With me her efforts were quite unneeded. With
Rufus Blight the impression which she seemed to create was alone one of
astonishment that any man could be happy doing nothing. Again and
again he interrupted her to express his doubt on that point, and when
dinner was over and Mrs. Bannister had retired, and we were smoking in
the room which he called his den, he unmasked to me a mind weary of
working over nothing. He should never have sold out to the trust, he
said; in the mills he had been happy; every hour had its task and every
day its victories in orders for rails and armor-plate. Now in a single
day every month he could cut coupons and attend to dividends, and the
others he must pass with golf and magazines.
His den? How quickly does this bourgeois phrase call up before us a
hodgepodge room, an atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, a table covered
with pipes, books and magazines, littered with tobacco, walls burdened
with hideous prints, a mantel adorned with objects dear to their owner
from their associations, to the visitor hideous. The alien mind which
had conceived the great library had evidently been held at bay when
Rufus Blight was fitting himself into this den, his real home.
Over the fireplace was a great steel plate of the regretted mills, a
world covered with immaculate smokeless buildings and cut with streets
in which women were taking the air in barouches as though in a park;
before the fireplace two patent rockers, and behind them a table
littered with magazines and novels; in the corners golf sticks of
innumerable designs, and wherever the eye turned it met coldly colored
prints showing trotting horses in action. I had one of the
rocking-chairs and Rufus Blight the other, and he was looking up at the
mills when he spoke so regretfully of them. He referred again to
Talcott.
"I can't understand it--a man happy doing nothing. I suppose I am a
sort of machine--I must have work fed into me. Here I am at fifty-five
and not a wheel moving. It was the power of the mills that kept me
running. Now I have lost that." For a moment he was silent. Then he
leaned toward me and said in a wistful voice: "David, you remember my
brother. He could be happy just sitting thinking. Now if my energy
could have been combined with his mentality, what----"
I finished the sentence. From the past came the picture of the
Professor at the bare table in the cabin, pointing a long finger at me.
"What a man we would have made."
Rufus Blight's eyes opened wide. "How did you read my thoughts so
well!" he exclaimed.
"The conclusion was simple," said I. "Years ago I heard your brother
say the same thing."
"Oh! Well it does express the case exactly. Henderson was always a
wonderful man for thinking, David. In his young days he was perfectly
happy with a book. There were not many books in our valley, but he
read them all and it was very interesting to hear the ideas he formed
from them. He was a wonderful talker." Rufus Blight nodded his head
reminiscently. "A wonderful talker. But when it came to practical
things he was quite helpless. It wasn't that he was lazy. If there
had been at hand anything big to do, anything that appealed to him, he
would have done it. What he needed was an opportunity. He really
never had half a chance. He did try working in the store with me--and
he tried hard, but a mind like his could not be happy measuring out
sugar and counting eggs. Such work seemed to lead to nothing--I know
it did to me. But I had a different kind of a mind. I had to feed it,
like a machine, with figures and facts. But to him it was of no
importance that butter had gone up a cent a pound. He would say that
the ants weren't worried about it, nor the birds, nor the people of
other planets. Do you know, David, I really used to envy Hendry his
way of seeing things."
For a few moments Rufus Blight was silent, and my eyes were on the
picture of the great mills to which the counting of sugar and eggs had
led. From the mills they wandered to what they had given the man who
built them, from the golf sticks to the prints of trotting horses and
to the litter on the table. This den measured the true extent of his
conquest. I looked at him. With a movement of weariness he stretched
his feet toward the fire and leaned back and gazed at the ceiling, with
a whimsical smile playing around the corners of his mouth.
"I had to work, David," he went on. "Hendry could earn a living
teaching school, but I hadn't the brains, so I toiled away in the store
from early morning until late at night. Teaching school was easier.
He used to say that if the sluggard did actually go to the ant he would
probably find him a most uninteresting creature to talk to. I guess
Hendry was right. I do know that he had little of the virtue of the
ant, but he was one of the most interesting men I ever heard talk.
When I was behind the counter it was my main pleasure to listen to him,
perched on a chair in front of it." Rufus Blight laughed. "Really,
David, in those days I was proud of having such a distinguished
brother. I had always looked up to him. He was older than I, four
years, and he was my protector against the assaults of other lads--my
ready compendium of universal knowledge. I never dreamed but that if I
prospered he would prosper; and if he, then I. Why, David, I can feel
him now clapping me on the back and calling me his grub-worm. 'Some
day,' he would say, 'I'll come and ask a bed in your garret.' And I
would laugh at him and talk of the time when we--I always said
'we'--when we should have a pair of fine trotters, and should go
skimming over the country together instead of crawling along behind our
blind mare." Rufus Blight paused. The whimsical smile was gone and he
was looking at me through narrowed eyes. "Then the break came." And
quickly, as he said it, he turned from me and began to smoke very hard.
"The break?" said I in a questioning tone; for I believed that at last
I was to know the mystery which lay behind the Professor's conduct if
only I could lead him on.
"Yes," said he in an even voice, "the break. The break came and I had
to leave the valley. I wouldn't stay after that, David. There was
nothing left for me there, but I had my work; I could go on weighing
butter and counting eggs." Rufus Blight's voice was low and he spoke
rapidly. He seemed to have it in his mind that I knew the story of
those early days, had heard it, perhaps, from the lips of his brother
or from common report, for men are prone to think their fellows well
informed of the conspicuous facts of their lives. I dared not
interrupt again for an explanation, lest my question should betray me
to him as nothing more than a curious stranger. I know the story now
in all its detail, but it came to me only from Rufus Blight, and from
him in a few scattered threads, dropped for me to weave while in his
den that night; feeling that he had found one whom he could trust, he
unburdened his heart. Doubtless he had no such thought when he led me
into the room, but there might have been in my eyes, when he spoke of
the valley, some light of sympathy. And when he turned from that great
hall, from his heavy table and his liveried servants, to speak of
counting eggs and weighing butter, I had not even smiled at the
incongruity. Then the dam broke, and memories backed up in years of
silence broke forth in a quick and troubled flood.
"It was my fault, David, as much as his. I was a grub--a dull, toiling
grub. But those long hours that I was toiling came to be good hours
for me when it was for her sake. Why, it seemed that every pound of
sugar I sold, that every little profit I made, was for her. I planned
the finest house in the country as I stood all day at the counter, and
it was for her. She was to have it all, and I only asked to be allowed
to grub away--for her. She didn't understand me, David. She used to
taunt me with being sordid, and said that I stayed at the store early
and late because I loved a dollar most. I didn't understand women. I
guess at least I should have closed up the store for an evening or two
a week, and yet"--Rufus Blight hesitated--"and yet it wouldn't have
made any difference. Hendry was a tall fellow. I was short and rather
fat. Hendry could talk in a wonderful way. I was always silent except
when it came to a trade. It had to be as it was, David, but it was
hard--very hard. I don't think I said any more than most men would
have said to him--perhaps less, because I never was a talker. And,
after all, I couldn't blame them. Why, I remember, as I was leaving
the valley, I said to him that if they ever needed a home they must
come to me. He was offended. He drew himself up and said proudly that
when I needed help I must come to them. Poor Hendry! It wasn't long
before he did need help; but could you imagine him taking it from any
one? He lost the school--he had become not quite orthodox in his ideas
and was inclined to rail at church doctrine. He never was intended for
manual labor; he worked hard when he could get work, but everything
seemed against him. Then Penelope came, and he was left alone with
her, and it made him bitter. I tried to get him to come to me; but
could you imagine a man as proud as he, David--a man of his
mind--coming to me after what had happened! Why, he called my offer
charity. Then he left the valley, too, and I wrote to him from
Pittsburgh, where I had bought a little mill. I wanted them to come to
me--him and Penelope--for I was lonely. I had nothing but the mill;
why, only in the mill was I happy. But could you imagine a man as
proud as he, David, taking help from me? He answered rather curtly;
said that some day I should see what he was worth; that he was not the
idler he seemed. He said that again to me face to face, that once when
I have seen him in all the years since the break."
Rufus Blight left his chair and stood by the fireplace, a hand on the
mantel, his eyes watching the flames.
"Could I have done more, David? That night when I saw him I had come
in from the mills late, and the servants would not let him wait for me
even in the hall. He told me how he had shot the constable. He feared
he had killed him, but he did not know, not daring to turn back to find
out. He had walked the whole way, travelling day and night. I wanted
him to stay, but he said that in Mary he had taken from me everything I
had ever had; he could take no more. He had come not to beg, but to
give me Penelope; and when he came again it would not be as a brother
who could be turned from my door by the servants; when he came again it
would be as a father of whom Penelope could feel no shame. I could not
move him. I did my best, David, but he laughed and slapped me on the
back and called me his old grub; said that some day I should really see
what was in him. Then he went away--God only knows where."
"To the West," said I. "To the East, to Tibet."
"Yes," said Rufus Blight. He was standing before me, his hands clasped
behind him, his eyes intent on the ceiling.
"And you came to us for Penelope," I said. The last trace of my
antipathy to this man, once to me so fat and pompous, was gone.
He looked at me with a faint smile of embarrassment. "And what an
ungrateful brute I was!" he exclaimed. "David, did you remember the
promises I made that day?"
"I used to remember them," I answered, "and to wonder."
"You had the right," he said. "But remember what I was--just a lonely
grub. Till Penelope came to me I had nothing but the mills. Having
her, I wanted her entirely." He held out his hand. "She was only that
high, David, and I was getting gray. I never looked at her but there
came into my mind another just that high who had a desk in school in
front of mine, and sometimes I seemed to be looking again over the top
of my spelling-book at the same bright hair and the same bobbing bit of
ribbon. Can't you see what she meant to me, David? She hated me at
first--she spoke always of her father and of you--and I was jealous."
"I understand," said I.
He had not spoken of the letters. There was no need of it. I knew
that they were in his mind and that he was perfectly conscious of the
pettiness of his action. But for me his simple confession had absolved
him.
"I wanted her entirely," he went on, throwing himself into a chair at
my side. "I wanted something to live for beside the mills. In
Penelope I found it. What the mills gave me was for her. Every hour I
worked was happier because it was for her good. Sometimes I have to
fight against a dread that Hendry will come back and take her from me,
and yet when I think of him, tumbling around the world alone, I want
him too--want him in that very chair you are sitting in. It would be
so good just to hear him talk, and it wouldn't make any difference to
us now if he did just talk." Rufus Blight brought a fist down on the
arm of his chair. "David, I must find him!"
"He went to Tibet," said I.
"To the South Seas, to the Arctic, to Tibet--everywhere, David. His
trail has led me all over the world. I can never catch up to him. The
Philadelphia man you told me of--Harassan--dead three years. My
secretary, Mallencroft, has found that in San Francisco a man named
Henderson worked on _The Press_ there, but only two men remembered him.
They said he was erratic, always in trouble by writing things contrary
to the paper's policy, and gave up in disgust, to ship as supercargo on
a vessel trading in the South Seas. He wrote a book after that, but
the publishers failed, and Mallencroft couldn't even find a copy of it.
That must have been about the time you saw him--when he lectured on
'Life.' Poor old Hendry! It's his pride, his confounded pride--that's
the trouble."
I had risen. Rufus Blight came to me and laid a hand on each of my
shoulders. What a change since that day long ago! He had to reach up
to me, and I looked down into his face.
"You'll think me a strange fellow, David. I didn't mean to tell you so
much, but it just would come out when I saw that you understood. We
must find him--you and I. We may find him any day; at this very minute
he may be going by the Old Grub's door. Watch for him."
I promised. I must come often, he said; it was good to have such a
friend as I was, one who could understand, to whom he could talk of old
days in the valley. He had never really been at home since he left the
valley. He had lived in strange places, among strange people. We must
all go back--back to the valley, he and Penelope and I--we should go in
May--Penelope had talked of it--in May, when the orchards were in
blossom.
Rufus Blight laughed at the joyous prospect. And I? I closed my eyes
to it. I turned away, through the great hall, but he, with unwelcome
kindness, followed me to the stairs. What a great expedition it would
be--to the valley--just he and I and Penelope! I laughed
ironically--at myself. I plunged down the deep-carpeted steps. The
grilled door closed behind me. I paused a moment to turn up my collar
against the cold, to button my gloves and collect my scattered
thoughts. How the wind bit!
Across the Avenue a dark figure leaned against the wall of the park.
As I stepped over the pavement the man seemed to think that I was
moving toward him, for he roused himself quickly and walked rapidly up
the street. I laughed at his fright and turned on my way downtown, for
I was thinking of myself and of what I had lost, and I had no care for
shivering tramps. I reached the corner. Rufus Blight's words came
back to me. Had that man been watching the Old Grub's door? I turned
sharply, but I saw nothing, no sign of a living thing save the lights
of a retreating cab.