There was no doubt in my mind that Penelope Blight was engaged to marry
Talcott. They announced the fact when they rode the length of the
Avenue together in a hansom. But had I questioned the meaning of their
appearing thus in public I could not long have cheered myself with vain
hope, for the papers next morning blazoned the news to all the world.
That they printed it under great staring head-lines was not surprising
to me, for to me this fact transcended all others in importance.
Beside it the rumblings of war in the Balkans, the devastating flood in
China, or the earthquake which wrecked a southern city were trifles.
So to my distorted view the papers were filled with the announcement of
my overwhelming misfortune. Only by the greatest effort could I drag
myself from reading and rereading to my humdrum task. Before me in
black and white was the last chapter in my own story, the story which
had begun that day when I went fishing. Every line of it, couched in
the hackneyed phrases of the business, was a cutting blow, and yet I
must return again and again to the beating. Had Rufus Blight been a
poor man, a worthy man whose sole claim to consideration lay in his
having discovered some balm for human ills, then a paragraph would have
sufficed for the announcement of his niece's engagement. But he was a
millionaire; he lived in one of the largest houses in town, and his
niece was the greatest catch of the day, measured in dollars;
therefore, the coming marriage was worthy of columns. The existence of
Herbert Talcott became also of prime importance, not because he had
ever done anything, but because he was to marry the heiress of the
Blight fortune. How many a worthy Jones or a poor but noble Robinson
has to descend to an advertisement to make his happiness known to the
careless world? How many a lovely Joan goes to her wedding unread-of
because her forebears were lacking, not in those qualities which open
the gates of heaven, but in acquisitiveness?
To the public it could matter little that Rufus Blight was a simple,
kindly soul who was as contented years ago when he stood behind his
counter as to-day when he sought on the golf-links that sense of action
which is necessary to a man's happiness. The vital fact was that the
trust had paid him millions for his steel-works; not that Penelope was
a simple, lovely woman like thousands of her sisters, but that her
wedding-gifts would be worthy of the daughter of Maecenas. Accustomed
though I had become in the routine of my work to just such a judgment
of vital facts, now that the story told was my own last chapter I made
a silent protest against the manner of the telling.
I thought of Rufus Blight as a quiet man, happiest not in the stately
library, but in his den surrounded by a medley of homely things.
Thinking of Penelope I turned to those vagrant dreams, now forbidden.
In them Penelope and I were to go back to the valley, to ride again
over the mountain road, to stand again as we had stood that day when
she led me over the tangled trail into the sunlit clearing. Those were
joys in which millions had no part. But as I read of the Blight
millions, and of that blue-blooded Talcott line which traced back a
hundred years to a member of the cabinet, it was hard for me to believe
that I knew these exalted beings, that I had sat with Rufus Blight and
talked of days in the valley, that Penelope and I had galloped over the
country astride the same white mule, that I even had engaged with one
so distinguished as Herbert Talcott in a brawl in a restaurant. Gilded
by those who report the comings and goings of those whom one should
know, as Mrs. Bannister might put it, they seemed aliens, manikins that
moved in a stage world. As such I tried to think of them, for it was
best, but I had as well set myself to efface my memory.
The last chapter of my own story was written by unknown hands. The
epilogue remained, in which I was to go on seeking what contentment I
could find in action. But my whole story was not written on these
flimsy pages. It was before me always and always I was turning to it,
always asking myself how it would have run had this not happened or had
that occurred. Studying it over and over again in my room at night and
on my long walks up-town, I found that I could not think of Penelope
Blight as an alien creature for whose happiness I had no longer any
care. What of her story which was in the writing? Did she know this
Talcott whom she had chosen to fill its last pages? She knew him as I
knew him first, as a quiet, gentlemanly man with pleasant manners. Was
it not her right to know him as I knew him now, as a drunken brawler,
who in his cups had betrayed the unworthy motive of his devotion?
These questions troubled me for many days. I was not a prude. I knew
that all men have their foibles, that many great men have over-indulged
in liquor, that a man's whole character is not to be damned by a single
slip. I knew that did all women see the men whom they choose for
marriage as others see them we should have a plague of spinsters. But
I feared for Penelope Blight. This was not because Talcott was worse
than the mass of his fellows, but because the best of his fellows was
none too good for her. But how could I go to her and declare that
Talcott when drunk had avowed a purpose to marry her for her millions?
It seemed the part of a tattler. The world would say that I acted from
jealousy. Indeed, it was hard at times to convince myself that
jealousy was not the basis of my fear for her. Yet I felt that I must
save her from a disillusionment which might come too late. Were her
father here that disillusionment would be speedy; but he was far away,
and always his last words were with me, as he spoke them that night in
the street: "You will take care of Penelope, won't you, boy?"
I had promised that. It was simply repeating my boyhood promise. And
now I kept asking myself if I was not forgetting that trust when I kept
silent because I feared in my pride to place myself in the light of an
intermeddler, a bearer of scandalous tales; I would remember that
morning when we had stood by the cabin door and I told her not to be
afraid for I was guarding her. Was I guarding her?
For two weeks I kept puzzling over my course of action. I felt that
the knowledge I held was hers by right, and hers, not mine, to judge of
its triviality. Yet I could not bring myself to face her with it.
Then came the time when I had to speak at once if I was to speak at all.
Mr. Hanks sent for me. As I stood before him, he studied me through
his spectacles with his cold eyes, as he had studied me in those days
when I was trying to persuade him to give me work, and I began counting
my sins, wondering if in the cataclysm of ill luck which had overtaken
me, I was to lose my position also.
After a moment he asked, as casually as he might have assigned me to an
expedition to Harlem a few years before: "Malcolm, how soon can you
leave for London?"
"At once," I said, and I spoke as casually as he, though my heart
leaped at the mention of London, for here I sensed an opportunity
beyond my wildest hopes.
"At once," he laughed and rubbed his hands with satisfaction. "I told
the old man you would say that. He said that you were too young to
fill Colt's shoes. Colt is ill, Malcolm; has to come home for a year's
rest and I have backed you to do his work awhile. Of course, you won't
do it as well as he, but you will do it fairly well, I think."
"I will do my best," said I, smiling.
"That is the way to talk," he returned. "I need hardly tell you to
keep your head and work hard, and perhaps you will pull through till
Colt gets back. He will be a little hurt when he sees his substitute.
He has been there twenty years and feels himself quite a figure in the
world, but as he has cabled for relief at once, he can't complain if we
send him the one man who is always ready to go anywhere at once.
Really, you have three days; you sail on Saturday."
I could have gone that day, had Hanks commanded it. The trust which he
imposed in me was my reward for always having obeyed him without
question, and in my state of mind that morning, between walking from
his office to the steamer for years of absence and staying as I was, I
should have chosen the former alternative. I wanted to get away. The
only place where I could find even the shadow of contentment was at my
desk. There imperative tasks filled a mind at other times occupied
with unwholesome brooding. I seemed to move through waste places, with
no object to catch the eye and thought and to drive away the
consciousness of my unhappiness. Even my walk on Fifth Avenue had been
abandoned lest at any moment Penelope might pass me with Talcott at her
side; Miss Minion's had become a place of terror, for by ill chance Tom
Marshall had been introduced to Talcott and he had developed a habit of
dropping in on me and telling me what he had said to Bert Talcott and
what Bert Talcott had said to him. He seemed to think that Talcott had
conferred knighthood on him by knowing him. There were times, even,
when I had gravely considered abandoning my chosen career and retiring
to a bucolic life of loneliness in the valley. And at other times,
into such depths of despondency was I plunged that I could seriously
consider abandoning self entirely and devoting the remainder of my
wrecked life to doing good, though just what trend my saintliness would
take I never determined. In monkish days, I suppose, I should have
gone into a cloister. But Hanks aroused me. Of course he did not know
my thoughts. With his clear eyes he did not see that my life was a
ruin. He regarded me rather as a fortunate man to whom opportunities
were opening wonderfully well, and I accepted his view; though I was
sure that I was taking a road which led to nowhere, yet travelling was
better than sitting still. Looking at Hanks, I forgot that he had a
wife and four accomplished daughters over in Jersey, and I said that I
should take life as he took it, with a cynical interest in the game,
with all thought on the run of the cards and little for personal
winnings.
When I had cleared my desk for my successor and had bidden good-by to
my old known tasks, I found myself turning to the new and unknown with
more interest than I had believed myself capable of showing. So much
was to be done in those three days that I had little time for
self-condolence. One day had to be taken for a farewell to my parents;
and what a day it was, with my father and mother driving down to
Pleasantville in the late night to meet me that they might not lose one
moment of my visit! Only when I slept were they from my side, for my
mother's mind was filled with all the stories of shipwreck that she had
ever read, and my father had doubts as to whether or not the moral
environment of London was such as he would ask for his son. My father
never had much faith in my moral strength. Then Mr. Pound came up to
see me, having, as usual, commandeered Mr. Smiley's comfortable phaeton
for the transport of himself and Mrs. Pound. His hair was white now,
and he bent a little, and his voice had lost some of its pompous roll,
but his phrases were as round as ever. He insisted that I owned the
paper. He placed his hand on my head and for the information of Miss
Agnes Spinner named my good points much as a jockey would those of a
favorite horse. He congratulated himself on the success of his method
of training and called on Judge Malcolm to admit that his effort to
have his son go to Princeton had been based on a misconception of the
underlying merits of the McGraw system of education.
The Pounds stayed to supper, much to my mother's suppressed
indignation, for she had invited them, never thinking that under such
unusual circumstances they would accept so promptly, so that by the
time they drove away I had begun to feel that I must have made this
hurried journey just to say good-by to my old mentor. In the hour, all
too brief, that remained to me my mother broached the subject of my
broken engagement, for in that she saw the reason of my melancholy,
which I had been at pains to conceal. It could not be hidden from her
quick eyes. She was convinced that Gladys Todd was not in her right
mind; no woman in her right mind would deliberately refuse to marry
such a man as her son. Was it a question of blood? Surely there was
none better in the land than that which flowed in the veins of the
McLaurins. Was it money? There was no finer farm in all the valley
than the one which some day would be mine, with the bridge stock and
the Kansas bonds. Was it character? Recalling the Sunday afternoons
when she and I had worked together so patiently over the catechism and
Bible lessons, she was sure that she had done her duty toward me and
could never dream of my having failed in mine. So, to my mother's
thinking, the loss was Gladys Todd's, a consoling view of my plight
which she endeavored to make me take, and she sought to cheer me with a
highly uncomplimentary estimate of the frivolous character of my
quondam fiancée. It could serve no purpose for me to enlighten her as
to the real truth, for did she know the truth she might be haunted by
the dread spectre of self-destruction. So her last words as we parted
were an admonition to me not to think that all women were as blind and
as faithless as Gladys Todd.
Her arms were around my neck and she whispered in my ear, that even my
father might not hear her: "Davy, take Penelope. We McLaurins always
looked down on the Blights, but that makes no difference, Davy--take
Penelope."