On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
lunched and where, on leaving Farron’s office, he went. He had barely
finished ordering luncheon--oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
bottle of Rhine wine--when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
him, beaming.
“Haryer, Wilsey?” he said, without cordiality.
Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
only a moment or two to give to sociability.
“Haven’t seen you since that delightful evening,” he murmured. “I hope
Mrs. Baxter got my card.” He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
not munificent, but not negligible, either.
“Suppose she got it if you left it,” said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
comment on it. “My man’s pretty good at that sort of thing.”
“Ah, how rare they are getting!” said Wilsey, with a sigh--“good
servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I’m almost ready to go.”
“Because you can’t get good servants?” said his friend, who was drumming
on the table and looking blankly about.
“Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
that I value. I don’t think I’m a snob--”
“Of course you’re a snob, Wilsey.”
Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.
“What do you mean by the word?”
It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:
“I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
great-grandfather signed the Declaration.”
A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer’s face.
“I own,” he said, “that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
importance to being a New York Lanley.”
“I do,” answered Lanley; “but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
so. You’re proud of being proud of your old Signer.”
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, “Josiah Wilsey did not
sign the Declaration.”
“What!” cried Lanley. “You’ve always told me he did.”
Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.
“No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
if an attack of illness--”
Lanley gave a short roar.
“That’s just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn’t have signed it, either. You
would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--”
“As a matter of fact,” Wilsey began again even more coldly, “I should
have signed--”
“Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you’d sign a petition for
the eight-hour law.”
“Never!” said Wilsey, raising his hand. “I should never put my name to a
document--” He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
were worth arguing with on points of this sort.
When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
He actually chuckled a little. “So like Wilsey himself,” he thought. “No
moral courage; calls it conservatism.” Then his joy abated. Just so, he
thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
open-minded to Mrs. Wayne’s views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
banner the motto of which he didn’t wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, “I had supposed
Lanley was intelligent.” Never again had he had that professor’s
attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
but despair.
He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,--he was an extremely liberal
tipper; “it’s expected of us,” he used to say, meaning that it was
expected of people like the New York Lanleys,--and went away.
In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
take a local in rush hours. At three o’clock, however, even this was not
necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
visit Mrs. Wayne.
He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
the steep ascent.
She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
couldn’t for the life of her imagine why he had come.
“Come in,” she said, “though I’m afraid it’s a little cold in here. Our
janitor--”
“Let me light your fire for you,” he answered, and extracting a
parlor-match from his pocket,--safety-matches were his bugbear,--he
stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
and unhappy.
It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
anything to say.
“I saw your son in Farron’s office to-day.”
“Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!”
Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
Lanley said:
“And I hear he is dining at my daughter’s this evening.”
Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.
“I wondered, if you were alone--” Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
to him. “I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne, “but I can’t. I have a boy coming.
He’s studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn’t
touched a drop for two.”
He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
the scene at Adelaide’s; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady’s
drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
“I’m afraid I’m detaining you,” he said. The visit had been a failure.
“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more
sincerity: “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,”
she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying
to balance it.”
“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking
how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of
late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. “I don’t see how I
can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.
“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley. “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.
“It hasn’t been balanced since--dear me! not since October,” he said.
“I know; but I draw such small checks.”
“But you draw a good many.”
She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
observed severely:
“You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--”
“That’s always the way,” she interrupted. “Whenever people look at my
check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
there’s no time left for putting it right.”
“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really
help you--”
“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she
went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
through her like a knife.
The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
his own decreased.
He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
and rose to his feet.
“Mrs. Wayne,” he said, “I must tell you something.”
“You’re going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours.”
“I’m going to say something worse--more inexcusable. I’m going to tell
you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife.”
She pronounced only one syllable. She said, “_Oh_!” as crowds say it when
a rocket goes off.
“I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
but it’s not ridiculous, by Heaven! It’s tragic. I shouldn’t have
presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can’t
explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
haven’t everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
hope you will at least listen to me.”
“But you know it doesn’t make me suffer a bit,” said Mrs. Wayne.
“To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you--”
No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron’s
mother-in-law, and Pete’s grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
suitor’s nature.
“I should think you would be so lonely!” he said gently.
She nodded.
“I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
that”--she laughed--“I probably wouldn’t talk over if I had some one.
But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again.”
“You will always be first with me.”
“Even if I don’t marry you?”
“Whatever you do.”
Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
nothing--to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
perhaps she was right.
“I couldn’t marry you,” she said. “I couldn’t change. All your pretty
things and the way you live--it would be like a cage to me. I like my
life the way it is; but yours--”
“Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
to be like Mrs. Baxter?”
She laughed.
“You’d have a hard time. I never could have married again. I’d make you a
poor wife, but I’m a wonderful friend.”
“Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
for,” and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
uncertain. You don’t make any announcements to your friends or vows to
each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do. I suppose you think I’m an
old fool.”
“Two of us,” said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
had never felt the least shame about it.
It was a strange compact--strange at least for her, considering that only
a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
caution and candor, made her say:
“I’m so afraid you’ll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete.”
“I think I shall ask less than any one,” he returned.
The answer pleased her strangely.
Presently a ring came at the bell--a telegram. The expected guest was
detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
appeared to be delighted.
“Now you’ll stay to dine,” she said. “I can’t remember what there is
for dinner.”
“Now, that’s not friendly at the start,” said he, “to think I
care so much.”
“Well, you’re not like a theological student.”
“A good deal better, probably,” answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
one of many.
When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
stimulated by a respectful adoration.