[Footnote: From Scribner's Magazine, August, 1914.]
I
It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the
shivering young traveller from Boston, who had so confidently
counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge
Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform,
exposed to the full assault of nightfall and winter.
The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow fields and
ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues
of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and
sharpening its edge against the same bitter black and white
landscape. Dark, searching, and sword-like, it alternately muffled
and harried its victim, like a bullfighter now whirling his cloak
and now planting his darts. This analogy brought home to the young
man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat
in which he had faced the relatively temperate airs of Boston
seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak heights of
Northridge. George Faxon said to himself that the place was
uncommonly well named. It clung to an exposed ledge over the
valley from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it
with teeth of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping
against the wooden sides of the station. Other building there was
none: the village lay far down the road, and thither--since the
Weymore sleigh had not come--Faxon saw himself under the immediate
necessity of plodding through several feet of snow.
He understood well enough what had happened at Weymore: his
hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this
sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long
experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to
hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to
send for. Yet to say Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was perhaps too
crude a way of putting it. Similar incidents led him to think that
she had probably told her maid to tell the butler to telephone the
coachman to tell one of the grooms (if no one else needed him) to
drive over to Northridge to fetch the new secretary; but on a
night like this what groom who respected his rights would fail to
forget the order?
Faxon's obvious course was to struggle through the drifts to the
village, and there rout out a sleigh to convey him to Weymore; but
what if, on his arrival at Mrs. Culme's, no one remembered to ask
him what this devotion to duty had cost? That, again, was one of
the contingencies he had expensively learned to look out for, and
the perspicacity so acquired told him it would be cheaper to spend
the night at the Northridge inn, and advise Mrs. Culme of his
presence there by telephone. He had reached this decision, and was
about to entrust his luggage to a vague man with a lantern who
seemed to have some loose connection with the railway company,
when his hopes were raised by the sound of sleigh bells.
Two vehicles were just dashing up to the station, and from the
foremost there sprang a young man swathed in furs.
"Weymore?--No, these are not the Weymore sleighs."
The voice was that of the youth who had jumped to the platform--a
voice so agreeable that, in spite of the words, it fell
reassuringly on Faxon's ears. At the same moment the wandering
station-lantern, casting a transient light on the speaker, showed
his features to be in the pleasantest harmony with his voice. He
was very fair and very young--hardly in the twenties, Faxon
thought--but his face, though full of a morning freshness, was a
trifle too thin and fine-drawn, as though a vivid spirit contended
in him with a strain of physical weakness. Faxon was perhaps the
quicker to notice such delicacies of balance because his own
temperament hung on lightly vibrating nerves, which yet, as he
believed, would never quite swing him beyond the arc of a normal
sensibility.
"You expected a sleigh from Weymore?" the youth continued,
standing beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.
Mrs. Culme's secretary explained his difficulty, and the newcomer
brushed it aside with a contemptuous "Oh, Mrs. Culme!" that
carried both speakers a long way toward reciprocal understanding.
"But then you must be--" The youth broke off with a smile of
interrogation.
"The new secretary? Yes. But apparently there are no notes to be
answered this evening." Faxon's laugh deepened the sense of
solidarity which had so promptly established itself between the
two.
The newcomer laughed also. "Mrs. Culme," he explained, "was
lunching at my uncle's today, and she said you were due this
evening. But seven hours is a long time for Mrs. Culme to remember
anything."
"Well," said Faxon philosophically, "I suppose that's one of the
reasons why she needs a secretary. And I've always the inn at
Northridge," he concluded.
The youth laughed again. He was at the age when predicaments are
food for gaiety.
"Oh, but you haven't, though! It burned down last week."
"The deuce it did!" said Faxon; but the humor of the situation
struck him also before its inconvenience. His life, for years
past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he
had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments,
to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement.
"Oh, well, there's sure to be somebody in the place who can put me
up."
"No one you could put up with. Besides, Northridge is three miles
off, and our place--in the opposite direction--is a little
nearer." Through the darkness, Faxon saw his friend sketch a
gesture of self-introduction. "My name's Frank Rainer, and I'm
staying with my uncle at Overdale. I've driven over to meet two
friends of his, who are due in a few minutes from New York. If you
don't mind waiting till they arrive I'm sure Overdale can do you
better than Northridge. We're only down from town for a few days,
but the house is always ready for a lot of people."
"But your uncle--?" Faxon could only object, with the odd sense,
through his embarrassment, that it would be magically dispelled by
his invisible friend's next words.
"Oh, my uncle--you'll see! I answer for HIM! I dare say you've
heard of him--John Lavington?"
John Lavington! There was a certain irony in asking if one had
heard of John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as
obscure as that of Mrs. Culme's secretary, the rumor of John
Lavington's money, of his pictures, his politics, his charities
and his hospitality, was as difficult to escape as the roar of a
cataract in a mountain solitude. It might almost have been said
that the one place in which one would not have expected to come
upon him was in just such a solitude as now surrounded the
speakers--at least in this deepest hour of its desertedness. But
it was just like Lavington's brilliant ubiquity to put one in the
wrong even there.
"Oh, yes, I've heard of your uncle."
"Then you WILL come, won't you? We've only five minutes to wait,"
young Rainer urged, in the tone that dispels scruples by ignoring
them; and Faxon found himself accepting the invitation as simply
as it was offered.
A delay in the arrival of the New York train lengthened their five
minutes to fifteen; and as they paced the icy platform Faxon began
to see why it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to
accede to his new acquaintance's suggestion. It was because Frank
Rainer was one of the privileged beings who simplify human
intercourse by the atmosphere of confidence and good humor they
diffuse. He produced this effect, Faxon noted, by the exercise of
no gift save his youth, of no art save his sincerity; but these
qualities were revealed in a smile of such appealing sweetness
that Faxon felt, as never before, what Nature can achieve when she
deigns to match the face with the mind.
He learned that the young man was the ward, and only nephew, of
John Lavington, with whom he had made his home since the death of
his mother, the great man's sister. Mr. Lavington, Rainer said,
had been "a regular brick" to him--"But then he is to every one,
you know"--and the young fellow's situation seemed in fact to be
perfectly in keeping with his person. Apparently the only shade
that had ever rested on him was cast by the physical weakness
which Faxon had already detected. Young Rainer had been threatened
with a disease of the lungs which, according to the highest
authorities, made banishment to Arizona or New Mexico inevitable.
"But luckily my uncle didn't pack me off, as most people would
have done, without getting another opinion. Whose? Oh, an awfully
clever chap, a young doctor with a lot of new ideas, who simply
laughed at my being sent away, and said I'd do perfectly well in
New York if I didn't dine out too much, and if I dashed off
occasionally to Northridge for a little fresh air. So it's really
my uncle's doing that I'm not in exile--and I feel no end better
since the new chap told me I needn't bother." Young Rainer went on
to confess that he was extremely fond of dining out, dancing, and
other urban distractions; and Faxon, listening to him, concluded
that the physician who had refused to cut him off altogether from
these pleasures was probably a better psychologist than his
seniors.
"All the same you ought to be careful, you know." The sense of
elder brotherly concern that forced the words from Faxon made him,
as he spoke, slip his arm impulsively through Frank Rainer's.
The latter met the movement with a responsive pressure. "Oh, I AM:
awfully, awfully. And then my uncle has such an eye on me!"
"But if your uncle has such an eye on you, what does he say to
your swallowing knives out here in this Siberian wild?"
Rainer raised his fur collar with a careless gesture. "It's not
that that does it--the cold's good for me."
"And it's not the dinners and dances? What is it, then?" Faxon
good-humoredly insisted; to which his companion answered with a
laugh: "Well, my uncle says it's being bored; and I rather think
he's right!"
His laugh ended in a spasm of coughing and a struggle for breath
that made Faxon, still holding his arm, guide him hastily into the
shelter of the fireless waiting room.
Young Rainer had dropped down on the bench against the wall and
pulled off one of his fur gloves to grope for a handkerchief. He
tossed aside his cap and drew the handkerchief across his
forehead, which was intensely white, and beaded with moisture,
though his face retained a healthy glow. But Faxon's gaze remained
fastened to the hand he had uncovered: it was so long, so
colorless, so wasted, so much older than the brow he passed it
over.
"It's queer--a healthy face but dying hands," the secretary mused;
he somehow wished young Rainer had kept on his glove.
The whistle of the express drew the young men to their feet, and
the next moment two heavily furred gentlemen had descended to the
platform and were breasting the rigor of the night. Frank Rainer
introduced them as Mr. Grisben and Mr. Balch, and Faxon, while
their luggage was being lifted into the second sleigh, discerned
them, by the roving lantern gleam, to be an elderly gray-headed
pair, apparently of the average prosperous business cut.
They saluted their host's nephew with friendly familiarity, and
Mr. Grisben, who seemed the spokesman of the two, ended his
greeting with a genial--"and many many more of them, dear boy!"
which suggested to Faxon that their arrival coincided with an
anniversary. But he could not press the inquiry, for the seat
allotted him was at the coachman's side, while Frank Rainer joined
his uncle's guests inside the sleigh.
A swift flight (behind such horses as one could be sure of John
Lavington's having) brought them to tall gateposts, an illuminated
lodge, and an avenue on which the snow had been levelled to the
smoothness of marble. At the end of the avenue the long house
loomed through trees, its principal bulk dark but one wing sending
out a ray of welcome; and the next moment Faxon was receiving a
violent impression of warmth and light, of hothouse plants,
hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak hall like a stage
setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small concise
figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly
unlike his rather florid conception of the great John Lavington.
The shock of the contrast remained with him through his hurried
dressing in the large impersonally luxurious bedroom to which he
had been shown. "I don't see where he comes in," was the only way
he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of
Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame
and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly
explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and
stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff
hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make
yourself at home--at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that
suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the
feat he urged on his visitor. "Any friend of Frank's ... delighted ...
make yourself thoroughly at home!"