Aunt Mary dropped the paper with a gasp.
Lucinda looked at her with interest.
“It’s that same arm again,” said Aunt Mary, “just as I thought it was
settled for!” Her eyes seemed to fairly crackle with indignation. “Why
don’t she put it in a sling an’ have a little patience?”
Lucinda took the telegram and read it.
“’Pears like she can’t,” she commented, in a tone like a buzz saw;
“’pears like it’s goin’ to be took off.”
Aunt Mary reached forth her hand for the telegram and after a second
reading shook her head in a way that, if her companion had been a
globe-trotter, would have brought matadores and Seville to the front in
her mind in that instant.
“I declare,” she said, “seems like I had enough on my mind without a
cook, too. What’s to be done now? I only know one thing! I ain’t goin’
to pay no thousand dollars this week for no arm that wasn’t worth but
three hundred last week. Stands to reason that there ain’t no reason in
that. I guess you’d better bring me my desk, Lucinda; I’m goin’ to
write to Mr. Stebbins, an’ I’m goin’ to write to Jack, and I’m goin’ to
tell ’em both just what I think. I’m goin’ to write Jack that he’d
better be lookin’ out, and I’m goin’ to write to Mr. Stebbins that next
time he settles things I want him to take a receipt for that arm in
full.”
The letters were duly written and Mr. Stebbins, upon the receipt of
his, redoubled his efforts, and did succeed in permanently settling
with the cook, the arm being eventually saved. Aunt Mary regarded the
sum as much higher than necessary, but still pleasantly less than that
demanded of her, and so life in general moved quietly on until Easter.
But Easter is always a period of more or less commotion in the time of
youth and leads to various hilarious outbreaks. Jack’s Easter took him
to town for a “little time,” and the “little time” ended in the
station-house at three o’clock on Sunday morning.
Accusation: Producing concussion of the brain on a cab driver.
Chapter Two
Jack
The news was conveyed to Aunt Mary through private advices from Mr.
Stebbins (who had been hastily summoned to the city for purposes of
bail); she was very angry indeed, this time—primarily at the indignity
done her flesh and blood by arresting it. Then, as she re-read the
lawyer’s letter, other reflections crowded to the fore in her mind.
“Funny! Whatever could have made the boy get up and go downtown at
three in the morning, anyway?” she said. “Seems kind of queer, don’t
you think, Arethusa? Do you suppose he was ill and huntin’ for a drug
store?”
Arethusa had been sent for the second day previous because Lucinda’s
youngest sister’s youngest child had come down with scarlet fever, and
the family wanted Lucinda to enliven the quarantine. Arethusa had sent
invitations out for a dinner party, but she had recalled them and
hastened to obey the summons. It was an evil hour for her, for she
loved her brother and was mightily distressed at the bad news.
“I don’t believe he can have been ill,” she said, at the top of her
voice; “if he’d been ill he wouldn’t have had the strength to hit the
cab driver so hard.”
“I don’t blame him for hittin’ the cab driver,” said Aunt Mary warmly.
“As near as I can recollect, I’ve often wanted to do that myself. But I
can’t make out where he got the man to hit, or why he was there to hit
him. I can’t make rhyme or reason out of it. I wish we knew more. Well,
I presume we will, later.”
Her surmise was correct. They knew much more later. They knew more from
Mr. Stebbins, and they knew profusely more from the evening papers.
“I think our boy’d better have come home for his Easter,” Aunt Mary
remarked, with a species of angry undertow threading the current of her
speech. “There’s no sayin’ what this will cost before we’re done with
it.”
Arethusa choked; it was all so very terrible to her.
“What is it that the cabman wants, anyhow?” her aunt demanded
presently.
“He doesn’t want anything,” yelled the unhappy sister. “He’s going to
die.”
“Well, who is going to sue me, then?”
“It’s his wife; she wants five thousand dollars damages.”
Aunt Mary’s lips tightened.
“Five thousand dollars!” she said, with a bitter patience. “I can see
that this is goin’ to be an awful business. Five thousand dollars!
Dear, dear! I must say that that wife sets a pretty high price on her
husband—at least, a’cordin’ to my order of thinkin’, she does. From
what I’ve seen of cabmen, I’d undertake to get her another just as good
for a tenth of the money, any day.”
Arethusa was silent, staring thoughtfully at the newspaper cuts of a
great Tammany leader and a noted pugilist, which had been labeled as
the principals in the family tragedy.
Aunt Mary turned over another of the many papers received, and scanned
its sensational columns afresh.
“Arethusa,” she exclaimed suddenly, “do you know, I bet anythin’ I know
what this editor means to insinuate? It just strikes me that he’s
tryin’ to give the impression that our boy’s been drinkin’.”
“Perhaps so,” Arethusa screamed.
“Well, I don’t believe it,” said Aunt Mary firmly, “and I ain’t goin’
to believe it. And I ain’t goin’ to pay no five thousand dollars for no
cabman’s brains, neither. You write to Mr. Stebbins to compromise on
two or maybe three.”
She stopped and bit her lips and shook her head. “I don’t see why Jack
grows up so hard,” she murmured, half in anger and half in sorrow.
“Edward and Henry never had such times. Oh, well,” she sighed, “boys
will be boys, I suppose; an’ if this all results in the boy’s settlin’
down it’ll be money well spent in the end, after all.
Maybe—probably—most likely.”
The days that followed were anxious days, but at last the cabman
rallied and concluded not to die, and Jack went off yachting with a
light heart and a choice collection of good advice from Mr. Stebbins
and Aunt Mary.
Nothing happened to mar his holiday. He ran a borrowed steam launch on
to some rocks with rather heavy consequences to his aunt’s exchequer,
and returned from the West Indies so late that she never had a visit
from him at all that summer; but, barring these slightly unwelcome
incidents, he did remarkably well, and when he returned to college in
the fall he was regarded as having become, at last, a stable
proposition.
“I wonder whether our boy’s comin’ home for Christmas?” Aunt Mary asked
her niece, Mary, as that happy period of family reunions drew near.
Mary had come up to stay with her aunt while Lucinda went away to bury
a second cousin. Mary was very different from Arethusa, having a voice
that, when raised, was something between an icicle and a steam whistle,
and a temperament so much on the order of her aunt’s that neither could
abide the other an hour longer than was absolutely necessary. But
Arethusa had a sprained ankle, so there was no help for existing
circumstances.
“No, he isn’t,” said Mary, who had no patience at all with her brother,
and showed it. “He’s going West with the glee club.”
“With the she club!” cried poor Aunt Mary, in affright.
Mary explained.
“I don’t like the idea,” said the old lady, shaking her head.
“Somethin’ will be sure to happen. I can feel it runnin’ up and down my
bones this minute.”
“Oh, if he can get into trouble, of course, Jack will,” said Mary
cheerfully.
Aunt Mary didn’t hear her, because she didn’t raise her voice
particularly. Besides, the old lady was absorbed for the nonce in the
most dismal sort of prognostications.
And they all came true, too. Something unfortunate beyond all
expectations came to pass during the glee club’s visit to Chicago, and
the result was that, before the new year was well out of its incubator
Jack had papers in a breach-of-promise suit served on him. He wrote Mr.
Stebbins that it was all a joke, and had merely been a portion of that
foam which a train of youthful spirits are apt to leave in their wake;
but the girl stood solid for her rights, and, as she had never heard
from her fiancé since the night of the dance, her family—who were
rural, but sharp—thought it would take at least fifteen thousand
dollars to patch the crack in her heart. If the news could have been
kept from Aunt Mary until after Mr. Stebbins had looked into the
matter, everything might have resulted differently. But the Chicago
lawyer who had the case took good care that the wealthy aunt knew all
as quickly as possible, and it seemed as if this was the final straw
under which the camel must succumb.
And Aunt Mary did appear to waver.
“Fifteen thousand dollars!” she cried, aghast. “Heaven help us! What
next?”
It was Lucinda who was seated calmly opposite at this crisis.
“Do you suppose he really did it?” the aunt continued, after a minute
of appalled consideration.
“It’s about the only thing he ain’t never done,” the tried and true
servant answered, her tone more gratingly penetrative than ever.
Aunt Mary eyed her sharply, not to say furiously.
“I wish you’d give a plain answer when I ask you a plain question,
Lucinda,” she said coldly. “If you’d ever got a breach-of-promise suit
in the early mail you’d know how I feel. Perhaps—probably.”
“I ain’t a doubt but what he done it,” Lucinda screamed out; “an’ if I
was her an’ he wouldn’t marry me after sayin’ he would I’d sue him for
a hundred thousand, an’ think I let him off cheap then.”
Aunt Mary deigned to smile faintly over the subtlety of this speech;
but the next minute she was frowning blacker than ever.
“A girl from Kalamazoo, too, just up in Chicago for a week—just up in
Chicago long enough to come down on me for fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Maybe she’ll take five thousand instead,” Lucinda remarked.
“Maybe!” ejaculated her mistress, in fine scorn. “Maybe! Well, if you
don’t talk as if money was sweet peas an’ would dry up if it wasn’t
picked!”
Lucinda screwed up her face.
Aunt Mary gave her one awful look.
“You get me some paper an’ my desk, Lucinda,” she said. “I think it’s
about time I was takin’ a hand in it myself. I’ve been pretty patient,
an’ I don’t see as it’s helped matters any. Now I’m goin’ to write that
boy a letter that’ll settle him an’ his cats, an’ his cooks, an’ his
cabmen, an’ his Kalamazoo, just once for all. I guess I can do what I
set out to do. Pretty generally—most always.”
Lucinda brought the desk, and Aunt Mary frowned fearfully and began to
write the letter.
It developed very strongly. As her pen sized up the situation in black
and white, the old lady seemed to realize the iniquities of the case
more and more plainly; and as the letter grew her wrath grew also. The
whole came, in the end, to a threat—made in good earnest—to take a very
serious step indeed if any more “foolishness” developed.
Aunt Mary prided herself on her granite-like will. She had full faith
in her ability to slay her nearest and dearest if it seemed right and
best to do so.
She sealed her letter tight, stuck the stamp on square and hard, and
bid Lucinda convey it to Joshua and tell him never to quit it until he
saw it safe on to the evening train.
“She’s awful mad at him for sure, this time,” said Lucinda after she
had delivered her message, and while Joshua was considering the front
and back of the letter with a deliberateness born of long servitude.
“I sh’d think she would be,” he said.
As nearly all of Jack’s private difficulties were printed in every
newspaper in America, Joshua naturally was on the inside of all their
history.
“She scrinched up her face just awful over that letter,” Lucinda
continued. “I’m sure I wish he’d ’a’ been by to ’a’ taken warnin’.”
“He ain’t got nothin’ to really fret over,” said Joshua serenely; “he
knows it, ’n’ I know it, ’n’ you know it, too.”
“You don’t know nothin’ of the sort,” said Lucinda. “She’s madder’n
usual this time. She’s good an’ mad. You mark my words, if he goes off
on a ’nother spree this spring he’ll get cut out o’ her will.”
Joshua laughed.
“You mark my words!” rasped Lucinda, shaking her finger in witchlike
warning.
Joshua laughed again.
“Them laughs best what laughs last,” said Aunt Mary’s handmaiden. She
turned away, and then returned to give Joshua a look that proved that
the peppery mistress had inculcated some cayenne into the souls of
those about her. “You mark my words—them laughs best what laughs last,
an’ there’ll be little grinnin’ for him if he ain’t a chalk-walker for
one while now.”
Joshua laughed.
But, as a matter of fact, Jack’s situation was suddenly become
extremely precarious.
“There ain’t no sense in it,” said Aunt Mary to herself, with an
emphasis that screwed her face up until she looked quite like Lucinda;
“that life those young men lead on their little vacations is to blame
for everything. Cities are wells of iniquity; they’re full of all kinds
of doin’s that respectable people wouldn’t be seen at, and I’m proud to
say that I haven’t been in one myself for twenty-five years. I’m a
great believer in keepin’ out of trouble, an’ if Jack’d just stuck to
college an’ let towns go, he’d never have met the cabman and the
Kalamazoo girl, an’ I’d have overlooked the cook an’ the cat. As it is,
my patience is done. If he goes into one more scrape he’ll be done too.
I mean what I say. So my young man had better take warnin’.
Probably—most likely—pretty certainly.”
Chapter Three
Introducing Jack
It has been previously stated that Aunt Mary’s nephew, Jack, was a
scapegrace, and as delightful as scapegraces generally are. It goes
without saying that he was good-looking; and of course he must have
been jolly and pleasant or he wouldn’t have been so popular. As a
matter of fact, Jack was very good-looking, unusually jolly, and
uncommonly popular. He was one of the best liked men in each of the
colleges which he had attended. There was something so winning about
his smile and his eternal good humor that no one ever tried to dislike
him; and if anyone ever had tried he or she would not have succeeded
for very long. It is probably very unfortunate that the world is so
full of this type of young man, but that which should cause us all to
have infinite patience with them is the reflection of how much more
unfortunate it would be if they were suddenly eliminated from the
general scheme of things.
Like all college boys, Jack had a chum. The chum was Robert Burnett,
another charming young fellow of one-and-twenty, whose education had
been so cosmopolitan in design and so patriotic in practice that he
always said “Sacre bleu” and “Donnerwetter” when he thought of it, and
“Great Scott” when he didn’t. He and Jack were as congenial a pair as
ever existed, and they had just about as much in common as the aunt of
the one and the father of the other had had to pay for.
In the February of the year of which I write, Washington, celebrating
his birthday as usual, gave all American students their usual chance to
celebrate with him. Celebrations were temptations incarnate to Jack,
and he was feeling frowningly what a clog Aunt Mary’s latest epistle
was upon his joys, when his friend came to the rescue with an
invitation to spend the double holiday (it doubled that year—Sunday,
you know) at the brand-new ancestral castle which Burnett père had just
finished building for his descendants. It may be imagined that Jack
accepted the invitation with alacrity, and that his never-very-downcast
heart bounded gleefully higher than usual over the prospect of two days
of pleasure in the country.
It is not necessary to state where the castle of the Burnetts was
erected, but it was in a beautiful region, and the monthly magazines
had written it up and called it an architectural triumph. The owner
fully agreed with the monthly magazines, and his pride found vent in a
house-warming which filled every guest chamber in the place.
The festivities were in full swing before the youngest son and his
friend arrived; and when the dog-cart, which brought them from the
station, drew up under the mighty porte-cochère with its four stone
lions, rampant in four different directions, Jack felt one of those
delicious thrills which run through one under particularly hopeful and
buoyant circumstances.
“It’s like walking in a novel,” his friend said; as they entered under
some heavy draperies which the footman pushed aside and found a tiny
spiral staircase, which wound its way aloft in a style that Jack liked
immensely and the latter agreed with all his heart.
The staircase led them to the third floor and when they emerged
therefrom they found themselves in a big semi-circular billiard room,
with a fireplace at each end large enough to put one of the tables in,
and cues and counters and stools and divans and smoking utensils
sufficient for a regiment.
“I tell you, this is the way to do things,” exclaimed Burnett; “isn’t
it jolly? Time of your life, old man, time of your life!—And, oh, by
the way,” he said, suddenly interrupting himself, “I wonder if my
sister’s got here yet!”
“Which sister?” Jack inquired; for his friend was one of a very large
family, and he had met several of them on their various visits to town.
“Betty—the one who beats all the others hollow,”—but just there the
conversation was broken off by the servants coming up with the luggage
and setting two doors open that showed them two big rooms, both
exquisitely furnished, and both with windows that looked out, first on
to a stone balustrade, and secondly on to a superb view over the river
and the mountains beyond.
The men unstrapped the things and went away, leaving such a plenitude
of comfort behind them as led Jack to fling himself into the most
luxurious chair in the room and stretch his arms and legs far and wide
in utter contentment.
Burnett was fishing for his key ring.
“It’s a great old place, isn’t it?” he remarked parenthetically. “Great
Scott! but I’ll bet we have fun these two days! And if my sister Betty
is here—” He paused expressively.
“Doesn’t she live at home?” Jack asked.
“She’s just come home; she’s been in England for three years. Oh, but I
tell you she’s a corker!”
“I should think—”
The sentence was never completed because a voice without the
not-altogether-closed door cried:
“No, don’t think, please; let me come in instead.” And in the same
instant Burnett made one leap and flung the door open, crying as he did
so:
“Betty!”
Then Jack, bunching somewhat his starfish attitude, looked across the
room and realized instantly that it was all up with him forever after.