"How mean of you!" she exclaimed, and laughed too.
She thrust back her soup.
"I don't want it. I don't want anything. I can't eat a mouthful. Then I
was wrong about his being a society dude?"
"Completely."
"And how is she? S'posing I've made a mistake about her, too?"
"I don't know, I'm sure. I've never seen her."
"You're telling me a fib."
"Ho, truly, I never have. I don't believe there's any such person. I
think she's somebody that the papers have just made up. How many people
have you found to work for?"
"Oh, three or four. But time for more. Rhyme, ain't it? I'm trying for
the Massachusetts Brass, but I'd rather get Ingles. She gave a dance at
Kinsley's night before last."
"How many words can you do?"
"About ninety--enough for business; of course I couldn't manage courts
or banquets or sermons. I expect she comes down to his office for a
check every now and then. Why don't she ever have her picture in the
Sunday papers?"
"O Lord! I hope they're above _that_!"
"What's the objection? I'd have mine there quicker 'n scat if I could.
I will some time--bet you. And not in any office togs either."
"But don't dream of rivalry. She isn't real; she's only a beautiful
myth. What will you take next--roast beef?"
"I don't mind; yes. When I'm alone I usually skip right from soup to
pie--or pudding. But I guess I will take something a little solider
this time; nothing makes me tireder than sitting still and fidgeting."
She tapped her toes on the mosaic pavement, and gave a hitch and a pat
to the dimity curtain alongside her. "I squirmed around for an hour,
with a whole bookful of other people's notes that I might have been
writing out. What sort of a young fellow is he?"
"He has his own way."
"Only child, I suppose?"
"N--no."
"Only son?"
"No--yes--I don't know. How do you like your work?"
"Middling. I'm terrible enterprising, but I guess I was never meant for
a drudge. Say, what does a patroness really do?"
"Oh, nothing much; she just has her name on the list. Sometimes they
don't even go."
"I notice that your Mrs. Floyd is beginning to be one; I've seen her in
the papers two or three times."
"She doesn't like it, though; sometimes names get put on just to fill
up. 'My dear Mrs. Floyd, we thought you wouldn't mind; you don't, do
you?' they say. 'But my name in the papers,' she objects. 'You are too
sensitive,' they reply. 'You've had your name in the papers at home,'
her husband reminds her. 'Yes,' she answers, 'but--here!' She hates the
town."
"Well, if I was a patroness I guess I'd have some say--no figure-head
for me. I wouldn't be put on, either; I'd put the others on."
"I see you were cut out for a 'society' career."
"I guess you've about struck it. I went to a dance a week ago
to-night--Periclean Pleasure Party."
"Like it?"
'Twa'n't much. And I was invited to a firemen's ball--such impudence!"
"Right--don't cheapen yourself."
"I guess I understand that."
Meanwhile a nooning of a different character was going on in the
directors' room of the Underground. This is not to be taken as
indicating that the green-baize plane of the long centre-table was
littered with reports and memoranda, and that the high-backed,
leather-seated chairs were filled with the solid figures of a dozen
solid men. No; the aspect of the room was that of Sunday-like
disoccupation, and the only people in it were an appealing young woman
and a stubborn old man.
"Let her come in, father; please do."
"Take care, Abbie. You know what I think of you, but you make a mistake
when you try this."
Abbie Brainard passed her handkerchief across her tearful face. Her
father stood before her with his legs spread wide and his feet firmly
planted; he had his hands thrust deeply into his trousers pockets. His
jaw was set, and his shaggy brows were drawn down over eyes that glared
fiercely at nothing.
"Then meet her out in the hall somewhere, just for a minute." She laid
her hand tremblingly upon the old man's arm. He moved, as if to shake
it off.
"Then just walk by outside; she can see you from the cab."
He turned his eyes upon her, half in expostulation and half in threat.
"Abbie!"
"Then, father, just step here to the window; she'll see you and know
it's all right. Come." She caught hold of a fold of his sleeve. "You
won't keep her waiting out there such a cold day as this?"
Brainard moved his feet, but he turned his back on the window and
fixed his eye on the fireplace. His daughter's light touch was quite
powerless on his huge bulk.
"Father, you know Burt says--"
"Abbie," he interrupted sharply, "don't you say a word to set me
against Burt. I won't hear it. Don't drag him in, or you'll be sorry
for it." "But, father, don't you understand? He _struck_ her; there's a
mark on her face now."
Brainard's great frame shook, but he made no other sign. This quiet she
took as a favorable symptom. She would have done better in perceiving
that he was between two contending forces so nearly equal as to hold
him almost in equilibrium. The wretch had struck his daughter--a
brutal, hateful thing as regarded his daughter or any daughter or any
other woman; but his daughter had defied him, overridden him, and the
man whom she had chosen for a master was now the instrument of her
punishment. The accounts appeared to balance. However, figures do lie,
and his own agitation indicated that the _x_ of human emotion had
not been completely eliminated from his problem.
[Illustration: "She laid her hand tremblingly upon the old man's arm."]
He cleared his throat. "She has made her bed, Abbie," he said in a
husky tone, "and now she must lie on it."
"No, father; you must hear what Burt says. He has had to go up there
and--"
"Burt? Is that where he has been this morning? Has he turned against
me too? Good God! what have I done to deserve such treatment as this?
First it's Mark, with his drawing and his trying to play the fiddle;
and then it's this pen-pusher that puts on those things Sundays and
marches around singing songs; and now it's Burt, who's had every chance
to make a good business-man of himself, and everything done for him.
It's too bad; it's too almighty bad."
Abbie steadied herself against the corner of the table. Her breast
heaved with fearfulness; she had never before openly protested to her
father against himself.
"Why haven't you done anything for the others? Why didn't you give
Mark an education?--the kind, I mean, that would have helped him, and
the only kind. Why haven't you taken this Mr.--Mayme's hus--this man
and made the best of it, and found something for him to do?--he can
work in an office. Oh, father," she moaned, with a softening note of
deprecation, "you have made it pretty hard for all of us."
"Abbie," he gasped, "are you turning against me too? Abbie, I've always
thought so much of you, and I've done well by you. But I want you to go
away--I won't see her. I won't. She must go away, and you too."
He caught her by the arm and tried to move her towards the
door--gently, as if she might go of her own accord.
Ogden, on coming in from lunch, found himself intercepted by Freddy
Pratt. This youth had a few moments' leisure, and he assailed Ogden
between the wardrobe and the wash-stand.
"I went over to see the Viberts again; last night," he communicated.
"Poor Mayme--I wasn't going back on her, if others did. She was sitting
there all alone in the dark. I guess she had been crying. Anyway, when
I lit the gas her eyes looked red. She wouldn't say much--"
"Good plan."
"And after he came in she wouldn't say hardly anything at all. Slow
work talking to _him!_ He wasn't drunk exactly, but he had been
drinking; didn't need a light to tell that. I wasn't doing anything at
all, and all of a sudden he blurted out, 'I say, you young fellow you,
what do you mean by coming here and destroying the peace of a man's
family?' You can bet I was taken back. Then he got up and came towards
me--he looked big, too! 'You get out of here'--that's what he said."
"And did you?"
"Oh, yes, I got out," responded Freddy Pratt, with a meek complacency.
"You surprise me. You showed sense."
Freddy looked at him doubtfully. "I heard this morning that he had just
lost his place with those insurance people," he resumed cautiously.
"That was what was the matter, I guess."
"Possibly," said George, who had heard from Brower that something
of the kind was likely to occur. The fellow's work had been done
indifferently of late, and he was far from being worth the increased
salary he had asked for.
As Ogden passed up to the other end of the office Brainard appeared in
the doorway of the directors' room and beckoned to him. His face was
pale and disturbed; the veins in the end of his nose showed redly; his
eyes burned with an appealing fierceness.
"Ogden," he said, in a loud, hoarse whisper, "where is that type-writer
girl? Tell her to bring some water here as quick as she can."
"She isn't here, sir; she has gone back upstairs."
"Then you get some yourself. Here; take this tumbler. Be quick, and
don't make any fuss."
Ogden hastened to the wash-stand near which Freddy Pratt had detained
him. Returning again, he saw through the half-open door that Abbie
Brainard was lying back in one of the big chairs with her face pallid
and her eyes closed.
Her father dipped two of his great, clumsy fingers into the glass
and made an awkward attempt to sprinkle her face. "My poor girl has
fainted," he said.
The girl's eyes half opened; she seemed to see Ogden standing just
outside.
She clutched both arms of the chair and raised herself half up. Her
bosom heaved; her mouth was drawn tensely.
"Fainted?" she tried to say; "not at all!" She gasped once or twice and
rose to her feet. "I never fainted in my life," she said grandly; "I
never should think of doing such a thing!"
She reeled; her eyes closed. George rushed forward to catch her.
Her hand dropped numb on his arm, and her head fell heavily on his
shoulder.
X
Ogden and his mother were now beginning to have frequent conferences
with regard to the management of the property and to McDowell's
connection with the matter. Perhaps the word "conference" puts,
however, too set and formal a stamp on the brief, hap-hazard
interchanges of ideas that took place, as chance permitted, within
McDowell's own house--a few words after a Sunday dinner or at the front
door late at night. And besides being handicapped as to occasion, they
were further hampered by McDowell's new relation to them and by their
own presence under his roof. Besides, Mrs. Ogden, with a multitude
of small experiences, had no ability for grasping things in a large
and general way; while George, with a broader and more comprehensive
outlook, was embarrassed by a lack of experience in the actual details
of business transactions. Added to this, he was a new-comer, under
all a new-comer's disadvantages; he hardly knew where to turn for the
proper agents, legal or financial, that might have been employed; while
many of the agencies--courts, for instance--were different in procedure
and even, in name from anything he had known East.
"All the same, though," he said to his mother, "things ought to be in
different shape for you. I'm bound hand and foot in that bank--no time
or thought for anything outside. I don't know but what you'd better put
everything with some good real-estate firm, and let them look after
repairs and collections and taxes."
His mother fixed a pair of anxious eyes upon him, and the wrinkles of
perplexity appeared on her forehead.
"Eugene is real-estate."
"Or those lawyers," he went on. "Anyway, you ought to have an account
as administratrix with some bank. I believe I'll open one to-morrow.
Something has got to be done to make things quicker and clearer."
He presently took upon himself the delicate task of intimating to
McDowell that a simpler and more regular way of doing things was
desired.
He went up to McDowell's office in the latter part of the afternoon. As
he entered, a tall, dark man was standing in the middle of the room.
There was a sinister look in his eyes and a contemptuously sarcastic
smile on his heavy red lips. He gave a last fold to a small piece of
paper that he held in his hands and thrust it into his vest pocket. It
was Vibert.
"It's pretty near four now," he was saying to McDowell, "so I can't try
again to-day; but I expect to find this all right after ten to-morrow
morning."
He gave his hand a hardy flip across one side of his dark moustache
and passed out. McDowell looked after him sourly. "Damn the brute!" he
muttered.
As Vibert's words implied, he had been in McDowell's office once before
on the same day. His salary at St. Asaph's now meant more to him than
it had meant a month ago, and he had called with reference to it and
to the delay in its payment. Hitherto, the financial arrangements
of the church had gone on with the same precision as its anthems
and its processionals. In the present condition of things delay to
Vibert was more than a surprise, more than an embarrassment; it was an
exasperation.
"I don't sing for glory," he had declared with an offensive
brusqueness. "It's the here and not the hereafter that I'm busy with."
McDowell looked at him uneasily. "I'm going to fix up all the salaries
next week in one batch. I don't see why any particular man should be
favored."
"Favored!" repeated Vibert, with a loud insolence. "I should say not.
I don't feel favored in running my legs off for money three weeks
overdue. We can't live on air. We have bills to pay. We ain't singing
for the pleasure of it."
McDowell contracted his eyes to a critical narrowness. "You may not be
singing much longer for anything else, either."
"That's another matter; it isn't you that put the choir together."
McDowell tapped his fingers on the yellow varnish of his desk. "I don't
know about that. From what I hear, you're not making the sort of record
for yourself that's useful in a church."
"My private life is nobody's business. I sing; I'm worth the money."
"That may work on the stage; it won't work quite so close to the
pulpit. Come, now; I know a little something of your daily doings.
Plenty of men sing who _don't_ hang around race-tracks and loaf in
pool-rooms. And, from what I hear, you're helping that young Brainard
along at a good gait, too. You'd better wait--along with the others."
"Waiting be hanged! I'm here for money--money that's mine. If I can't
work it with the man who pays out the loaves and fishes, I'll try one
of the men that contribute them, in the first place." He tossed his
head insultingly towards the door that led to Ingles's office.
McDowell's elbow rested on the edge of his desk (his thumb on the tip
of his ear and his middle finger rubbing his farther eyebrow) as he
looked out steadily on Vibert from under his hand. "Joseph," he called
to his clerk, "bring me that check-book."
[Illustration: "He looked steadily on Vibert from under his hand."]
The man opened a lower drawer and brought out a book whose covers
enclosed a number of stubs and three or four blank checks.
McDowell wrote and passed the check to Vibert, who went out with no
further words on either side.
McDowell did some figuring and saw some people, and somewhat later
Vibert returned. He threw his check on McDowell's desk contemptuously.
"That's no good."
"How's that?"
"No account with 'em."
"No ac--oh, I see. We've changed banks, and I forgot to change the
name in the check." He picked up a ruler and drew the red-ink-bottle
a little nearer. "I'll fix it. Sorry to have troubled you. We want to
look out for this, Joseph."
Vibert withdrew, speaking the words that Ogden had heard on his
entrance--words that would have been the reverse of assuring if he had
fully understood them. "Bad egg," said McDowell to him, wagging his
head in the direction of the just closed door.
George looked at him studiously. He appeared to be in a state of
extreme nervous irritation. His wiry moustache moved up and down
stiffly as he felt about with, his teeth for the inner membrane of his
lips. His long, lean fingers were interlaced, and a clicking sound came
from his snapping his finger-nails together. It was clearly no occasion
for more than a partial statement of Ogden's matter, and this was the
most that he permitted himself.
But McDowell was in the sensitive state of mind when one word does the
work of three, and in the irritable state of mind when talk is such a
relief that three words evoke thirty in reply. He met George's brief
and modest suggestions with a hitching of his shoulders, and answered
them in a harsh and strident tone.
"The first thing in doing business," he said, "is to have an office to
do it in." He looked about his own--his desks, his cashier's window,
his letter-press. "And the second is to know how to do it." He looked
out of the window in a wholly impersonal way, but his words had a more
personal slant than he would have given them at almost any other time.
"Gad knows I've got enough to do already, but Kittie's affairs are
mine. She has equal interests with the others, and she seems to feel
that I am able and willing to look after them."
He spoke with some show of reason, and George was obliged so to concede.
"There's taxes, for one thing. Or, take special assessments alone;
they're almost a business by themselves. Say you've got ten acres or
so just beyond the limits. Some fine day it's six hundred dollars or
more for half a mile of side-walk--a sidewalk that won't be walked
on by seven people a week. What's the reason? Oh, some one of those
township politicians or other has got a friend that's a carpenter. Now,
who's going to tackle the boards and stave off such things?"
George looked at him silently.
"There's tax-sales--I guess you never went to one of them. You'd strike
a bloodthirsty crew if you did. Supposing you've got a mortgage, and
the mortgager don't come to time with his taxes? You've got to buy 'em
up to protect yourself. And you've got to get there first. Last year I
fought this point for a week with one of those tax-sharks. And so it
goes. Real estate is no kindergarten business, I can tell you."
The truth of this view was becoming more and more apparent to Ogden. He
withdrew, after some further parleyings, in a confused and inconclusive
state of mind--well convinced, however, of McDowell's abilities and
more fully conscious of McDowell's position as the husband of his
father's daughter. Never did the town of his adoption seem less,
indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to
dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over
to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of
ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands
of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs,
seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares
of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring
and wary game. And through the middle of the board ran a line, a hinge,
a crack--the same line that loomed up in ad those various deeds and
abstracts of his with the portentousness and unescapability of the
equator--the "line of the third principal meridian."
The Brainard house reared itself in the same frivolous ugliness that
we have already viewed; but an excess of light came through the front
parlor windows, and Ogden was prepared to find that at least four of
the eight burners in the big chandelier were lighted. This turned out
to be the case; it was as great a tribute as the family ordinarily paid
to society. The family he found represented by Brainard, his wife, and
his elder daughter; society was present in the shape of a young couple
who were called Mr. and Mrs. Valentine.
The elder daughter received him with a quiet and simple cordiality. He
could not help looking about furtively for the possible presence of
the younger. He had not remained ignorant of her half-hour wait in a
cab outside the bank; but he might have surmised the inflexibility of
her father's will. The old man had refused to see her or to let her
see him; the most that he would yield was a species of non-committal
communication through Burt.
Mrs. Brainard presented herself to Ogden as a peculiarly faded and
ineffective person; it was easy enough to grant her an abysmal
incapacity. Her husband, in fact, had fallen upon her, crushed her,
absorbed her--as a heavy blotting-pad falls on a page of light and
delicate writing. Except for one thing she had no aim, no occupation,
no diversion--beyond her ills and remedies. This was a penchant for
chess. To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may
simply put the question: have you ever seen it taken up by an elderly,
invalided female who has rested content with a mere learning of the
moves? It was thus with Mrs. Brainard; she played a good many games
with herself every day, and they really soothed and rested her.
On the social board, however, she had hardly learned the first
"opening," and the entertainment of the brilliant young couple now in
her house fell almost altogether on Abbie; for the girl's mother sank
back into a passive silence, while her father toured through the rooms
occasionally, and threw out remarks, more or less _à propos_, in a
gruff and abrupt fashion peculiar to himself.
His manner with young men had simply closed the house to them. To
him it was an inexplicable and harassing thing that a young fellow
of twenty-five should not possess the capacity, experience, and
accumulations of a man of thirty-five or forty. He regarded every
intruder in the light of a potential son-in-law, and no more potential
than undesirable. Most of these callers would gulp down once, with such
smile as they could master, the old man's abrupt ways and disconcerting
comments; then they got out of the house in good order and never came
back. However, at the present juncture he did not appear to resent
Ogden's appearance--notwithstanding the young man's share in the
episode at the bank; perhaps he looked upon him as a serviceable prop
in another bad quarter of an hour.
"Yes, Mr. Brainard," Mrs. Valentine was saying, as George entered,
"it's just as I have been telling Abbie; you ought to move over on the
North Side, too."
Brainard happened to be passing through the room; it had occurred to
him that he might turn down one of the side-burners in the back parlor.
"Um, no," he said, in an off-hand way; "too near the lake: fog; damp;
rheumatism."
"And pneumonia too, perhaps," his wife suggested feebly.
"I'll risk it!" cried Mrs. Valentine, vivaciously. She had an expansive
and affluent effect; she appeared mettlesome, decisive, confident.
"It seemed to me that, so long as I was going to build, I might as
well make a complete sweep--an out-and-out break. I've always had a
fancy for that part of town. So I sent Adrian around to the different
offices--"
She threw a look of passing reference towards her husband, who made a
little bow in return.
"--and I had the good luck to get a lot on Bellevue Place--one of the
last left, and only a block from the Lake Shore drive. Then I went to
Mr. Atwater, and he has made my house a perfect little dream! I thought
it best to have him to dinner once or twice, and I'm glad I did--he's
been so interested all through. There hasn't been the least hitch to
speak of, and I expect to get in within a fortnight. This," she went
on, turning to Ogden with an undiminished vivacity, "is really my P. P.
C."
Ogden glanced at the husband of the lady whose use of the first
person singular was so frank and continuous. He was a young man with
a pleasant and amiable face, and that face was set in a meek little
smile, from whose forced lines the element of deception was most
pitifully lacking.
"Yes, Abbie dear," Mrs. Valentine went on, "I'm afraid it's good-by--or
nearly the same thing." She took the girl's hand within her own and
gave it repeated pats in a rather careless and self-absorbed way. "I
shall try to see you often, of course; but it will be so far. How nice
it would be if you could only come up there and settle down right next
door to me."
Ogden sighed unconsciously. He had fancied the first rays of social
illumination as falling upon this benighted family; but it was only the
last faint glow of a Speeding twilight, after all.
Abbie withdrew _her_ hand with a quiet dignity; she seemed to put but a
moderate value on these protestations.
"I believe we are satisfied where we are, Fanny," she said in a low and
even tone. "We have always lived here; we feel more at home in this
house than we could anywhere else. All our--all our--friends are near
us"--a desolate little blush came in here--"and then there's the church
and everything. I've heard my sis--I'm told that the North Side is very
pleasant on some accounts, but I don't think we are likely ever to
change."
"Change!" called her father, suddenly. "I wouldn't live anywhere else
if you paid me to. What's better than this?"
"So attached," murmured her mother, vaguely.
Mrs. Valentine continued for some time further to flutter her hands,
her clothing, and her conversation, but she was very slow about getting
up and fluttering away. She was a neighbor, and her return home was
a matter of three minutes. Ogden's return was a matter of nearly an
hour, and he left first. He carried away the discontented feeling of
a young man whose aim in the direction of a young woman is frustrated
by the presence of uncongenial elders and irrelevant outsiders. He
had been quite certain of his ability to meet Abbie Brainard after
the bank episode without any particular embarrassment or restraint;
certainly he had come to view with more interest a girl whose hand
had lain in his and whose head had rested on his shoulder. There had
been no embarrassment in her greeting of him; her manner had been as
straightforward and sensible as it always was. But never mind; he
should try again; he was only too certain of soon finding her alone.
He took his hour through the clamor and the slime of the public ways.
He escaped from these by his talismanic night-key, and stumbled up
thoughtfully to his room.
There was a light burning in it, and the fireplace showed the faint
red of dying coals. A valise, open and half unpacked, stood in the
middle of the floor, and sitting up in bed was Brower, busy with the
last volume of "Monte Cristo." They now occupied a large front room
together, which Ogden had to himself a good half of the time.
"Back, are you?" said George. "When did you get in?"
"About seven."
"How's Missouri?"
"Weather good; eating bad."
"Heading all this time?"
"Went to theatre."
"What did you see?"
"'Crackling of Thorns.'"
"Any good?"
"Hot much; one pretty girl. Where have _you_ been?"
"West Side; Brainard's."
"Anybody there?"
"The old people. And some friends--Valentines."
"Valentine? I used to know a Valentine--nice, quiet fellow, light
complexion. His name was Alpheus--no, Adrian."
"That's the one."
"Poor fellow! he deserved a better fate."
"What's the matter with him?"
"His wife owns him."
George smiled. Brower hitched himself up on his pillow and put his
finger into the book to keep the place. "He was a first-rate fellow
--good all through and kind of capable; that is, he was worth a
salary of eighteen hundred a year--or two thousand. He married a
girl with two thousand a month. No head book-keeper, no cashier,
no secretary could she let him be after that; no, Johnny must be
his own master--except as regarded her. To-day he sort o' hangs on
the outskirts of business, and picks up a little here and a little
there--he has desk-room somewhere in the Clifton, I believe. He does
the best he can to preserve his self-respect, but I don't see how he
can pay the bills and the house-rent too."
"House-rent? They're building--I mean, _she_ is."
"Yaugh!" cried Brower, with deep meaning.
"Atwater's doing the house for them--for her."
"Atwater?" Brower gave a second hitch to the pillow, and threw the book
to the foot of the bed. "He's another. He's had a trip in the same
boat."
"Why, he isn't married."
"I guess he is--just about as hard as any man ever was. But he has
fought through gallantly--I'll say that for him."
"What's _his_ story?"
"Begins in the same way. She was rich, too, and a high-flyer. He had
education and family and his profession--and no money. He struggled up
for ten years, and now--now he stands on his own legs; his wife has her
own money for her clothes and amusements. He saw he had got to strike
society, and he struck it--hard; he costs like smoke. But he snatched
victory from defeat. It was a great act. Speaking of acts--who do you
think I saw there in a stage-box to-night?"
"Who?"
"Burt Brainard. Just kick that valise out of the way if you want to."
"All alone?"
"Hope. Girl with him. One of the Clifton type-writers--the one who used
to be down in the lunch-room."
"Healie McNabb?"
"U'm h'm."