McDowell's second check to Vibert proved good on the opening of
business next morning. It was paid in the usual mechanical and
impersonal fashion that gives no possible clue to the amount of the
balance remaining after; but paid it was, all the same, and Vibert's
anticipated opportunity for further invective--an opportunity which he
considered quite possible, and would have been by no means sorry to
embrace--came to naught.
McDowell's friendly intimation that St. Asaph's might presently
dispense with Vibert's services was soon found to have as solid a
backing as his signature. Within less than a fortnight Vibert was
dismissed, though on grounds not altogether the same as those that
McDowell had figured upon.
If Vibert, after descending to the ground floor, had immediately
crossed the great court of the Clifton instead of lingering there for
a moment, the outcome might have been quite different. But he paused
in the midst of its mosaicked expanse to pull out the check from his
pocket and to take another look at it. He projected his vision so
far into the future as the next forenoon, and saw the check again
rejected--this time by the teller of the Highflyers'--by reason of
"no account," or perhaps by reason of "no funds." He dramatized a
precipitous visit to McDowell's office, and improvised the scene of
denunciation and vigorous action that was to accompany it.
"It had better be good this time," he muttered, with his eyes on the
pavement. "I'll strangle him if it ain't."
He tossed up his head and sent a fierce and frowning glance through one
of the great plates of French glass that shut in the court. His eye
darted forward on its own level, but it saw nothing save McDowell in
his office, ten or twelve floors above.
Most of the panes that enclosed this central space were of great height
and breadth, and were lettered with the silvered styles and titles of
various railroad and mining companies; others, smaller, gave light and
some ventilation to a few booth-like shops; a few others, immovable
half-lights, admitted a little daylight and no air at all to certain
closet-like crannies that had a squeezed and crowded rôle in the
Clifton's general economy. One of these last looked out from under a
kind of secondary stairway; it lighted the scullery of the Acme Lunch
Room, and it commanded a view of that side of the court on which Vibert
was standing.
Vibert's heel gave a vicious dig into the mosaic pavement and made a
quick and rasping turn towards the exit; he crossed the court with a
heavy yet rapid stride, and passed out into the street. He was quite
unconscious of observation, but he had been seen.
Through the half-pane under the stairway a young woman had noted
his presence and witnessed his departure. She was a thin, faded
creature, in the forlorn garments of an undisguisable poverty. All
but the faintest traces of good looks seemed to have been taken from
her by a long experience with illness and suffering. She stood close
against the pane. Her thin fingers, red and chapped, showed, as they
pressed against the glass, the crinkled puffiness that comes from long
immersion in hot water, and she stared through with a look of mingled
fear, entreaty, and agony. At the glance which Vibert's indignation
over McDowell's trickery sent in her direction, she started and cowered
like one who had encountered that glance before; and when he turned to
go she recovered herself, and flung her bosom and her hands against the
pane as if bent upon breaking through and following him.
A moment later she appeared in the court; she had put on a shabby hat
and a flimsy, faded shawl. She crossed over hastily, and approached the
head of the elevator squad.
"The tall, dark man who just went out--you saw him?" she inquired
hurriedly. She spoke in two quick-expulsions of the breath, and seemed
left without a third.
"Um?" The man opposed his gold band and gilt buttons to her forlorn
and bedraggled shabbiness. His brief inquiry, made without opening his
lips, had the true official indifference; but it caused his questioner
to feel some of the disadvantage that comes to a young woman from a
public and impulsive inquiry after a young man.
"You saw him standing over there; he had a paper in his hand. Tell me,
does he work in this building?" She was panting and all a-tremble, but
she found breath for these words and will to use it.
"Yes, I saw him," the man answered, with the slow reluctance of his
kind to be interested in individuals as individuals. "Used to work
here, I believe. Haven't seen much of him lately."
"Where can I find him?"
The man turned towards the elevators; one had just that minute come
down. "Chicago!" its youthful conductor had called with an airy drawl.
"Pete," said his superior; "a tall, dark man who's been standing around
here." He threw his thumb over towards the girl, to indicate that the
inquiry was hers. "Had on a soft brown hat."
"Yes, I seen him," said the boy. "Used to be in one of them insurance
offices, didn't he? Vibert--was that his name?"
"Vi--?"
"Vibert," said the man, impatiently. "Come, come, don't block the
way--sev-en!" he cried, in his professional tone, and the boy at once
slammed his door to and started roofwards.
The man retired into himself with a resumption of his air of idle
dignity. The girl, at a short remove, stood looking at him with an
anxious face. She made a timid attempt to approach him again and
presently stole away.
Vibert was followed down from McDowell's office, in the course of half
an hour, by Ogden. McDowell's dissertation on tax matters, with its
pointed presentation of extreme cases, had left him, as we have seen,
in a state more or less stirred up; and it had occurred to him that if
he were to stop on the way down he might find some legal sedative in
the office of Freeze & Freeze. But the hour was now rather late; Freeze
& Freeze were being locked up by the last of their junior clerks;
and Ogden was left to ramble through the corridors in a confused and
disconsolate state.
He was presently accosted by a young woman, who appeared to be roaming
through the building in a state even more dazed and forlorn than his
own. She approached him with appeal so plainly written on her features
that his hand went instinctively to his pocket for the ready dime. He
was used to addresses of this sort; Brower had told him many times
that he was a "soft mark." He soon ascertained, however, that what she
wanted was not alms, but information--an appeal which is more familiar
still in the great down-town buildings; it comes frequently enough from
simple, inexperienced creatures who know what they want, but not at all
how to get it.
The girl thrust back a straggling lock and gave him a glance both wild
and timid.
"Please, sir," she said, "do you know any one in this building named
Vibert--in an insurance office?" She pronounced the name with an effort
of overcoming its strangeness.
There was a certain primitiveness in her speech; it was provincial,
rustic--a fine ear might have called it uncouth.
Ogden was struck with her plaintive "please, sir." He had never before
heard that literary form of speech in actual use.
"Well," he said, with the unceremonious kindness proper to the occasion
and person, "I think you can learn something about him in the office of
the Vesuvian--next floor below."
"Oh, thank you, sir!" She made a movement suggestive of an abbreviated
courtesy; it was as much in the way of acknowledgment as her sense
of strangeness and confusion of mind appeared to permit.
[Illustration: "The girl gave him a glance wild and timid."]
"Not that way," called Ogden after her, adding a benevolent postscript.
"Here; come along down these stairs with me; I'll show you where it is."
She stumbled after him down the marble steps with a heavy-footed
clatter that could hardly have been expected from her slightness, and
with a timorous hold on the bronze of the hand-rail.
"There," indicated Ogden; "the sixth door along, on the right.
'Vesuvian Fire Insurance Co.' it says." And he himself continued an
abstracted descent by the stairway.
His nearest way home lay through the court and out of the door that
led into the asphalted alley. Just within the archway of this door two
men stood. The one was Vibert and the other was a dark young fellow
of twenty or more whom Ogden, by a brief glimmer of fancy, made to be
Brainard's younger son. Vibert was in the act of receiving a roll of
bills from him.
The youth had a pinched and slender aspect; there was a furtive
tremulousness in his hands; his eyes were reddish and the pupils swam
half hazily in a lucent humor.
"I didn't know, Mark, but what you'd gone back on me, too," Vibert was
saying to him. "If you'd managed to get around a little sooner you'd
have saved a certain party from the grand razoo." He smiled grimly.
"It's pretty close sailing--thirty, forty, forty-five"--he ran over the
bills, rolled them up, and thrust them into his pocket.
The boy looked at him with some doubt and with a shade of fear. He
seemed to have been fascinated and then dominated by the bigness and
the hardihood of the other.
"It's all right, Mark," Vibert presently went on with a dogged
vagueness; "I'm his son, too. Why wouldn't he give me any show? Why
wouldn't he let me have a chance to show him what I am? Why did he go
and shut down on me at the very start?"
"You!" cried the boy. "What can you expect, after the way he's treated
me--his own son? They're up there now, I dare say"--with a bitter
glance towards the corner of the Underground--"but they can never make
things right with me. If it hadn't been for Abbie--she's about the only
one that's turned a hand for me."
"Haven't I done well by you, too?--don't forget that. Well, you
don't--'sh! I say you don't. Let the executors settle, and give 'em
plenty to settle, too; they'll get enough for doing it." Vibert glanced
up at the Underground windows. "He can't live forever." He brought his
eyes back to the boy. "You've got to live yourself, though, and so have
I. You've got some rights, haven't you?"
The boy did not accept this cue; perhaps he had already followed it
more than once. He studied Vibert with eyes that seemed to indicate a
change of thought.
"Say, Russ," he hinted, deprecatingly, "you're going to be a little
more patient with Mayme?"
Vibert scowled. "Come, now, Marcus, that's all right; only don't let's
have any preaching. What I like is a cheerful house--and an orderly
one. Less sniffling and better meals. I guess you won't deny that, for
a housekeeper, your sister is a good deal of a fizzle. She doesn't have
to wash her own dishes, does she? And that girl I got her does the
scrubbing and takes up the ashes, doesn't she? And we always take our
dinners out, don't we? Well, then! I don't see what else we can do but
go out altogether."
He drubbed his foot impatiently on the pavement.
"Well, so long!" he said carelessly to his companion. "Better not take
anything more this afternoon. Do I see you on the track to-morrow?"
Ogden, of course, heard next to nothing of this talk, and his own
preoccupations left him no opportunity to scandalize over the relations
between Vibert and the young woman of the corridors, even if his
inclinations had run that way. But it need not be denied that so
close a grouping of these various persons turned his thoughts in
the direction of the Brainard household, and his feet later in the
direction of the Brainard house. He had lately been cultivating a
more sympathetic apprehension of Abbie Brainard's position; it seemed
possible that an hour's talk would offer opportunity for the delicate
insinuation of his friendly interest. He rehearsed a number of suitable
phrases; they took felicitous advantage of remarks on her side--remarks
which he himself constructed--and left her, as she thought them over,
in no doubt of his feeling sense of her position and of his desire to
make his sympathies known and operative. That all these pretty paces
would have been gone through in the absence of the Valentines is by no
means certain; but their presence excluded the least attempt to try
them, and it was with lagging feet indeed that he made his late return
home to Brower and "Monte Cristo."