XIII

The appearance and deportment of young Frederick Pratt as a witness in

the Vibert case offered several delicate shades whose noting and whose

accounting for may justify a paragraph or two. His general effect,

then, was in the highest degree sobered, chastened, depressed. To what

was this to be attributed?

To his consciousness of the overshadowing majesty of the law? No; for

the law had turned its softest and most silken side outward; the little

party had taken up its informal grouping at the judge's elbow and had

replied conversationally to the interrogations of the judge himself

or to the prompting inquiries of Brainard's attorney. Justicia had

appeared in her most sympathetic and domestic aspect.

Was the youth disappointed as to his performance of a _beau rôle_?

There is no doubt that he had anticipated with some relish his first

appearance in the witness-box. He would have been obliged, it is true,

to confess himself a minor, and he might have been exposed to the

humiliating necessity of declaring that he understood the nature of an

oath; but after that all would have been smooth sailing. Only to be

for full fifteen minutes the observed of all observers, to be able to

lift up his voice and tell--all--he--knew! Yet to be balked in this

called for exasperation rather than deep dejection, and deep dejection,

after all, was what he chiefly showed.

Was this dejection the sign of sympathetic sorrow for the woes of his

former friend and playmate? Not quite. His sympathy, while real enough,

was largely the sprightly product of novelty, curiosity, and conscious

self-importance; unentangled with other considerations, it would have

shown itself in a nervous and volatile loquacity.

But Freddy in court was not loquacious; he gave his testimony after a

benumbed and backward fashion that indicated other and deeper troubles.

The boy, in fact, was under a cloud. An issue of some importance

had arisen between the Underground National Bank and its youngest

messenger; it involved no less a question than that of _meum_ and

_tuum_. Freddy Pratt, as messenger, had been in the habit of making

two or three daily trips through the business district, during which

the notes and acceptances that filled his big official wallet came to

be exchanged for checks and greenbacks that represented corresponding

values. One or two discrepancies had developed that called for

attention.

The boy's father came down to the Underground to contribute his share

of this attention. He was a grave, repressive, saturnine person, who

might have been set down as possessed of far greater means to meet the

requirements of a growing boy in the midst of a circle of well-to-do

urban acquaintances than of inclination to study those requirements.

He was received in Brainard's own private room, and the affairs of the

penitent and sobbing boy were discussed over his head by his parent and

his employer.

"You foolish child," said the elder Pratt to his son, in the

self-conscious tone by which we address age through youth; "if you

wanted anything, why didn't you ask me for it?"

This father, seriously handicapped as he was by his own temperament,

was attempting to treat the matter as something rather slight and

trivial. The pettiness of the amount involved, the perfect ease of

restitution, the youth of the offender, the utter simplicity and

primitiveness of his method--all these he touched upon with a feint

of light-handed ease. Another might have blown an airy bubble like

this, even in the face of Brainard's ominous and taciturn frown; but

Pratt was not the man to do it. He soon left the upper air of informal

jocularity for the firmer ground of argument and expostulation, and

this ground, before he ended, was almost pressed by the knees of

entreaty.

"It's plain enough," said Brainard, at length; "he took it, and he kept

it."

Each one, from his own point of view, cast his eye on the culprit.

"But it can't be that you mean to ruin a boy's future in any such way

as this?" snarled the boy's father with a rasping expostulation.

Brainard turned a look on him from under his overhanging brows.

"Um," he merely said, in a voice which might have meant anything.

But the affair presently came to adjustment--a treaty with several

clauses. Brainard wished to use the boy in court; to dispose of the

Vibert matter in the cursory fashion that he hoped to follow permitted

scant margin for the plea of desertion, and he was depending on young

Pratt for the recital of certain occurrences which, in a cumulative

way, might have their bearings on the plea of cruelty. Pratt, Jr., was

to testify in court, Pratt, Sr., was to reimburse the bank, and the

boy's final dismissal from the Underground would then be timed in a way

so disassociated from any particular cause as to excite no comment and

to occasion no injury. But all this was scant and nominal payment for

Brainard's clemency; a larger one followed.

Brainard owned a number of woe-begone tenements scattered here and

there over that unattractive part of the West Side which is most

affected by manufacturers of furniture. One of these tumble-down

dwellings adjoined a large lot owned by Ingles--took out one corner,

in fact, in such a way as to interfere seriously with its value for

building purposes. Ingles, in treaty with a furniture firm for the

putting up of a building, had made an offer for this corner. Brainard,

informed as to the circumstances, had put a price on it that was

excessive--exorbitant. Ingles had taken time for consideration; and at

the very moment of Pratt's call a letter from him lay on Brainard's

desk, to the effect that he was looking elsewhere; evidently, on

principle, he was drawing off. Brainard had no use for the property,

and it was hardly paying taxes. He wanted to sell it at his own figure,

and he had expected to. Ingles's tactics nettled him; he solaced

himself by a step that reached Ingles and Pratt at the same time. He

sardonically raised his price a peg higher, and offered the property

to Pratt with an intimation that refusal would not be entertained.

He put his lot still further beyond the reach of Ingles's possible

necessities, and he made it realize even more than Ingles had declined

to pay. Pratt swallowed this mouthful with such grace as he could

command; and with the celerity possible to a perfected system of land

transfer when supplemented by the guarantee of a title company, Norval

H. Pratt, in a day or two, became the owner, at an excessive price, of

a piece of property for which he had no use, and for which, so far as

he knew, no one else had any use either.

This transaction was at once noted by McDowell, whose study of the

daily transfers as reported in the real-estate publications was minute,

and whose attention had been fixed for some time on this particular

piece of ground. He knew something of Ingles's intentions, through the

people whom Ingles was endeavoring to accommodate, and he saw here

the entering wedge that he had waited for so long. He had approached

Brainard unsuccessfully; he now tried Pratt. Pratt, who figured

himself justly enough as a lamb led to the shearing, made no effort to

evade the rôle; he promptly made an agreement for the transfer of the

Brainard lot to McDowell. He let it go at a decided sacrifice--he sold

it at a possible shade under its actual value.

McDowell, whose eagerness had committed him to an out-and-out purchase,

was now in a position to approach Ingles. He was willing to sell the

ground for simply what it had cost him; his profits would come later,

through that open door between 1262 and 1263. Ingles received him

coldly. He had disposed, he said, of his holdings in that neighborhood,

and was using the proceeds to build for his new tenants in another

quarter. He bowed McDowell out with a faintly cynical contempt, and

this enterprising person was left with an unpromising piece of

ground on his hands to dispose of as best he might. He tried the new

purchasers of Ingles's lot; his own was not necessary to their purposes.

McDowell was seriously embarrassed. This bit of ground was a trifle in

itself--to Ingles or to Pratt it mattered little either way; but to

McDowell, who was of a considerably smaller calibre, the thing came as

a kind of last straw. In expectation of great activity in acres he had

loaded himself down with outside property; everything of his own was

invested in that way, everything that was his wife's, and something, to

tell the truth, that was neither his nor his wife's. He was in up to

his chin, and at this moment came Ogden, asking him in set terms for an

accounting and a settlement.

McDowell met this demand with a promise of figures, and he renewed

this promise several times. The intervals between gave opportunity

for a slow insinuation of the truth--for a graduated confession that

a considerable part of old Mr. Ogden's estate was tied up in the

operations of his son-in-law. This confession was followed by his

statement; but it was some time before the account opened at the

Underground by George received any great enlargement through the agent

of the administratrix.

"It's all right, though," McDowell said; "you don't need to worry, and

there's no use in stirring things up. There's big money ahead, and

you'll stand in."

But the statement was the ground, and a sufficient one, for a rupture.

McDowell, in order to diminish his indebtedness to the estate, had

charged it with various fees and percentages of his own, and with

numerous items that properly concerned his individual and household

expenses. He charged the estate with a new porch on the front of his

own house, and with the full expense of railway travel which had been

undertaken in great part for his own interests. He even made a hardy

attempt to force the Brainard lot upon the indignant widow.

Mrs. Ogden immediately left his house, in spite of the good offices

of her bewildered daughter. George himself, forecasting the future,

beheld a long succession of wrangling days in the law-courts and in

the offices of attorneys--days that threatened to surpass in worry,

loss, expense, and nerve-wear anything that his family had experienced

yet. He felt himself on the threshold of a struggle for which he was

but scantily equipped, and in which he was certain to be seriously

handicapped through consideration for Kittie.

Absorbed in these moody reflections, he was crossing the court of the

Clifton on a Saturday afternoon when a pencil-tap on one of the great

glass panes took his attention. The tap was sounded on the court

frontage of Darrell & Bradley's branch, and George started from his

revery to see the face of Bradley himself looking out at him over the

rulers, mucilage bottles, and memorandum-books that formed symmetrical

piles within.

Bradley hastened to throw open the narrow glass door adjoining the

show-window, and motioned George in with a friendly and quizzical grimace.

"Let Jones walk," he said, crinkling up his eyes and laying his fat hand

on Ogden’s shoulder.

"He is walking," responded George, with a wan smile.

Bradley drew him in and closed the door.

"Well, let him walk in a different path, then. Let him come out to

Hinsdale to-morrow and try the primrose path."

"Of dalliance?" asked George, with a doleful attempt to meet half-way

the cheery facetiousness of the other.

Well, I don’t think a little dalliance would hurt him." Bradley made it

seem quite absurd that a young fellow of twenty-five should have any

real cares and annoyances. "All work and no play—you know."

"Im afraid so, admitted George, with a pathos that the elder man found

amusing.

Bradley stepped back to a snug office that was stowed away behind a tall

piece of shelving piled with newly bound account-books, to pick up his

hat. "I'm glad to have caught sight of you," he proceeded, with the

friendliness of an elder brother; "I've just taken an hour or so to

overhaul things here a little. If you're going north, I'll walk a block

or two with you."

They passed out into the street and picked their way along through the

splashing, slumping, and dripping that marks the spring break-up. They

elbowed other pedestrians over miry flaggings, and they dodged the

muddy spray that bumping trucks sent up from the street-car tracks at

almost every crossing.

"My wife's wondering what has become of you," Bradley puffed out among

many other things, as he tried to keep up with Ogden's supple and

light-footed gait. "And Jessie, too. She's home to-morrow--just back

from Evanston. You come out on the eleven fifty-five, and we'll have

an early dinner, and that will leave enough of the afternoon to make

things worth while. And we'll show you that spring is a little nearer

at hand than you'd suspect in town. Your first spring here?"

"Yes."

"Pretty bad, ain't it?"

"Worse than Boston," said George, in a tone implying that nothing

further could be added.

At the next corner Bradley paused, detaining him for a moment with a

friendly hand.

"Sunday noon, then. You provide the dalliance and we'll see to the

primroses. Care anything for 'em?"

"Oh, yes, indeed."

"Good thing; can't have chrysanthemums all the year round. Well,

good-by. Jessie will drive down for you in the buggy."

"I'll be there," called Ogden, as they drifted apart in the thickening

crowd.

He had reached the point where he felt it would be a relief to cut

away from town and everything in it--the bustle, the uproar, the

filth, the routine of the bank, the complications of the Brainards,

the entanglements of the Ogdens. It was a simple thing to do--only

so many miles of flimsy and shabby shanties and back views of sheds

and stables; of grimy, cindered switch-yards, with the long flanks

of freight-houses and interminable strings of loaded or empty cars;

of dingy viaducts and groggy lamp-posts and dilapidated fences whose

scanty remains called to remembrance lotions and tonics that had long

passed their vogue; of groups of Sunday loungers before saloons, and

gangs of unclassifiable foreigners picking up bits of coal along the

tracks; of muddy crossings over roads whose bordering ditches were

filled with flocks of geese; of wide prairies cut up by endless tracks,

dotted with pools of water, and rustling with the dead grasses of

last summer; then suburbs new and old--some in the fresh promise of

sidewalks and trees and nothing else, others unkempt, shabby, gone to

seed; then a high passage over a marshy plain, a range of low wooded

hills, emancipation from the dubious body known as the Cook County

Commissioners--and Hinsdale.

At the station Jessie Bradley sat drawn up in a buggy: she had her

place in a small convention of phætons, carryalls, and express-wagons.

She tossed her head brightly and waved her whip.

"I could have walked as well as not," said Ogden, climbing in. "What's

half a mile?"

"Three quarters--almost," she corrected. She gathered up the lines and

secured the approved hold on the whip. "Unless _you_ care to drive?"

she suggested.

"Not particular," replied Ogden, leaning back easily. "Quite willing to

be a passenger."

He took a look at her sidewise from behind. She wore a pert little

flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat, set straight on the top of her head;

a stray lock of hair brushed across her ear in the breeze; she had a

bunch of pale purple primroses at her throat.

"You may if you want to," she said, with a sudden turn in his

direction. Her eyes snapped and sparkled.

[Illustration: "'Here we go,' she cried, 'Sunday or no Sunday, I hate

to poke.'"]

"I'd as soon see you--unless you don't care to."

"Oh, as far as that goes! Just hold on tight, though. Get up, John!"

She drew a taut rein and flicked the horse over the ear. He was a

mettlesome five-year-old, and he rushed into his best gait at once.

"Here we go!" she cried, "Sunday or no Sunday. I hate to poke."

She rushed him through the outskirts of the town; she bumped over the

cumbrous plank crossings, she grazed one or two of the wooden posts

that held up oil-lamps, she charged a flock on its homeward way from

church and cut it into two frightened and indignant halves. She was on

her native heath; she felt it; she showed it.

George grasped the buggy-cover with his left hand and held his right

in readiness to seize the reins. The buggy, with many a bump and

sudden wrench, sped on over the stones and ruts and puddles and rough

crossings of an indifferent country road, and presently it turned into

a yard with a rasping graze on one of the two painted white posts that

made the entrance way. On the side porch of the house stood the girl's

parents. They were laughing.

Jessie jumped out briskly. She struck a masculine attitude on the

carriage-block, her right hand resting on the stock of her whip, her

left arm a-kimbo.

"I was to get yer through on time; them was my orders, and here ye

are!"

George climbed out carefully.

"Poor Horace!" chuckled Bradley, coming down; "he's here all right, but

is he able to give his lecture?"

Mrs. Bradley followed, to shake hands. She wore a black silk dress,

and there was a bit of lace over her thin hair--an adornment which her

consciousness seemed to put forth as a modish novelty. Her wrinkles all

flowed together in a companionable smile.

"He may have lost his voice on the way," she joked, "but we hope he

saved his appetite."

"They're both all right," said George, laughing in turn.

Bradley was at the horse's head. "The voice is there, anyway," he said

in cautious acknowledgment. "And we'll see about the appetite as soon

as you've got enough spare breath to say 'Amen' to our grace." The

Bradley house was a mere box of a building set in an acre lot. They

had built for themselves, on finally breaking with the city, two years

before; and they had accepted the gables and dormers and shingles and

the brown and yellow paint that the modest suburban house of the period

finds it so difficult to evade. They stood on high, rolling ground;

there were half-hints of considerable vistas here and there, and they

were surrounded by groves and copses through which, to-day, the first

faint colors of the spring were hurtling. Bradley, after dinner,

walked Ogden around the house--previous visits had been confined to

the parlor. He dwelt on the swelling of the lilac buds, and he drew

attention with an impartial interest to the first sproutings of his

peonies and of his rhubarb. The back of the place was littered with the

debris of a second green-house in an advanced stage of construction,

and through this disorder he picked his way, along with his daughter

and his guest, towards the door of the first.

"Hop in," said Bradley, lifting his own foot over the perpendicular

threshold. The air within was but a few degrees warmer than the air

without, yet closer. On either side stretched fragmental beds of young

plants, with frequent breaks between. "It's late for prims, after all;

and a good many of them are outside, anyway." He waved his hand over a

few patches of color on the left; there were white, pink, cherry, pale

purple, such as Jessie was wearing, and a few belated clumps of young

and indeterminate green.

Ogden passed to and fro, with the oh's and ah's that accompany the

exposition of any host's pet hobby, however partial and trifling

the exhibit may be. He had done the same last autumn with the

chrysanthemums.

Bradley took this tribute with the customary complacency, and presently

drifted to one side for a word with his man about a small matter of

glazing--he had quite an eye for broken panes. Ogden leaned against a

damp ledge. Jessie had seated herself on one of the steps of a rude

flower-stand; she brushed aside two or three small pots that had been

left standing on it.

She showed an air of lassitude; it had been stealing over her all

through dinner, and now it had completely overtaken her in the languid

atmosphere of the flowers. Her slender arms hung limply, and she moved

her back as if to find a comfortable rest for it. Her face, under the

pallor of the painted glass, looked rather colorless and a little

drawn, and a languorous apathy seemed to have taken the sparkle from

her _eyes_.

She looked up at him as she dropped the petals of a primrose one by

one. "You didn't care to drive, then?"

"Bid you want me to? I'm sorry not to have understood. You drove down,

and so I thought--Was it too much for you, both ways?"

"Oh, no. It only struck me that you might want to. You were not--that

is, you understand horses?"

"Certainly; I drive on occasion." He smiled serenely, not in the least

disturbed by her perfectly obvious thought. "However, a wise man never

goes out of his way to handle a strange horse--perhaps that isn't one

of Solomon's proverbs, but it ought to be."

"You are awfully cautious." She rose undecidedly, and presently she

sat down again with a little sigh.

"I have to be. That is my business--from half-past eight till four.

Perhaps it's growing on me."

"I don't mean that. Ton were born cautions; you'd be cautions anyway."

"I'm a Down-easter, you know. Look before you leap. Perhaps I shall

learn the off-hand Western ways in time. I'll try to. I'll make myself

over."

"I wonder if you can," she said, half to herself. Then aloud:

"But I don't believe all Down-easters are as careful as you are. There

must be lots of them who would have just laid the whip on that horse,

and run over a boy or two, and knocked our gate-post to pieces, and

come up to the door with a wheel just ready to break to flinders. Why

couldn't you have done it? I shouldn't have minded it--I should have

liked it first-rate." She spoke with a kind of lingering drawl, and

there was a half-smile in her lack-lustre eye.

"Your father would have minded it, though, and so should I. Never begin

to dance without arranging about the fiddler--good rule, don't you

think?"

She threw a bare stem to the ground. "Oh, yes; but tiresome." She rose.

"Close in here, isn't it? Let's go outside."