I
It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the
shivering young traveller from Boston, who had 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 night-fall
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
bull-fighter 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 air 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 necessity of plodding through several feet of
snow.
He understood well enough what had happened: 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 that Mrs. Culme had
forgotten him was 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, when his hopes were raised by the
sound of bells.
Two sleighs were just dashing up to the station, and from the foremost
there sprang a young man muffled 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 consolingly 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 quivering nerves, which yet,
as he believed, would never quite swing him beyond a normal sensibility.
“You expected a sleigh from Weymore?” the newcomer continued, standing
beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.
Mrs. Culme’s secretary explained his difficulty, and the other 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.
His friend laughed also. “Mrs. Culme,” he explained, “was lunching at my
uncle’s to-day, 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.
“Oh, but you haven’t, though! It burned down last week.”
“The deuce it did!” said Faxon; but the humour of the situation struck
him 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 daresay 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 rumour 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 humour they diffuse. He produced this
effect, Faxon noted, by the exercise of no gift but his youth, and of no
art but his sincerity; and these qualities were revealed in a smile of
such 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 the 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 tuberculosis, and the disease was so far
advanced that, according to the highest authorities, banishment to
Arizona or New Mexico was 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 similar
distractions; and Faxon, listening to him, was inclined to think 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 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-humouredly 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 colourless, 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 rigour 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 greyheaded pair, 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 enquiry, 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 up,
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 hot-house plants, hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak
hall like a stage-setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small
figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly unlike
his rather florid conception of the great John Lavington.
The surprise of the contrast remained with him through his hurried
dressing in the large 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. Laving ton, 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, and 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!”