AT its best, the old Remsen house on West Twelfth Street, wore its
ancestral respectability cloaked with gloom. Home though it was to
Jacob of that name and possession, he regarded it with distinct
distaste as he approached the dull, brown steps leading to the massive
door. All that could reasonably be done to furbish it up against the
young master’s return, old Connor, Jacob’s inherited man, had
faithfully attempted: the house’s face was at least washed, and its
linen, so to speak, fresh and clean. But a home long unused becomes
musty to a sense deeper than the physical. Entering, young Mr. Remsen
felt a chill descend upon his blithe spirit. A _basso profondo_ clock
within struck a hollow five.
“Hark from the tomb!” observed young Mr. Remsen. “I think I’ll move to
the club.” Slow footsteps, sounding from below, dissipated that
intention.
“No; I can’t do that. I’ve got to stay here and be looked after by old
Connor, or forever wound his feelings. That’s the worst of family
responsibilities.”
The footsteps mounted the basement stairs unevenly and with a
suggestion of a stagger in them.
“What! Connor taken to drink?” thought Jacob with sinful amusement.
“Wonder where he found it. There is hope, still!”
The old servitor puffed into sight half carrying, half dragging a huge
clothes-basket. “What’s that?” demanded Jacob’:
“Your mail, sir.”
“Is that all?” asked the other, with a sardonicism which was lost upon
Connor’s matter-of-fact mind.
“No, sir. There’s another half-basket downstairs.”
“Good Lord! What’ll do with it?”
“If I may suggest, sir, it ought to be read.”
“Sound idea! You read it, Connor.”
“Me, sir?”
“Certainly. I don’t feel up to it. I’m tired. Strain of travel and all
that sort of thing. Besides”—he cast a glance of repulsion upon the
white heap—“this suggests work. And you know my principles regarding
work.”
“Yes, sir.” Connor rubbed his ear painfully. Of course the master was
joking. Always a great one for his joke, he was. But—
“There’s a special delivery quite at the top, sir, marked ‘Immediate.’
Don’t you think that perhaps—”
“Oh, all right: _all_ right! If I’ve got to begin I may as well go
through.”
Having, like some thousands of other young Americans, departed from his
native land and normal routine of life for a long period on important
business of a muddy, sanguinary, and profoundly wearisome nature,
concerning which he had but the one wish, namely, to forget the whole
ugly but necessary affair as swiftly and comprehensively as possible,
Mr Jacob Remsen had deemed it wise to cut loose from home
considerations as far as feasible; but he now reflected that he had
perhaps made a mistake in having no mail forwarded. Well, there was
nothing for it but to make up for arrears. He took off his coat and
plunged in. The “immediate” special he set aside, to teach it, as he
stated to the acquiescent Connor, not to be so infernally assertive and
insistent, while he ran through a few scores of communications, mainly
devoted to inviting him to dinners and dances which had passed into the
shades anywhere from a year to eighteen months previously.
“Now, I’ll attend to you,” said he severely to the special. “Only,
don’t brag about your superior importance, next time.”
He opened it and glanced at the heading. “Connor,” said he, “this is
from Mr. Bentley.”
“Yes, Mr. Jacob.”
“He says it is necessary for him to see me without delay.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you believe, Connor, that it is really as necessary as he pretends
for Mr. Bentley to see me without delay?”
“Mr. Bentley is your lawyer, sir,” pointed out Connor firmly. “If he
says so, sir, I think it would be so.”
“You’re wrong, Connor; you’re wrong! This letter is dated just seven
weeks ago. As I haven’t seen Mr. Bentley yet, and am still in good
health and spirits, it can’t have been vitally necessary that he see me
without delay, can it? Necessity knows no law, Connor, and law knows no
necessity that can’t wait seven weeks.”
“Mr. Bentley has been telephoning, sir, almost every day.”
“Has he? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried to inform you about several telephone messages, Mr. Jacob—”
“So you did, when you met me at the pier.”
“And you told me if the telephone annoyed me, to have it taken out,
sir.”
“Right; right; perfectly right! Did you have it taken out?”
“No, sir.”
“Then it doesn’t annoy you?”
“No, Mr. Jacob—”
“What a blessing is philosophic calm! I’ll take pattern by you and
learn not to let it annoy me, either. That’s it ringing now. Let it
ring. Are my dinner clothes laid out?”
“Yes, sir. And, beg pardon, sir; I think that’s the doorbell not
the’phone. It’ll be Mr. Bentley. I took the liberty of ’phoning him,
sir, that you’d be here in time to dress for dinner—”
“His blood be on your head. Let him in, Connor.”
Mr. Herbert Bentley, of Bench & Bentley, a huge, puffy man of fifty,
rolled into the room, shook hands warmly with Remsen, went through the
usual preliminary queries as to health, recent experience, and time of
return, and then attacked the matter in hand.
“How’s your family pride, Jacob?”
“Languid.”
“It’s likely to be stirred up a bit.”
“Some of us been distinguishing ourselves?”
“Not specially. But your cousins are threatening a will contest.”
“If they want to pry me loose from this grisly mausoleum,” observed
Jacob, with an illustrative wave of the hand around the gloomful
drawing-room, “I’ll listen to terms.”
“Nothing of that sort. The house is yours as long as you fulfill the
terms of your grandfather’s will.”
“Then what’s the contest to me? Let my amiable cousins choke themselves
and each other with law—”
“It’s a question of your Great-Uncle Simeon’s estate. They want you as
a witness.”
“For what?”
“To prove the old boy’s insanity.”
“Who says he was insane?”
“They do. Wasn’t he?”
“Well, he was eccentric in some particulars,” admitted Jacob
cautiously.
“As for instance?”
“Let me think. Whenever there was a long drought he used to claim that
he was a tree-toad, and he’d climb the ancestral elm up at the
Westchester place and squawk for rain.”
“Eccentric, as you say. Anything else?”
“He had the largest collection of tin-can labels in Westchester County.
At least, he boasted that it was the largest, and I never heard any one
dispute it.”
“What did he do with ’em?”
“Same as any kind of a collecting bug does with his collection;
nothing.”
“I see. Is that all?”
“Everything I can recall except that every May Day he used to put on a
high hat and a pink sash and dance around a Maypole in Central Park. As
he didn’t care whose Maypole it happened to be, he usually got
arrested.”
“I see. And the rest of the family; did they show any symptoms?”
“Nothing special.”
“What do you mean, special? Come, out with it!”
“Of course there was my poor old maiden aunt, Miss Melinda. You’ve
heard of her?”
“Only as a name.”
“She did her best to change that. When she was fifty-four she eloped
with the coachman. Only they couldn’t get any one to marry ’em, so she
had to come home.”
“What was wrong? Was the coachman married already?”
“No. But he was a trifle colored.”
“Interesting line of relatives you carry. What about the remainder of
the tribe?”
“Just about the usual run of old families, I guess. One of the other
aunts used to do a little in the anonymous letter line and break up
happy families. Then, of course, Cousin Fred used to pull some fairly
interesting stuff when he had the d-t’s, but the claim that Uncle
Simeon’s first wife dressed up as the Van Cortland Manor ghost isn’t—”
“Enough said! I didn’t ask for a new edition of the _Chronique
Scandaleuse_. How would you like to tell all this to the court, and
through it to the newspapers?”
“I’ll see ’em d—-d first!”
“All very well. But if they put you on the stand, you’ll have to tell
or go to jail. And they’ll put you on, for you’re their one best bet.
With you they can win and without you they can’t.”
“Then they lose. I’ll skip the country rather than rake up all that
dead and decayed stuff.”
“How about your grandfather’s will, under which you inherit this house
and most of your fortune? Have you forgotten that you’re required to
inhabit the house, from now on, at least three months out of every six
until you’re married?”
“So I have. Happy alternative! Lose the house or parade the family
skeletons all diked out in pink sashes and tin-can labels. When does
the blasted suit come on?”
“I don’t know. When I do I’ll let you know. Then it’s up to you either
to stand a siege in the house or to light out and go into hiding, and
take a chance on getting back within the three months.”
“Well, Connor,” said Jacob Remsen after the lawyer had left, “here’s a
complication for a peace-and-quiet-loving young man! How did such a
respectable person as you ever come to take service in such a herd of
black sheep?”
“I don’t know anything about those goings-on, sir,” asseverated the old
man doggedly. “If they put me in jail the rest of my life I couldn’t
remember ever hearing a word about any of ’em, sir.”
“Good man! Don’t you testify to anything that would tend to incriminate
or degrade the memory of Uncle Simeon or any other Remsen. And neither
will I. However, this isn’t dressing for dinner.”
Having changed, young Mr. Remsen returned to dine with Gloria Greene.
He found her smiling over a note which she carefully blotted before
turning from her desk to greet him.
“What did you think of my protégée?” she inquired. “I’m collecting
opinions on her.”
“The little Colter girl? She isn’t as sniffy as she appears at first
sight.”
“Her name isn’t Colter. And I don’t know how you can judge. First sight
is all that you had of her.”
“Not so, fair lady. She passed me in the hallway as I was waiting for a
taxi to come along. I could see her nerving herself up to say something
and finally she said it.”
“Well, what was it?”
“Nothing important. Just that she was sorry she couldn’t sing for me
and that some other time she would. But she said it quite pleasantly.
She hasn’t a bad voice.”
“Effect of Lesson the First,” commented the actress.
“What are you doing with that young person, Gloria? Working some of
your white magic on her?”
“Just remaking life a little for her,” replied the other offhandedly.
“This is part of it.”
She fluttered the note-paper on which she had been writing.
“What is it?” asked Remsen. “A pass to Paradise? She looked as
cheered-up as if she were getting something of the kind.”
“It’s a commutation ticket to Hades, first-class,” was the actress’s
Delphic response. “But the poor child won’t know it till she gets
there.”