"Well, those are my views," said Belden. He elevated his eyebrows
slightly as he dropped his glance to a row of shapely nails that lay
closely together on the thick of his thumb, and an imperceptible smile
moved slowly under the cover of his thick mustache. "To right completely
such a wrong as this there is only one course that _I_ know of."
Marshall ceased his earnest scrutiny of his partner's face to rest his
elbow on the edge of his desk and to drop his weary old face into the
hollow of his hand. There were more wrinkles on his cheeks, more white
hairs in the dull dry red of his beard, more signs of sleepless hours in
his anxious eyes.
Belden raised his hand and swept it across his mustache. The smile
beneath escaped and spread upward over his face. His nostrils, too,
dilated--half triumphally.
"It's a most unfortunate affair," he observed further, continuing his
series of careful modulations. "There is an error made, a false step
taken; the family flee their past to begin life anew in another land; yet
at the very threshold of their new life they meet the first cause of all
their misfortune and misery." Belden sighed.
His sigh seemed at once to breathe a deep sympathy and to call for the
meting out of justice at whatever cost--to some one else. As Belden
sighed, Marshall himself almost gave a groan.
He accepted these carefully composed observations for precisely what they
seemed. He was too inexperienced in the drama to detect the essential
insincerity of every word, though there was not one of the lowliest of
his clerks but had heard every one of these phrases bandied across the
footlights time and time again.
"I must acknowledge," continued Belden, as he moved towards the door,
"that her father has acted with a good deal of reasonableness and
forbearance. You can imagine Leppin's anxiety, without any word from me.
You can feel how keenly he looks forward to having justice done--to
having complete reparation made. You know what that means as well as I
do."
And he passed out, leaving his senior to ponder the matter alone.
Belden was the first person with whom Marshall had permitted himself a
full canvass of the situation, the sole husbandman towards whom he had
turned for assistance in garnering the first-fruits of Truesdale's career
abroad. Never before had evil grazed against him and his; he had regarded
it, in fact, as something appertaining principally to ill-regulated
persons in a lower walk of life. He had heard of such subjects as being
handled in fiction, and he had noticed them touched upon in the
theatrical reviews of the newspapers. But nothing of the sinful, the
vicious, the malodorous had ever, within his recollection, come to his
family, to his friends, or even to any of his business associates. Yet
here it had come at last, and it must be confronted.
He had quite shrank from the ordeal of considering the matter with so
nimble and experienced a person as Truesdale himself, and he was almost
too Anglo-Saxon in his pure-mindedness to attempt an over-intimate
discussion of it with his own wife; it took a large share of his
fortitude to broach the matter even to his elder son.
"I can't talk to Truesdale about it," said this virginal old man, as he
sat in Roger's office; "you've got to do it. I can't."
"Well, really, father," began Roger. He had almost the air of resenting
an imputation.
"I don't mean that, Roger," said his father, in some distress. "I have
every confidence in you; I believe you're all right. But--"
"Has anybody seen the girl?"
"Your mother says that--well, she says that Jane has seen her"--he
brought in his daughter's name with a great distress--"and your aunt
Lydia. She told your mother she was sure this girl was one to lend
herself to--to--"
"H'm," said Roger, in a non-committal way. He always subjected his aunt
Lydia's opinions and impressions to a double discount.
Meanwhile the odor of Truesdale's offence permeated the house as
completely as the office. Rosy wondered what could be under way as she
saw her mother and Jane seated on unaccustomed chairs in unaccustomed
attitudes at unaccustomed times in unaccustomed rooms while they engaged
in brief and infrequent interchanges of words, or co-operated for the
production of long and eloquent silences. Jane, in fact, took the matter
with the rigorous thoroughness of the complete theorist. She knew what it
was to thread the mazes of a guilty conscience through half a dozen
consecutive chapters; she knew how it felt to see the agonies of
acknowledged sin transferred from chair to sofa and sofa to chair over
the full extent of a large and well-equipped stage. How the leaves had
fluttered! How the footlights had palpitated! How those people had
suffered--and how she had suffered with them! How she was suffering
now--and how much greater still must be the suffering of her erring and
idolized brother!
"If he had only been born with eyes like other people's!" she would moan.
The actual mental state of Truesdale was, however, with Jane and with
everybody else, a matter of pure conjecture. Very little, in fact, was
seen of him. He breakfasted in his own room, as he had done ever since
his return home. When the waitress had declined to enter the chamber with
his coffee and rolls he had shrugged his shoulders and had directed to
have them set on the floor outside. "_Quelle pudeur!_" he more than once
observed, as her knock drew him towards the door. His lunch he took
wherever he happened to be, and he dined at his French restaurant, or at
a new Italian one where the _spaghetti_ was unapproachable, and where
everything was cheap, plentiful, and informal. He returned home at his
own discretion, and sometimes was heard working upon the obdurate old
night-lock at midnight or later.
Among the first of the family to have extended speech with him after the
_exposé_ was his aunt Lydia. He had gone to her house to put the
last few finishing touches to Bertie Patterson's portrait. To his aunt
and to Bertie herself the portrait seemed already finished, but it is
only the artist who knows when the end has really been reached. He asked
his aunt for Bertie.
"Well," she hesitated, as she looked at him with a kind of furtive and
wondering interest, "Bertie is very busy this afternoon. If there is
anything more to be done--and I don't exactly see that there is--it must
be done without her, I'm afraid."
"Can't I see her?" he asked, brusquely. "This is the very time I need
her. What is she so busy about?"
"She is packing. You know I've kept her a good deal longer already than I
expected to--she can't stay into summer. Her mother has written several
times, asking for her, and now, finally, she's really got to go." There
was a grieving disappointment in Mrs. Rhodes's voice, and a cast of keen
but discreet curiosity in her eye.
"When is she going?"
"In the morning. Then her own people will get her well before dark."
"I'm not to see her to say good-bye?--my own cousin, almost."
"Nonsense--not at all. I'll tell her good-bye for you."
"And the picture?"
"Well, _that_ we may consider finished, I think." Her eyes were resting
on the wall behind him. He turned and saw the portrait fastened upon it.
"So she is not even to have--" he began.
"Now, Truesdale," interrupted his aunt, "the picture is not Bertie's, but
mine. I thought you understood that."
She followed him to the door. "You won't stay a few minutes longer?" she
inquired, with an emollient intention. He shook his head.
"I won't say, Truesdale," she proceeded, with her hand on the knob, "how
disappointed I am. Everything, of course, is at a stand-still now.
Whether things ever go on again will depend upon you yourself. I am sure
that any--any expression of regret, any promise of--of--"
"Ouf!" said Truesdale, as he descended the steps, undecided whether to
laugh or to curse. "'When I was a student at Cadiz,'" he found himself
humming, half-unconsciously. "H'm! one thing learned in the study of this
peculiar civilization: general badness jollied up, specific badness
frowned down. What other discoveries await me, I wonder?"
Before he had taken a dozen steps a brougham drawn by a pair of blacks in
glittering, gold-plated harness drew up suddenly at the curbstone, in
obedience to directions given through the half-open door. In a second the
door opened wide, and Gladys McKenna beckoned to him. "Get in," she
uttered, in a half-repressed cry.
She had divined the situation in two swift glances. She had witnessed the
moody exit of Truesdale, and she had had a glimpse of the anxious little
face of Bertie Patterson in the bay-window above. Her desire to live
life, to dramatize it as promptly and effectively as possible, had led
her to the instant appropriation of the banned and rejected
Truesdale--thus it was that she figured him.
"Get in," she repeated; "I can take you along six or eight blocks. The
coachman knows you by sight, I'm sure. But never mind; nothing matters
now. My letter--did you get it?"
"Another!" thought Truesdale. He made the door fast. "No."
"I felt sure you wouldn't," she panted, excitedly. "I gave it to that man
to mail." She pointed towards the occupant of the box-seat. "He has
played me false."
Truesdale smiled at her phrase. "Well, never mind; you can tell me what
there was in it." He stretched out his long legs negligently under the
opposite seat, determined to take this new ordeal as lightly as possible.
From his point of view the girl was doing nothing towards gaining a
greater measure of approval. "She never had any consideration for me," he
was thinking, "until she saw that I cared for the town as little as she
did; and she has waited to fling herself at me unreservedly until I
have shown myself too awful for anybody else. Why did I let her pick me
up? and how soon can I have her set me down?"
"You will learn now who your real friends are," she declared, casting
herself energetically into a leading _rôle_; "not fair-weather
friends, but friends through thick and thin. Let me tell you: there is a
conspiracy against you." She laid her hand on his arm, and looked at him
with a wide stare; she seemed to thrill with the consciousness of an
important participation in a succession of stirring actualities.
"Is there, indeed?" Whatever one's plight, there is little consolation
in the ministrations of an unwelcome hand. Considering this, that, and
the other, he was now, as at his aunt's door, again midway between a
laugh and a curse.
"Yes. That man--that German, or whatever--was at the house last evening,
and--oh, why will Albert drive so fast?" she complained, as she made a
seeming calculation of the many things she had to say and the little time
she had to say them in. "Can't something be done to make him go a little
slower?"
"The horses feel lively," answered Truesdale, to whom the present rapid
course was perfectly agreeable; "I expect he'll have to let them go their
own gait." He glanced out at a passing church or two, and frowned
slightly; why did this girl insist upon doing his mathematical problems
for him? Had not he himself already put his two and two together and made
them four?
Gladys went on, telling him what she knew, guessed, surmised, suspected.
"And they--they suspect _me_," she continued, in a mounting tone of
tragedy. "And I'm--I'm going home in a few days." There were tears on the
dark fringes of her eyes; he thought of a wax image exposed overnight to
a heavy dew. "And all for your sake," the moisture seemed to say.
Truesdale began to feel uncomfortable and a shade ungrateful. "I dare
say she means well," he thought; "but I--I wish she wouldn't."
The carriage was passing between two other churches; he saw that he might
alight after another square of it. "One more will be plenty," he
muttered, and already his hand stole towards the handle of the door.
"You can't think how they both hate you--my aunt and uncle--and me, too,
I'm afraid. They're really driving me out of the house. But never mind; I
can endure even more than that for one that--for the right."
"When did you say you were going?" inquired Truesdale. It was only by
asking plain, every-day questions that he could oppose this robust
romanticism.
"Day after to-morrow--or the next."
"Well," said Truesdale, quietly, "I should think you would do very well
at home--much better than here."
"But where am I to see you before I go? Where are we to say good-bye?"
A cable-car clanged along the cross-street immediately ahead of them, and
the ten yellow stories of a vast hotel loomed up just beyond. "Right on
this corner," replied Truesdale, as the carriage bumped across the
tracks. "The interval is short, as you suggest, and there is no time like
the present." He put his hand on the door and fixed his eye upon the
corner shop; he often bought a cigar there, and meant to buy one now. He
also meant this good-bye as literally final.
"You want me to let you out here? Stop, Albert. Well, good-afternoon,"
she said, smilingly waiving the idea of finality; "you shall know
to-morrow where you can meet me. You are not deserted by everybody, after
all, you see." She gave him her hand, or rather laid hold of his. "But
take good care of yourself, all the same."
Truesdale stepped out. "I'll try to," he said, mumblingly; "I always
have."
Being thus minded, Truesdale received but grudgingly the tenders of his
brother Roger to assist in the caretaking. He admitted, however, that it
would be less embarrassing to confer with one person than a dozen, and
that if the whole connection were to be represented by a single
spokesman, then Roger was the one that he preferred.
Roger was held by his family to be above all foibles and frailties; his
aunt Lydia had once told him, on the day of a niece's hopeless return to
the East, that he had too much head and not enough heart. It is certain
that he had marked out a definite course for himself, and that nothing,
so far, had had the power to divert him materially from it; and he had a
far-reaching contempt for the man who permitted the gray matter of his
brain to be demoralized by the red matter in his veins. He kept a firm
hand on his own affairs and on those of his father that were not
immediately connected with the business of his father's firm. His severe
face was smooth-shaven, as he thought the face of a lawyer ought to be,
and he could address the higher courts with such a loud and brazen
utterance as to cause the court-loungers almost to feel the judges
shrinking and shrivelling under their robes. His was a hot and vehement
nature, but it burned with a flame blue rather than red.
"Well," he said, with a look of extreme distaste fixed half on his
brother and half on his book-shelves, "we can accept her and make the
best of her. I have seen her and her father. While I can't say I admire
the personal character of either, I am not prejudiced by the fact that he
is only a clerk and she only a shop-girl. They are beginners here; I am
willing to believe that they were something better at home. We can accept
her; we shall have to, I suppose."
Truesdale reared his beautiful brazen front and flashed on his brother a
haughty and disdainful smile. "You can accept her? Will you please tell
me what you mean by that? And 'better at home'!" He burst into open and
derisive laughter. "What new Arcadia is this, where even the lawyers walk
about with their beribboned crooks and the little baa-lambs following
behind them? We have been sitting in conclave, have we, on a mossy bank
in some sylvan shade, with chaplets on our brows, and we have piped and
twittered over the matter, and have decided that we can 'accept her'?
Well, you can do more than I can," he added, abruptly. His foot slipped
from the rung of the opposite chair and fell to the bare floor with a
contemptuous clump.
"You've got your own character to clear, haven't you?" asked Roger, with
a severe brevity.
Truesdale replaced his foot on the rung of the other chair and slid down
into his own as he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. "Dear me,"
he said, in affected apprehension, "am I in any danger? Well, well; if
such a thing can hurt a young man, I shall be glad to know it--I never
knew it before. Now, _là-bas_, for example--"
He drew out one of his hands and waved it vaguely; he seemed to be
conjuring up a wider and more liberal world--the only one he had learned.
"It can," insisted his brother; "it will. Both you and your family."
Truesdale's thought flashed back to Bertie Patterson and the unfinished
picture. It came to him all at once that his brother might be better
worth listening to than he had been disposed to concede.
"And your family," Roger repeated.
But Truesdale's thought, lingering over the picture, made little of this
second point. He did scant justice to the mortification of his mother
before her church-members and her few remaining neighbors, or that of his
sisters within the circle which they had lately constructed for
themselves. Nor did he yet realize, even with Bertie's picture in mind,
the hundred checks and bars that awaited him in a society of whose
primitive purity he had made a jest whenever occasion came.
"Dear Roger," he presently rejoined, in his most genial and winning
voice, "you mean well, I am sure--well by me and by the family and by
everybody. And I dare say you do very nicely in your own narrow field;
but as for knowing life--well, really now, do you think you understand
what it is to live?"
"Live!" cried Roger, with a sonorous contempt. "Who _does_ understand
what it is to live, then--the man who has all his work and worry done for
him by some one else?"
Truesdale smiled, serene and unabashed. "The world is wide," he said,
with an exquisite tolerance. "It is a very comprehensive subject. You
must take it up one of these days--you've hardly made a beginning on it
yet."
"The world!" cried Roger again, with a vibrant indignation at this
impertinence. "Who _are_ the world if not my father and I and all the
other earnest men who work to make the frame of things and to hold it
together? _We_ are the world, and you--you are only the rubbish strewn
over the top of it!"
He collected this rubbish and constructed from it a Frankenstein monster,
with a heart of cork, a brow of brass, and a triple-plating of
self-conceit. Then with a harsh laugh and a wide-flung arm he scattered
it apart again.
Perhaps Truesdale took these words and gestures merely as an example of
Roger's forensic eloquence. For--
"My dear brother," he began, quietly, while Roger beat his foot upon the
floor, stung to increased indignation by the conscious artificiality of
such an address--"my dear brother," said Truesdale, "you don't quite get
my position in this trifling episode. Every little _conte drolatique_
has its Monsieur X, of course--myself, in this instance, and rightfully
enough. But is Monsieur X the only gentleman involved? Let us see. Who
comes before Monsieur X? Why, Monsieur W, to be sure. And who before
Monsieur W? Monsieur V, _n'est-ce pas?_ And there is somebody still in
front of Monsieur V. And if we go far enough back, we may come at last
even to Monsieur A. Now, why are all these worthy gentlemen passed over
in favor of _ce cher_ Monsieur X? Well, perhaps Monsieur W, for example,
is a captain of dragoons and already mated. And maybe Monsieur V is a
young baron whose family won't stand any nonsense about him--families are
different. And as for Monsieur A--well, let us put him down for a poor
devil of a student who cuts no figure at all. But Monsieur X--ah, that is
different! he is pounced upon in the bosom of his family. It is Monsieur
X who has the scrupulous and strait-laced mother--"
"Truesdale!"
"And the little coterie of lily-sisters who never--"
"Truesdale! For shame!"
"And the over-conscientious and supersensitive father with millions and
millions stored away in bursting money-bags somewhere or other. Oh, those
money-bags, those money-bags, those money-bags!"
"Truesdale, what do you mean? Are they adventurers? Are they after
black-mail?"
Truesdale threw back his head, closing his eyes and twirling his thumbs.
"I knew them there; I know them here." Then he opened his eyes and gave
his brother a glance of satirical approval. "_Complimenti_, Roger; you
are ending where I should have expected you to begin."
"It is not the end," cried Roger, savagely. He saw that he had allowed
his view of the matter to be wrongly colored by the impressions of his
father and the representations of Belden; and Truesdale's comments
lacerated his self-esteem as with griffins' claws. "Haven't I told you
that they have taken legal advice, and that--"
"And that the whole grovelling tribe of Leppins, outnumbering the Van
Horns, possibly, are ready with oral testimony and a shower of
depositions, and what all besides. Ouf! not an inch do I yield. _J'y
suis; j'y reste_. Not an inch should anybody else yield. Well, thank me,
Roger, for having given you this little glimpse into the great big world.
It's full of interest." He rose suddenly, stiff and straight and slender
as some young fir-tree. "Come, Roger, put on your hat and go with me to
Japan."
He looked over into the half-open drawer of his brother's desk. "More of
those maps, I see."
"Other maps; another subdivision. I can do my work without trotting over
the whole globe; Cook County is big enough for me."
"H'm; you seem to be branching out quite extensively. Only, don't get in
too deep." Truesdale gave this valuable advice in a patronizing tone of
which he alone was master. "Yes, I should think Cook County would do very
well for you--until you have learned to spik something besides ze
Engleesh." He picked up his hat and moved towards the door.
"English will do for _me_!" retorted Roger, savagely.
"Well, turn the thing over in this new light," continued his brother,
pleasantly. "And one thing more--a little suggestion: you have some
notion of the man who comes before Monsieur X; give a bit of attention,
now, to the man who comes after. He could be of the greatest service to
us--permanent service. _Comprenez-vous_? Find him; find Monsieur Y--and
arrange it that he shall be the last!"
And Truesdale sauntered airily out of the room.