REUBEN’S first impulse, when he found himself alone in the little shop
with his former pupil, was to say good-by and get out as soon as he
could. To the best of his recollection, he had never before been in a
store consecrated entirely to the fashions and finery of the opposite
sex, and he was oppressed by a sense of being an intruder upon an
exclusively feminine domain. The young girl, too, whom he had been
thinking of all this while as an unfortunate child whom he must watch
over and be good to, stood revealed before him as a self-controlled and
sophisticated woman, only a few years younger than himself in actual
age, and much wiser than himself in the matters of head-gear and
textures and colors which belonged to this place. He could have talked
freely to her in his law-office, with his familiar accessories of papers
and books about him. A background of bonnets was disconcerting.
“How beautiful she is!” were Jessica’s first words, and they pleasurably
startled the lawyer from his embarrassed revery.
“She is, indeed,” he answered, and somehow found himself hoping that the
conversation would cling to this subject a good while. “I had never met
her before, as you saw, but of course I have known her by sight a long
time.”
“I don’t think I ever saw her before to-day,” said Jessica. “How
wonderful it seems that she should have come, and then that you came,
too, and that you both should like the plan, and take it up so, and make
a success of it right at the start.”
Reuben smiled. “In your eagerness to keep up with the procession I fear
you are getting ahead of the band,” he said. “I wouldn’t quite call it
a success, at present. But, no doubt, it’s a great thing to have her
enlisted in it. I’m glad she likes you; her friendship will make all the
difference in the world to you, here in Thessaly.”
The girl did not immediately answer, and Tracy, looking at her as she
walked across to the showcase, was surprised to catch the glisten of
tears on her eyelashes. He had no idea what to say, but waited in pained
puzzlement for her to speak.
“‘Friendship’ is not quite the word,” she said at last, looking up at
him and smiling with mournful softness through her tears. “I shall be
glad if she likes me--as you say, it will be a great thing if she helps
me--but we shall hardly be ‘friends,’ you know. _She_ would never call
it that. Oh, no! oh, no!”
Her voice trembled audibly over these last words, and she began
hurriedly to re-arrange some of the articles in the showcase, with the
obvious design of masking her emotion.
“You can do yourself no greater harm than by exaggerating that kind of
notion, my girl,” said Reuben Tracy, in his old gravely kind voice. “You
would put thoughts into her head that way which she had never dreamt of
otherwise; that is, if she weren’t a good and sensible person. Why, she
is a woman like yourself--”
“Oh, no, no! _Not_ like _me!_”
Tracy was infinitely touched by the pathos of this deprecating wail,
but he went on as if he had not heard it: “A woman like yourself, with
a heart turned in mercy and charity toward other women who are not so
strong to help themselves. Why on earth should you vex your soul with
fears that she will be unkind to you, when she showed you as plain
as the noonday sun her desire _to_ be kind? You mustn’t yield to such
fancies.”
“Kind, yes! But you don’t understand--you _can’t_ understand. I
shouldn’t have spoken as I did. It was a mere question of a word,
anyway.”
Jessica smiled again, to show that, though the tears were still there,
the grief behind them was to be regarded as gone, and added, “Yes, she
was kindness itself.”
“She is very rich in her own right, I believe, and if her interest
in your project is genuine--that is, of the kind that lasts--you will
hardly need any other assistance. Of course you must allow for the
chance of her dropping the idea as suddenly as she picked it up. Rich
women--rich people generally, for that matter--are often flighty about
such things. ‘Put not your trust in princes,’ serves as a warning about
millionnaires as well as monarchs. The rest of us are forced to be
more or less continuous in what we think and do. We have to keep at the
things we’ve started, because a waste of time would be serious to us.
We have to keep the friends and associates we’ve got, because others
are not to be had for the asking. But these favored people are more
free--their time doesn’t matter, and they can find new sets of friends
ready made whenever they weary of the others. Still, let us hope she
will be steadfast. She has a strong face, at all events.”
The girl had listened to this substantial dissertation with more or less
comprehension, but with unbounded respect. Anything that Reuben Tracy
said she felt must be good. Besides, his conclusion jumped with her
hopes.
“I’m not afraid of her losing interest in the thing itself,” she
answered. “What worries me is--or, no--” She stopped herself with a
smile, and made haste to add, “I forgot. I mustn’t be worried. But who
is our Miss Minster? Does she own the ironworks? Tell me about her.”
“She owns a share of the works, I think. I don’t know how big a share,
or, in fact, much else about her. I’ve heard my partner, Horace Boyce,
talk lately a good deal--”
Tracy did not finish his sentence, for Jessica had sunk suddenly into
the chair behind the case, and was staring at him over the glass-bound
row of bonnets with wide-open, startled eyes.
“_Your partner!_ Yours, did you say? That man?”
Her tone and manner very much surprised Reuben. “Why, yes, he’s my
partner,” he said, slowly and in wonderment. “Didn’t you know that?
We’ve been together since December.”
She shook her head, and murmured something hastily about having been
very busy, and being cooped up on a back street.
This did not explain her agitation, which more and more puzzled Reuben
as he thought upon it. He stood looking down upon her where she sat, and
noted that her face, though it was turned away from him now, was both
pale and excited.
“Do you know him?” he asked finally.
She shook her head again, and the lawyer fancied she was biting her
lips. He did not know well what else to say, and was speculating whether
it would not be best to say nothing, when all at once she burst forth
vehemently.
“I _won’t_ lie to you!” she exclaimed. “I _did_ know him, very much to
my cost. And, oh! don’t you trust him! Don’t you trust him, I say! He’s
not fit to be with you. Oh, my God!--_don’t_ I know Horace Boyce!”
Reuben stood silent, still looking down gravely into the girl’s flashing
eyes. What she had said annoyed and disturbed him, but what he thought
chiefly about was how to avoid bringing on an explanation which must
wound and humiliate her feelings. It was clear enough what she meant,
and he compassionately hoped she would not feel it necessary to add
anything. Above all things he felt that he wanted to spare her pain.
“I understand,” he said at last, as the frankest way out of the dilemma.
“Don’t say any more.” He pondered for a minute or so upon the propriety
of not saying anything more himself, and then with decision offered her
his hand across the showcase, and held hers in his expansive clasp with
what he took to be fatherly sympathy, as he said:
“I must go now. Good-by. And I shall hear from you soon about the
project?” He smiled to reassure her, and added, still holding her hand,
“Now, don’t you let worry come inside these doors at all. You have made
a famous start, and everything will go well, believe me.”
Then he went out, and the shrill clamor of the bell hung to jangle
when the door was opened woke Jessica from her day-dream, just as the
sunbeams had begun to drive away the night.
She rose with a start, and walked to the door to follow his
retiring figure through the glass. She stood there, lost in another
revery--vague, languorous, half-bright, half-hideous--until the door
from the back room was opened, and Samantha’s sharp voice fell on the
silence of the little shop.
“I ain’t going to set in that poky old kitchen any longer for all
the bonnets in your whole place,” she remarked, with determination,
advancing to the mirror with the toque on her truculently poised head.
“Besides, you said you’d call us when they were all gone.”
Lucinda stole up to her sister-employer, and murmured in a side-long
whisper: “I couldn’t keep her from listening a little. You talked too
loud. She heard what you said about that Boyce chap.”
The tidings angered Jessica even more than they alarmed her. With an
impulse equally illogical and natural, she frowned at Samantha, and
stiffened her fingers claw-wise, with a distinct itching to tear that
arrangement of bronze velvet and sage-green feathers from her perfidious
sister’s head.
Curiously enough, it was the usually aggressive Lucinda who counselled
prudence. “If I was you, I’d ask her to stay to dinner,” she said,
in the same furtive undertone. “I’ve been talking to her, and I guess
she’ll be all right if we make it kind o’ pleasant for her when she
comes. But if you rub her the wrong way, she’ll scratch.”
Samantha was asked to dinner, and stayed, and later, being offered her
choice of three hat-pins with heads of ornamented jet, took two.
*****
Reuben walked slowly back to the office, and then sat through a solitary
meal at a side-table in the Dearborn House dining-room, although his
customary seat was at the long table down the centre, in order that he
might think over what he had heard.
It is not clear that the isolated fact disclosed to him in the
milliner’s shop would, in itself, have been sufficient to awaken in his
mind any serious distrust of his partner. As the sexes have different
trainings and different spheres, so they have different standards. Men
set up the bars, for instance, against a brother who cheats at cards, or
divulges what he has heard in his club, or borrows money which he cannot
repay, or pockets cigars at feasts when he does not himself smoke. But
their courts of ethics do not exercise jurisdiction over sentimental or
sexual offences, as a rule. These the male instinct vaguely refers to
some other tribunal, which may or may not be in session somewhere else.
And this male instinct is not necessarily co-existent with immoral
tendencies, or blunted sensibilities, or even indifference: it is the
man’s way of looking at it--just as it is his way to cross a muddy
street on his toes, while his sisters perform the same feat on their
heels.
Reuben Tracy was a good man, and one with keen aspirations toward
honorable and ennobling things; but still he was a man, and it may
be that this discovery, standing by itself, would not seriously have
affected his opinion of Horace. But it did not stand by itself.
In an indefinite kind of way, he was conscious of being less attracted
by the wit and sparkling smalltalk of Horace than he had been at first.
Somehow, the young man seemed to have exhausted his store; he began to
repeat himself, as if he had already made the circuit of the small ring
around which his mind travelled. Reuben confronted a suspicion that the
Boyce soil was shallow.
This might not be necessarily an evil thing, he said to himself. Lawyers
quite often achieved notable successes before juries, who were not
deep or well-grounded men. Horace was versatile, and versatility was
a quality which Reuben distinctly lacked. From that point of view the
combination ought, therefore, to be of value.
But, then, Horace told lies. Versatility of that variety was not so
admirable. There could be no doubt on this point. Reuben could count
on his fingers now six separate falsehoods that his partner had already
told him. They happened not to be upon vital or even important subjects,
but that did not render them the more palatable.
And then there was the Minster business. He knew from other sources
that Horace had been intrusted with the papers left to Mr. Clarke’s
executors. The young man had taken them to his father’s house, and had
never mentioned so much as a syllable about them to his partner. No
doubt, Horace felt that he ought to have this as his personal business,
and upon the precedent Reuben himself had set with the railroad work,
this was fair enough. But there was something underhanded in his secrecy
about the matter. He should have spoken of it.
Reuben’s thoughts from this drifted to the Minsters themselves, and
centred reverently upon the luminous figure of that elder daughter
whom he had met an hour before. He did not dwell much upon her
beauty--perhaps he was a trifle dull about such things--but her
graciousness, her sweet interest in the charity, her womanly commingling
of softness and enthusiasm, seemed to shine about him as he mused.
Thessaly unconsciously assumed a brighter and more wholesome aspect,
with much less need of reform than before, in his mind’s eye, now that
he thought of it as her home.
Her home! The prosperous and respected lawyer was still a country boy
in his unformed speculations as to what that home might be like. The
Minster house was the most splendid mansion in Dearborn County, it was
said, but his experience with mansions was small. A hundred times it had
been said to him that he could go anywhere if he liked, and he gave the
statement credence enough. But somehow it happened that he had not gone.
To “be in society,” as the phrase went, had not seemed important to him.
Now, almost for the first time, he found himself regretting this. Then
he smiled somewhat scowlingly at his plate as the vagrant reflection
came up that his partner contributed social status as well as
versatility and mendacity to the outfit of the firm. Horace Boyce had a
swallowtail coat, and visited at the Minsters’. The reflection was not
altogether grateful to him.
Reuben rose from the table, and stood for a few moments by the window
overlooking the veranda and the side street. The sunny warmth of the
thawing noon-day had made it possible to have the window open, and the
sound of voices close at hand showed that there were people already
anticipating pneumonia and the springtime by sitting on the porch
outside.
These voices conveyed no distinct impression at first to Reuben’s mind,
busy as he was with his own reflections. But all at once there was a
scraping of feet and chair-legs on the floor, signifying that the party
had risen, and then he heard two remarks which made a sharp appeal to
his attention and interest.
The first voice said: “Mind, I’m not going to let you put me into a
hole. What I do, I do only when it has been proved to me to be to my
own interest, and not at all because I’m afraid of you. Understand that
clearly!”
The other voice replied: “All that you need be afraid of is that you
will kick over your own bucket of milk. You’ve got the whole game in
your hands, if you only listen to me and don’t play it like a fool. What
do you say? Shall we go up to your house and put the thing into shape?
We can be alone there.”
The voices ceased, and there was a sound of footsteps descending from
the porch to the sidewalk. The two men passed before the window,
ducking their heads for protection against the water dripping from the
overflowed eaves on the roof of the veranda, and thus missing sight of
the man who had overheard them.
Reuben had known at once by the sound of the voice that the first
speaker was Horace Boyce. He recognized his companion now as Schuyler
Tenney, and the sight startled him.
Just why it should have done so, he could not have explained. He had
seen this Schuyler Tenney almost every day for a good many years,
putting them all together, and had never before been troubled, much less
alarmed, by the spectacle. But coming now upon what Jessica had
told him, and what his own thoughts had evolved, and what he had
inadvertently overheard, the figure of the rising hardware merchant
loomed darkly in his perturbed fancy as an evil and threatening thing.
A rustic client with a grievance sought Tracy out in the seclusion
of the dining-room, and dragged him back to his office and into the
intricacies of the law of trespass; but though he did his best to listen
and understand, the farmer went away feeling that his lawyer was a
considerably overrated man.
For, strive as he might, Reuben could not get the sound of those words,
“you’ve got the whole game in your hands,” out of his ears, or restrain
his mind from wearying itself with the anxious puzzle of guessing what
that game could be.