“Tracy has found out that I’m doing the Minster business, and he’s cut
up rough about it. I shouldn’t be surprised if the firm came a cropper
over the thing.”
Horace Boyce confided this information to Mr. Schuyler Tenney on the
forenoon following his scene with Reuben, and though the language in
which it was couched was in part unfamiliar, the hardware merchant had
no difficulty in grasping its meaning. He stopped his task of going
through the morning’s batch of business letters, and looked up keenly at
the young man.
“Found out--how do you mean? I told you to tell him--told you the day
you came here to talk about the General’s affairs.”
“Well, I didn’t tell him.”
“And why?” Tenney demanded, sharply. “I should like to know why?”
“Because it didn’t suit me to do so,” replied the young man; “just as it
doesn’t suit me now to be bullied about it.”
Mr. Tenney looked for just a fleeting instant as if he were going to
respond in kind. Then he thought better of it, and began toying with one
of the envelopes before him.
“You must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,” he
said, smilingly. “Why, man alive, nobody dreamed of bullying you. Only,
of course, it would have been better if you’d told Tracy. And you say he
is mad about it?”
“Yes, he was deucedly offensive. I daresay it will come to an open row.
I haven’t seen him yet to-day, but things looked very dickey indeed for
the partnership last night.”
“Then the firm hasn’t got any specified term to run?”
“No, it is terminable at pleasure of both parties, which of course means
either party.”
“Well, there, you can tell him to go to the old Harry, if you like.”
“Precisely what I mean to do--if--”
“If what?”
“If there is going to be enough in this Minster business to keep me
going in the mean while. I don’t think I could take much of his regular
office business away. I haven’t been there long enough, you know.”
“Enough? I Should think there _would_ be enough! You will have five
thousand dollars as her representative in the Thessaly Manufacturing
Company. I daresay you might charge something for acting as her agent in
the pig-iron trust, too, though I’d draw it pretty mild if I were you.
Women get scared at bills for that sort of thing. A young fellow like
you ought to save money on half of five thousand dollars. It never cost
me fifteen hundred dollars yet to live, and live well, too.”
Horace smiled in turn, and the smile was felt by both to suffice,
without words. There was no need to express in terms the fact that
in matters of necessary expense a Boyce and a Tenney, were two widely
differentiated persons. Only perhaps. Horace had more satisfaction out
of the thought than did his companion.
“Oh, by the way,” he added, “I ought to tell you, Tracy knows in
some way that you are mixed up with me in the thing. He mentioned your
name--in that slow, ox-like way of his so that I couldn’t tell how much
he knew or suspected.”
Mr. Tenney was interested in this; and showed his concern by separating
the letters on his desk into little piles, as if he were preparing to
perform a card tricks:
“I guess it won’t matter, much,” he said at last. “Everybody’s going
to know it pretty soon, now.” He thought again for a little, and then
added: “Only, on second thought, you’d better stick in with him a while
longer, if you can. Make some sort of apology to him, if he needs one,
and keep in the firm. It will be better so.”
“Why should I, pray?” demanded the young man, curtly.
Mr. Tenney again looked momentarily as if he were tempted to reply with
acerbity, and again the look vanished as swiftly as it came. He answered
in all mildness:
“Because I don’t want Tracy to be sniffing around, inquiring into
things, until we are fairly in the saddle. He might spoil everything.”
“But how will my remaining with him prevent that?”
“You don’t know your man,” replied Tenney. “He’s one of those fellows
who would feel in honor bound to keep his hands off, simply because you
_were_ with him. That’s the beauty of that kind of chap.”
This tribute to the moral value of his partner impressed Horace but
faintly. “Well, I’ll see how he talks to-day,” he said, doubtfully.
“Perhaps we can manage to hit it off together a while longer.” Then a
thought crossed his mind, and he asked with abruptness:
“What are you afraid of his finding out, if he does ‘sniff around’ as
you call it? What is there to find out? Everything is above board, isn’t
it?”
“Why, you know it is. Who should know it better than you?” Mr. Tenney
responded.
Horace reasoned to himself as he walked away that there really was no
cause for apprehension. Tenney was smart, and evidently Wendover was
smart too, but if they tried to pull the wool over his eyes they would
find that he himself had not been born yesterday. He had done everything
they had suggested to him, but he felt that the independent and even
captious manner in which he had done it all must have shown the schemers
that he was not a man to be trifled with. Thus far he could see no
dishonesty in their plans. He had been very nervous about the first
steps, but his mind was almost easy now. He was in a position where he
could protect the Minsters if any harm threatened them. And very
soon now, he said confidently to himself, he would be in an even more
enviable position--that of a member of the family council, a prospective
son-in-law. It was clear to his perceptions that Kate liked him, and
that he had no rivals.
It happened that Reuben did not refer again to the subject of
yesterday’s dispute, and while Horace acquiesced in the silence, he was
conscious of some disappointment over it. It annoyed him to even look at
his partner this morning, and he was sick and tired of the partnership.
It required an effort to be passing civil with Reuben, and he said to
himself a hundred times during the day that he should be heartily glad
when the Thessaly Manufacturing Company got its new machinery in, and
began real operations, so that he could take up his position there
as the visible agent of the millions, and pitch his partner and the
pettifogging law business overboard altogether.
In the course of the afternoon he went to the residence of the Minsters.
The day was not Tuesday, but Horace regarded himself as emancipated from
formal conditions, and at the door asked for the ladies, and then made
his own way into the drawing-room, with entire self-possession.
When Mrs. Minster came down, he had some trivial matter of business
ready as a pretext for his visit, but her manner was so gracious that
he felt pleasantly conscious of the futility of pretexts. He was on such
a footing in the Minster household that he would never need excuses any
more.
The lady herself mentioned the plan of his attending the forthcoming
meeting of the directors of the pig-iron trust at Pittsburg, and told
him that she had instructed her bankers to deposit with his bankers a
lump sum for expenses chargeable against the estate, which he could
use at discretion. “You mustn’t be asked to use your own money on our
business,” she said, smilingly.
It is only natural to warm toward people who have such nice things as
this to say, and Horace found himself assuming a very confidential,
almost filial, attitude toward Mrs. Minster. Her kindness to him was so
marked that he felt really moved by it, and in a gracefully indirect
way said so. He managed this by alluding to his own mother, who had died
when he was a little boy, and then dwelling, with a tender inflection
in his voice, upon the painful loneliness which young men feel who are
brought up in motherless homes. “It seems as if I had never known a home
at all,” he said, and sighed.
“She was one of the Beekmans from Tyre, wasn’t she? I’ve heard Tabitha
speak of her often,” said Mrs. Minster. The words were not important,
but the look which accompanied them was distinctly sympathetic.
Perhaps it was this glance that affected Horace. He made a little
gulping sound in his throat, clinched his hands together, and looked
fixedly down upon the pattern of the carpet.
“We should both have been better men if she had lived’,” he murmured,
in a low voice.
As no answer came, he was forced to look up after a time, and then
upon the instant he realized that his pathos had been wasted, for Mrs.
Minster’s face did not betray the emotion he had anticipated. She seemed
to have been thinking of something else.
“Have you seen any Bermuda potatoes in the market yet?” she asked. “It’s
about time for them, isn’t it?”
“I’ll ask my father,” Horace replied, determined not to be thrown off
the trail. “He has been in the West Indies a good deal, and he knows all
about their vegetables, and the seasons, and so on. It is about him that
I wish to speak, Mrs. Minster.”
The lady nodded her head, and drew down the comers of her mouth a
little.
“I feel the homeless condition of the General very much,” Horace went
on. “The death of my mother was a terrible blow to him, one he has never
recovered from.”
Mrs. Minster had heard differently, but she nodded her head again in
sympathy with this new view. Horace had not been mistaken in believing
that filial affection was good in her eyes.
“So he has lived all these years almost alone in the big house,” the son
proceeded, “and the solitary life has affected his spirits, weakened
his ambition, relaxed his regard for the part he ought to play in the
community. Since I have been back, he has brightened up a good deal. He
has been a most loving father to me always, and I would do anything in
the world to contribute to his happiness. It is borne in upon me more
and more that if I had a cheerful home to which he could turn for warmth
and sunshine, if I had a wife whom he could reverence and be fond of, if
there were grandchildren to greet him when he came and to play upon his
knee--he would feel once more as if there was something in life worth
living for.”
Horace awaited with deep anxiety the answer to this. The General was the
worst card in his hand, one which he was glad to be rid of at any risk.
If it should turn out that it had actually taken a trick in the game,
then he would indeed be lucky.
“If it is no offence, how old are you, Mr. Boyce?” the lady asked.
“I shall be twenty-eight in April.”
Mrs. Minster seemed to approve the figures. “I never have believed in
early marriages,” she said. “They make more than half the trouble there
is. The Mauverensens were never great hands for marrying early. My
grandfather, Major Douw, was almost thirty, and my father was past
that age. And, of course, people married then much earlier than they do
nowadays.”
“I hope you do not think twenty-eight too young,” Horace pleaded, with
alert eyes resting on her face. He paused only for an instant, and then,
just as the tremor arising in his heart had reached his tongue, added
earnestly, “For it is a Mauverensen I wish to marry.”
Mrs. Minster looked at him with no light of comprehension in her glance.
“It can’t be our people,” she said, composedly, “for Anthony has no
daughters. It must be some of the Schenectady lot. We’re not related at
all. They try to make out that they are, but they’re not.”
“You are very closely and tenderly related to the young lady I have
learned to adore,” the young man said, leaning forward on his low chair
until one knee almost touched the carpet. “I called her a Mauverensen
because she is worthy of that historic blood, but it was her mother’s,
not her father’s name. Mrs. Minster, I love your daughter Kate!”
“Goodness me!” was the astonished lady’s comment.
She stared at the young man in suppliant attitude before her, in
very considerable confusion of thought, and for what seemed to him an
intolerable time.
“I am afraid it wouldn’t do at all,” she said first, doubtingly. Then
she added, as if thinking aloud: “I might have known Kate was keeping
something from me. She hasn’t been herself at all these last few weeks.”
“But she has not been keeping _this_ from you, Mrs. Minster,” urged the
young man, in his softest voice. “It is my own secret--all my own--kept
locked in the inner tabernacle of my heart until this very moment, when
I revealed it to you.”
“You mean that Kate--my daughter--does not know of this?”
“She must know that I worship the ground she treads on--she would be
blind not to realize that--but I have never said a word to her about it.
No, not a word!”
Mrs. Minster uttered the little monosyllable “oh!” with a hesitating,
long-drawn-out sound. It was evident that this revelation altered
matters in her mind, and Horace hurried on:
“No,” he said; “the relation between mother and child has always seemed
to pie the most sacred thing on earth--perhaps because my own mother
died so many, many years ago. I would rather stifle my own feelings than
let an act of mine desecrate or imperil that relation. It may be that
I am old-fashioned, Mrs. Minster,” the young man continued, with a
deprecatory smile, “but I like the old habit of the good families--that
of deferring to the parents. I say that to them the chief courtesy and
deference are due. I know it is out of date, but I have always felt that
way. So I speak to you first. I say to you with profound respect that
you have reared the loveliest and best of all the daughters of the sons
of men, and that if you will only entertain the idea of permitting me to
strive to win her love, I shall be the proudest and happiest mortal on
earth.”
Whatever might betide with the daughter, the conquest of the mother was
easy and complete.
“I like your sentiments very much indeed,” she said, with evident
sincerity. “And I like you too. I may as well tell you so. Of course I
haven’t the least idea what Kate will say.”
“Oh, leave that to me!” said Horace, with ardent confidence. Then, after
this rapturous outburst, he went on more quietly: “I would beg of you
not to mention the subject to her. I think that would be best.
Your favor has allowed me to come and go here on pleasant terms of
friendship. Let these terms not be altered. I will not ask your daughter
to commit herself until she has had time and chance to know me through
and through. It would not be fair to her otherwise. To pick a husband
is the one grand, irrevocable step in a young girl’s life. Its success
means bliss, content, sunshine; its failure means all that is the
reverse. Therefore, I say, she cannot have too much information, too
many advantages, to help her in her choice.”
Thus it came to be understood that Mrs. Minster was to say nothing, and
was not to seem to make more of Horace than she had previously done.
Then he bowed over her hand and lightly kissed it, in a fashion which
the good lady fondly assumed to be European, and was gone.
Mrs. Minster spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a semi-dazed
abstraction of mental power, from time to time fitfully remembering
some wealthy young man whom she had vaguely considered as a
possible son-in-law, and sighing impartially over each mustached
and shirt-fronted figure as she pushed it out into the limbo of the
might-have-been. She almost groaned once when she recalled that this
secret must be kept even from her friend Tabitha.
As for Horace, he walked on air. The marvel of his great success
surrounded and lifted him, as angels bear the souls of the blessed
fleeting from earth in the artist’s dream. The young Bonaparte, home
from Italy and the reproduction of Hannibal’s storied feat, with Paris
on its knees before him and France resounding with his name, could not
have swung his shoulders more proudly, or gazed upon unfolding destiny
with a more exultant confidence.
On his way homeward an instinctive desire to be alone with his joy led
him to choose unfrequented streets, and on one of these he passed a
milliner’s shop which he had never seen before. He would not have noted
it now, save that his eye was unconsciously caught by some stray
freak of color in the window where bonnets were displayed. Then, still
unconsciously, his vision embraced the glass door beside this window,
and there suddenly it was arrested and turned to a bewildered stare.
In the dusk of the little shop nothing could be distinguished but two
figures which stood close by the door. The dying light from the western
sky, ruddily brilliant and penetrating in its final glow, fell full upon
the faces of these two as they were framed in profile by the door.
One was the face of Kate Minster, the woman he was to wed. The other was
the face of Jessica Law-ton, the woman whose life he had despoiled.
Horace realized nothing else so swiftly as that he had not been seen,
and, with an instinctive lowering of the head and a quickened step, he
passed on. It was not until he had got out of the street altogether that
he breathed a long breath and was able to think. Then he found himself
trembling with excitement, as if he had been through a battle or a
burning house.
Reflection soon helped his nerves to quietude again. Evidently the girl
had opened a millinery shop, and evidently Miss Minster was buying a
bonnet of her. That was all there was of it, and surely there was no
earthly cause for perturbation in that. The young man had thought so
lightly of the Law-ton incident at Thanksgiving time that it had never
since occurred to him to ask Tracy about its sequel.
It came to his mind now that Tracy had probably helped her to start the
shop. “Damn Tracy!” he said to himself.
No, there was nothing to be uneasy about in the casual, commercial
meeting of these two women. He became quite clear on this point as he
strode along toward home. At his next meeting with Kate it might do no
harm to mention having seen her there in passing, and to drop a hint as
to the character of the girl whom she was dealing with. He would see
how the talk shaped itself, after the Law-ton woman’s name had been
mentioned. It was a great nuisance, her coming to Thessaly, anyway. He
didn’t wish her any special harm, but if she got in his way here she
should be crushed like an insect. But, pshaw! it was silly to conceive
injury or embarrassment coming from her.
So with a laugh he dismissed the subject from his thoughts, and went
home to dine with his father, and gladdened the General’s heart by
a more or less elaborated account of the day’s momentous event, in
complete forgetfulness of the shock he had had.
In the dead of the night, however, he did think of it again with a
vengeance. He awoke screaming, and cold with frightened quakings, under
the spell of some hideous nightmare. When he thought upon them, the
terrors of his dream were purely fantastic and could not be shaped into
any kind of coherent form. But the profile of the Lawton girl seemed to
be a part of all these terrors, a twisted and elongated side-face, with
staring, empty eyes and lips down-drawn like those of the Medusa’s head,
and yet, strangely enough, with a certain shifting effect of beauty upon
it all under the warm light of a winter sunset.
Horace lay a long time awake, deliberately striving to exorcise this
repellent countenance by fixing his thoughts upon the other face--the
strong, beautiful, queenly face of the girl who was to be his wife. But
he could not bring up before his mind’s eye this picture that he wanted,
and he could not drive the other away.
Sleep came again somehow, and there were no more bad dreams to be
remembered. In the morning Horace did not even recall very distinctly
the episode of the nightmare, but he discovered some novel threads of
gray at his temple as he brushed his hair, and for the first time in his
life, too, he took a drink of spirits before breakfast.