Then: 'She's a long time. They must be at the table still.' He sat up;
listened. But the dining-room in the Dexter Smith place was far back
behind the 'back parlour.' The walls were thick. There were heavy
hangings and vast areas of soft carpet. You couldn't hear. 'Gee!' his
thoughts raced on, 'think of owning all this! Wonder how people ever get
so much money. Wonder how it would seem.'
He caught himself twisting his neck nervously within his collar. And his
hands were clenched; his toes, even, were drawn up tightly in his shoes.
'Gotta relax,' he told himself again.
Then he felt for the little box. This time he transferred it to a
trousers pocket; held it tight in his hand there.
A door opened and closed. There was a distant rustling. Henry, paler,
sprang to his feet.
'I must be cool,' he thought. 'Think before I speak. Everything depends
on my steadiness now.'
But the step was not Cicely's. She was slim and light. This was a solid
tread.
He gripped the little box more tightly. He was meeting with a curious
difficulty in breathing.
Then, in the doorway, appeared the large person, the hooked nose, the
determined mouth, the piercing, hawklike eyes of Madame Watt.
'How d'do, Henry,' she said, in her deep voice. 'Sit down. I want to
talk to you. About Cicely. I'm going to tell you frankly--I like you,
Henry; I believe you're going to amount to something one of these
days--but I had no idea--now I want you to take this in the spirit I say
it in--I had no idea things were going along so fast between Cicely and
you. I've trusted you. I've let you two play together all you liked. And
I won't say I'd stand in the way, a few years from now----
'A few years!...'
'Now, Henry, I'm not going to have you getting all stirred up. Let's
admit that you're fond of Cicely. You are, aren't you? Yes? Well, now
we'll try to look at it sensibly. How old are you?'
'I'm twenty, but----'
'When will you be twenty-one?'
'Next month. You see----'
'Now tell me--try to think this out clearly--how on earth could you
expect to take care of a girl who's been brought up as Cicely has. Even
if she were old enough to know her own mind, which I can't believe she
is.'
'Oh, but she does!'
'Fudge, Henry! She couldn't. What experience has she had? Never mind
that, though. Tell me, what is your income now. You'll admit I have a
right to ask.'
'Twelve a week, but----'
'And what prospects have you? Be practical now! How far do you expect to
rise on the _Gleaner!_'
'Not very high, but our circulation----'
'What earthly difference can a little more or less circulation make when
it's a country weekly! No, Henry, believe me, I have a great deal of
confidence in you--I mean that you'll keep on growing up and forming
character--but this sort of thing can not--simply can not--go on now.
Why, Henry, you haven't even begun your man's life yet! Very likely
you'll write. It may be that you're a genius. But that makes it all the
more a problem. Can't you see----'
'Yes, of course, but----'
'No, listen to me! I asked Cicely to-day why you were coming so often.
I wasn't at all satisfied with her answers to my questions. And when I
forced her to admit that she has been as good as engaged to you----'
'But we _aren't_ engaged! It's only an understanding.'
'Understanding! Pah! Don't excite me, Henry. I want to straighten this
out just as pleasantly as I can. I _am_ fond of you, Henry. But I never
dreamed---- Tell me, you and that young Weaver own the _Gleaner_, I
think.'
'Yes'm we own it. But----'
'Just what does that mean? That you have paid money--actual money--for
it?'
'Yes'm. It's cost us about four thousand.'
'Four thousand! Hmm!'
'And then Charlie Waterhouse--he's town treasurer--he sued me for
libel--ten thousand dollars'--Henry seemed a thought proud of this--'and
I had to give him two thousand to settle. It was something in one of
my stories--the one called _Sinbad the Treasurer_. Mr Davis--he's my
lawyer--he said Charlie had a case, but----'
'Wait a minute, Henry! Where did you get that money. It's--let me
see--about four thousand dollars--your share--'
'Yes'm four thousand. It was my mother's. She left it to me. But----'
'I see. Your mother's estate. How much is left of it--outside what you
lost in this suit and the two thousand you've invested in the paper.'
'Nothing. But----'
'Nothing! Now, Henry'--no, don't speak! I want you to listen to me a few
minutes longer. And I want you to take seriously to heart what I'm going
to say. First, about this paper, the _Gleaner_. It's a serious question
whether you'll ever get your two thousand dollars back. If you ever
_have_ to sell out you won't get anything like it. If you were older,
and if you were by nature a business man--which you aren't!--you might
manage, by the hardest kind of work to build it up to where you could
get twenty or thirty dollars a week out of it instead of twelve. But
you'll never do it. You aren't fitted for it. You're another sort of
boy, by nature. And I'm sorry to say I firmly believe this money, or
the most of it is certain to go after the other two thousand, that Mr
Charlie Waterhouse got. But even considering that you boys _could_ make
the paper pay for itself, Cicely couldn't be the wife of a struggling
little country editor. I wouldn't listen to that for a minute! No, my
advice to you, Henry, is to take your losses as philosophically as you
can, call it experience, and go to work as a writer. It'll take you
years----'
'_Years!_ But----'
'Yes, to establish yourself. A success in a country town isn't a New
York success. Remember that. No, it's a long road you're going to
travel. After you've got somewhere, when you've become a man, when
you've found yourself, with some real prospects--it isn't that I'd
expect you to be rich, Henry, but I'd _have_ to be assured that you were
a going concern--why, then you might come to me again. But not now. I
want you to go now----'
'Without seeing Cicely?'
'Certainly. Above all things. I want you to go, and promise that you
won't try to see her. To-morrow she goes away for a long visit.'
'For--a--long... But she'd see other men, and--Oh!...'
'Exactly. I mean that she shall. Best way in the world to find out
whether you two are calves or lovers. One way or the other, we'll prove
it. And now you must go! Remember you have my best wishes. I hope you'll
find the road one of these days and make a go of it.'
A moment more and the front door had closed on him. He stood before
the house, staring up through the maple leaves at the starry sky,
struggling, for the moment vainly, toward sanity. It was like the end of
the world. If was unthinkable. It was awful.
But after waiting a while he went to Mr Merchant's. There was nothing
else to do.
5
Mr Merchant himself opened the door to Henry. He lived in one of the
earliest of the apartment buildings that later were to work a deep
change in the home life of Sunbury. 'How are you, Calverly!' he said, in
his offhand, superior way. Then in a lower and distinctly less superior
tone, almost friendly indeed, he added, 'Got a bit of a surprise for
you. Come in.'
The living-room was lighted by a single standing lamp with a red shade.
Beneath it, curled up like a boy in a cretonne-covered wing chair, his
shock of faded yellow hair mussed where his fingers had been, his
heavy faded yellow moustache bushing out under a straight nose and pale
cheeks, his old gray suit sadly wrinkled, sat a stranger reading from a
handful of newspaper clippings.
Henry paused in the door. The man looked up, so quickly that Henry
started, and fixed on him eyes that while they were a rather pale blue
yet had an uncanny fire in them.