Devotion to Business and a Chance Meeting
In the weeks that now followed, Percival became a model of sobriety and
patient, unremitting industry, according to his own ideas of industry.
He visited the offices of his various brokers daily, reading the tape
with the single-hearted devotion of a veteran speculator. He acquired a
general knowledge of the ebb and flow of popular stocks. He frequently
saw opportunities for quick profit in other stocks than the three he
was dealing in, but he would not let himself be diverted.
"I'm centering on those three," he told Uncle Peter. "When they win out
we'll take up some other lines. I could have cleared a quarter of a
million in that Northern Pacific deal last week, as easy as not. I saw
just what was being done by that Ledrick combine. But we've got
something better, and I don't want to take chances on tying up some
ready money we might need in a hurry. If a man gets started on those
little side issues he's too apt to lose his head. He jumps in one day,
and out the next, and gets to be what they call a 'kangaroo,' down in
the Street. It's all right for amusement, but the big money is in
cinching one deal and pushing hard. It's a bull market now, too; buy
A.O.T. is the good word--Any Old Thing--but I'm going to stay right by
my little line."
"You certainly have a genius fur finance," declared Uncle Peter, with
fervent admiration. "This going into business will be the makin' of
you. You'll be good fur something else besides holdin' one of them
dinky little teacups, and talking about 'trouserings'--no matter _what_
people say. Let 'em _talk_ about you--sayin' you'll never be anything
like the man your pa was--_you'll_ show 'em."
And Percival, important with his secret knowledge of the great _coup_,
went back to the ticker, and laughed inwardly at the seasoned experts
who frankly admitted their bewilderment as to what was "doing" in
copper and Western Trolley.
"When it's all over," he confided gaily to the old man, "we ought to
pinch off about ten per cent of the winnings, and put up a monument to
absinthe _frappe_--the stuff Relpin had been drinking that day.
They'll give us a fine public square for it in Paris if they won't here
in New York. And it wouldn't do any good to give it to Relpin, who's
really earned it--he'd only lush himself into one of those drunkard's
graves--I understand there's a few left yet."
Early in March, Coplen, the lawyer, was sent for, and with him Percival
spent two laborious weeks, going over inventories of the properties,
securities, and moneys of the estate. The major portion of the latter
was now invested in the three stocks, and the remainder was at hand
where it could be conveniently reached.
Percival informed himself minutely as to the values of the different
mining properties, railroad and other securities. A group of the
lesser-paying mines was disposed of to an English syndicate, the
proceeds being retained for the stock deal. All but the best paying of
the railroad, smelting, and land-improvement securities were also
thrown on the market.
The experience was a valuable one to the young man, enlarging greatly
his knowledge of affairs, and giving him a needed insight into the
methods by which the fortune had been accumulated.
"That was a slow, clumsy, old-fashioned way to make money," he declared
to Coplen. "Nowadays it's done quicker."
His grasp of details delighted Uncle Peter and surprised Coplen.
"I didn't know but he might be getting plucked," said Coplen to the old
man, "with all that money being drawn out so fast. If I hadn't known
you were with him, I'd have taken it on myself to find out something
about his operations. But he's all right, apparently. He had a scent
like a hound for those dead-wood properties--got rid of them while we
would have been making up our minds to. That boy will make his way
unless I'm mistaken. He has a head for detail."
"I'll make him a bigger man than his pa was yet," declared Uncle Peter.
"But I wouldn't want to let on that I'd had anything to do with it.
He'll think he's done it all himself, and it's right he should. It
stimulates 'em. Boys of his age need just about so much conceit, and it
don't do to take it out of 'em."
Reports of the most encouraging character came from Burman. The deal in
corn was being engineered with a riper caution than had been displayed
in the ill-fated wheat deal of the spring before.
"Burman's drawn close up to a million already," said Percival to Uncle
Peter, "and now he wants me to stand ready for another million."
"Is Burman," asked Uncle Peter, "that young fellow that had a habit of
standin' pat on a pair of Jacks, and then bettin' everybody off the
board?"
"Yes, that was Burman."
"Well, I liked his ways. I should say he could do you a whole lot of
good in a corn deal."
"It certainly does look good--and Burman has learned the ropes and
spars. They're already calling him the 'corn-king' out on the Chicago
Board of Trade."
"Use your own judgment," Uncle Peter urged him. "You're the one that
knows all about these things. My Lord! how you ever _do_ manage to keep
things runnin' in your head gets me. If you got confidence in Burman,
all I can say is--well, your pa was a fine judge of men, and I don't
see why you shouldn't have the gift."
"Between you and me, Uncle Peter, I _am_ a good judge of human nature,
and I know this much about Burman: when he does win out he'll win big.
And I think he's going to whipsaw the market to a standstill this time,
for sure. Here's a little item from this morning's paper that sounds
right, all along the line."
"COPPER, CORN, AND CORDAGE.
"There are just now three great movements in the market, Copper Trust
stock, corn, and cordage stock. The upward movement in corn seems to be
in the main not speculative but natural--the result of a short supply
and a long demand. The movements in Copper and Cordage Trust stocks are
purely speculative. The copper movement is based on this proposition:
Can the Copper Trust maintain the price for standard copper at
seventeen cents a pound, in face of enormously increased supply and the
rapidly decreasing demand, notably in Germany? The bears think not. The
bulls, contrarily, persist in behaving as if they had inside
information of a superior value. Just possibly a simultaneous rise in
corn, copper, and cordage will be the next sensation in the trading
world."
"You see?" said Percival. "They're beginning to wake up, down
there--beginning to turn over in their sleep and mutter. Pretty soon
they'll begin to stretch lazily; when they finally hear something drop
and jump out of bed it will be too late. The bulls will be counting
their chips to cash in, and the man waiting around to put out the
lights. And I don't see why Burman isn't as safe as I am." "I don't,
either," said Uncle Peter.
"'A short supply and a long demand,'--it would be a sin to let any one
else in. I'll just wire him we're on, and that we need all of that good
thing ourselves."
In the flush of his great plans and great expectations came a chance
meeting with Miss Milbrey. He had seen her only at a distance since
their talk at Newport. Yet the thought of her had persisted as a
plaintive undertone through all the days after. Only the sharp hurt to
his sensitive pride--from the conviction that she had found him
tolerable solely because of the money--had saved him from the willing
admission to himself that he had carried off too much of her ever to
forget. In his quiet moments, the tones of her clear, low voice came
movingly to his ears, and his eyes conjured involuntarily her girlish
animation, her rounded young form, her colour and fire--the choked,
smouldering fire of opals. He saw the curve of her wrist, the confident
swing of her walk, the easy poise of her head, her bearing, at once
girlish and womanly, the little air, half of wistful appeal, and half
of self-reliant assertion. Yet he failed not to regard these
indulgences as utter folly. It had been folly enough while he believed
that she stood ready to accept him and his wealth. It was more
flagrant, now that her quest for a husband with millions had been so
handsomely rewarded.
But again, the fact that she was now clearly impossible for him, so
that even a degrading submission on his part could no longer secure
her, served only to bring her attractiveness into greater relief. With
the fear gone that a sudden impulse to possess her might lead him to
stultify himself, he could see more clearly than ever why she was and
promised always to be to him the very dearest woman in the
world--dearest in spite of all he could reason about so lucidly. He
felt, then, a little shock of unreasoning joy to find one night that
they were dining together at the Oldakers'.
At four o'clock he had received a hasty note signed "Fidelia Oldaker,"
penned in the fine, precise script of some young ladies' finishing
school--perhaps extinct now for fifty years--imploring him, if aught of
chivalry survived within his breast, to fetch his young grandfather and
dine with her that evening. Two men had inconsiderately succumbed, at
this eleventh hour, to the prevailing grip-epidemic, and the lady
threw herself confidently on the well-known generosity of the Bines
male--"like one of the big, stout nets those acrobatic people fall into
from their high bars," she concluded.
Uncle Peter was more than willing. He liked the Oldakers.
"They're the only sane folks I've met among your friends," he had told
his grandson. He had dined there frequently during the winter, and
professed to be enamoured of the hostess. That fragile but sprightly
bit of antiquity professed in turn to find Uncle Peter a very dangerous
man among the ladies. They flirted outrageously at every opportunity,
and Uncle Peter sent her more violets than many a popular _debutante_
received that winter.
Percival, with his new air of Wall Street operator, was inclined to
hesitate.
"You know I'm up early now, Uncle Peter, to get the day's run of the
markets before I go downtown, and a man can't do much in the way of
dinners when his mind is working all day. Perhaps Mauburn will go."
But Mauburn was taking Psyche and Mrs. Drelmer to the first night of a
play, and Percival was finally persuaded by the old man to relax, for
one evening, the austerity of his _regime_.
"But how your pa would love to see you so conscientious," he said, "and
you with Wall Street, or a good part of it, right under your heel, just
like _that_," and the old man ground his heel viciously into the
carpet.
When Percival found Shepler with Mrs. Van Geist and Miss Milbrey among
the Oldakers' guests, he rejoiced. Now he would talk to her without any
of that old awkward self-consciousness. He was even audacious enough to
insist that Mrs. Oldaker direct him to take Miss Milbrey out to dinner.
"I claim it as the price of coming, you know, when I was only an
afterthought."
"You shall be paid, sir," his hostess declared, "if you consider it pay
to sit beside an engaged girl whose mind is full of her _trousseau_.
And here's this captivating young scapegrace relative of yours. What
price does he demand for coming?" and she glanced up at Uncle Peter
with arch liberality in her bright eyes.
That gentleman bowed low--a bow that had been the admiration of the
smartest society in Marietta County, Ohio, fifty years and more ago.
"I'm paid fur coming by coming," he replied, urbanely.
"There, now!" cried his hostess, "that's pretty, and means something.
You shall take me in for that."
"I'll have to give you a credit-slip, ma'am. You've overpaid me." And
Mrs. Oldaker, with a coy fillip of her fan, called him a naughty boy.
"Here, Rulon," she called to Shepler, "are two young daredevils who've
been good enough to save me as many empty chairs. Now you shall take
out Cornelia, and this juvenile sprig shall relieve you of Avice
Milbrey. It's a providence. You engaged couples are always so dull when
you're banished from your own _ciel a deux_."
Shepler bowed and greeted the two men. Percival sought Miss Milbrey,
who was with her aunt at the other side of the old-fashioned room, a
room whose brocade hangings had been imported from England in the days
of the Georges, and whose furniture was fabricated in the time when
France was suffering its last kings.
He no longer felt the presence of anything overt between them. The girl
herself seemed to have regained the charming frankness of her first
manner with him. Their relationship was defined irrevocably. No
uncertainty of doubt or false seeming lurked now under the surface to
perplex and embarrass. The relief was felt at once by each.
"I'm to have the pleasure of taking you in, Miss Milbrey--hostess
issues special commands to that effect."
"Isn't that jolly! We've not met for an age."
"And I've such an appetite for talk with you, I fear I won't eat a
thing. If I'd known you were to be here I'd have taken the forethought
to eat a gored ox, or something--what is the proverb, 'better a dinner
of stalled ox where--'"
"'Where talk is,'" suggested Miss Milbrey, quickly.
"Oh, yes--.' than to have your own ox gored without a word of talk.' I
remember it perfectly now. And--there--we're moving on to this feast of
reason--"
"And the flow of something superior to reason," finished Shepler, who
had come over for Mrs. Van Geist. "Oldaker has some port that lay in
the wood in his cellar for forty years--and went around the world
between keel and canvas."
"That sounds good," said Percival, and then to Miss Milbrey, "But come,
let us reason together." His next sentiment, unuttered, was that the
soft touch of her hand under his arm was headier than any drink, how
ancient soever.
Throughout the dinner their entire absorption in each other was all but
unbroken. Percival never could remember who had sat at his left; and
Miss Milbrey's right-hand neighbour saw more than the winning line of
her profile but twice. Percival began--
"Do you know, I've never been able to classify you at all. I never
could tell how to take you."
"I'll tell you a secret, Mr. Bines; I think I'm not to be taken at all.
I've begun to suspect that I'm like one of those words that haven't any
rhyme--like 'orange' and 'month,' you know."
"But you find poetry in life? I do."
"Plenty of verse--not much poetry."
"How would you order life now, if the little old wishing-lady came to
your door and knocked?"
And they plunged forthwith, buoyed by youth's divine effrontery, into
mysteries that have vexed diners, not less than hermit sages, since
"the fog of old time" first obscured truth. Of life and death--the
ugliness of life, and the beauty of death--
"... even as death might smile, Petting the plumes of some surprised
soul,"
quoted the girl. Of loving and hating, they talked; of trying and
failing--of the implacable urge under which men must strive in the face
of certain defeat--of the probability that men are purposely born
fools, since, if they were born wise they would refuse to strive;
whereupon life and death would merge, and naught would prevail but a
vast indifference. In fact, they were very deep, and affected to
consider these grave matters seriously. They affected that they never
habitually thought of lesser concerns. And they had the air of
listening to each other as if they were weighing the words judicially,
and were quite above any mere sensuous considerations of personality.
Once they emerged long enough to hear the hostess speaking, as it were
of yesterday, of a day when the new "German cotillion" was introduced,
to make a sensation in New York; of a time when the best ballrooms were
heated with wood stoves and lighted with lamps; and of a later but
apparently still remote time when the Assemblies were "really, quite
the smartest function of the season."
In another pause, they caught the kernel of a story being told by Uncle
Peter:
"The girl was a half-breed, but had a fair skin and the biggest shock
of hair you ever saw--bright yellow hair. She was awful proud of her
hair. So when her husband, Clem Dewler, went to this priest, Father
McNally, and complained that she _would_ run away from the shack and
hang around the dance-halls down at this mining-camp, Father McNally
made up his mind to learn her a lesson. Well, he goes down and finds
her jest comin' out of Tim Healy's place with two other women. He
rushes up to her, catches hold of this big shock of hair that was
trailin' behind her, and before she knew what was comin' he whipped out
a big pair of sharp, shiny shears, and made as if he was going to give
her a hair-cut. At that she begins to scream, but the priest he
wouldn't let go. 'I'll cut it off,' he says, 'close,' he says, 'if you
don't swear on this crucifix to be a good squaw to Clem Dewler, and
never set so much as one of your little feet in these places again.'
She could feel the shears against her hair, and she was so scared she
swore like he told her. And so she was that afraid of losin' her fine
yellow hair afterward, knowin' Father McNally was a man that didn't
make no idle threats, that she kept prim and proper--fur a half-breed."
"That poor creature had countless sisters," was Miss Milbrey's comment
to Percival. And they fell together once more in deciding whether,
after all, the brightest women ever cease to believe that men are
influenced most by surface beauties. They fired each other's enthusiasm
for expressing opinions, and they took the opinions very seriously. Yet
of their meeting, to an observer, their talk would have seemed the part
least worth recording.
Twice Percival caught Shepler's regard bent upon them. It amused him to
think he detected signs of uneasiness back of the survey, cool,
friendly, and guarded as it was on the surface.
At parting, later, Percival spoke for the first time to Miss Milbrey of
her engagement.
"You must know that I wish you all the happiness you hope for yourself;
and if I were as lucky in love as Mr. Shepler has been, I surely would
never dare to gamble in anything else--you know the saying."
"And you, Mr. Bines. I've been hearing so much of your marriage. I hope
the rumour I heard to-day is true, that your engagement has been
announced."
He laughed.
"Come, now! That's all gossip, you know; not a word of truth in it, and
it's been very annoying to us both. Please demolish that rumour on my
authority next time you hear it, thoroughly, so they can make nothing
out of the pieces."
Miss Milbrey showed genuine disappointment.
"I had thought, naturally--"
"The only member of that household I could marry is not suited to my
age."
Miss Milbrey was puzzled.
"But, really, she's not so old."
"No, not so very old. Still, she's going on five, and you know how time
flies--and so much disparity in our ages--twenty-one years or so; no,
she was no wife for me, although I don't mind confessing that there has
been an affair between us, but--really you can't imagine what a
frivolous and trifling creature she is."
Miss Milbrey laughed now, rather painfully he fancied.
"You mean the baby? Isn't she a little dear?"
"I'll tell you something, just between us--the baby's mother is--well,
I like her--but she's a joke. That's all, a joke."
"I beg your pardon for talking of it. It had seemed so definite.
They're waiting for me--good night--_so_ glad to have seen you--and,
nevertheless, she's a very _practical_ joke!"
He watched her with frank, utter longing, as she moved over to Mrs.
Oldaker, tender, girlish, appealing, with the old air of timid
wistfulness, kept guard over by her woman's knowledge. His fingers
still curved, as if they were loth to forget the clasp of her warm,
firm little hand. She was gowned in white fleece, and she wore one pink
rose where she could bend her blue eyes down upon it.
And she was going to marry Shepler for his millions. She might even yet
regret that she had not waited for him, when his own name had been
written up as the wizard of markets, and the master of millions. Since
money was all she loved, he would show her that even in that he was
pre-eminent; though he would still have none of her. And as for
Shepler--he wondered if Shepler knew just what risks he might be taking
on.
"Oh, Muetterchen! Wasn't it the jolliest evening?"
They were in the carriage.
"Did you and Mr. Bines enjoy yourselves as much as you seemed to?"
"And isn't his grandfather an old dear? What an interesting little
story about that woman. I know just how she felt. You see, sir," she
turned to Shepler, "there is always a way to manage a woman--you must
find her weakness."
"He's a very unusual old chap," said Shepler. "I had occasion not long
since to tell him that a certain business plan he proposed was entirely
without precedent. His answer was characteristic. He said, 'We _make_
precedents in the West when we can't find one to suit us.' It seemed so
typical of the people to me. You never can tell what they may do. You
see they were started out of old ruts by some form of necessity, almost
every one of them, when they went West, and as necessity stimulates
only the brightest people to action, those Westerners are apt to be of
a pretty keen, active, and sturdy mental type. As this old chap says,
they never hang back for lack of precedents; they go ahead and make
them. They're not afraid to take sudden queer steps. But, really, I
like them both."
"So do I," said his betrothed.