“Don’t, Lovey. That’s enough. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve
done, we’ll stick it out together. The only thing is that we’ll have to
give up the booze.”
“For good and all, Slim?”
“Yes; for good and all.”
“It’ll be awful ’ard.”
“Yes, it will be; but the worst of that is over.”
He seized one of my hands in both of his.
“Slim, if it’s got to be a ch’ice between you and liquor—well, I’m danged
if—if I won’t”—he made a great resolution—“give up the liquor—and so ’elp
me!”
So when I moved Lovey moved with me. Washing windows having become
a lucrative profession, he insisted on taking no wages from me and
on paying for his own food. In the matter of names we agreed on a
compromise. “Before company,” as he expressed it, I was Mr. Melbury and
sir; when we were alone together we reverted to the habits of Greeley’s
Slip and the Down and Out, and I became Slim and sonny.
I was truly sorry to leave the club, for its simple, brotherly ways,
wholesome and masculine, if never the most refined, had become curiously
a part of me. I had liked the fellowship with rough men who were perhaps
all the more human for being rough. For the first time in my life I had
known something of genuine fraternity. I do not affirm that we lived
together without disagreements or misunderstandings or that there were no
minutes electric with the tension that makes for an all-round fight. But
there was always some “wise guy,” as we called him, to make peace among
us; and on the whole we lived together with a mutual courtesy that proved
to me once for all that it is nothing external which makes a gentleman.
Finer gentlemen in the essentials of the word I never met than some of
those who were just struggling up from the seemingly bottomless pit.
Thus the summer of 1913 became for me a very happy one. There were
reserves to that happiness, and there were fears; but the optimism most
of us bring to the day’s work enabled me to face them. Of Regina Barry I
heard much from my friend Cantyre, and I made what I heard suffice me. He
was always willing to talk of this girl, whom he never named; and little
by little I formed an image in my heart, which would never be anywhere
but in my heart as long as I could help it. As long as I could help it
I should not see her, nor should she see me. As to that I was now quite
positive. Nothing could be gained by my seeing her, while by her seeing
me everything might be lost.
If everything was lost in one way I was sure it would be lost in another.
Because I have said little or nothing of the fight I was making you
must not suppose that I was free from the necessity of making it. I was
making it every day and hour. There were times when, if I hadn’t had
Lovey to think of, I should have yielded to that suggestion which had
come to me as neatly as it had come to him of having a little fall. Falls
were far from unknown among us. They were accepted as an unhappy matter
of course. Some of our steadiest members had made full use of the three
times the law of the club allowed them before finally settling down. I
believed that I could exercise this privilege—and come back. But not so
with Lovey! Once he failed in this attempt, I knew he would be gone. As
a matter of fact, he would have failed at any time after the first week
if it hadn’t been on my account; so I couldn’t fail on his. When I would
have done it eagerly, wildly, I was withheld by the old-fashioned motto
of _noblesse oblige_.
And yet in proportion as I grew stronger I realized more clearly that
my future was, as it were, balanced on the point of a pin. Once I had
met Regina Barry, and her eyes had said, “You are the man who stole my
gold-mesh purse,” I knew it would be all up with me. She wouldn’t have to
say a word. Her look would bring the accusation. Then, if I was weak I
should go off and get drunk; I should drink till I drank myself to death.
If I was strong I should shoot myself. There was just one thing of which
I was sure—I should never face that silent charge a second time.
But as the weeks went by and nothing happened I began to be confident
that nothing would. We reached the end of September and I never heard
Regina Barry’s name. Even Cantyre hadn’t told me that, and didn’t suppose
that I knew it. I calculated the chances against our ever meeting.
I built something, too, on the possibility that were we to meet she
wouldn’t know me again.
In this I got encouragement from the fact that one day in Fifth Avenue I
met my uncle Van Elstine. He didn’t know me. He wouldn’t have cut me for
anything in the world; he was too good-natured and kind; but he let his
wandering gaze rest on me as on any passing stranger, and went on his
way. I argued then that time, vicissitude, a hard life, and a mustache
had worked an effective disguise. If my own uncle, who had known me
all my life, could go by like that, how much more one to whom I could
be nothing but a sinister shadow seen for three or four minutes in a
rose-colored gloom.
So I reasoned and became a little comforted. And then one day my
arguments were put to the test.
It was quite at the end of September. The memorial was now so nearly
completed that Coningsby, who had returned to town, left it almost
entirely to my charge. A new bit of work at Atlantic City having come
his way, he was closely absorbed in it. Mrs. Grace had motored up once
or twice to consult me as to papers, rugs, and other details of interior
decoration. I found her a grave, beautiful woman who gave the impression
of nourishing something that lasts longer than grief—a deep regret. Our
intercourse was friendly but impersonal.
Once she was accompanied by a young lady whose voice I recognized as they
approached the room in which I was at work. It was a clear, bell-like,
staccato voice, whose tones would have made my heart stop still had I
heard it in heaven. Mrs. Grace entered the room, followed by a girl as
Anglo-Saxon in type as her brother, only with a decision and precision in
the manner which he had not.
In my confusion I was uncertain as to whether or not there was an
introduction, but I remember her saying: “Oh, Mr. Melbury, Ralph is so
indebted to you for all the help you’ve given him. He says if it hadn’t
been for you he wouldn’t have been able to get away from New York this
summer.”
She, too, regarded me impersonally, as her brother’s assistant, and no
more. I mean by that that she showed none of the interest good people
generally display in a brand that has been plucked from the burning.
“Is it possible she doesn’t know it?” I asked Cantyre the next time I saw
him.
“Of course she doesn’t. That would be the last thing Coningsby would tell
her. We never speak of these things outside the club. If a fellow likes
to do it himself—well, that’s his own affair.”
But early in October I came face to face with it all.
I was standing at one of the upper windows, looking down into Blankney
Place, when I saw a motor drive up to the door. I knew it was Mrs.
Grace’s motor, having seen it a number of times already. When the footman
held open the door Mrs. Grace herself stepped out, to be followed by Miss
Coningsby, who in turn was followed by....
I strolled away from the window into the interior of the house. I was not
so much calm as numb. There were details about which I had to speak to
Mrs. Grace, but they all went out of my mind. They went out of my mind
as matters with which I had no more concern. A dying man might feel that
way about the earthly things he is leaving behind. I was, in fact, not
so much like a dying man as like a man who in the full flush of vigor is
told that he must in a few minutes face the firing-squad.
So I stood doing nothing, thinking nothing, while I listened to the three
voices as they floated up, first from the lower floor, then from the
stairway, then from the floor on which I was waiting in this seeming
nervelessness.
They drifted nearer—Mrs. Grace’s gentle tones, Elsie Coningsby’s silvery
tinkle, and then the rich mezzo, which by association of ideas seemed to
shed round me a rose-colored light.
Mrs. Grace and Miss Coningsby came in together, the one in black, the
other in white. Both bade me a friendly, impersonal good morning, while
Mrs. Grace proceeded at once to the question of rugs. Didn’t I think that
good serviceable American rugs, with some of those nice Oriental druggets
people used in summer cottages, would be better than anything more
fragile and expensive?
I made such answers as I could, keeping my eyes on the door. Presently
she appeared on the threshold, looking about with interest and curiosity
in her great, dark eyes. Of the minute I retain no more than a vision in
rough green English tweed, with a goldish-greenish motoring-veil round
the head like a nimbus. She impressed me as at once more delicate and
more strong than I remembered her—eager, alert, independent.
“This is to be the men’s smoking-room,” Miss Coningsby explained.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” Miss Barry said, lightly. “One of the nicest
rooms in the house—I think the very nicest. It’s wonderful how well men
do themselves, isn’t it?”
“Oh, but in this case it’s Hilda.”
“It’s your brother first of all. You’ll see. It will be the snuggest
corner of the whole place, and they won’t let a woman look into it.”
She glanced at me—but casually. She glanced again—but casually again. As
no one introduced me, a greeting between us was not called for. But when
Mrs. Grace finished her questions about the rugs and they were passing
into the next room, Regina Barry turned and looked at me a third time. It
was now an inquiring look, and significant.
“Elsie, who’s that man?” I heard her say, after she had joined her
companions.
The reply gave my name.
“Oh!”
“He’s been helping Ralph all summer. That’s how he and Esther were able
to get away.”
“Oh!”
“Now we’re going on to the day nursery—”
But Regina Barry said: “Wait a minute! No; go on. I’ll overtake you.
I’m—I’m perfectly sure that that’s the very man who—” She added, as if
forcing herself to a determination: “I’m going back to speak to him. Tell
Hilda I’ll be with her in an instant.”
So I waited, repeating to myself the formula agreed on two or three
months before, that I would see her first—and shoot myself afterward.
_CHAPTER IX_
“Haven’t we met before?”
Regina Barry said this as she came into the room with her rapid, easy
movement and took two or three paces toward me, stopping as abruptly as
she entered.