Jardine, after one moment of stultified amaze, felt as if the floor
were sinking beneath his feet. In the sudden revulsion of his rage his
head whirled, and he saw the room and the people go round and round in
concentric circles. But for the chair he grasped he might have fallen.
He was grateful that the interest produced by the announcement so
superseded the surprise which his demonstration had occasioned that for
a time he escaped notice, and was afforded an interval for the recovery
of his composure.
"I am well acquainted in Glaston," one of the coterie observed. "I have
never had the pleasure of meeting you there, Mr. Dalton, but I have
often heard of you from my relatives, the Rickson family. Happy to make
your acquaintance," and he offered his hand.
Some further informal introductions and atoning hand-shaking ensued
with the discovery of mutual friends, all a trifle conscious and
awkward, however, and there was a very general feeling of relief when
Mrs. Laniston, perceiving the "lapse into barbarism," as she called it,
at an end, broke into vivacious comments with her tactful perception of
the least nettling phase of the disclosure.
"How perfectly delightful--such a romantic incident--an unexpected
legacy--a windfall. But--since from the nature of the case it must be
to a degree public--may I ask were not you two strangers when you met
to-day in the stage?"
Mr. Dalton, in younger and slimmer years might have been an acceptable
"ladies' man." He beamed with most responsive urbanity upon Mrs.
Laniston, and was quite willing to permit a little harmless gossip to
annul the impression of the violent methods by which the announcement
had been elicited.
"I had not the most remote idea that he was the legatee. I had been
looking for him--advertising in fact in every medium that I thought
might meet his eye for the last four months. I heard by an accident
that he was in Colbury as the manager of a little street fair."
There was a distinct sensation among the heavy-weights, financial and
social, upon this mention. A sort of dismayed surprise usurped the
genial satisfaction in more than one face in the coterie. Mr. Dalton
seemed rather to rejoice in the effect he produced, to shatter thus
their well-bred nerves. He looked around the circle, expansively
smiling, before he went on: "When the train came in this morning I
found that the Fair had collapsed, closed, and departed. Not disposed
to a wild-goose chase I sent telegrams in every direction which I
thought he might take. I concluded to await results, and preferred a
sojourn at the Springs to the little town."
"The subtleties of the professional legal mind are past fathoming,
I know," said Mrs. Laniston. "But I cannot understand by what keen
insight, by what unclassified faculty of discrimination you could
say to yourself as you toiled up the mountain beside an absolute
stranger '_This_ is the legatee I am hunting for.' Why, among your
fellow-travellers, did you select this Mr. Lloyd, instead of Mr.
Jardine or my son Francis Laniston?"
Mr. Dalton twinkled appreciatively as he listened to this. "I have a
mind to appropriate those compliments, madam--you have doubtless heard
that the profession is not overscrupulous in taking advantage of a
concession. But the fact is that the young gentleman's extraordinary
personal appearance first gave me a clue to his identity. His mother
took a fifteen thousand dollar prize in an international beauty show."
"Oh," ejaculated Mrs. Laniston, fairly taken aback. She had had it
vaguely in her mind that the manager was not really what he seemed, and
was about to protest that she had had the discrimination to discern
this from the first, inquiring who was "that distinguished-looking
young gentleman."
Mr. Jardine had thrown himself into the rocking-chair on which he had
been leaning, feeling that he had done all that he could, more than
his unfounded suspicions justified, and seeking to recover himself of
his excitement and nervous strain. At this disclosure of the showman's
antecedents he raised his eyebrows in sarcastic disdain. After all the
Lanistons were free agents, and if they deliberately chose association
of this type--why, they were not for him nor he for them.
Mrs. Laniston vaguely lifted her eyes to the window opening on the
verandah; to see Jardine not in attendance on Lucia gave her an
unwonted sense of something awry, but the next moment the interest
of the gossip annulled this impression, and she was listening to Mr.
Dalton, who, having exhausted his relish of the survey of the flinching
group, went on with animation.
"And she was as good as she was pretty--which is saying a very great
deal! She provided for her aged parents permanently out of her prize
money, sent a consumptive brother to a hospital where he was cured, to
be drowned afterward on an ocean voyage. I fancy she bought much fine
dry goods and frippery; in effect she distributed the sum in a year or
so, contentedly relying on her slender salary as a dancer--they tell me
that despite her beauty and grace she was an indifferent dancer--till
she met this young fellow's father, who straightway married her."
Mr. Dalton had reached the limit of his capacity it would seem to
sustain the public interest. So genteel a circle was not entertained
by a biography of this sordid character. The bridge party, albeit with
a civil effect of listening, had begun to play out the interrupted
hand, though the owner of the dummy sat sideways in his chair and still
turned an attentive face. Mrs. Laniston, fluttering the leaves of
her magazine, was vaguely disconcerted. She could hardly be said to
have her two charges in mind in this connection--she had no reason to
think that the young showman would presume to speak to either of them.
Jardine, a contemptuous satiric smile on his jaded face, sat languidly
listening.
Mr. Dalton, perhaps, had already found a field at the Bar for his gift
of marshalling facts, approaching with an ever-increasing velocity of
significance the climax, but a chancellor, or a _puisne_ judge, or even
a jury was better fitted to resist the shock of sudden surprise than
the idle summer birds in their relaxed mental attitude.
"Now," he continued, "the father was of a different sort; he was a
young man of the very highest social connections. Moreover, he was
talented, well-behaved, studious, very young--only in his junior year
at college--heart-rending infatuation. His family investigated the
facts and when they found that the marriage was really valid they cast
him off without a moment's hesitation, absolutely, irretrievably. I
never shall forget Judge Lloyd's dismay----"
"Judge Lloyd?" exclaimed several voices in different keys of sharp
surprise.
"You surely don't mean Judge Clarence Jennico Lloyd of Glaston?" said
the gentleman who had connections in that city, and was familiar with
the status of its principal people.
"The noted jurist?--I do! He was considered a hard man, but he was a
very just one. This happened in his palmy days, when he was very rich
as well as esteemed far and wide an ornament to the judiciary. The
family could trace a long and proud descent and they carried their
heads very high. The judge could not tolerate such a mésalliance. He
persisted in considering the woman a designing baggage and tried to buy
her off. He bid very high--that was before his financial reverses."
Mr. Dalton swayed his big head to and fro, his eyes alight with the
fires of reminiscence as the scenes of nearly thirty years earlier were
re-enacted in his memory. "And yet from his standpoint he was quite
right. They were very strict religionists, those Lloyds--Methodists,
or Campbellites, or what not--they thought it a mortal sin to attend
even a Shakespearean performance at a theatre. Judge Lloyd did not know
one card from another--and was proud of the fact. I remember that once
I tried a case in his court that involved a gambling transaction--his
cousin Charles Jennico was of the opposing counsel--but that's neither
here nor there. Judge Lloyd had other children then--boys and girls--he
could not bring them into such association--he could not justify such
an example."
"Jennico--isn't that a name down your way, in Louisiana, Mrs.
Laniston?" one of the chess players suggested.
"I was just thinking," said Mrs. Laniston, her surprised eyes on
the fire, her thin, jewelled fingers still keeping her place in the
magazine. "There is an inconsiderable plantation called the Jennico
place just beyond the bight of the bayou. The proprietor never lived
there. I always understood that the owner was wealthy--but it is much
neglected and in need of repair."
"It belongs to this fellow now," said the lawyer comfortably. "What
sort of a house is on it, do you know, madam?"
"Not much of a house--a six-room frame, I think--there is not much
land, but it is of good quality."
The lawyer, identified with his client's interests, nodded his head,
smiling as if in personal gratification.
"I have some curiosity, Mr. Dalton," said one of the chess players, a
soul dedicated to problems, "to know how such an unexpected windfall
would affect a man. How did the young fellow receive the news of his
good fortune?"
"Almost stunned at first--dreadfully taken aback;" the lawyer laughed
and then grew grave.
"He had some points besides the money interests to claim his attention,
you see. The _danseuse_ and her highly bred and refined husband had
very hard luck. Her earnings were poor, and he could not get employment
in any appropriate way on account of the impression which his marriage
gave to people of position. He was naturally supposed to be such a man
who would make such a marriage. He tried all sorts of things, unsuited
to his training and traditions. He was a ticket-taker, an advance
agent, doorkeeper--had a classical education and wrote theatrical
advertisements and puffs for newspapers--had no conception of the
dramatic afflatus, wrote a play or two, heavy as lead, warranted to
fall flat. He succumbed to ill-health, and then his father, having
lost several children--all but this one and the eldest, Robert--and
being much softened, offered to take this son back, excluding the wife
of course, but paying her a handsome pension; this was refused. Time
went on; the situation waxed worse continually; the judge then offered
financial assistance unconditionally. But it came too late; the son
died--presently his wife died also, and the grandson, then almost
grown, doing a 'ground-and-lofty-tumbling turn' in great glory in a
circus company went his way, chiefly on his head. He was lost sight
of for a time, for Robert Lloyd, an admirable man and considered to
have excellent business judgment, having made several most fortunate
speculations, went beyond his depth, was caught in the undertow
and dragged to ruin, overwhelming with him Judge Lloyd himself--I
never could understand the tangle of Robert Lloyd's affairs. In the
confusion of the financial wreck no one remembered this boy--the
friends of the family thought the outcome well enough. The boy in his
risky vocation must soon break his neck; and thus the unlucky episode
of the beauty-prize winner in the Lloyd family would be definitely
terminated. But, luckily enough it proved, the old gentleman once saw
this grandson. Have you met him--this young fellow?" he broke off
suddenly, addressing one of the chess players.
"No, I have not," the gentleman responded a trifle stiffly--street
fairs were not in his line.
Mr. Dalton smiled benignly. "The most winning personality--yet with a
quiet inherent dignity all his own, the most disarming amiability--and
a face that you might wander through a hundred exhibitions of painting
and never see equalled for a certain sort of charm. I don't wonder at
the award for the fifteen thousand dollar prize--ha, ha, ha!"
"What is it that the court says when counsel becomes prolix--Be brief,
sir--be brief," suggested Mrs. Laniston, laughing nervously. She
was surprised to find herself eager, expectant. "Your story is too
interesting to bear digressions, Mr. Dalton."
"Thanks--thanks greatly," Mr. Dalton beamed.
"Well, the circus roaming around the country gave an exhibition in
the neighbourhood of Charles Jennico's summer residence near Glaston,
where Judge Lloyd was visiting. He and Jennico were first cousins, and
after his financial reverses the judge, who was as proud as Lucifer,
scarcely went anywhere else. And this youngster, a man grown he was
then, had the hardihood, or the good feeling, or the curiosity--or
nobody knows what actuated him--to deliberately call on the old man.
'I don't want a thing in the world of you,' he said. 'But I know that
my father owed you much, and I owe you much for what my father was
to me. I came to pay my respects--to get the glad hand, that's all.'
Judge Lloyd never opened his lips to me on the subject of this visit,
but he was taken by surprise, the young man being ushered into the
library, and Charles Jennico was sitting in the bay-window--he used
to laugh and cry together when he rehearsed the scene. The judge, he
said, was like a man in a dream at first. Then he began to beseech this
stranger to come and live with him like a son without conditions and
without restraint. 'But I could not become a dependent on you,' the
boy said. 'It would be like a robbery of your old age. I have heard of
your financial reverses or I would not have come. I know that you are
broke.' And though he put it thus bluntly the judge did not wither him
with a look. He said that he had influence--without depriving himself
he could provide the youngster with respectable employment. 'You
have no idea of my ignorance, grandfather. What you call respectable
employment for me would have either to be a farce or a gratuity. I
can do real work, such as it is, where I am and eat my own bread.'
Judge Lloyd argued that he could secure money for his education. He
had friends who would be glad to oblige him. 'It would go hard with
you to ask a favour for yourself, sir--you shall not sue for me.'
The old gentleman then urged him to consider what he would lose--he
should have every advantage, he should travel. 'Grandfather,' he said,
'I have stood on my head in every capital of Europe--what I should be
tempted to do would be to stay with you, quiet, resting, for I am fed
up with stir and racket.' The whole thing captured Charles Jennico's
fancy. He said that he had never expected to hear Judge Lloyd come so
near a confession of arbitrary injustice, as when he said how cruel had
been the past, and how he feared that he had allowed a subservience to
artificial standards to embitter and impoverish and shorten the lives
of the youth's parents. 'You were just and true from your standpoint,'
the boy sought to comfort him. 'A father has a _right_ to his son's
obedience'--the old judge used to repeat this phrase; it justified
his course to himself. 'And yet my father was right, too, from his
standpoint--I can't judge between you. I don't blame either for what
is gone. I would willingly live with you in my father's place, but
I must make and eat my own bread and play the man. You made a great
mistake about my mother, though--you never knew my mother. She was It!
She was the whole team! She was the Pearl you threw away, worth all
your tribe!' And Judge Lloyd said that he believed it now that he had
seen her son--he wished he had seen her first. And then the two, as
competent fools as ever lived, fell on each other's necks and wept and
parted."
"Tut, tut, tut--what a pity," said the bald-headed bridge player,
oblivious of the words of his partner until she twice repeated, "Shall
I lead, partner," when he caught himself with a galvanic start and
responded, "Pray do."
There was a pause while Mr. Dalton eyed the fire reflectively, puffing
at his cigar, which had gone out while he talked, requiring to be
rekindled.
"What so won upon me this afternoon was the manner in which young Lloyd
received the intelligence. He did not seem to remember or care at first
that his financial miseries were now at an end--although he has been at
his wit's end for money as he told me afterward; in fact, that he had
not enough to pay for his transportation with the rest of the troupe or
show or carnival or whatever the organisation is called, and had even
tried to pawn his mother's engagement ring which had been indeed his
grandmother's engagement ring--an heirloom in Judge Lloyd's family, a
thing with a legend, more or less mythical, I suppose."
Jardine thought of the gems he had seen in the safe of the hotel in
Colbury, but he kept his own counsel.
"Of course the detail of the circumstances brought back to him that
day of parting, and he told me that when he had first heard of his
grandfather's death without another word between them he had deeply
regretted his refusal to live with him in his father's place. He
thought he had been too sensitive as to his independence--too afraid
of grafting. It would not have been for long. He could have been the
solace of the old gentleman's reverses and his age. He was wild that
he had denied him aught--the only time that they had ever seen each
other! His grandfather had been good to him that day, he said. And
there," said Mr. Dalton with a whimsical wave of his cigar, "I had
to wait and postpone the details of business communications while
he leaned up against a tree in the woods and sobbed like a child
because his grandfather had been good to him that day when he had
offered him--so late--the boon of a life of precarious dependence
in lieu of his free agency and a certain means of livelihood. I was
touched, I must confess, I was very much touched. He has a rare nature,
this-ground-and-lofty tumbler."
Mr. Dalton had not observed the usual legal reticence concerning a
client's affairs. The nature of the case, the will and other matters
of record, would give publicity to the mere facts, but he was
solicitous, since the details had of necessity been elicited here, that
the personal character of the harlequin legatee should be put into
evidence, and receive from all the respect which he felt to be its due.
No better method could he have found to disseminate the impression he
wished to create than these reminiscences addressed to a symposium
of idle gossips. Their craftily titillated interest kept them still
loitering around the fire after the card and chess tables had been
abandoned as the hour wore late, and when Mrs. Laniston began to ascend
the stairs to her apartment she noted, glancing back from the landing,
that a group of gentlemen with freshly lighted cigars were drawing
closer round the hearth continuing the subject with its cognate themes.
She had so unusually prolonged her loitering about the office fire
to-night that she found that her son and daughter had returned from
their mild diversions with the other youth of the place and were
awaiting her coming in her room.
Frank was busy with some boxing gloves and was directing with a very
exacting air precisely how some stitches should be set in the puffy
awkward bags which had somehow become ripped. His sister Ruth, with her
thimble and waxed thread, had placed the kerosene lamp and her workbox
on the little table and was patiently repairing the damages according
to his directions to the best of her ability.
"Ruthie, how close you do put your head to the lamp-chimney," her
mother exclaimed in irritable warning. "Do be more careful, child. In
another moment you would have singed your pompadour. Where is Lucia?"
Ruth lifted the endangered rouleau, stared around a moment, as if she
expected to see her cousin here. "Why, she came upstairs with me--"
then suggesting, "She must be in our room, I reckon," went on with her
work as before.
Mrs. Laniston, proceeding into the adjoining apartment, found that it
was not lighted, save by the moon, pouring the white rays through the
windows, the shades being still up, and the shutters open. Outside was
the limitless wilderness of the mountains, purple and dusky against the
light indeterminate blue of the sky. A few stars, large and whitely
lustrous, scintillated at vast intervals, but the moon was supreme, and
the white mists in the valleys shimmered with opalescent suggestions of
delicate tints. Far away the sudden shrill snarling cry of a catamount
smote the air, then all was silent save the rush of the torrent in the
valley. For a moment it seemed that no one was in the room; then Mrs.
Laniston perceived that Lucia was seated, half kneeling, close by the
window, very still, very silent, and she was sure that the girl had
been weeping.
"Want anything?" asked Lucia, in a voice that yet betrayed tears; then
she put her elbows on the window sill and more deliberately addressed
herself to the contemplation apparently of the night.
"Lucia--chilly as it is! What are you doing at that window? You'll
catch your death of cold."
Lucia in a muffled voice muttered something about the air being quite
balmy, and remarked that she had been already most of the evening
promenading on the verandah.
"Why," said Mrs. Laniston, stolidly amazed, "Mr. Jardine was in the
office the whole time."
"We are not the Siamese twins," said Lucia dully.
"Of course not. Who were you with, most of the time?"
For there still remained at New Helvetia a number of squires of
dames, eminently available for germans, and verandah promenades, and
sentimentalisings in the moonlight.
"I was with Mr. Lloyd, all the time." Her voice quavered as she
anticipated the note of surprise, and reprehension, and dismay in Mrs.
Laniston's rejoinder. It sounded instantly.
"Why, Lucia! That showman, Lloyd?"
"I could not very well avoid it--and I didn't want to avoid it," she
said rather doggedly.
Mrs. Laniston had a monition of George Laniston's ultra particularity
in social matters; then she had a saving recollection of the standing
of Judge Lloyd.
"Oh, poor fellow! I suppose he wanted to boast a bit of his legacy.
It seems he comes of good people on his father's side, and has been
remembered in a codicil, or something."
"He did not mention the legacy, except that he did say as it would
make his connections a matter of newspaper notoriety he did not mind
speaking of them. He said he would not do this ordinarily, for in a man
in his humble business it would seem boastful, and he declared that he
was more proud of his mother, and her generosity, and her struggles,
and her courage, and her life of sacrifice in the care of those dear to
her, than of every Lloyd that ever stepped."
And the proud Miss Laniston burst into tears--not the first she had
shed that night over the pathos of the ci-devant dancer's woes.
"Why, Lucia," Mrs. Laniston exclaimed, irritably, "I am surprised that
you should be so weak."
Lucia had no desire to be strong; she continued to weep without reserve.
"She was lovely--lovely; I can see it through all he says of her, and
how bitterly she blamed herself to be the cause of her husband's and
son's abandonment by their fine relations. She would have been willing
to give them up, to go off anywhere, in any poverty, so they might have
the position, and luxuries, and advantages of the station to which they
were born. But they clung to each other and to her, as anybody might
know they would!"
And once more the hot tears came.
There was a moment's silence in which Mrs. Laniston canvassed this
unprecedented difficulty.
"And now he reproaches himself that afterward he did not go to his
grandfather. He is wild about it. He says his grandfather was right
from his standpoint, and he was old and forlorn, and yearned for the
arm of his son's son to lean upon. He is stricken with remorse, and he
has no peace. No--he didn't talk at all about the legacy."
Mrs. Laniston gathered her forces for a desperate _coup_.
"Lucia Laniston, listen to me. You are not falling in love with that
man, for of course you couldn't consider so ignorant a person, with so
frightful an accent and choice of phrases. But you are allowing your
imagination to become involved."
"Oh, no, Aunt Dora," Lucia murmured. But Mrs. Laniston kept on.
"It is not becoming for you to sit here on the floor in that nice
dress--and there is no earthly process by which those delicate fabrics
can be cleaned--and weep your eyes out about a stranger's mother. No
matter how lovely--and she took an international prize for beauty--she
was a circus girl, or a ballet dancer, a position that in itself it
is impossible to ignore or forget, no matter what he or anyone else
may say. I am glad, since his father was one of Judge Lloyd's sons,
that he is to be redeemed from that awful calling; it seems that he
will own that small Jennico plantation near us in Louisiana, and the
little six-room frame house on it. I suppose he will farm there, and
maybe some people will receive him on sufferance--such an uneducated
man, my dear! Of course I know if he were really rich he could go
where he pleases, and the best society would pull caps for him, and he
could marry whom he chooses. Don't think I am sordid, dear. _I_ don't
make these conventions. They are the inexorable law of the world. But
consider, my dear, what--once in New Orleans, or St. Simon's Island,
or Jacksonville--you would think of such a cavalier. You know I have
never been hateful and stiff with you and Ruth. I have let you have all
the good time you could with propriety. I think this young fellow's
prize-beauty makes him very fetching, and his 'lydy,' isn't the awful
address it would be on any other tongue; and his suddenly inheriting
a bit of money is like a romance. But life is made up of commonplaces
and realities, dear, and a girl who lets herself dream in the moonlight
must wake at least to a very sordid day. Your papa wouldn't forgive
me if I didn't warn you, dear. Love must be founded on respect; a man
must be in a position for a woman to look up to him, to defer to his
experience and judgment, and superior information and education. A
woman cannot lead a husband by the hand."
"You take too much for granted, Aunt Dora," Lucia interrupted, a trifle
angrily.
"A man with a past like his would reveal a thousand amazing tastes and
prejudices and views, the like of which you never heard. You would
spend your life in teaching, and combating, and obliterating. And the
little six-room frame--seems to me it has a little garden in front,
with turfed flower beds, raised in stars, and hearts, and triangles.
If cotton doesn't pick up somehow you can't expect much from your
father till his death--I hope for your sake, as well as his, that's a
long way off. He is a young man, comparatively; he may marry again. I
want you to make a comfortable match, and be easy and happy. Ruth's
prospects are so good in her engagement to Philip Trumbull--I wish I
could make her write more regularly to that man--she is so idle!--and I
couldn't bear for you to be less appropriately placed."
"I haven't asked him to marry me, Aunt Dora," Lucia said suddenly in
her natural manner, "and I can assure you that he has not made the
slightest intimation tending that way."
"Well, so far, so good! Get up off the floor--that stuff pulls so, and
just see how your knee is straining it. What a moonlight night!" she
exclaimed, rising and standing before the window. "What a mystery on
the mountains!"