bully time in all my life, and Carl’s as happy as a king—his father
all right, his two years in Germany arranged, everything going his
way. The finest chap. I wish you knew him! Wasn’t it queer, though,
about that old Trefethen, the octopus? Nobody understands, but he
suddenly just took the clamps off, and buzz! the wheels went ’round.
The Southwestern Railroad came to, and is going like a queen, and Mr.
Ruthven was well the minute he heard it—pretty near dead he was, too.
Carl came back to college with howls of joy, and he rowed the race,
and we smeared the Harvards, and the whole thing went like a book.
What do you suppose happened to old Trefethen?” he shot at the other.
“Lost his mind, didn’t he?”
“Old Trefethen” puffed at his cigar. “Hadn’t heard of it,” he said
tersely.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Lord. I feel differently toward
that old galoot. Since the Southwestern business I respect him. I
don’t understand, but I swear I respect him. I’ve read every scrap
about him in the papers, and I’ve formed an opinion. It’s my idea
that he’s decided there are better games than being the richest man
in the world. He’s certainly thrown away his chance for that, by what
they say.”
“He certainly has,” the other responded, as one having authority,
but the boy did not notice. A flash of amusement lit his face and his
words flashed after it.
“Do you know, Mr. Lord—that’s queer—I’d forgotten.” The hurrying
words fell over each other. “You were pointed out to me as Trefethen
this minute. That’s how I came to see you.”
The man knocked his cigar ash into the sea. “Curious,” he said
quietly. “It’s not the first time, however—I look like him.” He went
on: “Tell me about yourself. What are you going to do when you get
home?”
The bright face grew serious. “Well, Mr. Lord,” he said, “I’m in bad
luck. Not the worst, for my people are all right, thank Heaven—but
it’s bad. My father’s business—he’s a steel man—is in poor shape,
and it’s about inevitable that he’s got to fail. If he could raise a
hundred thousand he could tide through, but he can’t do it. It’s too
much for the small people, and the big people won’t risk it—and he
can’t ask them. So. They wanted me to stay over with Carl and finish
out my six months, and I could, for the trip is off money that was
left me. They said they’d rather have me, and I’d only be in the
way at home, and all that. But it seemed to me that if the governor
was in a scrape I’d better go and stand by him. Even if I’m not good
for much at first, I might help brace him up. Don’t you think I was
right?” he asked wistfully.
“I do, indeed,” the other answered with emphasis. And then slowly,
staring at the earnest face: “I wish I owned something like a boy to
stand by me in time of trouble.” A quick color rushed to Elliot’s
cheeks.
“If you mean that—you don’t know me much—but if you’d let me—I’m not
a lot of good yet, but I’m trustworthy. I’ll stand by you, Mr. Lord.”
It was very boyish, but it went straight. So straight that Trefethen
did not speak, and the lad went on eagerly: “Looks like you were in
a scrape this minute, from the cock of your eye. Is it money? All
right. Here I be. Just use me for a battering-ram or any old thing,
and I’ll take charge of you and the governor together.”
At that Trefethen found his voice and his hand fell on the huge
shoulder. “You’re adopted,” he said. “Just remember that. But I
don’t need you just at present—not that way. I’m doing rather well
financially.”
Suddenly he drew back a step, and put his hands in his pockets and
stared at the boy quizzically, a slow smile coming in his eyes.
“You’re a dear lad,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to him.
“But you’re an expensive luxury. That afternoon at New Haven cost me
five million dollars down, and Heaven knows how many more by this
time.” The boy stared, amazed. “I don’t grudge it, you know. What I
got for it has paid, and will. I got a new point of view and a sense
of proportion. I got a suspicion that what men want millions for is
happiness, and that millions don’t bring it; I got a startling and
original impression that the only way to get anything out of life is
to live it for other people; I got the thought that service and not
selfishness is the measure of a man’s value, and I got—oh, I got this
thing rubbed in with salt and lemon juice till it smarted like the
devil—I got the idea that to play the game fairly is the first thing
required if you mean to be a man at all.”
The boy gasped. “Who are you?” he stammered.
“Wait a minute. I was just going over the edge of a precipice. I’d
have slid down pleasantly—a long way down—and I’d have wallowed in
gold at the bottom, and it would have been a mighty cold, hard bed,
too. I’d have been miserable and lonely, with half the world envying
me, after I’d got there. But there were two or three strings tied to
me yet—and they were lying up on God’s earth above the precipice,
and you boys got hold of them and yanked me back. Great Scott, but
you yanked manfully!” he said, and laughed and shook his head at the
memory. “It wasn’t your political economy—I’d read things something
like what you said. But I saw myself through your eyes—honest eyes.
You had nothing to gain or lose, and you gave me your sincere
thoughts—and you gave ’em from the shoulder, you’ll allow me to say.
Jove, how you roasted me! A spirit that I’d forgotten about was in
every word, and I caught it, and I’m trying to keep the disease, for
I believe that, from a practical point of view, it’s the spirit that
will bring a man peace at the last—and all along.”
“Who are you?” Dick Elliot demanded again in a frightened voice.
“I think you half know,” the other said. “I’m Marcus Lord Trefethen,
and I’ll never be the richest man in the world, and I thank
Heaven for it. Don’t hate me, boy—don’t be afraid of me, for your
friendship’s important to me,” he went on. “You remember what
you said—you’d stand by me. I need you now.” And the young face
brightened and smiled frankly at him.
“Ginger, I’ll do it, too!” he said. “You’re worth saving. You can’t
phase me just by being a bloated bondholder, Mr. Lor—Mr. Trefethen.”
“That’s the sort,” said Trefethen gladly. “And as you belong to me
a bit—adopted, you remember—you’re to take that hundred thousand to
your father from me. We’ll send him a Marconi that will stagger him.”
Elliot gasped again. “Oh, no—I can’t do that—I wouldn’t have told
you,” he stammered.
“Come, Dick, don’t be a jackass,” advised Trefethen. “It’s
business—I’m lending it to him—I’ll skin you both yet.” And then, as
he still hesitated, with wide troubled eyes on the great man’s face,
Trefethen put out his hand and found the football captain’s fingers,
and twisted them into the fraternity grip—and the old college boy
smiled at the young one. “Brothers, aren’t we?” he demanded. “You’ve
done a lot more for me than I can do for you,” and with that, a flash
of misty mischief coming into his eyes. “‘By ginger,’” quoted Marcus
Trefethen, “let me ‘make a try at least not to be a disgrace to my
Alma Mater.’”
LITTLE MARCUS
LITTLE MARCUS
Captain Fitzhugh told me this story as we sat in the last seat of
the last car of the Empire State Express, west-bound, and flung off
the line of the Hudson River Railway from the reel of the gilt-iron
observation-car just outside. Misty mountains lay on turquoise sky,
cotton-wool clouds hung over the broad silver of the river; patches
of vivid green—yellow-green of juicy grass, gray-green of shadowy
willows, black-green of pine-trees—shouted aloud of the spring.
“There’s the old Point!” Captain Fitzhugh said suddenly, breaking off
a sentence to say it.
The low mass of the West Point stables lay gray across the river, and
beside it the round-arched end of the Riding School. The Memorial
Building, new and magnificent, stood higher up, and the slender shaft
of the War Monument shot above the trees by the Parade Ground. A bit
of the hotel showed near it. If you knew the Point you could see
the whole well-groomed place through the scrap of foreground—the
crossing paths, the sweeping drives, the big empty Parade, the row
of officers’ quarters that looked across from white-curtained,
hospitable windows.
Captain Fitzhugh shook his head with a reminiscent smile, and stared
dreamily at the fast vanishing hillside. Then it was gone, and he
turned to me. “I remembered a tale of my youth in that two minutes,”
he explained.
“I was looking at Flirtation Walk and thinking of the blue eyes
and brown that have made my poor old leather heart beat, under
those trees. Then I got around to the corps, and my class, and then
suddenly I remembered little Marcus. Do you think it would bore you
to hear about little Marcus?” It was unnecessary to answer. He went
on. “It was the worst hole I was ever in, and I used to be an expert
on holes. Duncan was my wife that year—Jack Duncan of the ‘Fighting
9th.’”
“Your wife that year!”
“You don’t know the expression?” asked Captain Fitzhugh. “The cadets
call their roommates wives.” He smiled. “Well, then, Duncan was my
wife, you see, and Hill and Carruthers were across the hall, and
we four were thicker than thieves. The tactical officers had a bad
time with us, for what one didn’t think of another did, and the rest
covered up his tracks.”
“What did you do?” I asked, settling myself comfortably into my blue
velvet chair.
“We raised Cain. We did all the old tricks, and a good lot of new
ones out of our own mighty intellects. We kept an afternoon tea-table
up the chimney all winter, not that we liked tea, but we liked to
break regulations. Then Carruthers went to New York every Saturday
night for months—all one winter—in civilian dress-clothes which he
wasn’t supposed to have. His patent leathers lived in my arctic
overshoes. There was much other nonsense, but the liveliest was the
little Marcus episode. It began when Hill and Carruthers were in our
room one night, and we got speculating how far it was possible for
cadets—for us—to go. We discussed old scrapes and suggested new ones,
and finally one of the four struck out the great idea.”
Captain Fitzhugh’s easy tones went on, full of present joy of life
and past whirlwinds of mischief, and as he talked the Hudson River
rolled away unseen, for the tale held me. Yet the words of it are
as lost as the sunshine of that May morning. The atmosphere of the
post, and flavor of cadets’ quarters, the West Point argot, not to be
reproduced, the little touches which make local color, these could be
rightly given only by an army officer and an ex-cadet. So I must tell
the story as it stays in my memory—the simple tale of little Marcus.
I could see the four soldierly lads, in their gray uniforms, as
Captain Fitzhugh talked, in the bare, orderly room, and I could
imagine how their jaws dropped as the inspired one brought out “the
great idea”; for young Machiavelli, searching for a deed of daring,
had suggested that they should keep a baby in their rooms for a
week. The grotesqueness of the thought made it the more appealing,
and at once they planned a beginning. Carruthers was singled out to
correspond with an orphan asylum. His aunt in New York was interested
in one and he had been there with her and remembered the address. On
the instant he wrote, and his letter ran:
“MATRON ST. WINIFRED’S ORPHAN ASYLUM.
“DEAR MADAM: My sister and I, being maiden ladies of thirty and
seventy years of age—”
“Gosh!” remarked Hill. “Sisters! Why didn’t you make them grandmother
and grandchild?”
“What?” Carruthers looked up annoyed. “What’s the trouble? Oh—well,
that is far apart. I’ll join the dames.” He scratched a figure.
“Fifty and fifty-one—that’s safe, isn’t it?”
“Go ahead,” was the consensus of opinion.
“Of fifty and fifty-one years of age, and being very lonely alone
together, as we have neither of us ever succeeded in getting
married—”
“Or seldom,” murmured Hill.
Carruthers glanced sternly at him.
“Desire to purchase or obtain by gift a sound, kind, and
well-broken child, of about one year, light-colored preferred, with
good wind and good eyes, and, if possible, no vices.”
“Send that to a horse exchange,” advised Jack Duncan.
“Tommy-rot!” said Carruthers politely, and went on.
“We would like to have such child sent to us for a week on
approval, and guarantee to treat it with perfect kindness and
hygiene. As reference for the integrity and spotlessness of our
characters we are happy to name—”
“Who the deuce are we happy to name?” inquired Carruthers
despondently. “That queers it.”
There was deep thought. “Here’s a name,” suggested Duncan. “It sounds
like those two nice old ladies, the Misses Bellingham, who live down
near Highland Falls. Just sign it their name and give the chaplain
for reference.”
“The chaplain!” The boys gasped.
“Just the thing,” said Duncan confidently. “He’ll give them a
rattling recommend, and he’s too much of a gentleman to tell them
their characters are questioned. Besides, he’ll never think of it
again after he mails the letter. I know the chaplain. He’s a good
sort—he doesn’t fuss.”
“Proceed!” ordered the chorus.
Carruthers read aloud as he wrote:
“we are—happy to—name—that noble and uplifting—leader of—religious
thought—”
“The chaplain would swat you if he heard you call him that.”
“Hill,” said Carruthers, with irritation, “you’ve done nothing but
criticise and kick. If you can write better, do it. As far as I can
see there’s not a fault in this letter, so far. Now let me finish.
Where was I? Oh—‘leader of religious thought.’ That’s enough about
the chaplain.
“Anticipating news of our sweet charge, who will become, we hope,
the support of our declining years, we remain,
“Sincerely yours in hope,
“THE MISSES BELLINGHAM.
“Now, Hill, any more criticism?”
“If the asylum people think the old ladies are going to make the
child support them, they won’t send it,” objected Hill gloomily. “And
it’s not etiquettical to sign your name ‘The Misses Bellingham.’
Ought to sign it their front names and no title.”
“But I don’t know their front names,” complained Carruthers.
“Might be Letitia and Mary,” suggested Duncan. “Make ’em that and
have the letter sent in charge of Fitzhugh, else it will go straight
to Letitia.”
“Why in charge of me?” Fitzhugh straightened suspiciously.
“Because you’ve been sitting there asleep, and haven’t helped a
hair, and it’s time we made you,” his wife answered, with severity.
“Georgy, put in a P. S., and say it’s more convenient, owing to the
storms, to have an answer sent in charge of Letitia’s and Mary’s
nephew, Cadet Theodore Fitzhugh,” he directed the author.
Carruthers scribbled obediently.
“Why the storms?” Hill ventured. “There aren’t any storms.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fuss!” said Duncan. “Of course there aren’t, but
it prevents suspicion to give reasons, and they won’t investigate our
weather.”
There was silence for a moment while the boys stood over Carruthers,
an erect and stately young trio in their gray and gold, and
contemplated his finished labors. Duncan and Fitzhugh, leaning on
each other’s shoulders, nodded with satisfaction, and Carruthers
grinned with modest pride.
“Good work, lad!” said Fitzhugh, and slapped the scribe.
But Hill put his lips together. “Now look here!” he said; “that
letter’s no good.”
“No good!” echoed Duncan and Fitzhugh, and Carruthers asked frowning:
“What do you mean?”
“Why, this”—Hill sat on the edge of the chair and put his elbows on
the table aggressively—“it’s not businesslike. It’s drivel, and it’s
too long. You ought to talk to the point and not put on frills.”
Carruthers threw down his pencil. “All right then—you do it.”
Duncan, the conservative, was wary. “Your letter’s a good one,
_I_ think, Georgy,” he said; “but we want the best possible. Hill
might have something still better up his sleeve, and we’ll need the
devil and all his works to worry us through this. Take some paper,
Mountain-tops, and see if you can beat Georgy.”
Hill pulled the pad toward him, helped himself to the pencil, and
wrote fiercely. Then, running his fingers through his thick black
locks with an air, he read:
“MATRON ST. WINIFRED’S ORPHAN ASYLUM.
“DEAR MADAM: Please notify if you can send to address below,
on approval for one week, one white child, nine months old,
weight thirty pounds, no teeth, blue eyes. Adoption to follow if
satisfactory. Refer to Reverend Edgar Stuyvesant, Chaplain.
“Very truly,
“(MISSES) LETITIA AND MARY BELLINGHAM.
“Care CADET THEODORE FITZHUGH,
“U. S. Military Academy,
“West Point, N. Y.”
“There!” Hill looked at his colleagues to mark the effect.
Duncan voiced the sentiments of the three.
“Won’t do, Topsy.” He shook his head gently but firmly. “You’d never
get one to order exactly like that. What do you think they’d do if
they hadn’t it in stock—whittle the kid to thirty pounds? And pull
its teeth? It’s all right, you know, if you were ordering chickens,
but Georgy’s has more feeling, more what you’d expect from old ladies
with a kid in their eye. I think we’ll send Georgy’s letter, won’t
we, boys? Here, you—copy it.”
And Carruthers was planted with pen and ink while the others
discussed ways and means.
“It’ll need peculiar things to drink,” said Hill, undiscouraged by
his lack of success. “My sister has one that size, little Jimmie, and
it drinks—let’s see—something you see advertised. I don’t know but
it’s some sort of whiskey.”
“Oh, no,” said Duncan decidedly. “I’m sure it couldn’t. Awful way to
begin to raise a kid. I’m against that.”
“Well, perhaps I’ve got it twisted,” acknowledged Hill. “But it’s one
of those things.”
“Little Jimmie has naps,” went on Hill. “They sing him to sleep.”
“Holy Moses!” groaned Fitzhugh, who was the musician. “I see myself
singing this thing to sleep!”
“And they change little Jimmie’s dresses afternoons, and put on clean
ones—why, sometimes he’s dressed as much as four times a day.” Hill’s
face was rapt with reminiscent pride.
“Look here, Topsy,” said Fitzhugh nervously; “you’d better not get
the idea that this kid is to be modelled on your little Jimmie. Not
much. If it comes out alive from its outing to the country, it’s all
we ask. Most of the time we’ve got to keep it up the chimney.”
“Let’s turn Wipes on the case,” suggested Jack Duncan, the fruitful
thinker. “He has kids of his own, and he can get points from his
wife. He’ll keep it dark, too.”
For Wipes was an old collaborator in crime. He was what the cadets
call a “policeman,” an orderly detailed to take care of cadets’
quarters.
“Little Jimmie has a crib, white iron and brass,” Hill struck in,
quite carried away by poetic possibilities. “We’ll have to have
something for our young one to sleep in. And toys, you know. I could
write my sister for some of little Jimmie’s—”
“Hill,” broke in Fitzhugh, “cut it out. You’re losing your mind.
Thought you wanted to be businesslike. This infant isn’t going to
live in luxury. It’s going to live, we _hope_, but that’s all. Leave
your sister’s kid lay.”
Duncan, tactful as always, put in his word. “Anyway, there’s no use
settling things till we hear from Mrs. St. Winifred. First, we’ll
mail Georgy’s letter. Then, if they’ll let us have the kid, we’ll
call in Wipes and plan our campaign with that breadth of foresight
which has before led our banners to victory.”
* * * * *
Five days later saw Fitzhugh a widowed sojourner in his room, with
silence across the hall where Hill’s and Carruthers’s steps were wont
to echo. Scarlet fever had broken out in the academy, and the three,
Jack Duncan, Carruthers, and Hill, were among the first to be sent to
the infirmary. The cases were light, but the disease broke up the gay
partnership, and Fitzhugh was low-spirited.
As he came into his room there were letters on his table. He took
them up half-heartedly and slipped them through his hands. Two bills,
a letter from his mother and—he glanced at the printed words in the
corner of the other envelope. “St. Winifred’s Orphan Asylum.” His
blood ran cold. In the worry of his friends’ illness he had entirely
forgotten that letter of Georgy Carruthers’s, mailed the morning
after the council of war. He held the long envelope by two fingers,
and stared at it as if afraid to open it. Then he took courage, cut
the flap, and drew out a page or more of handwriting. This is what he
read:
“MISSES LETITIA AND MARY BELLINGHAM.
“DEAR MADAMS: Your letter of the seventh was received and we are
happy to look forward to placing one of our little ones in your
care. We wrote to the chaplain, as suggested, and the response was
gratifying. Therefore, as we are satisfied with the home offered,
we shall not wait to hear further from you, but send by four
o’clock train on Friday, in charge of an attendant, little Marcus.”
The paper dropped from the boy’s hand as if a bullet had struck it,
and his lips moved in wordless anathema. He sat for a moment stunned
by the blow, then picked up the letter and read on.
“We send him, as advised, to your nephew, Cadet Theodore Fitzhugh.”
The lad groaned.
“He is a fine child of ten months. Feed him condensed milk. It
should be prepared in the following way.”
Fitzhugh skipped four lines.
“This should be fed to him every—”
He skipped again. His eyes wandered down the page, and he read aloud,
in a gasping voice, bits of sentences:
“His bath should be tested with a thermometer.” “Must have four
hours a day of fresh air.” “Sleeps every morning from ten to—”
He sprang to his feet, dashing the letter to the floor, and marched
back and forth across his room, muttering. Then he rubbed his eyes
as if to see better. “What under the canopy _am_ I going to do?” he
groaned.
A subdued but firm knock rat-a-tat-tatted at the door. “Come in,”
moaned the cadet, too lost in misery to try to pull himself together,
and in the open doorway Wipes stood saluting.
Wipes was a tall, ugly soldier with a large nose, a red complexion,
and a wooden expression. Fitzhugh greeted him like a messenger from
heaven.
“Wipes! Oh, Wipes!” he cried in a bleat of joy. “I’d rather see you
than any one on earth.”
“Very good, sorr,” said Wipes, and saluted again. Under his stolidity
was a heart much like hominy served for breakfast—as warm, as soft,
as steaming with fragrant kindliness. In spite of experience, such a
greeting flattered him to its depths. It was five minutes before the
boy’s nervous statement made apparent impression on the slaty surface
of Wipes’s intellect. Then a smile expanded slowly over the hatchet
face, as if a mountainside had cracked.
“Wipes, if you grin like that I’ll kill you,” said Fitzhugh,
exasperated, and Wipes answered respectfully:
“Very good, sorr.”
Fitzhugh went on. “It’s up to you to get me out of this hole. It’s
the worst one yet, but you’ve never failed me, Wipesy. Now tell me
what can be done? The kid’s due”—he took out his watch—“oh, momma! In
an hour. Something’s got to be done, and quick.”
“If ye’d excuse me, sorr,” said Wipes, “Oi’ve ’n idea.”
“I’ll excuse you this time,” Fitzhugh agreed. “Get it out of your
system.”
“F’r me to meet th’ kid, sorr, and sind him back.”
For one moment of exquisite relief Fitzhugh felt almost sentimental
toward Wipes. Of course! Why had he not thought of it? He wrung the
soldier’s hand till the cracked-rock smile split his face again,
and then he rushed into arrangements. Wipes’s words were few and
direct, and what he said he seemed to swallow back half-way out, as
if with regret at the outlay. But Fitzhugh was equal to the talking.
Wipes was to say that the Misses Bellingham had suddenly decided
to go abroad for a year, and had given up the idea of adopting a
child; that they were on the point of so writing the matron when her
promptness forestalled them; the trip of attendant and child was to
be paid for, so that there should be no discussion. The young man
brought out some bills.
“Wipes, I’m broke, but it’s cheap at bankruptcy.”
But the soldier refused the money. “F’r me to sind in th’ bill, sorr,
whin th’ job’s done,” he remarked half-way down his throat.
Wipes went off, and Fitzhugh watched him from his window as the ship
that bore the cargo of his safety or destruction. His figure, fine
and erect, swung with vigorous strides along the diagonal path that
crosses the Parade, and the boy, his eyes glued on that one dark-blue
spot, did not see another figure advancing to meet it, till the man
stopped sharply. Then, with a jump of his pulse, he saw who it was.
But why should Julia Duncan be talking to Wipes? However, there
was no time to meditate over that—it wouldn’t help to be late to
cavalry-drill.