AT HOME
Burnett Senior, one evening early in February, sat in his library after
dinner, as was his custom, and, lighting a stogie, adjusted himself
comfortably in his big leather chair, picked up the evening paper,
and turned to the financial page. His wife sat just beyond him on the
other side of a fireplace filled with crackling wood. She was a quiet
body with graying hair, and wore a plain gown of black taffeta which
emphasized her age. She held in her lap the latest work of an English
novelist. In a week she had not succeeded in getting beyond the twelfth
chapter, chiefly because she had held it in her lap most of the time
that she thought she was reading.
For the last twenty years she had joined her husband immediately after
dinner, and sat like this while he read the financial news. And most
of the time she spent this hour wondering about Dicky; first, as a
baby sound asleep upstairs in his cradle; then as a youngster in his
trundle-bed, tired out after his day of romping; then as a schoolboy;
then as a young man away at college; and now as a full-grown man at
home once again. She had looked forward for four years to the time when
he would be back home, as she knew her husband had; and yet, now that
he was back, she found herself going over and over again those earlier
years rather than the present. For, somehow, he seemed to be slipping
more and more out of her life. She blamed no one for that, Dicky
least of all, for she realized that his interests were with his own
generation. She realized that better than her husband did. The latter
was tempted at times to judge the boy harshly and this worried her a
good deal.
Dicky, she knew, was in many ways a disappointment to his father—more
of a disappointment than the boy understood. Dicky failed to appreciate
how large a share of himself his father had put into the business—what
an acutely personal matter this business was with him. The boy did not
have the background she had. Her memory took her to the beginnings—to
those lean, hard years when Dicky was sleeping peacefully in his cradle
in other surroundings than these, while she watched her husband at work
over figures seemingly perverse. Burnett was putting in some sixteen
hours a day of himself then. Even after the figures began to be more
amenable to discipline, there were sudden reverses that made him pace
the floor until morning and kept her with her heart in her mouth.
It all came out right in the end, of course, but Burnett had left
something of himself behind—something in the business. All Dicky had
ever seen was the triumphant result. And he had never heard his father
talk, as she had heard him talk, of how he looked forward to the day
when he should be able to relinquish the reins to “my son” and watch
the business respond to the younger life. Perhaps she herself had been
more or less at fault for not having repeated these things to the boy,
but she had wanted him to have his youth—the youth of which Burnett
himself had been in a large measure deprived. So she had said nothing.
Well, Dicky had his youth. He was having it now; and yet, for the last
month or so she had felt as though something was going wrong with it.
She had seen him getting serious. She had thought at first it was the
new responsibilities of the business. She had said as much to her
husband one evening.
“Dicky is taking hold, isn’t he?”
“Of what?” Burnett snapped.
“Of the business?”
“If he wasn’t a son of mine I’d fire him to-morrow. That’s how much
he’s taking hold,” he replied.
“He—he will some day, Richard,” she ventured to declare in order to
pacify him.
“That isn’t even a good gamble,” answered Burnett.
Yet it was a fact that the boy was getting serious. In the last few
weeks she had seen him maturing, though she had little opportunity
of seeing him at all; often no more than a glimpse of him as he came
downstairs dressed to go out. But last night he had stopped and kissed
her. It brought the color to her cheeks. He was seldom as demonstrative
as that.
To-night she had not seen him at all. As Burnett put down his paper to
relight his cigar, she asked:
“Do you know where Dicky is going this evening?”
“Eh?”
“I haven’t seen him go out.”
“I haven’t seen him since lunch. He wouldn’t let me have anything but
crackers and milk to-day.”
Burnett picked up his paper again, and then put it down.
“Anything strange about not seeing him?” he demanded.
“No. Only—”
“Well?”
“I thought he had been looking kind of sober lately.”
“It’s a girl,” grunted Burnett.
“Not—”
“Nothing but a plain fool girl. He asked her to marry him and she
refused. That proves she’s a fool, doesn’t it?”
“You know her, then?”
“That’s all I know, except that she’s a Fairburne—one of the four
hundred—and thinks she is too good for him.”
“Why—why didn’t he tell me?”
“There, Mother,” Burnett returned, with a note of tenderness one might
not have suspected was there, “it’s only because he’s feeling rather
bad about it. The worst of it is that _he_ is willing to admit she is
too good for him. That’s bad business. You can’t sell goods or get a
wife in any such spirit as that. If he’d had a little training on the
road he’d know it.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“No. But, according to him, she’s a sort of princess.”
“I think, if he really cares, that’s the way he _would_ think of her,”
said the mother.
“I told him—”
But at that point Mrs. Burnett glanced up with a quick motion of her
hand to her lips in warning. For there at the door stood Dicky himself
in evening clothes, slowly removing his gloves.
“You look so comfortable here, I think I’ll stay,” he announced.
As Dicky drew a chair to the fire, Burnett tossed aside his paper and
his wife let the book in her lap slide to the floor. To them both the
situation was unusual enough to appear ominous. Burnett bit into his
stogie and waited.
But, after all, there appeared to be nothing to wait for. Dicky merely
lighted a cigarette, crossed his legs, and stared into the flames quite
as unconcernedly as though this were an everyday habit of his. So they
sat a few moments in silence, until Mrs. Burnett broke the tension by
asking:
“Is it cold out to-night, Dicky?”
“No,” he answered. “Not very.”
“Storming?” put in Burnett.
“Don’t think so. Wasn’t when I came in at five o’clock.”
“Have you had your dinner?” inquired his mother.
Dicky smiled.
“Now that you mention it, I haven’t,” he answered.
Mrs. Burnett rose.
“You should have told me,” she said. “I’ll see Mary about it at once.”
“Don’t, please,” protested Dicky. “Just sit where you were. I don’t
want a bite now—honest.”
“You aren’t going on one of those confounded diets yourself?” demanded
Burnett.
Dicky shook his head.
“No need of it yet. What’s the news?”
“Steel is off again.”
Burnett appeared a bit sulky about it. Dicky turned.
“How does that interest you?” he asked.
“Bought a block of it the other day,” replied Burnett uncomfortably.
“How long since you’ve been fooling with the market?” asked Dicky.
“I’m not fooling with it. I had a little spare cash and took a chance,
that’s all.”
“On whose advice?”
“Forsythe has a friend, and—”
“Forsythe?”
“What of it?”
“I don’t like the fellow.”
“You don’t know him. He’s been my right-hand man for the last three
years.”
“What about his friend?”
“I don’t know anything about his friend except that he’s on the inside.”
“I’d let him stay there,” observed Dicky.
Burnett senior bristled up aggressively—the readier because away down
deep in his heart he knew the advice was sound. At the same time he
resented being criticized by one thirty years his junior who had not
had as much business experience as the average newsboy. It was one
thing for Dicky to proffer suggestions on matters of diet, about which
presumably he did have some real knowledge, and another for the boy to
venture with the same assurance into the field of finance. Burnett was
taking a chance, and he knew it; but he did not relish being told about
it. That remark about Forsythe hit a particularly sore spot. Forsythe
was doing exactly the work that Dicky ought to have been doing. He was
instilling in the firm the snap that comes only of youth.
Besides all this, Burnett, if he lost, could afford to lose. If he
won—it was not for himself that he was making the gamble. He had
enough—more than enough. He had put fifty thousand dollars into steel
for the sake of the boy who now had the nerve to sit there and take him
to task about it.
“Look here,” returned Burnett; “just when and how did you acquire your
wide experience of the stock market?”
“I don’t know a darned thing about it,” replied Dicky coolly. “That’s
why I know so much about it.”
“Eh?” exclaimed Burnett, confused by such apparent nonsense.
“I mean just that,” went on Dicky. “The people who get stung on Wall
Street are those who know all about it, or trust to some one else who
knows all about it. If you were going it alone, dad, I’d bet on you.”
“Bah!” snorted Burnett.
“I suppose you’ll have to learn your lesson,” concluded Dicky. “After
all, that’s what keeps things moving down there. What you reading,
Mother?”
“I don’t know,” confessed Mrs. Burnett. “But it’s very good. It was
recommended to me.”
With the conversation launched into safer channels, Dicky spent the
remainder of a very restful and pleasant evening with his family, and
at ten o’clock became sleepy with them. As they rose to retire, he
kissed his mother good-night, patted his father on the back, and went
off upstairs. But he had no more than removed his coat before he heard
a timid tap at his door. He opened it, and found his mother standing
there.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“I—I wanted to talk a little with you, Dicky,” she faltered.
“Fine!” he exclaimed. “Come in.”
He found a chair for her, and, sitting on the edge of the bed, waited
with some curiosity to learn what had brought her here. She explained
at once.
“It’s because I thought you seemed worried, Dicky,” she said.
“Worried?”
“Your father told me that you were caring for—some one. You didn’t tell
me.”
“Oh—it’s that!”
And instantly, before her eyes, she saw his face grow serious. It was
as though he grew five years older in as many seconds.
“Don’t you want to tell me, Dicky?”
He rose, walked across the room once, and sat down again.
“There isn’t very much to tell, Mother,” he began quietly. “Her name is
Joan Fairburne, and she lives here in New York. You know of the family
and how prominent they are in a social way. But that hasn’t anything to
do with her. I met her when I was in college, and I’ve seen her more or
less ever since; but it wasn’t until this winter that I came to realize
what she is. We were together a good deal—until about two weeks ago.
Then, because I cared so much, I asked her to marry me. And she said
she did not care enough to do that. Since then I haven’t been able to
see her much. And—that’s about all there is to it.”
“You feel very badly about it?”
He looked up at his mother—then away.
“Yes,” he admitted.
She stole swiftly to his side and put her hand over his.
“I’m—I’m so sorry.”
“The deuce of it is,” he exclaimed, “there isn’t anything much you can
do about it.”
“I don’t see why she doesn’t love you, Dicky,” said his mother.
He laughed at that.
“If you knew her you’d wonder I even dared hope she might,” he ran on.
“She is different. I don’t think she was meant to be born in New York.
She was meant to be born in the Arabian Nights, for a man wearing a
scarlet silk doublet and hose and an ostrich feather in his hat and
oodles of jewels and an army to do her bidding.”
“Does she say that’s what she wants?”
“Bless you, no. But she looks it. She makes you feel that’s what you’d
like to give her. And you can’t give her anything because she has
everything she wants. And there you are.”
“I’d like to meet her, Dicky.”
“I’d like to have her meet you,” he replied enthusiastically. “Somehow,
I think she’d like you, Mother.”
“Perhaps, then, I could ask her to come here for tea—Thursday.”
“You’re a brick. She hasn’t been going out any lately, but if you’ll
send the note I’ll see what I can do to back it up.”
Mrs. Burnett rose to go.
“Even if it doesn’t turn out right, Dicky—” she began anxiously.
“That’s all there is to it,” he finished for her.
He placed a hand upon her shoulder.
“But I want her. You’ll understand how much when you see her.”
Then Dicky gave her his arm and escorted her to her room.