It had always been Vickers’s boast that he had never worked for any one
but his own father, and, as he usually added, not very long for him. To
find himself sitting on a high stool in a dark office, copying Emmons’s
letters for him, struck him as supremely ridiculous. In South America
he had been a person of some importance, and the contrast amused, even
while it annoyed him.
The work was not hard, but the hours, he noticed, were long. It was
after six, on this first day, before he reached home. The sound of
voices in the drawing-room warned him of visitors, and, like the true
home-coming American, he stole quietly upstairs to his own room.
About seven, Plimpton knocked on his door, to say that Miss Lee would
be glad to speak to him for a few minutes in the drawing-room, before
dinner.
Vickers was an optimist. A thousand agreeable possibilities occurred to
him. He dressed quickly--he had had time for a little shopping on his
way uptown, and was able to appear in the conventional evening dress of
the Anglo-Saxon.
He found Nellie occupied with some flowers which had just come for her
in the long pink pasteboard box of a New York florist. She was clipping
the stems and arranging them in a tall vase.
“Oh, Bob,” she said, without turning from her occupation, and the charm
of her pose contrasted oddly with her tone, “I wanted to warn you not
to trouble your father with this idea of your being some one else. It
would probably destroy his returning faith in you, and I don’t think
he would even get the amusement from it that I did.”
“Ah, he has not such a sense of humor as that merry fellow Emmons. You
did not tell me it was he whom my absence has kept you from for a year.
No wonder you resented it!”
“I always think,” Nellie observed with the utmost detachment, “that a
person who is not very strong in morals ought to have particularly good
taste to make up. I don’t think your last remark was conspicuous for
either.”
“My dear Nellie,” said Vickers, “if I had promised to marry Emmons, I
should never hear the word taste again without a blush.”
“We won’t discuss Mr. Emmons.”
“Discuss my revered employer with an outsider? I should think not,”
returned Vickers.
“At least he _is_ your employer, which not many men who knew your
record would care to be.”
“Ah, but Emmons doesn’t know _my_ record.”
“Really, Bob, you are tiresome,” said Nellie. “Do I show so much
evidence of believing you that you are encouraged to persist in your
absurd story? There is a proverb about sticking to a good lie, but no
one could advise you to stick to such a particularly stupid one as
this.”
“Facts are stubborn things, however,” said Vickers. “Lee, if you care
to know, died just ten days ago. I saw him dead. He died of drink.
Doesn’t that sound likely?”
“Very likely, if I did not see you before me at the moment.”
“Don’t be absurd,” he answered, coming nearer to her. “I knew Lee. We
were not even so very much alike. He was not as tall as I am, for one
thing. Look at me.”
“I can’t. I’m busy.”
“By George, you will, too,” he cried, taking her by the shoulders.
“You did not have to look up as much as that to Lee. He was not built
like me--not so well. He was older, too, and had led the devil of a
life, and showed it. Can’t you see, you stupid girl? Look at me;” and
he gave her a faint shake.
She was not in the least flustered, angered, or in any way upset by his
violence, apparently. She simply would not look at him. Her eyes roved
up and down and sideways, but would not meet his, and in the course of
their wanderings they encountered the figure of Mr. Lee, just entering.
“Isn’t dinner ready yet, Nellie?” he asked peevishly.
“Not yet, Uncle,” said Nellie, coolly escaping from Vickers’s grasp.
“Sit down here. Bob was just asking me if I did not think him very much
altered in twelve years.”
The old man looked at Vickers affectionately. “Why, no,” he said, “I
don’t think he has changed as much as I should expect.”
“Why, sir, you did not know me at first last night.”
“No, not just at first, though I suspected, I suspected. But your
manner of speaking is different. But as I look at you now I find you
wonderfully little changed. Just bring me that picture of him when he
was a boy, Nellie.”
Nellie obeyed with alacrity, and returned with a faded photograph in
a magnificent silver and enamel frame. It represented a stout little
boy in Highland costume, in which Vickers could not see the smallest
resemblance to himself. The old man, however, regarded it with tender,
almost tearful eyes. “Truly the boy is father to the man,” he said.
“Just the same expression, isn’t it?”
Vickers turned away with an exclamation of irritation which he could
not repress, and Nellie asked maliciously,
“You do not find Bob any taller than he was when he went away, do you,
Uncle?”
“Taller, Nellie? Why, of course not. Men don’t grow after they are
twenty-three or four. What are you thinking of? He has filled out a
good deal. That gives him an appearance of greater size. Sit down
here, my boy. Nellie tells me you insisted on going to work at once. I
suppose that is right, but I must admit I was a little disappointed. I
had hoped for one day of your society.”
During dinner the conversation was carried on chiefly between the two
men.
Before they rose from the table, Plimpton approached Vickers to say
that Mrs. Raikes had telephoned to ask if Mr. Robert Lee would dine
with her the next evening at eight. Vickers replied that Mr. Robert Lee
would be graciously minded to do so, and was delighted to see a shade
of some sort settle on Nellie’s brow.
The dinner was the first of many--not only with Mrs. Raikes, but with
other people. Indeed Vickers had--what is so rare in a large city like
New York--a sudden and conspicuous social success. He was good-looking,
he was amusing, he did not care very much what he said, or whether he
were liked or not, and the result was that he had more invitations than
he could accept. It was the first of April, and that short, pleasant
spring season that New York social life has lately known, had set in.
The winter was over, many people had gone away, but a small group of
those left behind drew closer together and felt a rare impulse to be
intimate. The Park was turning green, the country clubs were pleasant
objects for motor trips,--altogether there was a good deal of an
agreeable and informal nature to be done, and all of it Lee was asked
to share.
The strange feature of it all was that there was a general
understanding that Nellie and her cousin were not upon cordial terms,
and that they could not both be asked on the same party. The result was
that Nellie spent more time at home alone than she was accustomed to.
Mr. Lee, who had always been absolutely unconscious where or how much
Nellie went out, took the keenest interest in his son’s comings and
goings, and would often express to Nellie a pride in his popularity
which she found rather hard to bear.
Emmons disapproved intensely.
“We have no right to foist a fellow like that on our friends, unless we
are sure they know about his past.”
“Every one does know, I think.”
“They can’t, or they would not ask him. Though I must say the sort of
irresponsible man he is seems to me to stick out plainly enough.”
“Does it?” said Nellie. “I don’t think so. If I met Bob now for the
first time, I think I might be inclined to like him.”
The reply for some reason seemed to irritate Emmons. “Oh, then you
approve of letting him loose on society,” he said somewhat illogically.
“I don’t know what I can do about it, James. I can not forbid him to
accept invitations.”
“I am not so sure,” returned Emmons; “but one thing you certainly can
do. You can move out of town. He will find it hard work to accept
invitations in Hilltop, and we are justified, I think, in insisting
that he shall come out there every night.”
Nellie hesitated. “I could do that,” she said, “and yet I hate to go so
early to the country. I shall be very lonely at Hilltop, James.”
“No,” said Emmons, “for I have decided to take a house there
myself--the red one, I think, across the ravine from you.”
“Oh, that will be delightful,” said Nellie.
“Besides, you will need my help in keeping an eye on Bob. This way, he
and I can go up and down to town together every day.”
“You are very good, James. You think of everything to save me trouble.”
Mr. Lee was delighted at the prospect of an early move to Hilltop. He
and his forefathers had been born and bred there. He loved the place;
he loved the ugly red brick and stone house which his father had built
on high ground to replace the old farmhouse in the valley below. He
loved the farm itself--the acres of rolling country spread out on the
slopes.
And Vickers, too, was glad to go. A quiet countryside in spring
promised happier opportunities for tête-à-têtes with Nellie than New
York had afforded him. Every day in the course of the past two weeks
he had felt irked and humiliated by his position, and had been strongly
tempted to slip away. Perhaps if escape had looked more difficult he
would have been more likely to try it, but it was too easy to excite
his interest. And, though it seemed always possible to him that the
next day would be the last, his reasons for staying grew, without his
realizing it, more and more powerful. Not only his feeling for Nellie
held him--for indeed there were times when the prospect of putting her
once and for all out of his life seemed very desirable to him,--but
also old Mr. Lee’s feeling for him. The old man had not commanded
Vickers’s attachment, hardly his respect. He was small-minded,
irritable, petty, at times beyond endurance. He was ungrateful, almost
unkind to Nellie, but there could be no doubt of his passionate,
unqualified devotion to his only son. The one and only thing he cared
for was the well-being and companionship of the man he supposed to be
his boy. The idea of the pain his going would inflict held Vickers more
perhaps than anything else. The patience with which the old man hid his
eagerness for the younger one’s society, lest he should be a drag upon
him, the amount of thought he devoted to Vickers’s plans, the pride he
took in Vickers’s popularity were all inexpressibly touching to a man
who had never been the object of parental tenderness.
When Nellie and Emmons and his clerkship were more than usually trying,
Vickers would tell himself that the whole thing was absurd. Why
should he stay for the sake of an old man who had no claim upon him
whatsoever? And yet he stayed.
If he had felt the bond in New York he felt it twenty times more when
they had moved to Hilltop.
They arrived at Hilltop about five in the afternoon, and tired as he
was, Mr. Lee insisted on walking out a little way over the farm to show
it to his son. “It will all be yours, Bob, before long. To be sure, it
does not pay as it used to, but it’s a fine property.”
Vickers cordially agreed; and even after Mr. Lee had gone back he
continued his inspection. Vickers had been trained to farming. He
had not been half an hour on the place before he realized that there
was there a magnificent property badly if not actually dishonestly
mismanaged. Mr. Lee was not a farmer, and had left his land entirely
in the hands of his head-man. Vickers saw an opportunity for efficient
work before him. This prospect held him, too. He came in very late for
dinner, silent as a dog following a scent, quiet as a cat about to
spring; abstracted, in short, as a practical man just before action.
It was with just this dogged energy that he had made, as it were
actually with his two hands, his cavalry squad in South America. There
the problem had been only a practical one. Here a certain amount of
information had first to be acquired. He wanted the farm accounts, and
he got them, that first evening soon after dinner. He forgot everything
else--forgot even that Nellie was sitting outside all by herself in a
walled garden, lit by an April moon.
For two nights he sat up until sunrise, poring over the books. He had
no other time to give to them, for his hours at the office were long.
The second evening, hearing footsteps under the window, he looked out
and saw Nellie pacing up and down, closely wrapped about in a thin
light shawl, for the night was chilly. He wavered for a moment, and
then went back to work. After all, this was something definite that
could be done for her. The next evening he would take a holiday.
It was particularly annoying, therefore, when the next evening came, to
find that it brought Emmons with it--and Emmons not a merely transient
visitor, but a near neighbor very comfortably established not a mile
away.
The three sat a little while together in the moonlight while Vickers
wondered whether, if he showed no intention of leaving them alone,
Emmons would grow discouraged and go home. The answer to his question
came at once, for Emmons rose and said firmly that he had one or two
things he would like to discuss with Nellie: would she come into the
house? Nellie acceded without the least reluctance, and Vickers was
left alone.
He took one or two impatient turns up and down the path. This, he said
to himself, was just a little more than he proposed to stand. If he
were willing, for Nellie’s sake, to clerk in the daytime, and farm at
twilight, and figure at night, he would not in between times play
third to her and her _fiancé_.
Then suddenly the recollection came to him of a girl he had met at Mrs.
Raikes’s--a young and pretty creature, with the soft yet assured manner
of the American girl who has been educated in a French convent. Surely
that girl had told him she spent her summers at Hilltop. There had been
some talk of his coming to see her. If only he could remember her name.
A supreme effort of memory brought it to him--Overton. That was it. She
had seemed a nice little thing. He would go and see Miss Overton.
As he went through the hall, Nellie’s voice called to him from a
neighboring room--“Bob.”
He came and stood in the doorway. The lovers were seated at a discreet
distance. Emmons had paused like a man interrupted in the midst of a
sentence. Vickers felt convinced that he had been “laying down the law.”
“If you are going out, Bob, please be sure to come home before
half-past ten. My uncle is so easily disturbed.”
Vickers looked at her reflectively, debating whether if he were late
she would wait up, for the pleasure of scolding him. But there was
nothing encouraging in her manner, and to be let in by Plimpton would
hardly be rewarding.